Mysterium

The sulfa pills rattled in her coat pocket as she paced through snowy gloom. Because the electricity had been turned off to punish the townspeople, there would be no streetlights tonight. The military patrols had been redoubled but the snow would slow them down.

She was allowed to come and go as she wished from the civilians’ wing of the Blue View Motel. She ate dinner at the commissary in order not to arouse suspicion. The dinner was a stew of beef in watery broth and slices of dense bread buttered with suet. She told the pions who patrolled the hallway that she would be working on a paper tonight and didn’t want to be disturbed. She left a lamp burning in her room and pulled the curtains. When the pions adjourned to the lobby to smoke their noxious pipes, she went out a side door into the windy dark. She fell twice, hurrying along the empty streets. The church bell was tolling curfew when she reached Dexter Graham’s apartment.

∞

She fed him sulfanilamide and aspirin and sat with him through the night. When Dex slept, she slept on the sofa across the room. When he woke, often raving or thrashing, she bathed his forehead with a damp cloth.

She was aware of the danger of being here and of the danger Dex was in. The Proctors were like poisonous insects—harmless enough if allowed to toil undisturbed in their nests; lethal if aroused. She remembered the day the Proctors came to arrest her mother, before she was sent to the Renunciates, and that ancient fear rose like flood water from the culverts of memory.

While she cooled his forehead she admired Dexter Graham’s face. He was handsome. She seldom thought of the men she knew as handsome or unhandsome; they were threats or opportunities, seldom friends or lovers. The word lover sounded lewd even when she pronounced it in the privacy of her thoughts. Her last “lover,” if he could be called that, was the boy Campo. That was in the old days when she was very young and before the idolatry laws were enacted. Her father had taken the family to the annual civic service in Rome, where the Temple of Apollo was festooned with garlands and the Bishop of Rome himself rendered the oracles of the Prophetess in Latin hexameter. Linneth was bored by the ritual and sickened by the sacrifice of the animals. She avoided services and stayed in the paradeisos where foreign visitors lodged—or at least, she promised to. In fact she escaped each morning and taught herself to ride the buses and elevated trains; and she met Campo, an Egyptian boy who had come to the shrines with his family as Linneth had come with hers. They spent their meager allowances together on the trams, at the zoo, in the cafes. He told her about Alexandria. She told him about New York. In secret, in his small room in the paradeisos, they undressed one another. Her first and last lover, Campo. On the great passenger steamer Sardinia, bound for New York Harbor after the rites were finished, Linneth’s mother interpreted her silences and frowns. “Sometimes we meet Pan in unexpected places,” she said, smiling obliquely. “Linneth, weren’t the fountains lovely?” She supposed so. “And the choirs in the shrine?” Oh yes. “And the flowers, and the perfume, and the priestess on the axon?” Yes. “And that African boy we saw you with?” Linneth supposed he was lovely too.

She remembered the sunny days on the steamship with the Atlantic Ocean churning behind. She had seen distant mountains of ice, blue as summer air, floating off the Grand Banks. At night, constellations turned like mill wheels in the sky.

After that her life had changed. The Proctors took her to finish her schooling with the Christian Renunciates at their gray stone retraite in snowy Utica (New York, not Greece). She had worn gray dresses that swept the floor and she had learned the Christian panoply of gods, Archons, Demiurges, and dour apostles. And there had not been a lover since Campo, whose skin had smelled wonderfully of cinnamon and cedar.

When she was little her mother told her, “The god who lives in the forest lives in your belly and in your heart.” She wondered if her fierce scholasticism, her invasion of the masculine strongholds of library and carrel, had really been a search for that outcast god: in whose myths, villages, meadows, sacred places? Campo and Pan and the Golden Bough, she thought; everything we worshiped or should have worshiped or neglected to worship.

She tended Dexter Graham through his fever as the snow fell from the dark sky.

∞

After a day he woke and was able to drink a bowl of soup, which Linneth heated over a wax candle. He was thin under the many blankets (she bathed him with a sponge and changed his bandage often), and she saw that the wound and the fever had drawn heavily on his stores of life and strength.

She thought he might have lost some of his distrust of her, and that was good, although his eyes still followed her—if not suspiciously, at least curiously—as she moved about the room.