How like madness that sounded at the time Panthea said it.
As I wrote earlier, I see every human being as an eccentric to one degree or another. This can be true only if our assumption that there is a standard for normality is wrong. And I believe it is wrong. The human race is at the apex of all life-forms because, no matter how strenuously sociologists and politicians and others of their persuasion insist on defining our species into interest groups and factions and classes and tribes, the better to control us, in truth our greatest strength is in the uniqueness of each of us. Einstein, in his genius, can reveal to us much about the workings of the universe, and a child with Down syndrome can teach us, by his or her profound gentleness and humility, how urgently this troubled world needs kindness. Everyone has something to contribute.
Everyone but sociopaths. Those empty souls possess no genuine human feelings—other than a lust for power—but are excellent at faking them. Some say that as many as 10 percent of human beings are sociopaths. Some are street thugs who will kill you for the contents of your wallet or merely for the thrill of it. Others are among the most elite and privileged groups in society.
Although Panthea’s claim that our adversaries were older than the universe sounded like lunacy, I knew she wasn’t a sociopath. I found it nearly impossible to think of John Kennedy Ching producing one. However, madness is a different thing from sociopathy, and the potential lies in every heart. Auschwitz and Dachau and Belsen. The killing fields of Cambodia. The tens of millions murdered by Stalin, by Mao. When feverish politics and demented ideology entwine, those who are not well anchored to the beliefs that allow a civil society can be swept away, becoming part of the storm of madness that lays waste to everything. When she spoke of a war that had raged before stars ever formed, she seemed to have bought into a cultish creed that might lead to fanaticism and madness.
In Panthea’s home, however, Bridget and I found our experience of the morning—what we had seen when drawn into mirrors as if into another world—replicated on the walls of the front room. If these murals were part of Panthea’s madness, then we were mad as well.
As we would learn, the Quonset hut, which faced directly east at its entrance and west at its back door, was laid out like a shotgun house, without hallways: first, a large living room; then beyond a doorway, a smaller dining room; thereafter, another door into a kitchen; beyond the kitchen, a bathroom; beyond the bath, a garage in which a vintage Range Rover stood in wait.
The initial space, a living room with a circle of six armchairs and small tables to serve them, also included a large adjustable drawing table with a tall swiveling chair, a cabinet in which she stored brushes and paints, and a pair of easels to each of which was fixed a painting in progress.
Judging by just those two incomplete works, I thought Panthea Ching was immensely talented. Sadly, the paintings by the fry cooks Phil and Jill Beane—he with spiky purple hair and shaved eyebrows; she with spiky green hair, black pajamas, and red shoes—were by comparison much less affecting. If my friends, the twins, shaved their heads and dyed their skin blue, and if the art establishment decided they were marketable, perhaps the two paintings of theirs that I’d bought, which currently hung in the employee bathrooms at Arizona! magazine, would soar in value and provide me with the funds for a comfortable retirement. However, I had to admit that such a bonanza now seemed even less likely than a monster hunter’s living long enough to retire.
The Quonset hut was big, and the front room, by far the largest of its spaces, measured perhaps sixty feet square. On the long north and south walls were the halves of the mural she purported to have painted in her sleep.
“Each wall was completed over a period of weeks,” Panthea said. “I would often wake at night and be working on these. At times during the day, I’d be overcome with weariness, lie down, fall into sleep, only to wake hours later and find myself with the trolley, brushes and tubes of acrylics arranged on top, painting feverishly.”
We moved to the left of the front door, to the long south wall, where the eight-foot-tall mural began, portraying in vivid detail what I had seen in the motel-bathroom mirror that morning. Then it had been a three-dimensional underworld with its denizens in motion. Here it was a two-dimensional static image, although the artist’s passion and technique gave it unsettling power. The labyrinth of tunnels, the surreal architecture. Dead people hanging from the walls or lying on catafalques, spectral light emanating from their open mouths and sunken eyes. Ghouls devouring.