A plateau, a mile or more from the town. I skirted its edge, working toward the east, where I could gain a vantage. The soldiers appeared to have clustered near a natural hollow in the earth, large enough for a bus. Breathless, I scrambled upward. Hanging heavy, the vapor wreathing the bay and hillside seemed to pulse and coagulate.
I settled in to wait.
The soldiers arrayed themselves neatly. Two of them took prisoners and forced them into a line. The starlight had grown stronger now, as if whatever particulate matter hung in the air had luminesced. I looked back over my shoulder. The moon swelled and bloomed behind me and I had a sudden sense of dislocation: the soldiers, the prisoners, the plunging hillside beyond, the empty town below, all became clear in my sight. The haze—the miasma—wasn’t gone, it heightened my perception now. Like some supercharged electron cloud, crackling with light. A swarm of luminous flying insects. The tracers and afterimages from looking at the sun.
Soldiers pulled the gags from their prisoners’ mouths.
My heart skittered in my chest, as if it wanted to flee my body. I clutched at the pistol as if I could attack these carabineros. As if I could free these poor souls lined up on the edge of a pit.
Moving in unison, the soldiers pulled masks over their faces. A boy began to cry, a woman cursed them. An old man sobbed and called out to Jesus, and then his mother.
A soldier—misshapen, with a great cylinder on his back—raised his hand holding a baton. No, not a baton. If he was a conductor of music, it was no composition I’d ever want to hear again. Gas issued forth, merging with the miasma. The prisoners began to cough and spasm. The luminous smoke in the air pulsed and grew, sending congealing tendrils skyward. I could not breathe with the horror. The gun was forgotten.
A man pitched over, tumbled into the pit. The rest followed. The soldiers stood still, unmoving.
The miasma coalesced, the soldiers stilled to permanent inaction. Time had collapsed. A figure stood twenty paces in front of me. A man in a suit. Handsome. Glasses one size too small for his face.
“Hello, scholar,” Cleave said, looking up at me where I crouched. “I am so glad you can join us.” Even though I had never seen him before, I was struck with the frisson of recognition—it was as if Avendaño’s words had become my memory. He strode forward. At least that is how my brain interpreted the movement. The miasma shimmered and coursed around him, eddying in shifting currents. He was a man, yet he was more. In this man, I could feel my end. I could feel all ends.
“And you’ve brought it.” He laughed. “Perfect.”
I raised the pistol, centering it on his chest. He shook his head.
“You’re an initiate, are you not?” he said. “You’ve read the lines writ in blood? In semen? Of course you read them. You did more than read. You translated them. I could have never come to you if you had not been so invested. You’ve been at the edges of—” He uttered a phrase I did not understand that nevertheless caused my skin to crawl. “For weeks now.”
I thought back to Avendaño’s apartment in Málaga, the wading deep into the Opusculus Noctis. The growing shadow, the coalescing figure.
“Yes,” he said, as if reading my mind. “And then your little sentinel came.” Tomás. He shrugged. “But despite it all, you did not stop, though any sort of rational thought should have warned you. And now you’re here.” He extended his hand. “Bring forth the photographs.”
“No,” I said. “I have a gun and will use it.”
Cleave raised a hand. “You can try.”
I pulled the trigger, but the hammer did not fall. The miasma shimmered around the gun-blued metal.
“Give me the photographs,” Cleave said. “The Vatican library has burned, the passage through the girl has been closed now for years. Give me the photos.”
Cleave’s command of Spanish was eroded, possibly. The mask, slipping. I did not understand most of what he said.
“No,” I said. It would be so easy, though. To end it. Shrug off the backpack and sling it toward him and he would go away, surely.
I even asked. “If I give you the photos, you’ll let me go? And Avendaño?”
He tsked.
“We are beyond all that now. Swimming in the ancient air,” he said, raising his hands as if feeling a light summer shower. “Look.” He turned and looked out over the mass grave to the sea and sky. “See?”
The miasma had grown and its coils threaded into the sky in a convolution. Vines eating at the firmament of heaven.
“And look,” he said, gesturing to the earth.
The death pit seemed to swell in my vision. I marked the bodies of the prisoners; some were women, firebrands and activists and wives and lovers, some men, laborers and academics who had spoken with miscalculation within earshot of Vidalistas, some children, families wondering where they were. All offered up their misery to the enormous sky. All of them, their last moments were a misery and torment, swelling the miasma.
Beneath them, bodies, softened to indistinction—all black and gray and jumbled. Not countless, no. I sensed their number. But some so old there was no telling where one body ended and the next began. Except for one.
Avendaño.
He lay on his back, one arm spread wide, the other trapped behind his back in a painful and awkward position. Both eyes were vacant now. I had never seen him without the eyepatch. He wore the old linen suit I first met him in, tobacco-mottled at the cuffs, now stained and gray with putrefaction. But his face was still his. He looked surprised to find himself in this position. He seemed very small underneath the carious sky.
“No,” I said.
“I am afraid you have no choice,” Cleave said, and moved his hand in a passing gesture.
The soldiers stirred, still wearing gas masks, turning blankly to stare at me. They moved.
I tossed the gun and stood.
Withdrawing the corvo from my boot, I raised it. The gun might not work in the miasma, but the knife would.
Cleave seemed to flow forward, his human face a mask. Think of me as an envoy from the exterior brigade. The soldiers began scrabbling at the dun earth, feet and hands, loping forward like wolves.
It had seen too much. So I plucked it out, Avendaño had said.
It’s one thing to hold something close to one’s eye, the body’s seat of perception, and it’s another thing altogether different to assault it.
But at that moment I saw beyond now, past the physical world. Cleave was revealed in full, a writhing mass of darkness. His form streaked away in a perverted umbilicus to . . . what? Something else? Somewhere else? The miasma lashed and twined about him, sending coils and tendrils to penetrate the soldiers, the corpses in the pit, the sky.
My time had run out.
I drove the point of the corvo into my eye cavity. The pain, outrageous and heart shattering as if I had torn a breach in the levee of my soul and now the torrents of black water could rush in. Yet I worked the blade into my face—my own face!—and dug at the sclera until my eye ruptured.
I wept vitreous fluid and blood.
The corvo was sharp. Sharp enough for what I had to do. The pain, a sacrifice, instructed me on where the blade was to move, what I needed to cut. I required no words. I levered my eye from its seat and cut the flesh that still clung to it. It fell in the ignominious dust.
I cannot imagine what I might have looked like to Cleave. A white light? A hideous creature? An explosion?
From Cleave issued a thin, miserable sound that traveled through the miasma in phantasm vibrations. He had no human mouth to scream, after all.
The luminous haze gathered, coalescing, and entered me. The hollow of my eye contained a vastness where all the miasma’s misery could enthrone itself.
“I’m no scholar,” I said. “I am memory.”
And then, with a single step, I moved out of space and time and walked roads that only Avendaño might have found familiar.
Epilogue
The cemetery in Santaverde is almo
st empty today. It is bright, and relatively warm. A mother pushes her infant in a stroller heading to the ALDI supermercado just out of sight, behind the wall. In a place of death, still the tug and fret of the body, the churn of the gut and drive of sex, compels us.
I sit at the bench and stare at the names carved in the memorial, set in stone. Esteban Pávez is there, and Guillermo Benedición. Alejandra Llamos, near the fountain on the south end. Sofía Certa, my mother, there, not too far from The Eye’s paramour. Somewhere in Europe, Vidal sits in a cell, waiting for his trial.
Above the names, an inscription reads all my love is here and has been attached to rocks, sea, mountains.
A poet’s words, etched in stone.
But not my poet.
Sometimes, when I close my remaining eye, I can see the luminous and squirming coils of the miasma. Sometimes, in that particulate haze, faces surface like pallid koi in a dappled pond. I see them and we recognize in each other something.
But it is never Avendaño.
A group of young men laugh, running through the memorial space, holding a football in their hands. When they see me, dressed in black, sunning myself on a bench, one of them cups his hand over one eye and says, “El Ojo! El Ojo!” and they laugh, sneaking glances at me.
They call me The Eye now.
I have class soon and must return to my office to look over my notes. I never feel wholly at ease this far from the photographs. In this, Cleave was right: I am beyond all reason.
I stand and approach the wall. In a crevice, I place a piece of paper.
It reads:
Rafael Avendaño, champion of the internal brigade.
My Heart Struck Sorrow
1
Cromwell: Carbon Monoxide
For a month he sits at home before returning to work. The folklore division’s chief has given him leave—a month, but no more. They are so very sorry, but surely he understands. Cromwell reads the Bible, the books at his bedside table. He can’t bear to listen to music, though. That part of him seems so unimportant now. So he reads. Bright-colored thrillers and mysteries, more suitable for a beach cottage than his empty house. His gaze passes over the words and they remain with him only long enough to register. Winter has settled, snow hangs in the air and makes those souls with the will to venture outdoors blow brilliant white breath, but Cromwell stays inside. The cat has disappeared; he was never the one to feed it anyway. The heating system has been repaired but he often finds he’s cold. It’s an old Alexandria home, constructed in the thirties, central heat and air added laboriously later. The lights flicker each time the HVAC unit begins blowing.
“I’ll stay with him,” he said, looking down at Maizie curled around their son. William. A thermometer and a bottle of children’s acetaminophen sat on the bedside table. “If they need you at the office. I have sick days and leftover vacation.” He was jealous of the loving sprawl of the boy’s sickbed, Maizie so comfortable in it. On the iPad, cartoons danced in primary colors. His wife brushed William’s brow. The boy was pale, like a video feed with the picture desaturated. Usually flushed and olive complexioned, like his mother, pumping with energy and bright enthusiasm. Maizie’s arms encircled him. She would hoard all the boy’s love for herself.
“No, I’ve called in to Brad and let him know we’re sick,” she said. “We’re comfy cozy here. But it’s cold, isn’t it? I think it’s time to turn on the heat.”
“It’ll smell funny,” he said. He leaned down to kiss his son and wife.
“No,” she said, leaning her head away from his lips. “No kisses. We’re infected and one of us has to go to work.”
“Call me if you need anything. I can stop by the grocery on the way home.”
On his way out, he turned on the heat.
2
Cromwell: Vivian
He is oblivious to their stares, their consolations. Eventually, they stop wringing their hands, giving him cards that will remain unread, and allow him to reclaim his office. A blank expression settles upon his features—the caul of governmental vacuity, that wall that he can place between himself and the greater world with such ease. He can make himself other, when he wants, to protect himself.
The halls of the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress are still decorated for the holiday season—it’s the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, anyway: the dead week, the dead, weak ringing in his head—quilts and rustic paintings giving way to red and green streamers. The main hall’s corkboard has a purposefully nondescript and nondenominational banner reading happy holidays, careful to give no preference toward Christmas. At the department of American folklife, they are very careful not to offend. Christmas has passed and now it’s just a matter of whoever put up the decorations taking them down. But it can wait until after New Year’s.
He took William’s presents to the local Boys Club and Maizie’s sister took hers. He left for an afternoon, when Maizie’s family was there after the funeral, solicitous and nervous and discomposed by his composure, and they had removed the Christmas tree by the time he returned, as if getting rid of a body. Cromwell supposed they were, after all.
His office stands cluttered, stacked with printed copies of emails to his notice; beta, VHS, and mini-DV tapes—all legacy formats—waiting to be digitized and ingested into the network, those that Hattie either cannot process or has left to him, since folk music is his specialty. The taxonomy of filing and classification. The rendering of old recordings to melodies, the melodies to sheet music. Sheet music into the computer so it might be cross-referenced. A Highlands ballad? An Appalachian jig? A Low-Country dirge? A Negro field holler? And what tradition? What does the Markov model reveal? How is this modality different from the other? Some relation to French New Guinea lullabies? African wedding songs? Native American war chants? How can he work this into his next paper? How can he transform this melody into a “yes” on his next grant? The song of the department was “Justify Your Existence.”
He sits at his desk, turns on his computer, and waits. She does not take long.
“Hi,” she says from the door.
Cromwell says nothing. He looks at her and then back to his computer, where he again begins selecting emails to trash. The red notifications bar on his mail client now reads 1,633.
Vivian enters and shuts the door behind her. Wearing her hair back. He can smell her individual scent; he could never puzzle out if it was simply her or her perfume, or a lotion or cream she used on her skin, or some combination of it all. But her fragrance fills his office and his nostrils dilate involuntarily to smell her. A minor treachery his body commits without his permission.
“I—” she starts.
“Don’t,” he says. “No need. We’re all sorry. I’m sorry. You’re sorry.”
She sits down in the chair by the door and looks out into the hall to see if anyone has noticed she’s with Cromwell now. “I wanted to come by to see you after the funeral. But—” she says. But how appropriate would it have been for the woman you were fucking to come to the funeral of the woman you married. She twists her wedding ring thoughtlessly. Or maybe not. He is wearing his as well, even though now there’s no reason to except for remembrance.
Like he could forget.
“Not now,” he says, and watches her face crumple. In some abstract way, he realizes it took quite a bit of courage for her to come in here and speak to him and he should make some sort of concession to that, but he can’t think of what might suffice. “Soon, though,” he says. “We can talk.”
She looks down at her hands. When she looks back up, her face is more composed.
“Did Hattie tell you?”
“No,” Cromwell says. “She didn’t. What?”
“Matilda Parker has died. If it’s too soon—”
Cromwell waves his hand, dismissing her concern. His wife and son are dead. Yes. This has been established. “Matilda Parker? I’m not placing her.”
“Grandniece of Harlan Parker.”
Th
ere was a time he might have whistled his astonishment, but he can’t muster that sort of exuberance now. “And?”
“She has bequeathed all of her estate to the department of folklife.” She allows a smile to soften her face. “You’ve come back right in time.”
3
Cromwell: Hattie and Harlan
He’s reminded of the figure of Harlan Parker—how could he forget him? But now his mind splits when she says “You’ve come back right in time” and begins thinking of two things. The olfactory stimulus of Vivian has seeped in, seated itself in his mansion of many doors to remembrance—it triggers a cascade of thoughts and memories: the thrum of her pulse in the hollow of her neck, the taste of her skin so pale, how she wriggled beneath him, above him. The coarse hotel sheets, rough on their skin; her laughter; her mouth on him. The cold pulse of air-conditioning beading condensation on rented windows. The submerged desire during the workday chased by the fear and guilt and shame. Once more his nostrils dilate involuntarily to take in more of her smell. He’s betrayed by his body, another insult to his wife and son, another betrayal to their memory. All the doors lead back to not Vivian, but her. Maizie.
They married young and he’d always been happy; their future seemed a sun-dappled road with children, and holidays, and playgrounds. Laughter. She had kind eyes and a dry humor and he didn’t know when she was joking in half of their conversations, and that made her a source of endless fascination. They had dated for months before they found themselves in a place where sex might even be an option—their natural prudishness, the vagaries of college roommates, their driven schedules. When he entered her the first time it was as if he were an infinitesimal speck upon the ocean of her body. He was overwhelmed at the pleasure of that oblivion.
And still, his mind churns. Away from her. Toward not Vivian but Harlan Parker, born Springfield, Missouri, 1898, son of Frances and Tom Parker. Father died young, and his mother when he was a teen or preteen—Cromwell could not recall exactly—leaving his older, married sister to manage the family home and what little land they had. Trundles east to university at fourteen, a prodigy student at Washington and Lee, quite a hand at music and in particular piano; at seventeen found passage to Britain to join the RAF against his professors’ wishes. When the Brits found he was too tall to fit in a cockpit, he joined the men in the trenches of the Somme, crawling over gut-shot dead men entombed in mud and crying for their mothers in English and Dutch, French and German. Hiding from errant clouds of phosgene gas. Fruiting mold on his clothes and in the trenches. Away from the front lines in 1918—two years at war—after being shot in the thigh. He recuperated and, two years after the war was won, tramped halfway across Europe. Wrote a memoir of the Great War and his travels that found some minor success, notable for its fascination with the lot of the common people—the volk, from which their department derived its name, the laborers and workers, the downtrodden and disenfranchised—and there took down the words of the German and Austrian folk songs he came across in his travels. Once home, he turned his travel journals into a more scholarly work: From Cradle to Song: The Teutonic Musical Tradition. Wrote a series of obscure books on American folk music, and the chautauqua history. Sometime in the thirties, Harlan accepted a commission of ethnomusicology with the Library of Congress to document and index folk music across Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and the Ozarks. And there his story ended. He abruptly abandoned his commission. He retired to his sister’s Springfield home to live out the rest of his days, never to be seen again.
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