Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  LOYD: Why would a perfect, fulfilled, all-knowing, and changeless deity even bother to inflate the balloon of the physical cosmos? Isn’t that a capricious act? An unnecessary waste of energy?

  I AM: I like your metaphor. It has a festive spontaneity totally in accord with the motives of God in my timeless aspect. These motives are complex, innate, and immutable, but they center on the impulse to celebrate my self-awareness with living consciousnesses outside myself. This impulse requires a Creation—the Big Bang that gave birth to space-time and all the galactic populations.

  LOYD: How can you describe a God with impulses as “fulfilled”?

  I AM: In temporal terms, I can’t. But temporal terms are all we have here. It might be more accurate to say that, even in my timeless aspect, I possess the positive attribute of generosity. In the absence of beneficiaries, however, no one but I could document my possession of this trait. Therefore, I inflated the balloon of the cosmos to affirm the otherwise pointless fact of my generosity. I didn’t need to do so, I wanted to do so. Even this falls short of the reality, Mister Paul, but, here and now, I can scarcely do better.

  LOYD: Never mind. What about suffering and death and injustice? How do you square the murder of an innocent child with your hypothetical generosity as the God Beyond Time?

  I AM: I don’t. I don’t even try. Every secondary creation of any complexity is flawed. Perfections of various wonderful kinds may occur within it, of course, but the encompassing whole—well, its imperfections are equally numerous. In fact, some of the perfections depend upon them. The just recognize justice by unhappy exposure to its opposite. The wise distill their—

  LOYD (waving his hand in the gelatinous light): I’ve heard all this before. It’s a recipe for carrion-comfort, dog-god.

  I AM: What you must remember is that no matter how terrible the world may seem, no matter how cruel or pointless, the Mind that nudged its ecosystems toward the evolution of self-aware consciousness did so out of an inexpressible generosity.

  LOYD: A ponderous vanity, I’d say.

  I AM: And the timeless Mind whose temporal avatars intrude upon Creation to shape and direct it in their puny ways—well, that Mind releases them like antibodies into the besieged body of the world. There they help the sentient creatures of faith and goodwill neutralize the poisons of entropy and accident. I came for that reason. So did Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Gandhi, and perhaps the latter-day habiline whom you know as Adam Montaraz. In any case, Mister Paul, Adam came to extend the family of humankind, to demonstrate—via his struggle for personal revelation—the interconnectedness of creation.

  LOYD (flailing at the womb of visible darkness containing him): I curse you in your impotent timeless aspect! The holy physicians you send us are quacks! Better for us never to have existed than to suffer so grievously from the imperfections built into your misbegotten creation!

  I AM: Not at all. Not at all.

  (Yagaza, the dog-god, pins Loyd’s hands to his sides. The snout of the upright creature hovers inches from the possessed man’s face. Loyd smells carrion on its breath, the stench of the decaying human features—Craig Puddicombe’s—behind its hyena mask. He seizes the wound in the creature’s chest and averts his face.)

  LOYD (mockingly): Not at all. Not at all. How does knowing that God possesses a temporal and a timeless aspect improve our lot, Yagaza? What difference—what goddamn difference—does it make?

  I AM: By repostulating me as the Alpha and Omega, the supreme primal-and-ultimate holistic concept, you may believe in me again by rediscovering in me the ground of your own existence.

  LOYD (struggling in Yagaza’s powerful hands): What the hell for?

  I AM: To realize once again that you were spawned by a multidimensional, paratemporal Benevolence and that even your most pointless-appearing torments mean, Mister Paul. They resonate forever in the all-encompassing Mind of God.

  LOYD (weeping bitterly): Hooray for our resonating torments. Hooray, hooray. What a comfort, what a comfort . . . .

  The possessed man slumped from Yagaza’s immaterial embrace. Meanwhile, Agarou, god of ancestors, climbed out of the psychic grotto into which he had earlier withdrawn. He climbed out of it to remount the body of Paul Loyd. He meant to ride his human horse back into the rainy compass of Prix-des-Yeux and its houngfor. Regaining control was not hard. Because Loyd had so little fight left in him, Agarou routed the man’s defenses, occupied his overloaded mind, and looked out through his eyes. He found that Loyd was sitting at the feet of the agonized statue of Homo habilis primus. One of Loyd’s hands clutched the statue’s stone phallus, apparently to keep him from toppling over.

  Let go of me, Loyd told Agarou. I’m sick of the selfish double dealings of gods.

  The one who must release you comes now, Agarou said. Patience. Loyd peered through the loa’s eyes—his eyes, if only he could get them back—at the flashlight beams crisscrossing in the entrance shaft to the upland cave system. A small party of people was approaching, limned in nappy silhouette behind, or off to the sides of, the bobbing flashlight beams: figures of blood and substance, not habiline ghosts. The closer they came, the more palpable grew the light accompanying them. The darkness in the catacombs began to relinquish its ultraviolet character to the dim grittiness of the visible spectrum, for Agarou’s hold on him was weakening.

  Caroline knelt beside him. Adam knelt beside him. Their clothes were drenched, their faces beaded with rain. Behind them, looking down on him, stood two sinister-looking men whom Loyd could not place and whose postures bespoke a belligerent impatience. They carried weapons: rifles or submachine guns. Even the loa possessing him recoiled from these figures, and Loyd struggled to focus on Caroline and her habiline protector. Caroline looked like a drowned angel; Adam, a refugee from the bombed-out set of a 1930s Hollywood musical starring Fred Astaire. (It was the top hat and tails that did it.)

  “Come forth, Mister Paul,” urged Adam in his hoarsest whisper. “Come forth from your possession by Agarou, god of ancestors.”

  I sat up straighter. Embarrassed, I let go of the lustrous prick of the statue behind me. I blinked against the flashlight beams of the armed men regarding me with equal measures of curiosity and contempt.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Caroline kissed me and nodded at one of the beret-wearing men. “You remember Lieutenant Bacalou, Paul? We met him on the boat coming over from Cap-Haïtien.”

  “Hello again.” Lieutenant Bacalou gave me a curt nod and a superior smile.

  Groggy, I tried to stand. With Caroline and Adam’s support, I succeeded, but briefly teetered like a bounce-back toy trying to regain its equilibrium. Five minutes ago, I had been talking to God—scoring points against him in an emotional metaphysical debate that had utterly wrung me out. To find this grim pair of Tontons Macoutes in his place, holding my wife and my friend at gun point, seemed a bleak variation of a nightmare that had already taken place in Beulah Fork. E. L. Teavers and the Klan, Lieutenant Bacalou and another of Baby Doc’s rifle-toting bogeymen: they were mirror images. Or maybe this cave was the darkroom in which the negatives of the unsmiling macoutes would turn out to be pernicious double exposures. No matter where we went, we could not escape the merciless pursuit of zealots.

  “All right,” I managed. “Tell me something about this.”

  Caroline explained that Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had burst into the houngfor shortly after I, as Agarou’s human mount, had left it. The rain and my sudden leavetaking had forced their hand—they’d had to show themselves before assessing the entire situation to the lieutenant’s satisfaction. By accident, then, the macoutes had disrupted the vaudun ceremony at just the right moment to foil the efforts of the rain god Damballa and his bride Aïda Ovedo to possess Brian and Caroline. (I was glad to hear this. The idea of Caroline’s being the anthropologist’s consort, even in the twilight world of loa possession, revolted me.) The men under Bacalou’s command had entered the peristyle so unexpect
edly that RuthClaire had screamed and the habilines had panicked. Toussaint was dead. He had attacked the first man into the tonnelle—not Bacalou, but an agent from the Pointe d’Inagua security post—and the agent had riddled his body with his submachine gun. In the resultant confusion, Alberoi and Dégrasse had broken through the wall behind the drum platform and escaped into the night.

  “Erzulie? Hector?”

  “They’re okay,” Caroline said. “They’re under guard in a dry corner. Brian and RuthClaire are with them down there, likewise under guard.”

  I looked at Bacalou. “Did you bring a whole army up here with you?”

  “Not even a platoon,” he said with easy irony. “At first, Monsieur Loyd, it was only Philomé and I who followed the two women and the Austin-Antilles man up here from Rutherford’s Port.” He swung his flashlight in an arc that illuminated his stocky partner’s face. “Monsieur Loyd, Philomé Bobo.”

  “Enchanté,” said Bobo. But, frankly, he did not sound charmed.

  “On the edge of the cigouave encampment,” Bacalou continued, “I sent Philomé back down the mountain to Pointe d’Inagua for reinforcements. Who could say looking at their hovels how many demons might dwell there? Soon, Philomé returned with Charlemagne and Jean-Gérard—almost in time to see you leaving the houngfor, a loa on your back. It was needed, monsieur, to summon enough help to be fully prepared.”

  “You’d make a good Boy Scout,” I said.

  Bacalou ignored the compliment. “We still have no idea how many cigouaves live up here. There could be dozens, couldn’t there? This caverne—it’s very big.”

  “Not counting myself, only five of my people remained in the world,” Adam said. “You murdered Toussaint. Now there are only four.”

  “Peut-être,” the lieutenant replied. “Maybe.” He nodded at his partner.

  “And what Philomé did was not murder, Monsieur Montaraz, but a very quick-thoughtful defense of the self.”

  Further talk revealed that while holding the remaining occupants of the houngfor at gun point, Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had decided to retrieve me for questioning. Adam and Caroline had volunteered to lead the macoutes to me, Adam because he knew where I was and Caroline because she feared for my safety in my possessed state. Negotiating the uplands had not been easy in the dark and the rain, nor had their journey through the palisade of dripping sablier trees, but at last they’d reached the cave entrance and here they were. Their torn and sodden clothes testified to the pains they’d taken. Now, Caroline said, we could all be under arrest together.

  “Why are we under arrest?” I asked “What have we done?”

  Lieutenant Bacalou considered. “You have aided and abetted the cigouaves, who, during the previous regime, did many treasons against the government of Papa Doc. The order to rid the island of them has never been officially put away. We could kill those two old ones down there, and you their cunning accomplices, and any other demons we might find in this impressive hole, and do it, you understand, with the blessings of Baby Doc and also, maybe, the present U.S. administration.”

  “I doubt that,” Caroline said. “If RuthClaire and Adam disappeared, you’d have world public opinion, a dozen American Congressmen, and Amnesty International breathing down your necks to know why.”

  “Probably,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “And it makes me tremble.”

  “And there’s no sense killing Hector and Erzulie, or Alberoi and Dégrasse, either. They’re the last of the Rutherford Remnant. When they die, Lieutenant Bacalou, their species will be extinct. They’re trying to hang on here, not overthrow the corrupt tub of butter who pays you to terrorize the citizenry.”

  This sally offended the lieutenant. “We are not terrorists, Madame Loyd. We’re policemen. We keep the peace.”

  “A goal that murdering Toussaint has greatly furthered,” Caroline said angrily. “Do you have any proof that he or his kinspeople have tried to bring about the collapse of the Duvalier government?”

  “How could I?” Bacalou gestured with his flashlight. “Until this evening, I had no proof that he and the other cigouaves still existed.”

  Adam interjected, “Please think for a moment about what you’ve just said.”

  “Proof of the latter is proof of the former!” Somewhat less emphatically, Bacalou added, “At least in the eyes of my superiors.” He shone his flashlight to the left of the statue, picking out portions of the murals glistening on the cold rocks and undulating across their seams and crevices. “The acme of their criminality—theirs and yours, my friends—is that you have all conspired to keep this mighty national treasure a secret. You have worked to steal from the Haitian people a true marvel of their cultural heritage. And that is clearly criminal. It cries out for your arrest and punishment.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “This is a true marvel of habiline endurance and creativity. It belongs to Adam’s people, not to Baby Doc or the fat-cat foreigners who’ll pour in here to see the place if its secret is betrayed. Is that what you want, lieutenant? Pizza Huts and neon signs and helicopter overflights—right here on Pointe d’Inagua?”

  “Mais non,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. He was very unhappy. His partner had shot Toussaint. He and the other macoutes had summarily arrested us for crimes that the lieutenant could not easily define, and now the poor man was beginning to regard these magnificently decorated catacombs as a potential threat to the beauty of this peninsula, the only finger on the island not already overlaid with Austin-Antilles coffee plantations and bean-washing facilities. Was it more patriotic to betray the secret of the caves to Baby Doc or to keep it from the government for the sake of the locals and the indigenous wildlife? An influx of new tourists would bolster Haiti’s economy, but it would also make fresh headaches for the security personnel charged with protecting the foreigners. Worse, leftist spies and agents provocateurs would use the influx as cover for their own nefarious activities. The ramifications of his dilemma weighed heavily on Bacalou.

  “What are you going to do?” Adam asked him.

  “For a man in this kind of work,” he said, “I have too much education. I am not ruthless enough.”

  “Philomé is,” Caroline said. (Thank God Philomé had no English.) “Maybe you should let him do a ‘defense of the self’ against all three of us.” She smiled at the volontaire to imply his name had not been taken in vain . . . even though it had.

  “Let me see more of this,” Bacalou said, ignoring Caroline’s barb. He marched into the rotunda at the end of the righthand corridor. We followed. Both Philomé and the lieutenant splashed their flashlight beams on the ceilings and walls of this vast chamber, and Adam used his battery lamp to supplement their feeble lights. For a long time, no one spoke. The macoutes were wonderstruck. Caroline slipped her arm around my waist and supported me because I was falling prey to dizziness, the peculiar sensory lag of one recently possessed.

  I shut my eyes. Agarou inhabited the darkness, as did the hyena-headed godling of the habilines, and a vast, expanding interior light that I recognized as the signature of the Mind Beyond Time that had brainstormed all three of these apparitions. What had I to do with Beulah Fork, Atlanta, or Montaraz’s frigid caves? In Caroline’s loving grasp, I was bound for a temporal union with the source of all being. There, freed from my time-bound prejudices, I would meet and embrace the dead—from spiritually inclined australopithecines to materialistic Bolsheviks. Agamemnon. Cleopatra. Francis of Assisi. Queen Elizabeth. Montezuma. Feodor Dostoevski. Jesse Owens. My parents. Elvis Lamar Teavers. Tiny Paul. Nancy Teavers. Craig Puddicombe. Toussaint. They’d all be there, frozen in the timeless medium of God’s compassionate, all-encompassing, and unifying Thought . . . .

  Adam was talking to Lieutenant Bacalou, explaining that this exquisite habiline cave art needed a champion. Why not the lieutenant himself? Surely, he could convince Philomé Bobo to forget what he’d seen here, or to pretend to forget. As for the pair of Tontons Macoutes still in Prix-des-Yeux, the lieutenant need
not tell them that he and Philomé had seen these caves. Instead, they’d found me wandering the mountainside or huddled in a rock shelter several hundred yards below the summit. To reveal the presence of the caves would unleash on this lovely peninsula the full apocalypse of development, exploitation, advertisement, and ruin. What good would that do anyone?

  “None,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “But it is my duty to do so. It need not happen as you say.”

  “But it will,” Adam said. “You and I, we both know that.” He spotlighted another incandescent historical mural, another sculpture. The hallucinatory rapture of protracted cave-crawling had overtaken us all, even the miserable lieutenant. He was beside himself with awe and indecision.

  “What must I do?” he asked.

  Adam intuited that a bribe might work. It would present Bacalou with a material rationale for (a) shirking the stringent dictates of duty and (b) surrendering to the call of his own natural decency. A bribe would preserve the man’s self-respect. Succinctly, then, Adam explained that Caroline and I would take a number of habiline paintings back to the States and sell them as the work of a Haitian naif by the name of Francoise Fauver. Bacalou could pretend to be Fauver. For this imposture, he would receive a commission on every painting sold. If the work of “Fauver” proved especially popular, Adam would see to it that Bacalou toured North America with an exhibition of “his” paintings. Further, to keep Philomé Bobo from revealing this ruse to anyone, Adam would finance Bobo’s complicity in it by outfitting him as Bacalou’s amanuensis and valet. Otherwise, Bacalou might have to kill Philomé or frame him as a Castroite bent on the establishment of a Marxist regime in Haiti. “But Philomé hates Castro,” Bacalou told us.