by Philip Wylie
“Hello, Bill! Paula!” The voice was tranquil.
Connauth and Berthene stood beside them. They had been sitting in the last row of pews.
Berthene and Paula embraced. The men shook hands.
“You were here that other night,” Connauth said. The clergyman was not wearing his robes.
“I was, John.”
Connauth looked down the pews, over the people, toward the empty pulpit, then up along the arches and finally at the stained-glass windows where pulsing signs brought glitter, darkness, glitter. “A miracle,” he finally said.
“No doubt.”
“Did God do all this?”
Gaunt smiled a little and murmured, “You should tell us, John.”
The minister’s head shook. He spoke with hushed excitement. “How can I? Bill!
Berthene’s forgiven me! She always knew! And when she did it I suddenly found in her a different woman! A woman of burning passions. A love of me that was like holiness!
Beneath that plain face, Bill, is this other Berthene! The pity is, we waited so long to learn it! Even physical love is more a thing of spirits meeting, blending—than the flesh—
! I only learned.”
“We all have flesh—” Bill answered.
He heard Berthene and Paula laughing softly, trying not to disturb the others in the church. He did not want to look at Berthene then. He would see her ponderousness, her mammoth homeliness. He wanted, instead, to share a moment of the Bishop’s discovery, to add to his own impressions this one. He felt humble. For he, also, had been beguiled by surfaces and missed most of the experience of woman until this day.
John was watching him, a smile on his face. He glanced at his cathedral again. “I couldn’t preach tonight, Bill. I couldn’t even pray, except to say some shaken thanks. I couldn’t don my robes. This seems no time for costumes. I felt a need to dissociate myself from ritual.”
“I know.”
“Not many came here, anyway. I regard that as a sign. There is something wrong here. We will tear down this edifice! This mausoleum of God! We will build a bright place, a simple place, and go in search of a new God. Look at them—!” The Bishop waved his hands. “A few vinegary ones who will not change because they cannot. The rest, they came in here to neck! Yesterday, whenever yesterday was—before the Disappearance—I would have driven them out! I would have called them defilers! But today I think my temple defiled them! We took away the sweetness of their bodies, their souls’ temples. We kept them ashamed. We kept them sinning so we could own them through that hangman’s rope of perennial repentance! We cut them off from nature. We built the barricade down the ages. We made what was one seem twain! There is only one sex, Bill! Woman, man, are halves. In all the rest of nature they are one. By dividing them we kept them conquered and subservient. I am ashamed of my doctrines!” Sudden tears filled his eyes.
Gaunt wrapped an arm around Connauth’s shoulder and turned toward Berthene and Paula. There was a look in the older woman’s eye like the emblazoned love he had seen in his own wife’s, in Edwinna’s, in Bella’s, and everywhere that night. Gaunt impulsively put his other arm around her and he kissed Berthene.
“When you start that church to seek God, not to assert,” he said to Connauth,
“we’ll contribute and attend!”
With Paula, he went out.
They skirted the human masses by taking quiet streets. But even here were songs, soft voices; here was the laughter of men, the flash of dresses, the rustle and murmur of love. They did not talk much until they came to the bridge again.
Someone had brought fireworks to the water’s edge. Rockets and aerial bombs soared against the pale stars, broke and shook their scintillant confetti over the tumult.
They stopped at the rail to watch.
“Will it go back to the way it was?” Paula asked in a recurrence of alarm. “Will we all forget?”
“How can we?”
“Won’t people decide it was just a hallucination, or a collective dream—a tremendous, timeless moment of mass hypnotism, as you suggested at dinner?” Gaunt followed a climbing rocket until it burst. “Won’t they—we—be afraid if we do ‘go back’
again we’ll have the experience over? Won’t that check us?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“And then there’ll be histories. And memoirs. A thousand written records of something awful and real that did but didn’t happen and could again. Movies, telling both stories. Endless discussions. No, Paula. We won’t forget.”
“Did God do it, Bill?”
He seemed only half attentive. “Well, who made God? I don’t mean the real one that we have hardly tried to learn about. The God of the universe. Of evolution. Of instinct. Of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. I mean, the squalid gods made in men’s images that men worshiped. The gods as cruel and selfish and bigoted, exactly, as their devotees.” He painted. “Look! Silver pinwheels! I never saw a rocket do that before!”
Paula persisted. “I don’t see what you mean.”
He took her hand. “We made up our own religions and pretended they came from outside us. And that pretense finally split us apart. So, you can say ‘God’ did it. Man-made God. Now, if we try to learn what man is, we’ll learn more of what the Truth is; the Truth we gave the bad name the old gods, then cheated. Just the way you are part of me, just as what happens in you is me, so we are part of whatever God really is. But the trick is to go on learning forever, not to assert God and administer Him. We don’t own God, Paula. That’s what John has just realized. We are God, I think, but that includes all we are, not just the special fragments selected by some doctrine or other. The whole thing—
man as he is—Nature as It is. And we desperately need a new word, now, that means man-plus-woman and turns everybody away from the cockeyed idea that one without the other means anything-that there are differences—that there are relative superiorities and inferiorities. John saw that too! Others will. Millions. And more will feel it than think it, at first. But feeling’s as accurate as thought and the new insight ought to overthrow the long blunder. The blunder of both sexes, that grew out of their insane sense of separateness!”
Paula sighed. “I guess I’m a feeler, Bill. I can’t quite understand in my mind how it happened.” She shook her head and then said, “Holy mackerel!”
“What’s the matter?” In the light shed by the shining city he saw her alarm.
“My letters!”
He was still boyishly intrigued by the fireworks. “Letters? Did you write any?” “Not to mail, you dope! Did you find them? The letters locked in my desk?”
“Oh.” He turned toward her and grinned. “Sure.”
“You did!” Paula’s eyes were anxious. “You read them?”
“I read them.” The dazzling sky no longer held his attention. “I was angry at first, too.” His face relaxed; his eyes shone. “I had to know Teddy quite a long time, darling, before I realized he had the guts of a tiger, the instincts of a gent, the loyalty of a humble heart, and a decenter feeling about women than my own.”
She said, “Oh!” After a moment, when he did not go on, she added, “Yes.
Teddy’s a very nice boy.”
“In the end”—Gaunt stared at the sea now, ignoring the rockets and avoiding his wife’s troubled regard—“Teddy made me perceive what you felt, that it never occurred to me any women really felt. So look, Paula. I don’t own you. I am you. If, sometime, it isn’t quite enough—if you add something else—for fun, from love, because of curiosity—so long as it isn’t for revenge or from envy—I don’t believe I’ll notice the difference.”
“But if I am you,” Paula whispered, “would I need to?”
“It wouldn’t be an important need. But you might.”
“Bill!”
“Don’t be mushy! This is a public place!”
They began to giggle.
He pointed. “Look at that! Green pinwheels!”
It seemed funny to them.
Later, when they had agreed that they would try to sleep before dawn, Paula began chuckling. Gaunt, who had been lying in trancelike bliss, said, “You’re awake too!
What’s the joke?”
“Pinwheels,” Paula answered. “Green ones.”
They laughed.
From far away came the sound of rain that soon swept across the city toward their immaculate residence. A spring rain, beginning early that year. And though they did not speak of it, each felt the other listen and knew what the other knew. Neither questioned the cause of the peace that went with the knowledge, for there were many mysteries that night and many problems to solve and they were tired. But what both surely knew was this: that the morning would be beautiful.
— Philip Wylie
Table of Contents
PART I: THE HAND OF GOD
PART II: ARMAGEDDON
PART II: THE UNLOVED
PART IV: DREAM AND DIMENSION
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV