The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  Or so I think. When the pain begins, I know what to do: set it aside to get more sleep, rest I will need to do the work this day will require. At the time appointed it shakes me awake and wracks me with cold, and I say, There you are, my enemy, my fear. Let me wrestle you as with a lover. One at a time. This I can do. As the wrenching starts, low in the belly. As it catches and strengthens and pulls me into itself, tight. More, more. As I climb the steep side of the wave, and higher. Breathing through my throat, ah. Pain a burning cold that builds on itself and burns out from the marrow. Caught upon the tines of it. Whirled into a dense core. No words for this, but a moan and huff. A gleaming, blinding center, glaring as sun on ice. And from the peak of it, to slide down the far side. It wanes and I wax, aware of myself again, laughing at how it took me. And here comes another, crawling up my belly to my heart.

  They come, they come, a few breaths apart, then two, then one. My body wringing like a twist of cloth. We gather our gear—towels, Vaseline, The Joshua Tree, a snapshot of a two-lane highway—and go. David drives the car down the road. It was not this tidy, but to leave it unwritten is worse. It diffuses into the air, leaving flashes of images behind: squinting in the sun. A harsh birdcall. Swirl of rock flour in the cook pot. In the moments between I become aware of the seat belt snug under my belly, fluorescent lights in empty offices, bare sidewalk. 5:00 a.m. on a Monday. And then: yellow grass. A mosquito cloud rising from the tundra to find a haunch and settle. I have done this, have fattened with life and split, my labor inseparable from the place where I first divined its coming. This is the difference between spirit and flesh, the idea of a place and its reality. Beyond the mind lies the visceral: what the body knows. I have taken pleasure in the steaming mug of tea, sun on my back, springy earth pressing my feet. Look: a miniature forest of tiny golf clubs, short as a knuckle. And this: a gnawed antler, half-buried, tooth marks like little ditches in the bone. This lasts a long time, until the others take what they need, and this calcium turns into a vole nestling, from that into an owl’s eggshell, and from that into a thieving fox’s belly, where kits overwinter in the stretching dark.

  Slow. I walk down a hall. I lie down and relax a muscle at a time, neck to shoulders to back to belly, and the pain comes in wave after wave that I slip up and onto and over and down, up and onto and over and down, and when I glance over to gauge my progress, I see the same bedside, the same cutbank as before.

  When the final press comes I’m ready. “What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,” Starbuck says to Ahab, the chase hard upon them. Starbuck, always too careful. Doesn’t he know? When the time comes, you have to give it all; hold nothing back. Ahab knows this, and so do I. Breathless with the relief of finding, at last, the long-sought one, and after all the rolling of line and sharpening of points, anticipation and dream, nausea and swelling, ready now to stare and throw. I strive with my work as with an opponent outside my body, and wrestle myself to the mat. Can’t sit without help but I’m strong, feral, working through a body that doesn’t feel like mine, a curl of muscle and sinew, cut loose from a narrating mind. I lose speech during this repeated action; spells fill the space. What a strange glow marks this seam between life and death; one hand takes the other and grips.

  Pray for those who labor, the old ritual says, for danger holds them, and they must give themselves up to it, moving outside of thought into a place that splits them clean open. I drag myself forward a stroke at a time, by turns crabbed and lean with the strain, making for a place meant not to dwell but to witness things beyond time’s usual span. Eyes squeezed shut, I reach out and slap the slick of a broken berg, bobbing in an icy humor that blanks out thought and burns all over. With numb toes, I push off the bottom and make for land, blind-stumbling and staggering, choking with cold, gasping up and out and onto the beach, falling onto something that knocks the wind out of me, a solid thing that is not an idea but a fact on its way to arriving, a fact that sings I BE in a rising stream of notes that is a cry.

  And then I laugh and laugh, David will tell me later, but I have forgotten that. I remember only her here, warm and slick, holy dirt smearing her crown, clinging to a scalp that pulses with life.

  There is a logic that the body knows. The head gets in the way, most of the time. But not the red night we danced at Bird Camp, and not now. Soon, the midwife will wash and wrap her, but for now we hold tight to each other, curded with the river I drank to swell our first shared blood. She was with me all along. Child from far away, my daughter from the end of the earth.

  The World Is On Fire:

  Cave of the Apocalypse

  Patmos, Greece

  1.

  Women keep their own secrets. These four sit together in a dim room, polishing silver, door open to let out the kerosene fumes. Laughter and talk, none of which I can understand. Three of them polish with rags but one uses her bare hands, the pads of her thumbs flat and blacked with soot. Rubs her finger in the cranny to catch the stain.

  They see me standing in the courtyard, holding my little daughter in my arms. Because of her they call out to me in love and friendship. We do this every three weeks, they say when I ask. Wicker baskets piled with finished lamps rest on the cement step. French curves and cutouts through which the candle flame will shine. Metal blinding in the sun.

  2.

  John had climbed this very hill, hands bound, tunic dark with sweat. When he tripped and bloodied his toe against a stone, he managed somehow to keep silent. Guards surrounded him, men with short tempers. He had once been like them, not that they would dream of such a thing. Son of thunder. But that was long before, these boys not yet born when he had begun his discipleship on the banks of a faraway sea. He had woken that distant morning thinking only of the catch. Twist rope, mend net.

  The sun here was strong, the air dry and sweet. The guards turned off the main path and led him through a stand of junipers, resinous and perfumed, up to a dark hole that opened in the slope. Their captain gave him to understand that this would be his place until such time as the emperor extended mercy to him—a day unlikely to come. John stepped inside. The cave was small, its walls gray stone shouldering out here and there into knobs. He thanked the guards for his rations and sat down on the cool floor to eat, blessing God before breaking his fast.

  When the vision came to him, was he awake or asleep? A line of light, brighter than the sun’s keen edge. Thunder, perhaps, and a gust of wind that blew into the cave and scoured the room, making bits of refuse fly.

  Or maybe none of that, but a change he sensed in himself. The skin on the back of his hand went porous and he saw there scenes from his past. Fine wrinkles on his wrist like the net of braided rope rising from the skin of the lake, heavy with fish. Fig tree in leaf but not in fruit, for the time of figs had not yet come. Aaron’s breastplate set with precious stones. Sense impressions but no words; those would come later. All he could do now was open his eyes to see the thing as best he could.

  3.

  Three men, half-tight but still in step, stride down the old road in front of our little patio. Kalispera, good evening, they say as they pass, ’spera, ’spera. ’Spera, we reply. A fat red moon, missing a rind, rises slowly over the monastery and floats like a bubble in syrup. Sure, it all feels like an omen if you try, but then what to make of the motorbikes speeding loud around the switchbacks, or the FUCK POLICE graffiti by the public basketball court, or the SMOKE CANNABIS? The moon became as blood, and the sun black as sackcloth of hair. I stand on the patio and watch as the red fades.

  We’re on the latest stop of a long journey. The Corn Palace in Mitchell South Dakota, the Black Hills during the big Harley rally at Sturgis, the fallout shelter beneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, my grandparents’ graves in rural Ohio, the Spanish Steps in Rome, a Capuchin crypt walled with bones, Florence. All very earthbound, and I don’t know why I think this will be any different. You can find Patmos on a ferry schedule and buy a ticket. You can step off the boat at mid
night and catch a cab up the hill to a rented room. What do I think I’ll find here, on this little speck of an island in the middle of the Mediterranean?

  I’ve come to Patmos, along with my husband and our eighteen-month-old daughter, for the same reason most people do: to visit the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John the Beloved Disciple, also known as John the Apostle or John the Evangelist, is said to have written Revelation around 90 A.D. I had been a bookish kid, raised in the South during the late Cold War, in a church that preached a fair number of sermons about the end times. These factors had combined to make Revelation a book with which I had a strange relationship. I’d avoided it as an adult but read it as a child, believing it was a foregone conclusion that the world would end soon. Fireballs, nuclear winter, cancer, starvation. We’d make it through the initial blast, I sensed, but would live only to suffer and scrounge for years.

  None of this would seem to make for a carefree Mediterranean vacation. But since becoming a parent, I’ve realized I need to come to terms with this book somehow. Is the age of miracles past? Traveling here, could I make a vision of my own?

  4.

  To get to the Cave of the Apocalypse, take the stony old road up the hill, follow the left fork through the woods, and pass the trash heap by the abandoned house. We trudge along, sweaty and dusty, and pass a group of matrons heading down the road to the harbor town. Something makes me look back, and I see one of them squatting on the side of the path, relieving herself. Then she pulls up her drawers and runs to catch up with her friends.

  The Cave is smaller than I’d expected, like a living room dug out of the mountainside. We step inside and sit down to catch our breath on a narrow bench, unsure of what to do next. I’d been so focused on getting here that now I’m kind of lost. A small window looks out over the dry hillside, down to the sapphire water. Right in front of us there’s an icon, Jesus with a potbelly. To our right there’s the hollow where John would lay his head, the corner set off now by a brass fence. You can see the cleft where he’d put his hand and help himself up. The headrest and the handhold are haloed with hammered silver. And straight ahead, the stone ceiling dips lower, and I see the break through which the awful visions entered. When the baby gets squirmy, David carries her outside, cradling her head so she won’t bump it on the low hip of the three-part crack.

  5.

  I eavesdrop. The tour guide says that here is where John began to write, pointing to the white napkin spread like a tablecloth over a rock. Then she opens a leatherette-covered binder with L’APOCALYPSE printed on it in curving letters. “Apocalypse” is a Greek word meaning “unveiling.”

  Theologians note the spiraling pattern of the narrative in Revelation. The stars fall from the heavens and you think it can’t get any worse, but instead of the story ending, it starts again with fresh modes of destruction. The narrator returns again and again to this story he can’t escape.

  Revelation is a book in three parts. While exiled to Patmos, the narrator has a vision of Christ, who tells him about the end of the world. He charges the narrator with telling what has been, is, and will be—past, present, and future—and although the narrator’s first audience is the seven churches of nearby Asia Minor, in a larger sense, his audience is everyone who will ever read his book. Three times, Christ or an angel orders the narrator to write: “Write the things which thou hast seen” (1:19); “And he saith unto me, Write”(19:9); “And he said unto me, Write” (21:5).

  “What has been” is the vision he’s just had. “What is” are the shortcomings of the seven churches. “What will be” takes up the majority of the book, and it details the end times, with seals being ripped off of scrolls, rivers and oceans turning to blood, and terrible suffering coming to anyone unfortunate enough to be alive.

  “What will be” is what makes Revelation a scary book to read. It purports to be not history, but prophecy, and unlike the prophecies in the Old Testament, this one hadn’t come to fruition. We were waiting to see what would happen. Waiting for the moment when the story and our reality matched. The match might be coded; we had to watch closely or we might miss it. If we read it right, we could be on our guard, and as prepared as anyone could be. But reading the story implicated us, too, made us responsible. You know what to do. Live perfectly. Even as kid, I knew I couldn’t manage that. So maybe I’m here for a clue, a closer reading that might let me off the hook.

  6.

  John doesn’t make much use of Patmos except to name it at the beginning as the place of his exile. I, John, was in the isle called Patmos; and I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day. For me, this passage neatly lays out the book’s central duality. He’s in Patmos, but he’s also in the spirit; linear narration doesn’t apply.

  So I circle back again and again, returning to the Cave over the course of the week we spend in Patmos, not knowing what I hope to find. Whatever it is, it’s tied up with what I think is the most chilling verse of the whole book, Rev. 10:6: “that there should be time no longer.” The words call up a primal dread from my childhood, a fear that used to hit me at a particular time of day: summer evenings at eight o’clock.

  In South Carolina, in July, that’s when the sun starts to set. That’s when I knew, even then, that the brief time allotted to me was slipping away, and I had nothing to show for it. It wasn’t solely a fear of the world ending that scared me—my parents wisely forbade me from watching The Day After and movies like it, but even from the ads I knew that it showed entire city populations being vaporized by atomic weapons. No, mine was more of an inward fear of not having real faith, of trying to make myself believe something absolutely. Sometimes I couldn’t do it.

  If the Rapture came at one of my moments of doubt, I would be left completely alone for measureless time. I knew that was coming, had felt it even during children’s choir practice on Wednesday evenings. Yellow light poured in through the west windows of the choir room, and the director sat splaylegged on a stool. His khaki slacks were tight in the crotch—you couldn’t help but notice—but I was ashamed of myself for noticing, and knew that I was lost.

  Looking back on it now, I have some questions. Did he really have to sit like that, feet propped on the rungs of the stool, spreading his legs like a lazy dog airing out his merchandise? I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed. We were in elementary school and knew little or nothing about sex—even listening to Joan Jett at the roller rink was suspect; I still remember someone’s mother leaning in and telling us, That is a bad, bad song, when “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” came on the speakers. It wasn’t attraction I felt, looking at him, but fascination and embarrassment. Here was difference made unforgettably visible, a weird combination of pride and vulnerability.

  He was trying to teach us a song about the new heaven and the new earth: “For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away,” Rev. 21:1. The song was supposed to comfort us, but it chilled me. This first earth seemed pretty great. We used to drive down to the creek and wade in the cold water along the slick stones. We used to drive to the dump and heave our bags from the trunk into the pit, and once I found a book of poems there, and once a little table with a drawer set into the side. I painted the table pink and covered the worn spots on its top with picture postcards of places I had never been. In the backyard, puffballs squirted brown smoke out of their tops when you pressed them, and pill bugs motored along under the holly bushes. Could all this cease to be?

  Yes. The children are grown, the house sold, the creek diverted to feed a water-treatment plant. Was the awful dread I used to feel just an intimation of the brevity of life? Possibly, but I think the unease was something more. A realization that even the most dreadful story could come true. That an even worse story—one you hadn’t read yet—could likewise become reality. The world of Revelation is still peopled and vivid, filled with action and therefore the potential for change. Worse yet was the threat of a wordless existence. The idea that a time could come when there was not even a terrible story to hold
on to. My gut went hollow when I thought of that on those hot summer evenings. It was hard to explain to my parents, impossible to share with friends. This secret I had to bear alone. Its face was a blank sheet, bleached-out in the light.

  7.

  Is that monk Windexing the Bible? No—just the plastic sheet that covers it. There is much to do to prepare for tonight’s services. He tucks a loaf of bread into a napkin-lined basket, plucks spent tapers from the tray of sand and dumps them in a box, which goes outside to wait for trash day. Someone’s spread the rugs on the big rock outside for an airing. I watch the monk and he ignores me; I am just another visitor, sitting on the Cave’s bench. Nothing for me to do but pray or write, which is praying with your hands. You have to believe that someone’s listening.

  The view would have been the same. This dry air, this steep hill, terraced now with olive trees. Lichen splashed across lumps of limestone. Junipers, eucalyptus, and thorns, surely, dry like these and begging to burn. The whirlwind is in the thorn trees. Simple food he depended on someone to bring him. It’s a dry place and never bore much. Probably he ate fish, clams, now and then a bit of bread.

  Strange that his year of privation would lead, later, to the island’s becoming one of the richest in the Mediterranean. The monks of Patmos were wealthy for centuries, thanks to a chrysobull decree granted in 1088 by Emperor Alexius I Comnenus of Constantinople that exempted them from taxation and gave them the right to own ships that plied the waters and gained treasure. It’s a desert island and would seem to be naturally poor, devoted to an ascetic way of life, but an important story started here that’s attracted pilgrims and tribute for centuries, and you can see the wealth in the monastery at the top of the hill with its richly worked silver and gold icons, the treasures in its museum, its tapestries, the costly lamps I watched the women polish. The Cave itself can feel like an afterthought.