Текст книги "The Bone Clocks"
Автор книги: David Mitchell
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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 40 страниц)
Arkady broke the gloomy silence: “If you think this, so must the enemy. Why would Pfenninger risk giving us access to the Blind Cathar when he can stalemate us to death?”
“Because of his cardinal vice: vanity. Pfenninger wants to annihilate Horology in one glorious act of slaughter, so he’s offering us, his desperate enemy, this trap. But it’ll also give us a narrow window of time inside the Chapel. It won’t come again.”
“And what do we do with that narrow window of time,” countered L’Ohkna, “apart from being butchered, body and soul?”
“That,” I confessed, “I cannot answer. But I heard from someone who may be able to. I didn’t dare refer to this outside 119A, but now we’re all here, lend an old friend your ears …” I produced an ancient Walkman and inserted a BASF cassette.
WENDY HANGER’S FINGERS drum on the wheel while four lanes of traffic cross the intersection. She has no ring on her finger. The light turns green, but she doesn’t notice until the truck behind us blasts its horn. She pulls off, stalls, mutters, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Chevrolet, ignition!” We drive off, past a big Home Depot, and soon we’ve left Poughkeepsie behind. I ask, “How long to Blithewood?”
“Thirty, forty minutes.” Wendy Hanger puts a nicotine gum stick into her mouth and her sternocleidomastoideus ripples with every chew. The road winds between and under trees. Their buds are on the cusp of opening. A sign says RED HOOK 7 MILES. We overtake a pair of cyclists, and Wendy Hanger musters the courage: “Dr. Fenby, could I … uh, ask you a question?”
“Ask away.”
“This might sound like I’m outta my freaking tree.”
“You’re in luck, Ms. Hanger. I’m a psychiatrist.”
“Does the name ‘Marinus’ ring any bells?”
I hadn’t seen that coming. We don’t hide our true names, but neither do we advertise them. “Why do you ask?”
Wendy Hanger’s breathing is ragged. “Dunno how I knew it, but I knew it. Look, I—I—I’m sorry, I gotta pull over.” Around the next bend there’s a timely rest area with a bench and a view of woodland sloping down to the Hudson River. Wendy Hanger turns around. She’s sweating and wide-eyed. Her dolphin air freshener swings in diminishing arcs. “Do you know a Marinus—or areyou Marinus?”
The cyclists we passed not long ago speed by.
“I go by that name in certain circles,” I say.
Her face trembles. It’s scarred with childhood acne. “Ho– lycrap.” She shakes her head. “ Youcould hardly’ve been bornyet. Jeez, I reallyneed a smoke.”
“Don’t take your stress out on your bronchial tubes, Ms. Hanger. Stick to the gum. Now. I’m overdue an explanation.”
“This isn’t”—she frowns—“this isn’t some kinda setup?”
“I wish it was, because then I’d know what was happening.”
Suspicion, angst, and disbelief slug it out in Wendy Hanger’s face, but no clear winner emerges. “Okay, Doctor. Here’s the story. When I was younger, in Milwaukee, I went off the rails. Family issues, a divorce … substance abuse. My stepsister booted me out, and by the end, moms were, like, steering their kids across the road to avoid me. I was …” She flinches. Old memories still keep their sting.
“An addict,” I state calmly, “which means you’re now a survivor.”
Wendy Hanger chews her gum a few times. “I guess I am. New Year’s Eve 1983, though, the holiday lights all pretty—Jeez, I was no survivor then. I hit rock bottom, broke into my stepsister’s house, found her sleeping pills, swallowed the entire freakin’ bottle with a pint of Jim Beam. That movie The Towering Infernowas on, as I … sank away. You ever see it?” Before I can answer, a sports car storms by and Wendy Hanger shudders. “I woke up in the hospital with tubes in my stomach and throat. My stepsister’s neighbor had seen the TV on, come over, and found me. Called an ambulance in the nick of time. People think sleeping pills are painless, but that’s not true. I’d no idea a stomach could hurtthat much. I slept, woke, slept some more. Then I woke in the geriatric ward, which totallyfreaked me out ’cause I thought I’d aged,” Wendy Hanger does a bitter laugh, “and been in a coma for forty years, and was now, like, ancient. But there was this woman there, sitting by my bed. I didn’t know if she was staff or a patient or a volunteer, but she held my hand and asked, ‘Why are you here, Miss Hanger?’ I hear her now. ‘Why are you here, Wendy?’ She spoke kinda funny, like with an accent, but … I don’t know where from. She wasn’t black, but wasn’t quite white. She was … kind, like a … a gruff angel, who wouldn’t blame you or judge you for what you’d done or for what life’d done to you. And I—I heard myself telling her things I …” Wendy Hanger gazes at the backs of her hands, “… I never told anyone. Suddenly it was midnight. This woman smiled at me and said, ‘You’re over the worst. Happy New Year.’ And … I just freakin’ burst into tears. I don’t know why.”
“Did she tell you her name?”
Wendy’s eyes are a challenge.
“Was her name Esther Little, Wendy?”
Wendy Hanger breathes in deep: “She said you’d know that. She said you’d know. But you can’t have been more than a girl in 1984. What’s going on? How … Jeez.”
“Did Esther Little give you a message to give to me?”
“Yes. Yes, Doctor. She asked me, a homeless, suicidal addict whom she’d known for all of, like, two or three hours, to pass on a message to a colleague named Marinus. I—I—I—I asked, ‘Is “Marinus” like a Christian name, a surname, an alias?’ But Esther Little said, ‘Marinus is Marinus,’ and told me to tell you … to tell you …”
“I’m listening, Wendy. Go on.”
“ ‘Three on the Day of the Star of Riga.’ ”
The world’s hushed. “Three on the Day of the Star of Riga?”
“Not a word more, not a word less.” She studies me.
The Star of Riga. I know I’ve known that phrase, and I reach for the memory, but my fingers pass through it. No. I’ll have to be patient.
“ ‘Riga’ meant nothing,” Wendy Hanger chews what must now be a flavorless lump of gum, “back in my hospital bed in Milwaukee, so I asked her the spelling: R-I-G-A. Then I asked where I’d find this Marinus, so I could deliver the message. Esther said no, the time wasn’t right yet. So I asked when the time would be right. And she said,” Wendy Hanger swallows, her carotid artery pulsing fast, “ ‘The day you become a grandmother.’ ”
Pure Esther Little. “Many congratulations,” I tell Wendy Hanger. “Granddaughter or grandson?”
She looks more perturbed by this, not less. “A girl. My daughter-in-law gave birth in Santa Fe, early this morning. She wasn’t due for another two weeks, but just after midnight, Rainbow Hanger was born. Her people are hippies. But, look, you gotta … I mean, I thought Esther maybe had on-and-off dementia, or … Jeez. What sane person’d beg such a wacko favor off of anyone, least of all an addict who’d just swallowed a hundred sleeping pills? I asked her. Esther said the addict in me haddied, but that the real me, she’d survived. I’d be fine from now on, she said. She said the ‘Riga’ message and its due date were written in permanent marker, and on the right day, years from now, Marinus’d find me, but your name’d be different and—” Wendy Hanger’s sniffling and her eyes are streaming. “ Why’mI crying?”
I hand her a packet of tissues.
“Is she still alive? She’d be, like … ancient.”
“The woman you met has passed on.”
The newborn grandmother nods, unsurprised. “Pity. I’d’ve liked to thank her. I owe her so much.”
“How so?”
Wendy Hanger looks surprised, but decides to tell me. “By and by, I fell asleep, and didn’t wake until morning. Esther had gone. A nurse brought me breakfast, and said they’d be moving me to a private room later. I said there must a mistake, I didn’t have insurance, but the nurse said, ‘Your grandmother’s settling your account, honey,’ and I said, ‘What grandmother?’ The nurse smiled like I was concussed and said, ‘Mrs. Little, isn’t it?’ Then, later, in my private room, a nurse brought a … like a black zip-up folder. In it was a Bank of America card with my name on it, a door key, and some documents. These,” Wendy Hanger heaves an emotional sigh, “turned out to be the deeds to a house in Poughkeepsie. In my name. Two weeks later I was discharged from the hospital in Milwaukee. I went to my stepsister’s, apologized for trying to kill myself on her sofa, and said I was heading east, to try to, y’know, make a fresh start, where no one knew me. I think my stepsister was relieved. Two Greyhound bus rides later, I walked into my house in Poughkeepsie … A house that a real live fairy godmother had apparently given me. Next thing I knew, forty years or more flew by. I still live there, and to this day my husband believes it was a gift from an eccentric aunt. I never told no one the truth. But every single time I turned my key in the lock, I thought of her, I thought, ‘Three on the Day of the Star of Riga,’ and pretty much every hour since I learned my daughter-in-law was pregnant, I’d wonder if I’d run into a Marinus … This morning, holy crap, was I a mess! The day I become a grandmother. My husband told me to stay at home, so I did. But Carlotta, who runs the cab company for us these days, deviced to say that Jodie’d twisted her ankle and Zeinab’s baby was running a fever, so please, please, please, would I go to the station and pick up Dr. I. Fenby? And, y’know, there’s no reason why you’dbe Marinus, but when I saw you I …” she shakes her head, “… knew. That’s why I was kinda spooked. Sorry.”
Dappled sunshine shivers. “Forget it. Thank you.”
“The Riga message. Does it make sense?”
I should be careful. “Partially. Potentially.”
Wendy Hanger considers criminal networks, the FBI, The Da Vinci Code—but smiles, shyly. “Way, way over myhead, hey? Y’know, I feel … lighter.” She dabs her eyes with her wrists, notices the splodges of makeup, and checks in the mirror: “Holy crap, it’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Can I just, like, fix myself?”
“I’ll take the air, you take your time.” I get out of the car and walk over to the bench. I sit down, gaze over the stately Hudson River at the Catskill Mountains, egress, transverse back to the car, and ingress into Wendy Hanger. First I redact everything that’s happened since she pulled over. Then I trace the memory cord back forty-one years to a Milwaukee hospital. Redacting memories of Esther hurts, but it’s for the best. The messenger will forget the message she’s carried for so long, and everything else she just told me. At odd moments she may fret over a blank in her memory, but soon a Pied Piper thought will come dancing along and her untrained mind will follow …
WENDY HANGER SETS me down at the daffodil-clustered roundabout on Blithewood’s campus, just below the president’s ivy-veined house. “That wasa pleasure, Iris.”
“Thanks so much for the guided tour, Wendy.”
“I like to show the place to folks who’d appreciate it, specially on the first real day of spring.”
“Look, I know my assistant paid by charge card but”—I hand her a twenty-dollar bill—“buy a bottle of something silly to celebrate your life as a granny.” She hesitates, but I press it into her hand.
“That’s generous of you, Iris. I will, and my husband and I’ll drink to your health. You’re sure you’re good for the trip back?”
“I’m good. My friend’s driving us back to New York.”
“Have a great meeting, then, and an excellent day, and enjoy the sunshine. The forecast’s patchy for the next few days.” She pulls away, waving, and is gone. I hear myself subaddressed in Фshima’s plangent tones: Looking for your Sorority House?
I try to spot him, but see only students crossing the well-tended lawns with armfuls of folders and bags. Four men are carrying a piano. Ф shima, I just received a sign from Esther Little.
The front door of the president’s house opens and Фshima, a slight figure with hands buried deep in his knee-length mugger’s hoodie, emerges. What sort of sign?
A mnemocrypted key, I subreply, walking towards the house. Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow. I haven’t solved it yet, but I will. Is anyone at the cemetery?I unbutton my coat.
Only squirrels, humping and jumping, Фshima flips back his hood and angles his white-whiskered, septuagenarian Kenyan face to soak up the sun, until a quarter-hour ago. Take the path leading up to your left from where I’m standing.
I pass within a few yards. Anyone we know?
Go and see. She’s wearing a Jamaican head-wrap.
I follow the path: What’s a Jamaican head-wrap?
Фshima shuts the door behind him and walks the other way. Holler if you need me.
UNDERFOOT, OLD LEAVES crackle and squelch, while overhead, brand-new leaves ooze unbundling from swollen buds and the wood is Bluetoothed with birdsong. At the base of a trunk the girth of a brontosaurus’s leg, I find a gravestone. Here’s another, and another smothered by ivy. Blithewood’s campus cemetery, then, is not a regimented matrix of the dead but a wood whose graves are sunk between, and nourish the roots of, these pines, cedars, yews, and maples. Esther’s glimpse was precise: Tombs between the trees. Rounding a dense holly tree I come across Holly Sykes, and think, Who else?I haven’t seen her since my visit to Rye, four years ago. Her cancer is still in remission but she looks gaunter than ever, all bone and nerve. Her head-wrap is the red, green, and gold of the Jamaican flag. I scuff my feet to let her know someone’s coming, and Holly slips on a pair of sunglasses that conceal much of her face. “Good morning,” I venture.
“Good morning,” she echoes neutrally.
“Sorry to bother you, but I was looking for Crispin Hershey.”
“Right here.” Holly gestures at the white marble stone.
CRISPIN HERSHEY
WRITER
1966–2020
“Short and sweet,” I remark. “Clichйless.”
“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 sidesoand the Yakama called it a xw б shxway, 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 youhave a Chinese parent, then I’m … Vladimir Putin. Don’t force me to be rude. That’srude.”
“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. “ Iknow 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’tfollow, or I’ll call the cops.”
Birds crisscross and warble in the stripes of light.
That went well, subsays Фshima 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 cafй. 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 app й tit, 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 notone 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 Timesand 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 Prophetessslipped 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. Ihadn’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 boolatime. 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.
WE WALKED MOST of the night to an outcrop whose Noongar name meant “Five Fingers” in English, not far from present-day Armadale. This was home for the warriors’ clan, and the season’s residence for Esther. When day broke, I tried to make myself as useful to my hosts as I could, but although I’d been resurrected as Itsekiri, Kawйsqar, and Gurage tribespeople in earlier lives, I’d grown pampered as Lucas Marinus, Klara Koskov, and Pablo Antay, and two centuries had passed since I had hunted and foraged for dinner. I was of more use in helping the women to cure kangaroo hides, setting a broken arm, and gathering bush honey. I also busied myself gratifying my curiosity as a proto-anthropologist: My journals describe the burning of scrubland to smoke out game; totemic animals; a visit by five men from the south to trade red ocher for prized burdun wood; and a paternity suit, settled by Esther, who ingressed into a fetus to perform a psychosoteric DNA test. Esther’s skin-group showed me the pity owed to a simpleminded uncle, a distrust of my Europeanness, and respect for a Boylyada maaman colleague of Moombaki’s. The children were the least reserved. One boy named Kinta used to borrow my jacket and hat and strut about, and they all liked showing off their bushcraft skills to the clumsy pale visitor. My attempts to speak Noongar caused endless amusement, but with the tribe’s help Pablo Antay compiled the best extant glossary of the Noongar language.
Moombaki, I learned, was not thought of as a god but a spirit guardian, a collective memory, a healer, a weapon of last resort, and a sort of assize judge. She moved from skin-group to skin-group at the start of each of the six Noongar seasons, helping each family and clan as best she could, and circulating the idea that violent resistance to the Europeans would result in more dead Noongar. Some called her a traitor, she told me, but by the 1870s her logic was demonstrable. The Europeans were too many, their appetites too voracious, their morality too fickle, and their rifles too accurate. The Noongar’s slim hope of survival lay in adaptation, and if this altered what it meant to be Noongar, what choice was there? Without knowledge of the Ship People’s minds, however, even this slim hope was doomed, and so Moombaki had chosen a ten-year-old half-caste girl for her present sojourn. Similarly, she had invited Pablo Antay to Five Fingers with a view to learning about the world and its peoples.
By night, then, Esther and I sat across the fire from each other at the mouth of her small cave and subspoke about empires, their ascents and falls; about cities, shipbuilding, industry; slavery, the dismemberment of Africa, the genocide of the natives of Van Diemen’s Land; farming, husbandry, factories, telegraphs, newspapers, printing, mathematics, philosophy, law, and money and a hundred other topics. I felt like Lucas Marinus once did, lecturing in the houses of the Nagasaki scholars. I talked about who the settlers landing at Fremantle were, why they had voyaged here, and what they believed, desired, and feared. I tried to explain religion, too, but the Whadjuk Noongar had a distrust of priests after men had distributed blankets “from Jesus” to several clans up the Swan River, only for the recipients to die a few days later of what sounded like smallpox.
