The second (and lower) chamber, which I had not visited, was smaller. Its walls were covered in script of various languages. Some of the inscriptions were painted, some incised. A few were very rough scratches, others carved with great skill. Mortlake had me run lights to the “Cave of Scriptures” and got Angela to carry his sleeping bag down there. He told us to amuse ourselves.
Haliburton had provided us with a DVD player and we got through Finding Nemo before we found more primitive ways to amuse ourselves. I was a bit shy in front of the thirty-seven holy men and women, but Angela pointed out that stoned people were usually pretty accepting. After our sweaty play we fell asleep.
Dr. Mortlake prodded me awake with his titanium cane. From our state of undress, he would’ve been an idiot not to know what we were doing. I didn’t wonder about his not caring, but why didn’t we care anymore? Maybe as his quest grew shorter we were preparing for the parting of the ways. His eyes were bright. “Eureka! I have found it. Come!” He led me into the Cave of Scriptures. He moved as fast as a man of seventy. I saw he had filled up notebooks, two dictionaries lay open. One was Sanskrit/English one was Aklo/Latin. Dr. Mortlake adopted a professorial tone. “In Sanskrit there are countless references to a nectar called Amitra or Deathless. The A, which equals not (much as the Greek Alpha is negative as in A-theist) plus Mitra, which means Death. This “‘deathless’ nectar is said to be a by-product of yoga — dripping from the brain into the soulbody complex.”
I nodded. Like I knew or cared.
“You see, I don’t think it’s a myth. I think there was a Deathless Elixir, a secretion not of the mystically prepared human mind, but of an extraterrestrial beast,” he finished.
“You think the Peacock God.”
“Excellent Mr. Livingstone.”
“I came across references to ‘Peacock Milk’ in a very unorthodox Buddhist scripture called the Black Sutra. The god was called Yithra. Or perhaps Yidra. Well I don’t know about ‘God’—the text claims that the asura was captured from a broken sphere of metal. The being wept a clear fluid that the ‘hairy ones’ collected and use to trap evil souls into an eternity of maya. U Pao knew the Yithra’s cult was somewhere in these mountains. He suspected the asura was long dead. He says that in addition to drinking the elixir, a brief spell was needed at a certain time.”
“When did you discover this?”
“I found it out in the ’80s. Then I read a small write-up in Stars and Stripes: ‘Avoiding the Taliban With A Strange Peacock’—the exciting story of Michael Livingstone, your exciting tale of hiding in a small cave with a monstrous idol. Then I inherited my younger brother Frank’s money. Money opens all doors, Mr. Livingstone. I found you, and with the help of these inscriptions I found this.”
Dr. Mortlake walked to the cave wall and tapped it seven times while saying some gibberish: “Zodicare ob zodiramu.” A small section of wall opened. There was a stone nest full of crystal eggs. Actually, they were small bottles shaped like eggs with crystal stoppers. At first, I thought them all empty.
“The story of Aladdin,” said Dr. Mortlake. “There are three eggs left. Three, Mr. Livingstone. Me, Angela and you. We are the deathless. I have millions of dollars and now we have the world enough and time.”
He took the three crystal eggs from the pile of empties.
“The world, Mr. Livingstone, the world.”
He handed me the eggs. “Careful, my friend. I will let you tell her. Tomorrow when the moon and Mercury are in the right place, we will drink the elixir. I will say the words from U Pao’s text. We will live forever.”
I knew he believed. I was pretty damn unsure. Drinking weird liquids that may or may not have come out of an extra-terrestrial’s ass in a remote Himalayan cave did not strike me as a sound basis for one’s eternity. I was ready to bail, and I would take Angela with me. Sure, we would lose out on millions — somewhere in all of this I had begun to see Mortlake’s millions (as well as his woman) as mine. While he had been giving his ecstatic speech, Angela had quietly gotten dressed and descended to the lower chamber. I was about to speak but caught a warning look in her eyes. The next six hours were a special hell of awkward. I could smell her on my body, while I made the MREs for our dinner — I kept trying to read her eyes. Meanwhile Dr. Mortlake went on and on about the falsity of religion — how real immortality was not a spiritual state but a physical one — how our ancestors’ ancestors had encountered other races/entities, and their half-remembered stories became the control structures called religion. How only a few scholars like him had thrown off the blinding superstitions of mankind. How lucky Angela and I were to know him. How we would literally have eternity to thank him for what we were about to do. He laid it on thick and ended our evening by a blasphemous re-telling of the story of the Last Supper. I assumed that it was a not very well encoded story in which Angela was Mary Magdalene and I (of course) was Judas. True to form he fell asleep an hour after the tasteless spaghetti and grainy soy “meatballs.”
While he snored, I implored.
“We’ve got go now. I don’t want what’s in the eggs — and I don’t want to drink it. We should leave now.”
Angela saw it differently. “You don’t understand. He is the smartest human I’ve ever met. If he says the magic juice makes humans live forever, it will make humans live forever. I’m not bailing, you can run if you want. You don’t know him like I know him. I can trust the Peacock Milk.”
“So, you want to live forever with him? Well he probably has enough money for it.”
“No, you idiot, I want to live forever with you. We’re beautiful and fun and we could be wealthy when humans are building domed cities on Venus — if you weren’t a coward. If you were a man I could love.”
That hurt.
“But if we all drink the potion—”
“We won’t all drink it.”
She picked up one of the crystal eggs.
“He doesn’t know what the potion tastes like.”
She pulled at the crystal stopper. It gave a little plunk sound. Then she poured the clear oily liquid on the cave floor. The gray limestone drank it, becoming (no doubt) immortal dust.
“Hand me your canteen.”
I did so. She refilled the empty egg with water. Then she pushed the tiny crystal stopper back into place. She took her big diamond ring and cut an X on the water-holding egg.
“We give him this,” she said. “We will drink the true potions.”
We made love. He snored.
I told myself that he was an ugly, greedy man. That he was fearful and unobservant. That he was not giving the gift of life everlasting to a deserving mankind. That I was getting much more than thirty-three pieces of silver.
The next day I must have checked which egg bore the roughly scratched X at least a dozen times. He handed each of us an egg. He gave me the marked one. But before I could begin some I Love Lucy funny business he said, “I left the scroll I needed in the lower chamber. I’ll be right back.” He laid his egg down and left the room.
Angela said, “See? The gods want us to succeed.”
I wasn’t sure about the idea of gods after yesterday’s lecture, but I quickly switched the eggs.
He crawled back up, holding a short roll of brown parchment.
He was winded from his exertion. When he regained his breath, he said, “I’ll read the spell, then we will drink.” He held up his egg, and for a crazy moment I thought he was checking for the “X.”