cracking and peeling like snakeskin. He knocked again, louder, harder, and the door swung open beneath his fist. He entered, begging anyone’s pardon. The shop, however, was empty—perhaps the words meant “out of business” because dust covered the bare shelves and display cases. From another room he heard a sibilant, insect-like drilling. He moved to the doorway and stopped just as he was about to speak. Nothing in the room stirred but the slow horizontal roll of an image on the television screen: a pale, pale woman in a ball gown drifting up a flight of curved stairs, her lips moving, though the electronic hum was the only sound. She was faint as the morning moon and growing fainter, fading into a sky-blue background, lifted up and up and up.
Once his eyes had adjusted to the dimness he could perceive far back in the room an elderly man and woman asleep on straw pallets on the floor, the man’s arms folded around the woman. She groaned in her sleep as if she were being suffocated. Another woman was bent up in a chair with an infant at her breast. A small child lay naked and slowly revolving on a blanket. The blue fluorescence of the television (had it been left on during the night?) turned the room into an underwater grotto; the people appeared wrinkled and bluish as if they had been a long time in the ocean.
No one heard the traveler enter, but when he took a further tentative step into the room, the infant (who, unlike the rest, was white as the woman in the gown) opened its narrow olive eyes and stared searchingly at him. Then, softly, then louder, it began to wail—the traveler slipped quickly back out of the shop, shaking as if he had felt a snake winding up his leg. He heard the child howling for blocks, with more of the urgency of three voices than one. The sound rose higher and shriller, like a jaguar he had once heard in a jungle canyon at midnight, a jaguar that must have fallen into a pit.
The sun had cleared the ocean’s horizon and the air was turning sweet and hot. He was close to the beach; the surf masked the sounds he left behind him in the awakening town: the baby, strident radios and menacing televisions, late-risers calling out of open windows to one another, women bent under laundry and men bent under firewood, children bored at play. The last houses he passed had lost most of their color, their scaling hues little more than a memory of richer days, if there had been richer days.
On the edge of town, alone in a barren field unto itself, was a modest alabaster church, nothing distinguished about it. Doves looked down from its bell tower, whispering among themselves like nuns at mass; if dust and time has a voice, he thought, it is this sound. A skinny mongrel with wide frightened eyes dragged a pheasant’s tattered wing down the steps leading to the large wooden doors; the dog snuffled at his heels as the traveler opened a door with a shove and went in. First, it looked as if several people stood inside, lined along the walls and waiting for his arrival, but they were only the usual painted wooden statues of saints with garlands about their necks, smiling with homely peasant faces. The church was empty. He knelt briefly at a pew, but found it impossible to pray for or to anything.
He stood and approached a row of votive candles next to the altar. The candles burned deep inside little scarlet and blue medicine jars, giving off carrion-scented smoke. Crossing himself, he lit a cigarette off one of the candles.
(There was a cathedral in one of the southern cities on a plateau between jungles and desert which had been deserted after the last earthquake; he had been thinking, maybe even dreaming, of it for months, its seemed, before he came to it, although he had never seen even a picture of it before. The chains holding the doors shut allowed just enough room for him to enter. The pews had been ripped up, the stained glass stripped away, and a thick cottony dust coated everything. There were private marble chapels, broken but intact, behind wrought-iron gates. Bats and pigeons swooped down from the vaulted ceiling and great bell towers. He felt as if he were in the depths of a hushed, burned forest or an enormous cavern. Statues of saints peered down upon the nave from their alcoves high above—often as not noseless, eyeless, headless. A fractured stone angel’s wing on the floor tripped him. Beneath the altar, in a dark chamber, was hidden the marble tomb of a bishop; the lid had slipped off during the quake, and green bones lay scattered in the debris. For a keepsake, he had tucked what looked like a fingerbone into his pocket, wondering why no one had bothered to rebury the old gent.)
In the little church, the traveler discovered a glass coffin set across low wooden trestles in a corner off the altar. Inside slept a wax effigy of Jesus: it had dark skin the color of burnt caramel and black glass eyes, the same haunted black eyes of the mongrel outside. A surfeit of blood stained His brow, palms, ribs, and soles. The effigy’s face was contorted—not quite in pain or sorrow; perhaps it was meant to be ecstasy. The traveler stared at the figure a long time, his cigarette ash falling over Christ’s face; the glass was cracked, as if some sinner angry at God had brought his fist down hard upon that spot.
The dog with the black wild eyes of Christ followed him down to the surf, dragging along the bird’s broken wing; once on the beach the dog dropped the wing and nudged a dead crab with its nose—the crab wasn’t dead after all, and the dog ran whining back into town. The traveler was left alone at the edge of the world.
The ocean lapped up his footprints, erasing the only evidence that he had ever been here, in this place, at this time. He felt the dampness in his clothes and it made him shiver despite the heat. The ocean inhaled and exhaled and inhaled, spitting up bones and shells and swallowing more bones and shells. A silver fish leapt out of the water and snapped up his cigarette butt when he flung it toward the sun—which, much higher in the sky now, made a metallic mirror of the ocean’s surface, one in which the sky—empty but for two clouds—was reflected without a ripple.
The traveler looked ahead. A group of townspeople and fishermen were at the shore, some standing in water up to their ankles, looking across the ocean. They talked with many gesticulations, pointing at the water with accusatory fingers. A woman with her hair up in a loose coil, a worn magenta sweater over her shoulders, dropped to her knees, pounding the black sand. He saw why: a fisherman surfaced from the water, holding a limp white figure in his arms.
As the man came closer, walking with heavy tread toward the land, his clothes dripping water and seaweed, the figure in his arms became more distinct. It was a drowned child. The crowd retracted from the man when he gained the shore—all but the woman in the bright sweater, whose face remained to the ocean, and who did not turn to look at the child.
The fisherman walked past the traveler, the crowd following a pace behind, silently, and the traveler saw the child’s face, though he did not want to. The ocean had bled all color from the victim and its eyes were opaque, saurian. An emerald brooch of flies covered the child’s open mouth, to be temporarily dispersed with a wave of the fisherman’s hand. And then the traveler could neither look nor think anymore.
Again in his hotel room, the traveler stretched on his back in bed, sheets discarded on the floor. He felt his forehead—was it fever or the heat? There wasn’t a single fan to cool the room, and the windows were sealed shut with paint. The pall of heat smothered him like a great body pressed against his own. Yet he was not sweating; perhaps this heat was an illusion, like so much else here. He could not sweat. The heat was sealed within him; he was burning from inside. Water—he craved water, though he knew the water here was bad; you might as well drink kerosene. But he did not want any more of the wretched wine—he’d had more than enough the night before. Strange, glittering flies (large as hummingbirds, it seemed) softly buzzed against the dusty panes of the hotel windows. The palms had ceased their silken rustle; there was no wind. The sun seemed never to move in the sky. Nothing moved. The world had, quite simply, run itself down.
(He had known a silence like this in that ancient Mayan city he had left last week, a city which lay far off across the Yucatan’s endless jungles. He remembered the towers and temples blanched by moonlight, the whole place set into the rain f
orest like a white gemstone. He remembered skulls carved into stone and friezes of hook-nosed priests in quetzal feathers and jaguar skins. Nothing had ever changed in the city of the dead except the always-encroaching forest, which wanted to swallow the tombs back up, to keep the white jewel its secret. In the heart of the largest pyramid rested the sepulcher of an ancient prince. The sarcophagus lid, which weighed a ton, was carved with the intricate image of the young prince entering paradise via a Mayan starship. Underneath, the prince’s body and bones had long since disintegrated, and his blue jade mask and jade armor protected nothing.)
The traveler started, as if he had been abruptly broken from a sleep that may or may not have come. The vague memory of a wet clinging mouth, pressed to his own in a lamprey kiss and asphyxiating him, drawing him into a sinister, deathlike body, would not go away. (And neither would the recurring thought of a long vertical incision up her abdomen, between her great round breasts.) He longed for pure water, a cool bare room, and a cigarette with azure smoke to draw on and kiss like a lover. What was the time,