“So now . . .” she said.
“Yes?” I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.
“Take it back . . .” she said.
I didn’t comprehend what she was telling me. “Take what back?” I said.
“The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back.”
I understood. It was time to repossess all that I’d attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I’d hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.
“Take it back.”
I wanted to beg a few moments’ grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.
“Take it back,” she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat and lungs in an instant.
My head reeled; white blotches burnt at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.
The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up—hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.
What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I’d first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father’s wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.
All of the events that had just unfolded might have seemed a fiction but for one simple fact: I was still standing. Whatever force my mind had unleashed here, it had come with power enough to raise me up off the ground and set me on my feet. And there I stood, amazed; and of course certain I would fall down again at any moment. That moment passed, however; so did the next and the next and the next, and still I stood.
Tentatively I glanced back over my shoulder. There, not six yards from me, was the door through which I’d stepped all these visions ago. Beside it, overturned, lay my wheelchair. I fixed my gaze upon it. Dared I believe it was now redundant?
“Look at you . . .” said a slurred voice.
I glanced back from the wheelchair to the door, where Luman was now leaning. He’d found another source of liquor while I’d been occupied in the room. Not a bottle but a decanter. He had the glazed look of a well-soused man. “You’re standing,” he said. “When did you learn to do that?”
“I didn’t . . .” I said. “I mean, I don’t understand why I’m not falling down.”
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried.”
“Well, Lordie, man. Try.”
I looked down at my feet, which had not taken any instruction from me in a hundred and thirty years. “Go on then,” I murmured.
And they moved. Not easily at first, but they moved. First the left, then the right, turning me around to face Luman and the door.
I didn’t stop there. I kept moving, my breath quick and fast, my arms stretched before me to break my fall should my legs suddenly give out. But they didn’t. Some miracle had occurred when Cesaria had raised me up. Her will, or mine, or both combined, had healed me. I could walk; stride. In time, I would run. I would go all the places I’d not seen in my years in the chair. Out into the swamp, and the roads beyond; to the gardens beyond Luman’s Smoke House; to my father’s tomb in the empty stables.
But for now, I was happy to reach the door. So happy indeed that I embraced Luman. Tears were coming, and I could not have held them back if I’d cared to.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
He was quite happy to accept my embrace. Indeed he returned it with equal fervor, burying his face in my neck. He too was sobbing, though I didn’t quite know why. “I don’t see what you have to thank me for,” he said.
“For making me brave,” I said. “For persuading me to go in.”
“You don’t regret it then?”
I laughed, and took his bleary face in my hands. “No, brother, I do not regret it. Not a moment.”
“Were you nearly driven mad?”
“Nearly.”
“And you cursed me?
“Ripely.”
“But it was worth the suffering?
“Absolutely.”
He paused, and considered his next question. “Does that mean we can sit down and drink till we puke, like brothers should?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
IX
i
What must I do, in the time remaining? Only everything.
I don’t yet know how much I know; but it’s a great deal. There are vast tracts of my nature I never knew existed until now. I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn’t want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion. I daresay most of us live in such pitiful realms. It takes something profound to transform us; to open our eyes to our own glorious diversity.
Now my eyes were open, and I had no doubt that with my sight came great responsibility. I had to write about what I saw; I had to put it into the words that appear on the very pages you are reading.
But I could bear the weight of that responsibility. Gladly. For now I had the answer to the question: what lay at the center of all the threads of my story? It was myself. I wasn’t an abstracted recanter of these lives and loves. I was—I am—the story itself; its source, its voice, its music. Perhaps to you that doesn’t seem like much of a revelation. But for me, it changes everything. It makes me see, with brutal clarity, the person I once was. It makes me understand for the first time who I am now. And it makes me shake with anticipation of what I must become.
I must tell you not only how the living human world fared, but also how it went among the animals, and among those who had passed from life, yet still wandered the earth. I must tell you about those creatures God made, but also of those who made themselves by force of will or appetite. In other words, there must inevitably be unholy business here, just as there will be sacred, but I cannot guarantee to tell you—or even sometimes to know—which is which.
And in my heart I realize I want most to romance you; to share with you a vision of the world that puts order where there has been discordance and chaos. Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty. And it is my duty to sweat until I convince you of the same. Sometimes the stories will recount epic events—wars and insurrection; the fall of dynasties. Sometimes they’ll seem, by contrast, inconsequential, and you’ll wonder what business they have in these pages. Bear with me. Think of these fragments as the shavings off a carpenter’s floor, swept together after some great work has been made. The masterpiece has been taken from the workshop, but what might we learn from a study of some particular curl of wood about the moment of creation? How here the carpenter hesitated, or there moved to complete a form with unerring certainty? Are these shavings then, that seem a
t first glance redundant, not also part of the great work being that which has been removed to reveal it?
I won’t be staying here at L’Enfant, searching for these shavings. We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk Road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where the Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the mined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.
Only everything: prophets, poets, soldiers, dogs, birds, fishes, lovers, potentates, beggars, ghosts. Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities, and show you the loveliness of filth.
Wait! What am I saying? There’s a kind of madness in my pen; promising all this. It’s suicidal. I’m bound to fail. But it’s what I want to do. Even if I make a wretched fool of myself in the process, it’s what I want to do.
I want to show you bliss; my own, amongst others. And I will most certainly show you despair. That I promise you without the least hesitation. Despair so deep it will lighten your heart to discover that others suffer so much more than you do.
And how will it all end? This showing, this failing. Honestly? I don’t have the slightest idea.
Sitting here, looking out across the lawn, I wonder how far from the borders of our strange little domain the invading world is. Weeks away? Months away? A year? I don’t believe any of us here know the answer to that question. Even Cesaria, with all her powers of prophecy, couldn’t tell me how fast the enemy will be upon us. All I know is that they will come. Must come, indeed, for everybody’s sake. I no longer cling to the idea of this house as a blessed refuge for enchantment. Perhaps it was once that. But it has fallen into decadence; its fine ambitions rotted. Better it be taken apart, hopefully with some measure of dignity; but if not, not.
All I want now is the time to enchant you. After that, I suppose I’m history, just as this house is history. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t both end up at the bottom of the swamp together. And truth to tell, that prospect doesn’t entirely distress me, as long as I’ve done all I need to do before I go.
Which is only everything.
ii
And so at last I come to the beginning.
What place is that? Should I start, perhaps, with Rachel Pallenberg, who was lately married to one of the most handsome and powerful men in America, Mitchell Monroe Geary? Shall I describe her in her sudden desolation, driving around a little town in Ohio, utterly lost, even though this is the place where she was born and raised? Poor Rachel. She has not only left her husband, but several houses and apartments, along with a life that would be considered enviable by all but perhaps one percent of the populace (which percentage already lives that life, and knows it to be largely joyless). Now she has come home only to discover that she doesn’t belong here either, which leaves her asking herself: where do I belong?
It’s a tempting place to begin. Rachel’s so human; her confusions and contradictions are easy to comprehend. But if I begin with her I’m afraid I’m going to get distracted by modernity. I need first to strike a mythic note; to show you something from the distant past, when the world was a living fable.
So, it can’t be Rachel I begin with. She’ll come into these pages soon enough, but not yet.
It must be Galilee. Of course, it must be Galilee. My Galilee, who has been, and is, so many things: adored boy-child, lover of innumerable women (and a goodly number of men), shipwright, sailor, cowboy, stevedore, pool player and pimp; coward, deceiver and innocent. My Galilee.
I won’t begin with one of his great voyages, or one of his notorious romances. I will begin with what happened the day of his baptism. I would not have known any of this before I entered the room beneath the dome. But I know it now, as clearly as my own life. More clearly perhaps, because it’s only a day since I walked out of that chamber, and these memories seem to me but a few hours old.
PART TWO
The Holy Family
I
Two souls as old as heaven came down to the shore that ancient noon. They wandered, accompanied by a harmonious baying of wolves, out of the forest which in those days still spread to the very fringes of the Caspian Sea, its thicket so dense and its reputation so dire that no sane individual ventured into it more than a stone’s throw. It was not the wolves that people feared meeting between the trees, nor was it bears, nor snakes. It was another order of being entirely; one not made by God; some unforgivable thing that stood to the Creator as a shadow stands to the light.
The locals had legends aplenty about this unholy tribe, though they told them only in whispers, and behind closed doors. Tales of creatures that perched in the branches devouring children they’d tempted out of the sun; or squatted in foetid pools between the trees, adorning themselves with the entrails of murdered lovers. No storyteller along that shore worth his place at the fire failed to invent some new abomination to enrich the stew. Tales begot tales, bred upon one another in ever more perverted form, so that the men, women and children who passed their brief lives in the space between the sea and trees did so in a constant state of fearfulness.
Even at noon, on a day such as this, with the air so clear it rang, and the sky as polished as the flanks of a great fish; even today, in a light so bright no demon would dare show its snout, there was fear.
As proof, let me take you into the company of the four men who were working down at the water’s edge that day, mending their nets in preparation for the evening’s fishing. All were in a state of unrest; this even before the wolves began their chorus.
The oldest of the fishermen was one Kekmet, a man of nearly forty, though he looked half that again. If he had ever known joy there was no sign of it on his furrowed, leathery face. His warmest expression was a scowl, which he presently wore.
“You’re talking through your shithole,” he remarked to the youngest of this quartet, a youth called Zelim, who at the tender age of sixteen had already lost his cousin to a miscarriage. Zelim had earned Kekmet’s scorn by suggesting that as their lives were so hard here on the shore, perhaps everyone in the village should pack up their belongings, and find a better place to live.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Kekmet told the young man.
“My father saw the city of Samarkand,” Zelim replied. “He told me it was like a dream.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” the man working alongside Kekmet said. “If your father saw Samarkand it was in his sleep. Or when he’d had too much wine . . .”
The speaker, whose name was Hassan, raised his own jug of what passed for liquor in this place, a foul-smelling fermented milk he drank from dawn to dusk. He put the jug to his mouth, and tipped it. The filthy stuff overran his lips and dribbled into his greasy beard. He passed the jug to the fourth member of the group, one Baru, a man uncommonly fat by the standards of his peers, and uncommonly ill-tempered. He drank from the jug noisily, then set it down at his side. Hassan made no attempt to reclaim it. He knew better.
“My father . . .” Zelim began again.
“Never went to Samarkand,” old Kekmet said, with the weary tone of one who doesn’t want to hear the subject at hand spoken of again.
Zelim, however, was not about to allow his dead father’s reputation to be impugned this way. He had doted on Old Zelim, who had drowned four springs before, when his boat had capsized in a sudden squall. There was no question, as far as the son was concerned, that if his father claimed he’d seen the numberless glories of Samarkand, then he had.
“One day I’ll just get up and go,” Zelim said. “And leave you all to rot here.”
“In the name of God go!” fat Baru replied. “You make my ears ache th
e way you chatter. You’re like a woman.”
He’d no sooner spat this insult out than Zelim was on him, pounding Baru’s round red face with his fists. There were some insults he was prepared to take from his elders, but this was too much. “I’m no woman!” he yelped, beating his target until blood gushed from Baru’s nose.
The other two fishermen simply watched. It happened very seldom that anyone in the village intervened in a dispute. People were allowed to visit upon one another whatever insults and blows they wished; the rest either looked the other way or were glad of the diversion. So what if blood was spilled; so what if a woman was violated? Life went on.
Besides, fat Baru could defend himself. He had a vicious way with him, for all his unruly bulk, and he bucked beneath Zelim so violently the younger man was thrown off him, landing heavily beside one of the boats. Gasping, Baru rolled over on to his knees and came at him afresh.
“I’m going to tear off your balls, you little prick!” he said. “I’m sick of hearing about you and your dog of a father. He was born stupid and he died stupid.” As he spoke he reached between Zelim’s legs as though to make good on the threat of unmanning, but Zelim kicked out at him, and his bare sole hit the man in his already well-mashed nose. Baru howled, but he wasn’t about to be checked. He grabbed hold of Zelim’s foot, and twisted it, hard, first to the right, then to the left. He might have broken the young man’s ankle—which would have left Zelim crippled for the rest of his life—had his victim not reached into the shallow hull of the boat, and grasped the oar lying there. Barn was too engaged in the task of cracking Zelim’s ankle to notice. Grimacing with the effort of his torment, he looked up to enjoy the agony on Zelim’s face only to see the oar coming at him. He had no time to duck. The paddle slammed against his face, breaking the half dozen good teeth left in his head. He fell back, letting go of Zelim’s leg as he did so, and lay sprawled on the sand with his hands clamped to his wounded face, blood and curses springing from between his fat fingers.