Song of Kali

by Dan Simmons

  I refused to burn the manuscript because I did not want the smoke rising like a sacrificial offering to that dark thing I sensed waiting just beyond the fragile walls of my sanity.

  In the end, my solution was more prosaic than the Tower of Silence. I shredded the several hundred pages by hand — smelling the stink of Calcutta rising from the paper — and then stuffed the shredded strips in a Glad Bag to which I added some rotting vegetables to discourage scroungers. I drove several miles to a large dump and watched as the black bag bounced down a steep ravine of garbage to settle out of sight in a pool of foul muck.

  Driving back, I knew that ridding myself of the manuscript had not stopped the Song of Kali from echoing in my mind.

  Amrita and I continued to inhabit the same house. We suffered advice and continued sympathy from our friends, but we saw other people less and less as the harsh winter progressed. We also saw less and less of each other.

  Amrita had decided to finish up her Ph.D. work, and she set into her schedule of early rising, teaching, library work, grading papers in the evening, more research, and early to bed. I rose very late and was often gone for dinner and much of the evening. When Amrita gave up the study about ten P.M., I would take possession of it and read until the early hours of the morning. I read everything during those sunless months — Spengler, Ross McDonald, Malcolm Lowry, Hegel, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Catton, Ian Fleming, and Sinclair Lewis. I read classics I'd had on my shelves unread for decades, and I brought home best-sellers from Safeway. I read everything.

  In February a friend offered me a temporary teaching position at a small college north of Boston, and I took it. At first I commuted each day, but soon I took a small furnished apartment near the campus and went back to Exeter only on weekends. Frequently I did not return even then.

  Amrita and I never talked about Calcutta. We did not mention Victoria's name. Amrita was retreating into a world of number theory and Boolean algebra. It seemed to be a comfortable world for her: a world in which rules were abided by and truth tables could be logically determined. I was left outside with nothing but my unwieldy tools of language and the unfixable, nonsensical machine of reality.

  I was at the college for four months and might not have returned to Exeter if a friend had not called to tell me that Amrita had been hospitalized. Doctors diagnosed her problem as acute pneumonia complicated by exhaustion. She was hospitalized for eight days and too weak to get out of bed at home for a week after that. I stayed home during that time, and in the small acts of nursing I was beginning to feel echoes of our earlier tenderness; but then she announced that she felt better, she returned to her computer work in mid-June, and I went back to my apartment. I felt irresolute and lost, as if some huge, dark hole was opening wider in me, sucking me down.

  I bought the Luger that June.

  Roy Bennet, a taciturn little biology professor I'd met at the college, had invited me to his gun club in April. For years I had supported gun-control laws and hated the idea of handguns, but by the end of that school year I was spending most Saturdays on the firing range with Bennet. Even the children there seemed proficient at the two-handed, wide-legged firing stance that I knew only from the movies. When someone had to retrieve a target, everyone politely broke their weapons open and stepped back from the firing line with a smile. Many of the targets were in the shape of human bodies.

  When I suggested that I would like to buy my own gun, Roy smiled with the quiet joy of a successful missionary and suggested that a .22-caliber target pistol would be good to start with. I nodded agreement, and the next day spent a small fortune for a vintage 7.65-mm Luger. The woman who sold it said that the automatic had been her late husband's pride and joy. She included a handsome carrying case in the price.

  I never mastered the preferred two-handed stance, but became reasonably proficient at putting holes in the target at twenty yards. I had no idea what the others were thinking or feeling as they plinked away on those long-shadowed evenings, but each time I raised that oiled and balanced instrument I felt the power of its pent-up energy course through me like a shot of strong whiskey. The slow, careful squeezing, the deafening report, and the blow of the recoil along my stiffened arm created something akin to ecstasy in me.

  I brought the Luger back to Exeter with me one weekend after Amrita's recovery. She came downstairs late one night and found me turning the freshly oiled and loaded weapon over and over in my hands. She said nothing, but looked at me for a long moment before going back upstairs. Neither of us mentioned it in the morning.

  "There's a new book out in India. Quite the rage. An epic poem, I believe. All about Kali, one of their tutelary goddesses," said the book salesman.

  I had come down to New York for a party at Doubleday, attracted more by the offer of free drinks than by anything else. I was on the balcony and debating whether to get my fourth Scotch when I heard the salesman talking to two distributors. I went over and took him by the arm, led him to a far corner of the balcony. The man had just returned from a trade fair in New Delhi. He did not know who I was. I explained that I was a poet interested in contemporary Indian writing.

  "Yes, well, I'm afraid I can't tell you much about this book," he said. "I mentioned it because it seemed such a damned unlikely thing to be selling so well over there. Just a long poem, really. I guess it's taken the Indian intellectuals by storm. We wouldn't be interested, of course. Poetry never sells here, much less if it's — "

  "What's the title?" I asked.

  "It's funny, but I did remember that," he said. "Kalisambvha or Kalisavba or something like that. I remembered it because I used to work with a girl named Kelly Summers and I noticed the — "

  "Who's the author?"

  "Author? I'm sorry, I don't recall that. I only remember the book because the publisher had this huge display but no real graphics, you know? Just this big pile of books there. I kept seeing the blue cover in all the bookstores in the Delhi hotels. Have you ever been to India?"

  "Das?"

  "What?"

  "Was the author's name Das?" I said.

  "No, it wasn't Das," he said. "At least I don't think so. Something Indian and hard to pronounce, I think."

  "Was his first name Sanjay?" I asked.

  "Sorry, I have no idea," said the salesman. He was becoming irritated. "Look, does it make that much difference?"

  "No," I said, "it doesn't make any difference." I left him and went to lean on the balcony railing. I was still there two hours later when the moon rose over the serrated teeth of the city.

  I received the photograph in mid-July.

  Even before I saw the postmark I knew the letter was from India. The smell of the country rose from the flimsy envelope. It was postmarked Calcutta. I stood at the end of our drive under the leaves of the big birch tree and opened the envelope.

  I saw the note on the back of the photograph first. It said Das is alive, nothing more. The photo was in black and white, grainy; the people in the foreground were almost washed out by a poorly used flash while the people in the near background were mere silhouettes. Das, however, was immediately recognizable. His face was scabbed and the nose was distorted, but the leprosy was not nearly so obvious as when I had met him. He was wearing a white shirt, and his hand was extended as if he were making a point to students.

  The eight men in the photo were all seated on cushions around a low table. The flash showed paint peeling from a wall behind Das and a few dirty cups on the table. Two other men's faces were clearly illuminated, but I did not know them. My eyes went to a silhouette of a man seated on Das's right. It was too dark to make out facial features, but there was enough profile for me to see the predatory beak of a nose and the hair standing out like a black nimbus.

  There was nothing in the envelope except the photograph.

  Das is alive. What was I supposed to make of that? That M. Das had been resurrected yet another time by his bitch goddess? I looked at the photo again and stood tapping it against my fingers. Th
ere was no way of telling when the picture had been taken. Was the figure in the shadows Krishna? There was something about the bunched-forward aggressiveness of the head and body that made me want to say it was.

  Das is alive.

  I turned away from the driveway and walked into the woods. Underbrush grabbed at my ankles. There was a tilting, spinning emptiness inside me that threatened to open into a black chasm. I knew that once the darkness opened, there would be no hope of my escaping it.

  A quarter of a mile from the house, near where the stream widened into a marshy area, I knelt and tore the photograph into tiny pieces. Then I rolled a large rock over and sprinkled the pieces onto the matted, faded ground there before rolling the rock back in place.

  While walking home I retained the image of moist white things burrowing frantically to avoid the light.

  Amrita came into the room that night while I was packing. "We need to talk," she said.

  "When I get back," I said.

  "Where are you going, Bobby?"

  "New York," I said. "Just for a couple of days." I put another shirt over the place where I had packed away the Luger and sixty-four cartridges.

  "It's important that we talk," said Amrita. Her hand touched my arm.

  I pulled away and zipped closed my black suitcase. "When I get back," I said.

  I left my car at home, took a train to Boston, caught a cab to Logan International, and boarded a ten P.M. TWA flight to Frankfurt with connections to Calcutta.

  17

  "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

  — William Butler Yeats

  The sun rose as we were approaching the English coast, but even with the sunlight falling across my legs I felt trapped in a night that would not end. I was shivering violently, acutely aware that I was strapped into a fragile, pressurized tube suspended thousands of feet above the sea. Worse than that was a growing inward pressure that I first attributed to a claustrophobic reaction but then realized was something else altogether. There was a vertiginous tilting within me, like the first solid stirrings of some powerful homunculus.

  I sat gripping the armrests and watching the silent mouthings of characters on a movie screen while Europe passed beneath us. I thought of Tagore's last moments. Meals arrived and were dutifully eaten. Late in the day I tried to sleep. And all the while the hollowness and dizziness grew stronger and there was the constant sound of insect wings in my ears. Repeatedly I would be on the verge of sleep, only to snap awake to the sound of distant, mocking laughter. Eventually I gave up the attempt to sleep.

  I forced myself to join the other passengers during the refueling stop in Tehran. The pilot had announced the temperature outside as being 33 degrees, and only when the terrible heat and humidity struck me did I realize that it had been given in degrees Celsius.

  It was late, sometime before midnight, but the hot air stank of waiting violence. Pictures of the Shah were everywhere in the echoing, brightly lit barn of a terminal, and security men and soldiers roamed around with their sidearms drawn for no apparent reason. Muslim women cloaked in black chadors glided like wraiths through the green fluorescent emptiness. Old men slept on the floor or knelt on their dark prayer rugs amid cigarette butts and cellophane wrappers while nearby an American boy of about six — blond hair and red-striped shirt incongruous among dark hues, crouched behind a chair and raked the customs counter with automatic fire from his toy M-16.

  The PA system announced that our flight would be reboarding in fifteen minutes. I stumbled past an old man in a red scarf and found myself in the public restrooms. It was very dark in there, the only light reflected from a single bulb outside the entrance. Dark shapes moved through the gloom. For a second I wondered if I had inadvertently entered the women's side and was seeing chadors in the darkness, but then I heard deep voices speaking in guttural syllables. There was also the sound of water dripping. At that second the dizziness struck me worse than before, and I crouched over one of the Asian toilets and vomited, continuing to spasm long after I had rid myself of the last of the airline meals.

  I collapsed sideways and lay full-length on the cool tile floor. The emptiness inside me was almost complete now. I trembled as sweat poured from me and mixed with the salt of my tears. The incessant insect noise had risen to a crescendo so that I could hear distinct voices. The Song of Kali was very loud. I realized that already I had crossed the borders into her new domain.

  In a few minutes I rose in the darkness, cleaned myself as well as I could at the only sink, and walked quickly into the green light to joint the others lining up for the flight to Calcutta.

  We came out of the clouds, circled once, and landed at Calcutta's DumDum Airport at 3:10 A.M. I joined the line descending the staircase to the wet tarmac. The city seemed to be on fire. The orange light turned back by the low monsoon clouds, the red beacons reflected in countless puddles, and the blaze of spotlights from beyond the terminal added to the illusion. I could hear no sound but the chanting chorus of shrill voices as I stumbled along with the others toward the customs shed.

  A year before, Amrita, Victoria, and I had spent more than an hour going through customs in Bombay. This time I was through in less than five minutes. I had not the slightest anxiety that they would open my luggage. The little man in soiled khaki chalked an X on my suitcase directly over the outside compartment where I had hidden the Luger and ammunition, and then I was in the main terminal, walking toward the outside doors.

  Someone will be here to meet me. Probably Krishna-Sanjay. He will tell me where to find the Kamakhya bitch before he dies.

  It was almost three-thirty in the morning but the crowd was no less intense than the other times I had been in the airport. People shouted and shoved in the sick light from sputtering fluorescent strips, but I could barely hear the noise as I stepped over Kipling's "sheeted dead" while making little effort to avoid treading on the sleeping forms. I let the crowd move me. My arms and legs felt anesthetized, jerking along as if I had become a poorly handled marionette. I closed my eyes to listen to the Song and to feel the energy from the weapon only inches from my right hand.

  Chatterjee and Gupta also will have to die. However small their complicity, they will have to die.

  I stumbled along with the crowd like a man caught in a terrible windstorm. The noise and smell and pressure from the jostling mob joined perfectly with the growing emptiness within me to form a dark flower unfolding in my mind. The laughter was very loud now. Behind my closed eyelids I could see Her visage rising above the gray towers of the dying city, hear Her voice leading the rising chant, see Her arms moving to the beat of the terrible dance.

  When you open your eyes you will see someone you know. You do not have to wait. Let it begin here.

  I forced my eyes to stay shut, but gripping the suitcase with both hands I raised it to my chest. I could feel the crowd moving me forward with them toward the open doors. Screams of porters and the sewer-sweet smells of Calcutta came in clearly now. I felt my right hand begin unzipping the outside compartment of the suitcase where I had packed the loaded gun.

  Let it begin here.

  With my eyes still closed I saw the next few minutes opening before me like the waiting doors, like the maw of the great beast that was the city, and I could sense the dark flower opening wide inside me and then the lifting of the oiled perfection of the Luger and then the sacrament will commence, and then the power will flow up my arm and into me and through me and out of me in coughs of flame in the night, and the running forms will fall and I will reload with the satisfying snick of the new magazine sliding into place and the pain and the power will flow from me and the running forms will fall and flesh will fly from flesh from the impact and the flames of chimneys will light the sky and by their red hue I will find my way through the streets and lanes and alleys and I will find Victoria, in time this time, find Victoria in time, and I will kill those who took her from me and kill
those who get in my way and kill everyone who —

  Let it begin now.

  "No!" I screamed and opened my eyes. My scream quelled the Song for only a second or two but in that time I pulled my hand out of the open suitcase compartment and shoved violently to my left. The doors were only ten paces in front of me and the crowd surged relentlessly toward them, the current of their progress faster now, more concentrated. Through the doors I caught a glimpse of a man in a white shirt standing by a small blue-and-white bus. The man's hair rose like spikes of dark electricity.

  "No!" I used the suitcase as a battering ram to fight my way to the wall. A tall man in the crowd shoved me and I struck him in the chest until he let me pass. I was only three steps from the open doors now, and the movement of the crowd pulled me along as surely as an explosion of air into a vacuum.

  Let it begin now.

  "No!" I do not know if I shouted aloud. I threw myself forward, shoved against the crowd like a man wading chest-deep in a river, and with my left hand grasped the bar of an unmarked side door leading into the off-limits section of the terminal. Somehow I managed to hold onto the suitcase while human forms battered against me, fingers and arms accidentally striking my face in the melee.