Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  The towheaded man paused and Czerny spoke again. I could find nothing in his face to support the sternness of his previous words—he seemed to be babbling brokenly, as if speaking to a memory, giving voice to an imaginary dialogue, and thinking this, I wondered if that was what we were to him, memories and creatures of the imagination; if he had gone so far along the path to freedom that even those who lived in Diamond Bar had come to be no more than shadows in his mind.

  “This is the edge of the pit,” the towheaded man said when Czerny had finished. “The one you saw below is only its metaphor. Here you were closest to peril. That’s why we have summoned you, so you can watch and understand.”

  Another spate of muttering and then the towheaded man said, “This is your final instruction, Penhaligon. There are no further lessons to be learned. From now on we will not protect you.”

  Czerny turned away, the audience ended, but angered by his claim that the board had protected me—I had no memory of being protected when I fought with Colangelo—and emboldened by the certainty that I was not to be transferred, I said to him, “If the pit I saw below was a metaphor, tell me where Causey is.”

  The old man did not turn back, but muttered something the towheaded man did not have to translate, for I heard the words clearly.

  “If you are fortunate,” Czerny said, “you will meet him again in the new wing.”

  The towheaded man nudged me forward to stand by Czerny and the rest of the board, inches away from the line demarcating the limits of the prison and the beginning of the world, a dirt path leading downward among boulders to the river flashing along its course. I have said the river was moonstruck, yet that scarcely describes the brightness of the landscape. The light was so strong even the smallest objects cast a shadow, and though the shadows beneath the boughs quivered in a fitful wind, they looked solid and deep. The dense firs and the overhang of the entrance prevented me from seeing the moon, but it must have been enormous—I pictured a blazing silvery face peering down from directly above the river, pocked by craters that sketched the liver spots and crumpled features of a demented old man. Sprays of water flying from the rocks in midstream glittered like icy sparks; the shingle on the far shore glittered as though salted with silver. Beyond it, the terrain of the opposite bank lay hidden beneath a dark green canopy, but patches of needles carpeting the margins of the forest glowed a reddish-bronze.

  Who it was that shoved Colangelo out onto the path, I cannot say—I was not watching. It must have been a hard shove, for he went staggering down the slope and fell to all fours. He collected himself and glanced back toward us, not singling anyone out, it seemed, but taking us all in, as if claiming the sight for memory. He wiped dirt from his hands, and judging by his defiant posture I expected him to shout, to curse, but he turned and made for the river, going carefully over the uneven ground. When he reached the river’s edge, he stopped and glanced back a second time. I could not make out his face, though he stood in the light, but judging by the sudden furtiveness of his body language, I doubted he had believed that he would get this far, and now that he had, the idea that he actually might be able to escape sprang up hot inside him, and he was prey to the anxieties of a man afflicted by hope.

  Oddly enough, I hoped for him. I felt a sympathetic response to his desire for freedom. My heart raced and my brow broke a sweat, as if it were I and not that ungainly pinkish figure who was stepping from rock to rock, arms outspread for balance, groping for purchase on the slick surfaces, wobbling a bit, straining against gravity and fear. I had no apprehension of an inimical presence such as I had detected that morning, and this made me think that it had been nerves alone that had stopped me from escaping, and increased my enthusiasm for Colangelo’s escape. I wanted to cheer, to urge him on, and might have done so if I had not been surrounded by the silent members of the board and their faithful intimates. That Colangelo was doing what I had not dared caused me envy and bitterness but also infected me with hope for myself. The next time I was alone at the gate, perhaps I would be equal to the moment.

  The wind kicked up, outvoicing the chuckling rush of the river, sending sprays higher over the rocks, and along with the wind, the brightness of the river intensified. Every eddy, every momentary splotch of foam, every sinewy swell of water glinted and dazzled, as if it were coming to a boil beneath Colangelo. He kept going past the midpoint, steadier, more confident with each step, unhampered by the buffets of the wind. Close by the gate the boughs bent and swayed, stirring the shadows, sending them sliding forward and back over the dirt like a black film. The whole world seemed in motion, the atoms of the earth and air in a state of perturbation, and as Colangelo skipped over the last few rocks, I realized there was something unnatural about all this brilliant movement. The shapes of things were breaking down…briefly, for the merest fractions of seconds, their edges splintering, decaying into jittering bits of bright and dark, a pointillist dispersion of the real. I assumed I was imagining this, that I was emotionally overwrought, but the effect grew more pronounced. I looked to Czerny and the board. They were as always—distracted, apparently unalarmed—but what their lack of reaction meant, whether they saw what I did and were unsurprised, whether they saw something entirely different, I could not determine.

  Colangelo let out a shout—of triumph, I believed. He had reached the shore and was standing with a fist upraised. The sand beneath his feet was a shoal of agitated glitter, and at his back the bank was a dark particulate dance, the forms of the trees disintegrating into a rhythm of green and black dots, the river into a stream of fiery unreality. How could he not notice? He shouted again and flipped us off. I realized that his outlines were shimmering, his prison garb blurring. Everything around him was yielding up its individuality, blending with the surround, flattening into an undifferentiated backdrop. It was nearly impossible to tell the sprays of water from sparkling currents in the air. The wind came harder, less like a wind in its roaring passage than the flux of some fundamental cosmic force, the sound of time itself withdrawing from the frame of human event, of entropy and electron death, and as Colangelo sprinted up the bank into cover of the forest, he literally merged with the setting, dissipated, the stuff of his body flowing out to be absorbed into a vibratory field in which not one distinguishable form still flourished. I thought I heard him scream. In all that roaring confusion I could not be certain, but he was gone. That much I knew. The world beyond the annex gate was gone as well, its separate forms dissolved into an electric absence of tremulous black, green, and silver motes, depthless and afire with white noise, like a television set tuned to a channel whose signal had been lost.

  The board and their retainers moved away, talking softly among themselves, leaving me on the edge of the prison, of the pit, watching as—piece by piece—the forest and river and rocks reassembled, their inconstant shapes melting up from chaos, stabilizing, generating the imitation of a perfect moonlit night, the air cool and bracing, the freshness of the river sweetly palpable, all things alive with vital movement—boughs shifting, fallen needles drifting, light jumping along the surface of the water with the celerity of a charge along a translucent nerve. Even after what I had seen, I stood there a long while, tempted to run into the night, disbelieving the evidence of my senses, mistrusting the alternatives to belief, and so oppressed in spirit that I might have welcomed dissolution. A step forward, and I would be free one way or another. I stretched out a hand, testing its resistance to the dissolute power of the world beyond, and saw no hint of blurring or distortion. Yet still I stood there.

  • • •

  The anteroom is empty of scaffolding, swept clean of plaster dust, and I am sitting in a folding chair beneath the domed ceiling, like—I imagine—a gray-clad figure escaped from the lower portions of my mural. Years down the road I may look back and judge my work harshly, but I know at this moment I have achieved my goal and created something greater than myself. The mural rises up from solidity into the diffuse, from dark specificity in
to layered washes of light from which less definite figures emerge…less definite, at least, from this vantage. At close quarters they are easily identifiable. Bianca is there, a golden swimmer in the air, and at her side our son, her proof made flesh, born five months after our conversation in this very room. When told of his birth I went to visit her in the newly designated maternity ward of the prison hospital. Sleeping, she looked exhausted, her color weak and cheeks sunken, yet she was beautiful nonetheless. The child slept beneath a blanket in a crib beside her bed, only the back of his head visible. My emotions seemed to be circling one another like opponents in a ring. It was so strange to think of her with a child. Now that she had established the ultimate female credential, the freak detector in my brain emitted a steady beep. It was as if I were determined to paint her with a perverse brush, to view her condition and her Mystery in terms of an aberration. At the same time, I was drawn to her as never before. All my old feelings were reinvigorated. I decided to seek a reconciliation, but when I informed her of this she told me it was not what she wanted.

  “You can’t hide what you feel,” she said. “You’re still conflicted.” She gave “conflicted” a distasteful reading and closed her eyes. “I’m too tired to argue. Please go.”

  I sat with her a bit longer, thinking she might relent, but when she fell asleep again I left the room. We see each other on occasion. Each time we meet she searches my face but thus far has found no apparent cause for confidence there. I have little hope she will ever find me other than wanting, and the prospect of life without her grows more difficult to bear. It seems I cannot shake the skepticism that Frank Ristelli correctly attributed to me, for despite everything I have experienced at Diamond Bar, I continue to speculate that our lives are under the influence of a powerful coercive force that causes us to believe in unrealities. My chest, for instance. Some weeks ago I noticed a scatter of pale discolorations surfaced from the skin thereon, their hues and partly rendered shapes reminiscent of the tattoo on Ristelli’s chest, and yet when that tattoo achieves final form, as I assume it must, I will with part of my mind seek an explanation that satisfies my cynic’s soul. If the birth of a child from a woman once a man fails to persuade me of the miraculous, is there anything that will overwhelm my capacity for doubt? Only when I paint does the current of belief flow through me, and then I am uncertain whether the thing believed is intrinsic to the subject of the work or a constant of my ego, a self-aggrandizing principle I deify with my obsessive zeal.

  Ristelli, too, occupies a place in the dome of the anteroom, a mangy gray ghost slipping back into the world, and Causey is there as well, tumbling toward its center where, almost buried in light, Quires hangs in his eternal torment, a promethean Christ yielding to a barbaric sacrifice. I have pored over Causey’s notes and rummaged the archives in an attempt to learn more about Quires, to understand what brought him to this pass. A transcendent moment like the one that left Saul stricken on the road to Damascus, an illumination of blinding sight? Or did Quires gradually win his way to a faith strong enough to compel his redemptive act? I have discovered no clue to explain his transformation, only a record of atrocities, but I think now both answers are correct, that all our labors are directed toward the achievement of such a moment, and perhaps therein lies the root cause of my skepticism, for though an illumination of this sort would remove the barriers that keep me from my family, I fear that moment. I fear I will dissolve in light, grow addled and vague, like Czerny, or foolishly evangelical like Ristelli. The abhorrence of authority that pushed me into a criminal life resists even an authority that promises ultimate blessing. I am afflicted with a contrarian’s logic and formulate unanswerable questions to validate my stance. I poison my feeble attempts at faith with the irrationalities and improbabilities of Diamond Bar.

  Pleased by my celebration of their myth, the board has offered me another room to paint, and there I intend to celebrate Bianca. I have already sketched out the design. She will be the sole figure, but one repeated in miniature over and over again, emerging from flowers, aloft on floating islands, draped in shadow, dressed in dozens of guises and proximate past forms, a history of color and line flowing toward her twice lifesized image hovering like a Hindu goddess in an exotic heaven populated by her many incarnations. That I have relegated her to the subject of a painting, however contemplative of her nature, suggests that I have given up on the relationship, turned my obsession from the person to the memory of the person. This distresses me, but I cannot change the way things are. My chains still bind me, limiting my choices and contravening the will to change. In recent months, I have come to envision a future in which I am an ancient gray spider creaking across a web of scaffolding that spans a hundred rooms, leaking paintlike blood in his painful, solitary progress, creating of his life an illuminated tomb commemorating folly, mortal confusion, and lost love. Not so terrible a fate, perhaps. To die and love and dream of perfect colors, perfect forms. But like all those who strive and doubt and seek belief, I am moving rapidly in the direction of something that I fear, something whose consolations I mistrust, and am inclined to look past that inevitability, to locate a point toward which to steer. My son, whom Bianca has named Max, after—she says—her favorite painter, Max Ernst, an implied insult, a further dismissal from her life…I sometimes think my son might serve as such a point. My imagination is captivated by the potentials of a man so strangely born, and often I let myself believe he will be the wings of our liberty, the one in whom the genius of our home will fully manifest. Since he is kept apart from me, however, these thoughts have the weight of fantasy, and I am cast back onto the insubstantial ground of my own life, a gray silence in which I have rarely found a glint of promise. Tears come easily. Regrets like hawks swoop down to pluck my hopeful thoughts from midair. And yet, though I am afraid that, as with most promises of fulfillment, it will always hang beyond our grasp, an eidolon, the illusion of perfection, lately I have begun to anticipate the completion of the new wing.

  ETERNITY AND

  AFTERWARD

  Punctuality had come to be something of a curse for Viktor Chemayev. Though toward most of his affairs he displayed the typical nonchalance of a young man with a taste for the good life and the money to indulge it, he maintained an entirely different attitude toward his business appointments. Often he would begin to prepare himself hours in advance, inspecting his mirror image for flaws, running a hand over his shaved scalp, trying on a variety of smiles, none of which fit well on his narrow Baltic face, and critiquing the hang of his suit (his tailor had not yet mastered the secret of cutting cloth for someone with broad shoulders and a thin chest). Once satisfied with his appearance he would pace the length and breadth of his apartment, worrying over details, tactical nuances, planning every word, every expression, every gesture. Finally, having no better use for the time remaining, he would drive to the meeting place and there continue to pace and worry and plan. On occasion this compulsiveness caused him problems. He would drink too much while waiting in a bar, or catch cold from standing in the open air, or simply grow bored and lose his mental sharpness. But no matter how hard he tried to change his ways he remained a slave to the practice. And so it was that one night toward the end of October he found himself sitting in the parking lot of Eternity, watching solitary snowflakes spin down from a starless sky, fretting over his appointment with Yuri Lebedev, the owner of the club and its chief architect, from whom he intended to purchase the freedom of the woman he loved.

  For once it seemed that Chemayev’s anxiety was not misplaced. The prospect of meeting Lebedev, less a man than a creature of legend whom few claimed to have ever seen, was daunting of itself; and though Chemayev was a frequent visitor to Eternity and thus acquainted with many of its eccentricities, it occurred to him now that Lebedev and his establishment were one and the same, an inscrutable value shining forth from the dingy chaos of Moscow, a radiant character whose meaning no one had been able to determine and whose menace, albeit palpable, was imp
ossible to define. The appointment had been characterized as a mere formality, but Chemayev suspected that Lebedev’s notion of formality was quite different from his own, and while he waited he went over in his mind the several communications he had received from Eternity’s agents, wondering if he might have overlooked some devious turn of phrase designed to mislead him.

  The club was located half an hour to the north and west of the city center amidst a block of krushovas, crumbling apartment projects that sprouted from the frozen, rubble-strewn waste like huge gray headstones memorializing the Kruschev era—the graveyard of the Soviet state, home to generations of cabbage-eating drunks and party drones. Buildings so cheaply constructed that if you pressed your hand to their cement walls, your palm would come away coated with sand. No sign, neon or otherwise, announced the club’s presence. None was needed. Eternity’s patrons were members of the various mafiyas, and they required no lure apart from that of its fabulous reputation and exclusivity. All that was visible of the place was a low windowless structure resembling a bunker—the rest of the complex lay deep underground; but the lot that surrounded it was packed with Mercedes and Ferraris and Rolls Royces. As Chemayev gazed blankly, unseeingly, through the windshield of his ten-year-old Lada, shabby as a mule among thoroughbreds, his attention was caught by a group of men and women hurrying toward the entrance. The men walked with a brisk gait, talking and laughing, and the women followed silently in their wake, their furs and jewelry in sharp contrast to the men’s conservative attire, holding their collars shut against the wind or putting a hand to their head to keep an extravagant coiffure in place, tottering in their high heels, their breath venting in little white puffs.

  “Viktor!” Someone tapped on the driver side window. Chemayev cleared away condensation from the glass and saw the flushed, bloated features of his boss, Lev Polutin, peering in at him. Several feet away stood a pale man in a leather trenchcoat, with dark hair falling to his shoulders and a seamed, sorrowful face. “What are you doing out in the cold?” Polutin asked as Chemayev rolled down the window. “Come inside and drink with us!” His 100-proof breath produced a moist warmth on Chemayev’s cheeks.