Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd-loa approached them, intent on finding a solution. He gripped a pair of weather-polished tusks and swung between them into the labyrinthine heart of the puzzle. Inside the barrier, he ducked and climbed and twisted to find passage through the bones. A spur on a set of wildebeest horns stabbed him in the side, and he cried aloud, Let me out of here! His plea was for escape from both Agarou and this treacherous ivory maze. I’m in the picket of sablier trees, not a pile of interlocking tusks and antlers, Loyd thought, more coherently. And he was. The image of a bone-surrounded Mount Tharaka had disguised the reality of the Haitian mountain. It was Agarou who preferred the surrealism of the ancient African past, and because of Agarou’s ascendancy, Loyd had not seen the sablier hedge. Well, they were through it now, scrambling uphill in the open toward the shrub-lined cut where the entrance to the caves was hidden. Agarou-on-Loyd halted in a three-point stance and in a gust of ozone-heavy wind looked downhill at Inagua Bay. Sea and savannah did their dizzying switch, a sail boat metamorphosing into an albino elephant and a flight of bats into a flock of prehistoric flamingos.

  Then reality came back.

  How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.

  Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.

  But—

  Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.

  I can’t see! Loyd cried to his vaudun rider.

  Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!

  Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.

  Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.

  Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the loa had not dismounted, had instead just dropped the reins—but now his own peculiar Loyd-ness was free to direct his steps here or there in these weird caves. Agarou had retreated to a spectator’s place behind his eyes. (Undoubtedly, it was Agarou who allowed him to see.) Thus it was now Loyd’s will rather than the loa’s that counted. My will be done, Loyd thought. My kingdom’s come, and it’s hell rather than heaven . . . .

  Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.

  They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.

  A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits . . . . Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.

  It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena . . . or dog . . . or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.

  Once, Loyd realized, something like this had actually happened. With Agarou’s blessing, I’m witnessing what a real band of habiline hunters witnessed in Africa two million years ago. For them, this is an archetypal event. It defined them as human—before the advent of speech—in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. And they know it. . . . Exhausted and bleeding, the hyena-hominid pulled itself to its feet. It towered over the hunters. It was taller than Loyd too, if only by a little. Although by every objective sign, the creature appeared to be at the mercy of the habilines, they made no attempt to deal it a death blow. The creature commanded their awe. Humbling them by its height and its indifference to its own suffering, it wholly disarmed them. Loyd was frightened. He felt like running, but the habilines, expecting revelation, held their ground. This eerie stand-off continued.

  Finally, the hyena-hominid bowed its doglike head. This gesture of resignation or reverence or bodily surrender turned into something else, an act both grotesque and moving. The creature, stretching out its arms and gripping the rock face behind it for support, bent forward until its snout was nuzzling its left breast. The vertebrae on its neck and spine strained against its taut hide. With a jerk of its head, the creature tore the flesh of its own pectoral muscle. Then it straightened, removed one hand from the wall, and cupped from this narrow wound its own beating heart, which it held out to the wonder-struck habiline wraiths as a love offering. All who ate of it would know that the Mind implicit in Nature had affirmed their lives—through the agency of this hyena-headed messenger. Their salvation lay in this knowledge and in their ability to cohabit in a necessarily imperfect world.

  Come, the hyena-hominid challenged its pursuers, still extending its heart. Come and partake of my life’s blood.

  The largest of the habilines, the alpha male of their spectral party, advanced to accept the offering. Dwarfed by the dog-headed messenger, he tasted of the heart. Having tasted, he carried it to each member of the band, and they, too, cupped the beating organ to their mouths, bit into it, and took into themselves a living piece of their miraculous prey. Loy
d could only watch. None of the habilines brought the heart to him—clearly, they regarded him as alien to their world, too alien to benefit from this rite—and he was glad that they ignored him. When the heart was altogether eaten, the gloom of the catacombs absorbed the hominids into itself, and Loyd found that he was alone with the creature that had sacrificed its heart to feed a small remnant of feisty but unprepossessing human forebears.

  Agarou, the god of ancestors, had mediated this confrontation in the immaterial realm of Yagaza, but now it was Loyd who had to face the hyena hominid and to demand of it some explanation. His fear came back. What authority did he have to question such a being? What answers—if any—could he expect? The silver-crimson light of the caves coalesced around the two of them like a contracting womb. . . .

  LOYD: Who are you?

  (The hyena-hominid only laughs. Its demeaning animalish laughter echoes in the half-light like a huge coil unwinding.)

  LOYD (apprehensively insistent): I said, Who are you?

  I AM: Names fail. If you like, call me Yagaza, or Lord, or Logos, or even Anima Mundi. None of these titles suits absolutely, but if you have to have a name, pick one that doesn’t belittle me.

  LOYD: God?

  I AM: In this context, Yagaza might be more appropriate. After all, I’m Adam’s God—Adam Montaraz’s, that is. But, ultimately, I’m yours, too.

  LOYD: I thought Yagaza meant Africa—either Africa or the afterlife.

  I AM: In the vaudun scheme of things, it does. Because you’re here through the good offices of Agarou, perhaps we should honor him by adopting vaudun terminology. Without that body of ritual, we wouldn’t be talking like this.

  LOYD: I can’t call you Yagaza. I’m not a voodooist. I’m a victim of possession, but I’m not a voodooist. And you—you call yourself Adam’s God, but all I can see, squinting and cocking my head, is a heartless chimera, part man-ape and part African scavenger.

  (The hyena-headed being places both palms against the sides of its face. It lifts this face away like a mask, revealing the horror of a human countenance that has been three quarters obliterated by .357-caliber ammunition. Loyd is reminded of Craig Puddicombe in the parking lot behind Abraxas; he cannot understand why God would choose to appear to him in the guise of a mutilated dead murderer. He tries to turn aside, but he cannot make his possessed body obey even the simplest internal command.)

  LOYD: Please. Don’t make me look at you now. It’s crueler than you know.

  I AM (restoring the hyena mask): That I doubt. It’s just that I have no desire to slip my responsibility in matters that you must regard as terrible manifestations of evil. I don’t explicitly order them, but neither can I countermand them without sabotaging creation itself.

  LOYD: But you can inject yourself into the affairs of your temporal creation, can’t you? You did that with your hyena-hominid revelation to Adam’s Pleistocene ancestors. You’ve let me witness a reenactment of that “disclosure event.”

  I AM: What I’ve permitted you to see is an allegory of that event intelligible to your contemporary human understanding. Had I given you a reenactment of the event as it occurred, you would have misinterpreted it. More than likely, you would have utterly missed its sacred aspect.

  LOYD: But you were there, weren’t you? You made yourself manifest in the otherwise mundane history of the planet. You appeared to a small band of habilines whom most of us today would dismiss as protohumans.

  I AM: I did.

  LOYD: Why?

  I AM: You’ve already anticipated me here. To demonstrate my love for them. To affirm them. To validate their struggles to survive and evolve.

  LOYD: Can your appearance to them have had any measurable effect? At first, you terrified them. Momentarily, you made them forget their terror by appeasing their hunger. That’s all, surely.

  I AM: The Rutherford Remnant—Adam, Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi—demonstrates that it did have a lasting effect. They continue to celebrate my earliest quasi-human incarnation by observing Voodoo Saturday Night. Indeed, you’re celebrating that event with them. Possessed by Agarou, god of ancestors, you’re a vaudun devotee in spite of yourself, Mister Paul.

  LOYD: But what if there were no Rutherford Remnant? What if the species known as Homo habilis had died out about when paleoanthropologists supposed, namely, two million years ago?

  I AM: Does a falling tree land with a thud if there’s no one there to register the thud? Yes. The thud exists as a receivable potentiality in the sound waves generated by the tree’s impact with the ground. Because I was received by creatures now dead hardly suffices to demonstrate that I wasn’t received at all. I appeared to them, and they knew themselves blessed—validated, if you like—by my holy concern.

  LOYD (shaking his head): Impossible.

  I AM: It wounds your vanity to think that Homo sapiens was not the first hominid species to experience a sacred disclosure event?

  LOYD: You wrong me, Yagaza. Frankly, I’m by no means certain that Homo sapiens has ever experienced its own such event. Frankly, I doubt it. I’ve always doubted it.

  I AM (laughing in a melancholy-merry hyena voice): Then what about this, Mister Paul? What’s happening to you now?

  LOYD: I’m possessed. I’m dreaming. I’m talking to a sardonic corner of my own consciousness, not to—God forgive me—God.

  I AM: But God has a corner of your consciousness, doesn’t he? If God created you, why, then, he has a lien on all the physico-spiritual systems making up your identity. You’re one of my most valuable means of comprehending God—along with all the other self-aware entities, terrestrial or otherwise, of an ever-questing creation. You should take advantage of your dreaming—your possession—to help me in this self-reflexive quest.

  LOYD: You called yourself Adam’s God. Why? Because you appeared in hyena-hominid form to his ancestors?

  I AM: In part, certainly. But also because in searching for an element of the sacred to append to his Batesonian philosophy of evolutionary holism, which lacks such a dimension, he decided to repostulate God. I’m the God That Is, but I’m also the God that Adam humbly repostulated. Your species’ hunger for the sacred, going back even to the Pleistocene, doesn’t arise in the absence of satisfying spiritual meat, but in response to its availability in the miraculous slaughterhouse of creation. I AM that meat. I AM the architect of the sacred abattoir. Those who refuse to ignore their hunger will at length find me.

  LOYD: Adam told Alistair Patrick Blair that you have both a timeless aspect and a temporality that involves you in the time-bound doings of the material world. Is that true? It sounds paradoxical, probably even impossible.

  I AM: Like a man who both has a head and doesn’t have a head?

  LOYD: Exactly. That was Blair’s precise objection.

  I AM: Well, my temporal aspect hardly requires lengthy justification, does it? In that aspect, or one manifestation of it, I am talking to you now. And in one manifestation of that aspect, I possess both a hyena’s head and the mutilated face of the man who killed your godson. And, if you must know, no head at all.

  LOYD: All right. Fine. If you’re conversing with me, then you obviously depend on the flow of time to achieve such communication. But how can you simultaneously—ah, but that’s the wrong word, isn’t it—how can you also have a quality of timelessness that places you either outside or above the ongoing mayhem and muck of the physical universe?

  I AM: Because you’re a captive of time yourself, Mister Paul, this will be hard to explain. Timelessness is not an attribute you’re well-equipped to understand.

  LOYD: Oh, I see. You’re gearing up for a cop-out.

  I AM: Not at all. If you can accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in its specific application to quantum theory, confessing that one may know either where a subatomic particle is or how it happens to be moving, but not both attributes at once, why can’t you adopt a like uncertainty principle for a concept as grand and ineffable as that of God? Or, to
employ another analogy, if light can be either particle or wave depending on the perspective and the intentions of the observer, why can’t God be a temporal being within the context of creation and a timeless entity in his orientation above, or outside, the universe of matter and mutability? The supposition that he must be one or the other is a reflection of human limitation, which arises not only from finite human understanding but also from your existential immersion in time itself.

  LOYD: This isn’t fair. A man who’s spent most of his adult life concocting recipes for cheesecake and pasta dishes should not argue theology with God.

  I AM: Who better than you, Mister Paul? A person who has fed publicans and sinners, sociologists and habilines, knows something of what it means to satisfy hunger—as well as to fail in that task.

  LOYD: Okay, okay. You’ve mentioned subatomic particles—our ability to know either their location or their motion, but not both. And you’ve mentioned that light can be either a particle or a wave depending on what the observer wishes to find out. But these analogies break down in this situation because atoms and light are temporal phenomena. They have no atemporal attributes at all.

  I AM: Congratulations on stating the obvious. Can you think of any phenomena that aren’t finally time-bound or time-determined?

  LOYD (chagrined): I’m afraid I can’t.

  I AM: Then maybe you can see the difficulty of what I want to explain. If you could think of any examples, I’d try to work them into illustrative metaphors for the coincident timelessness and temporality of God. But since you can’t, I’m stuck with phenomena at play within the dimension of time. Thus, everything I tell you is an approximation of something largely inexpressible.

  LOYD: Go on. I’ll try to follow.

  I AM: Only in my timeless aspect—my supratemporal identity—am I utterly without blemish. There, I AM perfect and fulfilled and all-knowing and, yes, changeless. What I know never alters because it encompasses—until the “end” of “time”—the totality of changes past, present, and future in the physical universe. At my impetus, time—space-time—began on the edge between timelessness and temporality. And one day, in figurative temporal terms, I will put period to time by letting it run the course I’ve already omnisciently calibrated and clocked. Then I will necessarily subsume my temporal avatars and once again simply BE, perhaps from Everlasting to Everlasting. I can’t be more specific than this because my own immersion in the flow of universal time clouds my clairvoyance. Trapped here with you, Mister Paul, I see through a glass darkly—but with a vision, in comparison to your own, pristine and pellucid.