LIVES OF THE HIDDEN SAINTS
Zalman Paktorovics
I For a few moments Brother Francis was alone in the cathedral. He stood at the altar, with his back to the vacant pews. The voices had ceased for a while, but that made it more difficult for him to ignore the ringing in his ears and the pain in his teeth. One part of his mind¾a rational but now distant part¾connected these with the excessive tension in the muscles holding his jaws shut. Some other part¾the part that was in control of his actions¾drew the black sacrificial knife from its velvet sheath. He closed his eyes and surveyed with his fingertips the artifice of the carved ebony handle, the terror of the obsidian blade. Traces of moisture gathered on his upper lip.
It came to him abruptly that he was no longer alone, but he kept his balance, resisting an impulse to look behind him.
swear to me, he heard a voice calling once more. The drugs were doing their work. He opened his eyes and beheld again the granite altar, worn smooth by centuries of usage, carved with deep channels through which, later that day, blood would flow freely. The ruling gods, as everyone connected with them knew, were hungry.
Some of us believe a cycle of changes once marked the Earth’s journey around the sun. Some of our Elders claim to remember when this was the normal way of things. Early in March, they tell us, as the days lengthened inexorably and snow melted into rivers turned jade green from silt and turbulence, we could look up from our planting to watch wild geese return from their wintering grounds. Their passage, say the Elders, was an affirmation for the scheme of our lives, an occasion for great joy.
There are no more geese, or they no longer choose to return here. There is no more snow, either. The climate has shifted, it is eternal Autumn; leaves fall continuously in the groves, on the forested hillsides, while down in the valley it rains so incessantly that animals living there are driven insane. Only high in the most distant mountains does the snow linger. The white crags press upward like a row of broken knife blades, and every morning the sky, threatened in this manner, deposits a layer of crystalline dread, which in the evening turns to blood as the sun sets on the opposite horizon, falling into the clouds that hang over the great Western sea. If you look to the west, then, you will see the fishermen returning, making their way up the broad estuary that shelters our harbor. Their holds should be full, their arms and backs aching; when they have traded the product of their labors, they will celebrate well, sleep well, dream well. Tsweik will be with them....
Tsweik doesn’t look like most of the other fishermen; his blue eyes and skin are more pale, and he is shorter¾barely five foot four, seemingly too lean, even slight of build, for his profession; yet his muscles are hard and taut as bow strings, his grip nearly unbreakable if that is his intent¾a marvel of economy in human design. It is after sunset before the last of the fishing boats have tied up at the dock. Tsweik hurries about in the fading light, reefing sail as Darwini, his partner, haggles with the middleman who will bring their catch to the local market. It seems longer than usual before the transaction is settled, and Tsweik is done with his task by the time Darwini returns, but he’s satisfied, as always, that Darwini has negotiated the best price. "It should be enough," Tsweik says, pulling the last reef line against the boom.
"What do you mean by that?”
"The Blackmouth are about finished."
"We just started taking them!" Darwini looks startled.
"This run will be short."
"Short as last year?"
"Shorter. It'll be over in a day or so."
Darwini's lips, already a good fifteen degrees out of alignment with the rest of his face, press together and further into what is, for him, a grimace. He stares with dark deep-set eyes out over the water, his heavy grey eyebrows colliding like a pair of poorly manned boats. He doesn’t ask how Tsweik can be so certain in his prediction. Tsweik has always known these things, where the fish are running, when their numbers will peak, where they will not be found, since his youth, and even now in these disequilibrated times.
"You know what this is doing to us¾to all of us...."
"Don't I look worried enough?" An albatross floats above their mast, searching for prey. Tsweik studies its movements; to him, it represents an exemplary, natural life¾simple, efficient, beautiful. For all our intelligence and planning, he thinks, we can never hope to be as efficient as that bird; in the end we may catch more fish, but it costs us tenfold in effort. All our planning and artifice, all our clever machinery for killing¾when there are barely enough prey left to support all the predators, who will be better equipped to survive?
The albatross, as though it could read his thoughts and liked what it heard, dipped its wings in acknowledgement, climbed suddenly and pealed off, heading rapidly seaward. Tsweik watched until its body and wings coalesced into a point and then disappeared. It continued its flight over the estuary, then turned abruptly North, paralleling a long, narrow strip of rocky beach. Heavy forests occupied the headlands, hung on the black cliffs and, in places, grew right up and over the roiling surf. Huge sequoias and sugar pines fell at intervals onto the sea with thunderous crashes; sometimes one would bring a ton of soil and boulders with it. The albatross flew until it found a quiet place, an inlet, in which it came to rest. I saw it circle and glide down, landing among the remains of a wrecked wooden ship. I found myself walking toward it....
The ship’s skeleton lay bleaching on the strand, torn, parts scattered, shattered, drying into dust. It had to have been dragged from the water: high tide never reached this far. It made me think of you, Anita, gone these past three years. Three thousand miles you traveled, to be killed by a lunatic on a remote beach like this one. So far from home, a totally chance meeting, a stranger with a knife the only other person within miles, a day like today, like a thousand other days. I remember the sun streaming in through the kitchen window. The telephone dropping from my hands. I asked myself how it could be possible. It altered irrevocably what I believe about the world. I used to feel the fluid dynamics of change: the rhythm of tides, the cycle of seasons, the acquisition and dissipation of fortunes, the rise and fall of governments. Things go away, but return if you let them. The fishing declines for a while, then gets better. There is balance, flow, equilibrium. But now it's different. Things don't get better, only worse. There is no flow, no return, no equilibrium¾only pain and extinction.
And I don't need reminders, because it happened here, on this very spot¾and I know who did it….
I am aware of another person among the wreckage. It is Tsweik. He glances over to where I am standing, but says nothing. He slides his fingers along one of the ribs, implanting in his memory the smooth, resistant feel of her skin, slightly overwarm and damp in the humid atmosphere of their tent. He enjoys moving his fingers along the contours of the bones that lie beneath the flesh of her chest, just below the thick line of cloth that forms the hem of her bathing suit top. "In the four years I've known you, you have yet to learn how to be aggressive," Edapha said. She took his hand and placed it further up, on her breast. Tsweik pulled himself on top of her and thrust his pelvis into her groin. "Like this?" he asked, laughing. "You know what I mean!" Now they both were laughing and struggling in the sleeping bag. The movements of their limbs and torsos deformed it so that it looked, if anyone could have seen it, like a caterpillar that had swallowed a couple of praying mantisses.
They could hear the rain beating on the tent and the nearby surf rolling endlessly over the rocks and sand of the beach. They had camped at the edge of the forest, just above the reach of high tide. Tsweik thanked heaven they had had the foresight to reseal the tent seams before setting out on their trip. They were safe from the weather, but lay engulfed in the sound of rushing water, the periodic ebb and flow of an irresistibly penetrating hydropathic om.
"I love my gentle man," she said.
"What does an intelligent woman like yourself see in a fellow like me?" he said. "I'm just a simple fisherman. All I know about are fish."
"And I'm just a simple psychologist. All I know about are people." He wasn't satisfied. He thought about all the brilliant, aggressive people she must know back at the Institute¾so far from this place, from him¾where she spent ten months of the year: he had been there, once, before they had met. An army of investigators there were studying everything from psychosomatic illnesses to levitation, were altering matter, freezing time, verifying mystical cosmologies. Someone had asked him to be a subject in a sleep research project-psychic phenomena mediated by dreaming-and he had almost agreed to do it until they gave him a tour of the facilities, and he had seen a dreamer....
The wind was picking up. They heard thunder, felt a vibration through the sand beneath the floor of their tent, but there was no flash of lightning. Perhaps it was a sequoia falling from the nearby headlands into the sea? Edapha stretched restlessly, as best she could, within the confines of their shared sleeping bag. Tsweik lay on his back next to her, looking up at the dark fabric of the ceiling. The image of the dreamer still haunted him. He closed his eyes. He was looking into a small room lit by fluorescent lights. There, on a padded, leather-covered pallet, surrounded by white-smocked attendants, lay the experimental subject.
A movement of his arm. A restless breath. The dreamer's eyes shuttled rapidly behind flickering lids, examining another life. His phantasms were real, though they sampled a different plane of existence. They came to him without warning, images of devotion and sacrifice, images of ritual fornication and murder, ceaselessly, because he was never allowed to awaken.
Yet his body manifested occasional signs of the assault against his unconscious, a tremor of a finger, an agonized sigh; the best indications were invisible, clinical: tachycardia, electrical disturbances of the nervous system, contraction and dilation of veins and arteries.
(A pile of old, withered bones, withered frail bones; he shuddered at the sight of them. They made him think about his mortality. Deep down in his dark places, his subconscious, subterranean hollows, where the cold wind of regret swept through the holes in his being, he shivered, thinking it was just the cold dampness of the room, but the room was within him.)
Above him an empty light fixture cast a shadow on the ceiling. He stretched an arm out beside him but felt only vacant sheet. Anita had gone, while he slept, to the bathroom, but had not yet returned. Down the long hallway, in the tiny cubicle where he knew two naked light bulbs burned like tired eyes in their sockets, the toilet flushed; there was a sound of rushing water, a muffled cough, then silence. Except for the old voice in his skull, far off and faint, like the vibration that persists in certain resonant buildings after a sound has been made. A little louder and it would become the sound of his radiator when the steam first comes up; a barely audible hiss, interspersed with brief loud knocks-emphatic black parentheses containing white noise.
Bertrand got up scratching his ass. He nearly burned himself lighting a cigarette. Fuck! He shook the flame out violently and flung the match to the floor, where it ceased to concern him. He puffed away on the cigarette, watching the smoke rise to the ceiling and disperse, its Brownian motion carrying it to every corner of the room.
The hot tip of the cigarette amused him when he inhaled, glowing fierce red even under the dense grey ash, emitting a barely audible crackling sound. We are surrounded with such sounds, some no more audible than our brain waves; but they can be heard, if one listens carefully enough. He flicked the butt with his finger; the ashes fell to the floor and landed unnoticed, having passed below the field of his vision.
The TV was on but not the sound. He sat at the edge of the bed facing the grey screen, watching a docu-drama entitled "Lives of the Hidden Saints." These are the nistarim, 36 righteous beings of each generation who keep the world from ending through the combined power of their devout religious faith. The screen was blank, because nothing is known about them: who they are, how they live, by what criteria they are chosen. They communicate with no one. How they accomplish their task is a mystery, as are their opinions on secular matters, whether or not they support strategic arms limitations, whether they are left- or right-handed, left- or right-wingers, whether they have Rice Krispies, Huevos Rancheros, or Dim Sum for breakfast. After an unmeasurable period of time, two men abruptly appeared on the screen. They were sitting in armchairs, one wearing the casual, unmatched attire of an academic, the other wearing black clerical robes. The cleric appeared to introduce the other man to an audience. It looked like an interview. Sub-titles at the bottom of the screen identified them as “Brother Francis” and “Hamilcar Barca.” Brother Francis held up a book, which was shown in close-up so that the title, “Lives of the Hidden Saints,” could easily be seen. Bertrand turned up the volume with his remote control. It developed that Hamilcar Barca was the author of the book, on which the docu-drama just presented was based. He was also the author of other pseudo-mystical fictions with titles like “Voices in the Temple” and “The Wizards of Babylon.” Brother Francis opened up the book to various pages at random, each of which was blank. “Hamilcar¾” it was apparent that he knew the author well enough to address him this way without being presumptuous “¾Hamilcar, why should people watching our show today go out and buy this book?” he asked, half facing the audience. His tone was respectful but provocative. Hamilcar answered authoritatively, thoughtfully, but with little hesitation. “We live in turbulent times,” he said; “people need to make decisions, but they don’t know how things work any more¾” “¾so what you’re offering them is a sort of Guide for the Perplexed¾” “¾no, no, not at all; not a ‘guide for the perplexed,’ but a map of perplexity itself.…” and they went on in this manner until Bertrand changed the channel.
Now figures were moving on a beach. It was a mystery program. They were turning the body face up, Tsweik pulling her shoulder toward him, Edapha pushing the hips from the other side. "Drowned, I guess," said Tsweik, but Edapha could already see that it wasn't so. "No," she said. "Stabbed." Then the body was face up, the rain rinsing off the sand that had stuck to her. A young woman, maybe twenty-five or so, her chest covered with wounds from which blood had stopped flowing some time ago. Tsweik turned his face toward the sea and cursed, thrusting his head downward at each word, a formula which prevented him from vomiting. "Shit, shit, shit...." Edapha looked down at the woman's face, touched it lightly with her left hand; she was aware of the rain washing down over her own face, the sound of thunder rolling down the beach....
The phone rang. Bertrand got up to answer it. "I know who you are," said a voice, "and what you've done!" Bertrand stared into the receiver. "I know who you are!" much fainter, more distant. The TV control was still in his other hand. He changed the channel again, this time to a family show about a widower and his nine year old daughter, a sentimental comedy.
Darwini's nerve failed him. A woeful caricature, pressed in kraft paper with a red pencil, crudely thrust into his consciousness by a child's hand, his face, as it really was, as only a child could see it. And his nerve failed him.
"Where did you get this?" he whispered to Anita.
"In school."
"Who drew it?"
"Lawrence."
"With the limp?"
"Yes."
"Isn't he your friend?"
"Not any more."
Darwini was touched by the loyalty of his daughter. His face took on a tearful expression and he threw his arms around her. This impulsive display of emotion made Bertrand shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. The telephone receiver grew increasingly heavy in his left hand, as though it held an emotional burden that was growing too intense to bear. He felt it slipping from his fingers like consciousness from the dying, yet when it was gone, the sensation of its presence persisted, like the nervous messages of an amputated limb. With his right hand he was absently pressing the channel changer again and again. He doesn't know why strangers call him all the time to accuse him of unspeakable crimes. He doesn't know if he is of the nistarim, or has murdered one. He wonders why he is never held accountable for his thoughts and acts. He doesn't know that he is asleep, dreaming everything, while attendants hover over his naked form like protective spirits, and computers monitor every change, every nuance of his physical and mental states. He is unaware of Tsweik watching him through the inverted telescope of a vivid personal recollection, all the while the rain beating down on the roof of their tent and the endless waves threatening to wash their entire universe of experience back into the sea.
"Don't look now," said Edapha, "but one of us is alone."
"I'm sorry."
"I have an idea," she said. "Why don't we put on our rain gear and go outside."
"That sounds suspiciously like an adventure."
"Have you forgotten dragging me out here last January? It was twenty below! Not another word from you, sir." They slipped out of the bag and into blue and yellow nylon clothing, accomplishing the transfer with a good deal of clumsy contact and uneven breathing in the compact space of the tent. Tsweik's attention remained far away.
"Do you remember the dreamer...." he asked her, "that sleep project about three years ago...?"
She looked absent, then surprised. "Oh, yes...."
"Whatever happened with that project¾is he still there?"
"Oh, no-he died! It was quite a mess-resignations, dismissals, an investigation. They really hadn't thought through what they were doing, the medical consequences. Quite unethical¾in retrospect. Lots of Monday morning quarterbacking, whatever that means. What made you think of him?"
"I don't know...it's funny...that could have been me...."
She looked sharply at him. "Not funny at all. What do you mean?"
"The year before I met you, I was there for several weeks. They asked me to volunteer to be a subject."
"Lord...!"
They managed to make their exit with only a minimum of rain washing back into the tent. After checking to make sure that it was in no real danger of being swept away in the next hour or two, they decided to head North, into the wind, so that it would be at their backs on their return. It was difficult to see through the almost solid sheets of water pouring into their faces. After a while they simply got used to it, and made their way slowly up the beach, shielding their faces with their hands as much as possible during major gusts of wind. Without a watch, one couldn't tell whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.
It was Edapha who first noticed a strange shape just to the left of their intended path, something dark, artificially colored, lying on, or half in, the wet sand. As they approached, squinting, its form slowly coalesced into something more familiar: a bicycle, on its side, its wheels half covered, but otherwise looking fairly serviceable. Considering its location, it bore only a minimal coating of rust. Tsweik guessed it couldn't have been there more than a couple of days. It was an expensive-looking mountain bike, well equipped for rough terrain, but certainly not meant to be ridden on a wet beach.
"How could this have gotten down here?" Edapha asked. The nearest road ended at least a mile and a half inland. The intervening trail plunged steeply to the shore, down numerous sharp switchbacks, connected in some places by poorly maintained stone and wooden staircases, finally over yards of thickly clustered, interlocking piles of dead sun-and-water-bleached trees and logs, swept up from the sea during the most powerful storms.
Together they wrestled the bicycle out of the sand and drew it upright. Most of the sand was already washing off it. Anita set it against a wall next to the door in the foyer and headed back down the long hallway to the bedroom, where she began to gather her things together and put them in her backpack.
"I'm going," she said.
"Where?" said Bertrand, not taking his eyes off the TV monitor.
"The coast. Everyone tells me how beautiful it is, I thought it was time I finally made it out there."
"When will you be back?"
"I won't be back." What she wished she could say was, don't be here when I get back, but no, she couldn’t, it was his apartment. She wondered what she had found remotely interesting about him, even for ten minutes. In the two weeks she had been here, apart from sex, at which his technique was adequate, but merely that, technique, the only activities she had seen him engage in were eating, sleeping, smoking, working on his computer, lifting weights, and watching TV, or various combinations thereof, all of which were compatible with staying home in his underwear. She finished packing and made ready to leave. "I gave my father this number. If he calls here, would you just tell him I'll get in touch in a few days?"
Bertrand finally looked up at her. "He's not gonna call collect, is he?"
"Fuck you!" He watched her go. Then he turned his attention back to what was on the screen.
© Zalman Paktorowicz
