Shadrach in the Furnace

6

“I shall explain the method of our rite, if you wish,” says the transtemporalist. Deep slurred Mongol voice, monolithic face, all nose and cheekbones, the eyes hidden in shadows.

“Not necessary,” Mordecai tells him. “I’ve been here before.”

“Ah. Of course.” An obsequious little bow. “I was not sure of that, Dr. Mordecai.”

Shadrach is accustomed to being recognized. Mongolia is full of foreigners but very few of them are black. The sound of his own name, therefore, gives him only the most fleeting jab of surprise. Still, he would have welcomed more anonymity here. The transtemporalist kneels and beckons to him to do the same. They are in a private little cubicle, formed by thick carpets draped over ropes, within the vast dim tent. A thick yellow candle set in a pewter cup on the earthen floor flickers between them sending a heavy spiral of dark sour smoke toward the tent’s sloping top. In Mordecai’s nostrils are all sorts of primeval Mongol odors, the reek of shaggy goatskin walls, the stench of what might well be a cow-dung fire somewhere nearby. The floor is densely strewn with soft wood shavings, a luxury in this land of few trees. The transtemporalist is busy at the chemistry of his vocation, mixing fluids in a tall pewter beaker, an oily blue one and a thin scarlet one, stirring them around with an ivory swizzle stick that makes lively swirl patterns, adding now a sprinkle of a green powder and a yellow one. Hocus-pocus, all of it: Mordecai suspects that only one of these substances is the true drug, the others being mere decoration. But rites demand mystery and color, and these dour priests, claiming all of time and space for their province, must heighten their effects as best they can. Shadrach wonders how far from him Nikki is now. They were parted at the entrance to the transtemporalists’ maze of a tent, each led separately into the shadows by silent acolytes. The time voyage is a journey that one must take alone.

The Mongol concludes his pharmaceutics and, holding the cup tenderly in both hands, passes it above the candle’s sputtering flame to Shadrach Mordecai.

“Drink,” he says, and, feeling a bit like Tristan, Shadrach drinks. Surrenders the cup. Sits back on his haunches, waiting. “Give me your hands,” the transtemporalist murmurs. Shadrach extends them, palms upward. The Mongol covers them with his own short-fingered wide-spanned hands and intones some gibberish prayer, unintelligible except for scattered Mongol words that have no contextual coherence, A faint dizziness is beginning in Shadrach Mordecai now. This will be his third transtemporal experience, the first in nearly a year. Once he visited the court of King Baldwin of Jerusalem in the guise of a black prince of Ethiopia, a Christian Moor at the swaggering feasts of the Crusaders; and once he found himself atop a stone pyramid in Mexico, robed all in white, slashing with an obsidian dagger at the breast of a writhing Spaniard spread-eagled on the sacrificial altar of Huitzilopitchli. And now? He will have no choice in his destination. The transtemporalist will choose it for him according to some unfathomable whim, aiming him with a word or two, a skillful suggestion as he is cut loose from his moorings by the drug and sent adrift into the living past. His own imagination and historical knowledge, coupled with, perhaps — who knows? — whispered cues from the transtemporalist as his drugged body lies on the floor of the tent — will do the rest.

Mordecai sways now. Everything whirls. The transtemporalist leans close and speaks, and it is a struggle to comprehend the words, but Shadrach must comprehend, he needs to hear—

“It is the night of Cotopaxi,” the Mongol whispers. “Red sun, yellow sky.”

The tent disappears and Shadrach is alone.

Where is he? A city. Not Karakorum. This place is unfamiliar, subtropical, narrow streets, steep hills, iron-grilled doorways, twining red-flowered vines, cool clear air, grand fountains in spacious plazas, white-fronted houses with wrought-iron balconies. A Latin city, intense, hectic, busy.

—¡Barato aquí! Barato!

—Yo tengo un hambre canina.

Honking horns, barking dogs, the shouts of children, the cries of vendors. Women roasting bits of meat over charcoal braziers in the cobbled streets. A thousand strident people-sounds. Where is there a city with such vigorous life? Why does no one show signs of the organ-rot? They are all so healthy here, even the beggars, even the paupers. There are no such cities. No more, no more. Ah. Naturally. He is dreaming a city mat no longer exists. This is a city of yesterday.

—Le telefonearé un día de éstos.

—Hasta la semana que viene.

He has never spoken Spanish. And yet he recognizes the words, and yet he understands them.

—¿Dónde está el teléfono?

—¡Vaya de prisa! ¡Tenga cuidado!

—¡Maricón!

—No es verdad.

Standing in the middle of a busy street at the top of a broad hill, he is stunned by the view. Mountains! They rim the city, great snowcapped cones, gleaming in the midday sun. He has lived too long on the Mongolian plateau; mountains such as these have become unfamiliar and alien to him. Shadrach stares in awe at the immense glaciered peaks, so huge they seem top-heavy, they seem about to rumble from the sky to crush the bustling city. And is that a plume of smoke rising from the crest of that most enormous one? He is not sure. At such a distance — at least fifty kilometers — is it possible to see smoke? Yes. Yes. Beyond any doubt, smoke. He remembers the last words he heard before the dizziness took him: “It is the night of Cotopaxi. Red sun, yellow sky.” The great volcano — is that it? A flawless cone, swathed in snow and pumice, its base hidden in clouds, its summit outlined in numbing majesty against the darkening sky. He has never seen such a mountain.

He halts a boy who darts past him.

—Por favor.

The boy is wide-eyed, terrified, but yet he stops, looks up.

—¿Si, Señor?

—¿Cómo se llama esta montaña?

Shadrach points toward the colossal snowcapped volcano. The boy smiles and relaxes. His fear is gone; obviously he is pleased by the notion of knowing something that this tall dark-skinned stranger does not. He says:

—Cotopaxi. Cotopaxi. Of course. The transtemporalist has given him a front row ticket to the great catastrophe. This is the city of Quito, then, in Ecuador, and that trailing smoke to the southeast is Cotopaxi, the world’s loftiest active volcano, and this day must be the nineteenth of August, 1991, a day that everyone remembers, and Shadrach Mordecai knows that before the sun touches the Pacific tonight the world will be shaken as it rarely has been shaken in all the time of mankind, and an era will end and a reign of fire will be loosed upon civilization. And he is the only person on earth who knows this, and here he stands below great Cotopaxi and he can do nothing. Nothing. Nothing but watch, and tremble, and perhaps perish with the half million who will perish here tonight. Can one die, he wonders, while one is traveling this way? Is it not only a dream, a dream, a dream, and can dreams kill? Even if he dreams an eruption, even if he dreams tons of lava and brimstone descending on his broken body?

The boy is still standing there, staring at him.

—Gracias, amigo.

—De nada, señor.

The boy waits, perhaps for a coin, but Shadrach has none to give him, and after a moment he runs off, pausing after ten paces to look back and stick out his tongue, then running again, sprinting into an alleyway, disappearing.

And a moment later there is a terrible noise from Cotopaxi and a white column at least a hundred meters thick rises straight up like a scepter from a secondary cone on the volcano’s sloping flank.

Immediately all movement halts in the city. Everyone freezes; every head turns toward Cotopaxi. The white column, pouring from the vent with incredible velocity, rising already to a height of at least a thousand meters above Cotopaxi’s summit, is spreading now, filling the sky like a broad plume of feathers, a cloak of live steam. Mordecai perceives a low droning rumbling sound, as of a train passing through the city, but a train for giants, a titanic train that makes lanterns sway and potted plants topple from balconies. The cloud of steam has turned gray on top, with tinges of red and yellow toward its outer edges.

—¡Aie! ¡El fin del mundo!

—¡Madre de dios! ¡La montaña!

—¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda!

And the flight from Quito begins. Nothing has happened yet, nothing but a roar and a hiss and a column of steam rushing skyward, but nevertheless the people of the city abandon their houses, carrying little or nothing, grasping perhaps a crucifix or a child or a cat or a handful of clothes, crowding into the streets, shuffling somberly downhill, northward, long lines of people moving with hunched shoulders, no one looking back, everyone heading out of the city, heading away from Cotopaxi, from the frightening crimson cloud that now looms over the mountain, from the death that soon will come to Quito. These are people wise in the way of volcanoes, and they do not care to stay for the show. Shadrach Mordecai is swept along in the human tide. He towers over these folk as the volcano does over the city, and they glance strangely at him and some tug at his arms in a kind of appeal, as if they think he is a black deity come to lead them to safety. But he is leading no one. He is following, he is fleeing helplessly with all the rest. Unlike them he does look over his shoulder every few minutes. Whenever he can, whenever the press of refugees is not too powerful, he pauses and turns to see what is happening. The volcano now is spurting little bursts of pumice and light ash, wind-borne powdery stuff that changes the color of the air, staining it yellow, deepening the sun’s hues to an orange-red. The earth seems to be groaning. The whole city shakes. Automobiles laden with well-dressed citizens move slowly through the streets, unable to make headway in the throngs of shuffling pedestrians; there are collisions, shouts, quarrels. Soon the cars have halted altogether and their passengers, quirky-lipped and disdainful, shoulder their way into the lines of humbler folk. Shadrach has been marching for an hour or two now, perhaps three, mechanically pushing himself along; the air has grown thin and chilly, with an acrid reek of brimstone in it, and though it is only the middle of the afternoon the falling ash has so obscured the light that the street lamps have come on — the ash is accumulating like fine snow in the streets, already ankle-deep — and still Cotopaxi roars and hisses, and still the people straggle northward. Mordecai knows what will happen soon. With the eerie double-edged vision of the time traveler, he looks forward as well as back, remembering the future. Before long there will be the explosion that will be heard thousands of miles away, the earthquake, the clouds of poisonous gas, the lunatic outpouring of tons of volcanic ash that will blot out the sun all over the world, and on this night of Cotopaxi the ancient gods will be let loose on earth and empires will crumble. He has lived through this night once already, but not with the knowledge he now has. Somewhere far away at this moment is fifteen-year-old Shadrach, all arms and legs and huge eyes, doing his lessons and dreaming of medical school, and he will hear the explosion too, dull and muffled though it will sound after spanning the planet from Quito to Philadelphia, and he will think it is a terrorist’s bomb, perhaps, going off downtown, but in the morning he will see the sky tinted yellow and the swollen sun gone all red, and then the fine dust will fall for days, bringing early twilights on these summer evenings, and news will trickle out of South America of the terrible eruption, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. What that young Shadrach does not know, what no one knows except the stranger striding through the northern outskirts of Quito under a dirty crimson cloud, is that the eruption of Cotopaxi is more than a natural event: it signals a political apocalypse, the fall of the nations about to begin, the time of Genghis Mao about to arrive.

—¡El fin del mundo!

Yes. Yes. The end of the world. And now the explosion comes.

It happens in stages, first five quick sharp reports like cannon-fire; then a long moment of total silence when even the persistent rumble that has gone on for hours abruptly halts; then a violent shaking of the earth and a single monstrous booming sound, the loudest sound Mordecai has ever heard, a sound that breaks windows and splits walls; then silence again; then the rumbling once more; then more cannonfire, bang bang bang, quick hard pops; then a second great boom, five times as powerful as the first, that drops people to their knees, clutching at their ears; then silence, an ominous, sinister, nerve-tightening silence; and then the sound of sounds, the sound of a planet splitting apart at its core, an unending grotesque avalanche of sound that makes the neck snap and the arms jerk wildly and the eyes jiggle in then-sockets, a sound that rolls over Quito like the trampling foot of an angry god. And the sky turns black and a torrent of red fire spills out of Cotopaxi and burns with a hideous glare on the horizon. The mountain appears to be ripping open. Shadrach can see huge chunks of its crest, slabs of rock that must be the size of great buildings, flying loose and soaring slowly and grandly toward Quito. The perfect cone, once as graceful as Mount Fuji’s, is a ruin now; a shattered wreck, dimly visible through the dense clouds of ash and the flying balls of pumice; it is only a stump, irregular and ghastly. The air itself is burning. People still struggle onward, moving even more slowly, dragging themselves along on leaden legs toward a salvation that is not to be reached, but they vomit, they clutch at their throats, they gasp, they choke, they fall.

—Ayuda. Ayuda.

But there is no help to be had. They are dying here in the early afternoon of this sparkling day, sparkling no longer. Shadrach, trying to breathe an atmosphere that is half ash and half carbon monoxide, falls himself, gets up, falls again, forces himself to rise. He remembers that he is a doctor and kneels beside a fallen woman, a girl, really, whose face is distorted and nearly as black as his own from asphyxiation.

—Yo soy un médico.

—Gracias, señor. Gracias.

Her eyes flutter. She looks to him for aid, medicine, a drink of water, anything. How can he help her? He is a doctor, yes, but can he teach the dying to breathe poisoned air? She gags, shivers, and then — strangely — yawns. She is falling asleep in his arms. But it is a deadly drowsiness, and she will not wake. He releases her. He moves onward, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Useless. Useless. He falls again and does not rise, he lies in a heap of weeping murmuring victims, a victim himself. So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. Night and ash, flight and death. That saucy boy, those women roasting bits of meat, the shopkeepers and the bankers, the cab drivers and the policemen, that fall black-skinned stranger, all dying together now, the hours of frenzied flight a waste, and Cotopaxi’s ashy ejecta filling the heavens, giving all the world a blood-red twilight. El fin del mundo, yes. Shadrach claws at the ashes filling his mouth. There is another explosion, a lesser one now — for what could equal that last unimaginable apocalyptic blast? — and another, another, and he knows that the booms will continue in diminishing intensity for many hours, even for days. No one will sleep tonight in Ecuador, in Colombia, Venezuela, in all of Central America, even in Mexico; the dread thunder of Cotopaxi will resound in Canada, in Patagonia, it will reach far across both oceans, and by dawn, the dust-choked dawn, the black dawn through which no light can penetrate, the first revolution will be under way, the putsch in Brazil, the insurrectionists taking advantage of the strange darkness and the universal terror to launch their long-awaited coup; and then the chain reaction, the uprisings triggered by the Brazilian one in Argentina, Nicaragua, Algeria, Indonesia, one bloodbath providing the cue for the next, and all spurred by Cotopaxi, by the great symbol-freighted upheaval of the volcano; the economic crises of the 1970s and the repressions and shortages of the impoverished 1980s leading inexorably to the worldwide chaos of 1991, the global revolution, the long Walpurgisnacht touched off in some incalculable way by the eruption.

So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. The angry gods shaking the world and bringing the nations into destruction. Shadrach bows his head, closes his eyes, surrenders to the soft warm fragrant ash that drifts peacefully upon him. This is the night of Cotopaxi, yes, el fin del mundo, the sounding of the last trump, the opening of the seventh seal, and he has been part of it, he has tasted the pumice of the volcano. And now he sleeps.