Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Late? He glanced over his shoulder at a battery-powered clock radio beside the sofa bed. Late? Crimson numerals fresh as nose blood, carry the two … No time whatsoever had passed.

  Soon, however, it will be six o’clock, China said to the clock radio, but addressing without speaking aloud or at least without hearing himself address the diaphanating portrait in the dark window, which he now turned to face in the mirror, window, he meant window. The face’s lower jaw had gone missing, making it appear, though China did not know the word, like a calvarium, a skull without a jaw, the kind you keep hard by your lucubration as a candle stand. He touched two fingertips to the puffiness visible below his left eye and felt nothing. Is the picture coming down from the attic? He glanced down at the fingers. The hundred dollar bill was gone. He looked at his other hand. It was empty, too. Funny, he giggled, he hadn’t noticed a string. He looked at the window. Blood streaked the reflected face. He looked at his hands. Why had he not noticed the string attached to the c-note? A string that led all the way back to the penthouse? And the bindle, too? Monofilament, maybe? He flicked his tongue at the blood at the corner of his mouth. Whoa. The tongue in the reflection was forked. It can’t—. Wait. Don’t try that again.

  Half an hour. Half an hour to six, when the liquor stores will open, even if it’s Sunday. Thank god for California.

  But ghosts don’t need liquor. Ghosts don’t need money, either. Genuflect at the readyteller, that this may be so. There is a rumor, however, going all the way back to The Odyssey, that ghosts do need blood.

  Okay, stay calm, so now China needs blood. But so, see, he has blood. Blood running down his reflection. Blood on demand. Though the pressure is diminishing, pulse has become flow has become seepage.

  The bindle was still there though. He had already checked. Don’t jinx things by checking again. He’d take it to hell with him. Gak in hell: redundant? If things got too real, he’d trade it for blood.

  NINETEEN

  THE ENERGY IN THE HALL WAS AS PALPABLE AS IT WAS AUDIBLE.

  Officer Few’s nerves were already plenty wracked. He’d unexpectedly blundered into a new security gate at the employee’s entrance. Normally he’d have been informed. Normally, he might well have been manning the metal detector, or a wand, himself, rather than roaming the lecture hall in a rent-a-cop uniform with Mace, a pair of handcuffs, his media watch, and Tipsy Powell, his newly uniformed guest.

  They’d never put him on a strip search team. Not yet, anyway. He suppressed the imaginative clusterfuck of himself and Tipsy assigned to separate strip-search teams.

  The whole thing had been Protone’s idea, the bastard. What skin was it off his nose? While Few and Tipsy were playing with fire in a drought-blighted briar patch, Protone was sitting on the couch in his rented garage with a beer in one hand and his dick in the other.

  As backup, few had an eight-gigabyte media pen mixed in with the various writing implements in the breast pocket of his uniform. But if they caught him with either one of these toys, bad results would ensue, and the boys upstairs would know from nothing.

  Visual deterrent, they call it. Just a guy in a uniform standing around would keep people in line, particularly these people, unless they were drinking. Entitled people, when they were drinking, were worse than fraternity boys, and way worse than bikers.

  The gavel struck the podium.

  “Oscar,” Tipsy stage-whispered. “Who is that weird fuck up there?”

  “Anybody looks you in the eye,” Few hissed, “just let your eyes slide right off him, like you’re perfectly confident he don’t have the balls to pick a fight.”

  “Fight?” Tipsy hissed back. “These people don’t—”

  “Has anybody ever remarked how good you look in a uniform?”

  “Really? You think—”

  “Hey, Frank,” Few abruptly addressed a guy in a cheap suit, who appeared out of the crowd. “Everything cool?”

  Frank pointed. “What happened, you get the bud implanted?”

  “Uh, no,” Few replied. He fumbled in his breast pocket, a thing he hated to do. If and when he or anybody else reviewed the recording, the audio would be predictably sandblasted. “I’m running a little late, here. That new checkpoint—”

  “Hey,” Frank agreed, “I told them to text you guys.”

  “Yo,” Few said, “that might be it. I’m switching providers.”

  As Few hastily screwed the little bud into his left ear, Frank adroitly changed the subject. “Who’s the babe?”

  As Tipsy’s complexion flared, Few jumped in. “Officer Powell, a high-school buddy from Park Station. Her kid’s got a problem, she needs the OT.”

  “Sorry about the kid,” Frank lied unctuously. If a fly were to land on this guy’s face, Tipsy thought to herself, it would slide right off it.

  “Yeah,” Few agreed.

  “Your old man can’t cover the three of you?” Frank asked, as if to impugn a husband’s virility by way of hitting on his wife.

  “Ahm,” Tipsy replied, usurping her temper with a glance at Oscar, “he’s doing two shifts for the Petaluma PD as it is, and he was lucky to get the duty. They’ve got the budget problems too. …”

  “Mm,” Frank assented.

  Oscar beamed.

  “… There’s two other kids, the insurance is balking at covering the sick one. …”

  “No way you got three kids,” Frank said.

  “The one is Dan’s by his first marriage. So we took out a second on the house. …”

  Oscar raised an alarmed eyebrow.

  “MS,” Tipsy elaborated, unfazed. “They claim we must have known when we expanded the coverage.”

  The gavel struck closer to the microphone.

  “That’s tough,” Frank lied.

  “Yeah,” Oscar agreed.

  “So,” Tipsy said, “Oscar, here, is doing me a solid.”

  “Oscar’s a good man,” Frank chucked Oscar on the shoulder. It was as much as to say Keep it up, Oscar, you’ll get laid yet. Bad for the audio, Oscar was thinking. I should jam this chucklehead’s earbud up his urethra for him, Tipsy was thinking.

  “Order in the hall. Order …”

  Oscar had started the pen and the watch before he entered the hall, before he’d cleared security, so nobody would see him messing with buttons. But he shot his cuff anyway. One minute after eight. “They do like to go off on time,” he said.

  “Speaking of which …” Frank said, and he abruptly took his leave.

  “That’s …” Tipsy said.

  “Our boss,” Oscar said.

  The lights dimmed.

  “Great,” Tipsy said.

  “Yup,” Oscar agreed. “Especially if he doesn’t check with Payroll.”

  “Tonight’s topic: The Cycle of Desacralization.”

  Unbelievable, thought Few.

  The what? thought Tipsy.

  The speaker was a woman in a big hat with a dahlia on it. “Nature,” she began, “it was first held sacred by Paleolithic man. Witness the exquisite paintings on the walls of Lascaux.”

  Several slides, stored and presented by computer.

  “Nature imposed and supplied all things—food, wonder, fear, thunder, water, fire, thrills and terror, life and light, death and darkness. By mankind, nature was worshiped and defied, carnalized and spiritualized.”

  Several slides. A lava flow, a full moon, waves of sand dunes, the jaws of a spider.

  Being the Rudy Gelder of sub rosa audio, Few leaned back against a wall with his hands folded in front of him, at parade rest, immobile, the better not to rustle the dry goods.

  “At first, religion sacralized nature, too.”

  That’s true, Tipsy thought to herself, as Frank walked by, going the other way, with a wink.

  Slides of a reindeer headdress, eagle feathers, a golden calf, a mastodon hunt.

  “After eons,” continued the speaker, “this gave way to the desacralization of nature by the self-aggrandizement of its main sacralizer, r
eligion. The sacralizer usurped the sacred to itself, and itself became sacred.”

  Irish dolmens, Stonehenge, St. Peter’s basilica.

  “Interestingly, Stonehenge, a site of worship thought to be at least five thousand years old, also is of great astronomical interest. Outside of tools used for hunt and harvest, we see here an interesting first example of a new sacralization, that of technology.”

  Several slides of Stonehenge in apposition to solstice sunrises, equinoctial sunsets, and phases of the moon.

  “The pyramids likewise, whose builders made use of a vast number of employees, as we might term them, along with an equally vast technology, now mostly lost to us.”

  Slides of Cheops and the Valley of Kings.

  Oh, wow, Tipsy realized. That’s exactly the same view of a tomb entrance that Charley sent me on a postcard a hundred fucking years ago. …

  Sarcophagi, hieroglyphs. “Engineers became legendary, mythical, godlike. Why? Because they implement and augment technology.” The step pyramid at Saqqara. “Here’s a fine example. We find Imhotep—who designed this structure for King Neterikeht, around the turn of the twenty-sixth century B.C., and who is widely regarded as the first architect—and, for those of you who think Frank Lloyd Wright was the first architect to be deified, wrong, it was Imhotep.”

  Laughter.

  “… To this day his cult is significant. And why?” The arrow of a scarlet laser triangulated the pyramid. “The artifact. His artifact remains, and the spirit of the man is sacralized by his powerful relic.”

  I never thought of it that way, Tipsy thought.

  “Hey,” a voice hissed. Tipsy turned to find Frank’s face immediately next to hers in the darkness. “What’s happening?”

  Over Frank’s shoulder, Tipsy could see Oscar Few’s shape in the darkness, his eyes on them.

  “This is really interesting,” Tipsy ventured.

  “… Relics have their place throughout history, as we have seen. The eagle feather headdress and the bear or lion claw necklace, the tusk of the narwhale, the wrist bone of a martyr …”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Frank replied huskily. His breath was redolent of Tampa Jewels and salami.

  “… The pyramid constitutes a change in that it was spawned of man, not of nature. …”

  “What are you talking about?” Tipsy asked loudly. Two or three people in front of them glanced over their shoulders.

  “Keep your voice down,” Frank said, equally loudly.

  “… And here we trace the roots of the sacralization, first, of the technologist, the scientist, the engineer. …”

  Frank put a hand on Tipsy’s shoulder.

  “… And at first, of course, all the works of these technologists are dedicated to the sacralization of nature, then of the religion of nature, then of the exponents of such religions. Royalty, in other words, who were deified, often after their deaths, but increasingly in their lifetimes and finally by the mere fact of their birth within the context of a properly curried—or sacralized—bloodline.”

  Tipsy wasn’t all that worried about this Frank guy. After all, as she reassured herself, she had a truncheon on her belt, and she knew where his nuts lived. But a scene was precisely what nobody—neither Frank, nor Tipsy, nor Oscar Few—wanted.

  “This bred men with great sway over their fellows, and this power accrued to their factotums as well. The warrior caste, generals and tacticians make for obvious power figures, direct and fearful. But these usually toiled in the name of some greater good, and this good was guided by a king, if this figure were strong, or by a king’s advisers who, until very recently in our history, were usually religious figures.”

  “Well?” Frank said, squeezing her shoulder.

  The slides became portraits.

  Tipsy winced under his grip. “Okay,” she whispered, “this has gone far enough. My old man walked after he shot the last guy who laid a hand on me, and now he’s got a taste for it.”

  “… Cardinal Richelieu, 1585-1642, makes for an excellent example. Prince of the Church and a statesman virtually without peer in or out of the spheres of religion and monarchy, he ran France, nominally for his King, Louis XIII, for forty years. …”

  She put her lips right next to Frank’s ear, whispered, “Me, too,” and elbowed him right at the bottom of his ribcage, just under the offending arm. The hand promptly went away.

  Oscar stepped between them. “What’s up?”

  “I need bitches for strip search,” Frank rasped.

  “That’s a volunteer gig, Frank.”

  “Frank didn’t tell me that,” Tipsy said, regarding Frank through slitted eyes.

  Oscar looked at her. “Frank?” he said, looking back at his boss.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “I forgot.”

  Tipsy nodded. “I decline.”

  “That’s it, then,” Oscar said.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “That’s it.” There was an edge in his voice.

  “You’ll find somebody,” Few assured him.

  Frank melted into the crowd without a word.

  “Great,” Few said.

  “… Richelieu, too, retains his cult. But as politician and prelate he left precious little behind to be cherished by any means other than scholarship. And while this scholarship is sincere enough, and richly rewarding, Richelieu left no pyramid, no relic. And so, as a personage fit to be sacralized, his record will have to do. Down through the decades his name fades in human memory and his idolization becomes more difficult to maintain, and thereby less and less … useful, shall we say?”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Tipsy nodded. “Who put that creep in charge?”

  “He’s not in charge of us. He coordinates services for the organizers. Security is just one of them. But he’ll probably look into your credentials.”

  “Which he won’t be able to find.”

  “That would be correct.”

  “Great. Do I have time to listen to this?”

  Few shrugged. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “… Richelieu’s amorality is a tactic to be remarked—by this assembly, at least. For it is in the evolution of Richelieu’s thought that we can clearly see the needs of the state rise above those of religion, in which we perceive the change that put religion at the service of a state that ultimately —it took three hundred more years—became one of the major western democracies in which religion played a smaller and smaller part.”

  More slides. “These are from Rapa Nui. They’re called moai.” So as to linger, the speaker slowed the projection rate. “I like them. The big heads of Easter Island all have a three-to-five head to body ratio. Very handsome.”

  Rows of moai. She sped up the rate again.

  “But what is the state if it is not the most efficient use of its constituent entities? Religion, labor, industry, technology, military … ? Here we might discuss the twentieth century’s three or four really impressive fascist states: Japan, Italy, Germany. But don’t forget Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe …”

  Tipsy glanced over her shoulder. Oscar had merged into the crowd to take a few infrared pictures. Am I hearing this correctly? she wondered, looking back at the screen.

  “… And don’t forget their mistakes. In Japan, the emperor was still considered a deity. In the European states, however, this notion barely survived the eighteenth century. Certainly this is true of France, despite the very real presence of royalists there even today, not to mention the half-hearted deification of Napoleon.”

  I have to get a grip here, Tipsy thought to herself. I’m in danger of becoming gobsmacked.

  “But a true fascist, you see, deifies the state, because he—or she—embodies it. By this light, the pace of the sacralization and desacralization of one or another so-called reality constructs has increased. And we note that, while religions come and go, nature has outlasted everything. Nature Bats Last, says the bumper sticker. But this slogan, a
s with so many others, may turn out to be nothing more than a religious homily.”

  Gobsmacked and stupid …

  “Technology, in a word, is what we face. And, in the face of overweening technology, what do the people seek?”

  “A Messiah,” replied about eighty voices.

  The speaker chuckled. “Or a man, at the very least. A man to stand up to the onslaught. As Jacques Ellul spent his life annotating, by the middle of the twentieth century, technology had effaced all previous environments—nature, religion, even the state. Insofar as the efficiencies of either collude with the progress of technology, so much the better for them. Insofar as they hinder or interfere with the efficiencies of the new sacral reality, so much the worse for them.”

  Either you are on the same page with the momentum of history or you’re not, Tipsy concluded for herself.

  “… It’s that simple. There are two rules. (1) Never deviate from the message, the rationale of which, meanwhile, is ever mutable. And (2), never cease to vilify, disdain, calumniate, discredit, and slander anybody who speaks or acts against the message.”