Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  The drumming of the rain against the window in the darkened room caused me to feel dizzier, less in control, and thus I can’t be sure what moved me to call Patience; but I think it may have been that Rawley’s betrayal—so my drunken brain characterized it—inspired me to attempt to counterfeit a romantic relationship for myself. That would have been in keeping with the infantile tenor of my thoughts.

  To my surprise, she picked up on the third ring. “Michael! I’m so happy to hear you! When you coming home?”

  My toaster, I thought. Still mine.

  All during the call, Patience urged me to hurry home, saying the Congo was a dangerous place and she was worried about me. This was, I assumed, her loneliness speaking. But her expression of concern suited my fantasies, and I found myself murmuring endearments, making the kind of assurances that should never be made drunkenly or lightly; and when she offered similar assurances in return, rather than retreating from the edge of this moral precipice, I let her voice comfort me and fell asleep with the phone pressed to my ear.

  • • •

  Usually after drinking to excess, I sleep fitfully, tossing about, waking every so often, plagued by stomach pains and anxiety dreams; but that night I slept soundly and the only dream that came was not the typical helter-skelter of surreal adventures and circumstances, but had a clarity and mental coloration unlike that of any dream I had theretofore experienced. I was moving rapidly through shallow water, not swimming so much as being carried along by the current. Clouds of brownish yellow sediment stirred up by the passages of others before me obscured my vision, yet I could still make out reeds undulating on the river bottom, wedges of stone extruded from the bank. Within minutes, the water became cooler, deeper, greener, and I could no longer see the bottom. I was being drawn toward something, but what exactly that thing was, I did not know. While it was not in my nature to be afraid, I had a sudden comprehension of fear, of its potentials, and this caused me to become more alert to my surroundings, as might happen when food was near. But this knowledge was unimportant, for even had I been capable of fear, I somehow trusted the thing toward which I was being drawn; I understood that it was not inimical.

  The current grew faster, the water darkened to a cold blue, and I was overcome by a great lassitude. All my strength was draining from me, yet at the same time I sensed that I was accumulating new strength of a sort I could not fully understand, subtler form of power than my old strength, but no less serviceable. In the distance I saw a glowing patch of brighter blue, barely a spot, but increasing in size with every passing second, and I knew that this brightness was the signal fire of my destination…

  I’m not certain what woke me, but I believe it must have been a lightning strike, for I heard thunder, and lightning forked down the sky, illuminating tracers of rain. I was still half involved in the tag ends of the dream—it had been so compelling, it seemed to pull at me as inexorably as had that glowing patch of blue. Yet at the same time I was terrified, and my heart raced. Rain was pouring down my face, into my eyes, matting my hair, and I was utterly disoriented. The last thing I remembered of the waking world was Patience’s voice in my ear, a pillow beneath my head. I hugged myself against the chill, and realized I was outside, wearing only a pair of briefs. A flicker of distant lightning showed my immediate surroundings. I was standing atop the rock where that afternoon I had seen the crocodiles at their strange menage. Beneath me, water churned against the bank, and on the far side of the river, the shadowy crest of the jungle trees swayed against the lesser darkness of the sky, bending all to the left, then straightening, with the ponderous rhythm of a dancing bear. On every side, the crunch and tatter of windy collisions, and from above, the constant battering of thunder.

  Even after I had recognized my location, I remained terrified. I had no idea what could have happened. The idea of somnambulism had not yet entered my mind; instead, it seemed I had been spirited from my bed by the force of a dream to a place referenced by the dream; though confused, I was not confused about that—whether it was a product of my drunken imagination or of something more inexplicable, I had been dreaming a crocodile dream. I began to shiver, and this was not entirely due to the cold. The toiling dark was full of dangers, and I would have to negotiate nearly a mile of it before reaching the hotel. But no other option was open to me. I shuffled about, afraid of turning abruptly and losing my balance, and as I took my first step toward the hotel, a deafening crack of thunder—like the parting of some fundamental seam—shredded the clouds overhead, and I was knocked onto my back by a blast of vivid red light. A foundry color, like the molten shell that encases a white-hot core of liquefied steel. It was as if I’d been cupped in a fiery hand for a split second and then cast aside. For several seconds thereafter, I was dazed by the concussion, blinded, my nostrils stinging with the reek of ozone; when my vision cleared, I saw that a dead tree close by the rock had been struck by the lightning and was ablaze, serving as a torch to illumine a considerable portion of the flats, causing puddles to glitter and shining up all the slick muddy skin of the place. At the landward end of the rock, no more than twenty feet away, blocking my exit, was a crocodile.

  This was no ordinary crocodile, but one of nature’s great criminals, as unruled in its own place and time as the tyrannosaur. A creature, a beast, a monster. Fully sixteen feet long, I reckoned it. The top of its massive head at rest was parallel with the midpoint of my thigh, and its open jaws could have accommodated an oil drum. With its scales gilded by the firelight, its pupils cored with orange brilliance, it would have been at home by Cerberus’s side, an idol of pure menace guarding a portal into hell—that was my first thought (if I can call those chill lancings of affrighted, garbled language that shot through my brain “thoughts”). It seemed that beyond the portcullis of stained and twisted teeth, deep in its hollow tube of a belly, lay a gateway opening onto some greater torment.

  The largest branch of the burning tree broke off and fell with a hiss into the river. In the diminished light, the croc’s aspect changed from that of demiurge to the purely animal. A bloated grayish green lizard with a pale, thick tongue and cold mineral eyes and corrosive, rotting breath, a creature that would chew through my torso as though it were an underdone strip of bacon, then lift its head and, utilizing its powerful throat muscles, shift me down into its stomach, where—coated in sticky acids—I would quietly dissolve over a period of days, sharing the ignominy of a partly consumed river bass, its glazed eyes contemplating me with doting steadfastness as we lay together in our cozy, messy little cave.

  To this point, disorientation had dominated my fear, but now my uncertainty as to what had happened was washed away by a single horrid certainty, and the disabling weakness that accompanies deep terror infused my limbs. My instinct was to throw myself into the water, but there I would be totally helpless. Instead, I tried to prepare for a quick sprint, a leap. If I jumped toward the bank at an angle from the middle of the rock, I might be able to gain a foothold and scramble up and make my escape. The odds of success were not good, but then the odds favoring any other course of action were far worse. It would have been helpful if the crocodile had bellowed, made a violent noise that outvoiced the wind—that might have acted upon me like a starter’s pistol and given me a boost of energy. But crocs only bellow when their territory is threatened, and I was no threat, I was mere prey. Its baleful regard was more enfeebling than any sound could have been, and I knew that at any second it would lunge forward and take me.

  In the moment before I jumped, I had an incidence of perfect clarity. It was if I were receding from the world, leaving the body behind. I saw myself, a black, insignificant figure, a human scrap on a splinter of rock above turbulent water, facing a slightly less tiny creature with a tail, and the entire dark geography of the flats, with its one torched tree and a few smaller, flickering lights in the distance that might have been lanterns in the windows of shanty bars. I saw stitchings of lightning fencing the river valley, casting the hills
in brief silhouette, bringing up the boxy shapes of Mogado from the shadows. I did not see my life pass before my eyes, but rather saw the sum of my life imprinted upon that unimportant landscape, and understood that in this cunning design with its drear prospect and trivial monster, all the wastage and impotence of my days, all my misused intellect and defrauded ambitions, all my torpid compulsions and arousals, all my puerile dreams and dissipated hopes and contemptible passions had found their proper resolution. And it was this sorry recognition, this abandonment of last illusions, that bred in me a liberating fatalism and freed my limbs from the grip of fear and let me jump.

  I hit the side of the bank hard and slipped back. My feet touched the water, but I managed to claw out a handhold in the mud and haul myself up onto level ground. Lightning strobed as I rolled away from the water’s edge, and in those bright detonations I caught sight of the crocodile. Just a glimpse. It was in the process of turning toward me, jaws agape. I flung myself away, and came to my feet running. Thunder obscured all other sound, but I could have sworn I felt the croc close behind, the awful gravity of the beast swinging its head round to bite. As I ran, as it became apparent that I was not going to die, I began to laugh. I stumbled, I fell half a dozen times, I tore my skin on stones, on dead branches, but I continued to laugh until I was too exhausted to do more than breathe. It seemed ridiculous that I should have survived. Silly. Life itself seemed silly, when there was so much death to be had. The average human activity in Africa was dying, or so I perceived it then, and to be spared in this situation abrogated at least the law of averages, if not other, more consequential laws.

  I burst through the hotel doors, somehow failing to wake the African teenager behind the reception desk, and went into the bar, empty and lightless now, and helped myself to a bottle of whiskey; I sat down at one of the tables and had a restorative drink. Then I had another. I started laughing again, and this served to wake the kid at the desk. He peeked in the doorway, a startled look on his face; then he vanished, and I heard his footsteps moving away. Not long afterward, Dillip—wearing a fetching bathrobe of embroidered green silk—made his appearance. His manner was at first stern, but on seeing my condition—all but naked, streaked with mud, bleeding, wild of countenance—he stopped short of rebuking me. He went behind the bar, picked a glass from the rack and with an air of prim disappointment, brought it to me. I thanked him and poured the glass half full.

  “What can have happened to you, sah?” Dillip asked, hovering by the table.

  I did not know how to tell him and only shook my head.

  He drew up a chair and sat opposite me, adjusting the fall of his robe to cover his bony knees. From his expression, I gathered that he had not yet decided whether to be reproving or indulgent of my curious behavior.

  “Do you require medical assistance?” Dillip asked.

  “No,” I said. “No, just a drink or two.”

  This did not sit well with him. “Sah, you must tell me what has happened. If something has happened to you in the hotel, I must report it.”

  “Nothing happened in the hotel.” I pointed with the whiskey bottle. “Out there.”

  “Ah!” said Dillip. “You have been robbed, then. Bandits!”

  I considered accepting this judgment; it would be easier than trying to explain the events of the evening. But when I put everything together in my head—my sleepwalking, the storm, the crocodile, Buma—I did not arrive at an American conclusion, but an African one.

  “Not bandits,” I said. “Mobutu.”

  • • •

  African politics is frequently intertwined with the cult of personality. Perhaps because the land is vast, the men who pretend to rule it must proclaim their own vastness, each in a highly individual way…ways that are rarely beneficial to those whom they have been “elected” to serve. For instance, not far from Abidjan lies the village of Yamoussoukro, the birthplace of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the late president of the Ivory Coast. Upon his elevation to the office, the president initiated a building program designed to turn Yamoussoukro into a new capital, one that would rival Brasilia. He had long held an admiration for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and so nothing would do but that he erect a copy of the church half again as large as the original close to the village; and to provide better access to this newly historic area, he ordered the construction of a six-lane highway. The need for six-lane highways in West Africa is slight, if not nonexistent. The first time I drove along the highway, at what ordinarily would be considered rush hour, I encountered only one other person, an old man in a shabby brown suit riding a bicycle. That this building program nearly bankrupted the country was of secondary importance to President Houphouet-Boigny and his supporters; of primary importance was that in their minds this spanking new, empty, purposeless city and its various accessories established to the world the greatness of the man and suggested that he was not someone to be trifled with.

  Mobutu Sese Seko favored more of a minimalist approach to achieving this same effect. It suited him to create a fearsome ring of security about himself and throughout Kinshasa, and to permit the remainder of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) to fall into ruin. Beyond Kinshasa, the jungle overran the outlying highways, and the infrastructure crumbled, leaving a poverty-stricken populace without any resources other than the sweat of their brows. Did not this cruel policy express a godlike indifference to suffering? Was not a reign of more than thirty years funded by this unvarying indifference evidence of the man’s invulnerability and power? Might not such a man use his dying strength to visit some final and lasting pain upon his people by means of a curse? And might not the people, disposed to belief in his godhood by thirty years of oppression, be so psychologically in thrall to him that by dint of national will they had managed to make the curse manifest, or—put more basically—they had caused it to come true?

  This last was one of the questions I put to Buma the next afternoon. I was not in the best of shape. I felt cracked, things broken inside my head, the shape of my faith in logical process gone lopsided, and my hands trembled from fatigue and alcohol. Nothing I saw that day helped to right me. At the jail, the desk officer’s newspaper told of a village twenty miles downriver destroyed by fire—lightning or tribal violence, no one could say, for there were no survivors—and a small headline below the fold reported that fish were dying by the thousands in a lake fed by the Kilombo. The cause was unknown.

  “As long as you ask these questions,” Buma said, “you will never know the answers.” He was, as before, sitting sideways to me, gazing at the whitewashed wall, maintaining his customary reptilian poise. “Yet if you learn not to ask them, someday the knowledge will come.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “If you sit perfectly still, the world will move through you, and everything is everything else. I’ve heard the same crap from slicker hustlers than you.”

  “You’re angry because your dream was interrupted.” He turned his head to me, his seamed face calm, that thin smile in evidence. “Don’t worry. You’ll finish it tonight. Then you will understand.”

  I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew about my interrupted dream; but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Because it is my dream,” he said. “Because I gave it to you.” He refitted his gaze to the wall, and I imagined he was seeing through the whitewash to the bloodstained surface beneath, the dark Mobutu skin that stretched across the entire country—it could be covered up, but never truly obscured.

  I didn’t know what more to ask—most of the questions crowding my brain were those I needed to ask of myself. Questions relating to my behavior with Rawley, my overall stability. I had never before walked in my sleep, and though I had no knowledge concerning the causes of somnambulism, I assumed they must be pathological.

  In spite of my confusion, my self-absorption, I managed to frame a question for Buma. Not a particularly intelligent question, but it would serve to occupy him while I thought of a better one.

&
nbsp; “Who are you?” I asked him. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Do you see, Michael? It is always best to be direct. All your previous questions have begged the issue. But this…this is to the point.”

  “Then why don’t you answer it?”

  “Sometimes I think I am a man.” His smile widened. “But then I remember that I am not.”

  “This non-responsive style of yours,” I said, “it’s the classic tactic of the charlatan. The cryptic answer, the knowing nod. All it suggests is that you have nothing salient to tell me. It’s obvious that you’re a clever man, that you’re using what you’ve deduced about me from our conversations to try and persuade me of your supernatural abilities. But I’m not buying it.”

  Buma let out a hissing breath, a sign—I thought—of exasperation. “Your assumption seems to be that by answering you I will be helping myself, and you further assume that I am not answering you. In the first place, I do not need your help. In the second, I have given you a dream, and I have confessed to murder. If you wait and listen and watch, you will learn the rest. You must have patience, Michael.”

  The word “patience” startled me. “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  His eyes swung toward me. “Have you ever watched crocodiles hunt? How they wait and wait, how they persevere? Time and again they will attack and fail, yet they remain persevering. Because they have patience. If I were the king of the crocodiles, I would be the king of patience. Patience is much more than a simple virtue, Michael. Surely you know that?”

  He was doing exactly what I had said—probing, making rudimentary deductions, then using my reactions against me. But though I thought I understood him, this talk of patience led me to suspect that he had some connection with my Patience, or that he knew about her. A hundred wild suppositions contended in my brain, along with fantasies about crocodile kings with thin, false smiles and women who sat sideways and cut their eyes toward you rather than turning their heads; but I refused to give in to them.