Ten Days in the Hills (18 page)

“Why didn’t they stick with sheep or goats or something like that?”

“No domestic animals to speak of. Excess of human labor, paucity of animal labor. It was a problem throughout the Western Hemisphere, actually. Of course, they figured you wanted more and more, so they sacrificed people to you that were more precious and more beautiful and younger. They began wars just to get sacrificial victims from other tribes, and there was a premium on getting the very best—not just the king’s child, but the king’s best child. This in turn made it very hard for your tribe to get along with the neighbors, and there was a technological push in the invention of weapons, which always heightens tensions between warring groups. They had, for example, been killing each other with axes, but someone invented two-handed, double-edged axes, and the killings became offensive to some parts of the society, who considered them excessively brutal and felt that the breakdown of certain ritualized parameters was a sign of general desperation and breakdown, which obviously it was. The humans came to feel that nothing worked, that you were always sending the wrong weather.”

“Was I?”

“Well, you may have been god of the weather, but you didn’t actually control the weather per se. I would say you had some limited effect on upper air patterns and local precipitation, but no more than that and often less. And it may be that this period I am speaking of was a period of general climate change.”

“Like now.”

“Yes.”

“What happened to me?”

“They executed you.”

Oddly, Zoe was a bit shocked by this. She exclaimed, “But I was a god!”

“Gods are executed all the time. They went around to all your altars and broke up the statues of you. They defaced and obliterated all representations of you, and stopped saying your name. They made dolls of you and burned you on a pyre. They killed your priests and reassigned your wives to the sun god. They purged you from the records, which wasn’t easy, since the records were carved in stone.”

“Did I die?”

“I gather that you must have, because you were reincarnated shortly thereafter as a large predatory bird of some kind.”

“Did the weather improve?”

“I don’t think so. That civilization died out fairly suddenly.”

“Well, they were killing each other right and left, it sounds like.”

“Usually there is a combination of ecological and sociological factors.”

“How is this like Isabel, though?”

“It seems like you are always at the vortex. What you do initiates conflict even when you don’t ‘want’ it to.”

“Oh.” Zoe was definitely disappointed. She sank down in the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew it was true. She said, “Even in elementary school I couldn’t do the simplest thing without causing a fight of some kind.” Then she said, “That’s not the same as precipitating the end of a civilization, though.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “There’s nothing wrong with the end of a civilization,” and she had this sudden image of some sort of clearing in a jungle, as seen from far away and high up. The figures in the clearing were human, and they were running around at top speed. She knew what they were doing—they were killing one another in battle—but from a distance they looked like they were bumping together, bouncing apart, falling down, jumping up. The scene was alternately light and dark, as the sun rose and set. The figures disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again. The jungle vegetation advanced and receded like a wave on the beach, and the piece of ground was green, then gold, then green again, then gold again. Then she imagined herself looking upward, and in the dark sky, stars began to explode like fireworks. Paul said, “Isabel turned out fine, didn’t she?”

“Did she?”

“I was talking to her after dinner about her job and the young man, what’s his name?”

“Leo. Wow, I never liked him. He always acted like it was a favor to her that he was dating her, a favor to me if he was eating dinner at my house, and a favor to the world in general if he bothered to smile. And now she says he refuses to move out of their apartment because the marijuana plants that he keeps in the closet under lights are flowering and can’t be disturbed.”

“So it’s good that she’s fed up with him, and good that she’s ready for another job, and she’s healthy and full of energy, so it doesn’t matter what happened about the solid food, does it?”

“No. But she’s always been such a picky eater. I’m sure that if we—”

“It’s not so bad to be a picky eater. Picky eaters tend to have fewer obesity problems. French people, for example, are notoriously picky eaters.”

Yes, she did smile, acknowledging that Marcelle Vivier was actually none of her business.

“And it doesn’t matter about the end of that Oaxacan civilization, or the end of this one, either, does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, where is the end of that civilization taking place?”

“In my imagination?”

“Absolutely, so it only matters what you feel about it. What do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know. Curious. I mean, it’s invigorating more than anything else to think about being a god and then screwing up and being executed by your followers. And it’s funny in a way.”

“I think so, too.” He smiled a big amused smile. She emerged from the covers, which now seemed too warm, and sat up with her legs crossed. She saw him glance down at her breasts, and it was true, she was wearing a peach-colored silk chemise that she had bought on Melrose for just this sort of occasion. It had slender double strands for straps, and the front was cut narrow and loose so that it seemed to be barely clinging to her breasts, which, of course, were something she was known for, the other something being her ass. “Just a minute,” she said, and she knelt up onto her hands and knees and reached across the bed for the glass of water she had set on the nightstand before getting into bed. It took her a long time to reach for the glass of water, and when she had reached for it, it took her a long time to drink it, which she did while continuing to present her bare-naked buttocks for his appreciation. While she was drinking, she heard him open the drawer on his side of the bed, and then she heard the slippery, moist sound of his hand anointing what would certainly be his very nice erection with Aqua Lube. A neat and methodical person, he put the Aqua Lube bottle away and closed the drawer before kneeling up himself and introducing his prick. He went in slowly and with some difficulty at first, as if the session and all that talk of conflict had tightened her up. Then, as she felt herself be entered and filled, she also felt his hands on her hips, balancing himself and securing her. He said, “Mmm.”

It was interesting, she thought, how this idea of him right behind her, his hairless muscular chest and his beard, his shoulders, arms, and hands, so smoothly and easily succeeded that other image of the stars exploding. Even as he pressed his way into her and she could feel every millimeter of her vagina opening and widening around the pressure of his thrust, she could go in her mind from the thought of him to the thought of the black night and the bursting stars, some close, some far away—that would be some exploding right now and some exploding long ago. She could think how much she liked to be taken without foreplay, because without foreplay she felt it more suddenly and intensely, and right afterward she could remember the waves of green and gold surging and ebbing across the land, and of course there were mountains thrusting upward, too, and, more slowly, crumbling away and thrusting upward again, and once in a while a lake would appear at sunset in the cleft of the mountains like an opal and then vanish, and then her mind would go back to him, so odd that he was named something as dull as Paul. She cried out because he delved too deep, and she pulled away from him, but he pressed against her again, and then again, until she had fallen off the perch of her hands and knees and was collapsed into the bed, and still he was pressing, pulling out, and pressing, and then he pulled out completely and reanointed himself, and then he went in fast and hard and very quickly, and they were both calling and maybe screaming, though he was not howling in her ear as he had done once, because she told him no, under no circumstances, was he to put his mouth near her ear when he was having an orgasm, because he could damage her hearing, and for a singer that was potentially disastrous, but he was leaning back and arching upward and singing out to the rafters while she was crying, “Oh Oh O-H-h-h,” and pressing her face into the pillow.

Then she rolled onto her back, and they did it again, and she kept her eyes open and paid attention to his actual physical presence, his beard, his dark eyes, his smallish nose, his thinning hair, the caramel-colored beams behind his head, and the pale stucco on the walls, and she came again, this time a shorter, deeper, and warmer orgasm that was located right between her legs, unlike the outward explosion of the previous one—multiples were always like this, she should ask someone why that was. He did not come again, but he subsided with a smile after she did, and flopped onto the bed beside her, and then he opened his mouth and intoned, “OmmmmmmmmmMMMMMM,” at about G flat below middle C, and she harmonized at D flat above middle C, and then he went down, to about an E, and she went up to an E, so that they sounded quite primitive, like early music, and then they ran out of breath and laughed and she said, “You can make all the noise you want and no one anywhere else in the house can hear you.”

Now they got quite comfortable, really more comfortable than Zoe had felt in days, what with the planned trip to the monastery, which she admitted she had been a little nervous about, and not only the roads, but also the monks themselves and the probable accommodations. There was a double room for visiting couples, but only one, which someone else might already be occupying, and if so you had to go uncomplainingly into separate cells. And you were supposed to sit quietly for meditation, which Zoe had trouble with. In fact, in spite of the war and the television, she had been anticipating the monastery with a bit of dread that she had not confided in Paul. She produced a big yawn as Paul settled against her and settled her against him. She shifted her hips slightly back and forth and stretched. She closed her eyes. The last thing she heard was Paul’s soothing voice meandering around a bit, telling her a bedtime story, it seemed. He said, “You know, I was thinking about this woman I knew at the monastery in Wisconsin. That was a coed monastery, though of course they called it a ‘center.’ It wasn’t exactly Buddhist, because they talked all the time about Jesus, but he was a very Buddhist Jesus. There was always dancing, especially in the winter, because you had to do something for exercise when there was too much snow to go outside. There was a girl there. Her name was Darling. I mean, her original name was Martha Perkins, but the founder gave everyone new names, and hers was Darling. She was a substantial-looking girl, almost as tall as I am. But she was light as a feather. She seemed to float around the room, and dancing with her was amazing. You felt like your job was to hold her down. One guy was a trained dancer, and he would lift her up above his head and spin her around. He had trained for a long tme, and he could do things like step onto the front of a chair and then the back, and then balance himself while the chair fell over. He said she was miraculously light, lighter than a child. And she never wore a coat, either. She went around in the coldest weather in just a T-shirt. In all my practice and of all the yoga masters I’ve met, I have to say that Darling was the only one I ever saw firsthand who actually repealed the laws of nature.” He pulled Zoe more tightly to him. “No training at all,” he said. “No daily practice. Just a name change. I never understood it, really.” Now he was mumbling. Zoe didn’t ask what happened, but she did imagine the goddess Darling, golden-blonde, yielding her substance smile by smile.

Zoe, reading the morning paper,
could see Charlie, across the room, glancing at her. She adjusted the paper slightly so that it shaded her from him, and her eye fell on an awful article, about a man who had been carjacked at Ontario Airport. After the carjacker pushed him out of the car, he got stuck in the shoulder strap of his seat belt and, as far as Zoe could tell, tried to grab hold of the top of the car, but fell under the wheels, and was dragged to the end of the airport drive, where the carjacker got into an accident, and by that time the man was dead. The carjacker, apparently, was upset about lost luggage. This was exactly the sort of article Zoe least liked to read anymore, though at one time she would have read it over more than once in a kind of fascinated amazement at the details. September 11, she thought, had cured her of that sort of fascination, and then Paul came along and told her that she didn’t have to reflect upon every gruesome twist of every story, though she could if she wanted—she could choose what to read and think about—and so, rather than letting her gaze drift back to the beginning of this story, she lowered the paper again, which Charlie took as a signal. He came over and sat down. He said, “Hey, Zoe. How are you? I was hoping to talk to you.”