Keys of Babylon (28 page)

There's a last bus out at eleven. I get to this recovery yard by half past. And that's enough for The Captain. He's the owner. Says it's just, just about good enough. Because he's in all hours. So I'm here all night till seven, home by eight, start in the fair at twelve. Four hours sleep if I eat on the job.

Sometimes the Captain's around when I arrive, and then we sit in his cabin. I love it there, charts on the wall, golden gimbals off a gyroscope spinning on the desk.

He says himself he's out of date. Admits he hasn't a clue anymore what's in the yard. Everything's done cash. So I've told him, look boss, I could put an inventory on a computer for you. First rule of buying and selling, I say, is know your stock.

Where you from? he asks me then. But he always asks me that.

Vilnius, I say.

Oh yes, he says. Docked there once. Nice port.

And I smile and say nothing and he might get his brandy out and we have a tot each, but only a tot, because he has to drive home, he says. Be up and at it all over again in the morning.

There's no room to move in the cabin. There are two glass cases with a stuffed owl and a stuffed magpie from Penyfai Primary School, a moth-eaten hound the Captain says is from the fair. Even Nebo's harmonium with its ivory knobs.

By about 2 a.m. he'll have told me the history of half the junk in the yard and the taxi will be waiting by the padlocked gate. Know him of old, they do, the Captain, the Captain waddling through his alleyways and avenues between the banisters and the newel posts, the graveyard angels with their outspread wings and marble bibles, the big old-fashioned chimney pots like the crowns of pantomime kings.

When he's gone I'm left to it, guarding his empire, the world he's salvaged and stored at the arse-end of an industrial estate. First the stone, the lintels and the gravestones, the cracked kitchen tiles and the immovable farmhouse flags. Then the wood, the rotten gates and rottener window frames, the doors stacked like playing cards. I've seen a school honour board from the 1930s around here somewhere, gold writing on black wood. Yes, a man's time comes and a man's time goes.

In these light nights and early mornings I've wandered the yard but still don't trust my way. There are aisles I've never explored, rusted dead-ends, caverns under tarpaulins where whatever was precious is now mould and ash. He's tried to protect it all from the weather, but as the boys say, the wet gets behind things. Buckets where nails have rusted together, like sea urchins. Toilet bowls with cushiony moss, a grandfather clock with a pendulum seized at the waist.

But when I sit with him in the cabin I feel relaxed. Yes, maybe I'm home now. In Vilnius they are ripping the old things out, stripping it, selling it on. As if they are cleaning themselves of our dirty history.

Where you from? the Captain asks, and I smile, but Vilnius is vanishing even as I speak. When I wander these lanes at night, between the stone and the wood, the doors and the mirrors, I almost feel I am back in Uzupis, the walls crumbling, the iron street lights crooked across my path.

Maybe I'll keep on at the Captain about the inventory. Better than scraping varnish at Hafan, and the rides have only six weeks left. Virgilijs says he's going home then.

Now in the firelight the angels loom over me, angels of the dead with their empty books. Sometimes I stroke the angel wings, the angel breasts, but they're cold as the gods of Soviet spring. And in the firelight, in this yard, I might be in the forests once again, passing round the birch sap, that sweet, spunk-coloured wine we all drank then, talking about freedom, but never dreaming it would be like this.

August 13, 7 p.m. Druid, Saskatchewan, Canada

This time he was driving a Cherokee. It made him feel tall, its rusty red the only colour on that prairie. He put it in park and looked at the map again. West of Plenty, east of Superb. Yes, surely, he had arrived. This was journey's end.

The Big Little Man stepped down to the dirt. There was nothing forgiving about this earth. Summer baked it, winter provided an impenetrable exoskeleton. In Huangshan, the earth had been black. Or red, perhaps. Red as the Cherokee. But how soft the earth was at home and how the water buffalo loved to wallow in its pools, the pigs to bury their snouts in its velvet. That was good earth where the tea bushes grew, the tea gardens his parents tended on the hillside, where he crawled under the greenery as the stars came out, staring into mantis eyes.

Here I am, he said to himself, and the Big Little Man touched the demon's face he carried on a cord around his neck, the grinning dragon-demon carved from water buffalo bone, a gift from his sister when he told them he was leaving. Where was that sister now? In Huangshan, selling sunflowers and the loose green tea she picked herself, an old woman still living with the pigs, eating with her fingers from the bowl.

He stretched and scanned the horizon in every direction. Yes, he must have arrived. The map assured him that this was the town of Druid. But of Druid there was no trace. No roadsign or ruin knew Druid now, Druid on its map of silence. True, four hundred yards away a grain elevator broke the skyline. He followed its dazzling azimuth, the prairie on all sides silvered by dust in the irrigation ditches.

Everywhere there were tyre tracks in the dirt, as if men had arrived and waited, waited and chewed gum, waited and spat. And then driven on. Or been taken away. Yes, that was it. Taken.

Very good, the Big Little Man thought.

At last. At last he understood. Druid had vanished. To the final paling. The whole town had been taken. Druid had existed and now Druid did not exist.

And its people? Its horses and pigs, its shock-shot Cherokees and rusted Rancheros, its satellite dishes, its children's bikes? All cleared away.

No, he thought. Not cleaned up. But taken. Their possessions were taken when the people were taken. Everything they owned was taken. So they need not be afraid.

The Big Little
m
an looked up. The sky was darker now. Soon it would be green-black, with fire within it. There was one star in the north. The star was getting bigger, the star was as great as the Buddha's light his mother had showed him once in the mountains, the misty mountains where the cloud clung to his skin and they stood on a ledge and looked down on an ocean that was not really there, looked down from Heavenly City Peak. Then from Purple Cloud Peak.

Train coming, the Big Little Man said to himself. Train coming with its grilled headlamp, its white ditch lights. And he laughed, the star bigger still, the northern air rushing over the dust.

He thought again about the girl. As he had arrived, the girl had disappeared. On the hourly bulletins he heard of search parties, difficult terrain, a girl in stonewashed jeans and saskatoonberry sweatshirt.

Once, her father had spoken. Everyone was hushed. Her father talked uncertainly, with a trace of hurt, suspicious of the silence he discovered grown about him. He was unable to explain how a twelve year old had dashed away to hide while her sister counted ten, one hundred, ready or not, and kept on hiding.

Maybe a grizzly, someone said, igniting old stories of bears running into the woods, children plucked like pasque flowers from the sweetgrass. Old timers nodded. Child smell. Young meat. They brought bears round.

But all the bears were microchipped, the phone-ins said. And slowly that girl went missing from the news.

It was darker yet. The air rushed by.

Train coming, said the Big Little Man. And closed his eyes.

August 13, 5 p.m. Roadside outside Cachi, province of Salta, Argentina

They found a room above L'Aquila bar in Cachi. There was no aircon and the town baked. He and the woman lay abed, the woman who had trusted him, the skinny, redheaded woman, lying in her sodden underwear, delirious beside him.

Juan remembered the journey. The land rolling on. Telegraph wires, burned forest, a strawberry sow belly-belted to a tree. He had studied the birds. Doves, parakeets, and, like sentries, those villainous, anvil-headed hawks at the roadside, some glory crushed to grimness within them, a carrion majesty.

After that room another room. Bed, table, a window over the Ninth of July Plaza and its palms. Shoeshiners packing up, waggling their thumbs at each other, those flat and ebonised thumbs. And the fan's engine, the soundtrack to their days, plastic and brass grinding together, impossible to ignore but how quickly he learned to ignore it, turning on the television he would not turn off, despite the woman's protestations, surfing towards the Disaster Channel.

First item. On an interstate a Buick Skylark rear-ended by a Mustang. Again and again the impact, the fireball, and how they blazed in the room, those celebratory blue lights. About suffering we are never wrong. Or satisfied.

Usually he slept. Occasionally sipped from their carafe. But life lay in between, down a corridor where one nightlight burned like a cactus flower and the woman squatted above her blood in the
baños
.

But what was that? What had it been? A flake, a flame, something furred that was flung against her face, the redhead screaming, something flying through the room around her, over the bed and the basin, over the TV which talked of Starbucks in the forbidden city, while all the rest was Mastercard, flying, flighting.

The woman held her red hair in a tight ball, other hand between her legs. Then the something had moved again. The something chased its own reflection out of the mirror and against the walls.

It was a mist. Soft as a mitt. A moth. Only a moth. Yes, but such a moth. He looked at this moth's face. Ghost Aztec. A bishop in his chasuble. What was a moth but an old man buried in his country's flags? A broken toreador? Now there it was above the bed, its blood the dust of tapestries.

How silently this moth moved within the television glow. And how it amazed him, this moth. And terrified the woman. This moth his muse. Its wings two maps of black isotherms. And gone. Christ, where had it gone? she screamed. Where its shoon should be was only a shadow. A dream of dark matter. A moth out of Juan's mouth and mad as a mother.

And the woman's headache came on. In her eyes she said, an insane sun, malbec's violet chaff in the wineglass. She said that her skull was opening. Her head was becoming a TV screen and her bones turning to ferro-concrete, there on the bed beside him, there on the bed her head split wide and grinning, her scream coming out of the screen of her face.

Meanwhile the fan blade swung. Down in the square a shoeshine boy lay under a palm, oxblood in his hands, head on a stolen loaf. It's unbearable, her scream screamed. No one could bear this.

Next item on Disaster had been a Campari bottle beneath Vesuvian ash. Then Icarus tumbled in slomo, again and again, Icarus' fletching aflame, Icarus falling and lying broken, his face erased so they might not identify the dead. And there was Daedalus, rapt, grieving for Icarus his son, born of a slave.

But up had leapt Icarus from the beach, Icarus unfolding himself from the scrunched Kleenex he had become, Icarus' feathers reassembling themselves into wings, so there was Icarus whole again, a hawk in an unblemished sky, as back towards the labyrinth they went, Icarus and his father the terrible engineer, and down again plunged Icarus and up again in resurrection, and once more he dropped, red and ragged, to rise again. Then the woman slept and they checked out in the morning.

You can never go back, Juan says to himself. Never can. But here goes. And he has a good reference. Better than that, it is an impressive testimonial that describes how Juan has managed Dave's Tavern for two years, planned the menu, ordered the wines, and ensured Dave's had become one of the cult places in mid Manhattan. Signed by Mary McIninery, owner. Juan is proud. Of course, he has written it himself. But wasn't that how the world worked?

Ten miles back there'd been roadworks on a bend and an inexplicable delay. In all that desert a red light and one man, one man powerful in his isolation, preventing them moving on. Juan had left the engine run until he saw the temperature dial too high. After thirty minutes the traffic light had turned green and they had moved off, but the damage was done.

Now they are stopped in that high desert, above them the mountains banded copper and bronze, the cacti twenty foot tall, the candelabra cacti that confirmed the woman's nightmares, the condor too a demon she willed to exist, that creature one of many she summons from her nightmares, the cockroaches, the lizards, and now the condor swimming in the oceans between the peaks, the carrion-seeking condor, floating down.

Juan has burned his hand unscrewing the radiator. The steam is rising between them.

He strokes her brow. All the big talk, he thinks. And what is she but just another refugee from the midtown meltdown, a madonna in wraparound shades who wanted her life changed, wanted to write her travel blogs but stay with what she knew.

So here she stands, a skinny creature under the candelabra, its thorns long as hypodermics, its flowers red against a narcotic sky. How quickly her skin has disintegrated, the pieces of her scattered in the desert they had crossed, the ravines.