A Darker Place (36 page)

“I was happy to help, Jason. Dulcie’s good people. But I hope,” she added deliberately, “that it doesn’t happen again for a while. She was very upset.”

“I know,” he said with a grimace. “She’s having nightmares again. Look, I’ve got to go. They’re waiting for me.”

Nightmares, again? “Right. I’ll come down in a bit.”

She did not manage to make it to the kitchen to help prepare for dinner that afternoon.

Marc Bennett was gone by dinnertime, and that evening Steven returned to his central position in the meditation hall. Ana could feel the relief washing around her when he rose from his second-highest platform and started confidently across the walkway to the leader’s perch. He seemed restored—a degree more intense, perhaps, but back in control of himself and his community. Change breathed a sigh of satisfaction and stepped back into its former path.

Ana did not. Perhaps her equilibrium had been too disturbed, reminding her what she was actually doing there; perhaps it was just the residue of her own inner tension, but she could still sense the storm in the distance.

It came, sooner than she had expected, and in a form she could not have anticipated.

The next morning when she took her walk, Steven was there. She had gone west this time, up to the hills on which the high wind-run generator stood, on the opposite side of the compound from the red-rock platform where she had met him before. He was seated to one side of the path, his face raised to the growing sun. Mallory was nowhere in sight.

She hesitated. When he gave no sign that he had noticed her, she decided to continue on her path. She drew even to him and was starting to pass him by, when he spoke.

“Good morning, Ana of the Sunrise. Strange, to be a child of the West, where the sun sets, and yet be so drawn to the early manifestations of light.”

“Well,” she said, not quite sure how she wanted to respond. He went on regardless.

“What do you make of your reading on the philosophy of chemistry?”

“The philosophy—? Oh, alchemy.” She raised her eyes to the distant hills, and thought briefly how fortunate it was that people saw only what they expected to see. Steven had no idea. She looked down at him again and smiled, then sat down on a relatively flat place a few feet away from him, her legs out straight, leaning back on her hands.

“Most of the things I’ve been reading raise more questions than they answer. If, as you say, it is possible actually to make gold, then why did the science fade into a mere quest for spiritual growth, and then die out entirely?”

“Disbelief breeds failure,” Steven said promptly. “‘Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle, yet his folly will not depart from him.’ Everyone knows that men can’t possibly walk on red-hot coals without burning their feet to the bones, but people do. I did. And men can’t transform one substance into another, but they do. If, however, the person trying to firewalk is afraid, if he does not believe he can do it, he will indeed lose his feet.

“Alchemy was the beginning of scientific method, and the great irony is that the more the alchemists discovered about the nature of matter, the more improbable the whole thing seemed. Belief became divorced from
intellect, and they have continued to move further apart. Until the two are rejoined, the Philosopher’s Stone remains an impossibility.”

“You seriously think that the scientist’s state of mind affects the result of an experiment?”

“It is not an experiment,” he said sharply. “It is a process. A Work. Ana, all matter is related. This is a thing the ancients knew and we Westerners rejected in our single-minded quest to take things apart. We are reaping the results now, in a world poisoned by our convenience products, in children distorted by our providing them food and no wisdom. The only hopeful trend of the last thirty years is the faint stirring of realization that everything is interconnected, that the ozone layer over Australia is depleted by air conditioners used on the other side of the world; that the prisons are full because kids in the ghettos don’t have basketball courts and trips to the beach; that women die of cancer because their mothers took the wrong kind of drug when they were pregnant.

“Ana, look: The medical world has admitted that a person’s attitude has a strong bearing on how he or she fights off a disease. Alchemy says precisely the same thing: that the material in the vessel needs to be healed of impurity by a person whose mind and heart are both turned in the same direction.”

Ana had been caught up in far too many sophomoric arguments on religion to fall into the temptation of pointing out his glaring flaw in logic, but it was not necessary, because Steven was off and running, and she had only to sit and feel the warmth of the sun on her face and chest.

“The alchemist was regarded as mad precisely because of this singleness of intent. His family went hungry, his clothes turned to rags, while he stared into the
glass alembic and waited for the
nigredo
to give way to the peacock colors of transformation, through the white
albedo
to the glorious red of the final stage. ‘I blew my thrift at the coal,’ George Ripley wrote, ‘my clothes were bawdy, my stomach never whole.’ It would all be worth it if he could only reduce the universe, all the millennia of creation, into this alembic in front of him. It is a feeling like no other. It is like being God.”

This was the first glimpse of the fanatic she had seen in Steven Change: It brought a sudden chill to the morning. Her words were impulsive and her voice harsher than she intended.

“‘Behold’”, she quoted at him, “‘I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem as men gather silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into a furnace, to blow the fire upon it in order to melt it.’”

“Ezekiel’s God is an angry God. Remember, also, that ‘the city was pure gold, clear as glass.’”

“The God of Revelation can be angry, too. ‘I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire.’”

To Ana’s surprise, Steven threw back his head and laughed. “I know. I would make a lousy messiah. I’m far too softhearted.

“Which is why,” he said before she could react, “my dear Seeker Ana, I am sending you on a journey.

“In the very first conversation we had, you and I, I wondered aloud whether or not you had the commitment you needed to transform yourself. It was a natural enough question—most of the people who come here are so taken up with the pursuit of comfort and instant gratification that they will never go beyond what they are, will never learn that ‘No birth without labor’ and ‘Great heat, great gain’ are more than slogans. Most of the people who come here are content to warm their toes at the fire. They will never tear off their shoes and walk on the
coals, because they are unwilling to submit themselves to the hotter, harder disciplines that Change requires.

“You are surprised that I am so blunt,” he said, as indeed she was. “It is my job here to help people along the path to Change, yes, but it is also my responsibility as an adept to seek out those with greater possibilities than the masses, those with iron already in their spines. Teresa was one of those. The boy Jason Delgado is another, a young man with enormous potential. And you, Ana Wakefield. It is not my habit to speak like this to a person who has not been through the Work, but you have a natural affinity even without the experience. And not just intellectually—I feel in you a person who has been through the fire more than once, and has been strengthened by it. I feel in you the willingness to be worked and tried, to submit to the refining fires and be pounded into shape. To be transformed.

“I hesitated because I thought you were too frivolous for The Process. It is a long, hard journey. It has broken men and women before this.” (Was it just her imagination, Ana wondered, or did she hear sorrow in his voice? At the nameless Japanese boy’s death, perhaps? Or a different loss?) “I want you to begin your Change. I want you to set off on your journey, and to do so, I will send you on an actual journey, not one that is ‘simply allegorical.’ I am sending some of our children to our sister community in England. You will go with them, as a teacher, and as a student.”

“What?”
Oh shit, she cried to herself. Oh shit. I’m nowhere near ready to pull out of here, I can’t give Glen what he needs yet, and Jason—and Dulcie, what the hell am I going to do, oh
shit
—

“To England. I like you, Ana. I can’t teach someone I like. I may be further along in my journey than you, but I am not yet purified enough to overlook my own affections.
It is one of the reasons we have more than one community, in recognition that none of us has attained our pure state. I want to send you to my own teacher. You will find Jonas, our Change leader in England, considerably farther along on the Path than I am. I want to send him you and Jason and one or two others whom I cannot teach properly. He will help you.”

“Jason,” she repeated, grasping the name like a straw. “What about Dulcie?”

Steven sighed. “Jason is not ready to move away from her. His sense of responsibility is admirable, but it distracts him. He must concentrate on his own Transformation.”

“He’s only fourteen.”

“There is never time to waste.”

“Is that why you’ve taken his art away from him? His ‘sacrifice’?”

Steven’s face darkened. “He should not have spoken to you about his Work. It is his alone.”

“I wanted to draft him to help with the school mural; he had to tell me why he couldn’t. Why take that from him?”

“I think you know, Ana.”

“Heat and pressure, right? And the last time you put pressure on him, look what happened. My hand is still sore.”

“He has to learn to direct his energies.”

“Steven, how many alchemists were killed by explosions when they misjudged the pressures inside their vessels? More to the point, how many of their students did they take with them?”

So there was a degree of uncertainty in him, she thought, seeing his face. However, he said merely, “He will learn. Jonas will direct him.”

Ana did not much like the sound of that, but Steven had at least opened a door. She could stay with the community
as a whole and with her job. And with Dulcie and her brother. Glen would have a stroke, but if she chose, she might just stay long enough to give him a complete picture of Change. Going by what Steven just said, the center was in England, anyway.

(But—in England, where she had no authority, no Glen, no alarm bell or automatic pistol hidden inside Rocinante? No backup at all, in fact. She would be alone, and with two children on her hands. God, Glen wouldn’t bother with handcuffs—he would just straight out murder her for even considering it.)

“When do I need to decide?”

“The tickets will be purchased tomorrow morning. The names of the passengers need to be on them.”

“And when would we actually go?” she asked, reassuring herself that the end of the school year was still a long way off.

“In three days,” he said. “You do have a passport?”

Two days later, she drained Rocinante’s refrigerator, disconnected the propane tank, gave her knee enough cortisone to keep it numb for weeks, and spirited away the gun and cortisone needles from the hidden compartment to bury them in the desert. Before she pulled the tarpaulin over the bus, she stood looking at the medicine pouch that she had made from the objects in her past that meant something to her: the hairs from two dogs, the stones from her creek, and Abby’s red bead. She reached in to remove it from the rearview mirror, and slipped the smooth leather cord over her head and around her neck, where it lay beneath her shirt like a talisman.

She did not manage to speak to Glen before the plane left, although she did rip out the most recent pages of her diary and put them into an envelope addressed to “Uncle
Abner,” dropping it surreptitiously into a mail slot at the airport. On the last page she scribbled a note:

From the journal of Jason Delgado

The seats had been booked too late to enable them all to sit together, so Ana, in charge of Dulcie, Jason, and a boy not much older than Dulcie who was going to join his mother in England, sat apart from Dov Levinski, a kindergarten teacher named Margit, and their group of three children, two of whom were Margins. It suited Ana quite well, particularly as the little boy Benjamin was sweet-tempered, sleepy, and no trouble whatsoever.