He'd drawn the oddest sketch, pinning words and text in cartoon balloons to different positions on the body and linking them with a mess of arrows and lines.
Ike sipped at the coffee. Where to begin? The flesh declared a maze, both in the way it told the story and in the story it told. The man had written his evidence as it occurred to him, apparently, adding and revising and contradicting himself, wandering with his truths. He was like a shipwrecked diarist who had suddenly found a pen and couldn't quit filling in old details.
'First of all,' he began, 'his name was Isaac.'
'Isaac?' asked Darlene from the assembly line of coffee makers. They had stopped what they were doing to listen to him.
Ike ran his finger from nipple to nipple. The declaration was clear. Partially clear. I
am Isaac , it said, followed by In my exile/In my agony of Light.
'See these numbers?' said Ike. 'I figure this must be a serial number. And 10/03/23
could be his birthday, right?'
'Nineteen twenty-three?' someone asked. Their disappointment verged on childlike. Seventy-five years old evidently didn't qualify as a genuine antique.
'Sorry,' he said, then continued. 'See this other date here?' He brushed aside what remained of the pubic patch. '4/7/44. The day of his shoot-down, I'm guessing.'
'Shoot-down?'
'Or crash.'
They were bewildered. He started over, this time telling them the story he was piecing together. 'Look at him. Once upon a time, he was a kid. Twenty-one years old. World War II was on. He signed up or got drafted. That's the RAF tattoo. They sent him to India. His job was to fly the Hump.'
'Hump?' someone echoed. It was Bernard. He was furiously tapping the news into his laptop.
'That's what pilots called it when they flew supplies to bases in Tibet and China,' Ike said. 'The Himalayan chain. Back then, this whole region was part of an Oriental Western Front. It was a rough go. Every now and then a plane went down. The crews rarely survived.'
'A fallen angel,' sighed Owen. He wasn't alone. They were all becoming infatuated.
'I don't see how you've drawn all that from a couple of strands of numbers,' said Bernard. He aimed his pencil at Ike's latter set of numbers. 'You call that the date of his shoot-down. Why not the date of his marriage, or his graduation from Oxford, or the date he lost his virginity? What I mean is, this guy's no kid. He looks forty. If you ask me, he wandered away from some scientific or mountain-climbing expedition within the last couple years. He sure as snow didn't die in 1944 at the age of twenty-one.'
'I agree,' Ike said, and Bernard looked instantly deflated. 'He refers to a period of captivity. A long stretch. Darkness. Starvation. Hard labor.' The sacred deep.
'A prisoner of war. Of the Japanese?'
'I don't know about that,' Ike said.
'Chinese Communists, maybe?'
'Russians?' someone else tried.
'Nazis?'
'Drug lords?'
'Tibetan bandits!'
The guesses weren't so wild. Tibet had long been a chessboard for the Great Game.
'We saw you checking the map. You were looking for something.'
'Origins,' Ike said. 'A starting point.'
'And?'
With both hands, Ike smoothed down the thigh hair and exposed another set of numbers. 'These are map coordinates.'
'For where he got shot down. It makes perfect sense.' Bernard was with him now.
'You mean his airplane might be somewhere close?'
Mount Kailash was forgotten. The prospect of a crash site thrilled them.
'Not exactly,' Ike said.
'Spit it out, man. Where did he go down?'
Here's where it got a little fantastic. Mildly, Ike said, 'East of here.'
'How far east?'
'Just above Burma.'
'Burma!' Bernard and Cleopatra registered the incredibility. The rest sat mute, perplexed within their own ignorance.
'On the north side of the range,' said Ike, 'slightly inside Tibet.'
'But that's over a thousand miles away.'
'I know.'
It was well past midnight. Between their cafe lattes and adrenaline, sleep was unlikely for hours to come. They sat erect or stood in the cave while the enormity of this character's journey sank in.
'How did he get here?'
'I don't know.'
'I thought you said he was a prisoner.'
Eke exhaled cautiously. 'Something like that.'
'Something?'
'Well.' He cleared his throat softly. 'More like a pet.'
'What!'
'I don't know. It's a phrase he uses, right here: "favored cosset." That's a pet calf or something, isn't it?'
'Ah, get out, Ike. If you don't know, don't make it up.' He hunched. It sounded like crazed drivel to him, too.
'Actually it's a French term,' a voice interjected. It was Cleo, the librarian. 'Cosset means lamb, not calf. Ike's right, though. It does refer to a pet. One that is fondled and enjoyed.'
'Lamb?' someone objected, as if Cleo – or the dead man, or both – were insulting their pooled intelligence.
'Yes,' Cleo answered, 'lamb. But that bothers me less than the other word,
"favored." That's a pretty provocative term, don't you think?' By the group's silence, they clearly had not thought about it.
'This?' she asked them, and almost touched the body with her fingers. 'This is favored? Favored over what others? And above all, favored by whom? In my mind, anyway, it suggests some sort of master.'
'You're inventing,' a woman said. They didn't want it to be true.
'I wish I were,' said Cleo. 'But there is this, too.'
Ike had to squint at the faint lettering where she was pointing. Corvée , it said.
'What's that?'
'More of the same,' she answered. 'Subjugation. Maybe he was a prisoner of the
Japanese. It sounds like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.'
'Except I never heard of the Japanese putting nose rings in their prisoners,' Ike said.
'The history of domination is complex.'
'But nose rings?'
'All kinds of unspeakable things have been done.' Ike made it more emphatic. 'Gold nose rings?'
'Gold?' She blinked as he played his light on the dull gleam.
'You said it yourself. A favored lamb. And you asked the question, Who favored this lamb?'
'You know?'
'Put it this way. He thought he did. See this?' Ike pushed at one ice-cold leg. It was a single word almost hidden on the left quadricep.
'Satan,' she lip-read to herself.
'There's more,' he said, and gently rotated the skin.
Exists, it said.
'This is part of it, too.' He showed her. It was assembled on the flesh like a prayer or a poem. Bone of my bones / flesh of my flesh. 'From Genesis, right? The Garden of Eden.'