Swimming in the Volcano (80 page)

“It must be tough.”

“It's not tough, man. I'm not dead. I'm not missing.”

“Is there anything you need that we can get you? Books or something? Phone your family back home?”

“Yeah, a coat hanger.” The itch inside the plaster cast was getting to him. He was digging into it with a pencil, plucking out tufts of cotton wool, but he needed something like a coat hanger to go deeper. The door opened and there was the cook's jolly face, the food she left no match for her kindness—a bowl of jaundiced sweet potatoes atop a rank scoop of Guyanese rice, stinking like the breath of death. Mitchell set it on the table and walked back to the windows.

“Soul food. You can eat it.”

Sam bent over the bowl, sniffing, his nostrils scrolled.

“Uh huh, right,” he said, and came back to the window to light a cigarette, shake one out for Mitchell. “Man, you want to talk?”

“I've been doing that. Just wind me up.”

“What about Edison Banks?”

Sam leaned back from the waist, a little startled by Mitchell's sudden surge of passion.

“The man suffers, he's suffering for his people. He'll bleed for them if he has to.”

“I didn't expect to hear this, coming from you.”

“Look, I still believe in him, maybe more than ever. He's a well-intentioned man. His heart's pure. He's suffering for his people. He'll bleed for them if he has to. At the moment he's getting lousy advice. These bad elements, they've gotten too close to him. He needs other points of view.”

“Whose side should we be on here? Or does it matter?”

“What the hell do you mean,
does it matter?
You could be a moderating
influence. He wants moderating influences. He knows he's got a tiger by the tail.”

“We might disagree about which tiger. Or maybe we don't. Tell me about Joshua Kingsley.”

“Kingsley's very very happy you're here, poking around. If he was here right now he'd probably kiss me. The more of you the merrier for the PIP. He's jumping for joy. He's convinced you're going to save him ...”

“And?”

“And that would be a mistake.”

“Because of his ideology?”

“Because of corruption, because of his disregard for the welfare of his people. You can achieve justice without ideology, you're not going to change my mind about that.”

“What about this Selwyn Walker?”

“Selwyn Walker's why I'm here. This is the way his mind works. His idea of nation-building.”

“And you know this because ...?”

“I know.”

“Chances for armed conflict?”

“I would imagine that depends on you. What about this Bobby Fernandez?”

Sam grimaced and lowered his voice unnecessarily, almost causing Mitchell to snort at his pretense of secrecy. “We're still working that out. There may be a problem there. I can tell you a few things. Walker telephoned a contact of his at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, inquiring about Fernandez. This was an indiscretion on Walker's part. The Cubans made it clear that certain things should only be discussed in person, not by phone or cable. Certain sensitive issues require face-to-face meetings, of course. They dispatched someone to the island, we have reason to believe.”

“Fernandez.”

“We don't think so. No.”

“He was here, wasn't he?” He told Sam about the cat on the door, the note,
Te amo
.

“Maybe he arranged something,” conceded Sam. A
recuerdo de amor
. Something to jog her memory, to let her know he still cared. “We don't know much about Fernandez, we're still learning. What about Fernandez's wife? Was she in touch with him?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“They were quite a pair. He seems to be responsible for the death of her girlfriend in Hawaii. Did you know that?”

“I don't know.”

“Why did you send her off so quickly? What was going on there?”

“I don't know. I can't explain it.” Finally, here they were. Mitchell didn't think he was going to be able to handle this much longer, the weariness was bone-deep, soul-deep. He held firm to Sally's death, unwilling to barter for anything of unequal value.

“Oh,” Sam said quietly. After a pause he said, “Look, let's not talk about this in front of Jack, okay. He's excitable. He'll overreact. Jack'll be gone tomorrow.”

They talked about Julius Nyerere until the other two returned. They talked about who was teaching what at the University of Chicago School of Economics.

They wanted to know if he loved her, how much. Enough to lie? His relationship with Johnnie was embarking on a separate, secret life of its own, being given a new identity. No one really liked saying the word
love
and he was beginning to appreciate how it stuck in the mouth, then dropped out like an egg and you had no idea what was inside the shell.

There are so many ways to see this problem, Ben was saying. Between you and me, he told Mitchell, if you're lying it doesn't matter. Not to us, not among friends. Let's put it behind us and move on.

What matters, Ben was saying, it that you've fucked with the magnetic field around here. We rather wish you hadn't. At least some of us. My estimable colleague here at my side says he believes he smells a trend, he's afraid there's been a shift in how people imagine things in this part of the world. I tell him not to worry but he says it's in his job description. We're the only people in government who believe wholeheartedly in the power of the imagination. Think of us as a praetorian guard of the imagination, guarding the very limited ways in which the world must imagine itself. A civilized world. We find the theories very interesting, but we're concerned about individuals too. For instance, did someone imagine you, or did you imagine yourself? You understand what I'm saying. What brought you into being, my friend? That's all we care about, to be honest with you, and we realize this is not a simple question, answers to these questions are always complicated.

We don't like anyone imagining they're
us
, that's part of it. It gives us pause.
Are
they us? we are compelled to ask ourselves, and the answer's not always as clear as we'd like. You see the quandary it puts us in, Ben was saying.

“I am you,” Mitchell said. “That's the problem.” A sentiment for which he was rebuked.

“No, Mister Wilson, you are not us,” said Jack. “You are not me. You are not me because if you were, you would never have gone up into the mountains, looking for trouble. You are not me because if you were, you would have at least loaded your goddamn gun, first.”

Jack is our logician, Sam said grinning. Ben you could say is one of our poets.

Jack began to regard him, it seemed, as a personal affront to his world view. He began calling Mitchell
Professor
, changing the topic back to Soufrière.

“Professor, what do you think happened up there with this man Collymore?”

“He lost his mind, supposedly. He began seeing things.”

“Now, why, do you suppose?”

“How could I know.”

“Professor, what would you say caused him to go stone crazy like that, start shooting people?”

“How the fuck would I know, Jack?”

“He shot that girl, Professor. A good, decent person.”

She was nobody, he said, raising his voice. All he meant by that was Sally was innocent, completely, tragically, out of the picture the friends of golf were painting. Once Sally had died, he saw no way out of it for himself, everything that had happened became his responsibility, even Johnnie became his responsibility, he wasn't Sally's avenging angel as some had said but simply the custodian of her memory, because far more than in her life, in death Sally needed someone to protect her from harm, though he couldn't say even now if he had accomplished that, if it were possible. Sally and Isaac, he couldn't help them after all and, what made it worse, that very impulse had contributed to his failure.

He spent the late afternoon and early evening composing what he hoped would be a letter of placation, for Sam to carry back to the States with him and mail to his parents. Because it felt as if his intestines were beginning to disintegrate, he refused his dinner of watery stew, admitting he was making himself sick, he was going to have to get someone to start bringing him food—family members were allowed to deliver meals, or you could pay somebody. After lights out, a card game commenced in one of the communal cells; the dissent among the players filled the block and kept him awake
throughout the night. Not that it mattered, not that it really interfered in his more central habitat—the vortex of mosquitoes, the rotting of his right forearm, the mind's enormously nonproductive restlessness.

Lack of sleep notwithstanding, the morning of his third and last day with the friends of golf, he greeted the team's two holdouts in good spirits, old comrades-in-arms.

“So it's good-bye, Jack. Sayonara, Jack.”

“Actually, Jack's out scouting around today,” Sam said, offering to light Mitchell's cigarette for him, because of his cast. “Making new friends.”

“With who?”

“Everybody. It makes more sense nowadays.”

They had arranged a little farewell celebration of sorts, gotten permission from the warden to have their chat out in the fresh air, brought Mitchell a modest package of gifts—a copy of
Time International
, candy bars, a thermos of good coffee, a cablegram from his parents in Virginia saying they had lit a fire under Senator so-and-so's rear end, had high hopes, were praying for him and so on. They were up on the southern-facing battlement of Fort Gregory, strolling back and forth between two squat bastions where guards, discreet with laziness, were posted. Occasionally they would pause to gaze over the parapet, looking off in the blueness toward a continent that filled the distance in their thoughts, but generally Mitchell preferred the exercise, and would be the first to break the spell and get them walking again. Like any other citizen he could make his Hollywood-educated guess, but he still didn't know who these men were, not really, the government's men of course, but then he was one himself or close enough.
Close enough
was an answer Ben and Sam found quite admissible. They both wore gold wedding bands, had wives and maybe kids somewhere in the suburbs, as if to advertise the mundanity of their lives and free themselves from the imbecilic fantasies of the popular imagination. They weren't making myths or movies: this was business, Patriots Anonymous, an American Civ pop quiz, metapolitics, Roman Catholic confession, and apparently, Mitchell thought by the end of it, something near to being a job interview as well.

There was a sailing ship, a windjammer with crossbars and square sails, out on the sea midpoint between them and the horizon, running downwind toward Grenada. Sam asked, Is that what you call a frigate? but none of them knew.

“You didn't care much for our Jack, did you?” said Ben.

“I found him lacking in empathy.”

“He doesn't understand someone like you,” said Ben. “He doesn't get it. Frankly, it's not easy to get. He says, Tuck this kid, throw him off the roof, we got better things to do.' Jack's worried there's a flu going around down here. He doesn't want the island to catch cold. You know what I mean, the Cuban disease. He doesn't want anyone coming up to him a year or two from now whining about Who lost St. Catherine. Hah-hah. Of course that's his hang-up. Jack's a little bit of an alarmist, isn't he? It's not easy to convince him of the truth, that places like this never really amount to diplomatic disaster. Give him credit though, he feels very bad about the girl. It's eating him up. He has a daughter about her age. That's Jack.”

He had not forgotten how quickly the tropic sun seared, like a thin veneer of pain swabbed across your forehead and lips, around the back of your neck. They were all beginning to sweat, and the scum inside his cast was coming alive. The guards weren't allowing him to have the coat hanger Sam had brought; he looked around, preoccupied, until finally Sam gave him his ballpoint pen.

“That thing is nasty. You should have them crack it off and give you a new one.”

“This is already the second one.”

The nature of his longing seemed to be centered there, trapped in plaster, inaccessible, degrading and infernal. Void.

“On the other hand,” said Ben, walking with his own hands folded behind him, “Sam here shares your admiration for the honorable Mr. Edison Banks. A moderate and a populist, says Sam. What happened he thinks has just been a question of unfortunate experimentation. Does that feel right to you? Some misguided individual sitting around asking himself, What will happen if I push this button? Oops. Dead girl. Perhaps you recognize the impulse yourself.”

Mitchell said things: I am not the agent provocateur. For every contrivance, a contradiction. No one can imagine.

“Wrong,” said Sam, “this is exactly what everyone can imagine and there's a deep, deep problem inherent in that.”

“What you are,” said Ben, “is St. Catherine's very own attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

He chain-smoked and wanted to debate his soul but he was no match for the two of them, teaming up like the Founding Fathers. He didn't know whom or what he should be striving to appease, or why, or to what moral authority he might appeal his actions.

“Are you a religious man?” Ben asked in a benign tone. “Have you by chance read Paul's writings? Romans? seven-eighteen?” He looked
at Mitchell with his head cocked, eyebrows lifted, the blueness of his eyes, the aquilinity of his nose, the fine, thin flax of his balding hair all saying let us know ourselves by our country's traditions, and out came the quote like a gentleman's silk handkerchief of commiseration. ‘“To will is present with me, but how to perform that good I find not. For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.' Does that help? Words of an apostle, keep in mind.”