Danny Tobey - The Faculty Club

“Perhaps the most powerful item in voodoo is the baka.” She traced a circle around it on the table with her finger. “The baka is a talisman, but with a very special and dangerous composition. It is the fusion of two souls: the ka, the terrestrial soul that stays with the body after death, and the ba-the celestial soul that ascends to heaven. It is this combination that makes the baka’s power so volatile: it is whatever the holder wants it to be. A healing charm. A weapon.”

Isabella paused. She put the charm away. She walked to a cupboard, took out four glasses, and filled them with an almond liquor.

“For a time, voodoo did quite well in the New World. But you have to imagine the slave tent on a quiet night. The glow of the flames. The hint of drums. Rumors of rituals, miraculous seizures. The slave owners came down brutally, even for them: hangings, beatings, even flayings, punishments for the slightest whiff of voodoo.

“And so the religion evolved again. It cloaked itself in secrecy. Catholic saints were used to signify voodoo gods. Rituals were cloaked in other rituals. Erzulie becomes the Virgin Mary. Legba the Lion becomes Christ. Is it so surprising? Religions are always borrowing, mixing. Some believe that Moses himself was inducted into voodoo, under the tutelage of a black scholar named Pethro. Some even say Moses married a black woman briefly, until his family intervened. Who knows? But that is how voodoo, cloaked in a new skin, survived four hundred years of slavery in the New World. And how it exists to this very day.”

Isabella sat back in her chair and spread her hands.

“That, my friends, is all I know about voodoo.”

Miles, Sarah, and I each seemed to have the same reaction. Interesting-but what did it have to do with us? What did it tell us about the V &D? How was it going to save us? I weighed my words.

“Isabella, tell us about voodoo and death.”

“Well,” she said, thinking it over. “It’s common to honor the souls of your ancestors. And to prepare one’s soul for death. Penitence and redemption, like I said.”

“Okay, but what about… preventing death?”

“You mean healing the sick?”

“Not exactly… I mean, like, cheating death.”

Isabella wrinkled her brow.

“I don’t understand.”

“I met a man who was planning to live beyond his own obituary. To live forever. You didn’t say how someone would use voodoo to do that.”

She shook her head.

“They wouldn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s just not a part of it.”

“Come on, there must be something.”

There was a strain in my voice. This was our last thread. Our only remaining clue. And it was unraveling before my eyes.

“What about zombies?” I tried. “That’s a way to bring people back from the dead, right?”

“I told you, forget about zombies.”

“Do they exist?”

“That’s Hollywood stuff. It’s not part of the culture.”

“But do they exist?”

Isabella pulled back. My voice sounded wild, plaintive. She sighed.

“I don’t know. There are stories, rumors. Once, some Harvard scientists claimed to find chemicals in Haiti that would knock a person out and bring them back, sleepy and submissive. But you know the legend as well as I do. A zombie is mindless, empty. If I wanted to live forever, it wouldn’t be like that.”

A fair point. Running around with my tongue hanging out might be fun for a Saturday night-but eternity?

“Please, Isabella, think. There has to be something.”

Isabella closed her eyes for a moment. She filled the room with her warmth, her calm. In the fluorescent light her strand of gray hair seemed to glow. She appeared to be searching for an answer to my question. Then she opened her eyes and held her hands out to me. She rubbed the tops of my hands with her thumbs, like she was reading my fortune. Her expression was kind, but she shook her head.

“At some point, every culture has to choose between the circle and the line. The circle seeks contentment: the seasons, the tides, sunrise and sunset, birth to death and maybe even death to birth, who knows?

“The line… the line seeks progress: acquisition, mastery, refinement of the world around you.

“Neither is intrinsically good or evil. That’s the thing most people don’t realize. It’s the balance that matters…

“But to live forever, as one person, through all time? To cheat the cycle? That’s the line, Jeremy… that’s the line out of control. What you’re describing isn’t voodoo. There’s no magic, no belief to make that happen. I’m sorry, but I think you’re looking in the wrong place.”

I felt frantic. This was our last clue.

“But what if someone found a way to use voodoo-someone from outside the culture-in a way it was never intended?”

Isabella thought about it.

“Well, if that’s the case,” she said, with that magnificent, wry smile, “then my black half is very disappointed in my white half.”

We left, with our final clue in shambles.

I was devastated for about an hour, and then I cracked the whole damn thing wide open.

“Why don’t you tell him the joke?” Humpty Dumpty said. “Maybe he’ll thank you.”

“Enough,” Bernini snapped. “Remember your deal.”

I kept turning those words over and over in my head. We were missing something. Something that was right there, hanging in front of us.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had everything we needed to save ourselves.

Miles was spread out on the comforter of the shabby bed in our shabby motel room. He was mindlessly twisting his Rubik’s Cube-scramble, solve, scramble, solve. Miles wasn’t quite what they called a speed cuber, but he did go to a few conventions in high school, where math nerds, sci-fi fanatics, comic book collectors, and other of our fellow virgins would commune to break international cube-solving records. The fastest people today could solve a scrambled cube in fifteen seconds or less. Amazing how the world changes-it took Erno Rubik, the Hungarian mathematician, an entire month to solve his own cube for the first time.

“Why don’t you tell him the joke? Maybe he’ll thank you.”

Why would I thank him?

Miles was the only action in the room. We were holed up, stuck in a holding pattern. Scramble, solve, scramble, solve. His fingers were large but nimble.

Sarah was watching him too.

“How do you do that?” she finally asked.

Miles looked up, surprised, as if we’d woken him from a particularly deep dream.

“This?” He held up the cube.

“Yeah. How do you do it so fast?”

“It’s not that hard, really. The secret is the middle square. It never changes. Once you see the middle square, you know what color that side has to be. Everything else turns around that. From there, it’s just pattern recognition, clockwork.”

That’s when it clicked. The whole thing.

Why don’t you tell him the joke?

What was our middle square?

It had to be the dead professor who wasn’t dead. Everything turned around him.

It occurred to me: what if we had the wrong middle square? What if our clues didn’t fit together because everything flowed from the middle square-and we had the middle square totally backward? We saw red and thought it was blue…

The whole puzzle fell into place, like water molecules snapping into ice.

“Oh my God,” I said, and they looked at me. I told them everything. I couldn’t see my own expression, but I saw it reflected in their faces.

I saw fear.

Immortality was one thing.

But this?

For our sake, I hoped I was right. And so help me, I hoped I was wrong.

There was only one way to find out.