Mr. Eternity (7 page)

“Later I was in a place where hot water erupted from the ground and everything smelled like sulfur,” he continued. “It was my private hell. After that I was in Las Vegas, which was a Mexican city built in a beaver meadow. It had many brothels and casinos. Eventually I found my way back to the river, which the Indians called the Pirahao, and I paddled down the whole length in an old bathtub and reached the city of New Orleans just in time for election day, where I got drunk with a writer named Edward Ellen Poe.”

This was the end of his story, but I could not banish that smile from my mind. After dinner I seized a chance to confront him. I said, “Do you really believe the stories you tell?”

“Well, I exaggerate them a little bit to entertain your father.”

“I thought just as much. But why? You’re not a slave anymore.”

“And yet I’m forbidden from leaving the city. I have to ingratiate myself and make myself indispensable, so he doesn’t oppress me or enslave me again. But it’s okay. I have some experience in this zone of endeavor.”

“Interesting,” I said. “This is not so different from how I live. A slavish way of being free. But tell me the truth, in that case. Where did you emerge from and why were you wandering the desert?”

“I will tell you. A long time ago I was ejected from Europeland because it was illegal to be a Jew, which is what I was and am. The woman I loved stayed behind. Later I learned that she’d been sold as a whore by her own people. Ever since then I’ve been looking for her. That is my whole story. It’s a story of unrecanted love.”

I considered this with grave thoughtfulness. Christopher Smart pushed his head against my leg. I said, “But this happened to me also. My father sold me as a whore. Did you know? I have to marry Anthony Fucking Corvette in four months.”

“I heard something about it, yes. It’s like you say. It is a slavish way of being free.”

“It makes me extremely furious. I think I’ll never forgive my father.”

“But you never know. Life is very long.”

“Longer for some than others. Why do they say you’re a thousand years old?”

“It isn’t so miraculous. It’s only because I reaped the benefits of modern medicine.”

There came a crash and a shout of jubilance, and when we turned around we saw my father laughing amongst broken glass. He was wearing a yellow acrylic cardigan and also his crown, which was made from obsidian and gold. He was drinking sweet potato wine from an agateware pitcher. He was very happy. If a man must be a cracked window through which chaos escapes into the world, it is nice for him if he is a king and president.

After breakfast, the ancient mariner hung upside down from a scaffold behind the kitchen shed. He’d put on some boots that could be fastened into the wooden frame. The idea was to stretch his spine so that his rib cage and pelvis didn’t become locked together. Azar was taking a shower in the tidy little bathroom shed a few yards from the back door of the boat.

“In your letter you said you needed help with some digging,” I said.

“Never mind that.” He pointed to the bathroom shed. “Your friend. How well do you know him?”

“Azar? I know him very well. I’ve known him since we were eighteen. I should tell him sometime how much he means to me.”

“But what kind of name is Azar?”

“Persian. Iranian? Persian?”

“Persian,” he said, his voice stifled and his face red.

“Iranian? He’s a Persian Jew.”

“A Jew! I myself am a Jew. Then never mind. I thought he was a Turk.”

“He’s not a Turk. Or maybe he is. I’m not sure what you mean by Turk.”

“Turk doesn’t mean anything. Our enemies were the Turks, therefore anyone who was our enemy was a Turk, but they might have been Saracens and Malabars too. Truly I had no idea where they came from. They were Mohammedans. They must still be out there somewhere.”

“I don’t know if the Turkish Turks are our enemies now or not. I’m not so knowledgeable about politics. Are you talking about the Ottomans?”

“I’ll tell you sometime about when I was a slave in the Arab world,” he said. “It was all camels and camel milk. And the Turks! I will say one
thing for them. They had a delicious pastry called a croissant. You will know it today as a French butter crescent. But I can’t tell you about these things while I’m upside down.”

Out in the street it was the twenty-first century. I drank espresso out of a Styrofoam cup, which made me feel very guilty, and then I checked my email, which I’d sworn not to do, and then I checked my weather app for new information about climate change, which I’d especially sworn not to do. There was indeed new information.
In a Warming World, Where to Grow Wine?
And less trivially,
Melting Arctic Permafrost Looms as Major Factor in Warming
.

But even though the world was ending, I got my shoes out of the car and went for a run. Tight narrow streets, reckless driving, outlandish tropical plants, pastel houses with idyllic shady verandas, frigate birds stuck like decals in the hot blue sky. Soon I felt much better. Sharp and clearheaded and cheerful. It came to me that the movie would be a success. It would make us famous. Surely this would mitigate, at least for us, the sorrow of environmental devastation?

The island had come alive by the time I got back. Groups of stunned tourists were drifting down the street. The bars were open. There were street vendors who’d write your name on a shell, but the only people interested were Korean tourists. The shell people were working hard to produce transliterations.

Out in the street in front of the ancient mariner’s boat, a stumpy little man with a plastic toupee was having a telephone conversation and drinking from a red Solo cup.

“Baby,” he said, “there’s not a thing I can do. I’ll have to stay here in Cleveland another day.”

He was wearing a lavender sport coat and a bathing suit and his hair had slipped down over his right ear. He adjusted it fastidiously and put his phone away.

“I guess you want to know who was that on the phone,” he said.

“No.”

“It was my wife.”

“Of course it was your wife.”

He was silent for a moment. He drank from his cup and looked around with some satisfaction, savoring his deception. Then he pulled a crumpled McDonald’s bag from his pocket and held it out for me to inspect.

“I’ll bet you I can throw this thing into the trash can,” he said. He pointed to the trash can, which was close, not more than ten feet.

“I’ll bet you a hundred and fifty dollars you can’t.”

He was unnerved by this response, which had surprised me as well. “Let’s say twenty.”

“Deal.”

He missed, but then he fished out his wallet and paid me the money.

“Try again,” I said, touched by his honesty. “Double or nothing.”

“I can’t. I have a gambling problem.”

“Then I’ll bet you this twenty that I can do it.”

“Deal.”

The trash can seemed so close that I could almost reach out and drop the bag in. He called me a ringer. Again he paid what was owed.

“The name’s Tom Rath,” he said.

“Is it? I think that’s a name out of literature somewhere. Isn’t it the man in the gray flannel suit?”

“It’s my alias that I use for traveling.”

“It sounds made-up. What do you do for a living, Tom Rath?”

“I own an advertising agency in St. Petersburg.”

“In Russia!”

“In Florida. Pinellas County. I also have a boat. The Tampa Bay area is home to many attractions and destinations.”

Azar asked the ancient mariner if he had known Christopher Columbus. I thought he was baiting him a little. It was like asking a tourist in D.C. if he’d met the president, and either he says no, in which case fine, or he says yes, in which case you know he’s a madman.

“Of course I knew him,” said the ancient mariner. “I sailed with him in the
Dirty Mary
. We called her the
Dirty Mary
. I was right there on deck when we slid into that coral sea and discovered the Lucayan archipelago. It was a beautiful tropic morning at the beginning of the world. I say that I was on deck, but so was everyone else. We slept on deck. It was a different time. We didn’t use forks because they were against God, for instance. They were condemned by the Inquisition. If God wanted us to use forks, why would he have given us fingers?”

Azar winked at me. I had nothing to contribute. The ancient mariner talked and talked.

“His name was not Columbus. Another thing I should explain is why I sailed with him in the first place, because after all it was a crazy thing to do. It happened like this. I’d just returned from the Canary Islands. We had heavy seas the whole way, all the wrong winds, and three men in succession were taken by a sea snake as each went to pee into the ocean one fiery dawn. When I got back to Triana, I told myself I’d never go to sea again. I wanted to start a new life as a converso, a new Christian, and live out my days in a pious and retiring manner. No more canary wine, no more gambling, no more waterfront brothels. Truly I felt I’d turned a corner and put the mistakes of youth behind me. But then, to celebrate my resolution, I agreed to sip a little wine with a shipmate. We drank it from the skin like calves at the teat, and after that there was nothing, a splash of wild color, cartoon faces, a house of negotiable affection, a whore with breasts like watermelons and teeth like artillery shells, vomit sick, vomit sick, and a week later I knew I had to get away, I had to flee to the ends of the earth, and I went looking for a ship.”

“So you went to the New World,” I said, trying to be encouraging.

“There wasn’t any New World. There was only one ocean, and India lay just over the horizon in the west, and the only land between Seville and the out-islands of the China Sea was an island called Antilia, where seven kings lived in seven golden cities. I know because I saw it. Shimmering coastline, high cliffs, pink trees with down instead of leaves. And who will explain to me how Antilia was lost? And who will explain how
these continents came to rise from the sea? They were ancient already, and fully populated.

“Sailing out into the nowhere,” Azar said, “and finding land. It must have been like walking on the moon.”

“It was like there was no moon, and we walked on it anyway.”

Later we went for a walk. We wanted to talk things over.

“Has he mentioned this woman again?” I said. “Anna Gloria?”

“He knows that she’s out there somewhere. He’s very confident.”

“He seems confident in a general way too. Happy with his choices.”

“The old man looking for love,” he said. “Five hundred years of solitude. It’s not really the story I want to tell. It’s too tidy for the movie, almost. It’s hardly a credible metaphor.”

“And where do you suppose he’s from? He’s probably from Indianapolis or something. My great-uncle was happily married, living in St. Louis, and then he made a bio-rhythm chart that told him to abandon his family. Now he lives in San Francisco and eats a whole head of garlic every day.”

Azar would have none of this. “Remember that my position is I believe him.”

“You believe him?”

“Every word.”

There were two parakeets having a shrieking argument in a date palm next door, but they quieted down as we went by. They looked down at us with sweet cartoon faces.

I said, “Come back to earth here for a second, would you?”

“I will not.”

“Just for a second. Just listen to me. If not for me, then for the sake of the movie. Don’t you think it’s best to project a good-natured skepticism? I emphasize good-natured. We want to be generous and high-hearted without being stubbornly credulous.”

“I’ve already explained to you about my kombucha epiphany,” said Azar. “I’m trying to carry this understanding into the rest of my
life. We’re raised up from little kids to doubt everything. Sidelong glances. Smirking. When there’s a miracle we roll our eyes. But not me. Not anymore. I’m drinking kombucha and appreciating the magic in life.”

“But you admit that the story is not easy to believe.”

“I don’t care if he says he’s Robinson Crusoe.”

“He says that he’s Daniel Defoe.”

“We’re going to cure ourselves of cynicism, that’s the important thing. If we make a bad movie, what do we care? Are you suddenly very exacting about movies? Maybe we should also cure ourselves of good taste.”

Something evil had happened in my head by the time we returned. I sat quietly at the table while Azar set the camera up.

“You understand what a camera is?” he said. “You’re not worried about the camera?”

“Of course he knows what a camera is!” I said.

“I know in principle that there’s nothing to be frightened of,” said the ancient mariner. He looked warily at the camera. “I know in principle it’s just magnetism or whatever it is.”

He seemed to forget it was there, however. Soon he had yet another extraordinary admission to make.

“You might be interested to know that I killed Magellan. I might as well say so. I beat him to death with a cuirass in the surf off Mactan.”

Azar wouldn’t look at me. He nodded earnestly.

“Over the years you do sometimes have to kill people,” I said, trying to imitate the ancient mariner’s casual style. “I myself have killed a few.”

He leaned back and folded his hands over his belly. “I’ve killed a tremendous number. Turks, mostly. Turks beyond counting.”

“I poisoned my master when I was a slave in Jamaica,” I said. “There’s no harm in admitting these things now.”

Azar gave me a nasty look.

“I killed the conquistador Gonzalo de Castellana,” said the ancient mariner.

“You see how nice it is to get it off your chest? I killed a prison camp guard in Australia.”

“He’s never killed anyone,” Azar said. “He’s joking.”

“He’s joking?” said the ancient mariner.

“He was never a slave in Jamaica.”

“Oh. I get it. Haha! Do I get it?”

“It’s not a good joke,” said Azar. “There’s nothing to get.”

“Well, anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad. Killing people is not an agreeable experience. It gets easier, of course. Everything does. As for Magellan, he was a tyrant. We drew straws.”