by Walter Basho
This is it, he thought. This is initiation. With nowhere to go, he sat down and listened to his breathing. It sounded vast: it was the only sound he could find. He counted a hundred breaths. He thought he heard the rush of wind, but realized it was his imagination. He counted three hundred more breaths. His ears started to ring. He counted five hundred more before the ringing faded.
He swam in a trance for six hundred breaths before his mind rejected the whole enterprise, called Niall a liar, called himself a fool, and despaired. He sat still and counted a thousand more.
“Are you showing up, Niall?” He shouted. It didn’t echo. The space felt small. “I imagine you’re going to show up eventually. Any time now.” He waited and then shouted, “Niall!” It was as muffled as before.
He returned to his quiet and stayed still. A thousand breaths more.
He began to feel pine needles and brush beneath him. He opened his eyes and could see trees in their detail. He was in a clearing. The forest had a peculiar green glow.
It was the clearing where he had made his home in Baixa. He could see his cabin. And then it wasn’t his home, wasn’t his cabin, was just somewhere much like it. Other people lived here. He saw Baixans helping one another with their chores, bringing in food from the forest, cooking, bathing one another, taking midday naps.
A priest was making rounds there, talking closely to a woman with a baby. The woman seemed concerned, as if the baby might be in danger, or sick. The priest spoke matter-of-factly but calmly to the woman for a few moments, then looked to the baby and put a hand to the baby’s brow. The baby stopped its crying. The mother spoke again, affirming what the priest had told her. She kissed the priest on the cheek.
It can’t be Niall, he thought, but it is. He stared intently at the priest.
And then he heard Niall in his ear. Don’t try so hard. You can just relax and look. You don’t try to look at things with your eyes, right? You just look.
You’re cross, Albert said. You’re a man but you can bear a child.
Did your parents teach you that word? Niall asked.
When I was a boy, there was a cross at our school. She was a girl, but her body was a boy’s. The Adepts realized it. They took her and her parents to the Old City, to London. We talked about it a lot. Everyone was very excited. Albert remembered that it was a great moment, something remarkable. Her parents were so proud. Albert remembered wanting to be cross when he saw how special it was.
That’s right, Niall said, Adria is from the north. I should have remembered that.
Niall stared at the tableau, the village, his other self, before speaking again. My parents and brother were from Terra Baixa. They fled from here on a boat. They were hungry and sick, and they wanted to be somewhere safer and better. They went to London, and I was born there. My parents knew; they always knew.
When I was four, the Adepts came for me. My parents were content with letting me go. They still live in the city. I haven’t seen them since I was four years old. I grew up with the Adepts. Albert noticed a surprising hint of bitterness in the last sentence.
You have a man’s body, Albert said. It was partially a question, partially just an observation.
The Old People taught me as a child how to grow as a man, Niall said. Our strength, our height, our bodies are just codes and chemicals, bits that we organize into a system. Adepts are experts in what these codes all mean. We can control the systems of our bodies. That’s much of how we heal people.
It’s not just about bodies, though, Niall said. ‘Man’ is just a word for how we act in this world. He paused. It was different in Baixa, before. My body would be different if my parents had stayed in Baixa, or if we lived before the Old People. The Old People gave us different words for our bodies, to organize us. They changed what our bodies meant.
What is this place? Is this real? Albert asked. Why didn’t you come when I called?
You needed to sit a little longer. This is a place. You’ll learn that there’s something subjective about ‘real.’
When does the initiation start?
It’s started already. Niall leaned in closely to Albert, as if for a kiss. But Niall just put his finger at Albert’s third eye again.
And then there was a moment, and Albert didn’t know when it was. Niall was above him; Albert could feel Niall’s weight on him. And then he was wrapped around Niall: it hurt, but Albert also wanted it, he wanted to feel Niall. He felt the free fall of Niall in control; he gave in to it and then fell apart. It became a crystal prism of moments: Niall was inside him, he was inside Niall, in a moment that might have happened right now, or a long time ago, or was maybe something he dreamed. They were somewhere else; Niall lay back, naked, scratched his belly, looked at Albert, and said, “C’mon.” And then he was pinned beneath Niall again, staring at him helplessly, losing himself in Niall’s indomitable, impenetrable, calm, relentless, laughing eyes. He could hear Niall’s words in his mind again, unsure if he was hearing them just from his mind or from Niall himself, those words from before: You want to know, don’t you? You want to understand. What if we changed everything, you and I?
And then they were done for a moment, again maybe this moment, or maybe the past, or perhaps something Albert was anticipating. Albert was spooned against Niall now, staring at the black stubble of his neck. He nestled against it and smelled him and said I love you, and Niall said: I love you, too. It happens as a part of this. It’s beautiful and very frightening the way we fall in love with each other.
Niall rolled around to face Albert. He grasped Albert’s chin again and took him into his eyes. And for a moment, for just a moment, Niall let the act drop and let Albert see the fear and machination in his eyes. A surge of adrenaline pulsed through Albert: he tried to label it as either terror or excitement. The difference was too subtle, so he stopped trying to give it a name, but he knew he wanted more.
Niall was gone, though. Albert woke up in the forest, or else they had been here the whole time. He remembered the pine needles against his back, the humid slight breeze on his flesh, bits of mud striped on Niall’s thigh, on Niall’s furry chest and shoulders.
He sat up, dressed. As he looked around the clearing, a feeling of vague familiarity crystallized into realization. He stood and walked directly across to the far side of the clearing. That was the way back to the farm.
He emerged from the forest and walked the boundary of the pasture, around the fence. There were no animals in the pasture. Beyond the pasture sat the gardens, where they grew vegetables for the house. The season was the same as Baixa; the late summer vegetables were full. The garden looked well tended. He saw the wooden markers that Lini had used to label the rows.
He went into the house. He could smell dough rising. A fire burned; through an open window in the kitchen, a breeze dried dishes on a wooden rack. The house was as he remembered it, before his parents died, before he left, but no one was there. He went through the rooms, looking and finding no one. He combed the house for dogs or cats. Nothing lived here.
He sat in a chair. He watched the fire for a while. He listened to the sounds of outside from the open front door and the open window. He started crying a little, and let himself. He would cry and then stop, and then sit calmly, and then cry again. Little wells of emotion. With each well of emotion, he felt a color creep into his peripheral vision, a grassy green. His view got greener and greener.
After a while he said to the fire, “You killed my parents. You bastards killed my parents.”
Richard was there, by the fire. He drank a cup of tea. He said, “It was an accident, but yes.”
They’re all dead, Albert thought. Everything good is gone. We’ll never get it back. And it’s him, and his stupid plans, their plans for civilization. They don’t care about the people. They don’t care whom they hurt.
There was a flood of thoughts, green thoughts. Albert pictured filling Richard’s chest with arrows, chopping off Richard’s head, running a sword through Richard’s
gut, slowly. And then he dreamed of doing the same to others. Sister Alice. The little, terrible Old Sisters. Every green, sick savage in Terra Baixa. Even Niall, who manipulated him without giving him enough credit to think he might realize it. All of them.
He would bathe in the screams and stomp on their spilling viscera. He could do it. He was better at it than anyone. He could do it forever. He could ride all of it like a wave, a warm safe wave of the cries and dying exhalations and misery of others, all the others that put him where he was.
He swam in that place for a while. It felt good, and he started to think of making it happen for real, or as real as this place was. He had a sword and a fist and he took it toward Richard. He imagined putting a fist in Richard’s face. He could feel it. It was so close. All he had to do was let it happen. Richard stared at him, his stare unwavering. “Do it,” he said.
Albert stopped. “No.” He felt the heat and weight and tension detach from him, and with a rush move through him. He swam beneath the wave and felt its power finish itself above, around, away from him.
Richard shifted his posture. “You’re supposed to smack me now.”
“Shut up,” Albert said.
Richard smiled.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Albert said. “I love you. I don’t want to kill anybody. And if that’s what it means to be initiated, it’s a terrible plan and it’s not going to work.”
Richard smiled. “You’re not being initiated. None of this is an initiation. This is something different. I love you, too.”
Albert looked down. “I killed parents, too. I killed parents and children.” He collapsed in on himself, spine curving around his heart, and began shaking. “I killed, too. I did, I did, I did.” He watched himself say I did over and over, like it was breathing. He watched himself shaking and heard the sound of his own anguish.
After a while, his shaking settled, and he looked up at Richard, or the ghost of Richard, or whatever it was. It smiled upon him kindly, warmly, but it never touched him. “I don’t want to do that, never again. I never want to kill again,” he said to it. The two of them were quiet for a very long time. Albert listened to his breath, relaxed in the wake of his grief. He tried to listen to Richard’s, but he heard nothing.
“But I will, won’t I?” Albert asked.
“Yes,” Richard said.
With that, Albert fell away. He tumbled, deeper and deeper, into himself and away from himself, and he spun, and a voice said, “It’s all right. You can let go. It’s all right to let go,” and he didn’t know if the voice was himself, or Richard, or his papa, or someone else. He collapsed and let himself go. He fell, and fell apart. Everything fell apart: his home, Richard, the light through the window. He fell, and there wasn’t anything.
+ + +
There were four of them. Four in a faraway place, in the mountains, in a series of rooms, rooms that were white and smoother than any stone he knew. They called it a “laboratory.” One called himself a monk. The monk was a teacher, who knew his mind and how to be calm, and knew the sutras. He was older than Albert, but he looked like Albert. It was confusing; Albert wasn’t sure if he was himself, or if he was the monk.
Susan was here. She could map the mind from outside, just as he—he and the monk were the same here, he decided—could map the mind from experience. Lucy was here: she was a doctor, who could mix elixirs to change the mind. And Richard was here, with his understanding of the stories of forces and particles and spaces of being: the physicist.
It was a clean place, a bubble, isolated from the chaos of the world. Here, they could remove variables. Their method was to consider themselves both observers and subjects. They had decided this was the best way to make their discoveries. Richard and Susan provided the theory, an idea of perception and its effect on physical space. He and Lucy created the conditions: elixirs to alter the preconditions of the mind, practice to sharpen and calm and expand and open the mind as it was, to make it something sharp and of use, a sword, an earth-mover, a key. They were there, the four of them, in the most intimate of conditions, for ten years. Naturally, they would grow to love one another deeply, or hate one another desperately, or both.
It began with a lot of talking, and diagrams, and conceptual models: chemical formulae and enumerations of the relevant objects, maps, proofs, protocols, classifications of data, goals, all of which, over the course of months and years, dropped away, became meaningless. In the second year, they determined they had no more use for the drugs and medicines. In the third year, they had mastered the practice and chosen to let it fall away. For years after that, it was simply the four, in the room, sitting. Taking exercise together four times a day, in perfect synchrony. Eating four small meals, their preparation and consumption and cleaning like a dance. Sleeping on cots immediately adjacent to their sitting pillows, all of them attentive to the sleep as well, engaged in the real-time study of their dreams.
They didn’t speak: they heard each other completely, first in movement and disruptions of air, in breaths and shifts of posture, then later in the spaces before those actions. They knew each other in the moment, and they knew each other in the seconds before; they could read one another’s minds in the anticipatory possibility of space before thought and action. And then, after a while, before and after and myself and you became meaningless, and they were all the same mind, the same thing. And that thing began letting itself hear more deeply, to read the microscopy and transcendence that underlay everything, and that thing began knowing all the cosmos as well, began making that cosmos intimate to it.
They began to feel cosmos as a pool they floated on, a fluid state with a pattern of waves. The waves rocked them and soothed them. The waves loved them. And, after a long time, they began to understand the waves deeply, to know the tides and the patterns, to anticipate the waves as well, to surf on them. Then there was a moment when the wave was obvious to them: where it came from, where it went, how it worked. The machinery of the universe was an engine they could tinker with, a schematic where the inputs and outputs and processes were breathtakingly simple.
And, in that moment, they asked a question: “What if we . . .”
And then replied, “Relax. Leave it alone.”
And then justified, “But we’d just . . .”
And then insisted, “Why? Why is that necessary?”
And then conceded, “Fine, whatever. Fine.”
But then asked again, “But surely if we just did this . . .”
They made a shift, the subtlest, most trivial shift. It was all there, so obvious, so simple. Surely, it was meant to be changed like this. Just to see.
They saw it approaching and then happening, a white burning and an uncontrollable shaking, through them, through everything. The wave crashed across them and through them, over and over again, a cyclone, until there was nothing but the crashing, beyond duration or direction. They screamed. It was broken. It was all broken.
+ + +
Albert felt something, heat and coolness. No sounds, no light or things to see, no sense of where he was, or what kind of space surrounded him. Just heat, coolness. Like the feeling of the pillow as you sleep; there is warmth, and then you flip to the other side, and it is cool. Not painful or uncomfortable. Just temperature.
After a while, he started to see color. If pressed, he couldn’t really guarantee that it was sight as he knew it. There was nothing here to make out, no point of reference, only darkness. But there was a color in the darkness, vague, maybe red, maybe green or brown. The darkness itself had a color, some colors. He didn’t know whether this was external to him, or just changes he saw on the insides of his eyelids.
Then, somehow, the color organized itself, demarcated itself into multiple colors, hot and cool colors, as if the color had reached an accord with the temperature. There was a golden color that felt bright and crisp and fresh, and a hot iridescent green, and each of them had a pull. Adept energies and Dragon energies, he thought. He had the ability to make
a choice.
He stayed still, giving in to neither of them. He observed them, felt their color and temperature. He could feel what was behind them, the Adepts’ energy organizing into a structured world-mind, the Dragon’s energy enslaving scared and disorganized minds into a swarming, undulating mass. It was possible to stand outside the Dragon and look at it. One could dance with it, dodge it when it rushed forward, point it in directions, surf on it, and use its energy as one’s own. It wasn’t a bad thing, really.
He kept his place and watched for a while longer. It wasn’t really possible to say how long. Finally, he could understand where he was, where he sat relative to the color and temperature.
He was in the forest, the deepest forest of all, with every tree spidering out of the ground, and into the other trees. When he looked above, there was no sun, only dim light through the canopy. There were pine needles on the floor where he sat. There were no birdsongs, but he could feel the humming of life around him. He thought: The forest is what we try to control, but it is bigger than any of us.
He could see the pattern of every tree inside the leaves, and he knew that the pattern of the forest was the same as the pattern of the tree. He was in it so deeply that he didn’t know where he was, or how to get out. He was inside a thicket, and it felt like shelter.
And then the shadow came over him. He couldn’t see the shadow, but he could feel that the shadow was warm, and wanted Albert, and Albert wanted it back. And when he buried his face into the shadow, feeling its pulse and skin and warmth, he was the shadow, too, and they were the forest, too.
He couldn’t say how long they were there, he and the forest, holding and being held, warm, timeless, and endless. After a while, he started to feel colder and wetter. Water seeped up against his body and started to cover him.