by Paul Monette
Hurriedly, she turned back to the printed page and read ahead. She skimmed ten lines at a stretch till she reached the name a second time: The Reverend Roman Paradise, chief officer and prophet. He hadn’t been seen, except by his close associates, in six or seven years. Most of his flock knew him only by way of a fuzzy sepia photograph of a turbaned man in a trance, which hung on all the walls. In the last three years his followers had signed over to him the sum of their worldly goods—thought to be in excess of eleven million dollars. Nobody knew his real name. It was rumored that he’d started his whole operation out of a cell in the Georgia Penitentiary.
But this was just the numbers. What did they believe in? What did they want? She turned another page, her expectations high, only to find she’d gotten to the end. “As of this writing,” the paragraph ran, “four of the original group have taken their lives.” Ross Cochran threw himself under a train. The girl called Linda downed a bottle of oven cleaner. Two others leapt from the clinic windows, not five minutes after a session with Iris. “In no way,” she had written, “would the casual observer have thought to call them depressed.” Except for the fear of recrimination, they were cheerful, bright and helpful, determined to resume the lives of nicely turned-out college kids.
The surviving pair was placed under constant supervision, but there was only so much the clinic could do. It seemed they were set to go off like time bombs, no matter how far they recovered.
On the facing page was printed the votive photograph of Paradise—so dark in its present reproduction, Iris could hardly see the face. A man of indeterminate age, puffy about the eyes. The trance he was meant to be in the throes of looked to her more like sleeplessness. The mouth was slack. The skin was pocked. His turban had the feel of gauze, as if he’d needed bandaging. It was the most sullen state of rapture Iris had ever seen. As if he’d made his way to some innermost temple, and all he could think to do was tear it limb from limb.
There must be a separate file, she thought, and began to rifle the drawers on either side. But she didn’t get very far before the weight of the vanished life began to twist her up in knots. Each drawer was like the corner of some attic, filled to bursting with idiosyncrasy. Endless insipid mementos, peculiar to the single self she’d walked in circles all her life. At first she was merely annoyed, as she cleared her way through birthday cards and sweets for the dog, the random stones from country walks. Embarrassed, almost—as if she were sorting the last effects of somebody suddenly dead. When she turned up the three-faced frame again, with the three men safe at sea, she could feel the wave of irritation curdle into rage.
If she didn’t go now, she’d be late.
She threw the tapes down on the desk, then stood and grabbed her coat. She was halfway across the room when Donald called her name. She turned with a vast indifference.
“We’re not done yet,” Donald protested.
“But you haven’t said a word for the last ten minutes.”
“So what? I pay for this hour.”
“Ah, well it’s simple, then. Don’t pay.”
She opened the door to the outer room with a certain trepidation, for fear there might be more of them still waiting. Luckily, no. She passed on through, wincing at all the cozy touches. If only it had been tea leaves after all. She would have done much better—she and Donald both—with a crystal globe and a jabber of incantation. She paused on the threshold, putting a finger up to the sunstruck brass. She only wished she could cover up her name before she left. It was too like something chiseled on a tomb.
Donald seized the moment that she lingered and sidled up for a final go. “But Iris,” he pleaded, naked and lost, “what am I going to do?”
Though she’d only known him half an hour, she saw that Donald understood she wasn’t coming back. He had so little faith in permanence, he seemed quite gleeful underneath. Iris smiled as she stopped to think. Carefully, one by one, she left a set of fingerprints across the brazen plate. Her forefinger whorled on Ph.D. It looked as if Donald Sand, with his dread of endings and his deadly asthma, had come through with more intuitiveness than her own husband. She felt she owed him equal measure.
“Sell everything,” she said. “Get out.”
“But where will I go?”
“Doesn’t matter. Drift, if you have to.”
“Why?”
It was on her tongue, and it slipped away. She looked down the dull and thinly shadowed street outside her office. The morning sun was warm as June. Above her head, the scavenging sparrows had stopped their nervous search. They sat in a row on the wires and sang, tricked by the midday dream of summer. In the second-story window opposite, a woman very like herself neatened a room as she talked on the phone. The sound of children, shrill as a schoolyard, rode the autumn breeze. She couldn’t tell where it came from. Couldn’t say what, among these things, had suddenly made her sad.
“I don’t know, really,” Iris said. “But, Donald, try to remember: whatever they tell you, there’s nothing else. There’s only this right here. You understand?”
She made a helpless gesture at the world—the smallest shrug, uncurling her fingers as if to let go some secret light as a feather. Donald followed the drift of her hand. He looked out onto the tree-lined walk and slowly got things focused. All along the street there was only what was always there, but he blinked in a startled way just now, as if it had started to rain.
“Listen,” he answered carefully, “you don’t have to worry about me. I wouldn’t go to heaven if they sent a limousine. I don’t like nice people.”
Donald, she thought, was just the sort of person she could use. He was sensitized to the same high sound, which keened through the town like a crowd of the mad, let loose in the upper air. She had a feeling there would not be any realists about, not where she was going. None who were on her side, at least.
“Good-bye,” she said mildly. “Good luck.”
“You too,” called Donald as she walked away.
It was such a relief to take her leave—to say it out loud like a tolling bell. She left no evidence otherwise. Nothing trailed in her wake as she claimed her car and sped away, though she saw that the trash in the gutters had started to lift in tiny cyclones. The townsfolk steered quite clear of her. No cars but hers were out and riding. She wondered if maybe the people themselves were frozen in mid-stride, held captive till she’d gained some ground. The houses thinned out within half a mile, and she rocketed all alone through the bare and neutered woods. The highway roared like an animal next to all that crouching stillness.
Though she glanced a thousand times in the rearview mirror, she could tell there was no one following. She was strong for the reason they wanted her: because she did not care. She got all the way up to eighty-five, and nobody stopped her. For the sake of anonymity—for the lark of it, almost—she parked the car at LaGuardia and took a bus to Kennedy. It was so easy to be no one in particular.
She sat beside an old professor on the plane. She let him suppose she was slow. He treated her like a pet and told her all about a book he wrote on spiders. Within an hour, she knew more about these than anything. The other began to fade—the saltbox house, the town, the book-lined room—like so many stars at the crack of dawn. There was only one connection worth keeping. She shrieked across the sky to grapple with the phantoms in her head, hiding the one small detail like a coin in her hand.
Like a key in a dream, it opened the door to the vaster room beyond. For according to her article, the crackpot temple of Father Paradise stood at the corner of Ellis and Polk. From the moment it caught her eye, this single fact stayed sharp in her mind, like a snapshot tacked to the wall. At last she knew what she was after: the lunatic who ran the show was somewhere in San Francisco.
II
MICHAEL ROMAN SLIPPED INTO the darkened church at four A.M., a candle in his hand. He rounded the pulpit stairs and crept up close to the altar as if he planned to say some special early service. He set the light down in front of the cross
, then stooped to peer through a narrow slot cut into the altar proper, rather like a mail drop. He didn’t have enough light to see, so he stuck in his fingers and groped around. Not really expecting much: they’d cleaned out the week’s collection only the night before. Then he felt the rustle of paper, just out of reach. The old thrill gripped his heart.
Taking a key from his wallet he knelt down and patted around till he found the little door. He wheezed, and his knees hurt terribly on the cold stone floor. Still he persevered. He eased the cupboard open with a creak, like someone about to set a clock. He scrabbled around inside and scared up two or three envelopes. Then his hand closed on something metal. He snatched it up as if someone stood behind him, ready to pry it loose.
He heaved himself to his feet and poured his loot onto the altar. The cash was scarcely worth the counting—eighty, ninety dollars—but he stuffed it into his jacket all the same, purely out of habit. From one manila envelope he drew out a hefty sheaf of securities—oil and natural gas, it looked like, all made over to the Covenant. He went on to the next, annoyed and disappointed. Tucked inside a florid letter he tore across unread was a bankbook, balanced at just over eighteen thousand dollars. Worthless to him now, of course. He unfolded a deed to a tract of land in downtown Oakland and threw it aside impatiently. The metal thing was a silver case, about the right size for cigarettes, with a monogram he couldn’t stop to read. Very, very old. He dropped it in his pocket as he turned and made for the door.
It was just such singular things he looked for. Gold and silver, the occasional gem, an old watch—as long as he had been in power he’d put aside the greater portion of what was truly rare. It delighted him, once he had a bagful, to make the rounds of dealers, most of whom assumed he was a thief. He would bargain away for hours, turning things to cash. For all his millions in numbered accounts, he never ceased to find these raw transactions wonderful. His heart swelled up to human size. The air grew ripe with flowers.
Now he climbed in a spiral fifteen steps—slow for a man just thirty-five, but he’d taken on some weight. He stopped at the landing to get his wind, then mounted the rest of the way. The upstairs, back of the dome, was one great loft. When they bought this place from the cancerous bishop, vestments were stored here, rack on rack. The choir had used it for a changing room.
Michael had moved in and altered nothing. With his mattress flat on the floor and a battered deal table tucked in the dormer he looked like a pauper tailor, surrounded on every side by mildewed serge. Though no one would have ever thought of looking for him there, he didn’t especially see it as a hideout. He simply never cared to be locked up in a house. Besides, he’d always been prepared, as now, to leave it all behind on a moment’s notice. One always made another bed. There was always an empty foot of bitter ground.
As he threaded his way among robes and stacked-up plaster saints, the candle caught at a cobweb laced across his path. He did not startle. He froze like a snake till he saw it was nothing. The web went up in wisps of smoke without ever catching fire. Yet he felt this yearning all around him. The close and dusty attic room was made for a conflagration. He moved ahead along the narrow aisle, thinking what a perfect end a fire always made. Except for one thing: if the church burned down, they would all suppose him dead. He wanted them to know he was free.
He stood at the rickety table where he’d laid out what little he planned to take. He glanced out the circle window, down the hill to Market. The first gray light, the color of fog, had advanced as far as the shape of things. His lawyer, Norman Cates, was coming to get him now, at this ungodly hour, so there wouldn’t be any press about when he turned himself over to the U.S. marshals. They’d agreed to let him in by a side door, just at dawn. They were afraid of what might happen if word got out that Father Paradise would show his face at last. If his flock should gather to see him in the flesh, he would never be taken without a lot of blood.
Even now, he could hardly understand what the crime was. Something to do with mail fraud, though he could barely sign his name. In any case, it was nothing he’d done himself, with his own two hands. Some clerical inconsistency, arising out of assets that had piled up much too fast to count. He supposed he should feel betrayed. The men in the middle had put him in jeopardy, not to lose a dollar. Yet he couldn’t summon up the proper rage—perhaps because he’d left behind so many crimes that were his alone, completely unaccounted for. He never thought his luck would hold so long.
Besides, it was time to move on. He’d never really felt congenial being holy. He used to go out on the streets himself, converting one-on-one. He never left anyone’s side till they gave in. But once he’d got his organization going, he started to withdraw. For the last eight years he had been content to live on purely practical terms. There was Norman to handle the matters of law. He had Ruby Joel of Berkeley to write up his mystic pronouncements. Closest of all, most faithfully, he could count on Danny Merritt, fanatic and former anarchist, to manage the day-to-day life of the flock like a foreman in a mill. These three more than anyone he relied on to see him as he was. Yet even they had a way of touching wood whenever he came in the room. They never ceased to ask him what he needed.
Nothing.
Michael Roman had taught himself to live without desire. He used to say, if anyone asked, that he must have been born in prison. For all he recalled of the distant past, he had never been young for a minute. Simply, there had come this moment when he willed his life, and time became a river. He must have been about twelve—had already done two years on a farm for truant boys. He’d just put his fist through a jeweler’s window and torn his hand to the bone. He huddled under a railroad bridge beside the green and viscous flow of the Houston Ship Channel. The gold he’d stolen was littered across his lap. In the pouring rain, that dark spring evening, he knew he would have to find some better way.
And now he had twenty-eight churches coast to coast-acquired for next to nothing from dwindling bands of Methodists and Lutherans. Each had a slot like the one downstairs where the elect surrendered the things of this world. Poverty was salvation. Or to put it another way, God was a sort of bank where no one touched the principal.
Now he held up the back of his hand, as if he meant to consult the time. He could still trace the jagged scar, tattooed like a bolt of lightning. In the end, of course, it all came down to how little it cost to keep eighty thousand people drugged and fed and sheltered. Precious little, as it turned out, once you’d gotten them all to practice lives of deep desirelessness. Give them bread and water, and they’d steal for you. They’d stand on corners selling prayers. Would die, if they were asked.
“Father, I’m coming up,” called Norman Cates from the landing.
Clearly, here was a man brought up to be a good Catholic. He spoke the paternal title shyly, though Michael knew he had not confessed to anything in years. Perhaps because these two had met entirely by chance—the day the Revelation church passed papers on this property—they’d been prepared from the very first to go their separate ways. They had no illusion that all their dealings had wed them to each other. Norman had worked for the moribund bishop, deaccessioning real estate to keep His Grace in Belgian linen. He did these legal niceties free of charge, on the vague presumption that he thus took care of the civic if not the moral sphere. Michael simply made him see that a clever man had options. Why lag back with the charity cases, if one could be in at the birth of a whole new order?
“I thought you’d be all ready, Father.”
“I am,” said Michael, most precisely.
He turned to the three-piece lawyer, who stood beside the bed. As always, Norman lugged around a bulging attaché case, as if today were another affair of papers wanting signatures. Perhaps because he was ten years Michael’s senior—that, and the pinched demeanor—he seemed the more likely priest between them. Michael, drab as ever in busman’s jacket, baggy pants, and sneakers, appeared to have strayed much further afield from the well-trimmed path of righteousness.
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“Why don’t we go have breakfast?” Norman suggested, not without cheer.
“Sit down, please.”
It wasn’t quite a command, but there didn’t seem room to say no, either. The lawyer stooped to the edge of the mattress, where he perched gingerly, case in hand. He clearly didn’t like the place. No telling what indignities his parish priest had brought him to in the timid days of his youth. But he made the best of things, as always. He firmly believed he could get through anything, merely by being polite. He did not countenance crisis.
“Listen,” Michael announced, a certain quaver creeping in. From the strange, expectant look on his face, he seemed about to apprise the other of some faint tremor in the earth beneath. He picked up a sheet of paper and held it top and bottom like a scroll. “This ought to do the trick,” he said, gone bright with sudden confidence. Then he let his voice go down a notch—one could scarcely keep up with the changes he rang—so the words he now read out were hard and oddly stilted.
“We must go into the wilderness,” recited Michael Roman, healer of souls.
The predawn light had increased so far that the objects on the table began to yield to the shine of life. Michael’s weird, compulsive energy was rampant, even here: chewed-up pencils, candy bars, over-the-counter drugs. But beside all that, a dozen lockets and fine-set jewels were heaped in a jumble like a pirate’s treasure. The long, bone-handled knife did not seem out of place beside them. It had a ceremonial air—Egyptian, almost. Something made to sever the hands of those who violated tombs.
“Will that be enough, do you think?” asked Michael, when the lawyer made no comment.
“You’ll be out in five years, you know,” Norman said. “Two, if we’re lucky. Trust me.”
“You’ll notice I’ve written it out myself.”
He passed the paper across, ignoring Norman Cates’s practical remarks. The lawyer snapped his briefcase open and dropped the document in without a glance. The filing of things was paramount.
