by Matt Cardin
It was impossible, of course, for the new overnight growth on my face to be what I feared it was. Even the term “sudden onset” couldn’t cover the appearance of a cancerous mole in something like seven hours. But that was the fear that gripped me as I stood there looking at my marred face in the bathroom mirror. It literally caused me to shiver as I slowly showered and got dressed and ate a breakfast of cold cereal and hot toast. I had planned to put in some time at the office that day, but any activity that involved leaving my apartment was now out of the question. I couldn’t go and confront Susie at the receptionist’s counter and see the shock in her eyes when she saw my face. I couldn’t deal with the other women in the newsroom—Ginny with her big-toothed smile, Elaine with her plaid skirts, Larissa with her long brown hair and seemingly endless supply of bows—and know they were watching me not with desire but in horrified fascination at the obscenity on my cheek. In the end I resolved to stay home and phone in a report about my progress to Bobby.
Susie put me through to his extension, and when I told him that I had confirmed the existence of a Sick Seekers group in Terence, I heard him pound his desk as he fairly shouted, “I knew it!” His excitement made it all the easier for me to gloss over my meeting with Mitch. I said I had spoken with him briefly, and that I planned to ask some follow-up questions soon. I promised I would tell Bobby everything just as soon as I had gathered enough information for a story. He bought the whole thing, and we hung up with him expressing pleasure and excitement while I felt like a loser for lying to him.
I spent the day alternating between lying on the couch and poring over Mitch’s written words. A little before noon, I caved in to my lonely feelings and called Dr. Baumann’s voice mail, hoping that he might check it remotely and knowing that he probably wouldn’t receive an e-mail, so legendary was his disdain for “that impersonal, ephemeral excuse for a letter.” In my message, I apologized for not having been in contact for so long and explained that I was doing a story about the Sick Seekers and wanted his input, since I had heard he was researching the same subject. In contrast to my incomplete disclosure to Bobby, I told Dr. Baumann everything about my meeting with Mitch. I took particular pains in describing the Sick Seekers’ theology exactly as Mitch had explained it to me, and I asked if Dr. Baumann knew of any historical antecedents to it. I mentioned that Mitch had claimed to have an actual scripture in his possession, and I asked whether Dr. Baumann knew of this text. Before I hung up, I wished him well with his brother and asked him to call me at his earliest opportunity.
It seemed the sun took twice as long as normal to complete its circuit across the sky that day. The shadows crept across my carpeted living room floor like black molasses, and the long hours of solitude allowed a number of dark thoughts to steal into my consciousness. While studying the transcript of the interview, I kept returning to the last thing Mitch had told me about his beliefs: “The God gives you a choice. First He gives you a taste of the bliss He’s offering you. Then He shows you what it’s going to cost you to accept it.” I knew it was dangerous for me to think what I was thinking. I could hardly believe I was entertaining the idea, especially in light of my already precarious psychological life. But try as I might to warn myself away, I couldn’t help identifying my situation with Mitch’s words. My involuntary tendency to try on new worldviews like suits of clothes led me to think that maybe my recent sense of spiritual lightness was the gift of the God, whatever His name was, and that the growth on my face was a sign of the price I would have to pay for accepting it. I knew it was madness, but in the silence of my apartment, cut off from the rest of the world, with Dr. Baumann thousands of miles away, the transcript of a surreal spiritual puzzle in my hand, and an impossible mark riding on my cheek, I didn’t know how to convince myself otherwise. My philosophical schizophrenia was working overtime to undermine all my attempts at reasoning with myself. Nor was I helped by the fact that I was increasingly plagued by the mental image of these thoughts as deformed crabs that had been clinging to the underside of my consciousness for a very long time, awaiting a quiet moment in which to scuttle to the top and sink their claws into the soft gray folds where my sense of self resided.
By five o’clock I was utterly wretched. I felt dizzy, hot, and sick with worry, but at least my wooziness helped me for awhile as I tried to deny a phenomenon that I had noticed several times during the day but refused to acknowledge. At last it was undeniable, and that was when my world definitively began to tilt.
For even though it was impossible, the black spot was visibly growing. When I had first examined it around seven in the morning, it was the size of a pea. By noon, when I had fixed myself a half-hearted lunch of canned tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, it was big as a dime. I was just overwrought, I told myself as I chewed the cheesy bread. I was just letting my vivid mental and imaginative powers get away from me. Of course the spot couldn’t be growing. Not like that. Not so quickly that by the next morning it would surely cover the whole of my face like a putrid black mask.
But at five in the afternoon it was the size of a large marble, and its growth was impossible to deny. I stared at it in the mirror while the evening news blared from the TV set in the other room. My supernatural gift from the God (stop thinking that, don’t even flirt with that) had doubled its size in eight hours. I probed the area around it with trembling fingers and became aware of another astonishing fact: the pain had disappeared. There was no more itch, no more burning, no more anything. In fact, it wasn’t just my face that felt fine. All of me felt fine.
No, more than fine, I felt great, even in my semi-feverish condition, which I now recognized as a very shallow phenomenon beneath which I was positively charged, invigorated, vitalized with an abundant swell of energy and well being. The image of the waterwheel suddenly reappeared to join those deformed crabs. I could almost see it turning slowly, dipping into a placid black spring, drawing up buckets of cool water and dumping them into a cistern in my soul where they refreshed me, soothed me, and buoyed me up, making even the mere possibility of unhappiness or anxiety seem absurd. In the coolness and quietness of that secret place, there was nothing but pure bliss.
It was the first time I had ever felt wonderful and awful at the same time. By all rights I should have felt nothing but panic, but there I was, enjoying a calm center of seemingly supernatural peace while my face rotted off from an impossible disease.
The very recognition of my divided state initiated a dreadful synergy between my peaceful inner feelings and my rapidly deteriorating outer situation. A nightmarish sense of unreality whispered up like a shivering black cloud from the base of my brain. The chills from my pseudo-fever edged subtly into a deeper chill, a veritable frisson that was so pervasive it seemed to reach all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes. My eyes looked back at me from the mirror. Their green hue was muted with fever, giving them the appearance of two cloudy emeralds. Behind them I saw a spark glowing in the darkness. Or maybe it was a wheel turning. Or maybe it was an army of crabs, crouched on the edge of consciousness, pulsing and waiting.
Again the thought of the hospital arose. Again, I stuffed it down. Sleep beckoned. It was late. The day had lasted an eternity. The sluggish shadows had finally reached the couch, and I dragged myself to the living room and sank into the cushions with a sense of unknown activities and strange transformations still taking place behind the facade of my soul. Sleep rose like the waters of a cool dark spring, and I gratefully let it claim me.
6
Only when we are sick of our sickness
Shall we cease to be sick.
The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness;
This is the secret of health.
—Tao Te Ching, chapter 71
I overslept the next day by nearly eight hours. Instead of my usual wake-up time of seven-thirty, my eyes stayed shut and then opened of their own accord just before three-thirty in the afternoon. All night long I had inhabited a dream that seemed to last for
a timeless moment. I had been frozen in perpetual motion, suspended in a formless darkness that folded and separated into well-defined shapes, while I listened to a voice speaking silently into my inner ear. It whispered and slobbered things I never should have been able to understand, but in the murky clarity of the dream I did understand. The words spoke to me on a level of selfhood that resided in a timeless dimension prior to language, a primal plane where identity was nothing but the formless, structured chaos of the darkness that seethed and breathed around me.
I heard a name spoken. It was the name of a god. The voice was the god’s very voice, the words were its very words, and the sound of it was the sound of all foulness, like the liquid lapping of a bottomless whirlpool sucking down the stinking dregs of a stagnant, polluted ocean.
When I awoke to the half-light of my white-walled bedroom, the dim, dreamy color of the atmosphere reminded me of Mitch’s house. I shot upright in bed with the sheets still wrapped around my chest and arms, terrified for a moment that I would find myself lying on his tattered old couch while he sat beside me in his ratty recliner and murmured strange things into my ear.
My relief at finding myself in my bedroom was short-lived, for when I looked at the clock and read its red-trembling digital numbers, a cold adrenaline jolt of panic shot through my gut. I had slept away nearly the entire day. Yesterday seemed impossibly distant. What was I supposed to be doing? I couldn’t remember. Was I pursuing a doctorate in religious studies? Was my mother alive? Was I working for a newspaper and writing a story about the Sick Seekers? All seemed possible. None would fall into place as the real present.
Then I remembered the meeting at Mitch’s house scheduled for that very night. Simultaneously, as I was still rubbing my stubbly growth of beard, I remembered the mark on my face, and the coldness in my gut surged like an electric current.
I reached up with shaking fingers to rub my left cheekbone. My fingers found an irregular bump, and a groan escaped my mouth. I ran to the bathroom and flipped on the switch, expecting with the certainty of nightmarish foresight to see my entire face ravaged by a tar-black, pestilent growth.
But the mark hadn’t grown at all. It was still the size of a large marble, still black in the middle and fading toward the edges. It might have flattened out a little during the night, but otherwise there was no change.
A cinematic flash of memory eclipsed the present moment. I was nineteen years old and standing before my mother as I revealed my newly healed face to her. I showed her proudly that everything was fine, that my beauty was unmarred. Her face froze like a porcelain doll for the briefest of moments. Then it shattered, releasing a flood of tears and sobs that shocked me with their violence. When she turned and ran, I stayed rooted to the spot, listening to her footfalls retreat up the stairs and across the plush-carpeted hallway to her bedroom, where the door slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid.
Too many emotions washed over me, far more and far deeper than I knew how to cope with. I knew that if I accepted them they would overwhelm me and destroy all my cherished plans for a comfortable future far away from home, locked safely away in a high ivory tower. I did not possess the inner resources to handle such an ocean of negativity. So I did what I had to do. I took hold of something like a mental key, inserted it into something like a lock, and shut all my bleak feelings into something like a dark storehouse in my soul, where they would never be able to reach me. Afterwards, I felt numbed, but cleansed.
The memory ended and there I was, standing in the bathroom of my apartment with a horrible spot on my face and a surreal puzzle about a god of foulness taking shape in my mind. And I realized the door to that secret storehouse, which I had forgotten for all those years, was not as secure as I had imagined when I first discovered it. For years it had been leaking into my soul, polluting my life with an icy undercurrent of misery. Now, in the face of my rising tide of confusion and fear, it was threatening to burst wide open and destroy me with a deluge of despair.
One thing at a time, I told myself. Calm down and focus. Make everything ordinary. Make every act a mindful one. First, step away from the mirror and refuse to think about what it shows. Next, stop before the toilet to urinate. Then put one foot in front of the other to march into the living room and soak in the normality of the furniture arranged in its ordinary pattern, with the reassuring glow of the afternoon sunlight spilling through the front windows. Inhale, then exhale. Find that sweet center of mental and emotional transcendence, from where you can live as the witness of your life.
My cell phone had three voicemails on it when I reached the living room. I had missed three phone calls while I overslept. I dialed my account and pressed the button to hear my messages. Dr. Baumann’s voice began to speak into my ear.
“Lawrence! I’m stunned you’re researching the Sick Seekers too. Please forgive me, I don’t have time for small talk. I’ve learned more about the Sick Seekers in one week of visiting my brother than I learned from a year of reading the research literature. Listen to me: don’t have anything to do with that old man again. You asked if there’s a historical antecedent to the Sick Seekers’ theology. I can tell you that their insistence on the foulness of the body sounds a bit like an obscure Buddhist practice of meditating on corpses. It’s hardly practiced at all today. But there’s more to what’s happening than just the recurrence of an outdated contemplative practice. Lawrence, I mean it, listen to me: stay away from these people. There’s something unprecedented going on. While I’ve been down here in Las Vegas, my brother has mentioned some of the same things you’ve been saying, and I have a hunch—this is going to sound crazy, I know—that the Sick Seekers are worshipping deities that haven’t been worshipped for nearly six thousand years. There was a cult in the ancient Middle East centered around them. You remember the seminar I taught on the dark side of religion. Well, this cult could have filled up the entire semester, but I never mentioned it because I didn’t know anybody even remembered those gods, let alone worshipped them. Only a handful of scholars know the cult ever existed, but now the Sick Seekers have come along and shaken us all up. This is absolutely amazing stuff. It looks like the spontaneous resurrection of a cult that—” At this point the available space for his message ran out. I pressed the key to play the next one.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m getting long-winded here, but you have to hear this. Something’s not right, Lawrence. This ancient cult posited more than one god in their cosmology. The first was a god of primal chaos. The second was a kind of mystical bridge between this chaos and the created world. The worship of these gods was about undoing everything, uncreating creation, destroying the cosmos. The rituals devoted to them were positively nightmarish. They involved human sacrifice and something more: the attempted sacrifice of a worshipper’s very soul. But the cultists didn’t conceive of the body as a separate thing. Lawrence, in a way these people were proto-Gnostics! They believed the body was a cesspool of corruption. But the really unique thing that distinguished them from all the other sects and cults around them was that they believed the same thing about the individual soul. They regarded body and soul as dual facets of a single, horrible aberration. Salvation was conceived in terms of escaping the nightmare of created existence and returning to the bliss of uncreated chaos. The god of primal chaos was the goal. The second god was the bridge and the key. Then there was a third god. Do you understand what I’m telling you? A third god, Lawrence. He was never named in the ancient literature. His worshippers were zealous about guarding his identity. But we do know that this god was thought to be the manifest presence of the other two gods in the worshiper’s body. From what I’ve learned recently, I’m thinking there may be some correspondences with the trinitarian theology of orthodox Christianity, with its doctrine of the hypostatic union and mutual interpenetration of the three members of the godhead. I’m just speechless, Lawrence. This is all so exciting, I can barely contain myself. All these things I’m telling you are like playing connect the d
ots with a six-thousand-year-old puzzle. My brother has told me things that have allowed me to connect scattered bits of information I haven’t known what to do with for decades. If I can just—” End of message two. I pressed the button to play the final one.
“We have to talk about this in person. I’m sure we have many hours’ worth of things to share with each other. But please, please listen to me, Lawrence. Don’t let my professional excitement throw you off track. These people were the spiritual pariahs of the ancient world. Everybody else was utterly horrified by them. If the Sick Seekers really are the continuation of this ancient religion, then they’re the apocalyptic cult to end all apocalyptic cults. And if they’ve really got hold of the scripture you say they have, they’re the most dangerous thing the modern world has ever seen. I don’t pretend to know how it’s possible for them to be what I’m thinking they must be. I mean, it’s completely impossible by any normal standard of logic. It flies in the face of common sense and every other measure of sanity. It may take decades to unravel it all. But just stay away, no matter how curious you are. My brother has told me things that have stood my hair on end. I’ll tell you, I’m actually getting a bit nervous around him. I would have already taken him away from here by force, but he seems so enraptured by his new religion that I’m afraid the psychological damage of a sudden uprooting might be severe. I’m at a loss for what to do right now. Wish me luck. I promise to call you just as soon as I get back to Terence. Be safe, Lawrence.”
