Green Eyes

  The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this - thought Jocundra - a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia. Coil by coil, the various security agencies encircled the remnants of Ezawa’s project and drew them down into some mysterious sub-basement of the bureaucracy. Several people disappeared, evidence was mislaid, an investigative committee foundered in the dull summer heat of the Congress. Ezawa’s suicide caused a brief reawakening of interest, but by then the topic had lost vitality for even the off-color jokes of talk show comedians. After her interrogation and release by the CIA, Jocundra submitted a copy of one of the videotapes to a network newswoman and suffered debunking by a professional debunker, a pompous tub of a man, a beard and a belly and a five hundred dollar suit, who claimed any of Donnell’s feats could be duplicated by a competent magician. Throughout the winter she was besieged by obscene phone calls and letters, offers from publishers, badgered by the illegitimate press, and when someone painted a pair of devilish green eyes on her apartment door, she packed and moved back to a rented cottage on Bayou Teche.

  She used the cottage as a base from which to send out her applications to graduate schools, the idea being - as her psychiatrist had put it - to ‘get on with life, find a new direction.’ She had agreed to try, though she did not think there was any direction leading away from all that had happened. Not being able to feel the things she had felt with Donnell was intolerable; it was as if she had been given a strength she never knew existed, and once it had been taken from her, her original strength seemed inadequate. And whenever she sought comfort in memory, she was brought up against Otille’s conjuration of her fantasy, of Valcours, and the sickly light this shed on her own relationship with Donnell.

  ‘You’re underestimating yourself,’ the psychiatrist had said. ‘You’ve handled this surprisingly well. Look at some of the others. Petit, for instance. Her incidence of trauma was much less than yours, and I doubt they’ll ever put her together. You’ll be just fine in a while.’

  His pious smile, and everything he said, had come across as an indictment, an unspoken comment that she was an unfeeling bitch and should quit wasting his time. She had flared up, offering an angry apology for not having crumbled into schizophrenia, and walked out. But she had followed his advice. She had been accepted at Berkeley, and if everything went as planned, within a year she would be doing fieldwork in Africa. She had goals, much work to do, yet nothing had changed.

  It was all empty without him.

  The people of Bayou Teche, those Donnell had cured and others, had raised a stone to him at Mr Brisbeau’s. For a month she had avoided visiting it, but then, thinking this avoidance itself might be unhealthy, she drove to the cabin early one morning and - hoping not to rouse Mr Brisbeau - sneaked through the palmettos to the boathouse. It was there the stone had been erected facing the bayou. Her first sight of it appalled her. The stone was ordinary, gray-white marble shot with black veins, to the memory of donnell Harrison incised in neat capitals. But fronting it was a litter of candle stubs, gilt paper angels, satin ribbons, mirrors, rosary beads, and plate after plate of rotting food. Ants and flies crawled everywhere; mites and gnats swarmed the air. Greenish mounds of potato salad, iridescent hunks of meat. The stench made her gag. Dizzy, she sat down on a rickety chair, one of several crowding the boathouse. After a moment she regained her composure. She should have expected it considering how his legend had grown over the year, considering also the cultish nature of religion on the bayous. The chairs, no doubt, had been used in some rite or vigil.

  When she looked up again, she paid no attention to the horrid feast and saw only the stone. It glowed under the morning sun, and the glow seemed to be increasing, dazzling her, as if her eyes had suddenly become over sensitized to light. She noticed with peculiar clarity the way the black veins of the marble twisted up through the letters of his name. She had to rest her head on her knees, overcome by emotion. Everything was bright and familiar, yet at the same time it was vacant-feeling, haunted; not by him, but by old husks of moments that flocked to her like ghosts to a newly abandoned castle, wisping up, informing of their sad persistence. God, she never should have come. There was nothing of him here. His body was potions and powders in some government laboratory, and all the stone served to do was punish her.

  Someone whistled on the path.