The Isle of Blood

Seated alone at one table was a slender man around Warthrop’s age. His hair was dark, turning gray at the temples, and cut very short. He was wearing the ubiquitous white cotton suit. When he swung his head in our direction, I was immediately struck, as most who knew him were, by his eyes. At first I thought they were gray, but on further inspection determined they were the palest blue, like the color of moonstones, the gems that Indians called “dream stones,” believing they produced beautiful night visions. His gaze was direct and disconcerting, like everything else about Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud.

“Yes?” he asked. There was nothing pleasant in that “yes.”

The doctor introduced himself quickly, and a touch breathlessly, the lowly peasant who suddenly finds himself in the company of royalty. He handed Fadil’s letter to Rimbaud. We did not sit. We waited for Rimbaud to read the letter. It was not a long letter, but it seemed to take a good long while for the man to read it, as I stood there in the blistering Arabian heat with the sparkling ocean a tantalizing few hundred yards away. Rimbaud picked up a crystalline goblet filled with a liquid the color of green algae and sipped delicately.

“Fadil,” he said softly. “I haven’t seen Fadil in eight years or more. I am surprised he is not dead.” He glanced up from the paper, perhaps expecting the doctor to do something interesting, make a witty retort, laugh at the joke (if it was a joke), tell him something he didn’t know about Fadil. The doctor said nothing. Rimbaud flicked his free hand toward a chair, and we gratefully joined him at the table. He ordered another absinthe from the little Arab boy, who had been standing obediently out of the way, and asked the doctor if he wanted anything.

“Some tea would be wonderful.”

“And for the boy?” Rimbaud inquired.

“Just some water, please,” Ioaked. My throat burned with every dry swallow.

“You don’t want water,” Rimbaud cautioned me. “They say they boil it, but…” He shrugged and ordered a ginger ale for me.

“Monsieur Rimbaud,” Warthrop began, sitting forward in his chair and resting his forearms on his knees. “I must tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, sir. Having dabbled in the craft in my youth, I—”

“Dabbled in what craft? The coffee business?”

“No, I mean—”

“For that is my craft, Dr. Warthrop, my raison d’être. I am a businessman.”

“Just so!” cried the doctor, as if the Frenchman had pointed out another similarity. “That is how it played out for me. I abandoned poetry too, though it was for a very different sort of craft than yours.”

“Oh? And what would be that very different sort of craft, Dr. Warthrop?”

“I am a scientist.”

Rimbaud was lifting the glass to his lips. He froze at the word “scientist,” and then slowly set the glass back down, the absinthe untouched.

“Fadil did not mention in his letter that you were a scientific sort of doctor. I had hoped you could have a look at my leg; it has been bothering me, and the doctors at Camp Aden… Well, they are all very British, if you do not mind my saying so.”

Warthrop, who had just spent several months under the exclusive care of very British doctors, nodded emphatically, and said, “I understand completely, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

The boy came back with our drinks. Rimbaud gulped the remainder of his first absinthe—if it was his first; I suspected it was not—before accepting the fresh one from the boy, as if Rimbaud were hurrying to catch up with the doctor, who had not even begun. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, the monstrumologist had said, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.

Rimbaud sipped his new drink, decided he liked it better than the old one, and took another sip. His moonstone gaze fell upon my hand.

“What happened to your finger?”

I glanced at the doctor, who said, “An accident.”

“See this? This is my ‘accident.’” Rimbaud held out his wrist, displaying a bright red, puckered area of damaged flesh. “Shot by a dear friend. Also by ‘accident.’ My dear friend is in Europe. I am in Aden. And my wound is right here.”

“I think my favorite line is from Illuminations

,” said my master, pressing on. He seemed annoyed by something. “‘Et j’ai senti un peu son immense corps.’ The juxtaposition of ‘peu’ and ‘immense’… simply wonderful.8221;

“I do not talk of my poetry, Dr. Warthrop.”

“Really?” The doctor was stunned. “But…”

“It is… what? What are my poems? Rinçures—leavings, the dregs. The poet is dead. He died many years ago—drowned, at Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears—and I took his body up into those mountains behind us, to the Tower of Silence in Crater, where I left it for the carrion, lest his corruption poison what little was left of my soul.”

He smiled tightly, quite pleased with himself. Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.