It looked lumpish, deformed, a monster made of jungle slime. Washed off, the green and coral white gave way to perfect black, rough-hewn, the glass carved into the scallop-shaped divots glass always leaves when it is crafted. They had their find, an idol, a little feline god.
A treasure. It was, Asquith had breathed as soon as he examined it, a fake. Speke was more cheerful, even manic. Fake or not, he had argued, it was theirs. And it might well be authentic. Hamilton had argued for a trip to Merida, or Mexico City, to have it verified, but Asquith had wanted to bury it somewhere nearby while they decided what to do with it, to keep it away from robbers, or from the whims of the things themselves, which so easily vanished or got lost. While he voiced doubts, it was clear that he wanted to believe that the cat was a genuine treasure. This had led to their great disagreement, after their wondrous celebration. It had led to the end of their friendship.
Speke stood before him now, and lifted his hand to take Asquith’s shoulder. Where is Maria? his eyes asked, and even though Asquith had told him the truth, Speke was slow to understand. “I’m not going to play your game, Timothy. I want you to tell me what you have done with her.”
My game, Asquith wanted to laugh. But that wouldn’t be fair. Because this was, in a way, a game, after all, as was most art. “She is out there,” he said. “Go look.”
There was doubt in Speke’s eyes now. Anxiety was making him slow, and deliberate, the same feeling that caused some people to become frantic.
A jaguar god, Asquith mused now, as Speke stepped through the French windows of the Outer Office. It had almost certainly been authentic, he thought as he waited beside the desk, one of the many Mayan idols strewn in the jungle. The vegetation there was so ingrown and so infested that it healed over even famous monuments, closing in over parking lots and highways. It had long ago swallowed the remains of that symbol of their youth, and their friendship, the black god.
I always wanted to write a play, Asquith thought, about the two lost young men, so recently successful with Ham’s first songs that they could live in idleness and discovery like that in the heat. I wanted to write the play, or the screenplay, complete with music, that would convey the affection I had for Hamilton, and the wonder of finding such an astounding, rough-hewn miracle in the lime gray earth. This was going to be my crest-jewel, the tale that made up for years lost to illness, and to fear.
But, Asquith told himself, the tale had always been Ham’s—it had always belonged to the world of light. And I was wrong to ever imagine otherwise, to believe that I could claim even so much as an episode as my own.
Speke was out there in the woods now, and Asquith was waiting for him to make the discovery. Why hadn’t he seen her yet? She was not far from the Outer Office. Surely he had found her by now.
Asquith cut at the air with the poker, a fencer readying his thrust and cut. The iron hummed.
He eyed the poker. It seemed, just then, less a weapon than something magical, Aaron’s rod, a caduceus from which the snakes had fled. He made a sound, part cough, part laugh. Come back, he called to his old friend with his thoughts. Hamlet, mortally stung, will yet fight to his death.
Only please be quick, dear Hamilton. See her soon, make your discovery, and get all of this over with. The audience is hushed, hankies in hand. The ushers are frozen in place at the exits. All eyes are ours.
Be quick.
Speke saw trees. He saw a place of tree browns, tree grays. That was all. Where was Maria, he had asked, and Asquith had indicated that she was out here.
This was bad. This was a trick.
But as he failed to see her anywhere, he began to see that the living Maria was hiding. She must be. Dread stirred, and became relief. That was it—it was another part of the game, the rules of which kept multiplying and unfolding, the further dissemblance of Asquith, both Lazarus and magus.
Surely it would be all right. There would be limits to how evil Asquith had become. Speke had always believed in life, in the basic light within the core of even terrible events. “Maria?” he called softly, increasingly convinced that she was here, watching, waiting, Asquith’s sister but, at the same time, the wife and lover of Hamilton Speke.
Come out where I can see you.
That morning in Cozumel, the puddles chalk white from the hard rain on the coral soil, Asquith had taken Speke’s hand. They had been celebrating all night, drinking down their joy at discovering the obsidian cat.
Asquith had taken his hand. Held it, and, like a man lifting a glass to his lips, he had kissed Speke on his knuckle. The very knuckle burned, even now, the knuckle of the forefinger of his right hand. It had been plain in Asquith’s eyes: he expected to be kissed in return, there, on the lips.
The tiny frogs had scattered around them. There was so much life that unless you were very careful each footstep killed one of them. It was the impossible multitude, as well as their tininess, that had made them seem unreal. There were too many of them, he had thought, the way sometimes he stepped back from a television screen, struck by the thought: there are so many people.
There was so much life in the world. Speke rubbed his knuckle into the palm of his hand, a man trying to erase not his future, and not his past, but his own character. The little frogs had come out with the rain, and vanished with the heat, a kind of living smoke. The parrots had spiraled through the light, with cries like steel given the gift of joy. Iguanas had marched through the scrub like ugly aristocrats. The air itself had been an extended body, as warm as blood.
When Speke had responded by turning away, Asquith had strode into the excavated tumble of stones, stepped forth with the black cat and accused Speke of stealing. He stole Asquith’s time, and his affection, and all the while he was oblivious, knew only his own happiness, his own faith, his own belief that the world belonged to Hamilton Speke.
Asquith had lifted the black cat high into the sunlight, so high the glass god glittered.
And then it had all ended—all of it.
Maria, his prayers called, louder in his mind than any call could have been. Maria, please come out. The game is over. It was always going to be over soon, and it was always going to have a happy ending.
He heard them first, the living static that surrounds the wound, and feeds upon the blood. Even as he knew that Maria was hiding, or perhaps merely bound somewhere, clamped into silence, he began to hear the tiny songs, the keen of insect wings.
He put his hand out to a branch, grasped at it, and missed his hold. He found the branch again, and kept himself upright.
Time to come out, he called in his soul. Time to come home and be safe. He followed, step by step, the ceaseless thrumming of the flies.
Not like Clara, his inner shriek said. Not like Clara. It won’t be anything like what happened to Clara. You’ll see. It will be all right.
The roots, the stones, the scattered acorns, of course, and the clawed, worked-over grave. But there was nothing there to give him any concern. Everything is sun and air, he thought. There is nothing wrong. The light from the sky played on the sharp, cinnamon brown stones.
And then he saw her.
39
At first she looked like part of a tree, a forked, treelike growth, an oak turning into a human being. It was easy, for an instant, to believe exactly that: a tree was turning into a woman, blossoming into a human form. This transformation was curious, and even amazing, and it was an illusion he struggled to maintain even when he began to realize what he was actually seeing.
He reached up to take her into his arms, but she was too high, and her face, a twisted, blackened gargoyle, looked down into his. Speechless, he stretched his arms upward. A cord cut into her blue neck, and attached her to the great, smooth-barked branch of an oak.
Even when he called to her, she did not respond. This isn’t what it seems; it’s another trick, he tried to tell himself. It’s only another joke.
But the cold stone weight in his blood told him the truth. She was nothing like her
self at all. She was transformed. She was no longer human, this woman he had never really known at all.
Her name was his heartbeat, his breath: Maria.
Blood and other fluid had streamed from her body, and spattered the ground beneath the tree. Already there were flies. It was the sight of the flies that snapped him, that and the sound they made, the relentless, pointless hum, that endless nearly soundless syllable they made, that tiny, mindless keen.
The idiot chaff of the world had her. Flies, the little, mindless flecks, tasted her eyes, and Speke did not know where he was. He did not know his own name, and whether or not he had a past. He was not a man anymore.
There was only the strangest sound, a shriek, as of a voice torn. That, and the strangest lucidity. He observed himself with a sickening detachment. There had been blackouts before, during his drinking days, nights that were holes in his life, holes so complete they seemed never to have happened. Waking after such a night, it seemed that time had, somehow, healed itself, sunset welding with dawn.
But this was something entirely different. He forgot everything, and everyone. And yet, he knew. He lived the present like something years gone, or like something far in the future, something that had been foretold and inevitable.
Speke threw himself through the half-opened French windows. The window frame clung to him. Glass shattered, shards of it skittering underfoot. He stumbled, and recovered his footing.
The knife was in his hand, the light off the steel nearly making a sound, a crystalline peal. Asquith cut at him with the poker, but it was not, both of them seemed to understand, a serious attempt to defend himself. Asquith thrust again, and it was a fencing pose, the tragedian’s flair for the rapier, that allowed the poker to ring against the knife, withdraw, and strike it again, virgin fire tool against kitchen implement making a crisp, metallic music.
“The final scene, dear Hamilton, strewn with noble corpses.” Asquith stabbed with the poker, and Speke reflexively fended the heavy weapon to one side with a stroke of the knife.
“So you see at last,” said Asquith, smiling, or was it a grimace? It was the expression of a man looking into the blast of a sudden fire. “Endgame. I win. You mastered life, dear Hamilton, but I mastered everything else.”
The poker whipped the knife from Speke’s hand, and sent it spinning far across the floor. The heavy iron lashed again, humming through the air, an arc descending toward his skull.
He caught it, seizing it with both hands, wrenching the poker from Asquith’s grip, and hurled the tool to one side. It spun, describing a gray circle through the air, and punched the wall just beside Athena.
It was an embrace. He grappled with Asquith, finding a grip on Asquith’s crusted neck. His thumbs found the life in Asquith’s throat, a leaping thing like a trout, and he caught the living creature under his thumbs, and pressed, pressed hard, seeking, and finding, the little jerking thread.
He held the quivering fiber of Asquith’s life.
This wasn’t happening, and yet it was. It was the only event in his life that mattered, the only thing that had ever actually taken place. This embrace, this grip. There was, in this vivid dream, a struggle. Asquith fought back, his fist striking Speke’s forehead, knuckle crunching against his ear, his jaw, bringing the barest of taste of blood to his tongue.
Asquith flailed. He wrestled free. He slipped as he picked up the desk chair. He hurled it, but Speke caught it easily. Another pane of glass crashed, and the chair flew, as though by its own will, dancing on one leg, out the open window.
Speke caught him again, by the arm, and wrenched that limb so hard the joints popped. He felt now that he would never release Asquith again. They would be locked like this forever. Even Asquith seemed to understand, and to surrender, Speke’s hands at his throat. His hands clawed and grappled at Speke’s face briefly, but they weakened and began pattering about Speke’s eyes like large, warm butterflies.
Asquith’s expression was blissful. His lips twisted, as though with speech. Yes, his eyes seemed to say, I have put up a fight, but it was all to establish myself before this audience as a man who was a hero—flawed, betrayed by even his soul, but in the end a human being of noble nature.
Speke did not release his grip on Asquith’s throat. Asquith made a sound, a rasping, airy utterance, and one of his arms waved up and down, a referee signaling an obscure but outrageous penalty.
This was further magic, the adept at his most skillful, both hero and clown. This was yet another role, the escape artist in agony. Speke thought only of Maria, and Clara, even as he was aware of Asquith’s contortions. He watched himself, aware as he might have been aware of a television in a hotel room next to his own, hearing without listening to the tattoo of Asquith’s feet on the floor.
There was a bright sun inside him. It rose. They say suns never rise, that the earth falls, continually, toward the star, and away from itself. But this sun rose, white and blinding. Speke had the impression of squeezing so hard that Asquith’s spine was a knobbed cable in his fists. He saw only a distant face, blurred and unreal, a charred and twisted cartoon that became with every hammer of his pulse less and less human.
Speke took a breath.
He stepped back, and a heavy burden collapsed awkwardly away from him, and sprawled. Speke’s own throat hurt, and he coughed. There was a silence in the room, a flat, total quiet, worse than a blast. There had been a roar, but now there was nothing. The sun in his head faded, dissolved in the sky.
There was a smell, like the soil of a hospital room. Speke put his hands to his lips, to his eyes. He groped his own head with his hands.
He took another breath. The roaring noise, he realized, slowly, had been his own voice. He tried to take a step, but could only shift one foot forward, like dragging a large, heavy stone.
A room. Of course—he knew exactly where he was. He had always known. The gray and white veins of the green serpentine shivered in his vision. Athena was eyeless, staring with those two planets where there should be irises and pupils.
He wanted to talk to Asquith. He wanted to ask him a few questions. Where was his old friend? He would call and his friend would answer. They would understand each other. They would help each other again. He would never forsake his old companion.
Sarah’s hand was cool, and it was strong.
He worked his lips, and yet no words would come.
“Maria,” Sarah said, not a question, a password.
Outside, Speke said, forming the word soundlessly. She is outside. Go look. Go look, and tell me none of this has happened.
She left, briefly, and then she returned. She knelt and examined the sprawling, gaping creature at Speke’s feet.
She put her hands to her face, and her silence was like a word—like a prayer.
Speke felt a tiny, dry laugh twisting deep within himself. I can bury Asquith yet again, he thought. This entire play can be leafed back, page by page, to its beginning. It will all take place, over and over, scene one and the final, silent scene both encased in the same cover, held by the same spine, enclosed within the same darkness into one single point in timelessness.
She took his hand. “Come on out,” she whispered. “Come on out, away from this place.”
40
Speke’s father had never expressed a belief in God. His blueprints and his drafting table, his rolls of solder and his C-clamps had been, apparently, faith enough for him. And yet, from time to time, their father had taken Art and Hamilton to church, the big, purple-carpeted Methodist church with the pipe organ that vibrated the floor beneath their feet. The services were dull and stately, the minister black-robed and gregarious, shaking hands at the church door after sermon and collection and the final, sparsely voiced hymn. God had seemed to the youthful Speke to be associated with the prosaic, the microphone clipped to the minister’s robe, the freshly mimeographed program that stated which family had paid for the splash of lilies beside the Bible.
Somehow, though, he had gathered
that there was an illogical, even impossible, last court of appeals, a dumb wall which could be addressed, in a heartfelt apostrophe which did not even need to be heard. God was what was not there, a deep absence, and because Speke had learned that what was missing, or at least not apparent, was responsible for much of life, it did not seem completely foolish for even a faithless man to pray.
He prayed now, as Sarah led him into the sunlight. But this was not a prayer of supplication, or for forgiveness. This was a deeper, more anguished cry, almost devoid of coherent thought. It was the nearly wordless question: what have I done?
These hands of mine: what have they done?
Outside, where Sarah led him, the patches of sunlight flowed over their bodies, a stream of light and shadow, as if they had wandered before the flowing images of a movie projector.
Speke could not speak to a human being. He needed to speak to time itself, to the earth. And what language could he use to address the universe? He himself was the memory of a memory, a dream dreaming. Every hope he had ever entertained had vanished. Life would always be very simple, from now on, very simple and entirely empty.
“I’ll take care of everything,” said Sarah. “Don’t worry.”
Thank God, he found himself thinking, for Sarah.
Still, he could not respond. He could only take her hand again, as she was about to leave.
“Don’t worry,” she repeated.
Speke was beyond worry. He was washed up high ashore by everything that had happened. He did, though, feel gratitude for Sarah. She did what she had to do, like someone experienced at this, well-rehearsed for this sunlit scene.
He could not shape the words, but the thought twisted in him: her help was a treasure, but it was too late.
The names were wounds, the secret names for vital organs in his body that would never heal: Maria. Asquith. There was another thought, one that nearly stopped his heart: was it all my fault?
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