Gods of Aberdeen Read online

  Art picked up a pillow and smelled it. “More mildew. There’s probably mold down here, too. Stuff can get in your lungs. Oomycota. Nasty critters.” He tossed it aside.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I got back into town last night and asked Thomas if he’d heard from you, which he hadn’t. He didn’t know what I was talking about, actually sounded concerned, as if you were missing. I told him I must have been confused, that I’m sure you’re fine, and all that. And then I went into town and grabbed a bite at Edna’s, and I know that’s your favorite haunt so I asked the waitress if she’d seen you. She knew who you were, and as it turns out, her sister is married to the owner of this shithole.”

  “Henry Hobbes,” I said, feeling a little like Watson, watching his good friend deduce a particularly complex problem.

  “Have you lost weight? You look sick,” Art said. “Your skin is the color of nonfat milk. How do you feel?”

  I pushed the lightbulb and watched it swing on its thin cord. “Cold,” I said.

  Art winced and rubbed his neck. He stared at the lightbulb, squinting. “Does that look really bright to you? What’s the wattage?”

  I spun it around on its cord. “Forty-five.”

  He put his hand around his throat, up under his chin, and prodded with his thumb and forefinger. “You know anything about swollen glands?” When I answered no he sat up, on the edge of the bed, and started to roll his head from side to side.

  “Meningitis,” he said gravely. “The patient sharing George’s room was recovering from it. The nurse assured me he was long past the infectious stage, but you know how those things linger in hospitals.”

  “You don’t think you have it, do you?”

  He stopped and stared at me. “I can’t be certain. My neck does hurt, and I think I may have swollen salivary glands…and this light seems awfully glaring. You know that’s one of the symptoms—hypersensitivity to light.”

  “Like rabies,” I said. I don’t know why I said that.

  He frowned. “I suppose.” He looked around—at my books piled atop the chest of drawers, at the small TV with tinfoil antenna sticking out like a poorly designed prop for some science fiction movie.

  “Come to Prague,” he said, as casually as if he were asking me to join him for coffee at Campus Bean.

  “What?”

  “I’ll pay for your ticket. You have a passport?”

  “Actually, I do,” I said. “Before my mom died…we were planning a trip to England.”

  I stared at him in the dim light. Slender jawline, dirty-blond hair cropped close, small, rectangular glasses. The confident half smile. It was then I realized that no one matched Art’s persuasiveness. It crossed age and gender lines. The seduction was complete.

  Chapter 10

  We left the next morning. I hadn’t flown since my mom’s death, when I’d taken a jet from West Falls to Stulton with a social worker by my side, who talked to me the entire time, assuring me how safe flying was, while I remained completely oblivious and drew dragons with a box of crayons the stewardess had given me. I didn’t know what to expect this time, and Art tried nobly to distract me with his talk of Prague. Not thirty minutes into the trip, however, after some turbulence that prompted a flashing seat-belt sign, I had to sprint for the bathroom and throw up in the small metallic toilet, electric-blue water glowing like nuclear waste, fluorescent light buzzing overhead. Down went my raisin bagel and orange juice, and I stood up and splashed water on my face, looking into the mirror at my zombielike appearance—dark circles, pale skin, white lips.

  I walked back to my seat, light-headed and sweating. Art had a small plastic cup of ginger ale waiting for me on the pullout tray, while he sat with his head propped against a pillow, reading a book. The plane lurched again, engines whining.

  The pilot announced we were flying above a small storm system, and that we should expect “a few bumps, nothing to worry about.” All I could imagine was something out of a disaster film: cabin lights flashing, oxygen masks dangling, flight attendants crashing into their meal carts.

  “How are you feeling?” Art asked me.

  “Like hell,” I said.

  Art closed the book with his finger inserted to mark his place. He had one of the books Cornelius had given me for him, the ones I’d kept hostage on my desk. Abram Oslo’s Index Expurgatorius.

  “Remember what I told you about Gurdjieff?”

  The endless toil. The cunning man.

  “I think I have food poisoning,” I said.

  “Food poisoning? You’re airsick,” Art said. He reached down into his bag and handed me a small book. Labor et Paracelsus.

  “Try distracting yourself in work. Read this,” he said. “Paracelsus was a 16th-century physician. Claimed to have a substance called azoth, a reddish powder that assisted him in miraculous cures. He supposedly carried a quantity of it in his sword pommel.”

  The plane pitched and dropped suddenly.

  “There’s some charlatanism in there.” Art seemed completely unaffected by the turbulence. “But his success as a physician was remarkable. He cured the Margrave of Baden’s dysentery by grinding semiprecious stones and adding a dash of this azoth, and then preparing it into a potion.”

  I tried reading the first few pages but I couldn’t concentrate. There was another series of bumps as if we were riding full speed over a potholed road, and then I closed the book and sank into my seat.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Lightning flashed and I dropped the book onto the floor.

  Art sighed. “You want some Valium?”

  At that point I would have taken a horse tranquilizer. “Whatever,” I said. “As long as it works.”

  “Oh, it’ll work. Have you ever had Valium before?” Art whispered, reaching into his pocket. I shook my head. “Take only half,” he said, dropping a small chartreuse tablet into my palm. I bit it in half, found it too crumbly for a clean break, then licked the bitter remainder off my lips and downed the entire pill with a swig of lukewarm ginger ale.

  Forty minutes later I was on my own personal flight, skimming just over the clouds and relaxing under the soothing gaze of a cheerful sun.

  My first lesson in Europe: In spite of fascism’s demise, the trains, as Mussolini had promised, run on time.

  Our flight landed in Paris, and from there we were going by train to Prague. We had a few hours, and so Art took me to Michel’s, a small café along the Seine, owned by an American expatriate whom Art had met his first time in Paris five years earlier. I was overwhelmed by everything: the swooning aftereffects of the Valium, the speed with which Parisians talked, the icy glaze of the Seine and the colors of the buildings, slate and concrete, French Romanesque stone vaulted buildings with alabaster domes, and intricate Rayonnant Gothic churches, sunlight splashing onto their traceried glass and dripping down the tips of their delicate spires. Everyone was thin and everyone was smoking, and Art moved through the city streets like he had lived there his whole life while I was distracted at every corner by the narrow sidewalks and billboards and the small cars with their tinny horns and the singsong banter of spoken French from the mouths of modern-day Gauls and Franks.

  Along the way he bought a bottle of wine and a pouch of Turkish tobacco. I was going to get a postcard to send to Nicole, but I forgot, and as we sat at a small wrought-iron table at Café Michel, Art guzzling his espresso and talking with Michael, the owner, I closed my eyes and just listened while the sunlight streamed in through the window and warmed my face.

  There were two women seated across from us; both looked in their twenties. One was dressed in a fitted black suit with a short skirt and black boots reaching to her calves. The other wore a turtleneck sweater, red as blood to match her lips, and tight jeans, her bobbed black hair curving into her jawline. Michael smiled at them, and the one in the suit returned his smile with her eyes, her mouth hidden behind an espresso cup.

  Art was looking at a pocket map. “The train to Prague s
hould take us about twelve hours, barring any problems. We will be crossing the border into Germany at”—he traced a line with his finger—“Saar-brücken. Then we head east to Frankfurt—if we have time we’ll head into the city for a couple of steins—and then onto Nürnberg, cross the border into the Czech Republic at the city of Cheb, and then Prague.”

  “You should’ve flown,” Michael said. He tapped a cigarette on the back of his hand. His accent was still American, with flat a’s like a Midwesterner. “Paris to Prague. Easy trip by puddlejumper. Seventy dollars from a guy I know.” His fingernails were short and ragged and his black hair was slicked close to his skull. He wore a tight black crewneck sweater. He vaguely reminded me of Peter, the molesting yogi.

  “Eric’s never been here before,” Art said, folding the map. “I want him to see the countryside.”

  “Then he should also explore Paris. I got a killer rate on a hotel in the Left Bank. Ten minute walk from Luxembourg Gardens.”

  The woman in the red sweater was eyeing me, and she leaned over to her friend and they both laughed. I asked Michael how far the Church of St.-Germain des Prés was. He lit his cigarette, spat out a cloud of smoke, and answered while still looking at the two women.

  “C’est à environ vingt minutes à pied, cinq minutes par le taxi.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Art said, staring at Michael. He took out a pack of rolling papers and opened his pouch of tobacco. “Stick with English.”

  Michael looked at me. “How old did you say you were?”

  “Sixteen.”

  He tapped ash onto the floor. “So is Art like your big brother?”

  “Non,” I said. “Mais il est mon meilleur ami.”

  Art laughed and nodded in my direction. “How do you like that?”

  “Ça ne m’a fait pas bonne impression,” Michael said, and he stood up and walked away, leaving his cigarette burning on his plate.

  “Well,” Art grinned. “If you still want to see St.-Germain des Prés, the train doesn’t leave until two-thirty. We have approximately…”

  He looked at his watch and frowned.

  “Shit.”

  Exactly thirty minutes later we were sprinting through the Gare de l’Est, bags bouncing off our backs, pushing our way past tourists and businessmen and beggars. We turned a corner and saw our train beginning its slow acceleration away from the station. An attendant on the back rail was talking to one of the engineers on the platform.

  I bolted, my one heavy bag tugging on my shoulder, and when I looked to see if Art was close, I saw him trip over a child who had darted in front of him. Art twisted and sidestepped like a running back evading a tackler, but his bags shifted and knocked into the child, who fell forward with a loud thwack and started to scream. I paused, unsure of what to do. The mother rushed over and knelt before her child, uttering a soothing stream of motherly pleasantries while touching his face as if looking for wounds.

  “He’s fine, he’s fine,” Art said, looking back at me. I jogged over and tried to apologize but the mom yelled at Art and clutched her son fiercely, grinding his face into her chest.

  “Let’s go,” Art shouted, oblivious to the mom’s rage. He continued to run, slowing down only to shout at me again.

  I looked at Art, who was sprinting now, bags bouncing on the ends of their straps like marionettes. The mother had seemingly lost interest in us and was completely absorbed in her child, and so I fled.

  We made it, the attendant taking our bags from his perch on the back railing while Art and I grabbed on to the metal bar and heaved ourselves up. We remained on the back platform as we left the station.

  “I think that little boy was hurt,” I said. “He hit the ground pretty hard, you know.”

  Art merely shrugged, and recited a short passage from one of Caesar’s speeches about the rigors of war hardening youth to life’s future tribulations.

  We passed through the town of Épernay, where Art told me Armand de Gontaut was killed in 1592 defending French Catholics from sieging Huguenots, and then we continued along the river Marne, and through the French countryside, past countless villages with small stone homes and vineyards scattered along hillocks, barren vines cascading over sunken fences. Fescue and pale-green sedge covered most of the land, with ridges and pockets of snow dotting the landscape like bales of cotton. The sun cast a dull, gold haze across the Marne, a river of light, twisting and winding in a slow rivulet alongside the rhythmic clank of our train cars, moving closer and then pulling away, as if playing a game of tag.

  Art had put down his bed and lay on the bottom bunk while I leaned against the window and stared at the white and green landscape rushing by. We talked about Paris, and Art told me the story of his first arrival there five years earlier, during his junior year of high school. He had, naturally, fallen for a girl, a twenty-year-old medical student from Brussels, studying at the Sorbonne. She was tall and thin, with thick, long brown hair and frosty blue eyes that Art said reminded him of swirling water. Art told me he lied to her and said he was a musician touring through Europe, and then they had sex in the Luxembourg Gardens under an aster-colored moon. One week later he returned home and decided he was going to marry her, and he arranged everything—selling his car, contacting a housing agency in Paris, even inquiring about guitar lessons. He got into several arguments with his parents, who said he was acting too impulsively, but Art said he had never been more certain of anything in his life. One month later the letters slowed, however, and eight weeks after his return home, she stopped writing. Art said she was the kind of girl who, if he saw her again, he’d still ask her to marry him. Tomorrow or twenty years from now.

  By dinnertime we had turned north, over the river Meuse and into the city of Verdun, which Art said began as a Roman outpost and then became the commercial center for the Carolingian empire. From Verdun to Metz, and the conductor announced over the cabin speakers that the dining car would be closing in an hour.

  The food was delicious—chicken breast with cream sauce, served with fresh bread and a glass of heady Bordeaux. I ate voraciously, and by the time I finished it was dusk, the sun now just a sliver of fiery orange behind a faraway forest edge. I could see my reflection in the train window: wrinkled shirt, baggy pants, unwashed hair. I felt like a slob.

  Art smiled contentedly and slumped back, patting his stomach. “This is probably the last good dinner we’re going to have for a few days. Unless you like pork—that’s all they eat in Prague. Big mounds of the stuff. Sliced, stuffed, braised, boiled…” He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. We said nothing for a few minutes.

  “You ever read anything about Prague?” he said, his voice startling me. I thought he had fallen asleep.

  I shifted in my seat and stared out the dark window. The car bobbed up and down rhythmically, in time with the steady cla-clank of the train. “A little,” I said. I knew about the Hapsburg family, from a paper I wrote my high school junior year. I remembered photos of the city—dark jumbles of towering spires, the ubiquitous Vltava River slicing the city in half. Something else, a legend I had read in one of my favorite books, the ponderously titled Unexplained Creatures, Beasts, and Phenomena of the Ancient and Modern World. I must have read that book in my high school library at least a dozen times, keeping it hidden by putting it back high on the shelf, behind a thick text on geothermal dynamics. It was one of those fantastical tomes they don’t seem to make anymore, with a black-and-white cover taken from a medieval woodcutting of a werewolf attacking some farmer. The articles had grainy photos (or, more often than not, gruesome illustrations) of so-called “monsters,” and quotes by academics of questionable repute (mostly by a “Dr. H. L. Foster, professor of antiquities from St. Carmichael University”; for the record, to this day I have not located a university by that name). Each section usually ended with an unintentionally campy cliffhanger: Will science ever penetrate the murky depths of the Loch? Will we one day discover the answers behind the mystery of this elusive sea beast?
All we can do is wait, and hope old Nessie does not discover us first…

  From that book I knew of the legend of the golem, a hulking clay creature made in the image of man, inscribed in its forehead the secret name of God, and used by its creator for protection from evil. It was supposedly Rabbi Judah Loew, who, in Prague, first gave life to the golem, using clay from the banks of the Vltava. Perhaps the golem still lies in an unknown tomb beneath the bustling streets of Prague, awaiting the signal from his master to walk amongst the living again…

  “This worked out well, actually,” Art said, his eyes still closed. “You coming with me instead of Ellen.”

  We were the last ones remaining in the car. Behind us the waiter wiped down tables.

  Art opened his eyes. “I’ve been looking for a book, for about six months,” he said. “I finally found it, in Prague, which was such an obvious place that I didn’t think to look there.”

  He waved the waiter over and asked for a soda water. “Did I ever tell you about Jaroslav Capek?” he asked me, once the waiter had left.

  “A little,” I said. I remembered seeing his name in one of the books Art had given me to read. “He was some Czech alchemist, right?”

  Art reached down into the bag he’d brought to dinner, and pulled out Oslo’s Index Expurgatorius.

  “Page 123, second entry,” he said, laying the book on the table.

  I opened it:

  MALEZEL, JOHANN. Title: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. MCCCLIX. Quarto, a.e.g. 163 pages with title page. No illustration. Number of printings unknown. Declared heretical by Bishop prelate nullius Terás of Lavigerie in 1363 for alchemic references, diabolism.

  “Jaroslav Capek based his work on the writings of Brother Johann Malezel,” Art said. “Johann Malezel, also known as the Sacred Healer of St. Czerny, was the abbot of the St. Athanasius monastery in the Wallachian town of Brotöv, circa early 14th century. In 1350 Father Pisano of Milan, on order of the Roman Church, travelled to Brotöv to observe Brother Malezel’s so-called miracles. Father Pisano didn’t think he’d witnessed any miracles—in fact, what he saw he considered heretical. Johann Malezel could restore vision to the blind and make the crippled walk again, and he allegedly did it all with the aid of a white powder, which he would mix in holy water and give to the sick.”