The women had so disturbed his equilibrium that he nearly forgot to buy a pound of chocolate from a certain confectioner in Vienna for a policeman in Madrid. The main post office happened to be across the street from the confectioner’s. While he was mailing the chocolate, he decided on an impulse to ask the postmistress if there were any general delivery letters for him. No one on earth knew he would pass through Vienna—or even cared, for that matter—and yet asking for general delivery seemed the sort of thing a serious traveler should do. The woman soon returned with a postcard. On one side it bore a photograph of the limestone pyramid under construction in Bedford, Indiana, right near his hometown, and on the other side a printed message: MR. MOSS, I’LL MEET YOU IN TOKYO, IN FRONT OF THE ASSYRIAN EXILE CHURCH, MAY FIRST AT NOON. WE’LL CHECK OUT THOSE JAPANESE CHICKENS TOGETHER. HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A GOOD TRIP. YOUR ITCHY-FOOTED FRIEND, DORIS WILKINS. In the upper left corner a forceful hand had written, “Number 212 of 500.”
Jason recalled with perfect clarity jouncing in the truck beside the bearish widow who ranted in rage and affection about her four children and her farm mortgage and her fool husband who had died under five yards of concrete, and behind her voice the groan of the engine and the squawking of chickens, and her nearness filling the cab like the aroma of hot biscuits. Merely thinking about it, here on the tile floor of a Vienna post office, he was pierced by longing.
Of course he could not possibly meet Doris Wilkins in Tokyo. Would she expect him to shake hands? Kiss her? Buy her lunch? He was too old for learning the do-si-do of courtship.
Yet he held off replying to her message. Each time he entered a post office, instead of mailing the letter of apology which he had laboriously composed, he inquired at the general delivery counter. There were postcards waiting for him in every capital and in many of the secondary cities. One side invariably showed the limestone pyramid, the other carried the familiar message from Doris Wilkins. The only change from card to card was the number.
By the time he reached Ankara, where he collected his twenty-seventh card, Jason realized that he could not mail his letter of apology. He would have to meet the chicken lady. She had gone to so much trouble, and had perhaps already begun studying Japanese in preparation for her trip. Even now, browsing through catalogs, she might be circling the photographs of items she would need. Thinking about her preparations, he recovered some of his own early excitement, almost as if he himself were setting out on a journey once again.
For the truth was, his knees throbbed, his boots had worn thin, his umbrella was springing leaks. After tramping only a quarter of the way around the world, his joints were beginning to sound like old staircases. At least he remembered to rub alcohol into the soles of his feet. This not only prevented blisters but also mitigated the smell, a welcome side effect, for he was often forced to go long stretches without a bath.
In Kabul, a shoemaker to whom he had delivered a recipe for mutton pie rewarded him with a pair of ox hide boots, and also mended his umbrella. “To protect you from the murderous sun,” the shoemaker signaled in gestures.
Jason had chosen to contend with sun instead of snow, taking a southerly route through Asia in order to avoid the Russian winter. This forced him to neglect a good many of the memoranda in his notebooks, including that troublesome kiss which he was supposed to award in Odessa. But what more could he do? How was one man to run errands for the entire world?
The new ox hide boots and the restored umbrella—as well as, he had to admit, the prospect of meeting Doris Wilkins in Tokyo—stirred up his spirits. He crossed northern Pakistan in a jeep with an army patrol, thus saving his legs a good deal of stony walking. The soldiers advised him against entering India. The beggars and fake holy men in that land would nibble him to nothing. “There is a glow about you which the needy can detect from miles away,” said the lieutenant, who then asked Jason if he would mind carrying a blood-stained handkerchief to an old war comrade in Tibet. “He will know what it means,” the lieutenant added darkly.
Although Jason kept taking on small items for delivery, such as this handkerchief, or a comb from a matron in Damascus, a pair of false teeth from a fisherman in Beirut, a harmonica from a street sweeper in Sofia, he also gave away to urchins some of the equipment he had brought along, and so the weight of his backpack did not vary much up or down. As soon as he delivered anything—the goblet for a Greek Orthodox priest in Baghdad, for example—someone else was sure to give him a new parcel.
The beggars and holy men did indeed flock to him in India, but instead of asking for handouts they asked for advice. They perceived that he was a battered pilgrim, a veteran of untold miles, and wanted to know what visions seized him when the winds turned wicked or rains filled the sky or the sun balanced on a mountain peak. Jason gave the best answers he could. Children toyed with his compass, squealing and leaping about to avoid the magical point of its needle. Old men solemnly tried on his felt hat, sniffing the headband, examining the sweat stains as if they were some obscure calligraphy.
Here in the land of the original Buddha, Jason shrugged off his weariness. He climbed through a mountain pass into Tibet, in company with a band of refugees from Bangladesh. All night they sang folk songs as they walked, and Jason hummed along. One by one they sidled up to him and showed him an old scar, a tattoo, a talisman, or merely tramped beside him in deep silence, occasionally brushing their fingers against his sleeves. When an avalanche threatened to bury their little party, he remembered the silver whistle hanging round his neck and gave it a powerful puff. As the snow crashed down harmlessly behind them, the refugees decided that Jason was indeed a wayfaring saint. How else explain the odd parchment color of his skin, the unruly beard, the walking stick that became a tent, the tamed avalanche?
Runners carried the news ahead into the hinterlands of Tibet. In the villages, children made him presents of flowers. Elders pressed their foreheads to his and clasped him gravely by the hand. Girls fed him fragrant beans wrapped in leaves. Word of him traveled ahead to the Chinese border guards, who gave him a bamboo flute and escorted him to the nearest communal farm. There he was examined minutely by dozens of curious eyes. Very little in his appearance fit their notions of how a man should look. They did not believe in saints, but knew all about wandering wise men, and took him for one. To entertain them, Jason recounted his entire journey in mime. The old people as well as the children clapped with delight and laughed.
When it was time for him to leave, a doctor on a bicycle led him to the next commune, and from there two girls led him to the next, and thus he was guided from settlement to settlement across China. In each place he performed the story of his travels. The number of companions escorting him between villages kept growing, until by the time he reached Lanzhou, where another card from Doris awaited him, he was marching at the head of a parade. Although he could not play any musical instrument, he boldly whistled along on his bamboo flute. His followers imagined that the awful noise he made was music in his native land.
In Xi’an he delivered a paper fan, in Nanjing a pair of sandals encrusted with seashells, in Shanghai a drop of amber enshrining a flea. As he completed each errand he placed an X in the margin of his notebook. No sooner did he complete a task, however, than somebody would set him a new one. Even as he began inscribing memoranda in his seventh notebook, Jason thought back with pleasure over his modest labors, which had now been scattered halfway around the world.
The throngs who accompanied him into Shanghai gave the local authorities a fright. Was it an invasion? Refugees from some disaster in the interior? Spying Jason, they were reassured. Such a man could not march at the head of anything dangerous. The mayor, learning that this serene stranger was bound for Tokyo, asked him to deliver a copper thimble to her cousin. Since the mayor’s brother piloted a fishing boat, Jason’s passage to Japan was quickly arranged.
In the waters off Kyushu the Chinese rowed him to a Japanese trawler, which carried him into Tokyo Bay on the last day of Apr
il. The sea journey restored him completely. He drank jasmine tea and mended his gear. While the fishermen labored, he studied the flight of birds and the motions of clouds and the patterns of waves, regaining his bearings in the great wheel of things. To keep his joints limber he stood up from time to time and danced on the deck, or acted out some portion of his travels for the fishermen.
The woman in Tokyo to whom he delivered the thimble put him up for the night in her paper-walled house. “The honorable sir is truly around the world going?” she asked in polite disbelief.
“Yes, indeed,” said Jason, “and I’m on the homeward leg.”
The woman’s knowledge of English stopped short of allowing her to grasp how a trip could be divided into legs, and so she merely smiled, and the warmth of that smile left Jason wondering how he could possibly gather up enough courage before tomorrow noon to meet the chicken lady.
That evening he counted his postcards: sixty-three photos of the Indiana pyramid, sixty-three identical messages from Doris Wilkins. Nothing in the whole journey so amazed him as his arrival here for this rendezvous. He was sorely tempted to blow on his whistle; and indeed that night, in the midst of a dream about flower-covered islands, he did so, waking not only his hosts but also the neighboring families, all of whom shuffled into his sleeping alcove to see what was the matter.
“A dream,” Jason apologized.
Staring down into his eyes, as if surveying a pond for turtles, an old woman declared, “It is loneliness.” Everyone in the room nodded agreement.
Next morning, as he walked the last few blocks to the Assyrian Exile Church, Jason felt himself laboring uphill, even though the land was perfectly flat. He reached the spot five minutes early. Doris was already there, gazing about at the pedestrians as if they were migrating caribou.
“You don’t look half bad,” she cried on catching sight of him. “In fact, you look like you’ve ripened up. I like your sun-roasted color, and I flat out admire that beard. Who’d ever think it would come out like new butter? How’re the legs?”
“Still kicking,” said Jason. He was trying to decide whether to doff his hat or shake her hand when she seized him in a mighty hug and planted a kiss on his chapped lips.
“So you got my card?” she said, releasing him.
“Oh, yes. Several times. Sixty-three times, in fact.”
“I sent five hundred. Didn’t want to miss you, and God only knew where you might be headed. You were pretty vague about your itinerary, back when you hitched a ride in my truck.”
She was dressed in gear to match his own, except in yellow instead of green: floppy hat and windbreaker and baggy trousers, a rucksack with sleeping bag strapped on, a walking stick that doubled as an umbrella, a canteen slung round her neck. Out of respect for her stout build and raucous manner, the pedestrians gave her a wide berth as they passed.
“Who’s looking after the chickens?” Jason inquired.
“My brother. He owes me a favor for pasturing his goats.”
“And the children? Four of them, if I remember correctly?”
“Four is right. Seems like forty, some days. They’re with my other brother, who promised to keep them until school starts in September. I’ve been feeding him and his family free eggs ever since Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden.”
Jason reflected on dates for a moment, then asked, “You’re planning to be away from home until September?”
“I don’t see how we can get back to Buddha any sooner, not if we’re going to really see South America.”
“Right,” said Jason, after the shock had worn off.
Before shipping to South America, they walked and rode the length of Japan, investigating numerous breeds of chickens along the way. Although some varieties were indeed quieter than the ones Doris raised, none were mute, and none laid as well or put on flesh as quickly, and so she decided to stick with what she had.
“There’s no substitute for looking into things yourself,” she declared.
Among the other things they looked into while traversing Japan were volcanoes, about which Jason had often read in National Geographic. He felt some kinship with these quaking mountains, for ever since joining company with Doris he had been feeling as though a pool of lava bubbled in his own depths.
Although Doris rode guard beside him, people still approached him daily with petitions. Would he carry a deathbed message from a grandfather to a grandson? Would he give a wedding certificate to a plumber? Would he pass along a poem to an estranged sister? Filled with these missions, his notebooks occupied the lower third of his pack.
“Folks know a soft touch when they see one,” said Doris.
“I can’t help it,” he said.
“Don’t try. I’ve lived too long around people you couldn’t rouse with a poker.”
She made no bones about anything, eating out of the same bowl with him, unrolling her sleeping bag next to his at night. She treated their journeying together as such a matter of course, a thing as natural as summer lightning bugs, that after a while Jason began to treat it so himself. In fact, the second night of their passage from Japan to Argentina, he was the one who finally zipped their sleeping bags together. They rode on a freighter as guests of the bosun, to whom they had delivered a family watch. Although loaded now with automobiles, the freighter smelled of the cattle it routinely carried on return trips from Argentina.
“For warmth,” Jason said, explaining the joined bags.
Doris required no explanations. She crawled in beside him and hooked a brawny arm around his shoulders, as though dragging him to shore, then she led him down into the lava depths of his body and back up again, up into the avenues of birds, up into the moon’s path, up where the edges of galaxies brush against one another in the invincible darkness.
“I’m not looking to marry,” said Doris, as they started their hike northward from Buenos Aires, “but I sure need company, especially the adventurous kind. I got to feeling closed in and smothered, the way I was living. And it wasn’t only from breathing feathers. If you want, I’ll handle the chickens and you can do your bookkeeping in the dining room.”
Jason needed to savor the vision only for a moment before replying, “That sounds good to me.”
“How do you feel about kids?”
“I’ve met some amazing ones on this trip.”
“Good, because mine would amaze a zookeeper.” She heaved a sigh. “Someday maybe they’ll quit going to university and get jobs. They’ve been collecting degrees like T-shirts.”
Jason and Doris traveled the length of the continent, through swamps and deserts, with gauchos and priests and tax-collectors, sometimes in the cabooses of trains, in pirogues and panel trucks, once on a cart drawn by llamas, twice on mules, moving steadily northward until they reached the jungles of Central America. From there they took ship to New Orleans and then worked their way up the Mississippi Valley, Jason distributing messages and presents. They hiked from Illinois into Indiana, then rode the last fifty miles into Buddha with a bus full of gospel singers who were on their way to a contest in Fort Wayne.
The town was unchanged by the passage of a year, but Jason surveyed it now with altered eyes. Gas station, liquor store, corner grocery, rival churches—nothing had budged an inch. Some of last year’s posters, faded by sunlight, still hung in windows. The same yard flowers were in bloom. The money he had counted for others still swam like fish from pocket to pocket. Familiar voices complained of familiar ailments, or shouted with familiar joys. It was a spot on earth. Just one spot. He had dozens of errands still to run, parcels to deliver, questions to answer.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to stay here long,” Jason confessed.
“I didn’t expect you would,” Doris answered, “not after seeing the world.”
He stared at the buckled sidewalks and potholed streets, the pathways of his old self. Beside him, Doris seemed to glow in her yellow traveling clothes.
“Are your kids big enough to fend
for themselves?” he asked.
“If they aren’t now, they never will be,” she replied.
“Then you’re free to go?”
“Free as a blue jay.”
“Where to next?” he asked her.
That night they hunched over the atlas and studied maps, their shoulders rubbing together like the curves of continents.
The Artist of Hunger
It was not a convincing dawn. The eastern horizon resembled chicken liver simmering in butter. Flocks of chocolate birds wheeled overhead. Banks of fog rolled in from the North like a tide of mashed potatoes, and popcorn clouds dotted the South.
Edible, yes, but one could hardly call it persuasive. Gripping a lightbrush in one hand and a mug of malto in the other, Sir Toby Moore reclined on a couch and brooded on his wretched painting. The image shimmered on the vaulted ceiling of his studio, a miniature of the version that would later be projected onto the domes of shopping malls in five continents. With the lightbrush he added another touch of butter-yellow to the sunrise. Rather a vulgar mixture of foods, he had to confess, what with chicken giblets and chocolate. Why could he paint nothing but banquet skies? They had become a fixation with him, these firmaments stuffed with carbs and candies, poultries and pastries. He took a chilly swig of malto, then lay back on the couch and set the mug upon his prominent belly.
Sir Toby’s belly was prominent in two respects: it was large and it was famous. Its conspicuous bulk was due to his zeal for eating, his distaste for exercise, and his steadfast refusal to undergo a slenderizing operation. His rotund profile had achieved fame because it belonged to one of the world’s most celebrated mall-artists, whose sponsor, MEGA Corporation, owned The Sleek of Araby, the leading chain of slenderizing shops. He was not a sterling exhibit for their services. Nonetheless, he considered himself to be only physically fat, not metaphysically so. In his heart and mind he was svelte. Indeed, for the first twenty-odd years of his life he might have passed for willowy. Only after moving into the Wabash River Mall six years earlier had he begun putting on weight, and now he kept swelling, season after season, like a glacier adding a layer of snow each winter. While global warming had melted the glaciers, it had not diminished his bulk.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 7
