Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“We can go now,” the priest said. “I’ve been running on, I’ve talked too long. If you can walk, I’ll help you over to our dispensary. It’s not far.”

Pablo opened his eyes and shook his head.

“You need looking after now. You need some antibiotics.”

“No,” Pablo said. “I want to wait a minute. I’m too wasted right now. What I want to do, I want to lie down here and listen to those birds and I don’t give a shit.” He was looking into the fire, his head turned to one side. A howler monkey screamed an alarm from the edge of the clearing. A girl’s voice seemed to answer — one of the young foreigners, talking in her sleep. “I come a damn long way, you know that?”

“I’ll go back and get help for you. We have a nurse with us and you’ll be all right here.”

Pablo seized Egan’s arm and held it.

“I want you to stay, bro. I want you to tell me everything you can that I’m supposed to know becaue that’s what I’m here for.”

Egan settled down on the log where Pablo had rested and took a drink of Flor de Cana.

“All right,” he said. So he began to tell Pablo about the Sacred Pleroma and the Incomprehensible, Inconceivable One within Whom all things were, the Master of the Silence and the Abyss. He told him about the Errant Sophia, the whore of Wisdom, who in her foredoomed passion to comprehend the Holy One underestimated the depths of the Abyss and became lost. Wandering, stricken, Father Egan told Pablo, Sophia found herself walled out from the All, the Ineffable; she encountered, for the first time, Limit. From the torment of her loss, Egan explained, Sophia brought into existence fear and grief and bewilderment and all the things which were to make up the world without Him. Then, from these things came forth the Demiurge, the force of ignorance under whose power Pablo and he himself and everyone else made their blind passage through outer dark. He told these things to Pablo not as he had written about them, but as though they were literal, true things, as one might tell a story to a child. As Pablo had pointed out to him, he had never had a child. Then he thought that perhaps they were true things, real things, as real as the sun which was rising now over the clearing.

Pablo had gone to sleep, so the priest took a ground cloth and wrapped it across a sharp stick to keep the risen sun from the young man’s eyes.

Tabor’s fist was clenched; Egan gently pried the fingers apart and found the diamond. He slipped it back into the shirt pocket from which Pablo had taken it to show him. A curious thing, he thought. He supposed the youth had stolen it. Perhaps had killed for it, on his boat. He shook his head and picked up the bottle and drank.

In the city, in the villages of the coast, Tecan’s children were shouldering their daily burdens, prepared to endure with ancient grace the rule of plunder and violence. Nearby, the touring adolescents stirred at their campfires. At sea, the first light, filtered to green and gray, would begin to penetrate the depths where a murdered girl lay distantly mourned. Nor would she be alone there. And in the forest, Weitling would be looking at the sunrise and taking fire with fantasies of sacrifice and blood. Egan thought of the hunt he would have to set afield now, for the saving of other children.

The priest shielded his eyes and considered the Incomprehensible; he wondered if, across the awesome gulf of the abyss, across the darkness and the silence, he might presume to address toward It a prayer. He thought about it for some little time; in the end, he dared not. He picked up the rum and drank and then the exertions of the night set their weight on him and he fell into a sleep of his own.

Holliwell did not sleep although he lay in bed until dawn. In the slant of the new sun he drove to the mission, parked and walked the narrow beach.

The sight of the ocean oppressed him. He was not deceived by its exquisite sportiveness — the lacy flumes of breaking wave, the delicate rainbows in the spray. He knew what was spread out beneath its trivial entertainments. The ocean at its morning business brought cognate visions to his mind’s eye; a flower-painted cart hauling corpses, a bright turban on a leper.

Beside the beach at Danang he had seen a leper with a “Kiss Me” tee shirt. There was nothing to get angry about; some stern wit had made a statement and the leper had got a shirt.

For a long time Holliwell stood by the water. A few yards away under the slate-blue rollers, the universe was being most spontaneously itself. Its play dazzled. It beguiled temporal flesh with promises and it promised all things from petty cheer to cool annihilation.

Things were a lonely and dangerous business and he was tired of them. He wanted clarity and it was not to be had. It seemed to him that one could not stand in clear light for the twinkling of an eye. Each moment was immediately overrun with chemical illusion flashing up from the sea and its dependent blood, from the great steaming jakes of the mind.

So one had always to wander through vapors among phantoms, one was always just out in it and it never stopped. Illusion compounding illusion, a limitless hallucination without end or reference point — desires, fears, dread shadows and pretty lights, one’s own delirium and everyone else’s. It was what kept you going. It kept you going until your heart burst.

He was in love, he remembered. With May. And she was being hunted down.

He lit a cigarette and smoked and turned to see her standing by the beach road. She was waiting for a jitney bus to pass, shielding her eyes from the sun. He flicked the filtered butt into a crystalline wave.

She came to him across the litter of desiccated palm leaves and dead kelp; his heart raced. What was it then? Love? Another yearning distilled of fancy, another drug in the salt blood. Another passion to whipsaw in the wet cave of consciousness.

Then she was beside him trembling in the morning sun, honey-haired — and you wanted to be with her, of course you did. You wanted to salve the loneliness. You wanted to break down, however you might, the entombed separateness of the two selves there, yourself and May. Anyone would.

He started to speak but the look on her face silenced him. Remembering it, he would think that she looked like a vision — a figure of some other stuff, suddenly manifest. The diluvian chaos he inhabited was alien to her. He thought that she must live in some secret arrangement with the world of things; her beauty was the beauty of inward certainties. Such a woman could live, die, make choices, all those things — with a quiet heart. She could minister, heal the sick, march with apocalyptic legions. She looked like a vision to that degree.

Now, she was certainty confounded. She could not bring experience to bear and she had no guile. Through innocence, she had set herself in his quarter of things where the earth trembled underfoot and there was only seeming. The Queen of Swords betrayed. Or simply common sense at its ultimate reduction, at the end of its tether.

In this aspect, she was a challenge and a provocation to the likes of Holliwell. The impulse stripped down was to love her or destroy her. Stripped further it was toward both those ends, to subsume her in flesh and spirit. It was predatory.

But he was an honest man, known to be such. He was capable of honor and sacrifice. As a result she presented to Holliwell something he dreaded far more than a challenge. She presented a choice.

He closed his eyes and opened them. His mind was unstrung with fear, sleeplessness and booze — not for the first time. He was seeing things.

“You did come back.”

“Of course I did,” he said.

They walked together across the sand and up the steps to the dispensary. There was coffee simmering on the heater; she poured them out two cups.