“Shirin didn’t hold out much hope for you,” Bonnie told me.
“Not at first anyway.”
Bonnie shrugged away my qualifying phrase. “She thought you were too fix
ed.”
I pondered the various meanings of that word, and evidently so did Bonnie, for she soon added a clarification: “Too set in your ways.”
I nodded.
“Like, for example, here you are, you’ve smashed the fossil to bits, and you’re not even going to look at it.”
I glanced at the mess on the bricks. “Bonnie, it’s just a bunch of crushed calcium carbonate.”
“Yeah, that’s what she meant. That’s just the kind of thing she’d expect you to say.”
Well, goddamn. Tonight was definitely my night to be abused and chivvied about. With an exhausted sigh, I turned my attention to the debris beside me and sensed rather than saw Bonnie withdrawing a bit to give me some space.
What was I supposed to be seeing here, if there was anything to be seen? Or: How was I supposed to be looking at it? What had Shirin said about it? I didn’t think the memory was there at all, then it suddenly leaped to mind. She said, “I want to show you how to read the future.” Then she observed that Charles would have done it better and that the point of the exercise needed to be “more fully developed.”
She wanted to show me how to read the future. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for what she would say. What words would not surprise me coming from her mouth on this subject?
Suddenly I heard her say, “The universe is all of a piece, Jared.” It was so clear that I opened my eyes, half expecting to see her standing in front of me, but only Bonnie was there, sitting on a nearby stack of bricks and gazing up at the stars. I closed my eyes again, thinking, “So the universe is all of a piece. What does this tell me about anything?”
I let her speak: “This tells you that the flight path of a goose over Scandinavia has something to do with a man dying in a hospital room in New Jersey—but it takes some figuring to find out what it is. This tells you that what’s hidden inside a fossil two hundred million years old has something to do with Jared Osborne. This too takes some figuring. This kind of figuring is the diviner’s specialty, Jared, though anyone can learn to do it. The diviner is just a special tracker, a tracker of events and relations. Think about what you want right now. What are you looking for?”
That was easy. “I’m looking for you.”
“Your search begins with this fossil, Jared. You could easily have told me its future when I asked you to, but you were too cowardly to try. Now you know its future, don’t you.”
“Yes, it’s future is dust. It had no other future from the moment Charles handed it to me. Even if I hadn’t smashed it, it had no other future. One day, in a week or a million years, it was going to become rubble, and no other destiny was ever possible for it.”
“The universe is all of a piece, Jared. Charles bought this fossil for you because he knew it had a message for you—a message of some kind, he couldn’t have guessed what, at that point. Ask for that message now, Jared. Ask this fossil what it has to do with you. What is it trying to show you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, predictably.
“Become a diviner now, Jared. You’re looking for something. Cut open a bird and examine its entrails, consult your dreams, take up geomancy—or look at the remains of this fossil. Look at it and ask your question.”
I looked at and asked: Where is Shirin? I suppose it took half a second to realize that I had the answer, about as long as it once took me to realize that I’d actually filled that inside straight flush. I nearly fell over backward with illumination, nearly floated off the ground as I came in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being. If Bonnie hadn’t been nearby, I think I would have called out helplessly to the universe that in that moment had taken notice of me. As it was, my eyes flooded with tears and my arms and legs began to tremble uncontrollably.
“Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot,” the fossil debris said to me. “Look closely, look closely—look anywhere you like! Do you see any Shirin here? Any Shirin at all here? Idiot! Idiot! Shirin is not to he found in the rubble! She isn’t there!”
I waited a long, long time, till I was sure I’d be able to walk without wobbling and to talk without sobbing. It must have taken twenty or thirty minutes, and I thought Bonnie might have left, but no, she was still there. After sweeping the rubble away with my hand, I walked over and told her I’d learned what the fossil had to tell me. She saw with a glance that this was the truth, and graciously didn’t press for details.
“I’m glad,” she said. Then: “Do you want this?”
I said yes and held out my hand, and she dropped into it the little ball of paper that the conjuror Giinter had tossed over his shoulder.
“I’ve got to run,” she said, sliding down off her pile of bricks. “Do you need a ride back to your hotel?”
I didn’t bother to explain that I was no longer being accommodated there, I just told her no, “And thanks for making me face the fossil. I would’ve left it undone otherwise.”
“Oh, you know what Shirin always said. The universe is all of a piece.”
“I never heard her say that with my own ears, Bonnie, but I’m glad to have heard it now.”
She hurried into the night and I followed in her wake more slowly. At the first street lamp I came to, I paused and worked open the little ball of paper, just to make sure it was as blank as it was supposed to be. On it were penciled an even dozen words: