Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “But you do, you know. One always thinks about it. And if you don’t think about it, you dream about it.” Armand lowered his voice until it was a rumble from the deep barrel of his chest. Demarch leaned forward to listen. “I was at the Mandan River,” Armand said, “after the Lakota rebellion. They don’t tell you about that in the Académie, do they? No, nor in any other sort of school, except to say that a menace was disposed of. Careful words. Discreet. They don’t tell you what the camps looked like with their watchtowers overlooking the prairie sloughs. How the grass goes on for miles and miles. They don’t tell you how muddy it was that spring. Or how the smell from the furnaces lingered when the bodies were burned. The bodies of men and women and children—I know one isn’t supposed to call them that, but that’s what they were, or seemed to be, whatever the condition of their souls. I suppose their souls went up with the smoke. A body is some ounces lighter when it dies . . . I read that somewhere.” His eyes seemed to glaze. “Everything is a test, Symeon, in our line of work.”

  “Am I being tested?”

  “We’re always being tested.” Armand sipped his brandy. “We’re all subordinated, not just the ones we kill. There are no victims. You have to remember that. We’re all in the service of something larger than ourselves, and the difference between us and those corpses is that we are its willing servants. That’s all. That’s all. We’re spared because we put our bodies on the altar every day, and not just our bodies, but our minds and our wills. Remember the vow you took when you joined the Bureau. Incipit vita nova. A new life begins. You leave your priggish little intellect behind.”

  The brandy made him reckless. He said, “And our conscience?”

  “That was never yours,” Armand said. “Don’t be absurd.”

  He turned out the lights after Armand wheeled himself away. The fire had burned down to embers. He finished his brandy in the dark and then moved upstairs.

  The old man’s words seemed to follow him in stuttering echoes through the chilly house. We put our bodies on the altar every day. But for what? Something larger than ourselves. The Bureau, the Church, the Protennoia? Something more, surely. Some idea or vision of the good, a republic of permissible relations, a step up from the barbarism of the Lakota and all the countless other slaughtered aboriginals.

  But the corpses pile higher every day, and need to be burned.

  Dorothea was asleep when he joined her in bed. Her long hair lay across the pillow like a black wing. She reminded him of a temple, serene and pale even in sleep.

  He stood a moment watching the snow that had begun to fall beyond the double panes of the bedroom window. He thought about Christof. Christof still acted like a stranger. The way he looks at me, Demarch thought. As if he’s seeing something alien, something that makes him afraid.

  Bisonette telephoned after five days. “We think you should go back tomorrow,” the Censeur said. “I’m sorry to cut short your time with your family, but the arrangements have already been made.”

  “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

  “Only Clement Delafleur getting a little overzealous in your absence. I’m given to understand he’s hanging children in the public square.”

  He kissed Dorothea good-bye. Christof was presented for a kiss and consented to it. Probably he had been coached.

  He told the Haitian driver to stop at the Bureau Centrality on the way to the airport.

  Guy Marris was in his office. Demarch said he was stopping to say good-bye; he had been summoned back to duty.

  His friend wished him luck and shook his hand. At the door, he tucked a sheaf of papers into the pocket of Demarch’s veston. Neither man spoke of it.

  It had snowed a little, the Haitian driver said, but it would snow much more before long.

  CHAPTER 12

  Linneth arranged with the school’s principal to take Dexter Graham back to his apartment, as inconspicuously as possible, in the principal’s automobile, which he still drove from time to time although his hoard of gasoline was almost exhausted. Mr. Hoskins was wary of her intentions but understood the urgency of the situation. She was aware of the way he watched her in the rearview mirror. The distrust was mutual, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  Fresh snow had fallen, and the rear tires slipped each time they turned a corner. No one spoke during the drive. When the car stopped, Linneth helped Dex out of the rear seat. His blood, she saw, had stained the upholstery. The principal pulled away quickly and left them alone in the twining veils of snow.

  Linneth guided Dex up the steps to his apartment. He was lucid enough to use his door key but he passed out again when he reached the blood-stained bed.

  Linneth had learned emergency aid during her three years with the Christian Renunciates. She stripped his shirt and unwound the sodden, dirty bandage from his arm. Dex moaned but didn’t wake. The injury under the bandage leaked blood and suppuration in lazy pulses. Linneth cleaned it with water and a cloth, as gently as possible, but the pain was unavoidable; Dex screamed and twisted away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this has to be done.”

  “Get me something. The aspirin.”

  “The what?”

  “In the bottle on the kitchen counter.”

  She fetched the small tubule of pills and peered at its label. The fragmented English defied interpretation. “Is it a narcotic?”

  “A painkiller. And it’ll bring the fever down.”

  She shook out four tablets at his instruction and he swallowed them with water. She said, “Do you have a disinfectant, too?”

  “No. Uh, wait, there’s some Bactine in the medicine cabinet. . . .”

  “For cleaning wounds?” She didn’t like the way his eyes wandered. He might not be coherent.

  “For cuts,” he said. “You spray it on cuts.”

  She found the Bactine and experimented until she understood the operation of the aerosol bottle. When she came back to the bed Dex had closed his eyes again. He didn’t rouse until she bathed his injury with the disinfectant; then he screamed until she gave him a wadded pillowcase to bite on.

  The wound was patently a bullet wound. The missile had passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm. She would have liked to close the injury with stitches, but there was no needle or thread at hand. He did have sterile cotton in a bag in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and she used some of that to pack the wound and a clean linen bandage to wrap it. But his fever was very high.

  She pulled a kitchen chair near to the bed and watched him. Within an hour the fever had subsided, at least to her touch, and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. That was the effect of the antipyretics, Linneth supposed. Still, she didn’t like the way his wound had looked—or smelled.

  The light from the window was thin and gray. The snowy afternoon had begun to wane. She called his name until he opened his eyes.

  “Dex, I have to go. I’ll be back. If possible, before curfew. You’ll stay here, won’t you?”

  He squinted as if to bring her into focus. “Where the hell would I go?”

  “Out to make more trouble, I don’t doubt.”

  She put a second blanket on him. The room was cold and he owned no fireplace or gas jets.

  She hurried through torrents of dry, granular snow to the town’s medical clinic.

  The town of Two Rivers lacked a hospital. This building was the nearest thing: a cube of consulting rooms with windows of tinted glass and a wide tiled lobby. Dr. Eichorn would be here today, if her luck held. She identified herself to the soldier at the door and asked where she could find him. “First office left off the lobby,” he said, “last time I saw him, Miss.”

  Dr. Eichorn was the medical archivist who had been called in, like Linneth, by the Proctors. He was a tall, hairless, patrician Southerner, a teaching physician with a degree in natural history. She found him at a desk in a consulting room. He was wrapped in two woolen sweaters and a scarf, frowning over the pages of a medical journal, eyeglasses
thick as jeweler’s loupes riding the end of his nose. She tapped the open door. He looked up and his eyes narrowed in some combination of suspicion and annoyance. “Miss, is it, Stone? We met in the commissary—didn’t we?”

  “Yes. . . .” Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin.

  “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Yes, there is.” Forge ahead, she thought. “Dr. Eichorn, I need a course of sulfa drugs.”

  “You mean, you’re sick?”

  “No. It’s for a friend.”

  He was like a muddy pond. It took time for things to sink in. Eichorn pushed the journal aside and leaned back in his chair. “You’re that woman anthropologist from Boston.”

  “I am.”

  “I didn’t know you were also a medical prodigy.”

  “Sir, I’m not. But I was trained by the Christian Renunciates and I know how to administer drugs.”

  “And how to prescribe them?”

  “The object is to ward off infection in a wound.”

  “A wound, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “One of your anthropological subjects?”

  The question was awkward, but Linneth nodded.

  “I see. Well, maybe the best thing would be if the patient came to me directly.”

  “That would be difficult.”

  “Or if you took me to the patient.”

  “It isn’t necessary.” She worked to keep any hint of desperation out of her voice. “I know your time is valuable. I’m asking this favor as a colleague, Dr. Eichorn.”

  “As a colleague? Am I the colleague of a woman who studies savages?” He shook his bald head ponderously. “Sulfanilamide. Well, that’s problematic. There was trouble last night—you may have heard of it.”

  “Only rumors.”

  “Shooting in the main street.”

  “I see.”

  “A fire.”

  “If you say so.”

  Eichorn studied her from his turgid depths. Linneth waited for his verdict. She counted silently to ten and was careful not to lower her gaze.

  “In this building,” Eichorn said, “there are antibiotics the like of which I’ve never seen. I don’t know where this town came from or where it may be going, but there were some clever people here. We’ll be reaping the rewards for decades. We owe someone a debt, Miss Stone. I don’t know who.” He rubbed his scalp with a bony hand. “No one will miss a bottle of pills. But let’s keep this between us, yes?”

  Linneth knew that something inside her had changed, but the change had been gradual and she couldn’t be sure of its nature or degree. It was as if she had opened a familiar door and found a strange new landscape beyond it.

  Maybe the change had begun when the Proctor Symeon Demarch invaded her home in Boston, or when she arrived in this impossible town. But the axis and emblem of that change was surely Dexter Graham—not only the man but the qualities she had espied in him: skepticism, courage, defiance.

  She thought at first his virtues might be common American virtues, but the evidence for that was scant. Linneth had sampled the magazines and newspapers of his world and found them brash but often vulgar and concerned above all else with fashion: fashions in politics as much as fashions in dress; and fashion, Linneth thought, was only that drab whore Conformity in gaudier paint. Dexter Graham defied convention. He seemed to weigh everything—everything she said to him, her words, her presence—on an invisible scale. He had the bearing of a judge, but there was nothing imperious or awful in it. He did not exempt himself from judgment. She sensed that he had long ago passed some verdict on himself, and the verdict was far from favorable.

  Obviously, she should have turned him over to the soldiers as soon as she saw his wound. But when she thought about it she remembered a passage in the book he had given her, Huckleberry Finn, by Mr. Mark Twain. Much of the book had been hard to decipher, but there was a pivotal moment when Huck debated whether he ought to turn over his friend, the Negro Jim, to authorities. By the standards of his time, giving up Jim was the right thing to do. Huckleberry Finn had been told he would go to Hell and suffer unspeakable torment if he abetted an escaped slave. Nevertheless, Huck helped his friend. If it meant going to Hell, then he’d go to Hell.

  I’ll go to Hell, then, Linneth thought.

  The sulfa pills rattled in her coat pocket as she paced through snowy gloom. Because the electricity had been turned off to punish the townspeople, there would be no streetlights tonight. The military patrols had been redoubled but the snow would slow them down.

  She was allowed to come and go as she wished from the civilians’ wing of the Blue View Motel. She ate dinner at the commissary in order not to arouse suspicion. The dinner was a stew of beef in watery broth and slices of dense bread buttered with suet. She told the pions who patrolled the hallway that she would be working on a paper tonight and didn’t want to be disturbed. She left a lamp burning in her room and pulled the curtains. When the pions adjourned to the lobby to smoke their noxious pipes, she went out a side door into the windy dark. She fell twice, hurrying along the empty streets. The church bell was tolling curfew when she reached Dexter Graham’s apartment.

  She fed him sulfanilamide and aspirin and sat with him through the night. When Dex slept, she slept on the sofa across the room. When he woke, often raving or thrashing, she bathed his forehead with a damp cloth.

  She was aware of the danger of being here and of the danger Dex was in. The Proctors were like poisonous insects—harmless enough if allowed to toil undisturbed in their nests; lethal if aroused. She remembered the day the Proctors came to arrest her mother, before she was sent to the Renunciates, and that ancient fear rose like flood water from the culverts of memory.

  While she cooled his forehead she admired Dexter Graham’s face. He was handsome. She seldom thought of the men she knew as handsome or unhandsome; they were threats or opportunities, seldom friends or lovers. The word lover sounded lewd even when she pronounced it in the privacy of her thoughts. Her last “lover,” if he could be called that, was the boy Campo. That was in the old days when she was very young and before the idolatry laws were enacted. Her father had taken the family to the annual civic service in Rome, where the Temple of Apollo was festooned with garlands and the Bishop of Rome himself rendered the oracles of the Prophetess in Latin hexameter. Linneth was bored by the ritual and sickened by the sacrifice of the animals. She avoided services and stayed in the paradeisos where foreign visitors lodged—or at least, she promised to. In fact she escaped each morning and taught herself to ride the buses and elevated trains; and she met Campo, an Egyptian boy who had come to the shrines with his family as Linneth had come with hers. They spent their meager allowances together on the trams, at the zoo, in the cafés. He told her about Alexandria. She told him about New York. In secret, in his small room in the paradeisos, they undressed one another. Her first and last lover, Campo. On the great passenger steamer Sardinia, bound for New York Harbor after the rites were finished, Linneth’s mother interpreted her silences and frowns. “Sometimes we meet Pan in unexpected places,” she said, smiling obliquely. “Linneth, weren’t the fountains lovely?” She supposed so. “And the choirs in the shrine?” Oh yes. “And the flowers, and the perfume, and the priestess on the axon?” Yes. “And that African boy we saw you with?” Linneth supposed he was lovely too.

  She remembered the sunny days on the steamship with the Atlantic Ocean churning behind. She had seen distant mountains of ice, blue as summer air, floating off the Grand Banks. At night, constellations turned like mill wheels in the sky.

  After that her life had changed. The Proctors took her to finish her schooling with the Christian Renunciates at their gray stone retraite in snowy Utica (New York, not Greece). She had worn gray dresses that swept the floor and she had learned the Christian panoply of gods, Archons, Demiurges, and dour apostles. And there had not been a lover since Campo, whose skin had smelled wonderfully of cinnamon and cedar.
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br />   When she was little her mother told her, “The god who lives in the forest lives in your belly and in your heart.” She wondered if her fierce scholasticism, her invasion of the masculine strongholds of library and carrel, had really been a search for that outcast god: in whose myths, villages, meadows, sacred places? Campo and Pan and the Golden Bough, she thought; everything we worshiped or should have worshiped or neglected to worship.

  She tended Dexter Graham through his fever as the snow fell from the dark sky.

  After a day he woke and was able to drink a bowl of soup, which Linneth heated over a wax candle. He was thin under the many blankets (she bathed him with a sponge and changed his bandage often), and she saw that the wound and the fever had drawn heavily on his stores of life and strength.

  She thought he might have lost some of his distrust of her, and that was good, although his eyes still followed her—if not suspiciously, at least curiously—as she moved about the room.

  She was away often enough to establish her presence in the civilians’ compound. In the evenings she came back. When Dex was awake, she talked to him. She asked him questions about the book, Huckleberry Finn.

  The decision Huck Finn makes about Jim, she explained, represents a well-known heresy. To say Well, then, I’ll go to Hell . . . to imply that there exists some moral standard higher than Church and Law, and that this standard is accessible even to an ignorant peasant boy . . . that Huck Finn might have a firmer grasp of good and evil than, for instance, a Proctor of the Bureau . . . well, people had burned for less.

  Dex said, “Do you think it’s a heresy?”

  “Of course it is. Do you mean, do I think it’s true?” She lowered her voice and eyes. “Of course it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”

  A week passed. The snow mounted on the sill of the window and the talk between Linneth and Dex gathered a similar weight. She brought a paraffin heater to make his small rooms bearably warm, though she still had to wrap herself in sweaters and Dex in blankets. And she brought food: pails of stew, or bread with crumbling wedges of cheese.