essene — 12

Like rats leaving a sinking ship, Corcey’s hair fell out in greater and greater clumps as time degenerated his mind. The cream carpet around him looked like it had a black, hairy mould infestation. Corcey sat in the corner in a cross between lotus and fetal positions. Next to him was a large queen-sized bed, which had not been touched since he had checked in under the name James Thunderson.

He had not left the suite since arriving, and in fact scarcely moved from the little corner he’d staked out for himself. His only contact with the Outside was the room’s vidiofone. Not that he used it, but the hotel lobby was to qal him if either The Law travel restrictions were lifted, or the seventeen days that he’d rented the room for were up.

A glance at the screen. No messages, so neither had happened.

His eyes looked about. This was originally a very large suite, but Corcey felt like he could reach out and touch all four walls from his little corner. The tiny caged rabbit in his mind shrieked with claustrophobia.

He frequently went hours without breathing or blinking.

Corcey knew he was slowly losing more than his hair in this room. The utter boredom and sense of stagnancy were chewing away at the back of his brain. But all he could do was wait. And that was bad, because with nothing to do, his mind tended to think on weird tangents. It generally did that while he was on PsychoBuds, but now he found he still had Dark Thoughts despite the fact that he was abstaining from them. He only used them in Killing, and he certainly wouldn’t be doing any of that in this hotel room. He made an interesting discovery from all this: his mind operated pretty much the same way when it was sober as when it was under the influence.

To test this theory, he reexamined his solutions to the Gospel of Riddles to double-check that he got the same answers sober as he had tripping. His Thunian Bible had been an early casualty of his quest, but like any good Initiate he had it committed to memory. Thirty books, twenty-three of which were written on Earth before the Migration. He considered the opening to his favourite Gospel.

Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.

Uttering the prologue in its original Greek, the Irony (and apparent Truth) of the statement hit him. He’d deciphered the last of the one hundred and fourteen cryptographies three months ago, and elated, quickly made a noose of seriwire to test his hypothesis.

Three months later, with his sobriety inverse to his insanity, doubts nibbled at the back of his mind. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, he suspected (and not for the first or last time) an error in perception. That was the first thing Sophia (who was not only his lover, but his Discipleship Master) had taught him: interpretation is everything.

Doubts stopped nibbling and started gnawing: he suspected an error in interpretation. Unfortunately, he could not tell if he was misinterpreting his Scriptural solutions, or their reality tunnel aftermath.

At this point, he didn’t know what to believe any more. The Sophia of old would have been pleased with that, he realized. Theological complacency, she warned, was a sin.

He finished pondering the ancient enigmas, and though he achieved no new insights, he was as always filled with the old wonder of their wisdom.

Corcey continued on to the next piece, an edited excerpt known only as Fear and Trembling.

Let us then consider more closely the distress and fear in the paradox of faith. The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular. As mentioned, it all depends on how one is placed. Someone who believes it is a simple enough matter to be the individual can always be certain that he is not the knight of faith; for stragglers and vagrant geniuses are not men of faith. Faith’s knight knows on the contrary that it is glorious to belong to the universal. He knows it is beautiful and benign to be the particular who translates himself into the universal, the one who so to speak makes a clear and elegant edition of himself, as immaculate as possible, and readable for all. He knows it is refreshing to become intelligible to oneself in the universal, so that he understands the universal and everyone who understands him understands the universal through him in turn, and both rejoice in the security of the universal.... But he also knows that higher up there winds a lonely path, narrow and steep; he knows it is terrible to be born in solitude outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveler. He knows very well where he is, and how he is related to men. Humanly speaking he is insane and cannot make himself understood by anyone.

He considered switching from Danish to Russian for the next gospel, The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor, but decided against it. Since sequestering himself to the suite, he had already recited the sacred scriptures thirty times in their entirety.

Instead he began counting the carpet fibers between himself and the bed. He had done that several times as well. The number had been slowly but persistently decreasing, confirming his theory that the walls were closing in.

Moving furniture... The thought sent his stream of conscience off on another memory tangent.

He had come home, back from... From what? Or Where? Again, it seemed so long ago. Even though the circumstances were cloudy, he vividly remembered coming back in to his bedroom. And he noticed something right away. She’d been in there while he was gone. That was normally fine, but she’d played with the room. She’d moved things. He knew every millimeter of that room, and he saw the difference instantly.

The room was exactly the way he’d left it, except that everything had been moved four centimeters to the right.

And then, to really phuq with his mind, she’d moved everything back to where it had been.

But you could tell. It was phuqing there: the indentations in the carpet from where things had been shifted to, one area had a little less dust than another... And sneaky little shit, like on his desk. He’d had five loose piles of letters, papers, and fotografs, each pile holding five pieces except the last, which held eight. He counted them very carefully: the middle pile now had more than the others. She’d phuqed with things.

You could tell.

He never said a word to her about it, either. He just went into her room a week later and returned the favour.

For a second, he whimsically wondered if bellboys were sneaking in here while he was tranced out and pushing the bed toward him slightly. He shuddered at the thought as he kept counting carpet strands.

It was only slowly that he became aware of a soft, persistent sound that distracted him from his count.