At the End of the World

by Mark Macpherson

  ‘No. You’ll get paid. There’s some work to be done near the KulWinik village, at Yaxchilan, and I’ve based funding on that. Can you come? Please?’

  Hamish asked for the dates. He said he’d get back to Arthur and confirm but told him he would come.

  ‘Michelle’s coming,’ Arthur added, as if he had just remembered an interesting, but largely irrelevant, conversation item. ‘She thinks it might be fun. Coming back to the village for awhile.’

  Michelle Bayles was an epigrapher, well known for her research in decoding ancient Mayan glyphs. Hamish did not understand why a busy and important person like her would come on the small expedition Arthur had suggested. However, Hamish thought, Arthur had started her career. But, on the other hand, a relationship that looked permanent had ended disastrously ten years before.

  Hamish’s telephone fizzed and he understood that Arthur was talking again.

  ‘It would be best if you had a good knowledge of the KulWinik. And the Mayan creation stories. And their language. I’ll send you some books,’ Arthur said quickly.

  ‘Why? What are you not telling me?’ Hamish was worried about Arthur’s enthusiasm for the KulWinik. Hamish did not want to be stuck in a Southern Mexican jungle village.

  Arthur ignored Hamish’s question. ‘Do you think you could bring your twin grandsons with you? It would be a great learning experience, spending time living in a Mayan village. The KulWinik would appreciate their presence,’ Arthur said.

  ‘I don’t believe you. Do you want to pay me to come on a holiday?’ Hamish laughed. ‘A KulWinik village is the last place I’d go. I couldn’t take Kate. She’d hate it.’

  ‘Actually,’ Arthur hesitated then tried to command his friend. ‘The twins have to come. The KulWinik have insisted on it.’

  ‘How do they know about me?’

  ‘They’ve seen that picture I took of you and Jim and Harry in Boston, ten years ago. Do you remember?’

  Hamish said that he did.

  ‘You’ve got to come Hamish. Please?’ Arthur resorted to pleading. ‘This expedition depends on you and the twins. And Michelle has already agreed and has set aside the time. I don’t want to disappoint her,’ Arthur said.

  Hamish listened to the white noise as it twisted and whistled on the telephone line. He thought he heard Arthur say, ‘Not again.’

  Arthur stared at his telephone’s display for a moment after his call with Hamish was disconnected. He lifted his head and spoke to his companion.

  ‘I think he’ll come,’ Arthur said.

  ‘And the Twins?’

  ‘I think so,’ Arthur replied.

  ‘You have done well.’

  ‘I hope it’s worth it, Yax K’in.’

  The old man, the t’o’ohil, did not reply. He nodded his head and grimaced as if a difficult, necessary and dangerous task had been commenced.

  Chapter 3

  Arthur’s books on the Maya arrived. Hamish turned the package over and back again when it was delivered in to his hands. Arthur was too keen, Hamish worried, as he stared at the expensive, express air freight packaging.

  Hamish had not heard from Kate, although it had been a few days since she had left for New York. He was worried but didn’t call her. If she was displeased, for whatever reason, he would only aggravate her annoyance if he hounded her.

  He waited five days before he tried Kate’s phone. He left a vague message and when she had not replied by later that day, he called Kate’s mother.

  ‘She’s not here anymore,’ Kate’s mother said angrily. Her voice had altered after an initial friendly greeting. She became surly once Hamish identified himself.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Hamish asked, trying to sound diffident.

  ‘Yes,’ Kate’s mother said. ‘Don’t bother me with your marital problems.’ She was rude.

  ‘She’s not answering her phone. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘That’s not my problem. She’s not here I said,’ she spoke loudly into the telephone as if the technology was her enemy and then hung up.

  Two days later Hamish received a short message from Kate as he sat on the couch in the lounge room he had shared with her. A book, written by Michelle Bayles, lay open on his lap. His reading glasses were halfway down his nose. He stared through them at the message that had appeared on his telephone. His hand shook a little as he read what his wife had written.

  ‘Hamish. I am so sorry for not contacting you. Mum told me you called and, of course, I received your message. I did not know how to tell you. I should have, of course. No excuses. I’ve caught up with Euan. I’m so sorry. I’m staying with him. It was not my mother that caused me to think that we’re getting old. It was just me. Euan has written a book. You’re in it too but it’s mostly about him and me. In New Zealand and the time after. When I saw him, in New York, it was just like forty years ago. I’m so sorry, Hamish. I’ll be in touch to finalize things.’

  He read Kate’s message three times, thinking after each reading. When he was certain of the content, and it’s meaning, he placed the telephone back on the small side table next to the couch. He carefully closed the book. He would read no more, not just then. He placed both hands on the book’s hard cover and vacantly stared at the lounge room wall.

  This had happened to him before. He had lost Kate to Euan but had retrieved her forty years ago. He had feared that loss recurring.

  The consummation of an ancient anxiety does not make assimilation easier.

  Chapter 4

  The Southern Mexican jungle was too hot and too humid. Hamish could not sleep. He was tired, he wanted to sleep but could not conjure unconsciousness out of mere weariness. Anxiety held sleep in abeyance. In the complete darkness he imagined oblivion and nothingness. It is frightening, whether you are young or old, but Hamish’s anxiety was not fear of his own death, he had a new responsibility. He lay awake willing himself to stay alive.

  Why did Arthur insist that I still come to Mexico? Hamish thought. And why did I agree? However, he had agreed. His difficulty lay in false stoicism and a hollow complaint.

  ‘You can’t sleep either granddad?’

  Jim’s voice in the dark startled Hamish. His heart beat loudly and arrhythmically. Despite himself, Hamish must have been close to sleep.

  Hamish was overcome with the shock and sadness of memory. His shock was, momentarily, as intense, as bad, as first knowledge. It is not simply the transition from ignorance to unwanted knowledge that causes shock. It is not only new knowledge that is insufferable. It is also rediscovered awareness.

  It was not fair, Hamish thought, that a seventeen year old, admittedly as large and as strong as any grown, modest man could hope for, had to live through that shock. Even worse, Hamish thought, as he tried to imagine, and failed, what Jim had survived.

  Jim was too young for sorrow not self-manufactured. It was too much for Hamish, and he had lived.

  Chapter 5

  Hamish rose before dawn the next morning. He couldn’t say he woke early because he couldn’t remember sleeping. However, he did not rise with the tiredness of a whole night spent awake. He must have slept at times and in the darkness his dreams had continued his waking thoughts. He had not known the difference.

  The weak pre-dawn light allowed Hamish to see something of their accommodation. It had been late when he and Jim arrived the previous night and the single light globe in their room had blown as soon as it was turned on. They had felt their way to single beds to sleep. As Hamish peered through the gloom he saw that those two single beds were the only furniture. Jim was a disheveled mass of sweat and sleep in the other bed.

  Hamish quietly sorted their luggage and then noticed a switch for the single ceiling fan. He turned the fan on for Jim and watched his grandson sleep for a minute before he went outside.

  Hamish stood, silent and sentinel-like, on the veranda that lifted his hut off the ground. Thin fog hung in the air as if the heat had sapped it of energy and it could neither fall to ground n
or evaporate. It was warm and clammy, too hot for Hamish even if it had been the afternoon. But that pre-dawn time was merely the beginning of increasing discomfort.

  In the gloaming Hamish could see that his hut was among a compound of huts, about a dozen were visible. Some with corrugated iron roofs but the majority were made from jungle materials. They had no walls but the roof was saddle shaped so that two diagonally opposite corners sloped down and kissed the ground like they were two large beasts standing back to back eating the grass. Hamish’s hut was the exception. It was made of weather-board walls that supported an iron roof with a covered veranda all the way around it. It had, obviously, been constructed to be familiar to Western visitors.

  Hamish walked a lap around the veranda and confirmed that jungle surrounded the village compound. He stepped onto the coarse, spongy mat of large-blade tropical grass. The lawn was damp so he stepped back onto the veranda and went into the room again. He checked that Jim was still sleeping, put sandals on and set off across the grass not knowing where he was headed.

  Hamish could see into and through the huts he passed. The corners that were raised formed a front and back door. He thought he could see sleeping bodies in hammocks.

  He stopped next to a white, moulded-plastic table outside one of the huts. He noticed two empty bottles of Corona underneath. There was no other mess so they were not a sign of revelry and sloth. Hamish guessed that they had been overlooked during a late night clean up, perhaps the dim light of a lamp did not penetrate the murky curtain under the table, he thought.

  He scanned the silent village. Hamish felt like he was all that existed, at the moment before creation. He thought of his grandson. He again wondered why he had followed Arthur’s original plan. Why had he brought Jim to the Mayan village? What was Jim to do, away from his friends, away from his family? Hamish again concentrated on the beer bottles. He was all there was of Jim’s family. Of his family. Except for Kate, there was only the two of them.

  There must be people out of bed somewhere, he thought. He searched for signs of life and noticed a bare electric globe shining in a hut with fly-wire panels for walls. A shadow moved within so he set off in that direction.

  As he drew close to his destination, he disturbed a spider monkey kept inside a free standing cage. The monkey ran and jabbered excitedly from one wire mesh wall to the other. Hamish worried that the monkey would wake everyone. The captive stopped running and stared angrily at the man. Hamish felt a separate voice in his head speak in utter despair, the voice that had begun after Kate’s departure and, at times, caused Hamish to question his sanity. The monkey blamed him, Hamish thought, the one who had given it life, given it expectations and false hopes before trapping it and, now, had returned to destroy it. With difficulty Hamish broke off the torrent of negative thoughts he knew would follow, before the cascade overwhelmed him.

  He did not offer the monkey kind words or soothing sounds. He, most definitely, did not offer one of his fingers through the wire mesh.

  ‘Hamish! Over here.’ A voice came from inside the hut with the bare globe. The pre-dawn light was weak, he could only see an indistinct human shape inside.

  ‘Arthur?’ Hamish asked.

  ‘Yes. Come in. Come in.’

  A flimsy, paneled wire door was opened from the inside. Hamish extended his hand to Arthur, who grabbed the offered hand then dragged his friend close and enfolded him a hug. Hamish was embarrassed at the show of emotion. As he waited for Arthur to let him go he scanned the hut. It was a place for dining, he realized. A long table ran from one wall to the other. On the far side was a long wooden bench, while on the near side there was an odd assortment of mismatched chairs. White moulded-plastic ones, that went with the outside table Hamish had passed, deck chairs made from woven material, solid metal framed kitchen chairs with hard plastic seats that Hamish knew were back in fashion, decades after they had been discarded, and wooden, worn and old dining table chairs. A single, yellow glowing, low wattage light bulb was suspended from the ceiling, free to swing over the middle of the table. There were many shadows at that time of the morning.

  ‘I heard your car come in last night,’ Arthur said after ending the embrace. ‘Your driver told me you were OK so I didn’t bother you. I assumed you and Jim would be tired.’ A hand remained on Hamish’s shoulder, who wondered when Arthur would finally let him go.

  Arthur gave Hamish a final pat on the back and said, ‘You’re up early. Couldn’t sleep?’

  ‘No, it was too hot.’

  ‘You’re in the hut for tourists. Normal beds are not the best option in this climate.’

  ‘Hammocks would be better,’ Hamish said.

  They were not alone. Sitting in a corner, on the end of the bench, was an old man, much older than Arthur and Hamish. He was dressed in a white cotton tunic that covered him from his neck to this wrists and down to his shins. A large, hand-made cigar generated a pall of smoke. The smell was unpleasant so soon after sleep. The old man’s hair was black, unkempt and hung down to his shoulders. His face was flat and wrinkled, faintly simian. He was smiling, in a fixed way, at the two men. Too much smiling, Hamish thought uneasily, as if the old man was about to thrust out his hand and ask for money.

  Arthur again placed a hand on Hamish’s shoulder and shepherded him towards the seated, old man.

  ‘Hamish. This is Yax K’in. The spiritual leader, the t’o’ohil, of the KulWinik,’ Arthur said.

  Hamish moved forward after the introduction and shook Yax K’in’s hand which was limp and did not return Hamish’s grasp.

  ‘He doesn’t speak English and you don’t have much Spanish, do you?’ Arthur said.

  Hamish said that he didn’t.

  ‘Did you read the information I sent you? He’s well over a hundred years old,’ Arthur said to Hamish while looking at Yax K’in as if he was an extraordinary exhibit. ‘Maybe even a lot more. He doesn’t look seventy. Not a grey hair on his head. Amazing isn’t it? Compared to us, I mean. It’s as if time has stopped for him. His father lived, so they say, impossible to verify back then, for more than a hundred and twenty years. Must be good genes, eh?’

  Hamish smiled diffidently. He keenly felt the disrespect of talking about someone present, in a language they did not understand.

  ‘Do you want breakfast now?’ Arthur asked.

  Hamish said that he did.

  ‘OK, I’ll be back in a minute.’

  Arthur gave Hamish a little push in Yax K’in’s direction as he turned to leave the hut. ‘Go and sit down. He’s been waiting for you.’

  Hamish sat down next to the odd old man and smiled, not knowing what to say. After a long silence, during which the heavy cigar smoke annoyed Hamish, Yax K’in pointed at him and said, ‘Hamish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hijos?’ Yax K’in asked. The old Mayan man’s face brightened as he remembered an English word. ‘Son?’ He raised two of his fingers and pointed them at the ground. Hamish guessed he was being asked if two sons accompanied him.

  ‘No, just my grandson, Jim,’ Hamish said.

  Yax K’in stopped smoking. He stopped smiling. He frowned. ‘No?’

  ‘No. Grandson,’ Hamish said slowly.

  ‘Grandson?’ Yax K’in was asking what the word meant.

  Hamish thought about how to explain the concept and came up with, ‘Son son,’ and a rolling motion with his hand to indicate continuation.

  Yax K’in resumed smiling. ‘Ah! Son son.’ He again raised two of his fingers and then pointed them at the ground.

  ‘No, just one. Jim,’ Hamish said. He eventually explained, after more gesticulation, that Jim was the name of his grandson, and was his only companion.

  Yax K’in was visibly concerned at what Hamish had told him. The t’o’ohil resumed his heavy, pensive smoking while Hamish looked wistfully towards the door of the hut, hoping to be rescued by Arthur’s return. He did not want to talk about Jim.

  Yax K’in’s attention unnerved Hamish in the d
im morning light and strange shadows. ‘Jim. Son son,’ he said. Hamish once again nodded agreement. ‘Jim?’ Yax K’in asked and held up two of his fingers and thrust them at Hamish’s face.

  Hamish knew what he was asking.

  ‘Yes, he is one of twin brothers,’ Hamish said as he also raised two fingers and repeated, ‘Yes. Jim. Two.’

  Yax K’in pointed at Hamish’s face. ‘Jim?’

  He was asking if Jim shared Hamish’s appearance, his dark hair tinged with red and his too large, roman nose. Hamish laughed and said quickly, knowing Yax K’in would not understand, ‘It’s a distinctive look we have. I like to think it’s regal.’