A Darker Place (19 page)

The more Ana looked at this weird structure, the stranger it seemed. It was as if some mad engineer had decided to cross a huge chemical apparatus with the rat-guard of a ship’s ropes and turn the result into a tree house. That it was deeply symbolic for the builders she had no doubt—nobody would go to that amount of work for mere decoration—but what that symbolism might be, and if it had any actual function aside from holding the fireplace to heat the room; she could not tell.

What she did know, what she hadn’t been sure of until she had walked into this room, was that behind all its apparent openness, Change was full of hidden secrets.

The room began to quiet, until Ana could hear the low crackle of the fire burning behind its circle of screen. After a minute, high over her head, a man stood up. His was the highest occupied platform on his run of the helix, although three higher than his were unoccupied. (Steven and his right-hand man, Mallory, Ana wondered, off in England? And what of the third one?) This man now picking his way cautiously along the nearest walkway to the central platform was someone Ana had met during the day, in the workshop where he was working on a set of chairs. David Carteret, his name was, a big man with scars on his face that looked as if he’d
gone through a window. He seemed to be in charge of leading the meditation from his high perch directly above the fireplace. Ana wrenched her mind from speculation and her gaze from the extraordinarily beautiful cloud of gold, and prepared to give herself over to meditation.

David began with a greeting sent from Steven and a couple of brief announcements from the English sister house. He then moved quickly, and with the relief of a person taking refuge from public speaking, into a chant Steven had set for them. “I am Change,” said David; “Change am I.”

Ana dutifully joined the others, listening to how the voices rose and rang through the dome overhead, hearing the hundred voices slowly become one. It had been a while since she had joined in a group meditation, and it took her some time to immerse her voice in the others’, to lose herself in the words. Gradually, imperceptibly, she let go, and as the chant evolved from two statements into the slow two-beat rhythm of “I am Change am I am Change,” she moved along with it.

Silent meditation followed, although by this time the protests of Ana’s knee were loud and interfered with the purity of her contemplation. The ninety minutes seemed endless, and when finally people began to get to their feet, she followed them out gratefully, stumbling down the road on a leg that felt as if hot gravel had been inserted into the joint. All she could think about was a shot of cortisone from Rocinante’s locked cabinet, a jolt of whiskey from her illicit stores, and many hours stretched straight in bed.

An ancient school bus rumbled past her as she approached the guest quarters: the older children and their teachers returning from Tucson. She wished them a silent good night and took her creaking middle-aged body to bed.

From FBI documents relating to the Change case

Ana walked into the dining hall the next morning and found the community restored to itself, voices raised in a wall of sound, dishes clattering, excited teenagers calling to each other across the room. The energy embodied in the
TRANSFORMATION
mural no longer seemed unlikely.

The hub building, too, was transformed. What had yesterday been a half-empty nursery school was now a purposeful seat of learning. Halfway through the morning Ana was dragged out of the office to help Teresa with her fifteen eleventh and twelfth graders, who were finding it difficult to settle back into the classroom after two days of freedom.

“I just need another adult today,” Teresa told her as they hurried around the circular hallway. “You don’t need to do anything—they’ll settle down if you just go and stand next to them while I’m trying to teach.”

Not a terribly flattering judgment of Ana’s abilities, perhaps, but it was true that the repressive presence of an adult—any adult—goes far to smooth down youthful high spirits. Ana dutifully stood, and drifted, and saw the classroom gradually cool off from the near-boil. By lunchtime, concentration had been achieved.

The kids exploded out the door, and Teresa dropped down into her chair with her head thrown back. Ana noticed idly that despite Carla’s version of the community regulations that specified no jewelry, this woman, too (whom Ana would have classified as an ardent follower of rules), was wearing a necklace, in her case a delicate gold chain. Teresa sat forward and the chain disappeared under her collar. Perhaps the rule meant only no necklaces on top of clothing?

“It is always so difficult for them to focus when they have been away,” Teresa said. “I’ve come to dread field trips.”

“Sitting in a bus for all those hours,” Ana said. “Maybe they need some ‘sweat meditation’ when they get in.”

Teresa looked surprised, then thoughtful. “You could be right. Perhaps I’ll mention it to Steven.”

“Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”

“It was supposed to be tomorrow, but we heard this morning it will be three or four days. Well, let us go and have some lunch.”

Three or four days. Ana was seized by an abrupt spasm of boredom at the thought of it, because it would then be three or four more days while the great man settled in and found the time to exchange a few words with the newcomer, plus two or three more before the community got back into its normal functioning.

She told Teresa she had things to do, and excused herself from lunch, going instead to her room to change into her oldest clothes. She spotted the silver moon that she had bought in Sedona and obediently removed the night before, and after a moment she picked it up and dropped it over her head, tucking it under her shirt. She felt obscurely comforted by the small weight, and by the minor rebellion against the rules.

Rocinante’s cupboards provided some stale bread and a piece of cheese for lunch, and soon Ana was elbow-deep in the bus’s engine, red-faced and muttering, with the ancient, much-taped-together repair manual propped open at the heater section. Forty minutes into it she heard footsteps approach and stop behind her; she looked around and saw Dulcie’s serious and disconcertingly familiar face.

“Hello, Dulcie. I wondered where you’d gotten to. I think you must be my good luck, because I just this
minute found what’s wrong with Rocinante’s heater. You see this little switch? Well, you can’t tell it’s a switch, but the book says it is, and says it’s supposed to flip on to let the heat in, and it isn’t. You probably shouldn’t touch it,” she said, drawing it back slightly from the child’s inquiring finger. “It’s really filthy. So am I, in fact. How’ve you been? How’s the rug coming along?”

“Can you fix it?”

“What, the rug? Oh, you mean the switch. I don’t think I can fix it, but now that I know what the problem is, I can buy another one and replace it. I hope.”

“Why do you call your car Rosy Nante?”

“Rocinante? That’s her name. Have you ever heard about Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha?” She rolled the name on her tongue with magnificence and raised her eyebrows at the child.

Dulcie shook her head.

“Don Quixote was a great man, although he was a little bit crazy.” Ana reached for the small screwdriver and settled herself into the story while she put the engine back together.

“‘Don’ means ‘sir,’ or ‘lord,’ so it’s like calling him Sir Quixote. Anyway, Don Quixote lived a long time ago, in a country called Spain, where he spent all his spare time reading exciting adventures about knights who rode out and rescued maidens and punished bad guys. Could you hand me that roll of skinny black tape? And I promise not to bite it with my teeth.” Ana pulled her head out far enough to exchange grins with the child, accepted the tape, and returned to her task. “Where was I? Oh yes. Don Quixote loved to read stories about knights and their squires—that’s the person who helps the knight, bringing him food and polishing his armor. Are you reading yet, Dulcie?”

The child nodded. Ana paused to scrabble through
the toolbox for a stub of pencil she kept there, and printed the name
QUIXOTE
in clear letters along the upper margin of the manual on repairs, saying the letters aloud as she wrote them. She dropped the pencil stub into the fold; many weeks later Glen McCarthy would find the tattered manual, open it at the pencil, and wonder over the inscription.

“That’s what it looks like, with a Q and an X, which aren’t letters you get to use very often. Anyway, one day Don Quixote got it into his head that he, too, would be a great knight. He was by this time more than a little bit batty from all his reading, so he really believed that he could do this. He made himself a helmet out of an old bucket and climbed onto an ancient old nag of a horse he called Rocinante, imagining it to be a magnificent steed trained as a warhorse. He talked one of his neighbors, a man named Sancho Panza, into becoming his squire by saying that he would make Sancho the governor of an island when they returned, and Sancho believed him.

“Now would you hand me the crescent wrench? It’s that flat metal thing with the shape like a moon on the end. No, I think I need the bigger one. Thanks.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode forth, Don Quixote on his bag-of-bones Rocinante, Sancho on a donkey, and the first thing they did was come out onto a flat plain, where they saw two or three dozen windmills. Do you know what a windmill is?” Dulcie looked uncertain. “There’s one here, though it’s a very modern one. You know that thing on the high tower up on the hill past the barns, with little arms that turn really fast when the wind blows? That’s a windmill for making electricity; these windmills Don Quixote saw were shorter but wide as a shed, and instead of little metal blades that fly around fast, they had four huge arms stretching almost to the ground, made out of wood and cloth like the sail of a boat, and they went around and around slow and
strong, turning a stone that the people used to grind their wheat into flour.”

Most of this would be beyond the child’s comprehension, but that didn’t matter. Ana stuck her head back into the engine and went on with both repairs and story.

“The windmills that poor old confused Don Quixote saw looked to him like an army of giants, each of them with four enormous arms turning around and around. Of course, Don Quixote immediately decided that he would attack them all, wiping this scourge of giants from the face of the earth. Can I have that smaller crescent wrench now, Dulcie?” She waited a minute, caught in a tricky bit and unable to look around. “Do you see it? The one on the top?” she prompted, and was preparing to back out, when the wrench nudged her outstretched hand. She wrapped her fingers around it and continued.

“Don Quixote pulled down the visor on his bucket helmet, stretched out his lance, and jabbed his spurs into poor Rocinante’s sides. Off they pounded, straight at the nearest windmill, while Sancho Panza sat on his donkey and covered his eyes so he didn’t have to watch.

“‘Cowards and vile caitiffs,’ shouted Don Quixote.” Ana stuck her arm out behind her to gesture swordlike with the crescent wrench, then reapplied it to the task. “‘One knight will conquer you all!’ And he flew across the field at them and charged into the nearest giant. The wind was turning the sail, and it caught Don Quixote’s lance, broke it to pieces, and flipped both Don Quixote and his horse over and over, rolling across the ground.

“Sancho was so frightened. He came running up and helped Don Quixote to his feet. ‘Master,’ he cried, ‘what are you doing? These are not giants, they’re windmills. You can’t destroy them!’ And Don Quixote, groaning from his injuries, looked again and saw that they were indeed windmills, and he shook his head. ‘My great enemy, the magician Freston, has robbed me of my victory
by turning these giants into windmills before our very eyes. But never fear, dear Sancho; my sword will prevail.’

“And off they went to the inn, to bind their wounds and eat their supper.”

Ana had timed her conclusion carefully, to coincide with the end of the temporary repair. She emerged from the engine, dropped her tools into the box, closed Rocinante’s engine cover, and turned to look in triumph at her audience.