The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Page A

From Paris to Istanbul to Peking, he wandered the globe trying to outrun his sorrow, searching for some method or elixir by which he might again be able to feel anything but heartache. Nothing was able to help him. It seems that he had fallen in love with a young woman, Judith Sochell, who worked in the kitchen on his father’s estate. She was stunningly beautiful, and he greatly admired the delicate little creatures and people she was capable of creating from folded paper. Judith also had feelings for Cassius, but when Cake’s mother noticed him spending an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen and eventually caught wind of the budding romance, she bribed the girl to tell her son she did not love him. Judith dared not lose her job as too many at home depended upon her salary, so she complied with the old woman’s plot. On the very day she gave Cassius the brush-off, he fled home and booked passage on a steamship.
    Two years of anguish had passed for Cake before he finally came to the cave in the desert. He begged for a cure, and the yin/ yang wizard called for his blowpipe. The spell he cast upon Cake was one in which he took the young man’s soul and placed it within a many-colored bird of beautiful plumage. Instantly Cake’s heartache dissipated, and for the first time in years he had a clear thought. In fact, his thinking processes were many times clearer now, for with the relief of his anguish also had come the negation of his emotions. He left the cave with the remarkable bird in a cage and the rose-colored bubble in his pocket. On his travels back home, he encountered the world with an exponentially increased intellect, and it was then that he learned that war was coming and that drugs for use on the battlefield would be worth a fortune.
    He invented Orixadoll, a mixture of the narcotics he himself had tried during the two-year-long international quest to ease his pain. His special elixir helped many soldiers to survive, even though they returned home horribly addicted. Black market sales of Orixadoll on the streets of his own country far outweighed what he made from sales to the military. He became wealthier than his father ever was. And, because it was a time period when the respectable needed to be married in order to move in certain circles of high society, he wed. Letti Mane had not always been a self-interested windbag, but after the ceremony it soon became clear to her that Cassius didn’t love her; she was merely a decoration. He obviously cared more for the strange bird that was the sole inhabitant of an enormous aviary he’d had constructed on the grounds of his estate.
    Cake was not happy, but happiness did not enter his mind. What filled his thoughts were new methods for increasing profit. This he did exceptionally well until one day when he found in the top drawer of an old dresser amid useless keys, stopped watches, and foreign coins a tiny, delicate woman made of yellow paper. Thesight of this nudged his memory. It wasn’t an emotion he felt, just a dull, distant pain, like the ghost of a toothache from a long-missing false tooth. Later that month, he tracked down Judith Sochell, who was by this time married with one child, Emily’s mother. He sent her large sums of cash in exchange for origami. He would send a note as to what he wanted, she would create it, send it back, and he would forward her a stack of money.
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    Emily blinks and the bird of fire she momentarily believes she sees emanating from the broken glass bubble vanishes into mist. She rubs her eyes and takes a few deep breaths. Then she helps Vincent to his feet and leads him out of the dragon’s mouth grotto and back into the tunnel. As she makes her way carefully up the dark passageway, with him stumbling behind, he tells her he’s had a dream. “What was it?” she asks. “About my old man,” he says. “In it we leave him and he goes away on a journey. He’s gone a