Storyteller

by David Crossman

  Ranidya’s mind drifted back to the present. There would be no bone man for her. A leper’s bones were of no use.

  It was odd, this mist, this fog that flowed into the room. She had never seen anything like it. It swaddled her in coolness and caressed her sores with healing. Something was taking place within her, something beyond her capacity to express or understand. Yet a deep and ancient knowing whispered to her senses: she was dying. Soon she would be no longer be a leper . . . but would she cease to be? She was reminded of things the priest had said, of resurrection and eternal life in the presence of the glory and majesty of God. Twisted up in the recollection were the precepts of her father’s beliefs: perpetual return to life in a process of upward-spiraling toward Nirvana; the loss of self to the oneness of all Being. Were there many gods, she wondered, or just One whose many facets had earned the name of gods by those who perceived them?

  There were others in the room, now. This, too, she sensed. She opened her eyes and saw them, gathered in the mists that swirled around her pallet, drifting in and out, shadowy and smoke-shaped. They were performing some ritual upon her, filleting her soul from her body as the flesh of an animal is stripped from its bones.

  They spoke softly in words and languages she couldn’t comprehend, their voices musical, entwining one another in rapturous melodies that were at once distinct, yet each phrase dependent upon the others. The song was too beautiful for expression, almost painful to hear, yet her spirit ached for it, surged toward it, twisting and striving and writhing through the crushing cervix of death, until the process was complete and she was purged of the burden of life.

  The music faded away. The mists receded. She was alone, but not alarmed. Instead, she was free with perfect freedom. Willing herself to rise from the pallet, her body—that ragged, disease-ridden garment she had worn so long—was cast off. She did not mourn it. No longer was she defined by her disease. A magnificent silence swelled from somewhere in the center of her being: Ranidya was no longer hungry. The edges of herself that had once been restricted by sinew, bone, blood, and skin, fingers, feet, and toes, burst their earthly boundaries and rushed into the embrace of a greater awareness.

  The song, she thought at first, was coming from somewhere inside her, a natural manifestation of the joy coursing through the arteries of her soul. But it was not. It was around her. No. It was concentrated in a solid shaft of majesty that impaled her heart with grace. She closed her eyes, so as not to diminish the sound with other senses, and inhaled it deeply. It was the Voice.

  She opened her eyes. Her mind no longer constrained by her senses or experience, or deafened by the constant cries of her flesh, she knew at once where she was: the great concert hall in Milan, a place she had never seen or heard of in the life of her flesh. But this was the life of her soul. She knew many things now, had bottomless reservoirs of awareness that no experience had taught her. From her freed perspective, she discerned no anomaly in the fact that Caruso, so long dead, stood center stage, or that his feet didn’t touch the ground, nor that the words, as he sang, cascaded from his lips as lights of many colors, forming the very things of which he sang: heroes and heroines, despots and darklings, lovers and the unloved alike took their brief, shimmering turn on the stage, then rose to the ornate baroque ceiling where they burst, leaving wide, gaping holes of daylight or darkness.

  Caruso was no longer on the stage, he was beside her, within her, surrounding her, the molecules of his consciousness briefly caressing those of her own in sublime greeting, yet he remained distinct, an identifiable entity. They were no longer in the opera house, they were in someone’s living room, the walls, floor, and ceiling of which were perpetually in motion, admitting glimpses of other realms.

  “Welcome,” he said. He spoke the language of Paradise, which all understand.

  She thought to ask where she was, but no sooner had the question formed in her mind than it was met with an answer. “We are everywhere and nowhere,” said Caruso. “We inhabit the dreams of the living.”

  This was so. Ranidya knew dreams. For many years they had been her only refuge. Often, upon waking, she had struggled to retain images from that shape-shifting world where impossibilities were commonplace, where the dead and the living mingled comfortably apart from the restraints of time, space, and logic.

  “I love your music,” she said.

  “It is very good, is it not?” said Caruso with a smile. There was no pride in the reply. No self-awareness, merely acknowledgment of a truth. “And it gets better every time I sing. I can’t wait to open my mouth. I am anxious to hear what the next song will be! It is a joy.”

  Ranidya looked around her. The room was suddenly full of people. “Whose dream is this?”

  “Hers,” said Caruso, pointing to a diminutive brunette sitting on a sofa near a waterfall.

  Ranidya studied the woman, and in thinking about her came to know her. “She is Barbara,” she said. “She has a husband and two children and she is afraid.”

  Caruso smiled warmly. “Just so. Barbara. She is a very determined woman, is she not? But, as you say, she battles a spirit of fear. You can see it, the demon sitting beside her.”

  Ranidya saw no demon. The man on Barbara’s right hand was dressed like a doctor. In his hand was a little panel of numbered buttons, like those that operate an elevator and, as he pressed them, one by one, they would light up. At the same time, Ranidya knew that she was seeing the root of Barbara’s fear. Long ago she had been very sick. Her parents had rushed her to the hospital where she was strapped to a gurney, unable to move. Just as she lost consciousness, doctors and nurses were wheeling her into an elevator. A doctor pressed the button, and the doors closed. The experience had left her severely claustrophobic. The demon had taken the shape attached to that fear: a doctor.

  Caruso had been following her thoughts. “Once the spirit of fear has found a home, it invites others. So in time, as you see, she has become fearful of many things.”

  Ranidya’s thoughts bore more deeply into the woman. “She is not unhappy. And yet . . .”

  “There is a sadness. Yes. It is the prospect of joy to which she clings,” Caruso replied, “rather than awareness that is fulfilled around her every day. She will never be able to fully seize it and make it her own, until that demon is defeated.”

  “How can it be?”

  “That is for her to discover,” said Caruso. Barbara was looking at him. He stood up, walked across the room, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, my little one,” he said, then turned and left the room. Ranidya, with no awareness that she was doing so, followed.

  “Those other people, some are like us, some are like her,” she said. They were now walking through the deep, powdery snow of an inaccessible mountain pass.

  “The dead and the living,” said Caruso. “The living she dreams herself. The dead . . . we just show up uninvited. That is how we exist, you see, drifting from dream to dream.”

  “This is not how I imagined death would be.”

  “It would be a poor death indeed if it could be imagined by so limited a vessel as the human mind, would it not?” said Caruso. “But it is not death, really, it is a . . . waiting.”

  As she heard the words, Ranidya knew them to be true. They were waiting. For what?

  Caruso shrugged. “Judgment? A day of reckoning? A deeper heaven? We know no more of the next life than we did of this one. But you will notice that things here become more real. I have come to wonder if dreams are reality and life was the illusion.” The smile with which he punctuated the observation embraced her with warmth and peace. “I philosophize,” he said.

  In the distance someone screamed, and Ranidya felt the peace ripped from her consciousness. “What is that?”

  “Someone’s having a nightmare.”

  She knew that it was so. She knew, as well, that she could enter the nightmare and attempt to dispel it. But she would be putting herself at risk, somehow, in so doing. Nightmares were not s
afe territory. They were inhabited by restless souls, those of the dead whose hunger was darkness and destruction. To these, beauty and peace and joy were anathema.

  “They are the unforgiving,” said Caruso. “Those who harbor and nurture and feed upon every slight, every hurt, every disappointment. It is a feast that never fills and leaves only greater hunger.”

  “They are unforgiven.”

  “Just so. Unforgiving, so unforgiven. That is the dreamscape of their own choosing. That is where they live.”

  “And wait?”

  “And wait.”

  Ranidya followed Caruso from dream to dream to dream across a varied living landscape; backward to the remotest reaches of the past, forward to the dimmest, most hopeful imaginings of the future. Weaving and churning through a sea of shimmering neurons where impossibilities burst into existence, where every law of nature was exuberantly overturned and cast aside. All things that had once been so real to her seemed shadows now. Here the senses were more open, more able to perceive; tastes, colors, scents, sounds were deepened and magnified, and with each magnification the borders of the senses expanded until an entirely new sense evolved from the need to comprehend greater levels of wonder. Six, eight, ten, fifty . . . more and more senses were grafted to her comprehension.

  They never remained long in any one dream but, like sampling from a long table of delights, performed only brief cameos in each. “We must be gone before the dreamer wakes,” her guide admonished.

  “What will happen if we don’t?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Caruso. “Perhaps we will cease to exist? In any event, it lends excitement, does it not? Besides, there is so much to see!” He suddenly stopped short. “Someone is dreaming of me. I must go! What shall I sing?”

  And he was gone.

  Ranidya was by herself, but had never felt less alone. She had worlds to explore while she waited and, she knew, in one of them she would find Hajim, sitting at the dream table of some Midwestern housewife, feasting and fattening on delicacies of every description, and regaling that unconscious dreamer with tales of the impossibilities that await. “It is so. I am not lying!”

  It was with trepidation that Cummings entered Rat’s bedroom the following morning. The image of Caruso had been plaguing him and he wondered how the deceased tenor figured into the rehabilitation of the mansion’s sole inmate. It was a departure from the usual program and, for an English butler, improvisation is as unsettling as fingerprints in the tapioca.

  “You are well, sir?” he inquired, upon ascertaining that Rat was, if nothing else, present and breathing.

  Rat was not well. The eyes that peered at Cummings above the burlap blanket brimmed with fluid and confusion. Yet in them Cummings perceived a new dimension, a greater depth. Inwardly he sighed a sigh of relief. His guest was proving more resilient than he had hoped. Appearances, he reminded himself, are often deceiving. He recalled the general—another guest some time back—a man who had impressed him as the soul of self-assurance and ‘poke-the-devil- in-the-eye’ aplomb who, after only two nights in the mansion, he had found huddled in a corner, sucking his thumb and making the noises of a baby hippopotamus lately abandoned by its mother. Close on the heels of this recollection was another, of Ephod Smack, the American industrialist, also a man of supreme self-possession who, though he did last the better part of a week, concluded his sojourn under the conviction that he was Mary, Queen of Scots, confined to the Tower on the eve of her execution.

  A bald man, Mr. Smack developed the habit of sitting before the mirror for hours on end, making vain attempts to tie lavender ribbons in hair that wasn’t there. Every day, of course, he grew smaller and smaller until, like the Crab Nebula, he was no longer discernible with the naked eye.

  Rat’s eyes searched for and found the bit of broken glass propped against the wall, and there remarked the reflection of his soul. The creature was not attractive but, rather like a gargoyle after a make-over, or a former Hollywood starlet after a face-lift: a trans-species evolution seemed to be taking place. It may have been wishful thinking that the change signified improvement, but he was positive there was a little less tail, a little more chin.

  He recollected his time as Ranidya the leper and, for the first time, a tear escaped his eye.

  “I’m not a good person,” he said, the words muffled by the blanket he held over his mouth.

  “No, sir?”

  Rat shook his head. He lowered the blanket and stared out the window at the mud-brick wall of an adjacent building. Beyond, he knew, were the streets of Calcutta, teeming with those who, in varying degrees, were dead or dying. “What comes next?” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “After this life. What comes next?”

  “I do not have that information, sir,” said Cummings. He placed a freshly sliced mango on a little table of piled stones. “Reliable sources inform us that it is that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’”

  “I did. I was dead, and Caruso was there.”

  Cummings’ curiosity was piqued. “Indeed, sir? I trust you found his company amicable.”

  Rat nodded. “He was right at home, floatin’ in and out of people’s dreams. That’s how they stay alive.”

  “They, sir?”

  “The dead. They live in people’s dreams. That’s what he said.”

  “It is an interesting hypothesis, sir.”

  “I’m going to die some day,” Rat observed as Cummings, once again, tucked him under a crude blanket. This one, though, was thicker, and softer, and lice ambled insouciantly through the canyons of its warp and weave.

  “A history we shall all share,” said Cummings. “May I be of any further service, sir?”

  Rat was no longer astounded that another day had passed. He was sure that, if he asked, Cummings would tell him it had been a wonderful one during which he, Rat, had exhibited behavior he was not comfortable with. He didn’t ask. Instead, he hunkered into the blanket and searched for his reflection. He found it, flickering with candlelight, in a pewter tankard that rested on a stone ledge—little more than a projection from a wall of stones—beside his bed.

  Cummings withdrew, much as a cloud, or a shadow, or a coquette withdraws. Rat became one with the reflection, that of a humble layman in a community of Irish monks. His name was Colgu the Simple and he was holding a fistful of straw with which to dry the cold, blue skin of the abbot who, at the moment, was waist-deep in an ice-edged pool, softly reciting the 150 books of the Psalter from memory. Rat was about to become . . .

  The Copyist

  The fifth night

  The abbot concluded his penance. He had been in the water for over seven hours. His skin, as he climbed from the ink-black pool, was withered and purple. He shivered violently in the frigid North Sea wind that whipped the isle of Iona like a bone-tipped scourge. Raising his arms, like one crucified against the gray March sky, he allowed himself to be dried. Colgu bent to the task with a will, but the skin came off in pulpy strips.

  “Harder, Colgu,” said the monk, smiling through clenched teeth. “Strip it all away! S-s-s-suffering purges and p-p-purifies.”

  Colgu did as he was told. The ways of the monks were far beyond him. He was a menaig, an illiterate laborer; they were aes dana, men of special gifts. He was too coarse, too vile and pathetic to comprehend the holy fires that raged in their bellies, compelling them to such acts of martyrdom. Not that he objected, truth be told. He wasn’t spiritual enough to see the benefit of it. He was unenlightened. If he had been in any way touched by the hand of God, it was only a whack on the side of the head sometime shortly after his emergence from the womb that had left him nearly witless. Even witless, though, he could be of service. He could lift, and tote, and carry. He could care for the sheep, and cook the meals, and anything requiring two hands and half a brain. If he could not enter heaven by the main gate, perhaps, by such simple acts, he could drag himself up over the parapets brick by brick.

  The
straw became soggy with flesh and water and fell through his frozen fingers in clumps. He wrapped the abbot’s chlamys* around his striped and scoured body, and his brat* over that. The abbot was, by this time, deeply spiritual. An inner glow, which a man without spiritual discernment might have taken for insanity, populated his eyes and he stared the heavens in the face as an equal. In hours, though, days at best, the abbot would be reminded of another sin, and repeat the process all over again.

  Colgu was hard-pressed to find quantities of dry straw in March, the time of year when the island’s community of monks seemed possessed by the need to out-martyr one another; a sort of spiritual spring cleaning. Few could match the abbot stroke for stroke. If lashes were holiness, Colgu figured, God Himself might have to abdicate His throne upon the abbot’s arrival in Paradise.

  “Did you finish the grave?” said the abbot, between clenched teeth that chattered a language of their own.

  One of Colgu’s tasks was to dig the graves of monks who had died. He was especially proud of this one for Brother Lugaid for it was deep. He had found a pocket of soil tucked between clotted mounds of granite in the hallowed ground and dug until he could dig no more. Four or five feet, at least. Brother Lugaid had long ago adopted the practice of striking Colgu on the back of his legs with his walking stick—a substantial implement—whenever he asked the menaig to do something. It was an aid to comprehension. Colgu was comforted by the thought that this particular brother, who at the moment lay cooling on the floor before the stone alter in the chapel, would be buried deep.

  “Yes. It is done,” he said.

  The abbot’s attention was occupied. “There are sails on the horizon.”

  Colgu was busy strapping the abbot’s sandals and didn’t look to confirm the remark. Often, after intense intervals of fasting and deprivation, the monks spoke of seeing things that were not apparent to his mortal eyes. He knew no sane person would be on the open ocean this time of year, so assumed the abbot was peering into dimensions that were, to him, hidden. “I will mix some warm wine,” he said.