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  Formally they weren’t uninteresting. But transfiguring a quality of paint into a quality of spirit, as Peterson, as all the meaningful artists had, he hadn’t managed. It was alchemy. Maybe it was voodoo. Whatever it was, he wasn’t even close.

  The lack seemed not to be one of talent, or of imagination or craft, but of a certain power of synthesis. Vision in art was, at once, idea and experience, a joining of thought or affect with perception. He could conjure beautifully fresh sensations from paint. No one doubted that. And his ideas ran deep, as did his feeling for the world and its order. No one doubted that either. But he couldn’t seem to integrate them, not without seams. And eventually the stitching would give out, no matter how tight. Was it, in some sense, a lack of nerve? He didn’t know. If it was, though, he was in trouble, because day by day, summoning it got harder.

  His work stalled. His financial state was weak but stable. Painting earned him little more than the occasional four-figure sale. Sometimes he was tempted to take a more aggressive market position, swap the index funds he’d converted his portfolio into for more volatile securities. But he held off, knowing that Janice would eventually earn a reasonable income; that his portfolio, even as it stood, would last some time still before inflation eroded the capital; and that his desire for more was a desire for the superfluous, one which could only be pursued by putting the necessary at risk.

  So they remained, living in a false poverty, with no sign of improvement on the horizon. They had both thought this acceptable to start, and Lewis’s opinion hadn’t changed. He could have tolerated real squalor even, at least he imagined so, and they were probably heading for it. At times he took a stolid pride in this. But he sensed Janice’s growing unease with their present course, and this divergence was starting to color their relationship in ways that defeated expression.

  She’d noticed, of course, that he had mostly stopped painting. It had never happened before, and this must have added something to her worries about him. As did the weeks he would spend in bed. There were also the many nights now he was out until morning, and the increasing rate at which his appearance changed. New haircuts, new clothes. When she would ask about this, he would chalk it up, plausibly enough, to type-two bipolar, the condition that had hounded him since college, even high school, though it went untreated then.

  Still, she’d seen other episodes of his over the years. None was this peculiar. As for the stalling of his work, he passed it off as a deepening lack of inspiration, and the late nights as a search for some. The first part of this was true, the second not—or not in the way he meant it.

  In fact, he’d taken to whoring. The practice came with an illustrious artistic pedigree, which made it easier to dip his toes. It took away some of the sense of betrayal he felt. Self-betrayal. He couldn’t see it as a betrayal of Janice. She would think it trivial.

  It began, then, as a simple diversion from his unpromising present. But his spirit interfered from the start, from the time of that cab ride home from the Four Seasons. Here were women, many of them intelligent and for the most part not without options, humble though they may be, living in far greater comfort than him, purposeless comfort, on the basis of their orifices alone, not their talent or sacrifice or effort. These were self-betrayers on a Platonic scale, who refused all paths but the one of least resistance.

  More than anything, there was an absolute vacuum of belief in these women. They might be the most secular people on Earth. It was this recognition, of their etiolated spirits, that prevented him from actually having sex with most of the women after the Breguet girl. His own spirit wouldn’t submit.

  There were artists, like Peterson, supremely suited to giving substance to the deformed; their art in turn became the body of fellow-feeling. Perhaps nothing was more transcendent. Ruskin would have approved. But it wasn’t in Lewis. That’s what a decade of work had showed. His gift was limited, in the end, and cruelly bestowed, in that it was large enough to tempt him to try to scale the heights, but small enough for him not to be able to make the climb. And he would only understand this after falling from the mountain’s face.

  What was left for him? He had Janice, but she must be disappointed, though she would never say so. How to incarnate spirit, if not in art? Hadn’t that been his fount of meaning? Life seemed only to flicker with significance, and the gaps between flickers were growing.

  The Breguet girl was the start of the turnaround, though he’d felt only despair and confusion at the time. Through the next two girls, he unearthed a new fount. This one might even exceed art. Rather than give flesh to spirit, he would give spirit to flesh, re-enchant it. After the first four girls, there was no more sex even. But none would get the easy money they’d expected. Not that they didn’t get their money; he was too conscientious for that. But it was hard money—too hard, he hoped. If there was no true change without crisis, well, he would bring them crisis.

  He beat them to life, that’s how he liked to think of it. He also liked “beaten to a pulp,” since pulp was the kind of thing you reshaped into something of value. You pulped airport paperbacks and printed Shakespeare. Or if not Shakespeare, then Updike at least. That, more or less, was the idea.

  His powers of synthesis no longer seemed inadequate, as they had with painting. Each intervention seemed to him to embody his feeling for the world, the purity of purpose, the honoring of self, more seamlessly than the last. By the eighth girl, he’d felt he’d reached a kind of perfection. Maybe his talent for politics was not of the Wintry’s sort. It was for lived politics. Personal politics. Micropolitics. And maybe that really was greater than his talent with a brush.

  But there was second synthesis, of course, a more important one: an alignment of flesh and spirit in the women. How to know if he was succeeding? Or even improving? Tonight’s drive was evidence, wasn’t it? It was becoming harder to find streetwalkers in Halsley since he’d started. It was the same way with finding escorts, for him or anyone else, he understood. He’d brought things to a boil. He’d taken away their shortcuts, through fear. They would have to find another way. They’d have to kick, if they were strung out. They’d have to go humbly back to their families, if they’d run away. They’d have to learn how to make actual lives for themselves, however modest actuality proved, whether it meant Starbucks or Target or community college. This is what the new emptiness of the streets meant to him.

  What was certain, though, was that the most recent intervention, carried out days ago beneath an overpass, was a regression. It was as impenetrable, as confused, as the first one. It lacked all form. And it was worse than any botched painting.

  The girl—she went by Lisa—she’d been clear-eyed. There was no defensiveness or callow defiance, as with the intervening girls. She pursed her lips thoughtfully when he spoke and seemed to accept the fallibility of her stance. It was discomfiting, the possibility of wisdom in her.

  He might have let Lisa go had it not been for that, the easy cogency of her replies. They were familiar enough at their core, and he’d rejected versions of them in other girls. But their dress, her even-handed delivery, was unusual. It seemed to reform their content. Pinpointing her bad faith became impossible, which undid his sense of purpose and returned him to that first night at the Four Seasons, where there had been almost no talking at all.

  Lisa couldn’t be accused of elementary misapprehensions or a jumbled mind. But her notions were cool and neutral, and they threatened to ablate his own, in the way the sublime can menace beauty. Maybe too, in the shadow of the sublime, he sensed the monstrous. The feeling had hastened his decision. He aborted the inquiry, and for the first time since the Breguet girl, was tempted to have her. But he stopped short, striking Lisa instead with a rashness that embarrassed him now. He rolled her out of the car and pulled away after he’d finished.

  He tried to flush the memory of this episode from his mind as the back of a convertible, its top down, expanded before him. Lewis tapped the brake. A police SUV was parked roadside, it
s tailgate pockmarked here and there. The upper edge of a sheet of fine gray grit traced a line halfway up the back window and the mounted spare tire. On the other side of the road a squad car’s light-bar strobed.

  Lewis had yet to be stopped at a checkpoint. They were springing up with a confounding arbitrariness, never staying put for long, shifting throughout the city and the wider region. Halsley’s district borders were only sometimes used. Just as often, police cars would flank small roadways like this one that didn’t make it out of town without merging with the larger arteries. Whatever pattern there was, it was illegible, and anyway underwent continuous mutation, presumably in an attempt to trap trouble, or more frequently, its mere potentiality, which of late had become necessary, supply having grown so great. How many of these movements were addressed to the future? How many the past? He liked to think prevention and retribution were on a par.

  In the early days Lewis could safely assume his exploits could effect no change in the movement of the checks. He wasn’t serious quarry, given all else. But the assumption grew less secure every day. He wondered now if the net was sometimes recast to bag him, and at times, studying the newspapers, he couldn’t avoid the feeling that his deeds were making deeper impressions than even he intended.

  The quality of his masquerade was being tested. It made grasping the pattern urgent. There were websites devoted to mapping the checkpoints, but when he superimposed the locations of his encounters on these maps, he couldn’t settle the question. Sometimes he thought he saw influence, but quickly he would see nothing at all.

  The convertible, unstopped, drifted past the officer standing astride the road. The resolution of his face rose as Lewis approached, the details filled in: squat neck, wide ears, sharp nose, bad skin. His eyes remained unchanged, though, black voids from a distance and the same up close. The laws of optics appeared to have no bearing on them. Lewis fixed on the officer’s slack arm, looking for a twitch of the sinews running along the back of his hand, or perhaps some tightening of the forearm. Nothing.

  On the other side of the checkpoint, heading home to Janice, untested again, he assumed a swell of satisfaction, however small, a lightening, however transient, would arrive. But there was nothing. The eyes of the officer stayed with Lewis on the rest of the drive while he wondered what laws of affect his mind had just flouted.

  11

  Stephen rutland stood at the top of the path, well water in hand, peering down into the narrow Kandyan valley below, which was in truth not much more than a ravine. A stream, small but running with some force, passed through the rocks and tall grass of the valley floor. A wood frame twice his height and nearly half that wide lent shape to his view. A door was propped up on the cross-post of the frame, with ropes holding it in place, so that it formed a sort of inverted drawbridge. Rather than being fashioned from a solid piece of wood, it was woven from thick branches and vines radiating four-inch thorns.

  The gate was open, and the thorn door projected over the shoulders of the Rajasingha’s sentries stationed on either side of it. All comings and goings were kept track of at these checkpoints. Unless those passing were from neighboring villages and recognizable to the gatekeepers, they would produce identification issued by their village councilmen, or, in extraordinary cases, by their county governors. The ID would be impressed upon a small clay table. There were twenty-four recognized stamps, indicating caste, village seniority, marital status, as well as the sort of business they had that required passing the gate, whether personal, trade, or official.

  The Ceylonese councilmen or governors would modify these twenty-four if they needed to express something the stamps couldn’t accommodate. The meaning of these alterations—a set of x’s along the bottom of the tablet, say, or a red swatch cutting across a stamp—was often not known to the travelers, so that frequently they carried information about themselves and their journey they were not in a position to decipher.

  In times of little threat the gates were kept open. The sentries merely ensured that only locals freely passed. They could often be found chatting with them, joking, chewing betel-leaf. But whenever security was a concern, which was often, and even more often in the king’s mind, Rajasingha would send messengers, or else military scouts in the threatened areas, to have the gates lowered. Since the paths through the Highlands were typically narrow, falling away steeply into deep rocky crevasses, the kingdom was nearly impassable with the thorn-gates shut, and any part of it could be isolated from the rest.

  The gates, in fact, and the mountains they were built into, were a good part of the reason there was an independent kingdom left at all; whereas the coasts, north and south, where geography gave no advantage to the Sinhalese, had fallen easily to the Europeans.

  Dutch or Portuguese incursion was nearly always the given reason for closing the gates, and probably that was always a genuine concern. Still, had that reason not existed, it seemed to Rutland that the king might have been driven to do much the same for others. The people’s rebellion against him, for one, must have changed things. Rutland was still piecing the story together.

  He approached the sentries and half-waved. They smiled and followed him with their eyes as he walked through the gate with his pail of water, down toward the village of Belemby, his home for the past nine months. He’d seen this particular gate closed only a few times. The sentries’ mien had been altogether different then.

  ■■■

  Four years had passed since the Ceylonese had seized the Ann, their East India Company frigate. That was 1659, at the eastern port of Trincomalee. He, his old friend Robert Knox, and the rest of the crew were kept near the sea for weeks afterward, in a windowless military shed carved into the side of a mountain. It’s where Knox’s father, the ship’s captain, went delirious and died.

  Later Rutland learned that the seizure had been unusual. It was, in fact, only their slowness in presenting the king with gifts that brought it on. Knox Sr. had been preoccupied with getting back to England, and thought they might simply trade for the supplies they needed for the return voyage and get going toward home. But this wasn’t India. The rules were different.

  As mere merchants, they were thought to pose little threat, so the conditions of their captivity were mild. On Rajasingha’s orders, they were separated (to prevent collusion) and dispersed around the kingdom, to be housed and fed by locals on a rotating basis. Recompense for these families, when it came at all, came mostly as food, a few measures of rice or lentils. When it was time for a rotation, each family hoped it would not be chosen to maintain the men.

  Belemby, Rutland’s fourth village, sat in the western county of Hotteracourly, about twenty miles east of Rajasingha’s emergency residence, which he’d taken up only recently, after barely surviving a populist rebellion. Though it was now almost nine months ago, Rutland still knew few of the details, as they were kept from him. What he did know was that the king believed foreigners like him may have helped spur it.

  So this was his punishment. Belemby was easily the most unpleasant place he’d been kept. The terrain was arid, craggy, given to drought, and frequently short of grain. The cattle, emaciated in the best of times, would die off, or else the families would have to lead them to relatives living in the more temperate lowlands, if they had any.

  Though food and lodging were provided for, no allowance had been made for clothing. Except for his boots, which coconut oil had saved, and his heavy leather gloves, which served him now not on a ship’s deck but in the paddies, bringing in the neighbors’ harvest for a share, Rutland’s garments, mildly supplemented by old garb villagers had given him, were in tatters.

  He carried the pot of water along the main avenue bisecting the village, past the row of houses of the wealthiest townsmen. These were seven- or eight-room affairs—two rooms being reserved for the servants—built around handsome courtyards, whose short walls of clay limed white were covered with engravings of birds and lions.

  Further along, the houses scaled do
wn to three rooms, then mostly two, and then, for the lion’s share of the avenue, just a single large room. Rutland’s did not even reach this standard. It was just large enough for sleeping and sitting; cooking had to be done in the yard. But it was his, which was new. Through his efforts it might grow.

  He hung the water from a vine strung across a pair of coconut palms, above the twigs and woodchips and charred branches of last night’s fire. He picked up one of the sticks and turned for his neighbor’s house, one he had slept in many nights, before he’d been able to shelter himself.

  A fire burned in a ring of stones in the grass outside Rajarathnan’s house. He too would be cooking soon. Rutland planted the charred stick in the fire and caught the eye of the man and his wife, Priya, sitting in silence in the house. All nodded.

  Rajarathnan had been a natural host. He bore the burden of the Englishmen lightly, especially Rutland, whom he’d once assured was great company next to Francis Crutch, a stormy shipmate of Rutland’s he’d had to house for two months. He said this neutrally, though, as if really he didn’t much mind him either. Rutland himself had always liked Crutch, his irascibility, which even good breeding could not mold or mask. He had known him in boyhood. He was no different now.

  The stick smoldered an earthy red. Rutland took it back to his own yard and plunged it into the pile of firewood. It began to smoke. There was enough wood to start a fire, but he’d have to collect more after he ate to take him through to dawn.

  Near the outer wall of his little hut he found two small sacks of rice and a large basket full of limes, raw pumpkin slices, coconut meat, and wild leaves he didn’t know the names of, nor seen elsewhere, not even in India. Next to it was a smaller basket of sweet fruit, which the villagers were not obligated to provide. Four purple mangosteens. The supplies would have been left by other villagers—Elara and his wife. It was their turn.