“Let me go!” she said, pushing at my chest.
I glanced behind me. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”
“No!” She broke loose from my grasp. “I can’t!”
Again I caught hold of her.
“Leave me alone!” she said. “I’m.…” She brushed strands of wet hair away from her face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be crazy, acting like that.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“You can’t know that!”
I pulled her close, pressed her head onto my shoulder. She was shaking. “Calm down, just calm down. You’re all right. Don’t you feel all right? Don’t you feel better?” I stroked her hair, my words coming in a torrent. “It’s just the pressure, all the pressure. We’ve both been acting crazy. But it’s over now. We have to leave; we have to find a new place.” I searched the sky for signs of the monster I’d seen earlier, but there was only the darkness, the rushing moon, the lashing fronds. “Are you O.K.? Are you feeling O.K.?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t worry. It’s just the pressure. I’m surprised we both haven’t gone nuts.”
“You’re not going to leave me?” Her tone was similar to that of a child who’d been expecting a beating and had been granted a reprieve.
“Of course not. I love you. I’m not going to leave you … ever.”
Her arms tightened around my neck, and she said that she couldn’t stand the idea of losing me; that was why, she thought, she’d lost control. She just couldn’t bear going through the same heartbreak again. I reassured her as best I could, my mouth dry with fear, continuing to look in every direction for signs of danger. The sea rolled in, smooth swells of ebony that detonated into white flashes on the reef.
“Come on,” I said, taking her hand, pulling her along. “Let’s go back to the house. We have to get out. This place, it’s no good anyway. Too much bad shit has happened. Maybe we can find a boat to take us upriver tonight. Or tomorrow morning. O.K.?”
“O.K.” she forced a smile, squeezed my hand.
We went stumbling along the shore, beating our way against the wind. As we were passing close to a clump of palms, their trunks curved toward the sea, a figure stepped from behind them, blocking our path, and said, “Dass far as you go, mon!”
He was standing barely a dozen feet away, yet I had to peer in order to make him out: a cocoa-skinned boy in his teens, about my height and weight, wearing jeans and a shirt with the silk-screened image of a blonde woman on the front. In his hand was a snub-nosed pistol. His eyes looked sleepy, heavy-lidded—Chinese eyes—and he was swaying, unsteady on his feet. His expression changed moment to moment, smiling one second and the next growing tight, anxious, registering the shifts in chemical valence of whatever drug he was behind.
“Gimme what you got, mon!” He waggled the pistol. “Quickly, now!”
I fumbled out my wallet, tossed it to him; he let it slip through his fingers and fall to the sand. Keeping his eyes on me, the gun trained, he knelt and groped for the wallet. Then stood, pried it open with the fingers of his left hand, and removed the contents. My vision was acting up; superimposed on the boy’s face was another face, one with coarse features and pocked ocher skin—the image of the counter depicting the youth.
“Shit … boog muthafucka! Dis all you got? Quetzales all you got? I want gold, mon. Ain’t you got no gold?”
“Gold!” I said, easing Odille behind me. To the surprise of half my mind, I felt in control of the situation. The bastard planned to kill me, but he was in for a fight. I was in the game again, flooded with unnatural strength and cold determination, my fear dimmed by my partnered consciousness with a muscular little freak who thrived on bloodlust.
“Ras clot!” said the boy, his face hardening with rage, jabbing the gun toward me, coming a few steps closer. “Gold! American dollars! You t’ink I goin’ to settle fah dis?” He waved the fistful of Guatemalan currency at me.
The rain had let up, but the wind was increasing steadily; all along the beach the bushes and palms were seething. The sky above the hills had cleared, and the moon was riding just high enough so that the tip of the highest hill put a black notch in its lowest quarter. With ragged blue clouds sailing close above, their edges catching silver fire as they passed, it was a wild and lovely sight, and my heart stalled on seeing it. I felt calm, alert, as if attentive to some call, and I watched the tops of some silhouetted acacias inland swaying and straightening with a slow, ungainly rhythm, bending low all to one side and lurching heavily back to upright again, like the shadows of dancing bears. At the center of the wind, I heard a silence, a vast pool of dead air, and I knew that other world, that place half my home, was whirling close, ready to loose its monsters upon whoever failed this test. I was not unnerved; I was empowered by that silence, unafraid of losing.
“Didn’t you hear me, mon?” said the boy. “T’ink I foolin’ wit’ you? I ast if you got gold.”
“Yeah, I got gold,” I said coolly. “I got more gold than you can handle. Look in the secret compartment.”
“What you mean?”
“There’s a seam inside the billfold,” I said, gloating over what was to come. “An inner flap. You have to look real close. Slit it open with your fingernail.”
The boy stared into the wallet, and I flew at him, driving my shoulder into his abdomen, my arms wrapping around his legs, bringing him down beneath me. I clawed for his gun hand, caught the wrist as we went rolling in the wet sand left by the receding tide. I butted him under the jaw and smashed his hand against the sand again and again, butting him once more, and at last he let the gun fall. I had a glimpse of a dagger falling onto the rust-colored sand, and as we grappled together, face-to-face, in his eyes I saw the shadowy, depthless eyes of the counter, the coarse slitted folds, the hollowed pupils. I smelled cheap cologne, sweat, but I also smelled a hot desert wind. The boy spat out words in a language that I didn’t recognize, tearing at my hair, gouging at my eyes; he was stonger than he had appeared. He freed one hand, punched at the back of my neck, brought his knee up into my chest, sending me onto my back. Then he straddled me, twisting my head, forcing my face into the sand and flailing away with his fist, punching at my liver and kidneys. There was sand in my nose and mouth, and the pain in my side was enormous. I couldn’t breathe. Black lights were dancing behind my eyes, swelling to blot out everything, and in desperation I heaved up, unseating the boy, grabbing at his legs; I saw leaden clouds, a boiling sun, and then darkness filmed across the sky once again. The boy broke free, coming to his knees. But in doing so, he turned away from me, and that was his undoing. I knocked him flat on his stomach, crawled atop him, and barred my forearm under his neck, locking him in a choke hold by clutching my wrist. We went rolling across the sand and into the water. A wave lifted us; black water coursed over my face; the moon blurred into a silver stream like the flashing of a luminous eel. I surfaced, sputtering. I was on my back, the boy atop me, humping, straining, his fingers clawing. His Adam’s apple worked against my arm, and I tightened the hold, digging into his flesh with a twisting motion. He made a cawing noise, half gurgle, half scream. I think I laughed. Another wave swept over us, but we were anchored, heels dug into the sand. I heard Odille crying out above the tumult of wind and waves, and suddenly my glee and delight in the contest, the sense of possession, of abnormal strength … all that was gone.
The boy spasmed; his back arched like a wrestler bridging, trying to prevent a pin; and he went stiff, his muscles cabled. But I could feel the life inside him flopping about like a fish out of water, feel the frail tremor of his held breath. I didn’t know what to do. I could release him.… I doubted he would have any fight left, but what if he did? And if he lived, wouldn’t he continue to be a menace, wouldn’t the game be unresolved, and—if not the boy—would not some new menace arise to terrorize me? I didn’t so much think these things as I experienced a black rush of thought of which they were a part, one that ri
pped through me with the force of the tide that was sucking us farther from the shore, and once this rush had passed, I knew that the choice had already been made, that I was riding out the final, feeble processes of a death. Even this realization came too late, for at the moment the boy went limp, and his body floated up from mine in the drag of the tide.
Horrified, I pushed him away, scrambled to my feet, and stood in the knee-deep water, fighting for balance. For the briefest of instants, I spotted something huge, something with needle teeth and a flat skull, bending to the boy. The Odille was clinging to me, dragging me away from the shore, saying things I barely heard. I turned back to the boy, saw his body lifting, sliding down the face of a swell, almost lost in the darkness. I searched the sky and trees for signs of that other world. But there was nothing. The game was over. Whatever had come for the boy already had him, already was tormenting the last of him in that place of snakes and deserts and black silences. That place forever inside me now. I looked for the boy again. He had drifted out of sight, but I knew he was there, and I would always know how his body went sliding into the troughs, rising up, growing heavier and heavier, but not heavy enough to prevent him from nudging against the reef, his skin tearing on the sharp rocks, then lifting in the race of the outgoing tide and passing over the barrier, dropping down and down through schools of mindless fish and fleshy flowers and basking sharks and things stranger and more terrifying yet into the cold and final depths that lay beyond.
* * *
When I returned to the house, I discovered that the figurines depicting the youth and the warrior had been shattered. The marmalade cat fled from our footsteps and peered out from beneath a chair with a guilty look. I didn’t puzzle over this; I was for the moment unconcerned with validation and coincidence … except for my comprehension that the life of one world was the shade of another, that the best and brightest instances of our lives were merely functions of dark design. That and the memory of the boy dying in the shallows colored everything I did, and for a very long time, although I went about the days and work with my accustomed verve, I perceived a hollowness in every incidence of fullness and was hesitant about expressing my emotions, having come to doubt their rationality. Odille, while she had not been aware of the undercurrents of the fight on the beach, seemed to have undergone a similar evolution. We began to drift apart, and neither of us had the energy or will to pull things back together.
On the day she left for Paris, I walked her to the dock and waited with her as the ferry from Puerto Morales unloaded its cargo of fat black women and scrawny black men and chickens and fruit and flour. She leaned against a piling, holding down the brim of a straw hat to shield her eyes from the sun, looking very French, very beautiful. However, I was no longer moved by beauty. Some small part of me regretted her leaving, but mostly I was eager to have her gone, to pare life down to its essentials once again in hopes that I might find some untainted possibility in which to place my faith.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look … peculiar.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and then, to be polite, I added, “I’m sorry to see you go.”
She tipped back her head so as to better see my face. “I’m sorry, too. I’ll never understand what went wrong. I thought.…”
“Yeah, so did I.” I shrugged. “C’est la vie.”
She laughed palely, turned to the ferry, obviously nervous, wanting to end an awkward moment. “Will you be all right?” she asked suddenly, as if for an instant she were reinhabiting the depth of her old concern and caring. “I’ll worry about you here.”
“I’m not going to stay much longer … a couple of weeks. The doctors will be back by then.”
“I don’t know how you can stay a minute longer. Aren’t you worried about the police?”
“They’re tired of hassling me,” I said. “Hell, one of the lieutenants … you remember the one with the waxed mustache? He actually told me the other day that I was a hero.” I gave a sarcastic laugh. “Like Bernhard Goetz, I’m keeping the city clean.”
Odille started to say something, but kept it to herself. Instead, she let her fingers trail across my hand.
At last the ferry was empty, ready for boarding. She stood on tiptoe, kissed me lightly, and then was gone, merging with the crowd of blacks that poured up the gangplank.
The ferry veered away from the dock, venting black smoke, and I watched until it had rounded a spit of land, thinking that the saddest thing about Odille and me was that we had parted without tears. After a minute or so, I headed back to the house. I had planned to work, but I was unable to concentrate. The inside of my head felt like glass, too fragile to support the weighty process of thought. I fed the cat, paced awhile; eventually I went into the living room and gazed down at the cardboard box that contained the four remaining figurines. I had been intending to destroy them, but each time I had made to do so, I’d been restrained by a fear of some bad result. It occurred to me that I enjoyed this irresolute state of affairs, that I found it romantic to cling to the belief that—mad from unrequited love—I had done terrible violence, and that I’d been shying away from anything that might prove the contrary. I became enraged at my self-indulgence and lack of fortitude; without thinking, I picked up a figurine and hurled it at the wall. It shattered into a hundred pieces, and to my astonishment, a stain began to spread where it had struck. A spatter of thick crimson very like a smear of fresh blood. I tried to blink the sight away, but there it was, slowly washing down the wall. I was less afraid than numb. I looked into the box and saw that the figurine I’d broken was the infant. Ryan. I glanced again at the wall. The stain had vanished.
I started laughing, infinitely amused, wondering if I should call New Zealand and check on the particulars of Ryan’s health; but then I realized that I would never pin down the truth, that his health or illness or death could be explained in a dozen ways, and I was afraid that I might not stop laughing, that I would continue until laughter blocked out everything else. Everything was true. Insanity and the supernatural were in league. Finally I managed to get myself under control. I packed my papers, a few clothes, and after wrapping the three remaining figurines in crumpled newspaper, I carried them to the house of the local priest and donated them to his museum. He was delighted by the gift, though puzzled at my insistence that he not allow them to be handled, that they be treated with the utmost care. Nor did he understand my hilarity on telling him that I was placing my fate in God’s hands.
At the jetty, I found a swarthy, white-haired East Indian man with a powerboat who said he would transport me up the Rio Dulce to the town of Reunion for an exorbitant fee. I did not attempt to haggle. Minutes later we were speeding north through the jungle along the green river, and as the miles slipped past, I began to relax, to hope that I was putting the past behind me once and for all. The wind streamed into my face, and I closed my eyes, smiling at the freshness of the air, the sweetness of escape.
“You look happy,” the old man called out above the roar of the engine. “Are you going to meet your sweetheart?”
I told him, no, I was going home to New York.
“Why do you want to do that? All those gangsters and slums! Don’t tell me New York is as beautiful as this!” He waved at the jungle. “The Dulce, Livingston … nowhere is there a more lovely place!”
With a sudden jerk of the wheel, he swerved the boat toward the middle of the river, sending me toppling sideways, balanced for an instant on the edge of the stern, my face a foot above the water. Something big and dark was passing just beneath the surface. The old man clutched at my arm, hauling me back as I was about to overbalance and go into the water. “Did you see?” he said excitedly. “A manatee! We nearly struck it!”
“Uh-huh,” I said, shaken, my heart racing, wondering if the priest had mishandled one of the figurines back in Livingston.
“I would wager,” said the old man, unmindful of my close call, “that there are no manatees in New York. None of the marvelous
creatures we have here.”
No manatees, I thought; but dark things passing beneath the surface—we had plenty of those. They came in every form. Male, female, shadows in doorways, rooms in abandoned buildings with occult designs chalked on the walls. Everywhere the interface with an uncharted reality, everywhere the familiar world fraying into the unknown.
Escape was impossible, I realized. I had always been in danger, and I always would be, and it occurred to me that the supernatural and the ordinary were likely a unified whole, elements of a spectrum of reality whose range outstripped the human senses. Perhaps strong emotion was the catalyst that opened one to the extremes of that spectrum; perhaps desire and rage and ritual in alignment allowed one to slide from light to light, barely noticing the dark interval that had been bridged. There was a comforting symmetry between these thoughts and what I had experienced, and that symmetry, along with my brush with drowning, seemed to have settled things in my mind, to have satisfied—if not resolved—my doubts. This was not so simple an accommodation as my statement implies. I am still prone to analyze these events, and often I am frustrated by my lack of comprehension. But in some small yet consequential way, I had made peace with myself. I had achieved some inner balance, and as a result I felt capable of accepting my share of guilt for what had happened. I had, after all, been playing head games with Konwicki before taking up the counters, and I had to shoulder responsibility for that … if for nothing else.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 40
