The Names

marriage.”I saw him before I heard him, Owen Brademas (his shape) advancing softly up the stairs, knees high as he climbed, heedful, long-limbed, trailing the glow from his flashlight.'But you're sitting in the dark.”I said, 'Why were you pointing your light down behind you?”We spoke almost simultaneously.'Was I? Didn't realize. I know the way so well.”'Darkness makes us sentimental.”Kathryn brought a glass, I poured some wine. He switched off the light and settled into a chair, stretching.The storytelling voice.'I realize finally what the secret is. All these months I've wondered what it was I couldn't quite identify in my feelings about this place. The deep-reaching quality of things. Rock shapes, wind. Things seen against the sky. The clear light before sundown that just about breaks my heart.' Laughing. 'Then I realized. These are all things I seem to remember. But where do I remember them from? I've been to Greece before, yes, but never here, never to a place so isolated, never these particular sights and colors and silences. Ever since I got to the island I've been remembering. The experience is familiar, although that's not the right way to put it. There are times you do the simplest thing and it reaches you in a way you didn't think possible, in a way you'd once known but have long since forgotten. You eat a fig and there is something higher about this fig. The first fig. The prototype. The dawn of figs.' Laughing out. 'I feel I've known the particular clarity of this air and water, I've climbed these stony paths into the hills. It's eerie, this sense. Metempsychosis. It's what I've been feeling all along. But I didn't know it until now.”'There's a generic quality, an absoluteness,' I said. 'The bare hills, a figure in the distance.”'Yes, and it seems to be a remembered experience. If you play with the word 'metempsychosis' long enough I think you find not only transfer-of-soul but you reach the Indo-European root to breathe. That seems correct to me. We are breathing it again. There's some quality in the experience that goes deeper than the sensory apparatus will allow. Spirit, soul. The experience is tied up with self-perception somehow. I think you feel it only in certain places. This is my place perhaps, this island. Greece contains this mysterious absolute, yes. But maybe you have to wander to find yourself in it.”'An Indian concept,' Kathryn said. 'Or is it? Metempsychosis.”'A Greek word,' he said. 'Look straight up, the universe is pure possibility. James says the air is full of words. Maybe it's full of perceptions too, feelings, memories. Is it someone else's memories we sometimes have? The laws of physics don't distinguish between past and future. We are always in contact. There is random interaction. The patterns repeat. Worlds, star clusters, even memories perhaps.”'Turn on the lights,' I said.Again he laughed.'Am I growing soft-headed? Could be. I've reached an age.”'We all have. But I wish you'd stayed with figs. I understood that.”He rarely supported his arguments or views. The first sound of contention sent him into deep retreat. Kathryn knew this, of course, and moved protectively to other subjects, always ready to attend to his well- being.Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean? She wanted to know if the risk analyst had an opinion.'Bank loans, arms credits, goods, technology. Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them. New uses for death. New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They're all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive.”'Good, keep going.”'America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he's either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another.”'What percentage of these grievances is justified?”I pretended to calculate.'Of course we're a military presence in some of these places,' I said. 'Another reason to be targeted.”'You're a presence almost everywhere. You have influence everywhere. But you're only being shot at in selected locales.”'I think I hear a wistful note. Canada. Is that what you mean? Where we operate with impunity.”'Certainly you're there,' she said. 'Two-thirds of the largest corporations.”'They're a developed country. They have no moral edge. The people who have technology and bring technology are the death-dealers. Everyone else is innocent. These Mideast societies are at a particular pitch right now. There's no doubt or ambiguity. They burn with a clear vision. There must be times when a society feels the purest virtue lies in killing.”Talking with my wife on a starry night in the Greek archipelago.'Canadians are stricken by inevitability,' she said. 'Not that I defend the capitulation. That's what it is. Pathetic surrender.”'We do the wrong kind of killing in America. It's a form of consumerism. It's the logical extension of consumer fantasy. People shooting from overpasses, barricaded houses. Pure image.”'Now you're the one who sounds wistful.”'No connection to the earth.”'Some truth in that, I guess. A little.”'I like a little truth. A little truth is all I ever hope for. Do you know what I mean, Owen? Where are you? Make a noise. I like to stumble upon things.”I knocked over a glass, enjoying the sound it made rolling on coarse wood. Kathryn snatched it at the edge of the table.'Talk about stumble,' she said.'The worst thing about this wine is that you can get to like it.”A light high on the hill. We waited through a silence.'Why is the language of destruction so beautiful?' Owen said.I didn't know what he meant. Did he mean ordinary hardware -stun grenades, parabellum ammo? Or what a terrorist might carry, some soft-eyed boy from Adana, slung over his shoulder, Kalashnikov, sweet whisper in the dark, with a flash suppressor and folding stock. He sat quietly, Owen did, working out an answer. The way was open to interpretation, broader landscapes. Wehrmacht, Panzer, Blitzkrieg. He would have a patient theory to submit on the adductive force of such sounds, how they stir the chemistry of the early brain. Or did he mean the language of the mathematics of war, nuclear game theory, that bone country of tech data and little clicking words.'Perhaps they fear disorder,' he said. 'I've been trying to understand them, imagine how their minds work. The old man, Michaeli, may have been a victim of some ordering instinct. They may have felt they were moving toward a static perfection of some kind. Cults tend to be closed-in, of course. Inwardness is very much the point. One mind, one madness. To be part of some unified vision. Clustered, dense. Safe from chaos and life.”Kathryn said, 'I have one point to make, only one. I thought of it after James and I talked about the finds in central Crete, human sacrifice, the Minoan site. Is it possible these people are carrying out some latter-day version? You remember the Pylos tablet, Owen. Linear B. A plea for divine intercession. A list of sacrifices that included ten humans. Could this murder be a latter-day plea to the gods? Maybe they're a doomsday cult.”'Interesting. But something keeps me from thinking they would accept a higher being. I saw them and talked to them. They weren't god-haunted people, somehow I know this, and if they believed some final catastrophe was imminent they were waiting for it, not trying to prevent it, not trying to calm the gods or petition them. Definitely waiting. I came away with a sense that they were enormously patient. And where's the ritual in their sacrifice? Old man hammered to death. No sign of ritual. What god could they invent who might accept such a sacrifice, the death of a mental defective? A street mugging in effect.”'Maybe their god is a mental defective.”'I talked to them, Kathryn. They wanted to hear about ancient alphabets. We discussed the evolution of letters. The praying-man shape of the Sinai. The ox pictograph. Aleph, alpha. From nature, you see. The ox, the house, the camel, the palm of hand, the water, the fish. From the external world. What men saw, the simplest things. Everyday objects, animals, parts of the body. It's interesting to me, how these marks, these signs that appear so pure and abstract to us, began as objects in the world, living things in many cases.' A long pause. 'Your husband thinks all this is bookish drool.”Our voices in the dark. Kathryn reassures, James issues mild denials. But he wasn't far wrong. I had trouble enough getting Greek characters straight; picturesque desert alphabets were a little too remote to keep me interested. I didn't want to become an adversary, however. He'd probably withheld some things, misled us slightly, but I didn't think these were pieces of strategy so much as instances of personal confusion. And in his present silence I thought I sensed a dreaminess, a drift into memory. Owen's silences were problems to be worked out. Night is continuous, he'd said. The lulls, the measured respites were part of conversation.'It's possible they've killed another person,' he said after a while. 'Not here, Kathryn. Not anywhere in Greece.”His turn to reassure. This was considerate, his quickness to ease her fears for Tap's safety. I could imagine from that point on she would no longer feel so protective and affectionate. He was the friend who brought the bad news.'I received a letter from a colleague in Jordan. He's with the Department of Antiquities there. He knows about the cult, I'd written him. He tells me there was a murder two or three months ago which resembles this one in several respects. The victim was an old woman, near death, lingering for some time. She lived in a village at the edge of the Wadi Rum, the great sandstone desert in the southern part of the country.”Kathryn stood against the white wall. She wanted a cigarette. Twice a year since she'd given them up she wanted a cigarette. I always knew. Moments of helpless tension, an imbalance in the world. They broke the rules, so will I. She used to go through the house groping in dark closets for a lone Salem left faded in some coat pocket.'They found her outside the mud-brick house where she lived with relatives. She'd been killed with a hammer. I don't know whether it was a standard claw hammer like the one used