City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  Not that you shouldn’t watch your pocketbook, lady.

  —Uncounted billions of years idle away as this single-cell organism, this speck of corruption, this submicroscopic breach of nonlife, evolves selectively through realms of slime and armor-plated brutishness, past experimental kingdoms of horses two feet tall and lizards that fly, into the triumphant dominions of the furry self-improving bipeds, those of the opposed thumb and forefinger, who will lope out of prehistory to sublime into a teenage nerd at the Bronx High School of Science.

  Of the brilliant boys I knew at Science whose minds were made to solve mathematical problems and skip happily among the most abstruse concepts of physics, a large number were jerks. I’ve since run into a few of them in their adulthood and they are still jerks. It is possible that the scientific character of mind is by its nature childish, capable through life of a child’s wonder and excitements, but lacking real discernment, lacking sadness, too easily delighted by its own intellect. There are exceptions, of course, the physicist Steven Weinberg, for example, whom I’ve read and who has the moral gravity you would want from a scientist. But I wonder why, for instance, the cosmologists and astronomers, as a whole, are so given to cute names for their universe. Not only that it began as the Big Bang. In the event it cannot overcome its own gravity, it will fly back into itself, and that will be the Big Crunch. In the event of a lack of density, it will continue to expand, and that will be the Big Chill. The inexplicable dark matter of the universe that must necessarily exist because of the behavior of galactic perimeters is comprised of either the neutrino or of weakly interacting massive particles, known as WIMPs. And the dark-mattered halos around the galaxies are massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs.

  Are these clever fellows mocking themselves? Is it a kind of American trade humor they practice out of modesty, as the English practice self-denigration in their small talk? Or is it bravery under fire, that studied carelessness in the trenches while the metaphysical rounds come in?

  I think they simply are lacking in holy apprehension. I think the mad illiterate priest of a prehistoric religion tearing the heart out of a living sacrifice and holding it still pulsing in his two bloodied hands. . . might have had more discernment.

  —Heist

  Tuesday evening

  Up to Lenox Hill to see my terminal. Ambulances backing into the emergency bay with their beepings and blinding strobe lights. They used to have QUIET signs around hospitals. Doctors’ cars double-parked, patients strapped on gurneys double-parked on the sidewalk, smart young Upper East Side workforce pouring out of the subway.

  Lights coming on in the apartment buildings. If only I were elevating to a smart one-bedroom. . . a lithe young woman home from her interesting job awaiting my ring. . . uncorking the wine, humming, wearing no underwear.

  In the fluorescent lobby, a stoic crowd primed for visiting hours with bags and bundles and infants squirming in laps. And that profession of the plague of our time, the security guard, in various indolent versions.

  My terminal’s room door slapped with a RESTRICTED AREA warning. I push in, all smiles.

  You got medicine, Father? You gonna make me well? Then get the fuck outta here. The fuck out, I don’t need your bullshit.

  Enormous eyes all that’s left of him. An arm bone aims the remote like a gun, and there in the hanging set the smiling girl spins the big wheel.

  My healing pastoral visit concluded, I pass down the hall, where several neatly dressed black people wait outside a private room. They hold gifts in their arms. I smell nonhospital things. . . a whiff of fruit pie still hot from the oven, soups, a simmering roast. I stand on tiptoe. Who is that? Through the flowers, like a Gauguin, a handsome light-complected black woman sitting up in bed. Her bearing regal, her head turbaned. I don’t hear the words, but her melodious, deep voice of prayer knows whereof it speaks. The men with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. The women with white kerchiefs. On the way out I inquire of the floor nurse. SRO twice a day, she says. We get all of Zion up here. The only good thing, since Sister checked in I don’t have to shop for supper. Yesterday I brought home some baked pork chops. You wouldn’t believe how good they were.

  —Another one having trouble with my bullshit is the widow Samantha. In her new duplex that looks across the river to the Pepsi-Cola sign, she’s been reading Pagels on early Christianity.

  It was all politics, wasn’t it? she asks me.

  Yes, I sez to her.

  And so whoever won, that’s why we have what we have now?

  Well, with a nod at the Reformation, I suppose so, yes.

  She lies back down. So it’s all made up, it’s an invention.

  Yes, I sez, taking her in my arms. And you know for the longest time it actually worked.

  Used to try to make her laugh at the dances at Brearley. Couldn’t then, can’t now. A gifted melancholic, Sammy. The dead husband an add-on.

  But almost alone of the old crowd she didn’t think I was throwing my life away.

  Wavy thick brown hair parted in the middle. Glimmering dark eyes set a bit too wide. Figure not current, lacking tone, glory to God in the Highest.

  From the corner of the full-lipped mouth her tongue emerges and licks away a teardrop.

  And then, Jesus, the surprising condolence of her wet salted kiss.

  -for the sermon

  Open with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing. . . to share their trustfulness.

  But then I asked myself: Must faith be blind? Why must it come of people’s need to believe?

  We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. Look around. God’s authority reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly submission.

  So where is the truth to be found? Ecumenism is politically correct, but what is the case? If faith is valid in all its forms, are we merely making an aesthetic choice when we choose Jesus? And if you say, No, of course not, then we must ask, Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to salvation. . . and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know—of course we think we know. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a story? Can we, each of us examining our faith—I mean its pure center, not its consolations, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments—can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? To presume to contain God in this Christian story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive. . . in our story of Him? Of Her? OF WHOM? What in the name of Christ do we think we are talking about!

  —Wednesday lunch

  Well, Father, I hear you delivered yourself of another doozy.

  How do you get your information, Charley? My little deacon, maybe, or my kapellmeister?

  Be serious.

  No, really, unless you’ve got St. Timothy bugged. Because, God knows, there’s nobody but us chickens. Give me an uptown parish, why don’t you, where the subway doesn’t shake the rafters. Give me one of God’s midtown showplaces of the pious rich and famous and I’ll show you what doozy means.

  Now listen, Pem, he says. This is unseemly. You are doing and saying things that are. . . worrying.

  He frowns at his grilled fish as if wondering what it’s doing there. His well-chosen Pinot Grigio shamelessly neglected as he sips ice water.

  Tell me what I should be talking about, Charley, if not the test to our faith. My five parishioners are serious people, they can take it.

  Lays the knife and fork down, composes his thoughts: You’ve always been your own man, Pem, and in the past I’ve had a sneaking admiration for the freedom you’ve foun
d within church discipline. We all have. And in a sense you’ve paid for it, we both know that. In terms of talent and brains, the way you burned up Yale, you probably should have been my bishop. But in another sense it is harder to do what I do, be the authority that your kind is always testing.

  My kind?

  Please think about this. A tone has crept up, a pride of intellect, something is not right.

  His blue eyes look disarmingly into my own. Boyish shock of hair, now gray, falling over the forehead. Then his famous smile flashes over his face and instantly fades, having been the grimace of distraction of an administrative mind.

  What I know of such things, Pem, I know well. Self-destruction is not one act, or even one kind of act. It may start small and appear insignificant, but as it gathers momentum it is the whole man coming apart in every direction, all three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Amen to that, Charley. You don’t suppose there’s time for a double espresso?

  Oh, and his other line: We’re absolutely at a loss to know what is going on inside you, Father. But I’m pretty sure you are not availing yourself of the strength to hand.

  That may well be, Bishop, I should have said. But at least I don’t do séances.

  —This afternoon, two soft taps on the door. At the beginning it was awkward, looking at my books, the prints on the walls, my digs. She drank only water from the tap. In thrall to her quietness, I had not much to say. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. All was silence. Finally I went in. She was in bed with the covers up to her chin. She was skittish, balky, turned her head away from my kiss. She had to be dragged into it. She had to be held down to do what she had come to do.

  Afterward it was as if I lay in the blue-green warmth of Monet’s pond, feeling the wet lilies clinging to my skin.

  —Heist

  Friday

  All right, that wise old dog Tillich, Paulus Tillichus—how did he construe the sermon? Picked a text and worried the hell out of it. Sniffed the words, pawed them: What, when you get right down to it, is a demon? You say you want to be saved? What does that mean? When you pray for eternal life, what do you think you’re asking for? Paulus, God’s philologist, that Merriam-Webster of the DDs, that German. . . shepherd. The suspense he held us in—bringing us to the edge of secularism, arms waving. Of course he saved us every time, pulled us back from the abyss and we were okay after all, we were back with Jesus. Until the next sermon, the next lesson. Because if God is to live, the words of our faith must live. The words must be reborn.

  Oh did we flock to him. Enrollments soared.

  But that was then and this is now.

  We’re back in Christendom, Paulus. People are born again, not words. You can see it on television.

  Saturday morning

  Following his intuition, Divinity Detective wandered over to the restaurant-supply district on the Bowery, below Houston, where the trade is brisk in used steam tables, walk-in freezers, grills, sinks, pots, woks, and bins of cutlery. Back behind the Taipei Trading Company, too recently acquired to have a sales tag, was the antique gas-operated fridge with the mark of my shoe sole still on the door where I kicked it when it wouldn’t stay closed. And in one of the bins of the used dish department, the tea things from our pantry, white with a green trim, gift of the dear departed ladies’ auxiliary.

  Practically named my own price, Lord. With free delivery. A steal.

  evening

  I walk over to Tompkins Square, find my dealer friend on his bench.

  This has got to stop, I say to him.

  My, you riled up.

  Wouldn’t you be?

  Not like the Pops I know.

  I thought we had an understanding. I thought there was mutual respect.

  They is. Have a seat.

  Sparrows working the benches in the dusk.

  Told you wastin your time, but I ast aroun like I said I would. No one here hittin on Tim’s.

  Not from here?

  Thasit.

  How can you be sure?

  This regulated territory.

  Regulated! That’s funny.

  Now who’s not showin respeck. This my parish we talkin bout. Church of the Sweet Vision. They lean on me, see what I’m sayin? I am known for compassion. No one lies to me. You dealin with foreigners or some such, thas my word to you.

  Ah hell. I suppose you’re right.

  No problem. Unsnaps attaché case: Here, my very own personal blend. No charge. Relax yoursel.

  Thanks.

  Toke of my affection.

  Monday night

  I waited in the balcony. If something stirred, I’d just press the button and my 6-volt Bearscare Superbeam would hit the altar at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second—same cruising speed as the finger of God.

  The amber crime-prevention streetlights on the block making a perfect indoor crime-site of my church. Intimations of a kind of tarnished air substance in the vaulted spaces. The stained-glass figures yellowed into lurid obsolescence. For how many years has this church been home to me? But all I had to do was sit up in the back for a few hours to understand the truth of its stolid indifference. How an oak pew creaks. How a passing police siren in its two Doppler pitches is like a crisis being filed away in the stone walls.

  And then, Lord, I confess, I dozed. Father Brown would never have done that. But there was this crash, as if someone had dropped a whole load of dishes. The pantry again—I had figured them for the altar. I raced my bulk down the stairs, my Superbeam held aloft like a club. I think I was shouting. As in “Cry God for Tommy, England, and St. Tim!” How long had I been asleep? I stood in the doorway, found the light switch, and when you do that, for an instant the only working sense is the sense of smell: hashish in that empty pantry. Male body odor. But also the pungent sanguinary scent of female pheromone. And something else, something else. Like lipstick, or lollipop.

  The dish cabinets—some of the panes shattered, broken cups and saucers on the floor, a cup still rocking.

  The alley door was open. My sense of a bulk of something moving out there. A deep metallic bong sounds up through my heels. Someone curses. It’s me, fumbling with the damn searchlight. I swing the beam out and see a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner.

  I ran back into the church and let my little light shine. Behind the altar, where the big brass cross should have been, was a shadow of Your crucifix, Lord, in the unfaded paint of my predecessor’s poor taste.

  What the real detective said: Take my word for it, Padre. I been in this precinct ten years. They’ll hit a synagogue for the whatchamacallit, the Torah. Because it’s handwritten? Not a mass-produced item? It’ll bring, a minimum, five K. Whereas the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada. No disrespect, we’re related, I’m Catholic, go to mass, but on the street there is no way it is anything but scrap metal. Jesus! whata buncha sickos.

  Tuesday

  Mistake talking to the Times. Such a sympathetic young man. I didn’t understand anything till they took the cross, I told him. I thought they were just crackheads looking for a few dollars. Maybe they didn’t understand it themselves. Am I angry? No. I’m used to being robbed. When the diocese took away my food-for-the-homeless program and merged it with one across town, I lost most of my parish. That was a big-time heist. So now these people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But now I’m beginning to see it differently. That whoever stole the cross had to do it. And wouldn’t that be blessed? Christ going where He is needed?

  Wednesday

  Phone ringing off the hook. One coldly furious bishop. But also pledges of support, checks rolling in. Including some of the old crowd, pals now of my dear wife, who had thought my diction quaint, like hearing Mozart on period instruments. Tommy will now play us a few pieties on his viola da gamba. I count nine hundred and change here. Have I stumbled on a new scam? I tell you, Lord, these people just don’t get
it. What am I supposed to do, put up a barbed wire fence? Wrap up my church like the Reichstag?

  The TV news people swarming all over. Banging on my door. Mayday Mayday! I will raise the sash behind this desk, drop nimbly to the rubbled lot, pass under the window of Ecstatic Reps where the lady with the big hocks is doing the treadmill, and I’m gone. Thanks heaps, Metro section.

  —This just in. . . the elusive invisible heretofore only deduced neutrino has a detectable mass. How is this verified? There’s this cult of neutrino physicists, and all over the world they’re building great huge tanks to hold heavy water deep inside mountains, under the Aegean Sea, on the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia, in tunnels under the Alps, below the Antarctic ice cap. . . so they can watch the flying neutrinos that can slip so easily, effortlessly through the diameter of the earth, like bats at night flooping behind your ear and lifting your strands of hair with their wing wind—and detect with powerful light sensors the minuscule voltage emitted by the neutrinos plunging through the dark giant tanks of pure heavy water.. . . Some say Enrico Fermi figured out the neutrino had to exist. He may have given it its name, but unknown to all but me, the neutrino was discovered at the Bronx High School of Science, in the study hall one afternoon in 1948, when this fat jerk of a kid, Seligman, borrowed my algebra homework to copy and in return privileged me with the information that he’d proven the existence of a subatomic particle that had no physical properties whatsoever. So excited that he sprayed me with his words, very unpleasant. On the other hand we both got grades of 100 for our homework.

  Well if the neutrino is, after all, something with mass and it is monumentally present throughout the universe, why. . . shouldn’t that define dark matter? And doesn’t it suggest that space is not empty, not merely the capacity of distance between objects, but itself a qualified substance. . . and so far beyond our sensing abilities, like dog whistles, like ghosts, that for all our science nerdwork, we are just beginning to understand we are only at the beginning? I mean, if the universe has such mass, will it inevitably cease to inflate? There’ll be this moment of peace, a universe at neap tide, everything still, and then, with a little groan and creak, it will quietly shift into its shrink mode, slowly and then more quickly sucking itself back in the direction of itself again. And then what? Never mind the Big Crunch. What will it have left behind, vacated? Nothing? How can there be nothing! That was what Leibniz wanted to know: How, he said, can there be nothing? And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe. . . are the souls of the dead? Has that ever been considered by the hotshots of the Bronx High School of Science?