Deep Code

When I got to my office the message light on my phone was blinking. It was time for us to talk about what had happened, and what had not happened. I pushed the voice mail button. The message was from someone else. I erased it without listening, then dialed Celine. “Can you meet me somewhere tonight?” There was a pause. “Can we wait a while? I need time to think.” “Celine, this is very heavy for me. I can’t stand here and hold it. Anyway, I have to make decisions.” “Talk to me then.” “I…I’ll stay here if…if you want me to. Otherwise—“ I was cursing myself as the words and the tears came out. “You know I can’t ask that.” We were silent for a while, then she said, “Morse, I’m so grateful, so deeply grateful that you think you love me. But I think if it wasn’t me it’d be someone, or something, else. Think about what you told me in bed. You’ve lost your footing, your connection to everything, you’re drifting, you’re reaching for something, anything, an anchor. Oh, God, I wish I’d known, before I made it worse for you.” “Don’t start blaming yourself.” “I admire you so much. I’ll always remember this day. You may not believe it right now, but you gave me something really beautiful, okay?” “Yeah. Okay. Listen, I’ll call you before I leave.” “Okay. Everything will turn out, I know it will.” “Bye.” “Bye.” I sat there and shook, my brain an anthill of unconnected oddities. I got up and rushed out of the building, across the campus, through the town, until I found myself on a cliff among twisted cypress trees, looking out over a restless sea, a lone gull hovering on the wind just below me. As I scanned the horizon my mind began to clear. Was Celine right, was my need for her simply the need to value something, anything, to fill the hole that the flashbacks had torn in my ethos? I thought of Nietzsche, ‘Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure.’ Was this the lesson that the Fomors meant to beat into me, that the scruples of the mortal world are nothing but opiates? Indeed the Fomor Dryr had railed against heroes and saints. Well, for now they seemed to have made their point. A beautiful woman gives herself to a starving man, so that she can find out whether she really loves another. I looked down at the eternal, unchanging sea, which said, “Come on, join the legion of idiots who’ve thrown themselves here for nothing, for want of a word or a name to scratch on a wall.” Thank you Fomors, thank you Sea, thank you Celine. Where to begin, then? I had savings, and didn’t have to work for months, or even years if I stayed on the cheap. I had skills – teaching, writing, speaking. I could find work almost anywhere, but what I craved was simplicity, a place where life was elemental, where people were born, ate, slept, fought, danced, copulated and died, without calling it something else. A place, in other words, where people don’t read or write or use cars or TVs or telephones or banks. Nepal? Ladakh? Too cold. Indonesia? The Philippines? I don’t speak those languages, but I can get by in Spanish. South America, then. The Peruvian Amazon. I had studied the intricate shamanic lore of the Yanomami, the Jivaro, the Bororo, the Sharanahua, and I understood it, admired it.