A Beggar's Kingdom Read online

  “Jules, why are you reading the Bible?” Ashton asked. “Are you looking for a loophole?”

  “Sidesplitting. The Comedy Cellar in Leicester Square has open mike night on Mondays. That’s where you should be. You and Devi.”

  “Never lump me in with him. Or I’ll stop joking entirely.” Ashton always had a lot to say about what Devi had to say. Julian’s friend and his shaman fought each other through Julian. “He thinks it’s the Almighty you’re bargaining with?” Ashton laughed. “He didn’t say you were going against God, against God’s will? Imagine that.”

  How Julian regretted being the conduit through which their sharpened spears passed.

  “You think your shaman is an agent of God?” Ashton continued. “You’re hilarious. You should be at the Comedy Cellar. Think again. Devi’s name says it all. Devi, Devil. Leave the last L off for satanic ruses. I’d say by the results alone, I’m right. You were the one who summoned the dark force. He didn’t come to you. You sought him out. And now you’ve waged your soul to the scatterer of lies. I don’t know about this girl of yours, but I know about you. You’re being damned and refuse to see it. Just think about it—who keeps sending you into hell? Who keeps shattering your body? Who are you in a vicious battle with for your own soul? Why the hell would you ever think it’s God, Jules?”

  ∞

  In July, Julian’s father died.

  Julian flew back home.

  This is what civilized people did, even fake people. Returned for funerals.

  He decided not to rent a car. Ashton was already in L.A., and he had rented a car for the two of them. Julian took a cab from LAX to West Hollywood. He wanted to walk around Sunset, see his old haunts.

  Joanne Cruz, née Osment, his mother, passed him on Cahuenga.

  She walked right by him.

  She didn’t recognize him.

  He stopped, watched her walk by, debated what to do.

  Mom? he said.

  She startled, turned around.

  Julian! She hurried back to him. Oh, son. She burst into tears. She embraced him.

  His own mother.

  I’m so sorry, my love, she said, your father died, my eyes are going bad.

  But Julian knew the truth. His own mother didn’t recognize him.

  ∞

  In early August, his cell phone rang. It was a 718 area code. Julian knew only one person in that area code. Cautiously he answered.

  “Let me do it,” a grumbly female voice said. It was Ava McKenzie. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

  He was doing it all wrong! It was the same voice that had been hounding him since his return. Now it was calling him long distance to torment him. “Who is this?” Julian said.

  “Ava McKenzie, your almost mother-in-law,” the voice replied. “Give me the crystal. Next time, I go, not you.”

  “Hello, Ava, how are you? Are you well?” Julian said, stunned and troubled. “Sorry, um, our connection is bad, I couldn’t hear what you just said.” His hands shaking, Julian dropped the phone, and hung up. How could Ava possibly know anything about anything?

  When he asked Ashton about it, a casually shrugging Ashton couldn’t explain it either.

  Couldn’t, or didn’t want to?

  Julian left it, but the unsettled feeling didn’t leave him.

  ∞

  On a Sunday morning in September, Riley, who was spending a long weekend with the boys, declared she was headed to church with Julian. Ashton laughed at them from the comfort of his warm bed.

  After the service, Riley met Devi.

  Polite as always, Devi shook Riley’s hand. He tried to stay neutral while she charmed him. They chatted about the break in the rain and the pleasantly dry sidewalks. Devi recommended a park, perhaps St. James’s (though Julian would’ve liked to go anywhere but there), and Riley nodded, saying that for some reason she craved a vanilla shake. “I usually stay away from sweets. I’m more of a bean sprout girl myself.” The best shakes were on the other side of town, Mr. Useless-Know-it-All chimed in, in Clapham. Devi said there was no good reason to go all the way across the river for a vanilla shake. There were some adequate shake places near the Bethnal Green Sunday market, which also had some bean sprouts if Riley was interested. And because she was Riley, she said she wanted to go there immediately and asked Devi to join them. “I won’t take no for an answer,” Riley said, smiling down at him. She was five-eleven without heels and he was five-six in shoes.

  Surprising everyone, maybe even himself, Devi thanked her with a bow and accepted! They walked a mile to the market, which sold its fruits and vegetables for £1 a bowl, and for two hours Julian doggedly traipsed behind, carrying Devi’s mangoes and limes as Devi and Riley sauntered through the stalls, munching on grapes and discussing the health benefits of garlic and honey. Riley bought a vanilla shake, and so did Devi. When it was time to say goodbye, he kissed her hand, and she hugged him, his head fitting under her chin.

  “I love him,” Riley said, as she and Julian headed up Great Eastern Road to Old Street station. “And I think he loves me.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Julian said. “And was that the goal? To get a lonely seventy-year-old man to fall in love with you?”

  “He looks pretty good for seventy,” said Riley.

  “Calm yourself. It’s B day. You don’t cavort with seventy-year-old faith healers on B days.”

  “Au contraire, mon ami,” said Riley. “Clearly, I do.”

  At Paddington they switched to the Piccadilly Line and took a train to Green Park, slightly better than St. James’s, fewer memories.

  “Devi is such a nice man,” Riley said, sitting close to Julian on the tube. “I don’t know why Ashton doesn’t like him. But he’s sad, too. Devi, not Ashton.”

  “He just lost his mother.”

  Riley shook her head. “Sadder than that. Like permanently sad. You should talk to him.”

  “I never stop talking to him.”

  “Ugh, not about you, you self-involved lout. About him.”

  In Green Park, wandering, gazing at ducks, listening to mothers berating their children, Riley said she was thinking about the sermon that morning and about what the priest had said—that her body was bought at a price. “You know what I’d like to buy for myself, perhaps even with my body?” Riley said. “Freedom.”

  Freedom from what, Julian wanted to ask, from Ashton? Riley, her blonde head bobbing, her face altered by circumstance, continued without prodding. “For me, I want freedom from fear,” she said. “For you, I want freedom from grief. You’ve been knocked down, Jules, and even with the help of your delightful shaman, you can’t get up.”

  Because it’s brand new, Julian wanted to say. Every year, the love is brand new. The death, too. But the truth was, Riley was right; he didn’t know how he could continue to live like this.

  “For both of us,” Riley said, “I want freedom from those who enslave us. Freedom from pain. Freedom from joy, from desire, from hate. I want freedom from love,” Riley said, her brown eyes with no tears left, staring straight ahead.

  “Sounds like you want freedom from life,” said Julian.

  Riley, her beautiful face distorted, didn’t reply.

  ∞

  “Why do you keep looking at me?” Devi said a week after Riley had gone back home.

  “I’m not allowed to look at you?”

  “You’re looking at me an unacceptable amount,” the cook said. “Stop harassing me. Why can’t you be like your friend’s girlfriend?”

  “She was nice, wasn’t she?”

  “You’re foolish,” Devi said. “She cares about fresh produce, that’s what’s important. She was elegant and circumspect. I liked that, too. She wasn’t idly curious—like some people.”

  “I’m not idly curious,” Julian said. “I’m purposefully curious. What mountain did you go to?”

  “The Mountain of Purgatory.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You spend
half of each year telling me to mind my business. Follow your own advice.”

  “Is Ashton right? Are you using me for some nefarious purpose?”

  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” Devi said.

  “Come on,” Julian said. “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are not friends.”

  “We’re not friends?”

  Devi blinked. Julian seized his chance. “You told me you had a son. Why did Shinko’s wife say your son was missing?”

  “Are the dead not missing?” Devi said. “Is that what you of all people maintain? Done with your pho?” Devi yanked the bowl away even though Julian was still eating. “Time to go back to work, my friend.”

  “You just said we weren’t friends.”

  Over the next few visits, Julian tried in other ways. “Would you like me to go to the Islington Farmers’ Market for you on Sunday after church?”

  “No.”

  Julian chewed his lip in thought. “Would you like me to go with you? I can help you carry the cabbage back. Cabbage is so heavy.”

  “You can come with me if you like, be Sisyphus if you like, but I still won’t tell you.”

  The Islington Farmers’ Market was enormous and crowded. They browsed through the produce stalls. “Did you go into the caves looking for your son?” Julian asked. “Like Cleon looks for his father in the tunnels?”

  “I can’t talk to you, I’m buying bok choy,” Devi said. “But are you really comparing me to your sewer hunter?”

  “Cleon told me there’s a tunnel under the Thames, smack on the prime meridian, where his father vanished in 1710. Is he right?”

  “Well, you met Cleon in 1775, and the foot tunnel from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs wasn’t built until 1902, so you tell me if he’s right. Here, hold the bean sprouts. I’m going to buy some garlic.”

  Julian carried the sprouts and the bok choy. “He said it was begun and then abandoned.”

  “In other words, no foot tunnel? Take my garlic.”

  “His father found the passage on the fall equinox, not the spring one like me, is that possible?”

  “Definitely not. Look what you’re doing, you’re dropping my garlic on the ground.”

  With their purchases they took a cab to Kingsland Road. Devi needed some fish sauce from a Vietnamese grocer. “I’m carrying three cabbage heads for you, five live lobsters, five pounds of shrimp, and half a pig,” Julian said. “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because I don’t want to,” said Devi. “But I do need to sit for a bit. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  “Who is?” said Julian, looking around for a place to rest.

  Devi motioned him to St. Leonard’s. They dipped through the gate into the oak-covered courtyard and found a secluded bench.

  And there, Devi told him.

  ∞

  Twenty young photographers went into the red cleft in a town called Karmadon in the Caucasus Mountains. The light wasn’t good. They waited. But when the light still wasn’t good by seven in the evening, they decided to wrap for the night. They were packing away their cameras and water bottles when a block of ice half a mile wide broke off the top of Khoka Mountain, more than two miles above their heads, twelve thousand feet above sea level. The frozen mass dropped from the sky, the ice careening down the steep mountain at more than sixty miles an hour, picking up rock and trees and carrying them down, too, into the cleft. In less than two minutes it had reached the bottom of the gorge. It buried two villages under hundreds of feet of ice and stone, buried one hundred and twenty-seven people, twenty of them still packing up their cameras and water bottles.

  “One of those photographers was my son.”

  Julian bowed his head, his hands clenched around the plastic handles of the shopping bags between his feet. So Devi knew. Devi knew everything.

  Devi closed his shop and traveled east. He didn’t cook back then. He performed acupuncture and sold candles and incense. The search party looked for three months. Devi stayed for two years. Only seventeen people would eventually be found. Devi’s son was not one of them. Geologists called the Karmadon slide an extraordinary event of historical proportions. They said it would take twelve years for the ice in the canyon to melt. And maybe when the ice melted, they would find Devi’s son.

  So every few years Devi went back to Karmadon to see if the ice had melted.

  Julian didn’t want to ask.

  No, Devi said. The ice has not melted.

  When his son went missing, an intermittent stutter found him. The mud and stone slid down twelve thousand feet and crushed itself into the red cleft that was Devi’s voice box. “The Karmadon tremor in my throat,” Devi said, “is what’s left of my son.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Almost thirty. He was the son of a man who was the son of men who were catchers of tigers, but he didn’t want to learn the ancient rites. When we came to London, all he wanted was to be a real boy. And for twenty years that’s what he was. Twenty years mucking about in the red and white home colors of Arsenal, twenty years of mediocre grades and weekend-long pub crawls.” Devi broke off to collect himself.

  Julian stared at the shopping bags. “Is that why you became a shaman, to find him?”

  “I tried.” Devi folded his hands. “Unlike your Josephine, my son proved resistant to my efforts. His soul was new. There was nowhere for me to go.”

  “But you said you did try, though?”

  “I did try,” Devi repeated quietly.

  Pensively, Julian half-turned to Devi. “So Ashton was right,” he said. “From the start he suspected you wanted something from me.”

  The expression of lofty disdain returned to Devi’s face. “If by right, you mean completely wrong, then yes.”

  “Are you trying to get me to do what you couldn’t do?”

  “And what would that be, Julian?”

  “Is that why you got all excited when you learned that Josephine’s soul was old?”

  “What gave my excitement away, my indifferent attitude, my laconic nature?”

  “Did you hope that one of her iterations would be during a time when I could send you a message?”

  “Ah, see, messages are tricky things,” Devi said. “Like premonitions of the future, messages obey laws of unintended consequences. They can be—and many times are—misinterpreted, often with catastrophic results. Partial knowledge isn’t helpful. Don’t open your mouth to argue. Has your partial knowledge helped you in the slightest? Precisely. My son had been traveling around the globe with his friends. They’d gone to New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Nepal. The Caucasus was their last stop before home. He didn’t listen to my advice. What can a father tell a son anyway, be careful, watch out, don’t be reckless? I told him all those things. I saw danger everywhere. Not in ice slides, obviously. I didn’t tell him to watch out for falling mountains. But everywhere else. And before he went traveling, he did go to a fortune-teller. Not to me or his grandmother but to a tarot card reader in Covent Garden, so, you know, completely foolproof. He asked her if his trip was going to be a success. He drew only one card—the Magician. That was enough for him. The Magician is the one who bridges the gap between the divine and the mundane, between heaven and earth. The woman told him his trip was going to be a transformative one.”

  “She wasn’t wrong,” Julian said quietly.

  “Yet, so unhelpful.”

  Julian stayed with Devi the rest of that Sunday. After they returned to Quatrang, Devi showed Julian how to use a cleaver to shred cabbage. Julian was awkward and terrible. He nearly chopped off two of his fingers. “So I can be like you,” Julian said, making a joke about it. “Everyone will think we’re related.”

  The Vietnamese man dispassionately regarded the Norwegian-Mexican man. “Oh, yes,” he said, “that’s what they will think.”

  Devi taught Julian how to season the cabbage to make kimchi, how to roll the rice paper around the vegetables. They ate together, they drank toget
her. Now it was deep Sunday night, and they were alone together.

  “Are you an enchanter, Devi? Ashton thinks you’re a sorcerer. If you are, you’re not a very good one.”

  “Not a very good one what?”

  “Either.”

  “I showed you a way in, that’s all,” Devi said. “The rest has been up to you. Maybe you’re the sorcerer, did your friend think of that?”

  “Could there be another way in?” Julian asked. “Or another way out—”

  “No.”

  Julian became more alert. “No what?”

  “Neither.”

  “Why are you being so short with me?”

  “I’m always short with you. I must be careful of what I say. You tend to twist my words.”

  Julian sat up straighter on the stool. “Can I go in through the other equinox, in September?”

  “Definitely not. Why would you want to?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if I go in through the other equinox, I’ll come out at a different point. Or there will be another way out. Maybe I can bring her back with me, hide her from death.”

  “God, Julian, what power do you think you’ve been given?”

  “Um, the power to hide her from death?”

  Devi looked despairing.

  “Why do you keep returning to Karmadon, then?” Julian exclaimed.

  “Not to save him, you fool. To bury him.” Devi stared at his severed-by-frostbite fingers.

  Julian was too agitated to be empathetic. “Be honest with me, did you disarm me with your mysticism so you could use my life in some way? Are you Prospero?”

  Devi gazed upon Julian with exasperation, affection, wonder, exhaustion. “Have I been able to help you as you wish? Certainly your bad-tempered friend doesn’t think so.”

  “Ashton is not bad-tempered. He is literally the most cheerful soul around. You bring out the worst in him. He thinks you’re a wolf, and I’m the sheep. The sheep aren’t told what their purpose is. They’re led into the meadow, they’re sheared, and then they are slaughtered.”

  Devi took hold of Julian’s wrist, pressing hard on his pulsing radial artery to quiet him. “Calm down. If you’re a sheep, then you’re a sheep who has leapt where others could not leap. You’re grasping at the wrong things. Believe me, if I had the power to bring about a storm to part the seas, as you suggest, I would’ve brought the storm to part the seas when you could’ve done me the most good. If I could’ve brought you to a time when you could warn me or give me a chance to save my son—which has been the strongest and most unfulfilled desire of my life—I would’ve done it. Your cranky friend once said something that stuck with me. He said he did not want what he didn’t have. That’s when I realized I was wrong about him. He’s a better man than me, and he’s a better man than you.”