Chapter 28
There came a brief lull, a quick moment of quiet.
“Hey Doc, you O.K.?”
Jona leaned back in his chair, took a drag on his cigarette, and closed his eyes. He felt lightheaded, a floating sensation that made it seem as if he were hovering high above himself, looking down with idle curiosity as he defied the law of gravity. “Yeah. I’m good.”
The band soon started playing again, creating a frenetic blend of sounds from saxophone, clarinet, drum and trombone. The music pulsed like the beat of blood in his temples, rhythmic and dissonant all at once, swaying back and forth from one instrument to the other. The vibrant notes of the trumpet soared above all, ever higher, swirling into every nook and crevice of the pounding melody. It was jazz, but not like any he had ever heard. It was electric. Jona had never been moved by music the way he was at that moment, and he wanted the moment to play on and on. With eyes closed and shoulders swaying, he absorbed every sound as if it were a needed nutrient, feeding him with an infusion of...something. Something primitive, something necessary, something that could not be described easily with words. Not joy, not exactly. Neither ecstasy nor contentment. It was more like a sweet-sad fulfillment, as if the music was a seconds hand to his hours hand, spinning quickly around an imaginary dial of hidden pain, desire, everyday longing, and subdued memory. It danced a jig to his slow and creeping slog. And there was more; somewhere within the sound, imagined and believed, ticked the promise of sweet forgetfulness, a delirious, mocking remedy for all past sorrows, a playful, jeering reminder that laughter and love could be squeezed out of the anguish of any day’s life, ounce by cheeky ounce.
They were in the Venetian Room of the Grunewald Hotel, sitting for the second show, listening to the Jack Teargarden Band. Murphy was dead drunk, sweating through his jacket and tapping his fingers on the table as if playing the piccolo. The Louisiana government man who was appointed as their official chaperone clapped his hands in rhythm with the music as he belched out streams of smoke from an enormous cigar. His jagged, irregular eyebrows seemed to play up and down and back and forth, a silent instrument accompanying the band. Andrews sat across from Jona, appearing uncomfortable somehow. He remained blank faced and withdrawn while the others smiled and smoked and drank, preferring to play with his half empty glass of seltzer water as the musicians performed. Jona ignored them all, leaning forward intently to absorb every sound.
As he listened to the music, raw feelings of hurt and want flickered within him, soon overwhelmed by memories from the past months. Images of Marielle, and Elfieda, and Alex, and even Barzajian, would not leave him, shuffling in and out and on and off as if sprung from a deck of cards. Then, drifting even further back, memories of dreamy childhood fantasies and his boyhood desire to become a master conductor, a world famous maestro, washed over him, throbbing in and out of his memory in tune with the music. The sounds coming from tables nearby, the raucous laughter, the clink of tableware, the random, common, meaningless bellows and titters and hums and coughs all faded, dispersed within the syncopating wall of sound created by the musicians’ lips and fingers and feet. He had tried to follow the notes, attempting to identify the chords and scales being played, but he had long ago become lost in the fusillade of wandering tones and staccato repetitions that somehow, mysteriously, blended into unexpected harmony. Jona moved his hand back and forth, and with eyes closed imagined he was guiding the play of music with a baton, just as he did as a boy lying in his sick bed. Sights and sounds flowed through his mind, one at a time, as rapidly as the quick, steady thrum of low bass notes beating in the background.
He remembered a Victrola, solid and ornate, standing in the corner of his room, lit by floodlights of sunshine pouring in through an open window, lighting it with a supernatural glow, as if it were a tabernacle possessed of great power. His nurse, young faced but with graying hair, sat knitting mindlessly nearby while his father sat on the footboard of Jona’s bed. Caruso was singing an aria on the phonograph, his voice resonant, majestic, tinny only in the higher octaves. Jona remembered the scene as if it had just happened, as if it were that very moment. The aria was Niun mi tema, from Otello. His father had bought him the recording of the opera and explained the plot very carefully before he played it.
He concluded with a final, severe admonition. “This is the story of a powerful man, someone wise and brave. He destroys himself because he is consumed by jealousy. A simple human frailty, a failing that someone in his position should never allow. You understand, Jona? To be truly great, to reach for the highest star, you cannot allow yourself the most craven of emotions, like jealousy, or...” He pointed at Jona’s legs. “Fear. And most certainly, above all else, self-pity.”
“Is that the meaning, dad? About poor Otello?” Jona felt a rush of excitement, and squirming with arms and torso, struggled to sit up higher on his pillow. He could see that his father approved the effort.
“Partly. Perhaps even mostly. Jealousy is just a different incarnation of self-pity. A terrible disease when it strikes.”
Jona listened carefully as the aria drew to a melancholy close. I understand, he had thought, without any thought at all. Fear, pity, jealousy. These are feelings I must never have. They are disallowed. He had a copy of the libretto in his lap, and could read Otello’s last words as they played on the phonograph:
Pria d’ucciderti. .sposa ti baciai.
Or morendo. . .nell’ombra. . . ov’io mi giacio. . .
Un bacio. . .un bacio ancora. . . un altro bacio. .
It might have been a click or hiss on the recording, or it might have been some odd atmospherics, or a momentary creak from somewhere in the house, but as the deep and haunting sighs of the cor anglais resonated with the dying lover’s words, Jona thought he could hear a throaty coughing in the background, and then again, and again as the music faded. It sounded like a triple set of guttural, consumptive spasms accompanying Otello’s dying moans. In response, it seemed as if Otello clung to a few more moments of life for one reason only, to breathe a final echo of grief and passion: a kiss, a kiss once more, another kiss...
“Dad, did he love Desdemona?”
There was no answer for some time. The elder Lieb bowed his head, then nodded towards the phonograph. “He believed so.”
“Don’t you?”
Jona was not quite sure what he was asking. Looking back, the question could have been an opening for his father to discourse on the meaning of love, and loss, and the bonds that tie people together, and give life whatever meaning it can possibly have. But Earnest Lieb was never predictable in that way. Instead, He spread his arms wide, as if preparing to engulf everything that lay before him; Jona, the bed, the nurse, the entire room, everything. When he spoke, his words were smudged and hazy, not in the usual crisp tones of the great professor. “Do you believe in a Creator? I’ve never asked you that.”
Jona was ten at the time, barely entering the age when everything could be questioned, and when nothing as ethereal and unsubstantial as God could have much meaning. He could have lied, but instead propped himself up higher in the bed, enduring a red-hot stab of pain in his left leg, and answered truthfully. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you should, though. Maybe there is a Creator in our universe, or was, some power that orders the way things work. Not necessarily what we do every moment, but all the background, something that first turned the switch on. Gravity, the speed of light, the neat arrangement of the elements, the steady sequence of logical, reproducible, predictable occurrences, maybe other things as well...All the things that let us be, and all the things without which we cannot be. You understand?”
“Yes. No. Yes. I mean no.” Jona paused. “Dad!” He felt tears begin to flow from his eyes, as sudden, as copious, and as warm as raindrops falling on an August field of clover. “Dad! I asked you if he loved her! Did he love her?” And then, without meaning to and without knowing why, he blurted out, “Dad, did you love mom?”
Earnest Lieb gave a smile. It was his very best smile, one that crinkled the corners of his lips and lit up his eyes with an inner light, one that made others want to be near him. Without a word he rose up, turned off the Victrola, closed the window shutters and drew the curtains tightly together, casting the room into near darkness. He motioned the nurse to leave, following her to the door. At the threshold he turned back in Jona’s direction. The smile was gone. Backlighting from the hallway inscribed the arc of cheek and chin, curving in one continuous line, making it difficult to separate face and head from neck and torso, and grimace from sneer, and pity from hatred. One eye was obscured, and the other gleamed with reflected light, alive, like a tiny creature curled up in the ball of night. He began to close the door but stopped himself midway as if he had just remembered something. He turned back into the room, so that now he was nothing more than shadow.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words were slurred somehow, reverberating indistinctly as if they had been recorded ages before and were just now being heard, humming above a background of static. “Jona, if you want to create a great illusion, you must enter the illusion yourself. Don’t be afraid. Don’t ever be afraid...”
“Doc!”
Jona felt a blow to his shoulder. He snapped his head around to see the government man grinning as Murphy playfully punched him again. “Murph, leave me alone.”
“You look so serious, Doc. Ain’t ya havin’ fun? C’mon, lighten up a bit. This is some swingin’ joint.”
“Agent Murphy has a point Dr. Lieb. I hope you’re enjoying yourself. The governor told me to show you a good time, and I intend to.” Jona could see that the government man was trying to be friendly, but there was really no point to it. Everything about him reeked of deceit. His manner vacillated between oily solicitude and homey, okey-dokey familiarity, making his little charade completely unbelievable. Without question, he was not a simple public relations officer from the governor’s office. He was a spy, a government agent who was there to glean morsels of information, nosing around with whiskers quivering much like a rat sniffing for a crust of bread. Jona was almost at the point of telling him off, shooing him away like the little rodent he was. In any case, it was laughable to think there were any secrets left to be discovered. But, it was true the agent had his uses. Upon their arrival in New Orleans the government man had made all the arrangements for their hotel lodgings, and even better had reserved a choice table at the Venetian Club, assuring Jona he would have a night he would always remember.
So far, everything promised had come true. The band was performing with lightning-like energy, the crowd was festive, and Jona was on his third gin fizz. He was about ready for his fourth. “Here now, Mr. Agent Man, I forgot, what’s your name, anyway?”
“Why, you can call me Jones.” As he spoke, Jones’ eyebrows dipped and darted to and fro, like two dueling sabers, each thrusting at the other. “At your service, sir.”
“Listen, Doc!” It was Murphy, howling at the top of his lungs and grinning a satanic grin. “Listen to me. You know this guy’s full of shit, right? He’s the governor’s personal little boy, I can see the scum marks on his face. What he really intends is that he’s gonna stick his dick up your ass with one hand and stab you in the back with the other!”
Jones also grinned, baring a mouthful of teeth flashing with bright gold interspersed with pockets of blackened decay. Very smoothly, and without missing a puff of his cigar, he withdrew a dull finished, stubby pistol, a .38, from his jacket pocket and placed it carefully next to his glass tumbler. “I know you’re liquored up a mite, Mr. Murphy, so no harm, no foul. But you’d best watch your manner of speech down theseaways in the future. Otherwise,” he pointed at the gun, “This little thing would be considered insufficient for the occasion.”
Murphy’s eyes tightened slightly, but he raised his glass in silent salute to Jones as he shifted his gaze towards Andrews. “Hear that? Goes double for you, don’t it?”
Andrews glowered, holding Murphy’s stare with a fixed glare. “The only one we should be concerned about is Dr. Lieb.”
As Murphy opened his mouth to respond, the band struck up its next tune, and Jones clapped his hands loudly. He nudged Lieb and pointed. “Get ready for a treat. See that trumpet player? Hear him out. That boy’s somethin’ special, ain’t he?”
A cascade of high-pitched notes screamed harshly, settling quickly into a harmonious rhythm synchronizing with the other instruments. The trumpet player was a dark, dark black in color, and appeared very young. Somehow, along with the musical notes that permeated the room, he projected a part of himself outward, a magnetic source of power radiating in all directions through the sweat and smoke and boozy stink and din of the nightclub. The band leader played the trombone, artfully weaving his musical play in a dissonant synchrony with the trumpeter, and then, with a wave of his hand, hushed the band to allow for a prolonged trumpet solo. The young trumpet player then put his instrument to his side and began to sing, in a voice made gravelly and throaty, the sound of soft coal shoveled into a bin both wide and deep.
Jona stopped smoking and put aside his glass, trying to absorb every word:
I’m hurt inside, but that don’t help my case
Cause I can’t hide what is on my face
How will it end? Ain’t got a friend
My only sin is in my skin
What did I do to be so black and blue?
Tell me, what did I do?
What did I do? What did I do?
What did I do?
Tell me, what did I do to be so black and blue?
The crowd erupted as the song ended and the band took its bows. Jones stood up from his chair, joining the ovation by clapping furiously and then pursing his lips to blow a shrill whistle. He waved frantically, and in a few moments the band leader hopped off the stage and weaved his way to Jona’s table. Triumphant, Jones hugged him by the shoulder. “Dr. Lieb, sir, this is Jack Teargarden. He’s in charge of this bunch. Best trombone player ever.”
“You were wonderful!” Jona felt a surge of enthusiasm as he shook Teargarden’s hand, an exotic feeling of excitement and thrill that he hadn’t felt in so long that it now seemed foreign to him. He pointed to the trumpet player, who was still on stage, milling around with other members of the band. “I’d like to meet him too.”
Jones grabbed his wrist firmly, looking quickly left and right “No, no, Doctor Lieb. Sorry, you can’t do that. Just wouldn’t be proper.”
“Hey, it’s OK.” Teargarden smiled broadly. “Dipper can still meet you.” He shrugged a thumb back over his shoulder. “Out back in five. I’ll tell him.”
Andrews spoke up sharply. “Dr. Lieb, I don’t like the idea of crawling through back alleys in a town we don’t know.”
Jones assumed his silkiest tone. “Not to worry, Mr. Andrews. I will personally escort the doctor there and back. His safety will be my sole responsibility.” He patted at the gun in his pocket. “I’m sure it won’t be more than a few minutes.”
“I’m coming then.”
No, Jona thought. No more of that. “It’s OK,” he snapped. “I’ll be in charge of this little party.”
He gestured towards Murphy for a cigarette, who obliged with an amiable smile. “Sure, pal, you’re in control.” His smile turned into a glassy snicker as Jona sauntered away with the government man. He turned towards Andrews. “Hear that, Johnnie boy? He ain’t even in charge of his next crap, and he don’t know it yet.”
Stepping into the darkness outside, Jona felt as if he were submerging himself into an invisible tub of warm water. It was middle night, but the heat and humidity were still stifling, and within moments Jona was wet through and through, with thin trickles of sweat emerging like running fountains from his forehead. The alley stank from high piles of refuse stacked against peeling brick walls, surreal glaciers of garbage looming high above the narrow cobblestoned walkway in rear of the hotel. A puddle glistened with the soft reflection of an early moon hovering over the alley, a smooth silvery mirror that fractured into a thousand shards when Jones stepped directly into it, arms at his hips, waiting.
The trumpet player was not long in arriving, striding in long steps down the length of the alley. The clicking sound of shoe on cobblestone announced his coming before he emerged from the gloomy darkness, transitioning in an instant from indistinct wraith to human form. He smiled broadly as he approached, his teeth shining a luminous white in the blackness. Jona could not restrain himself. “Mr. Dipper, thank you, thank you, thank you! I just wanted to tell you how amazing you were at tonight’s performance.” He extended his hand.
Dipper gave a raspy chuckle. Instead of shaking Jona’s hand he gave it a soft slap on the open palm with his own palm in one smooth, sinuous motion. “You can call me Pops, and I ‘preciate it. You from up north, right?”
“New York. You would be a sensation there.”
“Yeah, always wanted to go, but you know, things don’t always work out.” He gave Jones a glance and then quickly looked away. “Love N’awleens, though. And you know what they say, nothin’s as good as home cookin’.”
“Yeah...” Jona hesitated. A myriad of impulses swirled through his mind, a confusing jumble of questions, feelings, and thoughts that he desperately wanted to sort through carefully. “So, tell me. How do you do it?”
Dipper’s smile became even larger. “Do what, man?”
“You know...The music. How do you do it? It’s crazy good, off the cuff, jumping like magic from one note and one key to another, but it all makes sense, and I feel like I’m getting it, really getting it. I mean, how do you know what to play?”
“Man, I don’t, that’s the thing. It ain’t like just playin’ flat seven. It comes from the heart, cat, you understand? If you ain’t gettin’ that then you ain’t gettin nothin’.”
Jona became visibly crestfallen. He studied the other’s face, looking for clues, but the musician’s features seemed to flicker in and out in the darkness, shading from black to transparent, fading from smooth skinned and firm to hazy and indefinite. “I thought that maybe there were rules. Some rules I could read, so I could understand. A book, maybe.”
“Believe me, I understand where you comin’ from. Myself, I crashed and burned many a time, too many to count. Sooner or later it either kills you or you straighten up and fly right. Listen to me, all you need to know is how to make the changes. That’s the main thing I learned from the old timers. Those cats had it all figured out and learned it to me. How to make the changes.”
“Changes? What changes?” Jona felt an involuntary fluttering in his chest.
Raising his eyes upwards, Pops shook his head slowly, the smile still affixed firmly to his face. He did not answer. The three men lapsed into an awkward silence. Jones looked at his watch, tapped it a few times, and crooked one of his eyebrows up to an impossible height on his forehead.
Dipper broke the silence abruptly. “Well, OK, man. Nice to meet a fan. Don’t worry, you’ll get it soon enough, just keep feelin’ it.” His eyes flitted towards Jones again, for just an instant. “You gonna be here a few days?”
“I think so.”
“In that case,” Pops lowered his voice to a thick, sandpaper whisper. “I’d be much obliged if you could spot me a sawbuck till Tuesday. That’s payday, and Jack, you know him, he’s no Santa Clause.”
“Of course.” Jona reached for his wallet, eager to offer a token of friendship.
Jones raised a cautionary hand. “Dr. Lieb, don’t do that, please. That’s like feeding the animals at the zoo, and we don’t much like it.” He gave a curt nod towards Pops, who turned quickly and trotted away. He disappeared rapidly in the murk, and in a few moments the rhythmic patter of his steps faded as well.
Although partial moonlight flooded down, illuminating the sky above, the alleyway remained a zone of darkness. Lieb sought out Jones in the murk, struggling to see his face. “Mr. Jones, is that man a...you know. You know what I mean?”
“A trumpet player in a band.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. You know what I mean. Is he owned? A man like that, a musical genius. Is he?” Jona could barely choke out the words.
“Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer, doctor. We have a system down here, don’t no one want to ask too many questions. It works for us, and all we ask is that you respect how we do things.” Jones paused with a relenting sigh. “I don’t know for sure. He might be under contract. Or there might be shareholders, like an ownership corporation, that kind of thing.”
Without warning, Jona felt the familiar, agonizing sting of pain and burning erupt over his back and hip, causing him to slump against the side of the building. The cool and coarse bare bricks lining the wall of the hotel offered momentary relief, until another wave of pain washed over him again. He felt suddenly nauseated, and in an instant burning bile licked at his throat and triggered an uncontrollable surge of vomit. The smell was overwhelming, and he quickly vomited again. He could barely breathe.
“Doctor, are you all right?” Jones seemed genuinely concerned, embracing Jona under the arms to help prop him up. “Do you need anything? A doctor?”
The words reverberated dully in Jona’s mind, over and over, as if they were echoes bouncing back from a deep well. “No. Just give me a minute.”
“Shall I help you back to the club? Your friends are still waiting, I’m sure.”
“OK. No. They don’t care about me, don’t be fooled. Not right now.” Jona gritted his teeth and moved his leg tentatively back and forth.
“Back to your room?”
“No. Let me hold on to your arm a minute. Let’s walk.”
“Sure.” The dancing eyebrows first merged then flew apart, framing Jones’ forehead like two thick eaves over a doorway. He guided Jona out of the alley, turning towards the hotel entrance when they reached the street. The sidewalks were deserted, and a foggy mist had settled down abruptly, a magical veil falling from the hand of an unseen wizard, masking the stars and the moon. The vaporous gloom was penetrated by a vague nimbus of light leaking out of a window across the street from the hotel. A faint wave of laughter wafted over the silence with a gentle ripple. Lieb could see a small sign over the window: 1-2-3 Club.
“Do they play jazz there?” Jona asked, pointing.
“No, Doctor. Not that kind of club. Gambling, and other entertainments.”
“What, then?”
“Why don’t I take you in to see? I know the manager well, he’s a good friend to the governor. In fact, the governor may be making a call there himself sometime. Who knows? You might enjoy yourself. First, though, I am just a bit curious about somethin.”
“OK, spit it out.”
“Thank you, but at the risk of causing any embarrassment…I don’t see a magic briefcase on your person. You know, the kind of a one that doesn’t come off without a secret spell or some kind of concoction. Something needing a magic key, so to speak.” Jones gave a low laugh, pretending he was sharing a joke. “Didn’t you bring something special with you?”
“Oh that. Stay tuned.” Jona found himself swaying left and right. “Let’s go in. I want to see.”
A narrow, wrought iron doorway adjacent to the window was the only entrance, and it appeared to be locked. Jones pecked at the clapper quietly several times before the gate squealed open. Jona was surprised to see a child, a young boy, at the doorway, standing within a cone of shadow in the hallway behind the door. At his graceful gesture, Jones and Jona entered.
“Good evening, suh.”
It was the boy, greeting them, but there was something strange about his voice; too deep and too rough. Jona turned to look more carefully. It was not a child. A dwarf stood before him, bowing. Lieb froze, amazed, and without wishing it, began to laugh with an incoherent, uncontrolled energy that caused him to collapse against Jones. The boy was a middle aged, smiling, solidly compact little man, of the kind he had not seen in very long. As billows of laughter erupted from him, another feeling, more primitive, deeper, overwhelming, began to weave through him, a woof crossing the warp of his memories. A rush of sensations emerged, textures and colors came and went, forms posed and moved, sibilant whispers floated through vaulted chambers, and then the deep purr of his father’s voice, coaxing, urging, demanding. God, Jona thought, are you not dead? Are you not gone? Can you not leave me? But the buzz of words and sounds would not abandon him, enveloping him in an invisible cloak, leaving him to float among his memories as if skulking through a deserted graveyard strewn with long fallen tombstones.
The time of spring, towards the end of his second year at school, bubbled up to his mind’s eye. He was fifteen, halfway between boy and man, a painful period of exploration, rejection and solitude. On that particular day, though, he was sitting with his classmate Peter, a pale, wan faced boy who appeared even more thin and frail than Jona himself. Both had perched themselves among the roots of a giant oak tree near the football field, secure in its protective shade. That day they were studying syllogisms. The material they were assigned to study was obscure and dense, much of it dating to medieval times, including the terms of nomenclature: Bocardo. Barbari. Copula. Universal affirmatives. Particular negatives. It was difficult, laborious work that seemed incredibly stupid and meaningless, and Jona was having trouble concentrating. He found his mind wandering, his thoughts straying in odd streams and eddies of silly, inconsequential daydreams, rapidly flowing rivulets of imagination that might carry him to a victory in the Olympic marathon, or travel to the moon in a spaceship of his own design, or better yet to the stage of a Broadway play where he would sweep a starlet off her feet with just a roguish smile and a wink. The warmth of the forenoon and the gentle sway of long boughs brushing over his head put him in the mood to relinquish the day and to immerse himself in the fableland of imagination, where there were no rules and no requirements, and where anything might happen. He felt strangely flushed and uneasy, squirming restlessly from one enormous, knotted root to another.
Nonetheless, he was determined to excel in syllogisms precisely because the subject was difficult. That was what his father expected of him; to overcome every obstacle and master every impediment along the way. If he had to memorize the writings of a medieval theologian to be successful, then he would do so. With great effort, he settled down and carefully studied a pictorial rendering of supporting and contradictory arguments derived from syllogisms: It was called The Square of Opposition, a diagram with Latin inscriptions that the great logician Abelard himself might have drawn to explain the reasoning behind the major and minor premises of an argument. Though he squinted at it as hard as possible, and traced his finger over it repeatedly, it seemed impossible to understand, appearing more like a mystical totem belonging to some ancient and long-lost civilization rather than a formal statement of reasoning. The principles of contraposition and obversion might as well have been explained in Chinese for all the sense they made.
Peter, on the other hand, seemed at ease with it, explaining it was nothing more than a simple example of semiotics, and could be understood in mathematical terms. It was a logic method used to analyze, in any formulation, the arguments of ‘all are true, none are true, some are contradictory…’, and so forth. Jona had a prodigious memory and found himself soaking in every word of explanation, to be repeated as needed in class, even as his mind continued to meander.
“Hello, Jona.”
The gentle breeze, the shouts of boys at play, the gentle friction of oak leaves rustling against one another - everything came to a frozen halt, creating a sudden, momentary dimple in time and space. It was his father, appearing before them as if he were a magical apparition, created out of thin air, or transported to that precise location under the tree by some mystical translocation. He was neither smiling nor frowning, neither excited nor reserved, but seemed to float forward, almost shimmering in a sun-bleached seersucker suit, holding a small travel case at his shoulder. It was a transcendent moment in Jona’s young life, a confirmation that his father was never really too far away from him, and it made him squeal in delight. He wanted to rush into his father’s arms, but his left leg had succumbed to a numbed palsy, and he could not move. Instead, the elder Lieb slipped between the two boys where they sat, resting his back comfortably against the tree trunk. He explained that he had returned from abroad a few days earlier than anticipated, and that he had taken the train from Boston to surprise Jona. How Jona soaked in every word with shining eyes, casting a triumphant smile in Peter’s direction. Earnest Lieb is a great man, a famous man, he wanted to shout, and he came all this way to see me!
“What are you boys studying?” Dr. Lieb leaned over to look at the book Jona was holding in his lap, and the illustration of the Square of Opposition.
“Syllogisms.”
“Excellent. Logic.” His father nodded sagely, gravely. “It all has to do with the laws of thought, where we may or may not allow ourselves to stray. One correct outcome, and one only, revealed by meticulous intellectual dissection, isn’t that correct? That is the one way, the only way life can be lived well. One possible answer, the only possible answer out of many choices. The only answer that can withstand the systematic analysis of the human mind. What a mystery that is, greater than any! To understand that gives us godlike power. And to understand, understand anything at all, requires something of the student, something that must be sought every day, eh?”
“What’s that, dad?” Jona could not wait for the next words to tumble from his father’s lips, an admonition or rule that would serve as a guide in his future life and strained his body forward to hear. “What?”
Earnest Lieb had a way about him sometimes, a look, a twist or strain of cheeks and forehead in such a way that his cobalt eyes seemed to free themselves from their orbits and, disembodied, float forward in their own three dimensional space, almost touching Jona eye to eye. And when his father breathed deeply the rush of air seemed to come from Jona’s own chest, and when he frowned it was Jona’s forehead that wrinkled. “Nosce Te Ipsum,” he said, with the finality of a sacrament performed at a deathbed. “Gnothi Seauton, the same meaning but in old Greek.” he paused for effect. “That’s what you must come to understand. The ancients understood. You must know thyself.”
Ordinarily, Jona inhaled his father’s words like vapors of wisdom, but for some reason, this particular time, the ancient phrases faded quickly, drowned out by the sounds of play coming from the football field. The moment simply straggled away, not lost completely, but becoming more like a forgotten message pinned to the collar of a neglected coat. Of course, Jona assumed the words had to be of great importance, and in later times he would research their meaning, and try to understand them, but at that instant, sitting under the vast canopy of the ancient oak, they were devoid of any special significance, nothing more than a fallen fruit left to moulder in the shade.
“And I brought you something, Jona, as a present.” The elder Lieb reached into the portmanteau strapped over his shoulder, shuffling among its compartments, rifling through one and then the other with a determined look. Finally, he withdrew a weighty book and held it high. “This is a volume of artwork from a famous museum in Madrid. I walked across half of Spain to get it.”
Jona grasped the book as if it were a sacred icon and began flipping through its pages. Images, faces, buildings, landscapes fled by as he turned manically from page to page. Finally, he stopped, at the very middle of the volume, at a rendering spread across two pages. He stared at the picture of a painting, fascinated. Unconsciously, he placed his palm over the picture, covering first one part and then the other, bending forward as if trying to look around a corner or into a far distance.
His father touched him on the shoulder, and whispered in his ear. “This is a painting that hangs in the Prado, a famous work. I am not surprised that it arrested your attention.”
“It’s wonderful.” Jona found himself outlining different parts of the picture using two fingers, up and down, left and right.
“So, Jona,” his father spoke smoothly into his ear, whispering softly so that only they two could hear his words, “Tell me. What do you find most striking?”
Jona did not hesitate. “This.” He pointed to the center of the work, to a diminutive mirror reflecting two faces. “This. It looks like a small picture inside a big picture, or maybe two people standing somewhere in front of a mirror.”
Earnest Lieb showed his irritation, as he often did, by pursing his lips into a tight mound in the center of his face, creating an appearance that was both opaque and completely expressive. He seized Jona’s hand, immobilizing it, and squeezed firmly. “That is speculation. Perhaps. Maybe. Could be. But do you see anything definite? Something clear in and of itself.”
Jona stared as hard as he could, but could perceive nothing else of importance. He was mesmerized by the two small, framed faces in the center, gazing at him with quiet equanimity, as if preparing to greet him for afternoon tea. Their images were positioned right in the middle, directly in his line of sight. The small tableau was a window into a secretive, unknown universe caroming past the two framed figures, a universe that could not possibly be known to the viewer without somehow stepping into their space. It had to be something symbolic of something very important. Surely, it was the focal point of the painting, wasn’t it? What else could matter as much?
Before he could say another word, Peter leaned over, pointing to one corner of the painting rather casually. “Look at these two. What about them? They look kind of strange, don’t you think?”
In a flash, Jona saw them; two figures emerging from a dimly illuminated corner, two child-like gnomes standing placidly within the scene, both of them fully present and yet unseen until the very last moment. Peter began to laugh, and then the elder Lieb began to laugh, with the deep and uncaring laugh that made Jona cringe, a laugh he recognized, a laugh touched by cynical humor and casual cruelty, both exhaled together in the same snigger.
“It’s easy to be fooled, Jona, but you must not be. The allure and fascination of fantasies can capture the imagination, and fill our heads with idle thoughts of vast and unplumbed mysteries, don’t they? They divert us from the here and now. But this,” he slapped his hand down with explosive force over the dwarf creatures in the corner of the picture. “This is truth. This is reality. This is what the human condition is about. Here you see the ugly, and somehow the artist has given them beauty. The obscure are given meaning. The shadows are stripped away from them, for anyone who wants to look. And just like these two in the painting, there are millions of others living in the shadows as well, not perfect but just as human as you and me. Your young friend got it right. He shall have the book as a reward.”
Jona felt a yawning emptiness as Peter scampered away with the book, holding it in high triumph like a trophy, eager to show it to the boys playing nearby. Jona was helpless to get up and follow. He remained sitting next to his father, and then what seemed like an eternity ensued while his father spoke about his recent travels. It was an eternity long enough to live ten lives, long enough to hear about a furtive passage across seas the color of sapphire burnished with silver, from restive Oran to sleepy Malaga, and travel by horse through craggy portillos high in the Sierra Nevada, then past great fields of almond trees, wheat and wild olive, and pastures waving with the rich blue crests of sweet pea mingled with thickly laid prickly broom, and forward to majestic Córdoba, city of resplendent emirs and conqueror Caliphs, where he touched with his own hands one of the five hundred pillars of the Great Mosque, each one glimmering with soft hues filtered through alabaster, marble and bloodstone, and onwards through the plains of the Guadalquivir, past vegas laced with vineyards that lay upon the land like so much delicate embroidery, and over the great central mesas where the sun burned and the breezes cooled, and boldly into the Castilian plains, treeless to the horizon, partitioned by ancient stone walls laid down by the legendary Giants of antiquity, then forced to flee for his life to Valencia, pursued every rod of the way by the Guardia, where he plotted with ardent Aliadófilos eager to enter the Great War, and rallied with rebellious students and laborers under tall and broad leafed palms they called datiles de raposa, prophesying both famine and revolution while sipping tart chacoli from brightly painted porcelain cups, and finally, with reluctant official sanction, on by train to Holy Madrid, across the quick streaming Jarama and into a city still living in the past, its pulse beating to frenetic tales told in nightly zarzuelas.
As the tale of travel and danger simmered in the hush of the shade tree, the rustling leaves seemed to whisper once again every word that was spoken, and again and again, until the very words themselves buzzed around Jona like so many bees, all intent on supping deeply on the nectar of rare adventure. And as the story was told, Jona imagined himself among the mountains of Andalusia, baking in the heat, an almost mirror image of his father tramping with grim determination towards a future that was both unknown and undeniable. He felt that he had entered the adventure himself, and had passed through the portals that bounded this life from the other, and as he did, he could not help wondering about the two faces in the window of the painting, looking wistfully into his world from the one beyond. He would never forget them.
But he did not forget about the dwarfs, either. In his later school years he scoured his textbooks, absorbing everything he could find about them. The rhizomelics, the achondroplastics, those who were hormone deprived, those who were grotesque and those who were perfectly formed; he became expert in identifying them all. For years they were a source of fascination, conjuring up images of sorcery and magic, black arts, icy fjords, Midgard and Nidavellir, black elves of the underground and pale dwarfs on frozen Nordic cliff heads. In time, some came to visit him at his place of work at the ME’s suite. They came in the usual manner, some bloodied and some neat, some contorted in final fear or pain, some in sublime peace. Jona had found the dissections interesting but in the end somewhat disappointing and deflating. He could not see the world through their eyes, of course, but ultimately they proved to be nothing special. Like others, they had sodden livers, tumerous stomachs, and stricken brains. Over time, any peculiarities of bone and cartilage were rendered irrelevant within the grander scheme of life and death. Their small size seemed insignificant as they lay upon the autopsy table, and any struggles they might have endured while living in a world of giants were obscured from view. They were taxonimized and categorized, listed and documented in the usual, logical manner. They were actually quite ordinary.
“Suh?” The beaming dwarf extended an arm with a gracious flourish towards a door at the end of the hallway. “Would you care to come in?”
Jona hesitated. “Is this a house of pleasure?”
“King Momus does reside here, it is true.” The dwarf spoke with a molasses smooth gentility, folding his hands patiently. “Would you like a lady companion to come down?”
“No.” Jona felt his cheeks begin to flush and burn.
“A young man?”
“No, no!”
“A girl? A boy?”
“No! Absolutely not!” Jona found himself beginning to shake and grabbed onto Jones.
“Hemp? Hashish? Peyote?”
Jona paused for the briefest blink of an eye. “No, thank you.”
The dwarfed host seemed to grow suddenly, becoming enormous, filling the small atrium like a genie emerging from a long-lost bottle. His lips became engorged and his smile grew until the corners of his cheeks became effaced, as if words of monstrous proportion were ready to be birthed out of his mouth. “Yes, suh,” he crooned. “We have cocaine and heroin, of course. But for today, I would recommend sweet opium, fresh from the lands of the distant Pashto.”
Later, Jona could not recall his answer.
Marielle hugged Jona closely, giggling in his ear and massaging his belly seductively. Elfieda seemed content to lie quietly on his other side, stroking his hair until it lay smoothly over his forehead. Jona was on his back, naked, spread eagled on an enormous white bed, somewhere near the center of the universe, past Ganymede and very near Aquarius.
“Jona, do you love me?” Marielle squeezed his navel, and inserted her finger deep inside it, seeking passage.
“I did.”
“Darling, do you know what love is?” Elfieda kissed him powerfully on the forehead, raising a welt swollen with blood.
“Not today.”
They then both spoke together, a chorus crooning in the same pitch. “Jona, don’t you want us?”
“Aren’t you dead, both of you?”
And they answered, holding masks up to their faces. “Of course not. We were, but that was before. Not now. We are here. You have changed us.”
“Changed?”
“Of course,” said Marielle. “Just look.”
“Yes,” said Elfieda. “Just touch.”
“You appear lost, my friend.” It was someone else speaking, someone standing nearby, measuring Jona from a near perspective, sizing him up and down, grinning with an understanding grin. He was dark suited, florid cheeked, with wrinkled brow damp with sweat.
“Who are you?” Jona didn’t mind a visitor.
“Could be a friend, maybe.”
Jona squinted but could not focus. He felt his respiration slowing, and a silent alarm vibrating somewhere nearby told him that soon all would be blackness. “Mr. Jones, is that you?”
The other laughed out loud. As he laughed his straw boater bobbed up and down and his bright blue galuses stretched and stretched across his chest, then contracted, and then stretched again to a syncopated rhythm of tones and hues that were reserved for the fairies of the night and unknown to ordinary man. Up and down, up and down went the suspenders, trying oh so hard to overcome the grim pull of the everyday world, straining as if about to twang loose and escape into uninhibited freedom with a baritone sigh. “Oh no, I’m not he. I’m the one you came to see, you see, and now that I’ve had a chance to see you, I can see that you’re quite a bit light in the loafers. Don’t know where you’ve been, do you, where you come from. Don’t know where you’re going, or where you want to be.” The words trilled as from a robin singing a summer song in high soprano.
Jona raised his finger high, waving it like a baton to the tune of the music. “I know where I’ve come from, that’s for sure.” He stared at the man as hard as he could, trying to really see him, and see his face, but as he stared he could not be certain whether his eyes were open or closed.
“You sure?”
“Sure.” Somewhere in the distance, Jona heard the screech of an owl. It seemed angry that it was dislodged from its habitual branch and bough outside his window just to be brought forward on a whim. “I’m’s free as a bird.”
“You know, some folks think I’m like a bird, too. They’ve given me that name, you know, sleek and slim, bedraggled and blue, flying way up and looking down on the high and low alike. Of course, I aim to fly even higher.” A peculiar thing then happened. The man seemed to shrink before Jona’s eyes, then shrink some more, and finally collapse to an impossible height, no taller than an elf, turning dense as a shadow while his sleeves and cuffs splayed empty and dragged along the floor. He also waved a finger, drawing the outline of a box, like a window, in the thin space that lay between them, inviting Jona to enter with a magisterial flourish of the hands. “Let me tell you a story, something to focus the mind,” he said. And as Jona began to close his eyes and drift into the abyss the pygmy bird began to sing:
In the time of the great emperor Zhou there lived a man in Quishan whose name was Ju.
He became rich in the service of the emperor and possessed many lands, so many they spanned the distance between the rising of the sun and the setting of the moon.
He acquired gold and jewels, wives of every shape and size, and many bolts of silk.
However, his greatest treasure, and what he loved more than life itself, was his stable of horses. They were pure white, more powerful than thunder and more fleet of hoof than the mountain wind.
It was said they were from the western deserts, the offspring of the god of the fast flying clouds and the goddess of the swift flowing river.
They were seventeen in number.
The man spent his days watching them run free and strong, and vowed they would one day become the patrimony bequeathed to his sons, and thus their lives would be a happy continuation of his own.
Now this man had nine sons born to nine wives, but only the first, third and ninth survived to walk the earth as men, standing tall in the sun and in the love of their father.
One day, completing the number of days ordained by Heaven, the man died, pointing from his deathbed to his written will.
The oldest son retrieved his father’s writings and read it to his brothers, and in the will was stipulated the father’s gift of the prized horses:
One half would go to the oldest son.
One third would go to the third son.
One ninth would go to the ninth son.
The sons wept with the reading of the will, and gnashed their teeth, and rent their garments.
How could they fulfill their beloved father’s last request?
The division of the seventeen horses could not be accomplished according to the will.
At last, the youngest son spoke.
‘Brothers’, he said, Let us go into the city and consult with the great Daifu. He is the wisest of wise men, and will tell us what to do.’
And so they went, and found the Daifu seated at the outer gates of the city.
‘Oh honorable Daifu’, they beseeched. ‘Help us fulfill the will of our father.
The horses are seventeen and cannot be divided as he required, and we
wish to do as he desired’
The Daifu read the will carefully but said nothing at first.
Shortly, he called his servant to him.
‘Bring forth my horse’, he commanded, and his horse was brought forth.
‘I gift my horse to the three sons of Ju’ he proclaimed
‘With this addition you can now make the division.
As there are now
eighteen horses there is no need for revision.
The oldest son receives one half or nine horses
The third son receives one third or six horses
The ninth son receives one ninth or two horses
Are we agreed?’
The three brothers fell to their knees, thanking the great Daifu for his
munificence and wisdom, and all three agreed to the terms of the division.
‘And now’, the wise man said, ‘since nine and six and two make seventeen,
you have no need of my horse, the eighteenth, and I will take it back.’
And so the three sons went their way.
One was filled with joy.
He wore sackcloth and ate plain congee for the required three years of mourning in honor of his father.
One was content.
He prayed at his father’s spirit tablet at the designated times of ancestral remembrance.
One was wroth.
He neglected his father’s spirit, cursed his brother’s names and conspired to poison them with gu in order to exact his revenge.
The story whirled around and around in Jona’s brain, nudging at some memory as gently as lifting the corner of a coverlet. The fable was familiar somehow, something he had read or heard before, and yet different in some unspoken way, as if it were being told in a language he did not completely understand. “Which one was the unhappy one?” He barely had the strength to murmur.
The visitor was now grown back to his normal size. “Are you worried it is you? If you really want to know that, then you’ll have to find out, won’t you?”
Jona felt himself sleeping but was somehow aware. He could feel the man’s breath on his face, a faint breeze of exhaled garlic and gin. King Momus is gone, he thought, trying to understand what the man was saying. Marielle and Elfieda had left by now, as well. He could hear them fleeing into the night, trailing a long howl of wails, and a warning: ‘King Somnus is come, with his many sons. And he is bringing his friend Phrike, master and god of fear and trembling. Beware.’
The end was very near. He spoke to the blue suspenders. “I can hear you, I can hear what you’re saying. How do I find out?”
The man with the dark suit and the boater and the very blue galuses continued to breathe, and as he did his words seemed to enter right into Jona’s mind, like a short dream planted in his brain by Phantasos or put there by a wizened black duende, weaving her sorcery with a magic wand.
There is a woman who can tell you everything you need to know, the words said. She lives in Echota, a small town north of Atlanta. I’ve talked to her, she is full of grace and wisdom, and I don’t think she’d mind talking to you. She would have a lot to say. You should go find her. Her name is Amelia. Amelia Lieb.
INTERLUDE (Chapter 29)
MENTOR was a big man with a small head. Like others with small heads, he had big ideas. Not ordinary ideas. Ideas that were too complex and convoluted for ordinary people to understand, and so he kept them confined to himself. He lived each day knowing that he was superior to the simpletons who surrounded him, and the knowing of it ate him alive, as if he were infested by crawling ticks consigned to permanent and irritable internment within the depths of his body. There was something else about him, too. He had a mean streak that stretched the length of his spine. In that regard he was similar to most with the same predisposition. There was something inside, not too far below skin level, that regarded the pain of others without a hint of compassion. He felt contempt for those groaning of their wounds; any laments that others might make about the loss of love, or kin, or future prospects only prompted him to tap as deeply as possible into the recesses of their weeping scars and squeeze, squeeze if possible until every last drop of agony was bled out. With all that, however, he had an odd quirk, something that set him apart from others who used cruelty as they would use a knife and fork to feast on the weakness of others. Sometimes, though not always, he felt remorse for his actions. Regret might overcome him, but not because of pity or sympathy. In some obscure way, he sometimes felt badly that he had descended to a low and primitive level of behavior, the kind expected of the clods and mental defectives he loathed, but far below where his own standards should be.
Eventually, it was contrition and not cruelty that created MENTOR.
He had not always been that way of course. He had been chiseled, moulded, baked and fired from the earliest stages to eventually become the person he was. He had a quiet background and a middle class upbringing, but despite his ordinary beginnings he had always felt apart from others. It had begun very early on, partly because he had learned to speak slowly and with deliberation, as cautiously as a turtle stepping on hot stones. As a youngster growing up in Sheboygan, he had refused to join with the neighborhood pack of boys who whooped and hollered like invading vandals as they swept through quiet, tree-lined streets, and who delighted in blowing up frogs with firecrackers or burning captured squirrels alive. He had never been able to bury himself in his studies, which he found boring, and consequently his grades never reflected the superiority of his mind. From an early age he found school and schoolteachers to be no more than a suffocating blanket wrapped so tightly around his head he wanted to scream. As he grew, he found himself pondering thoughts that he couldn’t express openly, ideas about identity, adventure, and passion. These were difficult thoughts, leading down very narrow and rigid crevices of understanding. Sheboygan was not the sort of place where those kinds of ideas could easily be discussed. In Sheboygan people arose in the morning, read their newspapers, shined their shoes, went to work, and said their prayers at dinner time. Life was regimented, orderly, and utterly predictable.
So, he preferred to sit alone with his dog on the narrow sandy beach at Northeast Park, far from the tedium of home life and the mind numbing patter of his parents, and watch the great ships crossing the horizon. The town had no port of its own, not even a marina for pleasure craft. The only boats to be seen were far off, hazy, and wrapped in mystery. His young imagination was seized by the vision of great ships, sturdy steel vessels filled with dull iron ore, or sparkling copper, or untold tons of trimmed timbers, traveling over the endless pewter waters of Lake Michigan to distant and exotic destinations like Thunder Bay or Duluth. And there, his make-believe told him, the ships would disgorge the plunder of a continent to feed the mouths of great furnaces stoked by coal. And there, at the terminus, were to be found mile-long factories consuming raw materials at one end and excreting bicycles and washing machines and basting spoons like so much confetti from the other. Over time his fertile mind became crowded with visions of great cities occupying an entire hemisphere, fed by a constant stream of ships of every description, manned by crews steady and true. He came to know, eventually, that his fantasy was not real, but he pretended anyway. In the secret sketches of his dreams, he saw himself sailing over the far horizon one day to find that world. For a good part of his boyhood that was satisfaction enough to keep him sane within the constricting straitjacket of his daily boredom.
His father was an attorney who specialized in the kinds of lawsuits neighbors brought against neighbors. It was assumed that the son would follow in the steps of the father, and that the upstanding shopkeepers and homeowners of Sheboygan would be assured of unending opportunities to pursue justice against any unscrupulous butchers, tobacconists, and gas pump attendants in town. Matriculation at Northwestern University was the first step in achieving that prospect, but it turned out that plans and scripts didn’t always account for the unknown. The predictably unexpected happened one day in the form of an advertisement in the student newspaper, announcing that the Navy had opened a recruiting office on campus for anyone wishing to become a Reserve Naval Officer. He did not hesitate to enlist. The student was transformed into an ensign over the course of the next three years, and by graduation he found himself on the very brink of the adventure he had always dreamed about. He could almost taste salty spray spewing over him as he kept watch from the bridge of a capital ship, calling out bearings and courses to navigate through the bright blue waves of the great Pacific. The future, he thought, was bright and the horizon was limitless.
Unfortunately, the Navy did not have the same future in mind, and the horizon was actually quite limited. He was given a stark choice, in a matter of fact way, by a chain smoking officer sitting behind a very narrow metal desk. The freshly minted ensign was offered the option of assignment to the Portsmouth shipyard to monitor construction of naval vessels, or shipping out for duty with the submarine service. He complained that he had joined the navy to travel over sunlit seas to distant destinations. He was brusquely ordered to stand to and make his choice known immediately, or the decision would be made for him. It was his first exposure to the workings of indifferent bureaucracy. He didn’t know it at the time, but that experience was just the initial application of what was to become coat after coat of rule and regulation, a hardened, multi laminated shell of mindless authority and idle stupidity. That was the Navy way. It gave him odd comfort, in a way, to observe that the navy merely served as a reflection of humanity in general. He learned much later that it was a lucky break to have been given any choice at all.
Olongapo might have been a dreamy tropical paradise at some time in the past, in a long lost world of sensual south sea island pleasure, nestled as it was between the creep of primordial green-brown jungle to the east and the crystal blue expanse of Subic Bay to the west. If it ever had been, though, it was no longer. It was now become an irregular urban sprawl, smelling of jungle rot and beer by day and swarmed by rodents, cats, and drunkards by night. The only reminder of its jungle pedigree was the steamy heat that percolated upwards through muddy streets during the course of the day, diffused overnight by soft ocean zephyrs blowing in from the bay. The naval base was laid out like a neat and tidy appendage to the town, almost sterile in comparison to the hurly burly of daily life in Olongapo. Sleek ships clustered in their dockside nests, inert, their dark gray hulls suffused by the bright pastels of sunrise and sunset but otherwise lifeless, deserted by crews that were released to prowl the back alleys of the town.
The young ensign reported for duty as ordered, neatly starched and trimmed out in his dress whites, forced to run from the bus stop to the headquarters building in a torrential downpour that exploded with unexpected ferocity. He was neither apprehensive nor excited. Three months at New London followed by three more at Mare Island had taught him everything he wanted to know about submarine operations. More than it was necessary to know, so far as he was concerned. For someone of his intelligence, mastering the various technical manuals had been easy. Many were redundant, clearly intended for the dull of mind. Engineering. Weapons. Navigation. Supply. Radio. Each area was covered repetitively in the classroom and in his readings. Once the technical terms were stripped away, and the jargon reduced to ordinary language, the details and procedures were easy to understand and simply required memorization. His own plan was simple as well. He would qualify in every area aboard ship, allow his abilities to shine, and earn rapid promotion to lieutenant. In twelve months, eighteen months at most, he would transfer to a surface ship and begin to live his dream.
The world he entered was like nothing he had imagined, though, and certainly not what he had hoped for. His sub, USS S-40, did not have the dignity of a name, apparently just one in a series of S-boats. Pig boats, they were called, with some justice. He entered a shadowy, low lit universe of strange fixtures and eerie groans and creaks. The stagnant air belowdecks was a malodorous mixture of smells; the aromas of human sweat, engine oil, feces, fried bacon, and paint all blended into an overwhelming, poisonous, gaseous presence that numbed the senses and left him nauseated. While making his first foray forward from the aft deck hatch he found it necessary to bend, stoop and twist to avoid low hanging cables, overhead ventilation ducts, and a myriad of valves, stopcocks, gauges and taps lining the bulkhead, all of which seemed to be specifically designed to gash a human body part if care was not given to avoid them with sinuous contortions of the hips and arms. He at last found the captain, who greeted him with hostile belligerence.
“Have you even stepped foot on a sub before?”
The answer was forthcoming only after careful and deliberate thought. “No, sir. They said in peacetime it was not necessary. Just books and lecture hall. I’ve seen pictures. They said we would learn on board. But I think you will find me more than capable. Sir.”
“Really?” The captain’s snarl combined a complete displacement of lips and mouth to the extreme right side of his face, as if drawn there by purse strings, together with the exploding sound of a cracking boiler. “They teach you procedures?”
The ensign answered slowly, meticulously, and only after a considerable pause. “They were emphasized, yes sir.”
The captain wrinkled his forehead, creating a cross between the appearance of desert dunes and straight, newly plowed lowlands. “Bull turd. You don’t know squat about procedure, mister, and I sure as hell don’t have the inclination to teach you. See this?” He pointed at a picture on the wall of his cabin, a faded black and white of an officer in formal dress, with layered medals dripping from neck and chest. “This here is Luther Von Arnauld de la Perière. He was a U-boat commander in the war, on the enemy side, understand? Sank one hundred and ninety four of our ships. That’s more ships sunk to the bottom than the total number of craps I’ve flushed down the toilet in my entire life, you understand? And you know what he taught his crew? Procedure. Procedure. Procedure. From now on I don’t want you pissing without having procedure instructions in your hand, understand? Now, just so you understand your status here, you are worthless to me until you become qualified and can actually do something without hand holding, so until then stay out of my way. I am assigning lieutenant Canary to be your personal escort. He will be at your side every day and night and will report every breath you take directly to me. Unless he tries to screw you, I don’t want to hear a peep outta you. Your actual instructor will be Bill Maegher, Chief of the Boat. He is not a nice man, and he smells bad. Stay close and listen close, and you will learn everything you need to know about being an officer on this here sub. Understand?”
The COB was indeed not a nice man. Some of the profanity dropped from his lips was so exotic it might as well have been a foreign language. And he did smell, exuding a strange aroma that combined cigarette smoke and grease, a foul odor that seemed ready to combust spontaneously at any moment. Over the next weeks, expertly and with constant repetition, he explained the inner workings of the boat in minute detail, teaching facts that were not found in manuals, including the importance and location of the levelometer gauges for the sanitary tanks, the functions and types of reducer bonnets and hammer valve handles studding the main hydraulic manifold, the proper location and method for stowing foul weather gear aft of the IC board, and other innumerable details that needed to be absorbed for the sake of safe and efficient performance. When the Chief spoke, he spoke very loudly and intensely, with considerable spitting between the teeth, as if the boat was about to sink with loss of all hands unless his instructions were followed rapidly and precisely. He was careful never to touch the young officer, but there was much arm waving, demonstrative eye rolling, and finger wagging. He also expounded at great length about the importance of onboard etiquette, especially with regard to the enlisted men.
“Do not stop in the aft battery room to chit chat with the men. That is raghat country and officers have no business visiting there. Hold your nose and go through quickly if you have any business further aft. Anyway, there is no kinda chit chat allowed in the Navy. Also, don’t talk with them at their mess, either. First of all, they’re all hornswagglers right down the line, and second, they are all fluent in bullshit, and you ain’t, and they’ll talk rings around you, especially the ones that have a pack of Camels rolled up in their sleeves halfway up their arms. They’ll try to convince you that’s where they keep their Medal of Honor. And don’t forget, the Master Chiefs invented the language of bullshit, and wrote the dictionary too, so don’t talk to them neither. I advise you to smoke a pipe and keep it clamped in your chops at all times. That way you can listen without having to talk or answer questions, and you won’t be tempted to give any orders. A fucking satisfactory situation to be in, and I recommend it fucking heartily, kabish?”
After a weekfull of instruction Meagher cornered the ensign while demonstrating how to inspect the badger stills, speaking in a low but vehement tone, with lips twitching, as if he had summoned all his energy to communicate quietly this one and only time. “One more thing about the crew. If you’re the night watch Duty Officer while we’re in port, it’s your duty to protect the men, you understand, if they’re brought in by the Shore Patrol or the local cops. They know they’re goin’ on patrol soon, and wanna have a good time ashore. Protect them, and they will protect you when necessary. Unless they done something really wrong. But even then. You get them aboard from the dock any way you can, upsydaisy-like.”
The young ensign did not fully understand what the COB meant, at least in the beginning, but he learned well enough as time went on. At the end of the second week he was called to the control room by the captain. “You’ve done OK so far, according to Meagher. He says you don’t talk much, and you’re an arrogant pisshead, but you’re not lazy and you absorb stuff like a sponge. He recommends assignment to a watch section. Let’s see how you do. As of tonight you will take the topside middle watch, twelve to four, as Duty Officer. The DO carries grave responsibilities. You think you’re ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The chief explained things to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain snapped off a wave of the hand as a sign of dismissal. “Take care of my crew. I don’t want half of them slammed in the brig, get it? We shove off tomorrow at 1300, and some of ‘em will want to blow off steam.”
As watch officer he was entitled to wear a sidearm, a standard issue .45 Colt, suspended from a thick leather belt slung low by his side. It was chambered with only one round and was meant merely for ceremonial show, but he liked the feel of the gun on his hip, and also liked the feel of having the fore and after watch salute him as he sauntered back and forth along the deck from one station to the other. He particularly liked it when the torpedo room chief, Moody, saluted with a limp motion of hand to hat. It was no secret that Moody had been assigned the night watch to keep an eye on the young ensign, and he could not hide his resentment about an assignment so far below what his status should allow. With every salute, he seemed to mutter something unintelligible under his breath, vague words that wafted silently into the sultry night, flying away to an aerie of other collected slights, wrongs, and affronts suffered over his many year career. As the hours dragged on, sailors began to straggle back, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, sometimes staggering, sometimes half carried by their buddies. The young ensign watched all this with a benign bemusement, returning the men’s salutes crisply at the top of the gangway before they went tumbling through the after hatch. He was certain that the captain would have no cause for complaint in the morning.
In the very deadest part of night a jeep pulled up, disgorging a trio of Philippino marines wearing shore patrol patches. Between them they propped up a sailor clad in his white duck jacket and nothing else, naked from the waist down. The man’s malfeasance was quickly explained. After becoming very drunk, he had gotten into a bar dispute with a bosun’s mate from the Canopus. The Canopus was their submarine tender. Both crews knew each other fairly well, and in the past had proven repeatedly that familiarity does indeed breed contempt. The quarrel might have been about anything, and very possibly about nothing. After a few shoves back and forth the submariner had gone outside, pulled down his pants, and defecated on the sidewalk, in full view of his amused shipmates sitting inside the bar. It didn’t end there, though. It was charged that he then scooped up a pile of his own droppings with his bare hands, marched back into the bar, and mashed all of it into the face of the bosun’s mate, who was slumped over his beer and in serious conversation with an unsteady young lady nearby. The brawl that ensued resulted in cuts and bruises, a few broken chairs, but no serious injuries.
One of the Philipino marines, a corporal barely taller than the sailor’s shoulder, used his club to tap the seaman on the head. “What you want do with him, sir? You want him, or take to brig?”
The ensign tried to process the matter quickly. The incident was hilarious, hilariously disgusting, or just disgusting, any one or all of the three. This kind of situation had not been covered at Mare Island Naval Station, therefore the proper adjudication required some careful thought. Before a decision could be rendered, Moody came huffing and panting to his side.
“That’s Lewis, Torpedo-man first class. You gotta bring him on board, sir.”
“Why? His crime was heinous. Let him rot behind bars for a night or two.”
“You can’t do that, sir. Look, he’s coming up on his pension. If he don’t go on this here little deployment he’ll lose his chance to start collecting when we get back, and he needs the money bad. Has an eleven year old girl in Panama City with beriberi and scurvy, or somethin’. Like I said, he needs the money bad what with doctor bills and medications. Have a heart sir.”
It was easy to relent under the circumstances, but as the night receded and a brilliant dawn bathed the dread gray hull of the S-40 in colors of saffron gold and periwinkle blue, qualms began to set in. He told Lieutenant Canary the tale right after breakfast. Canary took a long drag on his cigarette and checked his watch as if he wanted to be somewhere else, or note the precise time of their conversation.
“First of all, Lewis was a Torpedo-man first class, but no longer. He’s a third rate now. I think he tried to pick up a nun in Coronado, and was busted. I mean it. A nun. Second, I don’t think he was ever stationed in the Canal Zone, so I don’t know where any kid would come from, at least in Panama. Third, he owes Moody a coupl’a hundred from poker, and I’m guessing the Master Chief don’t want to lose sight of his little friend until that small sum has been settled. Also, they been shipmates for a long time. Pretty tight, I think. Don’t worry, though.” The lieutenant clapped him on the shoulder. “I don’t think the captain will mind when I tell him. Wouldn’t look good on his record, either, to have one of his crew in the slammer.”
The events of the previous night were now seen in a different light altogether. The naive and inexperienced DO had been hoodwinked by a cagey, veteran noncom. The thought that someone so poorly endowed in mental capacity was able to trick him smoldered inside the ensign, a smoking ember waiting to be stoked into righteous flame. He thought about it carefully, patiently, and decided to bide his time and wait for the right moment to seize revenge.
The S-40 was ordered to patrol in a wide arc stretching from Boaya Point and Veradero Bay, then due east of Batangas before finally slicing back between Botolan Point and Subic Bay. Each day of the two week patrol was to be spent in training exercises, including ceaseless fire drills, gunnery practice, and emergency dives. The young ensign found the sudden plunges into the depths unsettling, but gritted his teeth and forced himself to remain silent, supremely confident in his ability to overcome any fear, particularly since the others seemed able to do so. As expected, the crew endured each evolution with the cynical wisecracking of a veteran outfit, but by and large scored very well with each maneuver. The captain was seen to unscrew his distorted lips on several occasions and offer a jagged smile once or twice. He did not deem it necessary to congratulate his new ensign on work well done, or offer encouragement, but he did acknowledge the young officer’s progress by assigning him to the bridge watch together with the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Melville.
The XO, possibly under some psychological influence imposed by his name, considered himself a poet and writer. The crew seemed somewhat wary of him, mostly because he had the remarkable and unpredictable tendency to intone, at a moment’s notice and with sonorous affect, any number of poems, or snippets from plays and novels, and from time to time extemporaneous creations of his own. He made no bones of the fact that he intended to be a famous novelist one day, and that Wally Melville would become rich beyond compare. And when he did recite out loud, he made sure that everyone within earshot was forced to listen. For most of the crew, it was both irksome and tedious, just another example of the obligation to kowtow to an officer’s every whim.
That night the two officers manned the bridge along with Chief Moody and a sluggish, immobile, heavy-set seaman who wore his cap so low over his forehead that it did not seem possible he could see through his binoculars as he stood the starboard station. They were surface steaming at twelve knots, cruising the Verde Island passage between Mindoro and Luzon. The ocean crested three feet, causing the boat to porpoise just enough so that the men of the bridge watch rocked slightly back and forth in unison, a rhythmic sway that gently nudged them from heel to toe, in a continuous, unconscious dance beneath a low lying violet sky. The horizon was hazy, but the moon, fleeing fretfully across the heavens in an anxious gibbous mood, was strong enough to illuminate the seas surrounding them, striking each swell with a silver touch and gilding the ship’s phosphorescent wake with roiling flecks of argentine and gold. A chorus of sound surrounded them: the oblique crash of waves on the bow and tank tops, the regular thrum of the diesel engines, the ensign snapping in the wind just aft of the sail. Even so, looking back, the young officer could remember that he felt as if he were encased in a silent world of his own, gripping the twin barrels of his 7x50 against his chest as if it were a weapon, and aware of nothing. He had dreamed for so long of standing at his post high over the waves, his face to the plunging crests and troughs of an angry sea, spitting brine in defiance of the ocean’s fury, feeling himself swell with a sense of power as he devoured every twist of danger that came his way. And then, at some undefined moment, he had imagined that he would be given a revelation, a divine insight or vision inspired by the God of Nature, filling him with a promise of immensity. All in all, a gift commensurate with the standing of his native genius. But he felt none of that. There were no supernatural interventions, no spectral chimeras. After a time, he felt bored.
“Do you smell that?” Melville suddenly grasped his arm, as if shaking him from sleep.
“What? Smell what?”
“Are you alive, man? Take a deep smell.”
He did, and almost gagged. It was a nauseating, sour smell that might have emanated from a gaseous sewer. “My god, what is that stink?”
Melville leaned over the bridge, gazing forward, then pointed excitedly. “Look, there it is!” He pointed to a mound of green and black gelatinous debris near the forward torpedo hatch. “A whole pile of it!”
“What is it? And why does it smell so awful?”
The XO shouted some orders down to the control room, then peered forward in satisfaction as two crewmen appeared and scooped the irregular clumps of material into a metal container. Satisfied, he then turned back to the ensign. “My lord, it’s ambergris! Ambergris! Don’t you know what that is?”
There was a long delay before an answer seeped out, almost lost among the sounds of engines and pennants and waters from the deep. “No.”
“It’s whale shit. Or whale vomit, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. The stuff drifts through these straits, usually it washes ashore along the reefs and coves. We’re lucky, that was a big chunk.”
It didn’t seem credible that the XO was a particularly knowledgeable man, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. “Why do you want it? It smells atrocious.”
“You don’t know ambergris? Smells foul now, but in time it transforms into a fragrance so sweet a queen could bathe in it. Yes, it’s disgusting, but highly sought after. Loathing turns into lust, don’t you just love it? Poetic, no? It becomes miraculous, a loud perfume.”
“It’s chemistry, nothing more.”
It was Melville’s turn to hesitate in responding, squinting carefully, first at the ensign and then the others on the bridge. “You’re a strange one, aren’t you?”
“No stranger than anybody else. Sir.”
“Let me ask you a question. Where do you like it better, when we’re submerged or on the surface like this?”
“Up here. Where we belong.”
“You don’t feel anything when we’re down below?”
“Afraid, sometimes, just a bit. Nothing else.”
“Feel sorry for you. You can see all this anytime. Just a diversion.” He gestured broadly, taking in the dim silhouette of a pyramid mountain rising out of the sea not a mile distant. “But down below...you’re squeezed, compressed into yourself. Even if you’re just afraid, like you said, it’s still all inside, it belongs just to you. Like a closed book, don’t you think? You hold it real tight, up against your chest just like you’re holding your field glasses right now. You’re the only one writing in it, don’t you see? No one knows what’s in the book, only you. You and God. In the whole universe...” He pointed abruptly at the mantle of stars above, a swarm of wise and friendly holy fathers attending the boat’s narrow wake. “In all of creation, only you two know the secret of what is written, no one else. You. And God.” The XO breathed in deeply, as if inhaling an unseen nectar.
They lapsed into silence, but the ensign did not remove his gaze from the XO, measuring his mark carefully. “That may be. But what most people write is just a pile of shit, like ambergris. Don’t you think? Sir?”
The next day’s sun was barely risen when the hysterical clang of the klaxon erupted, alerting all hands to general quarters. The captain’s voice grated over the IC, announcing an unexpected practice torpedo run. The ensign hurried to his duty post in the forward torpedo room, groggy but anxious not to miss a moment of the drill. Moody and the Exec were both already there, supervising. The ensign made a point of standing right next to Melville, arms folded, grinning outwardly but inwardly steeling himself for the dive. The deck canted forward as the boat began to submerge, then straightened perceptibly as it reached periscope depth. Very shortly, though, and without warning, a great lurch upwards was felt, accompanied by a booming noise from the hull. Something was very wrong. His face grim, Melville scurried aft, dogging the watertight door to the torpedo room behind him, sealing the compartment securely.
Moody, perspiring heavily, placed his ear against the bulkhead as if listening for a secret message from beyond the boat. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. The boat began to roll at a sickening pitch, a clear sign it had gone dead in the water. The air became fetid, as if all oxygen had been exhausted. Soon, everyone was soaked from neck to trousers as the temperature within their steel-clad chamber rose steadily. Seaman Lewis, the same one who had been caught with his pants down at Olongapo, squatted on the floor and began to gag, appearing to gasp for breath. The ensign felt a sudden, irrational desire to scream. He understood logically that there was adequate oxygen to breathe, but he could not completely suppress a sprouting panic. Fear climbed steadily inside him, an unsteadying and unreasoning fright that threatened to explode into shouts, or screams, or an incomprehensible, sobbing babble. He struggled to keep from exposing himself to the others, forcing himself to keep his secret dread hidden deep within.
“Chief, you think we’re OK?” He regretted the question as soon as he asked it.
Moody picked up a wrench chained to one of the torpedo bays and struck it angrily against the carriage mechanism, and then again for effect, making a clang as clear and pure as the tolling of a bell. “All of you shut your holes!” He spoke in the direction of the crew, but his eyes flitted repeatedly towards the ensign. “Whassamatter, you never been belowdecks before? Anyone want their mommy?”
Lewis got up from his squat, smirking. “Naw, I want your mommy.”
Before another word could be said, the IC crackled into life, commanding all officers and senior chiefs to the control room. The ensign ran as quickly as he could, happy to be going anywhere, following Moody’s surprisingly agile form as they made their way aft. They found the captain scowling so hard it really did seem as if his lips were ready to descend onto his jowls. He gestured to the COB, who spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard as far away as the anchor chain housing. “The bow plane bull gears jammed on that last trim dive again. Had to blow the tanks to surface. Maybe somethin’ wrong with the bow planes, hope one of ‘em hasn’t fallen off.” Meagher leveled his gaze at Moody. “Get a volunteer from your crew. Get them outside, check it out.” He paused only long enough to scratch his sweat soaked underarm. “Who’s gonna be the volunteer?”
Looking back, time yawned. Or better, time gulped, devouring the moments and hours that followed. As if triggered by the push of a button, the ensign spoke up. “How about Lewis?” He heaved the words out as if they came from some deep reservoir of human understanding. “I know he wants to make up for some unfortunate past mistakes.” Moody had glowered and Meagher had nodded, and later Lewis had spit out some strange sounding rhyming curses when he was told, all very rude but reverent, almost like some kind of sacred spoken verses, and then before long he was on deck in his skivvies while his crew mates cheered lustily, with all the pent up passion of a crowd at the World Series. “Go it, Lewis,” they had cried, and “I got a beer for you when you’re done,” and “This will get your stripes back, man.” And as they peppered him with praise he raised his middle finger in salute, pointed to his crotch, and jumped into the water.
Some events have no explanation. They happen in the most random way, like two strangers meeting in a head-on collision at some forlorn intersection of no importance. Of course, afterwards it would be only human - in fact, very human, and vitally necessary - to measure up all the contributing factors to the crash, like velocity, and mass, and time, and many other things too, like ergonomics, and psychic stress, and nurture, and political persuasion, and gender, and hourly salary, and the cycles of the moon, and the physics of a tornado and on and on about the millions of triggers and restraints that dictate human action. But sometimes, events seem to happen only because a roll of dice tumbled one way or the other at the whim of a cosmic tosser.
The sea was calm, with the barest of swells caressing the slowly bobbing boat as it lay exposed beneath an azure sky that was clear from one end of the horizon to the other. Lewis dove, not very deep, a few feet only, then surfaced to announce that the bow planes were stuck at an odd angle and seemed loose. He asked for some rope and for some more help, dove once more, and was never seen again.
Later, there were many theories. Perhaps an unseen shark had come along, or a sudden, violent eddy had sucked him down, or an internal wave, silent and powerful, had dashed his brains out against the hull, or he had caught his legs, or arms, or neck as he attempted to secure the bow planes with the rope. Some even said it was certain that he had taken the chance and had swum to Marinduque, less than three miles off the port beam, and was already enjoying palm wine, women, and Tanduay. Much later, some would swear they could see scratch marks on the bow, conclusive and telling signs of a terrible fate. No one really knew, of course, and no Board of Inquiry could deduce the real reasons for this one man’s death. There was no family, and no telegram to send, and so his memory was fated to sink slowly down a distant horizon.
The next day, the ensign made a point of finding Moody topside on the fore deck, busy checking the muzzle tampion for the three inch-50. The young officer was chewing comfortably on his pipe as he approached, returning Moody’s salute with an affable wave towards his forehead. “Chief.”
“Sir.”
“Sorry about Lewis.”
“Yessir.”
“You knew him pretty well?”
“Twenty years. Got through the war side by side.”
“Friends?”
“Yeah. The son of a bitch was my friend. Maybe my only friend.”
“That’s tough. Well, it’s too bad.”
“That he’s dead? Too bad, yessir.” Moody grunted out the last words, expressing as much emotion as he would allow, and dropped his head just a bit.
“No, I didn’t mean that exactly.”
“Sir?”
“I mean it’s too bad that you’re the one who sent him to his death, seeing as he was your friend, and you were his. That’s got to be on your mind every moment, and the guilt, I suppose.”
The Chief said nothing, merely craning his neck to stare earnestly and deeply into the yawning muzzle of the cannon.
Weeks later the S-40 finally finished her refit at Olongapo, and orders arrived to rejoin the remainder of the Asiatic fleet at its summer anchorage. The base was now virtually deserted, as one by one the other subs, along with the Canopus, had departed with the blare of bands playing and the spectacle of crews lined along deck in their dress whites. The men of the S-40 champed at the bit to join their sister ships of the flotilla, and when repairs to the bow planes were finally completed an audible exhale of cool relief and exhilaration blew through the boat like a cleansing early March wind. At last, the XO ordered the mooring hawsers to be cast off. All lines and ropes were hauled in, and as the Leading Seaman secured the line lockers, wielding his T wrench like a scepter, the boat maneuvered away from its nest and drove its bow outwards, towards the sea, making turns for its summer base, to a place both mysterious and well worn. To Chefoo, in China.
It was dawn of the first day of June when S-40 carefully edged its way into the broad expanse of cobalt blue waters off Chefoo, with pennants flying as it paraded past the fleet’s majestic flagship, the venerable Augusta. A horde of Chinese merchants could be seen infesting the mighty cruiser’s foredeck, peddling their wares of fruit, silks, and straw hats, crooning, chattering, and hawking in voices loud enough to be heard clearly by the submariners as they drifted to their mooring nestled next to the Canopus.
The ensign devoured the contours of the town through his binoculars, feeling for the first time the thrill of adventure he had craved since the beginning of his enlistment. The following day, to his chagrin, he was assigned Officer of the Deck and remained on board while most of the crew packed themselves, sardine-like, into a launch for the half mile trip to shore. On the next day, though, he felt himself living a dream as he walked the whistle clean avenues of the town. He wandered away from the shoreline boulevard, studded with bars, souvenir shops and tea establishments, and meandered further into the depths of Chefoo. He was impressed to find the streets neat, laid out in an orderly fashion, and fronted by cleverly designed wooden homes with clay tile roofs and ornately carved latticework covering the windows. There were surprisingly few people to be seen along the town’s backstreets. He had expected the bustle of rickshaws and open air market stands, heavily rouged ladies of the night smoking cigarettes, or the collapsed and seedy entrances to opium parlors, but there was none of that. A few men were seen walking in the streets, short and thin and striding briskly and quietly. Occasionally, a wispy bearded elder sitting comfortably in a doorway would stare as he passed. It was all serene, quiet, and exotic. It was enchanting.
Somewhere in the heart of the city he turned a corner, and experienced a sudden, jarring sense of unreality. An enormous church lay straight ahead, made of ponderous and vaulting gray stone, with flaring arches and a high rising bell tower jutting proudly over the quaint streets of Chefoo. As he approached in disbelief, a plaque embedded in the ground swam into his vision, covered with elaborate gothic symbols more suitable to Cornwall than China:
St. Andrews Episcopal Church
All Who Believe in the
Everlasting Power of Christ
Are Welcome
Almost in a trance, the ensign wandered towards the main door and entered the narthex. The sight and smell were familiar, rushing back a trove of memories from his childhood. A church, a real church, a Christian church, erected in the depths of ancient China. He felt immediately uncomfortable, disturbed somehow, and turned to leave.
“Navy?”
Two forms were visible in the far darkened corner of the narthex, one a man obscured by shadow and one a woman in a long flowing yellow dress. The woman stepped forward, catching the flickering cast of candlelight across her face and shoulders, and by embracing the man’s arm pulled him forward very slightly as well. She had an imperial face, with vaulting forehead and broad, flaring eyebrows set over narrow, sloping eyes that glowed amber in the semilight. The raven black of her hair flowed freely down her neck, revealing her to be neither young nor old; the fine strands of her straight, silken, unbraided sentry guarded the mystery of her true age. Her focus stayed steady as she came nearer, gathering in the ensign’s face and form. She pursed her lips, and spoke again, gently, as if encouraging a bud to blossom. “Navy?”
For a long moment the ensign remained silent, overcome by her appearance. He searched for the right response. “U.S. Navy.”
The man standing behind her stepped into a sliver of light beaming down from a narrow stained glass window, smiling with a visible quiver of his lips. He seemed very old, sallow skinned, with a thick scar running down almost the center of his chin. The woman clasped him even more closely, also smiling. “Welcome. You are new here.”
“How did you know?” Immediately after blurting out the words, he felt shamed. “Of, course, it’s obvious.”
“Most who see this place for the first time react the way you do. It may seem out of place but for those who come to worship it’s a welcome sight.” She gestured with a wide sweep of her arm. “Remind you of home?”
He examined her more closely. She was asian, but different from the other moon faced women he had seen in town. The old man was certainly not Chinese. Even though his head hung low, the high sculpted cheekbones and round orbits of a westerner were testimony to his origin. “Not really.” He knew he was lying, but felt more comfortable for it. “And you, miss?”
“My father and I live here, on the grounds. We help the deacon. With the work.” She tugged at a small cross pinned to her collar.
The ensign dropped his eyes to view the lustrous silk of her dress. “I’m sure the deacon appreciates it.” He felt much better now, and did not mind flashing a broad grin. “See you next time, I guess.”
The woman touched him on the sleeve as he turned to go. “Please, sir. Wait.”
The ensign turned back towards her, raising his wrist in an exaggerated manner, hoisting it high between them as if it were a talisman of great power. “You realize I am an officer of the United States Navy?”
“Please, sir. Lieutenant. We beg for your help.”
The ensign stopped in his tracks. The hollow whisper of adventure and of the unknown blew softly, beckoning, entreating. “What help?”
Afterwards, he could barely recall her words. They erupted from her in such an incoherent and rapid stream of exclamations, entreaties, explanations and exhortations that they blended into a torrent of verbal babble. Somehow, though, he understood her, in everything she had to say. Her father was very ill, slowly losing the power of his limbs and of his thoughts. There was a doctor in Darwin, in Australia, they had been told about who was renowned for the treatment of this kind of condition, and that is where they needed to go before it was too late. She and her father had hidden wealth, but it was all in Chinese tender, fen, and it was useless for their purpose. To get to Australia they needed francs, or pounds, or dollars. She and her father were willing to offer ten times the market value of fen for dollars, if the transaction could be accomplished immediately. At the end, he could remember, she clasped his hands and looked into his eyes with a look he had never seen before. Defeat. Desperation. Determination. And desire, he really believed, desire hidden deeply within her gaze. It was a moment he would savor.
“What you want done is illegal. I won’t have anything to do with it.”
He almost skipped out of the church, satisfied he had done the right thing and put the exotic looking woman in her place. And, in some way, the defeat and pain he saw in her eyes was pleasurable to him. She was a mongrel of some kind, beautiful in her own way, but her pitiful plea did not move him. He had just begun to fantasize about possessing both her and her hoard of copper fen when he was abruptly accosted on the long, neat gravel pathway leading from church to street.
It was the man, her father, who had somehow gotten ahead of him, blocking his path. The old man could be seen vividly now, surprisingly tall and with robust shoulders and arms. He held a lustrous medallion in his right hand, thrusting it forward so that it caught the sun’s rays with a brilliant sheen. “Frrrom one navy man to anodder, pleashe help.” His words were thickened both by a slurring of the tongue and by a deep, foreign accent.
“What is the medal?” The American’s curiosity flared, a flame feeding on the moment.
“Order of Shaint Shtanislaus. Rus. Forrrr brave.”
A brief image of Sheboygan and the shadow of great ships cruising the horizon flashed through the ensign’s mind, just long enough to allow him to look the old man over once again, allowing time to trace the deep scar on his chin, a fibrous cord spiraling down to his neck before disappearing beneath his shirt. And then they walked together, slowly, while the sun receded below the great limestone belfry, touching it for just a few seconds with incandescent radiance, and the old Russian told his story.
He had been an officer aboard the Petroplovask, a Russian battleship blown out of the water during the Japanese war more than twenty years before. He and six of the crew survived a two week ordeal on a few planks of wood, crossing one hundred kilometers over the Yellow Sea before making landfall just north of Chefoo. They found refuge at the Russian consulate, where he was welcomed to remain, idle and safe for the remainder of hostilities. Instead, he and his men jury rigged radio transmission stations along the coast, hoping to report enemy ship movements. Somehow, the Japanese became aware of his signals, and before long their destroyers and gunships began patrolling, methodically shelling and destroying his stations, and killing, one by one, all of his men. Even then he did not give up. He trained homing pigeons smuggled in from Port Arthur, and continued sending reports for the duration of the war. None returned, probably because the distance was too great. Finally, sensing the end of the war was near, he purchased a decrepit sampan and attempted to run the gauntlet of enemy ships patrolling between Chefoo and the Russian bastion at Liantung. The rickety boat was blown off course at Changdao Island, and he barely made it back, starving and sick, to the coastline.
The Russian empire did not forget him after the war, awarding him the Medal of St. Stanislaus for exemplary courage and devotion. That was all well and good, and naturally there was a temptation to return home, but he had become disgusted and disillusioned with the ponderous incompetence of the military. And, he had met a woman. So, he stayed in Chefoo, ignoring the agents who had tried to woo him back to the land of Tsar Nicholas and then of Vladimir Lenin, and he had gone on to live a hard life in China. His wife was gone now, so his only daughter was the sole saving grace of his waning days. Her name was Kei. Kei-shaline, in memory of his own mother Catherine.
Now, he said, there were great disturbances in the country all around. The Japanese were threatening war on China. Brigands led by local war lords were terrorizing entire towns, even small cities, preventing safe travel from one place to another. Communists were just now arriving, beginning to peck at peasants and laborers like a ravenous bird searching for grubs in a rotting tree. The old man could smell calamity in the air and wanted more than anything to get Kei to a place of safety. Not Russia, never. Not Shanghai or Hong Kong. Australia would do.
“So it’s not to get treatment for you?”
“I don’t care about me. That is what she believes, but for me a convenient excuse only. Will you help? Navy offishers have duty to help fellow offishers.”
“My only duty is to my country.” The ensign made a half turn as if to leave, but hesitated, hoping there was more.
The old man coughed as if he were struggling to spit out something noxious he had swallowed. “I haff information. You help me, I help you, you help country.”
“What information?”
“Intelligence. Information about enemy.”
The ensign felt a shock strike at the base of his skull, an electric current that coursed down his spine. “What enemy?”
“Yourrrr enemy.” The Russian suddenly appeared younger, with eyes that gleamed and lips that twisted into a half smile. “You know who. Enemy. The shouthern country. They have spy here.”
“How would you even know that?” Without thinking, the ensign grabbed the medal of St. Stanislaus, yanking the old man’s head closer. “Tell me.”
“Know for sure.” The words gurgled out with a forceful exhale, like blood spurting from a recent wound. “They have agent who is shmuggling opium, knows everything and everyone.” There was just the briefest pause, no more than the time it takes for a teardrop to fall from eye to cheek. “He sleeps with Kei.”
It did not occur to the ensign, when the time came, to be frightened for his safety. He was not immune to the feeling; after all, confined within the thin walls of a steel coffin thirty meters below the ocean’s surface could cause sweat drops to pour down from brow and neck in anyone. But this, what he was about to do, caused no anxiety at all. He was vivified, his senses alert to every sound and motion, and he felt more alive than he had ever been. The old Russian, Yuri, had provided him with civilian clothes the color of faded brown and dark maroon, with wide cotton pantaloon legs that swooshed with every step he took. As they entered the darkened church, that was the only sound to be heard.
Yuri walked a few paces ahead, wheezing audibly. Kei had been told to stay away, but the father worried that she might appear anyway, out of concern that the meeting might somehow go awry. She had voiced her apprehension openly and honestly. It had taken her considerable time and toil to gain the trust of the southerner, and then even more effort to seduce him. He was in love with her, of that she was sure, and to a certain point he would do what she asked of him. However, there was another issue at stake, one of supreme importance. The agent had become their chief opium supplier; without him their brisk trade in the illicit powder would dwindle, and so would their only source of income. It was the ensign who insisted that the two men should meet, but it was she who insisted that they meet blinded to one another. In the case of a breakdown both men could then simply walk away, innocent of the other’s identity.
The arrangements had taken just a few days, once the ensign satisfied himself that the proposition made sense. There would be an exchange. He would give certain information to the CSA agent. The agent would give certain information to him. If the transaction was satisfactory, there might be another meeting. Or not. In either case the experience would be unforgettable, an event of high adventure, and if successful it would pay his ticket out of submarine duty.
The church interior was glum, lit only by a few candles clustered in the chancel. The old Russian trudged in the lead, head down until they reached the transept, then pointed with a grunt. To the right, on the near side of the communion rail, was a towering, ornately carved booth with three tall archways, the middle one larger than the other two, each enclosed by a glossy plank door. It was a confessional, something the ensign had never seen before. Kei was standing squarely in front, opening one of the doors and waiving impatiently.
“Get in,” she whispered, “He’ll come once you’re inside.”
“Did he see me?”
She shook her head quickly. “No. He’s outside. I will get him when you are hidden in there.”
“And you swear he doesn’t know who I am?”
“Swear. Better that way. For me and father too. I told him you have information. You talk. Then you give me money.”
The ensign nodded. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” He had agreed to exchange three hundred dollars, a sum that would easily buy two billets to Darwin. He would use the fen he received to purchase souvenirs and women, both in inexhaustible supply in the clean and hospitable city of Chefoo.
Once the door was closed, the ensign found himself immersed in blinding darkness. He suppressed a momentary move towards the door, a reflexive twitch to open it a crack and allow a wedge of light to come in. Instead, he passed his hand before his face, unable to see it, almost as if he was not really there, and allowed the blackness to seep in like a vapor, filtering through his body with the ghostly touch of unseen fingers. Feelings emerged from some subterranean space, then memories, then wild imaginings and thoughts, all spilling out one on top of the other, mingling anger and repulsion, desire and hope, disappointment, and great anticipation, and finally, a kind of disgust. He recognized it at once, a sensation he had experienced growing up as a boy, a latent hatred for everything he had come from, that had birthed and nourished him and then buried him a thousand fathoms deep in anger and acquiescence. A faint smell of incense wafted through the dead air of his cubicle, triggering the memory of ambergris, and he felt vomit rise to his throat.
The door to the adjacent booth creaked open. A brief splatter of light sprayed across the slatted window separating the two boxes, that was all, and then all was darkness again. “You there?” The sound was muffled.
“Yup.” The ensign put his hand over his mouth to disguise his voice.
“Got a name?” After a few moments of silence the voice resumed. “I am Rory. You?”
The ensign had not thought about an alternate identity in advance, but a name came to him quickly. “MENTOR. All in capitals.”
“Strange. Stand for something?”
“A king of great wisdom.”
A shallow, guttural laugh erupted in the darkness. “OK, MENTOR. So we meet. Why are we meeting?”
“I have things to tell you that might be useful.”
“And what do you want in exchange?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
There was a very long pause, long enough for thoughts to somersault through a million miles of empty space and race from moon to sun and back again. “Go ahead then.”
And MENTOR did. He quickly described the technical details of the S-40 class submarine, length and beam, tonnage, maximum speed and depth, torpedo characteristics, complement of crew, and he named the captain and XO of his own boat. As he spoke he could hear a pencil scribbling, and couldn’t help wondering how the man could write in the dark.
When he finished, the pencil continued squeaking for another minute, and then that sound ceased as well. “Why are you doing this?” The man’s voice was clearer now, less distorted and with a low resonance.
“To gain your trust.”
“Why?”
“Mind your hive, I’ll mind mine.”
“You got more?”
“Sure. Tell me what you want.”
“I’ll touch base with some folks. Meet you again.” With the creaking of the door, he was gone.
Afterwards, MENTOR did not give Kei three hundred dollars as he had promised. He handed her fifty dollars only, waiving the remaining bills casually in the air as if they were a bouquet of exotic flowers. He watched keenly as a look of confusion, anger, and then sadness overwhelmed her. “You’ll get the rest when my visits with Mr. Rory are terminated.” He snarled the words as roughly as he could. “And one more thing. You can take me to your room right now and you are going to pretend. You are going to pretend that I am your Southern friend, and you can do to me what you do to him.” MENTOR was very satisfied. There was no procedure for what he was doing, none was needed. That was all the difference, the difference between someone brilliant and the oafs surrounding him.
They met twice more in the same manner. Kei was absent when they met next. MENTOR volunteered information on fleet structure, order of battle, and doctrine. Rory’s scribbling continued frenetically and then stopped abruptly. His voice seemed high pitched when he broke into the ensign’s monologue. “We want codes. Fleet codes.”
MENTOR did not hesitate. “I need time for that. I’m not qualified in that area, so I would need time.”
“How much time?”
“I dunno. A week. Two.”
“We can wait.”
“Tough luck. We’re shipping out in three days. Shanghai. The marines there are getting lonely.”
“Wait. Wait...” There was a long pause that became longer and more uncomfortable with every passing moment. “Can we meet again before you go?” A lover’s entreaty could not be more earnest.
“I suppose.”
They rendezvoused again two days later as morning sun burst its swelling rim above the horizon. MENTOR entered the confessional uncertain about what was going to happen next. He had convinced himself that he would be abducted. He would resist, of course, but would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by a gang of kidnappers, then held at gunpoint by Rory. And after that, who knew what might happen? As he stood in the sterile emptiness of his booth he let his toes play with the prie-dieu and waited patiently, listening for any cues of an imminent attack. There was none. Straight, thin beams of light from the adjacent booth flashed on and off in an instant, all was darkness once again, and he could hear the sound of breathing just inches away. “My friends are very interested in you, MENTOR. You seem to be in the know and we’d like to keep in touch. When will you be back?”
“Dunno.”
“How can we communicate? Don’t have anyone in Shanghai right at the moment.”
“Dunno.”
“Do you want to keep up or no?” Rory hissed his exasperation.
“Sure.”
“OK, here’s the best I can come up with. I’ll give you an address, it’s In Montreal. You telegraph when you can, maybe when you’re back at your permanent base. Someone will respond, and set something up to meet with one of my associates. Alright?”
“Never said I had a base. What’s the address?”
“Kei will give it to you.”
“Kei.”
“Yeah. Kei. Listen, I know about the two of you. It’s fine, I had a good time while it lasted. She means nothing to me now. I’m done with her.”
The ensign could hear the repetitive scratching of Rory’s pencil, tapping rhythmically like the last tattoo of a long-dissolved regiment. “What about your business dealings?”
“Over, probably. Maybe. Every once in a while the two of them are useful.”
Sometimes, timing is everything. A cog has to fit into a wheel perfectly, or its mechanism does not work. If timed correctly, the gears work effortlessly, flawlessly, unconsciously. MENTOR had become a natural master of perfect timing. “You know, I’m curious about something...” He let the words dangle with a mellow resonance, enticing, glistening like a bunch of low-lying grapes drenched in moonlight.
“Well, what is it?”
“Just wondering where you get your product.”
Rory chuckled, and for the very first time spoke with something of a drawl. “A place called Ningxia. I been there, and let me tell you it’s the wild, wild west. Horses, guns, sabers, archers on horseback, the whole bit. It’s run by a warlord name of General Ma, and his brother General Ma, and his son, just plain Ma. Nice gents as long as you play by their rules, and believe me, they don’t tell you all the rules in advance, you need to figure’m out for yourself. We hide the stuff in bags of raw licorice, that was little Ma’s idea. I don’t necessarily approve of the shit, y’hear, I’m just an agent. We send the money from our transactions, every dime, to a bank in Baotou, and the Chinese, they count good, believe me when I tell you that. You do not want to mess with General Ma, he’s damn serious about his money. We talk real nice, once in a blue moon. They send me some copper every month, not much, but I don’t get much money from back home and it gets lonely out here, y’understand?”
The confessional lapsed into a deep silence. The confederate agent waited, cleared his throat as if to speak further, then left with a loud bang of the door.
Kei was sitting patiently in the front pew, stolid, her neck turned upwards in a graceful arch. Pure white lilies adorned her hair where it was pulled back. She was timeless in her beauty, her high cheeks framing her broad forehead and red lips perfectly. MENTOR sat next to her, clasped her hand, and brought his lips next to her ear, breathing in the fragrance of her neck. She stroked his hand gently, caressing each finger with a gentle touch.
“Are you really leaving tomorrow?” She breathed the words with a sigh.
“Yes.”
“I will miss you.” Her eyes gave a nervous dart towards his.
The ensign pressed in closer, and whispered, exhaling gently. “You are a dirty harlot. You sure as hell don’t deserve any money.” He leaned back expectantly, observing carefully. He thought she might lash out angrily, or even attempt to strike him.
Her shoulders heaved once and she sighed deeply, “This is for you.” She offered him a small, sealed envelope, the kind that looked like an invitation to a dinner party.
“Oh, I won’t be needing that. I’ve had my fun. The game is over, sweetheart.”
“Please, I am begging. He said he will destroy us, my father and me, if you are not genuine. He will learn if you send telegram or not. Please. My father will die, and if he does, I will die with him.” With a deft turn of hand she slipped the note into his pocket. She arose and hurried away, her sobs muffled by the vastness of the vaulting wooden beams that promised a pathway to heaven.
As she left, MENTOR felt elation, but also an unexpected sense of pride. Everything that had transpired was his handiwork and his alone. Every delicate detail had been woven by him, deftly and precisely. Taking a half step back, he could see the artistry in his work. Yes, he was a true artist, working in the most difficult medium of all. He had destroyed the life of a beautiful young woman, condemned an old man to an imminent death, and ensnared a witless southerner into a conspiratorial ballet that would surely lead to his downfall one day. How superb! How masterful! It was a stunning tableau vivant, a work of art of surpassing beauty. If only the world could see what he had done.
It was noon before MENTOR stepped back on the deck of the S-40. Hours had passed, and he had been immersed in thoughts of soft perfume, feathery floral silks and bedspreads of damask. He thought of Kei, of course, and pictured her in his mind. She was a mongrel, it was true, and now a wounded one, under circumstances where her beauty would not help her. There was no debt between them, and in any case, MENTOR did not believe in personal obligation. It would have been easy and even appropriate to put the whole adventure behind him, file her memory away for later retrieval, and go on with his life. Somehow, though, he felt a twinge of unhappiness that her humanity was completely consumed by the fires of his intellect. She was so far below him that it caused him some sadness. The feeling tugged at him without letup, until he made his final decision while still lounging on the deck of the sampan that paddled him to his boat.
Without hesitation and with no regrets he reported to the captain, and told him everything that had transpired, from the moment he met Kei and her father to the meeting with Rory that morning, and handed over the small envelope. The captain had him arrested immediately, and after being handled roughly by several marines the ensign spent that night, and the next, in the fleet gaol in the basement of an unused bank on Chefoo’s waterfront.
By the end of his third day of incarceration MENTOR began to wonder whether he had made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and overestimated the intelligence of the personnel investigating his case. Finally, that night his cell door opened without announcement and an officer with the rank insignia of a Commander entered. They exchanged salutes, the officer struck a cigarette, and then leaned into a corner to steady himself. He had long jowls and seemed somewhat old for the rank of commander.
“Sheboygan, huh?”
“Yes sir.”
“Sheboygan is a long way from Richmond.”
“Yes sir.”
“Right now you’re pretty far from either. There’s every reason to think you’re going to either hang or fry because of what you’ve done. I am the Fleet Intelligence Officer, you don’t need my name, and right now I’m not sure whether you’re nuts or a spy. I’ll decide that in the next few minutes. If you want any help from me I suggest you tell me what’s going on here. All of it.”
MENTOR did. He reviewed everything that happened, repeating verbatim his exchanges with the southern agent.
The commander sucked his cigarette down to the barest stub, then flicked it into a corner. “OK. Why?”
The ensign had hoped that he wouldn’t have to explain, that his actions were self revelatory and demonstrated a streak of genius. He spoke rapidly, frenetically, feeling more and more angry at the stupidity he was forced to endure. He pointed out the obvious fact that he had told the agent almost nothing that wasn’t already known or easily discovered through ordinary methods.
“You gave him the S-40’s specifications for maximum dive depth. You’re in uniform. That’s treason, usually handled by firing squad. Maybe hanging.”
“That knowledge is useless. We routinely go much deeper, and you know it. Besides, you’ve got to give something, or you get nothing.” MENTOR stood to his full height and thrust his chin forward arrogantly. He was a very large man, much larger than the commander, and appeared to overwhelm the cell’s narrow confines. “And look what I got back in exchange. We have the details of their opium operations in north China, the names of the masterminds, the location of their bank. How much would the Chinese government give in return for that information? And one thing more. We have the envelope. A contact. If we want, we can continue as long as it pays dividends.”
The commander shook his head slowly. “Whoever answers that telegram will be a true professional. No more pushovers like your hillbilly Rory.”
MENTOR gave a smile and sat down comfortably. “Maybe I could be a professional.”
“Possibly.” The commander retrieved two cigarettes, one for himself and one for MENTOR. “Just possibly.”
So, the past had carried him to the present, as surely as the train he was on was carrying him to Tulsa. Many days had passed, many seasons had changed, but he had remained himself, floating in a world where few were his peer and even fewer recognized his abilities. His boss, for one, still treated him like a junior partner, when it was painfully obvious that he scarcely knew what orders to give. It would be alright, though, in the end. The Director had agreed, after some gentle persuasion, to send him on this mission. It would be his final mission, but no one knew that yet.
The conductor opened the compartment door unexpectedly, leaning headfirst. “If you’re interested, sir, we are crossing the Municipal bridge right now. St. Louis is straight ahead and the Mississippi is right below us.”
MENTOR found it interesting that the conductor found it necessary to make that announcement. People were so attached to places and things. He wasn’t, not in the least. He was interested in ideas, and plans, and methods. And he was interested in himself, not knowing exactly where or how he was to be. He would go on for now, on to Tulsa, then to the Beaver River where he would meet Old Ben Duck, then over an imaginary border to Texas, and on and on until at last he would meet his contacts, and Patton, and Earnest Lieb’s son, and settle the whole matter of whether any letter was to be delivered, or peace was to come, or war, or good, or bad, or right, or wrong. He wasn’t sure what he would do when the time came, not yet, but he felt the story beginning to narrow down to its final acts. There would be no more diversions, and he, of course, would be the most important player. He inhaled deeply, with profound satisfaction, and for just a fleeting moment sensed the sweet, sweet, perfumed smell of ambergris.
Chapter 30
Which fantasy should we believe? One that brings us joy or one that makes us grieve? How do we choose, and what do we lose, when neither one is true? Fantasy, some say, masquerades as a gift but is actually a grisly curse; a bug that crawled quietly out of Pandora’s open box and promptly infested humankind with the diseases of imagination, and hope, and worst of all, belief. Belief. Believing. Seekers of wisdom learn that when all belief is shed at last, discarded like a primitive pupal skin, fantasies of every kind are revealed for what they are: unformed figments that swirl within the fabric of the brain, coalescing and reforming in random, illusory acts of creation. And the greatest belief, and most foul, is that everything will go on and on, and that tomorrow the eyes will see, and the tongue will taste, and the mind will revolve around the million forlorn and meaningless flutterings and dead end spurts and flickers and reflexive spasms that are the creation of life, and that make life what it appears to be. A relentless, continuous cycle that seems never ending.
In actuality, though, not never ending.
Jona lay on his side, on his bed, awake in the drawn out span of time that transitions from utter darkness to primitive dawn, handling a revolver attentively, fondling the cold smoothness of the barrel, toying with the hammer, and playing with the trigger guard. Guns were completely foreign to him, even the basics of loading and firing. On this night’s gray turn into morning, though, he desired to know the weapon intimately, since he and the gun were shortly to be joined together in a holy union. Very surely no one within the sight of God, or Brahma, or Allah would be able to break that bond asunder. Their moment together would be frozen in time, an indelible instant of consummation etched in a universe of infinite moments, infinite connections, and infinite stoppages and starts. He had been thinking about the infinite all day and all night, just as he had contemplated and fantasized about what he was shortly going to do. Slowly, clawing their way, and quietly, like predators on the hunt, questions had crawled into his mind about his place within the infinite.
Yes he was alone. But was he alone, the only one of his kind, unique in all creation? Were there a hundred other Jonas, a million, a billion perhaps, or an infinite number circling all around him, or stacked one on top of another, or scattered in every direction like beams of light radiating from the sun? When he was extinguished, as he was about to be, did the others live on? Why not, he thought, nodding his head sagely. Why not? I’m no more important than they are. Why should they die just because I do? Some will live on. For sure, if there are infinite numbers of Jonas then the possibilities are endless that many will live on, and some will live three score and ten years, and have children and grandchildren, and watch sunsets and eat oysters and feel warm and delicate breath upon their lips. They will all take turns, checking in and out of a Grand Hotel, waving hello and goodbye to the concierge as they come and go. Or maybe, once I’m gone, they will be both alive and dead, ready to reveal themselves to any visitor who may come to see. Or maybe I will be the one alive and dead, both here and there. A different voice sliced through his mind quickly just then and was gone, a brief roar of water diverted through a narrow sluice, no more. Just like dad, the voice said, still living though dead.
Jona heard the words quietly, still stroking the gun. He concentrated as hard as he could on his own thoughts. And if I am dead, can I come back? To life? To this life? Could I open a vast and secret grimoire of spells, curses and benedictions and make it so? The odd looking scientist from Berlin came to mind, the one with the glasses, who had told him with a great deal of arrogant certainty that time could go forward and back, and that nature’s laws allowed motion in both directions and to occur in either way. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, a naked rhythm that first gives birth to life and then takes it away. Would I want to? All the many possibilities were too many, Jona had decided. He would grasp the infinite in his own two hands and wring it, squeeze it out to meet his own ends, and no one else’s, and so he would be done with destiny. He alone would decide to travel down one fork in the road and not the other. Maybe he could meet the other Jonas on the way, or some of them at least, and say hello, and clasp their hands, and wish them better luck than he had ever had. And if I did, could I change anything? Everything? Could I speak some words right now and change the past and just say ‘It’s all different now?’
Jona knew that if he placed the revolver against the roof of his mouth, angling very slightly upwards, and pulled the trigger, he would be snuffed out without a moment’s thought. He took a deep breath, a sigh, really, and struggled to remember everything that had ever meant anything to him. Marielle, Elfieda, Alex, his father, and the distant shadow of his mother each had their turn, their faces hovering in front of him much like animals at the zoo thrusting their heads out of their cages, staring curiously at the onlookers. Jona struggled with the effort to remember them as fully as possible, grasping at each one, each one encumbered by the tethers and ropes of loss, love, grief, and the mystery of what might have been if everything had been altered just a little bit. He might have been the Jona who defied the odds, and whose life went on to the fulfillment of its days.
But that was not to be.
He had been dreaming frequently, perhaps because of the opium. Recently, his dreams had been nightmares of one kind or another, some about his childhood, some drawn from his older schooldays. This past night he had dreamed that he was a spectator, observing autopsies he had performed in the past, monitoring every incision and blunt dissection as if it were a ballet, or better yet a gymnastic competition, with every move and motion judged for its perfection. He was able to remember every case in great detail, just as he had experienced each one, but in his dream his hands and fingers had moved nimbly and precisely, without hesitation, and with unerring accuracy. He was able to get through five, ten, and then a hundred, then a million dissections, until it seemed he was performing post mortems on everyone, everyone who had ever lived, perhaps on everyone now living, all of them opened and exposed to the uncaring glance of daylight, all their inner secrets slowly dripping, dripping, dripping into a common collecting vat of thoughts and memories. And beliefs.
Jona felt euphoric, somehow, and was grateful for the revolver. It had been easy to sneak into Murphy’s room and lift the gun from its holster while the agent snored away the effects of a pint of whiskey. It was the needed instrument, the object, the necessary conduit to oblivion. This is my boat across the Styx, taking me to my abode in deepest Sheol, he thought. It was his cross, his tree, his steed, the worldly agent of his translocation from the singular to the infinite. It’s like a totem pole. I have to pray to it to understand what I must do. He fondled the gun handle reverently. It was truly time to pray, and to say goodbye, especially to himself. Jona knew he was no longer the person he once was. He had become a shibboleth, a shallow platitude of complicity, and pretence, and guilt, and ambivalence and ambition and lust, each item hung out to dry like laundry under a parching sun. No more, then. He would end the pain on his own terms, for once truly in charge of his own fate.
Jona stared out the window. The stars above, fading under the gaze of early light, swam into his vision, eternal, mysterious, a magic carpet expanding infinitely in every direction. He remembered the night in Berlin with Alex when he sat below a similar dusky canopy, bejeweled and studded with unmeasured numbers of brilliant, flickering points of light, he seeking love and salvation as if both could be had by simply stretching out his hands and taking what he wanted. He would pluck love out from among the stars, he had imagined, and hold love close and wrap himself within it, and embrace love, and love would hold him tight and never let him go, and love itself would become his lover, and would warm him in the coldest, darkest moments, and would never flee because he had found it at last. It was out there, love was, out among the void of stars and nebulae, waiting to be matched with him, linked to him, waiting to be found in due time, creating the perfect couplet needed to complete his rhyme. But when all was said, love was not found, because he had not searched long enough, or because he had not discovered some magical, mystical purification that would let love flow over him like sparkling silver waters from above, or maybe, just maybe, there was only so much love to be had and the other Jonas had taken what should have been his fair share.
Or maybe none of it was true.
Abruptly, he brought the gun to his temple. He placed his finger against the trigger, barely touching it. Gently, he breathed, Oh so gently leave this life.
The door burst open with a crash.
It was Murphy.
“Doc!” he cried, his voice booming out from the resonant depth of a deep underground cavern.
Startled by the agent’s appearance, almost in reflex, Jona squeezed at the trigger.
Nothing happened.
There followed an interval of nothingness, when both fear and comprehension took their exit from ordinary human awareness, leaving a dull blank space where just moments before, thoughts and dreams and imaginings had crawled one upon the other like a shifting mound of maggots. Then, Murphy was upon him, and a struggle followed, but very brief. Afterwards, Jona seemed almost somnolent and only hazily aware of his surroundings. Murphy loomed over him, and for a second appeared to ball his fist as if to strike a blow. Instead, he clutched at Jona’s shoulder with what felt to be talons of steel.
“Jeez, I didn’t know if I was gonna find you dead or alive.”
“What happened?” Lieb felt disoriented and detached, as if questioning a witness to a minor burglary.
“What happened is you looked like you almost zapped your brains to kingdom come. And who woulda gotten the shit for that? Yours truly, that’s who. Lucky I heard you sneaking into my room. Even more lucky, for both of us, this here Special is a single action, but you wouldn’t know about that and I ain’t explaining. What were you thinkin’?” Murphy glared at Lieb and clenched both hands once again.
“I don’t know.” Jona stared at his right hand, fascinated. It was tremoring with a fine shimmy, back and forth, and he couldn’t stop it, just as if were under the control of some power outside himself. “I thought I would try something different. Do something. Sick of all this.”
Murphy sat down wearily, leaned his body forward, and began rubbing his temples furiously. “We’re so close now. Three days from now is the day. Three days from now you meet the president. The reason we’ve come all this fucking way.”
“No. Not we. The reason you’ve come all this fucking way. And Andrews. Where is he? I need another hit.”
“Scumbag is sleeping like a baby. I know he brought some shit with him from New Orleans. Hiding it. He thinks he can control you by holding on to it and dosing you little by little.”
Jona stood up and began to pace. His tremor was gone, but his mind was still in a fog. “It’s the other way around, isn’t it? Don’t bother answering. Get him. Or get the stuff, I don’t care which, and no sermons, especially from you. Now make it snappy. Until I hand over that little piece of trash, the so called letter, you all do what I say and when I say it. After that, I don’t care.”
Murphy stood up, shaking his head, and turned to leave the room. “You’ve turned into a monster, a freakish version of a Frankenstein.”
“Wait!” Jona’s mind had begun to unfog. “Where is this holy writ, anyway? It’s like I’m delivering a Godamn epistle, it’s so important. I’ve never seen it, it should be in a big leather briefcase, right? Or carved onto stone tablets maybe? I sure don’t have it. Do you?”
“Ya know, I used to think that at least you was pretty smart, but I’ve come to learn you’re actually kinda stupid, doc. This little adventure is just a ratfuck. There ain’t no letter, haven’t you figured that out? It’s a fable, is all. Or there is one, and they already got it. The whole thing is a show, like a marching band at halftime. You’re gonna hand over an envelope, don’t matter how fancy it is, or what’s in it, the cameras click and flash for a few minutes, and the politicians will do the rest. But they need the photo, first and foremost. Then we go home and everything can go back to normal.”
A thought pierced Jona’s mind. A quick thought. A crazy thought. Yeah. Normal. Just like before.
Jona came awake again, now to late morning. The long ceramic pipe he had used at dawn was just inches away from his eyes as they opened, touched by a deluge of bright sunshine from the open window, teasing him with the promise of more mindless pleasure and release to come. He squinted at the gummy residue coating the interior of the bowl, then rubbed his finger vacantly along the rim. Andrews had given him a single pellet at first, but Jona had insisted on more, and in the end had smoked two before he fell unconscious. A current of nausea rumbled through him, accompanied by a feeling of exhaustion. He knew he should eat, but preferred crawling under the covers and trying to fall back asleep.
Without a knock, Andrews entered the room, treading carefully. He forced a smile and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re awake now, I see. That’s grand. You had some good sleep?”
Jona extended his middle finger and yawned. “Why are you here?”
“Lunch, remember? Lunch with Dr. Wilson? Let’s get moving. We’re supposed to be on a good will trip.” He helped Jona out of bed, laid out a suit for him, and watched as he dressed. When Jona faltered while putting on his socks, Andrews helped him, then tied the laces on his shoes. “Last night was crazy, truly insane. What got into you? You know, Dr. Lieb, it doesn’t have to end like this, the way you are right now. This could be a crowning moment in your career, something tangible you can take back to New York with you. Proudly. You are doing something very important for your country and the world. Have you forgotten how all this began?”
“Yeah. A lot of water under the bridge since then, though.”
“They say everyone contends with their own demons. Me with mine. You with yours. It doesn’t mean you can’t do great things. Like the delivery of this letter.”
Jona snorted. “Well let me just harrumph, and preen like a cockatoo and stick my chest out for the medal I am sure is coming. Yeah. The letter of all letters, the letter of salvation, the letter of end days and the letter that will launch a new era. Even though there’s no letter. On and on, the same bullshit I’ve been hearing for months. And for what? Even if you are sincere, you’re just tilting at windmills.”
“Believe me, I’m no Quixote. Right now, I have to be very pragmatic, and so do you. Accomplish the mission, right?”
Jona paused a moment, thoughtful. “Funny you should say that. Something came to me in my sleep, a reminder. There was a letter in the Quixote book, the one he gives Sancho to deliver to his imaginary girlfriend. I dreamed about it for some reason. This is the same thing right now, a kind of silly farce, a delusion.”
“But Quixote was insane, right? You’re not. Even so, it was no joke to him. And the letter you’re talking about in the book was real. This one is too, I assure you.”
Jona was startled for a moment, surprised that Andrews seemed to be sincere. “Lies. There’s no letter, it’s a game of make believe.”
“But there is.” Andrews quickly decided not to laugh or chuckle condescendingly. Instead, he gazed into Jona’s eyes with great earnestness, tenting his thin eyebrows with intensity. “There is, believe me, even if it’s not on any paper you have. Would you like to see it?”
“How could you possibly have it?”
“I have contacts.”
Jona paused to consider, glancing at Andrews through the corners of his eyes, not willing to look at him directly. “Man, you must be swimming in deep, deep waters. Or maybe you’re already waist high in flames.”
Andrews gave a long and genuine sigh. “Like Sancho said, nulla est retentio. Now come on, let’s face today.”
Atlanta was different from New Orleans, palpably different in almost every way. Pedestrians strolling the streets seemed to amble about in an orderly manner, and even when Peachtree Street was crowded the scene remained purposeful and sedate. The irregular shouts of coarse vitriol, the roll of wheels on cobblestone and brick, the background buzz and tempestuous feel of hourly tumult, and the omnipresent distant strains of street music so common in New Orleans were all absent. Missing also was the smell of rotting refuse and manure, the iridescent and violacious glare of neon signs, and the taste and texture of cigarette and cigar smoke swirling in the air. It seemed to Jona that Atlanta had been built to order, based on a master plan of construction spread-eagled over a large swath of north Georgia. Eager, clever, and ambitious, but still a backwater vying for prominence with other southern backwaters. Jona sensed the difference in the feel of the town from the moment of their arrival.
Their hotel was the Henry Grady, and it said everything about itself by its location next to a Masonic Temple on one side, a department store on the other, and directly across the street from a substantial, granite steepled church. Business could be conducted in the Henry Grady, ideas concocted, and great plans constructed, but only within the limits of what was proper. The hotel was both a place and a message, and Jona hated it immediately. They had been received at the train station by a close aide to the president, a man named Mosby, who laid out their itinerary as if naming the books of the Bible. They would meet the president at a convocation in honor of the great Dr. Lieb, to be held at the university. Jona would be asked to say a few words, and at the end of his remarks he would offer a sterile salutation from the President of the United States, and make a big show of handing over a document to President Pickett. He would be shown around the university grounds, including a tour of his father’s old laboratory, and then it would be over.
“And by the way,” Mosby had added, “An old friend of your father’s would like to meet you privately. Vice Dean Wilson. I have arranged for lunch at your hotel tomorrow. I hope that is... satisfactory... to... you.” The last three words were drawled out so elaborately that Murphy had laughed out loud and snickered something unpleasant under his breath. Mosby had sneered right back.
They were to meet in the hotel’s Paradise Room. Jona was running late. As he and Andrews hurtled fast paced into the dining room, they were greeted by a blare of music. Three musicians stood on a low platform, one vigorously strumming a guitar, one wailing on a violin in high pitch, and the third huffing and puffing an accordion. The instruments played a repetitive, entrancing rhythm, but most striking was the dolesome, fulsome, nasal twang of their song, crooned with a backwoods harmony that was new to Jona. He continued to stare at the performers even as Mosby appeared out of nowhere and guided them to their table. Wilson was sitting there, waiting for them.
At first glance, Jona thought that Mosby, or someone in the government, was creating an elaborate ruse, and one that was not very clever. Wilson looked nothing like any friend his father would possibly have. The man was monstrous. From a distance, it appeared to Jona that for some unknown reason Wilson was bundled up inside several oversized overcoats, but it was soon clear that Wilson himself was truly enormous, with spindly shoulders that drooped over a narrow chest that in turn was overwhelmed by the man’s bulbous, blubbery girth. With a start, Jona realized that Wilson was sitting on two chairs pushed close together. The professor was starkly white haired, with a long mane that hung down his back in irregular, unkempt, tangled strands that reached below his shoulder blades, proclaiming to anyone interested that he didn’t give a shit about almost anything. His face was very round, a deeply stained cacao color interspersed with mottled patches of white and pink, giving him the piebald appearance of someone with a desperate skin disorder. A sparse beard dispersed itself over a chin that was unidentifiable, lost within elephant ear jowls that framed his head and sagged downwards without remorse, obliterating any sign of a collar around his neck, and almost obscuring a small cloth cross that dangled from his lapel. A foul, unwashed, almost feculent odor suspended itself around him and possessed him. He was the most repulsive person Jona had ever met.
“Dr. Lieb, this is Dr. Wilson. I know he would like some private time alone with you, so I’ve arranged for a table nearby for your bodyguard and myself. Do not fear, your man will not be far. Do try to be comfortable.” Mosby spoke as if he were addressing Congress, bowed formally, and walked away stiffly with Andrews close behind.
Though he had sworn to himself that he cared nothing about Pickett’s aide, or Pickett himself, or anyone else he was going to meet, Jona could not help pointing at Mosby as he retreated. “He can barely say a civil word to me, can he?”
Wilson took a long sip of water before responding. “That’s because your bodyguard right there is a nigger, Dr. Lieb, and Mosby doesn’t like the idea of hanging around with a nigger.” Wilson’s voice was deep and pumice-polished smooth. He took another long drink, and filled his glass.
“No he’s not!” Jona spoke vehemently, now jabbing a finger in Wilson’s direction. “He’s not. He’s got Polynesian blood. Figi or somewhere like that. Maybe you don’t know that dark skin is found in more places than Africa, but I do. I am an experienced coroner and I can assure you that is the case. Why would you say such a thing?”
Wilson took another casual sip of water. “Because they say I’m one, and I’ve got the gift of discernment. He is corrupted. I can tell.”
“You are one? And you admit it?”
“Well, they say I am. I suppose because of the way I look, you understand, no other reason. But I have papers that prove I’m not. Not legally, anyway. Legally, I’m like you are. I hope that Is acceptable to you. It was to your father.”
A deep buzz began to penetrate Jona’s skull, vibrating over his temples and forehead. The sound of music in the background seemed to intensify, becoming loud and mournful caterwauling. It dawned on Jona that the band was singing in an unknown, foreign tongue. Joli blond, they were singing, over and over, and at the end of each lyric they managed to let out a sigh, a deep puff of breath, an exhale that might have first been inhaled a hundred years before in a place far away. He pointed at them, exasperated. “What are they singing? Are they French?”
“Cajun. They’re pretty known around these parts, these three, and you are lucky, because that is their most famous song. I love Cajun music, listen to it whenever I get a a chance. Also like zydeco, but I don’t care to admit it. I can tell you the words, if you like. Listen to me and I’ll say them:
Joli Blon, ma chere ‘tit fille
Gardez donc quoi t’aprés faire
Joli Blon, tu croyais
Il avait juste toi dedans le pays
Eh ha! Eh a ha!
Joli Blon ma ‘tit fille criminelle
Joli Blon, tu m’as laisse moi tout seul”
Wilson grew quiet as the song ended and the audience clapped, with a whoop and whistle here and there, but not too many, not too loud, and not too long. Jona leaned closer to make himself heard. “But what do the words mean?”
“Well, that’s another story, isn’t it? Your father also liked Cajun. Also, zydeco too. We were similar that way. He was down there, you know, as a young man just out of school. That’s where we met.” He barely finished speaking before gulping down more water.
The buzz got louder, reverberating in Jona’s ears with the sound of cicadas playing their music in the cool dark of night. “I didn’t know that,” he mumbled. “Never told me.”
“Yes we go way back. You look kind of like him, sort of, just a bit maybe, hard to say, but he was younger than you at the time we first met. Just out of school, he was maybe twenty two or three. Crazy, too. Already.”
Jona felt the old sensations begin to flare up; the rapid beating of his heart, the narrowed cone of vision and the tightened breathing, a bushfire threatening to flare into an all-consuming blaze within him. He could not restrain himself. “Tell me,” he implored. “Please tell me more.”
“Not too much to tell, really. We were both doing our years of government service right after graduation. I’m from the hills you see, a small place in Arkansas called Moody Holler, not too far from the Hiawassee. I was raised on chicken, corn, and cabbage, so any place at all was new and exciting for me. He was permanent in Alexandria, a pretty good sized town, since he was already a genius by most folks’ reckoning and an expert in infection, and so he got a real nice posting there. I was no genius, I can tell you, and I was posted to an office in a small place called Mamou, not too far away, maybe twenty miles or so. I didn’t get to sit in one place like Earnie. My job was to make the rounds of all the nearby villages. Some were no more than three or four houses where two roads met, that’s all, but I took them all in turn. I saw everything and everybody. I saw some of the saddest sights you can imagine, and once or twice some of the happiest. Made it all worthwhile. Anyway, I rounded in a place called Centerville every Monday, had a room set up in the mayor’s parlor. Mostly old folks there, blacks and such, mostly dying, I suppose, and not much I could do. Sometimes a baby or two.
One particular day this young fella comes in, black kid, kinda strapping, thick around the neck and chest. He had just recovered from smallpox. No big thing, he was way past any danger to himself or anyone else. But something happened to his left eye, he was losing sight in it, and I didn’t quite know why, so I telegrammed your father about it, asked if there was anything I could do. It won’t surprise you to know that he arrived in my office the very next day, poof, like magic, and let me tell you did he fill a room. He was all bubbles at first but turned to steel very quickly. He wanted to see this person promptly, examine him, and get the low down on him. The next morning we rode out to Centerville.
He was riding a big gray bay that worried him terrible, seemed like the horse hadn’t been broken in real well, and I thought your father was off his stride because of it, and he went on and on about this theory and that. Claimed the bodily system sometimes attacked itself after being thrown awry by infection, say like smallpox, and that some of the complications we were seeing were secondary to such a perturbation. Well, his ideas were a perturbation! It was a lot of guesswork at the time, he didn’t have proof you see, and I just had to keep my mouth shut about the whole thing. I realized quickly, though, that he was either a mad genius, or maybe just mad in the ordinary way. It took me a long time, years actually, to figure that one out.
We found the place of the young man in question, somewhat surprised to find he was a tenant farmer and belonged to nobody. It was kind of airish that day, already early evening by the time we arrived, and we weren’t dressed real well, so both of us were happy to get into his cabin and out of the cold, and look for him there. We were quite surprised when we entered.” Wilson suddenly hiccuped violently several times, causing him to pound his chest in distress and burp loudly. The stench of rot gushed out of him with every belch. When he calmed down he took a deep breath and several deep sips of water and gave a crooked smile.
It seemed to Jona, for just a fleeting moment, that Wilson’s eyes wandered left and right before they focused properly. “Tell me something, Dr. Lieb. Has anything ever happened to you that changed your life? Looking back, I mean, something that came along, and everything was suddenly different?” Wilson snapped his fingers for emphasis. “Just like that?”
The question made Jona feel even more dizzy and short of breath, a lightheaded sensation that made him stand up and lean over the table with both hands propping him up. “Pretty sure. Yes.”
“You O.K.? The way you’re bent over you look like you’re leaning crooked, kind of siggoglin’ a bit. Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”
“It’s alright, I don’t mind talking about it. Yes, definitely. Life changing, and not too long ago. Some things happened that I can’t forget, that have changed me. Forever.” Jona clutched at his coat pocket, suddenly yearning for his pipe.
Wilson nodded. “And the result? Of the change? You a better man for it?”
“If you mean, do I see reality more clearly now than before, then yes.”
“But that’s not what I mean. I asked if you’re a better man for it.”
Jona shook his head. “Truthfully, I don’t even know what that is.”
“So you came out different, dented, twisted, bent and beat up, but no better. Like I said, siggoglin’. That’s a pretty common occurrence, I’d say. I’ve heard lots of stories about Earnie, some bad, but I think it was different for him. I’d like to think he did come out better, despite everything, beginning that very day.”
“Well tell me, godammit! What happened? What’s the godamm secret, the one I can’t seem to find in all this fucking mess?” Jona pounded his fist on the table, then again, harder.
Wilson’s eyes seemed to wander back and forth again, briefly. “You are somewhat intemperate, aren’t you. Sort of like Earnie, who didn’t care very much for the feelings of others, but he never used foul language. He was a great one for shouting, pounding his fists, and so forth. Well, we all want that secret, Dr.Lieb. I can’t honestly say I’ve found the answer yet. But I have learned one thing for sure; it all begins inside. Someone told me once, and I believe it, that each of us has a deep place inside, a place of comfort, a fathomless well that refreshes and sustains even in the worst of times. For most, the well runs dry pretty soon, and long before death comes to them, they are already the living dead. For others, those who search deep enough, the well never dries up and the cool waters flow. And here is the peculiar thing; every once in a while, for no rhyme or reason the waters rise up, and overflow, and give voice to something divine. You believe me?”
“Did my father believe you?”
“He’s the one who taught me.”
Jona said nothing for a while, canting his neck to one side as if one half of his brain was burdened by a great, unmeasurable weight. Finally, he nodded at Wilson, a silent assent to proceed.
“We entered a room, a small one. A whole flock of people were there, maybe ten or fifteen. It was dark, and the shadows were long and deep, but I could see three or four whites in there, they stuck out pretty much. You might say that was unusual. This young man, the one with the eye ailment, was seated in the middle, in a halo of light, holding a bible in his lap and reciting. I grew bored after a while, I was not a particularly superstitious man, and the scriptures were mumbo jumbo to me. I wanted to leave, go back outside, get on my horse and go home, but Earnie restrained me. He sat down in the corner leaning against the wall and so I felt I had to as well, and we both listened. Lord, that kid could preach and pray! He went on for hours, first reading a passage, then going on about it, until he came out plum some other side of the reading in a place that you would never imagine. I’m not saying he made it up, but it all came out a certain way, you see. Look deep inside, he was saying, then you’ll be ready to take the next step.
I have to admit I fell asleep. Earnie jostled me awake, maybe a half hour later, telling me to watch. I was still a bit groggy, and what I saw didn’t make a lot of sense at first. There was a woman in the middle of the room now, standing next to the one eyed fellow, and would you believe it, she was a white woman. Standing pretty close to him, too, made a big impression on me. She had her hands straight up in the air, eyes closed, swaying back and forth as if she was about to keel over. I heard her mumbling, I guessed it was some kind of hymn, when suddenly she began to holler out some praying words, real fast. It was the strangest thing. It sounded like she was saying something, but not in words that made sense, not really. They were made up words, like babbling, but she was saying them in whole sentences as if they were real, like a recitation.”
Jona interrupted. “Yes, the phenomenon is well known. It’s called speaking in tongues. Gratuitous nonsense. Either a deliberate charade or a deep psychosis.” Jona felt good about speaking up, sparking a small sense of empowerment that had not touched him in a long time.
Wilson nodded his head judiciously and took several more sips. “Interesting you should say that. Your father came to speak in tongues over time. Guess he was nuts after all, huh?”
Jona’s hip suddenly began to throb in pain, and he felt a momentary panic when the left side of his waist seemed to lock up, freezing him in place. With some difficulty he managed to shift his weight to the right side, wincing with every ache that streaked down the length of his leg. He saw that Wilson was watching him carefully, silently. “It’s OK Dr. Wilson, don’t bother yourself, I’ll be fine.” Jona could not suppress the sarcasm in his voice.
“Alright. Let’s talk about you now.”
“No. No you don’t. You opened this chapter, now you’re going to close it. What happened with my father?”
“You know he gave up everything, right?”
“I don’t know shit. Now tell me.”
“My gracious but you’re a sweet-talking son of a gun, aren’t you. Now listen here:
He started coming regularly to that little cabin, got close to the preacher, and in not too long it seemed like he was coming over every night. It was quite a journey for him, coming up from Alexandria like that. Told me that these people were an interesting group, worthy of study, that they provided an unusual insight into human behavior, that’s how he justified it. In the beginning, he didn’t say anything about his beliefs. In early spring sometime, two months or so into attending these prayer meetings, Earnie came to visit me in my office. He told me he was beginning to feel it.
I asked him what he was talking about.
He told me he was feeling words coming up to his throat, regurgitating into his mouth, and that he couldn’t help it. Said that he felt out of control, that he couldn’t concentrate on his medical duties. We talked about it. I told him he was overwrought, which seemed like a good general kind of explanation to me. Earnie seemed a bit nervous... No, I would say a bit afraid. Maybe the only time I sensed fear in him. He tried to rationalize and make sense of the whole thing, give some kind of scientific explanation, maybe some kind of chemical imbalance in his system, as if his blood sodium was out of kilter. In the end, though, he confessed to experiencing something supernatural. He said it was a gift from God.
I have to say I didn’t know the man real well at the time, but he had not struck me as particularly religious when we first met. You know, none of that “Praise Jesus” sort of stuff. Believe me, I know that kind of talk from back home, it never made no sense to me. I told him he was grasping for answers, childish and juvenile answers, simply creating a world of make believe. I will never forget how he answered, it has always stayed with me. Just at that instant, as if on cue, he stood up and began spouting all kinds of words, great phrases, ringing exhortations, and great pronouncements. And not a single one of them made any sense to me at all, and as he did so he began to pound his chest, right over his heart, kind of regular, and sway back and forth. I won’t say he was in a trance, but nothing seemed to register with him, he just went on with whatever he was speaking. I remember thinking he might be talking in ancient Hittite, or Inca, or some other nonexistent language, or that he might just be smart enough to be making the whole thing up. This went on for a few minutes, then it stopped as suddenly as it started. When he finished, he sat down as if he was awful tired, rubbed his brow, and looked me up and down. Then he spoke in words I could understand.
‘I feel as if everything, all the present, all the past, all humanity, all that this world can offer has just run right through me’, he said, ‘just like I was a door that opened and let it all come through. It is an ecstatic feeling, and so it must be real. Nothing untrue could touch me that way. This is what I want to feel forever, as long as I am alive. I want life to flow right through me, like a river running from a time before time began. Not my life only, no. More. I want it all, all of everything, filling me up until I explode.’
There you have it. That is what you need to know to understand about Earnie. He wanted everything. ‘Filling me up until I explode’, he said, and he said it again many times afterwards.
He had a way of connecting with people, controlling them. It was kind of like sorcery, looking back at it. He certainly connected with me, I can tell you that. In a way, his dream became mine, and what he wanted sort of became what I wanted. It’s like he released me, from a rock I was buried in, or maybe a tree I was trapped in, immobilized, and would stay trapped in forever. That’s why I followed him.”
Jona’s head shot up. There was no longer any pain, or worry, or preoccupation. There was only the story being told, spread before him like a parchment of ancient runes that read without a beginning or an end. “What do you mean?”
Wilson refilled his glass and gulped down more water. “Well, I’ll tell you, I can see you don’t know:
We made the decision to leave. It all happened real fast. Four, five men burst into the prayer group one night. One said he was the sheriff and said the others were deputies, but they were dressed regular and I saw no badges. Who knows what the truth was. Announced we were breaking the law. Anyway, they had billy clubs and baseball bats and beat up some of the folks in there pretty bad. I think the white lady speaking in tongues got it the worst. I heard one of the deputies say they especially wanted to shut her up permanent, and sure enough she went straight to hospital in Alexandria and we heard later that she died. Billy, the preacher, got it pretty bad. He had his forehead split right through to the skull. I think Earnie put up a fight, but I wouldn’t know since I was hiding under a table. That’s the truth.
After stitching Billy’s scalp and cleaning up the place, Earnie announced that very night that we couldn’t stay in Centerville any longer. Billy said he didn’t care, that he would continue his ministry no matter what, but that didn’t fly with your father. He decided we had to go somewhere safe, and it followed logically that Billy would never be safe in the South. We spent a few days investigating, and decided on the Camaroons, the German part. In case you don’t know, that’s in Africa. It was Earnie’s idea of course. It was cheap and easy to go, and would cost almost nothing once the three of us settled down. He spoke to a merchant who did business there, who told him we could live like kings in Camaroon. Your father took care of the legalities.”
“Legalities?”
“Sure. Your father had to buy the preacher, you know what I mean? Own him legally, so that we could take him with us. We talked about it, and Billy agreed to sell himself for one dollar. It was the best dollar Earnie ever spent, I think.”
Jona shuddered. It’s not the same thing, he thought. Not the same thing as owning a slave…” OK. Go on.”
“So we took off for Camaroons, bringing a trunk full of quinine and a few bottles of whiskey with us, not much more, first to Cuba and then Caracas, and a month later landed on the other side of the Atlantic, at a mud hole on the coast called Douala. Turned out that Douala used to be a slave trade port in the old days. Ironic, don’t you think? Returning a slave to where it all began? I thought it was rich, but Billy didn’t seem to have much interest about it, he was too busy setting up in a rented house so that he could begin spreading the word, as he put it.
There was still a lot of slave dealing going on, mostly women and children shipped to Egypt, places like that. Did see a group in chains headed to Brownsville, though. Not supposed to happen, but none of the ship’s crew appeared too concerned about delivering their cargo to its destination. Still, it bothered me. You see, I felt like I was in the belly of the beast, and it made me real uncomfortable. Started thinking about it, the whole thing, how things were back home, and I became kind of tetchy about it. Maybe because there weren’t many whites around. You know, my kind. Maybe because the locals were living in filth among the flies and mosquitos. Some looked sick, others starved. Maybe because I couldn’t speak the language. Maybe, mostly, because I began to feel that something was wrong, and that I was part of that something, and I was stained by it, and that I would never be able to make myself clean. I had never thought too deeply about right and wrong before then, it had all been clear cut and black and white, like a straight line from point A to point B. But it wasn’t a straight line at all. At the time I remembered hard that I was made to study Aquinas when I was a youngster at school, to build moral character I guess, and you know what I remembered most? He said there was only one truth. One only. That’s hard to believe on occasion. Maybe there is only one truth, but it was not the one I was raised to believe in, I can tell you that. The more I thought about it, the more it caused a great collision, a smash up between what I thought I knew in the past and what I was beginning to know in the present. Looking back, some of Billy’s preaching was probably beginning to sink in, though I pretended not to believe a word of it. It didn’t take long before I was desperately unhappy.
It came to a head for me because of something that happened later. I had seen a little girl, seven or eight or nine, sitting every morning at the roadside in town selling bean cakes, fried plantains, stuff like that. She had a small straw mat spread out where she rested, and she sat there, morning after morning under the shade of some palms, pretty patient as she swatted the flies away in the deep, deep heat. She was molasses black with the biggest eyes you can imagine, and razor thin. Don’t believe I ever saw her sell a thing, so I got in the habit of buying something every time I passed that way, which was pretty often. After a while, she gave me a smile, and I gave a smile back, and it would make me feel good. Every now and then she might say something to me, too. I couldn’t understand, of course, but I knew she was speaking friendly, it’s easy to tell that kind of thing, you don’t really need to know the language. It turned me around, I have to say, just a little bit. Because of how I look, and my size and all, I don’t get a lot of people smiling at me.
Meanwhile, Earnie was telling everyone he was in hog heaven. He had set up a small office next to Billy’s place, and before long had a line of locals waiting outside his door in the mornings. He managed to get a lot of people real mad at him because he refused to see any Europeans or Americans. Africans only, because he wanted to see native diseases and how they effected the native population. Not for any other reason, believe me, he was a little rough edged in that way. I don’t think he was particularly devoted to the good people of Douala, far from it. It’s more fair to say he became devoted to filariasis and schistosomiasis. Liver flukes, amebiasis, even a few cases of Kal Azar, they were all to be found there. He’d only seen a few of these infestations in the past, back home, and now there were dozens literally at his doorstep. It seemed to me he was less and less interested in tongues and more and more interested in tropical diseases. Also, he turned a little sour, and not much interested in Billy, me, or anyone else in our church. Began to behave a bit brusquely, at times downright rude, and began shutting himself up in his office for long hours. In a few months he had mostly stopped attending Billy’s prayer meetings, and I found myself attending pretty regularly, and in not too long I was there every day. I think it was out of boredom in the beginning, but you know how people can veer sometimes.
I confronted him about his change of heart one evening near prayer time, real casual and off the cuff. In one way it didn’t matter to me, but in another I was curious about what had come over him. He didn’t want to talk about it, but I pressed him until he lost his temper with me and told me to get off his back. He never did tell me why he drifted away, but I had my suspicion. I felt afterwards, and to this day, that the whole thing touched him too deeply. Prayer and belief, the way he experienced it, was pretty consuming, in fact all-consuming. Anyone who truly believed had to give up everything inside, empty out completely, and succumb to faith. It’s not easy to surrender yourself in the beginning, and Earnie just was not going to do that. Or maybe he did, and had his fill, and refused to sip from that well again. He chose to lust for life and not lust for the Lord. Billy thought he was simply flitting from one flower to another, and was not ready to accept the true word. I don’t think he was a butterfly, though. I think he was more like a drunk staggering from one spree to another, losing himself in a different bottle every time he got juiced. Looking back, I think that was a low point for him, a time when he hit rock bottom and was looking desperately for anything to devote his mind to. I think he turned to science to help escape the rapture, to put it behind him in a safe place. Studying parasites seemed to fit the bill, I guess.
Anyway, one day I passed by where the little girl usually sat, and she wasn’t there. I wasn’t particularly concerned, but I passed by the next day and she wasn’t there again. After three or four more days had gone by I began to think she wouldn’t be coming back. Well, I missed that little smile, and that squeaky voice saying something friendly. I guess that she had come to mean more to me than I realized. I thought I might want to find out what happened to her, so I asked Billy to help me. He had picked up some of the local language and was able to say a few words, but more important he also had this little fellow he called Michael. Michael had become attracted to Billy’s sermonizing and by now was a regular at the prayer sessions. He was quite a character, this Michael. Of course, Michael was not his real name, God knows what that might have been. Billy called him his archangel, because he was fierce faced, with tattoos on his face and arms, and long straight scars on his cheeks and forehead. Also, he was extra loud in his praying, as if God was sitting way high up on a mountain top, and one not too close by. Now, this particular archangel was four foot tall, what they called a baka, the local word for a pygmy, and he told everyone, Billy included, that he was the king of the pygmies. Sure enough in the first few months we were there he gathered up more and more pygmies, the whole clan it seemed like, and insisted they all be baptized. That is of more than passing interest because they provided food and volunteered as workers for various tasks that Billy would set them. They were the shortest disciples you ever have seen, little bundles of energy. Truth is, it was Billy who became king of the pygmies, and he organized them like the heavenly hosts; archangels, regular angels, cherubim, and what not down the line. We had arrived in May. By October they were harvesting fruits, nuts, maize, some kind of turnip, and arrowroot from the fields behind the prayer house. And people, too. There was a small colony of expatriates from the South living there, and the North too, and before very long first one or two, and then many began crowding into the prayer meetings, black and white together. They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, you’ve heard that, haven’t you? If you’re not sure what that means, then that there is an example for you.
I mentioned the little girl to Billy, and he asked Michael about it. Turns out he had seen her a time or two as well. I asked if he could find out what had happened to her, and at first he said no. Turns out, the markings on her dress showed her to be from a tribe that was an enemy to the Pygmy race. They were from the lowlands and the Pygmy were from the highlands, and some such. Guess that kind of situation is bound to cause hatred. Billy pulled out his bible and read a passage of some kind, said some words that sounded prayerful, and in a flash Michael was off. Of course, I asked him what he said that caused the turn around, and he explained it to me. He had told Michael that whites were the enemy of his own race, the blacks, but they were welcome in his house of prayer anytime, despite that. He said that God created enemies so that they could feel the exaltation of a special kind of love when they finally made peace with one another. That sounded kind of nice, don’t you think?”
“Discard hate for love?” Jona sneered at Wilson. “Say that to the Germans. Say that to the Russians, and say it right here to the apes running this country. Hell, say that to the whole goddamn world, to goddamn humankind.”
Wilson’s eyes seemed to wander again, up and down and left and right, only briefly, as if trying to find Jona. “Sounds like we first have to say it just to you.”
“I knew it! I knew it from the moment you began speaking. You were infected, weren’t you? Infected by religion. And it is a disease, you know that, right? That’s something my father taught me!”
Wilson took another long sip from his glass, gulping water with abandon. “Disease is all around, isn’t it? You can die from it, that’s true, or survive and it will make you stronger.” He pointed in the direction of Jona’s leg. “Isn’t that true?”
“Hell no!” Jona found himself snarling, unable to control a flood of anger. He slapped his thigh, hard, feeling nothing. “This destroyed my life and is still ruining everything. Keep the claptrap to yourself, I’m sick of it.”
“Dr. Lieb...” Wilson’s hand wandered briefly, searching for his water glass once again. “Some are content with anger, accept it, welcome it in fact. It’s what they want. You?”
Jona found himself deflating as quickly as he had engorged. “No, that’s not me. That’s not what I want.”
“And you want what? To come out the other side of what you’ve been through...there’s got to be something better. If you don’t answer that question, you’ll die. Inside or outside, you’ll die. Answer that question, and you will come out stronger. Better. You must believe that. Your father did.”
“I didn’t come here for this. Complete bullshit, the kind I’ve been hearing all my life from him. You don’t know me, Doctor, so please keep your little soul-searching paradigms to yourself. Thanks for the memories, but I’m out of here.” Jona did not budge, though. He sat stiffly, unmoving, watching carefully as Wilson took another long drink of water, and then another. The band had finished, and the luncheon crowd began to clear from the room. The afternoon was dispersing into an ephemeral cloud of forgotten words and useless, insignificant chatter. After a few minutes of silence Jona called the waiter over and ordered a double bourbon and cigarettes.
Wilson said nothing until he saw Jona down his liquor in one gulp and light a cigarette. Bluish smoke curled over both of them, blunting the rank odor that emanated from the old man. Finally, he spoke, pointing at the smoke. “You know why it’s blue?”
“Actually, I do, O great teacher and phony. It’s because of the Rayleigh effect. Light scattering enhances the blue, because of the color blue’s shorter wavelength. I’m a well educated man, you see, grounded in the sciences and not in your asinine gobbledegook.” Jona inhaled deeply, feeling himself become slightly vertiginous. A little glimmer from the past came to him, a feeling of control. He puffed a halo in Wilson’s direction. “Go ahead. Tell me the rest of the story, now that I know it’s all propaganda.”
Wilson sighed. “Isn’t physics wonderful? It’s humbling, but it’s so rewarding and reassuring, puts everything in its rightful place. And it predicts so much. Do you think it predicts human behavior, though? I don’t know for sure but I tend to doubt it. It turned out the little girl had malaria. Quotidian fever, shakes and chills, sweats, vomiting. No science could predict whether she was to live or die. I went to Earnie. He was in charge of the quinine. I begged him for some, for the sake of the girl. You know what he said?”
Jona laughed in a high pitched vibrato, a laugh that reverberated across the arched ceilings and carefully manicured corners of the Paradise Room, a laugh that travelled across sea and sky and to the dusky furrows of Africa. “Of course I do. He said no. The quinine was needed to keep yourselves safe, not for a nameless, unknown, here today and gone tomorrow child who’s selling bananas in some Godforsaken coconut grove.” The cigarette smoke began to curl over his head, a thornless crown that twisted and swirled as if driven by unseen machinery. “That comes as no surprise to me, O zealot!”
Wilson gave a laugh also, a deep one, in a language of its own. “You are a peckerwood, I have to say. Your father’s son for sure. Well, he didn’t say no. He didn’t say yes either. It occurred to him that he should use the quinine - our quinine - as an experiment. He explained it to me this way, as I’m about to say:
It was midday when I approached him, in the heat of the day, and we were both in a haze of sweat and buzzing flies, the big blue kind. Now, mind you, he began talking kind of fast, almost frantic, as if the words were coming to him on the fly, just as if he was inventing the whole thing as he spoke. He had a serious look, you know, with those jet-black eyes kinda blazing, and when he began to rattle at you tat-tat-tat with all those many words exploding all around... He was something else, let me tell you, and there was no way to stop that diesel once it was revved up. You got on board or got out of the way. So he told me we had an opportunity. Blackie, he said, which was what he usually called me, Blackie, you can guess why, though I have to say I grew to dislike that name intensely. So he spoke, and though it didn’t make much sense, I remembered his words, then wrote ‘em down, because it was the last time he talked in a different tongue. It was his kind of tongue talking, though, you could tell it wasn’t just babble. Let me read it to you.” Here, Wilson ponderously retrieved a length of paper from his coat pocket, unfurled it carefully, as if it were the national flag, and read without any intonation at all:
Lo I the man whose Muse whilome did maske as time her taught in lonely shepheards weeds, am now enforced a far unfitter taske, and so must find a way to help mankind non sibi sed omnibus I dispense such pharmakeion, powerful and pure as bundes befod in pennyroyal following close the teachings of masters Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn whose writings of these lectuaries have shown and proven that sublata causa, tollitur effectus learned we from the hermetica syriaca, that gold in physik is a cordial, the dawn soft fingers of healing can cheat lurking Thanato, es is nicht Ernstes some would say, legyen hitetek on one side lay Scylla on the other divine Charybdis, the sons of Seth stand watching, edel sei der Mensch hilfreich und gut, great meteors mark the path both left and right, enclashing toto caeolo. O great empeirikos remember the golden rule, without question páthei máthos, over us still stands the Muse, watching and boasting exegi monumentum ære perennius if we are to mark our way, puesto ya el pie en el estriuo, watch unblinking, faithful in hope and healing and in the hidden arts, recorded by uncaring Clio, hinc ars atque inventio eius in deus ipsos relata est.
Jona shook his head, numbed by what he heard. “Crap. What did he say? It’s meaningless nonsense. Jargon.”
“You mean a lot of flapdoodle? Not really. I came to understand it eventually, and it very much made sense, if you can believe in lies. It’s not speaking in tongues, it’s phony. A good many of those words are out of the way or dead, but not gone. Latin and such, and Greek. Most found in the dictionary. Makes me think he invented the whole thing, and was not truly babbling. A sham, in other words, complete pretense meant to impress. You could spend hours trying to decipher it but in the end it’s just pretension. He must have rehearsed it a few times, that shows you where his mind had gone to. By that time he had become a man driven by will, ignoring all matters transitory and ephemeral, a seeker of greater things, you might say. He was lying when he said that as researchers, we are observers only, it was a sop thrown out to me, an attempt to assuage any guilt about the rights and wrongs that were to follow. You know, he grew to be a magnificent liar. Earnie was no observer, Dr. Lieb, you understand that, right? He became the greatest actor of his time, exposing himself wherever he thought the thrust would come, only to parry the blow and thrust back; that’s how he flourished. No...that’s how he survived, that’s how essential it was to him.
He decided he would distribute the quinine treatment in a random manner. You do know that he was virtually the first to conduct experiments along those lines, don’t you? Random allocation of a standardized treatment to two study groups, followed by a comparison of the two groups. Science. What a mind he had. What a shame.” Wilson fell silent again. He filled his glass with more water, and sipped repetitively.
Jona stubbed out the last embers of his cigarette and leaned forward. “So. The girl got the quinine and lived?”
“No, Dr. Lieb. She was allocated to the untreated group by lot. Random, uncaring chance. Despite my pleas, my arguments, my threats, my total submission, he would not change her designation. It would corrupt the science of the experiment, he said. But,” and here Wilson let go a vestigial smile, barely visible among the scraps of beard clinging to his face. “The little girl lived, as fate would have it, and grew to be a beautiful young woman, and married. In later years I played with her children. No, the protocol was followed to the letter. Ruthlessly, actually, to the despair of many poor natives who watched their loved ones die while others survived by taking the magic white pill.
The procedures and analysis took about a month. He was kind enough to name me coauthor on the paper, though I did very little. In any case it was never submitted for publication, I don’t know why. There was no shame in its scientific merit. He left in a hurry, back to Atlanta. You know the rest. To pursue a life of science, a life of service. A life of ambition, really. As he left he told me he needed more, much more than he could find in Douala to complete the journey of his life. Like I said before, he needed to be filled up completely, with everything possible that a man could experience. And, he had to leave that little prayer house behind, and all the demons swarming through his soul as he drained himself of his beliefs. Well, I suppose those beliefs did not stay with him very long, but it couldn’t have been as simple as draining a radiator. Something, a spark, a flare, a flicker, must have stayed with him. I often wondered whether he felt tormented in later years because he abandoned his sacred self for a temporal self.”
Wilson appeared content to sit quietly while Jona had a second drink and smoked a third cigarette. Outside, the day became overcast as storm clouds obscured the sky. Through an enormous, room-length window Jona could see bolts of lightning cracking across the arc of the horizon, lighting the summit of Stone Mountain in the distance, a thunderous message that the day was coming to an end. Soon, they were alone in the restaurant except for the watchful Andrews, sitting at sentry duty a few tables away. Mosby was gone for unknown reasons. Although the room was lit by the electric glow of ornate overhead chandeliers, Wilson’s skin seemed to have turned darker, morphing into plateaus of coffee brown mottled by grotesque, startling pink and white parcels that covered face and nose and ears indiscriminately. The smoke from Jona’s cigarette had transformed into a hazy smog that settled over his own head and shoulders, creating a vague aureole of gray settling over him, and partially obscuring his features.
“So. He pursued the requirements of the experiment. As you said, my father was brilliant in the application of scientific method, a necessary procedure done in order to help mankind. He was cruel to be kind.”
“No. He was cruel to be king. It had to be his way, always. I used to be bitter about it, but eventually I came to understand, and forgive.”
“Yes, I understand, you were helped by your faith and all that. Did you stay in that little church with Billy? The bible readings? The speaking in tongues?”
“A few years more. Twelve, actually. Came back to University a few years before your father defected. Anyway, I was never graced with the spirit of speaking. I became an interpreter of tongues, though it took some time for me to recognize that gift. I enjoyed doing that, tried to make some sense of the nature and rhythm and cadence of babbling, syllabic structure, and stuff like that. Interesting, ya know? Always thought that if a Martian came to visit, they would sound like they were babbling at first, till we figured it out.
Life was good there, and for the longest while I had no desire to come home. After a while I became interested in local things, like cocoa beans, and maize. It seemed to me that I awakened one day and I became curious, as if I were suddenly touched by the flame of inquiry. Studied and investigated, discovered a few things here and there. Billy gave me some money and I opened a small lab, and others from our church gave money, and I bought some equipment, and Michael gave me some young men to assist. Developed a few novel techniques, got around to flavonoids and then tocopherol, selenium, and so forth. Antioxidants. It was easier to study reagents in a flask than to study people. Published a paper or two. Eventually made a little name for myself, the university wooed me back, I climbed the ladder and here I am. Thought I could do more good by coming back, and I think I have.”
Jona swilled the liquor in his glass around and around, trying to imagine a foreign landscape of heat, and buzzing noises, and shifting shadows, and profound patience. He avoided looking squarely at Wilson. Don’t judge a book by….The words buzzed through his mind, then evaporated. After a few moments his head jerked up. “Why did you say he left in a hurry?”
“Because he did.”
“But why?”
“I thought it was nuts at the time, truthfully. He really should have stayed, there was so much more productive research to be done. God, how he loved worms. But he was persuaded by the agents they sent to get him, to bring him back home.”
A sound began keening in Jona’s ears almost instantly, sharp but distant, growing louder and more distinct in brief steps and stages, rising like a raven shriek bouncing over the bleak cliffs of a deserted mountain. There were secrets hidden within the moaning; quick whispers and beguiling half-truths that beckoned insistently. Listen, he heard, listen, listen, listen.
“What agents?”
“I told you before. Everyone thought he was some kind of boy genius. The government wasn’t about to let him get away easy. They sent two agents out to Douala to tempt him back, or coerce him, whatever, a man and a woman. Whatever they said to Earnie, it worked, because they all left together within a week or two. I am sure it was a hell of a bribe, whatever it was. The man did most of the talking, but said very little that made sense. Kept repeating he was from the agency, but never said which one, at least not to me. He was a jasper alright, and I disliked him right away. Don’t remember the name but I decided he was a spook, sent to shoot Earnie on the spot if he didn’t agree to return.”
Jona moved his jaw to speak, feeling it crack as if encrusted by a coat of rust. “And the woman?”
“Her I’ll never forget. What a doll, and did she know how to give Earnie the come on. Why, I think she gave me the come on as well. Blond, blue eyes...you get it, right? She was a doctor, and she worked for the government also. I think she gave him an offer he couldn’t say no to, and a big blushing smile he wouldn’t say no to. I saw them walking real close before too long, and I think Earnie fell for her in a really big way. Maybe that’s why he returned. She was daisy sweet, Amelia was. Daisy sweet, but sharp as a tack and tough as nails. I often wonder what became of her.”
Jona hung his head, lost in a fog of despair, and doubt, and disbelief, and the kind of madness that singed the edges of reason. Wilson remained quiet too, and for just a moment time was suspended, dissolved as if it had never been. Without warning, Jona felt a hand grasp his shoulder, and turned his head slowly, as if in a languorous dream.
“Why, hello, Jona.” The words wafted like a mist, creamy smooth, evoking in one instant feelings of both pleasure and shock. It was Kohler, cane in hand and black homburg set rakishly over his forehand. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Jona thought he knew his father. He was wrong.
A hidden past. A woman named Amelia Lieb. And now, just as Jona begins to understand how much has been kept from him, Kohler has found him.
The search for the truth is getting closer to home.
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