Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Falstaff looked at Daniel then, as if expecting him to say something in his support. But Daniel had no intention of speaking. Falstaff sighed and leaned back on his bunk, but Daniel didn’t think he was as relaxed as he seemed. “I listen well, is that a crime? We have to pay attention to the roaches if we’re to survive. I pay attention. I try to do what needs to be done. And, yes, I’ve tried to make myself an expert on the roaches, for the sake of my own survival, and yours. I’d urge you to do the same. But if my telling you more about myself will appease you, then I will oblige.

  “I know no more about why I came to be here than the rest of you. The roaches may not be as methodical as we’d like to think. Although I came from a family of financial advantage I took no share in that. It was my grandfather with the money, and we didn’t get along. I went to college in the sciences and although I did well, there were no jobs to be had when I got out. It was, it was during a period of serious... shortages.”

  The other residents listened quietly, respectfully, and Daniel wondered if the others were having the same problems with Falstaff’s speech he was. It all seemed so carefully—vague. What science? What shortages? There were never enough details to pin him down. Daniel had always assumed that Falstaff was taken from the same relative time period as the rest of them. But there was something about Falstaff that didn’t quite fit for the times Daniel knew.

  “I was drinking a great deal in those days. I had not seen my wife in more than a year. She had left me, or she was dead. It was never a very good marriage—I suppose that was mostly my fault. I was always a man of great faults. It was difficult for me to change. I was stubborn. But you said you were trying to change,” he said to Lenin. “You said you were trying to turn your life around.”

  Lenin looked eager, leaning forward. “I was tired of going to jail. Jail wasn’t Heaven, far from it. I was too old for jail, too old to survive it. I had to come up with something to keep me on the straight and narrow. But Heaven had to be part of it, you know? I had to have my perfect Heaven. So why not the old-fashioned way? The Bible, I mean. Christianity, all that? I could see it worked for some, so why couldn’t it work for me?”

  “It doesn’t work for a lot ofpeople,” Gandhi interjected.

  Lenin rounded on him. “Like everything else, you have to give it a chance. You have to take chances in this life, take a leap of faith, or you never get anywhere. And that’s a fact.” Gandhi looked surprised by Lenin’s vehemence and scooted back from the edge of his bunk, nodding. “So the last time I got out I started going to church. I went to church after church. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I was pretty sure I’d know it when I saw it. It took me awhile to find the church I felt comfortable in. Most of them, well, they were a little vanilla, a little white bread. I’m not talking race here; I’m talking boring. It was hard to sit through the sermons without falling asleep. Not much variety, not much passion. Not much sense that people actually believed what they said.

  “Then one day I walked into Reverend Philip’s church. True enough, I almost walked back out again, because of the way he was dressed. Light blue suit and shiny white shoes, pink carnation in his buttonhole. Sandy-colored, slicked-back hair. He looked like a high school kid on the way to his prom. But he caught my eye as I walked in, and he grinned like he knew me, so I sat down near the back and listened. And I have to say that although he still looked like the most ridiculous man to me, he spoke with poetry and passion.

  “John 14:23. I still remember the first verse I ever heard him talk about. Jesus says, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’ And it looked as if Philips was speaking directly to me. ‘Hebrews 13:2—Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.’ And he stepped out of the pulpit and walked down into the congregation, grasping hands and patting people on the back, and when he came to me he grabbed my hand and pulled me right out of my seat, and he said to me, ‘To be at home with the Lord is to make your home on the heights. There will be no one left to look down upon you because you’re way up there dwelling in paradise. Come, come with me, my son, because we’re on our way home today. We’re on our way to paradise.’”

  Lenin was smiling broadly then, remembering. It was the most genuinesmile Daniel had seen since he had arrived. And he envied him. But if a minister had pulled Daniel out of his seat in church like that he would have been beyond uncomfortable.

  “Paradise would be nice. Paradise would be great.” Falstaff’s voice boomed. And to Daniel’s surprise the emotion in it sounded genuine. “Have any of you been hungry, I mean more than for a late dinner? Perhaps you haven’t eaten in several days, certainly at least in two days. Nothing but some bad-tasting water that made you sick? My family had money—they could have saved me from that, but they didn’t.” Then he stopped, looked around, and appeared uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “But I’m interrupting. I apologize. Please continue—you were telling us about this church.”

  Lenin looked only vaguely annoyed before continuing. “The Reverend made it a point to talk to me after church that day, and every Sunday thereafter, and after Wednesday night services when I started attending those. I told him I had some catching up to do where religion was concerned, but that I was eager to learn. He told me I should start a Bible study group at the church, said the church basement was available to me Monday and Thursday nights.

  “With the Bible study happening the day after Sunday and Wednesday services, I began to see those meetings as a kind of debriefing session. We talked about the text covered by the sermons, and any other verses that seemed related—the Reverend would send me notes about those—and we talked about things from our own lives that seemed related. After a few weeks it became clear that the ones in the Bible study—about thirty of us by then—weren’t the typical churchgoers. We were stragglers, mostly, wanderers, outsiders with a history of self-control issues, folks who had been to Hell and back. That was partly the Reverend’s doing—he was always sending new people down to join the group.

  “I didn’t ask to be the leader—it just sort of happened that way, like gravity or centrifugal force, something that couldn’t be helped and was just understood. They believed in me, and their belief made me believe. The group became everything to me. When I wasn’t in the group, I was thinking about the group. They weren’t exactly my friends—and one of my regrets in life is that I’ve never had any close friends—but it’s hard to be a leader and a friend. It almost never works. I took the responsibility seriously, and I embraced modesty. I made myself obedient to the Lord. I was only going to follow God’s instructions. Of course, there’ve been killers who have said the same thing—we all know that now. But I trusted myself. I trusted I would hear God accurately. I knew about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. The dangers of an arrogant leader who believes himself divinely inspired. But I knew I wasn’t going to be any kind of Jim Jones. Not even close. God would guide me.”

  “Have any of you done the Jim Jones scenario?” Falstaff was standing again. Several of the men looked annoyed. The conversation must have hit a nerve in Falstaff—Daniel had never seen him look this agitated. No one responded. “Suicide as a social event—it’s almost unheard of. That was the charismatic power he had over these people. He abused them psychologically, blackmailed them, and still they revered him. Sometimes we underestimate how vulnerable people are.”

  “But like I said,” Lenin continued, “I was no Jim Jones. There were vulnerable people in that group, troubled people. and every new member seemed to have a different kind of trouble. We had our alcoholics, our addicts, our thieves, wife beaters, gamblers, and adulterers. There were folks into pornography and all manner of sins of the flesh, and we had individuals who were just sad, almost too sad to live.

  “I kept painting them this picture of the Heaven I wanted them to see. I wanted to convinc
e them how wonderful it was going to be. The ultimate location! If they strayed, if they started veering into beliefs and speech that didn’t contribute to my vision of Heaven, then I’d tell them, ‘my Bible doesn’t say that. You must have gotten hold of the wrong Bible.’

  “I didn’t try to cover up any of the hard truths. I talked about Noah, and all the people that had to die. I talked about Lot’s wife. They had to know that the stakes were high. Their immortal souls! The stakes don’t get much higher than that! This was serious business, and I had no tolerance when they weren’t serious about it.

  “I’d give them verse after verse to say with me. I wanted to get the words embedded so far into their heads they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Bible verse and their own thoughts. ‘Repeat after me,’ I’d say, again and again, ‘repeat after me.’

  “I convinced them all to tithe. Sometimes I shamed them into giving more than they planned to, and doing more. Maybe you don’t approve of that, and maybe you’re right. But I saw it as just winning more souls to Christ. Sometimes the ends do justify the means.”

  “But it always comes down to the money, doesn’t it?” Some of the men were trying to get Falstaff to sit down but he appeared oblivious to them. “The church needs it to get their message out, to convert people to their way of thinking. The rich man needs it to shield himself from death, or so he thinks. My grandfather was a rich man; he could have prevented everything that happened to me. I don’t know, maybe he wanted me to learn my lesson. Rich people are all for poor people learning their lessons, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and all that. My grandfather was one of those people who make money even in the hard times. Like they say, ‘the rich get richer while the poor only get poorer,’ something like that. He was always on top. Perhaps he sent people to look for me, perhaps not. I would have been difficult to find.

  “But so much could have been prevented if we’d all just agreed to get along with just a little less. If all of us had made that sacrifice—accepted a lower standard of living, fewer things, less expensive foods, a smaller footprint on the planet. Maybe we could have sustained things better. In the part of the city where I lived things had gotten pretty hopeless. There were just too many people and not enough good housing, not enough food. The New England summers had gotten hotter every year. Augusts were unbearable—it drove people crazy.

  “The neighborhoods were full of strangers-immigrants from Mexico, South America, and down from New York. Of course they came because they thought they had to. People have to eat somehow. But if you don’t want people to be racists, don’t let them get into situations where they have to compete with people from another culture for food.”

  “The money was for good works!” Lenin shouted. “Sometimes you have to feed the spirit while you feed the body, otherwise people forget what life is for. I was going to tell you about Malcolm before you interrupted me. One day the Reverend Philips brought Malcolm down to the basement and introduced me to him. He certainly looked troubled—his eyes buried in his face and never once did that young man look at me directly. The Reverend said, ‘I’m delivering our young Malcolm here into your care and to the ministrations of the group.’ What can I say? I took on Malcolm as part of my holy mission.

  “I admit I didn’t like him. Oh, I tried to like him, but you’re never going to like everybody, now are you? Most of the time you don’t need to take care of that—God will take care of them, God will adjudicate, but sometimes it’s God’s will that you take action.”

  Even the residents not part of their intimate little group had turned their heads to listen. Some had moved to closer bunks. Only Falstaff appeared nervous and restless. In the windows a red sky had fallen over the crumbling city. The distant shadows appeared smoky, on fire.

  “... abandoned by his parents to wander the streets begging, the addiction, the aggressive theft and other crimes. Obviously this young man was in considerable pain. But some of the things he would say about God, Jesus, and religion! I started to think he actually might be some kind of demon sent to test me. So defiant. So unreasonable. Maybe God let him in the door just to test me. God has all kinds of tests—you never know when you’re going to be tested.

  “‘A belief in God’s worse than heroin!’ He’d blurt out something like that right in the middle of a serious discussion. ‘More people have prostituted themselves in the name of Christianity than have ever whored for drugs!’ That kind of thing. It made some of the group furious. A couple even jumped out of their chairs and went after him. I had to break up more than a few fights, something I never expected to do in Bible study. Still, I kept telling the rest of them to have patience with ‘Brother Malcom,’ that his soul was wounded, but eventually we would win that soul for Christ and wouldn’t that be a triumph!”

  “People would riot over the smallest thing.” Daniel turned his head. The voice—he recognized Falstaff’s voice—had come from the corner. He could see Bogart and a few others sitting there, listening. Perhaps they’d been turned off by Lenin’s religious rhetoric. Or perhaps they simply found Falstaff’s pre- or post- apocalyptic narrative more intriguing, or in fact, more relevant. Daniel moved closer so that he was between the two groups.

  “The police rarely interfered. They generally stayed away from our part of the city—I suppose they found it too dangerous, and the local residents had too little power to influence them. The fire fighters still came—there were a large number of fires in those days, but I guess there are always fires—it’s one of the ways people vent their anger while still remaining largely anonymous. But in our neighborhood people didn’t shoot at the firefighters. It was a point of pride, I think.

  “But buildings still burned, and they were torn down, and everybody looted, sometimes in the middle of a fire. When you think you’re starving, and your family is starving, you’ll risk pretty much anything.”

  “So why did this Malcolm come?” Gandhi was asking Lenin. “How did you hold him there?”

  “We didn’t. And that’s why I didn’t kick him out when, to be honest, I used to kick people out for less—showing up intoxicated, for example, or when, say, one man’s wife divorced him for having an affair. I couldn’t abide that kind of hidden sin, that kind of hypocrisy. But Malcolm, even with all the trouble he gave us, the blasphemous interruptions of our discussions, he still came there voluntarily. No one was forcing him to come, so obviously he was desperately reaching out for our help. I just couldn’t turn my back on that. The Lord was testing me, and I wasn’t about to fail him. So I let that boy have it. Every meeting I gave him a double shotgun blast of the Lord! Winning souls to Christ, that’s what I was all about. I was even keeping a notebook listing all the souls I’d won, and I was determined to add Brother Malcolm’s name to my list.

  “I’d get right up in his face. ‘God told me to tell you,’ I’d say, ‘that he wants you to be one of his soldiers! God wanted me to tell you that you’re alone no longer!’

  “I’d talk to the others, and once a week I’d arrange for the group to plant a ‘lovebomb’ on him. Even the ones who hated the fellow did that for me! We’d surround him and we’d hug him, we’d pat him on the back and tell him we loved him, God loved him, everybody loved him. We were all on his side so he had nothing else to fear.

  “And I tell you he began to come around, even to participate a little. He still didn’t say much in the meetings, but those blasphemous declarations pretty much stopped. I gave him little chores, little assignments, and he did them well. He proved to have some real skills with words, so when the Reverend would give me some text to go over for him, some plea for money to keep the church’s message on the radio or on TV, I’d pass it to Malcolm, and he’d almost always improve it. Of course I gave him credit for it, and the Reverend Philips was so pleased with the both of us—I won some important points for the way I handled that, I gotta tell you.

  “And when we were looking for support for the new building program or the missions in Afric
a, he found some great pictures on the internet for us. That black child with the flies on his face? A huge increase in donations after we put that one up on the website!”

  “I hadn’t had much to eat that week,” Falstaff continued. “I could say that’s why I did what I did, but I’m not going to use that as an excuse. That night I didn’t think I was risking much. It was some rich man’s food storage. The fire had been put out, the firefighters were gone, the looters were gone, I was tired and on my way to this little room I shared with eight other people. I was thinking I’d just check it out, see if they’d missed some little thing I could eat.”

  Lenin, apparently aware of the distraction in the corner, raised his voice. “In no time at all Malcolm was handling some of our key initiatives—the prayer requests, the brochure for our Spring tour of the Holy Land, the special pleas for unexpected expenses, the lists recognizing the members who had contributed the most to the cause. He could have had quite a career in advertising if he only applied himself.

  “But it became clear after a while, I’m afraid, that our young friend Malcolm still clung to another life, a life outside the church. I gotta admit it was the other members of the group who saw it before I did—of course, they’d always been pretty suspicious of him. I suppose I just didn’t want to lose a soul. I’d been adding up all the souls I’d saved, and I was feeling pretty good about the number.

  “He started missing the Thursday night meetings. Now, they didn’t have to go to all the meetings, but it was pretty much expected. I just wanted them to attend voluntarily. So I asked Malcolm about it, and Malcolm, he said ‘I’ve been going to therapy,’ he said. ‘I still have problems, all kinds of problems. I still need help,’ he said.

  “I was a little shocked. ‘You don’t need that,’ I told him. ‘Jesus will provide forall your needs.’