Black Glass Read online

  • • •

  YOU ARE ON the surface of the moon and the air itself is a poison. Nothing moves, nothing grows, there is nothing but ash. A helicopter has left you here and the air from its liftoff made the ash fly and then resettle into definite shapes, like waves. You don’t move for fear of disturbing these patterns, which make you think of snow, of children lying on their backs in the snow until their arms turn into wings. You can see the shadows of winged people in the ash.

  Nothing is alive here, so you are not here, after all, on this man-made moon where nothing can breathe. You are home and have been home for months. Your tour lasted just over a year and you only missed one Christmas. You have a job and a wife and you eat at restaurants, go to baseball games, commute on the bus. The war is over and there is nothing behind you but the bodies of angels flying on their backs in the ash.

  • • •

  PONCHO NEVER CALLED. We went to the city meeting on the helicopter, all four of us, to help the city make this decision. The helicopter was item seven on the agenda. We never got to it. Child care had been promised but not provided. Angry parents dumped their children on the stage of the Berkeley Community Theatre to sit with the council members. A small girl with a sun painted on her forehead knocked over a microphone. The conservative council members went home. Berkeley.

  Lauren found Poncho and James in the dress circle. Poncho was covering the meeting. Lauren introduced us all. “By the way,” she said carefully, “you didn’t find a set of keys at your house, did you? I lost mine, and that night is the last I remember having them.”

  “Keys?” asked Poncho. “No.” Something in his smile told me Lauren must have overplayed herself that evening. He knew exactly what was going on.

  “If you do find them, you will call me?”

  “Of course.”

  Julie drove us home, and I made Lauren a cup of tea. She held my hand for a moment as she took it from me. Then she smiled. “I thought we were boycotting Lipton’s,” she said.

  “It’s a British tea.” I stirred some milk into my own cup. “That should be all right, shouldn’t it?”

  “Have you ever heard of Bernadette Devlin?” Gretchen asked.

  We never saw Poncho again except on TV. On 29 June he told us all American forces had been withdrawn from Cambodia. Your birthday, so I remember the date. Not a bad lottery number either. So I always wondered. Were you really drafted? Did you enlist?

  Poncho lost his job about the same time Nixon lost his. Some network executive decided blacks didn’t need special news, so they didn’t need special reporters to give it to them. Let them watch the same news as the rest of us. And apparently Poncho’s ability to handle generic news was doubtful. The network let him go. Politically we regretted this decision. Privately we thought he had it coming.

  God, it was years ago. Years and years ago. I got married. Lauren went to Los Angeles and then to Paris, and now she’s in Washington writing speeches for some senator. Hey, we emerged from the war of the words with some expertise. Gretchen and Julie had a falling-out and hardly speak to each other now. Only when I’m there. They make a special effort for me.

  Julie asked me recently why I was so sure there ever had been a real war. What proof did I have, she asked, that it wasn’t a TV movie of the decade? A miniseries? A maxiseries?

  It outraged Gretchen. “Don’t do that,” she snapped. “Keep it real.” She turned to me. She said she saw you about a month ago at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. She said you had no legs.

  It doesn’t alarm me as much as you might think. I see you all the time, too. You’re in the park, pushing your kids on the swings and you’ve got one hand and one hook. Or you’re sitting in a wheelchair in the aisle of the movie theater watching The Deer Hunter. Or you’re weighing vegetables at the supermarket and you’re fine, you’re just fine, only it’s never really you. Not any of them.

  • • •

  SO WHAT DO you think of my war? At the worst I imagine you’re a little angry. “My God,” I can imagine you saying. “You managed a clean escape. You had your friends, you had your games. You were quite happy.” Well, I promised you the truth. And the truth is that some of us went to jail. (Damn few. I know.) Some of us were killed. (And the numbers are irrelevant.) Some of us went to Canada and to Sweden. And some of us had a great time. But it wasn’t a clean escape, really, for any of us.

  Look at me. I’m operating all alone here with no affinity group and it seems unnatural to me. It seems to me that I should be surrounded by people I’d trust with my life. Always. It makes me cling to people, even people I don’t care for all that much. It makes me panic when people leave. I’m sure they’re not coming back. The war did this to me. Or you did. Same thing. What did the war do to you?

  Look how much we have in common, after all. We both lost. I lost my war. You lost your war. I look today at Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and I feel sick inside. Do you ever ask yourself who won? Who the hell won?

  Your war. I made it up, of course. It was nothing, nothing like that. Write me. Tell me about it. Please. If I have not heard from you by Christmas, I have decided to ask Lauren to go to the monument and look for your name. I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this. Just send me some word.

  I am thirty-five years old. I am ready to believe anything you say.

  DUPLICITY

  They took Alice out every single day. Sometimes she was crying when she came back. Sometimes she was limp and had to be carried. This was not much like Alice.

  Alice had been Alice the day she and Tilly had returned to the base camp and found it violated. The tent had been ransacked. The camp lantern had been taken and some of their more brightly colored clothes were gone. A box of tampons had been opened and several unwrapped. Alice picked one up, holding it by its long tail like a dead mouse. She laughed. “What do you suppose they made of these?” she asked Tilly. She stuck the tampon into one of her ears, plugging the other ear with her finger. “Very useful,” she said. “Yes? Sleep late in the mornings. Miss the birds.”

  Alice’s cheerfulness was so marked it required explanation. Alice, who was an artist and amateur cartographer, had told Tilly that the blank spaces in maps were often referred to as sleeping beauties. This surprised Tilly, who had never given it any thought. She could not imagine anyone actually functioning with this optimistic attitude toward the unknown. Not without a lot of effort. Here be dragons, was Tilly’s philosophy. Expect the worst and you’ll still be disappointed. Her reaction to the intrusion into their camp had been one of barely controlled alarm. She had known this trip would be dangerous. They had come so casually. They had been very stupid.

  But Alice had been Alice. “It was clearly investigative,” she told Tilly calmly. “And not malicious. Nothing was broken. If they had wanted us to go, they would have found an unambiguous way to suggest it. This was just curiosity. Though I do wish they hadn’t taken our light.” Alice had been sitting outside the tent in the sun, since she could no longer work at night. Propped open on her knees, she’d had a lap desk which folded and unfolded; she’d been penciling a curve in the Nhamundá River onto her graph.

  The map Alice and Tilly had brought was based on high-altitude infrared pictures. The maps Alice was doing would be much more detailed. On that day she had been working on something whimsical, partly map, partly picture. She had noted the turn in the river and then, in the water, had added the head of a large river turtle—the tracaja. On the day of their arrival, a turtle like this had watched them for hours while they emptied the boat and set up camp. Alice had sung the turtle song from Sesame Street to it, bringing civilization, she said, to the backwards turtles of Brazil, who could have no knowledge of the advances other turtles had made globally. Alice had nieces and nephews and a predilection for information there was no reasonable way she could know anyhow. Tilly didn’t know that song.

  Two untidy br
own braids rested on Alice’s shoulders. A slight breeze blew the unrestrained wisps of hair into her face. She held them back with her left hand, added an arrow to the map with her right. “You are here,” she’d said to Tilly. Brightly. You are here.

  • • •

  THE SUN WAS UP. Dim green light filtered through the walls of the tent, which smelled of sleeping bags and hiking boots and moisture. They opened the flaps every day but the tent never lost its hothouse feel. Tilly woke this morning missing Steven. Not memories; she wasn’t thinking. The surface of her body missed him. Her skin. Where’s Steven? it asked. Where’s his mouth? Where’re his hands? She substituted her own hands, but her body knew the difference. And there was another difference, which she recognized, that she would do this in front of Alice now. As if Alice had become part of her like an arm, like Tilly’s left arm, less intimate than the right but part of her all the same.

  Although really she believed Alice was still asleep. Sleep was the only escape for Alice now. Tilly would have felt very guilty if she woke Alice from it early. She listened to Alice breathe and tried to guess if Alice were awake or not. Alice moved so seldom; her body was landscape.

  Tilly would have liked to get up, but this would have woken Alice for sure, and anyway the tent was clogged with the sleeping mats and bags, with the unused stove, with Tilly’s camera cases, and with Alice’s maps. Tilly could only stand up straight in the very middle of the tent. She had bouts of claustrophobia. Everything Tilly knew, everything Tilly could imagine, was either inside or outside this tent. The two sets were infinitely inclusive. The two sets were mutually exclusive. Except for Alice. Alice could belong to both.

  The size of the tent had never bothered her before, when she could come and go as she pleased. In actual fact the tent was probably no smaller than the bedroom she had had as a child, and it had never seemed small to her either, although you couldn’t even open the bedroom door completely; the chest of drawers was behind it. The bedroom was a safe place, a place where you were cared for and protected. You could depend on this so confidently you didn’t even notice it. As Tilly grew older she began to see the shapes and shadows of another world. A girl in the sixth grade at Tilly’s school was followed home by a man in a white car. Tilly was told at the dinner table that she mustn’t talk to strangers. Angela Ruiz, who lived next door, had heard from her cousin in Chicago how some boy she knew was beaten with a pair of pliers by his own father while his mother watched. In Life magazine Tilly saw a picture of a little boy and his two sisters, but there was something wrong about the way they looked, and the article said that their mother hadn’t wanted anyone to know she had children so she’d hidden them in the basement for five years. Without sunshine, without exercise, their growth had been stunted. They were bonsai children. In the last week their vaguely misshapen bodies had returned to Tilly’s dreams.

  In Óbidos, where children at twelve play soccer and have sex, the man who sold them supplies had told them a story. A cautionary tale—Tilly could see this in retrospect. It involved the freshwater dolphin called the boto. The boto could take a woman, penetrating her in the water, or in human male form on shore, or even in her dreams. She would grow pale and die in childbirth, if she lasted that long, and her child would be deformed—having the smooth face of the father, his rubber skin, a blowhole on the top of the head where the fontanel should be.

  Tilly had moved her pad so that it was, in relation to the door, in the same spot as her bed was in her bedroom. Alice never mentioned it, though she’d had to move Alice’s pad, too. Alice was gone at the time. They took Alice out every single day. It was hard not to envy Alice for this, no matter how she looked when she came back.

  An unseen bird, a trogon, began to shriek nearby. The sound rose above the other rain-forest noises in the same way a police siren always buries the sounds of normal traffic. Shhh. The door was a curtain of nylon which whispered when the wind blew. The faint smell of mimosa, just discernible over the smell of sleep and sweat and last night’s urine, passed through the tent and was gone. Alice’s pad was as far away from the door as it could be. Tilly propped herself on one elbow to look at Alice, who was staring up at the ceiling. “Alice,” Tilly said. Any word you spoke in this little room was spoken too loudly. Shhh said the door.

  “I’m still here,” said Alice. “Did you think I might not be?” She moved and caught herself in mid-movement. Her hair was snarled in the back. She had stopped braiding it weeks ago when her last rubber band had snapped. “My back is sore,” she said. “I ache all over.” She looked directly at Tilly. “I thought of another one. The boy in the bubble.”

  This was a game Alice had made up to pass the time. She and Tilly were making a list of famous prisoners. The longer the game went on, the more flexible the category became. Tilly wanted to count Howard Hughes. You could be self-imprisoned, Tilly argued. But Alice said no, you weren’t a prisoner if there wasn’t a jailer, and the jailer had to be someone or something on the outside. Outside the tent something shifted and coughed.

  When the camp was violated, Alice and Tilly had assumed the trespassers were Indians—what else could they think?—although it had surprised them. A number of the local tribes were considered low contact but hardly untouched. There were the Hixkaryana, the Kaxuiana, the Tirio. They had shotguns and motorboats. They had been to the cities. If you mentioned Michael Jackson to them they would nod and let you know you were not the first. The man who advised them on supplies in Óbidos had been from the Tirio tribe. His advice, though lengthy, had been essentially indifferent; the spectacle of two women on holiday in the rain forest had aroused less comment than they expected. He had made one ominous observation in Portuguese. “It is quite possible,” he had said, “to go into the forest as a young woman and come out very old.”

  Alice and Tilly should have gone to FUNAI for permission to visit the Indians, who were protected by the Brazilian government from curious tourists. But Alice was only interested in the terrain. She had hardly given the Indians a thought when she planned the trip. Steven had asked about them, but then Steven asked about everything. He was in New York City riding the subways and worrying about Tilly out here with the savages. Steven had been mugged twice last year.

  Tilly had insisted on moving the camp after the intrusion, back from the river but not too far, since they still needed water and Alice was still taking measurements. It was a lot of work for nothing. Tilly was setting up the tent again when she realized she was being watched.

  From a distance they still looked like Indians. Tilly saw shadows of their shapes between the trees. They paced her when she went to the river for water. She wondered how she’d ever be able to bathe again, knowing or not knowing they were there. She wouldn’t even brush her teeth. She went back to camp and argued with Alice about setting a watch at night.

  By then it was afternoon. Alice had made lunch. “We can decide that later,” she said. “There will be plenty of time to decide that later.” But later they came right into the camp, and they didn’t look like Indians at all. Their heads were hairless and flattened uniformly in the back. The features on their faces were human enough to be recognizable: two eyes deep set into pockets of puffy skin and two nostrils flush with the rest of the face, expanding and contracting slightly when they breathed. Their mouths were large and mobile. They had a human mix of carnivorous and herbivorous teeth. If Tilly had only seen one she might have thought it a mutation of some sort, or the result of disease or accident. In books she had seen pictures of humans deformed to a similar degree. But these were all the same. They were aliens. She told Alice so.

  Alice was not sure. There was nothing off-world about their clothing, drapes of an undyed loose weave, covering the same parts of the body that humans felt compelled to conceal. She pointed to the tampons, which dangled by their strings from cloth belts. “They’ve taken trophies,” said Alice. “They’ve got our scalps. Doesn’t that strike you as rath
er primitive for a race with interstellar capabilities?” Alice invited them into the tent.

  Tilly did not follow. Tilly had the sense to be terrified. She was ready to run, had a clear path to the river, hardly stopped to notice that flight would have meant abandoning Alice. But there were more and more of them. She never had the chance. On the way into the tent one veered toward Tilly. She ducked away, but the arm was longer than she expected; the hand landed on her shoulder. There was an extra flexibility in the fingers, an additional joint, but Tilly didn’t notice it then. The hand was cooler than her own skin. She could feel it through her cotton shirt and it pulsed, or else that was her own heartbeat she felt. She was so frightened she fainted. It was a decision she made; she remembered this later. A blackening void behind her eyes and her own voice warning her that she was going to faint. Shall we stop? the voice asked, and Tilly said, No, no, let’s do it, let’s get out of here.

  The clasps of the tent door clicked together like rosary beads as it was brushed to one side. Breakfast had arrived. The dishes were from Tilly’s and Alice’s own kits. Tilly’s was handed to her. Alice’s was set on the floor by the door. One of them stayed to watch as Alice and Tilly ate.

  Tilly’s plate had a tiny orange on it, porridge made of their own farinha, and a small cooked fish. There were crackers from their own store. Alice was given only the crackers and fewer of them. From the very first there had been this difference in their treatment. Of course, Tilly shared her food with Alice. Tilly had to move onto Alice’s pad to do this; Alice would never come to Tilly. She made Tilly beg her to eat some of Tilly’s breakfast, because there was never enough food for two people. “What kind of fish do you think this is?” Tilly asked Alice, taking a bit of it and making Alice take a bite.