Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  The inside of the lighthouse proved, to be far more than he’d expected. The furnishings were warm and comfortable, the fixtures and appliances all state-of-the-art. Windows penetrated the spaces in so many places, that every room was flooded with light. The effect was initially unsettling, because it seemed to expand the interior, woofing and warping the three-dimensional space of the tapered cylinder into a structure that was far larger on the inside than the outside.

  A kind of architectural gestalt, thought Carlo.

  Again he was forced to pause to realize how quintessentially weird the whole set-up was…

  It was like those scenes in the cheesy horror movies where you want to stand up and scream at the protagonist: Don’t go in there…! Don’t you hear the scary music!?

  He smiled to himself. Indeed, he did hear the discordant violins, but he felt no sense of accompanying dread, no gut-level gnawing of fear. He knew he should be wary as hell of all the strangeness, but he rationalized it by telling himself he would keep bugging his employers to give him all the answers.

  Entering the top floor of the structure, he found a space that resembled the deck of an air traffic control center—laminated, built-in consoles, the obligatory computer, phone, and a couple of self-explanatory control panels, which he presumed linked up with the huge glass lamp dominating the center of the space. It was all medium-hi tech, and more than enough for what seemed like a job anybody could do in their sleep. Lying next to the keyboard was a thick, richly-bound folio entitled Procedures and Policies, which ignited in him a brief moment when he expected all to be made clear to him.

  Of course, he was wrong.

  But he did learn how to turn the powerful lamp on and off, and how to synch up its rotation with the ever-changing celestial clock that marked off each new sunrise and sunset. The book was written in clear, precise language, and organized to such a Teutonic degree, that it made him uncomfortable. Nobody, he thought, should be thinking in so orderly a fashion. Although he had to admit—after a single reading, and a dry-run at the controls, he understood every nuance of responsibility and duty of the job. Technology and the whole tool-thing had largely eluded his interest, but after reading Procedures and Policies, he believed he could even field-strip the giant lamp into its components like a soldier with his weapon, fix, and gang-bang it back together again.

  Not bad for somebody who spent most of his time worrying about running out of cadmium yellow or burnt sienna…

  Several hours later, once he’d gotten everything stashed away in his living quarters, he was standing in front of a fresh canvas. He had chosen the room just below the top floor for his studio because he liked the placements of the windows in terms of the kind of light they admitted, and the views afforded (both banks of the White River and the nearby peak of Mount Ascutney). He kind of liked the idea of seeing that familiar peak—the same one Maxfield Parrish always included in his electrically lush paintings. Then, just as he was about to make his first brush stroke, he heard a sound that lay somewhere between a buzz and a crackle (the huge bulb of the beacon bursting into heat and light), followed by the whine of the motors that would turn the lamp on its endless axis. Outside the tower, evening had surrendered to nightfall.

  Smiling, Carlo felt a flood of job-satisfaction wash his self-esteem centers. He’d set the timers, punched all the stacked commands into the systems, and waited for the semi-automation to take over. When it did it right, he felt good. The score was Carlo one, technology zero. Game over. Simple as that. The sensitive artist would no longer be intimidated and humbled by rampant science.

  Again, he checked his palette, and prepared the initial dab of pigment, when it occurred to him, should he take the wrought iron circular staircase up to the lamp…just to see it how things looked. As he lay down his tools, Carlo realized the day would soon come when he would probably cringe at the sound of the lamp firing up and the motors sliding into motion, but for the moment, he was curious.

  It was the artist in him, he thought. He needed to see what it looked like. That powerful beam sweeping out across the glassy surface and cutting through the blue aisle of night like a white-hot sword. He had to see it from the unique perspective of its source…

  And he did.

  Not surprisingly, it was a spectacular vantage point, and he never missed the hours that slipped past him as he sat first behind the thick glass, then later leaning on the railing outside, on the narrow gangway that encircled the beacon. Like a laser’s lance stretched to the moon, the lamp’s focused beam slowly turreted the Vermont river valley. Its sweep was cantered down at an angle that scoured the woods and the wide, languid bends in the river.

  Beautiful beyond imagining, but something else…

  There was power here. At the apex of this solitary tower, he stood like a general looking down from the soaring prow of his war machine. So striking the sensation, it made Carlo giddy. For the first time in his life he began to understand how it could happen…why it happened.

  Power.

  Hypnotic and utterly compelling.

  Carlo liked it.

  In fact, he liked the lighthouse-keeper gig in its entirety. He found himself anticipating the crackling ignition of the great filaments when the lamp would fire-up. And when it did, he’d run up the staircase and watch the servo-motors crank up the carousel of light and heat like a kid sneaking into a carnival tent. He’d never felt happier in his life. The job had become an intoxicating elixir. As the weeks passed, he began spending more and more of the night-hours just sitting up there, under the beacon’s sweeping thrall, then doing more of his sleeping during the day.

  Until then he was doing his sleeping while the sun was up.

  Which meant he’d essentially stopped painting. Oddly enough, a month had slipped passed him before he even realized it. And when he was sitting at the lamp control console one evening contemplating how long it had been since he attempted to create an image, he surprised himself with the absolute calm with which he accepted it.

  Not painting had always been simply unthinkable to him. It was something he had done every day of his adult life, and had become an organic part of his essence, his Carlo-ness. He’d always known nothing could stop him from painting. He’d been born to do it, and like the driven fools before him, the Monets and Renoirs and Van Goghs, he’d lived with the stink of turpentine under his nails.

  Keeping his light kept him content. The passion to paint, in order to feel good, had been replaced, and it was okay with him.

  And so it was at this point—when Carlo accepted his loss of his driving desire to paint—that he first saw the boat on its nightly crossing.

  At first he was confused; because, either it had been there all along and he’d been too obtuse to notice it, or it had just started a new nocturnal schedule, or else he was slipping off into the world of weird happenings.

  The boat was not large, nor was it small. Appearing on the lighthouse shoreline at the deepest hour of the night, there was no telling its color, its name or registration. Hard enough to even discern its “lines” (as the sailors used to say…). The craft’s silhouette against the lamplight that boiled off the water’s surface appeared simple, uncluttered. A low, sweeping gunwale and no masts made it seem like it could be the hull of a submarine up for a look-see.

  Hard to tell, thought Carlo.

  He shook his head, smiled only a little bit. Like his employer, the boat’s major characteristics were largely indeterminate.

  Although each night (and he was seeing the boat every night now), he began to notice more details. Not that it was difficult to study the target—its passage to the antipodal, dark shore proved glacially slow. Mainly because of the boatman, who pushed the shallow barque along with a long, willowy pole. He could have been in the Louisiana bayou, or a Venetian gondolier. Either way, his spindly, mechanical movements were unmistakable.

  Then, one night, he noticed the boatman was not alone. Carlo could not imagine just not noticing such a detail;
it must have been somehow kept from him till now. As he watched the boat pass through the sweep of lamp’s beam, he saw its open deck teeming with passengers. Hunched and huddled together, they formed a countless horde of silent souls.

  Carlo suddenly understood more than he wanted to, more than he would ever want to believe.

  Not that any of it made any sense…none at all.

  He tried to kill time until the next payday, the next time he would have any contact with his employers, the next time he would have a chance to ask a few questions. Hours slipped away with tarpit-slowness as he stood motionless in his studio, brush in hand, helpless to make it move. The elation and sense of completeness he’d previously experienced had left him, replaced by unquiet bewilderment. He could not create; nor could he make sense of the world of which he’d become a part.

  “Remember what you said about ‘the fullness’ of time?” he said to her as she entered the lighthouse in her flowing skirts and blouse, her large, black shoulder-bag.

  Looking at him with a smile that looked like an after-thought. “Actually, I do…”

  Carlo motioned her to a small table in the kitchen, sat down opposite and folded his hands. He felt haggard and dazed. He’d been spending so much time alone, with his thoughts, he was finding it difficult to conduct an interchange with another person.

  “I think I understand what’s going on here…but it—”

  “—doesn’t seem possible?”

  “It’s crazy!” he said, suddenly finding an anchor for his thoughts. “What the hell’s going on out here? No pun intended!”

  She smiled. “I understand your confusion. We knew you would catch on eventually.”

  Gesturing through the window towards the White River, he said: “Last time I checked, that’s not the Cocytus…or is it the Styx?”

  “Well, it is…and it isn’t.” She reached into her bag and placed a large parcel wrapped in brown paper on the table. “Here’s your stipend.”

  Carlo tried to look directly into her eyes, found it difficult. “Please, don’t distract me,” he said. “It’s bad for the job, I’m told.”

  “We are very happy with your work.”

  “I’ll bet you are,” said Carlo, forcing out a bark of mock-laughter. “But I think I need some answers.”

  “All right, you deserve them. I like you, Mr. Duarte.”

  “And your name, by the way, I kept thinking it was Stephanie or something like that, but…” Carlo paused to arrange his thoughts into a coherent sentence. “But…I either disremembered it or you made me think it was something else…something other than what it is.”

  The woman with the ageless face nodded. “All right, that’s close enough.”

  “Ms. Persephone, I presume.”

  She smiled.

  “So why? How? What do you need me for?”

  “Have you ever heard any of those theories, that talk about polar shifts, and the earth’s crust slipping and sliding over the mantle? Any of that arcane geology?”

  Carlo shrugged. “I guess I have. Never paid that much attention to it though. Why, are you telling me that things get moved around, like pieces on a chess board?”

  Persephone raised an eyebrow impishly. “The gods are capricious at times, especially Gaea. The process is more complicated than how you’re putting it—although I am impressed with your perspicuity. There are cycles through which the world passes. All thing pass; everything changes. Right now. At this time and place, we need things to be here.”

  “Okay, if I accept that as enough, what’s with the light?”

  She shrugged. “Obviously it is more than a light. It is like a key. It lights the path to the gates of Tantalus.”

  “So I’m a gatekeeper.”

  “After a fashion, yes. More like a 24-hour repairman.”

  Carlo stood, walked to the window which overlooked the banks of the White River. Evening was climbing the foothills of the Green Mountains. Everything looked so different, so benign, but it would change with the advancing darkness.

  “Okay,” he said. “So like I asked you before—why me? Why now? I keep asking myself—what happened to the other guy? The guy before me?”

  Persephone chuckled facetiously. “Don’t ask. He had some grand ideas that he could be the new Prometheus…”

  Carlo nodded. “So now he’s got what?—a bad liver?”

  She shook her head and grimaced. “You could say that, yes.”

  “There’s something else,” said Carlo, returning to the table so he could sit facing her, as if this would somehow intensify the seriousness of what he wanted to say. “I’m not sure how to explain this, so I guess I’ll just put it as plainly as possible: I haven’t painted a thing since I’ve been here.”

  “I see…” she said, her gaze taking him like a maelstrom.

  “Something’s been happening to me. Something’s been…I don’t know…changing me.”

  “You are so perceptive,” she said with a sad little grin. “But you haven’t caught on completely, have you?”

  Carlo didn’t like the sound of that. He gripped the edges of the table, reminding himself to keep control. “What’re you talking about. What’s happening to me?”

  “You’re becoming a demigod.”

  He looked at her and felt a furious tightening in his gut. “A what? What does that mean?”

  Persephone leaned forward, reached for his hands, taking them into her own. It was, however, a touch with something missing. He imagined she’d done it to make him feel better, but it left him cold and wary. “I will assume you have noticed how…how good you feel since you’ve been working here…? How healthy?”

  “Yes, I have noticed…go on…”

  “That’s because you’ve become immortal…well, sort of…” Carlo pulled his hands away from hers, ran his fingers through his hair. Her words didn’t surprise him, not really. For the first time, he admitted to himself that maybe he’d actually suspected such a thing on some deeper, unconscious level. And yet, he couldn’t actually accept what she said at face value, either. The idea of living forever, while greatly appealing, also sounded silly—especially when you considered the little coda she added to the end.

  “Ah…could we possibly get a little more explanation of the phrase ‘well, sort of…’?”

  “As long as you are here,” said Persephone. “As long as you stay in the lighthouse…you cannot die. Nothing can harm you.”

  “Okay, so what does that actually mean?” said Carlo, wondering if he already knew the answer to his next question, and needing only to hear her confirmation. “What does that have to do with me and my painting?”

  Persephone half-lidded her eyes, shook her head so subtly he almost missed it. “Carlo, you are very intelligent…I think you know.”

  Standing up, he backed away from the table and walked to one of the windows. The vista of the river valley was now draped in gray and purple mantles of twilight as he pondered her words. He did know, goddammit, and he’d kept thinking that if, somehow, he never spoke about it, never let his words make it real…then it wouldn’t be real.

  But it was.

  The unspoken, but implied second part of the corollary proffered by Persephone was elegant in its simplicity—as he’d become more godlike, then, he must, by definition become less human.

  And that meant…what? Just about everything, when you took the time to think about it. It was no accident he’d lost his passion, his turbine-intensity to create, because that kind of energy came from the dark well of the soul. From a place where the essence of what it means to be mortal is heated and forged and tempered in that weird crucible of human experience.

  Oh yeah, he knew, all right…

  There’d probably been some piece of him, some micro-fragments of the collective unconscious that shot through him like gamma rays at the moment of his conception, that had always known on the intuitive level what was going on. Always known a weird transaction had been completed here. And Carlo felt so asham
ed of himself. He’d always lived his life knowing there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but this time, he bellied up to this particular trough, self-deluding himself he was going to make it happen.

  No way, baby…he thought as he turned back and looked at Pluto’s main squeeze, sitting there like she was posing for Praxiteles.

  “I want out,” he said softly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t act so surprised. Don’t tell me there’s no way out—I didn’t sign any contract! No drop of blood, none of that Faustian crap here!”

  Persephone stood and moved to him, her long skirt imparting for an instant the illusion she glided rather than walked. “No, none of that…you are correct.”

  Carlo exhaled, relieved at a very basic level. “So…what’s next? Is this where you tell me that when I walk out of here…I’ll die?”

  She smiled. “You are an unusual man,” she said. “I could grow to like you very much. I think I already have.”

  Backing away, he shook his head. “Uh-uh, we’re not going there.”

  “No, I mean I admire you—in the classical sense. And you will die when you leave here…but not right away…but in the right and due course of your life. You will be mortal again.”

  He exhaled again. More relief. She had this way of keeping the tension-levels torqued way up there. Carlo was walking a metaphysical high-wire, and the subject of safety nets had never come up.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’ve made me realize a few things about myself.”

  “You are most welcome.” Persephone smiled, and for the time, allowed herself to look quite attractive.

  “I guess I’d better gather up my things. I have this very strong hope I’ll be needing them.”

  “You will,” she said.

  “Thanks. Thanks for everything. I hope you don’t think I’m ungrateful, or anything like that…and I hope you understand why I have to go…”

  “I do,” she said. “Probably more than you. Good-bye, Carlo Duarte.”