'Spit it out, man. Where did he go down?'
Here's where it got a little fantastic. Mildly, Ike said, 'East of here.'
'How far east?'
'Just above Burma.'
'Burma!' Bernard and Cleopatra registered the incredibility. The rest sat mute, perplexed within their own ignorance.
'On the north side of the range,' said Ike, 'slightly inside Tibet.'
'But that's over a thousand miles away.'
'I know.'
It was well past midnight. Between their cafe lattes and adrenaline, sleep was unlikely for hours to come. They sat erect or stood in the cave while the enormity of this character's journey sank in.
'How did he get here?'
'I don't know.'
'I thought you said he was a prisoner.'
Eke exhaled cautiously. 'Something like that.'
'Something?'
'Well.' He cleared his throat softly. 'More like a pet.'
'What!'
'I don't know. It's a phrase he uses, right here: 'favored cosset.' That's a pet calf or something, isn't it?'
'Ah, get out, Ike. If you don't know, don't make it up.' He hunched. It sounded like crazed drivel to him, too.
'Actually it's a French term,' a voice interjected. It was Cleo, the librarian. 'Cosset means lamb, not calf. Ike's right, though. It does refer to a pet. One that is fondled and enjoyed.'
'Lamb?' someone objected, as if Cleo – or the dead man, or both – were insulting their pooled intelligence.
'Yes,' Cleo answered, 'lamb. But that bothers me less than the other word,
'favored.' That's a pretty provocative term, don't you think?' By the group's silence, they clearly had not thought about it.
'This?' she asked them, and almost touched the body with her fingers. 'This is favored? Favored over what others? And above all, favored by whom? In my mind, anyway, it suggests some sort of master.'
'You're inventing,' a woman said. They didn't want it to be true.
'I wish I were,' said Cleo. 'But there is this, too.'
Ike had to squint at the faint lettering where she was pointing. Corvee , it said.
'What's that?'
'More of the same,' she answered. 'Subjugation. Maybe he was a prisoner of the
Japanese. It sounds like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.'
'Except I never heard of the Japanese putting nose rings in their prisoners,' Ike said.
'The history of domination is complex.'
'But nose rings?'
'All kinds of unspeakable things have been done.' Ike made it more emphatic. 'Gold nose rings?'
'Gold?' She blinked as he played his light on the dull gleam.
'You said it yourself. A favored lamb. And you asked the question, Who favored this lamb?'
'You know?'
'Put it this way. He thought he did. See this?' Ike pushed at one ice-cold leg. It was a single word almost hidden on the left quadricep.
'Satan,' she lip-read to herself.
'There's more,' he said, and gently rotated the skin.
Exists, it said.
'This is part of it, too.' He showed her. It was assembled on the flesh like a prayer or a poem. Bone of my bones / flesh of my flesh. 'From Genesis, right? The Garden of Eden.'
He could sense Kora struggling to orchestrate some sort of rebuttal. 'He was a prisoner,' she tried. 'He was writing about evil. In general. It's nothing. He hated his captors. He called them Satan. The worst name he knew.'
'You're doing what I did,' Ike said. 'You're fighting the evidence.'
'I don't think so.'
'What happened to him was evil. But he didn't hate it.'
'Of course he did.'
'And yet there's something here,' Ike said.
'I'm not so sure,' Kora said.
'It's in between the words. A tone. Don't you feel it?'
Kora did – her frown was clear – but she refused to admit it. Her wariness seemed more than academic.
'There are no warnings here,' Ike said. 'No 'Beware.' No 'Keep Out.''
'What's your point?'
'Doesn't it bother you that he quotes Romeo and Juliet? And talks about Satan the way Adam talked about Eve?'
Kora winced.
'He didn't mind the slavery.'
'How can you say that?' she whispered.
'Kora.' She looked at him. A tear was starting in one eye. 'He was grateful. It was written all over his body.'
She shook her head in denial.
'You know it's true.'
'No, I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Yes, you do,' Ike said. 'He was in love.'
Cabin fever set in.
On the second morning, Ike found that the snow had drifted to basketball-rim heights outside the cave's entry-way. By then the tattooed corpse had lost its novelty, and the group was getting dangerous in its boredom. One by one, the batteries of their Walkmans winked out, leaving them bereft of the music and words of angels, dragons, earth drums, and spiritual surgeons. Then the gas stove ran out of fuel, meaning several addicts went into caffeine withdrawal. It did not help matters when the supply of toilet paper ran out.
Ike did what he could. As possibly the only kid in Wyoming to take classical flute
lessons, he'd scorned his mother's assurances that someday it would come in handy. Now she was proved right. He had a plastic recorder, and the notes were quite beautiful in the cave. At the end of some Mozart snatches, they applauded, then petered off into their earlier moroseness.
On the morning of the third day, Owen went missing. Ike was not surprised. He'd seen mountain expeditions get high-centered on storms just like this, and knew how twisted the dynamics could get. Chances were Owen had wandered off to get exactly this kind of attention. Kora thought so, too.
'He's faking it,' she said. She was lying in his arms, their sleeping bags zipped together. Even the weeks of sweat had not worn away the smell of her coconut shampoo. At his recommendation, most of the others had buddied up for warmth, too, even Bernard. Owen was the one who had apparently gotten left out in the cold.
'He must have been heading for the front door,' Ike said. 'I'll go take a look.' Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora's paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.
He looked around the cave's chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn't like the look of
