Godstone

We slipped like fugitives from the cloisters and into a waiting car. The three of us sat in the backseat. I sat in the middle with Gee on my left and Adam, again holding my hand, on my right. I had no nephews, and I didn’t have any friends who had children. I didn’t know how to react to someone of Adam’s age. I was still on a buzz from the last of the cocaine, and I didn’t know what to say or do. I just let him hold my hand.

In the taxi, I began to ask Gee the million questions that were boiling over in my mind, but she held a finger to her mouth and pointed at the driver.

Gee then spoke to the driver in what I supposed was Hebrew; there was a brief exchange between them, perhaps a clarification as to where they were taking me or the route he was going to take. After that, we travelled in silence for the hour and a half that it took us to drive back to Jerusalem. And the silence made my anger worse.

We pulled up at a large house in an unfamiliar suburb. The house could have been a small school or a children’s nursery. Adam kept hold of my hand and led me into the house. The car stayed in the driveway; the driver stayed in the car.

Inside the house, the hallway led into a living room that was obviously lived in: books, magazines (ELLE, Vogue, Good Housekeeping), and toys, mainly small cars, were scattered around. French windows gave out onto a terrace enclosed with well-kept plants. On one side of the living room stood a small table with toy soldiers and a landscaped hillside.

This was a family house, a home. It was not the religious institution that I had been expecting.

A housekeeper, or perhaps she was a maid, appeared, and Gee gave her some instructions, again, I think, in Hebrew. The housekeeper disappeared, and then Gee said something to Adam. He looked up at me, let go of my hand, and left the room.

“You still have the stone?” Gee said; it was more of a statement than a question. She had taken off her veil and her headdress, and I looked at her for a moment before replying. She looked so different from when I had last seen her: not only had her face aged, but there was also something strange about her hair.

“Yes,” I replied. “I still have the stone. And apparently I also have a son, something that I find totally impossible.”

Gee lifted her head sharply—a movement a horse might make if it had seen something it didn’t like. To give herself more time to answer, she took a book from the sofa, put it on the coffee table, and sat down.

“Yes,” she said finally. “You have a son.”

“I’m having a hard time with that,” I replied angrily. “Today is my twenty-sixth birthday, and you’re telling me I have a nine-year-old son. I would have had to be a teenager at the time. And when I was teenager, I was living at home in England, going to school. It’s just not possible.” I heard my own voice begin to break as I spoke. I realised that I was losing control. I was in a rage.

“If he is indeed my son, you should have told me before.” I was on the verge of freaking out. “And you should have told him about me!”

“I have told him about you,” she replied. There was no compassion in her voice, only harshness, the same harshness—or was it anger?—that I had noticed the very first morning I had met her. But her face now didn’t match her voice. Her face had a sadness about it, a weariness that suddenly made me feel sorry for her. The way she looked, her vulnerability, took the edge off my rage.

“You have changed since I last saw you,” I said, gradually regaining control of my breathing. “There is something different about you.” She made that sudden jerky movement again with her head.

“I think it would be better if you stayed here for a few days,” she said, ignoring my comment. “It will be safer than at your hotel. Please go there now to check out and get your things. Tariq will drive you. I will wait here for your return.”

Gee stood up. The conversation was over. As I was leaving the living room, the housekeeper returned with what looked like lemon-flavoured drinks. Gee didn’t ask me to wait long enough to drink one.

Tariq drove me in silence to my hotel. I didn’t tell him which hotel it was, but apparently he already knew. When I went to pay my bill, the receptionist told me that it had already been paid. I asked him who had paid it, but I didn’t understand his mumbled, accented reply.

We drove back in silence to the house, and I tried to put all the questions that I had in my head into some sort of logical order.

It was dark when we arrived back at the house. Adam ran out to the car as we drove up. He again took my hand and pulled me into the sitting room. He explained that his mother had gone out and asked if I would play soldiers with him. Before I could answer, he had pulled me over to the table by the French windows and begun to explain the battle scene. I tried to listen to his explanation, but I couldn’t take anything in. I guess I was still in shock. I needed explanations but not about some war game.

Adam passed me a couple of toy soldiers and gave me instructions as to where to place them on the landscaped table.

“I am sorry, Adam,” I told him. “All this is a bit difficult for me to take in. Can you please explain the game to me again?”

“Sure, Dad,” he replied. It was the first time he had called me Dad. It had a weird effect on me. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. Nor did I know whether I was really his dad. And if I weren’t, then it certainly wasn’t fair to the boy to think I was.

“This table is the earth,” Adam continued, “although the real earth is round rather than flat. The figures on this side are the good soldiers. The figures on that side are not soldiers—they are just ordinary people. Some of the people are good people—they are the ones who live in the village here. The others are the bad people.”

“Why are they bad people?” I asked.

“Because they are destroying the earth,” he replied. “Well, they don’t know that they are destroying the earth; they just are. So it is the job of the soldiers to kill the bad people without hurting the good people. That’s the only way they can stop them from destroying the earth.”

Adam looked up at me to make sure that I was following him. I hadn’t really been listening to his explanation; instead I had been trying to decide if I was really his father. But at that instant I knew I was. There was something in the way he looked at me that just told me he was my son. It was impossible. I couldn’t explain it. But he was.

Gee arrived back at the house an hour or so later. Adam and I had moved from playing with soldiers on the table to playing with toy cars on the tiled floor. She walked in while we were competing with each other to see which car would go the farthest with a single push. I stood up, expecting her to be happy that I had been playing with her son—our son.

“Adam,” she said. “Please go and have your bath now and get your pyjamas on. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.” Adam smiled a conspiratorial smile at me and left the room.

Gee glanced at my small rucksack, which was still standing where I had left it by the door. “Let me show you to your room,” she said. As we walked out of the living room, she put her hand onto my back as if to guide me.

“William,” she said. “Please wait one minute.”

I turned and saw that she was holding the empty glass vial that Jazz had given me. She must have taken it from my jacket pocket.

“Are you high now?” she asked me.

“No,” I replied. “Well, maybe a little.” She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to. The look on her face said it all.

“I can’t do this,” I told her as we stood there in the doorway. My anger had dissipated but I had gone into meltdown mode. “I can’t do what you and my uncle want me to do. And most of all, I can’t be a father to your child.”

“You can do this,” she replied. There was no menace in her voice but no encouragement either. It was just a statement. “You are the only person who can do it. And you are all that Adam has. He has no choice. You don’t either.”

Gee closed her fist over the glass vial and crushed it. I expected to see blood, but all I saw was glass dust fall slowly to the floor. I felt a shiver of fear pass down my spine. There had been no exertion on her face; she had crushed that glass to dust as if it had been a stale crust of bread.

“Who or what are you?” I asked. The fear that had been in my spine had risen to my vocal chords.

She heard it, and her voice softened a little, as did the muscles in her face. “I am whatever you are,” she answered quietly. “You and I are the same. You just won’t admit it to yourself.”

She turned and went up the stairs. I followed her up to a bedroom with a small double bed and lace coverings on the bedside tables. It was a room that was evidently hardly ever used.

“There is a bathroom on the opposite side of the corridor. You can take a shower if you like. The water should be hot. Dinner is in half an hour.”

And then she was gone.

I took a shower, the first hot shower that I had had since I had been in Israel. When I went downstairs again, I found Gee in the kitchen with Adam. He was wearing Ninja Turtle pyjamas and sitting at a small kitchen table, apparently doing his homework. I went over to him and looked at what he was writing; it was in Hebrew. He smiled at me and moved his head to indicate a cake sitting on the windowsill. It had one candle in the middle.

“Happy birthday!” Adam said with a laugh. He pulled an envelope out from under his textbook and handed it to me. It had “For My Dad” written on the outside. Inside was a handmade birthday card with a drawing of a house: the windows were eyes, and the front door was a smile. An orange sun shone behind the house, and there was a green tree, bigger than the house, in the foreground. In the garden were three stick figures: one man, one woman, and one child. They were all holding hands.

Adam looked at me expectantly, waiting for my reaction.

“It’s a really great picture,” I replied. “Did you draw it?” He nodded shyly. I bent down and kissed him on his head. I had no idea why I did that. I had never kissed a child before. His hair felt thin and soft on my lips.

“Will you help me carry this through to the dining room?” Gee asked me, pointing to some plates, glasses, and cutlery that had been placed on the kitchen counter.

I did as she asked, and Adam followed me, helping to arrange the plates on the table. Gee brought in a tray with the food: fish fingers, green peas, and mashed potatoes. It was children’s food—English children’s food. I had forgotten that Gee’s mother had been English.

“Adam,” she said, “will you say grace?”

Adam leaned over and took Gee’s and my hands in his and bowed his head. “Lord, for what we are about to receive, please make us truly grateful.”

I felt the beginnings of a panic attack, and sweat began to drip down the small of my back. This whole family dinner thing was so alien to me, so fraudulent. The last effects of the cocaine were wearing off, and I couldn’t cope.

“Do you have any alcohol?” I asked Gee desperately. “A glass of wine?”

“Your liver,” Gee replied flatly. “You have the beginning of cirrhosis. You can’t drink alcohol anymore.” Gee served the food; that conversation was apparently closed.

Adam began to pick and turn the food around in his plate. I did the same. Neither of us was hungry.

“Can we have the cake now?” Adam asked after a while, pushing his plate away. He had eaten the mashed potatoes but had rearranged the fish and the peas on his plate, hiding most of them beneath a strategically placed knife and fork. “Maria made the cake,” he added. “It should be really good. Mum, can we have ice cream with it?”

“Only if you eat some more of your fish,” Gee replied sternly.

Adam cast his eyes back to his plate and picked at the fish again. Gee eventually put him out of his misery, took the plates back to the kitchen, and brought back the cake. Adam lit a match at the fourth attempt and then lit the candle. Gee turned off the lights, and the two of them sang “Happy Birthday” to me.

Gee turned the lights back on, and Adam cut three slices of cake. Adam was probably right about the cake being delicious, but it stuck in my throat; I couldn’t seem to swallow it.

It was cool in the room, but I was still sweating badly. The more I sweated, the more embarrassed I felt—and the more I sweated. My shirt was drenched. Gee noticed the state I was in and told Adam to go to his room, clean his teeth, and get ready for bed.

“I will be up in a moment to say goodnight,” she added.

“Can Daddy come up and say goodnight as well?” Adam asked.

Gee looked at me a moment, watching the sweat drip off my forehead. “Not tonight, Adam,” she told him. “Maybe tomorrow.”

That “maybe tomorrow” was my first indication that I was to stay with them for more than one night.

“Are you going to stay with us forever?” Adam asked me. He had picked up on it as well, but I had no idea how to answer him.

“For a little while,” Gee told him, looking at me. Once Adam had left the room, I turned to Gee.

“Where do we start?” I asked her. “There is so much that I do not understand.”

Gee didn’t answer at first but stood up and closed the curtains against the night. She then selected an LP from a collection in a sideboard music system and put it on the record player. It was Naturally by J. J. Cale. She came back to the dining table and sat down opposite me.

“Ask your questions, and I will do my best to answer them,” she said eventually. Her voice was flat and without emotion.

“Well, can you start by trying to explain how I have a nine-year-old son?” There was more aggression in my voice than I had intended.

Gee sighed. “The stone,” she said wistfully, “gives you access to a fifth dimension. Having access to that fifth dimension allows you to move back in time.”

I sat back suddenly in my chair. I felt as if something had hit me in the chest. Salim had guessed correctly. He had been right.

“So I went back…what, ten years? And you stayed in the same time? And that’s why Adam is nine years old now. Is that right?”

“More or less,” Gee replied. “I was in Turkey ten years ago. You were there three weeks ago. We met.”

“But that wasn’t an accident,” I replied. “You planned it. You knew that I would be there then. You had left a note for me at that café in Turkey ten years ago. How did you know ten years in advance that I would be there, coming to look for you?”

Gee didn’t respond, but a shadow of extreme tiredness passed over her face. I decided that I should go a little softer with my questions.

“Was Adam an accident?” I asked. “Or was he planned?”

Gee smiled, the shadow of tiredness momentarily gone at the mention of her son. “Nothing is planned, and everything is planned,” she answered with an enigmatic smile. “Nothing happens by accident, but everything happens by accident. If you know something is going to happen, then how can you call it an accident? So let’s just say that I knew before I met you that I was going to have your baby. The timing was important.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Just consider it as fate,” she said as if it made it any clearer. “I was fated to meet you, and I was fated to fall pregnant. There was no alternative reality.”

“But fate does not exist,” I argued weakly.

“Fate does exist,” she corrected me. “As does luck. Both are powerful exterior forces. People say they don’t exist, but they do.”

I remained silent, still trying to absorb what she was saying.

“Would you like some camomile tea?” she asked. It was a bizarre question after a bizarre conversation.

“I prefer brandy,” I replied rather sadly.

“I will go and make some tea,” she said.

I went with her into the kitchen, taking some of the dirty dinner plates with me. I put them in the sink and began to wash them under the tap. It was a reflex action, a kickback to my childhood. Without realising it, and without wanting to, I was falling back into this family thing.

“Leave the plates,” Gee commanded. “Maria will do them in the morning. It’s her job.”

Gee put some water on to boil and took the camomile tea, a teapot, and two cups out of a cupboard. I sat down at the kitchen table, and she leaned back against the kitchen counter. Routine actions, routine movements in a world in which I had lost all my bearings.

The kettle boiled, and she made the camomile tea. It tasted of nothing.

“But why me?” I asked. “Why did you choose me as the father of your child?”

“I had no choice,” she replied. “It always had to be you.” The muscles in her face relaxed, and she looked at me with what I can only describe as kindness. “William, I know that you don’t believe it, but you will be a good father to Adam. William, promise me that you’ll be a good father to him.”

I had no intention of promising anything to anyone at that particular moment.

“What do you mean when you said you had no choice?” I asked her. It came out more as a rasp than a question.

“William,” she replied slowly. “You don’t realise it yet but you’re not like everyone else. You are different. That’s why you had to be Adam’s father. And that’s why your uncle asked you to bring the stone to Jerusalem; it was the role you had to play. It was, if you like, your fate.” Gee stood up. “Don’t you ever feel different from everyone else?”

She could have been asking if I took sugar in my camomile tea. I didn’t take sugar in my tea, and I didn’t feel different from anyone else. But then it was a stupid question; I had no way of knowing how everyone else feels. I decided not to answer her.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have to go and say goodnight to Adam.”

While she was gone, I wandered back into the sitting room. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but whatever it was, I didn’t find it: no photos on the walls, no pictures of aging aunts or loved cousins. I heard Gee coming back down the stairs, and I returned to the kitchen.

As she once again sat down at the kitchen table, Gee asked me a question that I had not been expecting—and which had no relevance to what we had been talking about before. In fact, it seemed to have no relevance to anything at all.

“How long has mankind been on earth?”

“I don’t even know how old the earth is,” I replied. “I know that the dinosaurs were wiped out about sixty-five million years ago. But that’s about it.”

“The earth is about four and a half billion years old,” Gee told me, “the same age as the rest of the solar system. Man has been on earth for about two hundred thousand years. Civilization, as we define it, has only been around for about six thousand years. The process of industrialisation only began about two hundred years ago—a blink of an eye in terms of the history of the world.”

I wondered where this was going.

Gee looked at me inquisitively and continued. “Mankind has been around for only a blink of an eye, but in that time, man has done more damage to the earth than all the meteor strikes, earthquakes, volcanoes, or floods in the planet’s history.

“Man is different from every other animal on earth. While most animals take only what they need to live on, mankind always wants more. And because mankind always wants more, he’s depleting the earth’s natural resources and damaging the earth’s natural environment.

“The earth is fast approaching a tipping point,” she continued sadly. “Soon it will be too late. The damage will be irreversible.”

Gee stood up and turned her back to me to look out the kitchen window. It was dark outside, and I am sure that all she could see was the reflection back into the kitchen. The house was really quiet. Adam must have fallen quickly asleep.

“William, some people believe that the only way to save the earth is for mankind to disappear completely from the face of the planet. They believe that mankind has to be eradicated.”

“A collective suicide,” I said flatly. “It is a ridiculous idea.”

“In a way, yes,” she replied. “Others believe that mankind doesn’t need to be eradicated completely but just mostly. If there were fewer of us, we would do less damage.”

I thought of Salim and his talk of nuclear war. What was it that he said? That nuclear war would kill off around 80 percent of the world’s population?

“Is this what this is all about?” I asked Gee. “Some madman looking to set off a nuclear holocaust to save the planet?” The thought made me suddenly angry.

Gee nodded. “Yes,” she said slowly, “that’s exactly what this is all about: nuclear war, billions of deaths. Your uncle believes that extremists will look to use the next disarmament summit to try to somehow start a nuclear war. He also believes that the only way to stop them is to use the power of the stone. But to do that the two halves of the stone first have to be reunited.

“I’ve been looking for the other half of the stone for the last ten years but found nothing. Your uncle and I believe only you can find it. We believe it is your destiny.”

I took another sip of my camomile tea; it was now cold, and just as tasteless.

“And your destiny, Gee?” I asked her. “What is your fate, your future?”

“I have no future,” Gee replied, gently pulling off her wig to reveal her completely bald head.

Adam woke me up around 6:30 the next morning. I hadn’t slept much, and it was a real effort to sound enthusiastic when he asked me to play cars with him again. Gee rescued me half an hour later when she came to tell Adam to get ready for school. He complained, but Gee stood firm, arguing that he had already missed school the previous day and that he couldn’t miss it again. She said that I would still be there when he came back home in the afternoon.

We all had breakfast together in the kitchen: cereal, toast, coffee for Gee and me, and hot chocolate for Adam. Less than two months earlier, my breakfast would have consisted of a couple of vodkas and an orange juice. If I hadn’t had any orange juice, I would have just had the vodka. Now here I was eating Coco Pops and playing Happy Families.

Tariq took Adam to school, and Gee went for a morning walk. I stayed behind in the kitchen, reading the International Herald Tribune and finishing the coffee in the pot.

There was an article in the newspaper about some French men who were being held hostage in Beirut by something called the Revolutionary Justice Organization, a pro-Iranian Shia Muslim fundamentalist group. The group had promised to release the hostages, but a deadline had passed with no sign of the men. They were feared dead.

I heard Gee return home, but she disappeared straight upstairs to shower and change. When she reappeared, she was carrying a cardboard folder. She put the folder down on the kitchen table in front of me, on top of the newspaper.

“These are the adoption papers for Adam,” she said. “I asked your uncle to have them drawn up for me. Your uncle has also got Adam an English passport with your surname. All I am missing now is your signatures.”

I didn’t mean to, but I laughed out loud. The thought of me adopting and caring for a nine-year-old boy seemed ridiculous.

Gee looked at me sharply.

“I am on my own,” I told her truthfully. “I don’t have a partner, and I can’t even look after myself. You have seen how unstable I am. How can you expect me to look after Adam?”

“Please, just sign the papers,” Gee replied sadly.

“I can’t,” I told her. “You will have to find a different solution.”

Gee lifted her eyes off the papers and looked directly at me. I stood up, suddenly afraid that she would try to hypnotise me again. It was bad enough being hypnotised into not drinking; I couldn’t allow myself to be hypnotised into adopting a child. I walked quickly out of the kitchen into the sitting room, leaving the folder unopened on the table.

“You have to,” Gee told me as she picked up the folder and followed me. “There is no one else to look after him.”

“But I can’t,” I repeated. “I am too irresponsible to look after a child. You know that.”

Gee looked me in the eyes. She was once again inside my head, moving inside my brain. It took all my force, but I managed to turn sharply away from her and break eye contact.

“Adopting a child is not something you should hypnotise me into, and I am disappointed that you’d even try,” I said angrily, my back still to her.

“Forgive me,” Gee replied gently. “You’re right. But you’re wrong when you say you are adopting a child. That is only for formality, for the bureaucracy. You are not adopting a child. Adam is your biological son. You do know that, don’t you?”

There was something in the way she spoke that suddenly gave me a knot in my stomach. I pictured Adam playing with his soldiers and his cars and I once again felt the softness of his blond hair when I had kissed him.

“Yes, I do know that,” I told Gee. “I know that Adam is really my son. But until yesterday he was a son that I didn’t even know existed. You can’t bounce me into this.”

I turned back to face Gee and saw that she was crying. I felt my own eyes moistening, and I cracked. I melted. All resistance left me.

“Yes, I will look after him,” I told her. I was so emotional it was hard for me to speak.

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

“So you’ll sign the papers?”

“I will sign the papers.”