by Moira Crone
Greenmore told me that when visitors from “the outside world” came, they rang the bell and then raised the door on their side of the niche, and placed their money, then closed the door. The nuns would open on the other side and replace the money with “divinity,” then close it again, thus keeping themselves in seclusion. She said, “It seems to me they thought of prayer as the work of calling on something invisible. Then they produced that candy, something in honor of the invisible: made of sugar and egg white, sweet as heaven, like little dollops of cloud.”
“Like brosia,” I said. I want to remind her who she was. She seemed to be having trouble with this lately. She seemed to want to speak to me as if I were an equal.
“I think sweeter,” she said.
I told her people always forgot about the place in the middle, didn’t realize a small boy could wedge himself between two sets of doors, and stay, as it were, inside the wall for hours. And if someone started to open up one set, the boy hiding could go behind the second set, and run off. He always had a warning, and an escape. Actually, Ariel and I were the only two boys who could stand that enclosure—the others were afraid of being inside, couldn’t take it for hours. We always could. Neither of us was in the least claustrophobic.
“Is that so?” she asked. “Do you know why that is?”
I shrugged.
“How else were you and he different?”
I shrugged again.
“But where is our secret door?” she asked. “It must be here someplace,” she said, pressing on her chest. “No one sees it. How does ‘the god’ come and go? Or the soul, which is I think, the same thing but from this direction. They all have different names for it. The soul is the part that participates in the larger—a little tiny connector to the whole, so to speak. They say it exists. We don’t believe—” She put her fist near her heart.
I had no idea what she wanted to know, or why she was asking me.
She looked at me very hard and said something quite strange: “I would have thought you might have thoughts on such things, or have images of them.”
“All this was long over when I got to the Foundling House,” I said. “Why?”
“But what if you think back?” she asked, looking at me in that way she had before, fishing.
How could these things matter? She was confusing. She made me uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” I said. “Klamath needs me. We are working on the coriander.” I wanted to go back to the barns where he spread bushels of leaves of the spice on thin cloth, and we boiled water underneath them, and then captured the steam. I liked the work; I liked helping Serio and Klamath.
“I make you nervous, don’t I?” she asked.
I wanted to say I was worried, about her, but that would be too bold. In any event, she could tell from my expression, apparently.
“How can you worry about someone who is seeking the truth?” she asked. “Don’t.”
In general, this was the entire content of my position as “research assistant.” She was mining mystical literature, and the rest, and then she called me occasionally to ask me what I thought of things she’d learned. I never thought very much of it. It was written by Nats, it was all idiotic. She seemed to think that because I was a Nat, or for some other reason, I would have answers she couldn’t come up with on her own.
“Religion, so I was taught,” she went on. “Was what we had to cling to before the Reveal? It had to do with tying yourself on to some story, some myth, and repeating it so many times you believed it. And the myths were all about immortality, finally, so I was taught. Once we had that, or something this close, we didn’t need religion anymore—it was simple. Everyone was taught this. The word religion, after all, comes from the same root as ligament—people tied themselves to a story so they could live, as if forever. An act of group imagination, group self-hypnotism. And now it has no function. But what if it there is something to it? In their mystics, in their esoteric—”
“There can’t be anything,” I said.
“If I can crack the code of it. I’m going to posit there is something there, see where it goes. There are so many mystical testimonies—all these were liars? In fact, I’m not even going to have my Re-job this year. I’ve written them and told them. I am too engaged in my project to be interrupted. If I am going to try these practices, I’m going to have a Natural body, or as close as I can get—”
“What?” I had never even heard of such a thing.
“In due time,” she said. “You will see.” She picked up her tiny brosia plate, and handed it to me, to let me know I could take it with me when I left her suite.
Have scraps from her table. I took them. It was an honor, it seemed to me.
That afternoon, in the kitchen, I confided in Klamath, and asked, “Can she do this? Not go in for her Re-job?”
“She can do anything she wants,” he shrugged. “She’s an Heir.”
“Will her—”
“It’s not going to kill her. Not right away. She can skip a cycle. It’s been done. Not by her, but I have heard—”
“Why would any Heir risk something like that? Couldn’t it harm them?”
He shrugged. “The thing about them is they aren’t like us. Not like us at all. They don’t even have the same truth.”
*
“You are taking this too far,” Chotchko told Greenmore later that same month. Someone had to say it, and I couldn’t, and Klamath couldn’t. So we were thrilled she was here, saying it. She stood in the middle of Greenmore’s suite in her bright red leathery braids, her cherry colored sheath, her travel cape. I never liked her at the Curing Towers—I didn’t think she had enough deference to Dr. Greenmore, but now I loved her. She had heard of Greenmore’s plan not to get her Re-job on time, and she’d come to get our boss to change her mind.
I was watching all this through the blinds from my little room.
Greenmore just stared at Chotchko, tightlipped. Chotchko pressed: “Is it masked despair?”
“Will you stop condescending to me? You aren’t listening. I at least understand the problem. None of your crowd even does. What if some Protos have evolved to the point they can’t help but seek to expand—or whatever you want to call it. What if there is a natural imperative after a certain number of years in this consciousness—their physical entities, their minds, are expressing this, what, this climax, this natural transition. Look at the evidence, the way they are breaking out. I know it. There must be a conduit. Someone must have found it. Once, stumbled upon it—the mystics. A clarified path. The boundary can become the corridor. This must happen. There are so many who say so—and perhaps the ones who took the mushrooms knew. How to do it in a healthier, less chaotic fashion, in a way that doesn’t harm. Or the Tibetans, they wrote a whole book about the territory, I think—but it has to be decoded—”
“Oh my Albers,” Chotchko said. “That is the book of the Dead. They were dead. They died. You know? Bit the black? So so so-longed?”
“Those who wrote the books didn’t, or if they did, they came back. They wrote directions! Just how do we translate them? Everyone wasn’t an idiot before the Reveal—think about it. How could they have been? They produced us? Nats have reason. Malcolm—look at him, his I.Q., given everything, is completely unexpected, there is no ordinary explanation for it, did I show you that at the Towers? Have you ever read Swedenborg?” Greenmore was raising her hands again. Her gown made wings. I felt exposed, being discussed like that.
“What is this now? You want to figure out how to do what? And without the—so-long? That’s your research? So you are going to try to so-long to see?”
“If you are going to call me names—and, not, not so-long,expand. I have never mentioned that. That’s the whole point! There is reason to believe some consciousness loosens from the body after old death—” Greenmore’s raspy voice rising. “This would explain some of the experiences of the Chronics, their erratic voyaging, their insistence that the dimensions that hold them in don’t count�
��we have to do something so they won’t continue to destabilize. Or the First Wave. You don’t recognize sacrifice, do you? Is that it? I’m willing to go out, chart the territory—find the way—”
Chotchko: “Honestly Lydia. You are not making sense. Loosens from the body? We know there is no consciousness without the body. Perhaps you should see someone. Dr. Jeremiah has openings—come back to the Towers—perhaps if you rethought being redescribed. And certainly it’s lunacy to skip a Re-job.”
Greenmore leaned forward. “I am planning on the body being alive, of course! I believe in the Reveal! Of course! Don’t you understand? You, of all people, fail to see the importance of what I’m trying to discover—the First Wave will be hitting this limit. We are going to have millions all at once, filling all the beds. And think of the varietology possibilities, if these methods can be taught, and I think they can be taught, especially if one of us learns how they work, and how to adapt them to Heirs—and reduce the risks.”
“You know as well as I do that the most we can do is find a drug combination to calm them, slow them down, keep them in the normal range,” Chotchko countered. “When we were working at the Towers, working on the data coming in, we all thought it was chemical. You thought so too—”
Greenmore said, “Mental events have chemical consequences, you know this. Just think, we can give them a tour, so they don’t have to fear, or experience anything as messy as—”
“You sound like a heretic. Please.”
This was all too difficult, things between Heirs. I was actually on Chotchko’s side, and I had to be against her. I would have much preferred a play, if things were going to be dramatic. In a play you knew how things ended. That everyone was pretending.
Greenmore called me in. I obeyed.
“Pick her up and take her out,” she ordered.
“But Dr. Greenmore I can’t touch her,” I said.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
Chotchko stood, looked right into me, her bright ropes sprouting from her head.
Greenmore said, “Move,” but I did not.
Chotchko and I passed through a few more moments like that. I was throbbing, with confusion. What if she didn’t relent? I would have to carry her, a horror for us both.
At the last moment she said, “Oh, you fool,” and stalked out.
I followed.
A few minutes later, out on the pier, she said to me, “She has to get help. She just can’t stand to be wrong.”
Chotchko’s transport was at the end of the plank road. The driver had gotten out—he seemed alarmed to find me there, alone with an Heir. “I’m okay. He’s all right,” she called him. To me: “Perhaps I went too far, but she’s going off—do you see it? Off in her own world, it’s megalomania, worse. If there is some realm—who is she to travel there alone? Solo Columbus?”
I was shocked Chotchko would even entertain the ideas. It was hot, almost dusk, noisy with frogs in the marsh, and cicadas in the herb fields and low trees out in the firm land that the marshes were connected to.
“Do you know what she’s trying to find, Malcolm?” She was speaking to me as an equal, or closer to an equal than I was comfortable with. “Do you see the folly? You do, don’t you? I can tell. Why don’t you tell her?”
“She won’t listen to me,” I said. The whole idea that I could tell Greenmore anything and that she might act upon it was disconcerting.
“She’s disturbed by how far she has fallen. The reception of her research. It has devastated her. It’s her pride. She certainly doesn’t trust me. She may think she has her reasons. But I have always given her credit. I will, I’m not going after—explain this to her—she has something right about the Protos. And she was right it was going to hit the First Wave. That’s already starting. I have seen the reports. I didn’t want to tell her. Yet obviously, her approach is absurd—we can find a drug. We are trying some already.”
“But I can’t stop her. I’m just—” I said.
“She trusts you,” she said.
I shook my head.
“But she does, you don’t know?” Chotchko asked.
“Know what?” I asked.
She looked away, gestured for the driver to open the wide burgundy door of her high-wheeled vehicle. She made that noise, that click with the tongue at the top of the mouth, to know he should come and meet her, escort her back to the car. He ran up to her: he was a Gaist, wore that blue tattoo on the lids. I didn’t know what enclave he was from. He didn’t look her in the eye—he seemed surprised when he saw that I did. Out in the country, I had lost my manners. She turned back and looked at me before she set off. “Just, take care of her,” she said. “Will you?”
I swelled with pride, to think she felt she could ask me something like that. Then fear, because, who was I to take care of a grand, brilliant Heir?
Walking back to the house, I was still thinking about the fact that Greenmore had asked me to pick Chotchko up. The taboo was so strict; I was having trouble with it. I recalled a story from years before. An Heir had fainted into a puddle at a Sim. Vee had been the only one around. Two Heirs gave him permission, ordered him to handle her. None of them had anywhere near the strength. He didn’t want to. He never had touched one, not in forty odd years of life. Once he handled her, the Heir would have to go through a whole purging, purification—it was quite a tax on them, being defiled by one of us. But he did it. “They are so light,” he had told me later. “No more than a wet dog, the skin is not fat and muscle, what you call it, the prodermis—it’s like foam—they are very light, full of air, just like their voices”—and he had smiled when he said this, even laughed a little. It had been late at night at the Foundling House one of the many nights when we had no power and were huddled in the kitchen, with candles. He had just entertained us with a shadow play earlier. I was about twelve, or thirteen, and he was having a little orange-basil wine which they were still making then at Chef Menteur. He was giving me a confession, letting me in on a secret. “No substance—” He had shrugged. “I always knew in some way, but to touch—” He shrugged again. “There’s that moment when what you always knew, somehow in your mind, but it didn’t work to know it, or it somehow goes against your own view, yet it comes forth, it’s a revelation, a gift, when the knowledge arrives, the world rights itself.”
“What did you always know?” I had asked Vee.
“They are ghosts,” he had said.
“You can’t say that,” I had said.
“I know, I am sorry, I should never have said that to you.” He was turning over his palms in gesture of resignation, but still a vague smile, a flash of pride. “Will you forgive me?”
*
After Chotchko’s visit, Greenmore redoubled her efforts, said she was putting herself in a “cave”—adapting this from a mode of Tibetan sensory deprivation. We were not to go in to see her, only slip the brosias and hot water under the door. There were certain draughts she was taking, Klamath confided. She’d had them sent in from Gaist allies in South America. Smuggled, actually.
Even Mimi was excluded, except for every few days, to bring her fresh gowns.
I watched her sometimes through my blinds. She was in there for forty days and nights—chanting, and walking, and weeping, taking meticulous notes. When she emerged in late July, the relief was palpable, at least to me.
It was actually a beautiful day, not as awfully hot as it should have been. I saw her on the plank road. She seemed strong and alive. I was energized by the sight. I thought her decline must be over.
The house was high—we’d been working on raising the foundations—and the water level seemed to be stabilizing. The fields were well-drained. We had dug new lagoons, and the swamp irises and the gray night herons and the ibises and the dark beautiful ducks and the roosting egrets in the evenings filled the swamps around us. Greenmore was beaming. She had a new calm, perhaps. Okay, it was over.
I was watching her from the small dining table on the dec
k beside the open windows of Mimi’s galley kitchen. At this point, Greenmore had been out walking for about half an hour—off the boardwalk, and through the basil gardens, the collard patches, the mounds of cilantro, out to the marsh, and then back.
She came inside the house through the French doors off the kitchen. She never went into our kitchen. After a short tour past our stove and sink, she exited again and pulled up a bench at my outdoor table, and asked, blithely, “What are you eating?”
Shrimp and crawfish with herbs, and rice, thick and spicy, which I had an impulse to cover, to hide.
“Can I have some of it?” she asked.
“What did you say?” Klamath blurted out, through the open kitchen door.
Greenmore said back, “I want some of what he’s having—what is it? Okras, thick noodles, crawfish, shrimp with what? Ginger, basil? Cilantro?”
I had no idea she had these words in her vocabulary. I had never heard her speak of our food with any word other than the general term, “victuals,” a slur in their eyes.
Mimi was over at the counter peeling shrimp for the restaurants. (Serio had inspired his parents to start processing them, for the Pond Gaists and the Chef Menteur restaurant trade.) She turned so quickly she knocked some shrimps on the floor, where they formed a gelatinous gray mass.
I was disgusted, the way Greenmore should have been disgusted—the clumps and filth I still put in my mouth. I couldn’t stand her to be here, to see it. But she didn’t seem to mind.
I saw Mimi’s grooved and dimpled face, looking over at Greenmore, shocked. An Heir, asking for our lowly fare. What could it mean? The world was crazy.
Klamath came to the table, and offered his mistress a taste from a stirring spoon. He must have thought that would sour Greenmore on the general idea. She surely had not had victuals cross her lips for fifty years, or seventy, or more. He leaned in so close to her it seemed forbidden to me.