Moon Palace Read online

  On the morning of the fourth day, with his food gone and his canteen holding less than a cup of water, Effing spotted what looked like a cave at the top of a nearby cliff. It would be a good place to die in, he thought. Out of the sun and inaccessible to vultures, a place so hidden that no one would ever find him. Mustering his courage, he began the laborious trek upward. It took him almost two hours to get there, and when he arrived, he was at the end of his strength, barely able to stand. The cave was a good deal larger than it had appeared from below, and Effing was surprised to discover that he did not have to crouch to enter it. He pulled away the branches and twigs that blocked the opening and went in. Against all his expectations, the cave was not empty. Stretching a good twenty feet into the interior of the cliff, it contained several pieces of furniture: a table, four chairs, a cupboard, a dilapidated potbelly stove. For all intents and purposes, it was a house. The objects looked well cared-for, and everything in the room was neatly arranged, sitting comfortably in a kind of rough domestic order. Effing lit the candle that was on the table and took it with him to the back of the room, exploring the dark corners where the sunlight did not penetrate. Along the left wall he found a bed, and in the bed there was a man. Effing assumed the man was asleep, but when he cleared his throat to announce his presence and got no response, he bent down and held the candle over the stranger’s face. It was then that he saw he was dead. Not just dead, but murdered. In the place where the man’s copy eye should have been, there was a large bullet hole. The left eye stared blankly into the darkness, and the pillow under the head was splattered with blood.

  Turning away from the corpse, Effing walked back to the cupboard and found it filled with food. Canned goods, salted meats, flour and cooking supplies—there was enough packed onto the shelves to last someone a year. He promptly prepared himself a meal, consuming half a loaf of bread and two cans of beans. Once he had satisfied his hunger, he set about disposing of the dead man’s body. He had already worked out a plan; it was simply a matter of putting it into effect. The dead man must have been a hermit, Effing reasoned, living alone like this up in the mountains, and if that were the case, then not many people would have known he was there. From all that he could gather (the flesh still undecomposed, the absence of any overpowering smell, the bread not yet stale), the murder must have been committed quite recently, perhaps as recently as several hours ago—which meant that the only person who knew the hermit was dead was the man who had murdered him. There would be nothing to prevent him from taking the hermit’s place, Effing thought. They were more or less the same age, they were more or less the same size, they both had the same light brown hair. It would not be very difficult to grow a beard and start wearing the dead man’s clothes. He would take on the hermit’s life and continue to live it for him, acting as though the soul of this man had now passed into his possession. If anyone came up there to pay him a visit, he would simply pretend to be someone he was not—and see if he could get away with it. He had a rifle for self-defense if something went wrong, but he figured the odds were with him in any case, since it did not seem likely that a hermit would have many visitors.

  After removing the stranger’s clothes, he dragged the body out of the cave and took it around to the back side of the cliff. There he discovered the most remarkable thing of all: a small oasis thirty or forty feet below the level of the cave, a lush area with two towering cottonwood trees, an active brook, and innumerable shrubs whose names were unfamiliar to him. It was a miniature pocket of life in the midst of overpowering barrenness. As he buried the hermit in the soft earth beside the brook, he realized that everything would be possible for him in this place. He had food and water; he had a house; he had found a new identity for himself, a new and utterly unexpected life. The reversal was almost too much for him to comprehend. Just one hour before, he had been ready to die. Now, he was trembling with happiness, unable to stop himself from laughing as he flung one shovelful of dirt after another onto the dead man’s face.

  Months passed. In the beginning, Effing was too stunned by his good fortune to pay much attention to the things around him. He ate and slept, and when the sun was not too strong, he would sit on the rocks outside his cave and watch the bcopy, multicolored lizards that went flitting about his feet. The view from the cliff was immense, encompassing untold miles of terrain, but he did not look out at it very often, choosing instead to confine his thoughts to the immediate vicinity: his trips to the stream with the water bucket, the gathering of firewood, the inside of his cave. He had had his fill of scenery, and for now he was content to ignore it. Then, very suddenly, this sense of calm abandoned him, and he entered a period of almost unbearable loneliness. The horror of the past months engulfed him, and for the next week or two he came dangerously close to killing himself. His mind swarmed with delusions and fears, and more than once he imagined that he was already dead, that he had died the moment he entered the cave and was now the prisoner of some demonic afterlife. One day, in a fit of madness, he took out the hermit’s rifle and shot his donkey, thinking that it had been turned into the hermit himself, a spectre of wrath who had come back to haunt him with his insidious braying. The donkey knew the truth about him, and he had no choice but to eliminate this witness to his fraud. After that, he became obsessed with trying to uncover the identity of the dead man, systematically ransacking the interior of the cave for clues, looking for a diary, a packet of letters, the flyleaf of a book, anything that might reveal the hermit’s name. But nothing turned up, he never found the slightest particle of information.

  After two weeks, he slowly began to return to himself, eventually subsiding into something that resembled peace of mind. It couldn’t go on forever, he told himself, and that alone was a comfort, a thought that gave him the courage to continue. At some point, the food supplies were going to run out, and then he would have to go somewhere else. He gave himself approximately a year, a bit more than that if he was careful. By then, people would have given up hoping that he and Byrne would be coming back. He doubted that Scoresby would ever mail his letter, but even if he did, the results would be essentially the same. A search party would be sent out, financed by Elizabeth and Byrne’s father. They would wander around the desert for several weeks, hunting assiduously for the missing men—there was sure to be a reward offered as well—but they would never find a thing. At most, they might discover Byrne’s grave, but that was not very likely. Even if they did, it would not get them any closer to him. Julian Barber was gone, and no one was ever going to track him down. It was all a matter of holding out until they had stopped looking for him. The obituaries would be published in the New York papers, a memorial service would be held, and that would be the end of it. Once that happened, he could go wherever he liked; he could become whoever he wanted to be.

  Still, he knew that it would not be to his advantage to rush things. The longer he kept himself hidden, the safer it would be when he finally left. He therefore set about organizing his life in the strictest possible way, doing everything he could to stretch out the time he would spend there: limiting himself to one meal a day, laying in an ample supply of firewood for the winter, keeping his body fit. He made charts and schedules for himself, and each night before going to bed he wrote down meticulous accounts of the resources he had used during the day, pushing himself to maintain the most rigorous discipline. In the beginning, he found it hard to achieve the goals he had set, often succumbing to the temptation of another slice of bread or another plate of canned stew, but the effort in itself seemed worthwhile, and it helped to keep him alert. It was a way of testing himself against his own weaknesses, and as the actual and the ideal gradually came closer together, he could not help thinking of it as a personal triumph. He knew that it was no more than a game, but a fanatical devotion was required to play it, and that very excess of concentration was what allowed him to keep from slipping into despondency.

  After two or three weeks of this new, disciplined life, he began to feel
the urge to paint again. One night, sitting with a pencil in his hand and writing up his brief report of the day’s activities, he suddenly started to sketch out a little drawing of a mountain on the opposite page. Before he even realized what he was doing, the sketch was finished. It took no more than half a minute, but in that abrupt, unconscious gesture, he found a strength that had never been present in any of his other work. That same night, he unpacked his art supplies, and from then until his colors finally ran out, he continued to paint, leaving the cave every morning at dawn and spending the entire day outside. It lasted for two and a half months, and in that time he managed to finish nearly forty canvases. Without any question, he told me, it was the happiest period of his life.

  He was working under the demands of a double restriction, and each one wound up helping him in a different way. First, there was the fact that no one would ever see these paintings. That was a foregone conclusion, but rather than torment Effing with a sense of futility, it actually seemed to liberate him. He was working for himself now, no longer burdened by the threat of other people’s opinions, and that alone was enough to produce a fundamental change in how he approached his art. For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a con-sequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. He untaught himself the rules he had learned, trusting in the landscape as an equal partner, voluntarily abandoning his intentions to the assaults of chance, of spontaneity, the onrush of brute particulars. He was no longer afraid of the emptiness around him. The act of trying to put it on canvas had somehow internalized it for him, and now he was able to feel its indifference as something that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to the silent power of those gigantic spaces himself. The pictures he produced were raw, he said, filled with violent colors and strange, unpremeditated surges of energy, a whirl of forms and light. He had no idea if they were ugly or beautiful, but that was probably beside the point. They were his, and they didn’t look like any other paintings he had seen before. Fifty years later, he said, he was still able to remember each one of them.

  The second constraint was more subtle, but it nevertheless exerted an even stronger influence on him: eventually, his materials were going to run out. There were only so many tubes of paint and so many canvases, after all, and as long as he continued to work, they were bound to be used up. From the very first moment, therefore, the end was already in sight. Even as he painted his pictures, it was as though he could feel the landscape vanishing before his eyes. This gave a particular poignancy to everything he did during those months. Each time he completed another canvas, the dimensions of the future shrank for him, steadily drawing him closer to the moment when there would be no future at all. After a month and a half of constant work, he finally came to the last canvas. More than a dozen tubes of paint were still left, however. Scarcely breaking stride, Effing turned the pictures around and began a new series on the backs of the canvases. It was an extraordinary reprieve, he said, and for the next three weeks he felt as though he had been reborn. He worked on this second cycle of landscapes with even greater intensity than the first, and when all the backs were finally covered, he began painting on the furniture inside his cave, frantically inscribing his brushstrokes onto the cupboard, the table, and the wooden chairs, and when all these surfaces were covered as well, he squeezed out the last bits of color from the shriveled tubes and began work on the southern wall, sketching the outlines of a panoramic cave painting. It would have been his masterpiece, Effing said, but the colors ran dry when it was only half-finished.

  Then it was winter. He still had several notebooks and a box of pencils, but rather than switch from painting to drawing, he hunkered down during the cold months and spent his time writing. In one notebook he recorded his thoughts and observations, attempting to do in words what he had previously been doing in images, and in another he continued with the log of his daily routine, maintaining an exact account of his expenditures: how much food he had eaten, how much food was left, how many candles he had burned, how many candles were still intact. In January, it snowed every day for a week, and he took pleasure in seeing the whiteness fall on the red rocks, transforming the landscape that had become so familiar to him. In the afternoon, the sun would come out and melt the snow in irregular patches, creating a beautiful dappled effect, and when the wind picked up, it would blow the white, dusty particles into the air, swirling them around in brief, tempestuous dances. Effing would stand and watch these things for hours on end, never seeming to tire of them. His life had slowed down to such an extent that the smallest changes were now visible to him. After his paints ran out, he had gone through an anguished period of withdrawal, but then he had found that writing could serve as an adequate substitute for making pictures. By mid-February, however, he had filled all his notebooks, and there were no pages left to write on anymore. Contrary to what he had been expecting, this did not dampen his spirits. He had descended so deeply into his solitude by then that he no longer needed any distractions. He found it almost unimaginable, but little by little the world had become enough for him.

  In late March, he finally had his first visitor. As luck would have it, Effing was sitting on the roof of his cave when the stranger made his appearance at the bottom of the cliff, and this allowed him to follow the man’s progress up the rocks, watching for the better part of an hour as the small figure clambered toward him. By the time the man reached the top, Effing was waiting for him with the rifle in his hands. He had played out this scene for himself a hundred times before, but now that it was happening, he was shocked to discover how scared he was. It wouldn’t take more than thirty seconds for the situation to clarify itself: whether or not the man knew the hermit, and if he did, whether the disguise could fool him into thinking that Effing was the person he was pretending to be. If the man happened to be the hermit’s killer, then the question of the disguise would be irrelevant. Likewise if he was a member of the search party, a last benighted soul still dreaming of the reward. Everything would be settled within a few moments, but until it was, Effing had no choice but to expect the worst. He realized that on top of all his other sins, there was a good chance that he was about to become a murderer.

  The first thing he noticed about the man was that he was big, and immediately after that he noticed how oddly he was dressed. The man’s clothing had apparently been put together from a random assortment of patches—a square of bcopy red material here, a rectangle of blue and white checks there, a piece of wool in one place, a piece of denim in another—and this costume gave him a weirdly clownish aspect, as though he had just wandered off from some traveling circus. Instead of a wide-brimmed Western hat, he wore a battered derby with a white feather protruding from the band. His straight black hair hung all the way down to his shoulders, and as he continued to approach, Effing saw that the left side of his face was deformed, creased with a broad, jagged scar that ran from his cheek to his lower lip. Effing assumed the man was an Indian, but at that point it hardly mattered what he was. He was an apparition, a nightmare buffoon who had materialized out of the rocks. The man grunted with exhaustion as he hoisted himself onto the top ledge, and then he stood up and smiled at Effing. He was only ten or twelve feet away. Effing raised his rifle and pointed it at him, but the man seemed more puzzled than afraid.

  “Hey, Tom,” he said, speaking in a slow, halfwit’s voice. “Don’t you remember who I am? It’s your old pal, George. You don’t have to play no tricks with me.”

  Effing hesitated for a moment, then lowered the rifle, still keeping his finger on the trigger as a precaution. “George,” he muttered, speaking almost inaudib
ly so his voice would not betray him.

  “I been locked up all winter,” the big man said. “That’s why I didn’t come to see you.” He continued walking toward Effing and did not stop until he was close enough to shake hands. Effing transferred the rifle to his left hand and extended his copy in greeting. The Indian looked searchingly into his eyes for a moment, but then the danger suddenly passed. “You’re looking good, Tom,” he said. “Real good.”

  “Thanks,” Effing said. “You look good, too.”

  The big man burst out laughing, seized by a kind of oafish delight, and from that moment on, Effing knew he was going to get away with it. It was as though he had just told the funniest joke of the century, and if so little could produce so much, it wouldn’t be hard to keep up the deception. It was astonishing, in fact, how smoothly everything went. Effing’s resemblance to the hermit was only approximate, but it seemed that the power of suggestion was strong enough to transform the physical evidence into something it was not. The Indian had come to the cave expecting to find Tom the hermit, and because it was inconceivable to him that a man who answered to the name of Tom could be anyone other than the Tom he was looking for, he had hastily altered the facts to match his expectations, justifying any discrepancies between the two Toms as a product of his own faulty memory. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the man was a simpleton. Perhaps he knew all along that Effing wasn’t the real Tom. He had climbed up to the cave looking for a few hours’ companionship, and since he got what he was looking for, he wasn’t about to question who had given it to him. In the end, it was probably a matter of complete indifference to him whether he had been with the real Tom or not.

  They spent the afternoon together, sitting in the cave and smoking cigarettes. George had brought along a pouch of tobacco, his usual gift to the hermit, and Effing smoked one after the other in a trance of pleasure. He found it odd to be with someone after so many months of isolation, and for the first hour or so he had trouble getting any words out of his mouth. He had lost the habit of speech, and his tongue no longer worked as it once had. It felt clumsy to him, a lunging, thrashing serpent that no longer obeyed his commands. Fortunately, the original Tom had not been much of a talker, and the Indian did not seem to expect more than an occasional response from him. George was evidently enjoying himself to the utmost, and after every three or four sentences, he would throw back his head and laugh. Each time he laughed, he would forget his train of thought and start in on another topic, which made it difficult for Effing to follow what he was saying. A story about the Navaho reservation would suddenly turn into a story about a drunken brawl in a saloon, which would then turn into an excited account of a train robbery. From all that Effing could gather, his companion went by the name of George Ugly Mouth. That was what people called him, in any case, but the big man didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he gave the impression of being rather pleased that the world had given him a name that belonged to him and no one else, as though it were a badge of distinction. Effing had never met anyone who combined such sweetness and imbecility, and he did his best to listen carefully to him, to nod in all the copy places. Once or twice, he was tempted to ask George if he had heard anything about a search party, but each time he managed to fight back the impulse.