“Ah,” gasped Jack. “It’s that song…”
“I possess the keys of hell and death,” the young man sang. “I will give you the morning star. The end of the end. The end of the end…”
He was dressed like a temple dancer. Face ash white, lips and eyes outlined in scarlet, his blond hair all but hidden beneath a pagodalike headdress. His clothes were heavy with jewels and long fringes of brocade. Flowering vines swept across his body as he swayed and spun, crouched and leapt across what seemed a vertiginous height. Beneath his unshod feet clouds and sea churned like dust, and the ragged peaks of mountains. Jack watched raptly. There was something eerie, yet self-consciously hyperbolic, about the dancing figure which was at odds with the doomy music—that was merely (though gorgeously) anthemic, an irresistible pop coda to the century.
But the dancing boy—he reminded Jack of the Hindi films Leonard dragged him to when they were in Bombay in the late seventies and early eighties, bizarre epics where blue-skinned actors played gods who raped then embraced weeping ecstatic women, only to be interrupted by waves of sari-clad Busby Berkeley chorines on acid, all singing, all dancing, all for the greater glory of the avatars of Vishnu…
And that, too, was oddly familiar.
“… fear the phantoms of the Kali Yuga…”
A shiver of recognition edged up Jack’s spine. He frowned, remembering a coke-fueled evening in 1983. He and Leonard and one of Bollywood’s rising film stars, a golden-skinned man named Ashok Sonerwalla, sat on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Khambhat, talking long into the night and drinking a beverage the color of Pepto-Bismol. Even now Jack recalled their conversation very clearly, because Leonard (much impressed by My Dinner with Andre) had videotaped the entire evening. During the months of editing that followed, Jack was forced to watch an endless loop of his intoxicated self drooling over the actor.
Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—
“That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many yugas, of course. But this is the most evil yuga, this one we are in right now.”
He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each yuga has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always very exciting!”
Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences samadhi—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a lot of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the future, so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”
Jack’s memory of that particular night was of divine balance being restored somewhere within Ashok’s spacious Bhaunagar bedroom. A change in the music brought his attention back to the TV screen, the face of the dancing boy in close-up. High rounded cheekbones, strong jaw, cleft chin, strands of damp blond hair falling across his forehead. A distinctly occidental face—whatever it possessed of Eastern Mystery had been drawn there with makeup and computer theurgy. In the blue-white hollow of his throat a silver crucifix bobbed from a silver chain, the camera fixing for an instant upon a rapturous face that mirrored the boy’s own. The music pulsed and clanged. What was it about this song, that voice, the—
“No ! NO!—It’s not him! IT’S NOT HIM!”
Jack saw Marzana staggering to her feet.
“IT’S NOT HIM! IT’S NOT HIM! THEY DID SOMETHING! IT’S NOT—”
“Marzana!” Jack cried, aghast. “Marzana, what is it? Who—” He lunged to grab her by the shoulders. “Marzana!”
“THEY DID IT! THAT BITCH DID IT! THEY FUCKING—”
“Marz!”
Her screams gave way to hysterical crying, the girl kicking at him though her eyes never left the screen. In a panic Jack yelled at her to be quiet and tried to drag her from the room. But she was too strong for him, and so big now. With an explosive gasp she rammed her elbow into his stomach. Jack went reeling backward as the girl swept past him, stumbled to her knees, and began to wail.
“No, oh no, he’s gone, he’s GONE—”
Jack groaned and sat up. The girl knelt with her back to him, swaying as she moaned something he couldn’t understand—it sounded like rippp, rippp. Onscreen the music reached its crescendo, screeching feedback and the sound of waves and gongs, the dancer pivoting upon one foot with hands outstretched as though making an offering, or accepting one. From his eyes emerged sparks of gold and emerald that darted about him, hummingbird-like, and then shaped themselves into myriad glittering pyramids, each with a luminous corona. The pyramids arrayed themselves above the boy’s head, light streaming down to envelop him until, with a final peal of gongs, he disappeared. There was a flash, the same whorls of green and violet as before, with the ghostly outline of an eye peering upward through the glimmering. In the screen’s corner black letters faded into view.
Jack leaned forward to put his arms around Marzana’s shaking form. His eyes remained fixed on the glittering corporate logo that appeared at the end of the line of block letters—
A golden pyramid surmounted by the sun, a phantom gryphon shimmering within its rays.
PART THREE
Regrets Only
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Into the Mystic
They made preparations for leaving.
Diana began saving vegetables for greasing the launching ways. Nothing from her garden ever went to waste—if it wasn’t cooked, or baked, or dried, or canned, it was fed to the chickens or the pigs, or put into compost—but the pigs’ rations were cut back, the mealy ends of potatoes and zucchini and pockmarked eggplants put into a new bin marked WENDAMEEN.
And the ways itself was completed. It stretched twenty-seven feet from shore to waterline, then extended several more yards into the bay, where the wooden struts and pallets were anchored with lengths of automobile chain. Martin spent two days trying to figure out how to weight the cradle he’d designed for the boat. He finally pillaged his own car, a Toyota Camry whose engine he and Trip removed and which Trip then fastened with more chain to the wooden cradle. But that didn’t seem like it would be enough. So he went to Adele Grose and received permission to gut her car, a 1956 Cadillac that hadn’t run for decades. When that still didn’t seem enough weight, he and Trip trussed the entire structure with more automotive chains and the doors from the Camry.