A Darker Place (25 page)

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

In the days that followed, the sun grew marginally warmer, the nights fractionally shorter, and the community considerably more welcoming; slowly, Ana grew to have a deeper understanding of Change and how it functioned.

It did not take her long to verify that Change was indeed built around secret teachings, that initiates worked their way into the higher levels, moving by steps upward into greater knowledge and proximity to Steven. This was represented not only by the necklaces that certain initiates wore and the position each had in the multileveled meditation hall, but it extended to living quarters as well—the room Ana had been given was in a building populated almost entirely by newcomers. The only person in the building who had lived at Change for more than a few months was a young man with a vile temper, who had been demoted by Steven after getting angry at another member and hitting him. The young man stormed around furiously for a couple of weeks before he finally left, to the unvoiced relief of all.

Steven himself lived in the central building over the meditation hall, in the northern quadrant of the upper floor. The other upstairs rooms were all filled with the oldest, closest Change members. Most were men. The building to the northeast of the center was the communal dining hall with the kitchen and several offices, including Steven’s, and upstairs the quarters for the youngest children. Walking around the circle counterclockwise, the next building housed older members on the ground floor and older kids above, then came a building filled with earnest but inexperienced members, and finally the recently completed building where Ana was housed.

It was a bit worrying: Ana had no intention of staying out her promised year, but in a hierarchical organization where secret doctrine is given out in slow degrees, it would not be easy to speed her trip to the inner circle. All she could do was keep her ears and eyes wide open, and hope for a chance to bypass the preliminaries.

It helped, being a teacher, particularly as she convinced the others that she was best placed with the older students where her background of history could be used and her less-complete but still broad familiarity with English literature might assist in preparing the students for the state’s standardized tests. Even in an alternative community, test scores mattered.

Within a couple of weeks, Ana was well on her way to becoming an accepted member of the Change community. She taught her kids, she participated in group meditations, and she listened intently to Steven’s nightly talks.

One morning when Ana went in for breakfast, small, blond Suellen was not at her usual place behind the serving tables. When she did not appear again for lunch, Ana asked casually if anyone had seen her, and received only tight lips in answer. At the very end of dinner the young woman walked in, making an entrance into the dining hall, her hair wet from the shower, her body moving as if it ached all over, a small blister on the inside of her left wrist and the light of a radiant vision in her face. Ana watched thoughtfully as Suellen made her way proudly through the room, nodding regally at the respectful greetings her passage earned. Steven came in a short time later, and over the next ten minutes, Ana noticed three high-ranking Change members approach him, exchange a few words, and then glance at the radiant Suellen with knowing smiles—expressions that were affectionate, experienced, and not the least bit lewd. Whatever test the woman had faced during the day, she had obviously
passed it, and Ana would have sworn that it did not involve sleeping with the leader.

Ana added Suellen’s religious glow and the smiles of the others to her growing store of Change evidence. She studied the novels in the library and the paintings on the walls, she asked questions of the older members (most of whom were younger in years than she) and listened for the hidden references and intonations behind their words. She looked at the architecture and the arrangement of the buildings, at the
TRANSFORMATION
mural over the kitchen and the shape of the meditation hall, at the intriguing, glittering gold sculpture that was suspended over the hall and the way Steven and the higher initiates gazed at it, and she began to have some interesting ideas.

From the first she had seized on Steven’s continual references to heat and fire and the presence of the round suspended fireplace at the center of the meditation hall. Fire was not, she decided, merely one metaphor among many; as a symbol, it lay at the heart of the Change process.

That suspicion had led her to consider the phenomenon of fire worship, which was why she had talked about Agni at the crucial meeting in Steven’s office, and not Shiva or Jesus or any of the other figures she found present in Steven’s theological vocabulary. Steven and his three friends had spent time near Bombay, where they might have met Parsi thought and begun to develop a kind of neo-Zoroastrianism, fire-reverence with the Parsi tendency toward secrecy and an appreciation for the metaphysics of change.

However, wouldn’t she then see more tangible signs of Steven’s preoccupation with fire, like a continuous flame in front of each building or a ritual involving the meditation hall’s fireplace? Still, she remained convinced that fire entered the religious equation in some way.

And then one evening during Steven’s talk he used a
word that sent a shudder through the ranks of the higher initiates, and it all fell into place.

The chant that night was “Great heat, great hope,” which started out with four beats and ended up being little more than “heat” and “hope” with a brief pause between the words. That night Steven spoke not before the chant, but after. As usual, his subject was change, and specifically some problems the community had run into with a building inspector.

“I want you to regard the rules of the world,” he said, “not as the work of an enemy out to thwart you, but as the vessel for our transformation, and from our personal and communal Transformation to the transformation of the world. If the world brings pressure to bear, if it turns up the heat of tribulation, do not hate it, do not seek to escape it; welcome it as the means whereby change is effected. We are tried in the furnace of affliction, refined by the flames of daily torment. We do not turn from it—no, we enter into it freely, as the alembic of our own Transformation, the power nexus of our change.”

He continued in this vein, but Ana was too busy with her own thoughts to listen. The word “alembic,” the ancient chemical apparatus used to heat and distill, had jolted the people nearest to Steven, all the men and women on the platforms; she had felt their sudden intake of breath and the straightening of their spines, could still see it in their faces and their posture. She could feel it in her own. Because with that single noun it all came together in her mind, and she knew with certainty what Change’s hidden doctrine was all about.

Alchemy.

Good heavens, she thought in amazement—alchemy. Is there nothing new under the sun?

It was, she had to admit, the ultimate in transformational processes, extending beyond the spiritual to transmute base physical matter into pure incorruptible gold,
never to be tarnished, more valuable than any other metal. Her knowledge, unfortunately, was sparse: From a hodgepodge of roots and the earliest stages of chemistry, in China and through India and Arabia and finally to Europe, great minds had worked to develop a sort of physical philosophy, a method of intellectual and spiritual inquiry reflected in solid results. Base material such as lead was put through an elaborate series of processes (all of them involving, as Steven had said, heat) that led to its perfection into gold, while the alchemist, struggling over the years to perfect the process, was simultaneously being refined, purified, and ultimately transmuted into a being of untarnishable wisdom and immortality. And didn’t a branch of alchemy seek to make not just gold, but the Philosopher’s Stone—a tincture of immense power capable of changing any base substance it might touch into gold?

There was no doubt that charlatans abounded in this burgeoning science, but the mere possibility that a person might have a recipe for gold put that person into danger; for centuries, alchemists were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for their formulas. As a result, the secret doctrine became even more so. Rich symbolism and heavily allegorical writing served to obscure the process to all but those who were already in the know. Poetic imagery rather than clear description was used for speaking of the stages the metals went through within the alembics: the Peacock for the rising up of colors from the substance being heated, the Dragon for the fighting of the elements. Zodiacal symbols were used to refer to chemical substances, drawings of men with suns for their heads and women with moons for theirs represented gold and silver, and a king and queen in connubial embrace showed the joining of opposites that was necessary to the success of the Work.

Beyond that, Ana’s knowledge began to dissipate,
becoming thin and frayed around the edges. Deadly explosions in alchemical laboratories—fulminate of mercury?—Roger Bacon—Alexandria and the Arab Jabir, all bubbled up and burst in her mind, along with the conviction that Jung had written at some length about the symbolism of alchemy, and the clear memory of an illustration by Arthur Rackham that showed a dark and cluttered workshop peopled by a squat gnome of an alchemist, holding up a small glass vessel in which the gleam of gold provided the only light in the shadows; the alchemist was gazing at his miraculous creation in astonishment and dawning awe.

Ana felt a bit like the gnome in his workshop herself, all her discomfort and distraction swept to the side as she held up her shiny discovery, studying it from different angles. It was truly a beautiful thing, this pure knowledge of the distilled essence of Change, but as with any treasure, possession was not enough. How could she use it? And even more urgent, how could she add to it? Knowledge here was both the key to authority and a resource doled out in tiny dribbles. She had no intention of waiting years to earn her right to a silver chain around her neck. One obvious shortcut was Glen, but as a member of Change, she could no longer just climb into Rocinante and drive into town without attracting too many questions, and the U.S. mail and the telephone system were far too vulnerable to Change eyes and ears.

Still, she had to reach Glen somehow, both to show him her treasure and to request a heavy dose of additional information about the alchemical process. Retrieving his gathered information, then finding a means of studying it in private, was a problem she would face when she came to it. Now, however, how could she free herself up to reach Glen?

•     •     •

The next day a slim opportunity came up. In a moment Ana had seized it, wrenched it wider, and ruthlessly pushed her way through it.

One of the many advantages of working with a relatively small group of students is the ease of combining parts of the curriculum. Math lessons can spill over into English, a practicum such as filling out an income tax form or balancing a checkbook can be worked into government classes, and economics can be made to include family planning. (Just how much does it cost to raise that failure to use a condom up to college age?)

A few days earlier, Ana had been making her way along the circular hallway, the classrooms opening off to her right and to her left, the blank wall broken only by displayed notices, papers, and assorted pieces of student artwork, and she had idly thought what a waste of a long, unbroken stretch of wall it was.

She had mulled it over during the morning and at lunch she had turned to Teresa.

“You know that inside wall of the hallway? Has anyone thought about having the kids do a mural on it?”

“A mural?”

“Yeah. Each class could have a segment, maybe the one across from their doorway, and it could be along a theme like the one in the dining hall, only longer. I was thinking that it would be kind of fun to have the kids trace the historical development of Arizona, from dinosaurs to Anasazi cliff dwellings and settlers to now. It would be a great history lesson for them, and even useful for kids in the future. Of course, there are lots of themes they could work up, but it would be interesting to have the entire wall an integrated unit.”

“It would be an enormous task,” Teresa said dubiously, but Ana had made sure before she began that there were others within earshot, and she pressed on, aware that they were listening.

“It would take a lot of organization, but once it was done it could be left in place for years. Or painted over, if teachers wanted to do their section over again. We could ask about getting the paint donated. The biggest problem I can see would be covering the floor so the carpet doesn’t get trashed, but I think we could manage that.”

Dominique had been one of those listening in, and she spoke up.

“I think it is an excellent idea. We probably wouldn’t finish it before June, but we could stretch it out—or even let the kids work on it over summer vacation if they wanted to. Which they would.”

It was discussed some more and tentatively approved, depending on the cost. The school buzzed, preliminary sketches were made, themes were hammered out.