Alone again, he arranged his legs and trunk in order to get out of bed, which he just managed to do, and moved on sludgy joints to the window, where freedom was, where the small birds swooped and clamored in the vines. Just below him a tricolored cat had caught a brown lizard, which thrashed in its stiff, limited way until its tail came off, right off without any blood at all, and while the tail kept on wiggling all by itself the lizard escaped—he saw it work, that trick. The cat with fierce interest watched the tail, and hooked it fussily, fascinatedly, its fooled eyes gleaming.
Freedom from what? he thought. From imbecility, from the sweet delusions of this simpleminded church and from the chance of finding out why your father’s last known forwarding address was 601-B Los Robles, Tulaveda, California.
But his joints were not ready for freedom yet, so he carefully returned to bed, whereupon Urban Stumms knocked on his door and came in.
“You think I’m a nut, don’t you,” he said, his face of pink scar tissue exoskeletal, teeth and eyeballs moving behind it. “Bonnie told me you’re a veteran, so okay, buster, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something, dogface. Let me tell you something. You think I’m some kind of pansy fruitcake pastor going around praying and asking the people to be sweet to each other, huh? Is that what you think? But he’s got a screw loose somewhere because he thinks the world’s going to burn? Is that it? Huh? Is that it? So what did you ever see? You look too young anyway. You ain’t been kissed yet, I can tell. You ain’t got the look, buddy boy!”
So Urban was also this fellow, then, when not the theologian speaking “Ovarian.” He was a GI, a vet, buster. One of the wisecrackin’ normal guys. Take no shit. Tough titty. John felt no danger in Urban, but he could be wrong.
Urban said, “All right, all right. I’m here to tell you when I saw Heggim. It’s getting late for us. Late, late! I’ve already seen the burning—that’s not the question. The question is, will it come in time? Heggow leggong, eggo Leggord?
“So you think I’m crazy. Listen to me, then, and ask what a man is made for. Here’s what I was doing. I’ll just give it to you straight, statistics and all. It’s March 9, 1945—around twenty-four hundred hours, a few minutes after midnight, so it’s March 10, and I—me—this ordinary young shmoe—where am I? I’m at an altitude of around six thousand feet, airspeed around two hundred and ninety, and I’m over the second-biggest city on earth. And for what purpose? Doesn’t it seem strange to you that I’m there for the purpose of killing the people of that city? How should a man be used? What’s he for? Who in hell put me in that airplane with six other guys and nearly twenty thousand pounds of bombs? Our eggs. We’re laying our eggs at low level, incendiaries with maybe a few HE mixed in to stir up the omelette. We’re frying gooks, man, we’re making a firestorm. The plane’s humping all over the place in the turbulence from the fire. It’s getting to be one solid fire. There’s three hundred B-29S over the city and more coming, and we’re all there for the same purpose. Man-given purpose. We’re going to kill ninety-seven thousand people that night, and wound a hundred-twenty-five thousand more, and burn out the homes of a million, two hundred thousand. We found all that out later, but we knew what we were doing. Then we’re going to turn around and fly more than a thousand miles back to Guam, if the Franks and Tonys, Jacks and Oscars don’t get us. I’m scared shitless. We’re all scared shitless, but not of Geggod’s wrath like we ought to be. We’re scared of flak and twenty-millimeter cannon shells, which have already holed us in about six places. Before he got it the tail gunner said it was Jacks after us, Mitsubishis, but what I saw was a Tony, a Kawasaki Ki-61, with the radiator fairing under the cockpit. All the others had radial engines—that’s how you could tell ’em apart. I was at the port central aiming blister and all we had was one ventral turret, because the other turrets, guns and ammo had been taken out so we could carry more incendiaries, a new type—magnesium and jellied gasoline. The turbulence was so bad I thought the wings were going to come off, they were flapping up and down. The radio operator lost his helmet and got coldcocked on a frame member; he didn’t find all his marbles till we were halfway back to Harmon Field on Guam.
“We didn’t have Iwo then, so it was fly all the way home or swim—you wouldn’t want to bail out, now, would you, over Nippon? It was bright as day, all this time. Tokyo was like the sun, like we were flying over the sun, the light coming up from below. But it was all nasty, is what I mean. We were just burning houses, that’s the reason—just people and where they live, so if we got caught what the hell could we say? That was the whole purpose of the mission and we all agreed, so if a Tony shot us down or rammed us? Who cares about the Rape of Nanking or the Death March or Pearl Harbor—those poor bastards are burning down there, little kids and mama-sans and old ladies, everybody, in the firestorm. The ones that don’t burn first suffocate first, and the other way around. Who are we and who in hell’s domination is General Curtis E. LeMay to make that judgment? We have made a covenant with death, and with hell we are at agreement Isaiah 28:15. Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil Weggo eggunteggo theggem theggat ceggall eggiveggil geggood. Isaiah 5:20.
“Then we’re past the turbulence and there’s a Tony flying along with us, just under the port outboard engine. I don’t know how I can see him so plain. There’s his rising sun on a white square. He’s got a red spinner and a red tail with white lightning painted on it, and he’s just cruising alongside. I figure he’s going to ram and I’m in a panic trying to get the twin fifties on him, and then I do and I’m just creaming that guy, I can see the tracers going right through him, into his engine, knocking off hunks of his exhaust ports, and glycol and pieces of him flying back in his slipstream. I’m murdering the guy, I don’t know what’s keeping him there. My slugs are killing him, I can almost see the solids between the tracers, like it’s all in slow motion, and I’m in a panic to get him out of there before he can ram us, but I can’t seem to finish him off. I just want to plaster him, wipe him out, and there’s the fear and also a kind of exultation in the terrible damage I’m doing.
“Then he slid back his canopy and looked at me, and I looked into his eyes, we were that close, and there was a radiance about his head, and nothing between us but understanding. Then came the white fire and the heat and I saw nothing more of this world for three nights and three days until they dared to open my eyes, with surgery, on Guam. But he had spoken to me and I knew that he was Jeggeseggus Chreggist, that he had appeared over all that agony, over the fiery furnace, in the turbulence of burning human grease, in the stench of lost human souls, to tell me something, and what he told me was that the sons of man had gone too far. They crucify the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame. Theggey cregguceggifeggeye thegge Seggon eggof Geggod eggafreggesh, eggand peggut Heggim teggo eggan eggopeggen sheggame. Paul to the Hebrews 6:6.
“They had exceeded on that very night Geggod’s allotment of agony, registered in Cruces: the allotment of pain and agony caused by man since Creation had that very night been used up, and it was that very night, March 10, 1945, that man was given the final knowledge, for it wasn’t four months later that he exploded the first atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the second less than a month later, over Hiroshima, and the third three days later, over Nagasaki. We killed more people on March 10 than either of those, but the knowledge they contained was that here was the primer for the real egg, the final egg, the awful knowledge of how to blow up the whole world. When has man ever not done what he could do? And tomorrow morning at five hundred hours, our time, at an island in the South Pacific, man in his Satanic Pride will detonate a bomb a thousand-thousandfold more powerful that will cause the waters of the earth to burn, the oxygen and the hydrogen to catalyze. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot. Hegge meggakeggeth thegge deggeep teggo beggoil leggike egga peggot Job 41:31.
“In the Book of Daniel it is written: How long shall it be to the end of these wonders? And the question is answered: It shall be fo
r a time, times and an half. A year, two years, and half of a year: three and a half years. The time is now. This is the Ova of Armageddon! And the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic teaches that for every Crucis of agony caused by man since March 10, 1945, will each and every man at the Great and Dreadful Day of the Leggord suffer seventy and seven megatimes, and so do we beseech Theggee, eggo Leggord, Let the day come soon, let us abide Theggy punishment as we deserve! Let it come soon!”
Urban’s stiff mask, dark with passion, tilted toward his chest, and he stood silently as red splashes and deltas drained and faded from it until it was again all pink. Then, having said the last word, he turned abruptly and left.
John Hearne, while pondering this message and all of its implications, found himself in a state something like suspended animation only partly caused by little warnings, little cruces issuing from his connectors here and there. To him religion of any kind could be, he thought, rather precisely defined by the term “culture lag,” although he supposed the word “lag,” indicating that culture was somehow improving, could be called a religious impulse, an optimistic one not too well supported by hard evidence. Okay, he thought, play around with glib phrases in order to make yourself imperviously superior to the tortured man who had just left, a man wounded by fire and by an immensity of guilt it’s true you yourself ain’t yet been kissed by, buddy boy.
Ovarian Apocalyptic: Jeggeseggus Chreggist. And right now he lay in broad daylight in a bedroom of the parsonage of the Church of the Science of the Way, which at least didn’t sound very apocalyptic. But was the Atomic Energy Commission going to explode some god-awful bomb tomorrow? In any case, something was wrong with Urban’s calculations: March 1945 to June 1948 was three years and three months, not three years and a half. Maybe the world had until September but Urban couldn’t wait, or couldn’t count, or had made some arcane corrective calculation based upon Daniel’s calendar, and the goddam world was going to go in a chain reaction. Water was H2O, wasn’t it? And hydrogen bloody well burned, as the Hindenburg found out at Lakehurst, and oxygen was what was needed for combustion. Oh, cut out all this shit. All he had to do was wait about seventeen hours and find out. Meanwhile he would heal, he would concentrate on that, and get his legs under him that had once let him run like a deer from such and other complications.
His next visitor appeared at noon, asked him if he wanted some lunch and introduced himself as Hadasha Kemal Allgood, visiting the Church of the Science of the Way as biblical scholar and lecturer. He was a thin, stooped man in his forties whose skin had an almost cyanotic blue glow and whose Adam’s apple was so large it looked painful. “Bonnie asked me to look in on you,” he said. Though his voice seemed normal midwestern American he looked as though he had tried to swallow something as uncompromising as a broken goblet. Between the bow of his glasses and his head were two yellow pencils, and fountain pens and other pencils stuck out of his vest. On his shirt sleeves he wore black arm garters that suggested a nineteenth-century stationmaster.
“A sandwich? Can I get you something? I’m not terribly practical about such things, my being more at home, so to speak, with Greek and Aramaic. Do you want a cigarette?”
John accepted a thin cigarette with gold lettering on it that said
“Houri,” and Hadasha Kemal Allgood produced from a vest pocket a small silver ashtray, which he put on the bed.
“You haven’t met our pastor,” he said, pulling up a chair and seeming to have forgotten about lunch. He lit their cigarettes and the funky odor of Turkish tobacco preceded even its visible smoke throughout the room.
“No, not yet,” John said with a shiver of apprehension.
“Oval Forester is a saint,” Hadasha Kemal Allgood said. “A teacher. You will be aware of his power immediately. He has subsidized my work, given me time for my scholarship when the Huntington Foundation, in their ignorance, turned me away. So far I’ve found and corrected one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight major errors in the New Testament alone. Of course, I do have the advantage of possessing seven ancient scrolls given to me by my grandfather and unknown to the general scholarship. Some of the errors are quite obvious: Matthew 19:24, for instance. The Aramaic word for ‘camel’ is the same as their word for ’rope,’ and doesn’t it seem more logical, more analogous, to say that it is easier for a rope (rather than a camel) to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God? A thread will pass, but a rope will not!”
“It does sound logical,” John said, and then added, because Hadasha Kemal Allgood seemed fairly sane, “What do you think of ‘a time, times and an half’ in the Book of Daniel?”
“Oh, yes. Urban Stumms. All I can say is that the Bible is a power. I might once have scoffed at the Apocalyptics’ penchant for such calculations, but no more. They perceive an ending, and it’s hard not to perceive an ending. Oval Forester has taught us never to scoff at passion. But as for the meaning of ‘a time’ in Daniel, it could mean a decade—the way we refer to, say, the twenties and the thirties as separate ’times.’ And, in that case, counting from the hour of Urban’s extraordinary and powerful vision over Tokyo, we’ve got till 1984. No, I do not scoff at Urban, nor at his strange tongue. I, too, have felt the sting of the supercilious: the Huntington Foundation, the Gideons, the sanctimony of the elders of my former church, and more, more. But they will see. When each and every Holy Book in each and every church, in each and every seminary, in each and every domicile, in each and every court of law—yea, in each and every top dresser drawer in each and every hotel room—is shown to be rife with error and only the Allgood translation proved, Book by Book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, letter by letter, to be the true Word of God—then see if they scoff!”
Hadasha Kemal Allgood trembled for a moment and then grew vague, his eyes shifty and preoccupied. “My work,” he muttered. “My work. My work, you know. Well, goodbye.” He took with him his little silver ashtray and their cigarette butts.
Oh, well, John thought, he could do without a sandwich.
He would rest easy and heal. He wondered if the prayers aimed at him by the Healing Echelons were hitting their mark, or if his cynicism acted as a shield. Okay, Healing Echelon aimers, three clicks to the right. There, fire for effect.
He went to sleep; that is, he’d been asleep, just for a moment, maybe, knowing it in the sensual fuzz of dozing and waking. Bonnie Forester might enter his room, in her sheer nightgown, her hair like midnight, and her name would be biblical, her belly like a heap of wheat set about with lilies, her two breasts like two young roes, that are twins, which feed among the lilies, and she would say to him, “Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.” For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil, and he lusteth after her beauty in his heart, and let her take him with her eyelids.
A piece of cardboard banged down on his nose, and it was Thelma, her gray bib all wet now, moist heat radiating from the gross injustice of her body. “Thith ith for you, John!” she said against the will of her tongue.
At first glance the picture was of two smiling persons. Below it she had printed a word in block letters with falling and tilted lines. Strange that her drawing from life should be so precise and the symbols which made up a word so inexact. The word was recognizable as LOVE.
The two persons were Thelma and himself, both vivid, bright, smiling and holding hands as if they posed on a happy occasion for whatever loved friend or relative was about to snap the picture. But of course all except the authority of likeness and of line had changed, and he thought of the earliest pictures the Japanese had painted of Occidentals, where it seemed as if they didn’t quite know how to draw such round and characterless eyes, so that while other, more obvious characteristics, such as clothing, were plainly foreign, the eyes always hinted at the Mongolian fold, as his did here. Thelma had no doubt drawn her own likeness in front
of a mirror, because it was her, though slimmer and taller, more like him, as if they were kin, brother and sister. But it was still her, and he wondered how, out of the dulled neurons, the fudged genes, the errors of creation, the skewed glands, the signals unreceived or badly sent, came this one undamaged talent, a sort of genius peering out of the doomed vessel.
But in the picture there they were, John and Thelma, smiling happily from the Peaceful Kingdom.
He looked into her creation rather than at the soul who breathed and exuded heat into what had become a hot day, tongues of heat wafting from the open window, and her smell of bleach, or ammonia, along with flowers.
Thelma took the drawing from his hand, propped it on the varnished bureau next to her other present to him, and in the silence, smiling thickly and secretively, because she had been naughty to disobey Bonnie’s orders, said, “G’bye, John,” and went away, leaving the door open.
He willed healing fluids to his slow joints. Thelma’s condition was of course an accident of the chromosomes, a shake of the dice never to be recalled, and was not, at least for people other than John Hearne, catching. He could, he thought, catch anything, a symptom being a compulsion to imitate her congested voice, the swollen, imbecilic droop of her eyes and mouth. He couldn’t help an empathic horror of becoming, but it was not physical; his body had never really let him down. Even now he could feel his gristle healing. Any other body, he believed, would have let its bones break and its head smash in that trajectory along Los Robles. The entrance to his life was sympathetic, and his pain was for the trapped, the cheated, the helpless—every kind that by bis gifts and luck he wasn’t meant to be.
The Moon Pinnace Page 24