It got late. The faculty went home, and the students moved Barlow’s record player outside and danced to Artie Shaw’s Four Star Favorites. Rafael Bernal had moved in on a female undergraduate, who tried to look pleased while signaling with her eyes for help. The smell of marijuana drifted across from the sycamore’s shade. Things were falling apart: there was no society here. There was no world. Only some students with vacant, cruel faces laughing at a joke Barlow hadn’t caught. Then, suddenly, awfully, he realized that Juan was watching him from just inside the gate. He had brought a friend, short, skinny, and dark, who laughed at something Juan had just said. How long had they been there? Barlow hurried to them. “Juan,” he said, in Nahuatl, “tell your friend to leave, and go to bed.” Juan didn’t say anything, but his friend said: “Nice skirt, señor,” in Spanish. The two boys tittered. “You’re on private property,” Barlow said to the friend. “You were not invited. If you don’t go, I’ll call the police.” “Call them,” Juan’s friend said. So Barlow turned toward the house, and the friend said, loudly, “Maricón.” Barlow thought, or would think later, that he was protecting his guests, his students, from abuse. Also, he was a man, and you could not insult men in Mexico with impunity. Also, he was a god, and he had had enough. He swung his maize stick: it hit Juan’s friend in the face. “Go!” Barlow shouted. Juan’s friend doubled over, holding his eye. “You hurt him,” Juan said, reproachfully. “I told him to leave,” Barlow said. Everyone was staring at him. “Go to bed, Juan,” Barlow said. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” “You’re dead,” Juan’s friend said. Juan put his arm around him. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said. When they were gone, Barlow said, “It looks like we’ve had our child sacrifice! Please, go back to what you were doing.” But no one could go back. Had Barlow just struck a child? Had he lost his mind? The students thanked him in the briefest possible terms and left. The last to go was Rafael Bernal, who grabbed Barlow by the upper arm. “Do you have a pistol?” he asked. “No,” Barlow said. “Get one,” Rafael said. “I’m serious. You want to be ready when those fucking kids come back.”
The college went on its Christmas vacation. Barlow worked most of the day in his study, but just before sunset, he walked to the plaza at the center of Azcapotzalco, a vestige of the days when the suburb had been its own city. It had been a slave market under the Culhua Mexica; now it was a holding pen for the slaves of the office, the bus, the forty-hour week. Teenagers sat at the edges of the square in white button-down shirts, watching Barlow with a nonspecific mistrust which made his heart race. He thought in a lunatic way about trying to pick one of them up, but even if he had had the courage, he wouldn’t have had the desire. Sometimes he went into one of the cantinas where he was Señor Barlow, virtuosically nondescript. He drank a mescal and listened to a few minutes of futból on the radio. When it began to get dark, he hurried home, driven by a child’s fear of the night. He hadn’t seen Juan since the party, and although he didn’t think he would come back, he was still afraid. He locked the gate of his villa, which he had never done before, but it only made the fear worse. He ate quickly, drank too much, went to bed early. When he turned out the light, the dull green chaos of the air in his bedroom seethed with danger. If he took Seconal, he could fall asleep, but woke in the middle of the night, terrified and bereft, like the actual last person on Earth. Even the intricacies of the Matrícula de Tributos,* usually a comfort, didn’t protect him. History was an empty corridor that led to other, equally empty corridors; the only sound in it was the echo of his own footsteps. He fell asleep just after dawn and woke when the roar of delivery trucks on the Calle Santander brought him back into a world toward which he felt, increasingly, only resentment.
Atemoztli gave way to Tititl, the month of stretching. On New Year’s Eve, Barlow came home from his walk, and found Rosa waiting for him in the garden, clearly impatient to be gone. “There was a telephone call for you,” she said. “Señor Murray.” “Did he leave a message?” Barlow asked. “No, only that you should call him as soon as possible.” “Thank you,” Barlow said. He ignored the dinner she had prepared, went to his room, and lay on the bed. So Gene had decided he didn’t need five hundred dollars after all, he thought. He would have to resign. He wondered if Murray would hound him, or if he would be able to work somewhere else. The Rockefeller job in the Yucatán would evaporate, that was certain. They couldn’t afford to hire a known homosexual, not with McCarthy and Hoey* rooting around the government and everywhere else, looking for subversives. Don Pablo might find him something. Of course, he would be the disgraced Robert Barlow, but so what? Oscar Wilde had been the disgraced Oscar Wilde. Disgrace wouldn’t change the meaning of the words he wrote, the words he had written. Would it? He rolled to the side of the bed and reached for the bottle of Seconal, but decided against it.
All that night, Barlow listened to the hiss and boom of fireworks, and thought about various things: the New Year’s Eve he had spent with Howard in New York; the decline of the papermaking industry in Culhuacán; the fact that his record player was broken. He thought about Wandrei and Loveman, who were, so far as he knew, still spreading lies about him. He’d planned to sue them for libel one day, but now it was too late. A known homosexual would be laughed out of court. Why had he waited? He wished he had stayed in Lakeport, with Groo and Claire Beck, and started an artistic colony, as he had planned. Why had he given the idea up? Had it been required? Could he have found a way to stay in the world of writers and readers which was, in the end, the only world he had ever loved? He thought about the students who had come to his party, and a wave of bitterness washed over him. This was their world. Barlow’s kind inhabited it secretly, the way Martín did, or lurked at its edges and played at being outlaws, like Bill. Or they froze, and froze, until they were frozen, like Howard. Why was there no other choice? Except there was another choice: a note, an empty bottle of sleeping pills, and then, finally, rest. It appealed so strongly that Barlow wondered if he had sought out his present disgrace so he would have an excuse not to outlive it. He thought of all the books he would never have to read. He would be merely a cloud of atoms, untroubled, unashamed. Wouldn’t Howard be proud of him! “No,” Howard said. “No?” Barlow repeated. “If we’re all just atoms anyway, I can’t see how it matters.” “From that point of view, it doesn’t,” Howard said, “but think of what you’d be missing. Sunsets on the Moon Pool! The clouds over the ocean! The stories told by certain inhabitants of remote corners of the Florida swamp!” “I thought you hated those people,” Barlow said. “Oh, well, I don’t have much use for the people,” Howard said, “but I do enjoy their stories. Robert, you want too much from life. Why can’t you accept its small consolations? Architecture, for example, and lighting, and the interplay between the two.” Barlow waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “That’s it?” he asked. “Be patient,” Howard said. “Wait, and see what happens.” “I’ll tell you what will happen,” Barlow said, annoyed. “I’ll go to prison.” “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Howard asked, dreamily. “The possibility that our minds could inhabit other bodies. Even after death, I can’t help thinking, there must be some way for our patterns to return . . .” But already Howard was fading, and Barlow was alone in Azcapotzalco. He rolled away from the window. If only it were so easy, he thought, to come back as another person, in another time. If only it were possible to escape from time altogether, to be alive everywhere, and note the passing of cities and customs like the flicks of a watch’s second hand. To do that, and not to be alone. Then he thought, what if there is a way? Soon Barlow’s mind floated off to another place, a soft-walled labyrinth which he could bend if he wanted to, or roll up, so that one path touched another directly. He fell asleep smiling.
The first day of 1951 was bright and cool. Someone in the Calle Santander was beating a rug. Barlow bathed and put on an old blue suit that no one had seen him wear for years. He made a couple of telephone calls, one to John French at th
e Canadian Embassy, and one to Don Pablo. He pushed his notes on Tulan papermaking to one side and typed a long letter, which he sealed in an envelope. There was no practical need to seal it; but there was, possibly, a supernatural need. Barlow was performing a ritual, and he wanted to do it right, in case the gods were watching. He flushed the Seconal down the toilet, wrote a note for Rosa, and pinned it to his door. Do not disturb me, I wish to sleep for a long time. Then he went downstairs and smoked in the garden until he heard Don Pablo’s car pull up outside. He climbed over the villa’s gate: the key was on his desk, another probably needless gesture toward realism. Don Pablo looked distressed. “Robert,” he said, “this is completely unnecessary. I will intervene with Murray. I know people who can talk to him. It’s difficult to run a college in Mexico City, if you don’t have any Mexican friends.” “I don’t want that,” Barlow said. “Then what do you want?” Don Pablo asked. “Let’s take a walk,” Barlow said. They drove into the mountains, to the Desierto de los Leones, a place Barlow had always loved. Up there, you could see what the Valley of Mexico had been before the automobile, before Fanta: a pine forest, hills of dry grass, and clear, sweet air. Don Pablo parked by the convent, and they walked into the woods.
When they had gone far enough, Barlow told Don Pablo what he was going to do. “Dr. Márquez will draw up a death certificate,” he said. “Tell him to say the body was cremated. And get some ashes to satisfy my mother. You can scatter them here.” Don Pablo was horrified, then he laughed. “Excuse me for saying so, but I think you’ve gone back to writing weird fiction,” he said. “Not at all,” Barlow said. “In reality, this is the only way I can live. Because, even if you did talk to Dean Murray, he’d still know, and so would other people. I’d be like a piñata. And, eventually, I’d break . . .” They argued about it up and down hills. Don Pablo stepped in a stream and ruined his expensive English shoes, but in the end he was convinced that Barlow wouldn’t change his mind. “What are you going to do when you get there?” he asked. “Rest,” Barlow said. “I’d like to see that,” Don Pablo said. “Seriously, what will you do? Study the Eskimos?” Barlow shrugged. “Maybe I’ll paint. I’ve been neglecting that side of myself for a long time.” “You know, Robert,” Don Pablo said, “I have known many surprising people in my life, but I think you must be the most surprising of them all. How many sides do you have?” “Just one, right now,” Barlow said. “I want to live in peace, and not be afraid of anything.” “Yes, well,” Don Pablo said, “you know you can always write to me, if you need money.” “Thank you,” Barlow said. They hiked back to Don Pablo’s car and drove to the Canadian Embassy, where French was waiting.
9.
Barlow spent a month in Montreal, but he could not agree with Rafael Bernal: the city was too solid, too gray. He moved to Toronto, but it was the same as Montreal, only in an English way rather than in a French way. When the days got short again, he thought he might as well have killed himself in Mexico City, because he would never make it through another Canadian winter. His only consolation was the news he received from Don Pablo, who, with his infallible sense of what was needed, sent him reports on the anthropology department: Murray had named José Gaos as chairman; Horcasitas had taken over most of Barlow’s classes. Everything went on just as it had before. Even the Student Life Committee had not been reformed: in the spring, they sponsored a production of Sartre’s No Exit, and the actress who played Inès wore only a brassiere and a slip. The only really new thing was that some of the students were spies. Whether even Paul Murray was capable of instigating such lunacy, Don Pablo didn’t know, but the FBI, responding to reports that the Mexico City College students were consorting with Communists and other degenerates, had sent a dozen agents to infiltrate the campus. The problem with this laudable scheme, Don Pablo went on, was that everyone knew who the agents were, because they wore their shirts tucked in and obeyed the speed limit. The real students found them entertaining. Imaginary revolutionary organizations multiplied; scrawls in the washrooms announced meetings in neighborhoods where it was certain no Mexico City College student had ever gone. So we have the creative spirit here, Don Pablo wrote. Still, I am coming to think that you were wise to leave. The children do what they like, but this is not a place for free adults. He sent no news of Gene, or Bill. Maybe, Barlow thought, they had gone to Colombia after all.
Barlow was just going into a café on Sherbourne Street when the science fiction writer Al van Vogt came out, holding two cups of coffee in his hands and, in his mouth, a sticky bun. He and Barlow had exchanged letters when van Vogt’s story “The Black Destroyer” came out in Astounding Science Fiction, and they met once in San Francisco. “Bobby?” van Vogt said. The sticky bun fell to the ground. If Barlow had only turned away, it might have been all right: a case of mistaken identity. Instead, with instinctive pleasure—here was a friend!—he lurched forward, grinning, and said, “Al!” “I heard you were dead,” van Vogt said. “Don Wollheim told me . . . hold on, wait a sec! Did you pull a Singleton* on us?” But by now Barlow had recovered himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.” “What?” van Vogt said. “Don’t play that with me, I don’t care what you did.” Barlow hurried away, counting to himself in Nahuatl as a way to keep his mind from making any more trouble. “Bobby!” van Vogt called after him. “What the heck?” The last Barlow heard of him was an embarrassed Canadian sorry. He turned the corner, furious with himself. He couldn’t even stay dead! Now van Vogt would report that he was alive, and he would be doubly humiliated. Barlow the fairy who didn’t have the balls to die. Even in the unlikely event that van Vogt didn’t betray him this time, there would be a next time, and even if there wasn’t a next time there would be the constant dread of it. Barlow had thought he could make a life without fear, but really he’d just traded one fear for another. So he did what a fearful person would do: packed his suitcase and got on a bus heading north.
Two hours later, the bus stopped in Parry Sound. Barlow stepped out to use the men’s room. While he waited for the last members of a fall-foliage-viewing expedition to get their luggage on board, he walked up Seguin Street; then he went back to the bus and told the driver he wouldn’t be going any farther. It took him days to figure out why he’d done that, and when he’d figured it out, he laughed: Parry Sound looked like DeLand. It had the same broad streets, the same low buildings, the same feeling of being alive but asleep. It was as if he had become Howard, stepping off the bus, looking around for a Barlow to pick him up. He left his suitcase at the garage where the bus stopped and walked around. Halfway up Waubeek Street, he saw, in the window of a white clapboard two-story house, a handwritten sign: ROOM TO LET. An Englishwoman, Barlow thought, but she turned out to be an Australian, Lucy, who lived alone in this comfortable house and seemed totally unsurprised that Barlow planned to stay in Parry Sound indefinitely. What was even better, she had cats.
For a long time—three months, five—Barlow let himself be nothing. He got up at noon and drank cold tea from the pot Lucy had left on the dining room table. He ate toast. He walked to the Sound and sat on the beach, or pushed his way among blueberry brambles down the granite back of the coast. He ate codfish sandwiches in the luncheonette, crossed the river, climbed the fire tower and counted islands in the bay. He felt himself falling backward through time, not becoming younger, just headed the wrong way, turning his back on whatever it was that everyone else was looking for. Lucy’s previous boarder had left behind some issues of Galaxy, and Barlow read them with abstract interest. Their future was the same one he’d read about in Amazing Stories twenty years earlier, only it had gone gray and gotten tangled up in ideas of universal law.
As autumn lit the hills again, Barlow realized that he had feigned death only to end up more or less dead. In order to live, he needed to put something after something else, which, for him, meant writing sentences. The tenant from whom he’d inherited the Galaxys had a
lso left behind a Royal typewriter, its ribbon dry as dust. Barlow put in a new one and typed poems, which he immediately burned, because they carried nothing anywhere. He thought of writing weird fiction again and shuddered. It rained. One morning in November, Barlow thought he might write something about Howard. By dusk he was ten pages in, and by the time he was halfway done with the first draft, he knew what he would do when it was finished. It was, in the end, such a simple reversal: all he had to do was stop thinking of himself as the sacrifice and become the priest. In his hand, a knife named Howard. He locked the growing typescript in his desk each night.
Barlow wrote all through the fall and winter. It was even harder to tell the truth about Howard than it had been to get ancient Tula right, hard to be clear without being clinical. The truth of Howard’s life spooked at the first wrong word and flew off, leaving behind only its hooting call. He wrote and corrected and wrote again, and when he finished his story, on a warm March morning when the shifting ice creaked in the bay, he saw that he’d been working for nothing. The truth was too complicated and ambiguous; it would never be the weapon he was looking for. He burned the manuscript in the fireplace and might really have ended his life, if it hadn’t been for Lucy, who made him tea and laughed at his despair. Lucy had lost her husband in a plane crash; her daughter had moved back to Melbourne; she, too, had gone to Melbourne for a while, but found that she no longer believed in it. It was just a place, covered by the word home the way a skin of ice covers a lake. So she came back to Canada and taught herself to shoot, to bake bread. She was unalterably alive, like a drum, which can sit in a corner for a century and still make a noise when struck. Barlow took her as a model. When the ice broke up and the lawn turned to mud, and boats with diesel engines pushed their way into the Sound, he went back to work, and this time he gave himself permission to lie.
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