Part 20 (2/2)
”You asked him about me.”
”Ah, not a complete simpleton.”
”She was an atheist, not a Spiritualist.”
”Believe me, young man, you have no idea what your mother was.”
Robert closed his eyes. Then he said, ”How did you meet my mother?”
”We met as children.”
”Were you ever-”
”No,” said Monty, smiling almost wistfully. ”We were only friends.”
”My father told me something yesterday. About her disappearance.”
”It was all over the papers for a day or two.”
”And they never found her?”
”Of course not. Why did he tell you this now?”
”I'm sick.”
”There are reasons for that. And you know it here”-he patted the left side of his chest- ”but not”-he tapped his skull-”up here.”
”All I know is that it's somehow connected to her.”
”Not connected, Robert. It is her.” With that, the man stood. He was larger than Robert had imagined. He shrugged his shoulders and the quilt he had been wrapped in fell to the floor. He turned, picked up a smaller blanket, wrapped it around his waist like a towel. Step by step, shadows fled his skin. His chest was mottled with gray hair; beneath sallow, sagging skin, thick bunches of muscle flickered like knots of twine. He stood before Robert a moment, gazing down with eyes still shadowed, then lowered himself onto the chair. His face appeared impossible aged, like clay left in the kiln too long. ”People thought she was going mad,” he said.
”What did you think?”
”For such a long time she'd dropped the veil over her eyes, and accepted the physical world as all that was real.”
Robert leaned over, ran his hands over his face. ”Why did she burst into a cathedral, go nuts, and leave me on a sidewalk?”
”You'll have to ask her.”
”Wonderful. I'll do that.” Robert stood up. ”Thanks for your time.”
”Sit down.”
He stared at Monty, breathing heavily. ”How old are you?”
”Sit down.”
Robert pulled his chair back. He sat. They stared at each other.
”Close your eyes.”
”Come on, if you're-”
”Close you eyes.”
Slowly, Robert did as he was told.
”Listen, Robert, listen to my voice, imagine it's got skin, imagine it's a body . . . .”
8.
Some people (Monty said) call it Cla.s.sical Reality, some think of it as a veil, but this great body of energy is both paradox and reality, matter and anti-matter, question and answer. It is never-ending and finite, one thing, whole and complete, never changing but never the same. The matter is irreplaceable although it changes form, shape and dimension.
G.o.d is not separate from creation, but a part of it, one and the same, the name and the body. G.o.d is the mind of the cosmos, the self-awareness in the center of the sun. Everything, Robert, everything-earth and sky and sea-is the same. All is recycled endlessly, but it is always married, st.i.tched on an invisible seam. Men are women, women are men, and algae might be the teeth in a shark's mouth: everything depends on that indefinable definer we call time as to what a single cell is at a given moment.
Time is only useful to us because it measures lifetimes, but lifetimes do not exist. They are the lie man created when the first of his kind stopped breathing. Man believes in burial, but burial is only a planting of a different kind, and the harvest takes place after thousands or millions of our years. We are buried, and our earth once more carries the matter that used to bear our name out into her vast circulation, and sooner or later we are reborn, if only as a trillion grains of sand.
We are born of a woman, from an egg and a sperm, from a bloodline that traces its beginnings to apes, to single cell organisms, to the mist hovering over the primal land. We come from the earth, are born of it, and are weakened at birth because we've been separated from it. Our true ancestry is the soil, the water, the earth we return to when our bodies give out. Men are incomplete, a race of bared nerves severed from the root body, and these nerves possess a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and twist with it, with this life, until burning out. Until then, Man gazes up, muses on the stars, on G.o.d, on angels or demons, when he should look down at his home, at the one thing that connects all of his kind, all of his kind's thoughts, all of his kind's dreams.
Now, Robert, I want you to look down. There is a chasm at your feet. A flickering red light is somewhere in the darkness, and inside, deep inside it, is a sea of matter, of memory, of story. I want you to swim, Robert. I need you to swim.
9.
There was nothing but light. And a voice. A sense of movement, though nothing lay in any distance. Light ate inside him. He became light. Moving, roaming the infinite brightness. And then there was something. It was off in the white, a dot of black, a rip in the fabric, a tear in what had been an enveloping veil, and as he approached it wasn't a dot anymore but a hole. It began to pulse, and something glowed within it, perhaps down inside it. Something red. It grew, opened like a mouth, and he was inside. All was black and red. The red was shaded; the center was crimson while two shafts, like the stems of twin roses, were violet. Then the colors ripped as though along a seam, and in the rip he saw the world. It gaped, and he stood on nothing, looking down on a desert. It rose and fell like the line of a leg, a hip, a shoulder. A wind kicked up. The dunes cascaded around each other, whirling, rising, until nothing but sand existed.
A pyramid. It shot from the sand like the tip of a spear.
A coliseum. Cacophony plumed from its hollow insides, gathered in the air above it, paused, echoed. The cries of a city, of a time, of a race.
A brown boy sat in the sand. His garments drifted in the wind. His huge head lolled atop his shrunken, starving body. A vulture shrieked, landed in the sand above him. Its black eyes sized him. The boy leaned forward on an arm made only of bone, staring at the bird, his eyes avid yet curious, and the bird stepped forward, clucked his beak, measuring him, snapping at him, and then it was on him, scooping a chunk of flesh out, like a spoon through a pie.
He moved through it quicker now, stamping his feet on the earth, seeing jungles and steel, men and bombs, armies and galaxies. He saw All, if only a glimpse.
And stopped on a woman and boy child. They shared a bed. The boy awoke, tugged on her sleeve, and she moaned, dragged her arm along her sweating brow, opened her eyes.
It was her.
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