The Poison Sky (8 page)

The secretary had come in behind. “Mr. Hedrick, are we painting?”

Hedrick held up a palm and something about the gesture dismissed her. She backed out and shut the door. The light glistened off the top of the man's shaved head.

“The only sin is ignorance,” the man said evenly. He had a smile that was probably meant to be beatific, but Jack Liffey saw it as smug, the kind of look you put on when you knew you were holding way more than enough aces. His voice had a weird baritone edge to it that did not sound quite natural. “All sorrow, suffering, and pain are traceable to ignorance of how to act.”

It was offered like a formula greeting, and he guessed it was a small test of how you would react. “Except toothache,” Jack Liffey said. “Knowing how to bite doesn't really help very much.”

The smile broadened slightly. “You're not a painter, are you?”

“No.”

“Have a seat. Please. You may wish me harm but you will find that only those who wish to be harmed can be.”

He wasn't there to argue or he might have mentioned six million or so Jews who probably hadn't wished to be harmed. Jack Liffey wondered what the man knew, or thought he knew, about his interloper. He sat as best he could, wincing at his stiffness. He folded his legs under and found himself sideways a bit, resting a hand on a small pillow.

Hedrick held a palm in front of his face parallel to the ground as if describing the height of an elf. His hand was rock steady. “I could do that for a week,” he said.

“Good for you.”

“The first time I taught myself stillness it was for long-range reconnaissance patrols. In I Corps.”

“Marines,” Jack Liffey said.
“Fuck that.”

“You were there, too, but you weren't a marine.”

“Just a lowly E-4 technician in the draft army.”

The man set the palm flat on the ground in front of him and leaned gradually over it and kept going until his legs were straight out behind him and his neck was extended and his elbow formed a lever that held him up so that only the single palm touched the ground. There was only the slightest trembling. The one-hand gymnastic stand was impressive in such a big man, probably impressive in anyone.

“Nine-point-nine,” Jack Liffey said. “Performance
and
degree of difficulty.” Somewhere deep in the building people were chanting.

“Even during life in the dense body, we are in contact with the invisible world at every moment of our existence.” There was no strain apparent in his voice. “In fact, the invisible is the real and permanent world.”

“Goodman Hedrick,” Jack Liffey tested the name, as if a careful enunciation would reveal a new meaning. “That sounds like the name of somebody in charge of the Salem witch trials.”

The man righted himself slowly and breathed deeply a few times. The only flaw in the picture came from a tiny film of perspiration at his temple. He patted at it with a small pillow. “Goodman Hedrick was the name of one of the early Theodelphian Elect. According to our incomplete records, he lived in the second half of the eighteenth century. He discarded his mind envelope and I took it up two hundred years later to encapsulate my vital persons.”

Now
Jack Liffey recognized him. It was the context that had thrown him, but the shiny handsome bald face was unmistakable. He had read the man up in a Sunday magazine years ago, one of a long line of Westerners who'd passed through the flame of Indian culture and come out thinking he was an avatar of something or other and then come home to gather a cult around him. “You're Baba Ambu,” Jack Liffey said, “and you had a big ashram up in the hills above Malibu.”

“And I am Tom Clayton, mendicant in Asia. I wandered from one end of India to another, seeking escape from the shame of the things that I had done and seen done or just let pass without stopping them. Before that I was Captain Tom L. Clayton, U.S. Marine Corps, assassin. It is possible for each existence to subsume and transcend all the previous ones. Just as your life has changed dramatically, has it not?”

“Yeah, it's changed. I just don't think of it as a steady march up to Glory.”

“It may take longer than you think to work out which way is upward. Maybe more than one lifetime.”

Jack Liffey kept his ear tuned for even a hint of irony, but couldn't catch any. The man's eyes were boring into him, and he saw it as the old Special Forces challenge, what they called Mad Dog. The first to look away was weak, a pussy.

“Uh-huh, God's secret plan. I'm surprised you consider this Theodelphian thing a cosmic step up from the ashram.”

There was a flicker of annoyance, and Jack Liffey wondered if he was getting to him at last. He'd been there twenty minutes and the man hadn't even asked who he was. He was happy to go with it and pick up what he could, but the back of his neck prickled from time to time and he expected the thugs to come through the door at any moment.

“There are only three Paths—the Path of Love, the Path of Works and the Path of Knowledge. I discovered that the East generally offers a full spiritual tuition along only two of the three, and the Theodelphian Elect offer a perfect balance. When you see the truth you have to act, even if it means giving up something you have built up carefully and cherish. I've never been slow to accept a challenge. I found I was offered a chance to take a small step upward in human evolution and help others do the same.”

A part of the man seemed to go onto autopilot as another part was working out something else. Perhaps he was just counting down to the arrival of the troops.

“Is your spirit reaching that same point, do you think?” Hedrick asked. He glanced at the ladder, as if seeing it for the first time.

“I came to ask about Jimmy Mardesich, one of your disciples. You can get rid of me right away by telling me where he is.”

The atmosphere shifted suddenly toward winter. “Did you try to access our computers?”

“Would it matter?”

“We don't allow that. Now I see who you are. I let you stay because I believe in the Eternal Law of Accident. I knew you were planning something, you may even have thought you were an enemy of the Elect, but I could also see that you were in great spiritual crisis. Perhaps the Eternal Law had brought us another sublime soul.” He almost stopped, but finally decided to offer a further pearl. “The first few steps are really very beneficial for your earthbound shell, and not all that difficult. Before you begin the steeper part of the climb, we fix open wounds like yours and then you are much stronger at the wounded place.”

“Just tell me where Jimmy is. If he wants to stay, that's fine.”

“I offer you much more,” he said, opening his hands in an expansive gesture. “But men like you are always tempted by less. Under no circumstances do we discuss the spiritual progress of any of our souls, or even who is amongst us.” A terrible lassitude had come into his voice. “You may go. Don't make me spring the trapdoor.”

Jack Liffey glanced at the floor quickly. He had a vision of sliding down a chute into the basement like a gigantic Looney Tune. The floor looked okay.

“It's not literal.”

“Your strong-arm pal from the marines, the guy with the red hair, he's literal enough. Keep him away from me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I think you do.”

Jack Liffey got up and shouldered the ladder. “You could have got rid of me easy. Now I'll keep a picture of you over my desk, like Montgomery did with Rommel.”

“The picture was irrelevant.” Goodman Hedrick's mouth worked around the words as if they were something repellent. “Montgomery had more tanks.”

The secretary jumped up to hold the door open as he carried the ladder out. “Many worthy lives,” she said to him.

He didn't know whether it was a greeting or a prediction or an offer.

“Rain never falls up,” he replied, and he guessed she watched him all the way to the stairhead.

He left the ladder in the courtyard, beside the placid lagoon, where a few ducks swam in sluggish circles, and slipped quickly out of the overalls. Outside, up the street, he saw an angry conference of squat brown Latinos in paint-spattered clothing. He walked calmly up to the buzzing circle and pointed the way he had come.

“
Compañeros,
I saw a guy take your ladder inside there.
La escalera.
”

“Gracias.”

There wasn't a manual laborer in the city who spoke much English. If the Republicans succeeded in sealing the borders, he thought, everything in the built environment would crumble away inside of a generation. The painters went off in an angry clump, nobody even glancing twice at the painty jumpsuit crushed up in his hand.

He drove up a side street as the sun was turning fierce and he felt the hackles on his neck prickling. Dry santanas were coming, the hot winds that blew west and south off the Mojave down all the mountain canyons and propelled the smog back into the city from Riverside and Pomona. If they blew for two days straight, they'd push the evil brown cloud right out to sea, where it would hover off the coast like bad luck, poisoning the whales, until the wind dropped enough to let it back in.

He came to a halt at a red light next to an old man wearing an old-fashioned sandwich board that said
TENDONS OUT OF BALANCE = BLOCKED BIOENERGY,
and a lot of fine print. The man caught his eye. He had a stringy white beard like Uncle Ho and didn't look all too clean.

“Frogs,” the man declared, quite distinctly, right to him.

“Are you sure?”

“Frogs!” His neck pumped with a fierce certainty.
“They
know.”

The light changed and Jack Liffey nodded back as he drove away. He wondered what frogs knew, but since the sign had been about tendons, frogs seemed a pretty good candidate. He flexed his arms a bit, just to make sure the tendons were working.

It was still early for the lunch crowd and he waited in a green plastic booth at Wingo's and ordered another bad coffee. It made him uneasy that a guy like Goodman Hedrick had jumped to the conclusion that he was in spiritual crisis and that he needed fixing. He wondered if he was broadcasting a subliminal distress signal. If it was true, he'd have to do something about it. L.A. was too full of predators to let that go on.

But everybody these days had an extra helping or two of distress, he thought. He was broke, and he missed his daughter, and once in a while he even got nostalgic for his nice secure aerospace job and his suburban house and the big garage-workshop with his radial arm saw and drill press, now parked at a friend's, and even the little slobbering friendly cocker spaniel instead of the permanently pissed-off half coyote he'd acquired. But he knew he could shove the regrets down inside himself and hold them there out of the way, along with all the other stuff that he'd dropped overboard or screwed up or never quite got right. Stuff came and went and you just had to let it go.

He sipped at the coffee and made a face. There was one thing he'd never quite locked down, if he let himself think about it. It was Hedrick talking about his time in Vietnam that reminded him. For a few years in the early seventies, just back from the war and wandering around in a bit of a druggy haze, he'd fallen in with some angry vets and they'd dragged him along to meetings of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They'd really pumped themselves up with the possibilities of changing things, the war, then racism, sexism, capitalism, lots of things. He'd got a real charge out of it for a couple of years, until one day during a march on the Federal Building on Wilshire everything had suddenly turned pointless on him, just like that, and he'd been clobbered by the realization that he wasn't really part of some vast social movement that was going to carry them all toward a worthy goal.

What he'd seen in one disturbing moment was the fact that life pretty much chugged along on its own, and things strayed here and there without much purpose at all. You did your best with what you had, but there was no guarantee it would ever mean much. He'd rocked back on his feet at the time, hit by a genuine wave of nausea. It wasn't really belief in anything specific that had fled as much as the capacity for belief. And before very long he found there wasn't even a seam where it had been. Whatever it was had been torn out of the continuum of his life and the gap had clanged shut, and all he'd been left was a vague sense of deprivation, a feeling on late nights that something ought to be different. Too, he wished he had back his Good Conduct Medal that he'd tossed over the fence at the VA.

There was a plus side to it all, though. In the years since that queasy revelation he'd grown used to the kind of randomness of things that plagued Faye. That kept him from thinking he had it all figured out. He didn't much like people who thought they had it all figured out, which was probably what irked him about the big bald guru.

“Refill?” The waitress had a vertical scar on her cheek, as if a rotten boyfriend had cut her for some reason. She carried a round glass pot in each hand, one with a brown neck and one orange.

“Thanks, regular. You a vegetarian?” he asked.

“Huh-uh. Do I look like it or something?”

“Everybody seems to be something these days.”

“I've started doing a little past-life research,” she admitted. “My roomie said she found out she used to be a Nabatean princess.”

“Far out,” he said. They never found out they'd been serfs or cabdrivers, or night soil workers, he thought.

“Maybe I'll be something nice.”

“Good luck,” he offered as she wandered away. If everybody got their deepest wishes about life, he thought, things would probably be even worse than they were.

People were arriving in clumps and the place began filling up. Just after noon, Faye Mardesich wandered in carrying a string bag full of pamphlets and books. She looked the place over for a minute before finding him and he had the distinct impression she would have burst into tears if she'd had to look around
one more instant.