“Short and sweet,” I remark. “Clichéless.”
“Yes, he wasn’t a big fan of flowery prose.”
“And a more peaceful, more Emersonian resting place,” I say, “I can’t imagine. His work is urban and his wit’s urbane, but his soul is pastoral. One thinks of Trevor Upward in Echo Must Die, who finds peace only in the lesbian commune on the Isle of Muck.”
Holly inspects me through her dark lenses; she last saw me through a fug of medication, so I doubt she’ll recall me, but I’ll stay prepared: “Were you a colleague of Crispin’s here at the college?”
“No, no, I work in a different field. I’m a fan, though. I’ve read and reread Desiccated Embryos.”
“He always suspected that book would outlive him.”
“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.” A blue jay swoops onto a fungus-ruffled tree stump by Hershey’s grave, emits a volley of harsh jeers, then a breathy trill.
“They don’t make those birds where I’m from,” says Holly.
“A blue jay,” I say, “or Cyanocitta cristata. The Algonquin name was sideso and the Yakama called it a xwáshxway, but their territory was over on the Pacific, so now I’m merely showing off.”
Holly removes her sunglasses. “Are you a linguist?”
“By default. I’m a psychiatrist, here for a meeting. You?”
“Just here to pay my respects.” Holly bends down, takes an oak leaf from the grave, and puts it into her purse. “Well, nice talking with you. Hope your meeting goes well.”
The blue jay threads a flight path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark. Holly begins to walk off.
“So far so good, but it’s about to get trickier, I fear.”
Holly is struck by my strange answer and stops.
I clear my throat. “Ms. Sykes, we need to talk.”
Down come the shutters, out comes her hardscrabble Gravesend accent. “I don’t do media, I don’t do festivals.” She steps backwards. “I’ve retired from all that.” A frond of pine tree brushes her head and she ducks nervily. “So, no, whoever you are, you can—”
“Iris Fenby this time around, but you know me as Marinus.”
She freezes, thinks, frowns, and looks disgusted. “Oh, f’Chrissakes! Yu Leon Marinus died in 1984, he was Chinese, and if you have a Chinese parent, then I’m … Vladimir Putin. Don’t force me to be rude. That’s rude.”
“Dr. Yu Leon Marinus was indeed childless, Holly, and that body died in 1984. But his soul, this ‘I’ addressing you now, is Marinus. Truly.”
A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind. Holly’s walking off. Who knows how many Marinuses she’s met, from the mentally ill to fraudsters, after a slice of her royalties?
“You have two hours missing from July 1, 1984,” I call after her, “between Rochester and the Isle of Sheppey. I know what happened.”
She stops. “I know what happened!” Despite herself, she turns to face me again, properly angry now. “I hitched. A woman picked me up and dropped me off at the Sheppey bridge. Please, leave me alone.”
“Ian Fairweather and Heidi Cross picked you up. I know you know those names, but you don’t know you were at that bungalow that morning, that day, when they were killed.”
“Whatever! Post the whole story at bullshitparanoia.com. The crazies’ll give you all the attention you need.” Somewhere a lawnmover chugs into noisy life. “You digested The Radio People, sicked it up, mixed in your own psychoses, and made an occult reality show, starring yourself. Just like that wretched girl who shot Crispin. I’m going now. Don’t follow, or I’ll call the cops.”
Birds crisscross and warble in the stripes of light.
That went well, subsays ōshima the Unseen and Ironic.
I sit down on the blue jay’s stump. It’s a beginning.
April 4
“MY FAVORITE DISH on my menu, sweetheart, swear to God.” Nestor lays the plate in front of me. “People come in, they sit down, they see ‘vegetarian moussaka,’ they think, If moussaka ain’t meat it ain’t moussaka, so they order the steak, the pork belly, the lamb chops. They dunno what they missing. Go on. Taste. My own mother, God watch over her soul, that’s her recipe. Hell of a lady. Navy SEALs, ninjas, those Mafia guys, next to a Greek momma, they a sack of quivering pussies. That’s her, in the frame, over the till.” He points at the white-haired matriarch. “She made this café. She invented no-meat moussaka too, when Mussolini invaded and shot every sheep, every rabbit, every dog. Mama had to—wassaword?—improvise. Marinate the eggplant in red wine. Simmer the lentils, slow. Mushrooms cooked in soy sauce—she added soy sauce after she came to New York. Meatier than meat. Butter in white sauce, cornflour, dash of cream. Heavy on the paprika. That’s the kick. Bon appétit, sweetheart, and”—he passes me a clinking glass of iced tap water—“save space for dessert. You too skinny.”
“Skinny,” I pat my midriff, “is not one of my worries.”
Off he drifts, deftly avoided by higher-speed younger staff. I fork an eggplant and squish up some white sauce, smoosh on a mushroom and eat. Taste being the blood of memory, I remember 1969, when Yu Leon Marinus was teaching only a few blocks away, Old Nestor was Young Nestor, and the white-haired lady in the frame, upon learning that the Greek-speaking Chinaman was a doctor, held me up to her sons as the American Dream incarnate. She gave me a square of baklava with my coffee every time I came here, which was often. I’d like to ask when she passed away, but my curiosity might attract suspicion, so I downstream today’s New York Times and flick to the crossword. But it’s no good.
I can’t stop thinking about Esther Little …
IN 1871 PABLO Antay Marinus turned forty. He had inherited enough Latino DNA from his Catalan father to pass as Spanish, so he signed as a ship’s surgeon aboard an aging Yankee clipper, the Prophetess, at Rio de Janeiro, bound for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, via Cape Town. Notwithstanding a typhoon of Old Testament fury, an outbreak of ship fever that killed a dozen sailors, and a skirmish with corsairs off Panaitan Island, we limped into Batavia on Christmas Day. Lucas Marinus had visited the place eighty years before, and the malarial garrison town I remembered was now a malarial city. One cannot cross the same river twice. I traveled inland to botanize around Buitenzorg, but the brutality meted out by Europeans to the Javanese natives robbed me of all pleasure in Javanese flora, and when the Prophetess slipped anchor in January for the youthful Swan River Colony in Western Australia, I wasn’t sorry to leave. I’d never set foot on the southern continent in my entire metalife, so when our captain gave notice of a three-week layover in Fremantle for careening, I decided to spend two of them in the Becher Point wetlands. I engaged an eager-to-please local man named Caleb Warren and his long-suffering mule. Prior to the 1890s Gold Rush, Perth was a township of only a few hundred wooden dwellings, and within an hour Warren and I were making our way on a rough track through wilderness unchanged for millennia. As the rough track turned notional, Caleb Warren turned silent and moody. These days, I’d diagnose the man as bipolar. We walked through scrubby hills, swampy gullies, saltwater creeks, and copses of leaning paperbark trees. I was content. My sketchbook for February 7, 1872, contains drawings of six species of frog, a detailed description of a bandicoot, a botched sketch of a royal spoonbill, and a passable watercolor of Jervoise Bay. Night fell and we camped in a circle of rocks atop a low cliff. I asked my guide if Aborigines were likely to approach our fire. Caleb Warren slapped the butt of his rifle and announced, “Let the bastards try. We’ll be ready.” Pablo Antay recorded his impressions of the deep breakers and spatter of spray, the droning babel of insect scratches, mammalian barks, and the calls of birds. We ate “bush duff” with blood sausage and beans. My guide drank rum like water, and answered, “Who gives a damn?” to anything I said. Warren was a problem I’d have to fix the following day. I watched the stars and thought of other lives. I don’t know how much time passed before I noticed a small mouse skip up Warren’s forearm, onto his hand, and up the stick that served as a toasting fork to the greasy lump of sausage impaled there. I hadn’t hiatused the man. Warren’s eyes were open but he didn’t reply or stir …
… as four tall natives with hunting spears slipped into the globe of firelight. A scrawny dog with a stumpy tail sniffed around. I stood up, uncertain whether to run, talk, brandish my knife, or egress. The visitors ignored Caleb Warren, who was still frozen out of time. They were barefoot and wore a mixture of settlers’ breeches and shirts, Noongar skin cloaks, and loincloths. One wore a bone through his nose and all were ritually scarred. They were warriors. Whatever the costume, context, or century, one knows. I held up my hands to show I had no weapons, but the men’s intentions were unreadable. I was afraid. Egression in those days took me ten or fifteen seconds, much longer than four spearmen needed to end Pablo Antay’s peripatetic life, and death by skewering is quick but unpleasant. Then a pale, all skin-and-bone woman moved into the firelight. Her hair was tied back and she wore a shapeless cassock of the type handed out by missionaries faced with large quantities of native skin to cover up. Her age was hard to guess. She walked with a lopsided gait and she inspected me at close range with a critical eye, as if I were a horse she was having second thoughts about buying. “Don’t fret. If we want kill, y’be dead hours ago.”
“You speak English,” I blurted.
“M’father taught me.” She spoke to the warriors in what I would soon recognize as Noongar and sat on a rock by the fire. One of them prised the stick out of Caleb Warren’s fingers and sniffed the sausage. He took a cautious bite, and another. “Y’guide’s a baddun.” The woman spoke to the fire while addressing me. “He’s a plan to fill y’with grog, hit y’head, take y’money, throw y’off that cliff. Yer’ve more money’n he’ll see in two year, see. Big …” she searched for the word, “… tempting. That the right word, issit?”
“Temptation, perhaps.”
The woman clicked her tongue. “He’s a plan t’tell Swan River whitefellas you go in bush’n never come back no more. Steal y’goods.”
I asked her, “How can you know that?”
“Fly out.” She touched her forehead and one-handedly mimed a fluttering. “Y’know how. Aye?” She watched my reaction.
I felt a rushing sensation in my chest. “You’re … psychosoteric?”
She leaned closer to the fire. I saw European angles to her jaw and nose. “Big word, mister. Ain’t speak English boola time. F’get boola. But my soul-spot bright.” She tapped her forehead. “You, same. Boylyada maaman. Yurra spirit talker too.”
I tried to etch every detail onto my memory. The four warriors were rifling through Warren’s backpack. The stumpy dog sniffed about. Burning driftwood spat out sparks. Pablo Antay Marinus had happened upon a female Aborigine psychosoteric on the western edge of the Great Southern Continent. She was chewing a sausage now, and belched. “What y’name-it, this … pig-meat-stick?”
“A sausage.”
“Sausage.” She tasted the word. “Mick Little made sausages.”
The statement begged the question: “Who’s Mick Little?”
“This body’s father. Esther Little’s father. Mick Little kill pigs, make sausages, but he die.” She mimed coughing and held out her hand. “Blood. Like this.”
“Your body-father died of tuberculosis? Consumption?”
“That’sitsname it is, aye. Then men sell farm, Esther’s mother, a Noongar woman, she go back in bush. She takes Esther. Esther die, and I go in her body.” She frowned, rocking to and fro on her heels.
After a little time, I spoke up. “This body’s name is Pablo Antay Marinus. But my true name is Marinus. Call me Marinus. Do you have a true name?”
She warmed her hands at the fire. “My Noongar name’s Moombaki, but I’ve a longer name what I ain’t tellin’.”
Now I knew how Xi Lo and Holokai had felt upon entering the Koskov family’s drawing room in Saint Petersburg, fifty years earlier. Quite possibly this Atemporal Sojourner would want nothing to do with Horology, nor care that there were others like her, scattered thinly throughout the world, but I felt heartened that we were a species one individual less endangered than fifteen minutes before. I asked my visitor my next question in subspeech: So do I call you Esther or Moombaki? Time passed and no answer came. The fire shifted its burning bones, and sparks spiraled up as the warriors spoke to one another in quiet voices. Just as I concluded that she wasn’t telepathic, she subreplied: You a wadjela, a whitefella, so t’you, I’m Esther. If yurra Noongar, then I’m Moombaki.
“This is my thirty-sixth body,” I told Esther. “You?”
Esther killed questions she found irrelevant by ignoring them, and she did it now. So I subasked, When did you first come to this land? To Australia?
She patted her dog: I’m always here.
A Sojourner has that luxury. You never left Australia?
She told me, “Aye. I stay on Noongar land.”
I envied her. For a Returnee like myself, each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography. We die, wake up as children forty-nine days later, often on another landmass. Pablo Antay tried to imagine an entire metalife in one place as a Sojourner, migrating out of one old or dying body into a young and healthy one, but never severing one’s ties to a clan and its territory. “How did you find me?”
Esther gave the last lump of sausage to the dog. “The bush talks dunnit? We listen.”
I noticed the four warriors taking the saddlebags from the mule. “Are you stealing my baggage?”
The half-Aborigine rose. We carry y’bags. To our camp. You gunna come?
I looked at Caleb Warren and subworried, Something’ll eat him, if we leave him here. “Or he might just catch fire, or melt.”
Esther inspected her hand. Soon, he wake, his head like bees. He think he kill you already.