“You want to learn about Kumari,” she said after a while.
“Everybody asks you about her, huh?”
Again, that disturbing laugh. It had the rhythm of a fading echo and conveyed no feeling of amusement.
“Not at all,” she said. “The anthropologists come here and ask what I had to eat in the temple, who instructed me, who cared for me. They’re not interested in Kumari.”
“Then why assume that’s what I want?”
“Because it’s true,” she said. “Would you like me to make up a lie and pretend that’s true instead?”
“The plain truth’ll do just fine.”
She plucked at a splinter on the table’s edge. She was, he realized, always fidgeting, picking at something.
“I know all about you,” she said with a hint of defiance. “I know who you are.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he said, but felt a trace of alarm.
“You’re a violent man,” she said. “You’ve never had any qualms about it until lately. Now you’ve developed qualms, and you’re in a position where they’re a liability. But that’s not your biggest problem.” She planted her hands palms-down on the table, glanced back and forth between them as if gauging their relative size. “The trouble is you haven’t changed enough. It’s as if you’re half-formed. Violence is ingrained in you, and you haven’t been able to exorcise it. And now you’ve been led here…but not to learn about Kumari. I can’t help you with that, anyway.”
The possibility of clairvoyance and all that she had said threatened him. He felt compelled to deny at least part of it.
“I wasn’t led here,” he said. “I’m just taking a few days off.”
She shrugged; a silence lengthened between them.
“Why can’t you tell me about Kumari?” he asked.
“Oh, I can tell you a little, but it won’t be enough for you,” she said. “It seems I woke up one day and discovered I was twelve years old, a little girl being led out of the temple. Before that, my memories are vague. Whispers, golden rooms…and fighting. I remember always fighting. Kumari was dark, though there was light at her heart. Not evil. Dark by necessity…because she dealt with darkness. The only thing I’m sure of is that she was with me for a while.”
She pried at the splinter, peeling it back, working with what seemed fierce stubbornness; she cut her eyes toward him, then looked away.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asked.
“No more than most people.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to upset you.”
She shook her head wildly as if trying to shake bees from her hair.
“You won’t listen,” she said. “I can’t talk with you if you won’t listen.”
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”
She nodded, a twitch as much as an affirmation, and when she spoke again, she bit off each word as if restraining herself from a more forceful expression.
“I’m uncomfortable around people because I’m unlucky for them. I’m not talking about the kind of luck that brings a bad run at cards or a streak of household accidents. There’s death in me.” She glanced up at him. “You may not believe that, but you should heed it. There’s virtually no difference between how the two of us think. I say you were led here, and you claim that you were curious. I tell you I’m unlucky, and you might say that what happens to those around me is merely fate. What you consider ordinary seems magical to me. Where I see the workings of gods or devils, you may see the actions of logical consequence. For me the world is a vast spell, for you an intricate coincidence. There’s scarcely any distance between those poles. So when I tell you something, don’t belittle it. If you have to justify it in logical terms, that’s all right. But you have to accept what I say, or else we can’t talk.”
She leaned back, her hands at rest on the tabletop, and this sudden transition from tension to calm, more than any of the other signs, made it apparent to Clement that she was fighting for control, that she was traveling along the same path of madness down which he had been sliding. And he remembered that had been part of his original vision of her…though back in Katmandu he had assumed that she was struggling against an external adversary. Maybe he had been led here, he thought, maybe her knowledge of him was no more explicable than his knowledge of her, no less real.
She gave another of her unsettling laughs, and he had the idea that she knew what he had been thinking.
“It’s a matter of seeing,” she said. “You either see things or you don’t. Perhaps that’s why you’re here—to learn to see.”
He could not be sure if what she had said was responsive to what he had thought, or if he had worked himself up into such an excited and delusionary state that anything she said would seem responsive. He had, he realized, no clue as to what they had really been discussing, and he decided to change his tack, to force her to talk about herself, and not him.
“Why do you live here?” he asked. “There can’t be very much to interest you.”
“It’s an unlucky place, it suits me. And I have a great deal to do. I read, I walk, I practice chod.”
“Is that a religion?”
She hesitated. “It’s a ritual of Tibetan Buddhism, a test of the soul against demons.”
“You fight the demons?”
“I confront them. There’s no point in fighting, they always win.”
“Then why bother?”
“It’s Kumari,” she said. “Everything I do relates to her. To some part of her. Chod…I don’t know. There’s part of her I never understood. It seemed different, somehow. Not really her, but joined to her. Her ally, her shield against the darkness. The chod, I think, relates to that part.”
“Why would a goddess need an ally?”
“Not even Kumari can stand alone against the demons.” Cheni gave a wave of dismissal as if to erase what she had said. “It’s as I told you, I don’t remember much.”
From the corner she took a pole with a rope loop at one end and pushed up the trapdoor in the ceiling. Where the door had been was now a square of rich deep blue and stars and a half-moon. Silence seemed to pour into the room along with the chill air. Laughter came from an adjoining house, sounding unnaturally bright. And then from somewhere high above, a man’s voice chanting. Cheni scowled and appeared to be listening to the voice.
“What is it?” Clement asked.
“A crazy man,” she said. “A hermit. He lives up there.” She gestured toward the hilltop. “In the old monastery. The villagers think he’s a shaman. And the children dote on him…they call him ‘uncle.’ But he’s just crazy.”
“Maybe he’s a children’s shaman.”
Cheni sniffed. “He’s afraid of everything. He won’t say a word to anybody. Sometimes he helps me, but mostly he just hides in the ruin.”
“He sounds harmless.”
“Is that one of your American virtues?” she said with heavy sarcasm. “Harmlessness?”
Thin glowing clouds began to pass across the moon, and gazing at them, Clement recalled having had a similar feeling of isolation during his childhood, the nights after he had run away from the orphanage and hidden in culverts, in abandoned houses, in the woods. It suddenly seemed strange that he could have come so far from those empty nights, that he had lived and fought and killed and wound up in Mustang with a woman who had once been the goddess Kumari. Thinking this made him feel vulnerable, open to unseen influences, and for a moment he entertained the paranoid notion that the clouds overhead might be edging close to the light that shined him into being, threatening to blot him out. He turned to Cheni. She was staring at him, aghast; she pushed back her chair and came to her feet.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She felt behind her, groping for the door to the back room. “Don’t come near me!” she said. “Do you understand? I see you now! Keep away from me.” She darted into the room and closed the door. Clement heard the latch click.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What’s wrong? What’d I do?”
No response.
He got up and went to the door. “Hey, are you all right?” When she refused to answer, he said, “Is it okay if I sleep out here?”
Nothing.
“Fuck,” he said mildly, less disappointed than confused. The chanting from the hilltop began to annoy him. He reached for the pole and pulled the trapdoor shut. He stood awhile, nourished by the silence, unsure whether to go or to stay. His eyes caught on the bones sticking from the walls, and he pictured himself a crazy little man in a barbarous black house with walk of teeth and dirt, a miniature resting on a dusty shelf behind toy mountains. It pleased him to think of himself as inconsequential, as lost and small, and he decided that he would stay. For a night, at least. Cheni might come around, he thought. He sensed an unalloyed place inside her that madness had not touched, a place where her being was intact, as if madness were not central to her, but rather a kind of corruption infecting her from without…like his own madness. Kumari, perhaps. This persuaded him to conclude what he had been tempted to conclude ever since meeting her, that there was a bond between them, a basic compatibility, and he imagined lying down beside her amid the stench of burning yak dung, becoming one with her unluckiness and engaging a cosmic doom.
At length he snuffed out the butter lamps and spread his sleeping bag on the floor; he took out his automatic, wormed into the bag, and zipped it shut. The darkness closed in around him. He lay there alert, unable to sleep. Every few minutes he checked his watch, worried about insomnia. After an hour he heard a keening sound, and because of its complex modulation, he thought it must be an animal voicing pain or loneliness; but when the cry came again, he realized it was only the voice of the land in its emptiness, the white violin whisper of the wind flowing through the passes. He listened to it sounding over and over, hypnotized by its eerie music, and soon began to feel that he too was being drawn thin and fine and pure, reduced to a melody winded from the cuts and notches of his life, from the wasted and cratered terrain of his endless war, becoming a cold song that drifted into silence.
He dreamed about murders, but the murders were not dreams, though they had the artful lucidity of the imagined. He dreamed of knives and the feeling of knives, the tremor that preceded the rush of the blood, and he dreamed of explosive truth, of tiny figures blowing up into heaven, and he dreamed of the incisive meaning of hollow-points, of breast pockets centered by cross hairs, and of an old Hindu man riddled with cancer, strapping a bomb to his waist, shaking Clement’s hand, thanking him for the benefits paid to his family…and that waked him. At first he thought the sight of Cheni going through the front door was part of the dream, but once he realized it was not, he scrambled up, gun in hand, and pulled on his jacket and went out into the street, heavy with sleep yet curious about what she could be up to at such a late hour. He followed her along a trail that ascended the cliffside and then wound around the hill surmounting it, picking his way among loose rocks, slipping on gravel. The moon was still high, and he remembered other moonlit nights spent tracking a target; from those nights he appropriated a feeling of icy competence and calculation that dissipated the residue of dreams and transformed his pursuit into a logistical game. On several occasions he had the notion that he was being followed himself, but this he chalked up to a need to experience danger and an overactive imagination. At the summit of the hill, barely distinguishable from the pitch of stones beneath it, a jumbled patchwork of shadows and grays, stood a large ruin—the monastery—and it was toward this that Cheni was heading. The final ascent was rough going. Clement had to proceed along rocky defiles and up steep faces, and by the time he had reached the base of the walls, he was thoroughly winded.
The walls were about thirty feet high, crumbled away in sections, and the gate consisted of two massive wooden doors hanging askew, many of the planks shattered inward as if by an enormous fist. Flat mani stones with prayers graven in Tibetan script were propped beside the gate, and Clement sat down on one to catch his breath. He came to appreciate the hushed atmosphere, the imposing blankness of the walls, the resounding emptiness, the edged appliqués of shadow, and he began to feel akin to this irrational heap of stone, to the fundamental denials of hope and joy at its heart, with its echoes of animism and droning chants, old insect gods brought low to buzz among the haze of butter lamps and the fumes of ghastly revelation rising from the machineries of prayer. He laughed, alight with his own irrationality, his mind firing on all circuits as with the first rush of a cocaine high, and when he looked out over the village toward the snowy moonstruck peaks of the Himalayas, he felt the accomplished tranquillity of a conqueror, as if he had just completed an assault on some heretofore untraveled height. Everything he saw he claimed for his own; he named the foothills after old girlfriends and the highest mountain after Lily. He was Clement pukkah sahib, Clement of Nepal. At last, still chuckling, he dusted himself off and went inside the ruin.
He crossed a courtyard toward a windowless building of grayish white limestone that resembled an oversized bunker. Strung above the entrance were a number of tattered prayer flags: pale blue pennons inscribed with spidery characters, lashing and snapping in the wind. He climbed a flight of steps and entered a wide corridor lined with musty cells. The moonlight penetrated only a short way into the corridor, illuminating faded frescoes that depicted flayed bodies, skulls filled with blood, heaps of entrails, and demons standing among them—squat, muscular, with fanged mouths and glaring round eyes. Even the fiercest of them had a cartoonish aspect that reminded Clement of creatures created to represent tooth decay or bad breath. He was intrigued by them, and as he inspected the frescoes, he recognized that they were staring out over their terrestrial kingdom, and that he was at the forefront of a vast throng whose individual natures became evident to him, for he seemed to see them reflected in the demons’ eyes, an intricate conceit of contorted limbs and twisted sinews and tears and droplets of blood glistening like gemmy fruit, the whole mass seething in ferment as with a constant pour of wind, and beetles were feasting in the eyes of these damned, and women mated with serpents, and men with cancers that had consumed half their faces were clawing at their bellies, trying to dig out some vital organ that would end their suffering, and here a fat man was feeding on gobbets of his own flesh, and here an addict was injecting fire into his genitals, and behind this host of humanity were the legions of the netherworld, hunchbacks whose humps had spindly arms and bony hands, and flies with female mouths, and creatures such as griffins and chimeras and basilisks in whose eyes were registered the enigmatic record of entropic decay, and they were crowding forward, forcing mankind toward its doom, toward the terrible negative fates rendered on the corridor wall, and Clement tried to claw his way back from the brink, drawing moans from those whom he shoved aside, and…He pushed away from the wall, realizing that he had been in the process of losing it and that the moaning was real, coming from farther along the corridor. Still unsteady, he switched off the safety of his automatic, held it barrel-up beside his jaw, and eased along the wall, seeing tag ends of his hellish vision floating on the darkness. As he reached a corner of a cross-corridor the moan sounded again, and at the far end of it he spotted a vertical seam of moonlight. He moved quickly toward it. The way was blocked by a curtain of stringy dark hair that was coarse and dry and stiff to the touch. Yak hair, he realized. He twitched the curtain aside with the gun barrel. Directly opposite, some twenty yards away across an expanse of broken flagstones, was a doorway flanked by two stone columns. Cheni was spread-eagled between the columns, her arms and legs secured by ropes. She had sagged, her head hung down, face veiled by the black shawl of her hair. Clement assumed that she was unconscious, but then she lifted her head and stared through the strands of her hair at a point somewhere above him.
His instincts were to go to her, but it was such a strange and unexpected development that he held back. It was the perfect setup for an assassin. He recalled his feel
ing of being followed and wondered if Rice’s warning had not been merely a general caution, if he’d been hinting that definite action was being contemplated. He opened the curtain a few inches wider to get a view of the rest of the interior courtyard. It was a long notch between buildings, closed in by the monastery’s outer walls—a little stage of bone-white and ebony shadow. Apart from Cheni, it was deserted. Dark stems of dead nettles poked from the cracks. Clement glanced back along the corridor, but could detect no sign of movement. He turned again to the courtyard. Cheni had slumped, her head lolling drunkenly. He was, he decided, being overly paranoid. There had been a hundred opportunities for someone to take him since he’d left Katmandu, and he could see no reason why they would want to involve Cheni.
He stepped out into the courtyard, crossing toward her, wondering who could have done this, training his automatic on the darkness at her rear. Before he had gone halfway, she began to struggle against her ropes, and—her eyes rolling up to the strip of starry sky between the buildings—she let out a wild scream. In reflex, Clement looked up. Part of Orion was visible, and there was a feathery cloud passing off to the south. Then an almost imperceptible rippling like heat haze that disappeared within seconds. Some form of condensation, he thought.
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