The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  Isaiah removed his heavy belt. He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, let them fall into the dirt, and stepped out of them. With the belt folded in his hand he knelt beside her and then with a strong, quick movement turned her onto her stomach, twisting the ropes into her wrists and ankles, and ripped her nightgown up the back.

  “How beautiful she is,” Isaiah said, as if speaking to himself, or to God. He sighed. “Surely she is a succubus, come to steal the souls of men."

  The air was cold on her bare buttocks before the belt descended upon them and she screamed, partly from the pain but even more from the realization that she was damned and that she was going to die.

  The religious commune along the northern California coast had seemed like just the place her awakened soul had yearned for. The fog was creeping over the mountain range to the west, and redwoods towered to the north and east. Between them, glowing in sunlight, nestled in its valley like the vision of a pocket Arcadia, was the farm that she had dreamed about since she had first heard of it six months ago. The original quinta with its glistening white walls and red-tiled roof sprawled at the far end of the valley flanked by a newer, rectangular building on one side and a giant barn on the other. Two meadows adjoining the barn were enclosed by white, board fences. Hereford cattle stood in one, lining a feeding trough, their coats gleaming red and white in the sunlight. Magnificent Appaloosas threw up their heads in the other before, in their exuberance, they galloped off around the turf of their enclosure.

  Between Shepherd and the buildings, rows of neatly cultivated gardens had reached to her across the valley. Bonneted figures in long dresses had stood and stooped in the fields. Shepherd had sighed. Who would have thought that this kind of paradise could exist anywhere on earth in this year of judgment?

  For minutes she had sat there, unwilling to break the spell that this place had worked upon her heart, and then, at last, she had started up the automobile where it sat on the gravel road looking down into the valley and drove her BMW between the fields and up the long drive that led to the ranch house.

  Isaiah himself had greeted her. Coming out through the massive front doors, the morning sun turning his white hair into a halo-like nimbus around his massive head, he looked every bit the splendid saint she had seen on television, and when he spoke, his voice so much more impressive than the broadcasts could reproduce, she knew that she had made the right decision.

  “Welcome to the kingdom of God,” he had said.

  He had taken her hand in his. It had felt big and rough and strong. She could trust it to do what was right, and she had wanted to leave her hand there forever. “I have come to stay,” she had said, “if you will have me.” A great heaviness had lifted itself from her as she said the words. It had been like the moment when she had been born again.

  “The kingdom of God is for all His children,” Isaiah had said. “Come.” He had released her hand—she had felt a moment of loss—and turned toward the doors.

  She had followed him through the doorway into the relative darkness of the entryway beyond. The house had smelled of incense. As her vision adjusted, she saw polished floors and rooms opening out on either side of a hallway. To the right was a study lined with books; a massive walnut desk faced into the room from its place before the big front window. She had recognized it immediately. This was where Isaiah's television broadcasts were taped, with the Prophet in front of the desk speaking to the audience of sinners about the end of this world and revealing what they must do to be admitted to the next.

  A young woman had approached them from the study. Unlike the women who worked in the fields, she was dressed in a light-blue blouse and darker-blue slacks. She was pretty in a dark, sullen way and pregnant.

  “This is Janet,” Isaiah had said. “She will show you where you are to live and what your duties will be."

  “I'm Barbara Shepherd,” she had said.

  “We use only single names here,” Isaiah had said. His smile had been like a benediction. “From now on you will be known as ‘Barbara.’”

  He had turned and walked down the hall toward the back of the house like a disappearing angel.

  “Okay,” Janet had said in a businesslike way, “give me the keys to the BMW. I hope you brought the title with you."

  Shepherd had dug the keys from her purse, looked at them, and then dropped them into Janet's outstretched palm. “No, but I can send for it."

  “We'll do that right away,” Janet had said, turning toward the study and the big desk. “You can also make out your financial statement and the power of attorney."

  Janet had slid her swollen belly behind the desk. Shepherd had stood in front of it. “I don't understand,” she had said.

  “This is a commune,” Janet had said, looking up under her dark eyebrows. Shadows circled her eyes. Perhaps pregnancy wasn't agreeing with her, Shepherd had thought. “Everything is held in common. You knew that, didn't you?"

  “Yes,” Shepherd had said. She had known what a commune was, but she hadn't considered the implications. But she hadn't said that.

  “If you want to join, you must turn over all your assets to the commune.” Janet had stared at Shepherd out of shadowed eyes as if challenging her to turn and walk away.

  “I understand,” Shepherd had said. She more than understood. Janet would just as soon get rid of her. “I'll sign whatever you wish,” she had said humbly.

  Janet's expression had softened.

  As soon as Shepherd had signed away all her worldly possessions, she felt immeasurably lighter, as if her immortal spirit had been tied to the earth by everything she had owned and now it was free to soar.

  She had put her faith in God and in his earthly representative, and now she could await the Second Coming without apprehension. Or maybe, as the Russellites thought, He was already among them.

  Living with three dozen other women had at first appalled her. She had been taken back to her adolescence when as a competitive athlete she had showered with other women, dressed with other women, been sent to bed early and roused even earlier, kept her clothing in a locker.... Then, however, she had been in a formative stage, yearning toward independence but not yet able to demand it, postponing the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood to achieve a goal. And the bodies around her, like hers, had been boyish, unsexed by unrelenting exercise, even menstruation delayed by the effort to be the best gymnasts in the world.

  Here the women were often weary from their labors in the field, but they were obviously women. Some were young and pretty, but many were middle-aged and older with the imperfections of their years. But all their bodies and their bodily odors were clearly female. Shepherd preferred hard male bodies to the soft flesh of her kind, including her own, and she had found herself shrinking from incidental contact with the others, trying to find occasions when the shower or the bathroom were unoccupied.

  She had not minded the bunk bed so much, and getting into the top one was no struggle for an Olympic athlete, even one twenty years out of competition. The labor in the fields had tired her at first, unused as she had become to hard work and the nine or ten hours a day spent in such toil, and she had collapsed each night onto her bunk, thinking she would never rise again, too tired to notice the rock-hard mattress. But her body had soon toughened and she had regained the condition she had enjoyed as a teenager. She felt that if she had the chance or the desire she might even excel once more on the beam or the uneven bars or the pommel horse. Sometimes she had wished that there were a gymnasium nearby that she could use, perhaps even show Isaiah the skills she could lay before him. But then she had realized this was childish pride brought about by her improving physical condition.

  It was then she realized, too, that the whole experience was a mortification of the body for the sake of the spirit, and she began to accept, as well, the proximity, the enforced intimacy, of the other women. The self and all its foolish aversions had to be subdued. She did not abandon modesty, for this was one of the virtues cheris
hed by God, but she showered with the others and did not mind if they glanced at her when they thought she wasn't looking or if they bumped against her back or hip as they showered or came in or out.

  What she never quite got used to was the absence of men. Isaiah was the only male presence anywhere in the valley—even the videotaping personnel were recruited and trained from among the women in the commune—and Isaiah was not so much a male as a man of God, unsexed by saintliness, neutered by his juxtaposition to the Afterlife. Others might consider this a feminist utopia, where all were equal, even though the equality was at the low level of self-denial; here were no men to put women down, to set up prizes that only they were equipped to win, to dismiss the efforts of women with a smile or a thoughtless word. But Shepherd missed them, their different look, their different voices and perspectives, the mirror of their admiration; she missed, she thought, the other half of the human race.

  She had been set straight about that immediately. Sex and money were the root of all evil. To enter here they had given up both. Where there were men there was competition; individual differences became vanity; individual choices became more important than the basic choice of God over man.

  It was, Shepherd thought, mortification of the spirit as well as of the flesh.

  Isaiah was not much of a presence, either. As they worked in the fields, the women saw only brief glimpses of his craggy figure standing on the veranda surveying his—no, God's—domain, or getting into one of his Rolls Royces to go on a business trip. It was the moment they waited for. One would nudge another and they would turn their heads to gaze, just for a moment, at the Prophet, and return to their labors with renewed vigor.

  Only once had Isaiah spoken to her after their first meeting. It was late afternoon and the women were returning from the fields as Isaiah's long, black automobile had passed, raising a cloud of dust, and the Prophet had emerged from the rear door to watch the line of bonneted women approaching. He had singled her out. With one hand he had motioned her toward him.

  “Daughter,” he had said, when she stood before him, “remove your bonnet. Ah, Barbara,” he said, “the kingdom of God agrees with you. You are looking very well."

  The fact that he remembered her—she did not want to make the comparison, but it came unbidden—was like sexual awakening. And his praise made her feel the kind of pleasant weakness, the surrender of her body and her independence to another's will, that for her preceded passion.

  “We should have a private audience,” she had heard Isaiah saying, as if from a distance, and then Janet, from the nearby veranda of the quinta, had said, “Isaiah!” She said it sharply, almost possessively, and the Prophet had turned, smiling at Shepherd one last time, and walked up into the house followed by his secretary.

  On Sunday mornings they were allowed to enter the quinta and watch, on television, the service that was taped for broadcast from the study only a few yards away. This was what everyone saw, the Saved and the sinners alike, but they knew—they knew—that Isaiah was speaking to them.

  One Sunday his words had been particularly memorable because he had spoken about his conversations with God.

  “God has told me that the end of the world is only months away,” Isaiah had said. “The Millennium is at hand. Judgment Day is almost upon us. If that doesn't give you a sense of urgency about Salvation, nothing will.

  “When I say ‘God has told me,’ some of you may think that I am speaking metaphorically, that I have heard him in my heart, and even if you believe this to be true and have resolved to be Saved, you have not heard me correctly. I have heard him the way people hear each other, with my ears. He speaks and I listen.

  “In the loneliness of my room, in my walks along the ocean, yes, even when I am with other people, he speaks to me. He says, ‘Tell my people that this fair world that they have blackened with their sins and bloodied with their pointless quarrels will be destroyed. Tell them to prepare themselves, to ready their souls, to make their peace with Me, for soon I will walk among them in the flames of Armageddon and take up to Heaven with Me the souls of the Believers and leave the rest to the eternal torments of My Ancient Adversary.'

  “I do not ask you to take my word for this. I am a man like you, as filled with error as any when my actions are not guided by the hand of God. Why don't others hear with their ears the voice of God? ‘Why don't I hear Him speak?’ you ask. And I say, ‘You can!’ You can hear God speak, just as I do, if you will open your ears, if you will hear as a child hears, listening for marvels, believing in miracles, discarding the skepticism of what we misleadingly call ‘maturity.'

  “Listen, and you will hear God telling you to commit yourself to the Afterlife. Believe! Prepare for the end! Or gird your doubting soul for eternal torment. And if you believe, as I do, in the work at hand, rid yourself of the material possessions that only serve to drag you down. At the end of this program, you will see an address to which you can send your contributions. Divest yourself of everything you own as an act of belief, and you will float, yes, you will float with God to Heaven on that Judgment Day so close at hand. The money will be used not for this little group of believers but to spread this message, not just to this nation but to all nations of the world, whatever language they speak, whatever beliefs or non-beliefs they profess. For here we have taken a vow of poverty."

  And then the program had closed with the vision of the peaceful valley from the ridge at the south where Shepherd had first seen it. Only this time the figure of Isaiah loomed above it, larger and larger, until the camera moved in upon his beneficent features and they filled the entire screen.

  As they had filed out that morning, Shepherd had glimpsed Isaiah in the study with the camera lights turned off. He had looked tired and old, like someone giving his life's blood to redeem others, and she loved him with the terrible love that she knew he felt for God. If she could feel like that about God, she thought, maybe she, too, could hear His voice.

  In that moment of revelation she saw Janet, even greater with child, hand Isaiah a file folder that, as he opened it, revealed what looked like newspaper clippings. And then, as she passed, Janet had looked up and seen her, and Shepherd had been startled by the look of hatred on Janet's face.

  No one came in answer to Shepherd's scream, and after the first outcry she had pushed her head into her own shoulder to muffle the sounds she could not help making. Whatever happened to her she deserved, she knew, and perhaps she would save her eternal soul at the sacrifice of her weak flesh.

  Then, mercifully, the beating stopped. Over her own strangled sobs, she could hear the harsh sound of Isaiah's breaths and broken words coming from him as he fumbled with the knots that fastened her ankles. “He's going to let me go!” she thought, and then she made out his muttered words, “I hear Thee. She must be punished like a beast. Not like a woman. She is too foul to use as a woman is used...."

  She knew then why her ankles had been released and her legs spread. She would not be buggered for God! she thought. Perhaps she even shouted the words as she drew up her legs and rolled over. Her feet now were squarely in the chest of the kneeling Isaiah, a look of stunned surprise replacing the glaze of obsession, and she uncoiled her body like an acrobat springing to her feet. Isaiah toppled backward, propelled toward the far wall. She heard a thud as she was rising from her knees to her feet, drawing her wrists behind her up the pitchfork handle until she jumped and they were free.

  When she looked again, Isaiah was rising to his feet against the stall partition, shaking his head like a wounded buffalo, and then glaring incredulously at her. She placed her bound hands around the handle of the pitchfork where it joined the tines. As the angered Prophet charged toward her, she concentrated all her strength on the task at hand, as she had in the Olympic competition, pulled the pitchfork from the ground, and raised it just as Isaiah arrived.

  His momentum drove the handle of the pitchfork against the wall where it joined the floor and the tines through his chest until th
ey protruded through his back. His face twisted with surprise, and then as a trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth his expression changed from anger to one of peace and resignation. He stood there, his arms outstretched like a man crucified, until his arms sank to his sides and he died, still standing.

  A woman's voice broke into Shepherd's shocked paralysis. “What have you done?” the voice said in a tone of ugly condemnation. “You've killed Isaiah! You've killed our Master!"

  It was Janet, her face contorted with anger and grief.

  “Your master, not mine. He killed himself,” Shepherd said calmly. She was surprised at how calm she was. “He had betrayed his calling and his God, and he killed himself."

  Other women had joined them in the barn, gathering around them, staring at the dead Prophet in disbelief, glancing at Janet and then back at Shepherd. No one had panicked yet, but Shepherd could feel hysteria gathering. Not in her. She was serene. She had passed through the fire and been purified.

  “She killed him—she killed him—she killed him,” the other women murmured.

  “You killed him!” Janet said again. Her right hand was on her belly; her left hand pointed.

  “You think I got his pants off?” Shepherd said. “You think I tied my hands and feet together?” She held out her wrists, still bound. Blood trickled around the ropes. “You think God would have allowed a real Prophet to die before his time?"

  The other women were looking now at their dead leader, seeing him for the first time without the halo of their belief, seeing him dead, without his pants, like any ordinary man.

  “Take him down,” Shepherd said.

  Three of them stepped forward and eased his big body to the barn floor so that he lay on his side, the pitchfork handle at rest in front of him.

  “Put his pants back on him and his belt,” Shepherd said, “and somebody untie my hands."

  “What are we going to do?” Janet said. Both hands were on her belly now as if she were speaking not for herself and the other women but herself and her baby.