Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “You don’t want to know,” said Francesca. “Be quiet and listen.”

  “Shit.”

  They walked that way for another five minutes. Suddenly, there was a ferocious updraft, and the cloud bank was dispersed almost instantly. It was impossible not to feel a surge of carnival vertigo on seeing that they were 9,200 feet above sea level, with a sheer drop on either side of a path not more than four feet wide.

  “Beautiful,” said Raszer.

  “It’s savage, isn’t it?” said Dante. “And look.” He raised his arm and pointed to the northeast. “There’s where we’re going.”

  “You won’t see it again until morning,” Francesca said softly. “The angle is just right here, but after we drop a hundred feet, it will disappear.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Raszer, finally registering the massive battlements and towering minarets rising from the desert peaks some twelve miles distant, as the crow flew. Indeed, it was not the ephemeral city he’d glimpsed from Ispiria, although if the light were just right, a man could be fooled. “That’s it?” he asked. “El Mirai?”

  “That’s it,” said Dante. “It sits a mile above a southern branch of the Silk Road in territory claimed by three countries—four, if you count Kurdistan—but occupied by none of ’em. It’s a no-go zone, and it has been for at least a thousand years. It’s no’ even on a map. Even Marco Polo had to find his way there by trusting a blind man.”

  As Francesca had predicted, the fortress soon vanished from sight, and as she had promised, a stream of cold, clear glacier melt furnished water a mile on. They stopped for a lunch of dates and flatbread, and by midafternoon they were on the lee side of the mountains, where the look of the land was dramatically different. The three o’clock sun burned unfiltered through a sky that was almost violet, and the rocks were the color of rust. Patches of meadow were visible far below, but they were the golden brown of Assyria and not the green of the irrigated west. At five o’clock, they made camp for their last night in the familiar world.

  After everyone else had crashed, Raszer stirred the embers of the fire, lit a cigarette, and retrieved the gunmetal ionophone from his pack. He’d used it on only one prior job, and had to meditate for a few minutes on how to reprogram the thing to disguise his location. It registered the latitude, longitude, and altitude precisely enough to guide a missile, and as soon as he made a call, anyone spiked into Monica’s line would know exactly where he was.

  He disabled the autolocate function and set his coordinates at the offset he and Monica had agreed on, which put him—according to the readout—in the Alps somewhere east of Grenoble. Why not?

  She picked up after four rings. It must be five in the morning.

  “How’s the skiing?” she asked, registering his decoy location.

  “Good at nine thousand feet,” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’d be better if I heard from you more often.”

  “As often as necessary, partner,” he said. “No more than that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. How close are you?”

  “Within sight.”

  “You made good time. Listen, I have more on that black stone—”

  “Good. Tell me in a sec. First: Sometime tomorrow afternoon, we’ll make the lodge. I’ll send you the specs as soon as I’m there, and then you can let our friends know. There’s a village south of the base—the only one in the vicinity. That’s where I’ll bring her. I’d like to chopper out. Do we have a pilot and a couple of freelancers?”

  “We will by tomorrow. I’m cross-checking references and verifying credentials.”

  “Good girl.”

  “It isn’t going to be cheap, Raszer.”

  “It’s never cheap to salvage a career.”

  “And you’ll never be rich. Not the way you go at it.”

  “Who needs money when they’ve got Monica?”

  “Let’s get married,” she said.

  “Book the church.”

  “How’s Ruthie behaving?”

  “Better than I expected. But I still can’t connect the dots. Any luck tracing her ticket purchase?”

  “Yeah. She paid cash. She had all her docs. She was ready. And . . . her mother called yesterday. She suspects Ruthie’s with you. Should I tell her?”

  Raszer thought for a moment. “Yes. Tell her she’s fine. See if she knows where the money came from. Was that why she called? To find out where she was?”

  Monica told him about the cryptic note with the dated postmark.

  “You’re breaking up . . . did you say, ‘AC/DC’?”

  “No . . . N, C . . . ” The line went haywire with static.

  “Monica? Monica? Shit.” He’d lost her. He tried a number of times before conceding that he wasn’t going to get her back tonight.

  Francesca and Dante were up before dawn, and camp was broken by sunrise. The two Fedeli, attended by Shaykh Adi, offered fifteen minutes of prayer to the big red ball in the sky. Raszer joined them for the closing devotions, while Ruthie stood at a distance, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.

  The prayer was simple and eloquent. It invoked a number of avatars, including Sahak (the prophet Isaac), Nusayr (who was Jesus, the Nazarene), and Mirza Husayn Ali, the founder of Baha’i faith, and asserted that light can be summoned even from darkness. It ended with a call to Khezr, the wandering green man of the ponds and rivers, to guide them on the remaining journey.

  They descended nearly two thousand feet in just over three hours. It was hard on the knees, and Raszer felt his bad ankle protest. The weakness had plagued him for a decade now, and at this stage of his life, he acknowledged that he’d probably never shake it. Life gives us pain to weigh pleasure against, he reminded himself, as he stepped badly onto a loose rock and felt the jolt surge through his calf and all the way to his groin.

  Half a mile ahead, the path widened and rose slightly toward two natural pillars of tawny rock that were joined by an arch at the top and formed a towering dolmen, a mineral portal to the promised land of Na-Koja-Abad.

  “Wait’ll you see this,” said Dante.

  “Tell me it’s a Club Med with an open bar,” said Raszer.

  “Kind of, yeah,” Dante said with a grin. “But it’s off-season.”

  The topographical dish did not reveal itself until they had passed through the pillars, but when it did, it summoned awe. Spanning the field of vision and extending all the way to the next ridge was a rippling field of green, budding stems, hundreds of thousands of them, each just short of a meter in height. The flowers hadn’t blossomed yet, but the large, wineglass-shaped buds were the powdery aquamarine of a Cretan mural. Raszer guessed the field to be not less than twenty square miles.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “Poppies?”

  “The largest field of opium poppies in the known world,” said Dante. “And it belongs to no one because it’s claimed by everyone. The tribal councils work out the division every spring, but always with the understanding that the field belongs to Allah and he’s the final arbiter. The Americans won’t touch it because it would blow up in their face, but I bet they get their cut. And for the past twenty years—probably as payment for services rendered in Afghanistan and other places—the Old Man has been able to claim the entire eastern half. That’s his base. That’s where the juice comes from.

  “The Kurdish marksmen watch over the southwestern quadrant, the Turks and the Iranians squabble over the northwestern part and occasionally shoot at each other, and in the east, there are mercenaries in the employ of el Mirai.”

  “And we’re going to walk through the middle?” asked Raszer.

  “It’s the only way to go,” said Dante. He pointed downward to the cut that bisected the center. “Any other route would raise suspicion, make it look like we have something to hide. We’re just a trekking party taking two clients on a pilgrimage, right?”

  “Right,” said Raszer. “And you’ve done this before?”

  “Absolutely,” Dante answered. He unstrapped his ba
ckpack, took out a tightly rolled Red Cross flag, and, after shaking out the wrinkles, tied it to his snake stick and let the stiff breeze take it. “First off, the mountains beyond the eastern ridge of the dish are popular with climbers. Second, the crossroads at the base of el Mirai have become mythical. You wouldn’t believe how many people will pay good money, risk the snakes and the sharpshooters, just to know that they really exist. The cautious ones’ll settle for a glimpse from the hills, just to say they’ve been there. The serious trekkers, they want to experience the topographical inversion for themselves.”

  “Shams talked about that,” said Ruthie. “I never knew what the hell he meant.”

  “Some huge shift in perspective, right?” said Raszer. “Is it . . . magnetic?”

  “Not magnetic,” Dante replied emphatically. “It’s metanoia. Turns your head.”

  “The idea goes back at least to Ibn Arabi,” said Francesca. “It happens about a mile before the crossroads . . . if everything is right. When you cross into Na-Koja-Abad, Nowhere-Land. It can’t be put into words. Best I’ve heard it described is that you stop seeing inside out and start seeing outside in. The same landscape, but not the same, because the vanishing point is . . . inside your head, or your heart, or wherever active imagination is. I know, words are lame, but—”

  “Active imagination . . . ” Raszer repeated.

  “Yes,” said Francesca. “But not like imagining you’re a princess or a dragon slayer. This is when you realize that the world you see outside is just a projection of the world God sees inside. It’s plugging right into God’s imagination.”

  “It sounds like tripping,” said Ruthie.

  “Yeah, but . . . no,” said Dante. “You don’t ever come down from this trip.”

  “It’s the object of The Gauntlet, right?” Raszer asked. “No reference points. Like Mach space. Everything flips and you’re inside the game—just you and God.”

  “And up is down and right is left and everything is permitted,” added Dante. “And if you can come back from that and still be on the path, nothing will ever knock you off it again.”

  Raszer thought for a moment. “So how did someone like Scotty Darrell get so far off the track? He must’ve passed through here, too, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dante replied. “But you have to know where you wanna go before you go there. Have to have your bearings. Scotty didn’t . . . and he had a bad trip.” He hoisted the pack onto his shoulders. “Let’s go,” he said. “And don’t touch the flowers unless you want to get your fingers shot off.”

  The buds were still too new to have come under the knife. When they were ripe, their various tenders would descend from the ridges, blades in hand, and score the delicate, blue-green pods to release the sweet resin inside. That resin would become the salve for the world’s ravages, from toothache to childbirth to cancer to despair about the very thought of life. In differing formulations—heroin, morphine, laudanum, hydro-codone—it wrapped its users in a chemical cocoon designed to make everything okay.

  They kept their eyes forward en route through the field, joining their voices in a Sufi couplet that Francesca began to recite as soon as they were amid the budding stems. She had advised them all to keep to their private thoughts and resist the temptation to scan the surrounding hills for sharpshooters, lest they provoke suspicion.

  “What if we fall asleep?” Ruthie had asked.

  “We won’t,” replied Francesca.

  “Dorothy did,” Ruthie countered.

  “Dorothy was dreaming already,” said Raszer.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Ruthie. “I always forget that.”

  When the sun-warmed breeze from the south whistled over the field, the fat buds became a percussion ensemble, tapping against one another en masse and creating a distinct set of pitches—like a thousand bamboo wind chimes set in motion. Despite the field’s hypnotic effect—which extended to its absolute quiet when the wind ceased—Raszer couldn’t help but feel that they were under the gun from every angle. What a brash thing to do, trespassing the king’s opium field in broad daylight. Yet he understood what his guides were about and didn’t question it. It was as fools that Grail seekers had always approached the castle, stepping across the jaws of dragons.

  When at last they reached the far side and ascended once again into the foothills, Raszer felt a certain relief, despite the clear fact that they were now in the Old Man’s kingdom and the most dangerous leg of the journey had just begun.

  The next stretch was the most physically demanding. The sun was merciless, and sources of fresh water almost nonexistent. One by one, the aridity of the place got to each of them, striking Ruthie first with dizziness and a racing heart. Francesca was least affected. She had a light, bony frame and a Mediterranean constitution, and probably could have done well shouldering jugs of wine up and down the mountains of Sicily.

  “Once the sun is at our backs, the going will get easier,” said Dante.

  “If we don’t die first,” said Ruthie.

  “What’s our ETA?” asked Raszer.

  “About five,” Francesca replied. “If all goes well at the crossroads.”

  To conserve energy and moisture, they talked little for the next four hours. Even when they stopped at one o’clock to eat the last of their sheep’s cheese and flatbread, they let the wind and the harsh cawing of the scavenging birds do the talking for them. They had now achieved the familiarity that allows for silence.

  In the emptiness, Raszer discovered that the poison of despair that had accumulated in his organs over the last hard year in Los Angeles hadn’t been fully purged; his spiritual autoimmunity remained weak. Evil, like all pathogens, was opportunistic. It waited for the chink, the fraying, the crack. It could wait a lifetime for one soul. Raszer had a sick feeling that the man inside the fortress had been waiting for his.

  The scavenging birds that circled overhead only added to the sense that he was walking into a death trap. To the Assyrian priests, the birds had been known as monk vultures for their bald heads and cowls of plumage. They were enormous, some with wingspans of nearly eight feet. You can’t have me, Raszer called from inside, but they got to him. Vultures know it’s only a matter of waiting.

  They saw no one, nothing with a beating heart, for almost three hours. The surrounding crags might indeed have been climbing destinations, but the canyons below looked like every ancient world depiction of hell Raszer had ever seen. Gehanna. Sodom. The Pit. They’d entered the first world, the first place to claim a culture, and all around them was evidence that this culture had gone to dust.

  They struggled up one last, long grade—more than three miles at a forty-five-degree angle—before the land leveled out to a high plateau and they spotted, at what appeared to be about five hundred yards ahead, a grove of walnut trees, the ground beneath them carpeted in deep green vegetation. Just ahead of the trees, the path widened into a narrow dirt road that ran right through the arbor.

  “There’s a wee tributary,” said Dante. “Dry in summer, but now there should still be snowmelt. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a drink.”

  “And cool off a bit,” added Francesca.

  “And rest,” Ruthie moaned. “My feet have blisters on top of blisters.”

  “Those trees definitely look inviting,” said Raszer.

  “Well, keep your eyes on them,” cautioned Francesca. “This is where—for some people—it begins to happen. Perspective may start to shift. Reference points change.”

  Almost as soon as she’d said those words, Raszer began to notice that there was in fact something slightly wrong with the picture. Though surrounded by sawtooth peaks, the area was almost perfectly flat—a natural arena. In the midst of the barrenness, the anomalous grove of trees and the little green park they sheltered looked as if Magritte had conceived them. What rendered the scene most surreal was the fact that there appeared to be nothing beyond the trees. When he looked at them, he looked straight into them, and neither sky nor mountains beyond were
visible through their leaves. In the intervening space, atoms of blue fell from the heavens like glitter and reflected the blinding sunlight. Shaykh Adi bounded ahead and seemed swallowed up by the sparkle. He barked twice and then briefly disappeared from sight before rematerializing much farther ahead than seemed possible in the short time that had elapsed.

  “Did you see that?” Raszer exclaimed. “How did he do that?”

  Dante laughed. “It’s no ordinary place.”

  “And he is no ordinary dog,” added Francesca.

  “What the fuck’re you all talking about?” Ruthie asked.

  “Just keep your eye on Adi,” Dante replied.

  Now, a second strange thing occurred. Shaykh Adi kept trotting toward the trees—that is, his four legs appeared to be in locomotion—but did not seem to be bringing him any closer. His size didn’t change relative to the grove, but remained exactly the same, as if he were trotting on a treadmill. Nor did the trees loom any larger or come into focus, despite the fact that the group had closed another hundred yards; their leaves and branches remained a vivid but impressionistic blur, like a photo taken with a very long lens.