by T E. D Klein
The story—an Indian legend, he claimed—seemed to have been cooked up by a committee of primitive tribesmen sitting round a fire trying to scare themselves. It told of the invaders—clearly a bad bunch, given to all manner of atrocities—and of God’s repeated attempts to exterminate them.
“First, they say, God curse the women, make them all estériles, barren. But is no good; is not enough. The men, they leave the jungle, raid the city, carry off its women from their bed. As long as they find women, they are still breeding.”
“So then God curses the men, right?”
“Exactamente!” Raising a finger dramatically, he leaned toward me and lowered his voice, though there was no one else around. “God, He make their penes drop off. Their manhood. But again it is no good. Even this is not enough. The fighting, the raiding, she goes on as before. The women, they are taken from the city and—” Here a disapproving little clucking sound, “—just as before.”
“But how could they keep on breeding without their, uh…”
He gave another one of those all-purpose Latin shrugs, which seemed terribly enigmatic but may just have been embarrassed. “Oh,” he said vaguely, “they find a way.” He picked a sliver of pistachio from his teeth and stared at it a moment. “But is hard to guess what is truth here, what is tabula. Is not history, you know. Is only a story the Indians tell. Un cuento de hadds.”
A fairy tale—yes, that’s exactly what it was. A prehistoric fairy tale.
“Well,” I said, “I guess you can’t blame our ancestors for running away. Those outsiders don’t sound like the kind of people you want to hang around with. What happened, they take over when the others moved out?”
The old man nodded. “City, she is theirs now. Belong to them. For sport they pull her down—every temple, every tower, every brick. Soon they are making ready to go after the others; is time to breed again, time to bring back food, women, captives for the sacrifice. And now, just before they leave, God make His final curse: He seal their eyes close, every one, forever. No more can they follow the tribe of our fathers. For them, is no more sunlight, no more day. One by one they crawl back to the jungle. One by one they are lost. All of them are dead now, dead and in the earth for two hundred thousand year. Paraiso, she is built upon the place where bodies lie. Farmers turn their bones up with the plow, grind them up for meal. All are cenizas now—dust and ashes.”
That certainly sounded final enough, I thought. Exeunt the villains. At least the fairy tale had a happy ending…
“But hold on,” I said, “what if these fellows survived even a third curse? I mean, the first two didn’t even slow them down, they adapted right away. And it’s not as if losing your sight were a sentence of death. Who’s to say the smart ones didn’t stick around? Their children could be down there in the jungle right this minute, trying to figure out where all the women went!”
“You think perhaps they are hoping to make a new raid on Paraiso?” The old priest smiled wanly. “No, my friend. The last of them die off down there two hundred thousand year ago. Their story, she is over. Se termino.” He clapped his hands. “Now the tribes of man, they are far more interesting. My book tells how they learn to read the stars, build ships, make fire…”
But I wasn’t listening. I was thinking once again of those great Mayan cities, Tikal and Copan and the rest, standing silent and deserted in the middle of the jungle—as if, without warning, one afternoon or in the dead of night, all of their inhabitants had simply disappeared, or walked away, or fled.
I wasn’t sure just where those cities lay, but I knew they were nowhere near Paraiso.
My grandfather sat waiting for me in the snack bar, lacquered and perfumed and shorn. “You shoulda seen the fight,” he said as I settled into my chair. “Those colored boys can really take a beating. Damn thing would still be going on if it wasn’t for the weather.” He nodded toward the window, against which heavy drops of rain were splattering like gunfire.
For the next few minutes he regaled me with a description of the fight, which he’d viewed from the doorway of the barbershop. The shop itself had disappointed him—“four seventy-five,” he said ruefully, “I could’ve cut my own hair for less than that!”—but its magazines had been a revelation. “It’s unbelievable,” he said, “they’re showing everything nowadays. And you could see their faces!”
“What, are you kidding?” Maybe I hadn’t heard right. “You mean to say you spent your time looking at the faces, instead of—”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that! What the hell you take me for?” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “What I’m saying is, you could tell who these gals were. You’d recognize ’em if you saw ’em on the street. In my day, if some floozie took her clothes off in a magazine, they made damn sure they blocked her eyes out first. Or maybe they’d show you the back of her head. But you hardly ever got to see the face.”
I was going to ask him where he’d been living the past twenty years, but he was staring behind me and beginning to get up. I turned to see Coralette squeezing through the door. She saw us and moved ponderously toward our table, shaking rain from her umbrella as she came. “Lawd,” she said, “if this ain’t just the worst day I ever see!” Heaving herself into a seat, she sighed and shook her head. “Trouble, jus’ no end o’ trouble.”
Coralette, it turned out, was a resident of the Notre Dame Hotel, which stood beside a drug rehabilitation center on West 80th Street. I had passed beneath its awning several times; it was a shabby little place, notable only for the grandiosity of its name and for a Coke machine that all but filled its lobby. Coralette’s room was on the second floor, by the rear landing. Across the hall lived a tall, ungainly young black girl, a former addict who’d been enrolled in one of the programs at the building next door. The girl was severely retarded, with impaired speech and a pronounced mongoloid cast to her features, yet according to the scandalized Coralette she spent most of her time with a succession of men—criminals and fellow addicts, to judge by their appearance —from the s.r.o. hotels uptown. Occasionally she would bring one of these men back with her; more often she was out all night, and would return home in the morning barely able to report where she had been.
This spring had seen a change in her. She had stopped going out, and had taken to spending the nights in her room, although it was several weeks before the older woman had realized it. “She been in there all the time,” said Coralette, “only I figured she away ’cause I don’t never see no light under the door. Then one night I’s on the way to the bathroom and hears her voice, but she ain’t sayin’ nothin’… At first I think maybe she sick, or cryin’ out in her sleep. But then I hears this movin’ around, and I know she got somebody in there with her. I hears the two of ’em again on my way back. They makin’ a lot o’ noise, but they ain’t talkin’, if you knows what I mean.”
The noise had been repeated on succeeding nights, and once Coralette had walked by when the visitor apparently was sleeping, “snorin’ fit to kill.” A few weeks later she had heard somebody coming up the stairs, followed by the closing of the door across the hall. “Now I ain’t nosy,” she declared, “but I did take me a peek through the keyhole when he pass. Didn’t see much, ’cause the light out in the hall and it was dark as sin, but look to me like he didn’t have no trousers on.”
One night in April she’d encountered the girl outside the bathroom. “She lookin’ sorta sick—say she think she got some sorta worm in her—so I asks her to come on in and rest herself. I got me a hot plate, so I cooks up a can o’ black bean soup. Poor chile don’t even know enough to say thank you, but she drink it all right down. ’Fore she go I asks her how she feelin’, and she say she a whole lot better now. Say she think she gwin’ be my frien’. Cot herself a bran’ new boyfrien’, too. Sound like she real proud of herself.”
For the past two weeks no one had seen her, though from time to time Coralette had heard her moving about in the room. “Sound like she alone now,” Coralette recall
ed. “I figured she was finally settlin’ down, takin’ that treatment like she s’posed to. But then today the lady from the center come and say that girl ain’t showed up for a month.”
They had tried her door and found it locked. Knocking had brought no response; neither had an appeal from Coralette. Several other tenants had grown nervous. Finally the manager had been summoned; his passkey had opened the door.
The room, said Coralette, had been a shambles. “They was some kinda mess high up on the walls, and you got to hold your nose when you go in.” The girl had been found near the center of the room, hanging naked from the light fixture with a noose around her neck. Oddly, her feet had still been resting on the floor; she must have kept her legs drawn up while dying.
“I guess that boy of hers done left her all alone.” Coralette shook her head sorrowfully. “Seems a shame when you think of it, leavin’ her like that, ’specially ’cause I recollect how proud she been. Say he was the first white boyfrien’ she ever had.”
Wednesday, June 29
As one who believes that mornings are for sleeping, I’ve always tried, both as a student and a teacher, to schedule my classes for later in the day. The earliest I ever ride the subway is ten or ten-thirty a.m., with the executives, the shoppers, and the drones. One morning just before my marriage, however, returning home from Karen’s house downtown, I found myself on the subway at half-past seven. Immediately I knew that I was among a different class of people, virtually a different tribe; I could see it in their work clothes, in the absence of neckties, and in the brown bags and lunch pails that they carried in place of briefcases. But it took me several minutes to discern a more subtle difference: that, instead of the Times, the people around me were reading (and now and then moving their lips to) the Daily News.
This, as it happens, was my grandfather’s favorite—nay, only—reading matter, aside from an occasional racing form. “You see the story on page nine?” he demanded, waving the paper in my face. On an afternoon as hot as this I was grateful for the breeze. We were seated like three wise men, he, Father Pistachio, and I, on the stoop of Pistachio’s building. I had joined them only a moment before and was sweating from my walk. Somehow these old men didn’t mind the heat as much as I did; I couldn’t wait to get back to my air conditioner.
“Recognize this?” said my grandfather, pointing to a photo sandwiched between a paean to the threatened B-1 bomber and a profile of Menachem Begin. “See? Bet you won’t find this in your fancy-shmancy Times!”
I squinted at the photo. It was dark and rather smudged, but I recognized the awning of the Notre Dame Hotel.
“Wow,” I said, “we’ll have to send this down to Coralette.” Last week, totally without warning, she had packed her bags and gone to stay with a sister in South Carolina, crossing herself and mumbling about “white boys” who were smashing the lights in her hall. I’d had to get the details from Grandfather, as my wife and I had been upstate last week. I hadn’t even had a chance to say good-bye.
“I don’t know,” said Grandfather, “I’m not so sure she’d want to read this.”
The article—“Watery Grave for Infant Quints”—was little more than an extended caption. It spoke of the “five tiny bodies… shrunken and foul-smelling” that had been discovered in a flooded area of the hotel basement by Con Ed men investigating a broken power line. All five had displayed the same evidence of “albinism and massive birth defects,” giving the News the opportunity to refer to them as “the doomed quintuplets” and to speculate about the cause of death; “organic causes” seemed likely, but drowning and even strangulation had not been ruled out. “Owing to decomposition,” the article noted, “it has not been possible to determine the infants’ age at the time of death, nor whether they were male or female. Caseworkers in the Police Department’s newly revamped Child Welfare Bureau say that despite recent budget cutbacks they are tracking down several leads.”
“Pretty horrible,” I said, handing the paper back to my grandfather. “I’m just glad Karen doesn’t read things like this.”
“But I have brought for you a thing she may like.” Father Pistachio was holding up a slim orange book bound in some sort of shiny imitation cloth. It had one of those crude, British-type spines that stick out past the edges of the cover: obviously a foreign job, or else vanity press. This book, as it happened, was both. It was the Costa Rican edition of his “Commentary on Saint Thomas.”
“Is a present,” he said, placing it reverently in my hand. “For you, also for your wife. I inscribe it to you both.”
On the flyleaf, in trembly, old-fashioned script, he had written, “To my dear American friends: With your help I will spread the truth to all readers of your country,” and, beneath it, “‘We wander blind as children through a cave; yet though the way be lost, we journey from the darkness to the light.’ —Thomas xv:i.”
I read it out loud to Karen after dinner that night while she was in the kitchen washing up. “Gee,” she said, “he’s really got his heart set on getting that thing published. Sounds to me like a bit of a fanatic.”
“He’s just old.” I flipped through the pages searching for illustrations, since my Spanish was rusty and I didn’t feel like struggling through the text. Two Aztecs with a cornstalk flashed past me, then drawings of an arrowhead, a woolly mammoth, and a thing that resembled a swim-fin. “El guante de un usurpador,” the latter’s caption said. The glove of a usurper. It looked somehow familiar; maybe I’d seen one at the YMCA pool. I turned past it and came to a map. “See this?” I said, holding up the book. “A map of where your ancestors came from. Right on up through Nicaragua.”
“Mmm.”
“And here’s a map of that long-lost city—”
“Looks like something out of Flash Gordon.” She went back to the dishes.
“—and a cutaway view of the main temple.”
She peered at it skeptically. “Honey, are you sure that old man’s not putting you on? I’d swear that’s nothing but a blueprint of the Pyramid at Giza. You can find it in any textbook, I’ve seen it dozens of times. He must have gotten hold of a Xerox machine and— Good God, what’s that?”
She was pointing toward a small line drawing on the opposite page. I puzzled out the caption. “That’s, um, let me see, ‘La cabeza de un usurpador,’ the head of a usurper… Oh, I know, it must be one of the helmets the invaders wore. A sort of battle mask, I guess.”
“Really? Looks more like the head of a tapeworm. I’ll bet he cribbed it from an old bio book.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. He wouldn’t stoop to that.” Frowning, I drifted back to the living room, still staring at the page. From the page the thing stared blankly back. She was right, I had to admit. It certainly didn’t look like any helmet I’d ever seen: the alien proportions of the face, with great blank indentations where the eyes should be (unless those two tiny spots were meant for eyes), the round, puckered “mouth” area with rows of hooklike “teeth…”
Shutting the book, I strolled to the window and gazed out through the latticework of bars. Darkness had fallen on the street only half an hour before, yet already the world out there seemed totally transformed.
By day the neighborhood was pleasant enough; we had what was considered a “nice” building, fairly well maintained, and a “nice” block, at least our half of it. The sidewalk lay just outside our windows, level with the floor on which I stood. Living on the bottom meant a savings on the rent, and over the years I’d come to know the area rather well. I knew where the garbage cans were grouped like sentries at the curbside, and how the large brass knocker gleamed on the reconverted brownstone across the street. I knew which of the spindly little sidewalk trees had failed to bud this spring, and where a Mercedes was parked, and what the people looked like in the windows facing mine.
But it suddenly occurred to me, as I stood there watching the night, that a neighborhood can change in half an hour as assuredly as it can change in half a block. After dark it becomes
a different place: another neighborhood entirely, coexisting with the first and separated by only a few minutes in time, the first a place where everything is known, the other a place of uncertainty, the first a place of safety, the other one of—
It was time to draw the curtains, but for some reason I hesitated. Instead, I reached over and switched off the noisy little air conditioner, which had been rattling metallically in the next window. As it ground into silence, the noise outside seemed to rise and fill the room. I could hear crickets, and traffic, and the throb of distant drums. Somewhere out there in the darkness they were snapping their fingers, bobbing their heads, maybe even dancing; yet, for all that, the sound struck me as curiously ominous. My eyes kept darting back and forth, from the shadows of the lampposts to the line of strange dark trees—and to that menacing stretch of unfamiliar sidewalk down which, at any moment, anything might walk on any errand.
Stepping back to adjust the curtains, I was startled by the movement of my own pale reflection in the glass, and I had a sudden vision, decidedly unscientific, no doubt inspired by that picture in the book: a vision of a band of huge white tapeworms, with bodies big as men, inching blindly northward toward New York.
Wednesday, July 6
“It was awful. Awful.”
“You’re telling me! Musta been a real nightmare.”
I folded my paper and sat up in the chair, straining to hear above the hum of the fan. The lobby was momentarily deserted, except for an old man dozing in the corner and two old women leafing through a magazine; a third sat numbly by their side, as if waiting for a bus. In the mirror I could see Miss Pascua and Mr. Calzone talking in the office just behind me. They were keeping their voices low.
