Galilee

  The plan pleased me. I decided to drain the cordial glass there and then, which I did, (tossing the empty glass into the brackish water) and then starting back toward the house. Or so I thought. What became apparent after fifty yards or so was that my mind, enamored of its own aroused state, had misled me, and instead of walking the safe, solid ground of the lawn I was getting deeper into the swamp. This was probably not a wise thing to do, some cautious corner of my mind muttered; but the greater part, being under the influence of powder and brandy, declared that if this was the way my instincts were taking me, then I should obey those instincts, and take pleasure in the journey. The earth was sodden beneath my feet, and relinquished my feet only with a comical sucking sound; the canopy had so thickened overhead that only a fraction of the starlight still made its way through to illuminate the path. And still my instincts took me on, deeper into the thicket. Even in my rush-headed state I knew very well I was daring disaster. This terrain was unsuitable for trekking through in broad daylight, much less at such an hour as this. At any moment the glaucous mud underfoot might give way and I’d be up to my neck in wicked waters, foul and full of alligators.

  But what the hell? I had a hard-on to comfort me in extremis; and I would take my death as God’s way of telling me I was not the writer I imagined myself to be.

  Then, a strange thing. A certainty rose in me that I was not alone here. There was another human presence nearby; I could feel a curious gaze brushing the back of my neck. I stopped walking, and glanced back over my. shoulder.

  “Who’s there?” I said, speaking softly.

  I didn’t expect a reply (one who comes after a traveler in near total darkness does not usually reply to an inquiry); but to my surprise I got one. It was not in the form of speech however, at least not at first. It came as a kind of fluttering in the murk, as though my unseen companion carried birds in his coat, like a magician. I stared at the motion, trying to make sense of it, and as I was staring I became unaccountably certain that I knew who this was. After decades of exile L’Enfant’s sorrowful son, Galilee the wanderer, had come home.

  III

  I said his name, barely raising my voice to audibility this time. Again, there came the fluttering, and because my gaze knew where to look I seemed to see him there. He was shaped out of shadow rather than starlight; shadow on shadow. But it was him, no doubt. There are not two faces as beautiful as his on the planet. I wish there were. I wish he were not without equal. But he is, damn him. He’s an order of nature unto himself, and the rest of us have to take what little comfort we can from the fact of his unhappiness.

  “Are you really here?” I said to him. It would be a strange question, I realize, to ask most people; but Galilee inherited from his mother the ability to send his image where he wishes and having for a moment believed he was here in the flesh I now suspected this agitated form was not the man himself, but a message that he’d willed my way.

  This time, I comprehended words in the midst of the flutterings. “No,” he said. “I’m a long way off.”

  “Still at sea?

  “Still at sea.”

  “So to what do I owe the honor? Are you thinking of coming back home?”

  The fluttering became laughter; laughter, but bitter.

  “Home?” he said. “Why would I come home? I’m not welcome there.”

  “I’d welcome you,” I said. “So would Marietta.” Galilee grunted. He was plainly unconvinced. “I wish I could see you better,” I said to him.

  “That’s your fault, not mine,” the shadow-in-shadow replied.

  “What do you mean by that?” I replied, a little testily.

  “Brother, I appear to you as clearly as you can bear me to be,” Galilee replied. “No more, no less.” I assumed he was telling the truth. There was no purpose in his lying to me. “But this is as close to home as I will be getting anytime soon.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Somewhere off the coast of Madagascar. The sea’s calm; not a breath of wind. And there are flying fish all around the boat. I put my frying pan over the side and they just jump on into it . . .” His eyes shone in the murk, as though reflecting back at me some portion of the sunlit sea upon which he was gazing.

  “Is it strange?” I asked him.

  “Is what strange?”

  “Being in two places at one time?”

  “I do it all the time,” he said. “I let my mind slip away and I go walking round the world.”

  “What if something were to happen to your boat while your thoughts were off walking?”

  “I’d know,” he said. “Me and my Samarkand, we understand one another. But there isn’t any danger of that happening tonight. It’s as calm as a baby’s bath. You’d like it out here, Maddox. Once you get out here you have a different perspective on things. You start to let your dreams take over, start to forget the hurts you were done, start not to care about life and death and the riddles of the universe . . .”

  “You missed out love,” I said.

  “Ah, well, yes . . . love’s another matter.” He looked away from me, into the darkness. “It doesn’t matter how far you sail, there’s always going to be love isn’t there? It comes after you, wherever you go.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about that.”

  “Well, brother, the truth is it doesn’t matter whether I’m happy or not. There’s no escape for me and that’s all there is to it.” He reached out his hand. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Damn. Talking about love always makes me want to smoke.”

  “I’m a little confused,” I said. “Suppose I had been in possession of a cigarette . . .”

  “Could I have taken it from you and smoked it? Is that the question?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I couldn’t. But I could have watched you smoke it, and been almost as satisfied. You know how much I enjoy experiences by proxy.” He laughed again. This time there was no bitterness, just amusement. “In fact, the older I get—and I feel old, brother, I feel very, very old—the more it seems to me all the best experiences are’ second-hand, third-hand even. I’d prefer to tell a story about love, or hear one, than be in love myself.”

  “And you prefer to watch a cigarette being smoked than actually to smoke it?”

  “Well . . . not quite,” he sighed. “But I’m almost there. So, to business, brother of mine. Why did you call me?”

  “I didn’t call you.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “No, truly. I didn’t call you. I wouldn’t even know how to.”

  “Maddox,” he said, with just a touch of condescension. “You’re not listening to me—”

  “I’m listening, damn it—”

  “Don’t raise your voice.”

  “I’m not raising—”

  “Yes you are. You’re shouting at me.”

  “You accused me of not listening,” I replied, attempting to keep my tone reasonable even though I wasn’t feeling particularly reasonable. I never did in Galilee’s presence; that was the simple truth of the matter. Even in the balmy days before the war, before Galilee ran off to seek his fortune in the world, before the calamities of his return, and the death of my wife, and the undoing of Nicodemus, even then—when we’d lived in a place that comes to look paradisiacal in hindsight—we had fought often, and bitterly, over the most insignificant things. All I would have to do was hear a certain tone in his voice—or he hear some unwelcome nuance in mine—and we’d be at one another’s throats. The subject at hand was usually an irrelevance. We fought because we were at some profound level antithetical to one another. The passage of years had not, it seemed, mellowed that antipathy. We had only to exchange a few sentences and the old defenses were up, the old anger escalating.

  “Let’s change the subject,” I suggested.

  “Fine. How’s Luman?”

  “As crazy as ever.”

  “And Marietta? Is she well?”

&n
bsp; “Better than well.”

  “In love?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Tell her I asked after her.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was always fond of Marietta. I see her face in dreams all the time.”

  “She’ll be flattered.”

  “And yours,” Galilee said. “I see yours too.”

  “And you curse me.”

  “No, brother, I don’t. I dream we’re all back together again, before all the foolishness.”

  This seemed a particularly inappropriate word for him to use—almost insulting in its lack of gravity. I couldn’t help but comment.

  “It may have seemed foolishness to you,” I said, “but it was a lot more to the rest of us.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You went away to have your adventures, Galilee. And I’m sure that’s given you a lot of joy.”

  “Less than you’d imagine.”

  “You had responsibilities,” I pointed out. “You were the eldest. You should have been setting an example, instead of pleasuring yourself.”

  “Since when was that a crime?” Galilee countered. “It’s in the blood, brother. We’re a hedonistic family.”

  (There was no gainsaying this. Our father had been a sensualist of heroic proportions from his earliest childhood. I myself had found in a book of anthropology a story about his first sexual exploits recanted by Kurdish horsemen. They claim proudly that all seventeen of their tribe’s founding fathers were sired by my father while he was still too young to walk. Make what you will of that.)

  Galilee, meanwhile, had moved onto another matter.

  “My mother . . .”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she well?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” I said. “I see very little of her.”

  “Was it she who healed you?’ Galilee said, looking down at my legs. Last time he’d seen me I had been an invalid, raging at him.

  “I think she’d probably say both of us did the work together.”

  “That’s unlike her.”

  “She’s mellowed.”

  “Enough to forgive me?” I said nothing to this. “Do I take that to mean no?”

  “Perhaps you should ask her yourself,” I suggested. “If you like I could talk to her for you. Tell her we’ve spoken. Prepare her.”

  For the first time in this exchange I saw something more than Galilee’s shadow-self. A luminescence seemed to move up through his flesh, casting a cool brightness out toward me, and delineating his form as it did so. I seemed to see the curve of his torso lit from within; up through his throbbing neck to the cave of his mouth.

  “You’d help me?’ he said.

  “Of course.”

  “I thought you hated me. You had reason enough.”

  “I never hated you, Galilee. I swear.”

  The light was in his eyes now; and spilling down his cheeks.

  “Lord, brother . . .” he said softly “ . . . it’s a long time since I cried.”

  “Does it mean so much to you to come home?”

  “To have her forgive me,” he said. “That’s what I want, more than anything. Just to be forgiven.”

  “I can’t intercede for you there,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “All I can do is tell her you’d like to see her, and then bring you her answer.”

  “That’s more than I could have expected,” Galilee said, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand. “And don’t think I don’t know that I have to ask your forgiveness too. Your sweet lady Chiyojo—”

  I raised my hand to ward off whatever he was going to say next. “I’d prefer we didn’t . . .”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway, it isn’t a question of forgiveness,” I replied. “Both of us made errors. Believe me, I made as many as you did.”

  “I doubt that,” Galilee replied, the sourness that had first marked his speech returning. He hates himself, I thought. Lord, this man hates himself. “What are you thinking?” he said to me.

  I was too confounded to admit the truth. “Oh . . .” I said. “Nothing important.”

  “You think I’m ridiculous.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You think I’m ridiculous. You imagine I’ve been strutting around the world for the last God knows how many years fucking like a barnyard cock. What else? Oh yes, you think I never grew up. That I’m heartless. Stupid probably.” He stared at me with those sealit eyes. “Go on. I’ve said it for you now. You may as well admit it.”

  “All right. Some of that’s true. I thought you didn’t care. That’s what I was going to write: that you were heartless and—”

  “Write?” he said, breaking in. “Where?”

  “In a book.”

  “What book?”

  “My book,” I said, feeling a little shiver of pride.

  “Is this a book about me?”

  “It’s about us all,” I said. “You and me and Marietta, and Luman and Zabrina—”

  “Mother and Father?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do they all know you’re writing about them?” I nodded. “And are you telling the truth?”

  “It’s not a novel, if that’s what you mean. I’m telling the truth as best I can.”

  He mused on this for a moment. The news of my work had clearly unsettled him. Perhaps he feared what I would uncover; or already had.

  “Before you ask,” I said, “it’s not just our family I’m writing about.”

  By the expression on his face it was clear that this went to the heart of his anxiety. “Oh Christ,” he murmured. “So that’s why I’m here.”

  “I suppose it must be,” I said. “I was thinking about you and—”

  “What’s it called?” he said to me. I looked at him blankly. “Your book, dummy. What’s it called?”

  “Oh . . . well, I’m toying with a number of titles,” I said, pretending my best literary tone. “There’s nothing definite yet.”

  “You realize I know a lot of details that you could use.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Stuff you really can’t do without. Not if it’s to be a true account.”

  “Such as?”

  He gave me a sly smile. “What’s it worth?’ he said. It was the first time in this meeting I’d seen a glimpse of the Galilee I remembered; the creature whose confidence in his own charms had once been inviolate.

  “I’m going to Mama for you, remember?”

  “And you think that’s worth all the information I could give you?’ he countered. “Oh no, brother. You have to do better than that.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “First, you have to agree.”

  “I just said, “To what?”

  “Just agree, will you?”

  “This is going round in circles.”

  Galilee shrugged. “All right,” he said. “If you don’t want to know what I know, then don’t. But your book’s going to be the poorer for it, I’m warning you.”

  “I think we’d better stop this conversation here and now,” I said. “Before it goes bad on us.”

  Galilee regarded me with great gravity, a frown biting into his brow. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  “We were doing so well, and I got carried away.”

  “So did I.”

  “No, no, it was entirely my fault. I’ve lost a lot of social graces over the years. I spend too much time on my own. That’s my problem. It’s no excuse but . . .” The sentence trailed away. “Well, shall we agree to talk again?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Maybe around this time tomorrow? Will that give you sufficient opportunity to talk to Mama?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Galilee said softly. “I do think of her, you know. Of late, I’ve thought of her all the time. And the house. I think of the house.”
>
  “Have you visited?”

  “Visited?”

  “I mean, you could come looking and nobody would know.”

  “She’d know,” he said. Of course she would, I thought. “So no,” he went on. “I haven’t dared.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find it’s changed.”

  “That’s good,” he said, with a tentative smile. “So much else . . . almost everything, in fact . . . everywhere I go . . . things change. And never for the better. Places I used to love. Secret places, you know? Corners of the world where nobody ever went. Now there’s pink hotels and pleasure cruises. Once in a while I’ve tried to scare people off.” His shape shuddered as he spoke, and in the midst of his beauty I saw another form, far less attractive. Silver slits for eyes, and leathery lips drawn back from teeth like needles. Even knowing that he meant me no harm, the sight distressed me. I looked away. “See, it works,” he said, not without pride. “But then as soon as my back’s turned the rot creeps in again. “I glanced up at him; his rabidity was in retreat. “And before you know it . . .”

  “Pink hotels—”

  “—and pleasure cruises.” He sighed. “And everything’s spoiled.” He glanced up at the sky. “Well I should let you go. It won’t be long till morning, and you’ve got a day’s work ahead of you.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh I don’t sleep that much.” He replied. “I’m not sure that divinities ever do.”

  “Is that what you are?”

  He shrugged, as though the issue of his godhood were neither here nor there. “I suppose so. Ma and Pa are as pure a form of deity as this world will ever see, don’t you think? Which makes you a demigod, if that makes you feel any better.” I laughed out loud. “Goodnight then, brother,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He started to turn from me, and in so doing seemed to eclipse himself. “Wait,” I said. He glanced back at me.

  “What?”

  “I know what you were going to ask for,” I said.

  “Oh do you?’ he said with a little smile. “And what was that?”

  “If you gave me information for the book you were going to demand some kind of control over what I wrote.”

  “Wrong, brother,” he said, pivoting back on his heel and eclipsing himself again. “I was only going to ask you to call the book Galilee.” His eyes glittered. “But you’ll do that anyway,” he said. “Won’t you?”