The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  But the vicomte only smiled wan. “I am relieved—but also, I am being visited by fatigue. I must leave you to discharge your temporary infirmity while I cater to my permanent one. Rourke, my friend, if you depart tomorrow morning, I probably won’t see you. I wish you success, and you have my friendship always.”

  “And you mine, my dear.” Mallory said "mon cher" it escaped from Mallory, it won a smile from Rochereau.

  The Lord of Mont Veillac told what was left of his rosé: “I have just this word of counsel. You tell me that Kali represents his special powers as being inherent in every intelligent human. It follows that with or without some mystical and possibly evil Kali-unification, these powers are inherent in Rourke Mallory. Find and use those powers.”

  “And how would I find them?”

  Rochereau inhaled as deeply as he could, and exhaled raspingly, and cocked his head so that his eyes engaged Mallory’s, and told his guest straight: “Listen, Rourke. There will be something impossible that you want to come to you, something impossible that you want to do. All right: marshal total confidence, and inwardly demand that impossibility! If it works, you have the power. If it doesn’t work, then either you don’t have the power or you don’t know how to use it.”

  “But that,” Mallory expostulated, “seems little different from the promises of Kali! I am not going to play into his hands—”

  The vicomte was now breathing with labor; Mallory forbore, and Raoul was at his master’s elbow helping him to his feet. Once up, though—and Mallory had stood—the vicomte halted Raoul with a gesture and fixed his guest with a glittering eye: “Kali,” he reminded Mallory, “requires intense confrontation with your inner light Well, you don’t bother with that: just be yourself and call for what you want and see what happens—”

  He went into a fit of coughing. Raoul, nodding to the commodore, got Rochereau out of the room on the way to bed.

  Mallory sat and drummed on the big table, and nursed brandy.

  When Raoul returned, Mallory demanded, “How is the master?”

  “Easy now. He will sleep well. And you, monsieur le commodore?”

  “Raoul, the hell with noble protocol. How are you fixed for beer?”

  “Sir, reflect that I know you. In your private salon there are eight bottles of Heineken, iced. You’ll find the bottle opener on the wall of the closet where you really wash your hands.”

  “Why eight bottles, Raoul?"

  “You, sir, will want four or five. The other three are for some contingency. There is also, if needed, a half-bottle of Hennessey: four-star, naturally.”

  16.

  Had the Vogel woman been Lilith?

  Undressed, pajamaed and dressing-gowned and slippered by grace of his host, Mallory stood by a window clutching a Heineken bottle and frowning at a new-risen three-quarter moon fuzzed by trees high on eastern hills. Fifty-four years ago, she had come to be all his meaning; fifty years ago, for his own soul-salvation and hopefully also for hers, he had required himself to forget her; a few months later, finding that he could not forget her, angrily he had consigned her to happiness with the parts of the Halloran-self which he had rejected; thereafter, miraculously as now he realized, Rourke Mallory during half a century had never, or hardly ever, allowed himself to slip into even brief reverie about the Lilith who had redeemed Burk Halloran.

  The temptation was potent to think about her now. Dare he think about her now? Why should that sort of yesterday-thinking compulsively possess him, when what he needed to think about was the Kali problem in relationship to RP and REM and some species of occult power which conceivably Mallory himself might possess?

  He glugged Heineken and grinned; a grin was a potency for chasing away morbidity. A frown raped the grin: maybe Lilith had died, in the cave with some guy named Horse. (He was pleased to notice that he felt no irrational jealousy-twinge.) He went grim: that would have been soon after Esther had left Horse; and Mallory, who loved Esther as a dear friend, contemplated with distaste the notion that his own Lilith had been the other woman....

  His own Lilith!

  Eh, yes, he could think about her, he had to think about her!

  Maybe an hour later, he was interested to notice that he was sitting in an easy chair beside the dead fireplace gazing stupidly at his half-gone second beer. He didn’t remember going for another bottle.

  He shook himself. Boy had he revivified Lilith Vogell At one point in the remembering, he had erected—and that had a most special meaning, not at all mere animal sexuality, for by this means she had re-evoked his human self-confidence, giving him her virginity in the process.

  He smiled small: there was a little irony. He began to formulate it. ... Frowning, he shook it off, it was unworthy: let what she had done for him mean for Lilith what it had meant for Lilith, as now it meant for him what it meant for him. Because otherwise his defeated soul would have what would it have done? Gone to Hell? Shrunk into Limbo? Split in two?

  He had come to identify her with the goddess Ishtar, after whom he had named his flagship: a blend of homed eroticism and bearded intellect, walking on clouds above the earth, deigning occasionally to descend to Burk Halloran and fence with him wit-for-wit, then ascending again to smile ambiguously down upon him while nocturnally her luminous pallor irradiated a garden of peonies. And yet, during her brief descents when they were not fencing, she was warm, warm. And at the climax which had led to his self-freeing, by night under a full moon beside a pond in a peony garden, she had whispered up to him, “I am Ishtar. I have shining horns tonight, I have no beard at all....”

  He broke it off and glugged beer and fisted the bottle and stared at it Consider this a long-ago life-interlude with a mind-mature woman who had loved him a little and who subsequently had gone her own ways in (God grant it) self-fulfillment, as he had gone his own ways in self-fulfillment If she had died in the cave with Horse, there she had died; if not, not; no way to know; hope for the best, believe in the best, go on.

  This meditation had been nice, indeed it had been blessed. Leave it there. Mallory was convinced that he had done the right thing when in 1932 he had rejected the name Burk Halloran, linking the name to the dark extremis ms in his psychosis, and had adopted legally the name Rourke Mallory, and had determined finally not to look for Lilith, and had gone on from there. But he hurt that he hadn’t found a way to notify Lilith. ‘To Lilith, with love and rejection...”

  He finished the beer and went for a third: what the hell, there were eight. Tonight, there were two major projects: to arrive at some conclusion about this Kali (who allowing for stature-difference so much resembled the earlier Halloran, whose occult accomplishments so much resembled certain dark-delicious dreaming by the earlier Halloran); and then, perhaps, to grapple intellectually with Antoine’s concept that if Kali meant literally what he said, the powers of Kali were potentially the powers of Mallory.

  Part Five

  INTERTIME

  My responsible kind of muckraking often has led me to soul-distressing facts which my journalist’s conscience had to disclose. But this is the first time in my life when I have been forced into the position of forecasting the imminent end of the world; and I mean, physically and literally. We’ll keep hoping it won’t happen; but the diplomatic work necessary to avoid it will have to be titanic.

  From a high-ranking source in Washington: “Of course we are working for a REM Treaty; but even if it happens, we simply can’t rule out the possibility that distrust of our allies will precipitate a preventive button-push.”

  From a high-ranking source in Moscow: “The unreliability of treaty signatures by Washington and by Peking is historical. We will sign; but nevertheless, we may have to be first with the buttons.”

  From a high-ranking official in Peking: “We honor the concept of a REM Treaty, and we will sign enthusiastically, assuming that we and the other signatories will still be available for signatures. Every political philosopher must eventually balance the question, whether a worl
d haunted by subterranean time-bombs controlled by fallible humans is better than no world at all. We are walking the tightrope that Lao-Tse mentioned, strung between Heaven and .Hell”

  I cannot go far enough in emphasizing the knowledgeability of these sources...

  —Zack Manderson for the Washington Journal Syndicate, June 2002

  Keep up the good work; we are nearly there.

  —Guru Kali, in a private communiqué to seven lieutenants, June 2002

  17.

  2002:

  In Paris, Esther was not quite abed, but she was altogether ready for bed—alone, after a tough day at the office. She sat before her dressing-table mirror dutifully brushing her long hair before braiding it for the night. She wore blue pajamas, quite plain, almost mannish: with Esther, slinky stuff was for manning, and this she chose to do less and less often.

  In the psyche of Esther through more than seven decades of life, there had been an alternation like the vowels and consonants in banana; childhood exuberance, early-adolescent cynicism, late-adolescent exuberance, wartime cynicism, ear-ly-Horse exuberance, later-Horse cynicism, early marriage-to-Horse exuberance, later marriage-to-Horse cynicism—and then a probably psychotic fantasy involving a rope-climb into nowhere with a flame-haired stranger named Kali—followed by institutionalized cynicism (in l’Hôpital de Villejuif whither she had mysteriously arrived and where she had recovered consciousness) which persisted through her subsequent marriage-of-convenience to the Vicomte d'Illyria, then early-cosmetidan exuberance, then later-cosmetician cynicism, then the early exuberance of becoming a Desiderated Hostess ... Now, thanks partly to her final dismissal of illusions and partly to her warmly rewarding friendship with Rourke Mallory, Esther had kissed off attitudinal fluctuations and had settled into something approaching serenity.

  The brushing had ceased, she was curiously examining her own face in the mirror—neither with vanity nor in the mood of criticism which must precede planned reconstruction, but with a (fey) sense (do all of us sometimes have that sense, mirror-gazing?) that the face might or might not be herself, that both the identification of face with self and the sometimes-awareness of deeper and different self were cosmically amazing matters worthy of meditative exploitation. Allowing this meditation to persist and lead where it might, she found herself quite objectively evaluating the effect of many long-ago years with Diodoro Horse upon her face and upon her deeper psyche.

  Objectivity wavered, and her eyes dropped. Still she missed Dio. He should have followed her, but he hadn’t. After her post-escape coming-to-consciousness at Villejuif and another year of waiting for Dio-action, her desolation at having to accept his non-action had been succeeded, for a while, by total astonishment at this totally un-Horsemanlike failure; and that was when, despairing, she had divorced him unilaterally in a small European principality and had surrendered to the kindness-and-wealth blandishments of lonely old d’Illyria; but still she had been puzzled, and still she was. The Dio whom she had known might or might not have valued her enough to pursue her merely for the sake of getting her back—but the Dio she had known psotively could not have stopped himself from pursuing her with the threefold purpose of solving the enigma and learning why and buttressing his own ego by success in the search. In perspective now, her disappointment in Dio and for Dio (whom she had loved) seemed a more important ingredient in her psyche than the personal chagrin of not having been pursued.

  Again, as often before, she asked herself why as Madame d'Illyria she hadn’t discreetly checked on Dio, why she didn’t do so now. He could easily be long-dead now; but at least, she’d like to know whether he had prospered, whether his own agitated soul had found serenity with another woman or in his work or both. Well: during a number of years she hadn’t dared touch the question of Dio’s present reality, it had been an exposed hot wire; and during more recent years, when she had grasped that Commodore Mallory was perfectly capable of getting the information for her, she had somehow not brought herself to reveal that much of herself to Rourke, not even in bed, not even when all they were doing in bed was pillow-talking.

  Dio. Rourke. Kali. Kali . . . What out of Hell had that been? Five decades later, still Esther was subject to nipple-pucker when Kali’s name came up. Back then, Kali could not have been today’s all-important guru, whom she knew slightly and who still looked and acted early middle-thirtyish and who on first presentation to Esther at a soiree had given no sign of prior acquaintance; but good God, or bad Satan, wasn’t the guru the veritable twin brother of that Kali? Trying to slow her heartbeat, Esther faced down once again that 1952 Kali whom she had comprehended as a man-dressed woman: petite, breastless, slender-agile, face disturbingly like Rourke’s, with flaming red hair where Rourke’s had been silver as long as she had known him. And with charm, charm! Instantly total captivation . . .

  Well, look, Esther told herself for the thousandth time, it had all come about like this. Dio was due to drop in on her one afternoon, just to check in before leaving with that nice lady-psychologist for a late-aftemoon university lecture; he’d phoned ahead, and he expected to be back for six-thirty supper. Well: their relationship had been difficult for a long time, Esther had been quite candidly stepping out on him with a couple of younger men although she was sure he had not been reciprocating, his phone call and check-in concern had activated conscience-twinge while reactivating love; Esther had therefore been sprucing up for Dio, she had been sitting in her slip brushing her hair before her mirror just as now she sat before her mirror. . . . Warm female-feeling hands had grasped her bare upper arms from behind; turning her head, unaccountably with pleasure and without shock, she had looked up into the face of Kali. And hitherto and subsequently heterosexual Esther had been instantly ready to die for Kali. But Kali had not attempted love; instead, holding toward Esther a coil of rope, Kali had told Esther what to do, and had vanished; by hindsight, Esther recalled that there had been no mirror image, or at least she remembered none. And now there had been nothing at all in her mind or heart except to do the bidding of Kali. Esther had written the note, and placed it on top of the rope coil, and finished dressing, and waited by the balcony doors. When the flames had come, unafraid Esther had gone out on the balcony and stretched out her arms, ecstasy-suffused, possibly screaming: imminent total fulfillment. . . . She had seen Dio staring down there, and some woman staring on the other side, while Kali erected magically a groin-quivering golden cord and slid up it and seized her (gladly she had surrendered) and took her on upward and she had come to consciousness at Villejuif....

  Aa! no dice: reviews and reviews produced nothing more, no meaning, no due about the time which must have intervened between the rope-rape and Villejuif. And even her memories of l’Asyle de Villejuif were fragmentary, and interestingly untouched by strong emotion. She remembered being aesthetically ravished by rhapsodic flower-woman murals on high in the dining hall, done by some long-gone schizophrenic artist-inmate. And she remembered being mystically pleased by a romantic Rodin-type sculpture in the courtyard of one of the wards: Mercury rescuing Eurydice, naked holy Mercury clasping flowing-gowned bare-breasted languishing Eurydice’s waist and flying her aloft out of Hell with caduceus rampant. (Before she had departed Villejuif, an imp had led Esther to take two snapshots of the statue, noble bow and butt-muscular stem, and to label them Mercury Coming and Mercury Going.) And psychiatrists with owl-spectacles patiently questioning and questioning, pronouncing her finally “a victim of some transient amnesia resulting from marital strains, during which apparently she traveled here; but apparently recovered in totality, giving no present evidence of severe mental disturbance . .." And, on a tour for patients, the first meeting (chance) with amiable old d'Illyria in the Egyptian wing of the Louvre...

  She stood, impatient with herself: decidedly she must call a final halt to this fruitlessness. Abandoning her mirror image, Esther attended commode and killed lights and went to bed, musing by choice about Rourke because meditation about Rourke was so tranqu
ilizing. His psyche, alone among all the souls she’d known, blended realistic serenity and fantastic enterprise in a blend so perfectly organic that it might have been a harmonious rainbow.

  He’d hard-won the blend, too. At thirty-three he’d graduated from an American rest home for the mentally disturbed: that he’d told Esther, dismissing his prior life and the nature of his illness as “stuff that sublime and evil dreams are made of—forget it.” He’d had money in the millions at his command, but during a couple of years he hadn’t touched it, pursuing instead the traditional Grand Tour of the world at poverty level, subsisting on lucky earnings and handouts. A chance meeting with a bitter young scion named Randolph, who had sailed his own yawl into a harbor at Corfu, had produced between these two men the grand idea and the mutual eleven-million-dollar foundation of the present RP fleet which Rourke commanded: this RP which was increasingly constituting itself as a charismatic ambassador-at-large for Earth-consciousness as a replacement for nation-consciousness, for regional cultural variety as a magnificent substitute for international jealousy...

  Commodore Rourke, though, was in his eighties now, and despite his physical sixtyishness, advanced age meant uncertain mortality. And Rourke was fretting because no promising successor was visible. “It isn’t because I am sitting on them,” he had told her believably. “Everything about the RP structure prevents me from sitting on them and encourages their upward mobility. I—am beginning to suspect that my reputation may be sitting on them. Maybe if I were to vanish—”

  Esther had leaned over to kiss his naked chest in the night; and she had told him: “Never do that until you are sure you are no longer competent. Until then, RP needs you; all of us do. Who knows? It may even be in the cards that Mallory and RP are synonymous and will run their full time together, whereafter RP will no longer be needed in the world.”