Twilight in Babylon (49 page)

“I have to work for a while,” he said. “It is part of my agreement.”

“What are you doing?”

“Do not worry,” he said. “It will be fine.”

His tone wasn’t convincing.

*      *     *

“Good morning, Cheftu,” his overseer greeted him.

“Is it worse today?” he asked.

“Another fifteen outbreaks.”

Cheftu knew the only people who “mattered” were those who could afford to buy a location under some palm-tree awning. Those who couldn’t just died, uncounted. Worse, their bodies were dumped in the one direction Cheftu had steered Chloe away from looking. The stench of the mass graveyard blew away from the Esagila, but Cheftu had smelled it.

He followed the
asu
out the door and into the stinking heat. So many things he chose not to observe—he was focused on eyes.

Whatever illness had taken hold of the wealthy grew only in their children, and it bloomed like sunflowers in their eyes. The patient became temperamental, listless, unable to eat, unable to release poisons from his systems, dropped weight, then went into a coma. Cheftu was ancient enough to let those coma patients die. They couldn’t take nourishment; they wasted away. Thus far, the disease seemed unstoppable. But it wasn’t spreading quickly, and it didn’t seem to be contagious.

It hadn’t seemed to be contagious.

To make things easier for the families of the sick, when an individual began to show signs of the illness he or she was delivered to one part of the camp. The makeshift hospital was more primitive than anything a Pharaoh would have allowed on a campaign.

These people had invented writing, Cheftu reminded himself. It took centuries more for them to discover sanitation. And even then, in most European cities, they forgot those basic tenets for generations.
I must not judge. Assist. That’s all.

Pay off his debts—so Chloe could have comfort, they both could have food—and find a place to go.

Cheftu examined his fifteen new patients. Their median age was older than the first batch. He watched as a mother spoon-fed her daughter milk. The daughter was almost of marrying age, yet could no longer speak, just stare with sunflower eyes. A huge copper pot kept the milk warm, so all of the patients could be fed by their families. Cheftu shuddered to think what it must cost them to have access to it. Mercenaries controlled the Esagila.

Two patients passed on quietly during the afternoon.

Cheftu walked home through the masses, and wondered why they slaved, for what purpose. The building was growing, the speed of construction was staggering. If they’d built the pyramids this quickly, every town would have had one. Sunflower eyes, all in different stages of progression, stared back at him from tents and lean-tos, from prone positions and from sitting.

He climbed the inner stairway to the room he shared with Chloe, and Cheftu felt the ache of disillusionment. Where was God?

He handed her bread, some beer, and sat down with a sigh.

“I met the neighbors,” she said after kissing him hello. “A nice couple. Samu and Ela.”

“What do they do?”

“Ela is a weaver and Samu is something in construction. Ela will introduce me to the head brick painter when I’m feeling better. It’s strange, but they don’t have any children either.”

Cheftu grunted and finished his beer. His hair was growing back, a good couple of inches already. It was shaggy, and with the way he carried himself when he walked in, the overall picture was of a whipped bear. Chloe leaned forward and kissed him.

He kissed back, but he was distracted.

She slipped over to his lap, and kissed him again, rubbing the muscles of his shoulders, opening herself to him body and soul. He gave what he could, but whatever troubled him still did. She pulled him onto their rush bed and held him. “Talk to me.”

“It’s deception,” he said.

She stroked his temple and listened.

“The people think the gods are sending another Deluge. Every one of them, as best I can figure, has an imprinted memory of the great flood. They know their families lost their possessions, their lives.”

He sighed. “The people who designed the Esagila, they did it to outwit the gods. That is the claim.”

“What is the deception?” she asked when he didn’t go on.

“No flood is coming. It’s just a means for the poor and downtrodden to build a mansion for the wealthy and powerful. They sell food the poor have to buy. Any comfort is gotten through indentured servanthood. It will never end.”

“The company store,” Chloe said. Then she sang him the song: “Sixteen Tons.”

“So it’s a practice that doesn’t end?”

She’d never heard him sound so worn-out. “What are you doing, to pay them back for all of this.”

“Being a doctor.”

Chloe squeezed her eyes shut. Cheftu had forsaken medicine. For years he’d worked as other things—mostly in management. Though in David’s court, it was the position of counselor. “I’m sorry.”

“I am also.”

It seemed too pat to tell him she loved him. So she showed him again, with her body, her mouth, her words, her cries, her tears.

And they slept.

The first time Chloe thought something might be odd about Samu and Ela, was at dinner. While Cheftu had been out working, breaking his heart, Chloe had been developing her franchise idea with the help of Ela, another female. An accountant. Part of Ela’s plan was to have various wealthy people over for dinner and introduce them to the sausage balls.

Ela, as Chloe’s business partner, was underwriting the dinners; i.e., she was finding meat. Chloe didn’t ask. She just hoped, if it was rat, it didn’t carry rabies.

Twenty people came—the family, extended, and one or two of their cousins. The cousins worked in the sun and lived in the tent cities. They thought they were dining with the gods.

They began to eat, and someone spoke to Chloe—in Aztlantu, a version of Greek she knew. Reflexively, she answered. Then everyone began speaking in Aztlantu, on cue.

When Cheftu asked her how it had gone, she wasn’t sure if the language shift was her imagination or reality. But it couldn’t be reality. Could it? Just because she hadn’t heard any other languages didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

But…? So she didn’t say anything—knowing his wife might be losing her mind wasn’t going to help Cheftu.
Just my imagination, running away with me,
Chloe reasoned.
Again.

She knew that every death from the sunflower-eye illness wearied Cheftu even more. He’d lost his appetite, he didn’t initiate sex, and he wasn’t sleeping. Worse, he’d ceased to pray.

Chloe had started to.

Ela had been true to her word, and Chloe had begun painting bricks, a late-afternoon to early-morning shift. She listened to the people around her for twelve hours a day. The Esagila was going to save them. That was the only topic. Their children would live. As Chloe painted brick after brick demon-chasing blue, she pondered that. People would do anything for their children.

The violence got worse.

One day a woman came to work, missing a hand. Some other woman had stolen bread from her children, and they had gotten into a fight. The other woman was dead. After that, Chloe didn’t look at the faces of the women she worked with—
we’re rats,
she thought.
Rats who are burying themselves under sewage and garbage and stripping the land of everything it has.

Cheftu stopped coming home, except every few days. He was haggard and short-tempered. Chloe cursed herself for this whole plan. She’d dragged them there. She’d been responsible. She’d gotten sick and sold him into slavery. She was torturing his soul.

She’d just fallen into bed, the moon was past its zenith, when Cheftu returned. He didn’t kiss her or inquire about her day. He sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched, his hands clenched together.

“
Chérie,
I think I have the sunflower-eye illness.”

She bounded out of bed and held a torch in front of his eyes. They looked the same, but how could she tell? The copper color the patients’ eyes turned was the color Cheftu’s eyes already were. “Why? What can I do? What—”

“I can’t remember anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“The languages in my mind, I learned so many as a boy.”

“Eighteen, if I remember you correctly.”

“Such arrogance. I thought they would help me—no matter. That is the past, or the future. At any rate, I don’t remember them.”

She put her arms around him. “You’re tired, you work too hard, you—”

“
Chérie,
I have completely forgotten Latin and Chinese. Not a word remains in my mind.”

“You knew Chinese?”

“Mandarin, Szechuan, and four lesser-known dialects, yes.” He sighed. “It’s this madness. You’ll wake up, and I’ll be staring at the wall and drooling, like my patients.” His tone was bitter.

“Get some sleep,” she said.

“I cannot—”

“I’ll go tell them you are too ill to come to work.”

He didn’t argue. He passed out almost immediately.

Chloe got up, washed her face, and started up the stairs to the roof, then changed her mind and took the staircase down to the ground. It was dawn by the time she got there. Cheftu had told her once before where he worked.

She asked a child for directions and sucked in her breath when she saw his eyes. Sunflower eyes, this must be the beginning. An icy chill passed through her. His pupil was black. Surrounding it, like petals of a flower, were copper-colored plates that had started to obscure the brown of his eyes. She followed his directions, and stared into the gazes of everyone she saw.

By the time she’d reached the sorry excuse for an infirmary, she wanted to scream. Every other child had the beginnings in his eyes. A lot of adults, too. She worked for a while in Cheftu’s place, feeding those who could swallow, milk from the copper pot. She quit when she reached the bottom of the pot; it was corroded and black—almost gone. Milk, with rotted copper fibers swirling in it, was all that was left.

She strained what she could, fed the man, and almost ran home.

They couldn’t stay another day. If only she’d known! If only—

Chloe stopped in her tracks. Someone was speaking Arabic. To someone who was speaking Latin. She didn’t know it, but she could figure it out. Their conversation was punctuated with misunderstandings. One man was asking for more bricks. The other man thought he was being told to make more bricks. He was not a brickmaker, he was a bitumen pourer, he protested.

I’m losing my mind. This is it. Completely gone.
She rubbed her temples and walked on. She heard a crash and turned to see the Arabic speaker storm away, swearing to take his family and leave these idiots to build Esagila. Only in Arabic, it came out: the stairway to heaven.

Bab-ili. Gate of the gods. Stairway to heaven. Babel. Babylon.

Carefully, afraid of her head falling off because of this revelation, Chloe looked up. Images from art appreciation class slipped through her mind. A thousand artists had painted the Tower of Babel. Escher had made it impossibly tall and narrow. Doré had made it look like an ice-cream cone, upended. And Brueghel had left it abandoned and crumbling on a lush plain, the guts of it spilling out.

But no one had portrayed it accurately. No one in the future had trusted the ancients to be as clever or more clever, as creative or more creative, as ingenious or more ingenious, than they themselves were.

For the first time, Chloe realized what had struck her as so strange about this place, but she’d never really identified what that strangeness was:
I always understood everything here.

Not because I knew the languages.

Because everyone spoke
one
language.

To her side, someone cursed in German. She wasn’t fluent, but she knew how to swear. The person he was speaking to answered in Sanskrit. Sanskrit!

The sun was blinding. She should get some sleep, but she had never felt less tired. She turned down one pathway and saw a family packing up. They were speaking in some Asian tongue, a tonal language punctuated with sharp vowel sounds. Their neighbors seemed bewildered and talked about how they’d started babbling.

Babble.

The tent city was breaking up. People were screaming at each other in tongues she didn’t know. They left their garbage and their waste and cursed the ones who’d been their friends. And they left.

Chloe raced to her work, to see the same thing in action. Bricks were thrown, punches exchanged, hair pulled. And people left.

The forty bricks she should have painted in one day ended up being ten. Even those weren’t delivered to the wall, because the wheelbarrow man and the woman who brought the bricks couldn’t agree where they should go. A jangle of sounds.

When she reached the top of Esagila, she noticed it hadn’t grown taller today.

Chloe ran back to their room.

“We’re in Babylon,” she shouted. “That’s why we’re here!”

“We’ve known that,” Cheftu groused. “We’ve known that all along.”

“Cheftu, listen to me. The languages you can’t remember. Did you ever use them here?”

“Why would I do that? We speak Sumerian.”

She patted his thigh. “Think about it. Latin, Chinese, did you ever have a conversation with anyone in those languages. Here.”

He sat up, groggy and grouchy. “I don’t think so.”

“But you’re not positive?”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“I don’t know, but Cheftu, I don’t remember a word of Greek.”

“Wonderful. I’ve poisoned you, too. Your eyes will be sun—”

“Silence yourself!”

She had his attention now.

“Every dinner I’ve had with Ela and Samu, we’ve… well, we’ve spoken a different language.”

“You’re more ill than I am,” he said, reaching for her pulse.

Chloe ducked back. “It always seemed so far-fetched that I figured, yes, I was losing my mind, because no one ever reacted. Conversation just flowed, the way it always does with multilingual people. One word, change language, slipping into another. But Cheftu, every language I’ve spoken with them, is gone.”