— No well I, I mean I think I better go see if, Bibbs?
— No no sit down, sit down, look at this, here's his Survival Handbook, four pages they call it a book. Keep handy for future reference, that's any minute now when millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the earth and you're not one of them. They're all up there meeting the Lord in the clouds having a grand time and you're left here with seven years of tribulation but don't panic! Got your little handbook here just do what it tells you, here. Get ready for global war and global famine. Get out of the cities they'll be destroyed, stay away from mountains and islands they'll be destroyed, stay away from oceans everything in them will be killed, get in seven years' supply of food and water and get ready to fight off starving people and wild animals, fix up your house to resist earthquakes and hundred pound hailstones and watch out for demon controlled people and other creatures roaming around out there torturing and killing anybody in sight, Revelation nine, one to eighteen it says it right here, God's word isn't it? revealed to Saint John the Divine? just the way he revealed those three secrets to those kids at Fatima? Same damned thing, fire and pestilence, talk about being blown to Kingdom Come that's exactly what they mean and they can't wait. They can't wait to be snatched up to meet the Lord in the clouds and sit there watching the rest of us tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of his holy angels and the Lord right in there rubbing his hands, they can't wait to see the sun darkened, the stars fall, hailstones and fire, the cities crumbling, the seas turned to blood I'll tell you something Billy, the whole damned thing's a self fulfilling prophecy, I'll tell you something right now. The greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger and the greatest source of all of it is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look, Sikhs killing Hindus, Hindus killing Moslems, Druse killing Maronites, Jews killing Arabs, Arabs killing Christians and Christians killing each other maybe that's the one hope we've got. You take the self hatred generated by original sin turn it around on your neighbors and maybe you've got enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh to wipe out the whole damned thing, here… Suddenly he was up, — give you something real to read if you want the whole story… thrusting books aside in the bookshelf — because none of it's new, none of it's new…
— No but wait man, I mean I'm not really, no wait, Bibbs?
And she might have come in, she'd got as far as the doorway again standing there holding them at glare's length when the phone turned her back where she'd come from, pushing aside the tea still steeping in the cup, picking it up for — yes? Hello…? and then — oh… and — oh, and — but is everything… oh. Yes I, I'll be here yes where else would I… yes I'll be here… holding it, still, before hanging it up as though to give it time to reconsider, to retreat, retract or at the least to offer some reprieve, but the only voice to be heard was the one raised through the doorway behind her.
— talk about their deep religious convictions and that's what they are, they're convicts locked up in some shabby fiction doing life without parole and they want everybody else in prison with them it's the smugness, that's stupidity's telltale Billy, the damned self righteous smugness here, read this one. God and Jesus appear to a farm boy in upstate New York a hundred and fifty years ago out in the woods where he's praying for guidance, fourteen years old he's guilty as sin that he can't understand and just to make it worse there's the resurrection and the life starting to bulge in his pants so here comes the heavenly messenger, the resurrected angel who'd just happened to bury some plates on a nearby hill there fourteen centuries before with all the news, visions, revelations, prophecies, speaking with tongues, laying on of hands he finally gets it all down in a book that's one more recipe for bloodshed and they're off. Bloodshed in Missouri, bloodshed in Nauvoo Illinois and this time it's his, bloodshed across the Mississippi, Iowa wait, wait don't bother to read that one no, no that's just a sideshow here's the real thing, here's Runciman, three thousand years of religious slaughter have you read Runciman? Staggering piece of work, talk about having business with the Bible just try the Children's Crusade for a sideshow, thousands of kids led into slavery and death by a twelve year old with a letter from Jesus, that's one thing your Reverend Ude's learned since that trial in Smackover. Turn it into a crusade. You can't put the fear of God in them put in the fear of something right here and now, it's all fear, Satan wears a little thin so you tie him in with godless Marxism and you've got a crusade to scare the hell out of everybody, a crusade against the powers of darkness over there washing these Africans in the blood of Jesus and you'll have enough bloodshed to float the Titanic. These churches are all built on the blood of their martyrs aren't they? If Ude really wants to do it right he can always go out and get himself shot, and you know Billy? I think he'd do it…
The tea in the cup had steeped almost black and she left it there, up for a moment staring out the window again and then she pulled open the door and went out and sat on the edge of the chair overturned on the dead leaves carpeting the terrace, the streamers from the limbs of the mulberry tree drifting over her gentle as torn curtains and the lattice fence beyond like the ruptured wall of a room, of a house long since abandoned.
— You want to know what Africa's really all about here, here read this one… She'd come back in, chilled, to see him up tottering on the magazine bundle reaching down a book from a high shelf, her own hand already spotting white on the knuckles where she gripped the dark turn of wood standing there in the doorway — all four horsemen riding across the hills of Africa with every damned kind of war you could ask for. Coups d'etat and you've got Somalia, Benin, Madagascar, the Congo, nationalist war gives you Mozambique, war of liberation topped off by a civil war and there's Angola, revolution and you've got Ethiopia and the tribes, the tribes. Rwanda gets its independence and the Hutus celebrate by killing a hundred thousand Watusi and grabbing majority rule, right next door in Burundi the Watusi slaughter two hundred thousand Hutus just to make sure it won't happen there. North Koreans train the Shona in Zimbabwe's Fifth Brigade and off they go in their red berets chopping up the Ndebele people in southern Matabeleland, seven hundred languages they've all been at each other's throats since the creation war, famine, pestilence, death, they ask for food and water somebody hands them an AK47 and suddenly the whole thing's a Marxist conspiracy? It's money from the West and guns from the East and they'll all sell out to the highest bidder. Somalis and Ethiopians they were killing each other up there in the Ogaden a thousand years before Marx was born. Ethiopia sells us out to the Marxists and comes out owing them two billion dollars for arms, Somalia rigs up something called scientific socialism that's just about as real as this scientific creationism, they keep it running long enough to build up a vast system of patronage and corruption when a coup d'etat hands them over to us and we get to pay the bills no no no, if all this is a Marxist Leninist conspiracy to take over the dark continent it's a pretty damned pitiful show. Fifty countries over there and the seven or eight that call themselves Marxist are a shambles every damned one of them. This spectre of Marxism taking over black Africa good God, they're the best friends we've got, good healthy ignorance they believe in the same things we do, strong family ties, religion and greed.