So it was with great relief that after Ana's last class, when she was sitting at her desk doing paperwork and thinking that she ought to go by the kitchen and put in some time there chopping vegetables or at least setting out plates, she heard a light tapping noise at the door and looked up into Jason's face.
He looked as old as Glen, this kid of fourteen. "Jason, how are you?"
"Okay. How's the hand?"
In answer, she held it out and curled the fingers up until they touched the palm, then straightened them out again. The swelling was almost gone, the tenderness bearable unless she smacked it against something. She noticed that, half hidden by the doorjamb, his left arm cradled a basketball, and he was wearing sweats.
"Going to shoot a few baskets?"
"Yeah. It's warm enough now to use the outside court, so we don't have to quit every time people want to eat."
"Maybe I'll come down and watch for a while."
She wasn't sure, but she thought he looked pleased at the prospect. She doubted that was why he was there, but he seemed disinclined to say anything else, so she tried to bridge the gap by asking him, "How are you enjoying the mural? Has your teacher got you painting yet?"
She had thought it a harmless enough question, given the interest and talent that according to Carla he displayed, but she seemed to have hit it wrong again. She looked at his abruptly closed face, his eyes that had gone to study the corners of the room, and she sighed.
"I can't paint," he finally muttered.
"Maybe not, but that sketch of the quail on my coffee cup shows that you can certainly draw."
"I mean I can't. She won't let me."
"Your teacher? Why on earth not?"
"Steven thinks it's a good idea if I lay off drawing and stuff for a while. But it's okay, really. It's just a stupid mural, anyway."
"I beg your pardon," she retorted in mock resentment. Til have you know, the mural was my idea. Don't call it stupid." She laughed at his expression and waved away his embarrassed attempt at backtracking. "But look, Jason, let me get this straight: You like drawing?" He nodded. "You're good at it." A shrug, of course. "And you'd like to help on the mural but Steven said no." A convulsion of the shoulders and head that Ana took for a combined nod and shrug. "Did he tell you why?"
"Sacrifice." He looked at her and misread the expression on her face. "That's what he said."
"Not punishment?"
"He didn't say so."
Heat and pressure, and if a child with great potential and few outlets likes to draw, you take that away from him to increase the pressure. What was next: no basketball and a cancellation of all morning runs? And his only advocate another newcomer who was in no position to raise a stink. Dear God, what an impossible situation.
"Well," she said, "it seems like a massive waste to me. I know my classes could sure use some help in sketching things out—I'm actually the best artist in the bunch, heaven help us." Jason seemed relieved by her willingness to let the subject slide. "You going down to the courts now?" she asked. "I'll probably see you there."
"Okay. Look, I just wanted to say," he began abruptly, then stopped. "Um, I mean, the other day, I don't know why I told Dulcie to come to you. It wasn't your responsibility. It's just that, well, she likes you, and I couldn't think of anyone else in a hurry. So, thanks for taking care of her. I hope she wasn't too much of a pain."
"I was happy to help, Jason. Dulcie's good people. But I hope," she added deliberately,"that it doesn't happen again for a while. She was very upset."
"I know," he said with a grimace. "She's having nightmares again. Look, I've got to go. They're waiting for me."
Nightmares, again? "Right. I'll come down in a bit."
She did not manage to make it to the kitchen to help prepare for dinner that afternoon.
Marc Bennett was gone by dinnertime, and that evening Steven returned to his central position in the meditation hall. Ana could feel the relief washing around her when he rose from his second-highest platform and started confidently across the walkway to the leader's perch. He seemed restored—a degree more intense, perhaps, but back in control of himself and his community. Change breathed a sigh of satisfaction and stepped back into its former path.
Ana did not. Perhaps her equilibrium had been too disturbed, reminding her what she was actually doing there; perhaps it was just the residue of her own inner tension, but she could still sense the storm in the distance.
It came, sooner than she had expected, and in a form she could not have anticipated.
The next morning when she took her walk, Steven was there. She had gone west this time, up to the hills on which the high wind-run generator stood, on the opposite side of the compound from the red rock platform where she had met him before. He was seated to one side of the path, his face raised to the growing sun. Mallory was nowhere in sight.
She hesitated. When he gave no sign that he had noticed her, she decided to continue on her path. She drew even with him and was starting to pass him by, when he spoke.
"Good morning, Ana of the Sunrise. Strange, to be a child of the West, where the sun sets, and yet be so drawn to the early manifestations of light."
"Well," she said, not quite sure how she wanted to respond. He went on regardless.
"What do you make of your reading on the philosophy of chemistry?"
"The philosophy—? Oh, alchemy." She raised her eyes to the distant hills, and thought briefly how fortunate it was that people saw only what they expected to see. Steven had no idea. She looked down at him again and smiled, then sat down on a relatively flat place a few feet away from him, her legs out straight, leaning back on her hands.
"Most of the things I've been reading raise more questions than they answer. If, as you say, it is possible actually to make gold, then why did the science fade into a mere quest for spiritual growth, and then die out entirely?"
"Disbelief breeds failure," Steven said promptly. " 'Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle, yet his folly will not depart from him.' Everyone knows that men can't possibly walk on red-hot coals without burning their feet to the bones, but people do. I did. And men can't transform one substance into another, but they do. If, however, the person trying to firewalk is afraid, if he does not believe he can do it, he will indeed lose his feet.
"Alchemy was the beginning of scientific method, and the great irony is that the more the alchemists discovered about the nature of matter, the more improbable the whole thing seemed. Belief became divorced from intellect, and they have continued to move further apart. Until the two are rejoined, the Philosopher's Stone remains an impossibility."
"You seriously think that the scientist's state of mind affects the result of an experiment?"
"It is not an experiment," he said sharply. "It is a process. A Work. Ana, all matter is related. This is a thing the ancients knew and we Westerners rejected in our single-minded quest to take things apart. We are reaping the results now, in a world poisoned by our convenience products, in children distorted by our providing them food and no wisdom. The only hopeful trend of the last thirty years is the faint stirring of realization that everything is interconnected, that the ozone layer over Australia is depleted by air conditioners used on the other side of the world; that the prisons are full because kids in the ghettos don't have basketball courts and trips to the beach; that women die of cancer because their mothers took the wrong kind of drug when they were pregnant.
"Ana, look: The medical world has admitted that a person's attitude has a strong bearing on how he or she fights off a disease. Alchemy says precisely the same thing: that the material in the vessel needs to be healed of impurity by a person whose mind and heart are both turned in the same direction."
Ana had been caught up in far too many sophomoric arguments on religion to fall into the temptation of pointing out his glaring flaw in logic, but it was not necessary, because Steven was off and running, and she had only to sit and feel the warmth of the sun on her face and chest.
>
"The alchemist was regarded as mad precisely because of this singleness of intent. His family went hungry, his clothes turned to rags, while he stared into the glass alembic and waited for the nigredo to give way to the peacock colors of transformation, through the white albedo to the glorious red of the final stage. 'I blew my thrift at the coal,' George Ripley wrote, 'my clothes were bawdy, my stomach never whole.' It would all be worth it if he could only reduce the universe, all the millennia of creation, into this alembic in front of him. It is a feeling like no other. It is like being God."
This was the first glimpse of the fanatic she had seen in Steven Change: it brought a sudden chill to the morning. Her words were impulsive and her voice harsher than she intended.
" 'Behold,' " she quoted at him, " 'I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem as men gather silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into a furnace, to blow the fire upon it in order to melt it.' "
"Ezekiel's God is an angry God. Remember, also, that 'the city was pure gold, clear as glass'."
"The God of Revelations can be angry, too. 'I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire.' "
To Ana's surprise, Steven threw back his head and laughed. "I know. I would make a lousy messiah. I'm far too softhearted. "Which is why," he said before she could react, "my dear Seeker Ana, I am sending you on a journey.
"In the very first conversation we had, you and I, I wondered aloud whether or not you had the commitment you needed to transform yourself. It was a natural enough question—most of the people who come here are so taken up with the pursuit of comfort and instant gratification that they will never go beyond what they are, will never learn that 'No birth without labor' and 'Great heat, great gain' are more than slogans. Most of the people who come here are content to warm their toes at the fire. They will never tear off their shoes and walk on the coals, because they are unwilling to submit themselves to the hotter, harder disciplines that Change requires.
"You are surprised that I am so blunt," he said, as indeed she was. "It is my job here to help people along the path to Change, yes, but it is also my responsibility as an adept to seek out those with greater possibilities than the masses, those with iron already in their spines. Teresa was one of those. The boy Jason Delgado is another, a young man with enormous potential. And you, Ana Wakefield. It is not my habit to speak like this to a person who has not been through the Work, but you have a natural affinity even without the experience. And not just intellectually—I feel in you a person who has been through the fire more than once, and has been strengthened by it. I feel in you the willingness to be worked and tried, to submit to the refining fires and be pounded into shape. To be transformed.
"I hesitated because I thought you were too frivolous for The Process. It is a long, hard journey. It has broken men and women before this." (Was it just her imagination, Ana wondered, or did she hear sorrow in his voice? At the nameless Japanese boy's death, perhaps? Or a different loss?) "I want you to begin your Change. I want you to set off on your journey, and to do so, I will send you on an actual journey, not one that is 'simply allegorical'. I am sending some of our children to our sister community in England. You will go with them, as a teacher, and as a student."
"What?" Oh shit, she cried to herself. Oh shit. I'm nowhere near ready to pull out of here, I can't give Glen what he needs yet, and Jason—and Dulcie, what the hell am I going to do, oh shit—
"To England. I like you, Ana. I can't teach someone I like. I may be further along in my journey than you, but I am not yet purified enough to overlook my own affections. It is one of the reasons we have more than one community, in recognition that none of us has attained our pure state. I want to send you to my own teacher. You will find Jonas, our Change leader in England, considerably higher on the Path than I am. I want to send him you and Jason and one or two others whom I cannot teach properly. He will help you."
"Jason," she repeated, grasping the name like a straw. "What about Dulcie?"
Steven sighed. "Jason is not ready to move away from her. His sense of responsibility is admirable, but it distracts him. He must concentrate on his own transformation."
"He's only fourteen."
"There is never time to waste."
"Is that why you've taken his art away from him? His 'sacrifice'?"
Steven's face darkened. "He should not have spoken to you about his Work. It is his alone."
"I wanted to draft him to help with the school mural; he had to tell me why he couldn't. Why take that from him?"
"I think you know, Ana."
"Heat and pressure, right? And the last time you put pressure on him, look what happened. My hand is still sore."
"He has to learn to direct his energies."
"Steven, how many alchemists were killed by explosions when they misjudged the pressures inside their vessels? More to the point, how many of their students did they take with them?"
So there was a degree of uncertainty in him, she thought, seeing his face. However, he said merely, "He will learn. Jonas will direct him."
Ana did not much like the sound of that, but Steven had at least opened a door. She could stay with the community as a whole and with her job. And with Dulcie and her brother. Glen would have a stroke, but if she chose, she might just stay long enough to give him a complete picture of Change. Going by what Steven just said, the center was in England, anyway.
(But—in England, where she had no authority, no Glen, no alarm bell or automatic pistol hidden inside Rocinante? No backup at all, in fact. She would be alone, and with two children on her hands. God, Glen wouldn't bother with handcuffs—he would just straight out murder her for even considering it.)
"When do I need to decide?"
"The tickets will be purchased tomorrow morning. The name of the passenger needs to be on them."
"And when would we actually go?" she asked, reassuring herself that the end of the school year was still a long way off.
"In three days," he said. "You do have a passport?"
Two days later, she drained Rocinante's refrigerator, disconnected the propane tank, gave her knee enough cortisone to keep it numb for weeks, and spirited away the gun and cortisone needles from the hidden compartment to bury them in the desert. Before she pulled the tarpaulin over the bus, she stood looking at the "medicine pouch" that she had made from the objects in her past that meant something to her: the hairs from two dogs, the stone from her creek, and Abby's red bead. She reached in to remove it from the rearview mirror, and slipped the smooth leather cord over her head and around her neck, where it lay beneath her shirt like a talisman.
She did not manage to speak to Glen before the plane left, although she did rip out the most recent pages of her diary and put them into an envelope addressed to "Uncle Abner", dropping it surreptitiously into a mail slot at the airport. On the last page she scribbled a note:
No time to contact you, surprise trip to England with some kids being transferred there. I'll write you from the UK when I can. Do we have any family members in the area I can look up while I'm there?
--A
V
Separatio
separate (vb) To set or keep apart; to make
a distinction between; to sever conjugal ties or
contractual relations with; to isolate from a mixture
Separation doth each part from the other devide,
The subtill fro the gross, fro the thick the thin.
Chapter Twenty-three
From the journal of Jason Delgado
The seats had been booked too late to enable them all to sit together, so Ana, in charge of Dulcie, Jason, and a boy not much older than Dulcie who was going to join his mother in England, sat apart from Dov Levinski, a kindergarten teacher named Margit, and their group of three children, two of whom were Margit's. It suited Ana quite well, particularly as the little boy Benjamin was sweet-tempered, sleepy, and no trouble whatsoever.
The plane was scheduled for a three-forty-fiv
e takeoff. At four Ana took out the hardback illustrated Hunting of the Snark she had bought in Sedona and presented it to Dulcie. At four-ten the copilot came on the intercom and admitted that they were still on the ground, although the moment the deicer had been unclogged they would be away. By five-fifteen Ana had read Dulcie and Benjamin the Snark four times and most of the other books twice. At five-thirty the passengers heard a series of bangs and thuds from below, and those on the starboard windows were gratified to see the repair truck fill with men and drive away. In another three minutes the big jet lurched and began to creep backward, and Dulcie said she really, really had to use the toilet.
Ana had the child back in her seat and buckled in with twenty seconds to spare. They taxied and accelerated, rattling and roaring until the tons of metal and flesh gave its little hop and they were airborne. Dulcie did not notice, she and Benjamin being busy loudly discussing life in England across Ana's lap, but Jason's eyes shifted constantly, particularly upward to where the overhead baggage compartments were vibrating madly. If one of them drops open, Ana thought, he's going to land five rows back, taking his seat with him.
"Have you flown much, Jason?" she asked to distract him.
"Uh, no."
"Planes always look like they're about to shake themselves to pieces, but as I understand it, they build the flexibility and movement in. If everything was completely rigid and nailed down, it would be too brittle. Even the wings bend a surprising amount. Much safer that way."
"Oh yeah?" he said, looking dubiously up at the rattling bins.
"Actually, I don't have the faintest idea if that's true or not. It's just what I tell myself when I fly because it's better than believing the plane is about to fall apart."
That did distract him, to the point of making him meet her eyes and smile. He leaned back, looking less nervous.
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