When it was ready, I observed his work. The Twelfth Arcana. Eddie had painted it in his bedroom. This story was old. We walked away from Eddie to visit the nearest hanged people. Some knots were professional, others looked like bows: it wasn’t really the rope that held them up. There were men and women, and their bodies were conserved; none showed any signs of putrefaction or of any clear violence, though of course they had all been murdered in one way or another. There was nothing more for us to do, but something was keeping us there, and Juan realized what it was. He could take something, as always when he offered a sacrifice: the Place wanted to repay him. I looked at his hands. They were surrounded by black light. Thank you, Juan said out loud. With an unerring touch, because now he was blade and weapon, he cut off Eddie’s left hand. For my companion, he said. The Hand of Glory that she so desires. He offered it to me and I cried, in grief and in thanks.
We went back to the house. Stephen was waiting for us. He wasn’t going to call the police: the Order would take care of cleaning up the massacre. The gun his brother had used was still on the ground floor, all the proof we would need to avoid being accused, now that Eddie would never be found in this world.
The dead were dead, and it was the fault of this life that one chose or received as condemnation, depending on how you looked at it. Eddie’s sacrifice had been necessary, and so had the purge. The only survivors were Stephen, Juan, and me. I was irritated that Juan couldn’t understand and believed it was all his fault, believed it with a desperation that was black and （I thought） exaggerated. The monster always lurks inside the Labyrinth, and he who enters knows that if it’s not around the first bend, it will be around the next. Some know how to let out a rope and escape. He who makes it too far does so knowing the price. Juan thought Eddie’s shot could have killed me, and he blamed himself. But I didn’t want him to take care of me. I had told him so many times. Who could he protect, destined as he was to live in the abyss?
We traveled as planned to Cadaqués, several days later. In the beautiful Margarall house we followed the news of the massacre at Cheyne Walk, which mixed with the other terrible bloodbaths of 1969. Eddie Mathers, the Manson Family, Hells Angels, the bomb in Piazza Fontana, the news of M? Lai. Eddie was presumed guilty: the gun had his prints on it, and he’d also left them all over the house. We told the police he had escaped; I was wounded and couldn’t go after him; Juan had to abandon chase because of his health; Stephen had gotten farther, but lost him. We also told this story to Florence and Pedro, and they believed it: why wouldn’t they, when they themselves had met thanks to a similar purge? Florence was surprised Eddie hadn’t killed himself; she had her own vague doubts. They looked for his body in the river, with no luck. The other living witness was Graciela, the doctor: when she’d heard the shots, she’d tried to call the police, but the phone was dead. Eddie had cut the lines.
On the terrace, looking out at the blue sea, the puny boats, the white houses, I had time to think. Encarnación, the pregnant suicide victim, raped by the men of the Order. Eddie, the destroyed son. Both of them wanted to extinguish the lineage, and both had almost put an end to the Order in different ways: Encarnación slaughtered the old people; Eddie, the children. Not everyone, of course. They were right, Juan said, but I wanted a child now more than ever. My son would not be handed over or abused. And he would be the first child of a medium. I would have a family with Juan, and when the time came to lead the Order, or when the correct interpretation of how to keep consciousness alive was found, it wouldn’t be Florence, Mercedes, and Anne who gave the orders. Or at least they would have to negotiate with me.
Dealing with Juan’s depression was the hardest part. During the days we spent in Cadaqués, he never left his room. He couldn’t stand to be in Eddie’s parents’ house, and he was constantly on the verge of confessing the crime. He didn’t commit suicide only because he was always being watched. He ignored me, didn’t want to see Stephen. I understood I had to wait and, moreover, I was sure that a child would restore him. He needed to take care of someone defenseless, someone of his own. To forget about himself.
Juan’s depression wasn’t only about the deaths he thought he was responsible for. Or about Eddie’s sacrifice. After the massacre we spent a day making statements, and the day after that we were at Florence’s house. We had no reason to return to Cheyne Walk: if we needed clothes or documents, an assistant could get them. But Juan wanted to go back because he was convinced about something, and Stephen went with him. The passage to the Other Place had closed. Now, when Juan opened the door, he only saw the bed, the paintings, the window. He tried several times. He leaned against the wooden doorway, begging please. The Other Place had disappeared after receiving its sacrifice. Pájaro que comió, voló, as they say in Argentina. It had got what it wanted. Eddie was lost in that dead world. Of course, the Place of Power had also dried up. Florence received that news with a scream. She didn’t know how to interpret it. She related it to the purge Eddie had inflicted, of course, but she was missing the necessary details to fully understand what had happened. Just one Ceremonial in London, she said. What a waste.
Juan felt free and at the same time desperate when he found that his centers of power had vanished. I thought about leaving, he said later. Walking to the nearest train station, getting off in a town, drinking a beer in the pub, squatting on one of the abandoned farms, letting myself die in the ruins of some castle or at the side of a highway.
Why didn’t you? I asked. They always say they can find you, but what if you’re the exception, the one who can escape? We were in the darkness of his room in Cadaqués, and I could feel his heart beating, arrhythmic and frantic, against my own chest.
I don’t want to choke to death in a village hotel with my lungs full of fluid and my body half-paralyzed. I don’t know how to work. I can’t find my way with a map. It’s easy to talk about getting away, leaving, dying, changing, when leaving it all behind means nothing. But to feel the power in my whole body, to claw and mark people, to have a role as the companion of the god of night—it means something. It’s mine.
I’m yours too, I told him in a low voice.
You’re mine too, he replied.
For Juan, returning to Argentina meant failure. For me, it meant recovering my language, my hands freed, my blood cleaned of drugs; it meant finishing my studies at home, trying for my son in the place I knew I would find him. Puerto Reyes, the summer storms, having a drink on my father’s boat, going with Tali to the jungle and the reserves, traveling to Paraguay and laughing with her the whole way there. It meant having a bourgeois marriage, my fragile and beautiful husband waiting on the terrace reading poetry. It was the life of young millionaires waiting for their inheritance. Though we were no longer young, not after the massacre. Before returning to Argentina, I was able, finally, to visit Laura’s grave. I also wanted to leave so I could forget her. Everything in the city reminded me of her. Every street had a meaning on her alternative maps. We had walked through every park and every cemetery. They had placed her near the medium Olanna, at Highgate. Strawberry plants grew over the graves. Stephen had told me that on his first visit, he’d seen a fox. I lay down on Laura’s grave, remembered her dirty, tattooed body, and I said goodbye and promised to think of her. But when I got up and felt a pull in my shoulder, the muffled pain of the inoffensive wound that, nevertheless, sometimes hurt, I thought how this was my moment and Juan’s, and I knew that this death and the others had to be left behind, as, in her time, Florence had left others behind.