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chords echoed through our
stilt house on late afternoons, it was as if Isabella herself were in the air,
vibrating through every particle of the place that we called home. It was her
breath, her heart, her life. She no longer taught—travel was too difficult and
she didn't want her students to see the weight she'd gain and the hair she'd
lost. No, Isabella's music was no Ionger profession, but it was one of the two main
things that kept her sane. The other—I realized later—was me.
    That night, she had chosen an impossible recipe—roast lamb and a chutney
sauce I couldn't get right. The vegetables were slaughtered. The rice was
dripping but hard. The meat was overdone. Every time I looked down into my
wineglass, I saw the puddled ooze on Amber's carpet. I drank the bottle fast.
    We were sitting outside on the deck, next to each other, facing south
down the canyon toward the sea. Isabella spent hours there during the day, staring
off at the parched hills.
    "You drink a lot of wine," she said.
    "I'm a lot of man."
    "Well," she said finally, "be careful, Russ. It's getting
be every night. More than a little."
    "I know."
    "It w-w-worries me."
    The truth of the matter is that I was drinking an awful lot then. There
were two different worlds for me—the regular one and the one I could enter
through alcohol. I preferred the latter. It was a place of only the past and
the future, no present, place where action won out over thought, where possibility
seemed to wait. There was no cancer in it. I was drunk when I'd called Amber
the night before. I was drunk when I'd gone over there. Sober, I'd have done
neither. Sober, my world had begun to be a land of pure obligation and utility.
I felt like a post in the ground. But from the bottle called the twin worlds of
yesterday and tomorrow—thoughtless acceleration, unrestrained speed. I needed
motion. I craved it.
    So I opened the second bottle. The sun had gone down but there was still
an orange glow over the hills. A vulture Ianded on the power pole and looked
down at us. I despised it. It was a huge bird, and Izzy had named him Black
Death. She named a lot of things in our hillsides. I threw the empty wine
bottle at it and it flew away. The bottle vanished into the sagebrush that
thrives on our thirsty hillside. Predictably, with all the new development to
the south and west behind Laguna, the displaced wildlife has begun to
concentrate in our hills. Deer and coyote abound, much to the denigration of
local roses and cats. Hawks and vultures fill the air daily, and I have
spotted, just recently and for the first time, several bobcats. I killed two
five-foot rattlesnakes on my driveway last summer and captured a third that had
two heads, which I donated to the Los Angeles Zoo. An older woman on our street
was walking her teacup poodle one spring afternoon, only to have the tiny dog
swept from the pavement by a vulture (possibly Black Death himself). Since the
vulture is, according to ornithologists, strictly a scavenger, the vulture
attack was downgraded to a hawk attack by the local press. But I know the old
woman—her name is Astrid Kilfoy— and she's lived in this canyon long enough to
tell a vulture from a red-tail. As nature is compressed, she metastasizes
terrible, aberrant things. Like the tumor in Isabella's skull. Like the Midnight
Eye.
    I told Isabella about my day—mainly hanging around the cops trying to
get the scent for my next book. I came that close to telling her about
Amber, but that close was still a million miles away.
    "Do you have your subject y-yet?"
    "No. I'm still thinking about fiction."
    "I think you'd be a fine fiction writer."
    "I'm tempted and worried at the same time. Before, I've always had
the story there for me. In fiction, I'd have to make it up."
    Isabella thought about this for a long minute.
"But that way, it can end how you want it to. The hero can get the girl
and the good guys can shoot the bad guys. And you wouldn’t have to visit