9. The Faster the Rise the Harder the Fall
THE FASTER THE RISE THE HARDER THE FALL
I RACED UP THE STEPS from the courtyard, up to the entry level of the house. He couldn’t have gotten far. When I reached the landing of the main house, Genesis was standing there, waiting.
“Have you seen him?” I was already panting.
She arched one brow. “That’s your job.”
“He was asleep, literally one second ago—”
“I know what you want.” Genesis’s eyes on mine were probing and dark.
I thought idly of the eyes I’d seen on the monitor.
They’d been Jude’s, assuming they weren’t purely my imagination, but the eeriness was the same.
Eyes that know more than they’re saying.
“You think permission into this house means you are welcome here. You’re not. ”
She turned away, and I gaped after her, flabbergasted.
“He hasn’t left the house, has he?” I called at her back, desperate enough to think she might answer.
She walked away, of course. Not a word. It occurred to me to wonder whether she lived in the house as well, and if so, where. Was she invited to these parties? Presumably not. Maybe that was the source of the resentment.
I didn’t have time to ponder the hierarchy of the villa’s ecosystem.
I darted to the opposite side of the landing, to the edge of the balcony overlooking the rest of the property, where I could peer down to see if he might have taken a car.
It was so far down to the greenhouse, that crumbling garage, that my brain whispered its usual prompt: Could I Survive It?
I didn’t have time to run the scenarios. Instead I clutched, white-knuckled, onto the balcony’s edge. For half a second I could almost feel Genesis’s hands on my back. The ghost of a two-handed push.
My mind was running away with itself. She’s creative, I heard my grandma tell my mom.
Only because you’re filling her head with nonsense!
The garage door wasn’t open; I didn’t hear a car. Okay, so he hadn’t left the villa—for now. I ran into the house, shouting his name into the empty chamber of the living room. My voice bounced off the glass, the cathedral ceilings.
“Jude?”
Nothing. I hurried up the stairs, to the wing of the house where his bedroom was.
I was panicking—what little experience I’d had with Jude suggested I should panic—but maybe he’d only gone to the bathroom.
Maybe he’d gotten up to get a glass of water.
He wasn’t bedridden, and he wasn’t a prisoner, either. I was probably fretting over nothing.
“Jude?” The door was ajar. I nudged it wider. “Jude?”
Nothing. I stepped lightly inside, not wanting to disturb him in case he had some odd habit of sleeping under the bed or in the bathtub, whatever eccentric rich people might do. The room had an en suite bathroom, the door to which was also ajar.
I stepped deeper inside, holding my breath.
The moon was bright through the bathroom window, casting an eldritch haze over the contents of the room. The shower curtain was drawn, concealing the bathtub. I pulled it back hastily, jumping when the hooks of metal scraped along the rod.
“They call it the sacred disease,” a voice remarked mildly from over my shoulder.
“Fuck—” I gasped. My heart was thundering so hard I couldn’t hear anything aside from the sound of blood rushing. “Jude. Christ. What the fuck.”
I turned, locking eyes with him as I pressed the heel of my hand to my chest. He seemed completely unbothered by my presence, as if he’d already known I was coming, which probably he had. Presumably I was now part of some psychotic effort to entertain himself.
I’d never been this close to him while he was standing; which was to say, he was more substantial than I thought.
He must have been about his father’s height, but rail thin, an effect that warped him somehow.
His long hair hung loose around his face, making it look even gaunter.
It wasn’t truly curly or straight, mainly coarse waves, not unlike my natural hair, minus the oils and masks and detanglers.
His skin had a yellowish tint, a look of ill health.
Silly to think he wasn’t getting much sun when the most luxurious pool and spa I’d ever been to lived directly beneath us.
I could hear everything from the party, all the brays of drunken laughter, the voices raised in animated tones of pointless argument or shrill, euphoric joy.
An amphitheater effect, sound ricocheting up from below.
It would have been wrong to say he had no effect on me, or that the composite of his parts was as off-putting to me as it should have been. Visually he was—maybe the right word was surreal, elongated and dreamlike.
“Do you believe in evil?” Jude asked me.
I couldn’t tell which version of him this was—the one who got himself beaten half to death or the one who, as I supposed it could be shorthanded, did not.
He wasn’t moving toward me, so I tried to play the whole thing off as if I wasn’t shaken, or worried, or retroactively annoyed beyond belief.
The possibility remained that this was just a man who, like all other men, required me to play along with his various whims, politely charitable to his moods, whatever else I managed to intuit about him. Or what I read behind his eyes.
So I matched his indifference. Like an improv game, yes and.
“I believe that people are complex,” I said, using my dinner party voice.
The one where I reacted to the evening’s devil’s advocate as if the act of equivocating a person’s existence, occasionally my own, could be charming; as if every gentle slur could be performed in good faith, because the alternative was only to be humorless, insufferable, dull.
“I didn’t ask if you believe people are capable of evil.
I asked if you believe it exists.” Jude was looking at me with a sense of—well, no.
He was looking through me, like his thoughts were elsewhere.
Again, the possibility remained that he was just an angsty little edgelord who’d grown up without having to take responsibility for anything.
He had a private doctor on call, for example.
He’d already avoided assault charges, if not worse, on my watch.
As far as I knew, there had been no consequences for any of his actions, only concern for his well-being.
He probably believed, without any evidence to the contrary, that the world revolved around him.
“Can we have this conversation somewhere other than your bathroom?” I asked.
He took an obliging step back. A motion I felt, my breath strangely thin.
“Thanks.” I looked around at things in his room, or pretended to. I’d been there twice while he was unconscious, so I’d already realized, for example, that this was the window I’d first seen when I came to the house—the one from which I’d felt certain I was being watched.
“So,” I said. “What was that about your sacredness?”
He shook his head. “Epilepsy. It’s called the sacred disease.” I was becoming increasingly aware that his voice was rough with disuse, gravelly in a way. “The Greeks thought the seizures were brought on by gods. Some people with epilepsy believe they have visions.”
Some people. “And you?” I asked him. “What do you have?”
Jude glanced away from me. “I think you know what I don’t have.”
For a moment, something surged in the space between us; the specter of mutual confession, the truth we could shape for ourselves if we chose to.
I blew straight past it.
“So,” I said. “Are you Jude because of the Beatles song?”
“You need to leave,” he replied curtly. “You think he doesn’t see it. But he does.”
“Who is ‘he’?”
Jude stared at the window for a long time.
Long enough that I realized he wasn’t going to answer me.
Long enough that I wondered whether he was even listening.
I stepped beside him, looking down. There were figures at the side of the house, a couple, too far away to be distinguishable even if I knew anyone else at the party. A woman’s voice giggled. Then the motion light turned on, startling them into shrieks of laughter.
Maybe he was just voyeuristic. Maybe there was nothing better to do all day.
I felt a strange desperation to make sense of him, more so than my usual tendency to people-please, maybe because of the static that seemed to buzz in the space of the unknown.
I told myself it wasn’t fear, but it was tangible, palpable, unignorable all the same.
It was the unknown that bothered me, the sense that I couldn’t define myself without knowing his constraints.
If I could understand him—if I could place his archetype—then the pull would go away.
Once I knew who he was, I could find or create a requisite version of myself, and everything would be simple, and no longer enticing.
I could figure out my role, whether it was this story’s Mary Poppins or Body No. 3 on Law and Order: SVU.
“What happened to your mom?” I asked. Jude flinched.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t elaborate.
Fine. I left the window in a fit of agitation, losing interest in the sounds of drunken lovers’ trysts below.
People were arguing downstairs, why don’t you look at me like that, don’t you care how I feel?
I’d found it tiresome since I was a teenager; when everyone else became interested in sweethearts and fairytales, I took an interest in the romanticism of poverty, as my mother put it. That, and sex.