The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) (14 page)

“That sounds nutty.”

“Embrace the nuttiness, grasshopper. It’s arrogance to believe we can find all the answers at the conscious level, using our brains like little adding machines. If you have two candidates you’re thinking of marrying, you sit down and make up a list of their good and bad qualities, this one can cook, that one has higher earning potential, but he snores. Then you try to figure how to weigh the different qualities. You end up with one scoring 65, the other 57. What do you do?”

“Throw the list away and marry the one that makes your heart sing. Unless he beats you up.”

“For a young person, Chantal, I find your perceptions encouraging.”

“I have good instincts?”

“Most people start out with good instincts, the trick is to learn when to trust them, which is usually. It takes humility to become as a child again, to admit we need help, that the universe declines to work for us like something we built with an Erector Set.”

“With a what?”

“Out of Legos.”

“Oh.”

“All this creation is here to help us, the earth has given us every flower and fruit-bearing plant for our use, just like it says in Genesis. It doesn’t say ‘every plant for our use, except the opium poppy.’ It doesn’t say ‘except for the cactus
peyotl
and the magic mushroom, the flesh of the Gods,
teonanacatl
.’ We look back in horror at the way our forefathers accepted slavery. Our descendants will cringe in horror that the mere possession of the plants put here by God to allow us to know his presence, the entheogens, was in this time punishable by imprisonment or even death. Their fear of the liberation of the spirit is so revealing.”

Chantal was watching the cats move around the yard.

“We think they see the way we do, but they don’t,” she said.

Indoors, she knew, a cat’s close-in vision of things that had similar values on the gray scale really sucked. Sometimes they could only find a cat treat by smell. But put the same cat out here and let the wind tremble a leaf 40 yards away and watch her freeze, lock onto that movement, waggle her ass, start to stalk. They were attuned to motion.

“They’re adults in less than a year,” Matthew said, as though she’d spoken aloud. “But humans have far fewer instinctive screens, we’re far more wide open and more adaptable when we’re born, babies are a real
tabula rasa
, that’s why human mothers have to be so devoted for so many years, we need five or six years of training on what’s important to notice before it’s even safe to let us cross the street or sit by the swimming pool.

“These filters are necessary to function in the world, otherwise we’d be helpless idiots. But they also restrict us, lock us into seeing things only one way. If it’s too limiting that can get dangerous, it takes away our ability to see where our culture may have taken a wrong turn, to see that some of the things we were trained to ignore are suddenly more important now. Look at the Danish colonists in Greenland who starved because they never learned to eat fish, the Easter Islanders who couldn’t conceive of ever running out of trees.

“To hear those warnings we need the visionary, the prophet, people easily dismissed as crazies, or else we need the safety valve of the eight-hour visit back to the world the way we could perceive it before we were two.”

“Matthew?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“I know that. Although you should have chosen someone younger and more normal.” He squeezed her hand, which was nice.

To Chantal the colors felt brighter, more vibrant, now. Noises, sounds, sorted themselves by distance, a series of patchwork overlays, you could actually choose how many layers out from the center to focus your attention, amazing how far and how clearly you could hear, and then how much you could shut out when you decided to concentrate on birdsong or the buzzing of the insects. Was that because they also concentrated in different frequency ranges?

Now the whole visual field was pulsing, the grass, the trees, the flowers, the sky and clouds, as though everything was projected on some kind of hanging curtain or tapestry which was being rippled by the wind in symmetrical waves or pulses, what did you call a tapestry that hung along the wall so Polonius could hide back there and eavesdrop on Gertrude and the king?

She concentrated on one point of color, a bee in a flower. It expanded till everything else was gone. And then — whoa!

She was racing through a tunnel, bright colored geometric patterns of light receding on either side, paisleys, fractals. She’d seen this before. Oh, you naughty girls who created the special effects for all those wormholes in the science fiction movies, you’ve been trying these mushrooms, haven’t you?

Tunnels led off from tunnels, in infinite profusion, each offering different experiences, choices, destinations. One led to the Dark Mother. The Dark Mother knew all the bad things Chantal had done in her life, all the wrong turnings, all the times she’d failed, the times she’d hurt someone. Chantal wanted to turn away, but the Dark Mother showed her the monster that was the other side of Chantal, the side she never wanted anyone to see. Chantal wanted to scream, to escape, but she remembered she’d come here to learn, she’d asked for guidance. And then she realized the Dark Mother didn’t want to punish her, the Dark Mother wanted her to . . . forgive herself, to realize that she wouldn’t be complete without her dark twin, that it was a vital and necessary part without which the powder-puff Chantal could not have survived.

This, she realized, was the two-sided coin of religion. People sought some cosmic parent to forgive them; cynics dressed in priestly garb peddled that ersatz external forgiveness, say five Hail Marys and drop an envelope in the plate, when all that was needed was to confront the Dark Mother and the whispered voice that taught that you could . . . forgive yourself.

She smiled, and vowed to return, and . . . a large portion of the visual field ripped away, and what was behind it was a completely different vista.

Night. Some ancient stone-walled building. The stone floors were uneven from centuries of wear, and chilly. The two candles flickered. An old man sat at an angled wooden writing desk, itself very old, perched on a stool. He wore a simple brown robe, like some ancient monk. The lines on his face were accentuated by the candlelight, his tonsured hair unruly from sleep. He looked up and craned his neck when the draft caused his two candles to gutter and then recover. The breeze was cool, but not as chilly as it had been during the winter. That meant it must be . . . spring? He was worried that someone might be coming. Why else would he be here, sharpening his pen and stirring his ink, preparing to write in the dead of night? He dampened the tip of the pen with his tongue; his teeth were yellow and uneven.

To his left, opposite the inkwell, there was a scroll. Was it leather? Once white and now toned golden, already old, it was anchored with two small bronze weights so that it would stay open to the proper passage. Evidently he meant to copy from the scroll at some point, though he didn’t seem to be referring to it as he began to write. Chantal could not see well enough to make out the words. Instead, she heard the words as a low droning. Was the old monk actually muttering the words aloud as he wrote them, or was this just part of the vision as it was given to her, the ability to hear the words as he wrote? Much good that did her, since the droning voice was speaking a sing-song language which she only vaguely recognized as Greek. Then, even as she thought of the murmuring voice, it seemed she could understand this language which she had never spoken, as though God had never cursed the builders of the Tower, as though the differences of language were themselves just some kind of constructed illusion: “Brothers, we have all discussed the thirty-ninth letter of our Bishop Athanasius . . .” the monk began.

Then the vision fragmented, like a movie on fast forward. The sky began to lighten, the monk sealed his inkwell and wrapped his materials in a large brown cloth to hide them away. This was frustrating. Wasn’t she supposed to hear more of what he wrote? No time, apparently. The monk was gone, other figures came and went from the room, too quickly to make out any details, though one was an older man with a full beard who wore a black robe. Now Chantal’s entire visual field broke apart, she was racing through a dark tunnel. Strange beings made entirely of light were gibbering at her, she couldn’t understand their speech, it was too fast and high-pitched. They uttered words and the words took on solid form, the words became the world.

She would have been afraid, even terrified, but she could still smell the tobacco and the sage, and she heard Matthew’s voice. Was he really speaking to her or was it the memory of his calm voice that comforted her? She remembered what he’d said, that she could trust the vision, no harm would befall her if she was here for the right reasons, the trick was to be open, to accept what it would show her, that’s why she had come, not to fight it.

And just like that she was in a different place, more familiar — the bookstore in the early evening, Bob sitting alone at the main desk, glancing at the clock. . . .

But Bob was dead. So it wasn’t the bookstore now, today, but the bookstore in the recent past. Last Thursday night? Was Matthew seeing this, as well? She felt certain, somehow, that he was, or maybe the same events from some slightly different perspective. She felt Matthew was here with her, it was comforting.

“Hey! What are you doing? Stop that!”

Chantal jumped a little, but the voice wasn’t directed at her, it was inside the vision, in the bookstore of last week. Bob had jumped up at the noises he heard out front, on the front walk. Rushing outside into the rose and orange light, he pulled the door closed behind him. Ahead of him, to the east, the sky had that rose and violet glow it gets just after sunset. Bob hurried down the three wide concrete steps outside the front door, letting out an involuntary “oomph” as his foot hit the walkway. Bob was a very large man, unaccustomed to hurrying.

The two men were fighting for an object held over their heads in the twilight, each slamming an elbow into the other’s cheek or ear, then trying for a knee to the balls, grunting incoherently in their concentration as they grappled, struggling for an advantage. Robert didn’t know either of them, though one had to be the seller who said he’d sold to Matthew before, the Egyptian who had called to say he’d arrived a day early and to ask if Robert could stay late to take custody of the book. The highly unlikely book.

He’d heard two car doors slam before the shouting started, and there were two cars parked along the street. Their yellow parking lights were on, but not their headlights. One still had the engine running and a driver at the wheel, a third man.

“Stop that!” Bob shouted again as he bowled into the two men with his full 380 pounds moving at good speed, attempting to pull the two men apart. Then there was a crack like a sonic boom and a flash of orange flame shot into the purple sky from the square black pistol they were fighting over, now that he saw what it was. Robert covered his head and ducked.

“Mattieu, is that you?” asked the one with the Arab accent, the same one Robert had heard on the phone.

“Matthew’s away, I told you. I’m Robert.”

“Take the package, in God’s name. That’s what they’re after. Take it inside and lock the door. Tell Mattieu I trust him to do what’s right.”

Still grappling with his attacker, the Egyptian kicked a cardboard box that had fallen on the sidewalk. It skidded a foot or two in Robert’s direction.

The younger man, who appeared to have strong arms and shoulders and who seemed curiously pale beneath his shock of black hair made damp by his perspiration, lowered his shoulder now and tackled the Egyptian, pushing him to the ground on one of the patches of grass that framed the front walkway to the bookstore. For a moment they were both wrapped in the Egyptian’s beige raincoat and Robert couldn’t tell in the gathering gloom which man controlled the gun, although one of the lamp-post streetlights was now flickering on, across the way.

Robert picked up the cardboard package. There could well be a book inside, though it wasn’t as heavy as he expected. The driver of the car with the motor still running started to open his car door and get out on the far side, but seemed uncertain about whether to leave his vehicle with the engine running.

“Go!” shouted the Egyptian, as he rolled on the ground with his assailant. “It’s the book they’re after! Get inside; bar the door. Call your police! Don’t mind about me.” Then louder, in a purposely theatrical voice, “Robbery! Robbery!”

Bob hesitated another moment. Then, as the two men still rolled on the ground, the pale assailant, dressed all in black, swung out with one of his legs, kicking the back of one of the huge bookseller’s knees. Robert dropped painfully to one knee on the concrete walkway, then forced himself back to his feet through pure leg power and began waddling back toward the door of the shop at top speed, pressing the cardboard box to his breast the way a mother holds a precious child. Behind him the pistol fired again, then a third time. Without turning back, Bob could see the yellow flares casting his own shadow as they momentarily illuminated the front of the bookstore.

He bounded up the steps, grabbed the doorknob. But there was something wrong, a pain in his chest as though someone was pressing down on his ribcage with a heavy weight.

Bob got inside and bolted the door behind him. Would the door hold if two men put their shoulders to it from outside? Probably not.

He couldn’t catch his breath. He felt the front of his chest, then tried to reach behind his back, which of course he couldn’t do, seeing as how Bob weighed almost 400 pounds. Had he been shot? They said sometimes people were shot and didn’t realize it at first, it just felt like you’d been punched. But Bob suspected it was something else, something almost as bad, the thing Doctor Mike kept warning him about.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, he leaned his weight on the desk, picked up the scissors, and cut through the tape on the package. He peeled the cardboard box open by brute force. Inside was what appeared to be a leather-bound quarto, the size sometimes referred to as a “coffee-table book,” still swathed in bubble wrap. Did they have bubble wrap in Egypt, now? Employing the scissors more carefully now, only on the corners, he managed to tear that away, as well.