A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  Talk of being picked up was troubling to Pablo. As he watched the old man’s vacant face, cadaverous even in the firelight, his leg began to hurt and he felt cold. Things were wrong, he thought. Things were wiggy.

  Egan was drinking now; he sat with his head lowered, talking softly to himself.

  “Again I couldn’t see,” Pablo heard him say. “Could it be that because there was no concupiscence I was …” The priest’s thin voice trailed off.

  Pablo sat up.

  “Hey, man, you said you could help me out. You said you’d give me a place to crash. You said you had medicine. Now I’m sick, you understand me?”

  “The boat,” the old man said, “you fought on the boat. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Never mind the fuckin’ boat,” Pablo said. The fear that had been hovering in the surrounding darkness touched him with its feathers. The place was wiggy. There were killers and the old man was stoned mad. He was one of those people—whatever you wanted they had it, but jack shit was what they had. It was a turned-around place, a bad place. Maybe not a true place at all.

  “Something’s going on, Pablo,” the priest said. “Something to do with the place we’re in.”

  Pablo’s throat was dry as sand; he opened his mouth to breathe.

  “What do you mean?” He knew that the pills had started to poison him at last. And people had better beware then and they had better not try to turn him around.

  “Did you look at the stones?”

  Pablo realized he meant the inscribed upright slabs in the center of the clearing.

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Did you examine them? Did you read them?”

  “It was dark. Anyway, how’m I gonna read that craziness?”

  “The stones tell about human sacrifice. All the glyphs and all the figures here are about that and nothing else.”

  “Human sacrifice,” Pablo said.

  “A man came here once from the national museum. They took rubbings of those stones and they picked up everything that could be moved. They said it was for the museum’s collection but of course it was for the President’s family to sell. They picked up bone carvings and shards with graffiti on them. The man said he thought the graffiti might tell him something about everyday life here long ago, about how people went about life. But it turned out that he was wrong, it turned out that every single stroke represented human sacrifice—even the graffiti. It was as though there was no everyday life. Only sacrifice.”

  Tabor looked at him blankly.

  “You understand, Pablo? There’s a charge on the place. It draws people like Weitling and people like you. The field of blood. The place of the skull. They played the ball game here, you know.” The old priest frowned and shook his head. “Can that be? A temple? A temple of the demiurge?”

  Pablo felt as though the short hairs on the back of his neck were on end. He opened his mouth to breathe. “The ball game,” he repeated.

  “But why not?” Egan asked. “Whatever life is, it isn’t rational. Signs and wonders, eh?”

  “Now look,” Pablo said, “you’re tryin’ to turn me around.” Something like the taste of an old bad dream stirred under Pablo’s memory. Place of the skull. “What happened on that boat, man, that was the purest case of self-defense you could want. Those people were bad, man, they were wanting to kill me. I’m just lucky I’m alive.”

  The old man’s eyes had come to life. He pursed his lips and thumped Pablo on the chest.

  “Something’s going on, Pablo. Always. Something taking its course.”

  “I don’t …” Pablo began. “I don’t …”

  “A process.” Egan took a deep breath, held it and released it in a hoarse whisper. “Measureless.”

  I’m in such trouble now, Pablo thought, I might as well be dead. He thought of mornings in the piney woods, of going for quail. But he had shot his dogs.

  “Imagine it,” Egan said. “This colossal immanent force and it’s a gleam in the muck. Layer upon layer of intention, consciousness. Measureless will. Unseen and encompassing everything.”

  “Could I have some of your rum, bro?” Pablo asked. “See, I don’t feel good.” When Egan did not respond, he reached over and took it.

  “It’s woven in,” Egan said. “Hiding in the universe. Everywhere and yet never anywhere. Always present and never available.” Father Egan’s bright gaze fell upon Tabor. He appeared not to recognize him. Yet he called him by name. “Pablo,” he said, “what a mystery, eh?”

  “No,” Pablo said, “no, I don’t feel so good and that’s the truth. I don’t like the way I feel.”

  “It’s here after all, marking a passage, setting traps. Like insect traps among the leaves. For butterflies. We never find it. Does it ever find us?”

  “It’s my leg that’s hurting,” Pablo said. “I think it might be pretty bad.” He reached with difficulty into the pockets of his jeans. “See, all I got is these pain pills and I gotta have more.” He held up the little glass bottle for Egan’s inspection. “And even aspirin, if I had that, see.”

  “Telling the dancer from dance, Pablo. That’s what the poem’s about, you know. That’s the problem.”

  “You don’t even give a shit,” Pablo said bitterly.

  “But I do,” Egan said cheerfully, not looking at Pablo. “Now, listen. A friend of mine, a Maryknoll chap, lived fifty years in Africa. He told me they had a moth there that lived in colonies. The colonies lived in the branches of a certain kind of tree, they would settle on a branch and there they would form a leaf and flower pattern unknown to nature. It was totally their own. Now that’s marvelous, isn’t it? But that’s not the half. If you shook the branch, the moths would fly away. Then in minutes they’d settle down again and form the same leaf and flower. Hundreds, maybe thousands of moths, every one in its exact place. Each moth an exact part of the whole.” He turned toward Pablo. “A jigsaw.”

  Desperate, Tabor rolled his eyes and ground his teeth.

  “I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about, you crazy old bastard. You said you’d help me out.”

  Egan patted Tabor’s forearm.

  “Inconceivable,” he said. “Credo quia absurdum.”

  Pablo was tired of anger. His anxiety was dissolving into a gloom like that of the grave. He would have to take more speed and suffer the loss of rest, risk the terrors at the bottom of the pill bottle. There was rum and that might help. He felt as though he were cringing behind his own eyes.

  “Shining,” Egan said. “Shook foil.”

  Pablo put the pill in his mouth and tried to swallow it. His mouth seemed to be stuffed with dry straw; the stalks hurt his throat. When he closed his eyes there were small whirling lights. The Place of the Skull. I am the drug, he thought.

  “Why are You so unavailable?” Egan sang to the forest. “Why must it be so?”

  “Who you talking to?” Pablo demanded.

  Egan gave him a sad, reassuring smile. Both of them waited, as though for an answer.

  “Pity the Weitlings of the world, Pablo. They’re victims of things as they are. Some chemical in the blood, a shortage of sugar in the brain cells and they get the process whole. What they see is real enough, it’s so overwhelming it must seem like God to them. You can’t look on what they see and not run mad.” He turned in the direction Weitling had gone, watched for a moment and then faced the fire again. “They’ve been elected. Priests, because they’ve seen it, poor bastards. That’s what Satan is, Pablo. Satan is the way things are. Remember Mephistopheles, eh? ‘Why this is hell nor are we out of it.’ ”

  Pablo closed his eyes and shivered.

  “We say they’re deluded but reality’s their problem. Unlike you and me, they see it plain—no breakdown, no story material to go with it, so they have to make up their own story. It burns out their minds and they have to call it revelation. Primitive association, sympathetic magic—whatever comes to hand. You know how it is, boy, everybody has to make suffering mean s
omething. The other guy’s firstborn, paschal lambs, sacrifice. But that’s not revelation—not by a long shot. Revelation is something else.” Egan was silent for a moment, then he opened his mouth as though he were about to speak.

  Pablo was at the point of screaming. “What is it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “It’s all right, Pablo, do you see? That’s what it comes to. Everything is all right. In spite of appearances. There’s no other conclusion.”

  “I don’t know who you people are,” Pablo said despairingly, “but you all are crazy. I thought you could help me out. I got no business in this freak show.”

  “Pablo, listen, it’s all right. It’s all right for you too. We’ll take care of you. You’re among friends.”

  The old man’s eyes gave him no peace. He searched the field of vision for escape, a token of reason, a clue, the light of dawn. Things overcame him.

  “Hey,” he asked the priest, “what did you say this was a temple of?”

  Egan looked blank for a moment.

  “Oh. Oh, the demiurge. A kind of metaphor. At least I think so but who knows, eh? Another theological system.” He laughed to himself.

  Pablo felt the hairs on his neck rise.

  “You said … about Satan. Didn’t you say about Satan?”

  “Same sort of thing.”

  “Jesus,” Pablo said. His heart beat faster.

  “These systems, Pablo … words for the process. It’s what it comes down to that matters.”

  Pablo Tabor looked hard into the shadows. A numbing excitement thickened his blood.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “I’m in this. Me. I am.”

  “Of course,” Egan said.

  “Something is going on here,” Pablo said breathlessly. “You’re right, old man. Something far out and special. Things are going on here.”

  “Yes indeed,” the priest told him. “You can feel it now, can’t you?”

  Pablo trembled, fixed between elation and terror.

  “I do feel it,” he declared, nodding furiously. “Fuckin’-A.”

  “It’s the world moving in time,” Father Egan explained to him. “One gets these little epiphenomenal jolts. Petty spookery in a way. But underneath it all—there is something.” He clapped Pablo lightly on the shoulder. “It’s in the moment. Take it in your hands, my boy.”

  Tabor stared wide-eyed into the fire. In the dancing flames he saw dragons, winged horses, a choir of demiurges and such things.

  “It was meant to be,” he said in a choked voice. “It was all meant to be like this.” He put his hand to his face and shook his head. He felt happy.

  “This is what I came down here for,” Pablo told Father Egan. “This is how come I went over the hill. It was all leading up to this, see? There was a goddamn planned purpose to everything.” He thought of the diamond in his pocket and touched it.

  “Surely,” Father Egan said.

  “When I shot those dogs,” Pablo explained raptly, “I started this whole thing going. I was headed here from that time.”

  “You were trying to get back, Pablo. Like everyone.”

  “Then I came down, see. I got to the Cloud. I was learning all the time but I didn’t know it then.”

  Father Egan nodded.

  Dizzy with recognition, Pablo stared at him in wonder.

  “St. Joost, I met this old Jew. He was dying right in front of me. He was telling me stuff I couldn’t understand, but I understand it now. He gave me something.” Pablo reached into his pocket and took out the diamond. “I wouldn’t show this to nobody down here unless I thought they were all right and I think you’re all right and I’m showing it to you. That old Jew gave me this here.” Egan looked at the diamond. “I ain’t giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It’s worth a whole lot of money—you can tell that just by looking—but it means something, I think. It’s got a meaning, like.”

  “Let’s see,” Egan said, “what would it mean?” He took hold of Pablo’s hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. “The jewel is in the lotus,’ perhaps that’s what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That’s a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.”

  Pablo’s eyes glazed over. “Holy shit,” he said. “Santa Maria.” He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.

  “Hey,” he said to the priest, “diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don’t it?”

  “I have heard it,” Egan said. “Perhaps it has a religious meaning.”

  “Listen,” Pablo said, and swallowed. “Can you tell me about my past lives? That’s what I’d really like to know about.”

  “Well,” Egan said, “I’m afraid not. I don’t know anything about past lives, or even if we have them.”

  “You kidding me?” Pablo said. “I thought you knew about this kind of stuff.”

  “Not about past lives. One life at a time with me.”

  “Somebody’s gonna tell me someday,” Pablo said. “I’m gonna find it all out, man, because I’m meant to. People gonna be coming to me to find it out.” He yawned. The fever of revelation was a drug of its own, stronger than the Callahans’ pills. It made him feel strong and calm, peaceful, as though he could not be turned around.

  “Maybe so, Pablo. Maybe you’re the one with the talent and energy to know about it. We hold our treasure in earthen vessels.”

  “Fuckin’-A,” Pablo said.

  The fatigue he felt was no longer threatening. He spread himself out on the coarse grass beside the fire and closed his eyes.

  Egan put a hand on Pablo’s forehead and saw the youth shiver. For the first time he saw the wound on Tabor’s leg, and though he could not determine its gravity in the firelight, it was obviously dirty and untended.

  “We can go now,” the priest said. “I’ve been running on, I’ve talked too long. If you can walk, I’ll help you over to our dispensary. It’s not far.”

  Pablo opened his eyes and shook his head.

  “You need looking after now. You need some antibiotics.”

  “No,” Pablo said. “I want to wait a minute. I’m too wasted right now. What I want to do, I want to lie down here and listen to those birds and I don’t give a shit.” He was looking into the fire, his head turned to one side. A howler monkey screamed an alarm from the edge of the clearing. A girl’s voice seemed to answer—one of the young foreigners, talking in her sleep. “I come a damn long way, you know that?”

  “I’ll go back and get help for you. We have a nurse with us and you’ll be all right here.”

  Pablo seized Egan’s arm and held it.

  “I want you to stay, bro. I want you to tell me everything you can that I’m supposed to know becaue that’s what I’m here for.”

  Egan settled down on the log where Pablo had rested and took a drink of Flor de Cana.

  “All right,” he said. So he began to tell Pablo about the Sacred Pleroma and the Incomprehensible, Inconceivable One within Whom all things were, the Master of the Silence and the Abyss. He told him about the Errant Sophia, the whore of Wisdom, who in her foredoomed passion to comprehend the Holy One underestimated the depths of the Abyss and became lost. Wandering, stricken, Father Egan told Pablo, Sophia found herself walled out from the All, the Ineffable; she encountered, for the first time, Limit. From the torment of her loss, Egan explained, Sophia brought into existence fear and grief and bewilderment and all the things which were to make up the world without Him. Then, from these things came forth the Demiurge, the force of ignorance under whose power Pablo and he himself and everyone else made their blind passage through outer dark. He told these things to Pablo not as he had written about them, but as though they were literal, true things, as one might tell a story to a child. As Pablo had pointed out to him, he had never had a child. Then he thought that perhaps they were true things, real things, as real as the sun which was rising now over the clea
ring.

  Pablo had gone to sleep, so the priest took a ground cloth and wrapped it across a sharp stick to keep the risen sun from the young man’s eyes.

  Tabor’s fist was clenched; Egan gently pried the fingers apart and found the diamond. He slipped it back into the shirt pocket from which Pablo had taken it to show him. A curious thing, he thought. He supposed the youth had stolen it. Perhaps had killed for it, on his boat. He shook his head and picked up the bottle and drank.

  In the city, in the villages of the coast, Tecan’s children were shouldering their daily burdens, prepared to endure with ancient grace the rule of plunder and violence. Nearby, the touring adolescents stirred at their campfires. At sea, the first light, filtered to green and gray, would begin to penetrate the depths where a murdered girl lay distantly mourned. Nor would she be alone there. And in the forest, Weitling would be looking at the sunrise and taking fire with fantasies of sacrifice and blood. Egan thought of the hunt he would have to set afield now, for the saving of other children.

  The priest shielded his eyes and considered the Incomprehensible; he wondered if, across the awesome gulf of the abyss, across the darkness and the silence, he might presume to address toward It a prayer. He thought about it for some little time; in the end, he dared not. He picked up the rum and drank and then the exertions of the night set their weight on him and he fell into a sleep of his own.

  Holliwell did not sleep although he lay in bed until dawn. In the slant of the new sun he drove to the mission, parked and walked the narrow beach.

  The sight of the ocean oppressed him. He was not deceived by its exquisite sportiveness—the lacy flumes of breaking wave, the delicate rainbows in the spray. He knew what was spread out beneath its trivial entertainments. The ocean at its morning business brought cognate visions to his mind’s eye; a flower-painted cart hauling corpses, a bright turban on a leper.

  Beside the beach at Danang he had seen a leper with a “Kiss Me” tee shirt. There was nothing to get angry about; some stern wit had made a statement and the leper had got a shirt.