“I owe you, Maury,” Gammage said. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting your ass on the line like this.”
“You know how you can repay me.”
“I’ll push the story hard as I can, man.”
Margery shooed Gammage back into the bathroom.
“All right, all right.” He grabbed a magazine off the colonel’s nightstand. “If you order food, get me something. I didn’t have time for breakfast.”
Margery closed the bathroom door, removed the towel from her hair; then she pulled back the bedcovers and slipped beneath them, while the colonel watched in bewilderment. She wriggled about, dropped the bath towel on the floor beside the bed. “If they come back, we better give them something juicy to report.” She smiled wickedly. “Well, don’t keep me waiting, Mauricio. Take off your clothes.”
To the colonel’s great discomfort, as he disrobed he realized he was wearing a pair of under shorts decorated with little jet planes, a humorous gift that someone had presented him the previous month when he was visiting Puerto Cortez. Seeing them, Margery affected amazement. “Oh, my!” she said. “Should I be afraid?”
The colonel felt himself blushing. He slid beneath the sheets on the opposite side of the bed and lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling. The tension of anxiety had been replaced by a different kind of tension. He wanted to turn his head toward her, but held himself rigid, attuned to the sound of Margery’s breath. Then the bathroom door burst open; he started up guiltily.
“Golly gee.” Gammage grinned down at them. “I was gonna say, ‘Get a room,’ but I guess you already got one.” He shuffled the magazines on the nightstand. “Got anything to read in English?”
“No,” said the colonel stiffly, and Margery said, “Get the hell outta here, Jerry!”
Gammage’s grin broadened. “Damn, I wish I had my camera. The guys back in Atlanta would pay serious bucks for this picture.”
“Jerry!”
“I’m gone.” He chose another magazine, looked down at them fondly. “You kids have fun.”
The bathroom door closed and the silence in the room seemed to thicken. The sun broke from the clouds, and pale yellow light cast a complicated shadow on the bed. A scent of gasoline drifted on the breeze. The colonel’s chest felt banded by heavy restraints.
“Try and relax,” Margery told him.
“I’m trying.”
After a second she touched his shoulder. He stiffened at the contact, but when she left her hand there, whispering, “Just take it easy, okay?” his nervousness began to ebb and his breathing became steady.
“Know what Jerry says about you?”
“I can only guess,” said the colonel.
“He says you’ve got the strangest life of anyone he’s ever met.”
“I suppose it must seem so.”
“He also says you’re the only honest man he knows.”
“He doesn’t have enough information to make that judgment.”
“You don’t think of yourself as honest?”
A thin stream of radio music trickled from the street, and the colonel caught the words “…you never returned to me…” before it faded. “Not especially,” he said.
“I think you’re honest. I’m not overlooking the tricks everyone plays on themselves, the little deceits that make up so much of our lives. They’re inescapable. But I think you’re honest when it counts.”
As she spoke he cut his eyes toward her. He had assumed she was looking at him, but she was on her side, with her eyes closed, as if she were talking to someone in her thoughts, not to him. He took in the white curve of her shoulder, the little shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her face seemed softer than it had the night before, dazed and girlish, and he had the idea that whomever she was thinking of, whether him or some other, her thoughts of that person were slow and reflective and warm.
“I hope we get a chance to talk sometime when things are different,” she said. “When we can concentrate on what we’re saying.”
The colonel wanted to say that he was fairly concentrated at that moment, but knew this would strike a wrong note. Her voice lulled him, and he closed his own eyes, listening.
“I’d like you to tell me about your life,” Margery went on. “Not so I can understand it. I’d just like to hear you tell about it.” She left a pause. “Do you know what a diorama is? This circular strip of metal… it’s not always metal. Sometimes it’s canvas and there are lights behind it. But it’s painted with all these little scenes from life, from one culture usually, and it goes around and around. And even if you watch for a long time, if you come to know which scenes are about to appear, after a while you realize you’re seeing them differently. Noticing different things about them. That’s how your life sounds to me. It’s like you’ve been living in a diorama. Viewing the same scenes over and over from this odd distance…” She sighed. “The adrenaline’s wearing off. I feel so tired.”
“Go to sleep, then.”
“I’m tired, not sleepy. How about you?”
“If you keep talking, I think I might sleep.”
“Am I that boring?”
“No, it’s the sound of your voice, it’s nice… it makes me peaceful.”
“Really? That’s sweet.” Some seconds glided by and then she said, “Now I can’t think of anything to talk about.”
“Tell me about your life.”
“God! Now that is boring!”
“It wasn’t boring today, was it?”
“Today was unusual.” She shifted about, and her breath stirred his hair. “I did produce a feature once in Borneo. We spent nearly a month there. The forests were on fire—that’s what the feature was about. We were based in a town on the coast. Sumarinda. A nice air-conditioned hotel. But a lot of the time we were inland, closer to the fires. When the wind was right, ash fell from the sky and covered everything. The river, the land. There were days when all of us were gray. The Dayaks, the Americans… everyone. We were a single gray race. Except we were running around, shooting film, taking hits of oxygen, and the Dayaks were just hanging onto life. We ferried a few of them out on the helicopters, but the rest simply wouldn’t be moved, even though some of the old people were dying. Some of the footage we got was amazing. Once we were up near the edge of the fire. All you could hear was roaring and crackling. One of the cameramen waded across a river so he could shoot into the flames. He’d just found a good position when a deer broke from the trees nearby and began running alongside the bank. It was burning. A fringe of flame licking up from its back. Deer fur… it’s tough, you know. It’s not like cat fur. It wouldn’t burn easily. Maybe burning pitch drizzled down onto its back from a tree. Anyway, I couldn’t hear if it was making any cry, the fire was so loud, but it must have been crazy with pain. Just below where our cameraman crossed was a waterfall and a deep pool beneath it, and if the deer had gone into the water, it might have been all right. But it kept running parallel to the bank, leaping over fallen trees, avoiding burning branches, incredibly graceful, trying to outrun the pain. It almost seemed to be flying. Like the fire on its back was empowering it. I remember thinking it didn’t look real. Life never composed this kind of image, I told myself. It was something out of a book. A fantasy novel or a fairy tale. But when I was editing the footage I thought maybe this was how life works. Sometimes out of all the mess and clutter and sadness, it says something. It speaks what for us would be a word or a sentence or a poem, and mostly we don’t notice… or else we’re not around when it happens. But that one time we were there, we could bear witness. Out of all the smoke and flame and death, this perfect burning deer…”
When the colonel woke he was on his stomach, head turned toward the bedside table. Resting thereon was the indigo lizard, its tiny feet dark against the white shiny paper of a magazine ad, its orange eyes shining faintly in the twilight. The sight did not disturb him. If it was only a lizard, it was a pretty one; if it was something more, then he doubted it was dangerous. He had never thought that, he realized. It had merely unnerved him. Staring at it, he began to think of the eyes as lenses, and wondered what lay behind them. A speck of bloody tissue, or a scrap of unpredictable genius given form by some miraculous congruency… or was it both? He thought about Margery’s Borneo story. How unexpected it had been, seeming to arise from her like the deer from the burning forest. Perhaps in each instance it had been less a remarkable occurrence than a case of low expectations exceeded.