Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Raise, swing, and—away it flew. He watched the ball happily as it traced its arc, then landed not too far off—in part because he didn’t want to discourage her, and also because he was in no hurry.

  “Now you. Start off without the ball.”

  “Just the swing?”

  “You swing, I’ll correct you, and then you swing again. Come on,” he said and pointed to her cart. “I want to see you sweat.”

  It took her a while to identify the driver. When she got in position at the empty tee, she stood fairly well, but her swing was about as clumsy as could be. If there had been a ball on the tee, it wouldn’t even have felt a passing breeze. He told her what she was doing wrong. Let the club hang lower; swing farther back; don’t clutch it quite so hard. And again. Swing your hips there, baby. And again.

  After the tenth try, she groaned aloud. “Oooh! I’ll never get this.”

  Time to move things along a bit. “Oh, you’ll learn. No question about it. You just have to know how to hold the club. Here, allow me,” he said, stepping up behind her. He put his arms around her and corrected her grip. “Like that. Now swing back. Easy does it. You can take it slow, yeah?”

  He put his hands on her arms and for a moment he forgot all about her, forgot about everything but the task of making sure she held the club correctly, since a bad habit that has taken root is awfully hard to shake off. Then his nose caught a waft of her perfume, a sweet, cheap scent she had washed off last time she took a shower but that still lingered, mingling with the scent of her body, a mixture of musk and violets. And he remembered what he was really here for. The prize in this game.

  He looked down at her neck and saw the vein there throbbing. She allowed him to correct her grip, but he could feel as well that she was resisting him on another level. He thought about the kind of hole in one he wanted to score at the end of the course, and could hardly contain himself.

  Hiroshi and Charlotte walked along Massachusetts Avenue for a while, then crossed over onto Garden Street, with its comfortably wide, stone-paved sidewalks. The traffic was heavy, and the occasional jogger came panting past. They headed toward another church tower, this one bigger than the one before, left it behind, and continued past the Sheraton Hotel. The trees along the avenue gave way to grand redbrick facades on both sides. An elderly, uniformed hotel porter standing beneath a red canopy looked at them dubiously.

  The trees resumed, but the sidewalk had become just concrete slabs, buckled and broken. Dark redbrick town houses took over. The sidewalk became narrower and the trees taller, overshadowing the road itself in places. As they went on, the houses receded from the roadside, sometimes almost out of sight behind the bushes and trees.

  Charlotte finally stopped at a side street. “This is the end of the first ice age. Or the last, since we’re going backward. And it’s not the end, it’s the beginning.” She looked dubiously at him. “Am I making any sense?”

  “No,” Hiroshi said and had to laugh. “But I get what you mean.” He looked back. They had been walking for about a quarter of an hour and had covered maybe a kilometer, which, going by Charlotte’s scale, was around one hundred thousand years into the past. So most of the world had been covered by ice all this time? It was almost unbelievable.

  “Okay,” said Charlotte. “Remember this point.”

  Hiroshi looked up and read the street sign. The side street was called Parker Street. The grand old trees on both sides hid what he assumed to be residential buildings. They had been walking along Concord Avenue. Charlotte marched along it for about another 150 meters and then stopped near a bus stop.

  “And that,” she declared once Hiroshi had caught up with her, “was the interglacial warm period, between the Würm and the Riss glaciations. Anything strike you?”

  There was a chicken-wire fence along the sidewalk, behind which rose a slope covered with trees and bushes. Across the street was a school, or maybe a kindergarten, and a little park with a statue of a man raising his hand in blessing. Or was it an angel? Hiroshi didn’t know; he wasn’t so great on religious stuff.

  He looked at the distance they had come from Parker Street. “This period is longer than the whole of recorded history they teach us in school.”

  “Exactly,” Charlotte said. “And it’s a period we know next to nothing about.”

  Hiroshi raised his eyebrows. “That’s amazing,” he said. “I mean, there were people alive back then as well. They must have fought wars and all that, even then.”

  “Do you remember the Island of the Saints?” Charlotte asked. “The knife on the altar that I was so keen to touch?”

  “Sure,” said Hiroshi.

  Charlotte pointed ahead. “That was even older.”

  The first hole took forever. Terry drove her ball off the fairway, into the rough, into a bunker, into the water.…She ran into every hazard there was, meaning he had plenty of opportunity to correct her, touch her, breathe in her smell, stroke her bosom, take hold of her hips.

  “You have to relax here,” James said again as he put his hands on her buttocks and jiggled them about. “Again.”

  When they finally reached the green, it turned out Terry was no good at putting either. First she hit the ball too hard, sending it past the flag and back onto the fairway, then she tapped it too softly, so that it plopped sullenly back down in the grass. She became quite worked up. Which was hardly a bad thing, since when she was worked up, she shrugged and pouted most appealingly.

  “Just relax first,” James told her, stepping up behind her and correcting her stance a little. “Legs apart. Yes, that’s it. Now look at the ball. Imagine how it’s going to land. Just imagine it slipping easily into the hole. Gliding in without the least effort. Think what a great feeling that’ll be.” He heard her take a deep breath and saw her tremble slightly. So she wasn’t just thinking of golf balls. Very good. Not long now and he would have her. “Now swing.”

  This time she hit the ball just right. It glided across the green as though reeled in on a thread and dropped smoothly into the hole.

  “Well hey there,” he said admiringly. “You’re good at this.”

  “I have a good teacher,” she said and gave him a roguish glance.

  “That’s true,” James said, patting himself on the shoulder. “I’m good at this.”

  At last they reached the second hole. This had been his objective all along. Not only was there a rough along the edge of the fairway that was only mowed once a year, there was also a copse of trees, an overgrown thicket full of shrubbery probably full of lost balls. It was an unusual feature for a golf course, but city hall had made the wood a condition of the original land purchase, and it was considered a nature reserve. A lot of players complained bitterly about it, but the smarter members of the club recognized the possibilities. He and Terry wouldn’t be the first couple to get down in the grass there.

  “Can I start this time?” Terry asked.

  James nodded magnanimously, while his mind was on his own plans. He would have to drive his ball into the thicket, that much was clear. Then he would act all angry, blame her, tell her she was distracting him with her sexy outfit, and ask how a red-blooded man was supposed to concentrate on the game. She would like that; women liked to be blamed for that sort of thing. And then she wouldn’t protest if he shouted at her to come help him look…none of which needed planning, he realized as soon as he saw Terry drive.

  “Oops,” she said.

  The two of them watched the ball fly up in a long curving arc toward the wood and vanish between the treetops.

  “Am I putting you off your stroke?” James asked, amused.

  “It looks like,” Terry admitted bashfully.

  “I’ll come help you look.”

  “You’re a sweetie.”

  As they made their way into the underbrush, James felt surreptitiously for the condom in his trouser
pocket. There it was, within easy reach. Good. Time to spring the trap on this little mouse.

  The bushes pushed back against them, clawed at their clothing, and scratched their skin. There was a rustling and scurrying in the undergrowth—wildlife that hadn’t been expecting a visit. It was hot, too. They were sweating, and a cloud of hungry midges soon sought them out.

  “How am I supposed to be able to drive the ball back out of the wood?” Terry eventually asked. “It’s flat-out impossible.”

  Of course, she wasn’t supposed to. That was why they had spare balls in their golf bags. Strictly speaking, the rules gave them five minutes to search for a lost ball, and the only way to find a ball in this wood in that time was to be ridiculously lucky. Right now, though, the rules were the last thing on his mind.

  “Stand still a moment,” James said.

  She stopped, turned around, and looked at him with big eyes. She was gleaming with sweat. This was a good spot, a tiny clearing where the light and shadows chased each other around, and the ground was overgrown with moss and little white flowers, which gave off a heady, sweet scent.

  “Little lamb,” James said, taking her into his arms. “You shouldn’t be alone in the forest with the big bad wolf.” She was slack in his grasp, putting up not the least resistance. “Especially not when you’re wet through like this.” He stooped over her, kissed her neck, and ran his hands down her sides, shoving his fingers into her bright-red shorts.

  Now they were picking up the pace. More and more they found themselves hiking along roads that were never meant for pedestrians. Drivers looked at them in surprise from behind the wheel. They passed a lake, great sprawling buildings, filling stations, row homes, and still they were on Concord Avenue. The road seemed never to end.

  Hiroshi had asked Charlotte about the knife and what she had read from it, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Two kilometers from their last stop, she halted. By now Concorde Avenue had a pleasant strip of green lawn running down the central island, and they had just passed an imposing synagogue. “Oldest known fossils of modern Homo sapiens,” Charlotte declared. “Excavated at the Omo River site, southwest Ethiopia.”

  They set off again. “Fossils are very rare indeed,” she explained as they went. “Most of the time a dead body decays in its entirety, even the bones. You need very special conditions for a skeleton to survive. Which is why most regions yield no bone finds at all—the soil simply breaks everything down. That’s the rule, fossils are the exception.”

  Hiroshi had never really thought about it, but now it seemed obvious. “If it didn’t happen that way, our soil would be full of the bones of dead species, and their calcium would be locked out of the ecosystem.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Right back at the start of our paleoanthropology seminar, Dr. Wickersham told us that if we gathered up all the human bone fossils that had ever been discovered, we could easily load them into a single truck. That’s the underlying problem whenever you want to state anything about human prehistory with any certainty: the evidence is so slim that you’d never get a jury to convict. But there are theories all the same—there have to be—or we’d have nowhere to start from. Generally, they’re thought to be incontrovertible. Laymen think so, and even scientists think so if they don’t know all the details.”

  On and on they went. Hiroshi hadn’t realized Boston was such a leafy, green city. The sun climbed higher in the sky, the day grew ever hotter, but for long stretches they walked in the pleasant shade of trees. It was hard work and not something he was used to, but he enjoyed it all the same. When they weren’t talking, it was a companionable silence, and when they were, they talked about what they had each been doing since the old days. That was companionable, too.

  They went through an underpass and then began walking up a slope, sometimes steep, sometimes gentle. The going got a little tougher. They were in an area of huge mansions where single houses stood all on their own in grounds so vast he couldn’t see where they ended. Sometimes he could barely see the house. A wealthy neighborhood clearly. And then, sometime after nine o’clock, Concord Avenue ended. For the last couple of miles, they had been walking along grass verges, and they had now reached a junction with Spring Street.

  “Anything special here?” asked Hiroshi, out of breath.

  “One point three million years in the past,” Charlotte answered. “Homo erectus is living in Africa. He knows how to use fire, he’s lost most of his body hair and has developed dark skin. He can be up to six feet tall, and if we saw him on the street today we could barely tell him apart from modern man.” She pointed to the right. “Off we go.”

  Three kilometers farther on and a good forty minutes later, they were standing by a highway ramp.

  “Now we’re in the middle of the Olduvai period. We’ve discovered stone tools, and there are signs we were eating elephants back then. Homo erectus has already left Africa, by the way.” She pointed ahead. “About another three kilometers and we reach Homo georgicus. From Georgia, the Caucasus Mountains, as the name suggests. The oldest hominid find outside Africa.”

  She didn’t want to. My God, he’d never seen this before! She didn’t want to. She screamed, struggled, pushed his hands away, and said things like “It’s all happening too fast” and “No, JB, no” and “Not here, JB.” So what was all that about enjoying life and the finer things? Sure, she said, but not like this. They could go on a date. Get dinner and a movie. Then they could see…

  At last he let go of her, shaken to the core. This couldn’t really be happening, could it? He squatted on his heels, panting, sweaty all over, bitten everywhere by those damned midges. His cock reared upward out of his pants, a monumental hard-on that gleamed golden in the half-light but that seemed to impress her not one bit. She only glanced at it once, damn it all. It was enough to drive a guy mad. There she was, lying before him practically naked on the moss, surrounded by the little white flowers they had trampled down as they tussled. The sweat made her skin gleam like oil. Her red shorts were hanging down around her left ankle, her shirt was pushed up over her breasts, and he could see the nipples standing to attention. My God, he could see she wanted him, could see how wet she was—practically dripping. She wanted him. She was hot for him all right. But she refused. He felt dizzy. What should he do now? It wasn’t like he could rape her. That wouldn’t count; that wasn’t winning the game.

  She began to get dressed again, slowly. She pulled the shorts up and could barely get them back over her ass.

  “You could at least give me a blow job,” James said, his voice cracking. “I can’t go play golf like this.”

  At first, he thought she hadn’t heard him, and for a moment he wasn’t even sure he’d said it. But after she’d pulled her shirt down, she walked over to him, kneeled down at his side, and put her hand on his penis. She began to stroke it. James sank backward onto his elbows and shut his eyes. Oh, but she was good at this. She was amazingly good. Way better than most girls. Oh goddamn it all, she was good.…He felt her shift position and come round in front of him. He opened his eyes. Her face was right in front of his. She looked at him and held his gaze. She wanted him looking at her as she squeezed.

  “Is this good?” she whispered huskily.

  He nodded, breathing heavily. “Just don’t stop.”

  She didn’t stop, but she slowed down, dammit.

  “Do you want me?” she breathed.

  “You know I do! My God, if you haven’t noticed…”

  “Say it. Say you want me.”

  A wild hope flared up in him that perhaps he’d get laid after all. She was different from the other girls, got turned on by different things, so maybe if he gave her what she wanted…If that was what she wanted to hear him say…“Yes, my God,” he gasped. “I want you.”

  She kept stroking, but slowly, too slowly, just enough to keep him trembling on the edge. “You can have me, JB, if you wa
nt me,” she cooed just loud enough for him to hear. “You can have me, but you have to want me enough. You have to need me. Really, really need me…Do you need me?”

  “Yes,” James yelped helplessly.

  “Say it.”

  “I need you.”

  “Say my name,” she ordered.

  What kind of goddamned game was she playing here? What was she up to? Why didn’t she just jerk him off and be done with it? He gasped, swallowed, and spluttered her name. “Terry.”

  She stopped. She just stopped right where she was. Stopped while his balls were bulging. He let out an inarticulate howl.

  “Say it again,” she demanded. “And look at me. Keep looking at me the whole time.”

  So he looked at her and said it again. “Terry.” Just then she gave a quick tug with her hand, a movement that shot right through him, that brought him right to the edge but not quite over it, not quite…

  “Say it! Say my name. Say it as fast as you can!”

  “Terry.” He looked at her. “Terry.” Looked into her eyes. “Terry.” She had light brown eyes with the strangest green flecks in the iris. Witch eyes. “Terry.” Oh God! He was about to burst. “Terry. Terry…Terry…Terry…Terry!”

  When he came, he was bawling out her name. He shot his load like a ball from a cannon, and she looked into his eyes the entire time until he was done. It was as though she had some power over him all of a sudden. She gave a thin-lipped smile, then bent over and kissed him quickly on the forehead. Then she got up and left.

  James felt like he would never get his breath back. He climbed to his feet with difficulty, pulled his pants back on, and fumbled the button closed. He was trembling all over. That was because he’d been lying awkwardly, sure. He shot a furious glance at where Terry had vanished through the trees. What had all that been about? Whatever else it was, it had been the strangest sexual experience of his life. He swallowed and tasted bugs. Something had flown into his mouth. Shit. This wasn’t how winning the game felt.