“That’s sad,” she said.
“Is it? Everything passes, you know. First the gods fail and then the people lose heart and the dark closes in. As now. I’ll think you’ll agree that the gods we worship are, if anything, less powerful than great Pan.”
“You mean like Jesus?”
“Would that we actually worshipped Jesus…good Lord, is that a Palmira?” With that, Cooksey brought up his butterfly net and stalked a small white butterfly marked with yellow and brown for several minutes, finally scooping it up in the gauzy folds and holding it up to his face, upon which shone a delighted grin. Jenny thought he looked now about twelve. He transferred the insect, still wrapped in the netting, into a wide-mouthed jar; when its fluttering ceased, he examined it through a hand lens.
“Did you kill it?” asked Jenny.
“Well, yes,” said Cooksey, peering. “By God, it is a Palmira. It’s an Antillean butterfly, almost unknown in these parts. It feeds on beggar-tick. My word, there’s another one!” He leaped and snagged this one, too; into the jar it went.
“I wonder if it’s breeding here now,” he mused.
“Not anymore, since you got here, if those were the only ones.”
He looked at her closely. “You don’t think I should’ve killed them, do you? I quite sympathize, but after all I’m a scientist and therefore a soldier in the legions of death. We kill to understand, and we think it’s justified therefore. Pan would not have approved. Do you know, our friend Moie thinks we’re all dead people, although he believes you are still a little alive.”
She was looking at the bright still shapes in the killing jar. “I don’t know…I mean, no offense, Cooksey, but I don’t think I could, like, do that for a living, kill things. It kind of creeps me out. Why is it important if they’re breeding here?”
“Well, because it might be yet another tiny sign that the tropics are moving northward in response to global warming. This is a Cuban butterfly, after all. In any case, we will dedicate the rest of the day to Pan and kill no more and merely observe the life around us. This, too, is science, and a quite venerable sort of science at that.”
So they did and spent hours observing the insect, marine, and bird life of the small island through hand lens and binoculars until the sun sank to touch the tops of the tallest trees and Cooksey said it was time they started back, because they would have to paddle into the teeth of the wind. But when they cleared the pass and entered Whitewater Bay again, they found that the wind had died away entirely and that the whole sheet of water was as calm as a millpond. Jenny had that very thought, although she had never seen a millpond. Another alien image, this one from the story she had received from Cooksey’s old book, but it was not the only one. Indeed, her head now seemed to contain many more rooms than it had, all decorated with pictures and furniture she could not remember, and connecting hallways that beckoned mysteriously. This was what regular people were like, she thought, all this stuff, because when you knew stuff, like the Roman Empire and fig wasps and global warming and the great god Pan, well, the stuff wanted to connect up with itself and out of that came new thoughts you’d never thought before, thoughts maybe no one had ever thought before. It was disturbing, like being dumped in a new foster home and not knowing what was going to happen; you wanted to sit on the bed they showed you and not move until someone told you what was what.
She didn’t want to think about all that just now and found she could still shut it down pretty much and just be, and sink into the easy paddling and the passing scene, the silver water like a tarnished mirror perfectly reflecting the peach-colored wisps of clouds and the orange disk of the setting sun, each stroke of her paddle meeting its twin coming up from below before vanishing in the swirl of the stroke. And above floated the birds, white egrets, gulls, once a flight of brown pelicans, in their peculiar prehistoric-seeming lumbering flight, each of these, too, with its twin below for the instant of passage. And looking back she saw their wake, two long lines extending into the unrecover able past, and there was something nagging at her she wanted to ask Cooksey, what was it?
“What dowe worship, Cooksey?”
“Pardon?”
“You said something about dying gods and all. And that we didn’t worship Jesus. It was just before you found that butterfly.”
“Oh, yes. Well, my mother used to say that when people stopped worshipping God they didn’t stop worshipping entirely. She thought the urge to worship was hardwired into humankind, like the urge for procreation. So they worshipped lesser gods, mainly themselves, as being most convenient, but also things like money, fame, and sex. Or youth. And these gods all fail, just like Pan did, being tied to corruptible and earthly things. Of course she was quite a devout Catholic. She was a Howard, you see, a very ancient Catholic family where I come from. Very unusual for an anthropologist to be a believer, they spend so much time picking apart the beliefs of the natives, but when people asked her about it she would laugh and say yes, yes, it’s perfectly absurd, but I happen to believe it’s all true. She had a deep sense of the weird, and I picked up some of it, which is why I suppose I get along with our Moie. He doesn’t think Pan is dead at all. It would shock him most awfully to suggest it.”
“How does he know about Pan? I thought that was the Romans a long time ago.”
“Oh, he doesn’t call him Pan. He calls him Jaguar, but it’s the same fellow, you know, although with somewhat sharper teeth. Yes, I suspect Pan is loose again in the kingdom of the dead people, and I’d bet he’s more than a little cranky after his long sleep. I imagine we’re in for some interesting experiences.”
“What will happen?”
“Nothing very nice, I suspect. The earth is becoming a little bored with us dead people. Moie, whatever he is, represents a symptom, a bit like that butterfly from the south. I mean, suppose you had a great mansion and invited some guests because you were a generous and kind lady. And suppose these guests started to behave in a rude and destructive manner…”
“Like the weasels in Toad Hall.”
“Just so. Smearing the draperies with filth, breaking the crockery, insulting the servants…well, however generous you might be, you’d probably decide that it had gone beyond a joke and take steps to make the house somewhat less hospitable. You might turn up the heat, for example, so they swelter. You might stop serving nice meals. You might let the hounds loose in the bedrooms to raven and destroy. And so we have global warming, and sea-level rise, and new diseases, and deserts spreading, and failing water tables, and a kind of desperate madness, because perhaps nature includes the invisible as well as all this.” He gestured with his paddle at the surrounding scene.
“My mother certainly believed it and she was no one’s fool. As I’ve said, she would’ve been delighted to know Moie.”
“Do you think he’ll, like, kill any more people?” asked Jenny. It was still hard for her to associate the gentle Indian she knew with people being torn apart.
“That would depend. He wants the people who are planning to destroy his forest to stop doing it, and I suppose he’ll continue to kill those he thinks responsible until they actually stop. At least he seems to have decided to murder the guilty for a change. He can always depend upon us to slaughter the innocent ourselves, assuming any of us are innocent.” After an interval of silence Cooksey broke into song, a rhythmic ditty about rolling down to old Maui that seemed to make the paddling easier. They both dug in more vigorously until the canoe seemed to fly of its own will across the water’s smooth and flawless skin.
At the boat livery in Flamingo, Jenny felt the first effects of sunburn. Even through the fabric of her shirt the sun had struck fiercely at her redhead’s tender skin. And she had a headache, the sun making its contribution but also perhaps the result of deep and unaccustomed thought.
“Are you all right, dear?” Cooksey asked when he returned to the car.
“I’m sort of wiped out,” she replied. “You can drive if you want.”
His face clouded. “I don’t want,” he said. “I really can’t.”
“You never learned to drive?”
“I did. But I can’t. I was in an accident. My nerves won’t let me. I’m sorry.”
“What kind of accident?”
