The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  For a spilt second, I transported my mind back to 1961 when the world was sliding toward war. I thought of my father as he made plans to build the bomb shelter. I imagined nuclear warheads flying overhead. I saw Wolfgang and me as young boys. He had his Wall, and I had the walls of my bomb shelter, and we both wondered if we’d ever see past them to the light of the next day.

  A group of ducks appeared on the river, and I tossed the stone god into the middle of the flock. The East German guard strained over the ledge trying to see what we were doing. I snapped a few pictures and handed the character-laden cloth to Wolfgang.

  “It’s yours. Now you have a souvenir too,” I said to my friend.

  The placing had come easily, much like the first time in Norway: no angst, no doubts, and no strange happenings. I had put into motion the promise I had made to myself in New York. The last two placings had come much more easily since I had fully committed myself to the project.

  chapter 16

  The Baltic Sea ferry boat en route to Finland.

  Each individual who conquers the panic of their nightmare, who faces up to the terror of evil, and thereby discovers a goodness which heals and cannot be destroyed, brings fresh love into the world. The deepening of their capacity for love will first heal their own wound, and then go further, spreading its gentle influence upon family and friends.

  —Nightmares in Human Conflict, by John Mack

  A day after I placed the god in Berlin, Wolfgang drove me to the West Berlin train station. I planned to head north by night train to Norway, briefly visit my relatives, then continue by train to Stockholm. From there, I would take a ferry to Finland. My plan was to place a god in the Baltic Sea during the crossing.

  Shortly after the train left West Berlin, it ground to a halt on the other side of the Wall inside the East Berlin station, which was dimly lit and smelled of burnt coal. Big guard dogs, black ears pointed to the sky, patrolled the tracks, their masters looking every bit as serious. My fear of borders was instantly awakened. Stoic passport control officers looked very carefully at every page of my passport, but the baggage check was perfunctory and the second god remained undisturbed. I settled nervously into my sleeping couchette and finally fell asleep to the gentle swaying of the train as it slowly moved north through the dark countryside.

  It was still dark outside when I woke in a panic. The nightmare had returned. As usual, it involved me, the bomb shelter, and the evil. I couldn’t see the evil but as usual it pounded on the escape hatch door, taunting me to open it. The only thing between me and the outside was the escape hatch door and the evil, and I was frozen with fear. This time, however, like in my nightmare in New York, I actually reached for the door. This time I heard Kazz behind me softly telling me to open it. I cracked the door open, and the pounding on the other side suddenly stopped. The silence terrified me, and I quickly shut the door and froze, unable to move. Kazz disappeared and I woke, drenched in sweat.

  Damn, I thought, things are going so well. Why did it come back now? As I woke more completely, I realized that my nightmare had fundamentally changed from the days when I could do nothing but freeze in terror in front of the escape hatch door. Instead of blaming the Sword of Heaven project for bringing my nightmare back to the surface, I now suspected the project was helping me work through the nightmare. With that thought, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The next morning the Danish border check was virtually nonexistent; several hours later the Swedish guards were more thorough, but they were looking for illegal amounts of liquor and drugs and didn’t seem concerned with the heavy package in my suitcase. Late that afternoon, there were no checks at the Norwegian border—a surprise considering a story Kazz had told me about placing the god in Spitsbergen, high above the Arctic Circle.

  He had booked passage on a ship from England that stopped in Bergen, Norway, before continuing north. The god was contained in a much larger than normal stone, packed especially for the North Pole, which Kazz’s teacher considered a very powerful place. The Norwegian border guards wanted to open the package and see its contents. Kazz protested, explaining it was a sacred object and that there could be real trouble if it were opened. The Norwegians were firm, and Kazz finally agreed on the condition that there be a special ceremony. He pulled a white robe from his luggage, donned it and kneeled in the custom area. Pressing his hands together he started chanting and praying. Embarrassed by this outpouring of emotion and religious devotion, the Norwegian guards stuffed the huge god into Kazz’s bag and sent Kazz through with no further delay.

  Four years had passed since I placed the first Shinto god in the lake near my family home. My father was back in California so I stayed with my aunt and uncle. My schedule was so tight and the fall weather so bad that I didn’t visit the lake where I had placed the god, but I did go to see my 70-year-old great aunt, who owned the cabin there. We talked about the family, the weather, and the rest home where she received such good care, and then we easily slipped into a conversation about the Shinto project. She knew about the first placing and wondered how the project was going. She had read about many peace projects in the Norwegian press. “Was this one of them?” she wondered. “Probably not,” I said. “It’s not your average peace project.” No, she hadn’t heard of any children diving in the lake after the god. Then we continued our conversation about family and friends, and I left not thinking for a moment that it was strange to talk about Shinto gods with my elderly relative. I had come a long way since I first told my father about the project, when even the word “god” had stuck in my throat.

  Ten years earlier when I was living in Helsinki researching material for a book on sweat bathing customs around the world, I grew to love crossing Norway and Sweden by night train, then connecting to a ship for the crossing to Helsinki. The trip takes two full nights, and the boat ride across the Baltic Sea is my favorite part of the journey. My plan to place a Shinto god only slightly varied my routine.

  I arrived at the Stockholm harbor at 4:30 p.m. I had spent the day in Stockholm, as I usually did, visiting museums in the old town and enjoying a quaint coffee shop near the train station. The boat departed at 6 p.m. so I headed to my bunk in a small but comfortable cabin. The cabin had a shower, but instead I headed to the bottom of the ship where I joined a group of Finns with a similar mission: a real Finnish sauna. It’s here that I always experience culture shock. Being surrounded by Norwegians and Swedes is familiar to me. But the Finns! The language is so strange. Even the word for “telephone,” a recognizable word around the world, is alien: puhen. Photography? The Finns say valokuva.

  The ship was full of reminders that I was headed into a different land. There were two clocks, one with Swedish time and the other with Finnish time, an hour later; two currencies, Finnish markka and Swedish krona; two languages; and two distinct types of people. In the sauna, the boisterous Finns yelled and cried in their strange tongue as they splashed water on the sizzling rocks. They were happy to be almost home. The Swedes were invariably silent.

  After the sauna I went back to my room to dress for dinner. I had dreamed of the smorgasbord all day: piles of salmon, roast game, Finnish black bread, caviar, potatoes and fresh country vegetables, pickled herring, and generous amounts of dairy-rich desserts.

  My normal after-dinner routine on the overnight boat was to go upstairs to hear live music and play roulette and blackjack. But this night I went out on deck, where it was raining. I was alone except for a couple kissing near a lifeboat. Their faces melted into each other, like an Edvard Munch painting, so all I saw were two bodies and one head. I thought of Donna.

  We’d shared so much: my confusion in Japan, my malaise upon returning to San Francisco, my terror about the tornado in Florida, and, of course, New York. Through it all she had suffered my debilitating ambivalence. How many times had she pleaded, “What do you want?” She could have been asking about the Shinto project, or about us: for both I only offered vague answers. In New York, with my ba
ck against the wall, I had finally made the choice to cast aside the last of my doubts and finish the project.

  Why couldn’t I cast aside my doubts about Donna? I felt I carried a heavy burden, and suddenly I thought of my bomb shelter nightmare. My inability to resolve Donna felt connected to my inability to resolve the nightmare.

  Until I resolved my nightmare, until I made it through the door and confronted the evil, it would continue to darken my heart and keep me from fully engaging in life. It would keep me from fully loving Donna or anyone who tried to get close to me. I was getting closer, I knew that. But would I figure it out in time for Donna and me?

  I stood on the stern of the boat and watched the lights of the coast and waited for the ferry to pass the last of the coastal islands and reach the open sea. When the ship began tossing on the high seas and the lights disappeared, I heaved the god overboard. In the powerful wake of the ship, I didn’t see the splash. The rain came down harder. The couple stopped kissing and gently pushed away from each other.

  chapter 17

  Placing the god in Puerto Rico.

  “I know the ending.

  One day it will happen.

  One day we will see flashes, all of us.

  One day my daughter will die. One day, I know, my wife will

  leave me. It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color,

  and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket,

  and the world will surely end.”

  —The Nuclear Age, by Tim O’Brien

  In February 1987, three months after I returned from Europe, Parenting magazine called to ask for pictures of children playing in the sun. Hawaii was out, the photo editor said, they’d just published a piece from there. Did I have any other suggestions?

  I knew that a god had been placed in the Panama Canal but none in the Caribbean. I suggested Puerto Rico, but the magazine balked: too expensive, my editor said. But the Hyatt Hotel at Cerromar Beach agreed to provide airfare from New York to San Juan and accommodations if they were credited as the location for the shoot. Parenting would only have to get me to New York. The trip was on.

  When I called Donna, she was thrilled at the thought of escaping New York’s winter cold. She would come along as my assistant.

  When all the details were worked out, I was filled with accomplishment and anticipation. I had found a place for another god, a way for me and Donna to spend time together, and I would be paid for it all! The Sword of Heaven project was truly inspired. See what happens when you make up your mind? I could do no wrong. My ego soared as my plane took off for New York to pick up Donna.

  The first sign that something was wrong came at the airport in San Juan, where I had been assured by the public relations agency that the sun shines 90 percent of the time. It was raining.

  “Unusual weather,” said the porter with a shrug as he lifted my camera equipment into the hotel van.

  “Yeah, I don’t need children playing in the rain. This better clear up.”

  The hotel was fantastic, with tiled floors and a bed the size of a New York studio apartment. There was a well-stocked refrigerator and a small porch facing the nearby beach. But it rained the second day and the third day and the fourth. When it stopped and the sun burst through the clouds, we rushed to the beach along with the rest of the guests. But by the afternoon it was raining again, and I only had a dozen or so mediocre shots of children in the sun.

  I was angry and Donna was depressed.

  We had hoped the trip would give us time to solve our unsatisfying living situation and clarify our relationship. The rain was ominous.

  Trying to snap the mood, we rented a car and drove to the eastern tip of the island, where we boarded a ferry to Vieques Island. The rains had caused flooding, and the boat was thrown violently around. We passed the skeleton of an earlier ferry, recently capsized in the stormy sea.

  Still searching, we checked into a hotel which was advertised as a “beach club.” It was a mile from the beach, and our room was in shambles. The hot water didn’t work. The bed was wrapped in plastic with only a thin polyester sheet to cover it. The windows didn’t close and the door wouldn’t lock. The hotel restaurant made TV dinners look like gourmet dining. In the middle of the night, my pillow burst, and I woke almost suffocated from the foam rubber pieces.

  The next night we tried another place, a stately old mansion converted into a hotel. The calm scene was suddenly broken by the cry of one of the guests: someone had stolen $500 in cash he was keeping in his room. The owner scurried around, trying to reassure everyone, but it was obviously an inside job by one of the employees. Everyone was on edge.

  “Can’t anything go right?” I said to Donna.

  She had a plan. She had been sitting beside the tiny pool in the courtyard next to a young couple from Boston. They had rented a jeep and knew of a beach nearby where they planned to spend the day. Did we want to join them?

  Playa Azul is official navy territory, closed to the public during maneuvers, but open the rest of the time. Our only company on the beach was a navy man, dressed in fatigues, jogging toward us on the dirt road, his hairy chest dripping with sweat.

  I immediately took the Shinto god from my pack and walked alone a half mile to where the sandy beach turned into a rocky one. I jumped into the water, carrying the god. Not more than a hundred yards from the rocks, I noticed a huge head of waving coral, which reminded me of Hanukkah candles. I dove, placed the god snugly into the head of coral and surfaced. For a long time I floated and thought about Donna and me.

  “This isn’t working. She’s not happy. I’m not happy.”

  Like tiny bubbles coming off the ocean bottom, my thoughts started slowly, with few reaching the surface. But the longer I floated, the more powerful they became.

  I loved her, yes. But we’d allowed 3,000 miles to come between us. Was that love?

  When the Shinto teacher had spoken of love (after saying Donna and I were like brother and sister), he spoke of the love of Christ, the universal love. I had no trouble understanding that concept. It made sense: we have to live together on this small planet or we will perish. But the love between a man and a woman, specifically between me and Donna, that was different. That I didn’t understand.

  I knew I didn’t want to go to New York. But couldn’t she come back to San Francisco? What if she says no? What if she says yes? Both possibilities frightened me.

  What’s wrong with you? I berated myself. Are you scared to ask her for what you want?

  I rose and fell with the swells, listening to the pounding of my heart. After a moment it seemed to beat in synch with the pulsing ocean.

  Okay, okay! I am scared, I thought. Scared of being consumed. Scared of her powerful sense of self. Her confidence. Her determination. I’m also scared of losing myself.

  There are books written about men like me. We should be required to wear tags: “Beware, man scared of intimacy!” Mothers should warn their daughters: “Watch out for the shy, sensitive types. They make good friends but…”

  Finally, I swam back to the beach still feeling unresolved about Donna, but sensing that something was going to change, something I didn’t have the power to stop.

  It was still raining when we returned to San Juan, so we cut our trip short and flew back to New York. Donna and I said goodbye. I was flying back to San Francisco. She handed me the overcoat that I usually kept at her apartment, and the finality of it came crashing down on me. She looked at me sadly, then turned back to her apartment. I got in the taxi and cried on the way to the airport. Fear had won.

  I wasn’t surprised when the pictures of children in the sun were rejected. The images are too dull, the magazine’s art director said.

  chapter 18

  My classmates and me at the Iwakiyama monastery.

  In the fall of 1987, the world was on the brink of peace. The failed summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland had set the stage for a series of talks that led to the histor
ic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which for the first time reduced the total number of nuclear warheads. Later, when Gorbachev was asked what he thought was the turning point in U.S.-USSR relations, he didn’t hesitate. “Reykjavík,” he said. “Because for the first time the two leaders talked directly over an extended period in a real conversation about key issues.”

  It turns out that the monster I saw on Lake Lögurinn was not a sign of the end after all, but of the beginning.

  Kazz wrote me in October of 1987 and told me that most of the gods had been placed. Only a few more placings were needed. He acknowledged that the world situation had indeed improved, but the time before completion was the most precarious and dangerous time of all. The fire ceremony, an ancient annual rite Kazz said was the most important Shinto ceremony, would take place on the 13th of November at Iwakiyama monastery. During the ceremony, a huge battle for world peace would be waged, and all the gods that we had placed around the world would be called upon to protect the earth during this especially critical time.

  On November 8th I boarded the train in Tokyo at 9 a.m., heading south toward Iwakiyama, the same monastery where the teacher had promised me special training in the ways of Shinto.

  Not only was I looking forward to this trip as closure to a confusing but ultimately rewarding five years, but I had also taken the teacher’s promise of special training to heart. I hoped the training would give me the power he had said I was lacking during my first visit to Japan.

  Kazz hopped on the train in Osaka a few hours later, wearing a formal three-piece suit. I had only seen him dressed casually or in Shinto robes, and I teased him about looking like a businessman.“Bought in Turkey for $70,” Kazz said proudly, tugging on the vest as he sat down next to me and the train continued south.