Servant of the Bones

  All was quiet in the house. He watched me, studying me, listening to my every breath.

  "Yes, the stars," he said dreamily, with seeming respect.

  His quick dark eyes broadened and there came his smile again, loving and tender.

  "We'll talk to her later, I promise you," he said. He grasped my arm firmly and pointed. "But come now to my study, come now and let's talk together. It's time, is it not?"

  "I wish I knew," I said in a half murmur. "She's still crying, isn't she?"

  "She'll cry till she dies," he said. His shoulders were heavy with sorrow. His whole soul ached with it. I let him lead me down the hall. I wanted to know things from him. I wanted to know everything.

  I didn't respond.

  18

  We made our way down this corridor, Gregory leading boldly, letting his feet ring on the marble, and I corning behind him, dazzled by the peach-colored silk panels affixed to the walls. The floor itself was this same lovely nourishing color.

  We passed numerous doors, and one of them to our right lay open. It was her room. She was in there.

  I came to a halt and peered in, rudely, but the sight which struck me amazed me.

  It was a lavish bedchamber, done wildly in crimson with festoons of red silk coming from its ceilings down over the pillars of the bed The floor was again marble and this time snow white.

  But this in itself was not as remarkable as the sight of a woman--the woman who had been crying--sitting on a low couch, her gown airy and shimmering and as red as the trappings of the room. She had jet-black hair, like the hair of Esther, like my hair for that matter--and the same immense eyes of Esther with near glistening whites to them. But her hair was stranded through and through with silver; it seemed almost decorated by greater age. It spilled down behind her back. Nurses in white surrounded her. One moved quickly to shut the door.

  But she looked up, saw me. Her face was drawn and sallow and wet with tears. But she was not old. She'd been very young when she'd given birth to Esther. At once she sat up.

  The door was shut, the lock turned. I heard her call out: "Gregory!"

  He walked on, reaching back for my hand, his own warm and smooth and leading me alongside him.

  Others whispered behind other doors. There were wires in the walls that carried whispers. I couldn't hear the woman crying.

  We entered the main room, a grand demilune of splendid detail with a lofty half dome of a ceiling. A row of floor-length windows, each cut into twelve different panes of glass, ran across the street side of it, which was flat, and behind us doors of the same frame punctuated the half circle at equal intervals.

  It was more than magnificent.

  But the view of the night caught me with all its timeless sweetness. Across a deep dark divide I saw towers, patterned with lights set in rows of incredible regularity, but then I came to realize that all of these buildings had these straight rows of windows, that this age was very mathematically precise.

  My head was swimming. Information was pouring in on me.

  I saw that the room faced not a dark river, as I had supposed, but a broad dark park. I could smell the trees. I looked down and was amazed to see how truly far we were above the earth, from the tiny crowd still clogging the little thoroughfare and the mounted policemen moving awkwardly like trapped cavalry amid a battle. A swarm of ants.

  I turned around.

  The doors behind us, in the curved wall, were closed now. I couldn't even tell which door had been our door. I was distracted and obsessed suddenly with the brief glimpse of the weeping mother.

  But I cleared this for the present.

  In the very center of the half circle wall stood a hearth, monstrous, made of the usual white marble and cold and grand as an altar. Lions were carved into this hearth, and a shelf stood above it and above that a huge mirror which caught the reflection of the windows.

  Indeed reflections bounced about all around me. The twelve-paned doors of the rear wall were mirrored, rather than glassed! What an illusion it was. We were drifting in this palace, and comforted by the city as if it had taken us in its arms.

  A great heap of wood stood ready in the hearth, as if it were cruel winter, which it was not.

  All the doors, both real and mirrored, were double doors with gracefully twisted handles of plated gold, and fancy curving frames for their narrow and shining panes of mirror or glass.

  I turned around and around, absorbing everything, drawing out of each item every inference that I could, and no doubt drawing as always upon sources of knowledge inexplicable to me. I was startled by each new object. Then I knew what it was. Statues from China, a Grecian urn very familiar to me and comforting, and lavish glass vases of flowers--these things stood on pedestals.

  Strewn about us were couches and chairs of peach and gold velvet, tables with lustrous tops, more vases of magnificent lilies and great golden daisies, or so they seemed to me, and beneath all was a sprawling square carpet, reaching almost from the windows over the park to the edge of the circle in the rear.

  The carpet was sewn in magnificent detail with the tree of life, full of the birds of Heaven, and the fruit of Heaven, and figures walking beneath the tree limbs, figures in Asian dress.

  So it was always; the world changed; the world became more complex; the world increased in invention and sometimes in ugliness, yet the forms of my time were always embedded in the surfaces around me. Every object in the room was connected in some way to the oldest aesthetic principles ever known to me.

  I imagined suddenly that the lost tribes of Israel lived in the carpet, those sold when Nebuchadnezzar came down upon the northern kingdom, but that had been before Jerusalem had been taken. Images of battle, of fire.

  Azriel, master thyself.

  "Tell me," I said, disguising my delight in all this, my weakness and hunger for it. "What is the Temple of the Mind that its High Priest lives in this splendor? These are private rooms. Are you the thief and the charlatan, as your grandfather said?"

  He didn't answer me, but he was most delighted. He walked about me, watching me, waiting eagerly for me to speak again.

  "There lies a newspaper from the streets opened where you left it," I said. "Ah, there is Esther's face. Esther smiles for the historians. For the public. And beside the paper, what is this pitcher? Bitter coffee. Your taste is on the cup. I smell it. This is all private, your place of recollection. Yours is a rich God, Mind or no Mind." I took the time to smile. "And you a rich priest."

  "I'm not a priest," he said.

  Two men appeared suddenly, gawky youths in white stiff shirts and dark trousers. They entered out of the wall of doors, and Gregory was flustered.

  He made some quick gestures to them that they must go away. The mirrored doors closed again.

  We were alone. I felt my breath and my eyes moving in my skull, and I felt such desire for all things material and sensuous that I could have wept. If I had been alone I would have wept.

  I regarded him suspiciously. The night, both real and in reflection, pulsed with twinkling lights. Indeed lights were as plentiful and vital in this time as water had been perhaps in earlier times. Even in this room the lamps were powerful, sculpted pieces of bronze work with heavily adorned glass shades the color of parchment. Light, light, light.

  His excitement was palpable to me. He could scarce hold his tongue. He wanted to inundate me with questions, drink all the knowledge he could from me. I stood obdurate, as if I were really human and had every right as any man to be quiet and myself.

  Air moved in the room, full of the smell of trees and horses and of the fumes rising from the engines; the engines filled the night with discord. If he were to shut the window, it would go away, this noise, but then so would the fragrance of green grass.

  Finally he could contain himself no longer.

  "Who called you?" he said. He was not unpleasant. Indeed, he seemed now to slip into a childlike candor but with too much ease for it not to be a style. "Who brought
you out of the bones?" he asked. "Tell me, you have to. I am the Master now."

  "Don't take such a foolish tack," I answered. "It will be nothing for me to kill you. It would be too simple." I felt no weakening in myself as I resisted him.

  What if the world was my Master now? What if each and every human were my master? I saw a blazing fire suddenly, a fire not of the world, but of the gods.

  The bones which I still held all this time were heavy in my arms. Did they want me to see them? I looked down at the old battered casket. It had soiled my garments. I didn't care.

  "May I set down the bones?" I asked. "Here, on your table, beside your newspaper and your pitcher of bitter coffee and your dead daughter's face, so pretty to look at, with no veil?"

  He nodded, lips parted, straining to keep quiet, to think, and yet too exultant really to do either in any organized way.

  I laid down the casket. I felt a ripple of sensation pass through me, just from the proximity of the bones, and the thought suddenly that they were mine own, and I was dead and a ghost, and that I was walking the earth again.

  My god, don't let me be taken before I understand this!

  He approached. I didn't wait for him. I boldly took off the frail cover of the casket, just as he had before. I laid down the cover on the big table, crushing the newspaper a little, and I stared at the bones.

  They were as golden and brilliant as they had been the day I died. But when had that been?

  "The day I died!" I whispered. "Am I to find out everything now? Is that part of the plan?"

  I thought again of Esther's mother, the woman in red silk. I could sense her presence under this roof. She had most definitely seen me and I tried to imagine how I looked to her. I wanted her to come in here, or to find some way to go to her.

  "What are you saying?" He questioned me eagerly. "The day you died, when was it? Tell me. Who made you a ghost? What plan do you speak of?"

  "I don't know those answers," I said. "I wouldn't bother with you if I did. The Rebbe told you more than I knew when he translated those inscriptions."

  "Not bother with me!" he said. "Not bother with me! Don't you see that if there is a plan, a plan even greater than that which I have designed, you are part of it?"

  It gave me pleasure to see his mounting excitement. It was invigorating, beyond doubt. His fine eyebrows rose a little, and I saw that the charm of his eyes was not merely their depth, but their length. I was a person of rounded features; the lines of his face came to beautiful trajectories and points.

  "When did you first come? How could Esther have seen you?"

  "If I was sent to save her I failed. But why did you call her the lamb? Why did you use those words? Who are these enemies you speak of?"

  "You'll learn soon enough. We're all surrounded by enemies. All we have to do to rouse them is show a little power, resist the interjecting plans which they have laid with all the solemnity of a god, plans which are only the routine, the ritual, the tradition, the law, the normal, the regular, the sane...You know what I mean, you understand me."

  I did understand him.

  "Well, I have gone against them and they would come against me, only I'm too powerful for them, and I have dreams that dwarf their petty evil!"

  "My, but you speak with a silken tongue," I said, "and you give so much in your words. Why to me?"

  "To you? Because you're a spirit, a god, an angel sent to me. You witnessed her death because she was a lamb. Don't you see? You came when she died, as if a god to receive a sacrifice!"

  "I hated her death," I said. "I slew the three men who killed her."

  This astonished him. "You did that?"

  "Yes, Billy Joel, Hayden, and Doby Eval. I killed them. The papers know. The news talks of her blood on their weapons and their blood mingled with it now. I did that! Because I had failed to stop them from their evil plan. What sacrifice do you speak of? Why call her the lamb? Where was the altar and if you think I'm a god, you're a fool! I hate God and all gods. I hate them."

  He was enthralled. He drew close to me, and then stepped back, and then walked around, too excited to be still.

  If he was guilty of killing his daughter, he gave no clue. He looked at me with pure delight in our exchange.

  Something struck me suddenly. The skin of his face had been moved! A surgeon had tightened it over all his bones. I laughed at the ingenuity of it and the implications, that things in this age could be done so simply. And with a sudden sinking terror, I thought, What if I have been brought to this age for a reason that has to do with his horrors and the world's wonders, and this is the chance to stay whole and alive from now on?

  I winced, and he started to question me again. I put my hands up for him to be quiet.

  I backed away from my own thought. I turned and stared at the gleaming bones, and I bent down and laid my own fingers, my material fingers, upon my own bones.

  At once I felt as if someone were touching me as I touched them. I felt someone's touch on my own legs. I felt my own hands on my own face as I touched the skull. I sank my thumbs into the empty sockets defiantly, where my eyes had been, my eyes...something boiling, something too ghastly to think of--I uttered a small sound that made me ashamed.

  The room quivered, brightened, then contracted as though it were receding. No, stay here. Stay in this room. Stay here with him! But I was imagining things, as humans say. My body had not weakened at all. I was standing tall.

  I opened my eyes slowly and closed them and looked down at the golden bones. Iron fastened them to the rotted cloth beneath them, iron fastened them to the old wood of the casket, but it was the same casket, permeated with all the oils that would make it last unto the end of time, like the bones. An image of Zurvan flashed through me, and with it came a flood of words...to love, to learn, to know, to love...

  Once again came the huge city walls of blue-glazed bricks, the golden lions and the cries of voices, and one of them pointing his finger and screaming at me in the old Hebrew--the prophet--and the chants rose and fell.

  Something had happened! I had done something, something unspeakable to be made this ghost, this old ghost who had served Masters beyond recollection.

  But if I dwelt on this, I might vanish. Or I might not.

  I stood very still, but no more memories came. I withdrew my hands. I stood looking down at the bones.

  Gregory brought me out of it.

  He moved closer and he put his hands on me. He wanted so much to do this. How his pulse raced. It felt wondrously erotic, these fleshly hands touching my newly formed arms. If I was still gaining in strength, I didn't feel it anymore.

  I felt the world. Safe inside it for now.

  His fingers clenched the sleeves of this coat. He was staring at it, the precision of it, the dazzle of the buttons, the fine stitches. And all of this I'd drawn to me in haste with the old commands that rolled off my tongue like nothing. I could have made myself a woman suddenly to frighten him. But I didn't want to do that. I was too happy to be Azriel, and Azriel was too afraid.

  Yet again...what was the limit of this masterless power? I contrived a joke, an evil joke. I smiled, and then whispering all the words I knew, fashioning the most mellifluous incantations I could, I changed myself into Esther.

  The image of Esther. I felt her small body, and peered through her big eyes and smiled, and even felt the tightness of her garments on that last day, the flash of the painted animal coat in my eye.

  Thank God, I didn't have to see this myself! I felt sorry for him.

  "Stop it!" he roared. He fell back onto the floor, scrambling away from me, and then leaning back on his elbows.

  I returned to my own shape. I had done this and he had no control of it! I had control of it. I felt proud and wicked suddenly.

  "Why did you call her the lamb? Why did the Rebbe say you killed her?"

  "Azriel," he said. "Listen carefully to what I say." He climbed to his feet as effortlessly as a dancer. He walked towards me. "Whatever hap
pens after, whatever happens, remember this. The world is ours. The world, Azriel."

  I was startled.

  "The world, Gregory?" I asked. I tried to sound hard and clever. "What do you mean, the world?"

  "I mean all of it, I mean the world as Alexander meant the world when he went out to conquer it." He appealed to me, patiently. "What do you know, Spirit Friend? Do you know the names Bonaparte or Peter the Great or Alexander? Do you know the name Akhenaton? Constantine? What are the names you know?"

  "All of those and more, Gregory," I answered. "Those were emperors, conquerors. Add to them Tamerlane and Scanderbeg, and after him Hitler, Hitler, who slew our people by the millions."

  "Our people," he said with a smile. "Yes, we are of the same people, aren't we? I knew we were. I knew it."

  "What do you mean, you knew it? The Rebbe told you. He read the scroll. What are these conquerors to you? Who rules in this electric paradise called New York? You are a churchman, so says the Rebbe. You are a merchant. You have billions in every currency recognized on earth. You think Scanderbeg in his castle in the Balkans ever had the wealth you have here? You think Peter the Great ever brought back to Russia with him the luxuries you possess? They didn't have your power! They couldn't. Their world wasn't an electrical web of voices and lights."

  He laughed with delight, his eyes sparkling, and beautiful.

  "Ah, that's just it," he said. "And now in this world so filled with wonders, no one has their power! No one has the force of Alexander when he brought the philosophy of the Greeks to Asia. No one dares to kill as Peter the Great killed, chopping off the heads of his bad soldiers until the blood covered his arms."

  "Your times are not the worst of times," I said. "You have leaders; you have talk; you have the rich being kind to the poor; you have men the world wide who fear evil and want goodness."

  "We have madness," he said. "Look again. Madness!"

  "What does this mean to you? Is this the mission of your church to gain control of the whole world? Is that what drives you, as the old man asked? You want the power to chop off the heads of men? You want that?"

  "I want to change everything," he said. "Look back over those conquerors. Look back over their accomplishments. Use the finest reach of your spirit mind."