Perhaps the game was—as Konwicki had suggested—merely a matter of attunement, not of rules; and perhaps once I’d entered the game’s sphere of influence, I had only to acknowledge it, to make a choice, and then that choice would be actualized within its boundaries. Whatever the case, I must have reached a decision that bore upon the game, because I realized that the table and the counters had undergone a transformation. The surface of the table had become an undulating surface of rusty orange upon which the counters stood like colossi, and in the distance, apparently miles and miles away, was a complex of black pyramids. It was as if I were a giant peering in from the edge of the world, looking out over a miniature landscape…miniature, but nonetheless real. The wind was blowing the sand into tiny scarves, and hanging above the pyramids was a filming violet-white sun. Acting without thought, feeling again that sense of power and possession, I removed three of the counters, leaving the dwarf to stand facing the black buildings alone. After a moment I took one of the two remaining two counters from the cardboard box and set it close to the gnome. The figure depicted a youth, its proportions less distorted than those of the dwarf, yet with muscles not so developed as those of the warrior. I leaned back in my chair, feeling drained, wasted. The table had returned to normal, a flat surface marked with lines of chalk.
I was more than a little afraid. I wasn’t sure what exactly I had done, but now I wanted to retreat from it, deny it. I pushed back my chair, becoming panicked, darting glances to the side, expecting to see an immense black talon poking toward me from window or door. The house seemed a trap—I remembered Konwicki and Ryan in the hut on the hill—and I scurried out into the night. It was spitting rain, and the wind was driving in steadily off the sea, shredding the palms, breaking the music from a radio in the house next door into shards of bright noise. I felt disoriented, needing—as I had that first night at Konwicki’s—something to hold, something that would give me weight and balance, and I sprinted down onto the beach, thinking that Odille would be there. At the Café Pluto or one of the other bars. Maybe now that the game had been joined once again, she would have grown calm, regained her center. The moon flashed between banks of running clouds, and chutes of flickering lantern light spilled from shanty windows, illuminating patches of weeds, strips of mucky sand littered with fish corpses and offal and coconut tops. In the darkness above the tossing palms I glimpsed a phantom shape, immense and snake-headed, visible for a fraction of a second, and I picked up my pace, running now out of fear, the salt air sharp in my lungs, expecting a great claw to lay open my backbone. Then I spotted Odille—a shadow at the margin of the sea, facing toward the reef. The tide was going out, leaving an expanse of dark sand studded with driftwood and shells. I ran faster yet, and as I came near, she turned to me, backed away, saying something lost in the noise of the wind and surf. I caught her by her shoulders, and she tried to twist free.
“Let me go!” she said, pushing at my chest.
I glanced behind me. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”
“No!” She broke loose from my grasp. “I can’t!”
Again I caught hold of her.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “I’m…” She brushed strands of wet hair away from her face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be crazy, acting like that.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“You can’t know that!”
I pulled her close, pressed her head onto my shoulder. She was shaking. “Calm down, just calm down. You’re all right. Don’t you feel all right? Don’t you feel better?” I stroked her hair, my words coming in a torrent. “It’s just the pressure, all the pressure. We’ve both been acting crazy. But it’s over now. We have to leave; we have to find a new place.” I searched the sky for signs of the monster I’d seen earlier, but there was only the darkness, the rushing moon, the lashing fronds. “Are you okay, are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t worry. It’s just the pressure. I’m surprised we both haven’t gone nuts.”
“You’re not going to leave me?” Her tone was similar to that of a child who’d been expecting a beating and had been granted a reprieve.
“Of course not. I love you. I’m not going to leave you…ever.”
Her arms tightened around my neck, and she said that she couldn’t stand the idea of losing me; that was why, she thought, she’d lost control. She just couldn’t bear going through the same heartbreak again. I reassured her as best I could, my mouth dry with fear, continuing to look in every direction for signs of danger. The sea rolled in, smooth swells of ebony that detonated into white flashes on the reef.
“Come on,” I said, taking her hand, pulling her along. “Let’s go back to the house. We have to get out. This place, it’s no good anyway. Too much bad shit has happened. Maybe we can find a boat to take us upriver tonight. Or tomorrow morning. Okay?”
“Okay.” She forced a smile, squeezed my hand.
We went stumbling along the shore, beating our way against the wind. As we were passing close to a clump of palms, their trunks curved toward the sea, a figure stepped from behind them, blocking our path, and said, “Dat’s far as you go, mon!”
He was standing barely a dozen feet away, yet I had to peer in order to make him out: a cocoa-skinned boy in his teens, about my height and weight, wearing jeans and a shirt with the silk-screened image of a blond woman on the front. In his hand was a snub-nosed pistol. His eyes looked sleepy, heavy-lidded—Chinese eyes—and he was swaying, unsteady on his feet. His expression changed moment to moment, smiling one second and the next growing tight, anxious, registering the chemical eddies of whatever drug he was behind.
“Gimme what you got, mon!” He waggled the pistol. “Quickly, now!”
I fumbled out my wallet, tossed it to him; he let it slip through his fingers and fall to the sand. Keeping his eyes on me, the gun trained, he knelt and groped for the wallet. Then he stood, pried it open with the fingers of his left hand, and removed the contents. My vision was acting up; superimposed on the boy’s face was another face, one with coarse features and pocked ocher skin—the image of the counter depicting the youth.
“Shit…boog muthafucka! Dis all you got? Quetzales all you got? I want gold, mon. Ain’t you got no gold?”
“Gold!” I said, easing Odille behind me. To the surprise of half my mind, I felt in control of the situation. The bastard planned to kill me, but he was in for a fight. I was in the game again, flooded with unnatural strength and cold determination, my fear dimmed by my partnered consciousness with a muscular little freak who thrived on bloodlust.
“Ras clot!” said the boy, his face hardening with rage, jabbing the gun toward me, coming a few steps closer. “Gold! American dollars! You t’ink I goin’ to settle fah dis?” He waved the fistful of Guatemalan currency at me.
The rain had let up, but the wind was increasing steadily; all along the beach the bushes and palms were seething. The sky above the hills had cleared, and the moon was riding just high enough so that the tip of the highest hill put a black notch in its lowest quarter. With ragged blue clouds sailing close above, their edges catching silver fire as they passed, it was a wild and lovely sight, and my heart stalled on seeing it. I felt suddenly calm and alert, as if attentive to some call, and I watched the tops of some silhouetted acacias inland swaying and straightening with a slow ungainly rhythm, bending low all to one side and lurching heavily back to upright again, like the shadows of dancing bears. At the center of the wind, I heard a silence, a vast pool of dead air, and I knew that other world, that place half my home, was whirling close, ready to loose its monsters upon whoever failed this test. I was not unnerved; I was empowered by that silence, unafraid of losing.
“Didn’t you hear me, mon?” said the boy. “T’ink I foolin’ wit’ you? I ast if you got gold.”
“Yeah, I got gold,” I said coolly. “I got more gold than you can handle. Look in the secret compartment.”
“
What you mean?”
“There’s a seam inside the billfold,” I said, gloating over what was to come. “An inner flap. You have to look real close. Slit it open with your fingernail.”
The boy stared into the wallet, and I flew at him, driving my shoulder into his abdomen, my arms wrapping around his legs, bringing him down beneath me. I clawed for his gun hand, caught the wrist as we went rolling in the wet sand left by the receding tide. I butted him under the jaw and smashed his hand against the sand again and again, butting him once more, and at last he let the gun fall. I had a glimpse of a dagger falling onto the rust-colored sand, and as we grappled together, face-to-face, in his eyes I saw the shadowy, depthless eyes of the counter, the coarse slitted folds, the hollowed pupils. I smelled cheap cologne, sweat, but I also smelled a hot desert wind. The boy spat out words in a language that I didn’t recognize, tearing at my hair, gouging at my eyes; he was stronger than he had appeared. He freed one hand, punched at the back of my neck, brought his knee up into my chest, sending me onto my back. Then he straddled me, twisting my head, forcing my face into the sand and flailing away with his fist, punching at my liver and kidneys. There was sand in my nose and mouth, and the pain in my side was enormous. I couldn’t breathe. Black lights were dancing behind my eyes, swelling to blot out everything, and in desperation I heaved up, unseating the boy, grabbing at his legs; I saw leaden clouds, a boiling sun, and then darkness filmed across the sky once again. The boy broke free, coming to his knees. But in doing so he turned away from me, and that was his undoing. I knocked him flat on his stomach, crawled atop him, and barred my forearm under his neck, locking him in a choke hold by clutching my wrist. We went rolling across the sand and into the water. A wave lifted us, black water coursed over my face, the moon blurred into a silver stream like the flashing of a luminous eel. I surfaced, sputtering. I was on my back, the boy atop me, humping, straining, his fingers clawing. His Adam’s apple worked against my arm, and I tightened the hold, digging into his flesh with a twisting motion. He made a cawing noise, half gurgle, half scream. I think I laughed. Another wave swept over us, but we were anchored, heels dug into the sand. I heard Odille crying out above the tumult of wind and waves, and suddenly my glee and delight in the contest, the sense of possession, of abnormal strength…all that was gone.
The boy spasmed; his back arched like a wrestler bridging, trying to prevent a pin, then he went stiff, his muscles cabled. But I could feel the life inside him flopping about like a fish out of water, feel the frail tremor of his held breath. I didn’t know what to do. I could release him…I doubted he would have any fight left, but what if he did? And if he lived, wouldn’t he continue to be a menace, wouldn’t the game be unresolved, and—if not the boy—would not some new menace arise to terrorize me? I didn’t so much think these things as I experienced a black rush of thought of which they were a part, one that ripped through me with the force of the tide that was sucking us farther from the shore, and once this rush had passed, I knew that the choice had already been made, that I was riding out the final, feeble processes of a death. Even this realization came too late, for at the moment the boy went limp and his body floated up from mine in the drag of the tide.
Horrified, I pushed him away, scrambled to my feet, and stood in the knee-deep water, fighting for balance. For the briefest of instants I spotted something huge, something with needle teeth and a flat skull, bending to the boy. Then Odille was clinging to me, dragging me away from the shore, saying things I barely heard. I turned back to the boy, saw his body lifting, sliding down the face of a swell, almost lost in the darkness. I searched the sky and trees for signs of that other world. But there was nothing. The game was over. Whatever had come for the boy already had him, already was tormenting the last of him in that place of snakes and deserts and black silences. That place forever inside me now. I looked for the boy again. He had drifted out of sight, but I knew he was there, and I would always know how his body went sliding into the troughs, rising up, growing heavier and heavier, but not heavy enough to prevent him from nudging against the reef, his skin tearing on the sharp rocks, then lifting in the race of outgoing tide and passing over the barrier, dropping down and down through schools of mindless fish and fleshy flowers and basking sharks and things stranger and more terrifying yet into the cold and final depths that lay beyond.
When I returned to the house, I discovered that the figurines depicting the youth and the warrior had been shattered. The marmalade cat fled from our footsteps and peered out from beneath a chair with a guilty look. I didn’t puzzle over this; I was for the moment unconcerned with validation and coincidence…except for my comprehension that the life of one world was the shade of another, that the best and brightest instances of our lives were merely functions of a dark design. That and the memory of the boy dying in the shallows colored everything I did, and for a very long time, although I went about the days and work with my accustomed verve, I perceived a hollowness in every incidence of fullness and was hesitant about expressing my emotions, having come to doubt their rationality. Odille, while she had not been aware of the undercurrents of the fight on the beach, seemed to have undergone a similar evolution. We began to drift apart, and neither of us had the energy or will to pull things back together.
On the day she left for Paris, I walked her to the dock and waited with her as the ferry from Puerto Morales unloaded its cargo of fat black women and scrawny black men and chickens and fruit and flour. She leaned against a piling, holding down the brim of a straw hat to shield her eyes from the sun, looking very French, very beautiful. However, I was no longer moved by beauty. Some small part of me regretted her leaving, but mostly I was eager to have her gone, to pare life down to its essentials once again in hopes that I might find some untainted possibility in which to place my faith.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look…peculiar.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and then, to be polite, I added, “I’m sorry to see you go.”
She tipped back her head so as to better see my face. “I’m sorry, too. I’ll never understand what went wrong, I thought…”
“Yeah, so did I.” I shrugged. “C’est la vie.”
She laughed palely, turned to the ferry, obviously nervous, wanting to end an awkward moment. “Will you be all right?” she asked suddenly, as if for an instant she were reinhabiting the depth of her old concern and caring. “I’ll worry about you here.”
“I’m not going to stay much longer…a couple of weeks. The doctors will be back by then.”
“I don’t know how you can stand to stay a minute longer. Aren’t you worried about the police?”
“They’re tired of hassling me,” I said. “Hell, one of the lieutenants…you remember the one with the waxed mustache? He actually told me the other day that I was a hero.” I gave a sarcastic laugh. “Like Bernhard Goetz, I’m keeping the city clean.”
Odille started to say something, but kept it to herself. Instead, she let her fingers trail across my hand.
At last the ferry was empty, ready for boarding. She stood on tiptoe, kissed me lightly, and then was gone, merging with the crowd of blacks that poured up the gangplank.
The ferry veered away from the dock, venting black smoke, and I watched until it had rounded a spit of land, thinking that the saddest thing about Odille and me was that we had parted without tears. After a minute or so I headed back to the house. I had planned to work, but I was unable to concentrate. The inside of my head felt like glass, too fragile to support the weighty process of thought. I fed the cat, paced awhile; eventually I went into the living room and gazed down at the cardboard box that contained the four remaining figurines. I had been intending to destroy them, but each time I had made to do so, I’d been restrained by a fear of some bad result. It occurred to me that I enjoyed this irresolute state of affairs, that I found it romantic to cling to the belief that—mad from unrequited love—I had done terrible violence, and that I’d been shying away from anyt
hing that might prove the contrary. I became enraged at my self-indulgence and lack of fortitude; without thinking, I picked up a figurine and hurled it at the wall. It shattered into a hundred pieces, and to my astonishment, a stain began to spread where it had struck. A spatter of thick crimson very like a smear of fresh blood. I tried to blink the sight away, but there it was, slowly washing down the wall. I was less afraid than numb. I looked into the box and saw that the figurine I’d broken was the infant. Ryan. I glanced again at the wall. The stain had vanished.
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