Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  He put his hand on hers and said gently, “You’ll have memory loss from it. Some will come and go. Some will be gone forever.”

  The waitress approached, wiping her hands on her apron and casting a wary glance under the table.

  “You all through here or you want more food?” She threw an ironic eye across the laden table, with its litter of half-eaten food, dirty plates, cutlery, coffee cups, water glasses, syrup pitchers, and wadded napkins.

  “That should hold us until lunch,” Javier said with smooth courtesy, as he laid several bills on the table.

  Calypso suppressed a smile and reached under the table to scratch Lobo’s broad, furry head. Then they exited the booth and pushed through the finger-grimed glass front door into a gloriously clear and cold desert morning.

  §

  The three of them climbed into the cab of Javier’s truck with Javier at the wheel, Calypso nestled next to him and Lobo by the window.

  “Where do we go now?” she asked, suddenly realizing with a pang that they had no home to go home to.

  “I’ve been thinking. There’s a new house in the workers’ village that’s almost finished. We can move in there.”

  “But the cartel is there. I saw them when I climbed the cliff.”

  Javier scanned her face, frowning, then shook his head.

  “No, Caleepso.”

  “Yes! They were wearing protective vests and carrying assault rifles. I saw them!”

  Understanding flooded his face.

  “Ooooh! You must have seen the soldiers.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “The governor sent in soldiers to protect the ranch. I called him after the attack.”

  “So it’s safe to go back?”

  Javier nodded. “Yes. So we’ll go through Chihuahua City and buy some furniture. I have to talk to the insurance agent anyway.”

  “And we have to apply for our passports again.”

  He nodded. “That, too.”

  Calypso’s smile was impish. “Because I have a proposal.”

  Javier, reaching to put the key in the ignition, straightened at her tone and looked at her warily.

  “Yes?”

  “I know you’ll want to rebuild the house.”

  “Yes?”

  “So I’m thinking you could ask Pedro to supervise that. He was there the first time you built. He knows the whole process and we have good builders among the workers.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “And then, you and I could take a little vacation. We haven’t gone away together for years.”

  “A vacation where?” But he was already smiling, knowing.

  “A vacation to…well, you know…to France.”

  And then in a rush, “We could stay with Walter in Paris for a few days. And then maybe go to the South and rent a cottage in some little village somewhere. Maybe near Avignon. I love Avignon. And I could write. Because my manuscript is gone, you know, because of the fire. My computer, too. I’m going to have to write the whole thing again. And you could write, too. Write about the cartels, and the killing, and the corruption in the government because of all the drug money…”

  Her face was suffused with enthusiasm and Javier could not help but smile. “What?”

  “Caleepso, Caleepso,” he said shaking his head, bemused, and ruffling her hair.

  “Well—what do you think? Would you?”

  He reached to start the truck, backed and turned it, and headed out of the parking lot. He glanced both ways and then turned onto the old highway, headed east. Calypso regarded his profile fixedly, knowing that much was going on behind that impervious facade.

  He threw a glance at her.

  “What?”

  She laughed. “What indeed? Could you stop being a rancher for a while? It’s been a long time since you wrote The Speaking Sword. Maybe your country is calling you to write another book. Nothing really happens by accident, you know. Maybe the universe is booting us out of Rancho Cielo for awhile so you can write.”

  Javier rose up, bracing himself on the wheel, and settled again into the seat, taking a firmer grip at the helm.

  “We talk about it,” he said and then put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. “Later.”

  They drove into morning sun still low on the horizon. The angle of light cast long, blue shadows from the base of yucca trees and cactus, striping the yellow desert sand.

  Lobo thrust his nose out the crack in the window, his nostrils flaring, taking in the rich, sagey scent of the desert air and other smells that only his clan could register. The old highway was pitted with potholes, the white line was worn away in spots, and the truck rattled and jounced as the three drove on into their future.

  12

  Paris

  The three old friends sat in front of a small fire in the salon of Hill’s apartment on Place des Vosges. The remains of their supper had been cleared away and their little digestif glasses of cognac were half-empty. A stillness had fallen, such as only old and dear friends find comfortable.

  “Scopolamine, eh?” said Hill, breaking the silence. “You know, I never did drugs in the sixties and seventies when everyone was experimenting with them. I was too busy reporting in Vietnam. But then one night, a bunch of marines up on the DMZ pulled me into their hootch and insisted I smoke pot with them.”

  He laughed, his eyes lost in the past.

  “I got so damn stoned. We laughed all night. Christ, we had a party!”

  He bent to pick up the poker, rearranged the burning logs to his satisfaction, and settled back into his chair.

  “The next day, those guys went out on recon and only three came back.” He shook his head and sighed. “Fucking war.”

  A small pause ensued, as each thought about the scarification that war and drugs had wrought in each of their lives. Calypso broke the silence.

  “It’s a wicked drug, Walter. I’ve been researching it on my new laptop. They say people are robbed while they’re under the influence, and they’re so open to suggestion that they actually help the robbers rip off their own homes. Then, when they come out from under it, they can’t remember a thing. Other people have to tell them what they did. It’s scary! You ought to write an exposé, now that you’ve had personal experience.”

  “Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll leave it to the young bucks. I’m pretty happy, just poking around Paris for little scandals. You’d be amazed how many of those there are.”

  “Drugs are destroying the culture of Mexico,” Javier cut in. “The cartels are making so much money that drugs are the main export in my country now. How crazy is that?” He took a sip of cognac.

  “Think of the infrastructure that’s required to produce that kind of profit: the importation of cocaine from South America; the farming of opium and marijuana in Mexico; the processing, packaging, warehousing, shipping, and smuggling into the US; the distribution and sales. And then the arms trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and surveillance, the placing of connected people in high political and military places. But if you ask anybody in the government, they just shake their heads and say they know nothing about it.”

  Calypso smiled to herself as she rolled her glass between her fingers. She knew she was hearing the opening salvos of Javier’s next book.

  “They say that between one and ten million dollars of illegal drugs pass over the border from Juarez to El Paso every single day!” she added. “And that’s just one single port of entry. Somebody’s getting really stoned in the US.”

  “What we need to do is find that guy and stop him!” Hill said, deadpan.

  Calypso laughed. Even Javier shook his head and grinned.

  “Seriously though,” Hill continued, “an associate of mine in London did a piece on how drug money saved global banks from collapsing in 2008, when the speculative capital markets imploded. He quoted the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as saying that the only liquid investment capital available to some banks in 2008 was the actual cash they we
re taking in, literally by truckloads, from the cartels. He said over three hundred and fifty billion dollars of drug profits were absorbed into the economy that way.”

  “No one wants to say the real truth,” Javier added, “that the federal police and the Mexican Army have administered drug trafficking for decades and are recruitment centers for paramilitary assassins. Or that the big banks in the US—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, the big names—are laundering billions of dollars for the cartels, as we speak.”

  Hill nodded. “Yes, and don’t forget who else profits from the so-called War on Drugs. In the US arms sales are huge, private prisons are bulging with drug mules and small time dealers, and the prison guard unions count on that for their pay raises. Even the racists get their kicks, because criminalization of drugs mostly locks up people of color. The US government knows all that and turns a blind eye.”

  “El Chapo Guzmán was Mexico’s most-wanted capo—and he’s also been featured in Forbes on their list of billionaires, as if he were just another businessman!” Calypso added.

  “And even now that he’s been captured, he’ll just run his business from prison.” Javier’s face was dark with disgust. “Nothing will change.”

  “Who ever would have thought that we’d have personal experience of the power of the cartels?” Calypso said thoughtfully. “I mean, we knew what was going on around us and we prepared for an attack, but I don’t think I ever really believed they’d bother us when they have so much else going on. But here we sit. All three of us have been touched. Javier’s had to fight them physically and you and I have been under the spell of their drugs, Walter. Parts of our memories are expunged forever, along with our home and my manuscript. Did you ever expect that such a thing would happen to you?”

  Hill suddenly sat up straight.

  “Manuscript?”

  “Yes, the one I’d almost finished about the locket. It burned up in the fire.”

  Hill pushed himself from his chair.

  “Excuse me for a moment.”

  Javier and Calypso sat waiting for his return. She shot him a glance and he nodded imperceptibly. It was late. Time to make their excuses and head to bed.

  Hill returned holding a box, which he handed to Calypso with a flourish. “Yours, I believe, madame.”

  It was a manuscript box, dinged on the corners, smeared with mud, but still recognizable. Calypso ripped open the flap and peered inside.

  “Oh my God!” was all she could say.

  “What?” Javier asked.

  “It’s my manuscript! Walter—how in the world…?”

  Hill grinned triumphantly.

  “It was that morning of the attack. We were running for the cliff but then I went back, remember?”

  “Yes. For scones.”

  “And for your manuscript. I stuffed it in my pack. I was determined that you were going to finish telling me the story of the locket, come hell or high water.”

  Calypso sat dazed, staring at the stack of printed pages in her lap.

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe! And another thing you’d better believe is that while you’re here you’re going to read the rest to me. I’m not going to let you depart until you do.”

  “But it’s not finished.”

  “Then finish it.”

  “That’s what I intend to do once we get to the South. I thought I was going to have to rewrite the whole thing. Now it’s only a few pages. But I need to settle in somewhere before I can write them.”

  “Then read what you have and I’ll come to the South to hear the end.”

  Javier smiled and nodded. “That would be good.”

  Calypso reached out a hand to Hill. “It’s a deal. That’s the least I could do. How can I ever thank you?”

  “By starting tonight. Read a few pages for me. We left off where…”

  “I know, I know. Where Blanche de Muret jumped down the well.”

  “Yes,” Hill said eagerly.

  “Not tonight, Walter. Javier and I are still jet-lagged. But tomorrow night, I promise I’ll read everything I’ve got. Then you’ll have to wait for a couple of months until I can finish it.”

  Hill’s lower lip shot out in a pout.

  “If we wait until tomorrow night, something terrible will happen. Maybe war will be declared with aliens from deep space. Something will keep me from ever hearing the end of this damned story.”

  “No, Walter. Everything will be fine. Go to bed, now, and tomorrow I’ll read you the rest. I’m amazed you haven’t read it yourself.”

  “Oh, no!” He looked shocked. “I would never do that. This book is your intellectual property.”

  “Well, your patience and ethics will be rewarded. Tomorrow.”

  Calypso rose and held her hand out to Javier.

  “Come along, my love, before this persuasive man has his way with me.”

  Hill stayed seated, staring sullenly into the fire.

  “Tomorrow then,” he said glumly.

  “Goodnight, Walter.” She bent and kissed him on top of the head.

  Javier patted him on the shoulder as he passed and murmured, “I never win either. Just imagine trying to live with her!”

  “I do,” Hill whispered, after they had disappeared down the hallway to the guest room. “I do. All the time.”

  §

  Javier lay with Calypso’s head on his shoulder. Freshly pressed sheets of old, embroidered linen rustled as she burrowed her body toward him until her entire length was nestled against his.

  “It’s so nice to be here,” she sighed.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “What? Paris? This place?”

  “All of it.”

  Calypso raised up on her elbow, her face hovering over his, so that her hair made a tent containing them both.

  “Javier, my love, there is only one thing, ever, that I have truly missed—you. I don’t even know how many days we were apart because of the attack, but to me they were an eternity. All the rest of this,” she waved her hand at the guest room walls in a gesture meant to include Paris and the entire rest of the planet, “is superfluous. I can live without everything else. I don’t even want anything else. All I want, or have ever wanted, is you.”

  “So you won’t mind, when our vacation is over, going back to Rancho Cielo?”

  “Will you be there?”

  He laughed. “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll be happy. Or maybe you’d like to move to Jupiter. I hear the ambient temperature there is about minus two hundred and thirty-four degrees. I’d go there, too, if you were there.”

  She settled back and nuzzled her cheek into the swale of his shoulder.

  “Of course,” she murmured, “you’d have to buy me a new wardrobe.”

  He laughed, bent to kiss her, and found her already asleep.

  §

  The next night, the three friends again sat by the fire after supper. Calypso opened the manuscript box and pulled the sheaf from it. “Ready?” she flicked a teasing glance at Hill.

  “For about a decade,” he said. “Read on.” He reached to pour each of them a refill for their glasses.

  “You remember, we ended when…”

  “Yes, yes,” Hill said impatiently, “I remember!”

  “Okay then,” Calypso said, “here we go.” Then, adjusting her reading glasses and taking a sip of cognac, she began. She read until midnight, recounting Blanche’s jump down the well, her rescue, the meeting with Caspar and then with Allia. She read until her voice was hoarse, then begged off until the following night.

  The next evening, they went out for an early supper at a little bistro close to Place des Vosges and then walked home in the dusk. Traffic roared in the distance on the Champs-Élysées and small bright pink, oblong clouds floated in a sky of unearthly electric blue. Calypso strolled between the two men, an arm linked in each of theirs.

  “I haven’t been this happy in years,” she sighed.

  “Because you’re in Pari
s?” Hill asked.

  “No. Because we’re all together again. Because we’re all alive and well. It’s a miracle, don’t you think? Given what we’ve been through?”

  Both men nodded. Her question threw them both into a wordless place of gratitude.

  “Expansion and contraction,” Calypso went on, “that’s what we’ve endured. First, we’re on the edge of the abyss—endless void and light. Then suddenly, we’re in the cave, with its constriction and darkness. Or in Javier’s case, in a conflagration of blood and fire. We’ve all led big, expansive lives—and then, we’ve been reduced, compacted. Just to have survived it makes me happy.”

  “I guess it proves we’re flexible,” Hill said.

  “And invincible,” Javier added.

  Calypso pulled them both in close to her as they strolled, their footsteps synchronized. In the center of Place des Vosges, a beautiful young model in an ankle-length mink coat was posing near the fountain while the photographer, all in black, ducked and wove, snapping his shutter. The girl preened and pouted and strutted, and the three passersby smiled to themselves as they passed.

  Nothing of this world meant a hoot to them anymore, Hill reflected. He, Calypso, and Javier had passed through a veil into an alternate reality in which the rewards of this world, no matter how provocatively displayed, paled in comparison.

  In comparison to what? he asked himself, then smiled, knowing he was loved.

  §

  They were settled again by the fire.

  “Tonight we’ll finish all that I’ve written,” Calypso said as prelude.

  “I’m sad to hear it,” Hill said, “but at least I’ll finally know the end.”

  “You remember that we left off last night, with Blanche being prepared to meet Sa Tahuti?”

  “Yes, after Allia told her the story of Isis and Osiris and of the underground community,” Hill nodded. He turned to Javier.

  “When Calypso and I first met here in Paris, I told her we had known one another in a life in ancient Egypt. I thought I was kidding at the time, but this story makes me wonder…”