And yet in some mysterious way the silence remained unbroken. Like flies in a block of amber, the sounds were embedded in a transparent soundlessness which they were powerless to destroy or even modify, and to which they remained completely irrelevant. Timelessly, from intensity to intensity, the silence deepened. Silence in ambush, a watching, conspiratorial silence incomparably more sinister than the grisly little rococo death march which had preceded it. This was the abyss to whose brink the music had piped him. To the brink, and now over the brink into this everlasting silence.
“Infinite suffering,” he whispered. “And you can’t speak, you can’t even cry out.”
A chair creaked, silk rustled, he felt the wind of movement against his face, the nearness of a human presence. Behind his closed lids he was somehow aware that Susila was kneeling there in front of him. An instant later he felt her hands touching his face—the palms against his cheeks, the fingers on his temples.
The clock in the kitchen made a little whirring noise, then started to strike the hour. One, two, three, four. Outside in the garden a gusty breeze whispered intermittently among the leaves. A cock crowed and a moment later, from a long way off, came an answering call, and almost simultaneously another and another. Then an answer to the answers, and more answers in return. A counterpoint of challenges challenged, of defiances defied. And now a different kind of voice joined in the chorus. Articulate but inhuman. “Attention,” it called through the crowing and the insect noises. “Attention. Attention. Attention.”
“Attention,” Susila repeated; and as she spoke, he felt her fingers starting to move over his forehead. Lightly, lightly, from the brows up to the hair, from either temple to the midpoint between the eyes. Up and down, back and forth, soothing away the mind’s contractions, smoothing out the furrows of bewilderment and pain. “Attention to this.” And she increased the pressure of her palms against his cheekbones, of her fingertips above his ears. “To this,” she repeated. “To now. Your face between my two hands.” The pressure was relaxed, the fingers started to move again across his forehead.
“Attention.” Through a ragged counterpoint of crowing, the injunction was insistently repeated. “Attention. Attention. Atten…” The inhuman voice broke off in midword.
Attention to her hands on his face? Or attention to this dreadful glare of the inner light, to this uprush of tin and plastic stars and, through the barrage of vulgarity, to this packet of garbage that had once been Molly, to the whorehouse looking glass, to all those countless corpses in the mud, the dust, the rubble. And here were the lizards again and Gongylus gongyloides by the million, here were the marching columns, the rapt, devoutly listening faces of Nordic angels.
“Attention,” the mynah bird began to call again from the other side of the house. “Attention.”
Will shook his head. “Attention to what?”
“To this.” And she dug her nails into the skin of his forehead. “This. Here and now. And it isn’t anything so romantic as suffering and pain. It’s just the feel of fingernails. And even if it were much worse, it couldn’t possibly be forever or to infinity. Nothing is forever, nothing is to infinity. Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature.”
She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The fingertips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.
“Pay attention,” she whispered.
But it was impossible not to pay attention. However, gently and delicately, her fingers had probed to the very quick of his consciousness. And how intensely alive, he now noticed, those fingers were! What a strange tingling warmth flowed out of them!
“It’s like an electric current,” he marveled.
“But luckily,” she said, “the wire carries no messages. One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated. Just an exchange of life, that’s all.” Then, after a pause, “Do you realize, Will,” she went on, “that in all these hours we’ve been sitting here—all these centuries in your case, all these eternities—you haven’t looked at me once? Not once. Are you afraid of what you might see?”
He thought over the question and finally nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what it was,” he said. “Afraid of seeing something I’d have to be involved with, something I might have to do something about.”
“So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void.”
“Which you wouldn’t let me go on looking at,” he complained.
“Because the Void won’t do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus gongyloides. And in people,” she added. “Which is sometimes considerably more difficult.”
“Difficult?” He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
“No, not impossible,” she insisted. “Sunyata implies karuna. The Void is light; but it’s also compassion. Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds. And now,” she added, “it’s time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really looks like.”
The fingertips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.
Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.
“Dear God,” he whispered at last.
Susila laughed. “Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?” she asked.
But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently and went on looking. The eye sockets were mysterious with shadow and, except for a little crescent of illumination on the cheekbone, so was all the right side of her face. The left side glowed with a living, golden radiance—preternaturally bright, but with a brightness that was neither the vulgar and sinister glare of darkness visible nor yet that blissful incandescence revealed, in the far-off dawn of his eternity, behind his closed lids and, when he had opened his eyes, in the book-jewels, the compositions of the mystical Cubists, the transfigured landscape. What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light.
“It isn’t the sun,” he said at last, “and it isn’t Chartres. Nor the infernal bargain basement, thank God. It’s all of them together, and you’re recognizably you, and I’m recognizably me—though, needless to say, we’re both completely different. You and me by Rembrandt, but Rembrandt about five thousand times more so.” He was silent for a moment; then, nodding his head in confirmation of what he had just said, “Yes, that’s it,” he went on. “Sun into Chartres, and then stained-glass windows into bargain basement. And the bargain basement is also the torture chamber, the concentration camp, the charnel house with Christmas-tree decorations. And now the bargain basement goes into reverse, picks up Chartres and a slice of the sun, and backs out into this—into you and me by Rembrandt. Does that make any sense to you?”
“All the sense in the world,” she assured him.
But Will was too busy looking at her to be able to pay much attention to what she was saying. “You’re so incredibly beautiful,” he said at last. “But it wouldn’t matter if you were incredibly ugly; you’d still be a Rembrandt-but-five-thousand-times-more-so. Beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated. “And yet I don’t want to sleep with you. No, that isn’t true. I would like to sleep with you. Very much indeed. But it won’t make any difference if I never do. I shall go on loving you—loving you in the way one’s supposed to love people if one’s a Christian. Love,” he repeated, “love. It’s another of those dirty words. ‘In love,’ ‘make love’—those are all right. But plain ‘love’—that’s an obscenity I couldn’t pronounce. But now, now…” He smiled and shook his head. “Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, ‘God is love.’ What manifest nonsense. And yet it happens to be true. Meanwhile there’s this extraordinary face of yours.” He leaned forward to look into it more closely. “As though one were looking into a crystal ball,” he added incredulously. “Something new all
