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“You don’t have to do this,” Evie kept insisting.
“Ling,” Jericho said. “Ling, will you tell Lupe…” He swallowed hard. “Will you…”
Ling nodded. “I will.”
“Evie,” Jericho said.
“Yes?” She was crying.
“Don’t waste it. Make a good life.”
“Jericho!” Evie grabbed for him, but already he was running toward the Eye.
The land of the dead had fused with Ling and Henry’s dreamscape. It was changing rapidly, atoms realigning and realities folding in on themselves.
“Hen! Make it stop!” Theta screamed.
“I can’t! It has a will of its own now. We’re connected to it. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Memphis. The time is now,” Theta said.
Memphis faced the great wound between worlds. It was so big. How could he possibly hope to heal such a rift? The King of Crows’s words played in Memphis’s head, stealing away his hope: You gave away your power.
And suddenly, Memphis realized: He had given away his power. Willingly. But not to the King of Crows. He’d given his power to Bessie Timmons to cure her typhoid, and to the Widow DeVille for her bad arm. To the Washingtons’ baby with the croup, and to John Booker’s broken leg. To Dutch Schultz’s men and to his mother. And to Evie and Bill and Theta and Isaiah and all those hopeful faces showing up at the storefront church years before when he was the Harlem Healer. The King of Crows hoarded power; Memphis had shared it, and now, when he had need of it, that harvest had come up strong and fine inside him. This was his strength. All those people were within him—their atoms had become his atoms, a whole community carried forward, coming together now to heal the healer. He had not come here alone, and he had not come unarmed. He felt something new stirring within, rising up. Like standing in that wheat field the day the rains came, or in the wings of the Hotsy Totsy when the band was on fire. The healing power was coming on strong—stronger than before. Memphis was incandescent with energy. He burned as brightly as the Eye itself. Like the King of Crows, electrical sparks played at his fingertips, golden, bright, alive.
He placed his hands on the edge of the portal and felt it soften under his touch. Then he stood back and watched as his work took hold, spreading.
Healing.
THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE
As Jericho ran toward the rapidly devolving Eye, he heard whispers. It was like an ancestral memory playing out. As if all the stories collected here feared being obliterated, too. They were rising up around him, talking to him. Letting him know they were there.
How many times had Jericho read Nietzsche’s passage on the eternal recurrence?
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The etern
al hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Jericho had reflected on that passage so many times. It had seemed to him a rebuke to any religious notion of living not for this world, but for the idea of the one after, a paradise that rejected all that was human: no strife or greed or want. No discovery or sudden joy. But if you abandoned the idea that such a paradise awaited you, and believed that you would live this life over and over again, would you not live the life you had more thoughtfully? Would you not think carefully about your choices? Would you not love with abandon—love and love and love some more?
Sergeant Leonard fell into step beside Jericho. He grinned. “Let’s see how far we can take this ride, kid.”
What makes a man? His choices. That was at the heart of an argument Jericho had been having with himself for many years.
The soldiers were gone, but the record still spun around and around on the Victrola, endless revolutions. It spun so fast that the song was lost to a whine. The Eye was breaking open, releasing all it held. Around Jericho, beautiful chaos unfolded. Atoms splitting, absorbing and releasing, throwing off particles. Jericho was in the middle of it. The machine had split apart and was re-forming around him. Jericho was inside the Eye and he was the Eye and he and the Eye were in decay, transforming, becoming energy.
Light punctured his hands.
His skin glowed like a Blake painting.
Jericho saw the land. And he saw the dead underneath the land. He saw them decomposing, their flesh sinking into the ground. The dead became the land. Nutrients for crops, which the living harvested and ate. The dead became the living until the living became the dead. An eternal recurrence. A circle. This was the oldest and most important story humankind told itself: that it could transcend death. All religion, all stories boiled down to this: We are born. We live. We struggle. We love. We search for meaning. We die. Again and again and again.
Sergeant Leonard took hold of Jericho’s dissolving hand until they, too, were joined. Even at this last moment, Jericho was not alone.
There had been Sam and Will. Memphis and Isaiah, Ling and Henry and Theta. Lupe and Evie. There had been someone named Jericho, but none of that mattered now.
