His words had been coming so fast, so smoothly, that only now was the Rev. Schrag able to interdict the rococo syntax.
"Paganism! That's all it was! Ignorant savages sloughing through darkness toward the light of Jesus Christ!"
"Ah, yes certainly, no question about it, I agree absolutely wholeheartedly," the man from Beloit said, slicing through the minister's fustian so coolly it was as if Schrag had taken a breath mint rather than having popped his eyeballs. "But you see how driven you are to use the word 'paganism? Which was not, at least in the first instance, a concept that the 'pagans' applied to themselves, but one that evolved as a way of distinguishing the non-Christian survivals after the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine and subsequent..."
"These were barbarians...barely able to tie their shoelaces...they painted their fundaments blue and ripped out each other's hearts and danced around campfires naked and ate each other's entrails...pagans...bar-bare-ians!" His voice had spiraled to a level that was drawing attention from other passengers. The man from Beloit smiled awkwardly at the elderly black man across the aisle, but his attention could be held only an instant: his daughter was singsonging, over and over, "Ma'y tinkle, ma'y tinkle, ma'y tinkle."
He turned back to Rev. Schrag and said, "Well, there is certainly no condoning such behavior, particularly the part about painting their asses blue, but when you call them barbarians, I'm not sure you're aware of all the facts."
"Whuh-what facts?"
"Well, for instance, archaeologists working in Peru at sites such as Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke and Sechin Alto, ten thousand freezing feet above sea level in the Andes, have found a culture that predates the Mayas by 2000 years and the Aztecs by 3000 years.
"Huge U-shaped temples ten storeys high; an enormous warehouse, bigger than a baseball field, it served as a food storage complex; the buildings gorgeously decorated with painted friezes of jaguars, spiders, serpents." He leaned in and whispered, "Their vivid colors preserved intact by the dry cold of the Andean atmosphere. Why do you think they would settle at that altitude, build a sophisticated civilization at the same time the Egyptians were building pyramids and the Sumerian city-states were flourishing, in such a grossly hostile region?
"Perhaps to get closer to the gods they deified? Do you think that's possible? What do you think about that, dropping the 'paganism' business, ass-painting notwithstanding? What do you think?"
"Will you kindly stop saying that!"
"Which part of it, the paganism?"
"No, the other."
"Oh, you mean the part about how they painted—"
"Yes! Yes, that's the part."
"Well, I don't mean to be contumacious, Reverend, but I was discussing alternative deities; it was you who brought up how they..."
Rev. Schrag crashed back into the conversation. "There never were any such deities," he said quickly. "Until the True Word was revealed, pag—uh, heathens believed many strange and impossible things."
"Mmm, I see. So we can assume that such 'heathen' martyrs as Hypatia of Alexandria died for nothing. But let me ask you this—" and he sneaked a glance across the aisle where preparations to ma'y tinkle were proceeding apace, "—what if you were one such as these, one of these obsolete gods. And all your believers were gone, all the Hypatias had been properly stoned to death by good Christians, no more worshippers, except perhaps a random diabolist here and there, corrupt individuals trying to bring you back so you could pick winning lottery tickets for them. What do you do then?"
Stiffly, Schrag said, "I have no conjecture on that, sir."
"No idea at all?"
"None."
"You don't think maybe Hera went off in a snit and took to drinking too much mead and became a bitchy alcoholic?"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Maybe Jizo sank into a funk and contemplated hara-kiri?"
"Who did what?"
"So let me get this straight. What you're saying is that you don't think maybe possibly Jupiter just kept right on existing after Constantine bullied all the Romans into converting, and after a while with nobody praying to him, not even one daub of blue paint on a backside, he just got bored with it all and, say, just put a pistol up to his Olympian forehead and blew his beatific brains out?"
The minister stared at him, growing angrier by the moment. Then he settled himself facing stiffly forward, took up the magazine, opened it, and went back to the crossword puzzle.
"Sixteen down," the man from Beloit said idly, "an eight-letter word for 'neutral': middling"
The minister said nothing; and he did not look up as the man from Beloit unbuckled and rose, following the elderly black man as he aided his daughter toward the rear of the plane, and the lavatories.
He waited as the father spoke softly to the girl, saying, "Now you go on in an' make tinkle, Evelyn. You know. The way you do. That's a sweet child." And he opened the door for her, saying, "Now don't touch the door, don't mess with the lock, just go in an' make tinkle, all right? I'll be right here."
She went in, and he closed the door, turning to smile awkwardly at the man waiting behind him for the cubicle next in the row.
The man from Beloit sidled past, entered the lavatory that shared a bulkhead with the cubicle in which Evelyn was slowly and carefully pulling down her panties, then the absorbent cotton incontinence liner. He closed his eyes for a moment, made a small sound, and then reached through the bulkhead to touch Evelyn's head. She closed her eyes.
"Sleep, good child. They love you so. Their time is so short. Let them live." And he formed the aneurism, and he made it explode, and she made a gentle sound, and fell.
He flushed the toilet, left the cubicle, and edged past the open door of the next stall, where the elderly black man was kneeling half in the aisle, calling to his daughter.
He returned to his seat. The mother gave a start as one of the stewardesses from the rear leaned in to speak quietly to her. In a panic, she tried to get out of her seat, found herself still buckled, pulled and pulled at the device till the stewardess helped her, and then they rushed back up the aisle.
The man from Beloit closed his eyes and feigned sleep. He didn't think there would be conversation with the Reverend Carl Schrag before they landed at De Gaulle, but he wanted to repose in privacy and darkness for a time. Repose and think clearly of the moment of relief that would come to the old people before they began to deal with their grief.
The sky was very clear, and far below the clouds went on their way.
The man from the jet liner stood on the edge of the cliffs, staring out past Thásos, across the Aegean. "Levendis," he murmured. "Levendis." He sighed deeply, plucked three pebbles from the ground, and hurled them into the sky. They flew up toward the sun, spreading their wings for a moment, white herons that formed an ancient design with their flying forms; then in an instant they rolled and dove, feathered shafts that struck the water, pierced the sea and vanished, plummeting toward the distant floor littered with broken stones. Enormous broken stones. Cyclopean blocks bearing praises to a god whose name had not been spoken on this earth since the long night of hungry waters that had wiped an entire civilization from the land, and from memory. Intricately-carved broken stones now merely accretions of limestone, barnacles and anemones, acrawl with crustaceans and small, blind fish. Softened shapes of fractured statues hundreds of meters in height when they had stood against the sky, before the night of ash and flame. The pulverized Great Temple in which the sacred ethmoid crystals had been kept. Down and down the heron shafts went, into a darkness never suspected, much less penetrated. They went to wreckage.
In anguish, he called out across the water; but the wind died and the day was silent; and all who might have heard would not understand the tongue in which he spoke, for it had not been spoken in thousands of years.
"Stranger, can I soften your pain?"
The man from the jet liner turned at the sound of the voice behind him. It was an old man, as bli
nd as the fish that swam among a million mosaic tiles.
"Did you see that?" the man from the jet liner asked.
"Did I see you throw pebbles into the air?"
"You did see, then."
"No. I see nothing. I heard them click in your hands. I heard them as you threw them. You aren't Greek, are you?"
"No. Not Greek."
"Where are you from, stranger?"
"From a land that no longer exists."
"You sound lonely."
"I was lonely, for a long time."
"For your people?"
"Yes. But they're gone, and I haven't heard my name spoken for much too long. And why are you here, sir? What brings you to this empty place?"
"I come here to worship."
The man from the jet liner drew a deep breath. "What god do you worship here? Nothing ever stood here."
"Not here. Out there." He waved a hand toward the sea, and beyond to the greater ocean. "I hear the voices of the children of Poseidon."
"They were not Poseidon's disciples. You hear the lamentations of an older race. Nobler and more accomplished than any other. They never had the time to claim their inheritance."
The old man laughed lightly. "So you say."
"There were worlds and lands and peoples..."
"I think you are dreaming dreams that make you an empty man," he said. "Perhaps you should return to your homeland, no matter what name it now bears. Home is where you go when there is no place else to go. You can know it again through the words of your poets."
"No poets wrote of my land. Plato had a few words...but I gave him those words. If I go home, it will only be to sleep." He paused, and added, "To rest."
The old man spoke softly. "Too much rest is rust."
"Why did you think I might be Greek?"
"Because you knew our word, levendis. But I was wrong."
On the Bahnhofstrasse, amid crowds entering and exiting the five-level "everything store" called Jelmoli's, Zürich's answer to an American department store with a basement storey of drugs and groceries, the man from Greece, hurrying to the Icelandic Airlines ticket office, bumped into Gwen Fritcher, a Californian on detached duty with IBM's Swiss affiliate.
She had gone to Jelmoli's to get a few cans of American product— Dennison's chili, Campbell's tomato soup, Durkee's french fried onion rings, Pringles—because she was certain that one more meal of schnitzel, spaetzle and cabbage, submersed in sauce as appetizing as Elmer's Glue, would send her over the brink. She had begun having fever dreams, as sultry as sexual fantasies, herself entwined with packages of Nabisco ginger snaps and (shamefully) Spaghetti-Os.
She was also having terrible menstrual cramps, and there had been literally a crying need for Panadol.
When he blindsided her, and the bag of groceries rocketed from her grasp, she gave a small croak of despair. "Hey, I'm awfully sorry," the man from Greece said, stooping to retrieve the still-rolling cans. "Oh, really, I'm sorry...I wasn't watching where I was going...the crowd, you know..."
They gathered everything, repacked it, and stood. He smiled his best smile, and she looked embarrassed at even having thought the things she'd thought. "American?" she asked.
"Once upon a time," he said. And added, "I really am sorry I'm such a klutz." And he touched her forearm, and smiled again, and said, "I'll be more careful." And he strode away into the crowd.
Gwen returned to the tiny apartment IBM had secured for her. The company suites were all filled, and they had taken a three month lease on this little flat, in hopes she would have completed her transference survey by that time or, failing that recourse, would be able to move her into a company-owned residence.
She set the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, fished around till she found the small plastic-wrapped box of Panadol, and carried it into the bathroom.
With a fingernail, she slit the price tag and bar code sealing the Panadol box, and tore off the protective plastic wrap with some difficulty, fumbling interminably and cursing the mythical children who were thus guaranteed all protection against taking too much menses medicine. She finally got the box open and dumped out the two sheets of caps, each shrouded in a plastic bubble.
There was a folded slip of paper between the sheets. She laid it aside, pressed the back of one of the plastic bubbles, and popped out a capsule, then repeated the maneuver. She took her toothbrush from the water glass, ran it half full, swished the water, poured it out, refilled the glass halfway, and took the two Panadol.
She sat on the closed toilet, letting the analgesic start to do its work, smoothing the waves of pain. She thought for just an instant of the attractive man who had bumped into her on the Bahnhofstrasse. Idly, she picked up the piece of paper that had been folded inside the plastic-wrapped box. She opened it and looked at it, expecting an advertisement in at least three languages. Hand-printed in pencil on the slip of white paper were the words
YOU'LL BE DEAD BY MORNING, GWEN.
For no good reason, because this was clearly some kind of stupid thing that might have to do with an idiotic advertising campaign, she felt her heart thump heavily. She was, in an instant, and inexplicably, terribly frightened.
She dropped the note as if it had come from enemies.
There was a knock on the apartment door, and then the doorbell rang twice. She sat where she was. Thinking through the fear.
She was an employee of a multinational corporation. Could this have something to do with international terrorism? Had they somehow tapped into the computer, run the personnel records and selected her at random? She knew it couldn't be personal. She had been in Zürich only three weeks. She knew almost no one. Was there, on the other side of that door, a pair of ski-masked and black-suited kneecappers from the Red Army Faction or the IRA? Beneath their masks a young man and woman, pockmarked skin, anthracite eyes, teeth in need of polishing, sworn angels of death sent by Carlos or Abu Nidal?
The doorbell chimed.
A spurned lover. Someone she'd known in New York, during that crazy summer before AIDS came to the world, when she was answering personals in New York magazine? One of the more than a few men she had seen in the nude? The one she had laughed at, had been forced to use a kitchen knife to hold off till she could gather up her clothes and flee? Traced her, followed her, come to quench some psychopathic thirst for revenge?
A voice called from the other side of the door.
"Fraülein, Miss, Lady..."
She went to the door, put her ear against it. No sound. Finally, she said, "Yes, who is it?" And then she quickly stepped to the side, in case the serial killer fired through the door, or cleaved the center panel with a fire ax.
"Ah! Guten Morgen, Fraülein Fritcher... ich bin der... "
"I don't speak German! Who are you? Speak English, please; I speak only English!" She heard the panic in her own voice.
"Ah! Ja. Ich, uh, that isz, I...yes, I am the taking-care-of man. Nein...vhat isz that I mean...I am der superviszer... der superintendent, ja, das ist...yes, I am der janitor!" There was a note of almost desperate relief in his voice as he found the correct word.
And she listened as the crazed silk-stocking strangler advised her that the incinerator in the hall had gone geflunkt or some similar word, and that it would not be available for trash and paper dumping till after six that evening. Then he went away.
Gwen wandered back to the kitchen, certain now that there could have been no way in which such a message could have found its way into that sealed box. Not at the factory, not in the grocery, not any way at all. There had been no signs of tampering, no pinholes, inviolate, untouched.
Yet the message had been there, and she knew, now, that it had been supernatural creatures. Beings from the other side, the souls of those she had done harm in her previous lives. They were warning her, and there was no escape. By morning, she would be dead.
She sat at the kitchen table and began to cry.
I haven't lived nearly long enough, she thought. And I'm
on the management track.
She reached across to the counter and pulled down the thick cylinder of Pringles, husking breath so deeply that her chest hurt; and she pulled the plastic strip from the container, popped off the metal lid, and took out a potato chip. It didn't help at all, not even the taste of the world and the life she had left behind. She thought hopelessly that she didn't want to die in a foreign land. She ate another Pringle.
Lying atop the, third chip, nested perfectly with the other slim forms, was a slip of folded paper. She opened it with utter terror consuming her, and read
IGNORE PREVIOUS MESSAGE.
She received only two pieces of mail that day in the IBM courier pouch from New York. One was an announcement of Nancy Kimmler's shower two weeks hence. The other was contained in a plain white envelope with no return address, and the single sheet of neatly-typed message was this: "The life which is unexamined is not worth living." Beneath, were two words in pencil: Plato and bang.
He stood now, the man from Zürich, where he had never set foot before. He had rented a car in Reykjavík two days earlier, the 26th, and driven to Budhir where he had taken a room and given sight to a man blind from birth. In truth, he hadn't needed a car; no more than he had needed a castle, a brigantine, an arbalest, a flatbed truck, a 451-barrel Vandenberg Volley Gun, an ethmoid crystal, a 1980 Mustang, or an Icelandic Airlines DC-8 Zürich-Reykjavík. No more than he had needed special equipment to breathe the water of the Aegean, centuries before it had borne that name.
But he had wanted to see the riot of colors, the ecstasy of moss growing in volcanic cinders deposited by the eruption of Mount Hekla in 1970 along a rivulet on the edge of Thjorsardalur; he had wanted to go as a man, to stand before the black ash cliff at Langahlidh and marvel at the tenacity of the exquisite, delicate white flowers that grew toward the light from inhospitable fissures. He wanted to have the time before the kalends of July to contemplate how long, how far he had wandered; to think back to what had been and what was now; to reconcile himself to the end of the journey.
Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories Page 34
