Mr. Eternity (33 page)

I stretched out on my reed mat, which was placed for comfort on a soft tinder of leaves, and his voice sang on into the booming brightness of the
night. I had a great feeling for these tangled connections, which were the real substance of the world, and Edward Halloween appeared to feel the same way. He said, “That is a beautiful story. That is the true apocalyptic poetry.”

When we had passed even from the nominal dominions of the Reunited States, we crept our way closer to the inhabited country of the riverbanks, a bustling but unincorporated territory, and here Daniel Defoe traded a bag of nuts and a hunting knife for a canoe. It was made from one hemisphere of a tree, burned and hollowed out by eager hands. Our velocity was much quicker after this.

I promised myself I would tell Daniel Defoe the truth when we arrived in the vicinity of El Dorado, but one day, judging by the inquiries we made of river people, we did arrive there, and I quailed from telling him. We walked inland upon the slender neck of the path and he began to hunt for this old fabled town, but even though Edward Halloween continually gave me encouragements, and even though he prophesied to Daniel Defoe that Anna Gloria would manifest herself very soon, I could not find a way to tell him.

Daniel Defoe was meanwhile excited to show us El Dorado, which he remembered with fondness and longing. “But if we see the goddess or queen,” he said, “I’ll do the talking. She is not so scary when you get to know her.”

“In Babylon you said this goddess was Anna Gloria herself,” I said.

Edward Halloween gave me a significant look, but I ignored him. Daniel Defoe said, “Did I? I don’t think so.”

In any case, we could not find any town. We might have been traipsing through El Dorado but simultaneously we were also lost in the untenanted wilderness, for El Dorado wasn’t in El Dorado anymore.

“Where is it?” said Daniel Defoe. “Where are the earthworks and the round white houses and all the places to get rat meat? But this is the main feature of El Dorado. It is hard to find.”

Eventually we induced him to leave this place, which he did in a mood
of great disappointment, and I didn’t tell him then, not even then. Instead we went down to the Delta Bay to look for a barge, for now Daniel Defoe had seen enough of these lands. He wanted to pole away upon the pillowy swells of the sea.

“But you have to tell him,” said Edward Halloween. “This man is deranged by longing and his dream is before him plain as day. You have to tell him as a mercy.”

“My tongue is tied. You have to distract my mind. Tell me a chapter of your new novel. What is it a novel of?”

“It is a story of doomed cities. St. Louis and Akkad and New York and El Dorado. But listen, my friend, it is also a story about an ageless sojourner and a president’s daughter. Better that you tell it to yourself.” And now he smiled. “Better that you tell it to him.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is what I should do.”

“That is what you should do.”

He gave me his thumbs-up, but I perceived that he was thoughtful. I said, “Is there a clown in your story also?”

“There is. And then he is not a clown any longer, and what is he?”

“He is only himself.”

“Yes. But I don’t understand what happens to him then. Does he cross the river into the other country and become a millennial wanderer himself? Does he return to Babylon, where a sorcerer teaches him to speak to gods? What is the ending of this story?”

I could not think of an ending. No ending existed. But Edward Halloween was not saddened or melancholic and all he did now was heft a nice laugh into the green trees and kiss me on the hand. I felt a great love for my dearest oldest friend, and I found that I could almost have cried with emotion if I had been that kind of person, which I am not.

“Or maybe the story does not tell what he becomes,” he said. “It is enough that the clown has ceased to be a clown.”

That afternoon I walked with Daniel Defoe and Christopher Smart across the scree of uneven ruined ground to the Delta Bay itself, which
was not a bay like I’d visioned in my dreams of oceans but instead a jellyfish wallow full of palm islands and cutgrass. It went on and on interminably and it was shallow enough to slop across on foot. But the magical thing was that it was full of very many birds, two hundred at least, or three hundred.

“Interesting,” said Daniel Defoe. “The wading birds are coming back. This raises the question of where they’ve been.”

He told me that once, many years before, so many years he could hardly count so high any longer, he endured a shipwreck upon an island in the south of the Delta Bay, where the water ran deep and blue. This island was constructed from the bones and shells of sea creatures. He was marooned with a young man named Jam, who was a filmmaker, and together they excavated some gold ingots he had buried after an utterly different shipwreck, centuries previous, in the very same place.

“Do you know what a filmmaker is?” he said.

I did, or at least, as with so many things that used to exist, I knew and I did not know. But I said nothing. I was watching for my chance.

“We dug up the treasure and I was going to use it to buy Anna Gloria out of everlasting bondage and servitude. She was enslaved on a caffeine plantation in the island of Brasil. The problem was that I couldn’t go back to Brasil right away because I was a wanted man in those regions. I was the pirate Blackeye. Jam was rescued one day but I had to stay behind, to wait for my piratical statute of limitations. Then one day I took a nap and I slept for fifty years. When I woke up I had learned to speak to the parakeets, who had many interesting things to say, but I knew I’d slept too long. I knew Anna Gloria would have given up on me by then.”

Thus he talked and talked and it may be he was anxious, feeling that an event of true moment would soon crowd upon him. He said he had gone back to Spain eventually, where at last they had forgotten he was a Jew, and there he lived in a town in La Mancha.

I swallowed a big breath and turned to him with a gentle look, and I said, “But now let me tell you a story.”

“The storytellee is become the storyteller. Very good.”

“It’s a story about an eternal millennial wanderer.”

“Aha!” he said.

“A long time ago, in a time beyond memory, he was taken by slave traders and sold to a king. This king lived at the edge of the desert in the ruined city of St. Louis, a city of camels and scorched weeds, and there he worshipped the vanished gods of America.”

“I know this story.”

“You do not. Listen. Then the rain ceased to fall. The sorghum became poisonous. Thomason Jeffers perpetrated a revolution. Our protagonist watched these disasters from the stables in the royal compound, where his only associates were a clown and a cat and a princess. All this while he dreamed of slipping away and going in search of Anna Gloria, his fiancée, whom he had met in a dream. It was not until much later, in the loneliness of the southern wilds, upon the shores of a fetid estuarial region, that he realized his mistake: The princess of St. Louis was Anna Gloria herself, the object of his eternal search.”

Then I was quiet. He too was quiet, with an expression I had never before seen upon his face. The air was cool and the birds were standing with their necks cocked and straining. Christopher Smart watched them with the greatest attention imaginable. It was the season of short days and there was only a gentle wind of solar particles coming from the low sun. Now that I’d said what I had to say, I felt calm.

“I like this story,” he said.

“I hoped you would.”

Then he started to laugh. “You let me tell all my stories, and for this whole time you knew the ending!”

“Oh no, my friend. It’s only recently that I thought of it.”

He shook his head. He laughed again. He caught me up in his sinewy arms and sighed into my bosoms. “I’m as perceptive as an eggshell. I’m always the last one to figure it out.”

The ancient mariner was leaving Key West, as he had left so many other places at so many other times, or so he said. He was overwhelmingly cheerful about the prospect of travel. He said that he did not like to remain in one place, and he couldn’t understand why he’d stayed here so long. Azar, however, was planning to go with him. He intended to finish the documentary, to learn something, to prolong this moment with the ancient mariner, whoever he was. I was amazed. Azar had made a real resolution, like an adult.

Quaco reappeared around noon and Azar filmed him while he chanted and burned some leaves in the kitchen shed. The ancient mariner talked about all the places he’d been and all the places he still had to go. He talked about Anna Gloria. He waved his arms and threw stuff into his trunk.

But I thought only about Lena. I was trying to attend as well as I could to this bizarre scene, which seemed in some empirical way like the most interesting thing that would ever happen to me, but I thought only about Lena and in the late afternoon I left them to their chanting and packing and filmmaking and went to see her at her house. This was a kind of resolution as well.

She had taken Ben to rehab, as promised. Now she was sitting on the porch in a state of emotional dissolution. It was a tiny white bungalow with peeling Bahama-blue trim. There was a tire on the porch and a deflated basketball and an old cooler with no lid. There were areca palms in the yard and a huge mound of bougainvillea where the fence had been. It reminded me of the future. It was a tropical ruin. She lived there with her brother and her dad, but her dad had gone somewhere, Idaho or Iowa, and now her brother was gone too.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You love the house. You love that it’s
small
. A tropical bungalow and all of that.”

“Yes.”

“But try growing up here with those guys. It’s a shitty house.”

“It’s not. It’s a tropical bungalow. I love that it’s small.”

“Very funny. The truth is you can only be happy here if you know there’s somewhere better in your future. Only if you
choose
to live like this.”

We sat watching an old lady push her clothes to the Laundromat in a green shopping cart. It wasn’t the right shade of green, but it reminded me of my pills anyway.

“I didn’t really understand about your brother,” I said. “I took so many pills the other day. I kept talking about it. I didn’t mean to make light of it.”

“It’s okay.”

“But it isn’t. It’s a bad problem. I’ve gotten myself into a bad spot.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re fucked.” But she said it sweetly. She patted my arm.

“Maybe one day I’ll have a great revelation and I’ll be saved.”

“You said it.”

“I mean maybe one day I’ll snap out of it.”

“I hear you. It could happen.”

And it could. It was possible. It was possible to envision a scenario in which I was okay, in which I did not take pills or sweat with fear, in which I did some mild kind of work and loved this lovely woman. It was a stretch but I could imagine it.

Lena had a bottle of vodka under her chair. She took a little sip and her eyes watered. She drank like someone who didn’t drink.

“It’s not good to drink vodka after you take your brother to rehab,” she said, “but the other way of looking at it is, when are you more justified?”

The bougainvillea was just as good as everyone said it was. The sky was clear and the day was hot. Somehow I knew that the areca palms produced a psychoactive nut, but just because I knew it didn’t make it true. Lena had a little more vodka and made a terrible face.

“Give me a green pill instead.”

I only had one with me, but I gave it to her. She swallowed it dry and she winced and I knew she wasn’t used to taking pills either.

“I didn’t want you to see this place,” she said. “I didn’t want you to meet my brother. I didn’t want you to know anything about me.”

“But you brought Ben to meet me.”

“Yes.” She paused to consider this. “Because I wanted you to see that I kind of get what you’re going through.”

“It’s fine, anyway. Don’t worry.”

“But everything’s all fucked up! You’re fucked up. I’m fucked up.”

“It’s true.”

“And you’ll leave in a few days.”

I hadn’t been thinking about this. In fact, I had nowhere to go. I had no plans. I had no return ticket.

“Where will I go?” I said.

“You’ll go home. Haven’t you got a home? I’m just the stunningly beautiful girl you meet on vacation.”

“That’s not the story! Remember the lesson of Tom Rath. Our story is very simple. It’s a subplot. It’s a story told again and again, so many times that it doesn’t need to be told at all. It only needs to be gestured at while the main plot moves forward. In our story, there’s no room for class tensions. There’s no room for worrying about what comes next. We just fall in love, that’s our story. In the foreground the grand narrative is being told, conquests and wars and politics and whatever else, but we don’t have to worry about it.”

“We don’t have to worry about it,” she said.

“No.”

“That’s good. I like it. Think of those main characters out there, sweating and arguing.”

“And we’re here on this nice porch. There’s a whole alarming future in which to do all kinds of worrying, but we don’t have to worry about that.”

The books that stick in my mind are:
The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be
by J.B. MacKinnon;
Tristes Tropiques
by Claude Lévi-Strauss;
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat
and
Shah of Shahs
by Ryszard
Kapuściński
;
Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
by Wade Davis (and all his other books too);
The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820: A Documentary History
translated and edited by John F. Chuchiak IV;
Explorers of the Amazon
by Anthony Smith;
River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon
by Buddy Levy;
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
by Daniel L. Everett;
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert;
Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
and
The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman;
The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut
by Freya Stark;
In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786
edited by Douglas Hall;
The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover
; Marco Polo’s
Travels
; John Mandeville’s
Travels
;
The London Practice of Physic
by Thomas Willis;
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes (the Smollett translation);
The Voyages and Adventures
of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto
by Fernão Mendes Pinto;
The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas Up to 1615
by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala; and
The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
by Bernal Díaz del Castillo.