Byzantium (9 page)

He led the rest away in a grumbling mob, back toward the pestilential city, and I stood in the yard with John, head hung in defeat, bruised where a bottle had struck me on the shoulder, and felt—it was a low moment—that I would not care if the fever took them all.

V

On Baptism

Does one baptism wash away another? I hope not, for I remember when Penelope and I were baptized together before the congregation by Reverend Hall, and if men can claim but one baptism, that is the one I will claim. Afterward, the both of us wet and clean in our white baptismal garments, we sat together in the sun and she smiled and touched my hair as I held her hand, running my fingers over her bare wrist.

But Timson was keen to baptize me himself, and not wanting to lose favor I walked with him to the gulf, where he took me into the waters, asked me to confess my faith in Jesus and His bond with the white man, and then dropped me under just as a wave approached, the sea foam rushing over his back and my pliant body. He pulled me up again and said, “Praise God!” and the men from his company, watching from the shore, let out a cheer.

It had been several weeks since I had first met him, and support for the expedition was mounting. Timson was dining in some of the city’s finest homes and lodged now on the third floor of the Tremont. We walked along the beach as our clothing dried, the sun shining down a clear curtain of light, and Timson told me that in a chest he kept plans for his new capital city. He said the streets would be modeled on those of old Jerusalem, and that already he had families from as far away as Boston sending him deposits for plots of land.

“We’ll use palm tree bark to pave the roads,” he said, “and leaves for fans.” He put some shredded bark in my hand, pressing it to reveal its springiness, then slapped my shoulder and left me in the Strand.

When I met Dr. Smith at the warehouse for dinner, I showed him the bark. He sniffed it, then set it on the table, considering it for some time. “I pray this will not prove another disappointment,” he said, his eyes sorrowful and heavy, his face softened with doubt. He had too much tact to go further. We rarely talked about the past, and never about the Cooling Safe.

“It won’t,” I promised.

That night we ate the biscuit dry, straight from the canister.

VI

A New Scheme Brings About Protest

I decided John and I would use the box. Together we would pass safely through the remaining months of fever, isolated and frozen, and show the city the efficacy of the Cooling Safe. But once my plan became known, I was troubled with complaints from the public. “For a day I would allow a white man and a negro to share common chambers,” Judge Carter said, standing with two aldermen on the porch, “but for perhaps the entire summer?”

In answer I promised to install a curtain, creating a whites’ side and a negroes’ side. “But do not fret, John,” I assured the boy once the deputation had left. “You and I both shall survive the fever’s cruel menace.”

He looked at me, silent, his arms ashy from cleaning the fireplace.

“And just think,” I added. “If my estimates are correct, with annual freezing we shall live two hundred years!”

VII

The Deal Is Struck

I did not see Timson for three weeks. He went about the city in a velvet-trimmed suit and had most of his backers lined up and his company of men filled. But we had yet to draft an agreement. I despaired. Had he found a replacement for the biscuit? I neglected the handbills and spent my days in the warehouse, waiting.

Fortunately, my uncertainty was not prolonged. At the month’s end Timson moved his lodgings from the Tremont to his steamer, the
Maria
—payment for its use was being footed by twelve Houston bankers—and sent a messenger to request that I join him. It was night, and I had dined already with Dr. Smith, so I took my coat, locked the warehouse, and followed the messenger, a skinny lad of thirteen, down to the ship. There Timson introduced me to Lyons and Wayhurst, two Louisiana planters who were to provide the expedition with guns. We went aboard and toured the deck, Timson guiding us with a lantern past the paddle wheel and the stack. The harbor was black all around us, here and there lights from boats and dock houses meeting us from across the emptiness like phantom eyes, and the only sound was the chug of the night steamboat returning from the mainland. In the captain’s quarters we sat while Timson led us in prayer, raising his right hand high as he called down Jehovah and beseeched Him to dwell in the cabin. Lyons and Wayhurst exchanged worried looks, but I motioned for them to have no fear, this was all in the normal course of things. Timson stamped his foot, his eyes drifted, and he spoke as if through his nose, hissing his words. “Praise ye! Praise ye! I bless this transaction!” Then he let his hand fall and banged it on the table. “We have an agreement,” he said to the two planters, his voice calm, the red retreating from his face, his eyes settling into their regular tracks.

The cabin was now very still, none of us knowing what to do next, and we waited in the quiet until Lyons or Wayhurst—I can’t remember which—said, “Excellent!” The silence broken, they arranged for the guns’ delivery, shook hands all around, then went into town seeking whores. I watched them through the porthole, their arms at each other’s backs as they walked up the dock toward the lights of the city. I exhaled, clearing my mind of envy (in my great loneliness I too have been tempted), and looked over at Timson. He had not noticed the planters’ departure; he was busy signing Honduran banknotes for the payment of his men. They were for a hundred reales each, and had been printed four to a sheet.

“Do you still desire the biscuit?” I asked, watching as Timson cut the notes with great care. I saw before me sailors starving at the antipodes, children in need of precious nutriment. Must they suffer due to the whim of a fickle public? “Please tell me the meat purveyors have not gotten to you with their slanders.”

The
Maria
rocked and creaked ever so slightly in the harbor waters. Timson looked up from the notes. “The Lord spoke to me of the biscuit,” he said, and I hung on his words—so much hung on them! “He said I should feed my men by your bread and none other.”

I rejoiced, shook Timson’s hand, and bowed several times, not caring if he thought me a madman. Ready to complete the business, we went over the final agreement. Dr. Smith and I would provide Timson’s militia with the remaining meat biscuit, supplying the entire expedition, and in return we asked only two things. I requested that Timson write a testimonial to the biscuit’s goodness, and Dr. Smith wanted a banana plantation. Timson offered no objection, we both signed the contract, and it was done.

VIII

The Altar of Discovery

With my new plan for the box I was exuberant, despite the mocking of the city men. I instructed John to roll up the carpets and prepare the house for our long absence, and hired a reliable man, Hiram Wheelock, to open the Cooling Safe after the first frost, paying him five dollars in gold and promising him five more once he greeted us at the heat’s end. I also retained James Johnson, the cartwright, to do the services in the case of Hiram’s passing, and contracted with Levy the merchant to supply the ether. Twice a week he would deliver a new jug and note for me any variations shown by the gauges. The city was silent, every corner hung with death, and as I went about making my arrangements, I ran into Dr. Smith, with whom I had not spoken since the day I had first shown him the box. He took me aside and asked in hushed tones if I truly meant to go through with the freezing. When I said yes, he shook his head. “I have remained silent too long. Every man mourns in his own way, but this must stop!” I ignored his remonstrance, and he suggested I at least try a pig first. “Hog flesh is sound for experiment,” he said, but I slipped from his grasp and told him I needed no counsel.

Yet I did fear, briefly, that during our entombment the fever’s toll would mount higher than in seasons past, would take the whole city and leave no one to wake us, or that perhaps another hurricane would cross the island and wash the city along with the box into the bay. Still, enterprise requires risks. The death of one inventor and one slave boy was a small offering to lay at the altar of discovery, should such a misfortune occur.

IX

A Ceremonious Departure

The day Timson sailed for Honduras, I went down to the docks like everyone else. He had filled the steamer’s stores to the fullest with meat biscuit, leaving room only for the guns and his robes of state, fashioned from the old curtains of the Star Theater. A brass band played, people cheered, and Timson’s men lined up on the steamer and waved their hats over their heads in farewell.

The crowd pressed close as girls handed flowers up to the men, and after some minutes, in answer to cries from his admirers, Timson came to the railing and addressed us. “With this endeavor,” he said, shouting so all could hear, “we shall not only preserve our Union, we shall perform God’s work on this earth, fulfilling His holy plans for slave and free!”

We applauded, and several in the crowd shot off their guns in celebration as the steamer broke away from the wharf. Timson moved to the stern and raised his hands, and between the blasts of the ship’s horn, over the churn of the engine, we could hear him blessing our city. Everyone stayed, watching until the steamer had cleared the harbor and rounded the tip of the island. Then we let out another cheer and some, mostly children, ran across the island’s humped middle to the gulf, to watch the steamer pass into the broad waters. Soon she was beyond the horizon and all that could be seen was the last puff of smoke belched from her stack, grayish black on the gulf’s far edge, and then this too disappeared. I returned to the warehouse. Dr. Smith was already there, standing beside the table and looking out the window, his hands clasped behind his back. “Today I treated a man for the fever,” he said. “First of the season.” I turned my eyes to the floor, grimy near the stove, and said nothing. That night I fried us some of the biscuit—even after Timson’s men had taken all they could, we were left with above a thousand pounds.

X

In Which Dr. Smith Plays the Hero

The morning I had set for our confinement, I woke to find John gone. I called his name throughout the house and in every corner of the yard and heard only the echo of my own voice. I wondered if he had been stolen—in the midst of the fever there had been a rash of slave thefts, the stolen negroes turning up in the market at New Orleans—and then if he had run away. I had no time to investigate and, hoping the latter was the case, wished him good journey and readied myself for the box. I slipped the ring of Penelope’s hair over my finger, kissed it, and stepped into the yard. Dressed in a wool garment of my own design, I performed a series of exercises, bending at the waist and stretching my arms, then crouching and holding my hands at my hips, in order to even the blood for optimal freezing. I had not seen a soul all morning, yet as I was opening the box’s iron door, Dr. Smith came riding up. I hailed him, but he did not answer. Instead he leapt from his horse, bolted toward me, and gave me two hard punches in the jaw. The second one felled me.

“You goddamn fool,” he said when I woke. “Do you mean to kill yourself?”

I scrabbled toward the safe, but he held me down, and only then, as I spent myself in struggle against him, did I begin to see my madness. The suffering—I so wished to end the suffering!

XI

Despair

I spent the next weeks walking the island and dining with Dr. Smith, who had developed the habit of reading aloud from pamphlets on banana cultivation while at table. During the mornings I drafted letters trumpeting the biscuit’s success and our plans for renewed production, which I would post to various government agencies and newspapers of record once I had word from Honduras. Each day, awaiting this word, I twisted in currents of emotion, from hope to dread and back again, my only solace wandering the dunes and feeling the gulf breeze whip over me. At times I thought of slave ships putting in at Trujillo, to supply Timson’s new plantations. My heart fell at the vision, but was swiftly buoyed by another: the biscuit proved before the world.

Then, a month after his leaving to the fanfare of the city, we got news of Timson’s campaign. His men returned in rags, arriving in twos and threes on the ships of charitable captains, and told their stories in the saloons and on the docks. The Honduran army had made quick work of them, and after only a few days of jungle fighting Timson had been captured and hanged in the plaza at Comayagua. I caught one man on the wharf. He had a bandage on his head and would not answer any question, any hello or how are you. I followed him as he walked down to the water and along the beach, poking at the jetsam left by the last tide. Finally I clutched his arm.

“The biscuit?” I asked. “The biscuit?”

He fixed me with his good eye, sunken and glassy. “One half dumped in the bay,” he said, “the other half left in the jungle.”

I fell to my knees. It was the final blow.

XII

Leave-taking

After I met Timson’s man, I drifted in a stupor for a week, passing from the city to the wastes and back again. The clouds came in low over the gulf, the rain fell gray and cold, and by the time the sun returned, I knew I could live here no longer, where every effort proved another folly. These streets, these shores offered no succor for the loss of my Penelope, only frustrations to inspire the laughter of my neighbors.

“I am sure,” Dr. Smith said, smiling and raising his glass, “that in Manhattan you will find an environment as nourishing to your creative faculties as the biscuit has been to your corporeal ones.” This was during our last dinner together, on the eve of my departure. Dr. Smith had taken the news of Timson hard, but charged me with no fault. Already he was full of plans for turning the warehouse into a medical college, where he would meet daily with his students to pick over fresh corpses.