But the Second Coming had failed to materialize, and Hope seemed suddenly to tire of waiting on it. Joseph began to dream of Perfection.
Joseph Benton Hope realized that Perfection—“If by Perfection we mean a purity of heart, an absolute communion with our Heavenly Father, and a complete inexistence of sin”—was simply, even easily, attainable.
Joseph came up with the following regimen, designed to help purge sin from the spirit: repeated fasting for two days (only grains and nutmeats allowed on the third); continuous self-denial (three and one half hours of sleep nightly); exercise (a four-mile walk in the forenoon, six miles in the evening); prayer (five times daily, no small or petty entreaties); three hours of spiritual activity (Bible study and the reading of works of acknowledged theological merit) and contemplation. Joseph Benton Hope found this very effective; emptied of sin, his soul was purged of everything earthbound and sullied.
His teachers and peers wanted none of this. They wanted Beelzebubs and Lucifers. They wanted Hellfire so hot that they burned to hear of it.
The auditorium was perhaps half full now, some twenty minutes before the exhibition began. Benton Hope looked at the people with disdain. Most of them were Harvard men, young louts with rich fathers and small intelligences. Some were townsmen, laborers and farmers, and they found it for some reason incumbent to attend in their Sabbath finery. Joseph snorted haughtily, propelling a thin line of mucus on to his upper lip. He wiped it away and shifted in his seat. Hope realized, with dismay, that he was possessed of an erection.
Joseph Benton Hope was boyish in appearance, looking in all respects to be no older than fourteen. His face didn’t need shaving, and his voice was adolescently temperamental. His manly endowment was therefore anomalous. It was long and thick, ribbed with veins, and perpetually insistent on growing even larger. Joseph had been forced to adjust his tailoring, making sure that all his trousers were loose-fitting and roomy. Now, in the theater, Joseph shifted and dug a fist into his groin covertly. He rifled the pages of his Bible and read. When next he looked up, the auditorium was all but full. Two weeks ago, when Benton Hope had first attended, he had been one of perhaps two dozen. Now there were close to four hundred, including many of the faculty. Benton Hope watched as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dashed through the door. Longfellow stopped, dusted himself and ran his fingers through his sideburns. Longfellow then proceeded into the auditorium, quickly and hurriedly, and Hope was reminded of the familiar Harvard doggerel—“With his hat on one whisker and an air that says ‘Go it,’ you have the great American poet.’ ” Joseph Benton Hope attended Longfellow’s special lectures on Goethe’s Faust (which was viewed as a trifle rebellious of him).
Then Dr. Charles X. Poyen walked out on to the stage. He was a small, silver-haired man, gracefully into his middle age, one of the university’s most distinguished lecturers. Poyen looked at the assembled (nodding briefly to Longfellow, who was having trouble choosing a place), and then Poyen said, “Good evening.” His accent was continental French.
Joseph Benton Hope had, of course, heard Poyen’s lecture before. It had to do with Franz Anton Mesmer and his discovery of the fluids (and the empathic balancing thereof) that are inherent in the human body. Not only had Hope heard it before, he had most of the speech written down on the endpapers of various textbooks. After some minutes, the lecture was concluded, and Hope refocused his attention.
Dr. Poyen asked for a volunteer. A young freshman with a peculiar, froglike face virtually bolted on to the stage. Poyen took the fellow by the elbow and stationed him so that his back faced the north. Poyen induced in the lad “human hibernation,” the state in which the subject’s magnetic fluids are most susceptible to the influence of another’s animal magnetism. The young man’s mouth dropped stupidly open, and his tongue pressed flatly against his lower lip. “Now,” said Poyen, “I would like to demonstrate the powers of the science of Phreno-Mesmerism.” The words rang in J. B. Hope’s ears, cloaked exotically in Poyen’s French accent—“ze poors of ze seance of Phreno-Mezmereezem.” Poyen touched his hand to the freshman’s head and excited several phrenological sites. When Dr. Poyen touched the Organ of Veneration the young man folded his hands together as if in prayer. When Poyen excited the Antagonistical Site the subject snarled and brandished his fists.
At this point someone in the audience yelled, “You’re a croakus!” For the past several nights, such protests were made with increasing frequency. Dr. Poyen merely smiled, a trifle embarrassed, and quoted the great philosophe Voltaire: “Those who believe in occult causes are subjected to ridicule, but we ought rather to ridicule those who do not.”
Joseph Benton Hope was momentarily distracted by the bulge in his lap. He scowled at it, then looked again to the stage. The Veiled Lady had been introduced and stood in Joseph’s sight.
She was covered with silver drapery, all of her, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Poyen explained that this was to separate her from the material world. Benton Hope was reminded of a cocoon he’d found as a boy, and some part of his mind envisioned a glorious springtime emergence, even though the cocoon from his childhood had dried up and turned to dust. The Veiled Lady moved then, at least her mantle danced as if touched by a breeze. Joseph sat forward in his seat. He was certain that light was cutting through the veil, illuminating the woman within. He had the distinct impression of nakedness. The head of his penis pressed painfully against his trouser stays.
The Veiled Lady’s voice was soft, often unable to break free of the silver hood, forcing Poyen to repeat her words. “Ze Veiled Lady,” he announced, “needs an assistawnt!”
A young woman was propelled (by a crude type, Joseph thought, a well-dressed puttyhead with a braying laugh) toward the stage. The young woman was plump and golden-haired. Hope’s body was wracked with a strange sort of pain, one that emanated from his groin and tied his stomach in complicated knots.
The Veiled Lady raised an arm (Hope thought he spied breasts through the draperies) and touched the volunteer upon the forehead, immediately inducing human hibernation. Then she announced her intention of demonstrating the empathic relationship now established between the two sensibilities. This intention was repeated by Dr. Poyen, although Benton Hope didn’t know why. (Benton Hope likewise didn’t know that his hearing had become preternaturally sensitive.)
The Veiled Lady drifted down to one end of the stage, and the young woman was placed at the opposite. Dr. Poyen, standing between them, produced the following objects: a glass ball, a pin and a piece of tree bark. He held them aloft, in the view of everyone (everyone except the young woman, who slumbered in peaceful human hibernation). The esteemed professor (of mathematics, by the way—J. B. Hope therefore assumed that this new world made some sort of arithmetical sense) explained that the volunteer was to enunciate any sensations she might have. Poyen handed the Veiled Lady the glass ball.
Her hand, emerging from within the shroud, was enough to start Hope’s poor netherparts screaming. The hand was so pale that it seemed to glow. The other hand appeared, and Joseph doubled over.
The Veiled Lady caressed the sphere gently. After a few moments the volunteer, her eyes closed, her words soft and dreamy, said, “Smooth. Round.” There was a smattering of applause. The Veiled Lady was next handed the pin. She pricked her finger with it, producing a small crimson dewbead. The volunteer and Joseph said “Ouch” simultaneously. Then the treebark was touched. The young woman whispered, “Rough. Hard.”
Then the Veiled Lady reached within her own silver cocoon and touched something. The subject said, “Soft. Warm.”
Joseph Benton Hope’s crotch exploded with pyrotechnical fury. His lower half was immediately soaking wet, so wet that he imagined rivers of jism flowing down his legs and collecting in his boots. This ebullition was so intense that it drained the whole of Hope’s body.
Having worked at being pure in all things, Joseph had never before consciously experienced orgasm. He avoided his nagging erectio
ns with a deep-seated fear that they were not good things—being, as they were, wildly uncontrollable. Yet when he came, for the first time wide awake and aware, more aware, it seemed, than he’d ever been before, the feeling was an old one, recognizable. It seemed to recall times and lives he had no present awareness of. It linked him strongly to something he could only understand as human, but felt must be divine. His erections had to be from God. He even checked his Bible, but it seemed obscure. There were references only to “his staff” and “his rod” which shall lead them.
This liquid from his loins, Hope thought, there was something to this.
Liquid
Boston, Massachusetts, 1846
Regarding the Fortunes of Hope, we know the following: that they reached a nadir in his so-called “Black Days”; that he was frequently Intemperate.
Joseph Benton Hope devised the following theory: the word wasn’t made “flesh” at all, this being somehow a mistranslation. (The etymology Hope would work out later.) The word was rather made “liquid.” Liquid is the basis of the Lord’s creation, after all. Did not the Spirit of God move upon the face of the waters? And—this was all preached in a sermon, one of the last that J. B. Hope delivered—when the men of Ai smote them thirty-six men, did not the hearts of the people melt, and become as water? And hearken to the words of the twenty-second psalm: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels.” Liquid is the basis of human life, Hope contended. And thus, ye should drink deeply.
Joe Hope became the town drunk, no mean feat considering he had recently moved to the city of Boston. His face was known in every tavern within a twenty-mile radius; known, laughed at, resented and often feared. Joe Hope took to wearing black clothes, and these in turn made his pallor so white as to seem lifeless. Joe Hope would lunge into an establishment with his Bible held high, and as he drank Hope would quote from the Good Book endlessly. “Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets!” Joe Hope would shout. “All my bones shake! I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the Lord, and because of the words of his holiness!” Joe Hope shouted so loudly and for so long that his voice broke in the most literal sense; it collapsed into his throat, froglike and inhuman.
Alcohol seemed to be the only thing that could heighten his awareness and expand him the way his first orgasm had. He seemed to learn new things and be open to the voice of God. He thought things he had never thought before. He did things he would never have done before. He also bumped into things, broke things and generally found himself wrestling more often with the reality of the physical world. It took its toll. During one drunken rampage Joe Hope lost his right eye. Various rumors circulated as to how this had happened. One story had it that he’d been hexing a milk-maiden beneath the moon, forcing her through Phreno-Mesmerism to dance naked and to copulate with bulls—according to this tale, the girl’s father still had Joe Hope’s eyeball impaled on one prong of his pitchfork. Another story was that a discomfuddled Hope had become over-exuberant during one of his barroom sermons. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! It is better to enter the king … dom … oh-oh.” Most likely Joe Hope had stumbled into something, for he had no resistance to alcohol; one or two sips and he began weaving, and by his fourth or fifth drink he was spastic. So, although his Christmas Eve tumble off the ropewalk and into the icy Boston Harbor was widely regarded as an attempt to commit suicide, it seems equally probable that Joseph Benton Hope had but tripped over his own two feet.
Nothing So Petty As Dreams
Boston, Massachusetts, 1847
Regarding the followers of Hope, we know the following: that his two most loyal disciples, George and Martha Quinton, discovered his seemingly lifeless body in the waters of Boston Harbor; that George could affect no resuscitation; that Martha, after her fashion, beat upon Joseph Benton Hope’s body; that it was revived.
Joseph Benton Hope was having a strange dream (although from around that point in his life forward, he would acknowledge nothing so petty as “dreams”) wherein his body was stripped naked and began to float. Joseph realized that he was entering Paradise, although the journey was bumpier than he’d expected, accompanied by little grunts. The Gates to Heaven also screeched like a door with hinges long deprived of grease. And instead of being blinded by a glorious radiance, Joseph Hope found it increasingly difficult to see, things getting dimmer and dimmer. Hope discovered that he could turn his head to the side, and having done so, saw that his fellow Angels were old men, old gray men from whom Time had stolen body parts; teeth, eyes, even arms and legs. These old men lay on little cots, motionless, and Joseph would have thought them devoid of life except that their collective breathing sent out a great, wheezy wail.
Joseph began to suspect that he wasn’t in Heaven, if only because he couldn’t imagine that it was necessary to breathe in Paradise. Experimentally, Hope held his breath. For many a long moment Hope was satisfied that he had no need of air. Then his lungs shuddered and forced his mouth open, and Hope pulled in great drafts, more smoke than anything else. Smoke? thought Joseph Hope. Quickly he turned his head the other way, and there in the darkness roared a great red fire. J. B. Hope hadn’t truly expected eternal damnation, but he accepted his judgment immediately. He was lowered on to a cot, one just beside the fire, and covered with a sheet.
“Theah,” said a voice, “that should keep him all toasty.”
At one point Hope opened his eye (this was the ultimate irony of Hell, apparently, that you still had to endure corporeal tediums, your eyes opening and closing, your heart and lungs thudding along without desire or end) and suspended above him was a face. Oddly, this was a kindly face. The man’s eyes were huge and slightly crossed, and made the face look a little addled, perhaps even stupid. But the smile he wore seemed genuine and heartfelt, framed on either side by healthy red cheeks. The face moved closer, more of the body coming into view. Hope got the impression of outlandish largeness, for the man’s head (which had in itself seemed big) looked dwarfed upon his massive shoulders. Hope closed his eye again, and didn’t open it for a good long while. When he did, the face was still there, but now it had transformed itself into a hideous parody of femininity, a wig of girlish blond curls attached to the skull. The eyes, still slightly crossed, had been ludicrously adorned with long lashes, which were being batted rapidly. The face loomed closer, and Hope saw that the mountainous body had been stuffed into female attire, although the musculature threatened to rend the garments to tatters. Hope shuddered, rammed his eye shut and refused to open it again, afraid of any further transmogrifications.
“ ’Ey!” came a voice. “This ’ere is Joe Hope!”
“Joe Hope?” came another. “What’s he doing here?”
“Not bloody much!” the first voice returned with a phlegmy cackle. “Looks like he’s got the ork-orks.”
Joseph’s body had begun to twitch convulsively, his limbs lashing out, his toes and fingers trembling. Hope had stoically accepted this as some brand of punishment, but this diagnosis of “ork-orks” made sudden sense. Someone gave a second opinion. “That’s the whoops and jingles if ever I saw it!” J. B. Hope became almost deliriously happy. He had the whoops and jingles, the blue horrors, alcohol dementia. Joseph Hope opened his eye and announced, “Then I’m alive!”
An old man stood next to his bed, a man whose right arm had been reduced to a tiny stump. “Oh, you be alive, all right, Hope. But once you’ve had a bowl of Miss Martha’s chowder, you’ll wish you warn’t!”
The old men explained it all to Joe Hope. They were ensconced in the Harbor Light Mission, an establishment operated by George and Martha Quinton. All of them, the old men admitted sheepishly, had been fished out of Boston Harbor by the Quinton siblings. The Quintons (twins, the old men pointed out, although Joseph had deduced that) were fervently religious and, moreover, literalists. They accepted everything in the Good Book at face value, and so
, being instructed to become “fishers of men” they’d bought a dinghy and a huge seining net and begun to search the water for unfortunates. These were always nocturnal searches (“That’s where they are now,” an old man pointed out, “looking for poor buggers who’s stumbled in.”) and catches were brought to the Mission with amazing frequency. “It’s strange,” commented one ancient, “t’ think that so many are clumsy and wrong-footed,” for none would admit to having jumped.
George, they went on, was all right, a large-hearted though somewhat simple man. Miss Martha, on the other hand, was terrifying. The old men recounted beatings they’d suffered at her hands. Joseph listened to each tale patiently, without much real interest; without interest because he knew what the story would be as soon as an old, wrinkled mouth opened. The one instant he’d spent staring into Martha’s face had told him much. Joe Hope lay on his cot and waited patiently.
It was around six o’clock in the morning. The men were in a huge room without windows, so that time was suspended like the firesmoke, but J. B. Hope, with his sensitive ears, could hear a bell, somewhere, tolling hourly. The door opened, and the Quinton twins entered. George came first, and Joseph saw that his impression of largeness had been well-founded, although not at all adequate; Quinton was some seven feet tall, massively built. The full-grown man George held cradled in his arms appeared almost baby-sized. George rocked the man slightly, occasionally cooing, “Theah, theah,” into his ear, because the man was blubbering incoherently, drowning in emotion. George looked at the room’s occupants. “Do you know what it is?” he asked gently. “It’s when it wains. Then the docks get all slippy, and no one can keep a toe to them. Now, Mr. Opdycke was just out foh his constitutional—isn’t that so, Mr. Opdycke?—and all of a sudden found himself in the wateh! But it’s all betteh now.”
The Life of Hope Page 6
