Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (12 page)

“Then come with us.”

In those days, I was aware of little more than my chronic rage; I had not noticed, until that moment, my loneliness. Thus, despite my filthy mood, I went with him. We walked back to the card game, which the players packed up in short order, and then we all crept through the mesquite trees in the direction of the river. I dragged myself along at the rearguard, taking my own un-sweet time about it.

We sat in the bushes by the Rio Grande for a couple of hours, playing cards, sipping from various bottles, smoking cigarettes, watching the sky in case any DSI hovercraft showed up unexpectedly. I drank more than I had planned. The rage was gone, leaving a rotten though not unpleasant melancholy in its wake. I didn’t say much, but I couldn’t help smiling at the crazy jokes being tossed around. The Aztecs were in high spirits, and I began to feel somewhat improved myself. When the sun set and twilight threw a nice cover over us, they crawled out of the bushes, stripped down to their undershorts, and plunged into the water, hooting and screaming. I did not join them. I drank some more and watched.

At one point, Alvaro came up out of the river and stood on the shore, beckoning me in.

“Come on, Hoyos; don’t be scared; the water’s great.”

“I ain’t scared”, I snapped, slipping back into my mood.

“Yeah, you’re scared. You think life’s gonna hand you a tortilla full of
mierda
every day of the week.”

“Yeah, well it does. It already did.”

“So?”

“So, I’ll just sit here and wait for the next pile of
mierda
to hit.”

“Coward!” he mumbled, with a haughty look.

If he had shouted it, I wouldn’t have been provoked. But the way he said it, as if he meant it, triggered something in me. I stood up and hobbled down to the shore and pushed him hard on the chest. He staggered and fell into the mud. He leaped up and pushed me back. My balance was not great, due to the leg, and I fell into the mud. I tripped him. Then we flew into a punching match, yelling and thrashing about in the horizontal position. Some of the
muchachos
swam toward us to break it up.

We both scrambled to our feet and resumed punching. I hit him hard on the nose, and it began to bleed. He landed a good one to my stomach, and I doubled over, down on one knee. Then I threw myself at him, tumbling us both into the water, where the bashing and adolescent roaring went on for some time, until, I suppose, we had both exhausted ourselves. At that point, the Aztecs arrived, separated us, and hauled us back onto shore. The bottles were passed around, cigarettes were lit, and a good deal of joshing was launched by the others in order to defuse the situation.

I looked at Alvaro warily.

He looked at me warily.

Then we both started laughing—uncontrollable, cathartic laughter. He fell down on the mud and rolled around, guffawing and bleeding, holding his belly. I dropped to my knees, gasping and bleeding, and pretty hysterical too.

“H-h-hoyos”, Alvaro crowed when he could speak again. “Today I will not kill you. Do you know why I will not kill you?”

“No. Tell me why you think you will not kill me, though you would not be able to do it anyway.”

“I will not kill you because your Mama and Papa saved my life when I was a red blossom kid. And your Mama she taught me how to read; she gave me education because I cannot go to the school.”

“Fair trade”, I said.

On an impulse, I tore off my clothing and lurched toward the river, screaming as I dove into the water, and the last sound I heard was the cheering of the Aztecs.

The river was colder than I thought it would be. My unused muscles went into violent spasm as the current swept me into deeper water. I struggled against it, trying to swim, but I was full of alcohol and drained by the fistfight. I went down in a panic and only survived because Alvaro dove in after me and pulled me up from the bottom. He and his pals dragged me onto the shore and knocked the water out of my lungs at the very last minute before I was to expire and go onward prematurely, anonymously, Nobel-less, into eternity.

Eight months later, Alvaro was shot to death by an undercover mall marshal while trying to get into a sandwich machine at a shopping complex in Tucson, Arizona. At the time, he had been hitchhiking through the Southwest, looking for under-the-radar farm work. He was having no luck, and the day he died he was desperately hungry. When the news reached our village, I decided then and there never to swim again.

Standing in the
Kosmos
pool all these years later, I sighed, remembering Alvaro, wondering what he might have become if given even a fraction of a chance. In his honor, I did a dog paddle from one side of the pool to the other, forcing my legs to resist the pull of gravity, also resisting my psychological need to touch bottom. I did just fine. Then I performed something like a breaststroke back and forth. This was followed by a crawl. I did a few more lateral laps and really liked the feel of it. The pain in my lower leg and bad ankle was down to minimal.

Finally, winded, I stood up in shallow water and surveyed the inland sea. The waves I had made were still kissing the distant shores. Eyeing the diving board, I shook my head emphatically. “No way”, I murmured, and meant it.

But then it crossed my mind how pleasant it would be to tell Pia that I had done real lengths. Taking a deep breath, I eased my body forward and launched into a long, slow crawl. Little by little, the old muscle memory returned, some of it sluggish but mostly not. At one point, I stopped to tread water and let my legs glide downward. My toes no longer touched the bottom. This gave me a moment of near panic, but I pressed onward, resuming a carefully paced and deliberately meditative crawl above the suction of the abyss.

I touched the distant rim and turned around for the homeward journey, arriving where I’d started with neither mishap nor undue alarm nor water in the lungs. It was a great feeling to have mastered an old enemy after a lapse of more than half a century.

I did a few more lengths. On the final one, I was struck with a moment of awe when I realized that I was lazily performing laps in a miniature body of water within a vessel that was, itself, doing one great lap on an infinite sea. The micro-abyss within the macro-void. I could not tell which of these I was afloat upon. The
Kosmos
was speeding toward AC-A-7 at around one hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second, a velocity impossible for the human mind to conceptualize, except abstractly. The ship was doing the unthinkable, conceptualizing and actualizing simultaneously. And I, swimming in the opposite direction at the moment, was maintaining a speed of about one kilometer per hour.

The immensity of it, the apparent contradictions of it, seemed visual for a second or two. It stunned me and immobilized me. Fortunately, this occurred in shallow water. I got out of the pool and dried myself, feeling my mind stretching to breaking point. And because I did not want it broken, I shook off the images of proportion and relativity and returned to my room for a sleep, which proved to be a luxuriously deep one.

Day 1002
:

Today, my first invitation to visit the home of a neighbor. It was triggered when I stopped Xue in the hallway and asked if I could make a copy of the poem he gave me and pass it on to someone else. He agreed without hesitation, then asked me to come along to his room because he wanted to show me something.

I won’t embarrass the poor fellow by leaving a detailed paper record of what his room looks like. Let me at least say that while it is structurally identical to mine, the difference can be seen at every turn. It is pin-neat. It is obsessively neat. It is pathologically neat. The few books on his shelves are arranged according to finely sliced categories. There are no photos beaded to the walls. It looks like no one really lives here. Back home in my real cabin in the mountains, I have high-class litter everywhere and keep adding to it: stacks of books on side tables, my writing desk a heap of papers, fascinating phenomena from nature sitting on window sills, a giant wasp nest hanging from the rafters, a magnificent horse’s skull in the entrance hall, waiting to greet my hypothetical visitors, etc., etc. By contrast, Xue’s cell is a shrine devoted to pristine oriental order.

“Are you a Buddhist, Ao-li?” I asked him upon entering his little home away from home.

“No, though I am sympathetic to its aesthetics.”

“A Confucian, then?”

“I admire the concepts of harmony in the Dao, but no, I am not a disciple of Confucius in the religious sense.”

“You keep a real clean house.”

“It is restful, and conducive to clear thought.”

“You should get out more, have a little fun.”

“I’ll make an effort.”

“Don’t tell me you spend all your time doing physics. You gave me that poem, after all. And there’s your Shui-mo too, though I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

“I will show you when my skills are more developed.”

“Well, it’s good to see you’ve got some diversion.”

“Mastery of different languages, rational and supra-rational, is an essential part of comprehending harmony. Macrocosm, for example, cannot be truly understood without the celestial language that derives from beyond it.”

He was getting all obscure on me, which is a trait of his. I was still absorbing the aforementioned when he said, “I have something to show you that may illuminate the answers to your many questions.”

He went to a closet cupboard, said what I think is the word
open
in Chinese, and the door vanished sideways. Within, sitting alone on a shelf, was a sculpture of some kind. He picked it up carefully and brought it to me.

It was dark metal, very old, spotted with rust. A stag with a great rack of antlers, about eight inches tall by eight inches long. Sitting on its back, side-saddle, was a little man reading a scroll with intense concentration. The deer’s head was turned sideways, looking at me.

First it made me laugh, so whimsical did it seem, as if this were the artist’s intention. Then I felt a subtle kind of . . . of what? Some kind of happiness maybe?

“Obviously not a literal scene”, I said.

“Correct, not literal.”

“But what does it mean? What is it saying? How old is it? Where did you get it?”

“So many questions, Neil. Let the image speak.”

I did, and he observed me in his peculiar Xue way, quietly smiling to himself.

“It’s really beautiful”, I sighed. “But I don’t pretend to understand it.”

“It is a depiction of the spirit of poetry.”

“Ah”, I said, handing it back to him.

Day 1003
:

The sculpture was given to Xue years ago by his father. His was a family of artisans who for generations have made such things and sold them in a little shop on a side street in a poorer section of Beijing.

Today, while surfing, I found a surprising quote from the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens. Recalling that Pia likes his books, I decided to e-mail it to her, along with Xue’s Li Po poem, addressing my message to her name, care of her clinic, since I don’t have her private address. Before tapping the send button, however, I reconsidered.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

—Charles Dickens

Whew, what a close call! I deleted the message and wrote it out by hand on a sheet of my white bond paper, which I folded into an airplane with her name on the wings. I took it down to the clinic to deliver it personally, but Pia wasn’t on duty, so I asked one of her colleagues to give it to her. Li Po was also delivered as an airplane. Dreams take wings.

Later in the day, there was a knock at my door. I said, “Open”, and the door disappeared into the walls. No one was there. Suddenly a brown arm and hand appeared and fired a green paper airplane into the room. The door slid shut. Astonished (no one has ever come a-calling before), I picked up the airplane. Inked on it in purple script were the words:
Thanks, pardner
.

Day 1005
:

Earlier today I gave a copy of the Li Po poem to Dariush. He read it and seemed thrilled. This evening after our usual study session, as we were sipping our drinks in the bistro, he said in Kashmiri: “I must tell you, Neil, that the poem stirred something in me. These intuitions emerge from the hearts of every race and at every period of history.”

“This is so”, I replied sagely (in English). “Human emotions produce universal images.”

Replying in that language, he said, “By the word heart, I do not mean the emotions. I mean the deepest intuitions in the soul.”

“The soul. A much-debated topic.”

“Indeed.”

“Are you saying you believe it exists, that it’s more than just the flashing of synapses at a subtle neurological level, which stimulates a particular zone of the brain?”

“I believe it is more than that. Would you not agree that one can map precisely the ancient road that passes through the lands between Rome and Naples in Italy, and at the same time, one may remain largely ignorant of the men who built that road in ages past, and equally ignorant of the vanished civilization that passed to and fro on it?”

“Forgive me, Dariush, but the analogy is flawed.”

“As are all analogies. But, oh, look at me; I am distracted from my subject, which is poetry. After you gave me the Li Po this morning, I did some research. By the way, where did you find it?”

“The physicist Xue Ao-li gave it to me.”

Surprisingly, Dariush convulsed into chortling laughter (I have never before seen him crack a smile) and threw his arms in the air.

“Oh splendid”, he said. “How interesting these coincidences. You see, I, too, have brought you a poem.”

“Really?” I sat back, chuckling nervously.
This is a little weird
, I thought to myself.

“Yes, yes”, he went on, “Yet, before I give it to you, I must explain that my composition is only loosely based on the original. Though the sense is close, the wording and some images are slightly altered.”