Authors: Stephen Anable
We were conducted away, to other greenhouses where more fruit, more vegetables were flourishing, even a collection of bonsai, little bits of Kyoto, cypresses and cherry trees centuries old. With care, with tenderness, they thrived. Restricted to their limited dishes, pruned, pampered, fed, they lasted centuries longer than their brethren outdoors.
The truncated trees reminded me of the bound feet of Chinese concubines, beautiful in embroidered slippers, but hideous when exposed, like hands brutalized by arthritis, like fetuses gone wrong. Here, our host said, bonsai were valued as “living ambassadors, emissaries from the botanical past.” They were studied “at the cellular level” to see what they could teach about plant longevity. I wondered whether the metaphor with their pot-bound community was deliberate.
Our host continued, speaking complex agricultural jargon. He could talk forever about the beauty, the efficiency of their system, and make it all sound sane and even superior. He was boasting about their community avoiding the drought when the long-silent Roberto broke in. “Who does all this work?”
Our host maintained a beatific exterior. “We’re a community, a family. Everything is shared.”
“The woman we drove here,” Roberto said, “she looked like a street person. She was dirty, she looked hungry.”
“There is no hunger here, only abundance.” The man nodded at the produce prospering in the greenhouse, at the raspberries, red as sores. “Just look around you. The hunger is outside, a spiritual famine. That compelled you to come here—perhaps
.
” His “perhaps” was confrontational.
I knew, then, that I’d been crazy not to share Edward’s story with the police. If these people were responsible for killing Ian, for causing Clark to go mad and die, for abducting Chloe, for all sorts of crimes, Almeida was right—it was best for the authorities to handle them. Leaving the humidity of our last greenhouse, I was about to thank him for our tour and ask for the keys to my Volvo, when he said, “Our people are fixing your car.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Only a flat tire, a small puncture.”
Of course we’d taken some difficult roads, getting here, virtual gullies, winding through the woods. A rock, a nail could’ve damaged a tire. No, that was ridiculous; I was making excuses to absolve them, to stay calm, when I knew perfectly well what had happened—they had vandalized my car to prevent our escape.
Roberto was about to erupt, so I placed my hand flat against his chest.
“The Master is anxious to meet you,” our host said.
Some called him the Master, others, the Golden One. Was this the same person? Was this Mikkonen from Rockport, or some other authority? Everything was all so formal and ritualistic. We could’ve been Commodore Perry and his American crew negotiating entry into a long-closed Japan, trying to penetrate the paper screens of the shogun’s palace.
“First, you must be purified,” our host said to me, “before you enter his presence.” “You may stay here,” he told Roberto. “Someone will be along for you in a moment.”
They wanted to separate us. “We’d both be honored to meet the Master. But I can’t go without Roberto, I won’t.”
“Of course.” He smiled as if indulging us. “Of course. The two of you.”
I realized now I’d ensnared Roberto in my fate. And I’d been the one they’d targeted, caught probing.
Roberto sensed my fears, saying, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Our host ushered us toward a grove of birches, then into woods, past cairns of stones, and, standing in an expanse of muck, a fantastic lantern, a kind of iron spider, like the bristling Victorian lamps on the old section of the Boston Public Library. Surely this was a relic of Royall’s community, disintegrating amid the skunk cabbage.
“That lantern,” I said.
“It sheds no light,” he laughed. “It’s left over from Mr. Royall’s Great Mistake, as we call it.”
He disparaged Royall, just like Jason.
We crossed a small bridge of peeling logs, over a brook the drought had downgraded to a muddy hollow. Before us, in the woods, a kind of hut had been built into a brushy hillock. On either side of the structure’s low entrance, granite troughs held water vivid with sunlight. A eucalyptus odor bit through the air. Of course, this was some sort of sauna or steam bath.
Was he going to purify us, seduce us, or both? The KGB had schooled Soviet agents in love-making of all varieties to compromise useful foreign visitors. But Roberto and I were openly gay, onstage, for God’s sake, we couldn’t be blackmailed.
“Loki will assist you,” our host told us.
From the entrance to the bath, our first guide, the dazzling silent man with the sun tattooed on his back, came smiling, with fawn-colored cloth draped over his arm.
Our older host retreated up the path we’d just taken. At least Loki had the keys to my Volvo, I thought. Or hoped.
He actually spoke. “For you.” The fawn-colored bolts of cloth were, we saw, clothing, shirts and pants with pewter clasps embellished with whorls like labyrinths.
Does telepathy work? Can thought travel from person to person without voice or modems or fiberoptic cable? At that moment, I sincerely hoped so. With a glance and a nod, I tried to rally Roberto to act the part, to improvise with the greatest intelligence and caution possible, to comply with these people’s requests, however odd. If their leader wanted to see us, I reasoned, they wouldn’t harm us, if they wished to, until we’d satisfied his sense of curiosity. They, after all, had engineered the meeting, right down to the “small puncture” in our tire.
Loki draped the extra clothing on the branch of an oak. Then, shy as a boy in his first gym class, he undid the clasp fastening his kilt and allowed the garment to slip down past his legs, past his ankles. Beneath the kilt, he wore a loincloth, glaring white as adobe against his tan. “You too,” he said, and laughed. “The two of you.”
Hard and smooth, he had shaved himself hairless, like a swimmer competing in the Olympics. Bending, he pulled open the low door to the steam bath, which you bowed to enter, like a shrine.
I stripped quickly. Roberto was slower, but he too removed his clothes, hanging them with mine and Loki’s kilt and the fawn-colored items presumably meant for us.
Loki held the small heavy door, waiting for us to enter first. Steam billowed out, sharp with eucalyptus. “I don’t like it too hot,” Roberto said, fright and irritation affecting his voice. “Not too hot,” Loki said, and, for the first time, I speculated that our companion was not haughty, mute, or foreign, but “slow.”
Roberto balked at going first, so, naked, I slipped inside. I found myself in a long room, twelve by fifteen feet, gorgeous with tile and well-lit. Bulbs which Thomas Edison might have manufactured, big, with prominent filaments, like the stamens of lilies, were burning in brass lamps shaped like clusters of antlers. The walls were covered in murals, figures from Norse mythology: Thor, with his hammer; trolls with the wide, panicked eyes of trout; a spectral horse white as frost; and warriors with blond braids and blood-brightened axes. Spongy wooden benches rimmed the room, and, built into one wall was an altar, a block of granite inscribed with runes. Stacked in front of it were earthenware pots and iron instruments, pokers and tongs.
Roberto, now next to me, also gaped. Mist streaming down the walls seemed to animate the figures, making this seem less like a bunker dug in a Truro hillside and more like a dream or the underworld. But it smelled rank, like the St. Harold’s gym, of bodies and the odor of plumbers’ chemicals.
Loki came inside, then banged the door shut. He retained his loincloth. His buttocks were naked, heavily tattooed with abstract symbols.
I ran my hands over the tiles, over the ogres, gods, and warriors, now fading as the stream intensified. “Royall did this?” I asked Loki, instinctively simplifying my speech. “The artists in Royall’s colony?”
“Not good. Royall—not good.” Loki laughed then worked busily at the altar, scattering a spray of dried herbs that he’d retrieved from a ceramic jar on the floor. The herbs sizzled on the stone, filling the room with a welcome musky fragrance.
“Excuse me,” Roberto said to Loki. “I’m not being disrespectful. I’d just like to know what’s going on.”
I was just as puzzled, unsure whether we were supposed to copy Loki’s actions or observe.
“What does all of this mean?” Roberto said to Loki and to me. He was referring, I was sure, to our entire experience in Truro, to everything in this mad little fiefdom.
Loki dipped his fingertips into an earthenware jar on the floor by the altar. “Oils, oils for cleansing.”
Laughing, he seized Roberto in a bear hug. “If you don’t mind,” Roberto protested, but Loki laughed and rocked Roberto back and forth, then gently wrestled him to the bench by the altar.
I kept glancing at the tongs by the altar, iron tongs, heavy enough to knock a man unconscious. I was about to grab them and attack Loki when he released Roberto and instructed him, “Lie flat. Just relax.”
Roberto obeyed. Loki rubbed his hands together and repeated, “Oils, oils for cleansing,” then began massaging Roberto’s chest, in wide circles around his nipples, then in quick, rough strokes down his belly.
Roberto lay rigid, shaking his head. Loki continued massaging him, concentrating on his task like a third-grader concentrating on a test, earnest and serious. And harmless, I thought; if someone harms us here, it won’t be him, but someone with greater authority.
Roberto cringed. Loki was working on his belly, his palms flat as he rubbed the taut flesh. Was this strapping man gay; was that why he’d been assigned to take us to this place? Roberto was too frightened to respond.
Loki kneaded Roberto’s upper thighs. He was no longer pinning Roberto to the bench, so Roberto began to struggle to sit upright. “I’ve had enough,” he said.
To distract Loki into giving Roberto a reprieve, I placed my hands on Loki’s shoulders. I was shaking as badly as the night I’d found Ian on the breakwater. I was terrified he would feel me shaking, that I’d communicate my terror, flesh to flesh. “My friend is shy. He’s a wonderful actor, much better than me, but you know the cliché, all actors are shy.”
I was rubbing Loki’s shoulders as he knelt by Roberto. His shoulders were wide as a yoke long-dead peasants might have used harnessing oxen. His skin, despite his size and tattoos, was baby-soft. I had to lift his long hair to massage his back. I thought of other people who had to mimic lust to save their lives, like Scheherazade amusing her sultan. But I had the advantage of being an actor, so, as Loki’s long golden hair brushed against my body, I told Roberto, “Relax,” and found myself becoming aroused.
Roberto seemed riveted to the bench, watching, letting me orchestrate the scene. Murmuring, Loki stood, still facing Roberto. He trusted me enough to turn his back to me when potential weapons like tongs and jars of herbs and oil were nearby, near the altar.
I began rubbing his lower back, where the loincloth knotted near his waist. I had taken my advice to Roberto and was beginning to relax, to focus on the moment and ignore the dangers beyond, so, playfully, I tugged at Loki’s loincloth.
Loki faced me, took my hand, and dipped my fingers into the jar of oil he’d been using to massage Roberto. “Oil for cleansing.” “Yes,” I said, then surprised myself by laughing.
I rubbed the oil into my hands. Warm and runny, it exuded no discernable fragrance. Loki smiled, handsome and stupid. His loincloth gave no clue as to his state of arousal; the fabric was too puzzling, too thick. To gauge whether I should continue my seduction, I again playfully tugged at his loincloth.
Loki laughed. He mimed removing the loincloth, but kept it on. “I’m clean,” he said, still smiling. Unsure what he meant, unsure what to do, I decided to act on my own, without glancing at the nervous Roberto.
As I massaged the oil onto Loki’s chest, my erection knocked against his thigh. If this offended him, he’d let me know soon, I was sure.
Instead, he bent his knees and pushed the loincloth past his hips. Then he stood before me naked, for the first time. Wringing the loincloth in his hands, he repeated, “I’m clean.”
Then a pulse traveled through me, not desire or fright, but nausea. Where his testicles belonged was a line of scabs, a line of scabs bright with infection, oozing pus.
Someone had used a knife on him. Loki had been castrated.
Roberto was rising from the bench, pointing through the steam to something beyond Loki. It was a young girl in ragged, archaic clothing. She crossed the room until she came to the altar. Then she sprinkled more herbs across the hot granite slab, with no more reverence or mysticism than a Mexican housewife setting down tortillas on her stove. Our nudity did not seem to embarrass her, although Loki quickly covered himself, as if she somehow threatened him.
“Are you done?” the girl asked Loki, superior despite her youth. “All done,” he answered, as the herbs deposited on the altar filled the room with minty coolness. She walked toward us and Roberto positioned his legs to cover himself.
“If you’re done,” the girl told Loki, “get them dressed. The Master will see them now.”
We washed, we three men, in the troughs of spring water by the entrance to the steam bath. While we were in the steam, someone had left towels in the branches of the tree containing our clothes. I found the thick towels, ordinary cotton with the manufacturers’ labels still attached, comforting objects from the rational world.
“Leave them here,” Loki commanded, when we attempted to retrieve our own clothing. “Yours,” Loki said, of the fawn-colored shirts and pants.
Loki seemed to have rinsed off his playfulness in the trough of water. Stern and intent, he refused to interact with us beyond telling us to follow him deeper into the woods, along dirt paths crumbly from the drought, until we came to a building unlike any we’d yet seen—circular, of chalky concrete, with Bauhaus lines and slits of windows, like a bunker.
This was not the building where Jason had brought me, but he was here, part of a small crowd lazing on the grass in front of the building: a woman nursing a naked newborn; adolescent boys whittling something with bright knives; the Giant who’d guarded the entrance to their world, listening to a sputtering walkie-talkie. Jason’s charcoal suit, his tie as red and narrow as a tongue, and his loafers with brass buckles looked absurd in the woods, in this heat. All these people, handsome thanks to genes or surgery, directed their attention toward us.
Jason smiled, a broad transforming smile directed at me, a smile of conquest, I thought. He whispered something to an older woman whose golden hair was becoming silver, a woman busy with a lap full of loose-leaf binders whose plastic covers were another welcome souvenir of our own century.
Would Jason doom us or help us or do neither? It was the woman who rose and picked her way through her compatriots. “The Master will see you now,” she told us. Her soft face seemed motherly and sincere. “It’s a beautiful day.” But she spoke with rehearsed enthusiasm, like the receptionist in an oncologist’s office, used to distracting patients. Her shift was richer than others I’d seen today, blue with acorns stylized in metallic threads. “I feel as though I know you,” she said, voicing my own thoughts. Then she punched in some code, some combination into the panel of rubber buttons doing duty for a doorknob.
Inside, we entered a hall, frigidly air-conditioned and lined with shut doors, like some dangerous corridor in a dream. Everything was white—the concrete of the walls, the terrazzo of the floors—with no windows or furniture to break the bleakness.
I shivered in the skimpy clothing; Roberto hugged himself. The woman chose one of the identical doors and punched another code into a panel of buttons. Then, cautiously, the door glided aside—and we saw him.
He was immense; he must have weighed four-hundred pounds. He had a soft, doughy face and golden hair that went on indefinitely. It was the most beautiful hair imaginable, like the substance composing saints’ haloes in paintings, but no Giotto or Cimbaue had ever captured a being such as this.
He was dressed in a robe the color of his hair, rich as a reliquary enshrining the bones of an apostle. Images and motifs, suns and serpents and runes, flickered into sight on his robe then vanished, like figures in a hologram. His toes, like fat slugs, protruded from gilded sandals. He sat on a dais, on a leather and steel chair, tapping at the keyboard of a laptop computer. In front of him, on a folding metal table adorned with paint-by-numbers roses—surely from his mother’s home in Rockport—rested a large calabash filled with thick liquid the color of grape bubble gum.
The compulsive neatness so evident in the community outside was absent here. All flat surfaces in the room, desks, chairs, the tops of tables and cabinets, were burdened with stacks of papers, magazines, and books. And what books! Huge texts with leather covers soft as the spoors bursting from puffballs; books written by men sure the human body was governed by the four humors. Interspersed with these were magazines from Silicon Valley, and, chillingly, issues of
Janes,
the British armaments journal.
There were no windows in the room, and no chairs other than his. Roberto began to kneel, but I squeezed his arm to stop him. We had to stand, to retain as much of our power as possible.
His eyes were the pale blue penetrating sort. From this huge man came a tiny voice, a voice accustomed to obedience, with no need to be loud. “Why have you sought to sabotage me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roberto piped up, but the Master channeled his hostility toward me.
Wearing their clothing made me literally uncomfortable in my own skin, but I treated my answer as an actor’s challenge, to sound as clear and confident as possible. “I’ve
never
tried to sabotage you.”
He dipped two fingers into the calabash of liquid, then licked them clean. I remembered this gesture from a luau in Waikiki. It was poi in the calabash, the taro root paste esteemed in ancient Hawaii. In his girth, the Master resembled some Polynesian king whose shadow was so sacred that to cross it was to invite execution.
“Friendship seldom comes in disguise. You were observed, photographed, actually, in Stark, in Rockport, and twice on our property here in Truro. Not counting today.”
We could hardly be blamed for our presence here today, I said. We’d come here by accident, we’d met a random hitchhiker who happened to be heading for their community.
“There are no accidents,” he said, as though he’d coined this cliché, grown it in one of his greenhouses.
“Then that explains what happened to my car,” I said, “the flat tire I got here. It was no accident.”
I knew then that I had overplayed my hand. A hardness in his eyes lent strength to his moon face. He shifted slightly so that his laptop computer almost fell to the floor. “Your friend was an evil man!” he snapped, and a flush discolored his pallid skin the way sediment, shaken, discolors a beaker of liquid. He wasn’t referring to Roberto, but I wanted him to speak the name first, to divulge as much as possible without my prompting him.
“You told Jason lies, about starting a small business. Your business is subterfuge.” He straightened his laptop and resumed typing; it seemed an automatic gesture, like our hitchhiker fingering her knife.
I said the first thing that came to my mind: “I had to see you.”
“He said the same thing.”
“Who?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Your desperate friend.” His smile was at war with his eyes.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Roberto said. “I’m not feeling well.”
It was evident that he was telling the truth; he’d gone white. The older woman fetched a big silk pillow from a pile of junk mail and placed it on the floor. Roberto sank down, cradling his head in his hands.
We’d had a difficult day, I told our hosts, exhausting, what with the heat then the steam bath, the cleansing with Loki. Shuddering inside, I remembered the sores where his testicles had been. “We’ve had nothing to eat since morning.”
“Of course,” the Master said, brightening. He disrupted a stack of chaotic papers on a filing cabinet next to his chair, revealing a speaker. Cupping his hand as if whispering to a child, he mumbled something into the speaker, and, in a matter of seconds, another young girl, the smallest I’d seen here, came in, bearing a tray of fresh cut fruit, strawberries and peaches and plums.
I’d been daring enough to eat the strawberry Roberto refused in the greenhouse, but this tray of fruit—cold, fragrant, gleaming—had appeared all too quickly. But before we could make a decision about its safety, the Master frowned, and, indicating Roberto, scolded the little girl: “He’s allergic to strawberries, he said so in the greenhouse.” She curtsied, holding her grubby dress like a countess dancing the minuet, but the gesture was pitiful, coming from someone so fearful and so young. She scurried away with the plate.
“What I’m talking about is evolution,” the Master said.
“Excuse me?” I said. I’d sat on the floor next to Roberto, who seemed a bit better. The subservience implied in our position bothered me, but I thought it flattered the Master and brought forth what passed for benevolence on his part.
“Have you heard of the brown tree snake?” he asked us, shifting so that new deities or demons flickered then vanished, temporary as mirages, in the folds of his robe. “The brown tree snake is native to southeast Asia, and to New Guinea and Australia. In its native habitat, predators keep it in check. But it fares quite well as a stowaway, slipping into packing crates, even winding around the wheels of jet aircraft, thus managing to cross oceans.”
He made a feminine gesture; he gathered a handful of his hair and began stroking it. Then, from a plastic box, he drew a paper towel moistened with alcohol and rubbed his plump hands, afraid, apparently, of contaminating himself with his own hair. I thought of Loki’s definition of being “clean”—castration—and of our “cleansing” with steam, oils, and herbs. Females here—abused women, neglected children—formed some sort of servant class, some of them. Was this Chloe’s fate? Was she here, in some greenhouse or cell? How terrified a little child—or anyone—would be. I kept thinking of Miriam’s crying, of how Chloe was afraid of the dark. We must find her, somehow, if she was here.
The Master resumed his zoology lesson. “This snake, the brown tree snake, has made its way to Guam, the tiny island of Guam in the South Pacific. There, it has no natural enemies. It is free to multiply rapturously.” He enjoyed pronouncing the last word, smiling to reveal miniature teeth, juvenile as the milk teeth of a young boy. “The brown tree snake has infested Guam, at densities as high as ten thousand snakes per acre. It has been known to exist in sewers and emerge from pipes and drains into people’s homes. It has bitten small babies in their cradles. It is immune to pesticides, and, because of its habitat and appetite for eggs, it has rendered the songbirds of Guam, the native songbirds, extinct in the wild. The songbirds of Guam exist only in captivity.”
“I would like to go now,” Roberto announced. “I’m sure that by now your very capable colleagues have fixed our flat tire, our puncture, the ‘no accident.’ Or are we in captivity, like the songbirds of Guam?”
Just then, the little girl returned, wheeling a rickety aluminum cart on which wobbled three steaming plates of something thick and vegetarian, turnip-colored. Again, the girl curtsied. Her legs were peppered with insect bites and scratches.
“Choose whichever plate you wish,” the Master commanded. “I shall take the third.”
He was giving us this choice to challenge us to trust him; everything couldn’t be poisoned if he was to eat it too. “Shall,” he had said, like a character from
Masterpiece Theatre,
yet the overall impression he conveyed, despite his robe and sandals and long golden hair, was of power and an alien masculinity, like the mountain of power that is a sumo wrestler.
Roberto chose first, then I did. The Master took the remaining plate. He was the first to eat, attacking the food with a golden spoon which he cleaned with paper towels before using. The food was very hot; it singed the roof of my mouth, but it tasted good, like yam with a barrage of spices, as if all the herbs in Scents of Being had been included in this one particular recipe. The Master was a noisy eater, smacking his enlightened lips, noisy as an adopted puppy at its first meal out of the pound.
The young girl remained in the room, along with the older woman, kneeling on the chill terrazzo. They kept their attention fixed on the Master as the three of us ate. The room, like the building where I’d been grilled by Jason, was air-conditioned bitingly cold. The little girl, in particular, seemed to be minding it, and she was so thin, so I said, “If you like, have some of my food.”
“NO!” The Master’s word filled the room, as the little girl recoiled in terror.
“It was delicious, but I’ve had plenty.”
“She is not the right level!” the Master bellowed. “She has not evolved, she is not suitable!” He dabbed his mouth with a moistened towel. I’d angered him; his robe rose and fell unevenly while he caught his breath. For a moment, something akin to fear disturbed his expression as he said, “How did you first meet Ian Drummond?”