“Our well-loved brother, Sam W. Wilson, of Cicero, Illinois, who lost his life in an impersonation in the early 1990s, says in our Guidebook, What do you know when you’re not thinking? Those words are important for us now, for we all know what we merely think. Now it is time for us to turn to what we know, or rather what the Knower wishes to share with us.
“So then, my sisters, my brothers, let us enter the silence. I ask you to enter the silence with the special sense of Sister Margot of Trieste, who observes in the gloss of Recommendation 57 that one listens not only with one’s ears, but with one’s hands and feet and stomach and legs and all parts of the bodily arrangement. I join you in the silence with love and humility.”
At the conclusion of these remarks the ninety-one brothers and sisters of the Society had given Father Benjamin the thrive sign and commenced the listening.
Willie closed his eyes, listening with the others. He did not know that they watched him. And they, as they watched, did not see him going away from them, his spirit gravitating to that territory he loved so well and that was his natural home, where he felt his partness with the wholeness of things and through the partness, the wholeness of all.
What was that place he went to? He never thought to describe it to others, believing that everyone moved to the same place themselves, at will, and he never thought it was extraordinary that when he listened to his breathing he could hear the turning of the world, and he did not think it remarkable that he understood certain matters before he knew them and that knowledge always came later, if it came at all, and that it did not matter.
He was both entirely enclosed in himself and at the same time open to that enormous person stirring in the universe, opening a hand—or was it only turning, smiling in its sleep?
For a minute or so he was in the old dream then, soaring towards the sun, yet not so far away from earth that he could not see the steeple of the church in Delphi, the enormous bowl of the Regent Complex in New York, the colonnade of Saint Peter’s.
Then he was standing in a field, a farm lot, it seemed, with dim buildings in the distance.
As he stood there, he had the sense that the Friend was there, and he turned around and saw him robed in fire with light pouring through his body. And Willie beheld him as he came nearer, stretching out his arms, and Willie went toward him and then he was gone.
Willie opened his eyes. There were his brothers and sisters listening and opening to life. He has gone, he thought, to one of them.
He resumed the listening. Once again he found himself in the same dark field, this time at a greater distance from the buildings. Trees. Other shapes that finally became tents. The faint glow of a lantern.
Someone laughed and he heard men talking somewhere beyond one of the tents.
It was very cold and there was snow on the ground. He began to walk toward the tents. The wind gusted suddenly and he felt snow cutting his face. He stopped under a towering tree.
Two figures, bundled in overcoats, came up from the tent area. They moved like bears. They were carrying something, a pole or stand of some kind. When they came to the tree, they paused and eased their burden to the ground.
“Only an hour now. Where is the idiot?”
“Praying.”
“Will he come do you think?”
“Regent?”
“Who did you think I meant?”
The other man laughed.
“What are you going to do if the idiot is right? You don’t know the Lord’s Prayer.”
Laughter.
“Come on, it’s colder when you stand.”
They went on, carrying the pole on their shoulders. Willie watched them go and then he saw the mansion for the first time. It was an enormous affair at the far end of the field, in the direction the men were walking. Its dark gables stood between the snow steppes and the sky. There were amber lights in the windows, and the light spilled out into the night and fell in oblong patterns on the ground.
As he stood there gazing at the mansion that was surely a palace from a childhood book, there was a commotion to his left, in the tent area. Shouts. The sound of motors. A powerful searchlight switched on and sent a white finger up to the sky. Into that column of light a helicopter floated—it was like a wasp with red eyes, fuming and buzzing and seeking a victim.
Willie came around the tree and immediately tripped over something, a dark shape he had not seen, and fell forward into the snow.
Angry grumbling. A man stood up.
“For God’s sake, watch where you’re going!”
“I’m sorry, I—” Willie got up. His hands stung from the fall.
“Where are you headed?”
“I just got here.”
“From where?”
“Rome.”
“With them?”
“I—came here by myself.”
“Who sent you?”
“Nobody.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. What’s going on?”
“What’s going on? This is L-Night.”
“What is that?”
The man drew closer, but it was too dark to see his face.
“You’re from the village maybe.”
“No, Rome.”
“Then you’re with them.”
“No. What is L-Night?”
“You know—what the idiot has arranged. Everybody making up with everybody. Can’t you find anyone in the village?”
“No sir. Who are you making up with?”
The man laughed. “My credit union.”
Willie tried to see the man’s face. The voice was raspy, big city.
“Why are you pretending like you don’t know anything?”
“I’m not pretending,” Willie said.
The man came closer still. He was only a yard away now. His voice dropped as he went on.
“Are you the second man—in case I fail?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You can tell me,” the man said, almost whispering. “I know there’s a backup somewhere. I also know there’s someone to take care of me after it’s over.”
“Sir—”
“Let me tell you something though, just for your own personal guidance. I have a man with me—someone to handle the ape who’s taking care of me. Understand?”
“No.”
The man laughed a nonhumorous laugh.
“But what does it come down to, brother?”
“I don’t know.”
“It comes down to this. If you aren’t with them and you aren’t my backup and you’re not the man I paid to settle the difference, there’s only one answer.”
“Sir?
“You’re the one they hired to get me after it’s over.”
“No one hired me, I just arrived, I don’t even know what—”
“Please, please, why insult my intelligence? Why work up a sweat? It doesn’t matter anyway does it? I mean, there’s so many people tied into this thing, who’s to know you’re not just an extra that somebody threw in?”
“I—”
“Let me ask you, brother, are you a man of faith? Do you believe in things? Do you believe, let’s say, Jesus was a little lamb who took the rap for sin?”
“I believe in Jesus,” said Willie.
“And the coming of Jesus? Do you believe that too, brother?”
“Jesus came and will come,” said Willie into the cold wind, and he felt the cold now in his voice and the cold was coming up through his legs and taking over his body.
When the man laughed now, it was the laugh of a man who had been put into prison for life and would never be released and who found happy things sorrowful, and sad and terrible things that could not be helped, funny and gladdening.
“With such faith, brother, what shall you fear? What can harm you on L-Night, when according to the teaching of the idiot the J-bird comes again? Why wait, brother, why wait? There’s only an hour left now anyway, if the idiot is right, and yo
u believe he is right. That is what the Director also is thinking—the Director with the silencer that can help a man greet the Lord halfway.”
The man raised the black shadow of an arm, motioning to something or someone behind Willie.
Willie turned, and there stood the other man, very close, and the scent of roses came to Willie and there was a sudden flame lighting up the face and then the fire in his stomach—and he woke screaming.
To the same face.
“Don’t!” he cried softly.
“Easy,” said Herman Felder. “You were dreaming.”
The brothers and sisters were looking at him from far away. He palmed his eyes in embarrassment; his heart beat wildly.
Felder smiled and Willie felt the horror coming toward him from the eyes.
“You want to speak?”
“I have nothing to say,” he said, trying to calm himself.
“You said you wished to speak.”
Willie said, “What is L-Day?”
Felder looked nonplused. “It is for you to answer.”
Dizzy, his blood racing, Willie got to his feet. For a moment the dark fields stretched before him once more. Something had been said to him, he knew, but that grotesque face obliterated it.
What is it? he asked.
He moved into the circle of his brothers and sisters.
“Beloved,” he said. “Let us listen for one more minute. Then we’ll try to say what needs to be said.”
In that minute, the longest of his life, he saw the whole plan clearly and fully—what he would do and what would be done—and he saw it all at once, as if it were a tapestry of living beings, and he saw himself throughout it and he saw it all and he knew it all, and in the tapestry he saw the beginning and he saw the ending and he saw how the figures who were living beings in the beginning became shadows in the end, strange quick-darting vapors, fishlike ghosts propelled by whispers and unearthly signals, creatures that turned continuously about a changing point of illumination that set fire to the whole piece.
A cloud lifted then, and for an enraptured moment he saw with human eyes the unutterable mystery that had always been buried in his heart, saw the abounding glory of life, the diversity of being and the kinship of being, the measureless lands and the bright-breasted seas, the blue fields and the green streams, and he saw the creatures of the world in all their numberless varieties and he saw the creature man in the rich raiment of his flesh—now red, now brown, now white, now golden—and he saw the tinctures of many faces glowing in a transforming light that lent fire to the sun and seemed to impart a pulsing energy to earth and beyond earth to worlds beyond, the luminous galaxies stretching away, Wedded by that same radiance to one another and wedded also to earth, and he saw the incomparable majesty of being, its ceaseless becoming, its luxuriant playfulness, its opening-closing, rising-falling, lightening-darkening, striving to be one.
His lips parted and he tried to speak, but a shadow scuttled across the vision, and when it passed, he saw only the miniature of the immediate future and the tangled scenes of the agonized present.
He saw then the conventions of death coming down like a grid upon the living figures of this smaller tapestry, and he heard the cries of the trapped victims—murderers and murdered, starvers and starved, warriors and mutilated children—and he heard the low mourning of the world beneath the tumultuous discord of understood emergencies. Speeches, epithets, curses rang in his ears, and the flowing-together of life ceased and fell into chaos, and the eyes of man turned to the void.
Here! he whispered fiercely, Here!
But they would not listen.
Silence. The grand universal image came back a second time. Again he saw what he would do, what would be done. Then the vision slipped away forever. As it left him, he knew he had reached a limit of the structures that the world contained, and he knew too that the box that would carry him now was meant to be the nonbox of the world and was in truth the tarnished, forgotten sign of what he had just beheld, and he felt indistinctly the fear, which he tried to deny, that the box would be a coffin, and he tried to erase that earlier dull flash and the face of the man it identified as assassin—in that detail, he told himself, the dream had been mistaken.
He looked at them with love, the off-scouring of the world, the ragpickers of civilization, this remnant of fools who believed insanely against a thousand years of reason.
A lofty calm possessed him as he spoke.
“My brothers, my sisters,” he said. “Since the Lord came into this world, we have never had a day of love, not a single day when the world was everywhere tender and solicitous of loving, more tender and more caring of love than of anything else.
“Now we shall have a day of love, alone, when brother shall forgive brother and sister forgive sister and parent child and child parent—so that for a few hours, enmity will vanish from the earth.
“So that the old deathbound world will pass away and a new one come to be.”
And that is how the L-Day Plan began.
Chapter four
“To end the old world,” the pope told the world four nights later on live Telstar broadcast, “to make it possible for something new to start, we must have this one day, this one twenty-four-hour period, when no gun shall fire, brother shall not strike brother—one day when enemy will befriend enemy.
“Is it really so much to ask—just a single day?”
Willie spoke from the Vatican broadcast studio. Before him, beyond the camera, stood his brothers—Benjamin and Joto and Truman and Herman and Thatcher Grayson.
And beyond them were the others, disconsolate and shattered—Liderant and Nervi and Profacci and Tisch. Worn out with grief and argument, they were like men attending a funeral; Liderant wept.
“Some call this plan crazy. But is it so crazy, brothers and sisters, to try to be our best for a single day?
“Some say that a day such as this will interfere with the business of the world. Perhaps some of the business of the world needs to be interfered with. Will one day off from the making of guns and bombs be so bad?”
George Doveland Goldenblade, watching the telecast from his home in Houston, Texas estimated that the production loss would cost him $650,000, and took the name of the Lord in vain twenty-seven times.
“What can be more important than love and what day could be more important for the world than a day set aside for brothering and sistering, for forgiving and being forgiven, a day when all come together in the sharing of love?
“This is not a day for word prayer, not a day for going to church. Rather this is the day for the true prayer of deed and action.
“What does that mean? Just this. On this special day, let each man and each woman living in the world today, whatever their faith, whatever he or she thinks of God, of religion, of the church, let each go to that man, that woman, that person who is an enemy and embrace him in peace, forgiveness and love.
“This is the day when everybody will make up.
“This is the day of universal reconciling and coming together, involving everybody in the world, a day such as the human family has never known before.
“On this day no nationalities exist, all the barriers crumble, all the divisions cease to be. No one is a Russian or an American or African or Brazilian.
“There is no rich and no poor.
“There is no young and no old.
“This is the day when we are all only people.”
Willie wore the white cassock (on Benjamin’s advice) and he spoke very slowly and more formally than usual. Felder and Benjamin had talked him into preparing some of the speech ahead of time.
“I have the pope’s job,” he said. “They tell me I could make some sort of rule about the observance of this day for Catholics. But that would go against the whole idea, having a rule to make up with somebody you have hurt or who has hurt you. Besides, what about all the rest of you who aren’t Catholics? No, I do not wish to rule, brothers and sisters. I come to you as one w
ho asks, in fact, pleads.
“And I come before you as a fellow human being, not as pope, to ask you to do this hard, simple thing.
“I ask every human being in the world to set this day aside. All you of the Jewish faith, beloved of God. All you of the Islam faith, beloved of God. All you of the Hindu faith, beloved of God. All you of the other religions and faiths of the world, beloved of God. All you of no faith and no religion, but beloved of God all the same.
“I ask you all to prepare for this day and give yourself to it and when it comes, to enter into it with all the trust and hope you ever had from your childhood or maybe what you can borrow from someone else, if you cannot believe yourself—and go out to your neighbor and be reconciled.
“What can we hope to gain by trying to come together and getting rid of the pride and the fear and the things that keep us apart?”
And what followed now became the most controversial part of the pope’s speech.
“An end of the world that we have known, the end of the pattern of things as they are. Yes, the definite breaking up and dissolving of all those arrangements that we have allowed to press down on our human growth, those systems and—ways of doing things—those ways we have developed of thinking of things—that have trapped us and confined us and held us in boxes.
“We may go back to our boxes again. But I tell you that they will never be the same again.
“I tell you that we will bring such a flame into our affairs as to consume and utterly destroy the world as we know it—the world of master and slave and rich and poor and the world of the starving children. We shall burn it, we shall burn it away in a night!”
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