Moon Palace (23 page)

T
hat was as far as we got that day. As soon as he had uttered the last sentence, Effing paused to catch his breath, and before he was able to go on with his story, Mrs. Hume walked in and announced that it was time for lunch. After the terrible things he had recounted, I thought it would be difficult for him to regain his composure, but the interruption hardly seemed to affect him. “Good,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Time for lunch. I’m famished.” It bewildered me how he could shift so rapidly from one mood to another. Just moments before, his voice had been shaking with emotion. I had thought he was on the brink of collapse, and now, all of a sudden, he was brimming with enthusiasm and good cheer. “We’re getting on with it now, boy,” he said to me as I wheeled him into the dining room. “That was just the beginning, what you might call the preface. Wait till I get warmed up. You haven’t heard anything yet.”

Once we sat down at the table, there was no more mention of the obituary. The lunch proceeded as normal, with the usual accompaniment of slurps and outrages, neither more nor less than on any other day. It was as though Effing had already forgotten that he had spent the past three hours spilling his guts to me in the other room. We made our usual small talk, and toward the
end of the meal we went through the daily weather briefing in preparation for our afternoon excursion. That was how it went for the next three or four weeks. Mornings, we worked on the obituary; afternoons, we went out for walks. I filled more than a dozen notebooks with Effing’s stories, generally at a clip of twenty or thirty new pages a day. I had to write at great speed to keep up with him, and there were times when my transcriptions were barely legible. At one point I asked him if we could switch to a tape recorder, but Effing refused. No electricity, he said, no machines. “I hate the noise of those infernal things. All whirr and whoosh, it’s enough to make you sick. The only sound I want to hear is your pen moving across the paper.” I explained to him that I wasn’t a professional secretary. “I don’t know shorthand,” I said, “and it’s not always easy for me to read what I’ve written.” “Then type it up when I’m not around,” he said. “I’ll give you Pavel’s typewriter. It’s a beautiful old contraption, I bought it for him when we came to America in thirty-nine. An Underwood. They don’t make them like that anymore. It must weigh three and a half tons.” That same night, I dug it out from the back of the closet in my room and set it up on a small end table. From then on, I spent several hours every evening transcribing the pages from our morning session. It was tedious work, but Effing’s words were still fresh in my mind, and I did not lose very many of them.

After Byrne died, he said, he gave up hope. He made a halfhearted attempt to extricate himself from the canyon, but he soon got lost in a maze of obstacles: cliffs, gorges, unclimbable buttes. His horse collapsed on the second day, but with no firewood to be found, the butchered meat was almost useless. Sagebrush would not ignite. It smoked and sputtered, but it would not produce a fire. To quell his hunger, Effing shaved off slivers of meat from the carcass and singed them with matches. This was enough for one meal, but after the matches ran out, he left the animal behind, unwilling to eat the flesh without cooking it. At that point, Effing was convinced his life was over. He continued blundering among the rocks, leading along the last surviving donkey,
but with each step he took, he was tormented by the thought that he was drifting farther and farther from the possibility of rescue. His art supplies were still intact, and he had enough food and water for another two days. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. Even if he managed to live through it, he realized that everything was finished for him. Byrne’s death had seen to that, and there was no way he could ever bring himself to go home. The shame of it would be too much for him: the questions, the recriminations, the loss of face. Much better that they should think he had died, too, for at least his honor would be preserved, and no one would have to know how weak and irresponsible he had been. That was the moment when Julian Barber was obliterated: out there in the desert, hemmed in by rocks and blistering light, he simply canceled himself out. At the time, it did not seem like such a drastic decision to him. There was no question that he was going to die, and even if he didn’t, he would be as good as dead anyway. No one would know the first thing about what had happened to him.

Effing told me that he went crazy, but I wasn’t sure how literally I was supposed to take that word. After Byrne’s death, he said, he howled almost constantly for three days, smearing his face with the blood that came trickling out of his hands—which had been lacerated by the rocks—but given the circumstances, this behavior did not strike me as unusual. I had done my fair share of screaming during the storm in Central Park, and my situation had been far less desperate than his. When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream. The air bunches in his lungs, and he cannot breathe unless he pushes it out of him, unless he howls it forth with all his strength. Otherwise, he will choke on his own breath, the very sky will smother him.

On the morning of the fourth day, with his food gone and his canteen holding less than a cup of water, Effing spotted what looked like a cave at the top of a nearby cliff. It would be a good place to die in, he thought. Out of the sun and inaccessible to vultures, a place so hidden that no one would ever find him.
Mustering his courage, he began the laborious trek upward. It took him almost two hours to get there, and when he arrived, he was at the end of his strength, barely able to stand. The cave was a good deal larger than it had appeared from below, and Effing was surprised to discover that he did not have to crouch to enter it. He pulled away the branches and twigs that blocked the opening and went in. Against all his expectations, the cave was not empty. Stretching a good twenty feet into the interior of the cliff, it contained several pieces of furniture: a table, four chairs, a cupboard, a dilapidated potbelly stove. For all intents and purposes, it was a house. The objects looked well cared-for, and everything in the room was neatly arranged, sitting comfortably in a kind of rough domestic order. Effing lit the candle that was on the table and took it with him to the back of the room, exploring the dark corners where the sunlight did not penetrate. Along the left wall he found a bed, and in the bed there was a man. Effing assumed the man was asleep, but when he cleared his throat to announce his presence and got no response, he bent down and held the candle over the stranger’s face. It was then that he saw he was dead. Not just dead, but murdered. In the place where the man’s copy eye should have been, there was a large bullet hole. The left eye stared blankly into the darkness, and the pillow under the head was splattered with blood.

Turning away from the corpse, Effing walked back to the cupboard and found it filled with food. Canned goods, salted meats, flour and cooking supplies—there was enough packed onto the shelves to last someone a year. He promptly prepared himself a meal, consuming half a loaf of bread and two cans of beans. Once he had satisfied his hunger, he set about disposing of the dead man’s body. He had already worked out a plan; it was simply a matter of putting it into effect. The dead man must have been a hermit, Effing reasoned, living alone like this up in the mountains, and if that were the case, then not many people would have known he was there. From all that he could gather (the flesh still undecomposed, the absence of any overpowering smell, the bread
not yet stale), the murder must have been committed quite recently, perhaps as recently as several hours ago—which meant that the only person who knew the hermit was dead was the man who had murdered him. There would be nothing to prevent him from taking the hermit’s place, Effing thought. They were more or less the same age, they were more or less the same size, they both had the same light brown hair. It would not be very difficult to grow a beard and start wearing the dead man’s clothes. He would take on the hermit’s life and continue to live it for him, acting as though the soul of this man had now passed into his possession. If anyone came up there to pay him a visit, he would simply pretend to be someone he was not—and see if he could get away with it. He had a rifle for self-defense if something went wrong, but he figured the odds were with him in any case, since it did not seem likely that a hermit would have many visitors.

After removing the stranger’s clothes, he dragged the body out of the cave and took it around to the back side of the cliff. There he discovered the most remarkable thing of all: a small oasis thirty or forty feet below the level of the cave, a lush area with two towering cottonwood trees, an active brook, and innumerable shrubs whose names were unfamiliar to him. It was a miniature pocket of life in the midst of overpowering barrenness. As he buried the hermit in the soft earth beside the brook, he realized that everything would be possible for him in this place. He had food and water; he had a house; he had found a new identity for himself, a new and utterly unexpected life. The reversal was almost too much for him to comprehend. Just one hour before, he had been ready to die. Now, he was trembling with happiness, unable to stop himself from laughing as he flung one shovelful of dirt after another onto the dead man’s face.

Months passed. In the beginning, Effing was too stunned by his good fortune to pay much attention to the things around him. He ate and slept, and when the sun was not too strong, he would sit on the rocks outside his cave and watch the bcopy, multicolored lizards that went flitting about his feet. The view from the cliff
was immense, encompassing untold miles of terrain, but he did not look out at it very often, choosing instead to confine his thoughts to the immediate vicinity: his trips to the stream with the water bucket, the gathering of firewood, the inside of his cave. He had had his fill of scenery, and for now he was content to ignore it. Then, very suddenly, this sense of calm abandoned him, and he entered a period of almost unbearable loneliness. The horror of the past months engulfed him, and for the next week or two he came dangerously close to killing himself. His mind swarmed with delusions and fears, and more than once he imagined that he was already dead, that he had died the moment he entered the cave and was now the prisoner of some demonic afterlife. One day, in a fit of madness, he took out the hermit’s rifle and shot his donkey, thinking that it had been turned into the hermit himself, a spectre of wrath who had come back to haunt him with his insidious braying. The donkey knew the truth about him, and he had no choice but to eliminate this witness to his fraud. After that, he became obsessed with trying to uncover the identity of the dead man, systematically ransacking the interior of the cave for clues, looking for a diary, a packet of letters, the flyleaf of a book, anything that might reveal the hermit’s name. But nothing turned up, he never found the slightest particle of information.

After two weeks, he slowly began to return to himself, eventually subsiding into something that resembled peace of mind. It couldn’t go on forever, he told himself, and that alone was a comfort, a thought that gave him the courage to continue. At some point, the food supplies were going to run out, and then he would have to go somewhere else. He gave himself approximately a year, a bit more than that if he was careful. By then, people would have given up hoping that he and Byrne would be coming back. He doubted that Scoresby would ever mail his letter, but even if he did, the results would be essentially the same. A search party would be sent out, financed by Elizabeth and Byrne’s father. They would wander around the desert for several weeks, hunting assiduously for the missing men—there was sure to be a reward
offered as well—but they would never find a thing. At most, they might discover Byrne’s grave, but that was not very likely. Even if they did, it would not get them any closer to him. Julian Barber was gone, and no one was ever going to track him down. It was all a matter of holding out until they had stopped looking for him. The obituaries would be published in the New York papers, a memorial service would be held, and that would be the end of it. Once that happened, he could go wherever he liked; he could become whoever he wanted to be.

Still, he knew that it would not be to his advantage to rush things. The longer he kept himself hidden, the safer it would be when he finally left. He therefore set about organizing his life in the strictest possible way, doing everything he could to stretch out the time he would spend there: limiting himself to one meal a day, laying in an ample supply of firewood for the winter, keeping his body fit. He made charts and schedules for himself, and each night before going to bed he wrote down meticulous accounts of the resources he had used during the day, pushing himself to maintain the most rigorous discipline. In the beginning, he found it hard to achieve the goals he had set, often succumbing to the temptation of another slice of bread or another plate of canned stew, but the effort in itself seemed worthwhile, and it helped to keep him alert. It was a way of testing himself against his own weaknesses, and as the actual and the ideal gradually came closer together, he could not help thinking of it as a personal triumph. He knew that it was no more than a game, but a fanatical devotion was required to play it, and that very excess of concentration was what allowed him to keep from slipping into despondency.

After two or three weeks of this new, disciplined life, he began to feel the urge to paint again. One night, sitting with a pencil in his hand and writing up his brief report of the day’s activities, he suddenly started to sketch out a little drawing of a mountain on the opposite page. Before he even realized what he was doing, the sketch was finished. It took no more than half a minute, but in that abrupt, unconscious gesture, he found a strength that had
never been present in any of his other work. That same night, he unpacked his art supplies, and from then until his colors finally ran out, he continued to paint, leaving the cave every morning at dawn and spending the entire day outside. It lasted for two and a half months, and in that time he managed to finish nearly forty canvases. Without any question, he told me, it was the happiest period of his life.