Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (49 page)

    
So
Raszer, knowing that the price of knowledge was often at least a bellyache,
drank, and at first felt only a warm throbbing in his solar plexus and an
immediate cold in his extremities. Ruthie smiled, drained her cup, and laid
back again.

    
“I made
it through,” said Shams. “I saw the place where everything turns inside out. Na-Koja-Abad.
The landscape inverts, brother, and you’re standing outside yourself, looking
in. Then I got sick, truly sick—some kind of Turkish flu—and had to come back.

    
“But
here’s what I came back with; here’s how the players get it wrong, how your kid
wound up in federal custody and Ruthie’s friends wound up dead. Every river
forks, man. Everything in the universe is a fuckin’ dichotomy. Nothing is one.
If there ever was a One, it existed just long enough to blow the seeds off the
dandelion, and all that’s left is a trace of breath. Monotheism is bullshit.
But they don’t tell us that.

    
“So
you’re out there, your feet covered with blisters and your tongue swollen from
thirst, but you don’t care ’cause you’ve got the world inside you; you’re going
to God. You’re on the fuckin’ yellow brick road and you can see the Emerald
City. And then you come to a fork. And at the fork, there’s a sign that points
left and right. The left arrow says P
ath of
A
ll
,
and the right one says P
ath of
N
othing
, and
you say,
What the fuck
?

    
“
One last riddle to solve?
Bullshit
, you say.
You can’t
fool me. I know God is both all and nothing.
I know God is One
. But you can’t just fuckin’ stand there—you have
to make a choice—so you drop to your knees and pray for gnosis. You call on
God, and God rises up from the rocks like a grinnin’ harvest moon and his light
shines down on
both roads
.

    
“So you
smile and you’re about to toss a coin, figuring it’s all good, when the man in
the black robe appears on the right fork and says, ‘Welcome home, pilgrim.’ Maybe
he offers you water; maybe he’s set it up so he saves your life. You look up to
God for guidance but God just shines on. Because,
rafiq
, God doesn’t make choices.
We do
. The Almighty doesn’t care if we kill or steal.
We do
.
God didn’t make the rules.
We
did
.
So we have to choose the road
that allows us to rule ourselves in God’s name
.”

    
In the silence that followed, Raszer noticed that
his fingertips had grown numb. The interior of the yurt seemed larger and the
distance between its inhabitants greater, as if space itself had expanded.
Cures warts, my ass
, he thought. The
brew was both psychoactive and mildly toxic, like all shamanic cocktails. Smoke
and steam poured through the yurt’s aperture, where the wind took it and
exposed clear black sky and the three stars on Orion’s belt. Raszer felt
faintly nauseous and laid back on a cushion to regain his equilibrium. The
stars were rushing away, and the fire was not enough to warm him.

    
Go with it
, he reminded himself, as he
always had to.

    
“Does
anybody ever choose the other road?” asked Ruthie, from a distance.

    
“Sure,
they do, sweetheart,” answered Shams. “But only if they’ve been oriented to it.
Only if they know that in this world, there really is a choice.”

    
“What
about you, Shams?” Raszer asked. “What was your choice?”

    
“Like I
said, man, I got sick. I turned back. I don’t flatter myself, though.”

    
“And the
players who take the left fork . . . what happens to them?”

    
“They
transcend the game, man. They become a sort of Gauntlet VFW. They call
themselves the Fedeli d’Amore. They guard the path, offer the pilgrims comfort.
But they don’t tell you what to do, and once you’ve passed, you’re on your
own.”

    
“You
said you came down with a
Turkish
flu,” said Raszer. “Does that mean—”

    
“There’s
more than one path in more than one country,” said Shams, “but I’m betting the
Urfa route through southern Turkey’s the one you want. There’s a pilgrims’
hostel in Harran—south of Sanliurfa, where Abraham lived and Jesus preached.
That’s the part of Turkey that’s more Syrian than Turkish and more Kurdish than
Syrian. The trekkers have passed through there for years. It used to be run by
the Franciscans. Now it’s all Gauntlet vets—the Fedeli. If anybody’s got a
treasure map, they do. They run it like a wilderness outfitter—but that’s just
the front. You gotta ask the right questions.”

    
“Such
as?” Raszer queried.

    
“What is
expected of me?” Shams replied. “Or try this ditty:
Do you know the way to El Mirai
?”
He sang it à la Dionne Warwick.

    
“El Mirai?”

    
“I’m
guessing that’s where you’ll find her. I can’t say more.”

    
“Why’s
that?” Raszer asked.

    
“Words
fail here, brother. Action speaks. But if you want to get in the game . . . ”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer. “I think I understand. But tell me this . . . ”

    
Raszer
was now fully supine, as were Shams and Ruthie. Splayed out around the hearth.
The broth had leveled them. The effect, it seemed to Raszer, was a little like
that of
Salvia divinorum
: mind
receptive, reeling; body in a state of near paralysis.

    
“ . . .
The man on the right fork,” Raszer continued, more aware of his tongue than
usual. “What does he offer?”

    
“Perfect
order in exchange for perfect chaos,” said Shams, chuckling darkly.

    
“And
what’s the price of his goods?”

    
“I’ll
tell you what the fuckin’ price is,” said Ruthie, up on an elbow. “Something
nobody should ever have to pay. One day, just before I got my ass hauled back
to Taos for good, Henry asks me to take a walk in the canyon, back there behind
Johnny’s trailer. By this time, me ’n Henry had been together for a while and,
far as I know, Johnny was doin’ some mindfuck on my kid sister while he banged
that bitch-whore Layla. Henry’d been sick for a few days. Just disappeared
somewhere, but it wasn’t the first time, so I let it go. But now he’s actin’
even weirder than usual and walkin’ like a cripple, so I ask him what’s wrong.

    
“He says
he wants to tell me, but he’s afraid I’ll reject him. I told him I’d never do
that. So he says these goons came to him and Johnny after they found out that
Johnny raked a little extra for himself on that gun deal. They’re like, ‘How
can we trust you guys for the big jobs? If you can cheat us, you can cheat the
Old Man. It happens again, we’ll put ferrets up your ass and let them eat their
way out through your intestines.’

    
“So now
they want a show of loyalty. Something precious, they say, ‘so we can assure
the Old Man you’re
fid-ah-ee
.’
Fidai
—that’s what they called
themselves. Johnny says whaddayou want, and they say they want
me
to be one of their export whores.
Johnny turns to Henry and Henry says, ‘Fuck no’ and Johnny says, ‘No fuckin’
way.’ They put Johnny against the wall, and they’re all methed up, ’n they say,
‘
Okay,
rafiq,
we’ll take your eye, then. No one reaches El Mirai without sacrifice
.’
And they put a knife to Johnny’s eye
and they’re gonna do it . . . except that Henry yells, ‘No. I’ll give you what
you want. Make me a servant of the master. Make me a virgin.’

    
“And
they heated the knife with a blowtorch and tied him down on the rocks behind
the trailer and did it right there. They castrated him and burned the wound
shut and gave me his balls in a velvet sack. Henry loved me that much, he loved
Johnny that much, and Johnny saw it go down and it tore him up for weeks, and
that was when he decided they wouldn’t get what they
really
wanted: my virgin sister. But they did, didn’t they?”

    
“Christ,”
Raszer muttered.

    
“Harsh,”
said Shams. “That boy didn’t need balls. He had heart.”

    
“So
Aquino was wrong,” Raszer thought out loud. “It didn’t happen in Iraq. It
happened here.” He rolled onto his side and looked at Ruthie through the smoke.
“What did Henry mean, ‘Make me a servant of the master’?”

    
“Some of
the Witness honchos—the top guys, the anointed ones—they have themselves fixed.
They call it becoming a servant of the master. It’s a big secret, like
everything else about the JWs. Henry used to talk about doing it. He said it’d
free his mind. That church got inside him more than he knew—it gets inside of
everybody.”

    
“Some
men make eunuchs of themselves,” said Raszer, quoting scripture.

    
“What’s
that?” said Ruthie.

    
“I guess
this accounts for Amos Leach,” Raszer mused.

    
“That
creep,” Ruthie spat. “He screwed up Henry good. Emmett Parrish, too. Henry
never squealed, but the theocratic council finally had Amos fixed to stop it.”

    
Raszer
turned toward his host’s shadowed face. “Something here doesn’t square, Shams.
These assassins . . . the ‘Old Man’ . . . your guy in the black robe. From the
MO, you’d think we were looking at a revival of the old Ismaili cult. But the
Ismailis weren’t thugs. Even the crusaders praised their integrity. The
Templars adopted parts of their doctrine. When they struck, they killed, and
always for strategic purpose. They didn’t torture, they didn’t recruit outside
the faith, and they didn’t kidnap kids.”

    
“Just
because it calls itself a duck,” said Shams quietly, “doesn’t mean it is,
right? You gotta listen for the quack. The ‘Christian Coalition’ isn’t really
so Christian, is it?

    
 
“Like I said, every river forks. Whatever’s
left of the true Ismailis, they’re in India, or burrowed in with the Sufis or
the Druze or the Yezidis. But there’s always the diseased offshoot that gets
left behind for dead in the wasteland. One day, a little rain falls, and the
shoot digs roots and buds. Often as not, my brother, it’s the bastard who
claims the crown . . . and the family name.”

    
“So
we’re dealing with an Islamic fraud,” said Raszer.

    
“We’re
dealing with the right fork,” said Shams, rising to a squat. “Be it Islamic or
Christian or whatever. But you need to think on this before you jump in. Let
that brew seep in.” He moved to the fire and took a bundle of sage and local
herbs, tied with hemp, from a sack hanging from the tripod.

    
“Drift
for a while,” he whispered. “Drift . . . ” Shams waved the little sachet over
the coals until it caught fire, then blew it to hot ash, sending the aromatic
smoke in their direction. “
La ilaha illa
Allah . . . La ilaha illa Allah . . .
” he chanted, his voice growing more
distant with each recitation of the Shahadah.
He stood and walked the perimeter of the yurt on his tiptoes,
fanning the sage. To the right . . . to the left . . . to the right . . . to
the left.

    
Very
soon, he was seen no more.

    
“Ruthie?”
Raszer heard himself say. Had he said it in a dream? He saw the prone form of a
woman against a red background and geometrical designs, but could not seem to
bring her into focus. There was smoke in the air. Or was it just the narcotic
fog of sleep? The wind made assault after assault on the yurt’s felt walls, but
what yields will not fall.

    
I am safe in here
, he thought.

    
He
looked down at his body and it was small, tapered. The air around him was
grainy. His jaw was sore.

    
At the
clucking of a hen, he looked right, and there was Shams, three feet in the air,
the Mongolian shepherd’s cap pulled down over his eyes. A dog growled, and
there again was Shams, spread-eagled against the vaulting canvas roof, his arms
in cruciform, his eyes rolled back to the whites.

    
A small
bell rang, and Shams sat against the upright on the opposite side of the yurt,
tossing a pomegranate in the air. Raszer felt sure that Shams was in all three
places at once, but because he could not see all three places at once, his
certitude turned to anxiety. His eyes began to burn, then his lungs, and a
moment later, he realized that the yurt was on fire.

    
“Ruthie!”
he called again, much louder. “Shams!”

    
A
clawlike hand gripped his shoulder. Raszer wheeled around and staggered.
“Shams?” The round head was hairless on top without its cap. Shams pushed him
to the floor and said, “Down, brother, down. The Devil’s at play.” Ruthie
fumbled with the yurt’s door, in a panic made clumsy by sleep and sorcery.
Shams reached up and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her into their huddle on
the floor. “Don’t you dare, precious,” he said. “Don’t let in what’s out
there.” He motioned toward the heavens. The fire was burning from the roof
down. He sniffed and scowled. “Must be ethyl alcohol,” he said. “Nothing else
would light up that canvas. Mother
fuckers!
”