I’m mad between long intervals of horrible sanity.
I feel no pain when madness crests.
Keith Sidney “Max” Pontifex
There’s an island where fish have wings and birds dive in the blue for their favorite catch, where men, groping for self-realization, blinded by the sun but scarcely enlightened by their colonial past, prey on each-other the better to cope with a common nightmare.
It was serendipity, not purpose or plan that first brought me to Stonewall. I would call this small island home for a decade or so as I searched for Shangri-La and surrendered lustfully to its siren call. Beyond its golden shores and the languid cadence of its ways, the world turned, and each rotation witnessed the dawning of human hopes and the demise of reason. Man was neither smarter nor more depraved than he’d ever been -- just more inventive, brazen. It was a ten-year period defined by momentous events long since forgotten or demoted to the back pages of history: The Watergate scandal. The raid on Entebbe. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger seventy-three seconds after takeoff. In Edmond, Oklahoma, Patrick Sherrill had gone “postal,” killed fourteen co-workers and committed suicide. The Iran-Contra affair exposed yet another aspect of America’s two-faced foreign policy.
In far-flung Stonewall, hidden from view under an azure canopy, as lush rain forests and mangroves spread their green tendrils all the way to the sea, things take place that escape scrutiny.
Fickle and self-absorbed, people entomb what they need not remember; they enshrine what they will not forget. Trifles take on mythical dimensions. Minor scandals feed the rumor mill; large ones invite outlandish, crowd-pleasing twaddle or ignite choleric tirades. Reminiscences apt to give people nightmares are promptly swept under a rug of selective amnesia. If you probe too deeply, if you resort to insightful conjecture, you will be greeted with suspicion or scorn. When doors slam shut, when friendly smiles turn to scowl, the truth, mind-boggling or hideous, lurks underfoot like a scorpion squeezing beneath a rock. Shadow politics and spin-doctoring are Stonewall’s national sports. Boozing and cricket come a very distant third and fourth.
To the more astute observer, and for all its undeniable allure, Stonewall is eerily reminiscent of a theatrical backdrop; an all-too-perfect Hollywoodish “trompe l’oeil” that lures wanderers to its surreal perfection the way hibiscus and frangipani attract butterflies and bees. At first glance its exquisite beauty, the kind rhapsodized in syrupy sonnets and corny travelogues, can be hypnotic. Ringed by coastlines of striking majesty, silvery beaches here, rocky shores hammered by high surf there, it nestles, seductive and unruffled, a few square miles of old colonial charm seemingly unruffled, untouched by time. There’s the ubiquitous clip-clop of horses’ hooves on dusty back roads, whitewashed little churches, tumble down wooden rum shops where vacant-eyed loafers doze off in the noonday sun, and amiable peddlers who hawk worthless trinkets at jaded tourists. There’s the redolence of grilled fish wafting from under the parasols of pushcart eateries; the cooling evening breezes, the graceful dawn-and-twilight flights of snowy egrets over lush, mist-covered uplands; the crisp, starlit nights and the leathery sound of batwings thrashing in the darkness.
Behind this idyllic setting unfold dramas unimagined by visitors, ignored or squelched by the press and warily entombed by the locals. Not far from the posh resorts, the crystal waters of the lagoons, the quaint restaurants and grungy guesthouses, pettifoggery, deceit, collusion and intimidation reign supreme while the locals live in sham unconcern.
Low tide. The surf tugs gently at the flotsam of sea moss, sun-bleached coral and broken shells scattered on the slick sandy shore. Purple clouds glide past a waxen moon, exposing an amber and cobalt sky. Pressing low against the sea, the remnants of a distant storm fade away as one last streak of lightning splashes the eastern horizon with a silvery glow.
Stillness fills my ears as I dream. Tree frogs suspend their call. Red-shelled crabs scuttle back to their burrows as the sun’s smallest arc turns night into day. Shafts of light burst through the splintered shutters. A rooster crows in the distance. Doves respond, cooing their melancholy lilt. I make contact with reality when the voices down by the beach are not those that inhabit my dreams.
But I’m not here to dream. With every blink of the eye reality returns, clipped and spasmodic, like a badly edited film, like a parody of life in which nothing lies so well as the naked truth. What I see and what my words convey somehow never seem to coincide. Syntax gets in the way. I’m now the prisoner of my own craft. Narrating a phantasm may be as risky as living it.
Rising from the ashtray, a thin, unwavering column of bluish smoke climbs from the smoldering mosquito-repelling coil to the ceiling where it shatters on impact. Inches away, a spider cruises by upside down, oblivious to the deadly wisps of insecticide that billow in its path. The fumes keep the mosquitoes at bay. I no longer get bitten. The local variety is fond of whitey only when his skin still bears the ghastly urban complexion of a newcomer. Eventually, they cease to visit and raid other abodes in search of fresh prey.
Cockroaches, bedbugs and spiders, the squatters of the insect world, are much less inventive. They move in for good.
Downstairs, the maids are setting tables. Sleepy-eyed and sullen, they meander in and out of the kitchen. I can hear the shuffle of dragging feet on the age-old tile floor. Dolores Wingate, the proprietor’s wife, supervises the girls, issuing terse, monosyllabic orders from her room. She rarely leaves her room nowadays.
Mavis -- chambermaid, waitress, short-order cook and bartender -- mutters something in my direction. She stops halfway back to the kitchen. Looking elsewhere, wiping a lippy yawn, she asks, chopping her gs, “Yo be havin’ coffee this mornin’?” I always have coffee; every mornin’, but Mavis was instructed to ask. Just in case. The Wingates are such penny-pinchers.
Poached eggs stare back at me, lifeless, like the eyes of a dead fish. I fine-focus my field of view and I see myself in stereoscopic detail. My likeness beckons me to draw near. As I do, bleary-eyed, crumbling snippets of dream still fogging up my brain, my face looms larger in a yolk-yellow sea. I smile synthetically as if posing for a family portrait. It’s a smile of my own creation. My lips are parted. That’s all. It’s a smile without cheer.
I poke the yolk and partake of breakfast. Repentance is where you find it. The eggs dissolve and submerge the shriveled, pinkie-sized sausages and undercooked home fries. Dolores’ husband, Ephraim, turns on the radio. I don’t like to be serenaded when I eat, least of all by Telemann or Handel. But Wingate has no passion for Debussy or Ravel.
Uninvited, a gecko leaps from the wall onto the faded plastic tablecloth. I overturn the sugar bowl. The little gray lizard with the big soulful eyes stops dead in its tracks, his senses aroused, his instincts on the alert. Hunger triumphs. A viscous tongue whips at the mound of sugar and retracts it laden with nourishing brown crystals.
Fuck Wingate.
Brooks is livid. The resident drunk, Whitney T. Brooks rooms here whenever he remembers the address or gets a lift from the local constabulary. Monthly checks keep him out of his family’s hair in East Hampton, and he doesn’t seem to give a shit, not about the hostility, the loneliness, the heat, the spiders, the monotony, the inescapable, unrelenting streams of Calypso music that swell and fade with the wind, the inky blackness of night.
“Filthy animal,” Brooks snivels, recoiling with fear and revulsion. Coming from Brooks, it’s a compliment. He won’t look you in the eye. He cowers, instead, curling his upper lip like a dog begging to be kicked. He reeks of cheap rum. His teeth are yellow, his gaze reptilian, and a white slimy film coats the corners of his mouth. He shares my table. Day after day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don’t have the heart to snub him.
Wingate lacks finesse. “Mixed-bloods,” he calls them, sit under the wind chime at a large round table set in the center of the dining room. Those of “common stock,” a special label reserved for people of dubious extraction, sit in clusters at tiny square tables, like satellites orbiting a mother ship. Miss Gwendolyn Peckham -- “Sussex, naturally” -- talkative and stone deaf, and more energetic than ten men half her eighty years, breaks bread with a young German drifter, Helmut Brunner, who speaks comic book English and never gets a chance to improve it in her presence.
Bates eats alone. His table faces a narrow wall from which hang reeking boughs of fan coral and a framed needlepoint inscription. Victory Looms Brighter out of Darkness, it proclaims with cryptic solemnity. Bates shuns the others. He eats with great haste, his nose in his plate, his eyes deep in thought. He always refolds the paper napkin on its original creases, gets up, mutters an apology and returns to his own dreams. He never sits in the sun.
Find me. I’m here, three, maybe four miles from town, past the old fishing village, off the winding road that girds the south coast. Turn left as you face north. Look for the sign.
THE BEARDED FIG TREE
BED & BREAKFAST
Ephraim Wingate, Proprietor
The old wooden placard swings at the end of a corroded yard of metal tubing extending from the eaves. It cries on windy nights. Stray cats often rally to its lugubrious wail.
The elements conspire; neglect finishes the job. The red corrugated iron roof sags. The verandah shows irreparable signs of fatigue. Devoured by wood worms, the balustrade threatens to collapse. Along the porch wall, hundreds of pockmarks erupt in tiny bloody splotches, each the silent witness of a swatted insect. Growing in untamed profusion, lime trees, breadfruit, hibiscus and bougainvillea soften the decadence.
Upstairs where I sleep, there are two single beds, lumpy and creaking, a narrow plywood closet that smells of old sweat and tree rot, a small desk and a wobbly chest of drawers lined with old newspapers perused a dozen times or more. Stand by as I quote from their pages from time to time.
Item:
“Owen Courtney, 47, of Marshall Hall, St. Lucy, pleaded guilty in the Fourth Assize Court to defecating on the steps of the Governor General’s mansion. The infraction is reported to have occurred late on the night of 16 April. Justice Stewart L. Wifing, Q.C., deputy director for public prosecutions, appeared for the Crown.
“Mr. Frampton H. Cheltenham represented the defendant. Mr. Courtney could not explain why he had been drawn to that particular venue to respond to what he termed ‘an urgent call of nature,’ when an adjacent public lot, the very one from whence he had emerged, is dark and deserted at night. Sentencing has been postponed for a month and Mr. Courtney was released in his own custody.”
Hanging from the ceiling, a bare forty-Watt bulb lights up my nights. Night comes at six sharp. Every night. Day returns at six sharp. Every morning.
Item:
“Carlton Frott, 32, of Scott’s Gully, St. Barnaby, is appearing today in Third Assize Court -- Justice Florian Sturgis presiding -- to plead on a charge of aggravated sexual misconduct during a funeral procession on Swan Lane Monday last. Several outraged female mourners have accused Mr. Frott of seeking sexual gratification by cunningly and persistently rubbing himself against their posteriors. Mr. Frott insists that, overwhelmed with grief, he had merely tried to inch his way closer to the casket to pay his respects to the deceased. The defendant, who later admitted he didn’t know the deceased, was once granted a suspended sentence in a similar incident involving church statuary.”
The island dozes in mindless serenity, an overgrown chunk of coral sprouting from the scintillating turquoise deep like an oasis in the vastness of the desert.
Today the sea is high, the sky barren. Angry crests collide over cloudy waters. In nature’s indulgence you can sense its inventive cruelty.
Old man Godfrey sits on the verandah, shielding his glaucomatous eyes with the back of one hand, scratching Blondie’s forever pregnant belly with the other. He is nearly blind but he scans the heavens high above the northwestern horizon, pointing a knotty finger yellowed by nicotine, a toothless, gloating grin upon his face.
“Ah, Flight 902,” he chuckles as the jetliner banks leftward on final. Blondie senses elation in Godfrey’s strokes. Shooing away her latest litter with a flick of her tail, she rolls on her back and spreads her rear legs farther apart to receive her master’s caress.
Godfrey has an interesting occupation. If he smiles it’s because every planeload, he reckons, brings a flock of sex-starved white women who pay hard cash for the privilege of being fucked by the uncomplicated youths he has groomed for the occasion, all of them muscular Neanderthals from the highlands who would gladly do it for nothing just to keep score.
Colonel Doulton James, the tall, gaunt, Oxford-bred former chief of Her Majesty’s Royal Police, is a steady guest. No one really knows who he does it with -- Godfrey’s studs or the prim Québécoises who fly south every year with the geese.
Godfrey rents space from Wingate. They split the profits.
Dolores Wingate leaves her room when the first patrons arrive. She can’t bear the moans and the cries of rapture. Walking slowly, feigning sobriety, she sits by the water’s edge, alone. The horizon makes no sound at all so she stares at it until she hears nothing but the sea.
High tide. Low tide. Should the ebbing cease, you tell yourself, so will your pulse. Life oozes by. You do not live it; you let it feast on you.
Then there are nights. No, they’re not all foretold by fiery sunsets and the smell of nutmeg wafting on the wings of an errant breeze. You soon discover a new kind of blackness, beguiling and ominous where exquisite and chilling dreams compete for a share of your being, nights spent in alternating states of suffocating boredom and unease. Shut your eyes. Hold your breath. Listen to your heartbeat. It often is the only sound you recognize.
Drink yourself silly. Like Brooks. Or fill your lungs with burning ganja, as half the island does when no one looks. Indulge in other pleasures if you can find them, endure them. Lust, like a predator, feeds upon the weak, the lonely, the lost. Deliverance lies ahead, at the far end of a mirror in which you see yourself. No, nights do not beget morning. They’re one-way voyages. Everything must end with them when you surrender to your dreams. As you disembark, another flotilla hoists the mainsails, weighs anchor and hazards out of port into Mother Sea’s embrace.
Reena. You can’t see her in the dark but the black satin form writhing in your arms substantiates her existence. She is real, like the night that engulfs her. Clouds disperse, letting moonlight in through the open shutters. Her eyes shimmer like speckled diamonds but she winces and her ivory smile turns to grimace. It’s hard to tell if it’s pleasure or pain.
She swears it’s okay through the eighth month, and you know she’s lying, but you push harder, seeking to go in deeper yet, plowing her life-bearing young body, overlooking the gamy odors, thinking of someone else until the images fade away one by one as you feel yourself coming.
“… I say, that’s nothing, nothing at all. Why, on the savanna -- yes I spent a fortnight in Basutoland last fall. Oh, I know they don’t call it that anymore, but who can keep track? So many new nations, you know. Every jungle outpost wants its own pennant. Every reformed cannibal yearns for an ambassadorship to the United Nations. As I was saying -- now, was it Basutoland? Yes. Dreadful climate, you know. Why, I found a tarantula snuggling in a bag of bonbons I’d carelessly neglected to secure. Big as my palm, I say, frightfully handsome creature, what…?”
Gwen Peckham cups her hands and wiggles her fingers, spider-like, at Helmut Brunner who nods mechanically and keeps eating. Brunner does not partake of food. He attacks it as if it were still endowed with life.
“… Heavens to Horatio Hornblower, in Tashkent one summer night -- or was it in -- oh, never mind. Anyway, I was stalked by a vampire bat who took peculiar interest in my chignon. Luckily, I wasn’t wearing it at the time. You know, bats are so very fond of hair, what?”
Brooks gags as he belches and yawns simultaneously.
Was it Reena? I’m not sure. Maybe it was Rose or Regina or Rebecca or Ruth. It’s hard to remember all the monikers they assume. Pick her up at the House of Limbo where young girls give themselves for a meal, a hot shower, a clean bed and the short-lived illusion that love can somehow be kindled by raw, savage sex. Show her a good time. Treat her with kindness. You’ll find the experience ennobling. Kindness has a way of humanizing exploitation. No need to pay for your pleasure. Buy her some groceries instead. Hers is a risky occupation and there are at least five other mouths to feed back at the shack on Briton Hill. The one-room hovel is filled with precious dreams, I know, but they will never get past the single window that overlooks the sea where dreams are born.
In these parts a window is like a movie screen on which are projected snippets of immovable, remote reality.
Then morning returns and the sun blazes through dawn’s chill dampness. The sea is at your feet and hummingbirds drink from the passionflowers. A new day rises. Think of Tantalus and bite into life as if it were Eden’s last fruit.
Pot-bellied, hook-nosed and bronze-skinned like his cousin Rajiv from Poona, Ephraim Wingate, né Gupta, gets high on premium gin. His British upbringing demands it. When he’s had one too many and he’s in the mood to talk, you can forget his cantankerous side. Every man has deep within him a trace of innocence and Wingate’s surfaces when he imbibes, a pastime that begins before noon in the shade of his beloved fig tree and continues late into the night until someone carries him to bed.
His stories are laced with bittersweet remembrances of a squandered youth, hurricanes and U-boat sightings off North Point, of volcanic eruptions and moonlit picnics by the reef at low tide, in the nude. You embark with him on the decks of rum-runners and shrimp boats, and sail with their loathsome crews and the hideous harlots they bring on board. He revels in the memory of countless trysts with women of opulent proportions for whom he donned grotesque rubber dildos, many of which are still on display in the bar next to the Queen’s official portrait.
In her room since dusk, Dolores Wingate, who has heard it all, drowns her shame in a fifth of Bourbon and sings herself softly to sleep.
On this ocarina-shaped little coral speck, rumors spread like the clap. The official press remains crassly unconcerned and only the outlawed but widely circulated Onyx dares tell it like it is. I write for it under a pseudonym.
The whites, few as they are, perambulate toward extinction. Outnumbered, cut off from the rest of society, they live on windswept knolls overlooking the sea, well above the rickety tar-roofed cottages that hug the dusty road below, and they peer at the blue expanse longingly as if the Union Jack still plied the deep. An hour before dusk, they gather on their terraces and sip tea with lime. Lime is a very sour fruit, even in paradise.
Item:
“New Zealand film producer and world-famed magician Don Drew is stranded on Stonewall, poorer by ten thousand dollars, or so he claims.
“Drew landed here on April 9 from Bigoudi, via Puerto-Diablo where he changed planes and where he asserts he was prevented from retrieving a briefcase containing ten thousand dollars which he ‘inadvertently’ left on board the aircraft.
“Drew said that airlines are liable for up to five hundred dollars for passengers’ losses. He demanded that he be immediately compensated pending restitution of the remainder of the missing cash.
“Flat broke, Drew has contacted the local Muskrat Lodge and was promptly offered temporary shelter by one of its members. Drew has since been summoned to appear at the Immigration Office, a request he called ‘tantamount to bullying.’
“Inspector Lionel Hendricks confirmed summoning Drew but insists that it is routine to conduct random checks on foreigners entering Stonewall.”
Item:
“‘In coming to the aid of film producer and magician Don Drew, the Benevolent Order of Muskrats acted promptly to help a brother in distress,’ Hugh Hale, a Muskrat spokesman said yesterday. Noting that the Muskrats do not normally offer charity to their members, Mr. Hale said that when asked, Drew was unable to produce ‘any evidence of membership, past or present in a Muskrat lodge, anywhere in the world. Nor could he recite the Muskrat Obligation or display the Muskrat secret grip and sign of distress.’
“Mr. Hale went on to say that ‘the person described in the Solicitor as a famous magician told a rather extraordinary tale to several of our members, most of whom found it hard to comprehend let alone believe that a grownup carrying a briefcase filled with money could leave it behind -- except if it hadn’t existed in the first place.’
“‘Our incredulity deepened,’ Mr. Hale went on, ‘when we learned that Mr. Drew had no credentials or any proof of his alleged renown. The rope trick and disappearing coin act he performed failed to convince us of his prowess as a magician, though they did provide some measure of comic relief. Nevertheless, the Muskrats, imbued with compassion, acted promptly and extended the hospitality of food and shelter to a perfect stranger.’”
Clyde Ng (pronounced ng’) was born in Guyana which, for all its shortcomings, must seem like dream heaven compared to the nauseating walled city of Kowloon where his grandparents came from. Ng owns and runs the only Chinese eatery on Stonewall. His cuisine is as Chinese as Great Neck is unpretentious, which is just as well because his clientele is strictly local, and so are the cooks. Forget Pell Street. Forget Grant Avenue.
Ng is tolerable in the dark or when he doesn’t burp, pick his teeth or yawn. Bedecked in rippling layers of solid gold around his neck and wrists, he rarely has anything interesting to say -- a blessing in his case, considering that all his teeth are capped with gold, too.
His wife Kina, a pleasantly plump Orinoco bush Indian who went to mission school, says even less. She paints her nails, brushes her long black tresses with slow, languid strokes and plays dominoes.
The Ng visit regularly. Just to kill time. I sleep with Kina when Clyde is out of town. Everybody sleeps with Kina when Clyde is out of town.
The Zanzi Bar. You can smell the sweat and the beer and the urine long before you reach the top of the stairs. Dimly lit, it’s Mobile and Mombasa, Yalta and Yokohama, Rotterdam and Rangoon, Gdansk and Guayaquil all rolled into one stinking pit of depravity.
In one corner, a group of beefy, pink-faced Swedish sailors lean against the counter in drunken stupor, waiting their turn to dance or get laid, their eyes screwed on the apish rear-ends that rock and roll by the juke box.
Dance is the most erotic form of self-expression and eroticism is infectious, so every now and then couples leave the dance floor and retire to a windowless alcove behind the unisex lavatory and down onto filthy mattresses where the owner’s dogs sleep at closing time. The music doesn’t always drown out the grunts and the ululations.
Amid the graffiti, a limerick sums up the truism of the century. Penned in a tight, disciplined script, it cautions against an especially tenacious breed of body lice, the kind that is “a pain in the groin to get rid of.” It is signed by one Jonathan Morris-Moore.
Mr. Morris-Moore has obviously never been to Khartoum.
Item:
“Immigration officials breathed easier yesterday with the expulsion of Don Drew, a citizen of New Zealand caught in a number of squabbles for nearly a month.
“Drew, a self-styled film producer/magician, gave the media and the authorities a hard-luck story involving the loss of a briefcase containing ten thousand dollars on a flight from Bigoudi to Puerto-Diablo.
“When authorities summoned Drew for what they said was a routine consultation, he refused, claiming he was being ‘hounded.’ Meanwhile, the TeleCom Office has called in their attorney to deal with staff grievances alleging that Drew had verbally abused several operators while attempting to place collect calls to New York, Auckland, Zagreb and Casablanca, with parties at the other end refusing to accept the charges.
“A formal complaint was subsequently delivered at the south coast bed-and-breakfast where Drew was staying. When asked to vacate the premises, Drew made obscene gestures, threw an overflowing chamber pot at immigration agents and barricaded himself in his room.
“Police were called to remove the locks from the doors. Drew grudgingly paid his bill in a dozen different currencies and agreed to leave.
“The episode ended Monday when, under heavy escort and the watchful eye of armed soldiers, Drew boarded a flight to Amsterdam via Paramaribo.
“The Muskrats, whose aid Drew had sought, have since issued a statement in which Drew is described as a ‘cheap crook and a swindler.’”
The ruby sun is sinking. Try not to blink. The fabled “green flash” is as elusive as a fading dream. Should you glimpse the fleeting burst of emerald iridescence, make your wish before night drapes the island in sweet fragrant darkness. If you miss it, come back same time tomorrow and try again. Sometimes, the only remedy against boredom is ritual.
Item:
“Mr. Louis Musgrove, 75, of Split Rock, St. Patrick, received a ten-year jail sentence for sodomizing a goat during recess in full view of the pupils at Bishop Johnson Anglican School for Girls.
“Defending Mr. Musgrove, court-appointed counsel, Sir Oswald Bloomquist entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, asserting that his client had quickly been overcome with deep feelings of contrition and was about to slit the goat’s throat and donate the carcass to the school’s kitchen when he was apprehended by the school custodian, Mr. Nestor Ogilvie of Felarnum Heights, St. Cecilia.
“Sir Oswald pleaded for clemency, arguing in favor of his client’s spontaneous -- ‘if somewhat misguided’ -- good intentions.
“A last-minute motion to remand Mr. Musgrove to Queen Victoria Asylum was denied. In handing down his verdict, Justice Swathmore Hornblythe, Q.C., expressed his personal sense of relief and noted with magisterial panache that, owing the defendant’s age and the length of his sentence, the island’s goat population could now resume without fear the existence to which it is destined -- ‘goat water stew….’”
When you smell formic acid in the air -- you will one night soon -- turn off the lights everywhere. Flying ants are descending on the island and light attracts them.
Congregating on the ceiling in dense, frenzied clusters, they shed their wings and fall to the ground. They will never fly again. Most will be gone by morning. Shake your clothes and shoes before you put them on. Their mandibles are unforgiving and the irritation lasts for days.
It seems that one of old man Godfrey’s boys, after defiling the rest of her anatomy, has conquered the heart of one Marie-Thérèse Lapine, of Chicoutimi, and the two are getting “married” at The Bearded Fig Tree
Rounding up guests and “witnesses” for the impromptu ceremony is a cinch. Godfrey sends his scouts to the beaches, the rum shops, the guest houses and the wharf. The dragnet yields a dozen volunteers who will do or submit to anything with ravenous abandon.
Unkindly regarded by nature, Mademoiselle Lapine is one step beyond homeliness, which accounts for the unprecedented extra ten dollars Godfrey had to offer the young stallion for sticking with it a bit longer.
Poorer but outfitted with a man for one short, irreversible dream, Mademoiselle Lapine will awaken alone in a day or two. She will come to her senses, conclude that you can’t put a price tag on a dream, and fly back home for another fifty weeks at the typing pool and Sunday confessions until the itch returns, insistent and unmanageable.
Wingate, a licensed notary public, performs the sham ritual. Then everyone joins in. After a while, it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to whom.
Dolores Wingate is away at her sister’s. Business has been brisk at The Bearded Fig Tree. She will not drink this time. She cries a lot when she is sober.
You won’t warm up to Bates right away but don’t prejudge him. His story speaks volumes about the frailty of dreams. Accused of treason by Ennis Garrison -- “Uncle” to his adoring fans -- the very man he helped hoist to power, Bates was awakened shortly before dawn, forcibly removed from his bed and escorted to the first plane out of Deception where he lived. He landed in Stonewall with the clothes on his back, leaving behind a villa nestling atop a sandy cove and a sloop that often took him for a day or two of seclusion to the outer rims of Deception’s coral archipelago.
Bates now earns his keep doing chores for Wingate. His former station in life has earned him the privilege of eating with the rest of us.
Pushing fifty, Andrew Barrington Bates was born in Sri Lanka -- Ceylon at the time -- of British parents who left mother England, “the better to serve her” and as far away as possible from the grayness of her skies and the tedium of her middle class. He was nineteen when he first went to Manchester to study architecture on a stipend extracted from the Home Office by his father in return for some unspecified favor.
Shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, Bates married the daughter of a Liverpool barrister. Eleven years and three children later, he walked out on his wife and fell for a ballet dancer who sucked his savings dry, did a jeté and split. Tired of the drizzle, yearning for some curry in his veins, Bates accepted a civil service posting on Deception and promptly married the first pretty mulatto he’d laid eyes on, Marcia, the maid who came with the house.
For his part, Ennis Garrison quit school early. He earned money fetching tennis balls for his colonial masters and keeping his cute little black ass clean for Major Fitzhugh down at regimental headquarters.
Marcia produced two boys, both the spitting image of their natural father, and a daughter, somewhat darker than anticipated. Bates knew his Cromwell but eugenics escaped him. He later learned that Garrison, the handsome agitator who shocked the ruling party into surrender, had regularly fucked Marcia and lavished her with assorted gifts for her munificence.
Marcia held the door wide open when Garrison’s goons, the feared Weasels, yanked her husband out of bed and threw him on the first plane out of Deception.
They called her Daphne. Brooding all day, she draped the sky with a thick overcast that kept rolling in from the east in menacing formations. The wind rose by mid-afternoon, sending shivers through the palm fronds. Squalls lifted beach sand, sending it crashing against the stone parapet with relentless wrath. Thunder rumbled in the distance in muted tones and lightning clawed at the sky, spattering a black, embattled horizon with a brief milky radiance. By sundown, seized with convulsions, the sky turned colors, churning angry clouds that alternately collided and parted to reveal gashes of starlit blue.
Daphne slammed into us a little after midnight at high tide. The assault was merciless. She ripped into the shore, uprooting trees, pulverizing dikes and sea walls. The verandah collapsed. The tin roof was upended. Half the beach caved in and a thick, bubbling sandy bog invaded The Bearded Fig Tree’s lower quarters.
Blondie was found floating in the dry well near the tool shed. Brooks was decapitated when a sheet of corrugated roofing tore off the bar and flew into him. Crabs were feasting inside him when we unearthed his headless body in the morning.
Heeding the radio station’s advisories, Wingate, old man Godfrey and Gwen Peckham had fled inland to Campbell’s Summit. Protected by high, barren ridges, their refuge sustained little damage. Bates, young Brunner and I stayed behind, drawn perhaps by the spectacle of Daphne’s magnificent fury. Dolores rode the storm at her sister’s cottage on Graham’s Landing.
My friend, Max Pontifex, who had not visited for days, later told me he’d taken refuge not on high ground, as disaster preparedness wardens had instructed, but in the flimsy hunters’ blind he’d erected in the mangrove and where he often spent the night.
“If I must die, let the sea be my grave,” Max had proclaimed with his usual swagger.
Brook’s death went largely unnoticed. What with the repairs and the mess to clean up, no one paid much attention when his remains were carted away to a potter’s field where unclaimed bodies are interred. That’s what his folks in East Hampton had wanted.
Back from her sister’s, Dolores immediately drowned the news of Brook’s death in a quart of whiskey that took her system three days to distill. She didn’t shed a tear. It was her way of celebrating the deliverance of a kindred spirit.
“I adore exotic cuisine. My favorite is God’s tongue, or Qx, as the Wanambudu call it. Imagine a large pink slug adorned with markings that resemble a pair of human eyes, each set in a red triangle. How very Masonic…. What? Yes, actually, Qx has a crunchy sort of gumminess to it. Think of caramelized anchovy and headcheese; or pigs’ knuckles in aspic. You must try it sometime. I’m also quite fond of rattlesnake. Had some in a Yuma cantina one blistering afternoon. Siberian yak, you say? Why, of course. I was dining with General Fyodor Gregoritchnikov when I first sampled it. Did I ever tell you about dear old Fyodor? No? Ah, what a charmer. Such a good listener. So attentive. He never interrupted me, though he did fall asleep once or twice, the dear fellow. But you know, generals are such busy men. I’ll never forget the day we first met in Saint-Tropez. We were both so very young. He was a mere lieutenant then. I was vacationing with Aunt Trudy, may she rest in peace. Yes, well, Fyodor gave me a yak hair comforter when we parted. Must have come from the beast we had just dined on, ho ho ho, what? I’m still mad about it after all these years. I take it to Minneapolis every spring. It keeps me warm. Would you believe I once had to wear my mink coat, gloves and a scarf in Minneapolis in mid-June? Dreadfully cold it was, you know. It seems Minneapolis never escaped the Ice Age. I remember cutting my visit short and booking a flight to St. Kitts that very same afternoon. My friend Gladys -- the one from Minneapolis -- was mortified, poor woman. She even called the weather bureau and complained.
“Have you ever been to Patagonia? No? Rotten climate, I say. Not unlike Newfoundland. Reminds me of the Orkneys, you know. Well, it’ll soon be time to move on. Helga is expecting me in Hamburg next week. We’re flying to Mogador for a fortnight. The desert air will do us good. Hamburg is so damp, nicht war?”
Helmut Brunner, who has just finished scraping a soup bone clean, marrow and all, with his bare teeth, is about to answer but Gwendolyn Peckham has no patience for trivia so she goes on to recount that fateful day in the Congo when a Pygmy mistook her plumed pith helmet for a bird of paradise and shot poisoned arrows at her through the brush.
Item:
“Prime Minister Ennis Garrison has flatly denied rumors that Deception has become ‘the epicenter of regional espionage activity’ in recent months.
“In a similar communiqué, opposition leader, Foreign Minister Lewis Sandiford Malta, labeled allegations of irregularities by members of his cabinet as ‘ludicrous and demented,’ and warned that ‘rumor-mongers and slanderers’ would be unmasked and prosecuted.”
Trebor Wirst, editor and publisher of the Solicitor, is a man of refinement and wit. His logic and insights slash through bombast and oratory, and his arguments seldom leave any wiggle room.
Every once in a while, when his hormones act up, when his negritude resurfaces and peels away the gilt of a Cambridge education, Wirst can be expected to deliver one of his legendary broadsides. There are a hundred counterpoints, a thousand repartees, but you find none that appeases your conscience. So you listen politely until he calms down. It’s the least you can do for a useful if moody colleague.
“Come now, you can’t expect us to survive on raw sugar, nutmeg and saffron, rum and molasses and a rare goodwill visit by the Queen Mum, can you? Sure, we control fifty-one percent of the bauxite mining rights. So what? We have one of the highest density populations on earth. Our trade deficit triples every nine months and the Commonwealth, which had steadfastly shouldered our debt, is itself nearly bankrupt.
“The Regional Common Market? What a farce! We still can’t agree on a permanent capital -- though there are more contenders than crabs up a whore’s ass. All this makes for lofty parliamentary debate back at Whitehall but nothing ever gets done. Taking sides doesn’t help. Yes, we could live by another set of dreams for a while but the granaries would still be half-empty and the police would step up their gruesome witch-hunts.
“So, we invite the world. And every time a plane touches down at Waring Field, with every cruise ship full of chic bleached blondes and white-shod tycoons climbing down the gangplank, we put on our affable, soft-spoken, smiling native faces. Exoticism has a way of camouflaging poverty and political sleaze. So they come back. Then they send their friends and relatives. Word gets around and they all return. Their parenthetical sojourn in ‘paradise’ guarantees us a permanent listing in the travel guides. It helps us keep our flag unfurled.
“We just can’t do without these hordes of part-time interlopers. Our very dreams belong to them. If this goes on, we may never learn what it is we can do without them. We shall forever live in fear that someday, someone else will decide to rearrange our reality. It won’t be what we had in mind, what we’d hoped for. The weak and the insolvent must make do with a less obliging reality than most, isn’t that right?”
Cop out. Breaking out of bondage is the work of heroes. Freedom is expensive; some forms of servitude last forever. The shackles that once bound wrists and ankles can ensnare souls. Weigh the alternatives. Don’t procrastinate. It may be time to turn off the lights when you finally make up your mind. You might not be sleepy yet but who are you to argue with the final curfew?
Low tide. Sharma’s nubile body glistens through the water. Her cinder-hued skin feels like wet porcelain and her buttocks, firm and spirited, rest against your thighs as her legs encircle your waist. Hardened by lust, her purple nipples press against your chest.
You take her that way, far from shore, your feet firmly anchored in the soft silt-like sand lining the shallow lagoon.
Facing the sea, feeling her warmth through your veins, you look past her searching eyes until the last wave of pleasure tells you it’s time to thank Sharma and head back to shore.
Max Pontifex was a master of the epigram, of the off-the-cuff one-liner. He kept large land crabs in a cistern in the lush orchard behind his house on Rock Hall Terrace. He used them for bait and fed them scraps of fish he’d caught earlier in the day.
“It gives the crabs a chance to get even -- in advance,” Max had remarked without a trace of sarcasm.
Reliving Stonewall, even in my dreams, forces me to exhume Max, my old friend, my alter ego, the man whose deceptive serenity and lack of pretense I envied above all virtues from the moment our lives intersected and merged.
Max was unkempt and eccentric and anarchic and petulant, but he never came empty-handed. There were always blushing mangoes, tangy tamarinds and other very special treats in his knapsack: turtle soup, fried conch in ginger and saffron, broiled plover breasts stuffed with avocado, to name a few of the delicacies he lavished on me.
But let me tell you about Max.
I’d been fishing that morning, or trying to. Waist-high in water, I’d landed no more than seaweed. Then came Max, wading toward shore, an old rowboat in tow. A straw hat, grimy and frayed, obscured his face, save for the leathered, jutting cheekbones and large, sad eyes, blue like tempered steel. Fixed somewhere on the open sea, they gleamed like the eyes of a man possessed or racked with fever. I will never forget those eyes, the crooked teeth, the untrimmed beard, the scars that tilled his face, the strong, gnarled, skillful hands, the jutting blue veins that tunneled under his sun-bleached pink Scottish skin.
The rowboat brimmed with fish and I suddenly felt like a schmuck with my expensive fiberglass rod and reel and the piece of salami dangling from the hook.
“Some catch,” I ventured. “How far out do you go?”
“Not far. Up yonder.”
“Up yonder?” I would soon master the subtleties of linguistic ambiguity. “Up yonder,” like “over dee hill,” “up dee road” and “round dee bend,” are not precise indicators of distance. Perhaps where time is as elastic as it is on Stonewall, near and far have no real meaning. When I later lived in Central America, I would learn to cope with yet another oddity: the absence of street names or numbers. A common address, I recall, went something like this: Two hundred [meters] south, fifty [meters] east of Lupe’s shop. Turn right at the yellow house with the black Chihuahua, then left at José’s gas station. That’s assuming you knew how to get to Lupe’s shop.
“Yes, by the reef.” Max pointed to a darker patch of sea three hundred feet from shore.
“What do you use?”
Max held up a battered plastic Clorox bottle and a coil of 20-pound test line.
“What about bait?”
Max pointed to a large tin. “Sea cat” [octopus in our parlance] “and chum.” Max removed the lid from a pail in which simmered a rotting bouillabaisse of squashed squid, crushed crab and other putrefying morsels of aquatic life.
“Can I join you sometime? I’ll gladly pay you for your trouble.”
Max studied me for a moment, took a deep puff from his cigarette, snorted and spat in the water.
“Tell you what. Meet me by Hartley’s tomorrow at five. We’ll….”
“Five… uh… in the morning?”
Max’s eyes narrowed. A hint of sarcasm animated a tentative smile.
“Is that a problem?”
“No, no, no,” I muttered. Five is fine.”
“Another thing. Keep your money. Just share your catch.” Max eyed my state-of-the-art rod and reel and grinned. “That’s if you catch anything.” He then turned solemn. “You gotta swear you can swim, man, and won’t puke in my boat or I’ll toss you overboard like bilge water.”
I swore and we were friends, and we left with the morning tide and the catch was abundant. I gave Max my meager take.
“Sorry, I don’t eat fish.”
Max scowled. He said that killing an animal and not eating it is a senseless pastime. He may have been unkempt and eccentric but he related to animals. He was less tolerant of men. It was difficult not to like him.
Max understood animals: they reminded him of his untamed self. He’d adopted nine dogs and seven cats, all strays. He bred tropical fish and exotic birds, and played mother to a capuchin monkey and a pair of surly macaws that would have gladly scratched each other’s eyes out had Max not taken the precaution to house them in separate cages. He also tended to a herd of giant tortoises, a brood of somnolent iguanas and a mongoose that would eventually claim a chunk of his left pinkie.
His favorite creatures, I would soon realize, were the land crabs. Earth-gray, some nearly a foot wide, their claws are bigger than a man’s hand and they can crush a toe or snap a finger clean off the joint as if it were a twig. Crabs have one thing in common. They’re antisocial and territorial. Every so often, when they feel the urge, they seek out an adversary and fight to the finish. There is rarely a victor in such contests, only lifeless shards of carapace and severed, quivering limbs. Max said that man is descended from crabs; or sharks. He wasn’t sure. Max was not always in a generous mood.
Item:
“A Librana Airways plane exploded off Bathsheba’s jagged coast shortly after takeoff from Waring Field. All 73 passengers and crew are presumed to have perished. The Coast Guard has dispatched a cutter and divers are now scouring the crash site.
“Several area residents said they were awakened by a loud conflagration at about four in the morning. Mr. Ambrose Fletcher, keeper of the North Point lighthouse, reported seeing flaming debris hurtling toward the sea from an altitude of about one thousand feet.
“An investigation is now underway. No official statement will be issued until fragments from the ill-fated aircraft are recovered. The four-engine DC-8 jetliner had been refueled and was reportedly en route to Santiago when it burst in midair.
“Airport officials here say refueling took place uneventfully under the supervision of two Librana Airways ground personnel. The rest of the crew did not deplane during the hour-long stopover.”
Item.
“Downed in a fiery explosion yesterday, Librana Airways Flight 455 was sabotaged. So allege investigators who, sifting through the wreckage, found traces of Semptex and remnants of a timing device taped to a shard of tubing identified as the main fuel line.
“Seventy-three mangled bodies have been recovered, all burned beyond recognition.”
Item.
“Investigators now report that the doomed Librana Airways DC-8 aircraft that exploded and crashed off the Bathsheba coast had failed to file a flight plan and was operating under night visual flight rules before it landed in Stonewall.
“It was further revealed that the control tower at Waring Field had not picked up the inbound plane until it entered Stonewall’s airspace, well below the pattern, and requested landing instructions.
“Authorities believe the plane had been skimming the ocean surface for a distance of about a hundred nautical miles to the southwest to avoid radar detection.
“The motive for this stratagem has not been elucidated.”
Item:
“Deception Prime Minister Ennis Garrison has reported sighting a ‘covey’ of flying saucers hovering over the ministerial mansion and has instructed his ambassador at the United World League to request an emergency meeting of the Security Conclave.
“Taking note of P. M. Garrison’s plea, United World League Secretary General Olatunji Illabobo conveyed his sympathy and assured Deception’s head of state that the matter would be addressed when the world body reconvenes after summer recess.
“An independent dispatch filed by our special correspondent on Deception confirms large formations of migratory birds vectored on a southerly course and transiting for a brief rest on the island’s coastal marshlands.”
The moon is high. You can hear the snarls and the whimpers, the wails and the howls as a pack of feral dogs saunter out of the shadows to copulate on the open road.
Sometimes there aren’t enough bitches to go around so the males lose patience and mount each other. So much for the fiction that homosexuality is the sole province of humans.
Move toward them. Vulnerable, galvanized by fear, roused by lust, they freeze and stare, baring angry fangs. Clap your hands once or twice. They disperse and night swallows them.
Find me. Look for the sign, beyond the breadfruit and the almond trees. You’re not here to dream but you must find a way.
Fear is such an ugly emotion.
Item:
“Two men, one from Broome Hill, St. Peter, and the other from Irish Gulley, St. Ann, were jailed at the Fortress Prison. Each drew a 90-day sentence.
“Marshall Winston, 27, a car washer, and Olivier Smythe, 24, unemployed, appeared on separate charges. Winston pleaded guilty to using indecent language, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. He was separately charged with loitering. Smythe was charged with masturbating on Palmetto Lane and urging a group of visiting Southern Baptist church members to take his picture.
“Both cases were prosecuted by Sgt. Bingham Leonard in District A Criminal Court before Magistrate Coleman Grant.
“In the same court, murder suspect Gloria Prince, of Licorish Village, St. Andrew, made a second appearance. She is accused of murdering her common-law husband, Victor Milling last April. Ms. Prince alleges that Milling fathered five of her seven children but refused to contribute to their support.”
Item:
“Former Deception Prime Minister Ennis Garrison, who disappeared under mysterious circumstance two weeks ago after the collapse of his government, is now a guest at an unnamed psychiatric institution in the United States, a reliable source revealed yesterday on condition of anonymity.
“Garrison was thought to have been eliminated when rebels led by Morris Cardinal launched a surprise pre-dawn attack on Deception. The former Deception leader, an incongruous cross between ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and Idi Amin (Dada), is said to be entertaining other inmates with accounts of UFO encounters and excursions in space in the company of winged angels.
“The informant has declined to confirm or deny whether Mr. Garrison had been secreted out of Deception. An independent press contact suggested that ‘the likelihood of U.S. involvement cannot be written off.’ He cited America’s ‘historic propensity for giving shelter to political renegades and misfits, war criminals, spies and deposed dictators, or to surgically alter their appearance and arrange for a prosperous and serene retirement in a debtor client-state.’
“The informant further alleged that Garrison is suffering from dementia praecox, possibly the aftermath of an irreversible syphilitic infection of long duration.”
So Bates gave Wingate notice. He promised he’d tend to the few remaining chores and thanked him for his hospitality. Wingate toasted the news in his customary fashion that evening and Bates helped him back to his room and tucked him in bed as he’d done so many times before.
On the morning of the fifth, Bates flew to Miami where he’d obtained a professorship in architecture at one of the state’s universities. Deception was far behind him. He’d itched for something new. If there’s nothing quite as maddening as a persistent itch, nothing gives as much pleasure as a good scratch. Cromwell notwithstanding.
Bates died of a massive heart attack in 1988.
And then, one day, Max, the man I thought I always wanted -- but never had the courage -- to be, Max, with glints of Jesus and Robinson Crusoe flashing from his steely blue eyes, Max, philosopher and fisherman, Max, my good old friend, was dying. I knew the end was near when he saw me off before Christmas, offering me a hollow, almost brittle handshake, his once inexhaustible rucksack now empty, insanity and looming death etched upon his face, disdain and resignation dominating his distant gaze. The transformation had been swift and obvious. He himself had alluded to it from time to time, describing episodes alternating between “awakenings and dizzying descents into dungeons of despair.” It was I who had stubbornly dismissed the warning signs, ignored his chivalrous reticence to elaborate, disregarded the hints and the blunt entreaties. I had selfishly reveled in Max’s maturing psychosis, pretending that by poking into the dark corners of his mind we would both be headed to some spiritual Promised Land. In reality, I’d carelessly used Max. He’d been a passport to my own self-discovery. He’d made me lust for a power found only in the dreams of children and madmen, and I’d overlooked his pain by pretending that we were both at play in some cerebral dimension that only the two of us could access.
I’d imagined that neighbors would find his partially mummified remains amid the carcasses of parrots and dogs and cats and tortoises, rats scurrying across the filthy litter where he lay, their excrement flecking his hair and beard, maggots, intoxicated and trapped, thrashing about in his stench-filled room.
I could have predicted his unseemly end. His once pristine hilltop home was a shambles and the skeletonized remains of the animals he had raised and collected lay pell-mell throughout the house. His eyes had acquired that glossy, pitiable, distant look of madness.
Max had once said, “Death ain’t no cure for madness.” It had come, as did all his non-sequiturs, from nowhere, unsolicited and out of context as we fished silently for conger at the edge of the reef. “No,” he’d added, his eyes fixed on the horizon as sunset’s widening crimson stain splashed the sea before us, “sanity begins at the far end of eternal sleep.”
I remember asking him to elaborate but he’d shrugged his shoulders, snorted and spat in the water, as if to consecrate the impending capture of a nightmarish creature, fanged jaws snapping idly at the air, slime dripping from its writhing snakelike body.
“Take congers,” Max said, laughing nervously. “They have no friends, you know. We’re lucky you and I, we have each other,” he added, a primeval fear gripping his voice as the machete rose and fell, decapitating the hideous monster of the deep.
I had over-dramatized my friend’s demise, but not by much. Max and the woman who’d mothered him since infancy -- he’d called her “Auntie,” both made a slow but irrevocable descent into poverty. The woman eventually died. Max survived, malnourished, slovenly. Eccentricities turned to recklessness. He chain-smoked, antagonized his friends, nettled his detractors.
“I’m mad between long intervals of horrible sanity,” he’d once blurted out. “I feel no pain when madness crests.” His fleeting but intense bouts of lunacy, it was widely believed, were triggered by alcohol, speed and Valium washed down with Coca Cola. His excesses had become part of the gossip of Stonewall.
“This chap is self-destructing.”
One day, as he staggered in a delirious state on the streets of the small east coast village where he’d been given refuge, Max passed out and collapsed. Bleeding profusely from a wound to his skull, he was found by a passerby and rushed by ambulance to a local hospital. He died a couple of days later at the age of 62. The autopsy listed lung cancer and bronchogenic carcinoma of the brain as the main causes of death. He was buried a week later in an unmarked grave.
That year, 1998, the Lunar Prospector found evidence of frozen water near the Moon’s poles; cosmologists asserted that the universe’s rate of expansion is increasing. Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, declaring jihad against Jews and Crusaders. Linked to him, a series of explosions at U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500.
As Max is laid to rest, nineteen European nations sign a treaty banning human cloning. Unfettered reproduction, even if it results in monsters and madmen, is sanctioned by the Church.
A framed picture of Max adorns one of my walls. A straw hat cockily crowns his shoulder-length hair. Slung over his left arm is a backpack filled with goodies, His right hand, held close against his bosom, restrains a fawn and tan spider monkey. Feigning half a smile, Max’s blue eyes seem to focus on mine from any angle in the room. When I look at them I see myself. Max may have been unkempt and eccentric but he made dreaming worthwhile.
If Max looms slightly larger-than-life, or mythic in stature, perhaps even more ethereal in his jarring earthiness, it’s because he was flesh and blood, not legend. Reassuringly, that did not prevent him from assuming allegorical dimensions after his death. Those who knew him still speak of him, some with guarded awe, others with aversion. Some saw him as a tormented man; others as a half-witted buffoon. Those who only heard of the barefoot motorbike-riding, shotgun-toting hippie who preferred animals to the company of men still refer to him at the Birdman of Graeme Hall.
I’d ridden on the back of Max’s motorcycle, napped on the veranda of his pink coral house and marveled at his animal collections. I’d even spent time with him at the swamp. He had a wicked sense of humor, a disdain of ostentation, an utter lack of affectation. He became my alter ego in another time and space. When I last saw him in 1986, I knew that some deep psychosis had taken hold of him. His speech was slurred, his gait uncertain. He looked dazed. His once-immaculate home was in a state of disarray. Attempts to contact him after my return to New York were met with silence.
I would never set foot in Stonewall again.