No Enemy but Time (34 page)
“Very imaginative, Joshua.”
“Not for me. For me it was an obvious notion.”
They left his Kawasaki capsized in the grass, vaulted the low fence, and climbed the ladder to the catwalk about the tank's middle. Joshua carried the flashlight in his belt and the quilt over his shoulder like a serape. As insurance against Jackie's slipping, he brought up the rear, while she protested that because of the crap he was carrying he was the more likely to fall. Neither of them fell, but the climb made even Joshua dizzy, and they rested on the catwalk before proceeding up the hemisphere-hugging ladder to the hatch in the top of the tank. This time Joshua went first.
Perched on the hatch lip, he played the flashlight beam about the inside of the tank. Scale shone dully on the surfaces that had not yet been sandblasted, and the smell of chlorine, rust, and scoured metal made him hang fire. Maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea, after all.
“Go on,” Jackie urged him. “What are you waiting for?”
He descended into the tank. Nimbly, Jackie followed. Against one of the lower slopes, near the abyss of the tower's riser pipe, they found an island of migrating sand from the blasting. Here, in a conspiracy of whispers and useless hand gestures, they spread the quilt. The butt of the flashlight struck the side of the tank as Joshua was working, and the resultant clangor was deafening.
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“People
drink
the water from these tanks?”
“It's sampled every month for impurities.”
Her face rendered gargoylish by shadows, Jackie glanced about at the slime and scale. “Ugh.”
It occurred to Joshua that if she could differentiate his face from the encompassing darkness, he must look even more alien than she—but, touching his chin, she leaned forward to kiss him. They melted like candles to their knees. They collapsed into each other on the floating surface of the quilt. Their flesh was warm paraffin, and in the blindness of their melting they were transparent to each other.
When Joshua was next aware of himself as a separate person, they lay side by side, naked and sweat-lathered. The Garden of Eden on stilts, that's what the stinking water tank had become. The scale corroding the tank emitted not a stench but a perfume. Their bodies were relaxed, purged of lust, and no serpent had yet appeared.
“Nice.”
“Four stars,” Jackie said. “Highly recommended.”
“Let's get married.”
She let these words echo a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Mr. Kampa. You are a bitter young man who's not yet totally happy with himself. I don't want to be the live-in private secretary who records your dreams.”
“I asked you to marry me. You didn't even think about it.”
“I've thought about it many times. I just didn't think you would ever ask me—Joshua, I've got other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever heard of Mother Teresa of Calcutta? She's a role model not many people have tried to follow. I think a lot about trying to do work comparable to hers.”
Joshua yipped like a chihuahua.
“I'm not kidding. It sounds ridiculous to you because you can't imagine me undertaking a spiritual mission. A mission of mercy. That's your problem.”
“I asked you to marry me.”
“I told you no, and I told you why. You don't want to get married either. Think about these dreams you have, Joshua. The apemen in them—the apemen trying to become human—they're the key. You want what they want, but you don't know how to get there any better than they do. You're perplexed and conflicted.”
“I love you, Jackie.”
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“That's your glands talking. Glands and gratitude. You don't get married for those kinds of reasons. You shouldn't, anyway.”
“Jackie, I've had these goddamn dreams since before I could speak. I've been ‘perplexed and conflicted’ since infancy.”
“That's because you've got a mission, and you don't know what it is yet.”
“You.”
“Fuck that nonsense.”
“How the hell do you know you're
not
my mission?”
“Because I have a mission of my own. Otherwise, you know, I would not have been spared when so many others were taken.”
Jackie's quasi-mysticism was unanswerable. It reminded him that at the center of his own life lay a mystery that he had come to regard as both commonplace and disreputable, like a touch of the clap. He had revealed this mystery to the Tru family because their foreignness—that is, their assumed distance from the prejudices and thought patterns of
real
people—had made them seem safe confessors. Besides, telling his dreams had helped to win Kha over and demonstrably heightened Jackie's interest in him. At least at first. Now she was blithely dropping depth charges into the fragile fishbowl of his hopes.
“Anyone who's alive has been ‘spared,’ Jackie. Trouble is, nobody knows for how long or for what.”
“Some do, and some should.”
“Listen to you, you're gloating.”
“You're at odds with yourself, Joshua, not with me. So stop it. You're also at odds with your own family, and there's no longer any reason to be.”
“What are you talking about?”
“
Eden in His Dreams
.”
Ah, yes. His mother's—rather, Jeannette Monegal's—proposed book about his uncanny chronic affliction. So far as Joshua knew, the book had never appeared, under either that title or another. He had walked out on her, and she had apparently dropped the project. Jeannette still had no idea to what sanctuary he had fled, however, for he had not tried to get in touch with her since his defection from the West Bronx. Nor was he ready to repair the breach with a telephone call. No, ma'am. No long-distance orgy of apology and forgiveness for him. Who would apologize, who forgive? Joshua closed his eyes and tried to center himself in the impenetrable dark.
“You don't want to talk about that, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
After a while Jackie said, “What about your job, then? Are you willing to talk about that?”
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“You don't like my job? You don't want a steeplejack for a husband? A tank painter's wages don't thrill you?”
“None of that has anything to do with what I'm talking about, Joshua. Your job is a detour, a stopgap.
You go into some little town and set about sprucing up its most conspicuous phallic landmark. It's hard, honest work, but for you it's also a kind of masturbation. Mindless and lonely.”
“Holy shit. I can't believe this.”
“Can't believe what?”
“You sound like Lucy in a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon. Spouting off jargon under a sign that says ‘Psychiatric Care—Five Cents.'”
“You quit your job occasionally, don't you? And then Mr. Hubbard rehires you when you come back.
That's true, isn't it?”
Joshua said nothing.
“You're just preparing yourself for the final break. One day you'll feel good about quitting forever. You'll get your mission, and you'll do what you're supposed to. So maybe your mission is
supposed
to be delayed for a while. I'm not telling you to quit your job. I'm not trying to tell you how to run your life.”
“You're not?”
“You know I'm not. But if we were married I might. And you'd do the same to me, not even meaning to.” She laid her hand on his chest. “Don't fret, Joshua. It's not a tragedy that I've already got my mission and you're still waiting for yours. It'll happen.”
Chuckling ruefully, Joshua covered her hand with his own.
“What're you laughing at?”
“Getting my mission. You talk about it the way some girls I knew in New York used to talk about getting their periods. You make it sound biological. Inevitable. Foreordained. I don't think I believe that, Jackie. It doesn't compute—as an analogy, I mean.” He twisted aside and began feeling about for his clothes. He had struck right through her peculiar variety of psychobabble. For her a “mission” was a kind of psychic menarche, and she was being so understanding about his tardiness in achieving this condition for the same reason that she would avoid ridiculing a girl in a training bra. People develop at different paces. Joshua could feel his gorge rising, a prickle of anger erupting like a rash. “I'm ready to go,” he said. He found the flashlight and fumbled it on.
“Me too,” Jackie acknowledged, her voice as straightforward and bright as the flashlight beam.
* * * *
Joshua continued to work for Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., and he continued to dream....
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Dream Seed
Soon
after Mary's murder we separated from the Huns and made an encampment for ourselves on the northeastern flank of Mount Tharaka, eight or nine miles from our former hosts and at a considerably lower elevation. The mountain appeared to approve of our arrangements, for it refrained from bellyaching about them, and we could lie down at night without fearing that an outbreak of burps and belches would jolt us all awake. I may have been the only Minid who worried at all about the stability of Mount Tharaka's gastrointestinal tract. These worries I suppressed by a very simple expedient: I shut down most conscious mental activity and drifted from one day to the next as if
dreaming
the successive episodes of my outward life.
I became, as in my spirit-traveling episodes before White Sphinx, a disembodied observer, a camera on a mobile boom—with the telling exception that among the Minids I retained my body as a camera housing. For the next several weeks, then, my life was a picaresque narrative without a protagonist, a runaway Ferrari from which the driver has leapt, not out of panic but from a ripening indifference to its destination. The wind still scoured my flesh, and the night might kindle my vision with the fagot tips of stars—but now I drank in these phenomena without consciously remarking them.
Helen eventually recovered from the bouts of nausea that had plagued her in the highland kingdom of the Huns. She continued to mourn our loss of Mary, however. Picking a fruit from a galol tree or digging a tuber out of the ground, she would suddenly pause and cast a pitiable glance on Zippy or A.P.B. To distract her I would usually put one of my own grimy discoveries into her hand and gesture her on to the next likely foraging site. When we separated from the others, such descents into funk were rare, for we were away from the stimulus to melancholy that the children represented.
Our new camp—twig and brush hovels through which the wind played sonatinas—lay in a bamboo thicket near a spring not far from the savannah. Temperatures here sometimes dropped alarmingly, and Helen and I would lie entwined in each other's arms against the cold. My teeth made typewriter racket, and my body often quivered like a clapper-struck bell, but I did not suffer unduly. The running sore at the corner of my mouth, the insect bites damasking my flesh, the bruises and abrasions incising their steel-blue intaglios on my shins ... none of these annoyances truly annoyed me. Helen and I held each other, and the nights ricocheted away around us like the fragments of primeval chaos. I had become a habiline. So far as I could tell this transformation did not mark a devolution, but a detour. I was dreaming myself into being out of the forgotten materials of preconsciousness, and Helen was my guide through the dark.
I dreamed that my chukkas were wearing out, and they were. I had already broken and replaced several shoelaces, but now the rubber soles were fissuring, the scuffed Maple Cuddy leather cracking open to reveal the aromatic little piggies penned up inside. Babington would have been ashamed of me for not discarding my boots and going barefoot, but I patched them with bark, bound them with moistened strips of bamboo, and pretended that my repairs were successful. They were not. One day I tripped on a binding, tore out the side of my right chukka, and, in disgust, hurled both my beloved boots into the canebrake below me. Thenceforward, until my feet had developed a new set of calluses, I lurched about like a gimpy middle guard. Surprisingly, maybe because I was dreaming, the calluses were quick to form.
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My shorts also went. First the crotch seam split. Although I mended it with a fishhook needle and a remnant of fishing line (which, for want of an opportunity, I had never used in Lake Kiboko or anywhere else), the resewn seam promptly ripped out too. In any event, thorn bushes, briars, and hard wear had opened numerous tiny windows in the fabric. My flanks were exposed, and I was fighting a doomed rear-guard action against nakedness. Because a couple of my pockets had long since worn through, I had already transferred their contents to my knapsack. It was no hardship to displace my remaining belongings to it as well, and to surrender my shorts to Helen for a kaross.
More and more frequently I left my .45 in its holster in our hut. I covered the weapon, my bandolier, and my backpack with dried grass and walked upon Africa's good earth as naked as any Minid. The minor surgery Babington had performed on my masculine member in Lolitabu distinguished me from the other males in our band, but it was hardly a conspicuous addition to my several points of departure from the anatomical standard. In fact, naked, I was finally in uniform. Giving up the security of the .45 and the bullet-laden bandolier was easier than giving up the security of my bush shorts. Dreaming, still dreaming, I had almost totally divested myself of my twentieth-century identity.