by Alex Irvine

Alex Irvine is the author of A Scattering of Jades, The Narrows, and most recently, Buyout. He has also been doing some work in the comics field lately, including a longish essay on 1950s comics for a forthcoming book called The DC Chronicle. And he says that he got a Hahn’s macaw, but as yet it does not know how to talk.

Four days after the earthquake that leveled every building in the western part of Caracol—the part built over the protests of a now-extinct tribe on a filled-in lake bed, which the seismic event turned into a geological tuning fork—Arthur Lindsay leaned his elbows on the sill of his front window, the panes of which had fallen into the street. The wall around the window was intact and even still level, unlike its three fellows, which had sagged inward as if aspiring toward the pyramidal. The ceiling had buckled, covering the floor with plaster, but the timbers were intact if no longer parallel. Arthur’s hands, in loose fists, pressed into the sides of his face. From time to time he adjusted them so the points of his cheekbones fit more comfortably between two knuckles. His nose was full of the smell of garlic from his fingers. Across the street, walking in unstarched linen of an eggshell color, was the woman with whom Arthur believed himself in love. She was nineteen years younger than he was, and did not know of his existence except in the fleeting and unconscious way that she was aware of the vines growing up the side of a particular house she passed every morning. He wondered what she would smell like on his fingers.

The shattered profile of the buildings she passed made her seem like a survivor, or some kind of traveler, untouched by the ruination. Arthur imagined scenarios: she was an archeologist and he was a ghost, watching in ignorance of the passage of a thousand years. He would haunt her. She was the sole survivor of an extended family, now a row of freshly turned graves in the new cemetery cleared especially for earthquake victims, and she found her circumstances reduced to the point at which she must consider the unthinkable; he was a tourist afflicted with loneliness. He would save her.

Her name was, of course, Maria. Arthur had not known this when he conceived the notion that he was in love with her, but in his forty-four years of life he had learned that he was drawn to women named in some variation after the mother of Christ. He listed them in his head: Marie, Marja, Miriam, Marisol...Maria. Other women he had lusted after, or formed deep emotional attachments to even though he could not call those attachments love—there were too many of these to list even though Arthur was justly proud of his memory. And he had known dozens of other Marys and Mary-cognates; the name alone did not excite him. He’d been a little disappointed to find that the vision in unstarched linen, currently disappearing around a corner beyond the collapsed bricks and timbers of a smokehouse, was one more in his string of beloved Marys.

That he was not in love with her never crossed his mind.

* * * *

Arthur Lindsay lived in a Latin America of the mind. If he had been able to read Maria Rios’s mind, he would have discovered that he was wrong about a great number of the particulars of the situation. She knew exactly who he was, had intuited his attraction to her—if not his own characterization of it as love—and had gone to great lengths to uncover as much of his personal history as might be gleaned from the citizens of Caracol. Maria knew that he was forty-four years old and a native of a town in the United States called Portland. He celebrated his birthday on the seventh of August by buying drinks for everyone in whichever bar he happened to stumble into. This was most often a shack called Bananana, down by the river. During the earthquake he had gone into the basement of a damaged hotel to rescue a maid pinned by a fallen storage shelf, minutes before she would have drowned in the effluent from a broken sewer main. Beyond the consensus around those facts—and it was consensus, not unanimity—lay a wealth of conflicting detail that Maria found wondrous and sad. Profirio the outfitter of tourists who came to raft the great rapids on the Rio San Antonio, fifty miles upstream from the estuary where the river spent itself in the lake whose enormous eggplant-colored snails gave Caracol its name, swore that Arthur Lindsay was a bigamist who had abandoned eleven children upon the discovery of his doubled life. Christos the Greek, who managed the factory that turned eggplant-colored snails into organic purple dye much prized by upscale North American clothing manufacturers—dye, he was fond of saying, that Phoenician kings would have conquered the world to wear—had it on impeccable authority that Arthur Lindsay was a killer for the American mafia, who had not trusted the FBI to protect him after he testified in a murder trial. And so on. Maria had instituted a policy of only believing—provisionally—what three different people told her they had heard from Arthur Lindsay himself. This offered her a baseline of credibility, though she knew she was still dealing in hearsay. But it was too soon to talk to Arthur himself, because Maria Rios had one strange conviction of her own, which was that if she ever spoke to a man before he spoke to her, he would never love her. In Caracol there were thirteen men of marriageable age to whom she had never spoken. Three of them she knew to be homosexual, and a fourth had been traveling with an oceanographic survey since she had begun to categorize him as worth further investigation.

Before the earthquake, there had been twenty-one. The last four nights of Maria’s sleep had been plagued by dreams of the eight dead men who might have been her lovers—two each night, in what seemed to have become a tournament fought in the remotest mansions of the blood, with no winner save a dead man and Maria Rios’s unfortunate tendency to fixate on the unattainable so she could justify her failure to seize what might be hers. Last night, Eduardo and Jesus. Before that, going backward: Gabriel and Alejandro; Jesus and Pablo; Miguel and Miguel; Porfirio and German. That first night, Maria, who was able to dream with some lucidity but unable to predict when this ability would be given or taken away, had asked both of them, Would you have spoken to me? And both Porfirio and German had said yes. What would you have said? she asked, whereupon these two dead men had composed fierce rhapsodies that left Maria, in the morning, dazzled and heartsick and aching. But she could not remember what they had said.

* * * *

Arthur dreamed too, but in the scattershot and incomprehensible way of a man whose life made too much sense to him. He had a recurring dream about removing a dog from a mailbox much like the mailbox that had stood in front of a farmhouse where he’d lived with a group of actors in a touring children’s company when he was twenty-two. The dog, a flat-coated black and white mutt, did something different every time, and Arthur had wasted hours and days of his life in a compulsive and failed attempt to match the dog’s actions to events in his waking life. Every time a week went by without that dream, Arthur prayed he’d seen the last of it—really prayed, since he was religious if not especially observant of any particular rite. His prayers were never answered, or perhaps they were answered in the negative by the dog’s inevitable reappearance. His sometime lover, a schoolteacher named Dolores who was more perfectly monikered than any other human being Arthur had ever known, was of the opinion that his prayers were neutered by his lack of specific religious commitment. It was the one thing they fought about, although there would have been more if—as Dolores wished—they had seen each other more frequently and with a greater depth of nonsexual intimacy. Arthur kept her at arm’s length because of Maria, although doing this made him feel guilty and occasionally provoked the dream-dog to comment unfavorably.

* * * *

He wanted to tell Maria the truth: that he had in fact left his home in America fleeing a sense of inadequacy and prodded by a vague desire to become an adventurer. Arthur wanted a pith helmet and touchy negotiations with cannibals, and a beautiful native girl who knew the lay of the land but had yet to learn the nature of her heart. He wanted exotic and forbidding ruins, and something mysterious worth risking his life for. When he’d arrived in Caracol years before, he thought he had sensed in the town’s easy lassitude a latency, something behind, below, just always on the edge of vision. If he had known what it was, he would have continued on. Mystified, he stayed. Observations of Caracol’s day-to-day life told Arthur nothing about the mystery he sought, perhaps because there were no mysteries in its day-to-day life. He was looking in the wrong places, as it seemed to him he always had. The friends he made—acquaintances, really—in the shops and bars and hotels, they had nothing to contribute to his quest. Arthur blamed them for this, but knew that this was unfair because they did not know, any more than he did, what he was really after. Adventure is hard to find when you go looking for it. What you more often get, Arthur Lindsay discovered, is a different kind of disillusionment.

Maria Rios, or his imagined version of her, kept him going. She was desirable, which Arthur automatically assumed meant inaccessible to the likes of him: older, Anglo, an interloper. When he caught her eye on the street, no matter what she did he felt unfulfilled. Confiding in a prematurely aged drunk named Isaac, Arthur suggested that his love for Maria was the result of some flaw in himself. “If I was happy,” he said, “I wouldn’t give a shit about her.”

“Big news,” Isaac said. “What happy man gives a shit about a woman he doesn’t have?”

The inarguable logic of this, or perhaps the tautology of it, kept Arthur interested in the problem while he worked on shoring up his shattered home. Something about Caracol made him want to stay. He had known this before he had known of the existence of Maria Rios. Therefore, thought Arthur Lindsay with impeccable logic, Maria Rios had nothing to do with his desire to uncover whatever secrets Caracol kept hidden away in its jungle-shrouded adobe fastness.

Isaac had his own contribution to Arthur’s ill-considered obsession. “Out there,” he said of the jungle, “there are things no man has ever lived to tell about.”

“Then how do you know about them?” Arthur wanted to know.

“Stories survive,” Isaac said. “Even when the people who are supposed to tell them don’t.”

This was the beginning of Arthur’s project of cultivating the drunks of Caracol, to see what they knew and what they thought they knew, what they believed and what they found worthy of agave-fueled derision. He canvassed them, compiled his findings informally during insomniac wanderings, and realized shortly after the earthquake that there was something about the mansions of the blood that demanded his attention.

Nobody would admit to having been there. Nobody could give him directions. Nobody knew what function they served, who had built them, or what importance they still held outside of stories told to get another drink. Everyone took their existence for granted. This was an investigation Arthur Lindsay could get behind.

Isaac scoffed. “You don’t want to know what they are,” he said when Arthur asked him again. “You want to know what you can do with them.”

“No, no,” Arthur said. He explained, he hoped patiently, that he wanted to know everything there was to know about the mansions. “How long have I been here?” he asked Isaac. “Am I the kind of man who would use this? I want to know.”

Isaac drank, and ignored him. But it was a clue.

* * * *

His search for correspondences did not end with the dream-dog. Omens appeared in the clusters of spiders that built webs in abandoned doorways, and vanished by the next morning; in the distant rumble of masonry as a building fatally weakened by the earthquake teetered and collapsed, perhaps at the exact moment Arthur was trying to shore up a doorway in his own home. The morning after a dream in which the dog had bitten him on the thumb and refused to come out of the mailbox, Arthur was cleaning debris from his bedroom and remonstrating himself for his impulse to light a match and make the problem go away when he heard a knock from the direction of the front door. He emerged covered in dust and splinters, carrying an armload of broken lumber and drywall, to find Maria Rios a step inside his living room. “You shouldn’t stay here,” she said. “What if there’s an aftershock?”

There had been, dozens in fact. Each of them seemed to have squeezed Arthur’s house a little more tightly together, and he was certain—while aware that it was dumb to be certain about something like this—that the building was stronger now than it had been right after the first quake. Not wanting to sound like an idiot in front of Maria Rios, however, he did not express this belief. Instead he said, “It’s been five days. Probably won’t be any more aftershocks, right?”

Maria looked unconvinced. In fact, Arthur thought as he threw the load of junk through his front window into the street, she looked nervous and sad, but also resolute. For no good reason he decided to attribute these feelings, if they existed, to her trepidation about speaking to him, and that trepidation he in turn attributed to her being secretly in love with him, as he was with her.

* * * *

He was half-right, as Maria Rios might have told him if he’d asked. What she was really after, following a sixth night of her dream-tournament in which German and Miguel had fought a tense semifinal, was certainty. Her dead possible suitors were eliminating themselves, and she had taken it upon herself to whittle down the ranks of their living counterparts. Arthur Lindsay was by far the oldest of these, and she passed his house on the way to work every day, so he was first on the list of cuts.

Something about the earthquake had gotten into her head. She thought of herself as a post-disaster landscape, rearranged and transformed by the magnitude of the event. Every day she walked to work in the office of a lawyer named Chago Batista, who had not tried a case in a year. He made advances, in a self-effacing and humorous way. She rejected them, and they went about their day. Maria returned folders that for no discernible reason had emerged from filing cabinets to fan themselves across the lawyer’s desk.

* * * *

Arthur and Maria were creatures of a system, a self-created architecture of meaning and implication. To whatever extent either of them knew it, this fact made no difference in their everyday lives. They believed what they believed in the way it made sense to them to believe it. This was enough. Their systems conflicted in fundamental ways, and the unfolding of their story—each of them believed—would be a validation either of those conflicts or of one of the systems. In other words, Maria Rios and Arthur Lindsay both believed that something about the other would prove them right. The only thing thus proved was that nobody knows anything about love, and of course this was the last thing either of them would have been permitted by their systems to admit.

“She’s crazy,” Batista said to Arthur in his office late one afternoon. Arthur had waited until Maria went home, then presented himself to Batista under the pretext of needing to resolve a question about the deed to his crumbling house. Batista offered Arthur a cigar. As he puffed it into life, Arthur said, “Who’s crazy?”

“Maria,” Batista said. “You think I don’t know why you’re here?”

“Crazy how?” Arthur asked.

“She thinks every dead boy in Caracol might have been her lover. She thinks they fight to the death in the mansions over the right to have her when she dies.”

The cigar gave Arthur a powerful head rush. His lips got a little numb. “Mansions,” he repeated.

“The mansions of the blood,” Batista said. “You don’t know anything if you don’t know that every dead dreamer in Caracol goes to the mansions until the rest of us stop dreaming about him. And that whole time, they’re all trying like hell to get out and come back. Thing is, if they do, and they find you while you’re dreaming about them, both of you get what you want.” Batista burst out laughing. “Know what I mean?”

“So you believe it too,” Arthur said.

“Sure,” Batista said. “The mansions are out there. But I dreamed about my wife for fifteen years after she died, and she never came to get me. Women are fickle.”

Through his nicotine haze, Arthur considered this. “How does this make Maria crazy?” he said when he’d gotten his thoughts together.

Batista quit laughing. “That’s between you and her,” he said.

* * * *

Arthur dreamed of himself, seven years old, writing down his dreams. A house that flew, and pursued him down a dim street, with his father and brother already in the car not knowing or caring that he had not caught up. A basement room, stacked to the ceiling with dormant zombies that awoke when he entered. A subterranean complex full of monsters that could be navigated only in the company of cartoon characters remembered from Arthur’s childhood. “You ever see Charlie Brown?” he asked Isaac one night. “Linus is in my dreams. Monsters chase us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Isaac said.

What it means, Arthur thought, is that you never get away. What you start with is what you end with. When you love, you want beginning and ending, and you want to know both before you get either. You want to know what kind of chocolate she likes, how she’s going to react when something gets stained in the laundry. You imagine what the children would look like, and who they would love more. You lie awake at night itemizing an imagined roster of previous lovers whose existence you will never verify. You want to know why she chose you when she could have chosen someone else. You want to know why she did choose someone else before, and how she feels about the choice. You want to know the identity of the one man she wishes had been hers forever before she met you. You want to know everything. Even the mornings when she woke up consumed by shame and self-loathing, and what she did the night before. It will destroy you, this knowledge, implacably and by degrees, but you want to know. This is the vanishing edge between love and obsession, or perhaps between loving obsession and the kind that the lover indulges in order to sublimate and destroy a passion that cannot be survived.

This was the kind of passion Arthur felt for Maria, and he could never have killed Otro Gringo without it.

* * * *

He started frequenting Bananana because that was where Maria’s other suitors gathered to commiserate over the hopelessness of the cause. From a safe distance he observed them like a bank robber sizing up security. When he had learned all about their weaknesses, he would, by the process of elimination, hit upon the exact way to pursue his suit with Maria. Once, after an evening of observations, he mentioned the mansions of the blood to Isaac. Isaac, after a brief period of what looked like consideration, hawked up and spat something that looked like a brain into the curbside mire. “The mansions,” Isaac repeated, his eyes watering. “Six of them I have seen. Not in forty years, though.”

“Where?” Arthur asked, on the off chance that he might get a straight answer.

“That’s the thing,” Isaac said. “You find the mansions in relation to where you are. Problem is, most people don’t know where they are. Figure that out, the rest of the pattern is like the veins on the back of your hand. You’ll know it when you see it.”

They sat on the porch of Bananana, watching the stars wheel over the line of hills to the east of Caracol. “You bullshitting me?” Arthur said when it was time to either leave or buy Isaac another drink.

“Nope,” Isaac said. Arthur believed him. Isaac made an effort to tell a good story when he was bullshitting. When he was melancholy and self-absorbed, as tonight, odds were good that he was telling as much of the truth as he knew. Arthur went and got him another drink. As he took it, Isaac said, “What men like us understand is that there is no limit to the number of times the heart can be broken. And that each time it happens, there is no use doing anything but going on to see if it will happen again.”

Maria Rios would not break Arthur’s heart. Of this he was sure. If his heart was broken because of her, Arthur believed, it would be because he had done it to himself. It was not the first time he had entertained this thought, and when he immediately understood it was a rationalization, he then also understood that this particular rationalization was so important to him that he would perform it again and again until he died. He would forget having done it before. Each time he forgave a woman beforehand for her inevitable breaking of his heart, he would pretend that he had never done it before, and he would believe in the pretense. If he had been speaking aloud, this would have been his version of what Isaac had just said. Because he was not speaking out loud, Isaac looked at him and said, “Hey. You know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Arthur said. Every man in Caracol was in love with Maria Rios. It made no difference.

* * * *

Eventually he understood that the mansions of the blood were part and parcel of what made Caracol the kind of place that would arrest his wandering. They existed insofar as Caracol itself existed, as a collective creation, a Latin-inflected hidey-hole of the mind. It was the kind of place where a lonely woman could imagine that the dead fought a tournament for her living hand. No better place existed for a gringo who wanted to disappear. Arthur did not yet understand that he too was part of a tournament. Caracol offered insight, but rarely understanding. It was a place where events occurred uncertainly, where you slogged through the swamps and found that the landscape dissembled, and an hour’s work put you back in the city in the arms of your lover, you struggling free because you had just—at last—caught sight of one of the mansions of the blood and she is saying shush now, calm, it was just a dream, shush....

There had been another aftershock in the night. He remembered it as part of one of his dreams. A swamp, at night, flashlight beams swallowed by the jungle, leeches falling from the trees. The beam of the light caught the tarnished gleam of a door handle, and Arthur opened it. Ruins of a foyer: carpet turned into a field of mildew, tapestries hanging in strips, shuffle and skitter of small creatures fleeing the flashlight. Is this what the blood has come to?

No, Arthur said. It’s a dream because it hasn’t happened yet, not because it isn’t real. But the girl was not Maria Rios, and he rose from her bed, feeling strained and aching in his hips and the muscles deep down in his stomach. The kind of feeling you get from trying to keep up with a girl much younger than yourself, or from slogging through a swamp and seeing—there!—at the edge of perception, at the conceptual horizon, through a braided curtain of flowering vines, the remotest mansions of the blood. He got up and walked through Caracol, taking the long way home, seeing new cracks veining previously unscathed stucco, new plumes of dust trailing from structures at last given up for dead. Overnight his building had collapsed as if bombed. This gave his dream more meaning. He picked through the rubble, at first making careful piles of everything he could save, and then gradually just wandering from street to alley, regarding the wreckage from different angles. Scrying, perhaps, as if his former home and business were a sheep’s liver or the arcs of blood spraying from a decapitated chicken. When he came back out onto the street from his fifth or sixth trip back to the alley, Maria Rios was standing there.

She was about to speak to him. With the smell of another woman on his fingers, Arthur Lindsay knew that everything he had done since he had come to Caracol was wrong. “You have to go farther than the foyer,” she said.

“The what?” he said.

Maria looked at him closely. He was thinned out—no home, no livelihood, no one he could count on to bury him if he died right then and there. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding, she thought.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve made a mistake.” She had only come to him because all of her imagined lovers had disappointed her.

Foyer.

“No,” Arthur said. “No. I think I understand. Part of it, anyway. Will you tell me more?”

* * * *

Isaac’s skiff ran aground, spun broadside against surprise currents, took on water. Six hours into their excursion into the swamps south of the ancient lakebed, Isaac quit. “You want the mansions?” he said, letting go of the tiller. “They’re not out here.”

“Where are they, then?” Arthur wanted to know.

Isaac uncorked a bottle and took a long pull. He didn’t offer Arthur a drink. “I told you,” he said. “The geography of the mansions is all related to whoever’s looking for them. You don’t even know where you are. How are you supposed to find them?”

Consider Arthur Lindsay, thought Arthur Lindsay.

He had known his divorce from his first wife was inevitable when it occurred to him that although there were a million things he would miss about their marriage, there was not one thing she wanted from him. For a while he went through the motions of daily life feeling persecuted by this realization, and then he reached a point at which he was able to separate it from the question of whether or not she loved him. She did, and he knew it. But it wasn’t going to make any difference, because for her the question of love expressed itself in completely different areas from those Arthur would have considered decisive. She would miss none of the things about him that it was most important to give.

In the nineteen years since that divorce, Arthur had gradually become convinced that he was the only person in the world who understood what was important to him. Clearly this was a failure on his part, but he could not understand how he had so completely failed to communicate it. He was thinking of how he had botched his opportunity with Maria the day before. If he had been able to respond to her in a way that had seemed genuine to her and also to him, he wouldn’t have had to go drag Isaac off a barstool and demand that Isaac take him to the mansions right then, no questions asked, no demurrals brooked. So here they were, after a night spent readying the boat and sailing from the geometry of canals into the biology of swampland channels, undone an hour before dawn.

“Isaac,” he said, “I’m right here.”

And meant it, in a way he had never meant it before, or could have meant it before, or could have said it even if he had meant it.

“Arturo,” Isaac said. “The degree to which you are full of shit astonishes even me, who prides himself on being shit-full.”

But Arthur wasn’t listening to him, because there on the periphery of vision was a vine-hung roof, and windows long since broken, and the mossy walls of one of the mansions of the blood.

* * * *

Inside, Arthur went alone. He was wet. He had not slept in thirty hours. His home was destroyed not by an earthquake, but by the puny hiccup of an aftershock. He was newly awakened into a consciousness of heartbreak and yearning. There was nothing left of him. The mansions of the blood held no fear. Inside lived the unborn scions of the generalissimo, the gunslinger successors of the bandit princeling. One and all, they took their shots at Arthur, they did their best, peeling back the scabs on the emotional wounds that had driven him to this Caracol of the mind. He in turn rose to the occasion believing he inevitably must fail. To the woman of his future, whom he believed to be Maria Rios, he said: This is what I have been saying to you, the unattainable idol of the woman I want to love. Before I came to you, I suffered this; and before you came to me I suffered that. Whose suffering is greater does not matter, and cannot matter. We are here now, bringing only what we can be. It must be enough.

Faced with a man so indomitably committed to the future, the spirits scattered. Arthur Lindsay believed that he had won. He returned to the boat demanding the rest of the mansions of the blood. “You knew where they were all along,” he said. “I’m sick of the runaround. Show me.”

“Okay,” Isaac said. “But it doesn’t matter what I show you until you figure out that you already know what you’re going to find. And today we’re going home.”

Isaac knew that after Arthur’s first experience with the mansions of the blood, it was inevitable that he would find the rest. And he knew that it was best not to interfere with a driven man’s impulse to master time. He set Arthur on the course, allowed him to see the mansion...not allowed. The mansions allowed themselves. What was to be gained by someone else permitting this vision? The one thing Isaac could not do was turn the key for Arthur in the front door of the remotest mansion of the blood. It took Isaac’s death, and the death of Maria Rios, to tumble those tumblers and shift those gears.

* * * *

There were seven mansions of the blood, or maybe eight, each one farther out in the antediluvian idscape of the jungle. One by one, Arthur Lindsay found them, or maybe Isaac led him to each in turn, or maybe Isaac allowed Arthur’s singularity of purpose to guide each stroke of his oars. Up the river, back in time, Isaac thought, and waited for Arthur to figure it out too, but Arthur didn’t until they approached the last mansion of the blood. “I’m out here too, somewhere,” he said, as much to himself as to Isaac. The green oppressed him.

“You figured it out, huh?” Isaac said. Then he vomited over the side of the boat. “Home,” he said. “Can’t be in a boat when I’m this drunk.”

They got back to Caracol late that night and were greeted with the news that Maria Rios was dead. Isaac stumbled off home. Arthur refused to get out of the boat. He sat up all night, listening to the gentle slap and wash of the water and trying to fit this new fact into what he had learned. By morning he allowed himself to be sad, and the fishermen who left before sunrise heard him weeping and assumed that there would be no fish in their nets that day. They were wrong, and by the time they returned later that afternoon Arthur had left the boat and gone to see the lawyer Batista. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Dead,” Batista said. “That’s where she is.”

Arthur wanted to hit him. “You know what I mean. I want to see her.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Batista said. “Dead is where she is.”

There were husks of flies on the windowsill, swirls of cigar smoke crouching in the corners. With the devastating clarity of these details came another kind of clarity. Arthur closed his eyes. “Because I turned back,” he said.

Batista shrugged. “Maybe.”

Isaac died later that evening, on the porch at Bananana. The cause was said to be either alcohol poisoning or bowel cancer or resignation to the fact that he had done all he could do. When he heard the news, Arthur thought that it really couldn’t have happened any other way. The quest had always been his. In the morning, he went to Isaac’s boat, pushed it away from the dock, and rowed into the jungle for the last time. Caracol had been getting less and less real to him. He had the feeling that if he looked over his shoulder it would be gone: the wreckage of his house, Batista’s smug cigars, the creaking floorboards of Bananana, the purple dye crushed from the bodies of snails. The only thing that had ever been real about it was Maria.

* * * *

He found the place and left the boat to drift. The last mansion of the blood appeared, grandly decayed and foreboding. The front door opened without a sound. In the foyer, Arthur knew with prophetic clarity what awaited him. She is here, Arthur thought. And so am I. The worst of the mansions of the blood. He walked into the next room. In the house was a demon, predatory and leering, created from the pathological corners of Arthur’s mind. It was part and parcel of Caracol, and always had been. Perhaps he had been drawn to this place only to destroy it. It would be taller than he was, bloated, its mouth too big and its arms too long. It would have fangs, and from their points would tremble droplets of what could only be venom.

It would propose conundrums, and Arthur would know that there was no answer. Would Arthur face them down, solely for the love of a dead woman who had never done more than speak to him? In Arthur Lindsay, naivete was perhaps exactly that powerful. He would. He named the demon Otro Gringo, and called the name out.

You must either fail a woman by leaving, or fail a woman by staying.

You must either break the heart of a child, or....

“None of it matters,” Arthur said in the stillness of a supernaturally preserved music room. He stood in the doorway, and could see Maria Rios sitting at a parlor grand piano. Her fingers moved over the keys but made no sound. It would not matter to her whether he wanted to play catch with his son; it would not matter to her whether he would choke for the rest of his life on regret that his daughter would lose her first tooth a thousand miles away from where he stood deep into the swamps of his Latin America of the mind. The room was quiet again. All of the house’s spirits were elsewhere. Maria, he thought. Can I still come back to you and explain? Can explaining ever be enough?

She vanished. In her place sat Otro Gringo, playing a song Arthur remembered singing for his children when they were toddlers.

He would make it enough. Resolve was foreign to Arthur, but when he felt it, he could feel nothing else. He realized that he was never going to get into the last mansion of the blood while Maria was alive, because the only shining goal that could have given him the strength to enter was bringing her back. Not just from the death that had been slowly claiming her since she had pledged herself to the dead men who never spoke to her in life, but from the paralyzing embrace of his desperate infatuation. This was Otro Gringo, the demon grown fat on Arthur Lindsay’s refusal to live with himself and his insistence on recreating Maria Rios in the image of his own self-loathing.

Now was the time to be heroic. Arthur walked up to Otro Gringo, his feet silent on the carpet made by the fingers of children who had never existed. He took hold of the fleshy part of Otro Gringo’s right triceps, and pulled. Otro Gringo kept playing. Arthur put the piece of the demon in his mouth and ate it. He tore another loose, and another, looking for Maria, who he knew was inside. Arthur ate and ate, leaving the hands for last because he did not want the song to end, but when it was time he ate them too, first the left and then the right. He swallowed the last bite and sat in the silence of the remotest mansion of the blood.