At length, he came to the television broadcasting facility of a televangelist. When he reached this place, he knew that his life’s journey had culminated according to the will of the Lord. There was a great evil there, and much neglect of the millennia of prophecy that had been organized into the books of the Lord, for example the words of lovers, Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth: there I will give thee my loves. These words had been forgotten, in this spot and many others besides. And Jonah Feldman took up his signage, and he affixed language to it with the felt-tip marker known in these lands as a Sharpie, as follows:
Free remedial reading lessons! Apply herewith!
(In forty days, Lynchburg will be consumed by fire.)
Then, in a tattered robe, through which his capacious belly was sometimes protuberant, and wearing slippers fashioned from cast-off newspapers, smelling like vomit and human soil, unshaven and raving, Jonah Feldman, of Maspeth, Queens, preached the glory of reading in front of the security gate of the television station. This went on for many days. At times, the workers of the television station fed Jonah Feldman with fast-food snacks that they purchased on their lunch breaks. He thanked them effusively. He said, I know I look pretty bad, and I’m sorry to be a pest, but I am doing the work of the Lord. I will try not to frighten your children.
Perhaps the arrangement would have persisted, were it not for the sudden arrival of the overlord of this empire, the king of blinders, autocrat of poor reading skills and antievolutionist, scheduled to perform that day on his television station for cameras national and global. He was due in makeup, to have his comb-over combed over, to have his Pan-Cake applied, to have lipstick faintly smudged across his lips, though he had decried all harlotry and excesses in the matter of appearance. Jonah wondered as follows: What did it mean to this man to be a lover? Did it mean to care for the indigent with the love that the Lord cared for them? Did it mean to awake with worry? Did it mean to attempt perfect compassion? And could this guy read at all?
In his cavalcade of limousines, the king of blinders paused for a moment in front of the security gate of the television station, and in that moment, he glimpsed the repulsive freeloader in front of his place of business, who no doubt, according to this king of blinders, was a product of miscegenation or bastardy. The king indicated, then, with the faintest of gestures, that an aide in the limousine was to incline an ear to him, and thus the king spake: Have that guy removed.
The beating, when administered to Jonah Feldman, was prolonged and merciless. A soft answer turns away anger, it is said. Not in this story. He was carried away by men who set records in their high school football leagues for sacked quarterbacks. They took him to an alley behind a dry cleaner’s, long past nightfall, and they knew no sympathy. First these men impugned Jonah’s dignity, telling him that he no longer smelled like a man but now instead smelled like an animal, and then they told him that he was no man, since he would not fight like a man, and many bruises were administered, and there was cracking and crunching report that issued from Jonah in the region of his nose, and then perhaps also from his jaw, and the men said he was lucky that they didn’t fuck him, just to show who was boss, but they preferred to fuck things that smelled a lot better. Lids of trash cans in the alley were used as righteous instruments by these men, until Jonah’s head was abundantly swollen and his eyes shuttered. He had much internal bleeding, and now he was naked and alone. It occurred to Jonah, in his suffering, that it was all madness, that he was a mad person, that the drug that had a k in its name had kicked his ass, he had been beset by Klansmen, or their confederates, and that, though he was a keepsake, the Lord had been replaced, in this instance, by the knavery of this world, where all was knock-down and drag-out, where all was knuckle sandwiches, where all was kidney punches. All his imprecations, his requests for mercy came to naught. His madness was clear, it was in the obsession with words to the exclusion of things, his obsession was with sounds that rang in his head, as though the sounds themselves were the Lord. This was not enough. He was bereft. Without the Lord to intervene, without a compassionate soul to tend to his wounds. He was abject in the sight of the world.
And by what reason? For what cause? Might have been the pain; might have been the ordeal; might have been three days in a fish’s belly; might have been the drugs; might have been the loneliness of many years; might have been the abuse of older men who loved him and abandoned him; might have been the vilification of generations, the vilification that was like a second heartbeat in his breast; might have been the night; might have been the South; might have been an illness of the soul that had taken root in his father and forefathers, the illness of insight, might have been dumb luck or chance, or operations of the universe that were no more than mathematics, might have been the quotidian happenstance of the world. How else to explain why for some prophets it just got worse? How else to explain the decline and fall of Jonah Feldman, Kosher Fag? His days had all been trials. He had inexplicable vexations. Why did the Lord one day ameliorate his sufferings and then, on the next day, visit sufferings anew, as junior high school was followed by the even more fiendish tortures of high school.
Was it simply that a lover of nightclub habitués might fall, in torment, into the testamentary language so beloved of the Lord? Was it so that, as a prophet from the outlands, he might expatiate upon the paradoxes of the Lord for all future generations?
If so, then we are in luck. For in this abjection—days before Jonah’s father and mother came to the city of Lynchburg to bear away their firstborn to the hospital in Queens known as L.I.J., days before he was given drugs so that he might forget—Jonah Feldman composed a second prayer, mumbling it so that it was like an imperceptible breeze in the city of Lynchburg:
Thou art a gracious celestial agency,
Merciful and slow to anger, and of great kindness,
But why spare
A town full of bigots? Why spare those who
Hate their wives and belittle them?
Why spare callousness and violence?
Why spare agents of oppression,
Especially such agents of oppression as specifically invoke thy language
And thy tradition as
A bulwark for the meting out of unjust punishment?
Why lobby for enlightenment one day
And tolerate ignorance the next,
As though thy attentions were enfeebled?
As though thy methods were imprecise?
The fuel of all murders and wars, ignorance, is seemingly blessed in thy sight,
For it exists in abundance.
What ever happened to nonviolence, celestial agency?
Was that just a political formulation?
Where I should have served to enlarge the notion of compassion,
I have instead been broken upon it,
I have seen things driven apart;
My bones are shattered,
I am all disfigurement, all suffering, all chastisement, all neglect, all exile,
I am the end of a simple faith, therefore,
Take, I beseech thee,
My life from me,
For it is better to die than to live.
Now the voice of the Lord came one last time to the delirious prophet Jonah Feldman. The voice of the Lord, voice of compassion, voice of tenderness, voice of infinite care and nurturance, whose capacity it is always to have the last word, and thereby to insist on the perfect repetition of all His narratives, saying, Why shouldn’t I spare Lynchburg, which city houses more than sixscore thousand persons and many more presently being born? And if not for them, for the wild horses on the beach? And if not for the wild horses, for the swaying reeds they trample down? And if not for the reeds, for the crickets which linger there, and if not for the crickets, for the aphids which they disturb?
Unincorporated
Territory, Oklahoma
Lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds…
PSALM 68:4
WE left California and returned to the interior, not so much going anywhere in particular as roaming around the American underbelly, the flat, hot, still spaces south of the wheat-filled plains. In the town of Wichita Falls in West Texas, we drifted to a stop at a hotel called the Tradewinds, once prosperous, now located beneath an interstate overpass. Its guests were mostly families who’d temporarily moved out of their cars and into neatly kept rooms surrounding a pool that hadn’t held water in a decade. They paid their bills in spurts of five and ten dollars and occasional chores, and the Tradewinds seemed content to have them. We stayed there for a week, splurging on separate rooms, dozing in the courtyard of busted-up blacktop and cottonwood trees, at night walking over to the deserted main street of town for barbecue and beer at a joint that advertised itself with a neon nuclear bomb; West Texas is where they make such things.
One night we walked out of the bar and found the street strangely aglow, a pale orange light coming from around the corner to the west. We followed the light until we came upon its source, a brick building a block long and a block wide, bright yellow flickering in its windows, a black plume curling up from its roof like the whole thing was a chimney. We were the only witnesses, and we saw the building like that, a container made to fit perfectly its contents; then it blossomed, the walls nearly disappearing in flames that ballooned, cinched to a tight belt, and exploded into a mushroom twice the height of anything in the city. Heat tumbled toward us, so hot and sudden we could see it coming, watch the air ripple and distort with temperature and then feel ourselves become flotsam and jetsam in its ocean. People speak of the roar of a fire, but this one didn’t sound like much of anything. We could see it, smell it, even almost taste it, but we heard nothing. It was like watching a silent movie. Then sirens broke the calm and firemen pushed us back and hoses burst into stream. They had no effect at all. A fireman told us the building had been under construction, an old warehouse in conversion, it was filled with buckets of paint and varnish and other oily substances that burn slick and hot and quickly; it wasn’t long before first one then another wall of bricks seemed to lose its courage and crumble into flaming rubble. We watched for half an hour, then returned to the Tradewinds while the fire was still burning.
Later that night a West Texas thunderstorm rolled in over Wichita Falls, and rain beat down the flames, turned the smoldering bricks into crumbs and red mud, and washed the spent chemicals intended for rebuilding into the gutter. Opinion in town was divided over the timing of the storm. One school of thought held that it was fortunate, the saving grace of fate and perhaps the touch of God; another noted that it had, in fact, compounded the damage, made what was merely ruined entirely unrecoverable; and a third point of view, popular with the guests of the Tradewinds, believed that it didn’t matter, since after all, the course of the weather can be accounted for, but its meaning, that’s inscrutable.
As to the building, we couldn’t say; that was a question for insurance investigators. The storm, though—impersonal, arbitrary, and unconnected to the flames—that made us wonder. We packed up our bags the next day and left Wichita Falls with a new mission: to find someone who could read the subtext of the sky.
Dr. Jason Persoff leaned over the steering wheel toward the windshield of his rented minivan, looking for directions in the dirty white clouds. “The weather is a lot like language,” he said. “We think and we talk in words. But we don’t see those words. We don’t see the letters.” He spotted a slightly darker patch on the horizon, faint as a fingerprint on glass. “Yet we’re able to process language. We talk about things that are completely abstract, and we recognize them instantly.”
Jason belonged to a tiny sect the doctrine of which revolved, literally, around tornadoes. There are thousands who share their passion, high holiday weather watchers, but true storm chasers are a rolling denomination only about three hundred strong, the high priests of nature worship. Of the two dozen whom we contacted via their Internet chat rooms, Jason alone agreed to share his secrets.
A video camera and a case of Diet Pepsi rode shotgun in Jason’s minivan, so we were crowded into the back as we cruised down the spine of Tornado Alley, the north-to-south corridor known for the most destructive weather in the country. Every year around the same time, late spring, the plains stretching from central Texas to Nebraska and Iowa become the whipping strap of the Bible Belt, where acts of God come in the form of Dorothy-and-Toto-style twisters, challenging the Midwest’s black-and-white order with the full-color chaos of two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, the kind that can pluck a small house from its foundation intact and redistribute it across the land: torn shingles in a neighbor’s mailbox, canned food rolling like marbles on the road, forks and spoons and shattered windowpanes stabbed into a garden on the other side of town.
Jason clicked on his weather radio, tilting closer to the speaker to hear the National Weather Service’s computerized announcer. A quick, robotic, male voice, it sounded piqued, struggling to form a full sentence as if gasping for air: Warm temperatures. Will begin to cool. This afternoon and. Converge. Along. The dry line. Will cause. Thunderstorms to form. Large hail and damaging. Winds. Storms will move northeast. Into. Central Kansas.
Directly ahead of us clouds had begun to gather; Jason popped open a can of Diet Pepsi and poured it into a purple travel mug big enough to hold a brick. “Looking at storms, there are certain features that come up again and again,” he said after a long draft from his cup. “They tell you an incredible amount about the storms themselves. And that’s one of the things I really like: I like seeing the patterns, finding the flow. Like language.” He nodded at the word. “Language flows,” he said. “And it flows in a very distinct way.” He sipped his soda. “I like seeing how words flow. And I like seeing how storms flow.” He sipped again. “And how medicine flows. Finding the patterns.”
We met up with Jason in a restaurant called Meridy’s, somewhere on the Colorado side of Kansas. Bible tracts by the cash register; American eagles on the place mats; a good BLT for two dollars and change. Jason didn’t want any of what the diner usually offered. All morning the clouds had been shifting outside the plate-glass windows. He wanted to look at them from above.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” He leaned in close on the cash-register counter so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice for the big woman standing there to hear him. This was a mom-and-pop establishment; we took her to be Mrs. Meridy. She kept her eyes on her blue-and-white order pad, totaling our bill.
“Would it possible to borrow a phone line for just a moment?” Jason asked. A purple computer the size of a steno pad appeared from his fanny pack. He set it between the Bible pamphlets and a bowl of pastel after-dinner mints. “A toll-free number, I swear.”
Mrs. Meridy glanced up without moving her chin. Every spring the locals endured a small siege of former science club types like Jason, tearing down their back roads in search of the thrill of seeing a tornado. The thrill: Storm-chasers called it a “stormgasm.” Last time Jason had had one was in West Texas, a year earlier. “It was an extravaganza,” he’d told us. “Four tornadoes touching down at once, kicking up beautiful walls of red dirt.” He hadn’t been able even to think about how to film it. He’d just kept staring, mesmerized.
Mrs. Meridy looked back to her pad and shook her head as if to say, “Must be easy to get turned on by tornadoes when it’s not your restaurant standing in their way.” There were only a half dozen other paying customers in the place. “Well, all right,” she said. “It’s the only line we got, though.”
Jason formed his hands into a prayerful steeple and put them to his goateed chin. “Thank you, ma’am, thank you. It won’t take a minute.” He unfolded his computer and began tapping its screen with a stubby plastic stylus. A few seconds later, he had what he wanted. “Okay, I’ve got the satellite.”
Though st
anding just a few feet from us in jeans, sneakers, and a green-and-black windbreaker, when he stared at the screen Jason seemed to be in two places at once: down on the ground but also flying over it. His eyes grew wide behind his glasses, focused like lasers on the newly downloaded satellite map. Colored splotches and symbols spread out on the screen, jigsaw puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled. If you knew how to read it, the map told the story of everything around and above us.
“See here,” Jason said, waving his stylus over the upper left corner. “These cold fronts will bring the moist air up to the higher atmosphere. As it pushes up, the air gets colder, eventually it condenses.” He leaned in closer, almost pressing his glasses to the screen. “Looks like thunderstorms in a prefrontal trough in western Oklahoma. This area is very ripe. When a big storm system forms, cold, dense air forces surface moisture up into the atmosphere.” He tapped the corner of the screen like the X on a treasure map. “My bet is that’s where things are really going to fall.” He pointed to what seemed to us an empty expanse on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. “That’s where we’re going. Could be pretty exciting.”
We leaned in toward the map to see what his big grin was about but saw nothing.
“Don’t worry, you will soon,” Jason said. “When you first show med students an X ray, they all say the same thing: I don’t see anything. I see the heart, and I see the lungs and the ribs, but I don’t see anything else. And then you’ll point out a feature to them and they’ll say, My god, how did I miss that? I mean, it was right there in front of me and I didn’t see it at all.”
Killing the Buddha Page 26
