The Jules Verne Steam Balloon Page 13

  Who’s dead, Mariana. I know what you mean. He hurt Hugo.

  Because, Pastor Tvemunding said, Hugo had never really before, I believe, encountered evil face to face. He doesn’t want to admit that evil cannot be dealt with. He cannot believe that there are wholly selfish people drowned in themselves, beyond the reach of love and understanding. That there are people who, impotent to create, destroy. That there are people whose self-loathing is so deep they know nothing of generosity and invariably do the mean thing even when they might as easily do the generous one. The young man was on drugs, and had been for years, but I’m not one to blame drugs for human evil: the evil is there before the drugs, which are part of the meanness and not its cause.

  All this theological work, which will not take him into the ministry, began with a remark I made years ago, that God will remain inscrutable and uncertain forever, but that Jesus—Hugo’s Yeshua, for the Aramaic name is of the essence for him—had an intuitive idea of God that put goodness in our hands. He is light, of which we are free to partake, or be in darkness. We can be transparent to our fellow man, or opaque.

  BUCKEYE

  Possum ate a lightning bug and now he shines inside.

  RED AND YELLOW ZINNIAS

  I want to be up-to-date, Pastor Tvemunding said at tea, reaching over to wipe whipped cream from the corners of Franklin’s mouth with his napkin. There’s Hugo’s room, and the guest room which is so jolly with the apple tree at the window. Mariana and I, Hugo said, will sleep together, and I’ll rig out my old scout cot for Franklin. But, said the pastor, there’s the guest room for him. Oh no, Hugo said, travellers should stay together.

  MEADOW WITH GOLDFLOWERS AND POPPIES

  Buckeye in a Portuguese sailor’s shirt, abrupt white denim pants, beret, and espadrilles climbed backward down the rope ladder of the balloon, singing onward under over through! Quark tossed the anchor onto the meadow. The balloon tilted in its drift, exhaled vapor from its cylinders, bounced and swayed as Tumble pumped the declinators. Quark swung himself over the wicker taffrail with a deft scissor kick and landed springing. Tumble closed valves, cinched a line, made an entry in a ledger and vaulted out, rolling forward in a somersault. Ho! said Buckeye, Hi! said Quark, Hup! said Tumble. For adoration beyond match, sang Tumble pulling his sailor’s middy over his blond rick of windscrumpled hair, the scholar bulfinch aims to catch. The soft flute’s ivory touch, sang Quark sopranino, his gray American sweatshirt halfway over his head. And, careless on the hazel spray, Buckeye sang as he snatched off his Portuguese sailor’s blouse, the daring redbreast keeps at bay the damsel’s greedy clutch. Shoeless, socksless, Tumble backed out of his sailor’s pants singing, While Israel sits beneath his fig. With coral root and amber spring, Quark sang with trills and a cadenza as he wriggled off his Sears Roebuck blue jeans. The weaned adventurer sports, tossing his short white pants into the gondola of the balloon. Tumble, pretending to blush, thumbed down his drawers, Quark and Buckeye pindling briefs, and the three in their pinkbrown slender ribby nakedness sang in chiming Mozartian harmony, Where to the palm the jasmin cleaves for adoration mongst the leaves the gale his peace reports. Now labor, they sang, making a triangle of arms on one another’s shoulders, his reward receives, for adoration counts his sheaves, to peace, her bounteous prince. The nectarine his strong tint imbibes, and apples of ten thousand tribes, and quick peculiar quince.

  TROLLFLÖJTEN

  Ring-tailed kinkajous trotting on the logging road, bouncing and siffling, squeaking and hopping, in pairs and trios, alone and in quartets. Yellow parrots above them, monkeys and kingfishers. Franklin’s world, Mariana said. Years ago he was a rat in the Pied Piper festival, he and scads of littles in brown and gray rat suits with rope tails, creeping along behind the Piper playing Mozart. I remember a rat who lost his way and had to be carried by a woman and restored to the pack. Wasn’t me, Franklin said. I crept good.

  GOLDEN SAMPHIRE

  Buckeye in the meadow, where the balloon was tethered. Tumble and Quark were leapfrogging by the river. He held out his hand for a meadowlark to fly to him and stand on his palm. She spoke to him. He answered in quail. Silly! she said. Do I look like a quail hen? He spoke goat. She laughed. Frog. Giggle.

  AURIGA. BETELGEUSE. BARNARD’S STAR.

  In spite of their intangibility, neutrinos enjoy a status unmatched by any other known particle, for they are actually the most common objects in the universe, outnumbering electrons by a thousand million to one. In fact, the universe is really a sea of neutrinos, punctuated only rarely by impurities such as atoms. It is even possible that neutrinos collectively outweigh the stars, and therefore dominate the gravity of the cosmos.

  RIGHT THE SECOND TIME

  Tom’ll be here in a bit, Hugo said to Mariana nose to nose. I think I can walk, Mariana said, though my brains are all gone, so much jelly they are. There’s somebody. It was Franklin. O wow, he said, looking squiggle-eyed and pretending to barf. Who, said Mariana, pulled his piddler till his eyes rolled back in his head the whole week we were at Papa Tvemunding’s, while we had to make do with teenage smooching? You said Augustus would spoil me, Franklin said solemnly. I like Augustus. I imagine so, Hugo said. Nasty little spy. Papa with a dry cough to introduce the subject, which amused him tremendously, said that Franklin confided in him that we were not making love, but only kissing a lot and whispering, before we went to sleep. I guess, he’d opined, you wouldn’t like them to, but he didn’t tell us that Papa had laughed and said that love was a joyful and good thing, and that young people were very close to God when they made love. Franklin, being Franklin, next got Papa to say a good word for rabbity-nosed boys jacking off, in moderation, naturally. It’s nature, Franklin said. To be thought of as fun. That was the afternoon the rascal so coolly shed his pants and stomped around upstairs whacking away. Afternoons, and once a morning and twice in the afternoon, Franklin explained, was because Augustus said I was to, but at night was because you said I was to, if I wanted. So I did. I suppose, Mariana said to the skylight, if a third party had assured him of the naturalness of the kinship between boys and monkeys, Franklin would have had no time to eat, sleep, or have all those long talks with Papa Tvemunding. Who, said Hugo, spoiled him rotten. I promised to write him a letter, Franklin said. I will, too. Tom’s here, Mariana said.

  Hugo, who had pulled on long sweatpants and a singlet and was howling for coffee, set the painting of the Bicycle Rider on the easel. He had whited out the lazily handsome blond face and its dead blue eyes. The right arm, on the fist of which the head had leaned, was also overpainted. Dark background’s going, too, Hugo mused: it wants to be white. Mariana, her breasts loose under a rich blue pullover, was zipping herself into tight coral shorts when big Tom, tossing his floppy hair out of his eyes, shifted from foot to foot. He crossed his hands on his behind, touching a lampshade with an elbow. He then cupped them over his crotch, seeing instantly that, expand or contract, he was equally awkward. He tried sliding his fingers into his pockets, hitting the lampshade again, and settled for knuckling his nose and scratching a convenient itch on his thigh. Shown the painting, he stared at it. That, Hugo said, was that dopey kid who was a day student, the one who floated around on lysergic acid and managed the ultimate in trendy distance by killing himself with an overdose of God knows what. I tried getting his head out of his ass. I failed. No, Mariana said, he failed you.

  Anyway, Hugo said, I’m going to repaint. Tom hates coffee, Mariana said brightly. Every time he’s been here, he has suffered and squirmed. Beer, milk, fizz water, which? Beer, Tom said, his voice rasping at his own audacity. Head turned slightly, so that you’re looking at me out of the side of your eyes. Right elbow on the chair arm. Everything else the same, except that your body is harder and better muscled than the Rider’s, so I have all sorts of changes to make. Take off your pants. This sloshed Tom’s beer. Leave your briefs on. They’re nicely stinted and stressed.

  The balloon, Hugo could see through the skylight, was just outside.
He had learned on a walk with Mariana that she could not see Buckeye, Quark, and Tumble. They had come and stood gravely interested around while they sat under the oak, Mariana’s head in Hugo’s lap.

  Burnt sienna, Hugo said, raw sienna, titanium white. Franklin made a great show of finding the tubes and laying them on the little table that served as a palette.

  Buckeye was on the skylight, peering in. Short khaki pants, gray white and ochre striped soccer jersey, and not till he came into the room, through the door, in less time than the blinking of an eye, could you see his dinky blue cap.

  Calabash! he said to Hugo, straked gourd pumpkin vine!

  If I had some paper and a pencil and an envelope and a stamp, Franklin said, I could write Augustus. And, Mariana said, if you could spell and write so that anybody but God could read it. Put in your letter, Hugo said, that while we visited I saw what I needed to see. Say that the casting out of demons is the hub on which everything else turns. He’ll know what I mean. The self is the demon. Demon out, daimon in.

  O wow! Franklin said. Start spelling. Hugo painted, Tom, with only his good nature to see him through his ordeal, took courage from the fact that it was his beauty that got him into this, and thought of seducing Franklin without breaking Lemuel’s heart, share him perhaps, and Mariana, and even Hugo, and the green-eyed sailor with the silver eyelashes, humped pectorals, and a sleepy friendly smile. Mariana spelled, Franklin wrote and erased and wrote again. Hugo painted.

  Tumble was at the skylight, Quark looking over his shoulder. Why do you keep looking up? Mariana asked idly. The light, Hugo said. It’s what I paint by.

  Buckeye was inspecting Tom, closely, and with doggish curiosity. His eyes met Hugo’s. Under all’s a fire so fine it is and isn’t in and out of time, a pulse of is, a pulse of isn’t. But, Buckeye said with a shrug of his boney shoulders and a crinkle of dimples in his smile, that isn’t worth knowing, is it? Over all’s the nothing that’s something because of the curving tides of the is and isn’t. No matter, that, either. He stood behind Tom and put his hands around his neck and rested his chin in Tom’s hair. Quark read Franklin’s letter. Tumble sniffed Mariana. What matters, Buckeye said, is that there are so many who don’t know their right hand from their left.

  Jonah

  In the harbor of Joppa in Phoenicia a merchant ship with two kids stitched in black on its sail the yellow of pumpkins was stowing and lashing its cargo when yet another passenger made his way through the crates of figs, bundles of cedarwood, and straw-bound casks of sweet water being unloaded from asses, to pay in full from a leather purse his fare to Tarshish.

  He had a fine black beard, round as a basket. Though his carpetbags were neatly strapped and his clothes showed that he was an experienced traveler, there was a furtiveness in his eyes, as if there might be someone about whom he did not care to meet. His staff was of olive, and his name was Dove. Teomim, he read aloud the ship’s name on the prow, so he was a man of letters. He added, by way of a friendly word with whoever might be interested, that for a sign of A Pair of Kids his people said Rebecca’s Twins, or Esau and Yakov.

  —Yes, said the captain, the good of pictures is that you can call them what you want. I have heard those stars called The Double Gazelle.

  —Simeon and Levi also, Dove remarked.

  The sea was as dark as wine, the sky sweet. A stout wind took them out of the bay, toward the other side of the world. A sailor played a tambourine, the sail swelled fat and tight, and the helmsman with a complacent bellow ordered sailors to let out or bring in lines, to trim this, and make that fast, until he was satisfied that his ship, the wind, and sea were in his hands.

  —Grand weather! was the opinion of a merchant. While gourds are ripening and spiders spinning is the time to sail. This part of the year, I mean. Earlier, when swallows nest.

  —Signs, said Dove, if we could but read them all.

  —My guess, Brother Dove, is that your business in this world is with more than salt fish and dried figs?

  —I’ll wager a scholar, the captain said.

  —A clerk, said Dove, in the survey service, but with some training in the scrolls.

  He talked, as men of business talk, of his work with the boundary markers when the government extended the tax lands from the gates at Hamath to the shores of Arabah. He had searched the titles for that, and knew that Jeroboam, the second of that name, had been pleased with his work and had even put his name in the deeds as the consultant who had certified the religious correctness of this extension of Israel.

  For Dove had been educated at Gath Hepher as a man of law.

  A raindrop, from nowhere, plopped on the back of his hand.

  In the school he had mastered the scrolls, but his heart was with the study of birds and plants. He had drawn greenshanks, buntings, and stonechats in the margins of his texts, the moabite sparrow, smew, stint, flycatcher, snipe, grebe, godwit, wheatear, moor hen, goldeneye.

  He felt that he saw the Everlasting better in His creation than in the scrolls of the law. Angels had come down from the stars to men and women of old, and the Everlasting had dealt with Moses and Abraham face to face, a fire in a bush, a voice in the wind. But Dove preferred to know the Everlasting in the garden, the meadow, the terebinth grove.

  The fair wind that had taken them from Joppa was beginning to blow hot, as from an oven, and then chill, as through a door opened in springtime. Sultry, then fresh. Fresh, sultry.

  But the week before, of an evening, when he was admiring gourds in his garden, he had felt a voice at his ear. His astonishment was as great as his fear. There was no mistaking the voice. It was that of the Everlasting.

  A merchant pointed out to another, and to Dove, a glow on the tip of the mast.

  That fitful misty light was like the voice in the garden.

  —O do not doubt but do believe!

  —Lord I am not worthy.

  —Thy name is the carrier dove.

  The archaic Hebrew of the Everlasting with its purring gutterals and shimmering sibilants dropped word by word into his heart.

  The wind fell calm, sails hung slack, the sea went flat.

  —Go to Nineveh in Assyria, it said. Go to Nineveh in Assyria and take the people from their superstitions. Tell them that I am. Tell them fate is a lie. Tell them that I am that I am. Tell them that their images of monsters and wandering stars are but a pitiful and childish understanding of being.

  It was in the cool after sunset, shadows filling the garden, doves cooing in the terebinths. He was admiring the small white gourds straked with bitter green, the longnecked gourds the color of sand, the martin’s nest gourds. Cucumbers, gherkins, pumpkins.

  It was old Liveforever, no doubt about it. Jonah go to Nineveh in Assyria.

  He had done well to flee.

  The sea began to heave in low greasy swells.

  What had he to do with the dovecotes and bee gums of Assyria? The lions and hyenas of Assyria? They had Ishtar there, the abomination of the bed. Calculators of starlight, pounders of unlawful herbs, delineators of impossible creatures, bulls with wings, demons with claws.

  The Everlasting is a spirit, source of our being, who guides the feet of the ant and the tooth of the fox, but man was left free to find for himself the hand of his maker. The swelling pumpkin sits while the vine on which it fattens creeps and multiplies its leaves. So the heart fills with knowledge as the body moves through the world, learning from kind and mean alike.

  If the Everlasting made us free, why does he treat us like slaves?

  There was a devil dance of lightning where a black wall of cloud sank down to the darkening sea.

  —A squall, the captain said.

  It hit so hard and so suddenly that the ship moved backwards. The sail tore loose and boomed above them. The sailors, each shouting to his god, began throwing bolts of merchandise into the sea. Some man, one said, with whom Baal is angry, is aboard this luckless ship. Another cried that someone who had done an unclean thing in the eyes
of Thoth was with them. Who? The passenger Dove was asleep in a trance, some work of magic upon him.

  The captain shook him until his head rolled on his shoulders.

  —Is it you? he bellowed.

  —He is the one! they all agreed.

  —Is it you? the captain cried over and over.

  —It is I, said Dove. I am a Jew. I am gripped by a great fear of my god, whose name is Everlasting, creator of the seas and the dry land.

  —What can we do, a merchant asked, to keep your guilt from drowning us all?

  And he said unto them:

  —Take me up, and cast me into the sea. So shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.

  Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship to land, but they could not. For the sea worked against them. Wherefore they cried unto their gods, saying, Let us not perish because of this man, O Lord! Why should the innocent die in the loss of a sinner?

  Then they hoisted Dove, three men carrying him, and threw him over the side.

  Now the Everlasting had sent a great fish to swallow Dove, whose body was inside the fish for three days, but his face looked from the fish’s mouth, and he held onto its back teeth. The fish leapt from wave to wave, and Dove breathed when the fish breathed, and held his breath when it swam under water.

  I am, said Dove in his anguish, banished from the eyes of the Everlasting. I am dead, and yet alive. I exist, but the Everlasting is not with me.

  I know what it is to exist and yet not be. I know how the roots of mountains and the bottom of the sea exist without knowing. I see that by putting myself and my comfort before the word of the Everlasting, I have abandoned mercy. I have made myself a stranger to kindness, and live in darkness, away from the light. My debt is enormous, but were I allowed to pay it, my thanksgiving would be endless, and I would pay beyond measure, again and again, without thought for anything else. For there is no life except that the Everlasting gives it.