The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Was this location something more than just a lure to get me out here? Was that why it was different from the others? Did they capture Avendaño that way, too? Did they capture him? Was it too much to hope he was alive? Was it too much to hope he was free?

  I had no answers. Every part of me with reason, every fiber wanted me to turn back toward the border. Go back to the comfort and safety of the University. Find Claudia and kiss her and tell her I’m sorry, it was a mistake, just something I had to do and she’d be outraged but then she’d soften and we could find comfort among Moroccan tiles and Egyptian sheets and drink Avendaño’s booze and spend his money until it dried up. We could bring Laura into our bed, that gorgeous tor of a woman, and explore every crack and cranny of her. We could find all the ways smart, loving women can make their lives work.

  But I didn’t.

  I fell into the fugue state of motion. I was alone on the face of the earth, outside of time and light and human connection.

  I found a road in the dark. I took it. And the next. And the next.

  Until dawn.

  10

  I woke surprised my skin wasn’t crawling with scorpions. I lay in the dirt watching birds circle high above. The sun shone thin and watery and it was cold, a brisk wind ripping at my hands, my face. My lips were cracked—I had slept with my mouth open—and all of my body ached. When I shut my mouth, my teeth ground painfully on silica. Mustering what saliva I could, I spat. Coughed. Spat again.

  I pushed myself up, lost my balance, and took two quick steps to correct myself. My body was a reflection of my tumbling thoughts.

  Looking around, I spotted the motorcycle, turned on its side. The ground here was too soft for the kickstand. A khaki, dusty soil marked only with stunted grasses. In the distance, obstinate and solitary trees dotted the countryside. A spindly telephone line. Dun-colored hills sloping into dun-colored mountains.

  Magera, my homeland. Seeing it now, I wondered why would Vidal commit the crimes he had to rule such a barren and forsaken place. But that was man, was it not? He would water the dust with blood to claim title and rule. I spat again.

  I was becoming Avendaño.

  I filled the dirt bike tank from the canisters, and in the first town I came to, located where I was. I bought workman’s gloves, thin but better than nothing. Tortillas, carne seca. I drank water and used the gas station’s restroom. I stripped to the waist and washed my armpits, my chest, my neck. I wet my hair and wrung it out. I made pools of water in my hands, sucked it into my nasal passages and then blew that out too, into the sink, to clear the dust of my fugue state. I pored over the map and memorized my route to Unquera. It was less than a full day’s ride.

  I reclaimed the road, almost thoughtless. Prudence and discretion were lost to me. This disregard for safety and outward concerns, a form of dumb lassitude. It seemed only moments later when I found myself following highway signs out of the heights and down turning roads to Unquera. From above, the vantage where the highway switched back and forth in its descent, the town looked very small and orderly. An elongated traza, planned and surveyed and plotted a century before, when copper was rich in these tawny mountains. A town with a workforce and a wharf on the shore, buried in the curving rind of bay. The sea gave no usable moisture for vegetation, but it was sustaining nonetheless—fish and commerce to a wharf that had seen more prosperous days. At its back, lifeless rocks sloped downward to the shore and their journey was interrupted not by any vegetation, only the construction of man: highway, house, road, wall, breakwall, wharf, pier.

  I descended, back and forth on the switchback highway, watching Unquera grow below me. A white-and-blue spear tip of espadaña stood sentinel on a hilltop, its bell silent. Closer, an umber park grassless, treeless, childless; a school, abandoned; a hut, a fishing shack. A narrow dirt path threading through bare-walled shacks. Warmer now, at sea level. Salt on the air. The desert of Magera meets the salt desert of sea.

  There were more buildings—dun-colored buildings, like the land all around, dun and dun and done and Donne, I thought. A valediction forfeiting mooring. Thoughts skittering off into nonsense. I examined the buildings. Some looked industrial, some like dwellings, some looked vaguely military. One, a husk of a hotel, scaling paint and open doorway like the mouth of Pantagruel at carnival. All seemed empty, missing windows and doors. Some appeared to be warehouses, great buglike buildings with hundreds of fractured eyes as windows. There was movement north, closer to the wharf, I could see, where seagulls rode rising air drafts, feathers darkened by the rising dust of vehicles. Diesel exhaust. Soldiers. Green trucks.

  I pulled my bike behind a Quonset hut between an industrial-size garbage bin and a wall, hiding it from any casual viewer. I left my helmet on the handlebar and stuffed the atlas in the small compartment under the blue seat. Down the alley where buildings pointed their asses, their most unflattering parts toward each other. I made my way as covertly as possible toward the hotel. I slipped around front, into its gullet. bienvenido al hotel elencantoquintay, a sign read. Wallpaper hung in rotting streamers, in corners piles of broken furniture. All of the light fixtures ripped from the walls. The last vestige of the hotel’s dignity was the concierge and clerk’s desk, an immovable and immemorial construction of real mahogany now beginning to striate and turn gray from the elements. The sea could strip any finish. It rises up, voracious.

  El mar sueña que es el cielo.

  I took the stairs by twos. Graffiti here, and the overwhelming smell of mold. I found a room on the third floor with a window that looked out over the northern part of Unquera, where the army vehicles were parked between buildings. I took a position at the window, watching. A barracks, maybe, or an arsenal.

  Canvas-tarped trucks surrounded by carabineros. Men barking orders. Not many soldiers, maybe fifteen, mostly milling about. From one of the trucks came bound and blindfolded people; men, women, children. The horror Avendaño had documented in his testament went on.

  The carabineros hustled the prisoners into the building, and the soldiers followed, leaving the streets empty except for an officer and another man I had not seen before. A fat man in a dark suit without a tie, his shirt untucked. He stood near the pier speaking with the officer, gesturing at the ship anchored at the pier. A gray metal boat, with pilot’s roost, radar tower, and swivel cannons on the prow and stern. The officer gestured to the building where they had taken the prisoners. He disappeared from sight, entering the building, and then returned, followed by the soldiers that had been there before, plus some who must have been in the building.

  I tried counting, but lost track at thirty. They came bearing duffels and weapons, kits and chests, and moved to the ship. Fresh men to man the forsaken outpost, fresh prisoners from Santaverde or Coronada, Mediera or Los Diaz. A changing of the guard. After two hours, they had boarded the vessel and a great horn sounded and the ship retreated into the bay. As the afternoon grew long and the sun fractured on the sea, vanished in the horizon.

  A few sodium lights clicked on, buzzing, casting yellow circles of light intermittently on Unquera’s streets. The sky blazed with sunset and then darkened. Another streetlight crackled to life, right outside the hotel. I sat on the floor, eating peanuts I had bought and watching shadows grow, and cursed myself afterward, parched. I wandered the hotel, going in and out of empty rooms, bathrooms, looking for sinks or even toilets that might contain a bit of water. There was none. I was just leaving one room, a room very close to where I had observed the ship’s departure, when I noticed a handprint on the wall near the door. It was crusted, and brown. Blood.

  I scanned the room. Nothing, but—

  On the wall, painted in blood, a crude drawing of an eye.

  Avendaño.

  He had been here.

  * * *

  My thirst was unbearable now. The cascading susurrus of the Pacific’s waves maddened me. Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink. I waited, staring at the eye. I traced it with my hand. Avendaño.
Something about it caused me to shrug off my pack and withdraw the sheaf of photographs of the Opusculus Noctis.

  A Little Night Work indeed.

  I pawed through his translations. La dulce bruma del dolor. The Sweet Miasma of Pain. I sorted through my own translations. El señuelo de la inocencia. The Lure of Innocence. I rifled through the photographs. The words swam in my sight.

  In the end, I focused on Un pasaje a los sueños. A Passage to Dreams.

  * * *

  It was not the noise that roused me, but the lack of it. The sounds of surf had died away, drawn back from the shore by the tide. My sight could not penetrate the darkness enough to see. But it had quieted. In the sodium light below I could see figures moving. Dark figures, indistinct, walking in a group. A flash of white skin. Bound hands, gagged mouth.

  A mist had risen from the bay, it seemed. It hung in the air, still. A clotted artery of air, snaking down the street, between dark figures and their prisoner. Soldiers carrying devices, great packs on their backs, but absolutely silent.

  I took the stairs to the ground floor on cat feet. I checked the gun in my belt to see if it was still there. I had fired it three times, and I was sure there were more rounds in it, but as I told Avendaño so long before, I knew nothing of guns. I hoped, if I needed it, it would fire again.

  From the throat of the hotel, I waited for the dark figures of soldiers, and the others, the prisoners, to pass and then I followed.

  Out, out of the town, past the hill upon which the church bell tower stood, a jutting angle piercing the night sky. The stars a great smear across the sky and the moon just a white haze outlining the mountains to the east. It would take it time to clear their summits and surmount the heavens.

  The soldiers did not speak. They did not march in time.

  Leaving the road, they followed a packed trail in the dirt, rising up, and up, away from Unquera. Lights winked on the bay from fishermen’s skiffs and then became obscured by the thickening haze. I hung back, not wanting to be spotted by the soldiers. I moved, crouching.

  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 him 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. I am an emissary for the external brigade. The soldiers began scrabbling at the dun earth, feet and hands, loping forward like wolves.

  I plucked it out, I had seen too much, 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 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.