The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

by John Hornor Jacobs

  And then I thought about Avendaño, when he said, full of good-natured mischievousness, Misery is a condition that we are all promised. On the screen, painted in light, that misery is very small. Little witches! Next time, we will go see wrestlers fighting vampires and maybe you’ll understand. I missed him then, desperately. He would sort out Old Vesta.

  “Nivia Campos,” I said. “You know her people? Her family?”

  Old Vesta’s eyes hardened, and she pursed her lips. “I will give you no answer without knowing one thing,” she said.

  There are holes in the world, spewing out darkness, covering up hope. One of these holes was Old Vesta’s rotten mouth.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Who told you of me?” she asked.

  There was no hesitation on my part. To what end? Protecting a man I didn’t know? From an old, miserable woman? “The bartender at Piñon Cervecería. Good-looking. Likes books.”

  She tightened her jaw. “You’re looking for Jorge Campos. Nivia Campos’s brother. He lives on Boulevard Agustín Garzón, near where it ends at the university. White house, blue shutters. Red tile roof.”

  White, blue, red. I stood up. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “I appreciate it.” I didn’t try to make any more pleasantries. I moved to the door and had it open, the street in sight.

  “Don’t you want me to tell your fortune?” she said, smiling. Her eyes were terrible. “It’s very good wine. I like the looks of you.”

  “I’ll make my own fortune,” I said. But I didn’t turn and flee. Her hard, tight gaze held me in place.

  “You will never be happy,” she said. Her voice had changed. It was empty of hate, empty of glee. It was simply dead, with less feeling than Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, in the underworld. “Your purpose is folly. But you may find justice.”

  Avendaño would have sorted this old bag out. But Avendaño was not here, and that’s why I was. I set my jaw. “I’ve got a fortune for you,” I said. I walked back into her dining room and approached the table. Standing above her, I took her cup and drained the wine to the dregs. I had paid for it, after all. “When you die, you won’t know peace. You’ll writhe in your grave. For a hundred years, the sons and daughters of Córdoba will curse your name. And then you’ll be forgotten.” I dropped the cup on the table where it clattered, spattering the surface with a fine spray of wine droplets. It bounced once, twice, without breaking and then spun to a stop. It seemed so loud in her small dining room. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Good wine.”

  Old Vesta began to wheeze laughter, a high, dry sound like dust whipped down roads by wind from the Andes.

  “No one ever knows peace, little girl,” she said. She pulled the wine bottle from under her chair, popped the cork, and tossed it at my feet. She took a long drink from the bottle. “And every goddamned soul is forgotten.” She stood. “Now go. Go find your desaparecidos, if you can.”

  * * *

  The home of Jorge Campos was a tidy affair, ringed in planters with thick, oily-leaved vegetation I could not recognize. I went to the shop across the street and bought a Fanta and drank it under the awning near my Yamaha. It was so sweet, I felt the fuzzy divergent sensations of a sugar rush and the soporific of a heavy dessert. There was no traffic to or near the house, so I tucked my helmet under my arm and crossed the street, letting myself into the waist-high walled yard through a metal gate, up the steps to the shaded patio with the multifarious and waxy-looking plants, and knocked on the door.

  It pushed slightly open, as if it had not been latched properly.

  Light washed into the home’s interior, revealing a hallway with arched doors and dark stained wooden floors. On a credenza stood once-lovely purple sprays of lupinus flowers, now flaccid and dropping petals onto the floor.

  “Hello?” I said. “Jorge Campos?”

  I am as sensitive to situation and intuition as any person. The idea that academics—especially female academics—are cloistered aesthetics that retreat from the real world to content themselves only with books is nonsense.

  All of that was to say: Something was very wrong here. I pushed open the door and walked inside, listening. I called out again. Nothing. After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light and it was unsatisfyingly cool in the house. My body responded to the temperature change; every follicle firmed and prickled, my hairs standing on end. I tried to concentrate on the ambient noise of the house, if I could discern any movement by sound alone, but I was distracted by the cloying aftertaste of the Fanta I’d drunk outside and the odd scent that hung in the still air. I walked down the hallway, looking into a formal dining room, another room with a television and record player and many seats. The Camposes were wealthy; it was a large house with many rooms. All of them empty. So far.

  I pushed through a knobless swinging door into a large sun-drenched area, copper pots strung from a center ceiling rack, wood chopping block. Tile counters and cabinets.

  He was maybe eight or nine, lying on the floor of the kitchen, shot in the head. The blood around him had dried and turned black and tacky. His skin, gray-blue. Flies had begun to gather, not too many, but there were enough, feasting at the corners of his mouth and in the wet surfaces of his open eyes. A man lay in the opening of a doorway to a hall leading back into the center of the house. He’d been running, maybe, toward the kitchen. One arm out in panic when he was shot.

  I stopped, terrified. It was hard to hold it all in my head. I felt as though I was a water droplet spattered on a hot skillet, the aggressive boil sending it careening around the cast-iron surface until it’s gone, evaporated. I should call the police, I thought. I could not look at the boy, so I found myself staring blankly at the man. As he was facedown, his back pockets were easily accessible and the one on the right had a distinct bulge. Avoiding the blood, I withdrew his wallet and identification card. The flies took flight from his face, agitated. Jorge Campos.

  They did not even look like people. With nothing animating them—not breath, not the subtle yet very real pulse of blood through artery, vein, and capillary—they seemed carved from some soft foreign material. He’d fallen forward in his bolt for the kitchen—whoever had killed him must have been holding his son—and his head had turned sideways with the death-fall, arm outstretched. His mouth was open, as if he’d been bellowing something. But there was something more, something strange about his mouth.

  I bent again and gingerly worked my index finger and thumb between his lips. As my skin encountered the ivory of his teeth, I felt an unreasoning fear that at any moment they would close viciously. A dead man biting. Some malicious chemical spark left in the meat of the fallen. I drew my hand away. A puff of foul air emanated from him. The churning posthumous gas of his gut, erupting. I coughed, gagging.

  I knelt carefully, avoiding the blood. There was something there, I was sure. I extended my hand again. From his mouth, I withdrew a piece of torn paper. Yellow, and discolored at the edges from the man’s death molt.

  -19.569912, -70.197901

  Isabel

  9

  Isabel.

  Out and back and out, stumbling, into the fresh air of the street. Cars honking as I raced across the boulevard to reach my bike. The smell of the man and boy, all over me. I thought about Avendaño smelling the photos of Opusculus Noctis, hunting for that fractional bit of Alejandra’s essence. The dead’s essence had settled upon me.

  Pounding head, breathless and flushed, I reached the mercado. I had my helmet on and the motorcycle throttling into traffic when I noticed a maroon van parked down the street, within sight of the Camposes’ front door. I felt as though my heart would hammer its way out of my chest. I kicked the machine into life and maneuvered the motorcycle between speeding automobiles, putting as much distance between myself and the maroon van as I could in the shortest amount of time. At the velocity I was traveling I was not able to turn my head to observe if it was following me for fear of wrecking.

  The fermata.
The stillness of time in acceleration, wind surrounding me, the sound a deafening white noise. Time enough to think. Vibrations thrummed into my body. My ass, my cunt, my hands: all the points of contact with the Yamaha, thrumming. The man and his son. And who else? Was there a woman lying somewhere in the house, eyes open and unseeing? A sister? A baby? And who would have done it? The hushed roar of mechanical speed, hurling me forward. I pressed my breast down, toward the gas tank, making a smaller profile, giving the wind less of me to assault. All the time thinking: Who would have done it? Who would kill just to plant a piece of paper in a dead man’s mouth? With a location and my name?

  Cleave had called Avendaño a poet and himself an envoy from the exterior brigade. Suddenly The Eye’s account began to congeal in my mind, taking on firmness and weight it did not have before. All Magerans are paranoid, Isabel, Avendaño had said to me, smiling. With good reason. I took turns uncounted, clutching up and down gears, until the buildings passed away and I found myself driving madly, throttle wide open, on white packed-earth ghost roads. The dust crackled as it flecked my helmet’s visor.

  The western mountains drew nearer now, but in my haste, I had not paid any attention to road marker or highway. Just what was immediately in front of me, and what wasn’t immediately behind. Outside of Córdoba, I’d been able to see if I had a tail. It was empty, rural roads. What vehicles I did see were purely utilitarian. No van.

  I took the time once more to consider the paper. Three pieces of paper, three names, three sets of coordinates. And the last, the one plucked from a dead man’s mouth. My name. It was a taunt. It was a hook.

  It is a lure, a sweet aroma, the killing and the letting of blood. The pain becomes an offering and sacrifice becomes a beacon.

  The sun dipped behind the rim of the mountains faster than I could have believed. The gloaming seeped up around me like a mist, and I cursed myself for not buying a vehicle with working headlights.

  I dropped speed, sure every moment a van’s lights would appear behind me.

  The ride went on interminably, and I found myself ultimately having to stop the bike and dismount. I pissed on the side of the road, in the dark, holding on to the Yahama’s seat for balance. I looked up to the heavens, waiting for the stars to shine through, but high thin clouds wreathed the sky. I could make out the jagged line of the foothills, and the short sparse scrub lining the road. In the distance, a single sodium bulb burned on a pole overseeing a metal barn. Its light made everything else darker.

  I leaned into the Yahama’s seat and smoked, waiting, looking up into blank sky, staring into the dark landscape. I sensed movement. A nocturnal raptor, maybe. The distant yips of canines or coyotes, echoing.

  When the lights appeared on the horizon, I waited, tensing. I felt as though at any moment it would slew toward me and from it erupt . . . what? Soldiers? Even worse, well-dressed Americans?

  The lights passed. A rattling pickup truck full of empty crates, red taillights illuminating the road before me. I climbed back on the Yahama, started it, and followed the truck as closely as I dared.

  * * *

  We came to a crossroads, where there was a small family-owned gas station and mercado still open under brilliant florescent lights. The old beater continued on. I turned off, rolling to a stop in the white-gravel parking lot. With the lights buzzing overhead, insects swarming and batting them, the place took on a washed-out, desaturated look. I entered the mercado on loose, still-vibrating legs.

  A greasy-haired, seriously obese middle-aged woman with a goiter that looked to be strangling her said, “Hello, welcome to Gas y Mercantida Lazaro. Let me know if I can help you find anything.” It was one of those stores where they sold everything: hominy, lard, milk, cheese, wine, liquor, beer, chorizo, socks, toothpaste, shortwave radios, boots, hats, transmission fluid, oil, aspirin, tampons, velvet artworks, candles, antennae, condoms, paperbacks, cigarettes, Fanta, pornographic magazines, fireworks.

  “I think I’ve got what I need,” I said. On the counter, I placed a South American atlas, an ink pen, two large beers, peanuts, a heavy-duty flashlight and extra batteries, duct tape, two packs of Gitanes cigarettes, a knock-off Zippo with a little poncho-clad figure on a horse and the word gaucho embossed on the side, and lighter fluid.

  “This might sound weird, but . . . where am I?” I asked. She stared at me as if I was a lunatic. And maybe I was. “No headlight on my bike,” I added. “Got caught out of town at nightfall and had to follow a truck here.”

  “Los Gigantes,” she said.

  “It doesn’t seem so big,” I said.

  She laughed harder than she should have, glad for the nighttime company. The goitered woman, still smiling, began to ring me up, looking at each item for a price sticker and then entering the number she found into the register. “You hear about the visit?”

  “The visit?” I said. “What visit?”

  “The visit,” she said. “Everyone knows about the visit.”

  “I’m sure you have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The Pope,” she said. “In Magera. Where you’re from.”

  “How do you know where I’m from?” I said.

  “Look at you. Leather jacket. Big clomping boots. I can pick out a Mageran anywhere,” she said. The goiter was painful to look at, a heaving fleshy fist reaching up from the swamp of her skin.

  I can pick out a Mageran anywhere.

  “The Pope?”

  “Love is stronger, you know?” El amor es más fuerte. The lady behind the counter waved a fat hand, rings buried in the flesh of her fingers. “To heal Magera. They’re saying that Vidal is going to return the country to democratic rule.”

  I shook my head. “He won’t.”

  “No?”

  “Never,” I said. “Because we’ll kill him if he does.”

  “But the Pope said—”

  “How much is that?” I said. There was a glass case near the register, and inside it were knives of various sorts. Small plain pocket knives, larger pocket knives, even larger knives in sheaths, scenes of gauchos and nude women etched into bone handles. The prices displayed became larger with the size of the corresponding weapon. Near the bottom of the case, where the knives became less ornate and more military looking, was a hooked blade with a crenelated back full of rip teeth taking up the width of the container, nearer to a machete than a knife. The label next to it said CORVO, but did not list a price.

  “Why would you want that?” the counter woman asked.

  “A present for my dad,” I said.

  “It’s been there for years,” she said looking into the case. “I don’t know how much it is.”

  “The one above it is seventy-five pesos. It’s almost as big.”

  “One hundred,” she said.

  “That seems reasonable,” I said. “And the whetstone.”

  The woman added the corvo and whetstone to the tally and I paid. Outside the mercado, I sat down on the concrete slab the building was built upon, leaned back into its wall and drank beer, watching the insects swarm the lights above the gas pumps. I filled the lighter, put the batteries in the flashlight and the extras in my backpack. I smoked and closed my eyes, waiting for dawn. No sleep would come, and dawn was a long while away. From my backpack I withdrew an envelope containing two slips of paper. I took the other from my pocket.

  Three pieces of paper, three names. But only two different sets of numbers. Had I time to look at the paper I took from Jorge Campos’s home before now, I might have seen that two were the same.

  Opening the Atlas, I held the slip bearing Alejandra near the map’s face and traced the latitude north, to somewhere in the high Mageran deserts, and followed the longitude to a point close to the Argentinian border. I marked it with an X. Both Avendaño and Nivia, I traced their longitude and latitude to a blip of a coastal village, in the far north of the country to a town called Unquera.

  If you connected Córdoba, and the point in the high
desert, and the coastal town of Unquera, it was almost a straight line, north by northwest.

  I dozed some, leaning against the wall, waiting for light. When I finally abandoned the restless half-sleep, I withdrew the corvo and spat on the whetstone, running the dull blade over its rough surface, over and over. The rhythmic movement lulled me into a trance-like state, punctuated only by the steaming air brakes of big trucks pulling in to refuel. Goats bleated from livestock trailers, horses nickered, men whistled tunelessly as they walked to their vehicles, checking tires—the cacophony of transporting disparate cargos: livestock, diesel tanks, grapes, sunflower oil, wheat, corn, cotton. Work never seemed to stop in the scrub. The men paid more attention to the bike than they did to me, despite the weapon I sharpened in full view. It was Argentina—no one blinked at a naked blade. At some point the lights above the gas pumps winked out and I was left in the dark. Using my backpack as a pillow, I lay upon the concrete and slept.

  When light bloomed in the east, I remounted my bike and rode until late afternoon, covering more than seven hundred miles. The land rose and became more barren—sparse grasses dying away, leaving only bleached rock and dust, passing white at times, and then ochre, then brown, and then back to white once more. The air grew thin. The road-weariness finally settled upon me and I slept in a motel in an unknown and unnamed town for twenty-four hours, my motorcycle sharing the room with me as it had before. The phone did not ring, or if it did, I was not aware of it.

  * * *

  The next day I came to the border. It was manned by soldiers watching the bare road in a small hut. There were no cars. The constant scouring of wind over the million summits of the mountains had softened the edges of the pass. The high salt flats had become shattered rock, like ejecta from some cosmic impact eons before where no plant, no lichen, no living thing grew. The pass was marked by a simple green sign over the highway that read Paso de Mazabrón Limite Internacional with mile markers to the next town.