by Неизвестный
And in that sound he feels all meaning to his life is flowing away into derisive nothingness. What he had ambitioned to be, what he had become, the values he had lived by—all now seems an ugly, useless comedy of illusions. “I never meant anything, never came to anything, never was anything.” Hearty's mind drummed with the words.
And what now seems the core of that childish view is the way he always saw Earth as a collection of things, of separate and disparate little objects, men, animals, plants, stones. “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” are the echoes in his mind. “Wrong and childish from the beginning.” The sadness and chagrin at his weakness and childishness are about as great as he can bear, when that vision is swept away and a new series of images is presented to him in an aura not of ridicule, but of approbation and applause. The aura of untruth.
It is the globe again, together with all the objects in it-men, women, animals, plants, cities, oceans. But now all exist in an organized system. Everything is interconnected. There is really no difference between one thing and anything else. From the mitochondria in cells that convert oxygen into energy up to the largest land masses, the most complicated systems of living societies. He is shown it all. And all, land, oceans, animals, humans, plants are one living organism clad in the shell of breathable atmosphere. Psychic forces bind it all together, like ethereal blood running in the veins of some unimagined giant. It is a self-creating, self-protecting, self-developing thing. A unique being. Earth as mother, as womb, as god, as tomb, as a whole unity protected by its own shell and its own strength, as all there is.
Now and again that globe's outlines swirl into the form of a snail or a tortoise clad in its own protective hard and furrowed shell. This sight swamps Hearty's mind with intellectual satisfaction and clothes his imagination with images of harmony, freedom, truth.
His memory is in abeyance. He is only in the present moment, and he can anticipate no future. It is irresistible for all his powers-except his embattled will. Naked and, as it were, standing alone in the shadow of its own unfulfilled desire, his willing self remains aloof-brooding, wavering, doubtful—but aloof, not yet committed.
Only one element in that vision of human life keeps him from embracing it. It is its loveless character. Something inside him keeps crying out, “I need love. I won't take less.” At the last central pinpoint of his free being Hearty stands and holds, rejecting the ultimatum, the “either/or” thrown at him.
But immediately some physical strength starts giving way in him under a series of shooting pains that jab at the muscles in his arms and legs. The strain is unbearable. His fingers are loosening their grip on the crucifix. He ceases to hold it rigidly upright with the crucified facing him. It wavers and swings a little to the left, a little to the right. The light glances off the metal head of the crucified and off the small notice over it which carries the letters “INRI” (“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”).
In Hearty's world at that moment there is no such thing as an accident. The apparently accidental shining of the metal sparks a deep instinct in him. He begins to say, at first internally, then audibly: “Jesus. . . Jesus. . . Jesus. . . Jesus. . . Jesus. . . Jesus.”
When his words become audible, he is already over the worst. A new force sweeps across his mind and imagination, blowing to nothingness the entire fabric of loveless belief thrust at him as his guarantee of peace. Hearty feels for an instant some crushing pain within him: in his success he has had to sacrifice something—he does not yet know what—some intimate joy of being human, some one personal desire or inclination, some indulgence in the comeliness of human beauty and symmetry, some happiness he otherwise would be able to have legitimately in his human living. Some deeply personal fiber of his will has been seared.
The switch of Hearty's concentration from himself to Carl is instantaneous and “murderous”—his own word—in its intent. He now wants to murder that which holds Carl. The assistants see his head lift and his eyes burn with some fire of anger and willfulness. “I honestly thought for an instant that he had gone mad,” the assistant priest relates frankly.
Hearty's first words after the Clash still sound vicious today on the tape.
“Murderer! Be murdered now! In your turn!”
Carl falls back on the couch. The assistants hold him, but Carl's struggle is not physical now. In a weak and pathetic voice he says only: “Opaque. . . opaque. . . opaque. . .”
“Evil Spirit,” Hearty continues, “you will go away from this creature, Carl. You will cease to possess his soul and body. In the name of Jesus you will cease. Now.”
Then he turns to Carl in his remarks. “Carl, you have to pay the price. But Jesus is with you. Insofar as you are not under the control of evil, you will renounce step by step each of your former consents. Each one of them.”
Carl shakes with terror. He has begun to perspire. He says nothing.
“The vision, Carl! You will see it again. You will see it.”
Carl's eyes are fixed now on Hearty's own. They bulge with fear and loathing.
“You will see it. You will reject it!”
“N-n-n-n-n-n-n-no!” Carl suddenly stutters. “No. Please! No. . .” The words on the tape trail away incoherently.
“Renounce it, Carl,” Hearty says sharply, “even though you cannot say so in words.”
Carl begins to babble and moan, then stops. Foam seeps out of his mouth.
Hearty goes on mercilessly.
“Carl! Your psychic powers! Carl! Renounce them, insofar as they are products of the Evil One. In the name of Jesus, Carl! Renounce them!”
Carl is no longer looking at Hearty. He has turned his head to one side and keeps looking at the wall to his far left.
“Turn his head around.” Hearty's command is curt. The assistants do so. Carl's head is boiling hot and bathed in sweat.
“Now, Carl! For the final renunciation. Look at Tortoise, Carl!” The assistants feel from now on that they are listening to a verbal description of an invisible scene. Only Hearty and Carl seem to be in view of it; both are looking over toward the wall of the room.
“Look at that Evil One, Carl! The Tortoise, your all, your friend, your master, your devil, your death, that Evil One is about to be destroyed for you by Jesus.”
Hearty stops. The others see him turn his head aside, as if listening to some instructions; they see a wave of new light shine in his eyes. Then he looks steadily at Carl again.
“You will see that Evil Spirit for what it is, Carl!”
Hearty pauses abruptly as if he has been interrupted. Then: “No! Not in anybody's name, anybody who merely lives and dies.” Another pause. Then: “Only one who lives and dies and lives again. Only in his name, Carl.”
Carl's eyes are now full of some scene which only he sees. He is not focusing on Hearty. And even though Hearty is looking straight at Carl, he is obviously watching something more than Carl. The assistants can only guess at its identity, but they are as sure as people watching a theater audience that Carl and Hearty are watching something they cannot see.
At a certain point Hearty draws near the couch. Hearty speaks in a low, confident tone. He is praying:
“Lord Jesus Christ, who said, 'I and the Father are one,' act now to purify your servant, Carl, and save him from the Pit and all those who fall into it in everlasting death.”
Carl's attitude has changed. He is relaxing. The tension is being wiped off his face. A faint smile of recognition creeps over his mouth and eyes.
Hearty bends low over Carl and whispers in his ear: “Carl! Carl! Look at me, if you can.”
There is a small wait. Then Carl turns his head and looks at Hearty. His eyes are warm. And even though they are bloodshot and tired, behind them Hearty can read Carl's look, his personal regard.
“Carl, repeat these words after me. As much, as quick as you can. Put your heart into them. It's the last help before your final struggle.”
Carl is looking at him steadily. Hearty says quickly, pausing after each ph
rase so that Carl can repeat it:
“Lord Jesus, if I must die, let me die. If I live, it will be your will. As long as I remain in life, let me abide in your presence, so completely that, despite my sins and my enemy, when I die, I merely go from your presence to your presence. Amen.”
Carl repeats every word. But at the “Amen,” his eyes are glazing over. His face is hardening. His head jerks back on the couch.
“Hold his head,” Hearty tells the assistants.
He stands up and takes his place at the foot of the couch, holding the crucifix up in front of him. This is the last stage of the exorcism.
Hearty today is loath to go into details of what Carl and he saw at that moment. Clearly from the tapes, it was some vision of Tortoise, but not as in the Aquileia mosaic medallion, and not simply as the animal whose name Tortoise took as his own. Hearty gave the nearest measure I could get of the character of what they both saw when he commented that only because something of human joy had been seared in him was he able to see Tortoise, and, to use his words, “not have a brainstorm or a heart attack or go into permanent shock.”
It was apparently some view of Tortoise as a mass of suffering and punishment illuminated and glowing with a hatred and vicious contempt. It was Tortoise as an angel who had been damned to eternal pain by love itself and who only increased in hatred of love according as his pain increased with the infinity of eternity. “Damnation unrelieved in any way,” Hearty commented in one of our meetings.
Hearty viewed Tortoise as a threatening enemy, but Carl was now seeing Tortoise, his master, who held him in his actual condition of damned misery.
After a little waiting, Hearty speaks with evident urgency.
“This is Tortoise, Carl, your friend and master. This is the world our enemy would have us accept.” He stops and waits.
Carl never takes his eyes off Hearty now.
“Enclosed and shut up within its hard shell, Carl. Imprisoned in Hell. It's the same. Only—” Carl interrupts with a choking sound. Hearty goes on: “Only multiplying its own shape in endless succession, soul-killing succession, banal as graves in a row, Carl.”
Carl is beginning to shake again. Hearty assures the assistants with a look, then he continues:
“This is our enemy, Carl. The one who possesses you and has fascinated you and wills you to die the death of the Pit.”
If Carl is listening and taking it all in, he is far from uneasy or fearful. His eyes are full of the old fire. There is a look on his face that reminds Hearty of the “twist” or askewness that Carl used to acquire during his trances in his heyday as a psychic.
Hearty's voice gets a special edge to it. “It is all deception, Carl. And it is all about to be destroyed.”
Hearty is interrupted by a sound that shakes him severely. Carl has started to cry in sobs. For that moment, Hearty recalls, “I felt like the most uncouth and cruel person that ever existed. I was hurting a baby, it seemed to me.”
He forced himself to go on.
“It must be destroyed, Carl. And your Non-Self aura, your non-thingness, your voices, your visions, all will go into the Pit of Oblivion with that Tortoise.”
Carl is beginning to struggle against the restraining hands of the assistants.
Hearty grits his teeth for the last effort. He has been on his feet now for over 21 hours. His legs are tired. He has shooting pains across his back. His chest is stiff. His arms and fingers ache from holding the crucifix. His voice is hoarse. The migraine is splitting across his forehead still. Within him, the strange, deep wound in his soul bleeds. All his physical pain is only a dull accompaniment in the background of that inner agony so sharp and present and intimate to him. He will not recover from that wound for a long time.
Carl is trying to get up, to stretch out his arms.
“Nothing can save you, Evil Spirit. And nothing can hold you against the power of Jesus. As you took the form of Tortoise for this creature of God, so as Tortoise depart and fall back where you belong, with your Non-Self aura, with your deceptions, with your lies, with your death.”
Hearty makes the sign of the cross over Carl slowly and very deliberately three times.
“Sink into the primeval slime of your punishment where God thrust you after your own rebellion. Be dissolved in the mud and waters and air and fire of that Hell from which Jesus saved Carl and all human beings. Depart!” Hearty pauses. Then in a loud shout: “Depart! Unclean Spirit! In the name of Jesus, depart! Go!”
“DON'T GO!” Carl screams. “Don't leave-me now. I cannot live without you. Don't go! Please! My friend! Master!”
Hearty's voice breaks in sharply.
“Look at it, Carl! Look at this chair!”
Carl swivels around, twisting his head. Then he starts to groan: the chair, he sees, has no aura. The Non-Self glow is gone. The chair is there. That is all. Simply there. In all its isness. Just a thing. Just a chair. Frantically he looks around the room. As he sees it now, all the lights are out. Things. Things. Things. Things. Among more things. Yellowed ceiling. Faded rose-colored wallpaper. Oaken door and windowsill, parquet flooring. The table with candles and crucifix. The bodies of the assistants and of Hearty. Six brutish lumps. Clods of flesh standing in a darkened world of crass things.
Carl screams and screams until darkness and unconsciousness smother him.
When he forced Carl to look at the objects around him-chairs, windows, flooring, people-Hearty already knew he had vanquished Tortoise. As with any crisis that has carried with it the threat of death, there had been at its ending an abrupt sense of a “lifting off” of stifling oppression; it was the same sudden relief that Father Gerald and his assistants described when Girl-Fixer was beaten and Richard/Rita was freed. It was something akin to the feeling so often recalled by those who were in London the morning everyone expected the final wave of Hitler's blitz that would crush London altogether. In previous weeks, the whining rain of bombs had brought unending destruction, death, mutilation, and growing helplessness. But on that morning of expected horror the eastern sky was empty, tranquil. There was a lifting off of dread. There was the sound of silence. It was over. They had defended and persevered and survived. They knew.
Hearty knew.
And when he forced Carl to see it too, the rest of Hearty's fears for Carl were in large measure justified again. When Carl screamed as Hearty showed him all the things in the room, Hearty knew that, along with Tortoise, the more spectacular elements that had gilded Carl's real psychic abilities had left him. The “Non-Self” aura was gone, as Hearty knew it would be.
With it, Hearty was sure, had gone all those elements that Tortoise—under Hearty's relentless prodding during the Confrontation—had admitted to producing: astral travel, bilocation, and all the rest. Remaining were only those more modest talents Carl had possessed since his early childhood and which he still possesses today.
So desperate was Carl's fear to let go of those privileges and of all his life structure built around them that he cried in pain at the departure even of purest evil. He screamed in horror as all that he had been convinced was “normal” left him forever. He saw again only what everyone sees. Carl in that moment knew with his heart and soul that every warning Hearty had given him was accurate. He had listened to Hearty's warnings before the exorcism only with a cool and detached mind, because with his will he had chosen to follow the fascinating secrets Tortoise offered to share with him.
Now, with Tortoise expelled and the truth of Tortoise's identity crystal clear and admitted by him, a frightful disillusionment ran through Carl with the speed of an electric shock, searing and twisting all his thinking and remembering. This was the shock Hearty had tried to warn Carl of, the shock he was not sure Carl would survive with his sanity, perhaps not even with his life.
The doctor who had assisted at the exorcism continued with Carl's case. Carl remained unconscious for several hours. When he came to, he was unable to converse. He barely reacted to any stimulus and was seemingly al
ienated from his surroundings. He seemed to recognize no one. But there was no trace of violence.
Carl was transferred to a private clinic, where he remained for just over 11 months. At first, he was not able to care for himself at all. He remained in bed all the time, motionless and apparently caring about nothing. Little by little, he regained awareness of his surroundings. But, even with returning awareness, it was quickly evident that, if he had not lost his memory, it was blurred and incomplete.
During the first few months of his convalescence, Hearty spent hours sitting by Carl's bedside. Sometimes he read excerpts from the daily newspaper, or a chapter from some book about current events, or prayers from the ritual book. At other times, Hearty talked to Carl, for all the world as if the sick man were listening and understanding every word, even though for quite a while there never was the slightest sign or response from Carl.
All this while, as he read or talked by Carl's bedside, Hearty was probing psychically for some stirring in Carl, some little break in the congealed immobility that now enveloped Carl's spirit, some motion out of that deadening passivity he “felt” held Carl captive now that he was free of Tortoise. Each time he left Carl, Hearty carried away with him to haunt his waking hours the memory of that still, drawn face and Carl's staring eyes.
One afternoon at the end of a short visit, as he opened the bedroom door to leave, Hearty turned back to wave goodbye to the man he left each day lying inert, impassive on his bed. But what he saw now held him rooted in the doorway. Carl had turned his head. He was returning Hearty's look. His eyes shone with meaning and recognition and intention.