Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (80 page)

    
Far below, through the valleys beneath the
serrated mountains, the Silk Road caravans had traveled, laden with peppercorns
and coffee—things men had once killed for. The position of the sun made it
midday. Raszer was there an hour before anyone came.

    
The curtains parted.

    
“Are you feeling better?” the man asked, in
an unnervingly delicate voice.

    
“That’s all relative, isn’t it?” Raszer
replied.

    
“As all things are,” answered the sheikh.

    
The voice, the robes, and the bearing were
similar—identical, in fact—to those of his torturer, but it seemed possible
that this was a different man.

    
“All things? Even Allah?”

    
“If by Allah, you mean that which presides
over the machinery of the universe, this is coeternal with the universe . . .
but its interpretation by man is relative.”

    
“The Qur’an—some would say—is also an
interpretation. Is its truth relative?”

    
“The truth of the Prophet’s revelation is
not in the text. One must have eyes to see it. Most see only words, and no word
can be read without prejudice. Worse, men try to divine moral law from them,
and there is no kinship between law and revelation. The truth of the Qur’an is
that there is no truth but God, and God is incomprehensible.”

    
“I wonder what truth you hoped to divine
from torturing me.”

    
 
“Truth is not the point of torture.”

    
“Truly,” said Raszer. “Are you the god of
this place, who determines who will suffer and who will be granted pardon?”

    
“Anyone can be a god,” replied the sheikh.
“Consider the dog taken from its mother and placed in a strange home. It has
been stripped of the familiar, and will offer unqualified devotion to the first
person who provides it with sustenance . . . even though that person may in the
next moment beat it severely. Shall I demonstrate?”

    
“It wouldn’t have effect, and I know that’s
what you’re after. I’ve been to the well of nothing, and found it wasn’t empty.
You can take everything, and God will still be there. That is the reason to
develop faith: to survive monsters like you.”

    
“And if the monster you see is a mirror of
your own self?”

    
“Then I know which mirrors to smash.”

    
“Ha!” said the sheikh. “Fortitude you have.
But passion blinds you. Let me show you the world as it is.” He whistled
through his teeth, a long, trilling tone with a scoop at the end. Presently, a
young man—one of those Raszer had seen in the garden—came through the curtained
doorway and stood before the sheikh. “What is your name?” his master asked.

    
“My name is yours to give,” the young man
replied.

    
“Son of a whore,” said the sheikh. “Where
were you born?”

    
“I was born in the Garden.”

    
“Remove your robe.”

    
The young man—now seeming far more a
boy--did as he was told, and stood naked before the wall. A shiver ran the
length of his body. Instinctively, he cupped a hand over his groin, but not
quickly enough. Raszer was at first moved to pity, the way he might have been
moved by an animal missing a limb, or a child with a cleft palate, but quickly
the milk of pity soured to anger, and then to fury.

Between
the young man’s legs was only a vestigial organ.

He
had been cut to the root.

    
Maybe it was the memory of the mortally
wounded soldier, twitching spastically in the road, and maybe the outrage of
the waking nightmares they’d only an hour ago projected on the white walls of
his mind, but finally it was too much. Raszer turned on his tormentor and took
hold of the veil that covered his face.

    
“Fils
de merde,”
he spat.

    
“Poor
comportment for a priest,” said the sheikh, freeing himself. “Have you heard
what science has found? Ninety percent of the human genome is identical to that
of an earthworm. And what is fornication but the worm in human nature? And what
is law but the boot that keeps the worm pinned to the ground? If we wish to be
free of the boot, we must be prepared to sacrifice the worm. Only then can the
will triumph.”

    
“Very tidy,” said Raszer. “Very clean. But
you’ve destroyed the fruit to cut out the rot. Man and the earthworm share
genetic lineage because both are the products of a single idea: the Word made
flesh. An essential current flows through the sex parts; if you break the
circuit, we lose our connection to the power source. If I call myself a priest,
it is because each day I strive to transform this current into love, and this
service is by choice. Deny this choice, and I’m no longer a servant—I’m a
slave.”

    
The sheikh uttered a command that Raszer
didn’t comprehend, and in less than three seconds, the naked boy had vaulted
the wall and leapt to his death. Raszer followed the descent to impact eight
hundred feet below with his breath stopped in his windpipe, a hand still
outstretched impotently in an effort to grab the boy’s ankle.

    
“There are a thousand more like him
inside,” said the sheikh. “Do you truly believe that your world can survive an
order such as this?”

    
“And what is your place in it?” Raszer
asked. “If there’s no truth, and everything is permitted, it’s difficult for me
to see the ‘order’ in it.”

    
“We are . . . what has always been in these
highlands. We are like the wind, and want only what the wind has: pure
existence, without constraint of law or social order. To go where we please,
invisibly. The only God on Earth is will. The only law is will expressed as
power. Men once knew this, but have been tricked by sentiment. Tell me, where
is pity in the world? The God of this world demands discord, not community.”

    
“I think you’re a few thousand years late .
. . maybe a few hundred million. Even orangutans form communities. You can’t
will the world to jump when you say, ‘Jump.’”

    
“Perhaps not. But we can will the world to
fear, and in fearing, it will form boundaries and stand one side against the
other. We will occupy the neutral ground. We will hasten the world’s division
and reap the space between.”

    
“What you’ll reap is the whirlwind . . . ”

    
“Have you come to preach to us, Father?”

    
“No. I’ve come for one girl. One girl is
surely worth keeping your castle.”

    
“Perhaps more. She is a special girl. What
do you offer?”

    
“What can one American girl be worth to
someone like you?”

    
“Let me answer your question with a
question,” said the sheikh. “What quality in woman is most valued by man?”

    
“Why don’t you tell me,” said Raszer.

    
“A beautiful emptiness, upon which he may
project his desire.”

    
Raszer said nothing.

    
“What will it mean for your world if her
face becomes the face of terror?”

    
Again, Raszer stayed silent.

    
“So I ask you again. What will you pay for
her?”

    
“Something worth a thousand souls to you.
The missing piece of the Ka’ba stone,
al-Hajar
al-Aswad
, taken from Mecca when your forebears sacked it. That’s the
history, isn’t it? They returned it in pieces after twenty-two years. But of
twelve fragments, only seven were restored. Four of those remaining were hardly
more than chips, but one was of a size great enough—in the hands of a master—to
evoke Atargatis. The stone was yours until a boy named Henry Lee took it from
under your nose.”

    
“The whole of this fortress is built upon
sacred rock. Why should we bargain with a Christian for a fragment of what we
already possess?”

    
“Because it’s a very special fragment, and
because you understand that cracks lead to catastrophes. Once it’s widely known
that the stone of the Ka’ba is
not
intact—and
that the Satanic verses have a basis in history, the Islamic world will erupt .
. . and the conflict you hope to profit from may never occur.”

    
“How would you propose to deliver this
stone to us?”

    
“As soon as the girl is on her way home, it
will be handed over to you.”

    
“By whom?”

    
“By me.”

    
The sheikh said nothing, but stepped to the
wall and surveyed the sweep of the canyon. After a few moments, he spoke. “This
matter is not for me to decide.” His voice trailed off as he left the balcony,
saying, “I will send someone for you.”

    
If the story went where stories are wont to
go, Raszer was about to meet the Old Man of the Mountains.

    
It was an ordinary door of uncertain age, pale
green with a knob of tarnished brass. Raszer stepped through into a small,
square space that resembled a museum re-creation of a late-eighteenth-century
European sitting room. There were in the room a love seat with fat cushions
upholstered in striped silk, two high-backed chairs of dark, ornamented wood,
two matching hutches of the same dark wood, and an oil painting of a small
cottage in a deep forest. Nothing about the room was especially inviting, or
forbidding. Nothing made him feel that he was expected to linger there. But he
felt out of place and uneasy, as if he were the wrong-size doll in a dollhouse.

    
Raszer
had been given no instructions by his attendant, other than a gesture and the
words “Through there.” On the opposite end of the room was another green door,
identical to the first.

    
He
walked to the door and was about to open it; then he paused and turned. It was
then that he perceived the truth of the room: The scale of everything was just
slightly—almost imperceptibly—smaller than life. That’s why he’d felt too big.

    
He
turned the green door’s tarnished knob and stepped into a larger square room
with precisely the same furnishings. The placement was identical, as was the
position of the green door on the opposite wall, only now he felt smaller, as
if a lens had been flipped or the floor had dropped. Oddly, the possibility
that the furniture was larger seemed the least likely. He tried to access the
first room so that he could compare the scale, but the door had locked behind
him. He did not want to stay here, either, so he proceeded to the next door.
Again, he turned just before leaving, and noticed that smoke was rising from
the chimney in the painting of the little house in the woods. He didn’t think
it had been there before, but he might not have noticed it.

    
The
third room was larger still, although the relative proportion and placement of
every article in it were exactly the same. This time, Raszer allowed himself to
gather his thoughts for a minute, sitting on the love seat. The pause did him
no good. His bearings were off; he felt vulnerable. He reasoned that the interrogation
had taken a lot out of him, and now they were fucking further with his head. If
his senses were to be believed, he had lost about six inches of height in two
minutes. He knew now, of course, that the scale of the rooms and furnishings
must be gradually increasing—that it was some kind of optical riddle—but this
was not at all what he
felt
.

    
What he
felt was that he was shrinking. Once again, the door locked behind him. He
glanced at the painting. The front door of the cottage had now opened, and a
blond child was coming out. She seemed to be upset. He thought immediately of
Brigit.

    
The
fourth, fifth, and sixth rooms continued his diminution, but in increments so
finely calibrated that his mind couldn’t get a fix on the change in scale.
Someone with a mastery of geometry—and the science of human perception—had
mapped this out.

    
In
physical stature, he was now about ten years old.

    
On
entering room number four, having learned his lesson about the self-locking
doors, he determined to remain at the threshold with the doorknob in hand,
looking both ahead and behind, until he’d figured out the ratio. But he found
that he was unable to see the space ahead without stepping fully into it—and
that the door shut smartly the moment he stepped away from it.