Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Symeon Demarch had allowed the churches to carry on with services, which had been a morale booster, but it was Congreve’s private conviction that the writing was on the wall. He might not go to his death a martyr, but he would probably go down as one of the last living Lutherans. There was not even history to sustain him. History had been erased, somehow.

  The only thing that had not been challenged was his belief in miracles.

  In the meantime he drew together the Christian community in Two Rivers and tried to set a dignified tone. There was argument tonight about the explosion at the filling station and the curious phenomena some people had seen there. Signs and wonders. Congreve shunted that aside when he called the meeting to order. It was not the kind of issue they could resolve; it only fostered disagreement.

  Instead, he raised the more immediate and practical question of Christmas decorations. The electrical power would be restored by the beginning of next week, and it was already the first of December—although it felt more like January with all this snow. His youth group wanted to string Christmas lights on the church lawn. A few lights would make everybody feel better, Congreve supposed. But Christmas lights were a religious display and according to Demarch all such displays needed prior approval by the Proctors. That was where the problem arose. Symeon Demarch was out of town; the man in charge was an unpleasant bureaucrat named Clement Delafleur. Father Gregory of the Catholic church had already spoken to Delafleur and the meeting had not been a happy one; Delafleur had expressed a desire to close down the churches altogether and had called Father Gregory “an idolator and an alien.”

  But Christmas decorations were a secular tradition, too, and no doubt some of the private citizens in Two Rivers would be moved to dig out their strings of lights—so why not the churches?

  A plausible argument, Congreve thought, but the Proctors might disagree. He counseled a prudent caution. Reverend Lockheed of the Mission Baptist said his young people were also anxious to do something to mark the season, so how about decorating the big pine in the Civic Gardens outside City Hall—as a kind of test case? If the Proctors objected, the lights could be unstrung. (Though not without vocal objections, if Congreve knew Terry Lockheed.)

  Lockheed made it a formal motion. Congreve would have preferred to hold over the entire issue until Demarch was back. Why court trouble? But the show of hands overruled him.

  The combined Lutheran and Baptist youth groups, plus interested parties from the Episcopalians and Catholics—about seventy-five young people in all—converged on the Civic Gardens east of City Hall the next Saturday morning.

  Electrical power was still interdicted at the source, so no one brought lights—those could be added later. Instead there were ribbons, balls, colored string; spun-glass angels, gold and silver coronets; tinsel, brocade, and popcorn chains by the yard. A morning snow fell gently and there was room for everything among the capacious, snowy branches of the tree. Reverend Lockheed showed up with a cherry-picking ladder so that even the peaks of the big pine were not neglected.

  Work went on for more than two hours despite the cold. When the last ornament was installed, Pastor Congreve handed out songsheets printed on the Methodists’ hand-crank mimeograph: Silent Night, to be followed by O Come All Ye Faithful.

  Midway through the first carol, a military vehicle pulled up across the road and a single soldier emerged. The militiaman stood looking on without expression. Congreve wondered if he understood the purpose of the display.

  The soldier watched, arms folded across his chest, but didn’t interfere. Across the square, a crowd of townspeople had been watching the tree-trimming. They ignored the militiaman and clapped for the carolers.

  Terry Lockheed looked at the soldier, then at Congreve, a mute enquiry: Should we carry on? Why not, Congreve thought. One more song. If this was a crisis, they were already well in it. He nodded his head. The faithful, the joyful, the triumphant were duly summoned.

  Then, suddenly, there was nothing left of the morning. The young people adjourned to Tucker’s Restaurant for hot milk. The crowd melted away. Before long the Civic Gardens were empty save for the soldier, the tree, and the falling snow.

  The tree disappeared that night.

  Sometime before dawn it was cut, thrown into the back of a military transport, and burned on the perpetual trash fire in the parking lot of the highway 7-Eleven. Only the stump remained, a snow-covered hummock by the dim light of morning.

  The news traveled fast.

  It was never clear who initiated the Youth Club picket. Forced to guess, Brad Congreve would have picked the thickset Burmeister girl, Shelda—the one who wore bottle-glass lenses and quoted Gandhi during Sunday Discussion. It was exactly the sort of febrile notion Shelda would have taken into her head.

  She was certainly one of the twelve young people who had set up a picket line around the Civic Gardens, carrying stick-and-cardboard signs with such legends as

  LET US WORSHIP AS WE CHOOSE

  and

  JESUS DOESN’T PLAY FAVORITES!

  This time there was no pastoral guidance and no approving crowd of strangers. This wasn’t fun or familiar. This was patently dangerous. Pedestrians who saw the picket line stared a moment, then turned away.

  When the soldiers came, Shelda and her eleven compatriots filed submissively into the back of a dung-green transport truck. In best Gandhian fashion, they were willing to be arrested. Calmly, they appealed to the consciences of the soldiers. The soldiers, grim as stones, said nothing at all.

  The trouble with being close to a man, Evelyn Woodward thought, is that you find out his secrets.

  From hints and silences, from phone calls half-overheard and words half-pronounced and documents glimpsed as they crossed his desk, she had learned one of Symeon Demarch’s secrets—a secret too terrible to contain and impossible to share.

  It was a secret about what was going to happen to Two Rivers. No. Worse than that. Let’s not be coy, Evelyn thought. It was a secret about the last thing that would happen to Two Rivers.

  It was a secret about an atomic bomb. No one called it that; but she had discerned words like nucleic and megaton among the veiled discussion of what would be done with the town, the vexing and impossible town of Two Rivers.

  Now, with Symeon away and the house empty and all this snow coming so relentlessly from a woolen sky, the secret was an awkward weight inside her. It was like having a terminal disease: no matter how hard she tried not to think about it, her thoughts came circling back.

  Her only consolation was that Symeon had not originated the idea and even seemed to despise it. He hadn’t argued when he talked to his superiors, but she heard the unhappiness in his voice. And when he told her she would be safe, he seemed to mean it. He would take her away. He might not live with her; he had a wife and child in the capital; but he would find a place for her out of harm’s way. Maybe she would go on being his mistress.

  But that left everybody else. Her neighbors, she thought, Dex Graham, the grocer, the schoolkids—everybody. How do you imagine so many deaths? If you went to Hiroshima before the bomb fell, and you told those people what was going to happen to them, they wouldn’t believe you—not because it wasn’t plausible but because the human mind can’t contain such things.

  There was plenty of food, and she dealt with the cold by burying herself in sweaters and blankets and lighting the propane stove Symeon had left. But she couldn’t keep out the dark, and in the dark her thoughts were loudest. Sleep didn’t help. One night she dreamed she was Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, but the A on her breast stood for Atom, not Adultery.

  She was gratified when, at the end of that unendurable week, the electricity came back. She woke up to a wave of new heat. The blankets were superfluous. The room was warm. The windows ran wet with condensation. She ate a hot breakfast and sat by the stove until it was time for a hot lunch. And then a hot dinner. And bright lights to batten out the night.

  The morning after that sh
e felt both restless and celebratory. She decided she would take a walk: not in any of the fine dresses Symeon had given her, which would mark her for abuse, but in her old clothes, her old jeans, her shabby blouse and heavy winter jacket.

  Dressing in these things was like putting on a discarded skin. Old clothes have old memories inside. Briefly, she wondered what Dex was doing now. But Dex had moved out when the lieutenant came (Evelyn had chosen to stay in the house); Dex had been threatened by the Proctors; worst of all, Dex was going to die in the bomb blast (damn that hideous, unstoppable thought).

  She walked along Beacon past Commercial until she reached the woody corner of Powell Creek Park, which was quite far enough: her cheeks were ruddy and her feet were cold.

  The exercise helped to empty her mind. Evelyn hummed to herself from deep in her throat. There was not much traffic on the streets and it was better that way. She decided to go home by way of City Hall, a walk she had always enjoyed in winter when the skating rink was open. She didn’t skate but she used to like seeing the people glide in looping curves, like beings from a better world, light as angels.

  Of course the skating rink was closed. The Civic Gardens looked barren, too. City Hall itself was stony gray, and there was something odd about the lampposts lining the avenue.

  When she saw the dead children she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The bodies were stiff inside frozen clothing; they moved in the wind, but not like anything human. The ropes had been thrown over the angle brackets of the streetlights and knotted in timeless fashion around the children’s necks. The children’s hands had been tied behind their backs and their faces were hidden under shapeless hemp sacks.

  Evelyn came closer without really meaning to, shocked beyond reason. The shock was purely physical, like putting your finger in a wall socket. She felt it in her arms and legs. Somebody went and hung their laundry from the lampposts, she thought, and then the world became suddenly much uglier: No . . . those are children. Those are dead children.

  She stopped and stood for a long time looking at the dead children hanging from the lampposts outside City Hall. A delicate snow began to float down from the sky. The flakes of snow were large and perfect and they landed on the humped, frozen clothing of the dead children until the dead children were clothed all in white, a perfect unsullied purity.

  A patrol car passed on the snowy street. Evelyn turned to look at the soldier who was driving, but he was hidden in the shadow of the car and had turned his head away: away from Evelyn, or away from what Evelyn had seen.

  She walked without a destination and after a bleak passage found herself peering up through veils of snow to the window of Dex Graham’s apartment. His light was on. The window was a yellow punctuation in the snow-scabbed brick wall. She went inside, walked up the stairs, knocked on his door.

  Dex opened the door and looked at her with unconcealed surprise. Maybe he had been expecting someone else. That was natural, after so much time apart. But, seeing him, she was overwhelmed with memories that seemed terribly immediate: of his voice, his touch, his smell. There was that catalog of intimate knowledge still between them. She wasn’t entitled to it but couldn’t put it away.

  He said, “Evelyn? Evelyn, what is it—are you all right?”

  “I have to tell you a secret,” she said.

  CHAPTER 15

  “We met at a bar,” Ruth Wintermeyer said. “Sounds tacky, doesn’t it? But really, we met because he’d read my book.”

  She lit a cigarette, drew the smoke into her lungs, and closed her eyes a moment. After the accident at the lab, Ruth said, she had driven to the local grocery and filled a bag with cartons of cigarettes. Lately she had weaned herself to one cigarette a day—“Just a little taste of better times.” She had two packs left.

  Howard Poole sat in an easy chair opposite her, too warm in his jacket but cold without it. Like everyone else, Ruth Wintermeyer was cautious about turning up her heat—as if electricity could be hoarded, too.

  She said, “I’m a member of the Historical Society. I wrote a book of Peninsula history from colonial times to the Civil War. Strictly amateur scholarship. My degrees are thirty years old and my publisher doesn’t distribute east of the Great Lakes. But I guess in Two Rivers that makes me an intellectual.

  “Your uncle called on the phone and we got together. He was interested in the history of the town. In a way, I think he was adopting it. He refused to live in government housing—when I met him he was renting a room at the Blue View. Very unorthodox. The government wanted him inside perimeters, but Stern wouldn’t hear of it. He was a kind of scientific celebrity and he could get away with a little prima donna behavior. I think the price of having Stern was indulging Stern.” She paused. “Not that the security people weren’t busy. When he started seeing me, suddenly there were these, you know, little men, these guys in three-piece suits parked outside the house or asking questions at the bank, checking my credit record and so forth. I guess I passed the test. I’m not much of a security risk.”

  “You two were dating?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “No. It’s just that I never saw much of his personal life. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he had one.”

  “A private life?”

  “A romantic life. I guess I imagined he was all intellect.”

  “I know what you mean. He didn’t do intimacy very well. Part of him was always detached. Howard, have you always called him Stern?”

  “Everybody in the family called him Stern. Except my mother, when they were together, and even then—she called him Alan, but I didn’t sense a real connection. She said he always stood apart even as a child. The Sterns were a big family. Had a big house on Long Island. Not rich, but certainly not poor. There was some inherited money, I think.”

  Ruth said, “A religious family?”

  “Agnostic at best.”

  “Because he talked a lot about religion.”

  “He had some odd ideas.”

  Ruth stubbed out her cigarette and cleared her throat. “Maybe we should talk about those odd ideas,” she said.

  The conversation wound into the afternoon. Ruth fed him sandwiches and coffee for lunch. (“Ground coffee from the Pine Street depot. It’s stale, and there’s more than a little chicory in it. But it’s hot.”) And as curfew approached and a new snow dappled the windows, a picture of Stern began to emerge.

  Alan Stern, the outsider. The one who stood apart even in childhood. Stern the seeker. His religiosity wasn’t so mysterious, Howard thought. It was not an uncommon motivation among the scientists Howard knew, though few of them would admit it. One of the things that drew people to cosmology was the promise that the universe might yield up a secret or two . . . maybe even the secret; a glimpse into the hidden order of things.

  But the best science is always tentative, a grope into the darkness. “That was never enough for Stern. He wanted more. He was always playing with the grand systems. In his own field, he paid attention to people like Guth and Linde, the fearless theoreticians; or else it was Hegel, Platonism, the Gnostics—”

  “Oh, Gnosticism—he loved to talk about Hellenic and Christian Gnosticism. And it was genuinely interesting. I borrowed some of his books. . . .”

  “But it wasn’t just a hobby. He saw something in it.”

  “Himself,” Ruth said promptly. “He saw himself in it. What would you call the basic Gnostic idea, Howard? I think it’s that there’s a secret world, that it’s hidden from us, but we can find our way to it—or back to it, because we’re imperfect reflections of perfect souls, embedded in an imperfect world.”

  “Cast out from the Pleroma,” Howard supplied. “The World of Light.”

  “Yes. The Gnostics said, ‘You can find your way to this, because you’re part of it. You long for it. It’s your original true home.’ ”

  Howard pictured Stern as a lonely child, perhaps too aware of his own awkwardness and great intelligence. He must have felt it keenly, th
at lost imperium from which he had dropped into humble matter.

  “And we do live in an unholy world,” Ruth said. “He was always conscious of that. When he watched the news on TV, the wars and the starving children, he looked like he was in pain.”

  Howard said, “It became an obsession.”

  “Oh, at least.”

  “More than that? Ruth, are you questioning his sanity?”

  “I don’t want to judge. I knew him for a little more than a year, Howard. We were close. I loved him. Or I thought I did. All I can say is, during that time, he changed. Maybe something at the lab affected him. He started spending more time with his books. He picked up religious arguments everybody else abandoned centuries ago. Worse, he wanted to have these arguments with me.” She held up her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t have any particular faith in God. I don’t know if evil is a creative force. I worry about, you know, shopping. Or the national debt, if I’m ambitious. Not theology.”

  The room was silent for a moment. Howard listened to the ticking of snow on a windowpane. He sipped coffee.

  Ruth toyed with her cigarette pack but didn’t light one.

  He said, “It’s hard not to make the connection.”

  She nodded at once. “I’ve thought of that. It’s a neat little scenario: Stern is obsessed with Gnosticism. He runs the Two Rivers Research Lab. Something happens out there, God knows what, and we’re transplanted into a place where there’s a powerful church that professes a version of Gnostic Christianity.”

  “I wasn’t sure you knew about that.”

  “I’ve heard the soldiers at the food depot swearing by Samael and Sophia Achamoth. I don’t know the details.”

  “If it’s a meaningful connection,” Howard said, “what are we saying? That Stern, somehow, brought us here?”