The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  But the only treasure John carried out was the one wrung from his own mind. The words unspooled and he followed the trail they made.

  Here God spoke. In a gray room that looks like a highway underpass. If here, why not anywhere? Walls of stone pliant as dough under your hands. Hollow out a place for your head to rest, and a grip to help your hand as you rise. What we take to be solid can turn soft and you sink, the earth’s skin breaking under your weight.

  As many times as I visit, I never sit alone.

  8.

  The group filing in must be Russian Orthodox. The men gather in a circle and start singing an ancient-sounding song, led by a baby-faced priest with frizzy red hair. The women wear their hair wrapped in scarves of many patterned colors—print, paisley, white, turquoise. Nuns file in, wimples framing their faces and covering their chins. Now they’re all singing, men and women both, Kyrie eleison. The women kneel and then put a hand on the bench as they rise.

  It occurs to me that this shiny, wobbly bench is holy too, and ought to be edged with silver. That the bottle of Windex is as transformational as holy oil, and more subtle. Kisses wear a smooth place into the bottom of Jesus’s robe, and shuffling feet press a trail into the floor. I breathe in and the tour group’s collective stale breath gusts into my lungs. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. On an old cane-seat chair behind me, the monk murmurs to himself in Greek, going over accounts.

  The three-part seam says that the Word is powerful, fearsome. Be wary; inspiration can strike anywhere. It’s dangerous that way, destroying what you had believed, demanding a new place for itself. Inspiration carving itself onto the warm clay of hand and brain. Inspiration strong enough to split stone. Who hasn’t prayed for that? For a word that, even if inscrutable, is loud enough to transcribe?

  Watching the pilgrims, I see what I’m supposed to do. Cross yourself; buy a candle; kiss the icons; drop a coin in the alms box. It makes no sound when it falls, muffled as it is by other gifts. All of us are searching for a way to express something—reverence, delight at having arrived here safely, gratitude to God for the inspiration to do work, awe at the beauty of the dry hills and the dark sapphire sea. We share, I think, a desire to show respect to the monk, whose job it is to take care of the place, who domesticates its wildness by living here. I can barely greet him in his native language, and am abashed when I try. I envy the silver-polishers; they have a job that needs doing. The Russian women unwind their scarves and touch them to the crack. I want to participate, too, but what do I have to sanctify? I look down and see my hat and my notebook, and stand up to take my turn.

  The Cave could provide an example of the compromises of a good life. Yes, the terrors of world’s end—which you can decide not to believe. It’s too awful; make it untrue. Distance the Beast to the historical past, Nero, ancient Rome. Yet there’s part of you that knows the Beast can change himself into the thing you fear most. Think what that is; don’t speak it. To say it could bring him to life. The fear of Revelation is the fear of death. You know the end is real, much as it torments you. Once you find out, the trick is trying to forget about it. At best it becomes like my memory of the choir director in the khaki slacks—always present, often underground.

  But this is the other half of the compromise: going over accounts so you can use the coins left in the box to buy candles for tomorrow’s prayers. Carpets freshly beaten. Whang, whang, the sexton bangs the brass candelabrum to make the taper fit. Wraps the base with a paper towel and tests it. Secure.

  9.

  During our days in Patmos, we eat our faces off. Octopus, prawns in melted garlic butter, green beans. Slab of feta and a spoonful of yellow oil. Glass tumbler of ouzo, steel cup of salted potato chips. A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

  One evening in town, I see the Russian Orthodox priest with the red beard, his face open and frankly relieved that his work is over for the moment. Enjoy yourself in the tourist shops, young priest. Buy an olivewood spoon, bricks of soap, a child’s dress edged with white lace. Buy a cardboard box of incense the same size as a pack of cigarettes. Buy a gold-smeared icon of potbelly Jesus, a plastic magnet picturing the Cave, a postcard of a naked satyr dancing joyfully with his enormous erection.

  We visit the grocery store, where we learn that the Greek word for diapers is pampers. Toot Toot is a popular brand of sandwich bread. Along the road, I steal seeds from blooming four-o’clocks and stash them in my pocket. When evening falls, the air fills with the sweet smell of juniper and eucalyptus, hay and warm stone. This is my favorite time of day here; though it used to bring me dread as a child, in Patmos, somehow it doesn’t. The buildings the faintest of pink in the fading sunlight; the grumpy sexton driving up the hill in his little car. No portents of destruction, only the world we would grieve to leave.

  I conflated my old fear of apocalypse with the place its story began—a natural mistake for a Cold War kid, for whom place names have the power to convey a physical chill. Alamogordo, Frenchman Flat, Jornada del Muerto. The Cave of the Apocalypse is a popular site for a particular kind of tourist, but what kind? One whose mind is on the things of heaven and not of earth? Who venerates the site of a story’s beginning? Or who is confused by something in herself and believes that taking notes and pinching sand into a plastic bag will let her in on some secret? She strains her ears to hear that secret over the whining mopeds, the generator that rattles one hill over, and the reruns of The Nanny, dubbed in Greek. The clock on the wall reads, permanently, 10:01.

  10.

  I thought everything written was true. Give me the little book. Sweet as honey in my mouth but as soon as I had eaten it my belly was bitter. I was always looking for a sign, asking myself what it could mean. Trying to interpret things I found in my daily life, which can get you into trouble. What does it mean to let a story scare you? I went to Patmos because I had read about it. I knew the story, and believed that gave me an insight into the place. At its root, this impulse wasn’t so different from the desire I’d had to visit Nantucket Harbor, or New Bedford, Massachusetts: “How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again!” But there’s a difference if you believe the story might be prophetic.

  Look at these fragments. Shards of ironware. Green thumbnails of sand-scoured glass from Kampos Beach. After five on Sundays, the buses don’t run, and you have to borrow the cell phone the tavern owner gives you to call Patmos Taxi. An old story says that John gathered sticks and pebbles from the seashore and transformed them into gold and pearls and rubies, to teach his followers about the folly of trading eternal grace for the transient riches of earth. After a month of penance, his disciples turned the gems back into common stones and left them on there on the beach, where we found them.

  Remember this: the child asleep in the cleft between beds, pushed close together. This: how the rat running under the tables in the plaka makes us all scream and drop our potato chips. This: a German tour guide stops me in the courtyard to read my child’s face and palms. “She is destined for a great work,” she says, “but she must be surrounded by people who support her.”

  As she walks away, she turns back and calls out, “Agapemo,” my love. “She will have a large dream-world,” she says.

  Potted plants grow in the courtyard beside the steps leading down to the Cave. Tea roses, jade plants. Shaded by the whitewashed wall, sheltered from the sea wind. The saucers beneath the plants hold water; it must be someone’s job to refill them. Who knows how long we have? In the meantime, tend the flowers till they bloom, and pinch them when they’re blown.

  11.

  A year or so after his arrival, John left Patmos, his book finished, the emperor who exiled him dead. He would have walked down the steep hillside path he’d climbed before, heading for the harbor. A little boat would have taken him to Ephesus, where according to tradition, he died of natural cause
s at a good old age, the only one of the disciples to avoid death by crucifixion or torture. In the last letters he’s believed to have written, John says again and again, Little children, love one another.

  We walk through town on our last night there. A sign in the goldsmith’s window reads: JEWELRY COLLECTION INSPIRED BY APOCALYPSE. Strings of pearls, coral figurines, lapis lazuli pendants, beads of onyx and tigereye. John spends much more time describing gems than he does on his one bare mention of Patmos. Jasper, sapphire, topaz, amethyst. I buy a silver ring inscribed with rubbed-black characters in ancient Greek. He shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. Not exactly the inscription I wanted but it’s the one that fits my finger. If I could pick any verse it would be: What thou seest, write in a book.

  Tradition says that John performed many miracles after he left Patmos. In one of them, a man shattered priceless gems into shards to prove that he did not care for riches. But John said that this was pointless, because it did not help anyone. He put the fragments back together again, and his followers sold the gems, giving the proceeds to the poor.

  Diamonds can be set afire. Diamonds can shatter if struck a certain blow. Rough diamonds are greasy, gray, onion-skinned. Little pebbles you’ll throw out with the mudwater if you don’t take care. Rub them between your fingers to know them.

  Pearls demand special care, and love to lie against the skin. True amber smells of resin. Zeolites, known as “boiling stones,” bubble when heated. Emeralds are cool against the finger; reject warm stones as false. Emeralds are also known for their flaws. Were John’s shattered gems emeralds? Did they keep their seams after their miraculous repair, like the crack in the roof of the Cave? John had a fondness for that kind of thing, could have decided purposely to leave one, to tell the tale of the break to those who knew how to read it.

  12.

  Those four-o’clock seeds I pocketed have taken root in the clay here at home. My flowers of the apocalypse, blooming in late afternoon on heart-shaped leaves. Mama, the pink flowers have started, the child said to me yesterday as we weeded.

  And I believe the act of having a child flies in the face of actual belief in apocalypse. If you really think that extended suffering and an awful end must be our portion, you don’t want to bring a child into that and sentence her to such pain. If you have a kid, you’re betting that it’s at least unlikely. And that maybe it won’t happen at all.

  The people who live in the shadow of the Cave of the Apocalypse aren’t more aware of the brevity of life than people anywhere else. They don’t possess some rare secret that walking the streets of their towns might let you in on. It wasn’t religious reasons that pulled me to Patmos, exactly. More like a funeral for my childhood dread so that I wouldn’t pass it along. If I could go back to the child I used to be, that serious girl even then keeping track of everything, trying to do right, I would take the Bible out of her hands and close it on the desk. I would tell her that eternal things matter, but God loves you, and so do I. Nothing you do can separate you from that truth.

  I was onto something when I went outside and hunted the ground for treasure as a child. I didn’t know it then, but seeing the beauty in a chip of colored stone and knowing that stone’s name is a gift. I was able to see the love of God paving the world around me but I distrusted this knowledge because it was concrete. I believed in bodiless dread, but not in the physical reality that I could see and touch. At the end of Revelation John writes about the stones that furnish paradise. He must have known his readers would need the relief of the physical after all he had put them through, and he might have needed the relief himself. There is something more than what we see and know in this mortal life. And our days are precious; I knew it even then, reading the line “when time should be no more.”

  If there should be time no more, let it end here, paused in this moment. Our last afternoon in Patmos. The child eating green beans and tomatoes from a thick ironware plate until she’s full and sleepy, then tipping over in her high chair to fall dazed into the yellow sand. Sleeping in her father’s arms under the ailanthus tree as the afternoon wanes. Then we peel off our clothes and swim in the warm bay until the man with the boat calls out to us that it’s time to go.

  Touch the Bones

  Come and see.

  —Revelation 6:1

  Walk with me down a narrow hall.

  There are worse things on display at the Mütter Museum of medical curiosities, in Philadelphia, but start here, with the glass cases of Things Swallowed. Jade bead, enameled Greek cross, lozenge of lapis lazuli. The cross would catch in your throat, but the lapis would slip down easy and root in your gut, a blue seed. Note the pair of toy opera glasses, a charm shaped like a football, a wee ship. A safety pin.

  And if you walk from room to room down a narrow hall, you can double back on your tracks and see if you missed something.

  GRAZIE HO FAME

  —Sign held by a beggar, Florence

  The La Specola museum, in Italy, is known for its collection of anatomical models. Made of wax in the late eighteenth century, the models are detailed to a fanatical degree, and many of them were cast from molds made from cadavers. The unsettling quality about them, though, is that they don’t look dead. Not even the ones without skin, or the ones with muscles pared away from the face. It’s partly because the artists were so meticulous—in the poses they chose, in the shaping of each lacy vessel and nerve and bony landmark, in the staple of the model’s muscle fibers. And it’s partly because of the wax the artists used. Even after all these years, the figures seem almost to sweat.

  Something about the place makes me queasy. It could be the smell of dead birds, on display elsewhere in the museum, or the warm day; we walked across Florence and crossed the shimmering Arno to get here. But it’s more than that. You can’t help seeing yourself in these figures. In the gesture of the hand of the standing man. In each carefully placed hair, rooted in its socket on his brow. In the half-closed eyes of the woman they call Venus, lying naked on a silk sheet in the Pregnancy Room.

  Here’s a case filled with pigments and tools that the artists used. A glass decanter holds a measure of blue-black ink for painting veins. Pink powder, meant to impart the blush of life to skin, fills another bottle. Here’s a jar of black liquid, labeled with letters too faded to read—turpentine. Open dishes hold stubs of wax, translucent as honey or opaque as jasper.

  Liquid wax would have flowed through the spout of this copper pot. The wood-handled scrapers and spatulas lying nearby could have come from a present-day studio, but others are strange to me: a handled iron spoon; a thin bar knobbed at one end; a ring-handled syringe, meant for applying wax onto small areas. Like the ropy veins that twist all over the swollen surface of uterus gravidus, “uterus of a pregnant woman.”

  Some of these are hard to take. “Fetus with thoracic and abdominal cavities laid open” looks like a sweet little sleeping baby, lying there on its silk cloth, eyes closed, arms at its sides. But from chin to thighs it’s disemboweled, the liver turned up so you can see the stomach and intestines. Under the museum lights, the surfaces of the lungs and heart shine.

  Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

  —Revelation 10:4

  You wouldn’t know it to look at her; it’s too early. Observe Venus’s face, her head tilted. Dark hair falls halfway down her back. She wears a pearl necklace to help hide the seam where her body can be taken apart.

  Remove her skin by taking hold of these white satin tabs. And see her veins, swollen with blood, and the mammary glands preparing for the work they soon must do. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling.” Her right breast detaches by means of another satin tab, this one red.

  Remove her lungs by grasping another set of red satin tabs. Remove the greater omentum, to see her intestines, by the same method. Remove the various parts of her heart. All she can do is lie there on the silken sheet, face turned away. Remove the small intestine. Remove the top of the uterine
wall and see the little one curled into a ball, head covered by tiny feet crossed at the ankles.

  A dissection was regarded and experienced as a special public occasion which one not only attended but paid to attend.

  —Monika von Düring, “The Anatomy of the Human Body: A Unique Collection of the Late Eighteenth Century”

  Theologians note that one feature of apocalyptic writing is its tendency to write about past events in future tense, as if prophesying.

  And so you will walk from room to room, barefoot. Wake in the night to find yourself standing at the front door, checking the dead bolt.

  The first two weeks are free—you haven’t conceived yet!—but they still count. The initial cell division happens during week three; in week four, if you’re paying attention, you find out; in week five, the two-part split between skin and inner organs takes place; by week seven, nostrils form. And as for you, you will long to lick salt in glittering mounds. The very idea of kale, crumpled and dark, will turn your stomach.

  And you will wake in the night to see a dark figure standing beside your bed. Wake and see and gasp aloud. Watch the figure dissipate as you stare.

  Right now nobody will know it to look at you, although you feel dead in the marrow, sleep overtaking you at unguarded moments, like chloroform in an old movie. Things are happening inside your body that you can sense only through signs.

  And you will wake in the night to see the dark figure once more. Standing next to your bed, a glowing lamp in one hand.

  Remember things you had forgotten. Like standing in the Pregnancy Room in La Specola, looking at the woman they call Venus and thinking of yourself as you carried your daughter, a toddler now. You want to hurry up and get to the end of this new pregnancy, when you will be dramatically large and the baby ready to live on its own.

  But there are many weeks to make it through first. And the depictions of the early embryo and fetus are one of the few things the Italian artists got wrong. They made homunculi that look like plastic babies for a king cake. The earlier in the term, the smaller these models are. A baby the size of your fingernail, fixed by slender wires to a square of polished wood.