Mysterium (23 page)

I’ll go to Hell, then,
Linneth thought.

The sulfa pills rattled in her coat pocket as she paced through snowy gloom. Because the electricity had been turned off to punish the townspeople, there would be no streetlights tonight. The military patrols had been redoubled but the snow would slow them down.

She was allowed to come and go as she wished from the civilians’ wing of the Blue View Motel. She ate dinner at the commissary in order not to arouse suspicion. The dinner was a stew of beef in watery broth and slices of dense bread buttered with suet. She told the pions who patrolled the hallway that she would be working on a paper tonight and didn’t want to be disturbed. She left a lamp burning in her room and pulled the curtains. When the pions adjourned to the lobby to smoke their noxious pipes, she went out a side door into the windy dark. She fell twice, hurrying along the empty streets. The church bell was tolling curfew when she reached Dexter Graham’s apartment.

She fed him sulfanilamide and aspirin and sat with him through the night. When Dex slept, she slept on the sofa across the room. When he woke, often raving or thrashing, she bathed his forehead with a damp cloth.

She was aware of the danger of being here and of the danger Dex was in. The Proctors were like poisonous insects—harmless enough if allowed to toil undisturbed in their nests; lethal if aroused. She remembered the day the Proctors came to arrest her mother, before she was sent to the Renunciates, and that ancient fear rose like flood water from the culverts of memory.

While she cooled his forehead she admired Dexter Graham’s face. He was handsome. She seldom thought of the men she knew as handsome or unhandsome; they were threats or opportunities, seldom friends or lovers. The word
lover
sounded lewd even when she pronounced it in the privacy of her thoughts. Her last “lover,” if he could be called that, was the boy Campo. That was in the old days when she was very young and before the idolatry laws were enacted. Her father had taken the family to the annual civic service in Rome, where the Temple of Apollo was festooned with garlands and the Bishop of Rome himself rendered the oracles of the Prophetess in Latin hexameter. Linneth was bored by the ritual and sickened by the sacrifice of the animals. She avoided services and stayed in the paradeisos where foreign visitors lodged—or at least, she promised to. In fact she escaped each morning and taught herself to ride the buses and elevated trains; and she met Campo, an Egyptian boy who had come to the shrines with his family as Linneth had come with hers. They spent their meager allowances together on the trams, at the zoo, in the cafés. He told her about Alexandria. She told him about New York. In secret, in his small room in the paradeisos, they undressed one another. Her first and last lover, Campo. On the great passenger steamer
Sardinia,
bound for New York Harbor after the rites were finished, Linneth’s mother interpreted her silences and frowns. “Sometimes we meet Pan in unexpected places,” she said, smiling obliquely. “Linneth, weren’t the fountains lovely?” She supposed so. “And the choirs in the shrine?” Oh yes. “And the flowers, and the perfume, and the priestess on the axon?” Yes. “And that African boy we saw you with?” Linneth supposed he was lovely too.

She remembered the sunny days on the steamship with the Atlantic Ocean churning behind. She had seen distant mountains of ice, blue as summer air, floating off the Grand Banks. At night, constellations turned like mill wheels in the sky.

After that her life had changed. The Proctors took her to finish her schooling with the Christian Renunciates at their gray stone retraite in snowy Utica (New York, not Greece). She had worn gray dresses that swept the floor and she had learned the Christian panoply of gods, Archons, Demiurges, and dour apostles. And there had not been a lover since Campo, whose skin had smelled wonderfully of cinnamon and cedar.

When she was little her mother told her, “The god who lives in the forest lives in your belly and in your heart.” She wondered if her fierce scholasticism, her invasion of the masculine strongholds of library and carrel, had really been a search for that outcast god: in whose myths, villages, meadows, sacred places? Campo and Pan and the Golden Bough, she thought; everything we worshiped or should have worshiped or neglected to worship.

She tended Dexter Graham through his fever as the snow fell from the dark sky.

After a day he woke and was able to drink a bowl of soup, which Linneth heated over a wax candle. He was thin under the many blankets (she bathed him with a sponge and changed his bandage often), and she saw that the wound and the fever had drawn heavily on his stores of life and strength.

She thought he might have lost some of his distrust of her, and that was good, although his eyes still followed her—if not suspiciously, at least curiously—as she moved about the room.

She was away often enough to establish her presence in the civilians’ compound. In the evenings she came back. When Dex was awake, she talked to him. She asked him questions about the book,
Huckleberry Finn
.

The decision Huck Finn makes about Jim, she explained, represents a well-known heresy. To say
Well, then, I’ll go to Hell
. . . to imply that there exists some moral standard higher than Church and Law, and that this standard is accessible even to an ignorant peasant boy . . . that Huck Finn might have a firmer grasp of good and evil than, for instance, a Proctor of the Bureau . . . well, people had burned for less.

Dex said, “Do
you
think it’s a heresy?”

“Of course it is. Do you mean, do I think it’s true?” She lowered her voice and eyes. “Of course it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”

A week passed. The snow mounted on the sill of the window and the talk between Linneth and Dex gathered a similar weight. She brought a paraffin heater to make his small rooms bearably warm, though she still had to wrap herself in sweaters and Dex in blankets. And she brought food: pails of stew, or bread with crumbling wedges of cheese.

Linneth talked about herself as the snow sifted against the window glass with a sound that made her think of feathers and diamonds. She told him about her childhood, when the forests near the family’s stone house had seemed enchanted during the icebound winter days; about mugs of mulled wine, devotions in mysterious Latin, storybooks wrapped in red paper and imported from the pagan states of southern Europe and Byzantium. Her father was bearded, devout, aloof, and learned. Her mother told secrets.
Something lives in everything,
her mother said,
if only you look for it
.

When the idolatry laws were passed and the Proctors came to take her father away, he went wordlessly. A month later they came back for Linneth’s mother, who screamed all the way down the drive to the boxy black truck. The Proctors took Linneth, too, and sent her to the Renunciates, until a Christian aunt in Boston bought her free and arranged for her education, the best education money could buy.

Dex Graham talked about a wholly different childhood: suburban, fast-paced, suffused by the glow of television. It was a freer existence than Linneth could imagine; but narrow, too, in its way. Where Dex came from, no one talked much about life or death or good or evil—except, Linneth pointed out, Mr. Mark Twain; but he was of an older tradition. Was it possible, she wondered, to suffocate in triviality? In Dex’s world one could spend one’s entire life in a blaze of the most florid triviality.
It blinds you,
he said,
but it doesn’t keep you warm
.

She asked if he had been married. He said yes, his wife had been Abigail and his son had been David. They were dead. They died in a fire. Their house had burned down.

“Were you there when it happened?”

Dex looked at the ceiling. After a long time he said, “No.”

Then: “No, that’s a lie. I was there. I was in the house when it caught fire.” She had to lean closer to hear him. “I used to drink. Sometimes I drank to excess. So one night I came home late. I went to sleep on the sofa because I didn’t want to disturb Abby. When I woke up a couple of hours later the air was full of smoke. There were flames running up the stairs. Abby and David were up there. I tried to go after them but I couldn’t get through. Burned the hair off my face. The fire was too hot. Or I was too scared of it. Neighbors called the fire department and a guy with an oxygen mask dragged me out of the house. But the question is—in the end, nobody could say what started the fire. The insurance people investigated but it was inconclusive. So I keep thinking, did I knock over a lamp? Leave a cigarette burning? The kind of thing a drunk does.” He shook his head. “I still don’t know whether I killed them.”

He looked at her as if he regretted saying it, or feared what she might say; so she didn’t speak, only took his hand and touched a cooling cloth to his forehead.

She came to the apartment every day, even when his recovery made it obvious she wasn’t needed. She liked being here.

The room Dex Graham occupied was sparsely furnished but oddly pleasant, especially now that the punitive week had passed and the lights were back on. It was a cloistered space, a bubble of warmth in the snow that seemed never to stop falling. Dex tolerated her presence and even appeared to welcome it, though he was often subdued, often quiet. There was a dimple of pink flesh where the bullet had entered his arm.

The wound still hurt him. He favored the arm. She had to mind the injury when she came into bed with him.

This was a sin, she reckoned, by some lights; but not a sin of the forest or the belly or the heart. The Renunciates would call it a sin. So would that Bureau ideologue, Delafleur. Let them, Linneth thought. It doesn’t matter. Let them call it what they want. I’ll go to Hell.

CHAPTER 13

On the first night of that cold week, when the windows grew opaque with ice and the street was crowded with soldiers, Clifford tore up his maps and notes and flushed them down the toilet. The maps were evidence of his guilt. They might not prove anything, but they would surely get him into trouble if Luke, for instance, found them.

He couldn’t dispose of the radio scanner as easily. He buried it under a stack of encyclopedias of science at the back of his bedroom closet—but only until he could think of a more permanent solution.

His mood alternated between boredom and panic. In those first days after the fire, wild rumors circulated. Clifford’s mother passed them on, absentmindedly but in meticulous detail, over the meager dinners she made him sit down to. (She kept perishables in the snow on the back step since the refrigerator wasn’t working. Mostly there was bread and cheese on the table, and not much of that.)

People had seen peculiar things, his mother said. Some people claimed they saw God that night, or maybe it was the Devil—though what either one of them would want with the Beacon Street filling station was beyond her. According to Mrs. Fraser, some soldiers had died in the explosion. According to someone else it was a Proctor who had been killed, and God help us all if
that
was true. Mr. Kingsley next door said it was some new experiment at the defense plant that caused the explosion . . . but Joe Kingsley hadn’t been in his right mind since his wife died last August; you could tell because he never washed his clothes anymore.

And so on. On Friday, Clifford picked up a single-sheet edition of the
Two Rivers Crier
from the stack at the corner of Beacon and Arbutus. The newspaper reported “hooliganism on the main street” but said no one had been seriously hurt, and Clifford decided to believe that, although you couldn’t be sure of what they printed in the
Crier
anymore. The town’s punishment had been fairly mild, considering what was possible, and the number of soldiers on the street declined over the course of the week; so it was probably true that no one had been killed. If a soldier or a Proctor had died, Clifford thought, things would be much worse.

It was good to think he hadn’t hurt anyone. Still, the presence of the scanner in his closet continued to make him nervous. He lost sleep, thinking about it. His mother said, “Cliffy, are you sick? Your eyes are all puffy.”

Friday night, Luke came to the house again. He brought rice and a half pound of fatty ground beef, plus the inevitable quart jar of barracks whiskey. Clifford’s mother cooked the meat and rice for dinner, all of it at once. The whiskey she placed at the back of the counter next to the microwave oven, handling the bottle as reverently as if it were a piece of the True Cross.

Clifford ate a good share of food, although the conversation at the table was strained and halting. As usual, the talk picked up after he departed for his room. They always sent him to his room after dinner. Clifford only went as far as the halfway point on the stairs—close enough to the kitchen to hear what was being said; close enough to the bedroom to make good his escape when they left the table. What his mother said to Luke, or the soldier to his mother, sometimes bewildered him and sometimes made him blush. His mother seemed like a different person, a stranger with a hidden history and a new vocabulary. The soldier called her Ellen. That made him uneasy. Clifford had never thought of his mother as “Ellen.” As she drank, she used more dirty words. She said, “No shit!” or “Well, fuck!” And Clifford always winced when this happened.

Luke drank, too, and in the long pauses between drinking he would talk about his work. It was this talk Clifford particularly wanted to hear. The disaster on Beacon Street should have cured him of eavesdropping, he thought. Eavesdropping with the scanner had almost gotten him killed. But he went on listening to Luke. It seemed important. He couldn’t say why.

Tonight was a good example. Tonight Luke talked about all the bulldozers that had come in from Fort LeDuc, and what the bulldozers were doing on the edge of town.

Tuesday was the first food depot day after the electricity came back on and Clifford volunteered to make the trip to pick up rations. His mother agreed. Which was no surprise. She seldom left the house if she could help it. Some days she didn’t even leave her room.