Waking the Moon (25 page)

“So—I guess you guys are really like, involved, huh?”

I laughed as I said it, but I knew I sounded lame and jealous. Though probably I couldn’t even have told you what, exactly, I was jealous
of.
Angelica, I suppose, but it was stupid to be jealous of Angelica—like being jealous of the Mona Lisa. And really, what could be better? My two best friends were in love with each other. Only that left
me
somewhere in between, running back and forth like a stupid yappy little dog; because I was in love with both of them.

“Oh, you know Oliver …” She sighed. “I can tell you one thing, though. My father would hate him.”

“How come?”

We started down a wide stairway. “Oh, everything. The drugs, the partying all the time. Just the way he is. Okay, I think the kitchen’s over there—”

We found the kitchen, large and brightly lit and filled with huge gleaming stainless steel stoves and sinks and refrigerators. Small hand-lettered signs admonished everyone to wash their hands and put things back where they’d found them. Balthazar Warnick was nowhere in sight, but Hasel Bright was bent over a sink by the wall, pumping furiously at an old-fashioned hand pump and shouting excitedly as water gushed out.

“Look at this! It’s amazing—” yelled Hasel.

I peered into the deep slate sink, the water sluicing down a small hole in the middle. “Isn’t there running water?”

Hasel looked at me, red-faced and grinning. “Yeah, sure there is, but isn’t this
amazing
? I’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes, and it
never stops
!
”

I laughed. “Wow. That really is great, Hasel. Maybe later you’ll invent the wheel.”

I crossed to where Oliver and Baby Joe and Angelica stood before one of the big gas ranges. Oliver was poking thoughtfully at an immense steaming pot with a wooden spoon. Baby Joe was smoking a cigarette, occasionally leaning over to tap his ashes into the pot. Angelica was watching Oliver, her brow furrowed.

“You want it to be just barely
al dente,
” she said primly. “Do you know how to tell when it’s done?”

“Yes.” Oliver leaned forward on the balls of his feet and dipped his utensil into the roiling water. He backed up, shaking his head to clear the steam from his glasses, then dramatically flicked the wooden spoon and sent several long streamers of spaghetti sailing toward the ceiling. Baby Joe and Angelica ducked as a few of them sailed back down, but Oliver nodded.

“It’s done when it sticks,” he said. I looked up and saw the ceiling mapped with dozens of darkened threads of dried pasta, and among them several fresh and glistening strands. “And it’s done.”

We ate in the dining room, a big open space with raftered ceiling and chandeliers made of antlers. I counted thirty-two of us, students and grad students and Balthazar Warnick, the only genuine adult present although I assumed the housekeeper was brooding elsewhere. The room was dark and drafty. There were citronella candles in little red glasses at every table, and spongy Italian bread from the Safeway back in D.C., and gallon bottles of Gallo Burgundy. I sat at a long table with Annie and Angelica and Oliver. Behind us Baby Joe and Hasel talked and laughed loudly, watching the rest of us, but especially Angelica, as they passed around bowls of spaghetti and iceberg lettuce drenched with bottled dressing.

“Hey, we’re having a party later. You want to come?”

“Keep it down, man.” Hasel tilted his head across the room to where Balthazar Warnick sat with half a dozen well-behaved graduate students.

Baby Joe lowered his voice. “Upstairs. Oliver knows which room it is.”

Angelica smiled and looked at Oliver. “Oliver knows where
everything
is.”

Annie stuck her finger in her throat and made a gagging noise. “I’m out of here. It’s either help with the dishes tonight or do breakfast in the morning.” She grabbed her plate and stood. “Later, guys.”

Oliver grinned as he watched her leave. He leaned back in his chair, and Angelica turned sideways in her seat so that she could lean against him. “There goes Jiminy Cricket,” he said.

Angelica closed her eyes and nestled closer to him. “This is wonderful. Isn’t it wonderful, Sweeney?”

“Absolutely, it’s wonderful.” I stacked our dishes and left them what remained of the bottle of wine. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”

“I’ll find you,” Angelica called. “Oliver says they’ll make a fire later in the big room down here.”

In the kitchen I dumped the dishes into the sink and hoisted myself onto a counter. “I’m a morning person,” I said to Annie. “I’ll watch you clean and I’ll do breakfast tomorrow.”

A few other people straggled in, dropping off plates, drying a few glasses and dishes before wandering off again. Hasel bounded through, eyeing the slate sink and pump longingly, but Annie yelled at him to leave. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his torn jeans and sauntered out the door.

“Now don’t you all forget to come to our party,” he yelled.

“Maybe if he had two brain cells to rub together, he could start a fire,” Annie said, and sighed. “You know, the only reason I came along was to keep an eye on Angelica. And now look at me.”

“It seems kind of laid-back,” I said at last. “I mean, nothing weird is going on. It all seems pretty quiet. Kind of boring, actually.”

Annie swiped at her sweating face with a dish towel and nodded. “Yeah, I know. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“Well, you’ve got some reason to be paranoid. I mean we all do, I guess, you and me and Angelica, at least.”

“If I were you, I’d be worried about Oliver.”

“Oliver? How come?”

Annie stared out one of the black windows. “Look at him! He’s wasted
all the time.
And he hangs out at those places in Southeast—”

“So do I.”

“Yeah, but it’s different for you, Sweeney. I mean, no offense, but underneath all that black eye makeup and stuff, you’re kind of—well, kind of
normal.
But Oliver just seems to be too unstable to be doing all this stuff—”

“Oliver is
brilliant,”
I said hotly. “He says he wants to be a visionary, a—”

Annie put on her best long-suffering expression. “Boy, no one can tell you anything, can they?” She squeezed a stream of grungy water from her sponge and wiped her hands on her fatigues. “Well, I’m done. Tell Hasel Bright he can come back now and pump all he wants.”

After she left I sat there for a long time, chatting with whoever happened through. Somebody brought in a half-empty bottle of red wine and I drank most of that, filling and discarding paper cups as they disintegrated into a soggy red mass. After an hour or so I left, taking the rest of the wine with me. When I got to our room the light was on. Angelica stood in front of the bathroom mirror, curling her eyelashes. She smiled at me and waved her mascara wand.

“Hi! I was hoping you’d come back up—I couldn’t find you downstairs.”

I flopped onto the bed nearest her, the wine bottle at my feet. It was dark. She hadn’t turned on the lights in the rest of the room, but I saw a hurricane lantern on the windowsill behind me. I picked it up and slid open the metal hatch on the side, where a box of matches was stored. “I figured you and O wanted some time alone together.”

“Well, we did.” She turned back to the mirror and wiped a smudge of mascara from beneath one eye. “But you could have come with us, Sweeney …

“I kind of felt like a third wheel.”

“Fifth wheel.”

“Whatever. I felt like a wheel.” I cupped the hurricane lantern in my hands, and asked, “Listen, Angelica—you mind telling me a little bit about what’s going on here?”

She dotted carmine gloss on her lower lip and rubbed it in very slowly. When she was finished she looked at me. “You mean with Oliver and me?”

“I mean with everything.”

“Sweeney.” She tilted her head and smiled with maddening sweetness. “My dear soul mate. Are you jealous?”

“No, I’m not jealous. I’m just—I guess I don’t know
what
I am,” I sighed. I gulped a mouthful of wine from the bottle and grimaced. “Gah. This stuff is awful.”

Angelica regarded me shrewdly. “Perhaps it would taste better if you didn’t drink so much of it. But okay. Twenty questions. What do you want to know?”

“The
Benandanti.”

She said nothing.

“Who they are,” I said.
“What
they are.”

“We—ell.” She took a deep breath. “They’re sort of a sacred priesthood.” She said it matter-of-factly, as though she’d announced “They all went to Harvard” or “They play in a foursome every weekend at Burning Tree.”

“What does it mean?”

“Benandanti.”
The word slid off her tongue. “It means ‘The Good Walkers,’ or sometimes ‘Those Who Do Well.’ They started in the Middle Ages, in Italy—I mean their whole sort of organized way of doing things dates back that far, to the eighth century, I think. You can find accounts of them in records from the Inquisition. But really they’re much,
much
older. They go back thousands and thou-sands of years, my father told me once.”

She stopped and reached for the wine bottle, as though she was going to take a sip, but then thought better of it. I took another swig and asked, “But what do they do? I mean, is it like the Masons or something, that you can’t talk about?”

“No—well, yes, some of it is. Most of it, I suppose; at least there are things my father has never told me, and I guess he never will. Because I’m a woman, and women are—well, they’re not exactly forbidden, I mean there’ve always been a few women—Magda Kurtz was one—but as far as the
Benandanti
are concerned, women are just sort of beside the point.”

I frowned and let this sink in. “Is it part of the Church, then? I mean, there they all are at the Divine, all these priests and rabbis and ministers running around—”

Angelica shook her head emphatically. “No. It’s not a religious thing—at least, it’s not
just
a religious thing. It’s more like the Church is part of the
Benandanti
—like
all
these churches and religions and things are part of it. There are members everywhere, all over the world. The Masons, the Vatican, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones … It’s like the ultimate Old Boys’ Network.”

“But then why doesn’t anyone
else
know about them? I mean, even if it’s such a huge secret, wouldn’t this have popped up on ‘Sixty Minutes’ or something?”

“It’s not a secret.”

In the glow of the hurricane lamp Angelica’s face looked lovelier and more serene than ever, but also strangely remote: her voice detached, a little strained. As though she was reciting something she’d learned long before and was having difficulty remembering. ‘“Hide in plain sight,’ that’s one of their maxims. So, we all know about
parts
of the
Benandanti
—but nobody knows about
all
of it, unless you’re in the very center; and that’s where people like Balthazar Warnick are.”

“So what do they do?”

“Research, mostly. Very obscure, totally useless research.” She began to enumerate. “Sacrificial rituals of the ancient Scythians. The secret meaning of the Book of Genesis. Trying to find a pattern in NYSE figures between April and June of 1957.” She laughed. “I mean, can you imagine wasting your whole life on something like that?”

I thought of Balthazar Warnick running his fingers across a door, letting it fall open upon the landscape from a nightmare. “Yeah,” I said at last. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can see how it might come in pretty fucking useful.”

I moved closer to her.

“Angelica,” I said, my voice low but urgent, “if what you’re telling me is true—and, I mean, it
is
true, I
saw
what they did to Magda Kurtz!—if this is all true, it means the world is completely different from what we think it is. It means—it means there’s, like,
magic,
or something—

“It means that everything I know is
wrong.”

“No.” Her eyes were huge and luminous. “It just means that you didn’t know everything. That’s all.”

“But what happens now? Are they going to kill me because I saw them? Because I found out about this big awful secret?”

She looked at me pensively. “I don’t think so. I think if they were going to kill you, they would have done it already. I mean, I found out about them when
I
was young, and nothing happened to me.”

“But you said your father is one of them.”

“He is. But my father always said that no one ever really learned about the
Benandanti
unless they were supposed to, unless there was some reason for it. No, I don’t think they’ll kill you, Sweeney.”

I leaned back and gazed at the ceiling. “Tell me this, then. What’s the point? Why are they doing all this research, if it’s so useless? I assume they get their weird books and monographs published, and they all get tenure, but
why?
What are they trying to find out?”

Angelica hugged her pillow to her. “It’s not so much that they’re trying to
learn
things. It’s more that they’re trying not to forget, trying to make sure they remember—

“Someone like Professor Warnick … he knows the words to all the
Vedas,
he knows a language they spoke in eastern Europe
ten thousand years ago.
Not the whole language, maybe, but words, phrases, stories: this whole incredibly ancient oral tradition that’s been carried on since the Ice Age. Maybe even before then; maybe so far back that the people who spoke it, we’d hardly even recognize as human at all. But the
Benandanti
remember. That’s their job.”

I felt chilled, by what lay behind her words: thousands of years unrolling in the darkness before me like a vast eternal plain, endless steppes where tiny figures could just barely be discerned, crouched around a single flame or dancing with arms outflung beneath the starless sky.

“So,” I said at last. “They go out and find these old primitive priests, these witch doctors, and take their pictures and film them and stuff. Like they’re an endangered species. They’re just into saving all these old shamans.”

“No, Sweeney,” Angelica said softly. “You don’t get it. The
Benandanti
aren’t into saving the shamans. They
are
the shamans.”