Shadrach in the Furnace

17

She is pale qnd peaked-looking, still in the grip of yesterday’s illness, but on the mend, definitely on the mend. She seems to know why he has come, and it takes only half a dozen harsh words from him to get from her the answer he did not really want to hear. Yes, it is true. Yes. Yes. Shadrach listens for a while to her stammering confession, full of circumlocutions and evasions, and then he says, quietly, reproachfully, “You couldhave told me before this.” He is staring straight at her, and now, finally, she returns his stare: now that it is all out in the open between them, now that she has admitted the monstrous truth, she is at last able to meet his eyes again. “You could have told me,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me, Nikki?”

“I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

“Wasn’t possible? Wasn’t possible? Sure it was possible. All you had to do was open your mouth and let words come out. ‘Shadrach, I think I ought to warn you that you—’ ”

“Stop,” she says. “It didn’t seem that easy to me.”

“When was it decided?”

“The day they sent Buckmaster to the organ farm.”

“Did you have any part in selecting me?”

“Do you think I could have had any part in it, Shadrach?”

He says, “One thing I learned a long time ago is that guilty people have a way of answering a troublesome question with another question.”

But she does not seem wounded by his thrust, and instantly he regrets having made it. She is a strong woman, quite calm now that she has been unmasked by him, and in an altogether steady voice she says, “Genghis Mao chose you all by himself. I wasn’t consulted.”

“Very well.”

“You might as well believe that.”

Shadrach nods. “I believe it.”

“And so?”

“When you learned I was the one, did you make any attempt to change his mind?”

“Has anyone ever changed Genghis Mao’s mind about anything?”

“You notice how you parry my question with a question of your own?”

This time the jab hurts. She loses some of her newly regained poise. Her eyes slip from his, and she says hollowly, “All right. All right. I didn’t try to argue with him, no.”

Shadrach is silent a moment. Then he says, “I thought I knew you pretty well, Nikki, but I was wrong.”

“What does that mean?”

“I believed you were the sort of person who sees human beings as ends, not means. I didn’t think you’d let a — ah — a close friend — be nominated for the junkheap, and not lift a finger to save him, and not even say a word to him about it, no hint of what’s been decreed for him. And start to avoid him, even. As if you had written him off as an unperson the moment he was chosen. As if you were afraid that his bad luck might be contagious.”

“Why are you lecturing me, Shadrach?”

“Because I hurt,” he says. “Because someone I loved sold me out. Because I can’t bring myself to hurt you back in any way that’s real.”

“What would you have wanted me to do?” Nikki asks.

“The right thing.”

“Which was?”

“You could have stood up to Genghis Mao. You could have told him you wouldn’t participate in your lover’s slaughter. You could have let him know that there was a relationship between us, that you weren’t capable of — oh, Christ, Nikki, I shouldn’t have to be explaining all this to you!”

“I’m sure Genghis Mao was quite aware of the relationship between us.”

“And picked me deliberately, by way of testing your loyalty? To find out how you would react if you were made to choose between your lover and your laboratory? One of his little psychological games?”

She shrugs. “That’s entirely conceivable.”

“Maybe you made the wrong choice, then. Maybe he was trying to measure your fundamental humanity rather than your loyalty to Genghis Mao. And now that he sees how coldblooded, soulless, unfeeling you are, he may decide that he can’t take the chance of having a person like you in charge of—”

“Stop it, Shadrach.” She is giving ground under his steady assault, his quiet, measured, remorseless voice; her lips are trembling, she is visibly fighting back tears. “Please,” she says. “Stop. Stop. You’re getting what you want.”

“You think I’m being unkind? You think I’ve got no call being angry with you?”

“There was nothing I could have done.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“What about threatening to resign?”

“He’d have let me resign, then. I’m not indispensable. Redundancy is—”

“And your successor would have continued with the project, using me as the donor.”

“I imagine so.”

“Still, even if it changed nothing at all, wouldn’t you have felt cleaner putting up some kind of resistance?”

“Perhaps,” she says. “But it would have changed nothing at all.”

“You could have warned me, at least. I might have fled from Ulan Bator. We might have fled together, if your resignation got you in trouble with Genghis Mao. Wasn’t worth destroying your career over me, though, was it?”

“Flee? Where to? He’d be watching us. On Surveillance Vector One, or some other spy gadget. In a day or two he’d decide we had had a long enough holiday, and the Citpols would pick us up and bring us back.”

“Maybe.” “Not maybe. And I’d end up in the organ farm. And you’d still become the Avatar donor.”

Shadrach considers that scenario. “You’re telling me that it wouldn’t have mattered whether you had warned me or not?”

“Not to you,” Nikki replies. “It would have mattered to me. One way I lose my job and maybe my skin. The other way I get to survive a little longer.”

“I still wish you had been the one to tell me.”

“Instead of Katya?”

“When did I say Katya was the one?”

Nikki smiles. “You didn’t need to, love.”

August 19, 2009

A mild summer day in Ulan Bator. Across half the world it is summer now. The time of lovers. Surveillance Vector One shows me the lovers going arm in arm through the streets of Paris, London, San Francisco, Tokyo. The fond gazes, the little kisses, the nudges of hip against hip. Even the ones with organ-rot shuffling along together, slowly dying but still doing the dance of love. Fools! I think I remember how that dance goes, though it’s forty or fifty years behind me. Yes, yes, the first meeting, the preliminary tensions and assessments, theprobing andparrying, the spark of contact, the dissolving of barriers, the first embrace, the tender words, the pledges, the sense of conspiracy, two against the world, the assumption that all this will last forever, the discovery that it will not, the falling apart, the falling out, the parting, the healing, the forgetting — oh, yes, the man who is Genghis Mao once danced that dance, long before he was Genghis Mao, he once played that game. Long ago. What purpose does it serve? An anesthetic for the aching ego. A lubricant for the biological necessities. A diversion, a distraction, a foolishness. When I saw it for what it was I renounced it, and no regrets. Look at them strolling together. “Eternal love.” As if anything’s eternal, but love? Love? It’s an unstable state, thermodynamic nonsense, two energy sources, two suns, trying to establish orbits around one another, each one striving to give light and heat to the other. How pretty it sounds, how implausible. Naturally the system breaks down under gravitational stress sooner or later, and one pulls the other to pieces, or they spiral into collision, or they go tumbling away from one another. A waste of energy, a futile spilling of the life-force. Love? Abolish it! If only I could.

January 4, 1989

The text of my doctrine is complete, and when the appropriate moment comes I will reveal it to the world. Today, as I finished the last passages, a name for it came to me: centripetal depolarization. Defined as the forging of a consensus of irreconcilables through the illusion of the attainment of everyone’s mutually exclusive goals. And it will sweep the world as irresistibly as once did the hordes of old Father Genghis.

Shadrach takes momentary refuge in carpentry. Until now that fashionable cult has been mere amusement for him, a source of relaxation and release rather than the quasi-mystical focus that it is for many of its adherents, but now, frayed and desperate, no longer the calm and detached Shadrach of yore, he surrenders to its full intensity. The world has tightened around him. Ostensibly, all is as it has been, and is not going to change; his routines will continue, his doctoring and his calisthenics and his collecting and his trips to Karakorum; but in these past two days, aware now of the dread subtraction of self that Genghis Mao has covertly ordained for him, Shadrach finds the familiar and comfortable rhythms of life no longer enough to keep him together. Fear and pain have begun to seep into his soul, and the only antidote he knows for that is submission to some force greater than himself, greater even than Genghis Mao, some all-encompassing power. If he can, he will make carpentry the vehicle of that submission. With hammer and nails, then, with chisel and adze, with plane and saw and awl, he seeks, if not salvation, then at least temporary freedom from anguish.

Usually Shadrach attends the large and majestic carpentry chapel in Karakorum. But there is always a carnival atmosphere in Karakorum, and that tends to trivialize whatever he does there, be it carpentry or dream-death or transtemporalism or mere fornication. Now, in genuine spiritual need, he wants not the fanciest chapel but the one most readily accessible, the one that will enable him most quickly to find surcease from pain, and he goes to a place here in Ulan Bator, down by the Tuula River, in one of those streets of formidable blocky white-stucco buildings constructed in the latter days of the Mongolian Peoples Republic.

It is a starkly functional no-nonsense sort of chapel, lacking in any religious or pseudoreligious iconography. Big bare rooms, sputtering fluorescent lights, the smell of sawdust and lemon oil — it could be an ordinary carpenters’ shop, but for the silence and the peculiar concentration with which the men and women at the benches are going about their tasks. Shadrach pays a fee at the entrance — strictly a service charge, covering the cost of tool rental, lumber, and maintenance, never a fee for worship itself — and is shown to a locker where he exchanges his street clothes for clean coveralls. Then he selects a vacant bench. Shining well-oiled tools have been arranged along and around it with an eye for symmetry and neatness that is positively Japanese: chisels of many sizes in a precisely ordered row, an assortment of hammers and mallets, a cluster of gauges, augers, pincers, compasses, bevels, files, try squares, and rules. The equipment is deliberately varied and copious, to impress upon the worshipper the hieratic nature of the craft, the ancient lineage of its practice, the complexity of its scope.

No one speaks to him. No one looks at him. No one will; those who enter here must remain alone with their tools and their wood. A strange solemnity steals over him as he makes ready to enter the customary initial stale of meditation. In the past, having come to the chapel for nothing more than a relaxing couple of hours of cutting and joining, seeing the whole experience as an amusement on the same level as a round of golf or a game of billiards, he has approached this stage of the ceremony in a casual and amiable way, accepting it as part of the tradition, something that one does merely to get into the spirit of the thing, the equivalent of a golfer’s ritualized practice swings or a billiards player’s careful chalking of the cue; but this time, as he presses both hands flat against the workbench and bows his head, he feels neither flippant nor stagily ostentatious; he is aware of a numinous presence all about him, and he grows somber and reflective as it enters his soul.

In the meditation one first must consider the tools, their form and divine essence. One must visualize them and name them: this is a tenon saw, this a dovetail saw, this a gimlet, this a brad-awl. One then must dwell on their purpose, which requires one to imagine each tool in action, and this in turn calls for contemplation of certain basic techniques of carpentry and joinery: the making of mortises and tenons, the construction of joists and frames, the fitting of veneers, the setting of braces and struts and wedging. This phase of the meditation is the most prolonged and the most intense. Shadrach has heard that some adherents to the cult devote the entire energy of their worship to it, and never actually take tools and wood into their hands, but carry out a completely satisfying communion in their minds alone. Until today he has never really understood how this could be accomplished, but now, scribing and mitring and butting as he sits with closed eyes, menially fitting tenon into mortise and tongue into groove, he sees that actual manual labor can be extraneous to this experience if one is able fully to enter into the meditative phase.

He perceives this, but he moves on anyway into the terminal stage of the meditation, which is the entry into the wood, the mother-stuff. This too is a highly structured exercise, which one must begin by imagining trees, not merely any trees but specific timber trees of one’s own choice, ordinarily pine or spruce or fir for Shadrach, occasionally more exotic woods, according to his whim, ebony, palisander, mahogany, teak. One must see the tree; one must imagine it felled; one must carry it onward to be milled and seasoned; one must at last behold the finished board, and contemplate its grain, its texture, its moisture content, its vulnerability to shrinkage and warpage, all its characteristics and special beauties. And then, only then, when one can taste the wood on one’s tongue, when one feels the tool hot and eager in one’s hand, then does one rise and go to the bin and select one’s lumber and begin at last to work.

Shadrach knows, by the time he has reached this stage, exactly what the form of his worship will be today. He will do no fancy joinery this day, but simple heavy carpentry, simple but pure, a job that strikes to the essence of form: he will construct the centering for a brick arch. It has sprung entire into his mind, the ribs and ties, the braces and struts, the laggings, the wedges; he has calculated the curvature, the span, the height of the crown, the springing line, all in one rush of inner vision, and now he need only cut and fit and hammer, and when he is done he will disassemble everything, carry out the ceremonial burning of the sawdust, and depart, drained and eased of tension.

He works quickly. A kind of wild feverish energy has come over him. He hastens from bin to bench, from bin to bench; his mouth bristles with nails of half a dozen lengths; he does not pause for an instant. Yet there is nothing rushed about his labor. To rush would be folly; the point here is to attain calmness of spirit. The work should be accomplished swiftly but without haste. Serenely Shadrach builds. The work contains its own purpose and has none beyond the immediate spiritual fulfillment, for one never uses anything one constructs in the carpentry chapel, one never takes anything away that one has put together, any more than one would bring in one’s own tools. This is not a substitute for the home workshop, after all. The idea here is solely to exercise skill in joining, and thus to experience the fundamental connectivity of the universe; what one actually makes is incidental, a means to a higher end, and must not be allowed to become a goal in itself. Shadrach has never fully understood that part of it before today, either. He has enjoyed the physicality of the work, the hammering and the sweat, and he has enjoyed the aesthetic reward, the pleasure of watching something sturdy and attractive take shape under his hands, and he has always felt mildly distressed at the necessary disassembling that follows; because he has never seen the carpentry cult as anything more profound than tennis or golf or bicycle riding, he has never attained those farther reaches of the spirit which he has heard are available to the communicants here. Now he does attain those reaches, at least their nearer fringes, and, penetrating unexpected realms, he finds that his fears and resentments fall away, and he is purified. So it must have been for the Creator, shaping worlds on quiet afternoons, experiencing a total sense of identification with the task, a sense of utter selflessness, of being no more than a conduit for the great shaping force that flows through the universe. No doubt one can just as readily attain ihe same tranquil place through tennis or golf or bicycle riding, Shadrach realizes. The means is unimportant; only the state of consciousness toward which one journeys matters. He sees his arch acquiring form; it is not his arch but the arch, the prototype of all arches, the ideal arch, the arch on which the vault of the heavens rests, and he and the arch have become one, and he, Shadrach Mordecai of Utan Bator, bears all the weight of the cosmos and feels no burden. Does an arch complain of the load? The arch, if the arch is a proper arch, merely transmits the weight to the earth, and the earth does not complain either, but imparts the thrust of its burden to the stars, which accept it unprotestingly, for there is no burden, there is no weight, there is simply the ebb and flow of substance between the joined members of the one great entity that is the matrix of everything; and when one has perceived that, can it be such a serious matter that one’s body, which at the moment houses a pattern of responses that calls itself “Shadrach Mordecai,” may soon house instead something calling itself “Genghis Mao”? Such transformations are meaningless. Change does nor occur; there are only transfers, not transformations: the only reality is the reality of eternal flux. He is purged of all discord and all dismay.

The arch is done. Shadrach briefly admires its perfection of form; then, calmly, he knocks it apart and carries the pieces to the salvage bin.

Does the arch no longer exist, simply because its components have been dismembered? No. The arch exists, shining as brightly in his mind as when he first conceived it. The arch will always exist. The arch is indestructible. Shadrach restores his tools to their original immaculate order, and gathers his sawdust, and makes the ceremonial pyre of it in the urn in the aisle. When his bench is as clean as he first found it, he kneels, bows his head, and remains that way a minute or two, altogether untroubled, mind blank, a tabula rasa, healed and made whole. Then he goes out.

Images of Mangu are everywhere in the streets, the handsome Mongol face looking down from the facade of every building and staring out from great banners strung from lampposts high above the roadways. At the intersection of three grand boulevards workmen are diligently erecting the armature for what is undoubtedly going to be a vast statue of the dead viceroy. The process of canonization is well advanced; day by day, departed Mangu is thrust more visibly into the consciousness of the citizens of the world capital, and doubtless everywhere else as well. Mangu dead has taken on a power and a presence never possessed by Mangu alive: he has indeed become a fallen demigod, he is Baldur, Adonis, Osiris, the slaughtered promise of spring, and he is due to rise again.

Shadrach, cool and bouncy, wanders toward the river, whistling some lush romantic melody — a tune out of Rachmaninoff, he suspects. He is being followed, he realizes, by a man who emerged from the carpentry chapel a moment after he did. This does not worry him. For the moment, nothing worries him. He is charmed by everything: the steppe, the hills, the faintly chilly spring air, the idea of being followed. He is charmed even by the silly ubiquity of Mangu, whose bland symmetrical features have been plastered to everything, and sprout from mailboxes, from trashbins, from the low smooth white wall of the promenade that runs along the river; there are Mangu pennants and streamers hanging all around, and everything is done to a background of the Mongol mourning color, which is yellow and lends an oddly bright and festive tone to the display, as though there is shortly to be a parade in Mangu’s honor, followed by the viceroy’s glorious second coming. Shadrach smiles. He leans his long body over the promenade wall to admire the lovely turbulent flow of the river, quickened by its spring freshets and humming along with rare energy, swirling and dancing. He imagines filaments and tendrils of tributary streams spreading outward from the channel below him, lacing this arid land together, carrying water joyously from the mountains, sweeping it to the river and thence to the sea, a vast arterial system serving the living, throbbing entity that is the earth, and the image pleases the doctor in him. If he listens carefully, he tells himself, he can hear the breathing of the planet, and even the rhythms of its heart, tub-dub, tub-dub. The man who has been following him appears now on the promenade and takes up a position just to Shadrach’s left. Side by side they watch the river in silence. After a moment Shadrach risks a furtive glance and discovers that the man is Frank Ficifolia, the communications expert, the designer of Surveillance Vector One. Ficifolia is a short, rotund, capable man, perhaps fifty years old, good-natured and talkative, and his uncharacteristic silence now is significant. Upon entering the carpentry chapel Shadrach had had a glimpse of someone he thought might be Ficifolia, but the etiquette of the cult had kept him from taking a second look; his guess is now confirmed. But a different etiquette controls Shadrach here. In the bugged and spy-eyed world of Genghis Mao, one is frequently approached by people who wish to talk without outwardly seeming to be holding a conversation. Many times Shadrach has carried on long interchanges with someone who is staring in another direction, even with someone whose back is to him. He continues, therefore, to study the rushing flow of the river, offering Ficifolia no greeting, and waiting. Eventually Ficifolia says, apropos of nothing and without looking at Shadrach, “I don’t understand why you’re still hanging around here.”

“Pardon me?”

“In Ulan Bator. Waiting for the ax to fall. If I were you I’d go into hiding, Shadrach.”

“So you know about—”

“I know, yes. Several people know. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure. Stay put for a while, I guess, and think things over. There’s a lot I have to evaluate.”

“Evaluate? Evaluate? Of course you’d say something like that!” Ficifolia, though plainly trying to be unobtrusive, cannot control his emotions; he raises his voice; he gesticulates passionately. “You know, man, you never belonged in this town. You aren’t crazy enough to qualify. You’re so calm, so reasonable, you always want to think things out, you want to stop and evaluate when they’ve got the knife to your throat — how did you ever land here, anyway? This is a place for madmen. I mean that seriously, Shadrach. The lunatics are running the asylum, and the head lunatic is the craziest one of all, and you just don’t fit in. Can you think of anything crazier than a world full of rotting people governed by a few thousand Antidote-filled bureaucrats and ruled by a ninety-year-old Mongol warlord who’s planning to live forever? This is sanity? This is the logical outcome of five hundred years of Western imperialism? And the spy-eyes everywhere? The surveillance vectors taping my very words right now and feeding them to God knows what kind of machine where they may not be digested and acted upon for three thousand years? The robot policemen? The organ farms? Anyone who begins to take this world at face value has to be a madman, and that’s what we are, all of us, top to bottom, Avogadro, Horthy, Lindman, Labile, me, the whole crew. Except you. So solemn, so contained, so accepting. Doing your job, doing your job, you and Warhaftig, stitching the new liver into the Khan, never cracking a smile, never saying to each other. This is a crazy way of making a living, never even perceiving the craziness because you’re so fundamentally sane — not Warhaftig, he’s either a robot or a lunatic, but you, Shadrach, deadpan, full of weird microelectronic gear and even that doesn’t upset you. Don’t you ever want to scream and rant? Do you have to accept everything? Do you even accept the idea that Genghis Mao is going to evict you from your own fucking head? Do you — ” Abruptly Ficifolia checks himself, reining himself in with a little shudder and a quick series of jerking ticks of the facial muscles. More calmly, in an entirely different voice, he says, “Really, Shadrach, you’re in big trouble. You ought to disappear while you still can.”

Shadrach shakes his head. “Hiding’s not my style.”

“Is dying?”

“Not particularly. But I won’t hide. That’s not like me. My people are done with hiding. The old Underground Railway days are gone forever.”

“ ‘My people are done with hiding,’ ” Ficifolia says, doing his mimicry in a harsh, high-pitched tone. “Jesus. Jesus! Maybe I underestimated you. Maybe you’re as crazy as the rest of us here. Genghis Mao has fingered you for doom, has put the old black spot right on you, and you put racial pride ahead of survival. Bravo, Shadrach! Very noble. Very dumb.”

“Where could I go? The Khan’s spy gadgets will find me anywhere. Gadgets that you helped invent for him.”

“There are ways.”

“Disguise myself? Paint my skin white? Wear a blond wig?”

“You could disappear the way Buckmaster did.”

Shadrach coughs. “I don’t need sick jokes just now, Frank.”

“I’m not talking about organ farms. I mean disappearing. We disappeared Buckmaster. We could do the same for you.”

“Buckmaster isn’t dead?”

“Alive and well. We altered the master personnel register the day he was sentenced. Transposed half a dozen binary digits and the records show that Roger Buckmaster went to the organ farms on such-and-such day and was duly carved up. Once it’s in the record, it’s realer than real. Machine reality is a higher order of reality than reality reality. If Buckmaster shows upon any of the Khan’s scanners now, the computer will reject the data as nonsense, because Buckmaster is known to be dead, and dead men by definition aren’t found walking around.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s not important now. What’s important is that we saved him, and we can save you.”

“We? Who’s ‘we’?”

“That’s not important either.”

“Should I believe any of this, Frank?”

“No. Of course not. It’s all lies. Actually, I’m spying for the Khan, trying to trap you. Jesus, Shadrach, use your head! Do you think I’m trying to get you into trouble? You are in trouble. I’m risking my ass to—”

“All right. Let me think, Frank.”

“So think, already.”

“You do your hocus-pocus and I disappear. Now I’m without an identity and without a profession. Can I practice medicine if I’m hiding out in some cellar? I was meant to be a doctor. Maybe not Genghis Mao’s doctor, but somebody’s doctor, Frank. If I’m not working at that, I’m nobody, I’m a waste of skills and talent. In my own eyes I’ll be nothing. Is there any point in disappearing into that kind of life? And how long would I have to stay underground? If I’m going to spend the rest of my life locked up in a cellar, I wouldn’t be a whole lot worse off letting Genghis Mao use me for Avatar. Better off, maybe.”

“You might have to stay out of sight until Genghis Mao dies. But afterward—”

“Afterward? What afterward? Genghis Mao might live another hundred years. I won’t.”

“He won’t either,” Ficifolia says, strange undertones of menace in his voice. Shadrach stares in wonder. He is not sure he believes a syllable of this. Buckmaster alive? Ficifolia a subversive? Conspiratorial plans afoot to do away with the Khan? Questions bubble in him, and he hungers for a thousand answers; but from the corner of his eye he perceives men in gray and blue, two Citpols on patrol. So there will be no answers now. Ficifolia sees them too and nods ever so slightly and says, “Think about it. Do your evaluating, let me know what you warn to do.”

“All right.”

“Have you ever seen the river as high us this?”

“It was an unusually snowy winter,” Shadrach says, as the Citpols saunter past.