Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Shams pushed up to his knees and scooped himself a cup of the steaming broth, then sat back on his heels. “Indeed. You see there, that’s what the GamesMasters didn’t think through. They were fuckin’ seminarians, after all. All spirit, no psyche. They didn’t consider the predatory instinct: that if you put all these innocents out there on the road to Damascus, sooner or later some buzzard is gonna pick ’em off. I can still quote from the book of play: Do not resist the entreaties of your guide, for God may appear in the guise of the corrupt or malign, just as his opposite may appear beneficent. It is not for you to discern the difference. It is for you to ask only, ‘How can I serve?’ In doing this, you will always find favor with God.”

  “Sounds like good advice for rising in the Mafia,” Raszer observed.

  “Right,” Shams continued. “At the lower levels of play, the worst that can happen is you wind up working for some sleazebag and getting your nose rubbed in shit, which is a kind of inoculation if you think about it. I ran whores for this evil fucker in Dubai, and believe me, I never wanna see the inside of a whorehouse again. Seeing evil makes you not want to be it. Plus, for the first six levels, you’re still wired in to the game, to the other players. You’re swappin’ war stories in chatrooms, gettin’ texted and instant-messaged in the middle of the night, sent to porn websites where a pop-up window gives you your next set of directions, even going to parties where half the guests are actors. You’ve got a safety net, and you can call for a DX if you get scared.

  “But once they give you Extreme Unction, you lose your bearings unless you’re really together. Take this, for example: You’re in the seventh circle of play. You’ve jumped the wires and you’re offline, man. No email, no text messages, no nothin’. The pay phone rings on an empty street. How the fuck do they know you’re there? A recorded voice says, Your next guide is a deceiver and a criminal. Query him about the holiest place he has ever been and the wisest person still residing there. Offer to carry a message or gift to that person on behalf of your guide, and request a letter of introduction. Upon meeting, ask, ‘What is expected of me?’ Play out your line until you begin to feel the snake. This is where the men separate from the boys, ’cause you don’t know where the fuck you are, man.”

  “So you toss three coins and read the I Ching?”

  “That works,” Shams replied. “However you do it, you have to stop trusting your own instincts—which are basically faulty—and start trusting the snake’s. Because the snake doesn’t think—it knows. God is in the I Ching. He’s also in the Big Mac wrapper blowin’ down that empty street. Will you recognize Him? That depends on something beyond instinct or intuition or intelligence: it depends on knowing.” “So who gets through the eye of the needle?” Raszer asked. “Who wins?”

  Shams took two rough ceramic mugs from beneath the tripod and filled them with the black broth. He handed one to Ruthie and one to Raszer. The liquid was viscous and filmy and fermented. It smelled as old as the Mesozoic era.

  “You haven’t told me about the side effects yet,” said Raszer.

  “Put it this way,” said Shams. “I’ll make a whole lot more sense. Trust. Drink.”

  So Raszer, knowing that the price of knowledge was often at least a bellyache, drank, and at first felt only a warm throbbing in his solar plexus and an immediate cold in his extremities. Ruthie smiled, drained her cup, and laid back again.

  “I made it through,” said Shams. “I saw the place where everything turns inside out. Na-Koja-Abad. The landscape inverts, brother, and you’re standing outside yourself, looking in. Then I got sick, truly sick—some kind of Turkish flu—and had to come back.

  “But here’s what I came back with; here’s how the players get it wrong, how your kid wound up in federal custody and Ruthie’s friends wound up dead. Every river forks, man. Everything in the universe is a fuckin’ dichotomy. Nothing is one. If there ever was a One, it existed just long enough to blow the seeds off the dandelion, and all that’s left is a trace of breath. Monotheism is bullshit. But they don’t tell us that.

  “So you’re out there, your feet covered with blisters and your tongue swollen from thirst, but you don’t care ’cause you’ve got the world inside you; you’re going to God. You’re on the fuckin’ yellow brick road and you can see the Emerald City. And then you come to a fork. And at the fork, there’s a sign that points left and right. The left arrow says Path of All, and the right one says Path of Nothing, and you say, What the fuck?

  “One last riddle to solve? Bullshit, you say. You can’t fool me. I know God is both all and nothing. I know God is One. But you can’t just fuckin’ stand there—you have to make a choice—so you drop to your knees and pray for gnosis. You call on God, and God rises up from the rocks like a grinnin’ harvest moon and his light shines down on both roads.

  “So you smile and you’re about to toss a coin, figuring it’s all good, when the man in the black robe appears on the right fork and says, ‘Welcome home, pilgrim.’ Maybe he offers you water; maybe he’s set it up so he saves your life. You look up to God for guidance but God just shines on. Because, rafiq, God doesn’t make choices. We do. The Almighty doesn’t care if we kill or steal. We do. God didn’t make the rules. We did. So we have to choose the road that allows us to rule ourselves in God’s name.”

  In the silence that followed, Raszer noticed that his fingertips had grown numb. The interior of the yurt seemed larger and the distance between its inhabitants greater, as if space itself had expanded. Cures warts, my ass, he thought. The brew was both psychoactive and mildly toxic, like all shamanic cocktails. Smoke and steam poured through the yurt’s aperture, where the wind took it and exposed clear black sky and the three stars on Orion’s belt. Raszer felt faintly nauseous and laid back on a cushion to regain his equilibrium. The stars were rushing away, and the fire was not enough to warm him.

  Go with it, he reminded himself, as he always had to.

  “Does anybody ever choose the other road?” asked Ruthie, from a distance.

  “Sure, they do, sweetheart,” answered Shams. “But only if they’ve been oriented to it. Only if they know that in this world, there really is a choice.”

  “What about you, Shams?” Raszer asked. “What was your choice?”

  “Like I said, man, I got sick. I turned back. I don’t flatter myself, though.”

  “And the players who take the left fork . . . what happens to them?”

  “They transcend the game, man. They become a sort of Gauntlet VFW. They call themselves the Fedeli d’Amore. They guard the path, offer the pilgrims comfort. But they don’t tell you what to do, and once you’ve passed, you’re on your own.”

  “You said you came down with a Turkish flu,” said Raszer. “Does that mean—”

  “There’s more than one path in more than one country,” said Shams, “but I’m betting the Urfa route through southern Turkey’s the one you want. There’s a pilgrims’ hostel in Harran—south of Sanliurfa, where Abraham lived and Jesus preached. That’s the part of Turkey that’s more Syrian than Turkish and more Kurdish than Syrian. The trekkers have passed through there for years. It used to be run by the Franciscans. Now it’s all Gauntlet vets—the Fedeli. If anybody’s got a treasure map, they do. They run it like a wilderness outfitter—but that’s just the front. You gotta ask the right questions.”

  “Such as?” Raszer queried.

  “What is expected of me?” Shams replied. “Or try this ditty: Do you know the way to El Mirai?” He sang it à la Dionne Warwick.

  “El Mirai?”

  “I’m guessing that’s where you’ll find her. I can’t say more.”

  “Why’s that?” Raszer asked.

  “Words fail here, brother. Action speaks. But if you want to get in the game . . . ”

  “Right,” said Raszer. “I think I understand. But tell me this . . . ”

  Raszer was now fully supine, as were Shams and Ruthie. Splayed out around the hearth. The broth had leveled them. The effect,
it seemed to Raszer, was a little like that of Salvia divinorum: mind receptive, reeling; body in a state of near paralysis.

  “ . . . The man on the right fork,” Raszer continued, more aware of his tongue than usual. “What does he offer?”

  “Perfect order in exchange for perfect chaos,” said Shams, chuckling darkly.

  “And what’s the price of his goods?”

  “I’ll tell you what the fuckin’ price is,” said Ruthie, up on an elbow. “Something nobody should ever have to pay. One day, just before I got my ass hauled back to Taos for good, Henry asks me to take a walk in the canyon, back there behind Johnny’s trailer. By this time, me ’n Henry had been together for a while and, far as I know, Johnny was doin’ some mindfuck on my kid sister while he banged that bitch-whore Layla. Henry’d been sick for a few days. Just disappeared somewhere, but it wasn’t the first time, so I let it go. But now he’s actin’ even weirder than usual and walkin’ like a cripple, so I ask him what’s wrong.

  “He says he wants to tell me, but he’s afraid I’ll reject him. I told him I’d never do that. So he says these goons came to him and Johnny after they found out that Johnny raked a little extra for himself on that gun deal. They’re like, ‘How can we trust you guys for the big jobs? If you can cheat us, you can cheat the Old Man. It happens again, we’ll put ferrets up your ass and let them eat their way out through your intestines.’

  “So now they want a show of loyalty. Something precious, they say, ‘so we can assure the Old Man you’re fid-ah-ee.’ Fidai—that’s what they called themselves. Johnny says whaddayou want, and they say they want me to be one of their export whores. Johnny turns to Henry and Henry says, ‘Fuck no’ and Johnny says, ‘No fuckin’ way.’ They put Johnny against the wall, and they’re all methed up, ’n they say, ‘Okay, rafiq, we’ll take your eye, then. No one reaches El Mirai without sacrifice.’ And they put a knife to Johnny’s eye and they’re gonna do it . . . except that Henry yells, ‘No. I’ll give you what you want. Make me a servant of the master. Make me a virgin.’

  “And they heated the knife with a blowtorch and tied him down on the rocks behind the trailer and did it right there. They castrated him and burned the wound shut and gave me his balls in a velvet sack. Henry loved me that much, he loved Johnny that much, and Johnny saw it go down and it tore him up for weeks, and that was when he decided they wouldn’t get what they really wanted: my virgin sister. But they did, didn’t they?”

  “Christ,” Raszer muttered.

  “Harsh,” said Shams. “That boy didn’t need balls. He had heart.”

  “So Aquino was wrong,” Raszer thought out loud. “It didn’t happen in Iraq. It happened here.” He rolled onto his side and looked at Ruthie through the smoke. “What did Henry mean, ‘Make me a servant of the master’?”

  “Some of the Witness honchos—the top guys, the anointed ones—they have themselves fixed. They call it becoming a servant of the master. It’s a big secret, like everything else about the JWs. Henry used to talk about doing it. He said it’d free his mind. That church got inside him more than he knew—it gets inside of everybody.”

  “Some men make eunuchs of themselves,” said Raszer, quoting scripture.

  “What’s that?” said Ruthie.

  “I guess this accounts for Amos Leach,” Raszer mused.

  “That creep,” Ruthie spat. “He screwed up Henry good. Emmett Parrish, too. Henry never squealed, but the theocratic council finally had Amos fixed to stop it.”

  Raszer turned toward his host’s shadowed face. “Something here doesn’t square, Shams. These assassins . . . the ‘Old Man’ . . . your guy in the black robe. From the MO, you’d think we were looking at a revival of the old Ismaili cult. But the Ismailis weren’t thugs. Even the crusaders praised their integrity. The Templars adopted parts of their doctrine. When they struck, they killed, and always for strategic purpose. They didn’t torture, they didn’t recruit outside the faith, and they didn’t kidnap kids.”

  “Just because it calls itself a duck,” said Shams quietly, “doesn’t mean it is, right? You gotta listen for the quack. The ‘Christian Coalition’ isn’t really so Christian, is it?

  “Like I said, every river forks. Whatever’s left of the true Ismailis, they’re in India, or burrowed in with the Sufis or the Druze or the Yezidis. But there’s always the diseased offshoot that gets left behind for dead in the wasteland. One day, a little rain falls, and the shoot digs roots and buds. Often as not, my brother, it’s the bastard who claims the crown . . . and the family name.”

  “So we’re dealing with an Islamic fraud,” said Raszer.

  “We’re dealing with the right fork,” said Shams, rising to a squat. “Be it Islamic or Christian or whatever. But you need to think on this before you jump in. Let that brew seep in.” He moved to the fire and took a bundle of sage and local herbs, tied with hemp, from a sack hanging from the tripod.

  “Drift for a while,” he whispered. “Drift . . . ” Shams waved the little sachet over the coals until it caught fire, then blew it to hot ash, sending the aromatic smoke in their direction. “La ilaha illa Allah . . . La ilaha illa Allah . . . ” he chanted, his voice growing more distant with each recitation of the Shahadah. He stood and walked the perimeter of the yurt on his tiptoes, fanning the sage. To the right . . . to the left . . . to the right . . . to the left.

  Very soon, he was seen no more.

  “Ruthie?” Raszer heard himself say. Had he said it in a dream? He saw the prone form of a woman against a red background and geometrical designs, but could not seem to bring her into focus. There was smoke in the air. Or was it just the narcotic fog of sleep? The wind made assault after assault on the yurt’s felt walls, but what yields will not fall.

  I am safe in here, he thought.

  He looked down at his body and it was small, tapered. The air around him was grainy. His jaw was sore.

  At the clucking of a hen, he looked right, and there was Shams, three feet in the air, the Mongolian shepherd’s cap pulled down over his eyes. A dog growled, and there again was Shams, spread-eagled against the vaulting canvas roof, his arms in cruciform, his eyes rolled back to the whites.

  A small bell rang, and Shams sat against the upright on the opposite side of the yurt, tossing a pomegranate in the air. Raszer felt sure that Shams was in all three places at once, but because he could not see all three places at once, his certitude turned to anxiety. His eyes began to burn, then his lungs, and a moment later, he realized that the yurt was on fire.

  “Ruthie!” he called again, much louder. “Shams!”

  A clawlike hand gripped his shoulder. Raszer wheeled around and staggered. “Shams?” The round head was hairless on top without its cap. Shams pushed him to the floor and said, “Down, brother, down. The Devil’s at play.” Ruthie fumbled with the yurt’s door, in a panic made clumsy by sleep and sorcery. Shams reached up and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her into their huddle on the floor. “Don’t you dare, precious,” he said. “Don’t let in what’s out there.” He motioned toward the heavens. The fire was burning from the roof down. He sniffed and scowled. “Must be ethyl alcohol,” he said. “Nothing else would light up that canvas. Motherfuckers!”

  “You got a gun, Shams?” Raszer asked.

  “Keep a .22 under the floor,” Shams replied, “for the occasional rabbit stew. But I’ve got better. Follow the leader.”

  Like a salamander, he slithered across the floor without lifting his belly more than an inch, rolled back the corners of six carpets one by one, released a catch, and slid open a three-foot square hatch. It opened so quietly, Raszer thought, that it must be on greased bearings. Shams turned, hailed them over, and then, laying a finger aside his nose like Clement C. Moore’s Saint Nick, disappeared down the hole headfirst.

  The crawl space beneath the yurt’s plank floor was far larger than was to be expected, as Shams had scooped out a ton of earth, right down to bedrock, and fortified the crumbling clay walls with one-by-six pla
nks. A ten-year-old could have stood upright, and Shams wasn’t a great deal bigger than that. He’d installed ceramic drains for the rainy season and cut peepholes into the platform, offering a wraparound view at ground level. Most critically, he’d created an emergency exit, and Raszer now saw why nearly sixty degrees of the yurt’s shell was flush with the concave rock face outside.

  “The Army taught you well,” he whispered to Shams.

  “Hell,” said Shams. “The Army taught me shit. I learned this from the Bedouin. They’re always squirreling stuff away. There’s a glacier split in the rock, a tunnel that runs about forty feet in and then opens into a crevasse. If we’re quick, we can get up on top before they know we’ve left the building.” He grabbed his .22 from where it sat propped against the wall and turned to Ruthie. “Your new friend brings a lot of heat, princess.” He tore off the burlap curtain covering the tunnel and motioned her in. “Ladies first. We’ll be right behind.”