Bestiary

  After a long silence, she said, “That’s not a good idea.” I could tell she had been drinking. “I need to be alone for a while. Anyway, I’m not coming back to school anytime soon. Just mail me half our stash.”

  When I didn’t reply fast enough, she raised her voice. “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  And she hung up.

  I wedged the hash into a hollowed-out textbook and packaged it carefully, along with the book of dragons.

  Soon afterward, I traded in my Yamaha for a silver 750cc Triumph Bonneville, powerful enough to travel the interstate, and set out for California. Officially I was on leave from school for a semester, so I assumed my draft status—student deferment, II-S—would remain unchanged. I followed an erratic route, south to New Orleans, north to the Dakotas, and south again to the Mexican border. By the time I reached San Francisco, I had grown a beard and smoked the rest of the hash. As arranged beforehand, I crashed with a friend in his apartment near Alamo Park. In mail forwarded to his address I found a letter from Nathalie inviting me to join her on Corfu, and a notice from my draft board with a different sort of invitation. My deferment had been canceled and I was reclassified I-A. Opposed to the Vietnam war, with no desire to kill or be killed for something I didn’t believe in, I dropped methedrine for a week and for two days drank Ex-Lax. When I went in for my physical, I was sleepless, strung out, dehydrated, but still I passed. I could have fled to Canada—or Denmark, where Nathalie insisted I could make a life for myself—but I wasn’t ready to renounce my citizenship and live abroad. For better or worse, I was an American; because I had no family or roots to speak of, giving up that particular connection would be even more painful. So instead of basking in the Ionian sun with Nathalie, I soon found myself in the dark jungles near An Loc. She thought I was insane. In our last phone call before I shipped out from San Diego, she shouted, “I will never forgive you, going over there.” And she never did.

  The day before I was released from the hospital in Honolulu, a major with red hair and unblinking eyes paid me a visit, accompanied by an aide who stood at attention. The major’s name tag read CAPELLO. I knew why he was there; I had been expecting him.

  “Private Atlas,” he said, “it is a privilege to honor your service to our nation.”

  The aide snapped open a briefcase from which Major Capello took a small leather box. He pinned a medal to my robe and shook my hand. It was a Purple Heart. Nearly everyone in the ward had received one; if you were wounded in action, it was automatic.

  As I studied George Washington’s cameo on the medal, the major surprised me, taking out a second box. He made a little speech, which concluded, “For valor in combat above and beyond the call of duty, in Trang Province, Republic of South Vietnam, on the twenty-second of April, 1972, I hereby award you the Silver Star. Congratulations.”

  This was not something everyone got. And when you did get it, you knew why. I had to ask.

  Major Capello looked at me skeptically, then leaned closer. I smelled tobacco on his breath and saw the groove on his lower lip where he planted his cigarette. “It was the pouch. You brought it home under fire.”

  The pouch. Of course. In the end, Murphy, the motorcycle, the radio, my rifle, even my uniform—everything else I’d set out with that day was gone. I’d stayed alive and I’d held on to the pouch, and they didn’t give you a Silver Star for staying alive. “May I ask what it contained, Major?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  He hesitated again. “Phoenix,” he whispered, his eyes more unblinking than ever. “There were dossiers…operational details.”

  Operation Phoenix was an assassination program run by the CIA. The targets were not soldiers, but citizens alleged to be Vietcong sympathizers. Forty thousand of them had been executed by U.S. Special Forces. By war’s end, twenty thousand more would die. Most CIA informers were petty criminals or corrupt officials on whose word entire families were killed if a single member was accused of aiding the communists. What I had been carrying was a new list of intended victims.

  In June 1972 I may have exited Vietnam without shooting anyone, but I knew now that I had assisted in the killing of hundreds of people. Nathalie had been right: just getting inducted, becoming complicitous in something I detested, I was sure to end up tainted—and miserable. I didn’t know just how miserable.

  For years I made myself read everything I could find about Operation Phoenix, from transcripts of congressional testimony to the lurid paperback memoirs of assassins. It was my attempt at expiation. But it never gave me relief.

  MOLOKAI WAS ONCE an island of sorcerers. They tattooed their bodies with the images of beasts. They shaved their heads with sharks’ teeth. They could assume the shape of lizards. Their eyes were smoke. And in the oily smoke of palm fires they divined the future. Because of them, the warriors of Maui and Oahu, perpetually at war, avoided Molokai. The sorcerers’ armies were composed of ghosts. When the sorcerers died off, the ghosts remained, roaming the island.

  Molokai is still said to be a haven for ghosts—especially the ghosts of soldiers. I’d come close to becoming one myself, I thought, stepping off the prop plane from Honolulu in a driving rain. As I crossed the island in a rental car, through forests choked with mist, I wondered if I would encounter Murphy’s ghost. If so, would his two halves be rejoined? Would he be a transparent version of himself, or just a coil of that mist, whispering by?

  After receiving my medical discharge, I made a reservation on a flight to San Francisco—then thought better of it. I had wanted to get as far from Southeast Asia as possible, to ease back into civilian life, but realized I had a better chance of doing so in Hawaii, where things were more laid-back. I checked into a sleepy motel on the north shore of Oahu. For the first time in ten months, I ate alone, showered alone, and had my own bathroom. I tried not to drink a lot, though I wanted to; I stayed away from weed, which was readily available; and I cut down on the painkillers the doctors had loaded me up with. In my nightmares I was still riding on that motorcycle with Murphy, but he was just a skeleton pressed up against me; or I was back in that field, scrambling as the napalm hit; or sitting on a freezing C-130 transport with hundreds of other soldiers, stiff as statues, forced to return to Vietnam for another tour of duty. These dreams became so torturous that—in vain—I invoked Baku, the Japanese spirit known as the “Eater of Dreams.” With a lion’s head, tiger’s feet, and horse’s body, Baku resembled the chimera or the manticore, but was a beneficent spirit. If a sleeper awoke from a nightmare and cried, “Baku, eat my dreams,” Baku would do so, and the sleeper, relieved of his burden, would drift off serenely.

  Mr. Hood, my old history teacher, had invited me to Molokai. He had retired to the island two years earlier and lived in a ranch house on a rough stretch of its southern shore. Catching my name in the newspaper, in a list of newly decorated soldiers, he had sent me a letter, care of the army. I was surprised to learn that he was in Hawaii, and even more surprised that he would invite me to be a houseguest. He had offered me crucial encouragement as a student, but we had never socialized—not even a cup of coffee in the school cafeteria. We met in his office, never his home, to discuss coursework and my research, not personal matters. To the end, he was formal and reserved. So I did not find it strange when we fell out of touch during my freshman year in college.

  Approaching his house, I felt for a moment as if I were back in Maine: he was on the lanai, holding a book at arm’s length and puffing a pipe. His dog Polyphemus was asleep at his feet. The dog was thirteen, and I was halfway across the lawn before he rose stiffly, to sniff me out. He was nearly as old as Re when he died. The lawn ended at the beach, about thirty yards away. There was a one-man kayak propped against a tree. And on a low platform, under construction, a forty-foot canoe.

  Mr. Hood looked much as he had when I walked into his classroom seven years before. Thin waist, rough hands, powerful shoulders and arms from his d
aily rowing. The crow’s-feet were deeper beside his blue eyes. His beard was grayer. The crew cut was gone. It was disconcerting at first to see him with longer hair, well over his collar. It too was grayer, with sprays of white on the sides. But he seemed far more at ease. The tropics evidently agreed with him more than the Frozen North. Or maybe he too was just glad to have left the school.

  “Welcome,” he said, and we shook hands.

  I had been wondering if he had invited me out of loneliness. Or if, having always liked me, he could now befriend me as an adult. More importantly, I had become a fellow vet. Whatever his motives, I was gratified: at school, after all, he had learned a great deal about me, while I knew little about him.

  He picked up my bag and led me into the house. The guest room was cool and quiet, with darkly lacquered Chinese furniture. There was an empty antique birdcage. A sliding door opened onto a terrace in the garden. Blackbirds were singing through the louvered windows.

  He got a plate of walnuts, cheese, and crackers from the kitchen and set it out on the lanai. Dropping ice into two glasses and pouring us Irish whisky, he saw that I was admiring the canoe under construction.

  “I was taught the Phoenicians were the greatest seafarers ever,” he said, handing me my drink. “But they were day-trippers compared to the Polynesians, who roamed the Pacific in canoes like that. Fifteen hundred years ago, they sailed here from the Marquesas Islands, across seven thousand miles of open sea. They believed the first canoe was built by a warrior named Rata. After he rescued a heron from the jaws of a sea serpent, the heron taught Rata the art of canoe-building. Rata visited dozens of islands, passing on his knowledge. As in Maine, I’m only using indigenous tools—an adz, a mallet, a machete—and ironwood and palm from that forest. The Polynesians could build a canoe in five days. I’ll have this one seaworthy in three months.”

  “Where will you sail?”

  “Only as far as Oahu,” he smiled. “I’ll enlist some rowers in town.”

  We sat down and I lit a cigarette. He refilled his pipe. The surf was rough and the first stars were flickering.

  “You should call me Cletis now,” he said simply.

  Then he told me something of his history—more in twenty minutes than I had learned in five years at school. First he put to rest the rumors I’d heard, ticking them off with a grimace. His wife was not a suicide: she had died of a heart attack at forty; he had never been court-martialed; none of his limbs was prosthetic; and his children had not died in an automobile accident. The most outlandish rumor, that his father-in-law had been a South American dictator—“Presidentfor-Life of Bolivia for three years,” he said wryly—was true. And he did have an independent income that allowed him to give up teaching and live wherever he wanted and do what he liked.

  “I am attempting that one book,” he smiled thinly, “which someone like me saves up to write. A specialized topic that accommodates digression.”

  He was writing about the cities Alexander the Great founded, and named after himself, when he swept across Asia.

  “There were eighteen Alexandrias,” he explained. “Alexander chose the sites himself: in Persia, India, even Siberia. Only the Egyptian Alexandria survives. In Scythia, Alexandria was a city of sandstone towers. By the Indus River, it was a sprawl of canals, with houses on stilts. The Babylonian Alexandria contained a zoo, with exotic animals from around his empire. Kabul, Afghanistan, was one of the Alexandrias. And this should interest you: Alexander also named one city, Bucephalia, after his horse, and another, Peritas, to honor his dog.”

  The previous year, I doubt I would have heard all this with such a jaundiced ear; but, sipping my whisky, watching the breakers burst against the reefs, I told myself that, for every city he founded, Alexander must have razed ten others, and for every animal placed in a zoo, thousands more were sacrificed to his gods. In Vietnam, in the Year of the Rat, people were eating rats. And the only construction project I’d seen was the lengthening of airport runways for bigger, deadlier bombers. Still, after my grim stay in Honolulu, Mr. Hood’s conversation was a tonic. Having been wounded in combat himself as a young man, he knew that enthusiasm for anything—except survival—was in short supply where I had been.

  “There’s my theme,” he went on, “built on a contradiction: Alexander is the only conqueror to have left in his wake a string of new cities while waging an active military campaign. He explored deserts and rivers no European had ever seen. He had radical notions for a king, allowing the tribes he defeated to govern themselves, adopting their customs and dress, conversing with their priests. He made a Bactrian princess, Roxane, his queen, and rewarded his soldiers when they too married Asian women. When he visited the Temple of Ammon-Re, the reclusive priests, who had no idea of his identity, hailed him as a god. He began to believe this himself.” He smiled. “He’s a tough subject to keep up with. My book will take years to write.”

  “Is that why you moved here?”

  “It’s one reason.” He relit his pipe. “This house belonged to my wife. After she died, I couldn’t bring myself to stay on alone. I didn’t want to rent or sell, so I closed it up.”

  “That’s when you started teaching.”

  “Yes. It was a way to start over. To stay sane. It was the only real job I ever had outside the military. But I always knew I’d return here. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.”

  Of all the reasons I had imagined for his moving to Maine, a broken heart was not one of them. I felt bad about that now. “When did your wife die?”

  “Twelve years ago.” He saw my surprise, and added, “To me, that doesn’t seem long. Not long enough.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “We had a wonderful run. In Spain, Mexico, here. Here best of all. This was our only real home. Then one morning, coming up from the beach, I heard Polyphemus barking. Marion had collapsed in the garden. I rushed her to the hospital—too late.” He leaned over to pet the dog. “He was just a year old when she rescued him on the road. When he and I returned to the island, it was as if he had never left. He went right to his favorite spots in the house. He slept on her bed.” Mr. Hood sat back slowly. “Marion had a weak heart, and it finally gave out.”

  My grandmother used that expression when she spoke of my mother. “Her heart give out,” she would sigh. I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly until I discovered that, because my birth was complicated, my mother had hemorrhaged suddenly, gone into shock, and died of cardiac arrest.

  I watched the smoke from my cigarette waft into the vines above Mr. Hood’s lanai. The moon was high. Mercury was visible, too, unblinking among the stars. After coming and going several times, Polyphemus had nudged open the screen door and retired.

  It was close to midnight when I told Mr. Hood about my stint in the Signal Corps. My side ached, as it did whenever I sat for too long. The surgeons had warned me it would be this way for at least six months, until my wound healed fully.

  Mr. Hood listened carefully, and after a long silence, said, “Livy tells the story of a courier in the Galatian campaign who overcame countless obstacles—dangerous terrain, hunger, enemy patrols—only to discover that the message he delivered included his own death warrant. That’s an extreme example, but soldiers are always kept in the dark. In war, you think you know some fraction of the story, including your own story, when you know nothing. When, in fact, there is no story. If you had lost that pouch, the army wouldn’t have told you anything. If you had known what it contained, you might have been tempted to lose it, and no one the wiser.”

  “Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”

  “But you didn’t know. You couldn’t.” He leaned forward, placing his palms on his knees. “Phoenix is shameful. This war is lost. But that doesn’t mean it’s over.”

  “It’s over for me.”

  He knew better but—out of kindness, I’m sure—didn’t correct me.

  Instead, he pointed at the half-built canoe. “To the Polynesians,
canoes were living spirits. Canoe-building is a healing art. I built my first canoe when I returned from the Philippines. I worked on it for three months. After going to war, the hardest part isn’t coming back to other people, but to yourself. Some people can’t.” He looked away. “My son Roy fought in Korea. He made it home in one piece. He seemed all right. Then, a week later, he was gone.”

  It was his son who had committed suicide.

  He shook his head. “Roy tried to hide it, but I knew things weren’t right. I’d seen it in other soldiers. Still, I felt powerless. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—discuss what happened to him the way you just did. My daughter, Katie, blamed me for that.” He poured himself a last drink. “She was right. He and I had never talked much, not really, and that was my responsibility. She also blamed me for pushing him into the Corps. I didn’t push him, but I didn’t discourage him either. She lives in Spain now. We haven’t talked since her mother died. Marion never got over Roy’s death. For us, it just kept rippling. It’s still rippling.”

  I was stunned to hear him talk like this. And to learn how much pain he’d been carrying. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching his arm.

  “I thought hearing this might help you.”

  I looked at his lined face, the washed-out eyes. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “You already have,” he said quietly.

  We sat back and looked out at the sea. On the horizon, the lights of a passing ship were just disappearing.

  “Xeno, what about the Caravan Bestiary? Last I heard from you, you were still researching.”

  “Yes, I filled a lot of notebooks, trying to reconstruct the bestiary’s contents. Before I was drafted, my goal was to learn all I could and lay the groundwork so I could search properly.” I hesitated. “I need time now, before I get back to it. Everything I read in college confirms what you told me years ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “Brox, Cava, and Faville were probably right: the book was destroyed. All the evidence points to it.”