by Lorraine Ray
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How the dead fish named Joseph G. Terrel came among them in their Movement for the Reappearance of Anauk, and how they came to decide he must be with the goat-faced immigrant is a longish story.
It begins with understanding principled men. For a principled man who is continually incensed by the miscreant deeds of others (and the many resulting world social injustices), true contentment lies in remote, inhospitable places. While in these deserts such a man feels at ease surrounded by a landscape which is devoid of shelter and populated by savage beasts in whose souls no sympathy dwells. Without the comforting presence of lush green meadows or any definitive sign of the promise of life which God renews each year in spring, the principled man silently revels in the knowledge that he will meet his death far removed from the world of human evils and far from hope at the same time. In such lost places, he supposes, John baptized, Jesus wandered, Muhammad prophesied. And for the modern version of an austere gentleman, happiness, which truthfully is not his object, flows from the self-imposed solitude and tragedy of his earthly sojourn, and though he may finally adopt an attitude of quiet resignation to living, it is still quite anomalous when he displays anything remotely akin to joy.
Joseph G. Terrel was just such a fiercely somber young man, who had grown increasingly scornful of the great American prosperity of the 1980s. During the last years of that decade, when Joseph was studying for his doctorate in sociology at Harvard, he supplanted his vaguely scornful attitude with an impregnable lifetime principle: wealth and the pursuit of individual pleasure must be condemned as vehicles for the imperialistic exploitation of the poor (he reached this conviction during long afternoon discussions in one of the last counter-culture enclaves after the terrible encroachment of chain coffee stores of Au Pain Boulle). He was seen in the company of one of his only friends, Juan Berrios de Barca, a Harvard law student from Mexico, and he vowed, even before he turned in his thesis to consider only those tenured-track offers from university located in impoverished, relatively desolate places and to eschew the comforts of wife and family in favor of the advancement of worthy causes.
Early one spring afternoon the sun shimmered off Boston's remnant snow and the patrons in one of those cafes in Harvard Square consisted of Joseph and two students who sat across from each other in a booth and lingered over their thick wedged of sandwiches, all the while adopting gravely defensive postures toward their stacks of books. Joseph served himself a steaming cup of coffee and promptly ripped open a sugar packet, scattering the contents across this table. He was anxious. When the string of bells on the restaurant door jangled, and Juan walked in, Joseph stood up and laid one palm in the sugar, awkwardly brushing away the sharp sugar pricks.
Juan ordered hard rolls, but without waiting for them to arrive, launched into an intense discussion regarding his opinion of the teaching position Joseph should accept. Upon examining Joseph's three offers, Juan declared that without a doubt the Arizona offer, because of its proximity to several shabby border towns and depressing Indian reservations, was especially pitiable, and therefore ideal. With Juan's opinion set, Joseph became visibly more relaxed; his friend's opinion was so highly prized that he already had planned to let Juan choose for him since Joseph never could decide anything for himself. That afternoon he accepted the offer and began preparing to move to Arizona.
So that was how, at the urging of his friend, Joseph chose the appointment at the university in Arizona, where he soon became a familiar sight, walking deliberately across the Bermuda lawns and alongside the university's ponderous black basalt walls, a tallish, thin man with large, pensive brown eyes, glowering behind tortoise-shell frames. Each noon while the university was in session, he sat rigidly on the balmy porch benches surrounding the second story of Old Main (the original university was completely contain in that building in the 1880s) dressed even during the summer's greatest head, in a brown cord jacket and matching waistcoat, with saggy khaki trousers, and black zippered half-boots, worn at the heels and unpolished.
He developed an immediate appreciation of every strange form of desert vegetation or wildlife, whether it was the chains of pendulous cholla cactus, the imposing alien figure of a giant saguaro cactus or even a lizard, a bug or a snake. He formed an alliance with the marked impermanence of the place; the hapless trailer parks and matchbox homes, scattered about like bone chards, gratified his appetite for deprivation. Then, as an increased charm associated with his move, he encountered the same cheerful privation abounding nearby in Sonora, Mexico.
By his third year in the desert southwest, Joseph had fashioned himself into a contemporary John the Baptist, banished to the wilderness; half sociology professor, half-social activist, a resolutely virtuous young man. But he missed the great discussions with his friend.
Over time, Joseph's impressions of the desert, filling his letters to Juan, strengthened Juan's emerging conviction that he too should work there, offering his legal services freely to all and sundry under-repressed people. So shortly after he received his degree, Juan arrived in the desert, passed the Arizona bar exam, and established his law office in the crumbling second story of an aged adobe building.
Very soon after he opened his office, Juan taped a hand-lettered notice on the opaque window of his front door which proclaimed that free legal services were a right to be accorded all residents of the land of Greater Anauk, which stretched from Nicaragua to Massachusetts, areas encompassing the Aztec empire and including rather wild projections of the extent of its trading relationships. Juan had learned of Greater Anauk after he joined the Nauhautl Society, the Party of Mexicality, which had as its goal the creation of a genuine aboriginal democracy. According to the party doctrine, in a genuine aboriginal democracy, man lived together like fingers in a hand. Such an important form of democracy was thought to emerge once man returned to the principles of the ancestors of Anuak: rejected the retrograde dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, revived the animalistic relations existing in Greater Anauk prior to Spanish and English domination, and ate corn instead of wheat.
As never before in the history of Joseph's moral passions, this peculiar-sounding goal, the awakening of this extinct religion in Greater Anauk, immediately consumed the greater part of Joseph's thoughts. When he wasn't at the university teaching, he sat in Juan's office, conducting a campaign of regular submission of wild diatribes against American policy in Central America for the society's newsletter "Azteca Grande," articles which Juan meticulously, but rather wearily, translated into the archaic version of Spanish the newsletter employed. With increasing fervency, Joseph endorsed the opinions of society elders, including those who perished in the Spanish genocide of 1500, whom the society preferred to believe had not died, but rather had gone to sleep (and still regularly attended their meetings in spirit).
Unfortunately Joseph's fervor in his continuous work of behalf of the Movement for the Reappearance of Greater Anauk, soon troubled Juan. Juan, who was twenty-seven years old, was not yet married himself, but he had an active social life. With a little inquiry about his friend's past, Juan realized that Joseph's troubles stemmed from overly strict, uptight parents. The sight of Joseph's severe person persistently inhabiting his office distressed Juan, who realized that Joseph's sudden obsessive interest in things pro-Mexican ameliorated his loneliness. Such loneliness and celibacy never figured into Juan's plans, so he vowed to end it for his cause-driven friend.
Periodically, through his involvement in the society, Joseph had been asked to provide one bedroom of his two bedroom apartment to be used as a safe house for Central American refugees being smuggled into the United States. Joseph had always been eager to offer a spare room of his, too. In this, Juan saw an opportunity to effect the change he desired.
