Mr. Eternity (31 page)

“What’s magical about the ancient mariner are his lies,” I said.

And for a moment, I thought that I almost understood something. I could almost say what it was. But then Lena arrived and interrupted my train of thought, and that was important too, another kind of lesson. Real life was all about interruptions.

“This is my brother,” she said, jerking her thumb at the tall, handsome man bouncing on his heels behind her. “This is Ben.”

Ben grinned. I’d imagined a furtive creeping person with wild eyes. Instead he was impressive and substantial. Immediately I had the sense that he was a major character.

“Don’t miss the haunted pub crawl!” he said. “Meet me at the south end of Duval at ten tomorrow night! Only way to meet the ghosts of old Key West! Brochures available on every corner!”

Lena hung her head and rubbed her eyes. Ben laughed. He said, “I feel like a million Confederate bucks. How do ya’ll feel?”

“So, Ben,” said Azar. “What do you do?”

“As I was saying, tour guide. We’re all tour guides. Destitution or tour guide are the only options for long-term Key West residents.”

He had all the important characteristics. Forceful gestures, a winning smile, a tragic flaw.

“Sorry about this,” said Lena. “We should’ve stayed home. I don’t know what I was thinking bringing him to a bar. It’s been a long day.”

“Us too,” said Azar.

“Not like my day.”

“It’s rehab in the morning,” Ben explained.

Azar nodded briskly, as if rehab were a subject on which he was a great expert. I worried that he was going to mention my own drug problem, but instead he asked, “What are you going for?”

“No reason.”

“Those painkiller patches,” said Lena. “Alcohol. Things you can smoke. Who the hell knows? Craziness.”

“Et fucking cetera,” said Ben.

I tried to explain what the ancient mariner had said about pirates. That they lived on borrowed time. That eventually, one morning, there was an accounting.

“On what morning is there not an accounting?” said Ben.

Lena started to cry, but she stopped as quickly as she’d started. Azar
was looking at me and I knew he was thinking that for me too there would be an accounting one day.

“So let’s all just have a drink and try to forget about this,” Ben said. “Like pirates.”

Azar shook his head. “Not on our watch, my man.”

And then I thought again about the ancient mariner. More particularly I thought how incredible it was that we weren’t talking about him. We weren’t talking about Quaco either. We weren’t talking about the buried treasure, whatever it was.

Now Ben was delivering a speech about LeBron James. Azar was laughing. The man with the cigarette and the oxygen tank was laughing too.

Lena said, “Shit. I shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to say hi.”

“I’m glad you came,” I said.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Once I overdosed on headache medication that I’d stolen from my aunt. It was two days before Christmas and my little cousin found me stumbling around the kitchen. Everyone else was out shopping or something. My cousin was only nine.”

“That’s not so much embarrassing as really horrible.”

“Well,” I said, looking at Ben, “I’m sure this is really more horrible for you than it is embarrassing.”

“It’s just hard to think it’s me and my own brother in this situation. It’s a thing you hear about or see on TV. It’s very surprising to have to live it. He was a nice kid. Everyone liked him.”

“Everyone likes him now.”

“There’s nothing to like. He’s no one. Talk about cynicism. He’s a nihilist drug addict.”

But everybody did like him. I liked him. Now he was talking about facial hair. He said, “A beard occurs incidentally, over time, like the Grand Canyon. A mustache is a contrived object, like Michelangelo’s David.” It sounded like something Azar or I might have said, but it sounded better when Ben said it.

Lena was going to take him to a rehab in Boca Raton. She was planning to leave at three in the morning so she could be there when the office opened. There was no one else to take him and she was worried he wouldn’t agree to go. I said that he was being very agreeable so far, but I said it just to say it. I knew very well that it wouldn’t last. I knew how these things worked. I myself felt very sharp, but just yesterday I’d taken so many green pills that I couldn’t remember going to sleep.

“I’m just wandering around with him,” she said. “I can’t go to sleep because he’ll run off, so it’s just more of this for the next few hours.”

I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Would it cheer you up to know that Isaac Newton calculated that the world will end in 2060?”

“Yes.”

“He also thought Jesus had come down to earth to operate the levers of gravity.”

We are an army of dead men and one Pirahao girl named Maria, which is not a Pirahao name. We tell stories about a man named God, who lives in the sky. We tell stories about his son, Hiso, whose sorrow is that he must live in the sky with his father, who hates him just as he hates everything in the world. But Hiso loves the world as much as his father hates it, and he especially loves his mother, who is called Maria, just as I am. We tell these stories and the Pirahao listen carefully and they understand that they are stories about me. Why else would we be telling them? I am Maria, mother of Hiso.

This is how I become a god. It happens because I have no home in the world, because no language is my true language, because I am lost in the spaces between what can be said and thought.

“You deserve some congratulations,” says Daniel de Fo. “It is not an easy trick to become a god. Once I was the god of Amahamagupta, but it was only a very small island and my only power was to make coconuts grow. I think they’d have grown anyway. It is better to be the god of America.”

There can be no god of Anaquitos because there are no gods in Anaquitos, but Anaquitos is not here anymore. I am the god of El Dorado. The Pirahao accept this. Every Pirahao changes her name many times over the course of her life. It is no trouble to change the name of the city.

But they have never known a god before, and Daniel de Fo must explain how they should behave. He tells them to bring me gifts. Gold. Pearls. But they do not have gold or pearls. He tells them to pray to me, but they have no prayers. He tries to explain how a god differs from a person.

“A god is like a person disappearing around a bend in a river. A god is what doesn’t exist. A god is what isn’t here anymore.”

They accept that they must try to change the way they think. They accept that I am a creature of a different kind, from a different place, who must be treated in a different way. The danger of the Christians is obvious to them.

By now Miguel Oreja is very angry at me. He tells me that he knew I was a witch all along. He has seen me speaking with vultures. He has seen me eating iguana eggs. He has heard me speak the languages of dreams. I explain that there are no dreams, there are only the things we do when we’re asleep, but he takes this to mean that I’m abroad in the night casting spells. He has grown fat with xaxa meat and miserable with the indifference of the Pirahao, who say they embrace Christianity but give no sign of their faith. He says I have bewitched him. He says he will destroy the city after all. I tell him he should hurry or it will destroy itself.

Just as Daniel de Fo must teach the Pirahao to worship me, so he must teach me to behave like a god. There are customs and manners, just as there are for people.

“What are the characteristics of a god?” he says in Spanish. “They never apologize.”

“There are no apologies in Pirahao.”

“They love nice clothes,” he says. “They are forgetful. They never die.”

“You’re describing yourself.”

He laughs, haha, but then he says, “Gods don’t make jokes. Try to remember.”

I have cut the bottom of my dress off, so it only reaches my navel, and I wear a strip of cotton below, and this is the costume of the god of El Dorado. It drives the Christians mad. There is no beauty like the beauty of a god.

But they are mad already. They wander aimlessly through the city. They are the disease, but the disease is not the plague. The disease is the future. The disease is time. The disease is a way of thinking. It doesn’t kill anyone yet, but it kills things. It begins to kill the world.
The hills fall away in the rain and trees consume the mounds at the edges of the city. A person does not need to be a god to see what’s happening.

And in the end the Pirahao cannot learn to see what the Christians see. They try very hard but they have lived in this place where there is no way to mark time, and the only colors are the colors of things, and it is not proper to mourn longer than a change of the moon. I am the god of this place, but I am no more real to them than time is real. I am the thing that vanishes around the bend in the river.

So they live as they always have. They live for the day in which they live. Instead of saying goodnight, they say I’m going. They talk all the time. They talk to no one. They talk about things they’re doing and thinking. I will have some fish today. I will walk in the sun. Xohoi is bringing me a toucan. When they go to void themselves in the river, they shout with joy and enthusiasm. I am an anaconda. I am a jaguar. The plague has left the city many times larger than it should be. The city is full of people who aren’t here anymore. Everyone has lost the person she loves most. It isn’t proper to speak of this. Those who remain stand in the river and say I am an anaconda, I am a jaguar.

And then it is time for Daniel de Fo to leave. He must search for Anna Gloria. It is a search that will never end, because she is herself a god, she is what does not exist, and the language in which her true name can be spoken has not yet been spoken by anyone.

I make him a present of clay figurines, amulets, carved bone. These are not Pirahao objects. They are things taken in tribute long before and then forgotten. There is no gold for the alcalde of Santa Inés, poor man.

“I want to say goodbye but I know I’ll see you again,” he says.

“Say I’m going. Don’t say goodbye.”

“I’ll see you in Vinland. On Saint Brendan’s island. I’ll see you in Zanzibar.” He laughs, haha. “We’ll go to El Dorado together. You’ll have your vengeance and I’ll have my woman. We have all the time in the world, but let’s hope it doesn’t take that long.”

And he does leave. And then whores murder three of the Christians.
And then the Christians leave and the rest of them are murdered in the forest by the Omagua. But this is only what happens.

It is not easier to be a god than it is to be an Indian, a Pirahao, a slave, a whore, a Christian, but it’s easier to be a god than it is to be nothing. For now, and there is only now, for now I am a god and that is what happens. That is the truth.

Now Old Dan were telling me about El Dorado. It were a great city of course like all cities in the past. In fact Anakitos were only a suburb of this great place or so he recalled. They had cashew beer plus fast food plus movies televisions streamy media rollercoasters. It were there he saw Anna Gloria once but he didn’t realize it were her until much too late.

We was now at last digging for our treasure on a little slope of rising ground outside Saint Augustine. It were funny to me I had objected to digging up this treasure. How could I of thought I did not want treasure.

Old Dan also told me of old Spanish Florida and Saint Brendan before its name were changed to Saint Augustine. He told me that in Castiyo San Marcos they had got a tide-operated latrine. He told me he were a dentist then. Later he were not Spanish at all but British. It were hard to keep track.

We dug one hole and another but we did not find the treasure. We sweated and sweated. My beard itches I said does your beard itch. Of course said Old Dan for it is about a million degrees out here. I wondered if Christopher the kitten was itching. Maybe he was but he were also playing at killing a lizard.

I asked Old Dan how old he was really and what was his secret. Are you a vampire I asked remember it is not Peaches asking you. I am no vampire he said you would not mistake a man for a vampire they have long teeth plus white faces. What is your secret of eternal life then I said. I don’t know he said it is just that I have not died. You said probiotic I reminded him. It is not that he said. Have you age very slowly I said or were you young for many years then suddenly old. Interesting he said interesting
question. What is the answer I said. The answer he said well I don’t remember. I don’t believe you I said. It is true he said when you get old you won’t remember how it happened neither. I will not live to be old I said nobody does no more. You will he said you will shrink you will grow white hair all the trimmings of age you will be so much happier you won’t be a sad young man anymore. I am not sad no more anyway I said I think I am cured. Wow he said that’s good. Yes I said. But what about Anna Gloria I said. She also is very old he said though not as old as me she is fifty years younger I think. You like them young I said. Oh haha said Old Dan yes I like them young give me a young lady 700 years old.

Next we paused we were quiet for a time we were thinking. But where is she I said. I don’t know he said. How do you know she is called Anna Gloria I said. Good question he said.

Then he looked around he examined the trees he looked down at his feet. Here it is he said the treasure is right here. Oh sure I said oh sure haha. I no longer believed we would find it but who cares I were happy anyway I were king of the Independent States of Jam. It is here he said again. I dug a little bit laughing saying it is all just looking for a grain of sand on the beach isn’t it. No he said it is here stand back. He stooped down groaning saying my back my back and then he scrabbled around in the sand and pulled out a plastic box. Oh I said. Inside was some plastic bags and inside these bags was gold coins. Wow I said amazing incredible wow wow it is treasure. But Old Dan was not so impressed. He looked underneath the bags of coins he scrabbled around in the dirt some more. Interesting he said do you know something this isn’t it. What I said. This isn’t the treasure of Anakitos he said. Yes it is I said it is gold coins what could be a more iconic treasure. He were frowning he were very disappointed. I think I see what happened he said. Old Dan I said you are not getting it this is treasure this is gold coins we are rich. He did not hear me. I think I see what happened he said for this is the treasure which I robbed off that Turk and his friend which was bigshot movie producers.