Given the “S” on the back of its cover, it was conceivable that Crail’s book had been owned by Shivas Irons. Had he underlined these sentences? Seamus MacDuff had talked about “the life to come” in much the same way as Crail. For both men it had a double meaning, referring at once to the afterlife and a greater, more luminous existence on earth. Had MacDuff met Crail or read his book? Golf: Its Roots in God and Nature had more leads than I’d thought to the thinking and work of Shivas Irons. It might have been a map of sorts for him and his teacher and, if so, would help us track their course.
A reading lamp was the only source of light in the dark high-ceilinged studio. Sitting beside Hannigan at his desk I could barely see Nadia, who sat on a couch some thirty feet away watching us as we studied MacDuff’s faded photograph. “ ‘August 6 again, but 1950,’ ” Hannigan read from its inscription. “It must be their way of saying that somehow they’ve found a better way than atom bombs to release the energy contained in matter. The question, of course, is ‘How?’ What in hell is this light, and how in hell did it get there?”
Both of us looked at the picture in silence. “So what have we got?” Hannigan said finally. “Let’s separate certainties from conjectures. First, we know that Irons and MacDuff believed that both human consciousness and the flesh are capable of radical transformations into a higher condition. This is obvious from your conversations with Irons, from notes in his journals and books, and from things we’ve learned about MacDuff. Second, we know that both of them practiced higher states, as well as supernormal powers, and that both of them were led to this early in life, Irons in his teens, MacDuff by his mother, probably from the time he was born. Third, we know that their practice had a purely contemplative side but also involved what they took to be some sort of materialization—of ‘spirit-matter’ or ‘soul-stuff,’ they gave it different names—that somehow brings the flesh to new levels of embodiment. This goes back to MacDuff’s old lady and her African shamanism, and to MacDuff’s early interest in the ‘fourth dimension.’ All of this we know for sure.”
He paused to look at the lists he’d made in his artist’s sketchbook. “Then there are things we suspect but aren’t quite sure of. First, four possible Irons sightings—three described in reports to me, one from Haig’s story about the man who stopped the glowing. We can’t be sure about any of these, but they are certainly suggestive. Second, Crail might’ve influenced them. His vision of human evolution, and his use of the term ‘the life to come,’ are just about the same as theirs. Through his book, he could’ve been Irons’s second mentor. If that’s the case, we’ve got another set of leads to what they were doing. Third, it’s conceivable that MacDuff, with Irons’s help, established a presence on his property, by some kind of spiritual and occult means, that still reflects what they were doing. It gets into workers at Ramsay’s Distillery—they think it’s brownies or ghosts. It gets into Haig—he thinks it’s atomic poisoning. It gets into you, ye hit a drive 420 yards, and begin to have mystical experiences. And fourth, our visitor in the necromanteion. It’s not too far-fetched, we agree, to think that the thing was connected to either Irons or MacDuff—or to them both. Nadia, don’t ye agree?”
“Oh, Baahch,” she said, filling his name with a long and affectionate sigh. “It was trying to tell Mackel something. But I don’t know if it was your golf man. Maybe Mackel should go to Moscow, and meet Boris. Mackel, would you like to go? Maybe Boris can call our visitor again through his tower in Peredelkino.”
Pretending not to hear her, Hannigan examined his lists. Written in his small, elegant hand, they looked as beautiful as his hyperspace equations. It occurred to me that he could sell them as visual art. “And then,” he said, “there are items that are mainly conjecture, but too suggestive to dismiss. The things we channeled after our night in the necromanteion. The burn marks at MacDuff’s house. Your vision with Irons on the eighteenth green. The different responses to whatever it was that happened there. Your glimpse of a phantom on the thirteenth hole, and Irons’s different responses to it. The inscription, ‘Sunrise at noon.’ Irons in North Africa during the war, and his vision there. And MacDuff’s trip to Africa in ’45.…”
“Baahch. Baahch!” Nadia interrupted, rising energetically from the couch. “This is not the way. Not with all those lists! Not with all those lines connected to the other lines, and those other ones not connected to the ones over there, and this one on top of that one. It is not mathematics, Bach.” She threw her hands up in a Russian gesture of solicitous reproval. “You cannot analyze it, Bach. Maybe, maybe, it will be like those little dot diagrams where finally you see a face or a cow or a map or saahmthing. Maybe when you have enough dots, you will see it. See who they really were, what they were really doing, or whether Mr. Irons is still alive. Or maybe, Bach, maybe Mr. Irons will suddenly appear. Maybe he will hear about you or Mackel, or read Mackel’s book. Or maybe Mr. MacDuff will come, like the stranger in my necromanteion. But you cannot find them with those little lists!”
Hannigan sighed. “Murphy,” he said, “will you please explain what we’re doin’. Tell her that’s what we’re tryin’ to do. We’re trying to connect the dots.”
She stood with a hand on a hip and the other on Hannigan’s couch, her striking figure accentuated by tight-fitting white slacks and brown sweater. I felt no impulse to argue with her. “Mackel,” she said imploringly, “don’t you agree with me? Tell Bach.”
“Baa . . aahch.” Hannigan mimicked her inflection. “Baa … ahch. She uses it like a weapon.”
“Mackel,” she said. “Tell Bach.”
“That’s what he’s trying to do. His lists are a pattern-recognition diagram. That’s what you mean, Nadia, don’t you? A pattern-recognition diagram?”
“Whatever you call it, Mackel. But you don’t have enough dots.” She tossed her head impatiently. “Or maybe you have the answer already, somewhere deep, deep down in your soul.”
I looked to Hannigan, who was studying the work of art he’d made with his beautifully constructed lists. “All right,” he said. “Maybe we need another consciousness to see what we have here. That’s what she’s driving at. Let’s break out a bottle of Ramsay’s whiskey.”
Neither Nadia nor I objected. A moment later, we stood waiting for the whiskey to work, looking down at Hannigan’s sketch pad. She put an arm around his waist, winked at me mischievously, then started to laugh. “What is this?” she asked, pointing to one of his notes. “What does this mean, ‘improving the cell’s MI5’? That is funny!”
“It’s from a note in one of his books,” said Hannigan. “Irons thought that our cells can improve their ability to find things, like master spies, to the extent that we become more spiritually alive and clairvoyant. Information, proteins, minerals, oxygen—or spirit-matter! Theoretically, each cell has all of these at its disposal, but can get better at finding them, like an intelligence agency. Body and soul mirror one another. What’s so funny about it?”
“A billion little KGBs! Oh, it’s funny, Bach. Just funny. A Raahshian writer would not use that example!”
“What’s this?” I pointed to another of Hannigan’s notes. “A loathsome toad squatting on every cell!”
“It is,” said Hannigan, “another Irons comment, and further proof that he was influenced by Professor Mortimer Crail. There’s a passage in Crail’s book about a gentleman who saw a loathsome toad squatting on every hole into which he was about to putt. Apparently, Irons thought that each of our cells, like the gentleman’s golf holes, can be squatted upon—yes, squatted upon—by particular images. In other words, our body is like a golf course.”
“And maybe Irons was cracked.” I laughed. “For him, everything was a golf course. Sometimes I think the game did him in.”
“The whiskey’s workin’.” Hannigan’s burr was more pronounced than ever. “Nadia, here’s yer altered state, but it’s producin’ only protests and giggles.”
“Is this the bottle we had the other night?”
I asked. “Christ, it’s psychedelic!”
“It’s a different bottle,” he said. “And stronger than the last one. Stronger by far! Wha’ d’ye see in my lovely lists now?”
“I see that Mackel should go to Moscow,” said Nadia. “And meet Big Boris there. And look into the big, tall glass in his dark and terrible necromanteion.”
“And you, Murphy. Wha’ d’ye see in yer new consciousness?”
“That maybe Haig was right about Ramsay’s whiskey. It could be radioactive.”
Large or small, each group of people has its own inexorable chemistry. The Kirova-Hannigan-Murphy group, at least in 1987, tended toward the Dionysian and subsequent erasure of memory. For the second time in a week, I could not precisely remember all the heights we had reached when I woke the next day. Perhaps this failure of recall came in part from an instinctive emotional economy. By rising above our erotic impulses into a self-forgetful, mystically charged hilarity, the three of us could avoid complications we didn’t want.
But two images seemed indelible. The materials that Hannigan and I had collected were indeed like a pattern-recognition diagram, which if added to would become more and more recognizable. And something in me also knew that the adventure of a lifetime waited in Russia, along with part of the greater mysteries represented by Shivas Irons.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PARTLY TO SATISFY my lingering nostalgia, but also to further my research, I played golf at Burningbush on the day before my return to America. Though I had wondered if the round might evoke signs of Shivas Irons, I didn’t expect the symmetries it produced. The first of these was evident when I reached the first tee a little before twelve o’clock.
Thirty-one years before, I’d been paired with Irons and a dour, methodical little Scotsman named MacIver. Now my playing partners would be a tall, red-haired west Texas professional named Sam Magee and a middle-aged Japanese gentleman about five feet six inches tall who referred to himself only as “Mitsubishi.” A threesome then, a threesome now, with members who had roughly the same height, build, and level of skill as their counterparts in 1956.
But this wasn’t all there was to it. Magee was instructing Mitsubishi with a booming Texas drawl, using phrases as mysterious to me as Irons’s admonitions to MacIver. Mitsubishi listened to these attentively, just as MacIver had done, accepting them with quick little bows and applying them with an obedience which at first was painful to behold. After teeing his ball, he pointed with a ramrod-straight left arm down his intended line of flight, flexed his knees three or four times, and drove with a backswing no longer than one he would use for a pitch shot. His ball went straight, for perhaps 150 yards, whereupon he bowed to Magee again with a look of embarrassment combined with tightly controlled satisfaction.
Then the professional turned to me. “Have at it, Murph,” he boomed, as if addressing a stadium filled with spectators. “Let it rip!”
Caught between a desire to be sociable and my hopes of playing with the concentration I’d experienced at MacDuff’s estate, I took a few practice swings, teed my ball, and hit my drive straight down the fairway. “We’ve got a ringer here!” Magee said loudly. “Look out for him, Mitsu. He’s dangerous. Don’t make any bets.” Then he hit a prodigious drive that almost reached the green.
Walking down the fairway, I decided to keep enough separation from Magee for the revelations this round might produce. Though it was tempting to think that he might have resemblances to Shivas Irons beyond his red hair, height, and build, it was clear that if I got too close, there would be a whirlwind of challenges, wagers, and jibes that would last for eighteen holes. This intuition was confirmed after we both got birdies, and he asked if I wanted to bet. How about a hundred a side, ten for the longest off each tee, ten for the closest to each pin, ten for each birdie, and five hundred for the eighteen? When I didn’t respond at once, he proposed cutting the wagers in half. When I said that I wasn’t in a betting mood, his interest in me faded. For the rest of the round, he gave Mitsubishi most of his attention.
On the slightly elevated second tee, I took my first long look at the course. The fairways were browner than they’d been two weeks before, but framed more lavishly by yellow gorse and first streaks of violet in the heather. A few cumulus clouds, their easterly edges trimmed in gold, were moving across the high blue sky, and the sea that was visible beyond the links, like a harlequin’s suit, was dramatically striped with lavender, blue, and grey. It occurred to me that these ever-changing vistas, like a hallucinogenic drug, amplified the slightest alterations of mood. This magical terrain, this soulscape, opened one’s consciousness to a greater freedom as well as an awareness of self-imposed sufferings.
“After you, Murph,” Magee said in his Texas drawl. “Birdies first!”
My contemplative moment broken, I hit a drive down the left-hand side of the fairway, then watched as Magee and Mitsubishi hit theirs down the middle. I was grateful that they were absorbed in their lesson. Memories of my round with Shivas Irons were pressing in upon me.
At first it seemed I could hear his voice, repeating advice he’d given me, describing features of the course, or shouting encouragement to MacIver. But after two or three holes, kinesthetic images reinforced these auditory memories. This wasn’t a deliberate exercise. His carriage and gestures were suddenly there in my muscle memory, causing me to lengthen and loosen my stride, find a lower center of gravity, and add elasticity to my swing. By the ninth green, Magee had noticed this. “You’re swinging slower, and bigger,” he said, and then, to my astonishment, asked, “What’s come into you, Murph? It’s like someone’s whisperin’ in your ear.” Such are the ways we read one another telepathically.
This phantom presence continued through the first twelve holes. At times it seemed he was standing near me, suggesting, perhaps by a subtle gesture, some readjustment of my swing, or sharing the enjoyment of a good shot, or appraising my mental state with his sympathetic and contagious good humor. This invisible companionship varied in intensity, but when we reached the thirteenth tee was suddenly magnified. This was more than muscle memory, or familiar visual imagery. Shivas Irons seemed about to precipitate into living flesh. As I looked across Lucifer’s Rug to the treacherous green on the hill above, I felt him aligning my stance, distributing my weight, and helping me grip my two-iron so that I would hit a low fade against the wind that was blowing from right to left. All of this was accomplished, as if by telepathy, while Mitsubishi and Magee watched with apparent fascination.
My ball sailed low up the clotted gorse, white against yellow as it curved toward the pin, then white against blue as it hovered above it. “Fuck it, Murph!” Magee exulted. “You might have a shit-faced hole in one!” After teeing his ball, he focused more intently than he had all day, and hit a shot on the same trajectory. We had painted two parallel streaks on the golf sky.
Walking up the narrow path along the ravine that borders the hole, I thought of the shot I’d hit in 1956. It, too, had been guided by something beyond my normal reflexes. Then I pictured the unflappable Bailie MacIver, dressed from head to foot in white and black.
Neither of us had spoken as we walked up the path, and I guessed that like me he’d been emptied of thought by Shivas’s extraordinary rituals. He walked briskly, head down, his stride measured, intent to find his ball in Lucifer’s Rug. His expensive white pants and black cardigan sweater contrasted sharply with his unsmiling demeanor.
Shivas had gone ahead, and stood near the green looking down at the crevasse. For two or three minutes, as MacIver hit his ball from the gorse, he stood completely motionless. Was he looking for someone, or simply lost in thought? After marking my ball, which sat just a foot from his on the putting surface, I waited for him to move. There were tremendous views in all directions from this vantage point.
The rolling fairways below were filling with the shadows that grace Scottish links when there’s sun in the late afternoon, while beyond the course, a mile and a half away, reflected light
flashed from a clubhouse window. The land and sky seemed to be pure consciousness, a diaphanous soulscape. Then into it came a man in black who had something important to tell me. Standing at the edge of the green, he spoke without moving his lips. “Remember your name. Remember who you are.”
Then he vanished. Just like that. Leaving no trace behind him.
Shivas, it seemed, hadn’t seen him, and sank his putt for a birdie. Stunned, I placed my ball where I’d marked it, and rolled it into the cup. Each of us had scored a two, but Shivas said nothing about it. As we walked to the fourteenth tee, he gave no hint of his thoughts or feelings.
Now Magee sank his putt for a birdie, just as Shivas had done, and I sank mine as well. But as I lifted my ball from the cup, I remembered that the man by the green had said something more before he vanished. “Ye’ll not remember,” he’d said with a Scottish burr that I now seemed to hear with perfect clarity. “You and Shivas are brothers. Ye’ll never be completely separated. Part o’ ye will travel with him wherever he goes, even to the ends of the Earth.”
Astonished by this small reverberating voice, which was conveyed with the peculiar resonance and force of an auditory hallucination, I turned away from my playing partners. Shivas and I would never be separated completely. Secretly, I’d known it all along. Which meant that my search for him reflected, however imperfectly, his movements, activities, and whereabouts.
Sensing that something had disturbed me, but not knowing what it was, Magee and Mitsubishi hit their drives in silence. Their unspoken sympathy, and Magee’s restraint, filled me with gratitude. “I’m sorry,” I said as I stepped to the tee. “This place calls up the damnedest memories.” As both of them nodded in agreement, I felt a sudden unexpected affection for them. Magee’s attitude especially, which seemed strikingly at odds with his manner when we’d met, reminded me again that golf has a genius for bringing out what is best in us.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 17
