The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 9

"Good. Good, I, uh ... I'm not the same guy she was with last time."

"I know. I bet we seem pretty different to you, don't we?"

"A little bit. Maybe we could talk about it. Get a hamburger or something."

The sun sets, and he sees nothing. Only her green eyes that have been with him since the service. When he finally does turn around, Emily is still nowhere in sight, and Marla Ann is not the person he thought she was. She is far too old.

"I've got something you want to see," she whispers; it is a new tone, low and conspiratorial. "Up at the church. In the bas.e.m.e.nt." And she is suddenly a child again who can't keep a secret.

"Really? Where's Emily?"

"Up there. Waiting for us."

And so he follows, knowing already that the story has taken a new twist. That Emily isn't just waiting. In fact is nowhere in sight. And the last car is disappearing down the misty road to town.

"Where's your Jeep?" the girl asks.

"We parked it a little off the road. So the rest of you could get through."

"Oh. You ever been to a Holiness church before?"

But since his lips are dry, he simply shakes his head.

The bas.e.m.e.nt is like a shallow grave beneath the church, its door almost level with the ground because the slope is steep. They go down two steps, then down another as they cross the threshold into a damp well of earth.

There are cardboard boxes disintegrating into the floor. Tightly tied stacks of newspaper. A whole pew shoved up against sagging bookshelves. A lawn mower. And enough tools and paintbrushes, rolls of wire, to suggest the innocent acc.u.mulation of any barn or attic. Except for the broken gravestone and the expression on Marla Ann's face. She glows with antic.i.p.ation, knowing that there is a sweet secret only she can reveal, like a girl who sneaks her boyfriend into her bedroom for the first time. She steps back and invites him to look closer before showing the thing itself, the real reason she has brought him here. And he is a man who cannot take his eyes away, even though he knows that there will not be a happy ending.

So he does as she wills him. He plays the game. Finding first a gla.s.s tea jar holding perhaps half a gallon of filthy, swamp-colored water and then beside it, on the same shelf, a hatchet and a can of gasoline. Higher up there is an old photograph alb.u.m that, at first, he believes is what she wants him to find. But when he reaches, she is suddenly there beside him, murmuring, "No. Lower. Go back to where you were." Squatting beside the shelves, chin on her knees now. Smiling. When he kneels, she draws in the long deep breath of calm certainty.

It is the jar she wants him to see. He looks. And the water moves.

It is a liquid thing inside the jar, but not the muddied water that he thought. It is coiled upon itself in multicolored brown and black and gold, breathing so subtly that it looks like the rocking of pond water after a pebble has been dropped in, its head submerged among the rippling scales. A body swelling and constricting in easy slumber.

"They just got him," she says. "He's never been in church before."

Sam can't move. "Why did you bring me here? Why would you ...?"

But she reaches past him, brushing his cheek with her arm, and taps the side of the jar. Inside, the familiar shape rises up from the tight coils, black tongue flickering. "Shhh," she says. "There's nothing to be afraid of." Lifting the jar now with both hands and holding it next to her own cheek, giving just the slightest shake until the tail stands up and makes the first tentative vibrations. "You're safe with me," she says. "You're safe." In hypnotic repet.i.tion. Until the open mouth of the vessel is before him, and she is saying, "Touch it."

The words should come like an electric shock, but they are numb and distant.

"That's what you have to do," she says. "Touch it. If you want to feel what I feel."

Sam's hand moves through the thick air. Across the open mouth of the jar. And down, into the perfect moment, when it happens. There is a flash of light, a whir of advancing film, and then an explosion of gla.s.s. His eyes blink shut, but not before he sees the green aurora at the edge of her world.

MICHAEL.

Loves his sister. She will call him once or twice a year with her overpowering need. Can you meet me, she will ask, in the aftermath of a story about a shooting or a stabbing or a fire. Can you meet me in the parking lot of some cheap motel, her voice as faint as a child's, and hold me, Michael, long enough to stop the shaking. Could you meet me? Michael? At the foot of a mountain where two highways cross. And bring your bag.

Breaker.

So many times it seems eternal. She whines. I lie. It's our fate. We'll be bound to each other in h.e.l.l by tangled telephone lines, except this time she reaches me through the air, across an entire ocean, inside an airport terminal. It's like a wasp buzzing in my briefcase, and I extract it with the tips of my fingers, holding the sound as close to my face as I can bear. When I hear her voice, I realize that she can reach me anywhere.

She says, without greeting, "Charles, I need a favor."

"You'll have to speak up," I tell her. "I don't think we have a good connection."

"Charles, don't start. I need you to take Eric this weekend."

"Narissa? Is that you?"

"Anthony and I are doing a wedding upstate. I need you to take Eric. Camping or something, you're always promising to take him camping."

"Gee, Nariss, I'd love to help you, but I'm sort of tied up at the moment."

"Where are you?"

"Where am I?"

"Yes, Charles. Where. Are. You."

"You mean right now? Right this minute?"

"Charles, for G.o.d's sake!"

"Oh. Yeah, well, right now I'm in Ma.r.s.eilles. Might not be back for a while."

"You're in Ma.r.s.eilles?"

"Yeah. I do international maritime law, Narissa. You know, boats and water. This is a very logical place. You and Anthony ought to try it sometime."

"You're lying."

"You dialed the number."

I have a talent for finding the argument-stopper. It's a gift-knowing that she had got the maid to call my office and then dial this number before touching the phone herself. And also knowing she would never admit it.

The truth is that I was in Ma.r.s.eilles yesterday, where they sell cold medication at the airport shops. Today I am here, with a sinus infection, at another airport on an island whose name I have forgotten, just off the coast of Liberia. Barely able to breathe. Right now I am waiting for a man named Robert N'mburo, who is a local chieftain, or whatever they call them over here, hoping that he will be able to write his own name. He isn't really required to write his own name, but it would make this whole charade easier. So I pinch my nose. Take sips of air through my mouth. Then finally, at some point, look down and see that I really am fondling a cigarette.

Waiting, after I get rid of the phone call, the way you do in this section of Africa.

And what a dump.

I can say that because my employer-International Filth, Human Misery, and Contamination, Incorporated-owns everything in sight. Really. We own the airstrip, the island itself, approximately two hundred ships in various stages of disa.s.sembly, the trucks, the cables, the acetylene torches, the infirmary such as it is, the dead fish, the twenty-four miles of sh.o.r.eline, and mineral rights. It's all in my briefcase, printed on 8 14 legal sheets. We own the dump and most of the human beings who live here. On the island at the end of the earth, whose name I cannot at present remember. And we own the terminal building in which I am sitting. And of course we own me, down to the pinstripes and New Orleans accent-slightly adulterated by the necessity of living in Manhattan for the past fourteen years and representing said ironies in federal district court from time to time.

So I'll say it again because these little moments don't last. And because I like saying it. We own this part of the world. We are the government. We are the parent, the tribal elder, the proprietor, and savior of this island. We are G.o.d, and this is our Earth. It is our lump of dirt until it outlasts its usefulness, a moment which, unfortunately, arrived about six weeks into our last business quarter. Paradise is still profitable, but when your legal liabilities-not to say the closing arguments of several lawsuits-begin to creep into the accounting.... Well, that's why I'm here. To shut it all down.

This particular building reminds me of a subway station, except that it has an oily teakwood floor and a few windows the size of portholes. Nevertheless, the air is subway air. I know it when I see it. And there's rust blossoming on the walls, like the mineral gardens in caves. I've never seen anything quite like it-great cankerous rust flowers, as crenellated as carnations, growing on the walls of a building. It's unnatural. Someone should pa.s.s an ordinance. The place smells like a fish market and echoes like a cathedral. I keep expecting someone to walk by and use the word aeroplane. That's the sort of thing that pops into my mind when I'm not thinking about the fact that I am seven hundred miles from the nearest aspirin. And the fact that no one in this room has ever heard of Robert N'mburo. And the further fact that my wrist.w.a.tch is missing.

Someone should have shut this place down years ago.

Did I say International Filth, Misery, Etc.? I believe I meant to say International Recovery Systems, Inc., a Fortune 500 company of sterling reputation whose major concern at the moment is that I make those two hundred ship carca.s.ses disappear. Before, of course, they generate further unfortunate publicity and a verdict or two.

The really interesting thing is that I can do it.

At least, I can make them disappear from my client's side of the table. As I said, I do not require Mr. Robert N'mburo's signature. I simply require evidence that my masters have made a good-faith effort to eliminate the atrocious conditions in which Mr. N'mburo's people labor, those impoverished shipbreaking members of his tribe who, as luck would have it, are also members of what might be the most dangerous profession on earth. Thank G.o.d they haven't yet discovered lawyers.

In any event, my name is Charles Metairie Allemand.

And it is my sincere belief that the only truly happy people in the world at this instant are the two little boys, as black as bear cubs, who have been roly-polying, climbing, and chasing each other through the one big room since we got off the plane together. Their mother is a dignified young woman who watches them, and me, with equal calm. And I watch them because they have just found the one oddity about this place that even sarcasm cannot explain. It is a large marine compa.s.s, of the kind they used to have on sailing vessels, which has been bolted to the floor near one of the windows. Twice as large as a fire hydrant and as shiny as a medallion. And here is the human hope for all of us. It is the universal and ineluctable fact that no two boys anywhere in the world will ask why there is a marine compa.s.s in an airport. They will simply run to it and climb like monkeys. They will strain to lift it from the floor. They will try to make the needle move. They will fiddle and finagle and go belly-polishing over every inch of bra.s.s until one of them has clambered to the top and thrown his arms up like a champion. That's what I like about this pair. They're not lawyers.

I wonder which of them has my watch.

You see, I understand that there is a terrible logic holding this island to the surface of the earth. Different rules and regulations. And I know that the next few hours, or the next few days, will pa.s.s like a dream and that it will be useless to pretend otherwise. Sooner or later someone will sign the doc.u.ments in my briefcase, perhaps even someone named Robert N'mburo, after which I will deliver one set to the Interior Ministry in Monrovia and then board the next flight to any major city in North Africa. Whence I will fly to Paris. Pick up an aspirin or twelve. Then from Paris to New York, where I will be paid an absurd amount of money by my employer, International Recovery Systems, Incorporated, for making this place disappear.

It's amazing how we can manipulate reality. Ten minutes ago, when the phone rang in my briefcase, every person in this building stopped to listen. Every one of them heard me lie to a woman who was not my wife, for a reason that I cannot, even at this moment, explain.

"Where are you?" she said. Just a disembodied voice from very far away, like a conscience.

"Where am I?" I said. "Do you mean right now? Where am I right this minute?"

And the voice said, "Charles, for G.o.d's sake. We need ..."

And I said Ma.r.s.eilles. "I'm in Ma.r.s.eilles."

While no one even blinked.

My greatest fear is of dying at sea. Of being swallowed by the ocean itself or by one of its creatures. I dream about it after watching the History Channel, those World War II sagas where they show submarine footage and the old fellows talk about what it's like to be torpedoed. I have nightmares of being trapped in the bowels of a sinking ship as the first foam rushes across the deck and steel doors go slamming and then I realize that outside my ever-constricting bubble there will be no one left aboard to hear the hammering of my fists. I think of that from time to time and how easily the sea erases any hint of our pa.s.sage. All the old fellows who didn't make it onto television. And I think how, in the midst of the gray Atlantic, five hundred miles from the continental shelf, the largest vessels go down without a ripple, slowly spinning through the first hundred feet of filtered light as schools of halibut scatter and strings of kelp become tattered streamers on the coffin as it drops into that darker deep, beyond anything even remotely human. Down, down to the places where sea dragons and skeletal, armor-plated worms wear their own luminescence and stare with mindless curiosity at our own white orbs, while-still descending-we drift far past the point where every breathing thing has already imploded and the bones have turned to jelly. Until at last we settle, the two of us, ship and self, into the sedimentary muck, which oozes like cold syrup through the one open hatch and down the vacant stair. Somewhere on the abyssal plain.

Or I think at times of drowning within sight of sh.o.r.e, drifting into some sharp crevice between brown rocks or floating facedown in a tidal pool like a tourist diver who's lost his mask and fins. Dying there and being inflated by my own pompous ga.s.ses, only to be punctured by an inquisitive crab so that I might become a holiday for the millions who feed from the bottom up, a bounteous plantation of limpets and filter feeders, a pink crust of coralline algae outlining my form like chalk marks at the scene of a crime. While the urchins rejoice. I, bobbing like a buoy until all my fat has been suctioned away and the blue-tentacled anemones have lost their sting. So that I sink into a kind of immortality among a constellation of starfish, my ribs pointing toward the sun like the fingers of the first astronomer. At the bottom of a deep, deep sky.

And just before the jellied tentacles, when our marriage was breaking up and Narissa and I thought we could cure everything with a flight to that other paradise, I saw the battleship Arizona. Spectacularly visible from the air, resting in less than twenty feet of water beneath a pane of wavy green gla.s.s. Turrets perfectly aligned, the familiar white memorial like a crown on a h.o.a.ry head. From my tiny window I could detect a peculiar undersea motion that made the ship's outline indistinct-an unresisting ebb and flow of marine plants that carpeted Arizona as if to a.s.sert how thoroughly, even in this remote and shallow puddle, the ocean would reclaim its own. Think of it, a battleship consumed by plants, and you will understand why as we prepared to land I told Narissa that we would not be among the tourists dropping their wreaths. Because I had already sensed that within inches of the surface were the outstretched arms of 1,177 sailors, a thought that terrified me even at a distance of several miles. As she leaned across to gape.

And now all these images flood my mind as I contemplate the young man standing in front of me. I'm trying to comprehend his words. He speaks perfect English, which is, after all, the official language of Liberia, but simple comprehension is not the problem. Rather, it sounds as though he is saying, "I have come to take you to the ship." A message that complicates things, since I am sure he means one of the skeletal ships being consumed along the sh.o.r.e.

"Mr. N'mburo sent you, yes?" I say.

"Yes, yes. Robert. I will bring you directly to him. Everything is arranged. I hope you had a decent and comfortable flight."

He is stick thin and just under six feet, a boy really, whose face is less than twelve years old and whose white shirt is b.u.t.toned to the collar. Perhaps one of the Ba.s.sa people come down from the hinterland with his parents to make money in the shipbreaking trade. I do not care to explain to him the horrors I a.s.sociate with ships, but neither do I intend to meet Robert N'mburo onboard one of the floating corpses at the edge of this island. "There has been a mistake," I say to him. "I am supposed to meet Mr. N'mburo here, at this place, now."

"A mistake with many apologies, Mr. Allemand, which most a.s.suredly is being met with correction, as everything is now in order. I have transportation immediately outside."

"What is your name?"

"Call me Sammy, that is the easy way. I will drive you immediately to your arrangement."

The absurdity of being driven anywhere by a twelve-year-old does not occur to me; it's the other absurdity that tingles along my spine. "Sammy, there is no need for anyone to be on a ship. In fact, I'm here to close down the shipyard. As a protection, for the workers. It's already decided. This meeting with your representative is just a formality really. A signature is all that's required. There won't be any more ships."

"Yes, I will take you. It is immediately arranged. I am an utmost excellent driver with apologies for this slight change, although I must believe that there will be more ships."

For a moment a flicker of fear crosses Sammy's face, and I want to say to him of course there will be more ships. There will always be rotting horror and putrefaction. But what I say instead is "I need for Mr. N'mburo to be here."

"Here? At this ship?"

Now he has confused me, and I have to stand and start over. Several people have come to stand with me and to offer help in several dialects. "No," I say. "Not a ship. I need you to bring Robert N'mburo here. To sign papers only."

"Here?" Sammy says.

The people nod, and I nod. "Yes. Here."

"To this ship?"

Everyone looks at me.

I look at the rust on the walls. The oily teakwood floor. Then Sammy takes my hand and leads me outside, several dozen yards out onto the airstrip itself where we turn and look and see the whole of it-a silhouette that still reminds me of a terminal building at some small airport upon some New England coast. Although now of course the details bring out the truth. There is the horizontal stripe, faded but still visible, just beneath a terraced array of windows, some with wipers still attached. Stanchions like a row of unthreaded needles picketing the open deck. Boom and funnels at the aft. The twin flags of America and Liberia fluttering from the radio mast. It is the superstructure of a cargo vessel, cut at her traverses, and dragged by some Egyptian strength across the beach and to this level stretch of sand. The type of thing I have seen in this part of Africa before, a solution so practical in its conception and yet so insane in its execution that you had sooner believe that a ship had fallen from the sky, burying herself, like the Arizona, in a shallow grave.

The boy looks at the terminal building and then looks at me, smiling at the colossal joke. "I am thinking that you are finding this very hard to believe, the way things are done."

I feel like a man who's been lifted out of the grave, and for a moment I share his humor. "I don't find anything hard to believe, Sammy. For the right money ..., I'll believe anything you say."

This is something he understands and that unleashes a flood of enthusiasm. "Gbambhala is a most logical place. We are not part of Liberia at all, Mr. Allemand, I am hoping you understand. The entire island has been purchased by the United States, and we are working for America."

I don't contradict him. "Gbambhala? Has it always been called that?"

"Yes, always I believe. And now you are still wishing to meet here?"

I stare toward the harbor, but all I can make out are wild sea oats and a scattering of palms and bilinga. The sun is low enough to make the beach road look like a strip of silver. "No. No, I just need a minute to, ah, get oriented here, Sammy. I just need to ... get this over with and then ... When did you say was the last flight, to the mainland?"

"There is a flight to Marrakech very late. Usually eleven o'clock or perhaps midnight. And a ferry boat to Abidjan across the water, in that direction perhaps a mile. Sometimes it arrives in the evening." He has a future, this kid who can remember more details than your average litigator.

"That's fine. Let's try to get me on that plane. But first let's make the call on Mr. N'mburo, wherever he happens to be."

There are only three places in the world where shipbreaking occurs on a large scale: Alang in India; Chittagong in Bangladesh; and the six-mile stretch of beach at Gbambhala-a wholly owned subsidiary of International Recovery Systems, Inc. There are no large shipbreaking operations anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Only desperately poor people can afford this work, and only a government ruled by a lunatic would sell an island to a private shipbreaking firm. Still, it is one of the most profitable enterprises on earth. The turbines alone from a twenty-five-year-old tanker will fetch nearly a million dollars. The unburned fuel and oil, electrical equipment and wiring, wood furniture and decking will bring in another half million. Then you are down to the precious metals-bra.s.s, copper, and steel-so much steel that Chittagong supplies the entire steel output for Bangladesh. There is not another steel mill in the entire country.

What is left after a ship has been broken is too small to be counted unless you count lives. The residue occurs in two forms-liquid and powder. The liquid will always be several hundred gallons of diesel fuel, refinery oil, insecticide, complex polymers, dyes, and fishery waste. It's the sludge you see along the coast. The powders will be invisible, occurring only as a haze hanging over the yard: it's made up of asbestos, silicon, steel filings, wood ash, and PCBS. Mixed together they form a gray paste or a gray-white dust that reminds you of Seattle mornings. When it settles on the water, it shines like a mirror for days, killing all marine life for one to two miles out to sea. The workers clean the sh.o.r.e by shoveling contaminated sand into levees and connecting them into one long road that parallels every shipbreaking operation in the world and separates the sh.o.r.e from the shantytown. Such roads can run for miles at six or eight feet above the gradient. Some of them require tunnels to cross from one side to the other. I once drove the sh.o.r.e road at Alang, drunk, late at night when it was most spectacular, speeding from one end to the other, just to watch the places where the sand was on fire, like the road into h.e.l.l.

But the road at Gbambhala is no more than eight inches above grade. It gives an un.o.bstructed view of the beach. On our left is the town, separated from us by a flooded ditch with numerous plank bridges. A mob of children chases our jeep past hanging clothes, cook fires, and the tangle of ropes that seem to hold the encampment together. Sammy looks like an adult as he drives, sounding the horn with an air of grave responsibility and waving casually at the youngsters who chase us like tattered ghosts. On the right are the ships, twenty medium-sized cargo vessels already grounded and another sixty trawlers and smaller craft being picked apart. Among the sharp-angled shadows of late afternoon we can see figures swarming over each corpse like an army of ants. That's the first thing that comes to mind; but they do not look like beached whales, these ships. They look like toppled buildings. Or like train wrecks at the edge of the ocean. And at first you cannot grasp what has happened because it does not seem logical that human beings would deliberately create this kind of destruction.

Sammy tells me that Robert N'mburo is supervising the lifting of the propeller shaft from the engine room of one of the freighters. We drive to the high tide line and begin to walk the rest of the way. They've made a path of palm fronds in honor of my visit. Everything has been arranged.

Farther out to sea are the silhouettes of another hundred vessels, all waiting for a vacant slot on the beach, some anch.o.r.ed, one already building up cruising speed. We stop and listen to the radioman fifty yards below us. He's directing the captain and engineer on a tanker that seems to be headed away from sh.o.r.e. "Sendai Maru, what is your heading?"