by A. W. Hill
“And if the monster you see is a mirror of your own self?”
“Then I know which mirrors to smash.”
“Ha!” said the sheikh. “Fortitude you have. But passion blinds you. Let me show you the world as it is.” He whistled through his teeth, a long, trilling tone with a scoop at the end. Presently, a young man—one of those Raszer had seen in the garden—came through the curtained doorway and stood before the sheikh. “What is your name?” his master asked.
“My name is yours to give,” the young man replied.
“Son of a whore,” said the sheikh. “Where were you born?”
“I was born in the Garden.”
“Remove your robe.”
The young man—now seeming far more a boy--did as he was told, and stood naked before the wall. A shiver ran the length of his body. Instinctively, he cupped a hand over his groin, but not quickly enough. Raszer was at first moved to pity, the way he might have been moved by an animal missing a limb, or a child with a cleft palate, but quickly the milk of pity soured to anger, and then to fury.
Between the young man’s legs was only a vestigial organ.
He had been cut to the root.
Maybe it was the memory of the mortally wounded soldier, twitching spastically in the road, and maybe the outrage of the waking nightmares they’d only an hour ago projected on the white walls of his mind, but finally it was too much. Raszer turned on his tormentor and took hold of the veil that covered his face.
“Fils de merde,” he spat.
“Poor comportment for a priest,” said the sheikh, freeing himself. “Have you heard what science has found? Ninety percent of the human genome is identical to that of an earthworm. And what is fornication but the worm in human nature? And what is law but the boot that keeps the worm pinned to the ground? If we wish to be free of the boot, we must be prepared to sacrifice the worm. Only then can the will triumph.”
“Very tidy,” said Raszer. “Very clean. But you’ve destroyed the fruit to cut out the rot. Man and the earthworm share genetic lineage because both are the products of a single idea: the Word made flesh. An essential current flows through the sex parts; if you break the circuit, we lose our connection to the power source. If I call myself a priest, it is because each day I strive to transform this current into love, and this service is by choice. Deny this choice, and I’m no longer a servant—I’m a slave.”
The sheikh uttered a command that Raszer didn’t comprehend, and in less than three seconds, the naked boy had vaulted the wall and leapt to his death. Raszer followed the descent to impact eight hundred feet below with his breath stopped in his windpipe, a hand still outstretched impotently in an effort to grab the boy’s ankle.
“There are a thousand more like him inside,” said the sheikh. “Do you truly believe that your world can survive an order such as this?”
“And what is your place in it?” Raszer asked. “If there’s no truth, and everything is permitted, it’s difficult for me to see the ‘order’ in it.”
“We are . . . what has always been in these highlands. We are like the wind, and want only what the wind has: pure existence, without constraint of law or social order. To go where we please, invisibly. The only God on Earth is will. The only law is will expressed as power. Men once knew this, but have been tricked by sentiment. Tell me, where is pity in the world? The God of this world demands discord, not community.”
“I think you’re a few thousand years late . . . maybe a few hundred million. Even orangutans form communities. You can’t will the world to jump when you say, ‘Jump.’”
“Perhaps not. But we can will the world to fear, and in fearing, it will form boundaries and stand one side against the other. We will occupy the neutral ground. We will hasten the world’s division and reap the space between.”
“What you’ll reap is the whirlwind . . . ”
“Have you come to preach to us, Father?”
“No. I’ve come for one girl. One girl is surely worth keeping your castle.”
“Perhaps more. She is a special girl. What do you offer?”
“What can one American girl be worth to someone like you?”
“Let me answer your question with a question,” said the sheikh. “What quality in woman is most valued by man?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” said Raszer.
“A beautiful emptiness, upon which he may project his desire.”
Raszer said nothing.
“What will it mean for your world if her face becomes the face of terror?”
Again, Raszer stayed silent.
“So I ask you again. What will you pay for her?”
“Something worth a thousand souls to you. The missing piece of the Ka’ba stone, al-Hajar al-Aswad, taken from Mecca when your forebears sacked it. That’s the history, isn’t it? They returned it in pieces after twenty-two years. But of twelve fragments, only seven were restored. Four of those remaining were hardly more than chips, but one was of a size great enough—in the hands of a master—to evoke Atargatis. The stone was yours until a boy named Henry Lee took it from under your nose.”
“The whole of this fortress is built upon sacred rock. Why should we bargain with a Christian for a fragment of what we already possess?”
“Because it’s a very special fragment, and because you understand that cracks lead to catastrophes. Once it’s widely known that the stone of the Ka’ba is not intact—and that the Satanic verses have a basis in history, the Islamic world will erupt . . . and the conflict you hope to profit from may never occur.”
“How would you propose to deliver this stone to us?”
“As soon as the girl is on her way home, it will be handed over to you.”
“By whom?”
“By me.”
The sheikh said nothing, but stepped to the wall and surveyed the sweep of the canyon. After a few moments, he spoke. “This matter is not for me to decide.” His voice trailed off as he left the balcony, saying, “I will send someone for you.”
If the story went where stories are wont to go, Raszer was about to meet the Old Man of the Mountains.
THIRTY-SIX
It was an ordinary door of uncertain age, pale green with a knob of tarnished brass. Raszer stepped through into a small, square space that resembled a museum re-creation of a late-eighteenth-century European sitting room. There were in the room a love seat with fat cushions upholstered in striped silk, two high-backed chairs of dark, ornamented wood, two matching hutches of the same dark wood, and an oil painting of a small cottage in a deep forest. Nothing about the room was especially inviting, or forbidding. Nothing made him feel that he was expected to linger there. But he felt out of place and uneasy, as if he were the wrong-size doll in a dollhouse.
Raszer had been given no instructions by his attendant, other than a gesture and the words “Through there.” On the opposite end of the room was another green door, identical to the first.
He walked to the door and was about to open it; then he paused and turned. It was then that he perceived the truth of the room: The scale of everything was just slightly—almost imperceptibly—smaller than life. That’s why he’d felt too big.
He turned the green door’s tarnished knob and stepped into a larger square room with precisely the same furnishings. The placement was identical, as was the position of the green door on the opposite wall, only now he felt smaller, as if a lens had been flipped or the floor had dropped. Oddly, the possibility that the furniture was larger seemed the least likely. He tried to access the first room so that he could compare the scale, but the door had locked behind him. He did not want to stay here, either, so he proceeded to the next door. Again, he turned just before leaving, and noticed that smoke was rising from the chimney in the painting of the little house in the woods. He didn’t think it had been there before, but he might not have noticed it.
The third room was larger still, although the relative proportion and placement of every article in it were exactly
the same. This time, Raszer allowed himself to gather his thoughts for a minute, sitting on the love seat. The pause did him no good. His bearings were off; he felt vulnerable. He reasoned that the interrogation had taken a lot out of him, and now they were fucking further with his head. If his senses were to be believed, he had lost about six inches of height in two minutes. He knew now, of course, that the scale of the rooms and furnishings must be gradually increasing—that it was some kind of optical riddle—but this was not at all what he felt.
What he felt was that he was shrinking. Once again, the door locked behind him. He glanced at the painting. The front door of the cottage had now opened, and a blond child was coming out. She seemed to be upset. He thought immediately of Brigit.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth rooms continued his diminution, but in increments so finely calibrated that his mind couldn’t get a fix on the change in scale. Someone with a mastery of geometry—and the science of human perception—had mapped this out.
In physical stature, he was now about ten years old.
On entering room number four, having learned his lesson about the self-locking doors, he determined to remain at the threshold with the doorknob in hand, looking both ahead and behind, until he’d figured out the ratio. But he found that he was unable to see the space ahead without stepping fully into it—and that the door shut smartly the moment he stepped away from it.
By room six, the expression on the face of the girl in the painting had become one of distinct panic, and the open door of the cottage revealed an adult figure, flat on a cot at the far end of the room, his arm dangling listlessly over the side, as if he were either drunk or dying.
Raszer denied the implications at first, but now they were unavoidable: The girl was coming more and more to resemble his daughter, and the enfeebled figure on the bed to resemble him.
He knew that a good optical illusion could be so deeply disorienting that you lost track of ordinary things, yet he was surprised to find that by the time his physical sense of himself had shrunk to about forty-two inches and the high-backed chairs towered over him like skyscrapers, he’d forgotten how many rooms he’d been through.
He didn’t think it could be more than a dozen, but why, then, was he so many worlds away?
How had they done it? A couple of ideas had taken root in Raszer’s mind, both based on the effect the experience was having on him. The first was that he was being taught to mistrust his perception. The second was that he was being diminished so that his ego would not present an obstacle to whatever sort of dark enlightenment they had in mind. Both seemed to be ways of preparing him for his destination. Weirdly enough, his altered perception and its inside-out quality lent him a kind a balance. That is, until he saw what was happening in the painting.
It was no longer a naturalistic landscape of quaint cottage and leafy trees, but a hyperrealistic depiction of death in the forest. The girl had moved into the extreme foreground and stood with her hands clapped over her open mouth, eyes wide in terror. A third of her form had passed outside the picture frame. The dying man in the cottage, jaundiced, horribly gaunt, and seemingly much older, was clearly meant to be him. The man had lifted his arm with what must have been a last reserve of strength, and appeared to be summoning. His cracked lips were parted as if calling.
Raszer stepped closer.
Did you say something? was what he thought. He stepped closer. Come again? He was in close and could now see—almost feel—the paper-thin skin stretched over the cheekbones, the sharp ridge of the avian nose, a strange glassiness in the right eye.
And then, suddenly, he found himself looking out from the skull of the man in the painting.
What he saw was a simple plank floor, swept clean, and a room in which he could make out only the chair beside the bed (where the child had probably kept her vigil), a wood-burning stove, and an easel on which the girl had painted the cottage in watercolors. Everything else was flared out by the light that spilled through the open door. The light was like gold mist. Raszer felt that if he could get to it, he might be young again. He would not be feeble.
But it was hard to tell how far away the door was. There was something wrong with his depth perception. One at a time, and with difficulty, he lowered his eyelids. With the right lid closed, he could see as he had before. With the left lid closed, he could see nothing. He opened his good eye and crawled from the cot onto the floor, remaining on all fours until he reached the door, which was, in fact, quite a long way away. When he arrived, he took hold of the knob and pulled himself up.
He had returned to his present self and stood in a room the size of the very first room, but empty of furniture and painted the same pale green as the doors. A fissure bisected the floor on a diagonal from corner to corner, and in the fissure ran a clear spring from which vapors rose. On the wall, where the painting had hung, there was now a large mirror with a gold frame, and inside the mirror, a peacock sat on a golden stool, preening its glowing feathers. It was both more real than a hologram and less real than a photograph. No matter which direction Raszer moved, he could not eclipse the bird. It had not seemed to notice his arrival, so he decided to speak to it.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hel-lo,” the bird said back. The voice struck Raszer immediately. It had the usual avian graininess, but behind that, something else: the quality of a marionette’s voice, thrown by the puppeteer. Hadn’t he’d heard this in the kitchen of the Kingdom Hall in Azusa, in the voice of Elder Amos Leach? A neither/nor quality.
“Do I hear an echo?” asked Raszer.
“In a manner of speaking,” said the bird.
“Who’s the fairest of them all?”
The bird said nothing. Clearly, it felt it was.
“You’ve mindfucked me and shrunk me, and shown me my own death. Now do I get the girl?”
“You have one more task to perform.”
“What’s that?”
“First, a question: Who is Philby Greenstreet?”
“Can’t tell you what I know. Only what I think.”
“That will do.”
“Philby Greenstreet is the Preserver. Like Shiva. You’re the Destroyer, right?”
“What is it he seeks to preserve?”
“For lack of a better term, civil society. Pluralism.”
“And this is your ideal? A ‘civil’ society?”
“Not ideal, maybe, but the base condition for anything better to happen.”
“What is ideal?”
Raszer hesitated. He knew he was being engaged in a dialectical exchange, preplotted by his avian interlocutor.
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a bird.”
“You are having this conversation with Melek Ta’us. What is ideal?”
“The peace which passeth understanding,” Raszer answered warily.
“And where is this peace to be found?”
He saw where the interrogatory was leading. The correct answer was “death.”
“Nowhere,” he replied.
“Nowhere?” the bird repeated, cocking its plumed head.
“Na-Koja-Abad. Nowhere-Land.”
“And how does one reach this wondrous place which is no place?”
“I won’t presume to teach hermeneutics to one such as yourself, Lucifer.”
“I was once an angel, yes. Now merely a god. But there is always more to learn.”
“Well said. Have I told you how beautiful you are?”
“You have no idea,” said the bird, opening its glorious fan. “Get to the point.”
“Look closer.”
“What?” asked the bird, unused to being directed.
“Na-Koja-Abad is the pearl in the oyster. A world enfolded, as the physicists say, in an extradimensional matrix. The seeker must use ta’wil to see past zahir to batin, the inner reality of things. If he’s successful, he enters through the door of imagination to alam al-mithal, the intermediate realm of subtle matter—things that haven’t yet be
come. He can do this only in the subtle body, the jism mithali. In this, he achieves dhawq, perception of the sublime. Finally, if he hasn’t been frightened away by what he sees, he achieves ilm, the gnosis that the world is the imperfect embodiment of the pearl, of perfect forms conceived in the mind of God. And there lies the peace I spoke of.”
“How Platonic,” said the bird, puffing its feathers. “But how does a man return to the ugliness and pointlessness of the world after seeing such sublime things?”
“In truth, he never left it. He has arrived at the Mountain of Qaf, where the point of departure and return are one and the same. The world, however, has become new to him, and he will never see it again with the same eyes. The beauty coexists with the world, however flawed its external manifestation.”