“Death is not an angel!”

“Maybe it is, just not the kind we dreamed of as kids. I saw you looking at the statue downstairs. That’s what we hope for: children with haloes and smiles and blessings for us all. But what if angels are as complex as humans? Good and bad, dangerous and benevolent.”

“That’s clever but it’s not real.”

“How do you know? What if the whole world is Peniel? The angel changed Jacob’s name to Israel. And Israel became a nation. Life is constantly wrestling with forces we don’t understand. Maybe if we win, those forces have to bless us.”

Almost to myself, I murmured, “The policeman in that store said there is free will. We’re allowed to live the way we want until we die.”

Jesse nodded. “Ian said the reason you’re in Vienna now is to find Death in life. Not in sleep like us, because we don’t understand the rules or the territory there so we have no control. Here in the real world, like Jacob. Because Death is here and only you can face Him successfully.”

“What am I supposed to do if I find Him? Play chess with Him?”

“No. Ask all the dangerous questions you can imagine. See if you’re courageous enough to do that. You’re the only person who can save McGann and me. He said that’s one of the things he’s ever fully understood in his dreams: you’re the one.”

“Why me?”

“Why Jacob? Why are we having dreams that eat away at us like hungry mouths? Why do you have cells in your body that hate you so much they want you dead? Because everyone has to wrestle, and some do it for all of us.

“Come over to the window. Let’s look at our angel again.” He stood up and smiled. “Maybe she’ll tell us something this time. I keep hoping.”

I joined him at the window and we looked down at the pretty courtyard below. To my surprise, standing beside the angel were Sophie and Caitlin. I guess they couldn’t see us because neither reacted to our presence, although both were staring up at us with almost identical expressions on their faces—worry, confusion, hope. As if any minute something would happen. As if it already had. 

April 20

Dearest Rose,

It was good to talk with you and Roland last week, although I must say again that I like talking to you in these letters just as well. Telephones make me feel so pressured to say everything fast and completely and full and precise and… unnatural. There’s the word for it. Everything is unnatural over the phone, no matter how close the friend or how long the conversation. Don’t you agree? You hear the real, wonderful voice, which is frustrating because it makes the friend almost there; you’re dying to reach through the receiver and pull her through so you can have the rest of her with you too. And no matter how long the call lasts, if there’s a lull or a pause, my mind starts working double-time to think up something, anything to say to fill that dead space, like a disc jockey on the radio. Even with someone like you, my other self—alter ego-soul mate, I feel the need to entertain or at least be interesting so that we get our money’s worth from these transatlantic calls. I know you’ll think that’s stupid—the paranoid actress at work in me, because I really don’t have to feel that way with you, of all people. But I do, so despite being almost with you via the telephone, sometimes I prefer writing you another of our never-ending letters. How long was my last one, twenty pages? Yummy. I love it. On a piece of paper I can take my time, stop for days or hours to think about what I want to tell you with no pressure on, smoke my cigarettes (which you so dramatically hate), and if there are no matches about, I can get up and go looking for some without worrying about irritating you with smoke in your face or leaving you (via the receiver) down on the chair too long.

Because I live so far out of town, the mailman usually doesn’t arrive here till after two in the afternoon, and if he brings something interesting, I torture myself by not opening it right away. Instead, like a stoical child holding a birthday present on her lap for minutes before attacking, I put whatever it is (a letter from you, a book I’ve ordered from America and am dying to read) on the couch. I go to the kitchen, grind some coffee, get out that favorite fat gray cup and the rest of the fixings. Wait around till the kitchen is filled with the great bitter smell of fresh brewed, wondering all the time what’s in that letter, what’s back in the other room waiting for me. Waiting, waiting. Put the coffee on a tray along with a clean ashtray and a Kipferl or a couple of slices of bread if it’s fresh. Take the spread into the living room. Don’t hurry, go slow. Make the wait even more painful and delicious. Walk purposely by the couch and look hungrily at the white mail sitting on that fat chunk of black leather. Go out to the terrace and arrange everything just so. Only when the world out there is perfectly set up am I allowed to go back for the letter and read it.

The irony of last week’s conversation was that I got your latest a day after we spoke, but was just as excited to see your handwriting as I was when I heard your voice on the phone. People will say we’re in love.

Today I want to answer your question about living overseas. You asked what it was like to live in a place for a long time where no one speaks your language. As I said, it’s lonely and certainly isolating in a way. I talk out loud to myself a lot more than I ever have, but that could be a result of growing older and more—gulp—eccentric. One of the things that drove me mad about living in California was the sickening amount of talk I heard every day that added up to nothing. Everybody talks out there, especially in the business. Everybody has lots and lots to say, but too often at the end of a conversation, even when I thought hard about it, I couldn’t remember what they’d said! And if you don’t watch out, you become like them—both your tongue and brain click onto that deadly L.A. mental cruise control. Know what I’m talking about? When you’re awake and aware and not stoned and your lips are moving normally—but what’s coming out of both your head and mouth is oatmeal? No, right now I prefer the rigors of this goddamned German language. It’s a nice challenge, staggering around my short moronic sentences and being proud when I get them right.

I’ve lived here six months now and think I’ve convinced both my body and spirit that I am staying; this is not just another pit stop in the race to some finish line far away from here. I have no idea whether I’ll spend the rest of my life in Austria, but I do want some years here. That’s certain. At first, I didn’t like the aloneness caused by my not speaking German well. Oh, sure, I could go into the local Feinkost and chat slowly with jolly Mr. Patzak behind the counter about this butter being more billig, but that doesn’t count as real conversation—it’s more kindergarten or beginning German class. Yet at the same time, the words you do know and understand take on a hundred times more importance and meaning.

Put another way, living away from home is like being in a hot air balloon hovering over the ground, say forty feet or so. Thirty—a little closer down. The perspective’s completely different, though most things down there are still recognizable. You float over people talking and can make out scraps of their conversations, distinct words here and there, even whole phrases, but never the whole thing. And the world does become different when you experience it from a completely new perspective. In this case, being forty feet away from the existence you knew. In America among English speakers, I was part of, so I didn’t watch closely. Here I’m forced to watch rather than listen, and like the blind person, I have a greater ability to “see,” but in a wholly different way. Hear too, only different things now—things other than language.