On My Way to Paradise Read online

  And though I was troubled because I suddenly remembered that one of Jafari’s men was still on board and I didn’t know his identity, I was too tired to speak, so I closed my eyes and slept.

  Part Two:

  The Chaeron

  Chapter 7

  I was standing in the jungle at dusk, in a deep crater filled with jagged black rocks. Around the rim of the crater, thousands of shadowy spider monkeys capered and shrieked, throwing stones and debris down from the cliff top.

  I was surrounded by large boulders, and across each sprawled a dying person covered with a white sheet. Flaco lay in front of me with his throat slashed, one hand dangling over the lip of his boulder, and I needed to sew the pieces of his esophagus together quickly if I was to save him.

  Tamara lay face down, slumped over a sharp rock to his right, her fever burning high, brain cells dying at a tremendous rate as she waited for an injection of antimosin. Behind me, Arish also lay on a low flat stone with a slashed throat. He tugged the back of my shirt to beg for help, but I was too busy caring for Flaco.

  I bent close in the failing light and stitched at Flaco’s throat. The rip in his esophagus lay between the triangular cricoids’ cartilage just above the Adam’s apple and the first ring of tracheal cartilage beneath—a region hard to treat quickly, since there could be major damage to his vocal cords. But I had no time to worry about niceties like re-stitching vocal cords. I had never performed anything but minor home-surgeries, yet I stitched the esophagus together rapidly, hoping I was doing it right. The monkeys on the crater’s rim shrieked and howled, and I could not think straight, could not decide if I was stitching the right pieces together. The lower section of esophagus suddenly seemed to appear very much like a section of small intestine. I sewed anyway, shook my head at the damage to Flaco’s severed spinal column. He would require much care, more than I can afford to give at the moment. His blood seeped down and stained the white sheet so gently lying over him.

  I looked for a clean stone on which to set my bloody sutures, and a small girl, perhaps ten years old, appeared to my left. I handed them to her.

  She said, "Thank you, Grandfather," and smiled at me. I looked at her face—a thin face with prominent features, skin as pale as a European’s and smooth as a china doll’s. She seemed familiar and I was glad to see her, but I could not put a name to her.

  I rushed over to Tamara’s slumped figure lying on a rock, filled a syringe with antimosin, gently lifted her head, and injected the antimosin into her neck. Arish tugged at my shirt.

  "How about some help over here? I’m dying! How about some help over here?" he yelled.

  I glanced back at him, surprised at how well he spoke with his throat cut. Beads of sweat dotted his face, and his pupils were constricted from fear. He tugged at my shirt again, and I slapped his hand away.

  "I’m busy!" I said.

  "Too busy to help me, you old fucker? Too busy to help me?" His feet started kicking, and he thrashed around. Arish’s legs kicked, making a big "whuff, whuff" sound as they scraped the sheets and billowed them out, and I knew he was dying.

  But suddenly the monkeys all let out a roar. Flaco arched his back and cried out; his stitches tore, and the blood poured out. Tamara’s eyes started to glaze, and I knew she needed another injection. Arish raised his hands and held them out, as if pleading for mercy from the air.

  Startled, I awoke on a cot in a coffin-sized tube with a single, dim overhead light. The white plastic walls smelled new, and piped-in salsa music trumpeted a gaiety that didn’t reflect the way I felt. The vision of Arish with a wound in his throat filled my mind, and I tried to push it away, concentrate on something else. My broken ankle was braced to the cot, so I couldn’t see my leg, but an ache like an old wasp sting told me the doctors had inserted needles so they could glue my bones together, a time-consuming process usually reserved for athletes.

  I knew I should remain immobile for at least three hours so the glue could set. I looked towards my feet for a clock. There was none. I was in a convalescence tube like those in Chinese hospitals, but usually the tube has some amenities—a clock, a drinking straw, a dream monitor. This one appeared empty, except for the blaring radio.

  I should find Tamara, I thought. I should check her hormone fusion pump, take care of her hand.

  It had been three days—long enough for a thin layer of undifferentiated cells to grow over her wound. Now was the time to paint a new wash over the cells, administer the hormones that would order a hand to regenerate. Otherwise, the undifferentiated cells would just keep growing like a cancer.

  I thought, I should also see if she has any major brain damage, see if the log phases and antimosin did the trick. The general I’d spoken with had wanted her alive. I supposed someone was caring for her. But still I thought I should check.

  I remembered the blood pumping from Arish’s throat, a red trickle over ebony skin. I tried to force the memory back, but could not concentrate. I felt as if I had a cold lump in my brain. I tried to pinpoint the cold spot, to visualize where it lay, and it seemed to move aside. Morphine overdoses can make it difficult for one to concentrate for several days, but this seemed more than a simple drug reaction. The cold spot felt alive, conscious, like an animal, a large black fly buzzing in my head, batting away thoughts with its wings while stirring up unpleasant images.

  The incidents from the past three days gave off a pervasive sense of wrongness, and the more I considered it, the more likely it appeared I was going—no, had gone—insane. This was my reasoning: When I was young, Don José Mirada, a rather eccentric friend to my father, counseled me to serve society. He believed society always rewards best those who serve it best, and destroys those who refuse to serve it. For example, the owner of the clinic in our small town always invested much in his business. Because of this, he had medical equipment other hospitals lacked, so people came from far away to visit his facility. This made him very rich and famous. He had many friends and a beautiful wife, and no one envied him because they felt he deserved everything he got. Society rewarded him for the service he performed. But the don also pointed out that the man of the world, the man who behaves toward society as a parasite behaves towards its host, is never secure. Dictators, dishonest businessmen, or those who become parasites of the social institutions will often be destroyed. If society does not squash them outright, it will destroy their spirits and they will find no lasting happiness.

  To prove his point, don José would dress in his white suit and get his gold-handled walking stick, then take me to the market in our village to point out some of the more wretched people on the street, all the time lecturing me about how society had destroyed their lives. "Look at Osvaldo," he would say, indicating a merchant. "See how miserable he is. Always in the market he tries to sell his clothes for twice their value, so when fashions change he must give the clothes away to unload his old merchandise. Because of his greed, no one buys from him except when he is desperate to sell, and he will die in poverty! Remember how society hates the greedy, Angelo, and learn from this man’s misfortune." Or again, pointing to a handsome couple, "Look at Juan, he cheated on his old wife and married his lover. Now his new wife doesn’t trust him to walk across the street alone! She clings to him like a hangman’s rope. Unwittingly she has become the avatar of her society’s conscience, and she punishes him mercilessly for his infidelity."

  Don José Mirada argued that there was great wisdom in letting consensus morality guide one in times when moral codes seemed a burden, and he said we should obey laws even when they seemed irrelevant.

  I eventually came to believe there was truth to his argument, and I’ve often wondered if at some subconscious level I chose a career medicine so I could best serve society and thus gain its greatest rewards.

  If this is true, my morality is an external artifice produced by greed.

  But I have always wanted to believe I serve society from the heart and that the rewards society gives in return are incide
ntal. Indeed, philosophers say the greatest happiness comes to those who learn to live without wealth, or fame. And if this is true, then the rewards society offers those who serve it are only grains of dust that blind men to the true happiness that comes from the act of serving.

  I have preferred to believe this, for it feels more right to my heart.

  But killing Arish was an act society did not condone—not when I had disabled him and had him at my mercy. Society jealously guards the right to retribution. In fact, because I had violated society’s right to retribution by killing Arish, my society would now try to punish me.

  So, when I’d killed Arish, at the very least I acted contrary to one of my most fundamental beliefs about how the world operates: I had violated consensus morality. Though Arish was a socialist, a murderer, a man dedicated to the belief that he could only advance his own Nicita Idealist doctrines by destroying me and my society, though he represented all this—yet I could not justify killing him. The fact that I acted inconsistent with my beliefs seemed a sure sign of insanity.

  I reasoned further that killing Arish had been very impulsive, and I have never been impulsive. Only once had I seriously considered killing a man, and that had been long ago. Even then it was not an impulsive act: When I was young, Gonzalvo Quintanilla, an army general with big cocaine connections in Australia, tried to overthrow Guatemala. For three days he led a reign of terror from Panzós to Belize. But his men were only interested in looting homes and raping women, and they felt no loyalty, so his regime fell. I was at school in Mexico City at the time, and when I learned my mother had been killed by Quintanilla’s looters, I rushed home.

  Though my mother had been murdered two days earlier, I found my father sitting in a chair in the living room, staring at the wall and weeping like a child. My sister Eva tried to comfort him while her three children ran about the house playing. My father would not reply when I spoke to him, but Eva took me aside and showed me where Mother had died. Dried blood still smeared the walls and floor tiles in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room—even after much cleaning Eva had been unable to wash it off—and as I crouched to inspect the stains I could smell the blood and could see dried, flaking droplets on the wall behind the china cabinet.

  "How did this happen?" I asked.

  "Five of Quintanilla’s soldiers came in the house to loot," Eva said. "Neighbors heard shooting. When the soldiers left, the neighbors came and found her dead."

  "How do they say she died?"

  "No one will say."

  I went from house to house, asking how my mother had been killed. The only answer I got was from an old gray-headed woman: "She didn’t lose her virtue. She tried to fight those rapists off, and that counts with God. No virtue is lost if you try your best to fight them off!"

  Even in her forties my mother had been a desirable woman. I was sure her killers had abused her. With so much blood around, I feared they had not left her in one piece.

  I armed myself with a revolver. For weeks I stalked the streets at night, evading military police who’d come to squash the rebellion, searching in bars and alleys, hoping to find someone who wore the uniform of Quintanilla’s soldiers. Every time I saw a scruffy teenager I imagined he’d been with Quintanilla, wondered if he was responsible for my mother’s death. I never found the men I searched for, and was never able to spend my rage by putting a bullet in someone.

  Even as I remembered this incident, my fists tightened and my anger burned. I sweated and trembled with rage. This scared me: I hadn’t felt such fierce emotion since my youth. It seemed to validate my theory that I had gone insane.

  I thought of Arish. If he’d lived in Guatemala during the revolt, he would have raped my mother and strewn her pieces around the house. I told myself I should be glad I’d killed him, but my chest burned with guilt.

  I felt the fly flapping in my head and wondered when I had gone insane. It seemed only right that I should be able to remember the precise moment. Had it happened at Flaco’s death? I had been shocked and saddened, but I couldn’t remember feeling any different in the head. Did it happen when Arish attacked me? Or when I found that Panamá would extradite me? Had it been when I first saw Tamara staring at the ceiling like a zombie? So many bad things had happened, one of them must certainly have been the trigger.

  But I could not recall when the fly had entered my head. Even now I was on my way to fight a war I knew nothing about while an assassin waited for an opportunity to strike. In fact, I lay in this tube weaponless, open to attack at any moment. The tube was like a giant drawer to a cabinet; anyone could open the drawer to strangle me. I was in more danger now than ever.

  My hands began to shake, and I wanted to escape the tube, but my foot was anchored to the floor. I tried squeezing to the bottom of the tube to release the brace, but the tube was too narrow and I couldn’t reach the buckles that strapped my foot. I kicked at the brace. When facing Arish, I hadn’t had time to contemplate my circumstances, and so had not been afraid. But now a wave of terror filled me. I struggled to free myself, gulping air, sweat streaming down my sides.

  I recalled the words of the metaphysicist Pío Baroja, "It is characteristic of Nature that when it intends to destroy you, it does so thoroughly." Certainly it seemed that Nature had led me to this place with unerring calculation—stripping me of my position in the community, snatching away my hopes for the future, sucking the life from my best friend. As I considered all the bad things that had happened to me, it was almost as if a voice whispered in my ear, saying: "Just remember, no matter what bad things have happened, the worst is yet to come."

  The certainty that this was true filled me with wonder and dread. A pure terror pierced me, and I lay like a moth pinned and flapping on a board. All my twisting and shouting would come to nothing. I could kick my legs, but there was nowhere to run.

  My leg ached from straining at the brace. I remembered the mean dog that had stepped in Rodrigo’s trap. He had twisted off his own foot, extricating himself with as little personal loss as possible. It was a grim choice to make. Yet, like the dog, I knew it was the only choice to make. I’d lost my home in Panamá, my good name, my best friend—and something more. I had lost my grip on reality, my own understanding of who I was. The sum of these losses was overwhelming, yet I resolved to keep my life.

  The radio started a song, and to the blare of the trumpets I repeated the litany, "The worst is yet to come; the worst is yet to come," and filled myself with a new toughness. I clenched my fists and pumped my arms, strengthening them. I felt powerful and vicious. Almost I hoped Jafari’s assassin would come. For if he opened the convalescence tube, he’d be within my grasp.

  When I calmed, I noticed two buttons on the ceiling above and behind my head. It was a stupid place to put the buttons. One said, "Call for Assistance"; the other said, "Push to open." I touched the open button and a latch sprung behind me. The cot rolled out, and I found myself a meter off the floor in an empty operating room. I sat up and removed my foot from the brace.

  I lowered myself to the floor, careful not to put any weight on my bad leg. The floor vibrated slightly, and I could feel that the ship was spaceborne. The whole room smelled of new plastic and sterile surfaces. It was spotless, empty. I expected a nurse or a doctor to come in at any moment and tell me to get back into bed.

  I left the drawer ajar so I could hear the music pumping into the convalescence tube. I found a crystalline-display note pad above my convalescence tube, and by thumbing the button on the pad I found I was to be released at 20:15. A clock beside the message showed the time—20:07. The glue in my leg had set.

  When I’d brought her on ship, Tamara had certainly been too ill to check into a cabin, so I decided to search for her in the convalescence tubes, hoping to learn her condition. Only one tube appeared occupied, and the note pad above it listed the patient as male. I opened thirty other tubes, and found them all empty. When I was half done, the music on the radio stopped and an announcer s
aid, "This is Carlos Carrera with Panamá City’s current news."

  I quit searching tubes, surprised to learn the salsa music came from Panamá.

  "Police in Colón have identified the corpse of a man who was dug up in a banana field this afternoon as ‘Flaco’ Alejandro Contento Rivera, a resident of Colón and former friend of the desperado Angelo Himinez Osic.

  "Reports say Rivera was stabbed in the throat, just as Osic’s earlier victim, the notorious Arish Muhammad Hustanifad, had been. Rivera is known to have possessed much hard currency before his death, and police believe Osic murdered him for money. Osic may have used the currency later in the day to bribe the mercenaries on Sol Station who helped him flee justice.

  "In this second murder, police have uncovered an eye witness ..."

  A female interviewer with a high voice like the twitter of a parakeet introduced the Chilean woman I’d met in the banana fields. The Chilean said, "Flaco, he was talking to me in the tent, then he went outside for a minute. I heard him scream, and I ran outside and saw that Devil, Osic, standing over Flaco, holding a knife. I screamed and Osic ran away. I got scared and started packing up to leave, but then Osic, he came back with a shovel and threatened to kill me. He took a whole bunch of money out of Flaco’s pockets, then he buried him and told me he’d kill me if I ever told. I have been too frightened to speak about it. I have been scared to death."

  The interviewer chirped, "Are you certain it was Osic?"

  "Yes, I’m certain. I got a good look at him!" the Chilena said.

  Carrera announced, "Besides Panamá and West Islamidad, three other nations have joined in demand for Osic’s extradition back to Earth, asking that he face charges for planting the bomb that devastated Sol Station, killing seven people and injuring thirty-six.