Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  The two stayed in close contact until the early 1970s, when she and Bono found themselves in New York at the same time. They fell in love, or admitted their love, or maybe just took up living together. They lived in Chava’s house in Canada and Bono’s in Australia, dividing the year between north and south, with numerous excursions to distant points in between. Their relationship was smooth and happy, and Chava never felt compelled to transform it into fiction. Then, in the spring of 1995, a strange anxiety overtook Chava. Bono could not live forever, and after he was gone, what would the world—what would she—have left of him? She insisted he write his memoirs.

  Bono had never written his book about the ghetto, and he was not prepared to write his own story. Instead, he told Chava all that he remembered. She began to write not a novel but a biography. That summer Chava completed a draft of her first chapter, the story of his childhood. Satisfied with her work, she put it away and decided to read it to him the next day. The following morning Bono had a stroke. A few days later he died.

  Not long afterward Di goldene keyt, the journal that had always published Chava’s work, ceased publication. This second blow nearly killed her. But she survived. In thinking about Bono’s life, she realized that the man who had always seemed whole and complete, living in the present but aware of the past, had in fact also doubled himself. The documents he had carried with him? “They were his alter ego.” No matter how long he lived, he would never have written his book. To do so would have been too close to the life he still lived.

  Chava revised her single chapter about Bono, ending it with a story about a trip they once took to Tahiti. They stayed in a hotel set on a cliff overlooking the sea. During their first night a hurricane hit the island. The electricity went out. Chava watched through darkness as uprooted trees and twisted pieces of roofing flew past their balcony. Bono, meanwhile, prepared for bed.

  “How can you sleep at a moment like this?” she yelled. “Can’t you see what’s going on outside?”

  “Why exactly should I start worrying now?” Bono answered. Then he turned to the wall and slept. Chava, shivering, stayed by the window through the night, watching the storm.

  7Clouds, When Determined by Context

  RADIO ON: MARCH 1950, station WING out of Dayton, Ohio, 1410 on the AM dial. The Bible Speaks, and your hosts Doyle D. Warner and G. Gene Honer are giving it voice over the air. Two two-bit radio preachers bringing you the news—on scripture time. Prophecy; ancient patterns revealed; the Russian scheme foretold. The end, nigh. Unless, that is, we heed the warning. To wit: Look to the sky. Not for the Second Coming but for death from above. Russian bombers, jet fighters, flying fortresses. Maybe even—scripture suggests—Russian UFOs. Daniel predicted as much, say the preachers: “Desolation coming from wings overhead,” a riff on the Book of Daniel 9:27, “And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate.”

  Are these broadcasters insane, their spittle like static as it crackles against the microphones? Is anybody listening? Does anybody care?

  A preacher named Abraham Vereide cares. Vereide has no church, but his flock is comprised of congressmen and businessmen. He meets them in offices and boardrooms. Silver haired, gentle tongued, elegantly tailored, a pinstripe man, he never embarrasses them. He believes God speaks to him; Vereide translates His messages into country-club vernacular. Since the start of the year he has been filing transcripts of Warner and Honer’s program among his folders of newsletters and tracts and broadsides, the ephemera of fringe fundamentalism—Christian Patriot and Christian Economics and Intelligence Digest, a monthly chronicle of Soviet espionage and theological counterweapons—funneled into his files, there to be squeezed, distilled, and transformed into Bible lessons for his followers, men too busy to listen to radio late into the night. Vereide doesn’t have a pulpit; he works across the desks of politicians. His flock, he says, are “key men,” “top men,” through whom God’s blessings will trickle down. Vereide doesn’t preach weird religion, never speaks to his disciples of UFOs or death from above, but he knows how to hear the signals, to make sense of the code—to translate airwaves from Dayton and rants from the dozens of letters he receives every day from burghers and petty officials, the little big men of the provinces, into breakfast-club homilies, garnishes for eggs and bacon and the bonhomie of political piety. Vereide is the middle man. Vereide makes fundamentalism sound sane.

  Maybe it is. Or “reasonable,” in the literal sense of the word, which is the only one in which men like Doyle D. Warner and G. Gene Honer can believe. That is: created by cause. Think of the moment at which they’re channeling their prophecies into the nights of Ohio, the “hard heart of hickland” in the vernacular of those who know that purest America is lousy with corruption and sin, the decadence of victory and the nightmares “our boys” brought home from the war, more crippling than any social disease. It’s just five years after VJ-day, and Harry Truman, a onetime haberdasher puffed into power by the racketeers of the Kansas City Pendergrast political machine, is steering the nation toward yet another field of blood and gore and dead young men. They do not quite understand why we fight in Korea, but then, they didn’t quite understand the last war, either. If they’d been soldiers, they might’ve seen firsthand the “wings” Daniel dreamed of, the bombing, the cities of friends and enemies in desolation, indeed—

  How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! laments the prophet Jeremiah. How is she become as a widow!

  If the listeners were too old for fighting, they’ve seen the widow just the same, in the newsreels that preface every movie. The movies themselves are filled with men who aren’t quite right, men who’re afraid, men who have seen things. Orson Welles slides through the ruins of postwar Vienna in The Third Man, telling his buddy to forget the orphans poisoned by Welles’s snake oil. There is no right or wrong anymore. In DOA, the best of the B’s, a man goes to the police to report a murder—his own, by radiation poisoning. Even comedies are peculiar: Picture Jimmy Stewart lost to his vapors, raising a toast to an invisible rabbit called Harvey. In science fiction, American G-men race against Red agents to find the ultimate weapon, The Flying Saucer.

  In Los Angeles a thirty-year-old Bible college president named Dr. William Frank Graham has just become Billy to the nation, launching the biggest revival since the days of Billy Sunday, thirty years past. The new Billy, preaching in arenas and stadiums, makes the wild old vaudeville Billy seem buttoned down. New-Billy wears pastel suits and hand-painted ties, the best he can afford. He’s almost good looking enough to play a cowboy, a gunfighter, his soon-to-be-famous blue eyes glowering between his rock jaw and a wave of blond hair, menace and sincerity. Hero or villain? He has been to the desert, weeping over the wheel of his car on the outskirts of the city weeks before the revival, wandering alone in the dark through the California hills. Submit, submit, urges his friend J. Edwin Orr, a Vereide man, translating the transmissions into theology for the nation. Billy doesn’t know how, doubts swarm his mind. Submit, submit. “Starve doubt, feed freedom,” says Vereide.

  At the start of his great revival, Billy declares himself a free man with a trumpet-blast sermon, twenty straight verses from the prophet Isaiah as its opening. “Ah, sinful nation,” he begins, his voice curling around the crowd. “A people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption!” To them he brings a vision: “Your cities burned by fire!”

  The Soviets have tested their first nuclear weapon, years ahead of schedule. Mao has completed the communist takeover of China, the “sleeping giant” of which FDR had warned the nation. Asia is lost, and Soviet tanks muster in East Germany. The American forces facing off against them are meant at best to be a “trip wire,” to give the United States enough time to get its bombers in the air.

  Too late. God has chosen Russia as His “chastening rod” and awarded as her prize the flying saucers from the movies, the better to execute
His wishes. Such is the writing on the screen. Scripture could not make it more plain: “In the first place,” declare Warner and Honer, “we have the following biblical terminology which is descriptive of the Flying Saucer: Chariots of GOD, Wheels of Ezekiel and of Daniel, Glittering Spears, Shining Arrows, Flying Swords, Flying Sickles, Shafts of Lightning, Engines of War (from which are hurled Hailstones of Fire).”

  The list goes on: “Weapons of Indignation, Weapons out of His Armory, Weapons Out of Heaven, New Sharp Threshing Instrument, Whirlwinds, Burning Winds, Flaming Chariots, Armored Chariots, Chariots of Salvation.”

  Finally: “Clouds, when determined by context.”

  The Christianity of American fundamentalism is a faith for futurists, the sort of people who delight in imagining what is to come next, even if it’s awful. The brightest of the believers realize that to hone one’s predictions, one must study the past as well. Our Ohio radio men declare that to be wise as serpents, one must be both a futurist and a historian. But World War II has changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it. It had at times raced toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its disposal—no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes are higher, the enemy stronger. In 1950 American fundamentalism responds not by following the trend of spotting flying saucers and aliens among us but by drawing it down to earth, science fiction transformed into the raw material of new political facts, old-time religion resurrecting as the cyborg doctrine—part faith, part technology—that hums and blinks and winks in the same sea of pixels in which you are as likely as not reading this transmission from fundamentalism’s past.

  8It Costs Nothing to Say

  VERA SCHNABEL* FELL in love with Jesus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she was seventeen, a shy but enthusiastic exchange student from Berlin who was overwhelmed by America. But she got to know him back home, at Gemeinde auf dem Weg, the Church on the Way. Where exactly the church was on its way to, Vera could not say. Her English was perfect, her grasp of middle American colloquialisms complete, but she had no ear for wordplay in a language not her own.

  Her eyes were enormous, the color of chestnuts. She wore inexpensive blue jeans and off-brand sneakers, her honey blond hair trimmed neatly in a perfunctory bob. The American English of the modern “praise songs” her pastor projected on two screens—one on either side of the church’s cross, as if Jesus himself held the lyrics aloft—appealed to her most of all for its clarity. German is precise, given to passionless conjugation and endless accretion of suffix and prefix. But English—its most precious words were those disdained by her parents in Berlin as simultaneously too small and too large, the revelation of spiritual one-size-fits-all. Antique lieben blushed becomingly as “love.” Herr dropped his formality and revealed himself as “the Lord.” A forgotten Gott shaved one consonant and rounded the other to become “God,” and then He gave Vera His Living Word: “Jesus.” Jesus; Jesus; Jesus. She loved His name. It sounded so simple, so American.

  She met Him during her second year in Tulsa. She’d gone in response to the startling realization, in ninth grade, that Berlin was a place one could leave. When she told me this, she sang a verse of “I’ll Fly Away.” Vera loved flying, airports, and airplanes: great, living machines designed to translate people from one place to another. From Berlin to Tulsa. From lost to found.

  Her first year in Oklahoma felt like living in an airport. Translation. Which to Vera, back before she let Jesus into her heart, was the closest thing to heaven imaginable. To be always on the verge of moving, of going, of leaving, of arriving. Of becoming.

  When her American year was over, she signed on for another. Her host family—wealthy, white, suburban—decided they could no longer support her. So she moved in with her friend Ellen. Ellen was a scholarship student at the Christian academy in which the suburbanites had enrolled Vera. Ellen was black, very poor, and a Baptist. She lived in what Vera called “the black American slum,” but she had so many brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles that the addition of Vera at her family’s dinner table seemed to make no difference at all. When the family went to their storefront church, they brought Vera along and poked her up front to stand next to Ellen in the choir. Vera felt like a little white spot, blushing red, a stain. She could feel eyes on her; so she sang. Don’t look, she thought, listen. The songs lifted her up high, and up there in the sky she was an angel, just like her black brothers and sisters. She wasn’t an American, she wasn’t a German, she was nothing: She disappeared into the clouds and came out the other side a believer.

  When she returned to Germany and told her parents what had happened to her in America, they were not pleased. Her mother had flirted with God as a girl and given up on winning his attention. She’d left the state church at age eighteen, as soon as Vera’s grandparents had allowed. Neither she nor Vera’s father cared for Vera’s American Jesus, or the changes he had worked in their daughter. The quiet will that had led Vera to America on her own at age fifteen had returned transformed into a disdain for what she’d left behind. Not that she disliked Berlin; she loved it, was glad to be home. She wanted more than anything else to see her native city, her native land, redeemed. She wanted to get on the other side of that verb, to help redeem: Erlösen.

  So she looked for a choir. For angels with whom to sing. None nested in the quiet old Catholic cathedrals of Berlin, havens for “religion,” which was everything that knowing Jesus personally was not. Nor in the civic temples of Lutheranism, where thin-lipped pastors practiced a desiccated theology in return for a government stipend that came whether they preached it to two old ladies or two hundred (more often the former).

  Upon her return she’d transferred to an English-language school for expat kids, JFK High. There she met a boy who wore a T-shirt for the band POD. POD was popular with kids who wore webbed bracelets that reminded them to ask themselves, What Would Jesus Do? Vera wore one herself. WWJD? Speak truth to popularity, she decided. “You know, POD isn’t really a Christian band,” she told the boy. “No?” he said. Vera explained. About commodification (“They sell our Lord”) and consumerism (“We think we can buy Him”), her beautiful English words translated back into German. “We are all Judas now,” she told him. “Okay,” said the boy, a little freaked out by this intense German girl channeling Tulsa. “You win. But let me tell you something.” He told her about a church, one like no other in Berlin. The Church on the Way.

  Vera had been a member of the church for two years when I met her. Membership, though, was as fluid for the church as geography: The Church on the Way was always on the move, seeking to expand in the material world to account for the room it needed in the spiritual realm. Twenty years old, it had ratcheted up to bigger and bigger buildings four times in the past two years, like a set of lungs that breathes in but never exhales.

  Vera had been assigned to me as a translator by Pastor Fabian, or Fab, a goateed young man with a shaved head who ran the church’s youth program. The night I met Vera was the occasion of an in-gathering of the tribe, youth delegations from eight evangelical churches around Berlin, about four hundred kids and twenty-somethings, the boys and men in baggy jeans halfway off their asses, the girls and women in tight jeans that seemed purposely to not quite cover theirs. I’d been pointed to the church by the local Billy Graham operation, told there’d be a translator, and since this wasn’t exactly true, foisted off on Vera despite the fact that the night I visited was not only a Special Day of Prayer but also her twenty-first birthday. She didn’t seem to mind. “We have energy!” she exclaimed, hopping up and down. “This is the place!”

  I confessed that I wasn’t a believer, not her kind anyway, and that I was there as an observer. I’m a religious voyeur, I told her. She laughed—a grown-up, self-aware chuckle—and guided me over to a group of her friends.

  We sat in hard chairs covered in brown fabric. The carpet was gray, the ceiling low and constructe
d of row upon row of cement egg cartons intended to prevent sound from drifting out of the building. It stood at the end of a dark block of Babelsberger Strasse, in a section of town that, architecturally speaking, resembled the ceiling of the church: box after dimly lit box on streets illuminated by pale strips of fluorescence on poles. Next door was a computer megastore, and the following block was a dark vacant lot. Since there were no windows, Pastor Fab had purchased eight-foot-long glossy photo murals of the city, generic scenes of a Berlin barely recognizable as any different from a dozen other cities similarly graced with the time-exposed streaking red-and-yellow lights of cars, constellations of twinkling office windows, a dark blue river, a bright blue sky. There were no pictures of Jesus, just a blank cross, six feet high, white, illuminated—an afterimage that burned in its worshippers’ minds when they closed their eyes.

  A “worship group” led us, and projected screens of lyrics guided us. The band consisted of a broad-hipped girl in low-slung jeans, her voice sweet like drinking a Shirley Temple through a straw; a boy with dark hair in his eyes and brown fuzz on his chin, a studded metal belt not really suspending his jeans; a tall spike of a drummer banging at his set behind a Plexiglas screen; a hunchbacked keyboarder; and a bass player, tallest and most Teutonic, dressed in faded black jeans tucked into heavy black boots, a black jacket over a black turtleneck beneath a black scarf wrapped round and round his neck. His jaw could have broken ice for the Titanic. The fuzz-chinned boy sang. He was best on the German songs, the tunes on which he could spiral down the neck of his guitar and yelp like a coyote: Oy! Oy! Oy! God-ska.

  “He is saying,” Vera whispered into my ear, “that we welcome Jesus our Lord into our hearts and that we hope that He will help us love another.”