Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“Don’t you care what light Adam’s people can shed on our species’ history?”

“I’m more concerned that we let Adam’s people— Les Gens , thank you—live out their own histories in peace. I’m more concerned those caves up there remain a habiline secret until there ain’t no more habilines to keep it.” I looked him square in the eye again. “What about you, Dr. Nollinger?”

He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed their lenses on one of the front pockets of his bush shorts. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, okay, okay!” he sang in annoyance. “I’ll lock everything I know in a vault in the back of my brain and let it molder there until the Montarazes relent and let me bring it out again. Not you, Mr. Loyd, the Montarazes. You’re hardly even a walk-on in this.” He put his glasses back on. Distractedly, he pulled an original Fauver/Sam from the crate, rolled it, and began tapping it lightly but obsessively on the cabinet’s edge. A voodooist coaxing Arada-Dahomey rhythms from some arrhythmic recess of his soul. I grabbed his wrist to make him stop.

“There’s one thing about you I’ll never understand,” I said.

His expression was neutral. I could explain myself or not explain myself—it made no difference to him.

“I’ll never understand what Caroline saw in you.”

“You’re of the wrong generation,” he said indifferently. “And you really don’t get people, anyway.”

I let go of his wrist and stalked out of the hut, my legs as flimsy as licorice braids. My backpack contained more than a major portion of the habilines’ output in acrylics: the weight of everything that had happened. I needed help getting down the mountain, but I needed none falling asleep on the featherbed in the guestroom of Adam and RuthClaire’s cottage on Caicos Bay. The white noise of the surf ebbed and flowed through my sleep like the hydrogen hiss interconnecting the myriad stars….

The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.

Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of Les Gens , the last of my people.”

I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.

Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”

“I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”

“All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”

“It looked something like a hyena or a dog. Its head did, anyway.”

Adam smiled. “I know. With a hominid body, yes? What you saw was the avatar of God most meaningful to every prehistoric specimen of the human family—by some reckonings, the Master of the Hunt. It lived in the collective unconscious of Homo habilis , Homo erectus , Homo neanderthalensis , and early Homo sapiens . It lives in many so-called primitive peoples even today. It ties the human to the divine and the divine to the animal—so that they are interconnected not just by Mind, but also by a unifying perception of the Sacred.”

“I saw the Sacred?”

“Yes. A projection of the God Beyond Time into the evolutionary aesthetic of his creation. You saw meaning, Mister Paul, and spoke in your possession to a messenger from its source.”

“Not Buddha or Jesus but the Master of the Hunt?”

Adam—a shadow in the indigo twilight—lifted both hands in an unsettling draw-your-own-conclusions gesture.

I leaned toward him in my rocker. “Why didn’t bells go off, Adam? Why didn’t the sky open up and light pour through? Why didn’t I feel that I could float eight feet off the floor of the cave? I mean, if that was a religious revelation, Adam, I prefer falling in love. With falling in love you get Roman candles and light-headedness and invisible champagne bubbles. With that business in the caves, all I got was horror-movie special effects and a theological lecture, and a lingering headache. How can I put any credence in a revelation like that?”

“Did you learn anything that you did not know before?”

“I was told some things I didn’t know before. Why?”

“Because if you didn’t know them before, or hadn’t been told them before, well, then, you would be foolish to conclude that what you experienced was nothing but your own subconscious talking. Something outside you was putting in its two cents of worth.”

“I don’t feel any different than I did two days ago. I’m the same materialistic rational pagan.”

“Who has been ridden by the vaudun loa of our African ancestors. Who has broken through one of God’s masks to talk to him face to face.”

I shivered. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

“It will come gradually, Mister Paul. Your bells will sound like they’re ringing at the bottom of the sea. Your fireworks will unfold in big slow-motion umbrellas. You will float only at the most modest, and so nearly imperceptible, heights. But it will come, and each instance of it will have its own design, and the many individual designs will compose an encompassing pattern, and that pattern will have its ground in the Mind and Megapattern of God.”

“You sound like a crackpot Indian guru, Adam.”

“Then I’ll shut up. Right now. Better to think about eating—” he gestured at the beach— “than get lost in the metaphysics of another.”

We sat in silence watching our wives pull coals into a circle of stones upon which they would soon place the greasy grill rack. Paul and Caroline, Adam and Ruthie Cee. Just another pair of sophisticated fun couples partying in a secluded cove on Montaraz. The bonfire ten feet away from their makeshift barbecue pit leapt like the funeral pyre of a Roman emperor. Caroline’s and RuthClaire’s shoulders gleamed in its roaring blaze as if made of bronze. They tonged strips of fileted fish out of a metal cooler onto the grill rack. They took turns basting each strip with the sauce that I had made. I watched them for a long time.

Finally, RuthClaire stood and shouted, “It’s nearly time to eat!”

Adam and I carried two pitchers of iced daiquiris to the beach, and, sitting on the sand at a remove from the bonfire, we ate and drank—somewhat solemnly, considering the late hour and the formidable size of our appetites and thirsts. Tomorrow, Caroline and I would fly back to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. That knowledge may have contributed to our solemnity, but, of course, a lot of it had to do with Toussaint’s death, the upheaval at Prix-des-Yeux, and the uncertainty of our own several futures. I found myself thinking forlorn thoughts about Livia George, Paradise Farm, and the West Bank. To keep from getting maudlin, I limited myself to three small lime daiquiris in a ceramic coffee mug. In fact, I did everything in threes—three strips of fish, three baked yams, and three avowals of either eternal love (that one for Caroline) or eternal friendship (one for RuthClaire, one for Adam) for my companions on the beach.