“Uh-oh,” Rose said.
“We,” Ray said, “we here of the Powerhouse are Christians. Our hearts have been entered and changed, and one way we know this is the powers that have been granted us. We know because we can speak in tongues, and we can prophesy. When called upon we can.”
He looked them over. Rose in her chair seemed to stiffen, and Pierce understood that, like an ill-prepared student, she was afraid she’d be called on. He too: as in a dream, called on though he had not done the lesson at all, nor knew what the subject was; a sudden feeling that the man on the dais might have the power to make him answer anyway, belch out meaningless language, just to show him. Ray named a name, and a young woman in the front arose. She spoke rapidly in what sounded like high-school Italian, and sat again. Another woman: “Prophesy,” said Ray, and she did: a burst of King James English, not anything specific, not tomorrow’s headlines or news of the millennium; vague injunctions and threats.
One or two more women (all women, all young) and that was done. Rose relaxed beside him.
That’s it? Pierce wanted to ask her. That’s all? He felt almost fleeced. It wasn’t exactly a trick, but certainly not magic; just a thing for believers to do, like prayer. He wondered what it felt like. Clearly a great weight of foreboding should now be lifted from his mind, but none was.
“The sign is not the thing,” Ray said. “The power granted to the Christian has not been and cannot be fully shown, because it has no limit. Read Mark sixteen. Anyone who wants to know these things can. It’s no secret. But life is short, and there isn’t another chance.”
He turned from them and went to sit; and just as the silence became profound, there leapt up from the front row a man as trim and chiselled as Ray was not. He looked at Ray and grinned, shaking his head as though to say Aw you old so-and-so.
Rose said to Pierce: “Pitt Thurston.” She seemed to settle in her chair, and lifted expectantly a corner of her Bible’s cover. It was white, in soft leather, with gold ribbons to mark her place.
Pitt Thurston expertly detached the mike from the lectern, and with it in his hand turned to them, feigning surprise, as though they had just appeared before him. A new kind of despair entered Pierce. Long ago in Kentucky he and his cousins with a delicious sense of trespass had used to watch the preachers on TV, they had just begun to use the new tool, they were clownish in every sense, they talked too loud and their haircuts were amazing, and their faith was so real and frank it was shaming. Pitt Thurston had learned not from such as they but from late-night talk-show hosts and corporate sales managers. He joked, he smoothed his tie and suppressed a chuckle. He went limp when he could get no enthusiastic response to his questions, and made the time-out sign to ask again. He had a trick of almost in his excitement letting slip a blasphemous or dirty word, altering it at the last minute to something innocuous, and raising titters—unless for shock effect he did say something strong, usually in condemnation of some other Christian sect.
“Okay,” he said at length, and took up the limp-leather book from the dais. “Got work to do.”
The work to be done was apparently the exegesis they were so proud of, the discovery of various appearances of a Greek word in the Gospels and Epistles, but Pitt never quite settled down to this task, or was easily distracted from it. They got to dunamis, power, from dunasthai, to be able. Dynamo, dynamite, anodyne.
“Tell you something,” he said thoughtfully, looking up from his text. “How many have ever been up to the new nuclear plant on the river island there? Ever taken the tour that the Metatron company gives? Metatron is the outfit that runs that. Quite a place. I’ve often been there myself. People, that is a powerhouse: that’s all it is. A powerhouse of a new big funny kind, slick as all … heck and working day and night for us. Now. Suppose you were invited in there by Metatron, into that powerhouse, and shown around; and then suppose the big boss took you into his office, maybe old mister what’s-his-name from the big plaza downtown himself. And he said to you We put out a billion megawatts of power every day, or whatever it may be, and we would like to put all that power at your personal disposal. Understand? All that power at your personal disposal. Need something done? The power’s yours. Do with it as you wish. Bet you could outdo your neighbor’s Christmas lights then. No really. Boys and girls, brothers and sisters, that powerhouse has got nothing on God’s. Metatron would run out of steam mighty quick if God chose to withdraw the power of His powerhouse from it. And that’s the one that God is offering to you. He’s just waiting to make that offer to you: all His power at your personal disposal. Free of charge.
“God made this world for us. For us to delight in and have what we want. Once we threw away that gift. Fine. He still wants us to have what we want. And He will get it for us and can get it for us because He made the rules by which the world runs. They’re His rules and He can change them. For you. God loves you so much and is so much a powerful friend to you that He can suspend the laws of nature on your behalf! He did it, has done it and will do it again. You don’t have to believe He will; I promise that if you only believe He can you’ll start to see and experience some pretty mystifying things, things that don’t happen to other people. If I started now I wouldn’t be done telling stories till morning. This whole great big ball of earth and all those stars around us are His doing! If He wants to rearrange the weather, think He can’t? If your car and another are on a collision course, think God can’t put His finger out and just push that car a little aside? No? What do you think the world is made of? Something real special? Something with a mind of its own? Or just dirt and rocks and metal and wood? Well? What do you think? If you think He can’t, can’t act on your behalf every day, or wouldn’t just for little old you, then why believe he’s going to change the laws of life and death He laid down, so that you don’t need to die forever? Or don’t you believe that either? Do you believe this stuff or don’t you?”
He surveyed them. He pretended to listen hard to hear their assent. Then he clapped his hands hard together, a sudden crack.
“Okay. Here’s how it works. You get down on your knees and say Lord I believe all that You have told me of Yourself through Your Son Jesus Christ in His book, the Bible. Lord I don’t care about anything of this world except Thy service. I want nothing but what You want for me, I’m happy with bread and water for Thy sake. And you know what happens then? They throw a party in heaven. They are rejoicing. ‘Cause I tell you there is more joy in heaven over one lost sheep found than ninety-nine who never left home. Hey, it’s your birthday! And what do you get on your birthday? Presents! Ice cream and cake! What you most want, what you most need! Don’t believe it? He said it: I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly. More abundantly. That’s a promise. You say to me, Pitt, surely you’re not talking about the things of this world, about money, about stuff—yes! I am! That’s the first thing I’m talking about. Abundance. And then next—it gets better and better—how about health? Never sick anymore? Can’t have abundance if you’re sick. So yes health. And better. Life. More life. Eternal life. Right here on this earth.
“Now you have to understand that these things are yours in Jesus Christ. They come to you because Jesus Christ renewed God’s promise in all its original glory. They aren’t for others. Sorry. I mean Buddha was a nice guy but he didn’t rise from the grave. God wanted us never to die, and He showed He wanted that for us all by raising His Son from the grave. No death. Simple as that.”
At that Pierce, who had sat stony-faced through all the little jokes and sweeteners, laughed aloud, a small bark that he instantly regretted; Pitt Thurston’s viper’s eye flicked to him, seeming to file the unknown face, then away. Oh hateful man, a catalogue of all that Pierce despised and feared, how could she. The suit of pale wintergreen, supressed at the waist, sculpted and tufted at shoulder and lapel. The horrid familiarity with the Deity, his boss-man, his chum; the smug self-love, the violent energy directed against others: who could not
see in him the smooth beast horned like a lamb who fronts for the Big Beast in Revelation, the top salesman, who marked the foreheads of everyone so they could buy and sell.
“Come meet him,” Rose said. They were done. The Bibles were closed around him and the damp coats picked up: school’s out.
“I can’t,” Pierce said. “No.”
“Oh come on,” Rose said. “Just hello.”
“I can’t,” Pierce said. “I can’t touch him.”
She had lifted him up by his elbow and pushed him gently forward. Ray and Pitt stood together, back-to-back, taking on the people exiting around them; Ray an immobile idol, Pitt a thrusting knife. Rose brought him before them.
“This is my friend Pierce.”
This was the penultimate place of Pierce’s Conurbana memory house, this exit guarded by these powers, now turning to see him, one with eyes like saucers, the other with eyes like pinwheels, Pierce’s only way out to toss them the sop of his humility and goodwill, hi, hello. His hand even, touching theirs. Hey hi, where you from? Oh yes? Hey we’re really getting established out there, you’ll be hearing things. Oh hey yes oh sure. And they let him by.
“Mike told me he thought you were a pretty interesting guy.”
“Oh yes?” Pierce pulled shut the Asp’s door and again vainly tried to shut the window fully. Mike had trapped him in the foyer of the Empire Room, unwilling to let him go without a chat, parhesia. Rose had vanished, maybe by prearrangement.
“What did you guys talk about?”
“God,” said Pierce. He was shivering, clutching his overcoat around him.
She grinned at him. “And?”
“He asked me if I believed in God. I said no. He asked me how then I accounted for everything, why there are things. I said I didn’t account for it. He asked me, if it wasn’t God, what was it, just chance? And I said I had no idea. I said that just because I rejected his or the Bible’s explanation didn’t mean I had to come up with one of my own. I said if he had told me that the wind is caused by the trees waggling their branches, I would feel okay about rejecting his explanation without knowing what really does make the wind blow.”
She laughed. “He said you were pretty definite. Knew your mind. He said that’s rare.”
“He seems to believe,” Pierce said, “that this whole universe, this inconceivably immense enormous, this whole thing was created for us, and that when our story’s over, this little Christian God story, then the whole universe is too.”
He had got away from Mike at last by announcing he had to go to the bathroom. His mouth phenomenally dry and his bowels uncertain. While he evacuated she must have checked in with Mike.
“Do you believe that?” he asked. “About the universe?”
“Oh,” she said. “To me it’s not what’s important.”
“Not important?” he said. “Not important?”
“We’ve got to make a stop at the store,” she said. “If you don’t mind. Otherwise there’ll be nothing for breakfast. Okay?”
“I’m with you,” Pierce said.
More travel, seeming to lead to no different places, the rain grown a little heavier, the darkened stores and the houses seeming to shrink beneath it. The supermarket she chose was huge, a half circle like a vast Quonset hut, lit by banks of fluorescent lights that could be seen even from outside through the glass front. Above the wide doors, red letters taller than a house and glowing from within said FOOD. He thought of the power the place must be sucking up and wasting, Metatron’s, more where that came from.
“Oh hey,” she said as she took him within this place (how did she dare operate here so briskly, so confidently? Had this been her world all along?). “I found the answer to one of the problems you had.”
“You did?”
“Well it was pointed out to me. About the end of the world. That Jesus said the end of the world was coming right away? Like soon? And then it didn’t happen?”
“Um,” said Pierce.
“Well,” she said. “In the Letter of Peter. Peter says not to worry about it. Because he says that in God’s sight a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.”
“Ah,” said Pierce. “Yes. Simple as that.”
“So,” she said. She was picking unhesitatingly among the multitudes of things on offer here, all of them signalling to her in bright colors and bold packages, and throwing them in her cart. “Oh and another thing.”
“That wasn’t Peter,” Pierce said. “Some other guy, much later on. Not Peter Peter.”
“Another thing.” She smiled at him, triumphant in advance. Her face in these lights was translucent, her eyes small and pale. “About Jews. This is really interesting.”
This he did not respond to.
“I guess you haven’t heard what’s coming out.”
“What.”
“It’s turning out,” she said, “that all that didn’t happen.”
“All what?”
“All the awful things. Six million people killed. The gas chambers. It didn’t happen.”
Why was it so brightly lit here, as though to deny night altogether; why had he never been taught to live here, where all his kind now must. “Didn’t happen?” he said.
She stopped her cart to look at him, at his face, perhaps to compel his attention. “Well of course bad things happened. People were hated and killed. They had camps where people died. But it wasn’t like people said. Six million. I mean.”
“So all these people,” Pierce said, “whose parents and grandparents were burned up …”
“Well they don’t know that, lots of them. They think that. They’ve been told that. But they could have been fooled too. I mean everybody has been. That’s the research that’s coming out. There’s just no basis for it.”
She waited for him to respond; when it became clear he could not or would not, would just go on staring, she said, “Isn’t that great?”
“Great?”
“Well that this terrible thing and all these people killed didn’t happen. That it wasn’t so bad. Because what people say is, How could God let something like that happen? How could it be that a God of love could let such a thing happen and not do anything to stop it for so long? And so if it didn’t.”
“And why,” he said, “do we think it did happen? If it didn’t. Who, why.”
“Well,” she said. “Just think about it. Who would want people to believe this? Who would want that? Who could tell a lie that big?”
“Jews,” he guessed. “Top Jews around the world.”
She seemed struck by this; it was apparently not the answer she had in mind but she seemed to consider it, as though it hadn’t occurred to her. “Well but,” she said. “What I meant was, who would want us to think that. About God. That something so terrible could happen, and God would do nothing.” She tapped her nails on the cart’s handle. “It ought to be obvious.”
Yes. Their counter-God, he saw it, out to blind us to the true God’s goodness. “Yes,” he said.
She held out both hands, showing him the palms. Easy.
“So, what,” Pierce said, “he created all this evidence somehow? Printed up documents, faked some films, I guess published books …”
“Oh Pierce,” she said, hopeless case. “Come on.”
Of course not, he thought. The Father of Lies needn’t tell any himself, only busy himself in the brains or souls of others. He said no more. His horror at her proposition, its dreadful falsity, was as great as if it were true; a world in which it was true, it and all the rest of their claims and ignorances, the little stone-dead world where they took up all the room, walking in the Spirit with Ray and Pitt and sending their enemies to Hell, was where he was; the world he had come from was withdrawing like a tide down a dark beach, waving goodbye.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “Mike said it would be hard and I didn’t know what he meant. Walking in the Spirit. Loving the whole world. I can do it for a little while at a t
ime, but it always stops. But while it’s happening there’s nothing like it, no ordinary happiness is anything like it. I’d give anything to share it with you. With anybody. I would.”
They lay in her narrow sofa bed. The lights were out but city lights from different sources fell over the place in stripes of cold color, blue and dead white and dinge, multiplying the windows across the wall. She had adopted a street cat, whose little slit eyes looked at Pierce from the top of the dresser.
“So nothing, nothing,” he said, “nothing can, can.”
She lay thoughtful for a time.
“The only thing that could make a difference,” she said then, “would be if I didn’t get what I wanted. That would make a difference.”
“If your wishes didn’t come true.”
“Well. And then anyway maybe when I was an old woman I would look back and say I did get what I wanted even if I didn’t know it at the time.”
“That’s what we were told by the nuns. You get what you want. Always.”
She put out her cigarette, and her last exhalation took momentary form in the streetlight, a little ghost. “I know I’ll slip up again,” she said. “Get drunk, fornicate, whatever—the dog returning to his vomit, you ever read that part? But it doesn’t matter, because what I’ve been given can’t be taken from me. I’ve got it for good. I can look down, and see how far up I’ve come. But I can’t fall. Ever again.”
The unsleeping pedant within Pierce recognized the Carpocratian heresy: there is no sin for those who are saved. He saw himself too in her scheme, fornicating, not excluded, if he could put up with it, which he couldn’t.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Rose.”
“Yes.”
“Is this. Is this the big payback? Is that really what all this is?” He knew it was not, but the monstrous possibility seized him, why not, why not anything.
“Payback?”