by Jeff Long
When it was not her shift to steer the convoy of boats, Ali slept. Her dreams were vivid. They had extra color.
She woke from one such catnap, thinking Gregorio had jostled her. Then she saw the gun in his hand. And he had cut the engine. “What?” she said.
“Quiet.”
A moment later, something glided crosswise against the bottom of the boat. Ali could feel its weight and power right through the rubber floor. She would have felt vindicated if not for her sudden urge to pee.
They rocked on the ripples. Ali said nothing. Silence was their only hiding place.
Gregorio handed her the light. Maybe the smarter thing would have been darkness. But they had to see.
Minutes passed. The lake gave a sigh.
Ali swept her beam across the black mirror of water. At the light’s far edge, the surface seemed to bulge a few inches. It took on the sleek shape of a jet’s cowl. The water made a slight hiss.
A gun appeared beside her cheek.
Don’t, she thought. Don’t make it mad. It was far too big. Even if he managed to hit it, even if he killed the thing, it would surely capsize them.
There was no time to argue with him.
The ridge of water hurtled toward them.
His hand propped on her shoulder. She could feel his muscles tighten. The shot would deafen her.
Abruptly the lake flattened out.
The bulge submerged. The thing dove under them, stroking the boat bottom. She felt it in her feet. Its flesh sizzled against the rubber.
She looked at Gregorio. “Thank God you didn’t shoot,” she whispered.
“I tried.” He turned the gun back and forth in his hand, fuming. “It wouldn’t work. How do you make it shoot?”
“You don’t know how to shoot it?”
“Of course I do,” he whispered. He aimed into the water to prove his mastery. The cords in his forearm bunched impressively. But nothing happened.
All her focus drew in from the lake. She huddled across from him. Details. The devil—or their salvation—lay in the details. “Is the safety on?”
“Yes, the safety,” he muttered to himself, searching the grip and body.
Ali watched with growing dismay. All these days her protector had been wielding the gun with such authority. Now that they were up against a real, live sea monster, something probably left over from the dinosaur age, now that they actually needed the gun, she realized how much its presence had meant to her. “Maybe it’s jammed,” she said.
“Jammed?”
He was helpless. In mortal danger and his gun wouldn’t work? It appalled her. Abruptly she saw them from high above, two little people floating in a thimble upon a sea, brandishing a useless weapon, pretending to be in charge of their fate. She laughed. And stopped. “Is it loaded, Gregorio?”
He glared at her.
She started hiccupping.
“Are you laughing?” he said.
“Not at you.”
“No? Then tell me.”
“It’s just, never mind, your gun…”
“I’m listening, Alexandra.”
His wounded expression, his sobriety, his nobility…she couldn’t quit hiccupping. “The women at the office call you El Cid,” she said.
“Go on, Alexandra.”
“And I was just thinking instead, you know…”
“Yes?”
“Well, a gun that won’t shoot. Tilting at windmills.”
His neck got longer. “Me?”
“Stop, I’m wetting my pants.”
“That,” he pointed at the water, “was no windmill.”
“Gregorio, please…”
They got no warning.
The front of the boat reared up out of the water.
Gregorio tumbled sideways, slamming into Ali. The light went flying. Their little ball of a world blinked out.
The hull crashed back upon the water.
Her heartbeat deafened her. The silence—the night—the lake. She felt swallowed alive.
“The light,” said Gregorio. “Where is the light?”
Their hands scuttled across the floor. They bumped heads. The boat rocked gently.
“I have it,” she said.
“Quickly.”
She fumbled for the switch. Nothing. Shook the flashlight. Nothing. She unscrewed the base and emptied the batteries into her hand and wiped them on her shirt and fed them back into the case. It worked.
Gregorio was pale among the scattered bags and loose rope. The shadows jumped, black and white. Water sloshed on the floor. The gun was missing. She turned the beam out across the water. The two boats behind bobbed quietly.
“The light,” said Gregorio. No more whispering. No more hopes of hiding on the lake’s surface. It would return for them.
Ali trained the light on Gregorio’s hands, whatever he was doing with them. The night pressed against her back. The famished night. Gregorio went on rooting through the bags.
“What are you looking for?” she said.
He drew his arm from a bag. “This.” He pulled out a fistful of sock.
“A sock?”
Pressing his knees together on the object, he carefully peeled away the sock to reveal what looked like a metal orange, a small one, a clementine. “My hand grenade,” he said.
Once again, her fear paused. She glanced from the grenade to Gregorio’s pleased look. First a gun that wouldn’t shoot, now a grenade. It got better. He opened his Swiss army knife.
“Hold this.” He gave her the grenade. It weighed as much as a clementine, too.
Was that the water hissing again? Don’t look. “Gregorio.”
He sawed at the ropes. One of the boats began drifting away, followed by the other. “Turn off the light.”
They plunged into darkness.
“Quiet.”
Ali heard water softly parting. Then something popped. Jerry cans banged against each other. It passed.
“Light,” said Gregorio.
The second raft was gone. A few bundles and empty cans floated on the surface. He took the flashlight from her and tossed it toward the third raft. Ali understood, a diversion. But the light bounced from its hull and into the water.
The world went black.
The water stirred again in the distance.
Ali fumbled at her neck for the night goggles. Hated them normally. Loved them now. On. The world turned green.
A ridge of water was driving at them. She looked at Gregorio.
Blind, eyes wide, mouth open, he was kneeling against the hull. His head moved from side to side, scoping for sound. His fist held the grenade.
The third inflatable exploded with a bang. Ali turned in time to see food and fuel cans skidding on the water. The flattened raft thrashed like a dying animal. The water swelled, spine up, and snaked a big turn. The creature had them now.
Gregorio shifted. Ali looked. She thought he would throw the grenade with all his might. Instead he gave it a feeble little toss, barely enough to lob a coin into a fountain. “Ah, gee,” she sighed.
The ridge of green-and-black water surged closer. Ali imagined the grenade fluttering deeper and deeper. Gregorio had chucked their final defense.
Up in the sun, where you could measure your shadow and see the proper order of things, Ali had always thought death would find her smiling. She had led a full life, not always a happy one, but rich with sense. She had gone deep and climbed back onto the green earth and given birth. Her heart had filled with as much love as it could hold. She was grateful for her blessings.
But now she had gone and spoiled her finale with this rerun of the abyss. Why? Up there you had only to open your eyes to know where you were. Here you were lost every minute, prying at the night with a tube of light, strangling on nightmares, suffering violence.
Would it wolf her down whole, or tear her to pieces? Teeth or tentacles? Something grabbed her arm. Gregorio. She clutched his hand.
The grenade detonated.
There was no
geyser of spray, no atomic ripple, no sonic boom. The lake made a slight oomph noise, as if surprised. The boat wiggled.
The hump of black water vanished.
A few bubbles surfaced, then the mirror resumed its smooth green-black face. A thick, fishy smell rose from the water.
“Did you kill it?” she said.
“I don’t know.” He held his blind head high. Ali found a flashlight in a bag and flipped it on. Gregorio blinked. She pulled away her goggles. They watched the water.
A minute passed, then five.
She shined the light to one side. A clot of white jelly or wax was drifting up from the depths. The slow, shapeless thing rose like a ghost.
The closer it came, the bigger it got. Gregorio tried the engine, but it was flooded. He started paddling. They got far enough to one side to avoid the jelly mass. Gregorio made a grand slit-throat gesture. “It is his stomach or lungs. He has gone to monster heaven.”
Then the lake began to disgorge the rest of its dead. The surface filled with creatures, large and small, killed by the grenade’s shock wave. They glittered like broken bottles, some green or white or pink, most without any color at all. There were fish with translucent armor, and eels as long as pythons. Every one of them came armed with stingers, claws, or banks of teeth.
Floating perhaps ten feet below the surface, that glutinous white mass seemed ready to enfold the entire banquet, Ali and Gregorio included. But for the moment, the ghostly thing kept its distance, and the menagerie of slaughtered creatures proved irresistible, at least to Gregorio. “Oh what a feast,” he said.
With the exuberance of a child, he began scooping bodies close enough to pluck from the water. “Look at this,” he said, prodding an eel covered in mucus. “A hagfish. Very primitive. No jawbone. See its teeth? And, see, my God, a trilobite.”
He hefted the hand-size animal. Its plated shell was a lovely burnished crimson. “My father used to take me on fossil holidays. Trilobites were our passion. We found them in coal country, in places like Bosnia and Poland.”
He flipped it upside down and smelled its sallow belly. The thing was only stunned. Its antennae and dozens of little legs started wiggling in the air. He laid it on the floor and gave it a pat.
He was giddy. They had survived.
Ali moved her feet away from the creature.
“Dinner,” he said. “My father”—he crossed himself—“used to wonder what their meat must have tasted like. Tonight I’ll find out for him.”
“No lake food,” she reminded him.
“I think, Alexandra, no more taboos.” He gestured at the debris from their destroyed boats. “Most of our supplies are at the bottom now. The captain was right. The lake provides.”
“We’re turning back,” she said. This was her fault. She had almost gotten them killed with her direct passage.
“But why?” he said.
“There’s no telling how far away the shore lies. We’ve gone as far as we can. We’ll be lucky to get back to where we came from.”
“Faith,” he said. “That’s what I heard you say. And now, see, we have killed the dragon—no windmill—and found a meal fit for my dead father. And reached our shore.”
She looked around. They were surrounded by night. “Gregorio, what shore?”
He laughed and reached over the edge. He lifted a dead frog. “Meet our pilot, Kermit. Kermit is amphibious.”
He let her put it together. Amphibious. Water and land dwelling. Land. “How close are we?” she said.
“Ask Kermit’s brothers and sisters.”
Right on cue, a whole chorus of frogs sprang to life in the distance. Gregorio didn’t bother with the engine. He simply started paddling. It took all of ten minutes to reach shore, where the aleph was waiting.
ARTIFACTS
USA TODAY
Chinese and American Warships Collide
Jan. 8. Hong Kong. Two Chinese warships bumped two U.S. Navy vessels in waters claimed by the People’s Republic of China. The incident further escalates tensions between the two superpowers, and the “Chinese Olympic spring” of friendly relations seems dead.
The incident between the ships took place in the Sea of Japan, off the United Korean peninsula. The American destroyer Caron and cruiser Yorktown were operating outside the twelve-mile territorial limit claimed by the PRC. They were challenged by a Chinese frigate and destroyer and told to leave the waters. Then, according to a navy spokesman, the Chinese ships “shouldered” the U.S. ships out of the way, bumping them slightly. There was no exchange of gunfire, although the Chinese warships did aim their guns and missile launchers at the American ships, and illuminated the Yorktown’s bridge. The American ships eventually departed from the area.
“This is a blatant violation of the second Incidents at Sea Agreement,” said Secretary of Defense Matthew Lee. “China is playing a very dangerous game, and we encourage her leadership to refrain from further aggression.”
This is the latest in a cascade of events since the Green Barrens disaster and the grounding of a Chinese submarine in California. “The rhetoric is nearing a boil,” said Jeffery Blockwick of the Brookings Institute. “The two powers seem bent on war.”
25
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 8
True to his word, the angel pays the occasional visit to his entombed student. He sits outside the neat heap of rocks, popping albino locusts, like grapes, into his mouth, and giving odds and ends of sermons.
Inside the meditation-chamber-turned-tomb, the disciple’s only measure of time is the corpse beside him. The thing is in constant motion. Maggots animate it, roiling the limbs and face and belly. From hour to hour, it twitches and shifts and changes expressions.
“It takes four days, on average, for the San Bushmen of the Kalahari to bring down a giraffe,” the angel is telling him. “Their arrows are barely twigs. Their bows are laughable. And the giraffe is a powerful giant. What’s their secret? Poison. These bushmen are old biowarriors. They have a whole arsenal of poisons. Here is the recipe for their giraffe poison.
“In a certain season of certain years, the grubs of a certain beetle, Diamphidia, are gathered from the sand that beds the roots of a certain bush. The grubs must be handled with exquisite care. The toxin resides in the thorax section of the larva, which is crushed and mixed with tree gum and painted onto the shaft of the arrow point. The point itself is never coated with this poison, because if a hunter scratched himself with it he would die inside forty-eight hours. Now I ask you,” says the angel, “do you think these people taught themselves such an intricate art?”
“No, Lord,” whispers the disciple. He clings to that voice as if it were a lifeline.
“For millions of years,” the angel continues, “the silkworm has beenwrapping a half mile of thread around itself. Then one fine morning a certain Chinese peasant felt inspired to unwrap that thread through a process even more elaborate than the Bushmen’s poison harvest. Tell me, where does a country bumpkin get the idea to take a filament, so fine the breeze can steal it, and make it into an emperor’s hankie? It’s like something out of a dream, don’t you think? Which is exactly how I planted it, in a Chinaman’s dream.”
The disciple can barely breathe for the corpse’s gases.
The angel goes on. “Herr Mozart, my manic wastrel, routinely pulled off a lifetime of works in a single month or so, and then did it again and again. Near the end of his life, he literally composed in his sleep, his hand jotting down page after page of music as fast as the hand could write. These were divinely written pages that needed no editing, not a single revision. This was music that was as perfect as it gets. Now tell me, do you think he accomplished all that alone in the night? (And who do you think commissioned his Requiem ?)
“Lord.” The corpse’s beard is wagging with its weight of worms. Laughing along. The disciple is fighting for his sanity.
“And what about Beethoven and all those gigantic symphonies that came thundering from his pen a
fter he was deaf? Come on now, a deaf man? I’ll give you a hint. Who do you think his ‘beloved’ was?”
The disciple’s lips are cracked from thirst. His stomach is hollow. A little meat would do the job. Meat half chewed by the worms. But he must fast.
“And what about van Gogh,” the angel leaps on. “They said he was mad. He wasn’t. He was listening to me, or at least to my messengers. Jonas Salk, have you heard of him, the father of the polio vaccine? It came to him in a vision. Homer was a blind hemophiliac. Never left his mother’s house, much less went to war. I poured the poetry into him. Moses. Abraham. Jesus. Mohammed. They heard voices. All mine. The Bhagavad Gita. The Inferno. The Book of Psalms. Pi. Relativity.”
“Mein Kampf,” the disciple says to himself. “The Red Book. Stalin. Pol Pot.” He whispers these things, and more, all the devilish stuff.
“No,” says the angel. His hearing is acute. “Those all belong to you. My covenant rests on beauty.”
The corpse’s mouth suddenly yaws open. Maggots spill out. Beauty? “Teller. Mengele. McNamara,” says the disciple. The evils tumble out at random.
“Speaking of Vietnam, you’ll never guess where I spent the war,” says the angel.
The disciple falls silent.
“At a nightclub in New York City,” says the angel. “It’s true. The Half Note Club. It was the spring of 1965. John Coltrane was whipping his jazz quartet into a holy frenzy. Oh, you should have heard them, the wildest notes man has ever known. Coltrane played like he was possessed. And he was. By me.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re down here. Trapped. Like me.”
“I wasn’t there in person, of course. Let’s call me a fly on the wall, but with this difference: I was moving civilization along. Whenever it moved, there I was. It was me who gave you drums to mark time with. I linked the stars into constellations so you could find your way. I gave you dogs to be your servants. I soothed your fear of fire to let you conquer the night. There are a thousand names for me. Prometheus is one. I am the father of all your miracles.”
The disciple suddenly starts clawing at the rocks. He doesn’t care about jazz or drums. He doesn’t care about Homer or silk or Bushmen. “Free me,” he roars.