The Bestiary (11 page)

I sent it to his post office box in Athens, and two weeks later received a postcard in reply:

Dear Xeno,

I am sorry you feel that way. The apartment will remain yours to use. Until further instructions.

—Theodore Atlas

D
URING MY LAST SEMESTER
, drugs were readily available at my school. It was 1967, and even in Maine we could find whatever we wanted. Until then, I hadn’t been much interested, but after Mr. Moretti’s death and the break with my father, I started smoking a lot of grass. Occasionally I dropped acid or mescaline. I was unhappy, but I also felt liberated. In the apartment in Boston, I could get high whenever I wanted and play music as loud as the neighbors would tolerate. I wandered the city, hanging out in the Commons, eating Mexican food, and going to the art houses to watch interminable European films, or, when I was stoned, a movie house in Chinatown where Taiwanese flicks were shown without subtitles. I met girls at the coffeehouses in Cambridge and lied that I was a Harvard student; in eight months, I actually would be an incoming freshman. Sometimes I got lucky with these girls. It helped that I had my own apartment downtown, twenty minutes away on the motorcycle I’d bought when I turned sixteen, a red 350cc Yamaha.

Earlier in my adolescence, I had few such opportunities. Locked away at school, I was limited to making out with the girls bussed in for dances from our sister school, eighty miles away. For anything more satisfying I would have to leave the campus, as I did just after my fifteenth birthday, traveling to Bangor one weekend with my archery teammate, Nathan Forman. His father owned the local Cadillac dealership. When he worked there the previous summer, Nathan went after the bookkeeper’s young secretary, Marie, who had slept with half the salesmen. When Nathan told Marie I was coming home with him, she let him know her best friend, Polly, would be open to a date with me. Which translated into the four of us taking two adjacent rooms in a motel. At eighteen Polly was very much the older woman. She was built like a farm girl, wide hips and big breasts, but with the pallor and the tired eyes—already—of someone trapped in a factory town. My strongest memory is of the cubes rumbling in the ice machine outside our door while she guided me inside her. After which I took my first shower with a girl, soaping her back, watching her rinse her stringy hair. Beaded with steam, her skin looked even paler. Her cheeks were blotched. Later we were joined by Nathan and Marie. We sat on the bed smoking joints and drinking beer. We ordered in a pizza. Afterward Nathan and I drove to his parents’ house and went to sleep in his room, where I took his brother’s old bed.

One snowy night in my senior year I dropped acid with two girls from Tufts whom I met at my dealer’s house in Somerville. We rode the subway back to my apartment. I put on a stack of LPs: Hendrix, the Dead, Cream. The first rushes of acid came on—sparks of color shooting off of objects, sound elongating. One of the girls went out for food and instead returned with a bunch of people. By then, we were tripping hard. I didn’t like having so many strangers in the apartment, talking, smoking grass, but I fell into conversation with one of them, a tall man around thirty with a red beard and a bandaged hand. I couldn’t say what he looked like exactly because his face kept turning to red clay, melting, and reconfiguring itself.

We sat at the dining room table. He chain-smoked Spanish cigarettes and said he was a reporter for
Mother Jones,
just returned from Spain.

“I was in the Pyrenees with ETA, the Basque separatists. They make the Weathermen look like fucking Boy Scouts. Their bombers are called
los felinos
because they’re elusive as wildcats. I was blindfolded and taken to their ace bombmaker. C-4 packed with drill bits is his specialty. During our interview, there was an explosion in the next room. My guide was killed.” He held up his bandaged hand. “I lost this.”

I was staring out the window at the snowflakes glinting in the streetlight.

“You don’t believe me?” he said, and to my horror he began unwrapping the bandage. Round and round—there was no end to it, and no hand in evidence underneath. I expected blood to gush from the stump of his wrist.

Finally I found my voice, at the end of a long tunnel. “I believe you.”

“No, you don’t.” Nearly the entire bandage was coiled on the floor.

The front door slammed. The girls from Tufts and the other strangers had left after cleaning out my father’s liquor cabinet. When I turned back to the journalist, he was gone, too, his cigarette smoke hovering across the table. The radiator hissed. Then I heard a sharper hiss: that discarded bandage was now a cobra, rearing up, with a darting tongue.

For the rest of the night, the cobra never left me, even as I moved from room to room, switched on all the lights, and opened windows, drinking in the icy air. At dawn I ended up back in the dining room, stiff and exhausted. The cobra remained by the door, watching me, poised to strike, until it dissolved in the first light.

T
HAT SPRING
, before graduation, I went for a walk, and as usual felt Re beside me. It was dusk, and I had just entered the thick woods north of the grounds. In the forest to the south there were trails on which science classes began field trips. Eventually the trails met at a dirt road with a furrow of grass down the middle that led to the state road. But the northern woods were virgin, off-limits, running straight into New Brunswick and beyond. No houses, no roads. They were the beginning of the wilderness.

The wind was swaying the treetops. The clouds were tinged violet. Underfoot the pine needles were damp. Night was falling—owls began to hoot, bats swooped—but I kept walking. That afternoon I had cut my classes and holed up at the library with my facsimile of the Hereford bestiary. I was still clutching it under my arm.

The first animal in the Hereford was the bear. A woodcut depicted it standing by a lake, with raised forepaws, beneath a ring of stars. It reminded me of the bear at Rockefeller Center.

Soon it was pitch-dark. I might have been two miles from the school—or two hundred. I had never felt so intensely alone, with such a mixture of fear and exhilaration. Finally the wall of trees opened onto a clearing. The Milky Way spanned the sky. To my right, the moon shone on a lake where something broke away from the shadows on the bank: a bear, on its hind legs, with forepaws extended. Within seconds it disappeared and a smaller animal—a fox!—emerged from the same shadows, sniffing the air before darting into the woods. Like the Chinese, the Hereford monks believed the wiliest foxes could transform themselves into other animals, including man.

The monks offered advice to anyone foolish enough to try trailing such a protean creature.

The fox can leave tracks in one direction while traveling in another.

They didn’t explain how the fox managed that feat, nor did they identify the song a dying bear might sing.

3

I
WALKED OUT
of the forest into a scorched field. The wind licked at me like fire. The soil was smoking beneath my boots. In bomb craters, twenty feet across, rainwater was boiling beneath the noon sun.

I was in a place ruled by the beast.

Province of fire, Year of the Rat,
I had scrawled on a postcard that I kept in the cargo pocket of my pants. On the other side of the postcard, a Vietnamese girl in a red dress and flip-flops stood astride her bicycle before a pagoda. Hibiscus flowers were clipped to the spokes of her wheels. Her black hair flowed over one shoulder. She was gazing into the distance. I often examined her image and looked into her eyes. Before I returned home, I wanted to meet her. I knew the postcard had been printed during French colonial times, that the girl must be much altered by the years—and the war—or else dead.

If the latter, why should that stop me? In the previous months I had come to realize that there were schemes of life and death more comprehensive, and far subtler, than anything I imagined—zones in which the living mingle with the dead: fighting, embracing, even falling in love. At certain times and places these crossovers are not the exception, but the rule. I was in such a place.

Increasingly the travel became one-way—terrifying numbers streaming from life to death. The dead overwhelming the living, demanding that we join them. Like everyone around me, I felt isolated, helpless. Between us and the rest of the world was an ocean of water and—infinitely vaster—an ocean of time.

I stopped beside a thicket to study my compass and map. I was a quarter mile from coordinates 11°27'49" N, 106°39'08" E, the location Murphy had radioed in to Central Command. Murphy was dead now, back in the forest, his legs in one place and his torso in another after he tripped a land mine. I had been about ten yards from him and my first impulse was to run; but I resisted it, and tried to block out the image of his guts plastered on tree trunks as I zigzagged to the forest’s edge, scanning the ground for packed dirt, leaves—anything that could conceal a trip wire. Murphy’s radio had been destroyed, too, before he received confirmation of his message. But still I was waiting for help, my ears peeled for the
chop-chop
of an approaching Huey. I was the only one left, with nowhere to go. All I could do was wait.

Across the field, bare trees lined a ridge. Their foliage had been blasted away. They looked like fence posts. Seeing dust kick up beyond them, I dived into the thicket. A man clutching a rifle appeared on the ridge. Eight more Vietcong followed him. They wore baggy green fatigues and straw hats. Two of them carried an antiaircraft gun.

I lay flat and didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. I couldn’t swallow the dry knot lodged in my throat.

I was in the Signal Corps, stationed in the hills east of An Loc near the Be River. We were just twenty-five miles from the Cambodian border; between us and it there were two U.S. Army regiments, a brigade of South Vietnamese Army regulars, and a dozen Special Forces units. We were a CC unit: communications and cryptography. We had radio receivers, transmitters, scramblers, Teletypes—all high-tech for that time. There were eight of us. The emblem on our sleeves was a bear clutching a lightning bolt. For four months we had lived and worked in a pair of glorified hootches, oblong wooden buildings erected in two days and nights by the Corps of Engineers. It had a name: L Base. We had an outhouse, an outdoor mess beneath a corrugated roof and a showerhead behind the mess for one-minute showers. For anyone in-country, these were deluxe accommodations. Indeed, the four grunts out of Ba Ra who shared our quarters and guarded the site considered it a plum assignment. Because the tree canopy was so thick, by day we operated in a constant twilight. At night the clatter of birds was deafening. And before dawn it grew so quiet I could hear the bamboo ticking miles from our perimeter. Sometimes in the darkness it felt as if we weren’t really there, while the enemy was everywhere—owning the darkness.

In basic training, after shaving my head and conditioning me to do fifty push-ups by my bunk at reveille and teaching me to take apart, clean, and reassemble my M-16 hundreds of times until I could do it blindfolded, the army had discovered that with my college education, speed-typing abilities, and (added bonus) skill on a motorcycle, I was suited for the Signal Corps. Once again my nickname was X. I encrypted and decoded messages: troop movements, bombing runs, surveillance data. I also served as a motorcycle courier, dispatched to forward positions at Loc Ninh and Bo Duc. Even the army’s stripped-down Harleys were tricky to handle on the rough dirt roads, but the fact I could ride one at all was what saved my life. The war had spilled over into Cambodia. Every morning we woke to the F-15s flying their sorties out of Saigon. One day in April we received an urgent message: three North Vietnamese Army armored divisions, equipped with Russian tanks, had crossed the border and joined up with a VC brigade. They were overrunning Binh Long province, routing the troops that had been our buffer. We had twenty-four hours to evacuate L Base and make for the army garrison at Tay Ninh City. The grunts had already left to join the remnants of their company, retreating from a massacre at Ba Ra. Six of our men would flee in a truck, with whatever equipment we didn’t destroy. Our captain, who had been burning papers in a pit, handed me a pouch of the most sensitive remaining material and ordered me to ride on ahead.

“The extra hour may make a difference, Atlas. Return this to me at Tay Ninh, or give it to the commanding officer. And take Murphy with you.”

Murphy was a tough kid from Oakland with an eagle tattooed on the back of his head. His specialty was unscrambling radio signals. Drafted on his nineteenth birthday, he was counting on the army to pay his way through electronics school when he got out. He wanted to work at a radio station. Not just any station. “KNEW in Oakland—country music 24/7—or KMPX across the bay.”

He climbed on the bike behind me. We were wearing our flak jackets and helmets. I had the pouch under my jacket, with the strap around my neck. Murphy slung our rifles over one shoulder and a PRC-6 radio over the other. We both wore holsters with standard-issue Smith Wesson .38s. On his belt Murphy also had a pair of canteens. Two more canteens, C rations, and our ponchos were stuffed into the bike’s saddlebags. A three-gallon can of gasoline was strapped onto the rack behind Murphy’s seat.

We set off at noon. Even then the road was dark, the bamboo on either side thirty feet high, the dust coating our goggles. Murphy was reading the map, directing me. I was familiar with the two main roads, Highway 9 to Tay Ninh and Highway 13 to Saigon, but with the VC moving south so fast, we avoided them. We rode hard for a couple of hours, fording streams, cutting through rice paddies, weaving in and out of the forest. We began to hear gunfire ahead. Then we heard it behind us, too, and finally on all sides. Until then, with the throttle open and the wind at our backs, I could tell myself we were escaping danger. But we were riding right into it. Since I was a child, I’d always known I could die young, like my mother—that it might really happen. But for the first time I believed it.

Murphy was scared, too. When we came to a river with a bombed-out bridge, he squeezed my shoulder and shouted, “Go back to that last crossroads.”

I spun the bike around and backtracked about a mile. We stood at the center of the crossroads and drank from one of the canteens. Dust and exhaust fumes had burned my throat. Murphy pushed up his goggles and pored over the map. It was a new map, updated and sent out to all command posts by our own unit the previous day.

“We go that way,” he said, nodding to the right. “It’s the only road that’s blue, not red.” A red road was off-limits at all times. “Every fucking cow path in this province is gonna be red by tomorrow. I just hope Kamazine didn’t fuck up when he made this one blue.” Kamazine was the guy in our unit who had updated the map.

“Which is the shortest route to Tay Ninh?” I said.

Murphy pointed to another road. “That one.”

I thought about it. “I say we take the blue road.”

Our captain and Kamazine and the four other members of our unit would be killed at that same crossroads an hour later when their truck was hit by a mortar shell. Soon afterward, twenty miles to the west, Murphy and I were ambushed. We never saw the VC that shot the bike out from under us. We were thrown and lucky to land in high grass. The VC kept strafing the road and we crawled through the grass and then began running, heads down, stumbling, falling, gulping for air, certain that without the bike we were dead. Without our rifles, too, which Murphy lost when we were thrown. We still had our .38s, and he had held on to the radio and one of the canteens. We ran without stopping until the gunfire grew faint, and then collapsed in the brush beside a muddy river.

It was over a hundred degrees. I tried to catch my breath, but it was like drawing fire into my lungs.

“They should’ve fucking gotten us out sooner,” Murphy shouted, slapping the mosquitoes from his neck. “There was no recon over Cambodia? No one saw three fucking armored divisions?”

We were scraped and bruised. My lip was cut and I pressed my sleeve to it to stop the bleeding.

“How many assholes were asleep at the wheel in An Loc and Saigon?” he railed.

“Here, Murph.” I had a Snickers bar in my pocket that I split in half.

He shook his head.

“It’s all we’ve got.”

He spat. “You think we’re gonna take on Charlie with these pistols—like Wyatt Earp?” He tore off his flak jacket. “And this fucking thing won’t be worth shit in a firefight.”

I let him go on. It was his way of dealing with his fear. How did I deal with mine? I felt like throwing up. I tried to think about something else—anything. The transistor radio I had as a kid: it was red, with a single earplug that hurt my ear, tiny serrated dials for volume and tuning, and a circle of numerals that lit up. Like Murphy, I was loyal to certain stations. WABC. WMCA. I thought of my favorite disk jockeys: Cousin Brucie, Scott Muni, Jack Spector. I tried to hear the songs they played.
Bye Bye Love. Money. You Can’t Catch Me.

“I don’t want no KIA after my name,” Murphy snapped.

Killed in Action.
Maybe he was right; maybe that would be the next station we heard:
WKIA.

We finished the water in the canteen, refilled it with river water, and dropped in iodine tablets. Then we popped some salt tablets and washed them down. My helmet that weighed five pounds felt like twenty. My flak jacket was like lead. Sweat was streaming down my back.

Murphy jumped up suddenly. “Fuck this, too!” he shouted, flinging his helmet into the river. I saw his eagle tattoo for the last time before he pulled an Oakland A’s cap, green with a gold brim, from his pocket and put it on as his helmet floated away through the reeds.

That had been nineteen hours and about twelve miles ago, across the roughest terrain I had ever seen. And Murphy had been right: his flak jacket and helmet could not have saved him when he stepped on that mine.

I still had the pouch under my flak jacket. And I still had my .38, which I slipped from its holster when that VC platoon descended the ridge and fanned out in my directon, heading for the forest. I had seen men die, but in my eight months in-country I had shot at no one. A bottomless silence was welling up beneath me. Maybe it was this that would carry off my spirit, I thought, when, in a few moments, my body was dead. Before that happened, before they killed me, would I kill one of them? Was that the only choice left me?

They were ninety feet away, moving in a broken line. Their leader was a wiry man with a goatee, bare-chested, a red bandanna knotted around his head. He was carrying a machete and staring at the thicket that concealed me. I’d heard reports of soldiers recently captured and executed, their heads affixed to spikes to frighten villagers who might collaborate. And other soldiers who, prior to interrogation, were stripped and doused with gasoline while their captors tossed lit matches at them. And—the worst—prisoners strung from trees with ropes, a canvas bag filled with rats fastened tightly over their heads.

As the men came closer, it struck me that I had another choice: put the pistol to my skull and—

Red Bandanna jerked his head up and shouted, pointing at the sky. As he turned, I saw the tattoo covering his back, a sea serpent in a storm—my father’s tattoo. Then there was a thunderclap, followed by an explosion that rocked the earth. A wall of fire swept past me. Red Bandanna, his men, the trees—everything was consumed as I flew into the air myself, into the flames, tumbling, flailing, blacking out.

When I came to, I was sprawled out far from what remained of that thicket—a mound of ashes. My uniform was in tatters, my skin black. One boot was gone. Dirt filled my mouth. All my bones felt broken, but in fact it was my left arm and two ribs that were cracked. And there was a hole in my left side—the size of a cigarette pack—caked with blood.