"Savior Self"

[Stardust]

All copyrights mine.

I.

The bar was identical to a thousand others he’d been in throughout his life. The faces, slack and vacant and drooling, reflected in a floor-length mirror polished to perfection, filled John with a sort of wistful nostalgia and memories of home. Only their color differed from those in his mind’s eye, all furnace-fired bronze and ultimately unlike those of even the Negroes he knew Stateside.
People are basically the same everywhere.
 “Are you here for the celebrations, Señor?”
 The voice startled him, not in the least because he couldn’t see its source reflected in the mirror. Then, realizing it came from behind, John removed the white felt hat from his head.
 The native was thin - emaciated, the shadow of a sliver. Full, oily locks draped over his handsome face, from which beamed a smile both full and half-empty.
 “Yes, that’s right,” John replied without turning. “I suppose you have the perfect spot to watch the occasion from, and for only a few pesos more than the last three fellows asked for?”
 “Si,” a response which came without interrupting that idiotic grin. “Very nice place, very high over the beach. You see everything there.”
 “I don’t need to see everything. There’s going to be a photojournalist sent out from the hotel. I’m simply there to write.”
 The native looked dismayed, and John stared at the ice in his rum to avoid meeting his gaze. “But it’s such a good view, Señor. You see all the way out to the ocean.”
 “And only you know how to get there?” John responded, exaggerating the ire he felt with his voice. He’d likely take the man up on his offer. He would be completely lost otherwise.
 The native nodded, and his grin widened.
 “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” John finished his drink and slid his glass to the tender with a flick of his wrist, then turned on his stool to meet his new employee.
 “What the Hell? I’m not paying for it.” Then, to avoid any discussion of money with the man: “Have you ever heard of Hegel?”
 The idiot-grin continued unabated. It was an expected response.
 “He got famous for a book he wrote on a mountain top, too.”
While watching men murder each other and themselves, no less.
 “If you’re thinking of coldcocking me up there and taking my money, don’t bother. I won’t carry any more on me than what I need to pay you with.”
 “No, no,” and for the first time the smile tightened and faded. “I worked for MacArthur. I am honest.”
 “As honest as Mac? Nevermind. Well, you’ll do for a tour guide.” John reached into the breast pocket of his coat and removed a handful of brightly-colored notes, then stuffed them into the man’s waiting hand. “Take these and buy a pair of boots for yourself. And a stick.”
 The native saluted, a curious holdover gesture from darker days, and turned to leave before John cupped his shoulder with a hand. 
 “What’s your name? Te llamo?”
 “Manuel.”
 “John Murneau. And, Manny, save enough of that money to buy a holiday lamb for your family.”
 “Si, Señor,” Manuel said, then turned and walked from the bar into the creeping heat of a Filipino spring.
Later, after the drinking and the wretching had both been done, John strolled along the coastline opposite his hotel, taking in the salty breeze. The ocean, vast and wild as a young man’s dreams, would have seemed incomprehensible to him once, long ago. Then he’d experienced its mysteries firsthand, as an attaché to a platoon of American soldiers fighting and dying out there, among the waves. After the war he’d hoped he had seen the last of the Pacific and its awful, glorious secrets.
 Yet here he was, though his memories were elsewhere yet. New York City, the world-island in a sea of peoples, had been far more ominous to a young journalist in 1924 than any Japanese redoubt had seemed twenty years later. There he’d been sent amid the grinding wheels of democracy’s machinery to cover a national political convention. It was to be one for the history books, the freewheeling beat reporters of the city had told him even before the delegates had gathered. 
 And they had been right. It was a history he had largely helped to write.
 That was a lifetime ago, and it had all led here, to balmy Manila and an assignment his peers at the paper had considered one step short of mandatory retirement. John had known better.
His sleep that night was restless, though no dream-image invaded it. And when the morning came, and, with it, a tropical rain, John felt as refreshet on the inside as he imagined the world might had it nerves and skin.
 The phone rang as he showered, and John answered it on the final ring. On the other end of the line was the hotel clerk, whose accent was so thick as to make Manuel’s sound thoroughly well-bred in comparison.
 “A call for the Señor. New York City.”
 John had expected that.
 “Put it through.”
 The phone clicked and buzzed, and when it returned John thought absently that the machine would make him perfectly obsolete one day. The singsong voice on the other end was that of his editor, Paul Lovejoy, a magnificent prick.
 “How’s the weather, John?”
 “It’s raining.”
 “Will that be a problem?”
 “No,” John answered, though he suspected that it might. “The ceremony won’t begin until this evening. It’ll clear up by then.”
 A pause.
 “You sure you aren’t going to upset the locals? By being there, I mean. I understand that they can be a bit touchy about things like this.”
 “That’s sweet of you, Paul,” John replied, hoping that the receiver managed to catch most of the sarcasm in his voice, “but they want us here. That’s the point.”
 Paul’s voice was like dead air. “What is?”
 “‘Whosoever shall deny me before men, him also will I deny before my Father in Heaven.’”
 Words he was long familiar with, they tastes stale in his mouth all the same.
 The reference was lost completely on Paul. “Well, I don’t know anything about that. I’m Jewish. But, if you say you won’t spook the locals, I’m game. Just be sure to find Pete. He ought to be there at the hotel already. God knows I dished out enough for his emergency flight.”
 John smiled as the line went dead. It had been a minor victory, he thought, but a victory nevertheless. Paul, ever the cosmopolitan, had seen no value at all in the assignment, and less still in a workhorse like John being wasted on it. Still, John had managed to convince Paul that he was the only journalist available who could be trusted to not completely handle the issue like an entry in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not magazine.
 And believe it he didn’t, but faith without work is deadening.

[Stardust]

Dressing quickly, John descended the hotel stairs and entered the lobby.  The clientele who filled it were uniformly white, and even the waiters and busboys who rushed to serve them were of a lighter complexion than the patrons he’d seen in the bar the night before. John’s mind, used as it was to finding humor in strange places, lit on this small irony like a spacecraft visiting another planet.
 The juxtaposition had barely formed itself when he saw a figure who brought the two thoughts together in perfect synchronicity - Piotr Nabokov in the corner, sipping on a White Russian and ogling the female hotel staff.
 It was a flair John could appreciate only after years of working with the man. Piotr certainly was a White Russian, a fact he did his best to impress upon anyone within earshot. His family, a small branch from the great tree of the Russian minor aristocracy, had emigrated to Germany between the wars. Piotr’s father had been a professional soldier previous to his career as a stateless dilettante, and soldiering was a habit which not only had not died hard for him but which had not died at all. No sooner had the Nabokovs arrived in Germany before they were caught up in counterrevolutionary activity, bankrolling all manner of absurd 'secret’ societies and vigilante organizations dedicated to the suppression of socialist groups.
 The contacts formed by the elder Nabokov had served Piotr well when the Reich rolled around, propelling him to the very top of Ufi’s cinematography department. And, after the last drum had beat in Nuremberg and there were no more rallies left to film, he’d followed the ratline to America, camera in tow.
 John could think of nobody more well-suited to the task at hand.
 Piotr looked up and smiled when he saw the journalist approach his table. “Old friend,” the Russian hiccuped through a brogue informed by a half-dozen nationalities and more varieties of liquor. “How good to see you here.”
 “Yes, Pete,” John agreed as he sat next to the photographer and motioned for a barmaid. “You look very well.”
 “You lie. I’m sweating like Pavelić in Argentina. It’s so ing hot here that I could puke.”
 John laughed. Neither time nor distance could change the tenor of their friendship. “It’s been too long,” he said at last. “I had thought Paul fired you after that incident at the United Nations.”
 “Piss on Sovolev!” Piotr raged, attracting the attention of some of the guests in the lobby. “I hope he never washed the smell out of his breeches.”
 “That you did, and I’m sure he didn’t. And you’re lucky your press credentials weren’t revoked.”
 Piotr nodded and gulped his drink. “Perhaps so,” he said through a half-swallowed mouthful of Kahlúa, “but it was a damn sight more entertaining than this job.”
 John took this remark as an invitation to discuss their present assignment. Lighting a cigarette, he leaned in to his friend. “Speaking of, what have they told you about it, anyway? I mean, I wasn’t told anything until I’d already landed.”
 The Russian sighed and ran a hand through his shock-white hair. “Nothing. They told me nothing. That bastard Lovejoy thinks little about flying a man around the world without telling him why for.”
 John smiled, oddly pleased to be the one to let Piotr in on the subject matter they were to report on. It felt a little like giving a girl a dead dog for Christmas, wrapped in a Macy’s bag. He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaling with a theatrical affect for Piotr’s benefit.
 “Well, why do you think we’re here?”
 “I don’t know,” came the expected response. “I thought maybe Paul sent me personally for a reason.”
 John blinked. “Like?”
 “Something political. That maybe he thought I had some sort of contact with the government. Garcia is a nationalist, after all...”
 “No,” John interrupted. “It has nothing to do with geopolitics at all. In fact, it’s only political in the broadest possible sense, in the same what that what we do is inherently political, you and I.”
 Piotr’s look of drunken bemusement faded subtly into one of confusion, and John reveled in it. So often had he been on the receiving end of Piotr’s mumbled vagaries that it felt good to turn the tables on him for once. 
 “I’m sorry, John, but I don’t understand.”
 John thought a moment, choosing his words carefully. It was essential to capture Piotr’s interest, as he had a bad habit of slacking off at work that bored him. Then, with a final hit on his cigarette, he began quietly:
 “The Filipino people are devoutly religious, like so many others who have inherited the world-view of the West without also inheriting its wealth. Do you follow?”
 “No, not particularly.”
 John leaned in closer, and Piotr drew back, startled. “I’m sorry,” said John, “but the subject is a sensitive one here and I’d rather we keep this among ourselves. Tell me, Piotr: are you familiar with the concept of a death-cult?”
 Piotr’s eyes searched out the ceiling as he considered the question, doubtlessly probing his encylopedic knowledge of the bizarre and the useless. 
 Then: “Of course. We had them amongst ourselves in Russia.”
 John felt his eyebrow raise, and knew his intuition about Piotr’s suitability had been correct.
 “Tell me.”
 “You know the story of Rasputin doubtlessly, how they say he corrupted the Czarina, how his outrages turned the people against the crown. It was all nonsense. Rasputin was one of many holy men she kept on as an attendant, and not the most impious of those.”
 John hadn’t heard the story before, but that didn’t matter. “Go on.”
 “Well, they said he kept a harem of women in the palace, that he mistreated boys and girls alike. Most of those tales were invented by kulaks with bad consciences who wanted to live vicariously through such a figure. But...”
 Piotr drained his glass.
 “But some of them were true. Rasputin was associated with a group that we called the khlysty. The Christers. Not a member himself, but a student of their ways. They... what is the word? Beat themselves bloody with brooms or riding crops?”
 “They were flagellants?”
 “Yes, that’s the word exactly. The khlysty were flagellants. They felt they were doing God’s work every time they lashed themselves bloody. The Russian soul has always been self-negating. That is essential to keep in mind when you think of the Soviets.”
 John was thinking of something else instead, the fragment of a Bible verse he’d learned in Sunday school:
Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.
 “Your mind is a septic tank, Piotr. Probably less useful than one.”
 “I know,” beamed Piotr, apparently amused by the comparison. “But I’m still curious as to just what my little tale has to do with the reason I was dragged across the ocean to this pit. It’s hot, I’m drunk, and you’re going to tell me everything you know, starting right now.”
 John nodded in agreement. “The Russians are Orthodox and the Filipinos Catholics, but there seems to be some common ground between them. How did the public in Russia react to the flagellants you told me about? The Christers?”
 “They didn’t,” Piotr responded as he waved over the barmaid. “The Czar outlawed the practice. Even the liberals of the Duma suppressed them after they took power. All for the better. I think they preferred it that way.”
 A silence came over the table as John again felt out his words about how to best educate Piotr about violent religious asceticism. Finally, he began.
 “There’s one difference between Russia and the Philippines, at least. Here they want all the world to see just how devoted they are to their faith.”
 Piotr shook his head. “I still do not follow you, friend. What the Hell are we here to report about, exactly?”
 John made no effort to reply immediately, but instead glanced at the clock on the wall behind Piotr. “You’d know soon enough if you just waited. But you’ve never been able to do that, have you? Well, I’ll tell you. But why do you think 
we’re here, Piotr? Not on this assignment in particular, but as reporters on the whole?”
 Piotr was not interested in discussing the ethical dimension of his job. “I don’t care about that. I care about no more than my next paycheck. Stop ing around with me, John.”
 The writer looked at his hands, then looked away. And, silently, said: “They’re going to crucify themselves today, Piotr.”
 The mood of the conversation shifted dramatically, and John saw his partner’s eyes widen and dilate. “They’re going to do what?”
 “Today is Easter Sunday. They do it on this day every year as a display of faith.”
 “Who are 'they’?”
 “Nobody in particular. Or, rather, an awful lot of nobodies. Dozens of men from the slums and the streets. They’ll carry their crosses to the beach and take turns hammering nails into one another.” 
 The photographer’s head bowed, in thought or in prayer, and John expected him to say something profound in response. Instead the Russian looked up and smirked. “I don’t suppose your American Baptists would have the balls to do something like that.”
 The vulgarity of the joke caused John to break out in laughter. “Probably not.”
 Piotr’s smile dimmed. “And where will we have to go to catch sight of this spectacle?”
 “On the beach.”
 “You have a guide?”
 “Of course.”
 “Then what are we waiting for?”

[Stardust]

II.

The rain had long subsided, leaving behind a thick swelter that wrapped around Manila like a baby’s blanket. The air was thick not only with moisture but with manure, the streets paved with animal droppings. But John was comfortable walking in it, and found more camaraderie in the fallen faces of the Filipinos than he remembered ever finding in those who shared his skin hue.
 Piotr took no such pleasure in trudging the city streets, following well behind John and kicking maniacally at every hill of dung in front of him. It was a self-defeating practice, as his pant legs were smeared with the stuff anyway. Occasionally an automobile would pass by, and while John had the presence of mind to step off the road to let them by, Piotr did not, and was inevitably splashed in the face every time they came through.
 “Now you know how it felt on Makin.”
 Piotr made an obscene gesture at John.
 “Where are we going, anyway? I thought you needed one of the locals to find your way around? We sure as sh**t could use one now.”
 John leaned against a hydrant to give the Russian time to catch up. “Yeah, and that’s exactly where we’re going. He lives down this way.”
 Piotr sat in a huff on the ground, then realized his mistake and leapt to his feet to brush off his backside. “I see no reason why he couldn’t have met us at the hotel,” he growled. “What else are you paying him for?”
 “It’s common courtesy, Pete. Not that it’s ever been common in the quarters you frequent.”
 Piotr rose, and the two continued on their way, down winding alleys that led to nowhere in particular and across yards which substituted for trash heaps. Rows of tenement housing swept by them, so unlike the neatly manicured tract houses of America that John marveled anyone could live in them. In the corners huddled children with dirty faces and hands, their noses caked in snot and their clothes with filth. It took an act of will on his part not to reach out and hand them money or the clothes off his back. 
 The barkeep had told him that Manuel’s house was in one of the seediest parts of town, and he was right. The house was dilapidated even by the standards of Manila. The door hung off its hinges at odd angles, revealing a living room even more disheveled than the yard. The floor was covered in a carpet the color of piss, and John was certain that it hadn’t been that color when it was first installed. On the carpet was strewn the detritus of a life lived in poverty: empty baked bean tins; soda bottles; black trash bags with strange liquids oozing out of the top.
 Something hanging from the back wall caught John’s eye, and he froze in his step. Floating against the bone-colored wall as if sitting in judgment of a Hell comprised of sinful soda cans was a massive crucifix, shined to a silvery sheen and dominating the entire rear end of the room. Its beauty was magnified by the garbage surrounding it, so out of place that it couldn’t have been anywhere else. The effect was tremendous.
 Piotr seemed overcome by it too, and John saw him in the corner of his eye fidget uncomfortably with his hands. “Where is this guide of yours?” Piotr asked impatiently. “I don’t like standing in someone else’s house if they don’t know I’m not there.”
 “I know you are here, Señor,” Manuel called out from a side room.
 John looked around, startled. The Filipino emerged from an entrance opposite the crucifix carrying a pair of climbing boots and a walking stick. 
At least he didn’t take the money and cut out.
 “Where’s your family, Manuel?” John hadn’t known the man to have any family; the subject had never even been broached. But it was a reasonable assumption, based on demographics. And the contents of the trash in the house.
 “I sent them away,” the man replied, sitting down on a faded couch to put on the boots. “To my wife’s madre. If the children stay, they would follow us.”
 John nodded in acknowledgment and sat across from Manuel on a stubby chair. “Well, you said you could show us the best place to watch the excitement from. Where is that?”
  Manuel looked up at the journalist, wearing the same grin he’d had on when John first saw him in the bar. “On the cliffs above the beach,” he answered. “Many people try to watch from the beach. They push each other out. We go above them all to see. 
 The Russian pushed through the garbage on the floor to inspect the crucifix. For a moment John thought he would faint, until Piotr reached out to touch it with a distant and rather frightening look in his eye. John had seen him get that way before, when the subject of the Czar was brought up in casual conversation or when he passed by the domed spires of an Orthodox church in a car. Normally he wouldn’t have disturbed Piotr when he went into one of his trances. But the pair of them had business to attend do, and it wouldn’t do to have his photographer’s mind elsewhere when they were seeing to it.
 “Pete? Are you alright?”
 The man shook his head, coming to as if nothing had happened. “I’m sorry. I get that way sometimes when I see something that is beautiful to me. And suffering, sweetest suffering, is more beautiful to me than is anything else in this world.”
 John ignored him, knowing better than to listen to one of his rants. Instead he looked at Manuel, who was struggling to lace up the new boots he’d bought.
 “You’re trying those awfully tight, aren’t you?”
 Manuel looked up at him and flashed his sheepish grin. “If I don’t, they club me over the head and steal them off my feet.”
 John felt a sudden jolt of sympathy flash through him for the peasantry he was about to make an object of ridicule out of halfway across the world. “Why are you working today anyway? Isn’t today the Sabbath?”
 The Filipino shrugged and started to answer when Piotr turned towards the pair with evident frustration in his face. “When are we going? I’m getting tired of standing here, staring at walls. Patience may be a virtue, but, I’m sorry to say, I’ve never been particularly virtuous.”
 Manuel looked up to address the photographer, and it occurred to John just how old he appeared, sunblasted and weathered like a desert stone. “We go whenever you are ready, Señor. But I warn you the trip is a long one. 
 “That’s perfectly alright. I’ve been on the road all my life. I hardly think an hour-long walk is going to kill me.”
 “Maybe not the walk,” Manuel deadpanned, “but the people you’ll be walking past.”
 As the trio left the house, John feared that Manuel might have been right. The houses, which he’d found so quaint on entering, had taken on a monstrous dimension in the radiance of the noontime sun, casting threatening shadows across the narrow streets they’d trailed. A multitude of identical brown faces peered out at them from the shadowed recesses of decaying parlors. The baryo John had found appealing in the morning light now struck him as a prospective mortuary. 
 He hadn’t noticed that Piotr had stalked up to him until he tapped him on the shoulder in mid-whisper. “Look at them,” the Russian said, his voice a cool hiss. “You sympathized with these people. I saw that this morning.”
 “What’s so wrong with that?”
 The pair glanced over their shoulders at Manuel almost simultaneously, for fear that he might hear their conversation. But he had kept his distance, whether out of absent-mindedness or a concern for his own security neither could say.  “How could you love a creature like that?” Piotr chided. 
 “For the same reason you love images of suffering,” John shot back.
 Piotr had no response.

[Stardust]

III.

Neither of them had thought to question the guide about the length of the walk, and it was far longer than either had anticipated. By the time the murky ground had begun to give way to sand not unlike the color of Manuel’s carpet, only the Filipino still seemed as energetic as he had when they’d left his house. He was by now leading the group, walking far ahead of John, with Piotr trailing complainingly behind. 
 Their path had followed the course of the sun as it arced its circle overhead. Constellations had begun to emerge from behind it, throwing their cold purple light into the white palette painted by the sun and forcing brilliant Technicolor tones onto the sky above. And amid it all swirled a reflected blue so brilliant that it seemed for all the world as if sea and sky had come together in an embrace.
 The effect, John thought, was beautiful.
 Heavenly.
 Not so below. 
 Piotr had removed his shoes and left them behind in the sand. If before they had hurt his feet, it seemed to be nothing next to the irritation he felt from the burning sand.
 “This is absolutely unbearable,” the Russian moaned, his accent breaking into a grating whine. “How much further have we to go?”
 “I thought you said you could take it?” 
 “The roads I lived on were paved, and we traveled them by automobile,” Piotr panted through great gulps of breath. “I wasn’t make for walking this. In Russia even the sand is cold.”
 The group continued onward despite his protestations and soon reached an elevation where the beach gradually ceded ground to a sloping rocky outcropping. Manuel motioned them on wordlessly, and the trio began their ascent. The sun had positioned itself opposite them in both movement and momentum, and had begun to sink back into the ocean. For a moment John could appreciate the ancient belief that it held court somewhere in the depths, rising up every morning to bring light to the world. 
 The cliff itself was far larger than he had thought it appeared from the beach. The path coiled itself around its edge like a serpent, and the trio were forced to walk single-file for its duration. It seemed to narrow to a fine point nearly halfway up the side, until John and Piotr were forced to grasp the cliff’s face for a handhold. Manuel continued as he was with Piotr’s camera in tow, and John found that he had begun to be disturbed by the smile that seemed to be plastered to his face. 
 Eventually the gravel smoothed out into a fine powder, bone-white and bleached. Piotr called the human caravan to a halt to put his shoes on and sat on the side of a large bolder for balance. In his face John saw exhaustion, but that was unsurprising; what did excite him was the odd look in his friend’s eyes, something he’d never seen there before.
 “Is anything bothering you, Pete?” John asked as he stopped to brush the dust off his pants.
 “This place,” the man blurted out so quickly that John was taken aback. It was if someone had opened a release valve in the photographer’s head. “It bothers me. Not the least because I think I’ve seen it before.”
 John had always found Piotr odd, but had never thought him mad before that moment. “How could you possibly have seen this before? You’ve never been south of Arkhangelsk. Perhaps you’ve seen a photograph. It’s gorgeous up here, isn’t it? I think I can see the Home Islands from here.”
 The Russian looked away and said nothing.
 Then Manuel walked over to the pair, and seemed little the worse for the climb. 
 “How much further are we from the top?”
 “Not too much, Señor. We are maybe halfway there right now. Why do we stop?”
 John smiled at the eagerness with which Manuel presented himself. It had been worthwhile after all. “Say,” he said, “you don’t seem too terribly bothered by the climb. You come up here often?”
 “No, Señor,” the Filipino said. “The Japanese soldiers made us walk to here before the Americanos came.”
 That was a revelation to John. “What happened then?”
 “They forced us to jump off the top,” he said, and the smile never left his face. 
 A suspicion now crossed John’s mind that the only madre his children had been sent to was Santa Maria, and that they would never make a return trip. Manuel had evidently been disturbed from the first time they’d met, but he would say nothing. If it comforted the man to believe that his wife and children were safe and well, he reasoned, it was hardly his place to shatter that illusion. 
Everyone has their delusions.
 The party continued after a brief respite, and the climb became more treacherous yet as the path turned upward and the gentle slope of the cliff face became a sheer vertical wall. Manuel was well ahead of his companions by now, occasionally slipping so far out of sight that John had to stop momentarily to regain his bearings. Piotr again brought up the rear, and several times seemed to be on the verge of collapse. His demeanor had so thoroughly changed over the course of the day that John feared they might have to return to the hotel and so miss the subject of their report. 
 Nor was Piotr the only thing slowing them down. By now the finely-ground dust that blanketed the ground had come to reach to John’s ankles, and he found it quite difficult to move around in. Eventually he stopped to inspect the powder, and saw with alarm that mixed into it were bones which had not quite yet been rendered into the same consistency as the rest of the stuff. 
 Teeth, fingers, jawbones, feet - all together, each hewn cleanly off at the joint. Looking more closely, John recoiled in horror after noticing that several of them appeared far too small to have come from an adult. 
 Mortified, he chased after Manuel, now a faint figure receding into the distance. 
 “What happened here?” he screamed to no avail. Manuel continued walking, utterly oblivious to the confusion of his pursuer. Exasperated, John hastened his step, at last catching up to the man near the top of the cliff.
 John grasped his shoulder and wheeled the Filipino on his feet. What he saw was a madness that he’d not quite noticed before.
 “Señor, they take us out here and shoot us, women and children and men all. But I sent my children away. I see them here sometimes.  They come up to me and cover me with kisses. I give them flowers.”
 His own mouth as lack as those which littered the beach, John fumbled for anything to say. He was stopped by the sound of drums. And the sound of screaming.
 The sight would have struck John as humorous if it hadn’t been so completely bizarre. Piotr had stripped, not only his shoes but every other piece of clothing on his body, and was running barefoot up the path towards the others. His movements were in perfect timing with a drum pounding off a military march somewhere in the distance. Piotr’s arms trailed behind him like the wings of a chicken, and his hair, a brilliant white like fire in the setting sunlight, completed the panorama. 
 The Russian slammed headfirst into John, and together the two crumpled to the ground in a power-white mangle of skin and dust. John’s head hit hard against the ground, and for a moment his vision narrowed, then pulsed in tune with the drumbeat. He lay there for a moment in stunned silence, then, using the body of his companion as leverage, slowly lifted himself off the ground.
 Piotr too had begun to come around and had risen to his knees. John offered him a hand, but he pushed it away wildly and fell on his ass.
 “What the Hell is the matter with you?” John screamed, by now having utterly ceased to care about writing any article ever again. “What’s going on?”
 Piotr didn’t answer. Instead he cupped his hands and scooped out a handful of the powder into it, then sifted it tenderly between his fingers, allowing the fine granules of bone to fall between the cracks. A few pieces of broken humanity remained behind.
 “Golgotha!” chanted Piotr. “Golgotha! Golgotha! Place of bones!”
 Then, with a look of existential fear on his face, the man pointed to the horizon and cried: “Look!”
 John looked, and beheld a massive wall of black slithering around the base of the cliff. Thousands of Filipinos, dirty and beautiful, had gathered on the beach to worship their God in the way they saw best fit. Many of the pilgrims had already erected their crosses; several others struggled to find support in the sand, still damp from the morning’s rain. Those in front were flogged by those behind, until the entire scene took on the dimensions of a colony of ants foraging for food. Others still had managed not only to put their crosses in place but had already ascended them, and were being nailed in place by others of their kind.
 John looked on in rapt attention as the nails began to be hammered home, and the drumbeat was drowned out by the noise of splintering wood. From the distance he could scarcely see the faces of the men, but he could imagine that their ecstasy was matched only by his awe.
 Then the blood came, spilling out of a thousand wounds, mingling in the water
(to wine to water to wine to water)
 like a bizarre transubstantiation, like a Holy Communion for the gods of the sea. 
 John understood then, and the onset of that knowledge left him dizzy and breathless. The intermingling of essences was the only escape for the mass of humanity beneath him; they were united in their ecstasy, in their horror, in their hope. The shedding of blood was not merely for the remission of sin, but for the remission of individuality. A thousand wounds, each identical to the last; a million cuts, every one an entryway to sights unseen. 
 From a height that felt like space, at the summit of his capacity for human experience, above scarlet seas as red as a wound in the world, he felt in equal measure a man and a God. How else could he survive the transcendental sight before him and grow strong in its presence? He paid no attention to the man (had he known his name?) who slipped past him to join the furor below, except that he envied the man as he envied all who could bear not only the sight but also the sensation of metal ripping skin.
 Then John saw a vision rise before him from the sea, a multifaceted thing. He saw, and knew no more.

[Stardust]

IV. It Appeared To Me As If In A Dream

New York, 1924  
Al Smith’s tirade against the Klan was met with equal parts adulation and scorn in the press box as he delivered it in his trademark New York argot. The delegates on the floor seemed to be moved by it at the least, stomping the floor like a drum in time to their chants: “Smith! Smith! Smith!”
Nobody really believed he could get the nomination, after all, least of all the reporter seated directly opposite the grandstand at the center of Madison Square Garden. Ultimately, he didn’t think it mattered. Coolidge was a shoe-in, not merely on account of the sympathy vote for Harding but because he was not Catholic. Smith couldn’t win the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, let along the office itself.
A large projection screen dropped down in front of the podium, and a fat, mousy man in an ill-fitting tuxedo climbed on top it to beg the crowd to stop. The Smith campaign had been an early adopter of the wondrous new technologies that now seemed to be springing up overnight, though John wondered idly if that was not in itself a factor in the strange way his campaign had been received by the public.
It certainly was a factor in his sudden need for a cigarette. Films bored John to tears. His mother said that they were the “peepholes of the devil”, and, for all he knew, she was right. He wouldn’t feel guilty for missing the show, and nobody would miss him for it.
It was only when he stepped outside that he saw where the real show was.
There had been reports throughout the evening of a Ku Klux Klan rally somewhere in the vicinity of the Gardens, and some of the more intrepid reporters had ventured out into the city to find them.
They needed have looked no further than the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.
It wasn’t the light from the flaming crosses that had attracted his eye, nor the faint but audible sound of their singing. It was the lightness of their robes contrasted against the city night, each one like a window with a gas lamp in it, which had drawn his attention and kept it there now in amazement.
He neither cared about nor heard just what they sang about. It would be the same old litany, a hymnal as old as the Republic itself: Smith was an agent of the Irish, who were to the last man agents of the Pope, who was himself an agent of Satan Himself. The cause of their complaint didn’t matter in the slightest. It would be forgotten after the election cycle, when some other social evil, like the enforcement of the Volstead Act, took its place.
It was the pageantry, the splendor, the grandeur: that was all that mattered. There was a beauty to it all of the sort that required a poet and not a journalist to express. There was something tangible on the tip of John’s tongue nevertheless; he wanted to say something about whiteness and redness, about cruciforms and city lights winking at night. But he couldn’t. His perception was clouded.
Then he was off again, his vision fading rapidly, then swelling into focus again. Night, still, but hotter, and, from his experience, later yet. Burma or Siam or any other nameless jungle country. He had been here before, too.
A rocket streaked into the night, and its explosion left John breathless. American, he thought. It ultimately didn’t matter. His life was in no danger at all. He wasn’t here in any real sense.
He looked at his feet, and as he remembered there was a soldier lying there, blood spilling out over hands clenched tightly and held on his chest. The man was dying, and any moral obligation John may have had towards him would die with him.
Dying - but not dead yet.
John bent his knee to the man, hovering over him like a priest administering the last rites. Peeling back the helmet, he could see his hair even in the gloom, even as matted with blood and dirt as it was.
His hair was as white as a child’s soul.
And when the man reached up to grasp at John, he did not pull back. He had done that too many times in his life. And when the man leaned into his ear, John made no effort to listen. He knew already what would be said.
“There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
Savior Self.”

[Stardust]

This is, incidentally, the - I don't want to say "eponymous"; we'll go with "title" to give it a musical nuance - title story to my book.