She wants something from you, or so she thinks.
She has an idea of you.
That idea is a lethal trap.
Never mind why.
The ideas come into your head like bulletins.
I know. That’s all. I just know.
It is a lethal trap.
Avoid it, deny.
Suppress.
Denial is like a cold current threading through the blood, spreading, numbing, rinsing away feeling. But denial is not cold. It is hot. Like a bonfire in the chest. Hot in your outlines, in your inner forearm, the edges of your ears. Hot far back behind the eyes, way back in the brain, and rushing out to your outline, your ear edges.
I will vanquish this emotion. I will not lower myself to do what it wants, or what she wants. What she thinks she wants. I will not obey her. She will not look inside my suit. I will not conform to her idea.
A superb and contradictory strengthweakness flows in and out of you through that “will not.”
I will never again abbreviate the word not. I visualize the word NOT in my mind and reach out and take the faucet in my hand and bend it, the metal tube, straight back in one smooth, unhurried motion, the metal tube folds back on itself without a sound and splatters water upwards.
There.
NOT made a fountain.
Praise NOT.
*
What makes it difficult? You can not fantasize about simply anyone, because the self is the true object of the fantasy, or, the self is no less important than the other one. One, I should say one, not you. One is in the fantasy what one wants to be, but the other one, the desideratum, must allow for it.
I can feel myself reading, my eyes adhere magnetically to the lines of text and scan them automatically, but I am not doing what I would call seeing, let alone reading, and I am not thinking, because there is no inner echo of the writing, not even this rather nice description of an inward state is what should be called actual thinking, even this is happening automatically. I am becoming pure mechanism, pure chaos. Why does that seem right?
*
Now there is smoke, something burning. Swiss landscape of Kashmir Valley. Heartbreaking blue sky, green meadow, yellow flowers, white mountains. Smoke rubbing itself on all that.
I am fifteen, she is nineteen. I have come out by myself looking for birds, although I am not a ‘birdwatcher’ in the usual sense. I know nothing about birds, I cannot identify them by species. But there are a few individual birds I know on sight, because I know where their nests are, and I like to make my rounds and see them. I usually do this with my old friend Khaayal, but he’s mourning the loss of a friend himself, and unable to enjoy anything right now.
Smriti turns, then notices me for the first time, and now she’s looking at me like I’m an exhibit in a museum. How rapidly, how hideously, my narrative flies away from me when I desire her. My whole ‘blueprint’ is gone. Which is worse? No blueprint, or blueprint? A huge blueprint, printed on stiff, stale paper, overspreading my entire life, and everything finished before it begins.
But what is she telling me now?
Her voice is speaking to me, saying innocuous things, but through those words I hear her tell me that the blueprint has no power of its own. Look how easily, with a casual word, an everyday encounter—which is all this is or will ever be, my poor fellow—that blueprint is flicked aside, leaving me blinking, like someone who has just come out of gloom into the blaze of midday, right out onto the battlements to look down into a void of wind and desert and mountains, deep and empty and beautiful, a boundless horde of meaning heaped up out there, and racing to and fro, zipping out of sight behind a low eminence like wild horses, or swooping up into the cloudless blue sky like a flock of vultures to be lost in nothing but the pure lostness of immensity. Wherever I see it, all I want to do with my life is produce immensities, and never live a moment without immensity being made from me.
I have followed her away from the lake, into the village. She is turning to me, the sun lancing at me from behind her, when there is a sudden hue and cry and the whole place flies up in panic, every path fills with rushing figures, the indescribable howls of old women who have had more than they can bear.
It was a false alarm. One person, a boy, hurt his leg in the scramble, and there are no other casualties but the peace of the day and the town, and my day with Smriti, because we were instantly separated the moment the alarm went up, and I never saw her again. There she stays, the blinding sun sharp above her left shoulder, turned to look at me, her figure obscured by the shade of the light, the whites of her eyes like moonlit snow and her gaze baffled, not reaching me, because that sun shade is between us like a wafer of smoked glass, muting her colors. Never again Smriti. What happened to you? What was that look on your face? Did you assume that, as I hadn’t heard anything about a woman being hurt, I wouldn’t have had cause to worry? And yet, I never exactly worried about you, Smriti. Thought, one thought that seemed at the time like a whole course and career of thought and never took a single step past the threshold of that meager handful of quotidian things we did together in a few months in one year that ended without closing. The next year the panic was real, the army was there, and, while I never heard the shooting and never happened to be anywhere near the violence, I had to go through it in my own way. I fell back on birds, fresh air, mountain beauty, silence up there. I went walking every day while we were staying in the village until the day I found a dead man lying face down in a shallow, muddy depression hidden between a heap of large stones. His head was bare. What had been covering it was lying nearby. On the opposite side of him his rifle lay and his outflung hand lay beside it. In falling, as he plainly had, his brow had been driven down into the mud. His legs had closed as he fell and were stretched out together, soles up, like a diver. I froze the moment I saw him, although I knew as if by magic he was dead. And there was no doubt about it.
When the first flash of shock began to waver, I felt a fierce upswelling of rage at this corpse for ruining my beautiful day. All violence was an intolerable offense, my fury told me, violently. It should be punishable by violence. When my anger died down, I felt pity both for the dead man and for the nightmarishly fragile beauty of the world, and it was at that moment that the corpse lifted its blind face out of the mud and spoke inhuman words in an inhuman voice, a buzzing, chorded, inhuman voice, not looking at me nor speaking to me, and I didn’t scream or run, but only stood there unable to look away from the face that was devouring my day, a shaggy face with a horrible, ragged, triangular mouth that was black inside and grinned, and eyes like two muddy pebbles, the sharp nose with a hole in it and smashed, and all bespattered with black slime. The voice spoke, and then the head sank. The body lay as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t leave it. Leaving it would have meant it was following me.
Staying with it was the only way I could leave it. It had to leave me. I remember the sun setting, the chill of evening, settling down on my haunches to wait, until the idea that the corpse would stir again once night fell, the idea that I would be sitting here in darkness, under the stars, with this corpse, jumped up in me and I fled, it was right behind me, looking behind myself so often I must have fallen more than once, because I came home smeared with blood and dirt. As I ran home, I suddenly imagined telling adults about the corpse, and I saw men’s faces lengthening grimly, their hands grasping lights, their faces gathered in a circle of orange light while the blue night sang behind them, and then tramping out, following me, or my directions. If they did that, and brought back the body slung in a sheet, then what?
They didn’t ask me to come along. I spent the night lying awake looking up at the ceiling but with all my attention on the window, glowing with ‘blue nocturnal antiradiance’ and the sullen outlines of the mountains. They’re out there, they’re finding it, they aren’t finding it and cursing me, they’re putting it in a sheet, they’re finding out he’s actually still alive and trying to revive him and blaming me for not helping hi
m. He’s crouched just outside my window—not him, it. It is there. Unbreathing. Lying face down. Like Smriti, though, I never knew any more about it than that, and I went on hating life for being so easily violated and resenting the beautiful day, mountains, flowers.
Now I lie in bed, not looking at you.
“So, now I’ve broken the Third Oath,” I think, and the thought fills me with indifference. Your presence fills me with neutrality.
It’s a neutral night, with grey squares of light on the dim walls, the sounds of the street seven floors below, a sighing bus, it’s a weeknight. A little movement of air, the smell from the potted flowers you lay out on the broad plain plaster sill. Your even breathing. The smell of those flowers is the only thing that interests me. It interests me because it conjures out of the uncaring me that is here today, a me that did care, and I get fascinated by the memory of caring. A few hours ago I waited for you on a park bench. We have to meet well away from campus of course, and make our way back to your apartment from the far side, to make sure no other students see us together. Why we don’t meet at your place is something you’ve explained but never satisfactorally. I think you may secretly season your pleasures with the risk of being caught. I sat waiting on the bench, bored with my book, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees and gazing across the path to the fenced meadow on the other side, a busy playground off to my left somewhere, to my right the park wardens moving grey plastic trash bins around the brick bathrooms.
I realize I have only to take one step forward off this bench to shake off the trance of encroaching age. The magic of the day will make me a boy again. I just have to step out of this aging form; only a single step. The grey brown earth of my youth, the grey brown youth of my earth, soil that lies in flat clots together, the bright voices of children in the playground, streaking like skyrockets over the bare plain of my earthyouth, a plain that isn’t green yet, still brown and grey, torn by strife, but also just rippled up by the ripples of youth and life, opening the soil to the wind and light. The birds. Their cries are the light’s cries. Light and birds caught in the precious few branches of the trees war left standing haphazardly. A young boy in the bushes, hiding in play for a change, there looking out through the branches, alert, using hard skills softly, trapped close to earth and leashed to space. It’s one step away. If I could take that step, I could undo the ruin and plunge into the day and the dry soil I was.
*
The giant bats set us down at a nameless village fifty miles west of Tehuch, and from there we have to proceed into the mountains on foot. No flying in the mountains—there’s too much lightning. The peaks are permanently blanketed by thick black clouds like huge petrified fever dreamers their sides raked with sizzling electric scars. The few villages up here huddle close against the slopes, beneath huge iron chevrons that serve as combination lightning shields and avalanche deflectors. Rockfalls are frequent as lightning rampages among the summits. At a distance, the mountains of Balkhmahez sputter and dance, appearing to flicker back and forth in the ceaseless lightning storm parked on top of them.
The air here at the base of the range is moist and surprisingly warm, with skeins of colder, drier air boring through it. The robe they’ve given me might as well be new; certainly it has no residual odor, and that is a consideration on their part. But it’s as heavy as a rug, with ungaingly, flapping cuffs. I sweat under it for a few minutes and then throw it off. I don’t wear robes and cowls.
We have reached the elevator. It’s a circular metal chamber that climbs an iron screw, powered by a team of huge, shaggy, red-eyed oxen. They stand side by side just within the outer wall of the chamber and turn a geared treadwheel that screws the chamber up a pair of rails set into a more or less natural groove in a sheer rock wall. We passengers stand in the middle of the chamber, on a platform above the great circular base and surrounding the oily, evil-smelling screw. The rock face crawls by outside, now and then opening in plunging views striated with dim sunbeams and vast bands of shadow. The elevator is moored at the top of the wall and, to my surprise, the two oxen are led out with us.
The road to the monastery of Maug Zunghun forks off from the main. The main road is a wide, shallowly furrowed clay causeway. The road to the monastery is black. A dull, black glaze with glittering motes embedded in it, like a frozen stream. The road climbs abruptly in steep, curving switchbacks up the side of Ci-andan Mohe, whose peak is flexed so far backwards that no one has ever seen it. We lean along the grade, but the black road is entirely level. The oxen find their footing readily. I don’t understand why we aren’t riding them.
The lightning is still mostly on the far side of the mountains just now, and muffled. The daylight clicks through several different set intensities of brightness with remote flashes. The air is clear, the light is losing the brownish tinge it had down in the valley, becoming more actinic and lunar, vividly contrasting lights and darks, rich greys and indigo shadows, vibrantly black rocks and the road. A flash of lightning turns the rocks to transparent smoke with veins of neon green. We pass a signpost topped with a leopard’s head elaborately moulded in steel. My skin feels clammy. I’m getting lightheaded, like I’ve had too much to smoke. This point marks the spot where we have to put on our masks of activated charcoal.
The road turns a corner and the monastery comes into view, high above us, lightning flashing in the sky beyond, the rumbling and blast of thunder suddenly distinct again as we are out from behind the acoustic baffle of the slope. The compound is set into the base of a naturally mandorla-shaped cliff, with several terraces descending. At this angle, only the upright walls of pale stone can be seen, and the black road snaking up among them.
We pass among crumbling enclosures. Above us, lightning cracks against colossal steel plates riveted to the mountain sides, making them slam and snap and hum. The oxen look up suddenly, not at the noise—following their eyes, I see the head of a leopard, looking at us over a wall. More leopards appear on the slope above us as we approach, eyeing us with haughtily casual interest. The oxen plod on, but their scarlet eyes note each leopard, one by one.
The fitful light makes it hard to put all the details of the scene together. I can’t prevent myself from flinching at the strikes, even though my guides assured me that the black road is never struck. Now we pass between fields of ash-blue soil with blue and silver crops growing in them, plants I don’t recognize. What I took for scarecrows are the ornamented mummies of dead mathetes. There’s a fresh body lying in a narrow coffin, propped up beside the road. The slack, sunken face and flabby hands crossed on its breast have the wavering phosphorescence of embers. The black ribbons festooning the coffin look like they’re struggling to escape into the air. The garlands of wilting flowers bristle as the wind combs through their petals. As we approach, I hear a voice starting to speak, a male voice, reverberating as if the word were being spoken in a small empty room. I remember a Professor I once had, who could recite the most scandalous things in just that unflappably reasonable voice.
“The volatile capital flows lasted forty days, in review of its mandate in word and deed. The demons used paper, and related patience and resignation; they were exorcised, and yet never said anything about the bodies of the persons. Obeying the order system based on rate stability facilitates balance manifested neither in words nor from the earth nor from the body.”
It’s as if the corpse were dispersing itself in words instead of flies and stink.
A wall sweeps up before us; I’ve barely had an opportunity to get a look at it, because the boulders lining the path block the view. I see it only once distinctly, up close and almost in the same moment I go through it. An arched passageway through the thick wall, almost a tunnel.
The monastery is suddenly there before us. It’s a collection of two and three storey buildings topped with squat onion domes of mottled steel. The domes are like gargantuan versions of those bells they use at the front desks of hotels; they don’t join directly to the fabric of the bui
ldings, but lift up on top of them with an aperture underneath. The mottling, I realize, is all Lichtenberg figures caused by lightning strikes.
The huge hoary heads of the oxen float at the ends of their powerful necks, and they blink impassively at me. Their eyes really are red, a smouldering, deep crimson, burning there behind a fringe of matted brown locks. The guides peel off with almost demure gestures, leaving me to find my own way forward.
Now up to the doorway, or rather socket, leading into the monastery itself. As I climb the many shallow steps a huge figure, robed, muffled, and wearing an apron embroidered in silvers and greys that somehow manages to look garish, and fringed around three sides with a translucent mane of clear fibers. The front of the hood has a mane, too, and the hands are lost inside sleeves that sweep the ground. Recalling my instructions, I take hold of the hood and thrust my head up inside. The luminous face I see far away is tiny, the size of a tomato, like a severed head resting on a dish. It picks up where the roadside cadaver left off.
“The assaults were followed by others still more violent, so that the marks of the blows are clear signs that found that the being exorcised responded to the staff and Chairman with new challenges waiting for their exchange arrangement. Oil shocks stopped his voice, fixed exchange rates collapsed alerting them to risks of possession.”
I was expecting this challenge, which is primarily a ritual, and the agent in Chayariliane told me how to respond. She expressed herself very melodramatically, if you ask me. I think she wanted me to be terribly impressed with what was expected of the visitor to the monastery, and perhaps to be intimidated by her experiences as well. Most of it is a matter of bullying demons, which is nothing to me. The only real challenge involves running a needle right through your tongue. To do it right, you have to thrust up through the meat. As I was told, there was almost no bleeding. Something in the air, they said. It’s like the air is full of clotting factor. I pierce my tongue, withdraw the needle, and wait. The taste in my mouth is like steel, not the iron flavor of blood.
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