American Shaman, Book 1
Brian Prioleau
Published by Brian Prioleau at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Brian Prioleau
About the author
Brian Prioleau was raised in Fairfield, Connecticut and educated at Colgate University and Cornell University. He has made a living as a writer for decades, but this is his first foray into fiction. Brian is married to his beloved Gloria Adriana and lives in Austin, Texas
Forewarned
American Shaman, Book One is the story of a young man from Siberia, Geser, who starts on the path to become a shaman and eventually finds himself in modern-day Texas, where he completes his training. (You may pronounce “Geser “as you see fit. It is a transliteration from another language that does not use our alphabet, and therefore spelled phonetically in English.) His initial selection and training, and his elaborate initiation at puberty, are taken from well-regarded sources in the anthropology of animism. The plot, concerning Geser’s third and final trial, is very much a contemporary invention intended to entertain.
I am not an animist or shamanist. I am a writer who loves a good “coming of age” story, and well-written entertainments that do not rely upon clichés. I wanted to write the story of how one young man, faced with a spiritual test that almost destroys him, comes to truly understand the myths and teachings he has known since childhood, and gains strength from that understanding.
In the very early days of the web (I mean, like, the Mosaic/Netscape days – early), I stumbled across an English translation of the Buryat shamanist mythology concerning the first shaman, Geser. I printed it out and shoved it a drawer. Several years later I came across it and decided to read it. It was boring – “Geser climbed this mountain and fought this monster, then he crossed this river to capture a demon, then he was exiled to this land,” etcetera, etcetera. It was simply a list of plot points. But then I realized why: what I was holding in my hand was merely an outline that would be fleshed out around the campfire, no doubt in reaction to, and elucidation of, recent events. It probably had been handed down for centuries orally, with the shaman memorizing what was needed to keep the tradition -- the stories that bound this nomadic culture -- alive.
That captured my imagination and was the seed for American Shaman, Book 1. The initial idea was to create a graphic novel, because it is a wonderful, evocative form that I thought would fit the sources. I wrote a treatment and approached a publisher friend. He wasn’t interested because he needed to see the artwork and not just the narrative. I tried to find somebody to collaborate with (I have no visual skills whatsoever) while I wrote it up as a novel. Though my intended audience is 16-to-26 year olds, I made no effort to “dumb it down” in any way, writing the best book I could given the resources I had. Eventually I found a terrific illustrator with a national reputation, Jim Siergey, who was willing to work with me. Jim supplied some storyboards, and eventually some four color illustrations, that were terrific, and a lot of fun. But I quickly realized it was not feasible to work with a guy this good on ‘spec’ (in other words, for no cash). But I absolutely wanted to use the drawings Jim had done because they were so good and they blended and contrasted with graphics from shaman drum paintings, some quite old, I also wanted to include. It was like there was this conversation between the modern drawings and the ancient ones that was fascinating. So I decided to go with what I had: a fully realized novel with graphical elements to it, including illustrations that were either brand new or thousands of years old.
This is a hybrid, a chimera; one that may not be to your liking. It contains modern elements and ancient elements in both the narrative and the graphics. I feel no impulse to be ‘consistent;’ it just seems irrelevant at this moment. All content is digital and therefore all content is mashable. I feel strongly that the interactions between ancient and modern, graphics and story, are very much the point. You may not agree, but I hope you enjoy it.
Prologue
“Shaman” is a Siberian word meaning “excited man.” A shaman has the power to heal by journeying to the spirit world and interacting with the spirits that plague the ill and infirm. The journey is undertaken through the drum – the shaman is transported on the beat of a tambourine-like drum, drumming and dancing until he falls into a deep trance, then journeying to Spirit Ground and confronting the spirits.
A shaman must undergo three trials before becoming a fully empowered healer – a mental trial, a physical trial and a spiritual trial. An Icci or spirit guide, an animal spirit that may take human form, guides and instructs the shaman and can help in times of trouble. The shaman may heal before completing the three trials, but it is only upon completing all three that the shaman can attain full powers. The closer to death the shaman is brought during the three trials, the more powerful a shaman he or she will be.
The earth is round, the earth spins. The spinning produces segmented time balanced between day and night. The earth takes care of itself -- human beings are not always so fortunate.
There is something in human nature that promotes imbalance. There is something in us that pushes us towards monomania, an excessive focus on a single activity or value, be it money or pleasure or beauty or power, and human culture historically rewards the most adept monomaniacs. Perhaps it is the pain of consciousness, the acute awareness of each moment in time and the finiteness of one’s own moments, the insistence there must be meaning in those moments. This insistence upon meaning is what drives human beings and what drives us insane. It drives us to build beautiful cities by warm rivers, and drives us to obliterate those cities in destructive wars. It drives us to have children, and then to ignore those children as we search fruitlessly for more meaning.
Arguably the need to restore balance is at the heart of every religion and every spiritual impulse. It certainly is at the core of the first religion, shamanism, as it developed in the vast, harsh world of Siberia a dozen millennia ago. The shaman’s purpose is to restore balance, or tegsh, to the imbalanced soul and the imbalanced community. The shaman is the outlier, the “excited man” who can go to places other humans cannot go, reconcile distortions and return. That is his role. That is his curse.
Chapter 1: Meet dead cute
The spirits desire communion with us but evil prevents it. Evil is the web of distractions we believe keep us sane in an insane world – the various pornographies that emanate from the screens and loudspeakers with which we upholster our world, the amusements that reinforce our cheap and pervasive sense of irony. But these things are merely clever, and quite intentionally meaningless. Distracting. We think they keep us sane because we have a measure of control over them – we can change the channel, turn up the volume, increase the dosage – but this is a lie. We have no real control.
The spirits have only soft and subtle weapons with which to fight this evil: The music of silence. The open and accepting face of a child. The resolute hopefulness of the cycle of life: winter followed by spring, death by birth. The challenging depth and complexity of a truly beautiful thing. These things must be attended to; they must be cultivated and nourished. They are simple, but they are not easy.
And so it is not a fair contest.
In a subterranean parking garage in Invent City, Texas, a beautiful young woman lay upon the cold concrete slowly slipping away. It was the very early hours of the morning, before the sun rises, the still hours; she was pierced and tattooed and dressed in the studiedly unselfconscious way of the contemporary hipster. The beautiful woman had one fashion accessory that drew the eye – a rig dangled out of her forearm, a syringe filled with her own blood and the last few drops of the brown heroin, or chiva, she had cooked up and coaxed into her veins. It was the good stuff, the stuff they call ‘glass’ – the concentrated residue left on the interior surface of the cooking drum, real strong, available only to those with the really good connections. If your dealer would sell it to you at all, he would be sure to let you know he was doing you a big fucking favor. The woman’s body convulsed but she was otherwise inert, her eyes slightly opened but unseeing, comatose, utterly alone in her narcotic reverie. A hand reached down and turned her head, reached into her mouth with two fingers to clear it of vomit. The hand and wrist were covered with impossibly white, shiny, inhuman looking skin, like the belly of a large fish, though the arm was otherwise normal-looking.
A young man stood over her and pulled several objects from a crude bag he had slung around his shoulder: a drum that looked like a oversized tambourine without bangles, with a supporting cross piece inside the drumhead that was carved into the shape of a child with outstretched arms and decorated with bits of colored ribbon, leather and feathers; a small, handmade rug; a bottle of brandy; a bit of cake; some tobacco. The young man sat upon the rug and arranged the objects around him. He was lithe, smallish but with a compact build and evident physical self confidence, with medium-long dark hair and intense eyes that consumed everything in their gaze. The last thing the young man pulled from his bag was a red silk string. He looked around to orient himself to Spirit Ground and ran the string from that direction to the prone, lifeless body of the girl, making sure it touched her – this would be the conduit for the girl’s spirit to return to her body. He found a rhythm on the drum and played it insistently, obsessively, filling the parking garage with an instinctive and ancient beat, compressed the rhythm and made it louder until the parking garage receded away to become a vast plain; an immeasurable, ancient wilderness filled with sunlight and wind. And then there was no drum and no rhythm and there was no rig and no chiva. There was only the young man and, standing in the immediate distance, the lost, confused spirit of the girl, encircled by a pack of wild dogs that were hungry and angry at this intruder.
In a soft but confident voice, the young man called to the girl’s spirit. “You cannot linger here. Your mother, your father miss you. They sit sad in their home, awaiting your return. You must come with me…” The girl’s spirit looked down, ashamed, but did not move. About ten feet away from the spirit sat a pot and the young man walked over to it. It was filled with water, and the young man carefully put his hand into it – warm. He smiled. There was a chance he could bring her back. If the water had been hot there would be no chance.
“She is mine!” snarled the lead dog as he rose up on its hind legs. “You can’t have her back. She let us in and we are not going to let go.” Slowly and fairly subtly, like the pack hunters they are, the dogs shifted position from around the spirit of the girl to around the young man.
The young man smiled broadly and laughed, carefully shifting his weight until he was centered and ready. “We? There is no ‘we’...”
In a blur he spun to confront the second dog, for the second dog always charges from behind, and with a powerful, quick motion the young man decapitated it and drove its still-snapping jaws into the throat of the third dog as it lunged for his liver. Wisely, the fourth and fifth dogs turned tail and ran.
“...there is only you and me.”
“You can’t have her, she is mine,” said the lead dog as it backed off a few steps. “This is what she wants – she let us in!”
“She was with me first,” the young man replied. It was a lie, but it was okay to lie to a devil. This particular devil decided it was better to save this fight for another day and trotted off into the indeterminate distance.
The man took the hand of the girl’s spirit and gently told her to come with him, to focus on the rhythm. They walked together to the east using the red string as a guide. And the vast, ancient plain again became the subterranean parking garage in a dawning city in America and the young woman was at the young man's feet again. He knelt down and took her head in his hands, gently removing the spike from her arm. She began to revive, her eyes losing their blindness and her heart pumping blood again into her ashen face. The beautiful woman moaned softly and was suddenly aware of the young man who held her in his arms.
“What happened? Where am I?”
“You are here outside the club. It is almost dawn. You tried to leave here forever.”
“What….what do you mean?”
The young man held up the syringe, still filled with her blood. “Is this what you want? You can have it, if that’s what you want. But I must warn you, your spirit, your soul as you in the West say, is an unstable thing. It yearns for the other side, to return to where it has lived for all eternity and where it will live after your body is gone. If you continue to separate your body and your spirit, as you do every time you use this needle, you may find that one day your spirit does not return.”
She stumbled to her feet and turned away. “I don’t want it – I hate it! But once you’re in, there is no walking away from it. It owns you.”
The young man smiled kindly. “That’s not true. Just say you I don’t want it anymore, that you are done. Just say the words and it will be true.”
“It is never that simple,” said the young junkie with a resignation no human being should ever hear in their own voice.
“Just say the words and it will be that simple.”
“Okay, fine. I am done. I don’t want it anymore.”
The young man clapped his hands and leapt up, uncharacteristic delight plainly evident. Suddenly, the beautiful young woman fell to her knees and vomited a huge tide of black bile. It was as if the young woman’s entire history wanted to leap out of her body in an instant. Her jaw appeared to unhinge in a reptilian way and a spume of blackness exploded from her as her neck and back strained spasmodically. The dark, wriggling, putrid expungement filled the floor of the parking garage ankle deep; first a pool, then a stream, then a river, and it poured down the concrete stairwells as it became, finally, a deafening torrent, like a drainage culvert at the end of a hard Texas rainstorm – 12,357 gallons, all told. It was measured. When she was finished retching, the reeking black bile disappeared and she rose transformed – healthy, strong, completed.
“Jesus – who are you? What the hell is going on?”
The young man took her by the arm and walked towards the exit. “My name is Geser. And you are?”
“Alma Mergen.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Wait – what did you say?”
“You asked my name and I told you it was Alma Mergen.”
“How did you know that? How did you know to call yourself Alma Mergen? Who told you? How did you KNOW THAT?”
She was more than a bit confused at the moment and this guy was starting to scare her. When Alma got scared she got hostile. She couldn’t look like she did, all pale and beautiful, and be a junkie walking through junkie streets in the raw, bleeding hours and ever show fear. She wouldn’t have made it to Wednesday.
“It’s my name you stupid fuck. It is what my parents called me, I didn’t have any fucking choice. Look…” She pulled her driver’s license out of her bag and showed it to him.
Geser stared at it for a long time. His shoulders began to shake and slowly a small laugh rose from his throat and grew larger and larger until it filled the street they were emerging onto as they walked away from the parking garage. Alma had no way of knowing it at that moment, but this would be the only time, through all their times together, through pain and death, through hopefulness and despair, through joy and loss, through piss and tears and black vomit and soaring and falling and all of it, this would be the only time she would ever see this man laugh. She did notice that his laugh was a bit ridiculous, as if he hadn’t had much practice.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why is my name such a big deal?”
“There are stories that we are told when we are children, stories of the ancients and of how the world was created and came to be as it is. Many of the stories are about a man named Geser – that is where my name comes from – who was sent to earth to help men defeat disease and evil spirits. One day he went hunting and just as he was about to shoot a deer with an arrow another hunter came along and stole his prize. He followed the hunter, who turned out to be the daughter of the head of the water spirits, who was a good friend of his father’s, another great spirit. The daughter’s name was Alma Mergen. In fact, Alma Mergen had been promised as Geser’s wife when they were children.”
The odd story the young man had been telling was charming up to that point, Alma thought to herself. Then it became the weirdest pickup line she had ever heard, and she had heard a lot of pickup lines. She began to kind of move away from Geser, thinking this would be a good time to head out on her own.
“So he married Alma and they had two daughters together, Tumen and Urmai, and his heart was filled with such happiness that he would sit by the banks of a river at sundown with his children and wife and say, “Is the sun in the sky beautiful, or is Tumen beautiful? Is the sun in the heavens beautiful or is Urmai beautiful? Is the glorious gold sun beautiful or is Alma Mergen beautiful?’”
Alma paused, felt her shoulders relax and walked back to Geser.
They walked through an industrial neighborhood in the accumulating dawn as Alma slowly regained her senses. Geser kept the conversation going. “I saw you in the club. You dance as if there is nothing in the world besides you and the music,” said Geser.
Alma laughed. “That’s true. I never thought of it that way but that is exactly how it feels. And the music felt particularly good tonight.”
“Thank you,” grinned Geser
“What, that was you – you were spinning the tunes? That must be a great job, making everybody dance like that.”
“Well, it isn’t really a job because they don’t pay me. But you are right, it is wonderful to make people move to my rhythms. Rhythm is everything.”
“Well, you certainly had me going,” says Alma. “It’s funny, I felt so wonderful in the club. But as soon as I got out here into the real world I needed to get high.”
“The real world will do that.”
“What is that strange accent you have?” Alma asked.
“I am what you would call Russian.”
“Ah, one of those Euro-fag techno rave freaks. We have a small but annoying population of them here in Invent City. Oh well. You looked almost normal.”
“I do not know what you mean by Euro-fag, but I am Siberian. It’s a big country, where I am from,” said Geser.
“Siberian – I don’t even know what that means. You look like a Hollywood Indian, with those cheekbones and dark hair.”
Geser looked at her quizzically.
“So, Siberian, if you don’t D.J. for a living, what do you do? I mean to eat?”
“I guess you would call me an exporter,” Geser said softly.
Tenger, the creator-Father of all things, often marveled at his own creations. The way he had conceived them was often not the way they turned out and Tenger found the discrepancies fascinating; the soul of beauty, in his eyes. One day he saw a beautiful woman by a river and he caught her up and placed her in a bottle so that he could look upon her as much as he wanted. He placed his finger in the mouth of the bottle so that she could not escape.
The first shaman came upon Tenger as he was enjoying his bottled treasure. The woman was obviously terrified – this did not bother Tenger because he had no intention of harming her, he just wanted to look at her – and the shaman decided he had to do something to set the woman free. He changed himself into a spider and he stealthily crawled up Tenger’s arm to his shoulder, to the neck of his shirt, slowly up his neck to his face, careful not to be detected. The woman was frozen with fear but she did not cry out to Tenger to warn him. Then the shaman-spider stung Tenger, who dropped the bottle, allowing the beautiful woman to escape.
Tenger was furious at the shaman, both for the painful bite, which swelled Tenger’s whole face and made him ugly for a month, but perhaps even more for the shaman’s impertinence. So Tenger took all the shaman’s powers away and told him he would have to spend the rest of his life on Human Ground struggling to survive as just another man.
Chapter 2: The business of America is business
The list they had was very specific – three Lexuses, no more than a year old, dark colors. Two Land Rovers, late model, color didn’t matter. A Jag, a Miata, preferably red. But since Invent Citizens had a car jones that puts Los Angelenos to shame, it was all in a night’s work. They drove through the neighborhoods of Invent City, famous for its epic disregard for zoning laws, where cardboard strip malls and barrios are hard up against million-dollar palaces owned by corporate lawyers and decorated by their silly trophy wives. Invent City was an entire city with its taste in its mouth. The Siberians felt right at home here – as long as the air conditioning worked. Before long all they had left on the list was one Lexus and the Jag.
Geser, Raven and the rest of the crew found the last Lexus parked in a driveway with a proximity light that glared on as they drove past. Not a problem. The first thing to do was to disable the light and put the truck in a good position for a quietly swift exit. As soon as darkness returned to the driveway someone was under the car with a screwdriver and a pair of wire clippers – no more alarm problems. Out came the pressure hammer and there went the driver’s side window. A few adjustments about halfway down the steering column and the ignition caught and they were ready to go. At 48 seconds someone was lowering the special plastic-coated sound-retardant steel ramps to load the Lexus onto the truck. This was the best crew Raven had, a bunch of artists who not only did it fast and smooth but also did it so there were minimal repairs needed to the cars themselves. These cars would be on the boat headed for Mother Russia by noon the next day.
Geser was content, as always, to focus on the process. He was in charge of the alarms and getting the car started. From the moment he began working with Raven’s crew it was evident he had a gift for systems, anything electronic. This was amazing to those on the crew who understood what life was like in the Buryat, where Geser was from. Until beginning his journey to America, the young Siberian had not encountered a single remnant of the industrial world, not a single, solitary electronic device, up to and including a light bulb. His father had seen such things on his travels, but the boy and his mother had stayed close to home and had seen none of them. And yet Geser’s mastery over them was immediate and complete, and it seemed he need only stare at something for a moment, punch the controls and twirl the knobs a bit, turn it around to look at the inputs and outputs, before he was operating any device as if he had designed it himself. Although Geser never shared this with anyone, he felt as if he owned this world, as if the quivering electrons coursing through the wires and semiconductors of any device were just particularly helpful manifestations of the spirit world that could be mastered with just a bit of sympathy and persuasion.
But right now there was a car that needed to be stolen, and at 56 seconds the owner of the Lexus came running around the corner dressed only in classy silk paisley boxers and a loaded .357 magnum. At 58 seconds he was on the ground with fatal wounds to his head and chest from triangulated 9-millimeter pistols. These guys were not amateurs. If someone is messing with your car in your own driveway, don’t bother dialing 911 because the cops cannot get there in time, and do not step outside that door. Just start dialing your insurance company. And seriously consider replacing the dearly departed vehicle with a used car, maybe one with a little body damage.
Geser stood over the dying man as Raven called to him with urgent hisses. There would be no time and no need for drums. This man would die, not because evil spirits wanted to possess him but because of the interruption of two spoonfuls of lead. Geser knew of no rhythms to defeat that.
As the truck sped away with Geser at the wheel, he spoke to Raven in their native tongue.
"You never said anyone would get killed. You said we would steal their cars and they'd get the insurance money to get new cars; that it was all a game and everyone knew the rules."
Raven laughed. "The fool didn't die because of the car, he died because he came around the corner with a loaded gun. Kill or be killed is God's rule, not mine."
"He was just trying to protect what was his."
Now Raven was angry. "Nothing is his -- certainly not now! If I can take it away from him, it is not his. If you can take it from me, it is not mine. If he wants to be an American cowboy then he must be prepared to die."
Chapter 3: Trial of the mind
Back at the shop, as the cars were being repaired, Geser sat outside in the early, still hours of the day. Yesterday he was saving the life of a reluctant young junkie. Today he was mourning a cowboy. In the darkness an owl silently landed on a cable television wire above Geser's head. The owl had the expressive face of a man.
"It is time, Geser, for your last trial," the owl said
Geser was not surprised to hear an owl speak to him in a human voice. "You give me a warning this time. Why do I think this is not a good sign?"
"You are right. I knew the outcome of your first two trials so I did not care to warn you. I do not know the outcome of the third trial. It will be difficult and you may not survive this time. It must always be that way. You will need allies. The girl will be your ally."
"What girl?"
The owl-spirit's face again became the unknowable mask of a bird. The owl turned to Geser. “The girl with the green rope.” It silently flew into the darkness.
Geser's first trial came when he was still a young child, before he discovered the drum and the power to heal. A shaman is both born and made. There is an innate gift in the young shaman that must be nurtured and developed before it attains its fullest potential -- training like that of the artist or poet.
Geser and his parents lived in the harsh, arctic world of Siberia during the even harsher days of the Breshnev era and its sclerotic aftermath. Though many in the area are nomads, Geser’s family survived by subsistence farming and his father made supplemental income through fur trapping. Every spring he loaded his catch of dense winter pelts and hauled them to Vladisvostok to sell to a Soviet sailor, who would in turn sell them in Rome or Copenhagen or some other Western port. It was a marginal commerce with a long tradition in this part of the world.
Of course, it was completely illegal under the Soviet system. Or rather, it was completely legal as long as the authorities received 90 percent of the revenue in the form of a tax or a bribe, whichever you preferred. So to do it at all was to accept being an outlaw, which Geser's father did.
One year, as Spring became apparent in the clearing weather and afternoon thaws, Geser's father prepared for the long journey to Vladivostok. Geser was seven years old and he helped sort the pelts his father trapped over the winter. The best ones would be sold, the rest they would keep for themselves or for local barter. As his reward for his labor, Geser would receive another chess lesson. Geser's father revered the game and spent much of the dark winter playing it with his friends, when he wasn't out in the forests checking his traps. He called it "war's little brother" and insisted that any man who mastered its strategies put himself on level ground in an unjust world. The father's reverence led to a somewhat pedantic instructional technique -- he taught Geser one piece at a time, painstakingly explaining all the possibilities and risks each character on the chessboard embodied. They spent several weeks on the pawn, the rook warranted five lessons, but the knight’s irregular and rigidly proscribed motion took almost ten lessons alone. That was as far as they had gone. Of course, Geser was impatient with this deliberate method of instruction and longed to play a real game. In fact, if he hadn't watched his father play for years, he wouldn't even know the goal of the game was to trap the king -- father had not revealed that yet. But Geser loved his father and loved the lessons and did not complain. And today's lesson was the devious, slashing bishop. Geser's father had just finished explaining the bishop's diagonal attack and the curious fact that the bishop was the only piece that was restricted to a single color square for the entire contest when a loud knock came at the door. It was the local party boss, Pushkoff, who entered the small wooden house without invitation. He was thin-limbed but with a bloated face and belly, and walked directly over to the pile of sorted pelts that Geser’s father would take to Vladivostok in the morning.
"A very successful hunt this year, I see." Pushkoff saw the packed bags. "Are you going away? Where ever are you going?" It was a game. Pushkoff's real desire was to collect a bribe and then continue the weeklong drinking binge he was on.
Geser's father knew the game and its rules, but there would be no bribe money available until he returned. "I'm going for a little jaunt to Vladivostok, and you and I can talk business when I return."
"Ah, but that will be so long -- it is almost 1,000 miles each way. The weather is better, but it is still not good. No, I must insist we make an arrangement now. I am very thirsty. Please give me something for my thirst."
Geser's mother pulled out a bottle with not more than two inches of vodka in it. Pushkoff drained it in one gulp. The vodka inflamed him but did not satisfy him. "I will arrest you right now for refusing to pay your taxes," he yelled too forcefully for the small room.
“There is nothing else to give you,” Geser’s father said firmly. “We will speak when I return.”
“Then I will take you to prison.”
“Do what you must. But then there will be nothing for anyone.”
That stopped the drunken official, for it was true. His own superiors had grown tired of Pushkoff’s propensity for incarcerating all those who insulted him, for like all drunks he was easily insulted. On the other hand, Pushkoff understood that once he had made that kind of threat, he must be strong and forceful. Otherwise, he would never be able to collect a decent bribe from anyone. He looked around the room trying to think of a way out of this impasse. His eyes fell on the chessboard.
“My idea is this: we will play chess, and whoever wins gets what he wants. If I win, you must give me money now. If you win, we will wait until you return from Vladivostok.”
A smile came to Geser’s father’s face, perhaps too quickly. On his best day, Pushkoff didn’t stand a chance of beating him, and this was not the drunken apparatchik’s best day. But Pushkoff saw the quick smile and adjusted.
“And I will play the boy, not you, old man.”
Geser’s mother let out a cry.
“You cannot do that. The boy hasn’t learned the game yet!” the father stammered.
“Well, you must have been playing with someone when I came in. The board is all set up.”
“But he hasn’t even learned all the pieces yet. He doesn’t know the first thing about strategy, or even the goal of the game.”
“Well then, I would suggest you start counting the money you will be donating to the Party. Come boy, we will play.”
Geser sat down and tried to remember everything his father had taught him and tried to forget that the family’s fate rested on his shoulders. He started out badly and faced Pushkoff’s derision as he lost piece after piece. But as the board thinned out the boy gained confidence and soon his father was no longer forcibly restraining his instructions but was instead restraining his laughter as he watched his son become a chess player before his very eyes. Geser moved boldly, confidently, and his father began to see his son think two, now three, now five moves ahead. There was, however, one problem. Every piece on the board was in play save one: Geser’s queen. The chess lessons had not gotten to that point and the young player could not figure out from Pushkoff’s moves exactly what rules applied to the queen. It appeared as if there were no rules and the queen could move anywhere, but Geser knew if he moved inappropriately he would lose the piece at Pushkoff’s insistence. The boy knew the queen was powerful but he did not understand that power yet. Soon the board was down to Pushkoff’s king, queen, one knight and three pawns, though he was badly positioned. Geser had only his king, four pawns and the dormant queen. Pushkoff sensed victory and began to demand a bigger and bigger bribe. Geser’s father was desperate to impart to his son the power of the queen’s unrestricted offense. Finally, Pushkoff gave him an opening. Geser’s mother had been flitting around the room nervously, mumbling to herself. Pushkoff yelled at her, insisting she sit down and remain quiet while he contemplated his endgame.
“My wife is the queen of this house, Pushkoff, and the queen may go anywhere she wants in her own castle.”
Pushkoff snorted derisively but did not comprehend the instruction. Geser looked at his father and placed one hand on the queen as his father faintly nodded and subtly drew a straight line in the air with his index finger. Finally, Geser liberated his queen and swiftly took Pushkoff’s queen and a pawn. Even the drunken official could see he was boxed in and defeated by a seven-year-old boy, and he hurled the chessboard to the floor in a fit of self-disgust.
This was why Geser was chosen.
Pushkoff was apoplectic. “You tricked me! You poisoned the vodka. You signaled the boy how to move. There is no other way he could beat me like that!”
“So, we shall see you again when I return from my travels?” Geser’s father could not repress a smile. “I promise to bring you more vodka next time.”
That comment, and the fact that it had been a couple of hours since his last drink, made Pushkoff insane. His eyes narrowed and his excitable manner immediately shut down to that of a viper ready to strike.
“You think you are clever. You think I shall simply walk out that door and you shall be rid of me. It shall not be that way. Kiss your wife and your child goodbye. You are coming with me.”
“But we had a deal -- if you lost you would return later. You can’t go back on that.”
“Perhaps I should have made it clear the deal was off if you cheated and disrespected me. I am not a man to be taken lightly. You must come with me. Now.” Pushkoff pulled a revolver out of his waistband and cocked the hammer.
That would be the last time Geser saw his father, which was fully understood by everyone that very day. His father disappeared into the prison system, ultimately being transferred to a prison east of the Urals, where Geser and his mother could not visit him. Inevitably they lost all contact with him and he died alone at the hands of a fellow inmate turned brutal and mad by an inhumane system. Geser tried to master chess as his father had, as a tribute, but he could not. He had learned that mastery of the chessboard does nothing to make the world more just.
Several weeks after Geser’s father’s arrest, a man appeared outside the door of the small house. For days he sat just outside the door, diligently constructing a tambourine-like drum, tuning it and decorating it with small bright bits of cloth and owl feathers he had brought with him. The silent man could not be coaxed inside by Geser’s mother, and would not accept any food or drink. Instead, he rocked gently back and forth and sang wordless songs to himself as he concentrated on the drum. Mother knew why he was there, for she had seen him many times in her early morning dreams. She knew this meant her son had been chosen to take the path of the healer, the shaman, and the man outside the door was no man at all but a spirit guide and teacher, an Icci. He would teach Geser the ways of the shaman, beginning with showing him how to journey to the spirit world using the rhythms of the drum. Mother was proud Geser had been chosen, for to be given the power to enter the spirit world in order to heal was a great honor, but she was also sad. Icci would now become Geser’s father, mother, teacher, taskmaster and friend. A shaman must keep himself separate from other people, to retain an objective diagnostic eye and avoid the petty temptations, appetites and jealousies of everyday life. The most successful shaman was the one who was most capable of being alone, and no mother wanted her child to be alone.
After three days the man was gone and the drum sat outside the door. Mother picked it up and took it inside the house, placing it in Geser’s hand. Though the child didn’t know it, the drum was somewhat smaller than the ordinary shaman’s drum, for portability. The skin of the drumhead was irregular and flawed – the flaws would give areas of the drum head different tones, the soul of any musical instrument. The round hoop of wood that held the drumhead was also irregular because it was shaped without a form but rather slowly and by hand, using steam and much patience. The most striking thing about the drum was inside the drumhead. The wooden circle was supported by a cross of wood that was shaped to look like a child, with an oversized head and barely defined features of nose, mouth and eyes that looked both kind and eerie. From the outstretched arms of this wooden child hung feathers and shiny metal. Throughout his life Geser would spend hours considering this wooden figure, amazed at how eloquent, how evocative it was, as if it was whispering words just to him. The drum was played by holding this crosspiece at the intersection and banging on the skin, as Geser did immediately upon being handed it by his mother. The songs of the drum were ancient and articulate, and the child understood immediately that he could spend his entire life translating the vocabulary of this mysteriously beautiful object.
“The man left this for you as a gift. It is very precious and very powerful and you must never let it out of your sight. You must always treat the drum with respect, for it does not belong to you. It belongs to the man. Many of my people have been chosen for this path, and you should be proud of being chosen. There is no greater vocation than that of healer. But it is a difficult, relentless, solitary path. You will make the choice at the appropriate time, and I will guide you and protect you no matter what you choose, because you are my son and I am your mother and nothing will ever change that.”
Geser was mystified by the gravity in her voice. After all, it was only a drum, and it was not even a very loud drum. But he took it and played it and even pretended it was a bird and made it fly through the air.
“So this Itchy guy starts showing up at your house and teaching you to be a shaman?” Alma tried to suppress her incredulity. She and Geser sat on the sink in the ladies room of the club as Geser’s rhythms pounded outside the door. She didn’t mean to mock him because he seemed to really believe what he was saying. And besides, since they met she had not suffered any withdrawal symptoms or even craved the chiva she once had to inject faithfully every six hours or risk getting sick. So Alma wanted to know more about the powerful magic Geser seemed to have at his command. Pretty young women crowded the mirror next to them applying makeup and performing maintenance adjustments on their lightly exposed cleavage.
“It was a process that took years. First came the drum, learning the rhythms, and then learning how to be transported on the rhythms to the spirit world. Then Icci taught me how to recognize the good spirits and the evil spirits. Spirits must be encouraged to leave the body of the sick person. You must make the evil spirits believe they have no alternative, or else they will pretend to leave but actually stay behind.”
“What do you mean ‘be transported on the rhythms to the spirit world?’” Alma asked suspiciously.
“To fly. In Western religions, heaven and hell and all that are invisible places, things that exist in the mind and the heart. But in my beliefs, Spirit Ground is a physical place, a geographical place right next to this world. I could walk there but it is quicker to fly, and the drum is what allows me to fly.”
Several of the mirror-gazing young women stopped in mid-mascara, stared at Geser and quickly left the bathroom giggling. The club was not the hippest place in Invent City, buried deep in a wasteland of nondescript offices and storefronts on Industrial Park Place. Most of the businesses surrounding the club were start-ups, on-their-way-downs or otherwise marginalized. This industrial park was the best and safest office space they could afford. Like people on a busy city street, all these businesses were on their way somewhere else – maybe better, maybe worse, but definitely somewhere else. All the other businesses in the area were long shut when Miggy’s opened its doors at 10 p.m., so there was always plenty of parking. With the lights down low, the music thumping and grinding and the lightshow going full blast, Miggy’s looked like an alternate universe. With the lights on and the floor swept, it looked like a place designed for cubicles, fax lines, copying machines and water coolers, which it was. Miggy’s was owned by an older man who gave various explanations for why he would undertake the considerable headaches and hassles of club ownership -- permits, drunks, cokeheads in the bathroom, fights, endless employee turnover, etc. He would tell the cops it was because kids needed a place to go, and kids these days loved to dance. He would tell his peers it was a great way to hook up with sweet young pussy. He would tell his girlfriend it was a good, steady, faintly lucrative business that didn’t require him to work too hard. All of these things were theoretically true, but the real reason was because clubs were a cash business, and the owner’s real business – wholesale marijuana importer and distributor – required a good front such as this to avoid the attentions of the authorities.
“Okay, Geser, I need to talk to you about something,” Alma said. “We are in America now. If you start talking about flying around on a drum and battling evil spirits and all that, they are going to lock you up.”
“You don’t believe me”
“Oh no, I believe you. I’m just afraid of what will happen if someone, you know, takes this stuff out of context. You know. People can be cruel.”
Geser stood up slowly and took Alma’s hand. He pushed up her sleeve and exposed her inner elbow, scarred and bruised and infected by seven months of daily IV drug use. He placed his hand on her tracks and she was instantly in the grips of hardcore heroin withdrawal, convulsing, retching, sweating, unable to stand, willing to give anything and volunteer for any degradation, for just one more hit of heroin. When Geser took his hand away she was instantly back to normal. She staggered to her feet. As she did, a length of silky green twine fell out of her bag on to the ground.
“Okay, I believe you,” Alma sputtered.
“It is you,” he said. “The green rope. You are the one.”
She saw the twine on the ground and quickly picked it up. “Oh this? My noose -- from the bad old days.” She faked tying off above her elbow. “You know, ‘give ‘em enough rope.’” Two Christmases ago – about the time she was starting to experience the God’s warm blanket embrace of IV heroin – Alma had received a small present from her niece. The child had been proudest of the way she had wrapped it, and she had looped the silky green rope around the small box so many times it looked as if it had been kidnapped. It was a special moment and Alma wanted to remember it, hang on to it, because she was dimly aware that her soul was moving into the shadows and she would need these memories to survive. So she never let go of the green rope.
“You have been sent to me to help me with my final trial. You are the one.” Geser was suddenly reminded again that Icci did not allow any accidents. “Do not lose this noose,” he insisted.
“Whatever. Just tell me you won’t ever do that again, that touching my arm thing,” she said, as she adjusted her clothing and dusted herself off. “I definitely believe you about this shaman stuff, now and forever.”