Head Dead West

by Oliver Atlas

  Passage down the Butte and across the east side of town takes us about an hour. When we ask after the orphanage, a snowy haired man with a kind face points west to the river. “Once you reach the Riverwalk, look for the tallest dome near the river on the west bank. You’ll see it. That’s the orphanage—or at least that’s the monastery that runs the orphanage. Have a beautiful night.”

  For most of our journey into Bentlam, Jenny has been a jabber mouth, going on and on about the beauty of the place. But now that our parting is in sight, she’s gone quiet, her eyes big and watchful, shining like the stars that begin prickling out of the deep blue above.

  “Scared?” I ask.

  She screws up her face and thinks about it. “I don’t think so.”

  “Sad?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Will you forgive me if I leave you at the orphanage?”

  She thinks again, this time with a slight grin. “Maybe.”

  For dinner, we find a wonderful Italian restaurant with red and white checkered tablecloths and appetizer bread that almost melts away as you break it. When the server asks what we’d like we both start laughing. Anything but salmon, we say together. The slender young man raises an eyebrow but smiles, joining our humor.

  After we’ve devoured two more courses than we should have—various pastas and cheeses with red and white sauces—we head slowly north alongside the river, admiring the gondolas that skim across the water and the gondola lifts that hum overhead along nearly invisible wire. Before long, we know where we’re headed: toward a golden dome, the tallest we can see.

  At the lavish building’s great oaken door, I rap the silver knocker. Once. Twice. As I’m about to knock again, I hear footsteps, followed by locks clicking. A moment later, the door opens and a small man with beady dark eyes and bowl cut black hair appears. He has a sharp nose, a large forehead, stooped shoulders, and wears a simple black cassock.

  “Good evening,” he says, throwing out his arms in welcome. He steps forward, ignoring the papers I hold out for him, and gathers Jenny up in a hug, lifting her off her feet, even though she is already nearly his size. “We began to fear for you, Jenny. You were due a day ago.” He sets her down and favors me with a welcoming, yet quizzical look. “Mr. Yaverts?”

  “No. My name is Blake Prose. Mr. Yaverts will be along shortly. He asked me to see Jenny safely to you in the meanwhile.”

  The man frowns. “Very odd. Mr. Yaverts’ reputation is not that of a delegator. All the same,” he says, grabbing Jenny’s hand, “a job done is a job done. Thank you for delivering Jenny to us safely. She’s a very special girl.”

  “Yes she is,” I say, struck by an inexplicable dislike of the man. There is something about his tone, something in the way he grabbed Jenny’s hand. “What is your name?” I ask.

  He simpers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Prose. We brothers of the order do not share our names, even with Rangers. But seeing as how Mr. Yaverts trusted you with our delivery, I will trust you with his reward.” With a wink, the man reaches into his pocket and hands me a white card with a black eye on it.

  “This is Yaverts’ reward?” I lift the card skeptically to the lamp light. “Did he know this was his reward?” I don’t want to imagine handing Yaverts the card if it’s not what he was expecting.

  “Oh, yes,” says the man, nodding vigorously. “That is exactly what he requested.”

  “What is it?” I ask, a bit of skepticism creeping into my voice.

  The man’s smile goes from appeasing to smarmy. “I’ll let Mr. Yaverts tell you.”

  He begins to turn. “Wait,” I say, extending a hand. “I’d like to rent a room for the night. I’m told you’re a monastery.”

  “Ha! I’m afraid we’re not that kind of monastery,” says the little man. His eyes dart back into the building before flashing over the cross on my chest. I can’t tell if he’s itching for me to leave or hoping someone else will come and deal with me. “The fact of the matter,” he continues, “is that we’re not a faith-based order.”

  “No?” I say, eyebrow raising. “All right. What kind of order are you?”

  “Officially? We are the Grand and Benevolent Order of Eternal Agnosticism, the Oregon Branch.”

  “’Eternal Agnosticism’? Is it that you don’t have any spare room or that you don’t know if you have any spare rooms? Because I’m willing to wait until you can turn me away with conviction.”

  “Mr. Prose,” sniffs the man, “we run an orphanage, thank you very much. If you’d like shelter, try the old church on Lightkeeper Hill. You might find hospitality there, although no doubt you’ll have to suffer priestcraft to get it. Now if you’ll excuse us—Jenny!”

  The little girl breaks from his grasp and tackles me in a hug.

  “Jenny,” I say, scooping her up. “I’ll miss you. I’ll come back soon. Very soon.”

  She looks at me with teary brown eyes and nods. “Soon,” she whispers, clinging to my words. “And Blake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Please bring Milly with you.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The Theologizer

  Talk about anticlimax. As I walk away from the monastery’s domed complex, out into a resplendent night full of stars and lamplit marble, it dawns on me that my adventure is pretty much over. Sure, I still need to make it to Portland and track down Milly and Skiss. But Jenny is finally in Bentlam. She’s finally safe. That’s a wrap.

  Yeah right.

  The hell that’s a wrap. There’s no way I’m leaving Jenny with some smarmy, twitchy monk who belongs to an order without even a guest room for weary travelers. I’ll find Yaverts and give him his stupid card. Then I’ll march back to the monastery and endure whatever paperwork torment is required to secure custody of Jenny from these Eternal Agnostics.

  “Eternal Agnosticism? What does that even mean?”

  I pose this question to a three story greenhouse as I walk past its warmly lit glass, where, within, white-robed men and women stroll from plant to plant, sniffing. The building doesn’t answer, but its big squarish warmth reminds me randomly of G.K. Chesterton and a snippet of his writing comes to mind. So I declare it aloud: “I am quite ready to respect another man’s faith; but it is too much to ask that I should respect his doubt.”

  Someone behind me laughs. No—cackles. “Is that so, my dear? Then you’ve come to the right city.”

  I expect to turn and find some hunched crone hobbling at me, straight out of MacBeth. Instead, I find a tall, willowy woman with silver hair wrapped high on her head. She is wearing a white robe and no shoes. Something about her—maybe simply her bare feet—makes me shiver. Even though Bentlam has an unnatural heat about it, the night is still growing chilly. I don’t know what to say other than ask for directions to Lightkeeper Hill.

  “Oh, that’s not far,” she says, pointing to the northwest where several grand buildings rise above the rest. Her eyes are a striking dark hazel, gorgeous and . . . off. Her pupils are far too small. Her smile, too, has a drunken twinge to it.

  “What is this place?” I ask, looking back inside the palatial greenhouse.

  “Ah,” she says, her noble face brightening dreamily. “Would you like to come in?” Her hand sweeps toward a yellow archway.

  Hesitant to offend by embarrassing her, I say jovially, “Come inside where?”

  “Oh! The House of Drooz.” She pulls absently at the collar of her robe, making it fairly clear she is wearing nothing else. “You should come inside,” she insists, holding out her hand for mine. “Come inside and experience peace such as you’ve never known. Mmm, yes. Such peace.”

  “Thank you,” I say, shaking my head and trying not to look appalled. “But I must be going.”

  The regal woman makes a disappointed clucking sound. “Then do come back. Do come back.”

  Her hand stays extended, weirdly, as though I will change my mind and take it, but I turn away and stride northwest, through grand and lightly crowded streets.

>   I’ve heard of drooz before. Drooz, the wonder drug. The shaman’s secret. The herb of ecstasy. Over the years, I’ve heard some stories that claim Bentlam’s uncanny heat comes from its hundreds of drooz hothouses. Many accounts claim the drug is harmless, non-addictive, just another paradoxically essential-but-optional element in Bentlam’s exquisite uniqueness. But I have always had doubts. What kind of paradise depends on a drug? What does peace mean if it requires illusion? Maybe these questions aren’t a problem for those who want to believe our life is a fleeting blip, the accidental hint of an echo in the universe’s forgotten daydreams. But for me, someone who believes our life is an invitation into a wondrous mystery—well, questions about real peace are important. I remember arguing with my brother, Casey, about the matter. Is drooz really wrong? Is drooz really bad? I don’t really care. I want to know if drooz fits in with the a world marked by fearless, selfless desire. As with everything, I want to know if it can serve true passion.

  I also want some sleep. I need to rest up, hunt down Yaverts, get square with him, and go prize Jenny from the prospect of getting tucked into bed every night by a bureaucracy. That thought puts new urgency in my stride.

  The church doesn’t take long to find. It stands on a steep hill full of opulent towers, tucked between two of the tallest and most lavish. Although a tall building itself, its bell tower rises only half as high as its neighbors and seems like a cottage dwarfed by mammoth shadows. That it’s the only gothic architecture I’ve seen in the city adds to the feeling that it doesn’t belong in Bentlam. Next to the clean lines and banners of the buildings beside it, its dark spires, gargoyles, and crosses make it seem like a transplanted bit of another dimension. In context of the neighboring structures, the cathedral is peculiar, oddly resistant, almost offensive.

  After finding Enemy a comfy straw bed in a neighboring stable-house, I climb the church’s sweeping front stair. Its doors stand open to the night, the soft glow of candlelight welcoming people, not out of a daunting darkness, but out of an over-lit, sterilely beautiful night. Inside, the room’s vast space quickly ushers me farther in, down the nave, and below a towering, frescoed dome. That feature doesn’t feel very gothic. I stop and stare upward, absorbing the eclectic sacredness of the space, feeling the weight of the past week fall away like scaled armor.

  Somewhere, an organ plays softly.

  The echo of footsteps to my left draws my attention. A short man in a black sports jacket and blue jeans walks toward me with an unassuming smile. He has a wide jaw, kindly dark eyes, and neat, sandy hair. “Welcome,” he says, with a faded accent only a fellow Texan would catch. “Are you here for confession?”

  I blink. His question catches me off-guard. “Um. People here still practice confession?”

  The man spots my cross. His eyes widen, but only for an instant. “Well, not in the traditional sense. I pretty much confess to them for anything and everything Christians might have done wrong in the past.”

  I cock my head and murmur, “That sounds familiar.”

  “Yeah,” he says, ruffling the back of his head. “My grandfather wrote a book that had that idea in it. The ol’ reverse confession. It really helped people, both inside and outside the church. I guess it encouraged them to rethink a lot of the lines they’d been drawing about sin and guilt and what God really cares about. I keep trying the method here. You know, hoping it might spark somebody past their old prejudices about faith.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Well, so far I have about five regular confessors. By which I mean folks who love hearing me dredge up the church’s sins.”

  “How about your congregation?”

  He chuckles drolly. “Sometimes my organist stays to hear a homily. I think he feels sorry for me. I’m about to give my Friday night message. Do you want to join us?”

  “Well, if you have a spare room I could use for a night or two.”

  “It’s a deal,” he says, smiling broadly and clapping once with excitement. “There’s an extra bedroom in the rectory. I already have one guest in it, but it has a second bunk and you’re welcome to it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, extending my hand. “I’m Blake Prose.”

  “I’m Pastor Jon,” he replies, accepting my handshake. “But around here they call me the Theologizer.”

  “Nice. Is that the religious version of a drooz dealer?”

  Pastor Jon chuckles. “You know, funny you should make that comparison. Did you know drooz sales keep this building open?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I’m here on the support of a church in Portland. The building, however, is kept alive by the city as evidence that there are other options to drooz.” Pastor Jon starts giggling. “In the common view, faith is basically a really lousy drug.”

  I grin, apologetically. “Isn’t it, sometimes?”

  The Pastor stiffens, straightening his face and his jacket as well. “Well, I suppose so. At least it can be. But that’s true of just about any powerful thing. Say, Blake, I was going to preach a homily on how St. Paul advises Timothy to be prepared to preach the word even when it seems nobody is listening. That was a message for me. But now that you’re here, I’d like to do a homily that touches on the meaning and power of love. Fair enough? I promise it will be a short, short message. You look pretty tired.”

  “Thanks,” I sigh, not sure if I mean thanks for the promise of a message, the promise to keep it short, or for commenting on how tired I look.

  All I know is that any message will be hard to appreciate at the moment. What I’m really itching to hear is whatever the Pastor knows about the Eternal Agnostics and how they treat their orphans. But I can be courteous and wait. However sad and scared Jenny may feel tonight, I’m sure she has to be safe and sound. Both Yaverts and Milly told me to take her to the orphanage. And I can’t imagine either of them having me deliver her into harm.

  Once I’m seated in the front pew, facing the elevated pulpit, Pastor Jon clears his throat loudly. The organ music stops and a wizened old man with mahogany skin and huge white hair shuffles from behind an undersized door and comes to sit beside me with a cordial nod.

  “Welcome, Byron. Welcome, Blake. Let’s reflect on a passage of Scripture from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, chapter thirteen. It’s a passage that’s famous for its description of love. And tonight I’d like to share with you a few thoughts about what love has to do with knowledge, and power, and the world to come.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Message

  Pastor Jon begins to read.

  “Even if I’m fluent in every language known to humans and angels, if I don’t have love, I’m no better than a clanking gong or a clacking cymbal. And even if I possess the gift of prophecy and can predict anything coming at me, and even if I grok all the universe’s mysteries and know everything there is to know, and even if I see things with a faith so potent I can think mountains into moving—well, if I don’t have love, I am nothing.

  “Okay, fine. But what if I give away everything I own to feed the poor? What if I sacrifice my body to flames for the noblest cause? What am I then? I’ll tell you. Without love, I’m zip. Zilch. Nada. Nada y nada y nada. All of my passionate vision and good intention would be worth nothing.

  “Love, however . . . . Love suffers as long as it needs to, and it remains kind the whole while. Love doesn’t do envy. Love never parades itself. Love doesn’t carry an ounce of self-important flab. It’s never rude. It never seeks its own good at the expense of others. It cannot be provoked. It thinks no evil. It takes no joy in tricking anyone, but delights in passing along even the simplest wisdom. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love simply can’t fail.

  “But prophecies will fail, tongues will cease, knowledge will vanish into obsolescence. For what we know is pretty limited, to say the least, and what we can predict is too. But when a complete reality arrives, limited realities are revealed as obviously passé.”r />
  Byron raises his hand. “Much longer, Pastor? My wife was fixing peach cobbler when I left.”

  “Wow,” winks the Pastor. “I think I’m going home with you, Byron. And no, not much longer.” He clears his throat and continues reading. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I listened like a child, I thought like a child. But when I grew up, I naturally let go of childish ways. Right now we see reality through a fogged up bunch of windows and mirrors, but pretty soon all the glass and the fog will be gone and we’ll see reality face to face. Right now we know in part, but pretty soon we’ll know fully, even as we’re fully known. And we have three capacities for knowing the world that are able to bridge the now and the great not yet: faith, hope, and love—these three. And pay special attention: the greatest of these is love.”

  Pastor Jon pauses to take a drink of water. “Any questions?”

  Byron checks his watch, recrosses his legs, his arms, and sighs.

  I sit up straight and ask, “What does any of that have to do with a world full of brain eaters?”

  Pastor Jon bursts into uneasy laughter. “Excellent question, Mr. Prose. I’m afraid before we can get to an application, we have to think first about what the passage is saying in its own terms. So let’s get clear on what it’s saying about love. The passage isn’t talking about love as a feeling. It isn’t talking about love as a capacity we have for a particularly wonderful emotion. It’s talking about love as a way of seeing. More than that, it’s talking about love as a way of knowing. It depicts love as what philosophers would call an episteme—a way of knowing, like eyes and microscopes and logic and hearing. Love, according to the passage, is a way of knowing the world both today and in God’s complete future. Love is an eternal form of sight. It allows us to see eternal dimensions. More than that, love is a uniting power, a way of merging today into the eternal, a way of sculpting order out of chaos.”

  “This is your craziest sermon yet!” hoots Byron, recrossing his legs. “Come on, PJ! I bet that cobbler is getting cold!”