by Brian Hodge
She put on a kettle for tea, a skillet…for eggs, he guessed. Then she turned to lean against the counter, facing him and wearing a long robe, cinched around the waist, that looked old, but extraordinarily well stitched. Wasn’t sure when he’d developed an eye for that kind of quality, but here it was.
“So are you just slumming at the shop, is that it?” he said. “Because I wasn’t…wasn’t expecting…”
“Let’s not,” she said. “Aren’t there more important things right now?”
And this wasn’t important? He didn’t say it, didn’t have to. She could read him as well as ever.
“That was him last night, wasn’t it?” he asked instead. “I’ve just been taking it for granted, but it’s not like he signed his name to it, is it?”
“I think we have to assume it was, yes.”
“Okay. Okay.” Andrei felt his chest tighten, his breath thin. “But why? Why them? Why that?”
“It’s what he does. It’s what he is.”
Down in Mt. Lebanon last night, picket fence territory, Bruce had taken heads, seven in all. An entire suburban family had been wiped out in an evening, father and mother and four children, none of them older than thirteen, and the mom’s visiting sister. Their bodies lay throughout the house where they’d fallen, apparently, and the heads had been arranged in a row across the driveway. He had ensured that they’d been found just minutes later, calling a taxi to the house and requesting that the driver pull in toward the garage.
“The rest is between the two of you,” Manon said. “He made that clear enough the other night. He seems to expect you to know why.”
I did promise your sister something earlier: that I wouldn’t hurt you unless you asked me to, Bruce had told him. You’re the one who laid down the terms of this challenge. Not me, you. The exact terms.
He still hadn’t figured it out.
“But I didn’t know those people,” Andrei said. “I’d never seen them, never even heard of them.”
“In his mind that’s probably the last thing that matters.”
The kettle began to whistle and she turned to tend to it, pouring boiling water into a ceramic pot and plopping in a stainless steel tea ball, packed with loose leaves, to steep. Eggs and ham next, sizzling on black cast iron.
It’s what he does. It’s what he is…
She’d said that with such knowledge, such authority.
“You’re not here by accident, are you? In Pittsburgh. At the shop,” he said. “I mean, you didn’t just walk past Globville one day and say, ‘Hey, this looks like a nice place, I think I’ll apply here.’ You had another reason for being there. And the way you’ve always looked…I bet you started by making yourself into something Janika couldn’t resist hiring. Because you’d look so right there. Am I getting warm?”
“Be careful, Andrei. Don’t you know it’s not a good idea to accuse a woman of duplicity when she’s cooking for you?” Manon said, lightly, but with a honed edge in her voice. “She might spit in your food.”
“Worse things on the way, I think.” He heard the words leave his mouth and couldn’t believe how calm they sounded. “Why are you here? Because of me? Or because you knew you could get to him through me? I mean…maybe not this Bruce guy specifically, but you figured somebody like him was going to show up in my life eventually, or…” He stopped, had run out of ideas.
“Something like that last part, yes. He’s an enemy, make no mistake about that.”
“So how did you find me?” Mind-boggling—all these bizarre people interested in him and he’d never had a clue. “How did you know?”
“The therapist you saw years ago, while you were living in Phoenix with your parents…he published a paper that focused a lot on you.” She flipped the ham. “I forget the title exactly, something about apocalyptic delusions brought on by post-traumatic stress.” Flipped the eggs, over easy. “I read it. I watch for things like that.”
“By name?” Dr. Heinrich, that was the guy. Backstabber, in so many ways. “He identified me by name?”
She shook her head no. “I went to Phoenix and broke into his office one night. His file cabinets weren’t any harder to get into than his front door. I’m very good with locks.”
He tried to process this but it only felt as though he were swirling around, around. She’d known everything about him all along, and about her he’d known only…what? Lies? Small, selectively filtered truths? There was no such thing as solid ground anymore. It could open wide and swallow him anywhere, anytime.
She must have seen it all over his face, and left the stove. Stood on tiptoes to hug him briefly and plant a soft, lingering kiss on the corner of his mouth—not quite his cheek, not quite his lips, a kiss that felt as indeterminate as the rest of her. Although if that wasn’t pain he saw in her eyes, she was doing an exquisite job of fakery.
Let it be real, he hoped. Whatever else isn’t, let that much be real…
“Tell me who you are,” he said.
She poured the tea, dished up the ham and eggs, and he may not have been hungry before, but he was starting to feel ravenous now, for anything and everything that might sustain him just a little longer. She joined him at her table and sat across from him.
“The answer to that has its roots in things that went on a long, long time ago.”
* * *
Close to 2,000 years ago, there lived groups of people known as the Gnostics—had he ever heard of them? Manon asked. He told her that he had, remembering some old family lecture when he was a boy, its origins unknown. His parents had gotten it wrong, anyway, come to find out, thinking that Gnostics and agnostics were the same thing. He’d labored under the misperception for years, but even after he finally learned otherwise, the distinction didn’t seem to have anything at all to do with his life.
Because he believed in God, of course he was no agnostic. As for the other, well, they were ancient history, right, and nothing about them could possibly matter now.
Wrong. As with so many things pertaining to his life and deaths, he’d been wrong.
Some claimed that the Gnostics—whose name was derived from the Greek word for knowledge—were the earliest form of the Church, while others insisted they were its most abominable heresy. Who was right and who was wrong, Manon said, depended not so much on fact as perspective.
They had some peculiar ideas and inclinations, though, that much was certain, not the least of which was a bitter hatred of their own bodies, because they believed that the flesh was so much lesser a substance than the spirit. And perhaps, for them, it was, for their belief had made it so.
In their eyes, that their spirits were tied to their bodies at all was a travesty of the worst order, not a part of any divine plan, because surely no ultimate source of something as pure as a soul would stoop to creating something so lowly as a body of flesh and bone, enslaved to earthly hungers and destined to feed beetles and worms.
And so to reconcile their disgust with themselves, they plumbed the mysteries of existence and divined a secret for which many of them were killed en masse…although the secret survived, as secrets often will, carried throughout the centuries by such groups as the Manichaeans and Cathars, the Bogomils and others, and they too were often slaughtered for the truth as they saw it:
That the earth and everything in it was not the creation of a benevolent deity, but a malevolent entity known as Ialdabaoth, who was neither god nor devil, but a schizophrenic combination of both: Demon est Deus inversus.
Eventually, though, like grain under a millstone, their secret was ground away, known to scholars and historians but, as a fervent belief, lost to all but a straggling few, and perhaps the greatest tragedy was that Gnostic and Cathar and Bogomil alike had all died for just another lie. Yet they were at least closer to the truth than those who hunted them down and butchered them in the deserts of ancient Palestine and the mountains of medieval France.
Their error: Ialdabaoth created nothing. Ialdabaoth only took.
&n
bsp; Imagine you work in a factory, was the way Manon explained it, and it really is your boss’s factory, because he built it with his own two hands. He mortared the bricks together one by one, and built the machines that fill it, and brought you and everyone else inside to run the place, and he’s always kept watch from a window in a high, remote office, although he doesn’t feel any great need to head down to the factory floor and get mixed up in the day-to-day business, because all the rest of you are proceeding well enough on your own.
Then imagine one day he leaves. He’s just gone—no one can say where—leaving behind a void that isn’t apparent at first, but seems to grow worse with time.
So imagine that eventually one of the factory’s more powerful managers climbs up to the office, because it’s empty, after all, and there might as well be someone there. Except he’s worse, much worse than anything that came before, and gets rid of anyone who says he doesn’t belong there, and most of the others are relieved to have something in charge again, because to them, even a tyrant is preferable to empty uncertainty, and before long everyone on the factory floor forgets how he got there, and for all they remember, this was the way it had always been, always and forever.
As goes the factory, so go the heavens.
Ialdabaoth—Manon used the name, she said, not because she believed that was what It called Itself, or that It even had a name at all, but only because she had to call It something—was powerful, to be sure, but hardly omnipotent. In ways both dramatic and subtle, It answered to the name Yahweh, and later to the name God, and all manner of other names, and through sacrifice and devotion Its power grew, and Its ego, and It found it easy to inspire the consolidation of Its reign with dungeon, fire, and sword…and yet, in spite of all that, It remained such a petty creature, oblivious to the wonders of everything It had taken credit for, and caring only for Its bottomless need.
Maybe It had come to believe Its own myths, she said.
Or maybe It had come to hate them.
* * *
Did he believe this? Just one person’s theory, after all, or worse, her delusion, or the worst of all, a tale she was making up to manipulate him for reasons yet to come.
Andrei supposed he did, though, in that experimental way that anything can sound plausible when you’ve been up all night and can’t remember the last time you slept without a care and know that people are dead not because of anything you’ve done, but because you simply draw breath, and something, somewhere, wants to put an end to that, too. It made as much sense as anything else.
If not exactly explaining Manon’s role in such a world.
“You’re not the only one at this table who’s died once already, you know,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t offend you that I say my death was worse. You came back from yours with gnosis—knowledge—and even though it was a terrible understanding, at least there has come out of that a certain power…the chance to loosen Heaven’s hold on you so that you don’t have to die the same way twice. My death…mine was used as a weapon against the people and the world I loved.”
One more look into her eyes and he had no doubts that it was true, wondering why he had never considered that she believed him because she too was like him.
“For many of us—the lucky ones—there is someone we know, or meet, or just know about, who becomes to us a personal miracle. These people can be a mirror that reflects back who we really are inside, when we need to see that reflection the most. Or they can be, without even knowing it, a perfect representation of what we would like ourselves to be…not who we are, but who we want to become, who we must become, because now that we know, we realize we’ll never be satisfied with anything else, because it will be so much less.
“For me,” she said, “that person was Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans.”
Okay, he thought. Didn’t see that one coming either.
* * *
Did Andrei believe her?
She hoped that the skepticism that periodically clouded his face was nothing worse than momentary doubts, healthy in a way. But this was for her benefit too. It had been a long time since she had shared this with anyone, and it was a tale that needed to be told, relived and reaffirmed, or else it might fade to a dream.
“I was far from alone in the impact Jeanne had on me, although I didn’t know it at the time. There must have been dozens of us, impressionable girls and young women…ignorant girls and young women…who wanted to be like her. Or to be her, or who maybe thought we really were. We broke our backs on farms, living lives of mud and cows, and we wanted to be special too. We wanted to hear the voice of saints too, telling us what we must do. We too wanted to know that God had a place for us, somewhere better than the simple graves of our parents and grandparents, and the brothers and sisters who’d been weaker children than we’d been.
“For so many of us, our faith and our need took us to bad ends. What else would you expect from naïve farm girls?”
She told Andrei of the moment that had changed her life, the summer day that she had seen Jeanne d’Arc on the road. Two months earlier, Jeanne had earned her fame throughout France by freeing the city of Orléans from the English, a peasant girl commanding an army she had—with words no one had ever learned—convinced Prince Charles VII to give her. Fresh from this victory, she and her army spent the first half of the summer driving the English from one town after another, clearing a path through occupied territory all the way to Rheims. Only through a coronation at the cathedral there would the people of France recognize Charles as their rightful king…and Jeanne saw that it was done.
“I was driving my family’s cows to pasture one day when I heard what sounded to me like ten thousand horses coming in the distance. I left the cows where they were and ran across the fields as fast as I could. From the direction they were coming, I knew who it had to be. I reached the edge of the field in time to see them pass by along the road…the columns of soldiers, and her riding in front of them all. There was no one else it could be, in the armor they’d made just for her, but inside it, a girl even younger than I was.”
When she closed her eyes, Manon could still see the way the sun gleamed off the armor’s breastplate, and feel the breezes at her back and stirring the grasses around her bare lower legs, and inhale the fertile smell of the soil and all that grew wild from it at the height of summer.
“For a long time after, I told myself that she smiled at me as she passed…and maybe she did…or maybe she was just grimacing at the sun and never even saw me. I never would’ve told anyone this, but for me it was as good as seeing God. I don’t know now what voices she really heard, but that day on the road I felt sure that I’d heard hers, telling me what I could be.
“Of course, within the year, she’d failed miserably trying to take back Paris, and later she was captured by the English and their allies among our own people. And a year after that she was dead, tried and convicted as a witch, and burned at the stake. It’s said that all that was left in the ashes was her heart.
“Her failures had diminished her in many people’s eyes, or at least left them not knowing what to think about her, but I wasn’t one of them. How could I be? She hadn’t just given us a king again…she’d awakened me to my own destiny. When the news of her burning reached me, finally I understood what she must have been communicating with me on the road that day: that if one Jeanne fell, shouldn’t another rise to take her place?
“That’s how I came to claim to be Jeanne reborn. I wore men’s clothes, just as she had when she began her journey to seek her meeting with Charles. I knew I couldn’t go to him too—he’d chosen to do nothing to spare her life—and there was no one else who could give me an army. So I decided to raise one…a peasants’ army. The people had real heart again. They’d seen the English defeated and on the run. They knew that the impossible could happen. All they needed was a new messenger to inspire them.
“Such stupidity brought me many reactions. In some towns they revered me as if what I claimed a
bout myself really was true. And in some, they laughed. In others, they scorned, or fell to arguing among themselves. Finally I came to a village where they met me with genuine fear. They could believe in only one resurrection, and it was not hers…especially after she’d been branded a heretic and a witch.
“There was no trial. I don’t think there was even much debate. There was just a stake that they sank into the ground, and the mound of kindling they heaped around it, and their wish to be rid of me before I caused them any trouble from outside. If one burning hadn’t done the job, maybe theirs would finish it.
“I went through it all, but with not nearly the grace that Jeanne did, according to her witnesses. When burnings were carried out within the law, the executioner would often strangle the condemned on the stake to spare them worse pains. There wasn’t any such mercy there for me that day. I burned from the feet up. I watched my own skin blister and blacken. And until the moment the smoke choked off my voice, I screamed out to Heaven to have me.
“I’m not sure what happened after that. You have more memory of where you went than I do. Mine’s still just a void. But I wonder if all that was left in the ashes was my heart.”
“No way,” Andrei whispered. “I mean, nothing happened to my body. It was intact. Nothing happened to Kimmy’s. We just died. None of us that I’ve ever heard of came back after being totally destroyed.”
“I only said that I’d died too, Andrei. I never claimed to be like you. I’m not. I’m something else entirely. And if you’ve been doing your math, you know I’m talking about things that happened almost six hundred years ago. Does that sound like any of your chat room people?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Only the crazy ones.”