Song of Kali

by Dan Simmons

  I pushed through the door and ran, my suitcase banging against my right leg, surprised airport workers stepping aside as I passed. The Song roared louder than ever before, bringing enough pain to make me squeeze my eyes shut.

  Let it begin here. Let it begin now.

  I stopped in midstride, struck the wall, and stumbled backward with the force of the compulsion. My arms and legs twitched and thrashed as if I was in the midst of an epileptic seizure. I took two steps back toward the terminal.

  "Fuck you!" I screamed — I think I screamed — and managed to stumble sideways against a wall that was a door, and then I was on my hands and knees in a long, dark room.

  The door closed and there was silence. True silence. I was alone. The room was long and dimly lit, empty except for a few unclaimed stacks of luggage, some boxes, and trunks. I sat down on the cement floor and looked around with a rising shock of recognition. I looked to my right and saw the battered counter where the airline casket had waited.

  The Song had stopped.

  For several minutes I sat on the floor and panted. The emptiness in me was almost a pleasant thing now — an absence of something black and poisonous.

  I closed my eyes. I remembered holding Victoria the night she was born, the other times, the milk and baby smell of her, and the thirty-step walk from the delivery room to the nursery.

  Without opening my eyes I gripped the handle of my suitcase and — rising now — flung it as far as I could across the long room. It bounced off a dusty shelf and crashed out of sight into a heap of boxes.

  I left the room, walked twenty steps down an empty corridor, emerged into the terminal ten paces from the only occupied ticket counter, and bought a ticket for the next flight out.

  There were no delays. The Lufthansa flight to Munich held only ten other passengers when it lifted off the runway twenty minutes later. I did not even think about looking out to catch a last glimpse of Calcutta. I was asleep before the landing gear retracted.

  I landed in New York the next afternoon and caught a Delta 727 to Logan International in Boston. There the last of my nervous energy left me and I could not keep my voice from cracking as I called Amrita and asked her for a ride.

  By the time she got there in the red Pinto, I was shaking all over and not completely aware of my surroundings. She wanted to take me to a hospital, but I slumped deep into the black vinyl seat and said, "Drive. Please drive."

  We headed north on I-95 with the evening sun throwing long shadows across the median. The fields were wet from a recent rainstorm. My teeth were chattering almost uncontrollably, but I insisted on talking. Amrita drove in silence, occasionally glancing at me with those deep, sad eyes. She did not interrupt me even when I began to babble.

  "I realized that it was exactly what they wanted me to do. What She wanted me to do," I said as we approached the state line. "I don't know why. Maybe She wanted me to take his place the way he took Das's. Or maybe Krishna saved me because he knew they would bring me back someday for some other insanity. I don't know. I don't care. Do you see what's really important?"

  Amrita looked at me and said nothing. Evening light turned her tan skin gold.

  "I've been blaming myself every day, knowing that I'll go on blaming myself until I die. I thought it was my fault. It was my fault. Now I know you've been blaming yourself."

  "If I hadn't let her in — " began Amrita.

  "Yes!" I said. It was almost a shout. "I know. But we have to stop that. If we don't go beyond that, we'll not only destroy each other and ourselves, we'll destroy what the three of us meant. We'll be part of the darkness."

  Amrita pulled into a rest stop near the Salisbury Plains exit. She took her hands off the wheel. We sat in silence for several minutes.

  "I miss Victoria," I said. It was the first time I had said our child's name to her since Calcutta. "I miss our baby. I miss Victoria."

  Her head came over against my chest. I could barely understand her through the muffling of my shirt and the beginning of her own tears. Then it was clear.

  "So do I, Bobby," she said. "I miss Victoria too."

  We held each other as the trucks moved by in a rush of wind and noise and the last of the rush-hour traffic filled the lanes with sunbaked colors and the sound of tires on pavement.

  18

  "Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

  The soul recovers radical innocence

  And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

  Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

  And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;

  She can, though every face should scowl

  And every windy quarter howl

  Or every bellows burst, be happy still."

  — William Butler Yeats A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER

  We live in Colorado now. In the spring of 1982 I was invited out

  to do a modest workshop at a mountain college here and I went

  back East only long enough to get Amrita. Our subsequent visit

  has turned into a reasonably permanent residence. We've leased the house in Exeter, furnishings and all, but the eight paintings are hanging here against the rough wood of the cabin and the little Jamie Wyeth oil sketch we purchased in 1973 comes closest to catching the rich play of light we see out the window. That quality of light obsessed us our first few months here, and both Amrita and I have — sheepishly at first — tried oil painting.

  The college facilities here are primitive by Boston standards, our salaries are low; but the house we're living in was once a ranger's cabin, and from our large window we can see snowy peaks over a hundred miles to the north. The light is so sharp and clear that it borders on being painful.

  We wear jeans most of the time, and Amrita has learned how to handle the four-wheel-drive Bronco in mud and snow. We miss the ocean. Even more, we miss some of our friends and the benefits of coastal civilization. Our nearest town now is eight miles down the mountain from the campus and it boasts only seven thousand people at the height of the summer influx. The fanciest restaurant is called La Cocina, and our other dining choices are the Pizza Hut, Nora's Breakfast Nook, Gary's Grill, and the twenty-four-hour truck stop on the Interstate. In the summer Amrita and I give a lot of our business to the Tastee Freez. The town library is operating out of an AirStream trailer until the new Civic Center is built. Denver is almost three hours away, and both mountain passes are closed for days at a time in winter.

  But the air seems especially clean here, and we feel somehow lighter in the morning, as if the altitude includes a dispensation from some of the gravity that inflicts its imperative on the rest of the world. And the quality of daylight here is more than a pleasant phenomenon, it is a form of clarity to us. A clarity which heals.

  Abe Bronstein died last autumn. He had just finished work on the Winter Issue, the one that included a short piece by Ann Beattie, when he suffered a massive coronary while walking to the subway.

  Amrita and I flew back for his funeral. Afterwards, over coffee with other mourners in the small townhouse he had shared with his mother, the old woman beckoned for Amrita and me to join her in Abe's room.

  The small bedroom was made even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that filled the better part of three walls. Mrs. Bronstein was eighty-six and seemed too frail to hold herself erect as she sat there on the edge of the bed. The room smelled of Abe's brand of cigars and of leather book-bindings.

  "Here, please," said the old woman. Her hand was surprisingly steady as she handed me the small envelope. "Abraham left instructions for you to have this, Robert." Her throaty voice must once have been beautifully exciting. Now, as it measured out the words in the precise diction of an acquired language, it was merely beautiful. "Abraham said that I was to deliver this to you personally — even, as he put it, if I had to walk to Colorado to find you."

  At any other time, the image of this frail old woman hitchhiking across the prairie would have brought a smile from me. Now I nodded and opene
d the letter.

  April 9, 1983

  Bobby —

  If you're reading this letter, then neither one of us is terribly

  thrilled about recent events. I've just come from my doctor. While

  he didn't tell me not to buy any long-playing records, he didn't try

  to sell me any long-term certificates either.

  I hope that you (and Amrita?) didn't have to drop anything important. That is, if there could be anything important going on out there in that godforsaken wilderness you're calling home as of this writing.

  I recently revised my will. Right now I'm sitting in the park near my old friend the Mad Hatter, enjoying a panatela, and watching some girls in halter tops and shorts trying to convince themselves that it's really spring. It's a warm day but not so warm that it keeps their goose bumps from showing.

  If Momma hasn't told you all yet, my new will leaves everything to her. Everything, that is, except the original Proust editions; the authors' correspondence files in my safety-deposit box; and the rights, titles, modest bank account, and executive editorship of Other Voices. These go to you, Bobby.

  Now wait a minute. I don't want to be accused of hanging an albatross around your carefree Polish neck. Feel free to dispose of the magazine as you see fit. If you'd prefer that some other responsible party continue it — fine. I've given you full power of attorney for any such arrangement.

  Bobby, just remember what we wanted the magazine to be. Don't unload it on some fucking conglomerate that wants a tax write-off and who'll hire some schmuck who can't tell good prose from day-old piss. If you have to put the magazine to sleep rather than lower its standards, that's all right by me.

  If, on the other hand, you decide to keep it going — good. You'll be surprised how portable a magazine like Voices can be. Take it out to wherever the hell it is that you live. (Miller was going to raise the rent on us anyway.) If you do give it a go, don't spend time worrying about continuing "Abe's old editorial policy." Abe didn't have any editorial policy! Just print the good stuff, Roberto. Follow your instincts.

  One thing, though. Not all of the best writing has to be Naked Lunch Regurgitated. A lot of the stuff coming in will depress the hell out of you. If it's good, it deserves to be printed, but there's still room for writing that holds out some hope for humanity. At least I think there is. You know better than I, Bobby. You've been closer to the flames and managed to return.

  Got to go. There's a cop been eyeing me here and I think he's appraised me correctly as a Dirty Old Man.

  You can read this to Momma — she won't rest until you do — but leave out the "day-old piss" and the "fucking" before "conglomerate," okay? Your first editing chore.

  My love to Amrita.

  ––Abe"

  Abe was right. The magazine was quite portable. The college was thrilled to have Other Voices originating from its P.O. box, and they obligingly cut back my teaching time to two sections with no cut in pay. I suspect that they would pay me for no teaching if my presence would keep Amrita in their math department. For her part, Amrita is pleased by the easy access to the college computer terminal that shares time with some monster Cray computer in Denver. She recently made the comment — "This place is pretty up to date." While on her way to the math building, she obviously has not noticed the quonset-hut dormitories, cinderblock buildings, and minuscule library.

  I find it reasonably easy to edit an Eastern literary journal from the top of a Colorado mountain, although I do have to make five or six trips a year to confer with printers and to visit with some of the writers and sponsors. Amrita has become involved with the publication and has shown surprising strength as a reader. She says that her training in language and mathematics has given her a sense of symbolic balance — whatever the hell that means. But it has been at Amrita's urging that I've tried to include more Western writers including Joanne Greenberg and the Cowboy Poet of Creed.

  The results have been encouraging. Subscriptions have gone up recently, we've established several shelf-sale outlets, and our old readership appears to be remaining loyal. We shall see.

  I have written no poetry. Not since Calcutta.

  The Song of Kali never quite goes away. It is a background sound to me like discordant music from a poorly tuned radio station.

  I still dream of crossing muddy wastes with gray-wrapped bodies underfoot while distant chimneys send up flames to lick at low clouds.

  Some nights the wind comes up and I rise and go to the front window of the cabin and look into the blackness and hear the scrabbling of six limbs on the rocks outside. I wait, then, but the gaunt face with its hungry mouth and its thirsting eyes stays just back in the darkness, held away by . . . by what? I do not know.

  But the Song of Kali still is sung.

  Recently, not far from us here, an older woman and her grown daughter, both self-described "good Christians," baked her grandson in the oven to drive out the demons that made him cry in the evening.

  One of my students here is distantly related to the California high school student who recently raped and murdered his girlfriend and then brought fourteen of his friends to view the body over a three-day period. One boy dropped a brick on the corpse to make sure she was dead. None of the kids thought to mention it to the authorities.

  One of the new printers I met at Adamsons in New York last month was Siem Ry, a forty-two-year-old refugee from Phnom Penh. He had owned his own printing company there and was able to bribe his way into Thailand and to the U.S. a few years ago. He worked his way up in Adamsons after starting over as a printer's devil. Over a few drinks, Ry told me about the forced evacuation of the city and the eight-day forced march which killed his parents. He quietly told me about the labor camp that claimed his wife, and about the morning he awoke to find that his three children had been taken to an "education-labor camp" in a distant part of the country. Ry described a field he stumbled into while escaping. He said that human skulls were piled three-and four-feet deep across half an acre in one place.

  The Age of Kali has begun.

  I went down to the mobile-home library last week and read up on the socalled Black Hole of Calcutta. It had been only a phrase to me until then. The historical details were not relevant to much of anything. Essentially, the Black Hole was just an airless room crammed full of too many people during one of the sporadic rebellions in the 1800s.

  But the phrase still haunts me. I've developed a theory about Calcutta, although theory is too dignified a word for such an intuitive opinion.

  I think that there are black holes in reality. Black holes in the human spirit. And actual places where, because of density or misery or sheer human perversity, the fabric of things just comes apart and that black core in us swallows all the rest.

  I read the papers, I look around, and I have a sinking feeling that these black holes are growing larger, more common, feeding on their own vile appetite. They are not restricted to strange cities in distant countries.

  Without telling Amrita any of this, I asked her recently about astronomical black holes. She gave a long explanation, much of it based on the work of a man named Stephen Hawking, much of it technical, most of it indecipherable to me. But a couple of things she mentioned interested me. First, she said that it did look as if light and other captured energies might be able to escape astronomical black holes after all. I forget the details of her explanation, but the impression I got was that although it was impossible to climb out of a black hole, energy might "tunnel out" into another place and time. Second, she said that even if all the matter and energy in the universe were gobbled up by black holes, it would only ensure that the mass came together into another Big Bang that would start what she called a Fresh New Universe with new laws, new forms, and blazing new galaxies of light.

  Maybe. I sit on a mountaintop and weave weak metaphors, all the while remembering a pale hint of cheek in a dirty shawl. Sometimes I touch the palm of my hand in an attempt to recall the sensation the last time I
cupped Victoria's head in my hand. Take care of your mom until I get back, okay, Little One?

  And the wind rises outside and the stars shake in the chill of night.

  Amrita is pregnant. She hasn't told me yet, but I know that she confirmed it with her doctor two days ago. I think she's worried about what my reaction will be. She needn't be.

  A month ago, just before school started again in September, Amrita and I took the Bronco up to the end of an old mining road and then backpacked about three miles along the ridgeline. There was no sound except for the breeze through the pines below us. The valleys there were either never inhabited or abandoned when the old mines played out. We explored a few of the old diggings and then crossed another ridge to where we could see snow-topped peaks extending away in all directions, to and beyond the curve of the planet. We paused to watch a hawk circle silently on high thermals half a mile above us.