Shadrach in the Furnace

13

He goes to Karakorum with Katya Lindman. Ordinarily he spends his free evenings with Nikki Crowfoot, but not always; they are not husband and wife, there is no monogamy between them. He loves Crowfoot, or believes he does, which amounts to the same thing for him. But he has never been able to escape Lindman for long. Now she is in the ascendant, like baleful Saturn rising into the house of Aquarius. This night will be hers. Nikki is elsewhere, anyway, he knows not where; he is free, accessible, vulnerable.

“You’ll do the dreams with me tonight?”

Why not? Her harsh forceful contralto has maimed his will. He shall allow himself finally to be indoctrinated into the mysteries of dream-death. Her dark eyes sparkle with savage succubal glee as he nods his agreement.

The dream-death pavilion is a wide many-poled tent, black cloth with trim of rusty orange stripes. Over its entrance is mounted a great jutting image of a ram’s head, heavy, glowering, aggressive, spearing the chilly spring air with massive superprepotent coiled homs. Shadrach knows the ram is Amon-Re, lord of fear, king of the sun, patron of dream-death; for this cult is said to be derived from Pharaonic Egypt, secret rites never lost since first they were practiced along the shores of the sluggish, sweltering Nile in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. Within the tent, surprisingly, all is light. The place is ablaze with glowing fixtures from floor to ceiling — hanging lamps, floor-poles, spots, cascading lavalieres of radiance, so that the air burns with a numbing blue-while brightness and all shadows are obliterated. Shadrach, remembering the murky atmosphere of the transtemporalists’ tent, is taken aback by this intense luminosity. But in the realm of Amon-Re a solar brilliance must prevail.

A costumed figure approaches, a slender Oriental female who wears nothing but a twist of white linen around her hips and a huge gilded lioness-mask that rests ponderously on her slim shoulders. Between her dainty breasts hangs a pendant, the crux ansata, in fiery gold. She does not speak; but with expressive gestures she leads Mordecai and Lindman through the crowded tent, past scores of sleepers who lie on fluffy mattresses of white cotton surrounded by high barriers of golden rope strung through ebony stanchions, to a vacant cubicle that is to be theirs. Within the ring of rope lie two thick mattresses side by side, a neatly folded dreaming costume beside each one, and an ornate wooden trunk which, their guide indicates, is for their street clothes. Katya immediately begins to strip, and Shadrach, after a moment, does the same. The guide stands aside, showing no interest in their nakedness. Shadrach feels foolish in his costume — a single handkerchief-sized square of linen to cover his loins and thighs, a beaded belt with which to fasten it around his hips, and two narrow strips of cloth, one green, one blue, which the guide helps him fasten crosswise over his chest.

Katya smiles at him. He feels heavy lust, unleavened by love or even by joy, as she removes her clothes. That dense dark pubic thatch, broad and curling, spilling into the corners of her thighs, exerts a terrible pull: he longs with weird intensity to bury his sex in it, to plunge like a hatchet to her hot unforgiving depths and stay there, motionless. Lindman dons a one-piece loincloth similar to his and a looped-cross pendant identical to the guide’s. These enhance, rather than mask, her nakedness. As always, her body disturbs him: wide-hipped, heavy-rumped, a peasant-woman’s body, the center of gravity quite low, the navel deep, hidden in smooth slabs of belly fat, the breasts full and somewhat elongated. It is a strong and voluptuous body, powerful without being at all athletic, as exaggeratedly female as those primordial Venuses out of the Cro-Magnon caves. What bothers Shadrach most, he suspects, is the contrast between that robustly sexual earth-mother body and those thin, predatory lips, those sharp, threatening teeth. Katya’s mouth is untrue to the archetype that the rest of her body projects, and that contradiction makes her a mystery to Shadrach. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, perhaps.

The lioness-headed one invites them to kneel on their mattresses and hands each of them a polished metal talisman. It seems at first to be no more than a mirror, a bright blank planchet with quasi-Egyptian motifs around its rim, small engravings of the Horushawk, serpents, scorpions, scarabs, bees, the ibis of Thoth, interspersed with tiny portentous-looking hieroglyphs; but as he stares Shadrach begins to perceive a dizzying pattern of almost invisible dotted lines spiraling around the middle of the amulet; these lines, he realizes, may be seen only when the angle at which he holds the talisman in relation to a certain brilliant lamp over his head is just right; and, by moving the device ever so slightly, he can make the lines appear to move, to swirl in a counterclockwise eddy, to create a vortex—

—sucking him toward the center of the disk—

So they work by hypnotism here rather than by drugs, he thinks, feeling smug, scientific, Shadrach the scholar, the detached observer of all human phenomena, and then he feels an irresistible tug, he finds himself caught, drawn helplessly inward, a mere speck blown on the cosmic winds, a mote, a phantasm—

—one moment kneeling here admiring the cleverness of the mechanism and a moment later gripped, held, pulled, altogether incapable of objective considerations, animula vagula blandula hospes comesque corporis—

As he goes under, the priestess, for so he must think of her, begins a rhythmic chant, fragmentary and elusive, a mingling of English words and Mongol and bits of what might well be Pharaonic Egyptian, invocations of Set, Hathor, Isis, Anubis, Bast. Figures out of myth surround him in the sudden shadows, the hawk-headed god, the great jackal, the dog-faced ape, the vast clicking scatabaeus, desiccated deities exchanging knowing comments in opaque tongues, nodding, pointing. Here is Father Amon, bright as solar fire, turbulent as the skin of the sun, beckoning to him. Here is the beast with no face, radiating streams of siarflame. Here is the dwarf-god, the buffoon, the protector of the dead, capering and guffawing. Here is the goddess with a woman’s body and the heads of three snakes. The gods dance, laugh, pass water, spit, weep, clap hands. Still the priestess chants. Her words, chasing one another round and round, seize and control him. He can barely comprehend anything any longer, all structures having dissolved and become formless, but yet he is remotely aware that he is being programmed, being propelled, being given by this slim naked yellow girl who speaks in impassive sing-song certain attitudes toward death and life that will shape his experience in the hours just ahead. She has him, she leads him, she guides and aims him as he tosses on the eschatological breeze.

He is being pulled apart. Something is gently and painlessly severing him from himself. He has never fell anything like this before, not in the tent of the transtemporalists, not when taking any of the traditional psychedelics, not on kot, not on yipka: this is new, this is unique, a shedding of mass, a dropping away of the flesh, a liberation into weightlessness. He knows he is—

—dying?—

Yes, dying. that’s the commodity offered here, death, the actual experience of departing from life, of having life depart from oneself. He can no longer feel his body. He is beyond all exterior sensation. This is the true death, that ultimate sundering toward which his life has moved throughout all its days; no simulation, no hypnotic trick, but real and actual death, the going-forth of Shadrach Mordecai. Of course, on a deeper level he knows it is only a dream, a night’s amusement purchased for sport; but under that awareness lies the realization that he may be dreaming that he is dreaming, dreaming the talisman and the tent and the lioness-girl, that he may really have fallen through the illusion of an illusion and really is dying here tonight. It does not matter.

How easy dying is! There is a cool moist gray mist about him, and everything dissolves in it, Anubis and Thoth, Katya and the priestess, the tent, the amulet, Shadrach himself, invaded and interpenetrated by the grayness until he is part of it. He floats toward the center of the void. Is this what Genghis Mao fears so much? To be a balloon and nothing but a balloon, so much helium surrounded by a nonexistent skin, to put aside all responsibility and, liberated wholly, to float and float? Genghis Mao is so heavy. He carries so much weight. It may be hard to relinquish that. Not for Shadrach. He passes through the center and emerges on the far side, congealing nicely out of the mist and resuming his human form. He is altogether naked now, not even a scrap at the waist. Katya, naked also, stands beside him. At their feet lie their discarded bodies, relaxed, limp, seemingly asleep, even giving the appearance of slow rhythmic breathing, but not so: they are actually dead, truly and really dead. Shadrach Mordecai beholds his own corpse. “How quiet it is here,” Katya says. “And clean. They’ve washed the world for us.”

“Where shall we go?”

“Anywhere.”

“The circus? The bullfight? The marketplace? Anywhere?”

“Anywhere,” Shadrach says. “Yes. Let’s go anywhere.”

Effortlessly they float into the world. The lioness waves farewell. The air is mild and balmy. The trees are in bloom, fireflowers, little cups of flame spouting at the tips of the branches; they break loose and drift down, swirl about, approach them, touch them, sink sweetly into their bodies. Shadrach watches the passage of a blazing red blossom through Katya’s breastbone; it emerges between her shoulders, falls lightly to the ground, goes to seed, sprouts. A skinny sapling rises and bursts into flaming flower. They laugh like children. Together they stride across the continent. The sands of the Gobi sparkle. The Great Wall stretches before them, a wriggling stone serpent humping its back.

“Why, it’s Nigger Jim and Little Nell!” cries Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, who stands atop the Wall. He does a little dance of joy, doffing his silken black skullcap, letting his long elaborate pigtails wave about.

“Chop-chop,” Shadrach says. “Kung po chi ding!”

“Which way to the egress?” Katya asks.

“There,” says the First Emperor. “Past the chains, over the spikes.”

They go through the gate. On the far side of the Great Wall are flooded rice paddies glittering in rosy sunlight. Women in black pajamas and broad coolie hats move slowly through ankle-deep water, stooping, planting, stooping, planting. Invisible chorus off screen. Swelling crescendo of celestial sound. Katya scoops rich yellow mud and hurls it at him. Glop! He throws mud at her. Glip! They plaster each other with it and embrace, slippery and wriggling. What sweet slime! They laugh; they romp; they tumble and topple, landing in the rice paddy with a splash, and the Chinese women dance around them. Huang! Ho! Lindman legs grasp his hips. Thighs like clamps. She reaches for him. They couple to the mud like rutting buffalo. Gripping one another, rolling over and over. Snorting. Slapping flesh. Wallowing in the primeval ooze. Very gratifying. Nostalgia for the mud. Belly to belly. He does not perceive his rigid organ as anything that particularly belongs to him, but rather as something shared, an independent connecting rod that passes back and forth in swift reciprocations between their clasped bodies. Without reaching a climax they rise, bathe, move on to New York. A hot wind blows through this city of sky-stabbing towers. Confetti showers down upon them; it stings, it burns. Cheers of the inhabitants. Everyone has organ-rot here, but it is accepted; it causes no alarm. The bodies of the New Yorkers are transparent, and Shadrach sees the red lesions within, the zones of corruption and decay, the eruptions and erosions and suppurations of intestines, lungs, vascular tissue, peritoneum, pericardium, spleen, liver, pancreas. The disease announces itself in radiating waves of low-spectrum electromagnetic pulsations, hammering dully at his soul, red red red. These people are full of holes from fetlock to gunwale and yet they are happy, as why should they not be? Shadrach and Katya do a buck-and-wing down Fifth Avenue. Shadrach’s skin is white. His lips are thin. His hair is straight and long; it blows across his face, momentarily blinding him, and when he clears it he sees that Katya now is black. Flat broad flanged nose, splendid steatopygous ass, yards of chocolate skin. Ruby lips, sweeter than wine. “Poon!” she cries.

“Tang!” he replies. “Hot!”

“Cha!”

They dance on swords. They dance on pineapples. He sells her into slavery and redeems her with his first-born. “Are we dead?” he asks her.

“Really and truly dead?”

“Is it supposed to be this much fun?”

“Are you having fun?” she asks.

They are in Mexico. Frangipani, flamboyans. It is spring: the cacti are in bloom. Towering spiny green poles topped by crazy clusters of fragrant yellow petals. Loops and whorls of thotni-ness exploding in gaudy firecracker bursts of red and white. They sleepwalk through the prickly pears. They somnambulate among the pitahayas. The pace is frantic but restful. Often they make love. He could waltz all night. Crossing the Pyrenees, they meet Pancho Sanchez, squat and greasy, who offers them green wine out of a leather bota and giggles shrilly when they spill it on themselves. Pancho licks wine from Katya’s breasts. She gives him a merry shove and he somersaults into Andorra. They follow. Commemorative coins of high denomination are struck in their honor by the adoring populace. “I thought death would be more serious,” Shadrach says.

“It is.”

Dead, they can go anywhere, and they do. But the journey is an empty one and the food at the feast is mere spun air, less sweet than cotton candy. He wishes for more substance and the servants bring him stones. He is black again, and so is Genghis Mao, enthroned in a seat of glistening jade ten meters overhead. Ficifolia is black, Buckmaster, Avogadro, Nikki Crowfoot; Mangu is the blackest of all; but the black of their skins is not Negro-black, not African-black, it is black-black, ebony-black, the color of a dark closet, the color of the air between the worlds. Black as the pit. They look like beings from some other galaxy. Shadrach goes among them, slapping palms, touching elbows. They speak nigger-Mongol to one another, they laugh and sing, they shuffle and shake. Ficifolia is on guitar, Buckmaster on Jew’s harp, Avogadro on banjo; Shadrach plays the bongos, Katya the tambourine.

“It isn’t really this good,” Shadrach tells Katya. “We’re fooling ourselves.”

“It has its points.”

“I can’t help feeling suspicious.”

“Even dead you can’t really let yourself go, can you?”

She takes him by the wrist and pulls him along with her, through a desert of sparkling sands, through a river of leaping white water, through a thicket of dense aromatic brambles, into the ocean, the great salty mother, and they lie on their backs, looking up into the sun. He is utterly becalmed.

“How long does it go on?” be asks.

“Forever.”

“When does it end?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Really?”

“Nature of the state. Death is nothing but a continuation of life by different means.”

“I don’t believe it. Dopo la morte, nulla.”

“Then where are we now?”

“Dreaming,” he says.

“Sharing the same dream? Don’t be a fool.”

The snouts of sharks poke through the gentle surface of the sea. Toothy jaws gape. Shadrach practices fearlessness. These beasts can do him no harm. He is, after all, dead. He is also a doctor of medicine. He gulps ocean until the shining sandy floor is laid bare and the sharks, beached, morosely flop about, munching on crabs and starfish. Shadrach laughs. Death is real, death is earnest! Out of the north come frosty winds, roaring down the flanks of the Himalayas. Indefatigably they continue the ascent of the North Cwm, clawing up the rocky face piton by piton, staring constantly at the formidable tapering peak rising like a giant whelk at the head of the valley. They shiver in their parkas; they clutch their ice-axes with weary hands; their oxygen tanks press inexorably against their aching shoulders; and still they climb, now into that giddy realm above seven thousand meters, where only the splay-footed snowmen dare to go. The summit is in sight. Vast crevasses loom, but they have no meaning; where crampons and pitons will not serve, Shadrach and Katya simply launch themselves into great sky-spanning leaps. It is too easy. He had not thought death to be so frivolous a place. Indeed now the sky is darkening, the pace is slowing; he hears solemn music, he experiences a lessening of the frenetic urges that have driven him thus far, he settles into a glacial calm, an Egyptian timelessness. He is one with Ptah and Osiris. He is a twanging Memnon beside the mighty river, waiting out the eons. Katya winks at him and he scowls his disapproval. Death is serious business, not a holiday. Ah, yes, now he has it, the proper pace, He is wholly absorbed by the task of being dead. He does not move. Vital signs nil; intellection nil; he has reached the core of the event. Hic jacet. Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet. Mors omnia solvit. Let there be trombones, please. Missa pro defunctis. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. It is very quiet here. When they speak at all, they speak in Sanskrit, Aramaic, Sumerian, or, of course, Latin. Thoth himself speaks Latin. Doubtless other tongues too, but the gods themselves have whims. How sweet it is to be immobile and to think, if at all, only in languages one no longer understands! Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius. What a good sound that has! If you would, a little more volume on the basset horns:

Gradually the voices diminish. The music becomes subdued and abstract as it fades; the sound of the instruments now is hollow, a mere outline of sound, blank within, the idea of sound rather than sound itself, and the chorus, far away, sings the terrible words of the ancient prayer in a faint, cluttering, rustling, elegant tone, poignant and penetrating:

And then all is silent. Now he is at peace. He has reached the essence of the dream-death, an end to striving, an end to seeking.

The chase is over. He could go, if he wished, to Bangkok, Addis Ababa, San Francisco, Bagdad, Jerusalem, traveling with no more effort than it takes to blink an eye, but there is no reason to go anywhere, for all places have become one, and it is better to remain here, at the still point, motionless, swaddled in the soft sweet woolly fleece of the grave. Consummation est. He is in perfect equilibrium. He is finally, truly dead. He knows he will sleep forever.

Instantly he wakes. His mind is clear, tingling, painfully alert. Passion inflames his penis, passion or else the blind force that comes over men in dreams; at any rate it juts shamelessly against his loincloth, making a little pyramid out of his lap. Katya lies not far away, propped up on her elbows, watching him. Her smile is sphinxlike. He sees her broad fleshy bareback, her firm meaty buttocks, and instantly the tranquility of dream-death is gone; lust rules him. “Let’s go,” he says hoarsely.

“All right.”

“It isn’t far to the lovers’ hospice.”

“No. Not there.” She has already begun to dress. The lioness-guide is across the aisle, greeting newcomers. The brightness of the air leaves Shadrach dazzled. Anubis and Thoth still lurk somewhere nearby, he is convinced. He struggles to regain that vanished equilibrium, to find his way back to the still point, but he knows it will take many more dream-death sessions before he can reach that calm place on his own.

“Where?” he says.

“At the tower. I hate making love in rented rooms. Didn’t you know that?”

So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that’s the lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he says, “Were you really there?”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when we went to Mexico.”

“That was your dream,” she says. “I was having other dreams.”

“Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you beside me.”

“The dreams always seem that way.”

“But I’m surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even.”

“Is that how it was for you?”

“Until the end,” he says. “It got solemn then. When things grew calm. But before then—”

“Frivolous?”

“Very frivolous, Katya.”

“For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness.”

“Is it different for everybody?”

“Of course,” she says. “What did you think?”

“Oh.”

“You thought, when you met me in your dream, that I was actually there, talking with you, sharing your experiences?”

“I confess that I did.”

“No. I wasn’t there.”

“No. I suppose not.” He laughs. “All right. I wasn’t thinking. For you it was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about me?”

“Nothing, Shadrach.”

“Really?”

“Nothing at all.”

“We don’t express something about our inner selves in the dreams we choose for ourselves?”

“No,” she says.

“How can you be so sure?”

“The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don’t know more than that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad outlines. The tone.”

“And we have no choice about the content?”

“Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But still — still—”

“Is your dream always the same?”

“In content? In tone?”

“Tone.”

“The dream is always different, ” Katya says. “And yet the flavor is the same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the end.”

“To the still point?”

“You could call it that. Yes. Yes.”

“And the meaning of what I dreamed—”

“No,” she says. “Don’t talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning.”

The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. “Come,” Katya says.

They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot’s, a dark place, three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of Katya’s thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back. But he cannot bring himself to kiss that terrifying mouth. He thinks of the joyous couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue, lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him — it is a maneuver she has clearly practiced often — and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong, above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking. He looks at her and sees her face distorted by the early spasms of ecstasy, nostrils flared, eyes tight shut, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace; then he closes his own eyes and gives himself up fully to their union. An awesome energy courses through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her breasts and joins her in the final climax.

Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of tears.

“What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head.

“Katya?”

“Nothing. Please.”

“What is it?”

Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, “I’m afraid for you.”

“Afraid? Why? What about?”

She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips. Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child’s mouth. She is frightened.

“Katya?”

“Please, Shadrach.”

“I don’t understand.”

She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.