Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Mistah Bob, mahn, listen, Mundo’s new wife, Concha, is going to say to me, the day before I leave again. When we are bairn we are each given a destiny, not so?

  I want to answer petulantly, wearily, cynically, I know, I know. But I don’t know, really.

  Or I want to say, Deaths, yes. Destinies, no. Destinies you wrestle with, until they shake you off.

  I don’t have a new revelation about Providence, but instead a revitalization of my original one: Time and chronology are two different animals; the latter tame, a beast of burden, always hungry; the former wild, unruly, popping in and out of existential holes, coming at you from all directions, everywhere at once.

  Sunday, we sat at a table moved out to the yard to eat the stewed conch, beans, and rice Concha had cooked for lunch. Chickens and cats scavenged at our feet, Jim Reeves crooned on the cassette player. Gabriel was there, returned from the world to marry his gal, Vivian, and take a government job, night watchman at the new hospital. His domesticated paunch and burgher’s affability made a poignant contrast to Mundo’s wizened poise. In went the food, out came the memories.

  I had first met them as a customer, wading out on the flats in front of Old Town to join the queue surrounding Mundo’s catboat, attempting to buy a fish. Mundo gave me a five-pound slab of red snapper but would not accept my money, which made me uncomfortable. Next day, same thing. Who did he think he was, Santa Claus? Take my pesos, I urged, but on the baffling basis that we were neighbors, he kept refusing. Neighbors, according to my upbringing, were nothing more than the people next door, a fuzzy part of the scenery. You didn’t need them, they didn’t need you.

  Where did a white kid from the D.C. suburbs go in 1973 to develop an abiding sense of community, family, tolerance, and generosity? How would I know? I would have replied at the time. Seek virtue was not ranked on my list of Things to Do in South America. I would have regarded any suggestion to go live among poor black people in the Third World as dubious indeed. Maybe even more so today, having done quite enough of it for the time being. All I know is that it was my destiny to alight in Providencia for a year, to rent a house in Old Town, to have Mundo as my neighbor and friend, then as my teacher. His pedagogy was rudimentary: Watch and learn. He rarely gave instructions or advice or reproach, except where danger and harm were imminent. He allowed me my mistakes, and I accepted his affectionate bemusement with my awkwardness.

  Occasionally he would say, about something good or bad, wrong or right, That is the black man’s way. Occasionally I would say the same thing about whites, but generally the issue of race was so mundane and pointless we never discussed it, except as a joke. I could never get him or anybody else on Providence to stop calling me Mistah—I even retaliated for a time with Mistah Mundo, with no success. It became my name, yet when Mundo requested my most earnest attention, he’d drop the formal, slightly teasing designation in a second. Bob, he’d say in his soft-spoken voice, I am a grown man and my father is dead but still I hate him for taking my future away from me to give me this life of hard work and suffering. In his youth, famous as a baseball player in Cartagena, Mundo was scouted by the gringos and offered a crack at the minors, and an education, in the States. A good son, he returned to his father’s house in San Andrés to ask permission, but his father said no and in those days, Mundo emphasized, you obeyed your father.

  Or, we’d be out on the reef, I’d be rowing, Mundo diving, when suddenly he’d spring up to rest his elbows on the gunnel, his face a bowl of euphoria. Bob, he’d say, put on your mask and come look. This is a beautiful spot, bwoy. Beautiful. He didn’t place a lot of faith in my nautical abilities, though he held to his conviction that, since I had voluntarily crossed the threshold into his world, on land or at sea, under his protection and guidance, I would endure, and that single belief became my own, became deeply self-defining. In return, I trusted him, probably far too much, not to kill me when he went a-cowboying beyond the limits of sane seamanship in his livelihood, half profession and half blood sport. It was a most unusual alliance.

  In went the food and beer, out poured the memories. Mundo and Gabriel exhaled laughter, reminiscing about the first time they carried me fishing. We went outside the reef into big swells; for eight hours I lay tucked into a fetal curl, awash in pink slimy bilge, puking, dry heaving, getting scorched with second-degree burns. That was the end of my life as a fisherman, they assumed, but at dawn the next morning I was on the beach with my gear, ready to go, and was never seasick again. My skin turned brown—When you come to Providence, bwoy, you cyan’t stay white for long.

  Now we had to talk about the first day they trusted me to row the catboat while they both dived. Mistah Bob come back sayin’, “My hands! My hands! They all bloody! What did you do with my hands!” The first time they let me share the diving: You swam ugly, Mistah Bob. Ugly. Like duck. My first encounter with a shark, which had just bumped me and wheeled around for a second pass—I never see a fella fly into a boat so fast as Mistah Bob. And him shoutin’, “Fuck this, fuck this, I ain’t punchin’ no more shark. Fuck this you motherfuckers.”

  More beer, more memories and hoots of laughter. Our two-week excursion up to the Serrana Bank aboard a mother ship, the time the panya cook pulled a knife on me and Gabriel stepped between us. Serrana, where some of the men in the catboat fleet went ashore on one of the atolls and robbed the eggs from the nests of boobies, terns, man-of-war birds. The eggs were overdeveloped and mostly rotten; they ate them anyway that night. Serrana, where you didn’t have to dive, just wade, to fill up a boat with conch, where the sea turtles were as plentiful as hummingbirds in a garden of bougainvillea. Where Mundo announced one morning he had a “sign,” had dreamed that night that he had sex with a man, and that meant this day he was going to shoot a big male hawksbill. And did.

  Mundo’s dream interpretations of the future, their accuracy—I’m at a loss for what to say about them. Or what to say about the psychic coincidence of a moment like this: In “Hunger,” a short story I had written about Serrana, there was a line I penned about Mundo’s mother, the only line I ever wrote about her, something about how she looked at the white man “as if he had come to steal the toes from her feet.” Naturally, I wanted to know what had become of her, since she had lived with her son but obviously wasn’t around anymore. With great pain, Mundo told me she had died only last year after long suffering. She had scratched her ankle, contracted blood poisoning. Mundo took her to the hospital in San Andrés, where they amputated her foot. Just coincidence, I know, but one of an abundance, offered to existence as a novelty. Like certain poems, the incident seems to beg meaning but eludes understanding, perhaps because I’ve lived so many years with these people in my imagination.

  After lunch I unzipped my day pack and brought out my books, flipped through Easy in the Islands, showed Mundo and Gabriel their stories, later read aloud from “Mundo’s Sign.” A tribute. If, as Debussy said, “music is the space between the notes,” then stories are the space between the islands, between lives. Mundo’s reaction was, well, demure; he regarded the books with a thin, aloof smile and, disappointed, I returned them to my bag. There were other people I wanted to show them to anyway.

  Fishing again with Mundo brought another twinge of heartache, like watching a former winner of the Kentucky Derby being roped up to a plow. Forget sailing, forget catboats—everyone used a motor launch now. The whine of the two-cycle engines replaced the hum and slice of the wind. Free diving was out, scuba tanks in. Plastic Clorox bottles instead of calabash gourds for bailers. The reef itself was in robust good health but you had to go farther and deeper to find the fish.

  The result of our hard day’s labor: not even enough of a catch to pay for our gas. On the way back in Mundo began telling me a story of another day he had spent in rough seas. A year after I had left, he built his first launch, took it eighteen miles up north to the top of the reef, and went outside into the indigo water. Then his engine c
onked out and the bad seas stove in one of the planks along the keel. He wedged his shirt into the hole and, with a piece of iron, banged the board back into place. Now they wouldn’t sink but they had to bail constantly. As night fell, he threw out the anchor to slow their drift through the open ocean. When the sun came up, he waited for Cessnyca to come searching for them and send a rescue boat, but there was no plane, and no rescue boat, and when the sun went down again he told himself, Fuck it, they think we’re dead, nailed a sheet of plywood to the bow to catch the wind, pulled the anchor and told his mate they were going to Nicaragua on the current. And for three days and nights, without food or water, that’s what they did.

  Mundo, I wanted to say but didn’t, you’re planting another story in me.

  This is what I remember.

  These are the lives I imagine.

  These are the recurring images that inhabit me, outside place and time:

  The ballet of a man and turtle, their pirouettes through the sorrow-filled loneliness of a blue universe. A black man gorging himself from a bucket of rotten eggs. Sharks like a whirl of gnats around the head of a diver. Boys racing horses on an endless golden beach. The spiral arm of a hurricane, like a serpent’s tail, lashing against the coast. The sleepless eyes of killers and the grin of the barracuda. A quiet day, fishermen asleep in their boats. A naked woman eating a mango, juice dripping off her chin. Rain like a swarm of crystal bees. A catboat heeling into a squall and going under. A machete slashing the arched throat of a hawksbill turtle. A man playing the jawbone, the bounce of the quadrille. An old black woman’s frown of suspicion. An old black woman’s prayers for my safe passage. The phantasmagoric light of the flambeaus, the slap of dominoes against wood, and children drowning. And this, first written in 1979 on the beach in Cape Hatteras, revised in 1980, coming to final rest in ’81, at home and at rest finally, in a short story called “Easy in the Islands.” A woman crawling along the ocean’s floor, weightless as a feather, her hair in flames of phosphorescence. Unbidden, after her death, without my knowledge of her death, Marta came to me, and comes to me, to construct another type of romance altogether.

  On my last day with Mundo I gave him, as I had always intended, the book containing his story. I wasn’t certain he wanted it, or what it meant to him, or if he thought of me, ultimately, as nothing more than a voyeur and a thief. “Ah,” he said softly, “I finally have it. Here it is in my hand,” and, to my astonishment, he raised it to his lips to kiss its cover and complete a twenty-year circle, spinning out into that place where everything exists but our flesh.

  Now it is time to confess. This is what I did with the gold.

  (1994)

  Wartime Interlude

  America’s Marriage to the Far Away

  1. The Bittersweet Lightness of Superbeing

  The numbers stagger and overwhelm, and thrust us far beyond weeping over the endless constellation of lives, so many many lives, brutally discontinued. Twenty-five million men and women in uniform slaughtered in two world wars; 60 million? 70 million? dead civilians. Nobody really knows the count; they are uncountable. Millions more in all the other wars of our time, our century, the American century, history’s bloodiest century. Surely the last to die will fall into a ditch or alley in some forsaken place, a bullet in his chest, shrapnel through her skull, on the very eve of the millennium as the dazzling ball of the future descends in Times Square.

  For the living, the endless expanse of blood is indivisible from the blessing, Pax Americana, or so I thought, watching the Sea Harrier jets come home last May to the USS Kearsarge, on whose hot deck I stood with the flight crew of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, peering out over the calm blue Adriatic, here at the end of this century held too long in what Rudyard Kipling called “the whirlpools of war.”

  Two fighter jets appeared out of the haze, their silhouettes no bigger to the eye than a pair of migratory geese. Where they had come from, what they had done, that they had found their way back to us—these gave weight to the moment. So it was sobering to see the Harriers circle and break their coupling, the first jet banking for its cautious approach, its landing gear extended like stubby feet, a terrible bird of prey hovering above the stern. The second Harrier blasted in a few minutes behind it, turbines winding down like sirens. Beneath the dull gray wings, the undercarriages were empty; the planes had dropped their bombs on Serbia.

  Released from the colorless anonymity of his warplane, the first aviator, all business in his olive-green flight suit and helmet, shook hands with the flight crew, his manner laconic, uncomplicated, elite. The second pilot, the squadron leader, was different, though: what was apparent to me, from the moment I approached him, was that he had a soul, pure and transparent, there for all to see, should they choose to look. Not all men make such an impression, and when I say soul here, it is to remember the words of Vietnam veteran William Broyles, talking about combat survivors: “If you come back whole, you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted.”

  The emblem screened onto the fuselage of the pilots’ jets—a knight’s armored helmet over a crossed battle-ax and sword—­resonated with the second pilot’s features—long face, long Norman nose—tightly framed by his own flight helmet, which made him seem so much like the reincarnation of a medieval crusader. His fingers, too, were long and unexpectedly elegant, and on the back of one hand were inscribed target grid coordinates he had written with a ballpoint pen. His mouth was wide and elastic; smiles contorted into grimaces, toothy laughs into the pained resignation of his jaw. He was, for the few minutes he stood by his warplane, separated from its awesome glory and yet still bathed in the light and darkness of the run, a mythic figure, exalted and tortured by grave responsibility.

  Today, the pilot allowed, was a good day, splendid weather, and they were able to get their ordnance off. That combination always made him feel better, less frustrated, but his eyes held the contradictions of his mission in the Balkans, or, for that matter, the role of the American military here at the end of the twentieth century. He had flown Harriers during Desert Storm too, but there was a not insignificant ­difference—the feeling, he said, that this was less than a conflict and more like a training mission in the States. Later, belowdecks in the officers’ mess, we would talk about the Orwellian corruption of language—NATO labeling the bombing a “humanitarian ­intervention”—which the pilot found distasteful, as if the bombing were the equivalent of philanthropy, one of the many illusions that contributed to the current notion that people don’t, or shouldn’t, get killed in a war or that fed the more airy delusion among politicians and the public that somehow America, here at the end of a war-saturated epoch, had achieved the immutable end of war itself.

  “Is it a fair fight? No, it’s not a fair fight,” he said, asking that he not be identified by name. “I don’t bother to comfort myself with the humanitarian cloak. My job is to just attack.” But later, with his dark eyes weathered and sad, he said, “I pray that it works,” meaning the air campaign, bowing his head. “I pray that it works. We’ve got to end it soon, end the suffering.”

  Maybe such humanity in one of our own warriors shouldn’t have surprised me, given the acute sensitivities of contemporary American society, but it did. Then again, humanity is a luxurious byproduct of waging yet another “war” so abstract, distant, and sanitized.

  After almost a decade of America’s secular jihad against ruthless disorder, it is the sacred and profane pairing of the humane warrior—forged by the military, the Clinton administration, and the counterculture-turned-popular-culture—with the volume of inherited history that much of the nation and much of the world finds curious, puzzling, suspect in its claim to virtue. Repeatedly throughout the bloodshed in Kosovo, the punditry referred to the “new military humanism,” the defense of human rights, as a righteous, or self-righteous, form of armed conflict.

/>   In the mostly illusionary void created by the end of the Cold War, America, too, like nature, reflexively abhors the relative emptiness of a vacuum, filling it with bursts of policy, another type of gas, and not necessarily inert, but more often than not perfumed with what the nation chooses to believe are good intentions: free markets, democracy, international order, the shining light of moral crusades. Applied to the United States, however, the phrase “military humanism” seems oxymoronic and dangerously unrealistic. Better to sort out the confusion generated by the de facto intertwining of military operations and humanitarian operations. How to distinguish between each entity? Where does the persona of soldier as samaritan end and his identity as killer begin? Can the so-called end of ideology really be extrapolated to mean the end of war, or has it merely afflicted the military and its operational doctrine with paradox, ambiguity, and ad hoc missions? Have we turned our military into a force of steroid-bloated cops stationed at the door of a reform school for regional delinquents, or has America truly evolved into the supreme do-gooder, “the ultimate benign superpower,” in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “and reluctant enforcer” of an imperial but enlightened globalism? In other words, here at the triumphant end of the Cold War, if we have regained the military and economic superiority that characterized America at the end of World War II, have we also regained the moral stature that accrued to us after the defeat of fascism, or has the subsequent defeat of Communism somehow muddled our collective value system, leaving us inspired but directionless in the absence of an apocalyptic pairing of good and evil?

  Oh, the bittersweet lightness of superbeing, alone in the world in our greatness, alone with the imperfect mirror of our ideals. Our power both ends grief and begins it. Against great harm we enact greater harm, preventative or corrective or sometimes even punitive, in the name of hope and abiding decency and the beckoning future. While history will perhaps measure our good intentions with approbation, our conspicuous goodness, as writer and World War II combat infantryman Paul Fussell has suggested, might be part of the trouble, allowing us to mislead ourselves and others into believing an ancient, terrible lie: that somehow war can be something less than “the very quintessence of immoral activity.” Immodesty of purpose and certainty of belief—two aspects of America’s vaunted optimism but otherwise known as sanctimony—never have been a particularly wise or holy mix.