The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  The gun showed a negative black against the planking, an ugly brand marring the smooth grain. I picked it up. Its cold weight fueled my anger, and I heaved it into the shadows.

  “I love you.” She trailed her fingers across my arm, but I refused to speak or turn to her. “Please, believe me! It’s just I don’t know what to do anymore.” Her voice broke, and it seemed I could smell her tears.

  “It’s all right.” My voice was harsh, burred with anger.

  We sat in silence. The crunch of waves on the reef built louder, the wind seethed in the palm crowns, and faint music from the resort added a fractured tinkling—I felt that the things of nature were losing definition, blending into a dissolute melodic rush. Finally I asked her what she intended to do, and she said, “I doubt my intentions matter. I don’t think I can avoid going back.”

  “To 1902? Is that what you mean?” I said this helplessly, sensing the gravity of events sweeping toward us like a huge dark fist. “How can you even consider it? You heard Dobler, you know the dangers.”

  “I don’t believe it’s dangerous. Only inevitable.”

  I turned to her then, ready with protests, arguments. Christ, she was beautiful! It was as if tears had washed her clean of a film, exposed a new depth of beauty. The words caught in my throat.

  “Just before Dobler killed himself,” she said, “I asked him what he thought time was. He’d been talking about it as a mathematical entity, but I had the idea he wasn’t saying what he really felt, and I wanted to know everything he did…because I was afraid. It seemed something magical was happening, that I was being drawn into some incomprehensible scheme.” She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “Dobler said that when he had begun to develop his equations, he’d had a feeling like mine. ‘An apprehension of the mystical,’ he called it. There was something hypnotic about the equations…they reminded him of mantras the way they affected him. The further his work progressed, the more he came to think of time—its event spectrum—as evidence of divinity. Its basic operation, its mechanics. Abimael laughed at this and asked if he was talking about God. And Dobler said that if by God he meant a stable energy system governing the actions of all matter on a subatomic level, then yes, that’s exactly what he was talking about.”

  I wanted to refute this, but it was so similar to my own thoughts concerning the nature of time, I could not muster a contrary word.

  “You feel it, too,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  I took her by the shoulders. “Let’s leave here. Tonight. We can hire a boat to run us over to La Ceiba, and by tomorrow…”

  She put a finger to my lips, then kissed me. The kiss deepened, and from that point on I lost track of what happened. One moment we were sitting on the floor of that skeleton house, and the next—our clothes magicked away—we were lying in the grass behind the house, in a tiny clearing bordered by banana trees. The way Ivie’s hair was fanned out around her head, its color merging with the dark grass, she looked to be a pale female bloom sprouting from the sandy soil, and her skin felt like the moonlight, smooth, coated with a cool emulsion. I thought I could taste the moonlight on the tips of her breasts. She guided me between her legs, her expression grave, focused on the act, and as I entered her she arched her neck, staring up into the banana leaves, and cried, “Oh, God!” as if she saw there some enrapturing presence. But I knew to whom she was really crying out. To that sensation of heat and weakness that enveloped us, sheltered us. To that sublimation of hope and fear into a pour of pure desiring. To that strange thoughtless and self-adoring creature we became, all hip and mouth and heart. That was God.

  Afterward as we dressed, among the sibilant noises and wind and sea, I heard a sharper noise, a click. But before I could categorize it, I put it from my mind. My head was full of plans. I would knock Ivie out, drug her, carry her off to the States. I would allow the guerrillas to destroy the project, and at the last moment come swinging out of nowhere and snatch her to safety. I envisioned even more improbable heroics. Strong with love, all these plans seemed workable to me.

  We walked around the side of the house, hand in hand, and I did not notice the figure standing in the shadow of a cashew tree until it spoke, saying, “Aymara!” Ivie gave a shriek of alarm, and I stepped in front of her, shielding her. The figure moved forward, and I saw it was Sotomayor, his sharp features set in a grim expression, his neatly trimmed beard looking fake in the moonlight. He stopped about six feet away, training a pistol on us, and fixed Ivie with a contemptuous stare. “Puta!” he said. He pulled something from his pocket and flung it at our feet. A folded piece of paper with writing on it. “You should be more discreet in your correspondence,” he said to me.

  “Listen…” I began.

  He swung the pistol to cover my forehead. “You may have value as a hostage,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rely on that. I don’t like being betrayed, and I’m not in the best of moods.”

  “I haven’t betrayed you!” Ivie stepped from behind me. “You don’t understand.”

  The muscles of Sotomayor’s face worked, as if he were repressing a scream of rage.

  “He’s on our side,” said Ivie. “You know that. He’s always supported the cause.”

  Sotomayor smiled—a vicious predator’s smile—and leveled the pistol at her. “Did you enjoy your last fuck, bitch? I could hear you squealing down on the beach.”

  The muscles on his forearms bunched, preparing for the kick, and I dove for him. Too late. The pistol went off an instant before I knocked him over, the report blending with Ivie’s cry, and we rolled in the grass and sand, clawing, grappling. Sotomayor was strong, but I was fighting out of sheer desperation, and he was no match for me. I tore the pistol from his grasp and brought the butt down on his temple. Brought it down a second time. He sagged, his head lolling. I crawled to where Ivie had fallen. Her legs were kicking in spasms, and when I touched her hair, I found it mired with blood. The bullet had entered through the side of her head and lodged in the brain. She must have been clinically dead already, but obeying some dumb reflex, she was trying to speak. Each time her mouth opened, blood jetted forth. She was bleeding from the eyes, the nostrils. Her entire face was slick with blood, and still her mouth kept opening and closing, making glutinous choking sounds. I wanted to touch her, to heal her with a touch, but there was so much broken, I could not decide where to lay my hands. They fluttered above her like stupid animals, and I heard myself screaming for it to stop, for her to stop. Her arms began to flop around, her hips to thrash, convulsing. A broken, bloody doll. I aimed the pistol at her chest, but could not bring myself to pull the trigger. Finally I covered her with my body, and, sobbing, held her until all movement ceased.

  I came to my feet, staggered over to Sotomayor. He had not yet regained consciousness. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I pointed the pistol at him. But it did not seem sufficient that he merely die. I kneeled beside him, then straddled his chest.

  A voice called out from behind me. “What goin’ on dere, mon?”

  Visible as shadows, two men were standing at the water’s edge.

  “Man killed somebody!” I answered.

  “You call de police?”

  “No!”

  “Den I’ll be goin’ to de Key, ax ’em to spark up dere radio!”

  I waved acknowledgment, watched the men sprint away. Once they were out of sight, I pried Sotomayor’s mouth open and inserted the pistol barrel. “Wake up!” I shouted. I spat in his face, slapped him. Repeated the process. His eyelids twitched, and he let out a muffled groan. “Wake up, you son of a bitch!” He gazed at me blearily, and I wiggled the pistol to make him aware of it. His eyes widened. He tried to speak, his eyebrows arching comically with the effort. I cocked the pistol, and he froze.

  “I should turn you in,” I said. “Let the police torture your ass. But I don’t trust you to be a hero, man. Maybe you’d talk. Maybe you know something worth trading for your life.”

  He gurgled something unintelligible. />
  “Can’t hear you,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Using the pistol as a lever, I began turning his head from side to side. He tried to keep his eyes on mine. Sweat popped out on his brow, and he was having trouble swallowing.

  “Here it comes,” I said.

  He tensed and shut his eyes.

  “Just kidding,” I told him. I waited a few seconds, then shouted, “Here it comes!”

  He flinched.

  I started sobbing again. “Did you see what you did to her, man? Did you see? You fucking son of a bitch! Did you see!” The pistol was shaking, and Sotomayor bit the barrel to keep it still.

  For a minute or thereabouts I was crying so hard, I was blinded. At last I managed to gain control. I wiped away the tears. “Here it comes,” I said.

  He blinked.

  “Here it comes!”

  Another blink.

  “Here it fucking comes!”

  His stare was mad and full of hate. But his hatred was nothing compared to mine. I was dizzy with it. The stars seemed very near, wheeling about my head. I wanted to sit astride him forever and cause him pain.

  I dug the fingers of my left hand in back of his Adam’s apple, forcing his jaws apart, and I battered his teeth with the barrel, breaking a couple. Blood filmed over his lower lip, trickled down into his beard. He gagged, choking on the fragments.

  “Like that?” I asked him. “How about this?”

  I broke his nose with the heel of my hand. Tears squeezed from his eyes, bloody saliva and mucus came from his nose. His breath made a sucking noise.

  Shouts from the direction of St. Mark’s Key.

  I leaned close to Sotomayor, my face inches away, the blood-slimed barrel sheathed in his mouth.

  “Here it comes,” I whispered. “Here. It. Comes.”

  I know he believed me, but he was mesmerized by my proximity, by whatever he saw in my eyes, and could not look away. I screamed at him and met his terrified gaze as I fired.

  Perhaps I would have been charged with murder in the States, but in Honduras, where politics and passion license all manner of violence, I was a hero.

  I was a hero, and insane…for grief possessed me as powerfully as had love.

  Now that Ivie was dead, it seemed only just that the others join her on the pyre. I told the police everything I knew. The island was sealed off, the guerrillas rounded up. The press acclaimed me; the President of the United States called to commend my actions; my fellow journalists besieged the Hotel Captain Henry, seeking to interview me but usually settling for interviews with the cleaning woman and the owner. I was in no mood to play the hero. I drank, I wept, I wandered. I gazed into nowhere, seeing Ivie’s face. Aymara’s face. In memoriam, I accorded her that name. Brave-sounding and lyrical, it suited her. And I wished she could have died wearing that name in 1902—that, I realized, should have been her destiny. Whenever I saw a dark-haired young woman, I would have the urge to follow her, to spy on her, to discover who her friends were, what made her laugh, what movies she liked, how she made love, thinking that knowing these details would help me regain the definition that Aymara had brought to my life. Yet even had this not been a fantasy, I could not have acted upon it. Grief had immobilized me. Grief…and guilt. It had been my meddling that had precipitated her death, hadn’t it? I was a dummy moving on a track between these two emotions, stopping now and again to stare at something that had caught my eye, some curiosity that would for a moment reduce my self-awareness.

  Several days after her death, the regional director of the CIA paid me a call. My visit to Project Longshot had originally been scheduled for two weeks prior to the initial test, but he now told me that since I knew about “our little secret down here,” the President had authorized my presence at the test. This exclusive was to be my reward for patriotism. I accepted his invitation and came close to telling him that I would be delighted to stand at ground zero during the end of the world.

  I had been too self-absorbed to give much thought to Dobler’s warnings, but now I decided I wanted the world to end. What was the point in trying to save it? We had been heading toward destruction for years, and as far as I was concerned the time was ripe. A few days before I might have raised a mighty protest against the project, but my political conscience—and perhaps my moral one—had died with Aymara, and I was angry at the world, at its hollow promise and mock virtues and fallacious judgments. Anger made my grief more endurable, and I nourished it, picturing it to be a tiny golden snake with ruby eyes. A familiar. It would feed on tears, transform them into venom. It would be my secret, coiled and ready to strike. It would fit perfectly inside my heart.

  On the day prior to the test, I was flown by small plane to a military base on the mainland, and from there by helicopter to the project site, passing over the valley in which lay the ruined city of Olancho Viejo, with its creeper-hung cathedral tower sticking up like an eroded green fang. Three buildings of white concrete crowned a massive jungled hill overlooking the valley, and on the hillside facing away from the valley were other buildings—living quarters and storage rooms and sentry posts. The administrator, a middle-aged balding man named Morrel, briefed me on the test; but I cut this short, informing him that I had heard most of what he was telling me from Dobler. His only reaction was to cluck his tongue and say, “Poor fellow.”

  Afterward, Morrel led me downhill to the commissary and introduced me to the rest of the personnel. Ostensibly this was a joint US-Honduran project, but there were only two Hondurans among the twenty-eight scientists—an elderly man clearly past his prime, and a dark-haired young woman who tried to duck out the door when I approached. Morrel urged her forward and said, “Mr. Corson, this is Señorita Aymara Luján.”

  I was nearly too stunned to accept her handshake. She refused to meet my eyes, and her hand was trembling. I could not believe that this was mere coincidence. Though to my mind she was not as lovely as my Aymara, she was undeniably beautiful and of a type with my dead love. Slim and large-eyed, her features displaying more than a trace of Indian blood. I had a mental image of a long line of beautiful dark-haired women stretching across the country, each prepared to step forward should an accident befall her sisters.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” this one said. “I’ve always admired your work.” She glanced around in apparent alarm as if she had said something indiscreet; then, recovering her poise, she added, “Perhaps we’ll have a chance to talk at dinner.”

  She placed an unnatural stress on these last words, making it plain that this was a message sent. “I’d like that,” I said.

  For the remainder of the day I was shown a variety of equipment and instrumentation to which I paid little attention. The appearance of this new Aymara undermined my anger somewhat, and Dobler’s thesis concerning the inalterability of time, its capacity to compensate for change, seemed to embody the menace of prophecy. But I made no move to reveal what I suspected. This development had brought my insanity to a peak, and I was gripped by a fatalistic malaise. Who the hell was I to trifle with fate, I reasoned. And besides, it was unlikely that any action I took would have an effect. Maybe it was coincidence. I retreated from the problem into an almost puritanical stance, as if dealing with the matter was somehow vile, beneath me, and when the dinner hour arrived, deciding it would be best to avoid the woman, I pleaded weariness and retired to my quarters.

  My room was a white cubicle furnished with a bed, a desk and chair, and a word processor. The window provided a view of the jungle that swept away toward Nicaragua, and I sat by it, watching sunset resolve into a slate-colored dusk, and then into a darkness figured by stars and a half-moon. With no one about to engage my interest, grief closed in around me.

  A few minutes after eight o’clock, small-arms fire began to crackle on the hilltop. I went to the door and peered out. Muzzle flashes were probing the darkness higher up. I had an impulse to run, but my inertia prevailed and I went back to the chair. Soon thereafter, the door opened and the woman who
called herself Aymara entered. She wore a white project jumpsuit that glowed in the moonlight, and she carried an automatic rifle, which she kept at the ready but aimed at a point to my right.

  Neither of us spoke for several seconds, and then I said, “What’s going on?” and laughed at the banal tone that comment struck.

  Another burst of fire from above.

  “It’s almost over,” she said.

  I allowed several more seconds to elapse before saying, “How did you pull it off? Security looked pretty tight.”

  “Most of them died at dinner.” She tossed her head, shaking hair from her eyes. “Poison.”

  “Oh.” Again I laughed. “Sorry I couldn’t make it.”

  “I didn’t want to kill you,” she said with urgency. “You’ve…been a friend to my country. But after what you did on Guanoja…”

  “What I did there was execute a murderer! An animal!”

  She studied me a moment. “I believe you. Sotomayor was an evil man.”

  “Evil!” I made a disparaging noise. “And what force for good do you represent? The EDP? The FDLM?”

  “We acted independently…I and a few friends.”

  Silence, then a single gunshot.

  “Is that really your name?” I asked. “Aymara?”

  She nodded. “I’ve often wondered how much influence your article has had on me. On everything. Because of it, I’ve always felt I was involved in…”

  “Something mystical, right? Magical. I know all about it.”

  “How could you?”

  “How could I have written the article in the first place? I don’t have any answers.” I turned back to the window. “I suppose you’re going to try to contact Christmas.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” she said defiantly. “I feel…”

  “Believe me,” I cut in. “I understand why. When did you decide to do this?”

  “I’d been considering it for some time, but I wasn’t sure. Then the news came about Sotomayor…”

  “Jesus God!” I leaned forward, burying my face in my hands.

  “What’s wrong?”