EIGHTEEN

 

At the side of the dust-run serving as a road, the cretin girl Alice remained in silence, and a thousand years passed as sun came and day held a time and finally fell into darkness. She knew he was dead, even before the lizzy approached her.

"Miss." .

She did not look up.

"Miss, come along with us."

"No!" she said, violently.

"The cadaver --"

"I no want!"

Seating itself beside her, the lizzy said in a patient voice, "By custom you're supposed to claim it." Time passed; she kept her eyes shut, so as not to see, and with her hands over her ears she could not be certain if it was speaking further or not. At last it touched her on the shoulder. "You're a retard, aren't you?"

"No."

"You're too retarded to know what I'm saying. He's dressed as a hunter, but he's the old man you were shacking up with, the rat man. He is the rat man, isn't he? Disguised. What was he doing disguised? Trying to get away from enemies, was he?" The lizzy laughed roughly, then, the scales of its body ambient in the noise of its voice. "Didn't work. They bashed his face in. You should see it; nothing but pulp and --"

She leaped up and ran, then ran back for her forgot­ten doll. The lizzy had the doll, and the lizzy grinned at her, not giving the doll to her but pressing it against its scaly chest. Mockery of her.

"He good man!" she shouted frantically, as she scrabbled for the doll, her doll.

"No, he wasn't a good man. He wasn't even a good rat catcher. A lot of times, more than you know, he sold old gristly rats for the price supposed to be the going rate for young plump ones. What did he used to do, before he was a rat catcher?"

Alice said, "Bombs."

"Your daddy."

"Yes, my daddy."

"Well, since he was your daddy we'll bring you the corpse. You stay here." The lizzy rose, dropped the doll before her, and ambulated off, after its fashion.

Seated by the doll, she watched the lizzy go, feeling the tears running silently down her cheeks. Knew it wouldn't work, she thought. Knew they'd get him. Maybe for bad rats; tough old ones. . . like it just now said.

Why is it all like this? she wondered. He gave me this doll, a long time ago. Now he won't give me nothing more again. Ever. Something is wrong, she realized. But why? People, they are here for a time and then even if you love them they are gone and it is for always, they are never back, not now.

Once more she shut her eyes and sat rocking back and forth.

When again she looked, a man who wasn't a lizard was coming along the dust-rut road toward her. It was her daddy. As she leaped up joyfully she realized that something had happened to him, and she faltered, taken aback by the transformation in him. Now he stood straighter, and his face had a kindness glowing about it, a warm expression, without the twistedness she had be­come accustomed to.

Her daddy approached, step by step, in a certain measured fashion, as if in solemn dance toward her, and then he seated himself silently, indicating to her to be seated, too. It was odd, she thought, that he did not speak, that he only gestured. There was about him a peacefulness she had never witnessed before, as if time had rolled back for him, malting him both younger and -- more gentle. She liked him better this way; the fear she had always felt toward him began to leave her, and she reached out, haltingly, to touch his arm.

Her fingers passed through his arm. And it came to her, then, in an instant, in a twinkling of an eye, a flash of insight, that this was only his spirit, that as the lizzy had said, her daddy was dead. His spirit had stopped on its way back to be with her, to spend a final moment resting by the side of the road with her. This was why he did not speak. Spirits could not be heard.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

Smiling, her daddy nodded.

An unusual sense of understanding things began to course through her, a kind of alertness which she could not recall from any time ever. It was as if a. . . she struggled for the word. A membrane of some nature had been removed from her mind; she could see in the sense that she could comprehend now what she had never comprehended. Gazing around her, she saw in truth, in very truth, a different world, a world compre­hensible at last, even if only for an interval.

"I love you," she said.

Again he smiled.

"Will I see you again?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"But I have to --" She hesitated, because these were difficult thoughts. "Pass across first, before that time."

Smiling, he nodded.

"You feel better, don't you," she said. It was evident beyond any doubt, from every aspect of him. "What is gone from you is something terrible," she said. Until now, now that it had gone, she had never understood how dreadful it was. "It was an evil about you. Is that why you feel better? Because now the evil about you --"

Rising silently to his feet, her daddy began to move away, along the dim marks of the road.

"Wait," she said.

But he could not or would not wait. He continued on away, now, his back to her, growing smaller, smaller, and then at last he disappeared; she watched him go and then she saw what remained of him travel through a clump of tangled rubbish and debris -- through, not around, ghostly and pale as he had become; he did not step aside to avoid it. And he had become very small, now, only three or so feet high, fading and sinking, dwindling into bits of mere light which drifted suddenly away in swirls which the wind carried off, and were ab­sorbed by the day.

Two lizzys came toiling along toward her, both of them looking perplexed and somewhat angry.

"It's gone," the first lizzy said to her. "Your corpse is gone -- your father's, I mean."

"Yes," Alice said. "I know."

"It was stolen, I guess," the other lizzy said. Half to itself it added, "Something dragged it off. . . maybe ate it."

Alice said, "It rose."

"It what?" Both lizzys stared at her, and then simul­taneously they broke into laughter. "Rose from the dead? How do you know? Did it come floating by here?"

"Yes," she said. "And stayed a moment to sit with me.

Cautiously, one lizzy said to its companion, in a to­tally changed tone of voice, "A miracle."

"Just a retard," the other said. "Prattling nonsense, like they do. Burned-out brain muttering. It was just a dead human, nothing more."

With genuine curiosity, the other lizzy asked the girl, "Where'd it go from here? Maybe we can catch up with it. Maybe it can tell the future and heal!"

"It dissipated," Alice said.

The lizzys blinked, and then one of them rustled its scales uneasily and muttered, "This is no retard; did you hear that word she used? Retards don't use words like that, not words like 'dissipated.' Are you sure this is the right girl?"

Alice, with her doll held tight, turned to go. A few of the particles of light which had comprised her daddy's transformed being brushed about her, like moonbeams visible in the day, like a magic, living dust spreading out across the landscape of the world, to become progres­sively finer and finer, always more rare, but never com­pletely to disappear. At least not for her. She could still sense the bits, the traces, of him around her, in the air itself, hovering and lingering, and in a certain real sense, speaking a message.

And the membrane which had, all her life, occluded her mind -- it remained gone. Her thoughts continued clear and distinct, and so they were to remain, for the rest of her life.

We have advanced up the manifold one move, she thought. My father and I. . . he beyond visible sight, and I into visible sight at last.

Around her the world sparkled in the warmth of day, and it seemed to her that it had permanently changed as well. What are these transformations? she asked herself. Certainly they will last; certainly they will endure. But she could not really be positive, because she had never witnessed anything like it before. In any case, what she perceived on all sides of her as she walked away from the puzzled lizards was good. Perhaps, she thought, it is springtime. The first spring since the war. She thought, The contamination is lifting from us all, finally, as well as from the place we live. And she knew why.

 

Dr. Abernathy felt the world's oppression lift but he did not have any insight as to why it had lifted. At the moment it began he had taken a walk to market for the purchase of vegetables. On the way back he smiled to himself, enjoying the air because it had -- what was it once called? -- he could not remember. Oh yes: ozone. Negative ions, he thought. The smell of new life. Asso­ciated with the vernal equinox; that which charged the Earth from solar flares, perhaps, from the great source.

Somewhere, he thought, a good event has happened, and it spreads out. He saw to his amazement palm trees. All at once he stopped, stood clasping his basket of string beans and beets. The warm air, the palm trees. . . funny, he thought, I never noticed any palm trees growing around here. And dry dusty land, as if I'm in the Middle East. Another world; touches of another continuum. I don't understand, he thought. What is breaking through? As if my eyes are now opened, in a special way.

To his right, a few people who had been shopping had seated themselves along the way, for rest. He saw young people, dusty from the walk, sweating, but full of a purity new to him. A pretty girl with dark hair, some­what chubby, she had unfastened her shirt; it did not bother him; he was not offended by her naked breasts. The film is scrubbed away, he thought, and again he wondered why. A good deed done? Hardly. There was no such deed. He paused, standing there, admiring the young people, the bareness of the girl who did not seem self-conscious at all although she saw him, a Christian, gazing.

Somehow goodness has Arrived, he decided. As Mil­ton wrote once, "Out of evil comes good." Notice, he said to himself, the relative disparity of the two terms; evil is the most powerful term for what is bad, and good -- it barely surpasses its opposite. The Fall of Sa­tan, the Fall of Man, the crucifixion of Christ. . . out of those dreadful, evil acts came good; out of the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden, man learned love. From a Trinity of Evil emerged at last a Trinity of Good! It is a balanced thing.

Then, he thought, possibly the world has been cleared of its oppressive film by an evil act. . . or am I getting into subtleties? In any case, he sensed the difference; it was real.

I swear to god I'm somewhere in Syria, he thought. In the Levant. Back in time, too, perhaps. . . thou­sands of years, possibly. He stood gazing around him, inhaling and excited, amazed.

To his right, the ruins of a prewar U. S. Post Office substation.

Old ruins, he thought. The antique world. Reborn, somehow, in this our present. Or have I been carried back? Not me back, he decided, but it transported in time, as through a weak spot, to enter here and suffuse us. Or me. Probably no one else sees it. My god, he thought, this is like Pete Sands and his drugs, except that I haven't taken anything. This is the sundering of the normal and the entry into or else the invasion by the paranormal which he experiences; this, he realized, is a vision, and I must try to fathom it.

He walked slowly across the stubble and dirt of the field, toward the ruins of the small U. S. Post Office substation. Against its standing wall lounged several people, enjoying midday rest and the sun. The sun! What vigor carried invisibly in its light, now!

They do not see what I see, he decided. Nothing is changed for them. What happened to bring this on? An ordinary sunny day in the world. . . if I interpret what I see as if it is mere symbol: a sunny day, representing in the highest order the termination of the authority of evil, of that obscure dominion? Yes, something evil has perished, he realized, and, understanding that, his heart gladdened.

Something of substance which was evil, he thought, has become only shadow. It has somehow lost an essen­tial personification. Did Tibor take the God of Wrath's picture, and in so doing steal his soul?

He chuckled with delight, standing there by the ruins of the old U. S. Post Office substation, the sun radiating down on him, the fields murmuring with the buzz and drone of satisfaction, the mild endless hum of life. Well, he said to himself, amused, if Carleton Lufteufel's soul can be stolen, then he is not a god but a man, like any of the rest of us. Gods have nothing to fear from cam­eras. Except, he thought, pleased at his pun, a fear of (he laughed delightedly) exposure.

Several half-dozing people glanced up at him and smiled mildly, not knowing why he was laughing and yet sharing in it themselves.

More somberly, Dr. Abernathy thought, The Ser­vants of Wrath may be with us for a long time -- false religions are as long-lasting as the real, it would seem -- but the reality of it has faded and fled from the world, and what remains is hollow and without the mekkis, the power, it had.

I will be interested in seeing the photograph which Tibor and Pete Sands bring back, he decided. As they say, Better a devil known.

By snaring his image they have broken him, he real­ized. They have reduced him to mortal size.

The palm trees rustled in the warm midday wind, ac­quainting him further, without words, in the sunny mys­tery of redemption. He was wondering, however, whom he could tell his pun to. The false god, he repeated in rapture, since normally he was very bad at jokes, can­not survive exposure. He must always be concealed. We have lured him out and frozen his visage. And he is doomed.

And so, he informed himself, by means of a project engineered by the guile and ambitions of the Servants of Wrath themselves, we Christians, evidently defeated, have triumphed; this portrait has initiated a process of perishing for him, by its very authenticity -- or rather the fact that the Servants of Wrath will insist on its au­thenticity, collaborating in their own downfall. Thus the True God uses evil to refine the good, and good to re­fine evil,, which is to say, in the final analysis we dis­cover that God Himself has been served by everyone. By every event, whether good or bad.

I mean, he thought, labeled good or bad. Good or bad, truth or error, the wrong road or the right road, ignorance and malice and wisdom and love. . . they are, he thought, to be viewed as, Omniae vitae ad Deum ducent. All lives, like all roads, lead -- not to Rome, but to God.

Walking on now, he reflected that he should put this in a sermon along with his pun; it was something to tell people, to make them smile as those resting persons by the ruins of the old U. S. Post Office substation had smiled. Even if they did not understand thoughts so complex, they could still take pleasure in them.

To enjoy things again. . . the world's oppression, vanquished by an act invisible to everyone, could not hold men back; they could bask and smile and unbutton their shirts to catch the sun and enjoy the humor of a simple priest.

I would like to know what did happen, he thought. But God occludes men to fulfill His will.

Maybe, Dr. Abernathy decided, it is better that way.

Firmly gripping his basket of string beans and beets, he continued on in the direction of Charlottesville and his little church.