by Tim Kring
“I-I’m sorry,” she stuttered, lifting her glass to her lips. “It’s just that I—”
“Whoa there,” he said, catching her hand. “That’s mine, remember?”
“Oh, uh.” Naz grinned sheepishly, handed him his glass. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t normally do this.”
Chandler looked around the little room, as if her lie was somehow evident in the dingy walls, the scuffed furniture, the dusty TV with one bent antenna. The unerring way she’d guided him here. He touched his glass to hers.
“I’m here too,” he said, and pounded his drink just as she had. The fingers of his right hand shivered and squeezed as the warm vodka went down, and she felt a tingle through her entire body.
“Ice,” he said when he could speak again.
Urizen, Naz suddenly remembered as Chandler grabbed a bucket and ducked into the hallway. That was the name of Blake’s god. Blake claimed to have seen him in a vision, as she recalled.
She rubbed her arm and contemplated her face in the mirror—and what lay on the other side of it—and wondered what she would see.
In the nine months since Morganthau had recruited her, she’d slipped the drug to almost four dozen men. She wasn’t exactly sure what he was hoping it would do. She only knew what she’d seen. One minute the men would be pawing at her, the next they’d jump back from something she couldn’t see. Occasionally it seemed pleasurable. One time a man sighed, “Cerberus? Is that you, boy?” in a way that made her think it must be a long-lost childhood dog. But nine times out of ten the visions seemed terrifying, and half the men ended up huddling in a corner, swatting at imaginary tormentors. Morganthau suggested that the things the men saw—hallucination seemed an inadequate term, at least from her perspective; they were more like demonic visitations—were influenced by context. Since this was Boston, where Puritan roots ran deep, her johns had a tendency to manifest whatever pillar of judgment they most feared: the police, their wives, their mothers. Urizen himself.
Yet none of them felt as guilty as Naz. She was the whore, after all. The one who’d lived when her parents died. The one who traded her body for a few dollars and the numbing bottles of alcohol they bought. It was only after she’d ingested the drug that she allowed herself to admit that perhaps she hadn’t taken it to defy Morganthau, or to find out what it was she’d been giving unwary men for the past nine months, but to punish herself even more than she normally did. To keep herself from getting close to the man who was even now staring into her eyes with a look of wonder on his face, a feeling of positive amazement radiating from his pores, as though he was asking himself what he’d done to deserve her.
She blinked, wondering when—how—he’d come back into the room. The ice bucket was on the table, fresh drinks had been poured. He’d even kicked his shoes off. One sat on the bed like a kitten with its legs folded beneath it.
“Are you cold?” he said.
She looked down and saw that she was still rubbing her arm where he’d held her.
“Want me to warm you up?”
He crossed the room in a black-and-white blur, and before she knew it his hands were on her arms again, rubbing gently. There was nothing fake in the gesture, or domineering, or sexual. He didn’t knead her like a lump of human dough. He was just rubbing her arms to warm them up, and, helplessly, she pressed herself against him, turned her face up to look at his.
“My God,” he said in a hoarse voice that was neither whisper nor groan. “You are so beautiful.”
He gazed into her eyes and she stared back, looking for the thing that made him different from all the others. For the first time she saw that they were hazel. The kind of eyes that change color depending on how the light strikes them. Brown, amber, green. A little of each all at the same time. Flecks of purple, too. Blue. Pink. Amazing eyes, really. The irises were kaleidoscopes surrounding the tunnels of his pupils, and all the way at the back of that inky darkness was yet another spark of color. Gold, this time. Pure, immutable, like an electrical charge.
She knew what that spark was. It was his essence. The thing that made him different from every other person she’d met since she came to this country a decade ago. It was right there, flickering at her. Inviting her in.
Even after he closed his eyes and kissed her she could still see it.
She reached for it with her hand, but it was too far inside his head. She would have to go in after it. She had to push at the edges of his pupil to squeeze through, but once she was inside, it was roomier than she’d’ve expected: when she reached out her hands she couldn’t touch the sides. Couldn’t feel anything beneath her feet, either, and it was so dark that all she could see was the spark in the distance. For a moment she felt her own spark of panic, but even before she recognized the feeling she heard Chandler’s voice.
It’s okay.
She giggled like a teenager at a monster movie. The light seemed to have grown limbs, as if it were not simply a spark, a flame, but a person. A person on fire. She thought that should have scared her, but it didn’t. There was no sense of torture from the figure leading her deeper inside Chandler, of agony or fear, but rather a sense of protection. Righteousness even. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego cavorting in the fiery furnace.
The spark was larger now. Had lost its limbs and taken on a more solid shape, taller than it was wide, flat on the bottom and sides but curved slightly on top. A tombstone, she thought at first, but when she got closer she realized that it was in fact an arched, open doorway.
It was only when she poked her head through that she saw the books. Thousands of them, stacked atop one another in spindly columns that sprang from the floor of Chandler’s brain and receded into impenetrable heights. She’d thought the spark had been his essence, his secret, but now she realized it had only led her here. The real secret was hidden in one of these thousands upon thousands of moldering tomes. A slip of paper folded between the covers of some favorite childhood story long since migrated to the bottom of one of these hundreds—thousands—of stacks.
An embarrassed chuckle sounded off to the side.
“I thought it would look more like a cave. Dark, slimy, water dripping somewhere out of sight.”
Chandler stood behind a stack of books just high enough to conceal his nakedness. She glanced down at herself, saw that she was naked too, and similarly shielded.
“Apparently you’re a scholar.” Even as she said it, she remembered what Morganthau had told her. He was a scholar, or at any rate a student. Harvard. The Divinity School. “So, uh, why books?”
Chandler shrugged. “Safer than the real world, I guess.”
“‘Politics,’ you mean?” Naz made air quotes, although it seemed a fairly ridiculous gesture, given the context.
“In my family we didn’t call it politics. We called it service. But from where I stood it just looked like servitude.”
Naz laughed. “So, uh, what do we do now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think we’re already doing it.” Before Naz could ask him what he meant, he opened the topmost book on the stack in front of him. “Look.”
Naz squinted. Not because the image was hard to see, but because it was hard to believe. It showed the motel room—the motel bed, to be precise, on which lay the apparently naked bodies of Chandler and Naz, although most of their flesh was covered by the blanket. But that wasn’t the part Naz had trouble accepting. The vantage point of the scene was the mirror over the dresser. It was as though she was looking at herself and Chandler through the eyes of Agent Morganthau, whose husky breathing came in time with the rhythmic squeak of springs beneath his body….
And all at once it was over. Naz was back in the room. On the bed. Under the covers. In Chandler’s arms. Naked.
Wow, she thought. That was some trip. But then she looked in Chandler’s eyes.
“Urizen?”
It took Naz a moment to remember the bearded man on the stamp.
“Oh no,” she said, and turned fearfully
toward the mirror.
Cambridge, MA
November 1, 1963
The coo of a mourning dove eased Chandler from sleep. He let the percussive gurgle tickle his eardrums while the last images from his dreams faded from his mind. He’d been back in his grandmother’s house, trapped at the table while the old battle-axe presided over one of her endless, tasteless meals. The really strange thing, though, was that the sooty portrait of his grandfather over the fireplace had been replaced by a one-way mirror behind which sat Eddie Logan, the annoying little brother of his best friend from boarding school. What was even stranger, Eddie was holding a movie camera with one hand and himself with the other. Chandler hadn’t thought of Percy’s pipsqueak brother in a decade. And what the hell was he doing with a movie camera?
Yet this was nothing compared to the other dream.
The girl.
He couldn’t bring himself to voice her name, lest, like Eurydice, she should disappear at the first sign of attention. Instead he savored the residue of her voice, her eyes, her lips. Her kiss. Her body. God, he hadn’t had a dream like that since he lived in his grandmother’s house. Hadn’t been that naively optimistic since his father had been alive.
And all of a sudden there was the other image, one that was never far from his thoughts, waking or sleeping. His father. Dressed in his three-piece suit, creases pressed, collar starched, every hair in place—a perfect imitation of Uncle Jimmy, as if sartorial splendor could mask the failure of his life. But in this memory one detail was out of place; namely, the noose that had jerked the tie from his father’s waistcoat, so that it hung in front of his chest in grotesque echo of the tongue that bulged from his mouth. And the crowning glory: the piece of paper pinned to his jacket like a teacher’s note on a toddler’s shirt:
PUTO DEUS FIO.
The line was Emperor Vespasian’s, uttered just before he died: I am becoming a god. His father had missed the first word of the quotation, however: vae, which could be translated as “alas” or “woe” or just plain “damn.” Leave it to his dad to get it wrong right up till the end.
Chandler’s eyes snapped open. Light filled the room, outlining everything in sharp relief, from the stacks of books piled three deep against the walls to the stack of dishes nearly as high in the kitchenette. He pressed his finger to the bridge of his nose to see if he’d fallen asleep wearing his glasses, but even as he did so, he saw them folded up on the bedside table. But still. The single room of his apartment, from the crumbs on the carpet to the cracks on the ceiling, was crystalline as a photograph. Weird.
He sprang from bed, his limbs snapping with energy. That was when he saw the bird. The mourning dove that had awakened him. It sat on the sill of the open window over the sink, pecking at crumbs of food on the topmost plate.
“Hey, little fellow. I didn’t know your kind liked Chinese food.”
The bird cocked one dark eye at him. Claws as thin and sharp as freshly sharpened pencil lead clicked and clacked over the sill, and its head and throat were a pearly gray that reminded him of something. The color of the girl’s dress, that was it. He still didn’t say her name. Didn’t even think it.
He walked toward the bird slowly, worried that it might fly into the room. He talked to it softly, but the bird seemed completely unbothered by his approach. He was five feet from it, three, he was standing at the counter’s edge. He reached toward the animal with his right hand.
“Don’t be scared, little guy. I just want to make sure—”
Just before his hand touched it, the bird looked up. Cocked that one eye at him again. Except this time when Chandler looked into the eye he seemed to fall down it as though the dove’s eye was an impossibly deep well. All the way down at the bottom a round, pale face stared up at him out of the inky water, only to disappear when he splashed through.
Naz.
He heard glass breaking, felt a sharp pain in his hand. The next thing he knew, he was standing over the kitchen sink. The window was closed, the glass in the bottom left pane broken. A thin trickle of blood ran down his hand and there was no sign of a bird. The dishes were still there, though, reeking faintly of mildew.
For a moment he stared at the blood trickling down his hand as though it might turn out to be another hallucination. He could feel the tiny pressure as the warm red stream pressed on each hair of his wrist, felt the weight of it pressing on the very vein that was pumping more blood to the wound. He stared at it until he was sure it was real, because if the blood was real, if the cut was real, then that meant she was real too. Only when he was absolutely sure did he say her name out loud.
“Naz.”
The word rippled into the world like a sonic cry. Out and out it went, but nothing bounced back. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t real. It just meant she was lost, and he would have to find her. Like Eurydice, he told himself again, and did his best to forget how that story ended. Then, catching himself, he chuckled sheepishly.
“I have got to stop drinking on an empty stomach.”
His protest rang hollow. He had no headache, no sign of a hangover. He wasn’t even hungry, even though he usually woke up starving after a bender. He remembered drinking the day before—remembered drinking a lot—but it seemed to have had no effect. He looked at his body for some sign that he’d had sex but found no incriminating marks. Not that he usually found marks after sex, but still. After an encounter like that, you’d think there’d be some trace. But that made him think of his eyes. Of his oddly clear vision. He’d worn glasses for nearly two years now, and his deteriorating eyesight was the kind of thing that was supposed to get worse, not better. So why was he seeing with 20/20 vision this morning—20/15, 20/10—and why did he feel like it had something to do with what happened last night?
What happened last night?
“Nothing happened last night,” he said out loud, but this protest was even more unconvincing than the last.
He filled the percolator and set it on one ring of his hot plate, opened the fridge, put a pan on the other ring of the hot plate, dropped in half a stick of butter and, while it melted, cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl. When the butter was sizzling, he poured the eggs in and scrambled them quickly, dumped some salt and pepper on top, ate them out of the pan. The coffee was done by then, and he poured himself a cup, added three teaspoons of sugar, and, more or less on instinct, sat down in front of his typewriter. He reached for his glasses by reflex, but they only blurred his vision—for a moment, anyway, and then it cleared again. He took his glasses off and the same thing happened: his sight blurred, then cleared, the sentence at the top of the page springing out in bold relief:
Toward the end of the Achaemenid era, the fire principle, atar, representing fire in both its burning and unburning aspect, became embodied in a demigod Adar, a divine elemental akin to the four winds of ancient Greece: Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus, and Notus.
It was the thousandth incarnation of a sentence he’d been writing for the past three months. His goal was to trace the history of fire through the world’s religions, from Akhenaten’s replacement of Amun with the sun god Ra in ancient Egypt to Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods in Greece to the Persian incarnation of Adar and onward. His intention was to show how the sun, the giver of all life, is first deified (Ra), then demystified (Prometheus), then resignified (Adar) as human beings realize that fire, like a stallion, can be only partially tamed—which is why most religions contain an apocalyptic vision of the earth consumed by flames in a final judgment against mankind’s hubris. It was this quasi-animist belief that Chandler believed was fueling the nuclear arms race: from primitive fire arrows to medieval trebuchets to nuclear bombs, humanity was doing the bidding of the fire god, building the tools that would enable it to realize its ultimate goal: the purification of the world through its annihilation.
He knew the arguments backward and forward, had scoured the dusty corners of every library between Cambridge and Princeton for supporting evidence. But every time he
sat down at the typewriter, something stopped him. There was always one more fact he needed to look up, a distracting errand he had to get done. Chandler knew the truth, of course. The truth was that if he ever finished his dissertation he’d have to leave school. Go out into the world and make something of himself, and he knew how that story ended. Knew how it had ended for his father at any rate, and Uncle Jimmy, and Percy Logan, his best friend at Andover: a slab of white marble forty-two inches tall, thirteen inches wide, and four inches thick. For now he’d settle for the less frightening prospect of a blank sheet of paper.
And besides, this time there was no getting around it. He had to write something. His advisor had given him a deadline of 5 p.m. to turn in a draft of this chaper or she was going to cancel his monthly stipend.
He glanced at his watch—7:18. Just under ten hours to write fifty pages. Chandler didn’t think he could fill that many pages even if, like the proverbial monkey, all he did was hit random keys for the next ten hours, let alone attempt to lay out a cogent argument spanning five continents and as many millennia.
He set his fingers on the keyboard, let his mind fill with the image of Adar. Like all fire, Adar was always moving from one place to another. To Chandler, he was like Hanuman, Rama’s devoted servant, not as powerful as his king, but made invincible by unwavering fealty. Hanuman’s chin was scarred by a lightning bolt when he was a child. Adar was the lightning itself: a limbed comet, a warrior made of pure flame—
The clacking of keys pulled him from his thoughts. He looked down, was surprised to see that he’d typed everything that had just run through his mind. He’d substituted the word “Urizen” for “Adar” (one of Blake’s deities? he wasn’t quite sure, although he could see the god clearly enough, beard and hair streaming in a cosmic breeze). Emboldened, his fingers flew over the keys. Words, sentences, paragraphs poured onto the page. One page, two, a third. In the middle of the fourth he needed to check a quotation but was afraid to get up. He knew the quote, could almost see it in front of him, written out on one of the thousands of index cards that filled a dozen drawers in his carrel in the library. And then, suddenly, he could see it: