Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  The room seemed to hold a faint humming; off along the street, a truck engine turned over, startling in its vulgar amplitude, like a beast clearing its throat. Then Gammage said, “I understand what you’re saying, Maury, but what Carbonell did, that goes way past treason.”

  “These are citizens of your own country we’re talking about,” Margery said. “Innocents. Tortured and macheted. Buried alive.”

  “I know!” The colonel stood, turning his back on them. “I know things like this have gone on. I…”

  “They’re going on now,” Margery said.

  “…I don’t condone them. But what will happen once you tell your story for the cameras? Will Carbonell be disgraced? Executed? Perhaps. But what will happen to those who sanctioned these abuses? Nothing. The world will look down their noses at us as they always have. Soon the story will be forgotten, and the men who gave Carbonell his license to slaughter, they will remain untouched.”

  “I’m not going to try and kid you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I can’t guarantee anything. But even if it’s just Carbonell goes in the crapper, that’s gotta be a good thing, right?”

  Men’s voices out in the hall, challenging, peremptory. A heavy knocking at a nearby door.

  “Not condoning something,” Margery said. “Is that your idea of a moral stance? I don’t believe it. I believe you’re a good man.”

  The colonel allowed himself a polite chuckle.

  “If I’m off-base,” she said, “now’s the time to prove it.”

  She was trying to manipulate him, but given the circumstances, that was forgivable. “‘Moral stance’ is an easy term to sling about when one’s own morality is not at issue,” he said.

  He was not going to let Carbonell have them, and not merely because Gammage was his friend and Margery someone to whom he was attracted. It was personal between him and Carbonell. Even if the man were innocent of the crimes Gammage claimed for him, his cologne was offensive, his manner pompous, his smile the emblem of a vain and supercilious nature. The colonel’s distaste for him was funded as much by chemistry as by principle, and he wondered if all his life’s decisions had been informed by such trivial impulses.

  “Go into the bathroom,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Once they had sequestered themselves in the bathroom, the colonel waited on the bed. The fabric of his decision was paper-thin, but he knew it would hold. He had felt this same frail decisiveness during the war, and he had always maintained his resolve even in the face of battle. But his battles had been fought in the service of his country, and he was not certain in whose service he was preparing now to fight. His decision satisfied him, however. He was calm and controlled. Just as he had been when he flew a sortie.

  A knock came at the door; a commanding voice called out.

  “Momentito!” The colonel shrugged into his uniform jacket and opened the door. Standing before him was a squat black man wearing captain’s bars on his fatigues, sweat beading his forehead and shining in the creases of his neck. When he recognized the colonel, his stony expression faltered.

  “Your pardon, Colonel,” he said. “But I have orders to search all the rooms.”

  “I am alone,” said Colonel Galpa. “It will not be necessary.”

  A soldier bearing an automatic rifle moved up behind the captain, who said, with more than a touch of desperation, “I intend no disrespect, sir, but I have my orders.”

  The colonel threw open the door, permitting the captain to see the entire room. “Are you satisfied?”

  The captain gestured at the soldier behind him. “Sir, you must allow my man to inspect the room. Someone may have obtained entrance while you were out.”

  “I have been here all afternoon. It’s as I told you. I am alone.”

  Letting his hand drop to his sidearm, the captain composed his features and said, “This is a matter of national security, Colonel. You must understand my position. I have no choice but to insist.”

  “What is your name, captain?”

  The captain straightened, squared his shoulders, but looked on the verge of tears. “José Evangelista. Please, sir. Will you stand aside?”

  “Very well. But be quick!”

  Reluctantly, his heart racing, he stepped back and the soldier, a mestizo, barely more than a boy with a wispy mustache and curly hair, entered the room and inspected the closet, poked under the bed.

  “There,” said the colonel. “You have done your duty. Now will you give me my privacy?”

  The soldier bent an ear toward the bathroom door, then gestured excitedly at it; the captain drew his sidearm and trained it on the colonel.

  “Are you insane? What do you think you’re doing?” The colonel went face-to-face with the captain. “I promise…you will regret this!”

  Crouching, his rifle at the ready, the soldier flung open the bathroom door, and Margery, who was standing behind it, dripping wet, her hair turbaned in a towel, holding another towel to cover herself, let out a shriek. The soldier recoiled, staring open-mouthed at her.

  “Ay, Dios!” said Captain Evangelista.

  “Are the needs of national security now satisfied?” the colonel asked him. “Then perhaps you would be so kind as to leave us alone.”

  The captain barked an order and the soldier hurried from the room. Offering florid apology, the captain, too, retreated. Colonel Galpa slammed the door behind him. Margery started to speak, but the colonel put a finger to his lips, silencing her, and listened at the door. Once assured that the soldiers had left, he went to her and said, “They will make a report, and it’s very possible someone else will be sent to investigate.”

  “What should we do?”

  “If they’re suspicious, and we must assume they are, they will watch the hotel. There’s nothing we can do…not until dark.”

  “The coast clear?” Gammage poked his head out from the bathroom. Fully clothed, he too, was wet.

  “For the moment,” said the colonel.

  “Do you really believe they’ll send someone else?” Margery asked.

  “Considering the circumstances…yes.”

  She finished tucking the edge of the towel beneath her arm, contriving of it a dress. “Jerry. I think you should stay hidden in the bathroom. If they do come back, we don’t want them to hear you running for cover.”

  “Choluteca may not be the best option,” said the colonel. “The checkpoints will be on alert for at least a day or two. How much money do you have?”

  “Couple hundred lempira,” said Gammage. “Maybe fifty bucks American.” And Margery said, “Forty dollars more-or-less.”

  “I know someone who can arrange for a boat to take you down the coast,” the colonel said to Gammage. “Tonight, probably. It will cost several hundred dollars.”

  “I can get it,” said Margery.

  “Then our only problem is how to get Jerry to the boat. I suppose that can be arranged as well.”

  “I owe you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting your ass on the line like this.”

  “You know how you can repay me.”

  “I’ll push the story hard as I can, man.”

  Margery shooed Gammage back into the bathroom.

  “All right, all right.” He grabbed a magazine off the colonel’s nightstand. “If you order food, get me something. I didn’t have time for breakfast.”

  Margery closed the bathroom door, removed the towel from her hair; then she pulled back the bedcovers and slipped beneath them, while the colonel watched in bewilderment. She wriggled about, dropped the bath towel on the floor beside the bed. “If they come back, we better give them something juicy to report.” She smiled wickedly. “Well, don’t keep me waiting, Mauricio. Take off your clothes.”

  To the colonel’s great discomfort, as he disrobed he realized he was wearing a pair of under shorts decorated with little jet planes, a humorous gift that someone had presented him the previous month when he was visiting Puerto Cortez. Seeing them, M
argery affected amazement. “Oh, my!” she said. “Should I be afraid?”

  The colonel felt himself blushing. He slid beneath the sheets on the opposite side of the bed and lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling. The tension of anxiety had been replaced by a different kind of tension. He wanted to turn his head toward her, but held himself rigid, attuned to the sound of Margery’s breath. Then the bathroom door burst open; he started up guiltily.

  “Golly gee.” Gammage grinned down at them. “I was gonna say, ‘Get a room,’ but I guess you already got one.” He shuffled the magazines on the nightstand. “Got anything to read in English?”

  “No,” said the colonel stiffly, and Margery said, “Get the hell outta here, Jerry!”

  Gammage’s grin broadened. “Damn, I wish I had my camera. The guys back in Atlanta would pay serious bucks for this picture.”

  “Jerry!”

  “I’m gone.” He chose another magazine, looked down at them fondly. “You kids have fun.”

  The bathroom door closed and the silence in the room seemed to thicken. The sun broke from the clouds, and pale yellow light cast a complicated shadow on the bed. A scent of gasoline drifted on the breeze. The colonel’s chest felt banded by heavy restraints.

  “Try and relax,” Margery told him.

  “I’m trying.”

  After a second she touched his shoulder. He stiffened at the contact, but when she left her hand there, whispering, “Just take it easy, okay?” his nervousness began to ebb and his breathing became steady.

  “Know what Jerry says about you?”

  “I can only guess,” said the colonel.

  “He says you’ve got the strangest life of anyone he’s ever met.”

  “I suppose it must seem so.”

  “He also says you’re the only honest man he knows.”

  “He doesn’t have enough information to make that judgment.”

  “You don’t think of yourself as honest?”

  A thin stream of radio music trickled from the street, and the colonel caught the words “…you never returned to me…” before it faded. “Not especially,” he said.

  “I think you’re honest. I’m not overlooking the tricks everyone plays on themselves, the little deceits that make up so much of our lives. They’re inescapable. But I think you’re honest when it counts.”

  As she spoke he cut his eyes toward her. He had assumed she was looking at him, but she was on her side, with her eyes closed, as if she were talking to someone in her thoughts, not to him. He took in the white curve of her shoulder, the little shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her face seemed softer than it had the night before, dazed and girlish, and he had the idea that whomever she was thinking of, whether him or some other, her thoughts of that person were slow and reflective and warm.

  “I hope we get a chance to talk sometime when things are different,” she said. “When we can concentrate on what we’re saying.”

  The colonel wanted to say that he was fairly concentrated at that moment, but knew this would strike a wrong note. Her voice lulled him, and he closed his own eyes, listening.

  “I’d like you to tell me about your life,” Margery went on. “Not so I can understand it. I’d just like to hear you tell about it.” She left a pause. “Do you know what a diorama is? This circular strip of metal…it’s not always metal. Sometimes it’s canvas and there are lights behind it. But it’s painted with all these little scenes from life, from one culture usually, and it goes around and around. And even if you watch for a long time, if you come to know which scenes are about to appear, after a while you realize you’re seeing them differently. Noticing different things about them. That’s how your life sounds to me. It’s like you’ve been living in a diorama. Viewing the same scenes over and over from this odd distance…” She sighed. “The adrenaline’s wearing off. I feel so tired.”

  “Go to sleep, then.”

  “I’m tired, not sleepy. How about you?”

  “If you keep talking, I think I might sleep.”

  “Am I that boring?”

  “No, it’s the sound of your voice, it’s nice…it makes me peaceful.”

  “Really? That’s sweet.” Some seconds glided by and then she said, “Now I can’t think of anything to talk about.”

  “Tell me about your life.”

  “God! Now that is boring!”

  “It wasn’t boring today, was it?”

  “Today was unusual.” She shifted about, and her breath stirred his hair. “I did produce a feature once in Borneo. We spent nearly a month there. The forests were on fire—that’s what the feature was about. We were based in a town on the coast. Sumarinda. A nice air-conditioned hotel. But a lot of the time we were inland, closer to the fires. When the wind was right, ash fell from the sky and covered everything. The river, the land. There were days when all of us were gray. The Dayaks, the Americans…everyone. We were a single gray race. Except we were running around, shooting film, taking hits of oxygen, and the Dayaks were just hanging onto life. We ferried a few of them out on the helicopters, but the rest simply wouldn’t be moved, even though some of the old people were dying. Some of the footage we got was amazing. Once we were up near the edge of the fire. All you could hear was roaring and crackling. One of the cameramen waded across a river so he could shoot into the flames. He’d just found a good position when a deer broke from the trees nearby and began running alongside the bank. It was burning. A fringe of flame licking up from its back. Deer fur…it’s tough, you know. It’s not like cat fur. It wouldn’t burn easily. Maybe burning pitch drizzled down onto its back from a tree. Anyway, I couldn’t hear if it was making any cry, the fire was so loud, but it must have been crazy with pain. Just below where our cameraman crossed was a waterfall and a deep pool beneath it, and if the deer had gone into the water, it might have been all right. But it kept running parallel to the bank, leaping over fallen trees, avoiding burning branches, incredibly graceful, trying to outrun the pain. It almost seemed to be flying. Like the fire on its back was empowering it. I remember thinking it didn’t look real. Life never composed this kind of image, I told myself. It was something out of a book. A fantasy novel or a fairy tale. But when I was editing the footage I thought maybe this was how life works. Sometimes out of all the mess and clutter and sadness, it says something. It speaks what for us would be a word or a sentence or a poem, and mostly we don’t notice…or else we’re not around when it happens. But that one time we were there, we could bear witness. Out of all the smoke and flame and death, this perfect burning deer…”

  • • •

  When the colonel woke he was on his stomach, head turned toward the bedside table. Resting thereon was the indigo lizard, its tiny feet dark against the white shiny paper of a magazine ad, its orange eyes shining faintly in the twilight. The sight did not disturb him. If it was only a lizard, it was a pretty one; if it was something more, then he doubted it was dangerous. He had never thought that, he realized. It had merely unnerved him. Staring at it, he began to think of the eyes as lenses, and wondered what lay behind them. A speck of bloody tissue, or a scrap of unpredictable genius given form by some miraculous congruency…or was it both? He thought about Margery’s Borneo story. How unexpected it had been, seeming to arise from her like the deer from the burning forest. Perhaps in each instance it had been less a remarkable occurrence than a case of low expectations exceeded.

  Margery began snoring. Delicate breaths edged with a glutinous phrasing. He rolled onto his back, careful not to wake her. The covers had slipped down about her waist, but she still lay on her side, one arm guarding her breasts, her hair undone, spilling over her cheek. At the point of her shoulder was a mole, perfectly round, like a period completing the milky phrase of her body. The sweet staleness of her breath, lips parted to reveal the bottom of a tooth. She seemed wholly unexpected. As unexpected as her story. It was not the sort of thing, he thought, that she would tell everyone, at least not in the way she had told it to him, and
while he was not prepared to give this much weight, to derive from it any promise, it intrigued him nonetheless. Everything she had done until this moment could be explained in terms of a professional pragmatism, but the story was unmistakably an intimacy. His eyes went again to her breasts, and he suddenly longed to pull her against him, to feel her come awake in his arms. Yet longing was notched, not by a fear of rejection or by the awkwardness of the situation, but by his concern that this was only circumstantially different from dozens of evenings he had spent with women who were no more than joyless functionaries, expressions of public debt.

  A light knock at the door alerted the colonel. Margery stirred, but continued to breathe deeply. He slipped out of bed and started to put on his trousers, then decided that whoever it was should see the whole show. He cracked the door. A tall young mestizo in a white waiter’s jacket was standing in the hall, holding a tray that bore two wine glasses and a green bottle in an ice bucket and a silver serving dish. “Con permiso…” the waiter began, but the colonel shushed him. The man nodded, pointed to the tray, and adopted an inquiring look. “Bueno…pase,” whispered the colonel, and opened the door to admit him, instructing him to set the tray on the chair by the window, and to do it quietly.

  The waiter tiptoed across the carpet, his eyes roaming about the room. Though the colonel detected no bulge in the waiter’s jacket that would indicate a weapon, judging by his bearing, the economy of his movements, he suspected that beneath it the man was wearing a standard-issue army T-shirt. As the waiter turned to make his exit, his eyes dropped to the colonel’s under shorts and amusement grazed his lips. He pressed a small envelope into the colonel’s hand, and with a slight bow, not appearing to expect a tip, he slipped out the door and was gone.

  Three words were printed on the card in the envelope:

  Enjoy your gringa.

  Beneath this salutation, intended—the colonel knew—to make him aware of the all-seeing eye now focused on him, was a scrawled signature, a single name of which only a fancifully scripted capital C was legible. That Carbonell signed himself like an emperor did not surprise him, nor did he find it laughable—though emperors were out of fashion, despots were not, and of such stuff as Carbonell were despots made. The colonel put on his trousers, shifted the tray to the floor, and sat by the window as darkness came to Puerto Morada. Intimations of what might come of the night turned slowly in his head, like millwheels in a lazy stream, affording him a glimpse of every bladed consequence. The woman in his bed moaned weakly, as in a fever; her pale face was blurred and indefinite in the shadow, like a white stone glimpsed through running water. Two roaring lights passed on the street; sprightly music from a nearby cantina braided the hissing of the wind in the palmettos. The colonel’s stomach growled. He ate several of the shrimp contained within the serving dish, but did not open the wine.