The Mobius Man

by M. S. Karl

  “Man does a hell of a lot of thinking in the jungle,” he said, folding a tortilla over some black beans. His arm was still a little stiff, but the healing process was well under way. “You’re a different fucking person. What you were back there, the outside world, that’s something else. You aren’t that anymore.” He looked up dreamily at the smoke rising into the night sky.

  “What were you back there?” I asked.

  He reached under his shirt and brought out his notebook. “If you’ve read this, you know.” He chuckled at my surprise. “Yeah, I went through your fucking things while you were asleep. I like to know more about the people I’m in the jungle with. For instance, you’ve got a pretty big gun in that briefcase. Never carry one, myself. Still, in the jungle, can’t hurt. If you know how to use it. Me, I don’t fool with them. I’m just a fucking ex-college professor. Most I ever hunted was butterflies. ’Course, you know that if you read this.” He stared into the fire. A piece of wood cracked with a loud pop and a spark went floating up the corridor of smoke.

  “Look.” All at once his eyes were on mine and his face was earnest. “If you read this, you probably think I’m some kind of shit that preyed on his students. I know you don’t like me. Though for some goddamn reason I can’t fathom, you seem dedicated to saving my ass. But I want you to know it wasn’t like you probably think. I was a good teacher. I was a goddamn good teacher. It was my work. And the fucking administration was to blame. I was fair. I never traded a grade. I did my goddamn work, met my classes. Nobody had cause to complain. Then I met Judy. Her husband taught English. A really rotten bastard. She took my course in ecology. She was a sort of flowerchild anyway. Had been, in San Francisco, before she married her old man. Hell, she wasn’t any freshman. Look, I never got any sympathy from Clarisse, my wife. Anyway, that’s what happened. It was between two adults. But her old man found out and decided to raise a stink. He actually went to the Board of Regents and complained.

  “At first I was going to fight it. I mean, just because you have an affair, it doesn’t mean you suddenly forgot all you ever knew. But the kids started whispering about it. I even got propositioned by a few of my female students. The Dean told me that I could fight it if I wished. He said it was a ‘very equivocal’ situation. Mealymouthed sons-of-bitches. I got halfway through the spring semester, but when Clarisse pulled out on me, I knew it was over. One day it was that clear. I looked up at the bell tower on campus and saw the students on their way to classes and I was hurrying to get to my one o’clock, then I thought, ‘Why?’ So I left. I went home, packed a suitcase, took the money out of the bank, and left. And for all I know they’re still looking for me. Except now it’s in two fucking countries.”

  I got up and looked down at him. What was there to say? There was something in his recital that touched my emotions. After all, it was his attempt to make himself likable. Maybe he had gotten a bad break. But there was also a cold, rational core to me that said that his performance was self-serving, and that the trouble he had had back there had been of his own making. And then a third voice told me that I was not God and should withhold judgment.

  I went to the woman. “How is the baby?”

  “He is well,” she said, giving me half a smile. “Fat, you see?” She gently pinched a plump thigh.

  I smiled back. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Luisa Maria,” she said. “My son is Abel.”

  “Abel,” I pronounced, and went back to my place.

  Soon it would be finished. They woud be crossing the river and I would never see them again. In a few days, I realized, I had become used to seeing the woman, used to being around her and the child. I had had something with her I had never had before and now it would be gone. All at once it came together, like something tangible, in my belly, and I sat down weakly. I did not want her to go, least of all with him. But I did not have the right to tell her not to. I had a job, a mission, and I must follow it to its end, however convoluted and complicated that might be.

  Once more I lay awake on the ground and watched the night sky. Somewhere hundreds of miles above us a piece of rock from another world hurtled into the earth’s air, blazed, and then vanished. A couple of thousand miles to the north, Adrian Kestering was at an intimate dinner, having his second drink. Someone who worked in State would be talking about the Mideast or the situation in Ethiopia. They would ask Kestering’s opinion and he would purse his lips and touch his chin.

  “Well, I think that the situation in the Mideast is stable. There will continue to be a great deal of belligerent talk but both sides know that a war is no-win.”

  And he would be thinking of a fevered message, smuggled into the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, that afternoon, and the warning that in three hours President Sadat would be assassinated by members of a PLO splinter group. He would be remembering the emergency call to Sadat and the mysterious cancellation of public appearances, and he would smile. “I expect that the situation in the Mideast will continue the same way indefinitely.” Then someone would mention Latin America and ask if it were true that Mexico was on the verge of anarchy. And once more Adrian Kestering, debonair in his white tie and tails, would tug an ear or touch his chin. “Mexico? It has some formidable problems, certainly, but the government is dealing with them extremely effectively.”

  And he would be wondering about an agent infiltrated into a communist group in Guadalajara, and a federal deputy’s secretary who was bought and paid for by the agency, and about a man who had been sent to Tabasco and had not been heard from. Tomorrow, he would tell himself, he would have to make an inquiry.

  That was the scenario, or something like it. There was another for Leah. I thought of her hair, a red glow in the half-light of the bedroom, her body white and soft and inviting his touch …

  And on a college campus somewhere to the north, life would be going on as usual, and a new professor would be hearing jokes about what had happened to his predecessor, a year ago, a man who had vanished without a trace.

  This time I did not know the people in the dream, but I knew it had all happened and so must happen that way again. I was acting out a role that was preordained.

  She was an ash blonde with swinging breasts, who was offering them up to me in the quiet of the room, walking toward me with a flick of the hips as I lay on the bed, pushing against the bed until my face was touching her dark public hair and I could smell her musky scent. She was pulling my head against her and moaning and calling me by my name, but the name was not my own. I was too aroused for it to matter, though, and pulled her down onto the bed with me and buried my face between her legs, and later we were lying in the bed and she was telling me about her other lovers before her marriage and how I was the first in so long, how bored she was with her husband, how he could hardly get it up, and I was rolling over on top of her again, my tongue deep in her mouth …

  And I was sitting in an office, when he came in, a gray-haired, thin figure wearing an ancient bow tie, who closed the door behind him and stood trembling in fury as he talked. His words were a torrent that rushed like a flood onto my mind and began to batter my sanity. What was he talking about—rape? What had she told him about at least one man still wanting her enough to take her by force? What had she done?

  I stammered and watched his face mottle with emotion. He took a step forward, a fist raised, and then controlled himself. He would not press charges with the district attorney because he did not want his wife’s name dragged through the courts. But he would request a closed-door meeting with the President. The door slammed as he went out and all at once it came to me: He, too, had called me by the wrong name. Perhaps it was all a mistake and he had me confused with someone else.

  I woke up screaming silently. I looked at my watch. Its luminous dial said two in the morning. The others were all asleep. I was soaked with perspiration. What was happening?

  I got up and walked to the circle of the encampment. The wind was a cold knife that cut in short jabs. Why was
I identifying with his life, his past? I did not like him, did not want him near me, wanted to be rid of him and this mission. Had I dreamed like this on all my previous missions? I heard movement behind me and saw the woman standing behind me.

  “You have trouble sleeping,” she said in a whisper.

  “Yes. I’m having trouble tonight,” I said.

  “Every night,” she corrected. “You move in your sleep.”

  “I do? Well, it will soon be over.”

  “Yes.” She looked at the ground, and I reached out and touched her cheek. She let my hand stay, but her face was sad. “I thought he would not return,” she said.

  “I did, too.”

  “But it was his destiny. One must accept.”

  I watched her barefoot form go back to the hammock and bend over to make sure the child was still warm. I could change it all, very easily. The gun was in my briefcase. Was I the coward I accused him of being? No one would ever know … I went to the briefcase, opened it, and looked down at the weapon. So easy. I shut it, went back to my blanket, and lay looking at the sky until the first milky light of dawn. Maybe the daylight would bring back sanity.

  But it didn’t. The day brought us to the river and gave the final twist to insanity, and afterward nothing would ever be the same.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We came to the river at midday and stood on its banks looking out over the muddy stream. There was a group of five or six shacks and a couple of dugouts with outboard motors. Across the stream, maybe five hundred yards, was the twisted greenness of the Guatemala jungle. It was the same jungle that we stood in now, but on that side lay refuge. Bassett went down to the water’s edge to talk to one of the men at the wooden pier. I heard him say something about San Marcos and the man, an Indian with a floppy straw hat, shook his head and pointed upstream. Bassett clambered up the mud hill to where we waited, batting away a horsefly.

  “I have to go upstream,” he said, “We came out at the wrong place.”

  “What?”

  He saw the surprise on my face and shrugged. “I have to do something before I cross over.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s personal. That’s all. You’ve come this far. Thanks. I appreciate your help. I don’t know what I would’ve done. If I had the money I’d pay you. But I don’t so, I’ll have to give you my thanks instead. And that’s it.”

  “You mean you aren’t crossing?”

  He shook his head and the sun glinted on his glasses. “Not just yet. But I’ll be okay.”

  “And the woman?”

  “I have to go by myself. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

  “After she came this far?” I felt the anger boiling up inside me. He raised a palm.

  “Man, look, I’m sorry, it’s tough as hell, but that’s how it is. You didn’t think she was coming to Guatemala with me? Hell, that wouldn’t be any good for her. She wouldn’t like the Peten.”

  “Considerate of you,” I said. People were watching us now, aware that something was happening from the tone of our voices. A grizzled old man with a cane stopped to watch, giving us a toothless smile. There was a smell of mud over everything, a smell not unlike that of the city, but this time without exhaust fumes. Little waves lapped at the mud banks and bits of trees went bobbing downstream in the dark flow. “Don’t you think she deserves more?” I asked.

  “Deserves? Let me tell you a fucking thing or two.” He shoved his face to within a few inches of mine. “Nobody in this whole goddamn world deserves a fucking thing. If you’re lucky, you may get something extra along the way, but that’s about it. If you’re so high on the fucking woman, you take her. Don’t give me that noble crap. I’ve seen you two looking at each other. You’ve probably screwed her yourself while I was in the fucking jail. Go on, deny it. Deny you were taking advantage of me, letting me rot there so you could put it in my woman.”

  My mouth opened, but no words came. His laugh was raucous.

  “You can’t, can you? Look, Mister Whoever-you-are, I never asked you to come this far and I don’t know why the hell you did. I never asked her, either. You came on your own goddamn responsibility, and I don’t owe you a damn thing.”

  “You bastard. What’s at San Marcos?”

  “None of your goddamn business. That’s what. Look.” He put a hand on a hip and stood with his feet spread in the soft mud to keep from sliding. “Here, right now, it ends. You can spend the night with her, all to yourself.”

  He was still laughing when I hit him. He slipped in the mud and rolled halfway down the bank. His hand grabbed a tuft of grass and he looked up, his beard streaked with mud. A little trickle of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth and his free hand scratched in the mud for his glasses. He found them, fitted them back on his face, and rose to his elbows.

  “Do you feel better now? You’ve wanted to do that for a long time. Admit it.” He hoisted himself painfully to his feet while the few inhabitants of the little settlement watched. Mud caked his clothes and there was a smudge of brown on one lens of his glasses. He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. “You dumb fuck,” he sneered. “You pitiful, dumb son-of-a-bitch. You must be the prize loser of all time. Jesus, I thought I was bad. But you take the cake. All this way, just to help me, telling me how you couldn’t let an innocent man suffer, and how you had found out the truth. The truth. Even going to pin it on Alexandra Whitcomb. Alex Whitcomb. So goddamn eager you didn’t even check her out. She wasn’t even in Tabasco the day of the murder. I know because I went to her house to see her that morning. Just before I killed Paul LaCour.” His teeth showed under the beard and I saw his reddened eyes laughing at me. “That’s right. I killed him. He was an arrogant, vicious son-of-a-bitch who liked to collect things. Butterflies, pottery, coins, stamps, people’s lives. He thought he was God. You’re the same. I thought you and I were alike. But we’re not. You’re like he was. You think you’re God, too. Well, I killed that bastard, as sure as I’m standing here and any night along the way I could’ve killed you, too.”

  The sun seemed to spin in the sky and I was no longer on the banks of a jungle river, confronting a madman. That was another person and I was slightly outside him, watching it all. The person standing above the madman was a thin, dirty-bearded scarecrow, in sweaty clothes whose face seemed to be in an invisible vise, undergoing torture.

  The man who was not myself spoke and his voice was a croak, “Why?”

  The other man’s laugh was a mocking rasp. “Why? You mean you can’t quite believe I had it in me?” He spat out blood and mud. “Because he pushed me too far, that’s why. He took the Morpho. Didn’t want to hear a goddamn thing about it. Just took it and then tried to short me on the price. The motherfucker had promised me five hundred pesos a day, and a bonus of ten thousand for the Morpho. He tried to renege on it. Tried to Jew me down. All of a sudden I saw all the goddamn administrators and deans and bastards that had run me out of my job. They were all standing right there in that room. He was just like they were, didn’t know a thing, didn’t care. And there was a pin lying on the table. And I killed him.”

  He turned his back on me and half slid down the bank to the pier. I heard him talking to the boatman, and I realized, in some part of my brain, that he was bargaining for a ride upriver to San Marcos. The man said something I didn’t catch and Bassett replied. But I had lost interest.

  The world had turned around once and I felt dizzy. Wrong. Completely wrong. I had been so sure. I took a seat on the bank and watched it all as if I were a disinterested observer. I watched the little outboard start and I watched the man I had just hit take a seat in the middle. I watched it nose out into the stream and begin a slow diagonal turn upriver. I saw the woman, too, out of the corner of my eye, watching the little boat vanish against the green of the jungle shore. I sat for a very long time and soon the people got tired of watching me and went about their business.

  It was mid-afternoon when I got u
p. The sun had baked cracks into the ground where we had fought and there was a swarm of gnats from off the water. I went over to where the woman sat under a tree with the child. I started to speak, but there was nothing to say. She nodded, and I knew that she understood.

  I was still standing beside her, trying to keep away the horseflies when I heard the motor, a dull rattle from upstream that pulsed louder and then died away. Then I looked up and saw it, an Indian dugout with two men, loaded with cardboard boxes. The first man jumped onto the pier and held the bow while the man at the stern made his way forward. Then they both began to lift out the boxes and stack them on the dock.

  The second man was an Indian, small and dark, with a beaten straw hat. The boxes seemed to be his, but the first man helped him take them uphill to one of the houses. A few minutes later the second man came down the hill toward us.

  He was the kind of man the jungle breeds, a grizzled Petenero who might have been left over from the Chicle boom half a century ago. His baseball cap shaded a face matted with gray stubble and his belly flopped over his belt buckle, but you knew that most of the fat was muscle. He wore new American boots, and a Shrade hunting knife was in a belt scabbard.

  “You’re American,” he said in English.

  I nodded. The old Chiclero reached into his pocket for a pack of Mexican cigarettes and offered me one. “No thanks.”

  He lit and then puffed for a while. “Woman with you?”

  “That’s right.”

  He grunted. His eyes had read us both on the first glance and filed away the impression. After that, it was nobody’s business and he knew it. “My name is Pedro Magana.”

  I took a hand that was like tanned leather. “Dennison.”

  “Going to Sacrificios, Mr. Dennison?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s good. There’s been trouble in this area I thought I would warn you, you know? Keep you from getting into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”