The Drowned Life Page 11

  “Take a lock of this hair, boy, when we’re done,” he said. “When you get old, tie it into a knot and wear it in your vest pocket. It will ward off danger…to an extent.”

  “How fast do they run?” I asked.

  “How fast?” he said, and then he stopped walking. A breeze blew through the windows and porticos of the workroom. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder out the window. Storm clouds, lush hedge, and a humidity of roses and cinnamon. The flies now swarmed. “That fast,” he said. “Draw it.”

  “Notice,” he said, “there is no wound. The hunters didn’t kill it. It died of old age and they found it.” He stood very silent, his hands behind his back. I wondered if he’d run out of things to say. Then he cleared his throat and said, “There’s a point at which a wince and a smile share the same shape and intensity, almost but not quite the same meaning. It’s at that point and that point alone that you can begin to understand the beast’s scorpion tail. Sleek, black, poisonous, and needle-sharp, it moves like lightning, piercing flesh and bone, depositing a chemical that halts all memory. When stung you want to scream, to run, to aim your crossbow at its magenta heart, but alas…you forget.”

  “I’m drawing it,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said and ran his free hand over one of the smooth sections of the scorpion tail. “Don’t forget to capture the forgetting.” He laughed to himself. “The manticore venom was at one time used to cure certain cases of melancholia. There’s very often some incident from the past at the heart of depression. The green poison, measured judiciously, and administered with a long syringe to the corner of the eye, will instantly paralyze memory, negating the cause of sorrow. There was one fellow, I’d heard, who took too much of it and forgot to forget—he remembered everything and could let nothing go. His head filled up with every second of every day and it finally exploded.

  “The poison doesn’t kill you, though. It only dazes you with the inability to remember, so those teeth can have their way. There are those few who’d been stung by the beast but not devoured. In every case, they described experiencing the same illusion—an eye-blink journey to an old summer home, with four floors of guest rooms, sunset, mosquitoes. For the duration of the poison’s strength, around two days, the victim lives at this retreat…in the mind, of course. There are cool breezes as the dark comes on, moths against the screen, the sound of waves far off, and the victim comes to the conclusion that he or she is alone. I suppose to die while in the throes of the poison is to stay alone at that beautiful place by the sea for eternity.”

  I spoke without thinking, “Every aspect of the beast brings you to eternity—the smile, the purest gold, the sting.”

  “Write that down,” said Watkin. “What else can you say of it?”

  “I remember that day I came to serve you,” I said, “and on the long stretch through the poplars, my carriage slowed for a dead body in the road. As the carriage passed, I peered out to see a bloody mess on the ground. You were one of the people in the crowd.”

  “You can’t understand my invisible connection to these creatures—a certain symbiosis. I feel it in my lower back. Magic becomes a pinhole shrinking into the future,” he said.

  “Can you bring the monster back to life?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. I have something else in mind.” He stepped over to a work bench, laid his cane there, and lifted a hatchet. Returning to the body of the creature, he walked slowly around it to the tail. “That was my wife you saw in the road that day. Killed by a manticore—by this very manticore.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d think you’d have tried harder to kill it.”

  “Don’t try to understand,” he said. He lifted the hatchet high above his head, and then with one swift chop, severed the stinger from the tail of the creature. “Under the spell of the poison, I will go to the summer house and rescue her from eternity.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “You can’t go. You could be stranded in eternity with my wife and me—think of that,” said Watkin. “No, there’s something else I need you to do for me while I’m under the effects of the venom. You must take the head of the manticore into the forest and bury it. Their heads turn into the roots of trees, the fruit of which are manticore pups. You’ll carry the last seed.” He used the hatchet to sever the creature’s head while I dressed for the outdoors.

  I’d learned to ride a horse before I went to serve the wizard, but the forest at night frightened me. I couldn’t shake the image of Watkin’s palm impaled on the tip of the black stinger and his rapidly accruing dullness, gagging, his eyes rolling back behind their lids. I carried the manticore head in a woolen sack tied to the saddle and trembled at the prospect that perhaps Watkin was wrong and the one sprawled on the worktable, headless and tailless, was not the last. For my protection, he’d given me a spell to use if it became necessary—a fistful of yellow powder and a half dozen words I no longer remembered.

  I rode through the dark for a few minutes and quickly had enough of it. I dismounted and thrust my torch into the soft earth of the path. It made a broad circle of light on the ground. I retrieved the shovel I’d brought and the head. After nearly a half hour of digging, I began to hear a slight murmuring sound coming from somewhere nearby. I thought someone was spying from deeper in the forest, and then I realized it was coming from inside the sack and was paralyzed by fear. When I looked, the smile was facing out. The manticore’s eyes went wide, that chasm of a mouth opened, flashing three-way ivory, and she spoke in a foreign language.

  I took her out of the sack, set her head in the center of the circle of torchlight, brushed back her hair, and listened to the beautiful singsongy language. Later, after waking from a kind of trance brought on by the flow of words, I remembered the spell Watkin had given me. Laying the powder out on the upturned palm of my hand, I aimed it carefully and blew it into the creature’s face. She coughed. I’d forgotten the words, so said anything that I recalled them sounding like. Then she spoke to me, and I understood her.

  “Eternity,” she said and then repeated it, methodically, with the precise same intonation again and again and again….

  I grabbed the shovel and continued digging. By the time I had dug a deep enough hole, my nerves were frayed by her repetition. I threw the head into the hole and couldn’t fill the dirt in fast enough. When the head was thoroughly buried, its endless phrase still sounding, muffled, beneath the ground, I tamped the soil down and then found an odd-looking green rock, like a fist, to mark the spot for future reference.

  Watkin never returned from the place by the sea. After the venom wore off, his body was lifeless. I then became the wizard. No one seemed to care that I knew nothing about magic. “Make it up till you’ve got it,” said the king. “Then spread it around.” I thanked him for his insight, but was aware he’d eaten pure gold and now, when not soaring in his dreams, was rarely sane. The years came and went, and I did my best to learn the devices, potions, phenomena, that Watkin had bothered to record. I suppose there was something of magic in it, but it wasn’t readily recognizable.

  I was able to witness Watkin’s fate by use of a magic looking glass I’d found in his bedroom and learned to command. In it I could see anywhere in existence with a simple command. I chose the quiet place by the sea, and there before me were the clean-swept pathways, the blossoming wisteria, the gray and splintering fence board. Darkness was coming on. The woman with golden hair sat on the screened porch in a wicker rocker, listening to the floor boards creak. The twilight breeze was cool against sunburn. The day seemed endless. As night came on, she rocked herself to sleep. I ordered the mirror to show me her dream.

  She dreamed that she was at the beach. The surf rolled gently up across the sand. There was a manticore—her crimson resplendent against the clear blue day—fishing at the shoreline with a weighted net. Without fear, the woman with bright hair approached the creature. The manticore politely asked, wit
h smile upon smile, if the woman would like to help hoist the net. She nodded. The net was flung far out and they waited. Finally there was a tug. The woman with the golden hair and the manticore both pulled hard to retrieve their catch. Eventually they dragged Watkin ashore, tangled in the webbing, seaweed in his hair. She ran to him and helped him out of the net. They put their arms around each other and kissed.

  Now I keep my ears pricked for descriptions of strange beasts in the heart of the forest. If a horse or a human goes missing, I must get to the bottom of it before I can rest. I try to speak to the hunters every day. Reports of the creature are vague but growing, and I realize now I have some invisible connection to it, as if its muffled, muted voice is enclosed within a chamber of my heart, relentlessly whispering, “Eternity.”

  THE FAT ONE

  No shit, I really did quit smoking this time. Now, I know I’ve said before that I was in the midst of quitting smoking, but, at most, the whole affair never lasted longer than a couple of weeks. At one point I wrote down the dreams I had when I’d leave the nicotine patch on all night—crazy, vivid-as-life CIA conspiracy scenarios with a blue rhinoceros, entire nights crawling along towering roller-coaster tracks, conversations with a bushman of the Kalahari while he mixed, in a cauldron, various liquids from different colored cut-glass bottles, a perfume called Tears of Carthage. Once I even dreamed I stuck my finger in a wall socket and my insides lit up to show I was the devil. But all that foolishness is in the past, because I’ve been off the butts for a good long time now.

  I used the patches again, but this time I didn’t leave them on overnight and make a game of it. I played it for real and dutifully stuck with the program. It was rough, but I managed. It’s been more than six months now. Not bad, right? The downside was that I just didn’t write anything during that time. Nothing. I tried. I sat in my office and stared at the screen, and the more I sat in my office, smelling ghost smoke from the cigs of Christmas Past, the crazier it would make me. I could just about feel that harsh smog hitting the back of my throat. I used pretzel sticks, but they don’t light well. So, no writing, just sitting and staring and grinding my teeth. The other problem, and health-wise this was even a bigger issue, I just started eating like mad. I wasn’t exactly thin before my ordeal started, but the jinni was out of the bottle, the gloves had come off, and it was mindless munching from sunup to sundown. My plan was to stay off the butts at all costs, and I figured I could deal with the extra weight afterward. But, man….

  My food group of choice quickly established itself—the hot dog. Don’t bother, I’ve already contemplated six ways to Sunday the Freudian nature of it. Yes, what Ralph Nader referred to as “America’s Most Dangerous Missile.” What they make out of the lips, toes, beaks, and whatever else is swept up off the slaughterhouse floor. I’d like to say I ate only the kosher ones, but that would have meant that I’d have had to cook them myself. I had no time to cook, because I had to sit in front of the computer and stare at the screen. So here’s how it went down….

  I’d get Jack, my older son, who now drives, to go to the store for me and buy me two hot dogs and a bottle of water. We have this kind of convenience store near us, Wawa. If you live in Jersey, you know Wawa. At Wawa the regular hot dogs are pretty lame, more bun than actual dog. But they have a variety and if you’re solvent you can up the ante and get something a little more worthwhile. They have these hot sausages, too, but I can’t eat them because they’re gray verging on yellow—I know, it makes no sense, but take my word for it. They’re also spicy, which I’m not crazy about, and the deal breaker was that once I ate one and chewed on what was either a piece of fingernail or a little tooth. So the hot sausage, although more substantial, was out.

  My choice of dog was the quarter pounder. That’s right, the Hindenburg of Wawa processed meat products. Two of those and you were doing a half pound of sodium nitrates (is that the stuff they use for explosives?) and animal by-products with a little food coloring added. This stuff can’t be good for you. Even while I was biting into these things, I was picturing a third eye growing in my asshole. It was Russian roulette and I was putting the barrel to my head at least twice a day. I’d become addicted to hot dogs while on the rebound from cigarettes.

  Then one day I made a big mistake. Sometimes when I’d send Jack on a trip to the Wawa, he’d get something for himself. He’d often come back with a tall, black can of this stuff called Rockstar. Who knows what that piss is. If I catch a whiff of it the hair on the back of my neck stands up straight. It’s supposed to give you energy and has ginseng and something called “guarano” in it (isn’t that bat shit?). Anyway, I busted his balls about drinking the Rockstar and told him it was bad for his health. He broke into a smile and shook his head. “Look at you,” he said, “the health expert. Gimme a fuckin’ break. Maybe I should eat four fatties a day instead.” Thus was born the term “fatties” for my quarter pounders.

  The next day, I sent Jack on a run for two fatties, and I insisted he put the mustard on this time, since he always forgot in the past. A little while later, he came back and had my two, each in its own little plastic fatty coffin. “Did you get the mustard?” I asked him. “Yes, oh, Prince of Whales,” he said. When I opened the first fatty box, that boiled pink reek wafted up and I beheld the quarter pound. The mustard had been applied, so I slipped Jack a couple bucks for a successful run. Then he said, “Read it.”

  “Read what?” I asked, removing the object of my affection from the container.

  “The mustard,” he said.

  I looked more closely, and there in bright yellow, looping script were the words “Douche Bag.”

  As time went on, he got better and better with the script. At first it was a steady barrage of profanity. We laughed like hell. Soon enough the curses got tiresome, though, and he started coming up with titles for me—King 1/4 Pound, Master of Fat, F Is for Fatty. When he was able to cram neatly onto one dog High Imam of Immobility, I knew we were dealing with some kind of real talent.

  While my own writing lay fallow, his abilities blossomed. It was somewhere in the middle of my second month off the butts that he did his first mustard drawing—a landscape of a cabin by a lake. From the very beginning his golden art was exceptional. I almost couldn’t bring myself to eat it it was so beautiful. He’d gained such dexterity with the mustard bottle, it was amazing. Granted, there were days when he was in a hurry and he’d just scribble, “You Suck!,” but a lot of times there were pictures. God, I remember a portrait he did of my wife. If I could have found a frame that size and shape, it’d be hanging on the wall right now. Jack told me that he’d become something of a celebrity down at the Wawa, and that people would gather around him now when he did one of his mustard jobs. He was really into it, taking it to new heights. There was a Jackson Pollock splatter deal that was sheer genius.

  I downed those fatties like a fatty eating machine that needed fatty energy on which to run in order to eat more fatties. Even though he could have really gone somewhere with his mustard art, Jack told me one day, “Dude, you’re a pile. You gotta stop eating fatties and get some exercise.” I blew him off, but after that every fatty that he delivered was inscribed in stark block letters with the phrase EAT YOUR DEATH! I was slow to get on board with what he was saying. I was smoke-free, but my brain was three-fifths pig hoof and jowl by then. He finally told me he wouldn’t get me another fatty. I made a deal with him—just one more. One more fat one and then I’d quit and start exercising and walking. He agreed. When he got back from that final Wawa run, he said to me, “Check this out. You hit the jackpot.” Then he unveiled it from the bag, cracked open an extra-long plastic coffin, and revealed what was obviously the next step in fatty evolution—what Wawa called the De Lux Dog. As he passed it over to me he said, “Suck on that bad boy.” It had to be a foot long and it had melted cheese on it and two long strips of bacon. Written in the clearest, spicy brown script, from north to south, was the word “Nirvana.” After I ate it, I was dizzy
for half an hour and had a pain in my left kidney.

  I walk now every day, long meandering journeys around town, and the open air and the slow rhythm of my zombie steps takes my mind off the butts and the hot dogs and the writing. Every once in a while a car will pull up next to me, the passenger window will slide down, and I’ll realize it’s Jack. “Keep moving,” he yells. “You’re almost there.” Then the tires screech and he’s gone.

  THE DISMANTLED INVENTION OF FATE

  The ancient astronaut John Gaghn lived atop a mountain, Gebila, on the southern shore of the Isle of Bistasi. His home was a sprawling, one-story house with whitewashed walls, long empty corridors, and sudden courtyards open to the sky. The windows held no glass and late in the afternoon the ocean breezes rushed up the slopes and flowed through the place like water through a mermaid’s villa. Around the island, the sea was the color of grape jam due to a tiny red organism that, in summer, swarmed across its surface. Exotic birds stopped there on migration, and their high trilled calls mixed with the eternal pounding of the surf were a persistent music heard even in sleep.

  Few ever visited the old man, for the mountain trails were, in certain spots, treacherously steep and haunted by predators. Through the years, more than one reporter or historian of space travel had attempted to scale the heights, grown dizzy in the hot island sun, and turned back. Others simply disappeared along the route, never to be heard from again. He’d seen them coming through his antique telescope, laboring in the ascent, appearing no bigger than ants, and smiled ruefully, knowing just by viewing them at a distance which ones would fail and which determined few would make the cool shade and sweet aroma of the lemon groves of the upper slopes. There the white blossoms would surround them like clouds and they might briefly believe that they were climbing into the sky.