Second sight, p.7
Second Sight, page 7
“Where is the other twin?” Cathy asked.
“Only one is alive,” Lla Kahina said. She held a bundle in her arms.
“Show me,” Cathy said.
Lla Kahina lifted the cloth. The face was peaceful, bronzed, with lidded eyes, like a death mask.
“Let me see the rest of him.”
“It was a boy,” Lla Kahina said, covering the tiny corpse as if she had not heard.
The living twin, a girl, was perfectly silent after its feed, sleeping. For some reason Lla Kahina had knotted a scarlet thread around her tiny wrist. Cathy was too tired to ask why; she fell asleep.
5
THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN CATHY WENT OUTSIDE INTO THE DAYlight, carrying the baby, no one was in sight except Lla Kahina, who stood over a charcoal brazier, stirring the breakfast pot. The boys had come back, and they squatted around the brazier in a circle, eating couscous with their fingers. Beyond the nearer peaks, gauzy cirrus clouds floated in a darkening sky. Cathy refused food, but drank several glasses of sugary mint tea. It made her more lightheaded than usual and everything—the gaudy landscape, the roaring fire, the dandelion sun coming up out of the Sahara on the other side of the mountains, the baby’s surprisingly hot little body pressed against her chest, the odd, sweetish aroma of her own milk—took on a dreamy remoteness.
“You should eat,” Lla Kahina said in a faraway voice. “The boys won’t want to stop. It’s going to snow.”
Cathy ignored her words. “What did you do with the other baby?”
Lla Kahina paused with her fingers full of food. She put it back into her bowl and handed the bowl to one of the boys.
“Come,” she said.
With Cathy following behind, she led the way to a cairn of round, bleached stones at the back of the campsite, up against the cliff. Other, older heaps of stones lay all around.
“He is here,” Lla Kahina said, pointing.
“Underneath all those heavy stones?” Cathy said. “Without even a cross above his head?”
“It’s better not to have a cross,” Lla Kahina said. “Arabs hate Christian things; they would tear it down.”
“Then I won’t leave him here,” Cathy said.
She fell to her knees and pried one of the stones out of the bottom of the cairn with her fingers. It was water-worn and smooth to the touch and wedged tightly in place by all the others, like a cobblestone. As soon as it came loose in her hand the whole layer to which it had belonged rattled to the ground and rolled away, forming a small avalanche that shot over the edge of the cliff, cannonading off the rock face of the chasm and setting up echoes.
Lla Kahina knelt beside Cathy and took her bleeding hands. “He isn’t here,” she said.
“He isn’t here?” Cathy said. “Then where is he? What are you telling me?”
“His body is under the rocks, but he died a long time ago, in Paris,” Lla Kahina said. “Daughter, listen. What is, is. You’ve had the child you were meant to have. Now come.”
Obediently, Cathy followed Lla Kahina and mounted her horse. The saddle was very uncomfortable, but she could not walk. After they had ridden a mile or two along the face of the cliff, Cathy standing up in the stirrups most of the way, snow began to descend in big sluggish flakes. It kept falling, covering people and animals with a thick white pelt, until just before sunset, when the Ja’wabi emerged from the rocks and the country opened up before them. A long way below, in a valley between two bosomlike hills, Cathy saw an expanse of grass and trees and cultivated fields, the first green things she had seen since leaving France. A silvery river threaded through it.
Lla Kahina rode up beside her.
“We’re here,” she said. “Hold up Zarah so she can see.”
Who was Zarah? Lla Kahina held out her hands for the baby. Cathy took her out of her sling and handed her over. As before, she was wide awake but silent.
“Tifawt,” Lla Kahina said, speaking directly to the infant as if she would recognize the name. She held the child up at arm’s length, with its face toward the fortified village below. From this distance, it looked like a castle, walls and towers flashing like heliographs in the light of the descending sun.
“See how it glitters in the sun?” Lla Kahina said to the child, in
English. “It was built with stones that are full of mica.”
“What name did you call my baby by just now?” Cathy asked. “Zarah,” Lla Kahina said.
“That’s not going to be her name.”
“Then we’ll only use it among ourselves, as her Ja’wabi name,” Lla Kahina said.
Cathy looked into her daughter’s face, and the child looked back at her out of Paul Christopher’s unfathomable eyes.
INTERLUDE
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
EVEN AS A BOY, BEFORE HE WENT TO WAR, CHRISTOPHER HAD DISliked games because they were mere parodies of reality. Afterward, as a spy, he despised them, a peculiarity that set him apart from nearly everyone else in the Outfit, an organization populated in its early days by men who looked on the Cold War as a sort of Hasty Pudding Olympics between the combined track and field teams of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and an awkward squad of European bookworms and Asiatic oafs.
“That was why you were so good—you didn’t think like everybody else on our side,” Patchen said. “Except maybe Wolkowicz, who was never really on our side. He thought you were a genius—did he ever tell you that?—because you were able to see the obvious while all around you were oblivious to reality. Nobody sees the obvious for us now. They depend on computers.”
Christopher heard these words but did not register them. As he and his friend walked along the peopleless Mall with the floodlit and scaffolded Capitol dome rising up before them, he was thinking about a moment in Rome, years and years before, when he had woken in the night to find his lover Molly hanging a drawing of the dome of the church of San Pancrazio on a wall of their apartment. Thinking herself alone, she was working stark naked by the light of the lamps that lined the embankment of the Tiber beneath the living room windows. The drawing was a gift for Christopher, and he knew that she wanted him to see it in the morning and be surprised, so he did not reveal his presence. Lifting the framed picture onto its hook above her head, Molly rose on her toes with her long legs pressed modestly together and her round bottom uplifted, and it seemed to Christopher then, as now, that she was, at that moment and in that brief attitude, the most innocently beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“It’s been three weeks since the last Beautiful Dreamer was delivered to us,” Patchen said. “The computer whizzes have gamed every possible combination of data—does the kidnapper strike when the moon is full, do his crimes coincide with the anniversaries of outrages against the Arab nation, is he trying to drive us crazy by running an operation that has no plan or purpose? Are you listening?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“I thought not, when you let all those golden opinions go by without a peep.”
“What golden opinions?”
“Never mind. There’s something obvious in this situation, something hidden in plain sight that nobody has seen.”
“Another purloined letter.”
“That’s right. Your specialty. Have you thought about this case at all since we last talked?”
A week had gone by since their last walk together.
Christopher said, “Yes, I’ve thought about it. What makes you think it will happen again?”
“If it stops now, what’s the point of it?”
“If it doesn’t stop, you’ll have to shut up shop.”
Patchen knew what Christopher meant. More important, he knew that he had his attention at last. So he said, “We will? Why?”
“You know why. Your whole stock-in-trade is secrets. But what happens to the market if you can’t keep a secret, if you never know which one of your people is going to be grabbed next and given a shot of something that makes him want to tell everything he knows?”
“Go on.”
Patchen was intense. Christopher was amused. “I can’t, without expressing an opinion.”
“Then express one,” Patchen said.
“I think your kidnapper is doing the Lord’s work. If he gave every member of the human race a shot of this stuff every day, he’d solve the problems of the world.”
“That’s right. There’d be a fresh corpse in every garage.”
An ambulance sped by on Seventh Street in a deafening clamor of horns and sirens; hooting police cars converged from every direction on the scene of a crime.
“Cinéma verité,” Patchen said. It was an apt remark. Since midnight they had walked all the way from Georgetown, more than five miles, and at every step Patchen had repeated another of the known facts of the Beautiful Dreamers case, like a film director obsessively screening and rescreening the same rough cut in the hope of capturing some tiny detail, some fleeting image in the shadows of a single frame, some subversive wink of an actor’s eye, that would explain why his own movie made no sense to him. “Okay, forgetting about a cure for original sin,” Patchen said. “What do you really think?”
“David, I do not wish to think on behalf of the Outfit. I’m out.”
“Then think like an outsider. What’s going on here? Who are we dealing with? How does he do it?”
“What do you care about what, who, and how?” Christopher asked. “The only real question is ‘Why?’ “
“I agree,” Patchen said. “But how do I answer it?”
Christopher shrugged. “That’s obvious.”
“It is? Explain it to me anyway.”
A taxi approached. Christopher hailed it. As it pulled to the curb the Doberman tensed, ready to attack. It was trained to hurl itself through car windows in case of a threat to its master. Because Patchen was concentrating on Christopher, he neglected to give the animal a reassuring command; it bared its teeth and got ready to attack. “No thank you,” the taxi driver said, and sped away with squealing tires.
If Patchen noticed he gave no sign. “Come on,” he said. “What’s obvious?”
“Only the kidnapper knows the answer to your questions,” Christopher said.
“So?”
Christopher signaled another taxi. “So kidnap the kidnapper,” he said.
II
THE ONE-EYED MAN
ONE
1
FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS DAVID PATCHEN SUSPECTED THAT HIS friend Paul Christopher had saved his life in battle. There was no eyewitness proof that this was so, only a few fragments of circumstantial evidence and memories he could not trust. Patchen never mentioned his suspicion to Christopher, though he often had the feeling that Christopher was waiting for him to do so. Christopher was his only friend, and before she was expelled from the Outfit, Maria Rothchild told Patchen that she believed that Christopher was his only link to human emotion. “You’re like a disembodied spirit, following him around, watching him live, wondering what it would be like to have a body and a heart and believe in something,” she said.
This was close to the truth. Even as a child Patchen had been an outcast, and after he was disfigured by his wounds, he might as well have been the last Neanderthal man, living in disguise among Cro-Magnons, for all the connection he felt to other human beings or they to him. The only exception to his loneliness was Christopher. Why? Late in their friendship, after Christopher was captured and imprisoned by the Chinese Communists, Patchen thought about this strange circumstance with new intensity, and came to the conclusion that it was because Christopher knew something about him that he himself did not know, and did not wish to know.
Whatever this was, it happened on Okinawa on the night of Thursday, May 24, 1945, when Patchen was blinded (or so he thought at the time) by a Japanese hand grenade. He was returning from a patrol along the Shuri Line when an enemy soldier leaped out of the darkness and grappled with him. It was like being attacked by a lynx. The Japanese, who seemed to be naked, his skin smeared with some sort of grease, fought with the brainless fury of a cat, clinging to Patchen’s back and raking him with a knife. He was small but almost unbelievably strong. He seized Patchen’s helmet and jerked his head back, trying to cut his throat with the knife. Patchen dropped his rifle and seized the other man’s wrist with both hands. The Japanese continued to pull on the helmet and Patchen heard himself gasping as the chin strap cut into his windpipe.
Patchen, nearly unconscious, whirled in the darkness, trying to dislodge his attacker. Finally he threw him to the ground. The enemy’s knife flew out of his hand. He looked around desperately for his weapon, then scuttled away down the hillside, doubled over like a four-footed creature. He was wearing a white loincloth that bobbed in the darkness like a tail. Patchen drew his pistol and pursued him, bleeding and gasping. He found the Japanese crouching in a foxhole. He had wound a white rag around his head; his right arm, the one Patchen had seized, was broken. He cradled it with the other hand and shrieked in pain or terror in a weird feline voice. Roaring wordlessly in reply, Patchen lifted his pistol. The Japanese stood up and extended his left arm, stiffly. Patchen saw that he was holding a live grenade. For an instant his hand and the muzzle of Patchen’s .45 almost touched. Patchen squeezed the trigger and felt the recoil a fraction of a second before the grenade went off in an eruption of fiery splinters.
Oddly, Patchen did not lose consciousness immediately, but this made him think that he was dead, because all his senses were extinguished by the explosion. He heard nothing except a soughing non-sound like the imitation of surf in a conch shell. His’body was numb. He tasted nothing and smelled nothing even though the mud on which he lay was saturated with the feces and the rotting dead of two armies. He knew that his eyes were open, but he could see nothing, not even the residue of light captured by the pupils just before the lids closed. He stared, but saw only blackness; when he stared harder, the blackness deepened. Then his hand moved and he knew that he was alive. The hand touched his right eye, then his left, and sent a message to Patchen’s brain that what it had encountered was formless slime. “My God!” he cried; these had been his eyes. He felt himself going under. The blackness deepened. He did not think or resist, but his mind, which had retained the last image his retina had captured, projected the grenade onto the screen of his memory, where it detonated again.
After a time Patchen woke up. At first he felt no pain, only a dreamy awareness of his injuries. Then, one by one, all his senses except sight returned. He could hear the stutter and pop of small arms fire and the muffled explosion of shells and the voices of Japanese soldiers shouting insults into the night. Patchen’s throat was parched, but he did not dare reach for the canteen attached to his ammunition belt. What if a Japanese was watching him, bayonet at the ready, for some sign of life? Without warning, very close by, a wounded man screamed in a tremendous howling voice, so close to Patchen that he twitched in fear. He thought, What if the Jap isn’t dead? What if his attacker was waking up, too? What if he was creeping toward him now with one hand blown away and a knife gripped in the other? Alone, defenseless, he waited, trying to feign death in case the Japanese stumbled on him. What if it wasn’t a knife his enemy held in his remaining hand? What if it was another grenade?
The pain in Patchen’s eyes was so intense that it made his body thrash. He could feel the involuntary reaction coming and he tried to control it, but in the end he was unable to do so. His face, his clothes, his whole sweaty body inside the thick cotton drill of his denims, were smeared with congealed blood. He groped under his clothes. To the touch his blood was sticky and scabby, like dried paste, and when he lifted his fingers to his nostrils it smelled like nothing Patchen had ever smelled before.
Each time he lost consciousness, he mistook what happened for death, only to wake up again to realize that it had not yet discovered him. When soldiers died in books they remembered moments of happiness, they saw beloved faces and heard their mother’s voices. In Patchen’s case, none of these things happened. He merely slept and woke and felt unbearable pain, and then slept again. He was awakened time after time by the screams of the wounded man who lay nearby. No matter how hard he listened, he could not tell if the voice belonged to an American or a Japanese.
Then he woke up and realized that he was being carried over the ground by another person. This rescuer, whoever he was, had slung Patchen across his shoulders and he was running in zig-zags over the blasted terrain. The man was very strong and swift. He seemed to be alone; there were no other voices, no other footsteps.
Patchen was wide awake now, but he existed in a bubble of quietude, floating inside the clamor of battle, in which all noises were distinct and separate. He heard his rescuer panting, he heard water sloshing in his canteen, he heard the thud of boots.
A mortar round detonated behind them and Patchen’s rescuer dove forward, spilling Patchen onto the ground. He lost consciousness again. When he woke up, he was alone. His rescuer had vanished. Perhaps, Patchen thought, he had never actually existed; maybe he had imagined it all, maybe this was simply part of the process of dying. Was death itself a rescue? He drifted into unconsciousness again.
When he woke he felt himself being borne across the battlefield by the same running man. This time his rescuer was grunting out numbers in German as he rushed over the mud and slime, counting to four—”Eins! Zwei! Drei! VIER! Eins! Zwei! Drei! VIER!” over and over again. Who was this person?
Shells from American warships offshore moaned overhead and detonated on the Japanese positions. Mortar rounds burst all around them; the snicker of small-caliber Japanese bullets filled the air. Suddenly Patchen’s rescuer grunted and fell to the ground with Patchen on top of him. Patchen reached out convulsively and gripped his leg just above the top of a Marine-issue boot. The man shouted in pain and pried Patchen’s fingers loose.
