Authors: David Gilbert
Robert ran over and hugged me. "Yes. There it is." His face was all relief. "And how are your feet?"
"Fine," I said. I lifted them up. They were covered in ash.
Robert turned to the rest of the group. "See. It can be done."
Chuck Hubert shook my hand. "That's the farthest I've ever seen someone go for a drink."
"Well," Zoe said, "that was interesting."
Robert stayed close to me. I was his first convert. "Don't you feel like you could do anything?"
Now that I was his shill, I said a loud "Yes!"
People still weren't convinced. Robert and I walked across the coals together. Then we did it hand in hand. Soon, we were
skipping, but by that time Tammy was locked in her bathroom, Bill was apologizing, and everyone was drinking the champagne
and eating the caviar, the toothpick-harpooned shrimp, the sliced ham, the smoked salmon. Robert packed up his motivational
devices. "Some people just aren't ready," he told me.
"Yeah," I said.
"But I'm proud of you, Mai."
"Thanks, Dad." I was well into the champagne. "You're not a failure either," I said.
"What?"
"You're not a failure."
"I know that."
When the rum was brought out people cheered, even Robert Porterhouse perked up and after a few mai tais was performing handstands
on the lawn. "My center of gravity is perfect," he told Leslie Pomeroy, and she pushed him over and stormed off into the bushes.
Hot dogs were roasted. S'mores for dessert. Chuck Hubert somehow got ahold of the asbestos boots and started to do his zombie
walk across the coals. There was laughter and applause. Tammy finally came back outside. She was smiling. "Oh, that Chuck,"
she said. Soon everyone was trying on the boots.
The party was still in swing when Zoe and I left. Most people had nannies or summer au pairs, while we were lowly with a babysitter.
The drive home was quicker than the drive there. "How're your feet?" Zoe asked.
"Fine."
"I still can't believe you did that. Crazy."
I concentrated on the corridor of light and tried to keep the car within it.
"You of all people," she said.
"Did you have a good time?" I said.
"It was ridiculous."
"Yeah." I didn't even try to make her laugh.
When we got home the TV was on and Gwen was lying on the couch watching a late-night movie. She quickly got up. I wanted to
help her with that head. "Hi," she said.
"Hey," Zoe said. She leaned against a chair. "Everything go all right?"
"No problem. A little tears in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
but otherwise, fine."
I said, "The child catcher, right?"
"Yeah."
I walked over to the bar and made myself a proper drink. "Poor Ray hates that creepy guy. 'Children,'" I called out in a shrill
voice. " 'Candies and sweets and lollipops.' "
Gwen giggled.
"But he was good?" I asked.
"Just fine."
"Good."
Zoe sighed and then abruptly said, "Well, I guess Mr. Scott will drive you home." She made her way upstairs. "Sorry we're
so late."
"No problem."
Gwen didn't live very far away.
"Did you have a good time?" she asked me.
"It was all right. Same old stuff."
The sporadic oncoming traffic lit the inside of the car, transforming Gwen's face into a second moon. And still wired from
the party, I wanted to talk, wanted to tell her something wise, something profound, something that would help her better understand
this awkward life. "You know my grandmother and grandfather used to live out on this island in Maine," I said. "A beautiful
spot. Coastal. Islands all around. Really beautiful. And on one of the islands these adolescent kids would get dropped off
for three days of survival. On their own, you know."
"Take a left," Gwen said.
"Here?"
"Yeah."
The headlights, like prison searchlights, ran by a corner house.
"Anyway, it was some sort of Outward Bound program. Leadership skills and all that crap." I glanced at her quickly. "You know,
where you're given something like a hook and fishing line and five matches and a knife. That's it. With that you have to make
do."
"A right." She was carefully watching the street.
"Right?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, I used to visit my grandparents during the summer. It was great. Really nice."
"Sounds it," Gwen said.
"And my grandparents had this sailboat, and we sailed around quite a bit. Always sailing."
"Okay." Gwen sagged forward. I thought something might be wrong. A stomach cramp. A contraction. Her hands rested on the dashboard.
"You're going to want to take a right pretty soon, The next right. It pops out of nowhere."
"Got it," I said. "A right. Anyway, I remember the three of us making sandwiches in the morning, a ton of them, and we'd seal
them in little plastic bags and pack them with us when we went sailing. And off we'd go. And we'd sail to this survival island,
and my grandfather would sound the foghorn."
She said, "This right."
"Here?"
"Yeah."
I made the turn. I wondered if the people inside the corner house could see the headlights dash across the walls, if they
woke up frightened at the possibility of escaped convicts, or if maybe they dreamed about being in jail for an unknown crime
they didn't commit. "Well, it was unreal," I said.
"What's that?"
"The survival island. It was unreal. These kids would come out from the woods, just emerge from the woods all cut up and covered
in bites. They looked miserable, almost beaten, you know, like they were in over their heads. But seeing us they'd smile and
wave and wade into the water, and we'd toss out the sandwiches—ham and cheese, turkey, roast beef, chicken salad,
egg
salad, tomato and cheese—and soon these kids were having a picnic on the rocks."
"Okay, after this street take the next street left." Gwen pointed to the distant spot.
"Left?"
"Yep. On Musgrove."
"Musgrove. Left on Musgrove." I leaned my elbow out the window. In front of houses, sprinklers clicked across lawns—my favorite
sound—and some of them swept the edge of the road like a scythe stretched to its limit. The car seemed suddenly loud, as if
low beams and high beams screamed through the night, so I reached down and just turned the headlights off. There. Darkness
was no longer cheated. The sky was everywhere, the stars visible, the space between objects flattened.
Gwen didn't say a word; she didn't move.
"A left?" I asked.
"Yeah."
I stared out at the suburban silhouettes: a few porch lights glowing, a few blue shimmerings from bedroom and living-room
televisions. Landmarks—a comforting word—landmarks to shore yourself against a mysterious world. And for a moment, things
felt present. My friends were my friends and my wife was my wife and my feet did not burn.
I flipped down the indicator. It clicked along with the sprinklers outside.
I
When not frightened, they slowly crawl along with their tails and
bellies dragging on the ground. They often stop, and doze for a minute or
two, with closed eyes, and hind legs spread out on the parched soil.
—CHARLES DARWIN
THE THREE OF them have been quiet for the last hour. Tired. Their bodies tired. Their conversation tired. That happens with
the seventh drink. Something about the seventh drink. It's like the onslaught of middle age, depressing, disheartening, you
can't believe you've arrived at this particular spot. But you slog through. An eighth drink. A ninth drink. And—boom!—at the
ten-drink mark you change and you accept this life you've made for yourself, a perfectly fine life, a solid life, and in the
end a life you can't do anything about. But these guys, at present, are stuck in the midlife crisis of the seventh drink.
Zev has almost completely given up, his right cheek planted on crossed elbows. Uneven snores bubble from his drooling mouth,
similar to a Saint Bernard in the midst of a nightmare. But he's always doing that, slumping wherever he can, on park benches,
against walls. A passerby might think he has just heard awful news.
McGraw is next to him, busy trying not to see his own reflection in the bottle-lined mirror behind the bar. To be a vampire
would be cool, he imagines, an invisible presence, with only your consequences being felt. He reaches for a pack of cigarettes,
his finger extending the same way God, or Adam—he can't remember which—extends his finger on the Sistine ceiling.
Nearby, Lewis leans forward and smiles his smile at the bartender. It is a well-designed smile, cultivated over the years
into an openmouthed smile, not too toothy, not crooked. All in all it's a smile of good faith that says, Nothing up my gums,
no secrets in my cheeks. And the tongue is always ready with a kind word while the hand reaches for the wallet. "Bueno country
here, muy bueno, mi amigo," he says, as if he really speaks the language. By now he has his wallet out, that thick piece of
leather so impressive to the Third World, and he's handing over a laminated ID to the bartender. This is the part of the job
that Lewis loves, saying the following words the same way James Bond says his name. "Press." He pauses. "CNN News."
"Press?"
"Si. We're here to do a little story." After decades in the business, Lewis never specifies the details of anything. That
way everyone is on guard, everyone is helpful, and everyone bends over backward because everyone, from a coat-check girl to
the President of the United States, thinks the story is about the twisted world they inhabit. It can also sometimes get him
a free drink.
"For the First Lady's arrival?" the bartender asks.
Lewis reluctantly confirms the hunch. "Si, mi amigo." No need to be secretive, this isn't a scoop. The First Lady of the United
States is coming here. A short stay. A little reprieve from Washington. She's always wanted to visit the Galapagos Islands—her
statement to the press—a place of origins, a place of beauty, a place of scientific discovery, a place like no other place
in the world. Unique. So Lewis and crew have been sent over to cover her brief journey. For them, it's a working vacation.
A deserved break. Just soft news wrapped up in a twenty-second kicker at the end of a newscast. There's no reason for a reporter
to be dragged along. Besides, their man Laraby is dead anyway.
Lewis checks on the state of his colleagues and figures that "we need another drink, a muy macho one."
The bartender smiles. "How about a Guy Fawkes?"
"Que's that?"
"A bomb that'll blow you away."
"Sounds bueno. Tres, por favor."
No hurry in his movement, the bartender sets out three glasses, each one shaped like a gunpowder keg. He packs in crushed
ice and then pours in the contents of various bottles: rum, vodka, triple sec, tequila, orange and cranberry juice. When all
mixed up and ready to go, the straw stands as straight as a fuse.
"The Emergency Broadcasting System"
Lewis calls out to the other two, his voice a monotone bugle.
"This is not a test, I repeat, this is not
a test. The end is near. The bombs are falling.
You know, just once I'd like to hear that."
McGraw slaps Zev a few times—it's the only way to wake him. Zev stirs with the speed of an ugly flower blooming. Seeing the
drink in front of him—what a funny glass!—he picks it up and deep-throats half of the brown liquid. "Ka-boom," he whispers.
It doesn't take much to envision this huge man as a mythical Titan with a hogshead of mead. Or a Hollywood bodyguard with
that blond ponytail and a face as big as a spare tire. He toasts, "Pozovite kola za hitnu pomoc," to the three of them, having
forgotten any sense of procedure.
"What the hell's that mean?"
"Call a fucking ambulance," is the Serbo-Croatian translation. Zev loves to inhabit his English with a herd of free-roaming
expletives.
A fresh load of tourists enters the airport bar. Many are American, but many are German and many are Australian and quite
a few are Dutch. They take the tables, dumping cameras and sunblock on the highly polished surfaces, removing Panama hats,
sunbonnets, pith helmets, baseball caps that have molded a slight tonsure into their bleached-blond, permed, mop-topped, feather-cut
hair. Everyone here is ready to be Saint Francis. Or Doctor Doolittle. They all let out deep sighs, almost in unison, as if
a forced march has been completed, the ball and chain of carry-on luggage resting at their feet.
McGraw lights up another cigarette, one of the supreme joys in his life. The tobacco cloud seems, for a second, to sublimate
his flesh from a painfully obvious solid—stubby limbs, bad skin, dandruff—into a mysterious vapor. He inhales and pauses,
licking his lips, and then blows out a casual blast, imagining within the whirlwind whole trailer parks sucked up and spinning.
He stares at the lava red of the cigarette; the barely burning paper is lovely. The smoke unfurls from the glowing ash the
same way gossamer shoots from a spider's anus. That's an attribute Spider-Man was lucky to avoid. Everyone would be disgusted,
no matter how many times you saved Manhattan from the evil Dr. Octopus. The theme song to the afternoon cartoon—"Spider-Man,
Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can"—begins to loop in his head.
Growing up, McGraw lived for comic books, his room cluttered with stacks of colored newsprint. But he wasn't crazy about the
superheroes or supervillains. They were boring, all identical except for their particular gimmicks. No, he loved the secret
identities, the people they pretended to be—Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Dr. Bruce Banner—normal joes with that hidden power
to influence a planet. Anytime. Anywhere. And even though somewhere in the world a tragedy happened every second of every
day, sometimes Clark Kent let it slide and didn't listen with super-hearing and didn't look with super-vision. Nope. Instead,
he went to work, earned a measly living as a reporter, and turned in puff pieces while children screamed in fast flaming fires.
"Some chasers," Lewis is suggesting. "The second wave of the attack is on. Commander Zev, you order the counterstrike."
"Sta?"
"Get us some beer."
"Ja bih tri pivo, molim."
"Speak Spanish, you asshole. Do your job for a change."
After fumbling through his Berlitz phrase book, Zev spits out, "Tomare tres cervezas, por favor." The pronunciation is awful,
like a ventriloquist trying to do a bit with water in his mouth.
"Man, you're hopeless," Lewis tells him.
"Fuck your teeth."
McGraw changes his order to a Bloody Mary, and sitting there, he begins to think to himself in a bad Transylvanian accent,
rolling over the r's, slamming shut the
k's.
He has it all figured out. A superhero vampire—by day he processes film in a newspaper's darkroom; it's always night in there
and has the chemical smell of a casket leaking embalming fluid. And when the sun goes down, he rights the wrongs on the front-page
photos. The murdered heiress. The oil spill. The gangster acquitted on a technicality. Murrow—that'd be his name—would shuck
his lab clothes for a black outfit, tastefully done, with a trench coat as cape. And the next morning, he'd feign ignorance
at the newly developed pictures, at the newly bannered headlines, at the do-good deeds of the night angel they call Murrow.
Then again, maybe it's too much like Batman. And what if all of those villains became part of the undead? That wouldn't be
too useful.
A captain and co-captain enter the bar. Neither wears a uniform, except both have those large mustaches favored by terrorists
and pilots alike. Stewardesses follow closely behind. Their conversation sounds flirty, but in Spanish everything sounds flirty.
Zev asks the bartender about the Spanish word for cunt, pussy, twat, you know, pastrmku, you know, polu-peceno sunku, you
know, vagina.
"Cono," the bartender mutters.
"Cono." Zev consults his phrase book. "¿Donde esta el cono mas cercano, por favor?" He thumbs through a page. "¿Se puede ir
andando?"
The bartender smiles. They all have a good laugh—Lewis just pretending to understand—while a voice comes over the loudspeaker
and speaks in five different languages.
II
They inhabit burrows . . . One front leg for a short time scratches up the
soil, and throws it towards the hind foot, which is well placed so as to
heave it beyond the mouth of the hole. That side of the body being tired,
the other takes up the task, and so on alternately.
–CHARLES DARWIN
BUT BEFORE THIS, before the Galapagos, about two weeks before, there is Sarajevo and there is the death of Richard Laraby,
the reporter, the tall blond stud who used to play quarter back for Georgia Tech. He doesn't die live. No, it's taped. But
they tape everything. Then they edit. Then they transmit the finished story back to Atlanta. That's their day, a two-minute-and-thirty-second
report. A little blood, a little suffering, a little gunplay, then bring on the drinks and maybe tonight a little hash. But
sometimes Laraby will do a live follow-up, a real pain, and at three in the morning he'll stand in the alley behind the Hilton,
freezing his nuts off, and he'll answer softball questions about the spirit of the Sarajevo people. "There is a haunted look
on their faces," he'll say in the headlights of the camera, the Southern tic trained out of his voice. "Their eyes well past
desperation and much closer to death itself. And like the city behind me, dark now, its scars hidden, only a semblance of
humanity remains." This, in fact, is an apt description of Laraby and Lewis and McGraw, the three of them huddling in that
alley, the only safe place to kick up the generator and the mercury lights. Tonight, the network wants the word "Live" tagged
to the vanity corner of the screen. The falling snow will be an added bonus. A nice touch. And it will film beautifully, the
flakes creating an optical effect of movement so that if you relax your eyes a bit, Laraby seems to lift slowly into the air.
It wouldn't take much. The man is losing weight, everybody can see that, and his clothes are starting to look absurdly ill-fitted.
"They're getting letters," Lewis tells him at dinner. They're sitting in the main restaurant at the Hilton, every table filled
with members of the world press. The Hilton, except for the gaping hole on the top two floors, has been doing great business.
A new Babel. Much better than the Winter Olympics.
"Letters?"
"About your weight. I guess people are worried. They want you to eat."
Laraby lifts up a forkful of rice and beans. A pile of stringy meat, zebra flanks that Zev managed to hustle up from the condemned
zoo, remains untouched along the edge. "Well," he says, "next time bring on the monkey. Yum yum."
Lewis reaches into his leather sidebag and pulls out a handful of mini chocolate bars, treats he gives to kids who pose in
rubble. "Just put on some weight."
With surprising quickness, McGraw snatches one of the candies, but the movement still feels wasted. Telekinesis would be so
much purer, the mind's tentacles grabbing on to the things you need while the useless body shrivels below the neck. McGraw
has lost weight as well, about ten pounds in the last year. God knows where it comes from, the guy's already a rail. Still,
he enjoys the lessening, even though this winter his skin is starting to turn a shade of light blue—not a good sign—and the
camera's feeling a bit heavy. "What time do we go?" he asks, the chocolate doing somersaults in his mouth.
"Three-thirteen A.M. We have the fourth spot."
Laraby nods. This is a great opportunity, this ongoing story, this constant coverage for the last year, and the public's growing
familiarity with his face. At least four times a week he files a report. There's Laraby standing next to the destroyed cathedral,
mosque, temple. There's Laraby in front of the Olympic oval now used as a mass graveyard. "The Siege of Sarajevo"—the network's
bloody banner—belongs solely to Laraby, and he's a hit. Number one with a bullet. Back home, mainly in the South, a fan club
has started up; they call themselves Larababes and they flood CNN with letters asking about this new reporter: Is he married?
No, recently divorced. How old is he? Thirty-two years old. How tall? Six feet one. What denomination? Baptist. But about
a month ago, the letters began to change: He looks pale! Feed him! He needs some color! Bring him home, poor thing!
"I think you also need a haircut," Lewis adds.
Laraby runs his hands through his greasy hair. This is certainly the longest it's ever been, a good two inches below the ear,
but he's enjoying the look. "I don't know."
"On camera you're getting a bit mangy."
"You think?"
"Yeah."
"Okay."
"Good."
Lewis usually gets his way. He's the veteran producer, a legend in the field and a witness to over twenty years of conflict.
Algeria to Zaire, a passport as thick as a phone book, that's what he'll tell you if you're next to him at a party. What he
won't tell you is that he'd probably be a reporter if he weren't so funny-looking. Long neck. No chin. A pinhead a few degrees
fatter than a sideshow freak. All he has is that smile, that great smile, and a voice that can talk anyone into anything.
Just ask his three ex-wives.