The Economy of Light

by Jack Dann

  He picked us up at a private airstrip on a nearby ranch, and we flew around storms, past the black thunderheads, and the plane shimmied and rattled and shook as if we were in an old bus. Below was rainforest, uniform, a seemingly endless sea of evergreen. It had often been described as an ocean, and that was the effect it had always had on me. Looking down through wisps of cloud, one was always on the verge of panic, for the forest seemed larger than life and somehow as deep and as dark as any uncharted undersea shelf. Genaro sat near a window, too, on the other side of me, and looked down. He was silent, and I imagined that he was feeling awe, just as I was. But Bob started talking, perhaps to break up the silence that seemed to be percolating up from the jungle floor below. “All this jungle used to scare the shit out of me. But I just stopped thinking about it, since I’m in the air all the goddamn time over it. If anything went wrong, though, we’d be shit out of luck. Even if we could survive crashing into the treetops, who the fuck would ever find us out here? I’ve known of planes going down; never found a one.”

  “What about your radio?” I asked.

  Bob laughed. “Don’t worry about it. This old horse feels like it’s falling apart, but it’s better than anything in its class, better than anything like it made in the USA.” Without pause, he asked. “What are you doing with all that shit, anyway?” He meant our packs and provisions. “ You still looking for war criminals?”

  “No,” I said, “just business.”

  Bob nodded, as if that would explain everything. “You still doing work for the Post?”

  “Yes,” I free-lance for them.”

  “You back here to work or just fucking the dog at your ranch?”

  “A little of both,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

  “And you’re completely full of shit,” he said. But he didn’t ask anything more, and he never said a word about the pemphigus that disfigured my face.

  We landed in Itaituba, and Bob said he wouldn’t be more than a half-hour. We waited in the plane. I took a painkiller and watched planes taking off and landing, seemingly at once from opposite ends of the airstrip, for this was a gold-rush town, which might account for why Bob was making a stop.

  Although Genaro was sitting right beside me, I felt absolutely alone, bereft. I had done nothing in my life but chase down a myth. Now, even when I knew that Mengele was dead, after I had seen his bones in the graveyard, I was still chasing the myth. Chasing it to death. I had no wife, no family. I shivered with the realization that I had suddenly leapt from all the possibilities of youth to the shock of mortality, as if the intervening wasted years had collapsed with the weight of my ennui, and here I was. Perhaps the stimulus had been seeing the jungle below me and trying to grasp its green infinities, and yet I felt I was slipping inescapably into its darkness. Even here in the noisy, gasoline-stinking afternoon, bright with sunlight, I knew that I had torn free of all that had been my life.

  I felt as if I were back in the camps.

  I was in pain. But that wasn’t it. I was feeling the magic of darkness, of the underside of things, of slipping past the rational and the traditional...even though this was a scorching, transparently clear and bright afternoon. I had let the jungle take me, just as I had let Mengele take me. I was of one mind again, child and adult.

  I looked away from the death-defying acrobatics of the pilots in the hundred or so planes taking-off and landing and found Genaro staring at me.

  As if we were both musselmanner.

  As if we were both lost.

  Damned.

  * * * *

  We were in Manaus by dusk. Bob had business to do in town and was going to stay the night. We took a taxi to a fleabag hotel we had both used over the years, a place just outside of the duty free zone. Manaus was probably one of the world’s largest outdoor bazaars. The streets were filled with elegant turn-of-the-century buildings adorned with French ironware; below were shops selling electronic equipment, watches, cameras, stereos; and street vendors sold their wares on blankets laid out side by side on the baking sidewalks. Music of every variety was constant, and at night neon and prostitutes turned the area into a honky-tonk whorehouse. In the center of town were skyscrapers, for this hole in the jungle was also a place of international commerce. Further out were shack cities and the modern, middle-class subdivisions called conjuntos; and on the edge of town were the new factories, mostly Japanese, that assembled radios and televisions, for there was no import duty on components here. The stench of chemicals pervaded the air of Manaus; it was as if Trenton, New Jersey had been transplanted in Eden, in the primordial forest. From where we were we could just see the blue and gold tiles of the Teatro do Amazonas reflecting the tropical sun like a jeweled helmet; it wasn’t a church, but an opera house built during the rubber boom.

  Our hotel, The Elegância, had a charming old-world façade. It was four stories, stuccoed, and covered with creeping vine. Outside the door an old cabloco woman wearing very dirty clothes of very bright colors was selling parrots and wild animals in cages. The musky smell of jaguar was overpowering, even outside on the streets. There was a large male, just over five feet from nose to the root of his tail, in an inadequately small cage. It growled as we passed, a low vibration. I turned to look back, and it met my eyes. It was orange-tan with rosettes of black all over its body. It pressed its head against the bars, as if it could somehow slip past them through stealth alone.

  What better guide to death than this cat by my door...?

  We checked in, walked up two flights to three adjoining rooms. I felt tired and depressed. The room didn’t help my mood: cracked plaster on walls and ceiling, a bed with a white cover that looked grimy and yellowed, and there was no door separating bedroom from bathroom. But my window overlooked the streets and I opened it fully. The sounds below were faint and muffled, yet comforting.

  I cleaned myself up and lay down on the bed.

  There was a knock on the door. I said “Enter” and Bob walked in with a bottle of cachaça and two water glasses.

  “You still drink this stuff?” he asked, sitting down on the bed beside me.

  “No, I haven’t had a drink in some time.”

  “Well, here,” he said, handing me a glass of the transparent liquid. “I got a big deal going down tomorrow. I’m nervous.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Gonna sell the stones, and some stuff I picked up in Itaituba. Then I’m going back home.”

  “What? I thought you loved it here.”

  “Time to go home,” he said, pouring himself some more rum and then putting the bottle on the floor between his feet. “This is going to be a big shot for me, and I’m going to take the money and go back to the US of A. I talked to Tonie.” Tonie was his wife.

  “You mean she’s going to take you back, after all these years?” I asked, incredulous.

  “I’ve been writing her letters for the past year, and calling her, you know, begging her forgiveness. The real problem’s going to be with my kids. They’re teenagers, and from what Tonie says, they hate my guts.”

  “You can work all that out,” I said. “But I must admit, it’s a surprise. It became dark quickly and the room glowed in blinking neon light from the barras below.

  “I’ll get a job. I gotta do something. But we’ll have enough money, and I’ll try to make it up to her. She thought I was dead, did you know that?” He laughed. “And when I called her the first time, she couldn’t believe it was me, that I was down here, doing what I’m doing. I think now she’s got some respect for me, you know what I mean? But, you know, she wasn’t seeing anybody else. Christ, it’s been ten years. It was as if she was waiting for me or something.”

  I nodded.

  “So this is probably the last time we’ll see each other for a while...if at all. We should have a party or something. So now you want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

  “There’s nothing going on,” I insisted.

  “You’re sick, and you smell bad. Te
ll me. I got a bad feeling about you, like you’re dying or something. That’s it, isn’t it. You’re dying. But what the fuck would you be doing out here, and don’t give me any of that secret mission shit. You owe me at least an explanation. You still owe me one for that tip on that SS guy who you found in Uruguay. What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Who killed him?”

  I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have to. We killed him in 1965. We were under orders from Mossad. He had been one of the executioners in Riga. I had bludgeoned him to death, and we put him in a trunk in Colombia Street near Carrasco. But killing him haunted me for years. I saw Mengele laughing at me as I hit the fugitive Nazi SS officer. Mengele supervised my dreams from that time on, for in that instant, I had become like him. I had become like the man who had killed my family. I had become the man I killed.

  “Well,” Bob said, “be seeing you.” He picked up his bottle and stood up.

  And then I told him that I was dying and going to see a witch doctor.

  But I didn’t tell him that he might, impossibly, be Mengele.

  Bob stood by the bed, shoulders hunched, and looked at me. “Well, if the doctors can’t help you, what the fuck else are you going to do? It makes as much sense as anything else. Wasn’t there some guy that was in the news some years ago, a healer who operated without instruments? Maybe that was in Mexico, I can’t remember.” He suddenly stopped talking, as if he had embarrassed himself. Perhaps he thought that I was delusional, yet he had been taken in, just for an instant, only because he could believe that I was very ill.

  He left the room, unable to say very much, unable to look straight at me, it seemed; but returned an hour later with three women.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked.

  “One last party, remember?” Then he knocked on Genaro’s door, shouting, “Hey, Genaro, I bought you a present, open up.”

  The women huddled just inside the doorway. They were obviously prostitutes, overly made-up and wearing very tight, low-cut dresses and high spiked heels. The one standing closest to the door was of average height, and her hair was blond. She was pretty, but much too thin and flat-chested for my taste, and she had buck teeth, just slightly bucked, but enough to cause her to open her mouth slightly, which gave her a breathy look, a caricature of a nineteen fifties pin-up. The others had dark hair and looked like caboclos: part white and part Indian. Their features were sharp and thick and strong, as if created by a woodcutter rather than an etcher; their bodies, although shapely, were compact, as if they were made of denser stuff than the other woman. The cabloclo women were quite pretty. Both were tall and had long straight black hair that was so shiny as to have been oiled; one of them had a hairline scar on her cheek, which added to her feral appearance. But all of them looked hard and bored, and angry that they had to be here at all, that they would have to lay down under Bob or me or someone else in a foul-smelling bed and be pounded and suffocated for those few minutes that it took to come.

  Well, they wouldn’t have to worry about me. “Goddammit, Bob,” I said as he returned to my room. “Get these people out of here.”

  “Don’t you like them?” he asked.

  “Just get them out.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I paid for them, I’ll take care of them. Your friend Genaro wouldn’t answer his door.”

  “He probably knew what you were up to.”

  “That’s such a crime?”

  “I thought you were going back to your wife?”

  “Not right away,” he said grinning, looking like a mortician in a black suit with shiny pants.

  I closed the door after them and was left once more to the almost hypnotic movement of light in the room. A red haze seemed to be blinking on and off, but it was dim, almost one with the dark. The neon out the window seemed to be reflections of the colors of my nightmares, and in the shifting shadows of the room I could almost imagine that Mengele was here, lowering his hand, giving the signal to electrocute my brother. I shivered with the same fear I had always had of being alone in the dark. I couldn’t take a shower at night, for whenever I would close my eyes so as not to be stung by the soap, I would imagine that someone would be on the other side of the curtain, ready to grab me for another experiment. I switched on the lamp by the bed, carving out a dimly lit and isolated area of safety. I sat on the bed and listened to my past, the whisperings of boyhood thoughts; and I was afraid to close my eyes, lest I might see myself once more in the camp, lest I might see my brother screaming and then jerk bolt stiff at the shock of electricity; but there was more that I didn’t want to see, that I was afraid to see. I was afraid to remember, to visualize, the look on the old man as I struck him. The SS officer, the killer of Riga, looked as if he was being eaten away by cancer; he must have weighed a hundred pounds. And as I killed him, he whispered ‘mother.’

  I didn’t hear it until years later.

  I heard it in recurring dreams, and it was my voice.

  I rose from the bed and hurried to the door. “Bob,” I shouted. “Bob....”

  Genaro looked out from his room, and then he closed his door without a word.

  Regretting my sudden change of mind, I went back into my room. Immediately there was a soft knock at the door. It was the woman with the scar. I let her into the room and turned off the lamp. She undressed in the neon, which was like firelight. She stared at me, taking off her blouse and her bra, and I felt frozen, an adolescent with his first whore. I undressed quickly, clumsily, while she watched, but I wouldn’t remove my underclothes until I was under the sheet, for I didn’t want her to see the marks of my pemphigus. Her touch was cool, her fingers surprising long, and I closed my eyes while she traced her nails over my chest and stomach, stopping short of my groin, a professional opening to her well-rehearsed act. Her face was tinged with red, softened somewhat by the outside light, and I held her face while she touched me, barely able to see her hairline scar that ran across her check. I kissed her, smelling cigarettes and perfume, and tasted the sugary residue of soda-pop, while she expertly took me inside her. This was going to be my last, I thought; and I was free, as if death was freeing me from disease and destination; but that too was illusion, for I was racing death as surely as I was pumping into this woman’s body; and destination was now destiny.

  Mengele.

  Even now, even here...especially now.

  The woman was quiet, her breathing even, It was as if she were in another room entirely, removed from me. But I was using her, and my guilt was another incarnation of loneliness. I was a dying, middle-aged man taking a last communion. But in the instant of climax, when I felt transformed into the neon light all around me, wan and pulsing, straining for my ending, for it all to be done, I heard the old man I had killed whispering his last word.

  And I opened my eyes and raised my head and saw my mother, ashes floating like dust, filling this room like a furnace with the red light of death and distance.

  I closed my eyes tightly and saw a death’s head in the red-limned darkness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOGEY-MAN

  We parted company with Bob early the next morning. Bob looked burned out, yet he offered to join us, if we would wait for him to conclude his deal. I thanked him, and then he offered to fly in and pick us up. “Sure,” I said, not believing that I would ever see him again; and we lost each other in the streets.

  The vendors had been out for hours, and as it was a Saturday, there were so many of them that Genaro and I had to watch where we stepped, lest we walk upon the vari-colored blankets displaying goods and, perhaps, break something. We passed tanned Italian tourists wearing leisure suits, Americans wearing bush jackets and baggy pants, and Japanese as well as native Brazilian tourists, all of whom had come to the wild and dangerous jungle to vacation and shop. We passed stands of vegetables and fruits where Indian vendors shouted and haggled with prospective buyers. We passed people selling crocodile skulls, shells, snake skins, musical instru
ments, herbs and potions, and I almost gagged as we went through a fish-market where seventy pound tambaquis catfish lay on long slippery stands alongside eel and turtle and piranha and fish that had probably never been catalogued—ugly, ancient-looking, spiny creatures that looked reptilian. Young boys were running around and loud music seemed to be blasting out of every doorway.

  I followed Genaro to the concrete wharfs where we might find a boat. There was a haze on the river, although it was late morning, and the barcos—the small boats and barges, which were in various states of disrepair—were packed into the quays, as if they were but a floating extension of shantytown. A speedboat passed slowly by with two uniformed men watching the shore: agency police patrolling the river for smugglers and poachers. I looked around at the nearby barcos: many of them were barges with a motor; some had two or three decks, all with the ubiquitous, colorful hammocks, upon which people were lying down and drinking and listening to portable radios. Even here music was a background. The sounds of canned easy-listening music mingled with samba, rock, and jazz-fusion. A beautiful mameluco woman breastfeeding a baby watched us from the deck of a small motor, which was covered with stacked boxes and grayish-white squares of sorva, a gum often used for calking and the basic stuff of chicle. A few fishing boats were anchored, but most were up river and long gone. In fact, although young boys were all about, shouting and catcalling each other as they packed and unpacked cases of soda, beer, supplies, and food from a large boat—this a passenger ship, with a high smokestack, several decks decorated with brass fittings and filigree, that plied the water between here and Santarem—there were few men in the area. There were many women working here, though: cooking, putting out wash, working on the boats, selling and trading fish and palm nuts and jute for sugar and salt and kerosene.