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“There is apparently a k-kind of plant,” he said slowly, “like a thistle, that g-grows at remote spots in the Holy Land. And you and I, my dear, have each seen enough of the sh-shameful supernatural to be at l-l-least ho-ho-open-minded to the idea that some specimens of this plant are inhabited, by the old entities. Maly said that when the r-rebel angels f-fell at the begi
The wheeling seagulls had disappeared in the darkness below the cliff at his feet. Low tide, he thought vaguely. They’ll be feeding.
“And if a p-person awakens one of these vegetation-bound angels,” he went on, “and then eats it with the p-proper sacramentals, sugar and garlic and l-liquor and such, that p-person will share in the angel’s immortality, will n-never grow old or suffer f-fatal injury or illness. My father had known something of this-in the Gilgamesh story, a g-god tells the man Upanishtim to build a boat and take into it ‘the seed of all living creatures,’ and Upanishtim and his family do it, and s-survive the flood-and long afterward, Upanishtim gives Gilgamesh a th-thorny plant that will restore youth. But b-before Gilgamesh can take it home to his people, an old s-s-snake!-comes out of a well!-and eats the plant, and immediately c-casts off its old skin and returns, y-young again, to the well. So the plant w-w-worked as promised, but Gilgamesh d-didn’t get it.”
“Maly did talk to me about this!” exclaimed Elena. She went on, almost to herself, “Oh, I think he did; I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.” She looked up at Philby, her eyes gleaming in the light from the hotels across the street. “I was only twelve, but Maly said that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep her and Adam away from the other tree, the Tree of Life, which-”
“Who’s that?” Philby shouted.
He had grabbed her arm with his left hand, and with his right he was pointing at the taller of the two rocks out in the bay-for he had just noticed a silhouetted figure standing in the meadow on the inaccessible top. It was far too remote for him to be able to tell if it was a man or a woman…but one of its arms was waving. It was beckoning.
“Don’t move,” he added in a whisper, for with a sound like sudden rain the birds now swept up from the abyss below the cliff and were circling low over Elena and himself-the pigeons and gulls made no cries, but the flutter of their wings was like rushing ba
Philby’s chest was suddenly cold. Is that thing aware that I’m trying to beg off, here? he thought. Trying to forsake the old covenant?
The tourists along the cliff rail had been startled when he shouted, and now they hurried away as the low-flying pigeons and seagulls did not disperse-and Philby became aware of the ringing of a telephone.
Hatif, he thought breathlessly-the call from the dead at night, foretelling another death-but where is it? He glanced at the figure out on the rock, fearful that it might be flying toward them through the twilight; but it was still there where he had first seen it, still beckoning.
Rocking into cautious motion, Elena took two stiff steps toward a purse and a couple of abandoned toys that a woman had left behind on the sidewalk after snatching up her baby and hurrying away from the intrusive birds. Philby squinted at the toys and saw that one of them was a yellow plastic telephone; and then he realized that the ringing was coming from this toy.
“Don’t-answer it,” he croaked.
But Elena had bent down awkwardly, her white hair blown into her face by the battering breeze of the close wings, and she lifted the receiver, which was co
She held the little receiver to her ear; the mouthpiece was pressed against her cheek.
His face hot with humiliation, Philby babbled, “It will only be my w-wife, my l-last wife-she d-d-died five years ago, and she’s always c-calling me-d-don’t listen to her f-f-filth-”
“It’s-a man,” Elena said tonelessly. “I-I think I know him.” She lifted the plastic receiver, with the telephone swinging below it on the string, not co
Philby reached out-slowly, for he feared that any sudden move might provoke some kind of calamitous definition of the birds-and as he kept his eyes on the beckoning figure on the distant rock he pressed the toy receiver to his ear.
“Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events,” said a British man’s voice from the unperforated earpiece, clearly enough for Philby to hear through the bandages, “wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the dji
The woman whose child the telephone belonged to had for several seconds now been yelling something from several yards away. “Shut her up!” yelled Philby now to Elena.
The voice in the toy had paused, as if it had heard him; then it went on, “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience-which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”
The speaker had not raised his voice, but at the word death the volume had increased, and Philby dropped the toy telephone when the abruptly loud word impacted his eardrum.
And the birds scattered away into the darkening sky, as if all released at once from invisible tethers. Philby turned awkwardly from the waist to watch as many of them as he could-he had no peripheral vision-and when he saw a Chevrolet sedan swerving in toward this cliff-side curb he whispered, “Fuck.”
But perhaps they were simply stopping because of the birds and the panicky tourists.
He was shaking from the enigmatic encounter with the animated birds and the figure on the rock and the hatif call, and from the ordeal of having begun at long last to confess his real career before that; he had been living on nerves and gin ever since passing his proposal to the SDECE five days ago-and he was fifty years old now and felt every conflicted day of it.
He took Elena’s elbow and led her away, toward the nearest crosswalk. “Don’t look b-back,” he said; “That’s r-rogue CIA in the Chevrolet behind us, n-not working through CIA Beirut, but sent independently by the head of their Office of Special Operations in Washington.”
Could they be here for me? he wondered tensely; could they be pla