The 37th mandala : a novel Read online

  For Geraldine

  There and back again ...

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For inspiration and assistance, direct and otherwise, my thanks to Victor and Cora Anderson; Matthew Bialer; Michael Blumlein, M.D.; Stephen P. Brown; Tim Ferret; Galen Gloss; Jay Kinney; Hal Robins; Rudy Rucker; John Shirley; Gordon Van Gelder; and William T. Vollmann.

  ON 37

  Number 37 is Dee's Prime, so named for its function in formulae derived from the Enochian Keys by Dr. John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelly. Aleister Crowley, Kelly's reincarnation, who conducted extensive investigations into the astral significance of this prime, asserted that the number resonates to a transcendent dimension of enforced stability, as if appointed to keep chaos at bay, and will maintain itself at all costs, expunging any extra digit that threatens conversion to 38 (which falters before Dee's Prime, being composed of the weak Malkuthian Lattice Prime 19, poorly reinforced by the Dyad) and also constantly adding to—thus overbalancing—pure 36, which is otherwise a most potent square, being divisible by both the Gnostic Prime and the Grand Triad, and having many mystical aspects and counterparts. 37's influence is thus an essentially baleful one, not fully explicable in human terms, operating according to a geometry inconceivable even on an akashic plane and so resisting categorization as strictly "evil." The keen-eyed numerologist will notice the manifestation of 37 in countless random places, in newspapers, motion pictures, bus terminals, telephone numbers—displaying an ubiquity exceeding the action of chance and bordering on deliberation. As an organizing principle, 37 is as threatening as it is fascinating, with many of its effects and attributes remaining therefore undiscovered and unexplored. Crowley's journals lapse into incoherence during his study of the number in Arabia; while John Dee, toward the end of his life, reduced to conditions of persecution and poverty, reversed his lifelong attitude toward open-minded contemplation of the symbols in his work and, in a charred fragment preserved by the Ashmolean Institute, cautioned vehemently against any manipulation whatsoever of 37, blaming it entirely for the reversal of his luck....

  —Georg von Rutter, Secrets of Gnostic Sumerology, vol. VIII: Esoteric Personae of the Prime Numbers, 1967

  PROLOGUE

  It didn't seem to bother the young couple that the museum stank of blood.

  They walked arm in arm through the dim halls of Tuol Sleng, pointing at the watercolors of atrocities and commenting softly, laughing now and then, clinging to each other like giddy lovers under the ponderous scythe-blades of ceiling fans that hardly stirred the humid air. Khmer guards watched them pass, shifting their guns uneasily, as if they'd never seen anything like them. The American trailed them for reasons he didn't quite understand.

  He tried to picture them walking the red dust roads of the countryside, followed by every watchful eye, every suspicious gun—UN teams and Khmer Rouge alike. He himself drew little attention in Cambodia, looking like an aging Asia correspondent: a tall, overweight man with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail that drooped from under a battered canvas hat. He shuffled through the lower floors of Tuol Sleng in sandals and drab cutoffs, his camouflage vest draped over a grimy undershirt, the pockets packed with lenses, film, and filters; his shoulders, chest, and belly were slung with battered Nikons.

  The smell should have bothered them a bit, he thought; even cattle balked in a slaughterhouse. It was the residual stench of old blood, never completely cleaned from between the checkered tiles of the schoolroom floors, never expunged from the cold brick stalls the Khmer Rouge had built to pen their prisoners. The journalist who'd steered him to the place had speculated that the German death camps must have been like this in the '50s, before they'd been sterilized for tourists. Tuol Sleng's curators had not bothered with disinfectant. The faint reek was more evocative than any number of placards describing the horrors that had made this place their home, more convincing and less susceptible to revision than any propaganda dispensed by the various regimes that had followed the reign of the Khmer Rouge.

  In one of several rooms lined floor to ceiling with photographs, the American finally came close enough to eavesdrop on the pair. They were absorbed in their surroundings and in each other, oblivious to him.

  "I see it almost as a Warhol piece," the male said, his voice accented French. "In the repetition, the anonymity of the artist."

  "I think of Avedon," said the woman, whose accent was German. "The coldness. ..."

  "But with a lived-in look. Irving Penn."

  "Joel-Peter Witkin."

  "Of course, but without his staging, his artifice. This is so spontaneous. Unforced. It really makes all the difference."

  "Doesn't it?"

  Makes all the difference, the American thought, letting them wander off without him now, afraid of attracting their notice when all he really wished was to finish his work and get out of here, back to his hotel, then out of the country forever. There were too many ghosts in Cambodia, ghosts whose bodies had all too recently joined the dust; a million tortured souls floating in the red-flecked haze. Besides, he had already gone where the lovers were headed: past converted classrooms with wooden shutters thrown wide to let in a rose-tinged light that revealed faint blood crusts spreading in tidal swirls beneath bed frames fit with manacles. He stayed to scrutinize the walls they had been admiring for artistic effect, walls covered with before-and-after photographs of Tuol Sleng's victims. Men, women, too many children: whole families. The torturers had been thorough in documenting their excavations of human flesh. On entering the extermination center—once a lycee, a yellowing relic of French colonial architecture—the captives had posed before the plain dropcloth with hopeful expressions; hopeful, yes, even knowing what they must have known about their photographers. A kind of willful blindness in the frightened eyes. The second in each pair of images showed the victims at the end of their stay, before deportation to the killing fields and mass graves of Choeung Ek, or burial in the courtyard of the high school.

  He had explored Choeung Ek while the Ministry of Information processed his application to conduct specific, limited research in Tuol Sleng's library. He had scuffed his sandals at the edges of the burial pits, bone dust gathering between his toes; he had counted a fraction of the skulls on display, arranged behind glass in order of sex and age ("Femalesenile Cambodian"); he had come up close to photograph the bole of a tree where infants' brains were said to have been bashed out by the Khmer Rouge in order to conserve ammunition. Now he studied the photographs with a similar morbid fascination, as if looking for something he would not know until he saw it. Some of the victims bore tribal tattoos, or sak, like the ones he'd seen everywhere in the Thai refugee camps—the imprints of magical amulets. The photos revealed another kind of artistry on the part of the torturers—an excruciating attention to anatomical detail. But nowhere did he see the marks he sought. In any case, only a small sampling of the photographs were on display: Tuol Sleng had accommodated 17,000 in its few years of operation. That would have meant 34,000 portraits, of which only a fraction papered these walls. The handful of survivors—fewer than ten escaped Tuol Sleng at the fall of Democratic Kampuchea—had returned to create a survivor's gallery, primitive paintings and drawings, brightly colored scenes of torture rendered as if by children. These latter he had inspected on prior visits, devoting particular care to the breasts of one watercolor woman whose nipples smoldered between red-hot pincers.

  (The bluish blotch like a smeared tattoo above one areola had proved a splash of paint, nothing more convoluted.)

  At last he heard bootsteps, hard and businesslike, coming down the main corridor. He went into the hall, where the small Khmer attendant was searching for him.

  "All ready now. I take you up
?"

  "I know the way."

  The American slipped a wad of bills into his hand and pressed past him down the hall toward the stairs.

  At the first landing, he paused and drew a pack of cigarettes from inside his vest. He lit one and watched the smoke swirl around his fingers, as if he might find what he sought in the whorls of soot. Below, he heard footsteps on the stairs, curious murmurs from the European couple. A guard called out and the steps retreated. He crushed out the cigarette without taking a puff.

  On the second floor, only one door was open to him. Here stood the custodian of records, waiting impatiently. The bony, scarred Khmer looked irritated to see him again, but official arrangements had been made. He had no choice but to stand aside.

  The small room was sweltering. It held very little but still felt crammed: two old desks, a filing cabinet, an ancient photocopier. A file folder rested on the farthest desk, under the window. The custodian gestured for him to sit. As he approached the desk, he passed a door that was slightly ajar, opening into another and much larger room. The American glimpsed shelves full of folders, student composition books, yellowing paper. A sampling of these journals were on display downstairs, confessions of crimes against the DK, written in Khmer and occasionally in French. The sheer number of folders was almost inconceivable: each represented a death, eked out page by page. The custodian, noticing his interest, quickly closed that door.

  He turned his attention to the folder waiting on the desk, and grunted when he read the name written on the cover.

  "This isn't the file I asked for," he said.

  "Yes."

  "I said, it isn't the file I—"

  The custodian handed him a written request, in his own handwriting, stamped with the Ministry's seal. It puzzled him for a moment, until he felt his fever's resurgence. He sank down into the chair, hugging his guts, clenched over the table while bright dots swarmed his eyes and cold sweat came. When the moment of illness passed, he sighed and pulled the folder toward him.

  "Yes?" said the custodian.

  "Yes," he agreed leadenly.

  The custodian held out his hands. "Cameras."

  "You've got to be kidding."

  "Cameras. Now."

  Instead the American produced his wallet. Twenty bucks ought to have taken care of it, but the man struck the proffered money aside—a gesture he had never experienced in the city. He had a bad feeling now—a sense of his failure, and the trouble he'd be in. He put his wallet away, sensing that a larger bribe would only meet with greater resistance.

  Again: "Cameras."

  The American glared for a moment, then unslung the straps and black bodies of the three FM2's. In his sack was a copying stand, useless now. The Khmer piled the cameras on the other desk. Then he went to the other desk and sat staring out the window above the American's head.

  When the American set his bag on the desktop and unzipped it, the custodian started to his feet again. He took out a pen and a notebook. As the Khmer sank back down, he tipped the pen toward the copier. "I don't suppose that thing works."

  The little man paled with anger. "You write by hand! Only by hand!"

  "I'm kidding. Relax."

  Inside the folder was a stack of unlined paper an inch thick, each page dated, signed, and marked with a thumbprint. He riffled the sheaf, heart quickening when he saw the first mandalas flicking past, elaborate wheels with wavering arms and spiral centers. This was what he'd been looking for. The circles were enclosed in Khmer script, as if the entire confession were an exegesis on the nature of the symbols. Highly unlikely. The Khmer Rouge had not allowed their guests to discourse on metaphysics.

  The American could not read Khmer. He noted instead how the handwriting deteriorated page by page, and then grew further obscured by reddish-black smears and splatters whose frequency increased toward the bottom of the stack. He went back to the beginning, stared for a moment at the first mandala, then drew his notebook closer and uncapped his pen. The custodian's eyes locked onto him.

  The wheel was carefully, intricately drawn, as if every jot of the author's energy had been conserved for this task. Why had the KR interrogators tolerated the time it must have taken to set down the pattern? It must have been an enormous distraction from the task of confession; yet there were dozens, equally elaborate, scattered throughout the text.

  He could not imagine how long it would take him to copy one, let alone all thirty-seven. The last thing he wanted was to spend days in this hot room, in this horrible museum, so drenched in the smell of blood that already he was ceasing to notice it. He did not want to become inured to this place, but he had no choice.

  He was slightly surprised to find that he'd tucked a sheaf of tracing paper into his notebook. He could not remember bringing it. He laid one sheet atop the mandala and carefully began to trace the perimeter, which ringed a complex core of woven lines. Sweat from the edge of his hand caused the paper to crinkle; he had to take care not to smear the ink. Finished with the outermost lines, he began to work his way into the whorled center. This required great patience, a hand far steadier than his. He was no artist.

  Stealing the file intact would have been the obvious solution, but he would have been the sole suspect in such a theft. He did not want to spend the rest of his life in a Cambodian prison. Nor could he fool himself into thinking he could make it as a fugitive to the nearest border. Cambodia was one vast mine field. No ... he would have to trace each mandala by hand, however long it took.

  Each line seemed impossibly long. He came upon tangles and involutions he hadn't noticed until they enmeshed him—endless twists and curls, impenetrable thickets. He didn't dare lift his hand from the paper. In order to rest, he had to anchor his penpoint in one place and close his eyes; but even then he continued to see the pattern throbbing behind his lids, swimming in the blood-reek, fanning the phosphene currents gently in time to a throbbing in his head. He heard a knocking, too brittle to be his heart, and opened his eyes to discover that his hand, unwatched, had continued tracing the shape. The pattern was complete now; and it had drawn itself in something like an instant.

  The custodian stood at the door, peering into the hall. The Khmer began whispering, gesturing angrily. Glancing back, he gave the American a warning look, then opened the door just wide enough to slip out.

  The American was startled to see the young Europeans outside. The man's eyes met his for a jolting instant. His pupils constricted, expanded, tightened again. The woman gave him a smile and a nod. Then the door shut. Voices rose in a babble—the custodian quite upset, the Frenchman calming him, the woman speaking low and soothingly, almost cooing to him. Their voices had an empty, echoing quality in the corridor. He sensed that they were drifting away from him.

  The mandala still burned in his eyes. Without further hesitation, as if he had planned for this moment, he took the folder to the copier. He touched the start button but got no response. The plug lay on the floor, below a wall socket. He plugged it in. The copier rattled to life. He didn't want to know how much time he wasted waiting for the machine to warm up. He laid the first sheet, the same he'd traced by hand, on the glass. Light blazed beneath his fingers, sweeping along in a hot bar. The copier creaked like a metal insect singing in the hot afternoon, calling out to everyone in Tuol Sleng. Once the light had measured the dimensions of the page, he snatched the sheet from the glass and put down a second, which he had in readiness. He flipped through the folder looking for the third mandala, embedded in miserable script. Two different hands seemed to have been at work simultaneously: artist and author.

  He quickly established his routine: lay down a page, wait for the machine to ready itself, hit the copy button, wait for the light to go on, wait for the slow scan to finish. Wait and wait and wait; flip through the folder, careful not to miss not a single mandala, getting each one ready to copy, all the time tensed for any sound from the halls—paranoid because the copier made such a racket that he knew he'd never hear the custodian retu
rning. But he mustn't think of that, mustn't wonder what might happen if he were caught. His only concern was to copy the mandalas. Only that.

  When he had copied the last sheet, he snatched the pages from the tray and quickly counted mandalas. Thirty-seven. That was that. The copy quality was surprisingly good. He yanked the plug from the wall, went back to his seat, hid the copies in his bag, and took up his pen, as if he had never stopped drawing. The copier was hot as an oven now, but why would the custodian bother to check it?

  He sat for several minutes, pretending to trace a mandala, wondering how long he should keep up the charade. Anxious to leave, he wanted to ensure the custodian witnessed his departure.

  He thought he heard the man speaking urgently from inside the records room. He put his head to the door, listening hard, then tested the knob. The door opened.

  He crept to the left down the aisle, past a shelf crammed with notebooks, then peered around the end of the shelf into a corner of the room. The French boy was farthest into the corner, his black jeans tangled around his calves, his hips grinding against the custodian's bony backside. The German woman knelt before the Khmer, her head bobbing at his groin. The custodian's head was pulled back, his curving throat long and exposed, his eyes fixed on a circular mirror that the boy held in one outstretched hand.

  The American must have made a sound, for the boy looked sidelong and gave him a slight smile, sleepily content as he pumped away. The custodian stiffened and trembled. The woman made a clicking noise as blood spilled from the corner of her mouth.

  The American backed away, rounding the shelf, rushing for the other room. He had seen something, something—he had seen it but didn't know what it meant. He didn't want to know. He was through with his part of it; the rest had nothing to do with him. He tossed the folder on the custodian's desk. A flat glassine packet slithered out and rustled to the floor.

  He looked guiltily about to see if anyone were watching, then remembered the scene in the next room. No one cared what he did. He shoved the packet into his bag, on top of the photocopies. Then he bolted from the room, still working himself back into the tangled harness of camera straps.