She managed to keep ahead of him. Mostly because he wanted to give her time to cool off. As they passed a narrow side alley he pulled abreast of her, taking her arm gently, and she allowed him to draw her into its shadowed coolness. “All it takes is believing, Jerry! Is that so much to ask?”
“Believe,” he snapped, the instant fury that always lay beneath the surface of his charm boiling up. “Believe. The same stupid mealy-mouth crap they tell the rednecks in the boondocks. Believe in this, and believe in that, and have faith, and holy holy you’ll get your ass saved. Well, I don’t believe.”
“Then how can any woman believe in you?”
It was more than anger that forced the words from him. It was a helplessness that translated itself into cynical ruthlessness. “I’d say that was her problem. “
She pulled her arm free and, turning without really seeing where she was going, she plunged down the alley. Down a flight of dim steps, and on again, a lower level of the same alley. “Berta!” he called after her.
Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.
A shop in a dingy back alley in a seedy border town more noted for street-corner whores than for wrinkled and leathery tellers-of-the-future who sold Huaraches and Serapes in their spare time. But he had quickly followed her, trying to find a way out of his own inarticulateness, to settle the senseless quarrel they were having and salvage this one good thing from a past filled with broken glass. He wanted to tell her his need was not a temporary thing, not a matter of good times only, of transitory bodies reaching and never quite finding one another. He wanted to tell her that he had lost all belief in his world, a world that seemed incapable of bringing to him any richness, any meaning, any vitality. But his words—if they came at all—he knew would come with ill-restrained fury, with anger and sharpness, insulting her, forcing her to walk away as she now walked away.
He had followed her, down the alley.
And the old, wizened, papyrus-tough Mexican had limped out of his shop, bent almost double with age, like a blue-belly lizard, all alertness and cunning, and had offered to tell them of the future.
“No thanks,” Niven had said, catching up to her at that moment.
But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the alley. Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and vileness he averred were necessary for truth and brightness in the visions. A bit of wild dog hair. A strip of flesh from the instep of a drowned child. Three drops of menstrual blood from a whore. The circular sucker from the underside of a polyp’s tentacle. Other things. Unspeakable, nameless, foul-smelling, terrible.
And then, strangely, he had said he would not tell the future of Berta…but of Niven.
There in the fetid closeness of a shop whose dimensions were lost in dusk, the old Mexican said Niven was a man without belief, without faith, without trust, and so was damned; a man doomed and forsaken. He said all the dark and tongueless things Niven had never been able to say of himself. And Niven, in fury, in frenzy brought on by a hurricane of truth, smashed the old man, swung across the little round table with all the strength in his big body, clubbed the old man, and in the same movement swept the strange mixed ingredients from the filthy table, as Berta: screamed—from somewhere far away.
And in that instant, a silent explosion. A force and impact that had hurled him out of himself. In that timeless, breathless instant Niven had been there/not-there. He had somehow inexplicably been moved elsewhere. In a bowl, in a valley, in a land, in a time or place or somewhere facing a minotaur. A creature of mythology, a creature from the past of man’s fables.
Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.
Facing a live minotaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the men that Niven had become. A god without worshippers, this minotaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe.
And in that instant—like the previous instant of truth—Niven was all the men who had forsaken their gods. Who had allowed the world to tell them they were alone; and believed it. Now he had to face one of the lost gods. A god who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.
Down and down and down into the waters of nowhere Niven plunged, all thoughts simply one thought, all memories crashing and jarring, all merged and melded and impinging upon a dense tapestry of seaweed images.
His breath seemed to clog in his throat. His stomach bulged with the amount of water he had swallowed, with the pressure on his temples, with the blackness that deluged him behind his eyes. Niven felt memory depart and consciousness at once returning—and leaving. He was coming back from the past to awareness, only to let it slip away finally as he drowned.
He made feeble swimming motions, overhand movements of arms that had sensation only by recall, not by his own volition. He moved erratically in the water, as thick as gelatin, and his movement toward the bottomless bottom was arrested. He moved upward through the water now, and saw a dim light, far ahead and above him.
An eternity. There. Toward it he struggled, and when he thought it was ended, he reached a ledge. He pulled himself toward it, and the dark water seeped through him till he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls of warm, evil-tasting water.
For a very long time he lay half on the ledge, half in the water, till someone came and pulled him up. Niven lay there on his stomach, learning to live again, while the one who had saved him stood silently waiting. Niven tried to get to his feet, and he was helped. He could not see who the man was, though he could feel a long robe in the dimness, and there was a light, a sort of corona that seemed to come dimly from the man. Then together, with the man supporting him, Niven went away from there, and they climbed for a long while between walls of stone, to the world that was outside.
He stood in the light, and was tired and sad and blinded by things he did not believe. Then the man left him, and as he walked slowly away. Niven recognized the beard and the infinitely sad eyes and the way he was dressed, and even the light.
And Jesus left him, with a sad smile, and Niven stood alone, for another time that was long. and empty.
Once, late that night, he thought he heard the bull-ram horn of Odin, ringing across this dim, shadowed land, but he could not be sure. And once he heard a sound of something passing, and when he opened his eyes to look it was a cat-headed woman, and he thought Bast, and she slipped smoothly away into the darkness without saying a word to him. And toward morning there was a light in the sky that seemed to be a burning chariot, Phaëthon the charioteer. Helios’s burning chariot, but that was probably the effects of the drowning, the hunger, the sorrow. He could not be certain.
So he wandered. And time passed without ever moving. In the land without a name; and his name was Niven; but it was no more important a name than Apollo or Vishnu or Baal, for it was not a name men believed in. It was only the name of a man who had not believed. And if gods cannot be called back, when their names have been known, then how can a man whose name was never known be called back?