The Museum of Doubt Read online

  Mak gathered himself. Listen, he said. Just you listen. He took another swig of his blood. He drained the bottle and licked his lips. I’ve done my research. Tell me this. Who’s better qualified to say whether the courts of the state of New Jersey are going to accept jurisdiction in the afterlife of Mesopotamia – you or me? You want to talk about law? See you in court.

  You’re dead, Mak, said Erishkigal. Death disqualifies counsel.

  Macy versus Tagus, 1927, said Mak. See? You don’t know jack.

  Erishkigal cocked her head. You shouldn’t trust Inanna. Last time my bitch of a sister came here I hung her on that hook out there, dead as you are. She screamed at me to let her down and I pushed her toes and watched her swing. I enjoyed it. What is it with her? Who does she think she is? Why does she want this fucking place? Does it look like fun to you, sitting around eating dirt for ever and ever? She got the looks in the family, she got the lifestyle, it’s like, everyone loves Inanna. What’s going to happen to Erishkigal? Oh, she’s dysfunctional, better give her the afterlife to take care of. Yeah, I’m dysfunctional, I’m running this operation, try counting the number of stiffs out there on the plateau. Try doing an audit. I’ll tell you who’s fucking dysfunctional. You know how my sister got out of here? She gets one of her big god friends, Enki, to send her food and water to bring her back to life, and she sweet talks me into letting her go as long as she sends me a substitute from among the living. And who does she send? Her husband! She says Erish, while I was away, the bastard was whoring and partying like it was going out of fashion. Dumuzi, his name was. He’s still here.

  I could find you a substitute, if you’d let me go, said Mak.

  Erishkigal laughed. I can’t let you go, she said. You’re not a god. You’re not a hero. You’re not even a king.

  Eternity, yeah? said Mak. Eternity. OK. I’m going to deal with your points one at a time.

  Mak began to argue. He argued in Erishkigal’s trailer for thirty-three days and thirty-three nights, or would have if there had been days and nights. Erishkigal’s aides, the Anunnaki, and her messengers Ashbath and Maikurg hung on the walls, eavesdropping. Some of the dead even summoned up the interest to try to listen in, greeting the lawyer’s sharper thrusts with a great bellow of squeezed toads. Stopping only to eat clay, Mak dredged up precedents going back to the ancient Egyptians, staged Platonic dialogues with imaginary witnesses, expounded on natural justice, fair play and the rights of man. He plucked articles from case law, canon law, commercial law, international law, common law, Roman law and the Code Napoléon. He cited from anthologies of near-death experiences, from Homer, Norse sagas, Pythagoras, Origen, Plotinus, Milton and the National Enquirer. On the thirty-third day, Erishkigal banged her fist on the table and told him to shut up.

  OK. Leave, she said, folding and unfolding her arms. Go on. Try making it back. Try.

  I can go?

  Sure.

  I can just leave?

  Three conditions, said Erishkigal, standing up, stretching and yawning. To get back to the land of the living, you have to be alive. Second, you have to bring me a substitute within seven days, or you get the hook. Third, you have to sleep with me before you go. You’re quite good-looking, and I don’t get enough of it.

  Mak took out the gold cereal bar Inanna had given him and put it in his mouth. Chewing it was like chewing a live mains wire. Rings of shock rippled through him and his heart ground out the futile stutter of a broken starter motor. He forced it down, fell to the floor writhing and screaming, scraped grooves in the floor with his nails and lay still. His head ached. He had a pulse. He smiled and snivelled and looked up at Erishkigal.

  Well, she said. You’re alive. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or excited. Straight to condition three.

  Just as Mak had struggled and failed to describe Inanna, so conveying the experience of sex with her sister proved beyond the glib lawyer’s mastery of English in all its registers. He groped for modifiers: dry, he said at last. It was dry. Disturbing. Dry and disturbing? No, not that … he had never felt so inadequate. So he got no pleasure out of it? No, no, there was pleasure … not enough … He came too early? Of course, several days early, but it wasn’t that … It was like you’d lived all your life in a desert, and the biggest stretch of water you could imagine was a pond, and when you thought of the sea you imagined something maybe like the pond, only ten times bigger, and then just before you died you saw the sea, and your whole notion of the scale of water changed, and you understood that what you’d thought was swimming was only paddling, and there was a whole new scale of travelling over water to comprehend – sailing – and you’d been so proud of your paddling …

  Forty days after Maurice Mak arrived in the afterlife, he stood at the edge of a glassy stretch of desert cleared of the dead, with Ashbath holding him by one hand and Maikurg, a short, powerful man with a Karl Marx-like beard, by the other. They began to walk forward, then to run. Mak’s feet left the ground and he floated back like a pennant in the slipstream as Ashbath and Maikurg thundered across the desert, a racehorse in two parts. The ground began to slope away from them. As it sloped steeper the two emissaries ran faster to stop themselves falling. The surface of the desert blurred, turned to a mirror-like finish, and they were running upside down on the underside of it. Mak felt himself turned inside out like a surgical glove carelessly peeled from a doctor’s fingers, felt Ashbath and Maikurg’s hold on his hands slipping, and curled himself up into a ball, hanging in the void. He hung clenched for an indefinite time, until he heard a dog barking and felt a warm wind on the back of his neck. He lifted up his head and saw an apricot light on the horizon, braiding the folds of thunderheads over an unseen ocean. He wept. Then he thought of Inanna and laughed. To see her again, hear her voice, meet her eyes. That warmth and grace. She was a goddess. But to match stories of the afterlife. They were the only ones who could do that now.

  Mak stood up. He was on the airfield he’d left from. The Gulfstream was gone. It was morning. He could see a city in the distance. Not far away, Ashbath and Maikurg were playing volleyball with what looked like a brick.

  A small figure emerged from a ruined hangar half a mile away and started walking towards Mak. Shaking his arms to drain out the rush of postponed pain through his muscles, Mak jogged to meet the receptor. His mind arranged the slim dark shape as Inanna and joy and love burst through the agony. A few seconds later he stopped and stood still, waiting. It was the boy, Najla’s son.

  Where’s Inanna? Mak called as the boy approached.

  The boy didn’t say anything. He walked up to Mak and said: Did you see my mother?

  What would you like me to say?

  That you saw her.

  Well, I saw her.

  Is that the truth?

  Yes, it’s the truth. She asked about you. I said you were fine.

  Is she happy there?

  Yes. She’s very happy. It’s peaceful there.

  Is that the truth?

  Yes. It’s peaceful.

  And she’s happy?

  Mak hesitated. Yes, he said. She’s very happy.

  Good, said the boy. I’ll go there tonight.

  No, said Mak. She said you were to stay here until it was time for you to go.

  Why? If it’s so good there, and my mother’s there, why should I stay here?

  Because some things are better for you here.

  What? When there’s no work, and we don’t have enough to eat, and we can’t travel anywhere, and between the bombers and the police and getting called up and the Mafia you don’t know who to be more afraid of?

  You’re alive, said Mak. Your heart keeps time, the sun rises and sets, the wind blows, the seasons change, and you can feel it all. If there’s just a piece of bread, you can smell it and taste it. People care. Even if they hate you, it means you matter. Even if they don’t care, you can try to make them. You can shout. You can laugh.

  So when you said my mother was happy, you were lying
?

  Yes, said Mak. That was a lie.

  How am I supposed to live now?

  I don’t know.

  The boy took a letter out of his shirt, gave it to Mak and walked away.

  I’m sorry, said Mak.

  The boy didn’t look back.

  The letter was printed out. It was on Enki-headed paper, pp Enki, no signature.

  Dear Maurice,

  We waited for you for several weeks. We were prepared to wait for you indefinitely. However something happened which upset Inanna so much that she insisted we leave. A fall of blood-red hailstones the size of oranges in the city of Mosul signified that you had exceeded your brief in the afterlife. Soon afterwards this was confirmed when we learned that you had attempted sexual congress with Inanna’s sister, Erishkigal. Maurice, that was very wrong of you. No doubt she told you that this was the only way you could escape to the land of the living. We feel that it would have been loyal of you to resist, and, like other courageous lawyers in similar situations, found another way to escape from the afterlife, no matter how long or painful. After all, we hired you to take on Erishkigal and her attorneys in the courtroom, not to sleep with her.

  I warned you against becoming Inanna’s slave. You chose to ignore that warning. I noticed how you felt about Inanna, of course, and decided to let it pass. She noticed it too. But having become her slave, neither of us can understand how you could then disgrace her so blatantly by having sex with her sister. Have you no sense of decency or honour? I am very disappointed.

  Erishkigal is a vile serpent, and our sworn enemy. At the same time she is one of us, a god. It would have been bad enough if you had sullied your worship of Inanna by having intercourse with one of your own. But to lie with a god suggests you had ideas incompatible with your status. It suggests that you dared to dream – I can barely bring myself to dictate these words – of a carnal match with Inanna herself. Shame!

  Inanna’s first intention was to wait for you nonetheless and slay you on the spot. I persuaded her against it. Please consider our contract rendered void by your actions. I hope your sojourn in the afterlife, your disgraceful behaviour aside, was not too upsetting. I realise that, as a US citizen without papers present on an Iraqi military facility without any rational explanation, you may experience difficulties returning to New York. I wish you luck.

  Maurice, we gods are rich, attractive, clever beings with time on our hands, little interest in ordinary people and a passion for social codes and breeding. In short, we are snobs. Inanna looks down on you, and so do I. We’re better than you are. You won’t be seen in our circles again. Goodbye. You’re alive. Be grateful.

  Sir? said the waiter. We’ll begin serving dinner in a few minutes. Would you like to see a menu?

  I blinked and looked out towards the street. The glass had darkened. The lights were on.

  What do you say? said Maurice.

  I saw it. I saw the beautiful worked-through logic of his psychosis, like a simple maze, and I saw how I was going to step through the maze to the way out and leave the restaurant without upsetting him, and carry off with me to dinner at Lee’s a marvellous story of Mak’s downfall to set against the missed meeting and calls of the lost afternoon.

  I get it, I said. They blew you off. There’s no lawsuit, right? The dead aren’t going to sue. The story’s not the case. It’s what you’ve just told me.

  No! said Mak, laughing and shaking his head. No no. Not the dead. Me! I’m going to sue.

  The walls of the maze telescoped upwards, shutting off the exit. I narrowed my eyes.

  What?

  I’m going to sue the federal government! For negligence! Is it my fault Inanna won’t love me? Am I responsible for the way I am, for the way I look, for the way I talk?

  Right, I said.

  Rejected lovers. I’m telling you, Bob, this is the case to end all cases. It’s not just me. This is going to be the greatest class action suit since the universe was formed. And I’m going to be the plaintiff, and the head lawyer, leading that lovers’ army into battle. We will not be fobbed off with money or phoney dismissals. We will demand that the court grant us the love we have been unjustly denied.

  Sorry, I said. I got to my feet. My apologies. I understood you wrong. There was me thinking it was the dead who were going to sue. That would have been a nice article. That would have been provocative. That would have been an excellent feature. Now you’re telling me the government’s going to be sued by disappointed lovers. Maurice, that’s not credible. It won’t play. It’s the wrong format.

  Where are you going? said Mak.

  Got an appointment.

  Wait a second. Listen. If I gave you a real exclusive, would you take it?

  Come on, Maurice, we’ve been here all afternoon.

  How about if I gave you a chance to visit the afterlife?

  Sure, I said. Sure. I’d love to go. Call me tomorrow.

  You’d love to go?

  Can’t think of anything better.

  You’re absolutely sure now?

  Absolutely. I’ll see––

  Because I don’t have to call you. They’re going to take you. Ashbath and Maikurg. They’re waiting at the door.

  He pointed. I looked over at the doorway. There were two guys loitering there with their hands in their pockets, a thin, spotty one with no chin and a stocky character with a bushy beard like Karl Marx. They looked like social workers. They probably were social workers.

  OK, I said. Maurice, great to see you.

  Goodbye, Bob, said Maurice, shaking my hand. He started to cry. I’m sorry.

  Maurice, the main thing is not to worry. You’ll be OK, I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. You can find your way home, can’t you? He nodded.

  I said goodbye and made for the door. The social workers moved towards me.

  Hi, said the beard. I wonder if I could ask what you were discussing with Mr Mak?

  That’s private, I said. Excuse me, I’m in a hurry.

  Sir, said the beard, we’re empowered by the city authorities to question anyone who comes in contact with Mr Mak.

  I don’t think so, I said.

  The two men took out plastic wallets and showed me their IDs. Maikurg, said the beard. Ashbath, said chinless. Sir! Sir! Please don’t attempt to leave! We’re going to have to restrain you, sir. Sir!

  The Return of the Godlike

  Narrator

  He limped to the beach one evening in spring. The limp was from a sporting accident in a dark hall. That morning, when he examined the injury, he’d rinsed the bandage in a dogbowl-sized basin in a guesthouse room, rubbing it with a pale green arrowhead of soap and chafing the folds together against the smell of smoke and old banknotes which’d impregnated the cloth. He’d sat cross legged on the bed, wearing just his vest, looking at the wet cotton strip smoothed out and flat on the bedcover in front of him, and read the brown shape left there by his blood.

  Blasphemy, he’d said, and bent his body to lick the wound with his tongue. But his belly airbagged out to prevent him.

  The beach was clean, flat, finegrained sand, on a bay stockaded by an even wall of sandy soil where the land dropped ten feet to the backshore. He’d known the tide’d be low before he saw it. He’d laboured so long and hard on the beach he could feel the moon’s hauling on the water of the bay, when he lay awake on beds and floors, when the stormy surface of the blood and water mass inside his body settled and cooled. He’d see the tiny eddies and kinks on the surface of the deep curl like singed hairs and the knifesharp shadow of a single bird move over it, passing between his blood and the dulling shine of his setting heart, his inner sea stopped. At that time the moon beat a tremendous blow and his blood shivered, the artery walls flattened to a bowl. The moon shook his blood from side to side, heaving it till it rose and fell in steep waves, stroking the inside top of his skull with foam and breaking down through his body. It tipped his blood up until it ran shallow and puckered across his bones, filling flesh
scoops with billowing pools, gushing latticed through sinewy channels, in a navel-shape a hundred miles across, a crimson delta lazily shored by skin.

  The causeway was there as he’d built it twenty years before, a bridge to nowhere, stretching out three hundred yards into the sea from its anchor, a concrete military obstacle sunk in the sand, once a cube, now a pyramid. The wood, almost white with sap when he’d nailed and lashed it together, was black now or, as he got closer, a dark grey-green, as if the powder left when the ocean dried was not salt, but ash. The first joints he’d made, once he’d rehearsed a few scenes of carpentry, were heavy, earnest and time-consuming. He’d worked over them again and again, dovetails mostly for the right angles, and diagonal support struts, not just hammered in for strength, but modelled for elegance, so they fitted flush with the round vertical posts pounded deep into the sand which carried the weight of the structure and prevented it being blown away in the storms. The planks on the boardwalk were planed smooth and flat and fitted together so snug that if you lay under them on a midsummer’s noon you’d hardly have light enough to read by. He ran his fingertips down one of the posts. He’d still been inspired then, mad to get at what he’d seen out on the bay. All the same, it’d seemed important to make the causeway perfect. He’d gone back to those first few timbers a hundred times, ripped them out and made bonfires of them and started again, when he could have gone ahead and built the causeway more quickly. After all, he’d known where he was going: he was building a bridge to what he’d seen. Now he wondered if he hadn’t had doubts from the time he hammered in the first post. It’d been easier to linger on the beginning of the causeway, tinkering with it, prising out nails, taking an hour to plane a millimetre-thick curl of wood off the narrow edge of a plank, than to hare on into the sea, sacrificing craftsmanship for speed, not because it was harder working below the high watermark, but because beginnings were always easier. Yeah, looking down towards the surf line, he could see how in the end he’d forced himself to charge seawards, lurching out a dozen yards at a time in forty-eight hour frenzies of labour, lips crimping cold nailheads, left thumb beaten black, slave to the sledgehammer, how in the last stretch he’d given up the nails and lashed it together with ship’s rope, up to his waist, inventing knots and bracing the timbers against each other, against all engineering intuition. He was a fool. The idiot in him had stolen up on the wise man one night and eaten his brains. Only a victim of duty would finish a structure like the causeway. The other one, the smart one, he’d known what he was about, tackling the beginning from every angle, always meaning to go on and finish it, but never doing it, just making the beginning more and more perfect. A beautiful beginning was something you could take with you happy to the grave, it was inexhaustible, it was immortal. Only failures never left before the end.