by Neil Cross
With the help of some friends, Lang’s wife and children searched the area of his abrupt disappearance. The land was quite firm. There were no old mine works under the farm, no subsidence. But David Lang was never found. The only marker of his vanishing was a strange circle that appeared on the ground where he’d last stood. Nothing ever grew there. Animals would not enter into it. Not even insects. David Lang’s terrible disappearance became famous because his daughter, Sarah, later wrote an article about it. It was called ‘How Lost Was My Father?’.
Derek needed these books because, while he prepared for Armageddon, he was also suturing together the severed, patchwork past. Human history, which was about to end, had begun with the intervention of space-men. Lost, ancient civilizations had possessed their extra-terrestrial technology. Disorder and decay were exemplified by bestial Negroes and malicious Jews. Nothing was meaningless and nothing was random.
It gave shape to his world, but the shape was never quite right. He kept looking, kept reading. He kept trying to believe something: that everything had a cause, and that behind the cause was a reason.
This was true even of the fact that trainloads of people had been taken to a frigid place and starved and shaved and stripped and gassed. Derek told me that, because they had scrambled over each other in their brutal death-fear, they had formed tangled, naked pyramids of corpses. He wondered at the significance of the pyramid shape.
He said, ‘The Jew is selfish. It isn’t his fault. He’s made like that. And Hitler wasn’t a good man. He was a very bad man, in some ways. But he was also very clever: he was a genius. What he did to the Jews wasn’t good, even though in some ways they asked for it. But Hitler also did great, great things for his country.’
He looked me in the eye.
‘They bulldozed them into graves,’ he said. ‘Thousands of them, tens of thousands. They fell into the holes. They were piled on top of each other. Men and women and babies. Like sticks.’
‘Derek,’ said Mum.
He stopped. Thinking about it always made him grim.
(And later, when I angrily announced in class that ‘Hitler was a genius,’ there was another acute, peculiar silence.
Miss Galloway looked at me with her eyebrows raised, as if a punchline was about to follow. The class looked at me as though I’d announced my intention to fart.
Miss Galloway said, ‘Well, Neil, a lot of people certainly thought so’, and moved us dextrously on.)
Derek had been born with something missing, and he knew it. But he couldn’t fathom the discontinuity inside him. It was an unbroken code, an apparent clutter of letters and shapes that somehow contained meaning, like the jumble of spots in a colour-blindness chart.
He delved for answers in strange corners and sometimes found treasure. But whatever pearl he unearthed changed shape as he examined it. All flowers wilted in Derek Cross’s hands. Everything went rotten.
And he rocked on the balls of his feet and put his hands in his pockets and grinned. And on Saturday night he’d have a few beers, and get a bit tipsy and tell me about Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and he’d play me ‘Lucille’ or ‘Route 66’, and later he’d tell me stories about distrustful niggers, who were as close to animals as they were to men.
I wondered what went on behind his eyelids when he lay down at night, or when he went in the storeroom at the supermarket in Corstorphine to cut up boxes with a carpet knife. Catch him unawares while he was doing that and he had a dead look in his eye, like the look in the eye of a great white shark. He was pale and there was a raven sheen to his hair. It was the face he wore when he beat the dog. He felt angry because he feared there was nothing. He carried it around like a tumour, like something voracious munching at him from the inside, from the middle of his brain. He cut at it when he cut the boxes. He kicked at it when he kicked the dog. His soul was rotten and full of gaps, like an old curtain.
And then the American boys came to the door, smiling.
14
The knock came early in 1978. We knew it must be important, because we never had visitors. The only person who had ever visited the flat was Derek’s assistant, who was also called Derek, but he never came any more.
By now, the dog was fully grown and fully insane. At the sound of the knocking, she exploded into a mass of teeth and saliva. Derek grabbed a fistful of scruff, but she squirmed free and ran. She stood on hindlegs, snarling and gnawing sideways at the door, trying to chew through it.
Mum dragged her into my bedroom. The dog howled with bloodlust as we gathered, curious, in the narrow hallway. Derek straightened his cardigan and opened the door.
It was the Men in Black: two young men in dark suits, white shirts, sober ties, CIA haircuts. Each of them carried a leather briefcase. Each of them smiled a Cadillac smile.
They stood there, smiling, apparently unconcerned by the maniacal wolf baying in my bedroom. After we said hello, their smiles only widened. They were from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
There was a moment. We were looking at them. They were looking at us. The dog was barking. Then Derek invited them in.
They hesitated; shared a glance; stepped over the threshold. Derek shut the door behind them and led them to the front room. Mum had gone first and was already in the kitchen, waiting to offer them tea or coffee. They declined, with thanks, and asked if they might have a glass of water instead.
(‘Wadder,’ said Mum, mimicking their accent, delighted: ‘I’d like a glass of wadder if I may.’)
They didn’t sit until Derek suggested they might like to. Then, having first placed their bulky briefcases on the floor, they sat straight, like boardroom members in a film. Derek sat in his deckchair.
They introduced themselves as Elder Baxter and Elder Follett and reminded us they were from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which we might know better as the Mormons.
Mum had no idea who or what the Mormons might be. I could tell by her earnest, wordless affirmative, from the kitchenette. But Derek seemed familiar with them. He made a cheeky moon face. He said, ‘You’re the ones with all the wives.’
They’d heard that one before. You could tell. Certain members of the early Church had believed in polygamy, they said. But it was an Article of Faith that Mormons should adhere to the law of the land. That law prohibited polygamy and accordingly, they didn’t practise it. Granted, there were small offshoot groups in the Utah desert who did, but they were not accepted by the church.
They sipped water.
I asked what polygamy was.
‘Having lots of wives,’ said Derek.
Elder Baxter opened his big briefcase and took out three books. One of them was a Bible; you could tell, because it was black, with gold writing stamped on the spine and the pages were edged in gold. The other books were cloth-bound in deep, navy blue. He also produced a small, leather-look portfolio, which he flipped open to show us.
This was the First Discussion, in which we talked of many things.
Joseph Smith was born in Vermont in 1805, the son of an impoverished farmer. He was a gifted but unschooled young man who lived in a time of great spiritual tribulation. During the emotional turmoil of his fifteenth year, Joseph despaired ever to know which of the many churches was true. Contemplating this most terrible question, he read from James 1:5: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.
Taking the Bible at its word, on a beautiful, clear day early in the spring of 1820, he went to a grove of trees not far from his home. He fell to his knees and prayed to be granted wisdom. A great light descended upon him, brighter than the American sun. It revealed ‘two Personages whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air.’1
Here, Elder Follett interrupted. He said, ‘Now, Neil. Okay. Tell me. What do you think God looks like?’
It was a trick question. He wanted me to say that God was an old man with a long white beard. I knew that was the wrong answer. But I hadn’t spent much time thinking
about God.
I said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ said Elder Follett, ‘at this point, you’re probably picturing an old man with a long, white beard…’
I said, ‘No.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you had been, you’d have been absolutely right.’
He swivelled the portfolio and showed me a picture. It was rendered in the hyper-real style of a Marvel Summer Special. It showed a young Joseph Smith, on his knees in a grove. He was looking upon two glowing, robed, bearded men. Each of them was barefoot, and they hovered several feet in the air.
God spoke to Joseph Smith. He said, ‘This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him.’2
And, to answer Joseph’s question, Jesus revealed that none of the existing churches were true. Even worse than that: ‘…all their creeds were an abomination’.3
This was called the First Vision, and it marked the beginning of the restoration of the true church of Jesus Christ to the planet earth.
Later, God sent an angel called Moroni who disclosed to Joseph the existence of a long-lost treasure: a holy book, inscribed on plates of pure gold. This book accounted for the former inhabitants of the American continent, and the ‘source from which they sprang’.4 It also contained the ‘fullness’ of the biblical gospels. One thousand, four hundred years ago, it had been hidden beneath a rock on a nearby hillside.
Nineteen witnesses testified to seeing the golden plates. They were about ‘six inches wide and eight inches long and not quite as thick as common tin. They were filled with engravings in Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume, as the leaves of a book with three rings running through the whole.’5
Joseph completed the translation in June, 1829. Nine years after meeting God in an American copse, he finally revealed the fullness of the gospels. It was called The Book of Mormon.
It was a good story. It had the ring of adventure. Joseph Smith reminded me of David Balfour, the gauche, faulted hero of Kidnapped.
The Book of Mormon was ‘the most correct of any book on earth, ever written’.6 But it was also the first blockbuster. Opening in Jerusalem, around 600 BC, it tells the story of a Hebrew tribe lead by the virtuous Lehi, who is instructed by God to relocate his tribe from Jerusalem to America. Having successfully completed this voyage of several thousand miles, the tribe splits into quarrelsome factions: the Nephites are descended from Lehi’s youngest son, who was favoured for his grace and obedience. The Lamanites are descended from Nephi’s older, jealous brothers.
The Lamanites are ‘an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety’, for which God smites them with a ‘skin of blackness’. More favoured, the Nephites remained ‘exceedingly fair and delightsome’.7
For many years, the tribes wage war on one another. Peace is only established in AD 33, when the recently crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ makes a surprise cameo appearance. Jesus urges the Nephites and the Lamanites to live in peace which, following his departure, they manage for several hundred years. But eventually, the false-hearted, ominously dark-skinned Lamanites descend once again into base idolatry, which leads to another war. During this final conflict, the superb leader of the fair-skinned and Godly Nephites is called Mormon.
Despite Mormon’s piety and tactical excellence, the Nephites are defeated in a final, titanic battle, after which the victorious Lamanites graduate into genocide. They put every last breathing Nephite to the sword.
All but one of them. The last of the Nephites is Mormon’s son, Moroni. Moroni lives just long enough to preserve the tale of his routed, Godly people. He does so on the pages of a golden book, which he later buries on the slopes of a hill called Cumorah.
It was the same Moroni who returned in glory fourteen hundred years later, restoring the lost and true church of Jesus Christ to the face of the earth. During this time, the pernicious Lamanites had continued to inhabit the land that became America. They were the peoples Joseph Smith knew as ‘Red Indians’.
The Holy Spirit was in the room with us, that night. Everyone could feel it. If you could feel it, it was there.
The story of ancient Hebrew tribes piloting boats to America sounded no more implausible than many of the Old Testament stories with which Derek had already familiarized me. And it seemed less fantastic that the Risen Christ should visit America than that he should rise in the first place. It even made a kind of sense that Satan was Jesus’s evil brother, especially if you’d read enough comics and seen enough movies.
But it was the missionaries, not their story, who made me want to go to their church. I wanted to be near them, to make them approve of me. They seemed unearthly, outsized, made of different materials, possessed of strange glamour. I wanted them to be my friends.
Mum was lonely. That was all it took for her: loneliness and a knock on a door that never knocked.
But Derek saw something else. In Joseph Smith, he had at last discovered his soul-mate. Derek saw himself mirrored in Joseph’s eye.
Joseph Smith looked Derek Cross in the eye, across all those years, and told him how it was. Here was the shape of things, at last. Here was the piece that was missing.
And Derek saw, and it was good.
15
One Saturday morning, wandering down Nicholson Street, I noticed a bright yellow shop which stood alone, halfway down a side street. It was opposite the sunny side: a yellow shop in violet shadow. It was called the Science Fiction Bookshop.
I’d passed that side street many times. I’d have noticed a yellow shop, had one been there before. It seemed to have materialized like Dr Who’s Tardis. It was impossible to see inside the shop: the windows were full of posters of big-breasted women in scanty armour and men in elaborate space-suits, carrying lasers. So I went in.
Because it was on a side street, and because it had so many posters on the windows, it was a pleasant shade of twilight inside. It smelled nice, of books and comics and new T-shirts. Several young men were in there. Behind the counter stood a short man in a frayed blue sweater and glasses. He had long, frizzy hair and a scanty beard. As I entered the shop and stood there, taking it in, he smiled and said, ‘Hiya’.
I said, ‘Hiya’.
It was a novelty to be spoken to, in a bookshop. Bobby–if that was even the name of the silent man who occupied Bobby’s Bookshop–had never yet acknowledged my presence, let alone bidding me an immediate and cheerful hello.
There were no spy books in the Science Fiction Bookshop and there were no Westerns or books about German punishment battalions on the Russian front. The shelves were full of books whose covers showed spaceships and astronauts and muscled barbarians. They were called The Mote in God’s Eye; Soldier, Ask Not; In Our Hands the Stars. Next to the counter stood a wire spinner, on which were displayed novels based on Marvel comic superheroes. One of them featured Spider Man.
The man at the counter looked at me, looking.
He said, ‘Those are American imports.’
I nodded, looking at the Avengers in The Man Who Stole Tomorrow.
I fingered the glossy blue spine.
I said, ‘Have you just opened?’
He said, ‘Oh, no. We’ve been here for ages.’
‘But I’ve never seen you.’
He smiled. ‘Everyone says that.’
Originally, he said, and for a long time, the outside of the shop had been painted black. But the shop didn’t have enough customers, so they tried to sell it. Because nobody wanted to buy a black shop, they painted the outside. The yellow was supposed to be an undercoat, something to cover up the black before they painted it a proper colour. But as soon as the undercoat went down, customers started to come through the doors. So they painted the outside an even brighter yellow and even more customers appeared. Now they weren’t selling the shop any more.
I said, ‘That’s great,’ and I meant it. It would have been terrible to discover and lose such a place at almost the same time.
I picked up Mayhem in Manhattan with awe and reverence. I was loath
to put it back on the wire spinner. But I had no money.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the shop. When I got back to St Cuthbert’s, Mum was wearing her coat and ready to go. She’d been worried; she asked where I’d been. I told her. But she didn’t believe that a nine-year-old boy could spend so long in a bookshop without buying something. The shopkeepers would mind.
But they didn’t mind. There were two of them, both short. One was hairy, the other was square and clean-shaven. Both wore frayed sweaters and jeans and old trainers. They showed me everything. They kept finding new things to show me, authors whose names I didn’t know and to whom they seemed excited to introduce me: Harry Harrison, Gordon R. Dickson, EE ‘Doc’ Smith. They offered to let me take home a second-hand copy of a book called The Stainless Steel Rat. I could bring in the money next week, if I liked.
‘Trust me,’ they said. ‘You’ll love it.’
It was a handsome book, creased and yellowing a little with age, with a vast, half-built space-vessel depicted on the cover. I had to say no, because I knew Derek would be angry if they gave me something for free, even if I went back and paid for it later.
That night, I told him about the Science Fiction Bookshop. He thought the story about the paint was funny. I asked him to take me there. I had to wait until it was his day off work, but he did.
He entered the shop with an air of amused sufferance. He stood behind me, rolling on the balls of his feet. I moved from shelf to shelf, trying to remember what I’d decided to buy, if I got the chance.
The hairy assistant came in from the back. He had a mug of coffee. He said, ‘Hello again. Neil, is it?’
I said, ‘Hello. This is my Dad.’
Derek arched an eyebrow in misjudged complicity. The hairy assistant looked through him like a window. I wanted to say something, to let the hairy assistant know that it wasn’t fair not to like Derek, that he always bought me books. That all the books on my shelf were there because of him.