Nine years ago, a Jewish mystic living in Denmark was found impaled on the spire of a medieval church. It wasn’t clear how she’d gotten there since all points of access to the roof were locked and sealed. But she seemed to have been propelled at it with force since a couple of her limbs had been ripped free of her body on impact. They were never recovered. It was assumed they had been taken by animals in the night—rats or strays.
Six years ago, a career aid worker living in Ethiopia near the Somali border was found murdered in her simple flat. Hacked to pieces. Some of her body parts were thought to have been taken as trophies. The government blamed Somali pirates since the pallets of aid supplies were raided, although it was never clear if that had happened before or after she was killed.
A few years ago, a Shinto priestess—one of a very few number of women given the honor—was cut to pieces with a katana after arguing with her brother about money. He claims to have no memory of the attack, nor of dumping her bits into a nearby river.
Last year, a local community organizer in New York walked into the offices of a capital investment firm and blew himself to pieces. The damage to his body was so extensive that not all of him could be recovered. The medical examiner estimated that up to 17 pounds of body weight were missing, although that was a guess since he had disappeared several days before and may not have been eating, making an exact accounting impossible.
A little over six years ago, while walking in the mountains near his monastery in Tibet, a 12-year-old boy was set upon by a bear, or maybe a snow leopard, and torn limb from limb. The reason the local authorities were certain it was an animal, and therefore not murder, was because no human footprints were found, because the attack was incomprehensibly savage, because the weapon was “clawlike,” and because some of his long bones were missing. He was supposedly the fourteenth reincarnation of the Great Lama Something-something Rinpoche. I found a picture of him in Bea Goswick’s file, along with all the others. It had been taken the day before his death. He was happy and smiling in his red robes, surrounded by local villagers, who had come to ask his blessing. One of them, off to the left, wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at him—blankly. She was young, had clear signs of Down’s, and was a spitting image of Alexa Sacchi. Her skin was well-tanned and a little darker than I remember, and her hair was longer and wilder, but it was her.
Another picture, this one clipped from a local magazine, showed Alonso White kneeling on a ball court with a group of special needs children. Not all of them were looking at the camera. Some looked elsewhere. But only one was looking at him. She was heavier. Her hair was shorter. But it was her.
There used to be saints in the world. Not even so long ago, if you think about it—people like Gandhi. Or Mandela, who rotted in prison for three decades, and when he got out, not only pardoned his jailers but forgave them. The racists. The men of apartheid.
There used to be saints in the world. But we killed them. We may not have driven the blade or pulled the trigger, but we may as well have. We gave them up. We stopped believing. Stopped protecting. Seems so quaint, doesn’t it? To believe that anyone is better than you.
The earnest, well-intended people of this world did to compassion what they did to reason. They said truth was infallible, so if our sources were ever wrong, then they must not be true, and if our side is wrong, then everything is wrong and one flawed thing is just as good as any other flawed thing and we may as well believe whatever we want, whatever is convenient.
The seekers of the dark couldn’t convince us to choose evil, not openly. They tried in the last century with Hitler and Franco and Stalin and Mao. So they convinced us instead that there was no choice, that we’re never evil, just flawed, so whatever bad thing we do isn’t evil, just a mistake made with the very best of intentions.
How dare anyone challenge us to do better?
But only a saint can perform a miracle, and a world without saints is a world without miracles, and a world without miracles is a dire place where the only things that happen are possible.
I opened the fridge. He said everything I needed to know was in a box of risotto.
I unhooked the lid. It didn’t look like much—gruel, really—but I gotta hand it to the man; a minute in the microwave and it was fucking delicious, earthy and salty and a tiny bit sweet. But not candy sweet. More like maple sap. I had just wanted a taste, but one bite turned to two and I ended up eating the whole damned thing.
An hour later I was squatting in the corner, shivering and sweating like a pig. I was in someone’s house. I didn’t know whose. I could see Alexa, almost as if through the walls. I knew exactly where she was, and I knew she was watching me. Waiting. But I couldn’t get to her. There was nothing stopping me. I just couldn’t get there. I moved forward through the house, up the stairs or down the hall, knowing that was the right way to go, but I could never make any progress. I was so angry. So frustrated. She was right there! Looking at me even! With a calm smile that begged me to join her. There was nothing stopping me. Why couldn’t I go? I got mad at my legs, at my feet. Only when I looked down to curse them, they were folded underneath me. I was sitting cross-legged before an old woman in a desert. And by old I mean like the mountains and the stars. She had a sparse beard, like the fuzz on a peach. I heard the throb of drums and felt the pulsing breath of the sky.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
For eons.
Clouds ran like water.
And over it all, that deep hum of a bull-roarer spinning for all time, like the wristwatch on the arm of eternity.
The old woman dipped a finger into a bowl of blue dye and reached out to touch my forehead.
Beware the wolf with three eyes.
And then I woke. I was in my room looking up at the drab ceiling. I could see the wolf. Clearly. It was so big. A giant. Its head hung over me. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t snarling. It was waiting for something.
For me.
Then, in the fur above its two piercing eyes, a third opened.
And I saw the stars.
I woke for real. I sat up. I was drenched in sweat. I looked at my alarm clock. It had only been a couple hours, but my stomach burned with hunger. I had wet myself. I had vomited. At least once. The room stank of it. I reached for my phone, but it was dead. It hadn’t been a few hours, I realized. That bastard chef, the old shaman, had served me a hallucinogenic mushroom risotto. Sent me on a vision quest. I’d been tripping for over a day.
I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and washed away the vomit and looked at myself in the mirror. I recognized her. That woman looking back. But she wasn’t the same. I grabbed my razor, the one I used on my legs, and shaved my head in a hurry, as if my hair were polluted with sin. I cut myself several times, and when it was all done, I stared at the blood.
I felt different.
Clear.
Awoken.
More than that, I felt angry. I had been deceived.
I had been deceived.