“Are you going to k-kill me?”
De-gagged, the charlatan in the rowboat stuttered with a thick New York accent. He was good, this one. Together with Sopras, the two had managed to put me in a bonafide tizzy the likes of which even the hottest, sun-spoiled Zambian afternoon had never achieved.
The evil doctor had disclosed something about cherry-picking this Kuwajii doppelgänger from a lineup. It didn’t make a lick of sense, none of it. But at the very least, the boy’s entire character was suspect. I would tread lightly upon his discourse.
I removed his blindfold.
“Marcus,” he recognized me under torch glow. Immediately, in that moment of iris reveal, I saw the boy for what he truly was: Underneath whatever sheen Sopras had covered him with lay a frightened, innocent babe, lost in youth, searching for a path through his forest. Exactly like Kuwajii. Bravo.
“These chains, Charlie. Where did you get them? Never mind, just give me the key.”
“He’s our ticket out of here, Marcus, slow down.”
“Just give me the fucking key, Charlie!”
Charlie patted down his pants, his bare chest. He shook his ears like a big, shaggy dog trying to get water out.
“Oh you’ve got to be shitting me,” the boy said.
“Charlie, quit fucking around. Where’s the key?”
“I thought you had it.”
“Why would I have it?”
“Didn’t I give it to you?”
“NO!”
Charlie suppressed a laugh. I didn’t understand how he could find any of this amusing. But then again, I’ve never fully grasped the notion of humor.
The boy, perhaps also guilty of being tortured by Sopras, probably didn’t deserve to be squeezed by iron. Summoning my strongest strength, I took a deep breath and held his chain tight by two links. They were solid, forged in fire. But I was solider, forged in hell.
Clink went the worthless links, breaking like peanut brittle in my palms. The rest of the chain dropped from the boy’s shoulders, chest, and waist. He looked down, a non-believer of what he’d just witnessed.
“How did you do that?”
“Marcus is magic!” Charlie said. “Houdini ain’t got nothin’ on …”
The boy was fast. Before Charlie could finish his thought, Kuwajii/Not-Kuwajii stepped past me, crossing the length of the short vessel in two quick, wobbly steps. He ceased Charlie’s jabbering with a fist to the chin. My dead friend’s head flung back and cracked against the side of the boat.
“OK, maybe I had that coming.”
Charlie picked himself up to a sitting position and pretended to reset his jaw. Satisfied for now, the boy carefully stepped out of the rowboat and into the shallow waters.
But something about it all just wasn’t right.
“Wait,” I insisted. “Hold on.”
He continued trudging his way back toward the ladder.
“Wait!” I repeated myself. I’ve always despised repeating myself. He was at the base of the ladder now, working on his own escape, reaching one arm up to grab hold of the first rung.
“He knocked you down,” I regarded Charlie. I was trying to align the world in my head with the one unfolding before my eyes.
“Well, the fucker sucker punched me, didn’t he?” Charlie made excuses. An elderly, invalid orangutan with a heart condition could have successfully dodged the boy’s jab.
“You’re alive?” I asked Charlie. The words were almost too impossible to be true.
“When have I purported to be otherwise?”
“Back there! In the psych ward! You said it was a good day to be dead!”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I was just fucken with you, man.”
But I saw him. His body had smattered the windshield of our mobile help unit before he rolled off and onto the ground, quite ungracefully, to join his insides. I’d been behind the wheel. I was responsible for his death. That’s why I was in this nuthouse to begin with. That’s why … all of this. Everything.
“OK, you process, I’ll row,” he said, situating his butt between the oars.
“No. Wait,” I said, repeating myself. The torch burned in a convenient holster at the back of the boat. Charlie did that. He’d carved the notch to fit it perfectly. He’d thought of every last detail, right down to the grooves that synced with the torch’s individual ridges. He’d fashioned the torch, and the boat, and the ladder, and the escape hatch in the floor above. I knew it all in an instant — Charlie’s master plan. He’d secured a lowly, unnoticed position, perhaps night janitor. He’d blocked off the long hallway with “Caution, Wet Floor” signs so any guard with a one a.m. rumbling in his tummy would avoid it, opting to take a shit somewhere else. And when he had his stolen moments, Charlie worked. He’d cut a perfect manhole in the soft linoleum — probably used a blowtorch and chisel. How long had it taken him? How long had he been cultivating the plan?
“Five hundred thirty-five sunsets,” I mumbled.
Of course he could do it. Of course he did do it! Charlie had a mind like no other species, animal or man; he embodied a rugged determination that equaled (if not surpassed) the Marisol dung beetle’s. His mobile help units were spellbinding feats of engineering, well ahead of their time. I should have known he had it in him to achieve even bigger, impossible things.
It would make sense that Charlie was alive. At my trial, there was no count of manslaughter because there had been no slaughtered man. Well, save for the dumb bastard truck driver who’d hit us. Let us not forget him.
If Charlie was alive, then I’d lived his part of my story wrong. And if I’d flubbed that important detail, then anything else was possible. Shumbuto, Shandra-Namba, all of the Shakasantie could still be living peaceful lives on the bank of the Zambezi River. Even Kuwajii.
“Kuwaji!”
The rowboat swayed and flipped as I lunged my body from it. I was a human rocket propelled on hope propane. I traveled fifteen yards and yanked the mystery man down from the second rung of Charlie’s ladder.
“Marcus! Make up your goddamn mind!” my resurrected savior hollered from the rocking boat. I heeded him not. If ever I could fathom being whole again, the restructuring would begin here.
Struggling with Kuwajii/Not-Kuwajii was more vexing than arduous. By the time we scrabbled back to the rowboat, he’d conked himself out from the persistent thrashing. I tossed him back in and resumed my place at the stern.
“Insurance policy,” I echoed Charlie’s earlier words.
“You think this is Kuwajii?” he asked. My upturned disarray of a face held all the answer he required. “I suppose anything is possible,” Charlie forfeited.
Charlie rowed us through the underground channel. Curious as a magpie shrike as to what fresh adventure might reveal itself next, I decided there were more pressing thoughts to apprehend.
Sopras over-explained much about his own sick intentions. He claimed he wanted to know my true truth. He imagined there was something deeper going on below my surface story. What a quack! Though I can’t recall any of our sessions together, it’s obvious, based on what happened, that I did reveal my full history to him over and over and over again. What else had Sopras been searching for? He’d found me a fascinating case study, that was certain. He also admitted to electrocuting me on a daily basis, hoping my story might evolve. Was he seeking some personal enlightenment through my words? Sad sacks for him; I never wavered.
Each day I spent as a victim to the doctor’s sick, homemade shock therapy erased the previous days’ memories. All he’d done, essentially, was blot out my time at the asylum and strengthen my perception of everything that came before. It was completely within my character to tell the only version of my life that I knew, and if a slight embellishment occurred here or there, what of it?
Having never had any direction whatsoever in my life, my current trajectory was no different. Facing front, I spotted dim daylight ahead.
“You just wait till you see what I’ve got waiting for us at the end of the tunnel,” Charlie said. “You won’t even believe your eyes.”
The boy stirred in his crumpled unconsciousness. Was he dreaming of his life here in New York or of his past life in Zambia? Maybe that was the answer. Maybe he bore a striking resemblance because he was Kuwajii reincarnated? Some quick and easy year-math brought that solution to zero, so I dropped it.
We emerged from the underground route, and, as soon as my pupils adjusted, my first sight was green, soggy grass blowing back and forth on both sides. Approximately twenty kilometers west was the north side of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Straight ahead, our little waterway looked to be spilling directly into the open flow of the East River.
Charlie brought the skiff to a natural stop just before channel met river. I got out and yanked the stern of the boat up and onto a man-made landing pad composed of hundreds of thousands of small pebbles, rocks, and dirt. Observing our mode of transportation in natural light, I could fully appreciate the amount of care that went into the creation of it. It was made of strong pine that, if given the chance, would not bend under decades of water pressure. Along a quarter portion of the starboard side, in gorgeous, steady calligraphy, the ship’s name was carved: S.S. Save Marcus.
“Yeah, I know,” said Charlie, reading my read. “You’re supposed to name a seaworthy ship after a beautiful woman. But A, I don’t know any beautiful women, and B …” He pointed to a great big shrub behind me. “The S.S. Save Marcus was just a stepping stone to her.”
Concealed to a pitiful degree, an enormous beast of a vehicle lay idle. For an inanimate object, it contained a hungry, perhaps nefarious, spirit. Made of bumpy, crudely fused, corrugated metal, the machine was a dark shade of forest green. Its wheels were round casings of shredded steel, no rubber, and they spiked out at ominous angles, promising sharp consequences. A strip of tinted, black glass made a U-shape, extending outward from the upper anterior to both sides, obscuring a view of the cabin within. Even so, the exterior was a sight to behold. The raised front panel gave the impression that any driver would be riding high, in order to have a clear, unobstructed view over the bulge. Marveling at the pivotal frontispiece, I could only surmise what a massive, nasty engine nestled under the hood. But there was no crack or opening for any hood that I could see — no seams from which a person could pop her open and tinker.
“Seamless,” I muttered.
“Ain’t she, though?” Charlie replied.
The intake manifold jutted out of a protuberance midway up the front. Clearly an aesthetic choice intended to intimidate, this misplaced hood ornament was placed too far back, toward the glass, as a dangerous exclamation point on an already uniquely unnerving specimen.
Low down in front, an upturned obsidian grille dared anyone to get in the vehicle’s way. Two headlights (one red, one blue), perched atop the grille, shining bright and new.
As I made my way around to the back, I made a conscious effort not to comment on the exhaust pipe protruding out from where I expected a passenger-side door should be. I also held my opinions (of which I had a few) of the two large antennae pointing skyward from the … rudder?
“Is that a propeller?” That was the kindest question I could pose of the roadside abortion.
“Gotta propel somehow,” Charlie said. “Check this out.”
He clapped his hands twice in rapid succession, and suddenly the beast came to life with a mighty roar. A third slap of his palms caused a mysterious steam to rise from the bellows; subsequently, two hidden doors unsealed, freeing themselves of the green demon and lifting skyward like dragon’s wings, revealing a larger than expected interior.
“I rigged her so she responds only to the sound of my hands. No one else on Earth has the key. It’s literally at my fingertips.” He showed me his calloused hands, worked from strenuous, dedicated labor.
Despite his goodwill, I doubted Charlie’s latest brag and brought my own hands together thrice — the vehicle’s propeller came to life, blowing dirt and weeds a dozen yards back.
“Goddamn it,” Charlie said, defeated. The wind laughed.
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said. “Charlie, what the fuck is it?”
“What is it?! Why, it’s the world’s first carmarine, of course! Now help me load the kid in before my beautiful creation draws the attention of those approaching choppers. She may be ugly, but she’s got drawing power, if you catch my drift.”
I didn’t, not entirely. Nonetheless, I needed no assistance in dragging our dozing beauty from the rowboat to the, um, carmarine.
Inside, there were two seats up front, riding high, just as I’d thought, as well as a padded bench with ample room for a body to lie down in the back. I set Kuwajii/Not-Kuwajii gently on the plank and positioned him on his side.
Charlie was making his way in and I made room for him, sitting in what I presumed to be the co-pilot’s chair, passenger side.
“You don’t get off that easy, bud,” Charlie said, buckling in. “I built the control panel to be 100 percent symmetrical from either side. You see?”
One hundred and thirty-three buttons, lights, levers, wheels, and herzogs were mirrored on each side of the arm’s-length display.
“If one of us expires when we’re underwater, the other won’t have to waste time moving the corpse to get to the controls. Genius, right?”
“Sure, sure.” Though there was nothing sure about any of it. I wasn’t sure what to make of the heightened obsessive-compulsive nature of Charlie’s character. Nor did I know what to do with the idea he presented of a maybe-already-dead man “expiring.”
“So, it floats?” I asked.
“Floats? Fucking balls, Marcus, it’s a goddamn subcarine!”
“You called it a carmarine,” I corrected.
“Jesus Christ, can’t one thing be two things? It’s the same thing, anyway. I’ll drive, for now. You’ll get the hang of it.”
Outside, a chopper was hovering nearby. Inside, our hostage was waking.
Charlie pressed three buttons, pulled two levers, and turned a key (all of which, I noted, had identical partners on my side of the panel). This seemingly random progression opened a floor panel below him, and a steering wheel on a rod shot up between his legs. It stopped at chest level and he held it there. Rotating a couple knobs and flicking a switch above his head prompted the sheen of the dark glass in front of us to lighten, revealing a perfect vision of the outside world; a blueprint map and targeting system overlay our surroundings.
“This thing fully loaded?” I asked knowingly.
“You bet your sweet bippy,” Charlie answered. He gave a shrill whistle and the beast gave a jolt. He whistled again, this time much louder and lower in pitch, and the carmarine/subcarine took off. The battering grille plowed through the bushy lowland, making it a trampled, disheveled version of its former self.
We’d made it not twenty-five yards when a massive explosion of sound and heat rocked us from the left. I put my hand to the seamless passenger side door and felt it burning on the outside.
“They’re bombing us,” Charlie spoke drably, as if a seasoned weatherman delivering a partly cloudy forecast. I craned my neck upward, trying to spot the culprit. He hovered in and out of airspace directly over our heads. The overlaid map claimed he was 20.28 feet above us.
“What’s happening?” the boy asked, waking from his slumber hold.
“Welcome back, kid. Looks like they don’t know (or don’t care) that we’ve got you. Some insurance policy you turned out to be!”
“What?” he said, shaking his head. But before he could grasp any part of the situation, another massive explosion flanked us on the left.
“Shit, that one was close.” Charlie was concentrating on the lack of road ahead and driving us straight for the river, not minding the vegetation composed of infant trees and erratic shrubbery.
“I didn’t sign up for this!” the boy-who-would-be-Kuwajii exclaimed. I heard the click of his seatbelt and followed suit.
“Hold on, boys!” Charlie instructed. “The S.S. Shandra-Namba’s going on her maiden voyage!”
“Maiden voyage? Sandra who?” the boy, dumbfounded, demanded an explanation. It would not come. Not now.
I was robbed of the appropriate opportunity to appreciate Charlie’s dedication to my long-lost Shakasantie mother, for he unapologetically plunged the metal beast into the East River. Immediately, she began to fill with water from the ground up.
“I don’t want to die!” the boy cried. What a pussy.
“Nobody’s going to die,” Charlie said, tweaking some knobs. “Not this mañana.”
“Mañana means tomorrow!” the boy corrected him.
“Oh, then maybe somebody will die today, chica. Better watch yourself.” He snapped his fingers and the stank water, which had risen to about ankle level, rushed toward the back and flushed out beneath some hidden panel.
The carmarine’s spiked wheels rolled and pulled as best they could, at a slow but steady pace, digging up the riverbed, due south. The readout on the windshield showed a depth of 30.22 feet.
Charlie futzed with some more buttons, and the targeting system went full red on screen. It zeroed in on a direct point above the surface of the water and lingered there.
“That’s the chopper right there, Marcus. Hit the diamond button marked FIRE right by your knee there and blow the shitbird to hell.”
I stared at the beeping, blipping dot on screen. That was all it was. It was just a dot. Not a chopper. Not a person. Not an enemy. Not a friend.
“Let him live,” I said. And that was that about that.
Charlie, appearing ambivalent about the decision, switched off the targeting system and continued the job of pushing the beast forward along the sodden riverbed. The boy relaxed into some heavy, careful breathing to try and stabilize himself as best he could.
“I can’t open her up till she breaks ocean,” explained Charlie, after a short while. “It’s too narrow to chance it. There’s Roosevelt Island dead ahead, so its gonna get even tighter. Port or starboard, Marcus?”
“Does it matter?”
“Nope,” he answered, then maneuvered left of the land. Soon, the blinking red dot in the sky flew off in another direction. We were free. Truly and finally free.
“Excuse me,” Kuwajii’s own voice clicked in my ear. “But what exactly are your intentions? I thought you were going to let me go back there in the sewer.”
“That was no sewer, friend,” Charlie said. “You ain’t been in the sewer till you’ve been in the sewer. If you’re smellin’ what I’m sellin’.”
I wasn’t smelling what Charlie was selling, not entirely. But I also wasn’t the intended procurer of his waft.
“Well, if it’s all the same to you, you can just drop me off here and I’ll —”
“Who do you think you are?” I decided I’d been a passive passenger in the conversation for too long, and so chose this moment to come to life.
“Excuse me?”
“Sopras told me he found you. Who are you? A patient? A dead boy? What’s your story?”
He shrugged, dropped his shoulders, and lifted the dim veil of his wishy-washy personality.
“Hey, I’m just an out-of-work actor, OK? I never meant any harm. My name’s Terence. Terence Lowry.”
“What do you know about Kuwajii?” I asked, not buying any of it.
“Nothing, really. Sopras picked me up off the street, just about three days ago, I’d guess.”
“You’d guess or you know?”
“I know.”
“What else do you know? Do you know Sopras was actively torturing his patients?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I mean, he wasn’t torturing all his patients … just you.”
“Just me.”
“Yes.”
“And you were fine with that?”
“No. I told you. I just started working for him. And he’s a doctor, right? I assumed he had good reason to be doing what he was doing.”
“You’re a coward.”
“Maybe. Probably. Look, I’m certainly not proud. But I was desperate. You know how that is, right? I wasn’t getting anywhere in the acting business. Then one day, this taxi rolls up next to me, right there on Sixth Ave, and this dude leans out the window and waves a franklin in my face. He says, ‘I got a proposition for you, young man.’ And all I had to do was just get in the car and listen. And you know, in a perfect world, I’d never trust some funky dude like that, but it’s tough out there, man! Besides, the guy was in the back of a yellow cab. What was he gonna do? Cut me into little pieces while the driver watched in the rearview?”
“I’ve seen stranger,” I said. “Go on.”
“Right, so I got in, didn’t I? I pocketed the hundo, and the cabbie kept the engine and the meter running. Sopras talked my ear off, and I only understood maybe half of what he was saying. He said I was the spitting image of some dead African kid and he wanted to know if I could play pretend. Christ, you should have seen him light the fuck up when I told him I was an actor. It was like his birthday and Christmas and a blowjob all at once.
“He kept saying, ‘You’re the one. You can unlock him!’ It was creepy as fuck, but he was willing to pay large, so I went along with it. Fucker still owes me $500.”
Charlie snickered.
“What?”
“That money’s gone, chief. Hasta la pasta.”
I shot him a look and he shut his trap.
“Why the ruse?” I asked, bringing Terence back on track. “What was Sopras trying to gain?”
“I don’t know exactly, but he was on you like ham on eggs. He claimed you only said ‘I am Marcus Fox’ over and over again till it made his nose bleed. Over time though, his technique … I guess he made you talk. He figured out how to zap it out of you. Your story. But he never truly believed it. He kept saying it was all gross exaggeration and tall tales. That’s what he told me anyway. I don’t know how long it went on like that before he met me. He was obsessed with breaking you and finding out what parts were true and what parts were false. He thought I looked exactly like your description of this Kuwajii person. He thought that if you could think Kuwajii was in there with you, that maybe you’d open up to me. It was a half-baked plan if you asked me. I never thought it would work. I gave it two days. Pretending like. You woke up out of your ‘I am Marcus Fox’ bit, sure. But you were only telling the same story Sopras had heard a thousand times before. And he kept shocking you. I hated that.”
“But you didn’t try to stop it.”
“I did! I did try! I decided I wasn’t gonna play the part no more. Two days was enough! So yesterday, in the rec room, I tried to warn you. But before I could even get started, the guards dragged me away. They tossed me out of the facility. Out into the rain. That’s when your friend here clobbered me over the head and brought me down below. Down to the sewer.”
“It wasn’t a sewer,” Charlie reiterated.
I thought about how Sopras used his prod on me in the asylum’s entrance hall. How he’d admitted to shocking me senseless for months, maybe longer.
“You worked for blood money,” I said. “The man was a sadist prick. He got what was coming to him.”
“Sadist? Yeah, sure, I buy that. But he did want to help you. Even if his methods were animalistic. What do you mean ‘he got what was coming to him?’ Did you … did you hurt him?”
“He’s dead.” There was no sense in holding the boy’s hand. After all, he was Sopras’s accomplice and, therefore, guilty by association. “I didn’t kill him. Maybe in a roundabout way. I wouldn’t shed a tear for the bastard. And I don’t see how you think you’re innocent in the whole ordeal.”
“I just thought it was some modern, newfangled electrotherapy. But you’re right. I shouldn’t have allowed it. I should have done more.”
“That son of a bitch hooked you up to one of those machines?!” Charlie was pissed. “What fucking year is this?”
“Charlie,” I said. “You saw the prod. I destroyed it into a million little pieces.”
“I saw you try to smash his ledger over your leg. It was thicker than the Manhattan yellow pages. Must have smarted pretty good, too, cuz you dropped the thing on your foot and started hobbling around. It was damn comical, actually.”
“Sopras is dead?” Terence asked, still rolling the idea around in his head, trying to make sense of it.
“Well,” Charlie conceded. “They fucked him up good for sure — the other patients.” He leaned over and whispered the next part to me. “I don’t think they killed him, though. I mean, maybe?”
“I think you’re still hallucinating,” Terence said. “Sopras pumped you so full of drugs. He insisted hallucinogens would play a vital role in getting to your core. He refused to believe you were a real-life Paul Bunyan riding a blue ox.”
“Blue ox?” I said. It was the only thing I could rein in that made a lick of sense.
“He researched everything you told him. He never found any record of Shakasantie.”
“No, that he wouldn’t,” I said. “The corrupt Zambian government wiped their memory from the slate of history.”
“Yes, well. Then there’s the question of your early years.”
“What about my early years?”
“Your parents — your birth parents — you claimed you were the son of Billy and Calliope Fox, better known down south as the Texas Terrors?”
“What about them?”
“They’re not a fiction —”
“Of course they’re not!”
“— but they never had any kids.”
Bullshit.
“Not to mention the fact that a small Cessna plane could never fly from Madagascar to the Eastern Coast of Africa, let alone Zambia. And what kind of berries did you eat in the forest? He was certain there weren’t any edible ones. Sopras was obsessed with these and so many other details. He claimed they were all false memories and …”
The Kuwajii imposter rambled on. He didn’t know his ass from a Hebaji Moon Rascal. Just as the annals of the Shakasantie tribe had been purged, so had any record of Billy and Calliope Fox’s lovechild. They effectively ratified that omission by dropping me out of existence, out of a low-flying plane. And though Terence didn’t say so, I knew that Sopras’s so-called research did not extend all the way to the Bay City, Texas police. But if Billy and Calliope were arrested, then there must be some old-timer cop or shopkeep who recalled a small boy being used as a hostage on numerous occasions.
Bullshit and titmouse turds.
What did I have to prove to myself, anyway? That I existed? That my life was my life? That my memories added up to more than egregious lies and delirium?
Maybe, the sage voice of Shumbuto spoke to me. Maybe it is time you learn what your name truly means, Marcus Fox.
We passed under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges undetected, skirted west of Governor’s Island without incident; according to the exquisitely detailed holographic map, the Statue of Liberty was approaching just ahead. Charlie steered the S.S. Shandra-Namba out of her sight. Not even she had the faintest notion of our whereabouts.
“It won’t be long now,” Charlie said. “We’ll be able to crank it up ten notches and see what this baby can do.”
“Where are we going, Charlie?” I asked, plaintive.
“Yeah, that’s an excellent question,” our captive seconded.
“Do you really have to ask, Marcus? I’m taking you back to Zambia, man! I’m taking you home!”
I sank low in my seat. It was the destination I’d been dreading. Charlie should have known there was nothing left for me there. Or perhaps he did know and was using me as an excuse to claim a piece of African adventure for his own.
“Um, beg your pardon?” Terence began, politely enough. His tone quickly inverted. “I am not going to motherfucking Africa. Turn this magnificent, innovative heap of junk around!”
He made two preposterously awkward moves at once. I’m not sure if he was attempting to punch Charlie in the elbow or seize control of the controls. Either way (maybe both), he failed and wound up looking like a half-melted toy soldier in a frying pan. He wiggled and wormed between our two seats. I’d seen enough. I grabbed him by the flap of his neck and forced him backward. His head hit hard against the upper casing, just above his bench.
“You try something like that again and I will kill you,” I said, half meaning it.
“Right on,” said Charlie.
“We aren’t going to Zambia, Charlie.”
“What are you talking about? You know I just want to help …”
“Yeah, Charlie, I know. You want to help anyone and everyone by removing physical and emotional slivers from their skin. Well all my slivers are baobabs, Charlie!”
Nothing.
“It’s a fucking tall tree in Africa, for fuck’s sake! The fucking baobabs! See? How could I know about the baobabs if I’d never lived in Africa? You don’t know about the baobabs, do you? You’ve never seen a baobab. Right? RIGHT?! How about you, Terence, if that is even your real name. You ever see a baobab?”
“No, but now I kinda want to.”
“Easy buddy, no one’s saying you were never in Africa. I’ve always admired you for the shit you went through over there. But listen, the kid does have a point. Your grasp on reality is a little … obscure. So just take a deep breath and relax, all right?”
“Don’t tell me to take a breath, Charlie. I’m always breathing. Maybe that’s the fucking problem.”
I didn’t mean it. He knew that. I’d been through too much to stop now. There were too many unanswered questions that could, potentially, reveal the true nature of my being.
“I’m not going back to Africa,” I repeated for perhaps the tenth time. “Maybe someday, but not now, for Chrissake.”
“That’s fine, man. No problem.”
Charlie pressed an oval, burnt-umber-brown button in the middle of his side of the console. Outside, in the dark of the river, lit by the subcarine/carmarine’s lights, a lengthy rod extended out and upward. Charlie pulled the wheel toward him and we rose, close to the surface. There, the periscope broke through the plain and gave a clear vision of Lady Liberty.
I should have been impressed at her overwhelming height, or the fake glow of her bright and shining torch, or the moral beliefs she represented, but all I could focus on was that crown of thorns resting atop her head. It gave her the appearance of being both divine and inflamed with ethereal pain. Yet she hid both extremes to near perfection — they welled forever, behind her copper eyes.
“So where do you want to go, then?” asked Charlie, interrupting my God-given, native retrospection.
“Texas,” I said point-blank, as if from somewhere deep and far away.
And just like that, we headed south.
On the advice of my trusted counsel, I tried to sleep. But sleep would not come. Understandably, my mind was a steel-jaw trap filled with roadblocks and detours. Signs reading “Wrong Way” and “Marcus City, Infinity Miles” sprouted up everywhere. I would have tossed and turned if that were my nature. But I didn’t even trust what I thought my nature was.
More obstacles. No escape routes. At least my seat reclined. That was cozy.
I focused, for the moment, on the inconceivable man at my side — the miracle of Charlie McManus. When all else failed (and it had), Charlie was my constant. Charlie was not a ghost and Charlie was not a lie. I was sure of it. Charlie was flesh and blood and sitting right beside me, navigating his creation, an unparalleled sub-aquatic rover, toward the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
With Brooklyn in our rearview, Charlie (the man, the myth, the legend) yanked a cord made of nylon rope once, a second time, then a meaningful third. The fourth pull had the strength of his entire mass behind it. With a pop and a whiz, the rear propeller started up, blowing the past behind us in wisps of fizz and bubbles.