The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  I had intended to go all the way to the top, but I grew uncomfortable with the isolation, the silence, and started back down. My progress was slowed by an attack of dizziness. I could still hear the woman crying, and the percussive effect of her sobs made me dizzier. The spaces beneath were swelling upward like black gas, and afraid that I would fall, overcoming my nervousness concerning the cubicles, I flung open the door to one, thinking I would sit inside until my vertigo had passed. A fecal stink poured from the cubicle, and something moved in the darkness at the rear, startling me.

  “Who’s there?” called a man’s voice.

  There was something familiar about the voice, and I peered into the cubicle. A pale shape was slumped against the far wall.

  “Come on out,” I said.

  The man shifted deeper into the corner. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m dreaming all this,” I said. “I don’t have much choice.”

  A feeble, scratchy laugh. “That’s what they all say.”

  I stepped inside, closing until I had clear sight of the man. For a moment I failed to recognize him, but then I realized it was Ryan—Ryan as he might have looked after a hard twenty years, his blond hair grayed and the youthful lines of his face dissolved into sagging flesh. The creases in his skin had filled in with grime and looked to be deep cuts. His clothes were in tatters. “Jesus, Ryan!” I said. “What happened?”

  “I’m in jail.” Another cracked laugh. “I have to stay put until…”

  “Till what?”

  He shook his head.

  I knelt beside him. “Where are we, Ryan?”

  He giggled. “The endgame.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “The game,” he said, “is not a game.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he lost his train of thought. I repeated the question.

  “The game is just a way of getting here. You’ve already done playing, and now you have to wait till all the moves have been made.”

  I asked him to explain why—if I’d done playing—moves were still to be made, and he replied by saying that a move wasn’t a move until it had been made everywhere. “It’s like this place,” he said. “A place isn’t really a place. One place leads to another, and that place leads to another yet, and on and on. There’s nothing that’s only itself.” That thought seemed to sadden him, and he said, “Nothing.”

  The woman let out a piercing scream, and her curses echoed through the pyramid.

  I tried to pull Ryan to his feet, thinking that there might be some more pleasant place for him to wait; he struck at my hands, a flurry of weak blows that did no damage, but caused me to release him.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m safe here.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “From you,” he answered. “The Master thinks he’s the dangerous one, but I know it’s you. He’s made the wrong move. Sooner or later he’ll see I’m right, and he’ll try and stop it. But you can’t stop it. The travelers have to come and go; the transitions have to…” His speech became incoherent for a few seconds; then he snapped out of it. “Of course there are no right moves. Even the winner pays a price once the game is done. But not to worry, Ray,” he said with a flash of his old cockiness. “It’ll hurt, but it’ll be a much cheaper price than the one the Master has to pay. Or else you can always keep playing if you want to be noble and take the risk.”

  He lapsed into incoherence once again; I attempted to bring him to his senses, but all he would say was to repeat that “it” couldn’t be stopped, “it” had to happen, and to ramble on about “exchanges, necessary transitions.” Giving up on him, I left the cubicle and went out onto the sand. The sun was low, its violet-white disk partially down on the horizon, and the shadows had grown indistinct. I strolled about the complex, feeling for the first time at ease among the buildings; I was comfortable even in proximity to the snake-headed statue. I stepped back from it, admiring its needle teeth and flat skull, all its obscene proportions, and although I felt as before a sense of resonant identity with it, on this occasion I was not frightened by the feeling, but rather was pleased. Indeed, I found the entire landscape soothing. The snakes, the crabs scuttling down the sanguine faces of the dunes, the black silence of the complex…all this had a bleak majesty and seemed the product of a pure aesthetic.

  On waking and remembering the dream, however, I was more disturbed by my acceptance of that bizarre landscape than I had been by my fear of it. It was still dark, and Odille was asleep beside me. I eased out of bed, pulled on jeans and a shirt, and went into the patio. The edges of the tile roof framed a rectangle of stars and dark blue sky, with the crowns of palms showing half in silhouette, the ragged fronds throwing back pale green shines from the lights of the house next door. I dropped onto a lawn chair and lay back, trying to settle my thoughts. After a few minutes I heard the whisper of Odille’s sandals on the concrete; she had thrown on a bathrobe, and her hair was in disarray, loose about her shoulders. She sat opposite me, put a hand on my knee, and asked what was wrong.

  I had previously told her that I’d been having bad dreams, but had not been specific; now, though, I told her the entire story—the game, the feelings I’d had, the dreams, and my meeting with Konwicki. Once I had done, she lowered her head, fingering the hem of her robe, and after a pause she asked, “What are you worried about? The game…that it’s real?”

  I was ashamed to admit it.

  “That’s ridiculous!” she said. “You can’t believe that.”

  “It’s just the dreams…and Ryan. I mean, what’s the matter with him?”

  She made a noise of disgust. “He’s weak. Carl’s found a way to undermine him with drugs or something. That’s all.”

  We were silent for several seconds; a palm frond scraped the roof, and the surf was a distant hiss.

  “I knew something was bothering you,” she said. “But…” She got to her feet, walked a couple of paces off, and stood with her arms folded. “Carl’s getting to you. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.” She sighed, jammed her hands in the pocket of the robe. “I’m going to see him.”

  “The hell you are!”

  “I am! And if he believes there’s anything to the game, I’ll find out about it.” I started to object, but she talked over me. “You aren’t worried about me, are you? About my going back to him?”

  “I guess not.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence.” She knelt beside my chair. “Don’t you understand how much I hate him?”

  “I never understood why you were with him in the first place.”

  “I was vulnerable. He took advantage of my confusion. He confused me even more. He violated my trust; he weakened me. If I could, I’d…” She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Don’t tell me you haven’t ever done anything that you knew was bad for you even when you were doing it.”

  “No,” I said, surprised by her vehemence. “I can’t tell you that.” I stroked her hair. “What did he do to you?”

  Her face worked, suppressing emotion. “The same sort of thing he’s trying to do to you…except I didn’t have anybody to tell me what was going on. Listen! Nothing’s going to happen. I’m just going to talk to him. He’ll lie, but I know when he’s lying. I’ll be able to tell whether he’s concerned for himself or looking for a way to hurt you. And that’ll put your mind at ease.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “Yes, it is!” She put her arms around my neck. “I want you to get past this so I can have your undivided attention.”

  There was an edge to her intensity, a hectic brightness in her eyes, that quieted my objections, and later that night when she said she loved me, I believed her for the first time.

  Two nights later as we sat at dinner in a small restaurant, a one-room place of stucco and thatch lit by candles, Odille told me that she had spoken with Konwicki. “You don’t have to be concerned about the game,” she said. “Carl’s only trying to unn
erve you.” She had a forkful of rice, chewed. “I told him all about your dreams…everything. You should have seen him. He was like a starving man who’d been handed a steak. He said, Yes, yes, it was the same for him. Dreams, odd intuitions. Then I described your last dream, the one with Ryan, and what he’d said about Carl’s making the wrong move. He loved that. He said, Yes, that was true. And he didn’t know how to stop it from happening. After that, he offered an apology for everything that had happened between us. He said the game had changed him, that he could see now what a reprehensible sort he’d been.”

  “A reprehensible sort?” I said. “Were those his words?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Reprehensible…shit!” I stared at her over the rim of my coffee cup. “It sounds to me like he’s corroborating the dreams. Why else would he admit that he’d made a bad move?”

  “Because,” said Odille, “he knows if he were to deny it, he’d have no way of affecting you. But now, claiming that it’s all true, especially the part about him possibly losing, he has an excuse to talk to you, to play with your mind. He can pretend to be your ally. You watch. He’ll come to see you. He’ll try to align himself with you. He’ll have a plan that’ll involve the two of you working together to save each other from the game…its perils. Then he’ll start manipulating.” She had another bite, swallowed. “He thought he was fooling me, but he was transparent.”

  “Are you sure about all this?”

  “Of course. Carl’s a greedy little man who thinks he’s smarter than the rest of the world. He can’t imagine that anyone could see through him. If there was anything to the game, he never would have told me.” She took my hand. “Just wait. Watch what happens. You’ll see I’m right.”

  Odille’s reassurances had not convinced me of the fecklessness of my fears. Recalling Konwicki’s statement that familiarity with one’s counter was important, I set out to reinhabit the feelings I’d had while playing, to recall the moves that had been made. It was not hard to recapture those feelings; they returned to me every night in dreams. But the moves were a different matter. Other than the first, I could remember only the last two: one in which all four figurines had been placed in close proximity, and another in which the figure of the infant had been placed in a zone adjoining that of the dwarf. I asked Odille what she could recall about the counters from working on the translation, and she said that all she knew was what Konwicki had told her.

  “He used to joke with me about them,” she said. “He identified himself with the warrior, and he said my counter was the female…the one you moved during the game. He described her to me. A real maniac, a terrible creature. Sluttish, foul-mouthed, vile. She was always throwing tantrums. Physically abusive.”

  “Maybe he was trying to demean you by describing her that way.”

  “I’m sure he was. But once he did show me some of the translation he’d done about her, and it looked authentic.”

  “What were they…the counters? Did he ever tell you that?”

  “Archetypes,” she said. “Mayan archetypes. Spirit forms…that was the term he used. I’m not sure what that meant. Whoever made the figures, whoever assigned them their characters, had a warped idea of human potential. All the characters were repellent in some way…I remember that much. But when he told me all that, I was trying to pull away from him, and I didn’t pay much attention.”

  A week went by, and I made no further progress. I was spinning my wheels, wasting myself in futile effort. Then I took stock of the situation, and suddenly all my paranoia seemed ludicrous. That I could have even half-believed I had been possessed by a Mayan spirit in the shape of a dwarf was evidence of severe mental slippage, and it was time to get a grip. The dreams must have some connection to the abuses I had suffered during the past few years, I thought, and to be this much of a fool for love was debasing, particularly in the face of the abuses I met with every day in Livingston. Malnutrition, tyranny, ignorance. I determined that I was going to take a hard line with my psyche. If I had dreams, so what? Sooner or later they would run their course. And I also determined to grant Odille’s wish, to give her my undivided attention; I realized that while I hadn’t been neglecting her, neither had I been utilizing the resources of the relationship as a lover should. Things were changing between us in a direction that I would never have predicted, and I owed it to her, to myself, to see where that would lead.

  Our lives were calm for the next couple of weeks. The dreams continued, but I refused to let them upset me. Odille and I fell into the habit of taking twilight walks along the beach, and one evening after a storm, with dark blue ridges of cloud pressing down upon a smear of buttermilk yellow on the horizon, we walked out to the point beyond the Café Pluto, a hook of land bearing a few palms whose crowns showed against the last of sunset like feathered headdresses. Nearby stretches of cobalt water merged with purplish slate farther out, and there were so many small waves, it looked as if the sea were moving in every direction at once. We sat on a boulder at the end of the point, watching the fight fade in the west, and after a minute Odille asked if I had ever been to Paris.

  “A long time ago,” I said.

  “What did you think?”

  “It was the winter,” I said. “I didn’t see too much. I had no money, and I was staying in a house that belonged to this old lady named Bunny. She was straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She’d been Lawrence Durrell’s lover…or maybe it wasn’t Durrell. Somebody famous, anyway. She was an invalid, and the house was a mess. Cat shit everywhere. There was a crazy Romanian who was printing an anarchist newsletter in the basement. And Bunny’s kids, they were true degenerates. Her fifteen-year-old raped the maid. The twenty-year-old was dealing smack. Bunny just lay around, and I ended up having to take care of her.”

  “God, you’ve lived!” said Odille, and we both laughed.

  I put an arm around her. “Are you homesick?”

  “Not so much…a little.” She leaned into me. “I was just wondering how you’d like Paris.”

  We had talked about the future in only the most general of terms, but I felt comfortable now considering a future with her, and that surprised me, because even though I was happier than I’d been in a very long time, I had also been nervous about formalizing the relationship.

  “I suppose we’re going to have to leave here eventually,” I said.

  She looked up at me. “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me where we go. I don’t have to be any particular place to do my work.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s your greatest virtue.”

  “Is that so?” I kissed her, the kiss grew long, and we lay back on the boulder. I touched her breasts. In the darkness the whites of her eyes were aglow; her breath was sweet and frail. Waves slapped at the rock. Finally I turned onto my back, pillowed my head on my hands. Icy stars made simple patterns in the sky, and it seemed to me at the moment that everything in the world had that same simplicity.

  “Someday,” Odille said after a long silence, “I’d like to go back to Paris…just to see my friends again.”

  “Want me to go with you?”

  She was silent for a bit; then she sat up and stared out to sea. I had asked the question glibly, thinking I knew the answer, yet now I was afraid that I’d misread her. At last she said, “You wouldn’t like it. Americans don’t like Parisians.”

  “The way I hear it, it’s mutual,” I said, relieved. “But there are exceptions.”

  “I guess so.” She glanced down at me and smiled. “Anyway, we don’t have to stay in Paris. We could come to the States. I wouldn’t mind that.” She tipped her head to the side. “You look puzzled.”

  “I wasn’t sure we’d get around to talking about this. And even if we did, I thought it would be awkward.”

  “So did I for a while. But then I realized we were past awkwardness.” With both hands she lifted the heft of her hair and pushed it back behind her head. “Sometimes I’ve tried to imagine mys
elf without you. I can do it. I can picture myself living a life, being with someone else. All that. But then I realized how artificial that was…that kind of self-examination. It was as if I were wishing for that prospect, because I was afraid of you. To end doubt, or to learn whether my doubts were real, all I had to do was stop thinking about them. Just give in to the moment. That was easier said than done, I thought. But then I tried it, and it was easy.” She ran a hand along my arm. “You did it, too. I could tell when you stopped.”

  “Could you, now?”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  Before I could answer, there was a crunching in the brush behind us, and two figures emerged from shadows about thirty feet away. It took me a second to identify them against the dark backdrop—Konwicki, with Ryan hanging at his shoulder. I stood, wary, and Odille came to her knees. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked them. “Tracking us?”

  “I have to talk with you,” said Konwicki. “About the game.”

  “Some other time, man.” I took Odille’s arm and began steering her back along the point, giving Konwicki and Ryan a wide berth, but keeping an eye on them.

  “Listen,” said Konwicki, coming after us. “I’m not after mucking you about. We’re in serious trouble.” I kept walking, and he grabbed my shoulder, spun me around. “I’ve been having dreams, too. They’re different from yours. But they’re indicators all the same.”

  His face betrayed anxiety, but I wasn’t buying the act. I shoved him back. “Keep your hands off me!”

  “The game’s a conduit,” he said as we walked away. “A means of transport to another world, another plane…something. And to another form as well.” He caught up with me, blocked our path; Ryan scuttled behind him. “I don’t know how the Mayans discovered it, but it was a major influence on their architecture, on every facet of their culture. The ritual cruelties of their religion, the—”