To the Land of the Living (23 page)

Originally there had been seven Land Rovers in the expedition – Simon’s gilded bullet-proof palanquin; two lesser vehicles for Gilgamesh and Herod; and four more that carried baggage and slaves. But on the third day the roadbed had gaped suddenly beneath the rear vehicles of the baggage train and the lastmost Land Rover had disappeared amid tongues of purple flame and the discordant wailing of unseen spirits. Then two days later Simon’s magnificent motor-chariot had developed a leprosy of its shining armor, turning all pockmarked and hideous, and its undercarriage had begun to melt and flow as if eaten by acid. So now five Land Rovers remained. Simon, disgruntled and fidgety, rode with Gilgamesh in the lead car, consoling himself with prodigious quantities of dark sweet wine.

This supposed Uruk that was their goal, Gilgamesh thought, could be anywhere: to the north, the south, the east, the
west. Or some other direction entirely. Or nowhere at all. Uruk might indeed be only a rumor, a vision, a wishful fantasy, a figment of some liar’s overheated imagination: mere vaporous hearsay, perhaps. They might spend a hundred years in search of it, or a thousand, and never find it.

So it was probably a foolish quest. But not to undertake it would be folly also. Even if Uruk turned out to be a phantom, they had nothing to lose by looking for it. “Time is money,” someone once had said to Gilgamesh – was it that strange old man Ben Franklin, he wondered? Or had it been Sennacherib the Assyrian?
Time is money
. Wrong, Gilgamesh thought. In the Afterworld, time is nothing, nothing at all. And if I stand a chance to find Enkidu this way, and Simon to get the jewels he hungers for – well, why not? The only alternatives were idleness, stasis, hopelessness. At worst they would be disappointed; but if there are no beginnings, there are no fulfilments.

Simon, squirming beside Gilgamesh, said uneasily, “I thought we would be traveling through a region of marshes and lakes, not a desert. This place looks like nothing that was shown on the map the Carthaginian sold me.”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “Why should it? The map was a dream, Simon. This desert is a dream. The city we seek is possibly only a dream too.”

“Then why were you in such a hurry to set out from Brasil to find it?”

“Even if it may not exist, that in itself is no reason not to search for it,” Gilgamesh replied. “And once we are resolved on the quest, searching sooner is better than searching later.”

“No Roman would talk such nonsense, Gilgamesh.”

“Perhaps not, but I am no Roman.”

“There are times when I doubt that you’re even human.”

“I am a poor damned soul, the same as you.”

Simon snorted and handed a fresh flask of wine to a slave to have its cork drawn. “Listen to him! A poor damned soul, he says! Since when do you believe in damnation, or any such Later Dead piffle? And am I supposed to be taken in by that note of sniveling self-pity? A poor damned soul! What hypocrisy! You couldn’t snivel sincerely if your life depended on it. Or pity yourself seriously even for half a minute running. You’re too damned noble!” Simon accepted the opened flask of wine, took a deep thoughtful pull, nodded,
belched. Then he offered the bottle to Gilgamesh, who drank indifferently, scarcely tasting the stuff.

“I did indeed speak sincerely,” Gilgamesh said after a time. “We are all damned in this place, though that seems to mean different things to different folk. And we are all poor, no matter how many caskets of treasure we amass, for everything is demon-stuff here, without substance to it, and only a fool would think otherwise.”

Simon went crimson, and his blotches and blemishes stood out angrily on his fleshy face. “Don’t mock me, Gilgamesh. I’m willing to accept a great deal of your arrogance, because I know you were something special in your own day, and because you have many qualities I admire. But don’t mock me. Don’t patronize me.”

“Do I, Simon?”

“You do it all the time, you condescending oversized Sumerian bastard!”

“Is it mockery to tell you that I accept the fact that the capricious gods have sent me to this place with a flick of a finger – even as they have sent you here, and Herod, and everyone else who ever drew breath on Earth? Do I mock you when I admit that I am and always have been nothing but a plaything in their hands – even as you?”

“You, Gilgamesh? A plaything in the gods’ hands?”

“Do you believe we have free will here?”

“Only a simpleton would think otherwise. Look, Gilgamesh: there are some who rule and some who are slaves,” said Simon. “Even in the Afterworld, I live in a palace bedecked with rubies and emeralds, and I have hundreds of servants to draw my baths and drive my chariots and prepare my meals. It’s a damned better life than I lived in Samaria, or in Rome. Here as once in the other world I’m a leader of men. There I led a sect; here I rule a rich isle. Is that by accident? Or is it by free will, Gilgamesh? By my choice, by my diligent effort, by my hard striving?”

“Those meals you eat: do they have any savor?”

“It is said I set the finest table in this entire region of the Afterworld.”

“The finest, yes. But do you get any pleasure from what you eat? Or is the finest not but a short span from the meanest, Simon?”

“Jupiter and Isis, man! Don’t be an ass. This is the life after life! We are all
dead
, Gilgamesh. Nobody expects the food to have much taste!”

“Dead? It’s only a word. We have died; for reasons the gods alone know, we live again. We breathe, we hunger, we feel pain, we know sensations of heat and cold, of moisture and dryness. This is not some ghostly shadowy life we lead. It is different in nature from the life we led before; but it is a life of its own kind. And not a pleasing one.”

“Perhaps not pleasing to you, Gilgamesh. There are some drawbacks, certainly, and some features that aren’t exactly ideal. All the same, I make the most of my opportunities. As anybody with any sense would do.”

“Yes,” said Gilgamesh sardonically. “As you keep insisting, you have free will. Tempered only by a few little inconveniences.”

“The inconveniences of this place don’t have a demon’s turd to do with the question of free will, which in any case is a foolish issue, a lot of gasbag vapor dreamed up by Later Dead idlers. Why are some men kings here and some slaves, if not that we shape our own destinies?”

“We have debated this point before, I think,” said Gilgamesh with a shrug. He turned away and stared out at the landscape of the Afterworld.

Mean jagged cliffs that looked like chipped teeth rose on both sides of them. The air had turned the color of dung. The earth was palpitating like a blanket stretched above a windy abyss. Black gaseous bubbles erupted from it here and there. Everything seemed suspended in a trembling flux. A blood-hued rain had begun to fall, but as so often happened, not a drop reached the parched ground. Lean dog-like beasts that were all mouth and fangs and eyes ran beside the highway, leaping and screeching and howling. Far away Gilgamesh saw a dark lake that appeared to be standing on its side. The road ahead still veered crazily, drifting both to the right and left at the same time without forking, and seeming now also to curve upward into the sky. A demon-road, Gilgamesh thought, designed to torment those who dared travel it. A demon-land.

“The Carthaginian’s map –” Simon said.

“Was all lies and fraud,” said Gilgamesh. “It turned blank in
your hands, did it not? Its purpose was to swindle you. Forget the Carthaginian’s map. We are where we are, Simon.”

“And where is that?”

Gilgamesh gestured with his hands outspread, and leaned forward, narrowing his eyes, seeking to make sense out of what he saw before him.

All was confusion and foulness out there. And, he realized, it was folly to try to comprehend it.

In the Afterworld there was never any hope of understanding distances, or spatial relationships, or the passing of time, or the size of things, or anything else. If you were wise, you took what came to you as it came, and asked no questions. That, Gilgamesh thought, was the fundamental thing about the Afterworld, the particular quality above all others that made it the Afterworld.
You took what came to you
. Simon Magus to the contrary, nobody was the shaper of his own destiny here. If you believed you were, you were only deceiving yourself.

Suddenly all the madness outside disappeared as if it had been blotted out. Thick gray mist began to spout from fissures in the ground and clung close as a cotton shroud, enfolding everything in dense murk. The Land Rover came to a jolting halt. The one just behind it, in which Herod of Judaea was riding, did not stop quite as quickly, and bashed into Simon’s with a resounding clang.

Then invisible hands seized the sides of Simon’s Land Rover and began to rock it up and down.

“What now?” Simon grunted. “Demons?”

Gilgamesh had already swung about to seize his bow, his quiver of arrows, his bronze dagger.

“Bandits, I think. This has the feel of an ambush.”

Faces appeared out of the mist, peering through the foggy windows of the Land Rover. Gilgamesh stared back at them in astonishment. Straight dark hair, dark eyes, swarthy skins – an unmistakably familiar cast of features –

Sumerians! Men of his own blood! He’d know those faces anywhere!

A mob of excited Sumerians, clustering about the caravan, jumping about, pounding on fenders, shouting!

Simon, aflame with rage and drunken courage, drew his short Roman sword and fumbled with the latch of the door.

“Wait,” Gilgamesh said, catching his elbow and pulling him back. “Before you get us embroiled in a battle, let me speak with these men. I think I know who they are. I think we’ve just been stopped by the border police of the city of Uruk.”

In a huge dank basement room on the Street of the Tanners and Dyers the man who called himself Ruiz sat before his easel under sputtering, crackling floodlights, working steadily in silence in the depths of the night. He sat stripped to the waist, a stocky, powerful man past his middle years, with deep-set piercing eyes and a round head that had only a fringe of white hair about it.

The work was almost going well. Almost. But it was hard, very hard. He could not get used to that, how hard the work was. It had always been easy for him up above, as natural as breathing. But in this place there were maddening complications that he had not had to face in the life before this life.

He squinted at the woman who stood before him, then at the half-finished canvas, then at the woman again. He let her features enter his mind and expand and expand until they filled his soul.

What a splendid creature she was! Look at her, standing there like a priestess, like a queen, like a goddess!

He didn’t even know her name. She was one of those ancient women that the city was full of, one of those Babylonian or Assyrian or Sumerian sorts that could easily have stepped right off the old limestone reliefs from Nineveh that they had in the Louvre. Shining dark eyes, great noble nose, gleaming black hair gathered in back under an elaborate silver coronet set with carnelian and lapis. She wore a magnificent robe, crimson cloth interwoven with silver strands and fastened at her shoulder by a long curving golden pin. It was not hard for the man who called himself Ruiz to imagine what lay beneath the robe, and he suspected that if he asked, she would undo the garment readily enough and let it slip. Maybe he would, later. But now he wanted the robe in the painting. Its powerfully sculpted lines were essential. They helped to give her that wondrously primordial look. She was Aphrodite, Eve, Ishtar, mother and whore all in one, a goddess, a queen.

She was splendid. But the painting – the painting –

Mierda
! It was coming out wrong, like all the others.

Anger and frustration roiled his soul. He could not stop – he would keep on going until he finally got one of them right – but it was a constant torture to him, these unaccustomed failures, this bewildering inability to make himself the master of his own vision, as he had so triumphantly been for all the ninety-odd years of his former life.

There were paintings stacked everywhere in the room, amid the ferocious clutter, the crumpled shirts, unwashed dishes, torn trousers, old socks, wax-encrusted candlesticks, empty wine-bottles, discarded sandals, fragments of rusted machinery, bits of driftwood, broken pottery, faded blankets, overflowing ashtrays, tools, brushes, guitars that had no strings, jars of paint, bleached bones, stuffed animals, newspapers, books, magazines. He painted all night long, every night, and by now, even though he destroyed most of what he did by painting over the canvases, he had accumulated enough to fill half a museum. But they were wrong, all wrong, worthless, trash. They were stale, useless paintings, self-imitations, self-parodies, even. What was the use of painting the harlequins and saltimbanques again, or the night-fishing, or the three musicians? He had done those once already. To repeat yourself was a death worse than death. The girl before the mirror? The cubist stuff? The demoiselles? Even if this new life of his was truly going to be eternal, what a waste it was to spend it solving problems whose answers he already knew! But he could not seem to help it. It was almost as though there were a curse on him.

This new one, now – this Mesopotamian goddess with the dark sparkling eyes – maybe this time, at last, she would inspire him to make it come out right –

He had made a bold start. Trust the eye, trust the hand, trust the
cojones
, just paint what you see. Fine. She posed like a professional model, tall and proud, nothing self-conscious about her. A beauty, maybe forty years old, prime of life. He worked with all his old assurance, thinking that perhaps this time he’d keep control, this time he’d actually achieve something new instead of merely reworking. Capture the mythic grandeur of her, the primordial goddess-nature of her, this woman of Sumer or Babylonia or wherever she came from.

But the painting began to shift beneath his hand, as they always did. As though a demon had seized the brush. He tried to paint what he saw, and it turned cubist on him, all planes and
angles, that nonsensical stuff that he had abandoned fifty years before he died.
Mierda! Carajo! Me cago en la mar
! He clenched his teeth and turned the painting back where he wanted it, but no, no, it grew all pink and gentle, rose-period stuff, and when in anger he painted over it the new outline had the harsh and jagged barbarism of the
Demoiselles d’Avignon.