Dust or something blew into my mouth, got down my throat; I cleared it, thinking: Christ, I hope he doesn’t decide my voice is breaking with emotion!
“—to remedy a little of that dissatisfaction. If he is not a good man, the Father is certainly a generous one. He is allowing me to stay here…Of course there’s always an odd relation between the head of the state and the head of the state-approved religion. After all, I helped set up this place. Same way I helped set up Teddy’s. Of course in this case, the biggest—if easiest—job, given my position with the Times, was making sure there was no publicity. In your present mood, you can probably appreciate that. But, no, my relation to the Father is not that of commoner to priest. On my side, at any rate, it is duplicitous, fraught with doubt. If I didn’t doubt, I wouldn’t be here now. I’m afraid the politics works through the spiritual like rot. The good governor at least wants it to be the best rot possible.”
“Is the Father a good man?” I asked again and tried not to sound at all like I was upset. (Maybe that backfired?)
“Has it occurred to you, my young Diogenes, that if you polished up the chimney of your own lamp, you’d be a little more likely to find this mysterious and miraculous Other you are searching out? Why does it concern you so?”
“So I can live here,” I said, “in Bellona.”
“You’re afraid that for want of one good man the city shall be struck down? You better look back across the train-tracks, boy. Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re just grubbing in the ashes. That simply isn’t our problem anymore. If you wanted out, you should have thought about it a long time back. Oh, you’re very high-minded—and so, at times, am I. Well, as the head of the state religion, the Father does a pretty good job; good enough so that those doing not quite so well would do a bit better not to question—especially if that’s all we can get.”
“What do you think about the religion of the people?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“You know. Reverend Amy’s church; George; June; that whole business.”
“Does anyone take that seriously?”
“For a governor,” I said, “you’re pretty out of touch with what the people are into, aren’t you? You’ve seen the things that have shown up in this sky. There’re posters of him all over town. You published the interview, and the pictures that made them gods.”
“I’ve seen some of it, of course. But I’m afraid all that black mysticism and homoeroticism is just not something I personally find very attractive. And it certainly doesn’t strike me as a particularly savory basis for worship. Is Reverend Taylor a good woman? Is George a good…god?”
“I’m not that interested in anybody’s religion,” I told him. “But if you want to bring the purpose of the church down to turning out people who do good things: When I was awfully hungry, she fed me. But when I was hurt and thirsty, someone at your gate told me I couldn’t get a glass of water.”
“Yes. That regrettable incident was reported to me. Things do catch up to you here, don’t they? When you were unpublished, however, I published you.”
“All right.” My laugh was too sharp. “You’ve got the whole thing down, Mr. Calkins. Sure, it’s your city. Hey, you remember the article about me saving the kids from the fire the night of the party? Well, it wasn’t me. It was George. I was just along. But he was down there, searching through the fire, seeing if anybody needed help. I just wandered by; and the only reason I stayed was because he told me the ones who’d started out with him from Teddy’s had gotten too chickenshit and run. I heard the kids crying first, but George was the one who busted into the building and got the five of them out alive. Then, when your reporter got to him later, George made out like it was all me, because he didn’t want the acclaim, prestige, and attendant hero-worship. Which, in the mood I am now, I approve of. Now is George a bad man?”
“I believe—” the voice was dry—“implicit in what you originally asked was that so necessary distinction between those who do good and who are good.”
“Sure,” I said. “But explicit in what you said was that bit about making do with what you can get. I can get George if I need him. He’s genial enough for a god, with some nicely human failings like a history of lust.”
“I think I’m still Judeo-Christian enough to be uncomfortable with expressly human demiurges.”
“In the state-approved religion, the governor is God’s appointed representative on earth, if I remember right. Isn’t that, when all is said and done, what makes the relation between the head of the state and the head of the church as ticklish as you were just telling me it is? You’re as much a god as George, minus some celestial portents and—of course, I’m just guessing—a couple of inches on your dick.”
“I suppose one valid purpose of poets is to bring blasphemy to the steps of the altar. I just wish you hadn’t felt obliged to do it today. Nevertheless, I appreciate it as a political, if not a religious, necessity.”
“Mr. Calkins,” I said, “most of your subjects aren’t sure whether or not this place even exists. I’m not presenting any long considered protest. I wasn’t sure there was a Father till today. I was just asking—”
“What are you asking, young man?”
What I’d intended to come back with got cut away by my realization of his real distress. “Um…” I tried to think of something clever and couldn’t. “…is the Father a good man?”
When he didn’t answer, and I began to suspect/recall why, I wanted to laugh. Determined to go in silence, I got off the arm of the chair. Three steps, though, and my blubbering broke into a full throated giggle that threatened torrents. If Calkins could have seen, I would have flashed my lights.
Brother Randy, robes blowing about his sneakers, stepped around the corner. “You’re going?” He still wore his methadrine grimace.
“Um-hm.”
He turned to walk with me. The breeze that had been dull in my left ear now grew firm enough to beat my vest about my sides; it tugged Randy’s hood off. I looked at the lone Australia on the South Pacific of his skull. It wasn’t nearly as big as I’d imagined from the edge. He saw me looking; so I asked: “Does that hurt?”
“Sometimes. I think the dust and junk in the air irritate it. It’s a lot better now than it used to be. Before, it was all down over my ear and the back of my neck—when I first got here. The Father suggested I shave my head; that’s certainly given it a chance to heal.” We reached the steps. “The Father knows an awful lot about medicine. He’s made me put some stuff on it and it seems to be clearing up. I thought for a while he might have been a doctor or something, once, but I asked him…”
In the pause I nodded and started down. I’d swear he was on something, and the moment he’d started talking I’d gotten auditory visions of the endless rap.
“…and he said he wasn’t.
“So long.” He waved his big, translucent hand.
All the way across the broken overpass I tried to assemble what I had of the man behind the wall (my lights flashing through two flowered grills of stone, a web of light around his body); I even wondered what he felt during our conversation. The one thing that cleared when all my speculations fell away was that I had an urge to write. (Do you have that restless…? like it says in the back of the magazines. Sure.) But sitting here, in a back booth at Teddy’s, tonight, while Bunny does her number to not-quite-as-many-as-usual customers (I asked Pepper if he wanted to come with me but he really has this thing about going in here, so I brought my notebook for company), I see all it has produced is this account—and not what I wanted to work on. (Bunny lives in a dangerous world; she wants a good man. What she can get is Pepper…no, an image Pepper at his best [when he can smile] consents to give, but he’s usually too tired or ashamed to. Is it my place to tell her that, bringing my blasphemy to the altar steps, sharing with her the data from my noon journey? I just wish I enjoyed his dancing more.) This is not a poem. It is a very shabby report of something that happened in the year of Our Lord it would be oh-so-nice to write down, month, day, and year. But I can’t.