Chapter Twenty-Eight: After the Bone Tour

Many were the wonders and many were the people that T. Allen McQuary knew on his voyage around the world. For example, when he went ashore in Gibraltar, he met a girl in a tavern, and she led him upstairs and pleasured him in the way he enjoyed most. At first, he thought she liked him but found instead that she only wanted money, so he gave her two dollars and asked her to do it again, and she did. As he left the tavern, he thought, It's a lot easier to get what you want with money than it is with all that Mesmer hocus-pocus.

In Ostia, he saw a fat man without a shirt kick a spotted spaniel off a pier. The dog pawed at the water for a while and then went under. The man continued to load bundles into a small boat and then climbed into the boat himself. Mack heard the man whistling as he untied the moorings and pushed the boat away from the dock. The man rowed out into the harbor and hoisted the sail, and the sail puffed out with the breeze. Mack watched as the boat disappeared around a peninsula. The waves lapped gently against the shore.

When he went ashore in Albania, Mack saw a man juggling cats. Hissing and wailing, the cats flew and flipped, and sometimes they clawed at one another in mid-flight. But, the juggler knew how to grab their tails and send them flying upward again, so the cats were caught in wild circularity, and the people in the crowd laughed and threw coins into the juggler's basket.

That should be funny, but it's not. It's not funny or cruel or anything. It's just a man juggling cats.

When the Indrani docked at the Piraeus harbor, Mack walked the ancient road to Athens and up the steep hill to the Acropolis where he hoped to experience some kind of mystical encounter with the ancient gods. Some three hundred years before, the Venetians had blown the top out of the temple, but enough was left to excite Mack's imagination or so he hoped. Mack spread his bedroll among the broken columns and acanthus plants and waited. Night fell and all was quiet except for a man and woman talking on a verandah somewhere below. Mack heard the man speaking gruffly and then speaking in a voice high and imploring, and then gruffly again, whereupon the woman began laughing–not a cackle but the way a pretty woman ought to laugh, melodically and merrily with the knowledge that her laughter would please her lover–and then the man was laughing, too, and Mack thought, That's how love should sound, like red wine and a candle on the table and a pretty, dark-eyed girl laughing. He leaned back against a broken column with his fingers laced behind his head and wondered if he could at least believe in love.

He looked toward the east where the horizon was becoming milky with the rising moon, brighter and brighter and washing out the stars, until at last her white crown peeked over Mt. Hymettus. Then the full moon rose into the black sky, perfectly round and white until she was framed between the silhouettes of two black columns. Mack struggled to feel something–awe, maybe, or melancholy–but, no, it was just the moon. The remnants and ruins about him glowed vaguely in the moonlight, and these moved Mack to beseech Athena for a sign of her ancient power or perhaps an intimation of her presence. But nothing moved among the stones except an occasional mouse, and once an owl flew overhead. The goddess had vacated her ruined precincts. Finally, Mack gave up and went to sleep. When he awoke the next morning, the moon was gone. Mack rolled up his blanket and began the long walk to the Indrani. On the way, he stopped to buy a kafe and pastry.

When the Indrani docked in Istanbul, Mack disembarked onto the wharf where he saw a girl forced under a donkey. Her hands were tied and her elbows propped forward on a shipping crate, and her mouth was gagged. Two men held her feet apart, and the donkey mounted her, and the men in the crowd laughed and threw fruit at her. "Yallah Hiristiyan! Yallah esek! Kahretsin Hiristiyani! Ha, ha, ha!" Mack remembered the whorehouse in New Orleans and the tan-copper girls and Madame Lulu, pink and plump in a bergère chair. The donkey was still on top of the girl and braying when Mack turned away.

The next night Mack was out "on the town" with three sailors he did not know very well, and they started drinking absinthe and whiskey, and they smoked hashish from a hookah. The night descended into a swirl of women with green scarves and ruby lips and copper lanterns with pinpricks of light gleaming through the sides and the steamy funk of pussy and incense and human sweat. The feel of the silk and yielding flesh and casual caresses, the gleams of light and the strong intoxicants, the whole phantasmagoria lifted Mack over the minarets of Hagia Sophia and then slammed him down onto a flagstone street where he lay on his back and vomit dribbled from his mouth. The sailors stood around his fallen body, and one of them said, "I think he's dead."

Another said, "No, he's breathing, but he's going to die."

And the third said, "He needs a doctor quick."

So, the three sailors carried Mack to the Bezm-i Alem, and an old doctor wearing a skull cap and a perfectly white thobe came in. He peeled back Mack's eyelids and looked into his eyes, took his pulse, and forced an emetic down his throat with a glass syringe. The sailors waited down the hall while Mack retched and puked. Then, the doctor gave Mack a dose of something bitter and some tepid tea to drink. Mack lay moaning for a few minutes and then asked, "Where am I?"

The doctor shook his head and said, "Cehennem, sen salak,' and left. Mack didn't know it, but the doctor had said, "In hell, you fool."

Across the room, an old woman in a hijab was sitting beside her bed-ridden husband and holding his hand. She was nodding her head and murmuring a prayer, and when she finished, she wiped the old man's brow with a damp cloth. He was barely breathing, and his time on earth was coming to a close, not as dramatically as on a battlefield or in a brothel or even in a street fight, but as men are often wont to die, in bed, drugged with morphine and fitfully sleeping. Mack heard the name "Allah" over and over in the old woman's prayer: The name sounded like water rippling over stony shallows. When she finished the prayer, she wiped her husband's forehead with the cloth.

All in a moment, the scene swept Mack back to his childhood. He remembered with vivid clarity the time he had the measles–he was nine or ten (he must remember to ask his father when he returned home)–and it was Christmas morning, the worst time of the year to be sick. His father knelt by his bed and prayed a long, Scripture-laden prayer in which he reminded God of His sovereignty and His promises in the Bible, as if God might forget what He promised and needed a nudge. And even though Mack was only nine (or ten) years old and shivering with fever, he both hoped and doubted: He hoped his father's prayer would save him but doubted that it would. After all, why would God need so much convincing to do the right thing, especially when it's so easy for Him and so hard for us? It didn't add up.

In the parlor, his sister started singing "In a One Horse Open Sleigh." His mother gave a peremptory "Shh! Your brother is sick!" and the singing stopped.

Now, in the Bezm-i Alem Hospital, Mack thought, Allah and Jehovah are different names for the same indifference. Why not heal the old man? Then the old woman and her husband would go home and eat olives and lamb in porcelain dishes, and she would brew strong coffee and take the cup to him with a little wedge of baklava. And he would recount how he had been lying abed and feeling poorly when, suddenly, Allah came to him and wiped his brow and took him by the hand and lifted him from the bed. The old man would say, "Allah be praised for the healing and this food and the coffee…and, of course, for you, my love!"

Mack recalled the line from "Dover Beach," "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" and thought, Maybe Baxter was right. Maybe gods and ghosts are envious vapors that forever thirst for human blood, but love . . . love is as strong as death. Mack didn't know it, but this particular sentiment about love and death was from the Song of Solomon.

Mack thought about the laughing couple in Athens, and the man changing his voice to mimic another man and the woman's pleasure in her lover's performance. In his ongoing moment of clarity, Mack realized that the laughter of the woman was not different from the old lady's care for her husband but rather the same melody in a different key. Laughter, compassion, anxiety, and mourning–even anger and frustration–are the warp and weft of love.

The Author of our lives is Love!

Mack lay his head back on the pillow and looked at the parabola of light cast by the bedside lantern on the dirty wall and ceiling.

With great conviction Mack said to himself, I hereby set aside all false faith and declare that I believe in Love!

Suddenly, the old man's eyes flew open and in terror he sat straight up in bed. "Ates! Ates!" he cried. With his eyes stretched wide and his mouth agape, he looked at his wife as if he had never seen her before, as if she were a djinn who had come to bear him to Hell. "Ates!" Then he lay down and the rattle commenced and a half hour later, he was dead. Mack watched the old man die and thought, Well, so much for the power of prayer.

Then the old woman did something Mack did not expect. She let drop her husband's hand and pulled the bedsheet down to his knees. Leaning over the body, she began patting his pants leg. Apparently, she didn't find what she was looking for because she leaned over to pat the other leg. Again, nothing. So, the old woman pulled the dead man's gomlek up to his neck, whereupon she let out a little cry of joy: "Ah!" as if a hummingbird had whirred into the room. She lifted a key hanging from a string tied around her husband's neck. Then, putting one hand on his forehead, she gave the key a sharp jerk, and the string broke. She put the key in a small bag with a drawstring, tugged the string taut, pulled the sheet over the man's head, and turned from his body. For the first time, she noticed that Mack had been watching her. She smiled, arched her eyebrows, and said, "Allahu Akbar." Then she left. He heard her singing in the hallway.

Mack sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

Goddamn it, he thought.