Ancient of Days

PART THREE: Heritor’s Home

On the first anniversary of Tiny Paul’s birth, Caroline and I were married in Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the Emory University campus. Over the autumn, I had prepared for this event by divesting myself of both Paradise Farm and the West Bank. My house and grounds (excluding only the burial plot near Ruben Decker’s place) I sold to a pecan-growing cooperative based in Americus, Georgia.

The restaurant, of course, went to Livia George. With a lawyer’s help, I arranged to receive a small percentage of her monthly profit for the next ten years, but conveyed full title to her and dissociated myself from the West Bank’s operation. If Livia George contracted any debts, a possibility that her experience and managerial skills greatly minimized, I had no responsibility for them. I wanted only to be free of Beulah Fork, its people, and my past there.

RuthClaire and Adam did not attend the wedding. In September, they had moved out of their house on Hurt Street to begin a month-long tour of England and mainland Europe. From October through December, they lived on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Both were working, but no specimen of their art or word of its character got back to the States. By the middle of January, they had returned to the Western Hemisphere, as a postcard from Mexico City attested. By late February, as another hasty card told us, they were living in a stucco beach cottage near Rutherford’s Port on the island of Montaraz, Adam’s birthplace. Neither Caroline nor I knew what to make of this last development, which took us wholly by surprise.

For a while, I had toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant in Atlanta. I dropped it not only because the city has eating places the way the Sahara has sand, but also because I was tired of the restrictive lifestyle. I had kept the West Bank going for nearly ten years, and the thought of resurrecting that routine for another decade turned my brains to tepid Creole gumbo. So, with David Blau’s consent and encouragement, I approached several of the artists at Abraxas to offer my services as business manager and artist’s representative. Six of these young people accepted, and I recruited other clients from Atlanta’s talented art students and independent craftspeople. By building rapport with art dealers, gallery directors, museum curators, and department-store buyers (ordinarily, a casual reference to my past association with RuthClaire turned doubtful frowns to expectant smiles), I was soon earning money for my clients. Although I had a small office near Emory Village, I liked my new work primarily because I was not shackled to a desk.

Caroline continued to teach her classes and to conduct periodic interviews with the Cuban refugees still in detention in Atlanta’s aging federal prison. Like an armada of doomed mariners sailing toward the edge of the world, the Freedom Flotilla of 1980 kept receding into the past; and most of the prison’s current detainees had paperwork identifying them as hard-core criminals. Caroline had no wish to put these people out on the streets, but the cases of three or four young men deeply troubled her. She saw these prisoners as captives of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and feared they would remain wards of the state forever.

Our marriage was working. Caroline never scolded me for letting the dental floss slip down into its plastic container, although I did that a lot. More important, neither of us currently wanted children. Later, T. P. having softened my objection to parenthood, we might consider adoption, but not now. There was too much to learn about each other and too much to do. We were learning. We were doing.

Montaraz is a Spanish word meaning wild, primitive, or uncivilized. As a masculine noun, it means forester. On the island by that name (a hand-shaped volcanic jut occupying about twenty-eight square miles in Manzanillo Bay), coffee plantations now compose the bulk of its accessible “forest.” A backpacker avoiding these industry-owned plantations might stumble upon a stand of mahogany or rosewood, but, for the most part, the island’s poor people have denuded the slopes to plant subsistence crops like cassava, yams, and beans. Today, then, a resident of Montaraz might fairly be called a farmer or a coffee-company employee, but none warrants the name of forester. A few who scrounge livings from neither private land nor industry jobs, however, do warrant labels such as wild and uncivilized, and many of these few included—at least until the early 1960s—the retiring descendants of the habiline slaves whom Louis Rutherford brought to Montaraz from Zanzibar in 1838. But their history is obscure, and many people alive today on Montaraz do not believe in them at all.

Most of the island’s population lives in the only noteworthy town, Rutherford’s Port, or in various fishing villages or tourist resorts along the many miles of twisty coast. In terms of health and economics, the native human population may be slightly better off than their counterparts on Haiti proper, but that assertion invites debate. Even a poverty-level citizen of Atlanta would incur envy in the waste archipelago of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s rule.

Until 1822, Montaraz had belonged to Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), but with Jean-Pierre Boyer’s subjugation of the Spanish-speaking sections of Hispaniola in that year, it became the property of Haiti. The Dominicans expelled the Haitians from their country in 1844, but by this time Louis Rutherford, an eminent American citizen, had acquired Montaraz by outright purchase. Therefore, although equidistant between Haiti and Santo Domingo, it was legally (albeit quite irregularly) another Caribbean territory of the United States. Rutherford died during the Dominican uprising against the Haitians, and followers of Pedro Santana quickly reclaimed the island as their own. Rutherford’s widow and grown sons protested to the new Democratic administration of James K. Polk, who had campaigned as an ardent expansionist, and Polk threatened the Dominicans with an invasion of marines. Judiciously, the Dominicans heeded the threat.

For another thirty years, then, the heirs of the late U.S. ambassador to Haiti ruled like kings on Montaraz. In 1874, however, Peter Martin Rutherford, the oldest grandson of the clan’s patriarch, negotiated an agreement with President Nissage Saget returning the island to Haitian sovereignty. This agreement gave the Rutherfords two important guarantees: (1) nonrescindable ownership of an estate occupying one fifth of the island, and (2) nonrevocable use of the English name Rutherford’s Port for the island’s only real town. Saget was able to conclude this agreement, where other Haitian leaders, notably Faustin Soulouque, had failed, because he was a sensible man with no major vices or reason-crippling ambitions. Peter Martin Rutherford liked him. The transfer was a fait accompli before the Dominicans had time to register the fact, and Montaraz has remained an unquestioned part of Haiti’s political sphere until the present day.

Montaraz appears on very few maps of the Caribbean. Early maps by Spanish cartographers feature it clearly enough, but maps drawn and printed during the twenty-year dictatorship of Boyer omit it completely. Although inescapable common knowledge to locals, the island’s presence in Manzanillo Bay remained obscure to outsiders through the 1870s because the Rutherfords did not wish to advertise it. After the negotiated Haitian takeover, however, Saget and his successors discouraged its appearance on maps as a peculiar kind of sop to Dominican pride. The Haitians apparently believed that if both sides pretended that Montaraz wasn’t there, their Spanish-speaking neighbors would shelve any strategies to reconquer it. You can’t plant a flag on invisible real estate. That the island was visible from the mid-northern coast of Hispaniola, if not on maps, both sides contentedly ignored.

Few Americans—few civilized people anywhere—had heard of Montaraz until Brian Nollinger broke the story of Adam’s presence on Paradise Farm to a reporter from the Atlanta Constitution. The notion that a habiline remnant might yet exist on the little island sent media people, anthropologists, professional adventurers, and scam artists scurrying for permission to visit Montaraz. Although American and Canadian citizens do not need passports to go to Haiti for thirty days or fewer, the Duvalier government—abetted by the Austin-Antilles Corporation, the licensed proprietor of most of the country’s coffee plantations—restricts travel to Montaraz to those who have made special application. In the wake of the story headlined REKNOWNED BEULAH FORK ARTIST / HARBORING PREHISTORIC HUMAN, these applications began arriving in Port-au-Prince by the bagful.

Very little came of this goal-oriented flurry of tourism, however, because the first eager visitors to Montaraz could find no habilines. They found blacks, mulattos, Spanish-Arawak survivors, jaded white Europeans, and affluent Japanese in polite, businesslike tour groups. They even found a puzzled party of middle-aged Kansans wearing Bermuda shorts, Italian sandals, and jaunty straw hats with green plastic visors. What they could not find, no matter how hard they searched, was anything remotely resembling a habiline. By this time, the government had placed a moratorium on issuing visitor permits to Montaraz, and word of the first arrivals’ lack of success began to migrate stateside. When Alistair Patrick Blair published his paper in Nature debunking Nollinger’s extravagant tale, interest in locating Adam’s relatives waned markedly. Pretty soon, applications to the Haitian Ministry of Tourism for special permits dwindled to the previous steady, but modest, level.

After the deluge, silence. More or less.

Anthropologists who accepted Dr. Nollinger’s contention that Adam was a living representative of Homo habilis, a manlike species presumed extinct for two million years, argued either that the Rutherford Remnant on Montaraz had been absorbed into the general population or that anti-Duvalier gunrunners and revolutionaries had press-ganged the habilines into service and scattered them across the Caribbean. (Anthropologists supporting Brian Nollinger, by the way, could be counted on one hand; the popular press canonized them as flamboyant idiot savants, good for human-interest copy but not for any reliable word on Adam’s origins.) Scientists opposed to Nollinger’s point of view declared that RuthClaire’s unusual husband was a small black man with certain archaic bone structures for which the processes of genetic atavism could easily account. No one could find other “habilines” on Montaraz because there were none. Adam was unique in many respects, but he did not depart so drastically from the human “norm,” whatever that might be, to require Linnaean pigeonholing as a protohuman. Besides, his intellectual capacity—his development of art, language, and a personal metaphysics—made nonsense of the idea that he was an evolutionary primitive.

Three months after the double funeral at Paradise Farm, Brian Nollinger’s point of view received some convincing support from the surgeons who had operated on Adam to enable him to speak. With permission, they released to the press several X-rays of Adam’s skull. Taken from different angles, these X-rays created a small sensation. Never before had RuthClaire or Adam let anyone examine him with an eye to precise physical measurement or speculative comparison. These X-rays, along with the plastic surgeons’ computer-generated “blueprints” of Adam’s head, revealed that he had a cranial capacity of 870 cubic centimeters. This figure exceeded that of most known fossil representatives of Homo habilis, but not by much. Even more spectacular was the discovery that in its overall shape and proportions, Adam’s skull bore a point-by-point resemblance to Skull ER-1470 in the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi. Because 1470 belonged to a creature once identified by Louis Leakey as an H. habilis individual, this startling resemblance led many paleoanthropologists to classify Adam, too, as a habiline. What RuthClaire had surmised about him on the first day she saw him, the scientific community had now also officially conceded. Even Alistair Patrick Blair had begun to come around.

By this time, however, the Montarazes had left the country. A few of their friends in Atlanta, among them the Blaus and the Loyds, knew their general whereabouts, but refused to divulge the information to reporters or scientists. RuthClaire and Adam had gone away to escape the public’s prying, to renew themselves on fresh and exotic shores. Moreover, I privately suspected that they mailed the postcards pinpointing their “current” locations only after having made up their minds to go elsewhere. Once they reached this new place, they lay low. Lying low, I told myself, was a survival strategy at which a Lolitabu habiline dispositionally excelled. If he did not want to be found, he would not be found—except by the rarest of accidents.

But the Montarazes apparently wanted to be found. Soon after she had sent us a postcard from Rutherford’s Port, RuthClaire wrote a bona fide letter. It reached us early in April. Here is what it said:

Caroline and I decided to go. Our honeymoon over the Christmas break had consisted of five days in Savannah and two on Tybee Island, a week of blustery weather during which we had dreamed of the voluptuous dazzle of summer. Our trip to Montaraz, then, would be an improvement upon our December honeymoon. We would combine business with pleasure. Caroline hadn’t committed to teaching a summer class, and I could set my own hours. That we could deduct almost everything we spent as business expenses had escaped neither of us—the Montarazes had arranged matters to make that possible.

The P.S. to RuthClaire’s letter disturbed me. Last summer, Brian had gone to the Dominican Republic for Austin-Antilles Corporation; now he had shown up on Montaraz at a great time for someone who had once told the world that Adam was a habiline. Had Brian gotten a tip through the paleoanthropological grapevine that A. P. Blair was traveling to Rutherford’s Port for some undisclosed, but promising, reason? I looked at Caroline, remembering her former interest in the man, and my heart misgave me. In my most self-critical moments, I told myself that I had caught her on the rebound.

“When’s the last time you heard from your old flame?”

Caroline’s eyes cut across me like lasers. “In January. He sent a card wishing us happiness and long life. I’d told him we were getting married, and he sent that card.”

“Why tell him anything? Why rub it in?”

“Brian meant something to me once,” she said. “I still consider him a friend. I like to stay in touch with my friends.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve seen every note Brian’s written me since he left Atlanta. There’ve been four, all but the last one mailed before we married. What’s the matter with you?”

“He’s in Montaraz, Caroline, and I don’t want to see him.”

“Well, I had nothing to do with his showing up there, and I won’t pussyfoot around everyplace we go on that damn island trying to avoid him. If I see him, I’ll speak to him. He may not even be there when we arrive. He may have taken a holiday from his work in the Dominican. He may have been trying to satisfy his natural curiosity about Montaraz. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Get off my case, Paul. I’m not Brian’s pen-pal paramour.”

The conversation ended. I’d almost provoked a serious quarrel, but Caroline had not let me. She’d held her anger in check. As a penance for my boorishness, I took her to dinner at Bugatti’s, and we spent nearly the entire meal making our travel plans.

In mid-May, I drove to Paradise Farm to disinter T. P.’s ashes. The Hothlepoya County Sanitarian, Jim Stevens, approved my request, and a new owner of my former property escorted me to the burial plot, which, in fulfillment of a clause authorizing the sale, his cooperative had enclosed with a treated-redwood fence and a hedge of flowering shrubs. I did the digging myself, and it took only twenty minutes to unearth the miniature casket holding the urn. I removed the urn without pulling the casket clear of the grave and then refilled the hole with displaced soil and sod. A small pink-marble headstone with a brass plaque remained to mark the site. I let the plaque stay, a memorial as much to Adam’s idealism as to the sadly brief life of my murdered godson.

In June, Caroline and I flew to Miami.

The next day we set sail aboard the Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship ’Zepaules for Cap-Haïtien. Our voyage was easy and uneventful. We docked in Cap-Haïtien on a mild summer evening, spent the night in a plush hotel, and took a tour boat to Rutherford’s Port with a small group of French-speaking Europeans who held themselves aloof from Caroline and me.

On the boat, the only person who took any notice of us, and who smiled at us each time he caught our attention, was a dark-skinned member of Duvalier’s Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. This militia is better known both locally and abroad as the “Tontons Macoutes,” a folkloric appellation implying that its “volunteers” are evil uncles who sometimes bag up unoffending citizens and, without charge or trial, spirit them away to nowhere, never to be heard of again. Our smiling Tonton Macoute wore the rural uniform of the species, namely faded blue jeans, a faded denim vest, scuffed military boots, a crushed black beret, and a pair of huge mirror-lens sunglasses. These monstrous lenses led me to suspect that the man was spying on us even when he appeared to be half-facing away. On a shoulder sling, he carried an ancient Springfield rifle whose barrel he had lovingly oiled and whose stock he’d either waxed or lacquered. A bulge under his denim vest told of another weapon, a revolver, in an armpit holster. He made me nervous, this smiler. And, to my dismay, he sauntered across the deck to the rail at which Caroline and I were standing. Rather like a Muslim, he touched his forehead in greeting.

“Americans, yes?”

We admitted to the charge.

“On what business do you come?”

I looked at Caroline. How much to tell this bogeyman? Was he making small talk, or were his questions subtle commands for self-disclosure? His teeth, when he smiled, looked like nicotine-stained cuff links—that big, that yellow.

Caroline played coy. “How do you know we haven’t come for pleasure?”

“Rutherford’s Port is, uh, ennuyeux. Dull, I think you say. Real pleasure-seekers go to Port-au-Prince. Habitation Leclerc, maybe. Those gentlemen—” he nodded at three of the French-speaking travelers—“are coffee buyers from the mother country; not playboys, not drug dealers. They come to Montaraz to work. You, too, I bet.”

“Does it make a difference?” I said, more hostile than inquisitive.

The Tonton Macoute kept smiling. “I am practicing my English is all. Sorry to trouble you so.” He touched his forehead again.

To make up for my rudeness, Caroline disclosed our names and said that we had come for business and pleasure. We were friends of Adam and RuthClaire Montaraz, the artists. Had he heard of them? (But of course.) Did he know anything about the habiline remnant from which Adam had supposedly sprung?

“Officially, I know nothing. Unofficially, I know it is hard to find this remnant because Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, well, he—” He gave an exaggerated shrug.

“What?” I urged him.

“He encouraged the local houngans—voodoo priests—to cast spells against these creatures. He said they were demons. And the priest most powerful on the island, Odilon Roi, was not only a famous houngan but also local chieftain of the security volunteers. Roi and his men cast bullets as well as spells at the habilines. This was over twenty years ago. A dozen or more of the little cigouaves were shot. My father was a civil volunteer under Roi and he remembers.”

“Duvalier, a medical doctor, thought the habilines were demons?”

“To carry out the vaudun persecution, Monsieur Loyd, yes. He feared any part of the population that had a certain—uniqueness. He thought such persons dangerous. They would corrupt others, or be corrupted. Castroites and Marxists would maybe turn the cigouaves against him. This, you see, made him decide they must go.”

Caroline said, “What would Baby Doc, your current President-for-Life, do if he heard you telling us these things?”

“Is it your wish to inform on me?” asked the macoute, smiling.

“Oh no! But if we went home and had your allegations printed in a newspaper as the story of a talkative civil guard on Montaraz, wouldn’t your loose tongue convict you as a traitor to the late Duvalier’s memory?”

“Things are freer under Baby Doc. Besides, I haven’t said my name, have I?” His big ivory teeth reflected sunlight off the water. “Do you suppose me the only security volunteer on the island?”

“What about all the habiline hunters who swept through here last fall?” I asked. “Did you tell any of those eager people your persecution story?”

“Mais non, Monsieur.”

“Why not?”

“I had not heard it then. It was this recent sweeping-in of foreigners in quest of the cigouaves—the demon habilines—that reminded mon père of la petit terreur of twenty years ago. He told me the story but bade my discretion. It’s foolish to confess to outsiders the crimes of one’s own family. How do Americans say it? Hanging out the dirty laundry for the hoi polloi to gaze upon?”

“But you’re telling us,” Caroline said.

“You are nicer people than the pushy ones who came last year. Also, it’s a good story, and maybe nobody anymore will see the cigouaves again. So what harm?”

“You think they’ve all been wiped out?”

“Oui, Monsieur. A dozen deaths is no very formidable massacre—think of the thousands upon thousands whom Trujillo killed—but on this island it makes a type of genocide.” No longer smiling, he shook his head. “I had nothing to do with it. The sins of the father is not a doctrine I care to embrace.”

“Do you consider Adam Montaraz a demon?”

“Oh, no. He’s a great man, a great artist.” He touched the forward bulge of his beret. “Call upon me, please, if I may be of service to you during your sojourn here.”

“But what’s your name?” Caroline asked.

He looked over his shoulder at us. “Lieutenant Bacalou, Madame and Monsieur Loyd. Ask for me at our security headquarters in Rutherford’s Port.”

Only later did we learn that bacalou is a Creole word for an evil spirit, a demon or a werewolf that feeds on human flesh. But our Tonton Macoute was making no attempt to hide his identity from us; rather, he was giving us the fearful nom de guerre by which his comrades and some of the common people under his jurisdiction already knew him. We also learned that cigouaves, his term for the island’s elusive habiline remnant, has its own superstitious connotations. It refers to another kind of lycanthropic demon, creatures with wolfish bodies and human heads whose singular method of attack results in the violent emasculation of their victims. Lovely: We’d come to an enchanted isle, a land possessed by black magic and primitive dread. The police were bogeys, and anyone who opposed them was an upright piece of meat animated by a malignant spirit. You exorcised the demon by killing its host’s body. Never mind that the rifle-toting exorcists, the Tontons Macoutes, housed malicious demons of their own….

RuthClaire met us in Rutherford’s Port. The city consists of ancient quays, government buildings and churches of a pre-revolutionary Spanish architectural style, a series of palm-lined public squares, a military barracks, and, still at sea level, dozens of private residences designed and built around 1900 by such masters of Gingerbread Gothic as Eugène Maximilien and Léon Mathon. These houses feature balconies, cupolas, and arabesque grillwork even more fanciful than the gimcracks decorating the old Montaraz house in Atlanta. (I was beginning to see why Adam had bought that house.) The yellow bricks used for walkways, foundations, and low decorative walls, RuthClaire told us, had arrived in Rutherford’s Port as ballast in ships coming for the island’s coffee, sisal, and cacao. The most famous house in the city belonged to the grandson of local architect Horacius Dimanche, who’d attended the Paris School of Architecture with Léon Mathon. Later, if we wished, RuthClaire would give us a tour of the Old City.

Above the Old City, climbing the forested flank of the mountain behind it, were two distinct enclaves. On the western side: condominiums of steel and glass, charming old hotels and restaurants (survivors of a recent effort at urban renewal), and a monolithic terra-cotta business complex. On the eastern side: shacks with corrugated tin roofs, slatted or cardboard walls, and doors consisting of rusted scrap metal or ragged woolen blankets. Sunlight ricocheted among these hovels like a bouncing ball above the lyrics of an amelodic song. A sluice of mud ran down the slope of one precarious neighborhood from a broken pump supplying water for half of the hillside’s inhabitants. Shantytown’s only saving grace, in fact, was the open-air market at the foot of the mountain. It boasted colorful pennants, hundreds of booths with thatched roofs, and huge mounds of tropical fruits and vegetables. The bazaar abutted a section of the Old City, through which we rode in RuthClaire’s rented Jeep on our way up the coast to the secluded beach cottage where she and Adam were staying.

“He didn’t come himself,” RuthClaire explained, “because he creates a lingering sensation wherever he goes.”

“What about you?” Caroline said.

“Me? I’m just another American tourist. That’s why I picked you up. Adam’s a local hero, and he’s tired of being mobbed.”

“Don’t they follow you to your house?”

RuthClaire lifted her eyebrows at me. “The people? No. They lack wheels. When we first got here, the press asked for interviews, but we declined. Then Haitian security put out word we weren’t to be bothered. Militiamen with rifles go up and down the road fronting our beach property, patrolling—one or two at a time, on their way back and forth between coastal villages. They’re not actually assigned to us.”

“Tontons Macoutes?”

“That’s not the approved term, Paul.”

“We met one on the boat over from Cap-Haïtien. He used the term. He even took a certain pride in it.”

“They do that, I guess. Instilling terror’s one of their collateral duties. They’ve been good to us, though.”

Caroline said, “Our Tonton Macoute told us the habilines here are extinct, victims of a Duvalier purge in the early sixties.”

“He’s right about the purge, wrong about extinct.”

“How many remain? When will we get to see them?”

RuthClaire laughed. “All in good time.” Still laughing, she swung the Jeep to the left to avoid hitting an old man wearing a straw hat and a polka-dot neckerchief of red and yellow. Behind the old man stumbled a donkey piled high with foraged firewood.

“What about Blair?” I asked.

“He’s here—another reason Adam didn’t come. He’s hosting the Great Man.”

“With or without his latex mask?”

Squinting at the unpaved, gully-riven coastal highway, RuthClaire sniggered. She was enjoying herself even as we traveled at ten miles per hour over terrain designed to inflict permanent kidney damage. She had not even asked about Tiny Paul’s ashes, and I was damned if I’d remind her that we had brought them.

From the air, Montaraz looks like the three-fingered hand of a Disney cartoon character: Goofy, Mickey Mouse, or that bird Donald Duck. The hand is tilted in Manzanillo Bay so that the thumb points northeast across a hundred miles of ocean at Grand Turk Island. The middle finger shoots a Donald Duck on a long northwesterly diagonal at Miami Beach. (So far as I know, no one in Miami Beach ever takes umbrage.) Rutherford’s Port nestles in its harbor at the base of the thumb, closer to the Dominican coast than to the Haitian. Our destination was an arc of beach on the inside edge of the island’s forefinger. Had there been a road straight across the interior, our trip would have taken no time at all, but no such road existed. Also, Austin-Antilles limits traffic on its coffee plantations, and their access-ways, to company vehicles. Consequently, our switchbacking journey along the coast took nearly an hour and a half.

The beach cottage was slightly more than a cottage—an adobe bungalow of beige stucco some three hundred yards from the road. A ridge of volcanic tuff and a phalanx of coconut palms and prickly-looking beach shrubs hid it from passersby. Whoever had stuccoed the cottage had adorned it with a low-level frieze of sea shells, shark’s teeth, sand dollars, and crab pincers. Red clay tiles shingled the roof, and an L-shaped screened-in porch clung to the building on two sides, one of them fronting the tiny inlet that locals called Caicos Bay. The sand here sparkled like refined sugar. RuthClaire and Adam had turned the porch overlooking this secluded strip of brightness into a studio. Easels, acrylics, canvases, and uncleaned brushes littered the shady L.

Blair, when we arrived, was sleeping, recuperating from a three-legged flight from Zarakal and a vicious case of jet lag. He had reached Rutherford’s Port yesterday afternoon. Although still vigorous at seventy-one, he no longer found it possible to move through time zones without suffering painful temporal discontinuities. His advisors told him that in flying westward he was “gaining” hours, stockpiling minutes that he could later add to the biologically determined span of his life. But the Great Man reminded them that they always depleted this surplus by flying him home the same way he’d come. Why didn’t they ever think to route him back to Marakoi over the Pacific Ocean and the Indian subcontinent? Because jet lag hung on to him like an unshakable bout of intestinal flu, he felt that he was a time-traveler whose time was rapidly running out.

Adam told this story after embracing us and showing us around the cottage. He recited most of it, in fact, while Caroline and I stood with him just outside Blair’s open bedroom door, looking in on the paleoanthropologist’s inert form and the sun-burnished tonsure of his massive head—like parents checking on a sick child. Blair snored while Adam talked: walrus-whistle arpeggios that overrode the lapping of the surf in Caicos Bay. We tiptoed off, and, in RuthClaire’s absence, I gave Adam Tiny Paul’s burial urn.

“Thank you from my heart.” Adam carried the urn into his and RuthClaire’s bedroom and set it on an end table by their bed.

Later, on the porch, Caroline and I had cold rum drinks with our host and hostess. We talked and talked, but never got too close to subjects that might be either emotionally painful or pertinent to our having come so many miles to see them. But that was the way we all wanted it on this first day, and we had a good time, anyway.

The next day, Blair was better: gallant, gracious, and witty. He spoke in the orotund tones of a word-drunk Welsh poet—a cross, said Caroline, between Dylan Thomas and Captain Kangaroo. It was hardly his fault that his every utterance put me in mind of a rutting sea lion. That afternoon, Caroline got out her notebooks and her recording equipment. The interview that she had agreed to moderate for Popular Anthropology took place in the cottage’s living room. RuthClaire and I were present, but we kept our mouths shut, and the tape spools turned inside their cassettes with a relentless whirr that trembled in the tropical air.

CAROLINE: It’s on, Dr. Blair. Why don’t you and Adam talk about whatever you like? I’ll stay out of the conversation—except for some followups and maybe some general explanatory comments. Okay?

BLAIR: That’s fine. Adam, I’ve spent better than fifty years digging up the bones of your ancestors and your collateral relations. It’s a surprise, and a profound honor, to meet a representative of your species in the flesh.

ADAM: Thank you.

BLAIR: Once, of course, I doubted. Except for you, I presume, your species is extinct. That any of your people have survived to this day is nothing short of miraculous. I’d scarcely be less astonished, Adam, if I were to go out and find Homo habilis fossils in a stratum containing the remains of Neanderthals and early Cro-Magnons. Your intrusion into even that stratum would have struck me as utterly fantastic six months ago. I would’ve had to assume that a smart-alecky mischief-maker was perpetrating a hoax: an inept hoax. How much more amazing to meet a hominid of that otherwise extinct kind—a living, breathing, English-speaking exemplar of Early Pleistocene humanity.

ADAM: Very much more, I would guess.

BLAIR (laughing): You’d be right, too. Listen, Adam, I hardly know where to begin. I’m a digger, not a diva of the interviewing trade, and far better with a fossil brush than a microphone.

CAROLINE: Your Peabody Award for Beginnings notwithstanding?

BLAIR: Never mind that. It was scripted. Adam, let me begin by asking you how you feel about the taxonomic terminology by which the scientific community has designated your species.

ADAM: Homo habilis?

BLAIR: Exactly. How do you feel about that nomenclature?

ADAM: About it, to be very candid, I have no feelings at all. Sticks and stones can break my bones, as the children sing, but names can never touch me. Hibber never touched me, either. It was to shrug off.

BLAIR: Does it strike you as accurate, Homo habilis?

ADAM: “Handyman”? Probably not. I am an artist, but around the house I am no good at all. Miss RuthClaire can vouch for my great unhandiness in household matters. Dripping faucets confound me.

BLAIR: You’re a living fossil with your own fair share of funny bones, aren’t you? That’s quite a droll observation, but it’s not what I’m angling for, Adam. I wonder how you’d feel about adopting a somewhat different nomenclature. Homo zarakalensis, to be precise. I ask because it’s an unwritten tenet of contemporary civilization that free nations and free peoples have the right of self-determination when it comes to the matter of what they wish to be called. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, for instance; and in the United States, fairly recently, most thinking Afro-Americans determined that they would rather be called blacks than Negroes. Do you see what I’m suggesting, Adam? Extinct species can’t tell us what they would like to be called. Living species, provided of course they’re human, do have that important option.

CAROLINE: Excuse me, Dr. Blair. Isn’t Homo zarakalensis a term you coined two years ago for a hominid skull that one of your Kikembu assistants found in the Lake Kiboko digs?

BLAIR: Yes, it is. It means “Zarakali Man.”

CAROLINE: But there’s controversy over that designation. Your skull appears similar to those of the habiline specimens unearthed by the Leakeys at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Richard Leakey, in fact, claims they’re identical.

BLAIR: That may be. We paleoanthropologists are aggressively territorial. What I’ve always stressed, however, is that my discovery is somewhat older—perhaps by as much as a half million years—than the Leakey “habilines.” In other words, this distinctive hominid probably originated in what is today Zarakal and only later migrated into what is today Kenya. For that reason, if for no other, it ought to be called Zarakali Man.

CAROLINE: But habilis is altogether neutral in regard to the hominid’s place of origin. It suggests the creature’s tool-making ability. Is it fair to discard that bit of preexisting descriptive nomenclature for a term that has only your own egotistical chauvinism to recommend it?

BLAIR (chuckling benignantly): Well, that’s what I’m trying to ask Adam. You see, it’s his place to decide. Just as American blacks decided they wished to be called blacks, Adam ought to be the sole authority in this matter. It directly affects only him. I’m not going to throw a tantrum if he opts to go with habilis. He’s the one who’ll have to answer to Handyman, Handyman, Handyman.

CAROLINE: Dr. Blair, it seems to me—

BLAIR: For someone who was going to let Adam and me converse, young lady, you’re becoming a fair threat to monopolize our talk.

CAROLINE (forthrightly): Forgive me.

BLAIR: Now, then, Adam. Which do you prefer? Homo habilis—Handyman, you know. Or Homo zarakalensis? Your word, I have a strong hunch, will be the paleoanthropological community’s command.

ADAM: Is not Homo sapiens sapiens within my humble purview? I’m not a handy person, and never in my life have I set foot in Zarakal.

BLAIR: Homo sapiens sapiens?

ADAM: Mais oui. With Miss RuthClaire’s tender help, I fathered a human child. And thanks to the surgeons at Emory, I speak even as you do, sir. Also, I have many perplexing spiritual longings and a freshly emergent concept of God. Considered in these lights, am I not a twentieth-century human being whose archaic bone structure is irrelevant to his dignity and worth?

BLAIR: But many species are interfertile, Adam. And your ability to speak is an acquired characteristic. A surgically acquired characteristic. To assign yourself to a species classification on that account is to fall prey to insidious Lamarckian error. Please, Adam, think.

CAROLINE: He’s thought, sir. He wants to be called Homo sapiens sapiens. You said you wouldn’t quibble with him.

ADAM: In truth, I’d prefer to be called Adam. Adam Montaraz.

CAROLINE: That’s fine with me. How about you, Dr. Blair?

BLAIR: I find it perfectly acceptable. But let’s get on with this. We’ve many important things to talk about.

(At this point, the participants took a short break. Caroline checked her recorder. Then the conversation resumed.)

BLAIR: I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking, Adam. What I’d like to know, of course, is how you were raised, what you remember of your childhood and youth, and whether any of your people, be they called habilines or Homo sapiens, still exist on this island. Would you mind addressing those questions?

ADAM: Very happy to. The first two are more difficult to answer than the last one, however. I can only do my best.

BLAIR: No one asks more of you, Adam. Begin with the easiest of the three and then proceed as you like.

ADAM: Miss RuthClaire told me once of the Yahi Indian called Ishi, about whom Theodora Kroeber wrote eloquently. Ishi was the last of his tribe in the state of California. Like Ishi, I am the last of my tribe—my species, you would say—on the island of Montaraz. In the entire great world, too, I fear.

(I glanced at RuthClaire. Her letter, of course, directly contradicted Adam’s testimony. Ostensibly, after all, I had come to Montaraz to see, evaluate, and perhaps represent the work of an unspecified number of habiline artists. Was Adam lying to Blair, or had RuthClaire lied to us to give us a compelling reason to come? Wearing a sheepish grin, she shrugged and looked away.)

BLAIR: What happened to your people?

ADAM: Exterminated. Persecuted, hunted, killed. Those who escaped the Duvalier pogrom—a very few—were scattered on the winds of politics and commerce. Off the coast of Cuba, five years ago, two of my people died at the hands of a man greatly more animalish than we. One who died was my brother. These deaths ended all our desperate struggles to prevail in a world such as this. I was then the last one of us all.

BLAIR: Weren’t there any women on Montaraz to keep things going? Isn’t it possible that some far-scattered fellow habilines may still be alive?

ADAM: No sightings, no reports. Such a hope seems foolish.

BLAIR (sighing audibly): Ah, well. Yet another proof of contemporary humanity’s unparalleled ability to muck up or destroy what clearly ought to be preserved. It makes me ashamed.

ADAM: Don’t reproach yourself too harshly, sir. Should I die before H. sapiens sapiens obliterates itself along with this oh-so-lovely planet, why, your kind will have outlasted mine. Only by a little, and only after a reign much briefer than the furtive persistence of us habilines—but you must take your victories, Dr. Blair, where you find them, even if they are upsettingly Pyrrhic. Not so?

CAROLINE: You seem to be identifying yourself as a habiline now, Adam. Do you mean to?

ADAM: I am identifying with my people, whom others have called habilines. Also, of course, I’m a good H. sapiens sapiens myself. Perhaps my people were too, even lacking speech. In my mind, Miss Caroline, they will always seem human—nobly human.

BLAIR: I take scant comfort from surviving by a mere breath an ancestral human species that preexisted us by at least two million years.

ADAM: Then you are noble, too, sir.

BLAIR: Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence.

CAROLINE: Adam, Dr. Blair’s other questions concerned your childhood and youth, your memories of habiline society and culture here on Montaraz. Those strike me as topics of crucial value to any study of your vanished people. Would you tell us what you can about those topics?

ADAM: You and Dr. Blair must never forget that that portion of my life corresponds to the portion of ongoing human experience you call “prehistory.” I have a prehistoric life and an ego-documented life. I’m speaking now out of the latter context. Recovering the prehistoric elements of my life from the vantage of my crystallized ego is very hard. Distortions arise. Who I am now contaminates what then I was. Contaminates and discolors.

BLAIR: You’re wholly unable to reconstruct your early life?

ADAM: Of course not. It goes around in my head like a dream. It’s a hard dream to tell, though, because then I had no language with which to chain and tame it. I had heard language spoken, but I had none of my own, and if you had seen me in those days, you would have thought me a feral thing surviving by instinct rather than wit. I had an invisible umbilical cord to my family, and another to the island’s soil and vegetation, and another to the snakes and capybaras, and yet another to the sea and air. Everything around us was magical, and I was a kind of joyfully suffering magician. Falling down might hurt. Getting kicked might hurt. Going hungry might hurt. But the living of life, the living of even these many cruelties and hurts, was ever and always magical, Dr. Blair.

BLAIR: But was the population of habilines from which you sprang a patrilineal or a matrilineal society? Was sexual dimorphism a factor in assigning domestic tasks and leadership roles? Did you have any noteworthy rites of passage to mark your movement from one stage of life to another? Did you hunt, scavenge, or forage for your food? That’s what my colleagues will ask me, Adam. Can’t you remember, can’t you tell me anything about such basic matters?

ADAM: In the absence of the people themselves, Dr. Blair, such knowledge seems—forgive me—irrelevant, keenly and profoundly irrelevant.

BLAIR: Hardly, Adam. Knowledge of the world is knowledge of ourselves. What you can tell us of habiline mores, customs, and survival strategies will enable us better to comprehend who and what we are.

ADAM: To know the habiline life in any sense truly meaningful, sir, you would have to live it. You would have to stop scrutinizing it from afar and plunge into it with uncritical abandon. That’s possible no longer. Gone, gone.

BLAIR: If nothing else, can you tell me where you lived?

ADAM: Dominican slaves were freed by Boyer in the 1820s, but it was not until 1874, when Peter Martin Rutherford ceded Montaraz to Haiti, that we habilines obtained our liberty from his cacao and coffee plantations. We left en masse and made a secret republic for ourselves on one of the island’s little-populated fingers. That is all I can say. For a long time, no one bothered us. Then the twentieth century happened, and everything changed. Gradually, oh so piecemeal, for the worse. I’m speaking now, you see, from the vantage of my crystallized ego.

BLAIR: Can you take me to the site or sites of that “republic”?

ADAM: No. It is impossible. They’re gone, and I’ve forgotten.

BLAIR: But, Adam, the island isn’t that large. Suppose the Haitian government were to authorize travel and archeological research in various areas. Don’t you think you’d assist? Wouldn’t you cooperate with me and others in uncovering your people’s past?

ADAM: No, Dr. Blair. Let the dead rest in the memories of their loving kin.

BLAIR: But isn’t it true that you had your son’s ashes disinterred and brought here to Montaraz by your friends the Loyds?

ADAM: It is.

BLAIR: Then I don’t understand the distinction between that and excavating the living sites of your extinct habiline relations.

ADAM (coldly): Apparently not.

BLAIR: Sorry. I meant no offense.

(The participants took another break.)

CAROLINE: All right. I’ve flipped the tape. Dr. Blair, please begin again.

BLAIR: This has been a somewhat frustrating exchange for both of us, Adam. Let me apologize for that again. You see, I never expected to sit down with a surviving representative of any of the hominid species whose bones I’ve been digging up and cataloguing these last fifty years. It’s not a conversation I ever imagined taking place.

ADAM: Of course not.

BLAIR: You don’t knap flint, do you? You don’t chase hyenas off the remains of a lion’s kill. You don’t recall walking upright through the ash storm of an erupting East African volcano. You can’t say anything about the other hominid species—Australopithecus robustus, Australopithecus africanus—with whom your people shared the savannahs. You can’t illuminate your people’s millennia-long trials and tribulations in the hills of present-day Zarakal.

ADAM: Regretfully, I can’t. I am a product of Montaraz. So were my parents. So were their parents. On this island, we go back nearly seven generations.

BLAIR: Doesn’t the allure of Africa niggle at you, Adam? I’ve seen some of your paintings. Baobabs, volcanoes, grass fires, hunting parties. It’s hard for me to believe that the continent of your origin doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Wouldn’t you like to visit? Wouldn’t you perhaps like to emigrate?

ADAM: I would like to see a giraffe.

BLAIR: A giraffe?

ADAM: Yes. It would be fine to see a giraffe performing its dreamy, slow-motion gallop across the great African steppe. Otherwise, sir, I have no ambitions to fulfill on that score. I am home again. Montaraz is home, and it puts me in touch with earlier homes.

BLAIR (after a lengthy pause): A little while ago, Adam, you mentioned that you have—let me see—“many troubling spiritual longings” and “a freshly emergent concept of God.” Would you care to expound a little on those matters?

ADAM: Only a little.

RUTHCLAIRE (her one and only interjection): Thank God.

ADAM: Before my ego crystallized, here on this island, I was an unconscious animist and also a lip-servicing Catholic. The magic all around me overwhelmed the dogmas of the Roman church. Then, in the late seventies, my ego began to take shape—in response, I am sure, to economic and political realities. At last, soon after the murders off the Cuban coast, my ego was precipitated from the terrible pressures of exile and refugee-ism. I became neurotically self-aware.

BLAIR: Neurotically?

ADAM: Even as you and everyone else alive in your world. To survive today, as “reality” is presently constituted, one must have a competitive neuroticism. So I surrendered to ego development in order to survive. I became an “I.”

BLAIR: And your spiritual longings?

ADAM: Much that my new “I” heard in your world was disparaging of my personhood. I was an animal. I had no soul. On the boat from Mariel Bay to Key West, the passengers were not physically cruel to me; the opposite, rather. They patted my back, laughed at my funnies, and treated me like a friendly performing dog. The “I” that my once-innocent self had become—well, it realized that in their private estimation, I was… soulless. I was excommunicated from real human fellowship because of my unhappy lack of this attribute.

BLAIR: Quite a tortuous chain of reasoning for a brand-new ego, Adam.

ADAM: Yes, but in my brand-newness I was very stupid. I made the mistake of appropriating these misinformed people’s concept of the soul. I began to think of it as an item separable from the body. Like, perhaps, a pocket watch. I wanted such a pocket watch. A pocket watch, after all, may very well survive the death of its owner. It can exist without that person. It can continue to keep its time in a drawer. But it isn’t coequal with its dead owner, and ultimately it, too, will perish. Nevertheless, I wanted this kind of soul, the sort that nearly everybody else mistakenly believes they possess—if, of course, they are “religious.” Having that kind of soul, I thought, would bring my crystallized ego into fellowship with those of the human beings around me.

BLAIR: But you learned better?

ADAM: I learned better than they, sir. If you wish to touch your soul, place your hands on your own body. I had known this as a creature without ego here on Montaraz, but in becoming an aggressive “I” to make my way in civilization, I forgot. The soul is not a pocket watch. It is inseparable from the live body. It does not reside in a pocket. It lives throughout the body’s systems. A dead body does not possess one. It’s dead, in fact, because its soul has been disrupted.

BLAIR: No immortality, then?

ADAM: The fatal disruption of the personality would seem to preclude it, Dr. Blair. But only rigidly crystallized egos despair on this account. A self that understands its subtle ties to the systems around it—family, plants, animals, water, air—knows that healthy living matters more than the egotistical lingering of personality after death. God’s grace is on those who know this.

CAROLINE: Not everyone would find that comforting, Adam.

ADAM: Well, it is the neuroticism of the developed ego that prevents them. It is the unfortunate psychic investment they’ve made in something called “salvation.” They’ve paid in too much for too long to withdraw from this investment. Or maybe they deeply love others who have paid in too much for too long. It’s a hard thing. I have much sympathy for all such travelers on the path to spirituality.

BLAIR: Does your spiritual journey recapitulate that of humanity as a whole?

ADAM: Only in the long view. I have no great hope that the human species will adopt a holistic faith without imposing a lethal rigidity upon it. And maybe, Dr. Blair, the interplay among current faiths, the tensions and slacknesses even yet linking them, is itself a holistic system with certain virtues. I don’t know. A nonneurotic human species would be a species nearly unimaginable. You would have to think up a new taxonomic designation, Dr. Blair.

BLAIR: Perhaps not. Maybe the one we have now would finally begin to imply something other than self-congratulation. What about your “freshly emergent concept of God”? You deny the immortality of the soul apart from the problematically immortal body, and yet still believe in a transcendent deity?

ADAM: Yes, I do. Perhaps, though, it is unimportant. I weary of talking. Do you hear how my voice rasps?

BLAIR: Quickly, then, just a hint of your formulation.

ADAM: It sounds like a paradox. Perhaps it is. I hold that God possesses both a fundamental timelessness—that he exists outside the operations of time—and also a complete and necessary temporality, permitting him to direct and change within the stream of time. There’s a hint, then, of my theology.

BLAIR: But isn’t that like saying that a man both has a head and doesn’t have a head? Or that a certain person happens to be both a Haitian citizen and not a Haitian citizen? It’s self-contradictory.

ADAM: Only because our temporality makes the issue seem baldly either-or. (Adam’s voice had gotten thicker and thicker. He cleared his throat.)

No more for now, please. I think I would like to take a swim.

CAROLINE: We’ll wrap it up with that, then. Thank you, Dr. Blair. Thank you, Adam. It’s been a strange but stimulating journey.

This interview was never resumed. Blair wanted to question Adam further. Indeed, he wanted to mount an impromptu expedition to the island’s various peninsulas, to traipse about among the pines and wild avocados in search of Adam’s “secret republic.” But late that afternoon, an advisor arrived from Rutherford’s Port to tell him that the American Geographic Foundation had added to his tour three new lectures and tomorrow he must fly to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. Storming about the bungalow, Blair cursed his advisor and impugned the good name of the director of American Geographic. Finally, though, he subsided, confessing that without this tour much important work at Lake Kiboko would go undone. After collecting his suitcases for the trip to town, he came back into the living room to bid us all goodbye, as downcast and jet-lagged a figure as I could imagine. He was truly disheartened to have to go.

Abruptly, his mood changed. Grinning, he knelt beside one of his leather bags and undid the straps on a bulging side pocket. From this pouch he extracted a magazine. “Adam, would you and RuthClaire autograph this for me? I’m not ordinarily a souvenir collector—fossils are the only souvenirs a man in my line requires—but I’d like to frame this for my office in the National Museum in Marakoi.”

It was the Newsweek with the infamous Maria-Katherine Kander photograph of Adam and RuthClaire. Only Blair, of all the people in the room, failed to detect the palpable air of embarrassment that had congealed about us. Even his advisor, a young black man in an expensive western suit, flinched. Adam, although not embarrassed or offended, understood that Blair had discomfited his wife and his guests. He took the magazine and initialed it with a ballpoint pen. Blair beamed. He nodded at RuthClaire to encourage Adam to pass the magazine to her. With some reluctance, Adam did so. She accepted with her head down and a crimson flush on her brow and cheeks.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” said Blair, buoyant again. “You’ve got quite a respectable little body there.”

“Thank you,” RuthClaire said. (Blair was a father figure, and you never upbraided Daddy for bad manners or an absence of tact. That would be unmannerly, that would be tactless.) But when she signed her portrait, she wrote her name in an angry vertical loop that partly effaced her two-dimensional nakedness. Then she shoved the magazine back into Blair’s chest. It trembled there at the end of her outstretched arm.

A cloudlet of confusion passed over Blair’s face. He took the magazine, regarded it as if it had been vandalized (maybe it had), and, kneeling again, slid it regretfully into the side pouch of his carry-on bag. No one spoke. When he stood again, his expression was abashed and apologetic.

“Body shame’s one of the saddest consequences of western civilization,” he said. “Of course, the commercial exploitation of nudity is a reprehensible thing, too. It’s a prurient outgrowth of that same unhealthy body shame.”

I was sure that this was an astute analysis of something, but a something sadly peripheral to our joint embarrassment.

“Sir,” said the young Zarakali to Blair, “it’s time to go.”

The Great Man agreed. He shook hands with Adam and me, embraced Caroline, and, when she failed to respond to his attempt to hug her, too, kissed RuthClaire on the forehead. Then all of us but RuthClaire trailed Blair and his aide outside and waved them goodbye. Their enclosed four-wheel-drive vehicle spun through the sand, at last obtaining purchase on the road to Rutherford’s Port. Inside again, we found RuthClaire standing in the middle of the living room with her hands limp at her sides and tears flowing down her face. Adam took her in his arms and held her.

Over Adam’s head, RuthClaire said, “Paulie’s dead because of that damn photo, and I thanked that stupid old coot for telling me I’ve got ‘quite a respectable little body.’ I thanked the son of a bitch!”

That evening, near twilight, Adam and I took a walk along the secluded beach below the cottage. Caroline and I had argued because although I had wanted to walk with her, she had insisted on starting the transcription and editing of the tapes. Her holiday would only begin, she declared, when she had accomplished this work. She could not relax with it hanging over her head, and I was selfish to pressure her to go for a skinnydip while the task remained undone. Damn Calvinist, I had thought—for, Blair’s little lecture about western “body shame” notwithstanding, I wanted nothing quite so much as to hold my unclad flesh against Caroline’s in the gently lapping waters of Caicos Bay.

Instead, my companion was Adam Montaraz, now naked. I shuffled along beside him in sandals, loose ebony swim trunks, and a short-sleeved terrycloth jacket. Shells crunched beneath our feet, and stars began to glimmer overhead.

“You told Blair you’re the last of your kind, but RuthClaire’s letter said there were habiline artists here. That’s why I came—to look at their work, maybe even to represent it in Atlanta. What the hell’s going on, Adam?”

“I lied to Dr. Blair.”

“Why?”

“To protect the remnant that survives: five persons, Mister Paul—only five.”

“But if I go back to Atlanta touting their work as the glory of an innate habiline aesthetic impulse, this place’ll be overrun again. You’ll have blown their cover for good. The art will prove they’re here, and bingo! another influx of bounty hunters.”

Adam halted. “Not if you represent their paintings as the work of dead Haitian artists, each item you put up for bid as a discovery from their estates. You needn’t even identify the artists as habilines. Haitian art has many aficionados in los Estados Unidos. Sell it as Haitian art—nothing more, nothing less.”

“It would sell for a lot more if I could reveal the identity of the artists—if, in fact, I could document their identities.”

“But I am not interested in ‘mopping up.’”

“What are you interested in?”

“Secure futures for these last five people. After them, no more. After me, no more. RuthClaire and I want enough money to look after them here on Montaraz, enough to see to their remaining needs.”

“Your own work sells. Let me represent that, Adam. We’d all make money, and you wouldn’t even have to mention your last five habiline relations.”

Adam explained that although their recent travels had stimulated a lot of creative activity, it had also denied them enough time to finish many of these new works. Further, RuthClaire’s latest paintings—the series entitled Souls that she’d completed in Atlanta—had not yet found an audience. Gallery directors declined to show them. If RuthClaire rented space in malls or department stores to counteract the gallery boycott, the public ignored them. Newspaper critics lambasted them as dull, flat, colorless, repetitive, picayune in concept, and uninspired, particularly in light of their grandiose overall title. Even more dismaying, one critic who hated what he called “decadent decal work for the AmeriCred porcelain-plate scam” had cited the acrylic paintings Souls as evidence of the “steep falling off” of RuthClaire’s talent since Footsteps on the Path to Man. Indeed, you could argue that these unpopular and much-belittled paintings had ruined RuthClaire’s marketability. Adam’s work continued to sell, but his artist wife had run headlong into an immovable brick wall. That was one of the reasons they’d summoned Caroline and me to Montaraz.

“They’re good,” I said. “It’s just that nobody sees.”

“For a time, you didn’t see. And maybe they aren’t good, Mister Paul. Maybe it’s only an accident of light that redeems them from mediocrity.”

“To be truthful, my appreciation of them came and went—just like the light. It’s easy to understand why she’s having trouble selling them.”

“Okay. But that’s why we require money.” He began walking again, his hands clasped in the small of his furry back.

I took two long strides to catch up with him. “When do I meet these habiline artists, Adam? When do I see their work?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where?”

In the early starlight, he grinned at me. “On the middle finger, Mister Paul. On the bird we shoot at Miami.” He turned, trotted toward the water, and threw himself out into the surf with a splash whose falling canopy of droplets iridesced like the bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war.

After shedding my jacket and kicking off my sandals, I followed Adam into the water. As I had hoped, it was warm without being strength-sapping. My habiline host was dog-paddling about the inlet, sometimes rolling to his back like a sea otter, sometimes treading water with the lackadaisical finning motion of a manatee. I sidled up using an easy breaststroke. He dog-paddled again, but stayed near so we could talk.

“From what you told Blair in that interview, you’ve abandoned Christianity for a new-fangled theory of the interrelatedness of biological systems.” I blew salt water away from my mouth.

“Nonbiological, too.”

“Where did it all come from, Adam?”

“It’s Batesonian, for a man named Gregory Bateson.” He circled me.

“Familiar, I guess, but I don’t really know him.”

“You can’t know him. He died the year my ego was beginning to crystallize out of the Edenic anonymity of my youth.”

“I don’t know his work. Have you uncritically adopted Bateson’s metaphysics? Jettisoned your time-tested religion for some kind of trendy Californian nonsense with pseudo-scientific underpinnings?”

“I adopt nothing uncritically, Mister Paul, and if you don’t know Bateson’s work, you understand nothing about its underpinnings, which are beautifully evolutionary.”

“I was worried about RuthClaire.”

“Why? I love her.”

“I’m sure you do, but it’s hard for me to believe she’s going to be crazy about a ‘religion’ based on the evolutionary interrelatedness of biological—and nonbiological—systems. She’s a traditionalist, but you’ve name-called traditional faiths like hers as egotistical and neurotic.”

He treaded water in front of me. “But I’m egotistical and neurotic. So was the young man who killed our son. I am trying to discover meaning, Mister Paul, also to cure myself of neurosis. Everyone should wish to cure themselves.”

“T. P.’s murder sent you down this path?”

“Yes. You heard the eulogies I spoke. I hurt. RuthClaire hurt. Maybe the family of Craig Puddicombe hurt. My choice was to seek consolation in the orthodox hereafter or find my place in the great systemic neurosis that devoured our son and so begin to heal myself from the inside: my gift to him.”

“Is it really an either-or situation?”

“Maybe not. But first things first.”

“How does what you believe now differ from Bateson’s world view?”

“He sees Mind and Megapattern. I see those things, but also continue to postulate God. It’s a matter of hopeful, nonneurotic faith.”

“Sez you.”

This tickled him. “Yes, sez me.” Both his palms struck the water, launching fusillades of spray right into my eyes. I yelled, clutched my face, and then blindly grabbed for him. He’d already dived out of reach, though, and was sea-ottering through the inlet toward the web of its sandy fingers. Once there, he scrambled onto the beach. Gasping, I waded ashore a minute or two later to join him on the ever-darkening strand.

“Do you mean you’ve jettisoned your favorite theologians for Charlie Darwin and Gregory Bateson? Adam, I don’t know what to say. It’s beginning to look as if we’re brothers under the skin, after all: rational pagans, both.”

“But I am not a pagan.”

“No?”

“I don’t deny the divinity of RuthClaire’s Savior. I don’t deny the possibility of historical revelation. Not at all, not at all. It’s only that the New Testament revelation came at a time and a place inaccessible to my earliest people. I know of another revelation more topical and timely. For me, anyway. For me.”

“What?” He’d completely lost me.

“Tomorrow, Mister Paul. Let’s go back to the cottage.”

So we did, stopping once for me to retrieve my sandals and jacket, and when we entered the house, I heard Adam’s recorded voice saying, “… no great hope that the human species will ever adopt a holistic faith….” The rest I blotted out. Caroline was still hard at work, and I was still resentfully horny.

I awoke with my lust unslaked. Caroline wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went looking for her. Neither she nor the Montarazes had waited for me. They’d gone down to the bay for an early swim. Their voices—or, at least, RuthClaire’s and Caroline’s—piped cheerfully on the balmy morning breeze. My resentment increased. Last night, Caroline had refused to stop work to accompany me to the water’s edge, but rising an hour or so ahead of me—after retiring an hour or so later—was apparently no obstacle to her enjoyment of the beach. I banged into the L-shaped porch overlooking the inlet and made an eyeshield of my hands. Pressing them against the screen, I peered down at the revelers.

Adam, as a concession to the gals’ southern sensibilities, wore a black monokini, while both his wife and mine had outfitted in modest one-piece maillot suits, Caroline’s turquoise-and-navy, RuthClaire’s blood-orange. Arm in arm, they danced into, and scampered away from, the lacy charges of the surf. The hilarity of this game had them struggling to stay upright.

“Shit,” I murmured.

Something on the porch moved. I nearly jumped out of my sandals. One hand went to my heart, the other groped for a support to which to cling. I found the nearest wooden stud bracing the screen and held on to that.

Looking at me from the far end of the porch was a wizened creature wearing a pastel-blue chemise and a grubby white head scarf. She sat on an upturned box with her gnarled hands between her legs and her bare toes playing the planks like so many soundless piano keys. I assumed her female only because of her clothing. For a moment, in fact, I had thought this person might be Adam in drag, joking with me. But Adam was cavorting with RuthClaire and Caroline beside Caicos Bay, and my visitor seemed years older than the habiline. A habiline too, she scrutinized me with beady, alien eyes.

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m Paul Loyd, a friend of Adam’s.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the surf-teasing trio.

Her eyes remained on me, more watchful than curious.

“Why not tell me your name?” I said.

“Ga gapag,” she said.

This expression meant nothing to me, but I was surprised she had spoken at all. Until his operation at Emory, Adam had been incapable of speech. True, he had never lacked the ability to vocalize, but uttering recognizable phonemes had had to wait for surgery. This woman’s “Ga gapag,” by contrast, represented something vaguely like intelligible human speech: a Creole habiline dialect, a primitive patois.

“Gaga pag,” I tried to echo her. “Is that your name?”

She shook her head.

“You’re part of the Rutherford Remnant, aren’t you?”

Contemptuously, she everted her bottom lip. The pink flesh curled back on her receding chin like a fan. Chimpanzees perform a similar trick when bored or irritated. Then her face returned to normal, and she looked away as if I had committed an asinine social blunder.

“Wait here,” I said, angry. “Just wait here.”

My command to the haughty gnome was superfluous; she sat stolidly on her upturned crate, “obeying” me only because she had already decided to remain where she was. I yanked open the screen door, descended a set of treated wooden stairs, and put my foot on the first island in a miniature archipelago of stepping stones. Then I floundered through a cut between two shapeless dunes and stumbled down the beach to my wife and our hosts.

Caroline, seeing me, broke free of RuthClaire and Adam. With a gait at once coltlike and feminine, she ran toward me on tiptoes. “Paul!” Her smile wiped out every other lovely natural sight on my horizon—diamond-blue water, glittering sand, even a gliding formation of brown pelicans at the mouth of the bay. She put her cool hands on my shoulders and kissed the bridge of my nose. I returned only a miserly peck.

“Why the hell didn’t you get me up, too?”

“Sleeping, you looked about five years old. How could I wake up a tuckered five-year-old?”

I made an irritated head gesture at the cottage. “There’s a rude little enana negra up there. One of Adam’s kind. You left me the rude little biddy to wake up to.”

Adam appeared at Caroline’s shoulder, RuthClaire behind him. “I did not expect her so early. You were alone in the house when we came down here. Not for anything, Mister Paul, would I have caused you discomfort.”

“She scared the bejesus out of me.”

“I’ll bet you frightened her, too,” Caroline said.

“A platoon of marines with a howitzer might frighten her. Me, she found about as scary as a sick ladybug.”

“That’s Erzulie,” Adam said. “My grandmother on my father’s side.”

“Erzulie?”

“Her vaudun name. I do not remember how we called her when I was a boy with no ego. Probably, we had no spoken name for her at all.”

“She speaks. She said, ‘Gaga pag.’ Something like that.”

“She meant, ‘Pa capab.’ That’s Creole for ‘Pas capable.’ It means ‘No can do.’ That’s about all the language she has. She says it seldom because, besides speak, there is not too much she cannot do. Unlike me, she has never grown an ego. And so she avoids identifying what she does not possess with the imperfect label of her vaudun name.”

“If you can follow that,” RuthClaire said, laughing. “What’s she doing here?”

“She is an artist,” Adam said. “Also, she wished to act as our guide. Now you’re awake—and now Erzulie is here—we can eat our breakfasts and go.”

We returned to the cottage. Although Caroline kept her hand in mine, I felt subtly betrayed and so declined to answer her friendly squeezes with squeezes of my own. By the time we reached the cottage, then, she was casting me puzzled looks, squinting for a sign of affection or thaw. I liked that. It served her right. Who the hell enjoyed being told that he resembled a tuckered five-year-old? I had had adult games in mind, but Caroline burnt my hedonistic ambition on the altar of the Protestant work ethic.

We had fresh eggs from the market in Rutherford’s Port. Although I cooked a reproachfully splendid breakfast, Erzulie spurned my platter of fried eggs. Standing at a counter in the kitchen, she drank her eggs raw from a ceramic cup. For a chaser, she downed a jelly jar of native clairin, or crude rum. When we left the cottage in the rented Jeep, she carried in the back seat a Tupperware container of rapadou, a coarse brown sugar that many Haitians use as a sweetener and a staple food item. Like a mountain woman taking snuff, she put pinches of this sugar between her gums and her rotted teeth and sucked at them as we followed the coastal road around the island’s middle finger.

Everyone else had put on jeans and rugged shoes, but Adam wore the same frock coat and top hat he’d worn to the double funeral at Paradise Farm. Horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses adorned his dark face. (Once, Adam had worn real glasses to read with, but since his operation at Emory, he relied on contacts, and today he was wearing them beneath the phony horn-rimmed glasses.) Sitting beside RuthClaire in the front seat, he had a walking stick between his legs and an unlit cigar in one hand. He clutched the brim of his top hat to keep it from blowing off. Occasionally, though not often, we passed a straw-hatted laborer or a child-toting mother, who, startled, gaped at the Jeep—but especially at Adam—as if seeing a disquieting revenant from the island’s past.

“Why the getup?” I shouted from the back seat. (Erzulie was between Caroline and me, sucking her rapadou.)

“It has religious significance,” Adam said over his shoulder.

“Religious significance?”

“He’s dressed like Baron Samedi, a voodoo spirit,” RuthClaire said. “Some of the Haitians call this traditional spirit Papa Guedé, a ribald authority figure associated with death and cemeteries.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “What’s the point?”

“It’s religious and ceremonial,” Adam snapped, as if he had already explained this and I was being willfully obtuse.

“Instead of another funeral, aren’t we going to the secret habiline republic?”

“That republic’s dying,” RuthClaire said. “It’s been dying for more than twenty years. You’re privileged to be visiting it, but just remember that visiting it is a lot like attending a magnificent funeral mass. So humor Adam in this, okay?”

“I’m here because you guys asked me to be here. Don’t get testy if I can’t help wondering aloud what the hell’s going on.”

“Paul,” Caroline admonished me.

On the dark, fertile slope to our left were the terraces of one of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s coffee plantations. The regularly spaced shrubs, most more than thirty feet tall, loomed over us like fragrant emerald geysers. Their white flowers stirred in the breeze, as did their bountiful crimson clusters of cherries—in this spot, if nowhere else, ready for harvest: coffee, coffee everywhere, but not a cup to drink. I realized that for breakfast RuthClaire had brewed a pot of tea while Erzulie had opted for rum. I needed a cup of coffee. I needed something.

RuthClaire said, “Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, sometimes wore top hat, horn rims, and tails. ‘I am the revolution and the flag,’ he said. He also liked to present himself as a champion of the people’s folk religion, vaudun, which they continue to practice hand in glove with Roman Catholicism. Duvalier exploited this unorthodox dualism. In the Port-au-Prince newspapers, he declared himself Christ’s chosen leader, and he made a habit of appearing on his reviewing stand as Baron Samedi. He wanted his identification with Haiti to be total. He wanted the respect, love, and fear of every Haitian, intellectuals and peasants alike.”

“Certainly their fear,” said Adam.

“So now you’re dressed as Baron Samedi,” I said. “You’re emulating Papa Doc, who almost everyone agrees was a paranoid megalomaniac. Pardon me if I see that as a nasty little imposture.”

Adam turned to look at me. “Baron Samedi—Lord Saturday—was here long before Duvalier. So were we habilines, les nains noirs of the original Rutherford estate. I am not copying the paranoid Papa Doc. I am honoring a Haitian religious tradition.”

“Wouldn’t superstition be a better word?”

“Pa conay,” Adam said, Creole for “I don’t know.” “Do you call something a superstition if it works?”

That shut me up. If throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder neutralizes the bad luck supposedly assured by having spilled it, do you call that act superstitious? At the moment, I had no idea. I looked down at the habiline woman Erzulie. Maybe she knew. She looked up at me from under the band of her head scarf and the ridge of her brow. A coquettish glimmer pirouetted in her eyes, reflecting the sea on our right. Then her tiny Tupperware container bumped me in the chest, and she offered me a pinch of rapadou. The lumpy brown stuff repulsed me. I turned my head.

The road climbed, as it sliced tentatively inland. Caroline and RuthClaire talked, but Adam, Erzulie, and I sat like hostages with gags in our mouths. After another twenty minutes, RuthClaire swung the Jeep into a foliage-capped side road that was mostly gravel and eroded channels. It ended about a hundred twisty yards from the main road. “Here we are.” She jammed the Jeep into park, and we all got out, pilgrims on a hidden path to mystery. No one on the main road would ever see us. Indeed, I was trying to figure out how RuthClaire had spotted the turnoff. Creepers netted the rocky ground, and eerily hairy lianas dangled from the trees—a stand of mahogany, I thought—in profligate loops and slings. The coffee plantations of Austin-Antilles lay far behind us to the south, far enough behind us to suggest our isolation and remoteness. A feeling of claustrophobic uncertainty sped my pulse and opened my sweat glands.

Erzulie, barefoot, plunged into the wall of foliage without any further ado, but Adam called her back. We had to unload and fasten on our backpacks, which contained canned goods, cooking utensils, water bottles, bedding, fresh clothes, and all our recording and photographic equipment. RuthClaire had even brought some art supplies for the habilines. I could hardly blame her—they rarely received Federal Express or United Parcel Service deliveries. Everyone wore a backpack but Erzulie. Adam—his carry-frame in place, his top hat at a jaunty angle, his walking stick a foot taller than he—reminded me less of a voodoo spirit than of a Victorian chimney sweep. Into what sooty recesses of Montaraz did he intend to lead us?

Actually, Erzulie did the leading. By sore-footed necessity, I brought up the rear. As a result, I could never even see the chemise-clad habiline. She was always thirty or forty yards ahead. To prevent me from being outdistanced and abandoned, Caroline had to lag well behind RuthClaire and Adam, occasionally signaling for rest stops. I had thought myself in better shape. Discovering the truth about my physical condition was a new source of resentment and chagrin.

I began to think that Caroline and the others had set out to humiliate me, not only on this fatiguing hike but earlier that morning at the beach cottage. How many jokes had they told about me? How many laughs had they milked from silly speculation about my response to Erzulie’s presence on the porch? Was it possible that the three of them—Adam, RuthClaire and Caroline—constituted a clandestine ménage à trois?

“Paul, you’re as red as a beet,” Caroline said. “Stop right there.” She poured some water onto her neckerchief and wiped my forehead and temples. For a moment, I let her. I was too tired to resist. RuthClaire and Adam came back on the unmarked trail to see what was happening. Their faces had outline but no definition. Their features were amorphous blurs against a revolving backdrop of emerald and turquoise. One of them asked me if I wanted to lie down with my head propped against a sleeping bag.

“No. You’ll dump crickets on me—crickets, red wigglers, a tub full of dirt.”

“He’s out of it,” RuthClaire said. “He needs to lie down.”

I grabbed the wet neckerchief out of Caroline’s hand and flung it at a nearby tree. “Bitch! Two-timing bitch!”

“She’s trying to cool you off,” RuthClaire told me. “You’ve gotten overheated. It’s not your fault. We didn’t give you time to get used to it. It’s too much too soon.”

“I’m Adam and you’re Eve,” I said. “Who are these other people? I’ve never seen them before.”

“Lie down, Paul. You’re delirious.”

“I’m delightful. I’m delicious. I’m delovely.”

Caroline, whose name I couldn’t then recall, turned away, and a dwarf in a blue dress and a white scarf limped out of the higher woods to peer into my nostrils from below. A cockatoo screamed, or a blood vessel in my temple hissed. I waved the dwarf in the chemise out of the way and sat down next to the tree. I was breathing hard, and I was angry. My new wife had disappeared. My old wife was kneeling in front of me. Beside her crouched a chimney sweep trying to unbutton my collar. (Did my chimney need cleaning?) His fingers poked me in the throat. I knocked his hand aside. As soon as I did that, though, a lid of some kind slid over the sky, blotting out sound and color alike. During this extended eclipse, my temples went in and out, as if my brain were struggling to breathe in a suffocating darkness.

Then a familiar female voice said, “The bastard’s still in love with you.”

Although the voice was familiar, I didn’t recognize it. I may not have even heard it. I may have simply imagined it….

I awoke sitting in the same spot. The light dappling the forest floor betrayed the fact that my delirium had lasted two or three hours. Noon had come and gone. Erzulie hunkered at my side with a thermos cap of orange juice. Seeing her, and no one else, panicked me. My wife, my ex-wife, and my ex’s husband had absconded, leaving me alone in an obscure upland glade with a wizened hominid woman whose name, Erzulie, was also that of a major voodoo goddess of the Haitian religion. Erzulie Freda, an imaginative yoking of the eternal female and the Virgin Mary. Why was this queer little person staring at me as if I had upset the balance between divinity and the material world?

“Bwah,” she said. “Bwah!”

That was pidgin French, wasn’t it? Bois. Didn’t that mean “wood”? Well, of course, there was a wood all around us, trees and shrubbery and vines. What could be more obvious? But when Erzulie said, “Bwah!” again, touching the thermos cap to my bottom lip, she was commanding me to drink. I slurped the orange juice greedily, grateful for its cold sweetness and for a brief reprieve from my panic. Then the panic came back.

I was lucid, I was refreshed, and I was scared. I pushed the thermos cap away and levered myself up against the tree trunk. I shouted Caroline’s name—two or three times. Then I called for RuthClaire and Adam. Erzulie grimaced, turned her back on me, and sat down on an outcropping of rock, embracing her knees with her thin, hairy arms.

“I’m here,” Caroline said, sliding down a mossy incline next to Erzulie’s rock. “Are you all right?” She hugged me.

“I don’t know. I could have died. You guys ran out on me.”

Caroline said she’d never been more than forty or fifty feet away, that Erzulie had stayed by my side to moisten my brow with makeshift compresses, and that we were now only ten minutes away from the habiline village. RuthClaire and Adam had each been back two or three times to check on me. If any had believed me in danger, they would have carried me to the Jeep and driven me to the hospital in Rutherford’s Port. But my fever had departed with the application of a second compress, and it had seemed to Adam that an hour or two of sleep, even if delirium-induced and fitful, would restore my physical and emotional equilibrium. My forehead was still cool, Caroline noted, touching me, and I looked a helluva lot better. Adam had been right.

These explanations did not appease me. Maybe the rest had restored my physical equilibrium, but I was an emotional shipwreck. In two days I’d toted up more grievances against Caroline than in our previous five months of marriage. Our working holiday was going to hell in a canvas backpack. I was the victim of gross neglect and an odious conspiracy of sexual exclusion. Using slightly blunter language, I told Caroline so.

She stared at me aghast. “You’re kidding.”

“I know what I know, Caroline. I feel what I feel.”

“Paul, you could run this country. You’re as paranoid as the first Duvalier.” I saw her waging a fierce internal battle to keep her composure from falling in ruins. “Maybe we shouldn’t have left you sitting here. You’ve had some weird fever dreams, old boy, and even though you’re awake again, you’re still under their brain-damaging influence.”

“Old boy?”

“Look, if I can forgive you for something you revealed while talking out of your head—if I can do that, even though it hurts like hell to find out—well, old boy, you can have the decency to forget the nonsense you dreamt sitting under this tree!” Both fists clenched at shoulder height, she began to cry.

My stomach flip-flopped. “Something I revealed?”

“You’re still in love with RuthClaire! You called her Eve and yourself Adam. Me, you called a two-timing bitch. Then you said you didn’t know who I was. Adam, either. In the sad little love pit of your subconscious, it’s just you and RuthClaire, world without end, amen.”

“Caroline, stop.”

“You think finding out something like that doesn’t hurt? My gut’s in an uproar, my nerves are knotted, and the irony of ironies is that from your paranoid point of view, I’m the perfidious two-timer—me, not you!”

“Caroline—”

“Just shut up? Every time you open your mouth, you put another foot in it. If you were a centipede, you’d’ve gagged to death by now.”

“That’s not bad, kid.” A wan chuckle escaped me.

“I’m not bad. There’s nothing bad about me. I’m so goddamn saintly I can go on living with a yahoo still in love with a woman happily married to someone else.”

Erzulie, whom I had virtually forgotten, made a hacking noise and spit into the leaves beside her rock. Then she got spryly to her feet and vanished into an uphill hedge of foliage. Caroline wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her blue work shirt.

“I didn’t know what I was saying,” I began.

“You did when you accused me of neglecting you—and, for God’s sake, when you accused me of getting kinky with Adam and RuthClaire.”

“I meant when I called myself Adam and RuthClaire Eve. A man’s not responsible for all the crap in his subconscious. I loved RuthClaire for a long time. We lived with each other for ten years. I was still in love with her when we divorced. I’ll never utterly eradicate those feelings. I really don’t think you’d want me to, either, as long as you realize that here and now, it’s all you, Caroline. My jealousy, my unfair resentments—they just go to prove it.”

“Hey, sport, that’s just hugely comforting.” But, her sarcasm aside, Caroline did appear comforted—or, if not comforted, then mollified. She had spent her anger. She had disillusioned me of the belief that I was the victim of a conspiracy.

“Caroline, I’m sorry.”

She smiled grudgingly. She put her arm through mine. “Come on, you jackass,” she said. “Let’s walk on up to Prix-des-Yeux.”

“Prix-des-Yeux?”

“The habiline village. We’re almost there. RuthClaire and Adam are waiting for us. The habilines, too, I guess.” Prix-des-Yeux means Eye-Price or Eye-Prize. In the special lingo of vaudun, the term connotes a state of mystical clairvoyance obtainable only by practitioners at the highest level of faith. Arm in arm, then, Caroline and I climbed toward that state—even though neither of us believed.

RuthClaire, Adam, and the habilines were not the only ones waiting for us when we arrived ten minutes later. Also on hand in the hidden village a hundred yards from the top of the mountain was Brian Nollinger. Once an anthropologist at Emory and a former beau of Caroline’s, Nollinger sat on a rosewood log next to the crude peristyle of the village houngfor, or voodoo temple. After we emerged into the ragged clearing encompassing Prix-des-Yeux, Brian stood up, turning his wide-brimmed hat in his hands like a steering wheel. I looked at Caroline. She looked at me. God blast me for a green-eyed fool, the first thought into my mind convicted her of a premeditated infidelity.

“Hello,” the interloper said. He wore bush shorts, hiking boots, calf-high socks, and a khaki shirt with epaulets and three or four button-down pockets.

Caroline said, “My God, Brian, what are you doing here?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you about him,” I told Caroline. “Please don’t try to pretend you didn’t know he was here.”

“But I didn’t—”

“That’s insulting. You must think I’m an idiot.”

RuthClaire, hearing this exchange, came out of the houngfor in front of which Brian had been sitting. A voodoo temple generally consists of a thatched enclosure with walls about two thirds of the way to its ceiling. The roof, as on this one, is wimpled with palm fronds. Hanging on cords beneath the ceiling is an eclectic jungle of sacred objects, including colored bottles, dried gourds, tin trinkets, and hand-carven mahogany charms. Exiting this shabby peristyle, RuthClaire walked straight across the small clearing to Caroline and me.

“She didn’t know he was here, Paul. He got here about fifteen minutes ago. He followed us from the cottage.”

Tentatively, Brian approached. As if afraid that I might leap forward to bust him in the chops, he halted about five feet behind RuthClaire. The wispy Fu Manchu that he had shaved off before showing up at Abraxas for Adam’s first formal exhibit was back again, but two or three days’ growth of patchy stubble had started to encroach upon it. In another few days, his beard would cover most of his lower jaw, with only the Fu Manchu’s dubious head start to mark it out from the newer sprouts. His hat, the kind that an African big-game hunter might wear, continued to turn in his hands—I was reminded of a bus driver trying to escape a crowded parking lot.

“That’s true,” he said. “I have a French motor scooter, very quiet and economical. I’d been watching the Montaraz beach cottage ever since Blair got here. When he left yesterday, I feared Adam had canceled any plans to come up here again. Why would a restaurant owner or a vacationing sociologist want to visit the Rutherford Remnant? But I hung on through the night, and this morning, pop! a habiline woman appeared at your cottage and five of you piled into a Jeep and drove up here. For once, I found the damned turnoff. Three or four earlier times, you gave me the slip. It’s the turnoff that flummoxes me. I keep puttering by it. It’s just a tear in the roadside foliage.”

“We knew you were on Montaraz,” RuthClaire said. “But we thought you were working on the Austin-Antilles coffee plantations.”

“I am. How do you think I bought a motor scooter down there at import prices?”

“You’re supposed to be in the Dominican Republic,” Caroline said, “doing demographic studies of the canecutters. To take that job, you left Atlanta without even telling me goodbye.”

Christ, I thought. Caroline’s really cleaning out her psychic cupboards today….

“Caroline, I wrote you about not saying goodbye, and I did do demographic work in the Dominican. But I took that job to escape a bad situation at Emory and to position myself close enough to Haiti to do independent research on the Rutherford habilines. As soon as I could, I finagled a transfer from the Austin-Antilles sugar operation to the coffee ranches here on Montaraz.”

“Doing what?” Caroline asked. “Installing punch clocks for the peasants?”

“Supervising the construction of concrete drying platforms, Caroline. They’ve had them since the thirties on Haiti itself, but the workers here on Montaraz have always resisted the washing and drying process. Austin-Antilles was afraid to push them too hard for fear of provoking work stoppages. About three months ago, I implemented an education program with the help of the Pan American Development Foundation. A month ago, we actually got platform construction under way.”

“What’s demographic about that, Brian? Where does your anthropological background come in? How does it help the laborers themselves?”

“Not much maybe, but it’s the job that got me transferred over here. It’s valuable work economically, Caroline—it benefits the company. But my ulterior motive was to find Adam’s people. I’ve searched this island many times since March, using my work as cover, and when the Montarazes settled here, I knew it was only a matter of time. Blair came. And then, icing on the cake, you and—” He gestured at me.

“Caroline’s husband,” I said.

“Icing on the cake?” Caroline mocked. “Because you could finally get what you wanted, namely, unauthorized access to the habilines.”

“With you and Mr. Loyd along, it wasn’t hard to follow you up here, if that’s what you mean. Mr. Loyd was so slow I had to sit down every couple of minutes to keep from stepping on his heels. Finally, he cracked up and went down on his fanny for a couple of hours.” He put his hat on, tightened its draw string under his chin, and stuffed his hands into his bush-shorts pockets. “I’m glad you’re okay, Mr. Loyd. I hung back a while, to figure out what was going on—but when Caroline returned to you and the two of you started arguing, well, it didn’t seem fair to sit there listening, so I made a big circle around you and came on up here to Habiline City.”

“Prix-des-Yeux,” RuthClaire corrected him. “You think following people without their knowledge is less despicable than eavesdropping on them?”

“Ma’am?”

“Why didn’t you come to our cottage, knock on the door, and ask us to bring you here? Didn’t that ever cross your mind?”

“I knew you didn’t want to see me, Mrs. Montaraz. You ducked me in the market one day.” He shook his head. “Don’t deny it. Don’t apologize. Anyway, if I’d done that, if I’d come to you and asked you to bring me up here, would you have done it?”

“Of course not,” RuthClaire said.

Brian Nollinger shrugged, then glanced about to see if anyone was sneaking up behind him to knock him senseless with a monkey-coco club.

I glanced about, too. On the sides of the houngfor sat squatter’s huts of cardboard, plywood, scrap metal, palm thatching, and broken cinderblocks. These dwellings might have been transported in from Shantytown in Rutherford’s Port—except that whoever made them had refrained from using any tin or glass, and had not employed any scrap metal on their roofs—because the habilines had no wish to disclose their village’s location to searchers in small aircraft. And so Prix-des-Yeux had an earthy drabness and a natural green canopy concealing its modest environs from aerial snooping.

“Now you’re here,” RuthClaire asked Nollinger, “what do you intend to do?”

“Study the habilines. With your permission, I’d like to do field work here.”

“With our permission? You did all you could to avoid asking for it, mister!”

“But now that I know where the Rutherford Remnant makes its home, surely you’ll let me follow up. I admire Adam. I’m sympathetic to his people’s desire to live out their lives as an autonomous community. Most of my work has been in primate ethology, yes, but that’s not an inappropriate background for such research. I’m strong on method, a good organizer, and can do whatever I put my mind to, given a chance. Supervising the construction of coffee-drying platforms proves that. Moreover, I’m able to—”

“Brian, old boy, you’ve got a job,” I said. “So just skip the self-serving resume.”

“What you lack,” RuthClaire told him; “is discretion and a basic regard for others’ feelings. To you, these people—” waving at the temple and nearby shanties, a township barren of visible inhabitants—“well, they’re nothing but subject matter. As I’m nothing but an obstacle to research and Adam’s only a means to personal advancement.”

“Forgive me, but that’s not fair. Remember when I showed up at Abraxas to apologize? Mr. Loyd here hustled me off, but I was sincere in my intentions.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Caroline told RuthClaire.

“Caroline!” I said.

Brian hurried to add, “Can you blame an anthropologist for being obsessed with Adam? The secret of our origins may rest with these persecuted habilines, ma’am.”

RuthClaire slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans and walked several steps away from our mutual nemesis. “Suppose you do your precious ‘field work’ here. Suppose Adam gives you a free hand. What then?”

“Ma’am?”

“What would you do with the results of your research?”

“Publish them, of course. That’s essential.”

“To whom?”

“To Nollinger,” I said. “He’ll one-up the entire paleoanthropological community, not excepting its high muckety-muck, A. P. Blair.”

“And destroy the Rutherford Remnant in the process,” RuthClaire said. “It was a small miracle they outlasted the first onslaught of scientific fortune hunters. Like their ancestors in Zarakal, they had to go underground—literally—to survive that dismaying siege. Montaraz is a small island, but their cunning and nimbleness, an inherited ability to lie low, saved them. A published account of their culture would be its death knell and eulogy. That’s not alarmism, Dr. Nollinger, but a realistic assessment of the likely results of human curiosity and greed.”

“Including yours,” I told my wife’s ex-beau.

“What if I refuse to pinpoint the location of this village?” Brian said. “It’s almost impossible to find it without prior knowledge. After all, thousands have suspected the existence of a habiline hideaway, but no one’s ever found it.”

“Until today,” RuthClaire said. “And that exception doesn’t prove the rule—it sabotages your entire argument.”

“You were careless, Mrs. Montaraz. You let a habiline woman visit your cottage, and then put her in a Jeep with your two foreign house guests. You took off as if going on a three- or four-day picnic. You never tried a single dodge to see if anyone was following you. And once on foot, you let Mr. Loyd and Caroline yak like school kids on a weekend field trip. Without such carelessness, I wouldn’t be here now.

“Well, you don’t have to be careless,” he went on. “Do things differently. Insure the site’s total anonymity. Keep doing so even after I’ve issued my monograph.”

RuthClaire spoke to the blue Haitian sky: “Too bad I don’t believe in murder. I could end this whole mess by putting a bullet in Dr. Nollinger’s brain.” She stared at her tormentor. “Do you think anybody’d ever find your body, mister?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Your bones, maybe—two million years from now. But only by a conjunction of skill and luck. Too bad murder’s not in my behavioral arsenal.”

“Where’s a bloodthirsty Tonton Macoute when you really need one?” Caroline asked RuthClaire. She added, “Why don’t you talk to Adam? Brian may be just the man to write an ethnography of the Rutherford Remnant… if anyone’s going to do one. I can vouch for his character.”

“And the Pope could vouch for Colonel Khadafy’s,” I said. “Never mind that he’d be an idiot to do it.”

Pointedly, the two women ignored me.

Where was Erzulie? Where were her fellow citizens of Prix-des-Yeux? For that matter, where was Adam?

RuthClaire led us across the clearing to the houngfor. Inside, we found Adam seated at the base of the poteau mitan, the central post of the roofed part of the temple called the tonnelle. Down this post, the gods of the voodoo pantheon, known individually and collectively as loa, descend upon the service from their spiritual abode in “Yagaza,” meaning either “Africa” or “the immaterial world beyond death.”

But Adam, still in his Baron Samedi costume, was not alone in the tonnelle. Facing him at the foot of the spirit pole sat Erzulie, legs crossed lotus fashion and hands clasping Adam’s in the same viselike manner that couplings on railway cars achieve an unbreakable grip. Adam had shut his eyes, and when we went deeper into the peristyle, walking cautiously beneath its hanging gourds and trinkets, we saw that Erzulie had shut hers too. The wizened habiline and her well-traveled grandson were communing through the agency of trance. What addled me even more than their abstraction from the present moment, though, was the fact that providing a weird Laocoön link between them was the sinuous body of a twelve-foot python. It curled about Adam’s torso, made a spavined loop around his and Erzulie’s arms, and, after lazily girdling the woman’s waist, rested its flat, evil-looking head atop her grubby scarf.

“My God,” Caroline said. “Are they all right?”

“They’re fine,” RuthClaire said. “We just can’t talk to them for a while.”

“But the snake—”

“It’s nonpoisonous, Caroline. Haiti has no poisonous snakes.”

Brian said, “It’s a local kind of python called a couleuvre. Islanders revere them because they eat rats. I’ve been in Dominican and Haitian homes where they put out food to attract the blesséd things: saucers of milk, fresh eggs, dishes of flour. You’re lucky if you have a couleuvre, Caroline.” He tilted his head to look at it. “Pretty, no?”

Even in the shade, the python glinted bronze and garnet. Its eyes sparkled like beryls. No one could dispute its prettiness, but it stank. The unmistakable odor of serpent drifted through the tonnelle like a thin gas. I covered my nose and turned aside.

“Cripes!” I said. “How do they stand it?”

RuthClaire regarded me with some sympathy. “It hit me that way, too, at first. You get used to it, just as you get acclimated to Montaraz.”

“But what are they doing?” Caroline asked.

“View the three of them as a symbiotic unit of old Arada-Dahomey spirits—Papa Guedé, Erzulie, and Damballa. There are plenty of other loa in the voodoo pantheon, but on Montaraz, that’s the Big Three. Damballa’s personal symbol is the serpent. He’s the god of rain, a guardian of lakes and fountains. Erzulie is Damballa’s mistress. Adam says when they link up like this, they make a metaphorical conduit between past and present, Africa and the New World, the spiritual and the material. The python’s the flow—the electricity—necessary to convey the gist of their messages.”

I was standing just inside the temple’s door again. “That doesn’t sound like Adam, RuthClaire. It sounds like superstitious gobbledegook.”

“The gist of what message?” Nollinger demanded. “What kinds of information are they supposed to be communicating?”

RuthClaire said, “The kinds that can’t be verbalized.”

“That’s appropriate,” I said. “Erzulie can’t talk much, the snake’s probably no orator, and Adam’s natural eloquence is lost on their likes.”

“Telepathy?”

“I wouldn’t call it telepathy, Dr. Nollinger. That has an unsavory paranormal ring. Mostly, though, it’s inaccurate.”

“How about witchcraft?” I said. “When it comes to savoriness, witchcraft takes the cake. Give me witchcraft over telepathy any day.”

“You’re making fun,” RuthClaire said, “but witchcraft implies an element of mysterious interplay that telepathy lacks. To explain what’s going on here, that element has to be accounted for. It’s religious, Paul, not crassly materialistic.”

“Wow. With you and Adam, everything’s religious.”

“Try holy. Or sacred. That’s even better.”

Avoiding the cabalistic vevés that had been laid out on the floor with cornmeal, flour, and colored sand, Caroline picked her way across the temple and crouched behind the center post to look at Adam and Erzulie. The couleuvre flicked its tongue. She drew back so quickly that she had to put her hand behind her to keep from falling on her butt. Recovered, she shifted but kept staring at the habilines. Without looking up, she said, “Can’t you give us a general idea of what they’re not talking about?”

“It’s hard to say,” RuthClaire said. “Details of Adam’s life on Montaraz before ego-crystallization. Maybe some stuff about habiline history both here and in the Lolitabu catacombs. It may go as far back as the beginning of the species. In fact, Adam says it does. Erzulie’s knitting him back into the unraveling fabric of his people without tearing him out of the life he’s made with me. He does this at least once every time we come up here. In a way, I envy him.”

“Why?” Caroline asked.

“Because it’s making it easier for him to forget what happened to Paul. I could use that kind of help myself.”

“Can’t you do this, too?”

“I’m afraid to. And I’m not a habiline.”

“Do you have to be? Isn’t simply being human enough? It was enough for you and Adam to marry.”

“Well,” RuthClaire said, “he’s human, but I… I’m not a habiline. It’s like time’s arrow, I guess—a one-way street. So I’m frightened and envious.”

“If you were an anthropologist,” Brian began, “you could…”

“What?”

“Try to identify with the habilines. Take part in their ceremonies. Translate the nonverbal images Adam and this woman are trading into an impressionistic history of human origins. You can see what that would mean. You can see why I’m badgering you to let me try it. It might revolutionize our whole species’ self-concept, our fundamental notions of who and what we are.”

I said, “You never let up, do you, Brian?”

Here, Adam leaned his head back and let go such a piercing cry that all four of us ducked away from it. Then Adam’s eyes sprang open. So did Erzulie’s. The couleuvre, Damballa’s living avatar on Montaraz, slipped the knots that it had tied around Erzulie’s waist and Adam’s torso and crawled away from them. Caroline leapt aside to let it pass.

The snake knew where it was going, namely, up onto a crude wooden dais beyond the poteau mitan. There, the habilines had arranged the three sets of Arada-Dahomey drums traditionally played during a vaudun ceremony. The python, taking its time, gripped the base of one of the tall asotor drums and flowed up it to the leather drumhead. Here the serpent balanced, as if on a fulcrum, until it could bridge the chasm between the drum and one of the posts supporting the houngfor’s outer wall. Still calmly flowing, the great bronze-and-garnet snake reached the top of the truncated wall, and, as its weight shifted from the drum to the rafter of the peristyle, the entire temple shook. To prevent the houngfor from collapsing on me, I stepped outside. Soon, though, Damballa came to rest on the flimsy rafter, and the temple stopped swaying.

Adam and Erzulie awakened. They had ceased to be loa—had become themselves again. Adam pulled Erzulie up, and the two groggy habilines turned to face us with a reluctance, or an apathy, that was palpable. The reality of this moment, no matter how strange, could not compete with the colorful intensity of their possession by the Haitian gods. Adam’s pupils were huge, as if he had imbibed light with which to illumine the visions of his trance. He stumbled toward RuthClaire before finding both his balance and his place in our small consensus world.

“Are you all right?” RuthClaire asked, catching him.

He was looking at Brian Nollinger. His pupils had contracted to the size of microdots. Something inside him, I thought, wanted to squeeze Nollinger utterly out of his sight.

“I was,” he said, his guttural voice scarcely audible. “I was.”

The five of us remained in Prix-des-Yeux for three days. We let Brian Nollinger stay because he had found us and would have little trouble finding us again. Too, he earnestly reiterated his promise not to divulge the location of the habiline village, if Adam would consent to his doing a respectful ethnographic study of the Rutherford Remnant. Adam consented, but his lack of enthusiasm suggested that he viewed Brian’s plea as a subtle form of blackmail. If he’d withheld consent, Nollinger could have avenged himself by returning to Rutherford’s Port and telling what he knew. Then Adam’s people would have had to move. Tearing down their houngfor and their huts would have posed no real problem, but on an island as small as Montaraz, finding an equally well-camouflaged site for a new village would have. So Adam let the blackmailer stay.

His decision irked me. Caroline’s offering the Montarazes unsolicited testimonials on Brian’s behalf didn’t sit well with me, either. What stake did she have in his staying with us? Why did she so value his talents—wholly untested talents—as an ethnographer? Why did she recall him with such fondness, when he’d deserted their earlier relationship without so much as a flippant ta-ta? I tried to find reasons. He was younger than I. His brief career in the Caribbean, begun out of something like Byronic desperation, gave him an irresistibly romantic air. Or, the least happy of all my conjectures, Caroline still loved him. She’d married me on the rebound, albeit a long one, and Brian’s reappearance in her life had come to her as a godsend.

Self-doubt. Paranoia. An absence of charity. I owned all these negative attributes. I kept thinking about what RuthClaire had jokingly said about killing Nollinger. The surreal tropical setting of Prix-des-Yeux had deprived me of all adult perspective. I was a teenager again, and the fact that I was living an oblique Lost Race fiction out of Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard simply heightened my adolescent self-doubt. And the Lost Race whose culture Brian hoped to observe, whose art my new wife and I had come all the way from Atlanta to see, and whose survival the Montarazes wanted to insure? Well, on the afternoon of the day of our arrival, we met these unusual people one at a time over a period of about two hours.

At Adam’s bidding, Erzulie left Prix-des-Yeux, hiked into the dense shrubbery uphill from the huts, and returned in half an hour with one of her habiline compatriots. Then, after mutually awkward pantomimic greetings, Erzulie accompanied her charge back up the mountain to fetch the next. Each habiline came dressed in a togalike garment that varied not at all in style or color from person to person. With the appearance of the third habiline, I realized that Erzulie’s relatives were all wearing the same garment. An ochre stain on its hem gave the game away. Although the motto “one size fits all” was not strictly true (the smallest of the four members of the Rutherford Remnant had to gather the toga’s skirts and carry them across one arm), they pretended otherwise. In the absence of visitors, they obviously wore no clothes at all. Hence these serial debuts.

Erzulie’s head scarf and chemise were dictated solely by her current status as a go-between, a role that she must often have played with the superstitious islanders grubbing out their livings farther down the mountain. Older and more worldly-wise than most of her conspecifics, she could pass herself off as a deaf-mute mambo or vaudun priestess. The Haitians might suspect she was a habiline, but to regard her as a witch—rather than a deceitful weredemon or a quasi-human survivor of Sayyid Sa’īd’s slave market—conferred a degree of safety on their dealings with her. Cigouaves and habilines, after all, you should report to the Tontons Macoutes, and the fewer contacts with those guys the better. You could trust a four-foot-tall witch a lot further than you could a six-foot-tall cop with mirrorshades and a Springfield rifle.

In any event, Erzulie—both mambo and goddess—introduced us to her people.

The first of the four habilines was a grizzled old man with a broad flap of flesh for a nose and eyes the hue of cloudy gin. He was blind. Adam told us his name was Hector, but, as with all the names that Adam gave us, I felt sure he’d invented it as a convenience for the rest of us. Although blind, Hector oriented himself to every rock and blossom in the landscape as if he could see. Once, when a butterfly with iridescent moiré patterns and peacock eyes on its wings tumbled past us, Hector moved his head as if to follow its flight. RuthClaire conjectured that an acute sensitivity to air currents and minuscule temperature changes had allowed him to perform this trick.

The remaining three habilines came out in turn. They included a furtive, middle-aged male whose pot belly pooched out the fabric of the toga; a relatively young female with a deformed pelvic structure that gave her a gimpy walk without really slowing her down; and an adolescent male whose fierce mistrust of us revealed itself in his flashing eyes and the irrepressible tendency of his upper lip to pull away from his teeth. Adam called these three Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. French names, every one. I reflected that before Peter Martin Rutherford deeded Montaraz to President Nissage Saget, most of the habilines had had English or Spanish names—if they’d had names at all. It hardly mattered, though. Among themselves, they most likely used primeval East African syllables, throaty names with no modern counterparts. Or maybe they had communicated by touch, gesture, facial expression, and eye movements. Because none of the Prix-des-Yeux habilines spoke, we had no way of knowing.

Toussaint, we learned, was young Alberoi’s uncle. Toussaint’s brother—the father of the edgy Alberoi—had belonged to the same gunrunning crew with which Adam had worked early in 1980. Adam had seen the murders of Alberoi’s father and his own brother by a Cuban thug (whom Caroline, by coincidence, had later interviewed in the Atlanta Penitentiary). As for Dégrasse, she’d broken her pelvis in a fall from a natural stope in the cave system above Prix-des-Yeux to a chamber far below it. She had been carrying an unborn child. The child died, and she had almost died. Friends managed to get her to the level on which she and her husband had made their home in the catacombs, and here she had eventually recovered. Destroyed along with her baby, however, was her ability to conceive. As the only surviving habiline woman of child-bearing age, she suffered from the knowledge (dim and unfocused, but ever-present) that her tenacious species was finally—after nearly three million self-abnegating years—doomed to pass away. Alberoi might well be the last of them to die, but Dégrasse had been their only viable hope for continuance.

Gone, that hope.

All that was left was for the males to mate with human women. Ironically, Adam had pioneered that option with results that had persuaded him and RuthClaire not to try again. Hector was old and blind. Toussaint and Alberoi might one day seek Haitian brides, but their fear of the human world—their experiences with Tontons Macoutes, plantation overseers, fortune hunters, and Marxist revolutionaries—argued against their doing so. Their people were universal victims. Even others who wished to protect them often endangered them by shining upon them the light of sincere concern. Adam, a habiline himself, had inadvertently done that. So it was unlikely that the anxious Toussaint or the feral Alberoi would ever venture down from their village to woo the sloe-eyed daughters of men.

I asked Adam why he had limited our first contact with his people to these stiff, serial meetings. He said it was simply to give them a chance to get used to our presence. They were suspicious, and shy. Erzulie had had some experience with outsiders, but the other habilines were innocents with soft ego structures. They had threaded their lives into the elemental natural beauties and terrors of the island, but latter-day humankind totally confounded them. Tomorrow, and the next day, we would see more of them. Meanwhile, we must let them think about our first meetings with us. In the darkness of the caves—I began to realize there were caves higher up the mountain—they would begin to weave us into the psychic patterns tying them to Montaraz and their immemorial family past. Or so, at least, Adam hoped.

That night, we lit candles in the houngfor and shared a rude picnic near its center post. We included Brian and made nervous jokes about the couleuvre coming to join us. Afterward, Brian asked questions about Blair’s visit to the cottage, and Caroline told him about her tapes of the Great Man’s conversation with Adam. Since we had brought our equipment with us, Brian insisted on hearing them. RuthClaire and I told Caroline she’d be crazy to let Brian eavesdrop on a privileged interview, especially before it saw print in Popular Anthropology, but Adam, having surrendered once, saw no reason to hold firm on this point, either. Besides, he wanted to hear the tapes. Up here in Prix-des-Yeux, what other entertainment did we have?

We listened to the tapes. Brian, like a man praying at an altar, leaned forward in the candlelight. Although he laughed aloud during Blair’s attempt to persuade Adam that Homo zarakalensis was a better species designation than Homo habilis, he was respectful through the latter two thirds of the interview. Only when Adam claimed to be the “last of my tribe” did Brian raise his eyebrows and let his gaze travel around the shadowy circle of our faces. The concluding section of the tape about the soul, the ego, and God, he listened to raptly, without criticism or censure.

“Good stuff, Caroline, but incomplete. You ought to do another interview like that—with me as the third participant.”

“No,” said Adam clearly. “No way.”

We spread out our sleeping bags in the tonnelle. The serpent in the rafters made me uneasy, but RuthClaire swore it coveted only small rodents, birds’ eggs, and vaudun offerings. No need to fear waking up as a paralyzed lump in its throat. We slept.

During the night, all the other habilines but Hector returned from the caves to the village. Alberoi and Erzulie had one of the Shantytown huts, Dégrasse and Toussaint the other. All four were up and about by the time we rubbed sand out of our eyes and pushed our creaky selves off the ground. The men had donned walking shorts, and Dégrasse was a vision of yellow and brown in a floral-print chemise whose pattern reminded me of nursery-school wallpaper: groups of baby ducks swimming through stands of graceful reeds. From hidden larders, the habilines had produced a small black cauldron of red beans and rice that they were heating over a fire not far from the houngfor. We emerged to the pleasing aroma of this stew. Alberoi stirred the pot, Erzulie ladled globs into chipped porcelain mugs, and Dégrasse passed out tin spoons to those walking by to be fed. Seated on the log by the temple, Toussaint was already greedily eating.

After breakfast, Brian declared it was time for the habilines to hold free elections.

“For what?” RuthClaire asked. “Five people don’t need a president.”

“To see what they want to be called!” Nollinger replied. “As Alistair Patrick Blair himself pointed out, even the scientific community will be bound by their decision. Let’s round them up so we can propose alternatives to Homo habilis and Homo zarakalensis and have them vote.”

“Adam,” RuthClaire said, “this is preposterous.”

But Adam had entered into the spirit of Brian’s early-morning madness. “I like it because it is preposterous. And because Dr. Nollinger recognizes the egotistical absurdity of his eminent colleague’s campaign for Homo zarakalensis.”

“Does it have to be a Latin term?” I asked.

“The habilines are the sole arbiters,” Brian said. “It can be anything they want.”

The habilines were sitting on the rosewood log beside the village houngfor. When Hector came into the clearing a moment later, Adam escorted him to a place on the log beside Erzulie. Every member of the Rutherford Remnant was on hand, and Brian, speaking alternately in English and French, explained the significance of this morning’s election.

“Adam, stop him,” RuthClaire said. “You’re betraying your own kind.”

“Only if you suppose Erzulie and the others incapable of deciding what they wish to be called. I give them more credit.”

“So do I,” said Brian. He looked at me. “Any suggestions, Mr. Loyd?”

“Well, they’re about the size of a singing group. How about the Ink Spots?”

Brian translated this for the habilines. “Les Taches de l’encre?”

“Lord!” RuthClaire shook her fists at shoulder level and stormed off into a hut to escape an outbreak of silliness that she regarded as low and pernicious.

“That really dates you,” Caroline told me. “Criminy, the Ink Spots!”

“How about the Jackson Five? Is that any better?”

“Singing-group names,” Adam said, deadpan, “are disqualifyingly frivolous.”

“Then how about the Dodgers?” I said. “The Rutherford’s Port Dodgers?”

“The Society for Self-Perpetuating Anachronism?” Caroline said.

“Homo nollingeri?” Brian said.

“The Survivors?”

“Friends of the Earth?”

“Adam Montaraz and the Voodoo Vagabonds?”

“Old and Young Republicans?”

“Stop,” Adam said. “I have a final proposal, Les Gens. I now demand the choices be put and the vote recorded.”

Les Gens—the People—won hands down. (Well, hands up.) And no one charged ballot stuffing or any other election fraud.

“It’s not that original,” Brian said after the count. “But it does have the force of tradition behind it.”

“Exactly,” Adam said. “Now RuthClaire can write Dr. Blair and tell him of my people’s decision.” He went into Erzulie’s hut to tell her. A moment later, the sounds of RuthClaire and Adam’s argument drifted out to all eight of us in the clearing.

I was frightened. Exploring caves, even in the company of a knowledgeable guide, strikes me as the physical equivalent of exploring the teeming darkness of the id. You have no idea what you will find. And there is no guarantee that once you confront this darkness, you will find the strength to overcome it and reemerge a saner person than you first went in. There is no guarantee that you will reemerge at all.

“Come on, Paul,” Caroline said. “The People do it all the time. Hector, who’s blind, has been doing it for years.”

“It might help to be blind.”

Still dressed as Baron Samedi, Adam led us away from the houngfor, from the village itself. We climbed through a dense course of bushes and scrub pines to a strip of open terrace. This terrace was only thirty or forty feet wide and ended in an upslope barricade of sablier trees. This tree takes its name from that of a tusked hog found on Haiti—for the tree, too, has tusks, an array of evil spines on its trunk and lower branches. RuthClaire explained that you seldom find the sablier so plentiful and closely spaced at the higher elevations, but that this stand was the result of deliberate plantings undertaken by the habilines to hide the cave mouths farther up the mountain. Until such hedges were outlawed as threats to the public safety, in fact, property-owning Haitians had often used sablier trees to fence their homes and gardens. Innocent passers-by, as well as would-be thieves, had sometimes suffered puncture wounds, lacerations, lost eyes, and even death upon unexpectedly running into a phalanx of sablier spines.

“Doesn’t a barricade like that call attention to itself?” Caroline asked, gesturing at the prickly wall.

“Only from the air,” RuthClaire said. “And the only people on Montaraz with helicopters or light aircraft are Austin-Antilles hires. They don’t overfly Pointe d’Inagua very often because they’ve already got most of the good coffee-growing land tied up, anyway. It’s a little weird, a sablier hedge this high, but it’s not so strange as to invite inspection trips. It just keeps tourists and local curiosity-seekers at bay.”

Hector was with us. He stared unseeingly at the wall, a look of fond contentment on his runneled face. He walked unassisted, without even a stick to help him feel his way, and his sure-footed strides amazed me. How, though, would he negotiate this murderous barricade? How, for that matter, would we?

Adam read my mind. “For Hector and the others, going into the sabliers is like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Come.” He and the old man set off across the terrace, climbing boldly toward the trees. Brian, RuthClaire, Caroline, and I followed, glancing about as if Tontons Macoutes might show at any moment to gun us down.

Hector led us through the barricade. His uncanny second sight allowed him to duck into an opening of spiny boughs that funneled us into another corridor requiring a sideways twist to enter. Each time Hector sensed, or remembered, the next array of spikes ready to stab him, his head bobbed to avoid it. And so we tiptoed behind him, bobbing and feinting as the person in front of us did, trusting that each feint replicated one already performed by Hector. I felt like an upright slug trying to defer my vivisection in a forest of jumbled razor blades.

At last we got through. The pine- and hardwood-studded mountain still loomed over us, but to its right gleamed a wedge of glittering blue from Inagua Bay, a peaceful triangular sail on the water, and the red-tile roof of a solitary villa next to the sea. The clarity of these images—after our claustrophobic hike from the coastal road to Prix-des-Yeux and from Prix-des-Yeux to this overlook—stunned me.

“Find an entrance to the caves,” Adam challenged us.

We stumbled along a dark-soiled cut between the sabliers and the lichen-coated rock formations above. Hector and Adam stood at the far end of this cut waiting for us to pass their test. I began to weary of it.

Turning, I said, “How long are we supposed to look?”

Adam was alone on the spot where he had been standing. Hector had vanished. Had he fallen through a metaphoric trap door into the maw of the mountain? I scrambled down the cut to Adam to try to solve the mystery.

Beside the habiline grew three or four blasted-looking bushes. They had clumped together so it was hard to tell their number. One stuck out and downward from the wall of the gravel-littered cut. Even though the slope of the mountain and the curve of the gully protected this bush from the wind, its inner branches were languidly waving, like sea anemones in a gentle current. I stuck my arm into the bush.

The air that struck my flesh was cool—refrigerated-feeling. This was undoubtedly Hector’s point of entry into the underworld.

“Here,” I said. “Right here.”

“Go on, then,” Adam encouraged me.

I waded into the tangled bushes, stooped to get my head beneath the bush growing out of the wall, and sat down to keep from scratching my face on its branches. Now my legs dangled invisibly beneath me, my upper body enmeshed in brambles like a fly in the pod of a carnivorous plant. RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian approached me, their faces visible through the interlocking twigs of my prison.

“Drop,” Adam said. “Drop on down.”

“I’m not sure I want to be first.”

“You won’t be,” RuthClaire said. “Hector’s already down there.”

“Wait!” Caroline knelt and shoved a Nikon into my hands. “Hang on to that, Paul. It’s expensive.”

“I know that. Who the hell do you think bought it?” But I gripped the camera more tightly and edged forward until my rump had nothing under it to support it. Like Alice, I fell—into obsidian blackness. Then my feet hit rock and went out from under me, and I was sitting again, albeit painfully. I’d jarred my coccyx, and I could see nothing at all. A hand touched my forehead and then discreetly withdrew.

“Hector? Hector, is that you?”

A hand grabbed my shirt and got me off my tail to a hunched standing position. It was indeed Hector. He was blind—but, down here, so much less blind than I, or anyone else, that his clairvoyance made him king. I feared that if I stood, I’d bump my head.

“That’s not the way to do it,” RuthClaire called from above. “You’re supposed to slide down.” Her words echoed through the catacombs.

Caroline shouted, “Paul, are you okay?”

“I think I’ve loosened the bolt that holds my ass on, kid. Otherwise, yeah, I’m all right.” It gratified me to note that my ex had scolded me, while Caroline had asked after my health. Maybe at some level of its operation, the world was running smoothly.

Then Brian Nollinger cried, “Hang on, Mr. Loyd, we’re coming!” Adam came first, then RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian. They slid down a natural ramp two feet over from where I’d been sitting, and this body-worn slide deposited them next to Hector and me without fracturing either their feet or their tailbones.

“I am very sorry you hurt your butt,” Adam said, touching my arm. “On this walk-through, we will avoid the most treacherous galleries, the coves and crawlways that speleologists call horrors: no wriggle rooms, rock bridges, or chatières, Mister Paul.”

“Chatières?”

“Cat holes,” RuthClaire said. “You can guess what those are.”

“En avant,” Adam said. He shone his battery lamp into the depths of the tunnel. Its beam lit the glassy black walls of the cavern and a high rugged arch beyond which ran a wall gleaming as if basted with coal oil. We walked toward that wall.

In its center, maybe fifty feet away, writhed a statue—its writhing a trick of the light, the oily dampness, and the sinuous lines of the sculpture itself—of a hominid creature like a habiline. It was carven from a dark, banded rock. Its contorted face had smooth hollows for eyes but an angry mouth and a flat nose with flared wings and nostrils. Its face seemed at once that of both a protohuman and a rabid canine. Its hands were fists, and its arms were raised to embrace or assault whoever approached. It boasted an erection as big and shiny as a Coca-Cola bottle, and testicles as distended and uneven as parallel drippings of candle wax. An agony of love, hunger, and rage emanated from the figure, which RuthClaire said was supposed to represent Homo habilis primus: the primeval habiline, the father of its species.

“Who did it?” Caroline asked. “Hector?”

Adam said, “No, not Hector. Even he can’t remember who shaped it, or how our ancestors set it here, but for as long as any of us can recall, it has stood at the base of this wall, at the mouth of this gallery: a memorial and a numen.”

“A numen?” Caroline handed me a flash attachment. I plugged it into the Nikon and took a series of photographs of the statue.

“A presiding spirit,” Brian told Caroline. “The creative energy of the caves and of the habilines.”

“Abraxas, if you like,” RuthClaire said.

I looked at her in the wavering light of Adam’s lamp. “What?”

“Not the art gallery,” she said.

“Then what?”

“In Christian Gnosticism, Abraxas was the god of day and night. The long, bitter day of Adam’s people is nearly over. Down here, it’s already given way to night.”

“We must move,” Adam said. “To stay too long is to tire the eyes so they begin to play tricks. You’ll see statues where none exist, wall paintings where none have been painted. Huge figures at a distance will seem tiny figures in a nearby niche. Tiny statues nearby will seem colossi viewed from across a chamber of humbling bigness. Please, let’s move on.”

We obeyed, and what Adam predicted would happen, happened. The longer we stayed underground the less reliable our perceptions of what he was showing us. Today I have a photographic record of our trip through the Montaraz catacombs, but these photos cannot communicate the impact of beholding such powerful art in its hallucinatory natural setting. Even my panoramas of the largest subterranean vaults cannot evoke the feel—the claustrophobic awe—of standing in those places and drinking in the glory of what the habilines had done. Once sundered from the context of the caves, the art loses meaning as well as immediacy. Like the Upper Paleolithic artists who painted the deep galleries of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, Adam’s people had decorated their grottoes, corridors, and rotundas for complicated religio-historical purposes—rites of initiation and socialization—that would fail of fulfillment anywhere else. You had to be there for the art to have context, and the art had to have context for its beholders to internalize the sacredness and force of what they saw. That the caves eventually deceive the eye and disorient the body only adds to their importance in shaping the experience of the initiates. What, then, either “correctly” or “incorrectly,” did we see?

With Adam as guide, and with Brian and RuthClaire as additional torchbearers (they had flashlights), we saw all we could see without crawling, rappelling, or sprouting wings and flying. Here on Montaraz, a school of habiline Michelangelos had rendered the entire history of their species in red, black, yellow, and glowing-white symbols. This chronicle began with a parade of East African animals migrating in discrete herds along the wall leading away from the primeval habiline; it concluded with a procession of gunrunning boats, cruiseships, and propeller-driven pot planes along the way leading back to this anguished figure.

In between, deeper into the mountain, these same artists and their descendants had painted awesome murals synopsizing their people’s years on the savannah, their uneasy relationships with Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, their furtive exile in the foothills of Lolitabu, the dwindling of their numbers during this protracted time, the capture of their surviving remnant by Kikembu warriors, their humiliation and sale in the slave market of Zanzibar, their painful sea voyage from the Island of Cloves to the Isle of Coffee and Cacao, their years of labor on the Rutherfords’ plantations, and their near-extermination by the Tontons Macoutes of Papa Doc Duvalier in the early 1960s.

These sprawling, almost phosphorescent murals took our breath away. Moreover, in front of each one stood a rock carving that subtly glossed the mural’s principal theme. Among these statues were a droll granite hippopotamus, a dying australopithecine, and a family of cave bats hanging upside down. I thought Brian would squeeze his eyeballs out of his sockets examining these works. Adam kept reminding him to stop touching the statuary and the paintings, particularly the murals, for too much touching would alter or deface them. Although the habilines’ pigments had strong color fastness, and although their artists had applied them only to the most absorbent rock faces, the preservation of this subterranean wonder still depended on its visitors’ respectful manners.

“You can’t continue to keep this secret!” Brian’s words bounced off a stagger of receding walls.

“We have to,” RuthClaire said. “To save it.”

“But Mr. Loyd’s taking pictures. Do you believe that after they’re published, another plague of professional schemers won’t swoop down on Montaraz?”

Adam said, “But these pictures, he won’t be publishing.”

“Then why am I taking them?”

“As a record,” Adam said. “If anything should destroy this magnificence, whether vandals, war, or volcanic eruption.”

Caroline asked what photos, of what art, I would be allowed to publish or to carry to gallery owners in my agent’s portfolio. Adam replied that he was not asking me to represent the dead habiline cave artists, but instead Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. It was their work that I’d come to photograph for business purposes, not the paintings and statuary now surrounding and thoroughly overawing us. I would also be given the chance to take some of their work back to Atlanta with us. Granted, I was presently taking celluloid inventory of these refrigerated basilica naves, but that was only a sidelight—an important one—of Caroline’s and my voyage to Montaraz. We had come to help the living rather than the dead. The dead were beyond our help, if not our memory and our gratitude.

“Where are Erzulie’s and the others’ paintings?” Caroline asked.

“In Prix-des-Yeux,” Adam said. “Mister Paul could have photographed them this morning, but we became involved in our free election for a species name. It’s best to visit caves early in the day so that nightfall does not catch us belowground. When we get back, you can see the paintings in Erzulie’s hut.”

“How could they compare to these?” Brian made a sweeping gesture.

“Why should they?” RuthClaire said. “They’re altogether different.”

“Not really,” Adam said. “Hector and Erzulie did some of the cave paintings—farther on—of the Duvalier persecution: bogeymen with rifles, our young ones thrown from cliffs, and so forth.”

“I understand their doing so,” Brian said. “Hector and Erzulie were alive during that very bad time. But this stuff—” he pointed at a two-dimensional scene of a habiline hunting party chasing a pack of jackals off a kill—“well, none of the Rutherford Remnant could have experienced it. None of your cave painters ever lived in Africa. Even more obvious is the fact that none of them lived there two million years ago.”

“Very true,” Adam said.

“So how did they render the entire history of their people in this unbelievably glorious way?”

“Vaudun,” RuthClaire said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Voodoo and revelation,” RuthClaire told Brian. “All the way back in the 1870s, local houngans and mambos began putting Les Gens in touch with their species’ collective unconscious. Adam figures that the earliest of these paintings date from then. Later, some of the habilines became priests or priestesses themselves. Erzulie’s a current example. In a less thoroughgoing way, so’s my Adam. He always dresses like Papa Guedé—Baron Samedi, if you prefer—when he comes up here, to insure a sympathetic continuity between the dead habilines of Africa and those on Montaraz who spiritually rediscovered them through voodoo.”

“That’s what Adam was doing last night,” I said. “What Adam and Erzulie were doing, I mean. With the snake.”

“Exactly,” RuthClaire said. “Getting in touch with their habiline past. And a trip through these caves can do the same in a way that brings all the rite’s participants closer together. The first cave painters probably began their work believing it would help their people survive by educating and unifying them. It would give them a sense of the sacred. Sadly, the twentieth century has been pretty efficient at destroying the sacred. And how could the cave painters know that a man named Papa Doc would turn into their Stalin, their Hitler, their Pol Pot? They’d never heard of any of these butchers.”

“Voodoo and revelation,” Brian said. “What did you mean by revelation?”

Adam’s lamp lit him from beneath, giving him the look of a disembodied floating head. “That God revealed himself to early Homo habilis as he later revealed himself to the Hebrews. Even as we approach extinction, we know we were favored by the earliest manifestation of God to a hominid species yet on record—even if it is on record only with us. We know we have our own Christ.”

“Your own Christ?”

“Not a prehistoric Jesus of Nazareth,” Adam told Brian. “But God in a form of flesh that any habiline would regard as holy: our own Christ.”

Somehow, our sensoriums overloaded with data, we groped our way to the surface and then back down the mountain to Prix-des-Yeux. Hector remained behind in the pitch-black darkness of the caves. He, after all, was their curator.

In the village, Adam took Caroline and me into the hut that Alberoi was sharing with Erzulie. Its interior was larger than its haphazard outer walls and carpentering had led me to think possible. Alberoi knelt toward the rear of the shanty beneath a hole in the roof through which fell a dusty column of sunlight. Was he sick? I thought for a moment that a stomach cramp had taken him, that he had assumed this hangdog posture to vomit—but then I realized that he was hovering over a small sheet of canvas tacked to a piece of plywood lying flat on the floor. With the edge of a rusted spoon, he applied paint to the canvas: the artist in his studio. Indeed, the hole in the roof served him as a skylight. A rain-warped hatch cover rested on one end of this opening, waiting for the hut’s occupant to grab its handle and slide it into place. In the event of rain, that act would offer a bit of protection. Mostly, though, it would plunge the hut’s interior into leaky gloom.

Speaking hesitant but well-accented French, Adam told Alberoi that we’d come to see his and the others’ paintings. The habiline backed off his canvas and squatted with his spine to the wall and his eyes cutting between RuthClaire and me. He still had his spoon. The pigment on it was a crimson acrylic, as if he had been sneaking tastes from a forbidden bowl of strawberry Jell-O: a naughty boy caught red-handed. We stepped around the room’s clutter—including a large crate resting on a foundation of bricks, a strip of oilcloth covering it—to see what Alberoi had been painting. Fortunately, he was fairly far along in the work, and I could tell a good deal about his talent.

He had talent. The painting was a colorful market scene in the “naive” style that had dominated David Blau’s Haitian exhibit at Abraxas: accessible, representational art. Its human figures had an affinity with the human-habiline figures on the walls of Hector’s caves, but its setting was modern. I recognized the market as the market in Rutherford’s Port. Vegetable stalls, milling people in bright clothes, a pair of buses with baskets tied to their roofs, groups of native musicians soliciting money from tourists. What drew my eye faster than these elements, however, was the grinning, dawdling giraffe in the midst of the crowd, none of whose members regarded its presence as a cause for either alarm or celebration. The giraffe belonged to the scene as surely as did the buses or the women in market garb. Delighted, Adam actually laughed aloud.

“Very good, Alberoi. Excellent.”

“A giraffe?” Caroline said.

“He knows my secret,” Adam said, as if that explained anything. “Do you think you could sell a painting like this, Mister Paul?”

“Sure. With no trouble at all.”

“Then come see the others.” He led me to the crate up on bricks—like a teenager’s engineless jalopy, I thought—and when we were out of his way, Alberoi crept back to his painting, laid the spoon aside, and took up a fine-tipped brush from a tray of acrylics. With this brush, he stippled in the mountain shrubbery behind the market. His concentration was intense. The rest of us might as well have been in Miami Beach.

Adam lifted the oilcloth covering the crate, which thin plywood dividers sectioned into a dozen compartments. Its cover off, the crate looked like a makeshift filing cabinet. Each compartment held canvases, some rolled, some stretched taut on narrow frames. We pulled the paintings from the crate and examined them. Almost all were in the bright naive style of the market scene that Alberoi was finishing. Several were portraits—or self-portraits—of Prix-des-Yeux people, the best being those of Erzulie and Dégrasse, as if the artists preferred the female countenance to the male. Three or four of the paintings, in stark contrast to the majority, radiated a gray or muddy-blue pessimism rather than a gaudy Caribbean joy, but their subjects were Tontons Macoutes or demons from local voodoo lore. Flipping past these, I saw several moderately realistic renderings of such loa as Damballa, Petro Simbi, and Ogou Achade, who is famous for being able to drink a great deal without becoming drunk. Unlike the demons, the loa were presented positively—in citrus-fruit colors and broad but enigmatic smiles. I liked what I saw.

“Am I supposed to photograph these?” I asked Adam.

“Only if you wish. Take a few with you, if you like, champion them about, and sell them for modest prices. Keep your commission and send the rest to RuthClaire and me. We can ship others to you, if your markets will bear such an influx.”

“I’ll take ten or twelve,” I said. “It’s probably best to see what sorts of interest they’ll generate before taking the lot.”

“You don’t want all of them?” Caroline asked me. “You’ll sell every habiline painting, or toenail clipping, entrusted to you.”

“But he won’t let me identify them as habiline artifacts.”

Caroline looked at Adam. “No? That’s self-defeating.”

“I am not trying to mop up, Miss Caroline, only to preserve what’s preservable and to pay for the privilege as we go.”

I had noticed an unusual, although perhaps not surprising, fact about all the paintings in the crate. “Adam, not one of these is signed. What names do you want to give the artists? I need names for gallery owners and department-store buyers.”

“Not names, Mister Paul. One name.”

I glanced at Alberoi. “He didn’t do all of these, did he? Didn’t you say Erzulie painted too? And all the others, for that matter?”

“Erzulie does. Likewise the others. But only one name is necessary for all the paintings, don’t you think? Regard them closely.”

I did as Adam asked. Caroline helped me compare. The canvases, no matter their subjects, did seem the work of a single hand. Brush strokes, color choices, draftsmanship, compositional techniques, overlay patterns—all these telltale criteria suggested but one artist. Even the bleak portraits of the Tontons Macoutes and the Arada-Dahomey demons differed from the other paintings only in color choice, and it was hard to think of many artists who did not sometimes vary their palettes to imply the full spectrum of human feelings. (RuthClaire had stayed with murky pastels for the Souls series, of course, but that series composed only a small fraction of her total output.) So, yes, it would make some sense, and simplify my marketing approach, to offer these paintings to prospective buyers as the work of a solitary talented naif.

“How did they manage this? It’s uncanny, Adam.”

“There is nothing to manage. It happens. In this creative endeavor, at least, the feelings of one are the others’ feelings; also, the talents. Because art requires leisure, they take turns at painting. They work turn by turn, by months. This is Alberoi’s month. Next, Dégrasse’s again. And so on. While the artist does art, the others tend their cassava patches, forage for firewood, or barter with trustworthy islanders for food items and such. It works very well. No one becomes disgruntled.”

Caroline said, “The canvases. The paints. Where do they get them?”

“Of late, RuthClaire and I have supplied them, but before we came, Erzulie went to Rutherford’s Port for them. She took carven figures of rosewood or mahogany to trade in the art shop next to Le Centre d’Art near the International Hotel. It was her idea. She saw primitive paintings like these—not as good, really—selling to tourists in the bazaars. This crate holds three years’ work—not quite, though, because Erzulie has sold some of these paintings already. To guess who may have them is impossible.”

“Used-car dealers from Ohio,” Caroline said. “Not knowing what they have, they hang them in their dens next to big paintings of Elvis on black velvet.”

“Maybe,” Adam said. “I don’t know.”

I asked him what name he favored for our solitary naif. Would it be wrong to use his? Adam rejected this idea. He was not ashamed to sign these canvases, but no one who knew his own paintings would believe that he’d done these, too. The styles diverged too widely. He worked with the advantage, and disadvantage, of a crystallized ego, whereas Alberoi and the others painted from the soft core of their unspoken common experience, from a collective unconscious too rubbery for any “I” ever to get a firm grip on it.

“What, then?”

“Fauver,” Adam said. “Call this unknown artist Fauver.”

“From fauve? That’s a school of painters, Adam, not a single artist. And it means ‘wild animal.’”

He smiled broadly. “Yes, I know.”

We could have chosen a dozen paintings, rolled them up, and bid farewell to Prix-des-Yeux, but Adam insisted that we must not leave Montaraz without experiencing a vaudun ceremony. A rational pagan like me, he declared, ought to subject himself to at least one powerful mystical experience in his life, and he and Erzulie would guide me safely through it. The other habilines would form a chorus, an upland rara band, to play drums and chant the needful chants. Fortunately, tomorrow was Saturday, and our voodoo service would begin a split second after nightfall. In the daylong interval, I must finish my photographic inventory of the caves—while Caroline and RuthClaire drove to the capital for items essential to the service. I liked none of these arrangements, but the others voted in a bloc against me (two cheers for democracy), and it was decided.

“There’s danger?” I asked. “I need help to see me safely through the ceremony?”

RuthClaire said, “It’s only dangerous, Paul, if you provoke the loa. Keep an open—preferably, a blank—mind.”

“He ought to be able to manage that.” Caroline was teasing, not being malicious, but the remark prompted RuthClaire’s laughter, too. The resurgent chumminess of the women, united again in playful ridicule, stung, and that Brian Nollinger was also present did nothing to pluck out the barb.

“Why the hell do they have to go to Rutherford’s Port?” I asked.

“To do this right,” Adam said. “We need a baptismal gown big enough to fit you, Mister Paul. Also some rum, orgeat, Florida water, cornmeal, oil, and two chickens.”

“Chickens?”

“Don’t ask,” RuthClaire said, and she and Caroline guffawed again, their arms around each other like long-lost-but-lately-found sisters.

“Do we have to get the chickens, too?” Caroline managed through this sputtering.

“I’ll drive you,” Brian said. “You can shop for trinkets. I’ll buy the chickens.”

“Live chickens,” Adam said.

“They don’t need you to chauffeur them, Herr Professor,” I said.

“I like to buy chickens,” RuthClaire said. “Even live ones. It’s hauling them home in a Jeep that rapidly loses its glamor.”

Brian tried to explain: “I’ve got to check in with my bosses. They give me a fairly free rein with this PADF project, but not so free that I can skip the island.”

Adam’s eyes widened and narrowed again. Nollinger saw, and I think both men remembered that nearly two years ago Brian had betrayed Adam to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. What would keep him from calling in the Tontons Macoutes in the hope of a reward, either money or preferential treatment?

“I’ll tell no one what I’ve seen here,” he said. “You have my word.”

A cynical snort escaped me.

“What would be the point?” he added. “I’d destroy my chance to do important field work here. I’d put myself in competition with dozens—maybe hundreds—of other would-be ethnographers. Do you really think I’d do that?”

“He wouldn’t,” Caroline said. “Brian knows what he’s got in Prix-des-Yeux.”

“And I want to see the vaudun ceremony tomorrow night. I’ll buy the damned chickens and truss them so they won’t flap. I can’t promise they won’t cackle, but that’s chickens for you.”

“Crumble sleeping tablets into their feed,” I said. “Do that methodically enough and maybe you’ll get research funding from the National Institutes of Health. You could call your paper ‘On the Tendency of Barnyard Fowls to Fall Asleep When Administered Mickeys.’”

This time Caroline and RuthClaire laughed with me, rather than at me, and I had the pleasure of seeing Brian’s annoyed look. But, hat in hand, he argued that he would be foolish to reveal what he knew and that RuthClaire and Caroline would be better off with him along than tooling down the coastal road unaccompanied. He’d help them load their purchases—he’d haggle for every item on their list. He was an expert at open-air bargaining, a skill he’d picked up in the Dominican Republic.

“We’ll keep an eye on him,” RuthClaire told Adam. “He’ll report to his bosses at Austin-Antilles, and that’s it. No side trips. No private phone calls. Et cetera.”

“Okay by me,” Brian said. He had won. He showed me a raised eyebrow of ironic triumph. Because RuthClaire and Caroline wanted showers and a good night’s rest before going into Rutherford’s Port, they hiked down to the beach that same afternoon and spent the night in the cottage on Caicos Bay. Brian Nollinger drove them. He made a pallet for himself on the porch, and, the next morning, he wrestled the rented Jeep along the coastal road into the city so that the women could do their vaudun shopping. This summary of events, of course, I report secondhand, trusting that it does not deviate too much from what actually happened. I slept very little that night, though.

At sunrise, the coolest part of the day, Dégrasse brought breakfast: mild Haitian coffee with rapadou and a spoonful of powdered milk, a stew of plantains, and a piece of odd-looking but tasty fish. The stew and the coffee were hot, but the fish seemed to have been forked out of lukewarm brine. Although groggy from lack of sleep, I ate ravenously. In the lee of the houngfor, Toussaint and Dégrasse ate with me, neither paying me the slightest heed. Then Adam appeared, in walking shorts and a pair of Adidas sneakers. He handed me the camera equipment and led me uphill through the fortification of sablier trees to Hector’s secret entrance to the caves.

We spent all day exploring them. I took so many pictures that my forefinger began to throb. Hector led us through the main rotunda and the most accessible galleries, but Adam, more nimble, took me places that I hadn’t already visited: chatières, rock chimneys, lofty crawlways. I saw ritual statuary, painted symbols, and weird faces cut out of the dead ends of labyrinthine tunnels. On at least six occasions, through different corridors of stone, we emerged to rest our eyes and clear our minds. Then we plunged back into darkness, to wriggle our way to deeper grottoes and worse bouts of vertigo. It was a daylong dream, this activity: a nightmare at tropical noon.

By the time Brian Nollinger and the two women returned, I was long since exhausted. Stars had begun to wink through the twilight sky over Prix-des-Yeux, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Adam wouldn’t let me. So I was standing bruised and bone-weary beside the houngfor when the marketing party came into camp with their duffles and baskets and trussed chickens, laughing ruefully through their own weariness, happy to have completed their journey.

Toussaint and Dégrasse fed the marketgoers, and Adam urged them to finish eating so that—in his self-appointed role as Lord Saturday—he could initiate the service that would allow Caroline and me to experience the full mystery and power of the vaudun gods. Only then, after all, would we be able to go back to Atlanta with a real appreciation of the spiritual forces that had sustained Les Gens in their Caribbean exile.

It was totally dark when Caroline, Brian, and I entered the sacred peristyle of the habilines. In his top hat and tails, Adam led us in. RuthClaire awaited us in the palm-thatched tonnelle with Erzulie, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. Even Hector was there, sitting cross-legged in a corner next to a series of stylized cornmeal designs that Alberoi had laid during the day. The three younger habilines occupied the low platform on which the vaudun drums rested, while RuthClaire and Erzulie walked about sprinkling water on the ground from flip-top metal pitchers like the creamers you might see in a roadside cafe in Alabama or Georgia: an odd, improvisatory touch.

Only Brian, Caroline, and I would be “couched” tonight, “put down on the floor” as potential communicants with the Yagaza gods. This service was expressly for us. We wore white baptismal gowns similar to the cambric robes in which the habilines had first introduced themselves. RuthClaire and Caroline had bought our garments in Rutherford’s Port, and they were spotless when we donned them, as immaculate as new wedding gowns. Candles in globelike pots burned at various places about the temple, reminding me again of the tacky accoutrements at a cheap stateside restaurant. Brian kept saying he wished just to observe, not to participate, but Adam forcibly rejoined that no one who came to Prix-des-Yeux could do so as an observer, that participation in its life and rituals was a requisite for staying.

Erzulie lit two tall red tapers in cast-iron holders at either end of the drum platform. Then she centered herself in front of the platform and nodded at Adam. Behind her, Toussaint began to tap out a light beat on the tallest of the drums; he was seated on a rickety stool that permitted him to lean forward over their taut skins. Alberoi picked up this beat on the set known as mama, largest of the ceremonial drums, and Dégrasse began to counterpoint these rhythms on the drums called boula, smallest of the three kinds. Although their beat was hypnotic, the drummers played with a curious delicacy, as if fearful of waking the birds. The faintness of the rhythms, even in the houngfor, mocked their purpose, that is, to induce a trance in us communicants. And then I realized that, to keep from revealing their presence and whereabouts to any hostiles on the mountain, the habilines must always conduct their vaudun service so.

“Lie down by the poteau mitan,” Adam said, “like so many nesting spoons.”

Spoons don’t nest, I thought. Spoonbills maybe, but not spoons.

Nollinger and my wife were not so literal in their thinking. They knelt by the center post, then assumed clumsy fetal curls facing it. Nollinger was first, with Caroline cupping her body into his and touching her chin to his shoulder blade. I lay down behind her in the same posture, grateful that Brian hadn’t tried to come between us in this matter. I pressed my groin into Caroline’s buttocks. Our robes were no longer immaculate, our first contact with the ground having soiled them.

Hector and the habiline drummers began to chant—faintly, in a guttural singsong that counterpointed or mimicked the rhythms of the Arada-Dahomey drums. The sound reminded me of Adam’s singing before he’d learned to speak, but rougher and more ritualized. Caroline shuddered. I shuddered with her. My place on the floor kept me from seeing much, but the tonnelle ceiling and the upper portions of the wall were visible to me, and down one of the peristyle posts came gliding the couleuvre that had linked Adam and Erzulie on our first evening in camp. I wanted to stand. A paralysis of fear or fatigue had gripped me, though, and I could merely watch. The guttural chanting of the habiline choir veered into spooky falsetto registers.

Like a spry gnome, Erzulie danced, her bare feet slapping the floor near the center post. The python kept flowing down its own post behind the drum platform, its bronze and garnet body shimmering in the candlelight. A chicken began to cluck: two chickens. Erzulie’s hand came into my view, swinging a chicken by its bound legs. Adam, who appeared above us near the poteau mitan, took this flapping fowl from her and bit off its head. He spat the head out, along with a mouthful of feathers, and gouts leapt from the decapitated bird’s neck, fountaining in a gaudy, queasy-making rain. Our white cambric gowns were spattered, and the stench of hot blood filled our nostrils, as did the fainter scent of flowing serpent.

“O great loa,” Adam chanted, “your horses await your mounting. They invite you to ride.” He dropped the headless chicken, which beat the ground with impotent, reflexive wing flaps. “O loa, come!”

The second chicken, which Erzulie thrust aloft, cackled hysterically. It, too, smelt blood, sensing that a like fate lay in store for it. And Erzulie beheaded it as quickly and surely as Adam had executed the other. Blood parachuted away from her like streamers from a crimson Roman candle. I shut my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my palm. Caroline leaned against me as tense as a vibrating metal pole. When I pushed my groin against her again—to reassure us both—my cock was now a shriveled nub. What, exactly, was mystical about this ceremony? So far, it was an abomination and a horror, and I wanted out.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing.

Opening my eyes and peering down the length of Caroline’s body, I saw that the couleuvre had reached the ground. Only an arm’s length from Caroline’s feet, it lay loosely coiled at the base of the wall. Having unhinged its lower jaw, it was methodically swallowing—with terrible, wavelike gulps—a headless chicken that, a moment past, had lain next to the center post. That damn serpent, I thought, is gagging down its dinner feathers and all. I shut my eyes again.

Drumbeats, chanting, dancing. Adam danced barefoot with the barefoot Erzulie. The drummers on the platform—or, at least, Dégrasse and Alberoi—undulated behind their instruments like revelers in a stalled conga line. Even Hector had got to his feet. He bounced up and down behind us, stutter-stepping between the vevés that Alberoi had designed. I could feel him moving, just as I did everyone. The drumbeats, the chanting, and the dancing pulsed in my temples like angry blood. Brian groaned, and Caroline’s head popped back so quickly that she split my bottom lip.

“O Legba,” Adam cried, no longer dancing, “let the loa descend into this temple and mount their horses. We call for Agarou, god of ancestors, and Aïda Ovedo, virgin wife of Damballa, and for Damballa himself, whose serpent we have propitiated. Let them descend and ride their horses. Let their horses run with them like thoroughbreds!”

Someone yanked my head back. Erzulie, I think. Over my split lip, she poured orgeat, a syrupy drink with a tang of almonds. This, Adam said, was another offering to Damballa and his wife, consumed by us prostrate horses so that the loa could enjoy it once they’d mounted us and brought us to our feet. If nothing else, the taste of the orgeat routed the sickening odors of couleuvre and slaughtered chicken. Then I could smell rum. A habiline drummer splashed it about, renewing the baptism of the already baptized ceremonial drums, being prodigal with the native clairin simply because Les Gens had it to be prodigal with.

“Come, Agarou! Mount your horse!”

The center post shook. Brian reached out to steady it. The electricity coursing through the poteau mitan galvanized him, and Caroline, and battered me like a thousand tiny tidal waves working to erode my identity. One moment, I was Paul Loyd; the next, I was obedient meat for the loa possessing me. In short, I was a horse.

Agarou, the vaudun god of ancestors, leapt down the lightning rod of the poteau mitan to convulse the robed body of the human being gripping its base. From this person, the god passed into Caroline Hanna, who kicked out, and on through her into the terrified consciousness of her husband. Agarou mounted Loyd. Racked by the god’s spiritual horsemanship, Loyd thrashed, as a mustang ridden by a determined cowboy will buck for its pride’s sake, foreknowing itself tamed. In just that way, Loyd thrashed. He threw himself far from Caroline. He writhed so violently on the hard-packed floor that his gown erased or smeared portions of the vevés drawn there.

Where stars had earlier shone, storm clouds massed in bands above the mountain. Still putting up a token fight for his body, Loyd heard thunder cannonading across the sky as if from the ramparts of the Citadelle Laferrière, south of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti itself. And with each new roll of thunder, the mounted man convulsed. Even as they continued to drum or dance, the habilines watched Loyd. Hector, the blind one, had moved into a corner to escape being knocked down by the flailings of his arms and legs. Erzulie, however, had taken his predicament as a challenge to her skill as a dancer. Above him, she leapt from foot to foot, guessing well where to place her feet without stepping on him. Adam, meanwhile, had renewed his plea for Aïda Ovedo and her husband Damballa to come down the center post into the temple.

The thunder above the mountain boomed louder, and the hidden kernel of Paul Loyd’s consciousness realized that the storm noise would completely drown that of the vaudun service—no more hope for rescue by sympathetic islanders. Agarou had him.

“Up, Agarou!” Adam urged the loa. “Ride your horse to revelation! Show your horse the god who showed himself to our ancestors!”

Loyd felt himself giving in to the inevitable. His movements became less violent. He bridged his loa-possessed body so that his heels and the back of his head held him off the ground. He searched the trinket-hung pavilion for sympathy. Where was RuthClaire? At last, he saw her—in the corner opposite Hector’s, regarding him with a grimace of appalled compassion. How must he look to her? He could scarcely hold his eyeballs still enough to focus her image. Maybe she’d never seen a possession like this one. She was frightened as well as appalled.

“Adam!” she cried, to be heard over the drumming and the thunder. “Adam, stop it! I think it’s killing him!”

Killing me, thought Loyd dispassionately. This is killing me.

The habiline in top hat and tails turned to his wife. “Oh, no, it is bringing him to life, to a knowledge that he could not otherwise so vividly acquire.”

Loyd placed his forearms on the floor parallel to his arched body. Pushing with them, he sprang off the ground like a limbo dancer who has just crept beneath the lowest level of the bar. Upright, his body swayed in the temple’s candlelit geometries. Caroline and the anthropologist lay beside the center post, entranced but not yet possessed, their blood-spattered gowns making them resemble murder victims: an interesting, but not too disturbing sight, for they weren’t dead, and once Aïda Ovedo and Damballa mounted them, he would have company in his spiritual slavery.

“Aaaawwgh,” he said. Spit ran down his lip and chin.

In his Baron Samedi costume, Adam made an ironic bow. “Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou.”

Agarou did a scissoring dance step.

“After such an entrance,” Adam said, “you must have great hunger.” He swept a headless chicken up, dug the nails of his hands into its breast, and broke it open with a wicked popping motion. From this bloody rent, he pulled entrails such as Loyd had never used in his cooking at the West Bank. Adam handed these items to Agarou, who, to Loyd’s consternation, began to eat them. Warm and slippery, they were hard to chew, but Agarou got them down almost as fast as the couleuvre had engorged the entire unplucked body of the other chicken.

RuthClaire (Loyd noticed, stealing a look through the vaudun god’s eyes) had left the houngfor. Why? Once, not so long ago, she had tolerated the barbaric eating habits of her habiline husband. Rain sheeted down, rattling the palm-frond thatching of the tonnelle. It blew in through the open tops of the peristyle’s walls. It dripped from the eaves and from seams in the roof’s underside. No longer inhibited by the need to play softly, the drummers beat their instruments with abandon. The noise inside the swaying building crescendoed and crescendoed again. So did the noise outside. In Loyd’s benumbed body, Agarou turned his face up and opened his bloodied mouth to the life-giving waters of which his fellow loa Damballa was the presiding deity. He had led his horse to water, and had made him drink.

Loyd drowned not only in this deluge, but also in the ancient personality of the loa astride him. Rain veiled his eyes. It penetrated the tonnelle’s roof and extinguished the candles in their plastic pots. The pots hissed their dismay. Or maybe it was the python hissing, swimming toward him in the downpour like a great ruby and golden eel. Of all the former inhabitants of the structure dissolving in the rain, the serpent was the only one that Loyd could see. He knelt—Agarou made him kneel—to embrace the creature, which lifted its head and kissed him on the lips with a double flicker of its tongue. Then the rain ceased, and the dripping echoes of its cessation thrummed, and Agarou found himself alone on the flank of his Caribbean Olympus.

“Giddyup, horse,” the loa said.

Loyd began to walk uphill, as did Agarou. He felt himself two consciousnesses at once, and had the further conviction, as he strode away from Prix-des-Yeux (which had dissolved in the rain along with the vaudun temple), that he was climbing not one but two mountains. First was the mountain on the tip of Pointe d’Inagua here in Manzanillo Bay, but superimposed spiritually on that landscape were the lineaments of Mount Tharaka in the African nation of Zarakal. Each time Loyd stopped to look back down the mountain, he saw—by lightning flashes—first the ebony ripples of the Atlantic and then the vast antelope-dotted expanse of the Zarakali plains. They alternated, these features, and with them Loyd’s present and East Africa’s Pleistocene past likewise alternated—so that, ridden by Agarou, he was two different minds at two different places at two different times. How could such a thing occur? Well, the vaudun service had done its work: the drumming, the chanting, the dancing. And then the python had kissed him, both to acknowledge Agarou’s power over him and to link his fitful self-awareness to distant places and earlier times.

Loyd-loa continued his hike uphill. The fragrance of coffee blossoms hovered over everything, wonderfully fresh after the rain. Where was Agarou going? If the loa riding him tried to take him very far, he—his body—would collapse. (You can’t ride a dead horse.) He had worn himself out crawling through the habiline caves, and a forced diet of chicken innards was not likely to counteract his body’s fatigue. Then Loyd heard himself laugh. Or was Agarou laughing through him, having found his ignorance of the mechanism of possession amusing? His body would do whatever Agarou demanded for as long as Agarou spurred and controlled it. (You can ride a dead horse—at least until its last vestiges of mind have decayed into insentient randomness.) Loyd resigned himself to a long hike, and an even longer captivity.

At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd-loa approached them, intent on finding a solution. He gripped a pair of weather-polished tusks and swung between them into the labyrinthine heart of the puzzle. Inside the barrier, he ducked and climbed and twisted to find passage through the bones. A spur on a set of wildebeest horns stabbed him in the side, and he cried aloud, Let me out of here! His plea was for escape from both Agarou and this treacherous ivory maze. I’m in the picket of sablier trees, not a pile of interlocking tusks and antlers, Loyd thought, more coherently. And he was. The image of a bone-surrounded Mount Tharaka had disguised the reality of the Haitian mountain. It was Agarou who preferred the surrealism of the ancient African past, and because of Agarou’s ascendancy, Loyd had not seen the sablier hedge. Well, they were through it now, scrambling uphill in the open toward the shrub-lined cut where the entrance to the caves was hidden. Agarou-on-Loyd halted in a three-point stance and in a gust of ozone-heavy wind looked downhill at Inagua Bay. Sea and savannah did their dizzying switch, a sail boat metamorphosing into an albino elephant and a flight of bats into a flock of prehistoric flamingos.

Then reality came back.

How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.

Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.

But—

Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.

I can’t see! Loyd cried to his vaudun rider.

Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!

Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.

Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.

Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the loa had not dismounted, had instead just dropped the reins—but now his own peculiar Loyd-ness was free to direct his steps here or there in these weird caves. Agarou had retreated to a spectator’s place behind his eyes. (Undoubtedly, it was Agarou who allowed him to see.) Thus it was now Loyd’s will rather than the loa’s that counted. My will be done, Loyd thought. My kingdom’s come, and it’s hell rather than heaven….

Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.

They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.

A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits…. Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.

It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena… or dog… or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.

Once, Loyd realized, something like this had actually happened. With Agarou’s blessing, I’m witnessing what a real band of habiline hunters witnessed in Africa two million years ago. For them, this is an archetypal event. It defined them as human—before the advent of speech—in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. And they know it…. Exhausted and bleeding, the hyena-hominid pulled itself to its feet. It towered over the hunters. It was taller than Loyd too, if only by a little. Although by every objective sign, the creature appeared to be at the mercy of the habilines, they made no attempt to deal it a death blow. The creature commanded their awe. Humbling them by its height and its indifference to its own suffering, it wholly disarmed them. Loyd was frightened. He felt like running, but the habilines, expecting revelation, held their ground. This eerie stand-off continued.

Finally, the hyena-hominid bowed its doglike head. This gesture of resignation or reverence or bodily surrender turned into something else, an act both grotesque and moving. The creature, stretching out its arms and gripping the rock face behind it for support, bent forward until its snout was nuzzling its left breast. The vertebrae on its neck and spine strained against its taut hide. With a jerk of its head, the creature tore the flesh of its own pectoral muscle. Then it straightened, removed one hand from the wall, and cupped from this narrow wound its own beating heart, which it held out to the wonder-struck habiline wraiths as a love offering. All who ate of it would know that the Mind implicit in Nature had affirmed their lives—through the agency of this hyena-headed messenger. Their salvation lay in this knowledge and in their ability to cohabit in a necessarily imperfect world.

Come, the hyena-hominid challenged its pursuers, still extending its heart. Come and partake of my life’s blood.

The largest of the habilines, the alpha male of their spectral party, advanced to accept the offering. Dwarfed by the dog-headed messenger, he tasted of the heart. Having tasted, he carried it to each member of the band, and they, too, cupped the beating organ to their mouths, bit into it, and took into themselves a living piece of their miraculous prey. Loyd could only watch. None of the habilines brought the heart to him—clearly, they regarded him as alien to their world, too alien to benefit from this rite—and he was glad that they ignored him. When the heart was altogether eaten, the gloom of the catacombs absorbed the hominids into itself, and Loyd found that he was alone with the creature that had sacrificed its heart to feed a small remnant of feisty but unprepossessing human forebears.

Agarou, the god of ancestors, had mediated this confrontation in the immaterial realm of Yagaza, but now it was Loyd who had to face the hyena hominid and to demand of it some explanation. His fear came back. What authority did he have to question such a being? What answers—if any—could he expect? The silver-crimson light of the caves coalesced around the two of them like a contracting womb….

LOYD: Who are you?

(The hyena-hominid only laughs. Its demeaning animalish laughter echoes in the half-light like a huge coil unwinding.)

LOYD (apprehensively insistent): I said, Who are you?

I AM: Names fail. If you like, call me Yagaza, or Lord, or Logos, or even Anima Mundi. None of these titles suits absolutely, but if you have to have a name, pick one that doesn’t belittle me.

LOYD: God?

I AM: In this context, Yagaza might be more appropriate. After all, I’m Adam’s God—Adam Montaraz’s, that is. But, ultimately, I’m yours, too.

LOYD: I thought Yagaza meant Africa—either Africa or the afterlife.

I AM: In the vaudun scheme of things, it does. Because you’re here through the good offices of Agarou, perhaps we should honor him by adopting vaudun terminology. Without that body of ritual, we wouldn’t be talking like this.

LOYD: I can’t call you Yagaza. I’m not a voodooist. I’m a victim of possession, but I’m not a voodooist. And you—you call yourself Adam’s God, but all I can see, squinting and cocking my head, is a heartless chimera, part man-ape and part African scavenger.

(The hyena-headed being places both palms against the sides of its face. It lifts this face away like a mask, revealing the horror of a human countenance that has been three quarters obliterated by .357-caliber ammunition. Loyd is reminded of Craig Puddicombe in the parking lot behind Abraxas; he cannot understand why God would choose to appear to him in the guise of a mutilated dead murderer. He tries to turn aside, but he cannot make his possessed body obey even the simplest internal command.)

LOYD: Please. Don’t make me look at you now. It’s crueler than you know.

I AM (restoring the hyena mask): That I doubt. It’s just that I have no desire to slip my responsibility in matters that you must regard as terrible manifestations of evil. I don’t explicitly order them, but neither can I countermand them without sabotaging creation itself.

LOYD: But you can inject yourself into the affairs of your temporal creation, can’t you? You did that with your hyena-hominid revelation to Adam’s Pleistocene ancestors. You’ve let me witness a reenactment of that “disclosure event.”

I AM: What I’ve permitted you to see is an allegory of that event intelligible to your contemporary human understanding. Had I given you a reenactment of the event as it occurred, you would have misinterpreted it. More than likely, you would have utterly missed its sacred aspect.

LOYD: But you were there, weren’t you? You made yourself manifest in the otherwise mundane history of the planet. You appeared to a small band of habilines whom most of us today would dismiss as protohumans.

I AM: I did.

LOYD: Why?

I AM: You’ve already anticipated me here. To demonstrate my love for them. To affirm them. To validate their struggles to survive and evolve.

LOYD: Can your appearance to them have had any measurable effect? At first, you terrified them. Momentarily, you made them forget their terror by appeasing their hunger. That’s all, surely.

I AM: The Rutherford Remnant—Adam, Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi—demonstrates that it did have a lasting effect. They continue to celebrate my earliest quasi-human incarnation by observing Voodoo Saturday Night. Indeed, you’re celebrating that event with them. Possessed by Agarou, god of ancestors, you’re a vaudun devotee in spite of yourself, Mister Paul.

LOYD: But what if there were no Rutherford Remnant? What if the species known as Homo habilis had died out about when paleoanthropologists supposed, namely, two million years ago?

I AM: Does a falling tree land with a thud if there’s no one there to register the thud? Yes. The thud exists as a receivable potentiality in the sound waves generated by the tree’s impact with the ground. Because I was received by creatures now dead hardly suffices to demonstrate that I wasn’t received at all. I appeared to them, and they knew themselves blessed—validated, if you like—by my holy concern.

LOYD (shaking his head): Impossible.

I AM: It wounds your vanity to think that Homo sapiens was not the first hominid species to experience a sacred disclosure event?

LOYD: You wrong me, Yagaza. Frankly, I’m by no means certain that Homo sapiens has ever experienced its own such event. Frankly, I doubt it. I’ve always doubted it.

I AM (laughing in a melancholy-merry hyena voice): Then what about this, Mister Paul? What’s happening to you now?

LOYD: I’m possessed. I’m dreaming. I’m talking to a sardonic corner of my own consciousness, not to—God forgive me—God.

I AM: But God has a corner of your consciousness, doesn’t he? If God created you, why, then, he has a lien on all the physico-spiritual systems making up your identity. You’re one of my most valuable means of comprehending God—along with all the other self-aware entities, terrestrial or otherwise, of an ever-questing creation. You should take advantage of your dreaming—your possession—to help me in this self-reflexive quest.

LOYD: You called yourself Adam’s God. Why? Because you appeared in hyena-hominid form to his ancestors?

I AM: In part, certainly. But also because in searching for an element of the sacred to append to his Batesonian philosophy of evolutionary holism, which lacks such a dimension, he decided to repostulate God. I’m the God That Is, but I’m also the God that Adam humbly repostulated. Your species’ hunger for the sacred, going back even to the Pleistocene, doesn’t arise in the absence of satisfying spiritual meat, but in response to its availability in the miraculous slaughterhouse of creation. I AM that meat. I AM the architect of the sacred abattoir. Those who refuse to ignore their hunger will at length find me.

LOYD: Adam told Alistair Patrick Blair that you have both a timeless aspect and a temporality that involves you in the time-bound doings of the material world. Is that true? It sounds paradoxical, probably even impossible.

I AM: Like a man who both has a head and doesn’t have a head?

LOYD: Exactly. That was Blair’s precise objection.

I AM: Well, my temporal aspect hardly requires lengthy justification, does it? In that aspect, or one manifestation of it, I am talking to you now. And in one manifestation of that aspect, I possess both a hyena’s head and the mutilated face of the man who killed your godson. And, if you must know, no head at all.

LOYD: All right. Fine. If you’re conversing with me, then you obviously depend on the flow of time to achieve such communication. But how can you simultaneously—ah, but that’s the wrong word, isn’t it—how can you also have a quality of timelessness that places you either outside or above the ongoing mayhem and muck of the physical universe?

I AM: Because you’re a captive of time yourself, Mister Paul, this will be hard to explain. Timelessness is not an attribute you’re well-equipped to understand.

LOYD: Oh, I see. You’re gearing up for a cop-out.

I AM: Not at all. If you can accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in its specific application to quantum theory, confessing that one may know either where a subatomic particle is or how it happens to be moving, but not both attributes at once, why can’t you adopt a like uncertainty principle for a concept as grand and ineffable as that of God? Or, to employ another analogy, if light can be either particle or wave depending on the perspective and the intentions of the observer, why can’t God be a temporal being within the context of creation and a timeless entity in his orientation above, or outside, the universe of matter and mutability? The supposition that he must be one or the other is a reflection of human limitation, which arises not only from finite human understanding but also from your existential immersion in time itself.

LOYD: This isn’t fair. A man who’s spent most of his adult life concocting recipes for cheesecake and pasta dishes should not argue theology with God.

I AM: Who better than you, Mister Paul? A person who has fed publicans and sinners, sociologists and habilines, knows something of what it means to satisfy hunger—as well as to fail in that task.

LOYD: Okay, okay. You’ve mentioned subatomic particles—our ability to know either their location or their motion, but not both. And you’ve mentioned that light can be either a particle or a wave depending on what the observer wishes to find out. But these analogies break down in this situation because atoms and light are temporal phenomena. They have no atemporal attributes at all.

I AM: Congratulations on stating the obvious. Can you think of any phenomena that aren’t finally time-bound or time-determined?

LOYD (chagrined): I’m afraid I can’t.

I AM: Then maybe you can see the difficulty of what I want to explain. If you could think of any examples, I’d try to work them into illustrative metaphors for the coincident timelessness and temporality of God. But since you can’t, I’m stuck with phenomena at play within the dimension of time. Thus, everything I tell you is an approximation of something largely inexpressible.

LOYD: Go on. I’ll try to follow.

I AM: Only in my timeless aspect—my supratemporal identity—am I utterly without blemish. There, I AM perfect and fulfilled and all-knowing and, yes, changeless. What I know never alters because it encompasses—until the “end” of “time”—the totality of changes past, present, and future in the physical universe. At my impetus, time—space-time—began on the edge between timelessness and temporality. And one day, in figurative temporal terms, I will put period to time by letting it run the course I’ve already omnisciently calibrated and clocked. Then I will necessarily subsume my temporal avatars and once again simply BE, perhaps from Everlasting to Everlasting. I can’t be more specific than this because my own immersion in the flow of universal time clouds my clairvoyance. Trapped here with you, Mister Paul, I see through a glass darkly—but with a vision, in comparison to your own, pristine and pellucid.

LOYD: Why would a perfect, fulfilled, all-knowing, and changeless deity even bother to inflate the balloon of the physical cosmos? Isn’t that a capricious act? An unnecessary waste of energy?

I AM: I like your metaphor. It has a festive spontaneity totally in accord with the motives of God in my timeless aspect. These motives are complex, innate, and immutable, but they center on the impulse to celebrate my self-awareness with living consciousnesses outside myself. This impulse requires a Creation—the Big Bang that gave birth to space-time and all the galactic populations.

LOYD: How can you describe a God with impulses as “fulfilled”?

I AM: In temporal terms, I can’t. But temporal terms are all we have here. It might be more accurate to say that, even in my timeless aspect, I possess the positive attribute of generosity. In the absence of beneficiaries, however, no one but I could document my possession of this trait. Therefore, I inflated the balloon of the cosmos to affirm the otherwise pointless fact of my generosity. I didn’t need to do so, I wanted to do so. Even this falls short of the reality, Mister Paul, but, here and now, I can scarcely do better.

LOYD: Never mind. What about suffering and death and injustice? How do you square the murder of an innocent child with your hypothetical generosity as the God Beyond Time?

I AM: I don’t. I don’t even try. Every secondary creation of any complexity is flawed. Perfections of various wonderful kinds may occur within it, of course, but the encompassing whole—well, its imperfections are equally numerous. In fact, some of the perfections depend upon them. The just recognize justice by unhappy exposure to its opposite. The wise distill their—

LOYD (waving his hand in the gelatinous light): I’ve heard all this before. It’s a recipe for carrion-comfort, dog-god.

I AM: What you must remember is that no matter how terrible the world may seem, no matter how cruel or pointless, the Mind that nudged its ecosystems toward the evolution of self-aware consciousness did so out of an inexpressible generosity.

LOYD: A ponderous vanity, I’d say.

I AM: And the timeless Mind whose temporal avatars intrude upon Creation to shape and direct it in their puny ways—well, that Mind releases them like antibodies into the besieged body of the world. There they help the sentient creatures of faith and goodwill neutralize the poisons of entropy and accident. I came for that reason. So did Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Gandhi, and perhaps the latter-day habiline whom you know as Adam Montaraz. In any case, Mister Paul, Adam came to extend the family of humankind, to demonstrate—via his struggle for personal revelation—the interconnectedness of creation.

LOYD (flailing at the womb of visible darkness containing him): I curse you in your impotent timeless aspect! The holy physicians you send us are quacks! Better for us never to have existed than to suffer so grievously from the imperfections built into your misbegotten creation!

I AM: Not at all. Not at all.

(Yagaza, the dog-god, pins Loyd’s hands to his sides. The snout of the upright creature hovers inches from the possessed man’s face. Loyd smells carrion on its breath, the stench of the decaying human features—Craig Puddicombe’s—behind its hyena mask. He seizes the wound in the creature’s chest and averts his face.)

LOYD (mockingly): Not at all. Not at all. How does knowing that God possesses a temporal and a timeless aspect improve our lot, Yagaza? What difference—what goddamn difference—does it make?

I AM: By repostulating me as the Alpha and Omega, the supreme primal-and-ultimate holistic concept, you may believe in me again by rediscovering in me the ground of your own existence.

LOYD (struggling in Yagaza’s powerful hands): What the hell for?

I AM: To realize once again that you were spawned by a multidimensional, paratemporal Benevolence and that even your most pointless-appearing torments mean, Mister Paul. They resonate forever in the all-encompassing Mind of God.

LOYD (weeping bitterly): Hooray for our resonating torments. Hooray, hooray. What a comfort, what a comfort….

The possessed man slumped from Yagaza’s immaterial embrace. Meanwhile, Agarou, god of ancestors, climbed out of the psychic grotto into which he had earlier withdrawn. He climbed out of it to remount the body of Paul Loyd. He meant to ride his human horse back into the rainy compass of Prix-des-Yeux and its houngfor. Regaining control was not hard. Because Loyd had so little fight left in him, Agarou routed the man’s defenses, occupied his overloaded mind, and looked out through his eyes. He found that Loyd was sitting at the feet of the agonized statue of Homo habilis primus. One of Loyd’s hands clutched the statue’s stone phallus, apparently to keep him from toppling over.

Let go of me, Loyd told Agarou. I’m sick of the selfish double dealings of gods.

The one who must release you comes now, Agarou said. Patience. Loyd peered through the loa’s eyes—his eyes, if only he could get them back—at the flashlight beams crisscrossing in the entrance shaft to the upland cave system. A small party of people was approaching, limned in nappy silhouette behind, or off to the sides of, the bobbing flashlight beams: figures of blood and substance, not habiline ghosts. The closer they came, the more palpable grew the light accompanying them. The darkness in the catacombs began to relinquish its ultraviolet character to the dim grittiness of the visible spectrum, for Agarou’s hold on him was weakening.

Caroline knelt beside him. Adam knelt beside him. Their clothes were drenched, their faces beaded with rain. Behind them, looking down on him, stood two sinister-looking men whom Loyd could not place and whose postures bespoke a belligerent impatience. They carried weapons: rifles or submachine guns. Even the loa possessing him recoiled from these figures, and Loyd struggled to focus on Caroline and her habiline protector. Caroline looked like a drowned angel; Adam, a refugee from the bombed-out set of a 1930s Hollywood musical starring Fred Astaire. (It was the top hat and tails that did it.)

“Come forth, Mister Paul,” urged Adam in his hoarsest whisper. “Come forth from your possession by Agarou, god of ancestors.”

I sat up straighter. Embarrassed, I let go of the lustrous prick of the statue behind me. I blinked against the flashlight beams of the armed men regarding me with equal measures of curiosity and contempt.

“What the hell’s going on?”

Caroline kissed me and nodded at one of the beret-wearing men. “You remember Lieutenant Bacalou, Paul? We met him on the boat coming over from Cap-Haïtien.”

“Hello again.” Lieutenant Bacalou gave me a curt nod and a superior smile.

Groggy, I tried to stand. With Caroline and Adam’s support, I succeeded, but briefly teetered like a bounce-back toy trying to regain its equilibrium. Five minutes ago, I had been talking to God—scoring points against him in an emotional metaphysical debate that had utterly wrung me out. To find this grim pair of Tontons Macoutes in his place, holding my wife and my friend at gun point, seemed a bleak variation of a nightmare that had already taken place in Beulah Fork. E. L. Teavers and the Klan, Lieutenant Bacalou and another of Baby Doc’s rifle-toting bogeymen: they were mirror images. Or maybe this cave was the darkroom in which the negatives of the unsmiling macoutes would turn out to be pernicious double exposures. No matter where we went, we could not escape the merciless pursuit of zealots.

“All right,” I managed. “Tell me something about this.”

Caroline explained that Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had burst into the houngfor shortly after I, as Agarou’s human mount, had left it. The rain and my sudden leavetaking had forced their hand—they’d had to show themselves before assessing the entire situation to the lieutenant’s satisfaction. By accident, then, the macoutes had disrupted the vaudun ceremony at just the right moment to foil the efforts of the rain god Damballa and his bride Aïda Ovedo to possess Brian and Caroline. (I was glad to hear this. The idea of Caroline’s being the anthropologist’s consort, even in the twilight world of loa possession, revolted me.) The men under Bacalou’s command had entered the peristyle so unexpectedly that RuthClaire had screamed and the habilines had panicked. Toussaint was dead. He had attacked the first man into the tonnelle—not Bacalou, but an agent from the Pointe d’Inagua security post—and the agent had riddled his body with his submachine gun. In the resultant confusion, Alberoi and Dégrasse had broken through the wall behind the drum platform and escaped into the night.

“Erzulie? Hector?”

“They’re okay,” Caroline said. “They’re under guard in a dry corner. Brian and RuthClaire are with them down there, likewise under guard.”

I looked at Bacalou. “Did you bring a whole army up here with you?”

“Not even a platoon,” he said with easy irony. “At first, Monsieur Loyd, it was only Philomé and I who followed the two women and the Austin-Antilles man up here from Rutherford’s Port.” He swung his flashlight in an arc that illuminated his stocky partner’s face. “Monsieur Loyd, Philomé Bobo.”

“Enchanté,” said Bobo. But, frankly, he did not sound charmed.

“On the edge of the cigouave encampment,” Bacalou continued, “I sent Philomé back down the mountain to Pointe d’Inagua for reinforcements. Who could say looking at their hovels how many demons might dwell there? Soon, Philomé returned with Charlemagne and Jean-Gérard—almost in time to see you leaving the houngfor, a loa on your back. It was needed, monsieur, to summon enough help to be fully prepared.”

“You’d make a good Boy Scout,” I said.

Bacalou ignored the compliment. “We still have no idea how many cigouaves live up here. There could be dozens, couldn’t there? This caverne—it’s very big.”

“Not counting myself, only five of my people remained in the world,” Adam said. “You murdered Toussaint. Now there are only four.”

“Peut-être,” the lieutenant replied. “Maybe.” He nodded at his partner.

“And what Philomé did was not murder, Monsieur Montaraz, but a very quick-thoughtful defense of the self.”

Further talk revealed that while holding the remaining occupants of the houngfor at gun point, Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had decided to retrieve me for questioning. Adam and Caroline had volunteered to lead the macoutes to me, Adam because he knew where I was and Caroline because she feared for my safety in my possessed state. Negotiating the uplands had not been easy in the dark and the rain, nor had their journey through the palisade of dripping sablier trees, but at last they’d reached the cave entrance and here they were. Their torn and sodden clothes testified to the pains they’d taken. Now, Caroline said, we could all be under arrest together.

“Why are we under arrest?” I asked “What have we done?”

Lieutenant Bacalou considered. “You have aided and abetted the cigouaves, who, during the previous regime, did many treasons against the government of Papa Doc. The order to rid the island of them has never been officially put away. We could kill those two old ones down there, and you their cunning accomplices, and any other demons we might find in this impressive hole, and do it, you understand, with the blessings of Baby Doc and also, maybe, the present U.S. administration.”

“I doubt that,” Caroline said. “If RuthClaire and Adam disappeared, you’d have world public opinion, a dozen American Congressmen, and Amnesty International breathing down your necks to know why.”

“Probably,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “And it makes me tremble.”

“And there’s no sense killing Hector and Erzulie, or Alberoi and Dégrasse, either. They’re the last of the Rutherford Remnant. When they die, Lieutenant Bacalou, their species will be extinct. They’re trying to hang on here, not overthrow the corrupt tub of butter who pays you to terrorize the citizenry.”

This sally offended the lieutenant. “We are not terrorists, Madame Loyd. We’re policemen. We keep the peace.”

“A goal that murdering Toussaint has greatly furthered,” Caroline said angrily. “Do you have any proof that he or his kinspeople have tried to bring about the collapse of the Duvalier government?”

“How could I?” Bacalou gestured with his flashlight. “Until this evening, I had no proof that he and the other cigouaves still existed.”

Adam interjected, “Please think for a moment about what you’ve just said.”

“Proof of the latter is proof of the former!” Somewhat less emphatically, Bacalou added, “At least in the eyes of my superiors.” He shone his flashlight to the left of the statue, picking out portions of the murals glistening on the cold rocks and undulating across their seams and crevices. “The acme of their criminality—theirs and yours, my friends—is that you have all conspired to keep this mighty national treasure a secret. You have worked to steal from the Haitian people a true marvel of their cultural heritage. And that is clearly criminal. It cries out for your arrest and punishment.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “This is a true marvel of habiline endurance and creativity. It belongs to Adam’s people, not to Baby Doc or the fat-cat foreigners who’ll pour in here to see the place if its secret is betrayed. Is that what you want, lieutenant? Pizza Huts and neon signs and helicopter overflights—right here on Pointe d’Inagua?”

“Mais non,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. He was very unhappy. His partner had shot Toussaint. He and the other macoutes had summarily arrested us for crimes that the lieutenant could not easily define, and now the poor man was beginning to regard these magnificently decorated catacombs as a potential threat to the beauty of this peninsula, the only finger on the island not already overlaid with Austin-Antilles coffee plantations and bean-washing facilities. Was it more patriotic to betray the secret of the caves to Baby Doc or to keep it from the government for the sake of the locals and the indigenous wildlife? An influx of new tourists would bolster Haiti’s economy, but it would also make fresh headaches for the security personnel charged with protecting the foreigners. Worse, leftist spies and agents provocateurs would use the influx as cover for their own nefarious activities. The ramifications of his dilemma weighed heavily on Bacalou.

“What are you going to do?” Adam asked him.

“For a man in this kind of work,” he said, “I have too much education. I am not ruthless enough.”

“Philomé is,” Caroline said. (Thank God Philomé had no English.) “Maybe you should let him do a ‘defense of the self’ against all three of us.” She smiled at the volontaire to imply his name had not been taken in vain… even though it had.

“Let me see more of this,” Bacalou said, ignoring Caroline’s barb. He marched into the rotunda at the end of the righthand corridor. We followed. Both Philomé and the lieutenant splashed their flashlight beams on the ceilings and walls of this vast chamber, and Adam used his battery lamp to supplement their feeble lights. For a long time, no one spoke. The macoutes were wonderstruck. Caroline slipped her arm around my waist and supported me because I was falling prey to dizziness, the peculiar sensory lag of one recently possessed.

I shut my eyes. Agarou inhabited the darkness, as did the hyena-headed godling of the habilines, and a vast, expanding interior light that I recognized as the signature of the Mind Beyond Time that had brainstormed all three of these apparitions. What had I to do with Beulah Fork, Atlanta, or Montaraz’s frigid caves? In Caroline’s loving grasp, I was bound for a temporal union with the source of all being. There, freed from my time-bound prejudices, I would meet and embrace the dead—from spiritually inclined australopithecines to materialistic Bolsheviks. Agamemnon. Cleopatra. Francis of Assisi. Queen Elizabeth. Montezuma. Feodor Dostoevski. Jesse Owens. My parents. Elvis Lamar Teavers. Tiny Paul. Nancy Teavers. Craig Puddicombe. Toussaint. They’d all be there, frozen in the timeless medium of God’s compassionate, all-encompassing, and unifying Thought….

Adam was talking to Lieutenant Bacalou, explaining that this exquisite habiline cave art needed a champion. Why not the lieutenant himself? Surely, he could convince Philomé Bobo to forget what he’d seen here, or to pretend to forget. As for the pair of Tontons Macoutes still in Prix-des-Yeux, the lieutenant need not tell them that he and Philomé had seen these caves. Instead, they’d found me wandering the mountainside or huddled in a rock shelter several hundred yards below the summit. To reveal the presence of the caves would unleash on this lovely peninsula the full apocalypse of development, exploitation, advertisement, and ruin. What good would that do anyone?

“None,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “But it is my duty to do so. It need not happen as you say.”

“But it will,” Adam said. “You and I, we both know that.” He spotlighted another incandescent historical mural, another sculpture. The hallucinatory rapture of protracted cave-crawling had overtaken us all, even the miserable lieutenant. He was beside himself with awe and indecision.

“What must I do?” he asked.

Adam intuited that a bribe might work. It would present Bacalou with a material rationale for (a) shirking the stringent dictates of duty and (b) surrendering to the call of his own natural decency. A bribe would preserve the man’s self-respect. Succinctly, then, Adam explained that Caroline and I would take a number of habiline paintings back to the States and sell them as the work of a Haitian naif by the name of Francoise Fauver. Bacalou could pretend to be Fauver. For this imposture, he would receive a commission on every painting sold. If the work of “Fauver” proved especially popular, Adam would see to it that Bacalou toured North America with an exhibition of “his” paintings. Further, to keep Philomé Bobo from revealing this ruse to anyone, Adam would finance Bobo’s complicity in it by outfitting him as Bacalou’s amanuensis and valet. Otherwise, Bacalou might have to kill Philomé or frame him as a Castroite bent on the establishment of a Marxist regime in Haiti. “But Philomé hates Castro,” Bacalou told us.

“Then persuade him to be your valet,” Adam said. “You can both resign from the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. I will use my influence to help you do so. Your lives as an artist and his traveling secretary will enrich you beyond telling—in a spiritual, as well as a monetary, sense.” Adam added that they would both be able to take great private satisfaction from the knowledge that they’d delayed, if not forever prevented, the commercial despoilment of the caves.

After pondering a moment, Bacalou said, “I dislike the name Francoise Fauver. It has, I think, the ring of phoniness.”

“What do you prefer?” Adam said.

“Why not my own? My real name, I mean, not my nom de guerre.”

“And what is that?”

“Marcel Sam,” the lieutenant said. “I have not used it since I was a boy, but it’s a real name, not an invention, and pretty too, ne pas?” He looked at Caroline. “An artiste should have a pretty name.”

“Very well,” Adam said. “Marcel Sam it is.”

But Marcel Sam’s happiness in this solution began to evaporate. He struck his forehead with an open palm. “Philomé is married. He has seven children. It’s not going to be easy for him to resign and become a traveling valet.”

“Then kill him,” I said impatiently, half meaning it. “Frame him as a Castroite.”

Adam shook his head. “Nothing as desperate as that is necessary. We will think of something, Monsieur Sam.”

And, in fact, we did. We went back down to Prix-des-Yeux with the erstwhile Lieutenant Bacalou in our pocket and his partner persuaded that what he had just seen was a subterranean annex to the Duvalier family’s secret banking and warehousing system, whose existence on Montaraz he dare not bruit about. He could talk of it only at peril to his wife and seven children. For the time being, at least, Bobo, too, was in our pocket, a dupe of a story too plausible to dismiss as fantasy.

The unpleasant banal truth is that every story of individual consciousness—except perhaps God’s—concludes with a death. Toussaint was dead. What had I really known about the little man? Almost nothing. Of the five surviving habilines who’d tried to make a community-in-hiding on Pointe d’Inagua, Toussaint had made the least impression on me. Hector, Erzulie, Dégrasse, and Alberoi all had physical handicaps or personality quirks that quickened them in my affection and my memory. By contrast, Toussaint was a cipher, a pot-bellied, middle-aged little man with no obvious talents and no ingratiating idiosyncrasies. (He could paint, Adam assured me, but June was not his month to do so.) Back in Prix-des-Yeux, then, it surprised me to find that RuthClaire had wrapped Toussaint’s bullet-riddled body in clean linen and knelt beside him in the tonnelle to stroke his cold brow and cry a little over him. To me of scarcely more consequence than someone’s pet dog, to RuthClaire this dead habiline had been a person of sacred worth. His private story had ended, but it continued in the impact, whether forceful or modest, that he had had on others.

A banal truth. A banal consolation.

Like enemies observing a holiday cease-fire, the Tontons Macoutes and our own party cooperated in giving Toussaint a funeral and burial. Mud and mire impeded our labors, but at last we got him into the ground so that an evil houngan or bocor could not resurrect him as a zombie. Alberoi and Dégrasse, who had fled earlier, did not return to help us, but I had the feeling that, from some hidden vantage, they were watching and carefully evaluating our methods.

Lieutenant Bacalou assured his fellow volontaires—Philomé, Charlemagne, and Jean-Gérard—that they had no charges under which to hold Toussaint’s companions. He assured Adam that for our promise not to report the unfortunate shooting of the habiline (who, in any case, had no certifiable status on the island), he would not mention, in his mandatory summary of tonight’s events, the discovery of Prix-des-Yeux. Officially, then, the incident had never happened. We all depended on one another to keep the lid on this tragic collision of purposes and personalities.

Lieutenant Bacalou led his men down the mountain ahead of us. Alone again, our own party puttered back and forth between the houngfor and the huts trying to tidy up after the rain. We were going back to the Caicos Bay beach cottage—all of us but Hector and Erzulie—and I gave myself the task of gathering the paintings of “Francoise Fauver,” to be known henceforth as Marcel Sam. I rolled each canvas as tightly as I could, removing from their frames those that were stretched taut and tacked down. I was inserting these paintings into my backpack when Brian Nollinger came into the shanty and wordlessly began to help me. My stomach did a queasy flip-flop.

After a while, he said, “Mr. Loyd?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you going to do with all your photos? Of the caves and so forth.”

I wanted to reply, What the hell’s it to you?—but instead said, “File them until the last of Les Gens has died.” I looked him in the eye. “I don’t intend to publish them.”

“Alberoi’s younger than you, Mr. Loyd. He could outlive you. He could outlive you by a great many years.”

“I hope he does.”

In the muggy damp of the hut, poor Brian looked down. The rolled painting in his hands was trembling.

“You’re afraid he might outlive you, too, aren’t you?” I said. “Well, that’s a possibility I’ve got my fingers crossed for.”

“I was going to do an ethnography of this wretched place. I wasn’t going to reveal its location, just record the lifestyle of these last habilines under oppressive conditions: a rigorous scientific study of a lost race of only five individuals. It would have been good, Mr. Loyd. It would have been an unparalleled—an unduplicatable—piece of work.”

“Buck up. You’ve still got your coffee-drying platforms to build.”

“The stupid Tontons Macoutes ruined everything. They barged in, shot Toussaint, and now, to preserve the fiction that he never existed, we’re all having to abandon Prix-des-Yeux. Doesn’t that offend you?”

“Not half so much as the death of Toussaint.” (A noble sentiment. Had I not seen RuthClaire crying over him, though, I might never have thought to utter it.)

“They ought to be exposed and made to pay for their arrogance and cruelty.”

“Exposing the macoutes means exposing the habilines, but that’s what you want, isn’t it? Once the world knows that the Rutherford Remnant is real, you can publish your I-was-there-when-they-victimized-Toussaint memoirs without a twinge of conscience.”

Brian sighed. “You’re really going to stick those photos in a drawer somewhere?”

“Why not? Did you want them to illustrate your paper? Text by Brian Nolo Contendere, pictures by Judas Loyd?” I chuckled. “Of course, you could leave my name out altogether. There’s precedent, isn’t there? You once took credit in the Atlanta papers for a photo of mine.”

“I meant to do you a favor. I was trying to keep your name out of a controversy that might’ve—”

“Do me another favor and shut up.”

He shut up. The damp canvas backpack held as many rolled paintings as I could stuff into it. To get those still remaining in the homemade filing cabinet, we would have to make a second trip. I hoisted the pack, squared it across my shoulders, and bounced it a couple of times to make sure I could carry it.

“Do you remember when RuthClaire told you that murder wasn’t in her behavioral armory, Brian Old Boy?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. Well, it may be in mine. It’s my bewildered belief that if you try to make capital of what you’ve seen here by publishing anything, down to and including a squib in Reader’s Digest, I’ll go to great pains to find you and do you malicious bodily harm. You’re the only person in God’s creation I feel that way about, Brian, but the down-and-dirty grunginess of that feeling just can’t be gainsaid or whitewashed. Believe me, Brian, I’d do it.”

“Bullshit,” he said, but the bleakness in his eyes told me I’d really scared him.

“I’m talking about the States. Here in Montaraz, it’s Lieutenant Bacalou you’ll have to be wary of. If you make any noises about the habilines while still a guest of Baby Doc, expect a late-night knock. Expect the key in your motor scooter’s ignition to trigger a bomb. Expect your next shower to greatly gratify the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.”

“You’re all talk, Loyd.”

“Maybe, but Bacalou, well, Lieutenant Bacalou you can’t write off so easily. He knows who you are, and he’s bayoneted babies for breakfast. He’s a butcher, a trained assassin. Just because you think I might hesitate to cut your liver out, don’t sell Bacalou short. That’d be a terrible, terrible error.”

“Don’t you care what light Adam’s people can shed on our species’ history?”

“I’m more concerned that we let Adam’s people—Les Gens, thank you—live out their own histories in peace. I’m more concerned those caves up there remain a habiline secret until there ain’t no more habilines to keep it.” I looked him square in the eye again. “What about you, Dr. Nollinger?”

He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed their lenses on one of the front pockets of his bush shorts. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, okay, okay!” he sang in annoyance. “I’ll lock everything I know in a vault in the back of my brain and let it molder there until the Montarazes relent and let me bring it out again. Not you, Mr. Loyd, the Montarazes. You’re hardly even a walk-on in this.” He put his glasses back on. Distractedly, he pulled an original Fauver/Sam from the crate, rolled it, and began tapping it lightly but obsessively on the cabinet’s edge. A voodooist coaxing Arada-Dahomey rhythms from some arrhythmic recess of his soul. I grabbed his wrist to make him stop.

“There’s one thing about you I’ll never understand,” I said.

His expression was neutral. I could explain myself or not explain myself—it made no difference to him.

“I’ll never understand what Caroline saw in you.”

“You’re of the wrong generation,” he said indifferently. “And you really don’t get people, anyway.”

I let go of his wrist and stalked out of the hut, my legs as flimsy as licorice braids. My backpack contained more than a major portion of the habilines’ output in acrylics: the weight of everything that had happened. I needed help getting down the mountain, but I needed none falling asleep on the featherbed in the guestroom of Adam and RuthClaire’s cottage on Caicos Bay. The white noise of the surf ebbed and flowed through my sleep like the hydrogen hiss interconnecting the myriad stars….

The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.

Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of Les Gens, the last of my people.”

I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.

Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”

“I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”

“All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”

“It looked something like a hyena or a dog. Its head did, anyway.”

Adam smiled. “I know. With a hominid body, yes? What you saw was the avatar of God most meaningful to every prehistoric specimen of the human family—by some reckonings, the Master of the Hunt. It lived in the collective unconscious of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and early Homo sapiens. It lives in many so-called primitive peoples even today. It ties the human to the divine and the divine to the animal—so that they are interconnected not just by Mind, but also by a unifying perception of the Sacred.”

“I saw the Sacred?”

“Yes. A projection of the God Beyond Time into the evolutionary aesthetic of his creation. You saw meaning, Mister Paul, and spoke in your possession to a messenger from its source.”

“Not Buddha or Jesus but the Master of the Hunt?”

Adam—a shadow in the indigo twilight—lifted both hands in an unsettling draw-your-own-conclusions gesture.

I leaned toward him in my rocker. “Why didn’t bells go off, Adam? Why didn’t the sky open up and light pour through? Why didn’t I feel that I could float eight feet off the floor of the cave? I mean, if that was a religious revelation, Adam, I prefer falling in love. With falling in love you get Roman candles and light-headedness and invisible champagne bubbles. With that business in the caves, all I got was horror-movie special effects and a theological lecture, and a lingering headache. How can I put any credence in a revelation like that?”

“Did you learn anything that you did not know before?”

“I was told some things I didn’t know before. Why?”

“Because if you didn’t know them before, or hadn’t been told them before, well, then, you would be foolish to conclude that what you experienced was nothing but your own subconscious talking. Something outside you was putting in its two cents of worth.”

“I don’t feel any different than I did two days ago. I’m the same materialistic rational pagan.”

“Who has been ridden by the vaudun loa of our African ancestors. Who has broken through one of God’s masks to talk to him face to face.”

I shivered. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

“It will come gradually, Mister Paul. Your bells will sound like they’re ringing at the bottom of the sea. Your fireworks will unfold in big slow-motion umbrellas. You will float only at the most modest, and so nearly imperceptible, heights. But it will come, and each instance of it will have its own design, and the many individual designs will compose an encompassing pattern, and that pattern will have its ground in the Mind and Megapattern of God.”

“You sound like a crackpot Indian guru, Adam.”

“Then I’ll shut up. Right now. Better to think about eating—” he gestured at the beach— “than get lost in the metaphysics of another.”

We sat in silence watching our wives pull coals into a circle of stones upon which they would soon place the greasy grill rack. Paul and Caroline, Adam and Ruthie Cee. Just another pair of sophisticated fun couples partying in a secluded cove on Montaraz. The bonfire ten feet away from their makeshift barbecue pit leapt like the funeral pyre of a Roman emperor. Caroline’s and RuthClaire’s shoulders gleamed in its roaring blaze as if made of bronze. They tonged strips of fileted fish out of a metal cooler onto the grill rack. They took turns basting each strip with the sauce that I had made. I watched them for a long time.

Finally, RuthClaire stood and shouted, “It’s nearly time to eat!”

Adam and I carried two pitchers of iced daiquiris to the beach, and, sitting on the sand at a remove from the bonfire, we ate and drank—somewhat solemnly, considering the late hour and the formidable size of our appetites and thirsts. Tomorrow, Caroline and I would fly back to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. That knowledge may have contributed to our solemnity, but, of course, a lot of it had to do with Toussaint’s death, the upheaval at Prix-des-Yeux, and the uncertainty of our own several futures. I found myself thinking forlorn thoughts about Livia George, Paradise Farm, and the West Bank. To keep from getting maudlin, I limited myself to three small lime daiquiris in a ceramic coffee mug. In fact, I did everything in threes—three strips of fish, three baked yams, and three avowals of either eternal love (that one for Caroline) or eternal friendship (one for RuthClaire, one for Adam) for my companions on the beach.

The bonfire started to die.

RuthClaire said, “We’ve got to build it up again,” pulled herself to her feet, and trudged up the sand toward the cottage. Halfway there, she turned and beckoned to us with a tipsy wave. “C’mon, you guise! He’p me get some stuff fer th’ fire!” Adam, Caroline, and I struggled up and followed her on her drunken anabasis.

Over the next hour or so, we hauled from their storage niches inside the cottage all the paintings in RuthClaire’s series Souls. Then we tossed each canvas, whether loose or affixed to a stretching frame, right into the crackling pyre. They burned well. In fact, in the fire they had the kind of stunning luminous beauty that they’d had for me on only one other occasion—a memorable occasion in the upstairs studio at Paradise Farm. Soon, though, they scrolled and blackened and turned to oozy char. It amazed me that we were abetting RuthClaire in this activity—Adam as eagerly as anyone else—and yet I asked no questions until we’d flung the last painting in.

“You destroyed them because they weren’t popular, is that it?”

RuthClaire straightened, as best she could. “It was either them or my porcelain plates. Porcelain won’t burn.” She laughed so hard she had to grab Caroline for support, and, again, they shared a sisterly hilarity with a rationale impenetrable to male intellects. Adam and I had no choice but to wait them out. Finally, still leaning on each other, they regained a parody of uprightness.

“The concept was all wrong,” RuthClaire said, swaying a little. “In spite of what the hot-shot critics said, I did ’em okay. I mean, I executed ’em okay. But a soul’s not a soul’s not a soul.”

“Who said that?” Caroline asked.

“Gertrude Steinem,” RuthClaire said, and they both guffawed. Then RuthClaire waved her hand and said, “What I mean is, the pastels were to show the insubstantiality, the immaterialness, of souls—but souls are living bodies, and so my stupid concept is all wrong. My stupid paintings never lived except when the light hit ’em just right, and they looked better burning than they ever did in the morgue of my studio gallery. I had to get rid of ’em, I have to start over, thash—that’s—all there is to it.”

“Adam liked them,” I said.

RuthClaire broke free of Caroline, tottered over to Adam, and put her arm through his. “Adam’s my hushbin, Paul.” He grinned, and the bonfire illuminated his teeth as if they were a bracelet of ancient ivory charms.

Still later, a little more sober, RuthClaire fetched the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes to the beach and asked me to open it. I was T. P.’s godfather, after all, and the honor of scattering his ashes on Caicos Bay was rightly mine. If it weren’t rightly mine—by the standards of Emily Post or proper cremation etiquette—well, she and Adam had decided to countermand those standards with an appeal to simple sentiment. I took the urn to my chest with one arm and tried to unstopper it. Nothing I did budged its form-fitting lid, though, and I feared breaking either the lid or the urn itself.

“My hero,” Caroline said. She took the urn, set it on the sand, squatted next to it, fiddled with it for forty seconds, and successfully unscrewed the fire-baked clay stopper. Then she stood and placed the urn back into my arms. I accepted it, smelling sea and ash and particulate spirit.

“Go on,” RuthClaire said.

So with the urn in my arms the way small children sometimes carry a rubber boot into the water to give them both ballast and a fragile sense of security, I carried Tiny Paul into the shallows of Caicos Bay. Like his father, he was home. Without looking back at the people who had sent me, I sowed the murdered child’s ashes on the murmuring inlet. Those that stuck to my palm I washed away in the gentle lapping of the evening tide. They weren’t inconsequential, I told myself, and they weren’t lost: They were afloat in the consciousness of God.

And I tried like crazy to believe it.