5
For Tesla, leaving Palomo Grove was like waking from sleep in which some dream-tutor had instructed her that all life was dreaming. There would be no simple division from now on between sense and nonsense; no arrogant assumption that this experience was real and this one not. Maybe she was living in a movie, she thought as she drove. Come to think of it that wasn’t a bad idea for a screenplay: the story of a woman who discovered that human history was just one vast family saga, written by that underrated team Gene and Chance, and watched by angels, aliens and folks in Pittsburgh who had tuned in by accident and were hooked. Maybe she’d write that story, once this adventure was over.
Except that it would never be over; not now. That was one of the consequences of seeing the world this way. For better or worse she would spend the rest of her life anticipating the next miracle; and while she waited, inventing it in her fiction, so as to prick herself and her audience into vigilance.
The drive was easy, at least as far as Tijuana, and left room for such musings. Once she had crossed the border, however, she had to consult the map she’d bought, and was obliged to postpone any further plottings or prophecies. She had committed Fletcher’s instructions to memory like an acceptance speech, and they—with help from the map—proved good. Never having travelled the peninsula before she was surprised to find it so deserted. This was not an environment in which man and his works had much hope of sustained existence, which led to the expectation that the Mission ruins, when she reached them, would most likely have been eroded, or swept away into the Pacific, whose murmur grew in volume as her route took her closer to the coast.
She could not have been more wrong in that expectation. As she rounded the bend of the hill Fletcher had directed her to, it was immediately apparent that the Mision de Santa Catrina was very much intact. The sight made her innards churn. A few minutes’ drive, and she’d be standing before the site at which an epic story—of which she knew only the tiniest part—had begun. For a Christian, perhaps Bethlehem would have aroused the same excitement. Or Golgotha.
It was not a place of skulls, she found. Quite the reverse. Though the fabric of the Mission had not been rebuilt—its blasted rubble was still spread over a substantial area—somebody had clearly preserved it from further dissolution. The reason for that preservation only became apparent once she’d parked the car, some way off from the building, and approached on foot across the dusty ground. The Mission, built for holy purpose, deserted, then turned to an endeavor its architects would surely have deemed heretical, was once again sanctified.
The closer she approached the jigsaw walls, the more evidence she found before her. First, the flowers, laid in rough bunches and wreaths among the scattered stones, their colors brilliant in the clear sea air.
Second, and more poignant, the small bundles of domestic items—a loaf, a jug, a door handle—that had been bound up with scraps of scrawled-upon paper and laid among the blossoms in such profusion she could scarcely take a step without treading on something. The sun was slipping away now, but its deepening gold only served to enhance the sense that this was a haunted place. She negotiated the rubble as quietly as she could, for fear of disturbing its occupants, human or otherwise. If there were miraculous beings in Ventura County (walking the streets, no less, unabashed) how much more likely that here, on this lonely headland, there should be wonder-workers?
Who they might be, and what shape (if any) they took, she didn’t even concern herself to try to guess. But if the number of gifts and supplications laid underfoot testified to anything it was that prayers were answered here.
The bundles and the messages left outside the Mission were affecting enough, but those inside were more moving still. She stepped through a gap in one of the walls into a silent crowd of portraits: dozens of photographs and sketches of men, women and children fixed to the stone along with a fragment of clothing, or a shoe; even spectacles. What she’d wandered through outside had been gifts. These, she guessed, were items for some bloodhound god to sniff. They belonged to missing souls, brought here in the hope that the powers would usher the lost back on to a familiar road and so bring them home.