Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  Rawley composed himself—he was above all this, he refused to get down in the gutter with me. “I’m not going to hold this against you. You’re drunk. We’ll talk in the morning, when you’re capable of reason.”

  With a worried glance at me, Elizabeth squeezed past Rawley and vanished into the bar.

  “Let’s talk now,” I said. “In the morning I’m gone.”

  He appeared to take this as a surrender, an admission on my part of wrong-headedness. “Very well. But let’s go back to the hotel. We might be overheard here.”

  “It’s your game,” I said. “We might as well play on your home court.”

  “Can we stop this?” He spread his hands as if to demonstrate he was holding no weapons. “Christ, Michael. We have ten years of history together, and this isn’t the first time we’ve fought. If you want me to apologize for breaking in on you and the girl…I apologize. I’ve been under so much pressure, perhaps I haven’t been sensitive to the fact that you’re under pressure, too. If so, I apologize for that as well.” He stepped forward, extending the hand of friendship. “Come on, man. What do you say?”

  I had always been a chump for his diplomatic side, even though I knew it was entirely tactical, and that it came as easily to him as eating bananas to a monkey. I took his hand, I accepted his clumsy embrace, but I knew in my heart that we were finished.

  “No problem,” I said.

  • • •

  I bought a bottle of yellowish brown poison from the bartender, and we set out toward the hotel. The rain had diminished to a drizzle, and as we crossed the pitch-dark flats, Rawley shined a flashlight ahead to show obstacles in our path, the beam sawing across broken glass and stumps and once a scurrying rat. I was very drunk, but my drunkenness was cored by a central clarity, and though my coordination was not good, my mind was charged with a peculiar energy that permitted me to think and speak with no sign of affliction. Between pulls on the bottle, I told Rawley about my conversations with Buma, the dreams, Mobutu’s curse, and my encounter with the crocodile, the odd behavior of the crocodiles I had witnessed on the day of my arrival in Mogado. I gave it to him flatly, as if it were all plain fact, with no mention of my self-doubts or any other of my reservations.

  “That’s absolute nonsense,” Rawley said; then hurriedly, not wanting to risk—I supposed—reinstituting an adversarial atmosphere, “I mean it sounds like nonsense.”

  “Like you said—Buma’s impressive. He’s obviously expert at mind-fucking people. Whether or not there’s something more arcane behind that…it’s not really important. Your problem is to decide whether you can successfully prosecute him. My feeling is that you can’t. Imagine what he could do with a jury. Or with the court, for that matter.”

  Two young men passed us in the dark, walking in the opposite direction; they shielded their eyes against Rawley’s flash and offered a polite greeting.

  “I may have no choice,” Rawley said. “I’m getting increasing pressure from Kinshasa. My ultimate problem may lie in trying to shift the blame for his acquittal away from me and onto the court.”

  “Why is this important? You’re going to England. One trivial defeat won’t spoil your entire record.”

  “My family will still be here. These bastards are capable of anything. If they get all in a twist about Buma, they might threaten our business interests. They might do more than that.” He swung the flashlight in a short arc, the beam whitening the trunk and upswept branches of a dead tree, making it look for an instant like the skeleton of a strange animal, frozen forever in an anguished pose. “God, sometimes I hate this country.”

  We walked in silence a few paces; finally I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with Buma. Suppose he’s acquitted. Let’s not even talk about whether he used to be a crocodile. Let’s just say that he’s a member of a cult, and once he’s acquitted, the cult gets a lot of ink. A lot of power. He could be more dangerous than your friends back in Kinshasa.”

  “Unfortunately,” Rawley said, “you’re not me. And I’m not you. I have responsibilities I can’t dodge.”

  And fuck you, too, I thought; I hope the son of a bitch bites you in half.

  We were passing a point parallel to the rock where I had been trapped by the big crocodile. I mentioned this to Rawley, suggested he might want to have a look.

  “Why not,” he said.

  We angled toward the river, walked along it for a minute or so, then Rawley’s flash picked out that tooth of dark rock extending out over the Kilombo.

  “No action tonight,” said Rawley as he stepped out onto it. I remained on the bank. “Not a sign of a fucking croc,” he went on. He swung the flash across the surface of the water and laughed. “Buma must have given them marching orders.”

  The clouds broke, and a thin silver moon like a fattened hook sailed up from behind them. Rawley came back onto the bank, shot me an amused glance. “Are you sure you weren’t drunk?”

  “You know me, boss,” I said coldly. “I can’t scarcely see nothin’ ’less I’s drinkin’.”

  In the weak silvery light, with a blond forelock drooping over his forehead to touch an eyebrow, his face looked oddly simple, childlike. “We have a few things to work out, don’t we?” he said. “I understand that, Michael. God only knows who we were back at Oxford. I can’t even remember those people, except that they were complete fucking idiots. But I’m certain they weren’t you and me. They weren’t us the way we are now.” He twitched the beam of the flashlight off along the bank. “Despite the shit people do to one another, we’ve stuck it out together. Perhaps not always for the purest of motives. But we have done, and I can’t help but believe there’s some good reason we’ve come this far. Don’t you think that’s a possibility worth exploring?”

  His words were so unexpected, I couldn’t muster a response; but I was, against my will, touched by them. Embarrassed, he turned toward the town and swept the flashlight inland; as the beam traveled across the ground, the light reflected off what appeared to be a row of yellow-orange jewels set atop a semicircle of dead logs. Logs with wrinkled, leathery bark and weird turreted structures atop their narrow snouts. Rawley let out a little gasp, as if he’d taken a playful blow to the belly, and focused the beam on the log closest to us. A crocodile. Not a very big one, maybe eight feet long. But some of its friends were bigger. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, maybe more. Just sitting. Watching. Forming a barrier in every direction except one.

  Rawley took a step backward onto the rock. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus.” Another croc let out a ghastly hiss.

  I was not afraid…not for myself, at any rate. It was as if the electric arc of fear had gapped and failed to engage my nerves. Perhaps I was too drunk to feel fear. Yet I was afraid for Rawley. He took another backward step, stumbled, and in doing so, went farther out onto the rock.

  “No!” I shouted, beckoning to him. “Run! You’ve got to run! This way!”

  I sprinted toward the crocodile closest to the bank. It was strange. I ran, it seemed, not fired by an instinct for self-preservation, but by the need to demonstrate to Rawley the proper method of escape. I may have felt a touch of fright as I hurdled the croc—it snapped at me halfheartedly—but it was nothing compared to the terror I had experienced the previous night. I landed awkwardly on one foot, spun half about, and fell hard on my chest. For the space of a few seconds, perhaps a bit more, I lost my wind. When I regained it, I came to one knee and looked back at Rawley. He had not followed my example. He was standing near the riverward end of the rock, made to seem small by the vastness of the sky that had opened up above him, with its scattering of wild stars and silver cicatrix of moon. His pale hair flew in the breeze, and the tail of his shirt fluttered; the beam of the flashlight struck downward from his left hand like a frail gold wand, his only weapon against the crocodiles massed and slithering toward him from the landward end of the rock. There was no way he could hurdle them now. Our gazes met. He said nothing, and at that d
istance, his expression was unreadable; but he must have known he was doomed. I called out his name and came a step toward him, thinking there must be something I could do. I screamed at the crocodiles, but they were intent upon him, crawling over one another in their eagerness for his blood.

  Rawley whirled about, the flashlight beam drawing a yellow stripe across the bright water. He glanced back at me once more, a mere flicking of his eyes, not a signal or message so much as a reflex, a last hopeful engagement of life, and then he dived into the Kilombo, a racer’s dive learned in his shining youth and practiced in the green pools of Oxford. The crocodiles surged forward. Rawley surfaced about twenty feet from the bank, just as the first of the crocs went into the water; he headed down river, stroking a racing crawl, aiming for a place some fifteen yards away where the bank jutted out. I didn’t think he had a chance—a dozen crocs were in the water now, arrowing after him, their bodies only partially submerged, moonstruck eyes aglitter. But Rawley was making decent headway, and I began to hope for him. Then the croc nearest him submerged completely. A moment later he screamed and came twisting high out of the water, clawing at the air, a dark stain on his lips and chin. And then the croc took him under. The other crocodiles converged on the spot where Rawley had vanished, and the surface was transformed into a melee of thrashing tails and rooting snouts, a raft of scaly, undulating bodies, all splashing and bumping and skittering half out of the water as one croc slid up and across another’s back in a display of murderous frolic. But there was no sign of the man they had killed.

  I backed away from the bank; I felt unsound, unclear. Rawley’s death had been real enough while it was occurring, but now it seemed I had imagined it, that I would have to re-imagine it in order to make it real. I was still holding my bottle, and now I hurled it into the river, as if it were damning evidence. And wasn’t I culpable for having hated him, even if the hatred was transitory and the event itself a dire form of coincidence? Hadn’t I brought him to the rock with murder in my heart?

  The crocodiles began to swim away from the spot where Rawley had disappeared. Their fun was over. I sank to my knees, suddenly overcome by loss, and by the gruesome manner of his passing. I bent my head, pressed the heels of my hands against my brow, as if to compress the memory of what I had seen, to flatten it and make it so thin it would slip into a crack in my brain and never be found. The hypocrisy of my grief, coming as it did in such close conjunction with my internalized expression of loathing for Rawley, caused his death to weigh more heavily upon me than it otherwise might. Though I truly grieved, at the same time my tears seemed a form of indulgence, as if I were grieving for myself, for my own frail transgressions, or else trying to present a false appearance to whatever deity was watching, to convince him that I was sorry for my part in what had happened. And this duality of grief, this fictive quality overlaying the real, this sense of innermost duplicity, made my thoughts scamper and collide like confused rabbits on a killing ground. I thought my head would burst, I wanted it to burst, and I was disappointed when it did not.

  At last I lifted my eyes. Not ten feet away along the bank, a crocodile was watching me. A smallish one, perhaps the same upon which Rawley had first shined his flashlight. Its jaws were slightly parted, its snaggled teeth in plain view, lending it a goofy look. A comical little death poised to pounce. My normal reactions were dammed up, and I could only stare at the thing. Numb, hopeless, and uncaring, I waited to die. Seconds ticked past, slow as water from a leaky tap. The croc began to seem familiar, almost human. Mad hilarity lapped the inside of my skull. I noted the croc’s resemblance to George Bush the elder. A distant relative, perhaps. An outside child conceived during a state visit. Then it bellowed, a glutinous, hollow noise—like a troll roaring in a cave—and that restored my natural animal terror. Its head jerked sideways, and it regarded me for a few beats with one cold gray eye, as if marking me for future reference. Then it whipped about, and moving in the ludicrous yet oh-so-efficient Chaplinesque paddling run of its species, it scuttled off into the shadows, leaving me to seek another solution to my misfortunes.

  • • •

  When I reported Rawley’s death, the police in Mogado detained me; later that night, they charged me with his murder. There was no body, no evidence of any sort, except for the fact that I had been seen arguing with him, then walking with him in the direction of the river. No one reported seeing him afterward. Men had been convicted and executed for less in the Congo. I neither disputed nor affirmed the charge. In truth, I could not dispute or affirm it. Rawley’s death lay at the center of a web of circumstance and possibility that could never be untangled. Unless one were to accept the explanation of my dream…or rather, Buma’s dream. My three improbable escapes from the crocodiles of the Kilombo lent credence to this explanation, for had not Buma spat on my palm to protect me from his “brothers and sisters”? But I was not prepared to accept it.

  Later that morning, the potbellied desk officer entered my cell and informed me that I was no longer under suspicion—I could leave—if I wished, I could return to Abidjan. I was in a state of shock and disbelief. “What do you mean?” I asked him. “I thought I was to be arraigned?”

  He hesitated. “We’ve been told to let you go.”

  “By Kinshasa?”

  The policeman dropped his eyes, as if embarrassed. “You are free to leave.”

  I considered the length of time it would likely take for the police to communicate with Kinshasa, then how much longer it would be before Kinshasa could get through their ritual rounds of squabbling and communicate an official reaction. “It wasn’t Kinshasa who gave the order, was it?”

  The policeman beckoned to me peremptorily. “Come along now. I have your possessions at the desk.”

  “Buma,” I said. “The crocodile man. It was him, wasn’t it? He gave the order.”

  “If you refuse to come with me,” said the policeman, “I will have you dragged from the cell.”

  It was clear what must have happened. With Rawley no longer serving as a buffer between them and Buma, the police—with their superstitions, their belief in sorcery—would have been easy prey for Buma’s mind games. In fact, they probably had never thought that I was a real suspect in the murder. I was only a bone they intended to throw to Kinshasa, a standin for Buma, whom they were too afraid of to prosecute. What I didn’t understand was why Buma would have me set free. “Where is he?” I asked. “Where’s Buma?”

  The policeman gazed stonily at me. “He is gone.”

  “You released him?”

  “He is gone.”

  “Where…Where did he go?”

  The policeman shrugged. He half-turned, then glanced back at me. “He left you a message.”

  I waited, and after checking the hallway to make sure no one else was listening, the policeman provided me with the final piece of the puzzle.

  “Have patience,” the policeman said. “That is all he told me to tell you. Have patience.”

  • • •

  It is as I said at the outset, you must not think of me as a reliable witness. Instead, you must read what I have written as you would testimony in a murder trial. You must weigh it and make a judgment according to the dictates of your experience. There is, I believe, one way to determine whether it is I who am mad, if—to justify my sins, perhaps even to hide a murderous act—I have conjured this story out of hints and intimations and a handful of anomalies; or if madness has infected the entire world, if the dying curse of a tiny African giant has poisoned all the waters, if crocodiles are fleeing that curse by becoming men, and if James Rawley was executed by means of witchery because he refused to drop his prosecution of Gilbert Buma. In order to make that determination, I would have to travel five days upriver from Mogado to a spot marked by a ferry landing burnt by Mobutu’s soldiers; I would have to walk inland until I came to a giant fig tree, and if then I were to find an albino rock python, it would be reasonable to conclude that magic and witchery have won the day. At
the time of these events, I was not prepared to make that trip, and I remain unprepared to do so—the Kilombo is not a place to which I ever care to return. But perhaps a different kind of proof will be forthcoming.

  Upon my return to Abidjan, I secured a visa for Patience and together we flew back to the States. Shortly thereafter we married and settled outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from the Huron River. Patience likes being close to a river; she says it reminds her of home. Sometimes she will sit with me on the banks of the Huron, humming under her breath, and when she feels my eyes on her, she will cut her own eyes toward me and hold my stare just as Buma was in the habit of doing. I don’t spend a great deal of time wondering about her origins; that would be fruitless. Though I may not have taken her seriously if it hadn’t been for Buma’s message and all that attended it, I try not to question either my mental state or the happiness that has come my way. I teach at the university, I come home at night to Patience, to love. And despite the fact that our immediate world appears to be in a state of collapse, with political scandal and murder and random violence reaching epidemic proportions, we have managed to find a degree of contentment.

  Lately, however, something has been happening that, I think, bears upon the matter at hand. Each weekend I drive to Detroit to teach a class at the science museum. The freeway, I-94, is a curving stretch of concrete along which flow thousands of cars, rather like the Kilombo both in form and in usage, and sometimes as I drive, a dreamlike feeling steals over me, I become distant from human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all, clear in the truth of our salvation…not the much-advertised salvation of religion, but salvation through the processes of nature, which often manifest in arcane ways and seem as wildly illogical as the consequences of a magic spell.