“Yes,” she said. “And stayed a moment to sit with me.
Cautiously, one lizzy said to its companion, in a totally changed tone of voice, “A miracle.”
“Just a retard,” the other said. “Prattling nonsense, like they do. Burned-out brain muttering. It was just a dead human, nothing more.”
With genuine curiosity, the other lizzy asked the girl, “Where’d it go from here? Maybe we can catch up with it. Maybe it can tell the future and heal!”
“It dissipated,” Alice said.
The lizzys blinked, and then one of them rustled its scales uneasily and muttered, “This is no retard; did you hear that word she used? Retards don’t use words like that, not words like ‘dissipated.’ Are you sure this is the right girl?”
Alice, with her doll held tight, turned to go. A few of the particles of light which had comprised her daddy’s transformed being brushed about her, like moonbeams visible in the day, like a magic, living dust spreading out across the landscape of the world, to become progressively finer and finer, always more rare, but never completely to disappear. At least not for her. She could still sense the bits, the traces, of him around her, in the air itself, hovering and lingering, and in a certain real sense, speaking a message.
And the membrane which had, all her life, occluded her mind—it remained gone. Her thoughts continued clear and distinct, and so they were to remain, for the rest of her life.
We have advanced up the manifold one move, she thought. My father and I… he beyond visible sight, and I into visible sight at last.
Around her the world sparkled in the warmth of day, and it seemed to her that it had permanently changed as well. What are these transformations? she asked herself. Certainly they will last; certainly they will endure. But she could not really be positive, because she had never witnessed anything like it before. In any case, what she perceived on all sides of her as she walked away from the puzzled lizards was good. Perhaps, she thought, it is springtime. The first spring since the war. She thought, The contamination is lifting from us all, finally, as well as from the place we live. And she knew why.
Dr. Abernathy felt the world’s oppression lift but he did not have any insight as to why it had lifted. At the moment it began he had taken a walk to market for the purchase of vegetables. On the way back he smiled to himself, enjoying the air because it had—what was it once called?—he could not remember. Oh yes: ozone. Negative ions, he thought. The smell of new life. Associated with the vernal equinox; that which charged the Earth from solar flares, perhaps, from the great source.
Somewhere, he thought, a good event has happened, and it spreads out. He saw to his amazement palm trees. All at once he stopped, stood clasping his basket of string beans and beets. The warm air, the palm trees… funny, he thought, I never noticed any palm trees growing around here. And dry dusty land, as if I’m in the Middle East. Another world; touches of another continuum. I don’t understand, he thought. What is breaking through? As if my eyes are now opened, in a special way.
To his right, a few people who had been shopping had seated themselves along the way, for rest. He saw young people, dusty from the walk, sweating, but full of a purity new to him. A pretty girl with dark hair, somewhat chubby, she had unfastened her shirt; it did not bother him; he was not offended by her naked breasts. The film is scrubbed away, he thought, and again he wondered why. A good deed done? Hardly. There was no such deed. He paused, standing there, admiring the young people, the bareness of the girl who did not seem self-conscious at all although she saw him, a Christian, gazing.
Somehow goodness has Arrived, he decided. As Milton wrote once, “Out of evil comes good.” Notice, he said to himself, the relative disparity of the two terms; evil is the most powerful term for what is bad, and good—it barely surpasses its opposite. The Fall of Satan, the Fall of Man, the crucifixion of Christ… out of those dreadful, evil acts came good; out of the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden, man learned love. From a Trinity of Evil emerged at last a Trinity of Good! It is a balanced thing.
Then, he thought, possibly the world has been cleared of its oppressive film by an evil act… or am I getting into subtleties? In any case, he sensed the difference; it was real.
I swear to god I’m somewhere in Syria, he thought. In the Levant. Back in time, too, perhaps… thousands of years, possibly. He stood gazing around him, inhaling and excited, amazed.
To his right, the ruins of a prewar U. S. Post Office substation.
Old ruins, he thought. The antique world. Reborn, somehow, in this our present. Or have I been carried back? Not me back, he decided, but it transported in time, as through a weak spot, to enter here and suffuse us. Or me. Probably no one else sees it. My god, he thought, this is like Pete Sands and his drugs, except that I haven’t taken anything. This is the sundering of the normal and the entry into or else the invasion by the paranormal which he experiences; this, he realized, is a vision, and I must try to fathom it.
He walked slowly across the stubble and dirt of the field, toward the ruins of the small U. S. Post Office substation. Against its standing wall lounged several people, enjoying midday rest and the sun. The sun! What vigor carried invisibly in its light, now!
They do not see what I see, he decided. Nothing is changed for them. What happened to bring this on? An ordinary sunny day in the world… if I interpret what I see as if it is mere symbol: a sunny day, representing in the highest order the termination of the authority of evil, of that obscure dominion? Yes, something evil has perished, he realized, and, understanding that, his heart gladdened.
Something of substance which was evil, he thought, has become only shadow. It has somehow lost an essential personification. Did Tibor take the God of Wrath’s picture, and in so doing steal his soul?
He chuckled with delight, standing there by the ruins of the old U. S. Post Office substation, the sun radiating down on him, the fields murmuring with the buzz and drone of satisfaction, the mild endless hum of life. Well, he said to himself, amused, if Carleton Lufteufel’s soul can be stolen, then he is not a god but a man, like any of the rest of us. Gods have nothing to fear from cameras. Except, he thought, pleased at his pun, a fear of (he laughed delightedly) exposure.
Several half-dozing people glanced up at him and smiled mildly, not knowing why he was laughing and yet sharing in it themselves.
More somberly, Dr. Abernathy thought, The Servants of Wrath may be with us for a long time—false religions are as long-lasting as the real, it would seem—but the reality of it has faded and fled from the world, and what remains is hollow and without the mekkis, the power, it had.
I will be interested in seeing the photograph which Tibor and Pete Sands bring back, he decided. As they say, Better a devil known.
By snaring his image they have broken him, he realized. They have reduced him to mortal size.
The palm trees rustled in the warm midday wind, acquainting him further, without words, in the sunny mystery of redemption. He was wondering, however, whom he could tell his pun to. The false god, he repeated in rapture, since normally he was very bad at jokes, cannot survive exposure. He must always be concealed. We have lured him out and frozen his visage. And he is doomed.
And so, he informed himself, by means of a project engineered by the guile and ambitions of the Servants of Wrath themselves, we Christians, evidently defeated, have triumphed; this portrait has initiated a process of perishing for him, by its very authenticity—or rather the fact that the Servants of Wrath will insist on its authenticity, collaborating in their own downfall. Thus the True God uses evil to refine the good, and good to refine evil,, which is to say, in the final analysis we discover that God Himself has been served by everyone. By every event, whether good or bad.
I mean, he thought, labeled good or bad. Good or bad, truth or error, the wrong road or the right road, ignorance and malice and wisdom and love… they are, he thought, to be viewed as, Omniae vitae ad Deum ducent. All lives, like al
l roads, lead—not to Rome, but to God.
Walking on now, he reflected that he should put this in a sermon along with his pun; it was something to tell people, to make them smile as those resting persons by the ruins of the old U. S. Post Office substation had smiled. Even if they did not understand thoughts so complex, they could still take pleasure in them.
To enjoy things again… the world’s oppression, vanquished by an act invisible to everyone, could not hold men back; they could bask and smile and unbutton their shirts to catch the sun and enjoy the humor of a simple priest.
I would like to know what did happen, he thought. But God occludes men to fulfill His will.
Maybe, Dr. Abernathy decided, it is better that way.
Firmly gripping his basket of string beans and beets, he continued on in the direction of Charlottesville and his little church.
Nineteen
The murch which Tibor McMasters painted did slowly become known throughout the world and was at last rated as equal to the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, most of which were known in the form of prints, the originals having been destroyed.
Seventeen years after Tiber’s death, an official pronouncement of authentication was made by the Servants of Wrath hierarchy. It was indeed the visage of the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel. There could be no doubt. Any disputing this was henceforth illegal and carried a penalty of emasculation for men, one ear removed for women. This was to insure reverence in an irreverent world, faith in a society which had become faithless, and belief in a world which had already discovered that most of what it believed were in actuality lies.
At the time of his death, Tibor was subsisting on a small annual pension from the Church, plus a guaranteed maintenance of his cart, with alfalfa hay for two cows: because of the excellence of his work he was given two cows, not one, to pull his cart. When he passed by, people recognized him and hailed him. He gave out a laborious autograph to tourists. Children yelled at him and did not jeer; Tibor was liked by everyone, and although he became eccentric and irascible in his old age, he was considered an asset to the community… this despite the fact that after rendering the true portrait of the God of Wrath he never painted anything of note again.
It was said that among his effects were certain diary-like entries he had jotted down from time to time, in which, to himself alone, he had expressed toward the end certain reservations as to the authenticity of his own great murch. However, no one saw such personal holographs. If they existed at all, the Servants of Wrath who sequestered his corpus of papers either filed them away behind locked metal doors or, more likely, destroyed them.
His last two cows were killed and stuffed and placed, one on each side of his great murch, to gaze solemnly—and glassily—at the tourists who came to pay homage to the renowned painting. Tibor McMasters himself was finally made a saint of the Church. His grave site is unknown. Several cities proudly claim it.
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