by Tim Wirkus
• • •
At their sister’s retelling of this memory, Anne lowered her head and Rex stared grimly at an empty corner of the light-filled room. I felt like an intruder, unsure whether to apologize or offer absolution. My eyes fixed on the elderly figure at the center of the room, and I chose to remain silent.
• • •
The three of us siblings were willing to lie low for a while and wait for things to blow over (said Madge), but Mother needed more dramatic relief. Nine days after decamping to the fazenda, Mother said she couldn’t take it anymore. She told us she’d booked a flight to Paris, where she would spend some time recuperating from the trauma of her separation from Dad. It was all too much, she said to us. All too terrible. We didn’t disagree.
And so, kissing each of us on the forehead, she wished us the best and said she didn’t know when she might return, but we would be in her thoughts and in her heart throughout our separation.
“Goodbye,” we said.
Mother’s departure left the three of us alone in Brazil, sans parents, and although we were all technically adults by this time, Mother and Dad’s departure left us feeling abandoned and afraid. Our entire lives, our family had served as the only context in which we could truly make sense of ourselves. Ultimately, we were not Americans, not Brazilians, not musicians, artists, or poets. First and foremost, we were the Coopers, whatever that signified, and we drew strength and purpose from that intimate fellowship. For decades, our family had withstood the devastating powers of entropy, huddling doggedly together as the forces of chaos and decay swirled around us. Now, those forces had found a way in, sundering us into disorderly, vulnerable little pieces. All that awaited us now was further chaos, further decay.
The day after Mother left for Paris, the three of us found ourselves idling listlessly in the library of the great fazenda, just as we had on so many bored Saturday mornings as children—Anne lazily scratching the belly of the latest farm dog she’d informally adopted, Rex sprawled out on the room’s magnificent Persian rug, clutching my guitar with far less care than I would have preferred, mindlessly strumming the three chords he’d once taken the time to learn, and me, leafing through the oversized and beautifully illustrated pages of The Guide to the Birds of Southeastern Brazil, a book I’d loved as a girl. I don’t remember which of us first suggested, half jokingly, that we should hold a wake for our family, but after batting the idea around with increasing seriousness, we decided we should hold a wake, that very night. We could gather right here in the library to contemplate the shattered body of our family, commemorating what it once was and would never be again.
We began preparations immediately. Anne picked a bouquet of flowers from the garden outside the kitchen. Rex cadged a bottle of bourbon from Dad’s private store, which he’d no longer be needing, anyway. And I selected a dozen or so records to lend the proceedings an appropriate aural atmosphere: Brahms’s Requiem, of course, as well as Fauré’s; some Britten in there too, I believe, though I can’t remember what else. Then we all exhumed our most somber evening clothes from the backs of our wardrobes and, now more suitably attired, reconvened in the library just as the sun went down.
Drinks in hand, the stately strains of the Selig sind die Toten movement filling the air, we stood stiffly in our mourningwear around the antique Norwegian sea chest that we’d dragged over from the sunroom to serve as the casket for our family’s imagined remains. After a few minutes spent inhabiting this solemn tableau, however, we recognized that we were going about the thing all wrong. We’d convened the wake semi-ironically, but after a few glasses of bourbon, we were willing to admit that we needed a more potent ceremony through which to channel our loss. So we decided to regroup.
I exchanged the Brahms for some Leonard Cohen. Rex doffed his jacket and tie. And Anne and I traded our gowns for a kimono and a festive party frock, respectively. Sitting cross-legged in a circle on the library rug, we took stock of our pharmacological assets. I had a shampoo bottle full of pep pills that I kept on hand for late-night club gigs, Anne had a half-empty dime bag and a few off-brand Quaaludes, and Rex had nine bars of blond Moroccan hash.
Our inventory impressed me, and I said as much to Rex and Anne, who nodded in agreement. The room had grown dark, but rather than switch on any of the room’s many lamps, we lit six votive candles and placed them at the center of our circle. With nothing beneath them, they dripped translucent white wax directly onto the ornately patterned rug, but by that point, none of us cared.
I said, “The problem with a wake is, it’s a gesture of defeat, an acknowledgment that death has won the day.”
My siblings’ faces, eerily illuminated by the flickering candles, looked somberly back at me. I think we’d forgotten that no one had actually died.
“But we don’t have to concede to death tonight,” I said. “There are other rituals we might explore.”
A tremor of excitement ran through my body, and I pulled my kimono tighter, half worried that my body would fly into pieces from the moment’s dark thrill. I told my siblings that I’d been reading a lot lately about the ancient Greek mystery cults. Not the Dionysians so much, with their ostentatious bacchanalia, but the Eleusinians, whose clandestine, drug-fueled rites celebrated—and some say harnessed—the power of Persephone’s ascent from the underworld.
“What I’m saying,” I said, “is that we don’t have to just roll over and accept entropy as some kind of unstoppable universal force. If we perform the proper rituals, if we utter the ancient incantations and write the necessary symbols in the soft clay of our creation’s forehead—”
I was wildly muddling my mystical traditions now, the Golem of Prague having lumbered its way into my vision of classical mystery rites. Rex and Anne nodded along, their eyes glowing in the dim room.
“If we harness these powers,” I said, “we can reverse entropy. We can summon life from death.” I looked from Rex to Anne, willing them through my gaze to feel the weight of this sentiment. “We can become immortal.”
I should note that the bourbon was gone by that point, and we’d set to work on the first of Rex’s nine bars of hash.
“But how will we do it?” said Anne, leaning forward.
Her question opened up a silence in the dimly lit room.
“Irena Sertôrian,” said Rex after a few moments. “We’ll bring her to life.”
As soon as Rex spoke those words, I knew that he was right. Thrilled, I reached out and grabbed each sibling by the hand.
“Yes,” I said. “Precisely. We’ll create a body for our ethereal space captain, one she can inhabit for millennia to come. Rather than clay, though, or a patchwork cadaver, we’ll use paper and ink for our raw material. What we’ll do . . .” I paused to look meaningfully into each sibling’s eyes. “What we’ll do is, we’ll write a new book of scripture,” I said. “A sacred text to rival the Bible or the I Ching.”
Rex jumped to his feet “Yes!” he said. “Exactly. Exactly!”
Pushing a swatch of hair back from his forehead, he said that the problem with the stories we’d written up to that point was their evanescent medium; magazines just didn’t last. They were made to be thrown away, and with them, the words that constituted Irena Sertôrian’s being. A whole book, on the other hand, especially if we constructed it in the proper manner, would stand through the ages, holding firm against the winds and rain of indifference and death. There was also the matter of Dad’s betrayal—of both us and our adopted country—and though none of us was willing to say as much, I think we all hoped that such a book could somehow atone for everything our father had done.
We were all giggling by this point, a bit edgily, it must be admitted—equal parts delighted and frightened by our own audacity. We had to catch hold of this feeling, though, before it slipped through our fingers, so I kept talking, interrupting Rex to agree with him that during all these years we’d been over-focu
sed on Salgado-MacKenzie when the true power lay much, much deeper than that, in the fictional creation of our fictional creation—the dream within the dream. Irena Sertôrian was the answer; Irena Sertôrian in all her mystical glory. We would call her forth, imbibe her everlasting power.
With a purpose in place, then, we relocated to Dad’s old study, the site of Salgado-MacKenzie’s first birth. We hadn’t written a story there since the first one, and the keys of the typewriter felt, to my eager fingers, replete with untapped power.
We spent most of that first night composing a wild précis of what our monumental text would contain. At first all we did was free-associate, committing every concept that left our mouths to the creamy bond paper our father had stocked by the ream. A book of futuristic spells synthesized from centuries of global witchcraft traditions, for instance, or a handwritten epic inked with a pot of our commingled blood. I remember a madcap account of Sertôrian’s childhood on Mars that eschewed any letters that appeared in her name—U was the only vowel we could use! No idea was too outrageous, but as the hastily typewritten pages accumulated, they failed to generate any accompanying transcendence.
Our enthusiasm momentarily flagged.
“What do we know about Sertôrian anyway?” asked Anne, perched feet up on the cracked leather club chair in the corner of Dad’s office. She’d been manically pacing the room for the past hour, and her sky-blue frock was now soaked through at the armpits, her face damp with sweat.
Lying on the floor, a bronze letter opener balanced on his forehead, Rex rattled off a handful of biographical details from the dozens of stories we’d written.
“That’s not what I mean,” said Anne, drumming her fingers on her raised knees. “I guess what I’m really asking is how we know what we know about Sertôrian.”
This stumped Rex, and me too, at first. Trying to think, I rested my head against the cool metal casing of the typewriter.
“We don’t know anything about Irena Sertôrian,” I said after a moment. “The only person who does is Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. We don’t have anything more than what he’s written.”
“Right,” said Rex, catching on. “So if we want a new perspective on Sertôrian, we need to figure out what other people have written about her. Or will have written about her, I suppose. In the future.”
He was close but not quite there. Closing my eyes, I could feel the answer barely tickling my fingertips, like a silk scarf snatched away by the wind on a stormy day. Then, with a fleet mental leap forward I said, “Almost. We don’t need to figure out what these people will write. Salgado-MacKenzie needs to figure it out.”
I explained that if we wanted to draw more fully on the latent potential of our beloved space captain, we needed to maintain, or even enhance, Sertôrian’s embedded nature, as this was the essence of our relationship to her. The only way in, after all, was further out.
We were all on such a sympathetic high that this all made as much sense to Rex and Anne as it did to me. We’d discovered the key that fit the metaphysical lock of our current predicaments—the frustrated aimlessness of young adulthood, the crimes of our father, the dissolution of our family—and just like that, we all knew exactly what the project needed to look like.
Assuming the persona of Salgado-MacKenzie, we would peer into the future at the mesmerizing galactic religion that would spring up around Sertôrian in the centuries after her death. We would conjure the heartfelt testaments of her not-yet-existent devotees. Then, as far-seeing amanuenses, we would copy down their psalms and mystic visions, their exegeses and spiritual biographies, their rants and their ecstasies. Our book would not be a novel so much as a single-volume library, its page count running into the thousands.
The practical question arose at this point of how long it might take us to compose such a work. After running the numbers on an unused page of one of her sketch pads, Anne informed us that if we wrote five thousand words a day—and with our powers combined, we could certainly do so—we would have a million-word novel in under a year, thousands and thousands of pages that would serve as a sturdy receptacle for the powerful as-yet-unembodied spirit of Irena Sertôrian.
We began work immediately, then, on the first chapter—or rather, the first book—in our quasi-boundless single-volume library, the light of dawn already leaking into our father’s office. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Sister Úrsula—that was our unofficial name for that first entry. It’s an account written some twelve hundred years after the death of Captain Irena Sertôrian: As the galaxy descends into political chaos, the narrator—a historian-nun—examines a troubling episode from the life of Sertôrian as the nun’s own life is imperiled by the approach of hostile armed forces. As good a place as any to begin, we supposed.
With the help of the pep pills and the Moroccan hash, composition of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Sister Úrsula moved quickly. We worked day and night, sleeping in shifts and eating much more sporadically than is generally advisable. Somehow we maintained the fervor of that first night throughout the whole process, and in six weeks, we had finished a two-hundred-page draft, fast work for us, but if it was any indication of what our pace might be on the dozens of narratives we had yet to write, our project would take at least twice as long as we’d originally estimated. Discouraging as that was, what ultimately killed our novel was the unfortunate decision we made one morning to read—while sober—what we’d spent the previous drug-fueled weeks writing.
Sitting in a row at the dining room table, we passed each page of the manuscript around, from me to Rex to Anne, until we’d read the whole thing. It took us four hours, with no snacks or bathroom breaks, and when Anne set the last page facedown on the half ream of paper to her right, we all looked at each other in grim dismay.
It wasn’t that the story was bad, per se. It was fine—maybe even pretty good. The real problem was that it seemed so ordinary. We’d hoped that the outlandish circumstances of the story’s conception and composition would have imbued it with some otherworldly splendor, some quality that would make up for everything Dad had done, that would guarantee the book’s place in the canon of world religions until the end of time. But this stack of paper was, tragically, just another story, different perhaps from Salgado-MacKenzie’s other work, but in no way transcendent.
Rex said, “That’s it then.”
And I said, “Looks like it.”
We were done with Salgado-MacKenzie. He’d failed us or we’d failed him, but in either case, he would never finish his Sertôrial book of scripture, would never even write another story.
We watched a hummingbird flit past the flowering hibiscus outside the dining room. Anne said, “I meant to tell you this before now, but I’m going home tomorrow.” Although Anne had lived in Idaho more briefly than any of us, it had always been her home—she’d felt its pull in ways that Rex and I never would. She explained that she’d been in touch with Dad, that he was back in Lodgepole, and that she’d decided that was where she wanted to be. It was her chance to make a clean break from the art world, a world that had never held much interest for her and that she’d occupied for as long as she had primarily to appease Mother.
• • •
Madge paused, looking at the now elderly Anne, who turned away with a grimace.
• • •
And so continued the sad dissolution of our remarkable family (said Madge). In light of this development, I decided it didn’t make much sense for me to stick around either. I started gigging at nightclubs up and down the coast, never letting on to my fellow musicians as we shared flea-ridden motel rooms and late-night meals at dingy lanchonetes that this lifestyle was a choice for me, that I had recourse to an immense family fortune that would grant me access to all the luxury I desired as soon as I grew weary of life on the road.
Rex was the only one who stayed in São Paulo, the only one of us who tried to keep Salgado-MacKenzie from expiring completely.
We had a whole back catalog of stories that nobody had picked up the first time we’d submitted them, and so, over the years, Rex kept submitting them, though only a few intrepid stories made it into print. I believe he did the same with The Infinite Future, sending queries to every press in the country that had ever published science fiction. On the rare occasions that an editor showed interest, Rex would send them The Agony and the Ecstasy of Sister Úrsula, supplemented for the sake of volume with a handful of whatever assortment of stories remained unpublished at the time.
• • •
Madge raised her bony shoulders in a melancholy shrug before continuing.
“And, as I’m sure you’re aware, Sérgio, the novel was never published.”
As Madge spoke my name, I realized I’d been listening to her account with an almost disembodied attentiveness, my awareness of myself and my own body having dissolved for a time into the sound of her rich and creaky voice. I took quick stock of myself in that still, light-flooded room, and a disorienting weariness engulfed me. Every part of me was tired, I realized: my mind, my body, my soul. I’d traveled so many miles in so few days—the flight from São Paulo, the drive from California to St. George to Salt Lake to Fremont Creek, and then, this morning, the ascent from Lodgepole to the top of this mountain. Humans, I believe, are not psychically equipped to cover so much distance in so little time, and I had to struggle to remember why I was there, what my objective had been in traveling so far.
