He could feel it beating like a sick and dirty heart, warring with the serene beauty of the rose, screaming harsh profanities against the choir of voices which had so soothed and lifted him.
He leaned closer to the rose and saw that its core was not just one sun but many . . . perhaps all suns contained within a ferocious yet fragile shell. But it’s wrong. It’s all in danger.
Knowing it would almost surely mean his death to touch that glowing microcosm Init helpless to stop himself, Jake reached forward. There was no curiosity or terror in this gesture; only a great, inarticulate need to protect the rose.
WHEN HE CAME BACK to himself, he was at first only aware that a great deal of time had passed and his head hurt like hell. What happened? Was I mugged?
He rolled over and sat up. Another blast of pain went through his head. He raised a hand to his left temple, and his fingers came away sticky with blood. He looked down and saw a brick poking out of the weeds. Its rounded comer was too red.
If it had been sharp, I’d probably be dead or in a coma. He looked at his wrist and was surprised to find he was still wearing his watch. It was a Seiko, not terribly expensive, but in this city you didn’t snooze in vacant lots without losing your stuff. Expensive or not, someone would be more than happy to relieve you of it. This time he had been lucky, it seemed. It was quarter past four in the afternoon. He had been lying here, dead to the world, for at least five hours. His father probably had the cops out looking for him by now, but that didn’t seem to matter much. It seemed to Jake that he had walked out of Piper School about a thou-sand years ago. Jake walked half the distance to the fence between the vacant lot and the Second Avenue sidewalk, then stopped.
What exactly had happened to him?
Little by little, the memories came back. Hopping the fence. Slip-ping and twisting his ankle. He reached down, touched it, and winced. Yes—that much had happened, all right. Then what?
Something magical.
He groped for that something like an old man groping his way across a shadowy room. Everything had been full of its own light. Everything— even the empty wrappers and discarded beer-bottles. There had been voices—they had been singing and telling thousands of overlapping stories. “And faces,” he muttered. This memory made him look around apprehensively. He saw no faces. The piles of bricks were just piles of bricks, and the tangles of weeds were just tangles of weeds. There were no faces, but— —but they were here. It wasn’t your imagination. He believed that. He couldn’t capture the essence of the memory, its quality of beauty and transcendence, but it seemed perfectly real. It was just that his memory of those moments before he had passed out seemed like photographs taken on the best day of your life. You can remember what that day was like—sort of, anyway—but the pictures are flat and almost powerless. Jake looked around the desolate lot, now filling up with the violet shadows of late afternoon, and thought: / want you back. God, I want you back the way you were.
Then he saw the rose, growing in its clump of purple grass, very close to the place where he had fallen. His heart leaped into his throat. Jake blundered back toward it, unmindful of the beats of pain each step sent up from his ankle. He dropped to his knees in front of it like a worshipper at an altar. He leaned forward, eyes wide.
It’s just a rose. Just a rose after all. And the grass— The grass wasn’t purple after all, he saw. There were splatters of purple on the blades, yes, but the color beneath was a perfectly normal green. He looked a little further and saw splashes of blue on another clump of weeds. To his right, a straggling burdock bush bore traces of both red and yellow. And beyond the burdocks was a little pile of dis-carded paint-cans. Glidden Spread Satin, the labels said.
That’s all it was. Just splatters of paint. Only with your head all messed up the way it was, you thought you were seeing— That was bullshit.
He knew what he had seen then, and what he was seeing now. “Camouflage,” he whispered. “It was all right here. Everything was. And … it still is.” Now that his head was clearing, he could again feel the steady, harmonic power that this place held. The choir was still here, its voice just as musical, although now dim and distant. He looked at a pile of bricks and old broken chunks of plaster and saw a barely discernible face hiding within it. It was the face of a woman with a scar on her forehead. “Allie?” Jake murmured. “Isn’t your name Allie?” There was no answer. The face was gone. He was only looking at an unlovely pile of bricks and plaster again.
He looked back at the rose. It was, he saw, not the dark red that lives at the heart of a blazing furnace, but a dusty, mottled pink. It was very beautiful, but not perfect. Some of the petals had curled back; the outer edges of these were brown and dead. It wasn’t the sort of cultivated flower he had seen in florists’ shops; he supposed it was a wild rose. “You’re very beautiful,” he said, and once more stretched his hand out to touch it.
Although there was no breeze, the rose nodded toward him. For just a moment the pads of his fingers touched its surface, smooth and velvety and marvellously alive, and all around him the voice of the choir seemed to swell. “Are you sick, rose?”
There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet, forgotten splendor. Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there’s one, how come there aren’t more?
He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would not make it so. It was time to go home.