by John Shirley
A man to Ira’s left sniffed, probably trying not to sneeze; someone’s stomach made a soft eeep sound. Ira had to smile.
Ira usually chose to do his sitting with his eyes open. He found himself looking at Paymenz. Beardless now but bearlike in his enormous brown sweater, Paymenz sat across from Ira, eyes closed, deep in meditation. He wasn’t yet used to Paymenz without a beard—his face looked too round, too pale, too tired without it. The erstwhile professor was going through changes, despite his age. He’d discarded as “energy-wasting and distorting” his old interest in ritual magic and divination. Paymenz instead had chosen the purity of the struggle for higher consciousness.
Ira himself had taken the same path—but sometimes, as now, he felt it was more a fishhook than a path. He felt, at times, impaled by the methods of this esoteric school; at such moments he felt himself squirming in the struggle to suffer all things consciously—like a shrike’s victim squirming on a thorn.
He was young in this school, he knew, despite having a certain gift for it. And he knew that he was still a slave to his lower impulses—like his resentment over Melissa’s absence, her going abroad with their son, Marcus. He knew the boy missed him, he could feel it, even now. Why couldn’t she have left Marcus? Her mission would take her to an obscure monastery in Turkmenistan, and the boy might succumb to some exotic Middle Eastern bacterium there; or he could be kidnapped by militants, taken hostage. Nine years old, wandering through the wastelands not far from the Afghanistan border.
But not alone. There were guides, protecting them. And of course, Nyerza was there.
He was ashamed at the naked surge of jealousy that rose up in him. Nyerza—who’d gathered her in his arms that night, as they’d hidden beneath the city . . . Nyerza in charge of his wife—and his son. If she’d had to insist on taking Marcus to that hard land, couldn’t she have told Ira why?
It would’ve been better if Melissa had lied. But instead she had said, with her typical disarming openness, “I don’t know why. But he has to go with me.”
She didn’t even know why she’d taken him there.
Ira was yanked back to the work at hand when Yanan spoke, bringing them to the end of the group meditation.
“And now we return our attention to the normal flow of events, to the social world, and the world of time.” His accent soft, faintly Middle Eastern. He was a small, compact man with a boyish brown face, though he was at least sixty. His curly black hair showed only the faintest peppering of gray. His wide flexible mouth was always on the verge of a smile—perpetually implying one, even when he didn’t smile.
Ira sighed inwardly, annoyed with himself for letting his mind wander. But there wasn’t any point in beating himself up about his lack of discipline. Anyone in his position would find it hard to stay cool and detached. He should have insisted on going with Melissa himself.
He’d tried to—but Yanan and Paymenz had made it sound as if it were a test of his faith and humility to stay here. If he hadn’t seen the demons nine years ago, if he hadn’t felt what he’d felt then, seen what he’d seen, he’d wonder if he was in a damn cult now. Perhaps, after nine years, it had deteriorated to just that.
Yanan stood and stretched, and that was the signal for the others to do so. Ira stood, grimacing as sensation came back into his legs but grateful to be able to move.
Yanan was there, gazing up at him. “Many kinks in the arms and legs today, eh?”
“My damn back hurts as soon as I stand up.”
“And why is that, do we know? Hm? Eh? It is you who put the hurts in with your tension. You sit today like a crocodile biting down. Crunch, all of your muscles. Big tension. Who’s in charge, you or the muscles, eh? Hm?”
“The muscles. My aunt Edna. Anybody but me.”
“You have an Aunt Edna? Is she with us?”
“No, that was a joke, I don’t have an Aunt Edna.”
“Ah! A joke! Too bad it’s not funny, eh? Hm?”
“Yeah.” Ira laughed softly. “Too bad.” The others were shuffling out of the room, carrying chairs, fetching the coffee table, saying nothing. “Okay, I’ll work on relaxing.”
“You’re worried about the Urn, the wife, the baby. You feel trapped in all this. Sometimes you like to be in it; sometimes you wish you had never started. Yes, eh?”
“Yes, eh.”
“Now you’re making fun of me?”
“Yes, eh.”
Yanan laughed and punched at Ira’s midriff. “Come on, let us have some coffee. No, first I make my evening prayers. Then we have some coffee. Eh? Hm?”
THE JOURNAL OF STEPHEN ISQUERAT
It only happened twice. The first time was when I was thirteen, the second time I was fifteen. I guess I’d convinced myself—sort of—that it hadn’t been real, that it was some kind of dream. And I kind of suppressed it. But when I took the psychonomics test, I remembered it, and it felt like the memory of something real.
Then I talked to Mr. Winderson, and met Latilla and got the tour of the psychonomics training room where those people sat at the desks. (None of them ever looked up! It was weird.) And after visiting that place and stumbling onto Mr. Deane, I remembered again. So I guess I’ll write it down in my journal. Maybe I can copy and paste it later for some psychonomics project.
It was winter, that first time, and we were snowed in. That was when Dad worked at that school in the Idaho panhandle. Nice kids, but the parents got really uptight when he mentioned evolution. Dad stuck it out there for two years.
The second year the snow was so high it buried the back of our one-story house and drifted halfway up the picture window; it was heavy enough it made the glass creak. We were way out in the boonies, away from anybody. I only saw my friends at school. It was Christmas vacation, and the power went out and we heated with wood, used lanterns for light. The County people kept saying they were going to plow our road, but somehow it never happened. Dad made arrangements for groceries to be brought out by a neighbor who had a snowmobile. Without power there was no TV, no Internet, no computer at all. I read, and we tried to enjoy the snow, but days passed and the claustrophobia, the cabin fever, got worse and worse.
It was snowing, sleeting really, early one night, and Dad wouldn’t let me go outside. But it had been just too long like this. I was sitting by the fireplace, staring into the flames. Dad was up in the loft reading something. I just sat there and stared, and the fire sort of sucked in all my attention. It was like I was escaping into it. It was like the whole world was blue and red and orange flames. Then suddenly one of the logs—I don’t know if it was because of pitch or trapped water—burst in half, and I jerked back.
But my body didn’t jerk back. It was whatever rides around in my body—my spirit or mind or both, I don’t know. It wasn’t much more than a moving point of view really. It was moving back away from my body . . . so I saw my body sitting by the fire, leaning back on outstretched hands, staring blankly. I was floating upward, away from that body.
I remember thinking, Is that what I look like? It’s not like seeing yourself in a mirror. I look goofier than I thought.
I wasn’t scared at all. It was like I floated away from fear when I floated away from my body. Then I saw some wood, dust, and spiders, and I knew I was going through the ceiling. I saw my dad, his back to me. I tried to call out to him, but I couldn’t speak.
Then I was falling, but falling up—that’s how it felt, like I was free-falling but upward, really rocketing up over the cabin. Up was down, down was up, and I was falling up. I watched the roof of the cabin receding below me and the melted outline of the snowy fir trees. A white owl perched near the top of a pine. The owl seemed to see me as I passed. Then I fell upward into a hole in the sky. It was like it wasn’t sky anymore—it was another world. I saw men and women rising like threads of smoke around me, each of them changing: They were a baby, a child, they were adult, they were old, they were babies again . . . flickering through that whole sequence and babbling to themselves
. I seemed to see a sky filled with stars that were actually words of some kind, written in some language I couldn’t understand. The stars seemed to be talking to me, all of them at once.
I remember thinking: I’m dying. But what about Dad?
That thought seemed to trigger a change, and I burst out from the other world, back into the sky over the cabin. It wasn’t like I came from up or down or sideways, it was like I exploded into being there, like fireworks expanding from a small missile of chemicals to a big, flaring, burning, shining shape in the sky, all at once.
Then I was just a point of view again, and I was drifting down through the roof and down to the fireplace.
There was a nasty clicking feeling—definitely not pleasant, it was like getting a hammer in the elbow—and then I was back in my body, lying on my side, feeling sick to my stomach. Shaking and crying.
My dad heard me and came downstairs to see what was wrong and I tried to talk about it and couldn’t. So finally I told him I’d fallen asleep and had a nightmare, and after a while I almost believed that’s what had happened.
The second time was almost a year later. I was at a school in L.A., and I was depressed that day to start with. I had PE first period, we were doing softball; and I missed an easy catch—I just choked up—and then I struck out at bat, and the other guys jeered at me big-time. Screwing up in sports was standard for me. I was feeling pretty down on myself. Then a girl I was interested in, Trisha, who was editor of the school literary magazine, walked up to me with a look on her face like she was going to eat something tasty.
She said she’d gotten my note in her editorial cubby asking her if she wanted to go to the spring dance, and she said, “The answer is, please don’t embarrass me again by asking. Some people heard about you asking me and they gave me a lot of crap. Capish?”
I don’t know why I thought she’d be sensitive, editing the school literary mag. It was a lot of dreck anyway.
So I was even more down on myself after that encounter with Trisha, and then a big lunk of a kid named Greg Monnard spotted me after school. He was a kid with died-white Eminem hair, a thick, naturally brawny body, big feet that turned outward, and his pants hanging low off his ass. He walked up to me, with no expression at all on his face, and just knocked me down, bang!, with a right to the side of my head. I went down, I rolled onto my side. Then Greg sat on me, and whenever I tried to get up, he bent over and backhanded me or ground his heel into my knee. As he sat on me he lit a cigarette. “Sit still, till I’m done with my cigarette. I don’t want to sit on the grass. I think there’s dog shit on it.” So he used me as his bench while he smoked his cigarette, just smiling a little bit, as if at all the irony in the whole world, while a crowd gathered to watch.
That’s when it happened again. I just couldn’t stay there. I had to, but I couldn’t. So the part of me that can leave my body backed out and was hovering over Greg and the crowd and my body down there. Suddenly all the pain and misery was gone. I flew upward and I didn’t want to come back to my body at all. I went through that hole in the sky and was back in the place where smoky spirits, changing from baby to child to adult to old, were floating upward, transforming as they went. The stars were talking runes again. And then I seemed to fly right into one of those stars, or through it like it was a door.
I passed through a world of living lightning bolts and then into a place where there was nothing but a constantly changing landscape, as if the land shifted like the sea does in a storm, and there were wailing, miserable spirits trapped there. Above them all was a being who was as big as a mountain, towering over everything. He had a beautiful face, and he had twisted horns, and he had wings that were broken and bleeding. His lower half was hidden because he was stuck in ice up to his waist—the ice was the only thing that didn’t shift and change in that world.
He turned his head to look at me, and I felt his looking like an ant would feel the beam from a magnifying glass. I felt myself shriveling up under that gaze, and I knew I was going to be trapped there, too, if I stayed. So I thought about my dad, and my body, and how I wantedto grow up to be a rich and powerful man, who people wouldn’t beat up on, and then I was back in my body, twisting out from under Greg Monnard.
I felt sick and disoriented, but different, and even stronger in some way. I guess it was that I wasn’t afraid of Greg anymore. He seemed so small after what I’d seen.
So after I squirmed out from under him, I grabbed the cigarette out of Greg’s mouth—he was pretty surprised!—and shoved it down his shirt. He backed away, yelling and slapping at himself, and then I kicked him hard in the pit of the stomach. He fell on his ass, gasping, and smoke was coming out of his shirt. I reached down, tugged it so the cigarette came out, and flicked it away. Somehow, taking the cigarette out of his shirt so it wouldn’t hurt him anymore gave me some kind of style or grace, like I had some character he didn’t have.
“I tried to let you be the big man,” I said, “but you went too far. And you are just so small.”
Some of the people watching applauded, and Greg didn’t bother me anymore after that.
But for the next couple of days I was afraid to sleep, afraid of my dreams, of feeling like the real world wasn’t real enough. I decided that what I’d seen was some weird mental aberration, like a seizure, a hallucination like the things epileptics see. It worked in my favor this once, because in my disassociated state I’d lost my fear of Greg. But I decided I had to never let it happen again, because if I did let it happen, I was going to end up being put away somewhere. I’d get lost in my own head, and they’d put me in an asylum.
I saw ten minutes or so of a show about Out-of-Body Experiences—OBEs, they call them—on the Discovery Channel, a year or so later. I turned it off pretty quickly. No, I told myself, bullshit. Not real.
So I talked myself again into believing it hadn’t been real.
But now, somehow, I know it was real. It was a real OBE. And maybe I have a kind of talent for it that Winderson wants to use somehow. So maybe it was a good thing.
I hope I can deal with it. Just seems to me that a person could go insane after a few experiences like that.
“I don’t think we’ve met, have we, Mr. Isquerat?” the woman with the red-blond hair asked, riding up the elevator with him.
A little more blond than red, that long wavy hair. Stephen thought of a pinup girl from the middle of the last century, painted on some bomber: an almost perfect face, dimpled chin, something glittering in her crystalline blue eyes. She wore a red leather coat opened in the front to show off voluptuous curves
tautly wrapped in a cream-colored blouse, a pantsuit, and red pumps to match her coat. Her nails were the color of her suit. He didn’t usually note so many details, but this woman made Stephen stare. She was perhaps a little short, a little too plump, but she carried herself with the supreme confidence of an overpaid cover girl.
“You are Mr. Isquerat?”
“Hm? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t answer you.” He felt his face burning. He’d been staring instead of listening. “I mean, in my mind I answered yes.”
“I’m not usually a mind reader. Only every third Wednesday.”
He chuckled dutifully, trying to identify her perfume. Gardenias? Yes, but very understated gardenias. The elevator reached the eleventh floor of the West Wind building and he followed her out. “I’m Stephen Isquerat. . . .”
“I’m the boss’s niece. Better be nice to me!” Her face was deadpan, except her eyes laughed.
“There was never any chance I wouldn’t be. I’m . . .” No, don’t say “I’m only human.” “Anyway—if you’re Mr. Winderson’s niece, then you’re Jonquil? He mentioned you to me once.”
“Well, he better had. He’s under strict instructions to mention me to every up-and-coming guy he brings in around here.”
“I don’t know how up-and-coming I am. . . .”
“I hear he’s got great plans for you. You’re going to revive psychonomics, I think?”
“Maybe—soon as I figure out what it is.”
She chuckled. “You and me both.”
But somehow he thought she was just playing along, that she knew exactly what it was all about. It gave him an uneasy feeling, but he quickly forgot it, looking into her eyes. What was that song his dad had liked? “Crystal Blue Persuasion”? “Well . . . uh . . .” He looked around in confusion. Eleventh floor.
She pursed her lips to keep the smile out this time. “Wrong floor?”
“No, no I just . . .” He sighed. “Yes, okay. Wrong floor.”
“I’ll take that as flattery. See you later . . . two floors up, I think.”
“Sure. Later . . .”
But he didn’t see her till it was almost time for him to go to Ash Valley.
Ira was sipping coffee flavored with roses. Seated across from him, at the small table of the Turkish-style café, Yanan watched and almost smiled. Paymenz, sitting on his right, glowered into his own undrunk coffee, chewing fitfully on a gooey wedge of baklava. There was canned Turkish music playing, but Ira was only vaguely aware of it.