The Dragon Griaule

I

This much is known:

Following the death of the dragon Griaule, after his scales had been removed, his blood drained and stored in canisters, his flesh and organs variously preserved, his bones pulverized and sold as a remedy for cancer, incontinence, arthritis, indigestion, eczema, and much else . . . after all of this, Griaule’s skull (nearly six hundred feet in length) was maneuvered onto a many-wheeled platform and hauled across eleven hundred miles of jungle to the court of Temalagua. The history of this journey, which lasted two decades and featured dozens of pitched battles, a brief and nearly disastrous passage by sea, and cost many thousands of lives, would require several volumes to recount. Perhaps someday that history will be told, but for the purposes of our story suffice it to say that by the time the skull reached its destination, a tract of land outlying the palace grounds, King Carlos VIII, who had purchased it from the city fathers of Teocinte, was dead and buried, and his son Adilberto the First had ascended to the Onyx Throne.

Adilberto’s obsessions were not those of his father. He spent the bulk of his reign pursuing wars of aggression against neighboring states and the skull became a roosting place for birds, home to monkeys, snakes, and palm rats, and was overgrown by vines and fungus. His son, a second and lesser Adilberto, restored the skull to a relatively pristine condition, transformed the land around it into an exotic garden, bronzed the enormous fangs and limned its eye sockets and jaw with brass, jade and copper filigrees that accentuated its sinister aspects and inspired the creation of tin masks that years later came to be sold in the tourist markets. He adorned the interior with teak and ebony furnishings, with gold, silk and precious stones, and therein held bacchanals that established new standards for debauchery (murder, torture, and rape were commonplace at these revels) and contributed greatly toward bankrupting an economy already decimated by the excesses of Adilberto I and Carlos VIII.

Upon his death (under circumstances that even a lenient observer would term suspicious), a third Adilberto known as El Frio (the Cold One) seized power following a protracted and bloody struggle with his elder brother Gonsalvo. El Frio, a religious zealot and occultist, intended to destroy the skull, but received warnings from his fortunetellers that such an act of desecration would not have a felicitous result. Instead, he devoted his energies to the systematic slaughter of his enemies, whom he apparently saw under every rock, for during his reign he put to death over two hundred thousand of his countrymen. His heir, a fourth Adilberto, was so ashamed of his father’s legacy that he changed his name to Juan Miel, a name whose proletarian flavor embodied his proto-Marxist view of the world, and abolished the monarchy, thereby ushering in a period of tumult unparalleled in the tumultuous history of Temalagua. Forty-four days after initiating this radical reform, he was hacked limb from limb by a crowd of cane workers whom he had been addressing – they were inspired to take action by his chief rival in the nascent presidential campaign, a wealthy plantation owner who had suggested that were they to act otherwise, they might lose their jobs. Thenceforth the country was governed by a succession of generals and politicians who had all they could do to combat innumerable revolutions and the economic incursions of more powerful nations to the north. The palace burned to the ground during the early years of the twentieth century and by the 1940s the gardens built by Adilberto II had merged with the surrounding jungle and the skull was hidden by dense vegetation, though it maintained a significant place in the public consciousness and was considered to have been the root cause of Temalagua’s fall from grace . . . if, indeed, grace had ever prevailed in the region.

Travelers occasionally visited the skull – many would pose for photographs inside the jaws, standing next to one of the brass-covered fangs, sheathed now in verdigris, and then they would hurry away, oppressed by the atmosphere of foreboding generated by the huge bony snout with its barbarous decorations protruding from epiphytes and tree ferns and the shadow of the thick canopy. Those who camped overnight at the site reported disquieting dreams, and several adventurers and scientists who had undertaken longer stays went missing, their number inclusive of a herpetologist who was discovered years later living with coastal Indians and had no memory of his former life. In the 1960s the city (Ciudad Temalagua) mushroomed, growing out and away from the jungle that enclosed the skull in much the same fashion that Teocinte had spread in relation to Griaule, as if obeying some arcane and relativistic regulation. No attempt was made to clear the land or destroy the skull, and the area was accorded the status of an historical site, one deemed essential to an understanding of contemporary Temalagua, yet was neglected by historians who preferred to ignore it rather than to risk their lives by studying its central relic (a tactic frequently employed in places whose history is dominated by villains and villainy). Slums sprang up along the western edge of the jungle, creating a buffer zone between the city and the skull, and producing a steady stream of abandoned and abused children who wandered off in one direction or another, into the urban sprawl or the vegetable, there to meet a fate that, although it could be guessed, was rarely verifiable. Over the next forty years, as the country declined toward the millennium, impoverished by corporate greed and narco-business, the slums became a breeding ground for fierce criminal gangs that contended for control of the streets with death squads composed of extreme right-wing factions within the army; yet even they were reluctant to enter the jungle and confront the strange cult purported to flourish there.

It is at this point that our story becomes the story of the woman who came to be called La Endriaga, and veers away from historical fact, entering the realm of supposition, anecdotal evidence, and the purely fictive, which are, after all, the most reliable forms of human codification. Her birth name was Xiomara Garza (though she was more widely known as Yara) and she was born in Barrio Zanja, a desolation of shacks and streets without names situated on a hillside overlooking the jungle. During the rainy season, mudslides intermittently cut wide swaths through the barrio, killing dozens of people and leaving hundreds more homeless; but since the shacks were flimsily constructed of plywood, cardboard, and so forth, and because moving to another location was not an option for the majority of the survivors, within a week or two a new and equally fragile settlement would be established. By many accounts Yara was a happy child, yet this might be doubted – Barrio Zanja was not an environment conducive to happiness and other accounts testify to her sullen temperament and stoicism. In sum, far more people claim to have been familiar with her as a young girl than lived in the barrio at the time, so it is probably safest to say that her early childhood is cloaked in mystery.

Images of an eleven-year-old Yara were among those discovered in a digital camera belonging to an Austrian pedophile, Anton Scheve, whose body was found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of his hotel room, his chest punctured by multiple stab wounds. In the pictures Yara, a lovely dark-haired girl with a pellucid complexion, can be seen supine on a bed (the same beside which Scheve breathed his last) in various stages of undress, her eyes heavily lidded, this somnolence attributable to the glue-soaked paper sack crumpled on the mattress next to her. As these images were the last recorded by Scheve, the police put forth a sincere effort to locate Yara – sex tourism, while officially discouraged, constituted a sizable portion of Temalagua’s tottering economy. Yara, however, was nowhere to be found and so, prevented by her absence from demonstrating their egalitarian approach toward the prosecution of murder, no matter the despicable character of the victim, the government printed Scheve’s images (with black bars obscuring her genitalia) in the capital’s largest newspaper alongside an article decrying the moral contagion that had been visited upon the country.

The next we hear of Yara comes in the form of a partial memoir published in An Obscure Literary Journal (both a description and the actual name of the publication) by George Craig Snow, a strikingly handsome young expatriate with dirty blond hair and weary-looking blue eyes and a wry manner who lived in Ciudad Temalagua between the years 2002 and 2008. As a child he never thought of himself as ‘George,’ a name he associated with dweebs, wimps, and insurance adjustors, and so he went by his mother’s maiden name, Craig. During the first years of his stay in Temalagua, he worked for a fraudulent charitable interest called Aurora House as a correspondent – his job was to write letters in clumsy English, in a childlike scrawl, that pretended to be the grateful, semi-literate messages of the children supported by Aurora House. These were mailed to gullible contributors in the United States who donated twenty dollars each per month in order to sponsor a Pilar or an Esteban or a Marisol. Included with the letters were pleas for more money and photographs that Snow snapped at random of happy, healthy children in school uniforms, proofs of the good effect that the contributions had on the malnourished children shown in photographs previously sent. To be clear, no child so depicted ever received a dime of charity from Aurora House, nor did any child whatsoever benefit from the enterprise. The majority of the monies collected went into the pocket of Pepe Salido, a lean, gray-haired man who put Snow in mind of a skeletal breed of dog with a narrow skull and prominent snout. The remainder of the funds were doled out in minuscule salaries to the Aurora House staff, among them several gringos like Snow, slackers who were cynical enough to find the swindle bleakly amusing, understanding that even if the money had been donated to the cause, twenty dollars a month paid by however many well-meaning housewives and idealistic students and guilty alcoholics was insufficient to counter the forces arrayed against the children of Temalagua.

Snow lived with a woman of Mayan heritage, a leftist teaching assistant at San Carlos University by the name of Expectación (his memoir was entitled He Lives With Expectation), who made her home in Barrio Villareal, a working class neighborhood in process of decaying into a slum. When not on the job, his two preferred activities were having sex with Ex (his lover’s nickname) and smoking heroin, the latter serving to cut into the frequency of the former. Evenings he would sit on his stoop, high, shirtless, and shoeless, scuffing up dirt with his toes, studying the stars that emerged from a pall of pollution above the low tile roofs, and taking in the pedestrian parade: shop girls scurrying home with their eyes lowered and bundles clutched to their breasts; short, wiry workmen who carried machetes and nodded politely in passing; dwarfish, raggedy street kids holding paper sacks with soggy bottoms drifting along in small, disheveled packs – on occasion, sensing a kindred spirit, they would hover beside Snow’s stoop, gazing up toward the rooftops and tracking things he could not see. One evening as he sat there, joined on his watch by a wizened-looking kid who could have been ten but was likely fifteen and, except for stringy, dark hair, resembled a tiny old man in grungy shorts and a faded Disneyworld T-shirt . . . one evening, then, he spotted a teenage girl approaching through the purpling air. Slender, leggy, pale. Black curls cascaded down over her shoulders, an opulent architecture of hair at odds with her overall Goth-punk aesthetic: black jeans, black kicks, and a long-sleeved black turtleneck. Black fingernails, too. Heavy make-up. She walked with an unhurried step, yet her movements were crisp and purposeful, and she had about her such an aura of energy, it seemed to Snow that he was watching the approach of a small storm. He pictured a funnel cloud of dirt and masonry chunks flying up in her wake, an image that prompted him to grin goofily at her as she came alongside them. She did not seek to avoid his scrutiny, but stopped in front of the stoop and gave an upward jerk of her head that spoke to him, saying, You got something on your mind? Spit it out.

‘Buenas noches,’ said Snow.

The kid stuck his face into his paper sack and huffed furiously, and the girl asked him in Spanish, ‘Who is this asshole?’

‘He lives here,’ said the kid groggily.

‘I speak Spanish,’ Snow said. ‘You can talk to me.’

The girl ignored him and asked the kid why he hung out with this pichicatero. The kid shrugged.

‘Pichicatero? What’s that?’ Snow asked the kid.

‘A fucking drug addict,’ said the girl in lightly accented English.

‘He’s the addict.’ Snow gestured at the kid. ‘For me it’s just a hobby.’

With its mask of mascara and bloody lip gloss, her face was trashy, beautified not beautiful, yet once he had wiped away the make-up with a mental cloth, he realized the basic materials were quality. A casual observer would perhaps have judged the face too bland, too standard in its perfection, like a schoolboy’s rendering of his favorite teenage angel vampire slut, but to Snow, a connoisseur, it was exuberantly and idiosyncratically feminine, a raptor’s purity of purpose implied by the way her lips curved above a slight overbite, the delicate molding of the tiny, tapered chin, and beside the nose flare of a nostril, the necessary flaw, a pink irregularity, a scar that, had it been treated properly, would have required but a stitch or two to close. Her skin seemed to carry a faint luminosity. Her irises and eyebrows were such a negative color they might have been cutaways in her flesh that permitted a lightless background to show through. She was, Snow decided, scary beautiful.

‘Dirty feet,’ she said to him. ‘Dirty fingernails. Dirty hair.’ She gave him a quick once-over. ‘Dirty heart.’

Though too stoned to be offended, Snow felt that he should offer an objection and said mildly, ‘Hey. Watch your mouth.’

She switched to Spanish and addressed the kid. ‘Be careful! You don’t want to wind up a shriveled soul like him.’

‘Bet you used to be an emo girl,’ said Snow. ‘Then you hooked up with some Goth guy and crossed over to the dark side.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Come see me and I’ll introduce you to him. He loves to meet new people.’

‘Sure thing. Give me your address.’

Her face emptied and her eyes lost focus, as if she were hearkening to an inner voice. She was silent for so long, Snow waggled a hand in her face and said, ‘Hello!’

She turned abruptly and strode off without another word – a man passing in the street gave her a wide berth.

‘That was weird,’ Snow said.

‘Yara.’ The kid fingered a tube of glue out of his pocket and began squeezing it into the paper sack.

Snow said, ‘What?’

‘Her name is Yara. She’s crazy.’

‘How’s that make her different from anyone else?’

Snow thought he would have to explain his view that human beings were no more than a collection of random impulses bound up in a net of societal constraints, but the kid may have had an innate awareness of this, because he asked for no clarification and said, ‘Yara’s not monkey-crazy. She’s snake-crazy.’ He started to bury his face in the fume-filled sack, but then offered it to Snow, and Snow, moved by this unexpected display of etiquette, accepted.

II

Excerpted from He Lives With Expectation

By Craig Snow

. . . Ex kicked me out of the house again. It was for the usual reason, an inability to balance her radical politics with having a boyfriend who espoused no political view more complex than ‘Yeah, America sucks, but so does everywhere else.’ As usual I checked into the Spring Hotel, so Ex would know where to find me once she had time to rethink her position, and spent the next few evenings playing video games in an arcade off Avenida Seis and drinking at the Club Sexy, a gay bar frequented by the wives and girlfriends of right-wing military types, women notable for their hotness and the monumental triviality of their conversation. You could hang out there all night and not hear a serious concern mentioned, though now and then things would get heated when the talk turned to hairstyles.

The club was a great place to go should you want to commit suicide-by-babe – a big room with frigid air conditioning and subdued lighting, round tables of bamboo and glass, and a childlike mural of a tropical beach with a starry indigo sky and coco palms painted on the walls. Most afternoons this old daisy in a tux would totter onto the bandstand and play Latinized arrangements of Beatles tunes and similar shit on a Casio, his silver-gray head nodding to the whispery samba beats. If you qualified as a cute guy, the women would have sex with you, no problem, but then you risked winding up in a basement with a Col Noriega look-alike clamping electrodes to your dick. To be on the safe side I would sit at the bar, blending in with guys who were fans of the owner of the club, Guillermo, a pale youth of approximately my age with exciting hair and the look of a male ingénue.

About four p.m. each weekday, ‘La Hora Feliz,’ the ladies would come breezing in, all bouncy in their low-cut frocks, sunglasses by Gucci and make-up by Sherwin-Williams. If you stared at them through slit eyes, it looked as though a couple of dozen spectacularly vivid butterflies had perched beside the little round tables. They were two-fisted drinkers, mainly tequila shots washed down with orange juice, and before long they’d be gabbing away happily, their chatter drowning out the Casio. I had an on-again, off-again relationship with one – Viviana, a perky blond with fake tits – and on the Thursday after Ex kicked me out I met her in the rear stall of the men’s room for a quickie. It wasn’t that I was eager to die. We’d begun our relationship before I fully understood the situation and after I became aware of what was going on . . . well, I had a self-destructive streak and a corresponding nonchalant attitude toward personal safety, and these qualities, allied with my American sense of entitlement, were sufficient to make me lower my guard. The thought of all that available pussy was too tempting to resist. Early on during the affair Viviana and I were caught exiting the women’s john by her boyfriend, a typical death-squad-loving psycho army captain. She leaped to my defense, screeching at the bewildered young sociopath, demanding that he stop beating me, claiming that I had been helping with her hair and saying, ‘Can’t you tell he’s a faggot?’ Thereafter I felt relatively secure in bending her over the toilet, though afterward I would have to re-establish my gay bona fides by acting femme and flirting with Guillermo.

That Thursday, once we had finished our business in the ladies’ room, she joined me for a drink at the bar. I told her about Ex giving me the boot – she offered sympathy, stroking my hair and murmuring encouragement, though she did so without much sincerity. Her gaze drifted about the room and locked onto a table close to the stage.

‘That filthy cunt!’ she said venomously.

The Goth girl who had insulted me on my stoop the week before, Yara, was talking to a woman named Dolores for whom Viviana had a thing (her infidelity was by no means gender specific – she had explained that many of the women, like her, felt imprisoned by their relationships and would fuck anything that moved so as to express their frustration and cause psychic damage to their significant others – Club Sexy provided them with a perfect cover). She started up from her barstool. I caught her arm and asked what was wrong, but she shook me off, beelined for the table and proceeded to chew out Yara, who regarded her with an impassive expression. When Viviana paused for breath, Yara spoke briefly. Whatever she said must have been potent, for without further ado Viviana went off to sulk at a corner table. I watched the girl for a while. Her gestures were slow, calm, languid, as if she were explaining a serious matter, taking her time, being patient. Several women at other tables watched her as well – dotingly, I thought. Intently. The way you’d stare at a movie star. This girl had a definite presence. In a room full of beautiful women, she was the one who stood out, who drew your eye.

‘Oh, Guillermo!’ I beckoned him over. ‘Could you make one of your elegant mango mojitos for Viviana?’

‘Of course.’

I put my elbows on the bar and interlaced my fingers, using them as a chin-rest, watching him prepare the drink.

‘I believe I’ll have one, too,’ I said. ‘Extra sweet.’ Then, leaning close, I added in a whisper, ‘Why’s Viv so upset?’

‘She thinks La Endriaga is hitting on Dolores.’

‘You mean the girl in black? She’s La . . . what was it? La Endriaga?’

He poured lime juice. ‘Aren’t you familiar with the story? La Endriaga’s supposed to be a creature part snake, part dragon, part female. The girl’s real name is Lara . . . or Mara. Or something. You know how I am with names. But people call her La Endriaga because she lives in the jungle, near the skull.’

‘I thought that was just a story . . . the skull.’

‘I’ve never seen it myself.’ Guillermo gave his hair a toss. ‘But Jaime Solis . . . you know, the boy who dyes his soul patch all different colors? He told me it’s real. He offered to take me to see it, but I said, “Why would I want to look at some nasty old bones? There are better ways to impress me.”’

I had drained the larger part of my mojito when Dolores passed Yara a fat envelope, the kind that in the movies often contains a payoff. Yara stuffed it into a straw market bag, presented her cheek to be kissed, and headed for the exit. Curious, I followed her outside. It was almost eight o’clock and the sidewalks were crowded, the street dressed in neon, choked with clamorous traffic, the night air steamy and reeking of exhaust. Music from radios and storefronts contended with the crowd noise and the squeal of arcade games. Grimy children, mainly pre-teen girls of the sort Aurora House was purported to help, plucked at my sleeve, held out their hands and made pleading faces. I surrendered my pocket change and shooed them away. Yara had been swallowed up by the crowd, but I spotted the psycho army captain’s Hummer, its hood decorated by red and purple smears of reflected light. He was hunting for a parking place, leaning on his horn – instead of a honk it produced a grandiose digital fanfare. We had long since made our peace, but I thought it best to move on. I went west along Avenida Seis, uncertain of my destination, pausing to look in shop windows, and caught sight of Yara in an otherwise empty electronics store, talking to a clerk, her black figure as slim and sharply defined as an exclamation point under the bright fluorescents. The clerk – a tall, stringy guy with a shock of white in his forelock – appeared upset with her, making florid gestures, but he cooled off when she passed him the envelope Dolores had given her. He inspected the contents, glanced about as if to ascertain whether anyone was watching, then removed a few bills from the envelope and handed them to her. She stuffed them into the hip pocket of her jeans and headed for the entrance. I turned my back and pretended to be studying a window display of cell phones, but she walked up to me and said cheerfully, ‘I wondered when we’d meet again.’

Put off by the dissonance between her tone now and that she had employed during our first encounter, I said, ‘You wondered that, did you?’

‘Don’t you want to know how I knew we’d meet again?’

‘Sure. Whatever.’

‘I always know that sort of thing.’

I waited for a deeper analysis and when none was forthcoming I said, ‘Well, this is nice, but I’ve got to be stepping.’

‘Don’t go.’ She linked arms with me and did this little snuggle-bunny move against my shoulder. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’

‘Whoa!’ I disengaged from her. ‘Last week you treated me like I was a fucking STD and now . . .’

‘I’m sorry! I was in a terrible mood.’

‘And now you’re coming on to me in this retarded way. What’s that all about?’

She took a backward step and said soberly, ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have a relationship. You’re an attractive man, but I think it’ll just be sex with us.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Enough crazy talk. I’ll catch you later.’

She gave me a pouty look. ‘Don’t you want to see where I live?’

‘Why should I? What do you have in mind?’

‘Americans are so paranoid,’ she said. ‘I guess you’ve a right to be. There’s a lot of anti-American feeling down here. A girl might invite you to dinner just so she can chop off your head.’

‘Damn straight.’

‘You could take preventive measures,’ she said. ‘Notify a policeman. Give him your name and destination. That way if you go missing they’d come after me. I’d be forced to control my murderous impulses.’

‘Now I really want to go with you,’ I said. ‘Because you saying that, wow, it makes clear what a paranoid asshole I am for thinking your invitation is suspicious.’

Four boys wearing designer jeans and polo shirts, expensive watches on their wrists, rich kids just into their teens, came pounding into the entranceway of the electronics store from the street, laughing and breathless, as if they had just played a prank on someone and made a narrow escape. One of them noticed Yara and said something about whores. For some reason, this infuriated me. I told him to fuck off. The boys’ faces grew stony, all the same face, the same soulless, zombie stare, and I had a shocking sense of the seven-billion-headed monster of which they constituted a four-headed expression. I spat on the sidewalk at their feet and took a step toward them. They cursed us and scooted off into the crowd, re-absorbed into the body of the beast.

Amused, Yara said, ‘You were really angry with those kids. You hated them.’

I became aware of the street sounds once more – radio music, car horns, the gabble of shouts and laughter – as if the curtain had been raised on a noisier production.

‘What’s not to hate?’ I said. ‘They’ll grow up to be fascist dicks just like their daddies.’

She seemed to be measuring me. ‘I think you’re a nihilist.’

I laughed. ‘That’s way too formal a term for what I am.’

She didn’t reply and I said, ‘You have a thing for nihilists, do you?’

‘You should come with me. Seriously.’

‘Give me a reason.’

‘You’ll like what I’ve got to show you. If that’s not enough of a reason . . .’ She shrugged. ‘You’ll miss out on the fun.’

‘What kind of fun are we talking about?’

‘The usual. Maybe more.’

Yara leaned against me, her breast nudging my elbow, and, though I remained paranoid, my resistance weakened.

‘Come with me, man,’ she said. ‘If you die, I promise you’ll die happy.’

We took a taxi to the rain forest. If we walked, Yara explained, if we went down through Barrio Zanja, we would have to traverse almost two miles of jungle terrain – this way we would only have to walk for fifteen or twenty minutes. The taxi whipped us around Plaza Obelisco, past the unsightly concrete monument to Temalaguan independence, some despot’s idea of a joke, and past the Flame of Liberty, which had been installed to memorialize the overthrow of the very same despot, and before long we were bouncing along over a dirt road that grew ever more narrow and dead-ended in the isolated village of Chajul on the verge of the jungle, set beneath towering aguacate trees. Yara gave the driver the bills she’d received from the electronics store clerk. I asked if the money had been a pay-off and she said, ‘They’re contributions. Funding.’

‘Funding for what?’

‘I’m not certain,’ she said.

Away from the city I could see the stars and the glow of a moon on the rise behind hills to the east, but once we entered the jungle it was pitch-dark. Yara shined a flashlight ahead and held my hand, warning me against obstructions. Insects chirred; frogs bleeped and tweedled. Rustlings issued from every quarter. Smells of sweet rot and rank decay. Mosquitoes whined in my hair. It felt hotter than it had in the city and I broke a sweat. Shuffling along in the dark, passing among unseen things, twigs and leaves poking, brushing my skin – I imagined vines forming into nooses over my head, spiders scurrying up my trouser legs, vipers uncoiling from branches above, pointing their shovel-shaped heads and darting their tongues. Yara may have sensed my apprehension because she told me we’d be there soon, but I didn’t buy it, I knew she was leading me into a trap. I gave thought to taking her hostage in order to forestall an attack by whoever was lying in wait, but I glimpsed a ruddy glow through the leaves and caught a strong fecal odor and shortly thereafter we emerged into a clearing the approximate length of a soccer pitch, though narrower, overspread by a dense canopy and bounded by walls of vegetation – you could have fit the upside-down hull of a mighty ark into the space described by those walls and that canopy. Among tree stumps and patchy underbrush lay a jungle squat that spread out across the clearing, a settlement combining the harsh realities of Stone Age life with those of brutal urban poverty. Lean-tos, tents, thatched huts, and a handful of shacks with rusting tin roofs. Campfires generated a smoky haze and as we passed through the settlement I saw shadowy people stirring, all moving about with what struck me as an excess of caution. Some acknowledged Yara with a wave, but no one called out her name. I estimated that several hundred souls lived in the squat and would have expected to hear a conversational murmur, the odd laugh or shout, music and such, yet the place was as hushed as a church and there was a corresponding air of pious oppression, one comprehensible when you considered the enormous reptilian skull, yellowed with age, illuminated by torches, that occupied the entire far end of the clearing, looming high into the canopy.

I had left the States five years previously, discouraged by the quality of my life, bored by the drabness of the American tragedy, with the consumerist mentality and the market forces that bred it, with celebrity scandals orchestrated to distract from more significant trouble, with every element of that carnival of lies – I had hoped a more vivid landscape would serve to pare away the rind that had accumulated over my brain, yet everywhere I went it seemed I brought drabness and boredom with me, and my life remained tedious and uninvolved. The skull was the first thing I had seen to put a crack in my worldview. Its size and uncanny aspect, the barbarous embellishments added by man and nature over the centuries, scribblings of moss and fungus, inlays of milky jade and black onyx, the fangs coated in verdigris, the snout covered by painted designs, much faded, that had been applied by some long-vanished tribe, all of it visible in the erratic light . . . at one second it seemed a clownish, grotesque fake, a gigantic papier mâché Mardi Gras mask, and the next I grew terrified that it would return to life and roar. Vegetation hid the greater part of the sloping brow and a thick matte of vines obscured one of its eye sockets, but apart from a few clusters of epiphytes the snout was unencumbered, reaching a height of forty feet above the jungle floor. Propped against the side of the jaw, its topmost section resting against a portion of bone adjacent to a fang, was a telescoping aluminum ladder. When I realized we were heading toward the ladder my anxiety peaked – I was insecure with the idea of climbing into the mouth, but Yara displayed no sign of trepidation and I kept my worries to myself. A disquieting atmosphere of the sort that gathers about ancient ruins enveloped the skull, an absence of vibration that causes you to listen closely, to attune yourself to the possibility of vibration, so that you may feel something where, perhaps, there is nothing to feel . . . except this particular vacancy had an inimical quality, as if it retained a residue of its former contents, like a glass that once held poison.

Yara scurried up the ladder with the quickness and confidence of someone accustomed to the ascent, whereas I, less certain of my footing, lagged behind, pausing to steady myself and to rethink the wisdom of this excursion. But on reaching the top, standing beside the wicked bronze-green curve of the fang and gazing down at the squat, I had an unwarranted sense of power. It was as though I’d scaled some hithertofore unscalable peak and was for that moment master of all I surveyed. Yara took my hand and her touch boosted the sensation. I felt heroin high, the way it is after your rush has dissipated and you seem in complete harmony with every part of your body, the slightest movement (the twitch of a finger, the curling of a toe) signaling a joyful competence. She led me deep into the skull, past volutes and voluptuous turns of bone, then upward along a narrow channel into the cavity that once had housed the monster’s brain, the far end of which was brightly lit by groups of candles and furnished with a much-patched waterbed, a desk, a table and three wooden chairs, and an antique steamer trunk that served as both filing cabinet and chest of drawers – the rest was empty, pale curves of bone lost in dimness. Seeing this collection of thrift shop artifacts crammed into a corner of a cavernous skull sponsored the thought that I had stumbled into a child’s bedtime story about a lost girl who dwelled in an abandoned palace of bone. I noticed that the candles had not burned down very far and asked who had lit them.

‘The adherents.’ She opened the bottom drawer of the trunk and removed a couple of towels. ‘They always seem to know when I’m going to return.’

‘You mean the people down below?’

‘Yes. They take care of me.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘They’re extremely nurturing.’

‘Yeah? You must do something for them.’

‘I perform an equivalent service.’ She tossed me a towel. ‘They’ll be bringing food soon. We’d better hurry if we want to wash up before dinner.’

Behind the skull, at the entrance to the gateway of splintered bone that had once sheathed part of the spinal chord, with thick tree trunks, leaf clusters, and ferns crowding near, stood a wooden tub, large enough in which to host a modest pool party and filled with water. A dripping pipe depended from the darkness overhead and, since there were no leaves adrift on the surface, I assumed the adherents had drawn Yara’s bath a short time before. She lit torches mounted beside the tub, igniting reflections in the water, and proceeded to strip off her clothes. Her body was perfectly proportioned, her pubic hair trimmed into a neat landing strip. I had presumed her to be heavily tattooed, but she sported only two: a tiny soaring bird of blurry blue ink above her right breast, not the work of a professional, and a diamond-shaped pattern of dark green scales positioned like a tramp stamp on the small of her back. These were of recent vintage and marvelously detailed. I joined her in the tub and watched her scrub away make-up (she had previously removed some of it with tissues) and city grime, revealing prominent cheekbones that added exotic planes to her face. After she finished scrubbing she sank down so that only her eyes and nose were visible. Serpentine tendrils of hair floating on the water were lent the impression of undulant movement by the flickering reflections with which they merged, making it appear that fiery snakes were swimming toward her, joining their substance with hers.

The jungle pressed close around and the chorusing of frogs was loud, which might have explained the absence of insect – yet I could recall no insects inside the skull. I mentioned the fact and she made a so-what face, watching me with eyes aglint with torchlight.

‘Do you want insects?’ she asked.

‘Can you arrange for some?’

‘I can try.’

I moved my hands in semicircles, sending ripples toward her. ‘Did you bring me out here just to take a bath?’

‘I’m a creature of impulse.’

‘Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’

She rested her arms on the edge of the tub, facing me, and let her feet float up. ‘I’d prefer you reach your own conclusions. That way you won’t be able to accuse me of manipulating you.’

‘Is my opinion that important?’

‘It’s difficult to say.’

‘This woman-of-mystery shit,’ I said. ‘It’s not working for me.’

‘You’re not giving it a chance.’

Torchlight lapped at the trees, quick tides of orange radiance illuminating leaf sprays and sections of trunks, and flared along bone interiors. From above came the long, stuttering trill of a bird chortling over its live supper. National Geographic Primitive, I told myself, trying to blunt my reaction to the place. But the presence of the skull overwhelmed me once again and I had an apprehension of danger.

‘Know what I think?’ I said. ‘I think you must be running some sort of game on those people back there. The adherents.’

‘You’re not the first to say that.’

‘Well, are you?’

‘Sometimes I wonder.’

‘This kind of answer, it’s all you’re going to give me?’

‘For now.’

The tops of her breasts showing above the surface distracted me – whenever she stirred her nipples bobbled up into view, pastel pink, an after-dinner mint color, centering perfect circles of slightly paler, delicately pebbled skin. I speculated on how it would be, screwing in her bone bedchamber, and compared her physicality to Ex’s heavy-breasted, thick-waisted body, her areolae large and oblate to the point of appearing misshapen. Though Ex had thrown me out, though we both slept with other people, I trusted that we would get back together. The relationship was too comfortable for either of us to discard. I had a trickle of guilt because Yara was prettier than she, yet guilt was not strong enough to prevent me from swimming over and putting an arm beneath her thighs to support her legs. Heat streamed off her. With my free hand I cleared strands of damp hair away from her face and started to move in for a kiss, but she held me off and leaned back further, as if hoping for a better perspective.

‘I want to be lucky for you,’ she said.

I mustered a glib response, something about getting lucky, but kept it to myself – there was nothing playful in her face, no indication of banter in her delivery and, with desire thickening my voice, I told her I could use a little luck.

While our supper (chicken and saffron rice) grew cold, we went at it hard on the waterbed. Yara was energetic and inventive, alternately demanding and giving, but the sex was merely good, merely proficient, and not great. As sometimes happens there was an element of performance art to our little exercise that diminished its other qualities and hampered emotional involvement. Her moans and cries were sweet to hear, but I recognized that she was in part emoting. Not faking it, exactly. Just throwing in a few extras to make sure I knew that she was having a grand time, and my execution was the masculine equivalent of hers. What surprised me was that instead of the usual pillow talk we discussed this afterward, analyzing our lovemaking in terms of its authenticity.

‘When attractive people hook up,’ Yara said, ‘narcissism sometimes gets in the way of things.’

‘I don’t consider myself a narcissist,’ I said.

‘Be honest!’

‘Actually I’m more of a self-hater.’

She blew air through her lips, a disparaging puff. ‘You don’t think it’s possible to be a self-hating narcissist?’

‘I guess you could say self-hatred is an extreme form of narcissism.’

‘It’s the soul of narcissism. Self-love and self-hatred aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, one’s a precursor to the other.’

I clasped my hands behind my head – the play of light across the ceiling gave the bone a creamy, cheese-like appearance.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Seventeen. Did you think I was older?’

‘I didn’t think much about it, but yeah, maybe a couple of years.’

‘And now you think I’m too young for you? Is that it? I should hope not, because I’ve been with guys older than you. A lot older!’

It was a peculiar conversation and her part in it seemed sophisticated for someone so young, but this digression made me aware that her personality was mostly posture and an occasional blurt of teenage defensiveness. I told her age didn’t matter to me and that mollified her.

‘It’s strange,’ she said, returning to the topic at hand. ‘I think self-love is decaying into self-hate in your case. Usually it’s the other way around.’

‘I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve been afflicted with a mixture of the two ever since I was fifteen.’

‘Since the girls got interested, eh?’

‘Nah, it was when I began using them to get at their mommies . . . that’s when the self-hate kicked in.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The girls I knew had some hot moms.’

‘You had sex with them?’

‘A few. Rene . . . my first mom. She came on to me while her daughter was out running errands. It made me a big deal in high school.’

‘You told your friends about it? What an asshole!’

‘I was fifteen, an idiot. And Rene told her friends. She even set me up with one of them. No one got hurt and I learned a few things.’

‘About sex?’

‘Sex . . . and women.’

Yara sighed – a sigh of forbearance, I figured. ‘The moms must have been bored with their husbands.’

‘I didn’t think about them. They were targets to me. I suppose they were bored. With their husbands, and themselves. But I don’t believe that’s what motivated them. It was the idea they were corrupting me that got them off. They needed that kind of excess in their lives. So I played the innocent and let myself be corrupted. It got to be a thing with me, bagging mothers and their daughters. When the moms found out their little Madisons and Brooks were fucking me, too, they were deeply pissed. But after they cooled down, a couple of them suggested threesomes.’

‘You must have thought you were a wicked boy.’

‘I was wicked.’

‘In an innocent way, maybe.’

Channeled through some complexity of bone, a warm breeze penetrated the chamber, producing a mournful whistle.

Yara turned onto her side, facing me. ‘I wasn’t interested in sex until last year.’

‘You got a late start, huh?’

‘Oh, I’ve had my share of experiences, but they were unpleasant. Most of them, anyway. I quit having sex when I moved out here. Then about a year ago I took a lover, but we didn’t communicate well in bed. We had chemistry, but it never came to much.’ She did a finger-walk across my stomach, coming to rest on my hip. ‘But you and I communicated very well. We understood each other’s signals.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Your time with the mommies must have taught you to be aware of a woman’s desires, because you knew what I wanted and when I wanted it. And I’m certain I knew what you wanted . . . which is unusual. I’ve never been adept at reading men.’

‘Give me an example.’

‘You remember what happened.’

‘Refresh my memory.’

‘You just want to hear me talk dirty.’

I smiled. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘All right. At the end, when you were battering away at me, I knew you were close and I wanted you to finish in my mouth. And you did, without my having to tell you.’

‘It seemed like the thing to do.’

She peered at me. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’

‘No.’

‘I am, aren’t I? You’re embarrassed!’

‘No, really. I’m not. I just think it’s weird, talking like this.’

‘Why is it weird?’

‘People tend to be gentle with each other after they hook up. They whisper sweet nothings. They say stuff like, “When did you know?” and “The first time I saw you I was rocked.” Or they tease one another, they’re playful. They don’t start breaking shit down.’

‘That kind of talk is generally insincere on some level.’

‘Not always.’

‘No, not always.’

The wind had grown stronger. Wheezy flutings came with increasing frequency over the bone channels of the skull, like an old calliope giving up the ghost.

‘It’s good to get all this out in the open,’ Yara said. ‘It’ll rid us of unnecessary baggage.’

‘You think? It’s making me more self-conscious.’

‘Probably that’s how it’ll be at first, it’ll help in the long run.’

The notion that we might have a long run started me thinking about Ex. I saw her in the entryway of our house, taking off the old army coat she wore in winter, smiling at me over her shoulder, her glossy hair braided into a thick rope.

‘You know, until recently I’ve been living with someone,’ I said.

‘What of it?’

‘We’ve been together on and off for almost four years. I’m not sure it’s over.’

‘She won’t have anything to do with how things work out for us.’

‘That’s an arrogant thing to say.’

‘It’s not arrogance if you’re certain about something, and I’m certain about this.’

Yara dozed awhile, lying on her stomach, but I lay awake, highlights from the previous hour or so flaring up in my head. Bored, I propped myself on an elbow and kissed her shoulder, ran a hand along the slope of her back, and studied her tattoo. She stirred and made a pleased noise. I touched the middle scale of the diamond pattern and was astonished to find that it was hard and had a distinct convexity. Before I could examine it further, she swatted my hand away and sat up.

‘Don’t!’ she said angrily.

‘What is that? Some kind of implant?’

‘Yes, an implant. Leave it alone.’

‘How did they do it? I didn’t think it was possible to do something like this.’

I stretched out a hand and again she knocked it away from the tattoo, saying, ‘I don’t want you to touch me there!’

I laughed.

‘It’s not funny!’ She swung her legs off the bed, as if preparing to bolt. ‘I mean it!’

‘I’ve heard women say that before, but they were referring to another part of their bodies.’

She picked up a flimsy robe from the floor and put it on. I asked what she was doing and she said she was going to eat.

‘It’ll be cold,’ I said.

‘It’s good cold.’

She sat at the table and dug in, forking up a bite, chewing, swallowing, forking up another bite, making of the meal an act of mechanical ferocity.

After a minute I stood and stepped into my boxers. Yara continued chowing down, not sparing me a glance. Despite the breeze I felt hot, my thoughts stale and repetitious. The unbroken eggshell-smooth surfaces of the chamber oppressed me.

‘This place could stand a window or two,’ I said.

I sleep too deeply and wake too abruptly to remember my dreams, but during the week that followed, though I retained nothing of their substance, I woke with a sense that my dreams had been disturbing, and not in the customary sense, not due to anxiety or stress. I had the feeling that something had been picking at the shell of my consciousness, trying to insinuate itself into a crack, to find a way in. When this feeling persisted I mentioned it to Yara. She said it was a common reaction.

‘Reaction to what?’ I asked.

‘To being here,’ she said, and headed off to the tiny chamber set forward of the brain box, where she commonly passed an hour or two each morning.

I spent a portion of the following day exploring the skull, negotiating channels that often led to other channels, but occasionally to small chambers, all so scrupulously clean that I suspected someone must have snuck in and done the sweeping. Nothing was out of the ordinary about the majority of the chambers (aside from the extraordinary fact of their existence), but the chamber to which Yara went each morning had a soporific effect on me, making me drowsy whenever I entered it. I would have asked Yara about this had she given me reason to anticipate a straight answer – as things stood, after determining that the drowsiness was not the product of my imagination, I marked it down as an anomaly, a minor mystery in the midst of a greater one.

My initial impression of the adherents had been that they were timid, sullen, and ignorant, dimwitted in some instances, and that they represented the disenfranchised, their lives ruled by poverty and informed by delusion. Yet though they lived rough, and though I continued to believe that the foundations of their community were based upon a significant delusion, I came to acknowledge that I had mistaken distraction for temerity, self-absorption for sullenness, and that a majority of the approximately five hundred people dwelling beneath the canopy were upper middle class: educators, doctors, artists, researchers, and professionals of various types. Of course there were also a good many laborers and shop clerks, and a number of ex-derelicts, reformed drunks and addicts, but these were counterbalanced somewhat by the presence of people like Major General Amadis de Lugo, who inhabited a shack close by the skull. A smallish man in his seventies, with a time-ravaged yet still handsome face, ragged white hair, and an untrimmed beard, customarily dressed in fatigue pants and a white T-shirt, he was nonetheless an imposing figure, at least to me. When I first arrived in Temalagua he had been the titular head of Department 46, the country’s notorious internal security unit, and thus had been responsible for the deaths of several of Ex’s colleagues at the university, not to mention thousands more deemed politically untrustworthy by the government. I was shocked to see him (I recognized him from newspaper photos), astonished that he could survive in the community. Someone in the camp must have lost a friend or relative to de Lugo’s death squads – I presumed that they would seek to exact vengeance, but the cult made a point of ignoring all sins committed before joining, even those of a villain like de Lugo, and the policy had not thus far been contravened.

Four days after I moved in with Yara, she spent the morning sequestered in her little bone chamber and in mid-afternoon she went about the encampment, conversing with the adherents. They were less conversations than counseling sessions – she did the lion’s share of the talking and the adherents were limited to nods and affirmations. I tagged along behind her and from what I could hear she appeared to be offering advice designed to shore up their commitment to some nebulous goal, generic hogwash of the kind that enraptures the fans of asswipes like Tony Robbins and Dr Phil. She had a ways to go before she perfected her spiel, but she had Tony and Phil beat all to hell in the looks department and I thought with proper management and a team of make-up people and hair stylists, she could be coached up into a serious money maker. She had a terrific back story: the abused street urchin who had learned life’s secrets from the rain forest swamis and was engaged in hauling herself up from society’s rat-infested basement to become every loser’s dream of success, a Rolex-wearing, couturier-clad, self-help diva striving to reach a platform that would enable her to sell the world some perfumed brand of bullshit. I imagined myself her advisor and complicitor. I’d warm up the audiences, an Armani-wearing stooge delivering a well-rehearsed message of non-denominational love, toothless liberalism, and capitalist greed, yielding the stage to Yara in order to seal the deal with a double shot of the same rendered in her charmingly accented English, all the more charming for having been polished so as to achieve a desired effect.

It was a humid day, the air heavy with the smell of rain. Smoke from the campfires lay close to the ground, thickening the usual haze to a roiling smog, so that people who were not close at hand acquired a ghostly aspect, their indefinite figures fading in from the murk and then dematerializing. Tired of listening to Yara mold her constituency, I staked myself out on a makeshift bench near the ashes of a fire and began sketching in my notebook, adding brief written descriptions of each subject. I’d been at it for perhaps twenty minutes when someone cleared his throat in an attention-getting way and I glanced up to find General de Lugo standing beside me, leaning on a cane, partially blocking my view of the skull. Seeing this emblem of death’s human expression superimposed against that vast iconic figure unsettled me, but de Lugo smiled – not the most assuring of sights – and indicated that he wished to sit down. I made room and he lowered himself onto the bench, groaning as he completed this arduous process.

I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. His hair was exceptionally silky and his clothes reeked of mildew. The flesh beneath his eyes looked bruised – from lack of sleep, I assumed. ‘Go on,’ he said, pointing at the notebook. ‘I will watch.’

He beamed at me again, a beacon of his approval, but when I continued to sketch he tsk-tsked and grunted as in apparent pain, as if displeased by my work. I sketched a pink umbrella tree at the edge of the clearing, a shriek of color like an exposed vein, a more vital territory laid bare behind the smoky green vegetation, and he snorted impatiently. I asked if I was doing something wrong.

‘You draw trees, shadows, people.’ De Lugo gestured at the skull – it towered above us some sixty or seventy feet away. ‘But not the dragon. Why? It is the only thing worth drawing.’

‘You want me to draw the skull? You got it.’

After a couple of false starts, using a pen with a fine point, I managed to get going on a miniature of the skull protruding from its cover, focusing to such a degree that once I finished I was startled to discover that three other people had joined us and were sitting on the ground about the dead fire. A young couple, student types, the guy’s hair longer than his girlfriend’s, and a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing shorts and a worn, dirty dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. De Lugo took the notebook from me, studied it a moment before passing it to the girl. She shared it with the two men and they murmured their appreciation.

‘Very good.’ De Lugo patted my arm – I could not help but flinch. ‘Perfect! You have captured him.’

Ignoring his personification of the skull, I asked him and his friends what had drawn them to the camp.

The girl – rather plain, with a complexion the color of adobe brick, she appeared to have lost a great deal of weight recently – introduced herself as Adalia and asked in a dusty contralto if I knew why I was there.

‘I’m with Yara,’ I said.

‘I am with Timo.’ She leaned into her boyfriend’s shoulder. ‘But that’s not why I am here.’

‘You tell me, then. Why are you here?’

The middle-aged man, a lawyer, Gonsalvo by name, said, ‘We are the ingredients.’

‘The ingredients for what?’ I asked.

‘A miracle,’ said Adalia.

I repeated her words quizzically and she added, ‘A miracle that will change the world.’

The others nodded and Timo, putting an arm around Adalia’s shoulders, said, ‘He will perfect us.’

They had bought into Yara’s craziness, perceiving her to be the key to a numinous mystery, and I doubted they knew any more than I.

‘You expect him to do all this?’ I asked, waving a hand at the skull.

‘With Yara’s help,’ Timo said. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you familiar with his history?’ Adalia asked.

‘All that crap about being paralyzed in a mystical battle, his mental powers becoming godlike? Sure, everybody’s heard that fairy tale.’

‘You do not give him his due,’ Gonsalvo said solemnly. ‘For thousands of years he lay on the plain at Teocinte. His mind grew to be a cloud that enveloped the planet, controlling every facet of our lives.’

‘Well, he’s dead meat now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t control jack.’

‘Jack?’ Gonsalvo said. ‘Who is Jack?’

Adalia explained it to him.

A silence rolled out over our little group and I became aware of two people stepping past, a snatch of soft talk, a man coughing. Gonsalvo intoned some tendentious garbage about how the dragon, having survived death, had been reduced to a shade with a fraction of his former prodigious power and now he required our assistance in order to be reborn and restored to primacy.

‘How’re you going to work that?’ I asked. ‘CPR? Give him a heart massage? No, wait! His heart’s in Minsk, Shanghai, Las Vegas, all over the place . . . in a zillion fucking pieces.’

‘We will contribute our energies,’ de Lugo said grandly.

I tried to resist the impulse toward further sarcasm, but failed. ‘How does that work? When the moment’s right you chant? You think pure thoughts in his direction?’

De Lugo nailed me with a stare that would have weakened my knees at another time and place. Timo scowled and Adalia said, ‘You haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? Be truthful.’

‘Curiosity,’ I said. ‘And chance. I’m a leaf blown to your door.’

‘And Yara? What of her?’

‘I enjoy fucking her, but she’s a little young for me.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘Too young in here, you understand.’

‘He doesn’t know,’ said de Lugo.

Adalia leaned back into the crook of Timo’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s all he is, a leaf. One day soon the wind will take him.’

Irritated, I said, ‘The least you can do is wait until I’ve gone to talk behind my back.’

They gazed at me with the placidity of stoners, impervious to amazement, as though we were guests of the Mad Hatter and they were waiting patiently for me to turn into a camel.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘What don’t I know?’

‘Why you’re here.’ De Lugo prodded the ashes of the dead fire with his stick. ‘Please don’t take offense. It’s something all of us wonder about now and then . . . with regard to ourselves as well as others.’

Still vexed, I asked why he was here and he replied that of all the ‘ingredients’ gathered beneath the canopy, he might well be the most essential.

‘Griaule will require ruthlessness to achieve what he must,’ he said. ‘And, God help me, I have been ruthless in my day.’

Adalia put a hand on his knee to comfort him. Gonsalvo offered consoling platitudes. I thought they might burst into a chorus of ‘Kumbaya.’ De Lugo’s ‘day’ was scarcely a year in the past, an incident wherein seven priests had been found with their brains cut out, excavated from their skulls in a side chapel of the National Cathedral, following which he been forced to relinquish his post. I wasn’t about to buy his penitent act and withdrew from the conversation, paying it marginal attention, and sketched their faces, their physical attitudes, anything else that caught my eye. Not until they left me, de Lugo being the last to go, patting my shoulder in an avuncular fashion . . . not until then did I think about the questions they had raised. Why was I there? Was I, too, an element essential to the dragon’s rebirth? Had I been drawn to the community not by the Yara woman, but by the dragon’s proxy? And what had they meant by their use of the word ‘ingredient’? The word had an ominous sound in context, implying the surrender of one’s individuality to a grim purpose.

Dusk blended the shapes of the leaves and branches, but the skull appeared to gain sharpness and detail and vitality, standing out from an indistinct backdrop, gray and granitic in the halflight, as if it were the only real thing in the picture. I envisioned the muscles of the face and jaw reforming over the bone, the packed masonry of green and gold scales reassembling, and I could have sworn that I glimpsed movement in the oily shadows filling its eye sockets, the flickering of a membrane, a glint of reflected light, evidence of life harbored within, still potent after centuries of dormancy. I felt its shadow heartbeat on my skin like the reverberations of a gong. My susceptibility to suggestion, I thought. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that the skull was the source of danger and a catastrophe was about to occur, that a more terrible visage would surface explosively from beneath that illusion of bone and fungus, and the dragon would shrug off its vegetable shroud and move against the city, mistaking Temalagua for Teocinte, the city where it had been imprisoned for millennia . . . or perhaps any city would serve as an apt target for his vengeance. This was nonsense, sheer fantasy, but the idea had fastened onto me and I stared at the skull for such a long time, I became convinced that my watchfulness was all that prevented the transformation. When fatigue caused my concentration to falter I worried that the change had begun without my notice. Infinitesimal changes. Fluctuations on the sub-atomic level. Subtle shifts that we would not register until too late and a shattering conclusion was already upon us.

From that day forward I more-or-less accepted that some fragment of the dragon’s anima clung to the skull and what skepticism I retained derived from my feelings for Yara, feelings that had magnified in intensity and scope over the weeks. I knew I was falling in love with her and love was something I had hoped to avoid – she wasn’t the sort of girl you gave your heart to unless you were looking to get it back FDA approved and sliced into patties. In many ways she was the female version of me, efficient in her cruelty where I was casual. More political and less cynical, but no less a manipulator, not someone in whom you would place your faith. I tried to equate loving her with my revamped attitude toward the skull, countenancing them both to be symptoms of mental defect, of weakness induced by exposure to a spiritually toxic environment. She was still the child-woman I had met in Barrio Villareal – I knew more about her than I had, but nothing that would alter the basic picture, and yet her flaws had diminished in my eyes and her strengths had become pre-eminent. This idealization, I told myself, was patently a distortion, a by-product of love’s madness, but I couldn’t so easily label and dismiss my emotional and physical responses to her. And, further, while I had my doubts about Yara’s sanity, her honesty, I didn’t really want those doubts to prosper.

Often I would pass an hour or two in the early evening sitting in the eye socket (the one not overgrown by vines), where I would pretend that my presence counterfeited the dragon’s missing pupil and was staring out over his kingdom, as it were. At full dark the clearing was a black field picked out by a scatter of dull, redly-glowing patches, like embers left over from a great burning whose smoky smell infused the air, with here and there the backlit, lumpy shapes of huts and tents, and silhouetted figures moving along sluggishly, appearing to struggle with their footing, as if walking in thick ash. Despite this infernal vista, my thoughts tended to be upbeat, consisting of flash visions of Yara, pieces of memory, a look, a cunning smile, a touch. One humid night she joined me there, kept vigil with me, and after a silence said, ‘This place was so much different when I arrived.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘There were only eight or nine people and most of them were crazy. Homeless guys. A couple of old women. The clearing was very small. Not even a quarter of what it is now.’

She left a pause and I did not try to fill it. This was the first time she had spoken in a nostalgic tone and I was afraid of spoiling the moment, hoping for a revelation. Birds rustled the foliage overhead, a last flurry before sleep.

‘It’s strange,’ she said at last. ‘I never thought any of this would happen. When I came here I was miserable, full of anger. All I wanted was to die . . . and to injure people by my death. I still have anger inside me, but now that seems irrelevant.’

She fell silent again and I felt the need to prompt her.

‘Some of your adherents tell me . . .’

‘They’re not my adherents,’ she said sharply.

‘The people down below tell me they’re here to help with the dragon’s rebirth.’

‘Did you laugh at them?’

Two people appeared to be dancing down below, silhouetted by a campfire, but I could hear no music. I felt Yara’s eyes on me and said carefully, ‘I’m less inclined to laugh than once I was.’

‘They have dozens of theories,’ she said. ‘I don’t subscribe to any of them.’

‘What theory do you subscribe to?’

‘I have no theory.’

‘But you advise them, you’re their guide, their mentor.’

Her sigh seemed to ignite a chorus of cicadas. ‘Each morning I go into that little chamber . . . you know the one.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have a nap. When I wake I go to the clearing. I’ll see someone . . . not the first person I see, but a specific person. I’ll be moved to speak to them. I realize I have something to say, but I don’t have any idea of what it will be. The message comes to me as I speak. Usually it’s a positive message – you’ve heard me. At other times I’ll give them a chore to do.’

She reached back and gathered her hair into ponytail, held that pose for a beat, as if trying to think of something else to say.

‘That’s it?’ I said. ‘That’s all you got?’

‘I know the idea of a renewal is involved. An alchemical change, a marriage of souls. And I know Griaule is behind it. I’ve been here so long I can feel him. Like how you feel when someone’s behind you, watching what you do.’

I thought she would have a complex rap explaining the great good news coming from beyond the sky. This sketchy recital didn’t mesh with my assumptions.

‘He compels me to do things I don’t understand,’ she went on. ‘The money, for example. There’s so much of it, more than we could ever use, and I keep on collecting more. He has me meet people in the city and give them money. It frustrates me, not being able to understand everything.’

‘Who are they, the people you give the money to?’

‘Young men, mostly. Some are military, I think. I tell them things, but I don’t have any recollection of what was said, just blank spots in my memory.’

I stopped short of asking how much money she had collected and said, ‘He must have big plans for you.’

‘For me? Maybe.’

She lay back and plucked at my arm, urging me down onto the cool bone surface beside her.

‘Why’d you wait so long to tell me this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t want to talk anymore,’ she said, fiddling with the top button of my jeans.

I pushed her hand away. ‘Was it the dragon? Did it feel like a message, as if he wanted you to tell me now?’

‘Un-uh. Don’t you want to fuck?’

‘One more question. Say you’re right about everything, about the dragon. How can you trust him? A beast, a giant lizard that has a really good reason to hate us. How can you think any change he brings will have a good effect?’

Even as I asked the question I suspected her answer would be the same that I had received from Ex when we argued about the value of revolution some months earlier:

‘You’ve been here how long? Four years? Five? Long enough to realize that any change is welcome in Temalagua. Any chance that things will improve, however slight, is welcome. You can’t impose your American logic on us. You people are smothered by the media, by lies, by silk sheets and fatty foods. Most of you don’t notice how fucked you are. Here the government doesn’t bother to hide things from us. Savagery, poverty, and injustice are shoved in our faces every day. We’re fucking desperate! If change makes things worse . . . so what?’

Yara’s answer was more succinct, yet no less to the point. Once she had spoken she pressed her body against mine and said, ‘Come on! I don’t want to talk.’ She kissed my neck, my mouth and eyes, and though I had further questions I allowed myself to be converted from inquisitor to lover.

That night was as close as I came to complete intimacy with her. I put my lips to her ear and told her I loved her, yet I didn’t whisper the words, I merely shaped them with my mouth. For one thing I was leery about what saying the words out loud would portend, but I suspect more devious motives were in play. By this inaudible, irresolute declaration I may have been hoping to convince myself that I wasn’t just a victim of sexual infatuation, but a real boy capable of real love, and so I pretended to be afraid that if she heard me, she might react badly, she might throw me out or something of the sort . . . because I had no clue, really, as to how she felt about me or about love or any of it. Then again, I may have been daring her to hear me, making said declaration so close to the range of the audible that she might hear the slight popping of my lips and deduce from this that I had spoken and conclude that ‘I love you’ was the most likely message, thereby leaving it up to her aural acuity and emotional state as to whether or not we would go to the next level. Someone once wrote that love is the drink that does not kill thirst, meaning that one’s thirst for love is inexhaustible, or that love is an addiction that demands more and more of it in order to satisfy the lover, and yet, like an opiate, has less and less effect, so that in the end demand outstrips supply. While these interpretations are congruent and both undoubtedly true, in the case of Yara and myself love became a perverse psychological competition, a power struggle wherein we used our attitudes and our principles (such as they were) to deconstruct the very thing we desired before it could disappoint us, because we knew the game was fixed.

III

Snow’s narrative continues for another 156 pages, many treating of the tedious day-to-day life in the camp, an almost equivalent number constituting a disquisition on the nature of love, also tedious and overly analytic (as the preceding paragraph foreshadows), and some few detailing and explaining (‘justifying’ might be more precise a word, for he appears to have borne a heavy burden of guilt) the circumstances under which, four months after initiating a relationship with Yara, he sneaked away from the clearing, intending never to return. He cites as the root cause of his abandonment the ominous atmosphere that accumulated about the place and goes on to describe the event that precipitated his escape.

‘One morning,’ Snow writes, ‘Yara went to stand in the mouth of the skull, at the point of the jaw, and there she stayed for several hours, saying nothing, motionless as in a fugue. Over a span of fifteen minutes the adherents gathered beneath her. They were perplexed at first, calling out to her and conferring among themselves, but then they grew as silent and still as their queen . . . as their god. They remained standing in a loose assembly for nearly four hours, rapt as though compelled by unheard voices. The air grew warmer – substantially warmer, it seemed to me – as if this act of devotion, of pathological immersion, were somehow increasing the spin of their constituent atoms and generating heat . . . though it’s probable my anxiety led me to misapprehend a slight elevation of air temperature. Throughout the episode I was close to panic. The gloomy space under the canopy, the rundown camp, the zombie-like connection between the adherents and their queen: it was an eerie spectacle that evoked images of Jonestown. That I had been excluded from the group, cast in the role of onlooker or tourist, someone unworthy of participating in the experience, amplified my sense of alienation. I didn’t belong here, I told myself. I was a leaf blown by chance to their door and not party to this insanity. If I were I would be as mindless and mute as they, as the creatures of the jungle (they, too, had gone silent), receiving instruction from a woman who channeled the wishes and whims of a gigantic reptilian skull.

‘When Yara turned away from the assembly, the jungle erupted into a clamor of croaks and screams, and the adherents shambled off, resuming their normal activities. Yara claimed to have no memory of what had transpired, yet she was not in the least disconcerted to learn of it, and this as much as anything convinced me that the disaster I feared was days if not hours away. I begged her to put some distance between herself and the skull, but when I told her the scene in the clearing had reminded me of Jonestown, she flew off the handle and accused me of subverting her work and otherwise distracting her.

‘That night I lay in bed wondering what to do, feeling wrecked, staring at yet not focused upon Yara’s naked back, pinpricks of actinic brilliance popping and fading before my eyes like miniature flashbulbs. And then I observed that the skin bordering her implant was inflamed, a distinct redness suffusing the colors of the surrounding tattoo. The implant itself appeared less regular in shape, its convexity more extreme, and I thought perhaps her body was rejecting it. I gently pressed my forefinger against the skin at the edge of the implant and her hips began to roll and jerk, a slow, grinding torsion, as if she were having sex with an invisible lover. I snatched my hand away, startled by her reaction, and the movements subsided. Lately she had encouraged me to touch the implant while we made love, but I had been too intent on my own pleasure to notice whether there had been a marked increase in hers . . . though it seemed then, in the unreliable archives of memory, that she displayed a measure of reaction. “Yara!” I said, and repeated her name, but she was out like a light. I pushed down on the implant with the heel of my hand – her hips thrashed as if she were on the verge of an orgasm. Once again I tried to wake her, shouting at and even shaking her, all to no avail. Horrified by her comatose state, by her erotic reflex, I was too rattled to think, yet a portion of my brain must have been functioning, a batch of neurons excited by dread must have sparked and transmitted a warning, for as the sky grayed I concluded that I needed to save myself.’

The disaster anticipated by Snow did not occur, at least not within the time frame he expected, and when nothing had happened after a month he was tempted to revisit the clearing, but shame and fear combined to negate this impulse. For a time he moved back in with Ex, yet it quickly became evident that the relationship had gone sour, as had his relationship with Temalagua, and he returned home to Concrete, Idaho, where he lived for free in an apartment owned by his father and landed a job in a local bookstore. He had intended to regroup there, to earn a little money and go off again, perhaps to Thailand, but was seduced by the lazy, listless patterns of existence in Concrete and stayed for the next ten years, maintaining a desultory lifestyle dominated by affairs with unattainable women, either married or disinterested in him as other than a pastime. The one noteworthy achievement of those years was the publication of his partial memoir, which remains unfinished to this day. (This may not be ascribed to a lack of effort, to youthful lassitude, but to the fact that it is an immature work to which he had only a passing attachment.) His infatuation with Yara developed into a full-blown obsession and, though when called upon to do so he would describe love in terms that accorded with his previous statements on the subject, he grew to think of Yara in terms more consistent with a romantic ideal. He searched the Internet for news of her and, finding none, he scribbled in his notebooks, dredging up memories, striving to piece together a coherent narrative of his four months in the jungle. He had done nude studies of Yara, but in them her face was either turned away or partly hidden by her hair – he could not recall why he had posed her this way, if it had been her idea or his, but the sketches seemed emblematic of their inadequate commitment to the relationship. He tried drawing her face from memory and was able to create accurate renderings of her features, but they were devoid of vitality and character, like better-than-average police sketches. He perceived this to be emblematic of what they had lost – an opportunity for emotional brilliance, for the transcendence of the ordinary. The conflation of time and an erratic memory presented him with the certainty of what he had heretofore merely imagined – that he had been in love with Yara and she with him, but they had not taken the final, necessary step to confirm those feelings.

One evening while netsurfing he chanced upon an article dated two years earlier about unexplained Central American mysteries that devoted a few sentences to a Temalaguan religious cult whose membership, some eight hundred strong, had recently vanished along with their object of veneration, a skull belonging to an immense specimen of the genus Megalania (this last assertion was without scholarly basis). The leader of the cult had been, the story said, ‘a charismatic young woman.’ And that was all. There was no mention whatsoever of the incident in the Temalaguan press at the time of the disappearance, a fact Snow found disturbing, and he could find no other online stories that referenced the event. Based on this sliver of information, however untrustworthy, he chucked his job, bought an airline ticket, and a week later arrived in Temalagua.

The city was more polluted and poverty-stricken than Snow remembered, though he wondered whether he had been too self-absorbed to notice how bad things were ten years before. Perhaps it had always been a smoky, slum-ridden slice of Mordor, Detroit with less industry, brighter colors, and hills crawling with the poor, the anonymous-as-roaches poor, some carrying their shelters on their backs. Beggars rushed at him in platoon-strength, displaying deformities, amputations, and open sores. Child prostitutes, some as young as eight or nine, called to him from alley mouths and doorways, and in piping, playground voices offered to perform the most deviant of perversions. Widows in black dresses and shawls sat on the curbs along Avenida Seis, their heads down, mere inches away from the stream of traffic, as if they had given up hope and were waiting for a car to swerve and put an end to their misery. Many of Snow’s old connections were dead or otherwise defunct. Ex had lost her taste for revolution and married the proprietor of a department store who called her his little Commie and delighted in pinching her now substantial ass – she was pregnant with their fourth child and was reluctant to speak with Snow. The offices of Aurora House had been taken over by a travel agency, Pepe Salido had been murdered in a gambling dispute, and Snow’s colleagues in the charity had drifted away to parts unknown. Club Sexy hadn’t changed that much. They had put in track lighting above the bar and added a karaoke machine. Miraculously, the old man still played his rickety Beatle tunes against the same chintzy backdrop of silver glitter, moonglow, and palms. Expensively attired women thronged the tables – Snow failed to recognize any of them, yet they were of a type similar to those he did recall, and the fabulous Guillermo was still pouring drinks. Aside from the start of a double chin and a questionable goatee, he looked none the worse for wear. On seeing Snow he rushed out from behind the bar to embrace him.

‘You look wonderful! Fantastic!’ said Guillermo, pulling back. ‘How do you do it?’

‘You look pretty good yourself,’ said Snow.

‘Me? I’m an absolute disaster! But it doesn’t matter anymore. I have a husband now, I can let myself go to seed.’

He steered Snow to a corner table and told the other barman, Canelo – a young black man with a light, freckly complexion, close-cropped reddish hair, and diamond piercings in his cheeks – to bring a bottle of tequila. Snow realized that he had forgotten to employ gayspeak and began to shade his inflections, subtly (he thought) re-acquiring his verbal disguise. Guillermo laid his hand atop Snow’s and said, ‘Please! There’s no need for that.’

Baffled, Snow asked what he meant.

‘Your act.’ Guillermo poured him a shot of tequila. ‘It never fooled anyone, you know. Some of us were angry – we thought you were mocking us. But when we realized you were using us to get close to the ladies, we understood and we laughed about it. Since you were a nice guy, we played along.’

‘I wasn’t a nice guy,’ said Snow. ‘I was a total asshole.’

‘Well, you looked nice, anyway. And you acted nice. That’s what counted most back then.’

They drank and reminisced for a while and then Snow asked about Yara.

Guillermo lowered his voice. ‘Did you hear about what happened to her?’

‘Only a little. I just read about it last week. I’m hoping to learn more. That’s why I came down.’

‘You must be careful who you talk to about this. Very careful.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The PVO.’ Guillermo refilled their glasses. ‘The Party of Organized Violence.’ He knocked back his shot. ‘They showed up about fifteen years ago, but they didn’t make much of a splash and no one took them seriously until the elections last year when they gained a plurality in Congress. They’re thugs. Scary right-wing thugs. Extremely scary. If they win a majority in the next election, and everyone says they will . . .’ He affected a shudder. ‘They don’t like gays. Joselito, my husband . . . he thinks we should relocate to Costa Rica.’

‘What’s this have to do with Yara?’

‘After she vanished a reporter got into Chajul. You know, the village out near the skull? This one guy got in, but soon the PVO sealed off access to that area of the jungle with their militia.’

‘They have their own soldiers?’

‘Nobody fucks with them. They might as well be running things already. But like I was saying . . .’ Guillermo knocked back a shot – it looked as if it hurt going down. ‘I have a friend who knew the reporter. The guy said most of the villagers had already fled, but he talked to one woman who told him there was a big spill of heat from the jungle. Hot enough to make you cover your face, she said. Then rippling lights appeared over the treetops. All colors. She assumed it was a religious thing, Jesus was coming down on a rainbow carpet, so she went into her house to pray to the Virgin. She heard people in the street and swears they had come out of the jungle, but she didn’t see them – she was afraid and hid. That’s all she had time to say before the PVO turned up and carried her away. The reporter beat it out the back window.’

The ancient keyboard player announced he was taking a break – the sounds of the Casio were replaced by Latin pop.

‘Can I talk to him?’ Snow asked. ‘The reporter.’

‘He disappeared,’ said Guillermo, giving the word ‘disappeared’ a certain emphasis.

Snow covered his glass to prevent Guillermo from pouring him another shot. ‘I guess I don’t get it. Why were the PVO so interested in a screwball cult?’

‘You’d have to ask them . . . but that’s not something I would recommend. You don’t want to attract the attention of those guys.’

Guillermo was called away to settle some issue at the bar and Snow, glancing around the room, caught a thirty-ish brunette at another table checking him out. She wore an orange-and-yellow print frock with a tight bodice that accentuated her cleavage and she permitted herself a half-smile before saying something to her companion, a plump blonde. The blonde cast a quick look in his direction and the women shared a laugh. Snow had an impulse to make a move, to indulge in his old life again, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Guillermo rejoined him and nodded toward the brunette.

‘Stay away from that one, man,’ he said. ‘She’s Juan Mazariegos’ mistress.’

‘He’s a bad guy?’

‘The worst. He’s a bigshot in the PVO. Half the women here are PVO.’

Snow asked him whether it was safe to visit the encampment.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Guillermo said. ‘But there’s no point. You know how quickly the jungle comes back. It’s all overgrown in there. Nobody lives in Chajul nowadays and Yara . . .’ He made a gesture of finality. ‘She’s gone.’

Snow didn’t want to believe that and had nothing to say. With an inquiring look, Guillermo held up the bottle – Snow shook his head.

‘Man!’ said Guillermo. ‘Drink with me. Who knows when you’ll be back again?’

‘I might stick around,’ Snow said. ‘I don’t really have anywhere else to go.’

‘Then we’ll drink to you staying. I’ll fill you in on all the gossip. Ten years’ worth.’

With reluctance, for he was not that much of a tequila drinker anymore, Snow let Guillermo pour him a double.

Guillermo raised his glass. ‘Old times!’

Snow hesitated before touching glasses and said, ‘La Endriaga.’

Guillermo had been right. The site of the camp was overrun with new vegetation and all Snow managed to unearth were a few sections of rusted tin. Despite the witness report of extreme heat, there were no charred tree trunks, no scorched areas. Nothing. He poked around for an hour, but couldn’t even find ashes. What kind of fire could have vaporized the skull and left tin unmarked? The absence of the skull, of any evidence as to the cause of its destruction, started to make him jumpy and he soon returned to his hotel.

Snow had saved his money over the past decade and could have survived for quite some time in Temalagua without a job, but he thought it prudent to find work and secured a position teaching English at a private school in the suburbs. Each morning he would ride the bus from the city center, where he had taken an apartment, and spend the better part of his day preparing the spoiled teenage sons and daughters of the wealthy – who, chauffered by armed bodyguards, arrived in Hummers and town cars and limousines – to deal with their equally spoiled peers in the United States. They were arrogant little monsters, for the most part. Sullen and disrespectful even to one another, they treated Snow with a polished contempt that, if one didn’t examine it too closely, might be mistaken for civility. He entertained fantasies of walking into a classroom with an explosive device strapped to his mid-section. He met regularly with their parents, advising them of learning disabilities and behavioral problems, and it was during such a counseling session that he encountered Luisa Bazan, a zaftig brunette of thirty-five years, mother of Onofrio, a lizard-like youth with a penchant for upskirt photography, a pursuit for which he had been threatened with expulsion (this threat unlikely to be acted upon, since Onofrio’s father was Enrique Bazan, in line to become the PVO’s defense minister after the elections).

Approaching his thirty-ninth birthday, Snow had retained his youthful good looks and thus he was not greatly surprised when Luisa requested increasingly frequent parent-teacher conferences and that during these sessions they discussed Luisa’s personal life more than they did Onofrio’s scholastic failings. Luisa complained about her husband’s cavalier treatment of her, his mental abuses, his rudeness to her family, his lack of concern for her concerns, and hinted at more heinous offenses. Snow offered a sympathetic ear; he understood the implied invitation and was tempted to accept it – although she would soon fall prey to obesity, sublimating her womanly desires with sweets and starches and bi-monthly shopping trips to Miami, where she now (according to her) satisfied her every appetite, Luisa was still exceptionally attractive and her desperation to employ her physical charms before age and indulgence further eroded them was as palpable and alluring to Snow as an exotic perfume. But he held firm and, when one afternoon she flung herself at him, rather than rejecting her out of hand, an act that might have antagonized her and sent her running to Enrique, complaining that Snow had committed an impropriety . . . on that afternoon he told Luisa he was grieving for a lost love (only half a lie) and that she was the first woman in years to have pierced the shroud of his grief and touch his heart. He asked for time to clear his head, to adjust to this unexpected change – he did not want to come to her encumbered by any shred of the past, he said. She deserved better and if she could wait but a little while for him to purge himself of old feelings, then all things would be possible. Due to his experience with such women, knowing that what they wanted was something excessive in their lives, some form of drama to break the comfortable tyranny of their marriages, Snow anticipated that a make-believe drama would be enough to suit Luisa’s purposes and in this he proved correct. From that day forward their conferences were models of comportment, marred only by incidental brushes of skin against skin, as happened when he helped her on with her jacket or handed her paperwork, and smoldering looks redolent of their unrequited passion.

If you had asked Snow why he stayed on in Temalagua after learning what he could about Yara’s fate – that is to say, very little – he might have answered because the cost of living was cheap and the weather temperate, but in truth he remained obsessed and began to make discreet inquiries about Yara’s activities during the period leading up to her disappearance. Over the next two years his life acquired an unvarying routine, teaching by day and by night and on the weekends pursuing his investigation via the Internet and in the various establishments (offices, shops, bars) mentioned in passing by Yara as places where she had collected or delivered sums of money. Yet for all his efforts, the sole result of his investigation came to him by chance. Some twenty months after his return to Temalagua, while leafing through the Sunday newspaper, he ran across an article on page six of the front section concerning the murder (by terrorists, the paper suggested) of one Hernan Ortiz, an official of the PVO. Accompanying the article was a headshot of the victim that showed him to have been a lean, cadaverous fellow with a distinctive shock of white hair in his forelock. Further photographs found on the Internet depicted a lanky man dressed in army fatigues. Snow thought instantly of the electronics store clerk to whom Yara had given the envelope stuffed with currency. He hadn’t gotten a close look at the clerk’s face, but given the PVO’s interest in Yara’s cult, her statement that some of the men to whom she had given instructions and money were military, and now this photograph of a man with an identical streak of white in his hair . . . he refused to believe it could be a coincidence.

That same morning, a warm spring morning, Snow met Guillermo for coffee at Mocca’s, a popular sidewalk café on the Avenida with a façade of tinted windows and heavy glass doors. Snow did not make friends easily. A serial manipulator, he mistrusted the validity of his emotional investments in other people and as a consequence he mistrusted the people as well – yet if forced to characterize his relationship with Guillermo, he would have said they were friends. In addition to feeling comfortable around Guillermo, he envied his openness, his ability to discuss freely every aspect of his life, and thus their Sunday meetings had become a semi-regular occurrence. They sat in the shade of an umbrella that sprouted from the center of their table, emblazoned with a Flor de Cana logo, one among several dozen identical tables from which arose the laughter and chatter of over a hundred upper class Temalaguans. The traffic stream was less heavy and less clamorous than usual, and the smell of coffee contended with that of gasoline fumes. Waiters in red T-shirts and dark slacks glided about, bearing trays loaded with food and drink, and chased off beggars who had infiltrated the tables, where they were being pointedly ignored by people so at variance in aspect from themselves, so well nourished, richly dressed, bedecked with gold, jewelry, and expensive sunglasses, they might have been of a different taxonomic order, sparrows among peacocks.

Guillermo dominated the conversation, commenting cattily on the scene, pointing to this or that local celebrity, tossing out bits of gossip, but when Snow showed him the photograph of Hernan Ortiz he had clipped from the newspaper and inquired about the man’s connection with Yara, Guillermo’s airy mood dissolved. He covered the photo with a napkin and said, ‘What is it with you? You live with this girl a few months, you leave her, and now, years later, when she’s dead, you want to know everything about her.’

‘Curiosity,’ said Snow. ‘The road not traveled and all that.’

‘Get yourself another hobby. This one could get you killed.’

‘Did you know Ortiz? Back in the day, I mean?’

Guillermo made an exasperated noise.

‘Come on, man,’ said Snow. ‘You knew everyone on the Avenida in those days.’

‘Yes, I knew him. He was a punk. He used to run with a gang who hung around the bus station. They ripped off street vendors returning home at night to their villages. They’d beat the hell out of them for a few quetzales. They beat the hell out of people like me for fun. A couple of years later he turned up looking clean and presentable, working at the electronics store. Word was he’d joined up with a big organization . . . but he was still a punk.’

‘A big organization? The PVO?’

‘Keep your voice down!’ As Guillermo sipped his coffee, he darted his eyes left and right. ‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me when I first got back? Or when I got involved with Yara?’

‘The PVO’ (Guillermo whispered the acronym) ‘weren’t that big a deal when you hooked up with Yara. It didn’t occur to me to tell you then. When you returned, well, call me sentimental, but I don’t want to see you dead.’ He dabbed at his lips with a napkin. ‘The reason I’m telling you now is to stop you from pursuing the matter. If you keep it up you’re going to make the acquaintance of some very unpleasant people and stir up a lot of trouble for your friends.’

‘Yeah, you keep saying that, but nothing ever happens.’

A weary-looking Indian woman with an infant in one arm, clad in a dress gone gray from repeated scrubbings, its printed pattern all but worn away, stopped by an adjoining table and dangled four or five necklaces in the face of a man with chiseled features, wearing aviator sunglasses and a crisp, pale yellow guayabera. He looked off to his left, surveying the tables, and his companion, a pretty woman with a café-con-leche complexion, carmine lips, and rhinestone-studded sunglasses, exhaled a jet of cigarette smoke and said something that made him smile.

‘For your lady,’ said the Indian woman, gently shaking the necklaces, an enticement. Her voice barely audible, she murmured a litany of afflictions – the child was sick, they were hungry, they needed money to return home.

The Indian woman noticed Snow was watching and moved toward him, an ounce of energy enlivening her face on having spotted an American. Guillermo looked away, but Snow, before the woman could begin her pitch, gave her ten quetzales, at least twice what she could have asked for, and selected one of the necklaces, a piece of poor quality jade upon which the design of a bird had been scratched, strung on a loop of black twine.

‘Why do you encourage them?’ asked Guillermo as the woman hurried off, a few paces ahead of a grim-faced waiter intent on evicting her.

‘The poor need to be encouraged, don’t you think?’ Snow slipped on the necklace. ‘And don’t tell me that I can’t give them all money. That’s a rationalization you use for not giving money to any of them. Besides, I was angry and I knew it would piss you off.’

‘You’re angry? Why’s that? Because I’m trying to keep you from getting into trouble?’

‘You’re not keeping me out of trouble. All I’m doing is asking questions of people I trust. And that’s basically you. I won’t take it any further.’

‘You’re a liar! Do you think I don’t hear things? People come up to me all the time and say, “That gringo friend of yours was in last night asking questions.” It’s a wonder you haven’t been picked up.’

‘Well, that’s my business, isn’t it?’

Guillermo shrugged, as if to imply that Snow’s survival was of no importance to him. He had plainly taken offense at Snow’s characterization of him as an uncaring sort. True or not, he liked to think of himself as egalitarian and not class conscious in the least.

‘Look, I apologize,’ said Snow. ‘I told you I was angry.’

Guillermo pretended to be interested in the goings-on at another table.

‘Stop this shit, man!’

‘What shit?’ Guillermo dug out his cell and checked for messages.

Already bright, the sunlight brightened further, bespeaking a break in some thin pall of pollution.

‘Okay,’ Snow said. ‘How about next time we come out I’ll buy you a necklace? Will that put the roses back in your cheeks?’

Guillermo’s struggled to maintain his indifferent pose, but the façade crumbled and he smiled. ‘Joselito will be so jealous!’

Snow touched the black twine about his neck. ‘Maybe I should just give you this.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Guillermo. ‘It’ll have to be something much more fashion forward. I’ll help you pick something out.’ He shifted in his chair and sighed. ‘It’s such a glorious day I can’t stay angry. I think I’ll have a glass of wine. Do you want one?’

‘I’ll take another coffee.’

‘Days like this I feel I could fall in love with everyone.’ Guillermo laughed and patted Snow’s forearm. ‘Even you.’ He signaled a waiter and then looked soberly at Snow and said, ‘You do know I love you, don’t you?’

His machismo enlisted, put off by this expression of sentiment, Snow said in a sardonic tone, ‘Oh yeah, sure.’

Guilllermo shook his head sadly. ‘What an asshole you are! I thought you’d grown up, but I’ll bet you still think about love as something that makes you dizzy.’

Two Sundays later when Snow dropped by Club Sexy to meet Guillermo, the place was empty except for a pair of solitary drinkers. Even the old keyboard player was absent. Snow asked Canelo, the black bartender with freckles and reddish hair, where everyone was and Canelo said, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ And when Snow said he had heard nothing, Canelo, who had recently grown a Van Dyke that, along with his piercings, his red skullcap of hair, and downcast manner, gave him the look of a sorrowful devil, told him that Guillermo and Joselito had been found dead in a barranca outside the city. Both had been tortured. He went on to say what a shock it had been to everyone and the club had been closed for three days out of respect, but now business was picking up again, especially at night, and some of the ladies had started coming back in. He might have said more, but Snow ran from the club, burst through the front door, and stood in the entranceway, letting the city’s polluted roar explode over him, a wetness in his eyes blurring the light, turning passersby into colored shadows. Canelo followed him out and told him to come back inside and have a drink.

‘Who killed them?’ asked Snow.

Taken aback by the question, Canelo said he didn’t know.

‘It was the PVO, wasn’t it?’ Snow came a step toward him.

‘In this life, the sort of life Guillermo lived, a man makes a great many enemies.’

‘What are you fucking saying?’

Canelo spread his hands to demonstrate his helplessness. ‘I wasn’t there. How can I know who killed them? It might have been a jealous ex-lover, a madman. The cops said the bodies were horribly mutilated. Their cocks were in each other’s mouths.’

‘Guillermo was terrified of the PVO. He said they hated gays.’

‘That proves nothing. Hating gays is all the fashion down here.’

Frustration overrode Snow’s sense of loss. His emotions crested, overflowing their confines, and he shoved Canelo in the chest, knocking him back against the wall. ‘You know damn well it was political! If it wasn’t why are people staying away from the club?’

‘Calm down, man! Okay?’ Canelo inspected the rear of his jeans for stucco dust. ‘Let’s go inside. I’ll tell you what I know.’

He held the door open and Snow, his temper cooling, went through. The instant the door swung shut behind them, he heard a complicated snick and Canelo slung him face-first into the wall. Something cold and sharp pricked his throat. Canelo pressed his mouth to Snow’s ear, his funky breath overpowering the smell of his cologne, and said, ‘Don’t you ever put your hands on me again!’

Snow held perfectly still. ‘Yeah. Okay.’

‘If you weren’t Guillermo’s friend I’d open you up. But don’t get the idea I’m your friend. To me you’re just a stupid fucking gringo who doesn’t know his ass.’

Canelo stepped away and Snow, hearing another snick, turned to see him pocketing a butterfly knife.

‘You want to know who I think killed Guillermo?’ Canelo asked. ‘It was you. You didn’t cut him, but he died because of you.’

‘That’s crazy,’ said Snow.

‘You don’t understand where you are, man. None of you fucks have a clue. You go blundering about, thinking you can solve any problem because you’re superior to the pitiful, fuckedup Temalaguans, but all you do is make more trouble for us.’

‘I think it was the PVO,’ Snow said weakly.

‘Maybe. It might have been political. The PVO could have done it, or some other political party. See, what you don’t seem to understand is that in order to stay in business Guillermo had to be an informer. All these bitches with their bigshot husbands coming around . . . the husbands asked him questions. He tried to be cool. He’d give them some information, nothing serious, enough maybe that someone would get slapped around now and then. But nothing more. He didn’t want anyone to get their head chopped because of him. He walked a fine line. But when you started asking about La Endriaga the line got even finer. He should have handed you over. We tried to tell him, we said if you give up the gringo the pressure will ease off, but he wanted to protect you. “He’s my friend,” he’d say. “I’m not going to betray a friendship.”’

‘He should have told me!’ said Snow. ‘If he’d told me about his predicament, how bad things were . . .’

‘Get real, man. Think about it. He warned you constantly. You simply didn’t want to listen.’

‘He didn’t tell me the whole story. I never understood . . . he never conveyed to me how serious it was.’

‘Maybe he thought you were smart enough to fill in the blanks. Or maybe he believed you were as much a friend to him as he was to you. Maybe he thought you respected him and actually paid attention to what he said. Big mistake, huh?’

Snow stood mute, absorbing what Canelo had told him.

‘It was casual with you,’ Canelo said. ‘You thought it was cool to have a fag who owned a night club for a friend.’

‘That’s not how it was!’

‘Sure it is. You’re like a half-ass method actor, man. One who almost buys into his character, but can’t quite get there.’ Canelo gestured at the door. ‘Get the fuck out.’

Snow balked at leaving. ‘It’s not like you say. Maybe I’ve made some missteps, but I . . .’

‘Maybe? Fuck!’ Canelo’s scorn was a physical force. ‘Nobody cares how you see the situation. Your viewpoint doesn’t mean dick. Now beat it! If I were you I’d leave the country. Guillermo wasn’t good with pain. He probably ratted you out when they tortured him. Even if he didn’t, I’m getting an urge to tell the next cop who comes in that you were talking shit about the PVO. I’m not kidding. Nothing’s stopping me and I may not be able to resist the temptation.’

IV

Following his set-to with Canelo, Snow returned to his apartment and packed his bags, shaken by what the bartender had told him and frightened not just by his threat, but by the world of threat, a world of maniacs and bloody politics of which he had, of course, been aware, yet never thought would menace him. He intended to catch the first plane north, wherever it was bound, but as he waited for the taxi and afterward, on the way to the airport, his guilt concerning Guillermo elbowed his paranoia aside and he wished for some way he could make a stab at redemption. He had nary a clue of how to go about this, but perhaps fate conspired to assist him, for on reaching the ticket counter he discovered that the destination of the first available flight was Miami – that provided the platform for the germ of an idea. An hour later, en route to that city of second-rate glitterati and leathery, sun-dried MILFs, he debated whether or not it was worth the risk and concluded that he could safely take a first step and pull back if things went badly. And so, upon landing in Miami on a humid Wednesday afternoon, Snow rented a cheap motel room in Coral Gables and prepared to initiate an affair with Luisa Bazan.

Every second Friday Luisa would check into a suite at the Bon Temps, a boutique hotel in the heart of South Beach, where she would reside until Sunday night. She had invited him to meet her there several times, offering to pay his airfare, and he had made his excuses. Now he hoped she would be amenable to an encounter (lately she had been testy toward him, impatient with the unconsummated relationship) and he also hoped that he could get to her before she secured the services of a cabana boy for the weekend. On the Friday evening after his arrival in Miami he staked himself out in the hotel bar, the Tres Jolie, and waited there without result until after midnight. He had steeled himself against this possibility (her schedule was governed by her husband’s whims) and he was certain she would come eventually – but waiting for another week to pass was more difficult than he presumed and he nearly abandoned his scheme. What, after all, could he learn from Luisa in one weekend that would alter the situation? She would likely have no salient information about the PVO and, even if she did, how could he use it? It was a crazy idea that had seemed for a moment wonderfully crafty and wise, one of many similar strokes of genius that had misdirected the meandering course of his life. The only consideration that stayed him from leaving Miami was that he had nowhere to go. He had blown his job at the private school, he had no friends to speak of in Temalagua, what with Guillermo dead, and no support system now that he had been banned from Club Sexy. No purpose, no real direction. He refused to contemplate the horror of returning to Idaho. That left him with the image of an addled, gray-bearded Snow drinking the dregs of his life away in some misbegotten Central American hell, with ‘Margaritaville’ and ‘The Piña Colada Song’ dominating the soundtrack and a tattooed female lizard by his side, watching for symptoms of terminal weakness that would allow her to rifle through his pockets for money and drugs. This picture in mind, the prospect of a weekend with Luisa Bazan acquired a fresh gloss.

At half past seven on the next Friday evening, Luisa flounced into the Bon Temps, spike heels clacking on the marble floor, her impressive rack rendered more impressive yet by a ruffled blouse that exaggerated every jiggle, blond streaks in her beautifully coiffed hair, and clingy slacks that made her ass seem iconic, like the majestic rump of a horse cast in bronze and mounted by a heroic warrior with a plumed hat and sword. Were she to put on ten or fifteen pounds more she might be able to pose for a fetish magazine, but for now she resembled a voluptuous sexual cartoon. From the reception desk you had an unobstructed view into the Tres Jolie – the bar was crowded with a group of yelping and whooting twenty-somethings having a starter drink before hitting the clubs, and Snow had positioned himself so Luisa would be likely to notice him, hanging his jacket over an adjacent stool to prevent anyone from sitting beside him. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she chatted up the receptionist, a bellboy, the manager. When she spotted him her face emptied and she took a step toward the elevators, as if intending to sneak past the bar without acknowledging him, but then she adopted an expression of haughty reserve and approached to within an arm’s length and said, ‘Craig?’

Snow glanced up and smiled – a well-rehearsed smile of boyish delight to which a dash of sadness was added.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘The school . . . they told me they didn’t know what happened to you?’

He persuaded her to sit and told her an equally well-rehearsed story consisting of half-truths and outright lies. He had, he said, experienced an emotional crisis. Thinking that he would never be able to exorcise the residue of feelings for his old flame, he’d decided that the most honorable thing he could do for Luisa was to remove himself from the picture and, obeying an impulse, he bolted. It was an act of desperation, perhaps of cowardice, for which he apologized. He had wanted to say goodbye, but she was a woman whom you did not say goodbye to easily. If he had come to her, her beauty, her spirit . . . they would have been too great an allure and he would not have been able to sustain the courage of his convictions. En route to Miami, however, he experienced an epiphany. He couldn’t think of anything other than Luisa. Her scent, her mouth, her sensitivity, the very sum of her pervaded his thoughts and nowhere could he find a trace of his obsession with his former love. It was a consummate irony, he said, that by running away from the object of his desire he had dissolved the bonds that prevented him from attaining it, though it was characteristic of the ironies that seemed to rule his existence.

Snow did not believe Luisa had bought into his story. She maintained a cool and disaffected mask throughout and he had been planning to amp up the emotion, to say that he expected nothing of her, he realized how badly he must have hurt her, and he would go his own way if that were her wish, etc. . . . but at this juncture she drew him into a passionate kiss, drowning him in perfume, engaging him with tongue and breasts, eliciting cheers and approbative comments (‘Fuck, yeah!’ and ‘Dude, if you don’t hit that, I will!’ and the like) from the nearby twenty-somethings, some of whom had been eavesdropping. Luisa blushed and led Snow from the bar, accompanied by a smattering of applause, and into the elevator, where unrestrained kissing and fondling supplanted the need to speak, and thence to her suite on the ninth floor, an interior decorator’s wet dream of ‘travertine floors, faux-zebra-skin rugs, Calcutta marble counters, and petrified wood accent tables . . .’ (Out of boredom he had read and re-read the hotel’s brochure while waiting for Luisa.) Amidst this hideous thousand-dollar-per-night splendor the evening held few surprises, yet Snow was unsettled to discover how demanding Luisa was in the bedroom. He felt like a German Shepherd being put through his paces. Harder, faster, deeper. Heel. He supposed her aggression and dominance were due to her enforced docility at home. Thankfully he had procured a supply of Viagra and was able to perform up to her standards, emerging from the training run unscathed apart from a bite mark or two and a sore tongue.

Around noon they went shopping for lingerie, a brief excursion that saw her buy a variety of peignoirs, bra-and-panty sets, and a number of more risqué costumes. Upon their return to the Bon Temps, Luisa put on a fashion show, modeling each and every item, breaking from the process for bouts of coitus interruptus. Their involvement had been so all consuming that it had frustrated Snow’s desire to extract information from her about the PVO, but the fashion show afforded him an opportunity to ask his questions. He had thought that he would have to be subtle in his interrogation, but once he got her started Luisa spoke freely about her husband’s lack of character and his nefarious activities. One typical exchange went as follows:

Luisa (from the next room): Here I come, baby!

Snow: Okay!

(an interval of several seconds)

Snow (hushed): My God.

Luisa: It’s pretty, no?

Snow: That’s not the word I’d use. You look . . . incredible. Amazing. There are no words. Enrique’s eyes are going to bug out when he sees you in this.

Luisa (sternly): Enrique never see me like this. Never. These clothes . . . they are for you. No one else.

Snow: Don’t you have to show him stuff that proves you went shopping?

Luisa: I buy some junk at the airport . . . at the duty free shops. Here. You like me like this?

Snow: Oh, yeah!

Luisa: You ready for me?

Snow: What do you think?

Luisa (giggles): Look. I can slide this over like so. And then I can sit like . . . Ohhh! That’s so nice!

(a minute or two of strenuous breathing)

Luisa (playful): Let me go, baby. I don’t want you to come yet.

Snow: You’re going to fucking kill me.

Luisa (laughs): I’m going to try.

During a viewing of the next outfit:

Snow: I don’t get it. Won’t he be able to tell you bought lingerie from the receipts?

Luisa: Enrique don’t ever look at the receipts. He don’t do nothing. I take care of the receipts, the bank, everything. That’s how I know where he goes on and the presents he buy for women. Puto pendejo! Lambioso! He don’t care if I know about them!

Snow (casually): Where’s he go on these trips?

Luisa: Mexico, sometimes. But mostly he goes to Tres Santos.

Snow: Tres Santos? That’s a little speck of a village. At least it used to be. What’s he do there?

Luisa: It’s where he meets the Jefe. The guy who runs the PVO. How’s this?

Snow: Very sexy. Beautiful. So what’s his name?

Luisa: Jefe. They just call him Jefe ’cause he’s the boss, the chief. He don’t like names. He got lots of secrets and he don’t ever leave Tres Santos. Enrique says he’s a really weird guy. He spend all the time flying inside this big building.

Snow: I’ve never heard of anything like that – flying in a building.

Luisa: I don’t know nothing about it. That’s what Enrique says.

Snow: What’s Enrique do? Does he fly, too?

Luisa: He fucks whores. I can smell them on him when he come home. And I can tell there are many because of the clothes he buy for them. Clothes like this. Different sizes.

Snow: I don’t recall there being any whores in Tres Santos. The population couldn’t support them.

Luisa (impatiently): Well, they got some now and Enrique buys them presents. Why you care? You want to talk about Enrique or you want more of this?

Snow: It’s just I can’t believe he goes with whores when he has a beautiful woman like you.

Luisa (coyly): You like these, eh?

Snow: When you shake them like that, I can’t think of anything else.

And again:

Snow: Maybe he’s a fag. You ever think about that?

Luisa: Enrique?

Snow: Maybe the reason he goes to see the Jefe so often is because they’re fucking.

Luisa: No, not Enrique.

Snow: You say this Jefe’s a weird guy. And powerful. Power can be sexy. Enrique wouldn’t be the first person to switch teams in that kind of situation.

Luisa (uncertainly): Jefe’s got a woman, but . . .

Snow: But what?

Luisa: She’s sick or something. I don’t know.

(a pause)

Luisa: I’m going to try on that black lace thing. What you call it?

Snow: A peignoir.

Luisa: Yeah, I’m going to try that on.

Lastly:

Snow: If you wear that tonight, I’ll rip it to shreds.

Luisa: You can rip up anything you want. We buy more next time.

Snow: You make me so crazy, I might hurt you. Accidentally, of course.

Luisa: You hurt me last night, baby. Did I complain?

(she hums absently)

Snow: You know, the more I think about it, the surer I am that something weird is going on with Enrique and Jefe. You say Jefe lives alone, unprotected? No guards, no soldiers?

Luisa: He don’t need them. Everyone is scared of him. Every time they walk around in the village, the people hide. Enrique say Jefe laughs when he sees that.

Snow: Right, and yet you’re telling me there are a couple of dozen whores in the village. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe the presents Enrique buys, maybe he does that to cover up what’s really going on. What’s he tell you he does with Jefe?

Luisa: They talk about the elections, about they going to get the country back on the right track. Make the army stronger.

Snow: (mutters unintelligibly)

Luisa: Huh?

Snow: Nothing.

And so it went. Sex, driblets of information extracted, more sex, the sole interlude an excursion out onto Collins Avenue and the Mynt Lounge, an exclusive club whose doorman dropped the velvet rope for Luisa, glanced suspiciously at Snow, and ushered them into a surprisingly drab room with black theater carpeting and spacious booths with Mynt green lighting and black walls painted by video projectors (at the moment they were playing what looked to be clips from the SeaWorld aquarium – manta rays and sharks and barracudas, oh my), presided over by a high priest DJ wearing robes adorned with Illuminati-type symbols, mystic eyes, ankhs, radiant objects, who spun anthemic techno at ear-bleeding levels, the dance floor jammed with cavorting models in micro-minis and drug dealers and their clients butt-shaking their way to Jesus or, more likely, the Big Red Dude, and a swank of celebrities, foremost among them in terms of personal power, a black-clad movie director named Brett (a purveyor of cinematic dog shit, in Snow’s view), the Annoying Ego-monster Incarnate with a Van Dyke that reminded him of Guillermo, who swaggered over to their table trailed by his personal assistant, a diminutive clean-shaven imp or familiar also dressed in black and bearing a bottle of designer vodka and three glasses (the imp was not permitted drink, apparently, lest he grow great with self-importance), and following an exchange of cheek kisses with Luisa, the Bearded One inquired of Snow his place in the world, a shouted conversation that evolved into a tiresome supercilious put-down once Brett ascertained that his place was lowly, though Snow wasn’t altogether sure whether or not he had fallen prey to paranoia, because Luisa had earlier that evening slipped him a large blue capsule whose contents wreaked havoc with his judgment and caused the inside of his eyeballs to itch and filled the air with lime spiders and their dark, astonishingly complex webs in which Snow could detect patterns revealing of both past and future, presenting him with the once-in-a-lifetime ability to anticipate the onset of consequential events, but that he wasted on foreseeing the approach of a model with icy eye shadow and breasts like highway emergency cones who slithered up shortly before they headed back to the Bon Temps, insisting that Brett and Luisa do jello shots off her lovely, tanned tummy, as an afterthought including Snow in the invitation, though not the imp – thoroughly disoriented at this juncture, he complied, pretending to be flattered, delighted, eager, but found the experience unpleasant, like licking puke off a still-convulsing corpse, and then lifting his head from this ghoulish feast he saw that the legion of the beautiful damned on the dance floor had broken out sparklers and were waving them around, setting fire to the webs, sending the spiders scuttling for cover, and a booming female voice exhorted everyone to ‘. . . feel free . . . while there’s time to be free!’, words to live by, advice Snow took to heart and went out into the soft warm air lit by the glowing, buzzing, neon cuneiform sign language of the Bauhaus hotels just off the strip, the noise from Collins Avenue – whooping groups of revelers, the purr and growl of muscle cars, sexy and dangerous, dripping with reflected light – a relief by contrast to the din of Mynt, and as they walked he tried to recall a clever phrase he had come up with, something about performing a glitterectomy on the nation, but removed from the environment that had bred and nurtured and defined it, the fundamental relevance of the phrase fizzled out, and Snow along with it.

Sunday evening, after a final copulation, a bouquet of tearful goodbye kisses, Luisa limo-ed off to the airport, promising to return in two weeks’ time. She had paid for the suite until Monday morning and told Snow that he should stay the night and charge whatever he wanted to the room, but cautioned him about over-tipping and, semi-playfully, advised him not to bring up any girls. The admonition was unnecessary – Snow was whipped. He ordered a thirty-dollar cheeseburger, fries, and two Cokes from room service and sat on the balcony, eating, watching combers rolling in, reduced to wavelets by the time they hit shore. Too tired to think, he lay down on the bed around eight-thirty and slept until one. South Beach would be still going strong and he briefly considered rejoining the party. Ten years before he would have, but now he went to the refrigerator and opened a bottle of water and stood at the kitchen counter, attempting to concentrate on the big issues: what next, whither, and so forth. He noticed a shadowy bulk at the end of the counter and switched on a light. A striped gift box – inside was a camp shirt he had admired in a shop window and a pill bottle containing about twenty blue capsules and a note. The note was in Spanish and read:

I can’t carry this through customs. For God’s sake, don’t take more than one at a time.

It was signed with a lipstick imprint and a cartoon drawing of a tubby little heart.

Snow pocketed the pills. He was still getting dark webs in the corners of his vision from the previous night. Distended or broken capillaries, he figured. But there might come a time when a blue pill would seem an appealing option. Feeling vacant, lethargic, he rode the elevator to the lobby, staring at his reflection in the mirrored walls, and went out to the deserted pool area and lay back in a lounge chair. A thin layer of clouds diminished the stars. The rectangle of placid aquamarine water lit by underwater spots and surrounded by empty white chairs complemented his mental state. He closed his eyes and thought about Yara, Guillermo, Tres Santos, redemption, but arrived at no clean answer to the question they posed. Now that he knew something, it seemed he understood less than before. One thing was clear, however. None of his passions were American and perhaps he was no longer an American but a citizen of some international slum, a country of losers without borders or passports or principles. The idea that he had wasted his life brought forth a self-pitying tear. He supposed everyone felt this way at one time or another, even people with lofty accomplishments to their credit, yet they had some basis for redemption, a foundation upon which to build a new life, whereas he did not.

‘Hey!’ said a voice above him.

A skinny kid of thirteen or fourteen in baggy swim trunks and a navy blue T-shirt peered at him through strings of long brown hair. ‘Is it too late to go in the pool?’

‘I think so, but I don’t know for sure,’ Snow said. ‘You could dive in and find out.’

‘My dad’ll kick my ass if I get into trouble.’

‘You down here with your folks?’

‘My dad and his girlfriend.’ The kid flopped onto a chair beside Snow – his lugubrious, bored-shitless look was the same that had dominated Snow’s expressions during his teens, and he had a cultivated flatness of affect that armored him against potential human interactions . . . and yet he appeared to want company.

‘How’s that going?’ Snow asked.

‘It fucking sucks.’

The writing on the kid’s T-shirt was in small lower-case white letters and read:

i went with my father to south beach, the home of wicked, beautiful, diseased women with unnatural desires, and all i caught was this lousy t-shirt

‘I like your shirt,’ said Snow.

The kid glanced down at his chest and sniffed. ‘My dad had it printed. He thinks it’s funny.’

‘But you don’t, huh? Why you wearing it?’

‘Because if I wear it long enough, like every day, it’ll start pissing him off.’

The water in the pool lapped against the tiles, the distant surf hissed, and a breeze stirred the chlorine smell.

‘How come you were crying?’ the kid asked.

‘Huh?’

‘You were crying when I came over.’

‘Oh . . . yeah.’

‘How come?’

‘I was remembering this old movie.’

‘Which one?’

‘Bladerunner.’

No sign of recognition registered on the kid’s face.

‘You ever see it?’ Snow asked.

‘Nah. What’s it about?’

‘These people, they’re called replicants. They’re clones, they only have a lifespan of a few years. Twelve, I think. Which makes them angry. They do all this dangerous work in outer space, in the far-flung corners of the galaxy. They fight humanity’s battles. They’re better than people. Stronger and better-looking. So like I said, they’re angry, and a few of them return to earth to try and learn if they can get an extension. Have a longer life, you know.’

‘What happens to them?’

‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

‘I probably won’t ever see it. I’m more into games.’

‘They die,’ said Snow. ‘There’s no cure, no remedy, and the bladerunners, these special cops who hunt runaway replicants, they kill them.’

The kid thought this over. ‘You’d think they’d name the movie after the replicants.’

‘Yeah, you’d think. I guess Bladerunner sounded sexier.’

‘It’s kind of sad,’ said the kid after a few beats. ‘But I wouldn’t cry about it.’

‘The saddest part is the replicants aren’t just stronger and better-looking. They live more intensely than regular people, even the cops that shoot them.’

‘I knew a guy who got shot by the cops once, but he was an old sleazebag.’ The kid stripped off his shirt. ‘Fuck it!’

He did a racing dive into the pool and swam furiously yet efficiently, showing off several strokes, with an especially strong butterfly. Snow refocused on his troubles, but his thoughts kept returning to Rutger Hauer, tears in rain, and when Daryl Hannah killed the toymaker. Romantic bullshit. He wondered if the book was better. The kid hauled himself out of the pool, dripping, and sat down, gathering his hair into a ponytail and squeezing water from it.

‘You didn’t stay in long,’ said Snow.

The kid acted surlier than he had before swimming, as if his nifty strokes had proved a point. ‘I didn’t want to get caught.’

‘You’re a pretty good swimmer.’

‘I’m all right.’

He picked up his T-shirt and slung it over his shoulder, preparing to leave.

‘I’ve got a problem,’ Snow said, struck by the irrational notion that the kid might have answers, that he had been sent by God or fate or a controlling interstellar agency. ‘A decision I’m struggling with. That’s why I was so emotional earlier. It wasn’t about the movie.’

This put the kid on the alert. ‘Yeah?’

Without going into much detail, Snow sketched out his problem.

‘You’re joking, right?’ said the kid snottily. ‘Take a shit job in some dead-ass place or go have a big weird adventure in another country? Where’s the decision? I’d be down there already.’

Snow didn’t care for the kid giving him attitude. ‘If your old man let you go, you mean.’

‘Fuck you, you pussy!’

The kid hurried away toward the hotel.

‘Some oracle,’ said Snow.

V

Under a threatening sky, with the bumpy, leaden underbellies of the clouds passing low overhead, winded from altitude (eight thousand feet) and exertion, Snow sat on a ridge top high above Tres Santos, eating a chocolate bar and peering at the village through binoculars. Except for two striking additions, the place was as he remembered – an impoverished outpost of humanity whose sorrows were obscured by distance, lent the illusion of tranquility by a lack of definition. Tres Santos was laid out on a relatively flat stretch of ground bounded by two rocky hills, their lower slopes forested with pine, the boughs ghost-dressed with rags and streamers of morning mist. A red dirt road with ruts brimming with rainwater angled away between the worn hills, leading toward the village of Nebaj. Whitewashed one- and two-room houses ranged a cross-hatching of muddy streets, many having a vegetable plot and banana trees for a back yard, and there were wandering pigs, goats, a cantina with a hand-lettered sign above the entrance, Cantina Alhambra, and a couple of dinged-up mini-trucks, Toyotas, both painted a bilious yellow. Surmounting the hill to the east stood the most impressive of the additions – a stubby white building without windows or doors or any feature whatsoever, jutting up from the summit like a strange, geometrically precise tooth from a moldering green jaw. At the base of the hill, about one hundred feet from the edge of the village, was a long single-story structure of pink concrete block with multiple doors and windows – it brought to mind an elementary school annex.

He replaced the binoculars in their case and finished the chocolate bar. An updraft made him shiver. He pulled the cowl of his sweatshirt over his head and zipped up his windbreaker, wishing the overcast would lift. He’d forgotten how cold it could get in the highlands. He shouldered his backpack and started down the hill, losing sight of the village once he was among the pines. With every step he felt lighter, more buoyant, as though the stupidity of what he was doing, the sheer pointlessness, somehow allayed his fears. Near the bottom of the hill he caught sight of Tres Santos again and his resolve faltered, yet not until he set foot on the dirt streets did his pace slow and weakness invade his limbs. He felt as though he were going against an invisible tide flowing in the streets, striving to bear him back among the pines. From his previous visit he surmised that the men of the village were working in the fields that terraced the gentler slopes on the opposite side of the hills, but now their absence seemed evidence of desolation. The women, who normally would wave or peek from their doorways, hid behind curtains and the one person who came forth to greet him, a naked toddler gnawing on a pulped mango, was snatched back into the shadows by his mother. No music, no chatter. Tension was a stench into which the smells of ordure and diesel fuel and cookery were folded.

The Cantina Alhambra was dingy and cramped, with plaster walls adorned by a religious calendar and the framed photo of an elderly Mayan man in a shabby suit coat posing stiffly for the camera – a black crepe ribbon cut diagonally across a corner of the frame. Three wooden tables and eight chairs were scattered about, and fencing off the rear of the room was a crudely carpentered counter behind which stood a pretty girl of fifteen or sixteen with an impassive air, glossy wings of hair falling down her back, and strong Mayan features. She wore a white huipil with a pattern of embroidered roses across her breasts. At her rear was a doorway covered by a red-and-white checkered plastic curtain. She spoke neither English nor Spanish, only Mam, the language of the region, and Snow was forced to pantomime his desire for coffee. She produced a bottle of beer and a dusty glass. Snow decided it wasn’t worth the effort to attempt a more accurate definition of his needs. He carried the beer to one of the tables and sat with his back against the wall, looking out at the empty street, now and again glancing at the girl, who swiped idly at the countertop with a rag.

Sipping the tepid beer failed to improve his outlook. He’d wait here fifteen minutes, he decided, no more, and then walk about the village, see what developed. And then, depending on his state of mind, he would either approach the pink building – the whorehouse, he suspected – or he would get the hell out of Dodge. At the moment he leaned toward the latter. He had satisfied his commitment, he told himself. It had been without any real purpose, a romantic gesture, a sop to his conscience, a token idiocy. Now that he had come to Tres Santos and found nothing of consequence, seen nothing that bore upon Guillermo or the skull or anything in his past, he could go home with a clear conscience.

Wherever home might be.

He lifted the bottle to his lips and a slim, pale, diminutive man emerged from the back room, pushing aside the plastic curtain. In his early thirties by the look of him, the same height as the girl, at least a head shorter than Snow, with barbered dark brown hair and a loose-fitting, button-less white shirt woven of coarse cloth. He had a TV actor’s plastic beauty, a clever symmetry of feature that appeared to be the work of a surgeon whose intent had been to create the face of a male doll with sharp cheekbones and a square jaw, yet one capable of simulating a feminine sensitivity, this implied by the largeness of his eyes and the fullness of his lips. He brushed the girl’s hair aside and kissed the side of her neck, putting a stamp on the nature of their relationship. He nodded pleasantly to Snow, rested his elbows on the counter, and said, ‘Doing some exploring, are you?’

Snow, flustered by the man’s sudden intrusion, aware of who he must be, said, ‘I’m sorry. What?’

‘Exploring.’ The man indicated Snow’s backpack. ‘Hiking. Taking in the scenery.’

‘Oh, right. I’m heading for Nebaj.’

‘Nebaj? What’s the attraction? Nebaj is a shithole.’

‘There’s a bus . . . to the city.’

‘Ah!’ The man stepped from behind the counter and, without invitation, joined Snow at his table. Snow was alarmed to have him so near. The cantina seemed more cramped than before, as if the man occupied a much greater space than in actuality he did. His movements were deft, precise, yet theatrical in their precision, and his eyes looked to be set at a peculiar angle within their orbits, canted slightly downward, investing his stare with an unnerving flatness. He flicked his hand toward Snow’s bottle and said, ‘A bit early for beer, no?’

‘I wanted coffee, but I didn’t know how to ask.’

The man spoke peremptorily to the girl, who vanished into the back room, and then said brightly, ‘Coffee’s on the way. Care for some eggs, some tortillas?’

‘No, that’s . . . I’m fine.’

‘Itzel can fix you something. It’s not a problem.’

‘I’m not really hungry.’

‘Well, if you change your mind, it’s no problem.’

‘Thanks.’

Snow couldn’t place the man’s accent. It was definitely not Temalaguan. Possibly some place farther to the south. Argentina or Chile.

‘You know,’ the man said. ‘You look familiar.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think you look familiar to me? That’s quite a presumption.’

‘I meant, I don’t believe we’ve met.’

‘I didn’t say we’d met.’ The man’s voice held an ounce of irritation and Snow had the impression that he was seething with anger, that anger was his base emotion.

Itzel returned with a tray bearing a jar of instant coffee, another of Cremora, a cup of hot water and a spoon. Chickens squabbled out in the street. A pig trotted by, emitting soft, rhythmic grunts. The coffee restored Snow somewhat and he hunted about for a conversation starter, something that would lighten the mood.

‘You’ve been in my head,’ the man said.

Snow was caught off guard, perplexed by this peculiar phrasing.

‘You or someone very like you,’ the man went on. ‘I’ve been trying to remember.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course not. Why should you?’

Snow’s sense of unease spiked. ‘Look, I . . .’

‘You know who I am, don’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ said Snow, uncertain whether or not he could pull off an outright lie.

‘So who am I?’

‘I figure you’re the guy who lives in the big house on the hill.’

‘And you believe that because . . . ?’

‘You’re obviously not from around here and yet you act like you’re in charge.’

The man chuckled. ‘I believe you know more about me than that.’

Sitting up straight, Snow said, ‘I’m not sure what you think I know, or why you’re fucking with me. I’m just going to drink my coffee and move along.’

‘That’s a real shame. Visitors are at a premium here.’

Snow’s eyes went to Itzel. She stood with her head down, hands spread on the countertop, unmoving, as if bracing herself.

‘You ought to stay a while,’ the man said. ‘I’ll put you up at my place.’

‘That’s kind of you, but I can’t afford to miss my bus.’

‘Tres Santos may not look like much, but it offers a variety of attractions for the casual tourist. Of course the main attraction is . . .’ He performed a florid gesture, as though presenting himself to an audience. ‘Me. People come from all over to ask for my advice. I counsel them, and sometimes I put on a little show. An entertainment. It’s only an exercise routine, but I’m told it’s unique.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Snow gulped down coffee. ‘Wish I had the time.’

Without warning, the man hauled Snow’s pack over to his side of the table.

‘Hey!’ Snow made a grab for the pack, but the man fended him off. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Having a peek inside.’

The man unzipped the top of the pack and began to inspect the contents.

Snow froze – then, thinking a lack of response would lend substance to the man’s suspicion that he, Snow, knew more than he had admitted, he reached for the pack again. The man caught his wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together, causing Snow to cry out. He struggled to break free, but the man’s grip was irresistible.

‘Please don’t do that again,’ the man said, letting him go.

Snow put pressure on his wrist to quell the pain and gazed out into the street. The gray sky and reddish mud, the puddles, the houses and the portion of the hillside framed by the doorway seemed to flutter, as if all the air and every object within view were made of the same inconstant stuff and troubled by a single disturbance. He was in deep shit, now. A thrill passed through a nerve in his jaw.

The man riffled through Snow’s passport. ‘Snow,’ he said, and repeated the word a couple of times, as if amused by it. ‘George Snow.’

‘Craig,’ said Snow, speaking out of reflex.

‘It says here, George.’

‘I don’t like George. My middle name is Craig. That’s what I go by.’

‘I think George is better for you,’ said the man indifferently.

He pulled out a filthy work shirt from the pack, deposited it on the floor, and extricated a pair of jeans.

‘It’s just dirty laundry,’ Snow said, and rubbed his wrist.

‘So it would appear.’ The man searched the pockets of the jeans. ‘What’s this?’

He fingered out a pill bottle, opened it, and shook three blue capsules out into his palm. ‘These aren’t prescription, are they?’

Alarmed, first by the fact that he had brought the pills through customs unawares, and secondly because he feared the man would force him to take them, Snow finally said, ‘A woman gave them to me in Miami. I didn’t realize I had the bottle with me.’

‘It’s contraband? Drugs? Are they any good?’

‘If you like to hallucinate.’

he man studied the pills and then popped them into his mouth. After a swift internal debate, realizing that if the man felt he had been poisoned he might punish him, Snow elected to err on the side of caution.

‘If I were you I’d bring those things back up quick,’ he said. ‘The woman who gave me them, she said not to do more than one.’

The man shook out two more pills and gulped them down.

‘Jesus! You need to stick a finger down your throat. Trust me, that shit will fuck with your head!’

‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen to me.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve done a shitload of drugs and one of those pills messed me up for a more than a day.’

The man seemed to take offense at this statement and said defiantly, ‘I have a strong resistance to drugs. I could swallow them all and it wouldn’t hurt me.’

Despite the man’s confidence, Snow was unconvinced, but there was nothing for it other than to hope he knew what he was doing.

‘If they don’t affect you,’ Snow asked, ‘why take them?’

‘Sometimes they affect me – they just don’t harm me.’ The man lost interest in the pack, pushing it aside with his foot. ‘Your coffee must be getting cold. Would you care for more?’

Anything to delay, thought Snow. He needed time to think how to deal with this teensy fucker. He said he would and held up his cup to attract Itzel’s attention.

‘I have better coffee at my place.’ The man scraped back his chair. ‘Bring your pack. I’ll have someone wash your clothes.’

Hoping for guidance, Snow glanced at Itzel once again, but her eyes were glued to the countertop . . . perhaps a message in itself. He thought about taking a swing at the man, catching him by surprise, but doubted that would end well. Despite his stature, the man’s strength hinted at extreme physical competence, so running was probably out of the question.

The man preceded him into the empty street and established a brisk pace, heading for the pink building, but stopped abruptly and, putting a hand on Snow’s chest, said, ‘You know who I am. Don’t deny it.’

Snow believed that if he admitted to any knowledge, it would be a fatal misstep. He could feel his heart beating against the man’s palm. ‘I’ve never laid eyes on you before today.’

The man struck him in the face – it was a light slap of the kind used to wake someone up, but his hand felt like solid bone and the blow twisted Snow’s head around and made him take a backward step.

‘I think you have,’ said the man.

‘I swear, I’ve never seen you! I don’t know anything about you!’

The man seemed dispirited, as if he had been seeking not an admission, but rather had hoped to learn something. He started walking again, The gray light flattened things out – the hill with its two buildings resembled a painted backdrop.

‘You can call me Jefe,’ the man said. ‘That’s what everyone calls me, but it’s not who I am.’

Women peered from the windows of the pink building as they approached – one of them beckoned, soliciting a visit – yet Jefe paid her no mind and entered a door with an intercom mounted on the wall beside it. Beyond lay a tunnel with concrete walls and a ceiling less than a foot higher than Snow’s head, lit for its entire length by fluorescent fixtures. He pictured electric carts rolling along the tunnel, conveying grim uniformed men with side arms and secret orders and missile codes toward a command center. He kept an eye on Jefe, watching for a sign that Luisa’s pills were having an effect, but the man’s walk held steady and his conversation was terse and on point.

After three or four minutes, by Snow’s estimation, they came to a large paneled room with indirect lighting, a burgundy carpet, and three doors leading, he assumed, to bedrooms, kitchen, and so on. Its central feature was a long banquet table set about with high-backed chairs, the dining surface fashioned from an ancient church door carved with a complex scene that illustrated a typically Temalaguan confusion of cosmologies – anguished men and woman supplicating the angels who hovered just beyond reach, appearing both disinterested in their suffering and unaware of the doings of the less well-defined beings above them who looked to be doing a portage across the heavens with some kind of solar vessel. A mahogany sideboard stood against one wall, supporting an array of liquor bottles, ice buckets, and glasses, and mounted above it was a flat screen TV. Four photographic prints in aluminum frames hung on the opposite wall, each depicting a spectacular cloud formation. For all the luxuriousness of its appointments, the room stood two-thirds empty, far too spacious for such a paucity of furnishings, and this indicated to Snow that while its primary inhabitant might have an awareness of interior decoration, he was seriously myopic as regarded an overall aesthetic.

Jefe told him to have a seat at the table, spoke into an intercom mounted on the wall, and then said to Snow, ‘I’m going upstairs for an hour or two.’ He opened the door to reveal a stairwell. ‘Yara will bring coffee and whatever else you require.’

Snow had nurtured a faint hope that Yara had survived the disappearance of the cult, but that had been wishful thinking and now, hearing her name, her presence alluded to so casually, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his head, obliterating his ability to reason. Once Jefe had gone he stood up from the table and immediately sat back down, dizzy to the point of passing out. He stared at the two doors at the far end of the room, shards of memory falling through his mental sky, and when a woman entered, wearing a shapeless gray smock (a nightgown, his initial impression), moving stiffly, slowly, her hair close cropped, a monastic look, lines of strain on her face deeper than those he would have predicted a thirty-year-old to have . . . and when he recognized her to be Yara, his Yara, miraculously alive and still beautiful despite the attrition of time, he started up from his chair again, intending to embrace her, a great joy building, enfolding him like a garment he had prepared in anticipation of this day yet never thought to wear . . . but then he halted his approach. Her expression betrayed no trace of any kindred emotion, not an ounce of welcome or happiness. She wrangled a chair back from the table and collapsed into it, breathing shallowly. After collecting herself, she said, ‘You have some things to wash?’

‘Yara,’ he said. ‘It’s me . . . Craig.’

‘I know who you are. Show me your clothes and I’ll wash them.’

Baffled by her response, he asked what he had done to anger her.

‘Apart from running out on me?’ She sniffed. ‘Nothing.’

‘I tried to persuade you to come with me.’

‘You should have tried harder. You could at least have told me you were leaving. You didn’t have to sneak away.’

‘You don’t . . .’

‘I hunted for you everywhere. People thought I was demented, I went on about you so. You should have told me. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you and we could have said a proper goodbye.’

‘It was all . . .’ He gave his head a frustrated shake. ‘You don’t understand how much I beat myself up for abandoning you, but I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘I guess I shouldn’t blame you for being yourself.’

That stung him, but he reminded himself that these emotional post-mortems unfailingly began with a litany of bitterness.

‘You’re not truly at fault,’ she said. ‘You weren’t a part of what was going on. But it hurt and I hated you for a long time. Seeing you again brings back a great deal of anger and heart-sickness, but I suppose it’s just residual emotion.’

‘Yara, listen. I . . .’

‘Don’t bother. It’s all in the past.’

‘Maybe for you. It’s been my present for the last thirteen years.’

She laughed humorlessly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a romantic at heart!’

‘Listen to me for a minute, okay?’

‘If you’ve come here thinking you can rekindle our affair, forget it. That part of my life is over.’

‘How can that be?’ he asked. ‘You’re still young, you’re a beautiful woman.’

She liked hearing that, he could tell, yet tried to hide the fact, thinning her lips in disapproval.

‘I didn’t come here for any reason I can name,’ he said. ‘I assumed you were dead. I may have hoped to see you again, but the hope wasn’t real. It was . . .’

‘Stop it!’

She slapped the table and, as if cued by that percussive sound, a mechanical grinding issued from the stairwell, growing louder with each passing second, impeding their conversation.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Snow asked.

‘He’s flying. Shut the door.’

Snow did as instructed, reducing the noise by half, and returned to the table.

‘Did you notice there aren’t any men in the village?’ Yara asked, cutting off his unspoken question. ‘Within a month after we came to Tres Santos, Jefe had killed them all. Some tried to run, he seemed to know when they ran, and where, and he hunted them down. He kills every man who comes here except for the PVO guys, and he’ll kill them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. I actually believe he gets along with men better than he does with women, but it’s like he’s obeying some beastly imperative, wiping out the competition.’ She paused. ‘He’s probably going to kill you.’

Snow wanted to make light of what she had told him, but could not.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ Yara said. ‘I don’t know how you found this place, but you knew about the PVO, didn’t you? You must have realized you were taking a risk by coming here.’

‘There must be some way of dealing with him. What should I do?’

Yara’s face, which had softened a little, walled over again. ‘I can’t help you.’

Snow was hard put to think of anything to say.

‘Do you want me to explain?’ Yara asked. ‘Can you listen without interrupting, without telling me I’m being ridiculous? I don’t have the patience for that anymore. There’s a lot I don’t understand, but what I know, I know.’

‘How long have I got?’

‘Chances are you’re safe for today.’ She brushed strands of hair from her eyes and, with no small degree of malice, said, ‘Even if I’m wrong, we have time. He’ll be flying for hours.’

‘As you recall,’ Yara began, ‘when we were together I used to go into the city to meet with various men, passing along Griaule’s instructions and delivering the money I’d collected from Club Sexy and other sources. I recalled little of those meetings, because I was under his thrall. But soon I realized the money was being used to establish the PVO, to fund their arms purchases and recruitment campaigns . . . even the construction of this complex. It was completed years before Jefe and I took up residence, and built according to a design I imparted to the architect. Of course I have no recollection of this, but I’ve been assured that was the case.

‘As the party grew in strength and numbers, the job of fund-raising was taken over by men who could operate with more efficiency than I, but I continued to serve as a conduit between the dragon and the party. It might seem odd that a woman could function as the putative leader of a male-dominated organization, especially once the party was on a solid footing. At any rate, it seemed odd to me. Yet I came to understand that extremist groups depend on a mystical element, an occult component, to lend gravitas to their actions. I was for the PVO that mystical element, the Virgin Mary who in effect gave birth to their messiah, so I was granted immunity from their prejudices, protected from their violence. Whenever a man crossed the line with me, as happened more than once, the party dealt with him mercilessly.

‘When you lived with me I wasn’t altogether certain about things. There were times I doubted my sanity and your doubts, your accusations, affected me more than I let on. Had you stayed, I might well have fled with you, because I was having a crisis of faith. I questioned the dragon’s reality and, in moments during which I was satisfied that he did exist and was not simply a function of my madness, I questioned his plan. Getting involved with the PVO was the antithesis of what I wanted for myself, for the country. After you left, however, my communication with the dragon sharpened. Previously I went into that little bone chamber, I went to sleep and emerged with vague messages. Now those messages came into my head while I was awake and were more defined. I could sense their flavor and configuration. It became evident that the PVO was only a step in Griaule’s plan. They would protect the dragon reborn until he no longer needed them. For a while I believed he had brought you and me together for some purpose. To test my faith, perhaps. But I know now that was a conceit. Disembodied, his will was weak and he required years to shape people to his purposes. I overestimated his influence where we were concerned.

‘Along with sharpened communication I experienced painful side effects that limited my mobility. Before long I was unable to venture into the city and I concentrated my efforts on the adherents, lecturing them on my enhanced appreciation of the dragon’s nature, counseling them and presiding over events like the one that frightened you away. You had a right to be afraid, as it turned out, but after each of them I felt enraptured, understanding that someday they would result in the achievement of our goal. We had additions to our community, and subtractions. Colonel de Lugo died, but not before he recruited his replacement. That was the way of it. Some left, others arrived, and little by little we approached the right mix of people that would enable the miracle to occur. I became so involved with the dragon, I was scarcely aware of my own life. One morning I woke to the knowledge that this would be the day. Everything was so sharp, so clear. I knew precisely what to do. From the first moment when the dragon touched my mind, I recognized that I would be the instrument of his renewal, but not until then did I fully comprehend the nature of that renewal, the act of transubstantiation it demanded. In this regard, the adherents had been closer to the truth than I. He may have whispered a promise to them, a guarantee that they would live on in him, and for all I know they do live on. But he made no such promise to me and I thought I was to die that morning.

‘I gathered the adherents in front of the skull and brought them into a trance state. The dragon’s mind and my own were in perfect unity, interpenetrating. His thoughts were mine, and mine his. What was about to happen might be seen as horrific, an event to rival Jonestown, as you had said, but all I saw was the perfection of Griaule’s design and I felt exalted to be part of it. The air grew warm, uncomfortably warm. Several people fainted – I remember fretting about them, but my main worry was whether they needed to be conscious for the miracle to take place. And then my clarity went away, my mind clouded over. When I regained my senses I discovered that I was wandering in the jungle, far from the skull. It was still hot and seconds later a burst of heat boiled through the trees, like the heat from an explosion, knocking me off my feet. I made my way to the clearing as rapidly as I could manage. The shelters had been flattened and the adherents were gone. The skull, too, was gone, yet the trees and the bushes were virtually undamaged, and there was no sign of scorching or charring. I was distraught. The deaths of hundreds of people, no matter I had anticipated this outcome . . . how could I feel otherwise? But my feelings may have been due less to grief than to the fact that I had not witnessed the miracle. All those years laboring to create it, and I had missed it! Where was the result? Had nothing happened apart from a mass disappearance? I looked around the clearing, hoping to find some evidence as to what had taken place. I think I was on the verge of losing my mind. I stumbled about, going first one direction and then another, beating aside the brush, becoming frantic, until at last I spotted Jefe. He lay curled up on a patch of emerald moss, close to where the jawbone had rested. A beautiful little man, naked and perfect. I had believed the dragon would be reborn in his original form, but I knew him at once. The sight was so serene and lovely, it was like a balm to me. It had the quality of myth. His milky skin against the oval of vivid moss, his fists clenched like a newborn infant’s. I went to him and cradled him in my arms. He woke to my touch and gazed about in confusion, unable to speak, clinging to me. Once he was able to stand I helped him out to the road. Shortly thereafter the PVO showed up and brought us to Tres Santos.’

Yara drew a deep breath and released it slowly.

‘In the years since,’ she continued, ‘he’s made unbelievable progress. He’s learned to speak and perform as a human. It wasn’t learning, really, I don’t think. I’d teach him one thing and within a day or two he’d display a complete spectrum of behaviors. As if we’d given him a key and he unlocked a door behind which a store of knowledge was hidden. Yet his instincts are different from ours and he doesn’t understand us very well. He assists the PVO with their schemes – he has an amazing grasp of politics and is a brilliant tactician. He has no memory of his life prior to his rebirth, yet he does recall the plan for political dominance he developed and he knows something is not as it should be. He talks about a recurring dream, a vision in which he stands in an arena before thousands of people and says that when that dream becomes reality he will undergo a change – from what I gather he’s referring to a second alchemical act, a more radical transformation, one that will enable him to regain his original form and fly as once he did, without the need for mechanical aids.’ She laughed merrily, a laugh that seemed misplaced to Snow. ‘He’d spend all his time flying if I let him. Neither the PVO nor I have been in a hurry to illuminate him about his past. Rushing the process would damage him, I believe, and their concern is fueled by a desire to keep him ignorant and under their control. They think that once he’s done his duty for them, they’ll get rid of him. They haven’t accepted the fact that their control is limited . . . if it exists at all.’

Yara winced as she adjusted her posture. ‘That’s the story in brief. It sounds mad, I know, but . . .’ She shrugged.

It did sound mad, classically delusional, and Snow would have liked to pass it off as madness, but sufficient evidence existed to suggest that it was not and he believed to a certainty that he was in imminent danger. He had only half-listened to much of her account, consumed by worries about his future, but one sentence in particular had attracted his notice: ‘He’d spend all his time flying if I let him.’ From this he deduced that Yara was capable of influencing Jefe.

‘So your position here is . . . what?’ he asked. ‘Surrogate mother?’

‘In the beginning, yes, that would have been an accurate description of my function. But as he’s matured I’ve become more of a nurse, a servant. He turns to me for advice now and then, and he trusts me. I doubt that’ll change.’

‘Isn’t there anything you can tell me that’ll help with my situation? You must know some way of playing him. What buttons to push.’

‘Flattery,’ she said. ‘He responds to flattery, but he’s so mercurial, so volatile . . . it may prolong things, but sooner or later he’ll turn on you.’

‘Then I guess my best bet is to run.’

‘Don’t!’ She stretched out a hand as if to hold him back, and then seemed flustered by her show of concern. ‘When someone tries to escape him, he’s spectacularly cruel. They, the PVO . . . they set snipers in the hills to watch him. He found out and chased them down and tore them limb from limb.’

‘You saw this?’

‘I saw what he did to the man who gave the snipers their orders. Two other PVO officials witnessed the murder as well. And yet they still believe they can control him.’

‘Can he be? Controlled?’

‘You’re asking if I can control him? I don’t want to. He’s the only chance we’ve got.’

The old political argument again – any change is good, whatever the risk. It was proof against logic, but nonetheless Snow said, ‘What about the cost? He’s already slaughtered the men in the village and who knows how many more. Next he . . .’

‘What do you know about costs? I’ve got more than eight hundred souls on my conscience, and many of them friends. I’ve known for years that I’m damned. I want him to go through another transformation, even if thousands are killed in the process. He has no real depth of interest in us. Once he’s able to fly he’ll go his own way and leave us to sort things out. The PVO won’t survive his absence – they’re incompetent. I know this for a fact because I helped to recruit their leadership. The country will explode, the army will be in chaos, without direction, and we’ll have the opportunity for reform in Temalagua.’

‘If things are as you say . . .’

‘They are!’

‘It’s a shaky goddamn premise. What if you’re wrong? What if he doesn’t go his own way, or if this second transformation is a fantasy? You’ll be handing over your country to a fucking monster.’

‘We’ve had worse.’ Her voice became less strident and a note of tenderness crept in. ‘You don’t know him like I do. He doesn’t care about any human thing, about revenge or politics. They’re a means to an end, that’s all. Admittedly it’s an end he can’t yet see, because he’s in the dark about his past. He doesn’t remember the centuries he spent paralyzed on a plain, or much of anything before that morning when he woke in the jungle – but he’s obeying his instincts, acting out the behaviors he learned when he was a dragon. All he really wants to do is fly about and fuck female dragons. You of all people should understand that.’

Ignoring the dig, Snow said, ‘He’s going to be pretty pissed off when he discovers there aren’t any female dragons.’

‘You don’t know that there aren’t.’

‘You’re talking about those old wives tales? The ones that claim dragons are still living in Argentina?’ He made a derisive sound, expelling a jet of air between his lips. ‘Or maybe Oz.’

‘You see? This is what you always do. We can’t have a conversation without you ridiculing me. You’re right! I don’t have all the answers and I may be proved wrong in the end. But I’ve been right so far, haven’t I?’

The mechanical noise overhead rose in pitch and they sat for half a minute without speaking.

‘You could help me if you wanted,’ said Snow churlishly.

Yara sighed impatiently and said, ‘What did you do after you left me?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Humor me. Where did you go after you left Temalagua?’

‘Home.’

‘And what did you do there?’

‘I got a job. Wrote a little.’

‘I imagine there were quite a few women in your life. And drugs.’

‘Yeah, you know. But mainly I thought about you. I realized . . .’

‘So you had a job, probably something that just allowed you to get by. You wrote some things no one ever saw . . .’

‘I published some stuff!’

‘And you fucked around. You lived the same kind of life in Idaho you lived here. That’s the man you expect me to sacrifice everything for? If I could help you, which I can’t, that’s the man I should give up . . .’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘No? You just admitted it.’

‘Superficially, yeah. That’s how it was. I was accustomed to that kind of life. But there were other things going on with me.’

‘You’ve got hidden depths? Is that what you’re telling me? You’ve grown a soul? Who cares? You expect me to toss aside the one chance we have of getting rid of the real villains? And I should do this because of the way you once made me feel?’ She waved her hand about as if dispersing a swarm of gnats. ‘Fuck it! Enough! I have to wash your clothes!’

She levered herself up from the chair, biting her lip, and stood, wobbly, trying to stabilize herself. He took hold of her elbow and, obeying an old reflex, she leaned into his shoulder. He slipped an arm about her waist – despite her infirmity it was supple as ever. She tensed, her breath quickened, and he found himself wondering how long it had been since she’d had a lover.

That evening Yara ushered Snow into a narrow corridor off the dining area ranged by a series of small bedrooms – like cells, really – each with plain concrete walls, a bath, and no lock on the door. She installed him in one of these and told him she was down the hall if he needed anything. He started to say that what he needed was her honesty, her help, but if her help were forthcoming, a direct approach was not the way to achieve it. Subtle pressure such as he had been applying ever since their initial conversation, reminding her of their golden moments years before, touching her as often as possible and sowing doubts about Jefe whenever he saw an opening, yet doing so slyly, indirectly – that was his best hope of influencing her. He knew he had made some progress, but how much longer could he afford to be subtle?

Lying in bed, he gave the situation a turn or two, but soon dozed off, waking some time later (an hour or two later, judging by his stupor) with the impression that someone else was in the room. He slit his eyes and saw a man standing beside the bed – just his trouser legs – and pretended to be asleep. The seconds slogged past. His circulatory system whined, his heart thudded and then he felt the man’s breath warm on his cheek. Recalling Yara’s talk about Jefe’s savagery, picturing him squatting beside the bed, sniffing out his fright and deliberating his fate, it was all he could do to refrain from shouting and scrambling away – yet he kept his eyes shut and his respiration normal until he heard the faint click of the door closing. Still terrified, he went over to the sink and splashed cold water onto his face. The mechanisms of his thought were gummed up, gears clotted with a sludge of fear. He pulled on his jeans and, after making certain the coast was clear, with no plan in mind, a frightened man making for the known, the familiar, he padded along the hall toward Yara’s room. Her door was open half an inch. He eased it wider.

She sat naked upon her bed, applying ointment to her pale skin, to the edges of what appeared in the dim yellow light of a reading lamp to be dark green slashes (not unlike a tiger’s stripes in form) that curved along her legs and torso and back. She was fleshier than she had been in her teens, her breasts larger and more pendulous, her pubic hair unruly, yet she was still beautiful, exquisitely proportioned, and thus after understanding that the dark green areas were some sort of growth, a hard, unyielding substance similar to the diamond-shaped convexity centering her tattoo, her tramp stamp, the likeness of a dragon’s scale, an implant she’d said . . . after understanding this he felt a mix of revulsion and sympathy and arousal. She set the tube of ointment on the bedside table among a phalanx of medicine bottles, opened a plastic container, and squeezed a dab of lotion into her palm. The diamond shape of the original scale (Snow now assumed it to be a scale) had lost its integrity and become a blotch occupying much of her lower back, the epicenter from which this apparent contagion had spread – as she reached behind her with the lotion, twisting her neck about so she could see to apply it, she caught sight of Snow. She gasped and fell onto her side, dropping the container and scrambling to cover herself. Snow entered the room and she said, ‘I don’t want you to see! Please!’ He perched on the side of the bed and laid a finger on her lips to mute her speech. Her eyes brightened with tears. ‘Please,’ she said again. He had questions, but knew what she needed from him. He picked up the plastic container and began to rub the lotion in, concentrating on places where the scale merged with the skin. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed, but he continued his ministrations, kneading the lotion into her skin, and felt stress draining from her body. Once he finished with her back, he turned her toward him and focused his attention on the stripes (he viewed them now as veins of a strange mineral) crossing her abdomen and fettering the slopes of her breasts, gripping and partly supporting them as would some cruel instrument of bondage. She searched his face, searching it (he suspected) for some twitch that would trigger her detectors, an aberrant expression conveying an excess of pity, a delight in the perverse, anything apart from an acceptable devotion. He maintained a calm, dutiful exterior, intent upon his task, and she surrendered herself, she closed her eyes and let him work. Before long, sighs escaped her lips, musical and daft, like the delicate sounds a contented infant might make. An urgency in her flesh manifested as a shudder, an arching of the back. Careful not to jostle her, he lay down and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was slack, but soon she responded and when he broke from the kiss he saw that the lines of strain around her eyes and mouth were less deep, as if years had fallen away. He touched her belly, her nipples, the soft places between the stripes of her affliction – she caught his hand and whispered, ‘I want you, but you can’t come inside me. It’ll hurt me if you do.’ He was too riveted on her to explain that this act, born of empathy, had evolved into one of desire. His decade-long obsession had been given release and he was redeemed by her pleasure, he needed nothing else. He eased his fingers into the heated damp of her, eliciting a cry, but not one of pain. As he guided her through a prolonged and convulsive orgasm, he pressed his face close to hers and said, ‘I love you.’ He kept on repeating the words, a counterpoint to her moans, as if this inculcation were a proof of love, until her thighs clamped together, trapping his hand, and she lay with her head tight against his chest, trembling, enduring the final aftershocks.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

She nodded, but gave no further reply, her breath coming in shudders.

It began to feel awkward, holding her that way and not speaking, and he asked if she wanted him to leave. Another nod. She must be, he decided, ashamed of what had happened, or confused by it, or both.

He got up and adjusted his belt. ‘Will I see you in the morning?’

An affirmative noise.

He started to tell her once again that he loved her, but thought she might not want to hear it. He went to the door, peeked out into the hall.

‘Craig.’

She had pulled the sheet up so that her head and shoulders were visible, and – separated by an expanse of the white cloth, appearing to be part of a separate body – her right leg from the knee down, marked by dark green striations.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If not tomorrow, soon . . . he’ll bring the women from the pink house.’

‘The prostitutes?’

‘Yes, and others. He’ll throw a party. The women will be dressed provocatively. Whatever you do, don’t flirt with them. Ignore them. Act as if you’re offended by their interest in you.’

‘All right.’

‘It’s a test, something he does in order to discover whether or not you’re interested in his women. If you don’t show interest, that will buy you some time.’

He expected her to say more, but when nothing was forthcoming he peered out into the hall again.

‘Craig.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I . . . never mind.’

‘What about you and me?’ He turned from the door. ‘Will that piss him off?’

Time became elastic, stretching out into a single un-demarcated moment. At long last she said, ‘I’m not his woman.’

Over the next days all Snow’s questions evaporated, those dating from years before as well as those arising from his encounter with Yara. It was obvious she had been correct in her belief that there was magic in the world, albeit of a dire sort. The striping of dark green scale that defiled her body could not be explained by any means other than her contact with the dragon. It had to be a physical consequence of their unnatural spiritual union, a punishment levied upon her for consorting with beasts, a curse she had accepted in order to achieve her ends. He was nearly persuaded to her opinion that Jefe might be a force for good and, left to his own devices, would allow Temalagua to determine its destiny – but the recognition that he would be long dead by the time such a future came to pass diminished his enthusiasm for the idea.

As Yara predicted, on the night following their encounter Jefe herded a group of approximately twenty attractive women into the dining room, all clad in lingerie. Judging by Luisa Bazan’s story, Snow accepted that her husband Enrique had purchased every scrap of silk and lace that adorned them, but that Luisa’s accusations of infidelity were without merit, or else (if he were to believe Yara) Enrique would be dead. Among the women was the girl from the cantina, Itzel. Jefe thrust her at him and, expressionless, she attempted to fondle his genitals. Snow, as instructed, rejected her. Before long the room was aflutter with drunken, chattering, underdressed women who came at him singly and in pairs, making much over him, cooing and caressing, while Jefe watched icily from a doorway. Snow was impervious to their tender assaults, affecting boredom, brushing them off, winding up alone in a corner and thinking that Griuale’s legendary subtlety must have gone glimmering along with his memories, because Jefe was nothing if not unsubtle. He felt he would have been able to see through this deception without Yara’s help, and he speculated that Griaule may never have been a subtle creature, that his reputed prowess in this regard had been exaggerated due to his bulk (even a gross manipulation would be perceived as a subtlety when the manipulator was roughly the size of a county in Rhode Island) and to the ease with which people could be manipulated, thanks in large part to their eagerness to absolve themselves of responsibility and shift blame for their behavior onto an outside influence, as if they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

Coincidentally, there were moments during the ensuing week when Snow saw himself as a master of calculation and guile. Because he was consumed by the prospect of death, these moments were fleeting, and yet they seemed of critical importance, crucial to his self-awareness, his self-worth, his entire sense of self inclusive of his will to survive. Each night, a male Sheherazade, he visited Yara in her room and made love to her, each night extracting information from her (a tip, a tendency, an allusion) that would enable him to prolong his life. Afterward he would have a flash of satisfaction, a not-quite gloating appreciation of his canniness. Yet at the same time his emotional connection with her deepened, as did his desire to please her, to ease her burdens – it injured him to watch her move about the complex, she was so frail and had so little stamina. These two strains of behavior appeared intertwined like the coils of a double helix, neither of them having primacy over nor predating the other, neither seeming more authentic, but he felt certain that one of them concealed a fathering principle. He sought to sneak up on himself, to catch himself unawares and snatch a glimpse of the bottom of his soul, hoping to discern whether selflessness or self-interest was the ground from which all else sprouted, or if they were an embodiment of an essential duality, two sides of the same coin. He failed to reach a conclusion, of course, and it seemed to him that his fear of death was not much greater than the fear that he might never acquire the slightest knowledge of his own heart.

One night toward the end of the week, Yara came astride Snow, allowing him to penetrate her. Her movements were rickety and it was apparent some pain was involved, but she went past the pain and seemed to lose herself in the act. Snow held her by the hips, guiding her, helping her move, yet he wasn’t as active as he would ordinarily have been, not wishing to hurt her. The striping on her body generated a fantasy that he had been transported to a cell in a Tibetan temple lit with the glow from a butter lamp, and she was a woman sprung from one of the legends illustrated by the tapestries that hung about the place, the handmaiden of an obscure god or herself the female incarnation of an elusive archetype, her ritual markings symbols in a perfected language known only to nine bodhisattvas that pointed up rather than detracted from her beauty. She flowed like honey around him and he, too, lost himself in the moment, in the old confusions of their relationship and the new. Yet once they were spent, as they lay quietly together, his mind began to run its usual circuits and he asked why she had chosen this night to make love to him.

‘“Make love,”’ she said teasingly. ‘You never said that when we were first together. It was always, “Let’s fuck.” You’ve become so gentlemanly.’

Impatient with her, he said, ‘Okay. Why did you fuck me?’

‘I couldn’t bear not to any longer.’

‘It wasn’t like a pity fuck? You weren’t saying goodbye?’

He expected a denial, but she said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘It means I don’t know!’

He waited for an explanation.

‘In the morning Jefe may invite you to watch him fly,’ she said. ‘He’ll . . .’

‘I should say, “No,” right? Pretend to be sick or something.’

‘No. You have to accept. And you have to flatter him constantly while he’s flying. I’ll come with you if I can, but he may send me away. If that happens, you have to cheer and applaud . . . applaud fervently no matter how long he flies. Be prepared for him to fly a long time. Several hours.’

Half-formed thoughts crowded one another aside in Snow’s head – a cold spot bloomed beneath his breastbone.

‘I have to do something,’ he said.

Yara pressed herself against him.

‘I can’t just sit around here waiting to be executed.’

She flung an arm across his stomach, resting her head on his chest so he could see nothing of her face.

‘Yara?’

‘I’m here,’ she said.

Every morning at ten a.m. Jefe ate his single meal of the day, consisting of four roast chickens. He would sit at the head of the dining room table, tearing off strips of meat, chewing methodically, gnawing clean the bones, reducing the birds to skeletal remains while Yara and Snow observed from their chairs. At Yara’s prompting Snow would offer absurdly fawning statements such as ‘You’re looking fit today’ and ‘I wish I had your appetite,’ and Jefe would cut his eyes toward him, grunt, and then cast his gaze toward another portion of the room, as if he found there something of greater interest. From time to time he would address himself to Yara, reminding her of some obligation, but otherwise he ignored her presence. On this particular morning, however, his eyes never wavered from Snow, transmitting a steely neutrality. As the number of chickens dwindled, believing his life could be measured in bites, he experienced a predictable cycling of conflicting emotions (fear, love for Yara, regret, anger at Yara for being complicit in his decision to stay, self-recrimination over that anger, fear . . . etc.) and at length decided that he’d had enough and would do or say something to bring matters to a head. The question of whether he would have acted on his decision was rendered moot by a loud buzzing that issued from the TV. A grainy picture appeared on the screen showing three men beside the pink house, at the entrance to the complex, one a boy of college age with a stubbly scalp, wearing a shiny rayon jacket embellished by the signature NY of the New York Yankees, and two fleshy, prosperous-looking types in their forties, also wearing jackets, but of leather. Jefe’s aloof manner did not change, but anger streamed off him. He walked over to the TV, half a chicken in his hand, and continued to eat, watching the men shift about.

The largest of the three spoke into the box mounted beside the door. ‘Jefe! We need to talk with you!’

Without turning from the screen, Jefe waggled a hand at Yara – she made her way haltingly toward the intercom, keyed the speaker, and said, ‘What do you want? You know he doesn’t like surprise visits.’

‘We have an urgent matter to discuss,’ said the man. ‘We called, but there was no signal.’

Jefe put his finger on the screen, touching the young man’s image.

‘Who’s the kid?’ Yara asked.

‘Chuy Velasquez. He’s one of us,’ said the other man. ‘We had car trouble and he volunteered to drive us.’

‘It’s an honor . . .’ Chuy began, but the big man shushed him.

Yara asked Jefe if she should have Chuy wait outside. Jefe bit off another mouthful of chicken.

The intercom squawked. ‘Yara?’

‘He’s thinking it over,’ she said to the men outside.

‘This is intolerable,’ Jefe said without emotion, as if the intolerable were merely a fact of his existence. ‘Ask them what they wish to discuss.’

Yara did as instructed and the big man said, ‘We’re having difficulty with Ortega. We could use force, and we will should it become necessary, but that will complicate our future dealings with him. The shipment is due in tomorrow and I didn’t want to move without consulting you.’

Jefe made a hissing nose and pointed at the door leading to the stairs. ‘Wait for me there.’

‘Both of us?’ Yara asked.

‘Just him.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Snow. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Private business.’

The stairwell was unheated and, after hovering for ten or fifteen minutes, unable to hear what was going on in the dining room, feeling the bite of the chill, Snow ascended the stairs. His spirits had been lifted by his banishment – it stood to reason that since Jefe did not want him to hear private matters discussed, this could be interpreted as a sign that Snow’s survival was guaranteed. For a while, anyway. If Jefe wasn’t merely being cautious. If his actions were governed by a logical scheme approximating reason, which of course they were not. By the time Snow had climbed four flights of stairs, his natural pessimism had been restored. Preoccupied with worry, he pushed through the door at the top of the stairway and went several paces onward before he understood that he had penetrated to the heart of Jefe’s complex and perhaps to the essence of his dragon-soul.

He stood in the depths of an enormous, well-lit shaft, one wide enough to encompass three or four good-sized barns, a structure whose terminus, he realized, had to be the white, windowless building surmounting the hill. The top of the shaft, five or six hundred feet above, was the blue of a deep autumn sky and spread across the walls were photomurals of the four framed prints in the dining room: cloudy, pristine Himalayas pierced by diamond rays of sun; tiers of parchment-colored, painterly clouds edged with peach and golden-white, complexities of dust and light that called to mind an elaborate music; a Turner-esque chaos of smoky stuff drenched in red and gold, yielding a brassy radiance redolent of a war in heaven; pale billows of cloud shading to indigo, some of them resembling figures and faces that were nearly recognizable, like the ghosts of Great Identities dissolving into dusk. Hundreds, maybe thousands of fine-linked silver chains strung ten feet apart were suspended from the ceiling, stretched taut, running the length of the shaft and vanishing into curved tracks on the concrete floor. Snow made to slide one of the chains along its track, but it wouldn’t budge. He thought there must be some controlling mechanism and, as he searched for it, he spotted a discoloration on the floor out among the chains. On closer inspection it appeared to be a dried-up pool of blood. Feeling like a child alone in a forest of skinny silver trees that offered neither shade nor protection, he hurried back down the stairs and sat on the bottom step, trying to equate the grandeur and strangeness of the shaft with the vicious killer in the next room, imagining that if a dragon-become-a-man had the slightest refinement it would have something to do with the sky . . . and yet it was difficult to believe a minimal creature such as Jefe deriving pleasure from anything apart from the exercise of power. Worn down by stress, he gave up analyzing the situation and rested his head on his forearms, his mind drumming with a single dread thought.

A half-hour later, more or less, Yara invited him back into the dining room. Flanked by his two friends, the big man stood partway out the tunnel door – he had a thick, glossy head of hair and a mustache trimmed to a straight line above an arrogant mouth. Belly flab overlapped his belt. His image on the TV had been too grainy to identify, but Snow knew him now: Enrique Bazan. He’d run into him once or twice at the school. Hoping that Bazan would not remember those meetings, Snow took a seat next to Yara and gave no sign of recognition, but Bazan said in a demanding tone, ‘What’s this prick doing here?’

‘Mister Snow is a guest.’ Standing between the table and Bazan, Jefe glanced back and forth between the two men, his face sharp with interest. ‘Do you know each other?’

With bad grace, Bazan said, ‘He’s my son’s teacher.’

Jefe’s eyes swerved to Snow. ‘Small world, eh?’

‘I used to be your son’s teacher,’ said Snow. ‘I resigned from the school some time ago.’

‘Is that so?’ Bazan’s voice surged in volume. ‘Then why does Luisa talk about you all the time? Tell me that!’

Yara said, ‘Don’t you have business elsewhere, Enrique?’

‘Indeed,’ said Jefe. ‘I suggest we leave this for another day.’

Bazan’s face grew flushed. ‘Fuck that! I want to ask him some questions.’

The elder of his companions, a man cut from similar cloth, same mustache, same belly flab, but shorter and with a receding hairline, moved in front of Bazan, or else he might have come at Snow.

‘The son-of-a-bitch has been fucking my wife!’ Bazan tried to throw the smaller man aside, but Chuy helped restrain him.

‘Is this true?’ Jefe’s enjoyment of the moment was evident in his tone of prim amusement. ‘Have you been trifling with Luisa’s affections?’

‘Hell, no!’ Snow made as if to stand, willing to let his anger rip after so long an enforced repression, but Yara dug her nails into his arm.

Bazan shook his head furiously, like a bull swarmed by bees. ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’

‘I was hiking in the hills,’ said Snow. ‘Jefe asked me to stay. As for your wife, I’ve never had so much as a cup of coffee with her.’

‘Calm yourself, Enrique.’ Jefe joined the two men who had Bazan backed against the wall. ‘Whoever’s been at your wife, I’m certain you’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘It’s him! I can tell by the way she talks about him!’

‘That’s your proof ? Luisa talks about him? It’s hardly convincing.’

‘Man, I’ve been married to her fat ass for eleven years! I know the signs!’

‘It doesn’t matter who’s been staining your bed sheets,’ Jefe said. ‘The real crime has nothing to do with your wife. Right, Chuy?’

Jefe patted Chuy on the back, shifted a hand to the nape of his neck, and Chuy, responding to this amiable gesture, looked to him over his shoulder, a smile aborning on his face . . . and then the smile, before it had fully established itself, dissolved into an expression of befuddlement, and thereafter into one of shock and pain. His right leg began to shake. Spittle flew from his lips.

‘The real crime is you bringing someone here who wasn’t invited,’ Jefe said to Bazan. ‘Someone I don’t know.’

Chuy clawed feebly at Jefe’s hand and loosed a warbling note that thinned into a keening. His shoes were not planted on the floor, but drifted across the carpet, their toes grazing the burgundy nap.

‘Jefe, don’t do this.’ Bazan eased away from him. ‘He’s a good kid.’

Chuy’s shoulders hitched violently, his arms went rigid, held out to the sides like a marionette whose elbow-strings had been yanked.

Yara heaved up from her chair. ‘The boy’s done nothing. Let him go!’

Startled, Jefe turned on her, rag-dolling Chuy.

‘No one’s harmed you.’ She pried at Jefe’s fingers, trying to loosen his grip. ‘He did you a favor by driving them. Or would you prefer to have been kept in the dark about Ortega? Let him go. Let Enrique get on with his business.’

‘Keep out of this!’ Jefe said.

‘This is how leaders treat their friends.’ She pried at his fingers again. ‘Presidents, generals, kings. Whatever title they give themselves, they’re pigs. Villains. You have to be better than that.’

So much fury was concentrated in Jefe’s face, Snow thought it might explode.

Yara’s words took on a blathering tone, as if she were counseling a disobedient child while straightening his collar. ‘You swore you’d pay attention to my advice. Well, I’m advising you now. You mustn’t lash out every time someone does something that doesn’t please you. You have to use some discretion.’

Jefe backhanded her, striking her side, releasing Chuy at the same moment. She reeled back against the table, shrieked and clutched her hip, and sagged to the floor. Yet after the briefest of intervals she sat up and continued her scolding, as though the shove had been but a trivial interruption. Jefe went toward her and Snow, thinking he was going to hit her again, came out of his chair and said, ‘Well done! A man has to maintain order in his house.’

Jefe’s head snapped toward him.

‘Without discipline at home,’ said Snow, ‘you can have no discipline. Who are these people to think they can rule you while you rule their country? It’s absurd!’

‘You should act from the standpoint of reason, not emotion.’ Yara managed to get to her knees. ‘You can’t simply react to events.’

Jefe turned back to her.

‘Reason, yes. But you can’t tolerate an insult to your authority.’ Snow began to understand where this byplay might lead. ‘There has to be a price.’

Helped by his friend, Bazan hauled the semi-conscious Chuy erect – his feet scrabbled for purchase on the carpet and he groaned. Hearing the commotion, Jefe whirled about, but was distracted once again by the dialogue between Yara and Snow.

Yara: ‘It’s important you keep things in balance . . .’

Snow: ‘Showing you have a temper has a certain value.’

Yara: ‘. . . or else you’ll lose control of the situation.’

Snow: ‘You can’t govern effectively unless people are afraid of you.’

An indecisive expression stole over Jefe’s face as they continued in this vein, and he became agitated when Bazan asked for permission to leave.

‘First and foremost, you have to learn self-control,’ said Yara. ‘You can’t expect people to respect someone who constantly yields to impulse.’

‘Chuy needs a doctor,’ said Bazan.

‘I agree with her,’ Snow said. ‘But the idea that you might be erratic, that you pose a threat, the iron fist in the velvet glove, that sort of thing . . .’

Bazan: ‘Please, Jefe!’

‘. . . that’s what’ll keep them in line.’

Jefe nodded in Snow’s direction – it seemed an acknowledgement – and headed for the stairwell, his composure restored.

‘The past is the past,’ said Yara. ‘We can’t afford to repeat it any longer.’

‘Neither should we utterly renounce it,’ said Snow.

‘For the love of God!’ Bazan.

Jefe dropped into a crouch and roared at him, an open-throated scream delivered with such ferocity that Snow feared it was prelude to an assault – but Jefe merely said, ‘Take your garbage and go. And don’t call me for a while.’ He slammed the door behind him.

Chuy’s head lolled back. Thick, dark blood eeled between his lips.

Snow pointed this out, saying to Bazan, ‘Your boy’s leaking.’

Though shaken by Jefe’s outburst, Bazan had recovered enough of his macho to curse Snow.

‘There’s a clinic in Nebaj,’ said Yara. ‘I think it’s open.’

Bazan might not have heard her. ‘I’m going to have your balls, man!’

‘Are you crazy?’ She limped toward Bazan. ‘Get out of here! Go! Before Jefe changes his mind!’

The men started down the tunnel with Chuy in tow. Bazan looked back and Yara flapped her arms at him shouting, ‘Go! Go!’

Once their visitors were on their way to Nebaj, to a roadside ditch or wherever Chuy’s destiny might bring him, Yara sank into a chair.

‘That’s the guy you’re going to put in charge?’ said Snow. ‘Really?’

Yara rubbed her hip, tipped back her head, and closed her eyes – her skin held a waxy pallor.

Scattered, unsteady on his feet, Snow sat down. ‘That prissy little fuck’s going to make Hitler seem like a day at the beach!’

She rubbed her hip again, glanced down at her hand.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

He worked to slow his breath, his heart rate, but his anger boiled over.

‘Do you actually fucking think he’ll be an upgrade?’ he asked. ‘A creepy teenager with the morals of Caligula? This sure as hell changes my view of dragons. I mean I figured them for noble beasts, at least to some degree, but they must have been like a gang of kids armed with flamethrowers, torching shit and getting off on it. Of course . . .’ He laughed scornfully. ‘I bet you’re going to sling some crap about how the act of transubstantiation squeezed his soul and it came out all scrunched and malformed like a balloon animal. Once he has his dragon body again, hey it’ll snap right back into shape! He’ll be the fucking lizard version of the Lion King!’

His head fizzed with adrenaline. In quick order he envisioned Chuy’s feet dangling, a tiny figure superimposed against a godlike immensity of clouds, and a vastness hung with silver chains.

‘The place with all the chains,’ he said. ‘Is that the . . .’

‘Can you help me back to my room?’

Rankled, he said, ‘How about answering my question first?’

The grinding noise kicked in upstairs.

Yara held up her right hand, showing the palm and fingers smeared with red.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she said.

Where the edge of the table had impacted Yara’s hip, blood seeped between her skin and one of the dark green lesions. Snow stopped the bleeding with compresses and then sat in a chair by the bed. She rested on her uninjured side, holding his hand, giving it a squeeze each time she experienced a fresh twinge of pain. It felt as though a colloidal weight, a gel compounded of hopelessness and something darker, colder, were shifting about inside his skull, forcing him to lower his head in order to stabilize it. When he looked up he found her watching him. Her color had improved.

‘How you doing?’ he asked.

‘I’m all right.’

There followed an awkward pause – it felt awkward to Snow, at any rate – after which they both spoke at once.

‘You go,’ he said.

‘No . . . you.’

‘I don’t have anything specific to say. I was just going to make comforting noises.’

She wetted her lips. ‘I can help you, I think.’

A match head of bright emotion flared up inside him.

‘The lair . . . the place with the chains,’ she said. ‘It’s where he does the preponderance of his killing. He uses the chains to fly. It’s not flying per se – it’s acrobatics. But it’s amazing to watch. There are ledges on the walls where he . . .’

‘I didn’t see any ledges.’

‘Most of them are high up, too high to see, and the ones lower down blend in with the mural. You wouldn’t notice them unless you were looking for them. They’re where he perches. Where he rests between flights.’

‘This was part of your design, the ledges, the clouds . . . you gave them that kind of detail?’

‘It’s Griaule’s design,’ she said. ‘I only added one thing. In case of a malfunction, the chains can be disengaged from the ceiling tracks. There’s a separate code for each chain that permits them to be replaced. When we moved here, while Jefe was still too weak to fly, we had an engineer and some workmen in to make sure everything was ready to go.’

She took a sip of water and replaced the glass on the night-stand.

‘After I’d been with Jefe a few weeks, caring for him twenty-four seven, I realized how willful he could be and I began to worry he wouldn’t turn out as I hoped.’

‘There’s a shocker,’ said Snow.

‘I wanted a means of stopping him, so I bribed the engineer to provide me with a code that would enable me to bring down the central section of the chains all at once. At first I asked for a code that would bring them all down, but he warned there would be a splashing effect – if all the chains fell they’d likely kill everyone in the room. I’ve been tempted to use the code several times, but until now I always trusted my original decision.’

He could guess what had changed for her, why she was now willing to act, and he wanted to be sure, to ask, Why now? because he doubted it had much if anything to do with Chuy – but he bit back the question, worried that if he pressed that particular button it would enlist a negative emotion and she might rethink her decision.

‘What’s the code?’ he asked.

‘In the lair there’s a panel at eye-level just to the left of the door. Inside there’s a keypad. Punch in seven-one-three-nine-one. It’s my birthday. Seven, thirteen, ninety-one. When it’s the right moment, you press Enter and down he’ll come. But I’ll be the one who enters the code.’

She sat up in bed, a process that required his assistance, and once she had resettled with pillows behind her, she said, ‘It’s best I do it, anyway. If he stays true to form, he’ll take you up to one of the perches and leave you there while he flies. I know the precise section of chains that will drop and I’m used to watching him fly – I know his timing and you don’t. But he may not allow me to go upstairs with you. In that case . . . he might leave you on the ground and have you watch him fly. Maybe you can use the code then. We have to make certain he brings me up with you. The way to ensure it is to act like we’re angry with one another and keep on arguing about how he should govern.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He was interested in what we said. If we can hold his interest, when it comes time to kill you, he’ll want me there to watch him end the argument.’

‘I’m not good with heights,’ Snow said after an interval.

‘You’re going to have to be.’ She rolled her neck to loosen the muscles. ‘There’s one more thing. You might have to finish him off.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was to make him fall from a height.’

‘The fall may not kill him. When he first started to fly he took a number of falls – they laid him up for a day, but that’s all.’

‘How long a fall are we talking about?’

‘The longest was fifty or sixty feet.’

‘He fell sixty feet onto a concrete floor and lived?’

‘This time the chains will come down on top of him – that should do the job. But we have to prepare for the possibility that he’ll survive. I’ll bring a machete, but you’ll have to use it. I’m not strong enough.’

‘Can you get a gun?’

She shook her head. ‘No guns. Since the sniper incident, he hasn’t let anyone near him with a gun. He sniffs them out.’

‘He doesn’t worry about machetes?’

‘He sees me with one every day. I have to kill chickens and chop weeds in the garden. He’s not concerned about anyone killing him at close range.’

‘Jesus fuck!’

‘You can do it! If he’s not dead he’ll be stunned, chewed up in the chains.’

‘How about making him fall from higher up?’

‘He wants his audience to see everything. Generally he’ll strand whomever he’s going to kill on a perch close to the floor. Then he makes this tumbling run across the center of the lair that brings him in at around thirty or forty feet. He plucks whomever it is off the wall and carries them higher before he drops them. I’m familiar with that run, I can time it. Otherwise he flies erratic patterns, and the odds against my being able to time him go way up. We can discuss it, but that’s not the path I’d choose if my life were in the balance.’

Something about the plan, her sudden conversion to his cause, seemed flimsy and too facile by half. Of course it hadn’t been that sudden, the conversion – it had taken him more than a week to work this change, to make her reflect on her feelings for him, yet nonetheless it was a quick turnaround.

‘You look funny,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘I was thinking . . . visualizing.’

They went over details. The chains, she told him, slid up or down, back and forth along their tracks, and their movements could be modified by means of the keypad, but usually Jefe keyed in a code that initiated a pre-choreographed sequence. The trucks, the old yellow Toyotas parked on the streets of the village, belonged to the PVO. They looked like wrecks, but were kept tuned up and gassed, and could be counted upon to get them as far as the border. They could not stay in Temalagua once Jefe was dead – they’d be hunted. If they could reach the States, they could sit down somewhere and decide what to do next. And so forth. A multitude of ifs, ands, and buts attached to the plan. No matter how carefully it had been worked out, they would need to be very lucky. One thing in particular kept nagging at Snow, causing him doubt, and he finally asked why she had risked involving the engineer.

‘It wasn’t much of a risk,’ she said. ‘I had no choice, and I knew the PVO intended to disappear everyone who worked on the project.’

‘Yeah, but he might have blurted out your secret before they could execute him. He would have betrayed you if he thought he could save himself.’

A grave look veiled her features. ‘Give me some credit. I killed him before he had the opportunity to betray me. As soon as I was certain the code worked, I stabbed him. I explained to the PVO that he had tried to rape me.’

Snow, nonplussed by this admission, by the cool authority in her voice, ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck to hide his reaction.

‘You see?’ she said. ‘I told you I was damned.’

Over the next few days Snow concocted elaborate paranoid fantasies about Yara. His favorite, the one he kept returning to, was that her plan was a cruelty meant to extract the last drop of torment from him, a lie that would insure his docility as he was led to the slaughter. He imagined her taunting him as he waited to die, and her insistence that they sleep in separate beds in order to reinforce the notion that they were feuding, played into the fantasy. Now she was through with him, the trap set, and the distasteful (to her) act of intercourse was no longer necessary – thus her ploy. He stopped short of believing this, yet when he recognized how dependent he was on her and thought of everything she had done to guarantee the dragon’s survival, he was tempted to think the worst of her.

‘You probably think it’s weird I haven’t told you I love you,’ she said the following night when Snow dropped by her room to wish her good night.

He thought she must have told him and searched his memory, wanting to remind her of the occasion.

‘I’m not sure why I’ve been so reticent. I think I know why, but . . .’ She pretended to punch the side of her head. ‘Sometimes things get all screwed up in here. Anyway, it must be obvious.’

‘What’s obvious?’

‘That I love you.’

Her voice carried no conviction. She had draped a blue scarf over the lampshade, dimming the light, making it difficult to read her expression.

‘I don’t mean to sound tentative,’ she said. ‘I had to decide about Jefe first and then I wondered whether you really wanted me. And there were other considerations, other pressures. I do love you, but saying it has just seemed awkward.’

He sat down on the bed. ‘I know you have trust issues.’

‘It’s not that. You’ve changed so much from how . . .’

‘I haven’t changed. Basically I’m the same post-hippie I’ve always been.’

She chewed that over. ‘Have I changed? Aside from physically?’

‘Yeah. You’re more worldly now, more in control. Less moody.’

‘That’s what being a murderer does for you – it either derails you or works wonders for your poise.’

‘I don’t think that’s to blame. You’d already killed someone when I met you.’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘The Austrian guy,’ he said. ‘The child molester.’

‘How do you know about that? I didn’t tell you, did I?’

‘Guillermo told me.’

After a few beats she said, ‘I don’t recall killing Scheve. I remember him bleeding, but I’m not certain it’s a real memory. I was always stoned when I was a kid and a lot of things happened that I’m not too clear about. Anyway . . .’ She dismissed the subject of her childhood with a flip of her fingers. ‘In my head I feel more-or-less the same as I did when we met, and yet you say I’ve changed. And I bet it’s like that for you. So if I’ve changed, you have to admit to the possibility that you have, too.’

‘I suppose.’

She lay without speaking for several seconds. ‘I forget what I was going to say. You made me lose track with that talk about Scheve.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’ll come back, maybe.’ She pressed her fists to her temples. ‘Even if I can’t remember how I wanted to link things up, I do remember the point I was going to make. We’re both of us pretty fucked-up.’

Snow chuckled. ‘You think?’

‘Listen! What I’m saying isn’t funny.’

‘All right. I’m listening.’

‘We’re fucked-up people. Me, because my life was a mess from day one. And you because . . .’

‘Being fucked-up was kind of my ambition,’ he said, but she acted as though she hadn’t heard.

‘. . . because the world disappointed you in some way I don’t understand. Whatever.

‘When we were together back then we never used the word “love” much. I don’t know if we ever used it, but we both knew there was something there. Something strong. But we didn’t deal with it, we skated around it. The night you got here, when you said you loved me, I knew it wasn’t totally sincere . . . but it wasn’t totally insincere, either. It was the most you ever gave to me. I felt that, and that’s why I responded.’

Her words had come in a rush, but now she faltered. ‘And . . . it got better after that.

‘Every night it’s better . . .’ She stared at him helplessly. ‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned Scheve. Now I’ve got these images in my head. I can’t think.’

He lay down beside her and she turned to face him – he kissed her forehead and felt her relax.

‘I’ll just make my point,’ she said. ‘We could be dead in a couple of days, maybe as soon as tomorrow. There’s no way to avoid what’s going to happen, but there’s an opportunity here. If we can get through this, if we stand up for one another and do what has to be done, we have a chance to turn all our fuckeduppedness, all our imperfections into strengths. That’s little enough to hope for considering everything that’s happened, the terrible mistakes I’ve made, and your mistakes . . . but if we can salvage that much, the relationship, love, potential, whatever you want to call it, maybe it’s something we can build on.’

Her pause lasted no longer than a hiccup.

‘God, that sounds lame,’ she said. ‘I had it worked out, exactly what I wanted to say, but then you brought up Scheve and . . . poof ! It’s out of my head.’

Snow told her to take her time and she closed her eyes for a minute.

‘I remember bits and pieces of it,’ she said. ‘How if we can kill Jefe, we have an obligation to the people we’ve destroyed to take advantage of the opportunity. And how if we do kill him, it’ll change us. It’ll be our alchemy. But without logic behind it, you know . . . without the proper order, the way I planned to say it . . . it sounds like straight bullshit.’

Her inability to remember was persuasive in its authenticity and Snow felt guilty for having doubted her.

‘It’s strange how just mentioning that bastard’s name can screw me up,’ she said. ‘I don’t recall many details. About being with him, you know. Just this sick, detached feeling, like it was in a dream. Like that movie you took me to in Antigua, remember, where I freaked out? His face was all blurry and distorted, moving in and out of frame, very close, like the guy in that movie. And that’s it. That’s all I remember about him. But if you say “Scheve” I start to fall apart.’

‘I’m sorry I brought it up.’ He kissed her again. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘I’m just mad at myself. I’ll be okay.’

‘Then I guess I should go.’

She traced the veins on the back of his hand, studying them as if they were a puzzle she needed to solve, and then said, ‘No, really. You shouldn’t.’

Whenever Jefe came within earshot they would resurrect their argument, debating conflicting styles of governance, and Snow, perhaps due to his dependency on Yara, the sense of helplessness it engendered, derived a trivial satisfaction from his ability to argue the right-wing point-of-view, one with which he did not agree in spirit, yet had to admit was the more pragmatic of the two political stances. He derided as a ‘leftist fairy tale’ Yara’s insistence that firmness tempered with altruism would bring about a peaceful and prosperous Temalagua, and suggested that it was odd to hear such drivel issue from the mouth of someone associated with the PVO since its inception.

‘What she’s saying is great for kids to hear,’ he said. ‘That is, if you want your kids to grow up without a spine. It’s moral pablum that weakens them, programs them to cling to their mothers’ skirts. A leader, a man who would rule, he has to rid himself of such naivete. He has a country to think of – every day he’ll have to resolve issues that will cause pain and anger whichever way he decides them. He has to see beyond that sort of morality, a morality whose function is solely to curb one’s instincts, to limit one’s behavior. His role demands he be capable of wider judgments.’

Jefe no longer seemed distressed by their contentiousness. In fact, he acted as if he relished these exchanges and would signify hs approval whenever Yara or (more frequently) Snow said something with which he agreed. Then at breakfast one morning, the fifth day following the incident with Chuy, he invited them to watch him fly. His manner was casual, genial, as if he were asking them to join him at a movie. Snow was unable to conceal his dismay.

Jefe clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Man, come on! I promise you’ll enjoy this.’

Yara picked up the machete from beside her chair and he told her to leave it, saying with heavy sarcasm that he doubted she would find any chickens upstairs.

A diversion from their plan so early in the game did not augur well, yet as they mounted the steps, though Snow knew the fearful incredulity of a condemned man going to the gallows, he nevertheless felt a corresponding sense of relief, one springing from the knowledge that they would soon have a resolution. Jefe stripped off his outerwear and stood before them clad only in black tights, his chest and arms plated with unusually smooth muscle, only the balance muscles in his back and those protecting his joints exceptionally defined. He opened a panel in the wall camouflaged by a section of indigo cloud and punched in a number on the keypad, initiating the grinding nose and starting the chains to slither up and down, to and fro in their tracks, some rapidly, some slowly, the light rivering along their silver links. He then pulled on a pair of thin black gloves and caught hold of a chain that carried him aloft.

Yara squeezed Snow’s hand and shouted into his ear: ‘Once you get back down to the floor, run and get the machete!’

When Jefe reached a height of around twenty feet he launched himself into the air, catching another chain, then whipped himself about, swinging higher, and caught yet another chain and swung again, repeating this process, going higher and higher until all Snow could see of him was a minute figure hurtling through a moving forest of silver chains and against a cinematic backdrop of brassy light and clouds like battle smoke. He descended in like fashion, performing a sequence of loops and somersaults, sudden shifts and reversals of direction that brought him, after several minutes, to within a few feet above them, whereupon he ascended again rapidly, arrowing from chain to chain, crossing spaces of forty feet and more before redirecting his course, throwing in spins and tumbling maneuvers and other elaborate stunts. Yara applauded wildly and shouted her praise, despite having scant hope of being heard. She elbowed Snow, enjoining him to do the same and, though he was not so inclined, he followed suit and was partly sincere in his applause, for he had never witnessed such a display of stamina and strength and coordination. He lost sight of Jefe among the chains and clouds, and inquired of Yara where he had gone – she pointed to a speck superimposed against a spray of golden light, perched on an invisible ledge. And then he was off again, soaring amongst the chains, not appearing to utilize their stability and momentum to alter his course, but scarcely touching them, as if gliding on updrafts, diving and banking, aerials too fluid and graceful to be other than flight.

How long Jefe flew, Snow could not have said. An hour, surely. Long enough so that his motivation for clapping and cheering waned and he stood silent and motionless until Jefe descended to the floor of the shaft and walked over to them, a light sheen of sweat the only register of his exertion. Yara congratulated him, patting his shoulder and smiling, but Snow, incapable of participating in this charade any further, looked off as if distracted, fighting panic, going over the list of things he needed to focus upon. Jefe smirked, stepping to him with a swaggering walk, rolling his shoulders, and gave him a push, moving him toward the wall covered with smoky clouds. Snow scuttled away and Jefe gave him a harder push that sent him reeling backward. As Snow toppled, windmilling his arms, Jefe sprang after him, snagging his belt, and lugged him toward the wall, kicking and twisting like a living satchel. He seized a chain, wrapping it once around his arm, and let it bear them upward.

Watching the floor shrink beneath him, Snow ceased his struggles and shut his eyes, clinging to Jefe’s leg, dizzy and sick with fright. After an interminable time he felt himself lifted. He screamed, convinced that this was the moment he had dreaded, but instead of plummeting downward he found himself pressed back against the wall, held there by Jefe’s hand at his throat and by something solid underfoot. A ledge. He slid his left shoe forward, feeling for the edge, and found it after two or three inches.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jefe said in his ear. ‘I’m not going to harm you.’

Snow squinted at Jefe, who stood beside him, facing the wall, and then glanced down at the floor of the shaft. Their elevation was so great he could not be certain he saw the floor, only a chaos of glittering, slithering chains, bright clouds on the wall opposite, and, as his eyes rolled up, the autumnal blue of the ceiling near to hand. His stomach flip-flopped, his knees buckled, and if Jefe had not tightened his grip, half-throttling him, he would have fallen.

Jefe gave him a gentle shake. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

Mind trash erupted from a shadowy place in Snow’s consciousness, like a gusher from a vent in the sea bottom, resolving into a silt of childlike prayers and wishes.

‘Calm yourself, my friend! It’s okay!’

If you fell far enough, Snow had heard, you would lose consciousness before the impact.

‘I know you don’t like it up here,’ said Jefe. ‘But I’ve got you, see? Try to relax.’

Jefe’s face was too close to read, only an ear and part of his cheek and neck visible. He had an arid scent, slightly acidic – like the smell of an alkali desert. Snow released breath with a shudder and closed his eyes again. The grinding of the chains gnawed at the outskirts of his reason.

‘Your advice strengthens me,’ said Jefe. ‘I value it greatly. I want you with me. This is a joke. A little joke I’m playing on Yara. Nothing more. Do you understand?’

Snow did not understand.

‘She deserves it, don’t you think? You were right about her.’

There were voices in the grinding noise, like those you hear in the humming of tires while resting your head against the window glass of a fast-moving car – hypnotic, hyper-resonant, trebly voices eerily reminiscent of Alvin and the Chipmunks, voices at once sinister and cheerful that sang a simple song advising him go with the flow, go with the flow, go with . . .

‘Look at me!’ said Jefe.

He pulled back, permitting Snow to see his entire face, a face composed so as to illustrate the quality of assurance, and then came close again. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. You’ve won.’

Snow couldn’t think of anything to say – he essayed a grin, but wasn’t sure he had pulled it off.

‘We haven’t had much chance to talk,’ said Jefe. ‘That’s my fault. I apologize. When I found you in the village I assumed you were a spy. I very nearly killed you the first night. But over the past days I’ve come to appreciate your insights into my situation. Others might say fate brought you to me, but someone like myself shapes his own fate. I must have sensed you and called you to my side, so you could give voice to what I know in my heart.’

He removed his hand from Snow’s throat and patted his cheek. Snow felt the pull of the gulf below and tried to sink into the wall.

‘I’m an intuitive sort,’ Jefe said. ‘I know you can help me access the portion of my life that’s closed off. I think I knew that the instant I first saw you, but I understand now that you were afraid. That’s why you refused me. You needed time to adjust, to acclimate to my presence. I tend to forget the effect I have on people. I can’t always be expected to notice it. Obviously I don’t have the same effect on myself.’

Snow would have preferred to tune him out and concentrate on his footing, but Jefe kept on bellowing nonsense into his ear, inducing him to listen. He had the cogent, albeit somewhat hysterical thought that he might have been onto something when he berated Yara after Enrique Bazan’s visit – maybe when translated into human form dragons were reduced to prattling twits with superhuman powers, yet once returned to their natural state they expanded into their bodies and became the mysterious cosmic beasts of legend. Or not. Maybe they were assholes, whatever their shape.

Jefe gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek, a move that made Snow cringe. ‘We’ve been up here long enough,’ he said. ‘We can talk more later. Let’s go down, shall we? Let’s finish the joke. Yara will be surprised to learn she has lost. We’ll show the bitch, won’t we?’

Snow had a presentiment of what was about to occur, but the idea that he might be carried down from the wall swept all else aside.

Jefe winked broadly at him, grabbed his belt and, before Snow could react, he leapt for a nearby chain, Snow hanging from his left hand. There was a split-second when he thought Jefe had lied and the joke was on him, but he felt a severe jolt that stopped his fall, the belt buckle digging into his gut with such force, he couldn’t breathe. Once he recovered he saw that they were descending at a rapid clip, the floor growing larger and larger. This time he didn’t shut his eyes – he yearned for the floor, he wanted the floor above all things, he willed it to rise to meet him, and when Jefe deposited him on the concrete, when the rough surface abraded his cheek, he almost wept with relief and lay there soaking up its beautiful wideness and firmness. He remembered Yara and looked for her. Spied her thirty feet above on a ledge, on the wall that portrayed clouds at dusk. She stared at him – he couldn’t make out her expression, but a bolt of terror shot through him, as if she had beamed it into his heart. Jefe flew in swoops and ascensions high above, sticking close to the wall, and then went higher yet, out into the center of the shaft. Something was different about his flying. It was less dervish, less spectacular than earlier, having a languorous air that reminded Snow of a trapeze artist doing lazy somersaults, relaxing, gathering momentum for his next show-stopping trick. Panicked, realizing what that trick must be, he sprinted to the panel and started to enter the code, but blanked on it. Her birthday. Seven . . . seven something, he thought. Fuck! He racked his brain. Seven thirteen ninety-one. He put in the numbers and his forefinger hovered over the keypad as he tried to locate Jefe among the chains. Spotted him descending from the heights, from the wall across from Yara, tumbling and twisting, a mad Olympic diver committed to a suicidal plunge, already halfway to her, more than halfway . . . Snow jabbed the Enter key, knowing he was too late.

Had he thrown in one less tumble, one less frill or flourish, Jefe might have saved himself. As it was, his momentum almost carried him out of danger. The grinding noise stopped abruptly and his graceful run became floundering and disjointed high above the concrete floor. His fall lasted two or three seconds, no more, but the replay, when Snow summoned it, took much longer to unwind. Jefe flung out a hand, snatching at a chain still attached to the ceiling, his fingertips grazing the links, and he went down without kicking or flailing his arms, his body describing a simple half-roll onto its side. He gave no outcry and impacted with a sickening crack, a leg touching first, as if he had made an effort at the end to land on his feet. He sagged onto his back so that, if he were still aware, he would have seen the chains collapsing, appearing as they descended to coalesce into a cloud of silvery serpents with long, lashing tails, their lengths all entangled. They smashed into the concrete with a clashing sound, dozens of them striking out in every direction as they hit, one leaping straight at Snow, cobra-quick, missing him by inches. Then it was quiet. An ominous quiet despite the happy result it represented. The lair had been made over into a piece of Gothic art, a stage set for the final scene in a surrealist play, a grim medieval fable whose ending was open to interpretation. A considerable fringe of chains remained connected to the ceiling, curtaining the huge photomurals, and a pall of concrete dust was suspended throughout the lower third of the shaft, a lunar fog partially obscuring the mountainous heap of chains that lay dead center of the floor, like a burial mound intended to confine some immortal monster.

Yara called out to Snow, telling him to bring the machete, and he shouted, ‘Not until you’re down!’

‘The machete!’

Stubbornly, Snow asked what he should do to help her down. She stood pressed flat to the wall on the narrow ledge, arms outspread for balance. He knew she must be afraid to do so much as nod for fear of toppling off the ledge, yet she briefly lifted a hand to point at the mound of chains. He saw nothing and said, ‘What are you pointing at?’

‘He’s alive! Look at the chains!’

‘Where? I don’t see anything!’

‘The pile of chains! The section nearest me! Just look!’

He could detect nothing, no trace of blood, no sign of a living presence, but came forward, stepping over outlying snarls of chain shaped like the ridged and twisted roots of a metal tree, like crocodile tails, like the spines of antediluvian creatures whose heads were buried beneath the spill of silver links. The mound was three times higher than his head and shed a cold radiance. He began to circumnavigate it, pacing slowly, warily, alert for movement, yet seeing none.

‘Where do you mean?’ he shouted, and then saw chains slither down across a slight convexity at the edge of the mound where they were piled only four and five feet deep. His heart jumped in his chest, but there was no further movement.

‘The mound’s settling, that’s all!’ He glanced up to Yara. ‘How do I get you down?’

‘Are you sure?’

He waited a bit, watching the mound, and said, ‘Yeah!’

‘Go to the panel – key in nine-nine-nine! That’ll start the chains moving down!’

‘Don’t you want me to come up?’

‘I can hang on long enough to reach the floor!’

A rattling at Snow’s back – the chains shifted, the base of the mound bulged, and then a bloody-knuckled fist punched out from it and Jefe’s fingers clawed the air.

Galvanized with fear, Snow ran for the stairs. He pounded down the steps, grabbed the machete, and raced back again, pausing on the landing to gather his courage, and his breath, and then re-entered the lair. Lengths of chain were draped around Jefe’s torso and legs, but he had fought mostly free of them and gotten to his knees. Blood welled from splits on his chest and arms – it was as if his skin had not been torn or abraded, but rather had cracked like a shell. He stared balefully at Snow, yet spoke not a word and made no threatening movement. Yara shouted, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Jefe did not react to her, continuing to watch Snow, who approached with trepidation, holding the machete behind his head, poised to strike.

He assumed Jefe would lunge at him when he came near, but he closed to within a few feet, just beyond reach, and Jefe had not moved, merely tracking his progress. This gave him confidence and he aimed a blow at Jefe’s head. Jefe flung up his arm to block it and the blade skimmed along the inside of the arm, taking with it a shaving of skin. Not human skin, but a rind of sorts, a thick sheath protecting his flesh, and Snow, as he retreated, remembered how hard Jefe’s hand had felt when he slapped him.

‘Don’t let him stand up!’ Yara shouted. ‘If he stands, he’ll be harder to get at!’

Snow did not believe Jefe could stand and he was uncertain whether or not Yara’s statement was accurate. The mound made it impossible to get behind Jefe and his range of motion enabled him to defend attacks from every available angle. On his feet and badly wounded, he might be vulnerable to a range of attacks – in his current posture there was no option except to try another frontal assault. Snow stabbed with the point of the blade and Jefe deflected it with ease. He feinted a backhand slash, shifted his stance, and swung the machete straight down at the top of Jefe’s head – but he strayed too close to his target. Jefe clubbed his wrist, sending the machete skittering across the floor, and snatched at his shirttail. Snow broke free and hurried to retrieve the weapon. As he stooped for it, Yara shouted a warning. Jefe had clambered to his feet and was heading toward the stairs, dragging his right leg, his torso bent to the right, staggering, going off-course and having constantly to correct it, a crooked man on a crooked path. Snow darted after him and took a swing at the side of Jefe’s good knee, hoping to cut a tendon, but due to the awkward angle at which he delivered it, the blow had little force and did no discernable damage. Moving with an old man’s stiffness and deliberation, Jefe turned to him and gave a hissing cry, like that of an enraged cat. His face had lost every ounce of humanity, revealing it to have been a cunning mask behind which some odious and repellent thing had hidden, and now that the tissues of the mask were dissolving, a corrosive anger shone through, directed not only toward Snow, but toward all things not itself, a vicious, wormy hatred that had kept it alive for millennia and become its sole reason for existence. All of this conveyed by a mere glance. It was as if a germ of the dragon’s vileness had spanned the distance between them and infected Snow, breeding of an instant its semblance in his brain and inspiring in him a consonant anger. As Jefe labored toward the stairwell, Snow let that anger spur his actions and guide his hand.

Leaping forward, sensing the truth of the blow as he swung the machete, he sank the blade into the side of Jefe’s neck, the tip transecting the hindward portion of his jaw. Jefe made a cawing noise and jerked away, tearing the machete from Snow’s grip, so firmly was it embedded in meat and bone. Blood seeped from around the edges of the blade. Jefe stumbled out onto the landing, his step grown discontinuous. He slipped, clutched ineffectually at the railing, and then pitched forward, bumping down the stairs on his belly and onto the landing below, dislodging the machete. He picked himself up and kept going, blood fron the wound cape-ing his back with a darker crimson.

An unusual calm, sudden in onset, was visited upon Snow. Not unusual as regarded its emotional basis, for he knew to his soul Jefe was dying and a menace no more, but in that it seemed to proceed from an inner resource he had not known he possessed. He stood calmly, then, watching Jefe totter from view before returning to the lair. Yara called on him to finish Jefe, but Snow walked over to the panel by the door, keyed in nine-nine-nine, and set the chains to rattling downward. The noise drowned out her cries. Once he knew she would be safe, he went downstairs at a leisurely pace, scooping up the machete, and entered the dining room. He stopped by the sideboard and, taking a minute to make his selection from among the whiskeys and tequilas, he poured a double shot of single malt and sipped it appreciatively. A tremor palsied his hand. He downed the scotch and strolled off along the tunnel, following Jefe’s blood trail.

He had not been out of the complex for almost two weeks and the sight of daylight at the tunnel’s end disoriented him, as did the wideness of the world and the hills enclosing the grassless stretch whereon the village had been established. Under a dreary sky eight or nine women – two of them dressed in filmy peignoirs, the others clad in shawls and long colorful skirts and embroidered blouses of coarse native cloth – had gathered at a point midway between the village and the pink house, and were staring with grim fixity at something Snow could not see from his perspective. On stepping from the tunnel mouth, he spotted Jefe to the right of the entrance – he still dragged his leg, yet made a doddering run across a stretch of sloppy ground, hitching his shoulders repeatedly as he went, going about ten yards before losing his footing and sprawling, splashing down into a puddle. It took several tries for him to stand. A commingling of blood and brick red mud slimed his chest and back, and he wore an expression of abject stupefaction. Appearing to have no awareness of Snow, he made a second and shorter run back toward the tunnel, adding a little hop at the end, but with no better outcome. Snow recognized he was attempting to fly and wondered whether he knew that he did not possess a dragon’s body.

A voluptuous black woman with blond spiky hair, holding the neck of her peignoir shut against the cold, approached Snow, circling away from Jefe. She touched the handle of the machete and said, ‘You did this?’

‘Yes. With Yara’s help.’

‘Yara? I don’t know this Yara.’

‘La Endriaga.’

‘La Endriaga is not Jefe’s woman?’

‘She was his prisoner. Like you.’

As Jefe made another effort to fly, the woman shouted excitedly in Mam to the others – Snow understood only the words ‘La Endriaga.’

One of the village women shouted in response and the black woman asked Snow if Jefe was mortally wounded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood, but he may still be dangerous.’

She reported this to the group and two of the women ran for the village, most likely to spread the news.

Jefe fell again – he lay on his side for a long count, his breath venting in gasps.

Snow’s calm had eroded into a mood as gray and energy-less as the sky above Tres Santos. The clouds looked to have the inert weight and solidity of battered armor plate, though thunderheads with dark bellies had begun pushing in from the north. As Jefe gathered himself for a further attempt, Yara limped from the tunnel. She stood at Snow’s side and watched Jefe perform his miserable trick. Her eyes brimmed with tears. This must be for her, he thought, like watching someone who had once had promise, with whom she had invested her precious time, and was now reduced to an addled derelict with half a functioning liver, putting on a show of his degeneracy and decrepitude in a parking lot, hoping his audience would throw quarters at him so he could buy a pint of fortified wine.

The black woman tapped Snow’s arm and whispered in his ear: ‘If she is not Jefe’s woman, why is she crying?’

‘She was Jefe’s prisoner for most of her life,’ Snow said. ‘When you’ve lived with someone that long, even as a captive, your emotions become confused.’

She nodded at this lie, or half-lie, as if she understood him, but her expression was perplexed.

More women joined the group, swelling its ranks to four times its former size. Some carried garden implements, others pointed sticks and fist-sized rocks – a young girl in chartreuse satin pajamas brandished a pair of sewing shears. They seethed closer to Jefe, their voices a chorus of vituperation, yet did not attack, wary of their tormentor, though he looked to be done with flying. Positioned on all fours amidst a large puddle, his head hanging down, slathered all over in reddish muck, his hair caked with mud, blood oozing from splits and gashes, strings of ruby-colored drool depending from his lips – he might have been an animal of the village, a pariah dog gone rabid, exhausted by fever, his world narrowed to a hideous reflection in murky water. Snow had no pity for him, no disgust, no anger. If he felt anything it was the temper of a functionary compelled to discharge an unpleasant duty. He stepped forward and rested the edge of the blade on Jefe’s neck. The women fell silent and Jefe’s guttering breath could be heard. He sought to lift his head, perhaps to inquire of Snow, perhaps simply alerted by the blade, but either his head was too heavy or else he lacked the will to see, to know what this cold, sharp object was. Perhaps he knew and no longer cared. Summoning his strength, Snow swung the machete in a savage arc. The blade sliced deep, burying itself to the bone, yet Jefe’s reactions were minimal – he gave forth with a grunt and shuddered and listed a degree or two, but remained upright. Frustrated at his inability to finish the job, Snow yanked at the blade, but once again it was stuck. He planted a foot between Jefe’s shoulders, pushed down and wrenched the blade free, shoving him face-first into the puddle. A tide of blood sluiced from the wound.

As Snow prepared to strike again Jefe’s breath blew a bubble in the mud and, with a choking cough, he flipped onto his back, his entire frame coming off the ground and twisting in mid-air – it was such a physically adept movement that Snow feared Jefe’s strength had been miraculously restored, but then he understood that it had been a lizard-ly reflex, a final surge of vitality, for Jefe was clearly close to death. His limbs jerked and twitched, and a horrid slackness overlay his features and from his throat there issued a repetitive glutinous clicking, indicative of a disruption in some internal function and not an attempt at speech . . . though his eyes yet held a glint of the poisonous hatred that had infected the world for thousands of years.

The women descended upon him, first Itzel with a hoe, blood welling from the trench she dug in his chest, and then the rest, stabbing and cutting and pounding, exacting their vengeance for rape and murder and innumerable humiliations. They swarmed over the body, blocking it from view, and shoved one another aside in their eagerness to share in his destruction, announcing their fury and delight with orgasmic cries, until a puff of heat and rainbow-colored light (no more impressive to see than the flash powder of a second-rate magician) bloomed from the rags of meat and splintered bone, causing them to fall over backward, to scramble and crawl away yelping with fright, spattered by the same amalgam of mud and thick, dark blood as their ancient enemy, some bearing slashes and bruises received during the melee, inadvertently gotten at the hands of their sisters, and some nursing curious burns they seemed to obtain from some melting process, deriving from the paltry magic of Jefe’s death. Snow glanced up at the sky, fearful that rippling lights would manifest in the clouds like those seen above the village of Chajul thirteen years before, the beacon of the dragon’s rebirth – but none materialized. Jefe was dead. Utterly and irrevocably dead.

At the last an elderly woman brought a gasoline can and emptied its contents upon his corpse, which had been rendered unrecognizable as life of any kind, like a red meal that had proved indigestible and been spat forth by the thing that consumed it. She lit a twist of paper and dropped it thereon. The flames yielded were low and of a ruddy translucence in the decaying light, and were whipped about by a cold north wind that soon would bring the storm. An oily smoke arose and was quickly dispersed. All the women of the village had come forth, and those of the pink house as well, and they huddled together in small groupings, somber and silent in that shabby, inglorious place, occasionally exchanging whispered comforts and assurances. When the blaze had burned down some retreated to their homes, but more gasoline was brought and many stayed to watch a second burning, and to stir the coals now and again so that a wisp of transparent flame licked up, signifying the immolation of a crumb of intestine, a scrap of cartilage. The sky darkened. Drops of icy rain began to fall, yet the women covered their heads with shawls, violent nuns at a ritual observance, and kept to their sentinel stations until they were shadows and the wind stiffened, carrying the taste of grit to their mouths, and all that survived of the dragon Griaule and his human avatar were nuggets of charred bone, which they would later collect and grind into meal for a mystical supper, and a cinereal residue indistinguishable from the dusts that had blown across those hills since time was in its cradle and the sky still bright with creation fire.

VI

It was raining steadily by the time they drove out from Tres Santos in the late afternoon, heading for Nebaj and the north in one of the battered yellow mini-trucks. The women of the village expressed no interest in having them join their celebration. They wanted a swift return to normalcy, to their traditions, and they treated Snow and Yara, despite their service, with disdain, there being no place amongst them for a gringo and his pale, crippled woman. As for Snow, he had no desire to linger in Tres Santos a second longer than was necessary. He suspected that these women would be forever at their burning, whether in dreams or by means of some surrogate or effigy. Their new husbands, if husbands they took, would be lucky to survive such passion.

Yara had barely spoken since Jefe’s death and she was not given now to speech. As they jounced over ruts and potholes, Snow jamming the gears in order to gain traction in the mud, she rubbed his leg every so often – whether to reassure herself or him, he could not have said – and offered neither commentary nor advice. In truth, he would have had little in the way of response, preoccupied by the gusting wind and the rain driven sideways against the windshield, and by the precipitous drop-off to the right of the narrow road. They were past the halfway point to Nebaj when the storm broke full upon them. In those regions it would not have been considered either an especially fulminant storm or one of great duration, unremarkable as to its apparitions and thunderous concatenations and lurid bursts of lightning that illuminated sections of the pine forest, bleaching the separate trees to bone-white and shrouding them in purple-haloed effulgence like sainted relics set to burn on the mountainside, charms and admonitions against some ghastly form of predation. It sufficed, however, to persuade Snow to shut down the engine and switch off the useless wipers. He cracked a window to prevent the glass from fogging over with their breath. Rain washed down in spills thick as gray paint, its drumming increased to deafening measure. He had wanted to talk to Yara, but now he thought the storm with its progeny of light and sound was a blessing, for there was too much to be sifted through and digested and mulled over before they could begin to discuss what had happened and what would be. And yet to sit there encysted in that musty cab, blind to the world, surrounded by spirits real and unreal, separated one from the other by silence, by a gearbox and a divider with receptacles for drinks and maps and such, that was no better solution to the moment. His mind pulled ahead, worrying about how they would negotiate the border crossing and where they could live and what he would do with a woman as damaged as Yara at his side, all the demeaning practicalities and shameful concerns that would inevitably dissolve the bond they had forged anew, a bond already once broken. He wished he could resist these dour thoughts, but they were ingrained in him – he had too long cohabited with the idea that love born of illusion would never prosper, and the principle that every truth could be fashioned into the lie of itself. It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that – despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death – it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

The rain abated and the worst of the storm moved toward the lowlands. Snow started the engine. Yara reached a hand across the divide and he warmed her chilled fingers. In her face was a serenity he could not fathom. He thought she must be drawing upon some secret female provenance to which he had no access, but something stirred inside him, sparked to life by her expression, and he had then a fresh recognition of what they had accomplished together, the destruction of a monster, the killing of a thing that could not be killed. And although it went against every negative of his former faith in nothing, he submitted to belief and believed . . . believed in alchemy, in the marriage of souls, in accomplishment and noble obligation, and believed also that he would never fail her again, nor she him.

Static spat and crackled on the radio, salseros lamented about injustice and pop divas celebrated the endlessly trivial. In a thin voice Yara sang along with those songs she knew and they talked of inconsequential things, favorite bands and bad movies, touching one another often to reaffirm their connection, for they were their own country now. When they turned onto the highway they lapsed into silence, Yara gazing out the window and Snow focusing on the traffic, each alone with their thoughts, each striving to ignore the outposts of doubt and fear that flashed at them from the darkness, as vivid in their enmity as the gas station-hotel-brothel where they stopped to fill the tank – a big, ugly, raw building englobed in lemony radiance, like the local headquarters of evil and sons, and out front a string of six short-skirted women standing brazen and hipshot along the road, shadowy figures who bared their breasts for speeding cars, watched over by a chain-smoking devil with gold incisors, who strode back and forth, cursing the cars, the women, cursing everything in sight, pimping the apocalypse. Some drunken teenage soldiers, Indian kids with AK-47s, lounged by the entrance, giving people a hard time. In a spirit of playful menace, one lifted the hem of Yara’s skirt with his rifle barrel – upon seeing her disfigured legs he let the skirt fall, made the sign of the cross, and held conference with his friends. Snow hustled her into the truck before they could decide to investigate further and drove away quickly. After that they kept to the back roads, to blue highways and unmapped trails, driving north and west into the realms of the ordinary, ordinary monsters and ordinary seductions, past towns whose sole reason for being was a refusal to die, making for a land of cynical enchantments and marathon sales, of lap dancers for cancer and political doctrine based on new wives’ tales, the Great American Salmagundi in all its glorious criminal delirium, with nothing to sustain them, nothing certain, only the strength of their imperfections and hope reborn a dragon in their hearts, while behind them the old world trembled and the light caught fire and roared.