The Weird Part 107

Michal Ajvaz.

Translated into English by James Naughton.

Michal Ajvaz (1949) is a Czech novelist, poet and translator. Born into an exiled Russian family, Ajvaz studied Czech studies and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. He did not begin publis.h.i.+ng fiction until 1989, probably due to the political repression in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) during the 1970s and 1980s. His novel Prazdne ulice (2004) was awarded the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert Prize for literary achievement (2005). English-language translations include the critically acclaimed The Other City (2009) and The Golden Age (2010). Ajvaz comes by the 'weirdness' in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity, as in 'The End of the Garden' (1991).

As I am pa.s.sing, I hear a pathetic call for help from a ground-floor window. I clamber up to the sill and jump into the room; I find myself in a room with heavy dark furniture, with ta.s.sel-edged covers, with mountains of variegated little cus.h.i.+ons, with a darkened painting of the Bay of Naples on the wall. Behind the great double bed something or other is wrestling on the ground, you can year puffing, groaning and blows. I rush over to the fight and see: a young woman in a black evening dress with narrow shoulder-straps and a plunging back is struggling with a lizard! It is evidently a huge monitor lizard (Vara.n.u.s komodoensis), which lives on the island of Komodo in Indonesia and reaches a length of as much as three metres. Zoologists reckon that these lizards were able to reach such a length on Komodo due to the fact that on this island they had no natural enemies. I jump on the lizard like Saint George, I grab it by the floppy wrinkled skin under the neck and heave it about. While I am shaking it, the lamenting call for help continues to be heard. Suddenly I realise, it is not the woman calling for help, but the lizard! I let the beast go, sit down on the threadbare carpet and awkwardly observe the struggle. It really looks as if the woman is the a.s.sailant and the lizard the a.s.saulted. If he didn't have any enemies on Komodo, I said to myself, here it is evidently otherwise. The lizard would clearly have done better to remain in Indonesia. He would have saved not only himself from a nasty situation but also me: for I was unable to decide how to behave; on the one hand the lizard was obviously the victim of an attack, on the other it seemed morally unacceptable for me to side with a lizard in this fight between a lizard and a human being. Hegel reproaches Kant for the merely formal and abstractly universal quality of his categorical imperative, which makes it unable to guide us sufficiently in concrete situations. 'Act in such a way that the principle of your behaviour may become a universal maxim': should this universal maxim rather be 'help those under attack' or 'help women who are struggling with monitor lizards'? Kant says: 'In your conduct let a human being be always the aim, not the means.' What of the lizard, can he be a means? On this subject the Critique of Practical Reason has absolutely nothing to say; as far as I know, in the whole of this extensive work there is not a single mention of monitor lizards. Kant is of course partly excused by the fact that, as is generally known, he never left Konigsberg (though he speculated whether after our death we would inhabit other heavenly spheres), so that he quite certainly never encountered a Komodo lizard; on the other hand, however, he might surely have devoted at least a couple of lines to a creature as remarkable as the three-metre-long monitor lizard. Maybe this lizard is now pursuing him across the endless empty plains of some other star.

(Here, I think, lies the misfortune of philosophy: always we encounter on our travels some exceptional freak to which the philosophical rules are found to be non-applicable. Which are right the freaks or the philosophical principles? I once had a lecture on this problem in a lift, inlaid with amber. On the one hand we are somewhat loath to dispose of the whole thing merely by saying 'so much worse for the freaks,' on the other we are also reluctant to accept that the whole of our fine system of thought be dependent on some ugly old freak. At the same time we fail to grasp the relativity of the concept of 'freakishness' if there were no human beings with their evaluating criteria, there would be no 'freakishness' either also we ignore the vicious circle of reasoning to which we fall victim: freakish for us is that which falls outside our own sense of order, but simultaneously we proclaim that this breaching of our own sense of order proves nothing against its truth value, since after all we are simply dealing with a freak.) So I followed this struggle, full of feelings of confusion and ambivalence, until finally I tapped the woman strangling the fretful lizard on the shoulder and said in an uncertain voice: 'Please leave the lizard alone,' and when that did nothing, I added: 'He's a rare creature from Indonesia, everywhere else these lizards are only tiny.' Eventually the woman let the lizard go, he shambled off, head drooping into the farthest corner of the room, where he huddled up against a gla.s.s-fronted cabinet with shelves displaying china dogs and sea sh.e.l.ls and began to sob loudly. The woman slowly got up from the floor, straightened her dress and looked at me severely. She had wavy black hair and an extraordinarily lovely, sharply sculptured face with an aquiline nose, her eyes were so vivaciously painted in various hues of turquoise, purple and green that it looked as if an exotic b.u.t.terfly with outspread wings were perched on the top of her nose.

She went up to a gla.s.s-fronted bookcase holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval, printed sometime at the turn of last century. She turned the key in the lock, and the doors opened with a gentle creak. She reached confidently inside, pulled out a thick old book with gilt edging, covered in dust, and handed it to me. With astonishment I read my own name on the cover, set in a rounded fin-de-siecle typeface interlaced with tendrils of plant decoration which swirled across the entire binding in inextricably tangled swathes; below was the book's t.i.tle: At the End of the Garden. I have never written a book in my life, although I have always wanted to be a writer, because I would enjoy working on a book in the mornings I used to imagine it would be something between Phenomenology of Mind, The Three Musketeers and Les Chants de Maldoror (nothing funny in that!) and in the afternoons I'd sit in a cafe, sip sweet coffee and watch the faces of the pa.s.sers-by in the street through the gla.s.s like fish in an aquarium. Now I gazed in surprise at the book whose binding held my name. Do demons execute for us works we have dreamt of and never created? Do our hidden literary projects ripen in the dark depths of other people's libraries? Are the books we regard as our own creations only copies of texts engraved on gla.s.s sheets and deposited in a library situated in a labyrinth of malachite pa.s.sageways beneath the city? In any case it seems that someone carries out unfulfilled tasks for us. I recalled how a musician friend once whispered to me in a pub about hearing beneath the surface of an evening pond in a desolate landscape the symphony he had resolved to write when he was studying at the conservatory, but of which he had only composed a few bars.

I opened the book, the work of a demon, and began to leaf through it. But wherever I opened the pages, though I saw the printed text, the letters immediately began to turn pale and vanish like ancient frescoes from the catacombs, exposed to fresh air, I only managed to glimpse a couple of words on each page; together they made up a mysterious sentence, oddly beautiful in its absurdity. It spoke of great railway-station halls, river embankments of marble, and the gla.s.s-fronted veranda of a mountain lodge. Beneath the melted text there remained only yellowed, melancholy fragrant paper, a few brown marks, only occasionally an isolated letter was left on the page or the fragment of a word.

But the pictures did not vanish. When the whole text had evaporated, I started to inspect them at last. I liked them, because they reminded me of the naive wash ill.u.s.trations from the books of Karl May which I read in my childhood when I was ill, lying by myself at home in an empty flat. All the pictures showed a monitor lizard in some situation or other, displaying him as a perfect scoundrel without a single jot of honour in all his long body. Here with lascivious paws he a.s.sails an innocent girl as she prepared in her translucent night-dress to lie down in her virginal bed, here we see him on top of the pyramid of Cheops, disguised as a bedouin, knocking over with his rifle b.u.t.t a gentleman in a light-coloured colonial suit, who loses his balance and hurtles into the terrible abyss, his tropical helmet has fallen off his head in the picture it hangs in the air a foot or two above the top of the pyramid. Another ill.u.s.tration is especially fine: we see a gloomy dark underground cavern, flooded with water, gus.h.i.+ng in a great current out of the mouth of some pipe projecting from the wall. To the pillar supporting the vault an elegant mustachioed young man and a nice young girl are tied with a strong rope (the girl is maybe the same as the one in the picture of the bedroom); the water has reached up to their waists. The monitor lizard is standing over them at the top of the stairs, opening the door, through which rays of daylight penetrate, and turning his head towards the unfortunates. The text beneath this picture lasted a bit longer, so I managed to read all of it. It said: 'I am sorry, my dear Count, that we shall not have occasion to finish our interesting debate on Kant's moral philosophy, begun during those unforgettable days in the gardens of El Amarna,' said the lizard with a devilish leer leer on his horrid face p.427.

When I had finished looking through the ill.u.s.trations, I glanced in surprise at the monitor lizard, huddled in the corner. He had covered his face with his paws, as though he were terribly ashamed, and tried to secrete himself right into the hollow between the display cabinet and the wall. He now surely regretted that his ancestors had attained such a length in Komodo. The woman took the book from my hand and placed it on a low round table, covered with a crocheted cloth. She looked at me frowningly and shook her head rebukingly. Although she was younger than I, she now looked like a school teacher. I began to feel ashamed too, I felt like crawling behind the cabinet after the lizard. Will this school teacher not complain to my parents that I make friends with lizards, that I am incapable of carrying out the categorical imperative in spite of going on about Kant all the time in Prague's Mala Strana restaurants, that I haven't written the book I was set to do as homework, that instead of working on this I spent my time aimlessly walking along past garden walls and fences, that my brain has produced nothing but incompletely crystallised thoughts, still half just the scents of places and inconsequential rhythms?

Now the monitor lizard got up and, still squinting timidly at the woman in the black dress, he opened a case lying on the cabinet. He took out of it a viola d'amore and tucked it under his lower jaw, after first pus.h.i.+ng aside the obstructing flap of skin. He caught the bow in his other claw and started playing a waltz. Into the quavering sounds of the strings he mingled his unabated wailing lament, sometimes reminiscent of the whining of a dog. I went up to the woman, bowed slowly and grandly to her and took her round the waist. We started to dance, clumsily we circled the leather armchairs and lamps on long metal standards. The room echoed to the melancholy notes of the viola and the lizard's whimpering and whining.

But in his playing the lizard evidently forgot his pain, the music engrossed him more and more, the whining gradually ceased and the notes of the viola became louder, more emphatic and joyous, the melody became ever more boisterous and aggressive. He rose from his corner and, with the viola under his chin, he approached us, playing like the first fiddler at a gypsy ball after midnight, he whooped and thumped the beat with his tail on the floor. His boisterous smile gradually changed into a devilish leer. A change also came over the woman. Her face was no longer that of a school teacher, rather the face of a terrified little girl, she gazed in horror at the grinning monster and pressed herself timidly against me. I stroked her hair soothingly. Don't be afraid, I'm here with you, I won't let the lizard eat you up. She whispered to me: 'I love you very much, if we manage to escape the claws of this terrible beast, we'll go off together somewhere where no such horrid lizards live, there must be such a place, not long ago three-metre-long lizards were only to be found on Komodo, and now they're everywhere; when I ride in the metro, they're sitting opposite me, dozing, I have to spend the whole journey looking at their thick faces, at work they've made a lizard my new boss, he keeps coming up and pawing my shoulders when I'm typing, he makes lewd suggestions...' The lizard stood close beside us, his jaw hanging open, with ghastly teeth flas.h.i.+ng, he played a wild Hungarian tune, he stamped his foot till the walls shook and cracks appeared in them, like branching roots, and he whooped loudly. But the tension fell away from me too, I wasn't afraid of the lizard's teeth, I no longer felt the need to give an account of myself, to apologise for not fulfilling my task, I knew now that no such task existed, there was only the quietly flowing river of being with its currents and scents, the unknown and the unenvisaged that ripens within the flow.

The lizard broke off the tune in mid-bar, shoved me, till I flew into the corner, and chucked the viola d'amore after me that clearly meant it was my turn to play. Then he clutched the woman in his embrace and started dancing a strange lizard's tango with her. I was furious, but the fall had taken my breath away, so I wasn't able to get up at once and jump on the lizard. The woman was half-dead with fear, the lizard dragged her round the room like a rag puppet, croaking a wordless song and leaning over her hapless body in eccentric figures. During one of these they fell on the carpet and with lascivious huffing the lizard started to a.s.sault the woman, sticking his maw into her neckline. I recovered myself, with a leap and a bound I went over and with the viola I hit the lizard on the head with all my strength.

When the musical instrument shattered on the lizard's skull, a terrific bang was heard and the walls surrounding us collapsed. When the dust settled, I saw we were on wide plain, covered with yellow gra.s.s and low desiccated bushes. On one side of the distant horizon the plain descended to a harbour town, whose houses from a distance looked like little stones scattered round the curving bay. The only building on the empty plain was the National Museum. It stood some way off, the same size as in Prague, but all made of gla.s.s, through the gla.s.s walls you could see, flapping its mighty wings as it flew down the empty corridors, an Andean condor. The lizard staggered to its feet, clasping his head with both paws. He started to feel scared again and hid behind me, so that the woman wouldn't see him. My courage also left me. The woman got up, shaking with fury, and angrily hissing: 'You haven't heard the last of this!' I decided to back off, pus.h.i.+ng the lizard in the rear, as he clung to my s.h.i.+rt and wept. But the woman let us alone, she went off towards the gla.s.s building; we could hear her muttering to herself: 'You'll pay for this, you blithering idiots' and 'It won't do you a bit of good, being a protected species, and the other little sod's also got it coming to him.' Up the gla.s.s ramp, past the gla.s.s statues she went, reached the main doorway and entered. She could be seen going up the gla.s.s staircase, walking slowly along the corridors, the condor slowly wheeling round her, occasionally brus.h.i.+ng a wing against her hair. Should I go after her? I was attracted by the cold gla.s.s and the condor's sharp beak. Meanwhile the monitor lizard bit its teeth into some rope tied to the end of the bed. He turned his head and gave me a doggy look. I smiled sadly and lay down on the pale quilt. The lizard slowly walked off with the rope in his mouth the rope went taut and the bed started to move, it began b.u.mping off along the plain. I lay on my back staring at the bright sky, sometimes I heard the cracking of a dry bush. After a while the lizard began to croon a little song, I didn't understand it too well, I only caught the words: At the end of the garden in thorn thicket's land treasures are harboured of Arabian sand.

You behold jewels' spark from silvery shrines when up with the lark you creep there betimes.

Towards evening we found ourselves on the edge of the harbour town. The lizard kept pulling with all his strength. First I rode through an estate of luxury villas whose walls shone white through the darkening foliage of their gardens. Then the bed rolled along the asphalt of broad and practically empty streets, where the red rays of the setting sun, penetrating through gaps between the houses, lit up large letters on facades of bare brick and struck sharp blinding flashes which bounced off the chrome of cars which pa.s.sed us from time to time. Finally we plunged into the winding lanes of the old harbour quarter, which were sometimes so narrow that the bed grated on the walls; then the lizard always turned round, patiently pushed the bed back and took another route. I was moving along in close proximity to men and women sitting at tables in front of little pubs; they shook hands with me, without having to get up from their seats, and shouted something at me in an unknown tongue. A little black bird jumped up on the bed, rode for a while and then flew off. People stood up, patted the lizard on the shoulder like a horse, someone brought a jug and tried to make the lizard drink some wine, by sticking his head into the jug. The lizard fended them all off benevolently with his paw and went on calmly pulling his load. Soon the harbour appeared at the end of one of the lanes. The red sun on the horizon was already touching the surface of the sea; the harbour was empty, only a few children were chasing a ball across the wide asphalt expanse, their shadows flitted across the distant facades of lengthy administrative buildings, reddened in the light of the setting sun. At the other end of the harbour cranes were unloading goods from a large white s.h.i.+p.

The lizard halted only on reaching the pier. A chill blew in from the sea. Yachts bobbed on the waves and sc.r.a.ped gently, the water splashed and there was a smell of rotting. The lizard curled up on the ground in a ball and slept. I felt sleepy too, what luck, not having to rush about an unfamiliar town looking for a room for the night in unwelcoming hotels. I buried myself in the quilt. When I shut my eyes I could hear the quiet voices of abandoned boats, the splas.h.i.+ng of waves, the distant call of children.

(Sea, harbour piers, large letters on facades, worn-through plush of hotel armchair backs, lights in drinks, marbles, smells of corridors, an unfamiliar animal walking in the gestures of hands, from unrepeatable and unnecessary encounters which we forget, yet whose poison ripens in the blood, there may perhaps be born a future home, unlooked-for asylum.) In the morning the lizard climbed on to the bed. I grasped the rope in my hands and started slowly pulling the bed in the direction of Prague. I think some other animals jumped on to the bed on the way, because it got heavier and heavier, apart from that behind my back the hooting and yelling of several voices resounded and sounds of wild struggles. But I didn't look back, I pulled the bed along empty highways, the mist rolling over them.

The Dark.

Karen Joy Fowler.

Karen Joy Fowler (1950) is an American writer who has written science fiction, fantasy novels and stories that tend to work by way of ambiguity, misdirection, and deep characterization. Although she is best-known for her New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), also made into a movie, novels such as Sarah Canary (1991), The Sweetheart Season (1996), and Sister Noon (2001) cemented her reputation as a writer of the first rank. Story collections include Artificial Things (1986), Black Gla.s.s (1997), and What I Didn't See (2010). Although Fowler rarely writes stories that could be called horror or weird, 'The Dark' is a powerful and topical exception.

In the summer of 1954, Anna and Richard Becker disappeared from Yosemite National Park along with Paul Becker, their three-year-old son. Their campsite was intact; two paper plates with half-eaten frankfurters remained on the picnic table, and a third frankfurter was in the trash. The rangers took several black-and-white photographs of the meal, which, when blown up to eight by ten, as part of the investigation, showed clearly the words love bites, carved into the wooden picnic table many years ago. There appeared to be some fresh scratches as well; the expert witness at the trial attributed them, with no great a.s.surance, to racc.o.o.n.

The Beckers' car was still backed into the campsite, a green De Soto with a spare key under the right b.u.mper and half a tank of gas. Inside the tent, two sleeping bags had been zipped together marital style and laid on a large tarp. A smaller flannel bag was spread over an inflated pool raft. Toiletries included three toothbrushes; Ipana toothpaste, squeezed in the middle; Ivory soap; three washcloths; and one towel. The newspapers discreetly made no mention of Anna's diaphragm, which remained powdered with talc, inside its pink sh.e.l.l, or of the fact that Paul apparently still took a bottle to bed with him.

Their nearest neighbor had seen nothing. He had been in his hammock, he said, listening to the game. Of course, the reception in Yosemite was lousy. At home he had a shortwave set; he said he had once pulled in Dover, clear as a bell. 'You had to really concentrate to hear the game,' he told the rangers. 'You could've dropped the bomb. I wouldn't have noticed.'

Anna Becker's mother, Edna, received a postcard postmarked a day earlier. 'Seen the firefall,' it said simply. 'Home Wednesday. Love.' Edna identified the bottle. 'Oh yes, that's Paul's bokkie,' she told the police. She dissolved into tears. 'He never goes anywhere without it,' she said.

In the spring of 1960, Mark Cooper and Manuel Rodriguez went on a fis.h.i.+ng expedition in Yosemite. They set up a base camp in Tuolumne Meadows and went off to pursue steelhead. They were gone from camp approximately six hours, leaving their food and a six-pack of beer zipped inside their backpacks zipped inside their tent. When they returned, both beer and food were gone. Canine footprints circled the tent, but a small and mysterious handprint remained on the tent flap. 'Racc.o.o.n,' said the rangers who hadn't seen it. The tent and packs were undamaged. Whatever had taken the food had worked the zippers. 'Has to be racc.o.o.n.'

The last time Manuel had gone backpacking, he'd suspended his pack from a tree to protect it. A deer had stopped to investigate, and when Manuel shouted to warn it off the deer hooked the pack over its antlers in a panic, tearing the pack loose from the branch and carrying it away. Pack and antlers were so entangled, Manuel imagined the deer must have worn his provisions and clean s.h.i.+rts until antler-shedding season. He reported that incident to the rangers, too, but what could anyone do? He was reminded of it, guiltily, every time he read Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose to his four-year-old son.

Manuel and Mark arrived home three days early. Manuel's wife said she'd been expecting him.

She emptied his pack. 'Where's the can opener?' she asked.

'It's there somewhere,' said Manuel.

'It's not,' she said.

'Check the s.h.i.+rt pocket.'

'It's not here.' Manuel's wife held the pack upside down and shook it. Dead leaves fell out. 'How were you going to drink the beer?' she asked.

In August of 1962, Caroline Crosby, a teenager from Palo Alto, accompanied her family on a forced march from Tuolumne Meadows to Vogelsang. She carried fourteen pounds in a pack with an aluminum frame and her father said it was the lightest pack on the market, and she should be able to carry one-third her weight, so fourteen pounds was nothing, but her pack stabbed her continuously in one coin-sized spot just below her right shoulder, and it still hurt the next morning. Her boots left a blister on her right heel, and her pack straps had rubbed. Her father had bought her a mummy bag with no zipper so as to minimize its weight; it was stiflingly hot, and she sweated all night. She missed an overnight at Ann Watson's house, where Ann showed them her sister's Mark Eden bust developer, and her sister retaliated by freezing all their bras behind the twin-pops. She missed The Beverly Hillbillies.

Caroline's father had quit smoking just for the duration of the trip, so as to spare himself the weight of cigarettes, and made continual comments about Nature, which were laudatory in content and increasingly abusive in tone. Caroline's mother kept telling her to smile.

In the morning her father mixed half a cup of stream water into a packet of powdered eggs and cooked them over a Coleman stove. 'd.a.m.n fine breakfast,' he told Caroline intimidatingly as she stared in horror at her plate. 'Out here in G.o.d's own country. What else could you ask for?' He turned to Caroline's mother, who was still trying to get a pot of water to come to a boil. 'Where's the G.o.dd.a.m.n coffee?' he asked. He went to the stream to brush his teeth with a toothbrush he had sawed the handle from in order to save the weight. Her mother told her to please make a little effort to be cheerful and not spoil the trip for everyone.

One week later she was in Letterman Hospital in San Francisco. The diagnosis was septicemic plague.

Which is finally where I come into the story. My name is Keith Harmon B.A. in history with a special emphasis on epidemics. I probably know as much as anyone about the plague of Athens. Typhus. Tarantism. Tsutsugamus.h.i.+ fever. It's an odder historical specialty than it ought to be. More battles have been decided by disease than by generals and if you don't believe me, take a closer look at the Crusades or the fall of the Roman Empire or Napoleon's Russian campaign.

My M.A. is in public administration. Vietnam veteran, too, but in 1962 I worked for the state of California as part of the plague-monitoring team. When Letterman's reported a plague victim, Sacramento sent me down to talk to her.

Caroline had been moved to a private room. 'You're going to be fine,' I told her. Of course, she was. We still lose people to the pneumonic plague, but the slower form is easily cured. The only tricky part is making the diagnosis.

'I don't feel well. I don't like the food,' she said. She pointed out Letterman's Tuesday menu. 'Hawaiian Delight. You know what that is? Green Jell-O with a canned pineapple ring on top. What's delightful about that?' She was feverish and lethargic. Her hair lay limply about her head, and she kept tangling it in her fingers as she talked. 'I'm missing a lot of school.' Impossible to tell if this last was a complaint or a boast. She raised her bed to a sitting position and spent most of the rest of the interview looking out the window, making it clear that a view of the Letterman parking lot was more arresting than a conversation with an old man like me. She seemed younger than fifteen. Of course, everyone in a hospital bed feels young. Helpless. 'Will you ask them to let me wash and set my hair?'

I pulled a chair over to the bed. 'I need to know if you've been anywhere unusual recently. We know about Yosemite. Anywhere else. Hiking out around the airport, for instance.' The plague is endemic in the San Bruno Mountains by the San Francisco Airport. That particular species of flea doesn't bite humans, though. Or so we'd always thought. 'It's kind of a romantic spot for some teenagers, isn't it?'

I've seen some withering adolescent stares in my time, but this one was practiced. I still remember it. I may be sick, it said, but at least I'm not an idiot. 'Out by the airport?' she said. 'Oh, right. Real romantic. The radio playing and those 727s overhead. Give me a break.'

'Let's talk about Yosemite, then.'

She softened a little. 'In Palo Alto we go to the water temple,' she informed me. 'And, no, I haven't been there, either. My parents made me go to Yosemite. And now I've got bubonic plague.' Her tone was one of satisfaction. 'I think it was the powdered eggs. They made me eat them. I've been sick ever since.'

'Did you see any unusual wildlife there? Did you play with any squirrels?'

'Oh, right,' she said. 'I always play with squirrels. Birds sit on my fingers.' She resumed the stare. 'My parents didn't tell you what I saw?'

'No,' I said.

'Figures.' Caroline combed her fingers through her hair. 'If I had a brush, I could at least rat it. Will you ask the doctors to bring me a brush?'

'What did you see, Caroline?'

'Nothing. According to my parents. No big deal.' She looked out at the parking lot. 'I saw a boy.'

She wouldn't look at me, but she finished her story. I heard about the mummy bag and the overnight party she missed. I heard about the eggs. Apparently, the altercation over breakfast had escalated, culminating in Caroline's refusal to accompany her parents on a brisk hike to Ireland Lake. She stayed behind, lying on top of her sleeping bag and reading the part of Green Mansions where Abel eats a fine meal of anteater flesh. 'After the breakfast I had, my mouth was watering,' she told me. Something made her look up suddenly from her book. She said it wasn't a sound. She said it was a silence.

A naked boy dipped his hands into the stream and licked the water from his fingers. His fingernails curled toward his palms like claws. 'Hey,' Caroline told me she told him. She could see his p.e.n.i.s and everything. The boy gave her a quick look and then backed away into the trees. She went back to her book.

She described him to her family when they returned. 'Real dirty,' she said. 'Real hairy.'

'You have a very superior att.i.tude,' her mother noted. 'It's going to get you in trouble someday.'

'Fine,' said Caroline, feeling superior. 'Don't believe me.' She made a vow never to tell her parents anything again. 'And I never will,' she told me. 'Not if I have to eat powdered eggs until I die.'

At this time there started a plague. It appeared not in one part of the world only, not in one race of men only, and not in any particular season; but it spread over the entire earth, and afflicted all without mercy of both s.e.xes and of every age. It began in Egypt, at Pelusium; thence it spread to Alexandria and to the rest of Egypt; then went to Palestine, and from there over the whole world...

In the second year, in the spring, it reached Byzantium and began in the following manner: To many there appeared phantoms in human form. Those who were so encountered, were struck by a blow from the phantom, and so contracted the disease. Others locked themselves into their houses. But then the phantoms appeared to them in dreams, or they heard voices that told them that they had been selected for death.

This comes from Procopius's account of the first pandemic. A.D. 541, De Bello Persico, chapter XXII. It's the only explanation I can give you for why Caroline's story made me so uneasy, why I chose not to mention it to anyone. I thought she'd had a fever dream, but thinking this didn't settle me any. I talked to her parents briefly and then went back to Sacramento to write my report.

We have no way of calculating the deaths in the first pandemic. Gibbon says that during three months, five to ten thousand people died daily in Constantinople, and many Eastern cities were completely abandoned.

The second pandemic began in 1346. It was the darkest time the planet has known. A third of the world died. The Jews were blamed, and, throughout Europe, pogroms occurred wherever sufficient health remained for the activity. When murdering Jews provided no alleviation, a committee of doctors at the University of Paris concluded the plague was the result of an unfortunate conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

The third pandemic occurred in Europe during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The fourth began in China in 1855. It reached Hong Kong in 1894, where Alexandre Yersin of the Inst.i.tut Pasteur at last identified the responsible bacilli. By 1898 the disease had killed six million people in India. Dr. Paul-Louis Simond, also working for the Inst.i.tut Pasteur, but stationed in Bombay, finally identified fleas as the primary carriers. 'On June 2, 1898, I was overwhelmed,' he wrote. 'I had just unveiled a secret which had tormented man for so long.'

His discoveries went unnoticed for another decade or so. On June 27, 1899, the disease came to San Francisco. The governor of California, acting in protection of business interests, made it a felony to publicize the presence of the plague. People died instead of syphilitic septicemia. Because of this deception, thirteen of the Western states are still designated plague areas.

The state team went into the high country in early October. Think of us as soldiers. One of the great mysteries of history is why the plague finally disappeared. The rats are still here. The fleas are still here. The disease is still here; it shows up in isolated cases like Caroline's. Only the epidemic is missing. We're in the middle of the fourth a.s.sault. The enemy is elusive. The war is unwinnable. We remain vigilant.

The Vogelsang Camp had already been closed for the winter. No snow yet, but the days were chilly and the nights below freezing. If the plague was present, it wasn't really going to be a problem until spring. We amused ourselves, poking sticks into warm burrows looking for dead rodents. We set out some traps. Not many. You don't want to decrease the rodent population. Deprive the fleas of their natural hosts, and they just look for replacements. They just bring the war home.

We picked up a few bodies, but no positives. We could have dusted the place anyway as a precaution. Silent Spring came out in 1962, but I hadn't read it.

I saw the coyote on the fourth day. She came out of a hole on the bank of Lewis Creek and stood for a minute with her nose in the air. She was grayed with age around her muzzle, possibly a bit arthritic. She shook out one hind leg. She shook out the other. Then, right as I watched, Caroline's boy climbed out of the burrow after the coyote.

I couldn't see the boy's face. There was too much hair in the way. But his body was hairless, and even though his movements were peculiar and inhuman, I never thought that he was anything but a boy. Twelve years old or maybe thirteen, I thought, although small for thirteen. Wild as a wolf, obviously. Raised by coyotes maybe. But clearly human. Circ.u.mcised, if anyone is interested.

I didn't move. I forgot about Procopius and stepped into the National Enquirer instead. Marilyn was in my den. Elvis was in my rinse cycle. It was my lucky day. I was amusing myself when I should have been awed. It was a stupid mistake. I wish now that I'd been someone different.

The boy yawned and closed his eyes, then shook himself awake and followed the coyote along the creek and out of sight. I went back to camp. The next morning we surrounded the hole and netted them coming out. This is the moment it stopped being such a lark. This is an uncomfortable memory. The coyote was terrified, and we let her go. The boy was terrified, and we kept him. He scratched us and bit and snarled. He cut me, and I thought it was one of his nails, but he turned out to be holding a can opener. He was covered with fleas, fifty or sixty of them visible at a time, which jumped from him to us, and they all bit, too. It was like being attacked by a cloud. We sprayed the burrow and the boy and ourselves, but we'd all been bitten by then. We took an immediate blood sample. The boy screamed and rolled his eyes all the way through it. The reading was negative. By the time we all calmed down, the boy really didn't like us.

Clint and I tied him up, and we took turns carrying him down to Tuolumne. His odor was somewhere between dog and boy, and worse than both. We tried to clean him up in the showers at the ranger station. Clint and I both had to strip to do this, so G.o.d knows what he must have thought we were about. He reacted to the touch of water as if it burned. There was no way to shampoo his hair, and no one with the strength to cut it. So we settled for was.h.i.+ng his face and hands, put our clothes back on, gave him a sweater that he dropped by the drain, put him in the backseat of my Rambler, and drove to Sacramento. He cried most of the way, and when we went around curves he allowed his body to be flung unresisting from one side of the car to the other, occasionally knocking his head against the door handle with a loud, painful sound.

I bought him a ham sandwich when we stopped for gas in Modesto, but he wouldn't eat it. He was a nice-looking kid, had a normal face, freckled, with blue eyes, brown hair, and if he'd had a haircut you could have imagined him in some Sears catalog modeling raincoats.

One of life's little ironies. It was October 14. We rescue a wild boy from isolation and deprivation and winter in the mountains. We bring him civilization and human contact. We bring him straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Maybe that's why you don't remember reading about him in the paper. We turned him over to the state of California, which had other things on its mind.

The state put him in Mercy Hospital and a.s.signed maybe a hundred doctors to the case. I was sent back to Yosemite to continue looking for fleas. The next time I saw the boy, about a week had pa.s.sed. He'd been cleaned up, of course. Scoured of parasites, inside and out. Measured. He was just over four feet tall and weighed seventy-five pounds. His head was all but shaved so as not to interfere with the various neurological tests, which had turned out normal and were being redone. He had been observed rocking in a seated position, left to right and back to front, mouth closed, chin up, eyes staring at nothing. Occasionally he had small spasms, convulsive movements, which suggested abnormalities in the nervous system. His teeth needed extensive work. He was sleeping under his bed. He wouldn't touch his Hawaiian Delight. He liked us even less than before.

About this time I had a brief conversation with a doctor whose name I didn't notice. I was never able to find him again. Red-haired doctor with gla.s.ses. Maybe thirty, thirty-two years old. 'He's got some unusual musculature,' this red-haired doctor told me. 'Quite singular. Especially the development of the legs. He's shown us some really surprising capabilities.' The boy started to howl, an unpleasant, inhuman sound that started in his throat and ended in yours. It was so unhappy. It made me so unhappy to hear it. I never followed up on what the doctor had said.

I felt peculiar about the boy, responsible for him. He had such a boyish face. I visited several times, and I took him little presents, a Dodgers baseball cap and an ill.u.s.trated Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the words printed big. Pretty silly, I suppose, but what would you have gotten? I drove to Fresno and asked Manuel Rodriguez if he could identify the can opener. 'Not with any a.s.surance,' he said. I talked personally to Sergeant Redburn, the man from Missing Persons. When he told me about the Beckers, I went to the state library and read the newspaper articles for myself. Sergeant Redburn thought the boy might be just about the same age as Paul Becker, and I thought so, too. And I know the sergeant went to talk to Anna Becker's mother about it, because he told me she was going to come and try to identify the boy.

By now it's November. Suddenly I get a call sending me back to Yosemite. In Sacramento they claim the team has reported a positive, but when I arrive in Yosemite, the whole team denies it. Fleas are astounding creatures. They can be frozen for a year or more and then revived to full activity. But November in the mountains is a stupid time to be out looking for them. It's already snowed once, and it snows again, so that I can't get my team back out. We spend three weeks in the ranger station at Vogelsang huddled around our camp stoves while they air-drop supplies to us. And when I get back, a doctor I've never seen before, a Dr. Frank Li, tells me the boy, who was not Paul Becker, died suddenly of a seizure while he slept. I have to work hard to put away the sense that it was my fault, that I should have left the boy where he belonged.

And then I hear Sergeant Redburn has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Non Gratum a.n.u.s Rodentum. Not worth a rat's a.s.s. This was the unofficial motto of the tunnel rats. We're leaping ahead here. Now it's 1967. Vietnam. Does the name Cu Chi mean anything to you? If not, why not? The district of Cu Chi is the most bombed, sh.e.l.led, ga.s.sed, strafed, defoliated, and destroyed piece of earth in the history of warfare. And beneath Cu Chi runs the most complex part of a network of tunnels that connects Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.

I want you to imagine, for a moment, a battle fought entirely in the dark. Imagine that you are in a hole that is too hot and too small. You cannot stand up; you must move on your hands and knees by touch and hearing alone through a terrain you can't see toward an enemy you can't see. At any moment you might trip a mine, put your hand on a snake, put your face on a decaying corpse. You know people who have done all three of these things. At any moment the air you breathe might turn to gas, the tunnel become so small you can't get back out; you could fall into a well of water and drown; you could be buried alive. If you are lucky, you will put your knife into an enemy you may never see before he puts his knife into you. In Cu Chi the Vietnamese and the Americans created, inch by inch, body part by body part, an entirely new type of warfare.

Among the Vietnamese who survived are soldiers who lived in the tiny underground tunnels without surfacing for five solid years. Their eyesight was permanently damaged. They suffered constant malnutrition, felt lucky when they could eat spoiled rice and rats. Self-deprivation was their weapon; they used it to force the soldiers of the most technically advanced army in the world to face them with knives, one on one, underground, in the dark.

On the American side, the tunnel rats were all volunteers. You can't force a man to do what he cannot do. Most Americans hyperventilated, had attacks of claustrophobia, were too big. The tunnel rats could be no bigger than the Vietnamese, or they wouldn't fit through the tunnels. Most of the tunnel rats were Hispanics and Puerto Ricans. They stopped wearing after-shave so the Vietcong wouldn't smell them. They stopped chewing gum, smoking, and eating candy because it impaired their ability to sense the enemy. They had to develop the sonar of bats. They had, in their own words, to become animals. What they did in the tunnels, they said, was unnatural.

In 1967 I was attached to the 521st Medical Detachment. I was an old man by Vietnamese standards, but then, I hadn't come to fight in the Vietnam War. Remember that the fourth pandemic began in China. Just before he died, Chinese poet s.h.i.+h Tao-nan wrote: Few days following the death of the rats, Men pa.s.s away like falling walls.

Between 1965 and 1970, 24,848 cases of the plague were reported in Vietnam.

War is the perfect breeding ground for disease. They always go together, the trinity: war, disease, and cruelty. Disease was my war. I'd been sent to Vietnam to keep my war from interfering with everybody else's war.

In March we received by special courier a package containing three dead rats. The rats had been found already dead, but leashed inside a tunnel in Hau Nghia province. Also found but not sent to us were a syringe, a phial containing yellow fluid, and several cages. I did the test myself. One of the dead rats carried the plague.

There has been speculation that the Vietcong were trying to use plague rats as weapons. It's also possible they were merely testing the rats prior to eating them themselves. In the end, it makes little difference. The plague was there in the tunnels whether the Vietcong used it or not.

I set up a tent outside Cu Chi town to give boosters to the tunnel rats. One of the men I inoculated was David Rivera. 'David has been into the tunnels so many times, he's a legend,' his companions told me.

'Yeah,' said David. 'Right. Me and Victor.'

'Victor Charlie?' I said. I was just making conversation. I could see David, whatever his record in the tunnels, was afraid of the needle. He held out one stiff arm. I was trying to get him to relax.

'No. Not hardly. Victor is the one.' He took his shot, put his s.h.i.+rt back on, gave up his place to the next man in line.

'Victor can see in the dark,' the next man told me.

'Victor Charlie?' I asked again.

'No,' the man said impatiently.

'You want to know about Victor?' David said. 'Let me tell you about Victor. Victor's the one who comes when someone goes down and doesn't come back out.'

'Victor can go faster on his hands and knees than most men can run,' the other man said. I pressed cotton on his arm after I withdrew the needle; he got up from the table. A third man sat down and took off his s.h.i.+rt.

David still stood next to me. 'I go into this tunnel. I'm not too scared, because I think it's cold; I'm not feeling anybody else there, and I'm maybe a quarter of a mile in, on my hands and knees, when I can almost see a hole in front of me, blacker than anything else in the tunnel, which is all black, you know. So I go into the hole, feeling my way, and I have this funny sense like I'm not moving into the hole; the hole is moving over to me. I put out my hands, and the ground moves under them.'