The hospital discharged him with crutches, a bottle of painkillers, and instructions to reappear in five weeks. He holed up in a cheap hotel and watched baseball. He watched Venezuelan sitcoms. He watched a dubbed episode of The Poem, It Is Bad! For practice, he spoke back to the screen. He hadn’t used Spanish since high school, when he and Bill had been conversation partners.
After the cast came off he spent another month rebuilding his strength. He took long, slow walks. He resumed his regimen of push-ups and sit-ups. He sat in the Plaza de la Catedral, eating croquetas and listening to the street musicians. He felt the nightly thump of the cannon at the Castilla de San Carlos de la Cabaña. He did a lot of thinking.
He took a taxi to a secluded beach about thirty minutes east of the city. He paid the driver to wait for him. He walked along the sand, his pockets swinging. The tide was far out. He knelt and dug a hole with his hands. He took out the dubnium polymer soap and dropped it into the hole. He took out the designer eau de cologne solvent and aimed the nozzle at the soap and spritzed it three times. The soap began to bubble and dissolve. The solvent was far less effective on the soap than it had been on the wooden crate. He spritzed again and watched the polymer fizz. He kept on spritzing until there was nothing left in the hole except a tuft of foam. At no point did he see anything resembling a flash drive. Which meant that he had been the real bait in the deal with Zhulk. Which meant that Paul had lied, at least about that, and that Carlotta was right. He could never go home.
He had the taxi driver take him to the Malecón. He walked along the esplanade, shielding his eyes and gazing northward toward Key West. It was too far away for him to actually see it, but he pretended he could.
114.
He moved on.
He boarded a propeller plane to Cancún. He spent the night in a motel and caught the first bus out of town. He got off the bus in a random village and walked around. He spent the night in a motel and got back on a different bus. He did the same thing the next day, and the next. Rarely did he stay in one place for more than twenty-four hours. He ate when he was hungry and slept when he was tired. He let his beard grow. It came in everywhere except for the strip of scar tissue on his upper left lip.
One evening while walking from the bus station in some no-name rural hamlet he heard the sound of a struggle and went to investigate. Down a trash-strewn alley, a pair of thugs was robbing an old woman at knifepoint. Pfefferkorn flexed his arms. His healed leg was still stiff. It impaired his mobility a hair. On the other hand, he was leaner and stronger than he had been in years. He was all sinew and muscle and bone.
The old woman was crying, being jerked about as she clung to her handbag.
Pfefferkorn whistled.
The thugs looked up, looked at each other, and smiled. One of them told the other to wait and then he advanced on Pfefferkorn, the knife glinting in the moonlight.
Pfefferkorn left him sinking to his knees, gasping for breath.
The other thug ran.
Pfefferkorn scooped up the old woman in his arms and carried her three blocks to her home. She was still crying, now with gratitude. She blessed him and kissed his cheeks.
“De nada,” he said.
The next morning, he moved on.
115.
The places he visited all had the same markets, plazas, and cathedrals. They all had the same murals of Hidalgo or Zapata or Pancho Villa. They were all too provincial and remote to get foreign newspaper service, and so he had to wait until he reached Mexico City to get to an Internet café and catch up on the latest developments in the Zlabian valley.
What had happened depended on whose account you chose to believe. According to the West Zlabian state-run news agency, the festival celebrating the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of Vassily Nabochka had been an unmitigated success. Copies of the newly completed poem were distributed to every citizen, and the resulting swell of patriotism provoked the jealousy of the East Zlabian capitalist aggressors, who then invaded. According to the East Zlabian Pyelikhyuin, the release of the controversial new ending had sent waves of anger through a West Zlabian populace already brimming with discontentment. The rumblings grew in strength and ferocity until they erupted into riots. Violence spilled across the Gyeznyuiy, at which point it became incumbent upon Lord High President Thithyich to breach the median and reestablish order. According to CNN, the chaos was total. Everybody was killing everybody. Neighboring governments, fearing errant shells and a flood of refugees, had begged the world powers to intervene. The White House had petitioned Congress to authorize the use of troops. In theory the peacekeeping force was to be multilateral, but ninety percent of the boots and all of the strategic command were American. Within twenty-four hours they had put the entire valley on lockdown. The president of the United States had issued a statement that there would be a complete withdrawal as soon as feasible. He refused to set a timetable, calling that a “prescription for disappointment.” Nor would he comment on what would happen to the West Zlabian gas field.
Pfefferkorn reread the words “newly completed poem” several times.
He tried looking for a copy of it online but found nothing.
Back at his motel, he reread his unfinished ending to Vassily Nabochka. A few months’ distance enabled him to admit that Zhulk’s wife had been right on the money. It was terrible.
That night he went out for a walk. He passed a pimp slapping around a prostitute, threatening to cut her tongue out.
Pfefferkorn whistled.
116.
He used public phones.
He dared not try more than once every few months. He didn’t know who was monitoring the line. He also worried that overdoing it would lead her to stop picking up calls from strange Mexican numbers. On balance he preferred the answering machine. His sole aim was to hear her voice, if only for a second, and it was less painful to get a recording than to listen to her asking Hello? Hello? without being able to respond.
117.
He liked to tell himself that he had chosen to settle in the seaside village because of its pleasant weather, or because reaching the Pacific implied some sort of finality. The truth was he had simply run out of money. At that point he had been on the road for more than a year, and he was tired: tired of the smell of diesel, of falling asleep sitting up, of waking up and having to ask his seatmate where he was. He was tired of dispensing vigilante justice. It had been fun for a while—he had been blessed more than a hooker having an allergy attack inside a confessional—but on the whole, the country was so saturated with corruption that he wasn’t doing much except gratifying his own ego.
The focal point of every Mexican village was an overlarge church, and his was no exception. Among other tasks, Pfefferkorn swept up, shined the pews, did the shopping, and helped prepare meals. He had become reasonably handy. If a lightbulb got stuck and broke off, he could get it out with a raw potato. If a chair went wobbly, he could screw the leg back on.
His chief duty was maintaining the belfry. He shooed away the birds and bats. He scaled off the guano. He oiled the hinges. He re-rigged the ropes. It was hard work, but later he would be reading or walking and he would hear the hour peal. What busy people heard as a single sustained note was to the patient listener a densely woven cloak of tones and overtones. Knowing that he had contributed in some small way to its beauty gave him a sense of accomplishment, one that lingered long after the ringing had died.
For his efforts he received a few pesos, two meals a day, and the right to sleep out back in a converted coal shed. It measured six by nine, with a packed dirt floor and a screened window that kept out most of the larger insects. He fell asleep to the sough of the ocean and woke to the mad babble of chickens running free in the yard. The gulls and pelicans that perched along the rear fence made an odd, bobbing skyline. Summers he slept nude. In winter the padre loaned him extra blankets, and Fray Manuel spread a
tarp across the tin roof. Just in case, as soon as the clouds started to darken, they disconnected the extension cord. For this reason Pfefferkorn kept a flashlight on hand. His spare shirt hung on a nail. Obeying the rebukes of his ancestors, he had surreptitiously taken down the crucifix. There was enough space for a cot and—on the floor, along the wall—his growing library.
On the first of the month, he wired money to an independent bookseller in San Diego. A few weeks later, he received in return a parcel addressed to “Arturo Pimienta.” The postage alone ate up most of his spending money. He didn’t mind. What else did he need it for? Four paperbacks per order made for a nice, unhurried pace. One would be a classic novel he’d always meant to read but had never gotten around to. The second book was the seller’s choice. She leaned toward contemporary fiction that had received favorable reviews in certain publications of repute. The third and fourth books varied. Biographies, history, and popular science were his favorites. This month, with Christmas coming, he had chosen a thriller for Fray Manuel, who liked to work on his English, and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which he planned to reread before giving it to the padre.
He put the food away in the rectory kitchen and retired to his shed. He hung up his hat, kicked off his shoes, and sat on the cot with the package in his lap, combing his fingers through his beard. He wasn’t ready to part with the delicious feeling of anticipation. He spanned the package with his hand. It was bulkier than usual, owing to the presence of a fifth book, a hardcover.
He had a ritual. He began with the cover. If there was an image, he analyzed it as one might a work of art: framing, perspective, dynamics. If the design was abstract, he contemplated the effect of its color scheme on his mood. Did it match the contents? He would have to wait and see. Next he read the flap copy, sleuthing out hidden meanings. He read the blurbs aloud, warmly dismissing their extravagant comparisons. He flipped to the front matter, starting with the Library of Congress information. He admired its tidy divisions. He read the author biography, stitching together names, institutions, cities, and accolades. The omissions spoke loudest. If a writer had graduated from a prestigious university, and this, ten years on, was her first novel, Pfefferkorn inferred that the intervening decade had been full of rejection. Other writers claimed advanced degrees, as if to explain why it had taken them so long. Still others made a fetish of their struggles, boasting of time spent driving taxis, delivering pizzas, working as short-order cooks or process servers. All wanted it to seem as though writing had been their destiny. Pfefferkorn understood the impulse and pardoned it.
He studied the photo, picturing the author buttering toast or waiting at the doctor’s office. He imagined what he or she would be like as a brother, a sister, a lover, a teacher, a friend. He imagined the author calling his agent and pitching a half-formed story that made no sense outside of his mind. He imagined the frustration the author felt when he understood, yet again, that his mind was not synonymous with anyone else’s, and that to tell his story he would have to sit down and write and rewrite and work and rework. And the frustration that came with knowing that the story would never come out quite the way he had envisioned it. Writing was impossible. It was easy to think of books as products, made in a factory, churned out by some gigantic machine. Pfefferkorn knew better. Books came from people. People were imperfect. It was their imperfections that made their books worth reading. And in committing those imperfections to paper, they became omnipotent. A book was a soft machine that made a god of its builder. It was impossible and yet it happened every single day.
Writing is impossible, Pfefferkorn thought, reading more impossible still. To read truly—to read bravely—to read with compassion and without fear—did anyone? Could anyone? There were too many ways to understand, too much emptiness between word and mind, an infinite chasm of misplaced sympathies.
118.
The hardcover had red library binding stamped with gold lettering. Breaking with tradition, he turned straight to the last page.
He wanted to feel disappointed, but disappointment entails the possibility of surprise, and he had formed in advance a fairly clear notion of what to expect. In the final, unattributed canto of the revised West Zlabian People’s Press edition of Vassily Nabochka, the king died before the antidote got to him, and a grief-stricken Prince Vassily repudiated the throne, deeding the royal lands over to the people and going to live as a commoner, tilling the fields and herding goats, finding redemption in manual labor before dying peacefully beneath a runty tree in the meadows of West Zlabia. It was the worst kind of agitprop: heavy-handed, impatient, and artless. The turns were improbable, the imagery fuzzy, and the characters reductive.
Pfefferkorn laughed until he cried.
119.
Three days before Christmas he made a pilgrimage. The bus dropped him at a dusty intersection in a village thirty miles south. He visited the market and the plaza. He admired the murals. He noted with pride that the church bell was not as fine as the one he tended.
He checked to make sure he was not being watched.
He entered a bodega and found the pay phone at the back.
He put in his phone card.
He dialed.
It rang once.
It rang twice.
They had it set to answer after the fourth ring.
It rang a third time.
“Hello?”
Pfefferkorn’s heart pitched. It felt as though he were breathing through a drinking straw.
“Hello,” his daughter said again. She sounded harassed. He wondered if she had had a bad day. He wanted to console her. It’ll be all right, he wanted to say. Let me help you. But he could not say that. And he could not help her. He silently implored her to stay on the line. Don’t give up, he thought. Say Hello again. Or don’t. But don’t hang up. Say something else. Say I can’t hear you. Say Can you call back. Say anything at all. Get angry. Yell. Only: speak.
A child cried.
She hung up.
Pfefferkorn did not move for some time. The receiver was heavy in his hand. He replaced it softly. The phone ejected his card. He slid it into his pocket. He went to wait for the bus.
120.
The next morning, Fray Manuel greeted him when he came back from the market.
“You have a visitor. I asked him to wait in the vestry.”
Pfefferkorn handed over the bags and went down the hall. He knocked and entered.
They stood face-to-face.
“Hello, Yankel.”
“Hello, Bill.”
“You don’t seem that surprised to see me.”
“It takes a lot to surprise me these days.”
“I like the beard,” Bill said. “It makes you look distinguished.”
Pfefferkorn smiled. “How are you?”
“Not bad, for a dead guy.” Bill glanced around. “Some place you got here.”
“You want the tour?”
“Why the heck not.”
They went out back to the shed.
“It suits my needs,” Pfefferkorn said. “Although—a doorman. That I miss.”
“You have the priest.”
“That’s true.”
Bill’s gaze settled on the hardcover on the cot. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Be my guest.”
Bill opened Vassily Nabochka and paged to the end. He read. He closed the book and looked up.
“Well, that’s shit,” he said.
Pfefferkorn agreed.
“What about you? Working on anything?”
“Oh no. I’m done with that for good.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Don’t be,” Pfefferkorn said. “I’m not.”
“Not even a little?”
“I’ve said everything I needed to say.”
“You sound very sure of yourself.”
“When you know, you know.”
“And so that’s that.”
Pfefferkorn nodded.
“Kudos,” Bill said. “It’s a rare writer who knows when it’s time to shut up.”
Pfefferkorn smiled.
“Carlotta sends her love,” Bill said.
“Same to her.”
“She wanted me to tell you that she appreciated the letter.”
Pfefferkorn said nothing.
“She wouldn’t tell me what was in it. But clearly it meant a lot to her.”
There was a silence.
“I’m sorry about that,” Pfefferkorn said.
“It’s all right.”
“I thought you were dead. I’m sorry.”
“Water under the bridge,” Bill said. He tossed the book back on the bed. “You want to get out of here?”
“Sure.”
They headed down to the beach. It was a cool day. The light was flat and even, sharpening the gray gulls turning circles against a scrim of gray clouds. Flaking pangas lay like casualties in the sand. The wind came whipping off the water, driving back Bill’s hair and causing Pfefferkorn to snuff brine through his sinuses. They had walked perhaps half a mile when the hour began to toll, nine rich peals.
“You’re back together, then,” Pfefferkorn said. “You and Carlotta.”
“Well, yes and no. More no than yes. I’m sort of in limbo, myself.”
“What happened to you?” Pfefferkorn asked.
Bill shrugged. “I said the wrong things to the wrong people. Someone decided I was no longer reliable. Next thing I know, I’m treading water in the middle of the Pacific. Five and a half hours. I got very, very lucky someone happened by. Terrible sunburn. Hurt for weeks.”
“What did you do to piss them off?”
“I wanted to write a book,” Bill said. “A real one.”
Potboiler Page 26