The Dancers of Noyo (6 page)

             
"Listen," he said, licking his lips and swallowing, "I'm a murderer." His voice rose. The medicine woman was looking at him. "I'm a murderer. I've spent my life trying to kill people. I came here to try to get your blood. I'm a sower of plague, a bree
der of pestilence. I'm a murder
er.

             
Tears were running down his cheeks. They trickled down his neck and ran on to his collar. The medicine woman had looked away again. The dance continued.

             
Alvin felt transfixed by futility. He had confessed, but nobody had listened. They hadn't paid any attention to him.

-

             
I didn't return to being Sam McGregor with anything like the abruptness with which I had become Alvin Riggs. There was a long period when I sat by the edge of the road, listening to the noise of the waves and trying to get back to being somebody, anybody at all, through preferentially Sam. (Who did the trying? If my identity had been lost, who was the "I" that was trying to recover it? I imagine a philosopher would have found the point of some interest.)

             
My training with
Pomo
Joe had involved
a
considerable amount of deliberate psychological dislocation: I was used to keeping going when I was not at all sure who "I" was. Finally I stood up and began walking along the highway. I—well, somebody—hoped the bodily movement would help restore me to myself.

             
It was a very dark night. The moon was not yet up. I was shivering violently, and so stiff from sitting I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I thought it must be about ten o'clock.

             
Had I been sitting in that one spot beside the highway all the time I—Alvin—had been visiting the New Life Commune? How badly I had behaved, really—it was not hyperbole, but merely accuracy, to call myself
a
mass
murderer. I had a heavy burden of guilt to bear. But of cour
s
e my mistakes of the past would be obliterated once I'd seen the Grail Vision. The sight of the Most Holy Grail makes up for everything.

             
Grail Vision?
Where had
that
come from? Confused as I was, I realized that the idea was appropriate neither to Sam McGregor nor to Alvin Riggs. Alvin had known nothing about the Grail, and Sam didn't believe in it. For a moment T wondered if a third personality were emerging. I even wondered what my name would be this time. Then I realized that the idea about the Grail, though inappropriate for Riggs or McGregor, was the sort of sentiment the Noyo Dancer would want one of his Pilgrims to have. The idea had seemed to come from without me—to be externally inspired.

             
But Riggs—where had the Riggs extra-life come from? Anybody who has dealings with Dancers must expect to have an occasional hallucination; even being near
a
Dancer will trigger them. But my Riggs-life hadn't been hallucinatory at all. I had simply
been
Riggs, in full, unexaggerated detail, for some three-quarters of
a
day. If the Riggs life had been sent me by the Noyo Dancer, how had the sending been mediated?

             
My first thought was that it had been Brotherly's doing. Yes, but how? He had obviously been following me waiting for something to happen, and once he was assured it had begun, he had turned back to Noyo. But Brotherly hadn't touched me, given me anything, or been in contact with me except verbally (the haymaker, I felt, didn't count). He'd behaved throughout as if he were expecting me to fall into a pit that had already been dug.

             
I wrestled with this for a while—I was still far from normal—as I walked along. The moon should be coming up soon, but it was still so dark that I could barely make out the lay of the road ahead of me. I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't start looking for a place to sleep, a place above high tide where I could build a fire with driftwood, when I saw the road ahead of me light up like a stage. It was, in fact, a dissecting theater, with a cadaver lying on the dissecting table and several students in white coats watching the demonstrator. I seemed to be looking on from a double vantage point-partly from the road, where I was actually standing, and partly from the level of the dissecting table, where I was lying. I was the cadaver. My name was Alice Lemmon.

             
The experience was a cross between an exceptionally vivid hallucination, and the sense of absolute identity I had had as Alvin Riggs. If you want to know how I could feel a real identity with a cadaver, I refer you to a literary work that haunted my childhood, Poe's
The Case of M.
Valdemar.
(One of the group mothers had read it to us six-year-olds.) Alice Lemmon wasn't a "mass of detestable putridity", of course; she had been well preserved in formaldehyde. But I had a terrible sense of being chained to something cold and claylike, of an unnatural intimacy with the isolatedness of death. Sam could not even look away from Alice, since her eyelids were gone.

             
It was beyond enduring. I (again the
tertium quid)
fumbled with the strings of the medicine bag tied around my neck. I remember feeling considerable surprise that my fingers would move as I was willing them to. When I got the bag open, I squatted down close to the bluff and felt over what was in the bag. The dissection, meanwhile, was silently being carried on.

             
There were six or eight packets of dried herbs in the bag, a rattle, a piece of snakeskin, some loose mescal buttons, an elderwood whistle, and a polished copper disk about two inches across. Pomo Joe had got the disk from a white man, a self-styled sorcerer. It was supposed to be used for scrying. It was wrapped up in a piece of black cloth.

             
Handling these familiar and valued objects made me feel
better,
able even to look away from Alice for a moment—though of course I remained lying on the dissecting table. The moon was just clearing the horizon. I
unwrapped
the disk and stared at it.

             
But I was standing in too-dense shadow. I walked over to the seaward side of the highway. Here, with my back to the moon, I looked into the disk once more. The dissection, I saw out of the comer of eye, had moved with me, and was now being carried out against the background of the glinting surf.

             
I have never been much good at scrying. I suppose I had selected the copper from my scanty arsenal of "magic" with the idea of using it for a mirror. Now I saw a thin, dark face, hawk-nosed, dark-eyed. I don't know what I had been expecting, but for a minute I didn't recognize myself. I remember thinking that the dim image in the disk was an improvement on Alice, anyhow. Then something clicked, and I recognized Sam. And the next instant I was Alvin again.

             
A good deal of time seemed to have passed. The sun had set, there were fewer dancers in the circle,
the
dust was a little less dense. Alvin—the
tears on his cheeks had dried long ago—was
standing in the center, beside the medicine woman. She was addressing him in a series of short sentences, punctuated by sharp explosions of breath. "The dance gives joy," she said, "Hu! It restores youth, hu! It heals disease, hu! It can revive the dead, hu!" She looked intently into Alvin's eyes.

             
He drew back a little. A certain doubt was stirring in his mind, despite his experiences and emotions. He may have been a mass murderer, as he had called himself, but he was an intellectual one. "Revive the dead?" he said with his thickened tongue.

             
She nodded. "Revive the dead, hu! It can make men walk on water, pass through fire, hu! It can—"

             
The next minute I was Alice, back on the dissecting table. And from then on I oscillated between being Alice Lemmon, the cadaver, and Alvin Riggs, the CBW worker, like a ball
bouncing. It was almost worse than just being Alice consistently. For now I felt that I was standing with a foot on either side of an abyss, and that the sides were drawing apart. I must either be split in two, or fall into the abyss.

             
When I was Alvin, I had no sense of having ever been either Alice or Sam. The medicine woman seemed to be giving him a feather, and exhorting to some sort of missionary action in connection with the dance. As Alice, I had some awareness of my real identity, and it was in one of those moments that I groped blindly among the herbs in my bag for something and shoved it into my mouth.

             
What I had got was some dried caps of
Panaeolus
campanulatus
, the
Variegata
Mushroom. (I had found its name in a botany book years ago, when I was about fifteen, after getting wildly high on some specimens I had found growing near an old stable in Fort Bragg. Pomo Joe had reintroduced me to it.)

             
The book had said that
Panaeolus
is remarkable for the quickness with which it acts. Almost as soon as the saliva from chewing the mushroom began to slide down my throat, I was
r
o
aring drunk: Alvin's
world began to reel around him, and I saw the dissecting table expand and contract like a piece of bubble gum being blown in and out.

             
I thought this was wonderfully funny. I might still be a female cadaver, pumped full of formaldehyde and carved into sections, but I could appreciate a good joke as well as anybody. I began to laugh, the noise ranging from whining giggles to a loud
,
Falstaf
fi
an
roar. Funny!
I never heard of anything funnier in my life! The moon, the sea, the sky were one vast roar.

             
I wanted to share this quintessential comicality with somebody. I took a couple of steps in the direction of the table where I was lying. The surgeons ought to appreciate the humor of it, if anybody would. On the second step I lost my balance, teetered, and fell over on my face.

             
I thought that was even funnier than the expanding dissecting table had been. I laughed and laughed. Then I began to cry.
Poor Alice, lying there, so cold, so lonely (Alvin I
Wasn
't, currently).
It was a dreadful thing to have happen to a girl.

             
Girl?
I was
Sammmm
,
Sammmm
. But I was getting awfully sleepy.
Sleepy-bye,
sleepby
-
pye
-bye.
The surf below me was a gorgeous changing aquamarine.
Rocked in the cradle of the perfectly beautiful deep.
Then I passed out.

             
I must have slept for quite a long time. The moon was well over in the western part of the sky when I sat up. I felt weak and nauseated, and my clothing was dank with dew and sweat. But I was Sam McGregor, indubitably Sam. Alvin and Alice had gone with the wind, leaving, I felt, no traces. There was an almost beatific quality in being Sam.

             
All the same, I wanted to find a place where I could make a fire and bake the chill out of my bones. I ached all over. After all, I had spent a lot of time in the past twelve hours being stationary beside Highway One.

             
I got up and hobbled over to the railing on the seaward side. No, the descent to the water was too steep here. I'd have to go farther on.

             
Did everybody who took the Grail Tourney have my
experiences? I wondered as I began my creaky plodding once more. My "mother" had said that nobody ever seemed improved by the journey; suddenly I realized that none of the Mandarins had ever gone on it themselves. And yet they were insistent about the desirability of the journey for their juniors, a journey from which nobody returned unchanged. Was it—did they—

             
It was a messy supposition. But were the Mandarins and the Dancers accomplices in a silent conspiracy, not quite conscious to the Mandarins, to keep the rising generation dependent, weak-minded, confused? The Mandarins wouldn't be the first generation in history that, despite its youthful rebelliousness, had wanted to hold on to status and power.
An insignificant status, a feeble power.
But, status and power.