Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Soul food. You can eat it.”

  Sam bent over the bowl, sniffing, his nostrils scrolled.

  “Uh huh, right,” he said, and came back to the window to light a cigarette, shake one out for Mitchell. “Man, you want to talk?”

  “I’ve been doing that. Just wind me up.”

  “What about Edison Banks?”

  Sam leaned back from the waist, a little startled by Mitchell’s sudden surge of passion.

  “The man suffers, he’s suffering for his people. He’ll bleed for them if he has to.”

  “I didn’t expect to hear this, coming from you.”

  “Look, I still believe in him, maybe more than ever. He’s a well-intentioned man. His heart’s pure. He’s suffering for his people. He’ll bleed for them if he has to. At the moment he’s getting lousy advice. These bad elements, they’ve gotten too close to him. He needs other points of view.”

  “Whose side should we be on here? Or does it matter?”

  “What the hell do you mean, does it matter? You could be a moderating influence. He wants moderating influences. He knows he’s got a tiger by the tail.”

  “We might disagree about which tiger. Or maybe we don’t. Tell me about Joshua Kingsley.”

  “Kingsley’s very very happy you’re here, poking around. If he was here right now he’d probably kiss me. The more of you the merrier for the PIP. He’s jumping for joy. He’s convinced you’re going to save him ...”

  “And?”

  “And that would be a mistake.”

  “Because of his ideology?”

  “Because of corruption, because of his disregard for the welfare of his people. You can achieve justice without ideology, you’re not going to change my mind about that.”

  “What about this Selwyn Walker?”

  “Selwyn Walker’s why I’m here. This is the way his mind works. His idea of nation-building.”

  “And you know this because ...?”

  “I know.”

  “Chances for armed conflict?”

  “I would imagine that depends on you. What about this Bobby Fernandez?”

  Sam grimaced and lowered his voice unnecessarily, almost causing Mitchell to snort at his pretense of secrecy. “We’re still working that out. There may be a problem there. I can tell you a few things. Walker telephoned a contact of his at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, inquiring about Fernandez. This was an indiscretion on Walker’s part. The Cubans made it clear that certain things should only be discussed in person, not by phone or cable. Certain sensitive issues require face-to-face meetings, of course. They dispatched someone to the island, we have reason to believe.”

  “Fernandez.”

  “We don’t think so. No.”

  “He was here, wasn’t he?” He told Sam about the cat on the door, the note, Te amo.

  “Maybe he arranged something,” conceded Sam. A recuerdo de amor. Something to jog her memory, to let her know he still cared. “We don’t know much about Fernandez, we’re still learning. What about Fernandez’s wife? Was she in touch with him?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “They were quite a pair. He seems to be responsible for the death of her girlfriend in Hawaii. Did you know that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you send her off so quickly? What was going on there?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” Finally, here they were. Mitchell didn’t think he was going to be able to handle this much longer, the weariness was bone-deep, soul-deep. He held firm to Sally’s death, unwilling to barter for anything of unequal value.

  “Oh,” Sam said quietly. After a pause he said, “Look, let’s not talk about this in front of Jack, okay. He’s excitable. He’ll overreact. Jack’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  They talked about Julius Nyerere until the other two returned. They talked about who was teaching what at the University of Chicago School of Economics.

  They wanted to know if he loved her, how much. Enough to lie? His relationship with Johnnie was embarking on a separate, secret life of its own, being given a new identity. No one really liked saying the word love and he was beginning to appreciate how it stuck in the mouth, then dropped out like an egg and you had no idea what was inside the shell.

  There are so many ways to see this problem, Ben was saying. Between you and me, he told Mitchell, if you’re lying it doesn’t matter. Not to us, not among friends. Let’s put it behind us and move on.

  What matters, Ben was saying, it that you’ve fucked with the magnetic field around here. We rather wish you hadn’t. At least some of us. My estimable colleague here at my side says he believes he smells a trend, he’s afraid there’s been a shift in how people imagine things in this part of the world. I tell him not to worry but he says it’s in his job description. We’re the only people in government who believe wholeheartedly in the power of the imagination. Think of us as a praetorian guard of the imagination, guarding the very limited ways in which the world must imagine itself. A civilized world. We find the theories very interesting, but we’re concerned about individuals too. For instance, did someone imagine you, or did you imagine yourself? You understand what I’m saying. What brought you into being, my friend? That’s all we care about, to be honest with you, and we realize this is not a simple question, answers to these questions are always complicated.

  We don’t like anyone imagining they’re us, that’s part of it. It gives us pause. Are they us? we are compelled to ask ourselves, and the answer’s not always as clear as we’d like. You see the quandary it puts us in, Ben was saying.

  “I am you,” Mitchell said. “That’s the problem.” A sentiment for which he was rebuked.

  “No, Mister Wilson, you are not us,” said Jack. “You are not me. You are not me because if you were, you would never have gone up into the mountains, looking for trouble. You are not me because if you were, you would have at least loaded your goddamn gun, first.”

  Jack is our logician, Sam said grinning. Ben you could say is one of our poets.

  Jack began to regard him, it seemed, as a personal affront to his world view. He began calling Mitchell Professor, changing the topic back to Soufrière.

  “Professor, what do you think happened up there with this man Collymore?”

  “He lost his mind, supposedly. He began seeing things.”

  “Now, why, do you suppose?”

  “How could I know.”

  “Professor, what would you say caused him to go stone crazy like that, start shooting people?”

  “How the fuck would I know, Jack?”

  “He shot that girl, Professor. A good, decent person.”

  She was nobody, he said, raising his voice. All he meant by that was Sally was innocent, completely, tragically, out of the picture the friends of golf were painting. Once Sally had died, he saw no way out of it for himself, everything that had happened became his responsibility, even Johnnie became his responsibility, he wasn’t Sally’s avenging angel as some had said but simply the custodian of her memory, because far more than in her life, in death Sally needed someone to protect her from harm, though he couldn’t say even now if he had accomplished that, if it were possible. Sally and Isaac, he couldn’t help them after all and, what made it worse, that very impulse had contributed to his failure.

  He spent the late afternoon and early evening composing what he hoped would be a letter of placation, for Sam to carry back to the States with him and mail to his parents. Because it felt as if his intestines were beginning to disintegrate, he refused his dinner of watery stew, admitting he was making himself sick, he was going to have to get someone to start bringing him food—family members were allowed to deliver meals, or you could pay somebody. After lights out, a card game commenced in one of the communal cells; the dissent among the players filled the block and kept him awake throughout the night. Not that it mattered, not that it really interfered in his more central habitat—the vortex of mosquitoes, the rotting of his right forea
rm, the mind’s enormously nonproductive restlessness.

  Lack of sleep notwithstanding, the morning of his third and last day with the friends of golf, he greeted the team’s two holdouts in good spirits, old comrades-in-arms.

  “So it’s good-bye, Jack. Sayonara, Jack.”

  “Actually, Jack’s out scouting around today,” Sam said, offering to light Mitchell’s cigarette for him, because of his cast. “Making new friends.”

  “With who?”

  “Everybody. It makes more sense nowadays.”

  They had arranged a little farewell celebration of sorts, gotten permission from the warden to have their chat out in the fresh air, brought Mitchell a modest package of gifts—a copy of Time International, candy bars, a thermos of good coffee, a cablegram from his parents in Virginia saying they had lit a fire under Senator so-and-so’s rear end, had high hopes, were praying for him and so on. They were up on the southern-facing battlement of Fort Gregory, strolling back and forth between two squat bastions where guards, discreet with laziness, were posted. Occasionally they would pause to gaze over the parapet, looking off in the blueness toward a continent that filled the distance in their thoughts, but generally Mitchell preferred the exercise, and would be the first to break the spell and get them walking again. Like any other citizen he could make his Hollywood-educated guess, but he still didn’t know who these men were, not really, the government’s men of course, but then he was one himself or close enough. Close enough was an answer Ben and Sam found quite admissible. They both wore gold wedding bands, had wives and maybe kids somewhere in the suburbs, as if to advertise the mundanity of their lives and free themselves from the imbecilic fantasies of the popular imagination. They weren’t making myths or movies: this was business, Patriots Anonymous, an American Civ pop quiz, metapolitics, Roman Catholic confession, and apparently, Mitchell thought by the end of it, something near to being a job interview as well.

  There was a sailing ship, a windjammer with crossbars and square sails, out on the sea midpoint between them and the horizon, running downwind toward Grenada. Sam asked, Is that what you call a frigate? but none of them knew.

  “You didn’t care much for our Jack, did you?” said Ben.

  “I found him lacking in empathy.”

  “He doesn’t understand someone like you,” said Ben. “He doesn’t get it. Frankly, it’s not easy to get. He says, Tuck this kid, throw him off the roof, we got better things to do.’ Jack’s worried there’s a flu going around down here. He doesn’t want the island to catch cold. You know what I mean, the Cuban disease. He doesn’t want anyone coming up to him a year or two from now whining about Who lost St. Catherine. Hah-hah. Of course that’s his hang-up. Jack’s a little bit of an alarmist, isn’t he? It’s not easy to convince him of the truth, that places like this never really amount to diplomatic disaster. Give him credit though, he feels very bad about the girl. It’s eating him up. He has a daughter about her age. That’s Jack.”

  He had not forgotten how quickly the tropic sun seared, like a thin veneer of pain swabbed across your forehead and lips, around the back of your neck. They were all beginning to sweat, and the scum inside his cast was coming alive. The guards weren’t allowing him to have the coat hanger Sam had brought; he looked around, preoccupied, until finally Sam gave him his ballpoint pen.

  “That thing is nasty. You should have them crack it off and give you a new one.”

  “This is already the second one.”

  The nature of his longing seemed to be centered there, trapped in plaster, inaccessible, degrading and infernal. Void.

  “On the other hand,” said Ben, walking with his own hands folded behind him, “Sam here shares your admiration for the honorable Mr. Edison Banks. A moderate and a populist, says Sam. What happened he thinks has just been a question of unfortunate experimentation. Does that feel right to you? Some misguided individual sitting around asking himself, What will happen if I push this button? Oops. Dead girl. Perhaps you recognize the impulse yourself.”

  Mitchell said things: I am not the agent provocateur. For every contrivance, a contradiction. No one can imagine.

  “Wrong,” said Sam, “this is exactly what everyone can imagine and there’s a deep, deep problem inherent in that.”

  “What you are,” said Ben, “is St. Catherine’s very own attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  He chain-smoked and wanted to debate his soul but he was no match for the two of them, teaming up like the Founding Fathers. He didn’t know whom or what he should be striving to appease, or why, or to what moral authority he might appeal his actions.

  “Are you a religious man?” Ben asked in a benign tone. “Have you by chance read Paul’s writings? Romans? seven-eighteen?” He looked at Mitchell with his head cocked, eyebrows lifted, the blueness of his eyes, the aquilinity of his nose, the fine, thin flax of his balding hair all saying let us know ourselves by our country’s traditions, and out came the quote like a gentleman’s silk handkerchief of commiseration. ‘“To will is present with me, but how to perform that good I find not. For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ Does that help? Words of an apostle, keep in mind.”

  Mitchell squinted back into the sun at Ben, feeling only callousness toward such ministering, saying no it didn’t help but he imagined Ben had gotten good mileage out of it on his own political trek toward nobility.

  “I see you as a man in transition between contexts,” said Ben. “I see you as a rider galloping hellbent from his father’s house to the border, trying to stay in the saddle until the rules change or all is forgiven. Would you like the key to the code? Here it is, no conversion necessary: The rules don’t change. All can be forgiven.”

  “I grant you this is a bad state of affairs,” Sam offered, “but not a hopeless case. Cut yourself some slack on this.”

  “Sam will only meet me halfway on this,” Ben said ruefully, “but ideologies are not always reliable. And political decisions based on moral arguments are not always a good bargain. Think of fairness. It’s the perfect template, the ideal standard of conduct. It precludes the need for justice. But who plays fair?”

  “Let’s turn the corner on this,” said Sam. “You relied on yourself and the goodness of your intentions. It was the best you could do. We applaud that effort.”

  “You don’t like the banality of being railroaded,” said Ben. “You don’t appreciate the simplicity of it. There was no old white bwana up there in the mountains running the show, was there? There was only you.”

  “Moral dandyism,” said Sam. “Moral vanity. That’s where Ben and I agree. The folly of sentimental commitment.”

  “The world preys on naïveté. It’s not much of an insight, is it? Priced too fucking high, for one thing. But you learned something, didn’t you?”

  “About gamesmanship. You have to play. You can’t not play.”

  “Well wait, it ain’t that goddamn simple,” said Ben. “You have to play well. Let’s put the emphasis where it belongs. And, man, you didn’t do that, did you,” he said with a cryptic smile, showing teeth too perfect not to be caps. “Not even with alacrity, not even for the fuck of it. You’re here running around taking drugs with the wife of a bigtime shithead, you purchased a weapon illegally, you go tramping around the jungle with a gun in an area that had been placed under martial law, telling yourself you’re making the world a better place. I’m afraid I side with Jack on this. People like you give me the creeps.”

  They reached the western limit of their walk, there was the guard with his sinister curiosity, Ben grabbed Mitchell’s arm only to swing him around, because it appeared he was about to keep on going. He was just too tired, his brain circuitry signaling emergency sleep, to protest. Ben kept his arm, marshaling him forward.

  “Do you want an explanation or not?” Mitchell said.

  Ben stopped and so they all stopped to watch him spit over the parapet, watching like boys must watch anything fall as th
e white dot of phlegm sailed out down to the rocks and placid sea.

  “You know,” said Ben, “Sam’s right. Your case is not hopeless. I think you’ve been getting better at this. I think you’re at like the fifth-grade level of a formative political and spiritual experience, which means you are now as smart as any ten-year-old who realizes that lies solve problems, especially when nobody, for reasons that are not often admirable but sometimes unavoidable, is able or willing to listen to the truth.”

  “Maybe Ben’s saying he’s worried your explanation will bore him,” said Sam.

  “Bore us,” Ben corrected him.

  “Maybe he’s concerned it won’t be of use to anybody, especially to your own situation.”

  “Let me be clear,” said Ben. “I want to hear a really first-rate lie, something that inspires me, something that works for us all. I don’t think I’m asking too much, am I? We came all this way. I don’t think this is going to strain your creative resources, is it? It would just ruin my little vacation here in paradise to have to listen to some weak-minded explanation.”

  “Or maybe,” suggested Sam, “the particular truth we seek from Wilson is so delectable, he’s saying to himself, Why lie at all?”

  “Maybe,” Ben allowed, skeptical.

  “Another thing,” said Sam. “A free man blames nobody but himself.”

  “What do you think about that, Mister Wilson?” chuckled Ben. “There’s something to think about. Once they let you out.”

  That was it. No more friends. He was on his own, knowing that he, in history, must assume the blame for Sally, but someone would have to rub his face in it hard, harder than this, before he’d live with the guilt.

  Don’t be insolent. Don’t set precedents. Final advice from the friends of golf. It’s better to believe the lies, they said. In a case like this.