Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  McElroy had replied that of course he did. On the other hand, he ought to give over the Biblically unsound, and soul-destroying, notion that he belonged to a prehuman species out of which yet another prehuman species had arisen, etc. A belief like that, denying the straightforward creation account in Genesis, put the soul in mortal jeopardy. Adam was obviously sincere in his questing, but sadly misled about which direction to go by today’s God-lost scientists and technocrats. McElroy would gladly counsel with Adam, even pray with him, while he recovered at Emory Hospital.

  “He wrote McElroy?” I asked incredulously. “Sent him money?”

  “Oh, yes. Adam’s keeping his options open. He’s written the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the chief elder of the Mormons, two or three ayatollahs in Iran, and a couple of voodoo artist-priests who exhibited work at Abraxas in February. If it meditates, sacrifices, or prays, Adam’s written it. Most of his correspondents reply. We have a scrapbook. We may need another one.”

  Adam worked his hands free of the sheet and tried to sign. By appearing to focus his will, he made these gestures distinct enough for RuthClaire to interpret. She must give over her hostility to McElroy, he advised, for the man was there on his own valuable time to affirm Adam’s humanity.

  With a folding chair and a chair with a cushion, McElroy returned. On the cushion rested a shiny bedpan in which two or three inches of water shimmered under the room’s fluorescents. McElroy set this chair down without sloshing any water out of the pan. The metal chair he gave to me to unfold for myself. Then he placed the bedpan—with a hokey flourish—on the food tray that swung out from Adam’s bed.

  “This is distilled water,” he said. “I got it at the nurses’ station, and it’s physically pure, free of germs and pollutants.”

  “Can the same be said of the bedpan?” RuthClaire asked.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. It’s been in an autoclave.”

  “Well, Adam’s already had a sponge bath, Reverend McElroy. I gave him one this morning. There’s no need to repeat it now.”

  “Has he been baptized?”

  “What?”

  “Has he received the sacrament of ultimate cleanliness?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Has he been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”

  “From a bedpan?” I wondered aloud.

  McElroy laughed. “The Lord and I make do with what’s available. By remaining unbaptized, Adam has begun to doubt his possession of the soul that even now he’s in danger of leaving to the Prince of Darkness forever. I can’t allow that, sir.”

  Her hands on T. P.’s shoulders, RuthClaire stared at the evangelist as if he had proposed dousing Adam with lighter fluid. “This is in the worst possible taste,” she finally managed.

  “You may be right, Mrs. Montaraz. Damnation has the weight of public favor on its side nowadays—it’s the in thing to shoot for—but your husband isn’t one to go along with the crowd simply because it’s a crowd. Ask him what he wants.”

  Realizing that McElroy had played an unanswerable trump, RuthClaire pulled Tiny Paul onto her lap and numbly shook her head.

  “I’ll ask him, then.” Looking down on Adam, McElroy said, “Do you wish to receive the holy benison of baptism?”

  Adam made the gesture signifying Yes.

  RuthClaire shook her head again, not believing that her husband would consent to what she regarded as a parody of the baptismal rite—but loving him too much to forbid him to continue.

  McElroy closed his eyes. He asked God to further purify the water in the bedpan, immersed his hands, lifted them dripping, carried them to Adam’s head, and dramatically brought them down on the faint sagittal crest dividing his skull into hemispheres. “Be careful,” RuthClaire warned. “Adam’s jaw is a jigsaw puzzle of fitted pieces. If you slow his healing, I’ll . . .”

  She stopped, but the warning got through McElroy’s devout trance to his understanding. Crooking his elbows, easing the pressure on Adam’s head, he intoned, “Adam Montaraz, husband and father, by the authority invested in me as a minister of the gospel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I said. The word slipped out, impelled, I think, by an unconscious memory of my slipshod Congregationalist upbringing in Tocqueville.

  Theoretically a believer, RuthClaire gave me a dirty look.

  McElroy wiped his hands. “Mrs. Montaraz, please know that I’ve also lifted a prayer for Adam’s speedy recovery.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What about that handsome boy there?”

  “What about him?”

  “Has he been baptized?”

  RuthClaire folded her arms around T. P. “You’ve performed your ceremony for the day. It’s time for you to leave.”

  “Delay could be a mortal mistake, ma’am. It could cause—”

  “He’s hardly in danger. Baptists wait until they’re twelve or thirteen, don’t they?”

  “You’re not Baptists, ma’am. Nor are we at the Greater Christian Constituency. We embrace the denomination, of course, but my own doctrinal origins are Methodist. We’re brother and sister, Mrs. Montaraz.”

  Adam began to sign, feebly but urgently.

  “No,” RuthClaire told him. “Absolutely not. If it’s done, it’ll be done in a church, with a congregation and a robed minister.” When Adam persisted, she bore down: “You’re overstepping what you have a right to ask! You’re not the only one in this room responsible for Tiny Paul’s spiritual dispensation!”

  McElroy said, “There’s a Biblical injunction commanding wives to—”

  “Get the holy hell out of here!” RuthClaire yelled. T. P. burrowed into her armpit. Adam’s eyes fluttered shut. Like me, he had probably never heard her utter an epithet stronger than “Heck!” or “Drat!”

  McElroy appeared ready to keep the argument going, but a portly man and a youth in his early twenties stopped at Adam’s doorway, distracting him. The younger of the two men reproduced McElroy’s lank physique almost exactly.

  “Daddy,” he said, “Dr. Siebert’s come to take you to your next lecture over in White.”

  “Adam, stay in touch, hear?” McElroy said cheerily. “It’s been a joy, sanctifying you in Christ’s sweet name. The boy next time, mebbe.”

  “Take the stupid bedpan with you,” RuthClaire said.

  McElroy gave her a thin smile and spoke to his son: “Come get the font, Duncan. I’m finished with it for today.”

  Duncan McElroy obeyed, retrieving the bedpan from the cantilevered tray and carrying it out of the room like a wise man bearing a thurible of perfumed incense. The evangelist gave a perfunctory salute, then followed Duncan and Dr. Siebert out of the room—off toward the elevator and another elevating session with some of Candler’s theology students.

  RuthClaire, wrung out, began very quietly to cry.

  *

  Over the next week, RuthClaire and I visited Adam daily, spelling each other when one of us needed a break. Livia George managed the West Bank in my absence. I drove down twice to check up on her, but her efficient handling of matters made me feel about as useful there as a training wheel on a tank.

  Adam improved rapidly, but his doctors still forbade the removal of his plastic chin support and the bandages holding it in place. So he took nourishment intravenously and talked with us with sign language. Also, he had a lap-sized electric typewriter that he had taught himself to use by the hunt-and-peck method.

  McElroy returned to Louisiana the day after Adam’s baptism, but one unsettling consequence of the Bedpan Ceremony was the habiline’s frequent recourse to prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi beginning, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Any number of Old Testament psalms. “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” The Pilot’s Prayer. The Newspaper Columnist’s Prayer. A few obscure Eastern supplications, including Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and of course Sufic formulae. And a small anthology of weird bu
t occasionally moving prayers—petitionary prayers—that Adam had written himself.

  Indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ Jesus’s name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had an ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers, typed out on the little machine he used to engage in animated dialogues with us:

  Creator, awake or asleep, watchful or drowsing,

  Timeless or time-bound,

  Awake fully to my oh-so-silent cry.

  Remember the long-ago dead who loved animals and clouds,

  Redeem them in your pity-taking Thought.

  And those who stumbled on the edge of Spirit,

  Who prowled, as do hyenas, just beyond the Light,

  Think them, too, into the center of the Fire,

  Consume them like sweet carrion in the loving warmth

  Of your Gut and Mind.

  If I am all Animal, Creator,

  Give my growls, my whimpers, and my barks

  The sound of angels hymning praise.

  Let me not sing only for Myself

  But also for the billion billion unbaptized Dead

  With talons, teeth, and tails to herd them

  Into unmarked graves of no importance.

  O Gut and Mind above and all about,

  Hear my oh-so-silent plea on their behalf

  And lift them as you have lifted Men. Amen.

  After the baptism, every visit to Adam’s room concluded with a prayer. Once, I asked him what he believed he was accomplishing with such ritual.

  On his lap machine, he typed: THERE IS NO TRUE RELIGION WITHOUT PRAYER.

  That led me to question the value of religion, true or not, and Adam struggled to answer that one, too. Finally, he typed this compound word: SELF-DEFINITION.

  He found it amusing that the value of a belief in a Higher Power had its ultimate ground in one’s own ego. Was that a contradiction? No, not really. A paradox? Probably. But if Adam felt a greater sense of urgency about his relationship with God than did most twentieth-century human beings, the ambiguity of his status vis-à-vis both God and his two-legged fellows fueled that feeling.

  “You know,” I told him after reading his “Gut and Mind” prayer, “you’re assuming a rigid line between the ensouled and the soulless, human beings and humanoid animals.”

  Go on, he signaled.

  “You’ve made it an either/or proposition. But what if there’s a gray area where the transition takes place?”

  LIKE THE DUSK SEPARATING DAY FROM NIGHT?

  “Exactly.”

  I read his next haltingly written response over his shoulder: I UNDERSTAND, MISTER PAUL, THE BASIS OF HOW YOU ARGUE HERE. THE WORRY ABOUT WHAT AN EARLY HOMINID IS, BEAST OR PERSON. BUT MANY THINGS, I THINK, IT TAKES TO MAKE A CREATURE HUMAN, AND IF A CREATURE IS MISSING ONLY ONE OR TWO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS RIGHT TO SAY, AH HA, YOU DO NOT BELONG TO HUMAN SPECIES.

  “Okay, Adam, if you believe that human beings have souls, then anyone on this side—our side—of the transitional area has one. You’re safe because . . . well, because you’ve successfully interbred with a human woman.”

  IT IS NOT SO EASY

  “Why not?”

  BECAUSE A CREATURE GOING THROUGH ANIMALNESS TO HUMANITY—IN THEORY, I TELL YOU—GOES THROUGH A MAPPABLE SORT OF EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY. BUT A SOUL DOES NOT DIVIDE OR BREAK. YOU CANNOT GET CHANGE FOR IT. YOU HAVE ONE IN YOUR POCKET OR YOU DO NOT. WHERE DOES GOD REACH INTO THE DUSK TO GIVE A SOUL TO ANY CREATURE ON THIS JOURNEY? WHAT REASONS DOES HE HAVE TO MAKE THIS MYSTERIOUS GIFT?

  “If God’s gift is mysterious, Adam, maybe it’s impossible to know and futile to fret. Maybe we should forget the whole stupid notion of souls, immortal or otherwise.”

  DOES IGNORING SUCH HARD QUESTIONS SEEM TO YOU, MISTER PAUL, AN ADMIRABLE WAY TO LIVE?

  “If they’re nonquestions. If they don’t have any answers.”

  Adam considered my reply. FOR ME, THEY ARE REAL QUESTIONS. He advanced the sheet of paper and added at the bottom of the page: LET US PRAY.

  RuthClaire, present throughout this verbal and typed exchange, took from her handbag a slick little paperback, The Way of a Pilgrim, reputedly by an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian peasant, and read aloud from its opening page:

  “‘On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. The first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians was being read, and among other words I heard these—“Pray without ceasing.” It was this text more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other things also in order to make a living.’ ”

  Soon RuthClaire was leading us in chanting the pilgrim’s habitual prayer, the Prayer of Jesus, which goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Throughout this chanting, though, I could think of nothing but how well Livia George was getting along at the West Bank without me.

  Damn her, anyway.

  *

  At the Montaraz house, I earned my keep preparing all the meals that we did not take at the hospital or at off-campus eateries. Keeping my hand in, I called this culinary activity. T. P. ate with us on most of these cozy occasions, growing fonder of me with each bite. He no longer smarled at me, he unequivocally smiled. He especially liked a cheese-and-baby-shrimp omelet that I served up one morning for breakfast.

  RuthClaire and I got along like brother and sister. Nights, I kept to the upstairs guest room with its bamboo-shoot wallpaper while she kept to the master bedroom just down the hall. T. P. awoke me in the morning by filching the bedcovers with a clever hand-over-hand motion that left the sheet and spread piled up on the floor like a drift of Dairy Queen ice cream. He wanted that gourmet omelet, and I was just the man to rustle it up. Less a godfather than an indulgent uncle, I happily obliged him.

  Sister and brother, RuthClaire and I. My stay in the Montaraz house finally reconciled me to our divorce. In the bathroom, too many conjugal clues to overlook: a common toothpaste tube (neatly rolled up from the bottom), His & Her electric razors, a jar of antiperspirant that they no doubt shared. We did not sleep together during my stay, RuthClaire and I, and the tension between us drained away. I was at ease in the Montaraz house, in total harmony with all its occupants. Or almost total harmony.

  How do you develop a cordial relationship with a hefty bearded young man who wears a .38 pistol strapped to his right ankle and a Ruger .357 half hidden under a fold of his Chattanooga Choo Choo T-shirt? This was Bilker Moody, the laconic Vietnam vet and erstwhile automobile repossessor who served as the Montaraz family’s chief security guard. Unmarried and virtually relative-less, he had adopted RuthClaire, Adam, and T. P. as surely as they had adopted him. I had met Bilker back in February, but he had stayed obsessively out of sight during those three days, as if the announced brevity of my visit required from him this considerate disappearing act.

  Now, I saw Bilker Moody every day. Although he reputedly had an apartment of his own somewhere, during the week he slept in a small bare room—at one time a walk-in pantry—between the kitchen and the garage. The Montarazes had agreed to this live-in arrangement because it obviated the need to hire guards in shifts, as I had done at Paradise Farm. Also, Bilker had insisted that his vested interest in his own quarters would make him more vigilant than a guard from off the premises.

  True, he sometimes took catnaps, but his experience in Southeast Asia had taught him to leap up at the tread of a cockroach. Besides, his peculiar circadian rhythms made him keenest at night, when the threat of intrusion was greatest. He was no slouch during the day, either. He had the reflexes, instincts, and nerves of a champion jai-alai player, despite his formidable bulk. He had honed his skills not only in the jungles of Vietnam but also during daring daylight recoveries of automobiles whose buyers had failed to keep up their payments. The Montarazes could scarcely go wrong engaging a willing man of his size, character, and fearlessness.

  Bilker Moody genuinely estee
med the folks under his care. T. P. was fond of him, too, and had a remorseless fascination for the big man’s full-face beard. Around the child, Bilker displayed the retiring gentleness of a silverback gorilla. Usually, though, he avoided any play activity for fear of letting his guard slip. Enemies of the Montarazes’ privacy were everywhere. During my stay in July, he intercepted and politely ran off any number of curiosity-seekers. That was his job, not babysitting.

  Bilker had as little to do with me as possible. He refused to eat the meals I fixed for RuthClaire and T. P., but clearly did not believe I was trying to poison anyone. If he and I chanced to approach each other, he showily gave me room to get by, sometimes mumbling “Hey” and sometimes not. RuthClaire said this was a respectful posture that, as an enlisted man, Bilker had automatically assumed for officers—but all I could think as I eased past was that he was pulling the pin on, and preparing to toss, a fragmentation grenade. Didn’t he know that in the late 1950s (ca. Elvis Presley’s induction), I had spent two years of obligatory military service as an enlisted man?

  “Is it my breath?” I asked RuthClaire. “Too much garlic in the blintzes?”

  “He’s shy, that’s all. His duty here is his life.”

  “Shy, huh? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his war and repo-man stories?”

  “He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He doesn’t dislike you. He just feels uneasy about you, knowing you came to bolster the guard.”