With the second key, which he still had in his pocket, he opened the door. He called Helen’s name. Went from room to room. Everything was cleaned out. There was a hotel form on the nightstand, not filled out. The only thing left was the gleaming chrome machine with the Polish writing on it that they had taken together from the workshop, which sat on the sideboard. And a basket of fruit.
Next to the despair he had felt when he first awoke in the barn and realized that his memory wasn’t coming back, this was the worst moment. And he didn’t know whether or not she had left the bungalow in such a hurry because of him. She had never spoken of her travel plans.
The main key had been turned in to reception, as a hotel staff member told him with a maximum of courtesy, and the bungalow was paid for another two days. There was, however, no information about the hastily departed American businesswoman. What businesswoman? This morning? No, the night porter was no longer in the building.
Carl sat on the terrace of the bungalow, ate an apple and looked out over the pines to the ocean. He opened the refrigerator. The freezer drawer. He read the technical data printed on the chrome machine again. A movie flickered gray on the television. For a second time he gathered the scraps of paper out of the trash can, but didn’t puzzle them back together. He shook the bedcovers. He lifted up the pillows. He found a sweater under one and he held it to his face and breathed through it for several minutes before putting it on. He looked under the bed.
There he found wood chips from a broken pencil and a pink hairband with a few long blonde hairs stuck in it.
Carl found an empty shampoo bottle in the bathroom, and he kept finding himself back in front of the gleaming chrome machine. Why had Helen confused it with a mine? Had she really? He examined the built-in two-pin plug on the side and looked around for a cable that he could repurpose. The cable of the lamp on the nightstand was attached, but the television had a twin wire. But the plug didn’t fit the chrome machine.
Resigned, he dropped onto the sofa and changed the channels of the TV with his feet. Test pattern, test pattern, movie.
“Now you listen to me. I’ll say this once. We are not sick men.”
He took a bite of the apple core, chewed once and spat it onto the television.
Beneath the wet apple remnants Helen’s face flickered on the screen. Carl closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again it wasn’t Helen. It wasn’t even a woman. It was Bruce Lee. With dancer-like ease he passed through a light-filled rectangle into a dark room and punched with the side of his hand the larynx of a man who you could tell by his laugh alone was obviously evil. Just like Helen had done. Exactly the same.
Carl walked down past both terraces to the beach while coughing and spitting pieces of the apple core and shaking his head. A few pale Europeans were sunning themselves. A squall blew their towels around.
Carl sat down in a sheltered spot among some black volcanic rock that formed a natural boundary on one side of the property and stared at the waves as they went about their timeless business.
Diagonally below him, two Berbers squatted in blue scarves. A young girl of perhaps twelve and an old woman with a face like a skull and eyes like holes. The old lady was holding a thin stick that was covered in a black paste. She pressed the girl’s head to her breast, clawed at one of her eyes with her index and middle finger, and ran the stick across her eyelid. The girl opened her eye, now circled in black, and blinked.
The more Carl thought about it, the less he could take issue with any of Helen’s allegations. She had followed logic, and logically speaking she was right. Everything that had happened during this short life he was able to remember was unlikely. An almost frightening abundance of improbability. His family, his buddy, the wooden gun… the Polish machine. Nothing made any sense. He tried to recall the words of the men in the workshop and detected a glance from the girl with the blackened eyes. The old woman was dyeing one of the girl’s hands with henna, and Carl wondered what had possibly convinced an American cosmetics company to send one of its employees to a country where people seemed satisfied with black and red paste. Helen would have to put in a lot of effort to sell anything here… and suddenly he was struck by something about her list that was off. He froze. Helen’s telephone list. That she had prepared while he stayed behind on the beach and Michelle read her comics and read tarot cards with the German tourist. When Helen went up to the bungalow it had been between ten and eleven in the morning. She wasn’t there long, maybe fifteen minutes. And during that time she had apparently called friends and acquaintances in Paris, London, Seville, Marseilles, New York and Montreal and asked them to look for the name Cetrois in the phonebook… the names Cetrois, Cetroix, Sitrois, Setrois. Why was this just occurring to him now?
A ship was sailing on the horizon, beyond which at great distance lay America. The time difference to New York must have been six or seven hours, meaning Helen had called there between three and five in the morning. It wasn’t impossible. But was it likely? And what kind of friends were they? Maybe there were freaks who weren’t bothered by being woken up in the middle of the night to look in their phonebook for a series of non-existent French names. But Helen didn’t seem like the type to hang out with freaks. And once this thought had got into Carl’s head, a veritable flood of other inconsistencies occurred to him.
That Helen had searched his things was the least of them—he had after all also searched her things. But why did she have handcuffs, leg irons and the other thing that looked like a baton and certainly was one? How had he seriously believed that she needed them for sexual purposes? And how as an employee of an American cosmetics company did someone learn to crush a man’s larynx with a single blow like Bruce Lee? Didn’t all of it point to some sort of law enforcement training? The more Carl thought about it, the less doubt he had. Helen, who had accompanied him day after day, had practically shadowed him—why had she never shown even the slightest sign of her professional duties? Totally coincidentally her sample case had fallen into the ocean as she disembarked from her ship. During a skirmish on the gangplank. A schoolboy had ripped it from her hands.
“You’re paranoid,” he heard Helen’s voice say in the back of his mind, and at the same time he remembered her peculiar unconcealed interest in the mine, only the mine. He was sure. In his mind he pictured Helen coming through the door in some nebulous uniform and putting his hands and ankles in cuffs… but there was one thing, unfortunately, that contradicted all these illusory images in his head. And that was the circumstances of their meeting. He had stumbled upon her at the gas station in the desert. She couldn’t possibly have known that he would turn up there. And he had approached her, not the other way around.
Exhausted, he slumped in front of the television. He sat there without moving until the late news came on. Dr Cockcroft’s bearded face popped into his head. Hadn’t he had the same doubts about the doctor? Hadn’t he raised a flood of objections against him and in the end everything, and hadn’t he wanted to see him as a charlatan, just not the one he actually was? Maybe he really was paranoid. He thought about it for a few minutes and then jumped up and went through all the drawers in the kitchen. In the utensil drawer he found a large knife, a small screwdriver and a flashlight. He took them and went out into the night and crept down the serpentine path to the next bungalow.
No lights were on and as far as he could remember none had been on during the last few nights, either. The blinds were shut, the place discernibly vacant. He shone the light on the front and the garden, convinced himself that nobody was watching him, and broke open the mailbox with the knife and screwdriver. He found a shrink-wrapped packet from the hotel to the next guest, some ads for restaurants and dive schools, the same ones that had been in Helen’s mailbox. He found all sorts of things. But he did not find a flyer for a psychological practice.
While he was still staring at the papers in his hand, the garden lit up. On the other side of the street, a few steps up the hill, a light had gone
on in the upper floor of one of the buildings. Two slender figures moved toward each other behind floral curtains. Carl thought for a second, marched over to the place with the bundle of ads in his hand and rang the doorbell. After a while the door opened a crack. Quiet music could be heard.
“Have you looked in your mailbox in the last few days?”
“Sorry?”
“Have you looked in your mailbox in the last few days?”
The door opened wider. A young man and then a younger man looked at him a little confused. They were both wearing bathrobes, and the hair of one of them was wet. Their gaze was drawn to Carl’s gestures, particularly those gestures made with the hand holding the long knife. They listened very earnestly and answered just as earnestly. Yes, they had been here for quite a while, nearly half a year, and they had regularly emptied their mailbox. One of them was a journalist and communicated regularly with Paris… and there hadn’t been any trouble with the mail thus far. They were professionally dependent on it, they hadn’t received a flyer for a psychology practice. No, they were sure. They would have remembered. They would be happy to have another look if he—what was his name again—would like.
Carl waited at the door with his head hanging. One disappeared into the house while the other waited at the door and fiddled with his bathrobe, which kept opening. So they were neighbors… interesting. And a psychology practice, really? That was connected to the Sheraton? For tourists? No, he could scarcely imagine it, sorry. Not that he had any problem with it, he himself had been to therapy several times, in New Jersey by the way, though more out of curiosity rather than because of an actual problem. But he was shocked that the same sort of thing was available here. Psychology in Africa, wasn’t that a bit like trying to sell refrigerators to Eskimos?
Carl strained to look past the man into the dark of the house.
The other man returned with a stack of ads and opened envelopes and confirmed apologetically that they had no such flyer.
“But you received one, or what? And now you need psychological assistance? No?”
Both men began at the same moment to laugh in a very odd way, and Carl, who wasn’t sure whether they were being friendly or making fun of him, quickly left.
He tossed the knife, the screwdriver and the bundle of papers he still had in his hand into some bushes and wandered up the hill along the little alley. Nobody had received a flyer, there had been no flyer. Only at Helen’s had there been one. In the only mailbox in the city where somebody with real problems was staying.
Carl had trouble finding the street where the practice was located. Only when he found the door he had tried in vain to unlock with his own key after leaving Dr Cockcroft did he recognize it.
There were no lights on. The door was open. Carl first pushed the doorbell and then felt around for the light switch in the hall. But the light didn’t work, not in any of the rooms. Carl rummaged through the entire building with the flashlight. All the furniture was gone. His surprise was limited. The three-legged table on the top floor was the only thing left. Both of the books were gone, too.
Carl opened the window with an indefinable sound of despair. He braced his elbows on the windowsill and looked out over the street into the night. The stars. The people, the buildings, the practice. Dr Cockcroft, Helen, the Polish machine. The corpse in the desert. He went back into the room and sat down on the floor with his back to the wall. Just as before, he had the feeling that he might be able to find something if he just thought things through, but whenever he tried to connect the various threads they got tangled in his hands and then a strong gust of wind blew through his thoughts that not only blew apart the connections but sent the threads themselves off into the air. All that was left was paralyzing darkness, and thinking about it was as painful as banging his head against a wall.
In the few days he was able to remember, he had experienced more absurd things than many people did in seventy years. And now he was running the risk of losing this new life again. Helen gone, Dr Cockcroft gone, a doctor’s practice that perhaps never existed. The cartridge stolen, Bassir’s ultimatum expired… and someone might possibly have been cutting off his son’s finger or raping his wife at that very moment.
He found it difficult to think of words to express his emotions. Not to mention for his situation. He didn’t know if he could feel anything at all. He turned around and hit his head against the wall. Half numb, he went back to the window and looked out. Dark shadows stood on the dark corners. One of the shadows was watching him. Or at least it seemed that way to him. Anyway. Either his pursuer or his paranoia hadn’t disappeared. He shone the beam of light from his flashlight on his own face. They might as well see him. They should see that they were being permitted to see him. They should see that he didn’t care. They should go ahead and come for him.
51
Marshal Mellow
Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he, too, was thrown out.
WILLIAM BLUM
BUT NOBODY CAME and, overwhelmed by fatigue, Carl finally lay down on the floor and tried to sleep. He wasn’t able to. A quiet banging sound kept him from falling asleep. He closed the window, but the sound reverberated like a heartbeat through the walls and ceiling. It robbed him of his last ounce of sanity. Finally he got up, went down onto the street and looked around. He took a few steps in the direction of the Sheraton, then, following an impulse, instead followed the sound. It led him to a building behind Dr Cockcroft’s office, above which hung a defective neon sign. The walls on either side of the entrance were covered with layers of posters, Jimi Hendrix, Castles Made of Sand… Africa Unite. And pasted sideways across everything by the hundred was a freshly inked image of a rectangular face with a monstrously broad jaw, around which three smaller heads and various musical instruments circled like swirling thoughts.
Marshal Mellow and his Skillet Lickers—Life!
While Carl read the dubious English, the pulsing rhythm went silent and muted elation rang out from the interior of the building. Two Bedouins with joints in their hands made their way around him, and then a busload of tourists who suddenly showed up pushed toward the entrance, pulling Carl along. He tried for a moment to escape the surge of bodies but gave up once he was past the ticket table and pressed into a thick wall of dry-ice fog.
The contours of a large hall were discernible from time to time, filled with a mix of people that was unusual for the area—Arabs, Americans, tourists, rowdy teens, men and women. There were even a handful of local women. A single spotlight cut through the fog, on stage stood a rectangular man with a monstrous chin wearing an American naval admiral’s uniform (if Carl wasn’t mistaken), he tapped the microphone and began to talk in a very soft voice. He talked without moving his body and only part of his face. His hands were wrapped around the microphone, his jaw set. Only his lips moved, like in a poorly synchronized cartoon. As Dixieland sing-song filled the room, Carl ordered a water at the bar and breathed the THC-saturated air. He heard scattered applause and enthusiastic screeches behind him and through it all, unwavering, the soft voice of Marshal Mellow talking about impulse control, four-year-old children, deferred gratification and character, about the Korean War, blood and thunder and the Marshmallow Experiment. It remained unclear for a long time whether the speech was propaganda or the introduction to a song. On the one hand the words seemed dark and incoherent, on the other hand his talk was getting the hippies at the front of the hall worked up. The drummer threw a young man who had climbed onto the side of the stage out over the crowd into the third or fourth row. Women screamed.
The band members on bass, guitar, synthesizer and drums were also wearing uniforms (lower-ranking), and their square jaws gave the impression that they might actually be affiliated with the armed forces. These were not times when the American military could expect to be met
with enthusiasm or even polite applause abroad or at home for that matter—and certainly not in front of this random collection of hippies—and Carl wondered if perhaps they had actually hit upon their ironic stage clothing because of their chiseled physiognomy and not the other way around.
The drum played a little roll and the whole room immediately pressed forward, pulling Carl along. Two women got up on the speaker towers; they began to spin around like chess pieces. Suddenly Carl felt his T-shirt being pulled up in the back. Two arms wrapped around his midriff, and because he had been staring at the two pretty women for too long his first thought was that there was a pretty woman behind him now. But the downward patting motion of the hands quickly made clear that he was mistaken. He tried to turn in the crowd. A dark shadow ducked down behind him and continued cavalierly to pat his pants. Carl struck at the head with both fists and a thin young man slowly emerged from the darkness below. Three vertical scars ran from the forehead to the chin of his beaming face.
“I had to check to see if you had a Claymore in your pants, man. Don’t get upset… but apparently you still haven’t bought one.”
Risa, known as Khach-Khach. He smacked Carl on the shoulder, grinned even more broadly, and seemed genuinely happy. In the din around him, Carl couldn’t make out every word. Marshal Mellow took a step back from the microphone and looked at his fellow band members.
“Can I buy you a drink, you hobby terrorist? What do you want to have… about the whole thing? Listen, I’ll sell you one for… but first the song… the song…oh, man. Geeshie. Mellow is… but Geeshie… ferried over specially with the boat.”
He steered Carl toward the stage by his hips. The hall had got quiet. Mellow now had a cigarette in his mouth and was sort of shadow-boxing with the microphone stand. The Americans in the audience shouted obscenities, the Arabs joined in, some fearfully, some excited about the intensity of the foreign words. Then a bass line boomed out and the room set in motion as one. Someone collapsed directly in front of Carl. Hands pressed to ears. He himself was pushed forward and to the side. He dropped his cup. Two black men in colorful pants and batik tops shoved their way through the crowd with their elbows. A sludgy, psychedelic rhythm poured out of the speakers, the slowest, sludgiest rhythm Carl had ever heard, like a hypnotized dinosaur stomping unknowingly over flower children and a meadow full of butterflies in a gently rolling landscape. Above the proceedings opened up a sky filled with the suns of a million spotlights and out of those heights came the falsetto voice of Marshal Mellow, naked and featherless, squawking as it flitted downward, a tiny, prehistoric bird landing on the dinosaur’s neck and tossed around. Carl wondered whether somebody had slipped something into his water.
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