Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “You underestimate yourself…” I began, but he gave a dismissive wave.

  “I have no need to ask whether you are a fool,” he said. “You claim to be a doctor who studies snakes, yet your questions are the same as that other fool’s. You think to trick me into revealing myself. Yet you are such a great fool, you can’t see that I have already done so.”

  “All men are fools one way or another,” I said. “But I’m willing to accept your judgment. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  To this point, his movements had been measured and slow, something I attributed to the weight of the manacles. Now he whirled about and brought both fists down upon the center of the table, splintering it. This movement was so quick and fluid, I did not even have time to flinch, but was frozen by the violence; and as he leaned toward me, pinning me with his angry yellow gaze, I realized that the manacles would not be much of an impediment should he choose to attack.

  The policeman’s voice came from beyond the locked door, asking if everything was all right. Before I could respond, Buma told him to leave us alone. Immediately thereafter, I heard footsteps in retreat along the corridor.

  “I wonder what’s gotten into him?” I said to Buma, tamping down the coals of an incipient panic. “Whatever you’re trying to sell, it seems you’ve found at least one idiot who’s swallowed it.”

  He said nothing, remaining motionless; but I sensed a trivial relaxation in his tense posture.

  I shifted to a more comfortable position, trying to present an image of cool indifference. “You were going to say?…”

  Buma dropped his eyes to the iron cuffs encircling his wrists; after a bit he let out another sigh and shifted back about to face the wall. “It would be best for you to return to Abidjan,” he said.

  I was for the moment confounded that he knew where I lived, but then realized there was an obvious explanation.

  “I’m not impressed,” I said. “It’s likely that Mister Rawley told you about me. If not Rawley, then one of your guards.”

  This time, I thought, his peculiar thin smile was in actuality a smile. “If you travel upriver five days,” he said, “you’ll come to a place marked by a ferry landing that was burned by the soldiers. Walk into the jungle straight back from the landing until you see a giant fig tree. It’s not far. There you will find what you have been seeking.”

  “And what exactly is that?”

  “A python,” Buma said. “A white one.”

  I was almost certain I had told Rawley that I was searching for an albino rock python—a healthy specimen would be worth six figures, and if it could be bred, I could make even more from the first litter. The money would free me from writing more grant proposals, from doing tedious research. From Africa. Yet I couldn’t imagine Rawley being so chummy with Buma that he would let slip this piece of information—if I had told him, I had done so only in passing; it would not have been in character for me to dwell on such a quixotic enterprise. Still, this was the only possible explanation.

  “I suppose the snake’s just hanging around the fig tree, waiting for me to catch it.”

  Buma shot me an icy glance. “If you go there, you will find it.”

  “Golly, thanks. I’ll get right on it,” I said. “And here I thought you told me I’d learn nothing about pythons from you.”

  “Then it seems you must assume I am a liar,” said Buma. “Not a fool.”

  I had to laugh at this. Rawley had been right—the man was clever; but I remained convinced that everything about him, from his reptilian mannerisms to his cryptic dialogue, was part of an act. Better conceived than others I’d seen, but an act nonetheless.

  “Do you truly want answers to your questions?” Buma asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  He turned to me again, slowly this time, and gave me an assessing look; he nodded. “It will be difficult, but you may be able to understand,” he said. “Very well.” He reached out and clasped my right wrist with his left hand.

  In reflex, I tried to pull away, but my hand might as well have been stuck in an iron wall—his strength was irresistible. He closed his eyes, squeezed my wrist until my fist opened; then leaned forward and spat into my palm. With his free hand, he closed my fingers around the spittle, so that it smeared into the flesh.

  “There,” he said, releasing me. “My brothers and sisters will not harm you now.”

  “I thought you were going to answer my questions.”

  “Words can never convey the truth,” he told me. “Truth must be revealed. And so it will be revealed to you.”

  He settled back in his chair, let out a hissing sigh.

  “That’s it? That’s your answer? The truth must be revealed?”

  Buma’s eyelids were half-closed; his chest rose and fell, but very, very slowly, as if he were asleep. “Tomorrow,” he said in a dusty, barely audible whisper. “We will talk more tomorrow.”

  • • •

  The town was tucked into a notch between low green hills, beyond which lay deep jungle, and it stretched for nearly a quarter mile along the banks of the Kilombo, thinning out to the west into a district of thatched huts and shanty bars. Farther to the west, separated from this district by mud flats, lay the hotel Rawley had mentioned, the Hotel du Rive Vert, a venerable structure dating from the 1900s, when European traders had plied the river, exchanging cheap modernities for skins and ivory. The rive was no longer vert, the grounds having deteriorated into patches of parched grass crossed by muddy tracks, sentried here and there by dying, sparsely leaved eucalyptus. Standing isolate amid this desolation, the building itself—a rambling white stucco colonial fantasy of second-story balconies and French doors and a red tile roof—had the too-luminous incongruity of a hallucination, a notion assisted by the presence next to the front entrance of a lightning-struck acacia with a hollow just below its crotch that resembled an aghast mouth—it looked to be pointing at the hotel with a forked twig hand and venting a silent scream.

  There was no sign of Rawley at the hotel, no message. The hotel bar, gloriously dim and cool and rife with mahogany gleam, was a temptation, but I didn’t want to be drunk when Rawley arrived. I set out walking along the riverbank, thinking I might stop in at one of the shanty bars for a beer or two—no more than two. The beer, I thought, would provide a base for the heavier alcohol consumption that would likely ensue once Rawley and I finished our business and got down to reminiscence.

  This was toward the end of the dry season, and while the better part of the days were sunny—as it was that day when I left the hotel—the late afternoon rains were lasting longer and longer, often well into night. The land was so thirsty that by mid-morning of the following day, the streets were parched again, and wind blew veils of dust up from the flats; but there was a new heaviness in the air, and in the mucky soil at the edge of the water you could see shallow troughs where crocodiles had lain motionless during the downpour, steeped—or so I imagined—in a kind of bleak satisfaction, as if they believed that the mud and the river and the wet darkness were merging into a single medium, one perfect for their uses. Curiously enough, I did not see a single crocodile during the first portion of my walk. The flats reeked of spoilage and were strewn about with cattle bones and skulls, empty bottles, paper litter, and fruit rinds; occasionally I passed a dead tree or a mounded puzzle of sun-whitened sticks and twigs that once had been a shrub of some sort. The river was a couple of hundred feet wide at this juncture, roiled and muddy, and the far bank was occupied by secondary-growth jungle, leached to a pale green by the summer drought—from it came the sound of a trillion exquisitely unimportant lives blended together into a seething hum, just audible above the idling wash of the water. Flies buzzed about my head, and at my feet I saw the delicate tracks of crabs. But no crocodiles, no significant animal life of any kind.

  On rounding a bend, however, I was brought up short by the sight of more crocodiles than I could have reasonably expected. Less than ten yards from where I stood, a wide, fl
at spur of tawny rock extended out from the Mogado side of the bank some twenty-five feet over the river, and upon it, slithering atop one another, stacked almost to the height of a man, were dozens of crocs, perhaps more than a hundred, hissing, snapping, exposing their ghastly discolored teeth, groping with their clawed feet for purchase; a great humping mass of gray-green scales and turreted eyes and dead-white mouths. I backed off a few paces, daunted by the closeness of so many predators, and by the strangeness of the scene. Not that it was entirely strange. During droughts, it sometimes happens that crocodiles will crowd together like this, pressing against each other in order to snare whatever moisture might have collected on the hides of their fellows; but in this instance, the drought had passed, and there was abundant water available. As I watched, one of the crocs dropped off the pile and went with a heavy splash into the murky water. Instead of making its way back up onto the rock, which I would have expected, it allowed itself to be carried off downstream, barely submerged, letting the current take it sideways, rolling it over partway to expose its pale, slimed belly, as if the thing were dead or moribund. Soon other crocs followed suit. This behavior was strange, indeed. I could think of no reason for it, except perhaps that toxic chemicals were responsible.

  Before long, several dozen crocodiles had gone into the water—the narrows just beyond the bend was thronged with bodies, but once past that point, the current picked up speed and scattered them out across the breadth of the river, carrying them along more smoothly, so it appeared they were all arrowing toward the same destination, like an amphibious hunting pack. The scene was disturbing, unsettling, and not simply because I had no good explanation for it. I could not, you see, accept that it had a rational explanation; there was about the crocs’ actions a quality of purposefulness, of surreal functionality, that caused me to think I was witnessing something to which rationality as I knew it did not apply. Though I had been trained as an academic, I was not the sort to be troubled by slight shifts in the alignment of reality—my personal life had been fraught with lapses into substance abuse and depression and various other altered states. But this particular shift seemed to embody a powerful, unfathomable value that outstripped my experience, and I was shaken by it.

  I had lost my taste for native beer, but not my thirst, and I hurried back to the hotel, where I immersed myself in a large whiskey, and in the illusion of Europe granted by the beveled mirror behind the bar, with its deep reflection of dark wood, candlelit tables, and plush red carpeting. Two whiskeys more, and the potential threat posed by afflicted crocodiles receded into a blurry inconsequentiality.

  The barman, a slender, dignified East Indian named Dillip, with pomaded gray hair, and a crimson sash accenting his white shirt and trousers, was watching television at the end of the counter: a news program from Kinshasa. Bodies were being hauled from a river. I asked him if this footage related to the ferry disaster reported in the morning headlines.

  “No, sah. Somebody just kill these boys and throw them in the Kilombo.” He shook his head ruefully. “Mobutu.”

  Mobutu, I reminded him, was dead.

  “Even dead, he make trouble for this place. Many people along the river were not his friend. They try to assassinate him.” He started to unload cutlery from a dishwasher. “You see, sah, at the end Mobutu was crazy from his cancer and the drugs. He does many crazy things. One thing, he tell his sorcerer to lay a curse upon the river. And now every town, every village along the Kilombo is poisoned by it.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “Yes, sah. They say the sorcerer take a scrap of Mobutu’s spirit and send into the river. Now nothing good can happen here.” He made a gesture of regret. “Nothing good can happen anywhere. You see, the Kilombo it flows into the ocean. And since the ocean goes everywhere, Mobutu’s curse have poisoned all the waters.”

  Despite the woeful character of this information, he imparted it with the air of a man glad to be helpful to a stranger, as if warning of a dangerous stretch of road ahead. Thus do most Africans, be they black or white or any shade in between, approach the subject of sorcery—it is a simple conversational resource, no more extraordinary than talk of politics and the weather; and as is the case with those topics, though the news concerning sorcerous activity is generally bad, it’s simply a fact of life, and nothing to get upset about.

  I was about to ask Dillip more about Mobutu’s relationship with the region, but Rawley chose that moment to put in an appearance. The next few minutes were occupied by a backslapping embrace and an exchange of crude pleasantries. And following that, I filled him in on my interview with Buma.

  “So you think he’s a talented thespian.” Rawley had a sip of beer. “I must admit that was my impression at first. And perhaps first impressions are the most accurate in this instance. The longer I spoke with him, the more persuaded I was that something else was going on. Magic. Sorcery. That’s why I wanted your opinion. Being born here makes me somewhat susceptible to these old frauds.”

  He didn’t seem convinced of this, however.

  “I want to talk to him again, if only to watch him work,” I said.

  “Yes, yes…absolutely. Talk to him as often as you like.” Rawley gazed at his reflection in the mirror. On the face of things, he looked the same as always, but now I noticed that his trousers and polo shirt were rumpled, and his hair had been hastily combed—a far cry from his normal pathological neatness. Dark puffy half moons under his eyes gave evidence of sleeplessness, and his ruddy tan was undercut by the sort of pallor that comes with illness or overwork.

  “Fuck me,” he said wearily, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “This business is sending me round my twist.” He signaled Dillip, pointed to my empty glass, and held up two fingers. “I’m getting it from both ends. Kinshasa wants me to prosecute, but the locals are terrified that if I do, Buma’s minions will slaughter them in their beds.”

  “Buma has minions?”

  “He’s never mentioned any. But then, as you yourself observed, he conveys a certain menace.” The whiskeys arrived, and Rawley knocked back half of his; he lit a cigarette, leaned back and regarded me fondly. “I’m glad you’re here, Michael. I really needed someone to get pissed with.”

  “Then it’s not my vast wisdom you were interested in.”

  He laughed. “Strictly a ruse.”

  An accomplished drinker, Rawley knew how to pace himself for a long evening. Though I had a head start, I slowed my own pace and fell into his rhythm of sips and swallows, and before long we had achieved a relatively equal level of inebriation. Other patrons entered the bar. A distinguished, white-haired African gentleman in a dark blue suit sat alone at a corner table, sipping a brightly colored drink decorated with a tiny paper parasol, and staring into the middle distance. His face betrayed no expression, but I imagined I could hear the memory tunes playing in his head. A young French couple—fieldworkers with a relief agency—littered the opposite end of the bar with government forms and talked earnestly. Two bearded thirtyish men in jeans and Tshirts took a table by the door; they downed beer after beer in rapid succession, their mulelike laughter at odds with the atmosphere of colonial decorum. Germans, probably.

  When not busy serving his customers, Dillip continued to watch the TV, which now offered a discussion amongst three government officials concerning the troubles along the Kilombo, and since Rawley and I had for the moment exhausted our store of reminiscences, I told him what Dillip had said about Mobutu and his curse.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that story,” Rawley said. “It’s true enough the region has been going through hell since he died. But it’s impossible to tell which came first, the trouble or the story.” With the tip of his forefinger, he smeared a puddle of moisture around on the polished surface of the bar. “The old boy was mad, there’s no doubt of it. And not just at the end. When I was a boy I met him with my father. Tiny fellow with outsized spectacles, wearing a leopard-skin hat, and carrying a fetish stick. Young as I was, I could feel his insanity. Li
ke some kind of radiation.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, a disappointed sound. “I used to think I understood this place, but lately…I don’t know. Perhaps things have just gotten so bloody awful, I tend to complicate them. Make them into something they’re not. Oh, well. I won’t have to deal with it much longer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Why’s that?”

  He hesitated. “I was planning to tell you this tomorrow; I thought it might make an effective cure for a hangover.” A pale smile. “I’m getting married next month. Beautiful girl named Helen Crowley. Extremely intelligent. Attached to the British embassy. She can’t abide Africa, however, so we’re going to live in London.”

  “Damn! When did all this happen?”

  “I met her last year, but things didn’t heat up until a couple of months ago.”

  I was startled. More than startled, actually. Rawley was the whitest African of my acquaintance, but he was nonetheless African through and through, and I couldn’t imagine him being happy anywhere else. I asked if he was looking forward to living in England and he said, “You must be joking! A Third World country with a Second World climate. I can’t fucking wait!” He fiddled with his cocktail napkin. “But she’s…she wants…Hell, you know how it goes.”

  I told him that I did, indeed, know how it went.

  Rawley began to extol Helen Crowley’s many virtues, and it struck me that he was attempting to excuse himself for running out on me, as if he believed that by marrying and exiling himself to Europe, he was effectively ending our relationship. Which was probably the case. My plans for the future, albeit sketchy, did not include a sojourn in England. I felt a childish resentment toward him. Though we only saw each other half a dozen times a year, he was the one real friend I had, and I had come to rely on his accessibility.

  He tried to play to me, asking about my love life, suggesting that it was time for me to find someone as he had. My responses were terse and unaccommodating. With part of my mind, I recognized what an asshole I was being, but I was too drunk to censor myself. Not long afterward, I made my own excuses, told him I would meet him in the hotel bar the next evening after I talked with Buma, and staggered off to bed.