Thomas Hoover

“ On the other hand, a weekend partial recovery was not totally beyond the realm of medical possibility. With a coma, so little is understood that anything's possible. Lou was right. This was definitely a weekend of the unexpected.
I'd been close to the deaths of people near to me, both my parents for starters, but I'd never been close to the restoration of life. It's hard to explain the rush of joy when you think somebody is gone for good and then they pop up again, like they'd never been lost. And with Sarah that feeling was es­pecially jarring. ”

“ I pulled away, still in shock from seeing Sarah so addled. I wanted more than anything else in the world just to slug him. "Why did you bring her here? Think about your answer. Kidnapping is a serious crime in the States."
"I've been very concerned about her." He looked up at the groves of Cebia trees around the square, a quiet glance, as though to inhale the misty morning air. My legal threat had gone right past him—probably because here he was the only law. "But now she's receiving the treatment she needs. I expect she'll be fine before long." ”

“ Sarah, Sarah, how could we both end up here, at the last outpost of the known world? But seeing is believ­ing. I took a deep breath, then turned down the pathway toward the thatch-roofed huts.
Through the mist it was gradually becoming clear that Baalum actually was a village, and a sizable one. The walk­way led past a string of clearings, each with clusters of one-room huts built in the ancient, classical style, with walls of mud over rows of vertical saplings, their roofs and porches peaked with yellow-green thatch weathering to browns and grays. ”

“ Now Alex Goddard was moving toward me holding the knife, as though tracking a prey, oblivious to Sarah, to everything. He'd concentrated all his hatred on me and me alone, and I hated him back as much. Death hovered between us, waiting to see whom to take.
But then the woman who had borne Tz'ac Tzotz said something in Kekchi Maya, pointing back at me and her child, and lunged at him. They collided together in the rain and next she slid down, first seizing his leg, then losing her grip and slipping onto the stones, her long black hair askew in the hovering smoke. ”

“ Meeting Carly and Paula's miracle worker in the flesh made me recall something Aldous Huxley once observed. He declared that the kind of man, and they are almost always men, who can control others with his mind needs to have certain qualities the rest of us can only envy. Of course he has to be intelligent and have a range of knowledge that can be used to impress people, but most of all, he has to have a will of iron, an unswerving tenacity of purpose, and an un­compromising self-confidence about who he is, what he wants. ”

“ The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her own minor facial cuts—which Lou immediately had re­paired with plastic surgery—somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of her soul. All her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up somewhere when she started col­lege, came back like a rush of demons loosed from some Pandora's box deep in her psyche. ”

“ Would we ever be together again?
On my hurried trip downtown, I kept wondering what I was about to encounter. Was it going to be the fantasy-bound Sarah of her girlhood, perhaps the same Sarah who'd spun out some stuttering vision of a jade mask? Or would all that be past and would she again be the ambitious, sparkling pre- med student she'd become when she was in college?
Getting to Soho took only about ten minutes, scant time to think. Lou's place was in what had once been a garment factory sweatshop. ”

“ It will be again. To make a place like Baalum is to coin the riches of God. I want you to stay. To be part of it. Together, we . . ." But whatever else he said was lost in the cloudburst that abruptly swept over the embankment. In an instant it was a torrent, the last outpouring of the storm, powerful and unrelenting. Nature had unleashed its worst, as though Kukulkan was rendering his final judgment.
"Morgy, I'm falling," Sarah screamed. ”

“ Nowadays, the ogres of our nightmares descend from outer space or even from our inner selves, places we can't physi­cally know or subdue. Here, though, at this very moment, Steve and Sarah and I were marooned in a thousand-year-old forest where horror still lived.
I got off the bed and steadied myself, breathing deeply, forcing my brain to clear. Steve was wearing a shift, but his clothes were hanging from a hook on the door. For a long moment I just stared at the bruises on his face.
"God, baby, what did he do to you?" ”

“ When you aren't ready, you can produce a baby in a momentary absence-of-mind, whereas once you're finally an adult, accomplished, lots-to-offer woman, ready to be the mother you wish you'd had, your body has closed down your baby-making equipment like an unused Rust Belt factory. Fertility has calculatingly abandoned you for the Sun Belt of youth. ”

“ Had some­thing clicked that freed her from Alex Goddard? Maybe her mind was finally becoming her own.
When we got outside, the skies were growing ever more foreboding, storm clouds looming. Steve had been right about the coming rain, but now it seemed the perfect cover for us to just get out. I took a deep breath of the misty air and forced myself to start helping Sarah up the cobblestone path. ”

“ A twenty-foot wall shielded their delicate eyes from the city's largest shanty-town, makeshift hovels of bamboo and rusted tin, with no signs of water or drains or toilets. Guatemala City: as Steve had put it once, a million doomed citizens, the rich and the poor, trapped together side by side in the most "modern" capital in Central America.
Why on earth had Sarah decided to come here? Even if she did travel with the mesmerizing Alex Goddard it was hard to imagine a place less spiritual. ”

“ Be strong. For both of us. I'm . . ."
I felt myself sinking slowly to the cold stones of the walk­way, the hard abrasion against my knees, Sarah tumbling forward as I pulled her down on top of me, Marcelina's arms around me trying to hold me up. It was the last real sensation I would remember.
Chapter Twenty-six
Sarah was hovering around me, a sylphlike presence, as I watched myself drift up the steps of the pyramid there in the square, my senses waxing and waning like the waves on a distant ocean shore. ”

“ Around me the room was still dark and, remembering the "dream," I came fully awake with a start, my heart pounding. What had . . . it done to me? I was shivering, with a piercing, pointed ache in my groin. I needed air.
I rose up unsteadily and reached out, and realized I was in a hospital bed with metal bars along one side.
What! How did I come to be in this? Then I began remembering. I was at Baalum, in Alex Goddard's Ninos del Mundo clinic. And I'd been trying to get Sarah and take her home.
Instead, I'd passed out and then . . . an attack, some unspeakably evil . . . ”

“ I jumped as I heard the "bump, thump, bump" sound of the operating table being rolled out of the OR and back down the hall. For some reason I thought of the sound of fate knocking on the door, like death coming to take Don Giovanni. Did Alex Goddard have plans to take me, only with drugs and medical sleight of hand? It wasn't going to happen.
I switched off the monitor and turned to stare at the computers. Why were they here in this "place of miracles"? What did they hold? Maybe that was where I should be. . . .
That was the moment when the heavy office door swung open and Marcelina appeared. ”

“ I yelled, first at him and then at the G-2 thugs. "Mira!" But their focus still was on some­thing beyond the square.
Finally I turned, following their gaze, and for a second I too forgot all about everything else. An intense red glow was illuminating the morning sky from the direction of the clinic, a vibrant electric rose weaving its hues in the mist. Then I saw spewing spikes of flame, orange and yellow, dancing over the top of the clinic. There was a finality about it that momentarily took my breath away.
Then it hit me. Steve's in there. ”

“ Half an hour later we were all headed downtown. Along the rain-swept streets the "All Beef" hot-dog vendors cow­ered under their red-and-yellow striped umbrellas, while de­parting office workers, briefcases perched above their heads as makeshift protection, scurried along the edges of build­ings searching for cabs. While Arlene continued to chat non­stop, I tried to do a little mental processing. And my mind kept drifting back to the sight of little Rachel, and Kevin. What perfect kids. ”

“ Finally I decided to just invent a phone conversation, recreating one from times past, one where we both felt secure enough to be flip. It was something I did more than I'd like to admit. Usually there'd be eight rings at his Park Slope loft and then a harried voice. Yes. Steve, talk to me. . . .
"Yo. This is not a recording. I am just in a transcendent plane. And if that's you, Murray, I'll have the contact sheets there by six. Patience is a virtue."
"Honey, it's me. Get out of the darkroom. Get a life."
"Oh, hi, baby." Finally tuning in. "I'm working. ”

“ When I marched into his cluttered, dimly lit office, my mind still churning over Carly's strange adoption story, what I saw sent my problem-detector straight into the red. There, sitting across from him, was Nicholas Russo, a five-seven smoothie in a charcoal Brioni double-breasted, the gentleman David sometimes referred to as Nicky the Purse. Another land mine in my life. He operated off and on as Applecore's "banker" when cash flow got dicey and real banks got nervous. It was an arrangement of last resort, since Nicky's loans had to be serviced at two percent a week. ”

“ The fact is, since Sarah and I were both only children, we'd identified a lot with each other. True, we'd traveled our separate paths, each looking, perhaps, for something to fill the lonely void in our lives that a sibling might have taken. As a child of the dusty, empty plains of West Texas, I didn't see other kids very much during the summer, and I made up reasons why she and I should visit each other as often as possible. ”

“ The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .
I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox Hill's third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a pale, sterile blue, and made even more de­pressing by stark fluorescent lights. Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel, including the instruments whose CRT screens reported her bodily functions. None of the instru­ments, however, had ever shown the brain activity associated with consciousness.
Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes, maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. ”

“ It's science, don't you realize? Ciencia. He's using you."
"We know he does many things that are magic. He makes powerful medicines from the plants we bring him, and when women want to bear a child—"
"No, Marcelina." I felt my heart go out to her, and to all the others. "It's black magic. It's all a lie."
The first thing to do was go down to the laboratory and dump every last one of my petri dishes into the sink, ova and all. Destroy the nest, then call Steve and warn him. ”

“ What was I going to do now?
"Listen, do you have any idea where Steve is? They're looking—"
"No shit, Madame Sherlock. I had a long, deeply unin­spiring interrogation by a couple of upscale assholes who showed up here in an Army Jeep. They wanted to know where the fuck he was, when I'd supped with him last. Let me inform you, love, you got my old heartstrings buddy in some decided doo-doo."
"I feel guilty enough about that as is, so stop." In spite of all Alex Goddard had done, I felt horrible about Steve, like a self-involved witch. "But do you know where he is now?" ”

“ Looking at her earnest Mayan face, I suddenly wondered if she could have any idea what Alex Goddard had done to Sarah, and to me?
"You were gone from your room," she declared, settling the basket onto the walkway and beginning to open it. "Where else would you be?" When I looked, I saw it had a sealed container of yogurt, a banana, and two eggs, presum­ably hard-boiled—traditional "safe" food for gringos in Third World places. "I'd been planning to bring you down today," she went on. "They all want to meet you." ”

“ I'm down here hoping to find Sarah, and I end up in a trash-filled park meeting some expat operator.
Steve had explained that the main benefit of Alan Dupre's CIA gig was that he did learn how to fly a helicopter. With that skill he'd ended up starting a tourist agency in Guatemala City using an old Bell he leased: "Mayan Pyramids from the Air." Mainly, though, he was a self-styled bon vivant who knew people.
"Steve the brave." On came Dupre's mirthless smile as he approached a jaunty spring entering his step.
"Alan, any friend of yours has got to be brave." Steve just stared at him. ”