Jonathan Carroll by From the Teeth of Angels

Author:From the Teeth of Angels
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-27T13:02:58+00:00

WYATT

My second day in Vienna I raised the dead.

Jet lag set in right after Sophie, Caitlin, and I had dinner at a restaurant near our hotel. One minute I felt fine; the next, I was so exhausted that I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to get up from the table and stagger back to the room. I did, but once there I simply dropped my clothes on the floor and fell into bed.

At six-thirty the next morning I was wide awake and on the phone to Jesse Chapman, telling him to come get me in his car because we had to go someplace right away. He didn’t sound surprised. The only thing he asked was if it had to do with what we’d discussed the day before. Yes, it did. Come get me.

I was standing in front of the hotel when he pulled up half an hour later.

“Hi, Wyatt. What’s up?” There was an eagerness on his face and in his voice that hadn’t been there the day before.

“Do you know where the Friedhof der Namenlosen is?”

“Cemetery of the Nameless? No.”

“Do you have a map of the city?”

“Yes, in the glove compartment. What is the place?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to Vienna before, remember? I just know we have to go there now. Is it this one?”

He looked at me a long second, then nodded. “What’s going on?”

Without knowing anything about the city or this place we had to visit, I looked at the map for no more than a few seconds before finding the cemetery.

“Here it is. I don’t know what’s going on. Do you know how to get here?” I pointed. He took the map and looked at it for a moment.

“It’s out by the airport. Yes, I can find it.”

There was a great deal of traffic, so it took us half an hour to get there. The only time he spoke was to point out certain famous sites — the Hofburg, the Prater, a building where Freud had lived early in his career. It was a clean, orderly city that didn’t strike me as very interesting. There were other places I would much rather have visited before I died. I’d always wanted to go to Bruges; always wanted to see that spectacular view of the sea from Santorini.

We rode for a while beside the Danube Canal. The water was brown and slow. There were no boats on it, not one, which I thought strange. Fishermen stood on the bank with their shirts off; bike riders pedaled by. A high summer day in Vienna. Jesse said they were in the middle of a drought — every day at least ninety degrees and no sign of rain. Trees drooped and the grass near the water was spotted with brown. A news broadcast in English came on the car radio and the commentator went into long details about the terrible war in Yugoslavia. Thousands dead, concentration camps; no one had any idea of how to make peace.

Jesse switched off the radio as soon as the report was finished.

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