Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘This is a free country,’ he resumed, ‘but you are never free to sin. That’s what we’ve got to remind our brother of. The law may allow you to fornicate like a mangy dog, it may allow you to sodomise, it may allow you to blaspheme, it may allow you to peddle pornography, and it may allow you to murder a child in the womb . . . but GOD DOES NOT!No wonder our brother is led astray when we have become so arrogant as to supersede God’s laws with ones we’ve dreamed up for our own convenience. God’s laws weren’t made for convenience; they were made for our good and His glory. And it’s up to all of us to remind our brother of that.

  ‘Now I know many of you have been trying to do that for a long time, maybe even all your lives. You have suffered ridicule and contempt as you stood up for the truth, as you stood outside the abortion clinics, as you picketed AIDS funerals, as you stood at the gates of your kids’ schools in defiance of the filth they told you was “sex education” and the blasphemy they told you was “natural history”. You have been trying to save your brother from his sins with all the efforts you can muster. So you must be looking up at me on this stage today and asking what more I think you can give if this has not been enough. Well, my brothers, my sisters, my friends, I understand that frustration, and I also understand the cause of that frustration.

  ‘You’ve been shouting God’s word to your brother, but he cannot hear it above the deafening clamour of evil that issues from our TV sets, from our radios and from our movie screens. You have tried to tell your brother that blasphemy is wrong, but he hears it and sees it unchecked, uncondemned, across the airwaves and on the silver screen. You have told him a man cannot lie down with another man, but he sees sodomites on his television, depicted as figures accepted in society, their sin accepted in society. You have tried to tell him about the virtues of chastity, of fidelity, of the sacred state of matrimony as the only sanctification for sexual intercourse, and yet he sees all around him pornography, images of sexuality and the condoning of free fornication. From the filth of “adult” movies, to TV shows aimed at our children,sex is promoted as a personal plaything.

  ‘Never before in the history of our world has evil had such a voice, and it is no coincidence that never before has there been so much sin, so much depravity, and so much godlessness. God couldn’t possibly expect you to compete with such a cacophony, could he?’

  St John stood still, looked down at the floor, building up expectations. He turned his head skywards a fraction, and smiled. ‘Well, friends,’ he said quietly, the crowd stilling their breathing lest they miss his soft words (the old Bill Shankly trick), ‘maybe He did expect that and maybe He didn’t. But He now knows it couldn’t be done, and remember that although life is a test, God wants you to succeed. That’s why He has decided to give us a hand in getting the world’s attention. He’s going to clear His throat pretty loud so that everybody turns off that racket and listens to His words.

  ‘I know, because I have seen His work beneath the ocean. I have seen detailed research – photographs, charts, plans – that the scientists who scoff at us cannot understand. They have refused to recognise His work etched in the earth in the past, so how could they have the vision to recognise His hand now? But I recognised it, and what I saw was awesome to behold. He is preparing to strike, preparing a mighty wave to demonstrate His wrath, to literally wash away the sinners.

  ‘And sagely He has chosen as His target the Twentieth Century’s combined Sodom and Gomorrah. For here, in Los Angeles, is the source of the river of filth that pollutes His word and poisons His people. From this city emanate the anti-Gospels of atheism, of immorality, of anarchy. The pornography that turns people into rapists, the images of violence that turn them into murderers, the lies that tell us it’s okay to rut like an animal, it’s okay to sodomise, it’s okay to murder your baby – it’s all produced here in so-called Tinseltown. Well,’ he said, shaking his head and walking to the very front of the stage, ‘not for long it’s not.’

  Steff swallowed. The crowd were screaming approval and jumping up and down like it was the World Cup Final. He thought fleetingly of Lord of the Flies,and wondered whether he’d better start joining in if he didn’t want to be dragged down to the beach for a terminal kicking.

  ‘Now I’m sure some of you have been wondering, under the circumstances, why I decided to stage this little get-together here on the coast. Well, that’s nothing to do with the tidal wave, but everything to do with its target.’

  St John pointed towards the Pacific Vista. Everyone turned to look at it then winced as the setting sun gave them a sharp poke in the eye via the glass canopy.

  ‘Over there at the AFFM you’ll find no better – or rather no worse – collection of filth and filth-peddlers. American Feature Film Market? I call it the UnAmerican Festering Filth Market. So I thought there could be no more appropriate setting to launch our Mission of Purity than right in front of that den of pornographers, atheists and sodomites, that Pandora’s box of evil and sin. Where each year they get together to plan the dissemination of their corrupting trash throughout the whole world, and where this year – nineteen ninety-nine, the end of the century, the end of the millennium – as predicted in the Book of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon will flaunt herself, a portent of the destruction to come.’

  Heads nodded gravely around Steff. He didn’t have a scoob what the man was talking about. That’s what you got for not watching CFC. That and a fully functioning brain.

  St John pointed at the hotel again. This time, the crowd’s eyes stayed on him, their pupils still recovering from the last assault. ‘People like them are the reason your voices haven’t been heard. People like them are the reason sin proliferates. People like them are the reason our lawmakers have forgotten God. And people like them are the reason God is angry.’

  It was getting worryingly Nurembergesque.

  ‘Them,’ he continued, with a sharp stab of the finger. ‘Those in that building, those in the film studios, those at the TV networks. But their time is running out, and our time is coming. Our. Time. Is. Coming. Our mission, our responsibility to our neighbour – if we truly want to be our brother’s keeper – is to make our voices heard and theirs silenced.

  ‘We will save the world from sin – and the battle starts right here, right now!’

  St John punched the air, clasping the mike to the stand with his left hand. The cheers were deafening, the adulation awe-inspiring. He leaned forward and shook the hands that were thrust up towards him, waving and punching the air again as he manoeuvred along the front of the stage, bouncers straining to hold back the hysterical devotees.

  From behind Steff came an incongruously deflated sigh.

  ‘Ah, shit, I really wish he hadn’t said that,’ rumbled a deep tired tone. Steff looked back. There was a big bald guy standing just behind him with his arms folded. He and Steff both stood out in the crowd for their height and demonstrable lack of euphoria, but this bloke had the further conspicuousness of being the only black person in the place.

  ‘Said what?’ Steff asked, catching his eye.

  ‘All of it.’

  seven

  The Whore of Babylon ran a hand through her hair and sighed, switching the TV set off with the remote and heading for the fridge. She grabbed an enticingly condensation-cloaked bottle of beer from beside a clingfilm-wrapped remnant of yesterday’s pizza and flipped off the cap against the wall-mounted opener with an unfailingly satisfying wrist-action. She walked over to the stereo and stuck on some Indigo Girls, turning the volume up an indulgent couple of notches.

  Then the Whore of Babylon pulled the cord tighter on her silk dressing gown, opened the slide door and took a seat on her balcony to watch the sunset. She sipped at her cold beer and looked at the evening sky’s play of colours, a palette Mother Nature had never intended, certainly, but a pleasing one nonetheless. She was trying to immerse herself in the moment, trying to relax, drink her drink, look at the view. Trying to tell herself she wasn’t going to get piss
ed off, that what St John said hadn’t got to her.

  But she was, and it had. She just needed to listen to the music to know that. She always put on the Indigos when she was furious about something she’d seen on TV or read in the newspaper, as though Emily Saliers and Amy Ray could respond on her behalf, strike out in a riposte that expressed her feelings more powerfully than she could herself. Or maybe it just renewed her strength for the fight to hear their voices ring out in anger, joy or sorrow, and know that she was less alone.

  The fucking TV. Why did they give the asshole airtime? He had his own goddamn network – if anyone was stupid enough to want to hear him, they knew where to look. But these days the son-of-a-bitch was all over the six o’clock news, having apparently rediscovered his taste for nationwide ridicule. And no matter whether he spoke for ten minutes or for two hours, and no matter what else he talked about, they always picked out any soundbite that mentioned her – and found time to reiterate once more for anyone recently returned from Mars who the Whore of Babylon was: ‘Republican Senator Bob Witherson’s daughter Madeleine, who shocked the world when it was discovered that she was in fact notorious porn actress Katy Koxx, star of Babylon Blue and several other XXX-rated movies.’

  Notorious porn actress. That always made her smile. Among porn actresses she was hardly notorious, indeed before the big revelation, barely known, and well down the cast list of anything she’d worked on. But in tabloid media-speak, all porn actresses were notorious porn actresses; well, at least the ones who had somehow made it into the wider public eye.

  The media at large had latched on to her because of who her father was, and had been too busy salivating over the news-value godsend of this hyper-conservative religious moralist having a daughter so disgrace him to dwell much on what the irony told them about cause and effect. They weren’t very big on analysis in journalism, these days. Hand-wringing usually stood in as a poor replacement.

  She liked to think Luther St John had latched on to her because she had been outspoken in defence of herself and in criticism of the hypocritical bullshit the likes of he and her father made a living peddling. But in truth she knew it was more to do with her serendipitously having been in a skin flick with the word ‘Babylon’ in the title, allowing the manipulative little prick to squeeze maximum biblical portent out of a very tenuous association.

  And he would not let it go. It had been the same old schtick for months, banging on about catastrophic prophecies being fulfilled because the Whore of Babylon had been made manifest here in 1999, omitting to observe that she had only been made manifest through him attaching that soubriquet to her. He tended also to skirt around the inconvenient fact that she no longer actively fitted even his definition of whore, as she had bailed out of the business right after the big story broke. The ‘former whore of Babylon’ didn’t quite have the same ring. Not even ‘notorious former whore of Babylon’ would send chills down many fundamentalists’ spines.

  Madeleine would admit to waking up in a fairly misanthropic mood now and again, but she didn’t really feel much like a fount of ultimate evil, not even on Monday mornings. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so cynically calculated. Never mind dictators, torturers, war criminals or realtors, Maddy Witherson was the true baddest of the bad just because she had balled a few guys, none of whom complained. But Luther knew what he was doing. He had made her a figurehead, not just for the pornography industry but for everything people hated about any kind of movies, TV shows, books, whatever.

  Talking to Tony, her agent, usually helped give her a sense of perspective about the whole thing. Tony was pissed off because St John was considered too much of a fringe figure for them to get maximum mileage out of his declamations. The news would quote Luther because wackos were good copy, but he wasn’t taken seriously enough to really put stars on Madeleine’s infamy-rating. ‘If we could get someone in DC to back up some of this biblical shit,’ he’d say, longingly, ‘maybe Ed Meese or Pat Buchanan . . .’

  Not that she was short of outraged barbs from big-name Washington rentaquotes, but they did tend to stick to ‘decency’ issues rather than apocalyptic visions. In politics, it never hurt anyone’s career to join a moral lynch-mob, especially when sexuality was involved.

  She had been curious at first to see how her father would react to St John’s onslaughts, whether he’d quietly use his influence to ask his political bedfellow to layoff a bit, less for the sake of his daughter than because it was heaping more embarrassment on him. But not a bit of it. He’d played the wounded parent for a little while, giving her a repentance ultimatum. When she didn’t deliver, it was open season. The Christian Right could cut loose on little Maddy much as they liked. Look what that ungrateful bitch had done to her poor daddy, and after all he’d done for her.

  Yeah. All he’d done for her. More than anyone would ever know.

  Madeleine adjusted her chair and sat with her head back, gulping down more beer. As she placed the bottle on the floor she noticed that the cord had come loose again and her gown had fallen open. She looked down at the dark shadow of her pubic hair and the slight mounds of her breasts, and wondered, not for the first time, what exposing them to a video camera had to do with a Jewish philosopher preaching tolerance in Roman-occupied Palestine.

  She had been over it in her head a million times; the signal absurdity was not a comfort before, so it certainly wasn’t going to offer solace now. Couldn’t these fucking primitives find something else to get stirred up about? Thousands of years into the development of human civilisation and America, supposedly the most advanced country on Earth, was still putting fertility rites at the centre of its social morality.

  Because that was all it was: pagan fertility rites. The superstitious ascribing of inflated spiritual significance to the sexual act. Mystifying it, cloaking it in ritual, and, most importantly, attempting to control it. Telling you when you could and couldn’t do it. Telling you how you were allowed to do it. Telling you who you were allowed to do it with. Telling you why you should or shouldn’t be doing it.

  The bottom line of all of which was, of course, reproduction – the divine miracle of childbirth.

  You don’t do it because it’s fun; the pleasure is an unfortunate side-effect that we’d eradicate if we could (and with female circumcision we’re halfway there). You do it to expand the tribe, for the greater glory of its God. Your sexuality is your reproductive potential; any abuse of it is a blasphemy against your God, incurring His wrath and that of the tribe.

  So doing it yourself is selfish and arrogant. Doing it with someone of the same sex is a grotesque and bestial insult to His honour. And doing it in front of a camera for other people’s voyeuristic pleasure will, apparently, bring about the end of the world.

  It was said that the dumber an idea was, the more likely its proponent to come forward brandishing a flag and a Bible. This was because the normal political currencies of reason and logic could offer no support. Men like St John – men like her father – had plied both totems with such vigour that the currencies of reason and logic had become devalued. You might be able to quote facts to back up your position, but they could counter with The Truth.

  Stark and utterly self-evident realities seemed to have their relevance sapped from them by a constant bombardment of pseudo-theological horseshit. Perhaps it was the fundamentalists’ ultimate revenge on the detested Darwin: they were actually reversing evolution. The next step in man’s development would be to shed his cognitive abilities, because he no longer needed them. Heck, all that thinking just made things too darn complicated. Besides, we already know all the answers.

  She remembered her father engaging in a TV debate, advocating parents’ rights to exempt their kids from sex education at school. It had been pointed out that in Europe, the countries with the lowest teenage pregnancy and abortion rates were also those with the frankest sex education, and where that education began earliest. The average age of first sexual activity in those countries was also seve
ral years older than in the USA.

  ‘Do you want our children’s innocence ruined at five?’ he’d countered. The age five had come from nowhere; it hadn’t been mentioned by his opponent, it was just helpfully emotive.

  ‘Do you want our kids hearing about oral sex and sodomy on Sesame Street?’Again, this was no answer, but then he wasn’t talking to his opponent, he was talking to ‘America’. And America was dumb enough to listen.

  ‘The choice here tonight is between the Condom and the Cross. Which do you want your children to learn about?’

  Nobody asked why they couldn’t learn about both – the sex educationists weren’t seeking a parental opt-out for religious lessons. But implied and imagined threats were the politician’s stock-in-trade.

  However, Madeleine thought, if there had to be such a choice, America might want to ask itself which would better equip its children to deal with the most powerful instinct in the human condition. One that would explain the physical and emotional changes, the longings, the desires, the fears and insecurities; or one that would simply tell you not to ask, not to think about it if you’re a good little girl or boy, you’ll know what to do when the time comes, and you’ll know the time has come because you’ll be in your wedding gown. One that would tell you what you were dealing with and assure you that it was normal and healthy (as well as complex, dangerous, baffling and frustrating); or one that would tell you it was dirty, alien, foreign and forbidden, vulgar and base, bestial and depraved.

  One that would give you control of your sexuality; or one that would leave it vulnerable to the control of others.

  One that could make it control you.

  That was why this moral code of abstinence and ignorance was utterly irresponsible. Sexuality was like a constant flow from an endlessly productive source. It could not be stopped, could not be suppressed, only regulated. If you tried to block it off, it would build up and build up until eventually it either found a way out or smashed a way out. Then it would come out in places it shouldn’t, or come out with violent force. When it did, pity help you if you were in its path. Especially if you were a woman or a child.