Bestiary

  “But you’re still not sure.”

  “I just don’t know. The Catholic Church really wants it gone, and then one day—it is gone. Does anything really disappear without a trace? Part of me says yes. I’ve seen it happen…”

  “And the other part?”

  “Tells me I need to find out for myself. In the real world.”

  He smiled. “I told you back then: it may not be in the real world that you’ll find answers.”

  “As soon as I finish school, I’ll start looking.”

  “You’re going back, then.”

  “Yes. I was a junior when I left. I need three semesters’ worth of credit. I’d like to cram it into a single year. And at the same time try to pick up where I left off with the bestiary. I got very interested in Brox. I read about his unfinished essay on the bestiary; probably there’s nothing there. But I want to see for myself. Like Cava, Brox was convinced the bestiary had been hidden away in Italy for centuries before it was destroyed in Spain. But he didn’t think it had been in the Vatican, or that the Catholic Church was involved.”

  “Good. The sooner you get back to it, the better.”

  “For starters, I thought I would go to the public library in San Francisco, and maybe Berkeley.”

  Mr. Hood stood up and put the bottle and our glasses on a tray. “We have some good libraries in Honolulu. You’re not leaving for a couple of weeks. Why not start here? I know some people at the university library in Manoa. I can give you an introduction.”

  When I retired to the guest room, rain was drumming softly on the roof. The leaves in the garden were dripping. I stepped outside, under the canopy of trees.

  That postcard of the girl with the bicycle was the only item I had carried during my tour of duty that survived. Everything else was gone, including my three photos—of Nathalie, Lena, and my mother (at Jones Beach)—and a Saint Francis medal my grandmother had given me. The postcard was bloodstained now, and my message to myself was gone.

  Province of fire, Year of the Rat.

  I put a match to the postcard, and holding one corner, watched it burn: the girl’s red dress and black hair, the hibiscus flowers, the pagoda. The wind caught the ashes in midair and blew them into the rain.

  I went back inside. Shadows flitted around the empty birdcage. I took my pills and checked my bandage. I got into bed and eased onto my right side, wedging a pillow behind my back to make sure I didn’t turn over.

  THREE DAYS LATER in Honolulu, on a steaming hot morning, I sat in the Asia Reading Room on the fourth floor of the Hamilton Library. Arrayed before me on the teak table were the fourth volume of the ancient Chinese Bamboo Books, an illustrated edition of the Annals of Lakes and Mountains, and a seventeenth-century Tibetan bestiary in which the renderings of the animals could only be appreciated with a magnifying glass: the snow leopard, the eagle, and that bizarre humanoid, the yeti (later, unfortunately tagged “the abominable snowman”), which was once a commonplace in the Himalayas. I also had the famous commentary on the Bamboo Books published in 1865 by the English Sinologist James Legge and a pile of books from the classical Greek collection on the second floor. Except for a Japanese scholar huddled over a scroll and a professor with a white beard dozing in the corner, I had the place to myself. A frieze from Angkor Wat, of monkey gods battling demons, was hung on the far wall. Two glass cabinets were filled with Han Dynasty ceramics. The prophet Milarepa, ringed by dancers, beamed down at the professor from a silk tapestry.

  Mr. Hood had made a phone call and written a letter of introduction to the Hamilton’s associate director, his friend Joseph Tamasho (mentioning that I had just returned from Vietnam), and—presto—I was issued a library card with full privileges. A slight, moustached man with impeccable manners, Mr. Tamasho wore a madras jacket and white shoes. He offered me tea and showed me around the library himself.

  The reading room was comfortable and the stacks well organized. Scents of plumeria and yellow ginger wafted in from the garden. There was a café across the courtyard that served good Kona coffee and sandwiches. Nevertheless, for the first two days I couldn’t concentrate. But for the rustle of pages and the purr of the air-conditioning, the room was practically silent. It made me restless. I caught myself staring out the tinted windows. In the jungle I had not even been able to get through the pulp mysteries and Westerns we passed around; focusing on a scholarly text now seemed impossible. I flipped through book after book, pausing over passages that caught my eye. My CC work, encrypting and decoding, had required concentration, but of a mechanical sort. There was nothing stimulating about encrypting dozens of messages like Alpha Red rendezvous Delta Blue, J Quadrant. To preserve my sanity, I had had to shut down selective parts of my mind; opening them up again was not so easy.

  This only intensified my despair. I was ready to thank Mr. Tamasho, return my library card, and move on. Then an entry in an encyclopedia of Greek scholiasts broke through my paralysis. The encyclopedia was compiled by a sixteenth-century rabbi from Fez, Jakob Ben Chaim. The entry was for the peryton, a high-circling bird—often mistaken for a hawk—that is among the most ominous of lost beasts. The rabbi discovered it in the trancription of an anonymous treatise, one of the 500,000 volumes lost when the Great Library of Alexandria burned down in 48 B.C. This is his description:

  It possesses the head and forelegs of a deer affixed to the torso of a bird. Geron of Chios reports that Perytons are the souls of lost wayfarers, especially soldiers, who have died far from home. If a man is unlucky enough to glimpse this creature, it means he himself is lost, and in danger of being transformed into a Peryton. The Peryton is always encountered as a large bird casting the shadow of a man.

  Perhaps the power of suggestion, abetted by my painkillers, was at work when late that afternoon I walked across the city and visited the Foster Botanical Garden. There were few people around. Steam rose from the ferns beneath the banyan trees. With their long bills the cranes in the pond tossed water onto their feathers. There was a couple necking in a gazebo. Near the Orchid House, in a maze walled by hedges, I came on an intersection in the paths where a man’s small, watery shadow was undulating on the flagstone. He must have been perched high in a tree around the corner—a gardener, pruning branches, I thought. But when I rounded that corner and squinted into the glare, I saw only a large bird streaking off a kapok tree, disappearing into the clouds. It may have been a hawk or a petrel, but I took it as a warning that, coming from where I’d been, if I wasn’t careful, I could get very lost very fast.

  Maybe I needed to be jolted. That night I slept for twelve hours and awoke with a terrible thirst. I drank several glasses of cold water, and was still thirsty. But I could breathe again. Something had snapped free inside me.

  I bought a notebook to replace the nearly empty one I had lost in the war. When I returned to the library, I made my first entry:

  THE PERYTON

  Originally from the continent of Atlantis.

  It nests in caves on the Rock of Gibraltar and subsists on soil and salt water.

  If it kills a man, it regains its true shadow.

  I dove into my reading with a new sense of purpose, making original entries and expanding old ones. With the phoenix, for example, I discovered a rich mythology across many cultures, from Sumatra, where the Garuda dwells in an underwater cavern, to India, where the Samandal is kept in a maharajah’s crystal cage. My favorite was the Japanese phoenix, the Ho-ho (named for its cry); Rijo, court astronomer to the Emperor Toba, took what we call the Fourth Dimension for granted when he wrote in the Imperial Annals of 1137 that “it is well known the Ho-ho can fly across time and space and in a single hour visit the same man in his cradle and on his deathbed.”

  In another Japanese chronicle, I found a cousin of the peryton, the Shinto war demon Oni, which had a human head on a hawk’s body. In the Bamboo Books I discovered a Chinese mermaid, the Ling yu, and countless other creatures that I dutifully recorded.*3

  One morning, in the Latin
American section of the library, I unearthed a Patagonian bestiary by an eighteenth-century missionary, Joaquin Alvaro, who crossed the pampas on foot in 1756. Instead of converting the natives to Christianity, he recorded their stories about the reputed fauna of the region, strange elusive animals, most of which—but not all—had died out long before: man-sized sloths, enormous birds (like the rukh) that feasted on dust, fish that swam in boiling lakes. Having traveled to the Far East, Alvaro claimed there were dragons at the remote heart of Patagonia composed of a single element—fire, water, stone, air—like their Chinese counterparts.

  The ghost dragon, for example, which frequents hospitals, nursing homes, and battlefields, feeding on the spirits of the newly deceased. It is invisible; only murderers can see it, just after committing their crimes.

  Mostly, though, I used this time in Honolulu to circle back to more familiar terrain, early natural historians like Pliny the Elder, Diodorus Siculus, and Aristotle. I had become proficient enough in Greek and Latin (having studied each for eight years) to read them in the original. I veered away from the Christian Physiologus and the monks who were his pious successors. Gradually they became less interested in the animals than the moral precepts that could be attached to them. The turtledove, for example, was presented as a symbol of a widow’s chastity first, a flesh-and-blood bird second. Certain creatures (dove, caladrius, panther) were declared to be stand-ins for the Savior, others (wild ass, wolf, serpent) for Satan. Christian dogma attempted to contract and sanitize, to make black-and-white, the bright complex tapestry on which these animals lent themselves to freer allegory. Soon the monks began eliminating the fantastical beasts altogether.

  I wondered how many such animals the conventional bestiaries had omitted; not just the ones Noah banished from the ark, but the other amazing stragglers and hybrids, from every continent, that had eluded history.

  Aristotle was intrigued by fantastical animals, and while completing his Animalia, wrote a book about them, Peri Mysterion (“Mysteries”), which inspired the first compilers of the Caravan Bestiary. The original disappeared in the fire at the Great Library, but traces of it were said to have survived. Hoping to find them, I turned to the chroniclers who annotated the Animalia and all of Aristotle’s other works. Most of these medieval texts were only available on microfiche; the originals were in Europe. In one of the most obscure, least promising tracts, written in 1382 by a prelate from Languedoc named Guy Pelletier, I stumbled on the crucial clue that marked the real starting point of my search for the Caravan Bestiary.

  In his rambling Commentarii, Pelletier used Aristotle as a springboard for digressions about his soldiering in the Eighth Crusade as a young man. I quickly grew bored with him, and was about to remove the microfiche of his book from the viewer when I came on his description of the Battle of Smyrna, in October 1351. The Crusaders had triumphed, despite heavy casualties, and Pelletier attended the signing of the peace treaty that followed and provided biographical sketches of the diplomats who conveyed Pope Clement VI’s terms to the Saracens. Prominent among them was a French knight named Martin Lafourie.

  Because he was a wily and skillful negotiator, Lafourie drafted the greater part of the treaty. Emissary of His Majesty King Philip VI, he was renowned for having advanced the interests of France in Afrique and the Levant. A brave soldier in his youth, Lafourie was so well-traveled as a diplomat that some at Philip’s court in Paris had never encountered him. It was rumored that on a mission to the Knights Hospitallers in Rhodes several years before, he recovered and carried away that rare and dangerous Bestiary called the Caravan. He neither acknowledged nor denied this, and did not reveal where he might have taken the book.

  I nearly jumped out of my chair. I reread the passage, closed my eyes, and read it again. I was stunned by my good luck.

  At the Hamilton Library in Honolulu, on June 2, 1972, from an incidental passage in a forgotten text, I had moved the whereabouts of the Caravan Bestiary forward a full century, to the 1340s, and established its last confirmed location on Rhodes.

  Michael Brox had been wrong when he said the bestiary was burned in Spain in 1191; and there was no telling if Niccólo Cava was correct to insist that the book had ended up in Italy, locked away by the Church; and Madame Faville had been right about Rhodes, but wrong to assert the bestiary was destroyed. Now I had discovered something that eluded all of them: the strong possibility that a medieval diplomat named Martin Lafourie visited Rhodes and “carried away” the bestiary. Back to France? When, and how? And from whom, or what, did he “recover” it? The book still may have been destroyed after Lafourie obtained it, but the fact it had already lived on for another hundred years gave me hope it might have survived even longer, and might still exist. Before leaving the library, I checked the catalogs, but there were no references to a Martin Lafourie. I knew I would have to dig deeper than that. If he were that easy to find, Brox, Cava, or Faville would somehow have learned of his connection to the bestiary.

  Night had fallen, and a warm wind was swaying the palms as I walked down Kapahulu Avenue. I felt both exhilarated and tired and I wanted to celebrate my find. I went into a package store, bought a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon, and headed for the ocean.

  On the beach, I popped the cork. I took a long swig and turned toward Diamond Head, past the hotel terraces with their burning torches, and the zoo, and the natatorium. I walked the length of Kahala Beach, until the lights of the city melted away behind me.

  Rounding a promontory into a sheltered cove, I heard music and laughter. There was a bonfire. A large party of people my age or younger wearing shorts or bathing suits. Dancing, drinking. I hesitated, then joined them. A guy in a cowboy hat handed me a can of beer from a cooler. I gave him the champagne. A girl passed me a joint. I took a hit. The girl smiled and I took another hit. She drank some champagne. A big man in a chef’s apron was barbecuing on a grill. Two girls in bikinis were sitting in the sand playing guitars and singing a medley of slow songs. Their faces glowed in the firelight. They had beautiful voices.

  Carlton, the youngest guy in my unit, used to sing all the time. He was from Minnesota. He had wanted to move to Louisiana and work on an oil rig in the Gulf. His family was poor, and someone had told him he could make real money down there. Suddenly I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I panicked. I had this crazy thought that if I didn’t remember him, no one would. Then I told myself it wasn’t that crazy. With the others dead, I was the last living person to have seen Carlton alive, when we evacuated our base. Murphy, too. All of them.

  The girl touched my arm. “Hey.”

  I looked at her more closely. She was stoned, but not that stoned. She had a nice smile. Beautiful teeth. Long black hair. She was Hawaiian.

  She passed back the champagne, and after I drank again, there wasn’t much left. I gave it to her to finish.

  “You a sailor?” she said.

  “No.”

  She cocked her head. “Lots of sailors, they get out of the navy and stay in the islands.”

  “I can understand that.” I took another hit off the joint.

  She smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Xeno.”

  “I’m T.J. Do you dance, Xeno?”

  “Sure.”

  I pulled off my boots and rolled up my jeans. She put her arms around me and we started dancing slowly. I hadn’t danced or been to a party or held a girl like her close in a thousand years.

  Just then Carlton’s face came into my head. A moon face. Brown eyes. Thin lips. Every detail clear. So it was all right again.

  The party grew louder, and we kept dancing, and her skin felt soft and her breasts against my chest and her hands on my shoulders and her hair smelled so good I didn’t want to stop, and we didn’t stop.

  ON MY LAST AFTERNOON in Honolulu, I watched a mermaid swim through a cloud of convict tangs, yellow with black stripes. The mermaid’s long hair was dyed green. Her outfit was skintight Lycra, silver with iridescent scales. She
wore a V-shaped mask and every couple of minutes sucked oxygen from rubber tubes, strategically placed among the plants. She navigated deftly with her rubber tail, climbing the walls, turning figure eights, hovering upright.

  The aquarium guidebook stated that the mermaid was an invention of sailors who mistook the dugong, a pale marine mammal, for a semihuman creature.

  In fact, the earliest mermaids were bird-women, with human heads, claw feet, and tail feathers. They inhabited secluded meadows and sang haunting melodies. Ker-Sirens, the Greeks called them, “souls that carry off other souls.” Spirits of the dead with license to travel in and out of the underworld.

  Eventually they gravitated to the sea. They grew fish tails, but kept their wings. They sang across the flashing waters, luring seamen onto rocky shores.

  Finally they took to the water themselves, fish from the waist down. A comb in one hand, a mirror in the other, they danced atop the waves. Their earrings were half-moons, their bracelets human bone. When they came ashore to dance with men, they concealed their tails and dyed their hair black, leaving a single clue to their identity: that the hem of a siren’s dress is always wet.

  The Polynesians had an identical myth, in which the dead became sirens, beautiful singers who diverted mariners into turbulent seas, and when they’d drowned, dispatched their shades to Reinga, the deep-sea netherworld.

  I walked down the promenade to a pier where men were fishing. There were pails at their feet with live bait and baskets into which they dropped their catch, yellowfins and lemonfish with glittering green fins.

  I bought a taco and a Coke from a vendor and sat on a wooden bench. I had called Mr. Hood to say goodbye and thank him again for his help. He was excited about my discovery of Martin Lafourie. “You’re on your way now,” he said. And I was. My flight was at nine o’clock, my bags were packed. The sun felt good on my skin. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, orange with purple palms. I unbuttoned the shirt, but because my scar was still livid, did not remove it. Three months out of the army and my hair was back to shoulder-length. I had grown a moustache. My sunglasses were a shade lighter than a blind man’s.