“It was just the fucking flu, Leonard,” Jack broke in. He felt anxious and angry and aroused, as he usually did when Leonard visited. “You didn’t—”
Leonard hushed him, touching a finger to Jack’s lips. “He said you were really quite ill; and so I decided this was not the time to be patient.”
“Oh, right. Leonard Thrope’s famous patience—”
Leonard ignored him. He stood, peeked into the corridor, then closed the bedroom door.
“You’re not going to smoke, are you?” Jack tried not to sound peevish.
“No.” Leonard settled back onto the bed. He looked so serious that Jack’s anxiety began to churn into fear.
“Now,” said Leonard, “I want you to listen to me very carefully. You know I was in Tibet, right?”
Jack nodded. His gaze was fixed on the little bag in Leonard’s hand.
“Well, I met someone there—”
“Congratulations.”
“Don’t be an idiot. I mean, I met a very extraordinary person, someone who—well, someone who just may have been the most important person I’ve ever met in my life. The most important person any of us might meet…”
Jack suppressed a groan, thinking of all the other Most Important People in Leonard’s life, from the Dalai Lama to Gunther, Leonard’s personal scarification artist.
“Don’t you look at me like that.” His tone startled Jack: not Leonard’s usual imperious command, but something that held a warning. Leonard looked distinctly uncomfortable, almost frightened. And that worried Jack most of all, because Leonard Thrope made his art, and his living, by not being afraid of anything.
“Jackie, I am doing you a favor. A very big favor. I think.” He glanced down at the cloth bag.
“Oh.” Jack swallowed. He imagined any number of horrors that Leonard might have brought back from Tibet—scorpions, a mummified penis, a chunk of uranium. “Well. Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
Leonard sighed. His fingers closed around the sack. For an instant Jack’s heart leapt: he wouldn’t be able to part with it, after all. But then Leonard let out his breath and, leaning forward, opened Jack’s hand and placed the cloth pouch inside it.
“Okay. There—I’ve done it. It’s yours, now.”
Jack tried to shove the thing back at Leonard. Leonard shook his head.
“Hey! Relax, Jack—it’s not a goddamn monkey’s paw—”
“Leonard, I don’t really—”
“Just open it, okay? For chrissake.” Leonard stared at his friend in disgust. “And be careful—”
Jack looked down at his open palm. The pouch lay there, small and oddly heavy.
“Open it,” Leonard urged.
The pouch was closed with a narrow strip of leather. Jack teased it loose, his heart beating much too fast. He turned so that Leonard would not see how his hands trembled.
“Right,” Jack whispered. Now the pouch was open. He tilted it above his palm, half-expecting something to spill forth, bones or stones or magic beans. But whatever it held was too big. Jack bit his lip, then stuck his finger and thumb into the pouch and pulled whatever was inside, out.
“There!” Leonard grinned triumphantly, the same expression he’d had when he first talked Jack into visiting the Anvil with him oh, a hundred years ago.
Jack held a small bottle up to the light. A brown-glass medical vial, of the sort Jack had become too familiar with over the last few years, wide-mouthed and stoppered with a lump of soft lead and a wax seal. A neatly hand-lettered label was pasted across it. Jack squinted, trying to read, but it was covered with Japanese characters. Only at the very bottom someone had written in a shaky hand.
FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA
FUSAX 687
Jack turned to Leonard. “What is it?”
Leonard hesitated. “It’s an experimental drug. Dr. Hanada calls it Fusax. The 687 is a batch number—it’s the most recent one.”
“Dr. who ?” Jack shook his head. “Leonard—what the hell is this?”
Leonard smoothed his leather kilt, fiddled with a gold chain dangling from a sleeve.
“I have a client, a CEO at Zeising, who collects birds,” he said, “Apparently there was a sighting a few months ago of a Himalayan griffon. Of course they’re supposed to be extinct, like everything else, but you’d be surprised what turns up.
“Anyway, my client arranged for me to go to Gyantse. Private jet, fake visas—the usual shit. Only when I got there the guide who’d been arranged for me had mysteriously disappeared—I never found out what happened—and I was stranded for two weeks in Lhasa. Just as well, since I needed the extra time to acclimate, so I wouldn’t get altitude sickness. I spent most of my time at Nechung Monastery. The monks weren’t crazy about having me at first, but eventually we came to an understanding and they allowed me to live there for several days.
“It was the griffon that did it. Sky burials, you know. In Tibet they chop you up and put the pieces on a mountaintop for the vultures, unless you’re a lama, in which case you’re cremated or buried. I—”
Jack sighed. “I remember.” Five years earlier, Leonard’s customarily graphic Cemetery of the 84 Mahasiddhas had caused some problems at Sundance. With a grim expression, Jack held up the vial of Fusax. “Leonard. What does this have to—”
“—I told them about the griffon,” Leonard went on. “They consider it sacred in Nechung. It’s a holdover from the Bon faith. Very rarely, holy men are given sky burial; if the griffon comes to the funeral, it’s considered a sign that the dead man has been accepted into the highest level of existence in the afterlife, and will not be reborn. Griffons oversee the passage between this world and the world of the dead. Really, it’s just a vulture—a very beautiful vulture.
“One night, a monk came to my room. He spoke a little English, and he understood that I didn’t want to hunt the griffon, or to kill it—they’d seen all my equipment, helped me hide it, as a matter of fact, in case the PSB came looking for me. He told me that there was a place I should visit, another monastery on an island in the sacred lake of Yandrok-tso. He said I might see the griffon there; but he also said there was a man I should meet. A monk. Someone who had been waiting many years for me to come.”
Leonard fell silent, his dark gaze fixed upon the window. Jack grew increasingly uneasy. In motion Leonard possessed a certain predictability; sitting still he filled Jack with alarm. He tried to think of something to say that would disarm the moment—like, who in their right mind would have been waiting for Leonard ?—but any answer to this question was too ominous to contemplate.
“So I went to Pelgye Kieria. That was the name of the island, and the monastery. An amazing place, Jack! Only seven monks are left there, from this sect that goes back to Genghis Khan. They say they protect the door between the worlds. They protect us from Brag-srin-mo, the demon of the cliff. Beneath Pelgye Kieria is the secret gate to her heart, which leads to the underworld. That’s what the monks believe, anyway…
“I was at Pelgye Kieria for three days before I learned that there was a Japanese monk there with them. Quite an elderly man—the others were relatively young, I mean in their forties or fifties—but this monk was old, and very frail. He didn’t take his meals with the rest, and no one at Pelgye Kieria mentioned him to me, even though I told them that the monks at Nechung had sent me there specifically to meet someone.
“I tell you, Jackie, the whole place gave me the fucking creeps, and by then I was pretty goddamn sick of yak butter and tsampa. They wouldn’t let me take any pictures inside the monastery, so I spent all my time out on the rocks, looking for the Himalayan griffon.
“Without any luck, as it turned out; for all I know they are extinct. By the third day I figured I’d just about shot my wad at Pelgye Kieria. I was outside taking pictures of the cliffs, trying to think of some way to get back to shore, when this very old man came up and started talking to me.
“He had his head shaved, and he was wearing the same robes and ev
erything as the rest of them. So I probably wouldn’t have figured out that he was Japanese and not Tibetan: he just looked like another incredibly ancient monk. But he spoke English—I just about swallowed my gum when he started talking to me—and he said that he had heard I was looking for him. I told him about the monk at Nechung; he just nodded, like he knew all about it. But when I asked what he was doing there, he just shook his head and said ‘Nga lam khag lag song. Ha ko ma song?’
“‘That means ‘I’m lost,’” Leonard explained, smiling wryly. “One of the few bits of Tibetan I do know. ‘I am lost: do you understand?’ I thought he was joking, and so I laughed.
“His name was Keisuke Hanada. Doctor Keisuke Hanada; he was careful to tell me that. He had heard that an American photographer had somehow managed to enter the country, looking for the griffon, and had visited Nechung and shown interest in the paintings of the demons there. He thought I was a newspaper reporter; he very much wanted to talk to me.
“He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war. I don’t know how or why they admitted him; he was pretty evasive about answering any questions. He described himself as samsara—‘wandering on’—you know, that whole Buddhist thing of being trapped between here and various afterlives. He’d had virtually no contact with the outside world since after the war, and the other monks at Pelgye Kieria pretty much left him alone. I guess if you were to look at it from our perspective, he was there to make atonement, to ease his guilt. But guilt’s a pretty Western concept—I don’t think that’s how Dr. Hanada would have put it.
“He invited me to his room, and—and showed me what he had in there. He said the time had come for him to tell someone the truth about his life. He wanted to tell an American. It was very important to him, that he talk to an American…”
Jack looked up, surprised at the hesitancy in Leonard’s voice. His friend only stared at the window, then continued.
“His room was your typical Tibetan monk’s cell. But he had set up this sort of—laboratory—in it. Not exactly state-of-the-art, either. He’d brought his own equipment with him fifty years ago, and since then he’s just sort of jury-rigged everything with—well, you can imagine the kind of shit you’d find in a Tibetan monastery, right? No electricity whatsoever. We’re talking Dr. Caligari here, Jackie. And he had a bunch of other stuff—photos and documentation, field notes—though he didn’t show me those on that particular visit.
“But it was a real working lab, and he’d been working in it, for all those years. He showed me. And he told me this—story. This very long, almost unbelievable, story. For two days, he told me—oh, everything! It would take me a week to do it justice.”
Leonard turned. There was something in his expression that Jack had never seen before. A look of abundance, of satiety. It would have been captivating in anyone else. Seeing it on Leonard’s merry death’s-mask of a face, Jack shuddered. When Leonard spoke again, his voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Have you ever seen someone look tortured? I don’t mean depressed, or sad, Jackie, but really tortured. Tormented. There’s this expression they get—it’s like they’re looking beyond, like they’re seeing the other side of something… When I did that series in Nairobi, after the femicides—I saw it there. Or remember that poem we learned in freshman English? ‘And then I saw his face/Like a devil’s sick of sin’—remember? Well, that was what Dr. Hanada looked like.
“He’s a kind of saint, Jack. I mean a real, live saint, like Mother Teresa, or—well, I don’t know. Thomas Merton, maybe? The Dalai Lama? I mean, I’ve met the Dalai Lama, Jack, and it wasn’t like this.
“Because Dr. Hanada—he had done things. Like Merton, you know? He hadn’t just been in this monastery his whole life, he’d had this whole other life, this—Christ, you wouldn’t have believed it, Jackie. I didn’t believe it, at first—I thought he was just some crazy, senile old man.
“But he had the photographs. And he had that lab. He’s been there for over fifty years now…”
Jack shivered, watching his old lover’s face trapped somewhere between horror and ecstasy, seeing in the ragged sky something Jack could not comprehend.
But Leonard had always seen it. The end of the century, the end of the world: Leonard had always known what was coming. In high school, the two of them on summer nights would sneak into the Episcopal church and in the darkness they would fuck breathless, nearly hysterical at their adolescent daring. Afterward Jack would lie exhausted across the front pew, his T-shirt pulled up to cool himself, bare feet pressed against the smooth wood. Leonard would sit at the church’s old pipe organ, and play and sing. He knew only one song. He played it over and over again, hands pounding the worn keys and feet stomping the treadles, shouting in his scorched voice until Jack’s hair stood on end—
“How do you think it feels?”
He sang himself hoarse, his face growing red and damp as he hunched over the keyboard. To Jack the words sounded like prophecy, or a threat.
“How do you think it feels?
And when do you think it stops?”
Whatever secret horrors fed Leonard’s vision, Jack had always believed his friend wanted nothing more than this: to make everyone else see what he saw: corpses rotting in a suburban bedroom, the husks of butterflies drained by spiders, naked men trussed like cattle in darkened basements.
And now we know, thought Jack. His gaze fell upon his friend’s ravaged face, the death’s-heads tattooed and branded and scarified across his wiry arms and the arc of glowing chips above his left eye. Nothing was left of the smooth-skinned boy Jack had loved except his eyes, which had never been boyish at all. The rest Leonard himself had smelted away, leaving bones and scars and unruly pockets of flesh; the only things that had ever interested him, anyway.
“Fifty years,” whispered Leonard. “You know what he was like? Have you ever seen a picture of Padmasambhava?”
Jack made a face. “Not in Yonkers. Not recently.”
“Really? Well, here, look—” Leonard rummaged in a knapsack until he found a battered leather wallet, opened it, and flipped through its contents. “This guy,” he said, holding up a little rectangle like a trading card, its lurid colors tempered by a crosshatch of tears and folds. “Padmasambhava. He’s a Tibetan magician, this legendary yogi. Anyway, that’s who Dr. Hanada looks like.”
Jack took the picture. It showed a demonic-looking figure with madly rolling eyes standing on one leg. In his left hand he clutched a staff almost twice his height, impaled with human skulls.
“Right,” said Jack. Very deliberately he placed first the picture and then the vial of Fusax into Leonard’s hand. “You know, I don’t think I want to hear any more about any of this, Leonard. Thank you all the same. And I’m pretty tired, so maybe we could see about getting together some other—”
“It’s the cure, Jack.”
Jack gaped at him. His friend stared back, his expression withdrawn, almost hostile, then Leonard dropped the picture of Padmasambhava. It wafted across the floor and beneath the bed.
“The cure.” Leonard held up the vial so light from the window flowed over it, gold and green. “A miracle, Jackie.”
Rage swelled inside Jack. “What?”
“You heard me, Jackie.” Leonard’s eyes glittered. His mouth stretched into a grin as broad as it was merciless. “All that other stuff they’ve been giving to us all these years? It’s bullshit, sweetheart. Bullshit—
“This is it. This is the cure. For AIDS, for petra virus, all of it. This is what’s going to change fucking human history. Fusax.”
Jack stared at the corona of light around Leonard’s hair, the little bottle in his hand like a bright grenade.
Then, “You fucking son of a bitch,” said Jack.
And he decked him.
“Hey—!”
Leonard crashed to the floor. Jack heard the crack of his friend’s skull against wood and felt his heart start joyously, as though a lover had called his name.
“What the fuck?” Leonard flung his arms across his face, the bottle rolling toward the wall. “WHAT THE—”
Jack ignored him. He walked over to where the vial had come to rest against the leg of his father’s old desk. He picked up the bottle and eyed it warily.
FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA
FUSAX 687
He pondered the indecipherable Japanese characters above the Latin name. But of course they had nothing to tell him, good old dependable Jackie-boy. Mysterious doctors never shared their secrets with him, and the only demon Jack had ever known sprawled on the floor, moaning and cursing.
“…fucking nuts, Jackie, you know that? Fucking…”
Jack continued to stare at the vial, giving it this last chance to redeem itself. At last he turned, facing the window with its rippling carnival light, and with all his strength hurled the bottle from him.
“JACKIE! NO—”
He had expected it to shatter against the pane. Instead the vial shot right through the glass, leaving a surprisingly small neat opening, like a bullet hole. Jack walked over and examined it.
“Wow.” He crouched down and eyeballed it, shaking his head in wonderment at a hole the size of an old-fashioned silver dollar. There was no radius of cracks, no broken glass. Just that perfect bull’s-eye. “I was sure it would break.”
Behind him Leonard stumbled to his feet and limped to the window. Jack flinched, but the other man seemed not even to notice him. Leonard put his hands upon the glass and pressed his face close, his breath fogging the pane as he peered at the lawn below. A bruise was already darkening his left cheek. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Me neither.” Jack glanced at him warily, but his friend only stared outside. His dark eyes were filled with tears.
“Oh, shit.” Jack’s bravado melted into remorse. He’d only seen Leonard cry once before, at Rachel Gardino’s funeral. “Leonard, I’m—oh, Jeez, Leonard…”
“I can’t believe it. I was only trying to—trying to—”
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