“So things are okay.”
“He can work from here. Coding identity software. It’s kept our parents out of it. I think they think I’ll eventually go back to college. That’s what he—Reed—tells me. But they are less sure now, it’s been three years, not the year off they signed on for.”
“You were studying what, before you left.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Anything can help.”
“Classics, while it lasted. Is that funny? Is it strange?”
“They get you to pick something. Why not.”
“It’s more than that. But the incompletes were piling up.”
“And they think what?”
“My parents? Traveling, partly. And I am. I spent about half the time, less than that, in California, between San Diego and L.A. And then a bunch of places around here. I assume they think I’m figuring things out. That’s never totally false, I guess, whoever says it.”
“And nothing unusual, no trouble.”
“Things aren’t good between us, just in the last year really. My father won’t take the phone anymore. I’m not mad though. I see it. They’re wondering about college. Officially it’s odd jobs—waitressing, tutoring even. I’ve done a little of those things too. They don’t know why I want to keep doing this, though, and I’ve said some things along the way about writing. I guess that’s another thing you can say and never really be insincere. Everyone has that wish in them, somewhere. But I’ve written nothing. No journals. I don’t really think I will, when it comes down to it. I think I prefer reading.”
“I think I do too.”
“When I’ve been able to. And they say, can’t I write after the degree? How could studying classics hurt a writer? I don’t know if that’s right though. But it doesn’t matter really, does it, since I don’t actually write. But I do still read them. Or I’ve started again. Ovid, last.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve read him? Your other profession maybe.”
“No.”
“Then?”
“Of ancient things, Gorgias last.”
“I knew I knew you. The Gorgias. Plato.”
“Actually, his Encomium of Helen”
“He’s there in Sextus Empiricus too, right? Against the Professors.”
“Right, but second-hand again.”
“I don’t know Gorgias, really. Except from the Gorgias.”
“He doesn’t really show up there, though. No one shows up in Plato but Plato. But Ovid, yes, I have read bits of the Metamorphoses. Not so different… your family, though, do they help you, financially?”
“I don’t expect help from them anymore. They used to send money, sometimes through Reed. They still do, but less regularly, less enthusiastically. It’s not enough anymore to help. He says they’re pretty desperate, wanting me back in Bethesda. I called them from my hospital bed, actually, in the middle of my stay, as if everything was fine. My body was just pieces after the beating. My mother asked me to speak up. That was the jaw. The drip kept me together. And the Librium.”
“Detox.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve stayed that way.”
“Mariela kept carting me to meetings in the wheelchair. NA, CA, AA. All I really needed was the last of those. The other things aren’t, well, entirely ‘unmanageable.’”
“You still go to AA.”
“I’m not drinking.”
“But the—”
“The point is I’m doing better. That was your point too, wasn’t it?”
“You won’t go home.”
“Not a solution.”
“For a stay. It could be easier to be sober.”
“Well, I spent two summers there during college, and every night I’d end up drinking this plastic pint of vodka out on the driveway. It’s no different now. And there’ll still be the decisions I can’t make.”
“Outside of that, since the hospital, nothing unusual. We haven’t heard from you, so that’s what we’ve assumed.”
“No.”
“Things are getting back to normal? I’m not interested in interfering, it’s not what I’m supposed to do. Same as the last time.”
“You only watch, I get it. Not normal exactly. Hooking was never normal. Anyway, what I’m thinking now is different. It’s safer.”
“It is.”
“It’s legal. I haven’t started. Reed won’t stay forever. He won’t stay more than a couple of weeks now really. I need to do something. I might move. Perk of the job.”
“New profession?”
“It’s definitely an improvement. I haven’t even told Reed what it is. If he knew, he’d be happy, or maybe he’d be sad, and then he’d be happier. You know, it’s been strange not needing to find money these last weeks, to have so much time. I sleep and read. And talk to Reed. I like him more than I remember. A lot more. Maybe I’m just not remembering. Or I just like him more now, and I remember fine.”
“But you won’t level with him.”
“Not now.”
“You can’t trust him.”
“I trust him completely.”
“It’s probably easier to tell—”
“I’m going now, Carl.”
“Okay.”
18
The light was diminishing in the forests surrounding Belemby, but more slowly now, almost asymptotically, as if the night were unbreachable. Rutland searched for the thin branches he might light with the bark he’d scraped as kindling. Most lay in damp undergrowth, moss-covered, rotting. But in a small clearing he found the stones and barely singed wood of a fire that looked as if it had been made and unmade immediately after. He fingered the branches, wispy and abundant. He pulled twine from his pocket and tied some of them up in a bundle.
The monk appeared at the edge of the clearing, his rust robe catching in a gust of wind. Rutland rose, leaving the wood on the ground. His fire, perhaps. Beyond the monk, in the distance, Rutland made out a narrow, tall building in gray stone with a steep roof tiled in the Portuguese style. The village vehar, its Buddhist temple.
Belemby was small so the temple housed only a few priests, and most rotated from this site to others in the region. To mark its autonomy from the kingdom proper it was placed on the outskirts of the city, though by a centuries-old arrangement between the priesthood and the royal court, the king paid for its construction and upkeep, beyond what the locals provided through a temple tax.
Rutland raised his hand and the monk came forth. In a mix of English and Sinhalese he explained his bundling of the wood, the assumptions made. He started to untie the sticks but the monk, Darasa, held his hand out flat and received a nod in thanks.
Over the years, Rutland had picked up enough Sinhalese to survive on. For his part, Darasa knew substantial tracts of the invaders’ languages: Portuguese, Dutch, and already some English. He asked the Englishman if his needs went beyond wood, light, heat. Rutland scanned the undergrowth before seeing the stylus and the folded parchment next to it in the monk’s hand. Darasa unfolded the parchment, revealing the script, alien to Rutland. He gestured for him to follow him back to the temple, explaining he may have something he might like to read.
I cannot trouble you, Rutland said. He thought to return, with or without the branches. The villagers would soon wonder where he’d gone. The bending of patterns brought unease. Darasa smiled and explained that he would escort him back to the village himself afterward.
They walked toward the spot the priest had emerged from, making parallel prints—Darasa’s feet, Rutland’s boots—in the dirt. The monk had acquired more than a few books over the years from the foreigners: navigational works, texts describing proper seamanship, collections of maps, and a very recent account of a plague crippling Europe. There were also religious works, like the Gemara, portions of the Mishnah, the Koran, and two copies of the New Testament. At the mention of the Bible, Rutland’s eyes got large.
They came across a shack. Rutland recognized it at once—a covel, a temple of the ja
cco, the devil’s house. They dotted the country. The resident priest (jaddese), pious in his way though of low birth and little learning, was absent. A boy with neatly combed hair sat on the stone steps, looking faint and ashen. Darasa touched his head with an impersonal warmth.
The two men entered the front room of the covel. Plates of rice, loose betel leaves, and overripe mangos stretched across the floor. Along the walls men were drawn in reds and blacks. Lying behind the offerings were arrowheads of flint and bone, one affixed to a long branch. They found two poorly wrought shortswords next to a door leading on to a space with room only for a bed. The blades were so blunt and tarnished Rutland couldn’t tell if they were weapons or relics.
They crossed out of the opposite door and came to the yard. Four birds, all short-feathered and blood-red, moved about the pen, pecking at the grass. Each represented a healing, or anyway a patient’s recovery by one means or another, ague being the common malady. The birds would have been gathered for a mass sacrifice to the governing devils; or else for a sale, depending on the scruples of the jaddese.
In trips through the country selling caps, Rutland had seen red cocks of this sort sold in bulk by these lesser priests. A dozen years later, during one of several escape attempts, Knox and Loveland would bring six of these birds, gathered on a reconnaissance trip, back to camp. They’d got them from a jaddese for an iron pan and a few coins. Having lost their common blade fording a river, Knox twisted the necks of some of the birds, rotating them two revolutions until he heard the pop. Loveland, disturbed by the noise and feel of cleanly snapping bone, preferred to smash their heads with a rock. Rutland recalled the plucking vividly, the luster of the feathers, the patience involved. Once the birds were all gooseflesh, they tore out their bowels with their fingers and spiked the gutless creatures on long young branches, roasting them with only the salt they had for sale.
They gorged on the pink meat, the skin sweating fat and blood. They dug out the marrow from steaming bones. There was too much. Two of the birds were tossed into the marsh. Their crisp bodies, their taut, charred skin shrunk tight over bony scaffolds, their gaping bellies, they watched it all sink in brackish waters. Manaar, the northernmost province where entry and exit were possible, was close now, and they had the full stomachs that might carry them through this time.
But the king’s men had not been far behind. They were soon overtaken in the swamps. Their lead had been lost roasting birds. The Englishmen saved their lives by playing off the dash as an especially wide merchant wander.
Darasa took Rutland through the covel only for contrast with the proper Buddhist temple they were headed to. He related how the jaddeses sometimes appeared mad, and it was then that they were taken for gods, not devils. Advice was sought. The people would pose questions of many sorts, practical, metaphysical, political, personal. The priest would answer all in the same tone, riddling and frenzied by turns, and his words would achieve a gravitas they could not approach in saner moments.
Unlike the jaddeses, Darasa said, the people could be inhabited only by devils, not gods. But they talked much the same as the priests then. Rutland had seen a man in the forest writhing and shaking. First he thought it a case of the sacred disease—epilepsy—or snakebite, perhaps; but as he approached to give succor, the man started mixing local sayings and proverbs, and indeed some European ones too, into novel, unimagined maxims, deforming and inventing meanings, so much so that though the grammar of sense remained, Rutland could not follow him.
He was convinced that something intelligible was said, if only his capacity to comprehend could keep pace with the man’s capacity to pronounce. He couldn’t call them ravings. Rutland had heard those many times, in Yorkshire and St. Andrews, by his ostensibly possessed countrymen. Maybe it was they who merely had the sacred disease. For the Sinhalese man’s speech did not bear much resemblance. In the British cases, there was just the simpleminded repetition of a few phrases, invocations of the Devil and of God: nothing nearly so complex and creative as what he was hearing from this man.
He wondered whether the Sinhalese possession, then, was the genuine sort, and what had come before, in his homeland, were merely the babblings of the mentally deficient. Or could it be that the devils possessing the Sinhalese were simply cleverer than Satan? Perhaps this was owed to their multiplicity, their regional grounding, each devil having his province and jurisdiction. Might there be spiritual specialties, smaller expertises exceeding any single intelligence, ones that issued not in universal claims, but in both ones tailored to the region of origin and ones that were crossbred, the most fertile of all, which correlated to the various routes one might traverse the country by?
Rutland conveyed to Darasa what he could of these thoughts, which put the monk in mind immediately of the prophet of the god without name. The god, or anyway the prophet, first made himself known by a trail of fallen dewals, temples of the gods, which were bound to the covels by a common commitment to idolatry (both sorts were held in less regard than the vehars, the proper Buddhist temples). The prophet claimed, through his messengers—he, like his god, was never seen—that the nameless one had commanded that the other gods’ temples be razed.
Over several months, collapsed temples appeared across the north, from Trincomalee through Anuradhapura. Chunks of clay with branches running through them lay scattered about, no less than the people’s offerings. The relics included arms (some of them European), clay figures (some of them Virgin Marys), and collections of household objects that were also the symbols of embedded gods. These were all carefully defaced, the clay figures dismembered, the swords bent in two and displayed in their abasement.
The people shrugged off the nameless one at first, but as his destructive powers grew, and the wreckage accumulated, their allegiances shifted. Next to the rubble of the dewals the villagers would leave fresh victuals and new items to be enchanted by the god.
The prophet, finding so much success, thought he might be not only a god but a king. Through his messengers, prophets of the prophet, he declared his intentions to establish a northern kingdom that would overlap Rajasingha’s.
The king had been happy enough for the prophet to rule over the next world. But not this one too. He dispatched soldiers to the north to monitor the remaining dewals. Eventually, in the night, the prophet and several of his disciples were discovered undermining a temple. The squat Dravidian and his assistants were brought before the king, who asked his name. Munjan. This incarnated god was bisected. The resulting aspects of the man-god were incinerated in the center of town, just outside the royal court. In the morning, in front of the smoldering pit of Munjan’s bones, there were flowers, victuals, and relics.
Rutland and Darasa came to another clearing, this one with rice paddies, clusters of coconut trees, and livestock, all managed by local farmers. They paid their taxes in harvests, Darasa said, and not to the king but to the vehar, where they maintained its monks. The king provided men to help collect the produce, look after the livestock, cook the meals, and serve the food as needed, when the farmers themselves could not.
At the center of Ratukela, holy satellite partner of Belemby, was the vehar, just as the administration was at the center of the king’s townships. None but the townsmen were admitted to pray. Women, even the best of them, were thought in some way unfit to affirm the destruction of want, the prime doctrine of the Buddha.
At noon the townsmen would serve the monks food and give offerings to paintings or drawings of past ones. The monks arranged themselves in a row, with space for the likenesses that were interspersed among them. The men would move down the row, ladle in hand, each offering a different dish to the monks. With a nod a monk accepted, with an extended hand he declined. The plates of the likenesses were always piled highest, as only they never refused.
Rutland and Darasa regarded the stone vehar, sober yet grand. The roof’s lime-whitened edge was inlaid with onyx in a pleasing but inscrutable pattern. The temple dated back centuries at least
, and the current Sinhalese builders could not match the skill of the originals, which meant that every renovation was also a defacement, an aesthetic and perhaps spiritual diminishment. So the Buddhist priests, the senior ones especially, liked the vehars restored as little as possible. As long as the walls didn’t collapse, and the roof mostly held the rains at bay, they preferred the unreconstructed shelter, vulnerable though it was. Rajasingha was pleased to go along with this, as it came at a savings to him.
They entered the temple from a side entrance and went up a set of stairs to a long, narrow room full of loose papers and bound books stacked on the tables, the benches, and the floor. Darasa headed toward the back, but just inside the door, Rutland saw what looked like an Arabic scroll with a set of calculations in familiar numerals at its center. A trader’s tally sheet. Next to that was a small book of recipes in a Germanic language, probably Dutch, he couldn’t tell.
Beyond the stacks were several sea charts laid out on benches, the oddest of them being a map buried in the face of a jester. A hood—the left half yellow, the right orange, with belled tassels—was pulled tight around the world-face. It merged with the jester’s suit, which was in the same colors, trimmed with gold piping, and decorated with medallions at the shoulder, as a ranking army officer’s might be. There was an inscription to the jester’s right:
Democritus laughed at the world,
Heraclitus wept over it,
Epichthonius Cosmopolites portrayed it.
Epichthonius Cosmopolites—“Everyman”—a name that did not name. The picture didn’t give away its tragic element easily, though Rutland’s heart sank infinitesimally the longer he stood over it, studying the geography of a clown’s face.
Mercator’s map, from decades before, was there too, up on a table opposite the main stacks of books. Next to it was a kind of update of the mappa mundi, Desceliers’ plane-chart of 1550, but with significant interior detail, beyond the coastal outlines and seaports. In this way it was more than a mere sea chart.
On the table near Darasa Rutland found the double-hemisphere of Jean Rotz. On one corner of it lay a small atlas with further maps: the charts, Rutland knew, of Battiste Agnese.
Square Wave Page 18