The Unfinished World (31 page)

Do you have such dreams, Hannah, when you close your eyes, your children down for the night? Do you dream of the land, of that strange thing they say we Irish all share? Do you dream of something like home?

I remain, forever yours in blood, Ingeborg

Curiosity #145: Stuffed albino crocodile, origin unknown. Glass eyes. Some scales missing or damaged on underside and left rear leg
.

The museum was short on money for its new African hall, and so they sold some of Set's films to an eager young businessman who planned to set up his own picture business, specializing in what he called “animal adventure pictures.” Set had no idea until the eager young businessman called him, demanding more. I want a picture shot in Kenya, he said. Charging elephants, lions, crocodiles on the riverbank, all of that.

Tanganyika, thought Set. Paradise Lake. Where the great African explorers went looking for the source of the Nile.

He told the eager young businessman, yes. Yes.

Let's make this picture about the lions, said Inge, between bites of corned beef.

You can't go, said Set. You know that.

She frowned at him. You mean you don't want me to go.

Well—

Is Lana going? She held her breath. He had never broken it off with Lana, in part because he didn't see why he should. They were all having fun, weren't they?

Alone in her rented bedroom, Inge sometimes cried to think of all the fun they were having. She thought of leaving again, hitching a ride on a packet boat to someplace exotic. But the thought made her head ache and her heart lurch about in her chest.

After all those unanswered letters, Set knew better than to write to Cedric again, but he wished his brother could come along. He wished he could ask Cedric what to do about Inge. Set thought about calling Pru, but he didn't suppose he should bother her with his worries. Still, he
was
worried. Cedric had always included him in his adventures. And here he was keeping secrets from him. Set didn't know what to make of it. In the end, he called Constance instead, who seemed thoroughly annoyed. Leave Cedric be, she told him. Attend to your own life, your own future.

But what about his lost city? said Set.

Look, I'm not trying to be unkind, said Constance, but I'm telling you, don't make Cedric's mistakes. Go forward. There's no flying back to the far-gone past.

Set and Inge are dancing in Inge's rented bedroom, lurching into bed and table and making lopsided, monstrous shadows on the walls. They stomp out a rough waltz to the three-four time of the landlady's polka music playing below. Laughing, breathless, half-drunk, they careen around, Inge attempting to mimic Set's easy grace. She finally stumbles, sinks to the ground in gasping mirth. He sits on the bed and shakes his head. Your landlady will be up any moment, he says, and then you'll be in for it.

But you're such a good dancer, Inge says. I'd never have believed it.

And you, says Set, pouring two more glasses of whisky, you are the lousiest dancer I've ever taken the floor with.

Inge snorts. It's these huge feet, she says. They're like great bloody bricks! What can I do with them but fall all about the place? She begins unlacing her boots. Set, slightly more sober, kneels to help her. She grabs his wrist. Don't think, she tells him, that I'm undressing for you. She is solemn, holds his eyes; her hair is a bright halo over her round Madonna's face. Then a smile splits it in two, ruins the effect. She purrs with laughter and flings herself onto him.

You're part animal, he says, just after. You're a wild creature. He leaves through the window, climbing down to the porch from the second floor. She watches him go. He waves merrily from the street and jumps in his car, no doubt off to meet Lana for a late dinner. She can tell it costs him nothing to leave, and she wonders if she is the stupidest person alive for giving herself away like this. Is he really a ghost, she wonders, or just a cad with a convenient excuse? But she has also watched him sleep, and she has seen the
way his face goes blank and smooth, the way his eyes go so unfocused. It seems much too easy for him to slip out of life, Set. She worries that one day he'll forget to slip back in.

Since the bear, Set has always been nervous around large animals on his expeditions. Even the ponies worry him. Their teeth are so big and they give off such an obvious odor; he isn't used to anything that smells and makes no attempt to mask it. And everything smells here in the jungle. The heat creates aggression, even in the smells themselves. They attack, they twist round one and squeeze, insidious, like the vines and other creeping things.

Inge laughs when he tells her this. She has grown up around animals. Horses, dogs, sheep, pigs—their musty earthiness mingling with the smell of fat sizzling in the kitchen, with the heavy smell of the hanging damp in the walls, the sharp wet of the dung in the hay, the sweet heather on the heath and the dark smoke of wood on the fire.

Odor is geography, she says. And it's the same in the city—but not natural smells, not such animal smells. More people, more soot, more smoke, more smells that get into the lungs and burn the eyes and the throat.

We never lived that way, says Set.

Of course you didn't, she tells him. Your people are wealthy.

Set knows this is true. He feels it is unfair of Inge to be constantly pointing it out, when her people were wealthy once, too. Just because they squandered it didn't mean she could cast it off like a dirty old coat. It followed her around the world, the sweet, decayed smell of the genteel poor. Like the dried flowers Pru put in clothing drawers.

But I'm not like that at all, says Inge. Why can't I cast it off?

You just can't, says Set. It clings to you. It makes you careless of the world.

She bristles, but she knows he's right. She remembers when she was very small, and one of her father's friends gave a magic lantern show for the children. This was a few years after her mother died, and her father seemed unlikely to ever pull himself out of his own sadness. And so his friends—back then he still had some—would bring entertainments for his children, puppets and picture books and candies and wooden toys. One particular friend possessed a magic lantern. He was an enormous old banker with a bushy red beard and a huge, booming voice. Inge had been quite afraid of him, until he transformed the walls of the nursery into the walls of the wide world instead. It was the first time Inge had seen such pictures of the sea. The hand-painted glass slides dramatized scenes from “The Wreck of the Hesperus”; there were brightly colored slides of dancing sailors singing sea chanteys, and there was a dramatic battle between French and English ships, complete with cannon fire and burning masts, stark orange in relief against the brilliant blue water. Inge fell in love on the spot, and she knew that someday she would seek these vast oceans, and the places beyond them.

But she thinks now of the feeling of watching the unreal from the safety of one's sleeping quarters. This, she feels sure, is how the world has continued to strike her, through her entire adult life so far. This is a life of watching, observation. Even her camera creates distance. All the more reason she sees to love Set—he may be a ghost, but she's never been more alive, more invested in the world, than when she's with him. She loves him like the sea, and like the sea she'd let him sweep her anywhere.

Set, for his part, wonders if he could be thawing: Is Inge warming him up, or just wearing him down? He is feeling, again, that inevitable pull toward Pru, toward Cedric, toward home. What would happen if he brought Inge with him? Would there be a kind of combustion? Would his soul come crashing back like the end of a spell? He knows he has, at least, to try.

Cedric finally broke his long silence and wrote to Set that fall, a shattering sort of letter.
Great men have passions
, he wrote.
Smaller men are frightened of them. The ruthless seeking of the single-minded—it frightens these small, petty men. They stifle us, smother us, take away our funds. They tell us to branch out, divest. Take up new interests. They call us obsessed. But I'll tell you something: the world needs obsession. No one can blaze a new path in the world without it. All the great explorers had it: Scott, Amundsen, Livingstone, Burton. I should have followed in their footsteps sooner
.

But it's not too late. This find—
it's nothing less than the City of the Dead itself. It will be the find of the century—King Tutankhamen will be nothing beside it. And you too should leave that terrible place, with its seductions and illusions and fleeting promises of fame, and follow me north to find Hades.

Set was unsure what to make of the letter. He was torn. He owed everything, his life, to Cedric, and yet he frightened Set, seemed too sure he owned his brother's soul. But this was Cedric,
Cedric
—so—should he go? Should he undo the life he'd made in service to his only living brother? What could the past continue to cost?