Страница 70 из 76
Boa was preserved from most of this within the heavily guarded portals of the Betti Bailey Memorial Clinic, an upper-crust, Westchester version of First National Flightpaths. At her own orders no one but Daniel and the Clinic’s staff were to be allowed into her room. He came there once a day in a rented limousine. While the limousine waited for the gates to be opened, the press would gather round with their cameras and their questions. Daniel would smile at them through the bullet-proof glass, which served the camera’s needs. As to the questions — Where had Boa been these many years? Why had she returned? What were her plans? — Daniel was as much in the dark as anyone, for they had yet to speak to each other. Usally she was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, and he would sit by her bed, arranging hecatombs of cut flowers and waiting for her to make the first move. He wondered how much of all he’d said over the last three years she’d been at hand to take in. He didn’t want to go through it all again, and in any case little of that was any longer to the point. The Boa who’d come back bore no resemblance to the living Boa he remembered. She was the same gaunt, hollow-eyed object that had Iain all those years, inert, on the other side of his room, whom to love was as impossible as if she had been a bundle of sticks. She seemed infinitely old and wasted. Her dark hair was streaked with gray. She did not smile. Her hands lay at her sides as though she had no interest in them, as though they were not hers but only a more cumbersome piece of bed linen. Once in these two weeks of visits she had opened her eyes to look at him, and then had closed them again, when she saw that he’d become aware of her attention.
Yet he knew she was capable of speech, for she’d given orders to the staff not to admit any visitors but Daniel. Even this small distinction was scarcely a balm to his heart when he knew, through Dr. Ricker, the director of the clinic, that no one, aside from the press had sought to be admitted. Once Boa’s miraculous return to life had become a matter of public interest, her father had made himself unavailable for comment. To the rest of the world Daniel and Boa may have been the love story of the century, but to Grandison Whiting they were gall and wormwood. He was not, Daniel supposed, a forgiving sort of person.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s bandwagon rolled onwards and upwards, a triumphal chariot, a juggernaut of success. Five of his songs were at the top of the charts. The two most popular, “Flying” and “The Song Does Not End,” were songs he’d written in the sauna of Adonis, Inc., back before any of this had begun. Except, logically, it must have begun then, or even before. Perhaps it all went back to that spring day on County Road B, when he’d been stopped in his tracks by that devastating inkling of some unknown glory. Sometimes he’d look up at the issue of Time that he’d nailed to the wall of his room at the Plaza with four stout nails and wonder if that had been the actual, foredestined shape of the vision that had loomed behind the clouds that day — that dark face with its animal ears and the dumb question rainbowed over it. He would have preferred a more inward and transfiguring glory to have been intended, as who would not, but if this was what the moving finger had writ, it would be churlish not to be grateful for benefits received — and received, and received.
The next rung of the ladder, the next plum to fall in his lap, was an hour-and-a-half special on ABC. A third of the program was to be numbers from Honeybu
Midas-like, Daniel’s success affected everyone within touching distance. Rey, besides his million and a half, booked a tour through the Midwest. Rather, he expanded the tour he’d already been pla
Perhaps the strangest consequence of Daniel’s celebrity was the cult that sprang up around not simply his myth but his image. His younger admirers, not content with mere passive adulation, determined to follow his darkling example and went out, in their thousands and soon their tens of thousands, and had themselves transformed into exact replicas of their idol — to the often considerable dismay of their thousands and tens of thousands of parents. Daniel became, by this means, a cause célèbre, a symbol of all that was most to be extolled or most to be abhorred in the new era, a real-life Honeybu
On an afternoon in February, on a day of bright and numbing cold, Boadicea opened her eyes and drew a deep breath that was partly a sigh and partly a yawn. Daniel didn’t dare so much as look toward her for fear of startling her back into the glades of her long silence. He went on staring at the facets of the stone in his ring, waiting for her mind to materialize before him in the form of words. At last the words arrived, faint and colorless. “Dear Daniel.” She seemed to be dictating a letter. He looked at her, not knowing how to reply. She didn’t look away. Her eyes were like porcelain, shining but depthless. “I must thank you for… the many flowers.” Her lips closed and tightened to signify a smile. The least movement, the blinking of her eyelids, seemed to require a conscious effort.
“You’re welcome,” he answered carefully. What does one say to a bird that decides to light on one’s finger? Hesitantly, he spoke of crumbs: “If there’s anything else I can bring you, Boa, just say the word. Anything that might help to pass the time.”