Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (81 page)

    
By room
six, the expression on the face of the girl in the painting had become one of
distinct panic, and the open door of the cottage revealed an adult figure, flat
on a cot at the far end of the room, his arm dangling listlessly over the side,
as if he were either drunk or dying.

    
Raszer
denied the implications at first, but now they were unavoidable: The girl was
coming more and more to resemble his daughter, and the enfeebled figure on the
bed to resemble him.

    
He knew
that a good optical illusion could be so deeply disorienting that you lost
track of ordinary things, yet he was surprised to find that by the time his
physical sense of himself had shrunk to about forty-two inches and the
high-backed chairs towered over him like skyscrapers, he’d forgotten how many
rooms he’d been through.

    
He
didn’t think it could be more than a dozen, but why, then, was he so many
worlds away?

    
How had
they done it? A couple of ideas had taken root in Raszer’s mind, both based on
the effect the experience was having on him. The first was that he was being
taught to mistrust his perception. The second was that he was being diminished
so that his ego would not present an obstacle to whatever sort of dark
enlightenment they had in mind. Both seemed to be ways of preparing him for his
destination. Weirdly enough, his altered perception and its inside-out quality
lent him a kind a balance. That is, until he saw what was happening in the
painting.

    
It was
no longer a naturalistic landscape of quaint cottage and leafy trees, but a
hyperrealistic depiction of death in the forest. The girl had moved into the
extreme foreground and stood with her hands clapped over her open mouth, eyes
wide in terror. A third of her form had passed outside the picture frame. The
dying man in the cottage, jaundiced, horribly gaunt, and seemingly much older,
was clearly meant to be him. The man had lifted his arm with what must have
been a last reserve of strength, and appeared to be summoning. His cracked lips
were parted as if calling.

    
Raszer
stepped closer.

    
Did you say something
? was what he
thought. He stepped closer.
Come again
?
He was in close and could now see—almost feel—the paper-thin skin stretched
over the cheekbones, the sharp ridge of the avian nose, a strange glassiness in
the right eye.

    
And
then, suddenly, he found himself looking out from the skull of the man in the
painting.

    
What he
saw was a simple plank floor, swept clean, and a room in which he could make
out only the chair beside the bed (where the child had probably kept her
vigil), a wood-burning stove, and an easel on which the girl had painted the
cottage in watercolors. Everything else was flared out by the light that
spilled through the open door. The light was like gold mist. Raszer felt that
if he could get to it, he might be young again. He would not be feeble.

    
But it
was hard to tell how far away the door was. There was something wrong with his
depth perception. One at a time, and with difficulty, he lowered his eyelids.
With the right lid closed, he could see as he had before. With the left lid
closed, he could see nothing. He opened his good eye and crawled from the cot
onto the floor, remaining on all fours until he reached the door, which was, in
fact, quite a long way away. When he arrived, he took hold of the knob and
pulled himself up.

    
He had
returned to his present self and stood in a room the size of the very first
room, but empty of furniture and painted the same pale green as the doors. A
fissure bisected the floor on a diagonal from corner to corner, and in the
fissure ran a clear spring from which vapors rose. On the wall, where the
painting had hung, there was now a large mirror with a gold frame, and inside
the mirror, a peacock sat on a golden stool, preening its glowing feathers. It
was both more real than a hologram and less real than a photograph. No matter
which direction Raszer moved, he could not eclipse the bird. It had not seemed
to notice his arrival, so he decided to speak to it.

    
“Hello,”
he said.

    
“Hel-lo,”
the bird said back. The voice struck Raszer immediately. It had the usual avian
graininess, but behind that, something else: the quality of a marionette’s
voice, thrown by the puppeteer. Hadn’t he’d heard this in the kitchen of the
Kingdom Hall in Azusa, in the voice of Elder Amos Leach? A neither/nor quality.

    
“Do I
hear an echo?” asked Raszer.

    
“In a
manner of speaking,” said the bird.

    
“Who’s
the fairest of them all?”

    
The bird
said nothing. Clearly, it felt it was.

    
“You’ve
mindfucked me and shrunk me, and shown me my own death. Now do I get the girl?”

    
“You
have one more task to perform.”

    
“What’s
that?”

    
“First,
a question: Who is Philby Greenstreet?”

    
“Can’t
tell you what I know. Only what I think.”

    
“That
will do.”

    
“Philby
Greenstreet is the Preserver. Like Shiva. You’re the Destroyer, right?”

    
“What is
it he seeks to preserve?”

    
“For
lack of a better term, civil society. Pluralism.”

    
“And
this is your ideal? A ‘civil’ society?”

    
“Not
ideal, maybe, but the base condition for anything better to happen.”

    
“What
is
ideal?”

    
Raszer
hesitated. He knew he was being engaged in a dialectical exchange, preplotted
by his avian interlocutor.

    
“I can’t
believe I’m having this conversation with a bird.”

    
“You are
having this conversation with Melek Ta’us. What is ideal?”

    
“The
peace which passeth understanding,” Raszer answered warily.

    
“And
where is this peace to be found?”

    
He saw
where the interrogatory was leading. The correct answer was “death.”

    
“Nowhere,”
he replied.

    
“Nowhere?”
the bird repeated, cocking its plumed head.

    
“Na-Koja-Abad.
Nowhere-Land.”

    
“And how
does one reach this wondrous place which is no place?”

    
“I won’t
presume to teach hermeneutics to one such as yourself, Lucifer.”

    
“I was
once an angel, yes. Now merely a god. But there is always more to learn.”

    
“Well
said. Have I told you how beautiful you are?”

    
“You
have no idea,” said the bird, opening its glorious fan. “Get to the point.”

    
“Look
closer.”

    
“What?”
asked the bird, unused to being directed.

    
“Na-Koja-Abad
is the pearl in the oyster. A world enfolded, as the physicists say, in an
extradimensional matrix. The seeker must use
ta’wil
to see past
zahir
to
batin
, the inner reality of
things. If he’s successful, he enters through the door of imagination to
alam al-mithal
, the intermediate realm
of subtle matter—things that haven’t yet become. He can do this only in the
subtle body, the
jism mithali
. In
this, he achieves
dhawq
, perception
of the sublime. Finally, if he hasn’t been frightened away by what he sees, he
achieves
ilm
, the gnosis that the
world is the imperfect embodiment of the pearl, of perfect forms conceived in
the mind of God. And there lies the peace I spoke of.”

    
“How
Platonic,” said the bird, puffing its feathers. “But how does a man return to
the ugliness and pointlessness of the world after seeing such sublime things?”

    
“In
truth, he never left it. He has arrived at the Mountain of Qaf, where the point
of departure and return are one and the same. The world, however, has become
new to him, and he will never see it again with the same eyes. The beauty
coexists with the world, however flawed its external manifestation.”

    
“Just
so. The world is a mere representation. A facsimile! What is lost if it ends?”

    
“Nothing
will be
lost
,” said Raszer. “But we
will have failed. And if a man can’t see the form of heaven on Earth, there’s
no reason to think he’ll recognize it later.”

    
“You are
clever, but you are wrong,” the bird said, “and living in vapors. We, too, have
created a place that many see as heaven, but this does not make it so. You are
no less fooled. There is no heaven on Earth, and no God in the lotus. Worldly
existence has no purpose other than the acquisition of advantage. You have,
however, seen the shadow of the real, which is that Qiyama is here for those
who can dispel illusion. We are not many. We draw from a great well of power at
the base of the world mountain, which connects in turn to all the wells of all
the mountains of all the worlds. Let the human cattle play their games. We are
the GamesMasters. We will enter heaven.”

    
“Then
pull some strings for me,” said Raszer. “I want the girl.”

    
“Why
save what is already lost? Why settle for a trinket . . . ”

    
Raszer
said nothing, but watched as the peacock’s image flickered--

    
“ . . .
When you can have emeralds?”

    
--and
was replaced by the magisterial figure of the Old Man, robed in vibrant green,
at first materializing in the illusory space inside the mirror, then finally
taking his place as a mere reflection, seen over Raszer’s left shoulder.

    
“Do not
turn around,” said a voice richer than the bird’s but of the same unsettling
ambiguity. “Regard me only in the mirror, or you will die.”

    
“Whatever
you say,” Raszer agreed.

    
The Old
Man stepped closer. An inch or two shy of Raszer’s height, his head was
entirely covered except for the eyeholes, and his body was draped in so many
layers of silk that it was impossible to determine what sort of frame was
underneath.

    
“You may
take the girl, but only after you have pledged fidelity to me.”

    
“I’m
already pledged to another.”

    
“Do you
not know that I can see through your disguise, priest?”

    
“You can
never be entirely sure, though, can you? That’s the beauty of disguise. All it
asks is a grain of doubt. And besides, the purpose of disguise isn’t only to
fool others. It’s to allow the wearer to be someone else.”

    
“What
will you give me, then?”

    
“I’ll
give you the black stone. I’ll walk out with the girl; she’ll be handed over to
a Kurdish unit outside the gates and held at a location close by until it’s in
your possession. I doubt Mam Rahim will break the rules, because he knows your
mercenaries will play polo with his head and most likely slaughter his family
if he does.”

    
“And how
can you be sure that we won’t . . . ‘break the rules’?”

    
There
was a lengthy pause.

    
Raszer’s
sensors began to tick. In the air surrounding them was a distinct electricity.
“Come closer,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why I trust you.”

    
He heard
the slippered foot move across the stone floor and felt the toe against his
heel. He heard the soft shifting of fabric and felt the arms encircle his hips.
The hands fluttered to rest, one atop the other, over his groin. He froze.

    
“Leave
the world,” the robed figure breathed, “and be immortal with us.”

    
From the
breath carrying the words came the scent of methyl salicylate. Oil of
wintergreen. He glanced down at the slender hands caressing him, and saw that
on one of them, a digit was missing where a ring finger should have been.

    
“Layla?”
he said. In a heartbeat, the figure folded into thin air like a time-lapse
sequence in reverse and returned to the mirror. The red walls lifted like
painted flats, and Raszer found himself in an expansive court, watching three
black figures—the puppet masters of his new fate—approach him from a colonnade
on the far end. In light of what he’d seen, he ought to have been awed by their
mastery of the game.