“I wouldn’t be surprised. You could ask.” The stranger nodded again at the departing liner. “A ship like that,” he said, “goes everywhere. In six months, it goes all around the world. Through Suez, through the Med. You could get off in Genoa or Barcelona. Or even all the way to Florida.”
Kwan looked at the ship. “America,” he said.
Ananayel
I really don’t like to do it in such a fashion, so sloppily, leaving these anomalies around, these quasi-miracles, like loose ends in a popular novel. Locked doors that open, alarms that do not sound.
It’s the haste that causes it, of course, His desire to get this mess cleaned up once and for all. So I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long run if I make a bit more of a mess along the way. It does offend the perfectionist in me, though, I must admit that.
And I do have to be careful that none of my principal performers notice these aberrations from the laws of physics. Fortunately, this is a skeptical age; belief in miracles is not widespread. There have been times and places in human history when I would never have gotten away with these slapdash methods, but they are long gone. Today’s humans would much rather believe they are being tricked; alternatively, “there must be an explanation,” which they simply have not yet quite worked out.
Still, I can’t help feeling rueful. Oh, if only I had been called on in an age worthy of my talents. On the other hand, I do increasingly see why He has had enough.
6
In São Sebastião, they talked with the sort of priest who believed that life on Earth was in any case irrelevant, that pain and suffering could only ensure greater joy and harmony in the next world, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly would be punished with horrible fire in the hereafter. He was not, as he told them proudly, an activist priest.
How, Maria Elena wondered, could such a man be any use at all to her employer, a doctor from WHO, the World Health Organization, a man who believed that life on Earth was all we have, that pain and suffering must be alleviated whenever and wherever possible, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly should be wrenched out of society like diseased rootstock from a vineyard? But in São Sebastião, there was no one else; the Administration Section doctor visited the village less than once a month and his records were useless, as they already knew. Only Father Tomaz had the statistics, the births and deaths, the illnesses, the deformities, all the spoor of the chemical assassin.
Maria Elena translated as best she could, as unemotionally as she could. Beside her, Jack — Dr. John Auston, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. — ploddingly asked his questions, filling in the spaces on the forms, writing his comments in his tiny illegible hieroglyphics in deep black ink. Maria Elena — Maria Elena Rodriguez, of Alta Campa, Brazil, later of Rio, most recently of Brasilia — translated Jack’s dry questions into rough-toned Portuguese, translated the priest’s indifferent and querulous answers, and kept her own personality firmly out of the equation.
Even her voice. A rich contralto, she kept it muted and flat, with none of the full-throated power that used to resound through the great music halls of São Paulo and Bio, when the crowds would rise to their feet, weeping and applauding, roaring the choruses with her, she striding back and forth on the stage, loving them, loving herself.
She never strode any more. Never sang.
The three sat in the shade of a large tree beside the squat, blunt adobe church, on folding chairs brought out from its dark interior, in which two old women in black, not together, whispered their prayers, their s’s enlacing in the air like the ghosts of snakes. Some distance away, in a brown field, their pilot sat in the shade of his plane reading fumetti, comic books that use staged photos instead of drawings. Behind them, the village baked in the sun, most of the residents away at work in the factory out of sight beyond the brown hills, the children away at their classes in the factory schooclass="underline" one of the benefits the factory had brought, to make up for the death and horror it had also brought.
Father Tomaz’s bland recital of children born dead, children born without arms, without eyes, without brains, poured through the transitional vessel of Maria Elena, unsullied by any trace of passion. Maria Elena’s mind was full of her own two dead children, but nothing of them, nothing of herself, touched her words, neither to the priest nor to the doctor.
What would Father Tomaz say if she were to tell him about her failed children, about Paco’s leaving her, about her agreement with Paco’s conviction that she was now foul — befouled? That Paco had died before their argument was resolved? He would say, “God is testing you, my child. He works in mysterious ways. We cannot understand Him, we can only bow to His will, secure in the knowledge that our suffering is recorded in Heaven, and that our reward is in Heaven as well, with our God, and our Savior, and His angels and saints, in eternal joy. Amen.”
Jack’s forms eventually were all filled in, Father Tomaz’s recital of the plague years was finished, and the three stood from the folding chairs to stretch. They carried the chairs back into the church — the sibilant old women continued, unending, unquenchable — and when they were back outside, in the sun, Father Tomaz said to Maria Elena, “Would you tell him, we don’t need medicine. What we need is faith in God.”
“No,” Maria Elena said. “I won’t tell him that.” And she allowed at last the hatred to show in her eyes.
The priest, offended, stepped back a pace, glaring at her. Jack said, “What was that about?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Today’s pilot was new, a skinny brown man with a bandit moustache. He got to his feet as he saw them coming across the field from the church, and grinned beneath that moustache. He’d probably been bored, even with his comics, which he now tossed up into the plane onto the seat beside his own.
As they walked, Jack took Maria Elena’s elbow, ostensibly because the dry cracked field was uneven, bumpy, a little awkward to walk on, but really, she knew, just to touch her. They’d been working together now for four months, and after the first month he’d begun to pursue her with a kind of lighthearted determination, not as though he didn’t really care, but as though his caring had to be kept swathed in protective padding. This caution, or self-protection, or whatever it was, made it easier for Maria Elena to fend him off, without ever having to explain that it wasn’t him but herself she was rejecting. In the last few weeks his pursuit had become more reflexive, absent-minded, ritualistic; they’d settled into a vaguely flirtatious but essentially comfortable relationship that could last for as long as they worked together.
He was a decent man, John Auston, thirty-seven years old, tall and awkwardly husky, as though his skeleton had never been properly hooked together but still jangled and skidded within its padding of flesh. He was methodical, quiet, devoted to his work for WHO, and if Maria Elena were in the market for a man, here was one, an excellent one. But she was not in the market, never would be in the market, and in any event Jack was not really unencumbered.
The fact was, Jack was married and divorced. He had an ex-wife far away up in the United States, and though he would never admit it, Maria Elena could tell that he still loved her. Or still needed her, which came to the same thing.
Jack always avoided talking about that ex-wife of his who, when their daughter was three, had packed up one day and taken the child and crossed the entire United States from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to Oregon, simply to get away from him. Maria Elena had no sense of the woman, whether she was a good or a bad person, strong or weak or anything about her, and yet sometimes she felt she understood why that wife had left. There had come a point, there must have come a point, when she had simply grown tired of steering him. He was so easily steered, as she herself had steered his flirtatiousness into this unthreatening shoal where it now safely stagnated, and yet how could you feel anything but tarnished if you devoted your life to treating another human being as though he were nothing but a docile ox?