by S. T. Joshi
“It was lost,” Isobel tells me. “For a very long time it was lost. There were rumors it had gone to Holland, early in the fifteenth century, that it was buried there with one who’d worn it in life. Other stories say it was stolen from the grave of that man sometime in the 1920s and carried off to England.”
I sip coffee while she talks.
“It’s all bound up in irony and coincidence, and, really, I don’t give that sort of prattle much credence,” she continues. “The Dutchman who’s said to have been buried with the idol, some claim he was a grave robber, that he fancied himself a proper ghoul. Charming fellow, sure, and then, five hundred years later, along come these two British degenerates—from somewhere in Yorkshire, I think. Supposedly, they dug him up and stole the idol, which they found hung around his neck.”
“But before that… I mean, before the Dutchman, where might it have been?” I ask, and Isobel smiles. Her smile could melt ice, or freeze the blood, depending on one’s perspective and penchant for hyperbole and metaphor. She shrugs and sets her coffee cup down on the kitchen table. We’re sitting together in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. The building was constructed in the 1890s, as cold storage for the wares of fur merchants. The walls are thick and solid and keep our secrets. She lights a cigarette and watches me a moment.
My train is pulling into South Station; I’ve never visited Boston before, and I shall never leave. It’s a rainy day, and I’ve been promised that Isobel will be waiting for me on the platform.
“Well, before Holland—assuming, of course, it was ever in Holland—I’ve spoken with a man who thinks it might have spent time in Greece, hidden at the Monastery of Holy Trinity at Metéora, but the monastery wasn’t built until 1475, so this really doesn’t jibe with the story of the Dutch grave robber. Of course, the hound is mentioned in Al Azif. But you know that.” And then the conversation shifts from the jade idol to archaeology in Damascus, and then Yemen, and, finally, the ruins of Babylon. In particular, I listen to Isobel describe the blue-glazed tiles of the Ishtar Gate, with their golden bas-reliefs of lions and auroch bulls and the strange, dragon-like sirrush. She saw a reconstructed portion of the gate at the Pergamon Museum when she was in Berlin, many years ago.
“In Germany, I was still a young woman,” she says, and glances at a window and the city lights, the Massachusetts night and the yellow-orange skyglow that’s there so no one ever has to look too closely at the stars.
This is the night of the new moon, and Isobel kneels before me and bathes my feet. I’m naked save the jade idol on its silver chain, hung about my neck. The temple of the Starry Wisdom smells of frankincense, galbanum, sage, clove, myrrh, and saffron smoldering in iron braziers suspended from the high ceiling beams. Her ash-blonde hair is pulled back from her face, pinned into a neat chignon. Her robes are the color of raw meat. I don’t want her to look me in the eyes, and yet I cannot imagine going up the granite stairs to the dais without first having done so, without that easy, familiar reassurance. Dark figures in robes of half a dozen other shades of red and black and grey press in close from all sides. The colors of their robes denote their rank. I close my eyes, though I have been forbidden to do so.
“This is our daughter,” barks the High Priestess, the old one crouched near the base of the altar. Her voice is phlegm and stripped gears, discord and tumult. “Of her own will does she come, and of her own will and the will of the Nameless Gods will she make the passage.”
And even in this instant—here at the end of my life and the beginning of my existence—I cannot help but smile at the High Priestess’ choice of words, at force of habit, her calling them the Nameless Gods, when we have given them so very many names over the millennia.
“She will see what we cannot,” the High Priestess barks. “She will walk unhindered where our feet will never tread. She will know their faces and their embrace. She will suffer fire and flood and the frozen wastes, and she will dine with the Mother and the Father. She will take a place at their table. She will know their blood, as they will know hers. She will fall and sleep, be raised and walk.”
I am pulling into South Station.
I am drinking coffee with Isobel.
I am nineteen years old, dreaming of a Dutch churchyard and violated graves. My dream is filled with the rustle of leathery wings and the mournful baying of some great, unseen beast. I smell freshly broken earth. The sky glares down at all the world with a single cratered eye which humanity, in its ignorance, would mistake for a full autumnal moon. There are two men with shovels and pick axes. Fascinated, I watch their grim, determined work, an unspeakable thievery done sixty-three years before my own birth. I hear the shovel scrape stone and wood.
In the temple, Isobel rises and kisses me. It’s no more than the palest ghost of all the many kisses we’ve shared during our long nights of lovemaking, those afternoons and mornings spent exploring one another’s bodies and desires and most taboo fancies.
The Hermit passes a jade cup to the Hierophant, who in turn passes it to Isobel. Though, in this place and in this hour, Isobel is not Isobel Endecott. She is the Empress, as I am here named the Wheel of Fortune. I have never seen this cup until now, but I know well enough that it was carved untold thousands of years before this night and from the same vein of leek-green jadeite as the pendant I wear about my throat. The mad Arabian author of the Al Azif believed the jade to have come from the Plateau of Y’Pawfrm e’din Leng, and it may be he was correct. The Empress places the rim of the cup to my lips, and I drink. The bitter ecru tincture burns going down and kindles a fire in my chest and belly. I know this is the fire that will make ashes of me, and from those ashes will I rise as surely as any phoenix.
“She stands at the threshold,” the High Priestess growls, “and soon will enter the Hall of the Mother and the Father.” The crowd murmurs blessings and blasphemies. Isobel’s delicate fingers caress my face, and I see the longing in her blue eyes, but the High Priestess may not kiss me again, not in this life.
“I will be waiting,” she whispers.
My train leaves Savannah.
“Do you miss Georgia?” Isobel asks me, a week after I arrive in Boston, and I tell her yes, sometimes I do miss Georgia. “But it always passes,” I say, and she smiles.
I am almost twenty years old, standing alone on a wide white beach where the tannin-stained Tybee River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, watching as a hurricane barrels towards shore. The outermost rain bands lash the sea, but haven’t yet reached the beach. The sand around me is littered with dead fish and sharks, crabs and squid. On February 5th, 1958, a B-47 collided in midair with an F-86 Sabre fighter 7,200 feet above this very spot, and the crew of the B-47 was forced to jettison the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb it was carrying; the “Tybee bomb” was never recovered and lies buried somewhere in silt and mud below the brackish waters of Wassaw Sound, six or seven miles southwest of where I’m standing. I draw a line in the sand, connecting one moment to another, and the hurricane wails.
I am sixteen, and a high-school English teacher is telling me that if a gun appears at the beginning of a story, it should be fired by the end. If it’s a bomb, the conscientious author should take care to be certain it explodes, so that the reader’s expectations are not neglected. It all sounds very silly, and I cite several examples to the contrary. The English teacher scowls and changes the subject.
In the temple of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I walk through the flames consuming my soul and take my place on the altar.
2.
IT’S A SWELTERING DAY IN LATE AUGUST 20—, AND I walk from the green shade of Telfair Square, moving north along Barnard Street. I would try to describe here the violence of the alabaster sun on this afternoon, hanging so far above Savannah, but I know I’d never come close to capturing in words the sheer spite and vehemence of it. The sky is bleached as pallid as the cement sidewalk and the whitewashed bricks on either side of the street. I pass what was once a cotton and grain warehouse, when the New South was still the
Old South, more than a century ago. The building has been “repurposed” for lofts and boutiques and a trendy soul-food restaurant. I walk, and the stillness of the summer afternoon makes my footsteps seem almost loud as thunderclaps. I can feel the dull beginnings of a headache, and wish I had a Pepsi or an orange drink, something icy cold in a perspiring bottle. I glance through windows at the air-conditioned sanctuaries on the other side of the glass, but I don’t stop and go inside.
The night before this day, there were dreams I will never tell anyone until I meet Isobel Endecott, two years farther along. I had dreams of a Dutch graveyard, and of a baying hound, and awoke to find an address on West Broughton scribbled on the cover of a paperback book I’d been reading when I fell asleep. The handwriting was indisputably mine, though I have no memory of having picked up the ballpoint pen on my nightstand and written the address. I did not get back to sleep until sometime after sunrise, and then there were only more dreams of that cemetery and the spire of a cathedral and the two men, busy with their picks and shovels.
I glance directly at the sun, daring it to blind me.
“You knew where to go,” Isobel says, my first evening in Boston, my first evening with her and already I felt as though I’d known her all my life. “The time was right, and you were chosen. I can’t even imagine such an honor.”
It is late August, and I sweat, and walk north until I come to the intersection with West Broughton Street. I am clutching the copy of Absalom, Absalom! in my left hand, and I pause to read the address again. Then I turn left, which also means I turn west.
“The stars were right,” she says, and pours me another brandy. “Which is really only another way of saying these events cannot occur until it is time for them to occur. That there is a proper sequence.”
I walk west down West Broughton until I come to the address that my sleeping self wrote on the Faulkner book. It’s a shop (calling itself an “emporium”) specializing in antique jewelry, porcelain figurines, and “Oriental” curios. Inside, after the scorching gaze of the sun, the dusty gloom seems almost frigid. I find what I did not even know I was looking for in a display case near the register. It is one of the most hideous things I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful, too. I guess the stone is jade, but it’s only a guess. I know next to nothing about gemstones and the lapidary arts. That day, I do not even know the word lapidary. I won’t learn it until later, when I begin asking questions about the pendant.
There’s a middle-aged man sitting on a stool behind the counter. He watches me through the lenses of his spectacles. He has about him a certain mincing fastidiousness. I notice the mole above his left eyebrow, and that his clean nails are trimmed almost to the quick. I notice there’s a hair growing from the mole. My mother always said I had an eye for detail.
“Anything I can show you today?” he wants to know, and I only almost hesitate before nodding and pointing to the jade pendant.
“Now, that is a very peculiar piece,” he says, leaning forward and sliding the back of the case open. He reaches inside and lifts the pendant and its chain from a felt-lined tray. The felt is a faded shade of burgundy. He sits up again and passes the pendant across the counter to me. I’d not expected it to be so heavy, or feel so slick in my fingers, almost as though it were coated with oil or wax.
“Picked it up at an estate sell, a few years back,” says the fastidious seller of antiques. “Never liked the thing myself, but different strokes, as they say. If I only stocked what I liked, wouldn’t make much of a living, now would I?”
“No,” I reply. “I don’t suppose you would.”
I stand alone on a beach at the south end of Tybee Island, watching the arrival of a hurricane. I’ve come to the beach to drown. However, I already know that’s not what’s going to happen, and the realization brings with it a faint pang of disappointment.
“Came from an old house down in Stephen’s Ward,” the man behind the counter says. “On East Hall Street, if memory serves. Strange bunch of women lived there, years ago, but then, one June, all of a sudden, the whole lot up and moved away. There were nine of them living in that house, and, well, you know how people talk.”
“Yes,” I say. “People talk.”
“Might be better if we all tended to our own business and let others be,” the man says and watches me as I examine the jade pendant. It looks a bit like a crouching dog, except for the wings, and it also puts me in mind of a sphinx. Its teeth are bared. Here, in my palm, carved from stone, is the countenance of every starving, tortured animal that has ever lived, the face of every madman, pure malevolence given form. I shiver, and the sensation is not entirely unpleasant. I realize that I am becoming aroused, that I am wet. There are letters from an alphabet I don’t recognize inscribed about the base of the figurine, and a stylized skull has been etched into the bottom. The pendant is wholly repellent, and I know I cannot possibly leave the shop without it. It occurs to me that I might kill to own this thing.
“I think it would be,” I tell him. “Be better if we all tended to our own business, I mean.”
“Still, you can’t change human nature,” he says.
“No, you can’t do that,” I agree.
The train is pulling into South Station.
The hurricane bears down on Tybee Island.
And I’m only eleven and standing at a wrought-iron gate set into a brick wall, a wall that surrounds a decrepit mansion on East Hall Street. The wall is yellow, not because it has been painted yellow, but because all the bricks used in its construction have been glazed the color of goldenrods. They shimmer in the heat of a late May afternoon. On the other side of the gate is a woman named Maddy (which she says is short for Madeleine). Sometimes, like today, I walk past and find Maddy waiting, as though I’m expected. She never opens the gate; we only ever talk through the bars, there in the cool below the live oak branches and Spanish moss. Sometimes, she reads my fortune with a pack of Tarot cards. Other times, we talk about books. On this day, though, she’s telling me about the woman who owns the house, whom she calls Aramat, a name I’m sure I’ve never heard before.
“Isn’t that the mountain where the Bible says Noah’s Ark landed after the flood?” I ask her.
“No, dear. That’s Mount Ararat.”
“Well, they sound very much alike, Ararat and Aramat,” I say, and Maddy stares at me. I can tell she’s thinking all sorts of things she’s not going to say aloud, things I’m not meant to ever hear.
And then Maddy says, almost whispering, “Write her name backwards sometime. Very often, what seems unusual becomes perfectly ordinary, if we take care to look at it from another angle.” She peers over her shoulder, and tells me that she has to go, and I should be on my way.
I’m twenty-three, and this is the day I found the pendant in an antique shop on West Broughton Street. I ask the man behind the counter how much he wants for it, and after he tells me, I ask him if it’s jade, or if it only looks like jade.
“Looks like real jade to me,” he replies, and I know from his expression that the question has offended him. “It’s not glass or plastic, if that’s what you mean. I don’t sell costume jewelry, Miss. The chain, that’s sterling silver. You want it, I’ll take ten bucks off the price on the tag. Frankly, it gives me the creeps, and I’ll be happy to be shed of it.”
I pay him twenty-five dollars, cash, and he puts the pendant into a small brown paper bag, and I go back out into the blazing sun.
I dream of a graveyard in Holland, and the October sky is filled with flittering bats. There is another sound, also of wings beating at the cold night air, but that sound is not being made by anything like a bat.
“This card,” says Maddy, “is the High Priestess. She has many meanings, depending.”
“Depending on what?” I want to know.
“Depending on many things,” Maddy says and smiles. Her Tarot cards are spread out on the mossy paving stones on her side of the black iron gate. She taps at the High Priestess with
an index finger. “In this instance, I’d suspect a future that has yet to be revealed, and duality, and hidden influences at work in your life.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by duality,” I tell her, so she explains.
“The Empress, she sits there on her throne, with a pillar on either side. Some say, these are two pillars from the Temple of Solomon, king of the Israelites and a powerful mystic. And some say that the woman on the throne is Pope Joan.”
“I never knew there was a woman pope,” I say.
“There probably wasn’t. It’s just a legend from the Middle Ages.” And then Maddy brushes a stray wisp of hair from her eyes before she goes back to explaining duality and the card’s symbolism. “On the Empress’ right hand is a dark pillar, which is called Boaz. It represents the negative life principle. On her left is a white pillar, Jakin, which represents the positive life principle. Positive and negative, that’s duality, and because she sits here between them, we know that the Empress represents balance.”
Maddy turns over another card, the Wheel of Fortune, but it’s upside down, reversed.
I am twenty-five years old, and Isobel Endecott is asleep in the bed we share in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. I lie awake, listening to her breathing and the myriad of noises from the street three stories below. It’s four minutes after three a.m., and I briefly consider taking an Ambien. But I don’t want to sleep. That’s the truth of it. There’s so little time left to me, and I’d rather not spend it in dreams. The night is fast approaching when the Starry Wisdom will meet on my behalf, because of what I’ve brought with me on that train from Savannah, and on that night I will slip this mortal coil (or be pushed, one or the other or both), and there’ll be time enough for dreaming when I’m dead and in my grave, or during whatever’s to come after my resurrection.
I find a pencil and a notepad. The latter has the name of the law firm that Isobel works for printed across the top of each page: Jackson, Monk, & Rowe, with an ampersand instead of “and” being written out. I don’t bother to put on my robe. I go to the bathroom wearing only my panties, and stand before the wide mirror above the sink and stare back at my reflection a few minutes. I’ve never thought of myself as pretty, and I still don’t. Tonight, I look like someone who hasn’t slept much in a while. My hazel eyes seem more green than brown, when it’s usually the other way around. The tattoo between my breasts is beginning to heal, the ink worked into my skin by the thin, nervous man designated the Ace of Pentacles by the High Priestess of the Church of Starry Wisdom.
