Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  On the other side of the stone’s vast thickness Julie felt her forearm come free, turning and groping in emptiness, the mystery beyond the stone.

  She couldn’t understand how she had said it or how she’d understood what she had said. But she felt a small hand, no larger then her own (but stronger), taking hold of hers. The palm was leathery and warm, with more hair on the back of it than on hers. The other hand began to pull her through the stone.

  27

  As Marko came over the ledge Jamal got up quickly and scraped the rattling sack of cans to tangle Marko’s feet.

  “You little shit!” cried Marko. With his heel he kicked the trash bag behind him, out over the ledge. A moment of silence, then a clatter when it landed somewhere down below.

  Jamal took one backward step, reaching under the hem of his windbreaker to draw the pistol from the bottom of his spine. The chrome of it glimmered weakly in the moonlight. It looked small.

  “What is this, a fucking cap gun?” Marko said. “You’re not gonna shoot me.”

  Julie was looking at Jamal’s back, since he had put himself exactly between her and Marko, and over his shoulder she saw Marko halt and hold both his hands palm-out, leaning a little into his palms, like he was pushing against an invisible wall. At any moment the tilt would bring him lunging forward, through Jamal, toward her.

  “Are you sure?” Jamal said. He lowered the barrel, using both hands; the shot, though tinny, splintered rock at Marko’s feet. Marko looked down as if dumbstruck, then backed a couple of steps away.

  “Hold on,” he said, as Sonny pulled himself over the ledge behind him, and came from a crouch upright.

  “Jamal,” said Sonny. “Don’t—” He turned slightly and caught Marko by the elbow. “Man, it’s not worth it. Let’s just go.”

  28

  “What is this, a fucking cap gun?” Marko said. “Nah, Jamal—you’re not gonna shoot me.”

  “What would you bet on it?” Jamal raised his left hand to support the pistol, bending his knees slightly; his upper body framed a triangle, with the barrel at the point. Marko kept on leaning forward, as if pushing against an invisible wall, and then he broke through it, roaring, lunging through Jamal toward Julie—the gun made two inconsequential pops and Jamal skipped aside, since Marko wasn’t stopping. Julie edged away, but slowly, like she was pulling her feet out of paste. Behind her she felt the slit of the cave’s opening, as if it had already taken her in.

  Marko fell face-down at Julie’s feet. Fluid seeped out from his torso, spreading on the stone beneath him, slow as maple syrup in the moonlight. Julie clapped both hands over her mouth, to clamp off screams and the urge to puke. Where was Karyn? She wished she’d really spent the night at Karyn’s. She wished they both were still ten years old, whispering and scattering cracker crumbs beneath the sheets of a shared bed.

  Then Sonny pulled himself over the ledge.

  “Jamal,” he said, as he brought himself from a crouch to his feet. “What did you do?”

  “What would you do?” Jamal raised the gun barrel bolt upright, pointing at the moon, and for a moment Julie wondered if he’d turn it on himself. Sonny’s eyes went from Jamal to the blood that purled from Marko’s body, then back to Jamal again.

  “Jesus,” Sonny said. “It looks like a goddamn starter pistol.”

  “Not much knockdown to it,” Jamal said. “But it’ll kill you just the same.” He aimed the pistol at Sonny, bracing it as he had before. “Three shots left.”

  29

  Let me come out of this rock.

  She couldn’t understand how she had said it or how she’d understood what she had said. Through joined hands she and she were balanced on a cusp and the wall of stone was no more than the finest membrane between them. For a moment they spun around in a slow orbit on the axis of the hand clasp. Then Julie felt herself pushing through, or the membrane was shaping itself to accommodate her, like a glove turning itself outside in. Or herself, with the other hand inverting to fit itself perfectly over her own, the whole other skin stretching over her flesh, her bones, her re-forming body.

  Now the stone wall was behind her and she stood on the ledge before the rock shelter, her face in the wind, looking out through astonished eyes of the other, into another world.

  30

  Jamal threw himself in Marko’s way, and Marko backhanded him aside, swatting him off like a mosquito—Jamal flew off, tumbling as he landed, rolling into a crack of the rock shelter. Julie had no time to wonder if he was hurt, hurt badly or not, because now there was nothing between her and Marko, and nowhere to go but the cave.

  She had to stoop, turning sideways to get into it. The edges of rock pressed into her clammily, and she thought, with a half-hysterical hiccup, of spiders, snakes—but Marko was roaring outside the opening, thrusting his heavy arm and stubby fingers after her. She had to—had to go further in. And what if her life ended just like this, like a kernel stuck in the whorls of a nut? The passage tightened as it turned, stone scraping the vinyl between her shoulder blades; she heard a couple more studs tear free and patter down.

  Then something gave, or softened rather. The texture of the passage changed, still pressing her on all sides but rubbery now, as warm as flesh, and pulsing. Tripping, tripping—her heart tripped in her mouth—she could hope the whole thing was just a weird trip, if they had cut the molly with acid, like Jamal had said.

  If she hadn’t drunk that water. If she had. Her head thrust tighter and tighter into the clasping walls of the passage, then finally, dizzyingly, broke free. She was falling into a cool breezy space, with no direction and no gravity, as if she were falling asleep.

  31

  Marissa woke as intended to the sound of the unearthly chant: qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis. She sat up on her prayer mat, hands folded across her heart, breathing as she had been taught, sharp intakes of air through the nostrils, pulled down to the bottom of her belly, then harshly expelled. The rushing sound of her breath flowed in and out between the long sustains of the singing. Ten breaths brought her alert. What had been the dream she was just dreaming?—but she was not meant go toward that now.

  Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus.

  Breathing normally now, forgetting even that she breathed, she lowered her hands from her heart and let them lie palms open on her inner thighs, in the cross of her legs on the prayer mat. Her palms were full of heart warmth, as if they cupped warm fluid in the dark. The darkness was not total, though. A weak light flickered in a high corner, partially obscured, casting a horned shadow across the floor and the far wall where it broke on the black felt that sealed the window. She brought her mind to bear on the First Sin, that of the Angels.

  — . . . wanting to recall and understand all this in order to make me more ashamed and confound me more, bringing into comparison with the one sin of the Angels my so many sins, and reflecting, while they, for one sin, were cast into Hell, how often I have deserved it for so many. . . .

  In doing so,, she concentrated on a point of warmth halfway between her navel and her vulva, as though blowing softly on a coal—this practice belonged to a different discipline yet she believed it might aid this one.

  Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis

  . . . the sin of the Angels, how they, being created in grace, not wanting to help themselves with their liberty to reverence and obey their Creator and Lord, and thus they were changed from grace to malice, and hurled from Heaven to Hell; and so then . . .

  qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostrum

  But here Marissa’s mind got stuck on the word hurled, which somehow attached itself to a weakness in her meditation, whispering itself into meaninglessness, tawdry as the hidden iPod on which she’d looped a Gregorian Qui Sedes, setting its timer to rouse her from her idle dreams at midnight, false as the yellow Christmas bulb tucked on top of her tall corner cupboard, which hurled the shape of its fineals across the room like horns. Mocked by her own monk
ey mind she trembled in frustration, hurled back and repulsed from the meditation even as she continued hopelessly to struggle

  to move the feelings more with the will.

  The music stopped, but she didn’t notice, and the light was gone too, something had changed, monkey mind was fussing over these changes but she managed to smother it quickly and completely, turning her being into the new thing, whatever it was, or rather, being snatched into it by three points, the one below her navel and the two aching points of her breasts. Across total darkness curved a sliver of light like a shooting star, going down and down, hurled down. O, O, O, she thought, with unutterable sorrow, She is lost. Back in her room, which somehow her being had departed, her hands were fluttering in her lap. Far away in the other realm, among its splintering materials. Lost to me. To herself. Not to herself.

  The spark went down a long way into darkness, but it did not go out.

  32

  Peggy Keenan flipped the top of a box of Winston Lights and shoved it across the mesh table toward her. Marissa shook her head, pushed the pack away, watched Peggy draw a pale cigarette from the box, strike fire from a pink butane lighter. She took a sip of the tasteless coffee from the office machine, whose only value was to wash down cigarettes, and with her other hand she slipped the beads in the pocket of her white lab coat along their string. Not that Peg’s cigarettes really tempted her. Marissa smoked—used to—real tobacco: Marlboro Reds, or Luckies when they could be found, the short Camel straights, something that would turn even her fingers brown, let alone her lungs. She hadn’t quit for health reasons. It was a mortification, and she felt it that way; the stale weak smoke from Peg’s exhale, blowing across her face in the autumn wind, was just a nasty smell, but enough to fire her craving.

  Peggy arched a plucked crescent of eyebrow. “How long’s it been?”

  Marissa worried a bead on her hidden rosary. “Six days,” she said.

  “Five hours,” said Peg. “Forty-three seconds.”

  Both women laughed briefly. Peggy tipped her ash onto the pavement—the same hexagon-scored concrete she’d seen spooled out by U.N. nation-building efforts all over the Third World. The wind skirled the cylinder of ash toward the narrow end of the trapezoidal courtyard, where a row of waiting clients smoked in the windbreak of the retaining wall and drank from containers hidden in paper sacks. It was just early autumn, but the breezes had a bite.

  “Seriously now,” Peg said. “You’re halfway home. Or better. First day’s the worst, just pure hell. Then the first week’s bad. Then after that—” She took a drag and blew it out over the head of her cigarette, held vertically before her face, “—it never gets any better!”

  Marissa looked at her, then away, toward the narrow end of the courtyard. In the space between them and their clientele, pigeons hunted crumbs through a windblown litter of snack wraps.

  “What?” said Peggy, stepping on her butt with the fat soft toe of her fleecy boot. “You think I don’t know how to quit? I do it all the time!”

  Marissa smiled thinly at the old gag, watching a pigeon peck its way closer to her own sneakered feet. She’d counted her way to the rosary’s cross. Claude had bought it from somebody on the rez, he’d told her, but it was finer than the usual tourist trinket, the beads satiny and sleek, the crucifix made of two different woods: light cross and a black Christ.

  “We used to club those things by the thousands,” Peggy said, looking down at the same pigeon. “Back when they were thicker than snow.” She made a fake retching sound. “Lord, I wouldn’t eat one now if you paid me.”

  We who? Marissa wondered briefly. Peg’s name and her pleasures were strictly Irish, her hair dirty blond and her eyes an impish green. Marissa had once blundered on her personnel file, where the statement that Peg was one-quarter Oglala Sioux had struck her at first as some kind of mistake. Later she took a closer look at Peg’s cheekbones and the way she walked, and decided after all there might be something in it. Something that could make Peg’s regular slurs on their clients a sort of speech within the tribe.

  “Those were passenger pigeons,” Marissa said, considering that whites had probably hammered more of them to death than the Indians ever did. “Not the same thing, I don’t think. Who knows, they might have been tasty.”

  Peggy snorted, stood up and kicked at the pigeon, which responded with a form of technical compliance, fluttering about a yard away from Peggy’s boot. Then the wind hooked down in a spiraling whoosh and lifted the trash and the pigeons all at once. Marissa followed the path of their flight to the thin end of the courtyard. The south wall of the building had two entries, one for Indian Health Services and the other for the counseling service that employed her and Peg. These were two ostensibly separate entities, but as Peg liked to quip, they did a lot of screwing around in the back alley. Looking at the huddle of clients waiting by the wall, Marissa felt a pang that was more than just wanting a smoke. She hadn’t realized Inez was there until the girl flipped back the fake-fur-lined hood of her stained parka. Inez was beautiful, so much so that she’d been a poster girl for the college she dropped in and out of. A métisse, more obviously Lakota than Peg, with long sleek hair and a sweet band of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her belly was just slightly rounded with what Marissa suspected to be an early pregnancy.

  Inez didn’t seem to notice her sitting at the table with Peg. She blew a smoke ring, smiled and sipped from a paper sack the man beside her offered. The sacks held cans of malt liquor, most likely, or the more recent ready-made canned cocktails, designed for children and street alcoholics. Most of their clients came in for court-ordered drug or alcohol counseling, and most of their payments were winkled somehow out of IHS. They did a little family counseling, and now and then there was a client like Inez who proffered an image of something that faintly resembled hope.

  Peg stood with her knuckles resting on the flaking white paint of the mesh tabletop, looking toward the other end of the courtyard. “My people,” she said, with her usual fine blend of sorrow and contempt. “Well, you wanna go in?”

  Marissa didn’t answer. She hadn’t really registered Peg’s question, which seemed pale and distant because her mind had returned to last night’s Exercise and its queer incomprehensible result. Inside the white patch pocket she balled the rosary, feeling the bony details of the crucifix rasping against her palm. The world in which she practiced the Exercises seemed to have nothing to do with this one; they were two utterly separate sequences of events, though she didn’t know if they were mutually exclusive. It pained her to be thinking that, and it wasn’t her own style of thinking either; the level of abstraction was Claude’s. What, after all, was the point? Once she had wanted to do good, and now she did this, which was a living, though a meager one.

  “Girlfriend?” Peg was frowning at her now. “You all right in there? You look a long way gone.”

  “Oh nothing,” Marissa stood up and shook herself. “I had a funny dream last night is all.” But of course she knew it had not been a dream.

  33

  “The eye of our intention,” Claude was saying, with the rasp and flare of a match as he scraped it on the striker. He leaned forward across his folded knees to light the candle between them on the wooden floor. Marissa looked down on the top of his bony, close-cropped head, sprouting a silvery down like dandelion seed. He wore his favorite sweater, a black crewneck riddled with tiny moth holes. This view of him gave Marissa a peculiar watery feeling, like looking at a puppy before its eyes had opened.

  She too was kneeling, sitting on her heels. It was a remarkably painful position if held for long. Claude had inured himself to it during a sojourn in Tibet. He tilted his baldish skull, whose shadow shifted on the wall behind him. In the dim his eyes seemed to acquire an ascetic slant.

  “. . . makes the difference,” he breathed slowly, “between an Exercise and ordinary trance.”

  The eye of our intention. Claude had told her not to think of him as pastor or confessor,
nor to call him Father, although he was a priest. He was her guide, through the Exercises. Like—

  But he did have an intuition for when her intention faltered. For her confusion, when she was confused. He looked at her now across the flickering candle flame, as if withholding a hint of a smile. As if somehow he knew the odd interruption of her Exercise two nights before: the image of a meteor hurtling down into the dark. The eye of her intention had wandered then—Marissa knew it, would not willingly admit it.

  “Set and setting,” Claude announced.

  Marissa rolled a little on her already-aching knees. “What are you talking about?”

  His smile became visible now. “You know, we used to cooperate with other religions sometimes.” By we he meant the Jesuits. “Not here so much, but sometimes in the East. Considerably. Maybe too much. As if any and all religious practices were really all about the same thing—the Divine—but in a different aspect.”

  “And so?” She returned his smile with her mouth, encouraging, her eyes turned down.

  “Set and setting is a phrase from LSD culture,” Claude explained. “There’re a hundred ways to enter a trance. What happens inside it depends on your expectations and your guidance. The cultural surroundings, so to speak.”

  Marissa raised her eyes from the candle to his face. “But you still believe?” she asked him.

  “Lord, I believe!” Claude said, raising his open hands. “Help thou mine unbelief!”

  They laughed. The room, which was drafty, grew a little warmer.

  Claude said, “Shall we begin?”

  The candle was a fat white cube, unscented, its four walls faced with thin slices of agate. The reddish-brown whorls of the cross-cut stone warmed with the interior light. Shadows of their two kneeling figures loomed in the corners of the ceiling. A voice resonated, Claude’s, not-Claude’s. . . .