On My Way to Paradise (13 page)

I shook my head and realized I thought I’d known
something about Tamara, that she’d seemed all-important to me. I’d
been willing to give my life for her, but suddenly I was confronted
by the knowledge that she was still a stranger.

"Did she live?" the General asked. "Where did you see
her last?"

And then I remembered I’d brought her with me. I was
afraid I’d been asleep for days, that Tamara had suffocated. "I put
her in a trunk. She’s in a coma. It’s a brown trunk made of teak,
with elephants carved on it. I left it at the station!"

Someone who’d been standing behind me left the room,
and Whorehouse Rat followed. As the door opened, I smelled oily
smoke. A moment later a medic and the Rat dragged in the teak chest
and flipped it open. Tamara was breathing easily, staring at the
ceiling, zombie-eyed.

The General bent over the chest and examined her,
caressed her arm with one finger. "Thank God," he said. He turned
to the medic and said, "Keep this socialist whore alive!"

The Whorehouse Rat pulled out a cigar and lit it,
inhaling deeply. He looked as if he’d just conquered a country. He
said, "You know, I think that a man like me, a man who captured a
whole space station with only a handful of men, pitting a mere
twenty soldiers against hundreds, could be very valuable to you.
No? A man with my talents would make a fine captain!"

The general glared at him, and spoke menacingly.
"Idiot! How dare you? You want a promotion for murdering unarmed
civilians?"

The Rat’s eyes smoldered. He exhaled his cigar smoke
evenly. "I am not an idiot. I saved a valuable man from slaughter
at the hands of the socialists, and I brought you an important
prisoner. I took over Sol Station with very little bloodshed, and
when you think upon it, I’m sure you will realize the rashness of
your decision. Think about it. We have two years on ship before we
reach Baker—plenty of time for you to show me your gratitude. We
will be going to Baker with you—my men, Señor Osic, and the
socialist whore—am I not right? It would not be wise to leave even
one of us behind, knowing what we know."

The General frowned, appearing to weigh the
consequences. He reached down to Tamara and ran his finger along
her jaw line, caressing her. "For this, I thank you, Mavro. We can
manage to bring you, I think," he said heavily. "Baker citizenship,
and no extradition."

I started to nod off. My eyes were closing, and I no
longer wanted to keep them open. I made a snoring sound and
startled myself awake.

The General turned to me and said, "Thank you, don
Angelo. You have done well today. Very well. You may go to sleep,
now. You’re safe. You are going to Baker, with your friends."

And though I was troubled because I suddenly
remembered that one of Jafari’s men was still on board and I didn’t
know his identity, I was too tired to speak, so I closed my eyes
and slept.

I was standing in the jungle at dusk, in a deep
crater filled with jagged black rocks. Around the rim of the
crater, thousands of shadowy spider monkeys capered and shrieked,
throwing stones and debris down from the cliff top.

I was surrounded by large boulders, and across each
sprawled a dying person covered with a white sheet. Flaco lay in
front of me with his throat slashed, one hand dangling over the lip
of his boulder, and I needed to sew the pieces of his esophagus
together quickly if I was to save him.

Tamara lay face down, slumped over a sharp rock to
his right, her fever burning high, brain cells dying at a
tremendous rate as she waited for an injection of antimosin. Behind
me, Arish also lay on a low flat stone with a slashed throat. He
tugged the back of my shirt to beg for help, but I was too busy
caring for Flaco.

I bent close in the failing light and stitched at
Flaco’s throat. The rip in his esophagus lay between the triangular
cricoids’ cartilage just above the Adam’s apple and the first ring
of tracheal cartilage beneath—a region hard to treat quickly, since
there could be major damage to his vocal cords. But I had no time
to worry about niceties like re-stitching vocal cords. I had never
performed anything but minor home-surgeries, yet I stitched the
esophagus together rapidly, hoping I was doing it right. The
monkeys on the crater’s rim shrieked and howled, and I could not
think straight, could not decide if I was stitching the right
pieces together. The lower section of esophagus suddenly seemed to
appear very much like a section of small intestine. I sewed anyway,
shook my head at the damage to Flaco’s severed spinal column. He
would require much care, more than I can afford to give at the
moment. His blood seeped down and stained the white sheet so gently
lying over him.

I looked for a clean stone on which to set my bloody
sutures, and a small girl, perhaps ten years old, appeared to my
left. I handed them to her.

She said, "Thank you, Grandfather," and smiled at me.
I looked at her face—a thin face with prominent features, skin as
pale as a European’s and smooth as a china doll’s. She seemed
familiar and I was glad to see her, but I could not put a name to
her.

I rushed over to Tamara’s slumped figure lying on a
rock, filled a syringe with antimosin, gently lifted her head, and
injected the antimosin into her neck. Arish tugged at my shirt.

"How about some help over here? I’m dying! How about
some help over here?" he yelled.

I glanced back at him, surprised at how well he spoke
with his throat cut. Beads of sweat dotted his face, and his pupils
were constricted from fear. He tugged at my shirt again, and I
slapped his hand away.

"I’m busy!" I said.

"Too busy to help me, you old fucker? Too busy to
help me?" His feet started kicking, and he thrashed around. Arish’s
legs kicked, making a big "whuff, whuff" sound as they scraped the
sheets and billowed them out, and I knew he was dying.

But suddenly the monkeys all let out a roar. Flaco
arched his back and cried out; his stitches tore, and the blood
poured out. Tamara’s eyes started to glaze, and I knew she needed
another injection. Arish raised his hands and held them out, as if
pleading for mercy from the air.

Startled, I awoke on a cot in a coffin-sized tube
with a single, dim overhead light. The white plastic walls smelled
new, and piped-in salsa music trumpeted a gaiety that didn’t
reflect the way I felt. The vision of Arish with a wound in his
throat filled my mind, and I tried to push it away, concentrate on
something else. My broken ankle was braced to the cot, so I
couldn’t see my leg, but an ache like an old wasp sting told me the
doctors had inserted needles so they could glue my bones together,
a time-consuming process usually reserved for athletes.

I knew I should remain immobile for at least three
hours so the glue could set. I looked towards my feet for a clock.
There was none. I was in a convalescence tube like those in Chinese
hospitals, but usually the tube has some amenities—a clock, a
drinking straw, a dream monitor. This one appeared empty, except
for the blaring radio.

I should find Tamara, I thought. I should check
her hormone fusion pump, take care of her hand.

It had been three days—long enough for a thin layer
of undifferentiated cells to grow over her wound. Now was the time
to paint a new wash over the cells, administer the hormones that
would order a hand to regenerate. Otherwise, the undifferentiated
cells would just keep growing like a cancer.

I thought, I should also see if she has any major
brain damage, see if the log phases and antimosin did the trick.
The general I’d spoken with had wanted her alive. I supposed
someone was caring for her. But still I thought I should check.

I remembered the blood pumping from Arish’s throat, a
red trickle over ebony skin. I tried to force the memory back, but
could not concentrate. I felt as if I had a cold lump in my brain.
I tried to pinpoint the cold spot, to visualize where it lay, and
it seemed to move aside. Morphine overdoses can make it difficult
for one to concentrate for several days, but this seemed more than
a simple drug reaction. The cold spot felt alive, conscious, like
an animal, a large black fly buzzing in my head, batting away
thoughts with its wings while stirring up unpleasant images.

The incidents from the past three days gave off a
pervasive sense of wrongness, and the more I considered it, the
more likely it appeared I was going—no, had gone—insane. This was
my reasoning: When I was young, Don José Mirada, a rather eccentric
friend to my father, counseled me to serve society. He believed
society always rewards best those who serve it best, and destroys
those who refuse to serve it. For example, the owner of the clinic
in our small town always invested much in his business. Because of
this, he had medical equipment other hospitals lacked, so people
came from far away to visit his facility. This made him very rich
and famous. He had many friends and a beautiful wife, and no one
envied him because they felt he deserved everything he got. Society
rewarded him for the service he performed. But the don also pointed
out that the man of the world, the man who behaves toward society
as a parasite behaves towards its host, is never secure. Dictators,
dishonest businessmen, or those who become parasites of the social
institutions will often be destroyed. If society does not squash
them outright, it will destroy their spirits and they will find no
lasting happiness.

To prove his point, don José would dress in his white
suit and get his gold-handled walking stick, then take me to the
market in our village to point out some of the more wretched people
on the street, all the time lecturing me about how society had
destroyed their lives. "Look at Osvaldo," he would say, indicating
a merchant. "See how miserable he is. Always in the market he tries
to sell his clothes for twice their value, so when fashions change
he must give the clothes away to unload his old merchandise.
Because of his greed, no one buys from him except when he is
desperate to sell, and he will die in poverty! Remember how society
hates the greedy, Angelo, and learn from this man’s misfortune." Or
again, pointing to a handsome couple, "Look at Juan, he cheated on
his old wife and married his lover. Now his new wife doesn’t trust
him to walk across the street alone! She clings to him like a
hangman’s rope. Unwittingly she has become the avatar of her
society’s conscience, and she punishes him mercilessly for his
infidelity."

Don José Mirada argued that there was great wisdom in
letting consensus morality guide one in times when moral codes
seemed a burden, and he said we should obey laws even when they
seemed irrelevant.

I eventually came to believe there was truth to his
argument, and I’ve often wondered if at some subconscious level I
chose a career medicine so I could best serve society and thus gain
its greatest rewards.

If this is true, my morality is an external artifice
produced by greed.

But I have always wanted to believe I serve society
from the heart and that the rewards society gives in return are
incidental. Indeed, philosophers say the greatest happiness comes
to those who learn to live without wealth, or fame. And if this is
true, then the
rewards
society offers those who serve it are
only grains of dust that blind men to the true happiness that comes
from the act of serving.

I have preferred to believe this, for it feels more
right to my heart.

But killing Arish was an act society did not
condone—not when I had disabled him and had him at my mercy.
Society jealously guards the right to retribution. In fact, because
I had violated society’s right to retribution by killing Arish, my
society would now try to punish me.

So, when I’d killed Arish, at the very least I acted
contrary to one of my most fundamental beliefs about how the world
operates: I had violated consensus morality. Though Arish was a
socialist, a murderer, a man dedicated to the belief that he could
only advance his own Nicita Idealist doctrines by destroying me and
my society, though he represented all this—yet I could not justify
killing him. The fact that I acted inconsistent with my beliefs
seemed a sure sign of insanity.

I reasoned further that killing Arish had been very
impulsive, and I have never been impulsive. Only once had I
seriously considered killing a man, and that had been long ago.
Even then it was not an impulsive act: When I was young, Gonzalvo
Quintanilla, an army general with big cocaine connections in
Australia, tried to overthrow Guatemala. For three days he led a
reign of terror from Panzós to Belize. But his men were only
interested in looting homes and raping women, and they felt no
loyalty, so his regime fell. I was at school in Mexico City at the
time, and when I learned my mother had been killed by Quintanilla’s
looters, I rushed home.

Though my mother had been murdered two days earlier,
I found my father sitting in a chair in the living room, staring at
the wall and weeping like a child. My sister Eva tried to comfort
him while her three children ran about the house playing. My father
would not reply when I spoke to him, but Eva took me aside and
showed me where Mother had died. Dried blood still smeared the
walls and floor tiles in the doorway between the kitchen and dining
room—even after much cleaning Eva had been unable to wash it
off—and as I crouched to inspect the stains I could smell the blood
and could see dried, flaking droplets on the wall behind the china
cabinet.

"How did this happen?" I asked.

"Five of Quintanilla’s soldiers came in the house to
loot," Eva said. "Neighbors heard shooting. When the soldiers left,
the neighbors came and found her dead."