Russell Hoban - The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

‘How?’ said Jachin-Boaz, looking at his watch. He was paying for fifty minutes of the doctor’s time, and ten of them were gone.

‘Try to remember the night before you saw the lion for the first time,’ said the doctor. ‘Is there anything at all that comes to mind? Any dreams?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘The day before the night before?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Anything happen at work? You said on the telephone that you work at the bookshop.’

‘Nothing happened at the bookshop. There was a lion door-stop at the other shop, my own shop where I sold maps before I came to this country.’

‘What about the lion door-stop? Anything come to mind?’

‘My son said that my map wouldn’t show where to find a lion.’

‘What about your son?’

‘Boaz-Jachin,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘That was my father’s name too. He started the business, the map shop. He ran away from his father. I ran away from my son. From my wife and son. My father said that the world was made for seeking and finding. By means of maps everything that is found is never lost again. That’s what my father said. But everything that is found is always lost again.’

‘What have you lost?’

‘Years of myself, my manhood,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘There is only one place, and that place is time. Why do I keep the map that I promised him? I don’t need it. I could have left it for him. I could send it to him.’

‘To your father?’

‘My father’s dead. To my son.’

‘Why didn’t you give it to him?’

‘I kept it for myself, kept it for finding what I’d never found.’

‘What was that?’

‘I want to talk about the lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz looking at his watch.

The doctor lit a pipe, using up almost a minute, it seemed to Jachin-Boaz.

‘All right,’ said the doctor from behind a big cloud of smoke. ‘What’s the lion? The lion is something that can kill you. What’s death?’

‘Have we got time to go into that?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘What I mean is, what’s death in this context? Is it something you want or something you don’t want?’

‘Who wants to die?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘You’d be surprised,’ said the doctor. ‘Let’s try to find out what being killed by the lion would be for you.’

‘The end,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Would it be, say, a reward for you?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Would it be, well, what’s the opposite of reward?’

‘Punishment?’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘For what?’

‘My wife and son could tell you that at great length,’ said Jachin-Boaz looking at his watch again. ‘And meanwhile the lion is waiting out there every morning before dawn.’

‘Does he come into the flat or follow you to work?’ said the doctor.

‘No. But he’s there, and I know he’s there.’

‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘But the choice is yours whether you meet him or not, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what we’re talking about is that you’re afraid you’ll go out to meet the meat-eating lion. You’re afraid you’ll accept the punishment.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘What kind of people get punished?’ said the doctor.

‘All kinds, I suppose.’

‘The jury goes out to deliberate,’ said the doctor. ‘The jury comes back in. The judge says, “How do you find the defendant?”’

‘Guilty,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘But where does the lion come from? Explain that.’

‘All right,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll go as far as I can with it. But you have to remember that not only don’t I have all the answers but I don’t even have most of the questions where you’re concerned. Let’s forget the technicalities. The lion is something extraordinary, but whether he eats meat or plays the clarinet is academic.’

‘He wouldn’t kill me with a clarinet,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘The lion’, continued the doctor, ‘is capable of a real effect on you. But that’s not much stranger than television, for instance. Right now coming through the air are pictures of people talking, singing, dancing, maybe even pictures of lions. With a television receiver in this room we could see those images. We could hear voices, music, sound effects. We could in reality be emotionally affected by them even though the images would only be images.’

‘That’s not quite parallel to my lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Also, everybody with a television receiver can see the programmes you’re talking about. But nobody but me can see my lion.’

‘Suppose,’ said the doctor, ‘that you were the only person in the world who had a receiver that could pick up this particular broadcast.’ He looked at his watch. ‘A guilt and punishment receiver.’

Jachin-Boaz looked at his watch. Less than a minute remained. ‘But where’s the lion coming from?’ he said. ‘Where’s the transmitter?’

‘From whom are you expecting punishment?’

‘Everybody,’ Jachin-Boaz was surprised to hear himself say as his mother and father unexpectedly rose up in his mind. Love us. Be how we want you to be.

‘That’s as far as we can get now,’ said the doctor, standing up. ‘We’ll have to stop there.’

‘But how can I turn off the programme?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Do you want to?’ said the doctor, opening the door.

‘What a question!’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Do I want to!’ But as the door closed behind him he was adding up the cost of daily beefsteak for the lion.

Boaz-Jachin sat down in the layby and marked on his map the place where the lorry driver had left him.

He was still sitting there thinking about the lorry driver when a little red convertible with its top down pulled up, playing music. The number plates were foreign and the driver was a deeply tanned handsome woman of about the same age as his mother.

The woman smiled with very white teeth and opened the door. Boaz-Jachin got in. ‘Where are you going?’ she said in English.

‘To the seaport,’ said Boaz-Jachin speaking English carefully. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Different places,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to the port.’ She swung the little red car smoothly out into the road.

Boaz-Jachin, since his encounter with the lorry driver, felt as if his former peaceful state of not knowing anything about people had been peeled from him like the rind from an orange. He doubted that it could be put back. As he sat beside the blonde woman it seemed to him that people’s stories were all written on their faces for anyone to read. Perhaps, he thought, he might now be able to converse also with animals, trees, stones. The lion came back to him briefly, like a memory from earliest childhood, then was gone. He felt guilty because he had made the lorry driver cry.

He looked at the blonde woman. She seemed to carry her womanhood the way men on the docks carried baling hooks on one shoulder — shiny, pointed, sharp.

The wind rushed by, blowing their hair. The music was being played by a tape machine. When one side was finished the woman turned over the cassette and there was new music. The music was smooth and full, and it sounded like the marvellous cocktail bars in films where unattainablelooking women and suave violent men understood each other immediately by a look.

Boaz-Jachin knew the blonde woman’s story as if she had told him everything. She had been married several times, and was now a wealthy divorcée. She, like the lorry driver, was looking for new faces coming out into the world. She too would want him to be something to her for a little while on the road between the past and the future.

There would be a hotel or a motel on the road, the little red car would pull up and stop, and she would look at him as the film stars looked, with her delicate eyebrows raised, without a word.