Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  The confusion reached his taste and sense of smell; it invaded every sense and every nuance of his being that was fed by his senses. Bitter and sweet, acrid and flowing, cesspool and perfume, sting and caress, animal and human, edible and inedible, vomit and delicacy, rough and smooth, subtle and pointed, shocking and wafting, dizzying and calming, aching and pleasuring—the contrasts jangled every taste bud and nerve in his mouth, throat, nose, and belly.

  He reached the point of near-hysteria when his sense of touch was attacked: every centimeter of his skin was being scraped with rough scales and stroked with velvet, burned by hot points and pained, by icicles, then relaxed and massaged by gentle warmth and frictionless surfaces.

  The storm in his senses grew more and more intense according as each of the contradictory sensations was pooled within him to make a jigsaw mosaic of nonsense, confusion, aimlessness, helplessness.

  Yet, even with all control lost, somehow his mind and will sought an answer to the ultimate question: Why can't I resist? What must I do to repel this? What motivation can I use to expel it all? What do I do? He realized clearly enough that his time was not up, that all was not lost yet; that somewhere in him something must be healthy and active still. For all the while he clung to one thing: the more intense the distortion became and the tighter the grip exercised on him, the more the sheer horror and pain paralyzed any initiative in him—the more beautiful and winning became that song from above.

  Its lovely sound was still at immeasurable distances and unreachable heights. In some way he could not understand, however, it was near him. He began to fight for the strength to hear it, to listen. It was not monochrome or single-toned. It was a chant of many voices; it harmonized some ineffable joy with sweeping clusters of chords and congregations of soaring grace notes. Adagio, it was grave but happy.

  Resounding, it had a coolness clinging to it. At once it had all the traits of love—its gentle teasing, its collusion and connivance, its favoritism; and beating within it, there was a steady organ-like pulsation that ran deeper than the heart of the universe and as high as the eternal placidness men have always ascribed to unchanging divinity.

  At one surprising moment in all the din and the pain, David's heart leaped. It was his only moment of relief and peace, and it came just before the climax of his struggle. It was not so much a beguiling lull that sometimes fools the priest in more ordinary exorcisms. It was a song he somehow knew, sung by voices he somehow knew. And although he could not recollect the song or who was singing it, he knew he was not alone. “Jesus! I'm not alone,” he heard himself muttering. “I'm not alone!”

  He began to distinguish several voices in that gentle song. He knew them! He knew them! He could not recognize them, but he knew them. They were friends. Where? When? Who were they? He had known them for years, he realized. But who were they? And as the new feeling penetrated to his inner senses and clashed with his loneliness, a wild seesawing emotion started to filter further and further into his mind and will and imagination. He found himself babbling incoherent phrases which were at first unintelligible even to himself. The phrases seemed to come from some inner faculty he had always used but never acknowledged, some source of knowledge that he had neglected for all his years as an adult and a professional intellectual.

  “My Salem chorus. . . my loved ones. . .” The phrases were squeezed out of him by some force and strength of his own, his very own. “My friends. . . Edward's friends. . . Come nearer. . . Forgive me. . .”

  A tiny eddy of understanding began to form in him as he tapped the memory of Old Edward's last days and of the visit to Salem long years ago. It was just in time. For in that moment there began what proved to be the last phase of David's trial.

  Moments of terror gripped David immediately: suddenly he felt everything, everything had been wrenched from his grasp and he could not find in himself any conscious reason to reject the clamorous and oppressive influence of Mister Natch. His mind again seemed to be a mere receptacle. His will—the will he had always relied on consciously for his discipline in study and his practical decisions—seemed to be at bay again and unable to carry him to victory.

  Terror deepened as his mind became more and more confused, and his will was overcome and strapped down and immobilized by contradictory and poisonously neutralizing motives. What poured into his mind and filled his spirit was like venom.

  A pell-mell mob of reasons squealed and screamed within him. Mister Natch pulsed and rasped horribly: Hoc est corpus meum. . . Hocus-pocus Jesus is, a crucified donkey. . . Good and truth is man's highest goal. . . How delightful and human to try the most unhuman. . . Jesus, Mary, and. . . Satan, devils can fuck, fuck, fuck. . . I give you my heart and my. . . God will not allow evil. . . Good is as banal as bad, have both. . . I desire the salvation of the Cross. . . and I hope to taste the liberty of blasphemy. . . I love. . . I hate. . . I believe. . . I disbelieve. . . He created Jesus out of slime. . . and said this my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. David's will was numbed with pain and exhaustion. All this while, his senses were attacked and confused with the same jangling conflict, until in a land of indescribable idiocy and confusion his touch, his smell, his hearing all echoed: The good is too good to be true. . . The evil is too evil not to be true. . . What is true?

  Now, no solution, no escape, no alternative to the dilemma, no determining factor, no deciding weight in the balance seemed possible. Lost. All lost. All that David had studied, every highway and byway of intellectual reasoning, psychological subtlety, theological proof, philosophical logic, historical evidence—all these became like so many objects, not parts of him, only mere possessions and trash he had accumulated, now thrown into flames that advanced across the threshold of his very being. Everything he threw at those flames was seized, melted, dissipated, mere fuel, unable to resist the burning.

  Blackness had almost fully beclouded his mind when David became aware that one thing still remained. Something that defied the blackness and the clouding. Something that rose in him strongly, independently every time that strange, insistent song dominated the clamor wrapping him around. At first, he was merely aware of the sound. Then he began to marvel at its strength, and not at its loudness, for he could not always hear it, but at its persistence in the middle of his pain and encroaching despair. He tried to reflect on it and on the strength that rose in him like a responding chord, but immediately he lost all awareness of it. And, immediately again, the struggle set in, and his attention turned. And no sooner did he hear the song again than that strange, autonomous strength within him rose up. All at once he knew what that strength was. It was his will. His autonomous will. He himself as a freely-choosing being.

  With a sidelong glance of his mind, he dismissed once and for all that fabric of mental illusions about psychological motivations, behavioral stimulations, rationales, mentalistic hedges, situational ethics, social loyalties, and communal shibboleths. All was dross and already eaten up and disintegrated in the flames of this experience which might still consume him.

  Only his will remained. Only his freedom of spirit to choose held firm. Only the agony of free choice remained.

  “My Salem chorus!” he heard himself say. “My friends! Pray for me. Ask Jesus for me. Pray for me. I have to choose.”

  Now a specific and peculiar agony beset David. He had never known it before. Indeed, afterwards he wondered for a long time how many real choices he had made freely in his life before that night. For it was that agony of choosing freely—totally freely—that was now his. Just for the sake of choosing. Without any outside stimuli. Without any background in memory. Without any push from acquired tastes and persuasions. Without any reason or cause or motive deciding his choice. Without any gravamen from a desire to live or to die—for at this moment he was indifferent to both. He was, in a sense, like the donkey medieval philosophers had fantasized as helpless, immobilized, and destined to starve because it stood equidistant from two equivalent bales of hay and could not decide whic
h one to approach and eat. Totally free choice.

  Mister Natch's clomping rhythm now became the grotesque accompaniment of an evil and sickening burlesque of distortion. A satyr face and body loomed in David's imagination—so real that he saw it with his eyes. Naked. Obscenely sprawled. Bulbous. The nose pointing in one askew direction. Two eyes squinting in opposite directions. Mouth grinning, foaming, crooked. Throat gurgling insane chuckles. Heavy female breasts blotched with warts, hanging nipples, blood-red, and pointing like twin penises. Legs apart, streaked with blood and sperm. One toe doubled back into the crotch scratching and rubbing frenetically. Twisted, irregular fingers with broken nails pulling at lumps of hair and gesturing crudely. Clots of caked excrement around the buttocks.

  David caught the odor of cowstalls and open-air privies. He remembered the devil figures of the Greeks and the Asmat. He felt the oldest pull recorded in the history of the human heart. He felt it as an ancient seed of evil he had received from all who went before him, not as a physical gift of terrible import but as a consequence of his being born of their line and, in a sense, accumulating all the evil they had transmitted. Not evil acts. Nor evil impulses. Neither guilts nor shame. Nothing positive. Rather an absence amounting to a fatal flaw. A deathly lack. A capacity for self-hatred, for suicide, not because he could not live forever but because he could so live if only. . . That tantalizing “if only” of mortality which aspires infinitely without being infinite itself. The fames peccati of the Latins. The yetzer ha-ra of the Hebrews. “Ye can be as gods knowing good and evil,” the Serpent had said in the Bible myth-not adding “but capable only of evil, if left to yourselves.”

  He had to choose. The freedom to accept or reject. A proposed step into a darkness. The song from on high was silent. The clamor of Mister Natch was stilled. All seemed waiting on his next step. His own. Only his.

  Even to be neutral was a decision. For to be neutral now was to take refuge in cynicism; to say, “I don't want to know;” to refuse an appeal for trust; to be alone; just to be.

  For a split second it seemed he should turn back and call for the consolation of evil-at least he would be under a tangible control and possessed by that which corresponded to one of his deepest urges. But it was only for a second, because from beyond that crag of decision he heard—or thought he heard—a great cry coming across an infinite distance, not in protest, not in hysteria, not in despair; rather a cry from a soul driven to the outermost point of endurance by pain and disgrace and abandonment. He heard that cry take several forms: “Abba, Father!” “Mother, behold!” “Lord, Remember me!” “In this sign. . .”

  It was all David needed to push him, even pursued by his fears, past that crag. He began to think words again, to open his lips, mouthing them soundlessly.

  Then panic rose. What if it were all delusion, mocking delusion? The panic became pandemonium in his brain. But now it was matched and outstripped by his violent wish to speak, to get those words out in living sound. Somehow, if it took his last strength, if it cost him his life, he had to pronounce them audibly. His intentions would not be humanly real until he did. . . unless he did.

  In his agony, still on his knees and still facing the window of his room, David remained so absorbed in this last effort that he still did not notice the figure standing outside the window. Father Joseph had waited at home for the storm to abate, and then set out for the farm. The only light in the place had been from David's window. Now he stood outside trying to guess what was happening to his friend inside. “Help him. Mother of Jesus. In the name of Jesus, ask for help for him, please.” He could see David's lips working silently and his wide, sightless eyes staring into the night.

  Joseph was about to tap on the window or wake up the others in the house when he heard David cry out loud, at first in a staccato fashion, then firmly and connectedly and vibrantly: “I choose. . . I will. . . I believe. . . Help my unbelief. . . Jesus!. . . I believe I believe I believe.” Joseph stood stock-still and listened. He could only see David's face and hear his words. He could not enter his consciousness, where the twin chants had once again sounded to the very depth of his soul.

  But it was different for David now. He had chosen, and the result was instantaneous. He found, not destruction and helplessness and childish weakness, and not the black slavery of mind and will that Mister Natch had taunted would be the fruits of belief. Instead, a great and breathtaking dimension full of relief and distance and height and depth flooded his mind and will and imagination.

  As if the darkness and agony behind him had been but a little transitory test, the horizons of life and existence were miraculously clear now. The air was suffused with serene sunlight and great, calm spaces of blue.

  Every scale, measurement, and extension of his life was clothed in the grace and comeliness of a freedom he had always feared losing but had never been sure he possessed. Every slope he had climbed as a young boy—his first attempts at thinking, at feeling, at judging morally, at self-expression—were now covered in beds of high flowers scented, like violets and harebells and columbine. Every cranny and niche where his feet had caught and he had tripped and stumbled during his early intellectualism at the university were now filled with springing green grass.

  And his greatest wonder was his new sky, his fresh horizon. Over the years his human sky had become a cast-iron grating—he had been able to send an odd plea winging through the little holes. But his horizon itself had become a tall, unscalable mesh of steel; it was misted with unknowing and agnosticism: with the “We cannot know exactly” of the pseudointellectual, the “Let's keep an open mind” that opens every argument against belief.

  Now, suddenly, with his decision made, David's sky was a dustless depth of expanding space. His horizon was an open vastness receding, receding, receding, ever receding, without obstacle or limit or speck or narrowness. He saw himself immeasurably high up, free of trammels, on a zenith of desire and volition, clear of all backward-looking, unhampered by cloying regrets or by wisping mice of memory gnawing at his untried sexuality and his unexpected whims.

  David was in full view of all he ever signified as a human being and all that being human ever signified for him, at the ancient heart of man's millennial weakness and on the peak of man's gratuitously given power to be with God, to be of God, and to live forever.

  The many figures that had peopled his past he now saw within the eternal light-Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Sinanthropos, Homo sapiens, food gatherers, food producers, Stone Age men, Bronze Agers, Iron Agers, Jew, Crusader, Muslim, Renaissance Pope, Russian Patriarch, Greek priest, Catholic cardinal, Asiatic Buddha, African devil, Satan, Darwin, Freud, Mao, Lenin, the poor of Sekelia, the running and burning figures in the streets of Hiroshima, the dying babies of Bombay, the houses in California's Bel Air, the lecture halls of the Sorbonne, the villas of Miami Beach, the mines of West Virginia, the wafer in his own hands at Mass, the lifeless face of Jonathan. . .

  He was just about to fall into prayer when, for an instant, he heard the two chants again. He was jerked out of his visioning back to the reality of the chair, the bay window, and the night. The heavenly chant was now no more than a single prolonged note on a lute, persistent, limpid, clear, beautiful. Mister Natch's grating chant had been diluted and shattered.

  By some mysterious proxy, David felt the pangs of an agony he did not regret. He was, he knew, assisting at the inescapable woe of some living beings whom he did not know, whom he had to hate, but whose fate was catastrophic disaster unmitigated by any poignancy or any pity. Despite the flooding peace and light washing over his spirit, he found himself following the desperate retreat of his wounded adversaries.

  The once-muscular, breathing cries of Mister Natch had now narrowed to a thin, piping wail shot through with trills of terror, arpeggios of agony running feverishly and irregularly through every note of protest. That lingering wail seemed to spiral up, twisting and writhing and curling, an insect shaking poisonous antennae while it scuttled backward de
sperately for home cover in the sewer, a snake whose body was a solid, pulsating pain, stabbing its head upward as it moved away from the fluid lava of that other resounding note—what David always described afterward as his “Salem chorus.”

  Then he began to feel great distances again. Mister Natch's clamor dwindled, always pursued by that chant of Heaven. As it all grew fainter, David stood up, listening intently. The two chants were withdrawing from him. He flung open the double windows and looked out past Joseph's shoulder, his gaze traveling to the garden and, beyond, to the countryside, the mountains, the horizon. As the sounds withdrew, sucked, as it were, into uncharted spaces among the stars overhead, he searched the sky. The storm center had slipped away to the Eastern seaboard to be spent over the Atlantic. It was cold, probably freezing. Up among the stars he tried to follow the trajectory of those sounds. But the last faint echoes died. All was quiet. He listened, gazing silently upward. There was no sound.

  A slow smile of recognition appeared around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, as he heard the rustling energies of the earth recovering themselves after the storm.

  His glance rested finally on Father Joseph, and he motioned him to step inside. The moon was already riding high, bright-faced, a warm, yellow hue to its light. Its very silence was golden and gentle and confident. He and Joseph were about to turn away from the window into the room when a mockingbird started to sing down in the copse where Old Edward used to stroll smoking his pipe in the evenings after dinner. That song came to David as a message from a world of grace, a hint of life without ending; not as Jonathan and as he, David, had taken such sounds of nature; not as intimations of molecules endlessly regrouping, but of endless life for each person, and of love without a shadow.