Augie Silver slept fitfully for most of the
day. It was brutally hot, the palm fronds hung limp and silent
outside the bedroom window, yet the painter never lowered the
cotton quilt from under his chin. He was too thin, too dry, too
tired to sweat, he lay there papery and brittle, his breathing
shallow, the dream movements of his eyeballs clear and
disconcerting through the veiny translucent skin of their lids.
Around six o'clock he struggled out of bed,
slipped out of his clothes, and went slowly to the closet for his
favorite robe. It never occurred to him that the robe perhaps had
been moved from its accustomed peg during his four-month
absence—and it hadn't been. It hung there patient and welcoming,
the loops of yellow terrycloth worn flat and shiny at the elbows,
the big soft collar suggesting a certain pomp, like the entrance of
a champion boxer. Directly under the robe, as if held in place by
an invisible mannequin, were the backless slippers that so
perfectly suited his shuffling, meandering walk. He stepped into
them with the reverent confidence of the prodigal who knows in his
bones that his wanderings have made him more profoundly, more
legitimately the possessor of his home, his comforts, his life.
Silently he strolled into the living room.
His former widow was lying on a sofa reading, and she did not hear
him approach. He took a moment to gaze around the house. His
paintings hung on almost every wall, they rang in his brain with a
glad but overwhelming clamor that had less to do with sight than
sound, as though he were a composer and ten orchestras were
simultaneously playing every tune he'd ever written.
"Looks like a goddamn museum in here," he
said.
Nina looked up. Her reading glasses
stretched her eyes, made them huge and liquid, and the lifting of
her head made the sinews rise and quiver from her collarbone to her
jaw. She had at that moment an unposed loveliness that made Augie's
knees go even weaker in appreciation of what he had come home
to.
"I hung the paintings for the memorial
service," said his wife.
"Memorial service," mused the painter. "I
keep forgetting I was dead." He mused further. "Guess I'm still
dead, far as anybody knows. It's kind of relaxing. . . . Was I
lavishly and excessively praised?"
"Your ears must have been on fire."
"Who gave the eulogy?"
"Clay."
"Ah. Elegant and flowery, I bet. I owe him
one."
Nina said nothing and Augie shuffled to the
sofa. He leaned over to kiss his wife and tried not to let her see
what an effort it was to straighten up again. She tried not to let
him know that she had noticed.
"Hungry?"
The word sounded somehow foreign to him and
he took a moment to respond. "I should be. But my body seems to
have forgotten what to do with food." He sat.
Nina hesitated. It seemed too soon to speak
of doctors, of worries, of the fresh fear of recurring death. She
draped herself across her husband's shoulders.
"I blew to Cuba," he suddenly said, being
pulled back into his story as into a fever dream. "Funny, huh? A
place I'd always wanted to go."
"Cuba?" said his wife.
Outside, soft evening light filtered through
the oleanders and the crotons. A faint smell of jasmine and mango
slipped past the louvered shutters and through the unscreened
windows. Augie half leaned, half fell against the back of the sofa.
His robe splayed open to reveal a white thigh that had grown
thinner than his knee.
"Eventually," he said. "I guess I passed out
after hauling myself into the broken dinghy. When I came awake, I
was still having trouble breathing, my arms and chest ached
horribly. But the storm was over and a fresh cool norther had blown
up behind it. From the color of the sea I figured I was in the Gulf
Stream. It was just before sunset. I watched awhile and conked out
again.
"Night came. It got cold. In the morning I
was shivering and parched but alert enough to remind myself not to
go crazy. I needed something to concentrate on; but when I tried to
pick something, I noticed I couldn't remember my name. Or what I
did. Or where I lived. Or you. For a while I was panicked, then a
weird acceptance kicked in: I was in the ocean and as blank as the
ocean. I drifted. I curled up this way and that way, trying to hide
from the sun. Now and then I peered around, imagining I would see a
boat, an island.
I tried to sleep but my head was pounding,
surging like waves were trapped inside it.
"By the next day I think I was getting
delirious. I shook. I tasted blood in my throat. I was no longer
sure whether I was asleep or awake, wet or dry, cold or hot. The
glare on the water was blinding me, I kept seeing green streamers
like when you press on your eyeballs. Then I saw the fins,
circling, approaching, retreating, approaching."
Nina whimpered. It was an involuntary sound,
a tiny shriek from an ancient nightmare. Augie reached out and put
a hand on her head. The sleeve of his robe hung down from his bony
arm. "Sharks?" she whispered.
"Dolphins," said her husband. "They were
swimming with me. Or at least I think they were. I was pretty out
of it by then. My sense of time was all screwed up, I expect I was
yammering to myself. But I had the definite impression that a pod
of dolphins, four or five, was surrounding me, protecting me,
guiding me to wherever it was I was floundering. I watched those
beautiful arched backs, the spume flying up from their blowholes
and exploding into rainbows in the sun.
"More time passed. Another day, maybe two. I
could feel myself shriveling up like a leaf. My skin was cracking
open. Then, when I was asleep or raving, I felt and heard the
dinghy being rammed, nudged, pushed. It was the first time I was
afraid of capsizing. I grabbed the gunwale and looked over the
side. Coconut palms. The dolphins were shepherding me to land.
"I have a very dim recollection of crawling
to shore. Pebbles and shells cutting my hands. Saltwater searing
deep into my flesh. I remember cool sand against my cheek. And the
next thing I knew, I was waking up in an old fisherman's hut.
"I heard voices before I
could open my eyes. Spanish voices. I couldn't understand much, but
I guess I wasn't in very good shape, because one of them kept
saying
muerto, muerto
. That made me nervous. I felt I had to do something
impressive to show them I was alive, or they might do the decent
thing and bury me. So I tried to move. I couldn't. I tried to
speak, to groan. Nothing. I used to think failure was relative, but
this was failure in the absolute. I couldn't even blink.
"But they must've found a pulse or
something," the painter continued. "Maybe they just didn't feel
like digging right then. Anyway, they told me afterward I was
unconscious for around ten days."
"Who told you, Augie?" asked his wife.
He slowly shifted on the
sofa and managed a skeletal smile. "This old man who spoke pretty
decent English. Used to work at a casino in the Batista days. Told
me I almost cashed in all my
cheeps
."
Nina tried to smile in return but found that
she could not. The person to whom something terrible has happened
is usually the first to be able to laugh about it; those who love
him are always the last. "But Augie," she said, "why did it take
you so long to get home?"
"Amnesia, paranoia, and politics," he said.
"I didn't know who I was. It wasn't till much later that I
remembered the waterspouts, the wreck. I had no I.D. As soon as I
could speak, the fishermen realized I was American, and they didn't
know what to do with me. Where I landed was very remote—an isolated
little peninsula called Boca de Cangrejo. What these people knew of
the outside world was what the government radio told them. They
were savvy enough to see I was no Yanqui imperialist devil, but
they were afraid of what might happen if they turned me in."
"Afraid for themselves?"
"For themselves. For me. Afraid. Who knows
of what exactly? So they kept me under wraps. Tried to feed me fish
broth. As I got a little stronger, they helped me to the beach to
watch the boats. They were very kind."
He paused, and Nina rubbed his shoulders. It
was almost dark outside, the windows were soft gray pauses in the
painting-covered walls. A block away a dog was barking, palm fronds
scratched softly against the tin shingles of the roof.
"Only problem was, these little strands of
memory started tugging at me, more and more each day. It didn't
bother me especially that I didn't have a name. So what? But I was
getting to ache about other things. Yearn. Yearning. I'd used those
words, everybody does, but now I knew what they meant. I knew I had
a home somewhere and I yearned to get back to it. I believed I had
a mate, someone it was my proper destiny to be with. And I had this
nagging and, if this doesn't sound too crazy, religious sense that
I had work, some kind of work, to do."
"It doesn't sound crazy," said Nina Silver,
but her husband continued as though he hadn't heard. Even through
his weakness, it seemed a kind of frenzy was upon him now, and he
hurtled through the rest of his story as if the meaning of it
existed not in the details but in the sheer momentum.
"Day to day," he said, "I felt that I was
getting stronger, but the strength wasn't going to my body, it was
being siphoned off into this groping quest for memory, this blank
struggle to recall or invent who I was and what I was put on earth
to do. Everything had to be relearned; it was exhausting as
childhood. Little bits of things triggered recollections that,
maddeningly, went nowhere. A color. A smell. I knew them. But how?
From where? I asked for a paper and pencil and I started to draw. I
didn't know I knew how, I just drew. I looked for hints in the
pictures. And that's what I saw: hints, nothing more. A couple of
months went by. I doodled and racked my brain. Meanwhile, my body
was languishing, this need to remember was like a tumor, was like a
sucker on a plant, it just took all the nourishment for itself.
"Then one day it clicked.
By chance. That's always how it happens, isn't it? Some screwball
fact that becomes the anchor of a new universe. There was a big
sport-fishing tournament—marlin, sailfish—international. Big
beautiful boats flocked by, the whole village stood on the beach
and cheered and waved. Boats from Venezuela, Mexico, boats from
Argentina, Panama. Americans weren't supposed to participate—part
of the economic embargo, you understand. So if the U.S. government
says don't do something, who's the most likely person to do it? A
Key Wester, right? So sure enough a Key West boat goes
by
. Lip Smacker, Key
West
. I'm standing on the beach, taking
turns looking through this ancient spyglass someone had, and I see
it on the transom.
"Suddenly it was as if I had a fever. I had
to be carried to my cot. I spent a couple days in bed, totally
immobile. I was conscious and I had the weirdest sensation I've
ever had in my life: a kind of itching, clicking, sparking inside
my brain, like the whole computer was being reprogrammed and it was
draining every last volt from the battery. I came out of the
stupor, and I remembered.
"The tournament headquarters was about
thirty miles up the coast, at a small resort called Puerto Dorado.
The old croupier went there and made discreet contact with the Key
West captain, a real crazy man named Wahoo Mateer. For the two of
them, I imagine, the whole thing was pretty titillating, both sides
feeling pleasantly subversive. A couple of evenings later, Mateer
came and fetched me, and here I am. In and out of Cuba without a
passport."
The painter paused and settled in farther
against the back of the settee. He ran the sleeve of his bathrobe
across his forehead as though mopping perspiration, but there was
no moisture there, only a brick-red sheeny flush through the burned
and crinkly skin. He pulled a slow deep breath into his ravaged
lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was even and serene.
"I'm home with my mate. And I've remembered
the work I have to do. I'm going to paint again, Nina. As soon as
I'm a little stronger. I'm going to paint every day. I don't have
to be great. That was arrogant nonsense: genius or nothing. I'll do
what I can. I'm going to fill the world with paintings."
It was full dark beyond the windows now, and
the only brightness was a yellow oval thrown by the lamp where Nina
Silver had been reading. Her husband looked closely at her face and
saw a catch at the corners of her mouth as she stretched her lips
to smile.
"You don't think that's a good idea?" he
asked.
Clayton Phipps expertly sliced the lead foil
from the top of a bottle of Gruaud-Larose 1975 and centered his
corkscrew in the spongy wood of the stopper. He wasn't quite sure
why he was squandering such a venerable wine on the unschooled
palate of Robert Natchez; part of him, moreover, disapproved of the
whole notion of quaffing a serious red on such a thick and sticky
evening, a night that called for talcum powder, fume blanc, and a
cool washcloth on the brow. But goddamnit, there were times in a
man's life when he wanted Bordeaux and nothing but Bordeaux, and
Clay Phipps saw less and less the virtue of denying himself what he
wanted at the moment that he wanted it. He pulled the cork. The
festive pop carried with it instant scents of black currants,
pepper, forest floor, and violets. Thank God there were some
things, some few things, that a man could count on and that did not
lose their savor.
He poured two glasses and carried them into
the living room, where Robert Natchez was sitting, dressed all in
black. Phipps wore tan linen, and the two of them might have been
the only people in the Florida Keys, not counting maitre'd's and
cops, in long pants just then. Clay Phipps was self-conscious about
his pale and hairless calves; Robert Natchez keenly felt that
shorts did not befit his dignity. So they sweated behind the knees
and felt well dressed.