Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

were."
    "When would you let her read it?"
    "When she is sixteen or seventeen. Old enough to understand what I was saying."
    "You're crazy about children, huh? How come you've never had any?"
    "Because I never met a man I loved enough to want to share that experience with. I don't care if we were married or not, or even if the relationship ended later. It's only important that at the time we decided to have the child, we were so completely involved with each other that it'd be the absolutely right thing to do."
    She looked out the window and ran her hand through her new haircut.
    "I've been talking the whole time, haven't I?"
    "I'm glad."
    "I can't tell if that's good or bad. It usually takes me a long time to talk like this with a man.
    Especially one I just met. But maybe we didn't just meet, you know? Someone came up to me once and said 'Weren't you my wife in our last incarnation?' It was the best come-on line I'd ever heard."
    "What happened to that man?"
    She looked calmly at me. "It was Luc. The one who . . . hit me yesterday."
    "It's four hundred steps to the top, Maris, maybe more. Then we have to walk for another fifteen minutes, straight up. Are you sure you want to do it?
    It really doesn't matter to me. Honestly."
    We stood at the bottom of a staircase in the Thirteenth District. To our right was the Lainzer Tiergarten, a private hunting reserve of Kaiser Franz
    Josef in the time of the Habsburg Empire. Now it's a big, lovely park, where strange animals roam free, and you can come face to face with a family of wild boars if you're lucky. It was weeks since the park had closed for the winter.
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    But after Maris insisted on visiting my third happy place, we drove to this far-off corner of Vienna to see . . . a field.
    She looked at the steps and then at me. She let her tongue hang out as if she'd made the climb three or four times that day already. "So what's up there that's worth four hundred steps?"
    "It won't sound interesting if I tell you. You have to see it for yourself."
    She pulled her tongue back in. "Is it the Emerald City?"
    "Better. I've never shown it to anyone. I only go there once in a while: Only when I'm either completely happy or totally sad."
    "Sounds interesting. Let's go."
    She started fast up the stairs, but by the halfway point I could hear her breathing hard. She finally stopped and put hands on hips. "Walker, I'm not in love with climbing four hundred stairs. How come you're not even winded?"
    "I used to do a lot of mountain climbing when I first came here. One of those grizzled old guides showed me how to walk vertically."
    "Teach me." She dropped her hands and gestured toward the stairs, ready to move again.
    I walked ahead and spoke to her over my shoulder. "Walk more slowly than you think you should. Don't take giant steps, because that'll just tire you.
    Walk slow and steady, and breathe like that too: slow and steady."
    "It sounds like a meditation from Bhagwan's _Orange Book_."
    I turned and mugged at her over my shoulder. She reached out and gave my jacket a friendly tug.
    It felt as if she'd stroked my hand: the same little electric shock that comes whenever someone important touches you the first time.
    We climbed and climbed. The steps were covered with layers of gray and brown leaves so dead they didn't even make that skittery, crackly, dead-leaf noise. Everything had gone out of them, and they were soft under our feet.
    A few other people passed on the way up and, invariably, said the inevitable "_Grüssgott!_"
    when we passed. God's greetings. It's a small, nice piece of Austria I have always noticed and liked.
    At the top of the stairs, Maris turned around for the first time and looked behind us. Above the treetops of the Tiergarten you could see wet rooftops and smoke from chimneys, slices of sun reflecting hard off windows everywhere, like flashy clues to God's whereabouts. The air had been washed clean by the rain, and we'd climbed high enough above the city for