The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (Mammoth Books)

by Paula Guran

Eliot concentrated on his tequila. These recitals never failed to annoy him, as did – for different reasons – the sleek Western disguise. When Eliot had arrived in Katmandu as a member of the Peace Corps, Mr Chatterji had presented a far less pompous image: a scrawny kid dressed in Levi’s that he had wheedled from a tourist. He’d been one of the hangers-on – mostly young Tibetans – who frequented the grubby tea rooms on Freak Street, watching the American hippies giggle over their hash yogurt, lusting after their clothes, their women, their entire culture. The hippies had respected the Tibetans, they were a people of legend, symbols of the occultism then in vogue, and the fact that they liked James Bond movies, fast cars and Jimi Hendrix had increased the hippies’ self-esteem. But they had found laughable the fact that Ranjeesh Chatterji–another Westernized Indian – had liked these same things, and they had treated him with mean condescension. Now, thirteen years later, the roles had been reversed; it was Eliot who had become the hanger-on.

  He had settled in Katmandu after his tour was up, his idea being to practice meditation, to achieve enlightenment. But it had not gone well. There was an impediment in his mind – he pictured it as a dark stone, a stone compounded of worldly attachments – that no amount of practice could wear down, and his life had fallen into a futile pattern. He would spend ten months of the year living in a small room near the temple of Swayambhunath, meditating, rubbing away at the stone; and then, during March and September, he would occupy Mr Chatterji’s house and debauch himself with liquor and sex and drugs. He was aware that Mr Chatterji considered him a burnout, that the position of caretaker was in effect a form of revenge, a means by which his employer could exercise his own brand of condescension; but Eliot minded neither the label nor the attitude. There were worse things to be than a burnout in Nepal. It was beautiful country, it was inexpensive, it was far from Minnesota (Eliot’s home). And the concept of personal failure was meaningless here. You lived, died, and were reborn over and over until at last you attained the ultimate success of non-being: a terrific consolation for failure.

  “. . . yet in your country,” Mr Chatterji was saying, “evil has a sultry character. Sexy! It’s as if the spirits were adopting vibrant personalities in order to contend with pop groups and movie stars.”

  Eliot thought of a comment, but the tequila backed up on him and he belched instead. Everything about Mr Chatterji – teeth, eyes, hair, gold rings – seemed to be gleaming with extraordinary brilliance. He looked as unstable as a soap bubble, a fat little Hindu illusion . . .

  Mr Chatterji clapped a hand, to his forehead. “I nearly forgot. There will be another American staying at the house. A girl. Very shapely!” He shaped an hourglass in the air. “I’m quite mad for her, but I don’t know if she’s trustworthy. Please see she doesn’t bring in any strays.”

  “Right,” said Eliot. “No problem.”

  “I believe I will gamble now,” said Mr Chatterji, standing and gazing toward the lobby. “Will you join me?”

  “No, I think I’ll get drunk. I guess I’ll see you in October.”

  “You’ re drunk already, Eliot.” Mr Chatterji patted him on the shoulder. “Hadn’t you noticed?

  Early the next morning, hungover, tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, Eliot sat himself down for a final bout of trying to visualize the Avalokitesvara Buddha. All the sounds outside – the buzzing of a motor scooter, birdsong, a girl’s laughter – seemed to be repeating the mantra, and the gray stone walls of his room looked at once intensely real and yet incredibly fragile, papery, a painted backdrop he could rip with his hands. He began to feel the same fragility, as if he were being immersed in a liquid that was turning him opaque, filling him with clarity. A breath of wind could float him out the window, drift him across the fields, and he would pass through the trees and mountains, all the phantoms of the material world . . . but then a trickle of panic welled up from the bottom of his soul, from that dark stone. It was beginning to smolder, to give off poison fumes: a little briquette of anger and lust and fear. Cracks were spreading across the clear substance he had become, and if he didn’t move soon, if he didn’t break off the meditation, he would shatter.

  He toppled out of the lotus position and lay propped on his elbows. His heart raced, his chest heaved, and he felt very much like screaming his frustration. Yeah, that was a temptation. To just say the hell with it and scream, to achieve through chaos what he could not through clarity: to empty himself into the scream. He was trembling, his emotions flowing between self-hate and self-pity. Finally, he struggled up and put on jeans and a cotton shirt. He knew he was close to a breakdown, and he realized that he usually reached this point just before taking up residence at Mr Chatterji’s. His life was a frayed thread stretched tight between those two poles of debauchery. One day it would snap.

  “The hell with it,” he said. He stuffed the remainder of his clothes into a duffel bag and headed into town.

  Walking through Durbar Square – which wasn’t really a square but a huge temple complex interspersed with open areas and wound through by cobbled path – always put Eliot in mind of his brief stint as a tour guide, a career cut short when the agency received complaints about his eccentricity. (“. . . As you pick your way among the piles of human waste and fruit rinds, I caution you not to breathe too deeply of the divine afflatus; otherwise, it may forever numb you to the scent of Prairie Cove or Petitpoint Gulch or whatever citadel of gracious living it is that you call home . . .”) It had irked him to have to lecture on the carvings and history of the square, especially to the just-plain-folks who only wanted a Polaroid of Edna or Uncle Jimmy standing next to that weird monkey god on the pedestal. The square was a unique place and, in Eliot’s opinion, such unenlightened tourism demeaned it.

  Pagoda-style temples of red brick and dark wood towered on all sides, their finials rising into brass lightning bolts. They were alien-looking – you half expected the sky above them to be of an otherworldly color, and figured by several moons. Their eaves and window screens were ornately carved into the images of gods and demons, and behind a large window screen on the temple of White Bhairab lay the mask of that god. It was almost ten feet high, brass, with a fanciful headdress and long-lobed ears and a mouth full of white fangs; its eyebrows were enameled red, fiercely arched, but the eyes had the goofy quality common to Newari gods – no matter how wrathful they were, there was something essentially friendly about them, and they reminded Eliot of cartoon germs. Once a year – in fact, a little more than a week from now – the screens would be opened, a pipe would be inserted into the god’s mouth, and rice beer would jet out into the mouths of the milling crowds; at some point a fish would be slipped into the pipe, and whoever caught it would be deemed the luckiest soul in the Katmandu Valley for the next year. It was one of Eliot’s traditions to make a try for the fish, though he knew that it wasn’t luck he needed.

  Beyond the square, the streets were narrow, running between long brick buildings three and four stories tall, each divided into dozens of separate dwellings. The strip of sky between the roofs was bright, burning blue – a void color – and in the shade the bricks looked purplish. People hung out the windows of the upper stories, talking back and forth: an exotic tenement life. Small shrines – wooden enclosures containing statuary of stucco or brass – were tucked into wall niches and the mouths of alleys. The gods were everywhere in Katmandu, and there was hardly a corner to which their gaze did not penetrate.

  On reaching Mr Chatterji’s, which occupied half a block-long building, Eliot made for the first of the interior courtyards; a stair led up from it to Mr Chatterji’s apartment, and he thought he would check on what had been left to drink. But as he entered the courtyard – a phalanx of ugly plants arranged around a lozenge of cement – he saw the girl and stopped short. She was sitting in a lawn chair, reading, and she was indeed very shapely. She wore loose cotton trousers, a T-shirt and a long white scarf shot through with golden threads. The scarf and the trousers were the uniform of the
young travelers who generally stayed in the expatriate enclave of Temal: it seemed that they all bought them immediately upon arrival in order to identify themselves to each other. Edging closer, peering between the leaves of a rubber plant, Eliot saw that the girl was doe-eyed, with honey-colored skin and shoulder-length brown hair interwoven by lighter strands. Her wide mouth had relaxed into a glum expression. Sensing him, she glanced up, startled; then she waved and set down her book.

  “I’m Eliot,” he said, walking over.

  “I know. Ranjeesh told me.” She stared at him incuriously.

  “And you?” He squatted beside her.

  “Michaela.” She fingered the book, as if she were eager to get back to it.

  “I can see you’re new in town.”

  “How’s that?”

  He told her about the clothes, and she shrugged. “That’s what I am,” she said. “I’ll probably always wear them.” She folded her hands on her stomach; it was a nicely rounded stomach, and Eliot – a connoisseur of women’s stomachs – felt the beginnings of arousal.

  “Always?” he said. “You plan on being here that long?”

  “I don’t know.” She ran a finger along the spine of the book. “Ranjeesh asked me to marry him, and I said maybe.”

  Eliot’s infant plan of seduction collapsed beneath this wrecking ball of a statement, and he failed to hide his incredulity. “You’re in love with Ranjeesh?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” A wrinkle creased her brow; it was the perfect symptom of her mood, the line a cartoonist might have chosen to express petulant anger.

  “Nothing. Not if it doesn’t have anything to do with it.” He tried a grin, but to no effect. “Well,” he said after a pause. “How do you like Katmandu?”

  “I don’t get out much,” she said flatly.

  She obviously did not want conversation, but Eliot wasn’t ready to give up. “You ought to,” he said. “The festival of Indra Jatra’s about to start. It’s pretty wild. Especially on the night of White Bhairab. Buffalo sacrifices, torchlight . . .”

  “I don’t like crowds,” she said.

  Strike two.

  Eliot strained to think of an enticing topic, but he had the idea it was a lost cause. There was something inert about her, a veneer of listlessness redolent of Thorazine, of hospital routine. “Have you seen the Khaa?” he asked.

  “The what?”

  “The Khaa. It’s a spirit . . . though some people will tell you it’s partly animal, because over here the animal and spirit worlds overlap. But whatever it is, all the old houses have one, and those that don’t are considered unlucky. There’s one here.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Vaguely anthropomorphic. Black, featureless. Kind of a living shadow. They can stand upright, but they roll instead of walk.”

  She laughed. “No, I haven’t seen it. Have you?”

  “Maybe,” said Eliot. “I thought I saw it a couple of times, but I was pretty stoned.”

  She sat up straighter and crossed her legs; her breasts jiggled and Eliot fought to keep his eyes centered on her face. “Ranjeesh tells me you’re a little cracked,” she said.

  Good ol’ Ranjeesh! He might have known that the son of a bitch would have sandbagged him with his new lady. “I guess I am,” he said, preparing for the brush-off. “I do a lot of meditation, and sometimes I teeter on the edge.”

  But she appeared more intrigued by this admission than by anything else he had told her; a smile melted up from her carefully composed features. “Tell me some more about the Khaa,” she said.

  Eliot congratulated himself. “They’re quirky sorts,” he said. “Neither good nor evil. They hide in dark corners, though now and then they’re seen in the streets or in the fields out near Jyapu. And the oldest ones, the most powerful ones, live in the temples in Durbar Square. There’s a story about the one here that’s descriptive of how they operate . . . if you’re interested.”

  “Sure.” Another smile.

  “Before Ranjeesh bought this place, it was a guest house, and one night a woman with three goiters on her neck came to spend the night. She had two loaves of bread that she was taking home to her family, and she stuck them under her pillow before going to sleep. Around midnight the Khaa rolled into her room and was struck by the sight of her goiters rising and falling as she breathed. He thought they’d make a beautiful necklace, so he took them and put them on his own neck. Then he spotted the loaves sticking out from her pillow. They looked good, so he took them as well and replaced them with two loaves of gold. When the woman woke, she was delighted. She hurried back to her village to tell her family, and on the way, she met a friend, a woman, who was going to market. This woman had four goiters. The first woman told her what had happened, and that night the second woman went to the guest house and did exactly the same things. Around midnight the Khaa rolled into her room. He’d grown bored with the necklace, and he gave it to the woman. He’d also decided that bread didn’t taste very good, but he still had a loaf and he figured he’d give it another chance. So in exchange for the necklace, he took the woman’s appetite for bread. When she woke, she had seven goiters, no gold, and she could never eat bread again the rest of her life.”

  Eliot had expected a response of mild amusement, and had hoped that the story would be the opening gambit in a game with a foregone and pleasurable conclusion; but he had not expected her to stand, to become walled off from him again.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said and, with a distracted wave, she made for the front door. She walked with her head down, hands thrust into her pockets, as if counting the steps.

  “Where are you going?” called Eliot, taken aback.

  “I don’t know. Freak Street, maybe.”

  “Want some company?”

  She turned back at the door. “It’s not your fault,” she said, “but I don’t really enjoy your company.”

  Shot down!

  Trailing smoke, spinning, smacking into the hillside, and blowing up into a fireball.

  Eliot didn’t understand why it had hit him so bad. It had happened before, and it would again. Ordinarily, he would have headed for Temal and found himself another long white scarf and pair of cotton trousers, one less morbidly self-involved (that, in retrospect, was how he characterized Michaela), one who would help him refuel for another bout of trying to visualize Avalokitesvara Buddha. He did, in fact, go to Temal; but he merely sat and drank tea and smoked hashish in a restaurant, and watched the young travelers pairing up for the night. Once he caught the bus to Patan and visited a friend, an old hippie pal named Sam Chipley who ran a medical clinic; once he walked out to Swayambhunath, close enough to see the white dome of the stupa, and atop it, the gilt structure on which the all-seeing eyes of Buddha were painted: they seemed squinty and mean-looking, as if taking unfavorable notice of his approach. But mostly over the next week he wandered through Mr Chatterji’s house, carrying a bottle, maintaining a buzz, and keeping an eye on Michaela.

  The majority of the rooms were unfurnished, but many bore signs of recent habitation: broken hash pipes, ripped sleeping bags, empty packets of incense. Mr Chatterji let travelers – those he fancied sexually, male and female – use the rooms for up to months at a time, and to walk through them was to take a historical tour of the American counterculture. The graffiti spoke of concerns as various as Vietnam, the Sex Pistols, women’s lib and the housing shortage in Great Britain, and also conveyed personal messages: “Ken Finkel please get in touch with me at Am. Ex. in Bangkok . . . love, Ruth.” In one of the rooms was a complicated mural depicting Farrah Fawcett sitting on the lap of a Tibetan demon, throttling his barbed phallus with her fingers. It all conjured up the image of a moldering, deranged milieu. Eliot’s milieu. At first the tour amused him, but eventually it began to sour him on himself, and he took to spending more and more time on a balcony overlooking the courtyard that was shared with the connecting house, listening to the Newari women sing at their chores and
reading books from Mr Chatterji’s library. One of the books was titled The Carversville Terror.

  “. . . bloodcurdling, chilling . . .” said the New York Times on the front flap. “. . . the Terror is, unrelenting . . .” commented Stephen King. “. . . riveting, gut-wrenching, mind-bending horror . . .” gushed People magazine. In neat letters, Eliot appended his own blurb: “. . . piece of crap . . .” The text – written to be read by the marginally literate – was a fictionalized treatment of purportedly real events, dealing with the experiences of the Whitcomb family, who had attempted to renovate the Cousineau mansion during the sixties. Following the usual build-up of apparitions, cold spots and noisome odors, the family – Papa David, Mama Elaine, young sons Tim and Randy, and teenage Ginny – had met to discuss the situation.

  . . . even the kids, thought David, had been aged by the house. Gathered around the dining-room table, they looked like a company of the damned, haggard shadows under their eyes, grim-faced. Even with the windows open and the light streaming in, it seemed there was a pall in the air that no light could dispel. Thank God the damned thing was dormant during the day!

  “Well,” he said, “I guess the floor’s open for arguments.”

  “I wanna go home!” Tears sprang from Randy’s eyes and, on cue, Tim started crying, too.

  “It’s not that simple,” said David. “This is home, and I don’t know how we’ll make it if we do leave. The savings account is just about flat.”

  “I suppose I could get a job,” said Elaine unenthusiastically.

  “I’m not leaving!” Ginny jumped to her feet, knocking over her chair. “Every time I start to make friends, we have to move!”

  “But Ginny!” Elaine reached out a hand to calm her. “You were the one . . .”

  “I’ve changed my mind!” She backed away, as if she had just recognized them all to be mortal enemies. “You can do what you want, but I’m staying!” And she ran from the room.