The Light is the Darkness (2 page)

After supper he broiled in the sauna and then off to his suite to brood over a collection of cryptic papers assembled from the dusty shelves and trunks of antiquarian bibliophiles from Alaska to Katmandu, or set up the antique projector and meditate upon the kaleidoscopic horror show spun from a film reel he’d found among his long lost sister’s effects, all the while repeating one of several mnemonic triggers that would alter his brainwaves and open a door to elsewhere, wherever that might be. From the glimpses of bloody bones and colloidal darkness, he wondered if it might not be Hell itself.

He doggedly awaited some sign of apprehended knowledge, a stirring of the atavistic consciousness. Occasionally, shadows and mist coalesced into nightmares of massive tendrils uncoiling from a vast and dreamless void, and visions of antlers and fiery destruction, but none of it made sense except that now, if he concentrated to the point of a violent migraine, he could cause a spoon to vibrate in a bowl by will alone and possibly once he had slightly levitated a few inches above the blanket while in lotus, but he had been drunk, so very drunk.

Such was the daily ritual.

The morning the neurologist landed for a series of scheduled tests, Conrad was on the lounge terrace, sipping the blackest of black coffee and smoking cigarettes. A radical chief of staff at a mainland university paid exorbitant fees for the privilege of monitoring Conrad’s unusual brainwaves.

Rains had begun the previous evening. Lightning stabbed at the horizon. A small man in an overcoat exited the plane and one of the attendants held an umbrella for him as they hurriedly made for the hotel. This was Dr. Enn, one of several persons Conrad had contacted to conduct periodic tests of his neurological activity. Soon came a number of trunks and cases, dutifully unloaded by hotel employees and wheeled up the dock on hand trucks.

Two more visitors, heavies in suits and glasses, trailed. The short, thick fellow with the bad 1970s haircut was Agent Marsh. The suave, dark gentleman who looked like he’d strolled off the cover of GQ was Agent Singh. Both worked for American intelligence—the National Security Agency. Conrad suspected he would have to kill them sooner or later. For now it meant he would have to relinquish the papers and film he’d retrieved in Brazil. Simply no time to stash everything. So be it: he’d hand over his curiosities like a good boy and maybe get the operatives to do some digging on his behalf in the bargain.

He finished his cigarette. The island and its routines were the nest. Now he’d crawl back into the egg.

II

He lay suspended beneath miles and miles of blue-black ice and dreamed.

This ice was the oldest kind that had come down from the great outer darkness and closed around the world eons past. Trapped in its glacial folds was a cornucopia of geological oddities: Cryptozoic bacteria writ large, fossilized palm fronds of ages when blood-warm oceans and perpetual fog wrapped hemisphere to hemisphere; insects, animals, men, and things that resembled men, but were not, and vast globular superstructures of primordial jelly and miles-long belts of ganglia, all caught fast in glacial webs, all preserved and on exhibit in the gelid recesses of his dreaming brain.

Conrad dreamed of waking, of thawing, which was a reliable indicator that control was shifting his way, that he had swum up from the Hadal depths to a semi-lucid state, and so he blinked away the ice and whispered the Second Word, which was
leviathan
, and was again a child in the backseat of Dad’s car. They were in Alaska, hauling ass along the Parks Highway, bound for Anchorage and the airport. A DC-10 waited to transport them to Spain and the clinic where miracles happened.

Mom and Imogene were somewhere ahead, cutting through arctic twilight in a Citroen with bald tires and a broken heater. Mom was reckless at the wheel, a damn the torpedoes, cry havoc! kind of lady and likely she was puffing a Pall Mall and lecturing hapless Imogene on the essential instability of subatomic matter. Or how the headhunters in Papua, New Guinea performed fertility rituals with the skulls of their victims.

The windows were frosted over, but when Conrad scratched a circle there was Denali rearing in the middle distance, a chunk of red-black rock wearing a frozen halo.

His head ached. It ached all the time those days; ached as if it were he and not brother Ezra being eaten alive by a melanoma the diameter of a mango. Ezra rode shotgun, the metal nub at the crown of his Seattle Mariners baseball hat chattering against the glass. Ezra was the elder; a little league all star shortstop, future hall-of-famer and devoted tormentor of younger siblings, currently under the weather and fading fast. Ezra wasn’t much for trapping groundballs or distributing Indian burns these days; he’d withered to skeletal dimensions that Conrad could tuck under one arm.

1980.

This was the year the famous Japanese mountaineer Kojima bought a one-way ticket to visit his ancestors. Kojima wasn’t dead yet either; he still had a few hours to watch his extremities freeze, to ponder whatever great men ponder as they wait for the curtain to drop. Kojima had been in the news all week. As they toiled past the shadow of his tomb, Conrad gazed at the storm clouds and tried to touch Kojima’s thoughts.

When he asked Dad his opinion, Dad grunted and said mountain climbers were responsible for polluting the wilderness with discarded oxygen bottles and food wrappers, that they were possibly the filthiest creatures alive.

Dad’s shoulders were roughly the span of a mattock handle under a plaid coat. He looked like a bison hunched at the wheel, not a lunatic physicist hell bent for leather to the airport. He was a second generation Swede. His own father got bayoneted on an atoll in the sunny South Pacific during WWII. Dad staunchly refused to drive Japanese imports. Wouldn’t touch sushi. He didn’t even glance out the window at the mountain.

Conrad realized he was not alone in the backseat. There was an old guy beside him, and he resembled Dad, but much older and dressed in weird clothes, a space suit or something, and he stared at Conrad in a way the boy would grow accustomed to over time. His eyes bled pity. There followed a psychedelic moment like Borges shaking hands with himself. And Conrad knew him because they’d met before. The old man said,
Time is a ring
, then fractured into motes of sparkling dust.

1980, 1980. For Conrad, 1980 was the magic number, albeit in the cursed, black magic sense. Ten years old and on the road to Hell.

The Navarro family shipped off to the Pyrenees and sought a miracle from Dr. Drake in his converted Thirteenth Century Abbey that locals referred to as The Cloister. Over the final months of Ezra’s decline, Mom, Dad, Imogene, and Conrad camped in the hostel of Blanco Village a few miles from the base of the mountain retreat and awaited a miracle.

That was a muddy spring and brutal summer. A summer of goats, flies and sluggish, crawling heat fended off with mosquito nets and pails of shaved ice. Sullen locals and ugly foreigners—Americans and Brits, mainly—clumped in the hostel taproom, or loitered near the well house in the village square, pecking each other like pullets in a too-small cage, squabbling over the news casts on the Armed Services Radio Network, the papers that came in the weekly mail run. It was a uniformly mournful time. The Cold War was colder than ever and an American embassy was in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Nobody in the village of Blanco seemed overjoyed about
anything
from the muddy roads that ate corduroy for breakfast, to the great louse infestation among the hens, to the low supply of drinkable whiskey in the hostel cellars. One of the Germans even complained publicly and bitterly that the farm girls weren’t as free with their charms as peasants in “more civilized” provinces. Tempers ran hot and led to several ungainly, drunken brawls in the damnable mud, although everything was usually patched up with a handshake and a few rounds of cheap booze.

Every day, the family mounted the bus, a relic from WWII, and endured the kidney-crushing trip up the switchback trail. Mom and dad usually sat near the shipping tycoon from Essex, or, if they were in the mood, exchanged pleasantries with another American couple, vociferous college professors from Madison Wisconsin. Imogene hung around with the youngest daughter of an Austrian diplomat and the pair traded earrings, braided each other’s hair and nattered incomprehensibly. Conrad remained apart, stoically regarding the sheer cliffs and smoky ravines beneath the bus wheels, his ears ringing with the girls’ false laughter.

In the beginning, the bus was overloaded with patrician families eager to make the daily pilgrimage. As days blurred into weeks and months, more empty seats appeared. New, fresh faces arrived on occasion, cowed into abject timidity by the shopworn expressions of those who remained from the spring. Come the glowering days of late August, Conrad was once more pressed to the edges of a boisterous, sweaty crowd composed of mostly strangers.

Ezra got a little worse each visit and everybody cried and sleepwalked around with red eyes and broken veins in their noses. Mom was the one who kept them together for the most part, diluted the incipient hysteria into a persistent mood of shrill grief, although she was a bag of bones and raw nerves before it was through. She’d taken to arguing with Dad. Not little arguments, either, but real bruisers and they went out into road for the worst of them, stood in the rain and shouted down the thunder.

Mom hated what Dr. Drake and his cronies were doing to Ezra. She wasn’t sure precisely
what
they were doing as no one was allowed to see behind the curtain. Drake interacted with the families via intermediaries, a duo of ancient, hook-nosed men who might’ve been twins with their identically thick Greek accents and dusty suits, their matching expressions of reptilian dispassion. The Greeks didn’t give away anything, ever. All anyone really knew about Drake’s technique was that it involved hypnotic regression via multiple mediums, and routine injections of an experimental medicine. There were side effects, of course. Pain and suffering. Nightmares and night sweats; exploding neuroses. None of it would’ve passed muster back in the States, but this was the refuge of last resort.

Mom begged Dad to call it off, to take Ezzy home and let him spend his remaining days in familiar surroundings. He missed his dog, his friends, his roomful of trophies.

Then, one day between summer and autumn, it was time to go.

Mom and Dad lovingly dressed Ezra in his Sunday best, packed his remains in a wooden box and shipped him overseas on a gigantic cargo plane flown by pock-cheeked men in parkas and goggles.

Conrad slept most of the way home across the Atlantic, drugged by growling turbines, the clink and jostle of nets and straps. There had been a funeral, although Conrad didn’t recall much, and after the dirt was shoveled on and the adults drowned themselves in alcohol and misery at the reception, nothing else was said. The coffin lid, the book of Ezra, was closed. Well, mom sailed her Supercub into a mountainside the next summer and dad went to pieces, lost his job at Drome Corp. and took a permanent vacation at Grable, the swankiest funny farm west of the Mississippi, and eventually died on the toilet, just like Elvis—
then
the incident was finished.

…The dream skipped forward…

Years later, when they’d grown and shuffled off to their respective colleges, long after Conrad was well on his way to cult fame and ruin and Imogene was a superstar graduate from the university of J.E. Hoover, and they’d reconciled themselves to Dad never getting out of the loony bin, his little sister summoned him for dinner at the Monarch Grill, a hole in the wall they haunted as teenagers. She’d materialized from the midnight blue, smiled that hard, sharp smile of hers and kissed him. Little sister was bittersweet, like gourmet European chocolate. She didn’t understand him, didn’t respect his choices, considered his shadow-career as a latter-day gladiator a colossal waste of superior genetic material. Her points were well taken—a Navarro was capable of almost anything, even Conrad whose talents ran to the brutish end of the spectrum. Daddy, a physicist cum Olympic caliber power lifter; Mom, a PhD poet and ace pilot; Ezra, the teen baseball star and internationally published essayist.

Conrad could’ve been an artist, a space shuttle pilot, a decathlon champion, except with advanced degrees in theology and quantum mechanics. Like the rest, he’d excelled at everything he’d attempted. He was stronger than Dad and smarter than Ezra, a million magnifications more artistically gifted than either of them and maybe a bit superior in that department to Imogene. Imogene was the rapier wit, the pop psychologist and crack shot with any light caliber sidearm, the deductive genius with metaphorical balls of steel.

Imogene had always been the mean one of the bunch, too. She opened up the old wounds with a casual swipe of her claws.

Kill anything interesting lately, bro?

An attack-trained orangutan.

With your bare hands, Tarzan style?

Hell no! Ka-Bar.

Wimp. Why do you pick on poor beasts, huh?

It was gonzo. Spent its whole life in a cage being pumped full of growth hormones and zapped with a cattle prod. The thing wanted to eat my liver.

Good for it!

Hey, it’s almost never animals now. I’m in the major leagues. I get to slaughter big, sweaty Turks and axe-wielding Slavs.