by Jeff Long
Rebecca took the doll from Hardin. The Barbie doll wasn’t a gavel. “Where did you find this?”
“Not far beyond the Green Barrens.”
That stopped her cold. Green Barrens meant massacre. It had entered the lexicon of My Lais and Wounded Knees. If not for the Green Barrens bloodshed, Rebecca might not even be here. Special ops would have stayed in the field. They might have found the children by now.
Hardin quit his grandstanding. “What were you doing at the Green Barrens?”
“I was there.” That was the haunt in his eyes. “I killed people. I shot children.”
“Who are you?” said the governor. “You’re the deserter. You’re a wanted man.”
Beckwith faced Rebecca. He waited for her judgment.
She had not the slightest doubt of his guilt. Everything about him fit, the flat stomach, the self-control, the need to confess. Rebecca did not believe in signs. But she accepted—completely and instantly—his appearance at the beginning of her journey as ordained.
Here was her missing link. Ali was wrong. The children were heading to Hinnom. “Did you go into the city?” she asked.
“I was going,” he said. “Then I found the doll.”
“Why did you come back?” Without my daughter.
“I was alone. So I came for more help, and heard what you’re doing and where you’re going, and here I am.”
The Barbie doll made more sense coming from this man than if she had found it herself. He was in pain. He was presenting himself for her to use. She would use him.
“We leave first thing in the morning,” she said to him.
“This man is wanted by the FBI,” Hardin said. “He’s a war criminal.”
“This man is with me,” Rebecca said. “He risked everything to come in, and I need him for what I’m going to do. And if you interfere with him, Governor, I swear I’ll kill you.”
Hardin double-chinned and snorted. But he didn’t retort.
Beckwith merely closed his eyes in thanks.
19
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 6
“I have been dancing with your ancestors ever since you came down from the trees,” says the angel.
They pause in front of a grotesque brute, part man, part something else with its fleshy nub of a tail. It hangs from the wall, stabbed onto a rocky spike. “This one I treated like a king because I was sure he was the one who would lead me out of here. But he had a mind made of mud. He and his people were just another dead end. I had no choice but to put them aside and wait for something better.”
They move on through the corridors of bodies.
“Each and every one of them represented a new hope to me. Some were brought to me in chains by hunters whom I’d trained. Some were led here by my whisperings. And some, like you, had the daring to seek me out. All have been disappointments.”
The Collection, as the angel calls it, would put any medical college or anthro lab to shame. Very eclectic. Then again, he has been acquiring specimens for over a thousand centuries.
Mutants of every kind hang next to perfect gods and goddesses with limbs in golden proportion, every detail a keeper. Skeletons and skulls sport all manner of subterranean deformities. Many of the bodies have been cured over natural heat vents, or been salted, stuffed, or mummified in the Egyptian tradition. A number have been preserved in amber or different colors of flowstone. Every species and race of mankind seems to be represented here, including beings the disciple had never really considered to be man.
“Monsters,” says the angel.
He pauses to stroke the exquisite bare torso of a tall Chinese mummy impaled very precisely through the vagina on a stalagmite. In life she must have been a princess or a ballerina, surely. Her skin gleams like porcelain. The angel’s hands cup her dried leather breasts. They were lovers, obviously.
“Do you know what I mean when I say that word ‘monster’?” says the angel.
“That we are horrible and must be destroyed, Lord.”
“Horrible? Far from it. You and all your ancestors, even the ugliest of them, are made in my image.”
“Lord.” The disciple dares to speak. “You call us monsters, but say that we are made in your image. Doesn’t that make you a monster, too?” The disciple has grown more reckless, accepting that one day soon he will be joining these trophies.
“Good.” The angel’s white eyes study him. “You see a contradiction. But that is only because you don’t understand. The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin monstrum, which grew from the root monere, meaning to show or reveal. Or warn. I once explained this to a Spanish monk named Isidore. Back then I felt a kinship with men like him, because I am the original monk, which means alone. But Isidore got only part of my instruction right. He wrote that what is monstrous reveals a prime origin. Then he bollixed the rest of it by mixing in God’s will and Christian design and his devil nonsense.” The angel sighs. “You see, it’s not only the body of man that has needed seasoning over the ages, but also man’s mind.”
They stroll farther, stopping before this or that old favorite. Bones lie gathered, catacomb style. Bodies hang like sides of beef, or stand propped along the wall, or lie where time has toppled them.
“If I am your demon,” says the angel, “then you are my author. Because I am anonymous unless you recognize me. If you see evil in me, it is only because you needed a release from your own evil. In which case, my salvation lies in you forgiving your fictions and legends. But if, on the other hand, I am your author, then you are the demon. Because you have rebelled against me. In which case, your salvation lies in me forgiving you.”
The angel sets a row of dangling bodies rocking, like balls on strings. Cause. Effect. Cause. Effect.
“Tell me,” says the angel, “which of us is the real monster, and which the creator, you or me?”
“Perhaps we are both things at the same time, Lord.”
“Clever. But false. Either the writer writes the book, or the book writes the writer. Which is it?”
“Sensei, I have no idea.”
“I know.”
The angel lingers in front of a Neanderthal woman covered with an arabesque of scars and tattooing. Her eye sockets have been filled with turquoise balls. Her gaze is a lovely blue. “Casparina.” He speaks, practically summoning her. Another of his lovers. He seems to be inviting her to speak to him. The disciple hears only the whispering cave breeze.
“There is nothing more dangerous than one’s own creation,” the angel tells him. “The monster that squeezes out from our own nature is always the most deadly one.”
It seems an innocuous remark. Then the disciple notices her loins, torn open. He wonders to himself, a pack of dogs? But dogs in this place?
Then he sees that a strand of fetal cord hangs from her riffled womb.
It strikes the disciple. Here is why they have come to the Collection today. This is today’s lesson. The angel mated with her. He mated with humankind. But then he had second thoughts. He tore his own child from the womb. That or it tore itself free and fled the father that would have destroyed it.
ARTIFACTS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Questions for Rebecca Coltrane
“THE WARRIOR QUEEN”
Your father was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, and your mother ran as a Green for the Austin city council. Where did you find the inspiration to wage a war and lead an army? If you have a child, look in her eyes. God lives in there. That is my inspiration. My daughter, Sam.
But where did Rebecca Coltrane the warlord come from? Or was the warrior queen there all along? My parents were peaceniks. My husband worked on hydrogen conversion from waste. Every day Sam and I rode bicycles to the HEB for fresh produce. I woke up to NPR, drank Lactaid, practiced yoga at the Y, and worked with Amnesty International. I don’t even recognize that world anymore.
Your new world seems more red meat, guns, and combat boots, a pair of which you’re wearing. There i
s talk that the GOP has been courting you. Does that offend the flower child in you? The only thing that offends me is failure. I failed my daughter once, the night she was taken. I will never fail her again.
Would you talk about that night a little? (a long pause) It was terrible.
How about your days? What is a typical day like now? Yesterday I signed endorsement deals with Nike and PowerBar, spoke to Congress, and met with a literary agent. Then I had breakfast. It went from there.
The life of a high-powered celebrity, as some critics have pointed out. Are you concerned that you are using your tragedy as a vehicle for self-promotion? That’s a stupid question.
On a larger level, critics charge that the Coltrane Crusade is a thinly disguised surrogate for the U.S. military. China has called your adventure a violation and a provocation. Other parents of missing children insist that the best chance of rescue lies in a United Nations coalition of forces. How do you respond? I’ll be glad to talk it over with them on my way back up, once I find my daughter and their children.
20
CHRISTMAS
Ali ran beside the ink-black lake.
The daily runs had begun shortly after Maggie’s death, as a way to cope. Of late, she ran to fend off the widening hips. This morning it was all about momentum.
Early morning was her habit. She was used to tunneling into the darkness with her light. But this darkness differed from up top. Here you never reached the dawn.
Her light bobbled as she struggled with the sand. Images jumped: sand, then water, then blackness. It was giving her vertigo. She was giving herself vertigo. Where are you going? What are you doing?
The blackness and silence pulled at her. It was like falling. Ever since the night of the mob, she had been falling. In the space of a single week, she and Gregorio had made their preparations, flown north to Alaska, and penetrated via Kiska Island in the Aleutian chain.
Today was their third day down. A sort of pony express of electric golf carts had transported them and their gear this far. The “highway,” a two-hundred-mile ribbon of asphalt, dead-ended at Emperor Lake. From here on, the way got wilder.
Ali turned and headed back to the settlement.
It was not too late to go home. No one would notice. No one would care. Except for a few of her staff, no one even knew they were down here. But with her institute in ashes, Ali felt almost disembodied. Descending into the underworld had a sort of logic.
The stink of rotting fish reached out from the grandly named Port Dylan, population forty-two. Ali slowed to a walk. The village was a hodgepodge of bright red and yellow Rubbermaid storage sheds that served as houses. Cheap and durable, the units were surreally cheery. Flat-fish, eels, and squid hung everywhere. It could have been laundry day, with all the whites out drying on lines and wires.
Emperor Lake was the largest freshwater body on earth, subterranean or otherwise, and the sole source of “glass,” or “ghost,” lobsters. For the moment, they were all the rage in high-end restaurants, the latest of the New World’s strange delights. Japanese gourmands ate them raw. Everybody else boiled them. The lobsters were all but invisible until they went into the pot, where their shells turned a faint turquoise. Sooner than later diners would move on to the next fad, and Ali wondered how Port Dylan would survive.
She found her hut. Gregorio was sitting on the floor watching a small television, its screen so dim it was like watching shadows. They were in the land of low lux now. Night vision ruled here. “Good, Alexandra, you’re back,” he said. “The boatman is ready for us. But first, look.”
It was a FOX news piece. The last of Rebecca’s crusaders was waving his gun. He threw a kiss at the sun, and entered the penetration complex on Guam. Big speakers were blaring “Born in the USA.” Yellow ribbons were tied to the palm trees. According to the reporter, the expedition numbered almost thirteen hundred men.
Ali remembered the tunnels Rebecca would be traveling through to reach the city of Hinnom. There were bottlenecks and potholes where only one person could pass at a time, a river to float, and ancient bridges near collapse. Rebecca’s army would be strung days and miles apart, a serpent whose tail would probably never meet its head. The geographical challenges aside, Ali could not imagine how Rebecca meant to feed so many stomachs three times a day.
They finished packing their gear, and lugged it to a big black Zodiac raft at the water’s edge. Its captain wore a Speedo swimsuit, flip-flops, and a beard. Shells and coins dangled on a string around his neck. A rifle lay by the engine. “Good morning,” said Ali.
“Let’s get this done,” the man said. No one smiled in Port Dylan. People spoke in whispers, “so as not to disturb the lake.” Melancholy hung in the air. She blamed their isolation and the darkness, and couldn’t wait to quit the place.
They loaded their gear and Ali climbed in. She opened her notebook on her knees. And sighed.
John Li’s journals and map had burned to ash in the Studio fire. When they left he was still in a coma. And with NASA documents about his expedition around Emperor Lake classified, Ali and Gregorio were madly improvising. In short, they had only their memory of someone else’s descriptions and maps and memory to guide them.
As best they could remember, the far side of Emperor Lake held the most promise. There Li had found the alephs in abundance, along with Ike’s carved initials. But as Ali was fast learning, the lake was next to impassable. It was huge and full of unknowns. The NASA team had taken two years to make the first and only circumnavigation, leapfrogging along the shore in boats. The lost children, if they were down here, didn’t have that kind of time.
Ali tried again with the captain. She flipped to a page in her notebook. “I did some calculations last night,” she said. “If we take extra fuel and cut straight across the lake, it will save us months.”
“First off,” the captain said, “cut straight across to where? You don’t have a clue where you’re going. Second off, only fools go out on the open water. Third, they don’t come back. So, my answer’s the same as last night. Missionary Point, no farther.”
“The children’s lives could depend on us. We have to get across the lake.”
“Go around it like your friends.”
“We’ll pay you extra.”
The captain looked at her. “Something lives out there.”
“Your sea serpent,” said Gregorio.
“Joke away,” said the captain.
If he wouldn’t take them across, they would have to take themselves. “We’ll buy your boat,” said Ali. “How much?”
“She is my boat,” said the captain.
“It’s old,” said Gregorio. “Look at all these patches. Take our money. Go buy a new one.”
That did it. “Mister,” the captain hissed.
Ali quickly said, “Missionary Point. That will do.”
The captain started the engine. He guided the Zodiac around a reef of twisted sodium forms, like melting statues of Lot’s wife, and opened the throttle. The lights of Port Dylan faded away. “Did you ferry the NASA expedition down the coast?” asked Ali.
“Me and everybody else down here. For a ways. They hired every boat in town. Throwing money around. Full of big purpose.” The captain gave a nod. “My wife ran a boat in those days.”
A wife, good. “What does she do now?” What kind of life did a settler’s wife lead in the caves, on a silent lake that never saw the dawn? What kind of life might Ali have led with Ike if they had returned to the depths together?
The boatman spit—carefully—keeping his head back from the water. Ali noted that. She brought her hand in from the rubber hull. “Tends the kids,” he said. “Down at the point.”
He had children then, but would not help find these others. Ali dropped it. The man had his reasons. Maybe his wife had taken the kids and run off with another man. Maybe she had just run off to be away from this sullen captain in a Speedo suit.
Ali ran her finger down a short list of names that she and Gr
egorio had managed to remember from the NASA map. “Have you ever heard of these places?” she said, and read the names.
“Graveyards,” said the captain.
“What do you mean by that?”
“There’s no one left.”
“But we have a friend from the NASA expedition who said—”
“That NASA bunch,” he said, “they came before it happened, before the invasion.”
Gregorio and Ali traded a glance. “The hadals came this way?” said Ali.
The captain shook his head no. “Migrants,” he said. “The fucking migrants. Every month. All the time. Edging closer. The drift, we call them. Missionary Point today. Port Dylan tomorrow, or next year. There’s no way to stop them.”
“Are you talking about Asian settlers?”
“They’re all kinds. Everything. We thought they’d go back where they belong. But that’s not happening.”
An equal-opportunity bigot. “We’re all migrants down here, aren’t we?” said Ali.
The captain squinted. “Lady,” he said, “you don’t know shit.”
Gregorio bristled, her paladin with his black eyes and stitches from the mob. Ali put her hand on his knee. With a grunt he looked off into the darkness.
The water slid by. Their light chased across the black mirror of the lake. Miles passed.
“Is this the same way you brought the NASA team?” Ali asked.
“Same lake. Same shore. Same boat.”
“Did you meet someone named John Li? Or one of his teammates, Bill McNabb? We think McNabb came through here alone.”
“Why bother learning their names? We figured they were dead men.”
“They made it back, though,” Ali said. “They went all the way around the lake.”
“Half,” said the captain. “Only half made it out is what I heard. Besides which, that was then, and this is now.”