Swimming in the Volcano (67 page)

“He touched my scar, I mean, no, what am I saying, what does all this have to do with anything, he didn't touch it but I knew that's what he wanted to do, he looked at it in a way that felt like he did, his fingers tracing it. Okay, that doesn't make sense. I mean his eyes. He wasn't at all talkative after he said what Isaac said. I promised I'd pass the word along. I didn't ask questions, like what if Mitchell needs to talk to Isaac tomorrow, what does he do? I toweled off and put my tee shirt back on and said I had to be somewhere and thanks, but he followed me up the path and, to finally answer your question, that's where I found the bat thing, poking out of the clay in the bank next to the path, the next good rain would have dislodged it, probably, it was just hanging there, waiting for me to come along. The guy had a moped parked up on the road—you know, he never told me his name so I can't tell you if you know him or not. He offered me a ride but honestly, he was way too spooky. I said no thanks, I'm out for a walk, and he drove away. If you can eat that,” she said, pointing her fork at his mouth, “I guess I can too.”

Kingsley's inflammatory drivel poured out of the radio. Mitchell watched her chewing the rubbery conch, trying to read the unforeseeable future in her face. Her bottom lip was cracked and he wondered if it was like that before and he hadn't noticed. It was a detail he'd have to keep in mind, later on, back at the house. Both stories, this one and the one aboard the
Carolanne
, communicated an opening up, an aggrandizement of spirit in their infectious, inflated intensity. She was switching on lights, implicating herself; he was elated to hear her talk so freely, without calculation.

He had not missed the message she carried to him: Isaac was okay, he'd be in touch. It brought genuine relief, a lifting of impending responsibility, like the silencing of a noise on the other side of the wall that was getting too loud, interfering.

Johnnie had an appetite, he was glad to see. He wanted to get her home.

“Did I tell you,” she said, laughing at the image that came into her
head, “that Sally tried to strangle some jerk who said she wanted to be black.”

In another minute or two, he saw—because there it was, already flowing forward into its shapes, ribboning across the border of consciousness—he would fall asleep to taste the unrefined sugar of love's sweetest dream. Once they were in the house she immediately wanted to check the map, touch her money. He looked at the green bills in rows and his first thought was they didn't make sense, arranged the way they were, like pop art—something about meaninglessness, another statement. Profits, his professional bailiwick, why people sought him out for advice; talking about profits was how he made his own living but now there was nothing to say, no theories to apply, no statistics to overcome the loneliness of this money. They took showers, Johnnie first. He organized his briefcase for the morning, waiting for her to come out. The house was quiet, filled with a gauzy haze of perfumed smoke, like a temple. “All yours,” she said into the hall, meaning the bathroom. The salt washed away like greasy ointment, uncovering a hard bark of skin, and it fascinated him, placing a forearm against his hipbone, to rediscover how brown the sun had made him. Wrapping a gritty towel around his waist, he opened the door to let in a draft while he shaved, which he preferred to do at night instead of the foggy dash of morning. Johnnie had gone to her own bed to read a magazine, deferring this last decision to him, careful not to risk assumptions, wearing only panties but nevertheless demure, and he was touched by the gesture that her recession was meant to be. He leaned against her doorway, grinning uncomfortably, not quite finding the very simple words that would move her from here to there, bringing her to his own bed.

“You're all right, aren't you?” Artless, or so he felt. The best he could do. He was deferring back, letting her take care of it. Was she still having her period?—he didn't ask, and she didn't say.

She closed the magazine and put it aside, propping herself up on her elbows to nod. “If you hold me I'll be better.”

“There's actually a room for that, with a real bed.”

Candlelight, a saxophone on the radio, played in another world and the notes blown in from the sea. He loved what a candle did, how it transformed the values of the colors in the house—leather and autumn rubies, golds and ambery varnish, so old it cracked like snakeskin. The air was cool enough for them to pull the topsheet over them like a vow, or blessing. His touch was speculative—he hoped wise. Every time he gazed at the twin flames locked in her eyes
time was backward, forward. He was a little shaky; for his body's own reason adrenaline had escaped into his blood, a beating heart. She rolled and fastened herself to him, he was holding his breath, clinging to the tautness of her, reading the riddle of her face, the poets who first linked sex and death weren't joking, there was a spreading, escalating moan that he listened to and then reproduced, submerging in the fiery current that was them, and then was them dissolving. She was changing him again, somebody else would have to say how.

He couldn't help himself then. The simplicity of it all was profound. He became silly, daffy, giddy, trite, a self only a woman would ever see in just this way.

“Back into the Woods,” he said.

She gurgled, falling asleep, her warm mouth a wetness on his shoulder, mumbling that she figured he'd say something like that, a revision of an old joke.

“Don't go into the Woods alone.”

“Shhh,” and then she was snoring, soft, erratic slurps; for a brief time she twitched, a snap of volts flashing through her body into his. Outside, a motorcycle went by on the road toward Augustine and he seemed to go with it and its zippering noise, not yet asleep but sealed into the dream,

and what it is, this dream of dreams, is only an embrace but it is final, the last exchanged on the road that was their lives, though the physical bodies of the man and the woman he sees are not old and withered but youthful and whole. Like a bare stage, there is no setting or background but darkness; he and Johnnie sit unclothed at its center, cross-legged, facing one another, their knees almost touching, their arms so tense and static with movement the action they are about to perform already exists in the mind of the viewer, and the light that makes them visible does not shine down upon them, does not enhance or dull their skin, but is simply there, a natural condition. He feels intense sympathy for the dream characters, and protective of their sentimentality—after all, their lives are at a close, they are composing an image of farewell. It is what they have, perhaps the world has no need for it but they do, it forms the welcoming place where they might rest momentarily and take account, strive against forgetting and the nonexistence that is imminent, the silence they will fall back into when they let each other go. Their arms lift and encircle, their cheeks press together, warm and smooth and powerfully comforting. Their heads lower onto respective shoulders, tears cornered in their closed eyes. There is a relieved sense of tenderness
fulfilled. He wants to open his mouth but cannot, knows he will choke. If their feelings for each other have meant anything, she will have to interpret that meaning from the way he holds her. She will have to look back at the distance they've come and the separate spans of their isolation and find a way to measure the value of the journey against whatever standard time would hold them to at this second of grace that is their reunion. They are naked, in blackness, and now their flesh is incandescent. What extraordinary kindness destiny was capable of, if it could remember love so well, if it could bring them together at such a moment so that they might have the opportunity to know the worth of all the days behind them, to see each other finally in whatever completeness they have managed, to know with certainty that they have truly survived the worst, have survived indifference and betrayal and the scattering force of passion into inertia. They have made their own small, unheralded, and soon-to-be-lost history of love, survived its airless depths and tended it enduringly in times of barrenness, and now, completed, justified, they could defer once more to the separateness of travel, where death was no more or less than the necessary absence of the other, the absence they knew as well as anything else, the serene absence that did not prohibit or restrict, the absence they could not regret, the absence that never caused despair, because it changed nothing. All he wanted to do finally was to thank her for coming here, for the embrace, to express the gratitude that was never so profound or real as in this chapter of dream, and when he awoke it was still night and he was crying noiselessly, knowing that the vision of the dream, everything it contained, the exultant faith of it, was unobtainable, was a perjury, and could not be appealed. Sometimes it would feel like the only dream he had ever been allowed, but it was nevertheless a dream, it overstepped reality by miles, its truth had no language and no world. It was too brave for mortal beings. Immanent in its sweetness was a whiff of decay. There was no chance they might ever conjure its delicate substance.

It was terribly, terribly cruel.

We have to give up everything of love
, he remembered reading, the first time she left.
Even the ghost
.

Now it was over, the government had quietly issued an order for his deportation: Today, tomorrow,
soon
. It seemed like years since he had been arrested, since the friends of golf had come and gone, since the trial of the person who called himself Iman Ibrahim.

Falling darkness throughout the underworld of prison. The pungent, rotting heat of July. The privations and humiliations of being locked up infinitely more tolerable than the culture of infernal noise.

Start where?—when all that ever really begins is the end.

Start where?—because he hadn't known where to start in order to do the right thing. Save a friend. Save
anyone
.

He wasn't a victim. All manner of treachery and bad luck had come his way, as it might in any life, and he had dealt with it, and he was willing to be held accountable for his own actions. He hadn't, to his knowledge, fucked up; there was no subjective moral dilemma but rather an evaluation of his culpability within the objective whole. Which is to say he felt contaminated; being locked up then was like detox, quarantine. To be honest he'd have to conclude that the shrinking of one's affairs and the enforced passivity were not without their small virtues. Incarceration made alienation, for instance, utterly permissible, a normal condition, despair too if you'd like, help yourself, take all you want. And a cell, at least a solitary one such as his, offered its occupant a monastic invitation to grandiose soul-searching, perhaps impossible to decline given the fact of one's material and sensory deprivations, and seemed the only correct environment for the conscience to fester uninterrupted in the garbage of aborted possibilities, and then (the penitent could always hope) clear.

He knew what freedom meant—perhaps this was what was wrong with him.

Start with the alphabet then, the evolution of
E
to
R
, a sleight of
hand that produced, had hoped to produce, a revolutionary government? For that matter he could start with what had been called the
Cuban disease
. That was easy enough—he could stand at his casement window and look down upon an olive-green APR parked on the cobblestones of the prison courtyard, a timely gift from Havana. He could start at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, the day Bobby Fernandez was told by one of the political attachés,
Maricon
, I just speak with this guy on the telephone: Did you misplace a wife? Johnnie had tried to put as much distance between herself and Bobby Fernandez as she could, understandably, but she got no farther than this, St. Catherine, to the illusionary haven of a man who reluctantly approached love in such a way as to make it always and forever include her, the primary source and reference, in its working definition. He could just start with Cuba, couldn't he: the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, the Triumph, the apparent gut-shot wounding of imperialism, the heroes, so many of them—Fidel, Raul, Vilma, Che, the list ran on and on—their successful ascent up the Everest of all political endeavor. Start with Che perhaps, for his unearthly idealism, his doctor's kit stocked with the hallucinatory medicines of violence.

What were you doing with the wife of Bobby Fernandez? they asked him. Why was Fernandez in Mexico City, what was he doing in Panama? They asked him ... and then they unasked him. They had answers, he didn't. Of course. The only answer he wanted from them was whether or not Johnnie's husband had made a surprise visit to St. Catherine, as she seemed to be convinced he had. The only answer they were truly interested in from Mitchell Wilson was to the question, Who is Mitchell Wilson? They couldn't decide. Finally someone settled on a neat bureaucratic catchphrase: an uncontrollable element in the field. It became his official definition.

He called them the friends of golf. They dressed like that, as though they had just strolled in off the links.

They found it difficult, these friends, to be very upbeat about 1977, where forces obliquely historic had set them all down. The year was turning out to be a riddle they were itching to solve, St. Catherine and Mitchell Wilson the latest installment of clues. They weren't convinced Wilson was sincere about the future. His convictions were suspect—convictions were no longer something Americans shared, wouldn't you say that's true, Wilson? The president had pardoned the draft evaders, was going to give back the Canal to a gang of greaser narcotraffickers and, even as they spoke, was conducting formal negotiations with Havana for the first time
since the Bay of Pigs. You see what we mean? wondered the friends of golf.

Human rights were on the agenda; whatever that meant, it raised possibilities. The president had appointed a very dangerous man from Atlanta to be the nation's apologist at the UN. Lists were made, allies lectured. Lists were unmade. America's friends are nervous, said the friends of golf.