Mr. Eternity

by Aaron Thier

  The truth is we had no fear of capture and torment at the hands of terrorists and revolutionaries. We had passed unnoticed from the realm of the Reunited States, and my father was just an indefinite and unspecified force. The people of Babylon knew no law but the ancient law of human concordance. They ate squirrels and trembled for the fear of superstitions. They believed that leeches were the dead man’s revenge against the living and they believed you could be carried to heaven on a bolt of lightning. They believed Jesus and Mary were always watching them. They believed you were required to hunt meat in this life in order to provide yourself with food in the next.

  It was an easy primeval life and I might have been happy here, except that Daniel Defoe would not leave off speculating about Anna Gloria. It was a thorn in my mind. He thought she might have been a goddess he knew in the jungle, and he became certain and convinced that she was waiting for him in El Dorado, Arkansas. He said we had to go there and meet her. And this is why I confided my heart once again in Quaco, who had heeded my griefs once before. I asked him had he ever seen this Anna Gloria? Was she real, or was she only allegorical?

  “That depends,” he said. “What is the difference?”

  I waited for a breath and a heartbeat, but he said no more.

  “No riddles,” I begged him. “I have walked out the back door of my kingdom. I have eaten bee maggots. I feel cold with dog malaria. I only want to know the truth.”

  His eyes seemed to soften a microscopic amount. He pointed to a puddle at his feet and said, “Look here. What do you see?”

  I could envision only my own face waggling in the muck. Then I saw Edward Halloween peep over my shoulder. We were both slimmed away from our weeks of dried shamo and travel.

  “That’s her,” said Edward Halloween, grinning and champing on a banana. He pointed a filthy finger at the puddle. “She’s you.”

  I blinked at my watery visage and suddenly the truth came home to make its roost. “Color me with crayons,” I said. “I should have known.”

  Leave it to Edward Halloween: genius, eunuch, clown, poet. “It’s her,” he said again, and Quaco smiled.

  2016

  * * *

  When we got back to Key West, the ancient mariner said he intended to start packing. It was time to go, he said. Time to leave the island. Time to resume his endless fruitless search for Anna Gloria. There was no time to lose.

  “Where are my keys?” he said. He patted his pockets and then spotted them on the table. They were enormous, two pounds apiece, three inches long, like keys in a museum exhibit about ancient keys. They were green with oxidation.

  “Are you going to tell us what this stuff is?” I said, handling one of the figurines we’d dug up.

  “It’s probably just ancient junk.”

  But I couldn’t concentrate on the problem of the treasure. Like John Baxter’s photograph, it was a mystery with which I felt unable to engage. I could not stop thinking about my green pills, my blue pills, my white pills. It was a genteel way of being a drug addict, but that didn’t matter.

  “You’re so old and you’re in such good spirits,” I asked him. “What’s the secret?”

  The ancient mariner said, “Take cinnamon for tonsillitis and remember that you can drink seawater in small quantities if you’re extremely dehydrated. When a poison wind like the simoom starts to blow, just go inside and splash water on your face.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I just mean how do you stand it, year after year?”

  “All you young people,” he said, laughing and fitting one of his keys into an old trunk. “You dudes have got to learn to be less hard on yourselves.”

  “I’ve gotta not be a shithead.”

  “This is what I mean.”

  “But how do you learn?”

  “You get older.”

  He opened the trunk and pulled out a weathered art object, a wooden panel with an image of Mary and a skinny, hideous baby Jesus.

  “I could sell this thing for about a trillion dollars,” he said.

  He looked around the interior of his boat. There were some silver spoons, an old leather-bound copy of David Copperfield, a ginger root that had started to sprout. There was a low wooden table and two orange plastic school chairs. A hammock. There was nothing he seemed to care very much about.

  “Are you going right away?” said Azar.

  “Soon.”

  “Will you miss Key West?”

  “I expect I’ll be back someday.”

  “Not if it’s underwater.”

  But he wasn’t listening. “I’ll go to the East Indies. I’ve always wanted to go back to Goa. For some reason I’ve always been fixated on the East Indies. It’s like I have some unfinished business out there.”

  “It might be dangerous out there now.”

  “Do you think I lived this long by getting myself killed all the time? I know how to survive.”

  Quaco said he wasn’t going to leave until the water was at his door. It was surprising to hear him say he had a door.

  “By then it’ll be too late, though,” I said.

  “Too late for what?”

  “Too late in general. Climate change will destroy everything. It will destroy the material foundation of our prosperity.”

  Quaco grinned. There was an energy in the air. I hadn’t seen him smile before.

  “The material foundation of your prosperity,” he said.

  Eventually, the ancient mariner went to sleep and Quaco wandered away. We were too worked up to go to sleep ourselves, so I called Lena and asked if she and Bee wanted to meet us somewhere. Bee was working, she said, but she would come herself. She hoped it was okay if she brought her brother along. He was going to rehab in the morning and she had to look after him until then. She had to make sure he didn’t get away. She permitted herself this candor because I’d been so straightforward about my green pills.

  We went to a place called the Blue Macaw. We waited for Lena and watched a basketball game. We didn’t know what to say.

  “Was the treasure hunt a success or a failure?” Azar said.

  “I think it was both.”

  “What is that stuff? What’s happening here? What if this man is five hundred and sixty years old?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow it’s hard to think about.”

  He ate some peanuts and frowned and looked around. “Here we are,” he said, “in the United States of America.”

  “But we can’t lose focus on account of that.”

  “It’s almost like a letdown. Is that crazy? I was really hoping they’d find those coins.”

  There were tourists buzzing all around us. There was a man smoking a cigarette and breathing oxygen through a tube. There were strangler figs and old mahogany trees. There were palm trees clattering in the breeze, like always. We were tourists ourselves. We were in the United States of America, and the world was getting hotter and hotter and more and more crowded.

  “Can you carbon-date a person?” said Azar.

  “You can’t carbon-date a living thing.”

  “I guess that would be the cynic’s way out anyway.” He ate some more peanuts. “I meant to tell you, I remembered a thing from Kierkegaard about irony and sincerity.”

  “You’re going to quote Kierkegaard? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “I can’t quote it, but the gist of it is that irony and sincerity aren’t incompatible. He’s kind of down on pure sincerity, as I remember.”

  We were quiet again for a little while.

  “I think what I’m struggling with is the everydayness of it,” I said. “You know what I mean? The everydayness of the ancient mariner. But this is how these things go. Think about cell phones, for instance.”

  “I think about them all the time.”

  “A cell phone is a piece of glowing glass in which you can see all the information in the world. It should be a magical thing, but instead I hate my cell phone.”

  “Yes. Because it’s a part of life. It�
�s not magic.”

  “It’s a part of life and it’s implicated in life’s troubles. It’s a portal through which bad news might come. The only magical things are the things that don’t exist.”

  “The ancient mariner exists,” said Azar, “so it becomes impossible to say that some aspect of him is magical. Nothing that exists can be magic. Cell phones are magic right up until the moment you can buy one in a store.”

  This was why we could not persist in being amazed by the things we’d seen. John Baxter’s photograph, the treasure map on the wall, the treasure itself. Life was still just life. Peanuts and warm air and a pill hangover. And it occurred to me that even if the ancient mariner were as old as he said he was, even if he really had done such miraculous things, still his life would have been just like this, just like our lives, cluttered with the trash of daily experience. Even on all those big historic expeditions, his main concerns would have been how cold his hands were and what he was going to eat when his watch rotated below. He’d worry about a dream he’d had and he’d tell himself he had to patch his pants. There would be no magic in any of it. The magic was what he invented, and it didn’t matter if he was seventy or seven hundred.

  “What’s magical about the ancient mariner are his lies,” I said.

  And for a moment, I thought that I almost understood something. I could almost say what it was. But then Lena arrived and interrupted my train of thought, and that was important too, another kind of lesson. Real life was all about interruptions.

  “This is my brother,” she said, jerking her thumb at the tall, handsome man bouncing on his heels behind her. “This is Ben.”

  Ben grinned. I’d imagined a furtive creeping person with wild eyes. Instead he was impressive and substantial. Immediately I had the sense that he was a major character.

  “Don’t miss the haunted pub crawl!” he said. “Meet me at the south end of Duval at ten tomorrow night! Only way to meet the ghosts of old Key West! Brochures available on every corner!”

  Lena hung her head and rubbed her eyes. Ben laughed. He said, “I feel like a million Confederate bucks. How do ya’ll feel?”

  “So, Ben,” said Azar. “What do you do?”

  “As I was saying, tour guide. We’re all tour guides. Destitution or tour guide are the only options for long-term Key West residents.”

  He had all the important characteristics. Forceful gestures, a winning smile, a tragic flaw.

  “Sorry about this,” said Lena. “We should’ve stayed home. I don’t know what I was thinking bringing him to a bar. It’s been a long day.”

  “Us too,” said Azar.

  “Not like my day.”

  “It’s rehab in the morning,” Ben explained.

  Azar nodded briskly, as if rehab were a subject on which he was a great expert. I worried that he was going to mention my own drug problem, but instead he asked, “What are you going for?”

  “No reason.”

  “Those painkiller patches,” said Lena. “Alcohol. Things you can smoke. Who the hell knows? Craziness.”

  “Et fucking cetera,” said Ben.

  I tried to explain what the ancient mariner had said about pirates. That they lived on borrowed time. That eventually, one morning, there was an accounting.

  “On what morning is there not an accounting?” said Ben.

  Lena started to cry, but she stopped as quickly as she’d started. Azar was looking at me and I knew he was thinking that for me too there would be an accounting one day.

  “So let’s all just have a drink and try to forget about this,” Ben said. “Like pirates.”

  Azar shook his head. “Not on our watch, my man.”

  And then I thought again about the ancient mariner. More particularly I thought how incredible it was that we weren’t talking about him. We weren’t talking about Quaco either. We weren’t talking about the buried treasure, whatever it was.

  Now Ben was delivering a speech about LeBron James. Azar was laughing. The man with the cigarette and the oxygen tank was laughing too.

  Lena said, “Shit. I shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to say hi.”

  “I’m glad you came,” I said.

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Once I overdosed on headache medication that I’d stolen from my aunt. It was two days before Christmas and my little cousin found me stumbling around the kitchen. Everyone else was out shopping or something. My cousin was only nine.”

  “That’s not so much embarrassing as really horrible.”

  “Well,” I said, looking at Ben, “I’m sure this is really more horrible for you than it is embarrassing.”

  “It’s just hard to think it’s me and my own brother in this situation. It’s a thing you hear about or see on TV. It’s very surprising to have to live it. He was a nice kid. Everyone liked him.”

  “Everyone likes him now.”

  “There’s nothing to like. He’s no one. Talk about cynicism. He’s a nihilist drug addict.”

  But everybody did like him. I liked him. Now he was talking about facial hair. He said, “A beard occurs incidentally, over time, like the Grand Canyon. A mustache is a contrived object, like Michelangelo’s David.” It sounded like something Azar or I might have said, but it sounded better when Ben said it.

  Lena was going to take him to a rehab in Boca Raton. She was planning to leave at three in the morning so she could be there when the office opened. There was no one else to take him and she was worried he wouldn’t agree to go. I said that he was being very agreeable so far, but I said it just to say it. I knew very well that it wouldn’t last. I knew how these things worked. I myself felt very sharp, but just yesterday I’d taken so many green pills that I couldn’t remember going to sleep.

  “I’m just wandering around with him,” she said. “I can’t go to sleep because he’ll run off, so it’s just more of this for the next few hours.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Would it cheer you up to know that Isaac Newton calculated that the world will end in 2060?”

  “Yes.”

  “He also thought Jesus had come down to earth to operate the levers of gravity.”

  1560

  * * *

  We are an army of dead men and one Pirahao girl named Maria, which is not a Pirahao name. We tell stories about a man named God, who lives in the sky. We tell stories about his son, Hiso, whose sorrow is that he must live in the sky with his father, who hates him just as he hates everything in the world. But Hiso loves the world as much as his father hates it, and he especially loves his mother, who is called Maria, just as I am. We tell these stories and the Pirahao listen carefully and they understand that they are stories about me. Why else would we be telling them? I am Maria, mother of Hiso.

  This is how I become a god. It happens because I have no home in the world, because no language is my true language, because I am lost in the spaces between what can be said and thought.

  “You deserve some congratulations,” says Daniel de Fo. “It is not an easy trick to become a god. Once I was the god of Amahamagupta, but it was only a very small island and my only power was to make coconuts grow. I think they’d have grown anyway. It is better to be the god of America.”

  There can be no god of Anaquitos because there are no gods in Anaquitos, but Anaquitos is not here anymore. I am the god of El Dorado. The Pirahao accept this. Every Pirahao changes her name many times over the course of her life. It is no trouble to change the name of the city.

  But they have never known a god before, and Daniel de Fo must explain how they should behave. He tells them to bring me gifts. Gold. Pearls. But they do not have gold or pearls. He tells them to pray to me, but they have no prayers. He tries to explain how a god differs from a person.

  “A god is like a person disappearing around a bend in a river. A god is what doesn’t exist. A god is what isn’t here anymore.”

  They accept that they must try to change the way they think. They accept that I am a creature of a d
ifferent kind, from a different place, who must be treated in a different way. The danger of the Christians is obvious to them.

  By now Miguel Oreja is very angry at me. He tells me that he knew I was a witch all along. He has seen me speaking with vultures. He has seen me eating iguana eggs. He has heard me speak the languages of dreams. I explain that there are no dreams, there are only the things we do when we’re asleep, but he takes this to mean that I’m abroad in the night casting spells. He has grown fat with xaxa meat and miserable with the indifference of the Pirahao, who say they embrace Christianity but give no sign of their faith. He says I have bewitched him. He says he will destroy the city after all. I tell him he should hurry or it will destroy itself.

  Just as Daniel de Fo must teach the Pirahao to worship me, so he must teach me to behave like a god. There are customs and manners, just as there are for people.

  “What are the characteristics of a god?” he says in Spanish. “They never apologize.”

  “There are no apologies in Pirahao.”

  “They love nice clothes,” he says. “They are forgetful. They never die.”

  “You’re describing yourself.”

  He laughs, haha, but then he says, “Gods don’t make jokes. Try to remember.”

  I have cut the bottom of my dress off, so it only reaches my navel, and I wear a strip of cotton below, and this is the costume of the god of El Dorado. It drives the Christians mad. There is no beauty like the beauty of a god.

  But they are mad already. They wander aimlessly through the city. They are the disease, but the disease is not the plague. The disease is the future. The disease is time. The disease is a way of thinking. It doesn’t kill anyone yet, but it kills things. It begins to kill the world. The hills fall away in the rain and trees consume the mounds at the edges of the city. A person does not need to be a god to see what’s happening.

  And in the end the Pirahao cannot learn to see what the Christians see. They try very hard but they have lived in this place where there is no way to mark time, and the only colors are the colors of things, and it is not proper to mourn longer than a change of the moon. I am the god of this place, but I am no more real to them than time is real. I am the thing that vanishes around the bend in the river.