No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  One evening in late September, however, Kaprow invited Joshua home with him for TV dinners and drinks. The physicist had a tiny cottage on the beach, and the first thing Joshua noticed about it when he stepped through the door was that every wall was lined with books. Most of them appeared to be math or science texts, but the glass-fronted cabinet near the kitchen was devoted entirely to tomes about Germany’s Third Reich: memoirs, biographies, historical studies, photographs, psychological monographs, and even a healthy smattering of novels, although until this moment Joshua had supposed Kaprow completely indifferent to fiction. Fiction with a specific historical basis was apparently another matter.

  The fried chicken in the frozen TV dinners seemed to have been basted with orange marmalade, and the mashed potatoes were like warm lumps of moist flour, but neither Joshua nor Kaprow was a dedicated gourmet, and they ate without complaining. Afterward, Kaprow broke out a bottle of Napoleon brandy that made up handsomely for the minor indignity of the dinner. They sat in the living room, in the gathering dusk, and drank. The books on the shelves grew darker and darker, and Joshua found himself sinking by twilight degrees into a state of mellow grogginess.

  “Am I going to survive this business?”

  “The brandy?”

  “No, sir. The dreamfaring.”

  “Well, soon enough you’ll be undergoing survival training in Zarakal. That ought to help.”

  “I’m talking about the psychological aspect, I think. The way it’s going to hit me when I come face to face with the substance of my dreams and I’m no longer exactly dreaming. That’s what I want to know if I’m going to survive. The trauma. What do you think?”

  “You’re probably a better judge of that than I am, Joshua. I’m not you, after all. And vice versa.”

  For several minutes Joshua watched the light dance across the surface of the brandy in his snifter. “What happened to the Indian who spirit-traveled back to Seventh Cavalry days?”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Stallworth. I stayed after him, though. It wasn’t exactly voluntary.”

  “Nothing happened to the Indian.”

  “He quit, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he quit. Not because of any emotional trauma, however. He didn’t like being surrounded by machinery—technological artifacts, he called the components that helped get him back. He decided the dreamfaring process violated his heritage. And so he went his way, sadder but wiser. I suppose.”

  “What about you?”

  Kaprow looked across the darkening room at his visitor.

  “What about you?” Joshua persisted. “Where do you go, when you go? Which when do you visit? What’s your attunement?”

  Kaprow leaned back in his chair and put his feet on a hassock. A moment later he said, “Hitler’s Germany. Dachau. In clever Aryan disguise, Joshua, I visit the ovens.”

  They talked for a long time.

  * * *

  That December the elf-sized effigies in the display window of the record shop looked to Joshua less like angels than embryonic bats. Each little figure was outfitted with cottony wings, a gown sprinkled with glitter, and a halo that appeared to be a Frisbee spray-painted an ugly gold. Worse, nearly every “angel” was holding in its malformed hands an album jacket featuring a full-color close-up of either a syphilitic or a coke-disfigured recording artist. (The simulation of disease- or drug-induced lesions was a minor show-biz trend this holiday season.) The effect was sublimely tacky. On the other hand, in its calculated contempt for every Christmas bromide, the display was perfect, the sort of flamboyant decadence that gave Big Gene Curtiss fits.

  Past other gussied-up windows and shop fronts, Joshua moved aimlessly through the mall. He had money in his pockets and a full month of leave before the Air Force sent him PCS (Permanent Change of Station) to East Africa. Before he left Eglin, he had presents to buy—for Big Gene Curtiss, Cosette Tru and her father at the Mekong Restaurant, and Woody Kaprow and a few of the other personnel working on the White Sphinx Project. None of them expected gifts, of course, but they were the only family he had these days and he wanted to do a little something for them.

  As for Jacqueline, well, she was still in school in Washington, D.C., newly engaged to a friend and colleague of her brother Dzu’s in the State Department. She had eased herself out of Joshua’s mind as painlessly as a pickpocket lifts a wallet, in part because he had come to agree with her objections to his suit, in part because the last year and a half had revealed to him the mission foreordained for him at birth. Jacqueline, for her part, appeared to have given up her hope of being canonized a second Our Lady of the Slums in favor of marriage and a civil-service career. Maybe these last goals were not, finally, incompatible with the first. . . .

  Almost against his will, Joshua thought of the family he had abandoned. It had been nearly seven years since he had seen his mother, Jeannette Monegal, and even longer than that since he had talked to Anna, his sister.

  Adoptive mother, he mentally corrected himself. Foster sister.

  But the qualifiers did not sanitize the guilt that suddenly came seeping up through him like a tide of untreated sewage. Anna he had always loved. His mother he had repudiated because she had betrayed him for the sake of a spurious tribute consisting, in fact, of a sizable advance for a book that he had kept her from publishing. After all this time, that betrayal, coupled with her treatment of Hugo, still rankled, still made him see red.

  Et tu, brute.

  Dante had consigned those treacherous to their own kin to the first round of the ninth, and final, circle of hell. These contemptible folks were imprisoned up to their necks in a vast lake of ice. Why feel guilty, then, about simply removing oneself from a betrayer’s sphere of influence? In comparison to Dante’s vindictiveness, Joshua was the saint that Jackie Tru had always wanted to be. . . .

  “Jesus, runt, watch where you’re going!”

  Startled, Joshua rebounded from a clean-cut young serviceman who, but for the passage of four years, could have been the identical twin of the would-be Ranger in whose company Joshua had first encountered Jackie. The serviceman angrily shook his head and escorted his companion—a blue-jeaned ingénue with a simulated lip lesion—around Joshua, who mumbled an apology and backed away. More than likely he would be going overseas soon, this strapping GI. Everyone seemed to be going overseas. The United States had more foreign outposts than the Roman legions.

  Whether by chance or unacknowledged design, Joshua edged along the wall of plate glass behind him into a bookstore.

  This Christmas the most prominently displayed paperbacks in the open storefront were a series of photo-novels devoted to the exploits of Count Stanislaw Stodt, a vampire in the employ of the CIA. A boxed set of five of these adventures was being touted as this year’s most popular stocking stuffer. Joshua sidled past these displays to the hardcover tables, where management had laid out its inventory of serious fiction: hauntings, space operas, espionage thrillers, movie tie-ins, political biographies, and the complete works of Wilkie Collins, now enjoying a renascence in updated abridgments by Stephen King.

  “Can I help you?”

  Glancing up, Joshua beheld a slender young man with watery blue eyes and the mustache of a Central American revolutionary. The standard response to this standard query, Joshua knew, was “No, thank you, I’m just looking,” but Joshua invariably employed another—to engage, if only briefly, the clerk’s professional expertise and to dispel the impression that he was merely one more itinerant airman killing time. To wit:

  “Do you have Jeannette R. Monegal’s I Couldn’t Put It Down, and I Was Sorry When It Ended?”

  The young man laughed. “Boy, that’s an old one. I’m afraid it’s out of print, even in paper.”

  Now, of course, the clerk was supposed to apologize and wander off, leaving Joshua free to browse as he liked.

  Instead the clerk said, “She’s written a new book, though. Maybe you’d like to take a look at it. Our copies came
in just last week.”

  “A new book?”

  “Yes. I forget the title. Right over here.”

  Joshua’s heart began to hammer his chest the way a fetus sometimes pummels its mother’s stomach. But he followed the young man to a shelf from which he withdrew a thick book in a glossy dark-green jacket. Frightened, Joshua could feel the warmth draining from his hands, almost as if his fingers were spigots. He closed his eyes.

  “Eden in His Dreams.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the clerk said.

  “That’s the title—Eden in His Dreams.”

  “No, sir. Not by this author. Here, why don’t you thumb through it? It’s not selling all that well yet, but we expect it to.”

  Joshua blurted, “But this is a novel.”

  “Yeah. Her first foray into fiction. Publishers Weekly liked it, for whatever that’s worth. Give it a gander.”

  The clerk left Joshua alone with the book, which, as hefty as a Hebraic tablet, he clutched in trembling hands.

  It was entitled The Outcast. The cover showed a tatterdemalion child crouching in the shadow thrown by an immense barred door. Yes indeed. A novel.

  Joshua let the book fall open and began to read. His mother’s narrative style seemed to be a cross between perfervid Mary Shelley and early Joyce Carol Oates. He tried to pick up at least a strand of the story line from this perusal, but so intense was his relief that the book was not Eden in His Dreams, he could think of little else. Gratitude welled up, and another fetid hint of guilt.

  Jeannette had spared him. In fact, she had spared him for nearly seven years. That, insofar as he understood the law, marked the statute of limitations for a great many criminal offenses. If old movies and numerous detective novels did not err, a person who had not been heard from in seven years could be declared legally dead. . . . Maybe it was time he began to forgive his mother, demonstrated to her by word and deed the fact of his continuing existence. In less than three weeks he would be descending the ramp of a commercial airliner at Marakoi International Airport in Zarakal. He would not return to the States until the end of the decade, assuming, of course, that he did not perish in the iffy ghost-past to which White Sphinx would eventually post him.

  Joshua carried the book forward to the cashier’s island and placed it on the counter. A dark young woman in a red velour jumpsuit turned the book around, studied the jacket painting, and then keyed the book’s price into the cash computer: $21.95.

  “You like Jeannette Monegal’s stuff, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never read a novel by her before.” He put three ten-dollar bills on the counter and waited for his change.

  “You’re some gambler, then. You wait long enough and you could probably pick this up on a discount table for less than the paperback. Four and a quarter or so.”

  “With me it’s now or never. I’ve never been able to delay the gratification of my impulses.”

  “I know a bunch o’ fellas like you.” The cashier raised her eyebrows, slid The Outcast into a brown paper sack, and counted out his change.

  Joshua winked a conspiratorial goodbye and left.

  On the shuttle bus back to Eglin—he had sold his Kawasaki to an airman in recreational services—he took the novel out of its grainy, biodegradable sack and opened it on his knees like a dictionary or a Bible. Then he thumbed forward from the end papers to the table of contents. While he was riffling these leaves, an inscription at the top of an otherwise virgin page caught his eye, and he turned back to see what he had missed.

  It was the dedication:

  In memory of

  Encarnación Consuela Ocampo

  and

  Lucky James Bledsoe

  —

  for all that they gave me

  That evening Joshua telephoned his mother’s Riverdale apartment from the day room in his barracks. No one answered. He dialed the number every half-hour. Shortly after eleven he reached a thin masculine voice that told him, peevishly, Jeannette Monegal had not had this particular telephone number for at least five years. Joshua called information and learned that although his mother no longer had a listing for Riverdale, the directory did show a few other Monegals whose first initials corresponded to his mother’s. He tried three such numbers with no success and a sense of mounting frustration. At midnight he hauled himself upstairs and fell into bed.

  In the morning his first thought was Ah ha, I’ll call Anna.

  But Anna had left Agnes Scott in Atlanta at least five years ago, and when he finally reached a hired official in the school’s alumnae society and tried to talk her into divulging the present whereabouts of Miss Anna Rivenbark Monegal, class of 1980, he was met with a distant, scrupulously polite, “Sorry—not a chance,” the implication being that he sounded like a rapist, a salesman, or some other unsavory blight on the stately live oak of civilization.

  Then, like being sideswiped by a Greyhound bus, it hit him: Van Luna, Kansas! Where but Van Luna, Kansas, would his mother and his sister retreat for the Christmas holidays? Nowhere else but!

  Excitedly Joshua put through a long-distance call to the residence of Mrs. William C. Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas. In 1972, at precisely this time of year, Old Bill had died of a heart attack in Cheyenne. He and Peggy had come to Wyoming—their second such trip—to visit their daughter and grandchildren for Christmas while Hugo was supervising the loading of B-52 bomb bays at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. Under decidedly peculiar circumstances, in the bedroom of Pete and Lily Grier, the Monegals’ former landlords, Bill Rivenbark had collapsed and nearly lost consciousness. Pete Grier had been out of state at the time, attending a bowl game in New Orleans with a cousin from Texas, and Lily, in an exemplary dither, had telephoned Jeannette to come and rescue her father before Peggy, asleep in the Monegals’ old apartment downstairs, discovered that her husband was upstairs with Lily rather than stretched out beside her in connubial repose.

  Angry and distraught, Jeannette had answered Lily’s plea, taking ten-year-old John-John with her to the Griers’ house since Anna was spending the night at a friend’s. Upstairs his grandfather had lain supine on another man’s bed, his dentures clamped together like a strip of yellow whalebone. The old man’s eyes had been as elusive as welding sparks, seeming to go everywhere without settling on anything. Bill had suffered a second heart attack in the hospital’s emergency room, and that one had finished him off. . . . Joshua’s recollection of this incident took on embarrassing vividness as the widow’s telephone rang. Maybe this was a mistake. He held the receiver away from his head and considered hanging up.

  “Hello?” A cautious female voice, girlish rather than elderly.

  “Anna?”

  “Who is this, anyway?”

  Joshua told her. There intervened a silence like the silence a bowler experiences after lofting a gutter ball. You couldn’t hear a pin drop.

  “Come on, Anna, talk to me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Is Mom there? I saw Mom’s book, the novel.”

  “She’s not here, Johnny. She may get here for Christmas, she may not. Everything’s up in the air. Where are you?”

  He wanted to tell her about meeting Alistair Patrick Blair a year and a half ago, but realized that every aspect of the White Sphinx Project, especially the involvement of the Zarakali paleontologist, was classified. Besides, Anna and he were using an unprotected public line. Besides, she probably didn’t give a damn.

  “Can’t talk long. I’ve been finger-feeding this squawk-box quarters for hours, just trying to run you folks down. ’Bout out o’ change. Anna, I’ve got to know if Mom—”

  “Are you coming?”

  Joshua Kampa, alias John-John (Johnny) Monegal, studied the receiver as if it were the single bone of contention separating him from his family. Deliberately he asked, “You inviting me?”

  “Get out here, you goddamn little defector. Of course I’m inviting you. Of course I’m—” Anna stuck, exasperated or overcome.
“Just get on out here, all right?”

  * * *

  It took two days to catch a MAC transport aircraft from Eglin to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, but only six hours to claim a seat on a giant, pelicanesque C-141 departing Lackland for McConnell. He rode in the belly of this prodigious bird with twenty other space-available bindlestiffs, a convoy of six haunted-looking blue buses, and several canvas-draped cylinders.

  One young airman claimed that the cylinders were unarmed nuclear warheads, while a paunchy officer in wire-rim glasses pooh-poohed this notion, declaring them experimental plastic cisterns for catching and storing water in certain hypothetical combat situations. Their ultimate destination was Fort Carson in Colorado. Joshua did not wait to see who emerged victorious in the warhead/cistern controversy. He disembarked the C-141 as soon after it had set down as the pilot would permit. It was cold in Wichita, and he pulled his Air Force horse-blanket coat tight about his neck and chest.

  Once off base, Joshua walked the right-hand side of the highway to Van Luna waiting for a ride. Finally a captain in a 1956 Nash Metropolitan picked him up and carried him the remainder of the way.

  Van Luna, once a farming village as well as a modest bedroom community for people employed in Wichita, had spilled over the countryside like the markers in a vast Monopoly game. Tract houses, convenience stores, and motels were everywhere. The highway between McConnell and Van Luna afforded only an occasional glimpse into the pastureland or the cottonwood copses beyond the roadside clutter; and Joshua, despite a long-term familiarity with the mercantile sprawl of Florida’s Miracle Strip, felt betrayed. Even if he had lived here only five years, Van Luna was the Eden of his dreams of childhood. Its streets and fields had represented, at least in memory, the landscape of his choppy evolution toward self-knowledge, a process he still did not regard as complete. This ongoing complication of the simple geometries—the innocent geometries—of the original town was demoralizing.

  “Damn.”

  “You’re welcome,” said the captain, letting him out not far from the building that had once housed Rivenbark’s Grocery.