by Neil Clarke
Shayreen had already gone far ahead. I hurried after her, skipping over jugs, boxes, empty food containers. Garbage had been scattered all over the floor. And buckets. Yikes, those buckets.
“What is all this?”
I winced at the volume of my voice. You could tell, looking around, that it was wrong to speak in that place. Shayreen’s lantern, weak even at its highest setting, lit only about ten feet of floor. Every once in a while, as she strolled along, a face passed through its feeble light. Old faces, young faces, women, men. The people lay on cots or pallets, even on the bare floor. Once, I saw a face I recognized, bearded and freckled, a man from one of our field teams. He lay silently, like the others, eyes closed. Serene.
“These people . . . ?” I whispered.
Shayreen turned to me. I didn’t need to see her face to know she was making hush-hush signals.
“They’re concentrating.” Shayreen pulled me close. “They’re not asleep. They hear everything you’re saying. Be respectful.”
“But what are they doing?” I asked.
“Practicing.” And then, as if she thought she might have said the wrong thing, “They have to focus. It takes a great deal of discipline. They’re waiting.”
“For what?”
“To be visited.”
A woman near us had begun to stir, rolling on her grungy blanket, moaning. In frustration? Pain? Shayreen pulled me away.
“Come on,” she said, guiding me. “You’ll soon understand.”
We walked the rows of silent faces. How many, in total? Five hundred? A thousand? Did they fill the building, I wondered, floor to roof, a town’s worth of people, lying silently in the dark? Concentrating, Shayreen had said. Practicing.
Waiting.
“Up here.” Shayreen pointed to an open door, a set of concrete stairs leading up. No guards blocked our way, no barriers. A dank wind blew down, the wind of the tropics, moaning through the empty halls. I heard it, whistling among the girders, rippling through construction nets that whipped from the building like shredded pennants. This was the wind of the Malacca Strait, the mighty breath of the Andaman Sea, blowing over a room of sleepers who were not actually, in fact, asleep.
“What’s up there?” I asked.
But Shayreen had vanished. Turning, I saw her lantern on the ground, between an army blanket and a strip of weather-tenting. Before the light went out, I caught a glimpse of her face. She had already lain down and closed her eyes. Now she rested with her fellows in the gloom, practicing, meditating, concentrating, waiting.
In darkness, fumbling at the wall, I climbed the stairs.
5
Here’s a question, Carter, you may not have been expecting.
Ever move out of a large apartment?
You know how it goes. You chuck out your knickknacks. The movers come in and saw your sofa in half.
Soon enough it’s over, and you do a last walk-through. Checking for dropped cards, grandma’s old photos, the kind of damage that’ll attract the insurance folks. Maybe just saying a sentimental goodbye.
That’s when it hits you. Like the walls are suddenly closer, the floors less expansive, the whole place contracting. Vacant, the apartment seems magically smaller. The very emptiness becomes surreally claustrophobic.
That was the effect of Abdul Shah’s quarters. He had taken a floor of the building for himself, a broad, empty space, half as large as a soccer field. In the center was the elevator shaft, a cinderblock column, punching up through floor and roof. An incomplete staircase rose beside it, the framework complete, the stairs still to come. Sunlight blasted down this empty well, a column of tropical gold spilling out onto the floor. It would have made a natural spotlight for Abdul Shah to stand in, awaiting my arrival.
He wasn’t there. It took me a minute to find him. I walked behind the elevator shaft, where the light was like a dusty pollen in the dark. A skinny figure stood against the wall, holding back the edge of a tarpaulin, looking out the glassless window.
The first thing that struck me about Shah was his Americanness. Maybe that sounds presumptuous. But there’s a kind of poise we Americans have, like a man being pushed from behind. Look out, this posture declares, I have big plans, get with me or get out of the way! Even our priests and mystics have this quality, which is probably why they always turn into hustlers. I was surprised to see that Abdul Shah had it, too.
The second thing I noticed was his bookish air. He wore thick-framed glasses, a trim little beard. Everything about him, down to his check shirt and corduroys, seemed to belong in a New England university. He didn’t look like a Brooklynite, a soldier, a beach rat, a visionary. He looked like the kind of scholar who studies those people.
He waved me over.
“Your people are gathering.” Abdul Shah held aside the tarp, making room for me to join him at the window. It was the only window I’d seen so far that hadn’t been boarded up. I crossed the floor, scanning the huge room as I did so. A cluster of equipment stood in one corner. Telescoping stands, tripods and bulbs, the kind of stuff you see at a photo shoot. A whiff of marshy odor came from outside, stinking of fish and coastal runoff, the salty tang of tidal mud. Looking down, I saw that the Medan police chief had begun to assemble his men around the tower, checking their shields and helmets and gear.
Abdul Shah’s tone was matter-of-fact. “How long do you think we have?”
I looked for Colm and Karen, but saw no sign of them. They must have gone back into the command tent. “Those aren’t my people down there,” I said. “Those are the Medan police.”
“Close enough.” Shah spoke with a confidence that made me bristle. He dropped the tarp. He was a shortish man, slight of build, but with a quiet air that put me on my guard. “So? What’s the estimate? An hour? Two?”
“Forty minutes,” I told him. “More like thirty-five.”
Shah fell silent. Not alarmed, I sensed, but thinking things over.
“In thirty minutes,” he said, “if nothing has changed, I’ll tell my followers to leave the building.”
Reasonable terms. If he held to them.
“If nothing has changed, eh?” I looked him in the eye.
Shah smiled. “I think I deserve a chance to explain myself.” His arms hung limply at his sides, nothing moving but his lips. This, at least, gave him a guru-like demeanor, this unconscious scorn for wasted movement. “If I can’t change your mind in half an hour,” he said, “then by all means . . . ” A twitch of his finger indicated the floor, the hundreds of people lying below. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it? Let’s not waste time. You have an argument to make. I do, too. I assume this is what you expected, Mister Lam?”
I thought about the people under us. Five hundred, nine hundred, maybe a thousand, all meditating or waiting or whatever it was they were doing. Eating cold rice and pissing in buckets. Followers of this man. I knew I had to speak carefully.
“My argument,” I said, pointing out the window, “is those police down there. Plus a corporate security team equipped with the day’s best acoustic weaponry. You know what that means. Here’s the deal. I can arrange for temporary shelter for your people. Two, maybe three months in a refugee camp. Protected transportation. Onsite medical care. If this goes well.”
Shah nodded. “I understand.”
“And you?”
“My argument,” he said, “is over here.”
He pointed to the corner, the equipment I’d noticed earlier. Big, blocky devices stood mounted on poles. As we approached, I saw that these were speakers, powerful ones, the kind that get deep into the low ranges. Shah clicked on a lamp. He had five lamps in total, arranged in a square, one hanging from the exposed girders overhead. These weren’t ordinary light fixtures, but advanced machines that gave out a shifting, unsteady glow. Entrancing.
I stood back. “And what’s all this for? Meditation?”
“In a sense,” Shah said.
I almost laughed. It was like something out of a cult-lea
der’s handbook. “And you need all this fancy equipment? No candles? No incense?” Seeing that the whole setup had been rigged to a MacBook resting on a stack of pallets, I bent over to study the screen. Shah smiled and gently folded shut the computer.
“No incense,” he said. “Though it wouldn’t hurt.”
He fiddled with the overhead lamp. A spiral bulb, bright as a tiny star, glared through a nest of reflectors and filters.
“The candle,” Shah said, “is very much an artificial light source. Like any artificial stimulus, it produces particular effects. A dreamlike state. Heightened imagination. Theological inclinations, perhaps a weakness for Cartesian theology.” He winked. “The intent of this setup is . . . well, slightly different.”
Shah tweaked a dial on the side of the lamp. A whine of machinery accompanied subtle adjustments. The light changed, breaking into a fluid, dappled pattern, a kind of spray of color and shadow. Like sunlight shimmering through leaves . . .
“These are sunlamps,” Shah said. “Very advanced ones. If you head up to Bangkok or down to Bali, you’ll see them in the new resorts. They advertise these as ‘phototherapy.’ The radiation is filtered through several kinds of crystal and gas, designed to mimic ambient light. Not a raw blast of radiation, as you get in a tanning bed. More like the healthy glow of a forest.” He smiled again. “It’s not necessary to use these,” he said. “But I find it helps.”
He reminded me of an English gardener, puttering around a tangled plot of roses. “So you sit here under these lamps,” I said, standing back with my hands in my pockets, “soaking up the rays, and . . . what? What’s the point?”
Shah’s face betrayed surprise. He adjusted his glasses. “I’m sorry. That’s not the intent at all. I’m not going to sit here, Mister Lam. You are.”
Of course. I should have known. I stepped into his thicket of tanning-salon accessories. “So I’ll squat down here, and you’ll work your mojo on me, and you think I’ll end up converting to your brave new religion? That’s the deal?”
Shah adjusted one of the speakers, smiling that funny smile. “These speakers, now . . . these are from an American home theater system. They’re perfectly safe. Unlike the acoustic weapons you threatened me with, they’re designed to be pleasingly stimulating. The body . . . ” He broke off, scratching his chin. “Let me start again. The self, I should say, isn’t confined to the body. It isn’t here, or here, or even here.” He touched his chest, his belly, his cranium. “It’s out here.” Shah spread his arms. “In the sensorium. The environment. The self converges on the body, but it’s not contained in the body. Do you follow?”
I sighed. He sounded exactly like the sort of babbling crackpot I’d expected. I shuffled to the center of his lights and speakers. “Just to clarify: I’ll sit here and put up with your little sensory therapy session. Twenty minutes, no more. And when this is over, whatever the effect, you’ll give the word and clear your people out.”
“All I ask,” Shah said, “is that you have an open mind.”
He had no prayer rug, no stool, no reed mat. He didn’t seem to care if I stood or sat. “And where will you be,” I said, “while I’m grooving to these good vibrations?”
“I’ll be right here,” Shah said. “Talking to you. Because the words, Mister Lam . . . ” Again with that weird smile. “The words are the most important part.”
It happens that, despite my background, I know a thing or two about the power of hypnosis.
I can thank my wife for that. My second wife. Not Terry or Linda or Fey-Long, but Francine. She went in for New Age stuff. Aroma therapy, cryotherapy, drawing Jackson Pollock pictures in pig blood while neoprimitives in yoga pants shout in your ear. Francine was into some nutty stuff, but she taught me a lot of good lessons, too. She taught me how the nutty stuff works, or makes people think it works. About the uncanny power of suggestion.
Hypnosis. It’s real, Carter. Not the wacky things you’ve heard, past-life regression and out-of-body trips. I mean the classic deal, mesmerism, the power of the voice. Those people who imagine alien visits and talking hippos, they aren’t faking it. They really see those things.
The smartest thing Francine ever told me is that when a word’s in the air, it’s only a wave. When it enters your ear, it’s only a vibration. But when a word gets into your head, into your brain, it becomes a chemical. And chemicals, those are the keys to the soul.
As I sat down amid Abdul Shah’s lamps and stands and sound generators, I honestly thought I was prepared. Prepared for something a little intense, even for a heavy trip.
But I wasn’t prepared for anything like this.
I can’t remember what Abdul Shah said. His words, at first, were ordinary words, the kinds of things any hypnotist might say. You feel relaxed. You’re very calm. He turned on his speakers. The light began to change. I wanted to open my eyes, but to my surprise I found I couldn’t move. The sound waves had taken hold of me.
Imagine the ocean, the way it heaves on a windy day. The waves don’t simply break over your head, when you go swimming on a day like that. They squeeze you. They grab hold of your guts and ribs. They pump your lungs, press your heart. Pretty soon you have no choice. You’re forced to breathe in the rhythm of the sea.
That was the effect, albeit more potent, created by Shah’s array of speakers. No sooner had it taken hold than Shah began to change his speech. Now he recited gibberish, or what sounded like gibberish. His voice skipped up and down, hitting odd pitches. It was more like singing than talking or chanting. A crazy kind of singing, like he was part of an ensemble, but all the other parts had been cut out. The light pounded against my eyes. I could feel the radiation from the lamps, a burning tingle.
Before long, Shah changed it up again. He began to repeat odd sounds, varying them in a mixed-up rhythm. Noise and light, voice and thought, pulsed and combined in a calibrated pattern. I couldn’t think. I mean that literally—I seemed to have no control of my mind. But I understood, in the meaty way of the body, that this was all leading to a terminal event. Not like a rocket heading for a target, but like a net that slowly loosens—until at last I slipped through, falling into an abyss.
Shah must have spoken a triggering word. His speakers and lamps delivered one final, precisely keyed, mind-busting blast. I realized that my mind was a shell, and that it was cracking, exposing a secret, internal place.
And into that place came . . .
Something.
Only later, as I put my mind, Humpty-Dumpty-like, back together, did I find the words for what had happened.
I’d been visited.
6
“Mister Lam?” Shah bent over me, backlit by his array of lamps. Even in silhouette, face in shadow, he looked worried, uncertain, and very, very tired. “Mister Lam, your pants are calling you.”
I blinked into the gaping void that remained of my short term memory. Where the hell had I gone? What the hell had happened? Gradually, I realized that Shah was right. A voice was rising out of my pants, emanating from the naughtiest part of my anatomy.
“Doug? Doug? Can you hear me, Doug?”
I staggered up. The light was different, softer. The air in the room felt different, too, less punishingly stuffy than when I had arrived. I stumbled past the lamps to the window, yanked back the tarp.
The sun was setting over the western hills.
Red marked the horizon. Pink beams slanted down the black, scoured valleys. Below, on the pavement, the riot police sat waiting, shields laid flat on the ground at their feet. A few played cards around an overturned water barrel. I could see the screen of their gambling machine flickering in the fading light.
“Doug, I’m getting worried. Are you there? Can you answer?”
I shoved a hand down my pants, fumbled at my groin, and ripped the wads of micropore tape off my skin. I lifted Karen’s miniphone on a strip of medical fabric. “I’m here, Karen. What’s up?”
“What’s up? What’s up is that I’ve been fighting to
oth and nail to buy you more time. Doug, what in the world’s going on in there? You’re not hurt, are you? Have you been restrained?”
Hurt? I blinked at the miniphone in my fist, trying to remember the person I’d been this morning, that man named Doug Lam who participated without hesitation in ordinary conversations. Corporate stooge, experienced site investigator, moderately skilled negotiator. Was that me? “Karen?” I ran my tongue around my mouth. “How long has it been?”
“Doug, I’m serious—”
“I have no clock, Karen. They took my phone. Tell me, how long?”
Her answer came back on a surge of static. “Six hours.” Karen’s voice rose. “I’ve been calling you, Doug, for six damn hours.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Abdul Shah, standing amid his collection of speakers, waiting for me to finish the call.
“What’s happening?” Karen’s voice cracked with exhaustion.
I was already talking, so fast I could hardly breathe. “Don’t let them do it. Karen. Don’t let them come in here. Get me as much time as you can.”
“Doug, for God’s sake—”
I’d already clicked off the miniphone, dropped it into my shirt pocket, and crossed the floor to face Abdul Shah.
“Tell me.” I spoke simply, not commanding or begging, merely issuing a humble request. “Tell me what just happened.”
He turned his back, fussing with something hidden behind his equipment. “This may take a moment.” Shah spoke over his shoulder, straightened, turned, used his heel to kick shut the door of a minifridge, and held out a dripping can. “Would you like a Sprite?”
7
Usually, when people have an experience like this, they tell you it simply can’t be described.
I dunno, man, it was surreal, y’know, like, intense, like, I couldn’t begin to describe it.
Bullshit. The truth is, there are thousands of ways to describe what I’d been through. And all of them have been tried before.
That was what Abdul Shah undertook to explain, as he turned down his lamps and clicked off his speakers and sat me down with a can of lemon pop.