Jaspin smiled, nodded. The relief was enormous.
Senhor Papamacer said, “You write books?”
“I was planning to do one.”
“You no write one yet?”
“Shorter pieces. Essays, reviews. For anthropological journals. I haven’t written my book yet.”
“You write a book on tumbondé?”
“No,” he said. “Not now. I thought perhaps I might, but I wouldn’t do it now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jaspin said.
“Ah. Ah. That is truth too.” A long silence again, but not a cold one. Jaspin felt totally at this strange little man’s mercy. He was wholly terrifying, this Senhor Papamacer. At length he said, as though from a great distance, “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come.”
Jaspin made the ritual response. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga.”
Anger flashed in the obsidian eyes. “No, now I mean something other! He will come, I am saying. Soon. We will march north. It will be almost any day, we leave. Ten, fifty thousand of us, I don’t know, a hundred thousand. I will give the word. It is the time of the Seventh Place, Jaspeen. We will go north, California, Oregon, Washington, Canada. To the North Pole. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Truth.”
“Truth, yes.” Senhor Papamacer leaned forward. His eyes were ablaze. “I tell you what you do. You march with me, with Senhora Aglaibahi, with the Inner Host. You write the book of the march. You have the words; you have the learning. Someone must tell the story for those who come after, how it was Papamacer who opened the way for Maguali-ga, who opened the way for Chungirá-He-Will-Come. That is what I want, that you should march beside me and tell what we have achieved. You, Jaspeen. You! We saw you on the hill. We saw the god coming into you. And you have the words, you have the head. You are a professor and also you are of tumbondé. It is the truth. You are our man.”
Jaspin stared.
“Say what you will do,” said Senhor Papamacer. “You refuse?”
“No. No. No. No. I’ll do it. I’ve been committed to the march since July. Truly. You know I’ll be there. You know I’ll write what you want.”
Quietly Senhor Papamacer said, in a voice rich with dark mysteries beyond Jaspin’s comprehension, “I have walked with the true gods, Jaspeen. I know the seven galaxies. These gods are true gods. I close my eyes and they come to me, and now not even when they are closed. You will tell that, the truth.”
“Yes.”
“You have seen the gods yourself?”
“I have seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come. The horns, the block of white stone.”
“In the sky, is what?”
“A red sun from here to here. And over here, a blue sun.”
“It is the truth. You have seen. Not the others?”
“Not the others, no.”
“You will. You will see them all, Jaspeen. As we march, you will see everything, the seven galaxies. And you will write the story.” Senhor Papamacer smiled. “You will tell only the truth. It will be very bad for you if you do not, you understand that? The truth, only the truth. Or else when the gate is open, Jaspeen, I will give you to the gods who serve Chungirá-He-Will-Come, and I will tell them what you have done. You know, not all the gods are kind. You write not truth, I will give you to gods who are not kind. You know that, Jaspeen? You know that? I say it to you: Not all the gods are kind.”
3
Morning rounds, one of the regular chores. Routine was important, a key structural thing, for them and sometimes even for her. Right now especially for her. Go through the dorms, room by room, check all the patients out, see how well they were doing as their minds returned from their morning pick. Cheer them up if she could. Get them to smile a little. It would help their recovery if they’d smile more. Smiling was a known cure for a lot of things: it triggered the outflow of soothing hormones, that little twitch of the facial muscles did, sending all sorts of beneficial stuff shooting into the weary bloodstream.
You ought to smile more often yourself, Elszabet thought.
Room Seven: Ferguson, Menendez, Double Rainbow. She knocked. “May I come in? It’s Dr. Lewis.”
She hovered, waiting. Quiet inside. This time of morning they often didn’t have a lot to say. Well, no one had said she couldn’t come in, right? She put her hand to the plate. Every doorplate in the building was set to accept her print, Bill Waldstein’s, Dan Robinson’s. The door slid back.
Menendez was sitting on the edge of his bed with his eyes closed. There were bonephones glued to his cheeks, and he was moving his head sharply from side to side as if he were listening to some strongly rhythmic music. Across the room, Nick Double Rainbow lay stretched out belly-down on his vivid red Indian blanket, staring at nothing, chin propped up on fists and elbows. Elszabet went over to him, pausing by his bed to activate the privacy screen around it. A crackle of blurry pink light leaped up and turned Double Rainbow’s corner of the room into a private cubicle.
In that moment, just as the screen went shooting up around them, Elszabet felt her mind invaded by a green tendril of fog. Almost as if the energy of the screen had allowed the greenness to get in. Surprise, fear, shock, anger. Something rising out of the floor to skewer her. She caught her breath. Her spine tightened.
No, she thought fiercely. Get the hell out of there. Get. Get. The vagrant greenness went away. Once it was gone Elszabet found it hard to believe that it had been in her just a moment ago, even for an instant. She let her breath out, commanded her back and shoulders to ease up. The Indian didn’t seem to have noticed a thing. Still belly-down, still staring.
“Nick?” she said.
He went on ignoring her.
“Nick, it’s Dr. Lewis.” She touched his shoulder lightly. He jerked as if a hornet had stung him. “Elszabet Lewis. You know me.”
“Yeah,” he said, not looking at her.
“Rough morning?”
Tonelessly he said, “It’s all gone. The whole thing.”
“What is, Nick?”
“The people. The thing that we had. Goddamn, you know we had a thing and it was taken away. Why should that have happened? What the hell reason was there for that?”
So he was on his Vanishing Redman kick again. He was lost in contemplation of the supreme unfairness of it all. You could pick and pick and pick, and somehow you could never pick down far enough to get that stuff out of him. Which was what had dumped him into the Center in the first place: he had come here suffering from deep and abiding despair, the thing that Kierkegaard had termed the sickness unto death, which Kierkegaard said was worse than death itself, and which nowadays was called Gelbard’s syndrome. Gelbard’s syndrome sounded more scientific. Double Rainbow had lost faith in the universe. He thought the whole damn thing was useless and pointless if not actually malevolent. And he wasn’t getting better. There were holes in his memory all over the place now, sure, but the sickness unto death remained, and Elszabet suspected it didn’t have a thing to do with his alleged American Indian heritage but only with the fact that he had been unlucky enough to have been born in the second half of the twenty-first century, when the whole world, exhausted by a hundred fifty years of dumb self-destructive ugliness, was beginning to be overwhelmed by this epidemic of all-purpose despair. Bill Waldstein might actually be right that Double Rainbow wasn’t an Indian at all. It didn’t matter. When you had the sickness unto death, any pretext was enough to drag you down into the pit.
“Nick, do you know who I am?”
“Dr. Lewis.”
“My first name?”
“Elsa—Ezla—”
“Elszabet.”
“That’s it. Yeah.”