Lucius Shepard

ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES

To Deborah

ONLY PARTLY HERE

There are legends in the pit. Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesn’t believe the stories, yet he’s prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep losing it one way or another. Fights, freak-outs, fits of weeping. It’s the smell of burning metal that seeps up from the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body, the whispers that come when there is no wind. It’s the things you find. The week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a woman’s shoe sticking up out of the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasn’t stuck—it was only half a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees the shoe. He’s glad he isn’t married. He doesn’t think he has much to bring to a relationship.

That evening Bobby’s taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate how the pit looks in the lights. It’s an outtake from The X-Files—the excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange, like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit, then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees. “You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? He’s a moron! First time the crowd gets on him, it’s gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guy’s gonna fucking crumble.” Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.

“Bobby don’t give a shit about baseball,” says Pineo. “My boy’s a Jets fan.”

Mazurek, a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking squares of pale muscle, says, “The Jets… fuck!”

“They’re playoff bound,” says Bobby cheerfully.

Mazurek crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. “They gonna drop dead in the first round like always.”

“It’s more interesting than being a Yankee fan,” says Bobby. “The Yankees are too corporate to be interesting.”

“‘Too corporate to be interesting’?” Mazurek stares. “You really are a geek, y’know that?”

“That’s me. The geek.”

“Whyn’t you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?”

“Take it easy, Carl! Chill!” Pineo—nervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling from beneath his hard hat—puts a hand on Mazurek’s arm, and Mazurek knocks it aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white. “What’s it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis?” he asks Bobby. “Playing tourist?”

Bobby looks down at the apple in his hand—it seems too shiny to be edible. “Just cleaning up is all. You know.”

Mazurek’s eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake. “Okay,” he says in a subdued voice. “Yeah… fuck. Okay.”

• • •

Midnight, after the shift ends, they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesn’t altogether understand why the three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of having it feel that good again. You can’t head straight home; you have to decompress. Mazurek’s wife gives him constant shit about the practice—she calls the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is anxious—like he’s afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit. Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was responsible. Now, though, either he’s immune or else he’s sick all the time and doesn’t notice.

Two hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to reading the Post. Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted, orders his face into respectful lines, says, “Hey, guys!” and sets them up with beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didn’t want to hear that hero crap while he was trying to unwind—he got enough of it from the fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ would increase exponentially.

The slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. She’s been coming in every night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of punky look. Fashion model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like accents grâve. Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe she’s not that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her makeup done so skillfully, that the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well tended. She wears the same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train, prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming she’s a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office bitch thing in order to attract men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some exotic flower or fruit he’s only seen in magazine pictures.

“I’ve just been to a funeral,” she says wearily, staring into her drink. “So, please… Okay?”

“That what you tell everybody?” he asks. “All the guys who hit on you?”

A fretful line cuts her brow. “Please!”

“No, really. I’ll go. All I want to know… that what you always say?”

She makes no response.

“It is,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s not entirely a lie.” Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises extraordinarily well-defined. “It’s intended as a lie, but it’s true in a way.”

“But that’s what you say, right? To everybody?”

“This is why you came over? You’re not hitting on me?”

“No, I… I mean, maybe… I thought…”

“So what you’re saying, you weren’t intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what I say to men when they come over. But now you’re not certain of your intent? Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I might be receptive, you’ll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that wasn’t your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?”

“I suppose,” he says.

She gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?”

“I’ll go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”

She points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at Ground Zero.”

The question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie, looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”

“It’s really…” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”

“Strange. I guess that covers it.”

“That’s not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it does to me.”

“You been down in it?”

“No, I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But…” She makes a swirling gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it. You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like you’re uncovering something else.”

“Y’know, I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know why you want to.”

“Probably it’s fucked up of me, huh?”

“Yeah, probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.

“She’s still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you doing back here? You could be fucking that.”

“She’s a freak,” Bobby tells him.

“So she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”

Affecting a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck you.”

He nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”

• • •

The following afternoon Bobby unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo, asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.

He thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half shoe and all the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.

“Brought you something,” he says.

She glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”

He shrugs. “Just something I found.”

“At Ground Zero?”

“Uh-huh.”

She pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”

Bobby says, “Yeah… sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.

“I want to understand what happened… what’s happening now,” she says. “I want what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”

“Okay,” Bobby says.

“‘Okay.’” She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on medication!”

A Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox—a soothing musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.

“I’m sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m impatient with everyone these days.”

She stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

She glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”

“How old are you? I’m twenty-three.”

“It doesn’t matter how old you are… how old I am. I’m much older than you in my head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d still be too old for you.”

“I just want to know your name.”

“Alicia.” She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.

“Bobby,” he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”

“This is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous… totally ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”

“I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand, I want to understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to understand.”

“Good Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”

“You still think I’m trying to hustle you?”

“If it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you… I don’t believe you have a clue.”

“And you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”

She twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a sudden clamping down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the subway when a girl he’s been looking at catches his eye and he pretends to be looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “Were not going to be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”

“Okay.”

“That’s your fall back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”

“Whatever.”

“‘Whatever.’” She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”

Bobby pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”

An exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”

“I gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.

• • •

The rubber disk takes its place in Bobby’s top dresser drawer, resting between the blue half shoe and a melted glob of metal that may have done duty as a cuff link, joining a larger company of remnants—scraps of silk and worsted and striped cotton; a flattened fountain pen; a few inches of brown leather hanging from a misshapen buckle; a hinged pin once attached to a brooch. Looking at them breeds a queer vacancy in his chest, as if their few ounces of reality cancel out some equivalent portion of his own. It’s the shoe, mostly, that wounds him. An object so powerful in its interrupted grace, sometimes he’s afraid to touch it.

After his shower he lies down in the dark of his bedroom and thinks of Alicia. Pictures her handling packets of bills bound with paper wrappers. Even her name sounds like currency, a riffling of crisp new banknotes. He wonders what he’s doing with her. She’s not his type at all, but maybe she was right, maybe he’s deceiving himself about his motives. He conjures up the images of the girls he’s been with. Soft and sweet and ultra feminine. Yet he finds Alicia’s sharp edges and severity attractive. Could be he’s looking for a little variety. Or maybe like so many people in the city, like lab rats stoned on coke and electricity, his circuits are scrambled and his brain is sending out irrational messages. He wants to talk to her, though. That much he’s certain of—he wants to unburden himself. Tales of the pit. His drawer full of relics. He wants to explain that they’re not souvenirs. They are the pins upon which he hangs whatever it is he has to leave behind each morning when he goes to work. They are proof of something he once thought a profound abstraction, something too elusive to frame in words, but has come to realize is no more than the fact of his survival. This fact, he tells himself, might be all that Alicia needs to understand.

Despite having urged Bobby on, Pineo taunts him about Alicia the next afternoon. His manic edginess has acquired an angry tonality. He takes to calling Alicia “Calculator Bitch.” Bobby expects Mazurek to join in, but it seems he is withdrawing from their loose union, retreating into some private pit. He goes about his work with oxlike steadiness and eats in silence. When Bobby suggests that he might want to seek counseling, a comment designed to inflame, to reawaken the man’s innate ferocity, Mazurek mutters something about maybe having a talk with one of the chaplains. Though they have only a few basic geographical concerns in common, the three men have sustained one another against the stresses of the job, and that afternoon, as Bobby scratches at the dirt, now turning to mud under a cold drenching rain, he feels abandoned, imperiled by the pit. It all looks unfamiliar and inimical. The silvery lattice of the framework appears to be trembling, as if receiving a transmission from beyond, and the nest of massive girders might be awaiting the return of a fabulous winged monster. Bobby tries to distract himself, but nothing he can come up with serves to brighten his sense of oppression. Toward the end of the shift, he begins to worry that they are laboring under an illusion, that the towers will suddenly snap back in from the dimension into which they have been nudged and everyone will be crushed.

The Blue Lady is nearly empty that night when they arrive. Hookers in the back, Alicia in her customary place. The juke box is off, the TV muttering—a blond woman is interviewing a balding man with a graphic beneath his image that identifies him as an anthrax expert. They sit at the bar and stare at the TV, tossing back drinks with dutiful regularity, speaking only when it’s necessary. The anthrax expert is soon replaced by a terrorism expert who holds forth on the disruptive potentials of Al Qaeda. Bobby can’t relate to the discussion. The political sky with its wheeling black shapes and noble music and secret masteries is not the sky he lives and works beneath, gray and changeless, simple as a coffin lid.

“Al Qaeda,” Roman says. “Didn’t he useta play second base for the Mets? Puerto Rican guy?”

The joke falls flat, but Roman’s in stand-up mode.

“How many Al Qaedas does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asks. Nobody has an answer.

“Two million,” says Roman. “One to hold the camel steady, one to do the work, and the rest to carry their picture through the streets in protest when they get trampled by the camel.”

“You made that shit up,” Pineo says. “‘I know it. Cause it ain’t that funny.”

“Fuck you guys!” Roman glares at Pineo, then takes himself off along the counter and goes to reading a newspaper, turning the pages with an angry flourish.

Four young couples enter the bar, annoying with their laughter and bright, flushed faces and prosperous good looks. As they mill about, some wrangling two tables together, others embracing, one woman earnestly asking Roman if he has Lillet, Bobby slides away from the suddenly energized center of the place and takes a seat beside Alicia. She cuts her eyes toward him briefly, but says nothing, and Bobby, who has spent much of the day thinking about things he might tell her, is restrained from speaking by her glum demeanor. He adopts her attitude—head down, hand on glass—and they sit there like two people weighted down by a shared problem. She crosses her legs, and he sees that she has kicked off a shoe. The sight of her slender ankle and stockinged foot rouses in him a sly Victorian delight.

“This is so very stimulating,” she says. “We’ll have to do it more often.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk.”

“If you’re going to sit here, it feels stupid not to.”

The things he considered telling her have gone out of his head.

“Well, how was your day?” she asks, modulating her voice like a mom inquiring of a sweet child, and when he mumbles that it was about the same as always, she says, “It’s like we’re married. Like we’ve passed beyond the need for verbal communion. All we have to do is sit here and vibe at each other.”

“It sucked, Okay?” he says, angered by her mockery. “It always sucks, but today it was worse than usual.”

He begins, then, to unburden himself. He tells her about him and Pineo and Mazurek. How they’re like a patrol joined in a purely unofficial unity, by means of which they somehow manage to shield one another from forces they either do not understand or are afraid to acknowledge. And now that unity is dissolving. The gravity of the pit is too strong. The death smell, the horrible litter of souls, the hidden terrors. The underground garage with its smashed, unhaunted cars white with concrete dust. Fires smoldering under the earth. It’s like going to work in Mordor, the shadow everywhere. Ashes and sorrow. After a while you begin to feel as if the place is turning you into a ghost. You’re not real anymore, you’re a relic, a fragment of life. When you say this shit to yourself, you laugh at it. It seems like bullshit. But then you stop laughing and you know it’s true. Ground Zero’s a killing field. Like Cambodia. Hiroshima. They’re already talking about what to build there, but they’re crazy. It’d make as much sense to put up a Dairy Queen at Dachau. Who’d want to eat there? People talk about doing it quickly so the terrorists will see it didn’t fuck us up. But pretending it didn’t fuck us up… what’s that about? Hey, it fucked us up! They should wait to build. They should wait until you can walk around in it and not feel like it’s hurting you to live. Because if they don’t, whatever they put there is going to be filled with that feeling. That sounds absurd, maybe. To believe the ground’s cursed. That there’s some terrible immateriality trapped in it, something that’ll seep up into the new halls and offices and cause spiritual affliction, bad karma… whatever. But when you’re in the middle of that mess, it’s impossible not to believe it.

Bobby doesn’t look at Alicia as he tells her all this, speaking in a rushed, anxious delivery. When he’s done he knocks back his drink, darts a glance at her to gauge her reaction, and says, “I had this friend in high school got into crystal meth. It fried his brain. He started having delusions. The government was fucking with his mind. They knew he was in contact with beings from a higher plane. Shit like that. He had this whole complex view of reality as conspiracy, and when he told me about it, it was like he was apologizing for telling me. He could sense his own damage, but he had to get it out because he couldn’t quite believe he was crazy. That’s how I feel. Like I’m missing some piece of myself.”

“I know,” Alicia says. “I feel that way, too. That’s why I come here. To try and figure out what’s missing… where I am with all this.”

She looks at him inquiringly, and Bobby, unburdened now, finds he has nothing worth saying. But he wants to say something, because he wants her to talk to him, and though he’s not sure why he wants this or what more he might want, he’s so confused by the things he’s confessed and also by the ordinary confusions that attend every consequential exchange between men and women. Though he’s not sure of anything, he wants whatever is happening to move forward.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. This isn’t terminal fucked-uppedness. ’Least I don’t think it is.”

She appears to be reassessing him. “Why do you put yourself through it?”

“The job? Because I’m qualified. I worked for FEMA the last coupla summers.”

Two of the yuppie couples have huddled around the jukebox, and their first selection, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” begins its tense, grinding push. Pineo dances on his barstool, his torso twisting back and forth, fists tight against his chest, a parody—Bobby knows—that’s aimed at the couples, meant as an insult. Brooding over his bourbon, Mazurek is a graying, thick-bodied troll turned to stone.

“I’m taking my masters in philosophy,” Bobby says. “It’s finally beginning to seem relevant.”

He intends this as humor, but Alicia doesn’t react to it as such. Her eyes are brimming. She swivels on her stool, knee pressing against his hip, and puts a hand on his wrist.

“I’m afraid,” she says. “You think that’s all this is? Just fear. Just an inability to cope.”

He’s not certain he understands her, but he says, “Maybe that’s all.” It feels so natural when she loops her arms about him and buries her face in the crook of his neck, he doesn’t think anything of it. His hand goes to her waist. He wants to turn toward her, to deepen the embrace, but is afraid that will alarm her, and as they cling together, he becomes insecure with the contact, unclear as to what he should do with it. Her pulse hits against his palm, her breath warms his skin. The articulation of her ribs, the soft swell of a hip, the presence of a breast an inch above the tip of his thumb, all her heated specificity both daunts and tempts him. Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional burn-outs who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there between those conditions? She pulls him closer. Her legs are still crossed, and her right knee slides into his lap, her shoeless foot pushing against his waist. She whispers something, words he can’t make out. An assurance, maybe. Her lips brush his cheek, then she pulls back and offers a smile he takes for an expression of regret.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “I have this feeling…” She shakes her head as if rejecting an errant notion.

“What?”

She holds a hand up beside her face as she speaks and waggles it, a blitheness of gesture that her expression does not reflect. “I shouldn’t be saying this to someone I met in a bar, and I don’t mean it the way you might think. But it’s—I have a feeling you can help me. Do something for me.”

“Talking helps.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right.” Thoughtful, she stirs her drink; then a sidelong glance. “There must be something some philosopher said that’s pertinent to the moment.”

“Predisposition fathers all logics, even those disposed to deny it.”

“Who said that?”

“I did… in a paper I wrote on Gorgias. The father of sophistry. He claimed that nothing can be known, and if anything could be known, it wasn’t worth knowing.”

“Well,” says Alicia, “I guess that explains everything.”

“I don’t know about that. I only got a B on the paper.”

One of the couples begins to dance, the man, who is still wearing his overcoat, flapping his elbows, making slow-motion swoops, while the woman stands rooted, her hips undulating in a fishlike rhythm. Pineo’s parody was more graceful. Watching them, Bobby imagines the bar a cave, the other patrons with matted hair, dressed in skins. Headlights slice across the window with the suddenness of a meteor flashing past in the primitive night. The song ends, the couple’s friends applaud them as they head for the group table. But when the opening riff of the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” blasts from the speakers, they start dancing again and the other couples join them, drinks in hand. The women toss their hair and shake their breasts; the men hump the air. A clumsy tribe on drugs.

The bar environment no longer works for Bobby. Too much unrelieved confusion. He hunches his shoulders against the noise, the happy jabber, and has a momentary conviction that this is not his true reaction, that a little scrap of black negativity perched between his shoulder blades, its claws buried in his spine, has folded its gargoyle wings, and he has reacted to the movement like a puppet. As he stands Alicia reaches out and squeezes his hand. “See you tomorrow?”

“No doubt,” he says, wondering if he will—he believes she’ll go home and chastise herself for permitting this partial intimacy, this unprophylactic intrusion into her stainless career-driven life. She’ll stop coming to the bar and seek redemption in a night school business course designed to flesh out her resumé. One lonely Sunday afternoon a few weeks hence, he’ll provide the animating fantasy for a battery-powered orgasm.

He digs in his wallet for a five, a tip for Roman, and catches Pineo looking at him with unalloyed hostility. The kind of look your great enemy might send your way right before pumping a couple of shells into his shotgun. Pineo lets his double-barreled stare linger a few beats, then turns away to a deep consideration of his beer glass, his neck turtled, his head down. It appears that he and Mazurek have been overwhelmed by identical enchantments.

• • •

Bobby wakes up a few minutes before he’s due at work. He calls the job, warns them he’ll be late, then lies back and contemplates the large orange and brown water stain that has transformed the ceiling into a terrain map. This thing with Alicia… it’s sick, he thinks. They’re not going to fuck—that much is clear. And not just because she said so. He can’t see himself going to her place, furnishings courtesy of The Sharper Image and Pottery Barn, nor can he picture her in this dump, and neither of them has displayed the urge for immediacy that would send them to a hotel. It’s ridiculous, unwieldy. They’re screwing around is all. Mind fucking on some perverted soul level. She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical postmodern Manhattan bullshit. Grief as a form of self-involvement. And now he’s part of that. What he’s doing with her may be even more perverse, but he has no desire to scrutinize his motives—that would only amplify the perversity. Better simply to let it play out and be done. These are strange days in the city. Men and women seeking intricate solace for intricate guilt. Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security. He still has things he needs, for whatever reason, to tell her. Tonight he’ll confide in her, and she will do what she must. Their mutual despondency, a wrap in four acts.

He stays forever in the shower; he’s in no hurry to get to the pit, and he considers not going in at all. But duty, habit, and doggedness exert a stronger pull than his hatred and fear of the place—though it’s not truly hatred and fear he feels, but a syncretic fusion of the two, an alchemical product for which a good brand name has not been coined. Before leaving, he inspects the contents of the top drawer in his dresser. The relics are the thing he most needs to explain to her. Whatever else he has determined them to be, he supposes that they are, to a degree, souvenirs, and thus a cause for shame, a morbid symptom. But when he looks at them he thinks there must be a purpose to the collection he has not yet divined, one that explaining it all to Alicia may illuminate. He selects the half shoe. It’s the only choice, really. The only object potent enough to convey the feelings he has about it. He stuffs it into his jacket pocket and goes out into the living room, where his roommate is watching The Cartoon Network, his head visible above the back of the couch.

“Slept late, huh?” says the roommate.

“Little bit,” Bobby says, riveted by the bright colors and goofy voices, wishing he could stay and discover how Scooby Doo and Jackie manage to outwit the swamp beast. “See ya later.”

Shortly before his shift ends, he experiences a bout of paranoia, during which he believes that if he glances up he’ll find the pit walls risen to skyscraper height and all he’ll be able to see of the sky is a tiny circle of glowing clouds. Even afterward, walking with Mazurek and Pineo through the chilly, smoking streets, distant car horns sounding in rhythm like an avant-garde brass section, he half persuades himself that it could have happened. The pit might have grown deeper, he might have dwindled. Earlier that evening they began to dig beneath a freshly excavated layer of cement rubble, and he knows his paranoia and the subsequent desire to retreat into irrationality are informed by what they unearthed. But while there is a comprehensible reason for his fear, this does not rule out other possibilities. Unbelievable things can happen of an instant. They all recognize that now.

The three men are silent as they head toward the Blue Lady. It’s as if their nightly ventures to the bar no longer serve as a release and have become an extension of the job, prone to its stresses. Pineo goes with hands thrust into his pockets, eyes angled away from the others, and Mazurek looks straight ahead, swinging his thermos, resembling a Trotskyite hero, a noble worker of Factory 39. Bobby walks between them. Their solidity makes him feel unstable, as if pulled at by large opposing magnets—he wants to dart ahead or drop back, but is dragged along by their attraction. He ditches them just inside the entrance and joins Alicia at the end of the bar. Her twenty-five watt smile switches on, and he thinks that though she must wear brighter, toothier smiles for co-workers and relatives, this particular smile measures the true fraction of her joy, all that is left after years of career management and bad love.

To test this theory he asks if she’s got a boyfriend, and she says, “Jesus! A boyfriend. That’s so quaint. You might as well ask if I have a beau.”

“You got a beau?”

“I have a history of beaus,” she says, “but no current need for one, thank you.”

“Your eye’s on the prize, huh?”

“It’s not just that. Though right now, it is that. I’m”—a sardonic laugh—“I’m ascending the corporate ladder. Trying to, anyway.”

She fades on him, gone to a gloomy distance beyond the bar, where the TV chatters ceaselessly of plague and misery and enduring freedom. “I wanted to have children,” she says at last. “I can’t stop thinking about it these days. Maybe all this sadness has a biological effect. You know. Repopulate the species.”

“You’ve got time to have children,” he says. “The career stuff may lighten up.”

“Not with the men I get involved with… not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them take care of my plants.”

“So you got a few war stories, do you?”

She puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t imagine!”

“I’ve got a few myself.”

“You’re a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

Telling him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naiveté, she is proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards, until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely… when she tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the makeup. Softer, probably. The makeup is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes. Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career. The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her experience… that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and probably no time.

The Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple in their sixties who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear; two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes them wait for service). Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk, isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen. Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the effect of a three-martini buzz.

“I don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men… maybe.”

“You’ve dated them all, huh?” he asks.

“Most of the acceptable ones, I have.”

“What qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

Perhaps he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of “Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance, “You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

“Why?” he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

“I don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

“It’s pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

“Bastard!” She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man intriguing.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”

“Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”

“Excuse me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”

A good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie, his face an exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk, weaving a little.

“My girlfriend… okay?” He glances back and forth between them. “I was supposed to meet her down…”

“No offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.

The guy holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”

“Maybe so,” says Bobby.

At this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says. “I could use some rye.”

“Seriously,” Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”

“Hey,” the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”

Alone again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.

“You first,” says Bobby.

“I was just thinking…” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

He knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.

She smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing along with it, nearly drowning out the vocals.

“I brought something for you,” Bobby says.

An uneasy look. “From your work?”

“Yeah, but this isn’t the same…”

“I told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”

“They’re not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you… and I’m sure I do. I feel messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for…” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand something.”

“About what?” she says, leery.

“About me… or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down, y’know. But I do want you to see it.”

Alicia’s eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you want.”

Bobby touches the half shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m not trying to freak you out, though. I think…”

She snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”

He sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human equivalent of an ice cube plinking in a glass, bright and clear, and puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but the glottal sound is buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she’s so still, Bobby wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.

“Alicia?”

She shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak, or is not interested in communicating.

“Are you Okay?” he asks.

She says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word “god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek, and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half shoe impressed her, as it has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has distressed her.

The jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling, it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining, the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out of existence by a porcelain Song of Bernadette saintliness, the clean lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience, doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather, no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness, uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half lowering, he is afraid a kiss may kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.

The kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath, yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely, tremulously, “Thank you… Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”

“Wait!” He catches at her, but she fends him off.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to… right now. I’m sorry.”

And she goes, walking smartly toward the door, leaving him with no certainty of conclusion, with his half-grown erection and his instantly catalogued memory of the kiss surfacing to be examined and weighed, its tenderness and fragility to be considered, its sexual intensity to be marked upon a scale, its meaning surmised, and by the time he’s made these judgments, waking to the truth that she has truly, unequivocally gone and deciding to run after her, she’s out the door. By the time he reaches the door, shouldering it open, she’s twenty-five, thirty feet down the sidewalk, stepping quickly between the parked cars and the storefronts, passing a shadowed doorway, and he’s about to call out her name when she moves into the light spilling from a coffee shop window and he notices that her shoes are blue. Pale blue with a silky sheen, and of a shape that appears identical to that of the half shoe left on the bar. If, indeed, it was left there. He can’t remember now. Did she take it? The question has a strange, frightful value, born of a frightful suspicion that he cannot quite reject, and for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to go after her and a desire to turn back into the bar and look for the shoe. That, in the end, is what’s important. To discover if she took the shoe, and if she did, then to fathom the act, to decipher it. Was it done because she thought it a gift, or because she wanted it so badly, maybe to satisfy some freaky neurotic demand, that she felt she had to more or less steal it, get him confused with a kiss and bolt before he realized it was missing? Or—and this is the notion that’s threatening to possess him—was the shoe hers to begin with? Feeling foolish, yet not persuaded he’s a fool, he watches her step off the curb at the next corner and cross the street, dwindling and dwindling, becoming indistinct from other pedestrians. A stream of traffic blocks off his view. Still toying with the idea of chasing after her, he stands there for half a minute or so, wondering if he has misinterpreted everything about her. A cold wind coils like a scarf about his neck, and the wet pavement begins soaking into his sock through the hole in his right boot. He squints at the poorly defined distance beyond the cross-street, denies a last twinge of impulse, then yanks open the door of the Blue Lady. A gust of talk and music seems to whirl past him from within, like the ghost of a party leaving the scene, and he goes on inside, even though he knows in his heart that the shoe is gone.

• • •

Bobby’s immunity to the pit has worn off. In the morning he’s sick as last week’s salmon plate. A fever that turns his bones to glass and rots his sinuses, a cough that sinks deep into his chest and hollows him with chills. His sweat smells sour and yellow, his spit is thick as curds. For the next forty-eight hours he can think of only two things, medicine and Alicia. She’s threaded through his fever, braided around every thought like a strand of RNA, but he can’t even begin to make sense of what he thinks and feels. A couple of nights later the fever breaks. He brings blankets, a pillow, and orange juice into the living room and takes up residence on the sofa. “Feeling better, huh?” says the roommate, and Bobby says, “Yeah, little bit.” After a pause the roommate hands him the remote and seeks refuge in his room, where he spends the day playing video games. Quake, mostly. The roars of demons and chattering chain guns issue from behind his closed door.

Bobby channel surfs, settles on CNN, which is alternating between an overhead view of Ground Zero and a studio shot of an attractive brunette sitting at an anchor desk, talking to various men and women about 9/11, the war, the recovery. After listening for almost half an hour, he concludes that if this is all people hear, this gossipy, maudlin chitchat about life and death and healing, they must know nothing. The pit looks like a dingy hole with some yellow machines moving debris—there’s no sense transmitted of its profundity, of how—when you’re down in it—it seems deep and everlasting, like an ancient broken well. He goes surfing again, finds an old Jack the Ripper movie starring Michael Caine, and turns the sound low, watches detectives in long dark coats hurrying through the dimly lit streets, paperboys shouting news of the latest atrocity. He begins to put together the things Alicia told him. All of them. From “I’ve just been to a funeral,” to “Everybody’s ready to go on with their lives, but I’m not ready,” to “That’s why I come here… to figure out what’s missing,” to “I have to go.” Her transformation… did he really see it? The memory is so unreal, but then all memories are unreal, and at the moment it happened, he knew to his bones who and what she was, and that when she took the shoe, the object that let her understand what had been done to her, she was only reclaiming her property. Of course everything can be explained in other ways, and it’s tempting to accept those other explanations, to believe she was just an uptight careerwoman taking a break from corporate sanity, and once she recognized where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with, she grabbed a souvenir and beat it back to the email-messaging, network-building, clickety-click world of spread sheets and wheat futures and martinis with some cute guy from advertising who would eventually fuck her brains out and afterward tell the-bitch-was-begging-for-it stories about her at his gym. That’s who she was, after all, whatever her condition. An unhappy woman committed to her unhappy path, wanting more yet unable to perceive how she had boxed herself in. But the things that came out of her on their last night at the Blue Lady, the self-revelatory character of her transformation… the temptation of the ordinary is incapable of denying those memories.

It’s a full week before Bobby returns to work. He comes in late, after darkness has fallen and the lights have been switched on, halfway inclined to tell his supervisor that he’s quitting. He shows his ID and goes down into the pit, looking for Pineo and Mazurek. The great yellow earth movers are still, men are standing around in groups, and from this Bobby recognizes that a body has been recently found, a ceremony just concluded, and they’re having a break before getting on with the job. He’s hesitant to join the others, and pauses next to a wall made of huge concrete slabs, shattered and resting at angles atop one another, holding pockets of shadow and worse in their depths.

He’s been standing there about a minute when he feels her behind him. It’s not like in a horror story. No terrible cold or prickling hairs or windy voices. It’s like being with her in the bar. Her warmth, her perfumey scent, her nervous poise. But frailer, weaker, a delicate presence barely in the world. He’s afraid if he turns to look at her, it will break their tenuous connection. She’s probably not visible, anyway. No Stephen King commercial, no sight of her hovering a few inches off the ground, bearing the horrid wounds that killed her. She’s a willed fraction of herself, less tangible than a wisp of smoke, less certain than a whisper. “Alicia,” he says, and her effect intensifies. Her scent grows stronger, her warmth more insistent, and he knows why she’s here. “I realize you had to go,” he says, and then it’s like when she embraced him, all her warmth employed to draw him close. He can almost touch her firm waist, the tiered ribs, the softness of a breast, and he wishes they could go out. Just once. Not so they could sweat and make sleepy promises and lose control and then regain control and bitterly go off in opposite directions, but because at most times people are only partly there for one another—which was how he and Alicia were in the Blue Lady, knowing only the superficial about each other, a few basic lines and a hint of detail, like two sketches in the midst of an oil painting, their minds directed elsewhere, not caring enough to know all there was to know—and the way it is between them at this moment, they would try to know everything. They would try to find the things that did not exist like smoke behind their eyes. The ancient grammars of the spirit, the truths behind their old yet newly demolished truths. In the disembodiment of desire, an absolute focus born. They would call to one another, they would forget the cities and the wars… Then it’s not her mouth he feels, but the feeling he had when they were kissing, a curious mixture of bewilderment and carnality, accented this time by a quieter emotion. Satisfaction, he thinks. At having helped her understand. At himself understanding his collection of relics and why he approached her. Fate or coincidence, it’s all the same, all clear to him now.

“Yo, Bobby!”

It’s Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like shit, y’know.”

“I wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”

“It’s what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.

“Where’s Carl?”

“Taking a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“C’mon! You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to me.’”

“I don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”

“That’s Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”

As they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed with her mind.”

Bobby wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that simple.

“What’d you say to her?” Pineo asks.

“Nothing. I just told her about the job.”

Pineo cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”

“Uh-huh. We’re gonna get married.”

“Don’t tell me you’re fucking her.”

“I’m not fucking her!”

Pineo points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”

“Sicilian ESP… Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”

“I can’t believe you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”

Bobby just shakes his head ruefully.

“So what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”

Irritated now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”

“Seriously. I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job. She…”

One of the earth movers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.

“She was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come along and pulled her trigger. Yeah… and once the little girl thing gets over, she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”

Bobby recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy, cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not fully grasped. That she did awaken, and not merely to her posthumous condition, but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,” maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the whirlwind.

“Yeah, she was all that,” Bobby says.

A WALK IN THE GARDEN

Thursday, 1435 hours

Paradise awaits.

It begins at the foot of a mountain, a slice of which has been carved away by bombardment to expose a field of yellow flowers beneath—it looks as if the entire base is hollow, an immense cave utilized for this pretty purpose. Unreal. Like a puddle of yellow blood spilled from the side of a wounded rock, spread out over a patch of dead ground. To Wilson, who hails from Colorado, where the mountains have snow on their slopes, this mountain is just a big ugly hill. He’s not sure, either, that he would classify the field of flowers as the gateway to Paradise. There seems to be a division of opinion as to what the field is. The bomb they used to open up the cave was something new. Nobody is clear about what happened. According to Wilson’s buddy, Baxter Tisdale, a corporal who’s friends with some of the tech specialists, the brainiacs are talking about paradigm shifts, changes on the quantum level. When Wilson asked what the fuck was all that, Baxter told him to do some IQ, he wasn’t going to attempt an explanation that Wilson, his intellect unamplified, couldn’t possibly comprehend. Wilson was tempted to do as Baxter said. He likes IQ, likes the rush of getting suddenly smart, the way the world fits around him differently. But he doesn’t want to be too smart to do his job. In the morning they’ll walk through the field of flowers and into the shadowy places beyond. Chances are he’ll do IQ at some point before the mission, but right now he doesn’t want to be thinking about that walk too deeply.

Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He’s shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he’s looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, “Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we’re gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!” Now he’s in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he’s not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There’s little doubt the ragheads believe it’s Paradise. If the village wasn’t cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.

Here and there among the flowers lie chunks of rock, some big as troop carriers. Wilson tells his helmet to go tight on one of the blossoms next to the big rock. It’s long and fluted like a lily, its interior petals convulsed like those of a rose. He’s never seen a flower resembling it. Not that he’s an expert. The weird thing is, there are no bugs. He scans from blossom to blossom. Nary an ant, an aphid, or a bee. Maybe Intel isn’t bullshitting; maybe the ragheads have developed a strain of flowers that don’t need bugs to fertilize them. Maybe they’re like a cool new drug source. Better than opium poppies. Wilson indulges a brief fantasy. He’s back in Greeley, at a party, in a room with Mackie and a couple of girls, and they’re about to twist one up when he produces a baggie filled with dried yellow petals and says, “Magic time.” A few minutes later he and Laura Witherspoon are screwing on the ceiling, the walls have turned to greenish blue music, the carpet is the surface of a shaggy planet far below. He wishes for things he can’t have. That Laura was with him, that he never re-upped. Most of all he wishes that he never volunteered for Special Ops. Depressed, he instructs his helmet to feed him a trippy level of downs via ocular mist. A minute drools off the lip of time. His head feels full of syrup, a warm sludge of thought. He’s got Chinese eyes, he’s nodding like the yellow flowers in the breeze… They’re so close it looks as if he could reach out and snap off a blossom, lift it to his lips and drink secret nectar from the Garden of Allah.

• • •

2018 hours

Sunsets from the perspective of the ledge are made beautiful by dust storms raging to the south. Immense swirls of crimson and gold figure the sky, transforming it into a swirling battle flag. Wilson watches the flowers redden, go purple at dusk, and finally vanish in darkness. He removes his helmet, picks up his sidearm, and strolls through the village. Narrow rocky streets; whitewashed houses lit by oil lamps; a diminutive mosque with a blue-and-white tiled dome. At the far end of the village, on a rocky shelf from which a path winds downhill toward the American compound, three teenage Iraqi boys are preparing to burn a cartoon of George Bush painted nearly life-size on a sheet of cardboard and suspended from a limb of a leafless tree. Bush has been portrayed with the body of a capering monkey. His head is a grinning pasted-on magazine photograph. The boys are dressed in jeans and T-shirts. They’re smoking cigarettes, joking around, not apparently motivated by political passion as much as by a desire to do mischief. One adds twigs to a small fire beneath the cardboard sheet. A lanky black man carrying a helmet like Wilson’s under one arm is standing off to the side, looking on.

“Hey, Baxman!” Wilson exchanges a complex handshake with his friend. “S’up?”

“Checkin’ out the rebels here.” Baxter’s face, highlighted by the flames, is a polished mask. His eyes are pointed with flickery red cores.

“We oughta clue these guys in there’s a new president,” says Wilson, and Baxter says, “They know that. They not goin’ forget ol’ George until he’s way longer gone than he is now. Man’s the embodiment of the Great Satan for these fuckers.”

Wilson notes his use of the word “embodiment” and wonders if Baxter’s working behind IQ. Hard to tell, because Baxter’s a pretty sharp guy even natural.

“Burn his monkey ass!” Baxter makes a two-handed gesture, emulating leaping flames. The boys look perplexed and fearful. “Go on! I’m not goin’ hurt you! Burn his ass!”

“Whatcha got against Bush?”

“What do you got for him? Dude was an embarrassment!”

“He chased Saddam outa town, man.”

Baxter gives him a pitying look. “Where you think Saddam’s at? He’s not dead, man. Some guys’re sayin’ the flowers might be the front of his secret hideout. I think that’s crap. Man probably had some surgery, turned himself into a woman and is right now fuckin’ his brains out on a beach in Brazil. My point bein’, all Bush did was give Saddam a goddamn golden parachute!”

Wilson knows Baxter’s just acting pissed-off at him; he’s driving away the demons of tomorrow morning the best he knows how. “So the flowers aren’t his secret palace or something… fuck, are they?”

Baxter pulls a sheaf of print-outs from his back pocket. The heading on the front page is Paradise and Hell: In the Light of the Holy Qur’an. It’s part of the library relating to Islamic culture and religion they were force-fed while on board the transport that brought them to Iraq. Wilson’s retention of the material was deemed substandard. “I’m down with the ragheads on this one,” Baxter says.

“You think it’s Paradise, huh?” Wilson examines the print-outs. “It say anything in there ’bout yellow flowers?”

“Naw, but you haven’t been hearin’ what I’m hearin’. The way the brainiacs are talkin’ about the bomb, how it maybe broke us through to some other plane. They say the whole area’s unstable, but when I ask ’em, ‘Unstable how?’ they clam up on me.” Baxter slaps the sheaf against his palm. “Paradise sounds reasonable as anything else. That’s why I’m readin’ up on it.”

Wilson’s attention has wandered, and seeing that Baxter is waiting for a response, he feels as he often did when called on in class back in high school. Unprepared, and yet compelled to say something. “We’re not fighting Saddam,” he says. “We’re fighting terror.”

“Say what?”

“We’re fighting terror. Saddam’s not the target, man.”

Baxter shakes his head ruefully. “Man, you a mess!”

The bottom of the cardboard sheet catches fire. The flames wash upward, devouring Monkey George. The teenage boys let out halfhearted whoops and glare fiercely at the Americans; then they, too, lapse into silence and watch the cardboard shriveling to ash.

As they walk together down the path, using their helmets in night-vision mode to find their way, the lights of the compound greenly visible below, illuminating tents and ranks of armored vehicles, Baxter says, “Ragheads got some weird ideas ’bout hell.”

Baxter’s voice is muffled by the helmet. Wilson asks him to repeat and then says, “Yeah? Like what kind?”

“They say most people in hell goin’ be women. Hey, call it whatever you want. Hell. Heaven. I don’t care. You can put me down in with the ladies anytime!”

“What else they say?”

“The usual shit. You drink melted brass, you get burned all over. They work your ass to death, but you never die. One weird thing: they let people out.”

“Outa hell?”

“Yeah. People in heaven intercede for people in hell and then they let ’em out. Book makes a big deal ’bout the last man gets into heaven. He has to crawl out from hell and then he sees a shade tree and after he goes through some other bullshit, he’s honored by Allah.” Baxter negotiates a tricky stretch of path banked downward from the hill over a hundred-foot drop. “’Course once he’s in heaven, he learns he’s the lowest status guy.”

“Probably still be happy,” Wilson says. “Probably still beats hell.”

“Sooner later he’s goin’ think about movin’ on up the ladder. It’s human fuckin’ nature.”

They stop for a smoke, sitting on a boulder barely twenty feet above the operations tent. The sky is starless, the air thick with heat. Faint shouts and rumblings rise to them. Baxter spits down onto the tent and says, “This shit here, man, it’s not what I signed on for. I got half a mind to go for a long walk east before tomorrow.”

“I’m not listening to this crap!” Wilson says, and when Baxter starts to come back with more of the same, he talks through him. “Uh-uh, man. I don’t wanna even take this to the level of a fucking discussion. You understand?”

Baxter hits his cigarette; the brightened coal paints his face in orange glow and shadow, making him look both dangerous and defeated.

“We’re gonna kick terrorist ass tomorrow,” Wilson says.

“Mmmph.”

“Our daddy was a stick of dynamite and mama was T-Rex on the rag.”

Baxter flips his cigarette out over the tent and tracks its sparking downward arc. “I’m not playin’ that game with you. I’m not into it.”

“How do you spell Democracy?”

“You heard what I said. I’m not doin’ this with you.”

“I want to know. How do you spell it?”

“Fuck you.”

“I am a truly ignorant son-of-a-bitch! I have a deep-seated soul-need to know how to spell Democracy.” Wilson holds out his right hand to Baxter, palm up. “I need it from you, Baxman. We going hunting together in the morning. I need to get motivated.”

Baxter says, “Shit,” and laughs, like whatever, okay, I’ll play your dumbass game, but when he slaps Wilson’s palm, he does so with gung-ho force. Their hands lock strong in a gladiator grip.

“How do you spell Democracy?” Wilson asks, and Baxter, all serious now, warrior-mean and going eye-to-eye, says, “With bullets, man. With bullets.”

• • •

Friday, 0525 hours

Packed into a troop carrier with Baxter and six other soldiers dressed in camo spacesuits, Wilson listens to tunes until his helmet asks him to review his medal file. Using the computer built into the left arm of his suit, he pulls it up on-screen. The file consists of biographical data, likes and dislikes, personal observations, quotes, information that will be provided to the media should he perform a brilliant act of bravery and initiative, especially if he should die in its performance, in which case a gorgeous news slut will announce his name on television, breathe sadly and then pick a choice bit from the file to give color to his life, informing her public that Spec 4 Charles Newfield Wilson taught his kid sister to play hoops and had a taste for orange soda. The last item in the file is entitled 10 Things Specialist Fourth Class Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know. Wilson can’t recall the last time he modified the list, but some of it seems incoherent. It’s clear he was in a different head at the time, riding a mighty chemical wave, or—and this is more likely—the list is a product of several variant chemical states. He sits with a finger poised over the delete key, but thinks maybe he knew more when he modified the list than he does now and closes the file unchanged.

The things he’s learned from Baxter and others about the bomb and the field of flowers, what happened and why, drift through his thoughts. Probably none of it’s true. They float these rumors in lieu of actual explanation, let the men and media sort and combine them into a consensus lie. But there are no media this far north in Iraq, he tells himself. So maybe it’s all true, maybe all the scraps of loose talk are pieces of a truth that he isn’t smart enough to fit together. He wonders what the villagers said when asked why they thought the field of flowers was the entrance to Paradise. He wonders why the answers they gave their interrogators have been classified. Like maybe the villagers knew something command doesn’t want the rest of them to hear. It’s better not to consider these things, better to shoot some battle juice and get drooly and red-eyed. Nonetheless, he considers them. The things he does know, the things he’s heard. Fitting them together—that’s Today’s New Army Challenge. He switches off his tunes, switches on the intrasuit channel and hears Baxter say, “…I’m live in hollowed-out pearls. Each man gets two gardens of gold and two gardens of silver.”

“I ain’t hearin’ nothin’ ’bout what the women s’posed to get,” says Janet Perdue. “Though I guess I can figger it out.” She laughs, and the other woman in the patrol, Gay Roban, GRob, joins in.

The carrier stops, and the lights go red. Wilson knows they’re at the edge of the field. Time to juice up, buckle down, jack your rifle into your computer, make everything secure. Baxter drones on, now talking about the varieties of demons and angels and how people are brought out of hell burned all over, except on their faces, and are laid down on the banks of a river to recuperate. How on the day of judgment, hell will be hauled up from beneath the earth by seventy thousand ropes. Wilson punches up a drug mix on the computer, treating himself to a dry martini of God’n Country, with just a whisper of IQ. The syringe bites his forearm. Within seconds he’s gripped by a pathologically smooth feeling of competency and confidence, underscored by a stream of outrage and devotion to duty. The claustrophobic enclosure of the carrier seems like a seed pod that will soon burst open and expel them, deploying them so as to sow Democracy in its new ground. Though muted by suits and helmets, the ferocity of his comrades-in-arms radiates out around him. Their expressions, partially shielded by red reflection, are uniformly grim. Except for DeNovo, who’s turned on his privacy screen. Instead of eyes and nose and mouth, his faceplate displays a video capture from a home movie, some kids—one of them probably DeNovo himself—playing in somebody’s back yard, splashing in a plastic pool. Wilson’s privacy screen is programmed to show shots of the Rockies, but he’s been thinking about making a change.

The voice of Colonel Reese sounds over the intrasuit channel. Wilson has never met the colonel, never even laid eyes on him. He suspects that Reese does not exist, that he is a computer program, but he hearkens to the words, he lets their design control him. He pictures Reese to be a towering martial figure and not a doughy chaplain type. Standing at crisp parade rest, engaging them sternly, yet with loving familiarity.

“The idea for which you are fighting is too large to hold in the mind,” says the colonel. “If it was visible, it would be too large to see. Like the breadth of the sky or the shape of the universe. Here in this place of terror and iniquity, you are the sole expression of that idea. You represent its burning edges, you carry its flame, you are the bearers of its purifying light. You are the most dangerous men and women in the world. You kill so others may not need to kill, and there is no one better at it. If you die, you will in some form continue, because what lives in you and through you will not die. Even your death will serve to light the way.”

The colonel talks about home, God, the country in whose national interest this beautifully tailored, corporate-sponsored message of warrior religion has been created, invoked to inspire in them a zealousness comparable to that of the Enemy. He mentions each soldier by name and refers to elements of their private lives, to specific moments and people and places. The words seem like a prayer to Wilson, and he closes his eyes.

• • •

0637 hours

There are three patrols, teams of eight each, with two more such patrol groups scheduled to follow. Seventy-two soldiers in all. Now and then Wilson checks his helmet screen, which shows a digital animation of their progress, little brown figures knee-deep in yellow flowers. He can control the screen to give him whatever angle he wants, even close-ups of the helmets that reveal the expression any soldier is wearing at a particular moment, stamped-on features that are individualized, but rendered like cartoon superheroes. Sometimes he commands the screen to give him a low angle looking upward at one soldier or another, a cool point of view that makes them appear to be giants moving beneath a blank grayish blue sky. He’s looking at Baxter that way when a toylike helicopter appears in the digital sky above Baxter’s image. Flashing red words materialize on the screen, ordering them to proceed more rapidly, the patrols at their rear are ready to deploy.

The mouth of the cave excavated by the bomb is four hundred sixty-seven feet wide, but its depth reads infinite on Wilson’s instruments. Even more distressing, the cave appears to occupy the entire base of the mountain—an unimaginable tonnage is essentially hovering, supported to a height ranging from forty-one to seventy-seven feet only by thin rock walls. Thinking his helmet must be whack, Wilson checks with the others. Everyone’s readings are the same. The red words keep on flashing, telling them to advance. Baxter, who leads the patrol, asks for a confirmation from command and receives a go. The thought that he’s about to be crushed does not unnerve Wilson. Death will be quick, his drugs are good, and Colonel Reese’s words were a knife that spread his fear so thin, it has melted away into him like hot butter into a biscuit. He moves forward, swinging his rifle in an easy arc to cover his area. As he passes beneath a toothy hang of rock at the entrance to the cave, he switches to a private channel and signals Baxter.

“Yo, dog!” Wilson says. “Got any more good advice on the afterlife?”

Baxter doesn’t respond for a couple of beats, then says, “Yeah. Get ready.”

“Fucking command knew this all along, man. They knew this was whack.”

“You think?” says Baxter, affecting a retard voice. “Do some IQ, man. Your dumbass is showin’.”

“This here’s no time to be peaking,” Wilson says. “This here’s look-straight-ahead time. Keep-your-mind-on-the-map time.”

“IQ’s good any ol’ time. You been usin’ too drifty a mix, man. You got to burn that shit home. Straight no chaser.”

They walk without speaking for a few seconds.

“All right. I’m shuttin’ it down,” Baxter says.

“Hey, Baxter!”

“Yeah?”

Wilson wants to say something to fortify their bond, to acknowledge it, because in the midst of his lion glow, his sense of supernatural direction, there’s an unfortified part of him that needs a human affirmation, but he can’t bring the words out. Finally he says, “We cool, man?”

“Nothin’ but, man. You know that. Nothin’ but.”

“Okay… cool.”

They trudge onward, crushing the yellow blossoms underfoot, and then Baxter says, “One thing that book tells about Paradise? Said you enter Paradise in the most beautiful and perfect of forms… in the form of Adam.”

“Adam-and-Eve Adam?”

“Yeah, you enter Paradise, you be just like him. You be tall as a palm tree. Sixty cubits tall.”

“Fucking Paradise must be a seriously fucking big joint,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Can’t get any bigger’n this cave, can it? ’Least that’s what I’m readin’.”

They remain joined in silence.

“All right, man,” says Baxter. “Shuttin’ it down.”

• • •

0742 hours

There’s no apparent end to the flowers, and the deeper they walk into the cave, the light stays the same, sourceless, as if they’re moving within a bubble of pale dawn radiance, carrying it forward with them. Wilson thinks that if the cave is truly Paradise, then all of Paradise must be this light and these flowers. They can no longer see the cave walls, only the rocky ceiling. At last his digital screen registers something round and white at the edge of the display. It’s massive, a white globe measuring more than two hundred feet in diameter. Yet as they draw near this surreal-looking object, he realizes that while it’s big enough to crawl inside and walk around in—there’s an open door for that very purpose—it can’t be anywhere near as big as his instruments say. Its skin is lustrous and gleaming, like that of a pearl. Instead of being set at ground level, the door is maybe eighteen, twenty feet overhead, occupying an area on the pearl’s upper curve. A track of crushed yellow flowers leads away from it, making it appear that the thing was tossed from a careless hand and rolled to a stop. Smears of bright blood streak the inside of the door.

A babble surges over the intrasuit channel. Baxter orders everyone except Wilson to shut up, fan out, and keep watch. Wilson punches up a shot of IQ, straight no chaser. It’s time to be wise. He stares awestruck at the pearl while Baxter contacts command and, as the shot takes effect, he thinks that the pearl might well be two hundred feet in diameter. If they have, in fact, entered Paradise, then their bodies, according to the Qur’an, are twenty cubits tall, and this would place the pearl’s size in a different perspective. That’s bullshit, of course, but this is a bullshit mission. Bullshit might prove the key to survival.

“I can’t raise ’em,” Baxter says privately to Wilson. “Command channel’s dead.”

Wilson waits for an order.

“Go take a look up there.” Baxter points to the door. “Stay private when you report.”

Wilson checks the energy storage units in his magic boots. He crouches, leaps high, catches the edge of the door and swings himself over so he’s braced, perched on the doorsill, looking down into the pearl. What he sees is opulence. Draperies of peach and turquoise silk, and tapestries on the walls; dishes of silver and gold; silken couches and pillows; ornate rugs, inlaid tables and chairs. Everything torn, scattered, broken, as after a violent home invasion. An archway leads to another opulently appointed room. The oddest thing, the floor—according to the placement of the door—should be canted out of true, the furniture all slid down to one end; but though toppled and knocked around, the furniture hasn’t obeyed the laws of gravity, and if Wilson were to drop down, he would not be standing at a lean. It disorients him to see this.

He reports to Baxter, and Baxter says, “I’m coming up.”

Baxter launches himself, grabs the door. Wilson holds out a gauntleted hand, helps him swing over. They crouch together in the doorway, awkwardly balanced, clinging to one another.

“Looks clear,” Baxter says after scoping things out. “Maybe this is the way.”

“The way? The way to fucking what?” says Wilson. “That’s not the protocol, man. We’re to reconnoiter the cave and report on what we find. We’re not supposed to go climbing inside the shit we find.”

“That’s not how I understand the orders.”

Baxter’s indifference, his clipped GI tone, pisses Wilson off. “I fucking respectfully disagree. I think the goddamn corporal’s got his head up his ass.”

“Check your display, man. See what the cave’s readin’.”

The cave reads infinite in all directions except up.

“Command channel is dead,” says Baxter. “There’s no direction out. We can wander around in these fuckin’ flowers ’til we stink out our suits or we can explore this apparent goddamn habitation. I’m sayin’ that’s the way we go.”

“I understand the corporal’s logic. I admit it makes a certain degree of sense. However…”

“Cut the shit, man!”

“…I suggest it may not be the wisest course to jump down the first fucking rabbit hole we come to.”

DeNovo signals on the intrasuit channel and Baxter tells him to report.

“You gotta see this!” DeNovo says excitedly. “There’s a big drop-off. Down in it’s like a forest. Trees… all gold. Trunks and leaves, they’re all gold!”

Wilson spots DeNovo in the distance, a tiny brown figure.

“Hell you doin’ way out there? Get your ass back now!” says Baxter.

“It’s amazing, Baxman!” says DeNovo. “Fucking beautiful!”

Wilson locates the digital DeNovo on his helmet screen and goes close-up on him. His expression is one of maxed-out glee, a delirious Italian cartoon hero. Wilson shifts to an overhead view, sees the drop-off, the ranks of digitally realized yellow trees and bushes. He shifts back to a close-up on DeNovo. Baxter is yelling, ordering DeNovo to return, when something dark sweeps across the screen and he’s gone. Wilson glances toward the spot where he last saw DeNovo. Only yellow flowers. Alarmed voices chatter on the intrasuit channel. Baxter shouts them down, orders everyone back to the pearl.

“You see what it was?” he asks Wilson.

“I was watching my screen, man. It was just a blur.”

Baxter nods toward the room below. “Jump on down in there.”

“Baxman, I don’t…”

“We got nowhere else to go. I need the door clear. Go.”

Wilson jumps, makes a cushioned landing on his magic boots, dropping to a squat. He comes up, rifle ready, reading for life signs. “Still clear,” he says to Baxter.

“Stay there!” Baxter continues urging the rest of the patrol to hurry and then he goes, “Aw, shit!” and screams at them. Wilson hears bursts of small arms fire and the concussion of grenades. He checks his screen. Wolves, he thinks when he sees the figures that are closing in on the pearl. But they’re not true wolves, they’ve got human feet and hands… except the fingers have talons. They’re knuckle-draggers, their arms incredibly long, covered in reddish brown hair, the same color as the mountain. They’re long-jawed, too. Red-eyed. Their limbs are spindly and strings of drool sway from their chins as they move through the flowers, harrowing the much smaller figures who’re racing toward the pearl. Even hunched over, their heads scrape the ceiling, so they must be forty, fifty feet tall… if he’s to believe his instruments. But how can he believe, how can he accept these digital monstrosities as truth? He calls out to Baxter, asks what he’s seeing, but Baxter’s too busy shouting orders to respond. Wilson focuses on the helmet screen. Watches as the shambling gait of one werewolf carries it close to a running soldier. Janet Perdue. It snatches her up in a taloned hand and bites her in half like she was a candy bar with wriggling legs. Blood splatters as in Japanese anime. Shocked, incapable of belief, Wilson hits replay and watches it happen again.

A soldier appears framed in the doorway above and jumps down beside him. Gay Roban, looking terrified behind her faceplate. She unlatches her helmet and removes it, rips off the skullcap that’s covered her close-cropped blond hair. She stares with dazed fixity at Wilson, then casts her eyes over the disarray of the room.

“Is it wolves up there, GRob?” Wilson asks, catching her arm. “Like werewolves?”

She pushes him away and says dully, “Fucking monsters.”

Baxter jumps down, closing the door behind him as he drops, and GRob screeches at him. “Chickenshit asshole! You can’t just leave ’em!”

“Check your screen,” he says, and when she won’t calm down, he shouts, “They’re gone, goddamn it! Check it out!”

Acting stunned, GRob puts her helmet back on. Wilson goes wide-angle on his screen. Werewolves prowling about, bending to sniff at the flowers, then hurrying with a gimpy, hunchbacked gait to another spot and sniffing again. No soldiers are visible, but the fact that the werewolves are hunting for survivors causes Wilson to think some may be alive, their suits shut down, maybe burrowed under the dirt. Three patrol groups. Seventy-two soldiers. They can’t be the only ones who made it. It was all so fast.

GRob lifts off her helmet. “Jesus!”

“Wrong fuckin’ prophet,” Baxter says flatly.

“Could be still some of our people out there,” Wilson says. “They could be shut down, they…”

“Could be?” Baxter spits out a laugh. “We ain’t goin’ back out there for ‘could be.’ Put that from your mind.”

“We can’t stay here.” GRob slaps at the wall. “Something picked this goddamn thing up and threw it. You seen the track it left. Like, y’know? They fucking threw it! You wanna be here when the son of a bitch comes back?”

“We’re not stickin’ around,” says Baxter.

“We’re not going outside, we’re not sticking around…” GRob gets in his face. “You gonna make us disappear, Baxman? You got that much mojo?”

Baxter steps away from confrontation and aims a forefinger at her. “You best slow it down, woman!”

Her cheeks flushed, GRob drills him with a furious stare, and even in the midst of fear and freakery, Wilson feels the pull of an old attraction, this long-standing thing he’s had for her. He wonders how he can think of sex, even fleetingly, even with GRob, who’s muscled up but looks like a woman, not a steroid queen like Perdue. Escape, he imagines. His hormones offering him an out. He still can’t accept that Perdue is dead. She was a mad fucking soldier.

“Punch yourself some downs,” Baxter says to GRob. “Light level.”

GRob doesn’t move to obey.

“That’s an order!” He looks to Wilson. “You, too.”

“That’s not cool, man! We can’t be doing downs, we’re in the shit!”

“Hear what I said? That’s an order!”

“I already did up. When the wolves showed,” Wilson says, not wanting to dull his edge. “I went way light, but I did up.”

Baxter eyes him with suspicion, then says wearily, “They’re shaitans, not wolves. I told you about ’em in the carrier.”

“I wasn’t all the time listening.”

“Muslim hell got some devils resemble wolves. That’s what we saw.”

“I thought this was supposed to be Paradise,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Who the fuck knows? Maybe the ragheads back in the village weren’t tellin’ it straight. Maybe they’re chumpin’ our ass. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. “We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?”

Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, “Read the pearl for her.”

The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, “You got that, GRob? Infinite. There’s this room, then another and another and another… Get the picture?”

GRob’s leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. “Naw, man. I don’t got it. How’s that possible?”

“Right! I’m goin’ explain this whole thing.”

She doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter’s voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. “This is probably the way to go,” she says.

It’s a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, understands precisely what she means.

• • •

1200 hours

They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson’s count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson’s not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding. Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he’s shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn’t believe this is a good time to rest, but he’s tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.

Wilson’s grateful for time alone. He needs to think and to augment thought he orders up another shot of IQ. He considers adding a jolt of God’n Country, but decides that the interests of the United States of America may well be in conflict with the interests of his own survival, that—indeed—they have always been so and he has, until now, allowed them preeminence. He’s done his duty, and he’s way past the regulation limit for IQ—his heart doesn’t need any more stress. The drug puts up blinders around his brain, prevents thoughts of home and comfort from seeping in, and he concentrates on the matter at hand. Where are they? What did this? That’s the basic question. If he can understand what happened, maybe he can work out where they are. He references a scientific encyclopedia on his helmet screen, reads articles on quantum physics, not getting all of it, but enough to have a handle on what “changes on the quantum level” signifies. If the bomb caused such changes… Well, a bomb being an entirely unsubtle weapon, the changes it produced would not be discrete ones. A chaotic effect would be the most likely result. He looks up the word “chaos” and finds this definition:

A state of things in which chance is supreme; especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms.

The place they’re in, the cave, Paradise, whatever, could not, Wilson thinks, be described as disorganized, though the supremacy of chance may be a factor. What are the chances that they have not encountered anything in the cave other than things he’s heard about from either the villagers or Baxter? Distinct form has obviously been imposed on a chaotic circumstance. There must be some anthropomorphic element involved. What you get is what you see or, better said, what you expect to see. Since the villagers were the first witnesses, and since they’ve been expecting to see Paradise all their lives, when something inexplicable happened they imposed the form of the Garden of Allah, the metaphorical forms of the Qur’an, on primordial matter, and then spread the news so that anyone who came afterward would have this possibility in mind and thus be capable of expecting the same things. The devils? Maybe half the village expected not Paradise, but hell—thus the two were jammed together in an unholy synthesis. Or maybe, like Baxter suggested, the villagers were holding back some vital details. This explanation satisfies Wilson. He feels he might poke a few holes in it if he did more IQ, but he’s confident the truth is something close to what he’s envisioned. The idea that there may be a congruent truth does not escape him. It’s conceivable the day of judgment, the day when hell is hauled up from beneath the earth, is at hand and that the bomb was the inciting event. None of this, however, helps him as he hoped it might. Knowing where he is has clarified the problem, but not the solution.

GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.

“Go on take a bath if you want,” Wilson says, grinning. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

She shoots him a diffident look. “Uh-huh.”

“Hey, I’ve seen your ass before.”

“That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license.”

The clear modulation of her voice and her use of the term “license” alert him. “You’re not on downs,” he says.

“I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess.”

“Yeah, same here.”

“You hit on anything?”

Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.

“We’re close,” she says, patting her face with damp hands. “But I don’t think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it’s all hell.”

“How you figure?”

“Only things we’ve seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air.” With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. “Hell.”

“Might be other doors.”

“Probably thousands, but I don’t get they’re gonna lead us anywhere good.” GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. “Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We’re infidels, man. We’re unbelievers.”

“You may be taking this all too literally.”

“Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused.” It seems she’s about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t hold back now. You got something, let’s hear it.”

“Okay.” GRob dries her right hand. “Maybe it’s BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy’s always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn’t know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound…”

“Fuck!” says Wilson.

“See what I’m saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it’s a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y’know.”

Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.

“Seventy thousand’s such a weird number,” GRob says. “I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it’s mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol’ raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong… or he received the message right and didn’t know what volts were, so he said, ‘ropes.’”

“Fuck,” says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.

“No doubt.” GRob hefts her rifle. “I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what’s on the other side.”

“Might be a big goddamn forest,” Wilson says dubiously.

“Didn’t you read it? It’s not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it reads infinite, but…” She shrugs. “What’s the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks.”

“Baxter’ll come up with something.”

GRob snorts. “Forget him! Man’s sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What’s that about?!”

“You were acting pretty crazy.”

“I saw a fifty-foot wolf that smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy.”

“He’ll bounce back.”

“Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That’s whack, man! He was right for command, we’d have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He’s over! You’n me, we gotta look to each other from now on.”

Baxter’s helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it’s no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter’s showing cracks, but he doesn’t dispute GRob’s last statement. “What’s Arizona like?” he asks.

“You live right next-door. Don’t you know?”

“I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That’s about it.”

“Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert’ll trip you out. I don’t know. It’s cool.” She gazes off into a private distance. “Running the border towns was the best. We’d start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing.” She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she’d toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered…

“Where’s your head at, man?” GRob asks. “Am I losing you, too?”

“Just a little vacation. I’m back.”

She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip. They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, “We get outa this, man… You’n me. For real.”

“Are you motivating me?”

“Fucking A! Is it working?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We’ll see how it sets up after that.”

“Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers.”

“You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing.”

Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman’s got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. “We’re not getting out of this,” he says.

She holds steady. “It’s still a promise.”

They stay locked, and then she says, “Fuck the monsters! We’re the real monsters here.”

“Fanged motherfuckers!” Wilson says. “We rule the goddamn world!”

“We’re poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they’ll crap blood and scream for their mamas.”

“They won’t eat us, we’ll eat them. We’ll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh.”

“We’re too cool to die! Too sexy!”

“We’re movie stars with mad fucking weapons!”

“We’re scrap iron…”

“We’re wild dogs!”

“…we were born for the shit!”

• • •

1323 hours

On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn’t seem to care what they do. He’s obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he’s likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can’t do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they’re thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, “Whatever.”

The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson’s ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, “Fuck you, Jim!” and then, to Wilson, says, “Keep firing!” Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently, and doesn’t react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest’s boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He’s excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter’s not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.

“Those fucking wolves are out there,” GRob says, “they’re dead for real, not just their transmitter’s down. I say we keep on going.”

“Deeper into the cave or out into the valley?” Wilson asks this of Baxter, but it’s GRob who answers. “Deeper,” she says. “Might be worse back in there, but I done enough with those wolves.”

“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Baxter says, slurring his words.

The anger and frustration that’ve been building in Wilson, his sense of being abandoned by Baxter, betrayed by him, all this spikes, but he doesn’t act on it, he doesn’t start ranking on his best friend, and from this he realizes that, like GRob, he has given up on Baxter. Their stroll in the brass forest has confirmed her judgment. “Dog!” he says to Baxter. “You in there? You are, you better do something, man. Battle juice, God’n Country, IQ. Whatever it takes. ’Cause you are fucking slipping away.”

Baxter’s eyes find him through the faceplate, and he’s about to speak when a silent shadow sweeps over them, a massive shadow. Wilson knows before he glances up that it’s death in some form. Its chill invades him, but it’s gone so quickly, the form that imprints itself on his mind doesn’t seem the one he actually saw, a cat’s face with black wings, leathery wings and struts of cartilage, maybe a bat, an enormous bat. Incredibly fast. Like the blur that took DeNovo. He looks back along the path. Rats are gathering in the crooks of the twisted brass trees that survived their passage, thousands of glinting red eyes pointed from pockets of shadow. He hears behind him the snick of GRob slotting a fresh magazine into her rifle. “Keep going,” she says. “That’s who we are, man. We keep going.”

• • •

1655 hours

They are miles from the brass forest, the walls of the cave once again too distant to see or to read, lost in a field of yellow flowers, when they happen upon what appears to be a survivor from another patrol, a suited figure sitting among the flowers, his torso and helmeted head visible above the blooms. At a distance he looks like an element of a Zen garden. A minimalist, vaguely human sculpture of pale brown stone. His privacy screen has been engaged and the display on his faceplate is showing a clip excerpted from a Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon. GRob bends to him, punches keys on the soldier’s computer, reads the arm display. “OD,” she says.

“Who is it?” Wilson asks.

“Gary Basknight.”

Wilson remembers him from training. The Basilisk, he called himself. Kept growing a soul patch against regs. Big, muscular kid from Tampa. A laughing skull tattooed on his neck. Wilson, himself tattooless, contemplated getting a similar one. He watches the cartoon clip. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird around a corner inside a house and screeches to a halt when he sees Tweety hovering before him. He makes a two-handed grab for the bird, but Tweety squirts up and Sylvester just misses. He makes another grab, and another. Another yet. Each time, Tweety Bird squirts higher, losing a yellow feather or two in the process, yet suffering no serious damage, continuing to hover almost within reach. Sylvester doesn’t notice that as he grabs and misses, he’s rising higher and higher off the floor. Finally he notices—oh-oh!—and realizes he can’t fly. A perplexed look comes over his face. Then down he falls, leaving a spreadeagled cat-shaped hole in the floor. The clip restarts. Wilson can’t get over the banal ugliness of the sight, this brightly animated few seconds of Oof! and Gasp! and Kapow! framed by a camo-painted combat suit, this human being reduced to a death utterance of streaming video. Nor can he connect these silly, albeit somewhat ominous, images with the surly badass who Basknight pretended to be and, in fact, was. Basknight’s choice of privacy screen might, like his own, have been hastily considered, or maybe this was Basknight’s way of flipping off the world, maybe he realized how obscenely trivial it would appear to anyone finding his body. Then again, maybe the clip embodies an absurdist view of life that he kept hidden from his peers, most of whom perceived him to have the famished appetites and clouded sensibility of a creature in a shooter game.

GRob nudges him and Wilson glances up to see that she’s pointing at Baxter, who has taken a seat among the flowers some twenty yards away. “Baxman?” he says.

“Don’t come near me,” Baxter says. “Come near me, I’ll mess you up.”

GRob puts a hand on Wilson’s arm and says, “Leave him,” but he shakes her off and screams, “Baxter, this is total bullshit!”

“Walk away,” Baxter says.

“That all you got for me? Walk away? After the shit we seen together? That’s it?”

Silence.

“You better talk to me, Baxter!”

“Devil’s loose in the world, man. Where we goin’ go? The devils, they got it all now.”

Fuming, Wilson can’t fit his feelings inside of words.

“War’s over, man,” says Baxter. “I’m shuttin’ it down.”

“Baxter! Goddamn it!”

“I’m with you, man. I hear what you sayin’. But you need to walk away. Right now.”

His words are badly slurred, almost unintelligible, and Wilson understands from this it’s too late for argument, that his own words, if he could find them, would form merely an annoying backdrop to whatever sweet ride of thought Baxter has chosen to rush away on. Tears are coming and he’s furious at Baxter. Were their good times and shared fear simply prelude to this muscle-spasm of an exit? Did people just invent each other, just imagine they were tight with one another?…

“Charlie.” GRob touches his hand and Wilson jerks it back from her angrily, saying, “Don’t call me that! I hate that fucking name!”

“I know,” she says. “Hate’s good.”

As they move off smartly across the field, Wilson glances back to see the cute yellow canary and the skuzzy black-and-white cat cavorting on Basknight’s faceplate, growing ever smaller, ever more indistinct. He doesn’t know what’s on Baxter’s privacy screen and he doesn’t want to know. Baxter’s always changing it. From an old Pong game to a photograph of a Russian meteor crater to an African mask. All stupidly announcing some sloganlike truth about the soon-to-be skull behind them. Wilson decides he’s sticking with shots of the Rockies for his screen. They don’t say diddly about him, which is better than saying one dumbass thing, and it’ll never seem as monstrously puerile as Basknight’s Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon.

The figures of Baxter and Basknight dwindle to anonymous lumps, and Wilson summons them onto his helmet display, taking an angle low to the ground and looking up, holding them both in frame so they resemble ancient statues, relics of a vanished civilization, weathered soldier-shaped monuments commemorating something, though he’s forgotten what.

• • •

1830 hours

Wilson no longer feels like scrap iron, like a wild dog, like a movie star with mad fucking weapons. He feels like Charles Newfield Wilson. Charlie. Walking through the valley of the shadow, waiting for the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch, and whatever else hell has in store. Scared shitless, even though he’s got a pretty, deadly blond at his side. He knows he should run some battle juice, but does more IQ instead. Dangerous levels. His mind’s eye wheels, encompassing fragmented images of childhood, phosphorescent flares like the explosive firings of neurons, an assortment of sense memories accumulated during the past few hours, a kaleidoscopic succession of what look to be magazine photographs, most relating to a museum display of Egyptian artifacts; these and other categories of things remembered all jumbled together, as if overloaded files are spilling their contents and causing short circuits. The insides of his eyes itch, he can’t swallow, his heart slams, and his vision has gone faintly orange. But soon the flurry and discomfort settle, and it’s as if he’s been fine-tuned, as if a bullet-smooth burnished cylinder has been slotted into place inside his twitchy self, a stabilizing presence, and he begins, for the first time, to have a grasp on the situation, to not merely react to its hopelessness, to accept it, and, by accepting it, by announcing it calmly to himself, stating its parameters, he comes to believe that all is not lost. They are in hell, maybe with a patch or two of heaven mixed in, and they cannot contact command. As with any battlefield, the situation is fluid, and, as has been the case with other battlefields, they can’t trust their instrumentation. He’s been here before. Not in so daunting a circumstance, perhaps, not on a field that—as this one seems to—was fluid to the point that it actually changed shape. But essentially they’re in the same position they were in during other covert actions, conflicts that never made the news back home. Recognizing this gives him hope. If your situation is fluid, you have to become fluid. You have to understand the unique laws of the place and moment and let them dictate the course of your survival. He switches off his instruments. He no longer wants to see things as digital cartoons or confuse the issue with readings that can’t be trusted. They’re on the right path, he thinks. Going forward. GRob nailed it. Going forward is who they are.

As they walk through the flowers, GRob asks him about Colorado, where he went to school, did he have a girlfriend, and all like that. By this, he realizes how scared she is. She’s never been much of a talker, just a mad fucking soldier like Perdue… and maybe, he thinks, that’s at the heart of her fear. GRob and Perdue were tighter than he and Baxter. They went on leave together, and there’s no doubt they were lovers, though Wilson knows GRob had an eye for guys. Plenty of times he caught her checking him out. But GRob and Perdue were a unit, they neutralized each other’s fear and now Perdue’s gone, GRob’s unsure of herself. In context of this, he wonders why he’s not more unsure of himself now that Baxter’s gone. He doesn’t believe it’s just that IQ is insulating him from fear, and he’s coming to accept that he and Baxter didn’t have anywhere near as strong a bond as GRob and Perdue. What purpose they served for one another is unclear. Yet even as he thinks this, he suspects that he does understand their relationship, that they weren’t really tight, they were flimsily aligned, doing big brother-little brother schtick to pass the time.

“I got this thing about flowers,” GRob says, and takes a swipe with her rifle as she tramples down the yellow blooms. “My uncle ran a funeral home in Tucson. I used to hafta come over after school because my mama was working, and my uncle would babysit me. It was like flowers all over the place. Guys would give me flowers, I’d hate it ’cause they made me think about dying.”

“They’re just flowers,” Wilson says. “Not a metaphor… right?”

She gives a salty laugh. “Yeah, I forgot.” They walk on a few paces, then she says, “Hard to believe it, though,” and this sparks something in Wilson, a flicker of comprehension, something that seems hopeful, helpful, but he doesn’t pursue it, he’s too concerned with keeping her straight.

“I’m not re-upping after this tour,” he says. “This does it for me.”

After a pause she says, “You said that after Angola.”

“Captain Wilts got me drunk and preached me a sermon. What can I say? I was a jerk.”

“I’m short. I got six weeks left. I could take it all in leave and catch a plane somewhere.”

“Tangiers, how about?”

“Y’know, I been thinking about that. Maybe not Tangiers. Somewhere away from the Arabs, man. Somewhere closer to home. Maybe Mexico.”

“Mexico’s cool.”

“My parents used to take me down when I was a kid. There was a town on the Gulf. Tecolutla. A real zero place. Palm trees, a beach, some crummy hotels. No tourists. I’d like to go there.”

“Might not be like that anymore.”

“Tecolutla’s never gonna change. A few more people… sure. But there’s nothing there. The beach isn’t even that good. Just a whole buncha nothing… and mosquitoes. I could use some nothing for a while.”

“You might get bored.”

“Well, that’d be your job, wouldn’t it? To see I didn’t.”

“Guess we better practice so I can prepare not to be boring. Get to know your ins and outs.”

She doesn’t respond right away, and Wilson wonders if she’s actually considering dropping trou and fucking in the flowers, but then she says, “I’m reading heat. Fluctuating. Like it’s a fire up ahead.”

Wilson switches on his helmet array. A wall of fire over two miles deep, maybe an hour away, extending to infinity. “The suits might handle it, we move through fast.”

“They might,” GRob says. “They might not.”

Through her faceplate he reads a grievous uncertainty, an emotion he refuses to let himself feel. He knows to his soul there’s hope, a path, a trick to all this, a secret adit, a magic door. “I’m not shutting down,” he says. “And it’s no use going back. Like Baxman said, ‘Devil’s loose in the world.’”

“You believe that?”

“You don’t?”

“I saw it, but… I don’t know.”

“What else you gonna believe?” he asks. “That we can walk back out, debrief, hit the PX? That we’re tripping? That we made this shit up? Those are the options.”

Her face hardens and she won’t meet his eyes.

“You wanna hang out?” he asks. “You wanna take a rest, sit for a while? Maybe lie down? Just chill? I’ll do it. I’ll stay with you, that’s what you want. But I’m not shutting down.”

Time inches along, five seconds, ten, twenty, becoming a memorial slowness, a graven interlude measuring her decision. She looks up at him. “I’m not shutting down.”

Wilson sees from her expression that they’re a unit now, they’ve become a function of one another’s trust in a way he and Baxter did not. They’re locked tighter, like a puzzle of plastic and metal and blood with two solid parts. They’ve made an agreement deeper than a week together after the war, one either he can’t articulate or doesn’t want to.

“Fight the fire with fire,” he says.

“Summers back in Arizona, I walked my dog in worse heat’n that.”

“Gotta burn the flames, GRob.”

“Muscle up to that motherfucker… make it hurt!”

“We trained hotter places! We breathed smoke and shit ash trays!”

“We racked out in the fiery fucking furnace!”

“Are you glad about it?”

“Damn straight I’m glad! I got some tunes I wanna play for whatever bitches live in there!”

“High caliber tunes?”

“Golden gospel hits, man!”

“Can you walk through the fire?”

“Can a little girl make a grown man cry?”

“Can we walk through the fire?”

“Aw, man! We are so motivated! We’re gonna be waltzing through it!”

• • •

1926 hours

They hear the roar of the fire before they see its glow, and once they’re close enough to see the wall itself, no end to it, reaching to the roof of the cave, a raging, reddish orange fence between them and the unknown, a fence that divides the entire world or all that remains of it… once they’re that close, the roar sounds like a thousand engines slightly mistimed, and once they’re really close, less than fifty feet, the sound is of a single mighty engine, and the cooling units in their suits kick in. GRob’s faceplate reflects the flickering light, the ghost of her face visible behind it. As they stand before the wall of fire, considering the question it’s asked of them, Wilson goes wide on his display screen, taking an angle low to the ground and from the side, looking upward at their figures. It appears they’re in partial eclipse, the front of their suits ablaze, the backs dark, their shadows joined and cast long over the yellow flowers, two tiny people dwarfed by a terrifying magic. He shifts the focus, keeping low and viewing them from the perspective of someone closer to the fire. Their figures seem larger and have acquired a heroic brightness. It’s a toss-up, he thinks, which angle is the truest. GRob says, “I can’t believe this shit,” and he’s about to say something neutral, a mild encouragement, when it hits him, the thing that’s been missing, the hidden door, the trick to all this. It’s so stunningly simple, he doubts it for a moment. It’s an answer that seems to rattle like a slug in a tin cup. But it’s so perfect, he can’t sustain doubt. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “You believe it.”

She stares at him, bewildered.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Fuck you mean?”

“Hell. We’re in hell.”

“I guess… yeah.”

“The Islamic hell.”

He runs it down for her. The induction of chaos by means of military device, the imposition of distinct form upon primordial matter, the anthropomorphic effect; the villagers believing that the flowers were the gateway to Paradise, and then there it was in its metaphorical form. But in this instance there was a truth congruent to the anthropomorphic effect; the cosmic disruption caused by the materialization of Paradise on the earthly plane brought about the day of judgment, allowed hell to be hauled up from wherever it rested on seventy thousand volts or ropes. Or maybe the villagers lied, maybe they wanted the Americans to think it was Paradise and knew it was hell all along. Maybe that’s why what they told the interrogators was classified.

“So? We been through all this,” GRob says.

“Are we in hell?”

“Yeah… I mean, I don’t know!”

“You do know!”

“Okay! I know! Fuck!”

The way she’s staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn’t dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.

“We’re in hell,” he says. “The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way.”

“The way?”

“The true religion. We’re in the middle of a verse from the Qur’an. It’s the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in.”

“You’re trashed!”

“How can you not believe it? We’re here!”

She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.

“You see? We’re not infidels… not anymore. We’re believers. We have to believe ’cause it’s happened to us.” He points at the wall of flame. “You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels… converts. That they’d be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense.”

“We’re not converts,” she said. “You hafta take classes and shit, don’tcha? To convert.”

“We been jumped into Islam, we don’t need classes.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “What’s the name of God?”

She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she’s hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, “Allah?” Then she turns away from him. “This is so whack!”

“It’s not! We been going like it wasn’t happening. Ignoring the reality of the situation. It was there for us all along… the answer. Only thing we had to do was accept where we were.”

“But…” GRob swings back around. “Even if you’re right, man, why would anybody intercede for us?”

“I told you! It’s the ragheads! They gotta have somebody to be sweeping up in heaven. What’s better’n a couple of ex-infidels they can rank on? Look! You can’t even question it. We survived! Out of seventy-two—out of the whole world, maybe—you’n me survived. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”

He keeps at her, explaining the obvious, the simple truth he’s excavated from the wreckage of heaven and the fires of hell. He hears himself preaching at her like how Captain Wilts preached him into re-upping, trying to convince her that a walk in the fire is just what they need, a trip to salvation, and recognizing this similarity, seeing that he’s conning her, even if it’s for her own good, even if the con is sincere, intended to instill faith, because that’s what’ll get them through, faith, the foundation of all religion… Recognizing this, he suspects he may be conning himself, and understands that, also like Captain Wilts, he’s not giving her the whole picture. He’s not sure there’s room for two infidels in heaven. Maybe only the last person allowed in can be an infidel… at least that’s the sense he has from what Baxter told them. If such is the case, he wants it to be GRob. He’s evangelical about this, he desires in his soldierly way to save her. She’s his sister in the shit, his blooded friend and ally, and possibly she’s more than that, so he continues banging words into her head, preaching up a storm, until he sees faith catch in her, a spark of understanding flaring into a flame and incinerating doubt. Watching her face glowing with reflected fire and inner fire, he feels his own doubts evaporate. There is a reason the two of them have gotten this far. They’re both going to make it.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asks, and GRob says, “Loud and clear, man!”

“Where are we going?”

“Paradise!”

“What’re we gonna do there?”

“Walk in gardens of silver and gold!”

“How we gonna get there?”

“With superior firepower!”

It’s not the answer he wants, and he repeats his question.

She falters and then says, “By the grace of God!” but she almost makes it seem another question.

“By the will of Allah!” he says.

“By the will of Allah!”

“Allah be praised!”

He pounds the message into her, motivating like he’s never done before, but it’s not his usual bullshit. He feels it; the words sing out of him like silver swords shivering from their sheaths until at last she’s singing with him, delirious and shiny-eyed, and she lifts her rifle above her head with one hand and shouts, “There is no God but Allah!”

• • •

2009 hours

They touch before they enter the fire. Not skin to skin, just resting their helmets together, acknowledging the agreement they have made, a soul contract that will cover either a few minutes, an eternity, or a week in Tecolutla. Then they walk forward into the flames. Wilson watches them on his helmet display, two silhouetted man-shaped robots slipping seamlessly inside the glaring reddish orange wall, and then there’s no time to watch, he’s moving fast, the cooling unit of his suit already beginning to labor.

The floor of hell is plated in yellow metal, at least Wilson thinks it’s yellow and thinks it’s plated. Hard to be sure of color from within the lurid, inconstant glare of the flames, and it might not be plated, it might be a vein of some perfect substance, God in mineral form. It’s neither gold nor brass, for those metals would melt from the heat and this metal is unmarred. It’s inscribed with the serpentine flourishes and squiggles of Arabic characters, each one longer than a man, and they are written everywhere he looks. The text of the Qur’an, perhaps, or of some other sacred book undelivered to the earth. In the depths of the brightness around him, he sees movement that’s not the liquid movement of fire and shapes that aren’t the shapes of flame, intimations of heavy, sluggish forms, and he swings his rifle in quick covering arcs. The rifle is a beautiful thing. Should he fall in the fire, overcome by heat, it will continue to function, lying there to be used by whatever weaponless soldier happens by, irrespective of the fact that no soldier will ever pass this way again. He keeps GRob on his left, concentrated more on her target environment than on his. The roaring of the inferno sounds different now, a river sound, a flowing, undulant rush, and the ruddy light comes to seem an expression of that rush, its flickering rhythms sinuous and almost soothing.

Half a mile in, he knows they’re in trouble. The heat. His suit, sheathing him in machinery and plastic, fitting tightly to his skin, extrudes an ointment and injects him with mild numbing agents. He hears GRob gasping over their private channel. His helmet, already dark, darkens further. According to his instrument array, they are surrounded by a myriad of invisible lives, and everything else reads infinite. He doesn’t switch off the array, but realizes he can’t trust it. Allah, he says to himself, and lets the sonority and power of the name bloom inside his head like a firework, a great inscription of cool radiance, a storm of peace that lets him ignore the pain of his blistering skin. They keep going. It’s who they are. There’s no quit in this bad blond and her sixty-rounds-per-second man, this mad-ass detonatrix and her Colorado killer… The silly lyrics of his thoughts make him gleeful, unwary, seduced by the golden rock ‘n’ roll legend he’d like to fashion of their walk, and, needing to steady himself, he boosts more IQ. Mega-dangerous levels. He’s long since maxed out, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll live or he’ll die by the will of God and by that alone.

Three-quarters of the way across, by Wilson’s estimate, and now they’re in serious trouble. Slowed by narcotic injections, their blisters evolved into burns, stumbling, veering to the side. It takes too much energy to talk, so he puts on his tunes, transmits them to GRob, and feels their connection strengthen. Her green telltale on his array blinks on and off. A signal. She feels him, too. He’d walk closer to her, but is afraid he might lurch and knock her down. A slow crawl of thought runs through his head. Images and the names that generate them. Like beads on the necklace of his life. GRob. Baxter. Home. Paradise. Allah. He understands that the nature of God is fire and ice, balm and poison, this and anti-this, all unified in a marvelous design, the design he’s treading, and if their act of faith succeeds and they reach Paradise, they will merely have stepped one inch in the eyes of God, because that’s how far the distance lies between faith and unbelief. His whole life has been spent traveling that inch, and now, able to grasp the sublimity of God’s design, the cleverness of His infinite text, Wilson is overcome with joy, his scorched awareness momentarily illuminated, made into a crystal lens through which he goes eye-to-eye with Allah, with the great golden white figure who fills the void… and then he sees something real. Not just an intimation of form, but something solid, having substance and volume. He switches off his tunes and peers at it. A long flexible limb, that’s his first thought. Black, with a mosaic pattern of some pale color. Whipping toward them out of the flames. A tail, he realizes. An immense fucking tail. He starts to bring up his rifle, but his reflexes are dulled, his fingers clumsy, and before he can lock down the target, the tip of the tail coils about GRob’s waist and snatches her high. She cries out, “Charlie!” while she’s being flipped about high overhead. Then the tail withdraws. As it does, as it whips away from Wilson, lashing GRob to and fro, the force of displacement sucks back the flame, creating a channel, and revealed in the fiery walls of the channel is an iconography of torment. Crucifixions, quarterings, flayings, eviscerations, hangings, people burdened by massive yokes. (Demons frolicking among them.) Hideous and subhuman, their skins scalded away, their striated muscles and sinews exposed. But Wilson barely notices them, staring toward the end of the channel, where resides a lizard the size of a dinosaur. A salamander with a mosaic black-and-pale skin. Its hindquarters and tail emergent, its flat head and supple neck and one powerful foreleg also emergent, the remainder of its body cloaked in flame. Its glazed yellow eye rests balefully upon him. The salamander twitches its tail toward its gaping black-gummed mouth, and, with the delicacy of a dowager nibbling a shrimp impaled on a toothpick, it nips off GRob’s head.

Wilson finally manages to lock onto the salamander. He opens up, but flames wash back to fill the channel. Both the tormented and their tormentors vanish, reabsorbed into the flames, once again becoming a myriad of invisible lives, as if the creation of the channel stretched their grain and made them visible for a few seconds. Wilson has no idea whether or not his bullets have struck their target. Everything is as before. The fire, the golden script beneath his feet, the intimations of movement. All his readings are infinite. He’s too shocked, too enfeebled to scream, but his mind’s clear and his mind is screaming. He can still see GRob’s blood jetting across the salamander’s snout from her severed neck arteries, an image that invokes nausea and gains in memory the luster of a vile sexuality. He wants to spend what’s left of his time seeking out the salamander, tracking it across the Word of Allah and exterminating it. He’s hot with anger, but his will is stunned, unequal to the duty, and after standing there a while, long enough to feel discomfort, he goes stumbling forward again, heartsick, trying to blot out the vision of her death, to cope with loss, an impossible chore since he’s not certain how much he’s lost. The measure of his grief seems too generous and he thinks he must be grieving for himself as well, for what he’s about to lose, though that’s the easiest route to take, to avoid looking closely at things. His faith has been shaken and restoring it’s got to be his priority. Perhaps, he thinks, GRob’s faith was to blame. Perhaps she was killed by doubt and not by chance. Perhaps it wasn’t only his protection that failed her, perhaps he didn’t preach to her enough. There’s guilt for Wilson at every turn, but justification serves him best, and he re-armors his faith with the notion that GRob simply couldn’t abandon her old preoccupations, couldn’t wrap her head around the new.

He can’t remember if he’s facing the right way, whether he spun completely around after he fired and is now walking back toward the flowers. This causes him some panic, but the dizziness he’s feeling, the pain and confusion, they trump panic, they thin it out until it’s an unimportant color in his head. Faith, he says to himself. Keep the faith. He goes another quarter-mile. The slowest quarter-mile yet. His air’s become a problem. Too hot. Baking his lungs, drying the surfaces of his eyes. Either the fire’s darkening or else a vast darkness is growing visible beyond the flames. Wilson knows if it isn’t the latter, he’s a dead man. Drugs are keeping the pain damned up, but he can feel it waiting to burst through and roll over him. The cooling unit in his helmet has done its job. His face isn’t badly burned. But the other units have been overtaxed and he doesn’t want to imagine how he looks under the suit. He’s weaving, staggering, almost falling, propping himself up with his rifle, moving like a barfly at closing time. Like he’s coming out of the desert dying of thirst, struggling toward the oasis. A shade tree, he thinks. That’s what Baxter said. First a riverbank and then a shade tree. Then Paradise. He’ll have to find the shade tree. In the dark. He can’t get a handle on his thoughts. Allah. That’s the only thought that holds and it’s scarcely a thought, more of an announcement, as if he’s some sort of fucked-up clock and every so often, irregularly, he bongs, “Allah,” a sound that gradually fades away into emotions and ideas that never quite announce themselves. Charlie. That name sputters up once in a while, too. Calling him Charlie means she must have thought of him that way… which makes the name more acceptable. But he can’t afford to care about the sweetness this implies.

More salamanders appear, first dozens, then hundreds of them, doubtless drawn by the kill. A slithering herd of identical terrors. They prowl alongside his path, crawling over one another’s tails, snapping and poking their snaky heads toward him, scuttling ahead and then peering back as if they’re saying, Come on, man! You can make it. Maybe we’ll let you make it… or maybe not. He’s afraid, but fear won’t take root in him, his mental soil’s too dried out to support it. Without the governance of fear, his courage is reborn. He begins to find a rhythm as he walks. The bongs grow more regular, aligning with the soldiering beats of his heart, until it’s like they’re overlapping, one “Allah” declining into the rise of the next, and underneath that sound—no, surrounding it!—are voices too vast to hear, spoken by people too large to see. He senses them as fluctuating pressure, the shapes of their words, like the flames, flowing around him. The intercession, he thinks. They’re singling him out, debating his worth, judging his faith. He can’t worry about their judgment, though. He’s got his job, he’s tasked to the max. Keep bonging, keep ringing out the name of God. He’s entirely self-motivating now.

• • •

2322 hours

Paradise awaits.

Somewhere far away in the absence, like a ragged hole in black cloth open onto a glowing white sky—a light, cool and promising. That’s what Wilson sees on waking. The rest is darkness. There’s a rushing in his ears that might be a faint roaring from the wall of fire, but he believes it’s a river nearby and he’s on the bank. He’s not overheated any longer. Tired, but calm. Pain is distant. The drugs are good. His helmet array is still lit, though the digital display screen is out, or else it’s showing nothing except black. He feels remote, cast down upon a foreign shore, and he gets an urge to look at his pictures, summons them up. Mom. Dad. Ol’ Mackie. Laura. They don’t hold his interest for long. They’re past considerations. He checks his medal file. It still seems incoherent—the IQ’s worn off—but nobody’s going to be reading it, anyway. Then he decides to change number 10 on his 10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know list. Just for the hell of it. Maybe they give out medals in Paradise. They give you better clothes, jewels and shit… so Baxter said. Why not a medal?

He wonders where he is, exactly. The border of hell, for sure. The shade tree, he supposes, lies between the light and the spot he’s resting in. Thinking comes hard. He keeps drifting off, hearing clicking noises, screams, the voices of ghosts. He considers doing more IQ. No, he tells himself. Let them see what they’re getting. The infidel, dumb as a stump, but janitor-smart. It’s what they expect. Lights start up behind his eyes, though not the light of heaven. That’s steady and these are actinic flashes. Phosphorous flares and rocket rounds. Some taking longer to fade against the blackness than others. As if inside him there’s a battlefield, a night engagement. He’s transfixed by their bursting flower forms. It’s time, he realizes. Time to get going—tempting as it is to lie there. He blanks out for a while and the thought of GRob brings him back. At least the thought begins with GRob. Her face. And then her face changes to Baxter’s face, to another, to another and another, the changes occurring faster and faster, imposed on the same head shape, until the faces blur together like he’s seeing the faces of everyone who was alive, the history of the world, of judgment day, of something, refined to a cool video image…

He’s got to get up.

That’s an order, Wilson! Move your ass!

Yes, sir! Fuck you, sir!

Charlie! You’re going to miss the bus!

Damn it, Charlie! Do I have to do this every morning?

All right! I’m up! Jesus Christ!

The Lord’s name in vain, Charlie. Every time you say it, He takes a note, he writes it down on the floor of hell in golden letters you can’t read…

You dumb little fucker! I swear to God, man! Stand up again, I’m not gonna knock you down, I’m gon’ fuck you up!

Charlie!

This last voice, a woman’s scream, does the trick. It’s an effort, but he makes it, he’s up. On his hands and knees. He can’t stand, his knees won’t lock. His arms are trembly, but he’s okay for strength and only mildly dizzy. He can’t feel much at all, not even the ground beneath him. It’s like he’s resting on something as solid and as insubstantial as an idea, and because the idea is without form or void, it’s impossible to get his bearings. But he knows what to do. Find the tree. Trust to faith that you’ll find it. Throw a move on the world before it throws one on you. Here we go. Left hand forward. Drag the right knee. Right hand forward. Drag the left knee. Breathe. You repeat that ten thousand times, Wilson, you just might get to be a soldier. Alternate method. Sliding both hands forward and then dragging the haunches. Slower, but more stable. It’s a tough choice, but he’ll work it out, he’ll devise a pattern of alternation, a system by which he can rest different muscles at different times and thus maximize his stamina. He knows how to do this shit. It’s all he’s ever done, really. Going forward against the crush of force and logic. Moving smartly when smart movement is called for. Crawling through shadow, looking for shade.

• • •

10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know

1. Everything I’ve ever known has been no more than a powerful conviction.

2. Nothing motivates like sex and death and sound effects.

3. Politics is the Enemy.

4. Jesus and Mohammed would probably hang out together.

5. GRob is a hottie, maybe not as cute as Laura Witherspoon, but a woman who can kick ass is a definite turn-on.

6. Love is all there is, but there ain’t enough to go around.

7. War is the geometry of chaos.

8. Only in the grip of fear can I appreciate the purity of my life’s disguise.

9. Survival as an occupation: I am the worker bee. Survival as religion: I am its revenant priest.

10. My pink-and-black skateboard with the design of the demon gleaming the cube, it is the bomb!

CROCODILE ROCK

You must not think of me as a reliable witness, as someone immune to bias and distortion. Every story, of course, should by rights be introduced with such a disclaimer, for we are none of us capable of a wholly disinterested clarity; though it is my intention to relate the truth, I am persuaded by the tumult of my recent past to consider myself a less reliable witness than most.

For several months prior to receiving Rawley’s phone call, I had been in a state of decline, spending my grant money on drink and drugs and women, a bender that left me nearly penniless and in shaky mental health. It seems that this downward spiral was precipitated by no particular event, but rather constituted a spiritual erosion, perhaps one expressing an internalized reflection of war, famine, plague, all the Biblical afflictions deviling the continent—it would not be the first time, if true, that the rich miseries of Africa have so infected an expatriate. Then, too, while many American and overseas blacks speak happily of a visit to the ancestral home, a view with which I do not completely disagree, for me it was an experience fraught with odd, delicate pressures and a constant feeling of mild dislocation—these things as well, I believe, took a toll on my stability. Whatever the root cause, I neglected my work, traveling with less and less frequency into the bush, and sequestered myself in my Abidjan apartment, a sweaty little rat’s nest of cement block and stucco with mustard-colored walls and vinyl-upholstered furniture that would have been appropriate to the waiting room of a forward-thinking American dentist circa 1955.

The morning of the call, I was sitting hung over, watching my latest live-in girlfriend, Patience, make toast. Patience was barely two weeks removed from her home village; city ways were still new and bright to her, and though she claimed to have previously observed the operation of a toaster, she’d never had any hands-on experience with the appliance. Stacks of buttered toast, varying in color from black to barely browned, evidence of her experiments with the process, covered half the kitchen table. The sight of this lovely seventeen-year-old girl (the age she claimed), naked except for a pair of red panties, staring intently at the toaster, laughing when the bread popped forth, breasts jiggling as she laboriously buttered each slice, glancing up every so often to flash me a delighted smile… it was the sort of thing that once might have stimulated me to insights concerning cultural syncretism and innocence, or to a more personal appreciation of the moment and my witness of it. Now, however, this sort of insight only made me feel weary, despairing of life, and I had grown too alienated to keep a collection of intimate mental Polaroids—and so I was glad when the ring of the telephone dragged me away into the living room.

“My God, man!” Rawley said when I answered. “You sound awful.” His tone became sly and knowing. “What can you have been doing with yourself?”

“Business as usual,” I said, more brusquely than I’d intended. “What’s on your mind?”

A pause, burst of static along the long-distance wire, after which Rawley’s voice seemed tinier, flatter, less human. “Actually, Michael, I’ve some work to toss your way… if you’re interested. But if this is a bad time…”

I apologized for being short with him, told him I’d had a rough couple of nights.

“Not to worry,” he said, and laughed. “My fault for calling so early. I should have remembered you’re a bit of a cunt before you’ve had your coffee.”

I asked what kind of work he was talking about, and there was another pause. A radio was switched on in the adjoining apartment; a soukous tune blasted forth, lilting guitars and Sam Mangwana chiding an unfaithful lover. From the street came the spicy smell of roasting meat; I was tempted to look out the window and see if a vendor had set up shop below, but the brightness hurt my eyes, and I closed the blinds instead.

“I’ve been put in charge of a rather curious case,” Rawley said. “It’s quite troubling, really. We’ve had some murders up in Bandundu Province that have been attributed to sorcery. Crocodile men, to be specific.”

“That’s hardly unusual.”

“No, no, of course it isn’t. Not a year goes by we don’t have similar reports. Sorcerers changing into various animals and doing murder. Although this year there’ve been considerably more. Dozens of them. Hang on a second, will you?”

I heard him speaking to someone in his office, and I pictured him as I had seen him three months before—blond Aryan youth grown into a beefy, smug, thirtyish ex-swimmer given to hearty backslapping and beery excess. Or, as a remittance man of our mutual acquaintance had described him, “Halfway through a transformation from beautiful boy to bloated alcoholic.”

“Michael?” Patience stood in the kitchen doorway; the room behind her was wreathed in smoke.

“The bread won’t come out the slots.” She said this sadly, her head tilted down, gazing up at me through her lashes—an attitude that suggested both penitence and sexual promise.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I told her. “Just pull the plug out of the wall.”

“Sorry about that, Michael.” Rawley was back, his manner more energized, as if he’d received encouraging news. “This particular case I mentioned. We have a witness who’s identified three men and two women he claims turned into monsters. Half man, half croc. He says he saw them kill and eat several people.”

I started to speak, but he cut me off.

“I know, I know. That’s not unusual, either. But this fellow’s testimony was compelling. Described the beasties in great detail. Human from the waist up, croc from the hips down. Skin in tatters, as if they were undergoing a change. That sort of thing. At any rate, arrests have been made. Four of them deny everything. As you might expect. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d let them go. Despite the superstition rampant in these parts, prosecuting a case based entirely on an accusation of sorcery would be a ludicrous exercise. But in this instance, one of the accused has confessed.”

I had been stretching the phone cord to its full extension, peering around the corner of the doorway to see how Patience was doing with the toaster cord. Now Rawley had won my complete attention.

“He confessed to killing and eating people?”

“Not only that. He confessed to killing them while in the form of half man, half crocodile.”

I took a moment to consider this, then said, “The police must have tortured him.”

“I don’t believe so. I’ve spoken with him in the jail at Mogado, and he’s not in the least intimidated. On the contrary, I have the sense he’s laughing at us. He seems amused that anyone would doubt him.”

“Then he must be insane.”

“The thought did occur. Naturally I had him examined by a psychiatrist. Clean bill of health. Of course, I’m not altogether sure of either my psychiatrist’s competency or his motives. His credentials are not of the highest quality, and there’s a great deal of political pressure being exerted to have the case brought to trial. The big boys in Kinshasa don’t enjoy the notion that someone out in the provinces might be practicing more effective juju than they themselves.”

“It all sounds intriguing,” I said. “But I don’t understand how I can help.”

“I want someone I trust to have a look at this fellow. A practiced observer. Someone with expertise in the field.”

“I’m scarcely an expert in human behavior. Certainly not by any academic standard.”

“True enough,” said Rawley. “But you do know a thing or two about crocodiles. Don’t you?”

This startled me. “I suppose… though I haven’t kept up with the literature. Snakes are my thing. But what possible use can you have for an expert on crocodiles?”

Again Rawley fell silent. I had another peek in at Patience. She was sitting by the table, staring glumly out the window, the black toaster plug protruding from her clasped hands—like a child holding a dead flower. She did not turn, but her eyes cut toward me and held my gaze—the effect was disconcerting, like the way a zombie might glance at you. Or a lizard.

“I realize this may sound mad,” Rawley said, “but Buma… That’s the man’s name. Gilbert Buma. He’s an impressive sort. Impressive in a way I can’t put into words. He has the most extraordinary effect on people. I—” He made a frustrated noise. “Christ, Michael! I need you to come and have a look at him. I can get you a nice consulting fee. We’ll fly you into Kinshasa, pay all expenses. Believe it or not, there’s a decent hotel in Mogado. A relic of empire. You’ll be very comfortable, and I’ll stand for the drinks. It shouldn’t take more than a week.” I heard the click of a cigarette lighter, the sound of Rawley exhaling. “C’mon, man. Say you’ll do it. It makes an excellent excuse for a visit if nothing else. I’ve missed you, you old bastard.”

“All right. I’ll come. But I’m still not sure what exactly it is you want from me.”

“I’m not entirely clear on the subject myself,” said Rawley. “But for the sake of the conversation, let’s just say I’d like you to give me your considered opinion as to whether or not Buma might be telling the truth.”

• • •

Patience wept when I left. We had only been together a few days, and our relationship had acquired no more than a gloss of emotional depth; yet judging by her display of tearful affection, you might have thought we were newlyweds torn apart in the midst of a honeymoon. I gave her enough money to last a couple of weeks and instructed her in the use of the apartment. Frankly, I didn’t believe I would see her again; I assumed that I would return home to find the place trashed, and myself in need of a new toaster. The tears, I suspected, were the product of her fear at being left alone in the city, a situation she would address the minute I was out the door. But despite this cynical view, I was moved, and tried to reassure her that everything would be fine. I told her I would call from Mogado and gave her Rawley’s office number. Nothing served to placate her. As I rattled about in the cab on the way to the airport, peering out at dusty slums through the mosaic of decals and fetishes that almost obscured the rear window, I felt a twinge of remorse at leaving her so bereft, and I wondered if by conditioning myself to expect the worst of people, I had also blinded myself to their potentials. Perhaps, I told myself, Patience was something other than the typical village girl driven from home by poverty, on her way to death by knife or beating or STD; perhaps she was offering more than I had taken the trouble to notice. But the sentimentality of this idea was off-putting. I pushed it aside and turned my thoughts to what lay ahead, to Mogado and Gilbert Buma, and to Rawley.

My friendship with James Rawley had been launched under the banner of political correctness. Though not so obnoxiously pervasive as it had become in the States, the politically correct mentality was nonetheless in vogue during my year at Oxford, and I believe Rawley perceived that friendship with a black American would effect a moral credential that would immunize him against the stereotyping reserved for white Africans, thereby assisting his student career—and it was for him a career in the purest sense of the word, a carefully crafted accretion of connections and influence. I doubt he was aware of this choice; it was more a by-product of natural craftiness than of any conscious scheme. But I also doubt he would have denied the fact, had I brought it to his attention—he had an intuitive self-knowledge and blunt honesty that made it difficult for him to harbor illusions regarding his motives. For my part, it was not so different. Rawley’s acceptance helped to ease my path at Oxford, and though the artificial character of the relationship was always a shadow between us, we never discussed the subject; we had sufficient affinities and commonalties of interest to allow us to finesse this potential problem.

For a long while, I considered the friendship abnormal, and I suppose it was to a degree, since from its onset it had not been informed by real affection; but as I grew older, I came to recognize that friends, like lovers, have their honeymoons, and that affection, like passion, lasts only for a season unless sustained by concerns of mutual advantage. Rawley and I had manufactured a friendship based on those concerns without the attendant warmth; yet over the years, our orbits continued to intersect, and a genuine warmth evolved between us. It was as if, because we had never bought into the illusion of friendship, because we had initiated our bond on the basest of levels, an enduring and dynamic friendship became possible. Whenever I stopped to analyze the relationship, I couldn’t be certain that I even liked Rawley; yet time and experience had inextricably woven together the threads of our lives, and our dependency on one another for counsel, money, a shoulder to cry on, and so forth had grown so deep-seated, we might have been an old married couple.

• • •

Though I had never been to Mogado, I knew what to expect. All African provincial capitals are much the same, both in essence and particulars, and Mogado’s downtown area of dusty, potholed streets, a scattering of leafless, skeletal trees, and shabby buildings with cracked stucco facades, was not in any wise distinctive. Just enough people about to give the impression of squatters in a ghost town: a barefoot woman in a faded dress peering from a dark doorway; three skinny kids squatting in the dirt, tormenting a captive mouse snake; a toothless old man sitting at a window, gazing blankly into the past. Everyone else hiding from the heat. In the central square, dominated by a plaster fountain decorated with faces from which all features had eroded, a pariah dog with a pelt the color of blanched almonds was poking about for bugs in a patch of sere grass. When my car passed close to him, he skittered away sideways, dragging behind him a shadow as thin as a wire animal.

The street sign on the corner nearest the jail was dented and weathered, almost unreadable. Peering closely, I saw it was inscribed with a date; I could just make out the month, November, and the slightest suggestion of a numeral—doubtless commemorating some brilliant revolutionary passage whose spirit had suffered a comparable erosion of clarity. The jail itself occupied the basement and ground floor of the provincial offices, which were housed in a four-story edifice of pastel green stucco. A potbellied Congolese policeman with blue-black skin, a presidential air of self-importance, and a wen under his left eye sat in the anteroom behind a flyspecked desk, reading a French-language newspaper whose headline proclaimed a ferry disaster on the Kilombo River, the same muddy watercourse that flowed past Mogado. The crack-webbed wall at his back was figured by a large rectangle paler by several degrees than the remainder of its dingy surface; I took this to be the space where for three decades a portrait of the late unlamented dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had hung. A ceiling fan stirred the air, but the faint breeze it created served merely to make me more aware of the humidity and the acrid stench of cleaning agents mixed in with a mustier scent, one I imagined to be that of blood and urine and sweat, the smell of old sufferings.

Rawley, the policeman told me, had been detained; he would join me that evening at the hotel. However, I could see the prisoner now if I wished.

I had presumed that Rawley would want to speak to me before my initial meeting with Buma; but now I suspected that his absence was by design, that he preferred to have my first impressions of the man be untainted by any further briefing on the case. I was tired from the flight and the drive, but I decided there was no point in putting things off.

A second policeman accompanied me down the stairs to a freshly whitewashed interrogation room at the rear of the building, furnished with a rough wooden table and two folding chairs. As I waited for Buma, I picked at the whitewash with my fingernails and succeeded in scraping away a sizable flake, revealing a dark undercoat dappled with rust-colored spots that were almost certainly dried blood. It would be nice, I thought, if Mobutu were doing time someplace a touch more tropical than Mogado, capering madly about in a red-hot iron cell, with snakes’ heads protruding from his eyes and rats playing tug-of-war with bloody strips of his tongue.

The door creaked back, and the policeman, wearing an agitated expression, ushered an elderly white-haired man into the room and locked the door behind him. The man was dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers of flour sacking, his arms and legs in manacles. His head was down, and he did not look at me. He stepped behind the chair opposite, repositioned it so that it was sideways to the table, and sat, affording me a view of his left profile. Only then did he dart his eyes toward me, engaging my stare for a few beats before fixing his gaze on the wall. He smiled, showing a sliver of discolored teeth—or perhaps it was not a true smile, for the expression held, as if this were the natural relaxed position of his jaws. His skin was coffee-colored, so crisscrossed with wrinkles that I initially assumed him to be in his eighties; but his musculature gave the lie to this impression. His forearms and biceps were those of someone who had thrived on a lifetime of physical labor, and his features were firmly fleshed and strong. It seemed that age had merely laid a patina upon him, and that if you could erase the wrinkles, you would be face to face with a man of hale middle age.

“Mr. Buma,” I said. “My name is Michael Mosely. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

He was slow to respond, but at length, as if it had taken several seconds for my words to penetrate his cerebral cortex, several more for the brain to interpret them, he said in a baritone of such resonance he might have been speaking through a wooden tube: “They tell me you are another doctor.”

“Yes,” I said. “But not the same sort of doctor who interviewed you previously. My discipline is herpetology. The study of snakes. To be precise, I’m an ethologist specializing in the behavior of pythons.”

This appeared to interest him. He turned the full force of his liverish eyes on me—when I say “force,” I am being literal, for I could have sworn I felt a sudden cold pressure on the skin of my face. That and his thin, false smile combined to instill in me a sense of unease.

“Pythons,” he said, and gave an amused grunt. “You will learn nothing about pythons from me.”

“As you probably know,” I said, “that’s not the subject of my inquiry.”

He lifted his large head a few degrees and appeared to be studying something in the corner of the ceiling. The most interesting thing about him to this juncture, I thought, was his stillness. After each movement, he seemed to freeze, not a muscle or a nerve twitching, and I wondered if this might not be the symptom of some pathology.

“Where were you born?” I asked.

“Along the river. A few days from here.”

“What’s the name of your village?”

“It no longer exists,” he said. “It has no name.”

Mobutu, I thought. Under Mobutu, many things in the Congo had ceased to exist.

“I’m going to assume,” I said, “you committed the murders you’ve been accused of. If that’s the case, why did you confess?”

He lowered his gaze to the wall. “Because I wished to announce myself. Because I am not afraid of what may follow.”

From his answer, I thought I understood him. Either he had participated in the murders, or else they had been done by someone else, and he had seen them as an opportunity. He was a witch man. A member of a crocodile cult. He wanted an acknowledgment of his power; once that acknowledgment had been made, and the cult’s authority affirmed, he believed that no Congolese court would have the courage to convict him—they would be intimidated by the threat posed by his sorcery. The entire process of accusation and confession had in effect been a public relations stunt designed to elevate the cult from a bush-league operation, so to speak, to a place of honor in the complicated hierarchy of witches and sorcerers that had always flourished in the country, no matter what political regime occupied the halls of power. While Mobutu was in office, this sort of stratagem would have been met with swift violence—no one was permitted to practice greater juju than the president-for-life; but now, with lesser monsters in control, it stood a chance of success. What I didn’t understand, however, was whether he was a con man or if he actually believed his own bullshit.

“Would you mind telling me how you acquired the ability to transform yourself?” I asked.

He seemed not to have heard me, continuing to stare at the wall.

I found this intriguing—it was my experience that most witch men would leap at an opportunity to present their magical credentials, to boast of their connections with various gods and elementals, to go on and on about the trials they had endured in their spiritual quests.

“The killings,” I said. “Were they somehow related to the ritual that permitted you to transform yourself? Or were they merely… coincidental?”

He let out a heavy sigh, and his mouth remained open, as if it had been a last breath; but then he blinked, and his eyes cut toward me again.

“These questions,” he said, “they hide another question. The thing you truly wish to know is whether I am a liar or a fool. If I were a fool, I would have no answer. If I were a liar, I would not tell you the truth.”

“You underestimate yourself…” I began, but he gave a dismissive wave.

“I have no need to ask whether you are a fool,” he said. “You claim to be a doctor who studies snakes, yet your questions are the same as that other fool’s. You think to trick me into revealing myself. Yet you are such a great fool, you can’t see that I have already done so.”

“All men are fools one way or another,” I said. “But I’m willing to accept your judgment. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

To this point, his movements had been measured and slow, something I attributed to the weight of the manacles. Now he whirled about and brought both fists down upon the center of the table, splintering it. This movement was so quick and fluid, I did not even have time to flinch, but was frozen by the violence; and as he leaned toward me, pinning me with his angry yellow gaze, I realized that the manacles would not be much of an impediment should he choose to attack.

The policeman’s voice came from beyond the locked door, asking if everything was all right. Before I could respond, Buma told him to leave us alone. Immediately thereafter, I heard footsteps in retreat along the corridor.

“I wonder what’s gotten into him?” I said to Buma, tamping down the coals of an incipient panic. “Whatever you’re trying to sell, it seems you’ve found at least one idiot who’s swallowed it.”

He said nothing, remaining motionless; but I sensed a trivial relaxation in his tense posture.

I shifted to a more comfortable position, trying to present an image of cool indifference. “You were going to say?…”

Buma dropped his eyes to the iron cuffs encircling his wrists; after a bit he let out another sigh and shifted back about to face the wall. “It would be best for you to return to Abidjan,” he said.

I was for the moment confounded that he knew where I lived, but then realized there was an obvious explanation.

“I’m not impressed,” I said. “It’s likely that Mister Rawley told you about me. If not Rawley, then one of your guards.”

This time, I thought, his peculiar thin smile was in actuality a smile. “If you travel upriver five days,” he said, “you’ll come to a place marked by a ferry landing that was burned by the soldiers. Walk into the jungle straight back from the landing until you see a giant fig tree. It’s not far. There you will find what you have been seeking.”

“And what exactly is that?”

“A python,” Buma said. “A white one.”

I was almost certain I had told Rawley that I was searching for an albino rock python—a healthy specimen would be worth six figures, and if it could be bred, I could make even more from the first litter. The money would free me from writing more grant proposals, from doing tedious research. From Africa. Yet I couldn’t imagine Rawley being so chummy with Buma that he would let slip this piece of information—if I had told him, I had done so only in passing; it would not have been in character for me to dwell on such a quixotic enterprise. Still, this was the only possible explanation.

“I suppose the snake’s just hanging around the fig tree, waiting for me to catch it.”

Buma shot me an icy glance. “If you go there, you will find it.”

“Golly, thanks. I’ll get right on it,” I said. “And here I thought you told me I’d learn nothing about pythons from you.”

“Then it seems you must assume I am a liar,” said Buma. “Not a fool.”

I had to laugh at this. Rawley had been right—the man was clever; but I remained convinced that everything about him, from his reptilian mannerisms to his cryptic dialogue, was part of an act. Better conceived than others I’d seen, but an act nonetheless.

“Do you truly want answers to your questions?” Buma asked.

“Of course I do.”

He turned to me again, slowly this time, and gave me an assessing look; he nodded. “It will be difficult, but you may be able to understand,” he said. “Very well.” He reached out and clasped my right wrist with his left hand.

In reflex, I tried to pull away, but my hand might as well have been stuck in an iron wall—his strength was irresistible. He closed his eyes, squeezed my wrist until my fist opened; then leaned forward and spat into my palm. With his free hand, he closed my fingers around the spittle, so that it smeared into the flesh.

“There,” he said, releasing me. “My brothers and sisters will not harm you now.”

“I thought you were going to answer my questions.”

“Words can never convey the truth,” he told me. “Truth must be revealed. And so it will be revealed to you.”

He settled back in his chair, let out a hissing sigh.

“That’s it? That’s your answer? The truth must be revealed?”

Buma’s eyelids were half-closed; his chest rose and fell, but very, very slowly, as if he were asleep. “Tomorrow,” he said in a dusty, barely audible whisper. “We will talk more tomorrow.”

• • •

The town was tucked into a notch between low green hills, beyond which lay deep jungle, and it stretched for nearly a quarter mile along the banks of the Kilombo, thinning out to the west into a district of thatched huts and shanty bars. Farther to the west, separated from this district by mud flats, lay the hotel Rawley had mentioned, the Hotel du Rive Vert, a venerable structure dating from the 1900s, when European traders had plied the river, exchanging cheap modernities for skins and ivory. The rive was no longer vert, the grounds having deteriorated into patches of parched grass crossed by muddy tracks, sentried here and there by dying, sparsely leaved eucalyptus. Standing isolate amid this desolation, the building itself—a rambling white stucco colonial fantasy of second-story balconies and French doors and a red tile roof—had the too-luminous incongruity of a hallucination, a notion assisted by the presence next to the front entrance of a lightning-struck acacia with a hollow just below its crotch that resembled an aghast mouth—it looked to be pointing at the hotel with a forked twig hand and venting a silent scream.

There was no sign of Rawley at the hotel, no message. The hotel bar, gloriously dim and cool and rife with mahogany gleam, was a temptation, but I didn’t want to be drunk when Rawley arrived. I set out walking along the riverbank, thinking I might stop in at one of the shanty bars for a beer or two—no more than two. The beer, I thought, would provide a base for the heavier alcohol consumption that would likely ensue once Rawley and I finished our business and got down to reminiscence.

This was toward the end of the dry season, and while the better part of the days were sunny—as it was that day when I left the hotel—the late afternoon rains were lasting longer and longer, often well into night. The land was so thirsty that by mid-morning of the following day, the streets were parched again, and wind blew veils of dust up from the flats; but there was a new heaviness in the air, and in the mucky soil at the edge of the water you could see shallow troughs where crocodiles had lain motionless during the downpour, steeped—or so I imagined—in a kind of bleak satisfaction, as if they believed that the mud and the river and the wet darkness were merging into a single medium, one perfect for their uses. Curiously enough, I did not see a single crocodile during the first portion of my walk. The flats reeked of spoilage and were strewn about with cattle bones and skulls, empty bottles, paper litter, and fruit rinds; occasionally I passed a dead tree or a mounded puzzle of sun-whitened sticks and twigs that once had been a shrub of some sort. The river was a couple of hundred feet wide at this juncture, roiled and muddy, and the far bank was occupied by secondary-growth jungle, leached to a pale green by the summer drought—from it came the sound of a trillion exquisitely unimportant lives blended together into a seething hum, just audible above the idling wash of the water. Flies buzzed about my head, and at my feet I saw the delicate tracks of crabs. But no crocodiles, no significant animal life of any kind.

On rounding a bend, however, I was brought up short by the sight of more crocodiles than I could have reasonably expected. Less than ten yards from where I stood, a wide, flat spur of tawny rock extended out from the Mogado side of the bank some twenty-five feet over the river, and upon it, slithering atop one another, stacked almost to the height of a man, were dozens of crocs, perhaps more than a hundred, hissing, snapping, exposing their ghastly discolored teeth, groping with their clawed feet for purchase; a great humping mass of gray-green scales and turreted eyes and dead-white mouths. I backed off a few paces, daunted by the closeness of so many predators, and by the strangeness of the scene. Not that it was entirely strange. During droughts, it sometimes happens that crocodiles will crowd together like this, pressing against each other in order to snare whatever moisture might have collected on the hides of their fellows; but in this instance, the drought had passed, and there was abundant water available. As I watched, one of the crocs dropped off the pile and went with a heavy splash into the murky water. Instead of making its way back up onto the rock, which I would have expected, it allowed itself to be carried off downstream, barely submerged, letting the current take it sideways, rolling it over partway to expose its pale, slimed belly, as if the thing were dead or moribund. Soon other crocs followed suit. This behavior was strange, indeed. I could think of no reason for it, except perhaps that toxic chemicals were responsible.

Before long, several dozen crocodiles had gone into the water—the narrows just beyond the bend was thronged with bodies, but once past that point, the current picked up speed and scattered them out across the breadth of the river, carrying them along more smoothly, so it appeared they were all arrowing toward the same destination, like an amphibious hunting pack. The scene was disturbing, unsettling, and not simply because I had no good explanation for it. I could not, you see, accept that it had a rational explanation; there was about the crocs’ actions a quality of purposefulness, of surreal functionality, that caused me to think I was witnessing something to which rationality as I knew it did not apply. Though I had been trained as an academic, I was not the sort to be troubled by slight shifts in the alignment of reality—my personal life had been fraught with lapses into substance abuse and depression and various other altered states. But this particular shift seemed to embody a powerful, unfathomable value that outstripped my experience, and I was shaken by it.

I had lost my taste for native beer, but not my thirst, and I hurried back to the hotel, where I immersed myself in a large whiskey, and in the illusion of Europe granted by the beveled mirror behind the bar, with its deep reflection of dark wood, candlelit tables, and plush red carpeting. Two whiskeys more, and the potential threat posed by afflicted crocodiles receded into a blurry inconsequentiality.

The barman, a slender, dignified East Indian named Dillip, with pomaded gray hair, and a crimson sash accenting his white shirt and trousers, was watching television at the end of the counter: a news program from Kinshasa. Bodies were being hauled from a river. I asked him if this footage related to the ferry disaster reported in the morning headlines.

“No, sah. Somebody just kill these boys and throw them in the Kilombo.” He shook his head ruefully. “Mobutu.”

Mobutu, I reminded him, was dead.

“Even dead, he make trouble for this place. Many people along the river were not his friend. They try to assassinate him.” He started to unload cutlery from a dishwasher. “You see, sah, at the end Mobutu was crazy from his cancer and the drugs. He does many crazy things. One thing, he tell his sorcerer to lay a curse upon the river. And now every town, every village along the Kilombo is poisoned by it.”

“Poisoned?”

“Yes, sah. They say the sorcerer take a scrap of Mobutu’s spirit and send into the river. Now nothing good can happen here.” He made a gesture of regret. “Nothing good can happen anywhere. You see, the Kilombo it flows into the ocean. And since the ocean goes everywhere, Mobutu’s curse have poisoned all the waters.”

Despite the woeful character of this information, he imparted it with the air of a man glad to be helpful to a stranger, as if warning of a dangerous stretch of road ahead. Thus do most Africans, be they black or white or any shade in between, approach the subject of sorcery—it is a simple conversational resource, no more extraordinary than talk of politics and the weather; and as is the case with those topics, though the news concerning sorcerous activity is generally bad, it’s simply a fact of life, and nothing to get upset about.

I was about to ask Dillip more about Mobutu’s relationship with the region, but Rawley chose that moment to put in an appearance. The next few minutes were occupied by a backslapping embrace and an exchange of crude pleasantries. And following that, I filled him in on my interview with Buma.

“So you think he’s a talented thespian.” Rawley had a sip of beer. “I must admit that was my impression at first. And perhaps first impressions are the most accurate in this instance. The longer I spoke with him, the more persuaded I was that something else was going on. Magic. Sorcery. That’s why I wanted your opinion. Being born here makes me somewhat susceptible to these old frauds.”

He didn’t seem convinced of this, however.

“I want to talk to him again, if only to watch him work,” I said.

“Yes, yes… absolutely. Talk to him as often as you like.” Rawley gazed at his reflection in the mirror. On the face of things, he looked the same as always, but now I noticed that his trousers and polo shirt were rumpled, and his hair had been hastily combed—a far cry from his normal pathological neatness. Dark puffy half moons under his eyes gave evidence of sleeplessness, and his ruddy tan was undercut by the sort of pallor that comes with illness or overwork.

“Fuck me,” he said wearily, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “This business is sending me round my twist.” He signaled Dillip, pointed to my empty glass, and held up two fingers. “I’m getting it from both ends. Kinshasa wants me to prosecute, but the locals are terrified that if I do, Buma’s minions will slaughter them in their beds.”

“Buma has minions?”

“He’s never mentioned any. But then, as you yourself observed, he conveys a certain menace.” The whiskeys arrived, and Rawley knocked back half of his; he lit a cigarette, leaned back and regarded me fondly. “I’m glad you’re here, Michael. I really needed someone to get pissed with.”

“Then it’s not my vast wisdom you were interested in.”

He laughed. “Strictly a ruse.”

An accomplished drinker, Rawley knew how to pace himself for a long evening. Though I had a head start, I slowed my own pace and fell into his rhythm of sips and swallows, and before long we had achieved a relatively equal level of inebriation. Other patrons entered the bar. A distinguished, white-haired African gentleman in a dark blue suit sat alone at a corner table, sipping a brightly colored drink decorated with a tiny paper parasol, and staring into the middle distance. His face betrayed no expression, but I imagined I could hear the memory tunes playing in his head. A young French couple—fieldworkers with a relief agency—littered the opposite end of the bar with government forms and talked earnestly. Two bearded thirtyish men in jeans and T-shirts took a table by the door; they downed beer after beer in rapid succession, their mule-like laughter at odds with the atmosphere of colonial decorum. Germans, probably.

When not busy serving his customers, Dillip continued to watch the TV, which now offered a discussion amongst three government officials concerning the troubles along the Kilombo, and since Rawley and I had for the moment exhausted our store of reminiscences, I told him what Dillip had said about Mobutu and his curse.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that story,” Rawley said. “It’s true enough the region has been going through hell since he died. But it’s impossible to tell which came first, the trouble or the story.” With the tip of his forefinger, he smeared a puddle of moisture around on the polished surface of the bar. “The old boy was mad, there’s no doubt of it. And not just at the end. When I was a boy I met him with my father. Tiny fellow with outsized spectacles, wearing a leopard-skin hat, and carrying a fetish stick. Young as I was, I could feel his insanity. Like some kind of radiation.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, a disappointed sound. “I used to think I understood this place, but lately… I don’t know. Perhaps things have just gotten so bloody awful, I tend to complicate them. Make them into something they’re not. Oh, well. I won’t have to deal with it much longer.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why’s that?”

He hesitated. “I was planning to tell you this tomorrow; I thought it might make an effective cure for a hangover.” A pale smile. “I’m getting married next month. Beautiful girl named Helen Crowley. Extremely intelligent. Attached to the British embassy. She can’t abide Africa, however, so we’re going to live in London.”

“Damn! When did all this happen?”

“I met her last year, but things didn’t heat up until a couple of months ago.”

I was startled. More than startled, actually. Rawley was the whitest African of my acquaintance, but he was nonetheless African through and through, and I couldn’t imagine him being happy anywhere else. I asked if he was looking forward to living in England and he said, “You must be joking! A Third World country with a Second World climate. I can’t fucking wait!” He fiddled with his cocktail napkin. “But she’s… she wants… Hell, you know how it goes.”

I told him that I did, indeed, know how it went.

Rawley began to extol Helen Crowley’s many virtues, and it struck me that he was attempting to excuse himself for running out on me, as if he believed that by marrying and exiling himself to Europe, he was effectively ending our relationship. Which was probably the case. My plans for the future, albeit sketchy, did not include a sojourn in England. I felt a childish resentment toward him. Though we only saw each other half a dozen times a year, he was the one real friend I had, and I had come to rely on his accessibility.

He tried to play to me, asking about my love life, suggesting that it was time for me to find someone as he had. My responses were terse and unaccommodating. With part of my mind, I recognized what an asshole I was being, but I was too drunk to censor myself. Not long afterward, I made my own excuses, told him I would meet him in the hotel bar the next evening after I talked with Buma, and staggered off to bed.

The drumming of the rain against the window in the darkened room caused me to feel dizzier, less in control, and thus I can’t be sure what moved me to call Patience; but I think it may have been that Rawley’s betrayal—so my drunken brain characterized it—inspired me to attempt to counterfeit a romantic relationship for myself. That would have been in keeping with the infantile tenor of my thoughts.

To my surprise, she picked up on the third ring. “Michael! I’m so happy to hear you! When you coming home?”

My toaster, I thought. Still mine.

All during the call, Patience urged me to hurry home, saying the Congo was a dangerous place and she was worried about me. This was, I assumed, her loneliness speaking. But her expression of concern suited my fantasies, and I found myself murmuring endearments, making the kind of assurances that should never be made drunkenly or lightly; and when she offered similar assurances in return, rather than retreating from the edge of this moral precipice, I let her voice comfort me and fell asleep with the phone pressed to my ear.

• • •

Usually after drinking to excess, I sleep fitfully, tossing about, waking every so often, plagued by stomach pains and anxiety dreams; but that night I slept soundly and the only dream that came was not the typical helter-skelter of surreal adventures and circumstances, but had a clarity and mental coloration unlike that of any dream I had theretofore experienced. I was moving rapidly through shallow water, not swimming so much as being carried along by the current. Clouds of brownish yellow sediment stirred up by the passages of others before me obscured my vision, yet I could still make out reeds undulating on the river bottom, wedges of stone extruded from the bank. Within minutes, the water became cooler, deeper, greener, and I could no longer see the bottom. I was being drawn toward something, but what exactly that thing was, I did not know. While it was not in my nature to be afraid, I had a sudden comprehension of fear, of its potentials, and this caused me to become more alert to my surroundings, as might happen when food was near. But this knowledge was unimportant, for even had I been capable of fear, I somehow trusted the thing toward which I was being drawn; I understood that it was not inimical.

The current grew faster, the water darkened to a cold blue, and I was overcome by a great lassitude. All my strength was draining from me, yet at the same time I sensed that I was accumulating new strength of a sort I could not fully understand, subtler form of power than my old strength, but no less serviceable. In the distance I saw a glowing patch of brighter blue, barely a spot, but increasing in size with every passing second, and I knew that this brightness was the signal fire of my destination…

I’m not certain what woke me, but I believe it must have been a lightning strike, for I heard thunder, and lightning forked down the sky, illuminating tracers of rain. I was still half involved in the tag ends of the dream—it had been so compelling, it seemed to pull at me as inexorably as had that glowing patch of blue. Yet at the same time I was terrified, and my heart raced. Rain was pouring down my face, into my eyes, matting my hair, and I was utterly disoriented. The last thing I remembered of the waking world was Patience’s voice in my ear, a pillow beneath my head. I hugged myself against the chill, and realized I was outside, wearing only a pair of briefs. A flicker of distant lightning showed my immediate surroundings. I was standing atop the rock where that afternoon I had seen the crocodiles at their strange menage. Beneath me, water churned against the bank, and on the far side of the river, the shadowy crest of the jungle trees swayed against the lesser darkness of the sky, bending all to the left, then straightening, with the ponderous rhythm of a dancing bear. On every side, the crunch and tatter of windy collisions, and from above, the constant battering of thunder.

Even after I had recognized my location, I remained terrified. I had no idea what could have happened. The idea of somnambulism had not yet entered my mind; instead, it seemed I had been spirited from my bed by the force of a dream to a place referenced by the dream; though confused, I was not confused about that—whether it was a product of my drunken imagination or of something more inexplicable, I had been dreaming a crocodile dream. I began to shiver, and this was not entirely due to the cold. The toiling dark was full of dangers, and I would have to negotiate nearly a mile of it before reaching the hotel. But no other option was open to me. I shuffled about, afraid of turning abruptly and losing my balance, and as I took my first step toward the hotel, a deafening crack of thunder—like the parting of some fundamental seam—shredded the clouds overhead, and I was knocked onto my back by a blast of vivid red light. A foundry color, like the molten shell that encases a white-hot core of liquefied steel. It was as if I’d been cupped in a fiery hand for a split second and then cast aside. For several seconds thereafter, I was dazed by the concussion, blinded, my nostrils stinging with the reek of ozone; when my vision cleared, I saw that a dead tree close by the rock had been struck by the lightning and was ablaze, serving as a torch to illumine a considerable portion of the flats, causing puddles to glitter and shining up all the slick muddy skin of the place. At the landward end of the rock, no more than twenty feet away, blocking my exit, was a crocodile.

This was no ordinary crocodile, but one of nature’s great criminals, as unruled in its own place and time as the tyrannosaur. A creature, a beast, a monster. Fully sixteen feet long, I reckoned it. The top of its massive head at rest was parallel with the mid-point of my thigh, and its open jaws could have accommodated an oil drum. With its scales gilded by the firelight, its pupils cored with orange brilliance, it would have been at home by Cerberus’s side, an idol of pure menace guarding a portal into hell—that was my first thought (if I can call those chill lancings of affrighted, garbled language that shot through my brain “thoughts”). It seemed that beyond the portcullis of stained and twisted teeth, deep in its hollow tube of a belly, lay a gateway opening onto some greater torment.

The largest branch of the burning tree broke off and fell with a hiss into the river. In the diminished light, the croc’s aspect changed from that of demiurge to the purely animal. A bloated grayish green lizard with a pale, thick tongue and cold mineral eyes and corrosive, rotting breath, a creature that would chew through my torso as though it were an underdone strip of bacon, then lift its head and, utilizing its powerful throat muscles, shift me down into its stomach, where—coated in sticky acids—I would quietly dissolve over a period of days, sharing the ignominy of a partly consumed river bass, its glazed eyes contemplating me with doting steadfastness as we lay together in our cozy, messy little cave.

To this point, disorientation had dominated my fear, but now my uncertainty as to what had happened was washed away by a single horrid certainty, and the disabling weakness that accompanies deep terror infused my limbs. My instinct was to throw myself into the water, but there I would be totally helpless. Instead, I tried to prepare for a quick sprint, a leap. If I jumped toward the bank at an angle from the middle of the rock, I might be able to gain a foothold and scramble up and make my escape. The odds of success were not good, but then the odds favoring any other course of action were far worse. It would have been helpful if the crocodile had bellowed, made a violent noise that out-voiced the wind—that might have acted upon me like a starter’s pistol and given me a boost of energy. But crocs only bellow when their territory is threatened, and I was no threat, I was mere prey. Its baleful regard was more enfeebling than any sound could have been, and I knew that at any second it would lunge forward and take me.

In the moment before I jumped, I had an incidence of perfect clarity. It was if I were receding from the world, leaving the body behind. I saw myself, a black, insignificant figure, a human scrap on a splinter of rock above turbulent water, facing a slightly less tiny creature with a tail, and the entire dark geography of the flats, with its one torched tree and a few smaller, flickering lights in the distance that might have been lanterns in the windows of shanty bars. I saw stitchings of lightning fencing the river valley, casting the hills in brief silhouette, bringing up the boxy shapes of Mogado from the shadows. I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution. And it was this sorry recognition, this abandonment of last illusions, that bred in me a liberating fatalism and freed my limbs from the grip of fear and let me jump.

I hit the side of the bank hard and slipped back. My feet touched the water, but I managed to claw out a handhold in the mud and haul myself up onto level ground. Lightning strobed as I rolled away from the water’s edge, and in those bright detonations I caught sight of the crocodile. Just a glimpse. It was in the process of turning toward me, jaws agape. I flung myself away, and came to my feet running. Thunder obscured all other sound, but I could have sworn I felt the croc close behind, the awful gravity of the beast swinging its head round to bite. As I ran, as it became apparent that I was not going to die, I began to laugh. I stumbled, I fell half a dozen times, I tore my skin on stones, on dead branches, but I continued to laugh until I was too exhausted to do more than breathe. It seemed ridiculous that I should have survived. Silly. Life itself seemed silly, when there was so much death to be had. The average human activity in Africa was dying, or so I perceived it then, and to be spared in this situation abrogated at least the law of averages, if not other, more consequential laws.

I burst through the hotel doors, somehow failing to wake the African teenager behind the reception desk, and went into the bar, empty and lightless now, and helped myself to a bottle of whiskey; I sat down at one of the tables and had a restorative drink. Then I had another. I started laughing again, and this served to wake the kid at the desk. He peeked in the doorway, a startled look on his face; then he vanished, and I heard his footsteps moving away. Not long afterward, Dillip—wearing a fetching bathrobe of embroidered green silk—made his appearance. His manner was at first stern, but on seeing my condition—all but naked, streaked with mud, bleeding, wild of countenance—he stopped short of rebuking me. He went behind the bar, picked a glass from the rack and with an air of prim disappointment, brought it to me. I thanked him and poured the glass half full.

“What can have happened to you, sah?” Dillip asked, hovering by the table.

I did not know how to tell him and only shook my head.

He drew up a chair and sat opposite me, adjusting the fall of his robe to cover his bony knees. From his expression, I gathered that he had not yet decided whether to be reproving or indulgent of my curious behavior.

“Do you require medical assistance?” Dillip asked.

“No,” I said. “No, just a drink or two.”

This did not sit well with him. “Sah, you must tell me what has happened. If something has happened to you in the hotel, I must report it.”

“Nothing happened in the hotel.” I pointed with the whiskey bottle. “Out there.”

“Ah!” said Dillip. “You have been robbed, then. Bandits!”

I considered accepting this judgment; it would be easier than trying to explain the events of the evening. But when I put everything together in my head—my sleepwalking, the storm, the crocodile, Buma—I did not arrive at an American conclusion, but an African one.

“Not bandits,” I said. “Mobutu.”

• • •

African politics is frequently intertwined with the cult of personality. Perhaps because the land is vast, the men who pretend to rule it must proclaim their own vastness, each in a highly individual way… ways that are rarely beneficial to those whom they have been “elected” to serve. For instance, not far from Abidjan lies the village of Yamoussoukro, the birthplace of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the late president of the Ivory Coast. Upon his elevation to the office, the president initiated a building program designed to turn Yamoussoukro into a new capital, one that would rival Brasilia. He had long held an admiration for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and so nothing would do but that he erect a copy of the church half again as large as the original close to the village; and to provide better access to this newly historic area, he ordered the construction of a six-lane highway. The need for six-lane highways in West Africa is slight, if not nonexistent. The first time I drove along the highway, at what ordinarily would be considered rush hour, I encountered only one other person, an old man in a shabby brown suit riding a bicycle. That this building program nearly bankrupted the country was of secondary importance to President Houphouet-Boigny and his supporters; of primary importance was that in their minds this spanking new, empty, purposeless city and its various accessories established to the world the greatness of the man and suggested that he was not someone to be trifled with.

Mobutu Sese Seko favored more of a minimalist approach to achieving this same effect. It suited him to create a fearsome ring of security about himself and throughout Kinshasa, and to permit the remainder of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) to fall into ruin. Beyond Kinshasa, the jungle overran the outlying highways, and the infrastructure crumbled, leaving a poverty-stricken populace without any resources other than the sweat of their brows. Did not this cruel policy express a godlike indifference to suffering? Was not a reign of more than thirty years funded by this unvarying indifference evidence of the man’s invulnerability and power? Might not such a man use his dying strength to visit some final and lasting pain upon his people by means of a curse? And might not the people, disposed to belief in his godhood by thirty years of oppression, be so psychologically in thrall to him that by dint of national will they had managed to make the curse manifest, or—put more basically—they had caused it to come true?

This last was one of the questions I put to Buma the next afternoon. I was not in the best of shape. I felt cracked, things broken inside my head, the shape of my faith in logical process gone lopsided, and my hands trembled from fatigue and alcohol. Nothing I saw that day helped to right me. At the jail, the desk officer’s newspaper told of a village twenty miles downriver destroyed by fire—lightning or tribal violence, no one could say, for there were no survivors—and a small headline below the fold reported that fish were dying by the thousands in a lake fed by the Kilombo. The cause was unknown.

“As long as you ask these questions,” Buma said, “you will never know the answers.” He was, as before, sitting sideways to me, gazing at the whitewashed wall, maintaining his customary reptilian poise. “Yet if you learn not to ask them, someday the knowledge will come.”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “If you sit perfectly still, the world will move through you, and everything is everything else. I’ve heard the same crap from slicker hustlers than you.”

“You’re angry because your dream was interrupted.” He turned his head to me, his seamed face calm, that thin smile in evidence. “Don’t worry. You’ll finish it tonight. Then you will understand.”

I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew about my interrupted dream; but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Because it is my dream,” he said. “Because I gave it to you.” He refitted his gaze to the wall, and I imagined he was seeing through the whitewash to the bloodstained surface beneath, the dark Mobutu skin that stretched across the entire country—it could be covered up, but never truly obscured.

I didn’t know what more to ask—most of the questions crowding my brain were those I needed to ask of myself. Questions relating to my behavior with Rawley, my overall stability. I had never before walked in my sleep, and though I had no knowledge concerning the causes of somnambulism, I assumed they must be pathological.

In spite of my confusion, my self-absorption, I managed to frame a question for Buma. Not a particularly intelligent question, but it would serve to occupy him while I thought of a better one.

“Who are you?” I asked him. “Who do you think you are?”

“Do you see, Michael? It is always best to be direct. All your previous questions have begged the issue. But this… this is to the point.”

“Then why don’t you answer it?”

“Sometimes I think I am a man.” His smile widened. “But then I remember that I am not.”

“This non-responsive style of yours,” I said, “it’s the classic tactic of the charlatan. The cryptic answer, the knowing nod. All it suggests is that you have nothing salient to tell me. It’s obvious that you’re a clever man, that you’re using what you’ve deduced about me from our conversations to try and persuade me of your supernatural abilities. But I’m not buying it.”

Buma let out a hissing breath, a sign—I thought—of exasperation. “Your assumption seems to be that by answering you I will be helping myself, and you further assume that I am not answering you. In the first place, I do not need your help. In the second, I have given you a dream, and I have confessed to murder. If you wait and listen and watch, you will learn the rest. You must have patience, Michael.”

The word “patience” startled me. “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

His eyes swung toward me. “Have you ever watched crocodiles hunt? How they wait and wait, how they persevere? Time and again they will attack and fail, yet they remain persevering. Because they have patience. If I were the king of the crocodiles, I would be the king of patience. Patience is much more than a simple virtue, Michael. Surely you know that?”

He was doing exactly what I had said—probing, making rudimentary deductions, then using my reactions against me. But though I thought I understood him, this talk of patience led me to suspect that he had some connection with my Patience, or that he knew about her. A hundred wild suppositions contended in my brain, along with fantasies about crocodile kings with thin, false smiles and women who sat sideways and cut their eyes toward you rather than turning their heads; but I refused to give in to them.

“What…” I began, and then forgot the question I’d intended to ask. I searched for another and asked, for no particular reason, simply because it was the only thing that occurred, “The river… Is there something wrong with the river?”

Buma got to his feet. He stepped to the wall, knocked against it with the sides of his iron cuffs, dislodging a roughly triangular section of flaking whitewash, revealing a large dark patch beneath. “Do you see this?” he asked. “This is what is wrong with the river. With all things. No matter how pure the surface, beneath it lies insanity and dread. Some will tell you it is Mobutu who is to blame. Others will say something different. They are each right in their own way. Mobutu. Poison. Bacteria. Curses. These are merely names for the incurable cancer spreading from the heart of the world, the terror from which life itself springs. We are all fleeing it. We try to swim away, we travel far from home, we tell ourselves it is a dream, we imprison ourselves in palaces, we speak to God on the mountaintop. We can never escape it, however, because we are part of it. Yet we must try, because that is our nature.” He sat back down, making a dull rattle with his chains. “Crocodiles understand this more clearly than do men. They are simple creatures, and simple answers do not elude them.”

I was dancing with him now; he was playing me, and logic could not stand against him. His words, though scarcely original, a medley of bleak clichés, had tapped into the core of my weakness, and all the fear I had nourished over long years in Africa, all the peculiarly African fear, the apprehension of spirits, of lion ghosts and magical presidents and the long-legged, licorice-skinned, lickety-split demons of the talking drum dancing with arms akimbo on the margins of one’s campfire light, ready to pounce with their red-hot spears and golden teeth… all this was loose in me, raving like a storm inside my skull, and I had the unshakable presentiment that if I didn’t move I would be trapped with this man who claimed not to be a man in that little white cell forever. I scraped back my chair, staggered against the wall, the wall infected with blood and darkness, and as I moved haltingly toward the door, Buma smiled at me. The cracks in his wrinkled, youthful face seemed to deepen so drastically, I thought his skin would fly apart into a kind of weathered shrapnel, releasing the all-consuming, crocodile-reeking blackness beneath.

“Remember, Michael,” he said. “Have patience. No matter what befalls the world, whether fire or ice, if you have patience, you will thrive.”

• • •

Dusk came suddenly as I left the jail, dragged in—it appeared—by flights of crows that swooped just above the rooftops, screaming down harsh curses on the people below. I badly wanted a drink, and since I was now persona non grata with Dillip, I headed for the nearest shanty bar, a construction of warped boards alternately painted pink and yellow and blue, furnished with picnic-style tables and lit by a kerosene lantern, all topped off by a rust-scabbed tin roof. The bartender, an enormous woman in a flowered dress, her hair wrapped in a white cloth, provided me with a bottle with a Jim Beam label that did not contain Jim Beam, but something yellowish-brown and vile and strong as poison. I drank it gratefully. Soon the woman came to resemble a deity, marooned by a spill of lantern light in the soft darkness behind a two-plank countertop, her shiny black plump breasts the source of all fecundity, her broad round face as serene as those faces at the corners of antique maps that signify the east wind. At another table sat three men, all young, muscular, two of them wearing polo shirts and jeans, the other jeans and a pink T-shirt decorated with the image of a pony. Pink T-shirt was fiddling with the dials of a transistor radio, bringing in static-filled reggae. Now and then he would glance sternly at me, as if he disapproved of my presence. But I didn’t care. I was ablaze with the happiness that only a satisfied drunk can know, liberated from—yet not unmindful of—my troubles. They seemed manageable now. Even the pronounced possibility that I was experiencing mental slippage seemed a trivial matter, one that could be reconciled in due course. And what if I was perfectly healthy? That was a possibility, I realized, that I had not given sufficient credence. It was not utterly beyond the pale to think that Buma was the king of the crocodiles, or that Mobutu’s curse was despoiling the Kilombo, or that Patience was more than a simple virtue. Then, too, it might be true both that I was slipping and that the world was mad enough to support crocodile kings and rule by voodoo. But it was unlikely that anyone could decide these questions, so why worry about them?

“You are an American Negro, I believe,” said Pink T-shirt, who without my notice had come to stand by my table, his pals at his shoulder. I could not deny the fact, though I found the word “Negro” rankling. Pink T-shirt introduced himself as Solomon, and he and his friends, whose names I promptly forgot, joined me.

“Are you a student of history?” Solomon asked, enunciating his words with the profound dignity and slow precision of the very drunk. His friends did not appear capable of speech. Drifting, eyes rolling, almost on the nod. I told Solomon I was a student of snakes, but he did not respond to this; his impassively handsome face was arranged in a contemplative mask. “I am a student of history,” he said, “at the university in Kinshasa. I have studied the history of the American Negro.”

“I see,” I said. “And what have your studies taught you?”

He nodded, as if I had made a statement and not asked a question. Tiny yellow circles of reflected lantern light lensed his pupils. “I am curious about the American Negro’s perspective on Africa.”

Having been elected the American Negro for purposes of the conversation, I felt a responsibility to offer something cogent in reply. “It’s a complex subject,” I said. “After all, Africa is not one thing, but many. And the American Negro is a term that embodies a number of perspectives.”

In the gathering dark outside, two little girls in pale smocks came chasing after a huge sow, one of them flicking at her rump with a long switch.

“It is my thesis,” Solomon said, regarding me with what I suspected he thought was an imperious stare, “that because he both venerates and despises the African, the American Negro stands closer to a white perspective on the continent than to the African. In effect, he is no longer part of the black race.”

The black race, I thought. A mystery novel. A description of the River Styx. A nighttime cycling event. I wanted to feel respect for Solomon… or if not respect, then sadness. I suppose I felt a little of both. He had, after all, managed a university education—not the easiest thing to achieve in the Congo—and his simplistic take on his subject implied an unfruitful and outmoded agenda that was, in its historical context, sad. It was also sad that Solomon was apparently unaware of his subtext, in which—if he examined it—he would find reflected a specific variety of self-loathing endemic among failed or inadequately prepared African intellectuals. But what I mainly felt was annoyance. I had been involved in far too many of these spurious philosophical discussions to feel challenged by them, as Solomon—I believed—wanted me to feel. Though it was possible to gain insights from indulging in such quasi-intellectual pissing matches, the type of insight one gained was in essence judgmental and inclined to make you feel superior to the Solomon-of-the-moment. And even if those judgments were relevant, even if they illuminated some twist of African behavior, some intricate contradiction that in turn illuminated a fragment of colonial history or post-colonial politics, they tended to make you think that you understood Africans… and if you believed that, then you had fallen into the same sort of simplistic trap as had Solomon, as had many journalists and sloppy novelists, who transformed such encounters into pithy anecdotes. It was impossible to avoid making judgments, but why bother to deify them? No, annoyance was the proper reaction. Solomon was spoiling my drunk.

“You know,” I said, as one of his friends slumped against the wall and began to snore, “I used to believe in approaching subjects like the American Negro and his perspective on Africa from an academic standpoint. But now, I guess I think that all this shit—y’know, life, Africa, the rules of chess, love, all that—I guess I think the best way to understand it is just to feel it along your skin.”

Solomon took a moment to absorb this. “You are laughing at me,” he said.

“Not at all. I’m speaking to you exactly as I would speak to anyone who said what you said to me. If what I say doesn’t validate you in the way you’d like, I’m sorry.”

Two young women entered the bar and began chatting with the bartender. One was pretty, wearing a simple yellow dress; she looked over to our table and smiled.

“Whores,” said Solomon, following my gaze. “Perhaps you would rather talk to whores.”

“I’m only human,” I told him; then I asked, “Here’s something I can approach from an academic stance. Tell me what you think of Mobutu.”

Solomon pursed his lips. “I’m not disposed to discuss this with you.”

“That’s fair.” The woman in the yellow dress was peeking at me over her friend’s shoulder; she caught my eye, covered her mouth to hide a smile, and whispered in her friend’s ear.

Solomon now began discussing American Negro writers he admired. In his opinion, James Baldwin, though a degenerate, was the most African of them all. I couldn’t decide if this bespoke a startling new comprehension on his part, or was absolute bullshit. Soon, accepting that I did not want to play, Solomon and his friends left the bar, but not before the man who had been asleep, who had heard nothing of the conversation, turned back to the table and, with shy formality, extended his hand to be shaken.

A few minutes later, the woman in the yellow dress—Elizabeth by name—was sitting beside me and had placed my hand between her legs, separated from her secret flesh by a thin layer of cotton. “Do you feel it?” she whispered. “Beating like the heart of a little bird?” Her eyes were large and beautifully shaped, her features delicate, her small breasts perfectly round. She had a strange spicy scent. The rains had begun—late, that day—and the drops drew a tremulous droning resonance from the tin roof; the bartender switched on her radio, and a man with a hoarse romantic tenor sang in French a song about a boy torn between lust for a city woman and longing for his village sweetheart. At that instant, my perspective on Africa was pervaded by dizziness and desire. Even when Elizabeth asked me for money (“You know, you will have to give me a present”), she did so sweetly, almost apologetically, in keeping with my mood, with the mood of that place and moment. And when I gave her more than the present she had expected, she slipped my hand beneath the yellow cotton and offered me access to the proof of her own desire.

There was a room attached to the back of the bar, just big enough for a cot and a table bearing a lantern, with a window covered by a plastic curtain imprinted with red roses. When the curtain was pulled back, you could see a banana frond caressing the pane, like the green foreleg of some large, gentle insect. Fucking Elizabeth made me think of Patience, though not with guilt or any negative emotion. She simply reminded me of Patience in her playful exuberance and—all things being relative—her guilelessness. I didn’t doubt that she might try to rob me, yet I knew that if she did it would not be premeditated, but the result of a whim, an irresistible impulse. One way or another, I wasn’t concerned. She already had almost all of the cash I’d brought from the hotel. And so, once I was happily spent, I felt not the least compunction against falling asleep in her arms.

If I had remembered Buma’s promise that I would finish my interrupted dream, I might have fought off sleep; but I did not, and the dream took me unawares. The glowing patch of blue in the depths of the river toward which I had been heading… I was past it, I had gone through it and was swimming up toward the surface. Swimming had always been second nature to me, but now it took all my strength, and I found I could not breathe, that it was necessary to hold my breath as I strained toward the light. I couldn’t remember very much of what had happened to me within the patch of glowing blue, but I did recall that it had been painful, and I was certain that whatever had happened was responsible for the physical changes I was experiencing.

At last I broke the surface, sputtering and coughing, so weak I could barely swim to shore. When I reached the bank, I scrambled up the side and to my amazement, I discovered that I was standing on my hind legs. Standing upright as did those slight dark creatures upon whom I sometimes fed. Then I glanced down at my body. My arms were smooth and unwrinkled, my hands clawless, and my chest was smooth, covered with a fuzzy growth. Tatters of my old familiar skin clung to my hips and legs, but it was apparent that my legs were much longer than they had been. I let out a bellow of fear and rage, and was stunned by the frailty of my voice. Then I noticed others of my kind ranged along the bank, their condition the same as mine—changed, enraged, frightened. And hungry. I had never been so hungry in my life—it was as if I had never eaten. I bellowed again, and my brothers and sisters joined me, making an outcry that altogether might have equaled in volume the cry that one of us could have sounded before the change. But it was loud enough to attract the attention of creatures like ourselves yet not like us. Five of them. Fishermen on their way home.

We ran them down in the bush and threw them to the ground and fed. My mouth was not wide enough for proper biting, my teeth too small and blunt, but I managed; and as I fed, fear vanished, and in its place came understanding… understanding such as I could never have imagined. The world, it seemed, was larger and stranger than I had known, and now that my home had been corrupted by dark forces, I would have to leave it behind and seek another home—it was for this reason I had been changed. But changed by whom? By what? That knowledge was gone from me—though I believed I once had understood it, the space in my head where it had been seated was now filled with curious information, theories, schemes, languages, and systems, things I would not have believed existed. Yet my grasp of them was total, and I realized that, armed with this knowledge, and with my old knowledge that—though I had forgotten much of it—still empowered me, I had the opportunity not merely to survive, but to rule. Men, I perceived, were not only frail of body, but of mind, easily swayed and easily broken, and I was convinced that I could dominate them.

There were six of us on the bank, one a young woman—with my human eyes I saw that she was lovely. Five of us understood all that had happened and what we must now do, but the woman was so young, so new not only to this world, but to the previous one, she remained confused. I instructed her to go into the city and to find someone who would take her to a safe place. In my mind’s eye I saw a man from a distant country. I described him to her, told her where he lived, and sent her on her way. Then I, along with my four brothers and sisters, set out into the country we could not have imagined, but that we now meant to make our own.

I woke from the dream to find Elizabeth straddling me, holding me down by the shoulders, a terrified look on her face. She told me I had tried to leave the room while still asleep, but she had pushed me back down. I assured her that I was fine, but I was not fine. I could taste blood in my mouth, I remembered the sensation of ripping off a strip of human flesh and chewing it juiceless, I heard again the crack of a neck bone. These things, and not the mad logic of the dream, the idea that crocodiles were changing into men in order to escape some magical pollution of the Kilombo, persuaded me of the dream’s validity. Even the irrational notion that Buma, newly human, had sent me a crocodile girl to protect seemed possible in light of these horrible memories. I could not overlook the possibility that Buma’s power was merely the power of suggestion, or that my mind had been wired for madness by my years in Africa, conditioned to accept the most insane of propositions and to create improbable scenarios from the materials provided by a fraudulent witch man so as to explain away dysfunction. But for the time being I preferred the prospect of supernaturally transformed crocodiles to that of insanity, and I let Elizabeth console me.

I was thoroughly involved in the process of consolation when I heard voices raised in anger from the bar, and shortly thereafter the door to the little room swung open, and Rawley—his face flushed, his shirt and hair drenched with rain—stepped into view. “My God, Michael!” he said, averting his eyes. Elizabeth squealed, rolled off me and covered herself. “Are you mad?” Rawley said. “You know these women are all fucking diseased! What the hell were you thinking?”

I sat up, pulled on my briefs, and said sullenly, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Fine! I won’t worry. But we did have a meeting scheduled. I trust you won’t mind too much if I express some concern over the fact that you fucking failed to show up!”

I buckled my belt, shrugged into my shirt. “Just go easy,” I said. “I’ve had a rough day.”

“Oh, really? Yes, I suppose you have. Few of life’s difficulties compare to the arduous nature of an evening spent drinking and whoring.”

It was amazing, the amount of loathing I felt toward him—this bloated blond bug in his signature golf shirt and chinos, with his political dabbling and his tight-ass fiancée, who was he to berate me? “I don’t think,” I said tightly, “that my information has been degraded by tardiness.”

“Degraded,” he said. “Interesting choice of terms, that.”

I finished buttoning my shirt; behind me, Elizabeth struggled into her dress. “Gee, what crawled up your ass, Jimmy? No, don’t tell me. I bet the lovely Helen has something to do with it. What’s the problem? She having trouble prying her knees apart?”

“You bastard!” He glared at me, puffed up with anger. “Here I throw you a bone for friendship’s sake, and what do you do? You…”

“A bone?” I said. “I’m not your fucking dog, Jimmy. I’m your boy. Whenever you get into trouble, you come running to rub my nappy head for luck. You did it at Oxford, and you’re doing it now. Trouble with a Classics exam? Hey, Michael! Mind coming over and letting me knuckle your head bone? I’ll stand for the drinks.”

Rawley composed himself—he was above all this, he refused to get down in the gutter with me. “I’m not going to hold this against you. You’re drunk. We’ll talk in the morning, when you’re capable of reason.”

With a worried glance at me, Elizabeth squeezed past Rawley and vanished into the bar.

“Let’s talk now,” I said. “In the morning I’m gone.”

He appeared to take this as a surrender, an admission on my part of wrong-headedness. “Very well. But let’s go back to the hotel. We might be overheard here.”

“It’s your game,” I said. “We might as well play on your home court.”

“Can we stop this?” He spread his hands as if to demonstrate he was holding no weapons. “Christ, Michael. We have ten years of history together, and this isn’t the first time we’ve fought. If you want me to apologize for breaking in on you and the girl… I apologize. I’ve been under so much pressure, perhaps I haven’t been sensitive to the fact that you’re under pressure, too. If so, I apologize for that as well.” He stepped forward, extending the hand of friendship. “Come on, man. What do you say?”

I had always been a chump for his diplomatic side, even though I knew it was entirely tactical, and that it came as easily to him as eating bananas to a monkey. I took his hand, I accepted his clumsy embrace, but I knew in my heart that we were finished.

“No problem,” I said.

• • •

I bought a bottle of yellowish brown poison from the bartender, and we set out toward the hotel. The rain had diminished to a drizzle, and as we crossed the pitch-dark flats, Rawley shined a flashlight ahead to show obstacles in our path, the beam sawing across broken glass and stumps and once a scurrying rat. I was very drunk, but my drunkenness was cored by a central clarity, and though my coordination was not good, my mind was charged with a peculiar energy that permitted me to think and speak with no sign of affliction. Between pulls on the bottle, I told Rawley about my conversations with Buma, the dreams, Mobutu’s curse, and my encounter with the crocodile, the odd behavior of the crocodiles I had witnessed on the day of my arrival in Mogado. I gave it to him flatly, as if it were all plain fact, with no mention of my self-doubts or any other of my reservations.

“That’s absolute nonsense,” Rawley said; then hurriedly, not wanting to risk—I supposed—reinstituting an adversarial atmosphere, “I mean it sounds like nonsense.”

“Like you said—Buma’s impressive. He’s obviously expert at mind-fucking people. Whether or not there’s something more arcane behind that… it’s not really important. Your problem is to decide whether you can successfully prosecute him. My feeling is that you can’t. Imagine what he could do with a jury. Or with the court, for that matter.”

Two young men passed us in the dark, walking in the opposite direction; they shielded their eyes against Rawley’s flash and offered a polite greeting.

“I may have no choice,” Rawley said. “I’m getting increasing pressure from Kinshasa. My ultimate problem may lie in trying to shift the blame for his acquittal away from me and onto the court.”

“Why is this important? You’re going to England. One trivial defeat won’t spoil your entire record.”

“My family will still be here. These bastards are capable of anything. If they get all in a twist about Buma, they might threaten our business interests. They might do more than that.” He swung the flashlight in a short arc, the beam whitening the trunk and upswept branches of a dead tree, making it look for an instant like the skeleton of a strange animal, frozen forever in an anguished pose. “God, sometimes I hate this country.”

We walked in silence a few paces; finally I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with Buma. Suppose he’s acquitted. Let’s not even talk about whether he used to be a crocodile. Let’s just say that he’s a member of a cult, and once he’s acquitted, the cult gets a lot of ink. A lot of power. He could be more dangerous than your friends back in Kinshasa.”

“Unfortunately,” Rawley said, “you’re not me. And I’m not you. I have responsibilities I can’t dodge.”

And fuck you, too, I thought; I hope the son of a bitch bites you in half.

We were passing a point parallel to the rock where I had been trapped by the big crocodile. I mentioned this to Rawley, suggested he might want to have a look.

“Why not,” he said.

We angled toward the river, walked along it for a minute or so, then Rawley’s flash picked out that tooth of dark rock extending out over the Kilombo.

“No action tonight,” said Rawley as he stepped out onto it. I remained on the bank. “Not a sign of a fucking croc,” he went on. He swung the flash across the surface of the water and laughed. “Buma must have given them marching orders.”

The clouds broke, and a thin silver moon like a fattened hook sailed up from behind them. Rawley came back onto the bank, shot me an amused glance. “Are you sure you weren’t drunk?”

“You know me, boss,” I said coldly. “I can’t scarcely see nothin’ ’less I’s drinkin’.”

In the weak silvery light, with a blond forelock drooping over his forehead to touch an eyebrow, his face looked oddly simple, childlike. “We have a few things to work out, don’t we?” he said. “I understand that, Michael. God only knows who we were back at Oxford. I can’t even remember those people, except that they were complete fucking idiots. But I’m certain they weren’t you and me. They weren’t us the way we are now.” He twitched the beam of the flashlight off along the bank. “Despite the shit people do to one another, we’ve stuck it out together. Perhaps not always for the purest of motives. But we have done, and I can’t help but believe there’s some good reason we’ve come this far. Don’t you think that’s a possibility worth exploring?”

His words were so unexpected, I couldn’t muster a response; but I was, against my will, touched by them. Embarrassed, he turned toward the town and swept the flashlight inland; as the beam traveled across the ground, the light reflected off what appeared to be a row of yellow-orange jewels set atop a semicircle of dead logs. Logs with wrinkled, leathery bark and weird turreted structures atop their narrow snouts. Rawley let out a little gasp, as if he’d taken a playful blow to the belly, and focused the beam on the log closest to us. A crocodile. Not a very big one, maybe eight feet long. But some of its friends were bigger. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, maybe more. Just sitting. Watching. Forming a barrier in every direction except one.

Rawley took a step backward onto the rock. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus.” Another croc let out a ghastly hiss.

I was not afraid… not for myself, at any rate. It was as if the electric arc of fear had gapped and failed to engage my nerves. Perhaps I was too drunk to feel fear. Yet I was afraid for Rawley. He took another backward step, stumbled, and in doing so, went farther out onto the rock.

“No!” I shouted, beckoning to him. “Run! You’ve got to run! This way!”

I sprinted toward the crocodile closest to the bank. It was strange. I ran, it seemed, not fired by an instinct for self-preservation, but by the need to demonstrate to Rawley the proper method of escape. I may have felt a touch of fright as I hurdled the croc—it snapped at me half-heartedly—but it was nothing compared to the terror I had experienced the previous night. I landed awkwardly on one foot, spun half about, and fell hard on my chest. For the space of a few seconds, perhaps a bit more, I lost my wind. When I regained it, I came to one knee and looked back at Rawley. He had not followed my example. He was standing near the riverward end of the rock, made to seem small by the vastness of the sky that had opened up above him, with its scattering of wild stars and silver cicatrix of moon. His pale hair flew in the breeze, and the tail of his shirt fluttered; the beam of the flashlight struck downward from his left hand like a frail gold wand, his only weapon against the crocodiles massed and slithering toward him from the landward end of the rock. There was no way he could hurdle them now. Our gazes met. He said nothing, and at that distance, his expression was unreadable; but he must have known he was doomed. I called out his name and came a step toward him, thinking there must be something I could do. I screamed at the crocodiles, but they were intent upon him, crawling over one another in their eagerness for his blood.

Rawley whirled about, the flashlight beam drawing a yellow stripe across the bright water. He glanced back at me once more, a mere flicking of his eyes, not a signal or message so much as a reflex, a last hopeful engagement of life, and then he dived into the Kilombo, a racer’s dive learned in his shining youth and practiced in the green pools of Oxford. The crocodiles surged forward. Rawley surfaced about twenty feet from the bank, just as the first of the crocs went into the water; he headed down river, stroking a racing crawl, aiming for a place some fifteen yards away where the bank jutted out. I didn’t think he had a chance—a dozen crocs were in the water now, arrowing after him, their bodies only partially submerged, moonstruck eyes aglitter. But Rawley was making decent headway, and I began to hope for him. Then the croc nearest him submerged completely. A moment later he screamed and came twisting high out of the water, clawing at the air, a dark stain on his lips and chin. And then the croc took him under. The other crocodiles converged on the spot where Rawley had vanished, and the surface was transformed into a melee of thrashing tails and rooting snouts, a raft of scaly, undulating bodies, all splashing and bumping and skittering half out of the water as one croc slid up and across another’s back in a display of murderous frolic. But there was no sign of the man they had killed.

I backed away from the bank; I felt unsound, unclear. Rawley’s death had been real enough while it was occurring, but now it seemed I had imagined it, that I would have to re-imagine it in order to make it real. I was still holding my bottle, and now I hurled it into the river, as if it were damning evidence. And wasn’t I culpable for having hated him, even if the hatred was transitory and the event itself a dire form of coincidence? Hadn’t I brought him to the rock with murder in my heart?

The crocodiles began to swim away from the spot where Rawley had disappeared. Their fun was over. I sank to my knees, suddenly overcome by loss, and by the gruesome manner of his passing. I bent my head, pressed the heels of my hands against my brow, as if to compress the memory of what I had seen, to flatten it and make it so thin it would slip into a crack in my brain and never be found. The hypocrisy of my grief, coming as it did in such close conjunction with my internalized expression of loathing for Rawley, caused his death to weigh more heavily upon me than it otherwise might. Though I truly grieved, at the same time my tears seemed a form of indulgence, as if I were grieving for myself, for my own frail transgressions, or else trying to present a false appearance to whatever deity was watching, to convince him that I was sorry for my part in what had happened. And this duality of grief, this fictive quality overlaying the real, this sense of innermost duplicity, made my thoughts scamper and collide like confused rabbits on a killing ground. I thought my head would burst, I wanted it to burst, and I was disappointed when it did not.

At last I lifted my eyes. Not ten feet away along the bank, a crocodile was watching me. A smallish one, perhaps the same upon which Rawley had first shined his flashlight. Its jaws were slightly parted, its snaggled teeth in plain view, lending it a goofy look. A comical little death poised to pounce. My normal reactions were dammed up, and I could only stare at the thing. Numb, hopeless, and uncaring, I waited to die. Seconds ticked past, slow as water from a leaky tap. The croc began to seem familiar, almost human. Mad hilarity lapped the inside of my skull. I noted the croc’s resemblance to George Bush the elder. A distant relative, perhaps. An outside child conceived during a state visit. Then it bellowed, a glutinous, hollow noise—like a troll roaring in a cave—and that restored my natural animal terror. Its head jerked sideways, and it regarded me for a few beats with one cold gray eye, as if marking me for future reference. Then it whipped about, and moving in the ludicrous yet oh-so-efficient Chaplinesque paddling run of its species, it scuttled off into the shadows, leaving me to seek another solution to my misfortunes.

• • •

When I reported Rawley’s death, the police in Mogado detained me; later that night, they charged me with his murder. There was no body, no evidence of any sort, except for the fact that I had been seen arguing with him, then walking with him in the direction of the river. No one reported seeing him afterward. Men had been convicted and executed for less in the Congo. I neither disputed nor affirmed the charge. In truth, I could not dispute or affirm it. Rawley’s death lay at the center of a web of circumstance and possibility that could never be untangled. Unless one were to accept the explanation of my dream… or rather, Buma’s dream. My three improbable escapes from the crocodiles of the Kilombo lent credence to this explanation, for had not Buma spat on my palm to protect me from his “brothers and sisters”? But I was not prepared to accept it.

Later that morning, the potbellied desk officer entered my cell and informed me that I was no longer under suspicion—I could leave—if I wished, I could return to Abidjan. I was in a state of shock and disbelief. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “I thought I was to be arraigned?”

He hesitated. “We’ve been told to let you go.”

“By Kinshasa?”

The policeman dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed. “You are free to leave.”

I considered the length of time it would likely take for the police to communicate with Kinshasa, then how much longer it would be before Kinshasa could get through their ritual rounds of squabbling and communicate an official reaction. “It wasn’t Kinshasa who gave the order, was it?”

The policeman beckoned to me peremptorily. “Come along now. I have your possessions at the desk.”

“Buma,” I said. “The crocodile man. It was him, wasn’t it? He gave the order.”

“If you refuse to come with me,” said the policeman, “I will have you dragged from the cell.”

It was clear what must have happened. With Rawley no longer serving as a buffer between them and Buma, the police—with their superstitions, their belief in sorcery—would have been easy prey for Buma’s mind games. In fact, they probably had never thought that I was a real suspect in the murder. I was only a bone they intended to throw to Kinshasa, a stand-in for Buma, whom they were too afraid of to prosecute. What I didn’t understand was why Buma would have me set free. “Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Buma?”

The policeman gazed stonily at me. “He is gone.”

“You released him?”

“He is gone.”

“Where… Where did he go?”

The policeman shrugged. He half-turned, then glanced back at me. “He left you a message.”

I waited, and after checking the hallway to make sure no one else was listening, the policeman provided me with the final piece of the puzzle.

“Have patience,” the policeman said. “That is all he told me to tell you. Have patience.”

• • •

It is as I said at the outset, you must not think of me as a reliable witness. Instead, you must read what I have written as you would testimony in a murder trial. You must weigh it and make a judgment according to the dictates of your experience. There is, I believe, one way to determine whether it is I who am mad, if—to justify my sins, perhaps even to hide a murderous act—I have conjured this story out of hints and intimations and a handful of anomalies; or if madness has infected the entire world, if the dying curse of a tiny African giant has poisoned all the waters, if crocodiles are fleeing that curse by becoming men, and if James Rawley was executed by means of witchery because he refused to drop his prosecution of Gilbert Buma. In order to make that determination, I would have to travel five days upriver from Mogado to a spot marked by a ferry landing burnt by Mobutu’s soldiers; I would have to walk inland until I came to a giant fig tree, and if then I were to find an albino rock python, it would be reasonable to conclude that magic and witchery have won the day. At the time of these events, I was not prepared to make that trip, and I remain unprepared to do so—the Kilombo is not a place to which I ever care to return. But perhaps a different kind of proof will be forthcoming.

Upon my return to Abidjan, I secured a visa for Patience and together we flew back to the States. Shortly thereafter we married and settled outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from the Huron River. Patience likes being close to a river; she says it reminds her of home. Sometimes she will sit with me on the banks of the Huron, humming under her breath, and when she feels my eyes on her, she will cut her own eyes toward me and hold my stare just as Buma was in the habit of doing. I don’t spend a great deal of time wondering about her origins; that would be fruitless. Though I may not have taken her seriously if it hadn’t been for Buma’s message and all that attended it, I try not to question either my mental state or the happiness that has come my way. I teach at the university, I come home at night to Patience, to love. And despite the fact that our immediate world appears to be in a state of collapse, with political scandal and murder and random violence reaching epidemic proportions, we have managed to find a degree of contentment.

Lately, however, something has been happening that, I think, bears upon the matter at hand. Each weekend I drive to Detroit to teach a class at the science museum. The freeway, I-94, is a curving stretch of concrete along which flow thousands of cars, rather like the Kilombo both in form and in usage, and sometimes as I drive, a dreamlike feeling steals over me, I become distant from human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all, clear in the truth of our salvation… not the much-advertised salvation of religion, but salvation through the processes of nature, which often manifest in arcane ways and seem as wildly illogical as the consequences of a magic spell.

I recognize that there are at least two possibilities here. Either there is a natural process that is triggered by devastating environmental perils, one by which various of the imperiled are forced along a fast evolutionary track, crocodiles evolving into men, men into… some speculative form; or else my subconscious has constructed this entire scenario as a mechanism of penance and punishment for my self-perceived crimes, and the patch of fiery, cataclysmic red—to which I draw nearer each Saturday—promises the ultimate in transformations. A rationalist would favor the second possibility, but then of all humankind, rationalists are the most vulnerable to the effects of magic, the most confounded by the magical expressions of nature. As for me, I have no opinion. I am content to wait and learn, to have patience, to ask no questions, to accept what comes. For though you may not understand how this story ends, whether love is disproved by death, whether truth is revelatory or merely deductive, whether life itself is an elastic energy, a pure informality with the infinite potential of a charm, or a sad interlude enclosed by black brackets, one way or the other, I will soon know for certain.

HANDS UP!

WHO WANTS TO DIE?

Shit happens, like they say. You know how it goes. The cops are looking at you for every nickel-and-dime robbery they can’t solve, and the landlady hates your guts for no reason except she’s a good Christian hater, and everything in the world is part of a clock you got to punch or else you’ll be docked or fined or sentenced to listen to some ex-doper who thinks he has attained self-mastery explain your behavior as if the reasons you’re a loser are a mystery that requires illumination. Otherwise it’s been a kicked dog of a week. The boss man’s had you stocking the refrigerator sections of the food mart, leaving you alone in the freezer while he sits and swaps Marine Corps stories with the guy supposed to be your helper, so you come off work half froze, looking for something to douse the meanness you’re feeling, which could be a chore since you’re a piss and a holler from being broke and New Smyrna Beach ain’t exactly Vegas. Well, turns out to be your lucky night. Along about eight o’clock you wind up with a crew of rejects in a beach shack that belongs to this fat old biker, snorting greasy homemade speed, swilling grape juice and vodka, with a windblown rain raising jazz beats from the tarpaper roof like brushes on cymbals. There’s a woman with big brown eyes and punky peroxided hair who’s a notch on the plain side of pretty, but she’s got one of those black girl butts sometimes get stuck onto a white girl, and it’s clear she’s come down with the same feeling as you, so when the rain lets up and she says how she’s got an itch to sneak onto the government property down the beach and check out what’s there, when everybody tells her it ain’t nothing but sand fleas and Spanish bayonet, you say, “Hell, I’ll go with you.” Ten minutes later you’re helping her jump down from a hurricane fence, risking a felony bust for a better view of those white panties gleaming against the strip of tanned skin that’s showing between her jeans and her tank top. She falls into you, gives you a kiss and a half, and before you can wrap her up, she scoots off into the dark and you go stumbling after.

It don’t take more than that to get shit started.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Come on back here!”

She glanced at me over her shoulder, her grin shining under a moon fresh out of hiding, then she skipped off behind some scrub palmetto. I was trying to recall her name as I ran, then a frond whacked me in the face and I slipped to a knee in the soft sand. I spotted her moving along a rise, framed by low stars. “Hell you going, girl?” I said, coming up beside her.

She slapped at a skeeter on her neck and said, “Lookit there.”

The land was all dips and rises, an old dune top gone nappy with shrubs and beach grass, but down below was a scooped-out circular area, wide and deep enough to bury a mini-mall in. Dead center of it stood a ranch house with cream-colored block walls and a composite roof and glass doors. If it was a giant banana, I couldn’t have been more startled.

“I heard about there was a house here,” she said. “But I swear I didn’t believe it!”

We scrambled down the slope and tromped around the house, peering in windows. Some rooms were empty, others were partly furnished, and though I wouldn’t have figured on it, the sliding door at the back was unlocked. I shoved it open and she put her hands over her head and got to snapping her fingers and hip-shaked across the threshold. A big leather sofa stood by its lonesome in the middle of the room. She struck a pose beside it, skinned off her jeans and showed me what I wanted. Wasn’t long before we were sweating all over each other, grunting and huffing like hogs in a hurry, our teeth clicking together when we kissed. The cushions got so slippery, we slid off onto the floor afterward and lay twisted together. The moon came pale through the flyspecked glass, but it wasn’t sufficient to light the corners of the room.

“God, I could use something to drink,” she said. “I know there can’t be nothing in the kitchen.”

My carpenter’s pants were puddled at the end of the couch. I undid the flap pockets and hauled out two wine coolers. “What you want?” I asked. “Tropical Strawberry or Mango Surprise?”

“I can’t believe you carrying ’round wine coolers in your pocket.”

“I hooked ’em off a truck when I was coming outa work.”

We unscrewed the caps, clinked our bottles and drank.

“My name’s Leeli, she said, sticking out her hand. I’m sorry but I forget yours.”

“Maceo.”

“That a family name? It’s so unusual!”

“It’s for some guitar player my mama liked.”

“Well, it’s real unusual.”

She seemed to be expecting me to take a turn, so I asked what a house was doing out there setting in a hole.

“Beats me. Government bought up all the land ’round here years ago. To keep people away from the Cape… ’cause of the rockets, y’know? But I never knew nothing was here. My ex, his friend runs a helicopter tourist ride? I guess he saw it once.”

“Maybe they opened it up for development,” I said. “And this here’s the model home.”

“Y’know, I bet you’re right!” She gave me a proud mama look, like My-ain’t-you-smart!

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I went to loving her up again. She started running hot and came astride me, but before she could settle herself, she let out a shriek and crawled over top the couch. I rolled my eyes back to see what had spooked her, said, “Shit—Jesus!” and next thing I was hunkered behind the couch with Leeli, my heart banging in my chest.

Two men and a woman were hanging by the glass doors, nailing us with a six-eyed stare as clear in its negativity as a NO TRESPASSING sign. The men were young, both a shade under six feet, dressed in slacks and T-shirts. A blond and a baldy. They had the look of fitness sissies, like they might have pumped some iron and run a few laps, but never put the results to any spirited use. The woman wore cutoffs and an oversized denim shirt and carried a bulky tote bag. She was fortyish and big-boned, with wavy dark hair, and her body had a sexy looseness that would still draw its share of eye traffic. Her face was full of bad days and wrong turns, the lines cutting her forehead and dragging down her mouth making it seem older than the rest of her. Way the men tucked themselves in at her shoulders, you could tell she was queen of the hive.

Leeli clutched at my arm, breathing fast. Nobody said nothing. Finally I came out from behind the couch and tossed Leeli her panties. I stepped into my pants and feeling more confident with my junk covered, I said, “Have yourself a show, did ya?”

“Have yourself a show?” the blond man said, mocking me, and the baldy sniggered like a kid who’d seen his first dirty picture.

I pulled on my shirt. “Y’know this here’s government property? Y’all be in deep shit, I turn your asses in.”

“You saying you the government?” The woman’s voice was a contralto drawl made me think of a dollop of honey hanging off the lip of a jar. “You the first government man I seen got jailhouse ink on his arms.” She turned to Leeli, who was tugging the tank top down over her breasts. “How’s about you, sweetcheeks? You in the government, too?”

Leeli snatched up her jeans. “You got no more right being here than we do!”

The woman sniffed explosively, like a cat sneezing, and the bald man said, “You can’t get much more government than we are. Government’s like mommy and daddy to us.”

Leeli piped up, “Well, whyn’t you show us your ID?”

The flow of feeling in the room was running high, like everyone was waiting for a direction to fly off in.

“Screw this,” said the woman. “We was just going for a drink. Y’all wanna come?”

I was about to say we’d do our own drinking, but Leeli said, “It’s Margarita Night over at the Dixieland!” and soon everybody was saying stuff like, “Looked like you was gonna fall out” and “God you scared the hell outa me” and telling their names and their stories. Though he didn’t seem up to the job, the blond man, Carl, was the woman’s husband. Her name was Ava and she owned a club in Boynton Beach where the bald man, Squire, worked as a bartender. I knew a kid name of Squire back in high school who was accused of having sex with a neighbor’s collie. Much as I would have enjoyed bringing this up, I kept it to myself.

We piled out through the glass doors, both Carl and Squire heading toward the water. “Fuck you think you going?” I asked.

“Ava got her four-by-four parked down on the beach,” Squire said.

I was staring at Ava and Leeli, who were still back at the glass doors. Leeli had her head down and Ava was talking. Something didn’t sit right about the way they were together.

“Government don’t care what goes on at the house no more,” Squire said, apparently thinking I was off onto another track. “We been partying here for years.”

• • •

You know that kid’s toy ball you can bounce and instead of coming straight back to your hand, it goes dribbling off along the floor or kicks off to the side? My expectations of the weekend had taken just that sort of wrong-angled bounce. After Leeli and I broke in the leather couch, I assumed we’d be heading over to my place, maybe coming up for air sometime Sunday. A shitkicker bar had for sure not been part of the plan.

The Dixieland was down on A1A, a concrete block eyesore with a neon sign on the roof that spelled the name in red and blue letters, except for the N was missing, which might have accounted for the gay boys who occasionally dropped in and left real quick. All the waitresses were decked out in Rebel caps and there were Confederate flags laminated on the table tops. The Friday night crowd was men in cowboy hats who had never set a horse and women with flakes of mascara clinging to their lashes and skirts so short you could see the tattooed butterflies, roses, hummingbirds and such advertising their little treasures whenever they hopped up onto a barstool. Some country & western goatboy was howling on the jukebox about the world owed him a living, while a few couples dragged around the dance floor, Ava and Leeli among them. Their relationship appeared to be deepening.

Carl fell in love with a digital beer display behind the bar that showed a bikini girl waterskiing. I was coming to understand the boy must have some empty rooms in his attic. He stood gawking at the thing like he was stoned on Jesus love. That left Squire and me alone at a table, sucking on our margaritas. Shaving his head probably hadn’t done for Squire what he hoped. It made his face resemble a cream pie somebody drew a man-in-the moon face on, but he tried to sell the look as being the front door into the world of a badass individual with secrets you would want to know. It was kinda pathetic. He threw a couple of insults my way and when that didn’t get a rise, he went on about how tight he was with Carl and Ava, how they’d been partying for two months solid, saying me and Leeli needed to get on board the party train, they’d sure show us a time.

“Two month vacation must get in the way of your bartending,” I said and he said, “Huh?” then got flustered and came back with, “Oh, yeah… hell, I just work when we’re there, y’know.”

The juke box played the Dixie Chicks. Leeli squealed, clapped her hands, and did this slow, snaky hula, dancing like she was on stage at a titty bar and using Ava for the pole.

“We ain’t hardly ever there, though.” Squire said this like it was super important for me to understand. He started to spout more worthless bullshit, but I told him to hang onto the thought. I walked over to Ava and tapped her on the shoulder and said, “’Scuse me, buddy. Believe it’s my turn.” She flashed a condescending smile and backed off. Leeli kept her eyes closed like she didn’t care what was going on, she was so lost in the music, but when I put my leg where Ava’s hip had been she said, “That was rude!”

“Yeah she was,” I said.

She punched me in the chest, but didn’t leave off dry-humping my leg. “Just ’cause we did the deed, don’t you go waving no papers at me.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

She didn’t hear and I said it again louder.

This ticked her off. “Just what is your intention?” she asked.

“I got a friend in Lauderdale lets me use his beach house. I thought we could drive down next weekend and see how it goes. But hey, you wanna fuck the old skank, do it.”

“Well, maybe I will!” She looped her arms about my neck and smiled me up. “Or maybe I’ll wait ’til after Lauderdale.”

I thought the two of us were back on track, but when Ava decided to hit another bar, Leeli said in a cajoling voice, “I’m having so much fun! Let’s not go home yet!” Wasn’t until we wound up in a Daytona Beach motel on Saturday morning, sleeping in the room next to Ava’s, that I realized somewhere in the middle of all those tequila shots, we’d climbed aboard the party train. I remembered telling everybody about the beach house. From that I guess the idea had developed for Ava to drive me and Leeli to Lauderdale, making frequent stops for refreshment, with Ava paying the freight. They weren’t going to welcome me back at the food mart when I turned up a week late for my shift, but that world was spinning me nowhere and I thought I might take a shot at separating Ava from some of the money she’d been throwing around. I worried about her going after Leeli, though. We’d only had us the one night, but Leeli and I seemed to recognize each other’s zero score in life as only folks do who’re born in a neighborhood where the most you aspire to is a double-wide and sufficient loose change to afford a couple of cases on the weekend. We’d both worn out our craziness to the point where we saw we might have us a nice little run and maybe avoid killing each other at the end. Once she loosened up and that sick-of-it-all waitress hardness drained from her face, I saw a sweet seam in her no one had bothered to mine.

I left Leeli sleeping and smoked in the breezeway of the motel, watching two rat-skinny children splash and squeak in the pool, while their two-hundred-pound-plus mama, milky breasts and thighs and belly squeezed into inner-tube shapes by a lemon yellow bathing suit, lay on a lawn chair and simmered like a dumpling over a low flame. The drapes of Ava’s room hung open a crack and I had a peek. All I saw of her was legs waving in the air and hands gripping onto a headboard. The rest was hidden underneath Squire. His pimply butt was just pumping up and down. Sitting straight in a chair beside the bed, like a schoolboy being taught a lesson, Carl was looking on with interest. Well, come get me Jesus, I said to myself. With Carl and Squire both bagging Ava, she wouldn’t have much time for Leeli. I had to admire Squire’s stamina, but he looked to be doing push-ups on a trampoline and if I was the boy’s daddy I’d have advised him that women tend to enjoy some rhythmic variation. He finally fell off his stroke and rolled onto his back. Ava came up flushed and sweaty, hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a sip of water, spoke briefly to Carl, then straddled Squire and began more-or-less to treat him like he’d been treating her. I’d been feeling about ten cents on the dollar, but watching her work cleaned the crust off my brain. Being the gentleman I am, I decided to buy Leeli coffee and a Krispy Kreme before checking out the rest of my parts.

• • •

I hated Daytona, and not just because I was born there, though every time I drove through Holly Hills, redneck purgatory, and saw those little bunkerlike concrete homes with cracked jalousie windows and chain link fences and Big Wheels with faded colors buried in the front yard weeds, my wattles got all red and swollen. I also hated the beach, the kids who cruised it eight and nine to a convertible or rode around in ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-buggies, the bikini girls with their inch-deep tans and MTV eyes, the boys in Hilfiger suits with an old man’s dream of financial security stuck like an ax into their brains at birth. I hated the fucking piped-in circus music that played along the boardwalk, sounding like it was made of sugar beets and red dye number seven. I hated the goddamn carnival rides and the heavy metal curses shouting from the arcades. I liked the ocean all right, liked the blue-green water inside the sandbar, the creamy ridges of foam the tide left along the margin, and the power of the combers, but I wished they rolled in to no shore. I hated the burger joints with their fried onion stink, their white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete deck, and walk-up windows manned by high school geeks with connect-the-dot acne puzzles on their foreheads, because it was at just such a joint I committed the error in judgment that earned me a nickel in Raiford, sauntering up to the service window so wired on crank, all I could smell was the inside of my nose, pulling a fifty dollar pistol, and before I could speak the magic words, two plainclothes cops who were drinking milkshakes at the time snuck up behind me and said to turn around real quick, they’d like that, and later in jail, Sgt. John True, a man apparently fascinated with me, visited my cell, the first of our many nights together, and said, “When I was a kid Is just like you”—meaning, I suppose, he no longer considered himself a dumbass hillbilly—prior to beating me unconscious. I carried a lot of anger relating to Daytona, and that afternoon while we were sitting at a white plastic table on a concrete deck, staring at baskets of onion rings and fried shrimp so heavily breaded, eating one was like eating a hush puppy with a flavorless crunchy prize inside, I let angry out for exercise.

Squire got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over the Joyland Arcade. “You gotta have balls,” he said, ’cause time to do it’s when it’s crowded. “You walk on up and let ’em see your piece and grab them bags of money!” He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

“You got a hard-on for quarters?” I asked. “They don’t bag nothing but the change.”

“You have people with you. Three or four of ’em so you can carry more.”

“You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.”

“You take the bills too,” Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

“Where am I?” I asked Leeli.

Her expression begged me to shut up.

“Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?”

Carl chuckled and I said, “Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.”

“You the one’s acting superior,” Ava said, and forked up some slaw.

“Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.”

Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, “Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!”

Leeli caught my arm and said, “Maceo!” I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, “Fucking chihuahua!”

One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, “Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.”

Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.

“You so smart,” Ava said, “whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Joyland?”

“Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.”

“I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.”

“Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.”

Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. “You gotta terrorize a place,” I told them. “People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ’em scared. So you say something lets ’em know how scared they oughta be.”

“Yeah?” Squire said churlishly. “Like what?”

I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. “Hands up! Who wants to die?” You say that, it gets their attention every time.

“I like that,” Carl said, grinning. “Hands up who wants to die?”

“Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile,” I said. “Tell ’em like you mean it.”

With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, “Hands up! Who wants to die?”

The pregnant lady yipped and the people at the table behind me grabbed up their belongings and scooted. Ava pulled Carl down into his chair and I said to him, “That’ll get it done.”

Leeli stood and said, “Can we just go? Please!”

We set off down the boardwalk toward the car and she fell into step with Ava and Carl. Irritated by this, not wanting to be stuck with Squire, I dropped off the pace, lollygagging along. That’s how Leeli wanted to play it, I told myself, to hell with her. I’d find myself a sweeter can of tuna. I started eye-fucking the bikini girls strolling past and when one made a smart-ass remark, getting her friends to laughing at me, I told her once she lost that babyfat she oughta try a real dick, but right now it’d likely be too much for her.

• • •

Ava drove south and then west on State Road 44 toward Orlando. She went to talking about the old days, the 60s, when there was so many UFOs in the sky—because of the rockets at the Cape, she guessed—you could see them from out on 44 every night. “Boys useta take us down here to see ’em,” she said, “’cause they thought we’d let ’em get fresh while we were stargazing.” Leeli, who was riding shotgun next to Carl, said, “I bet they were right, huh?”

“’Course they were,” Ava said, and they shared a laugh.

“You ever see any UFOs?” Leeli asked.

“All the time! You look up in the sky, you couldn’t help seeing ’em. Pretty soon what you thought was a group of stars would get to darting around, making these really sharp turns, flying in formation.”

She asked Leeli to fish around in her tote bag and find her cigarettes. Once she got a smoke going, she said, “Couple times we saw one real close.”

“A flying saucer?”

“Uh huh. We saw this one shoot a green light from its belly. Straight down to the ground.”

“Maybe it was Santa Claus you saw,” I suggested. “Waving his green flashlight.”

Ava took a glance back toward me. “You don’t believe in UFOs, Maceo?”

“’Bout as much as I believe in liberty and justice for all.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Leeli said. He’s a contrary sort.

I told Leeli she didn’t know squat about me and then said to Ava, “Whatever you saw, wasn’t no flying saucer. Ain’t no sense to any of that business.”

“That might be,” Ava said. “Most things don’t make sense, especially you try and understand ’em too hard.”

“I suppose that’s profound, but I’m just a dumb Florida Cracker. It goes right by me.”

Ava flicked ash and sparks out the window. “You might catch up to it one of these days,” she said.

It struck me that Ava must be a lot older than I’d estimated, she was dating back in the 60s, but I didn’t stay with the thought. I was a six pack along into a decent buzz and still feeling sour about Leeli, fully occupied with self-pity and scorn. When we stopped for gas I pulled Leeli aside, fed her all the I’m-sorry she could swallow and persuaded her to switch seats with Squire. I discovered a sensitive spot under her ear and before long I had her squirming pretty good, though each time my fingers traipsed near the old plantation home, she’d give them a spank. Squire began telling a lie about a beauty queen he’d gone with in high school and Ava shut him up quick, saying she needed to concentrate on the road. That clued me in she was upset about Leeli, and I felt satisfied in mind.

Scattered around the edges of Disneyworld were a number of shooting ranges where for a few dollars you could fire assault rifles. Given the encouragement this surely offered the freaks who flocked to the ranges, you had to wonder if the city fathers of Orlando didn’t unconsciously long to see TV coverage of a giant blood-spattered mouse. While Carl and Squire were busy playing soldier at Buck’s Guns and Sporting Gallery, me and Ava and Leeli walked to a nearby 7-11 and bought some forty-ouncers, one of which I chugged walking back to the parking lot. The girls sat talking on the hood of Ava’s truck. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel mean, but I felt separate from things. The cars racing along the six-lane were shiny toys with glaring headlights and dabs of meat inside. The strip malls lining the road were grimy slot-car accessories. The heat came from a neon tube inside my head and the starless orange-lit sky was a gasoline-soaked rag someone had throwed over the whole mess so’s to hide it from company. What I’m saying, it wouldn’t have taken much to upgrade me to mean. Ava was pitching hard at Leeli, touching her thigh, the back of her hair. I just kept working on my second forty. If I could drink fast enough, I wouldn’t care what they did and I’d be able to ignore some deeper thoughts that were trying to gnaw out my brains like a squirrel with a nut meat.

When Squire and Carl returned, all hotted up from proving their marksmanship, Ava announced a surprise. She had reserved us rooms at the mouse’s hotel. We’d have a few cocktails, go on some rides, and see what developed. This made Carl happy, but Squire and Leeli didn’t seem to care. I sucked down a third forty on the ride over and after Ava checked us in, I told her I felt poorly and was going to my room.

“Me, too,” said Leeli. “I’m awful tired.”

This surprised Ava as much as it did me. “You sure?” she said to Leeli. “Space Mountain’ll juice you right up.”

“Naw, we’ll catch y’all later.” Leeli started walking so fast, she beat me to the elevator.

I had a shower while Leeli ordered room service cheeseburgers and Cokes. The food left me placid and sleepy. I laid out on the bed in my skivvies and Leeli stood at the window, her arms folded, stern of face, like she was taking stock of a brightly lit country she’d just done conquering.

“You don’t have to worry ’bout me making a move, that’s what’s keeping you vertical,” I said. “I’m through for today.”

She made a noise that didn’t tell me much.

I grabbed the remote from the bedside table and found a wrestling show on TV. Wrestling hasn’t been the same since the prime of Hulk Hogan and the Giant and Macho Man Savage, you ask me. Back in the day your superhero had a gut just like the asshole sitting next to you in the bar and so when you smacked him with a beer bottle, you had a greater sense of accomplishment. Now there was too many pretty boys and it was more tumbling and role-playing than the honest-to-God fake it once was.

Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. “Ava gave me money to buy clothes,” she said. “Reckon we better do it soon.”

“We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ’em inside out.”

She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. “You always have to be a shit?”

“It was a fucking joke! Jesus!”

She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.

“I swear,” I said.

She held the stare a second longer. “Damn!” she said. “Why do I like you?”

“You want an honest answer?”

“Naw, I know why.” She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. “Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.”

“No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?”

“She showed me her badge!” Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

“Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.”

Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. “You wanna hear this or not?”

“Sure. Lemme have it.” I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.

“She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ’em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.”

“Want me to say what I’m thinking?”

“I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!”

“You see the money?”

Leeli gave a vigorous nod. “I get five now, the rest after.”

“Well, shit.” I rolled onto my back. “I guess this is goodbye.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks.”

She sat up cross-legged and muted the TV. “Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.”

“That ain’t what I think,” I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.

“Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.”

The word “us” punched a hole in my overcast.

“I don’t trust Ava,” Leeli said. “But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said it’d be okay ’long as you don’t get crazy ’bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.”

I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. “I don’t know,” I said. “I get these mood swings.”

“Oh, really! I couldn’t tell.” She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. “Can you deal with it? ’Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.”

I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. “You a bad woman, ain’tcha?”

“Goodness me!” She batted her eyelashes. “I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.”

• • •

In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, “It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.”

“You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.”

“That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?”

“Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe my ass!”

A polite room service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.

“I got no cash on me,” I told him.

“You can add it to the bill, sir.”

This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.

“I was you, hoss,” I said, “I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.”

I guess he wasn’t a total candy-ass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

“Rock on, dude,” I called after him.

I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking for a while, then she said, “It might be true what Ava told me. ’Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.”

“One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.”

She diddled the fork in her eggs. “I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.”

I had to talk around a bite of steak. “To make herself look like a big deal.”

“People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.”

“If they’re freaks they do.” I finally got the bite chewed. “Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.”

Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. “Nothing this good ever works out,” she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. “What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ’tween the two.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “There is that.”

• • •

With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.

Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word “Jellybean” embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, “Isn’t that amazing.” He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.

We stayed at Disneyworld four more days. Leeli spent the nights with Ava and mornings with me. The rest of the hours we traveled as a pack. At these times the air got icy. Dinners became occasions of grand formality, long bouts of chewing and swallowing broken by courteous exchanges. Please pass the butter. Would you like another dessert? Can I bring you back something? Leeli had to make sure both Ava and I got our share of flirty glances and secret smiles, and the strain of it all roughed her up some. I learned to let her relax when she came back to our room. She would take two valium from a bottle Ava had given her and sit by the window, her breath ragged, like she was pushing herself to exhale. Finally shed smile and say, “Hi” or “How you doing?” as if she had just noticed me.

“I can’t take much more of Carl,” she said one day. “It’s not about him watching. I’m almost grateful he’s there. It kinda makes it easier to switch off my head. But the talking they do… Jesus Lord!” She glanced at me for a reaction. “Am I boring you?”

“I was just letting you tell it.”

“I know you’re being sweet with me, and I appreciate it. But I’m wore out with sweetness. I could use a shot of male insensitivity. Can you handle that?”

I grinned at her and said gruffly, “Hell they talking about, woman?”

Leeli sighed like those words had hit the spot. “Ava’ll stop right in the middle of things and explain what’s going on. Anatomical stuff, y’know. And Carl he just sits there humming to himself.”

“He don’t say nothing back?”

“Sometimes he asks can he go do something with Squire, and she’ll say maybe later or naw it’s not your time to be with Squire.”

“See what I told you? He’s a fucking retard.”

“He’s not dumb! Ava’s always testing him or something. Asking him weird questions. He never gets a’one wrong. She’ll ask him to do a sum and he does ’em in his head. Just snaps ’em off!”

“Remember that Tom Cruise movie where his brother did all that? That guy was a retard.”

“It’s not just Carl. Ava, she’s…”

“What?”

“She’s a strong woman, is what it is. Sometimes I get a feeling I’m gonna drown in her, y’know. Like she’s this tide rolling over me and when it goes out again, nothing’s gonna be left of me. Leeli hung her chin onto her chest. I don’t know I can do this for a month.”

“Fine with me. Let’s take the five and split.”

The second hand must have galloped damn near ten times around the dial before she said, “Chances this good don’t come around but every so often. Let’s give it a few days.”

She come over to the foot of the bed and crawled up beside me and cuddled into my shoulder like she wanted to sleep. I did my best to be pillow and comforter, but the heat of her and my natural preoccupations got me all charged up. She reached her hand down and played with me a while, then lost interest and closed her eyes. “Want me take care of that for you?” she asked after another bit.

“We’ll have our time,” I said. “Whyn’t you rest?”

She blinked and peered at me. Wide open, those brown eyes could be like a car coming at you with its high beams on. They left me dazed and fighting for the road.

“That a real feeling I see in there?” she asked.

“Whatever you see, that’s what it is. You know I ain’t smart enough to fake nothing.”

She didn’t act like she believed this. Her lights dimmed and she lay quiet. She fingered my shirt button and appeared to be studying the stubble on my chin. I asked what she was thinking.

“Lots of things.”

“Say one.”

“I was wondering if anybody’s smart enough to know they’re faking and I was wishing we already had that twenty thousand.”

“Anything else?”

“I was thinking you got a whole crowd of people paying rent in your skull. Different sizes, different ways of doing. But they all wearing the same face.”

• • •

A woman starts to get deep on you, you know it’s just the coming attraction for a head movie that’ll be playing six shows daily in the weeks to come. She’s evaluating her prospects and unless you’re a fool, you best do some evaluating your own self. Generally speaking, a commitment is being called for, but with Ava in the picture I wasn’t sure how things were fitting together in Leeli’s thoughts. She went to drowning in moods so wide, they’d wash over me from the next room. Sometimes she wanted me to be patient and other times she wanted me to haul her off to the monkey jungle. After playing mama’s little helper at night, she needed daddy to straighten her out. I didn’t have a good record when it come to treating female mental disease, but I managed it with Leeli. I gave her to know I was there for her like Oprah and Tarzan both. It surprised me that I was up to the task and when I meditated on this, I realized the feeling Leeli had spotted in me might be for real. A runty little weed sprouted from sandy soil—that was all it was. If it was going to survive, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye would have to drop in from TV heaven and manifest a miracle. But there it waved, baking under the sky of all the shit that had ever gone wrong with me, waggling its dried-up leaves, trying like hell to grow up and learn how to whistle. Puny as it was, it stood taller than any decision I could have made to chop it down.

From Disneyworld the party train crossed the state to Ybor City, then up to Jacksonville and then back down to Silver Springs. Eleven days and we hadn’t gone a mile toward Lauderdale. Often as not, whenever Leeli was with Ava and Carl, Squire would seek me out. He figured we were in the same boat, I expect. Whereas Carl had one trick, Squire was proficient in two. Like he was a grade up on Carl in Ava’s pre-school. Mostly he desired to talk about how much pussy he’d been getting since a precocious early age, but it was plain he’d never gotten any that hadn’t got him first. He recounted a string of fabulous conquests, each more of a joke than the last. A female jockey, a porn star, a TV actress, the girl who played center for the Dallas Sparks. They had the feel of lies he’d overheard in a bar and loved so much he’d taken them in and given them a new home. Tempted as I was to blow a hole in his picture window, I let him rave. Sooner or later he’d wind down and go to thinking about Ava. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know this. Ava thoughts stamped their brand on that boy’s face. If I had thumped his head at those moments, it would’ve bonged like a bell.

In Silver Springs, instead of staying at the resort, we checked into a dump on a blue highway east of Ocala. A dozen frame bungalows painted beige with dark brown trim and tar paper roofs and screen doors tucked in among palmetto and Georgia pine. From the road they looked like the backdrop for a 1940s photograph of Grandma and Grandpa on the dashboard of their Model A, off to homestead down in Stark or Sanford, right before Grandma gave birth to the next gold-star-destiny generation of Scrogginses or Culpeppers or Inglethorpes. Up close you saw them different. Tar paper hats tipped at shady angles over chunky, sallow faces with indifferent eyes, like Chinamen with sly intentions. The screens documented tragic insect stories. Palmetto bugs the size of clothespins scuttled from crack to crack. The sheets were maps of gray and yellow countries. Facing my bed was a framed picture so dusty I could lie back and make it anything I wanted. You smelled the toilet from the steps outside. The place fucking cried out for a shotgun murder.

Of an evening the owner, Mr. Gammage, a scrawny old geezer whose Bermuda shorts hung like loose sail from his hipbones, would beautify the grounds. Chop a few weeds, prune a shrub or two, cut back a climbing cactus from a palm trunk. He’d fuel his labors with glugs from a thermos that likely contained a libation stiffer than Gatorade. If he was feeling frisky he’d start his electric trimmer and hunt up stuff to trim. You could tell he loved that machine, the way he flourished it about. Watching him survey his property, hands on hips, his turkey-baster belly popped full out, it was my impression he was a happy man, though it was tough to understand why. Whenever he revved up the trimmer his wife would come to the office door and yell for him to quit making that noise. She was built short and squarish and commonly wore a dark brown housecoat. This sponsored the idea she might have given birth to the bungalows or was their spirit made flesh, or something of the sort. Her face was topped off by about a foot of forehead on which God had written a grim Commandment. I felt the air stir when she glared at me. Inside the office there was a Bible big as a microwave and I bet she would open it and pray for everything around her to disappear.

I was sitting outside my bungalow our second afternoon there, nursing a forty, when she come flying from the office and took a run at Squire. He’d fallen out on the grass near the highway, his head resting in a petunia bed. Mrs. Gammage screamed, Get outa my flowers, punching the ground with a lurching, stiff-gaited stride like an NFL guard with bad knees. Squire never moved, not even when she kicked him. She kicked him again. I wouldn’t say I was spurred to action, but since I was technically supposed to be on Squire’s side, I thought I should make a supportive gesture. Time I got myself on over to the petunias, she had stopped kicking and was bending to him and saying, “Hey! Hey!” She had a thin, bitter smell, like a bin of rutabagas. Squire’s eyes were half-open, but only one iris showed.

“’Peers like you killed him,” I said.

Mrs. Gammage staggered back from the petunia bed, gazing at Squire with an expression that crossed stricken with disgusted. “He was already dead! I didn’t do nothing coulda killed him.”

“You kicked him right in the side of his chest where the heart’s on. That’ll do ’er every time. It’s a medical fact.”

I was just fucking with her, but Squire hadn’t twitched and it dawned on me that he actually might be dead. His color was good, though. Only dead man I’d ever seen up close was this old boy got shot in the head outside the Surf Bar in Ormond Beach for arguing about his girlfriend should have won the wet T-shirt contest. All the color had left him straightaway. His skin had the look of gray candlewax.

Mrs. Gammage snorted and snuffled some. Maybe she was seeing herself strapped into Old Sparky over to Raiford, or maybe she hadn’t yet gotten that specific with self-pity and was tearing up because she felt the victim of a vast injustice—here she’d been protecting her precious petunias and now Jesus had gone and let her down despite all everything she’d done for him. I had in mind to tell her that feeling she was having that everything had tightened up around her and no matter how hard she tried to turn with it, the world was no longer a comfortable fit, and if she made a move to pry herself loose from that terrible grip, it’d pinch her off at the neck… I would have told her after a while it got to feel natural and she likely wouldn’t know what to do things didn’t feel that way. Before I could advise her of this, Ava came on the run and shooed us away, babbling about how Squire was prone to these fits and she’d handle it, just to leave her alone with him because when he woke up he was scared and she could gentle him. I returned to step-sitting out front of my bungalow and Mrs. Gammage streaked toward the office to recast the deadly prayer spell she’d been fixing to hurl at the universe. Ava kneeled to Squire, hiding his upper body from sight. My forty had gone warmish, but I chugged down several swallows and wiped the spill from my chin and looked back to the petunia bed just in time to see Squire sit bolt upright. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d expect from someone smacked down by a fit. No wooziness or flailing about. It was like Ava had shot a few thousand volts through him.

Leeli had come out of Ava’s bungalow, wearing white shorts and a green halter. She wandered over to me and sat on the stoop. “What you think’s wrong with Squire?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“Boy’s so slow, maybe his brain idles out every so often.”

She stared at Ava and Squire as if she was trying to figure something out. I did some staring myself, digging my eyes under that halter. The heat cooked her scent strong. I leaned closer and did a hit. She glanced up and asked, What you doing?

“I wish I was smelling breakfast,” I said.

Squire and Ava scrambled up, Squire gesturing like he was wanting to explain something of importance. They made for Ava’s bungalow. Leeli started to join up with them, but Ava waved her off and said she needed to tend Squire for a while. That brightened Leeli, but she watched until the door closed behind them.

“Don’t none of this strike you peculiar?” she asked.

“Pretty much everything strikes me peculiar. So I guess nothing does, really.”

• • •

If I hadn’t been consumed with getting Leeli into the bungalow and the two of us shaking the walls so hard, the framed picture would shudder off its veil of dust and the palmetto bugs would prepare for the fall of creation, I might’ve had room for some helpful thoughts. I don’t suppose it matters, though. Chances are I wouldn’t have reached any conclusion. If I had, either I wouldn’t have acted on it or else it would have been the same half-assed conclusion I come to without even stretching my brain. Studying on things until you couldn’t tell whether what you thought was what you wanted to think and all that—it wasn’t my style. I had two ways of going at the world. One, I was a furnace of a man and everything I saw was viewed in terms of how it would do for fuel. The other, I was a pitiable creature who’d been walked on for so long there was a damn dog run wore down into my skull and whenever a shadow crossed my path, my instinct was to snap my teeth. Neither of those boys gave a sugary shit about situational fucking analysis.

Ava was kept busy that night tinkering with Squire’s self-esteem. Least that’s what I believed had sucked his fire down so low, his pilot light kicked off. It was like Leeli had been busted out of jail. She wanted one of everything with me. We come close to killing each other. Toward nine we took a break, borrowed Ava’s car, and brought back catfish and puppies and fries. Halfway through our greasy feast, we went at it again, smearing fish juice all over the bed. It would’ve took oven cleaner to scour the sheets. Long about midnight we smoked cigarettes on the steps. Fireflies bloomed in the hazy dark. The breeze hauled a smell of night-blooming cereus out from the shadows of the palms. A shine from the bulb over the office door fresh-tarred the blacktop. We had us one of those made-in-Nashville moments. Our arms around one another, heads together. Snap the photo, frame it with a heart, and stick in a word balloon with me saying something forever stupid like, Somepin’ wunnerful’s gonna happen to them peaches, honey. Hillbilly Hallmark. I gave Leeli a kiss that sparked a shiver and she settled in against me.

“I could stand another beer,” she said.

“Want me to fetch it?”

“Naw, it’s too much trouble.”

Skeeters whined. A night bird said its name about three hundred times in a row. The TV inside the office flickered a wicked green, an evil blue, a blast of white, as if Mrs. Gammage was receiving communication from an unholy sphere. I wouldn’t have much cared if the rest of everything was just this hot and black and quiet.

• • •

Squire seemed fine to me, especially for someone who looked to be a goner, but Ava was still acting mothery the next morning. Around noon she herded us into the car and drove to Silver Springs for, I guess, a give-Squire-love day. At a stall near the gift shop she bought a T-shirt with his face airbrushed on it by a genuine T-shirt artist. Squire had the good sense not to wear the thing. “Wanna go see the tropical fish?” she asked of Carl and Squire both. Squire said he didn’t know, whatever, and Carl repeated the word “fish” until he figured out how to spray spittle when saying it. We crammed into a glass-bottomed boat with a mob of lumpy fiftyish women in baggy slacks and floral blouses. I assumed they were a church group, because they appeared to be the cut-rate harem belonging to this balding, gray-haired individual with a banker’s belly and a sagging, doleful face, dressed like a Wal-Mart dummy in slacks with an elastic waistband and a sweated-through sports shirt. A pretty blond in a captain’s hat steered the boat and as we glided across the springs, her voice blatted from the speakers, identifying whatever portion of nature’s living rainbow we were then passing over. The man stood the whole trip, clutching a pole for balance, providing his own commentary and sneaking glances at Leeli, who was wearing short shorts. He was trying to make some general point relating to the fish. It had a charry Unitarian flavor, a serving of God and fried turnip slices. All the ladies nodded and favored him with doting gazes. Squashed between two of them was a chubby kid about fourteen who had the miserable air of a hostage. One of the women whispered urgently at him, probably telling him to pay attention or sit up straight. He stared cross-eyed into nowhere, dreaming of Columbining the bunch of us. I winked at him, wanting him to know that some of us so-called adults could be dangerous haters, too, when forced to ooh and aah over a glittery mess of edible sea bugs. This only got him hating me extra special. If somebody had slipped him a piece, they would’ve found me with my splattered head resting on a cellulite-riddled thigh.

After the boat ride we headed for a Howard Johnson’s restaurant down the road from the resort. The reverend and his flock had beaten us there and were crammed into a circular booth across from ours. The ladies chattered away, the kid stared at his fries like they were a heap of golden brown logs on which he was roasting his mom in miniature. Part of my problem was I’ve been cursed with this inept paranoia that sees danger everywhere except where danger lies. Though I’d done nothing criminal recently, the reverend’s presence made me feel criminally guilty. I fiddled with the suspicion that his turning up at the restaurant was police-related. That he’d recognized me for the perpetrator of a crime I’d committed and forgot. Now and then his fruity voice cut through the chatter. He was still going on about the damn fish.

“Did you notice,” he asked, “how the entire school turned as one? Indeed, all the actions of the underwater world seemed in concert, as though directed by a single mind. Is it such a leap to conceive that our actions are so directed?”

“Hell yes!” would’ve been my answer, but Carl thought this was about the best thing he’d ever heard. He jumped around in his seat, repeating portions of the reverend’s lesson and said to Ava, “You see? See what I mean?” like these phrases connected with an argument they’d been having.

“I know,” she said, and patted his hand to calm him.

“A single mind directed!” he said loudly.

Several of the ladies were shooting pissy looks his way. Ava shushed him and said they’d talk about it later. But Carl wanted to talk about it right then and there. I’d never seen him so heated up. Whenever the reverend’s voice carried to us, Carl would go to chuckling, spitting back the reverend’s words, saying, “Yes! Yes!” and sputtering other foolishness, giving this weird sort of affirmation, like he was a shouter in a retard church.

Eventually, urged on by his outraged ladies, the reverend scooted out of the booth and ambled over. He clasped his hands at his belly, delivered us a patient look, and asked Carl if he wouldn’t mind toning it down.

Carl beamed at him and said, “Yes! A single mind!”

Leeli said, “Can’t you see the man ain’t right!” Ava offered an apology and I said, “You best take your fat ass on back to the hen house, or they gonna need another rooster.”

The reverend armored his face with a smile and looked down on me from a peak of blessed understanding. “Young man,” he said. Actually he said a good bit more, but the words young man were all I heeded. When I was five Reverend Nichols from the First Baptist told my mama having such a sweet little fellow as me by his side would be an asset when he was doing fund-raising, and since this gave her more time for drinking, she loaned me out to him on a regular basis. “Young man,” he’d say once we were alone, “wanna sit my lap while I drive? Young man, I’m gonna open you to God’s greatest gift.” I didn’t much appreciate anybody calling me young man, and I sure as hell didn’t want it from a preacher. I caught him by the collar and yanked him down so he was gawking into the leavings of my chicken fried steak. The only thing I recall saying was, “Cocksucking holy Joe motherfucker,” but I know I expanded on that considerable. People were tugging at me, women were screaming, something struck the side of my head, but I was serene in the midst of it, talking to the reverend, showing him the ketchup-smeared edge of my steak knife.

Rougher hands grabbed me and the reverend broke free. Two guys wearing aprons wrangled me into the aisle, where we did some wrestling and grunting and swearing. A swung purse the size of a satchel knocked one guy off me. I clocked the other with a gut punch that cured him of upright and put him on his knees kissing the carpet like a devout Arab. Shouting people choked the aisle, a few wanting to get at me, the rest trying to get away. I heard Leeli cry, “Maceo!” but I couldn’t find her in the crowd, so I beelined for the exit, shoving aside Christian and heathen alike. The manager loomed ahead of me. A porky fellow in a maroon shirt and a black tie, his skin, that spoiled pumpkin color, comes either from a tanning booth or somewheres in India. A wedge of old ladies blocked him off to the left, clearing a path, and I went toward the door. That’s when Carl shouted the magic words.

“Hands up!” he said with sincere ferocity. “Who wants to die?”

The manager had retreated behind the cash register and Carl, beaming like a lottery winner, was pointing a blue steel automatic in his general direction, swinging the muzzle to cover the counter and a portion of window. People started hitting the ground, hiding in the booths, and wasn’t more than a couple of seconds before the only ones standing were the five in our party and the manager. You could hear whispering and sobbing and the wheedle of some old pop song turned into a symphony, but it was stone quiet compared to how it had been. Ava slapped at her tote bag, gave it a squeeze, and that told me where Carl had got his shiny new toy.

“Give it to me, Carl,” I said, easing toward him a step.

“Okay.” He kept on swinging the gun back and forth kind of aimlessly, like it had a momentum that was carrying his arms through an arc.

“Give me the gun,” Ava said. “You don’t need that gun now.”

Squire was at her shoulder, nodding as if he firmly supported this idea, and Leeli, smart girl, was halfway out the door.

The manager made a move for something under the register. Ava and I both shouted a warning to Carl. I said, “Watch it, man!” and Ava spoke what sounded like a word in a foreign language—I couldn’t tell for sure because our shouts mixed together. Carl whipped the gun around and fired just before the manager fired, the explosions overlapping. Carl’s head jerked, blood sprayed. His bullet kicked the manager into a buffet cart. He fell behind the counter. A few screams speared the quiet. Smoke lazied in the air. Somebody’s lunch treat sizzled and blackened on the griddle. I stepped forward and snatched the gun from Carl. There was blood all over his face, but he was still smiling. Ava wrapped him in a hug and hustled him to the door. I had a quick look back of the counter. The manager was staring off into someplace I never want to see. Frightened eyes were locked on me from every direction, like forest animals peeping at a mangy tiger that had interrupted their play. I fired a shot into the ceiling and told them not to twitch forever and ran like hell.

• • •

In the truck everybody talked at once, except for Squire. He was gazing out the passenger side window, having himself a fine vacation. Ava and Leeli fussed over Carl in the back seat, and I drove fast toward Ocala. I hadn’t put a face on the wrongness of what happened, but it nibbled at the edges of a fucked-up angry fear that raised a red shadow in my brain and jammed spikes into my bone-holes, making all my limbs want to stiffen and wiggle like a bug with a pin through its guts. Leeli urged me to drive faster and Ava said, “Take us back to the motel!” This all stirred in with Oh Gods and Carl repeating over and over in a sunny voice, “Hands up who wants to die,” shaping a child’s song of the line. I told them to shut the fuck up, then I yelled it. For half a minute it was quiet. A big shopping mall come floating up on our left. I slowed and swung the car into it. Ava screeched, “What’re you doing?” as I swerved into a parking slot away from the buildings, hidden by other cars from the highway. I switched off the engine. She clawed at my shoulder, cursing and giving orders.

I turned to her and saw that the manager’s bullet had dug a furrow along Carl’s jawline. The wound was oozing blood, yet he didn’t seem to mind. “I’m gonna find us another car,” I said. “But we ain’t going back to no motel.”

Ava objected to this and I said, “Here’s your keys. Go where the fuck you want. I’m getting the hell gone.”

I climbed out and told Leeli to come along with me.

Ava caught Leeli’s arm. “I need her here!”

“Well, I need a look-out, so fuck what you need!”

“Take Squire,” she said.

“Yeah, that’ll help. Come on, Leeli.”

Leeli hesitated.

A cop car whipped past on the highway, howling like a devil with a hotfoot.

“Goddamn it! Now!” I said. “You wanna wait around ’til he comes back for us?”

Leeli hopped out and glanced uncertainly between me and Ava. She blinked and shivered as if the sun was killing her.

For the first time ever I saw a distinct lack of confidence in Ava’s face. “You better not leave us here!” she said. “I swear to God!”

“I wasn’t thinking on it,” I said.

• • •

There was some sort of promotion going on within the mall. The lot was more crowded than you’d expect. Jolly old farts wearing gaudy sport coats and blue Shriner-type hats were holding bunches of balloons on strings, handing them out to children and mommies, collecting money to cure some great evil that would never die, and two lanes of parking were used up by a carnival with a little ferris wheel, kiddie rides, game and snack stalls. Some high school girls strolled in a small pod, twelve tits in a row, those belonging to a hefty redhead nosing out a close race. They were eyed by a pack of high school boys whose thoughts of rape had likely gotten sly and civilized during hygiene class. Senior citizens dressed in peppy colors gazed soberly at the wheel. I reckon they were recalling greater wheels from the big glorious world that had died out from under them. Treacly music played—the same, it seemed, that played everywhere I traveled.

Ava’s gun was stuck in my belt, under my shirt. Its weight made me walk taller than I should have felt. I held hands with Leeli, hoping to persuade folks we were a young couple hot for some corn dogs or whatever hell meat they were pushing at the carnival. We skirted the more populated area of the lot. I spotted a newish Ford van with smoked windows. We snuck up on it from the rear. Just as I was ready to pounce, Leeli warned me off. Standing a few cars over was a huddle of men in blue hats. These old fellows had ridded themselves of balloons. They were laughing, the nudge-nudge laughing men do when they hear a real good smutty joke. The fattest of them had a two-handed grip on his belly, like he was about to lift up a slab of fat and show them something even funnier. Of a sudden the men rested hands on each other’s shoulders, forming a circle, and bowed their heads, praying, I supposed, for more balloons or for Jesus to cover the point spread against Satan or that one of the high school girls would lose her mind and fuck them.

Out front of the Home Depot was an old Chevy panel van. I busted the driver’s window with the gun butt and hotwired it. The engine shook like the mounts were loose and made a tired, trebly noise until I got it idling. Leeli brushed glass off her seat and jumped in. I headed the van toward the nearest exit and she dug her fingers into my thigh and asked where I was going.

“South fucking America if we can get that far,” I said.

A pinch of time zipped by. “Turn it around,” she said.

“That’s not gonna happen.”

“I mean it! You turn this thing right around!”

“Fuck you going on about?”

“I’m serious!” She reached out with her left foot and stomped on the brake, nearly swerving me into a parked Camry. “I’m not running out on my friends.”

She kind of hiccupped over the word friends, but kept her gaze firm and determined.

“Your friends? You talking about the Munsters back there?”

Her eyes flicked away.

“Oh, okay. You’re talking about those twenty thousand friends. This ain’t about twenty thousand dollars no more, Leeli. This here’s about twenty-to-life.”

“I don’t care!”

“You’ll care when those lifer bitches with the tattooed mustaches start wanting to get cozy.”

She opened the door, planted one foot on the asphalt. “I’m not staying ’less you go back for Ava and them.”

“Those motherfuckers gonna get us killed! They almost got us killed!”

“Way I see it, you didn’t act such a fool with that preacher, Carl wouldn’t never done nothing!”

I put my eyes out the windshield. A lost balloon was sailing off into the blue—it vanished as it crossed the sun. “Damn it, Leeli! Get your ass back in here!”

She slid down from the seat and stood in the glare, defiant as a dog off its chain.

I gunned the engine. “I’m leaving!”

She slammed the door shut.

“Something wrong with those people,” I said. “Man’s shot in the face and it don’t even phase him? Fuck is that? This ain’t nothing we should be messing with.”

She took off walking. Her round little butt looked real tasty in those shorts.

“Aw, Leeli! Come on back here, girl!”

• • •

I’m not a complete fool. I understand it’s all about pussy, but pussy must be a sickness with me, otherwise I cannot explain why I let myself get pulled back into a situation I knew was a dead loser. A psychiatrist might say I was hunting for just such a situation, but if Leeli had been one of the reverend’s old gals, I wouldn’t have wasted a second before putting her in the rear view. I admit self-destruction is the way of my life. The way of every life, maybe. But the style Leeli brought to her walk-off scene, switching her hips and arching her back and giving a sad, pouty look over her shoulder, psychology wasn’t that huge a factor.

I told her to drive and funneled Ava, Carl, and Squire into the rear of the van, then climbed in behind the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on everybody. Squire was by the doors, legs kicked out, his head wobbling like he was listening to private music. Ava was next to the wheel hub, comforting Carl, who rested his good cheek on her shoulder.

“Get east,” I said to Leeli. “Use the interstate and keep it under the limit.”

Ava asked, “Where we going?” It was loud in the van and she had to shout it.

“Friend of mine’s place in South Daytona!”

She thought about this and nodded gloomily.

“Wanna tell me what’s going on?” I pointed to Squire and then Carl.

She shook her head. Not now! She shifted to accommodate Carl’s weight and said, “I’d like my gun back!”

“I like maple sugar on my oatmeal,” I told her. “But sometimes I gotta do without!”

The sun was bouncing along just above the palm tops like a dragged bait, and the light was growing orangey, and a brown shadow gathered in the rear of the van. It was all calming somehow, the shadow and the rattling, droning speed. I felt submerged in it, a man sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, unmindful of trouble in the air, and I worked the ride into a movie, not a big spectacular with sinister terrorist plots or world-shattering disasters, but a movie from back when stars used to play in crummy little stories about nobodies on their way to damnation. Creedence and Lynard Skynard for the soundtrack. My daddy’s kind of songs, but I liked them all the same. I found one cigarette left in my crumpled pack and lit up. It didn’t taste a thing like movie smoke must taste, clean and savory, a working man’s reward, but my exhales hazed the air so it looked old-fashioned and yellowy brown, 1970s air, air with some character, and I sat fingering the gun, trying to put my mind onto a future different from the sort promised by the movie I was in, but thinking mainly about the manager, what a strange thing it was for a man to come halfway around the world from a place where they had monkeys and elephants and shit to go with their nuclear bombs just to catch a bullet in a HoJos and die staring up at track lighting and styrofoam ceiling tile.

Rickey Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language. Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square white eggs before passing.

We hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a hundred dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil. Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover your arm unless you kept swiping them off.

“Nobody’s home,” Leeli said in an exhausted tone.

“Maybe. It don’t matter.” The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. “Just pick out some rooms,” I said. “I’ll see if anybody’s here.”

I left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase. Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.

From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.

“Shit!” The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. “That you, man?”

I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.

“Maceo.” He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. “Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?”

“Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.”

“Oh, yeah… right.” Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.

I asked what he was up to and he said, “Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly Dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.”

“There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.”

He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. “Yeah… okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms.” His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

“I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind,” I said.

“I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.”

I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.

“You get settled, come on back you wanna talk.” Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.

“Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.”

“Hey, Maceo!”

I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.

“’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?”

“Twila,” I said.

“Yeah, her. She got the virus.” He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. “’Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked,” he went on. “Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.”

“She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit.” My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

“Maceo?”

“What?”

“You wanna bring me something from the ’frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.”

“I’ll do ’er in a while.”

The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, “Oh, God… God!” Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.

• • •

Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

“What we gonna do?” she asked.

“I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.”

She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. “It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.”

“Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.”

“What is it?”

“Dilaudid.”

“Is it something good?”

“It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.”

I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.

“Oooh,” she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

“What I tell ya?”

I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Go-thous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jiggling in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.

“I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.”

“Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like… when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?”

We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, “Sweet Jesus. That was amazing!” I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.

Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cut-outs of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the HoJo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.

I thought I was out there on my lonesome, just me and a scrap of wilderness and Dilaudid, but when I climbed a hummock to avoid wading through the marsh, I spied Ava, Carl, and Squire standing at the tip of a grassy point about sixty feet farther along. Ava was gesturing at the sky like she was naming stars or teaching about the weather or something. Squire and Carl, whose jaw was bandaged, were gazing upward. I was too fogged to jam their nature walk in with all the other nothing junk I knew concerning them and make any sense of it, but when they strolled off still farther from the lodge, I realized this was my opportunity to take a peek at Ava’s personals and maybe scoop up some cash. I hustled back as fast I could, which was not real fast, and located the room where she was bunking. Her tote bag was stuffed under a pillow. I found no money, but among the keys and Kleenex and cosmetics and all was a badge holder holding a photo ID. Official evidence that Ava was affiliated with the FBI. A fake, I thought, but then remembered where I’d met up with her and wasn’t so sure. At the bottom of the bag was a leatherette photo album. The first picture was an overexposed black and white shot of Ava and Carl leaning against a vintage Chevy Impala. The ’62 convertible. She appeared to be around seventeen, eighteen, and wore white socks and buckle shoes and a print dress with a belling skirt that covered her legs to the mid-calves. Carl had on jeans and a sport shirt with its tail hanging out. He looked no younger than he did now. Another guy sat behind the wheel of the Impala. His face was a blur of sunlight, but going by his round head, I guessed this to be Squire. Both Ava and Carl were grinning and pointing at a shield-shaped sign on the shoulder of the road. The sign was also blurred, but readable: State Road 44.

Several of the remaining pictures were shots of Carl, some of Ava and Carl. A few recent ones showed them with Squire. None of these said much to me, not like the first. Seeing that Ava had aged, though not so much as she should have, and Carl hadn’t aged a day, this gave rise to Star Trek movies in my head. Space aliens, UFOs, abductions, secret government projects, intelligent robots, all kinds of happy horseshit. A couple of times I thought I’d figured out who they must be, but if they were aliens or whatever on the run from the government, what the hell were they doing on government property? If they were working with the government, why were they hanging out with the likes of Leeli and me? And what was that house doing in the dunes near the Cape? A trap for lowlifes such as myself, I decided. That was it. Damn straight. Alien creatures from beyond the stars were studying the pork rind set. Government super-clones were learning how to mimic the scum of the earth so they would be in place to assassinate the redneck Jesus, who’d be coming to a womb in Kissimmee any day now. Or could be robot killers who did the evil bidding of the Bush administration were given vacations during which they hung out with real folks and fucked them up every whichaway. Or Squire and Carl were aliens who’d suffered brain damage in the Roswell crash and Ava was their rehab nurse, training them in the ways of society, and their vibrations were keeping her young. I got somewhat insane behind all this, creating tabloid headlines, picturing me and Leeli on the talk shows, discussing her alien lesbian lover with Jerry and Jay and David and the rest, going out to Hollywood to attend the premiere of the movie about our life story. Gradually I calmed down. There was bound to be a logical explanation for the photo and Carl’s recuperative powers and everything else. I told myself I’d get to the bottom of it eventually.

• • •

I woke the following morning with a pistol barrel poking my nose and Rickey’s hand on my throat and his burnt out eyes giving me a close-up of the dark sour-smelling rathole they opened into. It was like the little room he lived in was inside him, too. Straggles of hair curtained off his face, but did nothing to filter his rotten breath.

“Motherfucker, you stole my dope!” he said.

Leeli gave a squeak and rolled off the bed, covering herself with the sheet.

“Where the fuck is it?” Rickey asked.

“I took four goddamn tabs!” I said. “You want ’em back, you gonna have to scrape out my nose!”

“Don’t think I won’t!” He screwed the barrel down hard against my cheek. “I’m missing a bottle.”

“He didn’t take nothing!” Leeli said. “I promise!”

“You check around by your chair?” I asked. “Jesus, you could hide a Volkswagen under all the crap you got on your floor.”

His face lost some intensity.

“I guess you were so clearheaded last night, you couldn’t have set it down somewheres and forgot,” I said. “You would know if you give it a kick accidental when you got up to piss or something.”

Thought confused his expression. He backed away from the bed, the pistol angled toward the side.

“Jesus Christ!” I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. “Fuck you so crazy about, anyway? You said you had a good goddamn supply.”

“It’s gotta last the weekend,” he said sullenly.

“You run out, I know you’ll get you some more.” I pulled on my undershorts. “What’s wrong with you, man? Busting in here like that. I ever cheat you before? I ever treat you anything but righteous?”

Rickey puzzled over that. The words came slow from his mouth, like slobber off a bull’s lip. “I can’t recall.”

“Well, you’d remember if I did, wouldn’t you?”

“I s’pose so. Yeah.” He lowered the pistol and let out a soggy, rueful snort of laughter. “Fuck, man. Y’know, I… just people been fucking me around a lot lately.”

“If you can’t find it, don’t come back in here busting on me about it. You know you gonna find it sooner or later in that mess. Someday you run out, you gonna be stumbling around and it’ll turn up under your big toe. Be like finding a diamond in a cornfield.”

This fairly brightened Rickey—he nodded energetically, seeing a vision of that glorious day. I noticed Leeli cowering in the corner, looking extra fine with her breasts gathered above her arm and her ass sticking out from the sheet.

“Hey, Leeli. Get your tail over here,” I said. “This here’s my ol’ pal Rickey.”

I tried to move Rickey on out of there before he could get paranoid again, but his eyes were leaving tracks all over Leeli, even after she covered everything up, and he kept hanging around. He began asking why we needed to hide and such. I told him some lies and when that didn’t stop his questions, I said I wanted to borrow his car so we could buy food and stuff. The best way to derail Rickey’s suspicions always was to beg a favor. If he could deny you something, he’d start feeling masterful and forget whatever was bothering him. I argued and pleaded, but he was resolute. “Nobody drives my car but me,” he said. Like everyone in the world was dying to park their behinds in his funky-smelling shitbox so they could race off to Monaco and display this automotive jewel before graceful society. It ended with Rickey agreeing to bring us food himself and stalking off to search for his missing Dilaudid with head held high.

“That was sly, way you managed that,” Leeli said, giving me a smooch. “You’re pretty smart for white trash.”

“Guess what that makes me in the real world,” I said.

• • •

Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get an itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the worst could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.

It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.

Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.

“A few words would be good.”

“I guess it’s inevitable.”

“I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.”

“No need. We’re like family now.”

Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.

“I sneaked a look at your photograph album last night,” I said.

“Oh? What did you think?”

“I think you’re damn sexy for a woman’s gotta be in her fifties.”

“Sixty-one,” she said. “I’m sixty-one.”

“Okay. A woman in her sixties. And Carl, how old is he?”

“Carl.” Her smile had a fond quality. “Carl’s ageless.”

“Squire, too. He ageless?”

“In a way.”

She crossed to the bed with a three-step stroll and laid herself out, back against the headboard, arms spread on the pillows. Her pubic hair was trimmed to a neat strip and she had a long waist to go with her trophy chest. She reminded me of this naked woman in a painting one of my high school teachers had prattled on about, some rich horny bitch from another century lying on a couch and looking at you with a similar scornful, seductive attitude.

“If you want to come over here with me, it’s all right,” she said.

“I’m fine where I am.”

“Leeli won’t mind, that’s what’s worrying you.”

“You don’t know nothing about that, believe me.”

She shrugged, smiled.

“Why would you even want me to come over there?” I asked. “We ain’t got nothing going on.”

“I like sex.”

“So do I, but…”

“Oh I see! You have to like the girl first. You require an emotional attachment.”

I didn’t care for her mocking me and I was tempted to fuck her knock-kneed, but that would have been playing with her deck. “I don’t have to like her all that much,” I said. “Helps if I like her some, though.”

Her smile cut itself a wider curve. “You don’t like me a tiny bit?”

“I ain’t even sure what the fuck you are. Whyn’t you clear that up for me?”

The rain came harder, spitting through the window screen, drops darkening a wedge of floor beneath it. Some giant’s stomach grumbled and the light dimmed.

“You gonna shoot me if I don’t tell you?”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“No? Yet you come in here with my gun on display.”

“Just making a point.”

“The point being, you might be prepared to shoot me.”

“You want me to shoot you? You keep pissing me off, maybe I will. Don’t seem like it would affect you that much, anyway. Or is it just the boys who’s good at taking bullets?”

This was the first real conversation I’d had with Ava. I’d seen that on the outside she was a cool, collected sort. Now I was coming to think coolness ran deep in her, that instead of a heart, a little refrigeration unit was humming in her chest, pumping out frosty air. She seemed like a lotta women I’d known who’d survived bar fights that passed for marriages. Women who felt you couldn’t do nothing more to them than had been done already. Yet I didn’t accept that picture of her. She was too steady, too unconcerned. I had a notion that her steadiness came from a perception of my weaknesses. Like she was X-raying me, reading all my flaws.

“You’d like me to tell you a story,” she said. “Is that it?”

“A true story. I don’t want no fairy tales.”

“All right.”

She proceeded to whip one off about how she and Carl had been dating back in the 60s while she was in high school and he was in college, and they had gone down to State Road 44 to look at the flying saucers and have sex, and a saucer had abducted them, worked some weird change on them both, and set them back on earth for God knows what purpose, maybe just as test subjects, and they were prodded this way and that by alien agencies—powerful ones that penetrated every layer of society, even the FBI—and they were always being put in strange situations, and this was why they had been at the house in the dunes when Leeli and I showed up.

I was about to ask if Squire was an alien agent, one who was doing the prodding, when she launched into a second story, saying Carl and Squire had been hybrid clone babies, grown from human eggs and alien juice extracted from a dead UFO pilot, and she’d been in charge of them when the government decided the experiment wasn’t producing any valuable result and decided to kill the two boys, so Ava, with the help of highly placed friends, had run off with them, and they’d been pursued for a time, but then the government changed their minds and thought the thing to do was let the boys run, acquire life experiences, and see if they developed into a crop worth harvesting. They lived in constant fear of judgment, she said. Never knowing if the government would change their minds again. She was worried that Carl shooting the HoJo’s manager might be the last straw and the government would send their killers.

I wondered if she could’ve tapped into my thoughts of the night before and devised these stories to suit my tabloid fantasies. “Why’d you tell two stories?” I asked. “You told me just the one, I might’ve believed it.”

“You’re not a believer,” Ava said. “You’re a doubter. Don’t matter what I say, you’re gonna pick at it.”

The rain had ceased and you could hear everything dripping. A bluejay began jattering and a dog started going crazy at the sound. Four-legged somethings, probably squirrels, skittered across the roof. All those noises, it was like the world was surfacing to snatch a breath before the rain went to drowning it again.

“Carl’s my son,” Ava said. “He’s the spitting image of his daddy. He’s dead… Carl Senior. He was killed in a car wreck right before we was about to marry. I was already pregnant. Carl was born retarded and he’s got lotta other problems. There’s this disease makes his nerves not work right. He can’t hardly feel a thing. It’s killing him. I don’t know how much longer he’s got. Not long, I expect. Squire, he’s just this fella I met in a bar over in Boynton Beach. He keeps me happy and he’s simple enough to relate to Carl. Carl Senior’s daddy worked for NASA. One of the directors. Even though I never married his son, he was kind to us. When he died he left a trust for me and Carl. The house where you met us? He had it built for us. Pulled some strings so we could have access. The government don’t care about the land no more and his friends make sure people leave us be when we’re there. Ava crossed her legs and clasped her hands behind her head. That fly any higher for you?”

“You’re a piece of fucking work, I’ll give you that,” I said.

Ava grinned. You’ll never know ’til you cut you a slice.

“What the hell you hanging around with us for, you got all this money?”

“I like Leeli. I like you, too. Different, though. I was enjoying myself with y’all until yesterday.”

“The thing gets me,” I said after studying on things a patch, “is how come you don’t seem so worried about your son or your old boyfriend or your experimental subject, whichever he is… about him committing murder.”

“Oh we’ll be all right. I got confidence in you.”

“Now that’s a lie.”

“You got us outa Ocala, didn’t you? With your experience in these matters and my money, we’re gonna do fine. I was thinking about Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

“Uh-huh. I was thinking I’d charter a plane and we’d lay low for a few and then jump on over. After Leeli finishes her time with me, the two of you can skedaddle. Twenty thousand’ll go a long way in Mexico.”

“Whyn’t you just call your bigwig friends to haul your ass outa this?”

“Maybe I will, things don’t go well. But you know how it is, Maceo. You got a favor in the bank, you want to hold back from using it long as you can.”

My thoughts skipped back and forth from story to story. I didn’t believe any of them, but I kind of believed them all. I suspected there was a spoonful of truth in each, or that each was a stand-in double for a truth she hadn’t spoken.

“It don’t matter who I am, who Carl and Squire are,” she said. “We still hafta deal with the problem.”

Trying to decide what to believe and what to do about it tied knots in my thought strings. Ava lay grinning at me, looking from the neck down like a dessert tray. I gave myself a nudge toward the bed, pretending to buy the proposition that if I tore one off with her, I’d have a better feel for the situation. Old hayseed philosophers gathered in the boiler room of my brain, swapped round a bottle, and spewed dipshit wisdoms: You can’t say how a peach tastes ’til the juice runs down your chin. Staring at the groceries don’t tell you who the cook is. Video footage of a naked, sucked-dry corpse, its mouth wrenched open in a final agony, was playing in the den, with graphics reading ALIEN EMBRACE KILLS REDNECK LOVER. I stayed where I was, speculating pro and con upon what I might be missing.

The door shrieked as someone shoved against it. Squire squeezed on in, followed by Carl. Squire glared at Ava, at me, and Carl beamed. His bandage was soaking wet, smudged with dirty finger marks.

“Hi, honey,” Ava said.

“That man went for food’s coming down the drive,” Squire said.

“That’s nice. Soon we can have us a feast!” She patted the bed, an invitation, and Squire, good dog that he was, laid down beside her. Carl gazed at the chair I was on for a second, then plunked himself down on the floor next to the bed. Squire began toying with Ava’s nipples, kissing her neck. The rain swept back in. I heard a clattering from the front of the lodge, a door slamming, but I didn’t turn from watching Squire and Ava. The rainy noise seemed to be tightening the space around us, compressing and heating the air. I told myself the minute Squire started taking off his clothes, I was gone, but there was something mesmerizing about Ava, about the lush, lazy strain of her belly, the slow surges of her hips, and the way her eyes would graze me every so often. I felt the cold pull of her. The sexy warmth of her surface was a dream and beneath lay an undertow that sucked all the swimmers who’d strayed out past the bar into whatever deep lightless place her story really sprung from. I had a glimmering of how it would be to go with the flow, to stroke hard and arrow down into her dark, to reach the great secret at the bottom, whether toothy maw or golden kingdom, it wasn’t much important, because you were bound to be part of it, and as Squire’s fingers traipsed between her thighs and her hips lifted, I thought what I was feeling now was closer to the truth than anything she’d said, and knew that she was willful and careless and irresistibly strong. The instant I understood this, however, I declared bullshit on it. I was watching a dirty movie, I told myself, and not falling down no rabbit hole.

“Fuck y’all doing?” Rickey had popped his head in and was gawking at the bed, where Squire and Ava hadn’t missed a beat.

“Notice how the entire school turns as one,” Carl said happily.

“Hallelujah!” I said. “The single mind’s directing.”

Rickey slid himself in past the stuck door. I could see he was hoping to get in on the act, but was all puffed up and ready to be outraged in case he couldn’t. “Goddamn it!” he said, and stepped over to the window, getting a side angle on the center ring. “I don’t want no weird shit going on in my house!”

“God, no!” I said. “There’s never been no weird shit like people fucking and people watching going on out here. Not in this holy temple.”

Rickey might have said something back, but his mouth stopped working, because right then Ava opened her legs and Squire started wrestling off his jeans.

“That’s Ava there showing her rosy,” I said to Rickey. “Squire, he’s the boy ’bout to have some fun. Down there in the front row, that’s Carl.”

“In concert,” said Carl. “In simple harmony and balance.”

“Carl’s got this kinda religious thing going,” I told Rickey.

This inspired Carl to point at me and say, “Hands up! Who wants to die?”

Rickey pricked up his ears at that, but again gave no response. Squire had climbed on board the Ava train and was making tracks for the station, giving out with chuffing noises. The springs backed him up with a jangly, crunchy rhythm and the rain kept drumming and Ava sang a lyric with a single breathy word. Carl nodded, smiled. Rickey’s eyes cut toward me—I expect he was wanting a sign it would be okay for him to mix in.

The floorboards creaked. Leeli had crept in and was nailing me with a .45-caliber stare. She said, “You asshole!” and ducked back out. Catching a last glimpse of Ava’s heels and Squire’s pimply backside, I wheeled up from the chair and after her. I checked the porch and saw Leeli standing with her arms folded out in the rain. I didn’t think she was crying or nothing, just had a mad on. Rickey came up at my shoulder and said, “Hey, man! Is that Ava, she doing everybody?”

“Don’t be shy, boy. Ask her.”

“You serious?”

“She ain’t gonna screech and hold her knees together if you do. She’ll just tell you yes or no.”

“Cool.”

“You might wanna wait to ask ’til Squire’s finished,” I said as he turned away.

“Oh… yeah. Okay.”

“But you better go back on in now. You wanna be there so you can get next.”

He set off again and I called to him, asked where the food was.

“Kitchen,” he said and slipped into Ava’s room.

Eight Burger King take-out sacks were resting on the kitchen table. I found one full of double cheeseburgers and carried it onto the porch. “Leeli!” I shouted, and waggled the sack out through the hole in the screen door. “I got burgers!”

Her head twitched, but she didn’t turn. I sat on the porch steps under the porch overhang and unwrapped a cheeseburger and had a bite. Soaked through, Leeli’s yellowy white hair had the look of the down on a baby chick. She glared at me similar to how this drunk Seminole boy I’d met in the Panama Beach lock-up one fine morning had glared: sideways, his shoulders rolled forward, with his close eye wide and the other narrowed. I figured Leeli and that Seminole had about the same ambition toward me.

I finished the burger and Leeli stomped over, snatched the bag and switched past me into the lodge. “Don’t you come after me!” she said. “I’m not talking to you.”

“I hear you, sugar,” I said. “I’ll be right in.”

• • •

With her belly full, Leeli’s mood improved. She was near to purring, curled up on the bed and looking out at the rain, but still it took me a few tries to drag her into a conversation. “I was just sitting there,” I said, “when they started going at it. What you expect me to do?”

“Leave,” she said. “I know how Ava and Squire get. You had plenty of warning.”

“That mean you watched ’em?”

“She wants me to!”

“Then why go beating on me about it?”

She clammed up, so I worked another angle, and when that didn’t satisfy her, I said, “’Member what you told me ’bout how you felt sometimes Ava was drowning you? I think I got a taste of what you were talking about.”

A little something tweaked behind Leeli’s face, but she didn’t let it out.

“Yeah, it was strange,” I said. “It was like she was pulling on me. Maybe that’s why I kept setting there.”

“She’s a witch,” Leeli said. “I swear she is.”

“I don’t know ’bout that.”

“That’s right! You don’t know fuck all! I’m telling you she’s got this power… it just eats away at you ’til you’re nothing. ’Til you’re like Carl or Squire.”

I spun this around and then said, “That’s how come you think Carl and Squire are slow?”

“Sometimes I think that.” Leeli picked at a fray on the pillow-case. “Sometimes I think she just wore ’em away.”

The witchy woman had tried to draw me close and drown me in her power. This seemed crazier than what Ava had told me, but only a little. Thinking about Ava as someone who left you hollow inside but still walking around wasn’t that tough a chore. I’d known regular folks who could do the same sort of job on you and I said as much to Leeli.

“Naw, un-uh, it’s more’n that. It’s what you were saying. She pulls at you, but she’s not playing you. It’s who she is, know what I mean? It’s like that’s all she is… this force.”

A lightning crack ran violet down the eastern sky, like we were inside a gray egg that was cracking open in the middle of hell. The thunder came a few seconds later.

“You pull at me, too,” I said. “Know that? You been pulling at me since New Smyrna.”

Leeli’s face went little girl serious and big-eyed.

I eased down beside her, laid a hand on her hip.

“I’m scared,” she said. “Ava wants to go to Mexico. I can’t think what to do.”

“Let’s leave tonight. Let’s just go.”

“Where? Where can we go?”

“This old boy I got to know in Raiford runs with some bikers got land over ’round Palatka. Cops never come near their place. We could stay ’long as we want.”

“Maybe you’d be comfortable with a buncha bikers, but I wouldn’t.” She snuggled in closer. “Maybe we should go with Ava and the second we get to Mexico, that’s it. Money or not.”

“I don’t like the idea of traveling more miles with her.”

“It’s the safest way. Won’t be no security to pass through with a charter.” Leeli picked up my hand from her hip and moved it around so I was holding her. “’Less you got something better’n bikers.”

I considered Lauderdale, but Lauderdale was a hell of a drive and we couldn’t stay for long at my friend’s house.

“Ain’t you scared?” Leeli asked. “I can’t tell if you are or not.”

“I’m past scared, I’m on into survive. That’s why I say get shut of ’em now.”

We left it hanging that way and closed the door and got foolish on the bed. Desperate straits and the desire to forget them lit up our nerves and made us better lovers. Leeli like to have died in my arms and my heart was sprained and limping in my chest, I worked it so long and furious. I left her drowsing and went into the kitchen and had another burger and a purple milk shake that tasted like nothing purple and puddled like melted plastic in my stomach. The TV was playing in Rickey’s room. I figured Ava must have kicked him to the curb.

I returned to the bedroom and drifted beside Leeli. My flesh felt light and insubstantial and everything had the sharpness of an important memory, how you feel the thing remembered before you see and smell and taste it. It was like the world itself was forming a memory that used me how a pearl uses a sore spot, sealing me in so I could be dug out at some later date to be admired. The rain blew slanty, then straightened out, then it blew sideways and the lightning moved closer. The air darkened to an ashy color. Things bumped and clanked against some section of the lodge. You’d have thought the rain had turned to chains. The marsh grass rippled with pantherish fury, twisting and flowing in every direction. The storm smell was ozone and dank trouble.

Sleep wouldn’t take me. I got dressed and padded down the hall to visit Rickey. He was in his chair, scratching himself, watching the local news with the sound low. He gave a disinterested, “Hey,” and paid me no mind as I drew up a chair.

“You get laid?” I asked.

“Damn! Did I! That woman’s got some evil fucking ways!”

Rickey didn’t look much different for the experience and I thought the last shriveled-up scrap of soul must have been sucked out before Ava got to him.

He craned his neck to see me. How long y’all staying?

“Day or two. Why, you wanna go again with her?”

“She promises not to kill me.”

“Better ask for the pony ride next time.”

Rickey coughed out a laugh and spat into the garbage alongside his chair. He spaced out on the TV and I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Rickey wasn’t much of a talker but he enjoyed people with him when he watched his programs. I knew if I didn’t hang out a while, he’d feel he wasn’t being respected, so I sat there deadheaded, peering at his mess. Must have been every kind of candy wrapper in the world scattered around that floor. It was like investigating a cave where some sick animal had puked up a month of bad meals. The next time I glanced toward the TV, I saw a blond woman in a pantsuit with her microphone stuck in the face of the gray-haired reverend I’d manhandled back in Ocala. I told Rickey to hit the volume, and when he was slow to act, I grabbed the remote and did it myself. The reverend shook his head mournfully and said, “There was so much confusion, I don’t know which one actually fired. It was the skinny one I saw holding the gun, but that’s after the shooting. All I can tell you for certain is I heard somebody shout, ‘Hands up! Who wants to die?’ And then I heard the shots.”

“Hands up! Who wants to die?” The blond reporter acquired a serious look as the camera went to a close-up on her. “Vikay Choudhoury responded to that challenge with a hero’s answer and now he lies dead.” She paused for effect and said, “This is Gloria Renard. Channel Twelve…”

I thumbed the mute button. There was a cold spread of panic inside me, like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and had just lost my balance.

“You get on outa here, Maceo!” Rickey stared at me through the straggles of his hair. “I mean right fucking now!”

“I didn’t kill nobody,” I said.

“I don’t care you did or you didn’t. Every damn cop in Volusia knows who it is says that dumb fucking hands-up-who-wants-to-die bullshit. You think they won’t be snooping ’round here? Wonder is, they ain’t here already.”

“We can’t leave now. They be on us ’fore we get clear the driveway.”

Rickey reached down beside his hip and produced his pistol. “I’ll shoot you my own self, you don’t get on out.”

Anger was a cold snake snapping out of me. I ripped the gun from his hand, then I stood and began punching him. He tried to block the first couple with his forearms, but each one was a lesson I’d been taught to deliver, a preachment of old pain. The blows drove him lower in the chair until his butt was hanging half off the seat and his head was jammed into the join of the cushions and there was blood in his eyes. I couldn’t have said why, but the sight of him unconscious jabbed another red-hot stick into my brain. I smashed the pistol against the wall again and again. The trigger guard fell off and the cylinder popped out from the housing and I threw the rest to the floor. I knew Rickey was right about the cops. Maybe that was what set me off. That and recognizing how good a look at my face I’d given everybody in the HoJo’s. When God invented the notion of crazy trumping common sense, He must’ve had me in mind for the standard model. Everything considered, it was a goddamn miracle I’d come this far in life.

• • •

The storm lived around us. Seemed the lodge was a battery discharging thunder cracks and splintered lightning that made stretches of churning marsh grass bloom for unholy seconds against the dark gulf of land and sky. I told Leeli about Rickey and the reverend and the cops and tried once again to persuade her to leave with me. She wouldn’t budge. Mexico, she kept saying, was the way to go. I didn’t put up all that much of an argument, having no better choice to offer. We brought Ava and Carl into the conversation, leaving Squire asleep, and stood on the porch in the flickering light and hashed things out. The storm appeared to frighten Carl. He sat in one of the rotted porch chairs, his hands to his ears, rocking his upper body.

Leeli said she knew of a little rural airport west of New Smyrna where we could charter a plane, no questions, and Ava said she and Carl and Leeli would use Rickey’s car and take care of it right away.

“Like hell!” I said. “We’ll go together.”

“You crazy? You know how it is when there’s a big storm,” Ava said. “Accidents and drownings. Cops’ll be all over the highway. There’ll be roadblocks. They see you, we’re finished.”

“That’s right!” Leeli said. “They gonna be too busy to worry ’bout looking for us now.”

“I’ll be damned I’m gonna let you run off without me,” I said.

“We can’t run off! Won’t nothing be flying ’til the storm blows out. But we set things up, we can fly soon as it does.”

“Just you go then,” I said to Ava.

“I can’t leave Carl. You see how he is. And I need Leeli to point the way.”

A pitchfork of lightning ripped away the dark and the thunder had a metallic sound, like somebody was pounding out a dent in the sky. Wind shivered the lodge and slammed loose boards.

“Naw,” I said. “Leeli can give you directions.”

“What if I get ’em wrong? You got Squire here. Ain’t that enough of a guarantee?”

I couldn’t see Ava’s face in that moment, but I thought I felt slyness steaming off of her. “Tell her the directions, Leeli,” I said.

“All those country roads.” Leeli put a hand to her brow like a mentalist trying to make contact. “I can show her, but I don’t know I can tell her.”

Rain drove in through the screen and we all moved back from it except for Carl, who just sat there rocking.

“I don’t trust you no more’n you trust me,” I said to Ava. “We gonna have to work something else out.”

Another lightning flash brought leached colors to the porch and fitted a long shadow beneath every object. Things looked to be tilted, as if the wind had knocked the lodge askew.

“Hang on,” Ava said, and went off toward her bedroom.

Leeli caught my hand and said something I didn’t catch, but had the sound of an assurance, and then Ava came back out onto the porch and handed me a thick envelope.

“Fuck’s this?” I asked.

“The rest of the money I promised Leeli. You can hold it while we’re gone.”

Leeli’s eyes got stuck on the envelope as I inspected the contents. Hundred-dollar bills and plenty of them.

“That guarantee enough for ya?” Ava asked. “’Tween Squire and the money, it’s ’bout the best I can do.”

I stuffed the envelope into my hip pocket. Leeli unstuck her eyes. I could see it was a strain for her and that she didn’t love the idea of leaving the envelope behind. “All right,” I said. I started to deliver a warning, to pose consequences, but there didn’t seem much point to it. We all knew the lay of the land.

“All right,” I repeated. “Let’s get it rolling.”

• • •

You know how it goes. Sometimes you’re so deep in the world, so mired in its trouble, you forget that you were born, you forget you were raised to be a dead man, you think you got where you’re standing all on your own and that you’re holding destiny in your hands, and when somebody passes you a golden ticket that’s stamped FREEDOM OR FOREVERAFTER, you don’t check to see if the ink’s dry or if there’s printing on the back, because you’re walking the road your daddy cut for you and stepping along in clothes your mama sewed, because it’s the tendency of your kind to believe the lottery can be won, great prizes are within your grasp, and though the only winning ticket ever came your parents’ way was an error in their favor made by a bartender or a grocery clerk, though you understand you’re their homemade fool, you just can’t accept that the rules of their life apply to you. That golden ticket is a guarantee all right, a twenty-four karat guaranteed loser. You know this in your heart, but you hang onto the bitch like it was a pass through the Gates of Glory or a voucher for an all-expenses-paid weekend at Casino World on the Redneck Riviera, whichever premium you prefer.

Thoughts such as these slammed my head as I dug through Rickey’s pockets, hunting for his keys. He was still unconscious, his face swollen from the beating I’d supplied him. Looked like he’d pissed off a swarm of bees. The keys were in the bib pocket of his overalls. I stood jingling them in my hand, holding a last debate over the wisdom of giving them to Ava. An old movie was playing on the TV. Japanese men in moonsuits were gazing awestruck at a fleet of flying saucers that soon began incinerating them with fiery beams. Watching them turn into bright wavering silhouettes and vanish somehow made my decision for me.

Things moved right smartly after that. Ava and Carl went for the car, Leeli gave me a pert little kiss and said, “Be back soon,” and ran off after them. I patted my hip pocket to make certain the money was still there. A minute later I was standing on the porch steps, watching a pair of red taillights, one patched with duct tape, jouncing along over the uneven ground toward the highway, shining up tracers of rain. I had a moment of dissatisfaction with my decision and I pulled Ava’s gun from the waist of my jeans with half a thought of shooting out a tire. The car stopped at the end of the drive. There wasn’t any traffic I could see and I wondered what was going on. A creep of paranoia stirred me from the steps and out in the rain. I imagined Ava and Leeli arguing over whether or not to betray me. Thunder mauled the sky. The car swung out onto the highway. I felt like six kinds of fool, with the rain running down my neck, alone as ever was, the gun cold and weighty in my hand.

The night grew wilder yet, the thunder continuous. A ring of fiery stick men a thousand feet tall jabbed and flashed on the horizons, penning me into their magic circle. There was such a confusion of light and sound, it rooted me to the spot. Behind the lodge a clump of palms bulked up solid, taking the shape of a black frowning Buddha in my mind, scrunched up and angry from having me in his sight. It seemed I could feel the wickedness of that place and time, the mortal separation from the flow of life that wickedness enforces. I was flying, stranded on a scrap of soggy marsh that had been chewed off from the planet and set to spinning loose in the void. The rain needled my cheeks and brow, spitting alternately dark and silver. The lodge looked to be changing shape, crouching like a beast one second, the next blurring into an emblem of negativity, a symbol on a rippling banner, then collapsing back into the ruinous thing it pretended to be. I had the idea this was my night, my big moment, that I was being showed a reflection of everything I’d said and thought and done, the chaos of my life given larger, windier form, and this was the only celebration of my useless days I’d likely get, this storm too small to have a name but big enough to damage the unprepared, the tore-down spaces, the vacant properties of the world. Then I glanced south to where Ava and Carl and Leeli had gone and saw a flash of green. Not a dazzling seam and not the dull flicker of heat lightning, but a dynamic burst of bright neon color like an enormous bug zapper taking a hit. The color hung in the air, draping its afterimages around the palm crowns, and I recalled Ava’s story about the green light coming from the UFO. I tried to think of something else it could have been. I expect there must have been a hundred possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with one. The rain slowed to a drizzle and as if the green flash had been a cue, the storm began to fade, flaring up now and again with a grumble and a distant snip of fire, then fading even more, its battery running low. Drips and plops succeeded the fury of the wind. Through scudding clouds you could glimpse a freckling of stars, and soon a slice of moon surfaced from the horizon. I knew Carl and Ava and Leeli were gone. It wasn’t the flash that told me so. Too many thoughts were flapping around in my attic for me to work that part of it out. The alignment of the world, the wrecked lodge and foundered cabins, the swaying grasses and the dark water slurping at the mucky bank, the stars and all the rest—it was like a sign saying GONE had been struck through every layer of creation.

Naturally I didn’t entirely believe this sign. Despite Ava’s anything-goes attitude toward screwing, I figured Squire must do something special for her, and I just knew Leeli wasn’t about to leave that money on the table. I patted my hip pocket again and this time I found nothing. No bulge, no envelope sticking out. I patted my other pockets and looked on the ground close by. Since I’d come out from the porch to watch them drive away, I hadn’t hardly moved a step, but there was no sign of the envelope. I told myself the wind must have took it. I searched along the edge of the water, near the porch, and as I was poking around in the grass, kicking scrap wood and fallen shingles aside, growing more desperate every second, because with or without Leeli I needed that money to get clear of Volusia County, it occurred to me there might never have been an envelope. Maybe Ava was that much of a witch. Maybe she’d handed me a parlor trick, an illusion, and made Leeli and me see what she wanted. Maybe Leeli had been in on the hustle and just pretended to be worried about the money. It was her, wasn’t it, led me to Ava in the first place? The missing envelope and the green flash and the stories Ava told, they all washed together into a stew of possibilities. I couldn’t separate out anything from it that sounded more than half true.

I stopped my searching and stood by the water. The clouds had slid off to the north, except for a wedge that was convoying the rising moon. The stars were thick. It was as if there had been no storm, just a gentle rain that smeared the vegetable smells around into a sickly green sweetness. I told myself I must be wrong about everything. Before long they’d be pulling into the driveway, talking about our plane ride. But fool though I was, I wasn’t that big of a fool. I could mumble all the pretty wishes I wanted to, but gone was still the impression I got.

I felt like a baby trapped under a bear rug, unable to crawl, too smothered to cry, and I must’ve stood by the water damn near an hour, trying to poke holes in the weighty thing that held me down. I was flummoxed by a question I wasn’t even sure had been asked, stumped and dumb, unable to work out a plan or think of a direction to travel in. I didn’t know what to do. Hitchhike out of there? Drive away in a van every cop in central Florida was probably on the look-out for? Heading into the marsh and living off mullet and gator tail was about my only option. The skeeters began to trouble me. Mostly I let them have my blood, but I spanked a few dead. Seemed like I’d been living with my brain switched off and now a recognition stole over me not just of how fucked I was at the moment, but how fucked the normal weather was in Maceo’s world. Everything was returning to normal. The frogs squelched up their bleepy cries. Cicadas established a drone. A fish jumping for a bug out in the marsh made a squishy plop and I could have sworn it was my own heart’s sound. Squire came out onto the porch steps, rubbing his stubbly scalp, sleepy as a tick full of juice, and asked, “Where they all at?”

“Went to charter a plane.”

He gaped at me. “They gone? Ava and everybody?”

“Yeah.”

“We gotta go find ’em!” He tripped on the bottom step and reeled out sideways into the yard, catching a furl of the rusted screen to right himself. He was wearing jeans that still had creases in the legs and that stupid T-shirt with his face spray-painted on it Ava had bought him in Silver Springs. “Move it!” he said. “We gotta find ’em now!”

He got to scooting around the yard, little dashes this way and that, like a dog with the runs in a hurry to locate a good place to do his business. “Which way they go?” he asked.

“I told you. They went to charter a plane somewheres ’round New Smyrna.”

“They ain’t gone to New Smyrna! Dumb motherfucker! They ain’t going nowhere near New Smyrna!”

Usually somebody calls me a dumb motherfucker, I don’t have much of an argument. It’s not much different from saying that the grass is pretty green or the water looks wet. But Squire irked me with his agitated movement and his two round faces, the one on his chest smiling, the other scowling, both of them staring at me.

“Leave me be!” I walked off a few paces and gazed out into the marsh. With the passage of the storm, heat was coming back into the world. A drop of sweat trickled down my side. The air was slow and thick and humid. Something with curved black wings scythed across the low-hanging moon. A dullness swept over my thoughts, an oppressive, clammy feeling like the first sign of a fever.

“You just gonna stand there?” Squire grabbed onto my shoulder and spun me about. “We gotta get us a move on!”

“Don’t put your hands on me,” I said.

“Aw, Jesus!” He wheeled away from me and looked to the sky. Thank you for sticking me with this ignorant fucking hillbilly!

I refitted my eyes to the marsh, the stirring grasses and the moon-licked water to the east.

“Goddamn it!” Squire said. “You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ’em!”

It struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out, like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.

Squire went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, “What you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ’til we get popped?”

“We don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.”

“They been gone an hour… maybe more. You think they just circling out there?”

“Trust me, man. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Trust you?” I said. “Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.”

I stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.

“What do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass?” Squire said. “What the fuck’s it gonna take to get through?”

He punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.

“Don’t be doing that,” I said.

“It don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the fucking sunset, but this here”—he punched at me again—“that bothers you?”

A thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.

“You are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that?” Squire said. I heard him kick at the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: “Guess you must like the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.”

I turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass say my name in welcome.

• • •

You might not understand, but then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.

I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.

“Stand up straight, motherfucker!”

Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off twelve-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.

“Come thisaway!” he said.

I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.

“You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive.” Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.

The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.

“I saw you kill that boy,” he said. “Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?”

I didn’t have no answers for him.

“You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy.” Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. “One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.”

He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.

“Hey, Maceo!”

He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.

“Hands up! Who wants to die?” he said. “How you like them apples, huh?”

A queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred-dollar bills for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.

“I feel them police dogs panting,” Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting comfortable. “I feel that heat humming out along the road.”

It come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts, showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich, dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.

“Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ’em,” Rickey said. “Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have?” He spat again. “You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.”

I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.

A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.

The air horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.

Rickey spat up more blood.

Like they say, shit happens.

I figure that about tells it.

THE DRIVE-IN PUERTO RICO

Things went well for Colonel Galpa after the war. Indeed, they went so well that wherever he traveled he became the object of a celebration. Whether in the north of the country with its gloomy mountain villages, or in the volcanic central region, or in the jungles along the coast, his arrival was a signal for the townspeople to set aside their daily concerns and honor the national spirit that had produced such a remarkable hero. For ten years he rarely passed a night without a splendid hotel room, a surfeit of food and drink, and a beautiful woman for a companion, these the gifts a grateful citizenry offered in tribute to the defining act of his heroism, the shooting down of three enemy jets during the single air battle of the war with Temalagua. Sometimes, upon learning the specifics of the colonel’s heroism, strangers might suggest that a tally of three was insufficient to warrant such prolonged reverence; but their judgment failed to take into account the fact that the country was small, with a tradition poor in heroes (unmartyred ones, at any rate), and when viewed in this light, Colonel Galpa’s hour in the sky assumed Herculean proportions.

At one point nearly a dozen years after his moment of glory, the colonel returned to his parents’ home in San Pedro Sula, intending to settle there and assist his father in running the family flour mill. The mill was in financial straits, yet this was not Colonel Galpa’s sole motive for returning. He was weary of parties, of boring speeches and floral tributes offered by schoolgirls; he wanted a family of his own, and friends. The ordinary consolations of an ordinary life. But at the time the government was undergoing a crisis of confidence, and by promising that certain valuable contracts would be awarded to his father, the leaders of the party in power persuaded him to go back out onto the road so as to remind the people of their one actual achievement: the winning of a back-fence war. In truth, there were many—notably the owners of the bars and clubs and hotels frequented by the colonel—who would have been happier had he remained in San Pedro. Like the colonel, albeit for more venal reasons, they had reached the conclusion that enough was enough, and they frequently expressed the opinion that the colonel’s heroism must have been an aberration, that he was at heart a freeloader; yet none dared to voice such complaints in public, where they might have had some effect, and so, despite this attendant irony, due in large part to politics and inertia—estates often confused for one another—the colonel continued on his joyless rounds.

On occasion, someone unacquainted with the colonel would ask the identity of the slender graying man with the complexion of an Indio puro sitting quietly in a secluded corner of a noisy party, and when they were told this was the famous Mauricio Galpa, they might say, “What curious behavior for the guest of honor!” “Oh, the colonel’s simply tired,” would be the response. Or, “The colonel’s got a touch of dysentery.” Or perhaps the person to whom the comment had been directed would make a fist with his thumb extended and put the thumb to his lips, implying that the colonel had overindulged in drink. But the reality of the situation was that while Colonel Galpa had once exulted in his good fortune and availed himself of every pleasurable opportunity, he had come to the conclusion that there was something ghoulish about these quasi-ritualistic bacchanals inspired by the deaths of three men whose faces he had never seen. He felt a certain disquiet regarding his fame, and had taken to remembering the three men in his prayers; but since he was not a particularly religious sort, this merely exacerbated his emotional state and caused him to think of himself as a hypocrite.

In August of the millennial year, as he had done for the previous nineteen years, Colonel Galpa traveled to Puerto Morada on the Caribbean coast. Each August, bureaucrats from the capital who could not afford better would swarm into the town to take their vacations—vacations in name only, because they spent their days sitting on the porches of the little hotels along the beach, typing reports commissioned by their superiors who had fled to Cannes or Majorca or Buenos Aires to escape the heat. With the bureaucrats came the whores, hundreds of them from every corner of the country, and following the whores came the journalists, both groups seeking a drunken bureaucrat from whom they could extort something of value. From the government’s perspective, August in Puerto Morada was the perfect showcase for the colonel. There were any number of gatherings at which he might be feted, and usually one or two unoccupied journalists could be persuaded to feature him in a nostalgia piece. For these exact same reasons Colonel Galpa loathed visiting the town and always managed to arrive late at night, when no one was likely to notice him.

The hotel where the colonel stayed each August was a venerable two-story colonial of white stucco with a red tile roof, shaded by bougainvilleas and palms. When he had first checked in nineteen years before, he had been given a fine bedchamber and sitting room overlooking the beach; these days, however, he chose to occupy the smallest room on the ground floor facing inland; this was not a consequence of his diminished status, but due to the fact that it housed a considerable population of lizards, many of which crawled in over the palmetto fronds that drooped through the window. Wherever he spent the night, be it Puerto Morada or the capital or a village in the Miskitia, the colonel enjoyed sitting on his bed with a single lamp lit and watching the lizards that clung to the walls, their bright sides pulsing with breath. He had no scholarly interest in them; he could barely tell a skink from a chameleon. He liked them because they decorated his solitude without disturbing it. Over the years he had developed a peculiar affinity with them. When he entered the room they neither froze nor kept their distance as they might in the presence of another human being, but instead perched on his nightstand and ran across his feet and otherwise continued on their tremulous mosquito hunts. Though he was a practical man who rejected the animist traditions of his forefathers, he allowed himself to flirt with the notion that lizards might be spiritual functionaries whose purpose was to oversee the travels of those fated to be exiles in the country of their birth.

On this particular evening, Colonel Galpa’s attention was captivated by a large indigo lizard with delicate black markings on its face that from several feet away resembled the fanciful mask of a harlequin. When he examined it at close range, bending so that his head was level with its own, it stared back at him, unblinking and serene, its pupils expanding to cover nearly all the retinal surfaces, so that the eyes resembled tiny orange suns in total eclipse. He derived from the stare a startling sense of energy and presence, its intensity such as one might receive from looking into the eyes of a child. Though he assumed this to be a misapprehension, the result of fatigue, the longer he regarded the lizard, the sharper this impression became.

“Who are you?” he asked playfully.

The lizard craned its neck toward him, and the colonel felt as if a hook had snagged in the silk of his soul and was tugging gently, seeking to draw him forth, like a thread drawn through the eye of a needle. Dizzy, he straightened, and felt instantly steadier. Still curious, he bent again to the lizard, and again was possessed by the sense that he was in danger of spilling out of his body. A checkup, he thought, might be in order. The dizziness could be a symptom of some difficulty with the inner ear. With a last glance at the lizard, he switched off the light and got into bed, where he lay awake for a while watching the frilly shadow of a palmetto frond nodding on the white sheets. The idle churning of his thoughts dredged up recent memories, trivial plans, old preoccupations. He recalled a woman with whom he had danced in Trujillo; he decided that after breakfast he would return to his room and unplug his phone; and he saw a sectioned-off panel of deep blue sky, sunlight dazzling the scuffmarks on a plastic canopy, and felt an immense vibration. He closed his eyes against this vision, concentrated on the darkness behind his lids, but did not pray.

• • •

In the morning, before even the most zealous of the bureaucrats were awake, Colonel Galpa set forth along the beach, heading for the Drive-In Puerto Rico. It was his favorite place in Puerto Morada, a bar-restaurant constructed of lime green concrete block, three walls and a metal awning that was rolled down each night to make a fourth, with a service bar and a jukebox inside, a room out back where the owner lived, and a wooden deck out front, furnished with red picnic tables, where one could sit shaded by coco palms, and gaze out across the Caribbean. The place had no discernable connection with either drive-ins or Puerto Rico, except for the fact that it faced eastward toward that captive island, and thus most people assumed that the name reflected the idiosyncratic nature of its proprietor, Tomas Quu, an elderly Miskitia Indian reputed to be an hechicero, one who listened to the spirits and could work small charms. A wizened man with a long gray braid and a face as wrinkled and dark as an avocado, he had once been a soldier and had, according to rumor, performed his duty with exceptional valor. On occasion the colonel tried to draw him out on his experiences, but Tomas was not inclined to speak on the subject. That morning the old man was on his knees inside the restaurant, painting a corner of the mural that spread across the rear wall.

This mural, the work of many years, depicted in bright, primitive imagery the history of the country from earliest times—Mayan pyramids and minor conquistadors; Yankee traders and soldiers of fortune, the most famous of whom had been executed in front of Santa Maria del Onda, the cathedral that shadowed the heart of the town; the white ships of the fruit company that had controlled the politics of the region; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the great hurricane of 1998, and so on. The thing the colonel liked best about the mural was that his role in history was represented by a tiny gray airplane suspended in a lozenge of turquoise, with no reference to missiles or enemy aircraft. The thing he liked least was that on each successive visit he discovered that Tomas had added horrid details: a young girl curled up around the syringe protruding from her arm; the bodies of several dead children strung up like fish and a man masked by a bandana standing proudly beside them, his rifle ported. Emblems of the country’s recent unfortunate leap into the modern world. To his surprise, the colonel saw that Tomas had painted a lizard on an unexploited section of the wall, in the lower right-hand corner, a lizard very like the specimen that had caught his attention the night before, indigo, with delicate black markings and orange eyes. Beneath the lizard was an uncompleted face, bearded and pale, with one glaring eye and a sketched-in eyebrow—the space where the second eye should have been was occupied by the lizard’s tail. Tomas rarely included the face of a specific man or woman in the mural, yet this had the look of a portrait in progress.

“Oye, Tomas!” The colonel took a seat on the deck. “Por favor, un café!”

The old man glanced toward the colonel and shaded his eyes. He waved and spoke to someone in the shadows. Then he went back to his painting. Soon a barefoot brown-skinned girl wearing an embroidered blouse and a long red skirt brought coffee and a sweet roll, and the colonel sat happily watching combers rolling in from the deep green swells beyond Punta Manabique, regarding the palm-lined ochre curve of the beach and the town set along it, the stucco and tile of the tourist places, the grim eminence of the cathedral thrusting up from the central plaza, and the rusted tin roofs of Barrio Clarin, in front of which a small herd of piebald cows had strayed onto the sand and were nudging at mounds of seaweed in hopes of uncovering something edible.

When Tomas quit work on the mural he joined the colonel at his table and the colonel told him that he had recently seen a lizard resembling the one in the mural.

“How odd,” said Tomas. “For there are no such lizards. It is a magical creature born in the imagination.”

“My imagination… or yours?”

“We are of the same blood. Our imaginations sing the same song. What is in my mind, lives also in yours, needing only to be awakened.”

“Well, there is at least one flesh-and-blood lizard. I saw it clinging to the wall of my room last night.”

“One is very like none,” Tomas said. “There is only the slightest difference between these values. The difference between the ordinary and the magical. It is easy to mistake the two.”

The colonel decided that Tomas was playing with him, let the subject drop, and asked who the half-completed face was intended to represent.

“Satan.” Tomas spat over the railing to indicate distaste.

“So…” The colonel leaned back and tilted his face to the sun. “Satan is a gringo, eh?”

“Pale, yes. A gringo, no,” said Tomas. “But like you he is a colonel.”

Colonel Galpa saw that the old man was not joking and asked him to explain.

“Surely you have heard of him?” Tomas asked, and when the colonel said he had not, the old man said, “It is too pleasant a day to speak of such things.”

A romantic song, strings and guitars underscoring a passionate tenor, issued from the jukebox inside the restaurant, and the girl who had served them could be seen dancing by herself, her head inclined to one side, holding her long skirt up to her ankles. The sun had risen high enough to illuminate the crates of lime and orange and grape and strawberry soda stacked beside the jukebox, causing the bottles to glow with gemmy brilliance.

“I know what you are thinking,” Tomas said. “You are thinking how beautiful women are when they are sad, and how that sadness might give way to something more beautiful yet if a man with the proper respect and temper were to happen along. Be wary, my friend. Let a woman wound you with her sadness, and you will carry that wound until the day of your death.”

“When was the last time you were with a woman?” the colonel asked.

The old man squinted at the glittering sea. “It was nineteen eighty-three. The summer the army went up into Olanchito. When all the drug dealers came running out of the mountains, she came with them. She stayed five months.” He gave a mournful shake of his head. “Your way is best, my friend. A few days, a week, then adios.”

“You’re a cynic, Tomas,” the colonel said; and Tomas said, “Not at all. I have reached a venerable age and am secure in the things I know. Yet like a fool I fall in love every day. I am merely too old to be a consummate fool. It is you who are the cynic.”

“I?” The colonel laughed. “First you accuse me of being a romantic, then a cynic. Surely there is a contradiction involved?”

“Perhaps ‘cynic’ is not the correct word. Though I can think of no better word for someone so obdurate as to deny the tradition that bred him.”

The old man was referring, the colonel knew, to their Indian blood and to his skeptical attitude toward Tomas’s mystical bent, his magical interpretation of the world, a view he believed that Colonel Galpa would do well to adopt.

“Must we always argue about this?” the colonel asked.

“No,” said Tomas, giving the colonel’s hand a fatherly pat. “I merely find it amusing to do so.”

• • •

The colonel spent the day reading in his room; the telephone rang on several occasions but he did not pick it up. At twilight he lay on his bed and watched the rain-swept peaks in the west darken from gray to a soft purple. Once night had settled over the town, he dressed and went forth to do his duty, to mingle with the whores and journalists and bureaucrats who would be gathered at the Club Atomica, a discotheque on the edge of Barrio Clarin.

By the time he arrived the dance floor was overflowing with a confusion of men and women whose clumsy movements made them appear to be struggling to keep their feet, as if dazed by the flashing lights and deafening music. He found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka rocks from a pretty girl wearing a mesh blouse through which her breasts were visible. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. On turning he was pleased to see Jerry Gammage, an American journalist whom he found generally agreeable, apart from Gammage’s habit of addressing him as “Maury.”

“Hey, Maury!” Gammage clapped him on the shoulder. “They still got you out riding the circuit, huh?”

The colonel shrugged as if to say, “What else?” and had a sip of his drink. He watched Gammage, a big sloppy blond man in jeans and a faded “Just Say No” T-shirt, lean across the counter and flirt with the barmaid, making a clownish face when she playfully pushed him away.

“Every fucking year this place gets a little more like Vegas,” Gammage said, settling beside the colonel. “It’s a damn shame. But what the hell. These are the end times. Can’t sweat the small stuff, right?” He clinked glasses with the colonel and drank. Judging by the slackness of his features and the expansiveness of his gestures, Gammage was a good ways along the road to being very drunk.

“Got any hot flashes for me?” Gammage asked, wobbling on his stool. “Any pews that’s nit to frint?”

“I saw a manta ray near the point this morning,” the colonel said. “It may have been the shadow from a school of mackerel, but I don’t think so.”

Gammage drank. “I’d love to write it. Beats the hell out of shit like Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing. Wha’cha think about all that, anyway?”

“About what?”

“About Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing.” Gammage leaned close, as if inspecting the colonel’s face for unsightly flaws. “Aw, man! Where you been? It’s the big story out of the capital.”

“Six priests were murdered in the capital?”

“And found with their brains missing, no less. If we luck out, we’ll get a shot at seeing the man s’posed to be responsible tonight. Word has it he’s in town.”

“The man who killed them? Why isn’t he in jail?”

“Because”—Gammage leaned close again—“he’s a fucking hero. Not like you, Maury. This guy’s your basic New World Order hero. A specialist in what’s being billed as ‘internal security.’ These honchos don’t get the free lunch treatment, but they know the secret handshake. And nobody fucks with ’em.” He signaled the barmaid with his empty glass. “I don’t know why I’m giving you grief. You’re one of the good guys. I’m just tired of this shit. You come to expect it in Salvador, Guatemala, Panama. But somehow I thought this place would be immune.”

The colonel thought of the new addition to Tomas’s mural. “What is this man’s name?” he asked, but Gammage did not appear to have heard.

“Y’know”—he accepted a fresh drink from the barmaid—“I’m ready to become a card-carrying freako. Know what I’m saying? Get my hand mirror, stand out on the desert at noon and heliograph the fucking mother ship.”

The colonel was accustomed to Gammage’s despairing tone, but this outburst appeared to signal a new and unhealthy level of disillusionment.

“Speak of the devil,” said Gammage. “Here’s the man of the hour now.”

Hector Canizales, the portly owner of the cantina, was pushing his way through the crowd, and in his wake, walking with immense dignity, as if he were the actual owner and Hector merely a flunky, came a pale heavyset man resplendent in a dark blue uniform that bore a colonel’s insignia. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the club; his hair was black and oily, combed straight back from a forehead so high and smooth and white, like a slab of marble, it seemed to warrant an inscription, and his thick eyebrows were so dark by contrast with the pallor of his skin, they appeared more decorative than functional. His face was squarish and had a soft, hand-carved look; his nose was aquiline, and his eyes large, set widely apart, and his full mouth put Colonel Galpa in mind of portraits he had seen of the old Spanish court—the mouth of a voluptuary, vaguely predatory and given to expressions of contempt. More to the point, he had no doubt that this was the face Tomas was painting on the wall of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.

“Colonel Mauricio Galpa,” said Hector, mopping his brow with a paisley handkerchief. “Allow me to present Colonel Felix Carbonell.”

“Mucho gusto,” said Carbonell, shaking the colonel’s hand. “I am honored.”

“Wow,” said Gammage, gesturing with his drink. “This is fucking massive. The veritable confluence of past and future.”

As he stood there enveloped by the overpowering sweetness of Carbonell’s cologne, the colonel was mesmerized by his opposite number’s face; despite its calm expression and regularity of feature, he derived from it a sense of tension, as if there were another face beneath it, one fiercely animated and straining to shatter the pale mask that held it in check. Though he had never before met the man, he had met with his reputation. The name Carbonell was associated with the worst excesses of the regime. With brutality and terror and slaughter.

“You might even say it’s kinda mythical,” Gammage went on. “Or do I mean mystical? Whatever. I’m talking the meeting of the twain, y’know. Yin and yang. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.”

Carbonell’s eyes slid toward Gammage.

“I’d love a shot of this.” Gammage gave Carbonell a jolly smile. “You do show up in photographs, don’tcha?”

“Excuse me!” A slim brunette in slacks and a white blouse grabbed Gammage by the elbow and yanked him away from the two colonels. “Jerry, I need you over here!”

Carbonell watched them disappear into the crowd; when he turned back to the colonel, he said. “Drunks, gringos, journalists. The new trinity.”

Colonel Galpa felt a gulf between them, as palpable in its own right as he might feel standing at the edge of a deep canyon, struck by a chill vacancy inspired by the thought of a misstep. He pretended to be amused by Carbonell’s comment and sipped his vodka.

“Well,” Carbonell said after an awkward interval. “It’s been a pleasure, Colonel. But if you will pardon me, there is a lady in the back who demands my attention.”

They exchanged polite bows, then Carbonell went off with Canizales, who had stood by all the while, toward the rear of the establishment. The colonel finished his vodka and ordered another, wondering how much longer he needed to stay in order to satisfy the requirements of duty. He did not expend a great deal of thought upon Carbonell; he had known other brutal men during his days of service, and though he disapproved of their actions, he had accepted the fact that history seemed to require them. Three drinks, he decided. He would stay for three drinks. Maybe four. Perhaps it would not be too late to call his father.

“Colonel Galpa?” The slim brunette woman who had dragged Gammage off now took the barstool beside him. She was somewhat older than he had thought. Forty, perhaps. Attractive in a quiet way. Framed by her dark hair, her face was kept from being a perfect oval by a longish chin. With her small mouth and large brown eyes, she put him in mind of one of his high school teachers, a pretty, no-nonsense woman who had rarely smiled.

“I’m Margery Emmons,” she said. “CNN.”

The colonel saw his immediate future. An hour or two under hot lights, questions, a camera, an experience that would ultimately be reduced to a ten-second sound bite. Unpleasant, but it would thrill his nephews.

“I’d like to speak with you about Battalion Three-Sixteen,” Margery Emmons said.

That name put a notch in the colonel’s expectations and alerted him to danger. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t help you.”

“You’ve never heard of Battalion Three-Sixteen?”

“You must realize, Miss Emmons, I’ve…”

“Margery… please.”

“Margery. You must realize that I have not been active in the affairs of my country since the war. Since my war. I am as you see. An exhibit, a public relations opportunity.”

“But you must have some knowledge of Three-Sixteen.”

“I probably know less than you. I know, of course, that they were closely involved with the contras during the eighties, taking their orders from the Americans, and that they have been accused of atrocities. That is all I know.” The colonel made his delivery more pointed. “As it was your country that commissioned these atrocities, you might do well to ask your questions in Washington. Information of this sort is widely disseminated there.”

“I hear you, colonel. But this is where the bodies are buried.”

He acknowledged the statement with a shrug and a “Yes, well…”

“If you knew anything, would you tell me?”

“That would depend on the circumstances under which you asked your questions.” He had not intended this to sound flirtatious, but now that it was out there, he could not come up with anything to say that would reduce its impact.

She smiled. “The question for me, then, would be, ‘Do I believe you know something that would be worth my creating such a circumstance?’”

“Probably not,” he said.

She patted down her hair, an unnecessary gesture—it was held by a gold barrette, not a strand out of place—and stood. “I’d better see to Jerry. I left him out back. He’s not feeling too well.” She extended her hand and he shook it, saying, “Good luck with your story.”

The colonel turned back to his drink, to a consideration of the woman. Margery. Perhaps, he thought, he had intended to flirt with her.

“Oh, colonel!”

She had stopped a few feet away.

“I’m staying at the Loma Linda.” Once again she smiled. “In case you remember something.”

• • •

When the colonel returned to his hotel that evening, he found the indigo lizard clinging to the wall beside the bathroom mirror. A little tipsy—it had been a while since he’d had four vodkas in such a short time—he put his face close to the lizard and asked, “Are you magic?”

The lizard did not appear to notice him.

“Do you eat flies, or do you consume?…” The colonel could not think of a word to finish his sentence; then he said, “Light. Do you consume light and breathe out fire? No?” He looked at himself in the mirror, at his ridiculous uniform and gilt-braided hat. His tired eyes. “To hell with you,” he said. He bent to the sink and splashed water onto his face; on straightening he discovered that the lizard had crawled onto the surface of the mirror and was staring at him. The stare affected the colonel profoundly, causing him to perceive his own woeful condition. Alone except for a lizard; half-drunk in a bathroom; on an endless fool’s errand. He resisted the easy allure of self-pity and stood rigid, almost at attention, until the feeling had passed. The lizard continued to watch him, and the colonel grew annoyed with those unblinking orange eyes. He clapped his hands, trying to drive it away, but it remained motionless, lifeless as a rubber toy. Its stare made him feel weak and unfocused, thoughts slopping about inside his skull, and he lifted his hand, intending to knock it from its perch. But before he could act, a curious lightness invaded his body, enfeebling him, and a burst of orange radiance blinded him, and for a moment, scarcely more than a second or two, he saw an enormous figure looming above. A darkly complected man wearing a hat, one hand upraised. His vision cleared and he felt once again the weight of flesh and bone; he saw his reflection in the mirror. A befuddled little man in a silly hat, standing with his hand upraised.

The lizard was gone.

The colonel hurriedly undressed and switched off the lights and slipped beneath the sheets. He could not put from mind the absurd notion that he had seen himself briefly from the lizard’s perspective; he recalled the feeling of dizzy instability he had derived from looking into the lizard’s eyes, and wondered if the two experiences had been connected. But what did this speculation imply? That somehow his soul had been trapped for an instant inside the lizard’s skin? Even more absurd. And yet he could think of nothing else to explain such an extreme disassociation. Though the colonel did not subscribe to a view of creation that accepted explanations of this kind, neither did he demand logic of the world, and he refused to let the experience ruin his sleep. He closed his eyes, said a hasty prayer for the souls of the three pilots he had shot from the sky, and soon drifted off into a black peace that lasted well into the day.

• • •

The colonel did not arrive at the Drive-In Puerto Rico until nine o’clock the next morning. Most of the tables on the deck were occupied. At one sat Margery Emmons; she was talking to a thin, balding man in a pale yellow guayabera who now and then cast anxious glances to the side. Her eyes slid toward the colonel as he took a seat in the corner of the deck closest to the water, but she did not smile, and gave no other sign of recognition. The colonel held a tiny mental burial for the minor fantasy he had conjured concerning her, and had a few sips of the strong black coffee that Tomas’s girl, unbidden, brought to his table.

Beyond the break the heavy swells glittered in patches, as if irradiated by the backs of glowing swimmers threatening to surface as they pushed their way in toward shore, shattering into white plumes of spray that rose and fell with the abandon of wild horses, and to the east, Punta Manabique stretched out into darker waters like a long green witch’s finger with a palm tree at its tip, its trunk forced by the wind to grow almost horizontal to the ground, so that at the distance it resembled a curving talon. The amiable chatter of the other patrons seemed part of nature, a random counterpoint to the percussive surf. A sweetish smell was borne on the north wind, overwhelming the scents of beans, eggs, and sausage, and the colonel imagined that a great ship filled with spices had been breached just over the horizon, its hull leaking streams of cinnamon and myrrh. The day held too much beauty for his troubled cast of mind, and he gazed down into his coffee, at the trembling incomplete reflection of his face, an image perfect in its summation of his mood. When Tomas dropped into the seat opposite him, the colonel asked him immediately about the lizard.

“You have seen it again… or another like it?” asked Tomas in a guileless tone that caused the colonel to suspect that Tomas knew something he himself did not; but then he thought that even if Tomas knew nothing, he would wish to give the impression that he did.

He told Tomas of his experiences the previous evening; when he had finished his story, Tomas said, “Hmm… curious.”

“‘Curious’?” said the colonel. “I expected more of a reaction. A lecture on spirit lizards, perhaps.”

“There are no such things. At least not that I’m aware of.”

“What is it, then?” the colonel asked after a pause.

“The lizard?” Tomas made a casual gesture, writing with his forefinger a sequence of quick little loops in the air. “How would I—a poor deluded hechicero—understand such a phenomenon? I think you should seek the help of a real expert. Perhaps there is someone at the Botanical Station who will advise you.”

The colonel refused to rise to this bait. “You painted a lizard on your wall like the one I saw. A lizard of a type neither of us have seen before. Can you explain it?”

“I was kneeling by a corner of the mural, trying to think what I should put in the space directly above the space where I intended to paint the face of Satan. It came into my mind to paint a lizard. An indigo lizard. With orange eyes. I recall that I felt rather strongly about this decision. Certain that it was correct. Since my artistic choices do not usually incur such a feeling of certitude, I made note of the fact. Apart than that… the world is replete with these strange correspondences. Who can guess their cause or their meaning?”

The girl set a plate of fried eggs, tortillas, and peppers in front of the colonel and asked Tomas if wanted something.

“Aguardiente,” he told her.

“Drinking so early?” The colonel tore off a piece of tortilla and dipped it in yolk.

“Early for one is late for another. All my life I have been a sober man. Now, at life’s end, I wish to be drunk. There are things to be learned from both conditions.”

“You’ll outlive us all, Tomas,” said the colonel, chewing.

“You speak as if you know, yet you know nothing.”

Tomas seemed aggravated; the colonel let the subject drop.

“I’m certain there’s no connection between the lizard I saw and the one you painted,” he said. “But nonetheless…”

“Do you know why you have come here this morning? You want me to tell you that the lizard is magical. It climbed down from my wall and sought you out. It is a message, a supernatural being compressed into the shape of a message. It has great import in your life. It is a sending from Oxala or Jesus or some primitive black shape whose name has the sound of a bubble squeezed up through jungle water from some terrible netherworld. It wants you to see yourself as it sees you. Henceforth, you must always give homage to this lizard and the god who sent it. That is what you want me to tell you. Because hearing such shit will make you believe nothing happened to you last night. That it was a dream, a mental slip. Then you’ll be comfortable. You’ll be able to ignore it.”

The girl handed Tomas a glass and an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. He poured a stiff measure. Startled by his vehemence, the colonel could not think what to say. At a nearby table a blond girl in a navy blue T-shirt with the word “Wolverines” printed on the chest collapsed in laughter and shrilled, “I just can’t believe you said that!” Margery, the colonel saw, had departed.

Tomas drank, let out a sigh, wiped his mouth on his forearm.

“I apologize if I’ve angered you,” said the colonel.

The old man made a popping sound with his lips and shook his head sadly. “When I came to Puerto Morada many years ago, I liked this place.” He tapped the table top. “This right here. This stretch of beach, I liked it very much. I knew I had to build my restaurant here. It was simple as that. I did not say to myself, This is a magic place, and if I build here, it will be a magic restaurant. Magic is an unwieldy word. It fails to communicate its true meaning. It has come to mean great works. A system of spells, a logic of supernatural connections. I am an hechicero, not a magician. I have no system, no history of great works. I see things, I feel things. I sometimes recognize certain sights and feelings that may have slightly more significance than certain others. Because I have done this for many years, on occasion I can create small effects. So small you might not notice them. But I cannot paint a lizard and cause it to come alive. I cannot ask it to seek you out and make you see through its eyes. If I played any part in what happened to you, I was acting without intent or forethought. This does not mean, however, that what happened was not magical.”

Two small boys ran past on the beach, yelling and waving their arms, chasing a skeletal yellow pariah dog that was so weak on its legs, it barely could outrun them; it stopped to catch its wind, panting, its body curled, gazing with desolate eyes back at its pursuers, then loped off as the boys drew near.

“It may have no importance,” said Tomas. “This lizard of yours. It may signify nothing. The energy of the world will sometimes express itself in singular ways and for no apparent reason. But you must try to understand it. It is yours alone to understand.”

The colonel thought that the old man’s advice about going to the Botanical Station was the most salient thing he had said. He wished now he had never mentioned the lizard. Tomas would likely go on at length about the subject of magic, its subtle nature, and the colonel did not want to be rude. But Tomas only looked about at the tables, at the bar, and said, “Tell me, Mauricio. Have you ever had a place that was yours? Not a place owned, or a place occupied. I’m speaking about one that called to your heart, your soul. One where you felt you absolutely belonged.”

“Not for a long time, certainly.”

Tomas poured another glass of aguardiente. “But you like my restaurant, eh? The place itself, not just the food and drink.”

“I come here as often as I can, don’t I? Of course I like it. You’re a fortunate man to have such a beautiful home.” As an afterthought, the colonel asked, “Why did you name it the Drive-In Puerto Rico?”

“The words have a pretty sound.” Tomas touched the edge of the colonel’s plate. “Your eggs are cold.”

• • •

The Botanical Station, operated by Princeton University, was located some miles from the center of town. Several dozen acres of plantation were enclosed by a hurricane fence and centered by a long, low building of pale brown concrete block, topped by a shingle roof edged in darker brown. Air conditioners were mounted beneath each window. The glass panes spotless, the lawn out front manicured. A healthy-looking parrot sat on a ring perch beside the door, clucking gently to itself. Automatic sprinklers whirled. It was so thoroughly American a place, everything so shiny and neat, that when the colonel stepped into the frosty interior, he felt that he had crossed a border illegally, bringing with him the dust of a poorer land. He pictured the beads of sweat on his brow popping like champagne bubbles.

He presented himself at the reception desk, inquiring if there was anyone about who had some expertise in herpetology, and moments later he was standing in an office, leaning over the shoulder of one Dr. Timothy Hicks, a sunburned young man with shoulder-length brown hair, looking at pictures of lizards on a computer screen.

“See anything?” Dr. Hicks asked.

“They all look the same,” said the colonel. “No… wait. There. That one there.”

On the screen was a photograph of a lizard whose shape resembled the one that had been haunting the colonel’s hotel room.

“Norops bicarum.” Dr. Hicks punched the keys and the photo vanished, then reappeared magnified several times over. “One of the anoles.”

Reading the information printed beneath the photo, the colonel was disappointed to learn that norops bicarum grew to lengths of only five inches.

“The one I saw was considerably larger,” he said. “Eight or nine inches long. And it was indigo in color.”

“Solid indigo?”

“Yes… except for some black markings around the face.”

Dr. Hicks tapped the side of his keyboard. “Well, I’m stumped. If you can catch it, I’d love to have a look at it. There are thirty-six known varieties of anole in this part of Central America. Who knows? Maybe you’ve found number thirty-seven.”

He gestured toward a chair on the other side of the desk, and the colonel took a seat.

“What do lizards see?” the colonel asked.

“They have excellent vision. They see colors… it’s very much like human vision. This fellow here is monoscopic. His eyes are set so that he sees in different directions. Two distinct visual fields. Some chameleons are able to see both ahead of them and behind them at the same time. But some types of anole have stereoscopic vision. They see a single image.”

Disappointed that he had not resolved the mystery, the colonel thanked Dr. Hicks, promising to bring the lizard to him if he could catch it, and returned to his hotel. He plumped up his pillows and lay on the bed, opened the book he had been reading, but his mind would not fit onto the page, and after a few minutes he set the book down. Loneliness at that moment struck him as less a passing condition than as an environment in which he was trapped. The sounds of life from without—traffic, the cries of vendors—seemed to arise from a great distance, and he had the thought that if he were to shout, no one would hear him. For an antidote, he picked up his cell phone, a recent acquisition that he rarely used, and called his father’s house in San Pedro Sula.

His sister answered in a strained voice. “Dígame!”

“Hola, Teresa!”

“Oh… Mauricio.”

“How are things?”

“Fine,” she said.

In the background he heard a commotion.

“It sounds as if you’ve got company.”

“Is that how it sounds? Like I’m entertaining?” Teresa scoffed at the notion. “That’s right. I’m always entertaining. Fabulous guests. Champagne brunches. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Is there something wrong?”

A brief silence. “How can you ask that question? Oh, I forgot. You’re never here. You don’t know the unending joy of our life.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Where shall I start? Your father. Do you know he’s running around with a twenty-two-year-old woman? Una puta sucia! He brings her here. To our mother’s house. He carries on in front of your nephews. And your nephews…” She moved the receiver away from her mouth and shouted at someone to be quiet. “Your nephews. They’re doing wonderfully. Here. I’ll let them tell you themselves.”

A second later, a sullen boyish voice said, “What do you want?”

“Emilio?”

Silence.

“Are you being difficult with your mother?”

“Fuck yourself,” Emilio said.

Immediately thereafter, Teresa said, “Do you see how well he’s doing? He’s a drug addict, Mauricio! He’s like you. He’s hardly ever here. And when he does come home, it’s only to steal money for his cocaine! And your other nephew… your precious Pepe! He told me the other day that it is his ambition to become a homosexual. His ambition! God knows, I do not judge those people, but I don’t believe that homosexuality should be an ambition!” A pause during which he heard her breathing hard; then, her voice sugary, she asked, “So how are you? Where are you?”

“Puerto Morada,” he said. “Listen, Teresa. I’m sorry things aren’t going well. I’ll try to get back home soon.”

“No, please! Not on our account. It would be criminal to interrupt your world tour.”

“You know I’m not doing this by choice.”

“You’ve been away twenty years, and you say it’s not by choice? That’s a lifetime, Mauricio. Twenty years. I married, had children. My husband died. Mother died, and our father grew old. You don’t know any of it. Just the dates. The birthdays, the funerals. Now and then you get lonely and you’ll call or drop in for a visit and pretend you’re part of our family. But you’re not… you’re a stranger. A ghost who haunts us at Christmas and Easter.”

“You know why I’m…” he began.

“Don’t tell me it’s the business! It can’t be just the business that’s kept you away so long.”

Resentful, yet at the same time knowing there was some truth to Teresa’s words, that his own indulgent nature had been in play, the colonel said nothing.

“I have to go. I have things…” Teresa broke off; then she said, “I love you, Mauricio. But I hardly know you. I… I’m sorry.”

• • •

After hanging up, the colonel sat on the edge of his bed, unable to clear his sister’s words from mind. A ghost. It was an apt image. While struggling with this new conception of his relationship with his family, he noticed the indigo lizard on the wall above the bathroom door; he was so depressed, he could not rouse himself to attempt its capture. The light dimmed; scattered raindrops began to fall. He lay down and let the seething of the rain on the palmetto fronds lull him to sleep. Shortly before three o’clock that afternoon he was wakened by a pounding on his door. “Who is it?” he called.

“Maury! Let me in!”

When he opened the door, Jerry Gammage piled into the room, followed by Margery Emmons. They both began talking at once.

“Man, I need your help…”

“I’m sorry to intrude…”

Margery succeeded in outvoicing Gammage. “Jerry’s in some trouble.”

“I think they mighta spotted me on the beach,” Gammage said.

“Who spotted you?” asked the colonel.

“Carbonell’s men. They’re trying to kill me.”

“What possible reason…”

“I’ll explain everything, I promise,” Margery said. “Will you let us stay here for a while?”

“I know I got no papers on you, Maury,” Gammage said. “But I’m in the shit.”

The colonel closed the door and indicated that they should sit; they perched side-by-side on the foot of the bed, gazing at him like anxious children.

“Why does Carbonell want to kill you?” he asked.

“Battalion Three-Sixteen.” Gammage twisted his mouth into a gloomy shape. “I got tape, pictures… everything.”

Margery shot the colonel a guilty look, but did not speak.

“Somehow they got wind of it,” Gammage went on. “They been beating the bushes for me since yesterday afternoon. I can’t risk the airport. I’d never get past the checkpoints on the highway. Basically, I’m fucked.”

“You have this material with you?” asked the colonel.

Gammage nodded.

“Perhaps if you surrendered it…”

“I got pictures of Carbonell doing horror movie shit with men, women, little kids. He’s twenty years younger, but you can tell it’s him. He posed for the shots. The guy’s fucking Dracula. He’s not gonna let me bounce.”

“He’s not exaggerating,” Margery said. “I’ve seen some of the pictures.”

The colonel asked Gammage what he planned to do.

“Live through the evening,” said Gammage. “Rancher I know in Choluteca owes me. Guy’s got a private plane. Little single-engine job. If I can smuggle myself to Choluteca, I think he’ll fly me down to Bluefields.”

The colonel paced across the room, sat on the arm of the chair by the window, gazing out through the palmetto fronds at the empty sunstruck street. His thoughts moved like sentries back and forth between two points.

“What’s wrong?” Margery asked.

“You’ve put me in a difficult position,” he said. “By helping you, I’ll be committing treason.”

The room seemed to hold a faint humming; off along the street, a truck engine turned over, startling in its vulgar amplitude, like a beast clearing its throat. Then Gammage said, “I understand what you’re saying, Maury, but what Carbonell did, that goes way past treason.”

“These are citizens of your own country we’re talking about,” Margery said. “Innocents. Tortured and macheted. Buried alive.”

“I know!” The colonel stood, turning his back on them. “I know things like this have gone on. I…”

“They’re going on now,” Margery said.

“…I don’t condone them. But what will happen once you tell your story for the cameras? Will Carbonell be disgraced? Executed? Perhaps. But what will happen to those who sanctioned these abuses? Nothing. The world will look down their noses at us as they always have. Soon the story will be forgotten, and the men who gave Carbonell his license to slaughter, they will remain untouched.”

“I’m not going to try and kid you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I can’t guarantee anything. But even if it’s just Carbonell goes in the crapper, that’s gotta be a good thing, right?”

Men’s voices out in the hall, challenging, peremptory. A heavy knocking at a nearby door.

“Not condoning something,” Margery said. “Is that your idea of a moral stance? I don’t believe it. I believe you’re a good man.”

The colonel allowed himself a polite chuckle.

“If I’m off-base,” she said, “now’s the time to prove it.”

She was trying to manipulate him, but given the circumstances, that was forgivable. “‘Moral stance’ is an easy term to sling about when one’s own morality is not at issue,” he said.

He was not going to let Carbonell have them, and not merely because Gammage was his friend and Margery someone to whom he was attracted. It was personal between him and Carbonell. Even if the man were innocent of the crimes Gammage claimed for him, his cologne was offensive, his manner pompous, his smile the emblem of a vain and supercilious nature. The colonel’s distaste for him was funded as much by chemistry as by principle, and he wondered if all his life’s decisions had been informed by such trivial impulses.

“Go into the bathroom,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.”

Once they had sequestered themselves in the bathroom, the colonel waited on the bed. The fabric of his decision was paper-thin, but he knew it would hold. He had felt this same frail decisiveness during the war, and he had always maintained his resolve even in the face of battle. But his battles had been fought in the service of his country, and he was not certain in whose service he was preparing now to fight. His decision satisfied him, however. He was calm and controlled. Just as he had been when he flew a sortie.

A knock came at the door; a commanding voice called out.

“Momentito!” The colonel shrugged into his uniform jacket and opened the door. Standing before him was a squat black man wearing captain’s bars on his fatigues, sweat beading his forehead and shining in the creases of his neck. When he recognized the colonel, his stony expression faltered.

“Your pardon, Colonel,” he said. “But I have orders to search all the rooms.”

“I am alone,” said Colonel Galpa. “It will not be necessary.”

A soldier bearing an automatic rifle moved up behind the captain, who said, with more than a touch of desperation, “I intend no disrespect, sir, but I have my orders.”

The colonel threw open the door, permitting the captain to see the entire room. “Are you satisfied?”

The captain gestured at the soldier behind him. “Sir, you must allow my man to inspect the room. Someone may have obtained entrance while you were out.”

“I have been here all afternoon. It’s as I told you. I am alone.”

Letting his hand drop to his sidearm, the captain composed his features and said, “This is a matter of national security, Colonel. You must understand my position. I have no choice but to insist.”

“What is your name, captain?”

The captain straightened, squared his shoulders, but looked on the verge of tears. “José Evangelista. Please, sir. Will you stand aside?”

“Very well. But be quick!”

Reluctantly, his heart racing, he stepped back and the soldier, a mestizo, barely more than a boy with a wispy mustache and curly hair, entered the room and inspected the closet, poked under the bed.

“There,” said the colonel. “You have done your duty. Now will you give me my privacy?”

The soldier bent an ear toward the bathroom door, then gestured excitedly at it; the captain drew his sidearm and trained it on the colonel.

“Are you insane? What do you think you’re doing?” The colonel went face-to-face with the captain. “I promise… you will regret this!”

Crouching, his rifle at the ready, the soldier flung open the bathroom door, and Margery, who was standing behind it, dripping wet, her hair turbaned in a towel, holding another towel to cover herself, let out a shriek. The soldier recoiled, staring open-mouthed at her.

“Ay, Dios!” said Captain Evangelista.

“Are the needs of national security now satisfied?” the colonel asked him. “Then perhaps you would be so kind as to leave us alone.”

The captain barked an order and the soldier hurried from the room. Offering florid apology, the captain, too, retreated. Colonel Galpa slammed the door behind him. Margery started to speak, but the colonel put a finger to his lips, silencing her, and listened at the door. Once assured that the soldiers had left, he went to her and said, “They will make a report, and it’s very possible someone else will be sent to investigate.”

“What should we do?”

“If they’re suspicious, and we must assume they are, they will watch the hotel. There’s nothing we can do… not until dark.”

“The coast clear?” Gammage poked his head out from the bathroom. Fully clothed, he too, was wet.

“For the moment,” said the colonel.

“Do you really believe they’ll send someone else?” Margery asked.

“Considering the circumstances… yes.”

She finished tucking the edge of the towel beneath her arm, contriving of it a dress. “Jerry. I think you should stay hidden in the bathroom. If they do come back, we don’t want them to hear you running for cover.”

“Choluteca may not be the best option,” said the colonel. “The checkpoints will be on alert for at least a day or two. How much money do you have?”

“Couple hundred lempira,” said Gammage. “Maybe fifty bucks American.” And Margery said, “Forty dollars more-or-less.”

“I know someone who can arrange for a boat to take you down the coast,” the colonel said to Gammage. “Tonight, probably. It will cost several hundred dollars.”

“I can get it,” said Margery.

“Then our only problem is how to get Jerry to the boat. I suppose that can be arranged as well.”

“I owe you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting your ass on the line like this.”

“You know how you can repay me.”

“I’ll push the story hard as I can, man.”

Margery shooed Gammage back into the bathroom.

“All right, all right.” He grabbed a magazine off the colonel’s nightstand. “If you order food, get me something. I didn’t have time for breakfast.”

Margery closed the bathroom door, removed the towel from her hair; then she pulled back the bedcovers and slipped beneath them, while the colonel watched in bewilderment. She wriggled about, dropped the bath towel on the floor beside the bed. “If they come back, we better give them something juicy to report.” She smiled wickedly. “Well, don’t keep me waiting, Mauricio. Take off your clothes.”

To the colonel’s great discomfort, as he disrobed he realized he was wearing a pair of under shorts decorated with little jet planes, a humorous gift that someone had presented him the previous month when he was visiting Puerto Cortez. Seeing them, Margery affected amazement. “Oh, my!” she said. “Should I be afraid?”

The colonel felt himself blushing. He slid beneath the sheets on the opposite side of the bed and lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling. The tension of anxiety had been replaced by a different kind of tension. He wanted to turn his head toward her, but held himself rigid, attuned to the sound of Margery’s breath. Then the bathroom door burst open; he started up guiltily.

“Golly gee.” Gammage grinned down at them. “I was gonna say, ‘Get a room,’ but I guess you already got one.” He shuffled the magazines on the nightstand. “Got anything to read in English?”

“No,” said the colonel stiffly, and Margery said, “Get the hell outta here, Jerry!”

Gammage’s grin broadened. “Damn, I wish I had my camera. The guys back in Atlanta would pay serious bucks for this picture.”

“Jerry!”

“I’m gone.” He chose another magazine, looked down at them fondly. “You kids have fun.”

The bathroom door closed and the silence in the room seemed to thicken. The sun broke from the clouds, and pale yellow light cast a complicated shadow on the bed. A scent of gasoline drifted on the breeze. The colonel’s chest felt banded by heavy restraints.

“Try and relax,” Margery told him.

“I’m trying.”

After a second she touched his shoulder. He stiffened at the contact, but when she left her hand there, whispering, “Just take it easy, okay?” his nervousness began to ebb and his breathing became steady.

“Know what Jerry says about you?”

“I can only guess,” said the colonel.

“He says you’ve got the strangest life of anyone he’s ever met.”

“I suppose it must seem so.”

“He also says you’re the only honest man he knows.”

“He doesn’t have enough information to make that judgment.”

“You don’t think of yourself as honest?”

A thin stream of radio music trickled from the street, and the colonel caught the words “…you never returned to me…” before it faded. “Not especially,” he said.

“I think you’re honest. I’m not overlooking the tricks everyone plays on themselves, the little deceits that make up so much of our lives. They’re inescapable. But I think you’re honest when it counts.”

As she spoke he cut his eyes toward her. He had assumed she was looking at him, but she was on her side, with her eyes closed, as if she were talking to someone in her thoughts, not to him. He took in the white curve of her shoulder, the little shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her face seemed softer than it had the night before, dazed and girlish, and he had the idea that whomever she was thinking of, whether him or some other, her thoughts of that person were slow and reflective and warm.

“I hope we get a chance to talk sometime when things are different,” she said. “When we can concentrate on what we’re saying.”

The colonel wanted to say that he was fairly concentrated at that moment, but knew this would strike a wrong note. Her voice lulled him, and he closed his own eyes, listening.

“I’d like you to tell me about your life,” Margery went on. “Not so I can understand it. I’d just like to hear you tell about it.” She left a pause. “Do you know what a diorama is? This circular strip of metal… it’s not always metal. Sometimes it’s canvas and there are lights behind it. But it’s painted with all these little scenes from life, from one culture usually, and it goes around and around. And even if you watch for a long time, if you come to know which scenes are about to appear, after a while you realize you’re seeing them differently. Noticing different things about them. That’s how your life sounds to me. It’s like you’ve been living in a diorama. Viewing the same scenes over and over from this odd distance…” She sighed. “The adrenaline’s wearing off. I feel so tired.”

“Go to sleep, then.”

“I’m tired, not sleepy. How about you?”

“If you keep talking, I think I might sleep.”

“Am I that boring?”

“No, it’s the sound of your voice, it’s nice… it makes me peaceful.”

“Really? That’s sweet.” Some seconds glided by and then she said, “Now I can’t think of anything to talk about.”

“Tell me about your life.”

“God! Now that is boring!”

“It wasn’t boring today, was it?”

“Today was unusual.” She shifted about, and her breath stirred his hair. “I did produce a feature once in Borneo. We spent nearly a month there. The forests were on fire—that’s what the feature was about. We were based in a town on the coast. Sumarinda. A nice air-conditioned hotel. But a lot of the time we were inland, closer to the fires. When the wind was right, ash fell from the sky and covered everything. The river, the land. There were days when all of us were gray. The Dayaks, the Americans… everyone. We were a single gray race. Except we were running around, shooting film, taking hits of oxygen, and the Dayaks were just hanging onto life. We ferried a few of them out on the helicopters, but the rest simply wouldn’t be moved, even though some of the old people were dying. Some of the footage we got was amazing. Once we were up near the edge of the fire. All you could hear was roaring and crackling. One of the cameramen waded across a river so he could shoot into the flames. He’d just found a good position when a deer broke from the trees nearby and began running alongside the bank. It was burning. A fringe of flame licking up from its back. Deer fur… it’s tough, you know. It’s not like cat fur. It wouldn’t burn easily. Maybe burning pitch drizzled down onto its back from a tree. Anyway, I couldn’t hear if it was making any cry, the fire was so loud, but it must have been crazy with pain. Just below where our cameraman crossed was a waterfall and a deep pool beneath it, and if the deer had gone into the water, it might have been all right. But it kept running parallel to the bank, leaping over fallen trees, avoiding burning branches, incredibly graceful, trying to outrun the pain. It almost seemed to be flying. Like the fire on its back was empowering it. I remember thinking it didn’t look real. Life never composed this kind of image, I told myself. It was something out of a book. A fantasy novel or a fairy tale. But when I was editing the footage I thought maybe this was how life works. Sometimes out of all the mess and clutter and sadness, it says something. It speaks what for us would be a word or a sentence or a poem, and mostly we don’t notice… or else we’re not around when it happens. But that one time we were there, we could bear witness. Out of all the smoke and flame and death, this perfect burning deer…”

• • •

When the colonel woke he was on his stomach, head turned toward the bedside table. Resting thereon was the indigo lizard, its tiny feet dark against the white shiny paper of a magazine ad, its orange eyes shining faintly in the twilight. The sight did not disturb him. If it was only a lizard, it was a pretty one; if it was something more, then he doubted it was dangerous. He had never thought that, he realized. It had merely unnerved him. Staring at it, he began to think of the eyes as lenses, and wondered what lay behind them. A speck of bloody tissue, or a scrap of unpredictable genius given form by some miraculous congruency… or was it both? He thought about Margery’s Borneo story. How unexpected it had been, seeming to arise from her like the deer from the burning forest. Perhaps in each instance it had been less a remarkable occurrence than a case of low expectations exceeded.

Margery began snoring. Delicate breaths edged with a glutinous phrasing. He rolled onto his back, careful not to wake her. The covers had slipped down about her waist, but she still lay on her side, one arm guarding her breasts, her hair undone, spilling over her cheek. At the point of her shoulder was a mole, perfectly round, like a period completing the milky phrase of her body. The sweet staleness of her breath, lips parted to reveal the bottom of a tooth. She seemed wholly unexpected. As unexpected as her story. It was not the sort of thing, he thought, that she would tell everyone, at least not in the way she had told it to him, and while he was not prepared to give this much weight, to derive from it any promise, it intrigued him nonetheless. Everything she had done until this moment could be explained in terms of a professional pragmatism, but the story was unmistakably an intimacy. His eyes went again to her breasts, and he suddenly longed to pull her against him, to feel her come awake in his arms. Yet longing was notched, not by a fear of rejection or by the awkwardness of the situation, but by his concern that this was only circumstantially different from dozens of evenings he had spent with women who were no more than joyless functionaries, expressions of public debt.

A light knock at the door alerted the colonel. Margery stirred, but continued to breathe deeply. He slipped out of bed and started to put on his trousers, then decided that whoever it was should see the whole show. He cracked the door. A tall young mestizo in a white waiter’s jacket was standing in the hall, holding a tray that bore two wine glasses and a green bottle in an ice bucket and a silver serving dish. “Con permiso…” the waiter began, but the colonel shushed him. The man nodded, pointed to the tray, and adopted an inquiring look. “Bueno… pase,” whispered the colonel, and opened the door to admit him, instructing him to set the tray on the chair by the window, and to do it quietly.

The waiter tiptoed across the carpet, his eyes roaming about the room. Though the colonel detected no bulge in the waiter’s jacket that would indicate a weapon, judging by his bearing, the economy of his movements, he suspected that beneath it the man was wearing a standard-issue army T-shirt. As the waiter turned to make his exit, his eyes dropped to the colonel’s under shorts and amusement grazed his lips. He pressed a small envelope into the colonel’s hand, and with a slight bow, not appearing to expect a tip, he slipped out the door and was gone.

Three words were printed on the card in the envelope:

Enjoy your gringa.

Beneath this salutation, intended—the colonel knew—to make him aware of the all-seeing eye now focused on him, was a scrawled signature, a single name of which only a fancifully scripted capital C was legible. That Carbonell signed himself like an emperor did not surprise him, nor did he find it laughable—though emperors were out of fashion, despots were not, and of such stuff as Carbonell were despots made. The colonel put on his trousers, shifted the tray to the floor, and sat by the window as darkness came to Puerto Morada. Intimations of what might come of the night turned slowly in his head, like millwheels in a lazy stream, affording him a glimpse of every bladed consequence. The woman in his bed moaned weakly, as in a fever; her pale face was blurred and indefinite in the shadow, like a white stone glimpsed through running water. Two roaring lights passed on the street; sprightly music from a nearby cantina braided the hissing of the wind in the palmettos. The colonel’s stomach growled. He ate several of the shrimp contained within the serving dish, but did not open the wine.

• • •

Shortly after nine o’clock, the hour when the Drive-In Puerto Rico customarily closed, Margery and the colonel went to talk with Tomas, leaving Gammage hiding in the room. They walked along the verge of the beach, keeping to the shadow of a palm hammock. Drops of orange fire pointed the windows of little wooden houses tucked in among the sinuous trunks, each one also announced by the rattle of a generator, and on occasion a lesser shadow emerged from the dark, tipped its hat and wished them good evening. Off on the horizon a lopsided moon, like an ancient medal of bone, paved the sea with a dwindling silver road, and the swarm of stars in its wild glitter seemed to construct a constant flickering conversation, causing the colonel to think that if he could hear them, their voices would resemble those of crickets. Bats squeaked high in the fronds; invisible chickens clucked; a dog barked distantly, with neurotic regularity. The wind had died, and mosquitoes whined in the colonel’s hair.

“Tomas feels that women have been a misfortune in his life,” he said as they came in sight of the Drive-In Puerto Rico. “He may appear rude.”

Margery slapped at her neck. “Maybe I shouldn’t be with you.”

“No, it’s better he knows a woman is involved.”

“But what if he won’t help?”

“He will. His attitude toward women doesn’t reflect dislike, just a mistrust of their effect on him. As far as I know, he has never been able to refuse them anything.”

The lights on the deck of the restaurant had been switched off, and Tomas was leaning on the railing. On spotting Margery, he let fall the hand he had raised in greeting, and his face grew impassive. As they sat together and the colonel told him what was required and why, he merely grunted in response. Margery continued slapping at mosquitoes, and finally, annoyed by these interruptions, Tomas went into the restaurant and returned with a jar containing a translucent greenish paste, which he handed to Margery. She sniffed at it, wrinkled her nose.

“It is not perfume,” he said brusquely. “However, it will keep away the mosquitoes.”

She thanked him and began dabbing it onto her arms and neck.

With a dolorous sigh, Tomas sat with his back to the railing, his face angled toward the stars. “Benito Casamayor has a suitable boat. And he is in need of money. But he will want a good price to challenge the authority of Felix Carbonell.”

“How much?” Margery asked.

“A thousand might persuade him.”

“Lempira?”

“Dollars,” said Tomas.

“I can have it within an hour.”

Tomas sniffed, a sign—the colonel thought—of his contempt for anyone who could so easily promise a thousand dollars. “I’ll arrange for Benito to be at the end of Punta Manabique at two o’clock in the morning. That will give him time to prepare his boat.”

“How will we get Jerry to the boat?”

Tomas refitted his gaze to the horizon. Their edges gone diaphanous, all smoke and luminous mother-of-pearl, bulky clouds had closed in around the moon, framing it in glowing complexity, like angels heralding a glorious birth in a Rafael or a Titian. A fish splashed in the offing, a sickly generator stuttered to life among the palms.

“How big a man is your friend?” Tomas asked.

“About six feet,” Margery said. “Two hundred pounds, maybe.”

“A little more, I think,” said Colonel Galpa.

“There is a woman from the Bay Islands here in town,” said Tomas. “Maude Brooks. The people call her Sister Anaya. She tells fortunes at the hotels.”

“I think I’ve seen her,” Margery said. “A big black woman… wears a turban?”

Tomas nodded. “She will come to Mauricio’s hotel and provide your friend with a disguise. She will remain in the room, and he will leave, pretending to be her. But you will require something with which to color his skin.”

“I have boot polish,” said the colonel. “It’s brown, but in the dark no one is likely to notice.”

“Do we pay her, too?” Margery asked.

“She will tell you her price.” Tomas chuckled. “Bring a great deal of money.”

A flow of wind poured in off the water, growing stronger by the second, flapping the colonel’s jacket, twitching the end of Tomas’s braid. For the first time, he looked directly at Margery. His creased, leathery face seemed more an accidental pattern of nature than a human design, the sort of shape your eye might assemble from the strands in a mound of seaweed. “Give me your hand,” he said.

She glanced anxiously at the colonel, but complied.

Tomas did not hold her hand, simply let it rest on his palm. He kept his eyes on her and she on him. It appeared initially that they were engaged in a contest of wills; but then the colonel realized that neither one showed evidence of strain. Still, it made him uneasy, and he asked Tomas what he was doing.

“Looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Must I look for something specific? Whenever you try too forcefully to order the world, you fail to see anything.”

Soon Tomas withdrew his hand, frowning.

“Is something wrong?” Margery asked.

The old man muttered several words in a language Colonel Galpa did not recognize, then his eyes downcast, said, “Mauricio. You will have to escort the American to meet Benito. Once he has disguised himself, the three of you must leave the hotel together. You,”—he gestured at Margery—“cannot go to Punta Manabique with them. Is there a place where your colleagues might gather at that hour?”

“Club Atomica,” she said.

“Then go there. It will seem that Mauricio is walking Madame Anaya home.” Tomas addressed himself to the colonel. “Do not accompany him all the way to the point. Leave him on the beach nearby. He will pass into the shadows of the trees. If anyone has followed, they will lose interest in him and follow you back to the club.” The plan sounded eminently workable to the colonel, but he was perturbed by Tomas’s subdued manner and asked if he felt ill.

Tomas took such a long time to respond, the colonel grew concerned that he had been stricken and rendered incapable of speech; but at last he said, “It is nothing. An intimation of ills to come. Men of my age often receive morbid signals of the future.” He patted the colonel’s hand, his own hand trembling. “It is you about whom I am concerned.”

“I’m perfectly well,” said the colonel. “Except for being hungry. I had only a few shrimp at dinner.”

“It is not your health that concerns me. I wonder if you are prepared for what may ensue should Carbonell discover what you have done.”

“Carbonell cannot hurt me. I have friends in the capital whom he will not wish to offend.”

“I think you underestimate him… and I am certain that you do not entirely comprehend his character. Men like Carbonell, beasts disguised by a thin dress of human behavior, they sometimes act without regard for consequence. As to your friends, ask yourself this, Who is more valuable to them—the hero of a war fought long ago, or a beast who wears their uniform, whose uncontrollable nature serves to strike fear into the hearts of the people, making them all the more malleable and accepting of their lot?”

Put this way, the question disheartened the colonel. He realized that—matters of principle aside—he was on the verge of risking everything for a man who, albeit a friend, was not a great friend, and for a woman whom he scarcely knew. And to what end? He had little conviction that Carbonell or his masters would be damaged by the revelations Gammage proposed to make. He wondered what his response might be if Margery were not sitting beside him. “I’ll be all right,” he told Tomas.

The old man made a clucking sound with his tongue. He stared at his hands, which rested flat on the table, the fingers lifting idly—like two ancient blind crabs seeking familiar purchase. “Then there’s nothing more to be said.”

• • •

Enthroned in the chair by the window in the colonel’s room, rolls of fat squeezed out over the arms, her voluminous white dress emblazoned with tiny red skeletons, hair turbaned in this same material, her scowling black face diamonded with beads of sweat, Madame Anaya was not shy about voicing her displeasure. “Dere’s no television,” she said. “De ol’ mon tol’ me dere were a television.” She pursed her cherub lips; almost hidden behind her pouchy cheeks, her eyes gleamed like polished sea beans. “How you ’spect me to sit t’rough half de night wit’out some television?”

“I have magazines,” the colonel said. “Books.”

“Now what I wan’ to read fah? Ruinin’ my eyes wit’ dat tiny print! You bring me dat television de mon promise!”

“I’m afraid at this hour it’s impossible.”

Madame Anaya made a beastly noise in her throat, but held her tongue. A brief commotion arose in the bathroom, where Margery was helping Gammage put the finishing touches on his disguise.

“I believe the café is still open,” said the colonel. “I could bring you something to eat.”

“I gots my own.” Madame Anaya’s right hand, dangling off the chair arm, stirred, and she pointed with a sausage-like finger at her purse, which—so black and bulging, it seemed her familiar—rested beside the chair. “Nevuh trus’ Sponnish cookin’. Make you weak in de liver.” She glared at the colonel. “Dis de night dey be playin’ de duppy movies.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“On de television. Dey plays de duppy movies at midnight of a Saturday.”

The colonel checked his watch. “You’re not going to miss much. It’s almost over.”

“Dey be playin’ two of dem,” Madame Anaya said reprovingly. “Las’ one always de best.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Been two weeks and dey played dis one, Curse of de Blood Witch.”

“That was a good one?”

“It were domn funny! De people make it, dey don’t know de first t’ing ’bout witches. Mus’ be dey t’inkin’ magic somet’ing you catch from a book.”

The colonel made a non-committal noise, thinking ahead to the beach, the walk to Punta Manabique, the dangers it might present.

“Magic what people gots in dere bodies. Some gots it in de eye, some in de hand, some in de heart. You gots it all three places, den you a witch.”

“I see,” said the colonel distractedly, trying to decide whether or not to carry his sidearm. Crime was not unheard of on the beach, but generally it was perpetrated against tourists. Better to leave it in the room—he did not want to arouse suspicion. He glanced at Madame Anaya. Immense and motionless; eyes fixed. She did not appear to be breathing. Then two fingers of her right hand began to move in slow circles, as if she were stirring something. The colonel was drawn to watch them. His head felt warm, thickish, his thoughts subject to a drifty confusion, similar to the way he had felt on the rare occasions when he smoked marijuana. The air seemed to eddy in response to the stirring of Madame Anaya’s fingers, rippling outward, and as the ripples washed over him he came to feel increasingly stoned, a faint keening in his ears. She looked to have no depth, an exotic image painted on a liquid surface. Then, abruptly, the fingers stopped, and the colonel became aware that the ripples in her considerable flesh were caused by silent laughter.

“Curse of de Blood Witch,” she said, and chuckled. “Dat ain’t nowhere de way of it.”

The bathroom door opened and Margery, followed sheepishly by Gammage, entered. Gammage’s white dress and turban were of a piece with Madame Anaya’s, only his were decorated with tiny blue skulls; his face, arms, and sandaled feet were coated with mahogany boot polish. The effect was both gruesome and laughable.

“Oh, God!” said Madame Anaya.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Gammage said sourly.

The colonel stood. “It’s twenty minutes’ walk to the point. We should go now.”

Gammage looked down at his glistening brown arms. “Man, I don’t know about this shit.”

Margery rubbed his shoulder. “It’ll be fine once you get out onto the beach.”

“Now you shed dat dress fah you leave de boat,” Madame Anaya said to Gammage as he moved toward the door. “And Benito he fetch it to me.”

“Hey, you’re welcome to it,” Gammage said with false bravado. “It doesn’t do a thing for my hips.”

She gave another quivery, silent laugh. “Darlin’, you hustle yo’self on down to Barrio Clarin, you gon’ get more action den you can handle.”

The colonel opened the door, peeked out to see if the corridor was clear, then beckoned to Margery and Gammage. They eased past him, and as he closed the door he heard Madame Anaya say, “You tell dat ol’ mon, I gon’ make him rueful ’bout de television.”

• • •

The wind that earlier had risen now swooped in off the water in long powerful gusts, giving roaring voice to the palms, their crowns tossing and swaying like an exalted crowd under a mesmeric preacher’s thrall. Surf pounded in over the break, exploding in phosphorescent sprays, and racing clouds cut just below the high-riding moon, now and then dimming, but not obscuring, its light. Through a gap between trunks, the colonel saw men and women moving their hips and waving their arms under the thatched canopy of a shanty bar to the rhythms of a small steel band. A rich yellow light englobed them, and beyond, for a backdrop, a deep green undulation of shrubs and sea grape, shaking their branches as if in mimicry. At that distance, unable to hear the liquid metallic arpeggios, the shouted vocals, it seemed to him that all the complicated grace of the dancers, the children chasing each other in and out among them, and the jittery attacks of the drummers served a more oblique principle than mere abandon, that their madness was orchestrated toward some end, a mysterious providence being invoked.

From the heat of late afternoon, the temperature must have dropped twenty-five degrees. The weather had driven most people inside, and so the colonel and Gammage came to the landward end of Punta Manabique without incident. “I’m not gonna hug you, Maury,” Gammage said as they stood together. “’Case somebody’s watching.”

“I appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Though it might do wonders for Madame Anaya’s reputation.” He gazed toward the seaward end; even in the strong moonlight, the thrashing foliage and shifting shadows made it impossible to determine if Benito Casamayor’s boat was at hand. “You’d better hurry.”

“I’m gone. But once Carbonell’s over, I’ll come back and we’ll hoist a few.”

Gammage stood there a moment longer, a vastly ludicrous figure with his turban, his boot-polish skin, and the dress alternately belling and molding to his thighs. The disguise failed to hide his anxiety. “See ya, Maury.” He hesitated another moment, turned, and went trudging off among the palms that bounded the little ridge guarding the point.

The colonel watched him out of sight. Then, head down against the wind, he started toward town, making slow progress in the tacky sand. He felt disconnected from the events of the night. Though concerned for Gammage, for Margery, he was unafraid of what might happen to him, and not because he was assured of his immunity. Either he did not especially care what happened, or else he believed he could do nothing about it. There was evidence to support both conclusions. Perhaps, he thought, they were more-or-less the same, related products of a larger mental circumstance. The wind chilled him; the concatenations of the surf were assaultive in their loudness, affecting his nerves. His unsettled mood deepened. Despite wanting to see Margery, he came to dread the noise and the crowd at the Club Atomica. Instead of going directly to the club, he decided he would first visit Tomas and let him know how the plan had turned out.

The corrugated metal door of the Drive-In Puerto Rico had been rolled almost all the way down, a half-foot-high gap of light showing beneath it. Tomas must be putting his bills in order, the colonel told himself, or working on his mural. He picked up his pace, slogging into the wind, eager to see the old man. As he came abreast of the steps that led up onto the deck, he made out a shadowy figure sitting at a table close by the door. “Tomas?” he called, mounting the steps. “What are you doing out here? Aren’t you cold?”

Someone pushed him hard, planted a hand between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward. He righted himself and saw a short dark man in fatigues standing at the top of the steps, training a pistol at his chest—his lined face had the vaguely oriental cast of a Mayan, and his jacket bore a sergeant’s insignia.

“Man, are you crazy?” Furious, the colonel took a step toward him. “I’ll have your balls!”

“Colonel Galpa!”

Carbonell had risen from his seat by the door. His presence was not completely unexpected, and the colonel was not shocked to see him; but he felt a kind of fatalistic incredulity, such as he might have experienced on hearing a gloomy prognosis from his doctor.

“Where is Tomas?” he asked.

“Where is the journalist… Gammage?” Carbonell came toward him, easy in his walk, like a cat sauntering toward his favorite chair after a big meal. The wind had not mussed a strand of his slicked-back hair. He folded his arms and waited for the colonel to respond, his face empty of emotion. He was in his shirtsleeves and on one of his cuffs was a dark spattering. In his left hand was a silvered automatic pistol.

“He is gone,” said the colonel. “Within a few hours, I imagine, the world will know what you are.”

“The world already knows. The world doesn’t care.”

“Then why concern yourself with Gammage?”

“A loose end,” said Carbonell. “I hate them.” He stepped back to the door, leaned down and rolled it up head-high. Inside the restaurant, Tomas was sitting on a cane-backed bar stool, lashed to it; his head was down, and there was blood on his shirt. Behind him, his mural had a zodiacal value, like those Hindu renderings of a higher plane, rife with gaudy emblems of illusion. A hurricane lamp rested on the bar, painting the scene with orange light and shadow, adding a gloss that made its brutality seem artful. The colonel could not tell if the old man was alive. Grief and rage contended in him.

“I’ll kill you for this,” he said to Carbonell.

“Please… let’s avoid histrionics,” said Carbonell. “We’re both soldiers. We both have our duties to perform.”

“You call this duty? This is the act of an animal!”

“At times it is my duty to act so.”

“Don’t hand me that!”

“Had you been ordered to fire your rockets into an enemy city, an action that would kill innocents, would you have obeyed? Of course you would. Now you can afford to speculate on the morality involved. But in the moment of war, you would not have hesitated. Your war may have ended, Colonel. But mine goes on.”

“There is no war except the one you prosecute against your own people. Even if there were, torturing an old man is not…”

“A traitor, not an old man!”

“An old man!” The colonel bunched his fists. “But what does it matter? An old man, a child, a pregnant woman…”

“Enough!”

The feral face that the colonel had glimpsed behind Carbonell’s polished exterior at the Club Atomica now surfaced. His teeth were bared, his eyes pointed with black light.

“There is no war? What could you know of it? A drunken fool who wanders the hinterlands in search of pleasure! You have no idea of the enemies I confront!”

He gestured sharply with his pistol, signaling the colonel to come inside, then instructed him to sit on the stool next to Tomas and ordered the sergeant to secure him.

“This is my fault,” Carbonell said as the sergeant lashed the colonel’s legs to the stool. “I failed to take you seriously. I so enjoyed watching the birth of your little conspiracy. I wanted to see who else would be pulled in. When I learned you had left the hotel with the black woman, I realized I had miscalculated. My men were fools not to follow you, but I should have expected them to be fools. I should have taken you into custody earlier.”

The sergeant finished his work, and Carbonell told him to return to his post. Once the sergeant had vanished into the dark, he rolled down the door and, his back to the colonel, asked, “Where is Gammage?” As he turned from the door, Tomas groaned. “Ah!” said Carbonell, as if delighted by this sign of life. He lifted Tomas’s head. One of the old man’s teeth had pierced his lower lip; his eyes were swollen shut. Fresh blood oozed from a cut at his scalp line.

“He’s not doing so well,” Carbonell said in a tone of mock concern. “Without medical treatment, I doubt there’s hope.”

The colonel started to vent his outrage, and Carbonell back-handed him with the butt of his pistol. White light shattered behind the colonel’s eyes, and he slumped toward unconsciousness, his mind filled with questions—then he realized the questions were all the same. Carbonell was asking about Gammage. Groggy, he said something, an answer, maybe the truth… he wasn’t sure what he had said. The words reverberated in his head, mushy, sonorous, like someone very large talking in his sleep. But if he had spoken the truth, it was apparent that learning the truth was not Carbonell’s primary motivation. Blow after blow rained upon the colonel’s face and chest. Pain no longer occurred in separate incidences; it was a continuum, a dark passage configured with intervals of hellish brightness. At one point he felt a burning in his knee, and at another he believed that his cheek had been bitten. It was as if he were being mauled, not interrogated. Carbonell had become a dimly perceived giant, an immense otherness that shouted and surrounded him with pain. In his mind’s eye he saw a black mouth opening, rushing to swallow him, and when he emerged from darkness into a ruddy orange glow, he noticed that the metal door had been raised and Carbonell was standing beneath it, smoking a cigarette, talking—it seemed—to no one in particular.

“…will not tolerate a traitor,” he was saying. “That’s the big story, not Gammage’s…” He smiled. “Gammage’s archaeological finds. No, the story that will enthrall our people is that their hero has betrayed the nation. Betrayed them. What I have done will be buried in the shadow of that betrayal. But it is always best to avoid trouble, even if it is no great trouble. Tell me where Gammage is, and I will allow the woman to return to the United States.”

Margery was alive. Carbonell had her. Striking those two bits of information together produced a spark that nourished the colonel and restored a vague semblance of ambition and intent; but he could not build it to a blaze. Pain surged in his leg, and he understood he had been shot. Blood was leaking from the side of his knee.

“There was a time,” Carbonell said, “when I wanted to know you, Colonel Galpa. When I hoped to understand what sort of man it required to do what you have done. But it is clear to me that you no longer are that man. You have been made decadent and weak by constant adulation… constant indulgence. There is nothing left of you that I would wish to understand.” He grasped the handle of the door. “I am offering you a chance to be that man again. If you want to save the woman, tell me about Gammage. Otherwise I will give her to my men.” The door made a grating sound as he rolled it down behind him. “Take some time to think about it. But not too long, Colonel. Not too long.”

Alone, the colonel felt weaker and more clear-headed, as if Carbonell’s presence had been both a confusion and a strength. With effort, he lifted his head to Tomas and spoke his name. The old man gave no sign of having heard. The colonel’s left eye was filmed over with blood, making half the world red. He struggled with his bonds, but could not loosen them. The exertion left him dizzy. Something cooled his chin. Spittle, he realized. Then blackness. A curtain of it was drawn across the light, then opened again. They were going to die. This notion, poignant though it was, seemed nonsensical. A verity. He edited the thought. He was going to die, Margery was going to die, Tomas was going to die. Gammage, too… perhaps. There was nothing he could do about it. He lifted his head a second time, and, trying to ignore dizziness, the whining in his ears, the sense that his head contained a volume of liquid sloshing back and forth, he did his best to focus. After staring at Tomas for several seconds, subtracting his wobbliness and the general spin of things from what he saw, he became certain that the old man had stopped breathing. The blood seeping from his scalp had congealed. Weighted down by despair, the colonel let his head fall, and became without thought, his consciousness directed toward twinges, aches, fluctuations in pain. He resolved not to tell Carbonell anything. It was the only choice that remained. Not an easy resolution to keep, but Tomas obviously had done so. His eyelids drooped, and he thought he might be slipping away; then he felt a delicate pressure on his chest, a pressure unrelated to pain, and saw the indigo lizard clinging to his jacket, its orange eyes less than six inches away from his own.

“Go away,” said the colonel, not rejecting the lizard so much as embracing rejection, recognizing this to be his sustaining principle.

The lizard scooted closer. Comical in its wide-eyed fixation. Provoked by some deep systemic injury, the colonel’s body triggered a wave of numbness; his breath sobbed forth. The lizard stretched toward him, as if attracted by a new scent. The colonel did not know what he should do. Something, he felt, was required of him. The word “Magic” appeared on his mental screen. Orange letters outlined in pink and radiating a neonlike glow. Then a thought about Tomas dragged its shadow across the word, erasing it. He suddenly hated the lizard, perceived it as emblematic of his guilt. Unable to shout for fear of alerting Carbonell, he bugged his eyes, hoping to infuse his stare with sufficient venom to frighten it. The lizard inched closer yet, and the colonel pushed his face toward it, going nose-to-nose. This particularized view of its miniature saurian snout and pebbly skin defanged his hatred. He had a giddy apprehension of kinship, of life confronting life. What do you want? he thought. He made a mantra of the question, repeating it over and over. As suddenly as he had hated it, he now desired the lizard to be what Tomas had said it was: a singular event that was his alone to explore.

“Whatever…” he began.

He had been about to say something on the order of, “Whatever thing you want of me, whatever you must do, now is the time to let it be known,” more a foxhole utterance than a devout entreaty. Before he could finish the thought, however, as had happened that first night in Puerto Morada, a lightness pervaded his body and he was blinded by a flash of orange radiance, and he saw a pair of enormous eyes, the bridge of a huge nose. But this time, instead of being restored to a more typical perspective, his field of vision began to shift, changing so rapidly that he barely registered the details. He found himself moving at a jittery pace, heading toward a red column that angled up on the diagonal from a rough wooden surface. Then he was ascending the column; then he was turned briefly upside down; then he was atop a wide red wooden expanse, proceeding toward a tall pale man in his shirtsleeves, standing in front of a corrugated metal door, smoking a cigarette.

The colonel had no doubt that his vantage point was atop one of the picnic tables on the deck and that the man was Carbonell; and, although it was difficult to credit, he had very little doubt that he was seeing this from the perspective of an indigo lizard with orange eyes. Had he been able to think clearly, he might have been more rigorous in his doubt, but the fact was, he could scarcely think at all. It seemed he had undergone a compression, the entire complexity of his mind shriveled to a point of observance, the memory of pain, and the will to act in some direction… a direction not yet manifest. Everything else, even the fear that would naturally attend such a transference, had been subsumed.

Once again the lizard—and the colonel with it—began to move. Down from the table, across the deck, and out onto the sand. He was becoming oriented to the lizard’s wide field of vision, the hand-held camera effect of its paddling run, and was thus able to recognize that the white valleys through which he skipped and skittered were dimples in the sand, and that the forest-like fringe ahead was the grass at the foot of a cashew tree. He was vaguely aware of the light, the noise of wind and sea, and acutely aware of a spectrum of lesser noises, tiny ticks and hisses and scuttlings. Bitterly alluring scents came to him, and as he darted into the grass, he realized he was hungry. Fiercely hungry. The need to satisfy his hunger was becoming paramount, yet he knew that this was wrong. Something was required of him. Something important. Exerting his remnant of will, he pushed hunger aside and heard a trebly ratcheting sound, a cry that seemed to issue from inside him. He was running now, scooting along through grass and across moonstruck patches of sand, into frills of restless shadow, continuing to emit that thin cry. To what end he did this, the colonel could not guess, he only knew it accorded with his sense of responsibility. Hunger returned to goad him, but each time he managed to repress it, reminding himself of the trust placed in him, no matter its indeterminate nature, and finally, buoyed by a feeling of accomplishment, he went scurrying back across the dimpled, grainy surface of the world and saw before him the steps of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.

The man in shirtsleeves was no longer on the deck; but his feet were visible through a gap between the floorboards and the metal door. From the colonel’s vantage on the railing he spotted a smaller man standing perhaps fifty feet away, half-obscured in the shadow of the palms. The colonel heard himself emit another ratcheting cry, then another and another yet, and the smaller man began to shake his legs and arms with extreme agitation. He shouted, his voice shredded by the torment of wind and surf; he staggered away from the palms and into the light, followed by a dark tide that flowed in a channel to his feet, up his legs to his back and chest, and then his face. He whirled madly, blindly, grabbing at the air, plucking at himself, and fell. He scrambled to his hands and knees, but fell again, and the tide—composed, the colonel understood, of little four-footed ribbons with tails—washed over him, mounding higher and higher until the man was hidden beneath a dome of writhing, wriggling bits of flesh. Off along the beach, similar tides were filming out from the margin of the grass onto the sand, and as the colonel looked on, the stretch of bone-colored beach leading away from the restaurant was gradually eroded, transformed inch by inch into a stretch of dark seething life, gleaming faintly and then going all to shadow under the glow of the inconstant moon.

Atop his railing, the colonel experienced an appreciation of power that verged on the religious, as if he were the focal point not only of the infinite army of lizards now surrounding the Drive-In Puerto Rico, but of the sky and sea, the tumultuous wind, and the electric principle of the distant storm whose gentlest edge helped to choreograph the moment. He seemed to remember other moments, brighter ones, a bright blue scatter of occasions, when he had felt much the same, high and solitary, deadly weapons at his command… though none so pure, so devoid of hesitancy. With a ratcheting cry, he announced himself to his troops, not yet summoning them to act. Then the metal door rolled up and the man against whom his army was arrayed stepped onto the deck and lit a cigarette. He stood for a second, making sure that his smoke was going, then rolled down the door, hiding the two bloody figures slumped within. He sat at the end of a bench, resting an elbow on the railing, his cigarette coal brightening and fading, the picture of a man taking his ease after a spate of hard work, watching the sea and thinking about some trivial thing, an appointment, a debt owed, a soccer match. Serene in the midst of tribulation. An absolutely ordinary man, even to the blood on his hands.

The colonel gave his order.

The army’s scuttling rush was out-voiced by wind and water, and Carbonell did not notice he was under attack until a vanguard of anoles swarmed onto his leg. He jumped up, beating at them, his face aghast. But upon seeing the rest of the army, the instant before they, too, swarmed over him, he seemed less frightened than bewildered, suggesting that while an assault of several dozen was alarming, an aggression perpetrated by thousands, millions, posed a mystery to be considered. Lizards sheathed his limbs six and seven deep, hampering the flailing of his arms. He wore momentarily a lizardskin cap that slipped down over his face and unraveled, the separate threads of it nipping at his eyes and darting into his mouth when he screamed—he bit down, spat out fragments of meat and skin, clamped his lips, trying to walk with legs made cumbersome by hip-high boots of squirming flesh, then fell, striking his head on the corner of a bench, and lay still while the army mounded atop him, building its dome ever higher… until the colonel, who had scuttled to the edge of a table overlooking Carbonell, ordered them to stop.

The colonel peered down at his fallen enemy. His head exposed, body buried beneath a mound equal in height to the roof of the restaurant, Carbonell might have been one of his own victims. The humor of his right eye was burst; the tissue beneath it had been worried bloody; the eyelid itself was missing. His lips were chewed ragged, as was the strip of cartilage dividing his nostrils. But he was alive. Breath shuddered out of him. His good eye fluttered open. He tried to scream, but perhaps the weight on his chest was too great to allow the full expansion of his lungs, and the guttering sound that issued from his throat was almost inaudible. He rolled his eye, as if hoping to find an avenue of sight that offered promise. In doing so, he locked stares with the colonel. From that exchange, he must have gained no encouraging impression, for he immediately set to twisting his shoulders about, trying to work them free. Once he recognized the impossibility of this, he closed his eye and grimaced, straining upward against the weight. After half a minute or thereabouts, he desisted and allowed his head, which had been lifted in the effort, to fall back. He looked in his submission as if he were under a peaceful charm, a magical creature guarded in his sleep by the clever reptilian faces peeking from his hair.

A bright green lizard, barely an inch long, perhaps a day or two out of the egg, came to explore his left ear, inserting itself into the inner canal. Suddenly agitated, Carbonell redoubled his efforts to escape, heaving against the weight of the mound, shaking his head wildly, and the little green one partially withdrew. A much larger lizard, gray with a sagittal crest and spots of brighter color on its throat, placed the tip of its snout in the crease between Carbonell’s lips, giving rise to the notion that should the mouth open, it would be prepared to slip inside and slither down the throat. A striped lizard with an alligator-like head flattened against his cheek, as did a pale brown chameleon. Several others arranged themselves on his brow. It looked as though his face were the subject of a primitive design. He kept very still. Only when a blue skink stuck its head into a nostril, plugging it, did he react, twitching, huffing, attempting to expel it. When the second nostril was plugged by a second skink, he sucked in air through the corners of his mouth. Three tiny lizards—babies, it appeared—joined the large grayish-green sentry at his lips, seeking to push inside, and soon dozens more skittered down from the mound to englobe his head, covering it completely. At this juncture Carbonell abandoned himself to terror, twisting his neck with such force, it appeared he had in mind to unscrew it from his body. He took once again to shaking his head, then to beating it against the boards. Whether as a last futile exercise or an attempt to knock himself out, it was difficult to say. Whatever the level of his desperation, the battering grew faster and faster, coming to seem a convulsive movement and not in the least controlled, the autonomic reaction of a system in the throes of shutting down. Eventually, abruptly, it ceased.

As the army made its disorganized retreat, flowing off across the sand in gradually dwindling streams, a black lake draining into rivulets and animated puddles, the colonel lost interest in the corpse and went pattering over the boards and beneath the metal door and up the leg of a barstool, then onto a trouser leg and higher, until he was gazing at a pair of enormous eyes directly above him. The eyes were shut, and this frustrated the colonel. Unclear as to how he should proceed, he gave in to hunger and started to descend, intent upon returning to the grass, where he had scented food. But as he clung to the trouser cuff, preparing to drop to the floor, it occurred to him that his duty was not done. There was one thing left to do. He scooted back up to hang beneath those lidded eyes, awaiting an opportunity for dutiful action.

Over the next minutes, ten of them at least, and each one seeming longer than average, the urge to hunt became increasingly powerful, but he succeeded in resisting it, demanding of himself a familiar rigor, growing comfortable with denial. It was as if some old discipline were helping to armor him against the depredations of repetition and boredom. He involved himself in examining the oily creases in the skin surrounding the eyes, the shallow fissures in the lips, the graying stubble sprouting above them. Turning back to the eyes he found that they had come partly open, but the irises were angled upward, as if about to slide back beneath the lids. He crept higher, extending his neck so that his snout was scant millimeters from the right eye, and gave a grating cry. The lid shuttered down, then up; the eye shifted, focused on him, and after a brief period of disorientation, he came to feel sodden and dull. Agony lanced his knee, like a lightning bolt expelled from an all-encompassing ache. Staring at him, its snout almost touching his skin, was an indigo lizard with orange eyes. The colonel recalled the lizard hanging in this exact position earlier that evening, and could not imagine how it had managed to remain there throughout the beating that he had received. Less reasonable memories sprang to mind, muddying his understanding of what had taken place. He wanted to look about and locate Carbonell, but was afraid to move. Everything inside him felt broken, contused. Nevertheless, he raised his eyes and saw the rolled-down door. Which meant that Carbonell must be outside. Smoking and talking to his sergeant. Another memory surfaced… or not a memory. A dream. Carbonell’s face with one eye missing, a pulp of blood and tissue occupying its place. Startled, half convinced it was not a dream, the colonel straightened. The exertion brought dark shapes swimming up to cloud his vision. The glare of the lamp beside him grew wavering and pointy like a Christmas star… dimming, receding. Pain spiked his temple, and he went sliding away from the world in the grip of an irresistible slippage.

• • •

During the colonel’s first week in the hospital, he received many visitors and learned many things. He learned that Tomas was dead, as he had feared, and that Margery had been released, thanks to the actions of a young lieutenant, Jaime Arguello, who had been proclaimed a national hero for his single-handed assault on the barracks where she had been held by soldiers loyal to the traitor, Carbonell. “Traitor” was what the newspapers called him now that his atrocities had become newsworthy. Policemen asked questions of the colonel, most of which he was unable to answer. His memories had been beaten out of him, but the process of questioning dredged up a few details, and the policemen supplied others. For instance, when asking about Carbonell’s death, one of the policemen told the colonel that the autopsy had revealed several lizards in Carbonell’s esophagus, and wanted to know how this might have occurred. The colonel had no information on the subject, but he recalled the indigo lizard and had the idea that it had played some part in the event. When he said as much to the representative of the air force who came to gauge his fitness for duty, the representative appeared to view the statement as a symptom of unsoundness—two days later the colonel received notification that he was to be retired on full pension, this an entirely misleading term for the pittance he was due.

Having no real income and no prospects, alienated from his family, the colonel’s view of the future, never rosy, turned bleak indeed. In the bathroom mirror he observed that the lines in his face had deepened and that the gray in his hair, formerly a salting, had spread to cover his entire scalp. He was old. Grown old in a single terrible night. What possible future could he have? But during his second week in the hospital, he was visited by a lawyer bearing Tomas’s will and the deed to the Drive-In Puerto Rico, who informed him that he, Mauricio Galpa, was now sole owner and proprietor of the restaurant. This legacy caused the colonel—until that moment benumbed by his experiences—to weep and to remember all the kindnesses done him by Tomas, and then to think that perhaps the old man, too, had played a part in what had happened. He tried to piece it all out, but medication and headaches impeded thought and he made little progress.

Several days before he was released from the hospital, he received a phone call from Margery in the States. She thanked him effusively for what he had done to help Gammage and said that she had wanted to see him, but the news bureau, fearing for her safety, had flown her out of the country; and now the government—the colonel’s government—had declared her persona non grata.

“I tried to call you,” she said. “But I couldn’t get through until today.”

“I’m glad you’re safe,” the colonel said.

“Sooner or later they’ll grant me another visa. Then I’ll come visit.”

“That would be nice.”

“This is so…” She made a frustrated noise. “I hate the telephone.”

The colonel waited for her to continue.

“I know there was something between us,” she said. “Not just a moment. Something I’d like to understand. You know?”

“I felt something, too,” the colonel said.

“Maybe you could visit me.”

“I’ll be undergoing treatment for a while. Physical therapy. But yes, it’s a possibility.”

“You sound so distant.”

“It’s the pills. They give me so many pills, it’s hard to think.” He reached for a glass of water on the bed table and took a sip. “What are you doing now?”

“Oh… I’m going to be flying to Israel next week. We’re doing a piece on the elections. The period leading up to them.”

“Israel. That’s very far away.”

“I’ll only be there a month.”

A vague emotion possessed the colonel, a nondescript sadness that seemed attached to no specific thing, but to all things, like weather blown in from the sea.

“They’re paging me. I have to go,” Margery said. “But we’ll get together. I’ll come visit you. I promise.”

“I know,” said the colonel.

The day before he was released, the colonel hired a man to transfer his belongings to Tomas’s room behind the Drive-In Puerto Rico, and the next morning, dressed in civilian clothes, going slowly with his cane, having to stop every couple of minutes to restore his equilibrium and catch his breath, he walked down to the beach and sat on the deck of the restaurant, watching the placid sea. Inside the break the water was the color of aquamarine; beyond it, a dark lapis lazuli. Gulls skied against the blue heavens, and confections of white cloud, bubbled like meringue, moved leisurely west to east along the horizon. Combers plumed at the seaward end of Punta Manabique. The glorious peace of the day overwhelmed the colonel. He rested his head in his hands, his mind flocked with things half felt and half remembered, with shades of sorrow, bright spikes of relief. Tears filled his eyes. He wiped them away and, steadier, he unlocked the corrugated metal door, rolled it up, and stepped into the restaurant.

The place had been cleaned, the bar stools washed free of blood and set in a neat row, and there was a note from Tomas’s girl, who signed herself Incarnacion, giving her telephone number and saying that she would be ready to work whenever he needed her. But it was the rear wall that held the colonel’s notice—the mural was missing. Gone. The lime green background color did not appear to have been painted over, but the volcanoes and cruise ships and Carbonell’s face and the gray airplane, they were all gone… except for the image of an indigo lizard high in the left-hand corner. The colonel was unclear about many things, but he was certain the image of the lizard had previously occupied the lower right-hand corner of the wall. He did not find this dissonance as disturbing as once he might. It seemed that by way of compensation for his lack of clarity concerning his personal life, he was now able to grasp some of what Tomas had told him over the years and, though he could not have articulated it at the time, he recognized a strange circularity in the events that had led to his ownership of the restaurant.

He switched on the generator to cool the beer, made coffee, and taking a cup, returned to the deck. In the verge of the palms, hummingbirds blurred the air above a hibiscus bush; the breeze wafted steam from his cup. A lapidary fineness of well-being settled about the colonel, as if land and sea and air had conformed to his physical shape and emotional configuration, and he thought of what Tomas had said about finding a place you knew was yours. It did not escape him that the old man might have known more than he had claimed about the world and magic, that he might have anticipated their fates, and may even have had a hand in directing them. Nor did the colonel fail to acknowledge the significance of the vanished mural, the blank wall that had been left for him, perhaps, to fill with his own images. Once he would have sought to explain this away, to debunk any less than traditionally rational explanation; but now he wanted to understand it, and he realized that in order to do so he would first have to accept the uniqueness of the circumstance.

Approaching from the direction of the colonel’s hotel, a man drew near and ascended the steps of the deck. Young, dark with the blood of the Miskitia; carrying a lieutenant’s dress jacket and hat. “Is it too early?” he asked.

“I have coffee,” said the colonel. “And some pastries… though they may be stale. This is my first day. I’ve had no time to organize.”

“Bueno… cafe.” The young man sat at a table removed by two from the colonel. He leaned against the railing and let his head fall back. The strain that had been apparent in his face dissolved. “Dios! The sun feels good.”

“Would you mind serving yourself?” The colonel indicated his bad knee. “I have an injury.”

The young man went inside and poured a coffee. On his return, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat on the bench opposite the colonel. He offered a friendly smile, blew steam from his cup. His mustache had not grown in fully, like the mustache of a pubescent boy, yet lines of stress tiered his brow and his eyes seemed worn, like dark coins from which the symbols of the realm had been effaced.

“What brings you out so early?” the colonel asked.

“I couldn’t sleep in my hotel. It’s all the reporters, the officials. They keep me awake half the night, and afterward I can’t sleep.”

“Reporters? Are you famous?”

“No, I… no. I’m only doing some appearances. Publicity for the army. They tell me I’ll be back with my unit in a month or two.”

“That’s not so long.”

“You have no idea how long a single day with these people can last.”

“I can imagine,” said the colonel. “Surely there must be some benefit attendant to these appearances.”

“The girls.” The young man smiled shyly. “That part of it’s all right.”

The colonel laughed, then introduced himself as Mauricio.

“Mucho gusto,” said the young man. “Jaime.”

They began to speak of other matters. The weather, the fishing, the quality of the national soccer team, the girls of Puerto Morada. And though the colonel suspected that the young man was his country’s latest hero, perhaps the next in a curious tradition of heroes whose lives were somehow connected to this stretch of beach with its hummingbirds, lizards, and wandering cows, he did not invest the notion with much thought and immersed himself in the conversation.

The sun climbed higher; warmth cored the colonel’s bones. The sky paled to an eggshell blue, the swells beyond the break grew heavier. A shadow glided through the water near Punta Manabique. He could not tell if it was a manta ray, but the shadow was itself validation of a kind, implying that beneath the surface of things there was always a beautiful monster waiting to rise.

“Do you think there are places that know us?” he asked the young man, and in asking the question, he felt the presence of Tomas, felt his old friend’s amiable yet pointed inquisitiveness occupying his flesh like a perfume, then drifting on, but leaving its trace. “It is a common enough question to ask if one knows such and such a place. ‘Do you know Fuengirola? Do you know Roatan?’ But do they have a sense of us? I wonder. Does their vitality affect us in ways we cannot conceive?”

The young man looked puzzled. “Are you implying that we are acted upon by the ground beneath our feet? I don’t believe it. Our fates are not controlled by mysterious forces. A man carries his fate with him.”

“That was not precisely my implication. But I must say I’m not so certain of things as you appear to be. I am beginning to believe there are places made for us in this world, and if we find them, we may understand patterns in our lives, in all life, that are immune to straightforward analysis.”

A tall black woman in a red blouse and a denim skirt emerged from the sea grape beside the restaurant, bearing atop her head a bowl covered by a white cloth, and began walking along the beach toward the town, establishing a human comparative to the swaying of the palms—this graceful juxtaposition of man and nature caused the colonel to contrast his generally dismaying impression of the world with his impression of it now.

“This place, for instance,” he said. “I have only been here a short time, but already I know a few things I did not know before.”

The young man, who had been staring apprehensively toward the hotel, turned to him, his face once more full of strain, and said, “I’m sorry… I was preoccupied. You said something about this place? I don’t think I understood you.”

A breeze drifted the grit that had accumulated on the table top, rearranging the grains into a slender crescent of glittering specks, and though some small portion of the colonel’s mind resisted the idea, he imagined a similar shift must have happened inside him, that all the grit of his desultory past had been realigned to suit a larger purpose. He wanted to deny this, but to do so he would have had to deny the feeling that then engulfed him. A feeling of calm satisfaction, of happiness. He had an urge to confide in the young man, to explain the simplicity of the thing it had taken him nearly twenty years to learn; but he realized that the years were necessary to the lesson.

“It’s not important,” he said, patting the young man’s hand. “It is enough to understand that whatever comes to you in life, you will always find a welcome here.”

JAILWISE

During my adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men wearing ponytails and wife-beater undershirts, their weightlifter chests and arms spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison always brought to my mind a less vainglorious type of criminal, an image derived, I believe, from characters in the old black-and-white movies that prior to the advent of the infomercial tended to dominate television’s early morning hours: smallish, gray-looking men in work shirts and loose-fitting trousers, miscreants who—although oppressed by screws and wardens, victimized by their fellows—managed to express, however inarticulately, a noble endurance, a working-class vitality and poetry of soul. Without understanding anything else, I seemed to understand their crippled honor, their Boy Scout cunning, their Legionnaire’s willingness to suffer. I felt in them the workings of a desolate beatitude, some secret virtue of insularity whose potentials they alone had mastered.

Nothing in my experience intimated that such men now or ever had existed as other than a fiction, yet they embodied a principle of anonymity that spoke to my sense of style, and so when I entered the carceral system at the age of fifteen, my parents having concluded that a night or two spent in the county lock-up might address my aggressive tendencies, I strived to present a sturdy, unglamorous presence among the mesomorphs, the skin artists, and the flamboyantly hirsute. During my first real stretch, a deuce in minimum security for Possession with Intent, I lifted no weights and adopted no yard name. Though I wore a serpent-shaped earring, a gift from a girlfriend, I indulged in no further self-decoration. I neither swaggered nor skulked, but went from cell to dining hall to prison job with the unhurried deliberation of an ordinary man engaged upon his daily business. I resisted, thanks to my hostility toward every sort of authority, therapy sessions designed to turn me inward, to coerce an analysis of the family difficulties and street pressures that had nourished my criminality, with the idea of liberating me from my past. At the time I might have told you that my resistance was instinctive. Psychiatrists and therapy: these things were articles of fashion, not implements of truth, and my spirit rejected them as impure. Today, however, years down the line from those immature judgments, I suspect my reaction was partially inspired by a sense that any revelation yielded by therapy would be irrelevant to the question, and that I already knew in my bones what I now know pit to pole: I was born to this order.

While I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death. One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images, all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear. The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt, balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone. “Should I call somebody?”

“Fuck are you?” I asked. “The Art Fairy?”

“Frank Ristelli,” he said without resentment. “I teach a class in painting and sculpture every Wednesday.”

“Those who can’t, teach… huh?”

A patient look. “Why would you say that?”

“’Cause the perspective on your Titian’s totally fucked.”

“It’s good enough for you to recognize. How do you know Titian?”

“I studied painting in college. Two years. People in the department thought I was going to be a hot-shit artist.”

“Guess you fooled them, huh?”

He was mocking me, but I was too worn out to care. “All that college pussy,” I said. “I couldn’t stay focused.”

“And you had places to rob, people to shoot. Right?”

That kindled my anger, but I said nothing. I wondered why he was hanging around, what he wanted of me.

“Have you kept it up? You been drawing?”

“I mess around some.”

“If you’d like, I’d be glad to take a look. Why don’t you bring me what you’ve been doing next Wednesday?”

I shrugged. “Sure, yeah. I can do that.”

“I’ll need your name if I’m going to hook you up with a pass.”

“Tommy Penhaligon,” I said.

Ristelli wrote it down on a note pad. “Okay… Tommy. Catch you Wednesday.” With that, he put the van in gear and rattled off to the land of the free, his pluming exhaust obscuring my view of the detail from a Piero della Francesca painted on the rear.

Of course, I had done no drawing for years, but I sensed in Ristelli the potential for a sweet hustle. Nothing solid, but you develop a nose for these things. With this in mind, I spent the following week sketching a roach—likely it was several different roaches, but I preferred to think of it as a brother inmate with a felonious history similar to my own. I drew that roach to death, rendering him in a variety of styles ranging from realism to caricature. I ennobled him, imbued him with charisma, invoked his humble, self-abnegatory nature. I made him into an avatar among roaches, a roach with a mission. I crucified him and portrayed him distributing Oreo crumbs to the faithful. I gave him my face, the face of a guard to whom I had a particular aversion, the faces of several friends, including that of Carl Dimassio, who supplied the crank that kept me working straight through the nights. I taped the drawings on the wall and chuckled with delight, amazed by my cleverness. On the night before Ristelli’s class, so wasted that I saw myself as a tragic figure, a savage with the soul of an artist, I set about creating a violent self-portrait, a hunched figure half buried in blackness, illuminated by a spill of lamplight, curled around my sketch pad like a slug about a leaf, with a harrowed face full of weakness and delirium, a construction of crude strokes and charred, glaring eyes, like the face of a murderer who has just understood the consequences of his act. It bore only a slight resemblance to me, but it impressed Ristelli.

“This is very strong,” he said of the self-portrait. “The rest of them”—he gestured at the roach drawings—“they’re good cartoons. But this is the truth.”

Rather than affecting the heightened stoicism that convicts tend to assume when they wish to demonstrate that they have not been emotionally encouraged, I reacted as might a prisoner in one of the movies that had shaped my expectations of prison, and said with boyish wonderment, “Yeah… you think?” intending by this to ruffle the sensibilities of Ristelli’s inmate assistant, a fat, ponytailed biker named Marion Truesdale, aka Pork, whose arms were inked with blue, circusy designs, the most prominent being a voluptuous naked woman with the head of a demon, and whose class work, albeit competent, tended to mirror the derivative fantasy world of his body art. The look that passed between us then was all I needed to know about the situation: Pork was telling me that he had staked out Ristelli and I should back the fuck off. But rather than heeding the warning, I concentrated on becoming Ristelli’s star pupil, the golden apple in a barrel of rotten ones. Over the next months, devoting myself to the refinement of my gift, I succeeded to such a degree that he started keeping me after class to talk, while Pork—his anger fermenting—cleaned palette knives and brushes.

Much of what I said to Ristelli during that time was designed to persuade him of the deprivation I faced, the lack of stimulation that was neutering my artistic spirit, all with an eye toward convincing him to do a little smuggling for me. Though he sympathized with my complaints, he gave no sign that he was ripe to be conned. He would often maneuver our conversation into theoretical or philosophical directions, and not merely as related to art. It seemed he considered himself my mentor and was attempting to prepare me for a vague future in which I would live if not totally free, then at least unconstrained by spiritual fetters. One day when I described myself in passing as having lived outside the law, he said, “That’s simply not so. The criminal stands at the absolute heart of the law.”

He was perched on a corner of an old scarred desk jammed into the rear of the art room, nearly hidden by the folded easels leaning against it, and I was sitting with my legs stretched out in a folding chair against the opposite wall, smoking one of Ristelli’s Camels. Pork stood at the sink, rinsing brushes in linseed oil, shoulders hunched, radiating enmity, like a sullen child forbidden the company of his elders.

“’Cause we’re inside?” I asked. “That what you’re saying?”

“I’m talking about criminals, not just prisoners,” Ristelli said. “The criminal is the basis for the law. Its inspiration, its justification. And ultimately, of course, its victim. At least in the view of society.”

“How the hell else can you view it?”

“Some might see incarceration as an opportunity to learn criminal skills. To network. Perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere, but they’re inside, so they take advantage. But they only take partial advantage. They don’t understand the true nature of the opportunity.”

I was about to ask for an explanation of this last statement, but Pork chose the moment to ask Ristelli if he needed any canvases stretched.

Ristelli said, “Why don’t you call it a day. I’ll see you next week.”

Aiming a bleak look in my direction, Pork said, “Yeah… all right,” and shambled out into the corridor.

“The criminal and what he emblematizes,” Ristelli went on. “The beast. Madness. The unpredictable. He’s the reason society exists. Thus the prison system is the central element of society. Its defining constituency. Its model.” He tapped a cigarette out of his pack and made a twirling gesture with it. “Who runs this place?”

“Vacaville? Fucking warden.”

“The warden!” Ristelli scoffed at the notion. “He and the guards are there to handle emergencies. To maintain order. They’re like the government. Except they have much less control than the president and the Congress. No taxes, no regulations. None that matter, anyway. They don’t care what you do, so long as you keep it quiet. Day to day it’s cons who run the prisons. There are those who think a man’s freer inside than out in the world.”

“You sound like an old lifer.”

Bemused, Ristelli hung the cigarette from his lower lip, lit up and let smoke flow out from his mouth and nostrils.

“Fuck you know about it, anyway?” I said. “You’re a free man.”

“You haven’t been listening.”

“I know I should be hanging on your every goddamn word. Just sometimes it gets a little deep, y’know.” I pinched the coal off the tip of the Camel and pocketed the butt. “What about the death penalty, man? If we’re running things, how come we let ’em do that shit?”

“Murderers and the innocent,” Ristelli said. “The system tolerates neither.”

It seemed I understood these words, but I could not abide the thought that Ristelli’s bullshit was getting to me, and instead of pursuing the matter, I told him I had things to do and returned to my cell.

I had been working on a series of portraits in charcoal and pastel that depicted my fellow students in contemplative poses, their brutish faces transfigured by the consideration of some painterly problem, and the next week after class, when Ristelli reviewed my progress, he made mention of the fact that I had neglected to include their tattoos. Arms and necks inscribed with barbed wire bracelets, lightning bolts, swastikas, dragons, madonnas, skulls; faces etched with Old English script and dripping with black tears—in my drawings they were unadorned, the muscles cleanly rendered so as not to detract from the fraudulent saintliness I was attempting to convey. Ristelli asked what I was trying for, and I said, “It’s a joke, man. I’m turning these mutts into philosopher-kings.”

“Royalty have been known to wear tattoos. The kings of Samoa, for instance.”

“Whatever.”

“You don’t like tattoos?”

“I’d sooner put a bone through my nose.”

Ristelli began unbuttoning his shirt. “See what you think of this one.”

“That’s okay,” I said, suspecting now Ristelli’s interest in my talent had been prelude to a homosexual seduction; but he was already laying bare his bony chest. Just above his right nipple, a bit off-center, was a glowing valentine heart, pale rose, with a gold banner entangling its pointy base, and on the banner were words etched in dark blue: THE HEART OF THE LAW. The colors were so soft and pure, the design so simple, it seemed—despite its contrast to Ristelli’s pallid skin—a natural thing, as if chance had arranged certain inborn discolorations into a comprehensible pattern; but at the moment, I was less aware of its artistic virtues than of the message it bore, words that brought to mind what Ristelli had told me a few days before.

“The heart of the law,” I said. “This mean you done crime? You’re a criminal?”

“You might say I do nothing else.”

“Oh, yeah! You’re one of the evil masters. Where’d you get the tattoo?”

“A place called Diamond Bar.”

The only Diamond Bar I’d heard of was a section of L.A. populated mainly by Asians, but Ristelli told me it was also the name of a prison in northern California where he had spent a number of years. He claimed to be among the few ever to leave the place.

“It’s unlikely you’ve met anyone who’s done time there,” he said. “Until now, that is. Not many are aware of its existence.”

“So it’s a supermax? Like Pelican Bay? The hell you do to get put someplace like that?”

“I was a fool. Like you, stupidity was my crime. But I was no longer a fool when I left Diamond Bar.”

There was in his voice an evangelical tremor, as if he were hearkening back to the memory of God and not a prison cell. I’d come to realize he was a strange sort, and I wondered if the reason he had been released might be due to some instability developed during his sentence. He started to button his shirt, and I studied the tattoo again.

“Doesn’t look like a jailhouse tat… ’least none I ever saw,” I said. “Doesn’t even look like ink, the colors are so clean.”

“The colors come from within,” Ristelli said with the pious aplomb of a preacher quoting a soothing text. “There are no jails.”

• • •

That conversation stayed with me. If Ristelli was not certifiably a wacko, I assumed he was well along the road; yet while he had given me no concrete information about Diamond Bar, the commingling of passion and firmness in his voice when he spoke of the place seemed evidence not of an unbalanced mind but of profound calm, as if it arose from a pivotal certainty bred in a quieter emotional climate than were most prison-bred fanaticisms. I believed everything he said was intended to produce an effect, but his motives did not concern me. The idea that he was trying to manipulate me for whatever purpose implied that he needed something from me, and this being the case, I thought it might be an opportune time to make my needs known to him.

I assumed that Pork understood how the relationship between Ristelli and me was developing. To discourage him from lashing out at me, I hired a large and scarily violent felon by the name of Rudy Wismer to watch my back in the yard, at meals, and on the block, paying for his services with a supply of the X-rated Japanese comics that were his sexual candy. I felt confident that Wismer’s reputation would give Pork pause—my bodyguard’s most recent victim, a bouncer in a Sacramento night club, had testified at trial wearing a mask that disguised the ongoing reconstruction of his facial features; but on the Wednesday following our discussion of tattoos, Ristelli took sick midway through class and was forced to seek medical attention, leaving Pork and me alone in the art room, the one place where Wismer could not accompany me. We went about our cleaning chores in different quarters of the room; we did not speak, but I was aware of his growing anger, and when finally, without overt warning, he assaulted me, I eluded his initial rush and made for the door, only to find it locked and two guards grinning at me through the safety glass.

Pork caught hold of my collar, but I twisted away, and for a minute or so I darted and ducked and feinted as he lumbered after me, splintering easels, scattering palettes and brushes, tromping tubes of paint, overturning file cabinets. Before long, every obstacle in the room had been flattened and, winded, I allowed myself to be cornered against the sink. Pork advanced on me, his arms outspread, swollen cheeks reddened by exertion, huffing like a hog in heat. I prepared for a last and likely ineffective resistance, certain that I was about to take a significant beating. Then, as Pork lunged, his front foot skidded in the paint oozing from a crushed tube of cadmium orange, sending him pitching forward, coming in too low; at the same time, I brought my knee up, intending to strike his groin but landing squarely on his face. I felt his teeth go and heard the cartilage in his nose snap. Moaning, he rolled onto his back. Blood bubbled from his nostrils and mouth, matted his beard. I ignored the guards, who now were shouting and fumbling for their keys, and, acting out of a cold, pragmatic fury, I stood over Pork and smashed his kneecaps with my heel, ensuring that for the remainder of his prison life he would occupy a substantially diminished rank in the food chain. When the guards burst into the room, feeling charmed, blessed by chance, immune to fate, I said, “You assholes betting on this? Did I cost you money? I fucking hope so!” Then I dropped to the floor and curled into a ball and waited for their sticks to come singing through the air.

• • •

Six days later, against all regulation, Frank Ristelli visited me in the isolation block. I asked how he had managed this, and dropping into his yardbird Zen mode, he said, “I knew the way.” He inquired after my health—the guards had rapped me around more than was usual—and after I assured him nothing was broken, he said, “I have good news. You’re being transferred to Diamond Bar.”

This hardly struck me as good news. I understood how to survive in Vacaville, and the prospect of having to learn the ropes of a new and probably harsher prison was not appealing. I said as much to Ristelli. He was standing beneath the ceiling fixture in my cell, isolated from the shadows—thanks to the metal cage in which the bulb was secured—in a cone of pale light, making it appear that he had just beamed in from a higher plane, a gray saint sent to illumine my solitary darkness.

“You’ve blown your chance at parole,” he said. “You’ll have to do the whole stretch. But this is not a setback; it’s an opportunity. We need men like you at Diamond Bar. The day I met you, I knew you’d be a candidate. I recommended your transfer myself.”

I could not have told you which of these statements most astonished me, which most aroused my anger. “‘We?’ ‘A candidate?’ What’re you talking about?”

“Don’t be upset. There’s…”

“You recommended me? Fuck does that mean? Who gives a shit what you recommend?”

“It’s true, my recommendation bears little weight. These judgments are made by the board. Nevertheless, I feel I’m due some credit for bringing you to their attention.”

Baffled by this and by his air of zoned sanctimony, I sat down on my bunk. “You made a recommendation to the Board of Prisons?”

“No, no! A higher authority. The board of Diamond Bar. Men who have achieved an extraordinary liberty.”

I leaned back against the wall, controlling my agitation. “That’s all you wanted to tell me? You could have written a letter.”

Ristelli sat on the opposite end of the bunk, becoming a shadow beside me. “When you reach Diamond Bar, you won’t know what to do. There are no rules. No regulations of any sort. None but the rule of brotherhood, which is implicit to the place. At times the board is compelled to impose punishment, but their decisions are based not on written law, but upon a comprehension of specific acts and their effect upon the population. Your instincts have brought you this far along the path, so put your trust in them. They’ll be your only guide.”

“Know what my instincts are right now? To bust your goddamn head.” Ristelli began to speak, but I cut him off. “No, man! You feed me this let-your-conscience-be-your-guide bullshit, and…”

“Not your conscience. Your instincts.”

“You feed me this total fucking bullshit, and all I can think is, based on your recommendation, I’m being sent to walls where you say hardly anybody ever gets out of ’em.” I prodded Ristelli’s chest with a forefinger. “You tell me something’ll do me some good up there!”

“I can’t give you anything of the sort. Diamond Bar’s not like Vacaville. There’s no correlation between them.”

“Are you psycho? That what this is? You fucking nuts? Or you’re blowing somebody lets your ass wander around in here and act like some kinda smacked-out Mother Teresa. Give me a name. Somebody can watch out for me when I get there.”

“I wish I could help you more, but each man must find his own freedom.” Ristelli came to his feet. “I envy you.”

“Yeah? So why not come with me? Guy with your pull should be able to wangle himself a ride-along.”

“That is not my fate, though I return there every day and every night in spirit.” His eyes glistened. “Listen to me, Tommy. You’re going to a place few will ever experience. A place removed from the world yet bound to it by a subtle connectivity. The decisions made by those in charge for the benefit of the population enter the consciousness of the general culture and come to govern the decisions made by kings and presidents and despots. By influencing the rule of law, they manipulate the shape of history and redefine cultural possibility.”

“They’re doing a hell of a job,” I said. “World’s in great goddamn shape these days.”

“Diamond Bar has only recently come to primacy. The new millennium will prove the wisdom of the board. And you have an opportunity to become part of that wisdom, Tommy. You have an uncommon sensibility, one that can illustrate the process of the place, give it visual form, and this will permit those who follow in your path to have a clearer understanding of their purpose and their truth. Your work will save them from the missteps that you will surely make.” Ristelli’s voice trembled with emotion. “I realize you can’t accept what I’m saying. Perhaps you never will. I see in you a deep skepticism that prevents you from finding peace. But accomplishment… that you can aspire to, and through accomplishment you may gain a coin of greater worth. Devote yourself to whatever you choose to do. Through devotion all avenues become open to the soul. Serve your ambition in the way a priest serves his divinity, and you will break the chains that weigh down your spirit.”

• • •

On my first night in jail, at the age of fifteen, a Mexican kid came over to where I was standing by myself in the day room, trying to hide behind an arrogant pose and asked if I was jailwise. Not wanting to appear inexperienced, I said that I was, but the Mexican, obviously convinced that I was not, proceeded to enlighten me. Among other things, he advised me to hang with my own kind (i.e., race) or else when trouble occurred no one would have my back, and he explained the diplomatic niceties of the racial divide, saying that whenever another white man offered to give me five, flesh-to-flesh contact was permitted, but should a Latino, an Asian, an Arab, an Afro-American, or any darkly hued member of the human troupe offer a similar encouragement, I was to take out my prison ID card and with it tap the other man’s fingertips. In every jail and prison where I did time, I received a similar indoctrination lecture from a stranger with whom I would never interact again. It was as if the system itself urged someone forward, stimulating them by means of some improbable circuitry to volunteer the fundamentals of survival specific to the place. Ristelli’s version was by far the most unhelpful I had ever heard, yet I did not doubt that his addled sermonette was an incarnation of that very lecture. And because of this; because I had so little information about the prison apart from Ristelli’s prattle; because I believed it must be a new style of supermax whose powers of spiritual deprivation were so ferocious, it ate everything it swallowed except for a handful of indigestible and irretrievably damaged fragments like Ristelli; for these reasons and more I greatly feared what might happen when I was brought to Diamond Bar.

The gray van that transported me from Vacaville seemed representative of the gray strangeness that I believed awaited me, and I constructed the mental image of a secret labyrinthine vastness, a Kafkaville of brick and steel, a partially subterranean complex like the supermax in Florence, Colorado where Timothy McVeigh, Carlos Escobar, and John Gotti had been held, but as we crested a hill on a blue highway south of Mount Shasta, a road that wound through a forest of old-growth spruce and fir, I caught sight of a sprawling granite structure saddling the ridge ahead, looking ominously medieval with its guard turrets and age-blackened stone and high, rough-hewn walls. My mental image of the prison morphed into more Gothic lines—I pictured dungeons, archaic torments, and a massive warden with a bald head the size of a bucket, filed teeth, and a zero tattooed on his brow.

The road angled to the left, and I saw an annex jutting from one side of the prison, a windowless construction almost as high as the main walls, also of weathered granite, that followed the slope of the ridge downward, its nether reach hidden by the forest. We passed in among the ranked trees, over a rattling bridge and along the banks of a fast flowing river whose waters ran a mineral green through the calm stretches, cold and clouded as poison in a trough, then foamed and seethed over thumblike boulders. Soon the entrance to the annex became visible on the opposite shore: iron doors enclosed by a granite arch and guarded by grandfather firs. The van pulled up, the rear door swung open. When it became apparent that the driver did not intend to stir himself, I climbed out and stood on the bank, gazing toward my future. The ancient stones of the annex were such a bleak corruption of the natural, they seemed to presage an imponderable darkness within, like a gate that when opened would prove the threshold of a gloomy Druid enchantment, and this, in conjunction with the solitude and the deafening rush of the river, made me feel daunted and small. The engine of the van kicked over, and the amplified voice of the driver, a mystery behind smoked windows, issued from a speaker atop the roof, “You have ten minutes to cross the river!” Then the van rolled away, gathering speed, and was gone.

At Vacaville I had been handcuffed but not shackled, not the normal procedure, and left alone now, I had the urge to run; but I was certain that invisible weapons were trained on me and thought this must be a test or the initial stage in a psychological harrowing designed to reduce me to a Ristelli-like condition. Cautiously, I stepped onto a flat stone just out from the bank, the first of about forty such stones that together formed a perilous footbridge, and began the crossing. Several times, besieged by a surge of water, a damp gust of wind, I slipped and nearly fell—to this day I do not know if anyone would have come to my rescue. Teetering and wobbling, fighting for balance, to a casual observer I would have presented the image of a convict making a desperate break for freedom. Eventually, my legs trembling from the effort, I reached the shore and walked up the shingle toward the annex. The building terminated, as I’ve said, in an arch of pitted stone, its curve as simple as that of a sewer tunnel, and chiseled upon it was not, as might have been expected, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE or some equally dispiriting legend, but a single word that seemed in context even more threatening: WELCOME. The iron doors were dappled with orange patches of corrosion, the separate plates stitched by rows of large rivets whose heads had the shape of nine-pointed stars. There was no sign of a knocker, a bell, or any alarm I might engage in order to announce myself. Once again I gave thought to running, but before I could act on the impulse, the doors swung silently inward, and, moved less by will than by the gravity of the dimness beyond, I stepped inside.

My first impression of Diamond Bar was of a quiet so deep and impacted, I imagined that a shout, such as I was tempted to vent, would have the value of a whisper. The light had a dull golden cast and a grainy quality, as if mixed in with particles of gloom, and the smell, while it plainly was that of a cleaning agent, did not have the astringency of an industrial cleaner. The most curious thing, however, was that there were no administrative personnel, no guards, no term of processing and orientation. Rather than being kept in isolation until it was determined to which block or unit I would be assigned, on passing through the annex door I entered the population of the prison like a pilgrim into a temple hall. The corridor ran straight, broken every fifty yards or so by a short stairway, and was lined with tiers of cells, old-fashioned cribs with sliding gates and steel bars, most of them unoccupied, and in those that were occupied, men sat reading, wall-gazing, watching television. None of them displayed other than a casual interest in me, this a far cry from the gauntlet of stares and taunts I had run when I entered the population at Vacaville. Absent the customary rites of passage, undirected, I kept going forward, thinking that I would sooner or later encounter an official who would inscribe my name or open a computer file or in some other fashion notate my arrival. As I ascended the fourth stairway, I glimpsed a man wearing what looked to be a guard’s cap and uniform standing at parade rest on the tier above. I stopped, expecting him to hail me, but his eyes passed over me, and without saying a word, he ambled away.

By the time I reached the sixth stairway, I estimated that I had walked approximately two-thirds the length of the annex, climbed two-thirds the height of the hill atop which the walls of the prison rested; and though I held out hope that there I might find some semblance of authority, I decided to ask for assistance and approached a lanky, pot-bellied man with a pinkish dome of a scalp that caused his head to resemble a lightly worn pencil eraser, an illusion assisted by his tiny eyes and otherwise negligible features. He was sitting in a cell to the right of the stairs, wearing—as was everyone within view—gray trousers and a shirt to match. He glanced up as I came near, scowled at me, and set down the notebook in which he had been writing. The gate to his cell was halfway open, and I took a stand well back from it, anticipating that his mood might escalate.

“Hey, brother,” I said. “What’s up with this place? Nobody signs you in and shit?”

The man studied me a moment, screwed the cap onto his pen. On the backs of his fingers were faint inky tracings, the ghosts of old tattoos. The precision of his movements conveyed a degree of snippishness, but when he spoke his voice was calm, free of attitude. “’Fraid I can’t help you,” he said.

I would have been on familiar ground if he had responded with a curse, a warning, or the fawning, fraudulent enthusiasm that would signal his perception of me as a mark, but this politely formal response met none of my expectations. “I’m not asking you to get involved, man. I just need to know where to go. I don’t want to get my nuts busted for making a wrong turn.”

The man’s eyes fitted themselves to the wall of the cell; he seemed to be composing himself, as if I were an irritant whose presence he felt challenged to overcome. “Go wherever you want,” he said. “Eventually you’ll find something that suits you.”

“Asshole!” I clanged my handcuffs against the bars. “Fuck you think you’re talking to? I’m not some fucking fish!”

His face tightened, but he kept on staring at the wall. The interior of the cell had been painted a yellowish cream, and the wall was marred by discolorations and spots from which the paint had flaked away that altogether bore a slight resemblance to a line of trees rising from a pale ground. After a few seconds he appeared to become lost in contemplation of it. Some of the men in other cells on the ground tier had turned our way, yet none ventured to their doors, and I sensed no general animosity. I was accustomed to prisons filled with men on the lookout for breaks in the routine, any kind of action to color the monotony, and the abnormal silence and passivity of these men both intimidated and infuriated me. I took a circular stroll about the corridor, addressing the occupants of the cells with a sweeping stare, hating their mild, incurious faces, and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “What’re you, a bunch of pussies? Where the hell I’m supposed to go!”

Some of the men resumed their quiet occupations, while others continued to watch, but no one answered, and the unanimity of their unresponsiveness, the peculiar density of the atmosphere their silence bred, played along my nerves. I thought I must have come to an asylum and not a prison, one abandoned by its keepers. I wanted to curse them further, but felt I would be slinging stones at a church steeple, so aloof and immune to judgment they seemed. Like old ladies lost in their knitting and their memory books, though not a man within sight looked any older than I. With a disrespectful, all-inclusive wave, I set out walking again, but someone behind me shouted, “Bitch!” and I turned back. The baldheaded man had emerged from his cell and was glaring at me with his dime-sized eyes. He lifted his fist and struck down at the air, a spastic gesture of frustration. “Bitch!” he repeated. “Bitch… you bitch!” He took another babyish swipe at the air and hiccupped. He was, I saw, close to tears, his chin gone quivery. He stumbled forward a step, then performed a rigid half-turn and grasped the bars of his cell, pushing his face between—it appeared that he had forgotten that his gate was open. Many of the inmates had left their cells and were standing along the tiers, intent upon him—he covered his head with his hands, as if defending himself against the pressure of their gaze, and slumped to his knees. A broken keening escaped his lips. Trembling now, he sank onto his haunches. Shame and rage contended in his face, two tides rushing together, and the instant before he collapsed onto his side, he caught the face of one and said feebly and for a last time, “Bitch!”

• • •

Beyond the ninth stairway lay a deeply shadowed cellblock that had the musty, claustrophobic atmosphere of a catacomb. Walls of undressed stone set close together and mounted by iron stairs; the cells showing like cave mouths; dim white ceiling lights that had the radiant force of distant stars tucked into folds of black cloud. Fatigued and on edge, I was not up to exploring it. A cell stood open and untenanted just below the stairway, and deciding that my safest course would be to allow whoever was in charge to come to me, I entered it and sat down on the bunk. I was struck immediately by the quality of the mattress. Though it appeared to be the usual thin lumpy item, it was softer and more resilient than any prison mattress I had ever rested on. I stretched out on the bunk and found that the pillow was remarkably soft and firm. Closing my eyes, I let the quiet soothe me.

I must have been drowsing for several minutes when I heard a baritone voice say, “Penhaligon? That you, man?”

The voice had a familiar ring, and there was something familiar, too, about the lean, broad-shouldered man standing at the entrance to my cell. Framed by a heavy mass of greased-back hair, his face was narrow and long-jawed, with hollow cheeks, a bladed nose, and a full-lipped mouth. He might have been the love child of Elvis and the Wicked Witch of the West. I could not place him, but felt I should be wary.

He grunted out a laugh. “I can’t look that different. Just shaved off the beard’s all.”

I recognized him then and sat up, alarmed.

“Don’t get worked up. I’m not gonna fuck with you.” He perched on the end of the bunk, angling his eyes about the cell. “You want to put up a picture or two ’fore your wall comes in, they got pretty much any kind you want in the commissary.”

There were questions I might have asked concerning both the essence and the rather housewifely character of this last statement, but during my first month in minimum security, Richard Causey, then doing an eight-spot for manslaughter, had put me in the hospital for the better part of a month with injuries resulting from a beating and attempted rape; thus his comments on interior decoration sailed right past me.

“I ’spect it’s been a while since anybody took the walk you did,” Causey said with a trace of admiration. “Straight up from the door all the way to eight? I never saw anyone do it, that’s for sure.” He clasped his hands on his stomach and settled back against the wall. “Took me a year to move up here from six.”

All my muscles were tensed, but he merely sat there, amiable and at ease.

“’Most everybody stops somewhere along the first few blocks,” Causey went on. “They don’t feel comfortable proceeding on ’til they nail down a crib.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, they feel kinda how you felt when you got to nine. Like you best stop and give things a chance to sort themselves out. It’s the same with everybody, ’cept you got a lot farther than most.”

Though I may have made a neutral noise in response, I was intent upon Causey’s hands, the muscles in his shoulders.

“Look here,” he said. “I understand what you’re feeling, but I’m not the man I used to be. You want me to leave, that’s cool. I just figured you’d want to talk. I know when I came here, all I wanted was somebody to talk to.”

“I’m not the man I was, either,” I said, injecting menace into my voice.

“Well, that’s good. Takes a different man than both of us were to do time in Diamond Bar.”

I was beginning to think that, truly, Causey might have changed. No longer did he give off the hostile radiation that once he had, and his speech, formerly characterized by bursts of profanity commingled with butchered elisions, was now measured and considered by contrast. His manner was composed and the tattoo of a red spider that had centered his brow was missing. “Just wore away, I guess,” he said when I asked about it. He told me what he could about Diamond Bar but cautioned that the prison was not easily explained.

“This’ll piss you off… ’least it did me,” he said. “But can’t anybody tell you how to work this place. Things come to you as you need ’em. There’s a dining hall and a commissary, like everywhere else. But the food’s a helluva lot better and you don’t need money at the commissary. The board handles everything. Supplies, discipline, recreation. We don’t have any guards. I don’t…”

“I saw a guard when I was walking up.”

“Everybody sees that guy, but I never heard about him whupping his stick onto anybody. Could be he does his thing so’s to give people something familiar to look at.”

“You saying he’s an inmate?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out about, but it’s coming.” He tapped his temple and grinned. “Best thing about the place is the plumes. You gonna love them.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“The queens who get you off down in Vacaville? The plumes put them away. You can’t hardly tell the difference between them and a real woman.”

Anxious to steer the conversation away from the sexual, I asked who I needed to watch out for and he said, “Guys down on the first three or four blocks… some of them been known to go off. They’re transferred out or given punishment duty. Mostly you need to watch out for yourself. Make sure you don’t screw up.”

“If there’s no guards, people must just walk on out of here.”

Causey gave me a penetrating look. “You crossed the river, didn’t you? You entered of your own free will?”

“I thought the guards were watching.”

“Might have been somebody watching. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you and me and everyone else, we chose to be here, so we’re not talking about a prison full of hard-core escape artists. And Diamond Bar’s not so bad. Truth is, it’s the best I’ve had it in a while. People say it’s going to be even better once they finish the new wing. Escaping crossed my mind a time or two when I was first here. But I had the feeling it wasn’t such a good idea.”

What Causey said made me no more certain of my estate, and after he returned to his cell I remained awake, staring at the mysterious reach of the old prison that lay beyond the ninth stair, the dim white lights and anthracitic cell mouths. Everything I knew about Diamond Bar was cornerless and unwieldy, of a shape that refused to fit the logic of prisons, and this gave me cause to wonder how much more unwieldy and ill-fitting were the things I did not know. I was accustomed to prison nights thronged with hoots, cries, whispers, complaints, screams, an uneasy consensus song like the nocturnal music of a rain forest, and the compressed silence of the place, broken intermittently by coughs and snores, inhibited thought. At length I slept fretfully, waking now and again from dreams of being chased, hunted, and accused, to find the silence grown deeper, alien and horrid in its thickness. But toward dawn—one I sensed, not witnessed—I woke to an outcry that seemed to issue from beneath the old prison, such a prolonged release of breath it could only have been the product of awful torment or extreme exaltation… or else it was the cry of something not quite human, expressing a primitive emotion whose cause and color is not ours to know, a response to some new shape of fear or a tidal influence or a memory from before birth, and following this I heard a whispering, chittering noise that seemed to arise from every quarter, like the agitated, subdued congress of a crowd gathered for an event of great and solemn gravity. While that chorus lasted I was full of dread, but once it subsided, almost stricken with relief, I fell into a black sleep and did not wake again until the shadows, too, had waked and the first full day of my true incarceration had begun.

• • •

During those early months at Diamond Bar I came to understand the gist of what Ristelli, Causey, and the baldheaded man had tried to tell me. Eventually one found what was suitable. Things came to you. Trust your instincts. These statements proved to be not the vague, useless pronouncements I had assumed, but cogent practicalities, the central verities of the prison. Initially I behaved as I had during my early days at Vacaville. In the dining hall, an appropriately cavernous room of cream-colored walls, with the image of a great flying bird upon the ceiling, dark and unfigured, yet cleanly rendered like an emblem on a flag… in the dining room, then, I guarded my tray with my free arm and glanced fiercely about as I ate, warning off potential food thieves. When I discovered that the commissary was, indeed, a free store, I took to hoarding cigarettes, candy, and soap. It was several days before I recognized the pointlessness of these behavioral twitches, several weeks before I grew comfortable enough to forego them. Though I was not a heavy drug user, on those occasions that I grew bored, prior to beginning my work, I had no difficulty in obtaining drugs—you only had to mention your requirements to one of several men and later that day the pills or the powder would appear in your cell. I have no idea what might have occurred if I had developed a habit, but I doubt this was a problem at the prison. It was clear that the men on my block were all either above average in intelligence or skilled in some craft, or both, and that most had found a means of employing their gifts and skills that left no time for recreational excess. As to the men housed in the cellblocks below the eighth stairway and how they managed things—of them I knew little. The men of different blocks rarely mingled. But I was told that they had a less innate grasp of Diamond Bar’s nature than did we. Consequently their day-to-day existence was more of a struggle to adapt. In time, if they were not transferred, they—like us—would move into the old wings of the prison.

It did not seem likely that anyone could have less firm a grasp on the subject of Diamond Bar than I did, but I adapted quickly, learned my way around, and soon became conversant with a theory espoused by the majority of the men on my block, which held that the prison was the ultimate expression of the carceral system, a mutation, an evolutionary leap forward both in terms of the system and the culture that they believed was modeled upon it. They did not claim to understand the specifics of how this mutation had been produced, but generally believed that a mystical conjunction of event (likely a systemic glitch, an alchemy of botched paperwork and inept bureaucracy), natural law, and cosmic intent had permitted the establishment and maintenance of a prison independent of the carceral system or—so said the true believers—one that acted through subtle manipulation to control both the system and the greater society whose backbone the system formed. Though this smacked of Ristelli’s cant, it was not so easy to dismiss now that I saw Diamond Bar for myself. The absence of guards, of any traditional authority; the peculiar demeanor of the inmates; the comfortable beds, decent food and free commissary; the crossing of the river in lieu of ordinary official process; the man dressed as a guard whom everyone had seen and no one knew; the rapid fading of all tattoos; the disturbing dawn cry and the subsequent mutterings, a phenomenon repeated each and every morning—what could be responsible for all this if not some mystical agency? For my part, I thought the theory a fantasy and preferred another, less popular theory—that we were being subjected to an experimental form of mind control and that our keepers were hidden among us. Whenever these theories were discussed, and they were often discussed, Richard Causey, who had studied political science at Duke University prior to turning to a career of violent crime and was writing a history of the prison, would declare that though he had his own ideas, the answer to this apparently unresolvable opposition resided with the board, but that thus far their responses to his inquiries concerning the matter had been inadequate.

The board consisted of four inmates ranging in age from sixtyish to over seventy. Holmes, Ashford, Czerny, and LeGary. They met each day in the yard to, it was said, decide the important questions relating to our lives and—if you bought into the view that Diamond Bar was the purest expression of a carceral universe, the irreducible distillate of the essential human condition—the lives of everyone on the planet. To reach the yard it was necessary to pass through the old wing of the prison visible beyond the eighth stairway, and though in the beginning I did not enjoy the passage, made anxious by the gloomy nineteenth century atmosphere of the wing’s antiquated cells with their key locks and hand-forged bars, and the masses of rotting stone in which they were set, I grew accustomed to the sight and came to view the old sections of the prison as places of unguessable potential—it was there, after all, that I would someday live if I stayed at Diamond Bar. As I’ve noted, the prison straddled a ridge—the spine of the ridge ran straight down the middle of the yard. Most of the population would gather close to the walls or sit on the slopes, which had been worn barren by countless footsteps, but the members of the board met among the grass and shrubs that flourished atop the ridge, this narrow strip of vegetation giving the enclosed land the look of a giant’s scalp pushing up from beneath the earth, one whose green hair had been trimmed into a ragged Mohawk. Rising beyond the west wall, several iron girders were visible, evidence of the new wing that was under construction. The new wing was frequently referenced in conversation as being the panacea for whatever problems existed in our relatively problem-free environment—it seemed an article of faith that prison life would therein be perfected. Again, this struck me as fiction disseminated by whoever was manipulating our fates.

Late one afternoon some four months after my arrival, myself and Causey—toward whom I had succeeded in developing a neutral attitude—and Terry Berbick, a short, thickset bank robber with a gnomish look, his curly black hair and beard shot through with gray, were sitting against the east wall in the yard, discussing the newcomer on our block, Harry Colangelo—this happened to be the baldheaded man whom I had confronted on the day I came to the prison. His furtive air and incoherent verbal outbursts had made a poor impression, and Berbick was of the opinion that Colangelo’s move onto the block had been premature.

“Something confused the boy. Caught him at a crucial moment during his period of adjustment and he’s never gotten squared away.” Berbick glanced at me. “Might be that dust-up with you did the trick.”

“It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“I don’t know. Way he stares at you, seems like you got under his skin. It might be why he moved up to eight—so he can come back at you easier.”

“I’ve seen it before,” Causey said. “Something happens early on to fuck up a man’s instincts, and next you know he goes to acting all haywire. Gets his ass transferred right out on outa here.”

I was not certain that being transferred out of Diamond Bar was the bleak prospect that Causey and Berbick thought it, but saw no need to argue the point.

“There the fucker is.” Causey pointed to the slope on our left, where Colangelo was moving crabwise down the ridge, his pink scalp agleam with the westering sun, eyes fixed upon us. “I think Terry nailed it. The man’s all messed up behind you.”

“Whatever.” I turned my attention to the four old men who purportedly ruled the world. Doddering on their height, the wind flying their sparse hair up into wild frays. Behind them, the tops of the girders burned gold, like iron candles touched with holy fire. Several younger men stood near the four. When I asked who they were, Berbick said they spoke for the board.

“What?” I said. “The masters of the universe can’t talk for themselves?”

Berbick rolled up to his feet, smartly dusted the seat of his trousers, acting pissed off. “You want to find out about the board, let’s go see them.”

I looked at him with amusement.

“You act like you know something,” he said, “but you don’t know as much as we do. And we don’t know dip.”

“Ain’t nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Nothing bad’ll happen. We’ll go with you.” He glanced at Causey. “Right?”

Causey shrugged. “Sure.”

Berbick arched an eyebrow and said to me in a taunting voice, “It’s just four old guys, Tommy. Come on!”

Colangelo, who had been sitting upslope and to the left of us, scrambled up and hurried out of our path as we climbed the ridge.

“Fucking freak!” said Berbick as we drew abreast of him.

The board members were standing in a semicircle just below the highest point of the ridge, which was tufted with two roughly globular, almost identically puny shrubs, so sparsely leaved that from a distance, seen against the backdrop of the stone wall, they looked like the models of two small planets with dark gray oceans and island continents of green. The steadfastness with which the board was contemplating them gave rise to the impression that they were considering emigration to one or the other. Drawing near, I saw that the oldest among them, Czerny, appeared to be speaking, and the others, their eyes wandering, did not appear to be listening. Holmes, a shrunken black man, bald except for puffs of cottony hair above his ears and behind his neck, was shifting his feet restlessly, and the other two, Ashford and LeGary, both grandfather-gray and gaunt, were posed in vacant attitudes. One of the younger men who shadowed them, a stocky Latino in his forties, blocked our path, politely asked what we wanted, and Berbick jerked his thumb toward me and said, “Penhaligon here wants to meet the board.”

“I don’t want to meet them,” I said, annoyed. “I was just wondering about them.”

“They’re busy,” the Latino said. “But I’ll see.”

“You trying to fuck me over?” I asked Berbick as the Latino man went to consult with the board.

He looked pleased with himself. “What could happen? It’s only four old guys.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Causey said. “He’s just giving you shit.”

“I don’t need you interpreting for me, okay?” I said. “You can quit acting like my fucking big sister.”

“Damn!” said Berbick with surprise. “He’s coming over.”

With the Latino holding his elbow, Czerny was heading toward us, shuffling through the ankle-high grasses, wobbly and frail. His caved-in face was freckled with liver spots, and the tip of his tongue flicked out with lizardly insistence. He was small, no more than five feet five, but his hands were those of a much larger man, wide and thick-fingered, with prominent knuckles—they trembled now, but looked as if they had been used violently during his youth. His eyes were a watery grayish blue, the sclera laced with broken vessels, and the right one had a cloudy cast. When he reached us, he extended a hand and gave my forearm a tentative three-fingered pat, like the benediction of a senile pope who had forgotten the proper form. He mumbled something, barely a whisper. The Latino man gave ear, and when Czerny had finished, he said, “There’s important work for you here, Penhaligon. You should set about it quickly.”

It did not seem that Czerny had spoken long enough to convey this much information. I suspected that the Latino man and his associates were running a hustle, pretending to interpret the maunderings of four senile old men and in the process guaranteeing a soft life for themselves.

Czerny muttered something more, and the Latino said, “Come visit me in my house whenever you wish.”

The old man assayed a faltering smile; the Latino steadied him as he turned and, with reverent tenderness, led him back to join the others. I framed a sarcastic comment but was stopped by Causey’s astonished expression. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Man invited you to his house,” Causey said with an air of disbelief.

“Yeah… so?”

“That doesn’t happen too often.”

“I been here almost five years, and I don’t remember it ever happening,” Berbick said.

I glanced back and forth between them. “Wasn’t him invited me—it was his fucking handler.”

Berbick made a disdainful noise, shook his head as if he couldn’t fathom my stupidity, and Causey said, “Maybe when you go see him, you’ll…”

“Why the fuck would I go see him? So I can get groped by some old wheeze?”

“I guess you got better things to do,” Berbick said. He was acting pissed off again, and I said, “What crawled up your ass, man?”

He started to step to me, but Causey moved between us, poked me in the chest with two fingers and said, “You little hump! You walk straight up to eight from the door… You don’t seem to appreciate what that means. Frank Czerny invites you to his house and you ridicule the man. I been trying to help you…”

“I don’t want your help, faggot!”

I recognized Causey’s humorless smile as the same expression he had worn many years ago prior to ramming my head into a shower wall. I moved back a pace, but the smile faded and he said calmly, “Powers that be got something in mind for you, Penhaligon. That’s plain to everyone ’cept you. Seems like you forgot everything you learned about surviving in prison. You don’t come to new walls with an attitude. You pay attention to how things are and behave accordingly. Doesn’t matter you don’t like it. You do what you hafta. Pm telling you—you don’t get with the program, they gonna transfer your sorry ass.”

I pretended to shudder.

“Man thinks he’s a hardass,” said Berbick, who was gazing up at one of the guard turrets, an untenanted cupola atop a stone tower. “He doesn’t know what hard is.”

“Thing you oughta ask yourself,” Causey said to me, “is where you gonna get transferred to.”

He and Berbick started downslope, angling toward an unpopulated section of the east wall. Alone on the height, I was possessed by the paranoid suspicion that the groups of men huddled along the wall were all talking about me, but the only evidence that supported this was Colangelo, who was standing halfway down the slope to my right, some forty feet away, almost directly beneath the spot where the board was assembled. He was watching me intently, expectantly, as if anticipating that I might come at him. With his glowing scalp, his eyes pointed with gold, he had the look of a strange pink demon dressed in prison gray, and my usual disdain for him was supplanted by nervousness. As I descended from the ridge top, he took a parallel path, maintaining the distance between us, and though under ordinary circumstances I would have been tempted to challenge him, having alienated Causey and Berbick, knowing myself isolated, I picked up my pace and did not feel secure until I was back in my cell.

• • •

Over the next several days, I came to recognize that, as Causey had asserted, I had indeed forgotten the basics of survival, and that no matter how I felt about the board, about the nature of Diamond Bar, I would be well served to pay Czerny a visit. I put off doing so, however, for several days more. Though I would not have admitted it, I found the prospect of mounting the iron stair to the tier where Czerny lived intimidating—it appeared that in acknowledging the semblance of the old man’s authority, I had to a degree accepted its reality. Sitting in my cell, staring up at the dim white lights beyond the ninth stair, I began to order what I knew of the prison, to seek in that newly ordered knowledge a logical underpinning that would, if not explain everything I had seen, at least provide a middle ground between the poles of faith and sophism. I repaired my relationship with Causey, a matter of simple apology, and from him I learned that the prison had been constructed in the 1850s and originally used to house men whose crimes were related in one way or another to the boomtowns of the Gold Rush. The Board of Prisons had decided to phase out Diamond Bar in the 1900s, and at this time, Causey believed, something had happened to transform a horrific place that few survived into the more genial habitation it had since become. He had unearthed from the library copies of communications between the Board of Prisons and the warden, a man named McCandless Quires, that documented the rescinding of the phase-out order and conferred autonomy upon the prison, with the idea that it should become a penal colony devoted to rehabilitation rather than punishment. During that period, every level of society had been rife with reformers, and prison reform was much discussed—in light of this, such a change as Diamond Bar had undergone did not seem extraordinary; but the fact that it had been given to Quires to oversee the change; that smacked of the bizarre, for he had been frequently reprimanded by the Board for his abuses of prisoners. Indeed, it was the atrocities perpetrated during his stewardship that had induced the Board to consider the question of reform. It was reported that men had been impaled, flayed, torn apart by the prison dogs. Quires’s letters demonstrated that he had undergone a transformation. Prior to 1903, his tone in response to the Board’s inquiries was defiant and blasphemous, but thereafter his letters displayed a rational, even a repentant character, and he continued to serve as warden until his retirement in 1917. There was no record of a replacement having been appointed, and Causey theorized that the board as we knew it had then come to power, though it was possible, given Quires’s advanced age (eighty-eight), that they had been running things for many years previously. From 1917 on, communications between Diamond Bar and the Board of Prisons steadily diminished, and in 1945, not long before V-E Day, they apparently ceased altogether. It was as if the prison, for all intents and purposes, had become non-existent in the eyes of the state.

Once Causey showed me a yellowed photograph he had unearthed from the prison archives. It had been shot in the yard on a sunny day in May of 1917—the date was inscribed on the back of the photo in a crabbed script—and it depicted a group of a woman and five men, four convicts, one of them black, and the last, an elderly man with white, windblown hair and a craggy, seamed face, clad in a dark suit and tie. Causey identified the elderly man as McCandless Quires, the warden. “And these here,” he said, indicating the other four, “that’s the board.” He tapped each in turn. “Ashford, Czerny, LeGary, Holmes.”

Judging by their faces, the men were all in their twenties. There was a rough similarity of feature between them and the old men who met each day in the yard, but the idea that they were one and the same seemed absurd.

“That’s so, they’d all have to be more than a hundred,” I said. “They’re old, but not that old.”

“Look at the shape of their heads,” Causey said. “Their expressions. They all got that spacey smile. Look at Czerny’s hands. See how big they are? It’s them, all right.”

“You need to take a breath, man. This isn’t the fucking Magic Kingdom, this is prison we’re talking about.”

“This is Diamond Bar,” he said sullenly. “And we don’t know what the hell that is.”

I studied the photograph more closely, concentrating on the woman. She was lovely, delicate of feature, with flowing blonde hair. Noticing my attentiveness, Causey said, “I believe that there’s a plume. Quires didn’t have no daughter, no wife, and she got the look of plume.”

“What look is that?”

“Too perfect. Like she ain’t a man or a woman, but something else entirely.”

The photograph aside, what Causey told me lent a plausible historical context to the implausible reality of Diamond Bar, but the key ingredient of the spell that had worked an enchantment upon the prison was missing, and when at last I went to visit Czerny, I had retrenched somewhat and was content to lean upon my assumption that we knew nothing of our circumstance and that everything we thought we knew might well have been put forward to distract us from the truth. Climbing the stairs, passing meter after meter of stone, ash-black and broken like the walls of a mineshaft, I felt on edge. Up on the third tier, the ceiling lights shed a glow that had the quality of strong moonlight; the bars and railings were flaked with rust. Four prisoners were lounging against the railing outside Czerny’s cell—the Latino who had spoken for him was not among them—and one, a long-limbed black man with processed hair, his sideburns and thin mustache giving his lean face a piratical look, separated from the rest and came toward me, frowning.

“You supposed to come a week ago and you just coming now?” he said. “That ain’t how it goes, Penhaligon.”

“He told me to come whenever I wanted.”

“I don’t care what he said. It’s disrespectful.”

“That kind of old school, isn’t it?”

He looked perplexed.

“It’s the kind of attitude you’d expect to find at Vacaville and San Q,” I said. “Not at a forward-thinking joint like Diamond Bar.”

The black man was about to speak, but turned back to the cell as Czerny shuffled onto the tier. I had no inclination to mock the old man. Surrounded by young men attentive as tigers, he seemed the source of their strength and not their ward. Though I did not truly credit this notion, when he beckoned, the slightest of gestures, I went to his side without hesitation. His eyes grazed mine, then wandered toward the dim vault beyond the railing. After a second, he shuffled back into the cell, indicating by another almost imperceptible gesture that I should follow.

A television set mounted on the wall was tuned to a dead channel, its speakers hissing, its screen filled with a patternless sleet of black, silver, and green. Czerny sat on his bunk, its sheets cream-colored and shiny like silk, and—since he did not invite me to sit—I took a position at the rear of the cell, resting a hand upon the wall. The surface of the wall was unusually smooth, and upon examining it I realized it was not granite but black marble worked with white veins that altogether formed a design of surpassing complexity.

During my first conversation with Causey, he had suggested I purchase some pictures from the commissary to decorate my cell “until your wall comes in.” Though struck by this phrase, at the time my attention had been dominated by other concerns; but I had since discovered that once a cell was occupied; discolorations manifested on the wall facing the bunk, and these discolorations gradually produced intricate patterns reminiscent of the rock the Chinese call “picture stone,” natural mineral abstractions in which an imaginative viewer could discern all manner of landscapes. The wall in my cell had begun to develop discolorations, their patterns as yet sparse and poorly defined, but Causey’s wall, Berbick’s, and others were fully realized. It was said these idiosyncratic designs were illustrative of the occupant’s inner nature and, when reflected upon, acted to instruct the observer as to his flaws, his potentials, the character of his soul. None of them—at least none I had seen—compared to the elaborate grandeur of the one on Czerny’s wall. Gazing at it, I traveled the labyrinthine streets of a fantastic city lined by buildings with spindly, spiny turrets and octagonal doorways; I explored the pathways of a white forest whose creatures were crowned with antlers that themselves formed other, even more intricate landscapes; I coursed along a black river whose banks were sublime constructions of crystal and ice, peopled by nymphs and angels with wings that dwarfed their snowy bodies like the wings of arctic butterflies. I cannot say how long I stared—quite a while, I believe, because my mouth was dry when I looked away—but from the experience I derived an impression of a convoluted, intensely spiritual intellect that warred with Czerny’s drab, dysfunctional appearance. He was smiling daftly, eyes fixed on his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap, and I wondered if the audience was over, if I should leave. Then he spoke, muttering as he had out in the yard. This time I understood him perfectly, yet I am certain no intelligible word passed his lips.

“Do you see?” he asked. “Do you understand where you are now?”

I was so startled at having understood him, I could muster no reply.

He raised a hand, trailed his fingers across the bars of the gate, the sort of gesture a salesman might make to display the hang of a fabric. Assuming that he wanted me to inspect the bars, I stepped around him and bent to look at one. A bit less than halfway along its length the color and finish of the metal changed from rough and dark to a rich yellow. The join where the two colors met was seamless, and the yellow metal had an unmistakable soft luster and smoothness: gold. It was as if a luxuriant infection were spreading along the bar, along—I realized—all the bars of Czerny’s cell.

I am not sure why this unsettled me more profoundly than the rest of the bizarre occurrences I’d met with at Diamond Bar. Perhaps it resonated with some gloomy fairy tale that had frightened me as a child or inflamed some even deeper wound to my imagination, for I had a sudden appreciation of Czerny as a wizardly figure, a shabby derelict who had revealed himself of an instant to be a creature of pure principle and power. I backed out of the cell, fetched up against the railing, only peripherally mindful of Czerny’s attendants. The old man continued to smile, his gaze drifting here and there, centering briefly on my face, and in that broken muttering whose message I now comprehended as clearly as I might the orotund tones of a preacher ringing from a pulpit, he said, “You cannot retreat from the heart of the law, Penhaligon. You can let it illuminate you or you can fail it, but you cannot retreat. Bear this in mind.”

• • •

That night as I lay in my cell, immersed in the quiet of the cellblock like a live coal at the heart of a diamond, growing ever more anxious at the thought of Czerny in his cell of gold and marble, an old mad king whose madness could kill, for I believed now he was the genius of the place… that night I determined I would escape. Despite the caution implicit in Czerny’s final words, I knew I could never thrive there. I needed firm ground beneath my feet, not philosophy and magic or the illusion of magic. If I were to live bounded by walls and laws—as do we all—I wanted walls manned and topped with razor wire, written regulations, enemies I could see. Yet the apparent openness of the prison, its lack of visible security, did not fool me. Power did not exist without enforcement. I would have to ferret out the traps, learn their weaknesses, and in order to do that I needed to become part of the prison and pretend to embrace its ways.

My first step in this direction was to find an occupation, a meaningful activity that would convince whoever was watching that I had turned my mind onto acceptable avenues; since my only skill was at art, I began drawing once again. But making sketches, I realized, would not generate a bona fide of my submersion in the life of Diamond Bar; thus I undertook the creation of a mural, using for a canvas the walls and ceiling of an empty storeroom in one of the sub-basements. I chose as a theme the journey that had led me to the prison, incorporating images of the river crossing, of Frank Ristelli, the gray van, and so forth. The overall effect was more crazy quilt than a series of unified images, although I was pleased with certain elements of the design; but for all the attention it received, it might have rivaled Piero della Francesca. Men stopped by at every hour to watch me paint, and the members of the board, along with their entourages, were frequent visitors. Czerny took particular interest in my depiction of Ristelli; he would stand in front of the image for periods up to half an hour, addressing it with his customary vacant nods. When I asked one of his attendants the reason for his interest, I was told that Ristelli was revered for a great personal sacrifice made on behalf of us all and—reflecting on the origins of our common home—he had been on the verge of being made a member of the board, but had forsworn the security and comfort of the prison and returned to the world in order to seek out men suitable for Diamond Bar.

Placing Ristelli’s zoned piety in context with the psychological climate of the prison, it was not difficult to understand why they perceived him to be their John the Baptist; but in the greater context of the rational, the idea was ludicrous. More than ludicrous. Insane. Recalling how laughable Ristelli’s preachments had seemed back in Vacaville reinforced my belief that the population of Diamond Bar was being transformed by a person or persons unknown into a brain-dead congregation of delusionaries, and fearful of joining them, I intensified my focus on escape, exploring the sub-basements, the walls, the turrets, searching for potential threats. On one of these explorative journeys, as I passed through Czerny’s block, I noticed that the massive oak door leading to the new wing, heretofore always locked, was standing partway open and, curious, I stepped inside. The space in which I found myself was apparently an anteroom, one more appropriate to a modern cathedral than a jail—domed and columned, with scaffolding erected that permitted access to every inch of the roof and walls. The door on the far side of the room was locked, and there was little else to see, the walls and ceiling being white and unadorned. I was on the verge of leaving when I saw a sheet of paper taped to one of the columns. Written in pencil upon it was the following:

This place is yours to paint, Penhaligon, if you wish.

A key lay on the scaffolding beside the note—it fit the oak door. I locked the door, pocketed the key and went about my business, understanding this show of trust to signify the board’s recognition that I had accepted my lot and that by taking up their charge I might earn a further degree of trust and so learn something to my benefit. To succeed in this I would have to do something that would enlist their delusion, and I immediately set about working on a design that would illustrate the essence of the delusion, The Heart of the Law. Though I began with cynical intent, as the weeks went by and my cell walls were covered with sketches, I grew obsessed with the project. I wanted the mural to be beautiful and strong to satisfy the artistic portion of my nature, my ego, and not simply to satisfy the board—in truth, I presumed they would approve of anything I did that hewed to their evangel. The dome and walls of the anteroom, the graceful volume of space they described, inspired me to think analytically about painting, something I had not done before, and I challenged myself to transcend the limits of my vision, to conceive a design that was somehow larger than my soul. I came to dwell more and more on the motive theory of Diamond Bar, that the criminal was the fundamental citizen, the archetype in whose service the whole of society had been created, and in the process I came obliquely to embrace the idea, proving, I suppose, the thesis that high art is the creation of truth from the raw materials of a lie, and the artist who wishes to be adjudged “great” must ultimately, through the use of passion and its obsessive tools, believe the lie he is intent upon illuminating. To augment my analytic capacities, I read books that might shed light on the subject—works of philosophy for the most part—and was astonished to discover in the writings of Michel Foucault a theory mirroring the less articulate theory espoused by the prison population. I wondered if it might be true, if delusion were being employed in the interests of truth, and, this being the case, whether the secret masters of Diamond Bar were contemplating a general good and the experiment of which we were a part was one that sought to evolve a generation in harmony with the grand design underlying all human culture. The books were difficult for me, but I schooled myself to understand them and became adept at knotting logic into shapes that revealed new facets of possibility—new to me, at any rate. This caused me to lose myself in abstraction and consequently diminished the urgency of my intention to escape. Like everyone who lived at Diamond Bar, I seemed to have a talent in that regard.

The design I settled upon owed more to Diego Rivera and Soviet poster art than to the muralists of the Renaissance. The walls would be thronged with figures, all reacting toward the center of the design, which was to occupy the dome and which I had not yet been able to conceptualize—I felt the image would naturally occur as a byproduct of my labors. It took three months of twelve-hour days to lay out the sketch on the walls, and I estimated that, if done properly, the painting would take a year to complete. Chances were I would be gone from Diamond Bar before then, and realizing this, when I began to paint, ensorcelled by my vision, driven by the idea of finishing in a shorter time, I worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Dangling in harness from the scaffolding, crouched over, forced into unnatural positions, I gained an appreciation for the physical afflictions that Michelangelo endured while painting the Sistine Chapel. Each night after work I tried to shake off the aches and pains by walking through the sub-basements of the prison, and it was during one of these walks that I encountered the plumes.

In prison, sex is an all-consuming preoccupation, a topic endlessly discussed, and from my earliest days at Diamond Bar the plumes had been recommended as a palatable alternative to self-gratification. The new wing, it was said, would house both women and men, thus ending the single unnatural constraint of prison life, and many held that the plumes would eventually become those women, evolving—as were we all—into their ideal form. Even now, Causey said, the plumes were superior to the sex available in other prisons. “It’s not like fucking a guy,” he said. “It feels, y’know, okay.”

“Is it like fucking a woman?” I asked.

He hesitated and said, “Kinda.”

“‘Kinda’ doesn’t do it for me.”

“Only reason it’s different is because you’re thinking about it not being a woman.”

“Yeah, well. I’ll pass. I don’t want to think when I’m fucking.”

Causey continued urging me to give the plumes a try, because—I believed—he felt that if I surrendered to temptation, I would become a complicitor in perversion, and this would somehow lessen the guilt attaching to his sexual assault on me. That he felt guilty about what had transpired between us was not in question. As our relationship progressed, he came to speak openly about the event and sought to engage me in a dialogue concerning it. Therapy, I supposed. Part of his process of self-examination. At the time, I rejected his suggestions that I visit the plumes out of hand, but they may have had some effect on me, for in retrospect I see that my initial encounter with them, though it seemed accidental, was likely an accident I contrived. I was, you see, in a heightened state of sexuality. Immersed in my work, essentially in love with it, while painting I would often become aroused not by any particular stimulus—there were no visual or tactile cues—but by the concentrated effort, itself a form of desire maintained at peak intensity for hours on end. And so on the night I strayed into the section of the prison occupied by the plumes, I was, though tired, mentally and sexually alert. I was tempting myself, testing my limits, my standards, hoping they would fail me.

Three levels down from the main walls were dozens of rooms—bedchambers, a communal kitchen, common rooms, and so forth—an area accessed by a double door painted white and bearing a carved emblem that appeared to represent a sheaf of plumes, this the source of the name given to those who dwelled within. Much of the space had the sterile decor of a franchise hotel: carpeted corridors with benches set into walls whose patterned discolorations brought to mind art nouveau flourishes. The common rooms were furnished with sofas and easy chairs and filled with soft music whose melodies were as unmemorable as an absent caress. No barred gates, just wooden doors. The lighting was dim, every fixture limned by a faint halation, giving the impression that the air was permeated by a fine mist. I felt giddy on entering the place, as if I had stood up too quickly. Nerves, I assumed, because I felt giddier yet when I caught sight of my first plume, a slim blond attired in a short gray dress with spaghetti straps. She had none of the telltale signs of a transvestite or a transsexual. Her hands and feet were small, her nose and mouth delicately shaped, her figure not at all angular. After she vanished around a corner, I remembered she was a man, and that recognition bred abhorrence and self-loathing in me. I turned, intending to leave, and bumped into another plume who had been about to walk past me from behind. A willowy brunette with enormous dark eyes, dressed in the same fashion as the blond, her mouth thinned in exasperation. Her expression softened as she stared at me. I suppose I gaped at her. The memory of how I behaved is impaired by the ardor with which I was studying her, stunned by the air of sweet intelligence generated when she smiled. Her face was almost unmarked by time—I imagined her to be in her late twenties—and reminded me of the faces of madonnas in Russian ikons: long and pale and solemn, wide at the cheekbones, with an exaggerated arch to the eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. Her hair fell straight and shining onto her back. There was nothing sluttish or coarse about her; on the contrary, she might have been a graduate student out for an evening on the town, a young wife preparing to meet her husband’s employer, an ordinary beauty in her prime. I tried to picture her as a man but did not succeed in this, claimed instead by the moment.

“Are you trying to find someone?” she asked. “You look lost.”

“No,” I said. “I’m just walking… looking around.”

“Would you like me to give you the tour?” She put out her right hand to be shaken. “I’m Bianca.”

The way she extended her arm straight out, assertive yet graceful, hand angled down and inward a bit, it was so inimitably a female gesture, devoid of the frilliness peculiar to the gestures of men who pretend to be women, it convinced me on some core level of her femininity, and my inhibitions fell away. As we strolled, she pointed out the features of the place. A bar where the ambience of a night club was created by red and purple spotlights that swept over couples dancing together; a grotto hollowed out from the rock with a pool in which several people were splashing one another; a room where groups of men and plumes were playing cards and shooting pool. During our walk, I told Bianca my life story in brief, but when I asked about hers, she said, “I didn’t exist before I came to Diamond Bar.” Then, perhaps because she noticed disaffection in my face, she added, “That sounds overly dramatic, I know. But it’s more or less true. I’m very different from how I used to be.”

“That’s true of everyone here. The thinking you do about the past, it can’t help but change you.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

At length she ushered me into a living room cozily furnished in the manner of a bachelorette apartment and insisted I take a seat on the sofa, then went through a door into the next room, reappearing seconds later carrying a tray on which were glasses and a bottle of red wine. She sat beside me, and as she poured the wine I watched her breasts straining against the gray bodice, the soft definition of her arms, the precise articulation of the muscles at the corners of her mouth. The wine, though a touch bitter, put me at ease, but my sense of a heated presence so near at hand sparked conflicting feelings, and I was unable to relax completely. I told myself that I did not want intimacy, yet that was patently untrue. I had been without a woman for three years, and even had I been surrounded by women during that time, Bianca would have made a powerful impression. The more we talked, the more she revealed of herself, not the details of her past, but the particularity of her present; her quiet laugh, a symptom—it seemed—of ladylike restraint; the grave consideration she gave to things I said; the serene grace of her movements. There was an aristocratic quality to her personal style, a practiced, almost ritual caution. Only after learning that I was the one painting a mural in the new wing did she betray the least excitement, and even her excitement was colored with restraint. She leaned toward me, hands clasped in her lap, and her smile broadened, as if my achievement, such as it was, made her proud.

“I wish I could do something creative,” she said wistfully at one point. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me.”

“Creativity’s like skin color. Everyone’s got some.”

She made a sad moue. “Not me.”

“I’ll teach you to draw if you want. Next time I’ll bring a sketch pad, some pencils.”

She traced the stem of her wine glass with a forefinger. “That would be nice… if you come back.”

“I will,” I told her.

“I don’t know.” She said this distantly, then straightened, sitting primly on the edge of the sofa. “I can tell you don’t think it would be natural between us.”

I offered a reassurance, but she cut me off, saying, “It’s all right. I understand it’s strange for you. You can’t accept that I’m natural.” She let her eyes hold on my face for a second, then lowered her gaze to the wine glass. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept, but I am, you know.”

I thought she was saying that she was post-operative, yet because she spoke with such offhanded conviction and not the hysteria-tinged defiance of a prison bitch, I also wondered, against logic, if she might be telling the truth and was a woman in every meaning of the word. She came to her feet and stepped around the coffee table and stood facing me. “I want to show you,” she said. “Will you let me show you?”

The mixture of shyness and seductiveness she exhibited in slipping out of her dress was completely natural, redolent of a woman who knew she was beautiful yet was not certain she would be beautiful enough to please a new man, and when she stood naked before me, I could not call to mind a single doubt as to her femininity, all my questions answered by high, small breasts and long legs evolving from the milky curve of her belly. She seemed the white proof of a sensual absolute, and the one thought that separated itself out from the thoughtlessness of desire was that here might be the central figure in my mural.

During the night that followed, nothing Bianca did in any way engaged my critical faculties. I had no perch upon which a portion of my mind stood and observed. It was like all good nights passed with a new lover, replete with tenderness and awkwardness and intensity. I spent every night for the next five weeks with her, teaching her to draw, talking, making love, and when I was in her company, no skepticism concerning the rightness of the relationship entered in. The skepticism that afflicted me when we were apart was ameliorated by the changes that knowing her brought to my work. I came to understand that the mural should embody a dynamic vertical progression from darkness and solidity to brightness and evanescence. The lower figures would be, as I had envisioned, heavy and stylized, but those above demanded to be rendered impressionistically, gradually growing less and less defined, until at the dome, at the heart of the law, they became creatures of light. I reshaped the design accordingly and set to work with renewed vigor, though I did not put in so many hours as before, eager each night to return to Bianca. I cannot say I neglected the analytic side of my nature—I continued to speculate on how she had become a woman. In exploring her body I had found no surgical scars, nothing to suggest such an invasive procedure as would be necessary to effect the transformation, and in her personality I perceived no masculine defect. She was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what she appeared: a young woman who, albeit experienced with men, had retained a certain innocence that I believed she was yielding up to me.

When I mentioned Bianca to Causey, he said, “See, I told ya.”

“Yeah, you told me. So what’s up with them?”

“The plumes? There’s references to them in the archives, but they’re vague.”

I asked him to elaborate, and he said all he knew was that the criteria by which the plumes were judged worthy of Diamond Bar was different from that applied to the rest of the population. The process by which they entered the prison, too, was different—they referred to it as the Mystery, and there were suggestions in the archival material that it involved a magical transformation. None of the plumes would discuss the matter other than obliquely. This seemed suggestive of the pathological myths developed by prison queens to justify their femininity, but I refused to let it taint my thoughts concerning Bianca. Our lives had intertwined so effortlessly, I began to look upon her as my companion. I recognized that if my plans for escape matured I would have to leave her, but rather than using this as an excuse to hold back, I sought to know her more deeply. Every day brought to light some new feature of her personality. She had a quiet wit that she employed with such subtlety, I sometimes did not realize until after the fact that she had been teasing me; and she possessed a stubborn streak that, in combination with her gift for logic, made her a formidable opponent in any argument. She was especially fervent in her defense of the proposition that Diamond Bar manifested the principle from which the form of the human world had been struck, emergent now, she liked to claim, for a mysterious yet ultimately beneficent reason.

In the midst of one such argument, she became frustrated and said, “It’s not that you’re a non-conformist, it’s like you’re practicing non-conformity to annoy everyone. You’re being childish!”

“Am not!” I said.

“I’m serious! It’s like with your attitude toward Ernst.” A book of Max Ernst prints, one of many art books she had checked out of the library, was resting on the coffee table. She gave it an angry tap. “Of all the books I bring home, this is the one you like best. You leaf through it all the time. But when I tell you I think he’s great, you…”

“He’s a fucking poster artist.”

“Then why look at his work every single night?”

“He’s easy on the eyes. That doesn’t mean he’s worth a shit. It just means his stuff pacifies you.”

She gave her head a rueful shake.

“We’re not talking about Max Ernst, anyway,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter what we talk about. Any subject it’s the same. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you’re here. In prison. You say the reason you started doing crime was due to your problems with authority, but I don’t see that in you. It’s there, I guess, but it doesn’t seem that significant. I can’t imagine you did crime simply because you wanted to spit in the face of authority.”

“It wasn’t anything deep, okay? It’s not like I had an abusive childhood or my father ran off with his secretary. None of that shit. I’m a fuck-up. Crime was my way of fucking up.”

“There must be something else! What appealed to you about it?”

“The thing I liked best,” I said after giving the question a spin, “was sitting around a house I broke into at three in the morning, thinking how stupid the owners were for letting a mutt like me mess with their lives.”

“And here you are, in a truly strange house, thinking we’re all stupid.”

The topic was making me uncomfortable. “We’re always analyzing my problems. Let’s talk about you for a change. Why don’t you confide your big secrets so we can run ’em around the track a few times?”

A wounded expression came to her face. “The reason I haven’t told you about my life is because I don’t think you’re ready to handle it.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

She leaned back against the cushions and folded her arms, stared at the coffee table. “That’s not it… altogether.”

“So you don’t trust me and there’s more. Great.” I made a show of petulance, only partly acting it.

“I can’t tell you some things.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I can’t!” Her anger didn’t seem a show, but it faded quickly. “You crossed the river to come here. We have to cross our own river. It’s different from yours.”

“The Mystery.”

She looked surprised, and I told her what I had learned from Causey.

“He’s right,” she said. “I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”

“Why? It’s like a vow or something?”

“Or something.” She relaxed her stiff posture. “The rest of it… I’m ashamed. When I look back, I can’t believe I was so disreputable. Be patient, all right? Please?”

“You, too,” I said.

“I am patient. I just enjoy arguing too much.”

I put my hand beneath her chin, trying to jolly her. “If you want, we can argue some more.”

“I want to win,” she said, smiling despite herself.

“Everything’s like you say. Diamond Bar’s heaven on fucking earth. The board’s…”

“I don’t want you to give in!” She pushed me onto my back and lay atop me. “I want to break you down and smash your flimsy defenses!”

Her face, poised above me, bright-eyed and soft, lips parted, seemed oddly predatory, like that of a hungry dove. “What were we arguing about?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said, and kissed me. “You, me, life. Max Ernst.”

• • •

One day while drinking a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, taking a break from work, I entered into a casual conversation with a dour red-headed twig of a man named Phillip Stringer, an ex-arsonist who had recently moved from the eighth tier into the old wing. He mentioned that he had seen me with Bianca a few nights previously. “She’s a reg’lar wild woman!” he said. “You touch her titties, you better hold on, ’cause the next thing it’s like you busting out of chute number three on Mustang Sally!”

Though giving and enthusiastic in sex, Bianca’s disposition toward the act impressed me as being on the demure side of “reg’lar wild woman.” Nevertheless, I withheld comment.

“She was too wild for me,” Stringer went on. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy screwing chicks with dicks. Truth is, I got a thing for ’em. But when they got a bigger dick’n I got… guess I felt a tad intimidated.”

“Hell are you talking about?” I asked.

He gazed at me in bewilderment. “The plume I saw you with. Bianca.”

“You’re fucked up, man! She doesn’t have a dick.”

“You think that, you never seen a dick. Thing’s damn near wide around as a Coke can!”

“You got the wrong girl,” I told him, growing irritated.

Stringer glowered at me. “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know who the hell I’m screwing.”

“Then you’re a goddamn liar,” I said.

If it had been another time, another prison, we would have been rolling around on the floor, thumbing eyes and throwing knees, but the placid offices of Diamond Bar prevailed, and Stringer dialed back his anger, got to his feet. “I been with that bitch must be fifty times, and I’m telling you she gets hard enough to bang nails with that son-of-a-bitch. She goes to bouncing up and down, moaning, ‘Only for you…’ All kindsa sweet shit. You close your eyes, you’d swear you’s with a woman. But you grab a peek and see that horse cock waggling around, it’s just more’n I can handle.” He hitched up his trousers. “You better get yourself an adjustment, pal. You spending way too much time on that painting of yours.”

If it were not for the phrase “only for you,” I would have disregarded what Stringer said. Indeed, I did disregard most of it. But that phrase, which Bianca habitually breathed into my ear whenever she drew near her moment, seeded me with paranoia, and that night as we sat on the sofa, going over the charcoal sketches she had done of her friends, I repeated the essence of Stringer’s words, posing them as a joke. Bianca displayed no reaction, continuing to study one of the sketches.

“Hear what I said?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I guess I thought you’d say something, this guy going around telling everybody you got a dick.”

She set down the sketchpad and looked at me glumly. “I haven’t been with Phillip for nearly two years.”

It took me a moment to interpret this. “I guess it’s been such a long time he mixed you up with somebody.”

The vitality drained from her face. “No.”

“Then what the fuck are you saying?”

“When I was with Phillip, I was different from the way I am with you.”

Irritated by the obliqueness with which she was framing her responses, I said, “You telling me you had a dick when you were seeing him?”

“Yes.”

Hearing this did not thrill me, but I had long since dealt with it emotionally. “So after that you had the operation?”

“No.”

“No? What? You magically lost your dick?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I do! Hell are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m not sure how it happens… it just does! Whatever the man wants, that’s how I am. It’s like that with all the plumes… until you find the right person. The one you can be who you really are with.”

I struggled to make sense of this. “So you’re claiming a guy comes along wanting you to have a dick, you grow one?”

She gave a nod of such minimal proportions, it could have been a twitch. “I’m sorry.”

“Gee,” I said with thick sarcasm. “It’s kinda like a fairy tale, isn’t it?”

“It’s true!” She put a hand to her forehead, collecting herself. “When I meet someone new, I change. It’s confusing. I hardly know it’s happening, but I’m different afterward.”

I do not know what upset me more, the implication, however improbable, that she was a shapeshifter, capable of switching her sexual characteristics to please a partner, or the idea that she believed this. Either way, I found the situation intolerable. This is not to say I had lost my feelings for her, but I could no longer ignore the perverse constituency of her personality. I pushed up from the couch and started for the door.

Bianca cried out, “Don’t go!”

I glanced back to find her gazing mournfully at me. She was beautiful, but I could not relate to her beauty, only to the neurotic falsity I believed had created it.

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “For you, I’m who I want to be. I’m a woman. I can prove it!”

“That’s okay,” I said coldly, finally. “I’ve had more than enough proof.”

• • •

Things did not go well for me after that evening. The mural went well. Though I no longer approached the work with the passion I had formerly brought to it, every brushstroke seemed a contrivance of passion, to be the product of an emotion that continued to act through me despite the fact that I had forgotten how to feel it. Otherwise, my life at Diamond Bar became fraught with unpleasantness. Harry Colangelo, who had more or less vanished during my relationship with Bianca, once again began to haunt me. He would appear in the doorway of the anteroom while I was painting and stare venomously until I shouted at him. Inarticulate shouts like those you might use to drive a dog away from a garbage can. I developed back problems for which I was forced to take pain medication, and this slowed the progress of my work. Yet the most painful of my problems was that I missed Bianca, and there was no medication for this ailment. I was tempted to seek her out, to apologize for my idiocy in rejecting her, but was persuaded not to do so by behavioral reflexes that, though I knew them to be outmoded, having no relation to my life at the moment, I could not help obeying. Whenever an image of our time together would flash through my mind, immediately thereafter would follow some grotesquely sexual mockery of the image that left me confused and mortified.

I retreated into my work. I slept on the scaffolding, roused by the mysterious cry that like the call of some grievous religion announced each dawn. I lived on candy bars, peanut butter, crackers, and soda that I obtained at the commissary, and I rarely left the anteroom, keeping the door locked most of the days, venturing out only for supplies. When I woke I would see the mural surrounding me on every side, men with thick arms and cold white eyes pupiled with black suns, masses of them, clad in prison gray, crowded together on iron stairs (the sole architectural component of the design), many-colored faces engraved with desperation, greed, lust, rage, longing, bitterness, fear, muscling each other out of the way so as to achieve a clearer view of the unpainted resolution that overarched their suffering and violence. At times I thought I glimpsed in the mural—or underlying it—a cohesive element I had not foreseen, something created from me and not by me, a truth the work was teaching me, and in my weaker moments I supposed it to be the true purpose of Diamond Bar, still fragmentary and thus inexpressible; but I did not seek to analyze or clarify it—if it was there, then its completion was not dependent upon my understanding. Yet having apprehended this unknown value in my work forced me to confront the reality that I was of two minds concerning the prison. I no longer perceived our lives as necessarily being under sinister control, and I had come to accept the possibility that the board was gifted with inscrutable wisdom, the prison itself an evolutionary platform, a crucible devised in order to invest its human ore with a fresh and potent mastery, and I glided between these two poles of thought with the same rapid pendulum swing that governed my contrary attitudes toward Bianca.

From time to time the board would venture into the anteroom to inspect the mural and offer their mumbling approbation, but apart from them and occasional sightings of Causey and Colangelo, I received no other visitors. Then one afternoon about six weeks after ending the relationship, while painting high on the scaffolding, I sensed someone watching me; Bianca was standing in the doorway thirty feet below, wearing a loose gray prison uniform that hid her figure. Our stares locked for an instant, then she gestured at the walls and said, “This is beautiful.” She moved deeper into the room, ducking to avoid a beam, and let her gaze drift across the closely packed images. “Your sketches weren’t…” She looked up at me, brushed strands of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t realize you were so accomplished.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, so overcome by emotion that I was unable to react to what she had said, only to what I was feeling.

She gave a brittle laugh. “Sorry that you’re good? Don’t be.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No… not really. I thought by coming here I would, but I don’t.” She struck a pose against the mural, standing with her back to it, her right knee drawn up, left arm extended above her head. “I suppose I’ll be portrayed like this.”

It was so quiet I could hear a faint humming, the engine of our tension.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“I’m glad you did.”

“If you’re so glad, why are you standing up there?”

“I’ll come down.”

“And yet,” she said after a beat, “still you stand there.”

“How’ve you been?”

“Do you want me to lie? The only reason I can think of for you to ask that is you want me to lie. You know how I’ve been. I’ve been heartbroken.” She ran a hand along one of the beams and examined her palm as if mindful of dust or a splinter. “I won’t ask the same question. I know how you’ve been. You’ve been conflicted. And now you look frightened.”

I felt encased in some cold unyielding substance, like a souvenir of life preserved in lucite.

“Why don’t you talk to me?” She let out a chillier laugh. “Explain yourself.”

“Jesus, Bianca. I just didn’t understand what was going on.”

“So it was an intellectual decision you made? A reaction to existential confusion?”

“Not entirely.”

“I was making a joke.” She strolled along the wall and stopped to peer at one of the faces.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “What you told me… How can you believe it?”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I think there’s drugs in the food… in the air. Or something. There has to be a mechanism involved. Some sort of reasonable explanation.”

“For what? My insanity?” She backed against the wall in order to see me better. “This is so dishonest of you.”

“How’s it dishonest?”

“You were happier thinking I was a post-operative transsexual? It’s my irrational beliefs that drove you away? Please!” She fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Suppose what I told you is true. Suppose who I am with you is who you want me to be. Who I want to be. Would that be more unpalatable than if my sex was the result of surgery?”

“But it’s not true.”

“Suppose it is.” She folded her arms, waiting.

“I don’t guess it would matter. But that’s not…”

“Now suppose just when we’re starting to establish something strong, you rip it apart?” A quaver crept into her voice. “What would that make you?”

“Bianca…”

“It’d make you a fool! But then of course I’m living in a drug-induced fantasy that causes you existential confusion.”

“Whatever the case,” I said, “I probably am a fool.”

It was impossible to read her face at that distance, but I knew her expression was shifting between anger and despair.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“God! What’s wrong with you?” She stalked to the door, paused in the entrance; she stood without speaking for what seemed a very long time, looking down at the floor, then glanced sideways up at me. “I was going to prove something to you today, but I can see proving it would frighten you even more. You have to learn to accept things, Tommy, or else you won’t be able to do your time. You’re not deceiving anyone except yourself.”

“I’m deceiving myself? Now that’s a joke!”

She waved at the mural. “You think what you’re painting is a lie. Don’t deny it. You think it’s a con you’re running on us. But when I leave it’ll be the only thing in the room that’s still alive.” She stepped halfway through the door, hesitated and, in a voice that was barely audible, said, “Goodbye, Tommy.”

• • •

I experienced a certain relief after Bianca’s visit, an emotion bred by my feeling that now the relationship was irretrievably broken, and I could refocus my attention on escape; but my relief was short-lived. It was not simply that I was unable to get Bianca out of my thoughts, or even that I continued to condemn myself both for abandoning her and for having involved myself with her in the first place—it was as if I were engaged in a deeper struggle, one whose nature was beyond my power to discern, though I assumed my attitudes toward Bianca contributed to its force. Because I was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to face it, this irresolvable conflict began to take a toll. I slept poorly and turned to drink as a remedy. Many days I painted drunk, but drunkenness had no deleterious effect on the mural—if anything, it sharpened my comprehension of what I was about. I redid the faces on the lower portions of the walls, accentuating their beastliness, contrasting them with more human faces above, and I had several small technical breakthroughs that helped me create the luminous intensity I wanted for the upper walls. The nights, however, were not so good. I went to wandering again, armed against self-recrimination and the intermittent appearances of Harry Colangelo with a bottle of something, usually home brew of recent vintage. Frequently I became lost in the sub-basements and wound up passed out on the floor. During one of these wanders, I noticed I was a single corridor removed from the habitat of the plumes, and this time, not deceiving myself as to motive, I headed for the white door. I had no wish to find Bianca. I was so debased in spirit, the idea of staining my flesh to match enticed me, and when I pushed into the entryway and heard loud rock and roll and saw that the halation surrounding the light fixtures had thickened into an actual mist that caused men and plumes to look like fantastical creatures, gray demons and their gaudy, grotesque mistresses, I plunged happily into the life of the place, searching for the most degrading encounter available.

Her name was Joy, a Los Angeleno by birth, and when I saw her dancing in the club with several men under a spotlight that shined alternately purple and rose, she seemed the parody of a woman. Not that she was unfeminine, not in the least. She was Raphaelesque, like an old-fashioned Hollywood blond teetering on the cusp between beauty and slovenly middle-age, glossy curls falling past her shoulders, the milky loaves of her breasts swaying ponderously in gray silk, her motherly buttocks dimpling beneath a tight skirt, her scarlet lips reminiscent of those gelatin lips full of cherry syrup you buy at Halloween, her eyes tunnels of mascara pricked by glitters. Drunk, I saw her change as the light changed. Under the purple she whitened, grew soft as ice cream, ultimately malleable; she would melt around you. Under the rose, a she-devilish shape emerged; her touch would make you feverish, infect you with a genital heat. I moved in on her, and because I had achieved an elevated status due to my connection with the board, the men dancing with her moved aside. Her fingers locked in my hair, her swollen belly rolled against me with the sodden insistence of a sea thing pushed by a tide. Her mouth tasted of liqueur and I gagged on her perfume, a scent of candied flowers. She was in every regard overpowering, like a blond rhinoceros. “What’s the party for?” I shouted above the music. She laughed and cupped both hands beneath her breasts, offering them to me, and as I squeezed, manipulating their shapes, her eyelids drooped and her hips undulated. She pulled my head close and told me what she wanted me to do, what she would do.

Whereas sex with Bianca had been nuanced, passion cored with sensitivity, with Joy it was rutting, tumultuous, a jungle act, all sweat and insanity, pounding and meaty, and when I came I felt I was deflating, every pure thing spurting out of me, leaving a sack of bones and organic stink lying between her Amazon thighs. We fucked a second time with her on top. I twisted her nipples hard, like someone spinning radio dials, and throwing back her head she spat up great yells, then braced both hands on the pillow beside my head and hammered down onto me, her mouth slack, lips glistening with saliva poised an inch above mine, grunting and gasping. Then she straightened, arched her back, her entire body quaking, and let out a hideous groan followed by a string of profane syllables. Afterward she sat in a chair at her dressing table wearing a black bra and panties, legs crossed, attaching a stocking to her garter belt, posing an image that was to my eyes grossly sexual, repellently voluptuous, obscenely desirable. As she stretched out her leg, smoothing ripples in the silk, she said, “You used to be Bianca’s friend.”

I did not deny it.

“She’s crazy about you, y’know.”

“Is she here? At the party?”

“You don’t need her tonight,” Joy said. “You already got everything you needed.”

“Is she here?”

She shook her head. “You won’t be seeing her around for a while.”

I mulled over this inadequate answer and decided not to pursue it.

Joy put on her other stocking. “You’re still crazy about her. I’m a magnet for guys in love with other women.” She admired the look of her newly stockinged leg. “It’s not so bad. Sad guys fuck like they have something to prove.”

“Is that right?”

“You were trying to prove something, weren’t you?”

“Probably not what you think.”

She adjusted her breasts, settling them more cozily in the brassiere. “Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to prove.” She turned to the mirror, went to touching up her lipstick, her speech becoming halting as she wielded the applicator. “I am… expert in these matters… like all… ladies of the evening.”

“Is that how you see yourself?”

She made a kissy mouth at her reflection. “There’s something else in me, I think, but I haven’t found the man who can bring it out.” She adopted a thoughtful expression. “I could be very domestic with the right person. Very nurturing. Once the new wing’s finished… I’m sure I’ll find him then.”

“There’ll be real women living in the new wing. Lots of competition.”

“We’re the real women,” she said with more than a hint of irritation. “We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there. Some of us are there already. You should know. Bianca’s living proof.”

Unwilling to explore this or any facet of this consensus fantasy, I changed the subject. “So, what’s your story?” I asked.

“You mean my life story? Do you care?”

“I’m just making conversation.”

“We had our conversation, sweetie. We just didn’t talk all that much.”

“I wasn’t finished.”

She looked at me over her shoulder, arching an eyebrow. “My, my. You must really have something to prove.” She rested an elbow on the back of the chair. “Maybe you should go hunt up Bianca.” It was a thought, but one I had grown accustomed to rejecting. I reached down beside the bed, groping for my bottle. The liquor seemed to have an immediate effect, increasing my capacity for rejection. The colors of the room were smeary, as if made from different shades of lipstick. Joy looked slug-white and bloated, a sickly exuberance of flesh strangled by black lace, the monstrous ikon of a German Expressionist wet dream.

She gave what I took for a deprecating laugh. “Sure, we can converse some more if you want.” She started to unhook her brassiere.

“Leave that shit on,” I said. “I’ll work around it.”

• • •

Not long after my night with Joy, a rumor began to circulate that one of the plumes had become pregnant, and when I discovered that the plume in question was Bianca, I tried to find her. I gave the rumor little credit. Yet she had claimed she could prove something to me, and thus I could not completely discredit it. I was unsure how I would react if the rumor reflected the truth, but what chance was there of that? My intention was to debunk the rumor. I would be doing her a favor by forcing her to face reality. That, at any rate, is what I told myself. When I was unable to track her down, informed that she was sequestered, I decided the rumor must be a ploy designed to win me back. I abandoned my search, and once again focused my energy upon the mural. Though a third of the walls remained unfinished, I now had a more coherent idea of the figures that would occupy the dome, and I was eager to finalize the conception. Despite this vitality of purpose, I felt bereft, dismally alone, and when Richard Causey came to visit, I greeted him effusively, offering him refreshment from my store of junk food. Unlike my other visitors, he had almost nothing to say about the mural, and as we ate on the lowest platform of the scaffolding, it became obvious that he was preoccupied. His eyes darted about; he cracked his knuckles and gave indifferent responses to everything I said. I asked what was on his mind and he told me he had stumbled upon an old tunnel beneath the lowest of the sub-basements. The door leading to it was wedged shut and would take two people to pry open. He believed there might be something significant at the end of the tunnel.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I ran across some papers in the archives. Letters, documents. They suggested the tunnel led to the heart of the law.” He appeared to expect me to speak, but I was chewing. “I figured you might want to have a look,” he went on. “Seeing that’s what you’re painting about.”

I worried that Causey might want to get me alone and finish what he had started years before; but my interest was piqued, and after listening for several minutes more, I grew convinced that his interest in the tunnel was purely academic. To be on the safe side, I brought along a couple of the chisels I used to scrape the walls—they would prove useful in unwedging the door as well. Though it was nearly three in the morning, we headed down into the sub-basements, joined briefly by Colangelo, who had been sleeping in the corridor outside the anteroom. I brandished a chisel and he retreated out of sight.

The door was ancient, its darkened boards strapped with iron bands, a barred grille set at eye level. It was not merely stuck, but sealed with concrete. I shined Causey’s flashlight through the grille and was able to make out moisture gleaming on brick walls. With both of us wielding chisels, it required the better part of an hour to chip away the concrete and another fifteen minutes to force the door open wide enough to allow us to pass. The tunnel angled sharply downward in a series of switchbacks, and by the time we reached the fifth switchback, with no end in view, I realized that the walk back up was going to be no fun whatsoever. The bricks were slimy to the touch, rats skittered and squeaked, and the air… dank, foul, noisome. None of these words or any combination thereof serve to convey the vileness of the stench it carried. Molecules of corruption seemed to cling to my tongue, to the insides of my nostrils, coating my skin, and I thought that if the tunnel did, indeed, lead to the heart of the law, then that heart must be rotten to the core. I tied my shirt across the lower half of my face and succeeded in filtering the reek, yet was not able to block it completely.

I lost track of the passage of time and lost track, too, of how many switchbacks we encountered, but we traveled far beneath the hill, of that much I am certain, descending to a level lower than that of the river flowing past the gate of the prison annex before we spotted a glimmer of light. Seeing it, we slowed our pace, wary of attracting the notice of whatever might occupy the depths of Diamond Bar, but the space into which we at length emerged contained nothing that would harm us—a vast egglike chamber that gave out into diffuse golden light a hundred feet above and opened below into a black pit whose bottom was not visible. Though the ovoid shape of the chamber implied artificiality, the walls were of natural greenish-white limestone, configured by rippled convexities and volutes, and filigreed with fungal growths, these arranged in roughly horizontal rows that resembled lines of text in an unknown script; the hundreds of small holes perforating the walls looked to have been placed there to simulate punctuation. A considerable ledge rimmed the pit, populated by colonies of rats, all gone still and silent at the sight of us, and as we moved out onto it, we discovered that the acoustics of the place rivaled that of a concert hall. Our footsteps resounded like the scraping of an enormous rasp, and our breath was amplified into the sighing of beasts. The terror I felt did not derive from anything I have described so much as from the figure at the center of the chamber. Dwarfed by its dimensions, suspended from hooks that pierced his flesh at nine separate points and were themselves affixed to chains that stretched to the walls, was the relic of a man. His begrimed skin had the dark granite color of the prison’s outer walls, and his long white hair was matted down along his back like a moldering cape; his limbs and torso were emaciated, his ribs and hipbones protruding and his ligature ridged like cables. Dead, I presumed. Mummified by some peculiar process.

“Quires!” Causey’s whisper reverberated through the chamber. “Jesus Christ! It’s Quires.”

The man’s head drooped, his features further hidden by clots of hair. I had no evidence with which to argue Causey’s claim and, indeed, not much inclination to do so. Who else, according to the history of the prison, merited the torment the man must have experienced? It did not seem possible. Quires had been in his eighties when he stepped down as warden more than eighty years before. But the existence of the chamber undermined my conception of the possible. Its silence was so liquid thick and chilling, it might have been the reservoir from which the quiet of the prison flowed. A brighter fear flickered up in me.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

At the sound of my voice, the rats offered up an uneasy chittering chorus that swirled around us like the rushing of water in a toilet. Causey was about to respond to my urging when Quires—if it was he—lifted his head and gave forth with a cry, feeble at first, but swelling in volume, a release of breath that went on and on as if issuing not from his lungs but from an opening inside him that admitted to another chamber, another voice more capable of such a prolonged expression, or perhaps to a succession of openings and voices and chambers, the infinitely modulated utterance of a scream proceeding from an unguessable source. The chittering of the rats, too, swelled in volume. Half-deafened, hands pressed to my ears, I sank to my knees, recognizing that the cry and its accompanying chorus was pouring up through the holes that perforated the walls and into every corner of the prison, a shout torn from the heart of the law to announce the advent of a bloody dawn. Quires’s body spasmed in his chains, acquiring the shape of a dark thorn against the pale limestone, and his face… Even at a distance I could see how years of torment had compressed his features into a knot of gristle picked out by two staring white eyes. I felt those eyes on me, felt the majestic insistence of his pain and his blissful acknowledgment that this state was his by right. He was the criminal at the heart of the law, the one in whom the arcs of evil and the redemptive met, the lightning rod through which coursed the twin electricities of punishment and sacrifice, the synchronicity of choice and fate, and I understood that as such he was the embodiment of the purpose of Diamond Bar, that only from evil can true redemption spring, only from true redemption can hope be made flesh. Joyful and reluctant, willing servant and fearful slave, he was thaumaturge and penitent, the violent psychotic saint who had been condemned to this harsh durance and simultaneously sought by that service to transfigure us. Thus illuminated, in that instant I could have translated and read to you the fungal inscriptions on the walls. I knew the meaning of every projection and declivity of stone, and knew as well that the heart of the law was empty except for the exaltation of the damned and the luminous peace of the corrupted. Then Quires’s cry guttered, his head drooped. The rats fell silent again, returned to their petty scuttling, and all but a residue of my understanding fled.

I staggered up, but Causey, who had also been borne to his knees by the ferocity of the cry, remained in that posture, his lips moving as though in prayer, and it occurred to me that his experience of what had happened must have been far different from mine to produce such a reverent reaction. I turned again to Quires, realizing I could not help him, that he did not want my help, yet moved to give it nonetheless, and thus I did not see Colangelo break from the tunnel behind us… nor did I see him push Causey into the pit. It was Causey’s outcry, shrill and feeble in contrast to Quires’s, but unalloyed in its terror, that alerted me to danger. When I glanced back I saw that he had vanished into the depths, his scream trailing after him like a snapped rope, and on the spot where he had knelt, Colangelo stood glaring at me, Causey’s chisel in his right hand. Had he forced a confrontation in the anteroom, anywhere in the upper levels of the prison, I would not have been so afraid, for though he was taller and heavier, I was accustomed to fighting men bigger than myself; but that dread place eroded my confidence, and I stumbled away from him, groping for my own chisel. He said nothing, made no sound apart from the stentorian gush of his breath, pinning me with his little eyes. The wan light diminished the pinkness of his skin. His lips glistened.

“The hell is your problem?” I said; then, alarmed by the reverberations of my voice, I added in a hushed tone, “I didn’t do shit to you.”

Colangelo let out an enervated sigh, perhaps signaling an unraveling of restraint, and rushed at me, slashing with the chisel. I caught his wrist and he caught mine. We swayed together on the edge of the pit, neither of us able to gain an advantage, equal in strength despite the difference in our sizes. The excited squeaking of the rats created a wall around us, a multiplicity of tiny cheers hardened into a shrill mosaic. At such close quarters, his anger and my fear seemed to mix and ferment a madness fueled by our breath, our spittle. I wanted to kill him. That was all I wanted. Everything else—Quires, Causey, the panic I had previously felt—dwindled to nothing.

Colangelo tried to butt me. I avoided the blow and, putting my head beneath his chin, pushed him back from the pit. He went off-balance, slipped to one knee. I wrenched my left arm free and brought my elbow hard into his temple. He slumped, still clutching my wrist, preventing me from using my chisel. I threw another elbow that landed on the hinge of his jaw, an uppercut that smacked into the side of his neck and elicited a grunt. He sagged onto his side as I continued to hit him, and when he lost consciousness I straddled his chest and lifted the chisel high, intending to drive it into his throat; but in straightening, I caught sight of Quires hanging at the center of his chains. He did not look at me, but I was certain that in some way he was watching, aware of the moment. How could he not be? He was the substance of the prison, its spirit and its fleshly essence, the male host in whom the spider of female principle had laid its eggs, and as such was witness to our every thought and action. I sensed from him a caution. Not reproval, nothing so pious. In the thin tide of thought that washed between us there was no hint of moral preachment, merely a reminder of the limit I was on the verge of transgressing. What was it Ristelli had said? “Innocents and murderers. The system tolerates neither.” Madness receded, and I came to my feet. Prison logic ordained that I should push Colangelo into the pit and spare myself the inevitability of a second attack; but the logic of Diamond Bar, not Vacaville, commanded me. Numbed by the aftershocks of adrenaline and rage, I left him for the rats or whatever else fate might have in store, and with a last glance at Quires, suspended between the light of heaven and the pit, like the filament in an immense bulb, I began my ascent.

I had in mind to seek out Berbick or someone else whom Causey had befriended, to tell them what had become of him and to determine from their advice whether or not to make the events of the night and morning known to the board. Perhaps, I thought, by opening the sealed door I had violated an inviolate taboo and would suffer as a result. I might be blamed for Causey’s death. But as I trudged wearily up along the switchbacks, the emotion generated by my fight with Colangelo ebbed away, and the awful chamber in which we had struggled began to dominate my thoughts. Its stench, its solitary revenant, its nightmarish centrality to the life of the prison. With each step, I grew increasingly horrified by my acceptance of the place and the changes it had worked in me. It had neutered my will, obscured my instincts, blinded me to perversity. The things I had done… Bianca, Joy, my devotion to that ridiculous mural. What had I been thinking? Where the fuck had Tommy Penhaligon gone? I wanted to be who I was at that precise moment: someone alert to every shadow and suspicious presence; open to the influence of emotion and not governed by a pathological serenity that transformed violent men into studious, self-examining drones and, were you to believe the plumes, less violent men into women. If I returned to my cell and confided in Berbick, thereby obeying the rule of the prison, sooner or later I would be sucked back in and lose this hard-won vantage from which I could perceive its depravity and pathetic self-involvements. I had no good prospects in the world, but all I could aspire to in Diamond Bar was that one day I would go shuffling through the yard, an old man dimly persuaded that he had been gifted with the grasp of a holy principle too great for the brains of common men to hold, a principle that was no more than a distorted reflection of the instrumentality responsible for his dementia. Instead of heading to my cell, when I reached the eighth stair I kept walking down through the hill toward the annex gate, past the cells of sedate men who had grown habituated to the prison, past those of agitated new arrivals; and when I reached the gate—it was, of course, unlocked—I threw it open and stood on the threshold, gazing out upon a beautiful spring morning. Cool and bright and fresh. A lacework of sun and shadow under the dark firs. The river running green with snowmelt. I had no fear of the quick-flowing current; I had crossed it once in handcuffs, and unfettered I would cross it all the more easily. Yet I hesitated. I could not, despite my revulsion for what lay behind me, put a foot forward on the path of freedom. I felt something gathering in the woods, a presence defined by the sound of rushing water, the shifting boughs and pouring wind. A wicked immanence, not quite material, needing me to come out from the gate a step or two in order to be real. I berated myself for a coward, tried to inject my spine with iron, but second by second my apprehension grew more detailed. I had a presentiment of jaws, teeth, a ravenous will, and I backed away from the gate, not far, but far enough to slow my pulse, to think. No one walked out of prison. There must be watchers… a single watcher, perhaps. A mindless four-footed punishment for the crime of flight. I told myself this was the same illusion of threat that had driven me inside the walls many months before, but I could not disregard it. The beckoning green and gold of the day, the light rippling everywhere—these had the insubstantiality of a banner fluttered across a window, hiding a dreadful country from my sight.

Once kindled, fear caught in me and burned. The flickering of sun on water; the stirring of fallen needles; mica glinting on the face of a boulder: these were unmistakable signs of an invisible beast who slumbered by the steps of the prison. I heard a noise. It may have been someone starting a chainsaw downriver, a car engine being revved, but to my ears it was a growl sounded high in a huge throat, a warning and a bloody promise. I sprang to the gate and slammed it shut, then rested against the cold metal, weak with relief. My eyes went to the second level of the tier. Gazing down at me was a man in a guard’s uniform, absently tapping the palm of his hand with a nightstick. I could hear the slap of wood on flesh, counting out the time with the regularity of a metronome, each stroke ticking off the ominous fractions of his displeasure. Finally, as if he had become sure of me, he sheathed the nightstick and walked away, the sharp report of his boot heels precisely echoing the now-steady rhythm of my heart.

• • •

I spent the remainder of the day and half the night staring at the discolorations on the wall opposite my bunk—they had never come in fully, never developed into a complicated abstraction as had the walls of my fellow prisoners, possibly because the walls upon which I expended most of my energy were the ones in the anteroom of the new wing. Yet during those hours I saw in their sparse scatter intimations of the scriptlike fungus inscribed upon the walls of the chamber at the heart of the law, indecipherable to me now as Arabic or Mandarin, tantalizingly inscrutable—I suspected they were the regulations by which we lived, and contemplating them soothed me. I could not avoid recalling the chamber and the man suspended therein, but my thoughts concerning these things were speculative, funded by neither fear nor regret. If it had been Quires, one hundred and sixty years old and more, tortured for half that span, this lent credence to Causey’s assertion that Czerny, LeGary, Ashford, and Holmes were the original board of Diamond Bar who had been photographed with the warden in 1917… and what did that say about the potentials of the prison? Time and again I returned to the truths I had sensed as Quires cried out from his chains, the dualities of punishment and sacrifice he seemed to incorporate. It was as if he were a battery through which the animating principle of the place was channeled. This was a simplistic analogy, yet when coupled with the image of a Christlike figure in torment, simplicity took on mythic potency and was difficult to deny. Now that I had proved myself unequal to traditional freedom, I was tempted to believe in the promised freedom of the new wing, in all the tenuous promise of Diamond Bar. The illusion of freedom, I realized, was the harshest of prisons, the most difficult to escape. Ristelli, Causey, Czerny, and Bianca had each in their way attempted to lead me to this knowledge, to demonstrate that only in a place like Diamond Bar, where walls kept that illusion at bay, was the road to freedom discernable. I had been a fool to disregard them.

Near midnight, a skinny, towheaded man stopped in front of my cell door and blew cigarette smoke through the bars from his shadowed mouth. I did not know him, but his arrogance and deferential attitude made me suspect he was a familiar of the board. “You’re wanted at the annex gate, Penhaligon,” he said, and blew another stream of smoke toward me. He looked off along the corridor, and in the half-light I saw the slant of a cheekbone, skin pitted with old acne scars.

In no mood to be disturbed, I asked, “What for?”

“Man’s being transferred. Guess they need a witness.”

I could not imagine why a transfer would require witnesses, and I felt the creep of paranoia; but I did not think the board would resort to trickery in the exercise of their power, and, reluctantly, I let the man escort me down through the annex.

The gate was open, and gathered by the entranceway, in partial silhouette against the moonstruck river, was a group of men, ten or twelve in all, consisting of the board and their spokesmen. Their silence unsettled me, and once again I grew paranoid, thinking that I was to be transferred; but then I spotted Colangelo off to one side, hemmed in against the wall by several men. His head twitched anxiously this way and that. The air was cool, but he was perspiring. He glanced at me, betraying no reaction, either he did not register me or else he had concluded that I was only a minor functionary of his troubles.

Czerny, along with LeGary, Ashford, and Holmes, was positioned to the left of the entrance. As I waited for whatever ritual was to occur, still uncertain why I had been invited, he came a tottering step toward me, eyes down, hands fingering his belt, and addressed me in his usual muttering cadence. I did not understand a single word, but the towheaded man, who was sticking to my elbow, said in a snide tone, “You been a bad boy, Penhaligon. That’s what the man’s telling you. You seen things few men have seen. Maybe you needed to see them, but you weren’t prepared.”

The towheaded man paused and Czerny spoke again. I could find nothing in his face to support the sternness of his previous words—he seemed to be babbling brokenly, as if speaking to a memory, giving voice to an imaginary dialogue, and thinking this, I wondered if that was what we were to him, memories and creatures of the imagination; if he had gone so far along the path to freedom that even those who lived in Diamond Bar had come to be no more than shadows in his mind.

“This is the edge of the pit,” the towheaded man said when Czerny had finished. “The one you saw below is only its metaphor. Here you were closest to peril. That’s why we have summoned you, so you can watch and understand.”

Another spate of muttering and then the towheaded man said, “This is your final instruction, Penhaligon. There are no further lessons to be learned. From now on we will not protect you.”

Czerny turned away, the audience ended, but angered by his claim that the board had protected me—I had no memory of being protected when I fought with Colangelo—and emboldened by the certainty that I was not to be transferred, I said to him, “If the pit I saw below was a metaphor, tell me where Causey is.”

The old man did not turn back, but muttered something the towheaded man did not have to translate, for I heard the words clearly.

“If you are fortunate,” Czerny said, “you will meet him again in the new wing.”

The towheaded man nudged me forward to stand by Czerny and the rest of the board, inches away from the line demarcating the limits of the prison and the beginning of the world, a dirt path leading downward among boulders to the river flashing along its course. I have said the river was moonstruck, yet that scarcely describes the brightness of the landscape. The light was so strong even the smallest objects cast a shadow, and though the shadows beneath the boughs quivered in a fitful wind, they looked solid and deep. The dense firs and the overhang of the entrance prevented me from seeing the moon, but it must have been enormous—I pictured a blazing silvery face peering down from directly above the river, pocked by craters that sketched the liver spots and crumpled features of a demented old man. Sprays of water flying from the rocks in midstream glittered like icy sparks; the shingle on the far shore glittered as though salted with silver. Beyond it, the terrain of the opposite bank lay hidden beneath a dark green canopy, but patches of needles carpeting the margins of the forest glowed a reddish-bronze.

Who it was that shoved Colangelo out onto the path, I cannot say—I was not watching. It must have been a hard shove, for he went staggering down the slope and fell to all fours. He collected himself and glanced back toward us, not singling anyone out, it seemed, but taking us all in, as if claiming the sight for memory. He wiped dirt from his hands, and judging by his defiant posture I expected him to shout, to curse, but he turned and made for the river, going carefully over the uneven ground. When he reached the river’s edge, he stopped and glanced back a second time. I could not make out his face, though he stood in the light, but judging by the sudden furtiveness of his body language, I doubted he had believed that he would get this far, and now that he had, the idea that he actually might be able to escape sprang up hot inside him, and he was prey to the anxieties of a man afflicted by hope.

Oddly enough, I hoped for him. I felt a sympathetic response to his desire for freedom. My heart raced and my brow broke a sweat, as if it were I and not that ungainly pinkish figure who was stepping from rock to rock, arms outspread for balance, groping for purchase on the slick surfaces, wobbling a bit, straining against gravity and fear. I had no apprehension of an inimical presence such as I had detected that morning, and this made me think that it had been nerves alone that had stopped me from escaping, and increased my enthusiasm for Colangelo’s escape. I wanted to cheer, to urge him on, and might have done so if I had not been surrounded by the silent members of the board and their faithful intimates. That Colangelo was doing what I had not dared caused me envy and bitterness but also infected me with hope for myself. The next time I was alone at the gate, perhaps I would be equal to the moment.

The wind kicked up, outvoicing the chuckling rush of the river, sending sprays higher over the rocks, and along with the wind, the brightness of the river intensified. Every eddy, every momentary splotch of foam, every sinewy swell of water glinted and dazzled, as if it were coming to a boil beneath Colangelo. He kept going past the midpoint, steadier, more confident with each step, unhampered by the buffets of the wind. Close by the gate the boughs bent and swayed, stirring the shadows, sending them sliding forward and back over the dirt like a black film. The whole world seemed in motion, the atoms of the earth and air in a state of perturbation, and as Colangelo skipped over the last few rocks, I realized there was something unnatural about all this brilliant movement. The shapes of things were breaking down… briefly, for the merest fractions of seconds, their edges splintering, decaying into jittering bits of bright and dark, a pointillist dispersion of the real. I assumed I was imagining this, that I was emotionally overwrought, but the effect grew more pronounced. I looked to Czerny and the board. They were as always—distracted, apparently unalarmed—but what their lack of reaction meant, whether they saw what I did and were unsurprised, whether they saw something entirely different, I could not determine.

Colangelo let out a shout—of triumph, I believed. He had reached the shore and was standing with a fist upraised. The sand beneath his feet was a shoal of agitated glitter, and at his back the bank was a dark particulate dance, the forms of the trees disintegrating into a rhythm of green and black dots, the river into a stream of fiery unreality. How could he not notice? He shouted again and flipped us off. I realized that his outlines were shimmering, his prison garb blurring. Everything around him was yielding up its individuality, blending with the surround, flattening into an undifferentiated backdrop. It was nearly impossible to tell the sprays of water from sparkling currents in the air. The wind came harder, less like a wind in its roaring passage than the flux of some fundamental cosmic force, the sound of time itself withdrawing from the frame of human event, of entropy and electron death, and as Colangelo sprinted up the bank into cover of the forest, he literally merged with the setting, dissipated, the stuff of his body flowing out to be absorbed into a vibratory field in which not one distinguishable form still flourished. I thought I heard him scream. In all that roaring confusion I could not be certain, but he was gone. That much I knew. The world beyond the annex gate was gone as well, its separate forms dissolved into an electric absence of tremulous black, green, and silver motes, depthless and afire with white noise, like a television set tuned to a channel whose signal had been lost.

The board and their retainers moved away, talking softly among themselves, leaving me on the edge of the prison, of the pit, watching as—piece by piece—the forest and river and rocks reassembled, their inconstant shapes melting up from chaos, stabilizing, generating the imitation of a perfect moonlit night, the air cool and bracing, the freshness of the river sweetly palpable, all things alive with vital movement—boughs shifting, fallen needles drifting, light jumping along the surface of the water with the celerity of a charge along a translucent nerve. Even after what I had seen, I stood there a long while, tempted to run into the night, disbelieving the evidence of my senses, mistrusting the alternatives to belief, and so oppressed in spirit that I might have welcomed dissolution. A step forward, and I would be free one way or another. I stretched out a hand, testing its resistance to the dissolute power of the world beyond, and saw no hint of blurring or distortion. Yet still I stood there.

• • •

The anteroom is empty of scaffolding, swept clean of plaster dust, and I am sitting in a folding chair beneath the domed ceiling, like—I imagine—a gray-clad figure escaped from the lower portions of my mural. Years down the road I may look back and judge my work harshly, but I know at this moment I have achieved my goal and created something greater than myself. The mural rises up from solidity into the diffuse, from dark specificity into layered washes of light from which less definite figures emerge… less definite, at least, from this vantage. At close quarters they are easily identifiable. Bianca is there, a golden swimmer in the air, and at her side our son, her proof made flesh, born five months after our conversation in this very room. When told of his birth I went to visit her in the newly designated maternity ward of the prison hospital. Sleeping, she looked exhausted, her color weak and cheeks sunken, yet she was beautiful nonetheless. The child slept beneath a blanket in a crib beside her bed, only the back of his head visible. My emotions seemed to be circling one another like opponents in a ring. It was so strange to think of her with a child. Now that she had established the ultimate female credential, the freak detector in my brain emitted a steady beep. It was as if I were determined to paint her with a perverse brush, to view her condition and her Mystery in terms of an aberration. At the same time, I was drawn to her as never before. All my old feelings were reinvigorated. I decided to seek a reconciliation, but when I informed her of this she told me it was not what she wanted.

“You can’t hide what you feel,” she said. “You’re still conflicted.” She gave “conflicted” a distasteful reading and closed her eyes. “I’m too tired to argue. Please go.”

I sat with her a bit longer, thinking she might relent, but when she fell asleep again I left the room. We see each other on occasion. Each time we meet she searches my face but thus far has found no apparent cause for confidence there. I have little hope she will ever find me other than wanting, and the prospect of life without her grows more difficult to bear. It seems I cannot shake the skepticism that Frank Ristelli correctly attributed to me, for despite everything I have experienced at Diamond Bar, I continue to speculate that our lives are under the influence of a powerful coercive force that causes us to believe in unrealities. My chest, for instance. Some weeks ago I noticed a scatter of pale discolorations surfaced from the skin thereon, their hues and partly rendered shapes reminiscent of the tattoo on Ristelli’s chest, and yet when that tattoo achieves final form, as I assume it must, I will with part of my mind seek an explanation that satisfies my cynic’s soul. If the birth of a child from a woman once a man fails to persuade me of the miraculous, is there anything that will overwhelm my capacity for doubt? Only when I paint does the current of belief flow through me, and then I am uncertain whether the thing believed is intrinsic to the subject of the work or a constant of my ego, a self-aggrandizing principle I deify with my obsessive zeal.

Ristelli, too, occupies a place in the dome of the anteroom, a mangy gray ghost slipping back into the world, and Causey is there as well, tumbling toward its center where, almost buried in light, Quires hangs in his eternal torment, a promethean Christ yielding to a barbaric sacrifice. I have pored over Causey’s notes and rummaged the archives in an attempt to learn more about Quires, to understand what brought him to this pass. A transcendent moment like the one that left Saul stricken on the road to Damascus, an illumination of blinding sight? Or did Quires gradually win his way to a faith strong enough to compel his redemptive act? I have discovered no clue to explain his transformation, only a record of atrocities, but I think now both answers are correct, that all our labors are directed toward the achievement of such a moment, and perhaps therein lies the root cause of my skepticism, for though an illumination of this sort would remove the barriers that keep me from my family, I fear that moment. I fear I will dissolve in light, grow addled and vague, like Czerny, or foolishly evangelical like Ristelli. The abhorrence of authority that pushed me into a criminal life resists even an authority that promises ultimate blessing. I am afflicted with a contrarian’s logic and formulate unanswerable questions to validate my stance. I poison my feeble attempts at faith with the irrationalities and improbabilities of Diamond Bar.

Pleased by my celebration of their myth, the board has offered me another room to paint, and there I intend to celebrate Bianca. I have already sketched out the design. She will be the sole figure, but one repeated in miniature over and over again, emerging from flowers, aloft on floating islands, draped in shadow, dressed in dozens of guises and proximate past forms, a history of color and line flowing toward her twice lifesized image hovering like a Hindu goddess in an exotic heaven populated by her many incarnations. That I have relegated her to the subject of a painting, however contemplative of her nature, suggests that I have given up on the relationship, turned my obsession from the person to the memory of the person. This distresses me, but I cannot change the way things are. My chains still bind me, limiting my choices and contravening the will to change. In recent months, I have come to envision a future in which I am an ancient gray spider creaking across a web of scaffolding that spans a hundred rooms, leaking paintlike blood in his painful, solitary progress, creating of his life an illuminated tomb commemorating folly, mortal confusion, and lost love. Not so terrible a fate, perhaps. To die and love and dream of perfect colors, perfect forms. But like all those who strive and doubt and seek belief, I am moving rapidly in the direction of something that I fear, something whose consolations I mistrust, and am inclined to look past that inevitability, to locate a point toward which to steer. My son, whom Bianca has named Max, after—she says—her favorite painter, Max Ernst, an implied insult, a further dismissal from her life… I sometimes think my son might serve as such a point. My imagination is captivated by the potentials of a man so strangely born, and often I let myself believe he will be the wings of our liberty, the one in whom the genius of our home will fully manifest. Since he is kept apart from me, however, these thoughts have the weight of fantasy, and I am cast back onto the insubstantial ground of my own life, a gray silence in which I have rarely found a glint of promise. Tears come easily. Regrets like hawks swoop down to pluck my hopeful thoughts from midair. And yet, though I am afraid that, as with most promises of fulfillment, it will always hang beyond our grasp, an eidolon, the illusion of perfection, lately I have begun to anticipate the completion of the new wing.

ETERNITY AND AFTERWARD

Punctuality had come to be something of a curse for Viktor Chemayev. Though toward most of his affairs he displayed the typical nonchalance of a young man with a taste for the good life and the money to indulge it, he maintained an entirely different attitude toward his business appointments. Often he would begin to prepare himself hours in advance, inspecting his mirror image for flaws, running a hand over his shaved scalp, trying on a variety of smiles, none of which fit well on his narrow Baltic face, and critiquing the hang of his suit (his tailor had not yet mastered the secret of cutting cloth for someone with broad shoulders and a thin chest). Once satisfied with his appearance he would pace the length and breadth of his apartment, worrying over details, tactical nuances, planning every word, every expression, every gesture. Finally, having no better use for the time remaining, he would drive to the meeting place and there continue to pace and worry and plan. On occasion this compulsiveness caused him problems. He would drink too much while waiting in a bar, or catch cold from standing in the open air, or simply grow bored and lose his mental sharpness. But no matter how hard he tried to change his ways he remained a slave to the practice. And so it was that one night toward the end of October he found himself sitting in the parking lot of Eternity, watching solitary snowflakes spin down from a starless sky, fretting over his appointment with Yuri Lebedev, the owner of the club and its chief architect, from whom he intended to purchase the freedom of the woman he loved.

For once it seemed that Chemayev’s anxiety was not misplaced. The prospect of meeting Lebedev, less a man than a creature of legend whom few claimed to have ever seen, was daunting of itself; and though Chemayev was a frequent visitor to Eternity and thus acquainted with many of its eccentricities, it occurred to him now that Lebedev and his establishment were one and the same, an inscrutable value shining forth from the dingy chaos of Moscow, a radiant character whose meaning no one had been able to determine and whose menace, albeit palpable, was impossible to define. The appointment had been characterized as a mere formality, but Chemayev suspected that Lebedev’s notion of formality was quite different from his own, and while he waited he went over in his mind the several communications he had received from Eternity’s agents, wondering if he might have overlooked some devious turn of phrase designed to mislead him.

The club was located half an hour to the north and west of the city center amidst a block of krushovas, crumbling apartment projects that sprouted from the frozen, rubble-strewn waste like huge gray headstones memorializing the Kruschev era—the graveyard of the Soviet state, home to generations of cabbage-eating drunks and party drones. Buildings so cheaply constructed that if you pressed your hand to their cement walls, your palm would come away coated with sand. No sign, neon or otherwise, announced the club’s presence. None was needed. Eternity’s patrons were members of the various mafiyas, and they required no lure apart from that of its fabulous reputation and exclusivity. All that was visible of the place was a low windowless structure resembling a bunker—the rest of the complex lay deep underground; but the lot that surrounded it was packed with Mercedes and Ferraris and Rolls Royces. As Chemayev gazed blankly, unseeingly, through the windshield of his ten-year-old Lada, shabby as a mule among thoroughbreds, his attention was caught by a group of men and women hurrying toward the entrance. The men walked with a brisk gait, talking and laughing, and the women followed silently in their wake, their furs and jewelry in sharp contrast to the men’s conservative attire, holding their collars shut against the wind or putting a hand to their head to keep an extravagant coiffure in place, tottering in their high heels, their breath venting in little white puffs.

“Viktor!” Someone tapped on the driver side window. Chemayev cleared away condensation from the glass and saw the flushed, bloated features of his boss, Lev Polutin, peering in at him. Several feet away stood a pale man in a leather trenchcoat, with dark hair falling to his shoulders and a seamed, sorrowful face. “What are you doing out in the cold?” Polutin asked as Chemayev rolled down the window. “Come inside and drink with us!” His 100-proof breath produced a moist warmth on Chemayev’s cheeks.

“I’ll be along soon,” Chemayev said, annoyed by this interruption to his routine.

Polutin straightened and blew on his hands. A big-bellied ursine man of early middle age, his muscles already running to fat, hair combed back in a wave of grease and black gleam from his brow. All his features were crammed toward the center of his round face, and his gestures had the tailored expansiveness common to politicians and actors out in public, to all those who delight in being watched. He introduced his companion as Niall March, a business associate from Ireland. March gave Chemayev an absent nod. “Let’s get on in,” he said to Polutin. “I’m fucking freezing.” But Polutin did not appear to have heard. He beamed at Chemayev, as might a father approving of his child’s cleverness, and said, “I promised Niall I’d show him the new Russia. And here you are, Viktor. Here you are.” He glanced toward March. “This one…”—he pointed at Chemayev—“always thinking, always making a plan.” He affected a comical expression of concern. “If I weren’t such a carefree fellow, I’d suspect him of plotting against me.”

Asshole, Chemayev thought, as he watched the two men cross the lot. Polutin liked to give himself intellectual airs, to think of himself as criminal royalty, and to his credit he had learned how to take advantage of society’s convulsions; but that required no particular intelligence, only the instincts and principles of a vulture. As for the new Russia, what a load of shit! Chemayev turned his eyes to the nearest of the krushovas no more than fifteen yards away, the building’s crumbling face picked out by wan flickering lights, evidence that power was out on some of the floors and candles were in use. The fluorescent brightness of the entranceway was sentried by a prostitute with bleached hair and a vinyl jacket, who paced back and forth with metronomic regularity, pausing at the end of each pass to peer out across the wasteland, as though expecting her relief. There, he thought, that was where the new Russia had been spawned. Open graves infested by the old, the desperate, the addicted, perverts of every stamp. They made the stars behind them look false, they reduced everything they shadowed. If the new Russia existed, it was merely as a byproduct of a past so grim that any possible future would be condemned to embody it.

The prospect of spending an evening with his boss, especially this one, when so much was at stake, weighed on Chemayev. He was not in the mood for Polutin’s condescension, his unctuous solicitude. But he could think of no way to avoid it. He stepped from the car and took a deep breath of the biting, gasoline-flavored Moscow air. A few hours more, and his troubles would be over. All the wormy, enfeebling pressures of the past year would be evicted from his spirit, and for the first time he’d be able to choose a path in life rather than accept the one upon which he had been set by necessity. Strengthened by this notion, he started across the lot. Each of his footsteps made a crisp sound, as if he were crushing a brittle insect underfoot, and left an impression of his sole in a paper-thin crust of ice.

• • •

Chemayev checked his pistols at the entrance to Eternity, handing them over to one of Lebedev’s young unsmiling soldiers, and descended in an elevator toward the theater that lay at the center of the complex. The empty holsters felt like dead, stubby wings strapped to his sides, increasing his sense of powerlessness—by contrast, the money belt about his waist felt inordinately heavy, as if full of golden bars, not gold certificates. The room into which the elevator discharged him was vast, roughly egg-shaped, larger at the base than at the apex, with snow white carpeting and walls of midnight blue. At the bottom of the egg was a circular stage, currently empty; tiers of white leather booths were arranged around it, occupied by prosperous-looking men and beautiful women whose conversations blended into a soft rustling that floated upon a bed of gentle, undulant music. Each booth encompassed a linen-covered table, and each table was centered by a block of ice hollowed so as to accommodate bottles of chilled vodka. The top of the egg, some thirty feet above the uppermost tier, was obscured by pale swirling mist, and through the mist you could see hanging lights—silvery, delicate, exotically configured shapes that put Chemayev in mind of photographs he’d seen of microscopic creatures found in polar seas. To many the room embodied a classic Russian elegance, but Chemayev, whose mother—long deceased—had been an architect and had provided him with an education in the arts, thought the place vulgar, a childish fantasy conceived by someone whose idea of elegance had been derived from old Hollywood movies.

Polutin’s booth, as befitted his station, was near the stage. The big man was leaning close to March, speaking energetically into his ear. Chemayev joined them and accepted a glass of vodka. “I was about to tell Niall about the auction,” Polutin said to him, then returned his attention to March. “You see, each night at a certain time… a different hour every night, depending on our host’s whim… Each night a beautiful woman will rise from beneath the stage. Naked as the day she came into the world. She carries a silver tray upon which there lies a single red rose. She will walk among the tables, and offer the rose to everyone in attendance.”

“Yeah?” March cocked an eye toward Polutin. “Then what?”

“Then the bidding begins.”

“What are they bidding for?” March’s responses were marked by a peculiar absence of inflection, and he appeared disinterested in Polutin’s lecture; yet Chemayev had the sense that he was observing everything with unnatural attentiveness. His cheeks were scored by two vertical lines as deep as knife cuts that extended from beneath the corners of his eyes to the corners of his lips. His mouth was thin, wide, almost chimpanzee-like in its mobility and expressiveness—this at odds with his eyes, which were small and pale and inactive. It was as if at the moment of creation he had been immersed in a finishing bath, one intended to add an invigorating luster, that had only partially covered his face, leaving the eyes and all that lay behind them lacking some vital essential.

“Why… for the rose, of course.” Polutin seemed put off by March’s lack of enthusiasm. “Sometimes the bidding is slow, but I’ve seen huge sums paid over. I believe the record is a hundred thousand pounds.”

“A hundred grand for a fucking flower?” March said. “Sounds like bollocks to me.”

“It’s an act of conspicuous consumption,” Chemayev said; he tossed back his vodka, poured another from a bottle of Ketel One. “Those who bid are trying to demonstrate how little money means to them.”

“There’s an element of truth in what Viktor says,” Polutin said archly, “but his understanding is incomplete. You are not only bidding for status… for a fucking flower.” He spooned caviar onto a silver dish and spread some on a cracker. “Think of a rose. Redder than fire. Redder than a beast’s eye. You’re bidding for that color, that priceless symptom of illusion.” He popped the cracker into his mouth and chewed noisily; once he had swallowed he said to March, “You see, Viktor does not bid. He’s a frugal man, and a frugal man cannot possibly understand the poetry of the auction.” He worried at a piece of cracker stuck in his teeth. “Viktor never gambles. He picks up a check only when it might prove an embarrassment to do otherwise. His apartment is a proletarian tragedy, and you’ve seen that piece of crap he drives. He’s not wealthy, but he is far from poor. He should want for nothing. Yet he hoards money like an old woman.” Polutin smiled at Chemayev with exaggerated fondness. “All his friends wonder why this is.”

Chemayev ignored this attempt to rankle him and poured another vodka. He noted with pleasure that the pouches beneath Polutin’s eyes were more swollen than usual, looking as if they were about to give birth to fat worms. A few more years of heavy alcohol intake, and he’d be ripe for a cardiac event. He lifted his glass to Polutin and returned his smile.

“To be successful in business one must have a firm grasp of human nature,” said Polutin, preparing another cracker. “So naturally I have studied my friends and associates. From my observations of Viktor I’ve concluded that he is capable of magic.” He glanced back and forth between Chemayev and March, as if expecting a strong reaction.

March gave an amused snort. “I suppose that means he’s got himself a little wand.”

Polutin laughed and clapped March on the shoulder. “Let me explain,” he said. “During the early days of glasnost, Yuri Lebedev was the strongest man in all the mafiyas. He made a vast fortune, but he also made enemies. The dogs were nipping at his heels, and he recognized it was only a matter of time before they brought him down. It was at this point he began to build Eternity.”

He gobbled the second cracker, washed it down with vodka; after swallowing with some difficulty he went on: “The place is immense. All around us the earth is honeycombed with chambers. Apartments, a casino, a gymnasium, gardens. Even a surgery. Eternity is both labyrinth and fortress, a country with its own regulations and doctrines. There are no policemen here, not even corrupt ones. But commit a crime within these walls, a crime that injures Yuri, and you will be dealt with according to his laws. Yuri is absolutely secure. He need never leave until the day he dies. Yet that alone does not convey the full extent of his genius. In the surgery he had doctors create a number of doubles for him. The doctors, of course, were never heard from again, and it became impossible to track Yuri. In fact it’s not at all certain that he is still here. Some will tell you he is dead. Others say he lives in Chile, in Tahiti. In a dacha on the Black Sea. He’s been reported in Turkestan, Montreal, Chiang Mai. He is seen everywhere. But no one knows where he is. No one will ever know.”

“That’s quite clever, that is,” March said.

Polutin spread his hands as if to reveal a marvel. “Right in front of our eyes Yuri built a device that would cause him to disappear, and then he stepped inside it. Like a pharaoh vanishing inside his tomb. We were so fascinated in watching the trick develop, we never suspected it was a real trick.” He licked a fleck of caviar from his forefinger. “Had Yuri vanished in any way other than the one he chose, his enemies would have kept searching for him, no matter how slim their chances of success. But he created Eternity both as the vehicle of his magical act and as a legacy, a gift to enemies and friends alike. He surrendered his power with such panache… It was a gesture no one could resist. People forgave him. Now he is revered. I’ve heard him described as ‘the sanest man in Moscow.’ Which in these times may well serve as a definition of God.”

Apprehension spidered Chemayev’s neck. Whatever parallel Polutin was trying to draw between himself and Yuri, it would probably prove to be a parable designed to manipulate him. The whole thing was tiresome, predictable… Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a tall girl with dark brown hair. He started to call to her, mistaking her for Larissa, but then realized she didn’t have Larissa’s long legs, her quiet bearing.

“There is tremendous irony in the situation,” Polutin continued. “Whether dead or alive, in the act of vanishing Yuri regained his power. Those close to him—or to his surrogates—are like monks. They keep watch day and night. Everything said and done here is monitored. And he is protected not only by paranoia. Being invisible, his actions concealed, he’s too valuable to kill. He’s become the confidante of politicians. Generals avail themselves of his services. As do various mafiya bosses.” He inclined his head, as if suggesting that he might be among this privileged number. “There are those who maintain that Yuri’s influence with these great men is due to the fact that his magical powers are not limited to primitive sleights of hand such as the illusion that enabled his disappearance. They claim he has become an adept of secret disciplines, that he works miracles on behalf of the rich and the mighty.” Polutin’s attitude grew conspiratorial. “A friend of mine involved in building the club told me that he came into the theater once—this very room—and found it filled with computer terminals. Scrolling across the screens were strings of what he assumed were letters in an unknown alphabet. He later discovered they were Kabalistic symbols. Some weeks later he entered the theater again. There was no sign of the terminals… or of anything else, for that matter. The room was choked with silvery fog. My friend decided to keep clear of the place thereafter. But not long before Eternity opened its doors, curiosity got the best of him and he visited the theater a third time. On this occasion he found the room completely dark and heard hushed voices chanting the same unintelligible phrase over and over.” Polutin allowed himself a dramatic pause. “None of this seems to reflect the usual methods of construction.”

“What’s this got to do with your boy Viktor?” March asked. “He’s planning a night club, too, is he?”

“Not that I know of.” Polutin’s eyes went lazily to Chemayev, like a man reassuring himself that his prize possession was still in its rightful place. “However, I see in Viktor many of the qualities Yuri possessed. He’s bright, ambitious. He can be ruthless when necessary. He understands the uses of compassion, but if he wasn’t capable of violence and betrayal, he would never have risen to his present position.”

“I only did as I was told,” Chemayev said fiercely. “You gave me no choice.” Furious, he prepared to defend himself further, but Polutin did not acknowledge him, turning instead to March.

“It’s in his talent for self-deception that Viktor most resembles Yuri,” he said. “In effect, he has made parts of himself disappear. But while Yuri became an adept, a true professional, Viktor is still a rank amateur… though perhaps I underestimate him. He may have some more spectacular disappearance in mind.”

Chemayev’s feeling of apprehension spiked, but he refused to give Polutin the satisfaction of thinking that his words had had any effect; he scanned the upper tiers of booths, pretending to search for a familiar face.

“If I were to ask Viktor to describe himself,” Polutin went on, “he would repeat much of what I’ve told you. But he would never describe himself as cautious. Yet I swear to you, Viktor is the most cautious man of my acquaintance. He won’t admit it, not to you or me. Nor to himself. But let me give you an example of how his mind works. Viktor has a lover. Larissa is her name. She works here at Eternity. As a prostitute.”

“Don’t tell him my business!” Chemayev could feel the pulse in his neck.

Polutin regarded him calmly. “This is common knowledge, is it not?”

“It’s scarcely common knowledge in Ireland.”

“Yes,” said Polutin. “But then we are not in Ireland. We are in Moscow. Where, if memory serves me, underlings do not dare treat their superiors with such impertinence.”

Chemayev did not trust himself to speak.

“Larissa is a beautiful woman. Such a lovely face”—Polutin bunched the fingers of his left hand and kissed their tips, the gesture of an ecstatic connoisseur—“your heart breaks to see it! Like many who work here, she does so in order to pay off a debt incurred by someone in her family. She’s not a typical whore. She’s intelligent, refined. And very expensive.”

“How much are we talking about?” March asked. “I’ve a few extra pounds in me pocket.”

Chemayev shot him a wicked glance, and March winked at him. “Just having you on, mate. Women aren’t my thing.”

“What exactly is your thing?” Chemayev asked. “Some sort of sea creature? Perhaps you prefer the invertebrates?”

“Nah.” March went deadpan. “It’s got nothing to do with sex.”

“The point is this,” Polutin said. “Viktor’s choice of a lover speaks to his cautious nature. A young man of his status, ambitious and talented, but as yet not entirely on a firm footing… such a man is vulnerable in many ways. If he were to take a wife it would add to his vulnerability. The woman might be threatened or kidnapped. In our business you must be secure indeed if you intend to engage in anything resembling a normal relationship. So Viktor has chosen a prostitute under the protection of Yuri Lebedev. No one will try to harm her for fear of reprisals. Eternity protects its own.”

Chemayev started up from the booth, but Polutin beckoned him to stay. “A minute longer, Viktor. Please.”

“Why are you doing this?” Chemayev asked. “Is there a purpose, or is it merely an exercise?”

“I’m trying to instruct you,” said Polutin. “I’m trying to show you who you are. I think you have forgotten some important truths.”

Chemayev drew a steadying breath, let it out with a dry, papery sound. “I know very well who I am, but I’m confused about much else.”

“It won’t hurt you to listen.” Polutin ran a finger along the inside of his collar to loosen it and addressed March. “Why does Viktor hide his cautious nature from himself? Perhaps he doesn’t like what he sees in the mirror. I’ve known men who’ve cultivated a sensitive self-image in order to obscure the brutish aspects of their character. Perhaps the explanation is as simple as that. But I think there’s more to it. I suspect it may be for him a form of practice. As I’ve said, Viktor and Yuri have much in common… most pertinently, a talent for self-deception. I believe it was the calculated development of this ability that led Yuri to understand the concept of deception in its entirety. Its subtleties, its potentials.” Polutin shifted his bulk, his belly bumping against the edge of the table, causing vodka to slosh in all the glasses. “At any rate, I think I understand how Viktor manages to hide from himself. He has permitted himself to fall in love with his prostitute—or to think he >has fallen in love. This affords him the illusion of incaution. How incautious it must seem to the casual eye for a man to fall in love with a woman he cannot possibly have. Who lives in another man’s house. Whom he can see only for an hour or two in the mornings, and the odd vacation. Who is bound by contract to spend the years of her great beauty fucking strangers. Is this a tactical maneuver? A phase of Viktor’s development? A necessary step along the path toward some larger, more magical duplicity?… Or could it be a simple mistake? A mistake he is now tempted to compound, thus making himself more vulnerable than ever.” He spread his hands, expressing a stagy degree of helplessness. “But these are questions only Viktor can answer.”

“I bet I’m going to like working for you,” March said. “You’re a right interesting fellow.”

“Nobody likes working for me. If you doubt this, ask Viktor.” Polutin locked his hands behind his head, thrusting out his belly so that it overlapped the edge of the table; he looked with unwavering disapproval at Chemayev. “Now you may go. When you’ve regained your self-control, come back and drink some more. I’m told the entertainment this evening will be wonderful.”

• • •

The countertop of the bar in the lounge adjoining the theater was overlaid with a mosaic depicting a party attended by guests from every decade of the Twentieth Century, all with cunningly rendered faces done in caricature, most unknown to Chemayev, but a few clearly recognizable. There was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, the bloody-handed director of the NKVD under Stalin, his doughy, peasant features lent a genteel air by rimless pince-nez. He was standing with a man wearing a Party armband and a woman in a green dress—Beria was glancing up as if he sensed someone overhead was watching him. Elsewhere, a uniformed Josef Stalin held conversation with his old pal Kruschev. Lenin and Gorbachev and Dobrynin stood at the center of small groups. Even old Yeltsin was there, mopping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. Looking at the mosaic, Chemayev, sick with worry, felt he was being viewed with suspicion not only by his boss, but by these historical personages as well. It wasn’t possible, he thought, that Polutin could know what he was planning; yet everything he’d said indicated that he did know something. Why else all his talk of disappearances, of Larissa and vulnerability? And who was the Irishman with him? A paid assassin. That much was for sure. No other occupation produced that kind of soulless lizard. Chemayev’s heart labored, as if it were pumping something heavier than blood. All his plans, so painstakingly crafted, were falling apart at the moment of success. He touched his money belt, the airline tickets in his suit pocket, half-expecting them to be missing. Finding them in place acted to soothe him. It’s all right, he told himself. Whatever Polutin knew, and perhaps it was nothing, perhaps all his bullshit had been designed to impress his new pet snake… whatever he thought he knew, things had progressed too far for him to pose a real threat.

He ordered a vodka from the bartender, a slender man with dyed white hair and a pleasant country face, wearing a white sweater and slacks. The room was almost empty of customers, just two couples chattering at a distant table. It was decorated in the style of an upscale watering hole—deep comfortable chairs, padded stools, paneled walls—but the ambiance was more exotic than one might expect. White leather upholstery, thick white carpeting. The paneling was fashioned of what appeared to be ivory planks, though they were patterned with a decidedly un-ivory-like grain reminiscent of the markings on moths’ wings; the bar itself was constructed of a similar material, albeit of a creamier hue, like wood petrified to marble. The edging of the glass tabletops and the frame of the mirror against which the bottled spirits were arrayed—indeed, every filigree and decorative conceit—were of silver, and there were glints of silver, too, visible among the crystal mysteries of the chandeliers. In great limestone fireplaces at opposite ends of the room burned pearly logs that yielded chemical blue flames, and the light from the chandeliers was also blue, casting glimmers and reflections from every surface, drenching the whiteness of the place in an arctic glamour.

Mounted above the bar was a television set, its volume turned so low that the voices proceeding from it were scarcely more than murmurs; on the screen Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was holding forth on his weekly talk show, preaching the need for moral reform to a worshipful guest. Amused to find the image of the Nobel Laureate in a place whose moral foundation he would vehemently decry, Chemayev moved closer to the set and ordered another vodka. The old bastard had written great novels, he thought. But his sermons needed an editor. Some liked them, of course. The relics who lived in the krushovas sucked up his spiritual blah blah blah. Hearing this crap flow from such a wise mouth ennobled their stubborn endurance in the face of food shortages, violent crime, and unemployment. It validated their mulelike tolerance, it gave lyric tongue to their drunken, docile complaining. Solzhenitsyn was their papa, their pope, the guru of their hopelessness. He knew their suffering, he praised their dazed stolidity as a virtue, he restored their threadbare souls. His words comforted them because they were imbued with the same numbing authority, the same dull stench of official truth, as the windbag belches of the old party lions with dead eyes and poisoned livers whom they had been conditioned to obey. You had to respect Solzhenitsyn. He had once been a Voice. Now he was merely an echo. And a distorted one at that. His years in exile might not have cut him off from the essence of the Russian spirit, but they had decayed his understanding of Russian stupidity. People listened, sure. But they heard just enough to make them reach for a bottle and toast him. The brand of snake oil he was trying to sell was suited only for cutting cheap vodka.

“Old Man Russia.” Chemayev waved disparagingly at the screen as the bartender served him, setting the glass down to cover Beria’s upturned face. The bartender laughed and said, “Maybe… but he’s sure as shit not Old Man Moscow.” He reached for a remote and flipped through the channels, settling on a music video. A black man with a sullen, arrogant face was singing to tinny music, creating voluptuous shapes in the air with his hands—Chemayev had the idea that he was preparing to make love to a female version of himself. “MTV,” said the bartender with satisfaction and sidled off along the counter.

Chemayev checked his watch. Still nearly three-quarters of an hour to go. He fingered his glass, thinking he’d already had too much. But he felt fine. Anger had burned off the alcohol he’d consumed at Polutin’s table. He drank the vodka in a single gulp. Then, in the mirror, he saw Larissa approaching.

As often happened, the sight of her shut him down for an instant. She seemed like an exotic form of weather, a column of energy gliding across the room, drawing the light to her. Wearing a blue silk dress that revealed her legs to the mid-thigh. Her dark hair was pinned high, and, in spite of heavy makeup and eyebrows plucked into severe arches, the naturalness of her beauty shone through. Her face was broad at the cheekbones, tapering to the chin, its shape resembling that of an inverted spearhead, and her generous features—the hazel eyes a bit large for proportion—could one moment look soft, maternal, the next girlish and seductive. In repose, her lips touched by a smile, eyes half-lidded, she reminded him of the painted figurehead on his Uncle Arkady’s boat, which had carried cargo along the Dvina when he was a child. Unlike most figureheads, this one had not been carved with eyes wide open so as to appear intent upon the course ahead, but displayed a look of dreamy, sleek contentment. When he asked why it was different from the rest his uncle told him he hadn’t wanted a lookout on his prow, but a woman whose gaze would bless the waters. Chemayev learned that the man who carved the figurehead had been a drunk embittered by lost love, and as a consequence—or so Chemayev assumed—he had created an image that embodied the kind of mystical serenity with which men who are forced to endure much for love tend to imbue their women, a quality that serves to mythologize their actions and make them immune to masculine judgments.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as she came into his arms.

“They told me I don’t have to work tonight. You know… because you’re paying.” She sat on the adjoining stool, her expression troubled; he asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just I can’t quite believe it. It’s all so difficult to believe, you know.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth—lightly so as not to smear her lipstick.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s taken care of.”

“I know. I’m just nervous.” Her smile flickered on and off. “I wonder what it’ll be like… America.”

He cupped the swell of her cheek, and she leaned into his hand. “It’ll be strange,” he said. “But we’ll be in the mountains to begin with. Just the two of us. We’ll be able to make sense of it all before we decide where we want to end up.”

“How will we do that?”

“We’ll learn all about the place from magazines… newspapers. TV.”

She laughed. “I can’t picture us doing much reading if we’re alone in a cabin.”

“We’ll leave the TV on. Pick things up subliminally.” He grinned, nudged his glass with a finger. “Want a drink?”

“No, I have to go back in a minute. I haven’t finished packing. And there’s something I have to sign.”

That worried him. “What is it?”

“A release. It says I haven’t contracted any diseases or been physically abused.” She laughed again, a single note clear and bright as a piano tone. “As if anyone would sue Eternity.” She took his face in her hands and studied him. Then she kissed his brow. “I love you so much,” she said, her lips still pressed to his skin. He was too dizzy to speak.

She settled back, holding his right hand in her lap. “Do you know what I want most. I want to talk. I want to talk with you for hours and hours.”

Chemayev loved to hear her talk—she wove events and objects and ideas together into textures of such palpable solidity that he could lie back against them, grasped by their resilient contours, and needed only to say “Yes” and “Really” and “Uh huh” every so often, providing a minor structural component that enabled her to extend and deepen her impromptu creations. The prospect that he might have to contribute more than this was daunting. “What will we talk about?” he asked.

“About you, for one thing. I hardly know anything about your family, your childhood.”

“We talk,” he said. “Just this morning…”

“Yes, sure. But only when you’re driving me to school, and you’re so busy dodging traffic you can’t say much. And when we’re at your apartment there’s never time. Not that I’m complaining.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “We’ll make love for hours, then we’ll talk. I want you to reveal all your secrets before I start to bore you.”

He saw her then as she looked each morning in the car, face scrubbed clean of makeup, the sweetly sad pragmatist of their five hundred days on her way to the university, almost ordinary in her jeans and cloth jacket, ready to spend hours listening to tired astronomers, hungover geographers, talentless poets, trying to find in their listless words some residue of truth, some glint of promise, a fact still empowered by its original energy, something that would bring her a glimpse of possibility beyond that which she knew. For the first time he wondered how America and freedom would change her. Not much, he decided. Not in any essential way. She would open like a flower to the sun, she would bloom, but she would not change. The naiveté of this notion did not bother him. He believed in her. Sometimes it seemed he believed in her even more than he loved her.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, and smiled slyly as if she knew the answer.

“Evil things,” he told her.

“Is that so?” She drew him close and slid his hand beneath her skirt. Then she edged forward on the stool, encouraging him. He touched her sex with a fingertip and she let out a gasp. Her head drooped, rested on his shoulder. He thrust aside the material of her panties. All her warmth was open to him. But then she pushed his hand away and whispered, “No, no! I can’t!” She remained leaning against him, her body tense and trembling. “I’m not ashamed, you understand,” she said, the words muffled by his shoulder. “I can’t bear the idea of doing anything here.” She let out a soft, cluttered sound—another laugh, he thought. “But there’s no shame in me. I’ll prove it to you tonight. On the plane.”

He stroked her hair. “You’ll be asleep ten minutes after take-off. You always sleep when we travel. Like a little baby.”

“Not tonight.” She broke from the embrace. Her face was grave, as if she were stating a vow. “I’m not going to sleep at all. Not until I absolutely have to.”

“If you say so. But I bet I’m right.” He checked his watch again.

“How long?” she asked.

“Less than half an hour. But I don’t know how long I’ll be with… with whoever it is I’m meeting.”

“One of the doubles. There must be a dozen of them. I can’t be sure, but I think I can tell most of them apart. They vary slightly in height. In weight. A couple have moles.”

“What do you call them?”

“Yuri.” She shrugged. “What else? Some of the girls invent funny names for them. But I guess I don’t find them funny.”

He looked down at the counter. “You know, we’ve never spoken about what it’s like for you here. I know some of it, of course. But your life, the way you spend your days…”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”

“I guess I didn’t. It just seems strange… but it’s not important.”

“We can talk about it if you want.” She wrapped a loose curl around her forefinger. “It isn’t so bad, really. When I’m not at school I like to sit in the theater mornings and read. There’s nobody about, and it’s quiet. Peaceful. Like an empty church. Every two weeks the doctor comes to examine us. She’s very nice. She brings us chocolates. Otherwise, we’re left pretty much to our own devices. Most of the girls are so young, it’s almost possible to believe I’m at boarding school. But then…” Her mouth twisted into an unhappy shape. “There’s not much else to tell.”

Something gave way in Chemayev. The pressures of the preceding months, the subterfuge, the planning, and now this pitiful recitation with its obvious omissions—his inner defenses collapsed under the weight of these separate travails, conjoined in a flood of stale emotion. Old suffocated panics, soured desires, yellowed griefs, lumps of mummified terror… the terror he had felt sitting alone at night, certain that he would lose her, his head close to bursting with despair. His eyes teared. He linked his hands behind her neck and drew her to him so that their foreheads touched. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

“It wasn’t long! It’s so much money! And you got it all in less than a year!”

“Every day I see enough money to choke the world. I could have fixed the books, I could have done something.”

“Yes… and then what? Polutin would have had you killed. God, Viktor! You amazed me! Don’t you understand? You were completely unexpected. I never thought anyone would care enough about me to do what you’ve done.” She kissed his eyes, applied delicate kisses all over his face. “When you told me what you were up to, I felt like a princess imprisoned in a high tower. And you were the prince trying to save me. You know me. I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. But I liked this one—it was a nice fantasy, and I needed a fantasy. I was certain you were lying to me… or to yourself. I prepared for the inevitable. But you turned out to be a real prince.” She rubbed his stubbly head. “A prince with a terrible haircut.”

He tried to smile, but emotion was still strong in him and his facial muscles wouldn’t work properly.

“Don’t punish yourself. Can’t you see how happy I am? It’s almost over now. Please, Viktor! I want you to be happy, too.”

He gathered himself, swallowed back the tight feeling in his throat. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just… I can’t…”

“I know,” she said. “It’s been hard for both of us. I know.” She lifted his wrist so she could see his watch. “I have to go. I don’t want to, but I have to. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go ahead… go.”

“Should I wait for you here?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, wait here, and we’ll ride up together. As soon as I’m through with Yuri I’ll call my security people. They’ll meet us at the entrance.”

She kissed him again, her tongue flirting with his, a lush contact that left him muddled. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, trailing her hand across his cheek; then she walked off toward a recessed door next to the fireplace at the far end of the room—the same door that led to Yuri Lebedev’s office and, ultimately, to the inscrutable heart of Eternity.

• • •

Without Larissa beside him Chemayev felt adrift, cut off from energy and purpose. His thoughts seemed to be circling, slowly eddying, as the surface of a stream might eddy after the sudden twisting submergence of a silvery fish. They seemed less thoughts than shadows of the moment just ended. On the television screen above the bar a child was sitting in a swing hung from the limb of an oak tree, spied on by an evil androgynous creature with a painted white face and wearing a lime green body stocking, who lurked in the shadows at the edge of a forest. All this underscored by an anxious, throbbing music. Chemayev watched the video without critical or aesthetic bias, satisfied by color and movement alone, and he was given a start when the bartender came over and offered him a drink in a glass with the silver initial L on its side.

“What’s this?” Chemayev asked, and the bartender said, “Yuri’s private booze. Everybody gets one. Everybody who meets with him.” He set down the glass, and Chemayev viewed it with suspicion. The liquid appeared to be vodka.

“You don’t have to drink,” the bartender said. “But it’s Yuri’s custom.”

Chemayev wondered if he was being tested. The courageous thing to do, the courteous thing, would be to drink. But abstinence might prove the wiser course.

“I can pour you another if you’d like. I can open a new bottle.” The bartender produced an unopened bottle; it, too, was embossed with a silver L.

“Why don’t you do that?” Chemayev told him. “I could use a drink, but… uh…”

“As you like.” The bartender stripped the seal from the bottle and poured. He did not appear in the least disturbed, and Chemayev supposed that he had been through this process before.

The vodka was excellent and Chemayev was relieved when, after several minutes, he remained conscious and his stomach gave no sign that he had ingested poison.

“Another?” the bartender asked.

“Sure.” Chemayev pushed the glass forward.

“Two’s the limit, I’m afraid. It’s precious stuff.” The bartender lifted the glass that Chemayev had refused, offered a silent toast and drank. “Fuck, that’s good!” He dabbed at his mouth with a cocktail napkin. “Almost everyone who tries it comes back and offers to buy a couple of bottles. But it’s not for sale. You have to meet with Yuri to earn your two shots.”

“Or work as a bartender in Eternity, eh?” Chemayev suggested.

“Privileges of the job. I’m always delighted to serve a suspicious soul.”

“I imagine you get quite a few.”

“People have every right to be suspicious. This is a weird place. Don’t get me wrong—it’s great working here. But it takes getting used to.”

“I can imagine.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t bet on it. You have no idea what goes on here after hours. But once you’ve met Yuri”—the bartender slung a towel over his shoulder—“you’ll probably be able to educate me. Everyone says it’s quite an experience.”

Chemayev downed the second vodka. Yet another video was showing on the TV, and something was interfering with the transmission. First there was an intense flickering, then a succession of scenes skittered across the screen, as if the video were playing on an old-fashioned projector and the film was breaking free of the spool. He glanced at the bartender. The man was standing at the opposite end of the counter with his head thrown back, apparently howling with laughter; yet though his mouth was open and the ligature of his neck cabled, he wasn’t making a sound. His white hair glowed like phosphorus. Unnerved, Chemayev turned again to the TV. On screen, to the accompaniment of a gloomy folk song, two women in white jumpsuits were embracing on a couch, deep in a passionate kiss. As he watched, the taller of the two, a blond with sharp cheekbones, unzipped her lover’s jumpsuit to the waist, exposing the slopes of her breasts… It was at this point that Chemayev experienced a confusing dislocation. Frames began flipping past too rapidly to discern, the strobing light causing him to grow drowsy yet dumbly attentive; then a veneer of opaque darkness slid in front of the screen, oval in shape, like a yawning mouth. There was a moment when he had a claustrophobic sense of being enclosed, and the next instant he found himself standing in the blackness beyond the mouth. He had the impression that this black place had reached out and enveloped him, and for that reason, though he remained drowsy and distanced from events, he felt a considerable measure of foreboding.

From Chemayev’s vantage it was impossible to estimate the size of the room in which he stood—the walls and ceiling were lost in darkness—but he could tell it was immense. Illumination was provided by long glowing silvery bars that looked to be hovering at an uncertain distance overhead, their radiance too feeble to provide any real perspective. Small trees and bushes with black trunks and branches grew in disorderly ranks on every side; their leaves were papery, white, bespotted with curious, sharply drawn, black designs—like little leaf-shaped magical texts. This must be, he thought, the garden Polutin had mentioned, though it seemed more thicket than garden. The leaves crisped against his jacket as he pushed past; twigs clawed at his trouser legs. After a couple of minutes he stumbled into a tiny clearing choked with pale weeds. Beetles scuttered in amongst them. Fat little scarabs, their chitin black and gleamless, they were horrid in their simplicity, like official notifications of death. The air was cool, thick with the skunky scent of the vegetation. He heard no sounds other than those he himself made. Yet he did not believe he was alone. He went cautiously, stopping every so often to peer between branches and to listen.

After several minutes more he came to a ruinous path of gray cobblestones, many uprooted from their bed of white clay, milky blades of grass thrusting up among them. The path was little more than a foot wide, overhung by low branches that forced him to duck; it wound away among trees taller than those he had first encountered. He followed it and after less than a minute he reached what he assumed to be the center of the garden. Ringed by trees so tall they towered nearly to the bars of light was a circular plaza some forty feet in width, constructed of the same gray stones, here laid out in a concentric pattern. In its midst stood the remains of a fountain, its unguessable original form reduced to a head-high mound of rubble, a thin stream of silvery water arcing from a section of shattered lead pipe, splashing, sluicing away into the carved fragments tumbled at its base. Sitting cross-legged beside it, his back to Chemayev, was a shirtless man with dark shoulder-length hair, his pale skin figured by intricate black tattoos, their designs reminiscent of those on the leaves.

“March?” Chemayev took a step toward the man. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” March said in a contemplative tone. “Why, I’m feeling right at home. That’s what I’m doing. How about yourself?”

“I have a meeting,” Chemayev said. “With Yuri Lebedev.”

March maintained his yogi-like pose. “Oh, yeah? He was banging about a minute ago. Try giving him a shout. He might still be around.”

“Are you serious?” Chemayev took another step forward. “Lebedev was here?”

March came smoothly, effortlessly to his feet—like a cobra rising from a basket. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Hey, Yuri! Got a man wants to see ya!” He cocked his head, listening for a response. “Nope,” he said at length. “No Yuri.”

Chemayev shrugged off his jacket and draped it over a shoulder. March’s disrespect for him was unmistakable, but he was uncertain of the Irishman’s intent. He couldn’t decide whether it would be safer to confront him or to walk away and chance that March would follow him into the thickets. “Do you know where the door to Yuri’s office is?”

“I could probably find it if I was in the mood. Why don’t you just poke around? Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Confrontation, thought Chemayev, would be the safer choice—he did not want this man sneaking up on him.

“What is this all about?” He gave a pained gesture with his jacket, flapping it at March. “This thing you’re doing. This… Clint Eastwood villain thing. What is it? Have you been sent to kill me? Does Polutin think I’m untrustworthy?”

“My oh my,” said March. “Could it be I’ve made an error in judgment? Here I thought you were just another sack of fish eggs and potato juice, and now you’ve gone all brave on me.” He extended his arms toward Chemayev, rotated them in opposite directions. The tattoos crawled like beetles across his skin, causing his muscles to appear even more sinewy than they were. In the half-light the seamed lines on his face were inked with shadow, like ritual scarifications. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Why don’t we have us a chat, you and I? A settling of the waters. We’ll pretend we’re a coupla old whores tipsy on lager and lime.” He dropped again into a cross-legged posture and with a flourish held up his right hand—palm on edge—by his head. Then he drew the hand across his face, pretending to push aside his dour expression, replacing it with a boyish smile. “There now,” he said. “What shall we talk about?”

Chemayev lowered into a squat. “You can answer my questions for a start.”

“Now that’s a problem, that is. I fucking hate being direct. Takes all the charm out of a conversation.” March rolled his neck, popping the vertebrae. “Wouldn’t you prefer to hear about my childhood?”

“No need,” said Chemayev. “I used to work in a kennel.”

“You’re missing out on a grand tale,” said March. “I was all the talk of Kilmorgan when I was a lad.” He gathered his hair behind his neck. “I foresee this is not destined to be an enjoyable conversation. So I’ll tell you what I know. Your Mister Polutin feels you’re on the verge of making a serious mistake, and he’s engaged me to show you the error of your ways.”

“What sort of mistake?”

“Ah! Now that, you see, I do not know.” March grinned. “I’m merely the poor instrument of his justice.”

Chemayev slipped off his shoulder harness, folded it on top of his coat; he did the same with his money belt. “So Polutin has sent you to punish me? To beat me?”

“He’s left the degree of punishment up to yours truly,” March said. “You have to understand, I like to think of myself as a teacher. But if the pupil isn’t capable of being taught… and you’d be surprised how often that’s the case… Then extreme measures are called for. When that happens there’s likely to be what you might call a morbid result.” He squinted, as if trying to make out Chemayev through a fog. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Petrified,” said Chemayev.

March chuckled. “You’ve every right to be confident. You’ve got about a yard of height and reach on me. And what?… Maybe a stone and a half, two stone in weight? By the looks of things I’m vastly overmatched.”

“How much is Polutin paying you?”

“Let’s not go down that path, Viktor. It’s unworthy of you. And disrespectful to me as well.”

“You misunderstand.” Chemayev tossed his shirt on top of the >money belt. “I simply wish to learn how much I’ll profit from breaking your neck.”

March hopped to his feet. “You’re a hell of a man in your own back yard, I’m certain. But you’re in a harsher world now, Viktor old son.” He gave his head a shake, working out a tightness in his neck. “Yes, indeed. A world terrible, pitiless, and strange. With no room a’tall for mistakes and your humble servant, Niall March, for a fucking welcome wagon.”

Chemayev took great satisfaction in resorting to the physical. In a fight all of the vagueness of life became comprehensible. Frustration made itself into a fist; nameless fears manifested in the flexing of a muscle. The pure principles of victory and defeat flushed away the muddle of half-truths and evasions that generally clotted his moral apparatus. He felt cleansed of doubt, possessed of keen conviction. And so when he smiled at March, dropping into a wrestler’s crouch, it was not only a show of confidence but an expression of actual pleasure. They began to circle one another, testing their footing, feinting. In the first thirty seconds March launched a flurry of kicks that Chemayev absorbed on his arms, but the force of each blow drove him backward. It had been plain from the outset that March was quick, but Chemayev hadn’t realized the efficiency with which he could employ his speed. The man skipped and jittered over the uneven terrain, one moment graceful, dancing, then shuffling forward in the manner of a boxer, then a moment later sinking into an apelike crouch and lashing out with a kick from ground level. Chemayev had intended to wait for the perfect moment to attack, but now he understood that if he waited, March was likely to land a kick cleanly; he would have to risk creating an opening. And when March next came into range he dove at the man’s back leg, bringing him down hard onto the stones.

The two men grabbed and countered, each trying to roll the other and gain the upper position, their breath coming in grunts. March’s quickness and flexibility made him difficult to control. After a struggle Chemayev managed to turn him onto his back and started to come astride his chest; but March’s legs scissored his waist, forcing him into a kneeling position, and they were joined almost like lovers, one wobbling above, the other on his back, seemingly vulnerable. Chemayev found he was able to strike downward at March’s face, but his leverage was poor, the blows weak, and March blocked most of them with his arms, evaded others by twitching his head to the side. Soon Chemayev grew winded. He braced himself on his left hand, intending to throw a powerful right that would penetrate the Irishman’s guard; but with a supple, twisting movement, March barred Chemayev’s braced arm with his forearm, holding it in place, and levered it backward, dislocating the elbow.

Chemayev screamed and flung himself away, clutching his arm above the elbow, afraid to touch the injury itself. The pain brought tears to his eyes, and for a moment he thought he might faint. Even after the initial burning shock had dissipated, the throbbing of the joint was nearly unbearable. He staggered to his feet, shielding the injury, so disoriented that when he tried to find March, he turned toward the trees.

“Over here, Viktor!” March was standing by the fountain, taking his ease. Chemayev made to back away, got his feet tangled, and inadvertently lurched toward him—the jolt of each step triggered a fresh twinge in his arm. His brain was sodden, empty of plan or emotion, as if he were drunk to the point of passing out.

“What d’ye think, sweetheart?” said March. “Am I man enough for you, or are you pining yet for young Tommy down at the pub?” He took a stroll away from the fountain, an angle that led him closer to Chemayev but not directly toward him. He spun in a complete circle, whirling near, and kicked Chemayev in the head.

A white star detonated inside Chemayev’s skull and he fell, landing on his injured elbow. The pain caused him to lose consciousness, and when he came to, when his eyes were able to focus, he found March squatting troll-like beside him, a little death incarnate with curses in the black language scrawled across his skin and long dark hair hiding his face like a cowl.

“Jesus, boyo,” he said with mock compassion. “That was a bad ’un. Couple more like that, we’ll be hoisting a pint in your honor and telling lies about the great deeds you done in your days of nature.”

Chemayev began to feel his elbow again—that and a second pain in the side of his face. He tasted blood in his mouth and wondered if his cheekbone was broken. He closed his eyes.

“Have you nothing to say? Well, I’ll leave you to mend for a minute or two. Then we’ll have our chat.”

Chemayev heard March’s footsteps retreating. A thought was forming in the bottom of his brain, growing strong enough to sustain itself against grogginess and pain. It pushed upward, surfacing like a bubble from a tar pit, and he realized it was only a mental belch of fear and hatred. He opened his eyes and was fascinated by the perspective—a view across the lumpy rounded tops of the cobblestones. He imagined them to be bald gray midgets buried to their eyebrows in the earth. He pushed feebly at the stones with his good arm and after inordinate labor succeeded in getting to his hands and knees. Dizzy, he remained in that position a while, his head hung down. Blood dripping from his mouth spotted the stones beneath him. When he tried to stand his legs refused to straighten; he sat back clumsily, supporting himself with his right hand.

“A beating’s a terrible thing,” said March from somewhere above. “But sometimes it’s the only medicine. You understand, don’t you, Viktor? I’ll wager you’ve handed out a few yourself. What with you being such a badass and all.” He was silent for a couple of ticks. “Polutin assures me you’re a bright lad. And I’m inclined to agree… though I’m not sure I’d go so far as saying you’re a bloody genius. Which is Polutin’s view of the matter. He’s an absolute fan of your mental capacities. If mental capacity was rock and roll he’d be front row at all your concerts, blowing kisses and tossing up his room key wrapped in a pair of knickers.” Another pause. “Am I getting through to you, Viktor?”

Chemayev nodded, a movement that set his cheekbone to throbbing more fiercely.

“That’s good.” March’s legs came into view. “According to Polutin, your talents lie in your ability to organize facts. He tells me you can take a newspaper, the Daily Slobova or whatever rag it is you boys subscribe to, and from the facts you’ve gathered in a single read, you’re able to devise a money-making scheme no one’s thought of before. Now that’s impressive. I’m fucking impressed, and I don’t impress easy. So here’s what I’m asking, Viktor. I’m asking you to marshal that massive talent of yours and organize the facts I’m about to present. Can you handle that?”

“Yes,” said Chemayev, not wanting to risk another nod. His elbow was feeling stronger and he wondered if the fall might not have jammed the bone back info its socket. He shifted his left arm, and though pain returned in force, he seemed to have mobility.

“All right,” said March. “Here we go. First fact. Polutin loves you like a son. That may seem farfetched, considering the crap he rubs in your face. But it’s what he tells me. And it’s for certain fathers have treated sons a great deal worse than he treats you. Love’s too strong a word, perhaps. But there’s definitely paternal feelings involved. Why he’d want a son, now, I’ve no idea. The thought of fathering a child turns my stomach. The little bollocks start out pissing on your hand and wind up spitting in your face and stealing the rent money. But I had a troubled upbringing, so I’m not the best judge of these things.”

He paced off to the side, moving beyond Chemayev’s field of vision. “Second fact. Whatever game you’ve been playing, it’s over. Terminated. Done. And by the way, I’ll be wanting you to tell me exactly what it was. Every last detail. But that can wait till you’ve got the roses back in your cheeks. Third fact. You’ve made one mistake. You can’t afford another. Are you following me, Viktor? You’re on the brink of oblivion with ten toes over the edge. No more mistakes or you’re going to fall a long, long way and hit the ground screaming.” March’s legs came back into view. “Fact number four. God is dead. The certain hope of the Resurrection is a pile of shite. You have my word on it. I’ve seen to the other side and I know.”

Chemayev found he could make a fist with his left hand. To test his strength he tightened it, fingernails cutting into his palm. March’s voice was stirring up a windy noise inside his head, like the rush of traffic on a highway.

“There you have it, Viktor. Four little facts. Organize away. Turn ’em over in your mind. See if you can come up with a scheme for living.”

Chemayev wanted badly to satisfy March, to avoid further punishment; but the facts with which he had been presented offered little room for scheming. Instead they formed four walls, the walls of the lightless world in which he had been confined before meeting Larissa. It occurred to him that this was exactly what March wished him to conclude, and that he could satisfy him by saying as much. But the thought of Larissa charged him with stubbornness. She was the fifth fact he could not ignore, the fact that had shattered those walls. Thanks to her there was a sixth fact, a seventh, an infinity of fact waiting to be explored.

“It’s no brainbuster, Viktor. I’m not the least gifted when it comes to organization. Fuck, I can’t even balance my checkbook. But even I can figure this one out.”

As if his engine had begun to idle out, Chemayev’s energy lapsed. He grew cold and the cold slowed his thoughts, replaced them with a foggy desire to lie down and sleep. March put a hand on his shoulder, gave him a shake, and pain lanced along his cheekbone. The touch renewed his hatred, and, braced by adrenaline, he let hate empower him.

“C’mon, lad.” March said with a trace of what seemed actual concern in his voice. “Tell me what you know.”

“I understand,” said Chemayev shakily.

“Understand what?”

“I have a… a good situation. A future. I’d be a fool to jeopardize it.”

“Four stars!” said March. “Top of the charts in the single leap! See what I told you, Viktor? A kick in the head can enlighten even the most backward amongst us. It’s a fucking miracle cure.” He kneeled beside Chemayev. “There’s one more thing I need to tell you. Perhaps you’ve been wondering why, with all the rude boys about in Moscow, our Mister Polutin hired in a Mick to do his dirty work. Truth is, Russki muscle is just not suited to subtlety. Those boys get started on you, they won’t stop till the meat’s off the bone. I’m considered something of a specialist. A saver of souls, as it were. You’re not my only project. Far from it! Your country has a great many sinners. But you’re my top priority. I intend to be your conscience. Should temptation rear its ugly head, there I’ll be, popping up over your shoulder. Cautioning you not to stray. Keep that well in mind, Viktor. Make it the marrow of your existence. For that’s what it is, and don’t you go thinking otherwise.” March stood, reached down and took Chemayev’s right arm. “Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get you up.”

Standing, it looked to Chemayev that the stones beneath his feet were miles away, the surface of a lumpy planet seen from space. A shadowy floater cluttered his vision. The white leaves each had a doubled image, and March’s features, rising from the pale seamy ground of his skin, made no sense as a face—like landmarks on a map without referents.

“Can you walk?” March asked.

“I don’t know.”

March positioned himself facing Chemayev and examined him with a critical eye. “We better have you looked at. You might have a spot of concussion.” He adjusted his grip on Chemayev’s shoulders. “I’m going to carry you… just so’s you know I’m not taking liberties. I’ll come back after and get your things.”

He bent at the knees and waist, preparing to pick Chemayev up in a fireman’s carry. Without the least forethought or inkling of intent, acting out of reflex or muscle memory, or perhaps goaded by the sour smell of March’s sweat, Chemayev slipped his right forearm under March’s throat, applying a headlock; then with all his strength he wrenched the Irishman up off his feet. March gurgled, flailed, kicked. And Chemayev, knowing that he only had to hang on a few seconds more, came full into his hatred. He heard himself yelling with effort, with the anticipation of victory, and he dug the grip deeper into March’s throat. Then March kicked out with his legs so that for the merest fraction of a second he was horizontal to the true. When his legs swung down again the momentum carried Chemayev’s upper body down as well, and March’s feet struck the ground. Lithe as an eel, he pushed himself into a backflip, his legs flying over Chemayev’s head, breaking the hold and sending them both sprawling onto the stones.

By the time Chemayev recovered March had gotten to his feet and was bent over at the edge of the circle, rubbing his throat. Stupefied, only dimly aware of the danger he faced, Chemayev managed to stand and set off stumbling toward the trees. But the Irishman hurried to cut him off, still holding his throat.

“Are you mad, Viktor?” he said hoarsely. “There’s no other explanation. Fuck!” He massaged his throat more vigorously, stretched his neck. “That’s as close as I’ve come. I’ll give you that much.”

Chemayev’s legs wanted to bend in odd directions. It felt as if some organ in his head, a scrap of flesh he never knew existed, had been torn free and was flipping about like a minnow in a bait bucket.

Strands of hair were stuck to March’s cheek; he brushed them back, adjusted the waist of his trousers. “It’s the girl, isn’t it? Liza… Louisa. Whatever her fucking name is. Back when I was of a mood for female companionship, there were more than a few knocked my brains loose. They’ll make a man incorrigible. Immune to even the most sensible of teachings.”

Chemayev glanced about, groggily certain that there must be an avenue of escape he had overlooked.

“I remember this one in particular,” said March as he approached. “Evvie was her name. Evvie Mahone. She wasn’t the most gorgeous item on the shelf. But she was nice-looking, y’know. A country girl. Come to Dublin for the university. Wild and red-cheeked and full of spirit, with lovely great milky bosoms, and a frizzy mane of ginger hair hanging to her ass that she could never comb out straight. I was over the moon ten times round about her. When we were courting we’d sit together for hours outside her dormitory, watching the golden days turn to gray, touching and talking soft while crowds moved past us without noticing, like we were two people who’d fallen so hard for one another we’d turned to stone. Our hearts just too pure to withstand the decay and disappointment of the world.” He stepped close to Chemayev, inches away—a wise white monkey with a creased, pouchy face and eyes as active as beetles. “After we became lovers we’d lie naked in the casement window of her room with a blanket around us, watching stars burn holes in the black flag flying over the Liffey. I swear to God I thought all the light was coming from her body, and there was music playing then that never existed… yet I still hear its strains. Is it like that for you, Viktor? That grand and all-consuming? I reckon it must be.”

March clasped Chemayev’s shoulder with his left hand, as if in camaraderie; he made a fist of his right. “Love,” he said wistfully. “It’s a wonderful thing.”

• • •

Chemayev was not witness to much of the beating that then ensued; a punch he never saw coming broke his connection with painful reality and sent him whirling down into the black lights of unconsciousness. When he awoke he discovered to his surprise that he was no longer in pain—to his further surprise he found that he was unable to move, a circumstance that should have alarmed him more than it did. It was not that he felt at peace, but rather as if he’d been sedated, the intensity of his possessive attitude toward mortality tuned down several notches and his attention channeled into a stuporous appreciation of the blurred silver beam hanging in the darkness overhead… like a crossbeam in the belly of a great ark constructed of negative energy. He could hear water splashing, and a lesser sound he soon recognized to be the guttering of his breath. He thought of Larissa, then tried not to think of her. The memory of her face, all her bright particularity, disturbed the strange equilibrium that allowed him to float on the surface of this pain-free, boundless place. But after a while he became able to summon her without anxiety, without longing overmuch, content to contemplate her the way an Orthodox saint painted on an ikon might gaze at an apparition of the Virgin. Full of wonder and daft regard. Soon she came to be the only thing he wanted to think of, the eidolon and mistress of his passage.

Things were changing inside him. He pictured conveyor belts being turned off, systems cooling, microbes filing out of his factory stomach on the final day of operation, leaving their machines running and all the taps going drip drip drip. It was amusing, really. To have feared this. It was easier by far than anything that had preceded it. Though fear nibbled at the edges of his acceptance, he remained essentially secure beneath his black comforter and his silver light and his love. The thought of death, once terrifying, now seemed only unfortunate. And when he began to drift upward, slowly approaching the light, he speculated that it might not even be unfortunate, that March had been wrong about God and the hope of the Resurrection. Beneath him the garden and its pagan central element were receding, and lying with its arms out and legs spread not far from the ruined fountain, his bloody, wide-eyed body watched him go. He fixed on the silver light, expecting, hoping to see and hear the faces and voices of departed souls greeting him, the blissful creatures that patrolled the border between life and true eternity, and the white beast Jesus in all Its majesty, crouched and roaring the joyful noise that ushered in the newly risen to the sacred plane. But then he sensed an erosion, a turmoil taking place on some fundamental level that he had previously failed to apprehend. Fragments of unrelated memory flew at him in a hail, shattering his calm. Images that meant nothing. A wooden flute he’d played as a child. An old man’s gassed, wheezing voice. Sparks corkscrewing up a chimney. Pieces of a winter day in the country. Shards of broken mental crockery that shredded the temporary cloth of his faith, allowing terror to seep through the rents. Real terror, this. Not the fakes he’d experienced previously, the rich fears bred in blood and bone, but an empty, impersonal terror that was itself alive, a being larger than all being, the vacuous ground upon which our illusion breeds, that we never let ourselves truly believe is there, yet underlies every footstep ever taken… gulping him down into its cold and voiceless scream, while all he knew and loved and was went scattering.

• • •

Trembling and sweaty, Chemayev stared at the television set above the bar. A brown-haired teenage girl in a denim jacket and jeans was hitchhiking on a desert road, singing angrily—if you could judge by her expression—at the cars that passed her by. He watched numbly as she caught a ride in a dusty van. Then, astounded by the realization he was alive, that the girl was not part of the storm of memory that had assailed his dying self, he heaved up from the barstool and looked avidly about, not yet convinced of the authenticity of what he saw. About a dozen people sitting at various tables; the bartender talking to two male customers. The recessed door beside the fireplace opened and a woman in a black cocktail dress came into the lounge and stood searching the tables for someone. Still shaky, Chemayev sat back down.

All that had happened in the garden remained with him, but he could examine it now. Not that examination helped. Explanations occurred. He’d been given a drug in a glass of Yuri’s special reserve—probably a hypnotic. Shown a film that triggered an illusion. But this fathered the need for other explanations. Was the object of the exercise to intimidate him? Were the things March had said to him about Polutin part of the exercise? Were they actual admonitions or the product of paranoia? Of course it had all been some sort of hallucination. Likely an orchestrated one. He could see that clearly. But despite the elements of fantasy—March’s lyric fluency, the white trees, and so on—he couldn’t devalue the notion that it had also had some quality of the real. The terror of those last moments, spurious though they had been, was still unclouded in his mind. He could touch it, taste it. The greedy blackness that had been about to suck him under… he knew to his soul that was real. The memory caused his thoughts to dart in a hundred different directions, like a school of fish menaced by a shadow. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to center himself. Real or unreal, what did it matter? The only question of any significance was, Who could have engineered this? It wasn’t Polutin’s style. Although March surely was. March was made to order for Polutin. The alternative explanations—magical vodka, mysterious Lebedevian machinations—didn’t persuade him; but neither could he rule them out… Suddenly electrified with fright, remembering his appointment, thinking he’d missed it, he peered at his watch. Only eleven minutes had passed since he’d drunk the vodka. It didn’t seem possible, yet the clock behind the bar showed the same time. He had fifteen minutes left to wait. He patted his pocket, felt the airline tickets. Touched the money belt. Pay Yuri, he told himself. Sign the papers. There’d be time to think later. Or maybe none of it was worth thinking about. He studied himself in the mirror. Tried a smile, straightened his tie unnecessarily, wiped his mouth. And saw Niall March’s reflection wending his way among the tables toward the bar. Toward him.

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” March said, dropping onto the stool beside Chemayev. “Listen, mate. I want to apologize for giving you a hard time back there in the fucking ice palace. I wasn’t meself. I’ve been driving around with that bastard Polutin all day. Listening to him jabber and having to kiss his fat ass has me ready to chew the tit off the Virgin. Can I buy you a drink?”

Totally at sea, Chemayev managed to say, no thanks, he’d had enough for one evening.

“When I can no longer hear that insipid voice, that’s when I’ll know I’ve had enough.” March hailed the bartender. “Still and all, he’s a fair sort, your boss. We held opposing positions on a business matter over in London a while back. He lost a couple of his boys, but apparently he’s not a man to let personal feelings intrude on his good judgment. We’ve been working together ever since.”

Chemayev had it in mind to disagree with the proposition that Polutin did not let personal feelings interfere with judgment—it was his feeling that the opposite held true; but March caught the bartender’s eye and said, “You don’t have any British beer, do you? Fuck! Then give me some clear piss in a glass.” The bartender stared at him without comprehension. “Vodka,” said March; then, to Chemayev: “What sorta scene do you got going on here? It’s like some kind of fucking czarist disco. With gangsters instead of the Romanovs. I mean, is it like a brotherhood, y’know? Sons of the Revolution or some such?”

The bartender set down his vodka. March drained the glass. “No offense,” he said. “But I hate this shit. It’s like drinking shoe polish.” He glanced sideways at Chemayev. “You’re not the most talkative soul I’ve encountered. Sure you’re not holding a grudge?”

“No,” said Chemayev, reining in the impulse to look directly at March, to try and pierce the man’s affable veneer and determine the truth of what lay beneath. “I’m just… anxious. I have an important meeting.”

“Oh, yeah? Who with?”

“Yuri Lebedev.”

“The fucking Buddha himself, huh? Judging by what I’ve seen of his establishment, that should be a frolic.” March called to the bartender, held up his empty glass. “Not only does this stuff taste like the sweat off a pig’s balls, but I seem immune to it.”

“If you keep drinking…” Chemayev said, and lost his train of thought. He was having trouble equating this chatty, superficial March with either of the man’s two previous incarnations—the sullen, reptilian assassin and the poetic martial arts wizard.

“What’s that?” March grabbed the second vodka the instant the bartender finished pouring and flushed it down.

“Nothing,” said Chemayev. He had no capacity for judgment left; the world had become proof against interpretation.

March turned on his stool to face the tables, resting his elbows on the bar. “Drink may not be your country’s strong suit,” he said, “but I’m forced to admit your women have it all over ours. I’m not saying Irish girls aren’t pretty. God, no! When they’re new pennies, ah… they’re such a blessing. But over here it’s like you’ve got the fucking franchise for long legs and cheekbones.” He winked at Chemayev. “If Ireland ever gets an economy, we’ll trade you straight-up booze for women—that way we’ll both make out.” He swiveled back to face the mirror, and looked into the eyes of Chemayev’s reflection. “I suppose your girlfriend’s a looker.”

Chemayev nodded glumly. “Yes… yes, she is.”

March studied him a moment more. “Well, don’t let it get you down, okay?” He gave Chemayev a friendly punch on the arm and eased off the stool. “I’ve got to be going.” He stuck out his hand. “Pals?” he said. With reluctance, Chemayev accepted the hand. March’s grip was strong, but not excessively so. “Brothers in the service of the great ship Polutin,” he said. “That’s us.”

He started off, then looked back pleadingly at Chemayev. “Y’know where the loo… the men’s room is?”

“No,” said Chemayev, too distracted to give directions. “I’m sorry. No.”

“Christ Jesus!” March grimaced and grabbed his crotch. “It better not be far. My back teeth are floating.”

• • •

The walls of the corridor that led to Yuri’s office were enlivened by a mural similar to the mosaic that covered the bar in the lounge—a crowd of people gathered at a cocktail party, many of them figures from recent Russian history, the faces of even the anonymous ones rendered with such a specificity of detail, it suggested that the artist had used models for all of them. Every thirty feet or so the mural was interrupted by windows of one-way glass that offered views of small gaudy rooms, some empty, others occupied by men and women engaged in sex. However, none of this distracted Chemayev from his illusory memory of death. It dominated his mental landscape, rising above the moil of lesser considerations like a peak lifting from a sea of clouds. He couldn’t escape the notion that it had been premonitory and that the possibility of death lay between him and a life of comfortable anonymity in America.

He rounded a bend and saw ahead an alcove furnished with a sofa, a coffee table, and a TV set—on the screen, a husky bearded man was playing the accordion, belting out an old folk tune. Two women in white jumpsuits were embracing on the sofa, unmindful of Chemayev’s approach. As he walked up the taller of the two, a pale Nordic blond with high cheekbones and eyes the color of aquamarines, unzipped her lover’s jumpsuit to expose the swells of her breasts… and that action triggered Chemayev’s memory. He’d seen this before. On the TV in the bar. Just prior to entering the garden where he had fought with March. The same women, the same sofa. Even the song was the same that had been playing then—the lament of a transplanted city dweller for the joys of country life. He must have cried out or made a noise of some sort, for the smaller woman—also a blond, younger and softer of feature—gave a start and closed her jumpsuit with a quick movement, making a tearing sound with the zipper that stated her mood as emphatically as her mean-spirited stare.

“You must be Viktor,” the taller woman said cheerfully, getting to her feet. “Larissa’s friend.”

Chemayev admitted to the fact.

“I’m Nataliya.” She extended a hand, gave his a vigorous shake. The sharpness of her features contrived a caricature of beauty, the hollows of her pale cheeks so pronounced they brought to mind the fracture planes of a freshly calved iceberg. “I am also friends with Larissa,” she said. “Perhaps she has told you about me?”

“I don’t know,” Chemayev said. “Perhaps. I think so.”

Before he could voice any of the questions that occurred to him she caught his arm and said, “Come. I’ll take you to Yuri.” Then turning to her lover, she said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” The smaller woman let out an angry sniff and pretended to be absorbed in watching the TV.

Nataliya led him along the corridor, chattering about Larissa. What a sweetheart she was, how kind she was to the other girls, even those who didn’t deserve it. God knows, there were some impossible bitches working here. Take that cunt Nadezhda. This scrawny redhead from Pyatigorsk. Her father had stolen from Yuri and now his little darling was keeping him alive by faking orgasms with drunks and perverts. You should have seen her the day she arrived. A real mess! Weeping and shivering. But after a couple of weeks, after she realized she wasn’t going to be raped or beaten, she started acting like Catherine the Great. Lots of girls went through a phase like that. It was only natural. Most came from awful situations and once they felt they had a little power, you expected them to get a swelled head. But Nadezhda had been here a year and every day she grew more intolerable. Putting on airs. Bragging about the rich men who wanted to set her up in an apartment or buy her a dacha. And now—Nataliya’s laugh sounded as if she were clearing her throat to spit—now she claimed some mystery man was going to pay her debt to Yuri and marry her. Everyone tried to tell her these things never worked out. Hadn’t lying beneath a different man every night taught her anything? In the first place, why would a man take a whore to wife when he could have what he wanted for a far less exacting price? Love? What a joke! Men didn’t love women, they loved the way women made them feel about themselves. Most of them, that is. The ones who did fall in love with you, the ones who were fool enough to surrender their power to a woman… because that’s what love was in essence, wasn’t it? A kind of absolute surrender. Well, you had to be suspicious of those types, didn’t you? You had to believe some weakness of character was involved.

To this point Chemayev had been listening with half an ear, more concerned with the significance of having run into these women from his dream, trying fruitlessly to recall how the dream had proceeded after he had seen them, and thinking that he should turn back so as to avoid what might prove to be a real confrontation with March; but now he searched Nataliya’s face for a sign that she might be commenting on his particular situation. She did not appear to notice his increased attentiveness and continued gossiping about the pitiful Nadezhda. She’d never liked the bitch, she said, but now that she was about to get her comeuppance, you had to feel badly for her. Maybe she wasn’t really a bitch, maybe she was just an idiot. And maybe that was why Larissa had befriended her… Nataliya stopped as they came abreast of yet another window, touched Chemayev on the shoulder, and said, “There’s Yuri now.”

In the room beyond the glass, its walls and furniture done in shades of violet, a pasty round-shouldered man with a dolorous, jowly face and thin strands of graying hair combed over a mottled scalp stood at the foot of a large bed, seeming at loose ends. He had on slacks and an unbuttoned shirt from which his belly protruded like an uncooked dumpling, and he was rubbing his hips with broad, powerful-looking hands. Chemayev had seen Yuri on numerous occasions—or rather he had seen the man who officiated at the nightly auctions—but he had never been this close to any of the doubles, and despite the man’s unprepossessing mien, or perhaps because of it, because his drab commonality echoed that of the old Soviet dinosaurs, the Kruschevs, the Andropovs, the Malenkovs, he felt a twinge of fear.

“Is that him?” he asked Nataliya.

She looked uncertain, then brightened. “You mean the one you’re expecting to meet? He’s upstairs. At the party.”

“What are you talking about? What party?”

“At Yuri’s place.”

“His office?”

“His office… his apartment. It’s all the same. He’s got an entire floor. The party’s been going on since Eternity opened. Eleven, twelve years now. It never shuts down. Don’t worry. You’ll do your business and meet some fascinating people.”

Chemayev studied the double, who was shuffling about, touching things, pursing his lips as though in disapproval. He did not appear to be the magical adept of Polutin’s description, but of course this was not the real Yuri—who could say what form he’d taken for himself?

“If you want to finish by the time Larissa gets off work,” Nataliya said, “we’d better hurry.”

“She’s not working tonight,” Chemayev said, still intrigued by the double.

“Sure she is. I saw her not half an hour ago. She was with this young blond guy. A real pretty boy. Her last client of the night… or so she said.”

She said this so off-handedly, Chemayev didn’t believe she was lying. “She told me she didn’t have to work tonight.”

“What’s she supposed to tell you? She’s going to throw some asshole a fuck? You know what she does. She cares for you, so she lied. Big surprise!”

What Nataliya had told him seemed obvious, patently true; nonetheless Chemayev was left with a feeling of mild stupor, like the thick-headedness that comes with the onset of flu, before it manifests as fever and congestion. He leaned against the wall.

“The amazing thing is, you believed her,” she said. “Who’d you think you were involved with? Lying’s second nature to a whore.”

“She’s not a whore,” he said, half under his breath.

Nataliya pushed her sharp face close to his. “No? What could she be then? A missionary? A nurse?”

“She didn’t have a choice. She…”

“Sure! That explains it! Every other girl who becomes a whore has a choice, but not sweet Larissa.” Nataliya made a dry sound in the back of her throat, like a cat hissing. “You’re pathetic!”

Chemayev hung his head, giving in to the dead weight of his skull. To graphic images of Larissa in bed. It was unreasonable to feel betrayed under such circumstances, yet that was how he felt. He wanted to run, to put distance between himself and the corridor; but the violet room seemed to exert a tidal influence on his mood, pulling his sense of betrayal into a dangerous shape, and he had the urge to batter the window, to break through and tear Yuri’s double apart.

“Want to watch? They’re probably going at it in one of the rooms. I bet we can find them.” Nataliya tugged at his jacket. “Come on! Treat yourself! I won’t say a thing to Larissa.”

Chemayev shoved her away, sending her reeling against the opposite wall. “Shut your fucking mouth!”

“Oo—oo—ooh!” Nataliya pretended to cower, holding her white hands like starfish in front of her face, peering through the gaps between her long fingers. “That was very good! Just like a real man!”

Chemayev’s head throbbed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m paying off her debt. We’re planning to go away… to marry.”

Nataliya was silent for a bit, then: “And now you’re not? That’s what you’re saying? Now you’ve realized your whore is really a whore, you intend to abandon her?”

“No… that’s not it.”

“Then why waste time? Keep your appointment. Pay the money. You’ll forget about this.”

Chemayev thought this was good advice, but he couldn’t muster the energy to follow it. His mental wattage had dimmed, as if he were experiencing a brown-out.

Nataliya leaned against the wall beside him. “What I said about Nadezhda… about her telling us someone was going to pay her debt. I bet Larissa told her about you, and she took the story for her own. She does that sort of thing. Takes scraps of other people’s lives and sews them into an autobiography.” She looked off along the corridor. “I’m sorry for what I said. If I’d known it was you and Larissa…” Her voice lost some value, some richness. “Maybe it’ll be different for you two.”

Her solicitude, which Chemayev suspected was only prelude to further abuse, snapped him out of his funk. “No need to apologize,” he said. “I haven’t taken anything you’ve said seriously.” He headed off along the corridor.

“Oh… right! You have the surety of love to support your convictions.” Nataliya fell into step beside him. “I’m curious about love. Me, I’ve never experienced it. Mind telling me what it’s like?”

Chemayev’s headache grew worse; he increased his pace. They came round a sharp bend and he saw an elevator door ahead.

“All I want’s a hint, you understand. Just tell me something you know about Larissa. Something only you with your lover’s eye can see.”

Enraged, Chemayev spun her about to face him. “Don’t talk anymore! Just take me to Yuri!”

Half-smiling, she knocked his hands away and walked toward the elevator; then she glanced back, smiling broadly now. “Is this how you treat her? No wonder she lies to you.”

• • •

Inside the cramped elevator, chest-to-chest with Nataliya, Chemayev fixed his eyes on a point above the silky curve of her scalp and studied the image of Stalin’s NKVD chief, Beria—the mural on the walls repeated the motif of those in the corridor and the bar, but here the figures were larger, giving the impression that they were passengers in the car. Contemplating this emblem of Soviet authority eased the throbbing in his head. Maybe, he thought, in the presence of such an evil ikon his own sins were diminished and thus became less capable of producing symptoms such as anxiety and headaches. The old thug looked dapper, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, sporting a red flower in his lapel instead of a hammer-and-sickle pin, quite different from the photographs Chemayev had seen in which he’d worn executioner’s black. His quizzical expression and pince-nez gave him the air of a schoolteacher, stern yet caring, a man whom you’d detest when you studied under him, but whom you would respect years later when you realized the value of the lessons he’d taught. Not at all the sort of character to preside over purges and summary executions, watching from a distance, betraying no more emotion than would a beetle perched on a leaf.

Inching upward, the elevator creaked and groaned—the sounds of a torture chamber. The exhausted cries of victims, the straining of mechanical torments. Nothing like the noiseless efficiency of the one that had brought him to the theater. The car lurched, passing a floor, and Chemayev’s thoughts, too, lurched. He reawakened to Nataliya’s presence, felt her eyes on him. Bitch. He wanted to beam the word into her brain. What right did she have to ask him personal questions? Tell me something you know about Larissa, something only you with your lover’s eye can see. What did she expect? That he’d bare his soul to her? Fat chance! There were lots of things he could have told her, though. A year-and-a-half’s worth of things. Thousands of intimate observations. The problem was, his head hurt too much at the moment for him to think of any.

The elevator door rattled open and Chemayev stepped out into a corridor with cement walls, smelling of urine and vomit, illuminated by the ghastly dim light from an overhead bulb. The floor was littered with empty bottles, crushed plastic containers, soggy newspapers, dead cigarette packs, used condoms. Partially unearthed from a mound of debris, a crumpled Pepsi can glittered like treasure. Heavy metal blasted from somewhere close by. At the far end of the corridor a lumpish old man with stringy gray hair falling to his shoulders was wielding a mop, feebly pushing a mound of trash into the shadowy space beneath a stairwell. Along the walls stood buckets of sand—for use in case of fire. Chemayev turned to Nataliya, who gestured for him to proceed. As they passed, the old man peered at him through the gray snakes of his hair, his face twisted into a frown, and he smacked his lips as if trying to rid himself of a nasty taste.

If Chemayev had any doubt as to where he stood, it was dispelled by what he saw from the window at the foot of the stairs—he was gazing down onto the parking lot of Eternity, a view that could only be achieved from high up in one of the krushovas. This surprised him, but he was becoming accustomed to Yuri Lebedev’s curious logic. As he started up the stairs, the music was switched off and he heard voices in the corridor above. At the top of the stairs, lounging against a wall, were two men in jeans and leather jackets, one with a shaved scalp, nursing a Walkman to his breast, and the other with a mohawk that had been teased into a rooster’s crest. They eyed Chemayev with contempt. The man with the Mohawk blew Nataliya a kiss. His face was narrow, scarcely any chin and a big nose, looking as if it had been squeezed in a vise. A pistol was stuck in his belt.

“Private party,” he said, blocking Chemayev’s path.

“I’ve got an appointment with Yuri,” Chemayev told him.

The bald guy affected a doltish expression. “Yuri? Which Yuri is that?”

“Maybe Yuri Gagarin,” said his pal. “Maybe this pussy wants to be an astronaut.”

“Better let him pass,” said Nataliya. “My friend’s a real assassin. A faggot like you doesn’t stand a chance with him.”

The man with the pistol in his belt made a twitchy move and Chemayev grabbed his hand as it closed around the pistol grip; at the same time he spun the man about and encircled his neck from behind with his left arm, cutting off his wind. The man let go of the pistol and pried at the arm. Chemayev flicked the safety off, pushed the pistol deeper into the man’s trousers.

The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Go easy, okay!”

Chemayev wrenched the gun free and waved both men back against the wall. “Are you crazy?” he asked Nataliya. “Why did you antagonize him?”

She moved off along the corridor, heading for a doorway thronged with partygoers. “I have so few chances to watch you be masterful. Indulge me.”

Chemayev shook his forefinger in warning at the two punks and followed her. The pistol—a nine-millimeter—didn’t fit his holster; he wedged it in the waistband of his trousers, at the small of his back.

The first thing he noticed about the party was that the instant he stepped through the door the stench of the hallway vanished, as if he had penetrated an invisible barrier impermeable to odors. The smells were now those you might expect of any Moscow gathering: perfume, marijuana and cigarette smoke, bad breath, the heat of people pressed together under the sickly lighting, crowded into an unguessable number of rooms. People of every description. Students in sweaters and jeans; old ragged folks with careworn faces, the sort you’d expect to find in the krushovas; beautiful women in couturier gowns; street prostitutes—some equally beautiful—in vinyl micro-minis and fake furs; men dressed like Chemayev himself, members of a mafiya or businessmen with more-or-less reputable interests; musicians with guitars and violins and horns; homosexuals in drag; uniformed soldiers; jugglers. In one corner several fit-looking men wearing jerseys tossed a soccer ball back and forth; in another two actors played a scene to an audience consisting of a blond middle-aged woman in a lab coat and thick spectacles, a thickset man in a wrinkled suit, the very image of a Party hack, and a pretty adolescent girl wearing leg warmers over her tights, holding a pair of ballet slippers. On occasion, as Chemayev and Nataliya forged a path, being pinched and fondled and grabbed in the process, incredible sights materialized, as fleeting as flashes of lightning. A geisha’s painted face appeared between shoulders; she flicked out a slender forked tongue at Chemayev, then was gone. Soon thereafter he caught sight of a small boy whirling as rapidly as a figure skater, transforming himself into a column of dervish blue light. And not long after that they squeezed past a group of men and women attending a giant with a prognathous jaw and a bulging forehead who, kneeling, was as tall as those gathered around him; he reached out his enormous hands and flickering auras manifested about the heads of those he touched. To someone unfamiliar with Eternity these sights might have seemed miraculous; but to Chemayev, who had witnessed similar curiosities on the stage of the theater, they were evidence of Yuri’s talent for illusion. He accepted them in stride and kept pushing ahead. Once he saw a brunette who might have been Larissa laughing flirtatiously on the arm of a slender blond man; he called to her, knocked people aside in his determination to reach her, but she disappeared into the crowd.

There were so many people milling about it was impossible to keep track of any single person, and they were of such great variety it seemed a contemporary Noah had scavenged the streets of the endangered city for two of every kind and brought them to this place of relative security, a cross between the Ark and the Tower of Babel. The hubbub, comprised of talking, singing, laughing—indeed, of every sort of human emission—was deafening, and the only impression Chemayev had of the general aspect of the place was derived from the objects that lined the walls. Overflowing bookcases; side-by-side refrigerators; an ornate China closet containing framed photographs; a massive secretary of golden oak; cupboards, reliquaries, travel posters, portraits, a calendar showing the wrong month and a picture of Siberian wheat fields. Items typical of a middle-class apartment. Smoke dimmed the lighting further, creating an amber haze, twisting with slow torsion into a menagerie of shapes that often appeared identifiable—ephemeral omega signs and kabalistic symbols and mutant Cyrillic characters—beneath which the closely packed heads of the party-goers bobbed and jerked. In various quarters couples were dancing, and due to the heat, many—both men and women—had removed their shirts; but because of the overall exuberance and the general lack of attention paid to the topless women, the effect was not truly prurient and had the casual eroticism of a tribal celebration.

Eventually Nataliya and Chemayev forced their way into a large, relatively under-populated room. No more than fifteen or sixteen people standing in clusters, some occupying the grouping of couches and easy chairs that dominated the far end. Nataliya drew Chemayev aside. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “For all I know we’re following Yuri about. Sit down and I’ll try to find him.”

Oppressed, mentally fatigued, Chemayev was in no mood to argue. Once she had left, he collapsed into an easy chair, let his head fall back, and closed his eyes. The workings of his mind were clouded, murky. It was as if the contents of his skull were the interior of a fishbowl that hadn’t been cleaned for weeks, the water thickened to a brown emulsion in which a golden glint of movement was visible now and again. Though not altogether pleasant, it was an oddly restful state, and he became irritated when a man’s voice intruded, telling a story about two young friends who’d come to Moscow from the north. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore the voice and finally opened his eyes to discover that the room had filled with decrepit, ill-clad men and women, typical denizens of the krushovas. The storyteller was hidden among them and his voice—a slurred yet authoritative baritone—was the only one audible.

“There was a special bond between them,” the man was saying. “They were both misfits in the life they had chosen—or, rather, that had chosen them. They were romantics and their circumstance was the very antithesis of the romantic, suppressing the natural expressions of their hearts and souls. Nicolai—the livelier of the pair—he was more grievously affected. He fancied himself a poet. He aspired to be a new Mayakovsky, to give tongue to the millennial monsters taking shape from the funeral smoke of Communism. A talented, personable fellow. Blond, handsome. For all his bloody deeds, he had something inside him that remained untouched. A core of… not innocence exactly, but a kind of youthful arrogance that counterfeited innocence. That made innocence unnecessary. Who knows what he might have achieved in a more forgiving age?”

This reference to someone named Nicolai and the accompanying description charged Chemayev with new anxiety and caused him to shake off his malaise. He sat up and peered about, trying to locate the speaker. An old woman fixed him with a baleful stare, then turned away. Her faded print dress was hiked up in back, revealing a raddled, purple-veined thigh; one of her grimy stockings had sagged about her calf in folds, like a seven league boot.

“The morning in question,” the man went on, “they got up well before dawn and drove to an open market north of the city. You know the sort of place. A muddy field where vendors set up stalls. Farmers selling vegetables and such. An old bus was parked at the edge of the field. It served as an office for Aleksander Fetisov, the small-time criminal they’d been sent to kill. Fetisov had grown dissatisfied with picking up the crumbs that fell from the table of the big shots. He had grand ambitions. But neither his strength nor his ingenuity had proved equal to those ambitions. When he stepped out of the bus with his bodyguards our heroes opened fire from behind the bushes where they had hidden themselves. The farmers ran away.

“Nicolai knelt beside Fetisov’s body. He needed proof that they’d done the job. A watch, a ring. Some identifiable token. As his friend searched the dead man’s clothing Viktor moved up behind him and aimed a pistol at his head. It would have been merciful if he had pulled the trigger right at that second, but he wasn’t committed to the act. He was still trying to think of a way out… even though he knew there was none. He couldn’t understand why Polutin had ordered him to kill Nicolai. But for Viktor, lack of understanding was not sufficient cause to break ranks. In this he differed from Nicolai. And of course, though he couldn’t see it at the time, this was the reason Polutin had ordered Nicolai’s death—he had too much imagination to be a good soldier.”

Bewildered and full of dread, Chemayev stood and began making his way toward the sound of the voice. He knew this story, he was familiar with every detail, but how anyone else could know it was beyond him. The elderly men and women shuffled out of his path clumsily, reluctantly—it seemed he was pushing through a sort of human vegetation, a clinging, malodorous thicket comprised of threadbare dresses, torn sweaters, and blotchy, wrinkled skin.

“Nicolai glanced up from the corpse to discover that his friend had become his executioner. For an instant, he was frozen. But after the initial shock dissipated he made no move to fight or to plead for his life. He just looked at Viktor, a look that seemed fully comprehending, as if he knew everything about the moment. The mechanisms that had created it. Its inevitability. And it was the composition of that look, the fact that it contained no element of disappointment, as if what was about to occur was no more nor less than what Nicolai might have expected of his friend… that was the spark that prompted Viktor, at last, to fire. To give him due credit, he wept profusely over the body. At one point he put the gun to his head, intending to end his own life. But that, certainly, was an act to which he was not committed.”

Standing near the door, his back to Chemayev, the center of the krushova dwellers’ attention, was a squat black-haired man in a blue serge suit. Chemayev stepped in front of him and stared into the unblinking eyes of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, his clothing identical in every respect to that worn by the painted image in the elevator, complete down to the pince-nez perched on his nose and the red blossom in his lapel. Flabbergasted, Chemayev fell back a step.

“If it were up to me,” Beria said, “I’d have you shot. Not because you betrayed your friend—in that you were only carrying out an order. But your penchant for self-recrimination interferes with the performance of your duty. That is reprehensible.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth and regarded Chemayev dourly. “I suspect you’d like to know how I came to hear the story I’ve been telling my comrades. No doubt you’re trying to rationalize my presence. Perhaps you’ve concluded that if Yuri could create doubles for himself, he might well have created a double for Beria. Perhaps you’re thinking that when Lev Polutin sent you and Nicolai to kill Fetisov, he also sent a spy to make certain you did the job right, and that this spy is my source. That would be the logical explanation. At least according to the lights of your experience. But let me assure you, such is not the case.”

Having recovered his poise somewhat, Chemayev seized on this explanation as if it were a rope that had been lowered from the heavens to lift him free of earthly confusion. “I’m sick of this shit!” he said, grabbing Beria by the lapels. “Tell me where the fuck Yuri is!”

An ominous muttering arose from the crowd, but Beria remained unruffled. “People have been trying to talk to you all evening,” he said. “Trying to help you make sense of things. But you’re not a good listener, are you? Very well.” He patted Chemayev on the cheek, an avuncular gesture that caused Chemayev, as if in reflex, to release him. “Let’s say for the sake of argument I’m not who I appear to be. That I’m merely the likeness of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. Not God’s creation, but Yuri’s. Given Yuri’s playful nature, this is a distinct possibility. But how far, I wonder, does playfulness extend? Does he only create doubles of the famous, the notorious? Or might he also create doubles of individuals who’re of no interest to anyone… except, perhaps, to Viktor Chemayev?” A meager smile touched his lips. “That doesn’t seem reasonable, does it?”

There was a rustling behind Chemayev, as of many people shifting about, and he turned toward the sound. An avenue had been created in the ranks of human wreckage from the krushovas, and sauntering toward him along it—the way he used to walk when he spotted you at a bar or on a street corner, and had it in mind to play a trick, his head tipped to the side, carrying his left hand by his waist, as if about to break into a dance step—was a blond, slender, blue-eyed man in a fawn leather jacket, gray silk shirt, and cream-colored slacks. His boyish smile was parenthetically displayed between two delicately incised lines that helped lend him a look of perpetual slyness. In fact, all the details of his features were so finely drawn they might have been created by a horde of artisan spiders armed with tiny lapidary instruments. It was the face of a sensitive, mischievous child come to a no less sensitive and mischievous maturity. He looked not a day older than he had on the last morning of his life three and a half years before.

“That’s right!” Nicolai said, holding out his arms to Viktor. “In the flesh! Surprised?” He wheeled in a circle as if showing off a new suit. “Still the handsome twenty-two-year-old, eh? Still a fucking cloud in trousers.”

Logic was no remedy for this apparition. If the floor had opened beneath him to reveal a lake of fire, Chemayev would not have been more frightened. He retreated in a panic, fumbling for the pistol.

“Man! Don’t be an asshole! I’m not going to give you any trouble.” Nicolai showed Chemayev his empty palms. “We’ve been down this road once. You don’t want to do it again.”

Guilt and remorse took up prominent posts along Chemayev’s mental perimeters. His breath came shallowly, and he had difficulty speaking. “Nicolai?” he said. “It… it’s not you?…”

“Sure it is. Want me to prove it? No problem.” Nicolai folded his arms on his chest and appeared to be thinking; then he grinned. “What’s that night club where all the whores dress like Nazis? Fuck! I’m no good with names. But you must remember the night we got drunk there? We screwed everything in sight. Remember?”

Chemayev nodded, though he barely registered the words.

“On the way home we had an argument,” Nicolai said. “It was the only time we ever got into a fight. You pulled the car off onto the side of the Garden Ring and we beat the shit out of each other. Remember what we argued about?”

“Yes.” Chemayev was beginning to believe that the man might actually be Nicolai. The thought gave him no comfort.

“We argued about whether the goddamn Rolling Stones were better with Brian Jones or Mick Taylor.” Nicolai fingered a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, tapped one out. “Stupid bullshit. I couldn’t chew for a fucking week.” He fired up his cigarette and exhaled a fan of smoke; he closed his right eye, squinted at Chemayev as if assessing the impact of his words. “Want more proof? No problem.”

He dropped, loose-limbed, into a nearby chair and began to reel off another anecdote, but no further proofs were necessary. His unstrung collapse; his languid gestures; the way he manipulated the cigarette in his left hand, passing it from one pair of fingers to another like a magician practicing a coin trick—the entire catalogue of his body language and speech was unmistakably Nicolai’s. No actor alive, however skillful, could have achieved such verisimilitude.

As Chemayev looked on, half-listening to Nicolai, a consoling inner voice, a voice of fundamental soundness and fine proletarian sensibilities that had been there all the time but only became audible when essential to mental stability, was offering assurances that beyond the boundaries of his temporary derangement the world was as ever, humdrum and explicable, and no such thing as this could be happening—drugs, alcohol, and stress were to blame—rambling on and on with increasingly insane calmness and irrelevance, like the whispered litany of a self-help guru suggesting seven simple methods for maximizing spiritual potential issuing from a cassette playing over a pair of headphones fallen from the head of a gunshot victim who was bleeding out onto a kitchen floor. Yet simultaneously, in some cramped sub-basement of his brain, urgent bulletins concerning zombie sightings and karmic retribution were being received, warnings that came too late to save the iniquitous murderer of a childhood friend…

“Viktor!” Nicolai was staring at him with concern. “Are you all right? Sit down, man. I know this is fucked up, but we’ve got some things to talk about.”

Unable to think of an acceptable alternative, Chemayev sagged into the chair opposite, but he did not lean back and he rested the pistol on his knee. Overwhelmed with guilt and regret, he had the urge to apologize, to beg forgiveness, but recognized the inadequacy of such gestures. His heart seemed to constrict into a dark nugget of self-loathing.

“You know it’s me now, right?” Nicolai asked. “You don’t have any doubts?”

Called upon to speak, Chemayev was unable to repress his urge for apology, and emitted a sobbing, incoherent string of phrases that, reduced to their essence, translated into an admission of responsibility and a denial of the same on the grounds that he’d had no choice, if he hadn’t followed Polutin’s orders, Polutin would have killed him, his family… The shame of the act never left him, but what else could he have done?

Nicolai shifted lower in his chair, reached down to the floor and stubbed out his cigarette. He watched the embers fade. “I never expected to last long in Moscow,” he said gloomily. “That’s one of the differences between us. You always thought you were going to win the game. Me, I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost.” He tapped out another cigarette. “I can’t help how you feel. And believe me, I know. I saw your face when you pulled the trigger. I see your face now. You’re not hard to read.” He lit up again. “You’ll never forgive yourself, no matter what I tell you. So why don’t we put the subject aside for now. We’ve more important things to discuss.”

Once again Chemayev could think of nothing to say other than to abase himself, to offer further apology. Tears streamed from his eyes, and though the tears were validation of a kind, evidence that his spirit, albeit tarnished, was still capable of normal reactions, they also infused him with shame. He struggled to control himself. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How is this possible? How can you be here?”

“With Yuri all things are possible,” said Nicolai; then his glum mood lifted. “You know those American jokes? The ones with the punch lines that go, ‘I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news’? It’s like that. I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news. Which do you want first?”

This was the old Nicolai, always joking, trying to make light of things. Chemayev relaxed by a degree from his rigid posture.

“Come on!” Nicolai said. “Which do you want?”

“Good.”

“Okay. The good news is there is an afterlife. The bad news is”—Nicolai made a sweeping gesture that, for all Chemayev knew, might have been intended to include the apartment, Russia, the universe—“this is it!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“This place.” Nicolai gave a sardonic laugh. “This fucking night club. Eternity.”

There must be, Chemayev thought, more to the joke.

“You still don’t get it, huh? Christ!” Nicolai leaned forward and gave Chemayev a rap on the knee, like a teacher scolding—fondly—a favorite pupil. “For such a genius you’re not too quick on the uptake.”

“Eternity?” said Chemayev, incredulous. “Yuri Lebedev’s Eternity… that’s the afterlife? You’re not serious?”

“Serious? What the fuck’s that? Is Moscow serious? Starving people camped in the subways. Generals selling tanks on the black market. That old fart in the Kremlin swilling down a quart a day and promising us the capitalist paradise. It’s no less serious than that.” Nicolai wriggled in his chair like a kid with an itch. “Yuri, man… he’s…” He gave his head a shake, as if to signify awe. “You don’t have to hang around the party long before you learn things about him.”

“You mean that horseshit about he’s a fucking wizard? A Master of the Mystic East?”

“They’re things a guy like you might not be able to swallow. But for a guy like me, with what I’ve been through, I don’t have any choice.”

Chemayev looked down at his hands.

“Have you ever met anyone who knew Yuri?” Nicolai asked. “Any of his friends, his associates. Not just someone who used to work for him.”

After giving this due consideration Chemayev said he had not.

“That’s because they’re dead. Grenkov, Zereva, Ashkenazy. All those guys. They’re all dead and they’re all at the party. Man, you wouldn’t believe who’s here! It’s the goddamn Communist Hall of Fame. Yuri’s a big fan of those power-mad old bastards. Lots of generals and shit. Not many poets, though. Yuri was never much of a reader.”

“Oh. So it’s the party that’s the afterlife!” Chemayev gave a scornful laugh. “This is bullshit!”

Nicolai’s face hardened. “Bullshit? Well, maybe you’ll think this is bullshit too! When you shot me, I went out. One second I was staring at you. At your dumbass face! It looked like you were going to start whimpering. I had time to say to myself, ‘Oh, fuck… yeah… of course…’ I figured things out, you understand. The way you were pouting—I knew it meant you’d scrambled over whatever pissy little moral hurdle the job had posed. And then”—he snapped his fingers—“I wasn’t there anymore.” He allowed Chemayev time to react and when no reaction was forthcoming he went on, “I don’t remember much afterward. But at some point I began to hear a voice. I can’t tell you what kind of voice. It was all around me… this enormous sound. As if I was inside the mouth that was speaking. Sometimes it seems I can almost repeat the words it was saying—they’re on the tip of my tongue. But I can’t spit them out.” He made a frustrated noise. “The next thing I remember for certain, I’m walking down a dingy corridor toward a door. Toward the party. I’m wearing nice clothes. Cologne. It’s like I just got out of the shower and I’m ready for a night on the town.”

Nicolai took a hit of his cigarette and let smoke leak out between his lips, as if too enervated to exhale properly. “I suppose it does sound like bullshit. I can’t explain it. Everybody says that while Yuri was building the club he was hanging out with some strange people. Experts on the Kabbala. Computer scientists. He even brought in a shaman from up near Archangel. They say he went through some drastic changes, and I believe it. Whatever he was like before, I’ll bet it wasn’t much like he is now.”

“You’ve met him?”

Nicolai coughed, grimaced, butted his cigarette. “You don’t meet Yuri. You experience him.”

“You experience him.” Chemayev gave a sarcastic laugh. “So you’re saying he’s like a sunset or something.”

“A sunset…” Nicolai looked as if he was mulling it over. “It’s not a totally inappropriate analogy. But for sure he’s not a guy you sit down and have a chat with. The fact is, I don’t think he’s a guy at all. Not anymore. The things he got into when he was building the club, they transformed him. The club, Yuri, the party… they’re all the same somehow.” Nicolai smiled crookedly. “That’s pretty weak, isn’t it? Maybe the best I can do is tell you what it’s like being here all the time.” He gestured at one of the walls. “Take a look around.”

Chemayev had not paid much attention to the room when he had entered, but he was fairly certain the walls had not been covered, as they were now, with a faded earth-toned mural like those found on the walls of factories during the Communist era: determined-looking, square-jawed men and broad-shouldered women with motherly bosoms engaged in the noble state-approved pursuit of dump-truck-assembly, faces aglow with the joy of communal effort, their sinewy arms seemingly imbued with the same iron strength as the mighty girders and grimly functional machinery that framed them. Other than their two chairs, the room was empty of furniture. The krushova dwellers and Beria were gone, and the noise of the party had abated, replaced by a faint roaring, like the sound of blood heard when you put a seashell close to your ear. Chemayev thought he had become inured to apparitions, but a chill spiked in his chest.

“Shit changes all the time,” said Nicolai. “Empty rooms fill up with people. You’ll be having a talk with someone and it’ll just end—like the rest of the scene was cut out of the movie. Snip! You’re in another room, doing something else. You’ll be sleeping in a bed, the next second you’re dancing with somebody. There’s no logic to it, it’s all done on a whim. Yuri’s whim. The physical laws of the place are his laws. Not God’s, not nature’s. It’s like everyone here is inside him. Part of him. He’s become a universe unto himself. One that contains the club and the party… For all I know he’s taken over the fucking world. But the difference between the places I’m familiar with—the club and the party—most people in the club are still alive.” He started to take out another cigarette, then thought better of it. “We get visitors like you from the real world now and again. And various among us are privileged to visit the club. But…” His mood veered toward exasperation, and Chemayev wondered, with only a touch of cynicism, if Yuri might not be editing his emotions as well as his scenes. “Don’t you understand?” Nicolai asked. “Yuri’s in control of everything that happens here. We’re fucking figments of his imagination. Once you step inside Eternity you’re subject to his whims the same as us. I don’t know what kind of deal you’re hoping to do with him, but take my word, it’s not going to be what you expected. You should get the hell out. Right now.” He chuckled. “Here I am trying to save your ass. Old habits. Of course”—he kept his face neutral—“I’m probably too late.”

“If what you say is true,” Chemayev said, “then logic would dictate that you’re the subject of Yuri’s whim at present. That’s the reason for this… this confrontation. You must have something to tell me. The lecture on Yuri’s power, I assume.”

Nicolai jumped up and went to stand facing one of the muralled walls, as if compelled by the heroic figure of a muscular redheaded man holding up an ingot in a pair of tongs, staring at it with such unalloyed devotion, it might have been the sacred light of Mother Russia soon to become an axle joint. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear,” he said. “The voice of the heartless motherfucker who shot me. I knew it was in you somewhere.” He wheeled about, his clever features cinched in fury. “You think this is a confrontation? My dear friend Viktor! My cherished boyhood companion! Don’t you worry. You’ll be back here one day… and maybe not just for a visit. Then we’ll have a fucking confrontation!” He paced toward Chemayev and stood with his feet apart as if preparing to attack. “I do have something to tell you, but it’s got nothing to do with what I said about Yuri. That was for old time’s sake. For a while it was like we were friends again, you know. A couple of guys sitting around bullshitting. I can’t figure why it happened, but that’s how it felt.”

Chemayev could relate to Nicolai’s confusion. His own feelings, compounded of love, fear, guilt, and much more, were too complex to analyze, like a stew that had been simmering for three and a half years, new ingredients constantly being added, fragrant, rich, and savory, but ultimately indigestible. Nothing could be salvaged here, he realized. “What do you have to tell me?”

Nicolai plucked out his Marlboros, tapped the pack on the back of his hand. “Russian women. Ever think about how tough they are, Viktor? They get the crap beat out of them, they take the best abuse of drunks and addicts. Their fathers fuck them, their boyfriends pimp them. By the time they’re sixteen they’re world-class ballbusters. They’re still sweet, still capable of love. But they’ve learned to do what’s necessary. Most men don’t see this. They don’t understand that no matter what the woman feels for them, she’s going to do what’s in her own best interests. She’s become just like a Russian man. Sentimental on the outside. Soft. But on the inside they’re steel.”

“Is this leading somewhere?” asked Chemayev.

“I fucked your woman tonight,” Nicolai said. “Your beautiful Larissa. I did her twice. The second time I had her up the ass. She loved it, she went absolutely crazy. I’ve never considered myself a petty sort, but I must admit it gave me a great deal of satisfaction.” He studied the pack of cigarettes, as if using it to focus his thoughts. “You know how it is with some women—when you make love to them their faces get twisted, distorted. Sex strips away their beauty, revealing the beast. But Larissa, man… She’s amazing. No matter how depraved the act, how degrading your intent, she just gets more beautiful. She had this entranced look. Radiant. Like a saint. Like the more I defiled her, the closer she grew to God.” His soft laugh expressed a touch of incredulity. “But none of that’s important, is it? She’s a whore, after all. So she fucks a guy—even a dead guy—what’s the big deal? She’s doing her job. If she enjoys it a little, all that means is she’s a professional.” He came closer and perched on the arm of his chair. “After the first fuck we talked a while. She told me this was her last night, she was going away with the man she loved. She told me all about you. What a great guy you were. How much you loved her. All your virtues. I didn’t try to illuminate her. I didn’t have to. She realizes you’re a calculating son-of-a-bitch at heart. She didn’t say it, but it was implicit in what she said. She knows you. She loves you. How could she not? She’s exactly the same as you. She’ll do whatever she has to and there won’t be a stain on her conscience.” He repocketed the Marlboros without removing one. He stood, adjusted the hang of his jacket. “Okay. That’s it. My duty’s done.”

He seemed to be waiting for a response.

In standing Chemayev was unsteady as an old man, he had to put a hand out to balance himself. He should be angry, he thought; but he only felt out of his depth. There was a gap between himself and his emotions too wide for any spark to cross. But because he believed he should react in some way, because not to react smacked of inadequacy, he pointed the pistol at Nicolai’s chest.

“Give it a try,” said Nicolai; he held both arms straight out from his sides, turning himself into a blond, expensively tailored Jesus on the Cross. “It worked the first time. I’m interested in what’ll happen myself.” He rested his head on his shoulder. “Wonder what Yuri will have to say?”

After pondering his options, Chemayev decided it would be best to hurry past this part of things. “Where’s Yuri now?”

As if in response the air between them began to ripple, a sluggish disturbance that spread throughout the room, infecting floor and ceiling and walls, and as it spread the dimensions of the room underwent a slow, undulant elongation, an evolution that seemed organic, like the stretching of a python’s gullet when it prepares to swallow an exceptionally large object. Once the rippling ceased Chemayev found that he was standing at a remove of some forty feet from Nicolai.

“Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve been telling you?” Nicolai’s voice carried a slight echo. “In this place you can’t get away from Yuri.”

Before Chemayev could react, the rippling started up once again, accompanied by a dimming of the lights. Moved by an old reflex of mutual reliance, he sprinted toward Nicolai, but the process of elongation was on this occasion so rapid, like the reduction in view achieved by narrowing the aperture of a telescopic lens, by the time he had gone only a couple of steps, Nicolai had dwindled to a tiny black figure at the far end of a long corridor. A foul-smelling corridor with stained, pitted concrete walls, littered with trash, ranged by warped wooden doors and buckets of sand. Hills of cans and bottles, stratified canyons of paper and plastic waste, dried-up riverbeds of urine and spilled vodka, altogether effecting a post-apocalyptic terrain laid out beneath a dirty white sky in which hung a jaundiced light bulb sun. It was the same corridor he and Nataliya had walked down earlier that evening.

The elevator door, battered, defaced by graffiti, stood about twenty feet away. Chemayev had the impulse to run to it, to seek shelter in the relative sanity of the night club. But he was fed up with being given the runaround; he’d entered into a straightforward business arrangement and he intended to see it through to a contract, no matter what games Yuri wanted to play. As for Larissa, if she’d lied… he could handle it. Their problems were every one associated with this psychotic country populated entirely by lunatics and their victims. By tomorrow night they’d be clear of all that.

He turned back, intending to frame a few last words that would convey to Nicolai both a more rational, more dignified portion of apology, and his acknowledgment of how things stood between them; but his former friend was nowhere to be seen. Looking at Chemayev from an arm’s-length away was the swarthy old derelict who had been sweeping up the corridor. He had barely noticed him on first meeting, but now he marveled at the man’s ugliness. With his stubby arms and legs, his swollen belly and narrow sloping shoulders, his smallish head, he might have been a toad that had undergone a transformation, only partially successful, into the human. He had about him a bitter reek reminiscent of the smell of the vegetation in the garden. The chest of his grimy T-shirt was mapped by a large, vaguely rectangular brown stain, like the image of a spectacularly undistinguished continent whose most prominent features were bits of dried food stuck to the fabric along the south coast and central plain. His wool trousers were shapeless as those of a clown, supported by frayed suspenders. Filthy twists of gray hair hung from his mottled scalp, half-curtaining his eyes, and his face, sagging, pouchy, cheeks and nose sporting graffiti of broken capillaries, thick-lipped and dull… It reminded Chemayev of dilapidated hovels in the villages of his childhood, each habitation humbled by weather and hard times into something lumpish, barely distinguishable from a mound of earth, a played-out vegetable plot in the back, rusted garden tools leaning against bowed steps, its thatched roof molting, sided with unpainted boards worn to a shit brown, and something ancient, howlingly mad with age and failure, peering out through two dark windows with cracked panes. It was fascinating in its lack of human vitality. More than fascinating. Compelling. It seemed to hold Chemayev’s eyes, to exert a pull that intensified with every passing second, as if the mad absence within had the virtue of a collapsed star, a generating fire grown so cold and inert it had become fire’s opposite, a negative engine wherein chaos became comprehensible and physical laws were reworked according to some implausible design. He could not look away from it, and when at last he did, not due to his own efforts, but because the old man moved, extending a hand to him, palm upward like a beggar, thus shattering the connection, he felt lightheaded and confused and frail, as if he had been winnowing away, unraveling in the depths of that bleak stare.

In his frail lightheaded confusion there were a few things Chemayev thought he understood. This liver-spotted troll, this mud man with a black hole inside him, was Yuri—he was fairly certain of that. He was also fairly certain that the old bastard had his hand out for money. For the gold certificates contained inside his, Chemayev’s, money belt. What was he supposed to do? Just fork it all over? Fuck that! Where were the papers to sign? What guarantees did he have—could he have—with a creature like this? He wanted to establish some sort of security for himself and Larissa, but couldn’t summon the words, and he realized with complete surety that fear had nothing to do with his inability to speak, words simply weren’t part of Yuri’s program—no more talk was needed, everything had been said, and now it was Chemayev’s choice to give over the money and see what that bought him… or to exercise caution for the time being.

That he accepted this prescription, that he believed Yuri had so much control over the situation, implied that he accepted Nicolai’s assessment of the man. He would have liked to deny this, but it seemed undeniable. He should tell someone, he thought. Before leaving Moscow he should tip the media, get a TV truck out to Eternity, expose the fact that the great Yuri Lebedev was running more than a night club, the old geezer had become a minor fucking deity in charge of a franchise in the afterlife catering to murderers, hookers, and various relics of the Cold War… This trickle of whimsy, edged with more than a little hysteria, dried up when Chemayev noticed that the walls and ceiling and floor of the corridor around and behind Yuri were billowing in and out with same rhythm as the rise and fall of his chest, as if the old man were the central image of a painting, a portrait of squalor floating on the surface of some gelatinous substance in a state of mild perturbation. He backed farther away, but the distance between himself and Yuri did not lengthen, and he saw that his body, too, was billowing, rippling, ruled by the tidal flux of Yuri’s sluggish breath—it appeared they were both elements of the same semi-liquid medium. Horrified, he flailed and kicked, trying to swim away, but none of his exertions had the least effect… unless they played a role in the steady expansion of Yuri’s face. It was widening, distending, losing its cohesion like a shape made of colored oil, spreading to cover more and more of the fluid atop which it was suspended, resembling a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, and Chemayev felt that his own body was suffering a similar distortion, his legs elongating, his torso becoming bulbous, his head lopsided and pumpkin-sized, and that he and Yuri were flowing together.

Yuri’s mouth stretched wider and wider, becoming a dark, gaping concavity that reduced his other features to tiny irrelevancies, like the glowing lures above the enormous mouth of an angler fish. It was curving to surround Chemayev, preparing less to swallow him than to incorporate him into its emptiness, and he thought briefly of the garden, the dark oval through which he had passed to reach it. If he could have screamed he would have made a cry that reached to heaven, but he was as voiceless as a strand of seaweed floating on an offshore billow, going out on the tide toward the great hollow places of the sea, and as he passed into the darkness, Yuri’s darkness, as it closed over him, his fear—like his voice—was subsumed by the myriad impressions that came to him from the place into which he was being absorbed.

He had a sense of the man Yuri had been, a quick mental rumor that left flavors of crudity, brutality, lustfulness, intelligence… an intellect that had aspired too high, that had sought a godlike invulnerability and created the means necessary to achieve it, but had lost everything of consequence in gaining it, for Yuri’s character was merely a component of the thing, the place, he had become. Through a mingling of magic and science and will he had triggered a sort of spiritual fission, all the particulars of his flesh and mind exploding into an immense, radiant cloud that did not dissipate in the way of a mushroom cloud, but maintained its integrity at the moment of peak fury, sustained by a surface tension that might have been the residue of the spell he had caused to be pronounced. Not a god so much as an embryonic entity of unguessable nature, striving to reach its maturity, extending its influence through various human (and perhaps inhuman—who could say?) agencies, populating its vacancy with dead souls, partly just for company, to ease its aching emptiness, but also utilizing their knowledge to engineer plots designed to increase its power, always feeding, growing, becoming… This was among the last thoughts Chemayev recalled before he was utterly subsumed, drowned in Yuri’s black essence—that all Yuri’s energies were being desperately directed toward the process of growth, of fulfilling whatever evolutionary destiny was now his—though perhaps he had no real destiny. That had come to be Yuri’s torment, the one feeling of which he was capable: the fear that he had trapped himself inside the prison of his own power, that he could only grow larger, that no matter how much power he gained, the dissolution and chaos of his new condition would never change, and he could impose no order, no equilibrium that would satisfy his original wish to be both man and god, he could merely unify his environment—whether this consisted of a night club, Moscow, Russia, or the entire planet—under the disordered banner of Eternity. His circumstance posed an intriguing intellectual and philosophical puzzle. Through his machinations, his alliances with generals and politicians and the mafiyas, might not Yuri be responsible for the chaos overwhelming the old Soviet states, or were the two forces feeding into one another? And if Yuri came to dominate the world or a substantial portion thereof, if he could avoid being absorbed by a creature like himself, but vaster and more cruel, would anyone notice? Was not the current chaos of the world all-pervasive, were not genocides and serial killings and natural disasters and the unending disregard of one soul for another sufficient evidence of this? And that being so, could it be possible that this chaos had always been the product of sad invisible monsters such as Yuri, a ruling class gone unnoticed by everyone except for saints and madmen?… Chemayev was amused by the formulation of these questions. He thought if he could sustain his awareness a while longer he might learn the answers, and they in turn would lead to subtler questions, the ones Yuri himself had asked, and if he could learn those answers, benefiting from Yuri’s experience, he might be able to avoid Yuri’s mistakes. But at the moment it didn’t seem worth the effort. Blind now, all his senses occluded, uncertain of his location, even as to which plane of existence he occupied, by all rights he should have been more afraid; but having practiced death once before, and having since witnessed a condition worse than death, he felt prepared for anything.

• • •

On regaining consciousness, Chemayev realized he was back in the garden. Considering the cautionary flavor of his previous experience and the circular pattern governing the evening, he had little doubt that March would soon put in an appearance, but nevertheless he found the bitter smell of Yuri’s vegetation and the sound of water spurting from the broken fountain and the silver bar of light floating overhead solid and comforting by contrast to the emptiness through which he had passed. Surprised to find that he was still holding the nine-millimeter pistol, he tucked it into his waist and headed for the fountain, pushing aside black branches clustered with white leaves bearing scatters of inky characters—he wondered now if these might not be fragments of the formula that had made Yuri’s transformation possible.

Once he reached the edge of the cobblestone circle he stationed himself behind some bushes, a position from which he had a clear view of the fountain. The abstracted calm that had eased his passage from the corridor to the garden remained strong in him, and waiting went easily at first. With its black serene sky, the silver bar in place of a sun, the ruined fountain and eccentric forest, the place had a Mexican Twilight Zone ambience—like an old B-movie set awaiting its Dramatis Personae—that appealed to him. But as the minutes wore on his anxiety resurfaced. He chastised himself for not having given Yuri the money. The moment had been brief, the circumstances problematic. But everything he’d worked for had been on the line. He should have been up to it. Of course paying the money might have been a fruitless gesture. God only knew what was going on. It was apparent that he was being manipulated. Equally apparent that Polutin had a hand in things—hadn’t he implied that he’d done business with Yuri? Perhaps he’d managed to sour the deal Chemayev had negotiated. One way or another, he’d just have to find another way to get the money to Yuri.

He became so enmeshed in worry he nearly failed to notice March on the opposite side of the circle, half-hidden in the bushes. Not shirtless as before. Wearing his leather trenchcoat. Chemayev aimed his pistol at him, but let the barrel drop. Killing him seemed the safest course, but he had no clue what the repercussions might be. It might be wise to feel things out. Risky, perhaps. But the pistol boosted his confidence. He tucked it back into the waist of his trousers, concealing it beneath his jacket, and stepped out onto the cobblestones.

“March!” he called.

March’s head snapped toward him. “Viktor! Christ, what’re you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? Just taking a stroll. What are you doing here?” As he spoke Chemayev recognized that their dialogue was roughly the mirror image of what they had said to one another on his previous adventure in the garden. He didn’t know whether to take this for a good or a bad omen.

“I’m not sure how to answer that.” March edged forward. “Frankly, I’ve been having myself one hell of a time. A fucking asylum would feel like a rest home after this place.”

It hadn’t occurred to Chemayev that anyone else might have been having experiences similar to his own; but judging by March’s behavior he thought now this might be the case. The Irishman kept casting furtive looks to the side, as if expecting some menace to emerge from the bushes.

“This Yuri character…” March’s right hand fluttered up; he rubbed the back of his head fitfully. “Did you keep your appointment with him?”

“Not yet,” said Chemayev.

“If I were you I might give it a pass.”

“You’ve seen him, then?”

March shook his head in the affirmative, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” He moved another step toward Chemayev. “I was talking to this old geezer. The guy looked like he’d spent the night in the boneyard kissing corpses. Filthy bugger! About seventy years old going on terminal. He claimed to be Yuri.”

“You talked with him?”

“Naw, we stared into one another’s eyes! Of course we talked.”

“What did you talk about?”

An angry tightness in his voice, March said, “Oh, this and that. The rugby final, the roots of British oppression. Chatty bits.” He had another quick glance behind him. “Do you know of a way out of here?”

March’s agitation lifted Chemayev’s spirits. “How about the way you came in?”

“Are you fucking with me, Viktor?” March walked purposefully toward him, stopping close to the fountain, about twenty feet away. “I need an ally. If you’re not an ally, I may have to take a bite out of you.” He had regained some of his self-assurance, as if the show of menace had been restorative. “I’ve had a number of unsettling experiences. A premonition of violence as well. Perhaps it’s all in my head. I’m not a’tall sure someone didn’t put something in my drink. But no matter that, I’m sensing a hostile vibe between us. Why would that be?”

Chemayev considered showing March the pistol, but decided against it. Confrontation had not served him well the last time. “Work it out for yourself. I’ve got my own problems.” He started to walk away, but March said, “Hang on, Viktor.” He was holding a chrome-plated automatic with a taped grip.

Chemayev gawked at it. “Where did you get the gun?”

“Picked it up during my travels. I was feeling a touch inadequate after checking my own weapon. But now”—he hefted the gun, as if appreciating its weight—“now I’m feeling twice the man I ever was.”

He urged Chemayev toward the fountain, had him sit on carved fragments at its base. Chemayev arranged himself carefully, adjusting his left hip so the pistol came loose in his waistband. In his thoughts he remarked again on the role reversal taking place. During their previous encounter he had been the anxious one, the one to ask about Yuri, the one to decide for confrontation. Perhaps all this pointed to a happier conclusion. But did March suspect what he suspected? He’d mentioned a premonition of violence. Chemayev was forced to assume that this premonition had involved the two of them.

“Do you fancy Irish music, Viktor?” March asked out of the blue; he sat down cross-legged about fifteen feet away. “Bands, you know. Rock ’n’ roll.”

“U2,” said Chemayev absently. “I like U2.”

“Jesus! U2!” March launched into a simpering parody of “In The Name of Love,” and then made a flatulent sound with his lips. “Bono Vox, my ass! That ball-less little prat! I’m talking about real Irish music. Like Van Morrison. Van the Man! Not some gobshite got up in a gold jockstrap.”

“He’s okay,” Chemayev said.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘okay’? That’s soul music, man! Ahh!” He made a dismissive gesture with the automatic. “That’s what I get for trying to talk rock ’n’ roll with a Russian. Your idea of music is some fat asshole playing folk songs on the lute.”

Chemayev leaned back against the base of the fountain. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the arc of water spurting from the broken pipe; overhead, a great crossbeam broadcast a benign silvery radiance. Black trees with leafy prayer flags stretched toward the light, and the round gray stones beneath him seemed to be eddying in their concentric circles. He allowed the fingers of his right hand to brush the pistol grip beneath his jacket. His chances were fifty-fifty, he figured. About the same as ever.

“You look almost happy,” March said. “Did you have the good thought?”

“Happy’s not the word for it,” said Chemayev.

“What am I missing, Viktor? You seem so at ease. It’s not like you. Do you know something I should know, or is it the drugs have just kicked in?”

“I don’t know shit,” said Chemayev. “I’ve been having a bad night, too. Someone’s been playing games with me.”

“Games,” said March. “Yeah, that’s my feeling.” He cracked the knuckles of his free hand by making a fist. “Do you recall me mentioning the dealings I had with your Mister Polutin over in London? A terrible business. Couple of his boys got taken out. Well, not long after I was passing the evening with this Rastafarian bunch in a squat in Chelsea. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores—suffice it to say, it was part of a complex proceeding. At any rate, I was feeling comfortable with things when I made the mistake of smoking a joint one of those savages handed me. I’m not sure what was in it, but from the extreme paranoia that resulted, I’m guessing it was angel dust. The idea was, I gather, to fuck me up sufficient so the Rastas could carve me. I had the suspicion it was Polutin’s idea… though considering the relationship we’ve had since, I may be mistaken. But the drug, whatever it was, didn’t have the desired effect.” The barrel of the automatic drooped toward his knee. “Not that I wasn’t sick as a fish. Fucking hell! I was feverish. My thoughts buzzing like flies. Patches of color swimming around me. My bones ached. I thought my heart was going to burst out its bottom like a soggy sack full of red milk. But the paranoia… it organized me somehow. I became a calm at the center of the storm of my symptoms. I could see everything in the room with wonderful clarity.

“There was eight of ’em. All licorice-skinned and snake-headed. Eyes agleam. Lounging in the doorways, sitting on sprung sofas. Trying to orchestrate my paranoia with their whispered talk. Streetlight washed through the busted-out windows, painting a shine on their faces and exposing the shit spray-painted on the walls. Designs, mostly. A variety of strange devices that had to do with that mongrel religion of theirs, but which spoke to me in a way unintended by the artist. I could read the future in those mazes of squiggly lines.”

A slackness came into March’s face, as if he’d been brought hard against the memory of a transcendent moment. Chemayev inched his hand beneath the flap of his jacket, touched the pistol grip with his fingertips.

“Have you ever been close to death, Viktor?” asked March. “I don’t mean nearly dead. I’m talking about the way you’re close to a woman when you’re lying with her in the act of love and there’s not an inch of air between you that isn’t humming with sweet vibration. That’s how it was that night. I was in death’s arms, fucking her slow and easy, and she was fusing her power with mine. I could actually see the bitch. She had a sleek silver face with a catlike Asian cast. The mask of a demoness. The silver moved as supplely as flesh to make her wicked smiles. Her hair was white, long and fine, and her breasts were corpse-pale, the nipples purplish. Like poison berries. When she opened her mouth I saw a silver word embossed on her black tongue. A character in the language I spoke before I was born, telling me it was time to act. That if I took action at that precise second, I’d come through the ordeal.”

In his distraction March’s pale face had an aspect of long-preserved youth, like that of a revivified mummy; the licks of black hair falling over his brow looked like absences in his flesh.

“When I drew my gun,” he went on, “I was inside death. Hot and slick with her. Her legs locked about my waist, fingernails stabbing my back. Both of us screaming with release. I had six bullets, and every one went true. Six head shots. Their dreadlocks hissed and snapped, their eyes rolled up like horses’ eyes. One of the survivors came at me with a machete, and I killed him with my hands. The last one fled.” He ran the barrel of the automatic idly along his thigh. “That was strange enough, but what happened next was stranger yet. I was standing there, reviewing my work. Stoned as a fucking goose, I was. Reading the bloody sentences newly written on the walls. Obituaries of the recently deceased. Tributes to my marksmanship. When I turned my head, following the red script of those shattered lives, I found death was still with me. I’d assumed she was an ordinary hallucination, that she’d served her purpose and moved on. But there she stood, posed like Hell’s calendar girl with hands on hips and one leg cocked, smiling at me. I’d only seen her close up before. Only been witness to half her beauty. The silvery stuff of her face flowed in sinuous curves to embellish her arms and legs. Silver flourishes coiled down her hips and framed her secret hair, which was trimmed to the shape of seven snakes standing on their tails. She beckoned to me, and I couldn’t resist. I lay with her once again.”

Chemayev had succeeded in securing a firm grasp on the pistol; but recalling March’s quickness, he didn’t trust the steadiness of his hand.

“It was a fool’s act,” March said, “to be coupling with what half my mind believed to be a product of madness. Especially with the dead lying around us, souls still tangled in their flesh. But I was in thrall. Her musk coated my tongue, her sweat formed a silvery sheen on my skin. My eyes went black with staring through the slits of her eyes into the thoughtless place beyond. She whispered to me. Not words of love, but a sibilant breath that entered through my ear and slithered into all my hollows, making an icy shape inside me. She stayed with me until the sky paled and flies began to gather like early fishermen at the edges of the spills of blood. But she never truly left me. I’ve seen her time and again since that night. Whenever trouble’s near she comes to guide my arm.” He gave Chemayev a sideways look. “I’ve seen her tonight.”

“Maybe you’re mistaken. It could have been one of Yuri’s girls. They like to dress up.” Chemayev thought if it weren’t for the plash of water behind him, he would be able to hear the beating of his heart.

“I’ve seen her tonight,” March repeated. “But I’m not so sure she’s with me this time.” He paused. “What do you think of my story, Viktor?”

“You mean apart from the obvious pathology?”

“Always ready to spit in the devil’s eye.” March lowered his head and chuckled. “You remind me of myself as a lad.”

Chemayev’s hand tightened on the pistol, but he failed to seize the opportunity.

“You probably think I’m having you on,” said March, and was about to say more, when Chemayev, his patience for this game exhausted, broke in: “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but I doubt you understand the implications of your story.”

“And I suppose you’re bursting to enlighten me?”

“Sure. Why not?” said Chemayev. “The idea that a man who’s accustomed to violence, who thrives on it, has come to rely on a fictive alliance with death… with a comic book image of death…”

“All alliances are fictive,” said March. “Haven’t you figured that one out?”

Chemayev ignored the interruption. “The fact you’ve created an imaginary playmate to help enable your violence—even if just in a story—that implies slippage. Weakness.”

March’s face emptied. “Weakness is it?”

“What else? Maybe it’s a touch of guilt. Some old flutter of religion. Something that demands you create a quasi-mystical justification for actions you previously considered utilitarian.”

“Quasi-mystical.” March blew air through his lips like a horse. “That cuts deep, Viktor. It’s a brand I’m not sure I can bear. Especially coming from a featherless little chirper like yourself.”

It seemed to Chemayev that March was fast approaching a moment of decision, a moment when he’d be preoccupied, all his attention focused on the possible consequences arising from the exercise of his anger, and as a result, for a fraction of a second he’d be slow to react.

“It may be a product of age,” Chemayev said. “Your increasing awareness of mortality.”

“Let it rest,” said March. “Seriously.”

“The brain could be in the early stages of decomposition. Logic decaying into fantasy, gasses collecting in the skull.”

“Do you hear what I’m telling you, boy?”

“It must look like a fucking swamp in there.” Chemayev tapped the side of his head. “Methane seeping from rotten stumps, gray scraps of tissue hanging down like moss. The brain a huge pale cheese wreathed in mist, rising from the black water. The creatures of your imagination peeping from its fissures. Most of them bullshit versions of yourself.”

“You bloody little piss merchant! Shut the fuck up!”

“Bruce Lee March, Dylan Thomas March, Charlie Manson March. Niall the Catholic Fishboy, old Father McConnell’s favorite sweet. And let’s not forget your masterpiece: Death. Based, I imagine, on some pimply little squinch who wouldn’t let you have a bite of her muffin back in trade school. When the mists get really thick, they all pick up banjos and sing ‘Toora Loora Loora.’”

“That’s enough!” said March.

“You know, there’s every chance you’ve developed a tumor. Brain cancer’s known to cause delusions. Or maybe it’s early Alzheimer’s. You might want to get yourself checked out.”

March’s nearly colorless eyes appeared to lighten further, as if the black shadow of his soul had shrunk to a more compact shape, pulling back from his skin, and Chemayev, feeling certain the moment had arrived, slid the pistol from beneath his jacket and shot him twice in the chest.

The bullets twisted March, flipped him fishlike onto his side; the detonations blended with and seemed to enlarge his outcry. His feet kicked in sequence as if he were trying to walk away from the pain. He was still clutching the automatic; he fumbled with the trigger guard, the barrel wobbled down, the muzzle lodging between two cobblestones. He strained to lift it, his eyebrows arching with effort. The heightened pallor of his skin and the bright blood filming his lips gave him the look of an actor in a Kabuki drama. Chemayev finished him with a bullet to the temple.

He dropped the pistol onto the cobblestones. He had no remorse—March had intended to kill him, hadn’t he?—but he was tired, desperately tired, and he felt an odd internal instability, as if the spiritual vacuum created by the death, the instantaneous decompression, had sheared off part of his soul and the remaining portion, now too small for the body it inhabited, was tipping this way and that like the air bubble in a carpenter’s level. He sat down awkwardly, one leg sticking out, the other folded beneath him. Streams of March’s blood fingered among the stones—Chemayev imagined them to be a cluster of gray environmental domes in a crimson flood, a mining colony amid the lava flows of Venus. The sound of the splashing water grew louder, troubling his head. He pressed his fingers to his brow, closed his eyes. Fuck. What next? Where did he stand with Larissa? With Yuri and Polutin? He had the suspicion none of it mattered anymore. The victor in this contrived war between himself and March would be trapped forever with an undecaying corpse on the stage set of a magical western, condemned to a limbo in which he would feed on deathly beetles and drink bitter water from a fountain whose splashing kept growing louder and louder. Becoming incredibly, irrationally loud. It was beginning to sound almost like applause… He opened his eyes. Blinked rapidly due to the unaccustomed brightness. Then scrambled to his feet. The body was gone, the fountain was gone, the stones, the trees, it was all gone, and he was standing on the stage of Eternity’s theater, tiers of white leather booths rising on every side into swirling fog, the elegantly attired men and women looking down at him, clapping and cheering. Stricken, overwhelmed by this latest transition, he turned in a circle, hoping to find a point of orientation, something that would explain, that would clarify. He caught sight of Polutin. The big man was standing in the aisle, his head tipped back, belly thrust out, applauding with such ponderous sincerity that Chemayev half expected to see a ringmaster urging him on with a whip in one hand, a piece of raw fish in the other. On unsteady legs, giddy with the aftershocks of violence, stunned by all he saw, he made his way up from the stage and along the aisle and let Polutin guide him into the booth.

“Why did you take so long? What’s wrong with you?” Polutin frowned at him, exasperated; but then he patted Chemayev’s knee, the brisk gesture of someone ready to put the past behind them. “You did well,” he said. “You may not think so now, but you’ll see it eventually.” In his sloppy, drink-reddened face was a bearish measure of self-satisfaction that seemed to answer all questions concerning his involvement in the evening’s events; but Chemayev was unable to process the information. There was too much to think about. Just the idea that he and March had been part of the entertainment suggested a labyrinthine complexity of physical and metaphysical relationships sufficient on its own to confound him. And the odd certitude he had felt immediately prior to shooting March, the correspondences between that feeling and March’s story about death—what could be made of that? For the life of him, he could not even recall how he had come to this moment. The road that led from a village along the Dvina was easy to follow up to the point he and Nicolai arrived in Moscow, but thereafter it was broken, gapped, and once it entered the darkness of Eternity, everything that had previously been easy to follow came, in retrospect, to seem unfathomable. Polutin began prattling on about a meeting scheduled for the next day with his Italian associates, and the talk of business calmed Chemayev. He tried to achieve a perspective, to reorder the universe according to Chemayevian principles, but the image of March intruded. Another ghost to join that of Nicolai. Not so much guilty baggage attached to this one. Though for a vicious killer, March hadn’t been such a bad guy. A slant of wild hilarity broke through his mental overcast. Someday they’d say the same about him.

The background music changed—a saccharine swell of violins flowing into a romantic brocade of darker strings, French horns, trumpets. “Aha!” Polutin said. “The auction!” Disinterested, Chemayev glanced toward the stage. And sat bolt upright. Emerging from the center of the stage, borne upward on a circular platform, was Larissa. Naked. Carrying a silver tray on which lay a single long-stemmed rose. Their eyes met and she looked hurriedly away. Waiting for her on the stage, his thinning hair slicked down, natty in a white suit, holding a microphone, was one of Yuri’s portly doubles. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” he said, and with a florid gesture directed the general attention to Larissa. “THE ROSE!”

As Larissa walked up the aisle, serene in her nakedness, several men shouted bids, which were duly noted by Yuri’s double, who plodded along behind her. When she reached Polutin’s booth she stopped and trained her eyes on a point above Chemayev’s head. Her expression was unreadable.

Chemayev said weakly, “Larissa?”

She betrayed no sign of having heard; he saw nothing but reflected dazzles in the darks of her eyes.

Polutin’s arm dropped onto his shoulder. “So, Viktor. How much are you bidding?”

Uncomprehending, Chemayev looked at him, then at Larissa. The stoniness of her face, in contrast with the soft vulnerability of her breasts and the gentle swell of her belly, seemed to restate the conflict between what he hoped and what he feared. He had the impulse to take off his coat and cover her, but he didn’t move a muscle. “I don’t have any money,” he said to Polutin. “Not for this. I have some, but… I…” He looked again to Larissa. “Why aren’t you at the bar?” He reached for her hand but she pulled away.

“Don’t.” Her chin trembled. “Don’t touch me. Just do what you have to and let me go.”

“What’s happened? Larissa, please!” Chemayev made as though to slide out of the booth, but Polutin caught his arm.

“Be very careful,” he said. “I can’t save you from this.”

Chemayev shook him off, leaned across the table to Larissa. “For God’s sake! I still have the money. All of it. What’s wrong?”

Yuri’s double moved between them, stared at him dispassionately, his thick lips pursed. “You refused to pay,” he said. “You broke the contract. Now”—he shrugged—“you can either bid or you can remain here until your debt is paid.”

“My debt? I don’t owe you…”

“The price of the woman,” said the double. “You broke the contract, you forfeit her price.”

A tiny nebula of platinum and emeralds glinted among the tangles of Larissa’s dark hair. Someone must have given her new earrings. In the silvery light her nipples showed candy pink, her skin milky. A mole the size of a .22-caliber bullet hole on the small of her back above the high, horsey ride of her buttocks. Chemayev realized he was cataloguing these details, filing them away, as if he’d have to remember them for a long time.

“What can I do?” he asked her. “Isn’t there anything?…”

“Leave me alone,” she said.

His desperation and confusion knitted into a third emotion, something akin to anger but imbued with the sort of hopeless frustration an insect might feel when, after an enduring struggle, it has freed itself from a spiderweb only to fall into an empty jelly glass, where it is peered at by the incurious eyes of an enormous child. Chemayev’s hand dropped to the money belt but he did not remove it.

“Make up your mind,” said the double. “There are others who may wish to bid.”

Chemayev had difficulty unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers felt thick and bloodless, and the inside of his head compacted, as if stuffed with gray rags. Stripping off the belt took an inordinately long time—it seemed to cling to his waist. Finally he managed it. The double grabbed the belt and gave it a shake. “There can’t be much here,” he said.

“Four million,” said Chemayev emptily.

“Four million rubles?” The double scoffed at the figure. “The bid’s already much higher than that.”

“Dollars,” Chemayev said. “It’s in gold certificates.”

Polutin was aghast. “Four million dollars? Where did you get such a sum?”

“I didn’t steal from you. I played the German market. The DAX.”

Polutin lifted his glass in salute. “And I thought I was familiar with all your talents.”

“FOUR MILLION!” The double roared into his microphone. “VIKTOR CHEMAYEV BIDS FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!”

The assemblage began to cheer wildly, shouts of “Bravo!” fists pounding the tables, women shrieking. Chemayev put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands.

“Here,” said Larissa, her voice like ashes. She thrust out the rose to him, the bloom nodding stupidly in his face, a knurl of convulsed crimson. He was unable to make sense of the thing. He tried to connect with her again, and when she looked away this time, his eyes ranged over her body like a metal detector over a snowy field, registering the fullness of her thighs, the razor-cut strip of pubic hair, the swollen underside of a breast. The least of her human details—she had withdrawn all else. She dropped the rose onto the block of ice. The bloom nestled against an empty bottle of Ketel One. Melting ice dripped onto the petals. Yuri’s double took Larissa by the arm and escorted her toward the stage.

“It might be best for you to leave, Viktor,” Polutin said. “Take the morning off. Come see me in my office around three. And be prepared for a difficult negotiation. These Italians will screw us good if they can.”

Chemayev laboriously pushed himself up from the booth. People were continuing to cheer, to talk excitedly about the size of the bid. On stage Yuri sailed one of the gold certificates into the air, where it burst into flames; the fire assumed the shape of a pair of flickering wings and then flew apart into a flurry of small orange birds. With gasps and delighted cries, the crowd marveled at what they assumed was a trick, but might well have been something more extraordinary. Yuri bowed, then sailed another of the certificates high—it floated above the heads of the crowd, expanding into a sunburst, becoming a stylized golden mask like the representation of the benign east wind on a medieval map. Golden coins sprayed from its mouth. One of the coins was plucked out of mid-air by a pale dark-haired man wearing a leather trenchcoat. Chemayev had only the briefest glimpse of him before he vanished in the swarm of people scrambling for the coins, but he could have sworn it was March. Niall your fucking Welcome Wagon March, the rage of Kilmorgan, the pale Gombeen Man. Chemayev could not sustain interest in the implications fostered by March’s possible presence, but he wondered about the man. Who the hell had March been, anyway? What he said he was, who he variously seemed, or a surprise waiting behind the game show’s mystery door?

“Come a little before three,” said Polutin. “That way we’ll be sure to have time to talk.”

As Chemayev turned to leave he noticed the rose. Contact with the cold had darkened the edges of several petals, but it remained an alluring complexity, vividly alive against the backdrop of ice and white linen. After a moment’s hesitation he picked it up. Chances were he would only throw it away, but considering the cost, he wanted no one else to claim it.

• • •

Outside, the snow was no longer falling. Long thin curves of wind-blown powder lay across the asphalt like the ghosts of immense talons; white crusts shrouded the windshields of the surrounding cars. Chemayev sat at the wheel of his Lada, the engine idling, wipers clearing a view of the bunkerlike entrance to Eternity. In the morning, he thought. In the morning when Larissa went to school he’d meet her at the door and ask why she had treated him so coldly. Was it simply because he’d failed her? Maybe they’d threatened her, lied to her. Whatever the reason, he’d be honest. Yes, he’d say, I fucked up. But it’s this place that’s mostly to blame, this broken down ex-country. Nothing good can happen here. I’m going to set things right and once we get away I’ll be the man you believed in, the one who loves you… Even as he rehearsed this speech he recognized its futility, but the plug of nothingness that had stoppered his emotions during the auction had worked itself loose, the speedball of failure and rejection had worn off, and all the usual passions and compulsions were sparking in him again.

A gaunt, gray-haired man in a tattered overcoat stumbled into his field of vision. One of the krushova dwellers, holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka. He lurched against the hood of a Jaguar parked in the row across from Chemayev, slumped onto the fender, then righted himself and took a pull from the bottle. He wiped his mouth, stared blearily at the Lada, and flung out his arm as if shooing away a dog or an annoying child. “Fuck off,” said Chemayev, mostly to himself. The man repeated the gesture, and Chemayev thought that perhaps he had not been gesturing at him, perhaps he’d been summoning reinforcements. Dozens… no, hundreds of similarly disheveled figures were shambling toward him among the ranks of gleaming cars. Bulky women with moth-eaten sweaters buttoned wrong; men in duct-tape-patched hooded parkas, ruined faces peering grimly through portholes lined with synthetic fur; others in ill-fitting uniform jackets of various types; one in rubber boots and long johns. Shadowy drabs and drudges coming from every corner of the lot, as if they were phantoms conjured from the asphalt, as if the asphalt were the black meniscus of Yuri’s brimful kingdom. Clinging to one another for support on the icy ground like the remnants of a routed army. Drunk on defeat. They stationed themselves along the row, all glaring at Chemayev, each with a charcoal mouth and inkdrop eyes, faces with the ridged, barren asymmetry of terrain maps, the background figures in an apocalypse by Goya come to life, each beaming at him a black fraction of state-approved, party-sponsored enmity. Yuri’s state. Yuri’s party.

Less frightened than repelled, Chemayev drew a pistol from his shoulder holster, rolled down the window, and fired into the air. Instead of fleeing they edged forward, clumsy and tentative as zombies, confused by the brightness of life but full of stuporous menace. What did they intend to do, he wondered. Curse him? Puke on him? He poked his head out the window and aimed the pistol at the closest of them, a balding man whose seventy-inch-waist trousers appeared to support his upper half like a dessert cup filled with two scoops of yellowish cream pudding, the smaller topped by sparse hanks of white hair like shredded coconut, his sweatshirt proclaiming allegiance to the Central Soviet hockey team. He displayed no fear. And why should he? Who’d be fool enough to kill one of Yuri’s people? Perhaps he was dead already. Chemayev ducked back into the car. Set the pistol on the dash. He had surrendered so much, he stubbornly refused to admit this last formal measure of defeat. But then the army of the krushovas came shuffling forward again, and he understood that he had neither the confidence nor the force of arms to stand against them. He shifted the Lada into gear and pulled out along the row, going slowly to avoid hitting the shabby creatures who stood everywhere throughout the lot. They pressed close as he passed, like animals in a preserve, peeking in through the windows, and he had a surge of panic… not true fright, but a less disabling emotion fueled by a shameful recognition of his relationship to these lusterless clots of anti-life, these exhibits in the existential sideshow. Sons and Daughters of the Soil. Old ragged male monsters with the hammer-and-sickle stamped on every cell of their bodies. Boring meat-eaters, ferocious farters, grunters, toilers, industrial oxen, blank-eyed suet-brained party trolls. Old lion-faced women with gray hair sprouting from every pore, ugly with the crap they’d eaten all their lives, their filth-encrusted nails as strong as silicon, breeding warmonger babies in their factory wombs, dead now like empty hangars, cobwebbed, with wheelmarks in the dust… You couldn’t hate them, that’d be the same as hating yourself, you could only say goodbye to all their grim Russian soul shit. You had to cut it out of yourself somehow, you had to sit down and pinch a roll of fat and slide a knife in, probe for that special Russian organ that made you such a bear for suffering, that prompted you to sit up with your mouth open when God came round with his funnel and his tube of black bile to forcefeed all the Russian as-yet-unborns he was fattening for some conflagration on the far side of infinity. You had to put some distance between yourself and this dirt with its own soul that reached up through the bottoms of your feet and moved you like a finger puppet. You had to find some way not to be like these relics, even if that meant killing the most vital part of your spirit. You had to run to America, you had to drown in its trivialities, bathe in its chrome wavelengths until all the scum of Mother Russia was washed off your skin, until your pores were so open the black oily essence of your birthright came seeping out like juice from a cracked bug. That’s what you had to do. That was the only thing that could save you. But it was probably not possible.

Once clear of the krushovas, Chemayev accelerated along the access road leading to the Garden Ring. Headlights penetrated the Lada, revealing patched brown plaid seat covers, a littered dash, bent ashtray stuffed with candy wrappers. The radio dial flickered, the heater whined and yielded up a smell of burning rubber. The crummy familiarity of the car consoled him, molding itself to him like a friendly old chair. He wanted a cigarette, but Larissa had made him quit. Shit. He rapped the top of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Not angrily. A call-to-order rap, a wake-up notice. He banished the feeling of unsoundness that had plagued him most of the night, took stock of his reserves. He pictured them straggled across a parade ground, the survivors of a force that had once numbered four million. He’d have to start over. He’d have to put tonight behind him. Approach tomorrow as if everything were normal. He’d permit himself to make no goals, not even where Larissa was concerned. He’d simply do his job and see what developed. He sped out onto the Garden Ring, merging with the stream of traffic headed for the city center. There was an ache in his chest that seemed part bruise, part constriction, and he knew it would worsen during the weeks ahead. Whenever he stopped for a solitary drink or tried to sleep it would send out fresh tendrils of pain, seeding despair and distraction; but he’d overcome those enemies before, and he could do it again, he would rise to the challenge. That was half of life, the way you dealt with challenges. Maybe more than half. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that his obsession with Larissa was partially fueled by the challenge she presented, but as always he refused to diminish the purity he accorded the relationship by defining it as a logical consequence of his compulsiveness. He brushed the idea aside, concentrated on the road, and soon his mind began to tick along with its customary efficiency, plotting the day ahead. Call Larissa. See where things stood with her. Then business. What had Polutin said? The Italians. His office. Chemayev decided to set his alarm for eleven o’clock. That should give him plenty of time. No, he thought. Better play it safe. He’d set the alarm for ten. It would not do to be late.

Copyright

ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES

Published by

Thunder’s Mouth Press

An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.

245 West 17th St., 11th Floor

New York, NY 10011

Copyright © 2005 by Lucius Shepard

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

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ISBN 1-56025-662-1

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Book design by Jamie McNeely

Printed in the United States

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Content

Lucius Shepard
ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES

ONLY PARTLY HERE

A WALK IN THE GARDEN

CROCODILE ROCK

HANDS UP! WHO WANTS TO DIE?

THE DRIVE-IN PUERTO RICO

JAILWISE

ETERNITY AND AFTERWARD

Copyright

Back Cover