The 37th mandala : a novel (26 page)

"She's going into shock," the old man said. He turned around to look at the others. "Watch her! I'll be right back."

Dr. Grand rushed off to his trailer, leaving Derek to hold May's hand. Her fingers suddenly clenched, crushing the bones of his hand together; her whole body arched and she began to writhe about, clutching at him with her other hand as if she were drowning and he might bear her up.

"May!" he cried. "May, don't!"

Her eyes were rolling up so hard they pulled her poor swollen lids open. Her tongue crawled in her gaping mouth. She continued to choke and rasp; he grabbed her around the chest and shook her, as if he could dislodge whatever it was. At that moment, May's mother tore him away. He stood back almost gratefully; she would know what to do, she would save her daughter. May's mother got to her knees besides the chaise longue and put her hand on May's blistered brow and took one of her hands and began, very softly, to pray.

Dr. Grand trotted back with his leather valise. He had already taken out a syringe and a small glass vial. He threw the case onto a patio table, working the hypodermic needle into the vial. As he drew back on the plunger, filling the syringe, he walked up behind May's mother and said, "Give me room."

May's mother didn't move; she seemed not to hear him.

"Out of the way, Beryl. Did you hear me?"

May's mother saw the needle. It seemed to snap her from her calm. "What are you doing?"

"This is epinephrine."

"Absolutely not."

Dr. Grand began to bellow. "She's having an allergic reaction—"

"Yes, she's allergic to bee stings."

"She's been stung before? Goddamn it, move out of the way—she needs this now!"

"Leave us be! She needs prayer, not your blasphemies!"

"Prayer? I'll show you—" He made a grab at May's mother, but several other men converged on the doctor and pulled him away: "Now, Grand, you can't go forcing your beliefs on her!"

"I'm not treating the mother! This girl will die without treatment. Can't you see she's suffocating?"

Derek had been distracted by the commotion. Now he looked back at May, who lay writhing and struggling with her head thrown back, her face darkening, and her mother bent above as if to shield her from the sun. Her mother's lips were moving very quietly, and there was great concern in her face, but also great calm and certainty. She looked up at Derek suddenly, saw his terror, and took a moment to give him an encouraging smile.

"May needs you to pray for her too, Derek. Come now, won't you?" She put out her hand to drag him down to his knees.

May's face was turning purple. He couldn't believe her own mother could look on calmly at such a time. He watched in disbelief as Dr. Grand was wrestled away from the chaise longue. He looked down on May with the dirt smeared on her swollen lips, her eyes bulging, her fingers digging into her mother's arms. May, dear May.

"God will heal you, dear," the woman was saying, stroking May's hair so mechanically that Derek felt certain her mind had snapped.

This realization freed him somehow; he broke from his own paralysis and ran toward Dr. Grand, whose hand was still outstretched, trying to keep the syringe out of reach of those who restrained him. Derek snatched the syringe and turned back toward May, determined that nothing would stop him, not even her mother.

"There's no place for fear," she was saying urgently in May's ear as he rushed up beside her. May's lips were blue, hideous blue. Bubbles burst from her mouth in a bloody froth. She was sagging. "There, there." Softening. "God will make you well." Sinking back onto the cushion in her mother's arms, as Derek's arm fell to his side and he heard the syringe drop, the needle snap. "Our Father who art in Heaven ..." May needed prayers now, yes. Prayers to send her on her way.

"No," he said, frozen there. He could not bear to look at her. His eyes went to the gray monstrosity that rose above the trailer park, rearing up incomplete and never to be finished, its shadow somehow to blame for all this—as much as anything. As much as bees or Christian Science or hypnosis or Derek himself. That shadow where he had gone so furtively, to do what he would never have dared in open light, seducing May to her death, ensuring he would never know if she had loved him or not.

"The ambulance is coming," someone said.

"No hospitals," May's mother said with ruthless consistency. "We don't need hospitals."

But the ambulance wouldn't reach them in time anyway. It was miles off, caught in traffic on the two-lane highway, unable to advance; and so May's only other possible source of rescue had also been thwarted by the unfinished freeway.

"No," he said again, louder now, because he could not let his eyes fall. He could not see her again; he had chased that sight from his memory and all this was a terrible lapse, he could not believe he had indulged it so thoroughly after consigning the events of that day to a place in his mind he had taken daily precautions to avoid for more than twenty-five years. He stared at the freeway and refused to see what lay below it, although he knew full well.

But what did Eli know?

He opened his eyes.

The old man sat staring at him, quiet and intent, gripping the arms of his wheelchair. Derek had the impression that somehow Eli had seen all of it, had relived it through him, reading his every thought, every sensation. And then he wondered if Eli might not have deliberately propelled him through the memory, playing it back like a videotape, not for Derek's benefit but for his own, to see what sort of man he was, exactly how far he could trust him....

Eli nodded. It was like waking from a dream beside your lover and knowing you had shared the dream exactly.

"All right, Derek," Eli said. "It's a beginning."

"What?" Derek felt obliged to plead ignorance, to refuse to honor Mooney's crazed currency of occult implications. It was impossible, what he'd just thought—impossible that Eli could have witnessed an event from Derek's past.

"The beginning of purification. But we must do more. We have opened the gate to healing, but you are quite vulnerable now. We must finish up the work before proceeding. Now, I want—"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Eli. Honestly."

He stood up restlessly and began to pace, determined to shake the old man's psychotic spell. It was time to leave anyway; the hour was much later than he usually stayed. He began to pack his briefcase.

"Don't run from these things, Derek." Eli sounded as if he were on the verge of pleading.

Don't run from you, you mean, Derek thought. But I can't be your sole entertainment.

"Sorry, Eli, I have to get moving. It's later than I realized. I have some other obligations tonight."

"Cancel them, Derek. This is critical. I insist. Too much is at jeopardy here—"

"Oh, come off it, old man," he said harshly, his tone surprising even to him.

Eli took it like a slap in the face. "I'm serious. I cannot reveal any more to you without being sure of your commitment to the path."

"How can you doubt it? I've sat here day after day, recording every word while you drone on and on. I should think I've more than proven my commitment by now."

Eli took the implied insult without blinking, as if eager to join in battle. "You've only proven your commitment to a book," he said caustically. "And that, only to the extent you can figure out some way to cash in on my madness, as you see it."

"Oh, Christ," Derek said.

"You don't even believe in him," said Eli, "yet his name comes easily enough to your lips. Is it that way with everything you do?"

Derek said nothing, stung to think that Eli had finally seen through him. His thoughts were in turmoil, because he realized that what was happening now might be permanent. He was turning his back on the old man; he was on the edge of abandoning his project, and it pained him not only because he had believed in the book more than in anything else he'd begun, but also because he had begun to feel friendship for Eli, which it surprised him to admit. Friendship and sympathy and, of course, pity for an old lunatic.

"Like it or not, aware or unaware, you have taken the first step on the path," Eli said portentously, as he said all things. "You cannot leave it now. Willingly or not, you must travel it to its end. I suggest you master yourself, my friend, or you will be mastered by others. In fact, I hope that you have not already been overmastered. That could even be ... Good Lord. ... I took you for an ally against evil; but what if you have always been their agent?"

"Don't be ludicrous." He said it coldly, but at the same time he was overcome with guilt. His motives were false; he could believe—truly, skeptically, rationally believe—at most one word in ten of Eli's tales. He was here entirely on a pretense. And yet he had grown fond of the old man, and this admission of mistrust hurt him deeply, though he certainly deserved it.

"I would never do anything to hurt you," he said as sincerely as he could. "You may not think highly of me, but I'm a peaceful man. I'm certainly not evil. And I think of myself as your friend."

Eli nodded, his own face full of pain now, tears starting from his eyes. "I know that. Believe me, Derek, I know you far better than you wish. I know you think that much of what I say is nonsense."

Derek tried not to squirm or blurt an immediate defense. He couldn't very well compound Eli's mistrust with lies.

"But underneath all your scorn, you do believe, and wisely fear the truth in what I say. Beneath your superficial rationality, your skin of skeptical calm, I believe you are hysterical with fear. It lends you perfectly to their errands...."

"Please, Elias!"

Eli bowed his head and growled, "So ... they brought you to me. They needed someone to take the ledgers, someone who can ... enlarge their following. I've carried their words as far as I can, fighting all the way. All I'd done for them, until I met you, was preserve the skin and the books. It would be futile for me to destroy the ledgers, after all, when they'd simply find someone weaker to corrupt, another life to ruin. I would not wish that on the world. It seems clear now. They put your books in my path and perhaps even clouded my mind, so that for a time I perceived your words as full of truth and light. I am often clouded and confused from the medications I take. They made you seem understanding, a sympathizer, an ally, when the truth may be otherwise. It's not too late to fight them, though, Derek. If you will only face these things in yourself which have delivered you into their service."

A slow sickness began to pervade Derek. God, how the old man must loathe him! Seen in such a light, the whole discourse, the story of the mandalas, might easily be taken as a hoax, a cruel fable thrown in his skeptical face.

He had never felt at such a loss. Accused, yet unable to plead his own case, which was after all founded on lies.

"I don't know what to say," he whispered.

"Tell me what you think is the truth."

"I... I would never hurt you."

"Evangeline held a knife to her own throat. Do you think that was her will at work, or theirs!"

Derek leapt from the sofa. "I think I'd better leave," he said. "If you distrust me so much."

"It's not you, for God's sake. I don't distrust you—no more than I distrusted Evangeline! But how can you resist telling my story, putting it out into the world—spreading their words, so that many more may learn to pay them the filthy respects they so desire?"

"Publishers aren't interested in that sort of thing."

"There—you see? Already you're wondering how to do it. You'll find a way to pitch it, Derek; that's your talent. People believe what you sell them; I believed you myself. That's why the mandalas wanted you. I was a fool not to see it sooner."

"There are a million other books I can write."

"You think that now. But one day you'll find yourself staring at a blank page; the words you need won't come. It will seem as if the only ideas left in the world are the ones they put in your head—the ones I've given you. You will write that story, believe me. I cannot stop you. I'll be dead soon enough myself. All I can do is limit the damage."

He sensed Derek's curiosity.

"Yes, limit it. What if I told you you'd have nothing but the memory you bring away tonight? What if I asked for the return of your tapes?"

"You can have them." Derek dug into his case and thrust a handful of the rattling cassettes at Eli. But the old man swept them aside, sent them scattering over the carpet.

"What if I said I'm burning that box tonight? I should have done it ages ago."

Derek found himself unable to speak. Something hot and choking burned in his throat, something he couldn't name.

"You see?" Eli said. "The idea frightens you, doesn't it?"

Derek spat out the words: "If it meant so much to you, I'd burn them myself."

Eli straightened in his wheelchair. "Would you really? No matter what happens to me? Can you swear it?"

"Nothing's going to happen to you."

"No? Then why do I feel like an empty vessel, now that I've told you what they wished?" He stared around the room, eyes bulging. "It was their doing all along, wasn't it?"

"Old man, you're crazy!" Derek knelt to reclaim his tapes. He would record over them, destroy all these records, leave Eli alone to his madness, anonymous and unremembered. "But you're right about one thing," he said from the floor. "I don't believe any of this. I made up all my damn books—they're garbage, cynical trash. No one with any brains believes them.
I
don't believe them. And I don't believe in your thirty-seven astral jellyfish. I think a heart attack killed your wife. We're all going to die eventually, but it won't have a thing to do with these mandalas. That's bullshit, all of it."

Eli's voice remained deep, unshaken, as if he had been expecting this. "You don't know what you're saying."

"Yes I do. I'm trying to reassure you, Eli. I want you to get in touch with reality."

Eli said nothing. Derek began to pace the length of the room, clutching his case, starting toward the door and then turning away again and again.