Holly inspects me through her dark lenses; she last saw me through a fug of medication, so I doubt she’ll recall me, but I’ll stay prepared: “Were you a colleague of Crispin’s here at the college?”
“No, no, I work in a different field. I’m a fan, though. I’ve read and reread Desiccated Embryos.”
“He always suspected that book would outlive him.”
“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.” A blue jay swoops onto a fungus-ruffled tree stump by Hershey’s grave, emits a volley of harsh jeers, then a breathy trill.
“They don’t make those birds where I’m from,” says Holly.
“A blue jay,” I say, “or Cyanocitta cristata. The Algonquin name was sidesoand the Yakama called it a xw б shxway, but their territory was over on the Pacific, so now I’m merely showing off.”
Holly removes her sunglasses. “Are you a linguist?”
“By default. I’m a psychiatrist, here for a meeting. You?”
“Just here to pay my respects.” Holly bends down, takes an oak leaf from the grave, and puts it into her purse. “Well, nice talking with you. Hope your meeting goes well.”
The blue jay threads a flight path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark. Holly begins to walk off.
“So far so good, but it’s about to get trickier, I fear.”
Holly is struck by my strange answer and stops.
I clear my throat. “Ms. Sykes, we need to talk.”
Down come the shutters, out comes her hardscrabble Gravesend accent. “I don’t do media, I don’t do festivals.” She steps backwards. “I’ve retired from all that.” A frond of pine tree brushes her head and she ducks nervily. “So, no, whoever you are, you can—”
“Iris Fenby this time around, but you know me as Marinus.”
She freezes, thinks, frowns, and looks disgusted. “Oh, f’Chrissakes! Yu Leon Marinus died in 1984, he was Chinese, and if youhave a Chinese parent, then I’m … Vladimir Putin. Don’t force me to be rude. That’srude.”
“Dr. Yu Leon Marinus was indeed childless, Holly, and that body died in 1984. But his soul, this ‘I’ addressing you now, is Marinus. Truly.”
A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind. Holly’s walking off. Who knows how many Marinuses she’s met, from the mentally ill to fraudsters, after a slice of her royalties?
“You have two hours missing from July 1, 1984,” I call after her, “between Rochester and the Isle of Sheppey. I know what happened.”
She stops. “ Iknow what happened!” Despite herself, she turns to face me again, properly angry now. “I hitched. A woman picked me up and dropped me off at the Sheppey bridge. Please, leave me alone.”
“Ian Fairweather and Heidi Cross picked you up. I know you know those names, but you don’t know you were at that bungalow that morning, that day, when they were killed.”
“Whatever! Post the whole story at bullshitparanoia.com. The crazies’ll give you all the attention you need.” Somewhere a lawnmover chugs into noisy life. “You digested The Radio People, sicked it up, mixed in your own psychoses, and made an occult reality show, starring yourself. Just like that wretched girl who shot Crispin. I’m going now. Don’tfollow, or I’ll call the cops.”
Birds crisscross and warble in the stripes of light.
That went well, subsays Фshima the Unseen and Ironic.
I sit down on the blue jay’s stump. It’s a beginning.
April 4
“MY FAVORITE DISH on my menu, sweetheart, swear to God.” Nestor lays the plate in front of me. “People come in, they sit down, they see ‘vegetarian moussaka,’ they think, If moussaka ain’t meat it ain’t moussaka, so they order the steak, the pork belly, the lamb chops. They dunno what they missing. Go on. Taste. My own mother, God watch over her soul, that’s her recipe. Hell of a lady. Navy SEALs, ninjas, those Mafia guys, next to a Greek momma, they a sack of quivering pussies. That’s her, in the frame, over the till.” He points at the white-haired matriarch. “She made this cafй. She invented no-meat moussaka too, when Mussolini invaded and shot every sheep, every rabbit, every dog. Mama had to—wassaword?—improvise. Marinate the eggplant in red wine. Simmer the lentils, slow. Mushrooms cooked in soy sauce—she added soy sauce after she came to New York. Meatier than meat. Butter in white sauce, cornflour, dash of cream. Heavy on the paprika. That’s the kick. Bon app й tit, sweetheart, and”—he passes me a clinking glass of iced tap water—“save space for dessert. You too skinny.”
“Skinny,” I pat my midriff, “is notone of my worries.”
Off he drifts, deftly avoided by higher-speed younger staff. I fork an eggplant and squish up some white sauce, smoosh on a mushroom and eat. Taste being the blood of memory, I remember 1969, when Yu Leon Marinus was teaching only a few blocks away, Old Nestor was Young Nestor, and the white-haired lady in the frame, upon learning that the Greek-speaking Chinaman was a doctor, held me up to her sons as the American Dream incarnate. She gave me a square of baklava with my coffee every time I came here, which was often. I’d like to ask when she passed away, but my curiosity might attract suspicion, so I downstream today’s New York Timesand flick to the crossword. But it’s no good.
I can’t stop thinking about Esther Little …
IN 1871 PABLO Antay Marinus turned forty. He had inherited enough Latino DNA from his Catalan father to pass as Spanish, so he signed as a ship’s surgeon aboard an aging Yankee clipper, the Prophetess, at Rio de Janeiro, bound for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, via Cape Town. Notwithstanding a typhoon of Old Testament fury, an outbreak of ship fever that killed a dozen sailors, and a skirmish with corsairs off Panaitan Island, we limped into Batavia on Christmas Day. Lucas Marinus had visited the place eighty years before, and the malarial garrison town I remembered was now a malarial city. One cannot cross the same river twice. I traveled inland to botanize around Buitenzorg, but the brutality meted out by Europeans to the Javanese natives robbed me of all pleasure in Javanese flora, and when the Prophetessslipped anchor in January for the youthful Swan River Colony in Western Australia, I wasn’t sorry to leave. I’d never set foot on the southern continent in my entire metalife, so when our captain gave notice of a three-week layover in Fremantle for careening, I decided to spend two of them in the Becher Point wetlands. I engaged an eager-to-please local man named Caleb Warren and his long-suffering mule. Prior to the 1890s Gold Rush, Perth was a township of only a few hundred wooden dwellings, and within an hour Warren and I were making our way on a rough track through wilderness unchanged for millennia. As the rough track turned notional, Caleb Warren turned silent and moody. These days, I’d diagnose the man as bipolar. We walked through scrubby hills, swampy gullies, saltwater creeks, and copses of leaning paperbark trees. I was content. My sketchbook for February 7, 1872, contains drawings of six species of frog, a detailed description of a bandicoot, a botched sketch of a royal spoonbill, and a passable watercolor of Jervoise Bay. Night fell and we camped in a circle of rocks atop a low cliff. I asked my guide if Aborigines were likely to approach our fire. Caleb Warren slapped the butt of his rifle and announced, “Let the bastards try. We’ll be ready.” Pablo Antay recorded his impressions of the deep breakers and spatter of spray, the droning babel of insect scratches, mammalian barks, and the calls of birds. We ate “bush duff” with blood sausage and beans. My guide drank rum like water, and answered, “Who gives a damn?” to anything I said. Warren was a problem I’d have to fix the following day. I watched the stars and thought of other lives. I don’t know how much time passed before I noticed a small mouse skip up Warren’s forearm, onto his hand, and up the stick that served as a toasting fork to the greasy lump of sausage impaled there. Ihadn’t hiatused the man. Warren’s eyes were open but he didn’t reply or stir …