“Be careful,” the wounded man whispered. “Lest you unleash uncertainties into this world.” He was quoting a philosopher long forgotten, or maybe a poet, he couldn’t remember. “Bolder sheep, once released? Who knows where it will end?”
HELL’S GATE
SOFT, THE WORLD EXHALING STEAM. A shifting landscape, the smell of gunpowder, of brimstone. The hiss of heat escaping.
He had driven through tunnels of green to get here, past lakes wet with mist. The filigreed patterns of ferns. A road winding through like a loosely folded rope. Fish bone clouds, thin and delicate. A terrain that was leaking smoke, and a parking lot with tour buses. WELCOME TO HELL’S GATE.
Hell has a souvenir shop? Rafferty laughed. Of course Hell has a souvenir shop.
Unbeknownst to the Maori, and the Europeans who followed them in, Aotearoa, as these islands were known, straddled a line between massive tectonic plates. The underworld often bubbled up, unbidden. The name was apt: Hell’s Gate. It was a biblical realm filled with purgatorial pools named Inferno, and Sodom & Gomorrah, and the Devil’s Cauldron.
Rafferty had come to this smelly, sulfuric domain—the Land of Ruamoko, God of Earthquakes and Volcanoes—to sink himself into its warmth.
“Medicinal,” the lady with the towels assured him as he lowered his body into the steaming mud baths of Hell’s Gate. “Ka pai?”
He nodded. “Ka pai.” It was a Maori turn of phrase that seemed to have entered the language as a whole. All good! Ka pai! It reminded him of the Japanese “bottoms up”: kanpai.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. Grit, perhaps. A scalding defoliate, maybe. In fact, the mud of the Maori gods was silken and smooth, like potter’s clay, and he emerged feeling, if not younger, at the very least, less old. But it was all a ruse. Rafferty was there under false pretenses.
“That didn’t take long,” said the lady as he rinsed off the mud. It ran in rivulets along the gutters of the outdoor shower.
Rafferty was passing himself off as a travel writer, which, although technically true, wasn’t entirely honest either. Hell had happily waived its fees and arranged for a tour guide to show him around.
“Who are you with then?” the guide asked when Rafferty came in, still towel-drying the caked mud from his hair. A typical sun-creased Kiwi, lean to the point of sinewy, affable but oddly taciturn.
“Me?” Raffety waved his hand in the general direction of Toledo. “I’m with the Free Press,” he said. A lie, but not a complete lie. He had indeed pitched the Toledo Free Press a possible travel feature on New Zealand’s spas; it was the Schrödinger’s cat of assignments. Until he opened his email that evening, he was both on and not on assignment.
Ash-dead trees among the green. Scorch marks on the stones revealed flash points of spontaneous ignition. Deep stomach rumblings from below. A hungry landscape. Rafferty and his guide skirted the edge of a sputtering ink pot of water, the fumaroles and steam vents identified and explained as Rafferty nodded, pretended to listen.
This was where tourism in New Zealand began, in the mist-shrouded airs of this unstable, otherworldly landscape. “Europeans have been coming to Rotorua ‘for the waters’ since the 1880s. Ladies with parasols and men with muttonchops and top hats.” They came here to float in the blood-warm waters amid a Calvinistic landscape of grim hells and scowling heights, of broken peaks and sunless valleys now rife with souvenir shops and greenstone emporiums.
Next to Hell was the Garden of Eden, a temperate rainforest with trees that glowed—literally glowed—with an effervescent fur on their bark that grew specifically in this moist, medicinal atmosphere.
“Naturally heated waterfall pool just up ahead. Maori warriors returning from battle would wash away the tapu of death there.”
“This was Maori land?”
“Still is.”
The spiced earth of a damp forest in summer, tiger-striped with light. If you listened carefully, you could hear the trees exhaling. They came out of the forest and back into purgatory. It was a place Raff knew well. Calcified minerals remained where the water had boiled off.
“Entire place looks like the inside of an electric kettle,” he noted.
The guide agreed, pointing out the meaning of the colors they passed: “The yellow, that’s sulfur. Gray is silica. Orange and brown are copper and iron, pink is cinnabar.” He stopped. Looked at Rafferty. “Don’t you need to write that down?”
“Oh. Right.” Rafferty patted his multi-pocketed jacket, came up with a notepad and the nub of a pencil, scribbled down something meant to resemble shorthand.
“You mentioned the Maori,” Rafferty said. “Wanted to ask you about that.” He dug around in a different pocket, produced a crumpled sheet of paper, checked his notes. “Te Arawa, that’s the name of a tribe, right?”
“The name of an iwi, yes.”
“An iwi?”
“One of the seven tribes.”
“So, is Te Arawa the same thing as”—Rafferty consulted the paper, couldn’t pronounce it, pointed instead.
The other man leaned in, read it off the page. “Ngati Wahiao? That’s a subtribe.”
“A subtribe?”
“A hapū of Te Arawa.”
Rafferty was getting closer, he could feel it. He’d jotted this info down from the exhibit display in Christchurch: Maori war club (patu). Te Arawa-Ngati Wahiao. North Island. Rebecca Hodges, M.Sc (ethnology) curator.
“Thing is, I’m looking for someone. An American. Her name is Rebecca, goes by Becks, sometimes. I think she’s been gathering stories around the artifacts of this particular region.”
“Ah. For that, you’ll want to go to Whakarewarewa.”
Rafferty looked blankly at the other man. Maori spellings, together with the speed with which New Zealanders spoke, had stumped him. “Say again?”
“They shorten the name to Whaka, if that helps.”
A grin. “It does.”
“It’s a village. Not far from here. Their iwi is made up of two subtribes, the Tuhourangi and the Ngati Wahiao. If she’s still around, chances are you’ll find her in Whaka. They got a meeting house, treasure stores. Lot of traditions there. Good café, too. Makes a decent hangi pie. Meat and root vegetables, smoked in the earth. Massive portions. You know what they say, the problem with hangi is that a week or two later, you’re hungry again.”
Rafferty didn’t give a damn about hangi. “Where did you say that village was?”
THE TAO OF BRYNNE
IT WAS LIKE WAKING INTO a nightmare, upward out of the darkness, into that land of wounded livers and blackened blood. A body, wracked. The feverish cold.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
Fragmented memories. A three-legged toad. The many walls of Belfast. His mother’s laughter.
“It changes,” she said. “When you’re sleeping. Your voice, how you speak. You’re not from America, are you?”
“No,” he whispered.
The wind was playing the barn as though it were a musical instrument: the tap-tap-tap of a loose slat, the breathy aria of the open door, a whistle in high C through a thin gap in the loft, even an occasional voice-like wail.
“I said a prayer,” she whispered. “More of a wish really, that you wouldn’t die.”
“Prayer and wishful thinking. Same thing,” he said, though he knew this wasn’t so. Wishes were real. A prayer was something else entirely. It was despair in the form of hope.
“So,” she straightened her skirt. “You find things?”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yup. You said, ‘I am the king of forgotten things.’ ”
“Did I?” A half laugh, a crooked smile. A waver of strength returning. “Forgotten, lost, stolen, or misplaced. And not a king. A knight errant, at best.”
“You find treasures? Is that what you do?” She’d never met a treasure hunter before, didn’t even know that was a possibility.
“No. Mainly just… things. Objects that are valuable mainly bec
ause they were lost.” He could see she didn’t understand. “Let me… Let me put it this way. Have you heard of The Maltese Falcon?”
She shook her head.
“No? I suppose not. Why would you? It was a movie that was made a long, long time ago, back before there were colors.” A black-and-white tale of a detective on the hunt for that rarest of objects. Such stuff as dreams are made of. The statuette of a falcon, dating back to the Knights Templar, a treasure priceless for which to kill. “But of course, there was no Maltese Falcon. The one that appears in the film is just a prop.” He knew it well. Inventory WB-90067. “When the filming was over, it was shoved in a box in a studio lot and promptly forgotten. It cost, at most, forty dollars to make. But, when the movie became iconic, the search for the lost movie prop began. It took years, but when the Maltese Falcon was finally uncovered, it sold for more than four million dollars. All for a cheap prop in a make-believe tale. Alfred Hitchcock called such objects ‘MacGuffins.’ ”
“MacGuffin?”
“A word he made up. The MacGuffin itself didn’t really matter. Not to Hitchcock. It could be anything. A secret code or a diamond tiara. Wasn’t important. Was only the means to an end, a way to justify the story. But”—he shifted, fought his way through the pain—“I always thought, ‘What if Hitchcock was wrong?’ ”
“Wrong?”
“What if the MacGuffin is the story? What if that’s what really matters, in movies, in life. The MacGuffins. The things we find along the way, not the machinations that surround them, but the objects themselves. Not the Commandments, but the golden calf.” His blood was poisoned. He could feel the fire radiating outward from his side, throbbing, probing, snaking its way into his flesh. “In my own small way”— he made an attempt at laughter—“I am the Patron Saint of MacGuffins.”
“How can something be valuable just because it got lost? I lose things all the time, and they aren’t worth anything, except to me.”
He tried to shift his weight again, fueling another sear of pain in his side. “If I offered you a slice of cake, you’d be happy, yes?”
“What kind of cake? I don’t like raisin.”
“Whatever kind of cake you wish for.”
“White chocolate?”
“Certainly. Let’s make it white chocolate. Now, imagine a slice of that cake has been sitting in a closet for sixty-seven years. Hard as a rock. Icing that has turned into cement. Completely inedible. Would you still want it?”
She shook her head.
“And what if I told you that slice of cake was worth thousands of pounds. Thousands more in New Zealand dollars.”
“Why would someone pay that much for an old piece of cake you can’t even eat?”
“Because it was lost, and now is found. That slice of cake was from the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II on November 20, 1947. It was saved as a memento by one C. H. Spackman, a guard of honor at the wedding. He tucked it away in a box in his closet, forgot about it, and eventually he passed away. That petrified piece of cake was discovered, put up for auction at Christie’s, and it sold for thousands of pounds.”
“Were you the one who found it?”
But the pain and fever had risen again like an ocean swell, and his head lolled back into the straw. If this is where it ends, where did it begin? In a doily-laden flat on Falls Road. Ceramic figurines with rictus grins, holiday snapshots in ill-fitting frames. This is Portrush. This is Blackpool. Here we are in happier times. “I come from Belfast,” he said, surfacing again. He felt the fever ebb, but knew another wave was gathering strength for a fresh assault. I come from Belfast. It was the one true thing he knew about himself.
“Is it nice there?”
“Belfast? No, not really. A city of churches. Churches and chapels and endless, endless walls. A city of religion. No faith, but lots of religion.”
He’d only ever told his life’s story once before, and then only as a form of misdirection, a narrative sleight of hand. Hide in plain sight. To discover a fellow Ulsterman like Billy Moore, to separate him from the herd, a feckin’ Prod no less, he’d only had to change a few details, shift his childhood a few blocks, from a flat on Falls Road to one on the Shankill, salt in some anachronistic references, a smattering of Americanisms and false leads, and he had shaken his banshee loose. But one mustn’t die with an unconfessed soul. It was impolite. And the desire rose in him to tell his story, just this once, to not let it die with him. It’s what we all boil down to, in the end: a story. “The only thing we can say for certain is that he is NOT Irish, is NOT from Belfast, wasn’t raised by a sad-eyed mother, has probably never been to Belfast.” He’d made a full confession to Agent Rhodes, but she would never know it; he might as well have shouted it into the wind. And when I die, this story dies with me, untold, unmarked. It was the worst form of confession: one without absolution. The dying man could feel his strength drain away again. “Your name?” he asked, hollow chested, barely audible. “You never told me.”
“Catherine.”
He smiled. “Catherine the Great.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Well, you found me, Catherine. And that’s something.”
“Were you lost?”
“I suppose, in a manner of speaking.” His back was prickly with straw. For a moment it seemed as though he were looking down on the scene as if from above; a parody of the Nativity. The lambs, afraid. Wise men nowhere to be found. “This world is better served through cunning than kindness,” he said. “I used to believe that. Now I’m not so sure.” He looked at her. So young, so lacking in guile. “I’m dying, Catherine.”
“You’re not, look. See?” She unwrapped a cheesecloth. “I made you some snacks. In case you’re hungry. Anzac biscuits. I made them myself. It’s easy, just rolled oats and golden syrup. My mom used to make them with walnuts. Those were really tasty. These ones aren’t so much. I’m not very good at baking. I’m not very good at most things.” Field hockey and haircuts and navigating the cruelty of classrooms.
“Most people aren’t very good at most things.” It was one of the kindest things anyone had ever said to her, and she gave him one of the biscuits and he ate it and it was good, and he drank the water and swallowed hard and that, too, was good.
“Have you been to a lot of countries?” she asked.
“I have.”
“What’s it like, the world?”
“Bigger than you imagine. Smaller than you’d think.”
“This one time,” she said, “I put messages in a bottle, sent them out into the world. I was ten or eleven, maybe. I wrote: Hello. My name is Catherine. I live in New Zealand with my dad and we grow sheep. If you want to be friends, you can write me a letter and I promise I will write back no matter what. I gave my address at the bottom, and I rolled up these messages in twelve different bottles that I had saved, and then I flung them out, as far as I could. I was thinking about where they might end up, in Asia or Africa or even Australia, maybe Japan. I imagined a little boy or a girl in Hawaii or Iceland opening one of the bottles and reading my message and sending me a postcard or a letter. And then we would be friends.” She wrapped up the last of the biscuits in a tissue, would save it for later.
“What happened?”
“The bottles? They washed back in, every one of them. When I went out the next morning, the bottles were in the cove below our house, all twelve, bobbing on the waves. I had to go down the path and fish them out, one by one.” She was quiet for a moment. “That wasn’t a very good day.”
“But you tried.”
“It didn’t matter. They rolled back in, every single bottle, every message I wrote. There were no little boys or girls in Iceland or Mexico who would ever find them. There was just me.” Then: “I can’t wait to be a grown-up.” She could see a hypothetical time when she would move through life, unopposed and unafraid, shedding former selves as she went.
He raised himself onto one elbow. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Sh
e nodded, eager to hear. No one ever confided in her, and she, in turn, had no one to confide in.
“All of us adults? Seem so confident? We’re faking it. We’re no more certain of things than you are, we just hide it better. There is no future you, Catherine. There’s just you, patched together, stumbling forward. It’s something they never tell you when you’re young.”
A secret shared demands a confidence, in kind. “Can I tell you something, too?” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.” She faltered. It was the self-conscious smile of someone trying to please the school photographer.
“Of course, you may,” he said. “I’m very good at keeping secrets.”
“My dad has these numbers I’m supposed to keep track of for him: number of food units, response time. There’s a clipboard with forms I’m to fill in. But sometimes, I just”—she smiled in spite of herself—“I just make them up.”
“Good! Let him fill in his own damn numbers, right?”
“He’s nice, though,” she said, quickly, fearing she’d betrayed her father somehow. “My dad, he’s a dab hand at anything he puts his mind to. He says, ‘I can fix near about anything with just a bit of pluck and some number eight wire.’ It’s true. He can. He’s probably a genius. The girls at my school, they make fun of us, which is okay, honest, I’m used to it, it doesn’t bother me so much anymore, it really doesn’t, but when they go on and on and make fun of us, of me and my dad, the teachers don’t say anything, they kind of smile, too, like they secretly agree, and that’s the part I don’t like.” She was trying not to cry, knuckled the tears back into her eyes. “I miss my mom.” Why couldn’t those rocks have rolled right through the school? Why did they have to stop short like that? “I never go anywhere,” she sobbed. “Just from the farm to the school and back again.” She closed her eyes, pressed her fingers into the corners, stanching the sadness the way pressure stops the bleeding, but her eyes remained raw and red. She cleared her throat, did her best not to sniffle. “Do you want the last biscuit?”
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