The Blue Bottle (Part 8)
When the Duesenberg stops, Frank and Rosie are in Havan, favorite haunts of two great men, Hemingway and Lorenzo.
Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6 Pt 7
“Compassion: that’s the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it’s the one thing that keeps men ahead of them.”–Dr. McCoy
“Who is the person you went to see, Frank?”
“Hemingway,” Frank says.
“The writer?”
“Not a writer, Rosie. A genius.”
“You know him?”
“I should have known him longer, we passed in the night. I never knew a man whose writings were so harmonious with his world.”
“Did Hemingway know about time travel?” Rosie asks.
Frank pulls a crumpled letter from his pocket. “Here, read this. I’ve highlighted a paragraph.”
Rosie takes the letter, reading aloud the highlighted words.
“Shoulders shrugged before the canvas; it didn’t please him. Rarely did. But maybe he was wrong; others said his work was remarkable. He compared his writing to the painting that had inspired it, an old encyclopedia still open to that timeless page. A sigh, and the encyclopedia was set aside.”
“What does it mean, Frank?”
“Raven, too, is a writer. Hemingway dislikes Raven more than he does Fitzgerald.
“What’s Raven’s writing actually about?” Rosie asked, stepping into the light coming through the door, revealing the outline of her young thighs through the cotton yellow dress.
Only Frank hears the intake of breath, the urge of desire, combined with the moist intake of lust. Rosie steps out of the light, looking at the rows of fine cigars. The breathing quiets.
“Raven’s writings are a combination of everything that led him down dangerous roads, to the edge of the world, the Cimmerian shore, and the haven of whirlwinds and darkness. Raven knew Lorenzo’s recklessness, and his love of beautiful women, thrust, willingly, into the company of Lorenzo.
But one woman, in love with another man, resisted Lorenzo’s charms until he became gnawingly remorseful, a worm crawling through eternity, determined to find this woman and take her for his own.
Lorenzo’s eternity is full of aesthetic musings and sometimes it’s the dirtiest of happenings because such a life is messy, turbulent as thunderclouds, and then, well, he becomes frustrated, traveling in shame.
It was then that Raven found me. He said my life would forever be too large to devote to beauty. He told me there was a way to escape the sweetness of evil. Lorenzo and I were hand in hand on a path to seek out the worst of history. In the briefest exchange, Raven taught me the secret of the open road. He said that escape from eternity wasn’t easy, and if I was to manage it, I’d have to drink the water from the Blue Bottle.
The fact is, I didn’t know where else to start. But then, the beginning was a faraway truth. Raven gave me a task, one that would involve centuries. Time has passed, but how much I wasn’t sure. The only clue Raven gave me was the beauty of the sun’s setting, the pinks and golds, and the timeless beauty of meeting a curious, Irish redhead.”
Rosie is reticent about asking her next question.
“Am I… you know… the curious Irish redhead?” she asked, coyly, resting back against the wooden counter, her hands folded on the edge.
“We are here, Rosie, Lorenzo is here. I think it's a good possibility that we want the same thing.”
“I must seem pretty dumb, Frank. You’re telling me I am from another time? I mean, I’ve told you I understand the concept, we travel through time using a machine, right? ‘I told you, I saw the movie, the guy, he had a car, a Dorothy, or something like that. You have a car.”
“DeLorean, Rosie.”
“What?”
“The car was a Delorean.”
“Frank, I don’t care about the damn car, encyclopedias, farms, or cigars, what is the secret of the Blue Bottle?”
Frank, still worried that his true identity has been learned, tells her the truth of the Blue Bottle.
“It holds all the answers to religion, Rosie. It holds purity. To drink from the Blue Bottle is to be pure again. Such a Bottle is hidden from men like me, from Raven, and Lorenzo. It is the water of Baptism, and its water from the Sea of Galilee.”
Galilee, Rosie ponders. Why is the word familiar?
“Where is the guy gone? It’s been ages.”
“He won’t be coming back, Rosie. He went to find Lorenzo.”
“He’s here, in Havana, now?”
“In this cigar shop.”
Rosie looks around and moves closer to Frank. “It’s fine. You’re safe.”
“How do you know?”
“Hemingway told me when I met him at the station, he explained to that Lorenzo has a weakness, his appetite for the finest cigars.”
“Lorenzo prefers cigars over women?” Rosie asks, sounding indignant.
“Beneath the bedclothes no man is Lorenzo’s match. He has fast, invisible hands. A woman always ends up satisfied without ever having done anything. In Paris he gave away his poetry, the Mademoiselles falling for the wild fury of his passion, and never a contest did he turn away. He had women in Paris, in Tangier, Milan, and on the corners of streets in Rome using prose and a woman’s intrigue as weapons of choice. He was magnificent, fighting in the azure darkness for a night’s romance. He was majestic, a lothario spiraling through space, thrusting, ever onward through the dark depth.”
“So, when did you begin to hate Lorenzo, I mean, you know, want to kill him?”
“I’d fallen for the minstrel’s prize. It really happened after I first met the Raven. He was stood upon a shore, barefoot, hat on his head, staring out to sea. There was poetry in his stance. I was standing in my own puberty against the vastness of his knowledge.
Raven is not a wanderer; he knows his destination and from where he has leave to go there. He could depart at four in the morning and arrive in summertime, living in love’s drowsiness and knowing time would never leave him.
After five minutes in Raven’s company, I knew Lorenzo had to die. There was no other thing to do, no other words to write, other loves to find, most notably the pure kind, the kind of love that halts a wanderer, builds a fence of love round him. That love is gone.”
“Would I be capable of that love, Frank?”
The poor wretch, so simple that she is pure — or so pure that she is simple. Making her what she is. Making him what he is.
How can they not hear the breathing come closer.
They do not hear because the breath is their breath.
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