Heritage of Smoke Read online

  The waves played with the bronze light as if lulling it to sleep. The light moved with each wave, evasive, unsubstantial, luring the eyes back to murder. The sky turned a gloomy indigo, as though it were a gigantic blood vessel. The full moon with its dried-up oceans slipped out, eclipsed. Its light cast down an unprocessed film that, once sunk in the chemicals of the ocean, began to develop; pictures appeared slowly, with emerging contrasts.

  Their eyeballs flickered in the dark, like four candles at a medieval plague carnival.

  I should have killed him as soon as I woke up, thought Peter.

  I should grab the oar, thought Francisco.

  No choice, thought Peter. I can’t wait and wait. If I fall asleep again, he’ll kill me.

  Peter began to move slowly, holding an empty glass in his hand, as if he would fill it with water to drink, and in his other hand, behind his back, he gripped the ivory handle of his hunting knife. Francisco tightened his muscles. Why did Peter move so slowly if he wanted to drink? Peter moved slowly like a tiger that needs to hide its movements, but on the boat nothing could be hidden. Even the moon failed to eclipse. Francisco grabbed the oar, still heavy from the water, acknowledging the imminent struggle. Peter hesitated. Is Francisco strong enough to use the oar? I must act swiftly. What if he falls overboard and drowns? We’d both die.

  Peter crept nearer. Francisco’s muscles tensed more, and he jumped. The boat shook. He flew at Peter, swinging the oar. Peter ducked sideways. The oar missed his head and smashed his left shoulder, cracking the collarbone loudly. Peter fell on the boards, his knife flying out of his hand. The motion swayed Francisco and he fell over the bench. Peter was in a knockdown. He tried to stand up and collapsed again. Francisco lifted himself slowly and took up the oar. Peter’s hand was reaching for the knife. Francisco was dizzy; the waves made it hard for him to keep his balance. Peter, the knife in his hand, his consciousness crimson, half stood and half leaped at Francisco, like a runner at the start of a race. Francisco started sideways. Peter missed and fell over Francisco’s feet. Francisco kicked at his face but hesitated because he felt pity for the bleeding Peter. The moon was not eclipsed. It came out of a thick cloud, full.

  Peter quickly stood up—the struggle actually fell together in slow, exhausted motions—and plunged and collapsed at Francisco again. Francisco jumped aside, but too slowly. The knife hit his rib cage, slid below it, and climbed into his liver. Peter pulled the knife out and stabbed again. Francisco lay against the rudder, blood spurting out of him to the rhythm of his heart. Peter stabbed again, aiming at the heart, and his knife got stuck in Francisco’s rib, between the head of the rib and the sternum. Peter pulled it out and the bones crunched. Peter’s shoulder was riven with scorching pangs of pain. He spat a couple of teeth from his mouth. Francisco stared at him with fervid fixedness.

  Peter kneeled on his side and pressed his four fingertips (he didn’t use the thumb) into Francisco’s lukewarm skin on the neck for pulse; he pressed in the front of the transverse muscle running from the back of the skull to the collarbone and wasn’t sure whose feeble pulse he felt, his or Francisco’s. I should finish killing him. Peter lifted the knife in his hand and held it high. The blade smudged with blood flickered in the vague moonlight. He waited like Abraham when sacrificing Isaac, but no angels came from the sky to stop his hand, and there were no goats around the altar to be sacrificed in Isaac’s stead. There was no faith to be proven; this was not a test. Out of pain in his shoulder more than resolve, Peter’s hand came down. The knife slid between the collarbone and the upper ridge of the trapezoid muscle as smoothly as the sun had sunk into the ocean. Francisco’s body convulsed, blood gushed; Francisco’s frozen blue eyeballs crisscrossed, focusing somewhere behind Peter’s neck. He opened his mouth, and to Peter it was not clear whether his throat gurgled in giving up his ghost or whether he said: rhrhood luckrh, the way a Dutchman might say Good luck. The light vanished out of Francisco’s eyes.

  Francisco’s blood, no longer spurting in the rhythm of heart, flowed slowly and feebly. Peter licked the blood off the skin below the rib cage and sucked the wound behind the collarbone. And after that, numb, no longer in pursuit of blood, his warm awareness oozed below the surface of the ocean, through the limbs of octopuses, past orange and green fish glowing into the paradise beneath good and evil, spreading with ease throughout his body to his sore eyelids. Through his fluttering eyelashes, instead of one silvery moon, he saw four merging in and out of one. Silver light flashed at him from the lulling waves, never from the same place, never offering to be scrutinized. He leaned against the bench and the sideboards; his head was gently swayed in the rhythm of the ocean. The actorless play of elusive light went on for him.

  The murmur and splashing of the waters was a purr of the oceanic mother cat suckling her kitten. The sounds changed and passed away, the light shifted, but the darkness always stayed in the ocean, steady and true. The warmth from within calmed his stomach, and the cool from the outside soothed his lungs and forehead, as if his mother’s hand had touched him at the end of a long fever.

  For breakfast, Peter cut through Francisco’s left calf, amazed at the thickness of the skin. Shoes could be made of it. If a tent could be made of the foreskins of the Philistines David had killed, you could make shoes out of the skin; if you peeled off the skin of the foot and put it back together, you’d have a perfect foot-glove, a moccasin. Peter laughed, thinking how his thoughts displayed good Yankee ingenuity. He carved out the medial head of the gastrocnemius, cut the stubborn Achilles’s tendon, and burnt the flesh on the propane cooker.

  In the afternoon Peter grew bored. Now he had nobody to be tense with, nobody to keep him alert and conscious, so he dozed. But gradually, insomnia set in. And rather than turn away from the corpse, he turned to it, as if begging Francisco to talk to him. The body lay supine with the eyes closed, giving an impression of an iris-less sculpture, a Rodin bronze of a sleeping philosopher, the one Rodin would have made had he lived longer.

  Peter wondered what he could do to kill the time. Why not study anatomy, the most basic of the humanistic as well as the natural sciences. He took up his knife, and with his thumbnail scratched the brown fragile sheets of blood from the blade. He began to peel the skin off the thinned left thigh. He tried to separate the layer of skin from the subcutaneous fat, but there was so little fat that it was no thicker than the fascia lata and the perimysium, the sheets enveloping the muscles below. Between the hardened thin layer of fat and the fascia, he freed the long saphenous vein, purple and limp. Then he cut sideways between adductor longus and sartorius, until he reached the femoral artery and vein, two-thirds of the way between the skin and the bone. He separated the muscles and reached for the femur. He cut lightly into the bone and peeled off the periosteum, the yellowish white sheet of bone. The femur was splendidly white, almost like the ivory handle of his knife. Throughout the practicum he was fascinated, highly alert and cautious, with his stomach growling. He tried to recall the objectivity of an anatomy lesson, the tightness of the corpse. His knife was much duller than a scalpel, and the fresh corpse was startlingly red compared with the old brown formaldehyde cadavers he had seen on TV. The procedure to him was like a scripted autopsy, as if the cause of death had to be determined. And what was the cause of death? Survival. Francisco had died from survival.

  Peter began to separate the triceps and the biceps of the right arm, letting the muscle sheet stay with the biceps. He pressed the brachial artery, which bounced right back, and traced the artery as it arose through the muscles and ran closer to the bone humerus, gradually twisting from the medial side to the front of it. His finger got stuck against its branch, profunda brachii, coiling backward through the triceps. Next to the brachial artery, further from the bone, Peter separated a thick white string, nervus medialis, and though he pulled it as hard as he could, it wouldn’t break nor slide much from between the muscles. Behind the string, close to the skin, ran a thinner string, the ulnar nerve, the
funny-bone nerve that he remembered playing with as a kid, striking the edge of the breakfast table with the elbow, coffee cups, with violets clanking, sunny-sides-up trembling with little waves, his mother shouting, “Pete, for Heaven’s sake!” while he concentrated on the electric tingle in his forearm. He had imagined swarms of ants covered his forearm, millions of little legs stepping inside his skin, skating over his muscles.

  Peter stuck his knife into Francisco’s crunchy sternum and tore through the abdomen to the navel, then to the pubic bone. He tried to pull the abdomen apart, but it was too tight, so he made a transverse cut through the navel, resulting in an inverse cross. He cut through several layers of muscles, each with fingers in a different direction, removed the abdominal wall with the peritoneum, the abdominal sheet, and plunged his hands into the slippery intestines. He stared at the many colors— pink, gray, brown, red, white—all impure, muted; there was a shade of blue in the ascending colon on the right, the transverse colon beneath the liver was still soaked in blood, the sigmoid colon on the low left was bluish. Upward, beneath the shrunken stomach, his fingers felt the tongue-like, spongy pancreas and the walls of the duodenum that enveloped the head of the pancreas, like a lover embracing his beloved. Peter, driven by curiosity to reach into the secrets of secreting matter, cut into the duodenum and found the opening of the pancreatic ducts in its wall, and cutting through the pancreas with his knife, he traced the common bile duct. He followed the pancreatic duct and felt the pancreas to the right as it thinned. He tried to pull it out, but it was firmly attached to the peritoneum in the back; he cut through the back peritoneum next to the bumpy spine and fingered the inferior vena cava and the rubbery aorta abdominalis. At the thin end of the pancreas, he touched the smooth surface of the kidney-like crimson spleen, squeezed it and cut it out, with blood dripping.

  Peter tore out half a yard of the intestines and threw them overboard. Shouldn’t I have used the intestines for sausages?

  It was getting dark, and Peter interrupted his anatomy lesson; for supper, he simmered the spleen on the propane cooker.

  Next pink dawn he recoiled from his sleep; he had been resting his head on a piece of Francisco’s abdominal wall, torn and thin. What to do with the body, after the anatomy lesson? To embalm or not to embalm? He remembered what he had read about how the Egyptians did it. They stuck a hook through the nostrils into the brain and scratched inside the skull so the brain could flow out, and what remained of it was dissolved in natrum. They opened the inside of the body, took out the organs, and oiled the inner walls and sewed them back. And there was another method: you don’t remove the intestines; you inject cedar oil into them through the anus, and the body pickles in natrum. After seventy days, the flesh it gone, and the skin remains taut on the bones, ready to last for thousands of years. But this was all useless to Peter; he had no natrum and he needed the flesh to eat.

  To preserve the flesh as long as possible, he cleaned out the bacteria-rich intestines completely, because from them the rotting would spread. And then he paused, gazing at Francisco’s corpse—well, it no longer belonged to Francisco, but to Peter; so, in a sense, he looked at his corpse.

  He lifted some seawater in the bit of plastic boat cover; he soaked his clothes in the water. With the salt that remained after the water evaporated, he rubbed a whole assortment of muscles neatly filed on the boards: the broad trapezius, the broader latissimus dorsi, the twisting streaks of pectoralis with the swollen deltoideus above, flexor carpi ulnaris sinister, rectus abdominis, the tongue, and the heart, which, with severed blood vessels sticking out of it, lay like a defeated octopus. He sliced the heart, admiring how thick the wall of the left ventricle was.

  He cut out the right lung, light and airy, wetly smooth, with little veins crisscrossing the surface, and he remembered what Francisco had told him—the Incas used to tell fortunes by tracing the vein patterns in the lungs of sacrificial llamas.

  In the evening Peter gorged, anxious that there might not be enough food for him, and afterward he fell asleep.

  A bell is tolling. The sun has not risen yet. Maybe it won’t. The horizon is rosy, the streets brown, the sky azure. Many people in black walk along the cobblestones of a narrow streets. The sound of the bell blows cold air into the people’s hearts, through the pores of their skins, drawing blood from their faces, ashen green under blue-black hairs. Peter walks toward the gathering. Two black horses, steam rising from their backs, pull a black hearse covered in stiff green garlands, with purple ribbons and golden letters. Four men carry an orange casket out of a gray bullet-riddled house. The bells cease to toll and only a buzzing echo remains, rising in pitch. All of a sudden, one of the four coffin carriers slips on a soft lump of green horse dung and the casket falls after him, crashes on his foot and cracks open on the cobblestones. From a white sheet rolls out a corpse, stiff and naked. Good chunks of flesh are missing. The bone of one leg is bare, as are the bones of one arm, white, without a trace of flesh. One half of the face is missing, with the hollow of a missing eye staring out from some spookily calm darkness. The screams of the crowd echo against the church as the corpse rolls downhill toward Peter. Peter recoils: the corpse at his feet is his, him.

  He woke up, catching his scream as it was vanishing in the murmur of the ocean.

  Six days after he had killed Francisco, Peter noticed a coast, a blue, rugged haze. Seeing patches of green in the gray haze, he was reassured. He threw Francisco’s bones overboard. Some bones floated, others sank. Peter pushed the skull into the water, but it emerged, grinning with its fleshless mouth.

  In the afternoon, Peter saw white high-rise hotels and a sandy beach covered with bronze and pink bodies, orange and blue parasols, yellow and red water floats. Soon his sailboat cut into the sandy gravel, screeching. Bathers ran aside from the path of the boat. They saw Peter’s apparition: hollow cheeks, hollow orbits of the eyes out of which two sad and brutal eyes glowed, long salty blond hair, burnt brown skin, ribs showing through a salt-eaten shirt. He looked like a holy man or a forlorn lunatic or an adventurer who has survived a trip into the heart of a volcano. Popsicle-sucking children shrieked and ran away, lotioned men and women shrank back.

  Peter walked straight to an outdoor café with the little white tables and small palms with red flowers and ordered una cerveza. That much Spanish he knew. A young olive-skinned waiter, his hairs greasily wet, combed in parallels, gave the beer to Peter, scrutinizing him through his long eyelashes. To Peter there was something familiar in the face. Peter paid, handing out one salty dollar, and asked: “Hotel?”

  “Esto completo” answered the boy. He drew a map on the back of a page from a notepad, which said Oasis, directing Peter to the outskirts of the town. There, Peter found a small hotel on a slanted cobbled street. He rented a room and slept for a day straight. Next afternoon he went to a barber’s to have his hair cut and his beard shaved. As the barber razed through the foam, tickling his neck with the gentle touch of the blade, Peter was uncomfortable; it would be so easy for the blade to cut beneath the muscle into the artery. Unlike Cain, Peter had no sign on his forehead to brand him as a murderer, yet he felt as though one was there. His sign, unlike Cain’s, wouldn’t protect him. But the shaving went on peacefully; the older barber, his eyes half-closed, whistled Gracias a la vida; the fresh smell of pines floated through the room, blaming and invigorating Peter, who kept his eyes closed. When the barber asked him to take a look, Peter was startled at seeing himself in the mirror. His face was much darker than it used to be. His eyes were smaller; they no longer had an optimistic and frank air about them.

  Strolling in the streets, he was surprised at how much Spanish he understood; he had never studied it. He had many déjà vu sensations. After two or three days, he understood the conversations fully. Whenever he shopped, his English consonants were softened; he attributed that to his three missing teeth, which made him lisp and activate his tongue more, to roll his r’s. His body felt different from what he was used to.
His movements were faster, his eyes shiftier. He looked in the mirror. His eyes were no longer blue, but greenish, tending towards hazel. His nose was thinner and a bit aquiline. It seemed to him that Francisco stared back at him. Francisco’s liquid glare cooled him. No, I must be hallucinating. I’m going out of my mind! Next morning, as soon as he woke up, he rushed to the mirror to convince himself that he had hallucinated the day before. Out of the mirror leered a dark-eyed face.

  Although he used to despise religion, Peter walked into the bullet-riddled church across the square from his inn and listened to a sermon amidst incense. On both sides stood pale Jesuses with thick red rivulets flowing from their thorn-pierced foreheads, and even thicker rivulets out of the holes in the ribs. He recalled the crunching sound of his knife in Francisco’s ribs, and shuddered at the monotonous words of the priest: Porque el que quisiere salvar su vida, la perdera; y el que perdiere su vida por causa de mi, la salvara. (For he who wants to save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake, will gain it.) Peter walked out of the cold church. The sun smarted his eyes. The bells began to toll, smarting his ears. His whole body was tense and sore.

  Several days later he was on a steel Greyhound. As the bus neared the U.S. border, there was a dark low cloud in the sky. At the border, Peter handed his salt-eaten passport to a border policeman. A heavy-set border guard said, “Damn weather, it makes my bones ache!” Then he lifted his grey eyes and said, “But this isn’t you! You’re not Peter Cunningham.”