The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  Then I received a letter from Juan’s Native American friend, Turtle Heart. He had successfully placed a god at the Trinity test site, in the New Mexican desert where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945. His letter, which was also addressed to Kazz, was twelve typewritten pages long. I read about his difficult but ultimately successful placing and felt a kinship with him. He said it was the most difficult episode of his life.

  Turtle Heart decided to follow a Native American practice and first circled the area around the nuclear test site before ritually placing the god. The circle turned out to be 350 miles in circumference, which he drove by car. After a few days of preparation he parked the car, packed the kami and sacred pipes and a deer antler, and walked into the desert toward the Trinity site. He walked nine hours. It grew dark and very cold. He napped and then donned his ceremonial dress. After a brief ceremony, he planted the god in the area he determined was the site of the first nuclear blast. On his return, in the middle of the night, he was stopped by White Sands Missile Range security police. He told them he was a lost hiker. He was detained for four hours and after a security check he was driven back to his car. “As I crossed the Rio Grande River,” he wrote, “twenty miles west of where I started, I had a tremendous emotional release, and I wept and sobbed and knew I was both afraid and amazed at this life and this place... I believe I left a physical piece of my own flesh on this land... I went north to Taos Pueblo and rested with the Elders for two days.”

  I couldn’t understand why our government has made it so hard for someone like Turtle Heart to make a pilgrimage to the spot where the atomic age began. I knew that the site was only open to the public twice a year, in April and October, and not on the actual July 16th date when the first bomb was successfully exploded. I knew that even when it is open to the public, no banners, no speeches, no outpouring of expression are allowed. Ground Zero should be a public monument, just like the Washington monument in Washington, D.C. It should be a place where anyone at anytime could pay homage to the powerful nuclear forces that changed the world.

  Turtle Heart’s letter made me keenly aware of my inaction in New York and my sense of helplessness. After my successful placing in Florida, I had hoped my life would flow more smoothly, or that I would at least feel it had a clearer direction. Instead, I was once again unfocused, without any sense of momentum from the project, my relationship with Donna, or my work.

  One day, at the end of February, I was in Midtown hurrying to a meeting with the art director of Forbes, my portfolio under my arm. I waited for the light to turn.

  The night before, Ziggy and his gang had been particularly wild. Someone had pounded furiously on the door of our flat, prompting me to barricade the door with a chair. I lay awake all night, worrying that someone would nonetheless manage to push the door open. Now, staring at the red light, I felt totally drained and vulnerable.

  I caught a nauseating odor of urine from the man standing next to me. I turned to look at him. His clothes were tattered and his crotch was wet. I looked at him a moment too long and his eyes caught mine.

  What eyes! They seemed to be black, bottomless pits, absorbing me into their emptiness. They fixed on me intently, and I felt caught in their glare. It took all my strength to tear my eyes away from his and run into the middle of Fifth Avenue, nearly into the path of an oncoming taxi.

  As I stumbled through the cacophony of honking horns and projectiles of steel and glass, I could hear the madman behind me screaming.

  “You! Hey, you! You bastard! Come back!”

  “You look terrible,” Donna said when I got home. “What happened? How did your meeting go?”

  I told her about my encounter with the madman, which inexplicably was haunting me. I didn’t even mention the business meeting, which hadn’t gone well anyway.

  “Why did you look at him? You know better.”

  “I was so tired.”

  “You look awful. I’m really worried about you.”

  “I’m okay. Anyway, the poor guy was harmless.”

  Donna looked at me carefully.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  What could I say? Clearly Donna loved New York. She had jumped into the city with both feet, and the city had responded, inspiring her work and giving it a meaningful context. Donna complained about the weather and the day-to-day grind of living in Manhattan just like everyone else, but at the same time she blossomed. While I wished I were someplace else.

  That night my bomb shelter nightmare returned. I was facing the escape hatch of the bomb shelter. I was filled with fear. But this time I actually moved close enough to the hatch door to touch it. I tried to open it, but then the evil started screaming; this time, the voice was the voice of the madman on the street. I froze, no longer able to move. I woke covered in sweat and breathing heavily. I pushed Donna, who was gently touching me, away.

  One day in March all the noise stopped. I looked out the window and saw huge flakes of snow swirling around the blackened buildings, winter’s final storm. Within a few hours the snow transformed the streets. The construction crews stayed home. The boiler, as it often did on cold days, ran out of fuel, and the radiator stopped its insufferable clanging. The door had been fixed and the third floor was quiet. Donna had an appointment with an art dealer, and I was alone in a still, cold room. Steam vapors from my breath hung in the air.

  It was noon, and I was quietly editing a batch of photographs I had taken the week before. Finishing, I washed my hands and put Grieg’s “Per Gynt Suite” on the turntable, sitting on a makeshift couch of cushions piled on the floor and against the wall. I sighed and turned my attention to the sad violin in the piece entitled “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

  As the music filled the stillness, I was overcome by an eerie feeling. My body became all breath: it didn’t have any substance, just a throat and lungs. At first I liked the feeling. I was so light! But then I got nervous. Would the feeling end? Would my breath and my body remain forever disconnected? Would I go insane?

  I stretched out on the couch. I no longer heard the music.

  I concentrated on taking a deep, slow breath.

  And then another.

  Now I could feel the rest of my body. As each breath rolled into my lungs I was aware of my feet, my ankles, my knees, even my hips. Then the breath moved to my chest, where I felt my heart pounding.

  “Stay deep,” I said to myself. “Don’t come up.”

  Out of the breath came the lake in Norway, my father at my side. My hand was outstretched, with the heavy god and its white cloth with strange symbols in such contrast to the calm lake and evergreens. I felt very strong and safe.

  Then the madman’s face replaced the idyllic scene. For a second I stopped breathing, frozen by the terror he instilled in me. I saw in him a part of me, the part of me that didn’t know what it was doing or where it was going. And I knew that if I didn’t figure things out soon, I might go completely mad, just like the man on the street.

  Then I saw the teacher’s face, and Kazz and the others. I saw their determination and the pain of the fighting ceremony as if they too were reaching to that lake and then here to our leaking ship on the Lower East Side. The wild sword-waving ceremony I witnessed in Japan was no longer threatening. Instead I felt its purpose and direction, and I felt connected to the warriors.

  I suddenly understood the Shinto project differently. It was an elaborate ritual in which, if I chose, I could explore the depths of my unconscious without fear of annihilation. It was a watertight container in which both my rational and intuitive minds could relax and perhaps even come to an understanding. It was like one of Donna’s frames, which gave her work a defined beginning and end in space. The project was a vessel that would carry me safely to my destination, a destination that I hoped I would soon comprehend.

  I decided that it wasn’t necessary for me to fully understand the spirit world of Shinto, or to reconc
ile its contradictions with my ingrained Western beliefs. I could still have my doubts and participate in the project.

  With these thoughts I found in myself a new momentum. The project must be finished—if not for Kazz or the teacher or the world, then for me. It had to become my top priority, above everything. When it came to the Sword of Heaven, from now on I would put both my feet forward.

  By the end of the symphony, the snow had stopped, and I could hear Ziggy’s obnoxious voice below. The boiler was chattering again. I heard Donna on the stairs.

  I went to the bookshelf and pulled out an atlas, looking for the right spot to place the next god.

  PART THREE

  Things

  that have affinity

  in their inmost natures

  seek one another.

  chapter 14

  Lake Lögurinn in southeast Iceland, where I placed the god.

  On April 5, 1986, at a popular disco in West Berlin, a bomb exploded and killed two American servicemen and a young Turkish woman and wounded 229 others. A few weeks later, on April 14th, the United States launched a carefully calculated air attack against targets in Libya claiming Libya’s involvement in the Berlin bombings. To many observers both the disco bombing and the U. S. air attacks were bold and provocative and only fueled the fear that the fate of the world hung in a precarious balance.

  When I called Donna from my hotel in Reykjavík, I was looking at snowcapped mountains, imagining her view of garbage and waste. When I told her that the river that flowed through the middle of the capital was full of salmon and was so pure you could drink from it, I felt guilty. She had wanted to come. But if both of us had left, our friends’ loft would have been picked clean.

  After the five-hour flight, I slept for a day, more from the exhaustion of the last five months than from jet lag. I chose Iceland to place the next god simply because it was the first place that caught my eye when I opened the atlas, but as I woke to an Arctic silence, I could already feel strength flowing back into my limbs and spirit.

  Although I had been to Iceland before, I had never ventured from Reykjavík, the capital. This time, on the suggestion of a friendly Icelandic travel agent, I planned to fly north across the barren center to Akureyri in the far north and then hop southeast along the coast, mostly taking planes like the locals because of the rugged land. My seven-day itinerary would give me a good overview of the island, and take me to several possible sites for placing the Shinto god.

  Lake Myvatn, in the north, famous for its bird life and fishing, was my first stop. A spring blizzard began just after I left Akureyri in my rental car, and none of the fishermen I asked would even consider taking me out on the still partly frozen lake.

  From my hotel window, I caught occasional glimpses through the snow of a huge volcanic caldera, near the lake. Most of Iceland is volcanically active with eruptions occurring on average every five years. A volcano seemed like an appropriate location for a god, especially after my unsuccessful attempt on Mount Shasta. I waited for the clouds to lift.

  When the blizzard finally subsided I drove to the volcano’s base. I packed the god in my day pack and walked up the steep wall to the rim, past gaping fissures that exuded sulfur gas. The wind was so strong and cold that I walked with my mittens up over my face. Now and then, an orange sun poked through the overcast sky, and I could see deep into the rocky bottom of the caldera. Steam hissed from the interior. I dropped down into the caldera to escape the wind and sat on a heated rock. I heard a low rumbling: I thought at first it was a jet but then realized it was the wind blowing over the edge, like the sound a kid makes blowing on a soda bottle.

  The thought of planes stirred memories of the first time I flew to Iceland, when I was nine, on my way to Norway with my younger brother Erik. Our prop plane developed engine trouble and was forced to land in Reykjavík. We were on the ground for 24 hours before continuing on to Oslo. As two young boys traveling alone, we were doted on by everyone.

  I still cherish memories of that Norwegian summer. We spent every day fishing, hiking, and playing in the countryside. We made a simple raft from logs and rope after we saw Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki in a museum in Oslo. The Norwegian explorers were my heroes: Heyerdahl, who sailed the Kon Tiki across the Pacific from Peru; Roald Amundsen, who discovered the South Pole; Fridtjof Nansen, who tried to reach the North Pole on skis; and, of course, Leif Eriksson, discoverer of both Iceland and North America. I had wanted more than anything an adventure of my own—on, of course, a boat. At the end of the idyllic summer we flew home to Livermore to my father building the bomb shelter, the Cuban missile crisis, and the start of my recurring nightmare.

  Now, sitting in Iceland on the edge of a volcano, it occurred to me that I was on an adventure not so different from my childhood fantasy. I’d traveled to exotic locales and met strange and magical people. There was even a boat, albeit only in a vision. My destination didn’t involve new worlds or scientific discovery, but my goal still felt noble: I wanted to make some contribution to world peace.

  As I grabbed the Shinto god from my pack, I realized that there was something else. I wanted to be happy like I was that summer so long ago in Norway. I didn’t want to live in a world of fear.

  Nothing held me back from placing the god on the volcano. I just felt it wasn’t the right place or the right time. I was only halfway through my itinerary and knew there would be other opportunities.

  I continued by plane southeast to Egilsstadir, a small town located on the oldest geological part of Iceland. Unlike most of the rest of the island, the area around Egilsstadir is geologically stable. Although the town has only a few hundred inhabitants, its geographic location makes it a crossroads of sorts. There is an airport with regular flights to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, several gas stations and hotels to service the heavy tourist traffic during the summer months, and just a few miles east in Seydisfjördur, a deepwater harbor where ferries leave for Norway, the ancestral home of all the island’s inhabitants, as well as Britain.

  All the hotels in town were full, but I found a room nearby on the shores of Lake Lögurinn in a private farmhouse. That night, sitting at a massive wooden table, my host told me in perfect English that the area had been considered a major crossroads even before the arrival of airplanes and cars. The legendary Norse gods Thor and Odin were said to meet here regularly, finding it a convenient spot.

  “Oh, we have lots of legends,” she said when she saw my interest. “In fact,” she said proudly, “did you know we have our own Loch Ness monster? Every time there is a sighting, something awful happens in the world. The last time was just before World War II. But if you want to know more about legends you must talk with Jøn Loftsson, the ranger in charge of the forest. He lives in the middle of the forest with his Norwegian wife and two children.”

  “Forest?” I asked, puzzled. Except for private gardens, so far I had only seen bare, moonlike landscapes.

  “The largest in Iceland,” she said. At that moment, the other overnight guests, a Norwegian woman and her traveling companion, walked in. The landlady turned her attention to them, and as I made my way upstairs to my room I heard her explaining that yes, the picture on the wall was Prince Charles. He had once stopped for lunch here.

  The next afternoon, under cloudy skies, I drove along the lake and found Loftsson’s house. The low structure was surrounded by trees I learned were Siberian larch. The family was just settling down for a hearty lamb stew and invited me to join them. We never got around to talk about Icelandic legends: instead, Loftsson’s ten-year-old son wanted to hear everything I knew about Native American Indians. Then Loftsson told me about historical Iceland and his dream for the future.

  “Today Iceland is only 1 percent forest,” he said in English, “but a thousand years ago, when the Vikings arrived, it was 25 percent forest and a virtual paradise. There were abundant fish and forest animals. No one went hungry. The winters were long and dark, but the Gulf Stream kept the average temperatur
e warmer than New York or Vienna.

  “The Vikings built huge mansions and heated them with entire tree trunks. They also brought sheep with them. The Vikings knocked down the trees, and the sheep did their best to keep any saplings from replacing the depleted forest.

  “It took only 200 years for the paradise to be spoiled. Without fuel, Icelanders could only scratch out a meager living. They were isolated from the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. There was little reason for Europeans to visit Iceland, and the culture became fixed in time.”

  After lunch we took a stroll and Loftsson showed me the tiny saplings growing nearby. There were only 800 hectares, but one day, he believed strongly, the entire valley would be forested again.

  We came to a fence. The larch and birch abruptly stopped, and on the other side was a denuded stretch of land filled with low scrub; it looked like the face of a man who shaves with a dull blade. “Sheep,” Loftsson mumbled disdainfully, as he handed me a tiny pinecone, the size of my thumbnail.

  Holding the tiny cone in my hand, I realized that like me, Loftsson was a man on a mission. But there was something fundamentally different between me and him. He had a beautiful family and a dream that was quantifiable. While I was trying to plant metaphorical seeds of peace, he was planting real seeds, and getting tangible results. I envied him and felt an intense pang of loneliness.

  That night at dinner at a nearby restaurant I drank too much red wine. Afterward, at my landlady’s farmhouse, I grabbed the Shinto god and took it to the edge of the lake. It was late in the evening, and cold. There was no one outside, although I saw a figure in a farmhouse window far away. A solitary bird flew overhead. The wine had intensified my loneliness. Despite the hour, it was still light and far across the lake a streak of snow reached down from a single cloud like a tentacle to lightly brush across the surface of the lake. For a moment I saw the cloud as the head of a giant monster and the waving shape underneath as its ominous body. I remembered my host’s story, and I briefly wondered if this was a sign that something awful was going to happen in the world.