Keys of Babylon (29 page)

Cool it, Anna, he keeps saying. This is what you wished for. And we'll be there soon. We'll be there tomorrow.

And Juan describes where they will be. A green swale where the grapes are growing fat in the Andean air. Their first job is to translate the wine labels into English, make them exciting for the connoisseurs. Then the breakfasts for the tourists who will come, the picnic hampers, the evening meals on that wide estancia with its streams and its corn and its orchards.

And Anna sniffs and smiles and nods her head, Anna who had come into Dave's Tavern that day, brave Anna whose restaurant blog was quoted by the press, Anna who had stood beside the denim slab of Peevo, taken off her sunglasses and peered about herself until Juan leaned over the counter and poured an iced water and smiled, Anna who now waits on the hot shales of a world she never dreamed could be so vast, Anna under mountains naked of shade, Anna beneath these cactuses on their plain of crucifixion.

It's going to be wonderful, Juan insists. Trust me.

August 13, 9 a.m. University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Pony Tail didn't show up much now. Yet he did Fabien one good turn. Pony Tail found him a residency. This was at the Dolphin café at the pier's end, Santa Cruz. As far out into the ocean as anyone could walk.

Three evenings a week Fabien would trudge there to set up. Then Darius who worked weekends would bring Fabien coffee and a plate of homefries with tapito hot sauce.

Darius was a young man but his tee shirts always said ‘Old Guys Rule'. Fabien knew the brand. Fabien knew the old guys too, he knew that at the end of the pier and everywhere else, The Purple Palm included, the old guys ruled. Old guys like Pony Tail. These same old guys had played with the Grateful Dead when the Grateful Dead were glad to be alive. These same old guys had smoked weed in that alley in Chinatown before it was renamed Jack Kerouac Street. ‘The older I get the better I was' was written on one of Darius's Old Guys tee shirts.

Whenever Fabien looked about him he saw the bikers, the surfers, the poets, and they were all old guys. That was the strangest thing about this country. Whether he was in Venice or up here in Santa Cruz, the old guys never died. The old guys hung on and on. The coast was full of them, these old guys. So Fabien sang ‘Yesterday', staring at a girl on her own table in the audience. Smiling at the girl. The rest of the crowd were old guys and their fearsome old women.

Yes, he knew the old guys' schtick. Longboards, seventeen-minute drum solos and macrobiotic munchies. Down the pier other old guys lined the railings with their rods and Rizlas. It was these old guys who last year had seen the blue whale that stopped in the bay.

Never a spout like it, they said. Before or since.

Would the old guys never die? he wondered.

Fabien thought of Olimpio's children playing in the gutters' rainwater, of Mauricio trying to ride the capybara in the Tiete undergrowth, and that fat sow squealing and shitting as the Santa Rita passengers urged him on.

When Fabien stopped being a child he had abandoned the city of children. He had left Olimpio behind but knew it was still the same. Only more traffic, more drugs, more knives, more babies, more children, more children splashing in the gutters, more children standing in the fountains made by the Santa Ritas, the red rains of those arroyos soaking the new children of that young country, his country getting younger all the time, although the old guys ruled there too, of course they did, that was the way of the world.

Hey, the girl said. Can I buy you a drink?

Fabien looked at her. Jeans, walking boots, tee shirt that said Audubon Society. More old guys, he decided.

Sure, he smiled. I'm due a mojito anyway.

The next day she was waiting at the bus stop for him. The same clothes, the same scrubbed face. The driver had the radio tuned to KSBW's Action 8 News. Prince Charles and Camilla were talking about visiting an organic farm. Then it was Paul McCartney, starting his tour in San Jose. The girl looked at him and laughed.

The Big Sirs, she said.

Fabien didn't get it but he knew she had made a joke.

The journey took twenty minutes. Then she rose and rang the bell and they stepped off into the middle of nowhere.

I've brought a picnic, she told him.

Good, he said. I'm hungry. It's so early and I'm so hungry.

Her name was Magdalene. She led him down a track towards woodland. Fabien could smell the sea but it was different from the other sea smells. This was a sharp smell. Battery acid, he decided. A smell like the bus station at Tiete. And he smiled at the thought and wondered where Mauricio was at that moment, and Maria, big-hearted Maria who had refused to hurry when Security had escorted them from the Bar Unique, escorted them all the way down in the mirrored elevator. But he had sung three songs. Three songs for high society, the couples applauding politely and never guessing he was not the official cabaret but a boy from Olimpio in a shirt off the back rail.

They walked through the yellow grass and entered the trees. It was gloomy there and very still. Fabien rubbed his eyes.

Okay, he laughed. Where are they?

Take your time, Magdalene whispered. They're all around us.

And they were. They were all around him, but he would never have noticed without the girl showing him, the girl in her hiking boots and green tee shirt, her scrubbed face and black scrunchy.

The monarchs, she whispered.

The thousands of butterflies hung like leaves. They clung together for security, in shivering hives like red lampshades.

Oh yes, he smiled.

They come all the way up from Mexico, she explained.

Yeah. Like the people.

And they had both laughed. When they found a clearing Magdalene started to unpack the food, while Fabien told her about Olimpio, walking home one early morning and watching the maids and the mothers with sweeping brushes knocking the moths off the porch ceilings, off the lightshades and the lintels, the black moths bigger than the women's hands, black and furry moths as big as vampire bats, an indecipherable writing on their wings, the moths of Olimpio that were as much a part of Olimpio as the children and the rats and the hummingbirds and the cars. Once Mauricio spread a dead moth over his palms, saying it would make a perfect bikini. Fabien recalled another moth with spurs on its wings that he had chased out of their bathroom once, its golden mothdust on his face.

The next morning Fabien woke up in the trees. He was in Magdalene's room at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California. From the balcony, all he could see was the redwoods, their crumbly bark oozing moisture, their everdark greenery covering the slopes. And the air was a pharmacy. He breathed its physic.

I'm starving, he said, and soon they were down in the refectory where a sign said ‘the Devil drinks Nescafe', and Fabien ordered hash browns, bacon and scrambled eggs that Magdalene paid for, and then they came back to the room.

I heard a noise last night, he said.

The twigs, she smiled. They tap the glass.

He looked out again and there were other students awake now, girls high in the trees wearing pyjamas, girls in little shortie nightdresses up there in the branches, shaking out Golden Grahams or opening tubs of strawberry froyo while a pair of stellar jays dived through the foliage.

Wow, said Fabien.

My favourite birds said Magdalene. Aztec birds. And you know something?

What? Fabien was now stretching luxuriously on her bed, wearing the Audubon tee shirt moist with her redwood sweat.

All the students have been warned to keep the windows shut, she laughed. This is mountain lion country. But, you know what I really think?

What you really think?

I think a lion came in last night.

And she laughed again and stroked his tawny skin, and Fabien laughed and reached over for her orange juice.

Yes, I'll get you the union gig, she said, pulling the shirt over his head. But you have to promise one thing.

Only one thing? What?

No more Yesterday.

No. No more Yesterday.

And the jays came screaming past.

August 13, 3 a.m. Babylon, Iraq

Five hundred rooms? No, six. Six or seven hundred rooms. One day, I will count them all. They will come, I believe it, the fat Kuwaitis, the bankers with their pensions and their women dry as cork. They will come, because that is what we are told to believe. In that respect, nothing has changed here.

At Woodlands, there was an old man who gave me money. Steradent denture tablets, he'd say. More Steradent. Extra strength. And I would go to Tesco for him and bring the Steradent back and show him the packet and put it in his cupboard with all the other Steradent packets. And he would fumble in his purse for money, tell me to get more Steradent. More. At once.

And yes, I took his money. No one came to see him. No one looked in his cupboard. And then, after a while, he would give me his card to use at the Tesco cash machine. No relative had taken his card away. No neighbour. Thank you, Walter, I would say, as I held his cock and he dribbled into the bottle, teeth fizzing in the glass. In the dead of night. In the dead of winter. His cock in my hand. Thank you, Walter.

Yes, sometimes money is the easiest thing in the world. In my room with the pipes groaning I would look at the stacks of purple twenties from Walter's account. Pretty soon I knew the only transactions would be the ones I made. All timed and dated. When I started to take his money, Walter had seven thousand pounds. All he wanted was his teeth cleaned. All he wanted was his cock, the colour of a twenty, held between my finger and thumb. One drop. Two. His poison warm on my hand. Perhaps Walter is still there in room 23. There's some don't have the wit to die. There's some who grip too tight.

It's too hot to sleep. I rise from my divan and walk the corridors. Yes, I still wander at night. And sometimes I come to this other room to look out from the balcony. There is no number on the door yet, and the walls smell of plaster. I sit and smoke and think of the Andalucian palaces. Perhaps every man should own a palace. With egrets on the pools, their filthy nests. Every man should own a balcony and when he cannot sleep he should stand in the darkness and gaze out into the world.

Below me now the river people have lit their lanterns and the lights move quickly over the water, like someone writing there. Writing with fire. The cement mixers have stopped for the night. So even at the hotel there is quiet. When I listen I hear the river in the reeds. Twelve, fifteen years ago I would leave Aadam leaning under the Ishtar Gate, his cigarette my compass, and I would walk down to the Euphrates and take off my clothes and slip into the river's darkness and reach out with its velvet upon me, the shivering sheath the desert had warmed, that midnight had chilled to a black oil.

On the far bank I could hear the people's radios, sometimes a man singing, a man playing the uwd, overhear the heartbroken music of Baghdad, the great maqams of legend, of love denied and love forlorn, then a mother calling her children away from the Pepsi stall. A mother gathering her children from the dusk. And I would roll in those waters, swim and roll over and over, like something pale snared in the nets, a dolphin from the Discovery channel, a river bream leaving the shallows in the shadows, whilst the grains of the Euphrates mud would rise around me, Babylon's grains, the red Babylonian mud from the secret places now hidden by the river, the river that would take me if it could, as it had taken Nebuchadnezzar's bones, the edicts of the caliph, all the plastic bags from the suq.

And I touch the key I carry, the key on its chain around my neck. The key doesn't work now. I have tried it, but there is a different gate today. A different lock. When I ask about Aadam, people shrug. Aadam was the keeper, they say, the keeper of Babylon. But who keeps the keeper? And they smile as if they have said something wise. Something I should learn.

What they mean is that nothing stays a secret long. Even in this place, this place of all places, where the mouths of the innocents were stopped with salt and stones. Especially in this place.

Here at the palace, which is becoming one of the greatest hotels in the world, they are very good to me. I speak English. And English makes life easy, they say. Who say? The managers say, the mysterious men in their black Mercedes, they say it. These men park exactly where the earlier men parked their black Mercedes, the crocodile's men, who parked in a circle like a black sundial on the cliff above Babylon. Perhaps they are the same men. But Saddam has gone. At Woodlands I sat in the lounge one night eating chocolate money and saw a rope snap Saddam's neck. Heard the hangman's curse that sent him to hell, a hell deeper than Babylon's dungeons and latrines that now lie beneath the river bed.

Soon, they say, I will stand behind a desk in the marble foyer and greet the sheiks, the European politicians and the women who smell of frankincense, who are tanned the colour of the temple walls. There are such plans. They will dredge the river and build a jetty. Boats will come, cruise ships full of tourists eager to see our civilization.