The Western Lands

  A. J. comes to the costume party as a Mexican bandit in filthy, torn cotton pants and shirt and a wide sombrero pocked with bullet holes.

  "¡Chinga!" he screams, and pulls his machete and decapitates Lady Caroline's Russian wolfhound with a single stroke.

  Now he points to the slavering head, and does a revolting imitation of the head and the body, which lies twitching in obscene spasms. A huge rubber penis snaps out of his fly and quivers, spraying the guests with a foul-smelling yellow ichor.

  "If anyone does not like this thing that I have done, I can use this machete a second time."

  He makes his re-entrance as a pirate with a patch over one eye, a cutlass and flintlock pistol at his belt, a vulture on his shoulder, singing lustily, "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest!"

  He draws his cutlass and decapitates Colonel Greenfield, whose face, purple with rage, splashes into the lobster Newburg, spattering the guests with rich cream sauces.

  "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!"

  He slices off Mrs. Worldly's head, face frozen in a maniacal shift from icy disapproval to naked terror. The head, spilling diamonds from her necklace, bounces across the terrace.

  "Scrambles!" screams an idiotic English Lord, showing his long yellow horse's teeth. Bloodstained guests scuffle and grab for the bouncing diamonds.

  A.J. beheads an ambitious young politician. The mouth gapes open, dying eyes pleading to be heard as if he would catch another vote with his silver tongue, which protrudes to the root as the eyes go out.

  "Drink and the devil had done for the rest."

  A.J. hauls out his double-barreled flintlock loaded with iron filings and cyanide crystals and takes out two secret, service guards before they can get their Uzis out of special briefcases with complex locking mechanisms.

  The old gardener's dance moves out in concentric circles.

  Plop, a starlet's head sinks into the blue lagoon.

  In Alamout the musicians and adepts take a break for mint tea. They have been concentrating to activate the distant agent with their music. The Old Man has them in stitches with his dummy. He's got this life-size dummy with a white beard and eyes of blue glass that shoot out rays of light.

  "You see, my son, all present, all past and all future can be contained in a single note of music."

  The dummy yacks out, "Give us more of thy wisdom!"

  "Since music is registered with the whole body it can serve as a means of communication between one organism and another."

  A CIA man leans forward, sweeping the room with laser eyes. "A viable means of conveying instructions to and receiving information from agents in the field."

  Musical intelligence. Agent attends a concert and receives his instructions. Information and directives in and out through street singers, musical broadcasts, jukeboxes, records, high school bands, whistling boys, cabaret performers, singing waiters, transistor radios.

  "Red sails in the sunset

  'Way out on the sea . . ."

  Red alert coming up.

  "Oh! carry my loved one

  Home safely to me."

  All agents return to Center.

  A team of dedicated Russian agents disguised as rednecks roar out "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a political rally.

  "And the rockets' red glare"

  Russian rockets are on the way.

  "At the twilight's last gleaming"

  Russian Missiles Hit Washington D.C.

  "Head for the hills!"

  What hills? Geiger counters click to countdown. Decaying lead spells out the last syllables of recorded time. Orgone balked at the post. Christ bled. Time ran out. Radiation has won at a half-life.

  When metal goes rotten, everything goes," said a wise old Texas sheriff. The young deputy wondered how you could keep lead straight. Maybe it just needed the love of a good woman, and apple pie. It's just as simple as that, he thought, as the jail disintegrated. This was more than the sheriff could take.

  "What can a man depend on when his jail falls apart? Get back in there, you sidewinders!" he screams, reaching for his melted shotgun with no hands.

  "'Only fools do those villains pity who are punished before they have done their mischief,' " Kim quotes, as he shoves a horrid rednecked oaf out of the lifeboat. The sharks cut his screams to a bearable pitch and period.

  "I wonder how long it would have taken him to reach the same conclusion about me? Just so long and long enough."

  He takes a long pull from his brandy flask and opens a tin of beef, thanking Allah for eyes to see and hands to push. The sun lays a crimson path across the darkening sea that stretches to the sky in all directions. Another pull at the brandy flask, to celebrate and savor a blessed absence.

  Occasionally the boat undulates slightly, as if the ocean bed has shifted without disturbing the surface, like moving an aquarium slowly, being careful not to break the film that holds a sprinkling of fish food on the surface. And that is what he is. A sprinkling of fish food.

  He recalls the Shark Spirit, a little wooden figure carved somewhere in the South Pacific. He'd seen it in the Burlington Museum in London . . . sly, enigmatic, very old and patient, driven by a cold, deadly, implacable hunger for anything its big mouth can tear off and swallow. Any individual shark is expendable, but the hunger remains to find another receptacle. Three hundred million years the shark has survived, with a big mouth to tear off chunks and a gut to digest almost anything.

  It is inconceivable that Homo sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register its passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception.

  Ahead and to the right Kim sees a black shape rising from the sea, clearly an island, though he can't see any lights. He stands up and rows toward the distant land, facing his objective in the Mediterranean rowing style, leaning forward with a long stroke that sends the boat gliding forward, then relax, feather oars, lean forward. Less than an hour till dark.

  A book with glowing roses twined around the words and growing through the words. He can see the roses growing through his body, the aching red translucent thorns growing from his fingers and toes, his penis a single glowing rose.

  Across the street he can see men in white robes standing by a doorway. The men step aside, and he enters an empty white space illuminated by the radiance that flows from his body. His eyes are shaded purple roses with glistening black rose pupils, his mouth is full of thorn teeth. He grows from place to place on swift silent vegetable currents. He comes to a white-walled room, one side open. Hawks glide against a fragile eggshell-blue sky. The room opens on a cliff with a sheer drop of three thousand feet to the valley below.

  An old man stands in front of him with an instrument like a paintbrush open in his hand. He is writing instructions back through the door, way past the two doormen and take the left fork. The road leads steeply upward to the familiar land of giants and dwarfs and castles, doors that pop open on steps leading down and slam shut, spider magic, mirror magic, card magic, coffee grinder magic, fork and spoon magic.

  He turns into a medieval inn, and cold hostile faces turn toward him. He sits down and drapes his arms on the table.

  "Barkeep!!"

  A slovenly brute looks up from the bar he is mopping with a filthy rag.

  "You talking me?"

  "I am. Bring me a beer, cheese and bread, quickly."

  "Maybe you wrong people, wrong place."

  "Wrong people learn place."

  Rose speaks in a blur of movement. Hands, fingers, palms, sprouting needle-sharp thorns close lightly on the barkeep's neck. Rose grows back to his table. The barkeep touches his throat and looks at the blood on his hands.

  "Right away, sir," says barkeep, looking behind Rose's table as a man in palace guard uniform steps forward and unsheaths his sword.

  "You must come with me, stranger
. Your papers?" Rose points the outstretched fingers of his left hand, squeezing out thorns that thud into the guard's chest. The guard's face turns bright red, then dead pale. He slumps gently to the floor. Outside it is getting dark, and the wind is rising from a cat's whine to a shriek. Rose spreads his cloak like a gliding lemur, sailing on gusts of wind out across the valley faster and faster on a jet of sulphurous, blazing farts, streaking across the sky like a comet, propelled by millennia of animal farts tearing and burning through him.

  I come to light in a muted bar, dining-room set, discreet conversation, well-dressed patrons who are obviously walk-on extras. The maître d' is exceedingly respectful, as he should be, showing me to the best table.

  "The Doctor phoned to say he will be a few minutes late, sir. Would you like a drink?"

  I order the martini with a dash of absinthe for which the establishment is renowned. These martinis are kept chilled in the freezer. Anyone asking for rocks would be immediately thrown out into the cobblestone alley.

  Now the Doctor slides into the seat opposite. Fine-looking old whitey, phony as Yellow Kid Weil. Two martinis materialize on the table.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting, Bill."

  He lifts his glass. We drink. He smiles knowingly over his drink. "Well, things have gotten out of hand."

  "Out of whose hands?"

  "Out of my hands of course." He looks down into his empty glass, twirling it. "I don't know what I'm going to do about you, Bill. I really don't." .

  "When in doubt, do nothing."

  "On the contrary . . . when in doubt, always do something. It may be your last act before doubt paralysis sets in. In the terminal stages you have to be force-fed, because you can't decide to eat—so many reasons not to." The old fraud ducks and laughs and punches me on the shoulder.

  A perfect venison steak with wild rice appears on my plate, and the old man gets this half smile on his face, shaking his head and looking down at the table. And I don't like it at all. It's creepy and corny and deceptive . . . very deceptive.

  "Now Bill, you know you've gotten out of line and caused a lot of important people a lot of concern. Gave old Countess ________ a sick headache, and brought on Monsieur ________'s ulcers. Now if you'd just listen to reason."

  "I'm listening. Talk some reason."

  "That's what I mean. You want us to tell you what we want. And that's not reasonable."

  "Depends on who decides."

  "We decide, Bill. We decide."

  "Prove it. Right here. Right now."

  He ducks around, holding up his hand in mock defense. "Don't blast me, Bill. Always played fair with you . . . just an old showman."

  "Good sir, to the purpose."

  "Well, put it this way, Bill." He is pacing around the patio of a run-down 1920s Spanish villa. Could be Florida or southern California. A balmy night, with the scent of night-blooming cereus, stars like wilted gardenias in the sky. "I can make you an offer."

  "In return for what?"

  "Well, look at the offer first: nice secure place, shooting range, swimming pool, and full of anything you want, Bill. We are men of the world. Sure, you're a bit worn out. We got serums will fix that."

  What is life worth when the purpose is gone? Skulking in an ill-fitting body from a shabby bargain long void, he is, if anything, the carrier of the child formed from his mind and body. Every assassin he trained became his child. He became his agents, his messengers.

  The Old Man's voice is a thin, dry rustle, like a snake shedding its skin.

  "The real struggle is yet to come. What we are doing here is simply an exercise. You have known the pure killing purpose that comes from the total awareness of what you are killing."

  The desperate days of pursuit and flight, the ambush sensed just in time, the quick knife in an alley, the after-kill feeling, sweet and clean like rebirth, the constant alertness, the crushing fatigue, a different lodging every night, the shifts of identity: a merchant, a holy man, a scholar, a beggar, a doctor, a man of no trade, a traveler on precarious roads of shifting alliances, partial commitments, treacherous loyalties. (He knows this man will betray him. There must be no outcry.) Safe houses that are not safe. (He knows he can't go back there tonight. An ambush will be waiting.)

  He is safe here in Alamout. No one can touch him. But safety is the most dangerous of all conditions.

  10

  THE VALLEY

  There is no way in or out of the Valley, which is ringed with sheer cliffs with an overhanging ledge. How did the people of the Valley get in there in the first place? No one remembers. They have been there for many years. Children have been born, grown old and died in the Valley, but not many children. Food is scarce. A stream runs through the Valley, and they have dammed up a large pond to raise fish. There is an area along the stream where they grow corn. Sometimes they kill birds, a few lizards and snakes. So most children must be killed at birth. Just an allotted number to continue the line.

  Maybe, some say, they will be seen, and people will lower ropes. There is a legend that one man built a flying machine from lizard, snake and fish skins sewn to a frame of light wood. It took him all his life to build it, and he was seventy when the machine was finally finished. It looked like a gigantic dragonfly with sixty-foot wings.

  The currents rising from the Valley on certain hot afternoons, he calculated, could bear the ship aloft. It could carry only one person, and that person must be very light. A boy of thirteen was chosen. The Builder was by then comparatively corpulent, since he was granted extra rations for his work, which they hoped would be their means of deliverance: Esperanza.

  The Builder had a device like a dowser's wand, carefully constructed of the lightest fish bones. He would hold the wand out, testing the air, and the wand would seem to be an extension of his hands, gnarled and twisted by their years of painstaking work. He would shake his head.

  But finally the rod seemed to leap and vibrate and point straight up to the sky beyond the cliffs. He nodded.

  "The time has come, but you must act quickly."

  The boy took his place. No time for goodbyes. The men and women of the Valley gently lifted the huge craft above their heads as high as their arms would reach.

  "¡Ahora!"

  They launched the craft into the air. It sailed forward and seemed about to crash, then the current caught it, wafted it upward, further and further, almost up to the vast overhangs now, as the scales of the fish and snakes and lizards caught the late sun and sparkled with iridescent lights, for the Valley was already in shadow.

  A powerful updraft from the darkening Valley, up, up, riding the wind like a vulture . . . then one wing tore loose and the craft dipped and veered. The other wing broke against the top of the cliff and the boy plummeted down, trailing gossamer rags of the torn fuselage, down, down into darkness.

  That was many years ago. How many, no one knows. There is no point in keeping any sort of time here. Only the old men remember, and no one knows how old the old men are. No one has tried to build such a craft since.

  The Valley is narrow, only six hundred yards across at the widest point, so that there is sun in the Valley for only a few hours each day. They have developed a strain of corn that grows by the light of the moon and the stars, a pale blue corn with a metallic taste, that emits a faint luminescence. The corn is nutritious, but it rots the gums, the teeth fall out, and the corn attacks the palate . . . finally the tongue and gums and lips are eaten away to the bone so that the Corn-Eaters resemble grinning skulls, their contaminated flesh glowing in the dark. Most of us avoid the deadly corn, knowing where it leads as the corn attacks the bones, until the spinal column is eaten through . . . even so, the head still lives for some hours.

  The only thing that keeps us alive is music, and in this the Corners excel. They sing through their rotting gums, a strange, viscous sound, exquisitely sad, a lament of living protoplasm, and they strum delicate instruments of feathers and fish skin and leaves and insect wings . . . the instrume
nts disintegrate under their hands, the delicate flutes split and flutter to the ground. . . .

  At one time we were able to grow chilies, but a blight killed the plants. I think we would all kill ourselves except for the grifa. We have planted it where it will reach all of the sun each day, in the middle of the Valley by the stream. The plants are of a very dark green, almost black, and oily. One whiff on the pipe is enough for hours. Like everything, the grifa is carefully rationed. How is this enforced? There is no need to enforce anything here, where we all know the precise limitation of needs. The fish, the grifa, the nettles, the ants, the lizards and snakes, the moss from the edge of the cliff, the birds, everything is precisely doled out. Those who are working on instruments take precedence and are allotted extra rations. Sometimes a Corner will spend years on an instrument, preparing a single song.