The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  After a week, the Dominicana’s health took a turn for the worse. She could no longer tell the difference between the stark reality of her sickness and her nightmares. She called for her dead parents in Spanish. She damned the American Marines to hell where they would be forced to march off cliffs like lemmings for all eternity. She told her husband that she wanted more than anything to swim and drown in the seas of the Antilles. She wept and laughed in turn. During moments of lucidity, she apologized to her husband and her son and she told them not to worry and that she loved them terribly, so terribly, in fact, she felt that at any moment her heart would burst open in radiance.

  * * *

  The Welsh doctor stopped by every few days. One late afternoon, as he was inspecting a series of rose-colored spots near her abdomen, the Dominicana grabbed his hand. She asked if he could tell her a story, any story really, just something to help her forget the pain. At first, the doctor didn’t know what story to tell, but then he thought about his childhood in Wales. The Dominicana closed her eyes and the Welsh doctor began:

  “My father was a miner from Wales, South Wales Valleys, to be accurate, and we lived in a village not too far from the coal mine where my father worked. We were a Catholic mining family. Life was systematic and grim, but not without its own vigor or rare joy, a birth, for example, or a strike. Regardless of the laws on the books, it was quite common for women and children to work the mines alongside the men. The owners didn’t care. Or, at most, they paid off the government commissioners.

  “One night, around my tenth birthday, my father came to my room and told me that the next morning I would be going to the mines with him. Of course, it didn’t come as a surprise. This was something the boys in the village expected. A rite of passage. At that time, I thought of myself as a resilient and rugged boy. Or rather, I wanted badly to be resilient and rugged since I saw my father that way. I suppose all boys fashion themselves after a perception of their father.

  “The next morning my father took me to the coal mines. I had been near them, but never in them. They were obscure, sunless, yet still full of movement and labor. Damn hard labor. Once we were deep in the coal mines, my father gave me an unexpected job. Instead of handling equipment or checking the mines for ventilation, like most of the other boys my age, my father put me in charge of a gray mining pony. The job of a mining pony, he explained, was to pull mining carts. It was a strenuous and almost endless job. He told me to take the pony to the surface and watch over him for two weeks. This was the yearly allotted time that a mining pony was allowed to have a break from the mines. My father instructed me on how to put sacks on the pony’s head in order to keep it from becoming upset from the light once we reached the surface. The pony, of course, was accustomed to the dark. Once on the surface, he instructed me to take the sacks off slowly, so the pony could get accustomed to the light. It was a process that reminded me of ascending into madness.

  “For two weeks, every morning, I walked the pony around a field and watched as it grazed on the grass and squinted at the sky, trying to remember, I thought, the idea of natural light. At the end of those two weeks, my father instructed me to bring the pony back into the coal mines. He met me in the field and he told me that the pony would become crazed when she saw the sacks. Careful, he told me, she knows. I thought then that to the pony the mines must have been a type of hell, a dark chrysalis from which she would never be able to leave. I was right. When we put the first sack over the pony’s head, she went mad. She brayed and kicked, and I remember thinking, if she could have wept she would have wept. I also remember that my heart ached for the pony in a very physical way. It felt as real as any other type of colossal pain I had ever experienced or have ever experienced since. I must have looked terrible or like I didn’t want to finish the job because my father scolded me. He grabbed my shoulders and looked me in my eyes and told me that I shouldn’t give the pony a second goddamn thought. At that point, I must have started crying because my father shook me. He shook me and told me that the pony had a very important, almost sacred, duty and that was to keep boys like me from working the mines for as long as possible.”

  * * *

  One August morning, Maxwell walked to the river and snuck on a ferry headed to the Algiers rail yards. Once there, he explored the carcasses of engines and cabin cars. It smelled like metal and wet rubber, a dense, humid smell very different from his home on Melpomene Avenue, which smelled of bread, sweat clinging to paper, his father’s dirty clothes, which was the thick smell of alligator skin and the marsh outside the city. Near some tracks, he found a pile of rubber strips. Using rotted wood and a matchbook the old mad pirate had given him, he started a large fire and threw the rubber strips into it.

  Later, when he was bored, he sat on a crate and watched trains arrive and depart. The trains moved slowly. He imagined that they were prehistoric black lizards and he wondered what it would be like to ride one or what it would be like to gaze into their black throats. After some time, Maxwell noticed men and boys running through the rail yards. He craned his neck and watched as they jumped into an empty boxcar. Moments later, two bullmen blew on whistles and gave chase to the train, but by then the train was already receding into the deep and indistinguishable blue of the horizon. Maxwell sat back down on the crate and waited for the next train, but partly due to his hunger and partly due to the yawning humidity, he soon fell into a deep sleep without dreams.

  When Maxwell woke up, it was night and the stars were out and a crescent moon hung over the French Quarter across the river. He sat on the crate and read the sky, but all he could read up there was despair. In the crescent moon, he read despair and in the light of the stars, which Maxwell knew was the only thing that remained of many of them, he read despair. Sometime later, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Yo, kid, I’ve been watching you,” said the bullman. He then took out a flashlight and shone it on Maxwell.

  Maxwell averted his eyes from the light, which he imagined was a yellow tentacle reaching into his thoughts.

  “You meaning to run off, right?”

  Maxwell was silent.

  “Listen, kid, everybody runs off when they need to run off. But tonight’s not your night. Go home.”

  Maxwell kicked at a clump of charred rubber and then took off running, but he didn’t head toward the ferries, which would take him across the river and back home. He didn’t want to go home. His mother would be there and he knew that she was dying.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before the Dominicana told David Ellison that she had destroyed the manuscript for A Model Earth.

  “I made a small fire,” she explained, as he was sitting by her bedside.

  He said that it was okay, yet he knew in his heart that it wasn’t okay. He felt mournful at the thought of the destroyed manuscript, which had been remarkable, and by the fact that no one else would ever read it. Briefly, he thought of his mother, or rather, the mother of his childhood, his permanent mother, an island herself, a quiet and perplexing woman adrift in an ocean of wheat, and how she had once told him in a steady and rising Yiddish voice that literature was a memory of a memory of a memory.

  Then, just to say something, he told the Dominicana about a recurring dream he had after reading Lost City for the first time. In the dream, Charles Darwin is an extraterrestrial sent to Earth with the task of collecting specimens for an interplanetary zoo on a distant planet, a planet millions of light-years away, which resembles a native Earth with native trees and native rivers and native beasts.

  “An Earth away from Earth,” the Dominicana said.

  “Yes, exactly like that,” the publisher said.

  “But then which Earth is the real one?” she asked, smiling.

  The publisher and the Dominicana sat for some time in silence, enjoying a late-afternoon breeze, and soon she began to drift in and out of sleep. The publisher stood up, bu
t he was reluctant to leave. One of the greatest writers of this young century is dying, he thought, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Later that night, in bed, in the dark, the publisher recalled the Dominicana’s question and he was suddenly unsure if he was living on Earth or an unknown planet that was a replica of Earth. Sleep deserted him. How could I mistake Earth for a replica of Earth? he asked himself. And then: What would the purpose of a zoo like that be? And then, horrifically: Am I a free man on Earth or a captive in Charles Darwin’s zoo? Three months later, David Ellison’s publishing house collapsed and he left in ruins for Los Angeles.

  * * *

  Maxwell sat with his mother and they both waited. He asked her if she needed anything and she shook her head. She then spoke to him softly and said that she had tried not to wish for more time, but in the end, she did. She wanted more time. She wanted each moment to last years. She wanted her very last second to contain an eternity, in which it was always dawn or always dusk. She then held Maxwell close and said she wouldn’t talk about time anymore. Instead, she told the story of how one morning when she was a girl the seas of the Antilles had brought her a pirate. She then described the Dominican Republic and the islands of the seas of the Antilles, which had been a stage setting for the Americas. But beyond that, she explained, beyond history or the mistakes of men, beyond time, which was a great and clever thief, beyond all of that, at the edge of the universe or maybe at the start and end of the universe, there was a soft murmur, a constant breath of beauty, a truth.

  * * *

  The End came exactly as she knew it would. But her only child, her seed, her amor, her baby, her restless Maxwell, her ensorcelled prince, her son et lumière, her true island, would go on. Into some vague and faraway year, when the world would be different and the people in it only slightly so. On and on and on.

  VOX HUMANA

  December 2004–August 2005

  A hospice nurse called Saul to say his grandfather was having trouble breathing and she asked him to come to the house. It took him twenty minutes to walk through the fresh snow from his apartment to his grandfather’s greystone on Humboldt Boulevard. Since he was young he’d possessed a strange kind of prescience regarding his grandfather’s death. He anticipated sitting on the same bed with his grandfather’s tiny and ruined body. He envisioned his grandfather’s hands and feet and elbows and closed eyes (the nurse would close them or he would), momentously at peace, otherworldly, and the earsplitting silence between them, which resolved itself only after ten minutes or maybe twenty, he couldn’t tell, but in the end, resolved itself fully when he coughed into his palm, pointlessly it seemed, and said, thank you for everything, after which he imagined his grandfather saying, it was nothing, Saul. Then he remained silent because everything that was about to happen had already happened before. His grief was already traveling backward in time from Chicago to Tel Aviv. He was already meeting himself coming the other way, like a shitty space-time opera, he thought, and then he left and the kind nurse entered the room.

  * * *

  Am I an orphan again? he asked himself later that day. Then he started washing his grandfather’s dirty dishes, glancing out the window at the snowy dunes on the rooftops and the clouds as they raced over the city like a cavalry of gray horses, and added, fuck, I’m too old to be an orphan.

  * * *

  The following week, on the Friday after the funeral, he returned to work. He worked at an old small hotel by the lake which had recently been renovated and which catered to wealthy European, Chinese, and American businesses, young couples, and the occasional nouveau riche transient. The hotel was called The Atlas. The building had a brick façade, a lobby with leather couches and a fireplace, a luxury conference room, a bar, a European-style elevator, and fifty rooms (each crowned with an original ink-on-paper drawing of a god or goddess of travel; so, for example, Room 2 was Chung-Kuei, Room 7 was Min, Room 33 was Hasamelis, Room 42 was Hermes, Room 19 was Ekchuah, and so on, tactfully, but also, thought Saul, with an exhausting affectation of mythology).

  On the rooftop of the hotel, there was a neglected and twisted garden worn by the irregular seasons. When business was slow or when he was on break, he went to the rooftop garden to read. For the most part, he read science fiction novels. Saul had a flexible schedule at The Atlas. There were three shifts. When he worked too early or too late he felt like a sleepwalker or a zombie. The 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift suited him well. His main responsibilities included reservations, check-ins, check-outs, preparations for business meetings and conferences, and responding to guest requests, which were sometimes reasonable and sometimes ridiculous or melodramatic.

  He liked his boss, Romário. Once, Romário, who was half Romanian, half Cuban and who spoke of Romania like it was a bizarre crime novel and spoke of Cuba like it was an irrevocable dream, had asked Saul what it was like to be descended from Litvak Jews. He told Romário that it must be like being descended from any other group of people. Other times, it felt like his skin was the cage of his ancient fate and there was absolutely no way out of his skin. This was his fifth year working at The Atlas. He had a salary that would’ve been laughable to most guests of the hotel.

  At seven, during his break, Saul put on his black wool coat and went to the rooftop, which was covered in a thin layer of snow. He sat on a steel bench, drank hot coffee, and read a Polish science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem called Solaris, which was, in short, about a thinking ocean on a distant planet. This was the fourth or maybe fifth time he had read it. At eight, he returned to the front desk. The Atlas was hosting a conference for futures traders called OpenConCon, so this kept him busy for the rest of the night.

  At eleven, he put on his black wool coat and clocked out. Then he went to a twenty-four-hour FedEx to drop off a package his grandfather had asked him to send just days before his death, a medium-sized white and brown box that weighed, according to the FedEx employee, just over nine pounds, and was addressed to a Maxwell Moreau in the Department of Physics at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile. Saul smiled awkwardly and shrugged when the FedEx employee said, oohhh! Chile, since he knew neither the contents of the package nor its recipient. Then he waited for the #72 bus and some fifteen minutes later transferred to the Blue Line.

  He got off at California and walked to a small Mexican restaurant near his home. He sat at a booth and ate enchiladas and read more from Solaris. He read more about the strange and nightmarish thinking ocean and wondered if his grandfather had ever read it, but he had no idea and this made him a little miserable. He should know these things, he thought. He should remember his grandfather accurately. He should remember as much as possible about the man who had raised him, even though remembering anything always brought consequences of its own and forgetting could be a type of a gift. For a long while he watched people pass by the front window of the small Mexican restaurant. They were wrapped up like nomads, and he detected an air of melancholy and resistance about them, the American mirror of melancholy and resistance, he thought, and then he read some more until the restaurant closed.

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoon, he went to his grandfather’s house on Humboldt Boulevard, following a guilty need to pack up and get rid of everything as quickly as possible. His grandfather had bought the house with his modest savings as a high school teacher and historian. Saul had come to live with him at the age of five, just three months after his parents were killed on March 11th, 1978, during the hijacking of a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway, a tragic event which journalists only later started calling the Coastal Road Massacre. In fact, one of the first English words he had learned, from hearing it so often in hushed tones, was massacre, a word, he now understood, that drew its very last breath from unreality.

  According to his grandfather, his mother had met his father, an Israeli student, in a café on Devon Avenue. One year later, in 1971, they married and moved to Tel Aviv. All Saul had left
of them were five photographs, which he kept wrapped in scraps of black Egyptian linen in a small wooden school box. He never looked at the photographs and he never showed them to others. He had very few memories of his parents or Israel, a nation that from time to time he imagined as a pyretic planet in another star system.

  Still, occasional memories of his childhood before their deaths slipped through. Sometimes when he closed his eyes on the #72 bus or sat by himself in a late-night diner, he conjured up images of the solar-yellow Negev Desert or an iridescent skyscraper in Tel Aviv at night or a humming market in Jerusalem. But it was always in vain because his parents were nowhere to be seen in those images; they weren’t even shadows or ghosts. They had died when he was still far too young to influence or direct his memories. Like in some strange Philip K. Dick novel, time had stopped existing but something like the passage of time had still left its violent mark on him. He had an unreal father and an unreal mother, lost to an unreal war.

  His first true memory, incandescent and brutal, was three months after their deaths. He was on a plane sitting by a window, but the shades were drawn and the plane was dark. He was terrified of flying, of traveling alone through an empty sky. Then the man sitting next to him lifted the shades and pointed out the window and said, look, that’s the Atlantic Ocean, and he looked and the sky and the ocean were the bluest things he had ever seen. They were, in fact, mirror images of each other. As long as he kept staring at the Atlantic Ocean, he told himself, he wouldn’t start crying. Then the man smiled in a way that was both tender and mischievous and said, I was born there, at which point Saul understood that the man was his maternal grandfather.