No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  The old business district, the cobblestone heart of Van Luna, did not look greatly different from Joshua’s memory of it. Although under the proprietorship of a stranger, the grocery was still a grocery. Even better, the façade of the old Pix Theatre had been restored. Joshua walked through an older neighborhood to his mother’s mother’s house, aware of the townspeople’s tentative curiosity and the chilly tingle of the December air.

  At the front door of an old-fashioned red-brick house with Tudor trim and ranks of gorgeous evergreen shrubs around the porch and walls, Joshua knocked. No one came. He pressed the buzzer and heard a thin, protracted raspberry deep inside the house. Whereupon the door swung open and there stood Anna, simultaneously smiling a welcome and trying to shush him to absolute silence. She was pregnant, quite far along, and their enthusiastic hug had to accommodate itself to the salience of her belly.

  “Come in,” she whispered. “Don’t stand out there in the cold—come in, Johnny, come in.”

  He did not budge. “What’s the deal, Anna? You married?”

  There in the doorway she explained that, yes, she was married; her husband was a man named Dennis Whitcomb, but Anna had not taken his last name. An ensign in the Navy, Whitcomb was stationed aboard the nuclear carrier Eisenhower, which was presently at rest in the harbor of the new naval facility at Bravanumbi, Zarakal.

  “Zarakal!” Joshua exclaimed in a high-pitched whisper.

  “Mutesa Tharaka’s country, Johnny. You know, the place where all those people starved to death a few years ago. On special occasions he wears some sort of early human skull on his head.”

  “Your husband?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Right, I do. It’s a habiline skull, Anna. President Tharaka wears it to celebrate the origin of humanity in his own backyard. It’s also a sign of his own preeminence in Zarakal.”

  “Good for him. Do you mind if we go inside?”

  “Lead the way.”

  Anna, who had not yet spoken above a whisper, led him to a sofa upholstered in a satiny floral print. She made him sit down, but did not herself take a seat. Instead, one hand in the small of her back, she paced a threadbare Oriental rug whose faded pattern reminded Joshua of a paisley shirt he had owned in Cheyenne. The room smelled of camphor, cedarwood, and, strangely, peppermint. It was shuttered, curtained, and wallpapered. The miasma of Peggy Rivenbark’s widowhood drifted from room to room like nerve gas, and Anna, suddenly, appeared to be suffering a convulsion of memory.

  “Do you still have those dreams, Johnny?”

  “Sometimes, yeah, I do. But I’m undergoing a treatment that’s supposed to help me control them.”

  “I was afraid the damn things would kill you.”

  “They might yet.”

  “But if you’re learning to control them—”

  “Scratch ‘They might yet,’ Sis. Melodramatic license. I’m fine.”

  “You’ve joined the Air Force. Following in Dad’s footsteps?”

  “Not too far, I hope.” Anna took his meaning, and he said, “The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to waive the height limitations for me. A blow for the civil rights of short people.”

  “Now you have a reason to live.”

  “Amen, Sister.”

  “Are you being sent overseas, too?”

  “Right after New Year’s.”

  “Where?”

  He decided, unilaterally, that this much, at least, he could divulge to his own sister. “Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in—”

  “Zarakal!”

  “I thought we were supposed to be whispering.”

  Halted in front of Joshua, Anna lowered her voice again: “Maybe you’ll be able to meet Dennis—No, probably not. They’re set for a long cruise in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don’t know exactly when. Soon, though. The Midway and the frigate T. C. Hart were strafed recently by American-made jets flown by—well, they think they may have been PLO sympathizers in the Saudi Arabian Air Force. No one knows for sure. They’re keeping it out of the news, Dennis says. It’s weird. Weird and scary.”

  “Yes.”

  “I met Dennis in Athens.”

  “Greece?”

  “Georgia, you turkey. He was going to the Navy School there. Did you know that Roger Staubach went there in the sixties?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Anyway, I’d gone over to Athens for one of the University of Georgia’s drama productions. Buried Child by Sam Shepard. During the second intermission I bumped into Dennis.”

  “Which intermission resulted in that bump?” He nodded at her belly.

  “You mean ‘intromission,’ don’t you? Well, we’ve never kept count. And I don’t remember you being such a wise guy.” Anna eased herself onto the sofa beside Joshua and kissed him daintily on the temple. “Welcome home, short stuff.”

  * * *

  Under a gingham canopy in an antique four-poster in the master bedroom, Peggy Rivenbark lay. She had been sickly ever since Bill’s death thirteen years ago, but only over the Christmas holidays, in perverse commemoration of the betrayal that had made her a widow, did she surrender to the elegant purdah of her bed. Who would have thought that, taking advantage of Pete Grier’s absence, Bill would have crept upstairs from his daughter’s former apartment to the boudoir of frumpy, frozen-pie-faced Lily, there to commit a cardiac-arresting instance of extramarital hanky-panky?

  “Should I go in to see her?” Joshua asked.

  “I don’t think we even need to let her know you’re here.”

  “She still associates me with that night, doesn’t she? I let it slip where Mom and I had found Bill, and I’m still the evil messenger of the Rivenbark household.”

  “It’s been a damn long time, honey. Peggy’s convinced herself that you’re dead. This probably isn’t the best time to show her you’re still kicking.”

  “Okay, I’ll play. No ghosts for Grandma.”

  “Good.”

  Before he could ask Anna about their mother, she rose by pushing off against his shoulder and beckoned him into the sunny kitchen on the house’s southwest side.

  Green glass canisters for sugar, flour, and tea. Knotty-pine cabinets. A bay window overlooking a margin of neat, winter-brown lawn, the kind of lawn that cries out for touch-football players and blithely romping dogs. Van Luna’s suburban sprawl was nowhere in evidence here.

  Joshua sat at a wrought-iron table with a Formica top while Anna served him coffee and leftover biscuits. When the heater kicked on, she spoke without whispering for the first time since he had entered the house.

  “You just about killed Mom, you little twerp. For two years she was strung out like an elastic clothesline, almost ready to snap. She tore up Eden in His Dreams and couldn’t get anything else going. The third year, well, she spent that right here in Van Luna, as if this house were a sanatorium for terminally bereaved females.”

  “Where is she now, Anna?”

  “Maybe I’m not ready to tell you.”

  Alarmed, Joshua ate crumbs off his fingertips. More than likely he deserved to be taunted in this tender, hair-trigger fashion. If Anna really squeezed, though, he would go off like his grandfather’s heart, in either apoplectic anger or tearful remorse. The latter if they were lucky. He remembered how Hugo had used to ascend from a grumbling snit into one of his infrequent but terrifying Panamanian eruptions. . . .

  “You got any Fritos, Anna?”

  She turned and faced him, her arms folded on the ledge of her pregnancy. “Jesus, you’ve got the recall of an elephant.”

  “Dumbo the Dinothere at your service.”

  “I remember almost everything about that little expedition—but, of course, I was twelve. I ought to remember.”

  “What about Mom? Where is she?”

  Anna crossed the little kitchen, walking on her heels, and patted him on the head. “Neat diversion, John-John. I got a cable from her yesterday. You won’t be seeing her this year.”r />
  “Why not, for Christ’s sake?”

  “She’s got a contract from Vireo to do a book on the Spanish monarchy—the impact of its restoration on the people and on European politics in general. She’s in Madrid. She plans to be in Spain for at least six months. She wanted to beat a possible moratorium on air travel—that’s why she took off so suddenly. It was my year to babysit Peggy, anyway.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’ll write and tell her you’re in Zarakal.”

  “You can’t. I shouldn’t have told you. You can tell her when you see her in person. Then swear her to secrecy. Cross your heart and hope to die.”

  “Are you a commando or something, Johnny?”

  “Or something, I guess. It’s a kind of grandiose depth-psychology therapy for my lifelong affliction.”

  “The one you’re learning to control?”

  “Right. At government expense. You won’t see my eyeballs roll up into my head this trip, Sis.”

  “Unless I shoot you.” She sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “That’s why you’re going to Zarakal, isn’t it? A correlation between that country and the landscapes of your dreams.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  * * *

  Conscientiously concealing his presence from his grandmother, Joshua stayed through Christmas. Peggy Rivenbark lay abed like a superannuated angel, decaying into the expensive linen mulch of paradise and dreaming for the unborn great-grandchild in Anna’s womb a future of crash-proof spaceliners and pristine colony planets. Well, maybe not. She was an old woman who had been born five years after Kitty Hawk, and it was more likely that she hallucinated not the future but the past. Meanwhile, she henpecked heaven with her prayers.

  What was it that Woody Kaprow had said? The future is forever inaccessible. . . . It has no pursuable resonances. Joshua was not sure he believed that. The past, after all, was the friable medium in which the future germinated. And the present was an illusion, another aspect of the great material lie known among Hindus as maya. . . .

  So much for metaphysics.

  For fear that the sight of him would kill her, Joshua purposely did not reveal himself to Peggy Rivenbark.

  Anna and he spent most of the holidays talking. When it came time for him to leave, they had exhausted hundreds of topics without depleting their stores of mutual affection. The nametag on his uniform jacket might say Kampa, but he was also a Monegal, and maybe when he got back from his tour of duty in the Horn, they would finally be reunited as a family. Anna and he affirmed this hope aloud over and over again, but on the transport aircraft flying back to Eglin, Joshua had his doubts. His past was a dream, and the future was inaccessible.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Life in Shangri-la

  IN MANY WAYS, THE PERIOD AFTER the unexpected rainfall—the five or six months after I discovered Helen’s pregnancy—comprised an Edenic idyll of the kind Jacqueline Tru’s father had conjured from the dream stories I told him in the Mekong Restaurant. Our little village became Shangri-la.

  Suddenly we had plenty to eat. No one had to bust a gut either foraging or hunting. Occasional hominid killers like leopards and hyenas ignored us to concentrate on the gazelles, zebras, and antelope that had filtered back into our area from the vast grasslands south of Mount Tharaka. I was dreaming this idyll. Submerged in my experience without benefit of continuous rational consciousness, I may have been more alive, alert, and accepting than at any other time in either of my pasts. Bearded and sinewy, I glided among the Minids like a dispossessed spirit from their own uncertain future.

  Helen glowed. Her face shone the way licorice shines, her belly the way a jawbreaker sucked down to streaky indigo glistens against the palate. Her several bouts of nausea before and after Mary’s death had of course signaled the habiline equivalent of morning sickness. Her metabolism had finally adjusted to the changes wrought by conception, though, and now she was a candidate for the “after” photograph in a health spa ad, sleek and vivacious in spite of that abdominal bulge. Half my mind began to wonder when she would bear our child, the other half to formulate lullabies of haunting prehistoric sweetness.

  We were people of leisure.

  During this same period I began to rise before dawn to lift my own wordless aubades to savannah and sky. These songs came out of me from sources unidentifiable then and altogether untappable now. Although during my adolescence and young manhood I had written poetry prompted by some of my spirit-traveling episodes, my new songs were almost entirely spontaneous. I awoke them from preconsciousness and released them to the light as crude melodies.

  Other habilines—not only Minids, but Huns in their high fastnesses southwest of us—answered my songs. The melancholy baying of wolves and the uncanny arias of humpback whales resonated alike in our voices, and the timbre of our singing seemed to impart outline and solidity to that quasi-prehistoric landscape. To put it another way, our morning songs made my dream world real.

  My total absorption into both the Minid band and their curious simulacrum of the Pleistocene altered even the texture of my subconscious mind. I ceased to dream about my twentieth-century past and began to experience night visions full of ancient East African imagery. By becoming a habiline and accepting the reality of their world I had purified my dreams. Seville, Van Luna, Cheyenne, Fort Walton Beach, Riverdale, and all the other hot spots of my childhood no longer figured prominently in these visions. Now I was far more likely to dream about the fauna around Lake Kiboko, the wildflowers along the rivercourses, or my relationship with Helen.

  This change embodied a kind of paradox. Whereas during my life in the twentieth century such dreams would have been spirit-traveling episodes, now they were merely dreams. My physical displacement into the past had cured me of the principal affliction of my life. At last I was “normal.” My dreams proved as much. And I hoped that I would never again have to suffer the disorienting indignity of spirit-traveling. . . .

  * * *

  One day was like another. Each began with sunrise and limped through the heat of noon toward the exit signs of twilight. Between these clear-cut demarcations we took care to consume at least the recommended minimum daily requirements of nutrients sufficient for survival. The savannah was our supermarket, Mount Tharaka our after-hours convenience store. When not playing habiline games or furiously loafing, we shopped. Our purchases were paid for in the coin of cunning, persistence, luck, or various combinations of all three. If we ever encountered inferior merchandise or empty shelves, there was no manager to complain to and no way of getting our money back. Stumbling across an extraordinary bargain was one of the few unfailing means of burning a noteworthy brand into the otherwise bald backside of the day.

  About two-thirds of the way through Helen’s pregnancy, when her belly was ripening like a huge Concord grape, she and I tripped over an extraordinary bargain. The jolt of this discovery bumped me out of dream consciousness into the predicament of rational awareness. Because what we had found was too big for us to dismantle alone, I left Helen on the edge of a small rivercourse and returned to Shangri-la for Alfie and the others. By eye movements and clumsy vocalizations I made them understand my welcome news and led them down the mountain to the stream bed on the steppe.

  Helen was sitting on the bank of the little gully jabbering insults at the carrion birds swooping on our find. It lay capsized in the water, trapped by the submerged stones into which it had apparently lumbered while alive. The vultures could get at it only by alighting on its shiny flank or wading determinedly through the muddy stream, their outspread pinion feathers dripping and their neck ruffs comically frazzled. When Alfie, the rest of the Minids, and I burst onto the scene, the vultures scattered, but settled near enough at hand to glut themselves with envy if not with flesh.

  Helen and I had found a hippopotamus, a representative of H. gorgops, that rare species with bulging, periscopic eyes. Moreover, we had found it quite soon after its death, in a section of rivercourse partly conc
ealed from the eyes of carrion eaters by the surrounding shrubbery. Sheer serendipity. Had we been a day earlier, we might have supposed the hippo contentedly wallowing and so passed it by. On the other hand, had we been a day later, the vultures would have reduced our supermarket special to an immense naked rib cage. Ecologically speaking, we had come in the niche of time, and the hippo was ours, all ours.

  The beast disturbed me, though. It was an albino hippopotamus, with skin the color and seemingly the consistency of blancmange. Finger-long freckles of pink and pinkish-brown dappled its back, and its eyes, which arose from the massive head like elongated burn blisters, appeared to track my movements—as if the hippo and I had an affinity of which I was ignorant. I was alert to the dead animal’s scrutiny, its implied criticism of my status as a scavenger. My consciousness had engaged, and suddenly, frighteningly, I felt that not even Helen’s love could legitimately bind me to these savage doings. The white hippopotamus was an omen, probably an evil one.

  It occurred to me that recently I had dreamed a dream in which Helen and I, astride a pair of docile chalicotheres, had ridden down from Shangri-la onto the moonlit savannah. During this ride we had seen an albino riverhorse run across our path from one half-hidden streambed to another. Other disconcerting events had followed, including my own painful transformation into a state that I could no longer recall. In fact, I probably would not have remembered dreaming about a white hippopotamus if Helen and I had not, quite by accident, found this one. What a strange concatenation of circumstances.

  Wading into the water to butcher and cheerfully apportion our find, the Minids fell to. My sense of estrangement heightened. Once, as a boy, I had relished a gone-awry dream in which a band of hominids mutilated and devoured a creature from a children’s television program. Today, though, the Minids were scavenging an image from one of my recent Pleistocene dreams. How could I abet them in the complete destruction of that image? This was a world in which even the projections of the dreaming mind were converted into food.