All travel, Speke knew, carries with it this text, the hash-marked plain of the palm. The strongest grasp is always part space. The palm shows a map of courses that are both beginning and end, and even when we love we cradle with this branched cartograph, this stitchery strong enough to search the world for the places that can be visited but never kept, the paths and culverts and fields all ways away.
He had been making his own muffins. It had not seemed right to hire a new housekeeper, and now, six months after Clara’s death, he had finally made a muffin that did not crumble when he took it out of the baking tin. It was not as good as Clara’s, Speke chided himself, but at least it had a shape, a peak, a symmetry, like a miniature cottage made of food.
What would Clara say? He could imagine her voice, her shy, and yet forthright phrasing: Not too bad, Mr. Speke.
He carried the muffins to the table. Sarah praised them. “Wonderful, Ham. Really delicious.”
He leaned on the table, surprised at the pleasure he felt at her praise. “They aren’t really all that delicious.” He wanted to add: are they?
She was persisting in her praise when the phone rang and he heard a familiar voice filtering through the distant answering machine.
He played back the message three times. “There’s a possible lead on Asquith. Not much of one, but it’s better than nothing. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.”
The air thinned, the colors faded to gray.
Asquith, Speke thought. They have found you at last.
“You don’t have to call Holub if you don’t want to,” Sarah was saying.
He did not answer.
“I’ll call him, if you want.”
Speke took a breath. He shook his head, and gave her what he knew must be a sickly smile: No.
This is something I have to do.
He sat at the telephone for a long while before he could force himself to return Holub’s call.
“Mexico,” said Holub breezily, in response to his question. “Showed up on a video of passengers changing planes in Mexico City. At least, we think he did. The quality of the video isn’t exactly great.”
“Where was he going?”
“You have no idea how many agencies have been looking for this man.”
“Where?” Speke repeated.
“East. A Mexicana flight to—I’m looking it up. Merida. On the Yucatan.”
Speke said nothing, although his hands were tingling.
“What I wanted to know is this—do you have any idea where he might be going?”
From Merida across the scrub jungle, through the heat. To the ferry to Cozumel, thought Speke. Or some place like it. Someplace where the parrots make those impossible, desperate-sounding and beautiful cries.
“So he didn’t just vanish,” Speke was saying. “He didn’t get absorbed into the air or the land or just become so much ether. He was a physical being. He had to be somewhere.”
Holub paused briefly before asking, “Did he have a favorite place that you know of.”
“In Mexico?” Speke asked, stalling.
“A favorite town, or a favorite resort. A favorite beach.”
“Every day I try to find him.” Try to find his skeleton, he meant, proof that he was dead. Because if he found no proof, then Asquith was alive, out there in the world somewhere.
“Any place you ever heard him talking about?” Holub was asking.
The bottom of the sea there is so pale, Speke thought, that you can watch the parrotfish just as easily as you could watch birds in the air.
Holub was silent.
Speke wanted to destroy the man who had killed Clara and Maria. And yet he felt that killing Maria was the last harm Asquith would ever do. One way or another, the killer was finished. Asquith would do no further harm.
How do I know this, he asked himself. How do I know anything about Asquith?
Because I mourn for him, he thought. Because I know that Asquith is gone, even if his body survived. The play is finished. The theater is dark.
Help me, he prayed to the souls of Clara, and the forever enigmatic Maria. Help me—tell me what to do.
Holub was waiting. Speke took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
“No,” he said. “I can’t think of a place where Asquith might be.”
The rain was small, not rain so much as vapor, breath, and it collected in the rough wool of his sweater. It descended through the branches, and glistened on the Indian rocks. The sky lowered itself to the earth, and trees vanished.
There was only silence, the steady murmur of the place itself, the sort of sounds that had flowed long before the first human speech.
The mist was heavy. Speke watched the land shrink to a small circle, where he sat beside the mortar holes. This is where the Indians had ground their acorns. The acorns, he reminded himself, from these trees.
The rye seed Brothers had scattered was sprouting, like a night sky of green stars. The ancient trees were already breaking into new growth. The fire, Brothers had said, was good for the trees, and woke them to life. It had seemed impossible, but the gardener was turning out to be right. To nearly die sometimes cures something in living things, a lassitude that claims even the oak.
Everyone knew the truth now. No one was much interested. His old acquaintance, Jessica Moe, whom he remembered drinking espresso on Green Street, had rushed a book into print proving that Asquith couldn’t write a coherent sentence, and that Speke was the force behind the plays after all. Even that point of view was half obliterated by the rapture over what the public saw as Speke the Hero.
The press was full of stories of Speke battling the poker-wielding, drug-crazed freak from his past. Speke as Hercules. Speke as grief-enraged husband. Speke as defender of the other woman in his life, the lovely Sarah Warren. Speke as Olympian. He deserved women by the dozen. Magazines were full of hackneyed imagery: Speke as David against the fire’s Goliath. Speke as Ulysses, warrior against the firestorm. Speke as Speke—bigger than life, larger than the truth.
It was all true, it was all false. He had to laugh. The fiction was all mixed in, a little manure brown to soften the blank white of the real.
He climbed to his feet again. The trail coursed its way through the dark claws of the underbrush, and at one point he gasped and knelt, thinking: bone.
And it was bone, something the fire had not stained. It was the chalky, giant shin of something not human, a cow most likely, a big club of calcium he hefted for a moment, and then let drop. He followed the path, and stopped to study the twin nicks of a deer print in the drizzle-scarred dirt. A young deer, Speke thought, on its way to the lake. He did not believe in spirits. He did not believe in ghosts at all. He did, though, have faith in animals, his fellow spirits, haunting his world, unseen.
Bell’s early chapters had arrived. The book was not titled formally, yet, but its working title was Buried Sun—the Life of Timothy Asquith. Speke was pleased with what he had read, and he had promised to help promote the book, which offered proof that the plays and the songs were the work of one man, working alone. The early studio tapes, those late-night songwriting sessions in Crystal Studios, showed Asquith complaining, arguing, refusing to sit still. Bell’s book maintained that Asquith was the inspiration, the spark, the prod, but the words and the music belonged to Speke.
Bell had also, just the day before, sent along a one-act, an early work by the pre-Speke Asquith. It was called Noonsmith. The play, for two actors, featured dialogue that amounted to little more than argument. The play was badly written, ragged, inept. The most sympathetic reading could only be painful.
Speke wiped the black mud from his shoes on the front step. He entered the house. The piranha flickered in its world of water, a silver flame.
That night he woke from a dream. He could not remember the dream, but the color of it stayed with him, the light of a blue sun in a white sky, a sky as blank as paper, as breath.
Sarah stirred beside him, but she did not wake. He swe
pt on his bathrobe, and slipped out of the bedroom. He passed quietly through the house, feeling very much like a shadow, a figure of no substance.
He was shivering. He sat in his office. The computer screen was blank. He switched on the lamp, and he switched on the computer, but he still did not know his own desire.
I should get up now, and go back to bed with Sarah, where I belong.
Perhaps it was the winter, climbing with its cold and light rain over the big house, but there was a creak. There was a breath of cold, great cold, greater cold than this house had ever experienced before.
There was a sound like a step behind Speke as he sat there, his fingers poised at the keyboard. His neck was cold, as at the touch of frozen speech. He had the impression, without knowing why, that he was not alone, and yet he was not frightened.
He began to poke the keyboard with one finger. Act One. Scene One. A very safe beginning. A play, perhaps even a musical. He could hear the music. Words jiggled into place on the screen. A few more words, a few more sentences. He leaned forward and typed a paragraph, a long blast of dialogue from a nervous, defensive man, the voice of an old friend.
Speke found himself smiling.
Two young men were on a ferry from the Yucatan, the blue of the water so transparent the fish scattered away from the shadow of the vessel, flung themselves across the white sand of the bottom.
The two men knew each other well, but they did not know the coast they approached, their future, the shaggy line of palms bent one way and another, and in some places stripped to bare poles by a recent hurricane.
Speke leaned even closer, unwilling to watch the words form on the screen. He was telling the truth, the story as it had really happened. He found himself laughing silently, alight with the greatest joy.
It was brilliant.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Michael Cadnum
Cover design by Kat JK Lee; photograph courtesy of the author
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2364-1
Distributed in 2015 by Open Road Distribution
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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