The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  He eyed me suspiciously, as if sensing I’d held something back. “Because Nadia’s been changing since she went on this six-month chastity kick, and she went through the biggest changes of all last Wednesday night. She knew you were there at Ryzhkov’s, and she thinks that there’s a connection.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “What’s going on. What kind of changes? Is she sick? Does she have stigmata?”

  “You figure it out,” he said coolly. “Different people see different things. Tell me when she gets here.”

  “And when will that be?”

  He glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes. Do ye want a cup of coffee?”

  Suddenly I felt a sharp anxiety. What had happened to her? Would I be shocked by her appearance? We drank our coffee in silence. Crail’s book lay open in front of me, and this passage was underlined:

  “Surface” as a quality of spirit-bodies is infrequently noted by religious authorities and would not occur to most of us as a descriptive term for our various supraphysical forms. But it seems important to the Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i and to Swedenborg, both of whom refer to the garments, skin, and other coverings of spiritual entities, which depend upon their metaetherial location and level of development.

  “She’s here.” Hannigan stood. “I hear her car.”

  He left the studio and opened the apartment’s squeaky front door. There was a muffled exchange punctuated by brief silences, then he ushered her into the room.

  Her skin was paler than before, and was made even paler by the grey sweater and slacks she wore, but her almond-shaped blue eyes had an extraordinary light. “Hello, Mackel,” she said, almost shyly, reaching to take my hand. “I want to hear about Boris and Peredelkino.”

  As Hannigan got her tea, she sat erect at one end of the couch, hands clasped around her knees. She’d lost ten or fifteen pounds, and was more subdued than I’d ever seen her. “Sit down.” She nodded to a chair. “Don’t stand in the dark like that.”

  I sat on the chair a few feet from her. Her quiet manner had begun to dispel my discomfort. “You look wonderful, Mackel,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about. But first! I must hear about Boris. Did you have a good visit with him?”

  “Yes, but not for long. We talked for half an hour, maybe, then spent a few minutes in his tower.”

  Hannigan brought her a mug of tea, and sat as I did on a chair some five or six feet from her. As she thanked him, I was struck by the look of her skin, which seemed to shift in texture and density each time her expression changed. Was this the feature that Hannigan had warned me about? “So, Mackel,” she said. “What happened in Boris’s necromanteion?”

  Vaguely unsettled, I briefly described the voice of Shivas Irons. When I was finished, she held her mug to her heart, both hands cupped around it, and studied my face with serene curiosity. The only sounds came from a passing car and the radiator’s gentle hissing. Hannigan stood, and carried his mug of tea to the sink.

  For a minute, or longer perhaps—it was hard to tell afterward—she gazed into my eyes. “Mackel,” she said at last, “I thought I was with you in Peredelkino. Being with you now, I am sure of it. But last Wednesday night I experienced more than that.” She gave me an affectionate smile. “For seven years, you and Bach and I have been a little circle. I have to tell you what has happened.”

  She paused. “Mackel, we die again and again. How did Rumi say it? ‘After each death, there is another, and we knock again at the old scarred door.’ Six months ago, a big shadow came and covered the sun. There was no light for me. You know something about this, how I quit my job and was a nun.” Bowing her head, she gave Hannigan a searching affectionate look. “So you know I lived like that since April. Is it too strange? Was it selfish? But Mackel, little by little, the shadow has moved away from the sun, and a new light came, and the old scarred door has opened—into a world.…” She paused again. “Ah, Mackel, how to tell you. Into a world so beautiful. So great. So near us. It is impossible to say it, but I must tell you some of its signs.”

  She put down her mug and took both of my hands into hers. “There are some things I cannot tell, Mackel. I tried with Bach, but a big hand came to my throat and almost killed me. Maybe I am superstitious, but there seem to be taboos about describing the life to come, things we cannot tell even our best friends and lovers. But there are also things we can tell, and things we must.”

  She let go of my hands, but still leaned close. “Last Wednesday in the necromanteion, I went into a place—or, better to say, a place came into me, where there is joy in every atom, and love in every touch, and forgiveness, Mackel, forgiveness in everything we do. That place opens—how to say it?—with each glance, each touch, each meeting of souls.” She stopped to gather herself. “Now, this is hard to say, and maybe you will not believe it. On Wednesday, that place and this place joined.” She pointed to her heart, then gestured to indicate her entire body. “It can join for everyone. It can happen on Earth. That is what I have to tell you.”

  She joined her hands as if in prayer. “And then in the mirror I saw it. More clearly than I see you now. Not an apparition, not a ghost. It was more beautiful and terrible than that. More alive. More present than anything in Boris’s tower or the Well of Light. It could destroy me. It could save my life. But Mackel, it was strangely familiar! It was showing what we can be, but also that it has been waiting a long, long time.” She leaned toward me. “It has been waiting a very long time, though it is reborn every instant. This is a paradox. It is also a fact.”

  She took my hands again. “Now Mackel, you can believe this or not. After I looked into the glass and saw the thing I just described, there was another shock. My body—the one you see—was different. Bach can tell you.”

  Hannigan stood at the end of the couch, watching us both intently. “Murphy,” he said. “There’s no denyin’ it. Something happened to her.”

  “But Bach and I saw different things,” she whispered. “When I looked at myself in the mirror, and then moved a hand or changed my position or had a new expression, my skin changed.”

  “I saw it,” said Hannigan.

  “Like I’d eaten some mushrooms!” She smiled with a kind of innocent wickedness. “And everything I touched sent thrills everywhere. Everywhere! All through my body, down to my toes! Everything was alive. This, and that, and that, and that.” She pointed to objects in the room. “They are alive for me now. This world, Mackel, is not very far from the place I lived on Wednesday night. This couch, it touches me back. Bach’s voice, your eyes …” She sighed. “But it couldn’t last. I would’ve died. On Thursday morning, when Bach saw me, I was changing back to normal.”

  “But not all the way back,” said Hannigan. “I can still see a part of it now.” He looked at her with an expression of wonder I’d never seen in his face before. There was no trace of his practiced dismissiveness, no hint of that little sneer. “Murphy, on Thursday I didn’t know who she was. Nadia, or not Nadia …” The telephone rang, but he didn’t move. After five or six rings, he answered it reluctantly, and Nadia turned to face me.

  In part perhaps because her revelations had been disorienting, but also because this intimacy was so charged, I have trouble remembering what happened next. She was stationed below me on the couch, bending forward with a graceful deference characteristic of many Russian women as they facilitate difficult exchanges. But her attitude arose from more than cultural conditioning. It came as well from the essential nature of her experience. The beauty and power and joy she’d known, her posture was telling me, is for all of us. No matter how threatening it seems to our fearful perception, it is gentle and gracious and ever-present.

  She took my hands. “So cold!” she whispered, rubbing them gently for warmth. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

  Uncertain what had happened, I looked around the studio. Nadia had gone to the stove. Hannigan continued to talk on the phone. But everything had shifted. A moment before, his sweater’s checkerboard pattern had been dom
inated by reds and browns, but now its golden squares stood out, and on the wall beyond him, the indigos and greens of an abstract painting had receded into a maze of vermilions I’d never noticed. Nadia brought me a cup of coffee, and sat again on the couch. Her eyes appeared to have turned to deeper shades of blue, and her skin seemed darker. Had our silent exchange altered my figure-ground perception? Or had she experienced another subtle transformation?

  Hannigan left the room, and I tried to compose myself. Nadia drank tea from a mug. I sipped a cup of coffee. But I found myself attempting in various ways to normalize what was happening. The lambent light of her skin, for example, reminded me of Ben Jipcho, the Kenyan middle-distance runner. I remembered him vividly now, two nights before a meet, downing two double gin and tonics. There was a quiet but wild light in his eyes, and blue in the ebony of his skin that constantly shifted in hue and intensity. Mike Spino, the pioneering track coach, had talked about him later that night. Jipcho’s skin, he’d said, and smell, were signs of world-class physical conditioning. But they showed more than that. There was something unfamiliar, something supernormal about them. Jipcho was in better shape than anyone else on the planet! Two days later, some of us declared Spino a prophet when Jipcho posted world-class times in three events, at 880 yards, a mile, and two miles, during a one and a half hour span of the meet.* No one had done such a thing before. Jipcho was in supernormal territory, and Spino had sensed it in his eyes and skin.

  Sensing my need to integrate the intensity I felt with familiar things, Nadia recalled the wonders of her own athletic conditioning. How could she forget the power and beauty and lift, or the fire she’d felt on the winter ice? Her training was cruel, but filled with graces. It was the cost, after all—and the gift!—of trying to make the Soviet team. But last Wednesday night, she had gone beyond the rewards of Olympic training. The grace-ladened capacities that world-class athletes realize at the peak of their physical conditioning are merely transitional to what she had experienced.

  But the integration of unfamiliar experience can trigger the questioning mind. Coming back from the phone, Hannigan was quick to see this. “Ye’re not buying it all,” he said over my protestations. “But ye weren’t with her last week. And ye haven’t seen this!” From his desk he took a black-and-white photograph. “Take a good look,” he said. “Then tell me what ye see.”

  Startled, I took the picture. “She’s striking,” I said. “Maybe African … maybe Fulani. Good God! Is it the mother of Seamus MacDuff?”

  “The mother of Seamus MacDuff!” He laughed. “Murphy, ye should be a writer. What an imagination! Now tell me why ye think she’s African.”

  The picture showed just the woman’s face, looking straight into the camera. Her high cheekbones, slightly upturned eyes, and generous curving lips hinted of aristocratic breeding. “She looks Fulani to me,” I said with a shrug, “with maybe a little Tuareg and Arab blood.”

  “No,” said Hannigan. “It’s Nadia last Thursday morning.”

  Shocked, I compared the photograph with the Nadia in front of me. “There is a resemblance. But … Nadia, is this really you?”

  “Bach says so,” she said with a little shrug. “He took the picture.”

  “Did you look like this in the mirror?”

  “No. I didn’t look like that. But everything was so, how to say it? So changing. So unstable. So different every minute.”

  “Buck,” I said. “Could you have gotten your film mixed up?”

  “Oh, God!” he groaned. “It’s not a mistake. And there’s more.” He held up another photograph. “Will ye tell me what ye see in this one.”

  It showed her necromanteion—there could be no doubt about that—in the middle of which a luminous oval stretched from floor to ceiling. “Shit!” I exclaimed, fighting the recognition. “It’s like the picture of MacDuff’s first fairway, and the thing I saw near Irons on the eighteenth green. When did you take it?”

  “Maybe a minute, maybe two, after the other one. Call it thoughtography, spirit photography, or whatever you want, but there it is.” No one spoke. Hannigan and I had often talked about the long history of photographic anomalies,* and here were two highly disturbing examples.

  I handed him the photographs. “Nadia,” he said with hesitation, “you should finish telling him why you thought what happened last Wednesday night had something to do with his being at Ryzhkov’s.”

  Clasping her hands on her lap, she closed her eyes to gather herself, then looked at me with a trace of the wickedness she’d exhibited so many times before. “Mackel, come here,” she said. “I need to see you when I talk.”

  I sat on the chair by the couch. “There was a moment,” she said, “after my vision in the necromanteion. For a few seconds, or a minute, or maybe ten minutes—it is hard to tell because everything was happening in another way—I saw a tall red-haired man with complicated blue eyes and a face that has enjoyed and suffered very much, sitting on the step of a little cottage looking down a slope to the sea. It was in the west of Ireland, I think, or maybe one of Scotland’s Western Isles.” Her voice softened almost to a whisper. “He didn’t see me, but said my name out loud! Then sang me a song, a wild, mystical Irish ballad, as he watched the sun go down into the rolling grey sea. Oh, Mackel!” She lifted both hands to her mouth as if the thing she’d seen was suddenly present. “It was so beautiful! He wasn’t made of flesh like this.” She pointed to her cheek. “He was like the thing I’d seen just a moment before, made of spirit-fire, but human like the rest of us, sitting there on his little step watching the sun go down.”

  She looked at Hannigan, who stood by the couch like a sentinel. “When did I tell you about it?” she asked. “Was it on Thursday morning or afternoon?”

  “Thursday morning. That’s when you said it had something to do with Ryzhkov’s tower.”

  “Mackel, what I just told you happened on Wednesday night, but I didn’t remember until Thursday that in the little time I saw him, more happened than what I just told you. As the sun set, he went for a swim in the sea—in waves that were huge, tremendous, like giants! He swam with them and through them and under them, and came up laughing again and again, and dove from a big black rock. Then stood in seawater near the beach to watch the sunset. Mackel! It was like a different planet, with golds and pinks and violets, and colors I’d never seen. He stood there naked, and so beautiful!—enjoying it all with those unforgettable blue eyes, and then …” She snapped her fingers. “Then just like that, he sat in a pub with three or four friends, reciting a poem by Robert Burns—yes, Robert Burns! I could hear it, about every one of them getting away from the Devil! He said it with such a smile that two of them started to dance. There was a band. It was Irish, I think. And that was when I thought of you. He called my name again and told the others I would join them. And when he did it, he smiled. An unforgettable smile! I was certain you would be there too.”

  “At that very moment?”

  “Right then. When he smiled and called my name.”

  “That was Wednesday night.” I looked at Hannigan. “About the time I was hearing the voice and seeing the face of Shivas Irons. But God! Wait! For an instant—just a split second—I thought he wanted me to go for a swim!”

  “Did you dream?” Hannigan asked. “Or did you and Nadia see him clairvoyantly, in Ireland or the Western Isles? Or did you both glimpse another world?” He went to his desk and held up Crail’s book. “In this passage, Crail quotes an obscure Iranian Shaikh, this Ahmad Ahsa’i, and his ‘physiology of the Resurrection Body,’ which has to do with life in the ‘Earth of Hurqalya.’ Isn’t it curious that on Wednesday night Ryzhkov gave you a book with references to this? Just before you heard that voice. Just as Nadia was having that experience. How many people know about Ahmad Ahsa’i or the Earth of Hurqalya? Is that where Irons is living?”

  Nadia sat on the edge of the couch, looking to shadows near the ceiling. In a voice so low I could barely hear it, she said, “In the mosque ne
ar Samarkand, it is thought that the Well of Light is a door to Hurqalya. When you go through it once, you can again, and again until you live there. That teaching led me to Wednesday night. They say that Hurqalya is coming. It is the future of our Earth. Mackel, your voice said, ‘The Kingdom is coming.’ ”

  The studio was dimly lit on this overcast day in October, and in its growing shadows her face gave the impression it might dissolve. “Mackel,” she said, “you went to the mosque. You sat in the Well of Light. Did you know that its lineage goes back through Ali Shirazi to Ahmad Ahsa’i? By giving you that book, Boris was showing you a way to his teaching.”

  “And maybe to Shivas Irons,” Hannigan said with a weariness that surprised me. “Ryzhkov said that to find Shivas Irons, you might need more than detective work. But it’s not an easy path he proposed. Murphy, the question for you and me is, ‘Will we take it?’ ”

  More than two years have passed, but I can still feel the silence that followed his remark, and the pain of my recognition. Ryzhkov had given voice to what I had suspected. To find Shivas Irons, I might have to do more than collect evidence of his activities. I would have to live like him, with a practice as wholehearted and all-embracing as his and Nadia’s. Otherwise I might circle indefinitely around the evanescent clues he was leaving.

  Observing Nadia as the day unfolded, I felt this recognition grow. My attraction to her aliveness and joy, and my envy for her discipline, were signs of its validity.

  For an outing that afternoon, we drove to Gullane, which is located on the Firth of Forth about an hour’s drive east of Edinburgh. But we didn’t have an easy walk after Hannigan decided we should climb to the summit of Gullane Hill by way of the second hole on the Number One Golf Course. If you’ve been there, you know what we faced. The fairway slants steeply upward through a saddle of the hill into which the prevailing wind is funneled at you. When we started the climb around two o’clock, the gale that was clearing the sky above us threatened to blow us all the way back to the parking lot.