Children of Light Read Free

appointment was all he owned of purpose. He must at least postpone the next drink until lunch. A small gesture toward renewal, nothing ambitious.
    Drinkless, he went into his living room, turned the television set on, turned it off again and began to pace the length of the room.
    This is where we begin, he told himself. We reinvent ourself. We put one foot in front of the other and we go on.
    In a moment he went back to the bedroom and did another line. Then he leaned back on the bed and stared through the balcony windows at the still surface of the pool five stories below.
    From somewhere amid the damp greenery of the garden, a mockingbird was trilling away, sounding a little fife march. For a fraction of a second Walker was beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of an old dream. It was gone too quickly to be pinned down.
    He got to his feet and went to stand at the window. The bird song came again, under the rush of traffic, stirring recall.
    He had gone away from the balcony and was sitting on the bed with the telephone in his hand when the memory surfaced. He put the receiver down and turned to the window. The bird trilled again.
    He was remembering Lu Anne Bourgeois, whom the greater world called Lee Verger. She had been half on his mind all the previous spring, but Seattle, the show and the dreadful events of the summer had swept everything away.
    Years before, when he and Lu Anne were young and fearless, in the days of mind drugs and transfiguration, they had invented a game together for bad nights. In fact, it was not so much a game as a state of mind to be indulged and they had called it Bats or Birdies.
    Bats or Birdies was played in the worst hours before dawn. Winning entailed holding your own until morning, making it through the night with your head intact to the moment when bird song announced the imminence of first light and day. That was Birdies. Losing was not making it through, losing your shit. Bats. Mockingbirds, with their untimely warbles at ungodly hours, upset the game, making you think that it was morning and you had won through when in fact you were still fast in the heart of night.
    He thought of Lu Anne and his heart rose. She was pale. She had dark blue saintly eyes and a smile that quivered between high drollery and madness. Nine years before, she had been nominated for an Academy Award in a supporting role; her subsequent career, like Walker’s, had been disappointing.
    Long ago, during their time together, Lu Anne had given him Kate Chopin’s novel
The Awakening.
Its setting was Louisiana in the late nineteenth century; Lu Anne was a Louisianan, Chopin’s book had been a favorite of hers. He had written a script, and every day of its writing she had been with him or in his expectation, so that when the principal character of Edna Pontellier was defined in scene and dialogue, Lu Anne inhabited it utterly. In those days they had dreamed of doing it together but it had not turned out that way.
    Time passed. The book was discovered by academics and declared a feminist document. Lu Anne had acquired a new agent, who wasvigorous, female and literate. About a year and a half before Walker committed for the Seattle
Lear
, ten years after his last revision of the script and six since his last conversation with Lu Anne, a package had been put together.
    A young director named Walter Drogue had been engaged.
The Awakening
would be Drogue’s fourth picture; he was generally accounted intelligent, original and aggressive. His father, also named Walter Drogue, was one of the industry’s living Buddhas. A director himself for almost fifty years, Drogue senior had been publicly caned, fired upon by sexual rivals, blacklisted, subpoenaed and biographied in French. The father’s name, it was felt, added luster to his son’s project, and the son’s price, like Walker’s and Lu Anne’s, was not immoderate.
    A producer of some probity took the picture over. One of the majors was induced to finance