Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 9
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 9: Katabasis
The airline attendant whom Evan had flirted with when he boarded the plane was making her rounds. She stopped next to him and saw him jackknifed in his seat. His arms were folded tightly over his chest. He had refused a blanket after dinner. “I’m always hot,” he’d told her. She smiled and removed a wool blanket from the overhead bin and untied the ribbon around it. Then she draped it over him. He clutched the corners of it in his sleep and unlimbered his legs. His features softened and relaxed.
Evan was climbing down a bamboo ladder in his dream. He no longer felt as cold as he had a few moments ago. It was dark and he could barely see his hands in front of him. He knew he was no longer wearing the scholar’s gown. In fact, his torso was uncovered. His hair had lengthened was brushing against the nape of his neck.
All around him he heard what sounded like a montage of fantasy film soundtracks from the Seventies and Eighties. There were electric keyboards, muffled guitars, kettle drums, triangles, hammered dulcimers, chimes, and symphonic choruses singing unintelligible lyrics in made-up languages, punctuated by harmonious interjections like “Ahhh!”
Evan reached the bottom of the fourteenth ladder; and stood on the fifteenth ledge. He put his hands on his hips and breathed deeply. He waited for Niyati to join him. Each ladder was approximately thirty feet long, the top extending a foot over the ledge. Niyati stepped down and went toward where she heard Evan breathing.
“I need a second,” she said and leaned forward, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. They could barely see each other in the dim amber glow, which seemed to have no source. But their eyes were adjusting.
Niyati stood up straight. “Oh, dear!” she said, looking at Evan.
“What?” he asked. He looked down at his bare chest. He was dressed like a barbarian. “Cool!” he said. “I’m a warrior!” Then he looked at her. “Oh, man, you look hot!”
Niyati frowned, plucking a gem-encrusted jewel from her navel and throwing it on the ground. “I think I’m supposed to be a priestess,” she said, “but I look like a temple prostitute.”
The bones and skulls of humans, elves and animals (both real and imaginary) littered the floors of the ledges. It was impossible to avoid stepping on them. A fetid and stagnant wind rose up from the abyss.
“I thought the ladders only led up,” Evan said.
“I have a secret to tell you. The snakes and ladders lead to the same place. You’re looking at things three-dimensionally again.”
“I know,” Evan sighed. “And three dimensions are irrelevant on the Astral Plane.” He touched his chin, because it occurred to him that Niyati was starting to sound like the inert singularity. And he recalled that whenever the singularity talked to him, Niyati was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t believe he’d been such a dipshit. He grinned and squinted knowingly at her.
She blushed and self-consciously covered her abdomen. “Why are you grinning like that?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “It’s just that I figured something out.” He turned his head to the left and right. Then he bent his neck back and inhaled deeply. But he didn’t detect anything. He apparently wasn’t a tracker or hunter in this part of the dream. “I wonder where we are,” he said.
“We’re in a part of the game called the katabasis. Do you know what that means?”
“No, I got dumb again once we left the library.”
“Evan, I wish you’d stop saying that. . . You’re not dumb. I think you find it amusing to pretend that you are to see how people will react. It’s not a nice thing to do. Chronic self-deprecation can be a form of narcissism.”
Evan tried to remember what those words meant the way she was using them. “I need a weapon,” he said.
Niyati ignored him. “The word katabasis,” she said, “is an ancient Greek word meaning descent. In literature it’s the part of an epic where the hero journeys into the underworld.”
“That’s why I need a weapon, so I can fight the monsters.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to fight these monsters with a weapon.”
Evan smiled confidently at her. And when he did this, the light expanded. Just behind Niyati stood the shriveled corpse of an elvish warrior standing against the rock wall, holding a magic spear, the point of which cast a bright light.
“Finally!” Evan exclaimed. He ran to the corpse and seized the spear. He was about to brandish it when it turned to dust in his hands. Then the corpse collapsed and crumbled at his feet.
“Are you kidding me?!”
“Evan,” Niyati said, “this is a spiritual journey. The point of a katabasis is to confront your fears and smooth things over with the shades of those whose lives you ruined when they were alive—that sort of thing.”
“If this is a spiritual journey,” Evan said, “then we don’t need to climb down the ladders. We can jump.”
He jumped from the ledge.
“Evan!”
“See!” He landed on the ledge below and was looking up at her. The scope of his vision had broadened again. He could see farther than he had before. He could even see Niyati’s panicked face looking down at him.
Niyati stood up, closed her eyes and jumped. She landed next to Evan, crushing a dragon’s skull under foot.
“That was fun!” she said.
The light around the two of them was intensifying.
“Race you to the bottom!” Evan said. Then he made a running leap and sprang over two ledges at once. He fell sixty feet down, losing his balance and landing on his head. This should’ve killed him, but he simply got up and dusted himself off.
Then he heard a whooshing sound overhead. Niyati had hit upon a novel idea. She had grabbed one of the ladders and was using it like a pole vault. It had become weightless in her hands. She tumbled acrobatically down the dark pit, cartwheeling from one ledge to the next, the ladder turning upside down and right-side up again.
Evan laughed, and the expanding light pushed away the darkness even more. He realized—and suspected this was something he was supposed to take note of—that the happier he was, the more he could see. He grabbed a giant’s ribcage and rode it like a sled. He knew this would work, because all he had to do was will it to work; and it would.
As the ambient red glow diffused over the scene, Evan saw that he and Niyati were descending a well of concentric terraces: four hundred in all, including the one they’d started from. Black-robed figures gathered in clusters along the margins of the rock. They pointed down at the two of them and seemed startled (or angry), because their hiding places had been revealed. They cackled like hyenas in their agitation.
The light condensed into a misty auburn-black globe that climbed high overhead and swam slowly to the center of the shaft until it hung like a blood moon over the well.
Evan stopped abruptly, and the giant’s ribcage clattered to the ground and shattered. He stood motionless on the sixth tier from the bottom of the well; and the reason he was on the sixth tier was because six was the highest one could roll on the six-sided die.—And if he was on the sixth tier, then he must have been at the bottom of the pit when the die had been cast.
Now he was sad; and he didn’t know why, and his mood was reflected in the diminishing intensity of the prophetic auburn-black light. He gazed up and wondered how he had come to this place. He knew he was in a dream, but if it was a dream, why did he feel so awake? Something was toying with him because it knew he was dumb, even though she’d told him he wasn’t. Now he wondered if she was even real. Had the unborn universe been wearing Niyati’s likeness since their chance encounter on the beach in Sydney?
The die rattled in the leather cup, and was cast. A playing piece advanced six spaces and Niyati stood by his side. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She placed her hand on his shoulder. “For Levi had taught the angels compassion.” (Evan heard this verse chanted in Hebrew and Aramaic, even though the verse did not exist in any known scripture.) And Levi’s angelic body smiled down on his beloved roommate whom the flight attendant (at Levi’s bidding) had covered with a blanket.
The sound (ting) of a Tibetan singing bowl (ting) filled the vacancy like an unbidden thought. The auburn-black globe overhead shed four hundred flecks of light that fell like the snowflakes that lighted on the maples outside the mission school in north-central Minnesota, where Mama Margot Ashwiyaa had learned the “sacred” “secret” (two words, one root) that had guided her (and her memories) to the reflection of the lodge-house on the surface of the Lake of Galilee, where she had found the midew Jesus Christ.
How do I know her story? Evan wondered.
Now he felt the pangs of unrequited love, and wept for the librarian in the Canadian Colony of Norway.
Why am I feeling these things? Why is my mind participating in the emotions of people, of entities, that aren’t even real? And why does my mind keep using expressions like ‘participating in the emotions of’ when I don’t even know what those expressions mean when I’m awake? How have these imaginary constructs hijacked my rather simple and untroubled mind? Maybe I have, indeed, fallen into the Astral Plane.
The coruscating flecks of light whirled and drifted down the central shaft, down through the enveloping gloom, down past the ranks of robed figures along the ledges. Then each fleck landed in the cupped hands of one of the four hundred mummified yogis who sat cross-legged on the bottom four tiers of the subterranean tombs beneath the very real temple city of Shambhala.
The globe began to spin. Then it flattened and became a wheel of fire. And in its marigold-yellow center Evan saw himself and Niyati playing Snakes and Ladders on that summer day in 1979. And he heard Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” fading in the distance.
He wept in confusion and said, “The game’s coming to an end.”
“The game doesn’t come to an end.” Niyati said. “That would chain it to the limitations of spacetime. Think of the final square as a fixed point that recedes from you the closer you get to it: a flower that blossoms out—even as it blossoms into the bulb that produced it.”
Then he saw himself as a newborn bathed by his mother in the kitchen sink. His curious eyes had been drawn to the droplets falling from the tap, and he’d watched each one hit the water’s surface: drip, drip, drip. He’d pointed and smiled; and looked at mama to see if she, too, had noticed the up-splashed blossoms where the wet kissed the wet.
“It’s not a cycle,” Niyati said, “not a repetition, not an. . . up-splash on the surface of Maya’s primordial waters. Does the flame up-splash when it blows out”—she snapped her fingers—“like that?”
“Then what happens?” he asked. “Are we reborn into non-being?”
She lowered her eyes and took his hand. Down the polished marble steps they walked, side by side, until they reached the bottom of the well. A low flame was burning in a hearth. But as they approached it, it went out. And Niyati told Evan that this was called Nirvana.
He looked up. The four hundred yogis were gone.
“It was all an illusion,” he said. “Everything here is an illusion.”
“Is not everything there,” by which she seemed to imply the waking world, “an illusion too?”
A curtain appeared on the wall behind Niyati. There was a light behind it.
“There’s no strategy to this game,” Evan said. “I haven’t the freedom to choose my own path. All I can do is chase the lights.”
He stepped to the curtain and stopped, looking pleadingly at Niyati because he knew there was something he didn’t want to see on the other side, something that would make the game less enjoyable.
Now he felt rage, lust, hunger, fear. The walls of the well began to contract and calcify, turning to bone. The auburn-black wheel of fire became the stem of a brain and its nerves and marrow began to seep down the narrowing shaft. Niyati and Evan stood in a spinal cord. The four hundred tiers had metamorphosed into four hundred vertebrae.
Evan pressed his hands against his temples, panting. His face was flushed and he was sweating. “What’s happening to me?!”
“We are in the hinge and pivot of your story. We are immersed in the boiling cauldron of your Id, where passion and chaos hold equal sway, because here each is indistinguishable from the other.
Evan looked at her and cried out in anguish. He wanted to possess her, protect her, devour her, fuck her, and then tear her limb from limb so no one else could ever take her from him. He tore aside the curtain and plunged into the dark. Another curtain confronted him with another light behind it.
He was too ashamed to turn around. He knew that she had seen what it was that he had felt. His feet sank in the black clay. He drew aside the second curtain and saw another in the distance—with yet a light behind it.
“I’m here, Evan!” Niyati whispered to him.
He kept his back to her.
She went to him and put her arms around his waist. “You said you had no power to choose your own path. But you just made a choice.”
“I didn’t make a choice,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “The only option I had was to follow the light. The choice was made for me.”
Although Evan and Niyati had vacated the well, the spinal cord continued to exist in the realm of the Collective Unconscious. And on the rocky surface of the desert planet of Satcitananda, the spinal cord would sometimes resolve itself into the leather spine of the Book of Life. Madame Blavatsky would turn the middle pages of Evan’s story, as Levi recounted the book’s contents to the Grand Watchers of the Ovoötes Void. The lovesick librarian would rise from her desk in the Canadian Colony of Norway and carry the book up the spiral staircase so that she could shelve it deep in the back room of the Havasupai man’s gas station off Route 66 on the Astral Plane, where Gordon sat with the great shaman, helping him solve his crossword puzzles. For Mama Margot Ashwiyaa had taught them both (long, long ago) that the surest way to keep from losing one’s mind was to search for the Word (with a capital “W”)—wherever it may be.
another fascinating chapter. i like all the various incarnations of the characters as they traverse the different aspects of this universe, and of course i have a soft spot for a barbarian ;-) but you also have such a wonderful knack for choosing the most unexpected moments and details of a life and evoking some deeper sense through it. the moment remembering being an infant washed in the sink watching water droplets is one beautiful example, so seemingly random, but so perfectly evocative.