Galilee

  Nicodemus was undismayed. He’d dealt with countless fractious animals in his time; for all Dumuzzi’ s heroic strength and size, he was just one more. After some struggle, my father bridled the beast and dragged him out of the stable to the open ground where he had the mare tethered. As I describe this now my heart has quickened, the scene is so vivid in my mind’s eye: the lightning erupting in the clouds overhead, the horses shrieking in their hysteria, foamy lips curled back from lethal teeth; Nicodemus yelling at his beauties against the din of the storm, the front of his trousers showing plainly how much this scene aroused him.

  I swear he looked half-bestial himself, by the glare of the lightning; his hair, which hung to his waist when he was standing still, roiling around him, his face cracked in half by a rabid smile, his skin iridescent. If he’d lost all trace of his human form then and there—convulsed and stretched and cracked his spine to become some other thing (a horse, a storm; a little of both)—I wouldn’t have been surprised. I was more astonished that his humanity held in the midst of this; that he didn’t unleash himself. Perhaps it excited him better to be confined by his anatomy in such circumstances; to have to sweat and fight.

  There he was—divinity made flesh, and that flesh halfway to becoming animal—hauling the protesting Dumuzzi into the presence of the mare. I thought the last thing the stallion would want to do was fuck, but I was wrong. Nicodemus insinuated himself between the two horses and proceeded to arouse them: rubbing their flanks, their bellies, their heads, and all the while talking to them. Despite his agitation, Dumuzzi became hot for the mare. His massive phallus was unsheathed, and he promptly threw himself up on her. Still talking, still patting and rubbing, my father took hold of the stallion’s rod and put it at the mare’s opening. Dumuzzi needed no help with the rest. He covered the mare with the efficiency of one born to the task.

  My father stood back and let them couple. His entire body seemed to be bristling: I swear to have touched him then would have proved fatal to my common heart. He was no longer laughing. His head had drooped, his shoulders were hunched: he seemed like a stalking predator, ready to tear out the throats of these creatures should they fail him.

  They didn’t. Though the storm continued to rage around—the lightning so frequent it visited a ghastly vivid day upon this midnight, the thunder so loud its reverberations shook down several trees and cracked a dozen windows in the house—the animals fucked and fucked and fucked, their panic subsumed into the frenzy of their mating.

  The foal that came of this coupling was a male. Nicodemus called him Temujin, the birth name of Genghis Khan. As for Dumuzzi, he seemed to dote on my father thereafter; as though that night they’d become brothers. I say seemed because I suspect the animal’s devotion was a sham. Why do I think that? Because the night my father died the panicked charge that trampled him to death was led by Dumuzzi, whose eyes carried in them—I swear—a flicker of revenge.

  I’ve told you all this in part to give you a better picture of my father, whose presence in this story must necessarily be anecdotal, and in part because it serves as a reminder to me of the capacities that lie dormant in my nature.

  As I said at the opening of the chapter, my own libido is a pitiful echo of Nicodemus’s sexual appetites. My erotic life has never been particularly complex or interesting, except for a short period in Japan, when I was courting, in the most formal fashion, Chiyojo, the woman who would become my wife, while nightly sharing the bed of her brother Takeda, who was a Kabuki actor of some renown (an onagatta, to be precise; that is to say, he only played women). Otherwise, the scandals of my sexual life would not fill a small pamphlet.

  And yet—as I prepare to enter the portion of this story dedicated to the act of love, I can’t help wondering where my father’s fire went to when it flowed into me. Is there a lover in me somewhere, waiting for his moment to show his skills? Or has that energy been turned to less frenetic purpose? Is it what fuels my laying these very words on the page? Have the juices of Nicodemus’ s desire become the ink in my pen?

  I’ve taken the analogy too far. Ah well. It’s written, and I’m not going to abort it now, after so much effort.

  I have to move on. Leave the memories of my father, and the storm, and the horses. I only hope that if the passion which drives me to my desk (obsessively now; every waking moment I’m thinking about what I’ve written, or about to write) isn’t as blind and confused as love can be. I need clarity. Oh Lord, how I need clarity!

  You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I’ve lost my way. I’ve got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don’t know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on a Long Island shore, and Loretta’s astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barbarossa, out of love with life itself. How the hell do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?

  Perhaps (this thought nauseates me, but I have to entertain it) they don’t belong together. Perhaps I lost my bearings some while ago, and I’ve simply been gathering up pieces that for all their individual prettiness can never be made to fit together.

  Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now. I can’t stop writing; I’ve got too much momentum. I have to forge on, using whatever little part of my father’s genius I’ve inherited to interpret the scenes of human need which are about to come before me, and hope that in their interpreting I’ll discover some way to make sense of all that I’ve described hitherto.

  ii

  One last thing. I can’t let another chapter go by without making mention of the conversation I had with Luman.

  I don’t want you to think I’m a coward; I’m not. I fully realize that at some point I have to address the accusations my half-brother flung at me; both face to face with him, and face to face with myself (which is to say: here, in this book). He said my devotion to Nicodemus was in some measure the reason for my wife’s death; that if I’d been the loving husband I claimed I would not have turned a blind eye to Chiyojo’s seduction. I would have told Nicodemus she was mine, and he was to keep his hands off her. I didn’t. I let him work his wiles upon her, and she paid the price.

  I’m guilty as charged.

  There; I’ve admitted it. Now what? It’s too late to make amends to Chiyojo. At least I can’t do so here; if her ghost still walks the mundane realm—which I suspect it does—then she’s at home in the hills above Ichinoseki, waiting for the cherry trees to blossom.

  The only peace I can make here in L’Enfant is with Luman, who I don’t doubt stirred up this trouble between us out of perfectly innocent motives. He’s not a man who knows how to conceal his thoughts. He had an opinion and he spat it out. Not only that, but what he said was right, though it agonizes me to admit the fact. I should go down to the Smoke House (with a conciliatory offering of cigars) and tell him that I’m sorry for my outburst; that I want us to start talking again.

  But I fear the thought of venturing down that overgrown path to the Smoke House door makes my head ache: I can’t do it. At least not yet. The time will come, I’m sure, when I have no excuses left—when I haven’t got a character suspended in the air—and I’ll go make my apologies.

  Maybe I’ll go tomorrow, or the day after. When I’ve written about the island, that’s when I’ll go. Yes, that’s it. Once I’ve cleared my head of all that I have to tell you about the island, and what happened to Rachel there, I’ll be in a better state to sit and talk with him. He deserves my full attention, after all, and I can’t possibly give it to him when I’m so distracted.

  I feel a little better now. I’ve confessed my guilt, and that’s oddly comforting. I won’t undermine that confession by attempting to justify what I did. I was weak, and too eager to please. But I can’t leave this passa
ge without returning to the image of Nicodemus, the night of the storm. He was a rare creature, no question of that; I think many sons would have put their service to such a father before their duties as a husband. The irony is this: that if I hoped to be like him, as I did, and that in letting him have Chiyojo I would gain his approbation, and come closer to him, I worked against my own interests with heroic thoroughness. In one night I lost my idol, I lost my wife, and—let this be said, once and for all—I lost myself. What little there was of me—a self separate from my desire to please my father—was trampled under the same hooves that took his life. It’s only been in the last few weeks, as I’ve been writing this history, that my sense of a soul called Maddox, alive in my flesh and worthy of preservation, has appeared. I suppose the moment of my rebirth was the moment I walked out of the skyroom, leaving the wheelchair behind me.

  Another irony, of course: the strength to do that was ignited in me by my stepmother; she’s the architect of my resurrection. Even if she doesn’t want payment for that service—beyond the words I’m writing—I know there’s a debt to be paid; and with every sentence, every paragraph, the Maddox who will make that payment comes into clearer focus.

  This is what I see: a man who has just confessed his guilt, and will make amends, in time. A man who loves telling stories, and will find a way to understand what he’s telling, in time. And a man who is capable of love, and who will find somebody to love again—oh please God yes; in time, in time.

  X

  Rachel’s first view of Kaua’i was tantalizingly brief; just enough to glimpse a series of bright scalloped beaches, and lush, rolling hills. Then the plane was making its steep descent into the airport at Lihu’e, and moments later a bumpy landing. The airport was small and quiet. She wandered through to pick up her bags, keeping her eyes open for the manager of the house where she’d be staying. And there he was, dutifully standing by the tiny baggage carousel, with a cart for her luggage. They recognized one another at the same moment.

  “Mrs. Geary . . .” he said, forsaking his cart to come and present himself before her. “I’m Jimmy Hornbeck.”

  “Yes. I thought it must be you. Margie told me to look out for the best-pressed clothes on Kaua’i.”

  Jimmy laughed. “So that’s my reputation,” he said. “Well, I suppose it could be worse.”

  They exchanged a few pleasantries about the flights until the baggage arrived, then he led the way out into the sunshine.

  “If you’d like to wait here,” he said, “I’ll go and fetch the car and bring it round for you. It saves you the walk to the parking lot.”

  She didn’t protest this; she was perfectly happy to stand on the sidewalk and feel the ocean breeze on her face. It seemed as she stood there she could feel the grime and anxiety of New York ooze out of her pores. Soon, she’d wash it all away.

  Hornbeck was back with the vehicle—which looked robust enough for jungle exploration—in two or three minutes. Another minute to load Rachel’s bags, and then they were out of the little maze of roads around the airport and onto the closest thing the island had to a highway.

  “I’m sorry about the transport, by the way,” he said. “I had intended to pick you up in something a bit more civilized, but the road to the house has deteriorated so badly in the last couple of months—”

  “Oh, really?”

  “We’ve had a lot of rain recently, which is why the island looks particularly lush at the moment.”

  Lush was an understatement. Off to the left of the highway, toward the island’s interior, were fields of rich red earth and green sugar cane. Beyond them, velvety hills, rising in ambition as they receded, until they became steep peaks whose heights were draped with sumptuous cloud.

  “The problem is that the little backroads just aren’t being taken care of the way they should be,” Hornbeck was saying. “And there’s a little tussle going on right now about who’s actually responsible for the road to the house. The local council says it’s really part of the property, and so I should be getting money from your people to get it fixed. But that’s nonsense. It’s public property. The council should be filling in the holes, not a private contractor.”

  Rachel was only half-attending to this. The beauty of the fields and mountains—and on the other side of the highway, the blue, pounding ocean—had claimed her attentions.

  “So this argument has been going on for two years,” Hornbeck went on. “Two years! And of course nothing’s going to be done about the road until it’s resolved. Which means it just deteriorates whenever there’s rain. It’s very frustrating so I apologize—”

  “There’s really no need . . .” Rachel said dreamily.

  “—for the vehicle.”

  “Really,” she said, “it’s fine.”

  “Well just as long as you understand. I don’t want you thinking I’m neglecting my duties.”

  “Hm?”

  “When you see the road.”

  She glanced at the man, and saw by his fretful demeanor, and the whiteness of his knuckles, that he was genuinely concerned that his job was in jeopardy. As far as he was concerned she was a visiting potentate; he was afraid of making a mistake.

  “Don’t worry, James. Do people call you James or Jim?”

  “Usually Jimmy,” he said.

  “You’re English, yes?”

  “I was born and raised in London. But then I came here. It’ll be thirty years ago next November. And I said to myself: this is perfect. So I never went back.”

  “And you still think it’s perfect?”

  “Sometimes I get a little stir-crazy,” Jimmy admitted. “But then you get a day like today and you think: where else would I want to be? I mean, look at it.”

  Rachel looked back toward the mountains. The clouds had parted on the heights, and the sun was breaking through.

  “Can you see the waterfalls?” Jimmy said. She could. Silvery threads of water plummeting down from cracks in the mountainside. “Up there’s the wettest place on earth,” Jimmy informed her. “Mount Waialeale gets about forty feet of rain a year. It’s raining right now.”

  “Have you been up?”

  “I’ve taken a helicopter trip once or twice. It’s spectacular. If you like I’ll organize a flight for you. One of my best friends runs a little operation down in Po’ipu. He and his brother-in-law pilot these little choppers.”

  “I don’t know that I trust helicopters.”

  “It’s really the best way to see the island. And if you ask Tom he’ll take you out over the ocean whale-spotting.”

  “Oh that I’d like to see.”

  “You like whales?”

  “I’ve never seen any up close.”

  “I can arrange that too,” Jimmy said. “I can have a boat organized for you at a day’s notice.”

  “That’s kind, Jimmy. Thank you.”

  “No problem. That’s what I’m here for. If there’s anything you need, just ask.”

  They were coming into a little town—Kapa’a, Jimmy informed her—where there were some regrettable signs of mainland influence. Beside the small stores of well-weathered clapboard stood the ubiquitous hamburger franchise, its gaud somewhat suppressed by island ordinance or corporate shame, but still ugly.

  “There’s a wonderful restaurant here in Kapa’a which is always booked up, but—”

  “Let me guess. You have a friend—”

  Jimmy laughed. “I do indeed. They always keep a prime table open each night, for special guests. Actually, I think your husband’s stepmother invested some money in the place.”

  “Loretta?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When was she last here?”

  “Oh . . . it must be ten years, maybe more.”

  “Did she come with Cadmus?”

  “No, no. On her own. She’s quite a lady.”

  “She is indeed.”

  He looked over at Rachel. Clearly he had more to say on the subject, but was afraid to say anything out of
place.

  “Go on . . .” Rachel said.

  “I was just thinking that . . . well, you’re different from the other ladies I’ve met I mean, the other members of the family.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you’re just less . . . how should I put it?”

  “Imperious.”

  He chuckled. “Yes. That’s good. Imperious. That’s perfect.”

  They had emerged from Kapa’a by now, and the road, which still hugged the coastline, became narrower and more serpentine. There was very little traffic. A few of the locals passed by in rusted trucks, there was a small group of bicyclists sweating on one of the inclines, and now and then they were overtaken by a slicker vehicle—tourists, Jimmy remarked, a little contemptuously. There were however several long stretches when they were the only travelers on the road.

  Nor was there much evidence of a human presence beyond the highway. Occasionally there’d be a house visible between the trees, sometimes a church (most so small they could only have served a tiny congregation), and on the beaches a handful of fishermen.

  “Is it always this quiet?” Rachel asked.

  “No, it’s off-season right now,” Jimmy said. “And we’re only slowly recovering from the last hurricane. It closed a lot of the hotels and some of them still haven’t reopened.”

  “But they will?”

  “Of course. You can’t hold back the rule of Mammon for ever.”

  “The rule of what?”

  “Mammon. The demon of acquisitiveness? I mean commerce. People exploiting the island for profit.”

  She looked back at the mountain, which in the ten minutes since she’d last glanced toward the interior had transformed yet again. “It seems such a pity,” she said, picturing the Hawaiian-shirted tourists she’d seen in Honolulu traipsing through this Eden, leaving trails of Coke cans and half-eaten hamburgers.