Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  He found a place at the edge of the crowd. Far ahead, halfway up the hillside, he saw the colossal papier-mâché statues of the divinities being carried on poles by sweating brawny men. Jaspin recognized each one: that was Prete Noir the Negus, that one was the thunder-serpent Narbail, that was O Minotauro the bull, that was Rei Ceupassear. And those two, the biggest of all, were the true great ones, Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga, the gods from deepest space. Jaspin shivered in the heat. Crazy as this stuff was, it had undeniable power.

  A slender young woman jammed up behind him twisted around to face him and said, “Pardon me. You’re Dr. Jaspin, aren’t you? From UCLA?”

  He looked at her as if she had bitten his arm. She was twenty-three, twenty-four, stringy blonde hair, white blouse open to the waist. Her eyes looked a little glazed. The marks of Maguali-ga were painted across her very minimal breasts in purple and orange. Jaspin didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean anything. He had forgotten a lot of people in the last few years.

  Gruffly he said, “Sorry. Wrong guy.”

  “I was sure you were him. I audited his course in ninety-nine. I thought it was really profound.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her, smiling vacantly, and moved away, elbowing through. She made the sign of Rei Ceupassear at him, as a kind of benediction. Forgiveness. Screw you and your forgiveness, Jaspin thought. Then he was instantly sorry. But he drilled forward, burrowing into the crowd.

  This was a low time in Jaspin’s life. Somehow things had begun falling apart for him right about the year that the blonde girl said she had sat in on his classes, and he had not yet figured out why. He was thirty-four. There were days when he felt three times as old as that: heavy leaden days, ass-dragging days, sometimes a month of them in a row. The university had dismissed him, for cause, early in ’02. He hadn’t quite managed to begin his dissertation then—the doctorate that the blonde girl had conferred on him existed only in her imagination. What he had been was an assistant professor in the anthropology department, and he hadn’t realized what a rare privilege it was in those times to have a cushy job in one of the few remaining universities. He realized it now. But what he was now was nothing at all.

  “Maguali-ga! Maguali-ga!” they were yelling on all sides. Jaspin took up the cry. “Maguali-ga!” He started to move, letting himself be swept onward, up toward the vast swaying statues shimmering in the heat.

  He had been coming to the tumbondé processions for five months now; this was his eighth one. He wasn’t entirely sure why he came. Part of it, he knew, was professional curiosity. He still thought of himself on some level as an anthropologist, and here was anthropology raw and wild, on the hoof, this apocalyptic messianic cult of star-god worshippers that had sprung up in the drab wastelands east of San Diego. Jaspin’s specialty had been contemporary irrationality: he had hoped to write a massive book that would explain the modern world to itself and make some sense out of the madhouse that the good people of the late twenty-first century had handed on to their descendants. Tumbondé was the craziest thing going; Jaspin had been drawn irresistibly toward it, as if by infiltrating it and analyzing it and reporting on it he might somehow be able to rehabilitate his broken academic career. But there was more to his being here than that. He admitted to himself that he felt some kind of hunger, some emptiness of the spirit that he dreamed he might satisfy here. God only knew how, though.

  “Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Jaspin shouted, and forced his way through the crowds.

  The excitement all around him was contagious. He could feel his pulse rising and his throat going dry. People were dancing in place, feet rooted, shoulders wriggling, arms flung this way and that. He saw the blonde girl again a dozen meters away, lost in some kind of trance. Maguali-ga the god of the gateway had come to collect her spirit.

  There were very few Anglos in the crowd. Tumbondé had emerged out of the Latino-African refugee community that had come crowding into the San Diego area after the Dust War, and most of these people were dark-skinned or outright black. The cult was an international stew, a mix of Brazilian and Guinean stuff with an underlay of something Haitian, and of course it had taken on a Mexican tinge too; you couldn’t have any kind of apocalyptic cult operating this close to the border without very quickly having it acquire a subtle Aztec coloration. But it was more ecstatic in nature than the usual Mexican variety—less death, more transfiguration.

  “Maguali-ga!” a tremendous voice roared. “Take me, Maguali-ga!”

  To Jaspin’s astonishment he realized the voice was his own.

  All right. All right. Just go with it, he told himself. He felt suddenly cold despite the horrific heat. Just go with it. Nice Jewish boy from Brentwood, sure, jumping around with the pagan shvartzers on a sizzling hillside in the middle of July—well, why the hell not? Go with it, kid.

  He was close enough now to see the leaders of the procession, rising awesomely above all the rest in their stiltlike platform shoes: there was Senhor Papamacer, there was Senhora Aglaibahi beside him, and surrounding them were the eleven members of the Inner Host. A kind of golden nimbus of sunlight flickered around all thirteen of them. Jaspin wondered how they worked that trick; for trick it surely must be. Their own explanation was simply that they were magnets for cosmic energy.

  “The force it comes from the seven galaxies,” Senhor Papamacer had told the Times reporter. “It is the great light that bears the power of salvation. Once it shined on Egypt, and then on Tibet, and then on the place of the gods in Yucatan; and it has been on Jerusalem and in the sacred shrine of the Andes, and now it is here, which is the sixth of the Seven Places. Soon it will move to the Seventh Place, which is the North Pole, when Maguali-ga will open the gateway and Chungirá He-Will-Come will break through to our world, bringing the wealth of the stars for those who love him. And that will be the time of the ending, which will be the new beginning.” That time, Senhor Papamacer had said, was not far off.

  Jaspin heard the bleating of tethered goats over all the other sounds. He heard the low mournful voice of the sacrificial white bull that he knew was in the hut at the top of the hill.

  Now he saw the masked dancers, cutting through the mob, seven of them representing the seven benevolent galaxies. Their faces were hidden by glittering metallic shields and their bodies, which were bare, bore ornaments in the shape of suns and moons and planets. On their heads were red metal domes bright as mirrors, from which blinding shafts of reflected sunlight bounced like spears. They carried gourd rattles and castanets, and they were chanting fiercely:

  Venha Maguali-ga

  Maguali-ga, venha!

  An invocation. He fell in behind them, chanting, flinging his arms around. To his left, a plump woman in green robes was saying over and over in Spanish “Forgive our sins forgive our sins” and on the other side of him a leathery-looking black man bare to the waist was muttering in thick French, “The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea. The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea.” The drums were louder and faster, now. Up the hill. Up. Animals were screeching in terror and pain somewhere: the sacrifices were beginning.

  Jaspin found himself standing on the lip of a huge ditch. It was full almost to the brim with the most amazing assortment of things: jewelry, coins, dolls, entertainment cubes, family photographs, clothing, toys, electronic gadgets, weapons, tools, packages of food. He knew what to do. This was the Well of Sacrifice: you had to rid yourself of something that was precious to you, by way of recognizing that you would not need such things once the gods came from the stars bringing incalculable wealth to all the suffering people of Earth. You must make a gift to the Earth, said Senhor Papamacer, if you wish the Earth to draw gifts from the stars. It didn’t matter if what you threw into the ditch wasn’t generally considered precious; it had to be precious to you. Jaspin had an offering ready—his wristwatch, probably the last valuable thing except for his books that he had not yet pawned, a sleek IBM job with nin
e function nodes. It was worth at least a thousand.

  This is lunacy, he thought.

  “To Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” he said, and hurled the shining watch far out into the cluttered ditch.

  Then he was swept on, upward, to the place of communion. The blood of goats and sheep was flowing there; they had not yet sacrificed the bull. Jaspin, trembling and shivering, found himself face to face with Senhora Aglaibahi, the virgin mother, the goddess on Earth. She seemed about three meters tall; her black hair was dusted with mirror-dust, her eyes were outlined in fiery scarlet, her bare heavy dark-tipped breasts glistened with the markings of Maguali-ga. She touched her fingertip to his arm and he felt a little sting, as though she had stuck him with a needle or tapped him with a shocker. He lurched on past her, past the even more gigantic form of Senhor Papamacer, past the papier-mâché figures of the gods Narbail and Prete Noir and O Minotauro and the star-rover Rei Ceupassear, and onward around a bare charred place that was sacred to Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga.

  Somewhere on the far side of that he felt himself growing dizzy and beginning to lose consciousness. The heat, he thought, the excitement, the mobs, the hysteria. He tottered, nearly fell, struggled to stay upright, fearing that he would be trampled if he let himself go down. He found a tree at the summit of the hill and clung to it as wave after wave of astounding vertigo came over him. It seemed to him that he was breaking free of the land, that he was being hurled by some enormous centrifugal power into the far reaches of the universe.

  As he soared through space he saw Chungirá-He-Will-Come.

  The god of the gateway was a great bizarre golden figure with curving ram’s-horns, the strangest being that Jaspin had ever seen, rising out of a block of pure shining alabaster that covered it—him—to the waist. Over its—his—left shoulder was an immense sun, dark red, filling half the purplish sky; it seemed to be swelling and pulsing, blowing up like an enormous balloon. There was a second sun over the god’s right shoulder, a blue one, fluctuating in sudden violent bursts of light. Between the two suns streamed a bridge of brilliantly glowing matter, like a fiery arch in the heavens.

  “My time is soon,” said Chungirá-He-Will-Come. “You will enter into my embrace, child. And all will be well.”

  Then the figure vanished. The red star and the blue one could no longer be seen. Jaspin clutched at the air but he was unable to bring back what he had just beheld. The wondrous moment was over.

  He began to shake. He had never experienced anything remotely like this before. It stunned him; it was devastating; he could not move, he could not breathe. For an instant he had been touched by a god. There was no explanation for it and he would not seek one. Just this once he had broken through into something that passed all his understanding, something that was so very much bigger than Barry Jaspin that he could lose himself utterly in it. Good Christ, he thought, can it really be that there are titanic space-beings out there, that the tumbondé people have a pipeline across half the universe to God knows where, that these creatures are watching over our world from a jillion light years away, that they are coming to us to govern us and change our lives? It has to be just a hallucination—doesn’t it? The heat, the crowds, maybe a drug the Senhora slipped into me?

  He opened his eyes. He was lying under a tree, and the thin blonde girl was bending over him. Her blouse was still open, but the Maguali-ga markings on her breasts were smeared and blurred, and her skin was shining with sweat.

  “I saw you pass out,” she said. “I was afraid you’d get hurt. Can I help you up? You look so strange, Dr. Jaspin!”

  He didn’t bother to deny that he was Jaspin. In a voice strangled with awe he said, “I can’t believe it. I absolutely can’t believe it. I saw him. I could have reached out and put my hand on him. Not that I would have dared.”

  “Saw whom, Dr. Jaspin?”

  “You didn’t? See him?”

  “You mean Senhor Papamacer?”

  “I mean Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” said Jaspin. “Looking at me from a planet of some other galaxy. Christ Almighty, it was the real thing! I never doubted it.” He felt shrouded in a numinous aura; he felt himself exalted by the divine touch. Some part of him, he knew, was Chungirá-He-Will-Come, and always would be. But in another moment it all started to flee and fade; and a moment after that he was no one but miserable, screwed-up Barry Jaspin again, lying sweaty and exhausted on a torrid hillside with thousands of people shouting and chanting and passing out all around him, and frightened animals bleating, and drums shaking the ground like nine-point-five Richter. He sat up and looked at the blonde girl and saw the awe and wonder reflected in her face. It was as if she too had seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come in his eyes, for that little moment before the ecstasy faded. And without warning the most terrible sadness he had ever known came over him, and he began to cry, dry racking tears and uncontrollable sobs.

  4

  WHEN they were finished working him over down in B Cabin, Ferguson made his way slowly up the hill to the dorm, feeling lightheaded and seasick. It was the same old afterward feeling that he had every morning at this time. He knew it was the same every morning because the molecular recorder he carried illicitly under his signet ring told him so. It remembered things for him. He tapped the ring twice and the recorder told him, “You feel crappy and disoriented right now because they just picked your mind. Don’t worry about it. These shits can’t grind you down, boy.” He had that message programmed right at the top: the recorder gave it to him first thing after pick, every morning.

  Wisps of fog drifted through the trees. Everything looked damp and shining. Holy Jesus, and this is July, he thought. Feels like February. He could never get used to Northern California. He missed the Los Angeles heat, the dryness, even the smog. That was the one thing the scientists were never going to get rid of, he thought, the smog. They had it in L.A. when there was nobody but Indians living there. Maybe even when just dinosaurs. They were going to have it forever.

  Ferguson thumbed the ring again and his voice said, “Lacy’s coming up from San Francisco this weekend. She’ll be staying in Mendo and she hopes you can get leave to visit her Saturday and Sunday. Give her a call right after breakfast. The number is—”

  He frowned and hit the ring twice more, digging into deeper memory. “Request Lacy,” he said.

  The recorder said, “Lacy Meyers lives in San Francisco, red hair, high cheekbones, thirty-one years old, single, you met her in January oh-two, worked with you on the Betelgeuse Five deal. She can only come when she’s on top. Birthday is March tenth. Home address and phone—”

  “Thanks,” he said. Living with pick, it was like writing your autobiography on water. But he didn’t plan on living this way forever.

  He went into the dorm, down the long brightly lit hall into the third room on the left, which, according to the orderly who had done recall routine with him today, he shared with two roommates, an Indian who called himself Nick Double Rainbow and a Chic named Tomás Menendez. Neither one seemed to be around at the moment: probably out getting picked, second shift. Ferguson stood wavering in the middle of the room, not sure which corner was his. One bed had a bunch of cubes on it; he picked one up and pressed it and it said something to him in Spanish. Okay. That was easy. The bed opposite it was covered with a bright red blanket marked with crisscross patterns. Indian stuff, he figured. By elimination that leaves this one over here, must be mine.

  God, I hate this shit, he thought. Starting every day like a newborn baby.

  The one thing he hadn’t forgotten was why he was here. It was either this or Rehab Two, and they were a lot rougher with you at Rehab Two. When you got out of there you were somebody else, meek and mild, fit only for pruning roses. They had intended to send him there after his conviction on the space scam, but he had flipped out, or had pretended to—he wasn’t sure which any more—and his lawyer had gotten him a year at Nepenthe instead. “This man is no criminal,” the lawyer had said. “He is as much a victim as
anyone.” True? Ferguson didn’t know any more. Maybe he genuinely did have that mental thing, that Gelbard’s syndrome, or maybe it had only been one more seam. Whatever it was, they were curing him of it here. Sure.

  He flopped out of his bed and pushed his thumb down on the phone’s print-plate. “Outside line,” he said.

  The computer voice replied, “I have one message for you. Do you want it first, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “It’s from your wife. In regard to her visit, scheduled for next Tuesday. She will arrive this morning instead, ten-thirty hours.”

  “Holy suffering Jesus,” Ferguson said. “You’re kidding. Today? What day is today?”

  “Friday, July 21, 2103.”

  “And how long is she planning to stay?”

  “Until 1500 hours Sunday.”

  There went the weekend with Lacy, for sure. Son of a bitch. Even here in this place he worked hard to keep everything lined up the way he wanted it, but it was too hard, goddamned near impossible when you could never remember anything from one day to the next, and nothing ever seemed to stay in position. Son of a bitch. Coming for her conjugal four days early! Furiously he said, “You sure? Dr. Lewis authorized the change of date? This has to be a mix-up.”

  “The authorization number is—”

  “Never mind. Listen, there’s a bad mix-up here. I’m due for external leave on Saturday. You’ve got something down there about my applying for an external leave for this weekend, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Ferguson, there’s nothing of that—”

  “Check again.”

  “There’s no record of any application for external leave.”

  “It’s got to be there. There’s been some mistake.” Try arguing with a computer, Ferguson thought, despondent. “I know I applied. You keep searching. And listen, get me Elszabet Lewis right away. She knows I applied, too.”