Waiting For Columbus (20 page)

“These are poems of longing! Of love. Of illicit, impossible love.”

“You seem agitated.” Oh God, that’s jargon, she thinks. It’s stupid and lazy of me. He’s angry. He’s really angry. But this may be a weak spot in Columbus’s defenses, a way in. She can’t remember him this angry, this quickly. The question is why. Why is he so angry about some poetry by a dead Persian poet named Hafiz?

He is angry, he realizes. To hear this poetry reminds him, in a new way, that he is trapped in this place. The truth of this poetry, the power, is too much.

He swallows. Breathes. “No, no, I enjoyed your reading of Hafiz.”

“I just thought they were beautiful. That’s why I picked this book. Perhaps I should have chosen something else … a novel—”

“Hafiz was a good choice.” He stops in the narrow hallway that leads up to ground level from the pool. I never did find the steam room, he thinks. He motions with his hand that she should go first through the doorway. As she passes, he whispers, “You ought to hear them in Persian.”

Columbus looks around the cafeteria but this is not what he sees. He is no longer at the institute. His pen begins to move on a new page in his notebook.

This picture could be in any café in any city in the world. There’s a thirty-something brunette sitting in front of a chessboard across from an empty chair
,
and he begins to imagine a story for her. She’s been studying the board, her narrow chin in her hand, her head leaned slightly to the side. The gray, even light in this café softens the contours of her face. It gives a kind, tender feel to this place. But she’s not interested in the facets of light. She’s looking at the chessboard. Perhaps she’s waiting for an opponent to come back from the washroom. Perhaps she’s just interested in the final positioning of an abandoned game—divining the stories of kings and queens, knights and soldiers. This is a woman who wears scarves, winter, spring, and fall—and quite often in the summer. She is a woman who appears to take great care when it comes to her shoes. They are always high-heeled, and they consistently straddle the line between elegant and fashionable. This is the same woman who wears amazing leather boots that hug her calves with such perfect clarity—boots that persuade her legs to become beautiful and curvaceous
.

He knows this woman but does not recognize her
.

These imagined stories always start with questions and more questions, which eventually lead to suppositions. Abstractions. Oblique theories. Why does she come to this café alone on a Saturday morning? Does she have a family at home? Is this negotiated alone time? There is an “away-ness” about her that speaks of an older place of origin. Was she born in a small town in France? Or Nebraska? A village in Ireland? To be able to say you are from the Basque region of Spain would be very romantic. Perhaps her name is Mary Francis and she was born in Trois-Rivières, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, in Canada. Maybe her name is Mary and she comes from Hope, British Columbia. Of course, there’s no way to know anything about her origins because nothing ever moves in these images
.

It’s easy to imagine she has no immediate family, not here anyway. Her narrative is there in her eyes, which flash with a hazel rawness and lust for life. Maybe she loved someone she was not supposed to love, and this chasm, this crack in her life, is her best story. Does she choose to be alone now? Is she alone? Does she tell her story? Does she whisper this narrative to a lover in a burgundy bedroom at 3 A.M.?

If this picture could move, there might be a younger woman sitting across
from the first woman now. When she arrives, the first woman stands; they hug and kiss each other’s cheeks. This kissing of cheeks is not obligatory; it is a loving ritual between them. The young woman has short but careless blond hair and wears the tortoiseshell, thick-rimmed glasses that represent the trend of the day. She is tapping her foot with nervous energy. She wears runners with red laces
.

There are more questions now, about the first woman, who today is wearing a chestnut-colored scarf … and additional questions about this new blond woman with reckless hair. This “away” woman and the younger woman seem genuinely pleased, comfortable in each other’s company. It is as if they are mother and daughter. But they cannot be related by blood. The color of their eyes, the line of their jaws, their hair—all these things speak to the lack of blood between them. These women are not playing chess. They are only talking and having coffee
.

He would bet that they are more than friends. But all of this is a fabrication—everything but the clear and vivid picture of the first woman sitting silently, motionless, in front of a chessboard across from an empty chair. Everything else is a lie
.

At 3:30 A.M., Columbus and two others break a window and manage
to bash out a section of wire mesh with a chair. Five security guards arrive moments later, before any of them have jumped into the courtyard, and the guards quietly take them back to their rooms. In the morning, Consuela and all the other staff are asked to produce their keys. The three somehow got out of their rooms without breaking anything. All keys are accounted for. So how did they get out? Dr. Balderas, the acting director, is put in charge of the investigation. Security is tightened on the three would-be escapees. Meds are upped. Rooms are searched. Nothing is found. A thong is found in Columbus’s room—tucked in the bottom of a drawer. Consuela has no idea how Columbus would have wound up with a pair of women’s underwear. She tells the orderly to just put them back where he found them. Three weeks pass before Consuela is able to have a chat with Columbus. For two weeks, he’s an isolated, drooling idiot—doped up on sertraline and kept away from the other patients. It takes another week for the drugs to clear his system.

She finds him in the upper courtyard, sitting in the sun, his eyes closed, an orderly thirty feet away, leaning against the main building,
watching. Another orderly is sitting in one of the three stairways reading. She’s not sure if he’s taking a break or if they’re that worried about Columbus. She looks at her patient. He’s got sunglasses propped on his face—not exactly square but they do offer a scratched, half protection. The institute offers all its patients utilitarian sunglasses—signs them out to whoever wants a pair. Insists they be returned intact.

“How are you?”

He flips open his robe, reveals a steady erection. “First one in weeks.”

Nothing surprises her anymore when it comes to Columbus. “Side effect from the drugs?”

“One can only hope,” he says.

“You must be pleased.”

“It scares me. These drugs scare me. I spent months that felt like years out of my mind and … now, two weeks stuck in a hellish nightmare in which I am at sea, and tempted by Satan. And I don’t do well.” He stops, looks up into the sky, moves his hand along the stubble at his jawline. Swallows hard. “I don’t know if I was dreaming or hallucinating.”

She can’t see his eyes. Consuela was not expecting this vulnerability. She drags a chair over, makes a shushing sound in the morning, makes two long lines in the gravel, sits down, and looks at his unshaven face.

“Columbus is at sea. I am at sea. I am on the deck of a ship, which I command. And we are adrift in a thick mist. The mist hangs, it persists, clings to us and we are becalmed. We do not see anything but the paleness, the heat is oppressive, and every time the young man walks by I am bothered. It is not a feeling I expected.”

The crewman is named Bertrand, a skinny young man. This is impossible, yet there it is again. Just thinking about him causes a reaction. There must be something wrong with me, Columbus thinks.

It has been two full days of this becalmed, thick fog, and each night Bertrand and Columbus meet at the starboard bow and talk about what to do. Tonight, Columbus cannot believe his ears.

“If you take me to your cabin,” Bertrand whispers, “I will tell you how to get out of here.”

“What?”

“Bed me,” he says, “and I will save you and your ships.”

“I do not lie down with men, and anyway, from what will you save us?”

“This fog, this becalmed death, this sitting dead in the water while food and water run down, this calm that numbs all hope, this—”

“—Enough. I admit we are in a little trouble. But we are only twenty-six days out. How do I know you have the power to save us from this?”

“You will have to act on your faith, your intuition, trust.”

Columbus turns away from the young man. With both hands firmly grasping the railing, he looks into the thick, black night. “No,” he says, “I will not.”

At noon of the next day there is only a white, even light all around them. Sunlight is brightly diffused. They cannot tell where the sun is, exactly. Crewmen begin to grumble out loud. Columbus stays in his cabin all day. He studies the charts and drinks. At sunset he walks the deck speaking to his crew. He tells them not to worry. “I have seen worse off the coast of Britain. There will be wind tomorrow,” he says. “This won’t last.” The men are silent in the face of his buoyancy.

That night, Bertrand continues his pursuit. “You are famous for your faith in the unbelievable, Columbus. Is my offer too much of a push for that faith?”

They are near Columbus’s cabin, sometime after midnight. The watch has just changed. It is another dead, black night.

“I have faith in things that have small slivers caught up in reality.”

“If you bed me,” Bertrand says, “not only will I get you out of this fog but I will find the land you seek.”

“What?”

“I know exactly where the land is.”

“How could you? Nobody has ever been there before.”

“Has nobody ever been there before?”

Columbus peers into the shadow where Bertrand’s face is hidden. This boy could not possibly know how to find land, he thinks. He is bluffing. It is a bluff I would dearly love to call. How I would like to bed him if only he were a woman. Even with his scarred face and whispered voice, there is something irresistible. If only he were female. I have never had such feelings of lust, passion.