Afterward, while walking home, the pirate and her son would ask her what she had been reading and she would describe the novels she had read in great detail. Then the Dominicana and her family would make up stories about Babylon or immortal warriors or space travel, after which they would walk in silence through the gray and rose–colored streets of New Orleans and think about the possibility of their stories, as if thinking about them made them real, which was a true reflection of literature and happiness.
In particular, the Dominicana enjoyed the horror and science fiction novels of North America and England: H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. G. Wells, and Mary Shelley (whose Frankenstein, she thought, had marked the dawn of a new and terrifying era), in addition to the lesser-known writers she found in literary magazines and pamphlets dedicated entirely to the genres. While she couldn’t be certain why she enjoyed these writers, she thought it might have something to do with the sorts of people who came from empires—people who suffered from a sense of unreality. But through unreality, the Dominicana thought, they understood at least one important thing: that people could be other people, cities could be other cities, and worlds could be other worlds.
One night, as Maxwell’s mother was helping Afraa reshelve books, she found a cutout Times-Picayune article about the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who, in 1925, had set out for the Amazon in search of the Lost City of Z, only to disappear. She remembered a similar story her mother had often told her about a Spanish conquistador who set out into the Amazon in search of a city of gold and eternal life, never to return. The story used to horrify her, but she had also been enchanted by it. The discovery of the Times-Picayune article, which coincided with her childhood memory, gave the Dominicana an idea for a science fiction novel about a heroine from the Dominican Republic. Later that night, she told her husband about her idea and he suggested, insisted even, that she write it down before she changed her mind. Shortly after, Afraa let her borrow one of the library’s typewriters and she set to work on a novel entitled Lost City. The plot was as follows: one night in the near future, a young girl of sixteen living in Santo Domingo decides to sneak out of her house and go for a swim. While swimming, she notices a great flash of light in the northern horizon. At first, she thinks the flash of light is beautiful. Then she feels bad for thinking this because she knows the flash of light must also be terrible. Her fears are confirmed. The next day her parents die and soon others follow. By the end of the second day, hundreds are dead. By the end of the week, thousands and thousands are dead.
Santo Domingo falls into chaos. Overcome with grief, she leaves. She walks for three days, avoiding people at all costs. Some are stricken with a horrifying disease and they try to kill her. She imagines that they are zombies, after the lovesick, indentured servants of Vodou priestesses in Haiti. Eventually, she stumbles across a group of survivors getting on a ship named the Bulukiya. The ship is named after a seafaring adventurer in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. She takes this as a good sign. The group of survivors let her on the ship on the condition that she work and sleep on deck. One night, in the middle of the sea, the captain transforms into a zombie and the young girl from Santo Domingo kills him. Afterward, the group of survivors elects her as the de facto captain.
For a few years, the survivors live like pirates in the Caribbean Sea. At night, sleeping under the fiery stars, the Dominicana dreams of sea monsters and mechanical soldiers and an endless library, but during the day she thinks only of the survival of the people on her ship. One day, regardless of her efforts, two large black ships attack the Bulukiya and the survivors are taken to Cartagena to be sold as slaves. The city resembles a ruined paradise on the edges of the earth.
In captivity, she meets an old, dying mestizo from Peru. He tells her stories about his travels before he was taken as a slave. He says that South America is a Netherworld. He says Bogotá is full of zombies. He says Quito is in ashes. He says Buenos Aires is quiet and cold and empty.
He does however tell her about a city in the Amazon where people are gathering and where humanity might have a chance. The Lost City, he says, the golden city, the eternal city. The mestizo says he discovered proof of it as a young man while traveling the world. He then shows the Dominicana a journal he found in an old library in Madrid which was written by an unknown woman in the 17th century. Some of its pages are missing and it’s full of incongruous details and deranged sketches: gold fountains that emit lava, jungle spiders the size of horses, men and women with heads in the middle of their chests, and skies inhabited by cities and prehistoric beasts. The journal also has a detailed map to the Lost City. Then the mestizo tells her that he’s dying and he gives her the journal. Some humid nights later, a fever devours the mestizo and he dies in his sleep. When her captors come to take the body, the Dominicana kills them and escapes.
During the day, she wanders the countryside, living off fruit and wild rice, avoiding zombies and survivors both. At night, she sleeps in abandoned village huts and dreams about her dead parents. Eventually, she reaches the edges of the jungle. The jungle, she knows, is an abyss from which she will never return.
At the start of Part 2, the Dominicana, emaciated and nearly shattered, finds the entrance to the Lost City. A man with gray eyes, who finds her lying near the entrance in a pool of blood and rainwater, nurses her back to health. Shortly after, they fall in love and build a small house together. The city, built amongst ancient ruins and hidden deep in the jungle, is not a golden, eternal city. Wanderers, raiders, and savage bands of zombies show up regularly, making life terrible for the survivors. In addition, the survivors have a hard time deciding on a political system on which to run their new society. They debate the disintegrated political systems and empires of the Old World. Occasionally, these debates lead to arguments, which then lead to acts of murder and rebellion. Sometimes, the Dominicana imagines that the survivors are zombies. She imagines that they are zombies infected with a type of amnesia. Regardless, life inside the city walls is more stable than life outside of them.
A growing number of survivors even start to believe that the Lost City holds occult or metaphysical properties that could be the key to their new civilization. One night, after making love, the man with gray eyes reveals to the Dominicana that the Lost City is a false Lost City. He says that as a young man his grandfather had found proof of the real Lost City. Your grandfather? she asks him. Yes, he says, you once met him. My grandfather disappeared years ago, he says, but I knew the moment I saw the journal in your hands that you had somehow met him and that he trusted you implicitly. Yes, she says, I met him in captivity in what remains of Cartagena. Then she says, I’m sorry, amor, he’s gone. The man with gray eyes nods sadly and says that the real Lost City exists somewhere in a parallel Earth. He says he has more proof. She asks him if anybody else knows about the real Lost City. He says no one else knows, but that a few people in the city suspect he knows something.
In the middle of the night, the Dominicana and the man with gray eyes trek through the jungle in search of the Lost City. The jungle swarms with insects and the eerie songs of nocturnal birds. The Dominicana thinks that even if mankind passes into oblivion, the Earth will still contain the frenzy of life. After some time, they come upon the remains of an ancient pyramid structure, mostly hidden by overgrowth. Inside of a small, roofless room, they find two skeletons and a 17th century telescope. The Dominicana looks through the telescope and sees an innumerable amount of stars. She imagines that the stars are the lights of Santo Domingo and she weeps.
The man with gray eyes tells her that there’s more. He reveals a stone portal in the shape of a perfect hemisphere. The portal shimmers, like the surface of a silver pool. Or a distant memory. In the distance, they hear screams. A small flash of light follows. The flash of light is not beautiful. In fact, the Dominicana’s skin and eyes burn and she has trouble seeing. Then she hears gnashing teeth. It’s the most terrifying sound she has ever
heard. The man with gray eyes tells her to enter the portal. She refuses to go anywhere without him. A zombie enters the small room, violently lurches, and then runs toward the man with gray eyes. The Dominicana recognizes the zombie as one of the survivors from the false Lost City. The man with gray eyes begs for her to go, then turns toward the zombie just as it reaches him. She enters the stone portal.
In the final Part, the Dominicana finds herself riding a train alone. The train passes through jungles and cities. Some cities seem unfinished and have spires that pierce the sky. Others are made entirely of glass or rock. Still others look like immense geometry problems or shadows that stretch into the horizon. Half of the cities throng with people and half of them are empty. The train finally stops. She steps off a wooden platform into a jungle. She understands then that she’s in a parallel Earth. She waits and waits for another train, but none come. She then searches the jungle for signs of other people, but there are none. At some point, she realizes she’s pregnant and she discovers a clearing in the jungle with the ruins of a city and another stone portal. When she tries to walk through the portal, nothing happens. Six months later this is where she gives birth to a boy with gray eyes.
One day, when her son is nearly nine years old, the Dominicana spots a girl bathing in a river. The girl has long legs and shining black hair. When the girl sees the boy, she runs away.
The next morning, the Dominicana notices that her son is melancholy. To no avail, they spend the next few days searching for the girl. One day, while searching, the Dominicana spots an immense creature with a sword-like beak and black wings circling above the jungle canopy. She remembers the mestizo’s journal. Who was the unknown woman who wrote the journal? she thinks. How did she find her way out of this endless jungle? she wonders. But she doesn’t have time to figure it out. She realizes, horrifically, that the immense creature is hunting her son.
Just before dusk, the Dominicana and her son hide in the trunk of a massive kapok tree. Night falls. Her son is terrified and can’t sleep, so she spends the long night fashioning a spear from a fallen branch and telling him about the seas of the Antilles and her life on another Earth in Santo Domingo. At some point, the boy asks her about his father and she tells him, again and again, that he saved her life and that he had gray eyes, just like him. She then sings to the boy. How was the Earth created? she sings. Is this truly the only one? Where does one universe end and another begin? The boy finally falls asleep.
At dawn, when the creature attacks, the Dominicana does not lower her gaze or even close her eyes in the anticipation of death, which is nearly certain. Instead, she stands in front of her son with the spear because, really, there is no other choice.
* * *
The Dominicana kept Lost City in a drawer for three months, until, one late summer day, she gave it to her husband while he was packing for a smuggling trip to Cuba. The pirate read Lost City from beginning to end, sometimes by flashlight, out in the middle of the sea at night or in a noisy hotel room in Havana, and not only did it give him the wondrous impression that the world was an infinite cycle of worlds, he greatly admired it. When he returned to New Orleans, he told his wife that she had written a masterpiece and he took her out to dinner to celebrate.
Some days later, the Dominicana gave the manuscript to Afraa, who, by chance, had recently met a young publisher at a party by the name of David Ellison. He had been involved with the short-lived literary magazine the Double Dealer, once hailed as “the Renaissance of the Vieux Carré,” but he now ran the small publishing house Amulet Books. Without telling her friend, Afraa gave the manuscript to the young publisher. After one exhilarating and sleepless night of reading, he decided to publish it in the spring of 1929. Lost City did well, especially for the small publishing house, which was accustomed to barely breaking even, and sold its one thousand copies by September. The fantasy, horror, and science fiction pulp magazine Weird Tales embraced the novel and published an excerpt. Lost City was even considered for a prestigious award for new writers given out by Loyola University.
A few months after the release, a sharp cultural critic for the Times-Picayune wrote that the novel predated and enhanced William Buehler Seabrook’s concept of the zombie and, in fact, upended the Western world’s fascination with Haitian Vodou, reanimation, and multiple dimensions. In other words, the critic concluded, the novel Lost City was visionary and there was nothing in contemporary literature like it.
Other and more numerous critics called the novel maundering or grotesque or dangerously socialist, each stating in their own careful yet counterfeit way that (much like with the New Orleans Voodoo queen Marie Catherine Laveau) the suspect reason was that it came from the frail and disturbed imagination of a woman from the Caribbean.
* * *
In mid-November 1929, an old journalist from New York City who had roots in New Orleans came to interview the Dominicana. A colleague of the journalist, whom he had worked with at The Messenger from 1924 to 1928, mailed him the novel and suggested that in addition to a review, he should find and interview the author in person. The journalist read the novel on the long train ride from New York City to New Orleans, yet he couldn’t quite make much sense out of it, or anything really, including the white and yellow landscape outside his train window, the recent events of the Wall Street Panic, or even his own life, which, he thought, had been marked by random and often meaningless events.
During the interview, the Dominicana and the journalist sat at her kitchen table and drank coffee. To start, he asked her how old she had been when she arrived to the United States. She replied she had been sixteen. He asked her what led to her immigration. At first the Dominicana didn’t say anything. She sipped her coffee slowly, letting the steam fill her nostrils like a scented breeze. She then calmly explained what it was like when the American Marines came to her country in black steel ships and murdered her parents.
She told him what it was like to be an orphan in San Pedro de Macorís and then Santo Domingo, which was a cursed thing, like the lives of Pelias and Neleus, the twin sons of Poseidon and Tyro who were left on a mountaintop to die by their mother, who herself had been an orphan. And the more the Dominican writer talked, the more she realized that it didn’t matter if the journalist was there or not. Really, the interview was more of a confession through which she could finally reveal something about her past—the warren of her memory, which contained immense fields of sugarcane, an island zephyr, the seas of the Antilles.
“And is this really what your novel is about?” the journalist asked.
“Oh,” the Dominicana said, “I don’t know. That’s for others to decide.”
The Dominicana and the journalist sipped their coffee in silence.
“And what do you think of this Panic?” he asked.
Before she could answer, her husband and her son came into the kitchen with a small bucket full of red beans, a basket of oysters, and French bread. The Dominicana excused herself and grabbed the basket of oysters from her husband, and kissed Maxwell on the forehead. The boy, a tall and wiry child, ran into the other room.
“My son,” said the Dominicana.
“An African cricket,” said the journalist, more to himself than to the Dominicana. He then glanced out the kitchen window, where the pale sun was setting, and he knew that he wouldn’t write the review and that his days were numbered.
* * *
Around this time, the men and women of Melpomene Avenue began to gather on street corners to discuss the Wall Street Panic. For a short time, there was general confusion as to what would happen to their neighborhood. The confusion began when the old mad pirate started the rumor that the city would assert ownership of the neighborhood and destroy it, much like what it had done to his parish. The old mad pirate bellowed that his shack was underwater and that the city had consumed it, like a great and ravenous octopus, and that it would now consume Melpomene Avenue.
Al
though many people living on Melpomene Avenue believed correctly that the city was indeed an octopus grabbing everything that was rightfully theirs, the rumor was ultimately unfounded. Before long, the pirate asked his dear friend to stop spreading rumors. The pirate walked door to door and consoled his neighbors, sometimes offering advice or even small favors. In this way, the people of Melpomene Avenue soon realized that they had other things to worry about.
* * *
Regardless of the Panic, David Ellison decided that he would forge on and publish the Dominicana’s second novel. In fact, he gave her a healthy advance and she started work right away on the sequel to Lost City, entitled A Model Earth, in which the city of New Orleans is a spaceship and in which there are innumerable Earths in parallel universes.
In the summer of 1930, when she was nearly done with A Model Earth, the Dominicana fell sick. Her advance was nearly all used up and her husband was having trouble finding work, so they didn’t immediately go to a doctor. It was only when she started to have nosebleeds and when a fever kept her from writing that the pirate took her to a Welsh doctor who owed him a favor. The doctor, a capable but exhausted man nearing the age of retirement, examined the Dominicana and then told the pirate and his son that they would have to be careful with whom they came in contact.
“Is it serious?” the pirate asked the Welsh doctor.
“It’s hard to be certain,” the doctor replied. “I haven’t seen an outbreak of typhoid since the war, but this is my third case in two weeks.”
“It’s serious, then,” the pirate concluded.
The pirate spent every waking hour taking care of his wife. He cleaned their home on Melpomene Avenue from top to bottom. Although her appetite was waning, he cooked for her and went to the market at least once daily to barter for the best vegetables, fish, and meats. He changed her sheets three times a day and made sure that she was never alone. He couldn’t stand the thought of her being alone. If he couldn’t be with her, he made sure Afraa or the old mad pirate or Maxwell was by her side. At night, he lay next to her, listening to her hoarse breathing. In the mornings, before the sun rose, he got up, kissed her on her sweaty forehead, and cooked breakfast.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 3
