Sins of the Reaper - 5

“Who am I?” I asked.

Even in the face of Marlowe's dire pronouncement, I still felt no real fear, my only emotion an inexplicable wave of compassion for the two of them as they lay prostrate on my apartment floor. Opening the closet, I grabbed my coat and patrol hat before slipping on the familiar weight of my old backpack across my shoulders and limping out and down the apartment stairs into the late morning light.

Deep within the woodland as darkness fell, I lay down and burrowed into the poncho liner. But even with my lids heavy with sleep, my thoughts gave me no rest, memories arising from the deep past that kept me awake long into the night. I heard a familiar voice rising like an echo in my thoughts that reminded me of our hike in the brutal Mexican heat a seeming lifetime ago.

“We rush from activity to activity,” Pan's voice rasped, “the desire to do things well, to be good friends, to be present in day-to-day activities … all this abandoned … and for what?” He shouted indignantly, “The god of imagined time?”

In the stillness of the night, I remember the shriek of a circling hawk as we stood in a circle around him, Professor Pangloss waxing with irritated eloquence, the sweat seeping from my armpits and uncomfortably soaking my under garments beneath the bright sun.

But one thing leading to another, I remembered Lily cornering me the night before our class flew to Mexico, her almost forgotten words floating in the night air. I found myself wondering how my life might have changed if I had loved the one woman who wanted to love me in return.

“Kiss me Jon,” her ghost whispered, her wet eyes gazing into mine, “kiss me … one last kiss.”

A day later our plane crossed the Gulf as I poisoned my body with drink, my flesh growing pleasantly lethargic and numb, a distant tingling in my arms and chest the only reminder of existential pain.

I remembered too the slum that our bus passed through on the way to the hotel and the memories it revived of unspeakable scenes of grinding poverty in the villages of a distant and now mostly forgotten war. That night in the hotel bar I drank myself into a stupor; I don’t even remember putting myself to bed. I was still drunk when the alarm went off the next morning, sheathing my fighting knife under my shirt from sheer habit as my roommate Raj looked on in undisguised horror.

A great stone head greeted us as we crossed a swamp to the sandy island of La Venta, its empty eyes staring blindly out of the past that once shaped it, a solemn sentinel guarding a terrible secret forgotten long ago. A general sense of unease permeated the humid air as I stared drunkenly back, an unknown dread lurking in the remains of the once mighty jungle surrounding us, its voice camouflaged by chattering birds and the whine of insects as they tormented our exposed skin.

But it wasn’t jungle, at least not anymore, the evidence of the previous century’s technology scaring the landscape with a line of industrial buildings at the dock where our boat had landed an hour before, the undergrowth carefully cleared around the monuments and altars at the site itself, sparse patches of trees hulking moodily in the background.

Pan’s remembered voice murmured “The jungle is a humbling place, the great people who once lived here created a calendar more accurate than our own. And where are they now?”

Where are they now? – was asked in derision, his words triggering something unspeakable within my own thoughts in the moment, as if reentering a darkened room where something bad had happened in a distant and unverifiable past, the thought of it – even as whimsy – frightening enough to reawaken the furies lurking within me.

“Where are they now,” he continued with a disheartening laugh, “a century ago no one knew they had ever existed.” Pointing at the enormous Olmec head, he said, “Something greater than simple craftsmanship was responsible for this. Look at the detail in the eyelids, the thick, realistic lips, the stylized head and headgear. The Olmec were not merely masters of iconic art … they made accurate records of constellations not discovered in Europe until the invention of modern telescopes.” After a long space of silence, he asked again, “Where are they now?”

The mosquitoes and biting flies were dreadful, in some places hovering in little angry clouds. We were all greasy with ineffectual bug repellant, its oily liquid streaked by sweat and blood after barely an hour had passed in the hot sun. Bea seemed the exception that disproved the rule, she had refused to apply any Deet and the flies and mosquitoes weren’t biting her.

But every surreptitious glance revealed a growing convocation of larger insects clinging to her clothes and hair; assorted beetles creeping across her pant legs, a slow moving walking stick glacially climbing her slippery, silky blouse, a crown of phosphorescent butterflies fluttering on their perches atop her raven hair, the electric blue of their open wings blinking to dusty brown whenever they snapped suddenly shut, a host of dark eyes peering angrily where a moment before sapphire brilliance had shone.

When Pan finally turned and we began to walk into the ruins, the butterfly’s fluttered into the air above her, the magic of the moment dissipating with my memory of it, Lilly’s red-rimmed eyes appearing in the butterflies’ stead. “Kiss me Jon,” she whispered, her eyes gazing into mine. “Kiss me … one last kiss.”

Sun Tzu warned, Know your enemy and know yourself, but I had not taken the full measure of either, her words penetrating my defenses with an ease that surprised us both. Thrusting my trembling hands into my pockets, I slowly shook my head in response, my eyes involuntarily welling up as she reached outward in supplication.

“I’m sorry Lilly,” I mumbled, “Really … I’m sorry,” and then began to turn away before the tears could fall in earnest. The amnesia created by the explosion in Bethlehem radiated slowly outward, its tentacled reach stretching beyond the beginnings of the journey itself, rending priceless memories like the fragile silk of a spider’s web abandoned only hours before.

The beginning of the journey in Mexico seems strangely connected to this memory of her, the two events fused not in time or theme, but with some as yet unrecognized purpose.

But Pan’s remembered voice returned me to Mexico. “The priest of La Venta,” I whispered hoarsely into the amorphous darkness, the image forming in my mind of the stone altar where we ended our tour, the cruel visage of a man emerging from the underworld with a child sacrifice in his arms.

Above his head, lay a great still and empty slab, the gore spilt on its rough-hewn surface washed clean a thousand rainy seasons past. I shivered in reciprocal terror when I first beheld it, Bea choosing in that moment to reach for my hand, a jolt of electricity rushing up my arm as I tried to let go, her fierce grasp preventing me from reflexively pulling away.

My terror of the stone shaman’s pitiless face redoubled in her claw like grip, the wail of his victim rising briefly in the still air surrounding us as if its beating heart was yanked from his small chest in that moment. Jerking backward as if the flinty knife had penetrated my own, my spasm sprung my hand free from hers, my eyes refocusing in embarrassment on Pan as he stared curiously back.

But his voice reawakened within the present, his words, slow and measured, my hands trembling at the remembered sound of them – “If you had lived among the Olmec … you would not have wanted this as your final resting place. They depended on a healthy harvest for survival, appeasing the gods to ensure it was a natural outgrowth of the birth of seasonal time. This scary fellow was a power broker – he dealt directly with the gods – communicating their demands, carrying out their wishes. You didn’t want him as an enemy.”

But Lilly's remembered eyes replaced Pan's, as she pleaded, “If you would only give me a chance, I would love you as no woman ever loved a man. Kiss me,” her wraith pleaded through trembling lips, “kiss me and live forever.”

Against all reason I braved her tearful gaze as the desire to kiss her pounded fiercely in my chest, my heart the last ungovernable muscle remaining. "Je t’aime jolie Lilly," I whispered as tears filled my eyes within the comforting confines of my poncho liner. Lilly kissed with the entirety of her being. One does not easily forget such a kiss.

One should never forget such a kiss.

But nobility of character or my love of Bea did not stay my lips. That much seems clear. Only fear wields such power over weak, carnal flesh. At arm’s length I could barely hold her gaze, but no closer. In the warmth of her close embrace I would have turned away like a sinner before the radiant glory of God. My lips might have said the words – I love you – but not my eyes. I could not kiss her because I was afraid of her. Even if I no longer remember why.

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence we parted, her final words turning strangely, tightly in my mind. Lilly was one more painful memory I could live more easily without. And so I did. I may not have intentionally altered my past, but something began to purge feeling for her from my psyche as I surrendered a little more of myself to a stiff and unfeeling numbness. God knows I had already given up more than could be bourn during the shitty war that separated us when I believed I loved her still.

A few days later I was in Mexico staring from a seemingly safe distance in millennia at the crumbling remains of a horrifying past. But the peril was no longer remote, Bea suddenly hissing in my ear – “For a good man would you possibly dare to die?” as my heart skipped a beat. “Would you die for a friend,” she continued, “or love of country? Would you die . . . for the harvest?”

Her abrupt joke broke the tension and I chuckled quietly, a low rumble in my chest, turning to gaze in surprise at her as she leaned away, almost convinced that she had a sense of humor until I noticed the pallor in her face and the tight set of her jaw. My eyes returned slowly to the priest frozen in the stone, eternally trapped between the limbo of spirit and flesh, 'For a good man would you possibly dare to die?' echoing fearfully in my thoughts.

Pan once said that time was a meaningless construct; the question – ‘What happens next?’ only has meaning if we assign it meaning.

What happens next? Answer: I don’t know. I don’t even really know what happened then.