The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  Javier looked at the prison sketches later that night when he was alone. The sketches were done in dark shaded pencil and showed gates, clay floors, dusty courtyards, guard stations, and bunk rooms with cots stacked three deep where some men—he had drawn the men as stick figures, but otherwise the sketches were quite detailed and capable—squatted near coal fires and others sat under urine soaked tents of newspapers, hundreds and hundreds of men in each prison, and, lastly, open doorways that led to concrete rooms full of wooden boxes stacked against walls, each box with small barred openings the size of a book through which the men trapped inside for months or even years could look out.

  What the hell am I supposed to do with these sketches? asked Javier. They’d left the diner and were walking, but Saul didn’t have an answer and they both fell silent until they reached the Western Blue Line, where they hugged and said, peace, and see you soon, and where Saul thought he should tell Javier something, anything, to make him understand that he should stay, but he didn’t say anything else and then just stood there for a few seconds on the sidewalk after Javier had entered the station, watching the pale headlights of cars on Western Avenue as they came and went, one after the other.

  * * *

  That was the last time they saw each other, Saul remembered it well, and those were the memories that came to him as they left his front porch and walked side by side that night to a dive bar down the street. A TV over the bar played a soccer game, Mexico vs. Colombia, an International Friendly according to the owner. They ordered beers and sat at a small wooden table near the back. The bar was nearly empty. For a brief time, they sipped their beers and talked about the weather in Chicago, a little unsure how to proceed, like strangers meeting for the first time in a foreign country. Maybe they had nothing else to say or maybe the opposite was true, maybe there was too much to say and they had no idea where to begin.

  After talking about the weather, they talked about Mexico City, about Marina and Maya, who was already bilingual, about the Iraq War, about the American need for war, and about the fanatical landscapes of the Internet. And as they talked and laughed too it occurred to Saul that talking to Javier after all these years still gave him a sense of peaceful familiarity, as if everything they said to each other was somehow a continuation of things already said, even if, thought Saul later that night, there was still something he’d been avoiding telling Javier.

  * * *

  How long do people know they’re dying before they begin to tell others? Or if they don’t tell anybody at all, like his grandfather, how long before others discover irrefutable proof that their loved one is dying? In July, Saul found an open manila envelope full of MRI images of his grandfather’s brain. Five grueling months later he died.

  Saul sighed and told Javier that he was doing a little better, that he’d taken some time off work after the funeral, that he was rereading a few good science fiction novels, that he was trying to figure out what to do with his grandfather’s things, but that, in the end, the stages of grief were bullshit kitsch Americana, like a black and white porcelain clown weeping behind its palms and placed next to an urn on a mantel, really just bullshit, and it all just came down to the simple fact that he missed his grandfather, a fact he suspected would always be true.

  * * *

  I’m sorry, pana, I didn’t know, said Javier. Then he leaned forward, resting his palms on the wood table and glancing behind Saul at the single bathroom door covered in faded stickers of punk and reggaetón bands, adding some seconds later, I left a few messages, but I had no idea.

  * * *

  Some hours later, after they’d left the bar, Javier a little drunk, and grinning the entire time, told Saul that he wasn’t just visiting Chicago but moving home. At first, he’d wanted to surprise him, but, well, fuck it, surprise, in November he’d accepted a good job at the Chicago Tribune, something steady for once, something he could sink his teeth into without it slithering away from him which was what freelance work did, it squirmed and slithered and then, if it couldn’t get away, it tried to bite you and tear your flesh away piece by piece, in twenty years everybody will have freelance jobs and everybody will be broke and miserable and half-dead. Anyway, he had a job and he’d be back in a few months with Marina and Maya. He wanted Saul to meet them as soon as possible. He’d cook up some tamales in banana leaves and roasted chicken in red mole sauce, two recipes he learned from Marina’s mother, Juana, who was Zapoteca and who cooked like a madwoman.

  As Javier got in a taxi, he rolled down the window and leaned half his body outside and said, look, pana, it’s snowing, I haven’t seen snow in years. He rubbed his eyes and the burning white snow turned mustard yellow beneath the streetlights and without a word of goodbye he pulled his torso back through the open window and the taxi sped west down the street, against the wind.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Saul was packing boxes in his grandfather’s kitchen when he heard a thud on the front porch. Once outside, he saw a FedEx truck turning down the street and he found his grandfather’s package on the bottom step, somewhat dented but still intact and still addressed to a Maxwell Moreau at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile. The package had been returned to sender.

  He took it inside and called FedEx. After nearly twenty minutes of rambling conversations with two representatives, he discovered that an executive assistant to a dean at the university had initially accepted the package on behalf of Maxwell Moreau, but then, some weeks later, had sent the package back with a notice stating that Maxwell Moreau no longer taught at the university nor lived in Santiago. Did the executive assistant to the dean give any new addresses for Maxwell Moreau? Saul asked the second representative. I don’t have anything like that here, sir, she said, at which point Saul envisioned a tiresome pilgrimage to Santiago, thanked her, and hung up.

  Completely puzzled and sadly embarrassed that he hadn’t been able to fulfill his grandfather’s last request, he went to his grandfather’s desk and opened the package with a pocketknife. Inside of the box was a large manuscript titled A Model Earth.

  Saul read and reread the name of the author on the title page of the manuscript: Adana Moreau (a writer he’d never heard of before). At first, he thought it was a history book, maybe written by one of his grandfather’s colleagues, but then he read the second page, which, otherwise blank, stated that the manuscript was a “sequel to the novel Lost City.” The third page had a dedication to Maxwell Moreau, who, Saul suspected, must somehow be related to Adana Moreau. The fourth page was the start of the first chapter. The manuscript was composed of nine-hundred and twenty-four letter-sized pages.

  * * *

  I don’t understand, said Saul out loud to himself.

  * * *

  After searching the office bookshelves, Saul finally found a copy of Lost City splayed open on his grandfather’s nightstand, its pages ruffled like a dead bird. At first, he was a little shocked that he had never seen the science fiction novel in the house before, but as he picked up the book he remembered that he rarely went into his grandfather’s bedroom and that the last time he had done so was to say goodbye to him after his death. The book, which was also written by Adana Moreau and which Saul then understood his grandfather had been reading some weeks or months before his death, was a first edition, published in 1929 by a short-lived (or so Saul suspected) publishing house in New Orleans called Amulet Books. On the faded cover was an illustration of a terrifying prehistoric flying creature, maybe a Pteranodon or a Quetzalcoatlus, and a stone portal in the shape of a perfect hemisphere somewhat obscured by jungle vines. The cover, so thought Saul, was a type of nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but the similarities ended there.

  He thumbed through the yellowed pages, searching for some other clues as to the book’s origin or nature—but, of course, it was in vain. The only thing to do was to read it straightaway, which he then did for hours while sitting on the cheap Turkish
rug in his grandfather’s office, just like he had done during his childhood, occasionally taking breaks to eat a snack or piss, occasionally stopping to reread a word, a sentence, a passage, all while the light outside his grandfather’s office window shifted Chagall-like from black to gray to amber, while the night vanished, while the dawn broke and brought with it the damp, sympathetic breeze of a not-yet-bitter spring, truly unable to stop reading until he reached the end because it only took him the first page to know that he had stumbled upon the presence of something extraordinary.

  * * *

  Okay, but what the hell is it about? asked Romário the next day, dropping his voice low as a couple dressed from head to toe in white approached the front desk. They protested to Romário about the hotel’s water, or something about the speed with which the water came out of the adjustable shower nozzle, and also the taste of the water, a taste like fish or algae, an unforgettable, terrible taste, according to the sulking woman who apparently couldn’t shower without drinking the water.

  Saul couldn’t exactly tell Romário what the novel Lost City was about, yet he had sensed something the moment he had started reading it. He had sensed something in its lingering, peculiar beauty, in the Dominicana’s terrible grace, in the madness of cataclysm, in the pale, feverish eyes of the zombies, in the eternal grief of Santo Domingo, in the dazzling blues of the seas of the Antilles, in the lost paradise of Cartagena, the sweet fragrance of fruit and wild rice, the stark violent greens of the jungle, the man with gray eyes, the political gossip and historical amnesia of the residents of the false Lost City, the kapok tree, the Dominicana’s love-struck son, the prehistoric flying creature, and the stone portal leading to other Earths, in short, yes, he had sensed something in its parts but also something beyond its whole, like a distant horizon flickering with blue and white bolts of lightning. And then, some minutes later, he could finally see what others had possibly not seen for a long time, or maybe what his grandfather had also seen in the book all along: that every word, every sentence, every passage, every chapter, concluding in the whole vast thing, spoke of exile. He turned to Romário, who had been holding his silence during those minutes and was now watching the pouting couple dressed from head to toe in white leave the hotel, and said, I think it’s about exile. Then Romário rubbed his eyes and rolled his neck until it cracked and said, did I ever tell you that I spent my thirteenth birthday in a goddamn boat packed with Cubans and two Romanians, I could spend all night talking about exile.

  * * *

  Searching online, Saul found some information on Adana Moreau. According to a sparse Wikipedia article, she was born in 1900 in the Dominican Republic, just outside of San Pedro de Macorís. At some point (the article was unclear when) her parents were killed and she sought refuge in the United States. In 1929, as Saul already knew, she published a science fiction novel titled Lost City. In 1930, she died of unknown causes. The name Adana Moreau also appeared in a travel magazine about the Dominican Republic, but after ten agonizing minutes of reading what he could in Spanish, Saul realized in dismay that the person in the travel magazine was a musician, a rising star, then aged twenty-seven. Adana Moreau was mentioned in a Los Angeles–based CGI artist’s blog devoted entirely to the fantasy, science fiction, and horror pulp magazine Weird Tales. In a blog post dated June 17th, 2001, Saul read that an excerpt of Lost City appeared in the June 1929, Vol. 13, No. 1 issue of Weird Tales. The CGI artist, in brief, explained that he had read and used references in the excerpt for a still-unfinished zombie film he and his friends were working on. There was no other information in the post, biographical or literary, about Adana Moreau.

  After a few more hours of unproductive searching, Saul found an obscure encyclopedia titled The Underground History of Latin American Science Fiction by Arthur Vazquez, self-published in 1984, but available since 2003 as an ebook. Following an entry for Sebastián Morales, a writer from Bogotá who claimed in 1963 that his book of interplanetary travel with talkative, octopus-like extraterrestrials was, in fact, a memoir, Saul discovered a two-paragraph entry for Adana Moreau. For the most part, the entry made the (non-encyclopedic) argument that the Dominican writer should be placed squarely among the pantheon of early 20th century science fiction masters, even if she only had one novel to her name and especially because the “North American, fuck-the-rest-of-you, winners of history” had long ago decided to exile her to the far fringes of science fiction history. The entry also ended with the following: “She was succeeded by her son, Maxwell Moreau, a theoretical physicist of note who specializes in parallel universes.” Saul couldn’t find any other references online to Adana Moreau or any mention at all of A Model Earth.

  * * *

  The next day, Saul went to Washington Square Park, a vaguely Victorian-looking park across the street from the Newberry Library, where his grandfather had sometimes taken him as a child when researching for a new book. He sat on a bench and watched an elderly woman walking in concentric circles around and around the park fountain, like Romário’s madman from Havana.

  How was it even possible for his grandfather to have been in possession of an unpublished sequel to a nearly forgotten seventy-six-year-old science fiction novel? As far as Saul could remember, his grandfather had never mentioned either novel, Adana Moreau, or Maxwell Moreau to him. And what else had his grandfather forgotten to tell him or willfully concealed? Under what circumstances, for example, had his grandfather been born in the Atlantic Ocean on October 21st, 1920? He had only told Saul the fact of his birth on that flight from Tel Aviv to Chicago, but nothing more in all those following years, not even why his own parents had decided to immigrate from Vitebsk to the United States following WWI. Why didn’t I ask him more when he was alive? thought Saul. And to whom then do the words and memories of a dying man even belong?

  The hospice nurse had told him that this sort of thing might happen. She saw it all the time. Near the end, old memories resurfaced like “bioluminescent organisms on the crests of ocean waves,” that’s exactly what she had said, “bioluminescent organisms,” as if she were a marine biologist instead of a nurse. The dying, she continued, often imagine themselves immersed in the remains of their lives and those memories—those bioluminescent organisms if you like—were more real to them than anything else. This can be very painful for those loved ones who still live in the present and who know so little of that past, she said and then gave Saul an empathetic smile.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, very warm days all over the Midwest, Saul read the manuscript for A Model Earth and, despite the mystery surrounding the text, he was left with the same feeling of wonder and exile he had when reading Lost City. The plot of A Model Earth was as follows: The man with gray eyes does not die. Instead, armed with a pistol from the Great War, he kills the zombie and follows the Dominicana through the shimmering portal. Once on the other side, he finds himself in the middle of a bustling tropical city called New Orleans. During the day, he searches in vain for the Dominicana. At night, sleeping on a park bench in the Plaza de Armas, the man with gray eyes dreams of interstellar travel and the face—as painted by Gauguin—of the Dominicana. Sometimes, he wakes from his dreams with a terrible sense of heartbreak, madness. The stars, he notices, are different from the ones he can see on his Earth.

  One night, half-starving, he meets a jazz musician who tells the man with gray eyes he moonlights as a smuggler. I can use a man like you, the jazz musician tells him. A man like me? he asks. A man without an Earth, says the jazz musician.

  Traveling through hidden stone portals on the outskirts of the city, the jazz musician and the man with gray eyes transport illicit arms, food, and technology in and out of countless other Earths. A few of the Earths are variations of his own before its ruin, but most are wildly different. One Earth is almost entirely covered in vast, warm seas, with people etching out a living among a dwindling number of archipelagos. On another, the ice age never ended. The men and wom
en on this Earth ride woolly mammoths and build enormous machines resembling arachnids. On yet another, the Aztec Empire has persisted through the centuries and was the first civilization to develop and drop a nuclear bomb in 1897. On more than a few Earths, there are cities in the sky. The jazz musician explains to him that the cityships, as they are called, are filled with refugees from Earths that are no longer habitable or no longer exist. Even the city of New Orleans on this Earth is a cityship that landed long ago. Goddamn entire multiverse is full of refugees like you, he says and then he starts to laugh. It takes the man with gray eyes a moment to understand that he is laughing at the cityships, not at him. There are no traces of the Dominicana on any of the Earths to which they transport goods, nor on any of the refugee cityships the man with gray eyes searches by himself during lonely nights that show no signs of ever ending.

  In the next Part, the jazz musician and the man with gray eyes receive a job to hand deliver a letter to resistance fighters. The job pays well, but they’re warned it’s dangerous, since there are many people on many Earths who don’t want the letter to get out. Despite these warnings, they take the job. After much hardship, they finally reach the resistance fighters in a small mountainous city and deliver the letter to a soldier, a young boy really, who tells them he used to be a wheat farmer. When the soldier reads the letter, he weeps. His face, in the light of the moon, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Simón Bolívar. Later that night, they set up camp with the resistance fighters in the cavernous lobby of a former bank in a large steel and brick building. They talk about dead languages, 20th century music, the possibility of extraterrestrials, and the unfathomable void left by a war with an empire that desired only to multiply itself across endless other Earths, including their own.