Rollie reached the tiny island and got another surprise. The stone was neither soft andesite nor limestone, as he had expected from seeing other Inca carvings. Nor was it the same hard stone of Sacsayhuaman’s base walls that was quarried from Sisicancha three kilometers away. It had a texture that clung to his skin like coarse sandpaper as he crawled out.
“The other side . . .” Miguel called softly across the water, “is there gold?”
Rollie felt his way around the base, encountering only shadows, the tower rearing up beside him like a three-sided obelisk but with only one face the one with the stele visible from the ledge where Miguel waited.
“Nothing!” he called back, jarred by the amplification of his own voice. “One lousy carving.”
Silence from Miguel.
Rollie tested his weight against the pylon and hauled himself up the coarse stone a foot or two, enough to trace his fingers over the raised glyph. He had never seen marks like these. Perhaps it was valuable. And then he heard something, felt a thrum through the pylon. He looked down, just catching the blistering of a layer of bubbles passing up through the skin of the lake.
Now what could have caused that?
In the ceaseless stillness of centuries, if not millennia, he and Miguel had probably set up a chain reaction of currents and eddies that were playing out in subtle ways. But what was that smell? His drug-drenched brain had conjured up as many bizarre sensory phenomena as any mortal’s over the last dozen years, but this . . . this tapped into something primal, an odor best forgotten in the mists of time, grave-sprung, crawling, degenerative, suppurating, bowel-wrenching, fracturing. It made his throat contract and his stomach convulse. The bubbles bursting on the surface must have brought it up. A slathered chain of organic sediment was moving on the bottom of the lake, releasing gases trapped since before the last upheavals in the Andes. Before Viracocha, perhaps. Before Christ. Before
Stop it!
He ran his fingers roughly over the stele, and to his surprise it moved.
“What have you got?” Miguel called.
Rollie pried the edge and found a seam. Strange. He had known black marketeers to separate steles from facings with diamond saws, but this one had actually been fastened on the pylon to begin with. He pulled and off it came, a light stone tablet that seemed to have been held by nothing more than surface tension, or magnetism, judging by the slight tug. Another tremor reverberated as if from something deep within the Andes. Not surprising. The region was geologically active, and here was a nearly sealed resonance chamber of air and water that could pick up and magnify vibrations.
He dropped to the base of the pylon, slipped back into the lake. Holding the stele slightly aloft, he paddled with one hand and kicked vigorously, inching his way back toward Miguel. Was it just his imagination or was the water warmer? Loathsome bubbles sizzled around him, and the stench was like a garrote squeezing his throat.
“El lago,” Miguel whispered uncertainly. The lake.
Rollie reached the edge and clambered out, dripping and heaving, just as the Peruvian dropped to his knees and began to pray in Spanish.
“Stop it, Miguel.”
But Miguel was already losing control of his voice in a long moan of terror. Dread rising, Rollie slowly turned and caught the puma visage illuminated briefly in the green depths. Something failed in both the mortal hearts like a puff of air extinguishing two candles, and thereafter, Rollie did not know who was moaning in terror. But the water in the lake was moving choppily, like the basin of a waterfall, which would explain perfectly the sudden thunder from deep within the shadows of the cavern and the white mist crawling forth a montage of effects, complicated by echoes and the fall of the flashlight to the ledge as he scrambled past his petrified companion.
Miguel’s last scream reached Rollie as he found the narrow rampway that led to the thinly veiled entrance they had squeezed through.
He ran for his life, he ran for his soul.
***
Tess had known when he left that morning that she was in labor. But it was her first baby, and the contractions that had begun before dawn were at least a half hour apart. From everything she had read, she estimated it would come late in the day. So there was no reason to ask her husband to stay. Here was the opportunity she had prayed for. A gift from the Inca gods to her baby. Rollie would find gold or at least valuable artifacts, and they would go back to the States. How badly she wanted to be home. She had stayed free of drugs for almost nine months, and it was like a running start on the rest of her life, which would officially begin with the birth of her child. She had decided not even to chew the coca leaf Rollie had brought her for when she went into labor. Let her do this one thing right! Let her not screw it up!
Only, the contractions had picked up almost immediately. Treachery of the Inca gods. She tried to keep her cool. She wouldn’t exaggerate every little pain like a pampered first-time mother in the ‘burbs of L.A. But, God, she was scared. Since she had quit taking drugs, she was hyper-attuned. Or maybe it was hormones. Her senses had always been more acute during her periods, so maybe pregnancy was like that. She lay back down on the grimy mattress.
For a moment after her water broke she thought something had gone wrong, that the warm gush was blood or the baby melting out of her. But then she remembered that Aracelia, the nurse at the clinic, had told her it might feel this way. She could still walk to Cuzco, she thought. Maybe. But the next stab was intense and seemed to go on and on. When it passed, she was dissuaded. If she left now, she could end up birthing on the slope next to the road. Better to stay here, looking out the doorway at the mist rising off the rounded humps of the Andes. God was with her today. Billions of women had done this. Performed their miracle. Midwives and nurses could stand around watching, but in the end it was just you and God and the baby. She hoped God knew what He was doing.
When she felt strong enough to prepare a basin of water, she struggled off the mattress and was surprised at how heavy her stomach felt. The baby was dropping too fast! Then she remembered: it was because the amniotic fluid had supported the baby, and now that was gone. Aracelia had mentioned that, too. She managed to get the porcelain basin half full from the kettle she had used to make matÉ the night before and haul it back to the mattress. The water was cold. Mother Mary, what a baptism this child would have!
She was sweating, semi-delirious and fighting the urge to push when she heard the slap of bare feet. Dimly she wanted it to be Rollie, but the baby was coming now! Grainy thoughts converged on the fade of each mind-ripping wave of pain. Did babies run out of the womb? And then she thought Rollie was there, only it must have been the baby already diapered, because she saw him wearing only his soaked underwear and gasping, whimpering.
Later she would find the peculiar stone tablet that Rollie must have shoved under the mattress, but his babbled explanation would be too fantastic to comprehend. She wasn’t even sure he had actually been there, because he was gone in just seconds. Long enough to babble his fright as he whirled around the tiny room, and hid the stele, and dropped to his knees in recognition at last of what was happening inside her body.
“Hello,” he quavered at what was emerging between her thighs. And then, “. . . good-by.”
Funny things to say. And when she opened her eyes after that last push it was as if her senses had gotten crossed in some sort of synesthesia. Because through the tears that blurred her vision she did not see that he had fled back outside in a solitary act of heroism for his family’s preservation, and instead she blissfully mingled the sounds of a first and last breath: Rollie Andersen’s riving death scream and Lane Andersen’s stuttering infant cry.
UNITED STATES
MINNESOTA
. . . 28 years later
3
James “The Amazing” Randi he was not. But Lane Andersen, age twenty-eight, born near Cuzco, Peru in the shadow of magic and legends, and severed from his father before he was severed from his umbilical cord, was very goo
d at peeping behind the curtain at the wizard. His first conscious memory was of incense and devotion bells, his first lullaby a mother’s mantra to the god-of-the-month, his first word “justice,” and he could never look at a picture of Machu Picchu or Inca ruins without trying to remember something as vague as Andean mist.
It was odd then or maybe entirely predictable that he hated the 60’s, hated touchy-feely, hated intuition and what he called the “fuzzy-brained-let’s-all-hold-hands-at-the-equator-and-sing-Kumbaya” types. He had grown up with those emotive people, grown up with insecurity and voluntary victimization and a deeply conditioned hate of discipline and with choices made solely for the sake of immediate feelings. Feelings were everything, he had been taught. Feelings were what life was all about. Were we stone? Most of the people around him on any given day had, in fact, been stoned. He had loved them, but their manifest love for him always failed in some way. They seemed incapable of permanence.
His mother had left him in a commune north of Sausalito when he was eleven, saying she had a vision that she was needed by all creatures who had no voice. He had no voice. Someone told him that she had moved to a tree to fight the terrorists in the lumber industry, but he never saw her again. He still looked up at the tops of trees when he walked through parks, as if to recover some airborne link to his past that had taken refuge there like an emancipated kite. And in the meantime, he cast his lot in the arena of rational skepticism and became good at debunking all things mumbo-jumbo. Lane “The Amazing” Andersen.
The non-fiction book he had published just after 9-11 confirmed his rationality and birthed a reputation across America. 13 Myths that Shape the World was still selling briskly and at its peak came very close to making the New York Times best-seller list. Quite circumstantially in the writing he had taken on religious extremism in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism as part of his historical survey, tracing how man’s quest for power had corrupted revealed truths and bred intolerance by all faiths, and here came 9-11 to underscore the point just as he was checking the galleys. His publisher wanted more.
But now that he had some money he wasn’t in any hurry to sit at a computer for hours on end. Writing was down-time from living. So was teaching field history at Willmont College south of St. Paul, which was what he had been doing while writing 13 Myths and collecting rejections. He longed to keep moving. Call it research. Itinerancy was the only thing he seemed to have inherited from his parents.
A happy synthesis consisting of his recent literary success, desire to travel, and compulsion to slaughter sacred cows was that he regularly got to play devil’s advocate on talk shows and at certain dubious events. The Reverend Allen Anthony All was clearly a dubious event the day Lane set out in his Honda Civic for Rockford, Illinois.
A faith healer and psychic surgeon, the Reverend’s P.R. had gotten too much of a head start to be discredited. No matter how many of All’s on-stage miracle cures died soon after of cancer or neglected their manageable conditions until it was too late, there would remain a large remnant of testimonials. Psychosomatic cases probably made up between five and fifty percent of the healer’s flock. The placebo effect would be overwhelming. So Lane had to catch the facile-fingered holy healer in the act. When A. A. All hovered over the gullible masses tonight in Rockford, Illinois, Lane Andersen would be waiting.
He arrived late in the afternoon, napped in the car parked by the river, and went to the site around dusk. It was a tent venue worthy of the Chautauqua label: handouts, tapes, divinely blessed merchandise, the clinic in Barbados, the mission in India, candles and canned organ music. Lane writhed from his first step inside. One whiff of tallow and he was eleven years old and back among the hippies in Sausalito.
Reverend All, resplendent in a white suit, sat coifed and pancaked in a chair downstage while the singing, chanting and clapping built to euphoria. Meanwhile the number of volunteers for surgery grew larger than Lane had expected. He found himself near the end of a line from which only five candidates were selected. Bummer. He needed to get close to a surgery. He would have to improvise or else make the long drive back to St. Paul grinding his teeth at a missed opportunity. Fortunately, he had been improvising all his life.
When the screeners pulled the five candidates aside along with their relatives and attendants, Lane saw his chance. He sidled in among them. The afflicted thought he was with the Reverend’s entourage, the entourage thought he was with one of the elective surgeries.
There was nothing at all unique about Allen Anthony All, Lane decided. The man was a stereotype of a small class of frauds. He lacked the sincerity of a Baker, the fervor of a Swaggart, and he traveled with hardened “roadies” who probably worked for Marilyn Manson when All wasn’t performing. He must have very good hands, though. Whereas the aforementioned evangelists were limited to sending compliant souls into swoons with a palm smacked to the forehead, Reverend All would be a genuine prestidigitator. Probably as good as the Filipino crowd: Magno or Palitayan or Bugarin or Dr. Tony. There would be “bullets” (balls of cotton with blood clots) and fake blood and chicken guts, and he would palm them as he probed the flesh of the candidates. All of the selected surgeries were on the pudgy side, Lane noticed. A little legerdemain as you pressed through body fat and you could fool somebody standing right over you. But then, sleight-of-hand was Lane’s forte too.
The first of the operations was the most elaborate. Reverend All swirled his hands above the exposed midriff of a cancer patient to balance magnetic forces, applied holy oil, and withdrew negative energy like an invisible needle pulling invisible thread. He kneaded and dimpled the flesh, then sunk his fingers knuckle deep inside the patient and yanked out a bloody tumor. Gasps and awe. Diapason on the organ accent as All threw up his hands and pronounced a victory over Satan. A collective sigh of relief and praise from the audience.
Adequate, Lane judged, but again hardly unique. He had seen what he wanted to see which pocket, which sleeve. The tumor went away in a towel that the psychic surgeon wiped his fingers on, and a few seconds later the Reverend was diving into a rear pocket for the handkerchief with which he periodically mopped his brow. But he was reloading as well, Lane knew. Fresh pouch of blood and chicken guts; more bullets. The second surgery removed a blood clot and came with an edict to banish pain. The patient declared it had.
The Reverend All tossed off a few foreheads with holy concussions from the palm of his holy hand while the third surgery was prepped. She was obese and had to be maneuvered onto the gurney face down in order to expose her diseased kidney area. Lane saw his chance and moved into the scrum. He made sure that the process was cumbersome, so that even the Reverend got bumped and jostled. When the woman was positioned and her light sweater hiked up a few inches, one of the retainers tugged Lane back a few feet.
This time the prayer and the magnetic manipulation lasted longer than the others. Big woman, big buildup. The psychic surgeon’s hands trembled against the force field as he moved around the gurney. Plainly this was a challenge, the outcome by no means certain. But at last, shaking with stress, he caught and drew out the negative energy. Then he reached for his handkerchief.
. . . and that was when he hesitated.
Just a nanosecond pause, but Lane was looking for it. Out came the handkerchief, mopped the brow, went back in. Another hesitation. The Reverend’s fingers snugged all around the pocket, coming out slowly. Both hands in the air now, eyes closed. Lane bet the wily son of a bitch was praying for real this time, because he was going to need a miracle. Lane had picked that pocket during the struggle to position the woman on the gurney. Back All went for the hanky and a quick swipe of the lips, returning it to a different pocket. Still searching.
“Praise the Lord!” Lane suddenly boomed forth. “Looking for this?”
With a reflexive jerk, Reverend All caught the packet tossed to him. Bewildered but riveted, no one else moved as Lane stepped quickly to the gurney, shaped a dimple on the left side of the woman’s back wit
h his left hand and extracted a bloody mass of tissue with his right. And that three-second performance bought him momentary immunity. In the eyes of the audience he must be a colleague of Reverend All’s. The retainers didn’t know what to think, but to stop him now would throw things into chaos. Before any of them could collect their wits, Lane had switched to the other side of the woman’s back and performed another surgery, only this time he pulled up a Kentucky fried drumstick.
“Mmmh,” he said, taking a grating bite. “Extra crispy.”
Even the audience got it this time. Meanwhile, the obese lady struggled to right herself, causing the gurney to slip this way and that. And the Reverend Triple A, having perhaps learned the value of a head start at previous uncomfortable moments in his career, swept off the platform. The audience began to stir. Some booed, some wept, one man brayed forced laughter, the majority just shook their heads stunned. Several others mounted the stage, but by then All’s staff had looked to their own exits through a tent opening they had used to bring in the lights, the sound system and the organ. It was over. A slow, milling recessional began.
Lane loved these moments when he became a circumstance and no one would look in the eye. The invisible man. Nary a thank you for what he had done. He pocketed his hands and wandered to the foot of the aisle as the rows drained away. And suddenly he realized that a woman sitting quietly next to a tent support was watching him. With an affable nod, he started to pass.
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