He noticed that Astrid’s breathing had grown deep and regular, and thinking she was asleep, he started to lower her to a prone position, intending to cover her with a blanket and then rub out the cramp that was developing in his arm. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she tightened her grip around his waist.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
“You’re asleep,” he said.
“No, I’m not…I’m just resting.”
“Well”—he chuckled—“maybe you better do your resting in the sleeping bag.”
“All right.”
She got to her feet sluggishly, went to the sleeping bag, and then, her eyes downcast, kicked off her shoes and skinned out of her jeans. That caught him by surprise. He watched her work the jeans past her hips, step out of them with the delicate awkward poise of a crane. Her legs were long and lovely, pale, pale white, and he could see the honey-colored thatch of her pubic hair through the opaque crotch of her panties. His mouth was dry. He looked away, looked back as, instead of getting inside the sleeping bag, she lay down atop it, covering herself with a blanket. Her hips bridged up beneath the blanket, her hands pushed at her thighs, and he knew she was removing her panties. She turned onto her side, facing him. In the shadowy corner her eyes were large and full of lights.
“Come be with me,” she said.
The storm slammed a wall of wind against the shack, rain drummed on the roof, and although Tyrell felt in the grasp of a curious morality, put off by Astrid’s invitation, because they were strangers and this should not be happening, the fury of the storm moved him to stand. He went over to the table, extinguished the hurricane lamp. The cherry red concentric circles of the hot plate’s heating coils floated on the darkness like bizarre halos. He stripped off his clothing and, shivering, squirmed in beneath the blanket, turning to her as he did. She had pushed her sweater up around her neck, and her breasts rolled and flattened against his chest, warming him. In the dim effusion of light from the hot plate her features were rapt, her eyes half-lidded. He wanted to ask her a question, to understand why this was happening, to make certain that it was nothing low, nothing small, but rather something clean and strong, something to suit the tenor of his cleansed sensibilities; but as she pressed close to him, he knew that it was good. He thought he could feel the whiteness of her limbs staining him, and when he sank into her, he felt the movement as a sweet gravity in his belly, the kind of sensation that comes when you take a tight curve in a fast car and settle back into the straightaway with the whole world pushing you deep into the plush tension of the machine.
“It’s been so long,” she whispered, holding him immobile, her hands locked around his back. “So long.”
He wasn’t sure of exactly what she meant, but it seemed true for him as well, it seemed forever since he had felt this perfect immersion, and he hooked his fingers into the plump meat of her hips, grinding her against him, easing deeper, dredging up a soft cry from her throat, and, without understanding anything at all, said, “I know, I know.”
Tyrell waked to find the storm unabated. Pine branches scraped the outside of the walls, and the wind was a constant mournful pour off the sea. Dim reddish light fanned up from the hot plate, seeming to diffuse into a granular dust near the ceiling, like powdered rust on black enamel. He was disoriented by the oscillating pitch of the wind, the incessant seething of the rain, and to ground himself in waking he turned to Astrid, letting his left arm fall across her waist. She didn’t stir. He peered at her, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, and when he made out her face, his heart was stalled by what he saw. Empty sockets; desiccated strings of tendon cabled across the bare cheekbone; the teeth gapped and the jawbone visible between tatters of yellow skin; hanks of pale hair attached to a parchment scalp. The stink of the grave cloyed in his nostrils, and he could feel her clamminess beneath his arm. He let out a shriek, rolled off the sleeping bag and onto the dry grasses covering the floorboards, and crouched there, panting, resisting the impulse to give in to fear, trying to persuade himself that he hadn’t really seen it.
“Astrid?” he said.
Not a sound.
He fumbled for his jeans, struggled into them. Called her name louder. Nothing. His skin pebbled with gooseflesh. He pulled on his sweater, slipped his feet into wet shoes.
“Astrid!” he said. “Wake up!”
He wanted to kneel beside her, to take a closer look and make sure of what he’d seen, but he couldn’t work up the courage. He backed away. The corner of the table jabbed his thigh; the hurricane lamp swayed and nearly toppled. He caught it, fumbled on the table for a match. His hands were shaking so badly that he wasted three matches trying to light the lamp, and when the light grew steady, it took all his willpower to turn toward the sleeping bag. He shrieked again and staggered against the door, unable to catch his breath, transfixed by the sight of that horrid death’s-head poking from beneath the blanket, sightless eyes focused on a white spider dangling on a single thread just above the face. Then the strand snapped. The spider dropped into one of the empty eye sockets, and for the briefest of instants the eye appeared to twinkle.
Tyrell’s control broke. Screaming, he clawed the door open and ran full tilt through the pines, wet branches whipping his face and chest. He burst out into the clearing, stopped beside the wreckage of the main house. Rain slanted hard into his face, soaked the wool of his sweater. He wiped his eyes, started toward the beach, the bunkers, then pulled up, remembering that Cisneros was dead, not knowing in which direction safety lay. The winded pines bent their dark green tips, lightning made a vivid white crack in the massy leaden clouds of the eastern sky, and from the beach came the cannonading of the surf. Suddenly terrified that Astrid had followed him, he wheeled about. Someone was coming toward him from the pines. But it wasn’t Astrid. It was Cisneros. Dressed in jeans and a wool hat and a slicker glistening with rain. Smiling.
Tyrell’s thoughts were in chaos. He retreated from Cisneros, but as he did he realized that everything Astrid—ghost or whatever she was—had told him must have been a lie. Cisneros couldn’t be dead. Obviously not. But he wasn’t quite able to believe that, and he continued to retreat, calling out to Cisneros.
“Bert!” he shouted above the wind. “Where you been, Bert?”
“Hello, Jack! What’s the problem, man?”
“Bert?” Tyrell was still uncertain who and what it was that confronted him. “I left you in the bunker. I was coming back, but I wanted to let you sleep.”
“I had a real good sleep,” said Cisneros, closing on him. “Nice dreams. What you been doing?”
“Trying to find some food.”
“Find any?”
Tyrell’s answer died stillborn. His stomach was full—no doubt about that. And if Astrid was a ghost, how could that be? He wiped his eyes clear of rain again, thoroughly befuddled. Cisneros had stopped a few feet away, his image blurred by the rain driving into Tyrell’s face.
“You look fucked up, man,” said Cisneros. “There’s no reason to be fucked up. This is a good place.”
Tyrell spat out a sardonic laugh. “Oh, right!”
“You having a bad time, man?” Cisneros chuckled. “Just take it easy. Relax. God is here.”
“God?” A chill began to map Tyrell’s spine; his scrotum tightened, and he blinked away the raindrops, trying to bring Cisneros into clearer focus. He felt at the center of a grayish green confusion, a medium without form, without border, the only real thing in a vast unreality. “What do you mean…‘God’?”
“I’m not talking ’bout Jesus,” said Cisneros with another sly chuckle. “Oh, no! I’m not talking ’bout Jesus.”
“Well, what are you talking about?”
“It’s interesting,” said Cisneros. “I wonder if the idea of God was based on a premonition of what exists here. It’s possible, you know. It’s obvious there are some astounding similarities between the laws of karma, certain Christian tenets, and the true process of the”—he sniffed, amused—“
the divine.”
Cisneros’s unnatural fluency and abstract self-absorption disconcerted Tyrell; he’d always been one to put on airs, but because he had nothing intelligent to say, the effect had been ludicrous. Now the effect was a little scary.
The rain intensified, and Cisneros wavered like a mirage. Something was dangling from his hand, swinging back and forth, and peering through the rain, Tyrell saw that it was an eight-pointed star that had been crudely carved from a piece of seashell, holed, and strung on a length of twine.
“What’s that?” Tyrell asked.
“Just something I made while I was waiting for you.” Cisneros flipped the star high, grabbed it in his fist. “Things have changed for me, Jack. I’m not the man I used to be.”
“Well, none of us are, Bert old son,” said Tyrell, trying to make light of it and taking a backward step. “It’s been one hell of a night.”
“That’s true,” said Cisneros. “But it’s much more than that. It’s the only truth there is.”
Tyrell noticed for the first time that the rain didn’t seem to be bothering Cisneros: it trickled into his eyes, yet he never even blinked. He wanted to run, but he didn’t know if there was a secure place to hide, and neither did he know what exactly he would be hiding from.
“Tell me about God, Bert,” he said, deciding against fear, hoping that this Cisneros’s behavior was merely derangement resulting from exposure and fatigue.
“You really want that, Jack? You don’t look like the kind of man cares too much ’bout God. But”—Cisneros twirled his little star on its string—“if you want to hear, you come to the right place. ’Cause I’m the man’s going to tell everybody ’bout God. Soon as I get off this island, that’s what I’m going to do. Preach the truth ’bout the God that is and the world that isn’t.” His smile seemed the product of absolute serenity. “You understand?”
“Not hardly,” said Tyrell. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“This world,” said Cisneros, waving at the pines, “it’s nothing but a dream.” He giggled. “The thing is, nobody knows who’s doing the dreaming. Nobody ’cept me.”
“And who’s that?”
“And when I tell everybody,” Cisneros went on, ignoring the question, “when I tell ’em nothing’s all there is, that anything they do is all right, ’cause there’s nothing for anybody to hurt, it’s all a dream…then there’s going to be chaos. Maybe it’ll be blood and sex and madness. A beautiful chaos of dreams. But maybe it’ll be the beginning of a new and glorious potential. I believe that might just be the case, I really do. I believe that beauty and hope will be reborn. Why else would they bother?”
Tyrell kept up his bold front, but kept on sizing up the possibilities of flight and hiding. “Is that so, Bert?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Nobody’s going to believe you…an illiterate little Portugee. They’ll laugh your ass back to New Bedford.”
“Want me to prove it, Jack? They’ve taught me how to do quite a few tricks. I’m sure I can find one that’ll impress you.”
“I’d love it. Go ahead…show me your stuff.”
“It’ll be my pleasure.” Cisneros’s smile broadened, displaying his gold teeth; his dark seamed face looked to have an impish, stylized evil, its detail lost in the streaming rain. Then the face began to pale. “Dreams, Jack,” he said. “That’s all there is. Dreams like me, like you. Like your girlfriend back in the shack.”
Tyrell started to ask how he had known about Astrid, but alarm stifled his curiosity, held him motionless and cold. Cisneros was fading, growing vague and indistinct, becoming a ghost in the rain. Yet his voice remained strong.
“You remember this, Jack, when you think you know something. You know nothing, man. Nothing. You’re smoke, you’re haze on the water, you’re not even real as the dew. And what you feel and what you know is even less real than that. Just think of yourself as a spark flying up against the darkness, visible for a moment, then gone. But not gone forever, Jack. Gone forever, that’s for real things, things that live and die. You’re in the wind, a pattern, a shape that what’s real calls back now and again to play with, to make new dreams, to amuse itself. You’re part of a game, a dream actor in a play.”
Cisneros had almost completely disappeared; all that remained was a roughly human shape hollowed from the rain, an indistinct opacity against the backdrop of the pines.
“Dreams,” came Cisneros’s voice, a sonorous whisper rising above the keening of the wind. “Sometimes they’re beautiful, Jack. Beautiful and slow and serene.”
More lightning in the east, accompanied by a savage crack of thunder.
“And sometimes they’re nightmares.”
VII
How, Cisneros thought, could he have sunk to the depths that he had in his former life? How could he have been such a posturing bully, a tormentor of women and the weak? He supposed that—like most of his friends—he had been enslaved by tradition, by the spiritual and physical meanness of life among the Portuguese of New Bedford. It was for certain that his father’s constant abuse of his mother had informed his own behavior, and he had not been able to rise above those origins. Well, now he had been given a chance for redemption…more, his lifelong desire for knowledge and the skills with which to employ it had been satisfied, and he planned to take full advantage of the opportunity. And in the process of spreading the truth he would make up all the bad times to his wife and children, to everyone whom he had wronged. He, unlike Tyrell, had untapped potential; he was capable of change. He knew how foolish it was to take pride in himself considering his ephemeral nature; but although he was merely a creation, an illusion, that was no excuse to ignore the decencies or to deny his potential. Even if Tyrell was able to accept the way things were, which Cisneros doubted, he would never be able to maintain his humanity; he was not strong, not resilient. It was a pity, but Cisneros had no time to spare on pity. He had a world to teach, to enlighten, and Tyrell’s fate was not his concern. Later he’d have another try at talking with him. But for now there was so much to learn, so much to understand. He let himself fade into the dream and the deep places beneath it, where he communed with the trillion forms of his Creator.
VIII
It was almost twilight, the storm still raging, before Tyrell screwed up the courage to approach the bunker. He was soaked to the skin, his sweater a foul-smelling matte of drenched wool, and he was shaking with cold; yet he stood at the side of the bunker for quite some time, leery of discovering what lay within. Huge slate-colored waves marbled with foam piled in from the sea, crashing explosively on the eroded beach, driving a thin tide to the bunker’s lip, then retreating, leaving a slope of tawny sand cut by deep channels; the wind flattened the grass at the crest of the dunes. But despite the ferocity of the elements, Tyrell sensed that the worst of the weather was past, that by morning the sea would be calm and the sky clear and any fire set upon the beach would be noticed by the keeper of the Gay Head light. One more night, then, and he would be safe. But that one night loomed endlessly before him, and he realized that he was in great peril from the terrors of his mind…if from nothing else. That, he thought, must be the cause of everything he had seen and felt. The trauma of the fire aboard the Preciosilla, of the swim to shore…these things must have unhinged him in some way, because he was not about to believe in what he had seen. And if he was ever going to quell his fears, he had to take a look inside the bunker, to begin ordering his mind, firming it against the solitude of the night ahead.
Finally, steeling himself, he made his way down the slope, sinking to midcalf with every step in the wet sand. He paused at the corner of the bunker, drawing strength from the power of the sea, filling his chest with its power, its briny smell; then he slogged around the corner and peered in over the lip. He felt relief on seeing Cisneros lying curled up in the shadow of the lip, still wearing his black slicker and jeans, his face turned to the wall.
“Bert!” he shouted. �
��Wake up!”
The Ends of the Earth Page 20