Old Green World (17 page)

Richard smiled. “You’re not being initiated. None of this is an initiation. This is something different. I love you, too.”

Albert looked down. “I killed parents, too. I killed parents and children.” He collapsed in on himself, spine curving around his heart, and began shaking. “I killed, too. I did, I did, I did.” He watched himself say
I did
over and over, like it was breathing. He watched himself shaking and heard the sound of his own anguish.

After a while, his shaking settled, and he looked up at Richard, or the ghost of Richard, or whatever it was. It smiled upon him kindly, warmly, but it never touched him. “I don’t want to do that, never again. I never want to kill again,” he said to it. The two of them were quiet for a very long time. Albert listened to his breath, relaxed in the wake of his grief. He tried to listen to Richard’s, but he heard nothing.

“But I will, won’t I?” Albert asked.

“Yes,” Richard said.

With that, Albert fell away. He tumbled, deeper and deeper, into himself and away from himself, and he spun, and a voice said, “It’s all right. You can let go. It’s all right to let go,” and he didn’t know if the voice was himself, or Richard, or his papa, or someone else. He collapsed and let himself go. He fell, and fell apart. Everything fell apart: his home, Richard, the light through the window. He fell, and there wasn’t anything.

+ + +

There were four of them. Four in a faraway place, in the mountains, in a series of rooms, rooms that were white and smoother than any stone he knew. They called it a “laboratory.” One called himself a monk. The monk was a teacher, who knew his mind and how to be calm, and knew the sutras. He was older than Albert, but he looked like Albert. It was confusing; Albert wasn’t sure if he was himself, or if he was the monk.

Susan was here. She could map the mind from outside, just as he—he and the monk were the same here, he decided—could map the mind from experience. Lucy was here: she was a doctor, who could mix elixirs to change the mind. And Richard was here, with his understanding of the stories of forces and particles and spaces of being: the physicist.

It was a clean place, a bubble, isolated from the chaos of the world. Here, they could remove variables. Their method was to consider themselves both observers and subjects. They had decided this was the best way to make their discoveries. Richard and Susan provided the theory, an idea of perception and its effect on physical space. He and Lucy created the conditions: elixirs to alter the preconditions of the mind, practice to sharpen and calm and expand and open the mind as it was, to make it something sharp and of use, a sword, an earth-mover, a key. They were there, the four of them, in the most intimate of conditions, for ten years. Naturally, they would grow to love one another deeply, or hate one another desperately, or both.

It began with a lot of talking, and diagrams, and conceptual models: chemical formulae and enumerations of the relevant objects, maps, proofs, protocols, classifications of data, goals, all of which, over the course of months and years, dropped away, became meaningless. In the second year, they determined they had no more use for the drugs and medicines. In the third year, they had mastered the practice and chosen to let it fall away. For years after that, it was simply the four, in the room, sitting. Taking exercise together four times a day, in perfect synchrony. Eating four small meals, their preparation and consumption and cleaning like a dance. Sleeping on cots immediately adjacent to their sitting pillows, all of them attentive to the sleep as well, engaged in the real-time study of their dreams.

They didn’t speak: they heard each other completely, first in movement and disruptions of air, in breaths and shifts of posture, then later in the spaces before those actions. They knew each other in the moment, and they knew each other in the seconds before; they could read one another’s minds in the anticipatory possibility of space before thought and action. And then, after a while, before and after and
myself
and
you
became meaningless, and they were all the same mind, the same thing. And that thing began letting itself hear more deeply, to read the microscopy and transcendence that underlay everything, and that thing began knowing all the cosmos as well, began making that cosmos intimate to it.

They began to feel cosmos as a pool they floated on, a fluid state with a pattern of waves. The waves rocked them and soothed them. The waves loved them. And, after a long time, they began to understand the waves deeply, to know the tides and the patterns, to anticipate the waves as well, to surf on them. Then there was a moment when the wave was obvious to them: where it came from, where it went, how it worked. The machinery of the universe was an engine they could tinker with, a schematic where the inputs and outputs and processes were breathtakingly simple.

And, in that moment, they asked a question: “What if we . . .”

And then replied, “Relax. Leave it alone.”

And then justified, “But we’d just . . .”

And then insisted, “Why? Why is that necessary?”

And then conceded, “Fine, whatever. Fine.”

But then asked again, “But surely if we just did this . . .”

They made a shift, the subtlest, most trivial shift. It was all there, so obvious, so simple. Surely, it was meant to be changed like this. Just to see.

They saw it approaching and then happening, a white burning and an uncontrollable shaking, through them, through everything. The wave crashed across them and through them, over and over again, a cyclone, until there was nothing but the crashing, beyond duration or direction. They screamed. It was broken. It was all broken.

+ + +

Albert felt something, heat and coolness. No sounds, no light or things to see, no sense of where he was, or what kind of space surrounded him. Just heat, coolness. Like the feeling of the pillow as you sleep; there is warmth, and then you flip to the other side, and it is cool. Not painful or uncomfortable. Just temperature.

After a while, he started to see color. If pressed, he couldn’t really guarantee that it was sight as he knew it. There was nothing here to make out, no point of reference, only darkness. But there was a color in the darkness, vague, maybe red, maybe green or brown. The darkness itself had a color, some colors. He didn’t know whether this was external to him, or just changes he saw on the insides of his eyelids.

Then, somehow, the color organized itself, demarcated itself into multiple colors, hot and cool colors, as if the color had reached an accord with the temperature. There was a golden color that felt bright and crisp and fresh, and a hot iridescent green, and each of them had a pull.
Adept energies and Dragon energies
, he thought. He had the ability to make a choice.

He stayed still, giving in to neither of them. He observed them, felt their color and temperature. He could feel what was behind them, the Adepts’ energy organizing into a structured world-mind, the Dragon’s energy enslaving scared and disorganized minds into a swarming, undulating mass. It was possible to stand outside the Dragon and look at it. One could dance with it, dodge it when it rushed forward, point it in directions, surf on it, and use its energy as one’s own. It wasn’t a bad thing, really.

He kept his place and watched for a while longer. It wasn’t really possible to say how long. Finally, he could understand where he was, where he sat relative to the color and temperature.

He was in the forest, the deepest forest of all, with every tree spidering out of the ground, and into the other trees. When he looked above, there was no sun, only dim light through the canopy. There were pine needles on the floor where he sat. There were no birdsongs, but he could feel the humming of life around him. He thought:
The forest is what we try to control, but it is bigger than any of us.

He could see the pattern of every tree inside the leaves, and he knew that the pattern of the forest was the same as the pattern of the tree. He was in it so deeply that he didn’t know where he was, or how to get out. He was inside a thicket, and it felt like shelter.

And then the shadow came over him. He couldn’t see the shadow, but he could feel that the shadow was warm, and wanted Albert, and Albert wanted it back. And when he buried his face into the shadow, feeling its pulse and skin and warmth, he was the shadow, too, and they were the forest, too.

He couldn’t say how long they were there, he and the forest, holding and being held, warm, timeless, and endless. After a while, he started to feel colder and wetter. Water seeped up against his body and started to cover him.

He found himself washed on a rocky shore. It was cold, so cold, and the rock and sand scraped against him. He was being covered in it, and in the surf, and he cried to himself,
no, please, you’re washing him off, you’re washing him off and I’ll forget him, I’ll never have him back
. Then he collapsed into unconsciousness.

+ + +

He woke in a warm bed covered in blankets. He could hear the surf. He could feel a little breeze through an open window and sunlight through it as well. Morning.

He looked around. It was a small cabin, one room. Two cats purred around a butcher block. Sister Clare was at the butcher block, taking apart a chicken. He reached out to her with his mind.
Where are we?

Clare’s face pinched in pain. “Stop connecting like that. You’ve been doing that all while you slept. Stop it, stop,” she said. “I can hear you, but you aren’t a part of us. What are you? What the hell happened to you?” She said the last words loudly, nervously, clearly upset.

He stopped and stayed silent.

After a moment she said, “This is the Green Island, Albert. This is where we come once the initiation is over. You went through the initiation, correct?”

He wasn’t sure he had, but he nodded nonetheless.

“What happened? How do you feel right now?” she asked.

“I’m not . . . Albert anymore, am I? Not in the way that I was. I let go of him.”

“That’s what happens in initiations, normal ones. I suppose it happened to you.”

“I don’t think I realized that would happen. I . . . I miss him.”

“Yes,” Clare said. For a moment, she let go of her fear and confusion about what he had become, and focused on comforting him. They just looked at each other for a moment.

“Would you do anything different, now that you know what happens?” she asked.

He stared at her, helplessly.

She stared down at the chicken, working a leg from the body with her knife. “I guess now we’re both enlightened.”

When Clare was very young, she lived with her grandmother. Her parents were dead; no one would ever tell her how, or why. Clare’s grandmother was the oldest person in all of the Green Island, save the Old People themselves. Grandmother remembered the time before, and what happened when the Old People came, and she told those stories to Clare.

“We lived in caves and huts in the forest,” Grandmother said. “We always fought with the other tribes. Sometimes we would ally with a tribe to fight another tribe, then we would fight the tribe that had been our ally. I could never tell our allies from those we hated. I just attacked anyone I didn’t know. We would usually figure it out before I killed them.

“If there was a problem in the tribe, we had to work it out or we would be tainted,” Grandmother said. “The people with the problem would go out in the woods and fight each other, or fuck each other. Either way, it was settled in body and blood.

“Some nights, we would all gather around the fire to roast the boar, and sing, and pass around the drink,” Grandmother said. “We drank until we were blind, and then we would all go out in the woods and work out our problems. Those nights it was more fucking than fighting. You would grab the person next to you, after you were finished with the drink and the boar, and have a go. Those were the happy nights.”

Clare’s grandmother had three brothers and two sisters. The brothers had died, and the sisters had both become Adepts, some of the first Adepts. Clare’s grandmother had stopped talking to them a long time ago.

“We’re all enslaved to the little people, but they are worse, because they volunteered. They wanted to be slaves. They pretend like it was always happy. Everyone pretends like it was all kind and happy. The thin one and the bald one pretended, too. They would show us all their teeth, and sing their light songs to us. But then, when someone from the tribe would fight them, the littlest one would take them into the woods and turn them inside out. She settled it in blood.”

Clare listened to her grandmother. The little people were monsters, and her aunts were fools. Then her grandmother died, and she went to live with her aunts, and eventually she became an Adept. She chose to stop believing the stories her grandmother told. She never forgot them, though.

+ + +

Niall would be there within a month, he said. She and Albert were to wait.

She decided to ignore the fact that Albert terrified her. She decided to organize things. He wanted to stay in bed, even after waking, with his back to her and to everything. She got him out of bed, sent him out to chop firewood and harvest vegetables. She remembered he could make bread, and put him to that.

“Does everyone wash up on the shore like that, when they become an Adept?” he asked her. They were making lunch. He was looking out the open window at the cliffs.

“Yes. It’s where the Old People first arrived. There’s always an Adept here, to meet initiates.”

“The Old People didn’t build the columns, though,” Albert said. “They are very old. It was just the rock and the water, working together. Molten rock came from the sea and turned into the columns.”

“Yes, that’s right. The patterns of nature can be complex, Albert,” she said, then noticed her tone. “You know all that already.”

Albert nodded and smiled. “It’s all right. I like it when you act like you’re still my teacher.”

There was something on the edges of Albert. She was trying to let herself understand. “The forest has a life and a pattern that we can’t comprehend. It’s too much impulse and color and sound. It’s too much. You sound like that to me now. That’s why I can’t hear you properly, and why it’s . . . upsetting. You’re like the forest.”