And there was an almost symphonic correctness to the titan’s having been unearthed in Providence, in Rhode Island, in that Yankee state so uncharacteristic of New England; that situs founded by Roger Williams for “those distressed for cause of conscience” and historically identified with independence of thought and freedom of religion; that locale where the odd and the bizarre melded with the mundane: Poe had lived there, and Lovecraft; and they had had strange visions, terrible dreams that had been recorded, that had influenced the course of literature; the moral ownership of the city by the modern coven known as the Mafia; these, and uncountable reports of bizarre happenings, sightings, gatherings, beliefs that made it seem the Providence Journal was an appendix to the writings of Charles Fort … provided a free-floating ambience of the peculiar.
The lines never seemed to grow shorter. The crowds came by the busloads, renting cassette players with background information spoken by a man who had played the lead in a television series dealing with the occult. Schoolchildren were herded past the staring green eye in gaggles; teenagers whose senses had been dulled by horror movies came in knots of five and ten; young lovers needing to share stopped and wondered; elderly citizens from whose lives had been leached all wonder smiled and pointed and clucked their tongues; skeptics and cynics and professional debunkers stood frozen in disbelief and came away bewildered.
Frank Kneller found himself involved in a way he had never experienced before, not even with the most artistically rewarding groups he had booked. He went to bed each night exhausted, but uplifted. And he awoke each day feeling his time was being well-spent. When he spoke of the feeling to his oldest friend, his accountant, with whom he had shared lodgings during college days, he was rewarded with the word ennobled. When he dwelled on the word, he came to agree.
Showing the monstrosity was important.
He wished with all his heart to know the reason. The single sound that echoed most often through the verdant glade of his thoughts was why?
“I understand you’ve taken to sleeping in the rotunda where the giant is on display?” The host of the late-night television talk show was leaning forward. The ash on his cigarette was growing to the point where it would drop on his sharply creased slacks. He didn’t notice.
Kneller nodded. “Yes, that’s true.”
“Why?”
“Why is a question I’ve been asking myself ever since I bought the great man and started letting people see him.…”
“Well, let’s be honest about it,” the interviewer said. “You don’t let people see the giant … you charge them for the privilege. You’re showing an attraction, after all. It’s not purely an humanitarian act.”
Kneller pursed his lips and acceded. “That’s right, that’s very true. But I’ll tell you, if I had the wherewithal, I’d do it free of charge. I don’t, of course, so I charge what it costs me to rent space at the Civic Center. That much; no more.”
The interviewer gave him a sly smile. “Come on…”
“No, really, honest to God, I mean it,” Frank said quickly. “It’s been eleven months, and I can’t begin to tell you how many hundreds of thousands of people have come to see the great man; maybe a million or more; I don’t know. And everybody who comes goes away feeling a little bit better, a little more important.…”
“A religious experience?” The interviewer did not smile.
Frank shrugged. “No, what I’m saying is that people feel ennobled in the presence of the great man.”
“You keep calling the giant ‘the great man.’ Strange phrase. Why?”
“Seems right, that’s all.”
“But you still haven’t told me why you sleep there in the place where he’s on display every day.”
Frank Kneller looked straight into the eyes of the interviewer, who had to live in New York City every day and so might not understand what peace of mind was all about, and he said, “I like the feeling. I feel as if I’m worth the trouble it took to create me. And I don’t want to be away from it too long. So I set up a bed in there. It may sound freaky to you, but …”
But if he had not been compelled to center his life around the immobile figure on the marble slab, then Frank Kneller would not have been there the night the destroyer came.
Moonlight flooded the rotunda through the enormous skylights of the central display areas.
Kneller lay on his back, hands behind his head, as usual finding sleep a long way off, yet at peace with himself, in the presence of the great man.
The titan lay on his marble slab, tilted against the far wall, thirty feet high, his face now cloaked in shadows. Kneller needed no light. He knew the single great eye was open, the twin pupils staring straight ahead. They had become companions, the man and the giant. And, as usual, Frank saw something that none of the thousands who had passed before the colossus had ever seen. In the darkness up there near the ceiling, the scars covering the chest of the giant glowed faintly, like amber plankton or the minuscule creatures that cling to limestone walls in the deepest caverns of the earth. When night fell, Frank was overcome with an unbearable sadness. Wherever and however this astounding being had lived … in whatever way he had passed through the days and nights that had been his life … he had suffered something more terrible than anyone merely human could conceive. What had done such awesome damage to his flesh, and how he had regenerated even as imperfectly as this, Kneller could not begin to fathom.
But he knew the pain had been interminable, and terrible.
He lay there on his back, thinking again, as he did every night, of the life the giant had known, and what it must have been for him on this Earth.
The questions were too potent, too complex, and beyond Frank Kneller’s ability even to pose properly. The titan defied the laws of nature and reason.
And the shadow of the destroyer covered the skylight of the rotunda, and the sound of a great wind rose around the Civic Center, and Frank Kneller felt a terror that was impossible to contain. Something was coming from the sky, and he knew without looking up that it was coming for the great man on the slab.
The hurricane wind shrieked past the point of audibility, vibrating in the roots of his teeth. The darkness outside seemed to fall toward the skylight, and with the final sound of enormous wings beating against the night, the destroyer splintered the shatterproof glass.
Razor-edged stalactites struck the bed, the floor, the walls; one long spear imbedded itself through the pillow where Frank’s head had lain a moment before, penetrating the mattress and missing him by inches where he cowered in the darkness.
Something enormous was moving beyond the foot of the bed.
Glass lay in a scintillant carpet across the rotunda. Moonlight still shone down and illuminated the display area.
Frank Kneller looked up and saw a nightmare.
The force that had collapsed the skylight was a bird. A bird so enormous he could not catalog it in the same genus with the robin he had found outside his bedroom window when he was a child … the robin that had flown against the pane when sunlight had turned it to a mirror … the robin that had struck and fallen and lain there till he came out of the house and picked it up. Its blood had been watery, and he could feel its heart beating against his palm. It had been defenseless and weak and dying in fear, he could feel that it was dying in fear. And Frank had rushed in to his mother, crying, and had begged her to help restore the creature to the sky. And his mother had gotten the old eyedropper that had been used to put cod-liver oil in Frank’s milk when he was younger, and she had tried to get the robin to take some sugar-water.
But it had died.
Tiny, it had died in fear.
The thing in the rotunda was of that genus, but it was neither tiny nor fearful.
Like no other bird he had ever seen, like no other bird that had ever been seen, like no other bird that had ever existed. Sinbad had known such a bird, perhaps, but no other human eyes had ever beheld such a destroyer. It was gigantic. Frank Kneller could
not estimate its size, because it was almost as tall as the great man, and when it made the hideous watery cawing sound and puffed out its bellows chest and jerked its wings into a billowing canopy, the pinfeathers scraped the walls of the rotunda on either side. The walls were seventy-five feet apart.
The vulture gave a hellish scream and sank its scimitar talons in the petrified flesh of the great man, its vicious beak in the chest, in the puckered area of scars that had glowed softly in the shadows.
It ripped away the flesh as hard as rhinoceros horn.
Its head came away with the beak locked around a chunk of horny flesh. Then, as Kneller watched, the flesh seemed to lose its rigidity, it softened, and blood ran off the carrion crow’s killer beak. And the great man groaned.
The eye blinked.
The bird struck again, tossing gobbets of meat across the rotunda.
Frank felt his brain exploding. He could not bear to see this.
But the vulture worked at its task, ripping out the area of chest where the heart of the great man lay under the scar tissue. Frank Kneller crawled out of the shadows and stood helpless. The creature was immense. He was the robin: pitiful and tiny.
Then he saw the fire extinguisher in its brackets on the wall, and he grabbed the pillow from the bed and rushed to the compartment holding the extinguisher and he smashed the glass with the pillow protecting his hand. He wrenched the extinguisher off its moorings and rushed the black bird, yanking the handle on the extinguisher so hard the wire broke without effort. He aimed it up at the vulture just as it threw back its head to rid itself of its carrion load, and the virulent Halon 1301 mixture sprayed in a white stream over the bird’s head. The mixture of fluorine, bromine, iodine, and chlorine washed the vulture, spurted into its eyes, filled its mouth. The vulture gave one last violent scream, tore its claws loose, and arced up into the darkness with a spastic beating of wings that caught Frank Kneller across the face and threw him thirty feet into a corner. He struck the wall; everything slid toward gray.
When he was able to get to his knees, he felt an excruciating pain in his side and knew at once several ribs had been broken. All he could think of was the great man.
He crawled across the floor of the rotunda to the base of the slab, and looked up. There, in the shadows…
The great man, in terrible pain, was staring down at him.
A moan escaped the huge lips.
What can I do? Kneller thought, desperately.
And the words were in his head. Nothing. It will come again.
Kneller looked up. Where the scar tissue had glowed faintly, the chest was ripped open, and the great man’s heart lay there in pulsing blood, part of it torn away.
Now I know who you are, Kneller said. Now I know your name.
The great man smiled a strange, shy smile. The one great green eye made the expression somehow winsome. Yes, he said, yes, you know who I am.
Your tears mingled with the earth to create us.
Yes.
You gave us fire.
Yes; and wisdom.
And you’ve suffered for it ever since.
Yes.
“I have to know,” Frank Kneller said, “I have to know if you were what we were before we became what we are now.”
The sound of the great wind was rising again. The destroyer was in the night, on its way back. The chemicals of man could not drive it away from the task it had to perform, could not drive it away for long.
It comes again, the great man said in Kneller’s mind. And I will not come again.
“Tell me! Were you what we were …?”
The shadow fell across the rotunda and darkness came down upon them as the great man said, in that final moment, No, I am what you would have become…
And the carrion crow sent by the gods struck him as he said one more thing…
When Frank Kneller regained consciousness, hours later, there on the floor where the scissoring pain of his broken ribs had dropped him, he heard those last words reverberating in his mind. And heard them endlessly all the days of his life.
No, I am what you would have become … if you had been worthy.
And the silence was deeper that night across the face of the world, from pole to pole, deeper than it had ever been before in the life of the creatures that called themselves human.
But not as deep as it would soon become.
24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai
ROGER ZELAZNY
1. MT. FUJI FROM OWARI
Kit lives, though he is buried not far from here; and I am dead, though I watch the days-end light pinking cloud-streaks above the mountain in the distance, a tree in the foreground for suitable contrast. The old barrel-man is dust; his cask, too, I daresay. Kit said that he loved me and I said I loved him. We were both telling the truth. But love can mean many things. It can be an instrument of aggression or a function of disease.
My name is Mari. I do not know whether my life will fit the forms I move to meet on this pilgrimage. Nor death. Not that tidiness becomes me. So begin anywhere. Either arcing of the circle, like that vanished barrel’s hoop, should lead to the same place. I have come to kill. I bear the hidden death, to cast against the secret life. Both are intolerable. I have weighed them. If I were an outsider I do not know which I would choose. But I am here, me, Mari, following the magic footsteps. Each moment is entire, though each requires its past. I do not understand causes, only sequences. And I am long weary of reality-reversal games. Things will have to grow clearer with each successive layer of my journey, and like the delicate play of light upon my magic mountain they must change. I must die a little and live a little each moment.
I begin here because we lived near here. I visited the place earlier. It is, of course, changed. I recall his hand upon my arm, his sometime smiling face, his stacks of books, the cold, flat eye of his computer terminal, his hands again, positioned in meditation, his smile different then. Distant and near. His hands, upon me. The power of his programs, to crack codes, to build them. His hands. Deadly. Who would have thought he would surrender those rapid-striking weapons, delicate instruments, twisters of bodies? Or myself? Paths … Hands…
I have come back. It is all. I do not know whether it is enough.
The old barrel-maker within the hoop of his labor … Half-full, half-empty, half-active, half-passive … Shall I make a yin-yang of that famous print? Shall I let it stand for Kit and myself? Shall I view it as the great Zero? Or as infinity? Or is all of this too obvious? One of those observations best left unstated? I am not always subtle. Let it stand. Fuji stands within it. And is it not Fuji one must climb to give an accounting of one’s life before God or the gods?
I have no intention of climbing Fuji and accounting for myself, to God or to anything else. Only the insecure and the uncertain require justification. I do what I must. If the deities have any questions they can come down from Fuji and ask me. Otherwise, this is the closest commerce between us. That which transcends should only be admired from afar.
Indeed. I of all people should know this. I, who have tasted transcendence. I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.
Traditionally, the henro—the pilgrim—would dress all in white. I do not. White does not become me, and my pilgrimage is a private thing, a secret thing, for so long as I can keep it so. I wear a red blouse today and a light khaki jacket and slacks, tough leather hiking shoes; I have bound my hair; a pack on my back holds my belongings. I do carry a stick, however, partly for the purpose of support, which I require upon occasion; partly, too, as a weapon should the need arise. I am adept at its use in both these functions. A staff is also said to symbolize one’s faith in a pilgrimage. Faith is beyond me. I will settle for hope.
In the pocket of my jacket is a small book containing reproductions of twenty-four of Hokusai’s forty-six prints of Mt. Fuji. It was a gift, long ago. Tradition also stands against a pilgrim’s traveling alone, for practical purposes of safety as well as for companionship
. The spirit of Hokusai, then, is my companion, for surely it resides in the places I would visit if it resides anywhere. There is no other companion I would desire at the moment, and what is a Japanese drama without a ghost?
Having viewed this scene and thought my thoughts and felt my feelings, I have begun. I have lived a little, I have died a little. My way will not be entirely on foot. But much of it will be. There are certain things I must avoid in this journey of greetings and farewells. Simplicity is my cloak of darkness, and perhaps the walking will be good for me.
I must watch my health.
2. MT. FUJI FROM A TEAHOUSE AT YOSHIDA
I study the print: A soft blueness to the dawn sky, Fuji to the left, seen through the teahouse window by two women; other bowed, drowsing figures like puppets on a shelf.…
It is not this way here, now. They are gone, like the barrel-maker—the people, the teahouse, that dawn. Only the mountain and the print remain of the moment. But that is enough.
I sit in the dining room of the hostel where I spent the night, my breakfast eaten, a pot of tea before me. There are other diners present, but none near me. I chose this table because of the window’s view, which approximates that of the print. Hokusai, my silent companion, may be smiling. The weather was sufficiently clement for me to have camped again last night, but I am deadly serious in my pilgrimage to vanished scenes in this life-death journey I have undertaken. It is partly a matter of seeking and partly a matter of waiting. It is quite possible that it may be cut short at any time. I hope not, but the patterns of life have seldom corresponded to my hopes—or, for that matter, to logic, desire, emptiness, or any patterns of my own against which I have measured them.
All of this is not the proper attitude and occupation for a fresh day. I will drink my tea and regard the mountain. The sky changes even as I watch.…
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