Impossible Places (13 page)

“It was very beautiful,” he told her. “You sing to the rock?”

“No.” She giggled softly, and her laughter was like water in the desert. “Why sing to a rock? Look above you.”

Tilting back his head, he brought the beam of the electric torch up—and his breath momentarily failed him.

The underside of the arch was completely covered in the most exquisite primitive paintings he’d ever seen. Both the ancient Bushmen and their cousins the Khoikhoi had left such paintings all over Namibia and Botswana, planting pigment at sacred places throughout the Kalahari and Namib Deserts. Only weeks ago he’d spent several days photographing the most famous of them at Twyfelfontein.

But this was grander, much grander. Everything had been executed on an overpowering scale. Their outlines incised into the rock and then filled with color, hundreds of animals paraded across a canvas of a million tons of flying granite. Pacing the great herds on either side were the famously fluid stick figures of the ancient hunter-gathers who had lived side by side among them.

The animals and people and paintings dated from a time long ago when this part of southwest Africa was much wetter and lusher, when the people called the Strandlopers hunted oryx and springbok and impala on the beach, and rivers like the Secomib and Nadas still reached the sea. Ten thousand and more years ago, when the game and the grass had covered the land as far as the eye could see. Before the Namib took over this part of the continent and the South African army slaughtered what animals remained.

“No one’s ever photographed this before.” He stood awestruck by the skill and accomplishments of the ancient painters. “I know: I would have seen pictures.” Despite the chill, his fingers were moist against the hard body of the camera.

“No. You can be the first. Or—you can help me.”

He blinked and turned back to her, the light flashing in her onyx eyes and making her turn away sharply.

“Sorry.” He lowered the beam and then, on impulse, clicked it off.

“Thank you.” In the shade of the arch she was a shadow herself now. “I need a man.”

“You really
are
direct.”

The bubbling laughter echoed again. “Not like that, though I wouldn’t refuse you. I need a man to dance for me. It has to be a man. The women sing the praises. The men dance.”

“I don’t understand, but if you need a man to dance for you, why not one of your own people?”

She leaned toward him. “Because they are all afraid.” The cold of the Namib night jumped suddenly closer, like a dancing white lady spider on the hunt.

“What are they afraid of?”

“They have been told that the old ways are wrong and that they must all become modern. I am modern; I have a good education and a modern job, but I also had a grandfather. He brought me to this place when I was a little girl, and showed me the dances, and because of him I was never afraid. My grandmother taught me the songs.

“When I was old enough I started coming here as soon as I could get away. First from Gibeon, where I was born, then from Keetmanshoop where I went to school, and now from Windhoek, where I work. Sometimes a boy or a man would come with me, but they wanted to dance a different dance. Sometimes I danced with them, sometimes not.” Eagerness infused her voice.

“You come from a far-off land. You have no fears of the old ways, no prejudices. You heard the singing and came of your own free will. I think you are special, Howard. Special to this place and special to me. If I sing, will you dance?”

He shook his head. This was too bizarre. But if he could get her to pose for him in the morning, she would make a magnificent image, framed in the impossible arch with the great valley stretching out before her.

“I’m not much of a dancer, Ms. . . . ?”

She didn’t stand so much as flow to her feet. “I am Anna Witbooi. My grandfather was the greatest of the Khoikhoi elders, a direct descendant of Heitsi Eibib, who was the first of our people. I will sing the true praise songs and you will dance. I can show you the steps, but I cannot dance them myself. The women sing; the men dance.

“First you must take off your clothes.”

It seemed crass to be self-conscious in so pure a setting. He folded his clothes and laid them in a neat pile—all but his briefs, which she told him he could retain. It was cold, and he hoped he wouldn’t start shivering. The damp chill didn’t seem to bother her at all.

“Like this.” Standing so close he could feel the warmth of her, she started to dance.

The movements were simple and not impossibly precise. More of a rhythmic stamping and turning than anything else. All he had to do was keep time to the chanting.

“All right,” he finally told her. “I’ll give it a try. Just don’t expect too much. But I want something in return. Tomorrow, when there’s light, I want to take some pictures of you.”

“Yes.” She was teasing him. “Tomorrow you can take pictures of me.”

“Just one question. Why do you do this, come out here year after year, to sing to a bunch of old paintings?”

“Because the praise songs need to be sung. Because of tales my grandfather told to me. Because I know in my heart that there can be nothing to fear from a place as breathtaking as this.”

Having said that, she began to sing.

At first he felt silly, prancing about in the altogether, but the feeling passed quickly. There was no one here to laugh at him or point accusingly. The steps felt natural, and he entered into the unbounded spirit of the moment with increasing enthusiasm. Dancing pushed back the damp night and warmed his body. He began throwing his arms up and out, careful not to scrape his fingertips against the unforgiving ceiling.

He hoped he was doing well, but he couldn’t tell. Anna had her eyes half closed and her own arms outstretched as he’d first seen her. Her voice echoed and quivered with words so ancient they had never been written down. They bounced off the smooth rock as he twisted and twirled, his feet rising and falling, the bare soles only occasionally smarting from the isolated pebble that marred the otherwise perfectly smooth floor of the majestic gash in the mountain.

A gleam caught his eye that did not come from his torch. Just a little to the left of his head, a family of giraffe etched in eternal stone and tinted white and red was glowing with a ghostly light all its own.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered urgently, somehow working the admonition into the singsong of the chant.

He missed a step but managed to recover. The glow within the rock was the palest of efflorescences. Head tilted back, he strained on tiptoes until his face was only inches from the ancient painting. He couldn’t tell if the light was emanating from the primordial pigment or the granite beneath.

“Faster!” she hissed at him, snapping him out of his awed stupor.

His knees lifted with her voice. Muscles long disused strained to comply. He found himself whirling with an abandon that verged on madness, the self-control of a lifetime fled, as if he no longer cared for anything save keeping step and time to her singing. The light in his eyes was internal, but that which had begun to illuminate the entire underside of the arch pulsed within the living rock itself as each painting, each patiently rendered etching, began to throb with the glow of a dozen candles.

Bushmen’s candles.

It was a toss-up as to whether his legs or his balance would give out first. It turned out to be his legs. Calves aching, thighs trembling, he settled slowly down onto the smooth rock like a tin top winding down. The pure air refreshed his lungs as he drew in long, deep breaths. He was utterly, completely exhausted.

“Sorry . . . ,” he managed to wheeze. “I’m—sorry, Anna. I can’t go any longer.”

“But you did fine, Howard. You did very fine.” As she knelt beside him, her warmth spread over his ribs like a blanket, burning where she placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed with the strength of old iron. “Look.”

He raised his eyes. As far as he could see, the Namib night was alive with massed game. Like runaway construction cranes, giraffe clans loped along above great herds of gemsbok and blue wildebeest. Rare black-faced impala mixed freely with zebra while families of wart-hogs scurried about underfoot. Four-legged phantasms, a clutch of albino springbok cropped contentedly at the thick grass. Somewhere a lion coughed into the night and a leopard cried lonely.

Thousands of them there were, surging and bawing and mewling and eating, the endless veld on which they trod a carpet of muted green in the moonlight. Close by but hidden a river flowed, its own special music sweet behind the stark curtain of night. Eden it was not, but it was close.

“What . . . ?” he started to say, but she put a firm finger to his lips, hushing him as she tucked her body against his.

“The men dance; the women sing,” she whispered. “This is the picture my grandparents wanted me to paint. Look at it, drink it, keep it always with you. Me too, if you want. You’re a distinct man, Howard Cooperman, and me—I’m tired of being an accountant.”

“What’s that?” He pointed excitedly. Graceful as ballerinas, the small herd paraded into view from amongst the wildebeest, elegant heads bobbing in time to their rumps. The front half of each body was striped, the back portion an unbroken shade of roan.

“Quagga,” she told him. “They say that the last ones became extinct in the nineteenth century, but my great-grandparents saw them in this country as late as the 1920s. Another secret of the Khoikhoi.”

Howard gaped. A quagga stallion turned to consider him and snort challengingly before moving on. It showed no anxiety at their presence. No fear of ever having been hunted. The stallion was a sublime and noble memory of recent Earth, of not-so-very-long-ago Africa. Howard forgot about his camera, useless in this light anyway, and used his eyes.

Eventually he returned his attention to his companion. It was the dancing, he knew. The dancing and the music. They had placed him in some sort of trance; a trance he wished would never end but that he knew soon must.

“Will they still be here when the sun comes up? Will you?”

Her face, redolent of both Asia and Africa, turned up to him, and she offered him that utterly natural, thoroughly guileless smile. “If you want me to be, big darling.”

Somewhere far away, in a place of mystery and wonder, he heard a voice saying, “Of course I do,” and realized it was his own. He commended that voice for its honesty, just as he commended his lips to hers.

Matthew Ovatango looked all the next day and well on into the evening before getting on the radio and calling for help. Planes flew out from Sesfontein and scanned from the air, but it was a couple of days before two Land Rovers full of rangers could arrive from Otjiwarongo and begin to search on foot.

They found a well-equipped Toyota Land Cruiser registered to an Anna Witbooi of Windhoek. Its tank was a quarter full, and there were three jerry cans of petrol in the back end. Protected from the omnipresent dust and grit by a plastic laundry bag, a severe black business suit with fluted white blouse hung like a shed exoskeleton from a hook above the passenger seat. From the empty vehicle they tracked petite footprints to the base of the inselberg, and from there climbed up and discovered the great arch. But there was nothing to indicate that Anna Witbooi or Howard Cooperman had ever climbed that far.

Eventually the search was called off, as were many in that part of Kaokoland and the Skeleton Coast, and the friends and relatives of the respective missing parties were officially notified. But the place was not forgotten, for awed anthropologists came to study the magnificent etchings that decorated the underside of the impossible granite bridge. They took measurements and made drawings and carefully photographed the deft incisions that extended from one end of the arch to the other, wishing only that more than a few lingering flecks of paint had adhered to the stone.

Sprinkled among the hundreds of animal etchings were the fragile, yet easily recognizable silhouettes of people, the ancient hunter-gatherers who had always followed the now vanished herds and whose most accomplished artists had decorated a thousand similar localities throughout southern Africa, though perhaps none so expertly as this. The images carried baskets and babies, spears and throwing sticks.

The youngest member of the largest party of visiting specialists pointed out that the berry-gathering basket being held by one male figure looked suspiciously like a Nikon. She and her colleagues had a good chuckle over it around the campfire that night, and their laughter lingered in the pure and empty air like a fragment of song.

THE BOY WHO WAS A SEA

I adore the ocean. I love the way it feels against my
skin, the way it envelops me in another medium when
I’m diving, the loving yet ferocious force with which it
tumbles me end over end when I wipe out while boogie
boarding or bodysurfing. When asked, I’m prone to say I
have saltwater in my blood.

And to think that would-be writers worry about
where to get ideas . . .

“I think I’ve found the trouble. Your boy has saltwater in his veins.”

George Warren turned uncertainly to his wife. Eleanor Warren put a protective arm around their son Daniel, who continued to play contentedly with his transformer robot toy while blissfully ignoring the adult conversation.

“He’s always liked the ocean, but I don’t see how that explains what’s wrong with him.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t mean that he’s attracted to the sea. I mean that he really has saltwater in his veins. And not just plain, ordinary saltwater. Seawater. See?” Taking a thumb-sized vial from a pocket of his white lab coat, he passed it to George Warren, who held the small glass tube close to his face and up to the light.

After a moment’s contemplation he passed it to his wife. “There are things moving around in it.”

Kindly Dr. Lowenstein nodded sagely. “Very unusual things. Exceptional things. One might even go so far as to say extraordinary things. Things without precedent. Tell me; when was the last time Daniel suffered a severe cut or laceration?”

Mr. and Mrs. Warren looked at one another. “Daniel’s never had a bad cut, Doctor,” his mother replied uneasily. “Is there something wrong with his blood?”

“Wrong? Dear me, no, Mrs. Warren. There can’t be anything wrong with your son’s blood because he hasn’t any. Not in the conventionally accepted sense, anyway. His circulatory system is full of seawater. Ordinary, standard-issue, Pacific-normal seawater. Furthermore, it is inhabited.”

George Warren was a hard worker and a devoted husband and father, but he was not an especially imaginative man. He was having some trouble following the doctor’s explanation.

“You mean Daniel’s veins and arteries are full of ocean water instead of blood?”

Lowenstein nodded again, solemnly this time.

“Then how can he live?” an understandably concerned Mrs. Warren inquired.

“Deuced if I know.” The doctor rubbed the little patch of white whisker that clung like a paralyzed moth to his lower lip. In his spare time, infrequent as it was, Dr. Stephen Mark Lowenstein liked to play the trumpet. This in no way inhibited his work or made him less kindly. He was quite a very good pediatrician. “Along with other minerals, there’s a lot of iron in seawater. In the case of your son there seems to be enough to supply adequate oxygen to his system with the aid of some as-yet-undetermined hemoglobin supplement. It’s all really quite fascinating. For consultation, I don’t know whether to call in a biochemist or a marine biologist.”

“But will he be all right?” Mrs. Warren asked earnestly.

Dr. Lowenstein’s shoulders rose and fell. “So far he acts like any ordinary, healthy boy of six. I don’t see why he shouldn’t continue to mature normally.”

“But the chills,” George Warren wondered, alluding to the reason for the office visit in the first place.

“It’s not unusual for a child to have chills. Not in Chicago in January. What is unusual is the way your son’s, uh, blood, seems to be responding to the change in climate. There are what appear to be tiny ice floes forming in his bloodstream. Seastream.”

Mr. and Mrs. Warren exchanged another glance.

“As you might expect, they’re most prevalent at what we might call his polar extremities. I suspect that’s why his feet are always cold and he has these headaches when it snows. There are also definite signs of a small glacier forming in the upper region of the superior vena cava. Many of these ice floes are the result of the berg calving which is taking place in the chest cavity.” At the alarmed look on Mrs. Warren’s face he added, “I don’t foresee any danger at this time. They appear to melt before they enter the heart. But it’s certainly a matter of concern.”

“What can we do?” a worried George Warren asked.

Lowenstein scratched his lower lip. “Your blood, Eleanor, is normal Type A, and you, George, are AB. Daniel appears to be type TS.”

“ ‘TS’?” George Warren echoed.

“Tropical Sea. I would suggest that you consider a move to a warmer climate. His specialized internal biota seem more closely related to the kinds of organisms one would be likely to encounter in the vicinity of the equator. There is evidence of coral-like building from the aortic arch on downward, as well as throughout the jugular. As soon as this, um, reef building reaches maturity, growth appears to cease, thus posing no danger to the boy’s general circulation. It’s calcification of the arteries to be sure, but not the sort that results from an excess of bad cholesterol. The rest of his remarkable internal biota seems not only benign, but quite healthy.”

“What sort of ‘internal biota,’ Doctor?” Mrs. Warren was still concerned, but less anxious.

“Most astonishing. I’ve observed evidence of schooling by more than twenty separate varieties. There is also a healthy population of sedentary forms. Everything seems to be thriving. Your son is a most beneficent host.”

“ ‘A warmer climate.’ ” George Warren looked thoughtful.

“Indeed,” Lowenstein murmured. “Somewhere on the ocean.”

“I’m a manager for Kmart. It may not be easy to get a transfer to a place like that.”

“I’ll write you a prescription.” Dr. Lowenstein smiled encouragingly.

“Remember when he was two?” Mrs. Warren gazed fondly down at her son, watching him reassemble the transformer. “When we went to Florida and he swallowed all that water and didn’t even gag?”

“That wouldn’t cause something like this.” Her husband hesitated and turned back to the doctor. “Would it?”

“Nothing should cause something like this,” Lowenstein replied assuredly. “But so long as the boy is healthy, why worry? Marvel, yes; worry, no.”

The Kmarts in Florida were all at full strength, personnel-wise, and had no need for the services of George Warren. But the family persisted, and kindly Dr. Lowenstein (
kindly
being an anomaly in these days of munificent malpractice suits and individual medical corporations) was there to help at every turn.

So it was that the family came to settle in Kahului, Maui, the largest town on the second-largest island in the placid and agreeable Hawaiian chain. No longer did Daniel suffer from annual shivering. They knew they’d made the right decision the first time he splashed excitedly into the shallows at Makena. His condition had been thoroughly explained to him, and he had come, as boys are wont to do, to simply accept it.

“I’m in the sea and the sea’s in me—yippie!” he said as he threw handfuls of warm water into the air. Sitting on the beach, a smiling George Warren took his wife’s hand in his own and squeezed reassuringly.

Just as Dr. Lowenstein had predicted, Daniel grew into a strong, healthy young man, handsome and with an air of the faraway about him that proved very attractive to the ladies. Students at the college did term papers on the singular liquid that ebbed and flowed through his body, competing to see who could be first to identify the next new microspecies. One transfer student even qualified for her thesis by providing evidence of seasonal migration within his veins, showing that at least two Danielian species migrated from his arms to his legs every spring, returning to his arms in the winter.

Displaying an abiding interest in oceanography that understandably exceeded that of all but the most avid graduate students, Daniel did his best to assist the professors at the college, willingly volunteering samples of his life-fluid whenever it was requested for study. A serum derived from his veins helped to save the life of an especially beloved orca at Sea World in San Diego, and another dose did wonders for a sick dolphin at Honolulu’s seaquarium.

Doctors decided that his heart forced water across the microscopic reefs in his system in much the same way that daily tides refreshed atolls and reefs in the Pacific and Caribbean. At the college and hospital they came to speak of the tides of Daniel, and tried to determine if his heartbeat was affected by the phases of the moon. When one day he was admitted suffering from dizziness and weak spells it was decided that his system needed the sort of replenishment supplied to normal seas by land-based rivers. Upon further analysis, a weekly dose of specified minerals matching precisely those found in the benthos were prescribed, and sure enough the spells soon went away.

It wasn’t that he had no aptitude for academics. It was just that he couldn’t bear to be long away from the water. So despite his more-than-adequate grades, additional college was dropped in favor of vocational studies, and in due course he received his ship captain’s license and divemaster’s certificate.

Desirous of seeing other seas, he initially spent some time in the merchant marine, always acquitting himself honorably and amazing seasoned sailors with his ability to pick a course through challenging waters without the aid of GPS or chart. After some years exploring the world’s oceans he returned to live permanently on Maui, preferring to work as a divemaster with an established concern instead of opening his own business.

“I’d rather not have the responsibility,” he told his now-retired parents when they questioned this decision, “and have more time free to dive on my own.”

They understood, of course. Urged on by his mother, he gave serious consideration to marriage, but there was some concern as to the physical status of prospective children, and despite his modest fame he had a difficult time with serious dating. No spray or mint could mask his breath, which smelled now of kelp, now of sargassum, and at its worst, of a weathered planktonic bloom. So he had ample female company, especially out on the water where such things were not as noticeable, but few amours.

There came a day, fine and sunny and not at all in any way ominous, when he was working in the dive office out on the pier and Fredo came running breathlessly from town to lean exhausted against the open portal.

“Have you heard?”

Everyone, including Daniel, looked up. “Heard what?” owner John Renssalear inquired on behalf of them all.

A junior divemaster, Fredo hugged the entrance as if reluctant to let loose of it. “Come and see for yourselves!”

Some curious, some concerned, everyone in the office shuffled out of the building onto the pier. Fredo pointed them not toward the bustle and haste of nearby Lahaina but south toward Kahoolawe. In between Maui and that uninhabited source of constant contention lay the tiny volcanic crescent of Molokini, famous as a dive site and marine sanctuary. There was next to no vegetation on the rocky outcropping, which made the smoke rising from its northeast flank very puzzling.

“It’s a tanker!” Fredo informed them breathlessly. “The
Comco Sulawesi
. She was bound for the refinery at Honolulu with sixty thousand barrels of Indonesian crude aboard when she went aground!” He swallowed, his throat dry. “I was monitoring the Coast Guard channels. She’s afire, and the crew’s preparing to abandon ship.”

“They can’t do that!” Martine Renosa exclaimed.

“What about the tug at Kahului?” Renssalear’s voice was calm, but tension caused his weathered face to crinkle like brown tinfoil.

Fredo shook his head sharply. “There’re no ships due in the harbor today, so the crew went over to Hilo for a break. They’re sending three oceangoing tugs from Honolulu.”

“They’ll never get here in time,” someone muttered angrily. “What the hell’s a tanker doing in the channel anyway? Especially at this time of year.”

“Nobody’s sure,” Fredo explained. “They think the captain wanted to see the islands close up.” From the back of the crowd someone groaned.

“Sixty thousand barrels.” John Renssalear had been a commercial diver on wells in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, working deep water under potentially lethal conditions. It took a lot to shake him.

“If she breaks up, that much crude could kill all the reefs on this side of the island, all the way from La Perouse Bay up to Kapalua. Not to mention everything around Kahoolawe, Lanai, and maybe even Molokai.”

“What about Molokini?” someone asked abruptly.

“Molokini?” Renssalear barely had the energy to shrug. “Molokini’s as good as dead. That oil will smother the coral and turn the diving sanctuary into an underwater desert.”

“Never mind Molokini,” Renosa growled darkly. “What about the whales?” No one said anything. Everyone knew it was the height of the calving season and that the channel was full of migrating humpbacks and their newborn young.

“Say, John.” Renssalear turned to Daniel Warren, who was staring evenly at the rising plume of black smoke. “Can you run me out there?”

The owner of the dive operation cocked his head slightly to one side as he regarded his most valued employee. “What did you have in mind, Dan?”

“Just run me out there. Maybe—maybe I can do something.”

Wide-eyed, Fredo looked from one man to the other. “Are you two crazy? That ship’s on fire. She could blow at any minute!”

“Or not,” Dan Warren whispered. “She might just burn until her tanks burn through.”

Renssalear didn’t hesitate. “Let me get my gear.”

The powerful little boat crashed through the swells, heading south toward the burgeoning pillar of doom. They sped around fleeing yachties, dodged the Coast Guard cutter that had positioned itself to keep back curious tourists, shot past the two big lifeboats that looked like fat waterborne grubs and that were carrying the multinational crew of the tanker to safety.

The emergency ladder the tanker crew had left behind flapped and banged against the side of the stricken ship. Maneuvering with the skill and experience born of many years at sea, Renssalear put the dive boat close alongside. Still, it took three tries before Dan Warren was able to make the short but dangerous leap to the dangling ladder.