“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 almost 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.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Eduardo Arias and Mónica Ramón Rios for reading this work with an eye toward any sort of issues of cultural insensitivity. Without them, I would not have been confident enough to see this story to publication.
Thanks to Dave Oliphant for helping me deal with some rights issues. Thanks to M. L. Brennan for information about the ins and outs of faculty at university. And to Fabio Fernandes for advice regarding South America, and how Americans speaking Spanish (or Portuguese, in Fabio’s case) sound to native speakers.
My thanks to Duke Boyne for information regarding motorcycles—I have ridden one, and enjoyed it (I didn’t die, or peel all the skin from my body), but I know nothing about them.
Any mistakes of culture, language, or any detail that is amiss regarding Argentina or South America—all my fault. Should you feel strongly enough about any of my errors to want to inform me of them, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].
About the Author
John Hornor Jacobs is the author of Southern Gods, short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, This Dark Earth, and the Incorruptibles fantasy series. He lives with his family in the South of America, where he is also a musician and graphic artist. Visit him at www.johnhornorjacobs.com.
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Also by John Hornor Jacobs
Incorruptibles
The Incorruptibles
Foreign Devils
Infernal Machines
The Twelve-Fingered Boy Trilogy
The Twelve-Fingered Boy
The Shibboleth
The Conformity
This Dark Earth
Southern Gods
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the sea dreams it is the sky. Copyright © 2018 by John Hornor Jacobs. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition October 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-288081-9
Cover design by John Hornor Jacobs and Richard L. Aquan
Harper Voyager, the Harper Voyager logo, and Harper Voyager Impulse are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
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