Under Radar

by Michael Tolkin

  The bishop did not respond, and the missionary knew that his silence meant that he was now observing the situation through Phineas.

  ...

  The more he thought about the poor Jamaicans and ministered to them in the most basic ways—visit the sick, read to a child, clothes for the family whose shack burned down—the more he hated them.

  His hatred of the Jamaicans spoke in the same tones as his voice of conscience, as the still small voice he answered on his way to ordination, as the voice of his vocation. Was God calling him to racism? Did God hate the Jamaicans? Why else make them suffer?

  The missionary started a letter to the bishop: “They’re cursed. I’ve been here for six months, and I know this now. There’s no other explanation. There’s no reason to stay. They’re cursed. They won’t change. They can’t change. They shouldn’t change. God cursed them, but I’m not on His side this time. I’m on their side.”

  He tore up the letter and burned it in his sink and washed away the ashes and then scoured the sink.

  This is not the obvious story, he told himself. I am not just a repressed man of the cloth who can’t control himself when a whore makes herself available. It can’t be that simple. There has to be something more, I can’t be the victim of such an old story.

  But what else is there? he asked himself. There is no other story. It’s the same old story, and if it is, and we know so much now about ourselves, then I should be able to control the story. I want to know both endings.

  He started another letter: “Between Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss, what’s left? I believe in God in spite of the academy’s evidence that faith is a social construct, that religion fills needs that are purely—what, social? The study of religion thinks itself clever for taking apart all of the pieces of religion, but the scholars miss the evidence that’s in front of them, that religion is made of broken pieces because the infinite God could not express His infinity in the physical world without shattering. So God shattered, and the pieces were worshiped instead of God in His all-embracing singularity. I understand that, I understand that, I understand that. Fine and good. Fine and good.”

  He burned that letter as well, and buried the ashes.

  But he wasn’t going crazy, he also knew that. He was exhilarated by his stupidity.

  He started another letter: “I have reached the limits of intelligence. I don’t mean that I have solved the problems of physics, well, actually, perhaps I have, and all I lack is the math. But never mind that, I don’t mean that. This is what I mean: there is a God. I know there is a God. And we cannot do what He asks of us, because we’re an experiment that failed.”

  And then he burned that letter, mixed the ashes in water, and drank them.

  He wrote another letter.

  “I went into the chapel and prayed. I prayed for strength and guidance. I prayed for my parish not to be destroyed for the sake of my weakness. While I was there, in the church, on my knees, I heard the first drum of the evening from the Lumarian village.

  “The breeze rose from the shore. Cars coming back up the mountain brought home the women who worked as maids for the hotels. I am surrounded by people who have never left the island. This is when I feel the age of the people here, their exhaustion, their resistance to change, their enslavement. Night falls, and the air carries the sound of a motorbike, and a guitar, and someone screaming, and I am in love with the matter of their helplessness, of my absolute inability to help them, and my sure knowledge that no one can help them. So I am in love with their ancient souls, and jealous of them for still owning a vitality that in my ancestral line was sapped probably by the end of the Middle Ages, when my forebears left the farm for town. I don’t see anything here to save. I see people alive, in their lives, making whatever of their lives they can, and that their attention to me and attendance to my mission reflects only on the basic human goodness that calls for decent treatment to strangers. I reflect on this goodness and loathe the whole system that takes advantage of someone else’s life and says of it that I know better than you what will give your life meaning.

  “I stayed up last night, sitting on the porch, listening to the drums, waiting for them to come down the hill. I thought about sex. I thought, Perhaps she’s right. There really is an aristocracy of sex, you see. When you cross the line into this Versailles of the mind and body, you enter the world of permission, and permission is privilege, and privilege bestows grace, and grace imposes itself as an oppressive force on everyone not directly touched. Like religion.

  “Here they are.

  “With steel drums and whistles, with tambourines and flutes, Yael and her cadre of sex warriors return to the town. I am drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I opened, then poured out half the soda, and filled back to the top with rum.

  “They greet old friends with the gracious calm of the wealthy returned after a summer in Tuscany. They have lost their quiet misery. I would say that there is nothing impoverished about them anymore, they have lost their beaten patience, the perception that time is stopped around them, that everything in their nature is old and exhausted; no consolation, no resuscitation possible.

  “In their return to the town, I see such confidence. How can I make sense of this? It is all in the way their hands move in the air. Here, picture the daughter of a very rich man, the teenage daughter of your wealthiest supporter. You’re in the living room of his mansion. You’re there for dinner. The man is a bit of a monster, filled with his own importance, and his personality is impenetrable though charming. You visit her father because he has enough money to build a new wing for the seminary. He’ll support you because he wants his daughter to meet you, to learn about God from you. He believes that you’re a man whose presence might shine on his daughter’s life. Now the rich man’s daughter, all seventeen years of her, sits beside you on the arm of a beautiful couch. As you teach them a bit of Bible, the rich man is curious about God and has many opinions, all of them ordinary though sincere. And then his daughter asks you about God, she asks you about God and faith, especially your own faith, the story of your faith, your struggles with faith. She looks you in the eye. This rich girl’s insult is that she appreciates you, she listens to your answers, she considers the implications of what you have to say, but her gracious smile, her strong posture, and the smooth skin on the inside of her wrists are all violent, disgusting assaults on you. She likes you! She tells you so, that she likes you! There’s the insult, appreciation. And how are the Lumarians like the daughter of a rich girl? They have the same hands. How does the daughter of a rich man move her hands? At table she sits with one hand in her lap while she eats, unless she needs them both to cut something. The unused hand rests patiently on the napkin in her lap. When walking, her hands, like a Lumarian’s, move freely in the air, sometimes reaching away from her in sheer delight of the flow of things, fingers spread to catch more of the air, even the smells of the air. When she goes to Paris, her hands catch the aroma of the bakery. I had never seen that gesture from a Jamaican before Yael came to the parish. Her followers were used to more activity, harder work. And this is what has changed in them, they have lost all their necessary, justified fear of the world. Lumarian hands move freely.

  “My thoughts have turned angry instead of sullen, and I like them for that, instead of my self-inflated piety, always trying to feel the way I think I should feel. It is all so simple to me now; emotion, a moral life, what matters, what can slide.

  “A small cloud passed over the town and rained on the parade. No one in Jamaica prepares for the daily rain, in destitution’s rags, everyone is always ready for whatever the sky god offers. There’s nothing to say about the mountain rain that isn’t obvious, but Yael looked up at the clouds and called to them, ‘Not today!’ And everyone laughed and joined her, pointing to the sky and calling out, ‘Not today!’

  “They pound their tom-toms and chant their own songs and the sky clears. But this is no miracle, the sky clears after every rain, the people here are
not stupid, but the villagers are—I don’t want to say superstitious—I want to say … I want to say that a people eager for entertainment will accept an event as a miracle if their commitment to the idea increases the entertainment value of whatever follows. Here’s a thought for you, my teacher: faith offers better drama—or comedy!—than skepticism. Skepticism shatters the possibility of coherent meaning, leaving a collection of pointless shards strung together only by mathematical coincidence, and no valid mystically obscure significance to induce revelation. So, for its own amusement, the town gives the credit for the sunshine to Yael.

  “The Lumarians applaud her, and shyly she curtsies. She offers her hands to the children, who join her in a circle. She teaches them a song:

  O sun, O sun …

  O giver of life …

  O sun, O giver of life …

  We are all one …

  O sun …

  Spirit in the flesh,

  We are made of woven clay,

  In the hands of the sun,

  In the fingers of each ray,

  We find we are one,

  In the hands of the sun,

  In the fingers of each ray,

  We are all one.

  “They have such beautiful songs here, and she gives them something so dreadful, and they take it; why? Everyone is singing along with her. Do you understand how awful that lyric is, how empty? There’s a reggae song, ‘Jah Penetrate to a Tenement Yard.’ How can anyone exchange such powerful immanence for such weak transcendence?

  “‘Let us bring our gods together,’ said Yael, leading the children across the road to the church, where I sit on the porch.

  “She’s singing one of our old hymns, ‘And Did He Walk on England’s Shores?,’ but for England she substitutes Jamaica. The crowd takes it up. I have never heard it sung so beautifully before; the hymn that belongs to this church, reinvigorated with sex. There’s no other word for the new element. Religion defiled and then made sacred again. I’m crying.

  “Now she’s telling everyone about a dream that she had last night, and a dream that Aston had.”

  ...

  “I had a dream last night,” said Yael. “I dreamed that God was frightened, but in that dream my name for God, the image of God, was nothing more than my own intimidated conscience, and this frightened image of God wanted to kill. I saw God’s carapace of fear behind God’s blinding light, I saw God from a cleft in the rocks, and that cleft was but a crack in God’s carapace of fear. God let me see God’s creation through God’s eyes, but God’s red, dimmed tide of jealousy obscured the beauty God had made. I wanted to coax God, and patiently teach God, that the fear of universal love is God’s enemy of life, and that the enemy of life is also the enemy of God, and that God could be the enemy of God’s own creation if God remained in fear.

  “And then, in my dream, God answered from inside God’s cloud with a dream, because God was too frightened to speak directly. God could answer only with another story, since God’s creation is just another story God told the empty universe, like a melody in the dark, for comfort. So God presented God’s new story, and when I woke up, I told Aston the dream, and he stopped me as I began, and finished the story as I had dreamed it, because God had given Aston God’s same dream. God wants us to show you God’s new dream.”

  The Lumarians formed two circles behind Yael. “God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley. God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley when his mother was living in Delaware. God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley and I was nineteen, and God dreamed that I dreamed that I went to Delaware to be with my beloved mother.”

  And one of the circles gathered around Yael.

  “God dreamed that I dreamed that I worked in a factory.”

  Yael imitated the rigid movements of a young man trapped in repetitive motion, the slave of a machine, repeating a sequence of gestures, passing something along, tightening a bolt, returning to the first piece of the sequence.

  One of the old Lumarian women stood before the second circle. “But why did Jah send Bob a ticket? Why, at that moment in his life, did God want Bob off from his native island of Jamaica?”

  The second circle opened, and within it, two Lumarian boys held the poles on which they’d mounted an Ethiopian flag, ten feet long and six feet high. And on the flag they’d sewn the outline of an airplane, and on the plane the royal crest of Ras Tafari, the emperor Haile Selassie. Aston was behind the flag, wearing an army uniform and a stiff-brimmed officer’s hat with gold braid.

  The woman said, “Because when Bob left Jamaica to be with Bob’s mother herself, who came to Jamaica but Ras Tafari?”

  The circle around the flag broke into two lines, making a landing strip for the emperor’s plane.

  While the plane landed, Yael as Bob toiled on the assembly line, without feeling the vibration of what was happening in Kingston.

  When the plane stopped, the two men raised the poles, and Aston stepped out into the Jamaican sun. The Lumarians knelt, crying, “Ras Tafari! Ras Tafari!”

  Aston played the emperor’s confusion and his fear. When the crowd moved towards the plane, he hid behind the flag. Now Aston started to sob, loudly, like a child.

  And then, in the other circle, in Delaware, Bob Marley stopped working on the assembly line. Yael raised her head, not as though she heard the cry but felt it deep in the soul of the planet.

  Ras Tafari cried, and Bob Marley answered him with a song, “Three Little Birds,” everyone knew the song and hummed along with Yael until she took the reggae out of the song and brought in the lullaby. Yael, as the Psalmist of Trenchtown by the command in God’s reverie, Yael, in song, told the timorous emperor not to worry about anything because everything was going to be all right, no strange sentiment to a song, but had the dread savior ever considered the simplicity of such an assurance? Selassie stopped crying. Now quiet, he searched across the sea, across the horizon, for the source of his tranquillity.

  When he found the direction of the heavenly voice and his eyes met Yael’s, it was her turn for silence, and her turn to kneel.

  Rising on the power of the sweet singer’s devotion, Aston assumed the full dignity of Ras Tafari, the emperor Haile Selassie, the living God, the redeemer of Babylon. The crowd of Rastas at his feet formed again the two ranks that became his airport, and the banner-as-plane took off for that part of the churchyard that was Delaware incarnate.

  The circle around Bob formed the two parallel lines that matched the rows of the other group, and now the four rows joined into two and then squared, then bent the square into a circle as the banner gathered Yael and wrapped around her as she must have dreamed it, joining her, joining Bob Marley, God’s salvation, with Ras Tafari, God’s salvation, two high beings, two nodes of perfection, discerned by the poorest of the poor in the worst of Jamaica’s shantytowns, all living prophets, forged from a poverty of everything but spirit.

  The circle became two long lines again, now leading the plane with its joined holy cargo up the steps of the church towards the pulpit, and not just the players but everyone in the churchyard joined the lines.

  When the couple wrapped in the Ethiopian flag passed the missionary on the steps, the ranks broke and the ragged crowd followed. The missionary, not moving, split the crowd like a memory splits attention, and like a bad memory, he was kicked and knocked off the steps to the ground.

  He grabbed his notebook and, looking up, saw something he had to write down: “A van with tourists stops. Someone takes pictures. I know what they’re thinking, it’s a festive day, they’re seeing natives follow a pageant into a rustic church, and they see a man on the church steps, writing in his notebook. What a colorful fellow.

  “And here’s Phineas with a machete. He’s chasing the plane into that rustic church. The mob runs after him. The tourists are taking pictures of this. I can see inside the church, the couple on the floor, the boy with the machete. He’s telling them to stop. They won’t listen. He’s just a boy.
They’re laughing at him. I’m going in.”

  Later, he wrote, just for himself, not in a letter, “The bishop had told me that if he thought burning the witches would make a difference, he’d light the match. It was easy for him to play with medieval fantasies, he was on the phone. As I tell him from time to time, I was on the ground. I did what I could, and I’d do it again. I can’t say I love being back at the seminary, but I suspect that if I stay here and make myself indispensable, I might find a place in the church’s High Command, and if not, I’ll ask for a second chance on a mission, and if they’re smart, they’ll let me go. What happened in my parish would never happen to me again. Couldn’t let a boy do my job. I’ve got experience now. The challenge will never go away. The next time I’ll tell her to keep to the hills, and don’t bring the party to town.”

  ...

  When the story was finished, Tom was taken to his cell, where his friends were waiting.

  “So that’s it,” said Tom, bewildered by this encounter with the mystery of inspiration. “Do you think the hanged man was Aston? Or was he Phineas, telling the story with the ending he wanted?”

  “That’s not the story,” said the old man. “That’s not the end of it. There’s more. That was for you. The missionary’s story freed you from your dungeon, but nothing changes for us. That was not the story for which the hanged man died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Listen,” said the old man. “The ordinary sounds of the prison have returned.”

  Tom opened himself to the world around him, the familiar frightening sounds of boredom and agony made of competing music, the screams of beatings, the tragic howls of the deranged, blasts of rage from guards, their occasional casual gunfire, the dramatic hustle of the soccer yard, and the infinitely shaded implications of belligerence and supplication that formed the context of most prison chatter. The rhythms of the place, silent while the story flowed from him, now broke into those interfering tempos. This signaled the prisoners’ noisy submission to their ordinary sadness.