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

‘How are we tick-tock today?’ said the doctor. ‘Ticktock?’

‘Very tock, thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Tick,’ said the doctor. ‘Ticks will tock themselves out, I have no doubt.’

‘I tick so,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Tick all right last tock?’

‘Very tock,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘No dreams that I can remember forgetting.’

‘That’s the ticket,’ said the doctor. ‘Tock it tick.’

‘Cheers,’ said Jachin-Boaz, making an upward gesture with two fingers.

‘You do it the other way for victory,’ said the doctor.

‘When I see a victory I’ll do it that way,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

The doctor’s feet went away, and the doctor went with them. Civilian feet appeared. Familiar shoes.

‘How are you feeling?’ said the owner of the bookshop. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Not so bad, thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘It’s kind of you to come.’

‘How come you’re here?’ said the bookshop owner. ‘You seem the same as you’ve always been. Was it the dog-food-eating hallucination?’

‘Something like that,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Unfortunately a police constable saw it too.’

‘Ah,’ said the bookshop owner. ‘It’s always best to keep that sort of thing to yourself, you know.’

‘I should like to have kept it to myself,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Things’ll sort themselves out,’ said the bookshop owner. ‘The rest will do you good and you’ll come back to work refreshed.’

‘You don’t have any reservations about taking me back?’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘Why should I? You sell more books than any other assistant I’ve ever had. Anybody can come unstuck once in a while.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not at all. Oh, there was an advert in the trade weekly. Letter for you at a box number. Here it is.’

‘A letter for me,’ said Jachin-Boaz. He opened the envelope. In it was another envelope, postmarked at his town, his town where he had been Jachin-Boaz the mapseller. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and put the letter on his bedside table.

‘And here’s some fruit,’ said the bookshop owner, ‘and a couple of paperbacks.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jachin-Boaz. He took an orange from the bag, held it in his hand. The paperbacks were two collections of supernatural and horror stories.

‘Escape literature,’ said the bookshop owner.

‘Escape,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

‘I’ll stop in again,’ said the bookshop owner. ‘Get well soon.’

‘Yes,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘Thank you.’

Only you, said the black water rushing past the ferry in the night.

‘Only I what, for God’s sake!’ said Boaz-Jachin. He saw no one near him, and spoke aloud. He leaned over the rail, smelled the blackness of the sea and cursed the water. ‘Every fucking thing talks to me,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone for a while. I’ll talk to you some other time. I can’t be rushed all the time.’ He walked aft to the stern, saw flights of white gulls rising and falling in eerie silence above the wake. Out of the darkness into the light. Out of the light into the darkness. Boaz-Jachin shook his fist at the gulls. ‘I don’t even know if he’s there!’ he said. ‘I don’t even know if I’m looking for him in the right place.’

You know, said the white wings silently rising and falling. Don’t tell us you don’t know.

‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ said Boaz-Jachin leaning out over the rail. ‘I don’t know.’ He saw no one on the afterdeck, and he began to talk more loudly, to shout into the darkness and the wake. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ Two gulls slanted towards each other like eyebrows, became for a moment a pale frown following the boat. Boaz-Jachin put one foot on the bottom rail and leaned farther out, staring at the darkness where the white wings had crossed and separated.

He felt a hand gripping his belt from behind. He turned, and was face to face with a woman. His turning had brought her arm halfway around him and their faces close together. She did not let go of his belt.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Boaz-Jachin.

‘Come away from the rail,’ she said, still holding his belt. Her voice was one that he had heard before. They moved towards the lighted windows of the lounge, and he saw her face clearly.

‘You!’ he said.

‘You know me?’

‘You gave me a ride. Months ago it was, on the other side, on the road to the port. You had a red car with a tape machine playing music. You didn’t like the way I looked at you.’

She let go of his belt. Under his shirt his flesh burned where her arm had been around him.

‘I didn’t recognize you,’ she said.

‘Why did you grab me by the belt?’

‘It made me nervous to see you leaning out over the rail that way and shouting into the dark.’

‘You thought I was going to jump overboard?’

‘It made me nervous, that’s all. You look older.’

‘You look kinder.’

She smiled, took his arm, walked with him along the deck past the lighted windows. Her breast against his arm made it feel hot.

’Did you think I was going to jump overboard?’ said Boaz-Jachin.

‘I have a son about your age,’ she said.

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know. I never hear from him.’

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘With a new wife.’

They walked the deck all the way around the boat, then around again. Hearing her say that her husband was with a new wife was not the same to Boaz-Jachin as the word divorcée that had been in his mind that day on the road.

‘You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘You’re less of a boy.’

‘More of a man?’

‘More of a person. More of a man.’

They drank cognac in the bar. In a corridor a group of students with back packs sang while one of them played a guitar. Honey, let me be your salty dog, went the song.

When the boat docked they drove off in the little red car. ‘Purpose of your visit?’ said the customs officer as he looked at Boaz-Jachin’s passport.

‘Holiday,’ said Boaz-Jachin. The customs officer looked at his face and his black hair, then at the blonde woman. He stamped the passport, handed it back.

It was raining, drumming on the canvas top. Numberless splashes leaped up from the road to meet the rain coming down. Red tail-lights blurred ahead of them. Yes, no, yes, no, said the windscreen wipers. The woman put a cassette in the machine. Where the morning sees the shadows of the orange grove there was nothing twenty years ago, sang the tape in the language of Boaz-Jachin’s country. Where the dry wind sowed the desert we brought water, planted seedlings, now the oranges grow. A woman’s voice, harsh and full of glaring sunlight.

Benjamin, thought Boaz-Jachin. Forgive. ‘You can buy that on a cassette?’ he said.

‘Sure,’ she said.

Boaz-Jachin shook his head. Why not thought cassettes too? Any kind. What an invention. A slot in the head and you just put in the cassette for the mood you wanted. Lion. Yes, I know, thought Boaz-Jachin. You’re in my mind. I’m in your mind.

‘Oranges,’ said the woman. ‘Oranges in the desert.’ She looked straight ahead into the darkness and the red tail-lights and drove on through the rain. For an hour they said nothing.

She turned off the main road, drove two or three miles to a half-timbered cottage with a thatched roof. Boaz-Jachin looked at her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Houses. Houses I have. Three of them in different countries.’ She looked at his face. ‘Last time in the car you were thinking of a hotel, weren’t you?’

Boaz-Jachin blushed.

She lit lamps, took covers off the furniture in the living room, went into the kitchen to make coffee. Boaz-Jachin took kindling from a basket, coal from a scuttle, started a fire in the fireplace. The books on the shelves came and went in the firelight, red, brown, orange, all their pages quiet. Thin gleams of gold showed in the insets of picture frames. Boaz-Jachin smelled coffee, looked at the couch, looked away, looked at the fire, sat in a chair, sighed.