(Examples: —Judaism & the minutiae of kashrut rules—holiness is in the details
—Post-resurrection Christianity, sifting the life of Jesus for symbols and unseen prophecies
—Modern examples-Heaven's Gate, etc.)
To the apocalyptist, who literally awaits the Great Uncovering, all coincidence is synchronicity, all accident revelation.
(note: intro ideas of archetypal/depth psych?? Examples in therapeutic situations, or Biblical dream interp???))
… It is the same logic one finds in the interpretation of dreams, where all events are related, where enlightenment comes with the understandings of links and the symbols thrust up from the unconscious.
What would seem to most of us a coincidence of minor importance, to the searching mind becomes a road sign to holiness. The unpredictability of these minds makes it very difficult to forecast where Meaning will be found.
If we wish to understand, we must contrive to stand over this person and look over his (her) shoulder, listening to his inner dialogue and duplicating his close scrutiny of his surroundings, before we can even begin to predict his interpretation of events, his understanding of portents. Like the chemist who knows what reagent will set off a certain reaction in his beaker-and even then, the being human individuals rather than simple chemicals, the variables are great, and it is easy to be very wrong.
From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly
The smell of food in the dining hall filled Ana with nausea, but she craved something hot to drink. She took a mug and filled it from the big urn, added sugar, and took it to her corner, where she cupped her hands around it as if the tiny heat it gave off would drive away the coldness of her bones. Three mugs later her thirst was slaked but she was still shivering in the warmth of the dining hall.
Then she looked up and saw Dulcie, and one glance at the child's expression cut her shivering off. Dulcie needed her; there was no time for weakness.
"Hello, Dulcinea," she said gently. "How's my squire this evening?"
The child shrugged, a motion so like her brother that Ana wanted to reach out and pull Dulcie to her, burying that sad, remote little face in her embrace. Instead, she put her mug down on the table and stood up, casually holding out her hand to the girl.
"Why don't you show me your room, Dulcie? Then I'll show you where mine is. Sorry my hand's so rough and covered with Band-Aids—I spent the afternoon digging and I got a bunch of blisters. I shouldn't call them Band-Aids, though, should I? Here they're sticking plasters. I wonder why they call them plasters? Plaster is that white stuff they cover walls with, that turns really hard and you can paint it. You remember that gray mud that Tom and Danny were using back in Arizona, that would get big blobs in their hair and when they came to meals they'd look really funny? Oh my little sweetheart, what's the matter?"
Dulcie had drifted to a halt halfway up the stairs and was now just standing, one hand limp in Ana's, her shoulders drooping and her head down. She was crying. Ana sat down on the upper step and pulled Dulcie to her. The child was pliable but unresponsive, weeping as if she were too tired and dispirited to do anything else. Ana crooned wordlessly and rocked her, oblivious to the people coming and going on the stairway, aware only of the small, warm head of hair tucked under her chin, and the slack hopelessness of this young body, and eventually the shuddering intake of breath as the tears tapered off. When the tears ended, some of Ana's own hopelessness seemed to have worked itself out as well.
"Where is your room, Dulcie?" she asked. The child stood without speaking, and they continued up the stairs and down the hallway, Ana's hand resting on the back of Dulcie's neck. Dulcie chose a door and Ana followed her in. She picked up the child and sat her down on the bed with the teddy bear from the pillow, and then sat next to her. Dulcie leaned into Ana's arm.
"What's wrong?" she asked the child again.
"I want to go home."
"Home to Arizona? To where Steven is? Or home—?" Where was the child's home, anyway?
"To Steven."
"Why are you unhappy here? Jason's here."
"No."
"He isn't?" Ana looked quickly around the room: shoes in the corner, a familiar plaid shirt over a chair, books and papers on the desk—all reassuring signs that a teenager lived there.
"He's always doing things. Talking to Her, or That Man."
"Jonas, you mean? And who's 'Her'?"
" The girl." Dulcie's voice vibrated with disgust.
Ah. "Do you mean Dierdre?" Dulcie nodded. "Dulcie, listen to me. Jason loves you. He's just excited to be in a new place, and it's hard for him to keep his mind on things. I'll have a talk with him, okay? Ask him to settle down a little?"
Dulcie nodded, then said, "But I still want to go home."
Ana thought for a minute and decided it was best not to bring That Man into it at all, but, rather, to dwell on the positive side. "There are some nice things here. Have you seen the barn with the horses? And there's lots of kids."
"I can't understand them."
"Their accents, you mean?"
"They talk funny. Like on TV."
"You know, I'll bet they think you talk funny like TV, too. There's a lot of American shows on English television." Not that the Change kids saw much TV, come to think of it, but never mind. "Come on, let's go see the horses go to bed."
Ana spent the next hour coaxing and amusing the child out of her feeling of abandonment. Dulcie found the horses beautiful, the lambs amusing, the cats still at the kitchen door, and the voices around her not quite as unintelligible as she had thought. At the end of their tour they went to see Ana's room. Ana let her look around, bounce on her bed, and paw through her meager belongings, and then told the child that she could come to visit anytime she wanted.
They talked for a while about church mice and other important matters, and then Ana took Dulcie down a set of stairs and along the long corridor and around a corner to the room the child shared with her brother. Jason leapt out of his chair at their entrance, looking worried and angry, but before he could berate Dulcie for disappearing, Ana broke in.
"Oh, Jason, there you are. Sorry I didn't leave you a note to tell you I'd taken Dulcie down to see the animals in the barn, I should have realized you'd wonder where she was. Dulcie, maybe you should pop in and have a bath after petting all those horses and playing with the cats. Need a hand?"
After the child was dispatched to the bathroom down the hall, Ana lingered to talk with Jason about school and work and how he had spent his day. His dark eyes were alive with enthusiasm and she enjoyed the rare—the formerly rare—sight of Jason Delgado smiling, twice. His animation and willingness to talk to her at length about ordinary things were disorienting but steadying, and as enormously comforting as the physical contact with his sister had been earlier.
"You know," she told him gently when he paused to draw breath, "Dulcie seemed kind of lonely and a little upset tonight. You've been busy, and she was feeling left out. Though I'm glad you're enjoying it here."
"It's all right," he said, adding, "I like some of the people."
"You're going to miss the basketball," she said.
"Season's over anyway."
"Tomorrow after lunch, let's get together and look at what you and the others need to do to finish the school year. Dov and I brought the final exams with us" (a thousand years ago, it seemed) "so maybe you could take them early and have the summer ahead of you."
"You don't think we'll be going home before school's out, then?"
"Doesn't sound like it to me. Why, did Steven say you were?"
"Nobody said anything," he said with a wry grimace. "Just 'get on the plane.' I didn't even know we had passports."
She did not tell him that it was standard procedure at Change for new members to apply for passports, or whenever possible for minors to have the application made for them. International experiences (carefully monitored, of course) were used as a selling point by the school.
"Well, I
hope you get to see something of the country while you're here." Dulcie was making final splashing noises down the hall. "Tomorrow is our half day, you know that?" Once a week, in addition to Sundays, the Change residents had an afternoon free. Thursday was theirs. "After the school meeting, assuming I'm free, I'd like to take you two for a walk. I have a little surprise for you. You personally, I mean."
Jason nodded, concealing his interest well, and went to supervise the nightgowning of his sister. Ana waited to give Dulcie a good night kiss, and then she returned to her room. She had intended to join the evening meditation, now that Jonas had acknowledged her existence, but she felt weary and distant, and when she had to make an effort to exchange a few simple words with her next-door neighbor, she knew she could not bear the entire gathered community. She closed her door, jammed the chair under the knob, tugged the curtains as closed as they would go, and sat on the hard bed, her skin crawling with tiredness and a cold that did not come from the soft night. Too tired even for sleep, her body twitching with the day's tensions, she took out her diary and got to work.
She sat on her narrow bed with the covers pulled up to her chest, and she wrote. It began as a straightforward report like any of those she had submitted to Glen in the past, detailed and analytical, complete with maps and diagrams, but within a page or two it began to get away from her. Speculations began to intrude: her personal reactions became a necessary part of the explanations. There was, in truth, very little about this case that was straightforward, and the attempt to reduce it to analysis and point out the logical progress of her thoughts only served to make the lack of logic more obvious and her own position more tenuous, even desperate. As she wrote, she was aware of how personal she was becoming, how she was revealing not her competence as a trained investigator, but her feelings—claustrophobia and grinding anxiety, the upwelling of fears and memories, the sensation of impotence. (What is the female equivalent of impotence, Glen? she found herself writing. Hysteria? Well, I am both impotent and hysterical.) What she wrote was like nothing she had ever given Glen before, presenting details of her self and her life that she had never given anyone, not since Aaron had died, but here she was, her hand shaping letters that described just what Abby's face had looked like in death and how that vision kept intruding itself on her current choices and decisions. Even while she wrote, she was appalled at the intimacy of the document, fully aware that Glen would have no choice but to set it before countless others, but unable to stop herself from writing. The sensation of open communication was a lifeline to sanity, the words a catharsis that reached down to her bones. She told herself that she would destroy it when she finished, that she could write a second, expurgated version for Glen, but she knew she would not.
Lights-out came and an officious passerby tapped at her door, so she turned out her lamp and opened the curtains to write by the light of the compound floodlights. She wrote until she had it all down, up to the point of what she planned to do next, and as she was thinking about that she fell asleep.
She woke some hours later, her diary jabbing her cheek and the floodlight shining in her eyes. Her bladder was also protesting at the number of cups of tea she had drunk, so she removed the chair from under the doorknob and went down the hall to use the toilet and brush her teeth. When she got back to her room, she saw the diary lying openly on the pillow, and she closed the door and cautiously tore out the incriminating pages. The only place she could think to hide them was inside the sole of her Chinese slippers; she folded the pages over and over and pushed the long rectangle in between the cloth lining and the sole. Not ideal, but as a temporary hiding place, as good as she could do.
She put her head back onto the pillow, and was asleep.
Ana's day began two hours later, long before the birds had begun their dawn chorus, when her bedroom door was flung open and a man's voice began talking at her. She went from deep sleep to heart-pounding panic in a split second, whirling around in the tangling covers and bruising her elbow on the wall before she was upright and blinking at the door. It was Jonas.
"What?" she croaked.
"What is wrong with you? I said I'm not going to need you during the day, I'm working on some calculations, but I may want you tonight. Be available. Listen for my call. You know how to get there?"
She sat up more fully, scratched her scalp to encourage brain activity, and said, her sarcasm half swallowed up by a yawn, "I think I can find it again, Jonas."
He stepped back and was gone. After a minute she climbed out of bed and closed the door. The sarcasm that she had let slip was not a good sign, but she was, after all, fast asleep, and it was annoying to be credited with barely enough brains to walk downstairs to the Bear's den.
Her eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. After a moment, she took it up and turned to a clean page.
Glen—I fully intend to watch my step, take care, and all the rest. For the first time in many long years I can honestly say that I do not want to die. Realistically, though, things happen. You and I both know that. We"ve known it since the day you planted your finger on the doorbell of my apartment fifteen years ago.
I should have died eighteen years ago with my husband and daughter. I did not. I have finally come to accept that, thanks in no small part to you, and to think that maybe the years between my should-have death and my actual one have been good for something. God's will is not a phrase I care to use, but there is a fate, Glen—a divinity, as Shakespeare calls it—and it does shape our ends.
My fate was to meet Jason and Dulcie. If it brings my end, if a thing happens to me in the next week or two, it will have been worth it. All I ask is that they be kept safe.
I ask it of God, and I ask it of you. I've never asked you for anything, Glen, not even an explanation. I am asking this. Keep those two children safe for me.
—Anne
She tore out the page and folded it up, and was beginning to slip it into the shoe, when she paused to run a hand over the rubbery skin of her face, then smoothed out the page and took up her pen again.
P.S. Sorry about the maudlin sentiments—I haven't slept much recently and my brain is a bit fried. If I can't e-mail this to you in the next two days, I'll find the village post office or a nice friendly helmeted constable riding his wide-tired bicycle down a country lane and send it to you that way. Not to carp, Glen, but you better hurry. There's not a lot of time here.
P.P.S. Oh, and Glen? I hope you're planning to invite me to your wedding. If you don't, I plan to turn up anyway and really embarrass you.
—A
She smiled as she folded the page into the slipper. As she set off in the direction of the early-morning coffeepot, she detoured to take her revenge on Jonas's followers by yanking the pull chain on the antique and incredibly noisy toilet.
She spent the morning happily and mindlessly scrubbing floors, and after lunch joined Jason and two other American students for a brief but productive meeting with Dov and one of the other teachers. Jason, blase as he had been, found it difficult to take his eyes off the lumpy sack she had brought into the room.
After the meeting they gathered up Dulcie from the kindergarten room (where she sat listening carefully to a wildly chattering friend) and Ana led them out through the kitchen and across the yard to a flat, paved area that was used to park the farm tractor during the rainy season. She had spent the hour before breakfast sweeping away the dirt and hanging up a circle she wove from a roll of baling wire. Jason stood with his hands on his hips, puzzling out the odd markings, and when he turned and Ana bounced the ball off the rough concrete and into his hands, a look of pure, uncontained pleasure lit up his face. He dribbled the ball a few times to get the feel of the surface, then circled around, took three fast steps, and shot it neatly through the lopsided hoop.
"I thought they didn't play basketball here," he said.
"Does that look like a regulation hoop? They don't—well, not many of them. I brought the ball with me."
That stoppe
d him short. "You brought the ball in your—oh. Duh. You let the air out first."
"I thought I was going to have to blow it up with my mouth like a balloon. Sara found me an old pump in the tool shed."
So she and Jason and little Dulcie played basketball, undisturbed and undistracted by the adults and children who came to investigate the odd noises. She blocked him, he dodged her, and Dulcie ran after them both, shrieking in joy. Twice Jason lifted his sister up so she could dunk the ball down through the makeshift and increasingly asymmetrical hoop. The third time Dulcie dunked it, the hoop came down. Dulcie felt terrible, but Jason only laughed.
Ana retrieved the mashed hoop. "I think this design needs some work," she said, putting it into the sack with the ball. "But now, I want to take you two for a walk."
She took a smaller sack out of the lumpy one, threaded the handles up over her shoulder, plunked obedient hats on all three heads, and led the two children down the road to the east of the house. The sparking air was rich with the fragrances of mint (from Dulcie, whose class had worked in the herb garden) and roses, lavender and cut grass, and the clean smell of sweat from the boy at her side.
The abbey was not quite as impressive when approached from the direction of cultivated land, but it was still a place of calm loveliness, even to a five-year-old child and a fourteen-year-old boy.
"It used to be a church," she told them. "Four hundred years ago it was part of a monastery; you can see the outline of the walls. That lumpy ground over there was probably the monastery itself, where the monks lived and worked."
They walked up and down, investigating the vague shapes beneath the turf, and then went into the space between the abbey walls and up to where the altar stone peeped out of the grass. There she laid out her picnic of cheese sandwiches and juice and three large and somewhat travel-worn cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookies that she had bought at the airport in Phoenix. She gave them each a packet of broken pieces, keeping for herself the one that had been completely pulverized.
The Birth of a new moon Page 36
