Travellers in Magic (23 page)

“We are mystical Marxists,” the young man translated.

This was ridiculous. Suddenly she remembered her first travel assignment, covering the centenary of Karl Marx's death. She had gone to Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetary in London and taken pictures of the solemn group of Chinese standing around the grave. A week later she had gone back, and the Chinese group—the same people? different people? the same uniforms, anyway—was still there. Now she imagined the group standing back, horrified, as a sound came from the tomb, the sound of Marx turning in his grave. “What on earth is a mystical Marxist?”

The man in the chair said two words. “Magicians,” the young man said. “Wizards.”

She was not getting anywhere following this line of questioning. “Are the Russians giving you arms?” she asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”

“What is necessary comes to us,” the young man said after Cumaq had finished.

That sounded so much like something the young man would have said on his own that she couldn't believe he was translating Cumaq faithfully. “But what is necessary comes—from the Russians?” she asked. She waited for the young man to translate.

Cumaq shrugged.

She sighed. “Can I take a picture?” she asked. “Show the world you're still alive?”

“No,” the young man said. “No pictures.”

An hour later she was still not sure if she had a story. Cumaq—if it really was Cumaq—spoke for most of that time, mixing Marxist rhetoric about the poor downtrodden masses with a vague, almost fatalistic belief that the world was working on his side. “You see,” he said, “it is as Marx said. Our victory is inevitable. And our astrologers say the same thing.” She wondered what they made of him in Moscow, if he had ever been to Moscow.

“You must go now,” the young man said. “He has been on a long journey. He must rest now.”

“How about some proof?” she asked. “Some proof that he isn't dead?”

“He spoke to you,” the young man said. “That is proof enough, surely.”

“No one will believe me,” she said. “I can't sell this story anywhere without proof. A picture, or—”

“No,” the young man said. “You must leave now.”

She sighed and left.

The next day she rented a car and drove to the beaches, took pictures of the white sand, the tropical blue water, the palm trees. The huge air-conditioned hotels facing the water were nearly empty, standing like monuments to a forgotten dynasty. In one the elevators didn't run. In another the large plate glass window in the lobby had been broken and never replaced.

She stayed at one of the hotels and took the car the next day to the ruins of Marmaz. Even here the tourists had stayed away. Only a few were walking through the echoing marble halls, sticking close together like the stunned survivors of a disaster. A man who spoke excellent English was leading a disheartened-looking group of Americans on a tour.

She and the tour finished at the same place, the central chamber with its cracked and empty pool made of white marble. “Tour, miss?” the guide asked her. “The next one starts in half an hour.”

“No, thank you,” she said. They stood together looking at the pool. “Your English is very good,” she said finally.

He laughed. “That's because I'm American,” he said. “My name's Charles.”

She turned to him in surprise. “How on earth did you end up here?” she asked.

“It's a long story,” he said.

“Well, can you tell me—” she said.

“Probably not,” he said. They both laughed. Ghosts of their laughter came back to them from the marble pool.

“How do people get news around here?” she said. “I mean, the only broadcasts I can find on the radio are foreign, the United States and China, mostly, and what I thought was a newspaper turns out to be poetry, I think.…”

He nodded. “Yeah, they're big on poetry here,” he said. “They get their news from the cards.”

“The—cards?”

“Sure,” he said. “Haven't you had half a dozen people try to sell you a deck of cards since you got here? Used to sell them myself for a while. That's their newspaper. And—other things.”

She was silent a moment, thinking about the boy who had tried to sell her the deck of cards, the card with Cumaq's picture, the boy shouting after her that he could get newer cards. “So that's it,” she said. “It doesn't seem very, well, accurate.”

“Not a lot out here is accurate,” Charles said. “Sometimes I think accuracy is something invented by the Americans.”

“Well, what about—” She hesitated. How much could she tell him without him thinking she was crazy? “Well, someone, a native, told me that death is different in this country. What do you think he meant?”

“Just what he said, I guess,” he said. “Lots of things are different here. It's hard to—to pin things down. You have to learn to stop looking for rational explanations.”

“I guess I'll never make it here, then,” she said. “I'm a journalist. We're always looking for rational explanations.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It's a hard habit to break.”

She did a short interview with him—“How has the shortage of tourists affected your job as a guide to the ruins?”—and then she drove back to the city.

In the next few days she tried to find the shabby three-story building again. It seemed to her that the city was shifting, moving landmarks, growing statues and fountains, swallowing parks and churches. The building had vanished. She showed a taxi driver her directions, and they ended up lost in the city's maze for over two hours.

She went back to the airport, but the young man was gone and no one seemed to remember who he was. The old man who had sold poetry was gone too.

And finally her time in the city was up. She packed her suitcase, tried to call Jeremy one last time and took her plane to San Francisco. She tried to read on the plane but thoughts of Jeremy kept intruding. She would see him in three hours, two hours, one hour.…

He wasn't at the airport to meet her. For an instant she was worried, and then she laughed. He was always so concerned about her safety, so protective. Now that it was her turn to be worried she would show him. She would take a taxi home and wait calmly for him to get back. No doubt there was a logical explanation.

The apartment was dark when she let herself in, and she could see the red light blinking on their answering machine. Six blinks, six calls. For the first time she felt fear catch at her. Where was he?

“Hello, Mrs. Schwartz,” the first caller said, an unfamiliar voice. She felt annoyance start to overlay her fear. She had never taken Jeremy's name. Who was this guy that he didn't know that? “This is Dr. Escobar, at the county hospital. Please give me a call. I'm afraid it's urgent.”

The doctor again, asking her to call back. Then Jeremy's brother—“Hey, Jer, where the hell are you? You're late for the game.”—then a familiar-sounding voice that she realized with horror was hers. But she had tried to call Jeremy
last night.
Hadn't he been home since then? Then the would-be writer—she fast-forwarded over him—and another strange voice. “Mrs. Schwartz? This is Sergeant Pierce. Your next-door neighbor tells me you're away for two weeks. Please call me at the police station when you get back.”

With shaking fingers she pressed the buttons on the phone for the police station. Sergeant Pierce wasn't in, and after a long wait they told her. Jeremy had died in a car accident. She felt nothing. She had known the moment she found herself calling the police and not the hospital.

She called a taxi. She picked up her suitcase and went outside. The minutes passed like glaciers, but finally she saw the lights of a car swing in toward the curb. She ran to the taxi and got in. “To the airport, please,” she said.

At the airport she ran to the Cathay Pacific counter. “One ticket to—” Damn. She had forgotten the name of the country. She fumbled through her purse, looking for her passport. “To Amaz, please.”

“To where?” the woman behind the counter said.

“Amaz. Here.” She showed her the stamp in the book.

“I never heard of it,” the woman said.

“I just got back this evening,” Monica said. “On Cathay Pacific. Amaz. In the Far East. Do you want to see my ticket?”

The woman had backed away a little and Monica realized she had been shouting. “I'm sorry,” the woman said. “Here's a list of the places we fly. See? Amaz is not one of them. Are you sure it's in the Far East?”

“Of course I'm sure,” Monica said. “I just got back this evening. I told you—”

“I'm sorry,” the woman said again. She turned to the next person in line. “Can I help you?”

Monica moved away. She sat on a wooden bench in the center of the echoing terminal and watched people get in line, check their gate number, run for their planes. She was too late. The magic didn't work this far away. It had been stupid, anyway, an idea borne out of desperation and something the crazy American had said at the ruins. She would have to face reality, have to face the idea that Jeremy—

A woman walked past her. She was wearing a gold five-pointed earring in one ear. Monica stood up quickly and followed her. The woman turned a corner and walked past a few ticket windows, her heels clicking unnaturally loudly on the marble floor, and got in line at Mexicana Airlines. Monica stood behind her. The glass windows behind them were dark, and the lights of the cars and buses shone through the windows like strange pearls. “One ticket for Amaz, please,” the woman said, and Monica watched with renewed hope as the clerk issued her a ticket. Amaz had apparently moved to Latin America. Monica could not bring herself to see anything very strange in that. “One ticket to Amaz, please,” she said to the clerk, her voice shaking.

The plane left almost immediately. She was very tired. She leaned back in her seat and tried to sleep. Two sentences looped through her mind, like fragments of a forgotten song. “Death is different in this country.” And, “You have to learn to stop looking for rational explanations.” She tried not to hope too much.

She must have slept, because the next thing she knew the stewardess was shaking her awake. “We've landed,” the stewardess said.

Monica picked up her suitcase and followed the others out of the plane. The landing field was almost pitch-dark, but the heat of the day persisted. She went inside the terminal and had her passport stamped and then followed the crowd down the narrow corridor.

Jeremy came up to her out of the crowd. She dropped her suitcase and ran to him, put her arms around him, held on to him as if her life depended on it.

A
FTERWORD

“Death is Different,” like “Cassandra's Photographs,” started with a character—in this case Monica, who realizes that she doesn't need to have adventures vicariously through men, that she can go out and live adventurously on her own. Once I had the character the natural place to put her was Amaz. I was happy to have the chance to revisit the place, to see how it had changed since I had gone there with Charles in “Tourists.”

B
READCRUMBS AND
S
TONES

My sister and I grew up on fabulous stories. Night after night we would listen, spellbound, as my mother talked of kings and queens, of quests through magical lands, of mythical beasts and fantastic treasure and powerful wizards. As I got older I realized that these were not the tales my friends and classmates were hearing: my mother was making them up, piecing them together from a dozen different places.

She seemed like a queen herself, tall and pale, a woman made of ivory. When I was a child I was sure she was the most beautiful person I knew. Yet she changed when she went outside the house, when she had to deal with grocers and policemen and bank tellers. Her store of words dried up, and she spoke only in short formal phrases. Her accent, nearly nonexistent at home, grew worse. But she never lost her grace or became awkward. It seemed instead as if she changed like one of the heroes of her stories, turned from a living woman into a statue.

I rarely thought about my childhood. But now, as we waited at the hospital, my father, my sister and I, all these things went through my mind. My mother's condition was the same, the nurse had told us: she was sleeping peacefully. There was no reason for us to stay.

We stayed, I guess, because we couldn't think of anywhere else to go. “They've got her in a room with a terminal patient, a woman who's had three operations so far,” my father said. He was angry and on edge; every few minutes he would stand and pace to the soda machine. “What kind of atmosphere is that for her?”

My sister Sarah and I said nothing. Was our mother a terminal patient too? We knew only that she had been in and out of the hospital, and that her illness had been diagnosed at least a year before my father told us about it. There were so many things we did not say in our family; we had grown used to mystery.

Finally Sarah stood up. “There's nothing we can do here,” she said. “I'm going home.”

“I'll go with you,” I said quickly.

Sarah lived in a one-room apartment in the Berkeley hills. She had a couch that turned into a bed and a wall of bookshelves and stereo equipment, and very little else. She made us some tea on a hot plate and we sat on the couch and sipped it, saying nothing.

“Do you think she's been happy, Lynne?” Sarah asked finally.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if she's—I don't think she's got much longer. Do you think it was all worth it? Did she have a good life? Did we treat her all right?”

“I don't know. No, I do know. She always tried to be cheerful for us, but there was something—something she kept hidden. I don't know what it was.” We had been talking about her in the past tense, I noticed, and I resolved to stop.