The Bestiary (14 page)

We sat down and I lit a cigarette. He refilled his pipe. The surf was rough and the first stars were flickering.

“You should call me Cletis now,” he said simply.

Then he told me something of his history—more in twenty minutes than I had learned in five years at school. First he put to rest the rumors I’d heard, ticking them off with a grimace. His wife was not a suicide: she had died of a heart attack at forty; he had never been court-martialed; none of his limbs was prosthetic; and his children had not died in an automobile accident. The most outlandish rumor, that his father-in-law had been a South American dictator—“Presidentfor-Life of Bolivia for three years,” he said wryly—was true. And he did have an independent income that allowed him to give up teaching and live wherever he wanted and do what he liked.

“I am attempting that one book,” he smiled thinly, “which someone like me saves up to write. A specialized topic that accommodates digression.”

He was writing about the cities Alexander the Great founded, and named after himself, when he swept across Asia.

“There were eighteen Alexandrias,” he explained. “Alexander chose the sites himself: in Persia, India, even Siberia. Only the Egyptian Alexandria survives. In Scythia, Alexandria was a city of sandstone towers. By the Indus River, it was a sprawl of canals, with houses on stilts. The Babylonian Alexandria contained a zoo, with exotic animals from around his empire. Kabul, Afghanistan, was one of the Alexandrias. And this should interest you: Alexander also named one city, Bucephalia, after his horse, and another, Peritas, to honor his dog.”

The previous year, I doubt I would have heard all this with such a jaundiced ear; but, sipping my whisky, watching the breakers burst against the reefs, I told myself that, for every city he founded, Alexander must have razed ten others, and for every animal placed in a zoo, thousands more were sacrificed to his gods. In Vietnam, in the Year of the Rat, people were eating rats. And the only construction project I’d seen was the lengthening of airport runways for bigger, deadlier bombers. Still, after my grim stay in Honolulu, Mr. Hood’s conversation was a tonic. Having been wounded in combat himself as a young man, he knew that enthusiasm for anything—except survival—was in short supply where I had been.

“There’s my theme,” he went on, “built on a contradiction: Alexander is the only conqueror to have left in his wake a string of new cities while waging an active military campaign. He explored deserts and rivers no European had ever seen. He had radical notions for a king, allowing the tribes he defeated to govern themselves, adopting their customs and dress, conversing with their priests. He made a Bactrian princess, Roxane, his queen, and rewarded his soldiers when they too married Asian women. When he visited the Temple of Ammon-Re, the reclusive priests, who had no idea of his identity, hailed him as a god. He began to believe this himself.” He smiled. “He’s a tough subject to keep up with. My book will take years to write.”

“Is that why you moved here?”

“It’s one reason.” He relit his pipe. “This house belonged to my wife. After she died, I couldn’t bring myself to stay on alone. I didn’t want to rent or sell, so I closed it up.”

“That’s when you started teaching.”

“Yes. It was a way to start over. To stay sane. It was the only real job I ever had outside the military. But I always knew I’d return here. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.”

Of all the reasons I had imagined for his moving to Maine, a broken heart was not one of them. I felt bad about that now. “When did your wife die?”

“Twelve years ago.” He saw my surprise, and added, “To me, that doesn’t seem long. Not long enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “We had a wonderful run. In Spain, Mexico, here. Here best of all. This was our only real home. Then one morning, coming up from the beach, I heard Polyphemus barking. Marion had collapsed in the garden. I rushed her to the hospital—too late.” He leaned over to pet the dog. “He was just a year old when she rescued him on the road. When he and I returned to the island, it was as if he had never left. He went right to his favorite spots in the house. He slept on her bed.” Mr. Hood sat back slowly. “Marion had a weak heart, and it finally gave out.”

My grandmother used that expression when she spoke of my mother. “Her heart give out,” she would sigh. I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly until I discovered that, because my birth was complicated, my mother had hemorrhaged suddenly, gone into shock, and died of cardiac arrest.

I watched the smoke from my cigarette waft into the vines above Mr. Hood’s lanai. The moon was high. Mercury was visible, too, unblinking among the stars. After coming and going several times, Polyphemus had nudged open the screen door and retired.

It was close to midnight when I told Mr. Hood about my stint in the Signal Corps. My side ached, as it did whenever I sat for too long. The surgeons had warned me it would be this way for at least six months, until my wound healed fully.

Mr. Hood listened carefully, and after a long silence, said, “Livy tells the story of a courier in the Galatian campaign who overcame countless obstacles—dangerous terrain, hunger, enemy patrols—only to discover that the message he delivered included his own death warrant. That’s an extreme example, but soldiers are always kept in the dark. In war, you think you know some fraction of the story, including your own story, when you know nothing. When, in fact, there is no story. If you had lost that pouch, the army wouldn’t have told you anything. If you had known what it contained, you might have been tempted to lose it, and no one the wiser.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”

“But you didn’t know. You couldn’t.” He leaned forward, placing his palms on his knees. “Phoenix is shameful. This war is lost. But that doesn’t mean it’s over.”

“It’s over for me.”

He knew better but—out of kindness, I’m sure—didn’t correct me.

Instead, he pointed at the half-built canoe. “To the Polynesians, canoes were living spirits. Canoe-building is a healing art. I built my first canoe when I returned from the Philippines. I worked on it for three months. After going to war, the hardest part isn’t coming back to other people, but to yourself. Some people can’t.” He looked away. “My son Roy fought in Korea. He made it home in one piece. He seemed all right. Then, a week later, he was gone.”

It was his son who had committed suicide.

He shook his head. “Roy tried to hide it, but I knew things weren’t right. I’d seen it in other soldiers. Still, I felt powerless. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—discuss what happened to him the way you just did. My daughter, Katie, blamed me for that.” He poured himself a last drink. “She was right. He and I had never talked much, not really, and that was my responsibility. She also blamed me for pushing him into the Corps. I didn’t push him, but I didn’t discourage him either. She lives in Spain now. We haven’t talked since her mother died. Marion never got over Roy’s death. For us, it just kept rippling. It’s still rippling.”

I was stunned to hear him talk like this. And to learn how much pain he’d been carrying. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching his arm.

“I thought hearing this might help you.”

I looked at his lined face, the washed-out eyes. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You already have,” he said quietly.

We sat back and looked out at the sea. On the horizon, the lights of a passing ship were just disappearing.

“Xeno, what about the
Caravan Bestiary
? Last I heard from you, you were still researching.”

“Yes, I filled a lot of notebooks, trying to reconstruct the bestiary’s contents. Before I was drafted, my goal was to learn all I could and lay the groundwork so I could search properly.” I hesitated. “I need time now, before I get back to it. Everything I read in college confirms what you told me years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Brox, Cava, and Faville were probably right: the book was destroyed. All the evidence points to it.”

“But you’re still not sure.”

“I just don’t know. The Catholic Church really wants it gone, and then one day—it is gone. Does anything really disappear without a trace? Part of me says yes. I’ve seen it happen…”

“And the other part?”

“Tells me I need to find out for myself. In the real world.”

He smiled. “I told you back then: it may not be in the real world that you’ll find answers.”

“As soon as I finish school, I’ll start looking.”

“You’re going back, then.”

“Yes. I was a junior when I left. I need three semesters’ worth of credit. I’d like to cram it into a single year. And at the same time try to pick up where I left off with the bestiary. I got very interested in Brox. I read about his unfinished essay on the bestiary; probably there’s nothing there. But I want to see for myself. Like Cava, Brox was convinced the bestiary had been hidden away in Italy for centuries before it was destroyed in Spain. But he didn’t think it had been in the Vatican, or that the Catholic Church was involved.”

“Good. The sooner you get back to it, the better.”

“For starters, I thought I would go to the public library in San Francisco, and maybe Berkeley.”

Mr. Hood stood up and put the bottle and our glasses on a tray. “We have some good libraries in Honolulu. You’re not leaving for a couple of weeks. Why not start here? I know some people at the university library in Manoa. I can give you an introduction.”

When I retired to the guest room, rain was drumming softly on the roof. The leaves in the garden were dripping. I stepped outside, under the canopy of trees.

That postcard of the girl with the bicycle was the only item I had carried during my tour of duty that survived. Everything else was gone, including my three photos—of Nathalie, Lena, and my mother (at Jones Beach)—and a Saint Francis medal my grandmother had given me. The postcard was bloodstained now, and my message to myself was gone.

Province of fire, Year of the Rat.

I put a match to the postcard, and holding one corner, watched it burn: the girl’s red dress and black hair, the hibiscus flowers, the pagoda. The wind caught the ashes in midair and blew them into the rain.

I went back inside. Shadows flitted around the empty birdcage. I took my pills and checked my bandage. I got into bed and eased onto my right side, wedging a pillow behind my back to make sure I didn’t turn over.

T
HREE DAYS LATER
in Honolulu, on a steaming hot morning, I sat in the Asia Reading Room on the fourth floor of the Hamilton Library. Arrayed before me on the teak table were the fourth volume of the ancient Chinese
Bamboo Books,
an illustrated edition of the
Annals of Lakes and Mountains,
and a seventeenth-century Tibetan bestiary in which the renderings of the animals could only be appreciated with a magnifying glass: the snow leopard, the eagle, and that bizarre humanoid, the yeti (later, unfortunately tagged “the abominable snowman”), which was once a commonplace in the Himalayas. I also had the famous commentary on the
Bamboo Books
published in 1865 by the English Sinologist James Legge and a pile of books from the classical Greek collection on the second floor. Except for a Japanese scholar huddled over a scroll and a professor with a white beard dozing in the corner, I had the place to myself. A frieze from Angkor Wat, of monkey gods battling demons, was hung on the far wall. Two glass cabinets were filled with Han Dynasty ceramics. The prophet Milarepa, ringed by dancers, beamed down at the professor from a silk tapestry.

Mr. Hood had made a phone call and written a letter of introduction to the Hamilton’s associate director, his friend Joseph Tamasho (mentioning that I had just returned from Vietnam), and—presto—I was issued a library card with full privileges. A slight, moustached man with impeccable manners, Mr. Tamasho wore a madras jacket and white shoes. He offered me tea and showed me around the library himself.

The reading room was comfortable and the stacks well organized. Scents of plumeria and yellow ginger wafted in from the garden. There was a café across the courtyard that served good Kona coffee and sandwiches. Nevertheless, for the first two days I couldn’t concentrate. But for the rustle of pages and the purr of the air-conditioning, the room was practically silent. It made me restless. I caught myself staring out the tinted windows. In the jungle I had not even been able to get through the pulp mysteries and Westerns we passed around; focusing on a scholarly text now seemed impossible. I flipped through book after book, pausing over passages that caught my eye. My CC work, encrypting and decoding, had required concentration, but of a mechanical sort. There was nothing stimulating about encrypting dozens of messages like
Alpha Red rendezvous Delta Blue, J Quadrant.
To preserve my sanity, I had had to shut down selective parts of my mind; opening them up again was not so easy.

This only intensified my despair. I was ready to thank Mr. Tamasho, return my library card, and move on. Then an entry in an encyclopedia of Greek scholiasts broke through my paralysis. The encyclopedia was compiled by a sixteenth-century rabbi from Fez, Jakob Ben Chaim. The entry was for the peryton, a high-circling bird—often mistaken for a hawk—that is among the most ominous of lost beasts. The rabbi discovered it in the trancription of an anonymous treatise, one of the 500,000 volumes lost when the Great Library of Alexandria burned down in 48
B.C
. This is his description: