Mysterium

plate and her quilted blankets. This is success, she told herself. This is my career. This is how I mean to spend the rest of my life.

But each night the memory came of her field expedition three summers ago in the Sierra Mazateca with her guides and two graduate students: a time when she had often been frightened for her life, when she had been dirty, uncomfortable, and too often helpless in the arms of fate. Now she would lie in bed reliving those months. And as terrifying as that time had often been, Linneth thought … it had not been tedious.

Certainly she didn’t want to go back to New Spain. That part of her research was finished. In any case, the entire area was a war zone. But she wondered if the trip had not changed something inside her, had not ignited an unsuspected appetite for—what? Adventure? Surely not. But for something to happen. Another milestone. Something that would matter in her life.

Some nights it was almost a prayer. She remembered her mother murmuring prayers at night: ostensibly to Apollo, since Daddy was a paidonomos in that cult, but more likely to the land around their house in rural New York, away from city lights, where the stars were vivid on summer nights and the forest hummed with life. A prayer to the local gods, who went nameless in the New World, at least since the aboriginals had been exterminated or driven west; whose sybils had fallen silent or never spoken from their meadows. “We live in a breathless place,” Linneth’s mother had once told her. “Without pneuma. No inspiration. No wonder the hierarchs are so powerful here.”

More powerful than she had guessed, Linneth thought. For her mother, the bad times had come all too soon.

Still, she allowed herself a small heretical prayer. Deliver me from this lonely sameness, she thought. And this damned rain!

But the gods, her mother would have reminded her, are capricious. Linneth’s deliverance came in an abrupt and unpleasant form. And the rain went on for days.

?

She shook her raincoat off in the chipped tile lobby of her walk-up building, carried it dripping upstairs past two landings decorated with circular framed mirrors, the bane of her life, always giving back reflections at the least flattering hours: dawn or dusk. Her hair was wet despite the rain cap and she looked small in the glare of the incandescent lamps. Small nose, small round face, compressed pale lips reluctant to offer a smile. When she first moved in, she had always smiled at herself in these mirrors. She no longer bothered. “Wet mouse,” she whispered. “Linneth, you are a wet mouse.”

Her wardrobe was conventionally black, a black blouse and black floorsweeper, buttonhooks tarnished with wear; underneath she wore a modest bustle and corset that contorted her into the shape of, she supposed, an acceptable female don, though there were not many guiding examples.

Linneth took a longer look at herself in the mirror at the second-floor landing. Women with careers were supposed to be hard. She didn’t look hard. Only weary. There were smudges under her eyes. She had stayed up late last night listening to the radio, a program of war songs, lonesome songs about separated lovers. She tried to imagine what it must be like to have a lover at the front—in Cuernavaca, say, where all those lovely white adobe buildings were being shelled. She thought it must be terrible.

She walked down the hallway to her door, which was ajar.

She stopped and looked at it.

Had she left it open? Impossible. She was compulsive about locking her door. There had been robberies in the neighborhood.

Perhaps she had been robbed. The thought of it made her sick with apprehension. She pushed on the door and it glided open. There was a light on inside. She was suddenly aware of the sound of her breathing and the rattle of rain on the frame of this old building. She stepped through the tiny entranceway, past the coat closet and into the sitting room.

There was a man inside. He sat calmly in her large chair with one long leg cocked over the other. He seemed to expect her.

He wore the brown uniform of a senior Proctor. He was a middle-aged man, but trim. His hair was thick and black; his eyes were pale and patient. He smiled at her.

Linneth was numb with fright.

He said, “Come in, Miss Stone. Though you hardly need an invitation into your own home. I know this is unexpected. I apologize.”

She didn’t want to come in. She wanted to bolt. She wanted to run back out into the rainy dark. But she drew a ragged breath and put her raincoat in the closet and stepped into the light of her floor lamp, a sculptured wooden electric lamp which was the nicest of her meager furnishings, but which she hated now, because this man had touched it.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Proctor said. She almost laughed.

He said, “You are Linneth Stone—are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Then sit down. I haven’t come to arrest you.”

She sat on the edge of her reading chair, as far from the Proctor as possible. Her racing heart had begun to recover its pace, but her body was on full alert. She felt keenly attentive. The room seemed terribly bright, wholly electric.

“My name is Demarch.” She looked at his pips. He added, “Lieutenant,” pronouncing it the European way, as Proctors did. “Please relax, Miss Stone. I’m here for a consultation. Your department head said you were the person to speak to.”

So the Bureau had already talked to faculty. This was serious. Demarch wasn’t here to arrest her, he claimed, but who could believe a Proctor?

She remembered the last time the Proctors had come to her door. Her mother had answered. Linneth had not seen her mother again.

And there were other stories, always new stories, the knock at the door, the disappeared colleague. Academics had been under scrutiny ever since the Alien and Sedition laws were enacted. With her family background, she could hardly be an exception.

Demarch hadn’t paid her the courtesy of knocking. He could have come to see her at her office if it was a consultation he wanted. But she supposed a Proctor wouldn’t do that. They were too accustomed to intimidation. It was their way of life, so familiar as to be invisible.

She said, “Is this about my book?”

“Pagan Cults of Middle America?”

“Meso,” she said. “Meso-America. Not ‘middle.’ ”

The Proctor smiled again. “You’ve spent too much time proofreading. Meso-America. I’ve read the manuscript. Your publishers have been cooperative. It’s a fine scholarly work, insofar as I can judge. The Ideological Branch gave it careful attention, of course. Disseminating falsehoods anti-religio is still a felony. But we do try to be reasonable. Science is science. You don’t strike me as a subversive.”

“Thank you. Comparative ethnology isn’t advocative. There have been court cases—”

“I know. This isn’t about your book, in any case, though the book is what qualifies you. We want you to do some work for the Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse.”

“I have my own work.”

“Nothing that can’t wait. We’ve arranged a sabbatical—if you choose to take it.”

“My book—”

“You must be nearly finished with the proofs.”

She didn’t deny it. Demarch would know all this. There was a saying: God sees the sparrow fall. The Bureau takes notes.

He said, “We’ll need you for six months—possibly as much as a year.”

She was aghast. It was too big an idea to swallow: the Bureau wanted her to work for them, to go away for six months, interrupt her life, such as it was… “For what?”

“To practice the science of ethnology,” Demarch said. “The thing you’re good at.”