Banquo's Ghost Kirk Wilson (bio) Tejada writes: Roger is exhausted. He reclines on a deck chair above his swimming pool. Intended as a celebration, the election-watching party turned into a debacle, and went on too long. Guests—mostly Natalie's colleagues—lingered with gutpunched expressions, drinking unwisely. The ghosts of their bewilderment now inhabit crumbed plates and stemmed glasses with half-moons of wine, abandoned on the rented bar tables that surround Roger's chair. There, Tejada thinks, it's started. He is besieged by this story, has held it at bay long enough. Facing any story to the end is difficult, but in this one he must play the perpetrator who betrays and badly wounds his friend and champion, the first critic north of Mexico to recognize his work. Revenge is a lifeless reason for a story, like building a gun made of words. But now he knows how the thing begins and has to find out how it ends. I love Natalie because she is of my soul, Tejada says. Not to mention helpful for my meager sales. Roger I admit because she loves him, but do not welcome or forgive. Tejada, whose grandmother spoke Nahuat, is not impressed that Roger speaks the better Spanish of the two. Natalie has been married to Roger for almost thirty years. She is twenty years behind him on the path to invisibility. Both are famous in small ways. Natalie is the world's authority on the Salvadoran fabulist Tejada, a person of one name. Roger is a VIP emeritus of the American elite that, until tonight, held off its enemies without and within, and deflected the worst impulses of the populace. He once upon a time ran the government's clandestine services in the Caribbean and Latin America—and yes, that includes clandestine services inside Tejada's country. Only Natalie has been previously married. They have no children. A neighbor's backyard security light winks on the surface of the water. A bird calls, or an insect, chi whee chi. The limbs of oaks and elms reach out to form a canopy. In warmer weather, Roger likes to swim on his back looking up at the underside of the leaves. Often he imagines floating off from there. When he does succeed in floating off, Tejada thinks that Roger thinks, Natalie will miss him, but she lives more or less exclusively between her ears, and the idea of him can stick around to keep her company. And of course she will always have Tejada, who, Roger suspects, is more important to her anyway. Tejada, when he floats, will no doubt savor the idea of being an idea. An afterlife devoutly to be wished. [End Page 123] Roger folds his hands together like birds that might escape. He surveys the rock wall that runs around the back side of the pool. Below it a ravine falls sharply to a creek bed, a steep but not impossible climb. The shouts of a drunken argument reach him, from deep in the ravine. A band of homeless people often camp there in a patch of woods. When the limbs are bare, as they soon will be, he can look over the top of his wall and make out the detritus of their lives through the branches of the trees: muddy blankets, beer cans, wine bottles, candy wrappers, a mattress made of leaves. Roger has no quarrel with the homeless. He and Natalie make sandwiches for them weekly, at their church. He watches them not because he considers them a threat, but because they stand as a factor in his equations, an indicator of the weather. So long as the trees stay rooted in their places and the campers stay among them, he can abide. He has known dangerous people. These are not them. The voices turn to water, and he drifts but does not float. His thoughts lose their linkages and his breathing goes shallow. Before long he is opening the door to the room of the neglected animals. Tejada is familiar with Roger's worst dream, and does not want to witness it again. Yet here it comes. A keeper's room...