My name is William Page Corson, and I am the black sheep of the Buckingham County Corsons of Virginia. How I came to earn such disrepute relates to several months I spent in Honduras during the spring and summer of 1978, while doing research for a novel to be based on the exploits of an American mercenary who had played a major role in regional politics. That novel was never written, partly because I was of an age (twenty-one) at which one’s concentration often proves unequal to lengthy projects, but mainly due to reasons that will be made clear—or if not made clear, then at least brought somewhat into focus—in the following pages.

One day while leafing through an old travel book, A Honduran Adventure by William Wells, I ran across the photograph of a blandly handsome young man with blond hair and mustache, carrying a saber and wearing an ostrich plume in his hat. The caption identified him as General Lee Christmas, and the text disclosed that he had been a railroad engineer in Louisiana until 1901, when—after three consecutive days on the job—he had fallen asleep at the wheel and wrecked his train. To avoid prosecution he had fled to Honduras, there securing employment on a fruit company railroad. One year later, soldiers of the revolution led by General Manuel Bonilla had seized his train, and rather than merely surrendering, he had showed his captors how to armor the flatcars with sheet iron; thus protected, the soldiers had gained control of the entire north coast, and for his part in the proceedings, Christmas had been awarded the rank of general.

From other sources I learned that Christmas had taken a fine house in Tegucigalpa after the successful conclusion of the revolution, and had spent most of his time hunting in Olancho, a wilderness region bordering Nicaragua. By all accounts, he had been the prototypical good ol’ boy, content with the cushy lot that had befallen him; but in 1904 something must have happened to change his basic attitudes, for it had been then that he entered the employ of the United Fruit Company, becoming in effect the company enforcer. Whenever one country or another would balk at company policy, Christmas would foment a rebellion and set a more malleable government in office; through this process, United Fruit had come to dominate Central American politics, earning the sobriquet El Pulpo (The Octopus) by virtue of its grasping tactics.

These materials fired my imagination and inflamed my leftist sensibility, and I traveled to Honduras in hopes of fleshing out the story. I soon unearthed a wealth of anecdotal detail, much of it testifying to Christmas’s irrational courage: he had, for instance, once blown up a building atop which he was standing to prevent the armory it contained from falling into counterrevolutionary hands. But nowhere could I discover what event had precipitated the transformation of an affable, easygoing man into a ruthless mercenary, and an understanding of Christmas’s motivations was, I believed, of central importance to my book. Six weeks went by, no new knowledge came to light, and I had more or less decided to create a fictive cause for Christmas’s transformation, when I heard that some of the men who had fought alongside him in 1902 might still be alive on the island of Guanoja Menor.

From the window of the ancient DC-3 that conveyed me to Guanoja, the island resembled the cover of a travel brochure, with green hills and white beaches fringed by graceful palms; but at ground level it was revealed to be the outpost of an unrelenting poverty. Derelict shacks were tucked into the folds of the hills, animal wastes fouled the beaches, and the harbors were choked with sewage. The capital, Meachem’s Landing, consisted of a few dirt streets lined with weather-beaten shanties set on pilings, and beneath them lay a carpet of coconut litter and broken glass and crab shells. Black men wearing rags glared at me as I hiked in from the airport, and their hostility convinced me that even the act of walking was an insult to the lethargic temper of the place.

I checked into the Hotel Captain Henry—a ramshackle wooden building, painted pink, with a rust-scabbed roof and an electric pole lashed to its second-story balcony—and slept until nightfall. Then I set out to investigate a lead provided by the hotel’s owner: he had told me of a man in his nineties, Fred Welcomes, who lived on the road to Flowers Bay and might have knowledge of Christmas. I had not gone more than a half-mile when I came upon a little graveyard confined by a fence of corroded ironwork and overgrown with weeds from which the tops of the tombstones bulged like toadstools. Many of the stones dated from the turn of the century, and realizing that the man I was soon to interview had been a contemporary of these long-dead people, I had a sense of foreboding, of standing on the verge of a supernatural threshold. Dozens of times in the years to follow, I was to have similar apprehensions, a notion that everything I did was governed by unfathomable forces; but never was it stronger than on that night. The wind was driving glowing clouds across the moon, intermittently allowing it to shine through, causing the landscape to pulse dark to bright with the rhythm of a failing circuit, and I could feel ghosts blowing about me, hear windy voices whispering words of warning.

Welcomes’s shanty sat amid a banana grove, its orange-lit windows flickering like spirits in a dark water. As I drew near, its rickety shape appeared to assemble the way details are filled in during a dream, acquiring a roof and door and pilings whenever I noticed that it seemed to lack such, until at last it stood complete, looking every bit as dilapidated as I supposed its owner to be. I hesitated before approaching, startled by a banging shutter. Glints of moonlit silver coursed along the warp of the tin roof, and the plastic curtains twitched like the eyelids of a sleeping cat. At last I climbed the steps, knocked, and a decrepit voice responded, asking who was there. I introduced myself, explained that I was interested in Lee Christmas, and—after a considerable pause—was invited to enter.

The old man was sitting in a room lit by a kerosene lantern, and on first glance he seemed a giant; even after I had more realistically estimated his height to be about six-five, his massive hands and the great width of his shoulders supported the idea that he was larger than anyone had a right to be. It may be that this impression was due to the fact that I had expected him to be shriveled with age; but though his coal-black skin was seamed and wrinkled, he was still well-muscled: I would have guessed him to be a hale man in his early seventies. He wore a white cotton shirt, gray trousers, and a baseball cap from which the emblem had been ripped. His face was solemn and long-jawed, all its features so prominent that it looked to be a mask carved of black bone; his eyes were clouded over with milky smears, and from his lack of reaction to my movements, I came to realize he was blind.

“Well, boy,” he said, apparently having gauged my youth from the timbre of my voice. “What fah you want to know ’bout Lee Christmas? You want to be a warrior?”

I switched on my pocket tape recorder and glanced around. The furniture—two chairs and a table—was rough-hewn; the bed was a pallet with some clothes folded atop it. An outdated calendar hung from the door, and mounted on the wall opposite Welcomes was a small cross of black coral: in the orange flux of the lantern light, it looked like a complex incision in the boards.

I told him about my book, and when I had done he said, “I ’spect I can help you some. I were wit’ Lee from the Battle of La Ceiba till the peace at Comayagua, and fah a while after dat.”

He began to ramble on in a direction that did not interest me, and I cut in, saying, “I’ve heard there was no love lost between the islanders and the Spanish. Why did they join Bonilla’s revolution?”

“Dat were Lee’s doin’,” he said. “He promise dat dis Bonilla goin’ to give us our freedom, and so he have no trouble raisin’ a company. And he tell us that we ain’t goin’ to have no difficulty wit’ de Sponnish, ’cause dey can’t shoot straight.” He gave an amused grunt. “Nowadays dey better at shootin’, lemme tell you. But in de backtime de men of de island were by far de superior marksmen, and Lee figure if he have us wit’ him, den he be able to defeat the garrison at La Ceiba. Dat were a tall order. De leader of de garrison, General Carrillo, were a man wit’ magic powers. He ride a white mule and carry a golden sword, and it were said no bullet can bring him down. Many of de boys were leery, but Lee gather us on the dock and make us a speech. ‘Boys,’ he say, ‘you done break your mothers’ hearts, but you no be breakin’ mine. We goin’ to come down on de Sponnish like buzzards on a sick steer, and when we through, dey goin’ to be showin’ to de bone.’ And by de time he finish, we everyone of us was spittin’ fire.”

As evidenced by this recall of a speech made seventy-five years before, Welcomes’s memory was phenomenal, and the longer he spoke, the more fluent and vital his narrative became. Everything I had learned about Christmas—his age (twenty-seven in 1902), his short stature, his background—all that was knitted into a whole cloth, and I began to see him as he must have been: an ignorant, cocky man whose courage stemmed from a belief that his life had been ruined and so he might as well throw what remained of it away on this joke of a revolution. And yet he had not been without hope of redemption. Like many of his countrymen, he adhered to the notion that through the application of American know-how, the inferior peoples of Central America could be brought forward into a Star-Spangled future and civilized; I believe he nurtured the hope that he could play a part in this process.

When Welcomes reached a stopping point, I took the opportunity to ask if he knew what had motivated Christmas to enter the service of United Fruit. He mulled the question over a second or two and finally answered with a single word: “Aymara.”

So, Aymara, it was then I first heard your name.

Perhaps it is passionate experience that colors my memory, but I recall now that the word had the sound of a charm the old man had pronounced, one that caused the wind to gust hard against the shanty, keening in the cracks, fluttering the pages of the calendar on the door as if it, too, were a creature playing with time. But it was only a name, that of a woman whom Christmas and Welcomes had met while on a hunting trip to Olancho in 1904; specifically, a trip to the site of the ruined city of Olancho Viejo, a place founded by the Spanish in 1589 and destroyed by a mysterious explosion not fifty years thereafter. Since that day, Welcomes said, the vegetation there had grown stunted and malformed, and all manner of evil legend had attached to the area, the most notable being that a beautiful woman had been seen walking in the flames that swept over the valley. Though the city had not been rebuilt, this apparition had continued to be sighted by travelers and Indians, always in the vicinity of a cave that had been blasted into the top of one of the surrounding hills by the explosion. Christmas and Welcomes had arrived at this very hilltop during a furious storm and…Well, I will let the old man’s words (edited for the sake of readability) describe what happened, for it is his story, not mine, that lies at the core of these complex events.

That wind can blow, Lord, that wind can blow! Howlin’, rippin’ branches off the trees, and drivin’ slants of gray rain. Seem like it ’bout to blow everything back to the beginnin’ and start all over with creation. Me and Lee was leadin’ the horses along the rim of the valley, lookin’ for shelter and fearin’ for our lives, ’cause the footin’ treacherous and the drop severe. And then I spot the cave. Not for a second did I think this the cave whereof the legend speak, but when I pass through the entrance, that legend come back to me. The walls, y’see, they smooth as glass, and there were atremble in the air like you’d get from a machine runnin’ close by…’cept there ain’t no sound. The horses took to snortin’ and balkin’, and Lee pressed hisself flat against the wall and pointed his pistol at the dark. His hair were drippin’ wet, plastered to his brow, and his eyes was big and starin’. “Fred,” he says, “this here ain’t no natural place.”

“You no have to be tellin’ me,” I say, and I reckon the shiver in my voice were plain, ’cause he grins and say, “What’s the matter, Fred? Ain’t you got no sand?” That were Lee’s way, you understand—another man’s fear always be the tonic for his own.

Just then I spy a light growin’ deeper in the cave. A white light, and brighter than any star. Before I could point it out to Lee, that light shooted from the dark and pass right through me with a flash of cold. Then come another light, and another yet. Each one colder and brighter than the one previous, and comin’ faster and faster, till it ’pears the cave brightly lit and the lights they flickerin’ a little. It were so damn cold that the rainwater have froze in my hair, and I were half-blinded on top of that, but I could have swore I seen somethin’ inside the light. And when the cold begin to heaten up, the light to dwindle, I made out the shape of a woman…just her shape at first, then her particulars. Slim and black-haired, she were. More than pretty, with both Spanish and Indian breedin’ showin’ in her face. And she wearin’ a garment such as I never seen before, but what in later years I come to recognize as a jumpsuit. There were blood on her mouth and a fearful expression on her face. The light gathered ’round her in a cloud and dwindle further, fadin’ and shrinkin’, and right when it ’bout to fade away complete, she take a step toward us and slump to the ground.

For a moment the cave were pitch-dark, with only the wind and the vexed sounds of the horses, but directly I hear a clatter and a spark flares and I see that Lee have got one of the lanterns goin’. He kneel beside the woman and make to touch her, and I tell him, “Man, I wouldn’t be doin’ that. She some kinda duppy.”

“Horseshit!” he say. “Ain’t no such thing.”

“You just seen her come a-whirlin’ outta nowhere,” I say. “That’s the duppy way.”

’Bout then the woman give out with a moan, and her eyelids they flutter open. When she spot Lee bendin’ to her, the muscles in her face start strainin’ and she try to speak, but all that come out were this creaky noise. Finally she muster her strength and say, “Lee…Lee Christmas?” Like she ain’t quite sure he’s who she thinks.

Lee ’pears dumbstruck by the fact she know his name and he can’t say nothin’. He glance up to me, bewildered.

“It is you,” she say. “Thank God…thank God.” And she reach out to him, clawin’ at his hand. Lee flinched some, and I expected him to go a-whirlin’ off with her into white light. But nothin’ happen.

“Who are you?” Lee asks, and the question seem to amuse her, ’cause she laugh, and the laugh turn into a fit of coughin’ that bring up more blood to her lips. “Aymara,” she say after the fit pass. “My name is Aymara.” Her eyes look to go blank for a second or two, and then she clutch at Lee’s hand, desperate-like, and say, “You have to listen to me! You have to!”

Lee look a little desperate himself. I can tell he at sea with this whole business. But he say, “Go easy, now. I’ll listen.” And that calm her some. She lie back, breathin’ deep, eyes closed, and Lee’s starin’ at her, fixated. Suddenly he give himself a shake and say, “We got to get you some doctorin’,” and try to lift her. But she fend him off. “Naw,” she say. “Can’t no doctor help me. I’m dyin’.” She open her eyes wide as if she just realize this fact. “Listen,” she say. “You know where I come from?” And Lee say, No, but he’s been a-wonderin’. “The future,” she tell him. “Almost a hundred years from now. And I come all that way to see you, Lee Christmas.”

Wellsir, me and Lee exchange looks, and it’s clear to me that he thinks whatever happened to this here lady done ’fected her brain.

“You don’t believe me!” she say in a panic. “You got to!” And she hold up her wrist and show Lee her watch. “See that? You ain’t got watches like that in 1904!” I peer close and see that this watch ain’t got no hands, just numbers made up of dots that flicker and change as they toll off the seconds. But it don’t convince me of nothin’—I figure it’s just some foreign thing. She must can tell we still don’t believe her, ’cause she pull out a coupla other items to make her case. I know what them items was now—a ballpoint pen and a calculator—but at the time they was new to me. I still ain’t convinced. Her bein’ from the future were a hard truth to swallow, no matter the manner of her arrival in the cave. She start gettin’ desperate again, beggin’ Lee to believe her, and then her features they firm up and she say, “If I ain’t from the future, then how come I know you been talkin’ to United Fruit ’bout doin’ some soldierin’ for ’em.”

This were the first I hear ’bout Lee and United Fruit, and I were surprised, ’cause Lee didn’t have no use for them people. “How the hell you know that?” he asks, and she say, “I told you how. It’s in the history books. And that ain’t all I know.” She take to reelin’ off a list of names that weren’t familiar to me, but—from the dumbstruck expression on Lee’s face—must have meant plenty to him. I recall she mention Jacob Wettstein and Andrew Colby and Machine Gun Guy Maloney, who were to become Lee’s second-in-command. And then she reel off another list, this one of battles and dates. When she finish, she clutch his hand again. “You gotta ’cept their offer, Lee. If you don’t, the world gonna suffer for it.”

I could tell Lee have found reason to believe from what she said, but that the idea of workin’ with United Fruit didn’t set well with him. “Couldn’t nothin’ good come of that,” he say. “Them boys at the fruit company ain’t got much in mind but fillin’ their pockets.”

“It’s true,” she say. “The company they villains, but sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing for to ’chieve the right result. And that’s what you gotta do. ’Less you help ’em, ’less America takes charge down here, the world’s gonna wind up in a war that might just be the end of it.”

I know this strike a chord in Lee, what with him always carryin’ on ’bout good ol’ American ingenuity bein’ the salvation of the world. But he don’t say nothin’.

“You gotta trust me,” she say. “Everything depends ’pon you trustin’ me and doin’ what I say. I come all this way, knowin’ I were bound to die of it, just to tell you this, to make sure you’d do what’s necessary. You think I’d do that to tell you a lie?”

“Naw,” he says. “I s’pose not.” But I can see he still havin’ his doubts.

She sigh and look worried and then she start explainin’ to us that the machine what brought her have gone haywire and set her swayin’ back and forth through time like a pendulum. Back to the days of the Conquistador and into the future an equal ways. She tell us ’bout watchin’ the valley explode and the old city crumblin’ and finally she say, “I only have a glimpse of the future, of what’s ahead of my time, and I won’t lie, it were too quick for me to have much sense of it. But I have a feelin’ from it, a feelin’ of peace and beauty…like a perfume the world’s givin’ off. When I ’cepted this duty, I thought it were just to make sure things wouldn’t work out worse than they has, but now I know somethin’ glorious is goin’ to come, somethin’ you never would ’spect to come of all the bloodshed and terror of history.”

It were the ’spression on her face at that moment—like she’s still havin’ that feelin’ of peace—that’s what put my doubts to rest. It weren’t nothin’ she coulda faked. Lee he seemed moved by it, but maybe he’s stuck with thinkin’ that she’s addled, ’cause he say, “If you from the future, you tell me some more ’bout my life.”

A shudder pass through her, and for a second I think we gonna lose her then and there. But she gather herself and say, “You gonna marry a woman named Anna and have two daughters, one by her and one by another woman.”

Not many knew Lee were in love with Anna Towers, the daughter of an indigo grower in Trujillo, and even less knew ’bout his illegitimate daughter. Far as I concerned, this sealed the matter, but Aymara didn’t understand the weight of what she’d said and kept goin’.

“You gonna die of a fever in Puerto Cortés,” she says, “in the year…”

“No!” Lee held up his hand. “I don’t wanna hear that.”

“Then you believe me.”

“Yes,” he say. “I do.”

For a while there weren’t no sound ’cept the keenin’ of the wind from the cave mouth. Lee were downcast, studyin’ the backs of his hands like he were readin’ there some sorry truth, and Aymara were glum herself, like she were sad he did believe her. “Will you do it?” she asks.

Lee give a shrug. “Do I got a choice?”

“Maybe not,” she tell him. “Maybe this how it have to be. One of the men who…who help send me here, he claim the course of time can’t be changed. But I couldn’t take the chance he were wrong.” She wince and swallow hard. “Will you do it?”

“Hell,” he say after mullin’ it over. “Guess I ain’t got no better thing to do. Might as well go soldierin’ awhile.”

She search his face to see if he lyin’…’least that’s how it look to me. “Swear to it,” she say, takin’ his hand. “Swear you’ll do it.”

“All right,” he say. “I swear. Now you rest easy.”

He try doctorin’ her some, wettin’ down her brow and such, but nothin’ come of it. Somethin’ ’bout the manner of travel, she say, have tore up her insides, and there’s no fixin’ ’em. It ’pear to me she just been hangin’ on to drag that vow outta Lee, and now he done it, she let go and start slippin’ away. Once she make a rally, and she tell us more ’bout her journey, sayin’ the strange feelin’s that sweep over her come close to drivin’ her mad. I think Lee’s doubtin’ her again, ’cause he ask another question or two ’bout the future. But it seem she answer to his satisfaction. Toward the end she take to talkin’ crazy to someone who ain’t there, callin’ him Darlin’ and sayin’ how she sorry. Then she grab hold of Lee and beg him not to go back on his word.

“I won’t,” he say. But I think she never hear him, ’cause as he speak, blood come gushin’ from her mouth and she sag and look to be gazin’ into nowhere.

Lee don’t hardly say nothin’ for a long time, and then it’s only after the storm have passed and he concerned with makin’ a grave. We put her down near the verge of the old city, and once she under the earth, Lee ask me to say a little somethin’ over her. So I utter up a prayer. It were strange tryin’ to talk to God with the ruined tower of the cathedral loomin’ above, all ivied and crumblin’, like a sign no prayers would be answered.

“What you gonna do?” I ask Lee as he saddlin’ up.

He shake his head and tighten the cinch. “What would you do, Fred?”

“I guess I wouldn’t want to be messin’ with them fruit company boys,” I say. “They takes things more serious than I likes.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” he say. He look over to me, and it seem all the hollows in his face has deepened. “But maybe I ain’t been takin’ things serious enough.” He worry his lip. “You really think she from the future?” He ask this like he wantin’ to have me say No.

“I think she from somewhere damn strange,” I say. “The future sound ’bout as good as anything.”

He scuff the ground with his heel. “Pretty woman,” he say. “I guess it ain’t reasonable she just throw her life away for nothin’.”

I reckoned he were right.

“Jesus Christ!” He smack his saddle. “I wish I could just forget alla ’bout her.”

“Well, maybe you can,” I tell him. “A man can forget ’bout most anything with enough time.”

I never should have say that, ’cause it provide Lee with somethin’ to act contrary to, with a reason to show off his pride, and it could be that little thing I say have tipped the scales of his judgment.

“Maybe you can forget it,” he say testily. “But not me. I ain’t ’bout to forget I give her my word.” He swing hisself up into the saddle and set his horse prancin’ with a jerk of the reins. Then he grin. “Goddamn it, Fred! Let’s go! If we gotta win the world for ol’ United Fruit, we better get us a move on!”

And with that, we ride up from the valley and into the wild and away from Aymara’s grave, and far as I know, Lee never did take a backward glance from that day forth, so busy he were with his work of forgin’ the future.

I asked questions, attempting to clarify certain points, the exact date of the encounter among other things, but of course I did not believe Welcomes. Despite his aura of folksy integrity, I knew that Guanoja was rife with storytellers, men who would stretch the truth to any dimension for a price, and I assumed Welcomes to be one of these. Yet I was intrigued by what I perceived as the pathos surrounding the story’s invention. Here was the citizen of a country long oppressed by the economic policies of the United States, who—in order to earn a tip from an American tourist (I had given him twenty lempira upon the conclusion of his tale)—had created a fable that exonerated the United States from guilt and laid the blame for much of Central America’s brutal history upon the shoulders of a mystical woman from the future. On returning to my hotel, I typed up sections of the story and seeded them throughout a longer piece that documented various of Christmas’s crimes along with others committed by his successors. I entitled the piece “Aymara,” and the following day I sent it off to Mother Jones, having no real expectations that it would see print.

But “Aymara” was published, as was my next piece, and the next…And so began a journalistic career that has lasted these sixteen years.

During those years, my espousal of left-wing causes and the ensuing notoriety inspired my family to break off all connections with me. (They preferred not to acknowledge that I also lent my support to populist rebellions against Soviet-sponsored regimes.) I was not offended by their action; in fact, I took it for a confirmation of the rightness of my course, since—with their stock portfolios and mausoleumlike homes and born-again conservatism—they were as nasty a pack of capitalist rats as one could meet. I traveled to Argentina, South Africa, the Philippines, to any country that offered the scenario of a superpower-backed dictatorship and masses of the oppressed, and I wired back stories that sought to undermine the Commie-hating mentality engendered by the Reagan years. I admit that my zeal was occasionally misplaced, that I was used at times by corrupt men who passed themselves off as populist leaders. And I will further admit that in some cases I was motivated less by passionate concern than by a desire to increase my own legend. I had, you see, become a media figure. My photograph was featured on the covers of national magazines concomitant with such headings as “William Corson and the New Journalism”; my books made the best-seller lists; talk shows pestered my agent. But despite the glitter, I truly cared about the causes I espoused. Perhaps I cared too much. Perhaps—like Lee Christmas—I made the mistaken assumption that my American citizenship was a guarantee of wisdom superior to that of the peoples whom I tried to help. In retrospect, I can see that the impulses that provoked my writing of “Aymara” were no less ingenuous, no more informed, than those that inspired his career; but this is an irony I do not choose to dwell upon.

In January of 1994, I returned to Guanoja. The purpose of the trip was partly for a vacation, my first in many years, and also to satisfy a nostalgic whim to visit the place where my career had begun. The years had brought little change to Meachem’s Landing. True, there was now a jetport outside of town, and a few of the shanty bars had been replaced by more pricey watering holes of concrete block; but it remained essentially the same confluence of dirt streets lined with weathered shacks and populated by raggedly dressed blacks. The most salient differences were the gaggle of lower-echelon Honduran civil servants who spent each day hunched over their typewriters on the second-story verandah of the Hotel Captain Henry, churning out reams of officialese, and the alarming number of CIA agents: cold-eyed, patently anonymous men who could be seen sitting in the bars, gazing moodily toward Nicaragua and the Red Menace. Despite the Chamorro presidency, the Sandinistas had once again begun to make expansionist noises. War was in the offing, its onset as inevitable as the approach of a season, and this, too, was a factor in my choice of a vacation spot. I had received word of a mysterious military installation on the Honduran mainland, and—after having nosed around Washington for several weeks—I had been invited to inspect this installation. The Pentagon apparently wanted to assure me of its harmlessness and thus prevent their benign policies from being besmirched by more of my yellow journalism.

After checking into the hotel, I walked out past the town to the weedy little graveyard, where I expected I would find a stone marking the remains of Fred Welcomes. There was, indeed, such a stone, and I was startled to learn that he had survived until 1990, dying at the age of 106. I had assumed that he could not have lived much past the date of my interview with him, and the fact that he had roused my guilt. All my good fortune was founded upon his eloquent he, and I could have done a great deal to ease his decline. I leaned against the rusted fence, thinking that I was no better than the businessmen whose exploitative practices I had long decried, that I had mined gold from the old man’s imagination and given him a pittance in return. I was made so morose that later the same night, unable to achieve peace of mind, I set out on a drunk…at least this was my intent.

Across the street from the hotel was a two-story building of white stucco with faded lettering above the door that read MAUD PRICE’S GOLDEN DREAM. I remembered Maud from my previous trip—a fat, black woman who had kept an enormous turtle in a tin washtub and would entertain herself by feeding it chicken necks and watching it eat—and I was saddened to discover that she, too, had passed away. Her daughter was now the proprietor, and I was pleased to find that she had maintained Maud’s inimitable decor. Strung across the ceiling were dozens upon dozens of man-shaped paper dolls, colored red and black, and these cast magical-looking shadows on the walls by the light of two flickering lanterns. Six wooden tables, a bar atop which rested a venerable stereo that was grinding out listless reggae, and a number of framed photographs whose glass was too flyspecked to permit easy observation of the subject matter. I ordered a beer, a Salvavidas, and was preparing for a bout of drunken self-abnegation when I noticed a young woman staring at me from the rear table. On meeting my eyes, she showed no sign of embarrassment and held her gaze steady for a long moment before turning back to the magazine she had been reading. Even in that dim light, I could see she was beautiful. Slim, long-limbed, with a honeyed complexion. Curls of black hair hung over the front of her white blouse, their shapes as elegant as the tail feathers of exotic birds. Her face…I could tell you that she had large dark eyes and high cheekbones, that her features had an impassive Indian cast. But that does nothing more than to define her by type and illuminates her not at all. This was a woman with whom I was soon to be in love, if I was not somewhat in love with her already, and the most difficult thing in the world to describe is the face of your lover, because though it is familiar in every detail, it tends to become a mirror of your devotion, to reflect the ideals of passion, and thus is less a human face than the face of love itself.

I continued to watch her, and after a while she looked up again and smiled. There was no way I could ignore this contact. I walked over, introduced myself (in Spanish, which I assumed to be her native tongue), and asked if I could join her. “Why not?” she replied in English, and after I had taken a seat, she pushed her magazine toward me, pointing to an inset photograph of me, one snapped some years before when I had worn a mustache. “I thought it was you,” she said. “You look much more handsome clean-shaven.”

Her name, she told me, was Ivie Solis. She was employed by a travel agency in La Ceiba and was on a working vacation, having arrived the day before. We talked of this and that, nothing of consequence, but the air between us seemed to crackle. Everything about her, everything she did, struck a chord within me, and I was mesmerized by her movements, entranced, as if she were a magician who might at any moment loose a flight of birds from her fingertips.

Eventually the conversation turned to my work, of which she had read the lion’s share, and she told me that her favorite piece was my first, “Aymara.” I expressed surprise that she had seen it—it had never been reprinted—and she explained that her parents had run a small hotel catering to American tourists, and the magazine had been left in one of the rooms. “It had the feel of being part of a puzzle,” she said. “Or the answer to a riddle.”

“It seems fairly straightforward to me,” I said.

She tucked a curl behind her ear, a gesture I was coming to recognize as characteristic. “That’s because you didn’t believe the old man’s story.”

“And you did?”

“I didn’t leap to disbelief as you did.” She settled back in her chair, picking at the label of her beer bottle. “I guess I just like thinking about what motivated the woman.”

“Obviously,” I said, “according to the logic of the story, she came from a world worse off than this one and was hoping to initiate a course of events that would improve it.”

“I thought that myself at first,” she said. “But it doesn’t fit the logic of the story. Don’t you remember? She knew what would happen to Christmas. His military career, his triumphs. If she’d come from a world in which those things hadn’t occurred, she wouldn’t have had knowledge of them.”

“So…” I began.

“I think,” she cut in, “that if she did exist, she came from this world. That she knew she would have to sacrifice herself in order to ensure that Christmas did as he did. It may be that your article was the agency that informed her of her duty.”

“Even if that’s the case,” I said, “why would she have tried to inspire Christmas’s crimes? Why wouldn’t she have tried to make him effect good works? Perhaps she could have destroyed United Fruit.”

“That would be the last thing she’d want. Don’t you see? If her actions were politically motivated, she would understand that before real change could occur, the circumstances, the conditions of life under American rule, would have to be so oppressive that violent change would become a viable option. Revolution. She’d realize that Christmas’s violences were necessary. They set the tone for American policies and licensed subsequent violence. She’d be afraid that if Christmas didn’t work for United Fruit, the process of history that set the stage for revolution might be slowed down or negated. Perhaps the American stranglehold might be achieved with such subtlety that change would be forever impossible.”

She spoke these words with marked intensity, and I believe I realized then that there was more to Ivie than met the eye. Her logic was the logic of terrorism, the justification of bloodshed in terms of its consciousness-raising effects. But I was so intent upon her as a woman, I scarcely noticed the implication of what she had said.

“Well,” I said, “given that your scenario is accurate, it still doesn’t make sense. The idea of time travel, of tinkering with the past…it’s absurd. Too many paradoxes are involved. What you’re supposing isn’t a chain of events wherein one action predicates another. It’s a loop, a metaphysical knot tied in reality, linking my article and some woman and a man years dead. There’s no end, no beginning. Things don’t work that way.”

“They don’t?” She lowered her eyes and traced a design in the moisture on the table. “It seems to me that life is paradox. Things occur without apparent reason between nations.” She looked up at me. “Between people. Perhaps there are reasons, but they’re impossible to unravel or define. And dealing with such an unreasonable quantity as time, I wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than paradoxical.”

We moved on to other topics, and shortly afterward we left the bar and walked along the road to Flowers Bay. A few hundred yards past the last shanty, at a point where the road meandered close to the shore and the sea lay calm beneath a sheen of starlight, visible through a labyrinthine fringe of mangrove, there I kissed her. It was the kind of kiss that holds a lifetime of promise, tentative, then growing more assured and involving as the contact surpasses all your expectations. I had thought kisses like that existed solely in the province of romance novels, and on discovering this was not so, all my cynicism was dissolved and I fell wholly in love with Ivie Solis.

I do not propose to detail our affair, the evolution of our feelings. While these things seemed to me remarkable, I doubt they were more so than the interactions of any other pair of lovers, and they are pertinent to my story only in the volatility that attached to our moments together. Despite Ivie’s thesis that love—like time—was an inexplicable mystery, I sought to explain it to myself and decided that because I had never had any slack in my life, because I had never allowed myself the luxury of deep emotional involvement, I had therefore been ripe for the picking. I might, I told myself, have fallen in love with anyone. Ivie had simply been the first acceptable candidate to happen along. All I knew of her aside from her work and place of birth was a few bits and pieces: that she was twenty-six; that she had attended the University of Miami; that—like most Hondurans—she resented the American presence in her country; that she had a passion for coconut candy and enjoyed the works of Manuel Puig. How, I wondered, could I be obsessed with someone about whose background I was almost completely ignorant. And yet perhaps my depth of feeling was enhanced by this lack of real knowledge. Things are often most alluring when they are not quite real, when your contact with them is brief and intense, and in the light of the mind they acquire the vivid artfulness of a dream.

We spent nearly every moment of every day in each other’s company, and most of this in making love. My room, our clothing, smelled of sex, and we became such a joke to the old woman who cleaned the hotel that whenever she saw us she would let loose with gales of laughter. The only times we were apart were an hour or so each afternoon when Ivie would have to perform her function as a travel agent, securing—she said—cheap group rates from various resorts that would be offered by her firm to American skin divers. On most of these occasions I would pace back and forth, impatient for her return. But then, ten days after we had initiated the affair, thinking I might as well make some use of the interval, I rented a car and drove to Spanish Harbor, a small town up the coast where there had lately been several outbreaks of racial violence, highly untypical for Guanoja; I was interested in determining whether or not these incidents were related to the martial atmosphere that had been gathering about the island.

By the time I arrived in the town, which differed from Meachem’s Landing hardly at all, having a larger harbor and perhaps a half a dozen more streets, I was thirsty, and I stopped in a tourist restaurant for a beer. This particular restaurant, The Treasure Chest, consisted of a small room done up in pirate decor that was fronted by a concrete deck where patrons sat beneath striped umbrellas. Standing at the bar, I had a clear view of the deck, and as I sipped my beer, wondering how best to pursue my subject, I spotted Ivie sitting at a table near the railing. With her was a man wearing a gray business suit. I assumed him to be a resort owner, but when he turned to signal a waiter, I recognized him by his hawkish features and fringe of salt-and-pepper beard to be Abimael Sotomayor, the leader of Sangre y Verdad (Blood and Truth), one of the most extreme of Latin American terrorist groups. I had twice interviewed him and I knew him for a charismatic and scary man, a poet who excelled at torture, whose followers performed quasi-mystical blood rituals in his name prior to each engagement. The sight of him with Ivie numbed me, and I began to construct rationalizations that would explain her presence in innocent terms. But none of my rationalizations held water.

I left the restaurant and drove full-tilt back to Meachem’s Landing, where I bribed the cleaning woman into admitting me to Ivie’s room. It was identical to mine, with gray boards and a metal cot and a night table covered in plastic and a single window that opened onto the second-story verandah. I began by searching the closet, but found only shoes and clothing, apparel quite in keeping with her purported job. Her overnight case contained makeup, and the rest of her luggage was empty…or so it appeared. But as I hefted one of the suitcases, preparing to stow it beneath the cot, I realized it was heavier than it should have been. I laid it on the cot, and before long I located the catch that opened a false bottom; inside was a machine pistol.

I sat staring at the gun. It was an emblem of Ivie’s complicity with an organization so violent that even I, who sympathized with their cause, was repelled by their actions. Yet despite this, I found I loved her no less; I only feared that she did not love me, that she was using me. And, too, I feared for her: the fact that she was at the least an associate of Sangre y Verdad offered little hope of a happy ending for the two of us. Finally I replaced the false bottom, restored the suitcase to its original spot beneath the cot, and went to my room to wait for Ivie.

That night I said nothing about the gun, rather I tested Ivie in a variety of ways, trying to learn whether or not her affections for me were fraudulent. Not only did she pass every test, but I came to understand much about her that had been puzzling me. I realized that her distracted silences, her deferential attitude concerning the future, her vague references to “responsibilities,” all these were symptomatic of the difficulty our relationship was causing her, the contrary pulls exerted by her two passions. Throughout the night, I kept thinking of horror stories I had heard about Sangre y Verdad, but I loved Ivie too much to judge her. How could I—a citizen of the country which had created the conditions that bred organizations like Sotomayor’s—ever hope to fathom the pressures that had brought her to this pass?

For the next three days, knowing that our time together was likely to be brief, I tried to put politics from mind. Those days were nearly perfect. We swam, we danced, we rented a dory and rowed out past the reef and threw out lines and caught silkfish, satinfish, fish that gleamed iridescent red and blue and yellow, like talismans of our own brilliance. Yet despite our playfulness, our happiness, I was constantly aware that the end could not be far off.

Four days after her meeting with Sotomayor, Ivie told me she had an appointment that evening, one that might last two or three hours; her nervous manner informed me that something important was in the works. At eight o’clock she drove off along the road to Flowers Bay, and I tailed her in my rented car, maintaining a discreet distance, my headlights dark. She parked by the side of the road about a mile past Welcomes’s shanty, and seeing this, I pulled my car into a thicket and continued on foot.

It was a moonless night, but the stars were thick, their light revealing every shadowy rut, silhouetting the palms and mangrove. Mosquitoes whined in my ear; the sound of waves on the reef came as a faint hiss. A couple of hundred feet beyond Ivie’s car stood a largish shanty set among a stand of coconut palms. Several cars were parked out front, and two men were lounging by the door, obviously on sentry duty. Orange light flickered in the window. I eased through the brush, making my way toward the rear of the shanty, and after ascertaining that no guards were posted there, I duckwalked across a patch of open ground and flattened against the wall. I could hear many voices speaking at once, none of them intelligible. I inched along the wall to the window whose shutter was cracked open. Through the gap I spotted Sotomayor sitting atop a table, and beside him, a thin, agitated-looking man of thirty-five or so, with prematurely gray hair. I could see none of the others, but judging by their voices, I guessed there to be at least a dozen men and women present.

With a peremptory gesture, Sotomayor signaled for quiet. “I would much have preferred to use my organization alone,” he said. “But Dr. Dobler”—he acknowledged the gray-haired man with a nod—“insisted that the entire spectrum of the left be included, and I had no choice but to agree. However, in the interests of security, I wish to limit participation in this operation to those in this room. And, since some of you are unknown to the rest, I suggest that we not increase our intimacy by an exchange of names. Let us choose false names. Simple ones, if you please.” He smoothed back his hair, glancing around at his audience. “As I am to lead, I will take a military rank for my name.” He smiled. “And as I am not overly ambitious, you may refer to me as the Sergeant.” Laughter. “Perhaps if we are successful, I will receive a promotion.”

Each of the men and women—there were fourteen in all—selected a name, and I heard Ivie say, “Aymara.”

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to hear it, but knowing her fascination with my article, I did not think it an unexpected choice.

“Very well,” said Sotomayor, all business now. “The matter under consideration is the American military project known as Longshot.”

I was startled—Longshot was the code name of the installation I was soon to inspect.

“For some months,” Sotomayor went on, “we have been hearing rumors concerning Longshot, none likely to inspire confidence in our neighbors to the north. We have been unable to substantiate the rumors, but this situation has changed. Dr. Dobler was until recently one of the coordinators of the project. He has come to us at great personal risk, because he believes there is terrible danger associated with Longshot, and because, with our lack of bureaucratic impediments, he believes we may be the only ones capable of acting swiftly enough to forestall disaster. I will let him explain the rest.”

Sotomayor stepped out of view, leaving the floor to Dobler, who looked terrified. Thinking what it must have taken for him to venture forth from his ivory tower and out among the bad dogs, I awarded him high marks for guts. He cleared his throat. “Project Longshot is essentially an experiment in temporal displacement…that is to say, time travel.”

This sparked a babble, and Sotomayor called for quiet. I wished I could have seen Ivie’s face, wanting to know if she were as stunned and frightened as I was.

“The initial test is to be conducted twenty-three days from now,” said Dobler. “We have every reason to believe it will succeed, because evidence exists in the past…” He broke off, appearing confused. “There’s so much to…” His eyes darted left to right. “I’m sorry. I…”

“Please be calm,” advised Sotomayor. “You’re among friends.”

Dobler squared his shoulders. “I’m all right,” he said, and drew a deep breath. “The site of the project is a hill overlooking the ruins of Olancho Viejo, a colonial city destroyed in 1623 by an explosion. I say ‘explosion,’ but I believe I can safely state that it was not an explosion in the typical sense of the word. For one thing, eyewitness accounts testify that while, indeed, some of the buildings were blown apart, others appeared to crumble, to collapse into powder and chunks of rotten stone, the result of being washed over by a wave of blinding white radiance. Of course these accounts were written by superstitious men—mainly priests—and are thus suspect. Some tell of a beautiful woman walking in the midst of the light, but I think we can attribute that to the Catholic propensity for seeing the Virgin in moments of stress.” This elicited a few chuckles, and Dobler was braced by the response. “However, allied with readings we have taken, with other anomalies we’ve discovered on and near the site, it’s evident that the destruction of Olancho Viejo was a direct result of our experiment. Though our target date is in the 1920s, it seems that the displacement will create a kind of shock wave that will produce dire effects 360 years in the past.”

“How does that affect us?” someone asked.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Dobler. He was warming to his task, becoming the model of an enthused lecturer. “First it’s important you understand that although the initial experiment will merely consist of the displacement of a few laboratory animals and some mineral specimens, plant life, and so forth, the target purpose of the project is the manipulation of the past through assassination and other means.”

Expressions of outrage from the gathering.

“Wait!” said Dobler. “That’s not what you should be worried about, because I don’t think it’s possible.”

“Why not?” A woman’s voice.

“I really don’t think I could explain it to you,” said Dobler. “The mathematics are too complex…and my conclusions, I admit, are arguable. Several of my colleagues are in complete disagreement; they believe the past can be altered. But I’m convinced otherwise. Time, according to my mathematical model, has a fixed shape. It is not simply a process that affects physical objects; it has its own physicality, or—better said—the process of time involves its own spectrum of physical events, all on the particulate level, and it is the isolation of this spectrum that will allow us to displace objects into the past.” He must have been the focus of bewildered stares, for he threw up his hands in helplessness. “The language isn’t capable of conveying an accurate explanation. Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, any attempt to alter the course of history will fail, because the physical potentials of time will compensate for that alteration.”

“It sounds to me,” said Sotomayor, “as if you’re embracing the doctrine of predestination.”

“That’s a rather murky analogue,” said Dobler. “But, yes, I suppose I am.”

“Then why are you asking us to stop something which, according to you, cannot be stopped? If evidence exists that the experiment was carried out, we can do nothing…at least if we are to accept your logic.”

“As I stated, I may be wrong in this,” said Dobler. “In which case, an attack on the project might succeed. But even if time does prove to be unalterable, what is unalterable in this circumstance is the destruction of Olancho Viejo. It’s possible that our experiment can be stopped, and the malleability of time will enlist some other causal agent.”

“There’s something I don’t understand.” Ivie’s voice. “If you are correct about the unalterability of time, what do we have to fear?”

“For every action,” said Dobler, “there must be a reaction. The action will be the experiment. One small part of the reaction can be observed in what happened three centuries ago. But my figures show that the greater part of the reaction will occur in the present. I’ve gone over and over the equations, and there’s no error.” Dobler paused, summoning thought. “I’ve no idea what form this end of the reaction will take. It may be similar to the explosion in 1623; it may be entirely different. We know nothing about the forces involved…except how to trigger them and how to perform a few simple tricks. But I’m sure of one thing. The reaction will affect matter on the subatomic levels, and it will be on the order of a billion times more extensive than what happened in 1623. I doubt anything will survive it.”

A silence ensued, broken at last by Sotomayor. “Have you shown these equations to your colleagues?”

“Of course.” Dobler gave a despairing laugh. “They believe they’ve solved the problem by constructing a containment chamber. It’s a solution comparable to wrapping a blanket around a nuclear device.”

“How can we discount their opinion?” someone asked.

“Look,” said Dobler, peeved. “Unless you can understand the mathematics involved, there’s no way I can prove my case. I believe my colleagues are too excited about the project to accept the fact that it’s potentially disastrous. But what does it mean for me to tell you that? The best evidence I can give you is the fact that I am here, that I have in effect thrown away my career in order to warn you.” He looked down at the floor. “Though perhaps I can offer one further proof.”

They began to bombard him with questions, most of them challenging in tone, and—concerned that the meeting might suddenly break up and my car be discovered—I slipped away from the window and headed back toward town.

It is a measure, I believe, of the foolishness of love that I was less worried about the fate of the world than about Ivie’s possible involvement in the events of Welcomes’s story, a story I was now hard put to disbelieve; it seemed I was operating under the assumption that if Ivie and I could work things out, everything else would fall into place around us. I drove back to the hotel, waited awhile, and then, deciding that I wanted to talk to her somewhere more private, somewhere an argument—I thought one likely—would not be overheard, I left a note asking her to meet me on the far side of the island, at an abandoned construction site a short ways up the beach from St. Mark’s Key—the skeleton of a large house belonging to the estate of an American who had died shortly after work had begun. This site was of special moment for Ivie and me. It was set back from the shore, hidden from prying eyes by dense growths of palms and sea grape and cashew trees, and we had made love there on several occasions. By the time I reached it, the moon had risen and the unfinished house—with its gapped walls and skewed beams and free-standing doorways—had the look of a surreal maze of silver light and shadow. Sitting inside it on the ground floor, I felt it posed an apt metaphor for the labyrinthine complexity of the situation.

Until that moment, I had not brought my concentration to bear on this complexity, and now, trying to unravel the problem, I found I could not do so. The circumstances of Welcomes’s story, of Dobler’s, Ivie’s, and my own…all this smacked of magical serendipity and was proof against logic. Time, which had always been for me a commodity, something to be saved and expended, seemed to have been revealed as a vast fabulous presence cloaked in mystery and capable of miracles, and I had as little hope of comprehending its processes as I would those of a star winking overhead. Less, actually. I attempted to narrow my focus, to consider separate pieces of the puzzle, beginning with what Welcomes had told me. Assuming it was true, I saw how it explained much I had not previously given thought to. Christmas’s courage, for instance. Knowing that he would die of a fever would have made him immune to fear in battle. All the pieces fit together with the same irrational perfection. It was only the whole, the image they comprised, that was inexplicable.

At last I gave it up and sat staring at the white combers piling in over the reef, listening to the scattery hiss of lizards running in the beach grass, watching the colored lights of the resort on St. Mark’s Key flicker as palm fronds were blown across them by the salt breeze. I must have sat this way an hour before I heard a car engine; a minute later, Aymara—so I had been thinking of her—walked through the frame of the front door and sat beside me. “Let’s not stay here,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “I’d like a drink.” In the moonlight her face looked to have been carved more finely, and her eyes were aswim with silvery reflections.

I could not think how to begin. Finally, settling on directness, I said, “Did you know what Dobler was going to tell you? Is that why you chose the name Aymara?”

She pulled back from me, consternation written on her features. “How…” she said; and then: “You followed me. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why the hell not?” Anger over her betrayal, her subterfuge, suddenly took precedence over my concern for her. “How else am I going to keep track of who’s who in the revolution these days?”

“You could have been killed,” she said flatly.

“Right!” I said, refusing to let her lack of emotionality subdue me. “God knows, Sotomayor might have had you drink my blood for a nightcap! What the hell possessed you to get involved with him?”

“I’m not involved with him!” she said, her own temper surfacing.

“You’re not with Sangre y Verdad?”

“No, the FDLM.”

I was relieved—the FDLM was the most populist and thus the most legitimate element of the Honduran left. “You haven’t answered my first question,” I said. “Why did you choose that name?”

“I was thinking of you. That’s all it was. But now…I don’t know.”

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you? Play out the story?” I slugged my thigh in frustration. “Jesus Christ! Sotomayor will kill you if he finds out! And Dobler, he might be a crazy! A CIA plant! Right now he’s…”

“You didn’t stay until the end?” she cut in.

“No.”

“He’s dead,” she said. “He told us that if we attacked, we should destroy all the computers and records, anyone who had knowledge of the process. He said that when he was younger, he would have supported any evil whose goal was the increase of knowledge, but now he had uncovered knowledge that he couldn’t control and he couldn’t live with that. He said he hoped what he intended to do would prove something to us. Then he went onto the porch and shot himself.”

I sat stunned, picturing that nervous little man and his moment of truth.

“I believe him,” she said. “Everyone did. I doubt we would have otherwise.”

“Sotomayor would have believed him no matter what,” I said. “He yearns for disaster. He’d find the end of the world an erotic experience.”

“I shouldn’t have to explain to you what produces men like Abimael,” she said stiffly. She reached behind her to—I assumed—adjust the waistband of her skirt. “Are you going to inform on us?”

Her voice was tremulous, her expression strained, and she continued holding her hand behind her back; it was an awkward posture, and I began to suspect her reasons for maintaining it. “What have you got there?” I asked, knowing the answer.

A car passed on the beach, its headlights throwing tattered leaf shadows over the beams.

“What if I said I was going to inform on you?”

She lowered her eyes, sighed, and brought forth a small caliber automatic; after a second, she let it fall to the floor. She studied it despondently, as if it were a failed something for which she had entertained high hopes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m…” She put her hand to her brow, covering her eyes.

The gun showed a negative black against the planking, an ugly brand marring the smooth grain. I picked it up. Its cold weight fueled my anger, and I heaved it into the shadows.

“I love you.” She trailed her fingers across my arm, but I refused to speak or turn to her. “Please, believe me! It’s just I don’t know what to do anymore.” Her voice broke, and it seemed I could smell her tears.

“It’s all right.” My voice was harsh, burred with anger.

We sat in silence. The crunch of waves on the reef built louder, the wind seethed in the palm crowns, and faint music from the resort added a fractured tinkling—I felt that the things of nature were losing definition, blending into a dissolute melodic rush. Finally I asked her what she intended to do, and she said, “I doubt my intentions matter. I don’t think I can avoid going back.”

“To 1902? Is that what you mean?” I said this helplessly, sensing the gravity of events sweeping toward us like a huge dark fist. “How can you even consider it? You heard Dobler, you know the dangers.”

“I don’t believe it’s dangerous. Only inevitable.”

I turned to her then, ready with protests, arguments. Christ, she was beautiful! It was as if tears had washed her clean of a film, exposed a new depth of beauty. The words caught in my throat.

“Just before Dobler killed himself,” she said, “I asked him what he thought time was. He’d been talking about it as a mathematical entity, but I had the idea he wasn’t saying what he really felt, and I wanted to know everything he did…because I was afraid. It seemed something magical was happening, that I was being drawn into some incomprehensible scheme.” She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “Dobler said that when he had begun to develop his equations, he’d had a feeling like mine. ‘An apprehension of the mystical,’ he called it. There was something hypnotic about the equations…they reminded him of mantras the way they affected him. The further his work progressed, the more he came to think of time—its event spectrum—as evidence of divinity. Its basic operation, its mechanics. Abimael laughed at this and asked if he was talking about God. And Dobler said that if by God he meant a stable energy system governing the actions of all matter on a subatomic level, then yes, that’s exactly what he was talking about.”

I wanted to refute this, but it was so similar to my own thoughts concerning the nature of time, I could not muster a contrary word.

“You feel it, too,” she said. “Don’t you?”

I took her by the shoulders. “Let’s leave here. Tonight. We can hire a boat to run us over to La Ceiba, and by tomorrow…”

She put a finger to my lips, then kissed me. The kiss deepened, and from that point on I lost track of what happened. One moment we were sitting on the floor of that skeleton house, and the next—our clothes magicked away—we were lying in the grass behind the house, in a tiny clearing bordered by banana trees. The way Ivie’s hair was fanned out around her head, its color merging with the dark grass, she looked to be a pale female bloom sprouting from the sandy soil, and her skin felt like the moonlight, smooth, coated with a cool emulsion. I thought I could taste the moonlight on the tips of her breasts. She guided me between her legs, her expression grave, focused on the act, and as I entered her she arched her neck, staring up into the banana leaves, and cried, “Oh, God!” as if she saw there some enrapturing presence. But I knew to whom she was really crying out. To that sensation of heat and weakness that enveloped us, sheltered us. To that sublimation of hope and fear into a pour of pure desiring. To that strange thoughtless and self-adoring creature we became, all hip and mouth and heart. That was God.

Afterward as we dressed, among the sibilant noises and wind and sea, I heard a sharper noise, a click. But before I could categorize it, I put it from my mind. My head was full of plans. I would knock Ivie out, drug her, carry her off to the States. I would allow the guerrillas to destroy the project, and at the last moment come swinging out of nowhere and snatch her to safety. I envisioned even more improbable heroics. Strong with love, all these plans seemed workable to me.

We walked around the side of the house, hand in hand, and I did not notice the figure standing in the shadow of a cashew tree until it spoke, saying, “Aymara!” Ivie gave a shriek of alarm, and I stepped in front of her, shielding her. The figure moved forward, and I saw it was Sotomayor, his sharp features set in a grim expression, his neatly trimmed beard looking fake in the moonlight. He stopped about six feet away, training a pistol on us, and fixed Ivie with a contemptuous stare. “Puta!” he said. He pulled something from his pocket and flung it at our feet. A folded piece of paper with writing on it. “You should be more discreet in your correspondence,” he said to me.

“Listen…” I began.

He swung the pistol to cover my forehead. “You may have value as a hostage,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rely on that. I don’t like being betrayed, and I’m not in the best of moods.”

“I haven’t betrayed you!” Ivie stepped from behind me. “You don’t understand.”

The muscles of Sotomayor’s face worked, as if he were repressing a scream of rage.

“He’s on our side,” said Ivie. “You know that. He’s always supported the cause.”

Sotomayor smiled—a vicious predator’s smile—and leveled the pistol at her. “Did you enjoy your last fuck, bitch? I could hear you squealing down on the beach.”

The muscles on his forearms bunched, preparing for the kick, and I dove for him. Too late. The pistol went off an instant before I knocked him over, the report blending with Ivie’s cry, and we rolled in the grass and sand, clawing, grappling. Sotomayor was strong, but I was fighting out of sheer desperation, and he was no match for me. I tore the pistol from his grasp and brought the butt down on his temple. Brought it down a second time. He sagged, his head lolling. I crawled to where Ivie had fallen. Her legs were kicking in spasms, and when I touched her hair, I found it mired with blood. The bullet had entered through the side of her head and lodged in the brain. She must have been clinically dead already, but obeying some dumb reflex, she was trying to speak. Each time her mouth opened, blood jetted forth. She was bleeding from the eyes, the nostrils. Her entire face was slick with blood, and still her mouth kept opening and closing, making glutinous choking sounds. I wanted to touch her, to heal her with a touch, but there was so much broken, I could not decide where to lay my hands. They fluttered above her like stupid animals, and I heard myself screaming for it to stop, for her to stop. Her arms began to flop around, her hips to thrash, convulsing. A broken, bloody doll. I aimed the pistol at her chest, but could not bring myself to pull the trigger. Finally I covered her with my body, and, sobbing, held her until all movement ceased.

I came to my feet, staggered over to Sotomayor. He had not yet regained consciousness. Tears streaming down my cheeks, I pointed the pistol at him. But it did not seem sufficient that he merely die. I kneeled beside him, then straddled his chest.

A voice called out from behind me. “What goin’ on dere, mon?”

Visible as shadows, two men were standing at the water’s edge.

“Man killed somebody!” I answered.

“You call de police?”

“No!”

“Den I’ll be goin’ to de Key, ax ’em to spark up dere radio!”

I waved acknowledgment, watched the men sprint away. Once they were out of sight, I pried Sotomayor’s mouth open and inserted the pistol barrel. “Wake up!” I shouted. I spat in his face, slapped him. Repeated the process. His eyelids twitched, and he let out a muffled groan. “Wake up, you son of a bitch!” He gazed at me blearily, and I wiggled the pistol to make him aware of it. His eyes widened. He tried to speak, his eyebrows arching comically with the effort. I cocked the pistol, and he froze.

“I should turn you in,” I said. “Let the police torture your ass. But I don’t trust you to be a hero, man. Maybe you’d talk. Maybe you know something worth trading for your life.”

He gurgled something unintelligible.

“Can’t hear you,” I said. “Sorry.”

Using the pistol as a lever, I began turning his head from side to side. He tried to keep his eyes on mine. Sweat popped out on his brow, and he was having trouble swallowing.

“Here it comes,” I said.

He tensed and shut his eyes.

“Just kidding,” I told him. I waited a few seconds, then shouted, “Here it comes!”

He flinched.

I started sobbing again. “Did you see what you did to her, man? Did you see? You fucking son of a bitch! Did you see!” The pistol was shaking, and Sotomayor bit the barrel to keep it still.

For a minute or thereabouts I was crying so hard, I was blinded. At last I managed to gain control. I wiped away the tears. “Here it comes,” I said.

He blinked.

“Here it comes!”

Another blink.

“Here it fucking comes!”

His stare was mad and full of hate. But his hatred was nothing compared to mine. I was dizzy with it. The stars seemed very near, wheeling about my head. I wanted to sit astride him forever and cause him pain.

I dug the fingers of my left hand in back of his Adam’s apple, forcing his jaws apart, and I battered his teeth with the barrel, breaking a couple. Blood filmed over his lower lip, trickled down into his beard. He gagged, choking on the fragments.

“Like that?” I asked him. “How about this?”

I broke his nose with the heel of my hand. Tears squeezed from his eyes, bloody saliva and mucus came from his nose. His breath made a sucking noise.

Shouts from the direction of St. Mark’s Key.

I leaned close to Sotomayor, my face inches away, the blood-slimed barrel sheathed in his mouth.

“Here it comes,” I whispered. “Here. It. Comes.”

I know he believed me, but he was mesmerized by my proximity, by whatever he saw in my eyes, and could not look away. I screamed at him and met his terrified gaze as I fired.

Perhaps I would have been charged with murder in the States, but in Honduras, where politics and passion license all manner of violence, I was a hero.

I was a hero, and insane…for grief possessed me as powerfully as had love.

Now that Ivie was dead, it seemed only just that the others join her on the pyre. I told the police everything I knew. The island was sealed off, the guerrillas rounded up. The press acclaimed me; the President of the United States called to commend my actions; my fellow journalists besieged the Hotel Captain Henry, seeking to interview me but usually settling for interviews with the cleaning woman and the owner. I was in no mood to play the hero. I drank, I wept, I wandered. I gazed into nowhere, seeing Ivie’s face. Aymara’s face. In memoriam, I accorded her that name. Brave-sounding and lyrical, it suited her. And I wished she could have died wearing that name in 1902—that, I realized, should have been her destiny. Whenever I saw a dark-haired young woman, I would have the urge to follow her, to spy on her, to discover who her friends were, what made her laugh, what movies she liked, how she made love, thinking that knowing these details would help me regain the definition that Aymara had brought to my life. Yet even had this not been a fantasy, I could not have acted upon it. Grief had immobilized me. Grief…and guilt. It had been my meddling that had precipitated her death, hadn’t it? I was a dummy moving on a track between these two emotions, stopping now and again to stare at something that had caught my eye, some curiosity that would for a moment reduce my self-awareness.

Several days after her death, the regional director of the CIA paid me a call. My visit to Project Longshot had originally been scheduled for two weeks prior to the initial test, but he now told me that since I knew about “our little secret down here,” the President had authorized my presence at the test. This exclusive was to be my reward for patriotism. I accepted his invitation and came close to telling him that I would be delighted to stand at ground zero during the end of the world.

I had been too self-absorbed to give much thought to Dobler’s warnings, but now I decided I wanted the world to end. What was the point in trying to save it? We had been heading toward destruction for years, and as far as I was concerned the time was ripe. A few days before I might have raised a mighty protest against the project, but my political conscience—and perhaps my moral one—had died with Aymara, and I was angry at the world, at its hollow promise and mock virtues and fallacious judgments. Anger made my grief more endurable, and I nourished it, picturing it to be a tiny golden snake with ruby eyes. A familiar. It would feed on tears, transform them into venom. It would be my secret, coiled and ready to strike. It would fit perfectly inside my heart.

On the day prior to the test, I was flown by small plane to a military base on the mainland, and from there by helicopter to the project site, passing over the valley in which lay the ruined city of Olancho Viejo, with its creeper-hung cathedral tower sticking up like an eroded green fang. Three buildings of white concrete crowned a massive jungled hill overlooking the valley, and on the hillside facing away from the valley were other buildings—living quarters and storage rooms and sentry posts. The administrator, a middle-aged balding man named Morrel, briefed me on the test; but I cut this short, informing him that I had heard most of what he was telling me from Dobler. His only reaction was to cluck his tongue and say, “Poor fellow.”

Afterward, Morrel led me downhill to the commissary and introduced me to the rest of the personnel. Ostensibly this was a joint US-Honduran project, but there were only two Hondurans among the twenty-eight scientists—an elderly man clearly past his prime, and a dark-haired young woman who tried to duck out the door when I approached. Morrel urged her forward and said, “Mr. Corson, this is Señorita Aymara Luján.”

I was nearly too stunned to accept her handshake. She refused to meet my eyes, and her hand was trembling. I could not believe that this was mere coincidence. Though to my mind she was not as lovely as my Aymara, she was undeniably beautiful and of a type with my dead love. Slim and large-eyed, her features displaying more than a trace of Indian blood. I had a mental image of a long line of beautiful dark-haired women stretching across the country, each prepared to step forward should an accident befall her sisters.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” this one said. “I’ve always admired your work.” She glanced around in apparent alarm as if she had said something indiscreet; then, recovering her poise, she added, “Perhaps we’ll have a chance to talk at dinner.”

She placed an unnatural stress on these last words, making it plain that this was a message sent. “I’d like that,” I said.

For the remainder of the day I was shown a variety of equipment and instrumentation to which I paid little attention. The appearance of this new Aymara undermined my anger somewhat, and Dobler’s thesis concerning the inalterability of time, its capacity to compensate for change, seemed to embody the menace of prophecy. But I made no move to reveal what I suspected. This development had brought my insanity to a peak, and I was gripped by a fatalistic malaise. Who the hell was I to trifle with fate, I reasoned. And besides, it was unlikely that any action I took would have an effect. Maybe it was coincidence. I retreated from the problem into an almost puritanical stance, as if dealing with the matter was somehow vile, beneath me, and when the dinner hour arrived, deciding it would be best to avoid the woman, I pleaded weariness and retired to my quarters.

My room was a white cubicle furnished with a bed, a desk and chair, and a word processor. The window provided a view of the jungle that swept away toward Nicaragua, and I sat by it, watching sunset resolve into a slate-colored dusk, and then into a darkness figured by stars and a half-moon. With no one about to engage my interest, grief closed in around me.

A few minutes after eight o’clock, small-arms fire began to crackle on the hilltop. I went to the door and peered out. Muzzle flashes were probing the darkness higher up. I had an impulse to run, but my inertia prevailed and I went back to the chair. Soon thereafter, the door opened and the woman who called herself Aymara entered. She wore a white project jumpsuit that glowed in the moonlight, and she carried an automatic rifle, which she kept at the ready but aimed at a point to my right.

Neither of us spoke for several seconds, and then I said, “What’s going on?” and laughed at the banal tone that comment struck.

Another burst of fire from above.

“It’s almost over,” she said.

I allowed several more seconds to elapse before saying, “How did you pull it off? Security looked pretty tight.”

“Most of them died at dinner.” She tossed her head, shaking hair from her eyes. “Poison.”

“Oh.” Again I laughed. “Sorry I couldn’t make it.”

“I didn’t want to kill you,” she said with urgency. “You’ve…been a friend to my country. But after what you did on Guanoja…”

“What I did there was execute a murderer! An animal!”

She studied me a moment. “I believe you. Sotomayor was an evil man.”

“Evil!” I made a disparaging noise. “And what force for good do you represent? The EDP? The FDLM?”

“We acted independently…I and a few friends.”

Silence, then a single gunshot.

“Is that really your name?” I asked. “Aymara?”

She nodded. “I’ve often wondered how much influence your article has had on me. On everything. Because of it, I’ve always felt I was involved in…”

“Something mystical, right? Magical. I know all about it.”

“How could you?”

“How could I have written the article in the first place? I don’t have any answers.” I turned back to the window. “I suppose you’re going to try to contact Christmas.”

“I don’t have a choice,” she said defiantly. “I feel…”

“Believe me,” I cut in. “I understand why. When did you decide to do this?”

“I’d been considering it for some time, but I wasn’t sure. Then the news came about Sotomayor…”

“Jesus God!” I leaned forward, burying my face in my hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“Get out!” I said. “Kill me, do whatever you have to…just get out of here.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

I sensed her moving close, and through my fingers saw her lay some papers on the desk.

“I’m giving you a map,” she said. “At the foot of the hill, next to the sentry post, there’s a trail leading east. It’s well-traveled, and even in the dark it won’t be difficult to follow. Less than a day’s walk from here, you’ll come to a river. You’ll find villages. Boats that’ll take you to the coast.”

I said nothing.

“We won’t be able to go operational until dawn,” she went on. “You have about ten hours. Things might not be so bad once you’re out of the immediate area.”

“Go away,” I told her.

“I…” She faltered. “I think we…”

“What the hell do you want from me?” Angry, I spun around. But on seeing her, my anger evaporated. The moonlight seemed to have erased all distinction between her and my Aymara—she might have been my lover reborn, her spirit returned. “What do you want?” I said weakly.

“I don’t know. But I do want something from you. For so long I’ve felt we were linked. Involved.” She reached out as if to touch me, then jerked back her hand. “I don’t know. Maybe I just want your blessing.”

I could smell her scent of soap and perfume, sharp and clean in that musty little room, and I felt a stirring of sexual attraction. In my mind’s eye I saw again that endless line of dark-haired women, and I suddenly believed that love was the scheme that had enforced our intricate union, that—truly or potentially—we were all lovers, myself and a thousand Aymaras, all tuned to the same mystical pitch. I got to my feet, rested my hands on her hips. Pulled her close. Her lips grazed my cheek as she settled into the embrace. Her heart beat rapidly against my chest. Then she drew back, her face tilted up to receive a kiss. I tasted her mouth, and her warmth spread through me, melting the cold partition I had erected between myself and life. At last she pushed me away and—averting her eyes—walked to the door.

“Goodbye.” She said it in Spanish—“Adiós”—a word that sounded too gentle and mellifluous to embody such a terminal meaning.

I heard her footsteps running up the hill.

I was tempted to go after her, and to resist this temptation, not to save myself, I took her map and set out walking the trail east. Yet as I went, my desire to survive grew stronger, and I increased my pace, beating my way through thickets and plaited vines, stumbling down rocky defiles. Had I been alone in the jungle at any other time, I would have been terrified, for the night sounds were ominous, the shadows eerie; but all my fear was focused upon those white buildings on the hilltop, and I paid no mind to the threat of jaguars and snakes. Toward dawn, I stopped in a weedy clearing bordered by ceibas and giant figs, their crowns towering high above the rest of the canopy. I was bruised, covered with scratches, exhausted, and I saw no reason to continue. I sat down, my back propped against a ceiba trunk, and watched the sky fading to gray.

I had thought brightness would fan across the heavens as with the detonation of a nuclear bomb, but this was not the case. I felt a disturbance in the air, a vibration, and then it was as if everything—trees, the earth, even my own flesh—were yielding up some brilliant white essence, blinding yet gradually growing less intense, until it seemed I was in the midst of a thick white fog through which I could just make out the phantom shapes of the jungle. Accompanying the whiteness was a bone-chilling cold; this, however, dissipated quickly, whereas it turned out that the fog lingered for hours, dwindling to a fine haze before at last becoming imperceptible. At first I was full of dread, anticipating death in one form or another; but soon I began to experience a perverse disappointment. The world had suffered a cold flash, a spot of vagueness, like the symptoms of a mild fever, and the idea that my lover had died for this made me more heartsick than ever.

I waited the better part of an hour for death to take me. Then, disconsolate, thinking I might as well push on, I glanced at my watch to estimate how much farther I had to travel, and found that not only had it stopped but that it could not be rewound. Curious, I thought. As I brushed against a bush at the edge of the clearing, its leaves crumbled to dust; its twigs remained intact, but when I snapped one off, a greenish fluid welled from the cortex. I tasted it, and within seconds I felt a burst of energy and well-being. Continuing on, I observed other changes. An intricate spiderweb whose strands I could not break, though I exerted all my strength; a whirling column of dust and light that looked to be emanating from the site of the project; and in the reflecting waters of a pond I discovered that my hair had gone pure white. Perhaps the most profound change was in the atmosphere of the jungle. Birds twittered, monkeys screeched. All as usual. Yet I sensed a vibrancy, a vitality, that had not been in evidence before.

By the time I reached the river, the fog had cleared. I walked along the bank for half an hour and came to a village of thatched huts, a miserable place littered with feces and mango rinds, hemmed in by brush and stands of bamboo. It appeared deserted, but moored to the bank, floating in the murky water, was a dilapidated boat that—except for the fact it was painted bright blue, decorated with crosses and bearded, haloed faces—might have been the twin of the scow in The African Queen. As I drew near, a man popped out of the cabin and waved. An old, old man wearing a gray robe. His hair was white and ragged, his face tanned and wrinkled, and his eyes showed as blue as the painted hull.

“Praise the Lord!” he yelled. “Where the hell you been?”

I glanced behind me to make sure he was not talking to someone else. “Hey,” I said. “Where is everybody?”

“Gone. Fled. Scared to death, they were. But now they’ll believe me, won’t they?” He beckoned impatiently. “Hurry up! You think I got all day. Souls are wastin’ for want of Jerome’s good news.” He tapped his chest. “That’s me. Jerome.”

I introduced myself.

Again he signaled his impatience. “Got all eternity to learn your name. Let’s get a move on.” He leaned on the railing, squinting at me. “You’re the one sent, ain’tcha?”

“I don’t think so.”

“’Course you are!” He clasped his hands prayerfully. “And, lo, I fell asleep in the white light of the Rapture and the Lord spake, sayin’, ‘Jerome, there will come a man of dour countenance bearin’ My holy sign, and he will aid your toil and lend ballast to your joy.’ Well, here you are, and here I am, and if that hair of your’n ain’t a sign, I don’t know what is. Come on!” He patted the railing. “Help me push ’er out into the current.”

“Why don’t you use the engine?”

“It don’t work.” He cackled, delighted. “Nothin’ works. Not the radio, not the generator. None of the Devil’s tools. Ain’t it wonderful?” He scowled. “Now, come on! That’s enough talk. You gonna aid my toil or not?”

“Where are you headed?”

“Down the Fundamental Stream to the Source and back again. Ain’t no other place to go now the Lord is come.”

“To the coast?” I insisted, not in the least taken with this looney.

“Yeah, yeah!” Jerome put his hands on his hips and regarded me with displeasure. “You gotta lighten up some, boy. Don’t know as I’m gonna be needin’ all this much ballast to my joy.”

I have been a month on the river with Jerome, and I expect I will remain with him awhile longer, for I have no desire to return to civilization until its breakdown is complete—the world, it seems, has ended, though not in the manner I would have thought. I am convinced Jerome is crazy, the victim of long solitudes and an overdose of religious tracts; yet he has no doubt I am the crazy one, and who is to say which of us is right. At every village we stop to allow him to proclaim the Rapture, the advent of the Age of Miracles…and, indeed, miracles abound. I have seen a mestizo boy call fish into his net by playing a flute; I have witnessed healings performed by a matronly Indian woman; I have watched an old German expatriate set fires with his stare. As for myself, I have acquired the gift of clairvoyance, which has permitted me to see something of the world that is aborning. Jerome attributes all this to an increase in the wattage of the Holy Spirit; whereas I believe that Project Longshot caused a waning of certain principles—especially those pertaining to anything mechanical or electrical—and a waxing of certain others—in particular those applying to ESP and related phenomena. The two ideas are not opposed. I can easily imagine some long-dead psychic perceiving a whiteness at the end of time and assigning it Godlike significance. Yet I have no faith that a messiah will appear. It strikes me that this new world holds greater promise than the old (though perhaps the old world merely milked its promise dry), a stronger hope of survival, and a wider spectrum of possibility; but God, to my way of thinking, darts among the quarks and neutrinos, an eternal signal harrying them to order, a resource capable of being tapped by magic or by science, and it may be that love is both the seminal impulse of this signal and the ultimate distillation of this resource.

We argue these matters constantly, Jerome and I, to pass green nights along the river. But upon one point we agree. All arguments lapse before the mystery and coincidence of our lives. All systems fail, all logics prove to zero.

So, Aymara, we have worked our spell, you and I and time. Now I must seek my own salvation. Jerome tells me time heals all wounds, but can it—I wonder—heal a wound that it has caused? Though we had only a few weeks, they were the central moments of my life, and their tragic culmination, the sudden elimination of their virtues, has left me irresolute and weak. The freshness and optimism of the world has made your loss more poignant, and I am not ashamed to admit that—like the most clichéd of grievers—I see your face in clouds, hear your voice in the articulations of the wind, and feel your warmth in the shafts of light piercing the canopy. Often I feel that I am breaking inside, that my heart is turning in my chest like a haywire compass, trying to fix upon some familiar pole and detecting none, and I know I will never be done with weeping.

Buck up, Jerome tells me. You can’t live in the past, you gotta look to the future and be strong.

I reply that I am far less at home in the fabulous present than I am in the past. As to the future, well…I have envisioned myself walking the high country, a place of mountains and rivers without end, of snowfields and temples with bronze doors, and I sense I am searching for something. Could it be you, Aymara? Could that white ray of science pouring from the magical green hill have somewhere resurrected you or your likeness? Perhaps I will someday find the strength to leave the river and find answers to these questions; perhaps finding that strength is an answer in itself. That hope alone sustains me. For without you, Aymara, even among miracles I am forlorn.