Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

But most gruesome were his eyes, which bore out of his enlarged skull with a manic, fervent propulsion, as if they wanted to pounce on Eugene — or punch him, since they were each the size of a small fist.

"Did you really come all this way just to see Agata?" asked Eakins. "Or to meet me? Or were you trying to escape your father?"

"I want to be with Sonia."

Eakins smiled, revealing two shining fleets of white teeth the size of dominoes.

"I know that's not true. Don't say that again. If you weren't running away from your father, then there's one other likely justification for your leaving. Pothos."

Eugene couldn't bear to stare into Eakins's face any longer. Those bulging eyes conveyed a haunting combination of acute concentration and internal rage. Eugene focused instead on a platter of stuffed pheasant.

"Lust?" asked Eugene. "You mean lust?"

"No! But just as noble. Pothos. It describes a kind of restlessness: the burning desire to see and to know new things and places for the sake of knowing."

"I know what I want. She's here." The stuffed pheasant was missing its head. Judging from the bite marks, it seemed to have been taken in a single chomp.

"I was young once too," said Eakins. His voice grew less severe — became jaunty, even — when he fell into speeches about his past, or when he wanted to impart wisdom. "Sure, I chased women across continents, but these pursuits were all made in the service of my pothos. The women were taken, in time, but I was after the thrill of the quest, the adventures along the way, the false starts and dead ends. That is how I found myself hunting for wild moose with a one-armed man outside Bratislava. Eating brains in Kathmandu. Murdering a prostitute in Nairobi."

Eugene stared at the revolver on its china dish.

"You murdered a prostitute? I don't remember that from any of your memoirs."

"It was suppressed. The point is, I was after experience, and although I had terrific amounts of sex along the way, I found it. From those experiences were born my first books. And my first bastard children. You see, you can't have anything valuable to say until you suffer — at least a little bit — the outrages of the world."

"Who said I wanted to say anything?"

"I'm no detective, but I see you've carried some papers up all this way."

Eugene regarded Alvaro's legal pad manuscript, and the dog-eared pages of his translation in his book bag. He was almost finished with it. The cannibals had seized Alsa's father, but Jacinto had saved him, earning his respect and trust. Jacinto and Alsa would be married on top of Pico Duarte, the highest mountain on the island.

"It's not mine," he said. "It's a friend's. I'm translating it for him."

"Can I take a look?"

Eugene looked up at the man's hands, filthy with some kind of yellow sauce — Hollandaise, perhaps — and flecked with chicken gristle.

"I'll wash up first," said Eakins. "Follow me."

With a small moan and several enormous gasps of breath— the way he was breathing, he would have choked in a room any smaller than the banquet hall — Eakins rose from the table, dropping the revolver into his vast velvet pocket, where it fell as silently as a penny. Eugene followed for several steps, trying to avoid looking at all the other food piled on the edge of the table: a pig's head, stewed tomatoes, blood pudding, a whole swordfish, stuffed potatoes, olives, apples, butter. A trail of breadcrumbs followed Eakins's feet, and it was only when he turned around that Eugene realized Eakins had carried some sort of baguette sandwich with him to the next room. Eakins patiently stuffed it, with both hands, deep into his throat. Then he turned on a faucet.

"Enter!" ordered Eakins, through a mouth of bread.

The room was a small bathroom, which Eakins's flesh filled nearly to capacity. He had cinched closed his bathrobe and he washed his hands in a white sink with gold faucets — though only one hand fit at a time. When he was done, Eakins led Eugene through a door into a garden behind the house. Now, in the fading sunlight, Eugene could see Eakins at his full height. His head momentarily blocked out the sun.

"I suggest you remove your sneakers," said Eakins. "The fresh grass feels lovely between the toes."

Eakins kicked off his slippers — velvet, to match his robe — and strolled into the garden, which was really a long grass field bound by boulders. Beyond the boulders lay the horizon. Under the boulders, the side of the cliff, and a thousand-foot drop to the churning waves.

"What kind of book is it?" asked Eakins, plucking the manuscript and its translation from Eugene's book bag.

"A fictionalized memoir — not my own, a friend's. He's written a story about life in a remote region of the Dominican Republic. I'm translating it into English."

They strolled across the field. The soil was moist against the soles of Eugene's feet. Over the cliff 's edge ahead of them, a cloud floated at eye level, expanding and compressing like a single-celled organism.

"So you speak a good Spanish?"

"Actually it's not written in Spanish, but in an obscure dialect from the region he's from. He's talked enough about it with me, and I get the gist. He's my closest friend. We have an understanding."

"Funny," said Eakins, "I'm at work on a similar project. A new memoir. My goal is to beat Abe to finishing it. So I haven't revealed to him what happens to me in my last chapter. That's my own. He can only speculate." He flipped through the pages of Eugene's text.

"In a funny way, Eugenio, I have some paternal feeling toward you. After reading your father's correspondence, and hearing Agata talk of you—"

"Sonia? What did she say?"

"Oh, the usual, that you are a bright, charming, shy, directionless boy ," said Eakins, emphasizing the last word. "That you may achieve something of value one day, as soon as you make up your mind to do it. And anyone dear to Agata earns my affection, given the nature of my relationship with her."

"She's like a daughter to you," said Eugene, nodding.

"Hmm. I can tell you this. You won't go home to New York after this little meeting here."

"Why do you say that? My life is there. My job with Abe. Alvaro is there."

"You don't mention your father. No matter. You would never have left if you weren't seeking something important. And I don't think it was Agata. At least not only Agata."

"Sonia."

"Not her either. I see in you something of myself when I was your age. Of course I don't mean your age exactly. What are you, nineteen?"

"Twenty-three."

"When I was twenty-three I had sired children in over three continents, trained as a merchant marine for the Yugoslavian armed forces, and published a story collection, two volumes of poetry, and my first memoir. I had been tried for treason in Jakarta, broke out of jail in Cairo, whupped Ernie within an inch of his life in a Havana mudflat—"

"I get it."

"That said, I remember when I shared your state of mind. I was seven then, and had just left home. I wish I had had some wise person to advise me. It certainly couldn't have been my father: an ineffectual underling at a seafood cannery on Lake Pontchartrain, a small, greedy, and yes, silent man, whose body smelled like tunafish and acrid tin and who once saved for three years to buy a shack made of wood."

Eakins was heaving uncontrollably now, and leaned on Eugene's shoulder. Eugene strained to support his prodigious weight. The breeze from the sea flared up and lifted the ends of Eakins's orange hair off his healthy bronze scalp. Eakins recovered his breath, and gradually the pressure on Eugene's shoulder subsided.

"You mentioned the last chapter of your memoir," said Eugene. "Will that explain why you live in the same town as Keftir the Blind? That he's actually a real human being?"