Disciples

by Austin Wright

  He thought often of Gus Wessel, his wife’s father who had been Harry’s professor and who died last fall. Old Gus was content to be obliterated. In his nineties glad to die with no residue of feeling, no breath of memory left. Harry couldn’t understand. The foreverness of time. The eternity of death making it as if he had never lived.

  Old Gus used to talk, repeating what nature told Harry. Are you afraid you’ll be forgotten? he said. Vanity. The same soup drowns us all.

  This old father-in-law was the only person Harry told about his fears and then only in his old age. The old mentor became a new mentor by authority of the shadow of death. They argued playfully, Harry pretending to be as afraid as he really was. Old Gus was a man of winks and jokes. His memories never changed, the same lost anchor on the sailboat, Professor Paul and the plums, running out of gas while driving up Cadillac Mountain. When Gus died it was peaceful and normal. And terrible. This was a death (of all deaths) that they could not discuss and Harry could only invent what Gus would have said. It was the reduction of Gus’s consciousness from real to imaginary, like his father’s death, his mother’s, and all the others to come. The insult of Gus Wessel’s nonexistence.

  Harry thought he knew what made death terrible. It was the idea of permanent good, gained from a lifetime of education and opinion. What mentors taught: things are good, some things transcendently good, some things worth more than life itself. Life saturated with value like a body soaked with gasoline. Art. Morality. Love. Then death kills you and me and it goes up in flames. Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, all you have been taught, flamed out into the eternal blank of death. Harry forgot to mention this idea to Gus Wessel and now he never could.

  Outwardly he took the scientific view and wrote articles. Inwardly he still longed to rediscover the reconciliation he had before his granddaughter’s kidnapping, lost like a gift stolen before he could open it.

  At Miller Farm, Harry Field interviewed God. Nothing allowed Harry to hope this fraudulent pretender could answer his question, the idea was insulting. That’s why this narrative can’t be in the first person. As they drove to Miller Farm in David’s car, Harry in the first person looked forward to jousting with Miller as a celebration of the baby’s release. In the dark peripheries outside his first person, who knows what hopes remained unuttered, inadmissible, ashamed?

  The sky was sullen, gray and blank revealing nothing. A woman came out to greet him. She directed him to the big house and sent David to wait with Mrs. Field and the baby.

  The house was a cavernous Victorian space. Stained glass panels in the door. A broad central hallway with a staircase and balcony. He saw through to the back and the house was full of light. An actor’s voice invited him up.

  A man stood on the balcony, tall with white hair, a red flannel shirt and jeans. Later Harry would hear Judy’s description of him as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Franz Liszt, but to Harry he looked more like Walter Huston as Old Scratch.

  Harry had an embarrassing need to pee. Bathroom? he asked. Over there, the man said. Harry knew, more men die of prostate than of any other cancer. It was foolish not to have it checked.

  Now here was Miller, who claimed to be God. They went into his study. A computer and a yellow cat washing itself among the papers. Glad you came, God said. Harry sat by the window in an upholstered chair with a high back. The man faced him in a similar chair. He looked benevolent until you noticed his eyes. There was something wrong with them. It was hard to tell which eye he was looking out of. One seemed fiery, the other was shaded.

  They looked out at the compound, the altered barn in the center, the cottages at the edge of the woods. I’m Miller and you’re Field, God said. What can I do for you?

  Mainly I came to get my daughter and my granddaughter.

  They’re free to leave. This is an interview you requested. What do you want to know?

  What did Harry want to know? I suppose I want to know what you really claim to be.

  I looked up your essay on religious credulity, Miller said. I’m on your side. I’m glad when pseudo-scientists and con artists are exposed.

  Is that so?

  I also looked up your essay on science and religion.

  He stared at Harry, though Harry couldn’t tell which eye was staring nor whether the look was benign or malignant. The light from outside cast a shadow across his face in the Walter Huston-Old Scratch way. You know what they call me, don’t you? Miller said. In the presence of madness Harry shivered.

  They call you God? Harry said. It sounded too ridiculous to be uttered, which made Harry timid.

  Some people do.

  And you encourage it?

  Miller closed his eyes, folded his hands, leaned back like William Buckley. This is an interview, he said. Let me tell you about my life. Would you like that?

  Fine, Harry said.

  Miller talked. Once I was an ordained minister, but too many people loved me and I had to leave. I started my own church in a Philadelphia apartment. Now here we are.

  His talk was like a practiced oration. I had a religious experience. We call it The Revelation and it’s the Constitution of the Miller Church. I was in a Philadelphia park on a bench thinking about something that had just happened. I heard a voice telling me who I was. And who do you think that was?

  A response was expected, but Harry waited. Miller nodded. Thus was born the Miller Church. I started with five from my original mission, meeting in the Philadelphia apartment. Now we have more than forty. We moved from Philadelphia to Cape Cod, living in tents. We grew. A benefactor let us use an island in Maine and last year we came here and became the Miller Farm. My disciples. We’re self-supporting. We live out of the wilderness. We grow our food and make goods to sell, clothing and wood carvings for small change. Reclusive and exclusive. We don’t seek members.

  All my people have been rescued from lives of personal despair. They are remade by their deliberate belief in the thing about me that most shocks you. They are stripped of ambition, freed from self. They don’t care for doctrine. They shrink from authority voices demanding them to choose, choose, choose. We give them shelter and leadership and relieve them from responsibility. I do good, man, I do good. Look out the window and see.

  Harry saw two women talking on a cottage porch and a fat man carrying a laundry basket.

  You rehabilitate people? Harry said.

  Not if you mean sending them back to the world, Miller said. I remove them from the world. My people are estranged from the world. They are allergic to institutions. The threat of penalty in every blank to be filled in. The enemy is society itself like a great schoolmarm. The scolding press, the tax collectors, the criticizing neighbors, the chiding church. I remake them into the ambitionless world of Miller Farm. Nothing can touch them here. We’re a sovereign community.

  You tell your followers you’re God and they believe you?

  That’s what rehabilitates them. Believing in me frees them.

  Do you yourself believe you’re God?

  Your own essay explains it.

  It does?

  There’s the objective world where the sciences prevail. And there’s subjective consciousness where the universe is mind, nature its embodiment. Wise people hope to reconcile the two worlds and believe both at once. You said that in your article. Well here I am, Miller said, the answer to your wish.

  What?

  The intersection of nature and mind. If the universe is mind then mind is divine. I am conscious, therefore I am divine. Therefore God. What do you think of that?

  It made Harry laugh. Why then, he said, if you’re God, so am I. We’re all God. Is that what you mean?

  Miller laughed too, like watch it, the waters are deeper than you think. There’s a difference between your divinity and mine, he said. Your consciousness partakes of God. But you and your consciousness together do not constitute God. I do.

  How do you know?

  Like this. Would you ever go among your fellow beings and announc
e in all seriousness that you are God?

  Of course not.

  Well I would. That’s the difference.

  You really are an old fake, Harry said. He liked Miller.

  Not at all, Miller said. What I really am is God.

  Meaning you’re a liar and I’m not.

  Not at all. I know I’m God. You don’t. Knowledge is faith and religion depends on faith. I know I am God, you know you are not, and neither of us needs proof.

  Is this what you tell your followers?

  I teach people to forsake ambition, break free from self. Defy the taboos that constrain their souls like the blueprint of an old castle. Familiarity is death, leave it and seek the strange, accept the unacceptable, think the unthinkable. This does not mean go out and seek adventures. It’s an inner change. My people live quietly on Miller Farm sharing their lives with the birds that sing and the animals that hunt and rest and mate and sleep.

  Believing you are God.

  When you’ve left the world it comforts you to have God near.

  And you snicker at them.

  Never. It’s a serious matter being God.

  I’ll bet it is.

  It’s a trust. I embody the spiritual God. Divine incarnation, most religions have it. It makes divinity, otherwise dispersed through the sentient universe, communicable. It brings God to people, so they can talk together like you and me. They like to see me confined by the same bodily limits that confine them. In my incarnation I can only do what the human machine I inhabit is able to do.

  You can’t work miracles?

  I prefer not to. Likewise my human knowledge is limited.

  You don’t know everything?

  This is the divine amnesia, temporary for the duration of the incarnation. Knowledge in God is sight, the direct perception of what is. What you see depends on where you stand. When I occupy my human body my sight lines are blocked. Mock away. I have an offer for you. In your article you said you had a lot of questions for God. Well, here’s your one-in-a-lifetime chance to ask God everything about the universe you always wanted to know.

  This is a joke. You’ll answer?

  If you don’t believe I’m God, just pretend and ask as if I were.

  You like games.

  Yes, God likes games.

  Here’s the scene, question and answer, Harry Field’s once-in-a-lifetime chance to ask God everything he always wanted to know, while Miller leaned back in his chair with his arms in the red flannel shirt behind his head, grinning, like Walter Huston as Old Scratch with reminiscences of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Franz Liszt and something wrong with one of his eyes. All right, Harry said, I’ll ask you a question.

  Question (Harry): Have you all the human body parts?

  Answer (God): Yes, shall I enumerate? I have a pancreas, a liver, a spleen, an appendix, a gall bladder, shall I go on?

  Q: Are you immortal?

  A: Miller will die. God lives on.

  Q: Have there been previous incarnations?

  A: Many.

  Q: Who controls your incarnations?

  A: God does. There is no God over God.

  Q: Yet you discovered, you did not ordain, your incarnation.

  A: That’s the divine amnesia.

  Q: Well then, God, what’s your relation to nature? Are you the creator or an overseer? Is there an opposition between you and nature?

  A: Nature is my general body. Miller is my particular body.

  Q: Did you create your body? Did you create yourself?

  A: That’s a language problem. Creation implies before and after. Eternity transcends time. I know myself without creation and there’s no knowing beyond me.

  Q: Well. I was going to ask if having started things up you just watch or do you sometimes intervene? But if you get rid of time that question has no meaning.

  A: What you’re asking is, do I suspend the laws of nature? Miracles, ghosts. My reply: God never violates God’s rules. On the other hand.

  Q: On the other hand?

  A: Here I am. Everything that happens is an Act of God.

  Q: What shall I report to the scientists as your latest word on the origin of the universe, the big bang, the beginning of life, the evolution of species, the inner structure of the atom, the strong and weak force, antimatter and quarks?

  A: Tell them to admire me.

  Q: You take the credit?

  A: Your scientists are probing me. They make mistakes but they’re on the right track.

  Q: What exactly are some of those mistakes?

  A: To tell would be tampering. They’ll find out.

  Q: You don’t know, do you?

  A: Ask me another.

  Q: Is there life after death?

  A: That’s what everybody wants to know. You’d think it was the most important question on earth.

  Q: Do you have an answer?

  A: Depends what you mean by “after.” If you stay within time, then by definition there’s no life after death. Outside of time, “after” is meaningless. There is no after and life is eternal.

  Q: There you go outside time again.

  A: Consider two ideas about time. In one, time moves constantly forward. Since everything eventually ends, eternity is death. In the other time is a field. The only movement is your consciousness scanning the field, arranging things into an illusion of sequence. From this point of view all moments are eternal and you live forever within your life.

  Q: That sounds like my article.

  A: That’s where I got it.

  Q: You don’t know any more about it than I do.

  A: When people ask me the death question, I tell them what they want to believe. If you die believing you’ll go to heaven you’ll never know if you don’t.

  Q: That’s my article too. What did you tell people before you read it?

  A: There are many religions on the face of the earth. I appear differently to different people.

  Q: What made you choose this remote place to incarnate?

  A: It’s not my only choice.

  Q: Are there other incarnations? At the same time?

  A: Why not, if time is a field?

  Q: Here’s another question. Many religions around the world regard the others as false. Do you prefer some to others?

  A: It’s possible.

  Q: Which do you prefer?

  A: That’s my secret.

  Q: Tell me then, why are you so brutal and cruel and unjust? God smiled. A: Are you speaking of God or Miller?

  Q: I thought you were the same.

  A: So we are. I’ll answer you. Life eats life and dies as food. That’s what’s known as flux, to make the universe work. Otherwise there’s nothing for you or me to be conscious of.

  Q: How mean. People think you are full of grief over the evil things they do and all the while you’re getting ready to give them the whammy.

  A: Some people blame it on the devil.

  Q: What? Is there a devil?

  A: You think I’m the devil, don’t you? Call it my two-part structure, the principle of antithesis, fundamental to all creation. You suffer pain so I may live, old sadist that I am. But don’t think you’re more virtuous than I, you hypocrite. Whence came your idea of virtue? And your love for the earth and your life which I gave you? You’re no different from me, except that you refuse the responsibility. You see the suffering in the world and feel safe because you can shift the blame to me and let my mysterious ways take the blame.

  Q: Are you calling me a hypocrite?

  A: If that’s what you heard, that’s what you heard.

  Q: Let’s talk about something else. What’s your relation to Jesus Christ?

  A: My son. I was very fond of him.

  Q: Did he rise from the dead?

  A: Don’t ask me to comment on doctrines. That would be to intervene.

  Q: I think you are a sly devil. Do you believe in God?

  A: I believe in myself.

  Q: I think you’re either a charlatan or a madman.
>
  A: I don’t mind.

  I have a more personal question, Harry said. Why did Oliver Quinn kidnap my granddaughter?

  Because he’s a fool. He thought it would impress me. But he died.

  Why did he die?

  That was an Act of God.

  An Act of God?

  An accident, you know the expression. People call it an Act of God because they see God’s hand in it.

  Did you have a hand in Oliver’s death?

  I have a hand in everyone’s death, Miller said. I willed it. What else do you want to ask?

  Harry thought.

  Q: I understand you have a large collection of weapons. What do you need them for?

  A: Some of my people are afraid of the end of the world. Don’t worry. I keep them under control. Nothing is more savage than religious war. Nothing equals the power I have over people’s souls and hearts. That’s why I advise you to show respect.

  Q: Respect for you?

  A: Respect for the fanatics. They’ll kill you if you insult me, even if you think them contemptible.

  Q: That’s your lesson to me?

  A: You may write about this if you wish.

  *

  At the end of the interview Miller rose and went to the door. The unasked question on Harry’s mind still pressed for an answer. Tell me, he wanted to say. What was the reconciliation with death that I have forgotten?

  But I’ll be damned if I’ll let this fraud know that much about me, he said to himself. At the door Miller put his hand on Harry’s shoulder as if he had heard the unuttered question and this were his unuttered answer.

  They went down the stairs. Do you need to go to the bathroom again? You should have your prostate checked, God said.

  They went to the compound. Get the woman with the baby, Miller said to the man on the porch. The man loped across the yard like a cowboy. He had black hair swept back from his forehead.

  While they waited Miller talked about his people. Maria Garn, he said, who’s been taking care of your grandchild. She’s a mother of kids, beaten by her husband. She heard me speak one day. I invited them to join me. The kids are grown now but they have stayed on, Jack, Paul, Nancy.