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Chapter Six
He let out a long body-racking sigh. What an unbelievable day! Jason inwardly moaned. Reactivating the whole past with Melissa, and the heart-rending of finding things were as they'd last been. His vision of the Cosmic Whirlpool, still swirling, reshaping his reality. Then coming down into this city that's more someone's whimsy than a geographical location. A whole other reality. The Wizard's Wisdom Talk piercing through his cynical armor to reawaken all those old ideals and longings. And it was clear that the Spiral the Wizard spoke about was the Cosmic Whirlpool he'd seen. That dance-drama at the Palace revealed some more layers of this Call. Jason knew he'd better understand it as best as he could. Then Plang's stripping bare his need for killing and his desperate need to disown those despised parts of himself.
He had to think things through, to at least get a glimpse through this splitting conflict of being sent to kill this man who stirred him so. Jason was sure that the issue with the Order was more than just a concern about his attitude. They felt he'd already lapsed from his original unquestioning loyalty to the Order's counsels and precepts. Through the Abbot, the Hierarchy had asked him for an examination of conscience, to clarify his position. His Vocation could be at risk. But with a proper attitude of repentance, he'd been assured, reconciliation was possible. This assignment was the test, no doubt.
But meeting Plang Mengli changed what had been a hazy discontent into a certain repulsion. Jason was through with the Order. He recognized too much about himself to continue as he'd been. And growing self-awareness gave him inklings of other possibilities. He studied Melissa on the bed next to him. Asleep, she was back in that state of childlike innocence and release. But she, more than anyone, was a possible threat to him. He feared she was a dangerous instrument of the Order's suspicions and dissatisfaction with him. She knew more truth about him than anyone. And that felt truly dangerous.
Since they'd met some five years before, just months after her leaving a convent college, they'd been together. Except for her time in the Order's Novitiate and during the last year or so since their break up, they were always together. On missions, down to survival drives when things got dangerous.
Laying back together in fun, savoring the relief, the thrill of victory. They couldn't help but draw closer. Unguarded with each other, they grew willing for a time to be open, to care and love each other.
In their work together, she could easily track along with him and fit into any cover or guise he should use. She knew the personal quirks he might choose to characterize his role. She knew how to skillfully move right in with his game, make it real as he spun out pretend details. She knew many things about him he didn't want anyone else to know. And she knew how to use them well to get her desires met. Blackmail between them could rest in the glint of an eye. Being her lover had kept him on his toes. Being her prey frightened him. And the Wizard's Omen casting that told of their role in his Ceremony of Transition. Yet, he didn't show any fear at all. Was he so evolved that he could accept it in such a open way? Or was it that he was certain he could take care of them first? Jason could imagine Plang killing, if there were dire cause. But from their talk coming back from the Palace, he felt the old man would avoid that if there were other alternatives. He was being honest with Jason and concerned. It was important to keep everything clear between them, so that nothing would be lost or fall through the cracks of misunderstanding. And the Wizard's honest scrutiny didn't leave much space for play acting either.
The Wizard had bared Jason's guts about his mania for killing -the deathing he needed to go on with his life. When all else failed to free him from the grip of depression — feeling utterly lost and helpless — only planning and carrying out a mission worked. At such moments, in a whirl of frenzy and exaltation, he was at peace. All of him at a fine pitch, in unison, balanced like a precision machine, totally absorbed in the task. Only then did he feel whole. So what was left for now? he wondered in agony. That vocation he'd spent most of his life doing? The only woman he'd felt he could really love? His belief in himself? A total zero. Null. Jason was dissolved into feeling fear-filled and heartless.
He watched the bars of moonlight glide through the blinds and creep across the things in the room. As he looked at Melissa, she felt like the pincers on a huge, diabolical machine made to hurt and torment him. Just like the local cart-drivers squeezed their oxen's nuts to goad them on. Desperately, he wanted to be free of that machine, for his life to come right, to make sense. But he understood by now that the answer could only lie beyond all that he could get to. At his very foundations, or from Above, far beyond the reach of his futile grasping.
He recalled the toy globe of the world he'd had in his room as a boy. It's upper and lower halves had gotten twisted around so that the Java Sea came right under Venezuela . It always seemed proof that, no matter what he did, it all came down to endless variations on, 'You can't get there from here.' He dozed. Then woke. Then dozed again. He saw it all shift round in his misty mind's eye, dark and murky, some glimmering shapes peeking through breaks in the gloom. There were snippets of dreams jumbled with memories. The jewel-eye of the peacock's feather on the coachman's perch. The Pushu in the dance-drama swaying like a sapling in a breeze. The black cross of the town's asphalt roads from the air. Then, when he knew he was sound asleep, he distinctly heard the Wizard repeat, "All your pretends, those self-deceptions you must believe in order to survive. Enough! It is time to accept the utter hopelessness of all that so that you can know the utter wonderment that truly awaits you."
From deep within, again, perhaps guided by the Wizard, Jason's consciousness rose to the realm the soul lives in and awoke into this vision:
Jason snapped fully awake. A cooling breeze from some fantasized sea washed over him. The swoosh, swoosh of the overhead fan. There was that far- off chanting, repetitions of a short, throaty refrain, a prayer, he assumed. He'd been moaning with yearning bliss during his vision he knew and hoped he hadn't been too noisy. Anyway, Melissa was still asleep. That was good. His glowing watch showed 4:47 a.m.
The night winds rushed over the palm and coconut trees along the streets below, flowing like long waves on a beach. Intense after-images of the visionary journey he'd just exalted in still held him. The room around him was dark, but his inner being still felt powerfully drawn by that incredible radiance of the Sun of Truth. And the pale trail of has-beeness he'd left behind. A band of yapping dogs caroused down a nearby street, in-heat chase or just celebrating. He was disappointed to find that the fliping between visioning and wakefulness had left him in Balangpur rather then being drawn with full loving abandonment into that Light.
The moon was low enough so that stars brightly showed between the shutters. Melissa's breathing next to him was soft, yet somehow not reassuring. His guts were telling him what the dream was saying. He realized that's what Plang's trying to entice him into. That devilish old bastard wanted him to blindly step off, in faith, to step off the edge of his world. Jason's gut reaction was to be cautious. The old man's overtures might be just to set him up, but he was bating the trap with something Jason really cared about.
Gold in one hand and shit in the other and the Spiral takes you up and down through both. Yes, Jason suspected that as he knew more of the Call, it put the longing to go beyond the Yi Yu in better perspective. Seen from that point of view, as Plang seemed to, could open the way to acheiving his goal. "Sure, Jason Bardow, the seeker of the Golden Fleece in the Between Lives Realm. You're just the one worthy to be drawn into the Light, along with other note worthies from around the universe. Visions or not, Jason, look at the proof of your life!"
Jason well knew that voice. Usually it wasn't so audible, or quite as viscous. His inner critic, his Accuser self, the tormentor that goes with. With full recall, as confirmation to his vitriolic charge, this Accuser took Jason back through to the time he began his ministry: a brother in the Order of St. Judas, an undercover international espionage, ordained in the ministry of delivering the Last Rites. Estreme Unction.
Jason's soul-seeking journeys with Phineus had come to an end. That was when they really had been seekers. But grants ran out and he'd run out of the driving interest those pursuits took. For all the teachings and experiences he'd gathered, he still felt as trapped in a pretend as ever, as immobilized in his habitual fears and defenses. He felt like a ghost haunting the machinery he called me. He saw himself as a silhouette of what wasn't, a gap in the shape of a human being in an field of undiscovered possibilities.
In need of excitement and income, and out of bored desperation, Jason answered an add on the Web. (Not the W.E.B. he knew now, the one that really connects beings. That was back when he still thought that virtual reality was the real one.)
Courier: Seek individual who knows their way around the world and can intelligently follow orders. Prestige and pay.
After exchanging letters, then phone calls to check each other out, he met with the Abbot at a retreat of the Order's in Paris, off the Place de Concorde. Their interest in him, he assumed, was that he spoke several languages and knew his way around many parts of the world.
Though he had some misgivings about the Abbot at first, from his croaky voice on the phone and his gauntness when they met. But Jason still thought in high flown ideals that dissolved his doubts away. He surmised the Abbot's voice must be from his years of silence and self-denying practices. And he wasn't emaciated to Jason then, but ethereal, even spiritual. His purpose and intensity seemed founded on some profound certainty. Confident, very confident. Jason envied that and imagined it came out of deep inner work and experience. Jason couldn't discern devotion from the Abbot's fanaticism. It was a very desperate time in Jason's life.
The Abbot never actually got around to telling him what the Order really was about or what he might be doing in it. All he said, in the vaguest of terms — top secret and all — was that this special branch of the government warranted the highest priorities, prestige and almost unlimited expenses and, like a code word, they had 'responsibilities.' After a thorough training, he'd be in the position to carry out highly exacting assignments, full of adventure and opportunity to show his gifts. Pay would be in the executive range. The Abbot's parchment skinned face creased into a deep smile, sensing Jason's interest, as if he worked on a commission basis.
Jason was pleased with the idea of serving the country in such a special way, like a calling to be a knight. But it was when he read the Gospel of St. Judas later, that the Abbot assured him the Order was founded and guided on, that Jason was convinced and made his choice.
Jason realized with bitter humor, watching the moonlight slicing their room in Balangpur, that those ideals that motivated him then had also turned to torments. Those became what dug deepest, ripped and split him into furthest opposites over the years.
Ten days after their meeting, Jason was flown in blindfolded to the Order's center and started his Novitiate.
The major part of the time was spent in classes and training — from the Order's view on international politics, studies on the teachings of Saint Judas, to the latest micro-spy paraphernalia. A lot of time was spent making them uncomfortable. They slept in wooden barracks with semi-partitions between areas big enough for a cot and footlocker. Basic comfort was ignored in their forced marches while fasting. They were given strange, often pointless menial, sometimes painful tasks. They were driven into bouts of exercise that pushed them all past their limits.
He'd thought the whole routine was childish, games to get the flab off their bodies and their minds sharp and attentive. He treated it like a hazing or initiation. But his attitude changed suddenly one afternoon after they'd been pulled out of a class and ordered to go back to their barracks. They were told to lie down silently and take rest, that they would need all their energy for their next task. Some ten minutes later, he heard the rattle of machine-guns. At first he smiled at their scare tactics. Blanks, of course, he assumed. But moments later, when two streams of bullets sprayed through the plywood wall just a few feet over and under his cot. That's when it flipped for Jason. In a breath, he got the whole setup and knew it was just another hype, another promise turned fiasco in his life. He was glad when he heard several screams. One man continued in a low, unconscious moan. The raging hurt and despair in him needed somebody to die. And he didn't care who.
Nobody moved until the Prior came in some long moments later. One novitiate had been shot through an arm that had dangled over the side of his cot as he slept. Several cubicles were splattered with their occupants blood who were silent.
"You were given orders. We assumed everyone would be horizontal so the firing would be harmless," the Prior explained with weariness. He chuckled at the wounded man's story of his dangling arm as if it were a good joke, then sent him to the dispensary.
"From the way their bodies fell," he surmised, looking into the other cubicles through squinting eyes, "he'd say they were sitting up and whispering to each other through the partition. That's forbidden in any case, during rest time," he pronounced flatly, emphasizing his displeasure with a slap of his black leather truncheon against his palm.
Jason was assigned to the cleanup detail. Or did he volunteer? In any case, he helped wipe the blood off the partitions and linoleum floors and to carry out the bodies. Those were the first violent deaths he'd seen. They were fools, he thought, for not keeping strictly to order. But he felt indignation and lasting repugnance for taking life so crudely.
Living beings, men he'd known, turned into things. The heft of that dead flesh as they moved their bodies told Jason something nothing else could have about the utter finality of mortality. They weren't there anymore to question or complain. That finality was very satisfying for Jason to know about. There was a shift in the training then. Long, hypnotic tirades took the place of classes, paranoiac badgering about the unknown threats around. "Stay aware and be on your guard," we constantly told. "Obey every letter of the instructions without reservation. Your life depends on it. Keep everything in absolute regulation order."
Their lives were in a worried flux moment to moment. They were told, on the spot and without notice, when to eat, sleep, go to class, undergo rigorous inspections, take a toilet or water break. There were forced night marches that went through open lands swept by sharp, cold winds.
There was less food and sleep and their timing was more erratic. They were issued razor-edged saber knives. Tensions between the Novitiates and their mentors changed from mere isolation to suspicion, from floating curiosity to antagonism. The obstacle course and weapons training filled more and more time. There was a snarl in Jason's bowels. He wanted to lash out at someone. Anyone. Entranced with his desperate need for some release, he wasn't sure whether weeks or months passed.
Death was with him all the time, his as close as another's. All the mysteries and enchantments he'd been drawn to before were paled as onlyhypothetical in comparison. Now death was real.
A torment raged inside him, severing all forms of human trust and connection, sealing him inside the layers of his armor. Totally estranged, he was constantly on guard for his very life. He learned to live stealthily. Awake or sleeping, all his senses were alert, sweeping round him like a bat's scanning scream. All fear was gone, like hunger vanishing while a man starves to death. It had been shaped and honed into a hate that could match the keenness of the knife he kept with him always.
Jason was certain that he would never have peace again until he killed every one around him. He assumed most of the other Novitiates felt the same. He saw his chance had come when he was called to be a server in the Refractory. He'd been squeezing ants and keeping the juice in a small plastic bottle, a lethal poison he'd remembered the natives of New Genoa used. He was alone in the kitchen, just on the point of emptying the toxin into a stew whose vile taste would make a perfect cover-up, when the Prior came in and took him by the elbow to the Abbot.
"Seems you're ready for Phase Two," was the Abbot's greeting to Jason. A flat, matter-of-fact business as far as they were concerned. Just part of the process of getting the kind of material they were after. He got their warm, good natured congratulations. He'd completed his Novitiate and was ready to be confirmed to his Vocation.
After Ordination, he had to wait nearly two tedious years, carrying sealed courier pouches from one anonymous drop off place to another. Finally he received his full Profession and ordination to administer the Last Sacraments — Extreme Unction. His first killing.
It was then the Prior gave him the cigarette lighter, as a 'graduation present'. Its normal looking polished gold case was actually a mini-arsenal of poisons, gas and projectiles. It could kill at some distance or right in your face. He loved it.
He recalled the dark thrill of those early adventures, the excitement in them. There was something of a love-tryst in them for him, sometimes more than just imaginary. All he cared about was that, according to some bureaucracy assigning their missions, this person was a threat to their nation's well-being.
To Jason, it was a total stranger he was intrigued to get to know. Because he knew how it was going to end. And he got to know the penitent well. Often they got to know something of him too, touches of self-revelations in the midst of his fabricated biographies — dreams, petty grips, favorite perversions, his life's disappointments — certain that none of it would go any further. And he never gave the Sacraments to the wrong person either, as some of his colleagues did.
In his ministry, it was with women that he flourished most. Seduction seemed a fitting way to play out their secret roles. He kept his immunities to certain poisons and drugs quite high. A shared drink would pass him unharmed, yet be lethal to his partner. The penis projectile was a variation of this. The finality of such a relationship can make it very special. A meeting to end all meetings. A wondrous intercourse that plants a new maidenhead — death. Like some cannibalistic insect's mating, love in a terminal form.
With all of them, there was some personal attention to the Extreme Unction. Those distant, proxy methods — letter bombs, booby traps and the like — had no appeal for him. Jason found he needed to be face to face to get that vitalizing rush. For him, it was most satisfying when the E.U. was given in a simple gesture, like a handshake. Or a kiss. With some bastards, of course, it wasn't any romance at all. Their ball-bearing eyes called for direct and brutal treatment from Jason. He wasn't an impersonal, hidden assassin. He was someone they damn-well better take notice of. Some he literally had to push in the face with the threat to get their attention. But everyone stops and takes notice when mortal terror stalks them.
It was there he always went for renewal, into his wolfish shadow. To violence. Sex. Death. There was his fountain of life. After one such ministry he honored it with:
Immune from the world's legalities, Jason killed with pleased impunity. With no sense of guilt, no fear of reprisal, he found it suited him well — a perfect expression of that reprisal wounding part of his being. His training in the Novitiate had, as intended, awakened that killer instinct in his reptilian mind, as primal as the fear of falling. The two parts connected, personal and primal. He found being lethal fulfilling and felt gratitude to those he ministered too. Killing without personal motives left him purged, more alive. It was his revenge for ancient wrongs done him. Clinging to his hurts and fearfulness, he could justify venting his rage. And there was always that ultimate release to look forward to, that merciful purging.
How thirstily he savored that power he had over others — his joy as the rage that always simmered within found expression and release. Even so, with the years and repetitions, that forbidden excitement wore off. No glamour was left in it and no belief that it was to any sane purpose at all. Even the Invocation, Jason now saw, had grown dull over the decades. And he was back being a kind of courier, delivering notices to expire. He numbly carried out what he was conditioned and paid to do. Only his rage gave him strength to go on. It braced him for survival. Without it, his life was flat and pointless.
He was caught in that split and lived in violence and self-deceit. Distorted beyond self-recognition to escape endless self-conflict and sorrow. What had once been authentic and alive in him now was hidden.
So all his acts could not make his dreams more real, but only make him less so. Insomnia, rages that came and went like hurricanes, feeling himself like a shadow among solid people. At times a paranoia that made him fearful of going out. He could no longer simply wait and hope for things to be different. "Yes, ready to step off into the Light, isn't he?" his inner Accuser bitingly mocked at this recall. It had proven its accusations.
The torment tore at Jason as he held both the radiant vision of the Sun of Truth and the viciousness of that life of defensive identity he'd lived side by side in his awareness. Light and dark agony, soul-shredding and dismembering paradox.
No wonder... No wonder..., he told himself as the anger softened into remorse. No wonder I am as I am. "No wonder," he whispered aloud because he felt it must be spoken, though Melissa still slept, "no wonder we have no way to really touch or trust each other. We are Beings of Light programmed to destroy."
Jason lay back inside the cubicle of mosquito-net, watching the waves across it from the fan's stroking and breathed deep the jasmine and donkey-dropping scented air. The chanting he'd heard earlier now was closer and fuller. His mind's fierce clasp relaxed, opened to his newly discovered sense of possibility. The growing esteem he felt for Plang held its own in this onslaught of despair. If the Order's brainwashing had been so successful in brutalizing him, perhaps this Enlightour of the Wizard might help him reach that state of wholeness he describes and that Jason so longed for.
A high-risk step at best, but he was at the end of his road, in any case. Maybe it was the time to step off the precipice?
The old man might be a Wizard indeed. And that's what it would take, a miracle for Jason to break free of everything that he knew as him. Though he could still suspect that Plang's whole routine might be a setup, he needed him to be what he claimed, needed to believe he could help him through this needle's eye. He felt a hope freeing itself from the mound of the years' dregs. It was like a new heart wanting to awaken in him, a stream of energies welling up within, flushed with new life. He only prayed Melissa would give him time to find out.
He felt the W.E.B. about him, Its energies pouring down through him, boundless to fill and overflow the starfish-shaped depression of Balangpur and up over the surrounding mountains. He could feel this wondrous, magical force, yearning to free him from the flexible coffin that trapped him. Hushed. Everything in the vast night was still but for the distant chanting, wafting by like smoke from incense.
In a kind of holy fervor, in spite of himself, he moaned aloud, "Yes. Yes." Was this the workings of his Other? He soon dozed off and dreamt again.
Click on the chapters from the list on top left. Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2010 |
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