‘How does one become a god, I asked them. How. By defeating the old gods. By reason of overweening pride. By not being the possessive slave. Weakened, smitten by the tiniest violation of his slavish happiness. Let us be butchers. Bear witness to our predilection for a universe of blood and bones. Create a cosmic slaughterhouse. .’
Close to the end of the film: that mountain again, the camera fixed now, a man approaching from the distance, a bulky shape. Then the explosion, premature, the fraction of a second it takes for the shockwave to knock down man and camera. The screen whirls, the camera like a dead man’s open eye staring at the sky. Raindrops fall on the lens. Someone picks up the camera and its glides over a man’s legs, registers for a moment his face seen from below — a short, grizzly beard spotted with gray. The flashing whites of the eyes, like those of a dog suddenly appearing beside you in the dark. Mediohombre. My father. Immeasurable loneliness was his task and his fulfillment. He created nothing but emptiness around him. It was a nuclear longing, the things shall never rise up again, he will rule over his grave for a million years. Schultz walked towards the place of the explosion, a climb. The camera swerved, a view of treetops as far as the eye could see. Higher. You could hear him panting. Sometimes he paused and pointed the camera at the destruction. Around it nothing but jungle, green and feverish at the edge of an open wound. That he had been there all those years. . I tried to imagine the volume of stone, the mind-boggling effort needed to move it all. The hollow gaze of the Indians as well, that comment on the futility of yet another hallucinating gringo come to bend the earth and the people to his will. They were used to this, their history was a litany of defeats and subjugation, their fate was hereditary.
‘Only the proud know what falling means, the chasm. The abyss at your feet. That one little step. That longing.’
The hissing of the wind, sometimes an animal noise like a dentist’s drill. His snorting breath. Far below, people were moving, forming chains; obedient ants.
I didn’t watch the entire film, at least not to the point where I had come in. Going out the door, I felt nauseous. The searing light — sunglasses, I needed a pair of sunglasses. From the glare of an over-exposed photo, the girl I’d just met suddenly appeared. I was not surprised.
‘So, are you convinced?’ she asked.
‘Wait a minute.’
I squatted down, with my hands covering my watering eyes.
‘Hey, can I do something?’
‘Could I borrow your sunglasses for a minute? I think that would help.’
I let some light in through my fingers to get accustomed, then accepted her glasses. Colored lenses, a comfort to my eyes. I stood up. The girl in rosy light.
‘I needed to sit down for a minute,’ I said, ‘I was completely blind.’
‘Are you allergic to light?’
‘Not that I know of, no.’
‘Your eyes are watering really bad.’
‘Did you come back to demonstrate a little?’
‘No. I just came back.’
A confident smile. Little teeth, the moist pink gums. To take my tongue and feel how smooth that would be.
Her shopping cart was parked in front of the diner window. She was drinking tea. She pointed at the stitches on my eyebrow and asked what had happened. Concerning the milkshakes going to other tables, she knew the quantity of sugar, colorants and fat they contained; the hamburger I’d ordered she commented on in terms of the origin of the meat, labor conditions in the meat-processing industry and the issue of waste. It was like clutching a landmine. She said, ‘That’s true, in the long run. That’s why it’s so hard to convince people, because it doesn’t pose an immediate threat. We’re not made to see long-term threats. We jump to our feet at a rustling in the bushes, that’s what we’re made for; a disaster fifty years from now doesn’t matter much to us. In evolutionary terms, we’re not prepared for the solutions to the problems we’ve created ourselves. We act as though nothing’s wrong. Our day in the sun is more important.’
‘You’re certainly well-informed,’ I said.
‘That’s right, joke about it. While you still can. So what did you think of the work of our Mr. Schultz?’
‘Mister Schultz?’
‘Um-hum. .’
‘Lonely. It’s lonely. I’ve never seen anything that lonely.’
‘A strange choice of words. For something so criminal, I mean.’
‘Have you seen it?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t have to.’
‘You go out demonstrating against something you haven’t even seen? That’s ridiculous.’
She shook her head stubbornly.
‘You don’t have to crawl into the sewer to know that it stinks.’
‘Nicely put, but it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘I look. . well, you can look with your principles too, if you get what I mean.’
‘Pretty blue principles.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Just kidding.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Yes, I noticed that.’
‘You didn’t finish what you were saying, about Schultz.’
‘There’s no way we can have a conversation if you haven’t even seen it.’
‘Now you’re angry.’
I grinned at this strange creature across from me. The tip of her tongue between her teeth. We knew. I got a hard-on.
‘Let’s go buy you some sunglasses,’ she said.
She had been born in Augusta, Montana, left home at eighteen. Boulder or Seattle, that’s where she wanted to go. Boulder was further away, she figured I’ll go there first, I can always go to Seattle later. I couldn’t quite follow her line of reasoning, but it made me laugh. Boulder hadn’t felt like home, so she went west, to Los Angeles. Her apartment was in Venice. She had never made it to Seattle.
She pushed the shopping cart along, talking the whole time with an exuberance that did me good. Her soul may have been drenched in activism, but there was little that was grave about her. She wore striking clothes, wide linen trousers, a black blouse that reached to her knees, on top of that a knitted something, maybe what they call a stole, purple, sometimes she stopped for a moment to fling it over her shoulder again. Flip-flops on her feet. Glistening rings on toes that were long and slender, no helpless appendages. Thin, sensitive wrists.
Her car was parked at a supermarket. She put the folders, press kits and bottles of water in the trunk, then walked off to return the cart. I shouted after her, ‘What’s your name, anyway?’
‘Sarah!’ she shouted back over her shoulder.
When she walked everything about her moved in a private current of air that tousled everything, her curly dark hair, her clothes.
‘What about you?’ she asked when she got back.
I told her my name.
‘German?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you headed, Ludwig?’
She pronounced my name as though tasting a new dish. I shrugged. She said, ‘I live close to the beach.’
‘I didn’t bring my swimming trunks.’
‘Trunks aplenty,’ she said.
There was nothing wrong with the way she drove, it was just that she never stopped doing all kinds of things while sitting at the wheel. A dust mote that she tried to remove from her eye while looking in the rearview mirror, something in her bag, a piece of chewing gum, lip gloss that suddenly demanded her complete attention.