Song of Kali

Chapter Eighteen

We live in Colorado now. In the spring of 1982 I was invited out to do a modest workshop at a mountain college here and I went back East only long enough to get Amrita. Our subsequent visit has turned into a reasonably permanent residence. We've leased the house in Exeter, furnishings and all, but the eight paintings are hanging here against the rough wood of the cabin and the little Jamie Wyeth oil sketch we purchased in 1973 comes closest to catching the rich play of light we see out the window. That quality of light obsessed us our first few months here, and both Amrita and I have — sheepishly at first — tried oil painting.

The college facilities here are primitive by Boston standards, our salaries are low; but the house we're living in was once a ranger's cabin, and from our large window we can see snowy peaks over a hundred miles to the north. The light is so sharp and clear that it borders on being painful.

We wear jeans most of the time, and Amrita has learned how to handle the four-wheel-drive Bronco in mud and snow. We miss the ocean. Even more, we miss some of our friends and the benefits of coastal civilization. Our nearest town now is eight miles down the mountain from the campus and its boasts only 7,000 people at the height of the summer influx. The fanciest restaurant is called la Cocina, and our other dining choices are the Pizza Hut, Nora's Breakfast Nook, Gary's Grill, and the 24-hour truck stop on the Interstate. In the summer Amrita and I give a lot of our business to the Tastee Freez. The town library is operating out of an AirStream trailer until the new Civic Center is built. Denver is almost three hours away, and both mountain passes are closed for days at a time in winter.

But the air seems espcially clean here, and we feel somehow lighter in the morning, as if the altitude includes a dispensation from some of the gravity that inflicts its imperative on the rest of the world. And the quality of daylight here is more than a pleasant phenomenon, it is a form of clarity to us. A clarity which heals.

Abe Bronstein died last autumn. He had just finished work on the Winter Issue, the one that included a short piece by Ann Beattie, when he suffered a massive coronary while walking to the subway.

Amrita and I flew back for his funeral. Afterwards, over coffee with other mourners in the small townhouse he had shared with his mother, the old woman beckoned for Amrita and me to join her in Abe's room.

The small bedroom was made even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that filled the better part of three walls. Mrs. Bronstein was eighty-six and seemed too frail to hold herself erect as she sat there on the edge of the bed. The room smelled of Abe's brand of cigars and of leather bookbindings.

"Here, please," said the old woman. Her hand was surprisingly steady as she handed me the small envelope. "Abraham left instructions for you to have this, Robert." Her throaty voice must once have been beautifully exciting. Now, as it measured out the words in the precise diction of an acquired language, it was merely beautiful. "Abraham said that I was to deliver this to you personally — even, as he put it, if I had to walk to Colorado to find you."

At any other time, the image of this frail old woman hitchhiking across the prairie would have brought a smile from me. Now I nodded and opened the letter.

Abe was right. The magazine was quite portable. The college was thrilled to have Other Voices originating from its PO. box, and they obligingly cut back my teaching time to two sections with no cut in pay. I suspect that they would pay me for no teaching if my presence would keep Amrita in their math department. For her part, Amrita is pleased by the easy access to the college computer terminal that shares time with some monster Cray computer in Denver, She recently made the comment — "This place is pretty up to date." While on her way to the math building, she obviously has not noticed the quonset-hut dormitories, cinderblock buildings, and minuscule library.

I find it reasonably easy to edit an Eastern literary journal from the top of a Colorado mountain, although I do have to make five or six trips a year to confer with printers and to visit with some of the writers and sponsors. Amrita has become involved with the publication and has shown surprising strength as a reader. She says that her training in language and mathematics has given her a sense of symbolic balance — whatever the hell that means. But it has been at Amrita's urging that I've tried to include more Western writers including Joanne Greenberg and the Cowboy Poet of Creed.

The results have been encouraging. Subscriptions have gone up recently, we've established several shelf sale outlets, and our old readership appears to be remaining loyal. We shall see.

I have written no poetry. Not since Calcutta.

The Song of Kali never quite goes away. It is a background sound to me like discordant music from a poorly tuned radio station.

I still dream of crossing muddy wastes with gray-wrapped bodies underfoot while distant chimneys send up flames to lick at low clouds.

Some nights the wind comes up and I rise and go to the front window of the cabin and look into the blackness and hear the scrabbling of six limbs on the rocks outside. I wait, then, but the gaunt face with its hungry mouth and its thirsting eyes stays just back in the darkness, held away by . . . by what? I do not know.

But the Song of Kali still is sung.

Recently, not far from us here, an older woman and her grown daughter, both self-described "good Christians," baked her grandson in the oven to drive out the demons that made him cry in the evening.

One of my students here is distantly related to the California high school student who recently raped and murdered his girlfriend and then brought fourteen of his friends to view the body over a three-day period. One boy dropped a brick on the corpse to make sure she was dead. None of the kids thought to mention it to the authorities.

One of the new printers I met at Adamsons in New York last month was Siem Ry, a 42-year-old refugee from Phnom Penh. He had owned his own printing company there and was able to bribe his way into Thailand and to the U.S. a few years ago. He worked his way up in Adamsons after starting over as a printer's devil. Over a few drinks, Ry told me about the forced evacuation of the city and the eight-day forced march which killed his parents. He quietly told me about the labor camp that claimed his wife, and about the morning he awoke to find that his three children had been taken to an "education-labor camp" in a distant part of the country. Ry described a field he stumbled into while escaping. He said that human skulls were piled three-and four-feet deep across half an acre in one place.

The Age of Kali has begun.

I went down to the mobile-home library last week and read up on the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta. It had been only a phrase to me until then. The historical details were not relevent to much of anything. Essentially, the Black Hole was just an airless room crammed full of too many people during one of the sporadic rebellions in the 1800's.

But the phrase still haunts me. I've developed a theory about Calcutta, although theory is too dignified a word for such an intuitive opinion.

I think that there are black holes in reality. Black holes in the human spirit. And actual places where, because of density or misery or sheer human perversity, the fabric of things just comes apart and that black core in us swallows all the rest.

I read the papers, I look around, and I have a sinking feeling that these black holes are growing larger, more common, feeding on their own vile appetite. They are not restricted to strange cities in distant countries.

Without telling Amrita any of this, I asked her recently about astronomical black holes. She gave a long explanation, much of it based on the work of a man named Stephen Hawking, much of it technical, most of it indecipherable to me. But a couple of things she mentioned interested me. First, she said that it did look as if light and other captured energies might be able to escape astronomical black holes after all. I forget the details of her explanation, but the impression I got was that although it was impossible to climb out of a black hole, energy might "tunnel out" into another place and time. Second, she said that even if all the matter and energy in the universe were gobbled up by black holes, it would only ensure that the mass came together into another Big Bang that would start what she called a Fresh New Universe with new laws, new forms, and blazing new galaxies of light.

Maybe. I sit on a mountaintop and weave weak metaphors, all the while remembering a pale hint of cheek in a dirty shawl. Sometimes I touch the palm of my hand in an attempt to recall the sensation the last time I cupped Victoria's head in my hand. Take care of your mom until I get back, okay, Little One?

And the wind rises outside and the stars shake in the chill of night.

Amrita is pregnant. She hasn't told me yet, but I know that she confirmed it with her doctor two days ago. I think she's worried about what my reaction will be. She needn't be.

A month ago, just before school started again in September, Amrita and I took the Bronco up to the end of an old mining road and then backpacked about three miles along the ridgeline. There was no sound except for the breeze through the pines below us. The valleys there were either never inhabited or abandoned when the old mines played out. We explored a few of the old diggings and then crossed another ridge to where we could see snow-topped peaks extending away in all directions, to and beyond the curve of the planet. We paused to watch a hawk circle silently on high thermals half a mile above us.

That night we camped near a high lake, a small, perfect circle of painfully cold snowmelt. The half-moon rose about midnight and cast a pale brilliance on the surrounding peaks. Patches of snow caught the moonlight on the rocky slope near us.

Amrita and I made love that night. It was not the first time since Calcutta, but it was the first time we were able to forget everything except each another. Afterward, Amrita fell asleep with her head on my chest while I lay there and watched the Perseid meteors cut their way across the August night sky. I counted twenty-eight before I fell asleep.

Amrita is thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine. I'm sure that her doctor will recommend amniocentesis. I'm going to urge her not to go through that. Amniocentesis is helpful primarily if the parents are willing to abort the fetus if there are genetic problems. I don't think we are. I also feel — feel very strongly — that there will be no problems.

It might be best if we were to have a boy this time, but it will be fine either way. There will be painful recollections with a baby in the house, but it will be less painful than the hurt we've shared so long now.

I still believe that some places are too wicked to be suffered. Occasionally, I dream of nuclear mushroom clouds rising above a city and human figures dancing against the flaming pyre that once was Calcutta.

Somewhere there are dark choruses ready to proclaim the Age of Kali. I am sure of this. As sure as I am that there will always be servants to do Her bidding.

All violence is power, Mr. Luczak.

Our child will be born in the spring. I want him or her to know all of the pleasures of hillsides under clear skies, of hot chocolate on a winter's morning, and of laughter on a grassy Saturday afternoon in summer. I want our child to hear the friendly voices of good books and the even-friendlier silences in the company of good people.

I have not written any poetry in years, but recently I bought a large, well-bound book of blank pages and I've written in it every day. It is not poetry. It is not for publication. It is a story — a series of stories, actually — about the adventures of a group of unlikely friends. There is a talking cat, a fearless and precocious mouse, a gallant but lonely centaur, and a vainglorious eagle who is afraid to fly. It is a story about courage and friendship and small quests to interesting places. It is a bedtime storybook.

The Song of Kali is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. Its chorus grows and grows and grows.

But there are other voices to be heard. There are other songs to be sung.