The Magic Circle (38 page)

“Oh, Miz Behn, I’m sorry,” said George, weighing and stamping things for the other customers. “I got to tell you this was all my fault, but I tried to make it up. Jest wait here fer a minute, and I’ll get it right quick.”

He tapped a bell on the counter as I got that horrid sinking feeling again. What had gone wrong? What did I need to be made up for by George? What was he going to get for me “right quick”? I was horribly afraid I knew, but I filled out my form anyway and handed it to him.

The assistant clerk, Stuart, came out from the back and started taking slips from those who’d come to collect parcels. George disappeared in the back and returned with a package. It didn’t look much like the one I’d received last week—but it
was
in a large, battered, padded mailing pouch such as Sam had described, about the size of two reams of paper.

“I gave you the wrong parcel last week,” said George. “
This
was the one what matched your yellow claim slip, but I didn’t check. That other one come in the very day you was here; we hadn’t filled out a slip to you about it yet. This Saturday, we was going through packages down here, to send unclaimed ones back to the sender—and lucky I was here jest then, and I seen my mistake. I sure am sorry about that, Miz Behn.”

He handed me the parcel, and I gritted my teeth before looking at it. I knew I had only ten minutes to get to the airport for my flight to Europe with Wolfgang Hauser. I forced myself to look at the package. The postmark was San Francisco, just as on the original yellow claim slip I’d found in the snow. And this time there could be no mistake: the handwriting scrawled across the mailing pouch was Sam’s.

THE GIFT

The danger [to giver and receiver is] nowhere better sensed than in the very ancient Germanic law and languages. This explains the double meaning of the word
gift
in all these languages: on the one hand a gift, on the other poison
.…

This theme of the fatal gift, the present or item of property that is changed into poison, is fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhein gold is fatal to the one who conquers it, Hagen’s cup is mortal to the hero who drinks from it. A thousand stories and romances of this kind, both Germanic and Celtic, still haunt our sensibilities
.

—Marcel Mauss,
The Gift

[When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, in retaliation] Zeus told the fabled craftsman Hephaestus to create a gift: to combine dirt and water and form a beautiful maiden just like the immortal goddesses … then Zeus instructed Hermes to fill her full of shameless trickery and deceit.… Hermes named this female “Pandora”: she who gives all gifts
.

Epimetheus had forgotten that his brother Prometheus had warned him never to accept a gift sent by Olympian Zeus, to return it in case it should prove an evil to mankind. But Epimetheus took the gift. Only later, when the evil was his own, did he comprehend
.

—Hesiod,
Works and Days

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
. (I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts.)

—Virgil,
The Aeneid

I fled the post office, jumped in my car, and headed at breakneck pace for the airport. I screeched into the parking lot, jumped out, grabbed my stuff, and tore across the icy drive. Inside, I frantically scanned the two gate areas. Down at the end near Gate-B security I saw Wolfgang, waving his arms in heated debate with a guy from the ground crew.

“Thank God,” Wolfgang said with relief the moment he saw me, but I could tell he was angry. To the crewman he said quickly, “Are we too late?”

“One sec,” the man said, picking up the phone to call the cockpit as, behind his back, Wolfgang glared at me. The man listened, then nodded. “The steps are still there—but you better hop to it, buddy. We got a schedule.”

He ran our bags through the scanner and pulled our ticket stubs. We dashed across the tarmac and up the metal steps. The instant our seatbelts had clicked into place, the plane was moving.

“I hope you have a good explanation for this,” Wolfgang said as we taxied toward the runway. “You knew there wasn’t another flight to Salt Lake for three hours. For the past half-hour I’ve talked and talked to convince them to hold the plane; we might have missed all our connections! What did you think you were doing?”

My heart, still pounding from that run, was hammering in my ears; my breath came in short hard bursts; I could barely speak.

“I—um—I had to run an important errand en route.”

“An errand?” Wolfgang said in disbelief.

He was about to add more, but just then the propjets started revving for takeoff. His lips were still moving, so I gestured that I could no longer hear him. He turned away in anger and pulled some papers from his briefcase, leafing through them as our plane raced down the runway and gained altitude. We didn’t speak again during the smooth but deafening forty-minute flight to Salt Lake. That was okay with me. I had plenty of thinking to do.

There was no question the parcel inside my canvas shoulder bag now stuffed under my flight seat was the gift my grandmother Pandora had bequeathed Uncle Earnest, which then passed from him to Sam—a gift so dangerous the body count included not only a few of Sam’s colleagues but maybe Pandora and Earnest as well—a gift so destructive that, given a difference of only seconds, it could have killed Sam too. Now the gift was mine.

Since I no longer trusted friends, colleagues, and most members of my own family to be anywhere near this poisonous parcel, I’d been understandably reluctant, under the eyes of a dozen postal patrons, to leave it with George behind the post office counter. Unable to locate a cache in the scant time left between post office and airport, now I was stuck with the problem of what to do with my lethal inheritance before getting to Soviet Russia, where I knew it would be thoroughly examined and probably confiscated, posing greater danger to all concerned. Especially to me.

With that in mind, my first idea had been to destroy it. I’d thought of various methods if I had to dispatch it quickly: death by water, death by fire. But by the time we reached Salt Lake, my options seemed greatly diminished. It was far from practical to flush a thousand pages down a toilet, or to ignite a ten-pound bonfire at any of the airports I’d be passing through in the next twenty-four hours. Nor was destroying it any guarantee I’d breathe more freely, since I hadn’t a clue who wanted these manuscripts or why. How could I announce that the object of everyone’s desire was no longer on the scene? And if I did, it might prove deadly to Sam, the only one who knew where the original, ancient documents were hidden.

The solution seemed to be to hide the parcel as I’d done with the first one, where no one would think to search for it.

I knew that the lockers at the Salt Lake airport, unlike those where characters in movies stash their loot, worked more like a parking meter, renting for just a few hours at a stretch. Even if I had time to break the package up into smaller parcels and post it back to myself, it seemed as risky a proposition as just leaving it at the post office, what with Olivier, the Pod, and God knew who all else sniffing about the place. I was fast running out of ideas.

At the Salt Lake airport, I apologized again to the still-disgruntled Wolfgang for my tardiness. Once we’d checked the larger bags through to Vienna, I made a trip to the lavatory and opened Sam’s parcel: strange squiggles in foreign characters, but recognizably in Sam’s hand. I stuffed it among the working papers inside my satchel, slung the heavy duffel over my shoulder, and tried to clear my mind until our flight. Before I left the lounge, I used the phone to call a Fax 800 number and sent a brief message to Sam:
Got your gift. It is more blessed to give than to receive
. A message from the Salt Lake airport would clue Sam in that my trip with Wolfgang was under way. I added the tip that any messages faxed in my absence would be forwarded.

Wolfgang was waiting for me at the entrance to the cafeteria, as we’d agreed. He was holding two steaming paper mugs. He said, “I got us some tea to drink at the gate. It’s too crowded to wait here.”

Over his shoulder I saw rows of tables already packed, so bright and early, with teams of Mormon “elders”—scrubbed, rosy-cheeked young men who sipped ice water while they waited for their flights—in crisp white shirts, dark suits, and ties, their uniform backpacks crammed with proselytizing materials. Day after day, year in and year out, such young elders were scattered across the globe like dandelion fluff, on missions to spread the good word cranked out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints straight from its heart here in Salt Lake City.

“They don’t convert many Austrians to their faith,” Wolfgang said of them as we headed down the hallway to our gate. “In so Roman Catholic a country, conversion to new faiths is rare. But in this airport there are always so many of them coming and going, these young men. To me they seem quite foreign and strange.”

“Not so strange, just different,” I told him, taking the lid off my tea and trying to sip it: it was scalding. “For instance, you’ve met my landlord Olivier. He’s a Mormon. But he’s more what they’d call a ‘Jack’ Mormon: that is, he doesn’t follow all the rules. He sometimes drinks coffee or alcohol, though they’re prohibited. And while he isn’t exactly a womanizer, he says he hasn’t remained a virgin either—”

“A virgin?” said Wolfgang askance. “Is that customary?”

“I assure you, I’m not an expert,” I said, laughing. “But according to Olivier it’s more or less on a volunteer basis—keeping yourself pure in body and soul, I mean. It seems that’s how they’re preparing themselves for salvation, at the millennium.”

“The millennium?” said Wolfgang. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s sort of the drill,” I told him. “Catholics have a catechism, right? Well, as I understand it, this is theirs: Today marks the beginning of the end, time is grinding to a halt. These are the Last Days, when the world as we know it is about to cease. Only those who’ve been purified and confessed their faith that ‘Jesus the Christ,’ as they say, is the Light and the Way will be saved when he returns to earth to judge and punish, and to bring forth the New Age. They’re preparing themselves with baptism, cleansing, and purging in these, the last days, so that each one will be resurrected into a new, ethereal body and given eternal life. Hence the name
Latter-day
Saints.”

“The Last Days is a widespread, ancient idea,” Wolfgang agreed. “Throughout history, it’s been the core belief of nearly all peoples on earth, eschatology, from
eschatos
—the farthest, the uttermost, the extreme. In Catholicism the doctrine is
Parousia:
the ‘presence’ or second coming, when the saviour reappears and makes the final judgment.” Then he added unexpectedly, “Do you believe in it?”

“You mean believe in the Apocalypse—‘I come quickly’ and all?” I said, always uncomfortable flirting with faith. Wasn’t reality tough enough? “That promise was made two thousand years ago and a few folks I know are still holding their breath. I’m afraid it takes something a bit more tangible to get me hooked.”

“Then in what do you believe?” Wolfgang asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I grew up around the Nez Percé Indians. Their wisdom is the nearest to a religious education I’ve had. I guess I believe what they do, when it comes to an idea of a new age.”

I elaborated as we continued down the hall. “Like most tribes, the Nez Percé believe that Native Americans are the people chosen to bring the transition about. Late in the last century there was a prophet named Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute. During an illness, he had a vision that revealed to him what would happen at the end of time—which for the Paiute would mark the dawn of this new aeon. Wovoka was shown an inspired and visionary dance that enabled the people to cross the boundary between themselves and the spirit world. The people would hold hands and dance in a circle for five days, nonstop, each year. He called it
Wanagi Wacipi
, the Ghost Dance.

“The dancers invoke the son of the Great Spirit; he’ll arrive as a whirlwind and all
Wasichu
—you fork-tongued sons of Europeans, who trash everything you touch—will be totally blown away. The ancestral spirits will return to earth, along with all the bison that were slaughtered by white men. Mother Earth becomes bountiful once more and we live in harmony with nature, as it was seen in all the ancient visions.”

“It’s very beautiful,” said Wolfgang. “And this is what you yourself actually believe, this harmonic image of paradise regained?”

“I think it’s time for
somebody
to start believing in it,” I assured him. “Here on the third planet we’ve really fouled our own nest. That’s why I do the job I’ve chosen. Waste management is sort of my own purification ritual: helping clean things up.”

Sam had once observed that no civilization in history, however powerful, had survived for long without decent plumbing. Rome kept control of half the world through its aqueducts, water and waste systems. When Gandhi wanted to liberate India from the British, the first thing he did was to make everybody get down on hands and knees and scrub the toilets. When I said as much to Wolfgang, he laughed.

We’d reached the gate. He set down his briefcase inside the waiting area, and he touched his paper cup of tea against mine as if we were having a champagne toast. “Saving the world by controlling its waste
is
very much in keeping with the mission of my employer, the IAEA,” he said with a smile. “But at root, men are still everywhere the same. I fail to see how purifying oneself as the Mormons choose to, or cleaning up after others as Mohandas Gandhi did—or dancing on the grassy plains, as your American Indians recommend—will change human behavior very much or bring about global reform.”