Galilee (36 page)

The point is: the night of which I speak there was a thunderstorm of majestic scale, which had been moving in since the late afternoon. Darkness had fallen prematurely, as great bruise-and-iron clouds covered the last of the sun. Even at several miles' distance the thunder was so deep it made the ground shake.

The horses were panicky, of course; in no mood to be fucking. Especially Dumuzzi, whose only real frailty was temperamental: he seemed to know he was a special creature and was wont to behave operatically. That night he was feeling particularly difficult: when my father came to the stable to prepare him Dumuzzi stamped and kicked and refused every calming word. I remember suggesting to Nicodemus that we try again the following morning, when the storm had passed, but there was a battle of wills here that no suggestion of mine was going to pacify. Nicodemus addressed Dumuzzi as he might have spoken to an inebriated and volatile friend; told him that he was in no mood for this drama, and the sooner Dumuzzi calmed down and began to behave sensibly, the better for all concerned. Dumuzzi ignored the warning; if anything his shenanigans escalated. He kicked his trough to splinters, and then kicked a hole in the stable wall—just punched out a dozen bricks as though they were so much papier-mâché. I wasn't
afraid for my father—at that time I believed him immune from harm—but I was certainly anxious for my own safety. In my various travels on behalf of Nicodemus, in search of great horses, I'd seen what harm they could do. I'd visited the grave of a breeder in Limoges who'd had his brain kicked to mush two days before I arrived (by the very horse I'd come to view); I'd seen another fellow, in the Tian Shan mountains, who'd lost his hands to an irate mare, just had them bitten off: one! two! And I'd seen horses fight among themselves until there was more blood on their flanks and the ground beneath their hooves than in their veins. So there I was, afraid for my limbs and my life, but unable to take my eyes off the spectacle before me. The storm was almost overhead by now, and Dumuzzi was in an eye-rolling frenzy. Sparks of static electricity ran up and down his mane, and leapt between his hooves and the ground; his complaints were so loud they cut through the thunder.

Nicodemus was undismayed. He'd dealt with countless fractious animals in his time; for all Dumuzzi' s heroic strength and size, he was just one more. After some struggle, my father bridled the beast and dragged him out of the stable to the open ground where he had the mare tethered. As I describe this now my heart has quickened, the scene is so vivid in my mind's eye: the lightning erupting in the clouds overhead, the horses shrieking in their hysteria, foamy lips curled back from lethal teeth; Nicodemus yelling at his beauties against the din of the storm, the front of his trousers showing plainly how much this scene aroused him.

I swear he looked half-bestial himself, by the glare of the lightning; his hair, which hung to his waist when he was standing still, roiling around him, his face cracked in half by a rabid smile, his skin iridescent. If he'd lost all trace of his human form then and there—convulsed and stretched and cracked his spine to become some other thing (a horse, a storm; a little of both)—I wouldn't have been surprised. I was more astonished that his humanity held in the midst of this; that he didn't unleash himself. Perhaps it excited him better to be confined by his anatomy in such circumstances; to have to sweat and fight.

There he was—divinity made flesh, and that flesh halfway to becoming animal—hauling the protesting Dumuzzi into the presence of the mare. I thought the last thing the stallion would want to do was fuck, but I was wrong. Nicodemus insinuated himself between the two horses and proceeded to arouse them: rubbing their flanks, their bellies, their heads, and all the while talking to them. Despite his agitation, Dumuzzi became hot for the mare. His massive phallus was unsheathed, and he promptly threw himself up on her. Still talking, still patting and rubbing, my father took hold of the stallion's rod and put it at the mare's opening. Dumuzzi needed no help with the rest. He covered the mare with the efficiency of one born to the task.

My father stood back and let them couple. His entire body seemed to be bristling: I swear to have touched him then would have proved fatal to my common heart. He was no longer laughing. His head had drooped, his shoulders were hunched: he seemed like a stalking predator, ready to tear out the throats of these creatures should they fail him.

They didn't. Though the storm continued to rage around—the lightning so frequent it visited a ghastly vivid day upon this midnight, the thunder so loud its reverberations shook down several trees and cracked a dozen windows in the house—the animals fucked and fucked and fucked, their panic subsumed into the frenzy of their mating.

The foal that came of this coupling was a male. Nicodemus called him Temujin, the birth name of Genghis Khan. As for Dumuzzi, he seemed to dote on my father thereafter; as though that night they'd become brothers. I say
seemed
because I suspect the animal's devotion was a sham. Why do I think that? Because the night my father died the panicked charge that trampled him to death was led by Dumuzzi, whose eyes carried in them—I swear—a flicker of revenge.

I've told you all this in part to give you a better picture of my father, whose presence in this story must necessarily be anecdotal, and in part because it serves as a reminder to me of the capacities that lie dormant in my nature.

As I said at the opening of the chapter, my own libido is a pitiful echo of Nicodemus's sexual appetites. My erotic life has never been particularly complex or interesting, except for a short period in Japan, when I was courting, in the most formal fashion, Chiyojo, the woman who would become my wife, while nightly sharing the bed of her brother Takeda, who was a Kabuki actor of some renown (an
onagatta,
to be precise; that is to say, he only played women). Otherwise, the scandals of my sexual life would not fill a small pamphlet.

And yet—as I prepare to enter the portion of this story dedicated to the act of love, I can't help wondering where my father's fire went to when it flowed into me. Is there a lover in me somewhere, waiting for his moment to show his skills? Or has that energy been turned to less frenetic purpose? Is it what fuels my laying these very words on the page? Have the juices of Nicodemus' s desire become the ink in my pen?

I've taken the analogy too far. Ah well. It's written, and I'm not going to abort it now, after so much effort.

I have to move on. Leave the memories of my father, and the storm, and the horses. I only hope that if the passion which drives me to my desk (obsessively now; every waking moment I'm thinking about what I've written, or about to write) isn't as blind and confused as love can be. I need clarity. Oh Lord, how I need clarity!

You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I've lost my way. I've got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don't know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on a Long Island shore, and Loretta's astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barbarossa, out of love with life itself. How the hell do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?

Perhaps (this thought nauseates me, but I have to entertain it) they
don't
belong together. Perhaps I lost my bearings some while ago, and I've simply been gathering up pieces that for all their individual prettiness can never be made to fit together.

Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. I can't stop writing; I've got too much momentum. I have to forge on, using whatever little part of my father's genius I've inherited to interpret the scenes of human need which are about to come before me, and hope that in their interpreting I'll discover some way to make sense of all that I've described hitherto.

One last thing. I can't let another chapter go by without making mention of the conversation I had with Luman.

I don't want you to think I'm a coward; I'm not. I fully realize that at some point I have to address the accusations my half-brother flung at me; both face to face with him, and face to face with myself (which is to say: here, in this book). He said my devotion to Nicodemus was in some measure the reason for my wife's death; that if I'd been the loving husband I claimed I would not have turned a blind eye to Chiyojo's seduction. I would have told Nicodemus she was mine, and he was to keep his hands off her. I didn't. I let him work his wiles upon her, and she paid the price.

I'm guilty as charged.

There; I've admitted it. Now what? It's too late to make amends to Chiyojo. At least I can't do so here; if her ghost still walks the mundane realm—which I suspect it does—then she's at home in the hills above Ichinoseki, waiting for the cherry trees to blossom.

The only peace I can make here in L'Enfant is with Luman, who I don't doubt stirred up this trouble between us out of perfectly innocent motives. He's not a man who knows how to conceal his thoughts. He had an opinion and he spat it out. Not only that, but what he said was right, though it agonizes me to admit the fact. I should go down to the Smoke House (with a conciliatory offering of cigars) and tell him that I'm sorry for my outburst; that I want us to start talking again.

But I fear the thought of venturing down that overgrown path to the Smoke House door makes my head ache: I can't do it. At least not yet. The time will come, I'm sure, when I have no excuses left—when I haven't got a character suspended in the air—and I'll go make my apologies.

Maybe I'll go tomorrow, or the day after. When I've written about the island, that's when I'll go. Yes, that's it. Once I've cleared my head of all that I have to tell you about the island, and what happened to Rachel there, I'll be in a better state to sit and talk with him. He deserves my full attention, after all, and I can't possibly give it to him when I'm so distracted.

I feel a little better now. I've confessed my guilt, and that's oddly comforting. I won't undermine that confession by attempting to justify what I did. I was weak, and too eager to please. But I can't leave this passage without returning to the image of Nicodemus, the night of the storm. He was a rare creature, no question of that; I think many sons would have put their service to such a father before their duties as a husband. The irony is this: that if I hoped to be like him, as I did, and that in letting him have Chiyojo I would gain his approbation, and come closer to him, I worked against my own interests with heroic thoroughness. In one night I lost my idol, I lost my wife, and—let this be said, once and for all—I lost myself. What little there was of me—a self separate from my desire to please my father—was trampled under the same hooves that took his life. It's only been in the last few weeks, as I've been writing this history, that my sense of
a soul called Maddox, alive in my flesh and worthy of preservation, has appeared. I suppose the moment of my rebirth was the moment I walked out of the skyroom, leaving the wheelchair behind me.

Another irony, of course: the strength to do that was ignited in me by my stepmother; she's the architect of my resurrection. Even if she doesn't want payment for that service—beyond the words I'm writing—I know there's a debt to be paid; and with every sentence, every paragraph, the Maddox who will make that payment comes into clearer focus.

This is what I see: a man who has just confessed his guilt, and will make amends, in time. A man who loves telling stories, and will find a way to understand what he's telling, in time. And a man who is capable of love, and who will find somebody to love again—oh please God yes; in time, in time.

R
achel's first view of Kaua'i was tantalizingly brief; just enough to glimpse a series of bright scalloped beaches, and lush, rolling hills. Then the plane was making its steep descent into the airport at Lihu'e, and moments later a bumpy landing. The airport was small and quiet. She wandered through to pick up her bags, keeping her eyes open for the manager of the house where she'd be staying. And there he was, dutifully standing by the tiny baggage carousel, with a cart for her luggage. They recognized one another at the same moment.

“Mrs. Geary . . .” he said, forsaking his cart to come and present himself before her. “I'm Jimmy Hornbeck.”

“Yes. I thought it must be you. Margie told me to look out for the best-pressed clothes on Kaua'i.”

Jimmy laughed. “So that's my reputation,” he said. “Well, I suppose it could be worse.”

They exchanged a few pleasantries about the flights until the baggage arrived, then he led the way out into the sunshine.

“If you'd like to wait here,” he said, “I'll go and fetch the car and bring it round for you. It saves you the walk to the parking lot.”

She didn't protest this; she was perfectly happy to stand on the sidewalk and feel the ocean breeze on her face. It seemed as she stood there she could feel the grime and anxiety of New York ooze out of her pores. Soon, she'd wash it all away.

Hornbeck was back with the vehicle—which looked robust enough for jungle exploration—in two or three minutes. Another minute to load Rachel's bags, and then they were out of the little maze of roads around the airport and onto the closest thing the island had to a highway.

“I'm sorry about the transport, by the way,” he said. “I had intended to pick you up in something a bit more civilized, but the road to the house has deteriorated so badly in the last couple of months—”

“Oh, really?”

“We've had a lot of rain recently, which is why the island looks particularly lush at the moment.”