After nearly tumbling down the stairs, he forced himself to stroll toward the exit. A group of drunken American businessmen had come into Tuol Sleng, mistaking it for another kind of museum. They turned around and around, some horrified, most of them clearly amused. He thanked the guards for all the help they had given him in the last few days, and then went out slowly, making sure he was seen leaving empty-handed.
In the streets he could breathe again. He strolled several blocks, slowing under shade trees, relishing the dusty air as if it were a sea breeze. Let it scour the blood-stench from his nose. Let the sun-drenched sights of Phnom Penh purge the unreal, cloistered nightmare of the library....
Out of sight of Tuol Sleng, he stopped and drew the glassine envelope from his pocket. Inside were several large photographic negatives. Fearful of exposing them to dust, he put the packet in his bag and hailed a cyclo to take him back to the hotel.
His bathroom was cluttered with bottles of developing chemicals, plastic trays, the craning neck of his enlarger. His photographs of burial pits, like a flowerbed of skulls, hung in the slimy shower stall. He considered printing the negatives right away, but his fever had returned. He collapsed on one of the twin beds, the glassine envelope resting on his chest. One at a time, he held the negatives up to the cloudy light that filtered through the dingy shades.
In the first, the subject stood naked before a dark background. Intricate white wheels emblazoned every visible inch of skin—skin the color of deeply tarnished silver. These were the very same mandalas scattered through the notebook.
Dizzy, he shut his eyes and saw the circles, now printed on his retinas, begin to spin.
The next two photographs were worse.
The second showed the same subject, now extremely emaciated, suspended by the wrists against a rough wall. His mouth was a bright silver smear, melting at the corners. The blazing white symbols that covered his flesh burned brighter than ever. This was bad enough, but the third picture was worst of all. No sign of the mandalas remained; they had been erased from the subject's flesh. His entire body now glowed like the moon, luminous silver all over. A puddle of mercury shone on the floor at his dangling feet.
It took the American some time to realize what he was seeing. He had to close his eyes and picture the image in reverse to understand it.
What he saw as gleaming silver was actually glistening black....
Terror poured out of the black images like a swarm of flies, a cluster of silvery whorls swarming into the room, released from the subject's flesh. It didn't matter that all these pictures had been taken years ago. Something was here at this instant, larger and more lasting than the atrocities of Democratic Kampuchea. Something filled the atmosphere until it strained at the bursting point. He was on the verge of seeing ... what? What would he see when his eyes lost their focus on this world?
He tried to rise from the bed, but sickness overwhelmed him. He lay back and closed his eyes. He was aware of the light fading, the window going dark; the noises in the street—never loud to begin with, there being so few cars—surged and died. It occurred to him that he still had not seen the file he had come all this way to review. Nothing he'd done today made any sense. A lovely new cerebral encephalitis was on the rise in Cambodia, mosquito-borne; perhaps that explained everything. He could feel light pressing in at his eyes, almost painful, and realized that he was standing at the copier again, pressing a sheet to the glass, watching the bar of light travel slowly under his hands. It burned through his flesh like an X ray, searing the mandala into his head. This time it was silvery white, as in the negatives. Blinding....
When he awoke, the room was dark, but he could still see the pattern he had dreamed. It floated just above him, a bright silver disk. He saw one of his eyes reflected at its heart, as in a mirror.
He started to sit, but a hand pushed him back. The touch was familiar, as was the woman's voice whispering in his ear. They had been here before. A shade knelt over him, pinning his legs. He couldn't see much beyond the edges of the mirror, which radiated darkness into the room and obscured its other occupants. But he knew the mirror was held in the French boy's hand; and he knew the German woman was beside him on the bed. The other time, he hadn't known who they were; but now, having seen them in Tuol Sleng, he could finally put faces to their voices.
This lucidity lasted but a moment, then he felt the woman's tongue in his ear and a hand groping at his crotch. Oblivion spread from these two points of contact. He withdrew from ordinary consciousness like a snake dragging out of its skin.
"Reveal yourself," the woman said. They struggled in the dark.
But that was a dream too. He woke up alone except for a mosquito singing in his ear. The sheets were tangled around his legs, his pants were undone, and his testicles ached as if he had just spent himself in a wet dream. He rolled from the mattress and stumbled into the bathroom, running tepid water to splash in his face. He looked in the mirror for reassurance, but there was no mirror. Disoriented by fever and nightmares, he was remembering another bathroom in another country. He dried his face on a towel that reeked of mildew and developer, and went back to the bed.
His bag lay open on the floor.
The copies were gone. They had left him with nothing—nothing but the one sheet of tracing paper he'd copied by hand and folded into his notebook. He stared at the design. It was the same he had dreamed of seeing in the French boy's mirror. Not dreamed, no; they had been here.
He had been robbed. Drugged, then robbed.
If so, then why did he feel relieved? Fulfilled?
He went into the dark narrow hall. The corridor looked longer than he remembered, and seemed to curve slightly, tapering until it deposited him at the top of the stairs. The clerk watched him descend into the dim, low-ceilinged lobby, smiling unconvincingly.
"Were there two people here to see me?"
The boy nodded. "Yes ... your friends. They go up, come back just now. They say you sleeping."
"My friends?"
"Yes, who come two nights ago."
"What?"
"Same ones. I remember."
At that moment the boy's eyes fixed on the American's forehead. He squinted, then went pale. The American wiped his brow, expecting to find a squashed insect there, something repellent, but there was nothing. He turned away from the desk and went out into the night, as if they might be lingering just outside.
The street, like the corridor upstairs, seemed to arch away from him, as if he had grown preternaturally aware of the curvature of the globe, as if he were about to slide away over the edge of everything. He was convinced now that these were the early stages of some illness new to him: dizziness, vertigo, and the slow steady throbbing of everything, as if a generator were pumping somewhere deep within the earth. In the intervals between waves of fever, everything looked uncannily clear. The light spilling out of bars and shops turned the garbage in the street into diamond replicas of itself. The babble and broken sounds of traffic merged into one voice breathing a harsh litany. The erratic motion of cyclos and pedestrians seemed elaborately choreographed. He felt as if he alone were capable of transcending the role written for him; the dance revolved on every side, but he had no part in it.
He spun around to see exactly how free he was and saw the desk clerk staring at him. The American moved what felt like an inch toward the street, extracting himself from the complex machinery of events. The boy's eyes widened as if he had vanished completely, sidestepped the world. The rest of the scene darkened with a violet light that threatened to dissolve the edges of all objects. The buildings looked transparent but by no means unreal.
The American sensed something coming into the light of his piercing consciousness, an opacity swimming up beneath the insubstantial surfaces of everything he saw. For a moment he found himself hovering above the street, above the entire city. Phnom Penh rearranged itself into a wheel, the streets like spokes. He could see all the way to Tuol Sleng, could see two official cars p
ulling away from the entrance of the museum. They were practically the only two cars in the streets of Phnom Penh at that moment. One of the cars drove away; he could see the custodian's body jouncing inside. The other headed straight toward him.
A grate clanged down over a shopfront, and his illusion of transcendence broke into a million disappointing pieces. He felt the world settle into place around him, coming down like the iron bars. He sunk to his knees, unsure where his body had been all the time he was hovering above it. He was not sure if what he had seen was the real Phnom Penh or a version that lay disguised within it, like a low flame that had blazed up wildly and then subsided again. The street was as it always had been, every shop different, every random speck of garbage uniquely meaningless. If there were a pattern here, it lay buried so deeply that he would never find it. He felt the night turning like a wheel, accelerating. Whatever wasn't at the still center of that wheel would be flung violently away. He knew he was nowhere near the center. He must head inward, toward the source of all patterns. He must creep and cling to every surface, crawling like a millipede, or be cast off forever into the surrounding dark.
He threw himself to the ground, scuttling for shelter, oblivious to the Cambodian faces watching him in amazement, the mouths open in warning as he scurried into the street. That was how he came to be crushed beneath the tires of the only car on that long boulevard.
PART 1
We spawn in the sickness of your souls. We feed on and hasten your spirit's decay. No move is made without our knowledge, no thought of yours but has our seed-thought at its core, which only waits the proper time to germinate. It is right that you fear us, for fear is worship; fear is the one prayer we never fail to answer.
—from The Mandala Rites of Elias Mooney
We live in the quickness of your souls. We strengthen your spirit and guard you from decay. When you are in danger, we are there to watch your steps; when you think on evil, we come near to ward it off. You need fear nothing in the world when you accept us, for the world is love, and prayer is our language. Your love gives us the power to move in your lives. Love is the answer to all your prayers.
—from The Mandala Rites of Derek Crowe
1
Lilith Allure, true to form, was already an hour late.
She did this to Derek every week, so he kept working long past the point at which he would have switched off the computer in anticipation of any other guest. He had finished writing his lecture days ago, and polished it repeatedly. There was no point in memorizing the thing since he was going to read it verbatim from the page. On the other hand, he had nothing better to do than rehearse it one more time.
Many of you already know this story, but please allow me to recount it briefly for those in the audience who might have attended tonight's talk as a favor to others more familiar with my work ...
Derek imagined scattered laughter in the hall. Always start with a bit of humor.
In November of 199_, a young woman came to me for past-life counseling. This encounter in a professional context was to change not only my personal life but my very outlook on reality. I had recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, finding it more congenial to spiritual pursuits. The Bay Area is a remarkable focal point, where the potent ley-lines of Earth's magnetism converge among the unparalleled feng shui of surrounding water and rolling hills dominated by the majestic and magical Mount Tamalpais. It is in short an astral omphalos and spiritual retreat for pilgrims the world round. It felt only natural that I should arrive in such a place while writing Exploring Your Past Lives. I found I was able to make a modest living through psychic consultation and hypnotherapy.
My visitor, whom I shall call Ms. A, had also recently moved to the Bay Area from Southern California, and was quite active in the City's flourishing Neo-pagan community. She had formed alliances with the Temple of Set, the Latest Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., a coven of Gardnerian Witches, and several other more politically conscious Wiccan groups. Perhaps as a result of such an eclectic curriculum, she had begun to experience a series of overwhelming visions, powerful trances that came without warning, whose content did not correlate with the imagery of any known mythology. Several of her acquaintances sought an Atlantean explanation, speculating that perhaps she had been a high priestess in that doomed culture of unmatched magical attainment; they thought her recent spiritual explorations had reactivated psychic abilities left untouched for aeons. Ms. A was advised to find a reputable guide to put her in touch with her prior incarnations. My reputation being more than slightly known among such circles, it was by no means an improbable coincidence that brought her to my office and opened the most amazing chapter of my life.
At our first session, Ms. A stated that she chiefly saw bright whirling wheels of light during her visions, like the mandalas of Buddhist philosophy; but whereas the Buddhist mandalas are sacred diagrams constructed for meditative purposes, these mandalas were living organisms, swimmers in the astral sea, and seemingly intent on communication. She was sharp-witted, intelligent, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world's religious iconography, but these images baffled her, as they did me.
I suggested a light exploratory trance, to give her time to acclimate to the hypnotic state. I expected this to take several minutes to attain; but no sooner had I suggested that she might feel sleepy and relaxed than Ms. A began to twitch and murmur like a sleepwalker.
"Write," she said, in a voice strangely altered. "Write down what we say!"
Obediently, I put pen to paper and began to transcribe the words Ms. A channeled. Thus I received, over the course of several months and numerous hypnotic sessions, what I believe is one of the most remarkable documents in human history....
Yeah, right.
He was sick of looking at the screen. Sick of rereading his own words, but that was hardly new. He'd been sick of them since long before the book came out. Now it was publicity time, salt in the wound. He was supposed to muster some enthusiasm for tomorrow's flight to the sticks, push the deluxe edition, put on a show for the blue-haired occult groupies. All he really wanted was to lie in bed with Lilith, listen to the rain, and pretend there had never been a Derek Crowe.
He heard the rain splashing in the street as he walked around his desk to the window. The blinds slanted down, giving him a view of Larkin Street and the sidewalk gleaming below his building, streaky drops of water pulling from the wires. A cab was at the curb, its passenger just vanishing under the faded awning. That had to be Lilith. He went to turn off the computer but froze with his hand on the switch.
In the hall, the buzzer rang. Derek didn't move.
Something was happening on the screen, something he had never seen before. Ordinarily, when the machine sat idle, the screen-saver sent geometric forms tumbling across the screen—lines and pyramids and parallelograms.
Tonight the amber light seemed to strobe, making his vision flicker. The usual linear shapes chased themselves across the screen, twisting back and forth, folding in and out of each other like four-dimensional figures. The patterns were often hypnotic, but tonight the lines moved jerkily, slowing, as if the computer were about to die. Several twitched away from the rest, spasmed and flickered in isolation. The screen filled with wheels, circles, mandalas. One, another, and then still more—tumbling faster and faster, new mandalas appearing before the old ones faded, accreting in layers, an unholy residue clotting on the screen until it looked like a wall worked over by occult vandals.
He backed away from the desk. The buzzer sounded again. He was afraid to move.
Suddenly, with an audible pop, the screen went blank. For a moment he thought it had burned out. Then bright letters flared:
CLUB MANDALA
GRAND OPENING
PRINT THIS SCREEN AND COME AS OUR GUEST!
"You fuckers!" Crowe said. The buzzer was blaring. He stabbed at the switch and the screen went black again, this time for good reason. He stormed into the living room and down th
e short hall, slamming his hand on the speaker button. "I'll deal with you later," he muttered.
Lilith's voice came crackling. "It is later."
"Not you! Come on up!" He pressed the button to unlock the street door, threw the deadbolts, and paced back down the hall to glare at his blank screen. Those sorry thieves would regret they'd ever messed with him. Crowe's lawyer had a full view of San Francisco Bay, from forty floors up, where such pathetic trend-hopping ripoff artists could be viewed as the pitiful insects they were and squashed accordingly.
They must've come in through my modem, he thought. Fucking with me of the Internet. They figured out my codes or something. That's got to be illegal. More fuel for the lawsuit. I'll be lucky if they didn't plant some kind of goddamn mandala virus to eat my lecture before I print it out.
Just then he heard the door open.
For a moment the sight of Lilith erased his irritation. She was wrapped tight in black plastic, lightly beaded with rain. She hooked her umbrella on the doorknob and came toward him, carrying a bottle of wine in a paper sack. It was uncorked, and from the taste of her mouth, she had been drinking from it. And smoking as well.
He pulled away from her kiss. "Cigarettes."
"Well, Derek, you're the hypnotist. Break me of the filthy habit."
"I haven't hypnotized anyone ... in years."
"That's not what your book says."
The 37th mandala : a novel Page 2