PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “You really feel good about yourself, don’t you?” she said in a crone’s voice punctuated with a crone’s cough.

  He peered hard into her emaciated features. “Why not?”

  She began a harsh laugh, but the cough caverned through her chest and the word, “Unbelievable,” begun three times, withered in her mouth.

  “Who are you, the star attraction’s mother?”

  “That depends on who the star attraction is.”

  “Lighten up lady, I didn’t come here to take bows. I’m sorry if your son’s performance disappointed you, but that’s his fault.”

  “Disappointed!” She drew a knuckle to her mouth. “It’s all those people who just went back to their lives of pain and despair who are disappointed. You took the only thing they had left.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Hope.”

  “Oh, please. That overhyped conman’s successes are all statistical remissions or conversion hysterias, and his failures die for want of medical attention.”

  “S’cuse me, you’ll have to talk down to us uneducated folk. What does that have to do with hope?”

  “Hope like that is a wrong turn on the road to reality.”

  She spit slowly into a wad of Kleenex. “Reality. You think life is all about quantity, don’t you? You don’t make any allowance for reaching beyond the horizon. That fine brain of yours is like an aircraft carrier with no planes.”

  “S’cuse me? Aircraft carriers? I don’t get your mixed semaphore, you’ll have to talk down to us uneducated folk.”

  She smiled sourly. “You can’t be that far removed.”

  “Removed from what?”

  “From your childhood. You weren’t born like this.”

  “What would you know about it?”

  “I know everything about you. You’re faithless, rootless and loveless. You don’t believe in God or in people and if you were loved, you wouldn’t know it because you wouldn’t trust it. The walking wounded who came here tonight probably understood that fraud better than you did, but he still offered them something and they took it. They were lonely and scared and hurting, and they took it. But then you rode in with a flaming sword . . .”

  “One right. I don’t believe in God.”

  She went into another coughing-laughing jag, this one as slow and weak as a dying car battery trying to turn over on a cold day. “You know, that’s the one thing I’d probably take back. You do believe in God. Or you want to. Desperately. You want to believe in something magical in the worst way. It’s all tied up with your innocence, isn’t it? Something you think was stolen from you when you were growing up. So you tried to ban magic from your life. But all you really did was change the name to science or logic or something. You think you can trust science. I’ll bet you even substituted a name for God when you were a little kid.”

  an eerie tingle on his neck, a presentiment, an intuition . . . but, of course, he didn’t trust intuition.

  “I’ll bet you called God something to do with science, with physical reality,” she said, “. . . like ‘Space Almighty.’”

  He craned forward. “Mother? Oh . . . my . . . God.”

  “You’re learning.”

  ***

  She looked eighty, was sixty, and she had AIDS. Full-blown. Even after she acknowledged who she was, he barely recognized her. Apparently she had less trouble identifying him grown up from a boy of eleven. Of course, she could have read about him, seen his picture on the flyleaf of his book and read it even. Which meant that she had known where he lived and had chosen not to contact him. Because tonight had been pure chance, and didn’t that fit nicely into her world governed by fate?

  She had come to the tent to receive energy, just another mystical happening in her free-flowing life. It didn’t matter if the messenger was false. The message was real. She used prophets as much as they used her; she used them like she had used drugs.

  Lane took her home almost as a reflex. The irony struck him later that he was taking her to the one place she had never been able to provide for him. They both cried but neither changed their mind about the errors of the other’s ways. He got her into a private hospice two weeks later and though his daily visits softened the barriers between them, they were like negotiations with the past:

  “Thank you for not letting me die alone, son. I wish I could do the same for you.”

  “I was never more alone than when you left me in that crowd of lost people in Cal.”

  “They weren’t lost, they were looking. There’s a difference.”

  “They were on their way to nowhere, and I don’t know what could be more lonely than that.”

  He wanted to know how she had gotten AIDS, and she said from his stepfather. He wanted to know who his stepfather was, and she said “which one.” And then he didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know whether they were all dead or in jail or if she had divorced one before marrying another. He asked about his real father the old question she had never answered about how he died but she wouldn’t talk about that either. She wanted to know about him and why he wasn’t married. He didn’t want to talk about it. They spent a lot of time not talking about things.

  And then one day she sent him to collect her “stuff”: a dresser drawer full of clothes that shocked him for their rattiness and her old rose-colored suitcase squeezed under a bed in a run-down apartment all the way back in Chicago. She asked him to bring them to her as if she were asking him to pass the salt across the table. He never protested, just took the address and made the trip.

  The overdue rent notice was slipped under her door, and he paid it out of pride, writing “MOVED” at the bottom before putting it in the drop box. When he delivered the suitcase, which might have contained lead cannon shot judging by the weight, she patted the counterpane for him to lay it over her knees on the bed. She was so frail that he hesitated until she motioned impatiently. Then she sprang the catches on the scuffed plastic lid and began to toss out the arcana of her life.

  It was paper, mostly. Concert flyers, clips, underground press, posters (hello, Twiggy; hello, Jimi). She had lived at Hog Farm and Drop City before his time, and there were love beads and a Peter Max tie that must have been his father’s, as if she led his ghost around by that tether. A Hard Rock CafÉ glass from the 80’s was somehow unbroken, but a 45 RPM (“The Age of Aquarius”) had snapped perfectly in half. There was nothing from the 90’s, which he took to mean that either that was when her life had become a void or it had been time to pay the piper. And here she was, days from death, digging down through the layers and years, the archaeologist of her own artifacts, until she came to . . .

  The stone.

  The glyph.

  The stele.

  He had seen it once before. Knew it wasn’t cultural nostalgia. Guessed it had something to do with his father.

  “This is what he died for,” she said. “Maybe I would’ve grown up, if it hadn’t been for this. Maybe I would’ve just split the whole scene the ideals and the connections and all the cool trips right after you were born. I could have stayed clean then. But that was when this happened.” She lifted the stele a few inches, hands trembling from emotion or frailty, and let it drop back into the suitcase. “I don’t even know what the damn thing is, but I know what your father and I were after, and I know that what killed him wasn’t anything from the material world.”

  “What were you after?”

  “The tunnels. Even when we gave up on the gold and I’m not saying we didn’t want to find treasure even then, we were flipped out by the legends. You know about the tunnels?”

  “I’ve read everything worth reading about where I was born.”

  “Worth reading. I guess that means you’re up to third grade level on Peruvian geography and Inca history.”

  “I know about the fortress at Sacsayhuaman and the theory that the sealed tunnels are where the gold went that the Spanish couldn’t find.”

  “I told you, forget the gold. The
tunnels aren’t theory. They go all over the place. All the way east into Bolivia and up past Madre de Dios into Brazil, north to Ecuador, south to Chile. Your father and I checked out the Chincana tunnel and a hundred others. We looked for Gran Paititi, and we spent a month at Samaipata where I got sicker than shit. I’ve forgotten most of the names, but the tunnels are all the same. Trust me. The same. They aren’t natural, and they’re all connected, and the dozens of government explorations over the last century that didn’t end in disaster gave up after days of wandering in labyrinths.”

  He braced his hands wearily on the window ledge. “Yes, yes, the tunnels are transcontinental, and they pop up all over the world. You can go on-line and read journals of people who swear they talked to Jules Verne in the center of the earth. It’s going to kick hell out of the airline business when they link up with the subways in New York and Moscow. Only, the connections aren’t under the Andes, they’re all in the fuzzy brains of you’ll pardon the pun underground people. So, don’t tell me you and my father hit every transit stop ”

  “Don’t tell me what I know!”

  She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, a faint suffusion of color in her dying white face. He understood then that they weren’t going to settle anything, that she was terminal in every sense.

  “All right,” she said, opening her eyes. “I’m not telling you we found anything or went anywhere. No one knows who built the tunnels, but it wasn’t the Spaniards, and it wasn’t the Quechua or the Aymara or the Inca, and it wasn’t the tunnels that convinced me. It was this” she waved dismissively at the stele as if to banish it “and the way your father died for it.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  But she wouldn’t tell him. Apparently the whole purpose of sending him to Chicago had been to retrieve the solitary artifact she hoped would convince him that her world was more encompassing than his. A piece of stone. Her Rosetta Stone, meant to facilitate communication between them. He didn’t get it.

  “Maybe if you told me how he died . . .”

  He thought she was going to do it, but then she had something like a panic attack, breathing in horrible rasps, her thin form writhing on the bed as it had in birth throes on the floor of a hut in Peru twenty-eight years earlier. She threw her arms back so that both forearms covered her eyes and when her breathing finally slowed, she croaked: “There are moments in a life . . . when you know what exists outside the world. Do you think I was stoned and it didn’t happen?” And she pointed trembling to the suitcase where the stone lay sandwiched between a glassine bag full of pacifist buttons and a plastic tambourine with a painted image of the Maharishi.

  “Where what happened? Mom?”

  And then one day he came to see her, and she was sitting up in bed alert and composed. She spoke immediately, without looking at him, her eyes focused on the rounded bulges in the counterpane where her feet and knees rose, as if she had erected again those eroded summits of the Andes:

  “You were coming, and at first I thought that was why your father was so frantic. But he hid the stone under the mattress. I found it later. He was babbling about a pillar in a pool, and he said that Supay that’s the Inca god of death and the underworld was after him. That was all I could grasp in my condition. The next thing I knew he was gone and you were there, and there was a chill going through the room, and the water I had put in a basin to bathe you in was boiling away. It was cold and it was boiling away. And there was this unspeakable odor. I didn’t know what it was whether or not it was something to do with giving birth but it got more and more awful until I knew it wasn’t anything to do with humans . . . or animals. And there was this incredible sound, like so loud that you didn’t know for sure it was for real. But it was real. The people in Cuzco heard it, I found out later. And they felt the earth shake, too. That was next. This tremendous shaking that lifted everything off the floor. I’ve been in earthquakes, which are common there, but this wasn’t like that. It was like a door slamming so hard that the house shakes, only this time it was the whole mountain range. And I heard Rollie scream.

  “Your father was killed by an animal. There were claw prints in the earth two feet long. The claw marks on his body went from the back of his skull to his heels, but he didn’t bleed. Not a drop. The wounds were cauterized. Scorched and cauterized. And his face . . . when I turned him over and saw his face, I knew that what he had said was coming after him was really after him.” She looked up at her son, looked through him. “So that’s why straight reality is just a neighborhood to me, because I know there are things on the next block. It came out of the tunnels. Something that broke all the rules about what life is came out of the tunnels because Rollie took that stone tablet.” Her eyes focused on his. “If you’re pissed off because you didn’t have someone to play catch with when you were growing up, then ask yourself why you take it out on people who try to understand what’s beyond reality. Now go away and leave me alone.”

  She didn’t talk about it again, and two days later she was dead.

  He felt angry at her for abandoning him again at just the wrong time. She had shown up in his life too late to change things between them, and instead of helping him bury the ghosts, she had reared them up like totem poles. “I don’t know why you came back to me now, but you had lousy timing, mom,” he told her before they took the body away. And then he cried because she had made him feel like he owed her something, instead of the other way around.

  He couldn’t find the stele. That was the amazing thing. For almost three decades she had kept it, and the fact that now it was gone had to mean she hadn’t wanted him to have it. Why? In her condition, where could she have taken it? He asked the nurses at the hospice, but no one had seen it. He brooded over the missing stone, searched the wastebasket in her room, even kicked through the bushes outside her window. Remembering what she had said about his father hiding it under the mattress, he checked with sudden certainty there. Nada.

  And then two days after the funeral and one day after he had removed all his mother’s belongings, he was back at the hospice. Someone had already been installed in the room and an orderly summoned by the desk was bearing down on him as he invaded the bathroom and lifted the lid on the toilet tank. There it was, leaning up against the fill tube. The water magnified the glyph somehow, and he saw the three triangles for the first time. The Great Pyramid of Giza, he thought. Which was pretty astonishing, considering that his mother had been trying to figure that out for almost thirty years.

  IRELAND

  CONNEMARA

  . . . the same year

  4

  Lightning slashed across the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu in the middle of the pond in the middle of the churchyard in the middle of the night. Sheets of rain blew across the water like scrims, veiling the grotto against the open sea beyond and to the north rendering the house of Brone McCabe gray or black by turns. Brone’s mongrel dog Mr. Billy the second successor to the long-dead hound His Nibs moved nervously from room to room with every thunderclap. He was too far away to pick up the sound of the wooden barrow above the storm.

  It was coming up the road, lurching in the ruts, guided by two stout women, one young, one middle-aged. The matron staggered doggedly behind the grips, her dress so drenched as to sieve water in a cascade at the hem. The younger one slogged barefoot in jeans and a Rugby shirt, steadying the side of the barrow and the two shovels that leaned against the man sprawled within. He lay half naked, a perfect swathe burned down his chest from his left shoulder like a deacon’s stole. That arm was stiff and straight, and the rain that washed in and out of his fixed stare commingled with blood from his retinas.

  When they reached the finialed gates the younger female darted out front and swung them wide, while the older woman leaned into the shafts, driving the wheel forward through the mud. Once within the confines of the graveyard, they seemed lost. And then the lightning bleached out the darkness, and the woman in the Rugby shirt danced a step and pointed to the side. A mossy depress
ion lay where water habitually ran off the higher ground leading up toward the grotto. The pusher of the barrow did not understand but nevertheless followed.

  Inside the house on the other side of the pond Mr. Billy ventured out from beneath the table. The gates had struck against the stones that checked their furthest swing. It was a sound made clarion on clarion days, and one that never failed to bring him roaring to the window, but now it was muted by the storm, and though he did indeed scrabble nose to sterile glass as if to sniff out the insoluble shadows beyond, his tutelary instincts were also muted by the storm. Another flash and he ghosted to the hearth, ears flattened.

  The women took the shovels now. They dug directly beneath the eroded overhang, and though the muck was heavy, it was also soft.

  “He’s dead,” the young one began to whimper between frenzied efforts, “. . . he’s dead.”

  “He’s not dead!” the older woman declared breathlessly, though she could smell the scorched flesh again. She wished she hadn’t brought the barrow so close to the sheltering rise.

  They slipped and plunged as the hole grew. It wasn’t very wide, just enough for a body to be placed upright and crouched. At half a meter, the ground became less saturated; but by then they were exhausted. The Rugby shirt looked decidedly like a Rugby shirt should as the young woman threw herself with each shovelful onto the embankment. Her companion braced and grunted and heaved in a progressively slower rhythm until at last she fell backward on her ample buttocks.

  “Deep enough,” the younger proclaimed.

  Ponderously they went to the barrow and lifted and dragged the man to the lip of the hole. Feet first he went in, stopping abruptly waist deep. His left leg was rigid. They tried to twist him, then cram him down, but it wouldn’t do. Moaning now, the older woman stuck the shovel down in the hole, caught him behind the knee, and jerked upright. He settled to his chest.

  “It won’t fill to his neck,” the younger one shrilled.