Nicholas sat with a moist teabag between his jaws as he waited for the pharmacy delivery boy to ring the doorbell.
The doorbell rang at last.
Still woozy from the pain, Nicholas made his way to the door and opened it. A girl stood there with heavy black hair, hair so black that the coils of it seemed almost blue. She wore an absolutely white uniform. Around her neck he saw a gold necklace, with a gold fish suspended between links of golden chain. Fascinated, staring at the necklace in a hypnoidal twilight state, Nicholas could not speak.
"Eight forty-two," the girl said. Nicholas, as he handed her a ten, said, "What - is that necklace?"
"An ancient sign," the girl said, raising her left hand to point to the golden fish. "Used by the early Christians."
He stood holding the bag of medication, watching her go. He was still there when Rachel came to tap him and rouse him to full consciousness.
The medication helped the pain, and in a few days Nicholas seemed okay. But he was, of course, under the weather from the oral surgery and stayed in bed resting.
The buzz saws, mercifully, were now gone; he had not seen them since visiting Dr Kosh.
"I have a favor to ask," he said to Rachel one day as she was getting ready to go shop at Alpha Beta. "Could you get me a few votive candles and a glass candleholder? The candleholder has to be white and the candles have to be white."
"What's a votive candle?" Rachel asked, puzzled.
"One of those little short fat candles," Nicholas said. "Like you see burning in Catholic churches."
"Why do you want them?"
Truthfully, Nicholas said, "I don't know. For - I guess healing. I need to get well." He was calmer these days, but very weak from the surgery. Anyhow, he seemed unfrightened; the fear and disorientation, the franticness we had seen on his face, was at last gone.
"How's your eyesight?" I asked him that night when I dropped over.
"Fine." Nicholas lay on his back in his bed, fully dressed; on the table beside him a white votive candle burned.
After I had shut the bedroom door Nicholas said, staring at the ceiling, "Phil, I really heard the radio saying that. „Nick the prick, Nick the prick" over and over again." I was the only one he had told about it. "And I know," he said, "I know equally that it could not have been saying that. I can still hear the voice in my mind. Speaking very slowly, very insistently. Like when someone is trying to program you. You understand? Programming me to die. A demon voice. It wasn't human. I wonder how many times I've heard it in my sleep and not remembered it. If I hadn't had insomnia - "
"Like you say,"I said,"it isn't possible."
"There are technical possibilities. They do exist. Such -as electronic signal override, by a small gain transmitter located very nearby, say in the next apartment. That way it wouldn't affect any other receivers. Just mine. Or from a satellite passing overhead."
"A what?"
"There's a lot of illicit satellite override of US radio and TV stations," Nicholas said, "Usually the material is subliminal. I must have somehow transliminated it, which I wasn't supposed to do. They fouled up somehow in their transmission. It sure as hell woke me thoroughly up, and that's exactly what it was not supposed to do."
"Who'd do that?"
Nicholas said, "I don't know. I have no theory. Some branch of the government, I suppose. Or the Soviets. There are a lot of secret Soviet transmitters overhead these days, beaming down to populated areas like this. Broadcasting filth and garbage and kinky suggestions, God knows what."
"But your name."
"Maybe everyone listening heard his own name," Nicholas said. „Pete, you beat your meat." Or, „Mike, you're a dike." I don't know. I'm exhausted from trying to figure it out." He pointed to the slightly flickering votive candle.
"So that's why you want that burning all the time," I said, understanding. "To drive -"
"To keep me sane," Nicholas interrupted.
"Nick," I said, "you're going to come out of this just fine. I have a theory. The whirling pinwheels of fire, they were due to poisons, toxins, from your infected wisdom tooth. So was what you heard on the radio. You were highly toxic without knowing it. Now that the oral surgery's done, you'll cease to be toxic and be okay. That's why you're better already."
"Except," he said, "what about the golden necklace the girl wore? And what she said?"
"How does that fit in?"
Nicholas said, "I've been expecting her at the door all my life. I recognized her when I saw her. There she was, and wearing what I knew she'd be wearing. I had to ask her what it was; there was no way I could keep from it. Phil, I was programmed to ask that question. It was my destiny."
"But that wasn't bad, like the buzz saws and what you heard from the radio."
"No," Nick agreed. "That was the most important experience I ever had, like a glimpse of - "He was silent for a time. "You don't know what it's like to wait year after year, wondering if it, if she, is ever going to show up, and at the same time knowing she is. Eventually. And then when you least expect it, but when you need it most - " He smiled up at me.
Most of his stress had departed, but, he told me, he still saw colors at night. Not the jagged pinwheels but rather vague patches, simply drifting. The colors seemed to change according to his thoughts; there was a direct connection. When he thought, in the long hypnagogic states preceding sleep, about erotic topics, the patches of fog-like color turned red. Once he thought he saw Aphrodite, naked and lovely and huge-breasted. When he thought about holy topics, the colored patches turned pure pale white.
It remined me of what I'd read in the Tibetan "Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol existence after death occurs. The soul moves along encountering different-colored lights; each color represents a different kind of womb, a different type of rebirth. It is the job of the departed soul to avoid all bad wombs and come at last to the clear white light. I decided not to tell Nicholas this; he was screwed-up enough already.
"Phil," he said to me, "as I move along through these different-colored patches of light, I feel - it's very strange. I feel as if I'm dying. Maybe the oral surgery did something fatal to me. But I'm not scared. It seems... you know: natural." It was anything but that. "You are on strange trips, Nick," I said. He nodded. "But something is happening. Something good. I think I'm past the worst part. The radio voice mocking me and insulting me in that gross way, and the whirling jagged buzz saws that were nearly blinding me -that was the worst part. I feel better with this candle." He pointed to the small narrow candle flame beside his bed. "It's strange ... I wasn't even sure what the word „votive" meant; I don't remember ever using it before. It just came to me, as the proper word. This was the kind of holy candle I wanted, and I knew how to ask for it."
"When are you going back to work?" I said. "Monday. Officially I'm on leave, on my own time. Not on sick leave any longer. It was awful to be nearly blind, and so goddamn dizzy. I was afraid it would last forever. But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign - you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600 B.C., they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they'd tell him, „You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth."" It's interesting: „Of starry heaven.""
"And the person would remember?"
"He was supposed to. I don't know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it. Anamnesis, it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block. There's a Christian anamnesis, too: memory of Christ, of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion; in Christian anamnesis those events are remembered in the same way, as a real memory. It's the sacred inner miracle of Christian worship; it's what the bread and wine cause, „Do this in remembrance of me," and you do it, and you remember Jesus all at once. As if you had known him but had forgotten. The bread and wine, partaking of them, bring it back."