Mr. Eternity (17 page)

“Aha,” said Azar, frowning in concentration. He already had the camera out.

“Because of the rising seas.”

“Right,” said Azar. “But maybe you could just elaborate on that?”

The ancient mariner held up his hands. “Everyone tells me that the seas are rising. You told me this yourselves. Isn’t that correct?”

“It’s correct,” I said. “Do you want to see the data?”

“You are two smart fellows, armed with all the best facts, and I believe you. I’ve heard it from other people too. So now Quaco and I have to dig up our treasure before the sea drowns these islands and it’s lost forever. This is the favor I have to ask you. Quaco and I are not young anymore, as you can see.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” said Azar.

“But first I have to remember which island I buried it on, so Quaco has just given me a medicine to help me remember.”

“Uh oh,” said Azar.

Quaco was strolling around the yard, hands clasped behind his back. He stooped and coughed and muttered in the raw sunlight. He didn’t pay any attention to us.

“Quaco is a sorcerer,” the ancient mariner explained. “Once he turned me into a pig so I could escape from my creditors.”

Azar looked anxious. “I feel like something big is going to happen, but I’m so hungry I can’t concentrate.”

“You want to talk about hunger! Many years ago, for a period of about two weeks, I ate only cardamom pods. I hardly eat anything now, but that’s only because I’m not hungry. If you ask me what I drank, I’m not afraid to say I drank camel urine. We were crossing the desert. It
was a place called Azawad. We were going to sell the cardamom pods somewhere on the coast, but yes, you guessed it, everyone died and I was alone with the camels. That was how I was freed from slavery, at least on that occasion.”

Then the color seemed to drain from his face.

“Is everything okay?” said Azar.

“I think I’ll just pop inside for a minute. Quaco tells me this is not going to be pleasant.”

He began to walk back to his boat. At the door he stopped and turned around.

“Camel urine is very thick,” he said. “These are impressive creatures. Their excrement is so dry you can burn it as soon as it falls.”

He closed his eyes and stood still for a moment, breathing slowly.

“And one more thing. Have you ever wondered why Spanish food has so much ham and bacon in it? It’s because the inquisitors always came at lunch, and if they saw you eating ham you were safe.”

Then he went inside and shut the door. We were left watching Quaco move slowly along the fence, stooping every few feet to examine a leaf or a flower.

“Here’s something new,” I said.

“I’ll say. Who is this Quaco?”

“Apparently he’s a bum off the street.”

“Yes. But we don’t say so just because he’s an old black man.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s not about race.”

“Why should it be about race?”

“I’m a swarthy fellow myself,” said Azar. “But the reason I ask is the computer keyboard. Also the bracelets of human teeth.”

“Bingo.”

We ate some trail mix, and after a while Quaco was done with whatever he was doing and he came to sit with us at the picnic table. He was instantly and profoundly absorbed by the cartoons in Azar’s
New Yorker
.

“Is it that they’re cavemen?” he said, studying one of them. “Is that the joke?”

“You’ve got it exactly.”

“The cavemen have invented language,” he said. “Now their troubles begin.”

But the ancient mariner was not the only one who’d taken medicine, and now I was suddenly conscious of not being conscious of my aching teeth. My shoulders felt loose. There was a singing in my chest. It had been four days, a kind of threshold, and my relief was profound. At this stage it seemed only proper to have another green pill. I had transferred five of them to my pocket, each one wrapped in little twists of receipt paper, and I took one while pretending to cough. My throat was so dry that it was like stuffing a bowling ball up an exhaust pipe.

“Quaco,” I said, “you’re about a million years old too, aren’t you? Is it your perception that everyone in every era thinks they’re living in the era when the world will end?”

“Yes.”

“Which means that everyone’s been wrong so far.”

“Incorrect.”

“Incorrect?”

“It always does end. Over and over again. Have you heard of Anaquitos? Or Achem?”

“No.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

Azar found the bottle of po in the kitchen shed and poured us both a cup. It had a sweet, rubbery flavor. I swallowed it with difficulty and then it seemed to rise into my face and settle in my cheeks. I felt smart and collected.

“Quaco,” I said, “did you poison Daniel Defoe?”

“Ask him yourself.”

“Are there human teeth on those bracelets?”

“Is there a more effective kind of tooth?”

There was no sign of life from the boat, but Quaco told us to leave the
ancient mariner alone, so we enjoyed a quiet interval. We drank our po and helped Quaco with the cartoons. The breeze rose. The sun climbed higher. I imagined a warm future in which all of America was just like this, a landscape of tumbledown tropical disorder, palm trees on the national mall, shaggy grass, the perfect quiet of a world without cars or leaf blowers. It was a beautiful vision. It was like a hallucination. I said to myself, Here I am in Baltimore in the year 2200.

Twenty minutes later we heard singing coming from the ancient mariner’s boat. Then the ancient mariner himself came tumbling out the door.

“I saw a boy with an ape on his shirt,” he said. “He was eating a cone of blue ice. He was the vision and the ape was the vision. The ape winked at me. The ape was wearing the boy.”

“Is he saying ape?” said Azar. “Like a gorilla?”

“Apes,” said the ancient mariner. “Apes, apes. I know about apes. They jeer at you from the trees. You ask them for fruit and they show you their asses. No help at all to a shipwrecked sailor or a man on the run.”

He paused in order to gesture more forcefully. Azar was filming everything.

“I looked up and I saw an enormous bird. It was a roc. It carried off a fat man in a leather vest. He waved to me. He was still trying to drink from his red cup. In a sky gone purple like a bruise. On a morning like every other morning.”

He pitched forward onto his face and then struggled to rise. Quaco stepped forward to help him up.

“Should we do something?” said Azar. “Should we call 911?”

“Apes,” I said. “Amazing. This is an incredible situation we’ve involved ourselves in.”

“Should we call 911?” he said again.

“It’s already so much like a movie. All we have to do is aim the camera.”

Azar gave up and turned to Quaco. “What do we do, Quaco? Do we trust you?”

“It would be a mistake for you to trust me. How could you begin to understand my intentions? But in this case, there’s no danger. We’re recovering ancient memories by magical practice, that’s all. I wouldn’t harm this man. He helped me cure myself of slavery.”

The crisis, such as it was, did not last long. Soon the ancient mariner calmed down and went back inside, there to sweat and dream, and Quaco went with him to begin chanting or praying or whatever he was going to do. We wanted to get this on film, but he wouldn’t let us. He was very firm on the subject. We weren’t allowed inside at all, and in fact he encouraged us to leave the property for a few hours. This is when I remembered the John Baxter Maritime Museum.

I was out in the street waiting for Azar to brush his teeth when Tom Rath appeared on the veranda of the Pelican Court. He was having Diet Coke for breakfast.

“What have you got going on out here, Tom Rath?”

“I’m just enjoying the sunshine.”

It had clouded over. It might have been dusk.

“How’d a man like you ever make it in the advertising business, huh?”

“Well,” he said, “the insurance business is like any other.”

“The advertising business.”

“The advertising business, correct. It’s like any other.”

But now I’d had enough. I wanted to have it out with him.

“What’s going on, Tom? What’s your business here?”

“I’m in the advertising business, like you said.”

“I mean what’s your role in this story? Why do you keep popping up?”

“What’s my role? I’m the main character. You’re the one playing a role.”

“I’m playing a role,” I said.

“You’re an extra in the story that is the story of Tom Rath’s exciting deceptions and stratagems.”

“I’m a minor character,” I said.

“You’re a minor character. You’re just a guy I talk to. You don’t have anything to do with my larger strategy. Even this whole Key West weekend is just a minor scene, and you’d better believe there’s lots of exciting stuff in store for Tom Rath. Involving people you don’t know. In places you’ve never been.”

“I’m a minor character,” I said again. I felt the truth of this statement. I felt its force. I was profoundly relieved. “So I can just do what I like. I’m offstage.”

“Sure you are.”

“No pressure.”

“It’s me who feels the pressure, being the main character.”

The John Baxter Maritime Museum was not a museum at all. It was a private residence. We stood out on the sidewalk looking up at its battered façade. It looked like a haunted house. The yard was bare and parched. There were coconut husks piled up outside the gate.

I leaned over and hissed, “So what’s our plan here?”

“What do you mean, what’s our plan?” said Azar. “We’re going to look at this picture.”

I shook my head. I had taken a few more green pills and now I was experiencing a wild unraveling of the spirit. When Azar looked away I ducked my head and chewed up another one. It made me happy to imagine that I appeared furtive and corrupt.

“I’ll make the distraction,” I said, “you grab the photo. But you haven’t even got a coat or something to hide it in!”

“Why do we want to steal it? We only want to look at it.”

I thought about this. It was no good. We had to steal the picture. “I’ll give the signal. The signal will be that I’ll say the word ‘Indigo.’”

“Indigo.”

“Or ‘Gooseneck.’ I’ll say ‘Gooseneck.’ When I give the signal is when I’ll make the distraction.”

I bounced slowly on my heels. I felt energetic and lethargic at the same time.

“Shit, man. If Quaco had come with us we could have a two-person distraction. Or better yet, he could pretend to be someone totally different, a third person who’s not associated with us. John Baxter is never going to know what hit him.”

“You seem to be feeling better today,” Azar said, “but I also feel that we’re losing control of the situation. Promise me we won’t walk out of there with the photo.”

I nodded. I clapped my hands. It was a delirious shipwreck of a morning and my mouth tasted like ennui.

“John Baxter is gonna rue the day, man.”

But John Baxter looked as if he had rued many a day already. He had a florid red face, a big red nose, watery mud-colored eyes. His head was screwed into a blue Gators hat, and his hat was the most vivid thing about him. He looked as if he’d been built from the hat down, with diminishing attention to detail. His shirt was plausible, with buttons and a pocket and a verisimilar drape, but the shorts seemed cardboard-stiff and hastily sketched in, like shorts drawn by a child. His legs were hardly legs at all. They were featureless white columns, wider at the bottom than at the top. They terminated in brown cartoon shoes, like deflated footballs. Poor John Baxter. He wasn’t going to know what hit him.

“Welcome,” he said. Then, under his breath, he said, “Welcome to all the carpetbaggers.”

The museum consisted mostly of incompetent maritime paintings, but there were also three magnificently executed models of old sailing ships. I’d have liked to spend some time examining them, but I could already see the way this would go and I was in a hurry to find the photograph before it was too late. There was a big Confederate flag hanging on the opposite wall.

“Had these paintings my whole life,” said John Baxter. “Not that you all could understand tradition or what it is to be from a place.”

Azar said, “What’s the matter with this guy?”

I realized that I was wearing a ragged T-shirt from a long-ago political campaign, which is what must have provoked Mr. Baxter’s anger.

“Tradition.” I laughed. “So many proud traditions. Let’s ask our black friends about American traditions.”

John Baxter’s eyes goggled around in his head. His face turned purple.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Tell me what other country on God’s earth ever fought a war to abolish slavery. The answer is no other country. You gonna tell me Sweden fought a war? You gonna tell me
China
?”

“Holy shit, man. That’s the craziest thing. Where did you hear that? Is that something people think? Did you hear that on TV? Who do you think it was a war against? You’ve got a Confederate flag on your wall.”

“A man can be proud of his history,” he said quietly.

“I for one am sympathetic to the lost cause,” said Azar. “A man should be allowed to do whatever he wants in his own home. If he commits a crime against humanity, that doesn’t mean he hates all of humanity.”

John Baxter nodded. He did not understand that he was being mocked. “It’s just our constitutional freedoms,” he said. “Even the Iraqi guy understands me.”

The photographs were hanging beneath the Confederate flag. They were large prints, well preserved, probably worth a good deal of money. Most of them were from the late nineteenth century, if the little handwritten cards were to be believed, but there were two from before the Civil War. One of them showed three ladies in magnificent gowns, with frightened expressions and indistinct eyes, the effect of having to sit still for so long in front of the camera. The other showed two men standing together on a pier somewhere. The image was blurry but it was unmistakably the ancient mariner and Quaco.

John Baxter was growing frustrated. “But this is perfect because now I got a Iraqi and a socialist in my museum.”

Azar said, “You’ve gotta be nicer to tourists, man! Don’t you depend on the tourist trade?”