The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  “It’s too dangerous for him here,” said the rabbi in English.

  “What is too dangerous?” said Saul. Then he asked whether the rabbi wasn’t ashamed, whether he had lost his mind, whether he didn’t understand that by showing up with others and a baseball bat that they were, as far as he could see, the ones instigating the danger.

  “We only need to talk to the boy,” said the rabbi, spreading his arms in supplication, “nothing more.”

  For a few seconds, Saul searched his face. “Tell me, Rabbi,” he said, “did you not escape Kiev within an inch of your life? Did you learn so well from the bloodthirsty Cossacks and Russian priests who came for you and your family when you were a boy?”

  The others looked at Saul as if they were seeing him for the first time.

  “I don’t think you should speak to the rabbi like that,” said the man with the baseball bat and then he pointed it in Saul’s face.

  The rabbi held a hand up. “Not like this.”

  Before leaving, the rabbi said something else to Saul, the thin words of which got lost in the wind.

  * * *

  So, it wasn’t much longer before Maxwell made up his mind to return to New Orleans. This was something else he never told Saul or Benjamin, even if, in some ineffable way, they already suspected it.

  On October 19th, they celebrated Benjamin’s thirteenth birthday. Since the brief encounter with the rabbi and his thugs, Saul thought it best if they had his son’s Bar Mitzvah at home. That morning he asked the neighborhood butcher for credit and, in the evening, they ate rye bread, borscht, and large strips of steaming brisket, followed by Mandelbrot cookies, an extravagant meal for each one of them during those hard times.

  Afterward, they played poker and Saul told a story about a trip to Minsk and Nevel he had taken with his father after his own Bar Mitzvah. He then told the boys a joke that his father had told him on that very same trip, a Russian joke about how the Devil, who for centuries had been planning the end of the world, falls in love with a beautiful girl in Moscow and cancels his plans and how they get married and start a family and then grow old together, although the Devil, who, of course, doesn’t grow old so much as fleshly and forgetful, one day blurts out to his wife that he’s been the Devil all along. But the Devil’s wife, who is still beautiful after all those years and is still mortal, just laughs and says, “I knew that from the first moment I met you, stupid. How else do you think the world is still spinning?”

  After Saul had gone to sleep, the boys went up to the rooftop. They sat on the ledge and shared a cigarette, talking nonstop, and laughing and laughing as if the world truly had been lost and then saved by a hair.

  * * *

  The following morning, Maxwell woke early, before dawn. Benjamin was asleep, a single white sheet wrapped loosely around his body. For a second, Maxwell thought about waking him to say goodbye, but quickly decided against it. Instead, he placed his copy of Lost City at the foot of Benjamin’s bed.

  In the kitchen, Saul was sitting at the table, sipping coffee. When he saw Maxwell, he wasn’t surprised. At first, he wanted to tell the boy that he didn’t have to go, that he could stay for as long as he needed, that he could find him a school or a job, that he would confront the rabbi and his thugs again and again if needed, that everything would change, but Maxwell just smiled and shook his head, as if to say, but what exactly would change? Of course, neither of them knew. Saul handed Maxwell a wrapped brisket sandwich, three dollars, and a large envelope.

  “Benjamin wanted you to have this,” he explained as Maxwell took the envelope.

  Outside, it was cold, as cold as anything Maxwell had ever known, and the street was like a long frozen passageway at the end of which a giant reddish eyeball was slowly blinking to life. At the Illinois Central Station, Maxwell bought a one-way ticket to New Orleans. Since he had a little time, he sat on a platform bench, watching the nameless crowds. A woman dressed in black mourning clothes ran down the platform, holding a paper lantern. A cheerful-looking soldier with one arm hugged a little girl. Porters stood talking near a newspaper stand. Every few minutes, a train left the station with a low, thundering bellow and Maxwell imagined that they were headed to other universes.

  At some point, he ate the brisket sandwich. Then he remembered the envelope. Inside were seven sheets of folded notebook paper, each, except the first, covered back to front with black ink. The first page was the title page and on it was written A Model Earth. Underneath was the following note: It’s only a few pages, but I’ll find you and send the rest when it’s finished.

  Maxwell closed his eyes and thought of nothing and everything, all at once, just as Saul had taught him, as if he were walking through a dark labyrinth, the center of which was bathed in moonlight, or, like his missing father, sailing through an endless dark blue sea toward something unknown. Then he opened his eyes and began to read.

  THE DESERT AND THE STORM

  October 2005

  Puedo ayudarte? she said after opening the Quality Suites motel door to Room 307. Then, after a short silence, during which she gazed past Saul, Javier, and Ms. Zora toward the highway in the distance now lit up by the near-equatorial orange sun, Javier said, Señora Ortiz?

  * * *

  For a moment, Victoria Ortiz just stood there in the threshold of the Quality Suites motel door to Room 307, scratching her forehead above her gray eyebrows, and then she nodded in recognition of Javier’s voice and said, oye! El Periodista, so, you came here checking in on him too, eh?

  Sitting on a couch watching a TV show about glaciers was an old man with salted black hair. When he saw them, he stood up without saying anything. Then he moved toward Ms. Zora, smiled, and gave her a hug. He was tall, as tall as anyone Saul had ever known, and he had the gait, self-possession, and calm gaze of someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Briefly, Saul imagined him hiking through a Martian landscape with its iridescent stones and polar ice caps, its deadly crater walls and wandering rovers. Despite everything, thought Saul, he’s still alive, and we’re here.

  In Spanish, Victoria explained to Maxwell that Javier was the journalist who had been looking for him before the Storm. Then Saul introduced himself as Benjamin Drower’s grandson and handed Maxwell the box containing the manuscript to A Model Earth.

  Maxwell sat back down on the couch and opened the box. He read the title and the name under the title. He thumbed through the nine hundred and twenty-four pages of the manuscript. He smiled at Saul with a mixture of slight, almost imperceptible, joy and bewilderment. Then he placed both hands on the manuscript and said, so, he really finished it?

  * * *

  I don’t understand, said Saul. What do you mean he finished it?

  * * *

  Thank you for bringing this to me. It feels like an impossible thing to hold in my hands right now, said Maxwell after a long pause, the type of pause, thought Saul, that announced he was trying to remember something from his distant past. Something otherworldly and pleasant like the slow unfolding of a long-lost triptych.

  But the truth of the matter, he continued, is that the last time I saw your grandfather, Saul, was in Chicago in 1933. I only knew him for a short while, maybe only a few months, but we still became very good friends. I don’t know how much you or Ms. Zora here know, but my mother did finish A Model Earth, which was a sequel to Lost City. Sadly, before her death, she destroyed it. But before then, quite by accident, I read it all and a few years later, after I met your grandfather in Chicago, I told him the entire story of A Model Earth. In fact, he was the only other person I ever told in my life. We were so young then, what the hell did we know, but he insisted that it should be written down again, which was something I thought I would never be able to do. So he decided he would instead. And all these years later, he said after a short pause, I can’t believe it’s here.

  I had no idea, said Saul, taken by surprise. My gr
andfather never told me about A Model Earth, and, like you, I only found it by accident. He died this past December. At some point before then, I don’t know when, he tracked you down to the Universidad de Chile and then asked me to send a package to you, but, at that time, I had no idea that there was a manuscript inside. In fact, it was his last request before he died, but, by the time I sent it, you had already left Santiago and the package was returned.

  I understand, said Maxwell, and I’m very sorry to hear about your loss, Saul. Then he fell silent and gazed at the TV, but showed no signs of watching it. Saul had seen that faraway look in his grandfather’s eyes many times. On the TV a massive Himalayan glacier was rapidly receding into a valley covered in rocks and gray pools of water. The Anthropocene, said a woman’s voice. The word Anthropocene to Saul sounded like the passage of a fitful breeze through an empty wasteland.

  How did you two meet? Saul asked finally.

  Maxwell smiled and then told them about his childhood, a time in his life he hadn’t thought about for many years, but which, since his return to New Orleans, had consumed his thoughts. He told them about the Isle of Orleans, as his mother had called it, and about his mother’s literary adventures, about her fierce magnetic attraction to science fiction, about her close friendships with Ms. Zora’s grandmother, the prolific librarian Afraa Laguerre, and a young publisher named David Ellison who stopped publishing, but who still left a tremendous rip in the fabric of Southern literature, as if literature were truly nothing more than cloth concealing a burning reality. He told them about his mother’s death in August 1930, about how, shortly after, his father left New Orleans to look for work, and about his few years spent with the old mad pirate and his failed journey to Chicago to meet up with his father, who, by then, had already vanished. His disappearance was still overwhelming to him after all these years, even if he had finally learned to accept it. It had been a naïve, reckless journey, but it had brought him and A Model Earth to Benjamin Drower, a journey, he understood more fully now, marked by light or waves or whatever it was that linked his past to his future across the bayous and the windswept fields of Kansas and the lakes and lonely train tracks also linking New Orleans to Chicago.

  * * *

  Afterward, they left the motel room and sat in the busy courtyard. Maxwell carried the heavy manuscript with both hands. An early-evening breeze passed through the courtyard, suffusing everything with the scrambled scent of barbecue meat and laundry detergent. By then the sun had already set. For some time they discussed Benjamin Drower’s life, or rather, in something like his own words, the narrative path he had followed in life, a path, thought Saul with some solace, that had converged (however briefly, however accidentally) with each of their own.

  At some point, the conversation veered toward the more recent past and the Storm, a territory through which they moved with the caution of a desplazado crossing an unknown border.

  You were a hard man to find, said Javier to Maxwell. If you don’t mind me asking, what happened after you retired and left Santiago? What happened during the Storm?

  The story Maxwell Moreau told them, at length, was as follows: During the second week of December in 2002 he gave his last lecture at the Universidad de Chile, where he had been teaching since 1995, a lecture about what some theoretical physicists called the Big Freeze, the accelerating expansion, thinning, and ultimate death of the universe, after which, he explained to his vaguely terrified students, there would be no stars and no light. With a great big smile, he then released them for the semester. When he could he liked to end all his courses in this manner because there was something useful in impermanence, asymmetry, and possibility, even if he didn’t always know what, something sinuous, elegant, and eel-like, something of an Amazonian river that wound through and gave life to dark, muddy lands, yet, in due course, still emptied out into its own death at sea.

  After the class, he turned in his office keys and walked the streets of Barrio Brasil. He ate outside at a small quiet restaurant in a plaza, talking to the waiters and waitresses there who were his friends and who occasionally sat down with him between dinner rushes and then again after the restaurant had closed to drink chicha fermented from apples and tell jokes until 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m., when everybody went home for the night.

  * * *

  In late January, Maxwell attended a ceremony at the university to celebrate the recent presidential decree giving Chile’s support to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). During the ceremony, he sat in the back of the auditorium and read a strange little Bolivian novel about a mysterious crime on a spaceship with no planet of origin, a novel that fit nicely into the pocket of his gray slacks for just this sort of occasion.

  Afterward, he ate dinner with the chair of the physics department, a cultural attaché from Germany, a vice-president of an information technologies business, and an assistant to the secretary of the interior of Chile in a lavish restaurant in Las Condes, on a brightly lit street flanked by glass and steel skyscrapers and tall boutique apartment buildings, some of which looked like abandoned Pinochet-era offices. The place, thought Maxwell, couldn’t have made him feel more awful, but the presence of the chair, who had long stood by his work and who had the long blooming laugh of someone raised, like him, in a working-class neighborhood, made him feel at ease.

  All in all, the conversation that night proceeded in three stages: First they talked about the approximate cost of ALMA, $552 million US, an enormous cost for an enormous endeavor. Then the chair told a story about a journey he had taken to the White Desert in Egypt in 1966, during which, half-starved, broke, and lost among the dunes, he had stumbled upon a Bedouin camp. At first, the Bedouins didn’t trust him, but eventually, after exhausting his very limited Arabic, they understood that he was a student, a Chilean stargazer who had stupidly forgotten to look where he was going, and they invited him to travel with them on the condition that he bury the silver cross he wore on a silver chain. He wasn’t a religious man, the chair explained, and a little later in life he would understand that he was an atheist, but he had still worn that cross, given to him by his grandmother, for nearly his entire life. But he ultimately agreed to bury it.

  For two months, he traveled and worked with the Bedouins in the White Desert. It was one of the happiest times in his life and, on his last night, they presented him with a small parting gift, a khanjar dagger with a short pistol grip shaped hilt and a short, curved blade like the letter J resembling a hook, a dagger, he only understood years later, that was an emblem of sorts depicting humankind’s fleeting, intricate, and often squandered relationship with the desert.

  After his story, the chair took out a long black box from under the table and handed it to Maxwell. Inside was the khanjar dagger. Without your tireless efforts in the Atacama Desert, he said, ALMA would never have happened at all. Maxwell thanked the chair and the others clapped. Of course, they wanted Maxwell to give a speech, but all he could do was say thank you, but no, no, and smile and soon enough the coffee and brazo de reina arrived and the conversation turned to other, more personal matters. In other words, as they drank coffee and ate dessert, they talked about themselves, about their dreams both fulfilled and unfulfilled, about their family vacations, the long hours spent in pointless meetings, the long hours spent alone but happy, or as close to alone and happy as they could possibly be in this new hyper-connected century. Out of all of them Maxwell said the least and after some time he stood up, thanked everyone for a pleasant evening, and left.

  * * *

  In February, with the help of two of his former students, he sold most of his belongings and donated his books to a local library. Some days later, he packed a large hiking backpack and left Santiago in a rented gray pickup truck, following the coast north along Route 5 with views of rock-strewn mountains, wild sand beaches, and a flat blue ocean.

  The following afternoon, Maxwell arrived in Calama. He’d last seen Victoria
Ortiz a few months earlier when she was in Santiago visiting her granddaughter. But this was the first time he was seeing her home, which was near the Cathedral San Juan Bautista, topped by a shining copper-plated spire, and which looked like a little citadel.

  Victoria greeted Maxwell warmly and they sat on the couch and drank strong, bitter coffee in large mugs while they talked about Maxwell’s retirement, which, he confessed, didn’t feel at all like a retirement. What does it feel like then? asked Victoria. He thought about it for a moment, but didn’t have a good answer. Then they talked about how bright and hot it was in Calama during the day and how at night the cold obliterated every memory of the warmth. When she laughed, her brow creased and a few strands of hair fell from her bun and then rested along her cheek, like, imagined Maxwell, the Spanish shepherdess in Don Quixote.

  Afterward, they walked to a supermarket to purchase a few items for dinner. As they walked along Calle Ramírez she took his hand into hers.

  * * *

  A few days later, in the morning, they drove in Victoria’s white pickup truck from Calama to the expansive plateau at the bottom of the Cerro Chajnantor. At some point, while looking in the glove box for Victoria’s map of the Atacama Desert, Maxwell found a human mandible. The mandible was partially toothless, stained russet, and fractured along one side. He had no idea if it was either thousands of years old or thirty. He held the mandible in his hands unsteadily, Hamlet-like, as if it were able to contort the air around it with fear, astonishment, or horror. It’s not my son, said Victoria, but its somebody’s son.