Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

When I awoke, the highland forest was emphatically swaying. The impetus for this motion was not the wind. Instead, the flank of the mountain had begun to convulse beneath us in just the way that cowhide convulses to dislodge a persnickety fly. Both Helen and Mary were gone. I staggered outside. Through the swaying foliage I saw them on the bank of the spring from which I had filched my compresses. Helen was holding Mary, but a lurch of Mount Tharaka knocked her legs out from under her. The child tumbled from her arms to the ground.

“ Helen!” I shouted. “ Mary!”

Mine was just one more voice in a chorus of confused voices. A crew of Hunnish habilines had spread out through the woods above the spring, chastising the mountain for its bad behavior and celebrating their own fearlessness. Their whoops and catcalls piped a puny counterpoint to Mount Tharaka’s rumblings, but none of the Huns seemed to believe that their lives were at hazard. In fact, they grew angrier. The louder the mountain rumbled, the more vehement their protests. Like pinballs, the Huns caromed about among the trees caroling their courage and their outrage.

Mary leapt to her feet, and Helen hurried to catch her. Before she could, one of Attila’s henchmen swept down on the australopithecine child with a club. One swing nearly severed Mary’s head from her neck, and the next narrowly missed Helen. I wanted to scream, but could not get any sound out. Instead, my pistol jumped into my hand. With hate in my heart and a trembling grip I pointed it at Mary’s murderer.

Whereupon Mount Tharaka shrugged again, tumbling all of us.

When, a minute or two after this convulsion, I again lifted my head, Helen was presenting her posterior to the Hun who had killed our daughter. He touched her gently on the rump, then walked past her into the leaf mold where Mary’s corpse lay. To each of the other habilines who arrived at the spring Helen also presented her buttocks. When none of them either accepted this invitation or kicked her down the slope, she went groveling to the feet of the premier culprit. In the extremity of her terror and grief she was seeking reassurance from an unconscionable barbarian. The barbarian gave it. As his comrades-in-arms dismembered our daughter’s headless corpse, he patted Helen on the shoulders, stroked her consolingly, and murmured Hunnish commiseration.

I fired my pistol in the air, one shot for each habiline. Although they had not scurried for the mountain’s rumblings, they scurried for my gunshots. The quake, by now, had run its course, and the reports were as clean and hard as the sound of an icepick chipping ice. A few moments later Helen stumbled down the debris-cluttered slope into my arms. Much more tenderly than Mount Tharaka had just rocked all of us, I rocked her, rocked her and rocked her.

Later, as Helen lay glassy-eyed and immobile in our hut, I gathered up what was left of Mary and buried these remnants in the soft earth near the spring. Then I took a walk.

In the twilight, preserved in a bed of volcanic tuff high on the mountain’s side, a cyclopean skull caught my eye. It was the skull of either a mastodon or a dinothere, a rope-nosed beast that had ventured up the slopes of Mount Tharaka in search of shoots and leaves, only to die before being able to rumba back down to bush country. What seemed to be an immense eye socket in the animal’s skull was in fact its nasal cavity, but the early Greeks would later mistake such skulls for those of one-eyed giants and would stand in glorious awe of the visions conjured by their imaginations from this error. I, too, stood in awe of the skull.

Polyphemus was a pachyderm.

After prising the enormous skull from the tuff in which it was partially embedded, I let it steer me back down the mountain.

At Mary’s grave I erected it as a headstone, a memorial to our daughter.

Themusic from the pavilion on the beach was stale disco stuff, jukebox leftovers from another summer.

Lots of activity, though, and the activity drew him.

Clad in huarache sandals and cut-off jeans, Joshua ambled down from the Miracle Strip to see what was happening. Hubbard had just paid him, and with Hubbard’s intervention at a local bank he had recently obtained a loan to buy a motorbike. The bike was padlocked in a rack next to the public showers near the highway, and as he angled over the yielding white sand to the pavilion, he revolved to admire it. A red Kawasaki, just beautiful. Money was independence.

Old music, new wheels.

Down at the pavilion Joshua propped one foot on a wooden rail and watched the dancers. Continually eclipsed by half-naked, spasming bodies, the jukebox on the floor seemed to expand and contract like a huge, opalescent lung. The sun had just set. A lingering red stain lay on the waters of the Gulf, and this same color was reflected in the concrete floor of the pavilion. Joshua was hypnotized. The rhythms pounding out of the jukebox held him, as did the flamboyant, robotic movements of the dancers. They were mostly white college kids or giggling teeny-boppers, but the predominant impression was of damned souls undergoing the torments of hell and perversely enjoying them. Joshua did not see much hope of his fitting into either group.

If you want company, he told himself, scoot back over to Eglin and look up some of your old Air Force buddy-buddies.

Of course that was not possible. Nobody he knew from the days before Hugo’s death lived in base housing anymore. Military families were professional refugees. They came and went like gypsies. Last October he had hitched a ride onto base with a young airman and then strolled past the old Capehart unit in which the Monegals had lived for nearly three years. Out front, one of those headache-green plastic tricycles for preschoolers. You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.

The number on the jukebox ended, not by resolving itself but by fading away into wounded silence. The next tune was a ballad with a lovely flute solo lifting above the repetitive thud of the bass. Sunburned bodies clutched each other and swayed together like amorous drunks. Refusing to acknowledge his disfranchisement, Joshua continued to watch.

Then a small miracle occurred.

A frail, brown-skinned girl with hair like liquid graphite was staring at him from the other side of the pavilion. Dragon Lady’s kid sister, he thought; an Oriental innocent. When she saw that he had seen her watching him, she closed her eyes and let her hair gust from side to side with the melancholy piping of the flute.

Alas, she was not alone. Beside her, gazing glassily at the dancers, slumped a skinheaded young man in a pair of polyester slacks and a pale yellow T-shirt commemorating the Freedom Flotilla of 1980. A trainee from one of the bases in the area, he had probably overdosed on potato chips and light beer, sunshine and Seconal. His date wanted to dance, but he was doing well to stay upright. Finally, his scalp shining obscenely pink, his chin fell to his breast and he began sliding slowly toward the floor. The girl tried to rescue him, but he was clearly too heavy for her to support alone. Struggling with his weight, she appealed to Joshua with her eyes, and the unequivocal message in that look was, “You see the trouble I’m having. Come on, turkey, give me a hand.” Joshua circled the crowd at the rail to do just that.

After some initial fumbling for handholds, Joshua and the girl walked her dehydrated beau back up the beach to the Miracle Strip, where they thrust his head beneath a shower spray and tried to revive him to at least zombie status. No go. The trainee regarded them with the bulging, transparent eyes of a whitefish.