GETHSEMANE
LIKE A CRUEL and prodding finger, a shaft of Middle Eastern sunlight abused the raw flesh between my shoulder blades where I had been burned. With absolute determination, I focused my gaze on my feet and slid them through the shallow margin of the sea toward the shore. When I left the water, my soles made contact with firm dampness, then dry sand. I was dazed with pain and the terrible brightness of the beach.
Desperately, I remembered the nude man lying on his side on the riverbank. His image became a talisman, an amulet against the torture of my burns. He had seemed too perfect, his torso and limbs too smoothly sculpted, to have been dead. Surely his body had curved in mere repose, a graceful arabesque.
Of course there should have been no sea near the position where I went down. From the beginning, I realized I had fallen into a place that was no place. Like a person in a Rousseau painting, I inhabited a landscape and a situation that combined realities with imaginative vision. Nevertheless, I would find where the river met the ocean, then follow the river backward to the place where the nude man lay. As I walked along the beach, I felt stronger, more clearheaded. Almost, I could imagine myself healed.
Suddenly I vomited. Even my sense of my own condition was entirely unreliable. All I could do was hope to find the river and to follow it. If there was a river, if there was a man with ivory skin—or was he carved of Carrara marble? Upstream, I would rinse my mouth and throat and drink fresh water. That simple idea seemed hard-won and profound. Sometimes I walked with my eyes closed to save them from the terrible brightness, but nothing sealed away the agony of my burns. I envisioned myself walking across a floor inside an enormous oven.
The shade of the trees set back from the shore beckoned. I might stumble. Their thick roots lying on top of the ground might be full of snakes. The shady, inviting trees might be a snare and a delusion. “Straight is the way, and narrow is the path,” my grandmother used to say sadly. From the beach I saw giant ferns springing up like so many green fountains among the roots webbing that shady forest floor. Below a chartreuse branch, the hairy tail of an animal hung down and curled up like a fiddlehead fern.
For a moment, I envisioned papyrus scrolls. Had I been carrying scrolls home to Grandmama in a brown grocery bag, with their ends stuck out like the long noses of French bread? But Pierre had not told me what shape the codex took.
Just ahead, the river emptied itself into the sea. I felt heartened.
Turn left.
It seemed to be Thom’s voice telling me what to do. He used to joke that way: “If you’re undecided about going left or right, always go left.” It was a socialist’s joke.
Actually, there was no choice: to survive, to follow the river inland, I must turn left.
The geography of all the far-flung earth was gathered together here. At times it seemed I was trudging blindly across an extension of an endless Sahara; other times, trees crowded down close to the edge of the river, and I was refreshed by the moist shade of Tennessee. I saw the snowy peak of the Matterhorn and an Antarctic shelf freighted with penguins. I imagined the burn on my back was smaller than it felt—about the size of my hand. I touched the wet black cord around my neck and followed it with my fingertips to the memory stick hanging between my breasts. Had Thom been murdered?
I would bend my mind to any question to escape awareness of the pain.
Had I almost been murdered? Pierre Saad’s plane had fallen apart around me. System after system had failed. Those who had murdered Thom should also want to murder me. Surely we were alike in our innocence, Thom and I, though our minds were furnished in wildly different ways. Who could account for people’s hatred—or their love? But the ancient manuscript—clearly Pierre Saad had loved the codex. Scrolls? Pages? Perhaps the heavy French horn case had been filled with cans of soup.
I came to a place where the bare bank was wide and flat and sloped very gradually toward the river. My unshod feet enjoyed the damp, sandy clay of the bank. It had the grainy texture of sugar cookie dough, though more firm. There, close to the water’s edge, was a scuffed place where a man might have lain. I fancied I could see the vague imprint of a manlike image. He must have been able to rise and walk.
Go on. Keep walking. I wanted to sink to my knees and die.
The river was wider here, and the water was shallow and slow-moving. On the other side, I envisioned a man’s large footprints in the sandy clay as surely as Robinson Crusoe had seen the print of Man Friday’s unshod foot. I would track and find him.
When I stepped into the river, the flowing water gently cooled my ankles, and it was a delicious cooling. As I progressed, the water covered my feet and came as high as the calves of my legs. Knee-deep, I stood still for a moment. Like freshening stockings pulled up as high as my knees, the water enveloped my legs. A flat fish, its sides striped orange and white, swam by just beneath the surface. Under my bare soles, I felt a large, smooth rock tilting upward. A midget octopus—a clot of roots—withdrew its suctioned tentacles under the rock’s edge. Glancing back as I walked toward the far shore, I saw a sticklike gar, long as my arm, moving down the middle of the river. Near the shore, where I stepped off the rock paving, mud oozed between my toes. Then came the firm bank. Ahead of my muddy feet hopped a brown toad with a bumpy back. For a moment, the pain between my shoulder blades flashed in conflagration.
I lifted my face to implore the heavens for release.
Far overhead, it appeared that two silvery jets would collide, but they crossed unscathed because one flew at a lower altitude than the other. From my vantage point below, their contrails formed a sign, a large X in the sky.
I thought a hurt dog was walking beside me; then I heard myself whining. Where the man’s footsteps left no mark, I merely walked ahead past the thick trunks, through shady groves, across small, sunny meadows. Why not suppose he had walked this way? I not only hoped but also trusted I was following him. Why not trust I would find help, salvation from my suffering?
When I passed the bright zinnias and marigolds, the mythos turned ordinary and comfortable. Memory spoke, and I thought, Grandmother’s Garden. And here were rows of roses—red, yellow, and pink—planted within an earthy rectangle prepared just for roses. Weren’t those rows of roses? Or mere streaks of color shooting like pain through my brain? The Stimsons had had a rectangular rose garden back then, with a silver reflecting globe at its center. Only adults—not Janet nor Margarita nor I—had been allowed to cut bouquets for the table.
Somewhere, I had seen such a garden ball—shattered. Some malicious child or adolescent had been tempted and had succumbed to his power to break the beautiful. How amazingly thin the shards of glass had been. The insides of the shattered curves of silver had been an astonishing royal purple. Igtiyal! Thom’s mind had been like a silver reflecting globe lined with royal purple.
The salt in my wounds bit like a billion diamonds.
I glided past two pear trees in full bloom, just like the Stimsons’ pear trees. Their shaggy flowers spoke of when childhood was paradise and pain was fleeting. Here was a drift of iris—purple, white, and lavender—and there a clump of blue pansies. Like a curled gray cloud the size of two fists, my disembodied brain seemed to float just above my head—a repulsive object, my brain, convoluted, too nasty to inhabit the open air.
Long ago, decades or centuries ago, in a ruined orchard, Thom and I had chanced to see under an apple tree a sleeping stag who must have gorged himself with fallen apples. I remembered the beautiful branching of his antlers. Like little apple trees they grew from the stag’s head, but now: even now, a man was sleeping, on the ground, his shoulders propped against the base of an apple tree.
A human, a man, nude like myself, but he was not so young as he had appeared from the sky. Thirty, perhaps, maturely muscled, well formed, powerful, innocently turning, as I watched, to lie on his side. He pillowed his cheek on his large, folded hands just before they branched into fingers.
In the middle of his forehead, he had a single black curl—like a question mark. He was beautiful. So as to cast no shadow over his face, I dropped to all fours and crawled toward him over the twiggy orchard floor. From under my knees, I heard the soft, betraying pops of breaking twigs.
I would join rather than disturb his repose. In sleep, I, too, would take on flesh whole and perfect, smooth as myth.
Lying down beside him, I turned myself so as to nestle against his side, but I kept the burned part of my back away from making contact with his chest. For a moment I feared my singed hair with its repugnant odor might disturb his sleep, but he sucked in air all the stronger, as though he were not afraid to breathe hellfire and brimstone. My buttocks found a place to fit roundly against his warm loins.