There was the Holocaust, of course, but Simon had been able to rationalize that as a terrible aberration, the horrendous face of a world in which Christ commanded but did not compel.
The Aztecs, however… the Aztecs had lodged in his mind like a burning cinder.
He could not dispel the persistent, horrible vision of those lines of prisoners snaking through angular stone colonnades to the temple at Tenochtitlan. It suggested whole worlds of unredeemed history: centuries fathomless, Christless, and unimaginably cruel. He envisioned the sacrificial victims and thought: These were men. These were human beings. These were their lives, alien and terrible and brief.
And then, one night in Episcopal Seminary, he had dreamed himself talking with an Aztec priest—a bony, nut-brown man in a feathered headdress, who had misunderstood his horror as religious awe and who responded with his own attempt at a compliment. Our knives are trivial, the priest had said. See what your people have achieved. All your missile silos, your invisible bombers, each one an obsidian knife aimed at the hearts of tens of millions of men and women and children; each one a temple, painstaking, ingenious, the work of an army of engineers, contractors, politicians, taxpayers. We have nothing to compare, the Aztec priest had said.
And Simon had awakened with the chilly suspicion that his own life, his own culture, everything familiar and dear, might in its essence be as twisted and cruel as the stone altars and kaleidoscopic deities of the Aztecs.
His faith sustained him through college, through his divinity degree, through his appointment to this parish. He was a thoughtful Christian, and on his good days he suspected his doubts only made him stronger. Other times—when the winter fogs enclosed Buchanan, or on moonless summer nights when the pines seemed to take on the barbed and thorny aspect of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of the underworld, in the repulsive mural of Tepantitla—he wished his doubts could be abolished, annihilated in a light of faith so intense it would wash away all these shadows.
Then—last night—he had had a very different dream.
He woke tentatively, as if exploring a world made new and unpredictable. Which perhaps it was.
Simon felt the world wake up around him. It was waking, he knew, from a very dramatic and peculiar kind of sleep.
But the immediate world, his world, was still the same: same bed, same bedroom, same creaking wooden floors.
The fair weather had not broken. Simon opened the bedroom drapes. The rectory was a wood-frame house erected in the boom years after the Second World War, next door to the church, in the old part of Buchanan riding up the foothills from the bay. A modest house: its luxury was this view. The morning sky was luminous above blue ocean water. Wind stirred up foam on the crests of the waves.
The world was transformed but not new, Simon thought. Or rather, it was the human landscape that had been transformed. They are at work inside us now.
He shaved and wondered at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Here was a gaunt forty-five-year-old man, receding hair and graying beard, quite ordinary, but all of us, he thought, have become remarkable underneath. He dressed and padded downstairs in his bare feet. It was Simon’s special indulgence to go barefoot around the house on pleasant summer mornings. His housekeeper, Mary Park, disapproved. She would glare at his feet as if they were a display of obstinence or bad taste, then shake her head. In fact, Simon rather admired his feet. His feet were unpretentious, unadorned, unbeautiful. They appealed to his Protestant impulses. They were “plain” feet, as the Amish might say.
Mrs. Park knocked and entered as Simon was tuning his small television set in the parlor—actually the church’s television set, usually appropriated by the Sunday School for audiovisual displays. The rectory had been connected to cable last June at Simon’s expense and for the purpose of indulging his addiction to news broadcasts and PBS. He tuned in CNN this morning, where a dazed female announcer was describing the events of the last thirty-two hours in baffled generalities. Apparently Western Europe was still asleep. Simon had a momentary vision of the Earth as an animal, a bear perhaps, groggy after a winter’s hibernation, stumbling toward the light.
Mrs. Park offered a distracted “Good morning.” She ignored his bare feet for once and began to assemble his breakfast—two eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. It was a cholesterol sin he could never bring himself to renounce. In any case, he was hungry this morning: He had slept for a night, a day, and another night. He thought with some awe of the morning he had missed, of the silent afternoon no human being had seen.
Mrs. Park seemed to be keeping an eye on the television through the kitchen doorway. Simon turned up the volume for her.
“Evidence of this ‘enforced sleep’ is inescapable,” the newswoman was saying. “Reports of injuries, remarkably, are nil. Reports of the subjective experience suggest a direct, almost telepathic, contact with the orbiting Artifact.”
And so on. Simon wondered how long this pretense at objectivity would be maintained. Good grief, he thought, we know all this.
No one wanted to name what was looming in the future. Elysium, he thought. Jerusalem. The illud tempus.
He adjourned to the kitchen when Mrs. Park summoned him. Had breakfast ever smelled this good before? Or was his body already different in some way?
She hovered at his shoulder. “Dr. Ackroyd—”
“Yes, Mary?”
“You had the dream?”
“We all did.”
His housekeeper confessed: “I told them—I told them yes.”
“Yes, Mary. So did I.”
She was obviously surprised. “But you were religious!”
“Why, Mary, I still am. I think I still am.”
“But then how could you answer them yes? If it’s all right to ask, I mean.”
He considered the question. Not a simple one. Many of his deepest beliefs had been challenged in the last thirty-odd hours. Some had been abrogated. Had he been tempted? Had he yielded to temptation?
He pictured the temple at Tenochtitlan, the arc and fall of the obsidian knives.
“Because of the Aztecs,” he said. “Sir?”
“Because there won’t be any Aztecs in the world anymore,” the Rector said. “That’s all finished now.”
The question had been posed in democratic fashion and it was becoming obvious that the yeas outnumbered the nays.
Mary Park had said yes, and so had her husband Ira; and they had known this about each other as soon as they woke and exchanged glances across the bedsheets. Ira was sixty this year, seven years older than Mary. All spring and all summer his emphysema had kept him housebound and weak as a child—his day a slow rotation of morning game shows, afternoon movies, evenings rereading the sports magazines that came in the mail. This morning he sat up and took a deep, experimental breath… then coughed, but not as deeply or painfully as the morning before. The air felt good. Sweet summer morning air, fresher than hospital oxygen. It was like a memory long forgotten and suddenly recalled. Do you want to live? Yes, by God! This morning he wanted very much to live. Even if it meant—in the long run—a certain strangeness.
Lingering in bed, Ira Park thought briefly about the possibility of going back to work at Harvest Hardware, where he had labored behind the counter for twenty-five years. Then he figured not. He had spent twenty-five years in retail sales and that was enough for one lifetime. Find something new to do for the next twenty-five years. Or twenty-five hundred.