The more absent Bill seemed, the more he looked toward the back room to see what Gene and his female friend were up to, the more Barlow wanted to break into him. “I think you’re going to be a great writer,” he said. “I’ve met a few great writers in my life, and I can tell. A great writer gives off a special hum, almost like a musical note.” “Is that right?” Bill asked. “I wish you could have met Howard!” Barlow said. “The two of you would have had a lot to talk about.” Which was another lie, or maybe not. Howard could have talked to Bill about the icy clouds of the planet Neptune and the mountains of Antarctica, but also about the philosophy of Seneca, and Alexander Pope’s acid wit. Barlow had a vision of the two of them becoming friends, and leaving him, which only made him more desperate. “Want to go for a walk?” he asked. “I ought to get back to my friends,” Bill said. “But I was just thinking, I probably did read something by your Lovecraft fellow, when I was a kid. Story about a guy who reanimates dead bodies? Real juvenile stuff. I’m surprised you take such an interest in it, Professor.” Bill went into the other room. Wait, Barlow wanted to cry after him, that was one of his minor stories!
He went back to the Bounty a few days later. Bill wasn’t there, so Barlow waited at the bar, drinking wine. Finally, near midnight, Bill came in with the chess-playing student, a bearded twenty-year-old in an untucked red-and-blue-checked shirt. Even Barlow could see he was straight; his chumminess was obviously an isomer of contempt. Spin it a few degrees and he’d spit in Bill’s face. Barlow stood up. “Mr. Burroughs! And Mr. . . .” “Hell, Professor, I’m just Gene,” the student said. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,” Barlow said. “I am recovering from the most unspeakably dull faculty meeting that has ever been held.” Neither Bill nor Gene seemed curious about it. Finally, Gene asked, “Why do you go? It’s not like anyone puts a gun to your head.” “They don’t have to,” Barlow said. “If one wants to do research, one must teach. If one teaches, one must attend faculty meetings. It must be a natural law, because no one understands it, and no one thinks it’s a good idea. Can I buy you gentlemen a drink?” “No, but really,” Gene said, “I don’t get cats like you. If you don’t realize your freedom, why are you in Mexico? Why are you alive?” “I’ll have a double tequila,” Bill said. “You can ask the barman to deliver it to my usual table, in the back.” “Oh, fine,” Gene said, “rum Coke,” and the two of them went into the other room. Barlow ordered the drinks with the sorrowful authority of a captain ordering a suicidal cavalry charge. He imagined Bill and Gene side by side, Bill’s hand settling on Gene’s thigh. Gene drunk enough, on Barlow’s drink, not to move it away. The wine had upset Barlow’s stomach; he went to the bathroom and took a shit. As he wiped his hands on the filthy towel, he thought of Bill unbuckling his pants. Stop! he told himself. Gene came into the bathroom. “You still here?” he said. He unzipped his jeans as if Barlow did not exist. “You know Bill is queer,” Barlow said. “Yup,” Gene said. “You know he wants to sleep with you,” Barlow said. Gene laughed. “You know what Bill calls you?” he asked. “The Dust Fairy.” Barlow couldn’t speak. “Yeah, he has a whole routine about you. I bet he’d do it for you, if you asked.” Gene shook his cock and zipped up his pants. “Are you going to buy me another drink?” “I’m sorry, not tonight,” Barlow mumbled. He drove back to Azcapotzalco, thinking of ways to destroy Bill and Gene. He could report them to Dean Murray: that would be the effective way of getting rid of them, and it would put him on the right side of Murray. That’s right, Paul. I heard them making plans to recruit more of our students to their homosexual cause . . . Then he was horrified and reproached himself: do that and you’ll be as worthless as they are. He went to bed feeling virtuous. His reward was that he himself was destroyed.
There was a letter on Barlow’s desk the next afternoon. It had no postmark; the secretary said a student had dropped it off. Barlow had the strange and, in retrospect, touching idea that it contained an apology from Gene, and he was partly right. The letter was from Gene. Say, Professor, it read, Bill and I were thinking you might loan us $500 for a trip we want to take, to see a guy in Colombia. Bill says to tell you that this would be a trip for research purposes, so you should feel OK about funding it. We want to leave right away, so if you could bring the $500 to Lola’s tonight, that’d be swell. Your pal, Gene. P.S. Your poo smells real bad. Barlow tore the letter up; then he regretted tearing it up. It was evidence. But now that he was sober, going to Murray seemed dangerous: Why, the dean would ask, was Gene blackmailing him? No. Barlow had to fight the way Gene and Bill were fighting, darkly, without honesty. He thought of calling Dr. Márquez and buying Bill off with morphine pills. He thought of asking Juan, the Nahua boy, whether he knew anyone who would . . . but Bill carried a gun. He sat there for a long time, thinking, on the one hand, nothing, and, on the other hand, that his life had suddenly become exciting.
It was, at least, busy. The Carnegie Foundation wanted to send Barlow to the Yucatán, to take over for Ralph Roys,* who was approaching retirement. The position would start in the spring: good-bye, Gene! And good-bye, he supposed, Bill. What was more, his article on the Aspects of Tlaloc was, despite his total distractedness and frequent inebriation, almost finished; and near the end of it, he had spied faint tracks leading backward out of certain codices toward as-yet uncharted chambers of the Toltec past. He sent letters to his correspondents in Paris, London, and Berlin, and looked again through catalogs and bibliographies he thought he knew by heart, but which yielded new surprises each time he returned to them. When he was doing this kind of work, Barlow couldn’t help thinking of young Charles Dexter Ward writing to wizards in distant lands, looking for the formula that would reanimate the dust of the dead. And yet what a difference there was between that work and this. Howard, for all his erudition, had never known the awfulness of real scholarship: the cheats who sent false information to protect their embryonic studies of related subjects; the pages made illegible by copying errors that could never be fixed; the pages eaten by water; the pages eaten by fire. The dry half-life to which the dead, under the best of circumstances, returned, a two-and-a-half-dimensional existence that flattened back to nothing when you turned your head. The dead people who would answer one question; the ones who waited for you to think of the question to which they knew the answer. And yet! This was how it had to be done. And if someone wanted to know how to raise the dead, no Transylvanian wizard would be able to tell them. But they could write to Robert Barlow, care of the Department of Anthropology, Mexico City College . . .
One November evening, Barlow sat in his garden with a bottle of rioja, reading the photostatic copy of a Spanish codex which he’d just received from Berlin. It was a Jesuit’s commentary on the correspondence between two priests, one at Tula and the other at Culhuacán, about the proper way to celebrate the Atl Caualo, the Ceasing of Water, a February ritual. The dancing and child sacrifices were not up for discussion, but, in the absence of paper, was it permitted to hang strips of cloth from the ceremonial poles? The Culhuacán priest thought it might be, but the Tulan disagreed. Had they who ruled at Teotihuacan permitted it, he wrote, we would find some scraps of cloth on their poles even now; the fact that there is nothing proves that it was not allowed. Which prompted the Jesuit Father to remark: The sophistication of the Tulan’s reasoning is out of keeping with any idea we have of the native intelligence. It is a Hebraic kind of reasoning, which lends credence to Fray Ramírez’s claim that the pyramids at Teotihuacan were built by the Jews. Barlow had to laugh, and groan. Here he was, trying to tell the story of the Culhua Mexica truthfully, but wherever he looked, he found a false floor of facts over a yawning basement of legend, the floor of which was also false. Beneath it was another legendary basement. The Spaniards got their information from the Mexica, the Mexica got their information from the Toltecs, and the Toltecs got theirs from the scattered peoples who survived the fall of Teotihuacan. About Teotihuacan itself, no one knew much. The pyramids had been
there, massive, sinister, and abandoned, when the Mexica came down from the north. Who had the Teotihuacanos been? Why had they abandoned their magnificent city? Even if Barlow lived another hundred years, and read every Nahuatl codex in existence, the Teotihuacanos would still be shadows, dancing at the very edge of the fire. Poems ought to be written about them, he thought, not history. Barlow felt a tightness in his chest. He was trying to write truthfully about the dead, but was he himself living? Could he even remember living? He thought of Howard, plucking a blue flower from a tree in De Leon Springs. You’re not supposed to pick the flowers, Barlow had said. I’m simply ruthless! Howard had replied. And Barlow had thought: yes, you are . . . But why had paper been in short supply, in Culhuacán, in the year Four Rabbit? A sound distracted him: Juan was raking up the sycamore leaves. It was a gesture only; he would not dispose of the leaves, and the wind would scatter them again.
“Juan!” Barlow called. “¿Señor?” “Come have a drink with me,” Barlow said, in Nahuatl. Juan edged up to the table; some residual sense of respect prohibited him from walking directly. “Señor,” he said, “the bottle is empty.” “Then get another one,” Barlow said. “You know where I keep them.” “I’ll ask Rosa,” Juan said, disingenuously. He shuffled to the kitchen and came back with a fresh bottle and a glass for himself. “Juan,” Barlow said, “what would you do if I died?” “Are you ill?” Juan asked. “No, not at all. But I could be killed in an accident, or murdered by a thief.” “I would be very sad,” Juan said. “But what would you do?” Barlow asked. “Who would take care of you?” Juan blushed. “I’m not a baby, señor,” he said. “No one has to take care of me.” He thought about it. “Probably I would go back to my father, and work for him.” “Would you like that?” Barlow asked. “No,” Juan said. “He would beat me, for having gone away.” “Then why do it?” Barlow asked. “You could go to school. You could become a professor, like me.” “I don’t want to be a professor,” Juan said. “If I went to school, I would study flying.” “Flying?” Barlow laughed. “It’s not funny,” Juan said. “My friend’s brother was in the air force for two years. He says that flying an airplane is a thousand times better than driving a car. It’s better than women, better than marijuana. When you’re in the air, no one can make you do anything. You have the radio, but,” he turned an invisible knob, “if you don’t listen, what can they do?” “I suppose they can do something, sooner or later,” Barlow said. “Later, they can,” Juan said, “but now you’re totally on your own. You could go to Texas, or Cuba.” “What would you do in Cuba?” Barlow asked. “I’d have sex with las cubanas, probably,” Juan said. “And then fly back up, and make a circle in the clouds, and . . . what?” Barlow was giggling. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m just trying to imagine you in the cockpit of an airplane. You’d have to lose some weight, wouldn’t you?” Juan blushed with anger. “I’m sorry,” Barlow said again. “I’m a little drunk. Would you like another glass of wine?” He poured him one before he could answer. Juan drank sullenly. “Juan,” Barlow said. “I’m just thinking about your future. With an education, you could go places, more even than with an airplane.” “Maybe,” Juan said, in Spanish, “but I don’t want to be a maricón like you.” “What?” Barlow said. “You heard me,” Juan said, and they sat there, looking at each other with hatred. “Why do you say I’m a maricón?” Barlow asked, finally. “Señor . . .” Juan said. He seemed embarrassed. “Everyone knows.” “But everyone may be wrong,” Barlow said. Juan shrugged. He drank the rest of his wine, got up, and went into the house. Barlow had to carry the empty glasses in.
This conversation took place the day before Barlow got the second letter. Professor, it read, I really do need that $500. I’m sure you can spare it, seeing that you have such a plum job. Why don’t you put the cash in an envelope, and leave it with Tom at the Bounty? That way we won’t have to see each other, and maybe say things we don’t mean. Hugs and kisses, Gene.
8.
In the solar calendar of the Culhua Mexica, the last two-thirds of December were Atemoztli, the month of falling water. It was Tlaloc’s month, and in his honor, Barlow threw a party and invited his guests—friends from the college, some students, plus a few Mexican artists whom he’d met long ago, through Martín—to come dressed as Aztec deities. Barlow himself dressed as Tlaloc; he summoned up his old art-school skills to make the costume. It had a papier-mâché headdress, with a snaky curlicue that came down over his nose, and a green cape hung with bronze discs, which he bought from an old Mixtec man in the Zócalo. Rosa sewed him a blue skirted tunic with a green belt. It was impossible to find a maize stalk in December, so Barlow made one from a mop handle and some corn husks. When that was done, he decorated the garden with green and blue streamers, and set out wicker baskets of popcorn: not quite authentic, but never mind. He bought green and blue lightbulbs for all his lamps. He was trying to make the Casa de Tlaloc into a magical realm, the way the Casa Azul had been magical, and when he looked over his creation, just before the party, he felt that he had done it. But the party itself was a drunken and somehow sordid event. At first, no one came, then Don Pablo appeared in evening dress but left a few minutes later for another party; and when the rest of the professors arrived, the only one who’d really embraced the costume idea was an English teacher named Wilkie, who came as Quetzalcoatl, a god whom he could not have resembled less. The addition of a feathered mask to his long, thin legs and potbelly made him look like a sunburned ostrich. True, some of the students wore costumes, but not with the respect Barlow would have liked them to show for the gods of the Culhua Mexica. The men read the invitation as an excuse to take off their shirts, and the women dressed as peasants or faintly surreal streetwalkers. There was nothing divine about any of them, except their youth. One girl wore green lipstick. They stood in clumps in the garden, drinking up Barlow’s beer and gossiping. The colored lights, which he had meant to evoke the watery spirit of Tlaloc, merely made the scene look like a cheap student bar.
Barlow went from group to group, feeling less like the host of the party than like a beggar or prophet who’d come in from the street. Everyone complimented him on his costume, but not in a way that made him feel it was a success. Wilkie, the English professor, said it made him look almost imposing—and by the way, Dean Murray was up in arms about the Tennessee Williams plays. “Can you believe it, he had no idea Williams is queer,” Wilkie said, which made Barlow cringe: he had voted for the idea. “Poor Murray! He views every day that passes as another brick in the road to Hell.” “Fortunately, it’s a long road,” said a hook-nosed man who was standing next to Barlow’s colleague Ignacio Bernal. “But who the fuck would pave a road with bricks?” “This is my brother, Rafael,”* Ignacio said. “Where’d you get that hat?” Rafael asked. “I made it,” Barlow said. “Then I salute you,” Rafael said. “That is one fucking amazing hat. Where are you from?” “Florida,” Barlow said. “Miami?” “Not quite.” “Miami is a fucking hellhole,” Rafael said. “It’s not a city, so much as one big fucking scheme to suck money out of your pocket, and pour it into the pocket of some Jewish gangster. Truly, they say we’re corrupt here in Mexico, but the United States is just as corrupt. The only difference is that the United States has more criminals, so they also have better roads. In my opinion, and I’ve been everywhere, the only honest place in North America is Montreal.” Rafael had studied there, and he spoke lovingly about its solid buildings and its women, who were surprisingly beautiful, he said, once you unwrapped them. But Barlow’s mind was elsewhere: What were the students talking about? He wondered how many of them knew Gene. He wondered how many of them knew. The thought of people knowing was awful, not because Barlow was ashamed—he was not, and never had been—but because the facts of his life belonged to him. People had no right to know whom he loved, any more than they had the right to open his wardrobe and wear his shirts. Also, his headdress was punishingly heavy: papier-mâché had been the wrong idea. He couldn’t take it off
, though. Taking it off would have been a surrender. Barlow would not surrender.
The Night Ocean Page 14