The four last things sg-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Please compose yourselves," said the man at the podium as if he were trying to quell an irresistible mob impulse to dance in the aisles. "Make yourselves ready for the revealing."

  All around me I had the sense of people taking a deep breath and holding it. From stage left a slender woman in her late thirties came out. She was followed by a golden-haired girl with long Alice in Wonderland locks falling around her shoulders. Cradled in the little girl's arms was a tiny gold kitten that matched her hair. The woman went to the podium and adjusted the microphone downward; she was much shorter than the man in the dark suit. The girl went straight to one of the chairs and sat down, facing out, with the kitten in her lap. She twisted one ankle behind the other nervously.

  Applause rippled across the now-darkened auditorium.

  The woman at the podium raised a hand. "Hello," she said into the darkness.

  "Hello, Mary Claire," Skippy said. Skippy and about a thousand other people.

  "Angel has an upset stomach tonight," the woman said into the microphone. "What can I say? She's a little girl."

  There was a wave of sympathetic laughter. Mary Claire waved it away cheerfully.

  "So anyway, nothing may happen. For those of you who have seen Revealings before, and I guess that's most of you, that should be no big deal. You know it doesn't happen every time. For the others, well, we're sorry. This isn't a fast-food restaurant. You can't always get a Big Mac here."

  A few people clapped manfully, but it had a disappointed sound to it.

  The little girl clutched the kitten and looked at her mother out of bewildered eyes and then gazed out at the audience. More than anything else she reminded me of a puppy who'd done something wrong but didn't know what it was.

  "Poor baby," I said to Skippy.

  "It's rough on her sometimes," Skippy said, "but it's worth it."

  "It's worth it to you. What about her?"

  "I'd trade places with her in a minute," he said.

  "If I'd had my way," Mary Claire was saying in her amplified voice, "we wouldn't have come onto the stage tonight. I'd have put my baby to bed. But she wouldn't let me. There are a lot of people here, she said. Maybe something will happen. Didn't you, Angel?"

  Angel looked at her mother and nodded distantly. She seemed to be receding, growing smaller and more distant, like Alice after the second "Drink me." Her dress was immaculate white, a blinding white that seemed somehow to make her hair even blonder. She was wearing white socks above flat black patent leather shoes. In all, she was a truly beautiful child.

  "Isn't she gorgeous?" Skippy said. It was the second time my mind had been read that evening. I felt like a library book; anybody could check me out.

  "Even if nothing happens," Mary Claire said, "we'll meet you in the other room afterward. Or I will, anyway. Angel may not feel up to it. Are you okay, Angel?"

  Angel was staring at her mother. Slowly she shook her head in the negative. Her jaw was hanging open.

  Mary Claire looked at her watch. "We've been up here four minutes," she said a little nervously. "If Angel doesn't Speak in a minute, we'll go back home. Five minutes is usually-"

  Angel groaned. Her head lolled back and her right hand slipped from her lap and hung lifelessly at her side. The kitten looked right and left. Angel shuddered.

  "You are the fisherman," she said in a preternaturally deep voice. "And you are the lake."

  My neck prickled.

  Mary Claire stepped away from the microphone and gave her daughter a concerned look. She might as well have been shooting at a rainbow; Angel wasn't there anymore.

  "You float on the skin of your past," Angel said, her eyes wide and sightless, "suspended above the dark landscape below. There are hills there and valleys there. You created them but you've forgotten where they are."

  Her mouth moved in time with the words, but it wasn't a little girl's voice. And yet it was her voice, there could be no doubt about it.

  "You cast your line down into the waters and you bring up small pieces of yourself. They are bright, silvery, and quick. But how many more shimmer away, how many escape, every time your line splashes into the water?"

  "Hot shit," Skippy whispered to himself.

  "You must do more," the voice speaking through Angel said. "You must learn the map of that invisible landscape below. It is the map of your life."

  "And a little child shall lead them," someone said behind me.

  "Why should they escape, those silvery ones?" Angel said. Her body was limp and lifeless. Her spine sagged against the hard back of the chair. Only the jaw seemed to be animated. It moved as though it had a life of its own. The kitten had jumped from her lap and strolled offstage.

  "They escape because you throw your nets, you cast your hooks, into the past. There is no past. You know that and you've always known it. A baby knows it.

  "The eternal moment is now. Only by existing in now, now and only now, can you command the power you need to deal with a world that will break you, defraud you, destroy you, if you let it. There are things you must cast away.

  "You have baggage with you. Cast it away; you can't fight with your hands full."

  Skippy sighed beside me.

  "You have memories with you," Angel droned on inexorably. "Cast them away; you can't float on the moment when you are anchored in the past. That is what the Listeners are for. To help you chart your explorations, to receive your memories.

  "You have commitments with you. Cast them away; you can't diffuse your strength by fighting others' battles. You can only give them one thing, the gift of example, the example of someone who can survive in the world.

  "You have your past with you. Cast it away. Become born in the eternal moment, the moment of now."

  Except for the stretched, contorted voice, the hall was absolutely silent. No one coughed, no one shuffled his feet.

  "There are devils in the world," Angel said. "They're not supernatural. They look like you and me. They are you and me." People cast sidelong looks at each other. "They're people who are stretched beyond their breaking point, people who are held together only by their skin, people who are trying to sustain the burden of their past, of all their pasts, in a world that exists only in the present.

  "They are people who haven't learned to cast away the Four Last Things: possessions, memories, others, one's self- one's past self. Pity them."

  Mary Claire had moved noiselessly across the stage to sit in the chair to her daughter's left. She looked worried.

  "Your past is your enemy," Angel said. Her legs shivered, and suddenly she sat upright. Mary Claire put a hand on her shoulder but her daughter didn't feel it.

  "You agonize," Angel said in a new and louder voice. Someone sobbed behind me. "You agonize because there are things in your past, things you've done, things you haven't done, things that were done to you.

  "Release them.

  "You feel inadequate. You feel inadequate because you are weighed down, chained down, with hopes, with fears, with old conceptions of your past. You're wrapped in a cocoon, the cocoon of your past.

  "Break free from the cocoon.

  "You are frightened."

  Someone cried out, "I am."

  "I can feel it," Angel said, "you are frightened. You are frightened because you can't look the moment in the eye. You can't look the moment in the eye because you're standing in a hole, the hole you've dug for yourself, the hole of your past, and you don't know how to step out of it.

  "Step up, step out of it." Her arms lifted as though pulled upward by strings and crisscrossed in benediction.

  "The moment is all," the voice said through her mouth. "The moment is harmonious. The moment is in perfect balance. The moment is a cross section of all that was, that is, and that will be. It is the pause between breathing out and breathing in. Without it there is no past, no present, no future. Everything is here. It is here now. Right now. You can learn to meet it. You are already in perfect balance with it. You just don't know it.

/>   "Release yourself. Break free. Step up. Step up into the moment. Say good-bye to the Four Last Things and say hello to yourself. Say hello to the world as it really is. Say hello to power and fulfillment and satisfaction and perfect love.

  "We can show you how.

  "We can give you the key to the moment. It's so simple." She made a guttural sound that might have been a laugh.

  "The key to the moment is the key to the world."

  The little girl collapsed back into her chair and her eyes fluttered and then closed. Her mother placed a hand on her daughter's forehead and then got up and hurried to the microphone.

  "That's all," she said. "I'm worried about Angel's stomach."

  Two men in dark clothing came out and helped the little girl from her chair under Mary Claire's watchful eyes. Angel sagged between them as they guided her from the chair. Her head rolled back as though her neck were broken.

  A murmur rolled through the auditorium. Skippy turned to me and placed a hand on my arm.

  "Wow," he said reverently.

  I looked around. People were watching the progress of the mother, the little girl, and the little girl's… the little girl's what? "Pallbearers" was the only word that came to mind. I turned back to Skippy.

  "No shit," I said.

  Chapter 7

  Absolutely everything was for sale. The room adjoining the auditorium was jammed full of tables, and each table was stacked with books, pamphlets, cassette tapes, and posters of Angel and Mary Claire. We'd been given a tote bag when we entered the room, and I stood next to Skippy, watching the church members drop the items into their bags like women at a hosiery sale. Nothing so vulgar as money changed hands; the people paid by waving their room keys.

  Skippy seemed subdued. He'd acknowledged a few greetings from people he didn't seem to know very well, but other than that he'd said nothing since the Revealing ended.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "I wish you hadn't said that, about it being hard on her. Usually she doesn't seem to mind, but tonight I almost felt like she was fighting it." He looked around the room. A number of people had gathered around a table with a couple of industrial-size metal coffee urns on it. They were sipping from Styrofoam cups and chewing on pastries. "Most of the time she seems to enjoy it," he said. "She says she enjoys it."

  "Skippy, how long have you been involved in the Church?"

  "About five years."

  "And she's how old, twelve?"

  "I guess."

  "So she's been doing this since she was seven at least?"

  He looked bewildered for a moment. Then his face cleared. "No, no," he said. "I forgot, you don't know anything about it. She's the third Speaker. There were two before her," he added, helping me with my math.

  "What happened to them?"

  A heavyset woman with such round cheeks that she looked like she was carrying a week's supply of nuts in them came up to us and shyly asked Skippy for his autograph. Looking simultaneously pleased and distracted, he wrote his name on her tote bag. She blushed appreciatively and headed for the pastry table.

  ''What?" he said absently.

  "What happened to the other two?"

  "They stopped Speaking," he said. "It happens after a while. It'll happen to Angel in a year or two."

  "And then what?"

  "Some other little girl will start to Speak."

  "They've all been girls?"

  "Sure," he said a little impatiently. "Look it up, it's all in the books. The Speakers change but the Voice remains the same."

  "And what's the Voice?"

  "The Voice gives the Church direction. It's always the same Voice. It's a Spirit, Simeon," he said. "Its name is Aton, or Alon in the first Revealings. The first Speaker, poor little Anna, had a cleft palate, she couldn't say her T's, and all the early writings called it Alon. See, the writings come through the Speaker, and they're spoken onto tape and then written down, so the first writings got it wrong. But the Voice is the same, and it doesn't seem to care what you call it. I've heard two Speakers, and they sounded pretty much alike. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is listen to the cassettes. They're only nineteen-ninety-five. And the content, of course, the content is the same from Speaker to Speaker."

  "Aton is Egyptian. The God of the Sun."

  "The voice is American. It's told us that, it's said that it was an American last time around."

  "Can we get some coffee?" I was beginning to feel like I weighed six hundred pounds. I hadn't slept much since Sally Oldfield was killed.

  "I've got some whiskey in my pocket," Skippy said unexpectedly. "You want to step outside?"

  Back out in the parking lot, Skippy shivered in the breeze as he pulled out a silver hip flask that could have dated from the twenties. "Glenfiddich," he said. "About a hundred years old and smoked over peat bogs or something." He handed it to me first.

  I'm not a whiskey drinker, but the first sip converted me. It was warm and smoky and smoother than an Irish lie. I felt a red line of heat, like a thermometer in reverse, snake down from my throat to my belly button.

  "I knew there was a reason for grain," I said, "other than roughage I mean." I handed it back. The world looked a lot better. The cypresses, black against the spangling of stars, achieved the spiral harmony Van Gogh had painted. Skippy gulped twice and then burped.

  "This is a no-no," he said, wiping his mouth and giving the flask back. "No drinking during the retreat."

  "I thought there weren't any rules."

  "Normally there aren't. But this thing, this retreat, is like a fat farm for the consciousness. Just like you're not supposed to slip away to Winchell's for a doughnut while you're losing weight, you're not supposed to cloud your consciousness while you're here."

  I took a much longer swig this time. The flask held more than I'd thought. "Sounds reasonable," I said, swallowing. "Are you sure this stuff is legal?"

  I was positive that Skippy's answer made sense, but it was hard to make it out around the neck of the flask, which was lodged between his lips. I hadn't eaten in hours, and I felt suddenly light-headed. "Damnaroonies," I said. "Gimme that."

  He did. This time I was the one who burped. I tried to hand the flask back, but Skippy was looking at his watch and I almost dropped it. "Any minute now, she should be coming in," he said.

  "Who?"

  "Angel. And Mary Claire. Don't you want to see them?"

  Since I still had the flask, I took another swipe at it. "Sure, I want to see them. Let's go."

  "Just a minute." Skippy turned the flask to a ninety-degree angle and drained it. "You know," he said confidingly, "as a great statesman and drinker once said, there is some shit up with which I will not put. That's Winston Churchill, when some twit tried to edit his prose. Why shouldn't a sentence end with a preposition?"

  "Every sentence has to end somewhere," I said. "Unless you're Marcel Proust."

  "Prowst. I always pronounced it Prowst."

  "Well, he's dead anyway. Are we going in, or what?"

  "In," Skippy said, shoving the flask back into his pocket. "About the shit I won't put up with, though. I mean, why shouldn't I drink? In moderation, of course."

  "That goes without saying." I hiccupped. "Moderation is the important thing." Skippy laughed. Together we wove our way back into the hall.

  It seemed brighter and noisier than when we'd left it. Also a lot more cheerful. The whiskey hummed a little Irish jig in my veins.

  "So what happens to them?"

  "Who?" Skippy said, squinting in the light. He was making a slightly erratic line for the pastries, with me trailing behind.

  "The ones who stop Speaking."

  "They grow up, I guess. Well, one of them, anyway. The first speaker, Anna Klein, she and her mother got killed a few years back. Automobile crash. They were on their way to one of the Church's cable broadcasts-did you know the Church has its own cable show?"

  "No. How would I? I don't watch TV."

  "Well, they were
driving down from Yosemite, where they lived, she and her mother, I mean, and they blew a tire on the Grapevine. On the long downhill. Totaled. Terrible thing. You want a bear claw?"

  "I'll take the whole bear." Skippy lurched around to hand me a pastry and succeeded in mashing it against my hand. "Oops," he said.

  "Gee, you still remember your line. Were they alone in the car?"

  "Yeah, I think so. Let me get you another one."

  "That's okay. My stomach doesn't know what it's supposed to look like. Whose fault was it?"

  Skippy's face was red enough to make Listener Dooley give him a hard look from across the table. Dooley's whiskey nose quivered like a divining rod.

  "Whose fault was what? The bear claw?"

  "No. The accident. The bear claw was John Barleycorn's fault." I gave Listener Dooley a winning smile. "Great pastries," I said. "My compliments to the chef."

  Skippy said, "The accident was the tire's fault."

  Dooley twitched audibly and Skippy followed my gaze. '"Evening, Listener," he said genially. "What, no coffee?"

  Dooley's little raisin eyes were nuggets of suspicion. "Mr. Miller " he began grimly, "alcohol is not…"I put a hand on Skippy's arm to steer him elsewhere.

  A celesta rang out. Everyone looked at the far end of the room.

  The bells were struck again and the crowd parted to admit Angel and Mary Claire. Both of them had changed clothes, the mother into a simple dark dress, and Angel into a sky-blue middy blouse with matching skirt. Her dazzling blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail now, and she looked like any other beautiful little girl. She held on to her mother's arm as though the presence of all the adults made her feel shy. She'd left the kitten backstage. There were four men with them, dressed alike in vaguely naval white jackets and dark trousers. A shimmer of coral behind them drew my eye, and I saw Dr. Merryman following along in their wake.

  "I guess her stomach's better," Skippy said. "See, Simeon, she doesn't look like she's been through anything terrible."

  "Who are the Gilbert-and-Sullivan sailors?"

  "Ushers. They're supposed to take care of Mary Claire and Angel. Just in case of crazies, you know?"