“You know a girl was found dead at your place?” He looked at me as if holding his breath. “That’s right, just keep that blank look. You don’t remember anything. You don’t even know who the girl could be.
“The girl is named Connie Catlin; that’s her stage name, real name Janet Complenz. She was found dead, strangled, in your bedroom. No one could find you. Neighbors said they heard a quarrel. Signs that you took off in a hurry. The search was all over the newspapers. Here.” He pointed to a stack of papers he’d put on the table. “The longer you were missing, the worse it looked. You were convicted in those papers. Then they found you, almost dead. For the first time there was some doubt in their minds. You could have gone away on a trip and let the girl use your place. Or you could have quarrelled then left. An intruder, caught robbing, could have killed her.”
“Time’s up.” The nurse held the door open determinedly. The cop behind her sneaked a look in at me.
“Okay. I’ll be back to talk to you again when you feel strong enough. Until then I advise you not to talk to anyone.”
It wasn’t real. Nothing was real. I can’t describe the shock that hit me. For about three days the doctors felt I would die after all. You know the story of Rip Van Winkle. This was worse. My loss was infinitely more than the few years lost by the old man in the story. He had slept, while I had awakened. And was I now to find that my awakening was only a dream?
I lay without speaking for two weeks. I tried to sleep to let dreams through. I saw only shadows, like the old shadows of long ago. They did not frighten me any more, but when I tried to face them, to make them visible, they only shrank into nothing. I could not trance. I had lost the rhythm; there was no unheard music to move to. There was nothing.
“You’re not trying,” the nurse began to say, and the doctor signed a release for me to leave the hospital. I refused to go. My lawyer came every day, thrusting the newspapers under my nose. “Listen, right now, temporarily, you’ve got a bit of sympathy on your side because of the accident, but it won’t last. We’ve got to get a hearing on this thing right away, while you’re still in a cast. Pull yourself together, man, your life may depend on it.”
I finally read the papers. I will not repeat their contents, as probably you are familiar with the case. I would only say that the newspapers, in vilifying me, in giving long accounts of my squalid relationships, my excesses, my other violent episodes, culminating (as they correctly guessed) in my killing of Connie, did not exaggerate. The only thing that bothered me about the accounts was their underlying flavor of envy and admiration.
“They’re really out to get you,” said Spanger. “They can’t forgive you for doing all the things they wish they had the guts to do. Now, listen, if you’re not going to end up dead or in a cell for the rest of your life, we have to move fast, now!”
I felt dead already, or too heavy to move. I could not imagine that I had been sent back to be caged or killed as a murderer and forgotten. What good could that do?
Once I had asked that question, all certainty fell away from me. I lost everything.
A good look in the mirror showed that I was thirty years old, no older. The dates on the papers, the statements of my lawyer, showed that no more than a few weeks had passed. I wished with all my soul that this were a dream, and I waited and waited to wake up. But I did not. Had all the events of the past time happened? Did Ata exist? The answer was obvious: Ata existed, but only in the drug-laden and injured brain of an admittedly imaginative and desperate man.
Once out of the hospital, it was impossible for me to cling any longer to the hope that anything had changed. I had undergone some profound experience. Perhaps it had changed me. Perhaps some day I would understand it. But in the meantime, Spanger convinced me, I had to survive.
“Your leg, and the trouble you have speaking because of the head injury, that’s all right, that’s good. I think it’ll gain some sympathy at the hearing; there’ll be a grand jury hearing first. It’s just possible we can convince them that you left and someone else came in and killed her. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
He showed me more newspapers. Their tone had changed slightly. There was a possibility that I was innocent, a possible mystery murderer, and my miraculous survival. To sell newspapers, it was expedient to be somewhat more sympathetic to me now. My lawyer hoped to take advantage of this. “After all, you’re a pretty famous man, not a common criminal. Sale of your books has tripled. If you come through this, if a lot of people begin to see how much money can be made off you alive and writing again …” He crossed his fingers and grinned.
I stayed at home and waited for the day of the hearing. I sent the servants away, and hobbled around, eating whatever I found—there was an incredible amount of food and liquor in the house, more than I could consume in a year. I lived with the lights out and the drapes drawn to keep out the people who crept about the place, trying to get a look at me.
Spanger advised me not to answer the phone, saying that if any friend wanted to see me, he would contact Spanger. No one did. But I knew that after I got through the hearing, if there were not enough evidence to try me, there would be dozens of “friends” and scores of women, just as there had been before … only a few weeks before.
And I would be more famous than ever. And there would be more money. And any trash I wrote would sell, for at least the next three years, until a new sensation was found. By that time I would have enough money to live in ease for the rest of my life.
I signed the statements Spanger brought to me.
I sat in front of the unlit fireplace. I tried to drink. But the wine soured in my stomach. So I just sat until the day of the hearing.
“They will already have read a lot of documents, evidence presented by the district attorney and so forth. You probably won’t have to say much. Just being there willing to talk, looks good. You’ve a good presence, and you look a bit strung out yet, and the crutches help. Direct your words at the women, you know what I mean. Our strongest argument will be that a man of your intelligence could not have been running away from a killing. Simply by reading your books, people know you’ve got too sharp a mind to do anything like that.”
I looked around the large round table at which these people sat informally, almost apologetically, sneaking looks at me, as they would at any celebrity. They were leading citizens of the city, respectable and respected. And ugly with pain. How I longed for the beauty of the faces of Ata.
As I watched them shuffle papers and glance at me, that ache grew into intolerable tension. I felt as if I might snap or explode. I felt faced with something so momentous that the whole universe was at stake.
The hearing would probably decide my survival. But, of course, survival meant a return to my old life. Since I now cared little for that life, I could not imagine why I felt full of this intolerable suspense.
I tried to analyze my situation calmly. Rationally, I had two choices.
I could, if lucky, carry through this lie about Connie’s death, and return to my old life … perhaps with resolution not to live it quite the same way, though it might be hard to keep a resolution which started with a lie.
Or I could tell the truth, be sent to my death, or to jail, still living out my life, but in considerably less comfort—in fact, subject to cruelties which might make me more vicious than I had ever been.
Those were the two alternatives, and between them the first seemed the only intelligent, rational choice.
But what if there were a third choice? What if, against all reason and evidence, against all common sense, against all rationality of the most intelligent or practical mind … what if Ata, the dream, was real?
What if, for some very good reason as yet unknown to me, I had been sent back not only in space, but in time. If I were willing to believe I could be sent through space, why did I balk at the possibility of being sent through time? Was one more difficult to believe than the other?
If I had truly been sent back,
if there were the slightest chance that it could be true, I would have to discipline myself to find the rhythm again, just as I had done when I was trying to contact Augustine. No matter what happened to me, no matter how hard the material events that came upon me, they were not real, if Ata was real. And, conversely, if I could not begin with belief in Ata, how could I ever find it again?
There was only one way to find out if Ata was real; that was to believe, to do only what was nagdeo, even if it meant throwing away my life. It was a gamble with all the odds against me. If I lost, I would die or spend the rest of my life in a cage.
Suddenly I laughed; would that life be any less vicious a prison, any less a death, now that I knew what it meant to be an Atan? With that laugh, the tension loosed its hold on me. Or, rather, I let go, like the last letting go in a long series of surrenders.
My laughter attracted their attention. Everyone looked at me questioningly. A couple frowned disapproval of my laughing at such a time.
“The statements. The statements I signed,” I said haltingly, “are lies. I killed the girl.”
To describe what happened next is, I am beginning to believe, impossible. I have written it over and over again, but it is still not right. If I had a whole lifetime to rewrite and rewrite, I still could not get it right within the limitations of words. And time is running out, so I must ask my reader please to accept the following as a suggestion of what actually happned, and to believe it.
There was an instant of silence, a silence more profound than that of the dumbfounded people around the table, more profound than the dark silence of the hol-ka, more profound even than the silence in the instant before I stepped into the fire.
And then there was light. Indescribably warm, glowing light. Light was everywhere. It shone on everything, through and into everything; it came out of everything, out of everyone. It was like a fire that does not consume, but not like a fire, like … like nothing else, nothing else was like it. But all things were full of it. The faces around the table, the table itself, the walls, the windows, everything was alive, everything lived in and through the light.
And I too. I too. From the center of my being the light broke in waves, in orgasmic waves, outward to the extremities of my body, every cell of my body melting together in the waves of light that flowed outward from my center, and over me from the very air around me, from everything. I breathed it into me and it poured out of me, sweeping through me like a million orgasms. I was full and whole. I was part of the light and of all the other things that shone in and with the light. All were one. And whole.
In that instant I understood all the stories and dreams and songs and dances of Ata, stories of jewels and of sun, of fire and of ocean. I understood the many versions of each story and the contradictions and paradoxes, and I knew that they were all, in their own way, true. For I had glimpsed the reality behind them.
Tears blinded my eyes for a moment but did not fall. Blinking through the blur, I saw something fluttering down from the chandelier above us. It circled my head once, then lit on my shoulder, a small black moth.
I have not spoken since then. There is no time. I know now why I was taken to Ata and why kept there and why chosen to come back. It was to fulfill Augustine’s dream by shining this feeble light on the people of Ata. What I don’t understand is why it should have been me. Perhaps I was chosen because my career, my life, my trial and my execution will attract a larger audience than might come to read the book of a better man or woman.
The guilty verdict and the death sentence came quickly. Spanger, confused and disgusted, went through the motions of pleading me insane. But an ambitious young assistant district attorney introduced a dramatic surprise: evidence for premeditation, in a letter Connie had written to a friend. In it she said she might be pregnant and planned, not an abortion, but a paternity suit demanding a huge and continuing share of my income. Then he read from one of my books, which details how a clever murderer feigned catatonic insanity and escaped prison. As he read to the court, he pointed to me, where I sat in trance most of the time to save energy so that I could write all night. He said I had been observed writing at night and insisted, quite rightly, that I could hardly be catatonic, yet able to write when I thought I was not being watched. He convinced the jury that I hoped to cheat the law and then publish a book which would capitalize on the trial publicity. And many people came forth to testify to my dishonesty, violence and opportunism. I bear resentment toward none of them. They merely told the truth.
While in trance I was attended by my daughter, who witnessed my trial, telling its events at dawn in our ka, to which she has returned. From her I learned that Salvatore died in the effort to send me back, and that his place and mine in our sleeping wheel will be taken by her and by the baby she carries in her body.
I would prefer to spend my remaining time with the people of Ata, but I have had to work night and day to finish the book in the time left to me. I have had to leave out many things, and even those that I have told may be misunderstood, told, as they are, in the faulty medium of words, and frozen on paper.
It is finished and tomorrow I go Home.
Perhaps you picked up this book because of the sensation surrounding my trial. Yet, you must have wanted more than sensation or you would have thrown it aside before now. If you continued to read, it was because in this hasty and incomplete account, I told you something that at some level of your being, you already know. Something you know as an echo, as a glimpse in a dream or as a fragile hope you are ashamed to voice.
Do not judge these words by the man who writes them. Listen, not to my words, but to the echo they evoke in you, and obey that echo. And think that if I, a murderer whose murders were the least of his crimes, if a man like me could find himself in Ata and could re-learn the dream, and further, could glimpse for a moment the reality behind the dream … then how much easier it might be for you.
You have only to want It, to believe in It, and tonight, when you close your eyes, you can begin your journey.
The kin of Ata are waiting for you.
Nagdeo.
Copyright © 1971 by D. M. Bryant
All rights reserved under International & Pan American Copyright Conventions. Co-published by: Random House
299 Park Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10171
and:
Moon Books
Post Office Box 9223
Berkeley, California 94709
Moon Books is an independent women’s publishing company operating out of San Francisco, California, with distribution through Random House, Inc., in New York. We are committed to making a wide variety of feminist material available in the general market.
Illustrations by Edidt Geever
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bryant, Dorothy.
The kin of Ata are waiting for you.
First published in 1971 under title: The Comforter.
I. Title.
PZ4.B91477Ki3 (PS3552.R878) 813’.5’4 76-8195
eISBN: 978-0-307-75540-7
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.0
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