Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  She leaned against the empty wooden seat in front of her, and made a witness to the truth: it was a one-way street. Warmth did not burst outward from her, filling the world with dreams, but the city, strangely like a burial place at that odd, half-remembered hour, had invaded her, made her, shaped her wholly, because there was nothing in here as the minister up front and Reverend Brown maintained. All was out there. Faith looked at the minister. He awaited an explanation for her outburst. She saw through him to the wall behind. He, too, was nothing—life was a play of shadows and mist on the marmoreal wall of a cave. . . .

  “What is your name?” he said sharply.

  “Name?” Faith wondered—should a thing as transitory as a human life have a name? It was a stupid convention, but she decided to play the game. “It’s Faith Cross.”

  “And what will you tell us, child?”

  Because it hurt so bad Faith set it free. “I came to Chicago looking for the one true Good Thing, the one thing that would end everyone’s bondage, and would bring us all out of the dark!” Tears dropped from her eyes and made her cheeks shine, and she felt herself hovering again between the wish and its impossibility. “I believed in it—I was devoted to it, just like you said. I looked for it, because I knew it had to be! Don’t you see? Wasn’t it possible that there were all kinds of things around us that we never knew about until we looked for them? Wasn’t there a purpose just waiting to show itself to someone who looked?”

  The minister’s brow knitted with deep lines and furrows as thick as a well-plowed field. “It’s within you, child—”

  “I looked there, too!” Faith cried. She sensed the weight, saw the horror of her realization. “That’s too easy. . . . You all stopped looking in the world because it was too hard. You tricked yourselves!” Something solid and stiff seemed to flip over in her stomach, fell to the floor of her stomach, and lie there like a log. “There’s nothing inside, and there’s nothing outside—”

  A curl stiffened the minister’s lower lip. He screwed his mouth to the right side of his dark face, the edges of his white teeth visible as he frowned. “When people see things the way you do, we say they’ve got the Evil Eye. It’s a false way of seeing life—it’s like wearing dark glasses that blind you to the truth of things. You’ve got it, child—a belief that’s an argument for the Pit.” He scratched his cheek nervously and glared at her. “And if thine eye offends thee—”

  “What?” Faith said coolly. Her composure returned, creeping in beneath her fatigue. “Should I change my glasses, or tear out my eyes, or pretend the Good Thing was always inside me, or—” She stopped, looking around the room at the drawn, startled faces. They were drained and almost the color of unleavened bread. Faith stepped into the aisle, drew her coat close around her, and turned to the minister. “Or should I use this darkness and suffering to get what I need?” It didn’t matter that he failed to understand. Faith saw him step down from the podium and start after her when she reached the door.

  “Sit down on the moaning bench,” he called. “Fawn, if you confess—”

  “It’s Faith,” she said. Her thoughts were sharp and clear. “My name is Faith Cross.”

  “Fawn or Faith,” he said, his arms open to her, “does it matter?”

  “Yes.” She pulled shut the door, returned to the bus stop, and rode to State Street and Washington where she walked for a while. Thinking: this is home—a strangely ordered city seething beneath its veneer of rigidity and regulation with growing pockets of anarchy, theft, murder, a death every day, and crimes which the authorities suppressed quickly, like a finger dousing a candle’s flame. All night the city’s lamps were lit, all night the borders of order buckled and receded and were reinstated before day. A losing battle. The truth would steal into this and every city like a Mongol horde, turning dreams into nightmares, incrusting even the most brilliant, self-certain careers with the dust and decay of time. Walking through the garment industry, along the obscure, reeking canal, then in and out of the weaving maze of curio shops, wax museums, and opium dens that was Old Town, Faith considered the possibility of release. There could be nothing good, or true, or beautiful when inner and outer worlds were as empty as she divined. There could only be small comforts, the solace of bittersweet illusion that her customers seemed to enjoy. She walked on, stopping to sit on the rocks near the frozen lake, and feeling, as she remembered the window displays in the Loop, anger strong enough to slay a troll in its tracks. One had to be independent of fortune, to be comfortable in the cave. To wear those fine furs she saw draped over manikins in store windows and on the slim shoulders of the haughty women who paraded down the streets: this is what she wanted, what she swore to achieve. She looked toward the apartment buildings rising above Chicago’s skyline, imagining how those women, less nice-looking, less cute than she, lived—in the sky, warm, well fed, as free as one could be in the endless mad flux of things. “The Good Thing,” she said. All bitterness. The sound of it made her sick. The minister had, in a small sense, been right: you had to bring your goals closer. Call them by another name. It was too hard to look, to suffer frustration, and keep searching in the face of probable defeat. It was true: you had to settle on something, to make your peace with your dreams and take, when the chance came, what you could get. Peace of mind. What else mattered? Inside her, the waves resounded. She looked at the sand beneath her feet, at the small impressions the thin soles of her shoes had made. Before dawn the wind would have erased them. None would know she’d sat there; in time, she would slip out of the world like a shadow. It reinforced her conviction, giving her strength to start back to the hotel, planning, vowing that, if nothing else, she would trample if need be the heads of thousands, and their ridiculous theories as well to get what she needed. She would number her days, but only to squeeze from each whatever comfort could be secured.

  Faith hurried, star-shaped snowflakes melting in her hair, trying to beat a snowstorm already clouding the morning, obscuring it with just the slightest tinge of mystery. She entered the lobby of Hotel Sinclair and found a folded note, scrawled in the large, nearly arthritic script of Mrs. Beasley, in her mailbox: you have a visitor.

  6

  Faith crumpled the note in her right hand. It could only be Tippis, coming to have his mind set at ease. She set her jaw, cursed him under her breath, and started climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, prepared to settle the issue as the Swamp Woman had for the Widow Thomas ten years ago. As it was told, the Widow Thomas’s husband died of drink, leaving her penniless and with enough unpaid bills to wallpaper her privy house. She traveled to the Swamp Woman’s shanty and offered the werewitch all her possessions—cheap jewelry, a spinning loom, small change, and two emaciated he-cats too sick to bristle if you yanked their tails—all in exchange for peace of mind.

  “Gimme your mind,” the Swamp Woman said. They say she was sitting outside the shanty, mending the bridge over the bogs with nails made from human bones.

  The Widow Thomas was startled. “How?”

  The Swamp Woman drove in a nail with her bare black fist, laughed, and said, “Hand it over, and I’ll do what I kin for it.” She cackled as evilly as a fiend in a cloud. “If ya can’t find it, then there ain’t no problem, is there? Hee hee!”

  But Tippis, Faith knew, was not so easily set at ease. She was certain he would lose his mind. Originally, he had told her he was a dentist, and this she believed. But thereafter he appeared at her door in a burgundy porter’s uniform, and the following week in a double-breasted suit, a briefcase filled with insurance forms at his side. After that he came peddling medical dictionaries. Of course, he explained: his license to practice dentistry was revoked for malpractice—taking advantage of an etherized girl spread out in his leather chair; his next job was as a porter, but he lost it for repeated insubordination. Yet still he tried, straining to situate himself in a world that resisted him at every turn. She remembered his coming to her with an armful of evening newspapers all opened to the want ads;
he would cringe at every ad for a musician to play in a local band, throw up his hands finally, and groan, “Nobody wants me—they want accountants, salesmen, movie ushers, and male nurses, but not me!” His confessions were unbearable, and Faith told him on numerous occasions to show more strength, to resist the changes outside himself. She’d pleaded with him, told him every fine and noble tale she knew, because his problem, in part, was undeniably her own. That she was new and different each day was indisputable. It would be fitting to reintroduce herself to herself each morning when she stood before her mirror, saying, “Who am I today?” But Tippis’s changes were never from within, only catalyzed from without. Seeing him suffer so saddened her, because there was no end to his transformations, to his plastic personality first servile and groveling as a porter’s, then jocular and rapacious as a salesman’s. Who was he forced to be this time? Suppose he’d become a mortician’s assistant?

  By the time Faith reached room 4-D she had worked up enough anger to shoot him. Mercy killing. She imagined buying a Saturday night special, raising it instantly at his head without aim, shooting—crack! crack!—and Tippis would be released. It was not morbidity that brought this on but the weariness she felt, acute now after her scaling of three flights of steps. Her joints felt as stiff as steel. She threw open the door to her room and stifled a scream. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, paring his ragged toenails with a tiny penknife and reading from a book, was a little man in a mauve-colored overcoat. Red-eyes. He, startled, too, scrambled to his feet and dropped the knife.

  “Get out of here!”—Faith. She bolted back into the dark hallway, confused. Thinking: Surely it was too late to recover her money. He’d probably spent every penny, and in a single night at that, on liquor. But she could awaken everyone, call the police, file a charge. . . .

  “I’ve found you!” Red-eyes roared. He shuffled clumsily in his single shoe toward the door, sweating like a horse, and leaned in the doorjamb. He cried in a reedy voice, “I’ve looked and looked and—”

  Spinning around, Faith pulled at the doorknob. She caught his right thumb between door and jamb. Red-eyes screamed. She pulled.

  “Mercy!”

  She pulled.

  His bulbous thumb grew red. She heard something cracking like soft bone, or brittle wood, and pulled harder. Inside the room Red-eyes moaned.

  “I hate you!” Faith shouted through the door. And, children, she meant it. Watching that twisted thumb swell was almost as satisfying as the sight of slavemasters burning in the inner circles of West Hell. She remembered vividly its rough and salty taste running along her gums—the texture of his skin, like coffee grounds; she thought of her miseries incurred since that first night in the city. And pulled.

  Behind the door his broken voice warbled in choking, plaintive, pitiful cries. “Mercy, child . . .!” Blood spurted from beneath his fingernail. He moaned like an old woman at a wake. “You must hear me—ou-open the door!”

  “Bullshit!” Faith shouted. She liked the sound of it; it made her feel evil, rebellious, because Big Todd had allowed no swearing in his house. It was a delicious word, and she sang it above his cries for “Mercy!” canceling them, because in all her months in Chicago she had seen no mercy, no love, no peace, no possibility of release. “Bullshit!” It made her feel good.

  “Please!”

  Shivers ran along Faith’s skin. The moment of Justice was sour, stinking in her nose now with the loud smell of blood, of empty rebellion. Her stomach clenched, her head spun, and she could only hold the door shut by leaning backward on her heels. She heard choking behind it, which chilled her. It was like some hidden, supernatural agony on the other side of the world—unseen behind this wooden barrier, and hence not wholly real. The grief of ghosts. Only the bright, distended thumb disclosed his unseen suffering. Revenge was not worth this. Faith, sickened, released the door and stepped aside. Slowly it swung open, framing a frightened little man rocking back and forth on his knees. He held his thumb vertically, squeezing it, his nearly toothless mouth open. She guessed he was in shock of some sort, staring black-eyed and simpering in a long, low wail. Like wind outside a cabin window, his breath whistled through his teeth.

  “Listen—” he broke off suddenly, hunkered on his haunches for a while, leaped to his feet, and flounced around the room, his watery eyes pinched together, his mouth hanging open like a stove lid. Faith forgot her thoughts of vengeance. She hurried to the sink, ran cold water to its brim, and said testily, “Stick your finger in here.”

  Red eyes—turbid eyes anxious to communicate—opened. They seemed to bless her, to say the thousand silent things expressed by dogs and cats and cows when you treat them nicely. He plunged his hand into the water, winced—“Ah-ahhhh!”—and watched the water suffuse with blood as bright as the Red Sea.

  Begrudgingly, Faith said, “I’m sorry,” and stood quietly beside him, at least two heads taller than he, and studying his reflection in the mirror: a wasted, pock-marked face laced with day-old dirt and holes like craters in the moon; a flask-shaped body, obconical nose, and, on his right cheek, a rectangular red patch that must have been a birthmark or a burn. It appeared that he still wore the same mephitic clothes she remembered from their first encounter. He smelled as if this were indeed the case. He was, in no small measure, dissipated, probably dying from internal disorders of a terminal kind that wracked his withered form the day long. He was, in truth, so apparently beaten that he was beautiful. Like the grizzled, gimped old men she remembered in Georgia: bent of back, ill beyond succor, their dun-colored clothing shiny with dirt, their ashen eyes discolored and incapable of the visions of youth. They were not so much revolting as revelatory, not so much broken as bending, in a kind of grace, to the fate of all flesh. . . .

  “I’ve looked for you,” he cried, sucking in his breath, “looked and looked and looked—”

  Faith took his wrist and lifted his right hand from the red water. No bones seemed broken. She glanced at the door, saw splintered shards of wood, and, for some reason, was relieved. Only his black thumbnail was shattered, and hung obliquely from his thumb. There was much blood, but no irremediable damage that she could see. She tore a strip from her bedsheet, wrapped it tightly around his thumb, and pointed with finality toward the door. “Now, get out.” She knew she was too tired to struggle with him, and hoped he would leave.

  Red-eyes shivered, sneezed, then coughed up clear phlegm with such violence that Faith grabbed his shoulders so he would not fall. She felt his forehead. It was burning. His arms—livid. She led him to her bed where she sat him down—spiteful that he occupied the space she needed there. He tugged his ragged shirttail from his trousers. Blew his nose. Hoo-oonk! And dried his eyes.

  Faith put her hands on her hips and arched her back, trying to stretch the stiffness out of her spine. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I am not such a fool as I look,” he said. He peered around her room and curled back his tawny lips. “Much like van Gogh’s wretched little room, isn’t it?” She didn’t appreciate that. It was true that the room was too much like a prison to be comfortable. She didn’t want to think about it and, instead, half closed her eyes, squeezing the sore muscles of her right arm. Red-eyes sighed. “But here we are—Comte’s Woman and Priest.” He looked at his swollen thumb curiously, as though it were affixed to a stranger’s hand, then hid it in his lap. With his free hand he reached into the large pockets of his coat, prattling, “I suppose I should say something about Universal Religion, but I’m not up to it.” He began producing from his pocket, one by one, articles which he laid on her bed.

  “This is yours”—a wad of bills wound with a dirty string.

  “Ugh! Not this!”—lint.

  “But—yes!—this”—a cigarette lighter.

  “And this”—a silver key.

  He stood up, retrieved his book from the floor, and handed it to her. “And this. The little key will open it.”

  Faith weighed the book in her hands. A small
leather strap stretched across its dog-eared edges. It was lightweight, covered with black binding, and bore a name in cerise letters on the cover: Dr. Richard M. Barrett.

  “That,” Barrett said beside her as he removed the bandage and sucked at his swollen thumb, “is all I own. You’re in need, so it’s yours. I can tell these things—it’s a nimbus around you, child. I’d give you more—ah! life itself if I could—but my Doomsday Book is the best of my possessions.”

  “What?” Faith gripped the book. She fumbled at its rusty lock with her key. Barrett placed his piebald hand over it and shook his head. “Don’t open it just yet. The Tree of Knowledge is not, I’m afraid, the Tree of Life.” He smiled broadly, and blew his nose into his hand: Whee-oonk! Then wiped his hand on the front of his shirt and said, “It’s the final vintage of a life devoted to incessant inquiry, the sum total of every truth I have come to know and believe. Haven’t you always wanted to see such a book?”

  “Yes,” Faith said. And though she knew her curiosity dated only from the time of Big Todd’s death, she said, “All my life.”