LOYD: Why would a perfect, fulfilled, all-knowing, and changeless deity even bother to inflate the balloon of the physical cosmos? Isn’t that a capricious act? An unnecessary waste of energy?
I AM: I like your metaphor. It has a festive spontaneity totally in accord with the motives of God in my timeless aspect. These motives are complex, innate, and immutable, but they center on the impulse to celebrate my self-awareness with living consciousnesses outside myself. This impulse requires a Creation—the Big Bang that gave birth to space-time and all the galactic populations.
LOYD: How can you describe a God with impulses as “fulfilled”?
I AM: In temporal terms, I can’t. But temporal terms are all we have here. It might be more accurate to say that, even in my timeless aspect, I possess the positive attribute of generosity. In the absence of beneficiaries, however, no one but I could document my possession of this trait. Therefore, I inflated the balloon of the cosmos to affirm the otherwise pointless fact of my generosity. I didn’t need to do so, I wanted to do so. Even this falls short of the reality, Mister Paul, but, here and now, I can scarcely do better.
LOYD: Never mind. What about suffering and death and injustice? How do you square the murder of an innocent child with your hypothetical generosity as the God Beyond Time?
I AM: I don’t. I don’t even try. Every secondary creation of any complexity is flawed. Perfections of various wonderful kinds may occur within it, of course, but the encompassing whole—well, its imperfections are equally numerous. In fact, some of the perfections depend upon them. The just recognize justice by unhappy exposure to its opposite. The wise distill their—
LOYD (waving his hand in the gelatinous light): I’ve heard all this before. It’s a recipe for carrion-comfort, dog-god.
I AM: What you must remember is that no matter how terrible the world may seem, no matter how cruel or pointless, the Mind that nudged its ecosystems toward the evolution of self-aware consciousness did so out of an inexpressible generosity.
LOYD: A ponderous vanity, I’d say.
I AM: And the timeless Mind whose temporal avatars intrude upon Creation to shape and direct it in their puny ways—well, that Mind releases them like antibodies into the besieged body of the world. There they help the sentient creatures of faith and goodwill neutralize the poisons of entropy and accident. I came for that reason. So did Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Gandhi, and perhaps the latter-day habiline whom you know as Adam Montaraz. In any case, Mister Paul, Adam came to extend the family of humankind, to demonstrate—via his struggle for personal revelation—the interconnectedness of creation.
LOYD (flailing at the womb of visible darkness containing him): I curse you in your impotent timeless aspect! The holy physicians you send us are quacks! Better for us never to have existed than to suffer so grievously from the imperfections built into your misbegotten creation!
I AM: Not at all. Not at all.
(Yagaza, the dog-god, pins Loyd’s hands to his sides. The snout of the upright creature hovers inches from the possessed man’s face. Loyd smells carrion on its breath, the stench of the decaying human features—Craig Puddicombe’s—behind its hyena mask. He seizes the wound in the creature’s chest and averts his face.)
LOYD (mockingly): Not at all. Not at all. How does knowing that God possesses a temporal and a timeless aspect improve our lot, Yagaza? What difference—what goddamn difference—does it make?
I AM: By repostulating me as the Alpha and Omega, the supreme primal-and-ultimate holistic concept, you may believe in me again by rediscovering in me the ground of your own existence.
LOYD (struggling in Yagaza’s powerful hands): What the hell for?
I AM: To realize once again that you were spawned by a multidimensional, paratemporal Benevolence and that even your most pointless-appearing torments mean, Mister Paul. They resonate forever in the all-encompassing Mind of God.
LOYD (weeping bitterly): Hooray for our resonating torments. Hooray, hooray. What a comfort, what a comfort….
The possessed man slumped from Yagaza’s immaterial embrace. Meanwhile, Agarou, god of ancestors, climbed out of the psychic grotto into which he had earlier withdrawn. He climbed out of it to remount the body of Paul Loyd. He meant to ride his human horse back into the rainy compass of Prix-des-Yeux and its houngfor. Regaining control was not hard. Because Loyd had so little fight left in him, Agarou routed the man’s defenses, occupied his overloaded mind, and looked out through his eyes. He found that Loyd was sitting at the feet of the agonized statue of Homo habilis primus. One of Loyd’s hands clutched the statue’s stone phallus, apparently to keep him from toppling over.
Let go of me, Loyd told Agarou. I’m sick of the selfish double dealings of gods.
The one who must release you comes now, Agarou said. Patience. Loyd peered through the loa’s eyes—his eyes, if only he could get them back—at the flashlight beams crisscrossing in the entrance shaft to the upland cave system. A small party of people was approaching, limned in nappy silhouette behind, or off to the sides of, the bobbing flashlight beams: figures of blood and substance, not habiline ghosts. The closer they came, the more palpable grew the light accompanying them. The darkness in the catacombs began to relinquish its ultraviolet character to the dim grittiness of the visible spectrum, for Agarou’s hold on him was weakening.
Caroline knelt beside him. Adam knelt beside him. Their clothes were drenched, their faces beaded with rain. Behind them, looking down on him, stood two sinister-looking men whom Loyd could not place and whose postures bespoke a belligerent impatience. They carried weapons: rifles or submachine guns. Even the loa possessing him recoiled from these figures, and Loyd struggled to focus on Caroline and her habiline protector. Caroline looked like a drowned angel; Adam, a refugee from the bombed-out set of a 1930s Hollywood musical starring Fred Astaire. (It was the top hat and tails that did it.)
“Come forth, Mister Paul,” urged Adam in his hoarsest whisper. “Come forth from your possession by Agarou, god of ancestors.”
I sat up straighter. Embarrassed, I let go of the lustrous prick of the statue behind me. I blinked against the flashlight beams of the armed men regarding me with equal measures of curiosity and contempt.
“What the hell’s going on?”
Caroline kissed me and nodded at one of the beret-wearing men. “You remember Lieutenant Bacalou, Paul? We met him on the boat coming over from Cap-Haïtien.”
“Hello again.” Lieutenant Bacalou gave me a curt nod and a superior smile.
Groggy, I tried to stand. With Caroline and Adam’s support, I succeeded, but briefly teetered like a bounce-back toy trying to regain its equilibrium. Five minutes ago, I had been talking to God—scoring points against him in an emotional metaphysical debate that had utterly wrung me out. To find this grim pair of Tontons Macoutes in his place, holding my wife and my friend at gun point, seemed a bleak variation of a nightmare that had already taken place in Beulah Fork. E. L. Teavers and the Klan, Lieutenant Bacalou and another of Baby Doc’s rifle-toting bogeymen: they were mirror images. Or maybe this cave was the darkroom in which the negatives of the unsmiling macoutes would turn out to be pernicious double exposures. No matter where we went, we could not escape the merciless pursuit of zealots.
“All right,” I managed. “Tell me something about this.”