City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  So this is someone else?

  It must be. Somebody took the cross off their hands—if they didn’t happen to find it in a dumpster. And then this second one or more persons had the intent. But how did they get it onto the roof? And nobody saw them, nobody heard them?

  Angelina, whom I think you met with the children: She heard noises from the roof one morning. We were already gone. That was the day I went to see my father, Sarah said, looking to Joshua for confirmation. But the noise didn’t last long and Angelina thought no more of it, that it was a repairman of some sort. We assume they came up through one of the houses on the block. The roofs abut.

  Did you go down the block? Did you ring bells?

  Joshua shook his head.

  What about the cops?

  They exchanged glances. Please, said Joshua. The congregation is new, not much more than a study group, just a beginning. A green shoot. The last thing we need is that kind of publicity. Besides, he says, that’s what they want, whoever did this.

  We don’t accept the ID of victim, said Sarah Blumenthal, looking me in the eye.

  And now I tell you, Lord, as I sit here back in my own study, in this bare ruined choir, I am exceptionally sorry for myself this evening, lacking as I do a companion like Sarah Blumenthal. This is not lust, and you know I would admit it if it were. No, but I think how quickly I took to her, how comfortable I was made, how naturally welcomed I was made to feel under these difficult circumstances. There is a freshness and honesty about these people, both of them I mean, they were so present in the moment, so self-possessed, a wonderful young couple with a quietly dedicated life, what a powerful family stronghold they make, and, oh Lord, he is one lucky rabbi, Joshua Gruen, to have that beautiful devout by his side.

  It was Sarah, apparently, who made the connection. He was sitting there trying to figure out how to handle it and she had come in from a conference somewhere and when he told her what was on the roof she wondered if that was the missing crucifix she had read about in the newspaper.

  I hadn’t read the piece and I was skeptical.

  You thought it was just too strange, a news story landing in your lap, Sarah said.

  That’s true. News is what happens somewhere else. And to realize that you know more than the reporter knew? But we found the article.

  He won’t let me throw out anything, Sarah says.

  Fortunately in this case, says the husband to the wife.

  It’s like living in the Library of Congress.

  So thanks to Sarah, we now have the rightful owner.

  She glances at me, colors a bit. Removes her glasses, the scholar, and pinches the bridge of her nose. I see her eyes in the instant before the specs go back on. Nearsighted, like a little girl I loved in grade school.

  I am extremely grateful, I say to my new friends. This is, in addition to everything else, a mitzvah you’ve performed. Can I use your phone? I’m going to get a van up here. We can take it apart, wrap it up, and carry it right out the front door and no one will be the wiser.

  I’m prepared to share the cost.

  Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I don’t need to tell you but my life has been hell lately. This is good coffee, but you don’t happen to have something to drink, do you?

  Sarah going to a wall cabinet. Will scotch do?

  Joshua, sighing, leans back in his chair. I could use something myself.

  The situation now: my cross dismantled and stacked like building materials behind the altar. It won’t be put back together and hung in time for Sunday worship. That’s fine, I can make a sermon out of that. The shadow is there, the shadow of the cross on the apse. We will offer our prayers to God in the name of His indelible Son, Jesus Christ. Not bad, Pem, you can still pull these things out of a hat when you want to.

  I’d been just about convinced it really was a new sect of some kind. I thought, Well, I’ll keep a vigil from across the street, watch them take St. Tim’s apart brick by brick. Maybe help them. They’ll reassemble it as a folk church somewhere. An expression of their simple faith. Maybe I’ll drop in, listen to the sermon now and then. Learn something. . .

  Then my other idea, admittedly paranoid: It would end up an installation in Soho. Let me wait a few months, a year, and I’d look in a gallery window and see it there, duly embellished, a statement. People standing there drinking white wine. So that was the secular version. I thought I had all bases covered. I am shaken. What am I to make of this strange night culture of stealth sickos. . . these mindless thieves of the valueless who go giggling through the streets, carrying what? whatever it is! through the watery precincts of urban nihilism. . . their wit their glimmering recognition of something that once had a significance they laughingly cannot remember. Jesus, there’s not even sacrilege there. A dog stealing a bone knows more what he’s up to.

  —Moira turning into a story, a woman crossing class lines. He’s a bit of a snob, isn’t he? Not sure I like him if he can spend his afternoons at the Met. He was shocked when she stuck her tongue in his ear. Not only the vulgarity of it, but as the act of a different person from the one he’d imagined her to be.

  Only way to go with this is to rev up their moral natures, put motors in them, but then all you have is a movie.

  Movie: Guy begins an affair with this really elegant trophy wife of a business leader—they are all three in the loosely bordered swirl of NY society comprised of publishing, the arts, advertising, journalism, Wall Street.

  After some encouragement she turns out to be an ardent lover without guilt or self-recrimination. He can’t devise anything she is unwilling to try. He is creative. She honors his every perversion and does not sulk and cannot be driven to anger.

  Largely from conditions he has laid down she trains herself to ask for nothing more of the relationship than he will give. He assumes uncontested control—when they will meet, how they will conduct themselves, what endeavors he will think up for her in her torrid state of self-abasement. She is content to meet him, indulge them both, and go to her home until the next time.

  But the total surrender of her will, and consequent stability of the affair, begins to bore him. He extends his control over her life with her husband: when she should withhold sex, when she should not withhold it, what clothes she must wear, what perfume, the dinners she is to order from their cook, the restaurants she is to insist upon, the destinations of their trips, even to the sheets he sleeps upon, the soap in the soap dish. It revives him to be exercising, through her, remote control of the private circumstances of her husband’s life.

  I see now that he is a real shithead. Why should I have anything to do with him? Once, by means of his direction, the husband finds himself with his wife in Maui—and while he, the husband, suns himself on a private beach, the lover is in his suite peeling off the wife’s swimsuit, pinching up the sand grains he finds in the groinal cleft of her thigh and presenting them with a dot of his finger to the tenderest part of her person. He leaves her short of breath, she is addicted to the danger he’s become to her, the threat to her well-being, her self-respect, her life.

  Someone as bad as this guy has to be a star. I mean, if he were a fat bald slob who sucked air through his teeth, the audience would be repelled, aroused to indignation. Want their money back. So he is lean, fit, he takes very good care of himself in that way of someone profoundly faithless. He runs, works out almost religiously, for the self-maintenance that is his due. Drinks sparingly, does nothing to excess except plot. Makes no effort to ingratiate himself with others, does not indulge in the small talk designed to demonstrate one’s unthreatening nature. He never raises his voice. When he is funny he is contemptuous, when he is angry he is quietly menacing. His selfishness is so smoothly distributed over every aspect of his life that it is not visible to others except as a patina of snobbery, a degree of arrogance that, in a better light, would be a visible ruthlessness. This is what attracts women. This is what attracted her.

  I realize now his casual upper-cl
ass grace of knowing the compensations in wine, horses, sailing, and so forth derives from his former profession, that of a CIA covert-action planner with a background in foreign postings. How could it be otherwise? He evinces the condescension of one who has been on the inside of the geopolitical adventures of the cold war toward ordinary people, who get their news from the newspaper.

  He is as middle-class as she is, born in upstate New York, perhaps, though it is wrong to place him precisely in that his whole life has been a training away from the specific identity attaching to a region or a family. More precisely, his nihilist moral endowment, or perhaps only the necessity of bringing the movie in under two hours, has erased any secondary compensation of character that is conferred by a religious or ethnic qualification.

  By now he has wired his mistress so that he can hear the husband’s private conversations with her, learn the weaknesses, the inflections of voice that betray fear or guilt, lust or love. The husband has a softness about the underchin, a mama thing in his most private moments, a desire for his wife’s praise and admiration. Living with him she has felt imprisoned. The drama of his business life is like a bludgeon. She understands that his prideful attention to her in public is a kind of self-congratulation, in the same way that he will not go anywhere or accept any invitation that does not by its auspices bring honor or status to himself.

  Why she has responded to the dark-hearted lover is not clearly thought out by her but is in fact what she responded to when her executive husband courted her, with the sense in both instances of rising on a tide that would lift her with immense power beyond any possibilities of freedom she could have realized for herself. But she has become as indentured to her lover and to his ways as she had been to her husband according to his, and freedom for her is realized as subjection, as an idea attainable only in its wreckage.

  And so we have in these three roles three lives more or less unattached to reality, and vivified by that fact. The lover, for his part, envisions a grand finale to his enterprise that is so dangerous, so extreme, that he decides his life, heretofore adrift in boredom and alienation and the absence of serious conviction, may now be redemptively recon-ceived as an art form.

  —This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. I can assure you that it is barely furnished. In fact, in a matter of speaking, my work has been to empty my laboratory of the furniture there, the beakers, measuring scales, cabinets, old books. While I have succeeded to some extent, there are still some things here that I can’t seem to part with: the idea that the universe is designed, that there are a few simple rules, or laws, physical laws, from which all the manifold processes of life and nonlife can be derived. So you see I am hardly the undermining subversive revolutionary the Nazis of Hitler made me out to be.

  Of course, the universe we have all known and seen since our childhoods is only apparently explained by the great, esteemed Sir Isaac Newton. That universe, with all the stars in the heavens and the planets turning in their orbits and night following day, and actions having reactions and objects in their gravity falling—all of it seems quite sound except to a mind like mine, nor is it the only one. Because my revered Sir Isaac’s mechanical model of the universe makes one or two assumptions that cannot be proven. The idea of absolute motion and absolute rest, for example, the idea that something can move in an absolute sense without reference to anything else. This is clearly impossible, a concept that cannot be proven empirically, by reference to experience. The ship that moves on the sea does so with reference to the land. Or if you prefer with reference to another ship, moving at a greater speed or a slower speed. Or by reference to a dirigible overhead. Or to a whale beneath the sea. Or to the currents of the sea itself. Always to something. And this is true of a planet as well. There is nothing in the universe that can be proven to move absolutely without reference to something else in the universe, or for that matter without reference to the universe in its entirety.

  Now, that is a very simple insistence upon which all my further thought is based. That absolute motion and absolute rest are false concepts that cannot be demonstrated. But you see the implications are enormous of this picky stubborn insistence of mine that we deal with these things only insofar as they can be proven. I’ll show you, it’s very simple. We will do a little thought experiment. . .

  If I am in a rocket ship flying through space at millions of miles an hour. . . and you catch up to me in your rocket ship and decelerate your engines so that we are flying at the same speed side by side. . . and a person asleep in each of our rocket ships wakes up and looks from his window into the other’s window. . . without seeing the meteorites and bits of star material whizzing or drifting by. . . but seeing only into each other’s cabin. . . they will not be able to say if the rocket ships are moving uniformly together or not moving at all. Because in either case the experience is the same.

  You see how simple that is? I am really a simple man and I begin with the questions that a child would ask. For example, I was not much more than a child when I wondered what would happen if I traveled at the speed of light. Nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. You know what that means? That means there are no instantaneous processes in our universe, because nothing can occur faster than light can move and light takes time to get from one place to another. That means for example that a person cannot be in two places at the same time. Also for example that there cannot be the ghosts which are cherished by so many people, because ghosts no more than anyone else can appear and disappear as if having taken no time to travel from one place to another. So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away. And there would be nothing I could see in the mirror I was holding up to my face. Yet that does not seem right. It doesn’t feel that this would be the case, does it? It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.

  So from this simple thought experiment I deduced the following: No object, neither mirror nor person, even a thinner person than myself, one who did not indulge in the Sacher torte or tea with raspberry jam or a scone with butter, no, not even the thinnest person alive can move through the universe with the speed of light. Because we are always visible to ourselves in our mirrors and to each other, we must move more slowly than that, though light itself is moving from the surface of our dear faces and from our mirrors at the same constant ultimate speed. We ourselves are slower than that. Even in our fastest rocket ships. Do you know what would happen if we moved toward or closer to the speed of light, going faster and faster, from zero miles an hour to one hundred and eighty-three million miles a second? Do you know what would happen to us? My goodness, we would get so leaden, heavier and heavier the faster we went, until our immense weight or density would be so great that the space around us would curve toward us and we would suck space into such density around us that. . . as fast as we might go, the less we would have the chance of attaining the speed of light. . . because the faster we moved, the more mass we would have and the more mass, the greater the resistance to our progress. . . until the celestial heaven around us would curl and bend and warp itself and us out of all recognition.

  And from these few simple thoughts, perhaps simpleminded thoughts, I have discovered laws, physical laws, that alarm people to such a degree that they have decided the man in the street cannot be made to realize what I’m talking about, the revolution I have supposedly made. That I am some sort of genius to respect or even venerate while you scratch your head and say, God bless him. Look how funny, his hair is sticking up in every direction, perhaps from his having tried to fly into his mirror at the speed of light. Look at his sweatshirt, hi
s unpressed trousers, not that this is practical for work but that forgetting to wear a coat and tie, he must be a genius. The chalk with which he writes his secret formulas on the blackboard, the chalk breaks in his hand! All this is the way the press and the radio people have relieved you of thinking about what I have to say. It is an insult not only to me but to you, because of course the human mind can always find out the truth, because however hidden it may be, eventually it will emerge. And nothing I have discovered is revolutionary, because I am seeing only what has always been as it is now and as far as I can tell always will be. It is only that our perception has become more. . . perceptive.

  So: after all, we may with assurance say only the following about the Old One’s universe: that nothing is constant other than the speed of light.

  Of space all we may say with assurance is that it is something you measure with a ruler.

  And of time all we may say is that it is something you measure with a clock.

  But for the theological visions and screams and terrors this produces in our brains, I beg you do not hold me responsible.

  —There are no science songs to speak of. No song tells you the force of gravity is a product of the masses of two objects divided by the ratio of the distance between them. Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe the laws by which the universe operates and suggest in equations that a balance is possible even when things are in apparent imbalance. So do songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do this to me, why did you break my heart. . . the inhering formula is that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry of pain. Feelings transmute as quickly and perversely as subatomic events, and when there is critical mass a song erupts, but the overall amount of pure energy is constant. And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.