Against the Day (31 page)

Later that evening, after another
breathless ten minutes with Dittany inside a striped palmetto tent during an
afternoon croquet party, most of the company having retired, Kit was wandering
through the house when he heard piano music coming, he supposed, from the music
room. He followed the sound, the unresolved phrases that gave rise to new ones
equally unfulfilled, chords he had himself hit by accident, sitting on piano
keyboards and so forth, but had never considered music, exactly
. . . .
He moved through a darkening amber
light as if the electric current in the house were being drained away, smoothly
diminishing like gaslight beneath a hand at a hidden valve. He looked around
for wall switches but could see none. Far down at the end of one of the
corridors, he thought he saw a dark figure receding into the invisible wearing
one of those pith helmets explorers were said to wear. Kit realized it must be
the widely discussed black sheep Fleetwood Vibe, in from one of his
expeditions.

R. Wilshire Vibe
had not endeared himself to his
nephew with his current “show”
African Antics,
featuring the catchy

When those natives, run amuck!When
your lifeain’t, worth a buck!Eyes all poppin, goin berserk,Might even make you
late for work, sayTell me, whatcha gonna do,When they come screamin, after
you?Runnin through those jungle trees, Tryin not to be the, groceries! well,

Out there, in that, distant land, You
won’t find no “hotdog” stand (uhuh!) Whattheyliketoeatinstead, is Barbecued
brains straightoutayourhead, soIf you’re trav’lin, out that way,Listen up to,
what I say,Don’t wanna be nobody’s meal? Better bring along a real fastAu
tomobile!

Which
everybody liked to gather around the Steinway in the parlor to sing along with.
All great fun for everybody except Fleetwood, who spent at least thirtytwo bars
a night trying not to take offense.

“They don’t actually know I’m here,”
he confided to Kit. “If they do, it’s only in the way some can detect
ghosts—though you may have noticed already these are not the most
spiritual of people. I once had hopes that Dittany could escape the general
corruption, but not so much lately.”

“She seems straightforward enough to
me.”

“I’m less and less qualified to judge
anyway. In fact, you shouldn’t trust anything I have to say about this family.”

Kit laughed. “Oh, good. Logical
paradoxes. Them I understand O.K.”

They had reached the top of a steep
hill, emerging from a stand of maples and black walnuts, some of them already
old when Europeans first arrived—the mansion hidden in foliage somewhere
below. “We all used to come up here in the winter and bobsled down this thing.
Back then it seemed damned near vertical. And look at that out there.” He
nodded westward. Through the miles of coalsmoke and salt haze, Kit could make
out a few semivisible towers of the city of New York, descended upon by radial
shafts of late sunlight from behind and among clouds that seemed almost their
own heavenly prototypes, what photographers called a “twominute sky,” destined
rapidly to cloud over and maybe even start dropping some rain. “When I came up
here by myself, it was to look at the city—I thought there had to be some
portal into another world
. . . .
I
couldn’t imagine any continuous landscape that would ever lead naturally from
where I was to what I was seeing. Of course it was Queens, but by the time I
had that sorted out, it was too late, I was possessed by the dream of a passage
through an invisible gate. It could have been a city, but it didn’t have to be
a city. It was more a matter of the invisible taking on substance.”

Kit nodded. “And . . .”

Fleetwood stood with his hands in his
pockets, shaking his head slowly. “There are stories, like maps that agree
. . .
too consistent among too many
languages and histories to be only wishful thinking
. . . .
It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not
obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen
upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but
returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.”

“Home.”

“Oh . . .” Following Kit’s glance,
downhill, toward the invisible “big house,” the late sun on the trees. “There’s
home, and there’s home, you know. And these days—all my colleagues care
about is finding waterfalls. The more spectacular the falls, the better the
chance for an expensive hotel
. . . .
It
seems all I’m looking for now is movement, just for its own sake, what you
fellows call the vector, I guess
. . . .
Are
there such things as vectorial unknowns?”

“Vectors
. . .
can be solved for. Sure. But maybe you mean something
else.”

“This one always points away from
here, but that”—indicating the shimmering metropolis with a sidewise lift
of his head—“is where the money is.” He did not pause then so much as
wait, as one might before a telegraph sounder, for some affirmation from the
far invisible.

“You know,” he continued, “out there
you run into some queer characters. You see them go in, they don’t come out
again till months later, sometimes never. Missionaries, deserters, citizens of
the trail, for that always turned out to be what they’d sworn their allegiance
to—trail, track, river, whatever could carry them to the next ridgeline,
the next bend in the river emerging from that strange humid light. ‘Home,’ what
could that possibly mean, what claim could it have on them? I’ll tell you a
story about the Heavenly City. About Zion.”

One night in eastern Africa, he was
no longer sure where, exactly, Fleetwood met Yitzhak Zilberfeld, a Zionist
agent, out traveling in the world scouting possibilities for a Jewish homeland.
They promptly got into discussion about the homeless condition visàvis the
ownership of property. Fever, abuse of local drugs, tribal bloodwarfare
ubiquitous and neverending, the thousand threats to white intrusion here, many
of them invisible, turned the colloquy increasingly deranged.

“What is the modern state,” Yitzhak
declared, “but a suburban houselot taken up to a larger scale? AntiSemitism
flows directly from the suburban fear of those who are always on the move, who
set up camp for a night, or pay rent, unlike the Good Citizen who believes he ‘owns’
his home, although it is more likely to be owned by a bank, perhaps even a
Jewish bank. Everyone must live in a simplyconnected space with an unbroken
line around it. Some

put hair ropes, to keep snakes out.
Any who live outside propertylines of any scale are automatically a threat to
the suburban order and by extension the State. Conveniently, Jews have this
history of statelessness.”

“It’s not dishonorable to want your
own piece of land, is it?” Fleetwood objected.

“Of course not. But no Jewish homeland
will ever end hatred of the unpropertied, which is a given element of the
suburban imperative. The hatred gets transferred to some new target, that’s
all.”

And would there ever actually prove
to be, right in the middle of the worst of the jungle, some peaceful expanse of
rangeland, unsettled as yet, free of all competing claims, high, fertile,
diseasefree, naturally defensible, so forth? Would they come around a bend in
the trail, or over a ridge, and abruptly be taken through the previously hidden
passage, into the pure land, into Zion?

They sat as the sun declined over the
blessed possibility. “Is this real?”

A shrug. “Yes
. . . .
Or, no.”

“Or we’re both feverish.”

They set up camp in a clearing, near
a small waterfall, and built a cookfire. Night began, as if declared.

“What was that?”

“An elephant,” Fleetwood said. “How
long did you say you’d been out here?”

“It sounds kind of close, don’t you
think?” When Fleetwood shrugged, “I mean, you’ve had
. . .
encounters with elephants?”

“Now and then.”

“You have an elephant
gun
with
you?”

“No. You?”

“So, this one charges us, what do we
do?”

“Depends how much he’s
charging—try to talk him down a little?”

“AntiSemitic!”

The elephant in the darkness let
loose with another fanfare, this time joined by another. In harmony. Whether by
way of commentary or not, who knew?

“What, they don’t sleep at night?”

Fleetwood exhaled audibly. “I don’t
mean to offend, but. . . if this sort of elephantrelated anxiety is at all
common among your people, perhaps Africa is not the most promising site for a
Zionist settlement.”

Through their feet they could feel
percussion on the jungle floor, consistent with an adult elephant approaching
at high speed.

“Well, it’s been nice chatting,” said
Yitzhak, “and now I think I’ll just—”

“Suggest you stand your ground,
actually.”

“And what?”

“Look him straight in the eyes.”

“Stare down some murderous elephant.”

“Ancient wisdom of the bush,”
Fleetwood advised, “never run. Run, you’ll get trampled.”

The elephant, standing about twelve
feet high, emerged from the perimeter of forest, heading straight for Fleetwood
and Yitzhak, his displeasure clear. He had his trunk lifted and curled back, a
precaution elephants are known to observe just before using their tusks against
some particular target of their spite.

“O.K., to review this—we stand
here, maintain eye contact, and you absolutely guarantee me, this elephant will
just. . . stop? Turn around, walk away, no hard feelings?”

“Watch.”

The headline in next week’s
Bush
Gazette
would read
saves Jew from
insane elephant
. Yitzhak was so grateful he passed along a number of
investment tips, plus the names of useful banking contacts all over Europe,
that eventually would have done quite nicely for Fleetwood had he not by then
been pursuing less financial goals. He tried to explain.

“I used to read Dickens as a child.
The cruelty didn’t surprise me, but I did wonder at the moments of
uncompensated kindness, which I had never observed outside the pages of
fiction. In any world I knew, it was a timehonored principle to do nothing for
free.”

“Just so,” said Yitzhak. “Trust me.
Buy Rand shares.”

“South Africa? But there’s a war
going on there.”

“Wars end, there’s fifty thousand
Chinese coolies all lined up, sleeping on the docks from Tientsin to Hong Kong,
waiting to be shipped into the Transvaal the minute the shooting stops
. . . .
”

As it happened, it was not too long
before the markets of the Earth were being swamped with gold, not only Rand
gold but also proceeds from the Australian gold rush then ebulliently in progress—exactly
the sort of “unfairly earned” revenue which sent the Vibe patriarch into
mouthfoaming episodes of unseemly behavior.

“I don’t understand it. This money is
coming from nowhere.”

“But it’s real,” Foley Walker pointed
out. “What they’re buying with it is real.”

“I feel myself turning goddamned
socialist,” said Scarsdale. “Communist, even. Like you know when you’re coming
down with a cold? My mind—or the part of it I use for thinking about
business matters—aches.”

“But Mr. V., you hate socialists.”

“I hate these climber sons of bitches
worse.”

·
    
·
    
·

He was only
faintly visible in the dark, at a
window on the haunted floor of the house, almost a fixture in the room from
some previous era, there for some outdated domestic purpose. It was the one
part of the house no one would come near, dedicated to exile, departure,
unquiet journeying, reserved for any who could not reside there. He was
remembering, declining into a sickbed of remembrance.

In Africa he had known saintly
lieutenants who were fated to die young, fugitives from all across the wreck of
the Eastern Question, traders in flesh or firearms indifferent to the nature of
the goods they handled, who would emerge from the green otherworld after
months, their cargo vanished not only from possession but from memory as well,
sick, poisoned, too often dying, cursed by shamans, betrayed by magnetic
anomalies, racked by Guinea worm and malaria, who, despite all, wished only to
return to the embrace of the interior
. . . .
Fleetwood wanted to be like them
. . .
.
He prayed to become one of them. He went out into country even the
local European insane knew was too dangerous, hoping to be invaded by whatever
it had to be
. . . .
Nothing “took.”
No one had the bad taste to suggest that it was his money keeping away the
spirits whose intercession he sought—that even those agents of mischief
somehow knew better than to get too close to unregulated funds whose source lay
in criminal acts, however fancifully defined.

At Massawa, Fleetwood had found a
coaster heading south. Debarking at Lourenço Marques, he spent a week in
various local
cantinhas,
gathering information, as he liked to think of
it. This required a tidy lakeful of Portuguese colonialmarket wine, the rotgut
rejectamenta of Bucelas and Dão, among puzzled looks from the locals who by
tradition were its devotees.