Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  Jocundra lay on her side, waking slowly, watching out the window as gray clouds lowered against a picket line of cypresses and scrub pine. At last she got up and smoothed her rumpled blouse, wishing they had not left the overnight bag in Salt Harvest. She heard a rummaging in the front room. Donnell was sitting beside one of the junkpiles, his sunglasses pushed up on to his head.

  ‘Morning,’ she mumbled, and went out back to the pump. A few raindrops hollowed conical depressions in the sandy yard, and the sweet odors of rot, myrtle and water hyacinth mixed with the smell of rain. The roof of an old boathouse stuck up above the palmetto tops about fifty feet away; a car rattled on the gravel road which passed in front of the cabin, hidden by more palmettos and a honeysuckle thicket.

  She had expected Donnell would want to discuss the events in Salt Harvest, but when she re-entered he insisted on showing her the things he had extracted from the junkpiles. An armadillo shell on which someone had painted a mushroom cloud, five-years-back issues of Madame Sonya’s Dream Book, and a chipped football helmet containing a human skull. ‘You suppose he found them together?’ he asked, deadpan, holding up the helmet. She laughed, picturing the ritual sacrifice of a losing quarterback.

  ‘What’s he do with this stuff?’ He flipped through one of the issues of the Dream Book.

  ‘He collects it.’ Jocundra lit the stove for coffee. ‘He’s kind of a primitive archaeologist, says he gets a clearer picture of the world from junk than he could any other way. Most people think he’s crazy, and I guess he is. He lost his son in the Asian War, and according to my father, that’s what started him drinking. He’d pin up photos of the president and target-shoot at them for hours.’

  ‘Something funny’s happening,’ said Donnell.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder, surprised by his abrupt change of subject. ‘Last night, you mean?’

  ‘The last few days, but last night especially.’ He riffled the pages of the book. ‘When I picked this up earlier, I had no idea what it was, but then I had a whole raft of associations and memories. Stuff about palmists, seances, fortune-tellers. That’s how my memory has always worked. But lately I’ve been comparing everything I see to something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on. It won’t come clear.’ Discouraged, he tossed the book onto a junkpile, dislodging a toy truck. ‘I guess I should tell you about last night.’

  His account took the better part of two cups of coffee, and after mulling it over, Jocundra said. ‘You have to consider this in light of the fact that your thrust has been to supply yourself with a past, and that your old memories have been proved false. You remember my telling you about the gros bon ange? Back at the motel?’

  ‘Yeah. The soul.’

  ‘Well, you began to see the black figures almost immediately after I told you about them. It’s possible you’ve started to construct another past from materials I’ve exposed to you. But,’ she added, seeing his distress, ‘you’re right. It’s not important to speculate about the reality of what you see. Obviously some of it’s real, and we have to get busy understanding it. I’ll ask Mr Brisbeau to pick up some physics texts.’ She plucked at her blouse. ‘And some clothes.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Here.’ He reached behind his packing crate. ‘It might not fit, but it’s clean.’ He pulled forth a dress, a very old, dowdy dress of blue rayon with a design of white camellias. ‘Try it on,’ he suggested.

  In the back room, Jocundra removed her jeans and blouse, and then, because it was so sweaty, her bra. The dress had been the property of someone shorter and more buxom. It was flimsy and musty-smelling, and she linked the mustiness with all the women she had known who had been habituated to such dresses. Her mother, musty aunts and neighbor ladies sporting hats adorned with plastic berries, looking as if they had dropped in from the 1930s. The skirt ended above her knees, the bodice hung slack, and the worn, silky material irritated her nipples.

  ‘I must look awful,’ she said, coming out of the back room, embarrassed by Donnell’s stare.

  He cleared his throat. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s fine.’

  To cover her embarrassment, she pretended interest in the camellia pattern. Striations of blue showed through the white of the petals; misprintings. But they had the effect of veins showing through pale, lustrous skin. The blossoms had been rendered with exaggerated voluptuousness, each curve and convolution implying the depth and softness of flesh, as if she were gazing at the throat of a seductively beautiful animal.

  Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, they puzzled over the ledger. According to Magnusson, if the Ezawa bacterium existed in the southern hemisphere it would tend to be south-seeking, following the direction of the geomagnetic field in those regions; but it would -like its northern counterpart - migrate downward. However, if a south-seeking bacterium could be transported to the north, then it would migrate upward. It seemed evident to her that a north-seeking bacterium could be induced to become south-seeking by exposure to brief, intense pulses of a magnetic field directed opposite to the ambient field, thereby reversing the magnetic dipolar movement of the magnetosome chain. If necessary the bacterium’s north-seeking orientation could be restored by a second pulse delivered anti-parallel to the first. Thus the colony could be steered back and forth between areas of stimulus and deprivation in the brain and its size controlled. Of course the engineering would be a problem, but given the accuracy of Magnusson’s data, the basic scenario made sense.

  The rain sprinkled intermittently, but by midafternoon the sun was beginning to break through. They walked down to the tributary in back of the cabin, a narrow serpent of lily-pad-choked water that wriggled off into the swamp. Droplets showered from the palmetto fronds when they brushed against them. The sun made everything steamy, and to escape the heat they went into the boathouse, a skeletal old ruin with half its roof missing. Spiders scuttling, beetles, empty wasp nests. The grain of the gray boards was as sharply etched as printed circuits. A single oar lay along one wall, its blade sheathed in spiderweb, and Mr Brisbeau’s pirogue drifted among the lily pads at the end of a rotting rope. They sat on the edge of the planking and dangled their feet, talking idly, skirting sensitive topics. He had rarely been so open with her; he seemed happy, swinging his legs, telling her about dreams he’d had, about the new story he had begun before leaving Shadows.

  ‘It had the same setting as the first. Purple sun, brooding forest. But I needed a castle so I invented this immense bramble, sort of a briar patch thousands of feet high growing from the side of a mountain, with the tips of the highest branches carved into turrets.’ He flipped up a lily pad with the end of his cane; long green tendrils trailed from the underside, thickening into white tubules. ‘I never had a chance to work out the plot.’

  A tin-colored heron landed with a slosh in the lily pads about thirty feet away, took a stately step forward and stopped, one foot poised above the surface.

  ‘You should finish it,’ said Jocundra; she smiled. ‘You’re going to have to do something for a living.’

  ‘Do you really think I can?’ he asked. ‘Survive?’

  ‘Yes.’ She flicked a chip of rotten wood onto the lily pads and watched a water strider scuttle away from the ripples. ‘You were right to leave Shadows. Here there won’t be so much pressure, and it’ll be easier to work things out. And they can be worked out.’ She hesitated.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Given the ledger, everything you’re seeing, everything you can do, I’m convinced a solution is possible. In fact, I’m surprised one of these geniuses at Tulane hasn’t stumbled on it. If you have the data at hand, it’s hardly more than a matter of common sense and engineering. But equipment and materials will be expensive. And the only way I can see of getting the money is to find a bargaining position and force the project to fund us.’

  ‘A bargaining position.’ He stirred the water with his cane. ‘What say we sell Edman a new diet plan? Harrison’s Magnetotactic Slimming Program. Reorients your fat molecu
les to be south-seeking and sends them down to Latin America where they’re really needed.’

  ‘It’s Ezawa you’d have to sell.’

  ‘Even easier. One jolt of Papa Salvatino’s Love Rub and he’d be putty in our hands.’

  Rainclouds passed up from the south. Big drops splat-ted on the lily pads, and the sun ducked in and out of cover. Donnell complained of leg cramps, and Jocundra supported his arm as they walked to the cabin. She stopped at the pump to wash off the grime of the boathouse, and as she bent to the gush of water, he rested his hand on her waist. She turned, thinking he had lost his balance. He put his other hand on her waist, holding her, not pulling her to him. His expression was stoic, prepared for rejection. The light pressure of his hands kindled a warmth in her abdomen, and it seemed to her she was building toward him the way the edges of a cloud build, boiling across the space between them. When he kissed her, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then she drew back, dizzy and a little afraid. A pine branch behind his head flared and was tipped with gold, the sun breaking through again.

  Tentatively, he fingered the top button of her dress. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, trying to gloss over his awkwardness. Still tentative, he began undoing the buttons. Static charges crackled wherever he touched the cloth, delicate stings. She wondered how the material could have accumulated such a charge, and then, recalling other occasions when he had touched her, other instances of static, she wondered if he might be their cause. It didn’t bother her. All his strangeness was common to her now, a final accommodation had been reached. As if a pool of electricity were draining around her, the dress slid from her shoulders, popping and clinging to her skin as it fell away.

  Twilight gathered in the back room. Jocundra lay with her face turned to the ceiling, her arm flung across Donnell’s hip. The fur tickled, and as she shifted position, he absently caressed her leg. Through narrowed eyes she watched the gaps between the boards empurple, imagining the cabin adrift in an unfeatured element of purple, a limbo where time had decayed matter to this one color. The intensity of her response to him perplexed her. She had not known how much she had wanted him. The desire had been buried in some anthracitic fold of herself, and she had seen but a single facet of it, unaware that it would take only the miner’s pick of opportunity to expose a significant lode. Sex for her had always involved a token abandonment, a minimal immersion in the act, and she was beginning to realize that she had been programmed to expect no more. Her mother’s attitude toward sex had been neatly summarized the day before Jocundra’s wedding; she had called Jocundra aside, thinking her still a virgin, and presented her with a gift-wrapped plastic sheet. ‘Sometimes,’ she had whispered, peering around to be sure no one would overhear, baring a horrible secret, ‘sometimes there’s an awful mess.’

  A moonless dark embedded the cabin, the wind blew warm and damp through the cracks, and as Donnell’s hand smoothed down the curve of her belly, the easy rise of her passion made her feel fragile and temporary, a creature of heat and blackness stirred from shapelessness by the wind and left to fade. Her arms went around his back, her consciousness frayed. Some childish part of her, a part schooled to caution by the dictates of a timorous mother, was unwilling to be swept away, fearful of committing to an uncertain future. But she banished it. Exulting in the loss of control, she cried out when he entered her.

  Mr Brisbeau returned shortly before noon the next day, earlier than planned and in a surly mood. He unloaded provisions from a burlap sack, tossing canned goods into a wooden storage chest, making an unnecessary racket, and then, with bad grace, thrust two parcels into their hands. Shirts and jeans for Donnell, blouses and jeans. for Jocundra. Their appreciation did not lighten his surliness. He stood by the wood stove, squinting angrily at them, and finally said, ‘That ol’ man Bivalaqua he’s nothin’ but talk-talk, tellin’ me ‘bout the holy show over in Salt Harvest.”

  Jocundra opened her mouth to say something, but Mr Brisbeau cut her off. ‘Why you takin’ my hospitality and don’t offer to cure me lak that Grimeaux boy?’

  ‘I didn’t cure him,’ said Donnell, nettled by the accusatory tone of his voice. ‘Nobody could cure him.’

  A frown carved the lines deeper on the old man’s face.

  ‘Look.’ Donnell sat up from the cot, where he had been going over the ledger. ‘I’m not even sure what I did. Last night was the first time I’ve ever done anything like that.’

  ‘It can’t hurt to try,’ said Jocundra, coming over to him. ‘Can it? We might learn something that’ll help.’

  Mr Brisbeau’s magnetic field was distinguished by a misty patch about the size of a walnut behind his right temple, floating amid the fiery arcs like a cloud permanently in place. When Donnell mentioned it, Jocundra dug among the junk and located a pencil and suggested she take notes while he described the process. Each time one of the arcs materialized near the misty patch, it would bend away to avoid contact. On impulse, Donnell began inducing arcs to enter the patch, but they resisted his guidance and tore away from his grip. Rather than the gentle tugging he had expected, they exerted a powerful pull, and the harder he strained at them, the more inelastic they became. After perhaps a half hour of experiment, he tried to direct two of the arcs to enter the patch from opposite sides, and to his amazement they entered easily. The patch glowed a pale whitish-gold, and the arcs held steady and bright, flowing inward toward each other.

  ‘Damn!’ said Mr Brisbeau, clapping his hand to his head. ‘Feel lak you plug me in or somethin’.’

  Within a few minutes the arcs began to fade, and this time Donnell introduced four pairs of them into the patch, setting it to glowing like a little gold spider. But for all his success at manipulating the field, Mr Brisbeau’s sight did not improve. He said, though, he felt better than he had in months, and whether due to the treatment or to his satisfaction with Donnell’s effort, his mood did brighten. He withdrew a bottle of bourbon and a jar of cherry juice from the storage chest, mixed and added sugar to taste, humming and chuckling to himself. ‘Cherry flips,’ he said, handing them each a glass. It tasted awful, bad medicine and melted lollypops, but he downed half a dozen while Donnell and Jocundra nursed their drinks.

  His eyes red-veined from the liquor, he launched into the tale of Bayou Vert, the legendary course of green water appearing now and again to those lost in the swamp, which - if they had the courage to follow - would lead them to the Swamp King’s palace and an eternity of sexual delights among his beautiful, gray-haired daughters.

  ‘Long gray hair lak the moss, skin white lak the lily,’ he said, kissing his fingertips. He scooted his crate next to Jocundra and put his arm around her waist. ‘But can’t none of ‘em shine lak Jo’ here, can they?’ His fingers strayed near her breast, and her smile froze. ‘One time,’ he went on, ‘fool me, I’m sick with the fever, and the hurricane she’s shreddin’ the swamp and I’m out at the traps. That’s when I see Bayou Vert. Jus’ a trickle runnin’ through the flood. But I tink it’s the fever, and I’m too scared to follow.’

  It had been drizzling, but now the sun broke through and slanted into the cabin, heating the air, shining off the veins of glue between the pictures on the walls, melting the images of dead presidents and centerfolds and famous buildings into an abstract of color and glare. Mr Brisbeau took to staring at Jocundra, madly doting; his narrative grew disconnected, lapsing in midsentence, and his hand wandered onto her thigh. Donnell was on the verge of interrupting, hoping to spare her further molestation, when the old man jumped up and staggered toward the door, sending avalanches of fragments slithering down the junkpiles.

  ‘he Bon Dieu!’ he shouted; he teetered on the top step and fell with a thump in the sand.

  By the time they reached the door, he had climbed to his feet and was gazing off at the treeline. Tears slithered down the creases of his cheeks.

  ‘Look there,’ he said. ‘Goddamn and son of a bitch! Look there!’ H
e pointed. ‘I ain’t seen that chinaberry for tree-four years. Oh, goddamn, jus’ look at that!’ He went a step forward, stumbled, and fell again, but crawled on all fours to the edge of the palmettos and pitched face downward beside a stubby, bluish-green shrub. ‘Indigo,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I tink she’s gone from here.’

  ‘You can see?’ Jocundra turned to Donnell, and mixed with the excitement, he thought he detected a new apprehension in her face. He looked down at his hands, shaken by the realization that he had done something material to Mr Brisbeau.

  ‘Firs’ I tink it’s the drinkin’ and mem’ries givin’ me sight of you, girl.’ The old man wiped his eyes. ‘But I mus’ be seein’, ‘cause I lose my good-time feelin’ when I fall.’ He pulled himself up and brushed the crust of mucky sand off his shirt; then, struck by a thought, he said, ‘Me, I’m goin’ to bring ol’ man Bivalaqua so you can touch his migraine.’

  ‘We can’t have people coming here,’ said Jocundra. ‘We’ll have the police…’

  ‘The Cajun he’s not goin’ to give you away,’ said Mr Brisbeau adamantly. ‘You know better’n that, girl. And besides, the boy he jus’ wither up if he try to hide his gift.’ He walked over to the steps and stared up at Donnell; his eyes were still brimming. ‘I thank you, boy, but how’m I goin’ to thank you for true?’ Then he grinned. ‘Come on! We ask Le Bon Dieu! I’m taking you to see Him.’ He started toward the boathouse, staggered, and fetched up against the cabin; he turned and went back to the bluish-green shrub. He plucked off a leaf.

  ‘Goddamn,’ he said, holding it up to the sun so the veins showed. ‘Indigo.’

  Mr Brisbeau poled the pirogue into a channel barely wider than the boat. Clouds of mosquitoes descended upon them, and thickly leaved bushes arched overhead, forming a buzzing green tunnel. The branches scratched their arms. They passed along the channel for what seemed to Donnell an inordinate length of time, and bent double to avoid the branches, breathing shallowly, he lost his sense of perspective. Up and down were no longer consistent with the colors of earth and sky. Whenever they passed beneath an opening in the brush, the water reflected a ragged oval of blue and the sun dazzled the droplets tipping the leaves; it was as if they were gliding through a mirrored abyss, one original likeness hidden among the myriad counterfeits. Fragments of dried wasp nest fell on his neck and stuck in the sweat; purplish-veined egg masses clung to holes in the bank, and the dark, web-spanned gaps between the roots of the bushes bristled with secretive movement. Just below the surface at the edge of the bank were fantastic turrets of slime tunnelled by black beetles.