“Should I go in to see her?” Joshua asked.
“I don’t think we even need to let her know you’re here.”
“She still associates me with that night, doesn’t she? I let it slip where Mom and I had found Bill, and I’m still the evil messenger of the Rivenbark household.”
“It’s been a damn long time, honey. Peggy’s convinced herself that you’re dead. This probably isn’t the best time to show her you’re still kicking.”
“Okay, I’ll play. No ghosts for Grandma.”
“Good.”
Before he could ask Anna about their mother, she rose by pushing off against his shoulder and beckoned him into the sunny kitchen on the house’s southwest side.
Green glass canisters for sugar, flour, and tea. Knotty-pine cabinets. A bay window overlooking a margin of neat, winter-brown lawn, the kind of lawn that cries out for touch-football players and blithely romping dogs. Van Luna’s suburban sprawl was nowhere in evidence here.
Joshua sat at a wrought-iron table with a Formica top while Anna served him coffee and leftover biscuits. When the heater kicked on, she spoke without whispering for the first time since he had entered the house.
“You just about killed Mom, you little twerp. For two years she was strung out like an elastic clothesline, almost ready to snap. She tore up Eden in His Dreams and couldn’t get anything else going. The third year, well, she spent that right here in Van Luna, as if this house were a sanatorium for terminally bereaved females.”
“Where is she now, Anna?”
“Maybe I’m not ready to tell you.”
Alarmed, Joshua ate crumbs off his fingertips. More than likely he deserved to be taunted in this tender, hair-trigger fashion. If Anna really squeezed, though, he would go off like his grandfather’s heart, in either apoplectic anger or tearful remorse. The latter if they were lucky. He remembered how Hugo had used to ascend from a grumbling snit into one of his infrequent but terrifying Panamanian eruptions….
“You got any Fritos, Anna?”
She turned and faced him, her arms folded on the ledge of her pregnancy. “Jesus, you’ve got the recall of an elephant.”
“Dumbo the Dinothere at your service.”
“I remember almost everything about that little expedition—but, of course, I was twelve. I ought to remember.”
“What about Mom? Where is she?”
Anna crossed the little kitchen, walking on her heels, and patted him on the head. “Neat diversion, John-John. I got a cable from her yesterday. You won’t be seeing her this year.”
“Why not, for Christ’s sake?”
“She’s got a contract from Vireo to do a book on the Spanish monarchy—the impact of its restoration on the people and on European politics in general. She’s in Madrid. She plans to be in Spain for at least six months. She wanted to beat a possible moratorium on air travel—that’s why she took off so suddenly.
It was my year to babysit Peggy, anyway.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll write and tell her you’re in Zarakal.”
“You can’t. I shouldn’t have told you. You can tell her when you see her in person. Then swear her to secrecy. Cross your heart and hope to die.”
“Are you a commando or something, Johnny?”
“Or something, I guess. It’s a kind of grandiose depth-psychology therapy for my lifelong affliction.”
“The one you’re learning to control?”
“Right. At government expense. You won’t see my eyeballs roll up into my head this trip, Sis.”
“Unless I shoot you.” She sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “That’s why you’re going to Zarakal, isn’t it? A correlation between that country and the landscapes of your dreams.”
“My lips are sealed.”
Conscientiously concealing his presence from his grandmother, Joshua stayed through Christmas. Peggy Rivenbark lay abed like a superannuated angel, decaying into the expensive linen mulch of paradise and dreaming for the unborn great-grandchild in Anna’s womb a future of crash-proof spaceliners and pristine colony planets. Well, maybe not. She was an old woman who had been born five years after Kitty Hawk, and it was more likely that she hallucinated not the future but the past. Meanwhile, she henpecked heaven with her prayers.
What was it that Woody Kaprow had said? The future is forever inaccessible…. It has no pursuable resonances. Joshua was not sure he believed that. The past, after all, was the friable medium in which the future germinated. And the present was an illusion, another aspect of the great material lie known among Hindus as maya….
So much for metaphysics.
For fear that the sight of him would kill her, Joshua purposely did not reveal himself to Peggy Rivenbark.
Anna and he spent most of the holidays talking. When it came time for him to leave, they had exhausted hundreds of topics without depleting their stores of mutual affection. The nametag on his uniform jacket might say Kampa, but he was also a Monegal, and maybe when he got back from his tour of duty in the Horn, they would finally be reunited as a family. Anna and he affirmed this hope aloud over and over again, but on the transport aircraft flying back to Eglin, Joshua had his doubts. His past was a dream, and the future was inaccessible.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In many ways, the period after the unexpected rainfall—the five or six months after I discovered Helen’s pregnancy—comprised an Edenic idyll of the kind Jacqueline Tru’s father had conjured from the dream stories I told him in the Mekong Restaurant. Our little village became Shangri-la.
Suddenly we had plenty to eat. No one had to bust a gut either foraging or hunting. Occasional hominid killers like leopards and hyenas ignored us to concentrate on the gazelles, zebras, and antelope that had filtered back into our area from the vast grasslands south of Mount Tharaka. I was dreaming this idyll.
Submerged in my experience without benefit of continuous rational consciousness, I may have been more alive, alert, and accepting than at any other time in either of my pasts. Bearded and sinewy, I glided among the Minids like a dispossessed spirit from their own uncertain future.
Helen glowed. Her face shone the way licorice shines, her belly the way a jawbreaker sucked down to streaky indigo glistens against the palate. Her several bouts of nausea before and after Mary’s death had of course signaled the habiline equivalent of morning sickness. Her metabolism had finally adjusted to the changes wrought by conception, though, and now she was a candidate for the “after” photograph in a health spa ad, sleek and vivacious in spite of that abdominal bulge. Half my mind began to wonder when she would bear our child, the other half to formulate lullabies of haunting prehistoric sweetness.
We were people of leisure.
During this same period I began to rise before dawn to lift my own wordless aubades to savannah and sky. These songs came out of me from sources unidentifiable then and altogether untappable now.
Although during my adolescence and young manhood I had written poetry prompted by some of my spirit-traveling episodes, my new songs were almost entirely spontaneous. I awoke them from preconsciousness and released them to the light as crude melodies.
Other habilines—not only Minids, but Huns in their high fastnesses southwest of us—answered my songs. The melancholy baying of wolves and the uncanny arias of humpback whales resonated alike in our voices, and the timbre of our singing seemed to impart outline and solidity to that quasi-prehistoric landscape. To put it another way, our morning songs made my dream world real.