Page 88 of The Forest of Lost Souls

To sleep or not to sleep. That is the question. Boschvark has spent over two hundred million dollars funding studies on a wide range of health issues, including multiple attempts to determine where the lines between excess sleep, ideal sleep time, and sleep deprivation should be drawn and how each category affects a person’s longevity. Every study has produced different recommendations, which infuriates Boschvark each time he receives the latest one. Even now, working out in the home gym of his estate in Montecito, California, though he hasn’t received results of a new sleep study in more than a year, hesimmerswith anger as he thinks about the unreliable nature of scientists when they aren’t paid extravagantly to form a consensus on an issue. If the research subject involves something that will affect a public policy he champions, he can get a hundred studies from universities and highly respected organizations that say the same thing with identical certitude. However, paying for a consensus on the issue of sleep would do him no good, because this is about his personal health, thus requiring accurate data supported by unassailable facts.

Terrence Boschvark intends to live for three hundred years if not forever. If the Singularity—the melding of man and machine—doesn’t occur within the next few years, there will instead be a monumental discovery in molecular biology thatswiftly leads to human immortality, and if there isn’t such a discovery in molecular biology, then the breakthrough will come in genetic engineering. He is fifty-two years old, and when he thinks about the current average lifespan of a male, he gets so angry that he could strangle someone, anyone, if that would make him feel better, although of course it wouldn’t, at least not enough better to make it worth all the bother that would follow the strangulation.

Every day, Boschvark takes 182 pills and capsules of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and micronutrients that he believes will help him achieve life everlasting.Except on infuriating nights like this when he suffers insomnia, he sleeps in a custom hyperbaric chamber that supplies an environment rich in oxygen, thus facilitating brain health and ensuring that he’s more clear-thinking than other people. Among additional procedures, every six months his blood is replaced with filtered blood from a group of younger men who submit to tests for diseases and whom he pays extravagantly for their donations.

In spite of all that, he still suffers from an allergy to wheat that greatly restricts his diet and puts him at risk of anaphylactic shock if he is accidentally served ordinary pasta when he has asked for rice noodles. A common sandwich would kill him. The damn wheat allergy causes him to fume with resentment every time he thinks of it, which is every time he sits down to a meal or wants a snack.

At the moment, he is not angry about his allergy or about the meager human lifespan. However, his vexation at his inability to sleep is exacerbated by a constant, abrading irritation that the four men in the search party are dead while Nochelobo’s tart is alive and still poses a threat to the Grand Plateau project.

His workout isn’t exhausting him enough to sleep; he gives it up. Boschvark has been on a high-protein diet and lifting weights all of his adult life, and his supremely oxygenated brain is housed in a body so muscled that he believes he could drag a stubborn horse anywhere he wanted to take it, although he has never tested that assumption. He dislikes horses because of an incident with a pony that his parents gave him for his birthday when he was eight, a humiliation about which he never speaks. Anyway, now that he has given up on both his workout and the possibility of sleep, what he needs is not a horse but his Gulfstream V jet.

He calls Tandor Shaft, a former Navy SEAL and one of three property managers who live on the estate. Tandor is assigned the four-o’clock-to-midnight shift and is ready to deal with anything from a malfunctioning toilet to an attack involving mercenaries hired by the biggest star on the Food Network. Boschvark has never met the Food Network personality, but the man once made an on-air joke about him and is therefore not to be trusted.

Now, he directs Tandor Shaft to wake Heath Granger and Shepherd Eagle, his full-time pilots, who are asleep in one of the estate’s guesthouses. They must go to the private terminal at the airport in neighboring Santa Barbara and ready the jet. After taking a shower and receiving a fifteen-minute massage from his masseuse, who will also have to be awakened, Boschvark will be driven to the plane in the Mercedes limousine—the black one—by Tandor. Granger and Eagle will fly their employer to the accommodating airstrip on his nine-thousand-acre ranch that is four miles outside of Kettleton. He acquired the ranch—one of his nineteen homes—when his company was awarded the contract for the plateau project.Since he learned that this Vida person escaped, he’s endured an abrading irritation, which has matured into a bitter peevishness that makes it impossible for him to enjoy anything. He intends personally to direct the further search for and the inevitable capture of this impertinent woman.

72

TWO MOON, SUN SPIRIT

Although Sherlock, Whimsey, and Marple have been freed from their leashes so that they will feel equal to the six wolves, they remain obedient and close to Sam, currently ceding the affection of Vida to their wild brethren. Here on the long slope leading to the meadowy glen where Two Moon and Sun Spirit reside, the forest is dense, with such little undergrowth that they can proceed directly rather than on a wandering path shaped by generations of deer.

Accompanied by dogs and wolves, they pass through purple and midnight-blue shadows that are pierced by bolts of sunshine as narrow as the beams of penlights. Although Vida has never before been in this far reach of the wilderness, it feels familiar to her.

In the lead, Lupo looks back at her, and for a moment all is changed. The forest is centuries younger, the trees farther apart, and a more revelatory light pours down on them, not the light of the sun, but the ghostly light of a full and enormous moon. In spite of a sense of familiarity, she cannot ever have been in this long-ago place, for she had not yet been born, nor would Lupo and his pack have existed then. This is not a memory or a vision of a true past, but something stranger; it is almost a message of reassurance—from whom?—that although our lives pass likeshadows, a continuity of experience shapes the world, and the world in all its glory would not be as magnificent as it is if even one of those lives had not passed through.

Lupo looks away from Vida, and the forest becomes as it had been before the curious change—the trees close-packed and gathered in deep gloom, sun streaming down in penlight beams, the moon once more on the far side of the planet.

When they come out of the woods and into the grassy glen, the house is as Sam described it; he’s been here twice in his roaming with his dogs, although not when leading a search party. The place is modest. No more than eight or nine hundred square feet. Weathered cedar siding. Fronted by a deep loggia for shade in the summer. At one end, a fireplace chimney built of native stones. Sheet-copper roof greened by time.

Maybe three hundred yards beyond the house, legions of white spectral forms writhe skyward. The smoking river.

A second, smaller structure with its own chimney is a stable for two horses. Currently the stallion and mare are grazing in an adjacent pasture encircled by a split-rail fence; though they raise their heads and cock their ears, pausing in their eating to observe the dogs and wolves, they are not alarmed.

There is as well a deep stand-alone ice cellar that remains functional seven months of the year.

According to Sam, all structures were built by the residents with the help of others from the Cheyenne nation who did not choose to retreat from a world gone wrong but who supported Two Moon’s and Sun Spirit’s desire to do so. The building materials were brought to this remote site in pickups with all-wheel drive, which was the first time the raucousness of the modernworld had penetrated this primeval realm though surely not the last.

The thirtysomething pair who live here tend gardens in these fields; the husband also hunts for game and otherwise forages the forest. Every six weeks, they make a three-day round-trip trek on horseback, into Kettleton, to purchase staples. Using a manual typewriter, she is a novelist of modest success, writing tales that some call “magical realism,” but that she insists are “just the way things are.”

Perhaps one of them happens to be looking out a window when Vida and Sam and their low-to-the-ground entourage emerge from the forest into the meadow. However, as Sun Spirit opens the front door and steps onto the loggia with Two Moon behind her, the rustic house and the grazing horses and the sun-washed glen seem to exist in a state of grace. Vida feels sure that, by a sense other than the common five, these people have known that visitors with a grave purpose are coming.

Sun Spirit goes to Sam, takes one of his hands in both of hers, and kisses his cheek. “Man of the hounds, woman of the wolves, each clothed in the same light.”

Sam murmurs something Vida can’t hear.

Dogs and wolves commingle around the woman, gazing up at her and moving with her as she comes to Vida. “Although I’ve never seen you before, why do I think I know you?”

“I wonder if you knew my fiancé—José Nochelobo.”

The woman’s hair is thick and black and glossy; it frames a face of chiseled features and matches the color of eyes that, in their seeing, seem always to be searching. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

From her jacket, Vida retrieves the notepad paper that was given to her by Anna Lagare, the mortician’s daughter. “This was found in the pocket of the shirt José was wearing the day that he was murdered.”

“Murdered.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

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