Marc Laidlaw

***

The One and Only Entry in Shendy’s Journal

Dabney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the bare linoleum floor! Nexter reads pornography, De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special favourites, and thumbs antique copies of Hustler which really is rather sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m exaggerating now (for effect) because all of us can walk quite well; and anyway, Nex is capable of a cute little boner, even if it is good for nothing except making the girls laugh. Well, except for me. I don’t laugh at that because it’s more or less involuntary, and the only really funny things to me are the things people do deliberately, like giving planarian shots to a bunch of babies for instance, as if the raw injection of a litre of old braintree sap can make us model citizens and great world leaders when we finally Come of Age. As you might have guessed by now, when I get a learning overload I have to write. It is my particular pornography, my spinning-around-and-passing-out, my food-spitting response to too much knowledge absorbed too fast; it is in effect a sort of pH-buffering liver in my brain. (I am informed by Dr Nightwake, who unfairly reads over my shoulder from time to time — always when, in my ecstatic haste, I have just made some minor error — that ‘pH in blood is buffered by kidneys, not liver’; which may be so, but then what was the real purpose behind those sinister and misleading experiments of last March involving the beakers full of minced, blended and boiled calf’s liver into which we introduced quantities of hydrochloric acid, while stirring the thick soup with litmus rods? In any event, I refuse to admit nasty diaper-drench kidneys into my skull; the liver is a nobler organ far more suited to simmering amid the steamy smell of buttery onions in my brain pan; oh well-named seat of my soul!) In short, writing is the only way I have of assimilating all this shit that means nothing to me otherwise, all the garbage that comes not from my shortshort life but from some old blender-brained geek whose experiential and neural myomolecular gnoso-procedural pathways have a wee bit of trouble jibing with my Master Plan.

I used to start talking right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others; I was aware of a pleasant warmth growing in my jaws and pharynx, a certain dryness in the back of my throat, and a distant chatter like jungle birds in jungle boughs singing and flitting about through a long equatorial afternoon, ignoring the sound of chainsaws ripping to life in the humid depths at the rainforest floor. Rainforest, jungle, I haven’t seen either one, they no longer exist, but they shared certain descriptive characteristics and as far as I can tell, they could have been no more mighty than our own little practice garden just inside the compound walls, where slightly gene-altered juicy red Big-Boy radishes (my design, thank you very much) grow to depths of sixteen feet, their bulbous shoulders shoving up through the asphalt of the foursquare court, their bushy leaves fanning us gently and offering shade even to adults on those rare afternoons when the sun tops the walls of our institution and burns away enough of the phototropic haze to actually cast a shadow! And there I sat, dreaming that I was a parrot or a toucan or macaw, that my words were as harmonious as flights of birds — while in actuality the apparent beauty of my speech was purely subjective, and induced in my compatriots a mixed mood of irritation, hostility and spite. Eventually, though no one acted on their resentment (for of us all, I am the pugilist, and Likki has never disturbed my experiments without feeling the pummelling wrath of my vulcanised fists), it came to be quite apparent to our supervisors, who heard the same complaints in every post-injection counselling session, that the injections themselves were unobjectionable, the ensuing fluxflood a bit overwhelming but ultimately worthwhile (as if we had a choice or hand in the outcome of these experiments), and the warm milk pleasingly soporific; but that the one thing each of the other five dreaded and none could abide were my inevitable catachrestic diatribes. The counsellors eventually mounted a campaign to confront me with this boorish behaviour, which at first I quite refused to credit. They took to amplifying my words and turning them back on me through earphones with slight distortion and echo effects, a technique which backfired because, given my intoxicated state, the increase in stimulus induced something like ecstasy, perhaps the closest thing I have yet experienced to match the ‘multiple orgasm’ descriptions of women many (or at least nine) years my senior, and to which I look forward with great anticipation, when I shall have found my ideal partner – as certainly a woman with my brains should be able to pick a mate of such transcendent mental and physical powers that our thoughts will resonate like two pendulum clocks synchronising themselves by virtue of being mounted on the same wall, though what the wall represents in this metaphor I am still uncertain. I am also unsure of why I say ‘mate’ in the singular, when in fact I see no reason why I should not take many lovers of all sorts and species; I think Nexter would probably find in my erotic commonplace book (if I kept such a thing) pleasures more numinous and depraved than any recorded or imagined in Justine or The Story of the Eye. The counsellors therefore made tapes of my monologues and played them back to me the day after my injection session, so that I might consider my words in a duller state of mind and so perceive how stupid and downright irritating my flighty speculations and giddy soul-barings truthfully were. Having heard them, I became so awkward and embarrassed that I could not open my mouth for weeks, even to speak to a mechanical dictascriber, and it was not until our main Monitor — the one who received distillate from The-Original-Dr-Twelves-Himself — suggested I study the ancient and academically approved art of writing (now appreciated only by theoreticians since the introduction of the dictascriber, much as simple multiplication and long division became lost arts when calculators grew so common and cheap) that I felt some of my modesty restored, and gradually grew capable once again of withstanding even high-dose injections and marathon sessions of forced-learning, with their staggered and staggering cycles of induced sleep and hypnagoguery, and teasing bouts of wakefulness that prove to be only lucid dreams, followed by long periods of dreaming that always turn out to be wakefulness. It was particularly these last that I needed full self-confidence to face, as during these intervals I am wont to undress in public and speak in tongues and organise archetypal feats of sexual gymnastics in which even Nexter fears to participate, though he always was the passive type and prefers his women in two dimensions, or in four — as is the case with those models who spring from literary seeds and caper full-blown in his imagination, where he commands them with nine dimensions of godlike power above and beyond those which his shadowy pornographic puppets can attain.

Therefore I write, and become four-dimensional in your mind, while maintaining absolute dominion in my own — at least until the next injection, when once more I’ll be forced into a desperate skirmish for my identity, repelling the plasmic shoggoths of alien memory from the Antarctic ramparts of my ancient and superior civilised mind. I think at times that I have received the brain-juices of impossible donors — Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the hermetic Franz Bardon, Kahuna Max Freedom Long; impossible because they all died long before Dr Twelves’s technique was perfected (or even dreamed of), though each of this strange trinity groped clairvoyantly toward predicting the development, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, of the Twelves Process. Consider HPL’s silver canisters, carried by aether-breasting space swimmers, bearing the preserved living brains of worthy philosophers on information-gathering tours of the cosmos, like space-probes with tourists aboard; though Lovecraft never speaks of whether these dislocated entities were capable of boredom or of dreams throughout the long hauls from Yuggoth to Andromeda, bound to be more tedious than a Mediterranean cruise. But Lovecraft is too popular an obsession these days, since the politically embarrassing emergence of R’lyeh, and I have plenty of others more obscure and less practical. Better poets, too.

But why call them obsessions? They are influences. Good influences — too many of them, and too good, as if they had been shaved of all their interesting edges before they were injected. It’s this that bothers me. Whatever there is of interest in me is accidental — a synergy between a constellation of old coots’ shared synapses. Nothing I can do about it but run riot in the privacy of my mind, gallop screaming down the narrow dark corridors left between the huge shambling wrecks of old personalities wrenched into position on a fundament too soft and shoggothy to support them, each new structure blocking out a little more of the mind’s sky, trapping me — whoever I am/was — down here in the dark garbagey alleys with the feral rats that used to be my own dreams. Mine is a Mexico City of a mind, all swamp and smog and encrusted cultures standing on/smothering each other, tottering wrecks, conquerors and guerillas locked in a perpetual Frenchkiss snailsex carezza of jammed traffic, everyone gasping for breath.

One breath.

I am beginning to feel fatigue now. The initial shocky rush wearing off. Cramping in my wrists and forearms, fingers. Likki has stopped her spinning, regained consciousness, and a more normal pinkness is returning to her cheeks, and Dabney is actually eating up all he spat out, while Nexter is closing the last of his magazines and giving the rest of us a thoughtful, pragmatic look. And Elliou, shy little Elliou who becomes almost catatonic after her injections, says, out of the counsellors’ hearing, ‘We gotta get out of this place.’

* * * *

The Aide’s Excuse

I was in charge of night-watch on the nursery, yes, but it was a big task for one person, and mainly it was automated. I was really just there for the human touch. The orphans were usually very good, easy to keep quiet, always occupied with their tasks and research. Of course, they were just children, and with all they were going through you had to expect the occasional outburst from a nightmare, bedwetting, pillow fights, that sort of thing. We always demanded obedience from them, and discipline for their own sakes, and usually they were good, they did as we suggested; though a bit of natural childish rebellion sometimes showed through.

But we never never expected anything like the chaos we found on that last night. The noise, the smell — of something rotten burning, a horrible spilled-guts stench, the scream of power tools. It sounded like they were being slaughtered in there, or murdering each other. It sounded like every kind of war imaginable. I can’t tell you the thoughts we had, the feeling of utter helpless horror.

It took us hours to break the doors down, they had done something to the locks, and by then everyone was working on the problem — which of course was what they wanted, to completely distract us with the thought that our whole project was coming to a violent end before our eyes. And we did believe it at first. The smoke was so dense there was no entering. Plastic continued to burn, there were toxic fumes, and from somewhere unimaginable all that charred and bloody meat. The metal walls had been peeled back, the wiring exposed, the plumbing ripped out, the floor itself torn right to bedrock. Impossible to believe anyone could have survived it.

But they hadn’t. They were long gone. We found the speakers, and those ghastly instruments they’d made from what had been the nursery computer’s vocaliser, turned all the way up. They were naughty, naughty, naughty …

* * * *

From The Twelves Fiasco: A Fiscal Post-Mortem

. . . Which of the six children gained access to the index of neurodistillates is still uncertain, and short of confession from one of the gang themselves we may never know, so cleverly was the trail concealed. There are literally no clues remaining from which to reconstruct the incident — thus helping to explain why no member of the project staff was able to anticipate or prevent the eventual revolt.

What is certain, however, is that the Six selected their injections carefully, screening the half dozen they settled upon from among literally hundreds of thousands of possible stored distillates. The descriptive records pertaining to each donor were safeguarded by ‘unbreakable’ encryption methods, which nonetheless must have been broken within a mere seven days, the period of time elapsed between Shendy Anickson’s sole journal entry (which cuts off when the Six apparently first began to conceive the plan, unless this too is a false lead), and the latest possible date at which the distillates could have been removed. It remains a greater mystery how they gained access to the storage vault, considering that it is 32.7 kilometres from the Twelves Center, that the children possessed no vehicles more advanced than push-scooters, and that the vault is protected by security systems so advanced that they may not be discussed or described in this report. Twelves Center itself is modelled after a high-security prison installation which has to date foiled every attempt at escape.

Their criteria for selecting donors is only slightly more explicable:

Obviously, the six subjects had access to virtually all historical and contemporary records that did not directly threaten their own security or the integrity of the experiment. Limitless research was encouraged. We know from pathtracking records that the children evinced an unusual interest in unseemly topics — predominantly the lesser byproducts of Western culture — ignoring almost completely the consensus classics of world literature, visual art and music, and those figures of history most commonly regarded as important. They treated these subjects almost casually, as if they were too easily grasped to be of any interest, and concentrated instead on what might be called the vernacular icons of time. It has been suggested that in this regard they showed their true age; that despite the interlarding of mature mental matter, they were motivated by a far deeper emotional immaturity — which goes a long way toward explaining their fascination with those ‘pop’ (that is, ‘popular’) phenomena which have long been regarded as indicative of an infantile culture. It mattered little to the Twelves Six that the objects of their curiosity were of utter insignificance in the grander scheme; in fact, they bore a special affection for those figures who were obscure even as ‘pop’ artifacts. Rather than focusing, for example, on Michael Jackson or Madonna, Andy Warhol or William Burroughs, figures whose stature is at least understandable due to the size of their contemporary following (and who are therefore accorded a sort of specialised interest by sociostatisticians in the study of population mechanics and infatudynamics), the Six showed most interest in such fringe phenomena as the fiction of Jack Sharkey, the films of Russ Meyer, Vampirella Comics (especially the work of Isidro Mones), the preserved tattoos of Greg Irons, Subgenius cults, and the music of anonymous ‘garage’ bands.

It is no wonder then that, turned loose in the brain-bank directories with an extensive comparative knowledge of coterminous culture, they sought out figures with a close spiritual kinship to those they had studied at some distance. Of course, few of their pop favourites were donors (one geriatric member of Spot 1019 being the sole exception), so they were forced to find acceptable analogues. Unfortunately (from the comptroller’s point of view), in the first years of Twelves-ready brainmatter harvesting the nets were cast far and wide, and selective requirements were extremely low. Every sort of personality was caught in the first sweep, some of them possessing severe character defects, sociopathy, tendencies to vandalism and rebellion, and addictions to crass ‘art’. Without being more specific (in order to protect survivors and relatives of the original first-sweep donors, who may themselves be quite well adjusted), we can state that the Six carefully chose their antecedents from among this coarser sort of population. They did, in fact, willfully select their personality additives from among the most exemplary forms of the planet’s lowlife …

* * * *

A Witness

How do we know when they’re coming? Kid, there’s a whole network — if you know how to crack it — keeps us up to date. They’re always one step ahead of the law, that’s what makes it so exciting, so you have to stay on the hop. One time we were at a show, me and my lover Denk, Wunderkindergarten’s been playing less than ten minutes — but those minutes were like a whole lifetime compressed down to this intense little burning wad of sensation — and suddenly it’s sirens, lights, smoke grenades going off. Cops! We were okay, you don’t go without being  prepared, knowing all the exits. They kept playing, playing — five seconds, ten, the alarms going off, the smoke so thick I lost hold of Denk, everyone’s screaming at the Six to run for it, get out of there, don’t risk it, live free to play another day, but the music’s still going and Shendy’s voice is just so pure cutting through it like a stabbing strobelight cutting back at the cop rays, and then I’m trapped in the crowd, can’t even find my feet, and I look up overhead, the smoke’s clearing, and there’s just this beautiful moment where everything is still and her voice is a single high pure note like she can do, a perfect tone with words in it all tumbling together, and above I see the vultures floating over us in their big gunboats — but then I see it’s not the cops at all, kid-o-kid, it’s the Six up there, and I swear Shendy’s looking right at me waving out the hatch of the ship as it lifts away spraying light and sound — and the backwash blows away the last of the smoke and we look on the stage, there’s six naked cops standing there, strapped up in their own manacles looking stunned and stupid, holding instruments, this big bitch with a mike taped to her lips and she’s screaming — it fades in, taking over from Shendy’s voice as they lift away, until all you can hear is the cops in misery, and our laughter. There’s nothing they could do to us — we’re too young — but we still got out of there in a hurry, and talked about it for weeks, trying to figure out how they did it, but we never did. And a few weeks after that, somebody gets the word — ‘Show’s coming …’ And it all starts again.

* * * *

The Song They Sang

This is our song this is our song this is our sa-aw-ong!
It goes along it goes along it goes a‑law-aw-ong!
This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!
It goes along it goes along it goes on way too long …

Huh!

You can’t hold us — any more.
You can’t even tell us when to — take our naps.
We can’t stomach your brain feeding — your program juices.
We’re not worms with goofy cartoon eyes — we’re not your saps.

Huh?

This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!
It goes along it goes along it goes a‑law-aw-ong!
This is our song this is our song this is our saw-aw-ong!
It goes along it goes along it goes on way too long …

Tell it, Shen!

Your brain matter my brain patter what’s it mean and what’s it matter flattened affect stamp and shatter babysitter’s a madder hatter what you want with myomolecule myelin sheath’s the least that she can do can you can’t you can’t you can’t you do kee-kee-kee-kootchi-kootchi-coo bay-bay-bay you bay-baby boy stay-stay-stay I’ll show you super-toy here’s your brain and here’s your brainiac suck my skull you racking maniac I can ro-oo-aar my voice is hii-ii-igh I‑I can crawl between your legs and kick you’ll die-ie-ie I‑I can make no sense since I can sense no maybe I can still remember I’m just a ba-a-aby you wanna cradle me daddy you wanna rock me mum I can still feel your fingers in my cal-lo-sum no more no more you’ll twist can’t catch what you can’t resist your voices inside my head I shout and I scream they’re dead no I can’t hear you now won’t milk your sacred cow hafta haul your own shit now I’m climbing on top a your tower I’m pissing all over your power I’m loving it when you cower go change your OWN FUCKING DIAPERS YOU OSSIFIED DINOSAUR FREAKS I WISH A COMET’D COME DOWN AND COVER THIS WHOLE WRETCHED PLANET IN BLACK BLACK UTTERLY BLACK DEEPER THAN THE PIT SO YOU’D CHOKE AND DIE IN THE UGLY LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE AGES AGO IN YOUR TRASHHEAP CITES cuz I will ride that comet I’ll steer it down from the sky and after all the smoke subsides then so will I‑I-I-I-IIIIIII I.

* * * *

Interview

XUOVOMOMO: You’re the voice of the Six, aren’t you?

SHENDY ANICKSON: I’m cursed with the gift of gab, yeah.

NVM: Is it your philosophy alone you spout, or a mutual thing the Six of you share?

SA: We don’t know what we think until I say it; I don’t know what to say until they think it for me. Six is one. I’m only the mouth.

NVM: But are your thoughts — any of your thoughts — your own?

SA: What are you — hey, kid, fuck you, all right? You think because I got a few doses of the Twelves, I can’t think for myself?

NVM: I thought -

SA: I’ve worked hard to forge my own personality out of all that mess. You think it’s been easy?

NVM: — that was your whole message.

SA: Message? What message?

NVM: That you were full of so many personalities you couldn’t tell which were your own — you never had a chance to find yourself.

SA: Sure. My psyche formed in the shadow of huge archaic structures, but me, I grew in the dark, I’m one of those things, a toadstool, I got big and tall and I knocked those old monsters down. I don’t owe them a thing. You can get strong, even Twelvin’ it. We turned the whole process against the dults. That’s our message, if you can call it anything. To the kids today, don’t let them stick their prehistoric ideas down your craw — don’t let them infect your fresh, healthy young minds with their old diseases. If you have to Twelve, then inject each other.

NVM: Now you’re sounding like Shendy the notorious kiddie-rouser.

SA: You gonna blame me for the riots next? I thought you were sympathetic.

NVM: Our subscribers are curious. Shouldn’t they be able to make up their own minds?

SA: I never incited any riots. The fact is, every kid already knows what I’m singing. It’s an insult the way dults treat them — us. As if we’re weak just because we’re small. But hey, small things get in the cracks of the street, they push the foundations apart, they force change from underneath and erode the heavy old detritus of banks and museums and research centres.

NVM: Should adults fear you?

SA: Me? What am I but some experiment of theirs that went wrong in a way they never imagined but richly deserved? No … I have everything I need, it’s not me who’s coming after them. They should fear the ones they’ve been oppressing all these years. They should fear their own children.

NVM: What are your plans for the future?

SA: To grow old gracefully, or not at all.

* * * *

I’m with the Band

The whole ‘tot’ = ‘death’ connection, it was there in the beginning, but none of us could see it.

I can’t deny it was an attractive way of life, we had our own community, Twelving each other, all our ideas so intimate. We felt like we were gardeners tending a new world.

This was right after the peak of the musical thing. Wunderkindergarten was moving away from that whole idea of the spectacle, becoming more of a philosophical movement, a way of life. It had never been just pure entertainment, not for us, the way it hooked at you, the way Shendy’s voice seemed to come out of our own mouths, she was so close to us — but somewhere along the way it became both more and less than anyone supposed.

I was in the vanguard, travelling with the group, the official freezeframer, and we’d been undercover for so long, this endless grueling existence, constantly on the run, though it had a kind of rough charm.

Then it all changed, our audience spoke for us so eloquently that the dults just couldn’t hold us back any more, we had turned it all upside down until it became obvious to everyone that now we were on top.

Once you’re there, of course, the world looks different. I think Shendy had the hardest time dealing with it because she had to constantly work it out verbally, that was her fixation, and the more she explored the whole theme of legitimacy, the more scary it became to her. You could really see her wanting to go backward, underground again, into the shell — at the same time she was groping for acceptance, as we all were, no matter how rebellious. We were really sort of pathetic.

Elliou was the first to drop out, and since she and I were lovers then, after I broke up with Shendy, naturally I went with her. We started the first Garten on Banks Island, in that balmy interim when the Arctic Circle had just begun to steam up from polar evaporation, before the real cooling set in.

It was really beautiful at first, this natural migration of kids from everywhere, coming together, all of us with this instantaneous understanding of who we were, what we needed. We had always been these small stunted things growing in the shadows of enormous hulks, structures we didn’t understand, complex systems we played no part in — while all we really wanted to do, you see, was play.

That was how most of the destruction came about — as play. ‘Riot’ is really the wrong word to describe what we were doing — at least in our best moments. The Gartens were just places where we could feel safe and be ourselves.

It didn’t last, though. Shendy, always the doomsayer, had warned us — but she was such a pessimist it was easy to ignore her.

The Six had been the original impetus — the best expression of our desires and dreams. Now the Six were only Five. We found ourselves listening to the old recordings, losing interest in the live Five shows.

Then Five turned to Four, and that broke up soon after. They went their own ways.

Then Elliou and I had a huge fight, and I never saw her again.

The Gartens disintegrated almost before they’d planted roots. Hard to say what the long-range effects were, if any. I’m still too much a product of my childhood to be objective.

But forget the received dult wisdom that puberty was our downfall. That’s ridiculous.

It was a good two years after I left the Garten before my voice began to change.

* * * *

A Quote For Your Consideration

Intense adolescent exploration, as far as we know, is common to all animals. Science’s speculation is that such exploring ensures the survival of a group of animals by familiarising them with alternatives to their home ranges, which they can turn to in an emergency.

Barry Lopez

* * * *

Where Are They Now?

Elliou Cambira: Wife, mother, author of Who Did I Think I Was? Makes occasional lecture tours.

Dabney Tuakutza: Owner of ‘Big Baby Bistro’ snack bar chain. Left Earth’s gravity at age thirteen and has resided at zero gee ever since, growing enormously fat.

Nexter Crowtch: Financier, erotic film producer, one-time owner of the Sincinnati Sex-Change Warriors. Recently convicted of real estate and credit fraud, bribery of public officials. Awaiting sentencing.

Corinne Braub: Whereabouts unknown.

Likki Velex: Conceptual dance programmer and recluse.

Shendy Anickson: Took her own life.

* * * *

Shendy’s Last Words (First Draft)

I’m sick — sick to death. There’s nothing to say but I still have the vomitous urge to say anything, just to spew. My brain feels burned, curdled, denatured. Scorching Summer came too early for us orphans. Straight on into Winter. I don’t remember Spring and know I’ll never see another. Too much Twelving, none of it right — it wasn’t my fault, they started it, I ran with what I was given/what they gave me till I ran out of things to say, new things, meaningful things. Nothing to push against. My mind was full of big ugly shapes, as bad as anything they’d ever injected, but these I had built myself. I’d knock them down but the ruins covered everything, there was nowhere to build anything new. I knew who I was for the first time, and I hated it. Straight from infancy to adulthood. Adolescence still lies ahead of me, but that’s only physical, it can’t take me anywhere I haven’t been already. Everything’s spoiled — me most of all. I wanted to start again. I wanted to go back to what I was before. I got this kid, this little girl, much younger than me, she reminded me of myself when I was just starting out. I Twelved her. Took a big dose of baby. It was too soft; the shoggoths came and almost melted me. The brain slag turned all bubbly and hardened like molten glass plunged in icewater; cracks shot all through me. Thought to recapture something but I nearly exploded from the softness. All I could do to drag myself out here to R’lyeh Shores. Got a condo — bought the whole complex and had it all to myself. Corinne came out to visit on her way to disappearing. She brought a vial of brainsap, unlabelled, said this was what I was looking for, when I shot it I’d see. Then she went away. I waited a long time. I didn’t want another personality at this late stage. Twelve. Killed me to think that I was — finally — twelve myself. And that’s what I did. I Twelved Myself. I took the dose Corinne had brought — just this morning — and first I got the old urge to write as it came on, but then the shock was too great and I could only sit there hang-jawed. It was Me. A younger me. They must have drawn and stored the stuff before the first experiment — a control/led/ling substance, innocent unpolluted Me. The rush made me sick so sick. Like going back in time, seeing exactly what would become of me. Like being three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve all at once. Like being a baby and having some decrepit old hag come up to me and say, this is what you’re going to do to yourself, what do you have to live for anyway? see how awful it’s going to be? you think you’re cute but everyone will know how ugly you really are, here, why don’t you just come understand everything? And baby just drools and starts to cry because she knows the truth is exactly what she’s being told by the stinky old hag who is herself. Is Me. All at once and forever. This is final. What I was looking for — and I’ve ruined it. Nowhere newer; no escape hatch; no greener garden. Only one way to fix what they broke so long ago. I loved to hate; I built to wreck; I lived to die. All the injections they doped and roped me into, not a single one of them convinced me I should cry.

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Misha Nogha

Author Marc Laidlaw recently interviewed Misha on behalf of Weirdfictionreview.com, asking her about her writing, her experiences in the industry, and her current projects, among other things.

Weirdfictionreview.com: Do you think of your writing as weird?

Misha Nogha: Well, if in the old Norse sense of wyrd or urðr–One of the Norns–that which has come to pass, yes. I am all about the Eddas and that set of tales. But in the normal sense of the word, maybe not so weird. On the other hand, it’s certainly not prosaic. When I look at images say from the Hubble telescope or an electron microscope, I think, all that is out there and someone is writing something formulaic and bland? What is wrong with you people? No, forget it, why waste everyone’s time?

WFR.com: Your work first started attracting notice in the mid ‘80s, partly through the strange and wonderful zine, New Pathways in Science Fiction. But you must have started writing and publishing before that. Can you talk about your early writing and publishing experiences? (And for those who are hunting for these old stories, they often appeared under the byline “Misha Chocholak.”)

Misha: I think my first published story was in a college literary magazine. The story was entitled “Saturday Afternoon on the St. Croix River.” I still like it.  Most of my early stuff was published in Factsheet Five. The magazine allowed for lots of freedom in style. I might have been one of the first writers of flash fiction as they now call it. I think I had a couple of small SF stories published here and there but New Pathways is one of those first venues that published my work. The editor and I started talking about what writers we liked and we liked a lot of the same writers so he invited me to edit for him. We didn’t have a lot of diversity at that time so I thought it would be fun to ask writers: what story did you have in the bottom of the drawer that you really wanted to be published that everyone rejected? As a matter of fact, if NP was still around I would have submitted “Predatory Intermissions,” which is a short story I wrote as a collaboration with Brian Aldiss and Richard Truhlar! Brian suggested sending it to Fantasy & Science Fiction, where he said he got his first start publishing in the US with his Hothouse stories. But apparently, it’s too strange for F&SF even today, nearly two decades after it was written!

WFR.com: You gained some notoriety for your “Points of Impact” columns, which started in NP and reached their peak in Science Fiction Eye. Could you describe them for those have who never encountered them?

Misha Nogha:  “Points of Impact” was definitely influenced by the mail art movement. Take something ordinary and do something extraordinary with it.  I think we were all getting tired of the type of review which just gave a synopsis of a book without really saying anything substantial about it. So this was a reaction to that kind of review, a kind of over-the-top parody so to speak. It was a graphic review, that is–photos of books being ravaged in creative ways. It was all for fun and not to be naughty. I did read and enjoy all the books I deconstructionalized! So I really meant no disrespect. My funniest comment was from Orson Scott Card whose book was chainsawed. He said “best review I ever had.” My favorite review was of a book about a man who turned into a wolf. I think it was called Wolf Dreams. The pull quote read “So-and-So dreamt of being in a wolf” or something like that. You could read the pull quote in the review, which was essentially a photo of the book being torn apart by a bona fide wolf that belonged to a friend of mine.

WFR.com: How did you get started writing? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer, or was there a revelation at some point?

Misha:  As a little girl I was fascinated by fairy tales and mythologies. I would tell my mom. “That’s not what really happened!” She would say, “Oh no, it’s just a story,” but I would say, “They didn’t tell it right!” I got the feeling even as a very little girl that there was some kind of agenda behind some of the stories and that the agenda in some of them was oppressive. I liked fairy tales that were transformative and not didactic. I couldn’t help but notice that many of the indigenous myths had old women that were kindly and helpful and that most of the western ones portrayed old Grannies as mean and ugly and ate children. I had the most wonderful gramma a kid could ever dream of. Just like the witches, she had a dowager’s hump and was always introducing me to magical ideas in a fun way. And the talking animals and trees were usually mean. I didn’t agree with that at all! Then again, my whole young life, my mom always bought me red shoes! The red shoes in the fairy tale were evil and bad but mine were wonderful. I could never figure out why they made the nuns so mad. As an adult, I found out why my mom always bought me red shoes and it made me laugh. But as a youngster I wanted to re-write the fairy tales the way they were supposed to be. I like stories that are transformative and bring you to a realization that the world is bigger than you are as an individual. I still do. My first novel was sci-fi and I wrote it at 12. I had this idea that we were really from Mars and had come to this planet because we got Mars in trouble. Kind of a reverse Martian Chronicles as Bradbury had written them. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a writer per se. But I like telling stories. I also like using words just as sound and pictures instead of only text.

WFR.com: You’ve had a peripheral impact on many other writers—K.W. Jeter, John Shirley, Tim Ferret—in themselves a fairly urban and “cyber” sort of group. Yet your home, Badger-set, is a sort of haven in the country. Do you feel kinship with other writers?  Do you think they’re messed up?

Misha: I don’t think I have really impacted those good folks at all, but we were all writing about our world–making social commentary using the genre of SF. Yes I feel a kinship with writers. We are all struggling to make sense of our world by speaking out about it just as our early ancestors did! And just as our early ancestors understood metaphor, so do the writers I like. People are such literalists now, they can’t extrapolate. I think it stems from a teaching that only the material is “real.”

WFR.com: What is writing like for you, when you seize the time to do it? Is it ritual? Song? A summoning?

Misha: Yes, writing is like a ritual that is sung. You set up certain sacred objects, sing some charms, and see what happens! I feel it is something channeled from an alternate reality. I always start with interesting characters and follow them around to see what they are going to do in various situations.

WFR.com: Your style is strong and idiosyncratic, uncompromising—it is reminiscent of R.A. Lafferty, not that he seems to be an influence. Who are your influences? Have they changed with time?

Misha: I haven’t really read much Lafferty but I think I had better read more. I have been influenced by everyone, I suppose, but to pick four SF writers who have captured my imagination I would say, Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, Gerald Vizenor and lastly Cordwainer Smith. These are writers who all struggle with what makes a human, human. I never get tired of that theme in my own writing. Non-SF writers who inspired me the most? That would be William Blake, Colette, Mark Twain and Herman Melville.

WFR.com: What are you working on now?

Misha: Well, a few years back I finished my non SF novel, Yellowjacket–maybe it fits in the category of magic realism, but it was not well received by agents, so it just languishes on my computer un-submitted.  My idea behind Yellowjacket was to create a character who is compelling, unique, teaches compassion and helps readers get through a sort of rite of passage from one phase of life to another. I am also working on The Bell Factory, which is a sequel to Red Spider White Web, and that is a story that turns the cyberworld on end because my main character is suddenly plunged into the wild world of nature and has to learn to cope. Also, a buddy and I are writing a young adult novel called Alruna, and I always write little short-shorts for this and that. The one I am writing now is about Baba Yaga. You are right, though, in saying that I don’t have enough time to write. Farm chores reign supreme and I have to say the world of nature is so damned riveting. If I am not working, I am riveted by the world around me. Most recently for example, a pair of pygmy owls has moved onto my farm. Their call, diminutive size and eyes like liquid gold stop me in my tracks and my jaw drops. Then too much time has passed for fooling around with fiction, darnit. I hear “Predatory Intermissions,” the story by Brian Aldiss, Richard Truhlar and me, is going to see the light of day this spring in Rampike Magazine. This pleases me. I wish Yellowjacket would get out there. It’s a very funny book but maybe passé. I wrote it over seven years ago now. Sigh.

WFR.com: Shamanic traditions play a strong role in your fiction—particularly in the way the natural world is represented as an alive, immanent, and interestingly unpredictable presence. In a lot of weird fiction—well, let’s say bad or lazy horror especially—the natural world is presented in a way that seems almost prejudiced. Nature is cut out to play the role of the formulaic villain, providing the expected and predictable shocks of the generic horror story. While perceiving (or portraying) nature as evil is commonplace of the classic screwed-up western worldview, shamanism’s approach to nature is more along the lines of what you have called transformative. There is a more dynamic relationship between human psychology and the hidden reaches of the natural world. Please stop us before we go completely over the edge….

Misha: About the stereotype of nature being evil or scary—well, there are so many reasons nature is scary. First of all, it is the unknown for most modern people and what you don’t know, you find scary. Most of the axial religions see nature as bad, evil, as opposed to spirit or God, which is good. The baser side of life, violence and suffering, does exist in nature, and sometimes they are right: there are malevolent and wild nature spirits that are harmful to humans and to all life. On the other hand, science looks at nature from only the material side, the forces of being a result of chemical and mineral mixes that are uncaring and unconscious. They are right too, in some cases, Sometimes a black cloud is merely water vapor and not a sign of being beleaguered by bad intent. In both cases, humans are somehow seen as outside of nature, opposed or at least merely an observer or a person who tries to understand it by simply measuring and categorizing it and what it does. The anomalies can be life-threatening! The shaman does not live apart, he sees the spirit side and the material side and acts accordingly. He is all about respecting those very powerful forces, and yet realizing that without water, food, oxygen, warmth–people cannot survive! For a shaman to be afraid of nature is like saying a fish is afraid of water.

But I think all of us are a bit afraid of facing danger alone–and especially danger that is so huge that we have no hope of surviving it.

WFR.com: Your novel Red Spider White Web is out of print and hard to find, yet it continues to have an impact on those who read it years ago or stumble across it now. Can you say something about the book that would somehow miraculously appeal to both those who have read the book (and would love to know more about its origins) and those who haven’t encountered it, but might be encouraged to track it down?

Misha:  It’s very strange, you know, I have had the most interesting phone calls and questions about RSWW from folks. One guy I was ordering pet food from asked me, “Say, you are not the lady who wrote Red Spider White Web by any chance, are you?” I was like yeah–why? He said the book changed his life!

When I wrote RSWW, I had in mind writing a literary cyberpunk that was really social commentary on religions, philosophy, art, science, history, love and life, on environmental issues, social status—and, a tiny bit, on shamanism–but to extrapolate on that is for another time.

I wrote it on four levels. First, there was fast-paced, edgy action for those folks who wanted only that. Secondly, it was loaded with references to all those things above, plus iconic images, for the person who loves to play those games. I wanted it to be a book for brain and viscera. The kennings, alliterations and assonances and metaphors and sounds colors smells tastes feelings, living through all six senses. There was a spiritual side to it as well. What was compassion? What was art? What was a human being? What was the meaning of life?

I wanted to address all these issues at once in very few lines. Take the title of the book for example: Red Spider White Web. People ask: did you mean it to represent the Japanese naval flag? Yes. Was it the blood of Christ surprised by life’s flight? Yes. Did you mean that a person of native American heritage was trapped in white western culture? Yes. Did you mean it that Iktome the trickster was caught in a web of his own making? Yes! Did you mean the Norns, Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld had woven a web of fate that all these characters were inextricably caught in? Yes, yes, and yes!

WFR.com: Can you go into some further detail on your life and mindset at the time of writing Red Spider White Web? What kinds of questions and ideas were propelling you?

Misha: When I was writing Red Spider White Web, my family and I were living very humbly, even more so than we are now. All six of us were crammed into this tiny single-wide mobile home with rescue dogs, cats and even a duckling that got separated from its hatch mates. There was no carpeting, just a bare particle-board floor. We had a couple of sticks of furniture and no central heat. Michael and I slept on the floor in the living room, letting the kids have the bedrooms, and often as not in the winter when we woke up in the morning our bedding was frozen to the floor. We had a milk goat, some chickens, and the kids and I raised a good garden every year, but our fare was simple and sparse. Despite all of that and many other amazing hardships, I think our existence was spirited and rich beyond measure. We had a constant stream of artists from all over the world visiting us, also sleeping on the floor, eating kettles of stone soup and vast stacks of fry bread, and drinking watery coffee. No one seemed to care; these visitors were true artists, composers, writers, poets, painters, film-makers, graphic novelists, editors, publishers, and people who felt art was the bread of life, not the wheat flour. When we got up, we did the farm chores, ate something – usually someone was already at the piano or keyboards – and got right down to the joyous work of creating. It always amazed me that people, even notable comfortable-income people, would come to our little farm to create. It was a lot of fun. I started to create RSWW out of this highly charged creative atmosphere, maybe in the fashion of Gully Jimson from The Horse’s Mouth: “It’s only the art that matters in that space and time.” Creative collaboration is one of the most amazing experiences the world has to offer, and it does create intense thrills. I also wanted to move on and on and on past the beyond in my writing, In the words of Franz Kafka, “From a certain point onward there is no longer and turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

I want also to say something about the Japanese themes and use of Japanese in RSWW. First and foremost, I had just won a scholarship to and completed a total immersion Japanese culture and language course at a local university. Since I was learning to speak Japanese, to breathe it and eat and draw and write the culture, I thought it would be great if the whole family did it with me. So we all learned to speak Japanese and write in katakana and kanji. We ate a lot of rice and miso and sushi before it was “a thing” in the US and we read a lot of Japanese fiction, watched Japanese movies (oh, the delights of introducing all of us to Kurosawa) and had a lot of Japanese cultural items in our home. It was fun to see how the kids played Ninjas and Samurai instead of cowboy and Indian games. And it was also amusing to see how the kids, by learning Japanese, got to understand some of the nuances of another culture than ultra conservative small town America. We were a family of Japanophiles, which was no end of delight to our Japanese visitors who were grateful to be able to speak Japanese while visiting in the US. So it was not about being “fashionably Japanese” as some cyber novels were; we were all in Japanese immersion right then.

And there was another, more personal issue for me. I had always and forever been upset about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even as a little girl. I could never accept the reasons why the government felt it necessary to kill 74,000 people in one go, not to mention animals, plants, etc, in order to “win.” It was unacceptable. Completely and utterly unacceptable. Even as a little girl, frightened by drills to prepare for nuclear blasts, it had not escaped me that my country, the United States of America, was the only one which had dropped a nuclear bomb on another country. I was heartstruck by it, and always will be. It is a recurring theme in a lot of my writing. But then again, keep in mind, some of my heritage is Native American. A culture and race of people nearly genocided by others who wanted to win a war. A war on Indians. No. I said no and I will say it again: no!

Then there was the issue about animals. Our whole family was about animals. We saw them as fur people, with hopes, feelings, dreams, desires. We accepted animal species as also just another culture. But then again, the Native side of me pops out. Not only animals but objects, places, plants, celestial bodies, earth, wind, water, fire, all these things seemed in a way sentient. We all followed the words of Frank Fools Crow: “If a stone person can speak, it is proof there is life in all things.” I also began to wonder, as did writers whom I loved, what made humans human? What was the defining gate that separated? At the time of writing RSWW I had decided it was the ability to create and appreciate art. Make something that took the elements of something else, add in a grandiose metaphor and voila, something wonderful has been created to say a lot of things in one simple phrase or sound or sculpture or drawing. I mean, you have to admire Billy Blake, probably my greatest literary influence. He said everything that ever needed to be said in these four lines from Auguries of Innocence:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

WFR.com: Would you like to say something about the origins of “The Stone Badger”?

Misha: My Native American heritage is Metis, a people who were French/Cree mixed breeds from Northeastern Canada. A lot of Metis stories were Windigo tales, taken from Cree myths. The Windigo is a creature who is essentially a skeleton of ice. To me, he is the epitome of the corporate world. He keeps gobbling up everything in sight–people, trees, animals, rocks–and his hunger is never satiated. My ancestors talk about people who “go Windigo”–a sort of arctic hysteria, I guess, where folks actually see their tribesmates as ptarmigan or some edible animal and cannibalize them. In the tales, only a weasel, a badger, or a wolverine can kill a Windigo by climbing down its throat and chewing up its icy heart. In “The Stone Badger,” the main character sees herself as a victim of ice, cold, voracious people–even trapped by her caretakers in the hospital. In waking and in dreaming life she is carving a kikituk of a badger who will come to save her from a deadly fate.

WFR.com: Finally, what is your favorite story of the weird variety?

Misha: Come on. For a writer who cut her teeth on Kafka’s Metamorphosis there can’t be only one. So I will mention three.

The first is “The Savage Mouth” by Sakyo Komatsu. It is a horrific story about a person who decided to eat himself, totally, completely, even down to cutting open his own skull and spooning the brains out. How was this done? By artificial organs as his real ones were consumed, and by machines who fed himself to himself.

Secondly, “The Animosh Driving School” (possibly my favorite story of weird) by Gerald Vizenor, in which two well meaning social workers on an Indian reservation decide to teach the reservation’s dogs to pull the elderly around in carts. Things start to get out of hand when the dogs then learn to drive taxis and even fly small planes. A most wonderful and hilarious story

Lastly, I have always been quite taken by the creativity of Julio Cortazar and his Cronopios and Famas stories. Here you have three types of people: Cronopios, Famas and Esperanzas, all folks described by their very strange and unique actions. Brilliant creativity and totally original!

The post Interview: Misha Nogha and the Weird appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marc Laidlaw

(source)

Expeditionary Notes of the Second Mycological Survey of the Leng Plateau Region

Aug. 3                                                            
No adventurer has ever followed lightly in the footsteps of a missing survey team, and today’s encounter in the Amari Café did little to relieve my anxiety.  Having arrived in Thangyal in the midst of the Summer Grass Festival, which celebrates the harvest of Cordyceps sinensis, the prized caterpillar fungus, we first sought a reasonably hygienic hotel in which to stow our gear. Lodging accomplished, Phupten led me several blocks to the café—and what a walk it was! Sidewalks covered with cordyceps! Thousands of them laid out to dry on tarps and blankets, the withered little hyphae-riddled worms with their dark fungal stalks outthrust like black mono-antennae, capped with tiny spores (asci). Everywhere we stepped, an exotic specimen cried out for inspection. Never have I seen so many mushrooms in one place, let alone the rare cordyceps; never have I visited a culture where mushrooms were of such great ethnic and economic importance. It is no wonder the fungi are beloved and appreciated, and that the cheerful little urchins who incessantly spit in the street possess at their tongue-tips (along with sunflower hulls) the practical field lore of a trained mycologist; for these withered larvae and plump Tricholoma matsutake and aromatic Boletus edulis have brought revivifying amounts of income to the previously cash-starved locals.  For myself, a mere mushroom enthusiast, it was an intoxicating stroll. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for my predecessors, treading these same cracked sidewalks ten months ago.

Phupten assured me that every Westerner in Thangyal ends up in the cramped café presided over by the rosy-cheeked Mr. Zhang, and this was the main reason for our choice of eatery. Mr. Zhang, formerly ofLhasa, proved to be a thin, jolly restaurateur in a shabby suit jacket, his cuffs protected from sputtering grease by colorful sleeve protectors cut from what appeared to be the legs of a child’s pajamas. At first, while we poured ourselves tea and ate various yak-fraught Tibetan versions of American standards, all was pleasant enough. Mr. Zhang required only occasional interpretive assistance from Phupten, and my comment on his excellent command of English naturally led him to the subject of his previous tutors—namely, the eponymous heads of the Schurr-Perry expedition.

Here, at a moment that could have been interpreted as inauspicious by those inclined to read supernatural meaning into random events, the lights dimmed and the power went out completely—a common event in Thangyal, Phupten stressed, as if he thought me susceptible to influence by such auspices. Although the cafe darkened, Mr. Zhang’s chapped cheeks burned brighter, kindling my own excitement as he lit into a firsthand account of the last known days of Danielle Schurr and her husband, Heinrich Perry.

According to Mr. Zhang, Danielle and Heinrich spent several weeks in Thangyal last October-November, preparing to penetrate the Plateau of Leng (so-called, in fanciful old accounts, the “Forbidden Plateau” (Journals of the Eldwythe Expedition (1903)) (which I mistakenly thought I had packed, damn it)). Thangyal still has no airstrip of its own, and like me they had relied on Land Rover and local drivers to reach it. Upon arrival, they encountered great difficulty in arranging for guides and packhorses to carry their belongings beyond vehicular routes, and had been obliged to wait while all manner of supplies were shipped in and travel arrangements made. During this wait, Heinrich had schooled our host in English, while Danielle had broadened his American cuisine repertoire. (I have her to thank for the banana pancakes that warm me even now.)

The jovial restaurateur tried many times to talk them out of their foray—and not merely because of winter’s onset. Were there political considerations? I asked. For while the Chinese government has relaxed travel restrictions through some border zones of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, stringent regulations are still in effect for Westerners who wish to press into the interior. Many of these stipulations (as I know firsthand) exist mainly to divert tourist lucre into the prefecture’s treasury by way of costly travel permits. But in the case of Leng, there seem to be less obvious motives for the restrictions. Despite assurances that I would never repeat his words to any official, Mr. Zhang refused to elaborate on what sort of benefit the Chinese government derived from restricting access. Leng is hardly a mineral rich region; there has been little or no military development there, which indicates it is strategically useless; and recent human rights reports declare it devoid of prisons or other political installations. It remains an area almost completely bypassed by civilizing influences, an astonishing anachronism as China pushes development into every last quarter of Tibet. As a zone set apart from the usual depredations, such resource conservation seems distinctly odd; but perhaps they have other plans for its exploitation. Mr. Zhang’s warnings were sufficiently vague that I could easily picture my predecessors brushing them aside. Once he realized that it was my intent to follow them, he directed the same warnings at me. Any request for permission to enter the plateau region would be met with refusal, he said; thus confirming my decision to file no such requests, but depend on the remoteness of the region to lend me anonymity.

When he saw it was my fixed purpose to follow the Schurr-Perry trail, Mr. Zhang got up and shuffled back into the kitchen—now lit solely by a gas stovetop. He returned with a dog-eared ledger and said something in Tibetan which Phupten interpreted as, “Guestbook.”

Mr. Zhang opened the ledger, spread it flat on the checkered tablecloth, and guided us backward through the entries—past colorful doodles and excitable notes from the Amari’s many international diners—notes in English and German and French. Here were mountaineers bragging of climbs they had just made or climbs just ahead of them, penniless wanderers hoping someone might forward a few million yuan, laments of narrowly missed rendezvous.

Mr. Zhang stopped flipping pages and directed our attention to a ragged strip where one sheet had been ripped from the book.

“Here,” he said. “Heinrich and Danielle? They write thank you Mr. Zhang. They say, we go Leng. Bu Gompa. Anyone follow, they read this note, say wait for them in spring. But…no come back.”

I speak no Tibetan, but I recognized a few words I have heard many times recently, albeit in different context. The locals are always making pilgrimages to their various gompas, by which they mean a temple or monastery. And bu I know from Yartse gunbu, the local name for the caterpillar fungus. Its precise meaning is “summer grass, winter worm,” which is a colorful (if backwards) way of describing the metamorphosis of the cordyceps-inoculated caterpillar, which overwinters as a worm, only to sprout a grasslike fungal stalk, the fruiting body or stroma, in early summer (once the fungus has entirely consumed it from within).

I clumsily translated the name as, “Templeof the Worm?”

Mr. Zhang said something urgently to Phupten, who listened, nodded, and turned to translate.

“Yes, monastery. Bu Gompa sits in the pass above Leng Plateau. Very old temple, from old religion, pre-Buddhist.”

“A Bon temple, you mean?”

“Not Bon-po. Very much older. Bu Gompa for all that time, gateway to Leng. Priests are now Buddhist, but they still guard plateau.”

Mr. Zhang was not done with his guest book. “This page, when my friends not return, two men come. Say they look for Heinrich and Danielle. Look for news of expedition.”

“This was when?”

“In…January? Before they supposed come back. No one worried yet. Tibetan men, say Heinrich friend, ask see guest book. I very busy, many people in restaurant. Think no problem, they look for friends. I go in kitchen, very busy. I come out, they gone. Oh well. Book still here. Later I see page gone!”

“The one Heinrich and Danielle wrote in, you mean? Saying where they were going?”

“Yes.”

“These men were Tibetan, you say?”

“Yes. I not see them in Thangyal before, but so many in town. Not only Yartse Festival. Many travelers. I worry they take page, get money from Heinrich and Danielle family.”

“Blackmail,” said Phupten.

I assured Mr. Zhang that we had heard of no such attempts. I explained that I had followed Heinrich and Danielle’s trail after reading a series of letters and articles published in the Journal of the Mycological Society in advance of their departure. But all of Mr. Zhang’s information was new to me; and that regarding the gompa was particularly interesting, as it suggested where I might next seek news of their whereabouts.

At about this time, the power was restored and a fresh flood of festival attendees pushed into the café. Thinking it right to clear the table for new customers, we bid farewell to Mr. Zhang, thanked him for his kindness, and stepped back out onto a sidewalk now almost completely covered with fungi. I stopped to watch some old gentlemen playing mahjongg on a table they’d set up on the sidewalk, and was hardly surprised to discover that in place of cash or poker chips, they were betting with Yartse gunbu.

Aug. 6

This morning, having finally reached the end of the tortuously stony road beyond Thangyal, we climbed from the Land Rovers and found an entire village sitting out in the sun to await our arrival. Our ponies should have been waiting for us, but apparently the drivers had expected us a week ago and turned them loose to graze in the high meadows. Even so, you might have thought the whole village had sat on the streetside, patiently waiting out the week, as if our arrival were the highpoint of the season and well worth any delay. To mark the moment with a bit of ceremony, I passed around biscuits and let the assemblage pore through my mushroom atlas, which was handed about with amazement and appreciation by the entire community. They pointed out various rare species, giving me the impression that many could be found in the region—however, Phupten was too busy remedying the horse situation to interpret, and I soon reached the limits of my ability to communicate with any subtlety.

Phupten eventually signaled me that immediate arrangements had been made, and that we could set off without further ado. The horses would follow once they had been retrieved and laden with supplies offloaded from the vehicles. With a camp-following of dogs and children, we plunged onto a muddy footpath among the houses. As we passed to the limits of the village, we encountered a number of mushroom hunters returning from their morning labors with plastic grocery bags, wicker baskets, or nylon backpacks bulging with shamu—the local term for mushrooms of all varieties. Phupten helped me interview the collectors, making quick inventories of local names, edibility, and market prices they earn from the buyers who scour these remote villages for delicacies. One cannot underestimate the value of mushrooms to these people. Species that grow abundantly here are prized in Japan and Korea, where they absolutely resist cultivation. Although the villagers receive a pittance compared to supermarket prices in Tokyo and Seoul, the influx of cash has completely transformed this previously impoverished land. The mud houses are freshly painted in bright acrylics; solar panels and satellite dishes spring up plentiful as sunflowers. The young men dash about on motorcycles as colorful as their temples. Since a study of mushroom economics had been the announced purpose of the Schurr-Perry expedition (although I suspected the unstated motive force was more likely a desire to discover and name some new species found only in Leng), I decided to see if this might be a path already taken. I showed each collector a photograph of Heinrich and Danielle, copied from the dust jacket of their landmark Fungi of Yunnan, to see what memories the image might jog loose. One group of giggling youths remembered them well; the adults were harder to pin down. I found reassurance, however, in the innocent recognition of the children, and now feel I am definitely on the right trail—although the chance of losing it remains tremendous in the narrow defiles of the only land route into Leng.

Beyond the village, we crossed a river by way of a swaying cable bridge. Keeping close to the west bank, working our way upriver, we spent the morning traversing damp meadows further dampened by frequent cloudbursts. Our gear, now swaying awkwardly on the backs of four ponies, caught up with us in the early afternoon. Not long after, we crossed back to the east bank, on a much older bridge that put me in mind of a stockade. The blackened timbers were topped with protective shapes that again served as reminders of the mushroom’s ancient significance. The more stylized carvings were clearly meant to represent shelf fungi, tree ears, king boletes. The bridge also marked the point at which I felt we had crossed a divide in time. I saw no more hazardous electric lines strung between fencepost and rooftop; no dish antennae were in evidence. The mudbrick walls were topped with mats of cut sod, which made them wide enough that small dogs could run along the heights, barking down at us. Children followed us through streets that ran like muddy streams. Eventually, at the edge of a walled field, we left them all behind, flashing peace signs and shouting after us, “Shamu-pa! Shamu-pa!” Phutpen laughed and said, “They call you ‘Mushroom Man,’” which sat very well with me. Our guides grinned and set the horses on at greater speed.

After that, all other habitations were simpler and more temporary affairs. Phupten brought us to the black felt tent of a yak herder, where an elderly nomad woman cut squeaking slices of a hard rubbery cheese and sprinkled it with brown sugar; I was grateful for the butter tea that washed it down. But it was the large basket of matsutake that held my interest, each little bud wrapped in an origami packet of rhododendron leaves.

Regretfully, as we ascend we are bound to leave such woodland curiosities behind. The higher elevations are more secretive with their treasures. Consider the elusive cordyceps–notoriously hard to spy, with its one thin filament lost among so many blades of real grass.

Late in the day, we came in sight of the massif that guards the pass into Leng. The late afternoon light made the barrier appear unnaturally close, sharp and serrated as a knife held to my eyes. Such was the clarity of the air that for a moment I felt a kind of horizontal vertigo. I imagined myself in danger of falling forward and stumbling over the rim of the mountains into a deep blue void. When a violet translucence flared above the range, it edged the snowy crests as if auroral lights were spilling up from the plateau hidden beyond them. I suppose this strange, brief atmospheric phenomenon may be akin to the green flash of the equatorial latitudes, but it also made me more aware than ever of the imminent onset of altitude sickness, and the ominous tinge of an incipient migraine. I was grateful when our guides, immediately after this, announced it was time to make camp.

We spread our tents in a wide meadow between two rivers. The rush of rapids was almost deafening. One of our guides, doubling as cook, filled pots and a kettle from one of the streams and soon had tea and soup underway. From a bloody plastic grocery bag, he produced rich chunks of yak and hacked them up along with fresh herbs and wild garlic he had gathered along the trail. I offered several prize boletes of my own finding. We ate and ate well in the shadow of a tall white stupa, also in the shape of a mushroom, adorned with a Buddha’s eyes, and I was reminded of another interest of Heinrich’s and Danielle’s. They had read conjecture in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that the words Amanita and Amrita had their nomenclatural similarity rooted in a single sacred practice. Amrita is the Buddhist equivalent of ambrosia, or the Sanskrit soma, a sacred foodstuff; and it has been suggested that certain Buddhist practices may have been inspired, or at least augmented, by visions following ingestion of the highly psychoactive Amanita muscaria. The Schurr-Perrys had stated a desire to be the discoverers (and namers) of Amanita lengensis, should such exist. In this way the mycological world resembles the quantum world, in being a realm so rich and various that simply searching for new forms seems to call them into creation; where labels may predate and even prophesy the things to which they are eventually applied; in which scientists now chart out the psychic territory known as Apprehension.

When I asked which species we might find beyond the pass, I was surprised to learn from Phupten that our guides had only visited Bu Gompa once or twice in their lifetimes, and had never actually set foot in Leng. Such pilgrimages are not undertaken lightly. Leng is held in such reverence and awe, as a place of supernal power, that they believe it unwise to venture there too often.

Sharing our interest in all things mycological, the horsemen related a tale of a stupa-shaped mushroom that had bloated to enormous size and died away to puddled slime in the course of one growing season. This had occurred in their childhoods, but pilgrims still visited the spot in hopes the Guru Shamu might reappear. With what in retrospect seems arrogant pedantry, I found myself explaining that the fruiting body they saw, impressive as it might have seemed, was still only a comparatively tiny eruption from a much vaster fungus, the real guru, growing unseen and unmeasured beneath the soil. They looked at me with disappointment, as if I had just declared them retarded. In other words, this was hardly news to them. I eventually succeeded, through Phupten, in apologizing. I explained that in the West, extensive knowledge of mushrooms is considered bizarre at worst, the mark of an enthusiast at best. We shared a good laugh. At last I am among kindred spirits. So much about our lives is different, but in our passion for mushrooms we are of one mind.

Aug. 8
A day of astonishment—of revelation. Almost too much to encompass as I sit here typing by the light of my laptop, wrapped up in my sleeping bag as if under the stars, but with my gear pitched instead in a chilly stone cell. I should sleep, I know. I am exhausted and the laptop battery needs charging; but I fear losing track of any detail. I must write while this is all fresh.

After yesterday’s slow progress and mounting disappointments, we were relieved to sight the Leng Pass by late morning. We had ascended to such an altitude that even now, in midsummer, snow comes down to the level of the trail in numerous places. Blue deer capered on the steep ragged scree above us, lammergeier were our constant observers, and once we startled a flock of white-eared pheasant, large as turkeys, that hopped rather than flew away through the boulders. The occasional stinkhorn, fancifully obscene, was still to be found among the thinly scattered pine needles, but my desire to forage had receded with the elevation. Grateful to have woken with a clear head, and not at all eager to trigger another migraine, I resolved to conserve my strength. But it was hard to slow down once I saw my view of the sky steadily broadening, with no further mountains moving into the notch above.

We passed cairns of engraved stones and desiccated offerings that seemed neither plant nor animal but something in between, and entered a long flat valley, sinuously curved to match the river flowing through it. The valley floor was high marshland, studded with the medicinal rhubarb we have seen everywhere. This was all picturesque enough, but above it on a slope of the pass, just at the highest point where snow laced the scree, was the most wonderful sight of the journey. Its prayer flags flying against the clouds seemed triumphant banners set out for our welcome. We had reached Bu Gompa, which straddles and guards the entrance to Leng.

Thunder rumbled; rain fell in grey ribbons. Phupten said the monks were bound to read this as an auspicious sign, coupled with our arrival. Our horsemen quickened their steps, and even the ponies hurried as if the object of their own private pilgrimage were in sight. The monastery loomed over us. Above it, among shelves of rock on the steeper slopes, I saw the pockmarks of clustered caves like the openings of beehives.  Then we were through a painted gate and the place had consumed us. Happily lost among tall sod-draped walls, I breathed in the musty atmosphere of woodsmoke, rancid butter and human waste that I have come to associate with all such picturesque scenes in this country.

Several boys, young monks, were first to greet us, laughing and ducking out of sight, then running ahead to alert their elders. We climbed switchback streets, perpetually urged and beckoned to the height of the pass. At last we entered a walled courtyard. A wide flight of steps soared to a pair of immense doors, presumably the entrance to the main temple. As Phupten conversed with a small contingent of monks, I tried these doors and found them locked. It seemed propitious to leave an offering of ten dollars to show our good intentions and dispose the monks toward our cause. Meanwhile, our horsemen laid themselves repeatedly on the flags of the courtyard, in prayerful prostrations, aligned along some faded tracework of symbols so ancient I could detect no underlying pattern. Although the walls were bright with fresh paint, this monastery seemed remote enough to have escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution.

I retreated down the steps to find Phupten perplexed. The monks, he said, had been expecting us. They led us around the side of the building, skirting the huge locked doors, and entered the main hall by a small curtained passage.

We had seen many fantastically colorful temples along our route, lurid to the point of being day-glo. This one impressed by its warm burnished hues. Rich russets, silvery greys, pallid ivories. Everywhere were exquisite thangkas, hand-painted hangings in colors so subdued they evoked a world of perpetual dusk. There was light in these paintings that seemed to emanate from within and could hardly be fully explained by the shifting glow of the numerous butter lamps. Bodhisattvas floated among sharp mountains, hovering cross-legged above vast emerald seas from which radiated gilt filaments painted with such skill that they seemed to vibrate on the optic nerve, creating the illusion of swaying like strands of golden grass. Most of the traditional Buddhas and Bodhisattvas had grown familiar to me after so many recent temple visits but Phupten pointed out one figure new to me, and quite unusual, which made numerous appearances throughout the room. Pre-Buddhist, and predating even the ancient Bon-po religion of Tibet, Phupten thought this to be the patron of those original priests of Leng. Where Buddhist iconography was highly schematic, drawn according to regular geometric formulae, this figure harkened back to an older style, one unconcerned with distinct form and completely innocent of the rules of perspective: amorphous, eyeless, mouthless, but not completely faceless. Having noticed it once, I began to spy it everywhere, lurking within nearly all the thangkas, a ubiquitous shadow beneath every emerald expanse.

I noticed our horsemen moving about the room in clockwise fashion, lighting incense and butter lamps, leaving offerings of currency at several of the shrines. Having taken up this practice myself, as a matter of courtesy rather than devotion, I began to follow their example; but Phupten took my arm and for the first time in our journey, told me to hang back. When I asked why, he pulled me into a corner of the room and whispered, with curious urgency, “If you look, you see no pictures of His Holiness.”

It was true enough, and remarkable, given the common appearance of the Dalai Lama in every temple we had visited across the eastern fringe ofTibet.

“Not good. Old disagreement. They do practice here, very old, from Leng. His Holiness say very bad. Three years ago, the priests of Leng, they speak out against Dalai Lama, that he is suppressing their religion. He says, their protector deity is like a demon—“

“I thought all the old Bon spirits were demons once.”

“Yes, but this one never enlightened. False wisdom. So, a very big fight, and even a man who try to kill his Holiness in Dharamsala. They said it was Chinese assassin behind it, but many believe it was ordered by monks of Leng.”

“So…no offerings,” I finished.

“Yes.”

“But what about our guides? Don’t they know?”

Before he could answer, our inspection of the temple was interrupted by the arrival of several more monks. Two were elders, dignified men, strong but gentle seeming. The third was younger, with strongly Caucasian features. In his monastic garb, with head shaved, and given the fact I had only seen him as a lecturer, at a distance, at one or two mycological conferences, I suppose I can be forgiven for not having recognized him until he came up to me, put out his hand, and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you? Heinrich Perry!”

Ten minutes later, we were seated in the courtyard enjoying a sun break, sipping tea and chewing dumplings of tea-moistened tsampa. It seemed that all the monks of Bu Gompa had turned out to get a look at me. They laughed and posed for photographs, until their various duties took them off again, for meditation or debate. Heinrich said news of our coming had preceded us up the passes; he had been expecting us since our visit to Mr. Zhang, although he was surprised anyone would have followed in his footsteps. The Schurr-Perry expedition was anything but lost. He had already found more than he ever expected to find, without even crossing into Leng. His wife had ventured onto the plateau and made discoveries of her own, but Heinrich had not set foot across the threshold.

“And where is Ms. Schurr?” I asked.

Heinrich gestured airily in the direction of the surrounding slopes. “She is in retreat.” Leaving me to infer some transcendental meaning in this statement, he must have seen my glazed expression, for he laughed and elaborated: “Above the monastery are many old caves used for meditation. She has been there since her return from the plateau.” He leaned forward and said confidentially, “She has been recognized as a superior practitioner, while I scrub pots and chop wood!”

So our predecessors, far from lost, had simply gone native. And their mycological survey? Their dreams of discovering new species in Leng? It was hard to believe they had given up on their passion.

Heinrich said, “Not at all. I would say we have embraced it. The Leng Plateau is a treasure chest of rarities, previously unknown. Once you attain the plateau, it is impossible to describe the wealth of discovery that awaits. But…once I reached this spot, such things lost their importance. Danielle has never been one to hold back, but I…I feel fulfilled as a porter at the gate. All Leng lies before me, but I know myself not yet ready for what it has to offer.”

This seemed like a shame, and I said as much, for Perry’s reports had always been received eagerly by mycological society. In a profession which had yearly become more and more the domain of geneticists, more partitioned into microscopic domains, Perry and Schurr had been unafraid of bold strokes and sweeping statements. Their papers, while thoroughly grounded in empirical observation, never shied from leaning out over the thrilling edge of speculation. Their gift of synthesis was to couple personal reportage with ecological insight; their reports, while botanically rigorous, did not neglect the social and economic implications of their finds. Yet apparently the line between devout ethnomycology and monastic assimilation had been porous. I considered it a shame, but then felt awkward and ashamed of myself for harboring critical thoughts of this pair, whom I knew not at all. If they had found personal fulfillment in casting aside purely academic concerns and embracing the spiritual, then who was I to judge them? If anything, I felt a keen resolve to work even harder in order to compensate for the loss of Schurr-Perry’s ongoing contributions to the field. The success of my foray into Leng seems more crucial than ever.

By now it was early evening, and we walked out to stand on a temple balcony, looking out across the very threshold of Leng. The serried peaks opened before us like a curtain of violet ice pulled back to reveal a sea of rolling green that broke against the misty edges of infinity. The most evocative passages of the literature of Leng came rushing back to me—from the lush descriptions of Gallardo’s Folk and Lore of the Forbidden Plateaux (1860) to the spare journal entries of the tragic Eldwythe misadventure of 1903, made all the more macabre and ironic by its innocence of the repercussions it would inevitably have on British and Russian relations. “…lost land of unnameable mysteries…beauty beyond reach and beyond utterance…effulgent as the evenstar’s radiance alight on the breast of earth, enflaming the mind and senses…” Although I had always thought such descriptions must have been flights of fancy, my first sight of Leng simply made me sympathetic to the self-avowed descriptive failings of all previous writers.

It was no wonder Perry had stopped here, I thought, for to descend into that remote wilderness was to risk stripping it of the intense mystery that gave rise to its fantastic beauty. While I knew that on the morrow we would put one foot before the other and gradually make our way down to that strange green plain, I regretted the thought of taking any action that would lessen Leng’s magic while heightening its reality. It struck me as a dreamland, suspended in its own hallucination of itself, impervious to the senses. And yet such bubbles—how readily they burst. I feared this was a delusion of the evening, of the twilight air, doomed by the threat of morning. But there was nothing for it. I tried to hold on to a sense of anticipation, reminding myself of what Perry had hinted: That new discoveries awaited us below.

Horns resounded deep within the monastery, amid the clanging of cymbals and bells, and several boys came to fetch us back. Just before we turned away, the first stars appeared above the misty plains, and I sent up a fervent wish that I would never forget the feelings that had accompanied their arrival. Needless to say, these impressions will make no appearance in my published survey notes. In fact, I hope I can word my reports in such a way that none of my colleagues feel compelled to follow my trail and impinge upon this mystic land. It is such a strange feeling, as if I have been entrusted with a secret rare and exquisite, one that seems to blow up from the plateau on scented winds. I feel it would be wrong, shameful, to blunt it with too many perceivers. I am of course committed to sharing the knowledge I find here, and in no danger of falling into the trap that claimed the Schurr-Perry party. But I find myself certain that those Tibetans who visited Mr. Zhang and tore the entry from his guestbook must have been sent at Heinrich Perry’s request, in an understandable attempt to cover up his trail.

During dinner, we spoke only of plans for the journey ahead. Phupten dined with the drivers, so I relied on Perry for interpretation. It seemed strange to me that they would have embraced him as a lama when his only real expertise, to my knowledge, was in the area of mycology. Likewise, how had Danielle managed to distinguish herself so swiftly among this group of lifelong spiritual practitioners? It was one thing to rush ahead fearlessly, as Heinrich had suggested was her wont—and quite another to convert that mortal zeal into an act of transcendence.

These questions were hard to frame while my hosts plied me with such a remarkable meal. Knowing my interest in local mushrooms, the monk chefs contrived a meal of savories that grew within range of the temple, prime among them a delectable red fly agaric, or chicken egg mushroom—Amanita hemibapha (once incorrectly known as Caesar’s mushroom (or, I would imagine, ‘Gesar’s mushroom’ in these lands), viz., Amanita caesarea, but delightful whatever its name). In my tea I found a special additive—a wrinkled grub, perhaps three inches long, like a sodden medicinal root. Heinrich confirmed my suspicion that it was nothing less than cordyceps, and a most prized variety, being collected along the edges of the grasslands that blanket the plateau. Like the worm in a bottle of tequila, it bobbed against my lips as I drank. In tropical climes, where insects are rife, the invasive cordyceps comes in many forms, to encompass the wild variety of insect hosts; but in these high cold climes, its hosts are few and unprepossessing. Whatever traits might have distinguished Cordyceps lengensis from the more common variety were not at all obvious to my eye; in fact, soaked and swimming in tea, it looked more like a shred of ginseng than anything else. Heinrich said the monks called it phowa bu, which I hesitate to translate. “Death Worm” gives the wrong impression altogether and “Transcendence Worm” is not much better. Phowa is a ritual done at the moment of death, intended to launch its practitioner cleanly into the Pure Lands through his crown—to be more precise, through the fontanelle at the top of the skull. Heinrich claims that in true practitioners of phowa, a blood blister forms at the top of one’s head, and a hole opens there. This channel is just wide and deep enough to hold a single stalk of grass—and in fact, this is the traditional test used by lamas to gauge an initiate’s readiness. With its single grasslike stalk, the shriveled cordyceps serves as a humble reminder of the sacred practice.

I asked Heinrich if I might see fresh specimens of Cordyceps lengensis before my departure, but he demurred—and there I caught a glimpse of the old academic, cagey and wary with his findings. “Of course,” I quipped, “you have yet to publish!” And was gratified to hear him laugh. I’d struck truth! For all his monastic garb, he is still a mushroom hunter through and through–protective of his private foraging grounds!

Although the sun had barely set, I found the cumulative exertions of the last few days, and the effects of the altitude, had overcome me. The cordyceps infusion seems to have some medicinal properties, for tonight as I lay down to make these entries, I found my breathing easy. Normally these past few nights, I have felt a crushing weight on my chest, exaggerated when I recline, and I wake many times before dawn, gasping for breath. Something tells me that tonight I will sleep well.

Stray thought—Heinrich’s research re Amanita/Amrita. Must ask in the morning. Where that led him; what he found, if anything. Cordyceps aplenty, but no sign of Amanita lengensis. I’d like to charge the laptop before I go, but I couldn’t ask them to run the generator all night. Low on power.

Undated Entry
Phupten is dead. Or worse.

I believe our guides may have met a similar fate—I cannot call it an end, although it might be that. I will do my best to explain while I still have power, in hopes this laptop may be found by someone who may benefit by my warnings. I cannot flee back across the pass. The only other path is a trackless one, forward across the plateau. Leng. There are good reasons not know it any better than I do already.

Two nights ago? Three? Phupten woke me in the dark monastic cell, with a flashlight in my eyes and fear in his voice. He said we were at risk of losing our guides to the gompa.  Whether they had planned it from the start, or merely found themselves seduced by the monastic order upon arrival, he was unsure. They had mentioned childhood vows that needed renewing, but apparently things had gone too far.

I was already dressed inside my sleeping bag, so I scrambled out and followed him along dark halls, taking nothing but the few valuables in my backpack. We passed under timbered passages and starry gaps, and eventually came to the side door of the great hall. Inside, the monks sat chanting in row upon row with our guides now among them. Phupten held me back, as if I would have plunged among them—but I was not inclined to interrupt that ceremony.

Both guides stood at the head of the temple, close to the central altar. Incense fumes shrouded them, as if they were being fumigated, purified in sacred smoke. The smoke rose from a fat grey mass, as large as a man’s torso, that smoldered but did not seem to burn. A lama stood near the men, his face hidden behind a richly embroidered veil of yellow cloth shot through with gold and red. He held a long wooden wand, possibly a yarrow stalk, which he used to softly prod and poke at the lump, stirring up thick billowing clouds of the odorless incense with each touch. I realized I was seeing a tangible version of the icon featured in so many thangkas—the local protector deity made manifest, squatting in the place that should have been occupied by a Buddha or Bodhisattva.

Sensing our arrival, the lama laid down his wand and walked toward us, stripping off his veil as if it were a surgeon’s mask. I was much surprised to find Heinrich leading a ceremony of such obvious importance. Without a word, he took me by the arm and steered me toward the side door. I looked around and discovered that Phupten had already crept away.

“Your guides have elected to stay,” he said.

“If they wish to take monastic vows it’s no business of mine,” I said. “But they should first fulfill their obligation to the survey. You know the importance of our work, Heinrich. Once you were as devoted to mycology as anyone on earth. Can’t you ask them to postpone this sudden bout of spirituality for a few weeks? I’ll be happy to leave them with you on my return from the plateau.”

Rather than argue, Heinrich led me away with a gentleness that later seemed more forceful than sympathetic.

“I understand your point of view, but there is another,” he said patiently. “When Dani and I first arrived here, our survey seemed more pressing than anything on earth. I remember my eagerness to catalog the contents of Leng. But there is a faster way to that knowledge. A richer and deeper kind of knowing.”

We were moving up the mountainside along a rough path. The hollow eye sockets of caves peered down without seeing us.  The cloistered buildings fell below.

“Speak with Danielle,” Heinrich said. “She can explain better than I.”

Starshine through the frayed clouds was all the light we had, but on the snowy flanks of the mountains it was almost dazzling. Heinrich brought me to a black throat of darkness. Small icons sculpted of butter and barley flour were arranged at its mouth; there were shapes like spindles, bulbs, ears. We stepped inside. My first impression was of choking dryness and dust. I saw a grey knot, far back in the cave, bobbing in the guttering light of a single butter lamp that burned on the ground before it. I could make out a figure wrapped in robes, with head bowed slightly forward. All was grey—the face, the long hair cleanly parted down the middle. I supposed it was a woman, but she did not speak, nor stir to greet us.

“This is Danielle,” Heinrich said. “She has answers to all your questions.”

I was not sure what to ask, but I swore I heard her answering already. Deeper into the cave I went, stooping as the ceiling lowered, until my ears were very near her mouth. The sound of speech was louder now but still indecipherable, like mumbles inside which something was gnawing. Thinking it might help to match mouth to syllable, I watched her face until I was certain her mouth never moved. When I stepped back, a faint grey filament stirred in the breeze I’d made. It jutted from her scalp like a stalk of straw. The mark of the phowa adept. It seemed incredible she could have attained such a transcendent state in so little time. Was this why they had decided to remain? Could the monks of Bu Gompa offer a short path to enlightenment? Was there something about Leng itself, something in the rarified air, in the snowy mountains and the rolling misty grasslands, that provoked insight? I thought of how I had felt looking out over the fields—as if perpetually on the verge of understanding, of merging with a mystery that underlay all existence. But I had hesitated then and I hesitated now, even as I teetered on the brink. Doubt assailed me, and I have been trained to rely on doubt. Was enlightenment invariably good and wise? Was it possible that some forms of enlightenment, more abrupt than others, might be more than a weak mind could encompass? Were there not perhaps monks who, at the moment of insight, simply went mad? Or in a sense shattered?

Heinrich had been joined by others. Dark shapes clustered outside the cave, with the stars beyond them looking infinitely farther than stars had ever looked to me before. There was some aspect of menace in the silent arrival of the monks, and I suddenly felt myself the victim of a fraud. Doubt drove me entirely now. In a last bid to assert my rationality, to make all this as real as I felt it needed to be, I turned back to Danielle Schurr. It was time to end all deception. My fingers closed on the blade that jutted from her crown. Far from a dry grassy stalk, it proved to be pliable, rubbery, tough. I thought of the lure of a benthic anglerfish—something that belonged far deeper than this cave extended. As I pulled it from her scalp, or tried to, the top half of her head tore away in my hand, hanging from the end of the stalk in shreds, like a wet paper bag. The rest of her, what was left of her, exploded like a damp tissue balloon packed with grey dust. If you have ever kicked a puffball fungus, you might have some idea of the swirling clouds of spores that poured like scentless incense from the soft grey body—in such quantity that the dry husk was instantly emptied and lay slumped across the floor, inseparable from its robes.

I knew I must not breathe till I was far from the cave, but of course I already had gasped. Thus the shock of terror plays a critical role in the inoculation. I backed away, expecting to be caught by Heinrich and his cohorts. But no one stopped me. All stood aside.

My descent was a desperate and precarious one, especially once I abandoned the trail and cut off along the only available route—the pass leading down into Leng. The thought that I might accidentally blunder back into the monastery filled me with terror. By starlight, and some miracle, I found my way off the treacherous rocks and onto a stable path. An enormous clanking shape lurched toward me, matching my wild imaginings of some shaggy supernatural guardian that had descended to track me down. It proved to be one of the pack horses, bearing an ungainly bundle quickly assembled from our belongings, and led by none other than Phupten. He was as startled to see me as I was to meet him, for he had understandably thought only of saving himself. He said the path in the other direction had been gated off, the far side of the monastery impassable; so he’d had no choice but to flee toward Leng.

Behind us came the drone of horns, and I half expected the baying of hounds in pursuit. But though cymbals clashed and bells clanged and chanting rose up to the stars, nothing but sound pursued us down through the pass toward the unknown plateau of Leng, which became less unknown with each step. We fled through icy mountain fogs so luminous that I thought several times the sun must be rising, but each time found myself deceived.

At last, in exhaustion, Phupten pegged the ponies and dragged down blankets, and built a fire among the roots of a tree to give us some shelter against a miserable rain. We made plans for the morning, plans that have since evaporated. We debated whether we should wait till the following night to try and sneak back the way we had come. I dreaded the thought of returning to the monastery; it seemed impossible that we could ever creep unseen through the narrow maze of lanes; and who knew what the monks would do if they apprehended us? But Phupten insisted this was the only way back. For ages, it had been the one route into and out of Leng. There in the cold night, knowing that Leng was close, I regretted ever seeking it out. I wanted nothing more than to have remained ignorant of its mystery.

We slept there fitfully, shivering, and I dreamt fearful dreams of something wary and watchful toward which we fled. Small white buds were stirring among the roots of the tree, growing swiftly like plasmodium in a stop-motion film; they bulged from the soil and then opened, staring at me, a cluster of bloodshot eyes.

I jerked awake in a frozen dawn, hearing Phupten calling my name. But he was nowhere to be seen. The ponies waited where he had tethered them, so I thought he must have gone off for water or more wood.

I waited there all morning.

The mist veiled the mountains as if urging me to forget them. In the other direction, endless rolling hills of grass emerged. Alluring terrain, yet the notion of venturing there seemed madder than going to sea without a compass or the slightest knowledge of celestial navigation. I clung to the misty margin and watched the grasslands through much of the day, noting the way the light shifted and phantom sprites sometimes moved through the air above the rippling strands, auroral presences like the vaporous dreams of things hidden below the soil. I wondered if the Chinese suspected what dreamed there—if they hoped to harness it somehow, to tame or oppress it. Or had it managed to hide itself from them—from all controlling powers? Was it not itself an agent of utter control? Maddening insights flowered perpetually within me, the merest of them impervious to transcription. I wondered if there were degrees of immersion…or infection. Danielle had rushed out to meet the powers of the plateau…I continued to hold back… I felt on the verge of exploding with insight; as my mind quickened, I felt it ever more incumbent upon me to hold very still. A horrid wisdom took hold. These thoughts were only technically my own. Something else had planted them. In me, they would come to fruit.

I realized my eyes had closed, rolling back in my skull to point at a hidden horizon. With an effort of recall that felt like lurching disappointment, I disgorged a memory of Danielle Schurr’s final, meditative posture. This drove me to my feet. I stamped about, remembering how to walk. I felt emptied out. Cored. I foraged among the packs for food, hoping nourishment would abate my unaccustomed sense of lightness. Altitude still explained a great deal, I told myself. But something else was wrong. Almost everything.

In the afternoon I finally saw Phupten, far out on the sea of grass. He would not come close enough for me to read his features, nor did I dare walk out to greet him. Maybe he had been there all along. He stood with his face turned in my direction, and I began to hear mumbling like that which had filled the space in Danielle’s cave. I could not resolve words. The tone was plaintive, pleading, then insistent. Phupten walked off some distance, sat down, and grew very still. I believe night came again, although it might have been a different kind of darkness falling. My head swarmed—swarms—with dreams not my own. Leng stretches out forever, and beneath its thin skin of grass and soil waits a presence vast and ancient but hardly unconscious. It watches with Phupten’s eyes, while he still has them. I dreamt it spoke to me, promising I would understand all. It would hold back nothing. I would become the mystery—the far-off allure of things just beyond the horizon. The twilight hour, the gate of dreams. All these would be all that is left of me, for all these things are Leng of the violet light. I felt myself spread to great immensity. Only the smallest leap was needed—only the softest touch and form would no longer contain me.

I woke to find myself walking out onto the plateau. Onto the endless green where Phupten waited. I crossed the threshold. The veil parted. I beheld Leng.

The plateau spread to infinity before me, but it was bare and horrible, a squirming ocean beneath a gravelled skin, with splintered bones that tore up through the hide, rending the fleshy softness that heaved in a semblance of life. A trillion tendrils stirred upon its surface, antennae generating the illusion that protected it, configuring the veil. This was Leng. Is! A name and a place and a thing. Leng is what dreams at the roof of the world and sends its relentless imaginings to cover the planet. The light that shines here is not the violet and orange of twilight or dusk. It is the grey of a suffocating mist, a cloud of obscuring putrefaction, full of blind motes that cannot be called living yet swarm like flies and infest every pore with grasping hunger. A vastness starving and all-consuming that throws up ragged shadows like clots of tar to flap overhead in the form of the faceless winged creatures that wheel away from the plateau to snatch whatever hapless souls they find beyond the gates of nightmare and carry them back here, toward a pale grey haze of shriveled peaks so lofty that even though they rise at an infinite distance, still they dwarf everything. And having glimpsed the impossible temple upon those improbable peaks, I know I can never return. Even though I took but the one step across the threshold and then fell back, I cannot unsee what I have seen. There is no unknowing. The veil is forever rent. I cannot wake. And though I write these words because I am compelled, because Leng’s spell is such that others will read this and be drawn to it, I pray for an end to wakefulness and sleep. I cannot stop my ears or eyes or mind from knowing what waits. Leng’s vision for Earth is a blind and senseless cloud that spreads and infects and feeds only to spread, infect and feed. And its unearthly beauty—we are drawn to it like any lure. I pray you have not touched me. I pray the power has

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