The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  “He was being discreet. He’s acquired an old Mayan game and some papers that go with it. That’s what he’s translating.”

  “What sort of game?”

  “From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s a role-playing game. The papers seem to imply that it has to do with spirit travel. The gods. All the old cultures have myths that deal with that. It might be something that the priests used to evoke trances…something like that.”

  For no reason I could determine, this news made me edgy.

  “Is that really what you were thinking about?” Odille asked.

  “I was being discreet,” I said, and she laughed.

  Konwicki’s place was a thatched hut with one large room and a sand floor over which a carpet of dried palm fronds had been laid, and was a scrupulously neat advertisement for his travels. Wall hangings from Peru, a brass hookah, a Japanese scroll, a bowl holding some Nepalese jewelry—rings of coral and worked silver, pillows embroidered in a pattern of turquoise thread that I recognized as being from Isfahan. Gourd bowls and various cooking implements hung from pegs, and a hurricane lantern provided a flickering orange light. An old Roxy Music album was playing on a cassette recorder, Bryan Ferry’s nostalgia seeming more effete than usual in those surroundings. In one corner was an orange crate containing a stack of papers covered with Mayan hieroglyphs. I started to pick up the top paper, and Konwicki, who was sitting against the rear wall, rolling a joint, said, “Don’t touch that…please!”

  “What’s the problem? My vibes might unsettle the spiritual fabric?”

  “Something like that.” He licked the edge of the rolling paper.

  Ryan had stretched out on his back between Konwicki and a cardboard box that held some clay figurines, a comic book spread over his eyes; Odille was on her knees facing Konwicki, watching him roll.

  “Why don’t you tell me what else is off-limits?” I said.

  He lit the joint, let smoke trickle from his nostrils. “Did you come here just to be contentious?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure why I came,” I said. “I figured you’d tell me.”

  He gave a shrug, blew more smoke. “Why are you so hostile?”

  I dropped down cross-legged next to Odille. “You know what’s going on here, man. But for one thing, I don’t like guys like you…guys who want to grow up to be Charles Manson, but don’t have the balls, so they hang out and maneuver weaker people into fucking them.”

  I said this mildly, and that was not a pose; I felt calm, without malice, merely making an observation. My dislike of Konwicki—it appeared—had shifted into a philosophical mode.

  “And what sort of person are you?” he asked with equal mildness.

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  He made a show of sizing me up. “How about this? A horny, lonely man who’s having trouble adjusting to the onset of middle age.”

  “Gee, Carl,” I said. “I like my kind of guy a lot better than I do yours.”

  He sniffed, amused. “There’s no accounting for taste.” He passed me the joint, and in the spirit of the moment, I took a hit, let it circulate, then took another, deeper one. Seconds later I realized that Konwicki had exercised the home-field advantage in our little war and pulled out his killer weed. Even though I was already ripped, I could feel its effects moving through me like a cool, soft wind; it was the kind of weed that immobilizes, the kind with which you need to plan where you want your body to fall. My thoughts became muddled, my extremities felt cold. Yet when the joint was passed to me again, I had still another hit, not wanting to seem a wimp.

  “Good shit, huh?” said Konwicki, watching Ryan suck on the joint.

  “Gawd!” said Ryan, leaking smoke. “What clarity!”

  I’m not sure why I reached for the clay figurines in the box next to Ryan—the need to hold on to something, probably. The wind tattering the thatch made a sound like something huge being tom apart. The inconstant wash of orange light along the walls mesmerized me, and the lantern flame itself was too bright to look at directly. In every minute event I perceived myriad subtleties, and I could have sworn I was floating a couple of inches above the ground. Perhaps I thought the figurine would give me ballast, bring me back down, because I was blitzed, wrecked, fucked-up. My hand moved in slow motion, effecting a lovely arc toward the box that contained the figurines. But the second I picked one up, I was cured of my sensory overload and felt stone-cold sober, in absolute control.

  “Christ!” said Konwicki with annoyance. “Put that down!”

  The figurine was a pre-Columbian dwarf of yellowish brown clay with stumpy legs, a potbelly, a hooked nose, and thick brutish lips. The eyes were slitted folds. About the size of a Barbie doll. Ugly as a wart. Holding it gave me focus and made me feel not merely whole, but powerful. The only remnant of my buzz was a sense that the figurine was full of something heavy and shifting, like a dollop of mercury. It seemed to throb in my hand.

  “Put it down!” Konwicki’s tone had become anxious.

  “Why? Is it valuable?” I turned the figure, examining it from every angle. “Don’t worry, man. I won’t drop it.”

  “Just put it down, all right?”

  Holding the figurine in my left hand, away from Konwicki, I leaned forward and saw that the cardboard box contained five more figurines, all standing. “What are they? They look like a set.”

  Konwicki held out his hand for the figurine, but I was feeling more and more in control. As if the figurine were a strengthening magic. I wasn’t about to let it go. Odille, I saw, was regarding Konwicki with distaste.

  “I’m not going to drop it, man. You think I’m too stoned or something? Hey”—I flashed him a cheery grin—“I feel great. Tell me what they are.”

  Ryan, too, was staring at Konwicki; he laughed soddenly and said in an Actors’ Equity German accent, “Tell him, Master.”

  Konwicki grimaced like a man much put upon. “They’re part of a game. An old Mayan game. I bought it off a chiclero in Flores.”

  “Really?” I said. “How do you play?”

  “I can set the figures up, but I don’t know what happens after that.”

  “If you know how to set them up, you must know something about it.”

  An exasperated sigh. “All right…I’ll set them up, but be careful.”

  A long piece of plyboard was leaning against the wall to his left; it was stained a rusty orange and marked with a mosaic of triangular zones. He laid the board flat and arranged the five figures, three at the corners, the other two at the center edge opposite one another. The corner nearest me was vacant, and after a brief hesitation I set the dwarf down upon it.

  “What next?” I said.

  “I told you. I don’t know. Whoever’s playing picks one of the figures to be his corner. But after that…” He shrugged.

  “How many can play?”

  “From two to six people.”

  “Why don’t you and I give it a shot?” I said.

  It was curious how I felt as I said that. I was giving him an order, one I knew he’d obey. And I was eager for him to obey. I wanted him on the board, vulnerable to my moves, even though I didn’t know what moves existed. That animal grin that had first manifested itself in front of the Café Pluto once again spread across my face.

  “Come on, Carl,” I said mockingly. “Don’t you want to play?”

  He pretended to be complying for the sake of harmony, giving Odille a glance that said, What can I do? and stretched out his hand, letting it hover above the figurines as if testing a discharge that issued from the head of each. At last he touched a clay warrior with a feathered headdress and a long spear. I felt less competent, and my thoughts frayed once again; it appeared that my relapse had boosted Konwicki’s spirits. His bland smile switched on, and he leaned back against the wall. The noise of wind and sea smoothed out into a slow oscillating roar, as if something big and winged were making leisurely flights around the outside of the hut.

  On impulse, I picked
up the dwarf, and, suddenly brimming with gleeful hostility, I set it down beside a figurine at the center of the board, a lumpy female gnome with a prognathous jaw and slack breasts. Konwicki countered by moving a figurine resembling a squat infant to the side of his warrior. Thereafter we made a number of moves in rapid succession using the same four figurines. Complex moves, each consisting of more than one figurine, sometimes in tandem, utilizing every portion of the board. The entire process could not have taken more than a few minutes, but I could have sworn the game lasted for an hour at least. The room had been transformed into a roaring cell that channeled the powers of wind and sea, drew them into a complex circuit. A weight was shifting inside me, shifting just as the interior weights of the figurines seemed to shift, as if some liquid were being tipped this way and that, guiding my hand. Along with the apprehension of strength was the feeling of a separate entity at work, a quick, nasty brute of a being with a potbelly and arms like tree trunks, grunting and scuttling here and there, stinking of clay and blood. And yet I maintained enough sense of myself to be afraid. Things were getting out of hand, I realized, but I had no means of controlling them. As I stared at the board it began to appear immense, to exhibit an undulating topography, and I could feel myself dwindling, becoming lost among those rust-colored swells and declivities, coming closer to some terrible danger.

  And then it was over…the game, the feelings of power and possession. Konwicki tried a smile, but it wouldn’t stick. He looked wasted, worn-out. Exactly how I felt. Despite the intensity and strangeness of what I had experienced, I blamed it all on substance abuse. And I was sick of games, of repartee. I struggled to my feet, held out a hand to Odille. “Want to take a walk?” I asked.

  I’d expected that she would look to Konwicki for approval or for some sort of validation; but without hesitation she let me help her to stand.

  “Carl,” I said with my best anchorman sincerity. “It’s been fun.”

  He kept his face deadpan, but in his eyes was a shine that struck me as virulent, venomous. “That’s how it is, huh?” he said, directing his words, I thought, to neither me nor Odille, but to the space between us.

  “Night, all,” I said, and steered Odille toward the door. I kept waiting for Konwicki to make some hostile remark; but he remained silent, and we got through the door without incident. We went along the edge of the shore, and after we had gone about thirty yards, Odille said, “You don’t want to walk, do you, Raymond? Tell me what you really want.”

  “This how it is in Paris?” I said. “Everything made clear beforehand?”

  “This isn’t Paris.”

  “How are you with honesty?” I asked.

  “Sometimes not so good.” She shrugged as if to say that was the best she could offer.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” I said. “Intelligent, appealing. I’m tired of being in pain. Whatever possibilities exist for us…that’s what I want.”

  She made a noncommittal noise.

  “What?” I said.

  “I thought you’d say you loved me.”

  “I want to love you, and that’s the same thing,” I said. “What the depth of my feelings are at this moment doesn’t matter. One thing I’ve learned about love…you’re a fool if you judge it by how dizzy it makes you feel.” To an extent this was a lie I was telling myself, but it was such a clever lie that it came cloaked in the illuminative suddenness of a truth recognized, allowing me to adopt the role of a sincere man struggling to be honest…which was the case. Perhaps we are all such fraudulent creatures at heart that we must find a good script before we can successfully play at being honest.

  “But the dizziness,” said Odille. “That’s important, too.”

  “I’m starting to get dizzy now. How about you?”

  “You’re a clever man, Raymond,” she said after a pause. “I don’t know if I’m a match for you.”

  “If I’m so damned clever, don’t try and baffle me with humility.”

  She said nothing, but the wind and surf and the thudding of coconuts falling onto the sand seemed an affirmation. At last she stood on tiptoe, and her lips grazed my cheek. “Let’s go home,” she whispered.

  Late that night Odille came astride me. Her skin gleamed palely in the moonlight shining through the window, her black hair stuck to the sweat on her shoulders in eloquent curls, and each of her rapid exhalations was cored with a frail note as if she were singing under her breath. Her breasts were small and long and slightly pendulous, with puffy dark areolae, reminding me of National Geographic breasts, shaped something like the slippers Aladdin wears in illustrations from The Arabian Nights; and her features looked so cleanly drawn as to appear stylized. Her delicacy, its exotic particularity, inspired desire, affection, passion. And one thing more, an emotion that underlay the rest: the need to degrade her. Part of my mind rebelled against this urge, but it was huge in me, a brutish drive, and I dug my fingertips into her thighs, gripping hard enough to leave bruises, and began to use her roughly. To my surprise she responded in kind; her fingernails raked my chest, and soon our lovemaking evolved into a savage contest that lasted nearly until dawn.

  I slept no more than a few hours, and even that was troubled by a dream in which I found myself in a dwarfish, heavily muscled body with ocher skin, crouching on the crest of a dune of rust-colored sand, one that overlooked a complex of black pyramids. A hot wind blew fans of grit into the air, stinging my face and chest. The complex appeared to be a mile or so away, but I knew this was an illusion created by the clarity of the air, and that it would take me hours to reach the buildings. I knew many things about the place. I knew, for instance, that the expanse of sand between the dune and the complex was rife with dangers, and I also knew that there was life within the complex…a form of life dangerous to me. I understood this was a dream, albeit of an unusual sort, and that awareness was, I thought, a kind of wakefulness, leading me to believe that the dangers involved were threats not only to my dream self but to my physical self as well. Yet despite this knowledge, I was moved to start walking toward the complex.

  I walked for about an hour, growing dehydrated and faint from the heat. The buildings seemed no nearer to hand, and the sun was a violet-white monster seething with prominences that looked much closer than the sun with which I was familiar, and although great banks of silvery-edged gray clouds were crossing the sky with the slowness of cruising galleons, they never once obscured the sun, breaking apart as they drew near to permit its continued radiance, re-forming once they had passed. It was as if the light were a solid barrier, an invisible cylindrical artifact around which they were forced to detour. Crabs with large pincers, their shells almost the same color as the sand, burrowed in the dunes; they were quite aggressive, occasionally chasing me away from their homes…or hunting me.

  After another hour I came to an exceptionally smooth stretch of sand, lying flat as a pond, in this wholly unlike the rest of the desert, which wind had sculpted into an infinite sequence of undulations and rises, and in color a shade more coppery. The world was so quiet that I could hear the whine of my circulatory system, and I was afraid to step forward, certain that the sand hid some peril; I supposed it to be something on the order of quicksand. At last, deciding to give it a test, I unbuckled the belt that held my sheathed knife (I was not in the least surprised to discover that I had a knife), and removing the weapon, I tossed the belt out onto the sand. For a moment it lay undisturbed. But then the sand beneath it began to circulate in the manner of a slow whirlpool. I sprang back from the edge of the sand, retreating into the lee of a dune, just as the whirlpool erupted, spraying coppery orange filaments high into the air, filaments that were—I realized as they fell back to earth around me—serpents with flat, questing heads, the largest of them seven or eight feet in length. The pit from which they had been spewed was expanding. I scrambled higher on the dune, clawing at the sand, and gazed down into a vast maw, where thousands of white sticks—human bones, I saw—were being pushed up and the
n scattered downward as if falling off the shoulders of a huge dark presence that was forcing its way up through them from some unimaginable depth…

  At that moment I waked, blinking against the sunlight, still snared by the tag ends of the dream, still trying to climb out of danger to the top of the dune, and discovered Odille propped on an elbow, looking down at me with a concerned expression. The sight of her seemed to nullify all the fearful logic of the dream, and I felt foolish for having been so caught up in it. The corners of Odille’s lips hitched up in a faint smile. “You were tossing about,” she said. “So I woke you. I’m sorry if…”

  “No,” I said, “I’m glad you did. I was having a bad dream.” I boosted myself to a sitting position. My muscles ached, and dried blood striped my chest. “Jesus Christ!” I said, staring at the scratches; I remembered how it had been the previous night and was embarrassed.

  “Are you all right?” Odille asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You…did I…?”

  “Hurt me? I have some bruises. But it looks to me”—she pointed at my abrasions—“that you lost the battle.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still flustered. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ve never…I mean, last night. I’ve never been like that…not so…”

  She put a forefinger to my lips. “Apparently it’s what we both wanted. Maybe we needed it, maybe…” She made an angry noise.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sick of explaining myself in terms of the past.”

  I thought I knew her meaning, and I wondered if that was what it had been for both us—a usage of each other’s bodies in order to inflict pain on phantom lovers. I pulled her down, let her rest on my shoulder; her hair fanned across my chest, cool and heavy and silky. I wanted to say something, but nothing came to mind. The pressure of her body aroused me, but I felt tender now, empty of that perverse lust that had enlivened me hours before. She shifted her head so she could see my eyes.

  “I won’t ask what you’re thinking,” she said.