Disciples

by Austin Wright

  I thought about not being smart enough. I thought about Oliver helping me and Loomer helping me and Harry helping me. I thought who will help me now. I thought how rotten not to be smarter. I thought if I was smarter then I wouldn’t be here. I thought whose fault was that.

  I thought whose fault. Everybody talking whose fault it was not theirs. Oliver Quinn got killed whose fault was that. Not David Leo. Loomer. David Leo escaped from the island whose fault was that. Not Loomer. David Leo. Nicky Foster killed Loomer whose fault was that. Not Harry. Not Nicky. Nicky is dumb whose fault is that. The voice said if not nobody somebody.

  It said if Nicky wasn’t dumb I’d know what to do. I thought why isn’t Nicky like Harry. I thought Loomer said don’t blame me blame God God made you ask him. I thought that. I thought it again. I never thought it before.

  I thought if God made me dumb why. If God made me dumb and Loomer smart why. Oliver smart why. Harry smart why. David Leo the black brown man why. If why I’d know what to do.

  I thought like I’d never thought before. I thought if Loomer killed Oliver Nicky killed Loomer. If Nicky killed Loomer they’ll kill Nicky. I thought who will kill them who killed Nicky. I thought if I don’t do it no one will. No one will care. I thought about nobody caring for Nicky. It made me cry.

  I sat in the woods a long time. I was thinking about God made me dumb. I remembered the lady said God loves you. I thought how she knew. Loomer said God made me dumb. I thought how God made some people dumb and me dumber than anybody. I thought if that was fair. I thought if God could change it if you asked him.

  The police car came back. Miller went into the altered barn. Everybody ran around. People said meeting. I thought if meeting I should go. I was scared. I thought if people think I killed Loomer. God will save me. I remembered people said God would save me.

  I went to the meeting. I walked in the back. Miller talked about Loomer. I don’t know what he said. I saw the policeman and the guns. I thought about the guns shooting me.

  I went up to Miller. Somebody said if he’s God he’s my guru. Miller told me to sit down.

  It said if Miller’s God he owes me something. It said he doesn’t know I have to tell him. Dumb people don’t know things like that. Dumb people don’t know when they know something that somebody else doesn’t know. It said even God doesn’t know he owes me something and I am not as dumb as he thinks. I went up front to tell him.

  He told me to sit down. It said not yet first I have to tell him. But I have to be fair so I said are you Miller.

  He said I knew who he was like I was dumb to ask which was dumb of him since I knew who he was and it wasn’t why I asked.

  I said are you God. He said he was the lord God almighty maker of heaven and earth and all the critters material and spiritual living therein and there was no God but he and if I didn’t take it up with him I couldn’t take it up with nobody. His voice clanged like my aunt’s silver set and gonged like the sun and crackled like the earth falling down.

  I said if you are God why did you make me like you did. I said why do I always need somebody else to think for me and tell me what to do. I said why do I need a guru to lead me why can’t I see for myself like a guru and why did you make people laugh at me and kill my gurus and make me kill them back and why did you make me so now they’ll chase me into the woods for the things you made me do and make me die under a leaf and rot away.

  He said come closer I can’t hear you. It said he was outwitting me like Loomer. I wouldn’t let him so I pushed the gun into his middle and squeezed the trigger. It went bang in my hand inside him like a pillow and I pulled back and felt good like Loomer and the TV. He made a face and fell down. Someone grabbed me and somebody pulled me away. Someone shouted and I heard another bang and another bang and I ran out the door.

  I saw them chasing me so I ran to the woods and the path up the waterfall. I watched me run. I run up the waterfall path hard and I heard some bang banging behind me but mostly not and it was quiet in the woods except the heavy breathing.

  The heavy breathing climbed up the path beside the waterfall. The path was steep. It never climbed so fast before.

  I didn’t hear anybody chasing me. I got to the top and said what am I going to do. I wished I had a guru. I thought Meditation Point where people sit. I thought if I stayed would they come after me.

  I sat down at the top. The water poured over the edge like a pitcher. I couldn’t see the tiger’s tongue. I couldn’t see the elephant pecker. All I could see was the edge where the water poured. I remembered Oliver and wondered how I could kill David Leo if I couldn’t see the tiger’s tongue or the elephant’s pecker. I thought if Miller didn’t know what I was talking about. If Miller didn’t make me an idiot. If nobody knew what I was talking about. If nobody made me an idiot. I thought if I was not an idiot what was I doing here. Harry said I wasn’t an idiot I was a moron. I said what’s the difference. Harry said I couldn’t ask that question if I was an idiot was the difference. I said was it normal for a moron to be what I was doing here. I said would they stop chasing me if they knew I was a moron. I said would they stop chasing me if they knew I was not a moron. If I was not as dumb as they say I am.

  I saw the men at the bottom. They were standing at the foot of the falls looking up. They were next to the spray with long guns in their hands. They were looking up at me. I thought if I can’t see the tiger tongue or elephant pecker I am safe. Then I thought but they can see the tiger tongue and elephant pecker and I am not safe. A dumb person wouldn’t think like that.

  The Meditation Point was on the other side. I had to cross over the water like David Leo. Like Oliver Quinn. I thought if I don’t cross they will climb up and catch me on this side. If I do cross I will be David Leo Oliver Quinn. It was because I let Loomer kill Oliver instead of me kill David Leo. I owed this to God because I let Loomer do it instead of me.

  I thought if they kill me I will die. I thought what that would be like. I thought most people don’t like to die. I thought why. I thought if I am going to die I wouldn’t know what to do with my life if I didn’t. I thought a smarter person like Loomer would not have come up this path. A really smart person would have taken the empty police car that was sitting in the clearing with its lights going around. Loomer would have taken that car and roared out with his sirens going. I thought a smart person like Harry would not cross over the waterfall. A really smart person like Harry would go to the back of the pond here. Such a person would be out of sight of the people below. He would cross the stream at the back of the pond instead of the front. Then he would go through the woods to Meditation Point and the people down below wouldn’t know. That would make him smarter than them. I thought when he got to Meditation Point a smart person would keep on going. He would go back into the woods and into the mountains. He would cross the mountains and come out someplace else and nobody would know where he had gone. That’s what a smart person would do. I thought why can’t I do that. I thought the reason I can’t do that is that Nicky Foster is a moron. That’s why people love him. If he wasn’t a moron he wouldn’t know what to do and people wouldn’t love him any more.

  This made me happy. I stood up and started across the waterfall. I looked down and saw the men raising their guns and pointing them at me.

  27

  Miller

  When Miller woke in His bed with the old woman, He knew His time had come. No source told Him, the knowledge seeped through the Amnesia. The old woman slept and He looked on her with pity and blessed her with happiness.

  He prepared for the day neither pursuing nor dreading what was to come, which He knew would arrive in time. He took His coffee and roll in His office and read the day’s documents to be signed. The first indication was the police car that silently entered the compound and the policeman who told Him of a man killed on the sidewalk in Wicker Falls. They believed the victim lived at Miller Farm and they wanted Miller to identify him.

  As He rode in the police car to Wicker
Falls He knew this was the final day. He knew who had been killed needing only the sight of his face to draw the veil of Amnesia from that knowledge. He went with the policeman into the hardware store where the body lay. It was on a table by stacks of screens full length on its back, face like a Roman dictator, the body of Jake Loomer. When Miller saw him He grieved. He was my heir, He said.

  They tagged the body of Jake Loomer and brought Miller back to the Farm. They used the sirens now because a suspect had been spotted driving Loomer’s pickup. When Miller returned He called a meeting. His disciples assembled and Miller told them the news. A moan of sorrow went up. Let there be peace, Miller said, deploring the tendency of the godly to divide into factions. He was about to say more when the man whom history will remember as the Deprived appeared in the back of the room. When Miller saw him He knew through the Amnesia what was about to happen.

  Are you God? the Deprived said.

  If you believe it.

  Did you make me what I am today?

  If you believe it.

  Why did you do that?

  Miller answered him. While the man held a pistol to Miller’s body Miller explained the world. He read the law that separates wheat from chaff. Some die that others may live. The flower yields to the plant. Your father died to make room for you. He spoke of the evolution of life from one-celled creatures and sea urchins and trilobites to lungfish and lizards and ocelots, with species going extinct that others may grow, for millions of years before mankind rose on the backs of the extinct. He spoke of the men and women who have lived since men and women first appeared, ancestors before language and after language, before and within history all in the flash of an eye, all before you came in your own life that like all others stands upon the dead. The dead that you too shall join. He spoke of the would-be lives, millions swarming even now in the body of every future father and mother, protected in the deep inside where they wait in the warm juice of life. In the moment of surge and connection these millions of potential lives rise like salmon into the stream where all but one will fall, the lucky one who can outreach the million dead competitors against odds greater than a lottery, though this winner may never know or acknowledge that winning luck. And Miller told the Deprived how even these luckiest survivors live only for the briefest of spans. And among them, the temporary survivors, creatures in the sea slime or individuals in a nest or people in a crowd, there will always be some whose manufacture is flawed. A detail gone wrong. A minor error in transmission, with consequences sometimes unnoticeable, sometimes inconvenient, even disabling. A deformed leaf, the feebleness of a runt, mental deficiency in a child. So Miller explained the Deprived’s condition but the man did not have the understanding to follow. Intent upon his grievance and the machine in his hand, his finger activated God’s chemistry in an explosion forceful enough to drive a pellet through the body of His incarnation. This pellet, innocuous as a pebble at rest but rendered monstrous and terrible by the energy of speed, tore God’s organism, severing enough vessels and lines of communication to block their functions. Obedient to God’s own laws of chemistry, physics, and biology, God’s body could only die.

  Now as Miller lay mortally wounded among His disciples He faced the questions of His existence. In pain, afflicted by His inability to will a remedy against His own laws, He asked, is this what my creatures go through? His eyes open, He could see only people’s feet, muddy farm boots, sneakers, sandals, open shoes with painted toenails. What have I done? He said.

  God is dying, He told Himself, shocked. But God cannot die or be shocked. The Amnesia must end. He looked forward to that, the release from sixty years in this body back into knowledge and power. Lying on the floor He tried to regain the divine memory forfeited when He adopted this shape, searching outside His mind for the shining of eternal knowledge.

  Remember, remember, He urged Himself, trying to overcome the Amnesia by thinking back to its origins. He remembered His youth, asking the question that once seemed so mysterious: Who is God? Who was God when as a boy in a state of innocent amnesia he thought he was only a boy? Why, he thought, God is the Father, capitalized, not his life father but the Father of us all, ruling and judging. He loved God in place of his unknown biological father just as he loved the good foster fathers and mothers, three different families, who raised him. He loved because he believed God loved him, and he grew up in that spirit of love extended to life which God gave him emulating his foster mother Clare and his other foster parents, and he thought himself obliged to please this love-judging God just as he pleased his loving and judging substitute parents. As a child he imagined talking to God, reciting the formal phrases that God expected and adding in his own impromptu language what he wanted God to hear. He grew up so enamored of God that he thought God said things to him that He said to nobody else, that God shared secrets with him and loved him more than he loved others.

  He observed with amazement how fortunate he was, just as the agency people said, to have such good foster parents even though each foster visit came to an end, terminated in one case by death, in another by a family breakup, in the third by causes he never knew. Yet even as he grieved for these transient parents good fortune followed. How gently and indulgently the kindly families in their different ways gave him what he needed. How fortunate not to be poor. To be healthy. People called him good looking and women loved him. Everyone praised him for qualities he did not have to work to develop, and he cultivated their praise. He praised himself. He heard God in his ear telling him what a good boy he was, how special. Someday you’ll be famous, God said. The world will look up to you. How different it could have been if you had been one of those people around you who are not you. If you had been the wheelchair cripple across the street or a black boy or a dog. Whose mind are you? God seemed to ask, which could only mean that he was unique. No one else saw the world out of his eyes. No one else was he. Only he was he. How extraordinary that was, like a miracle.

  He went to high school and college and seminary. He went to seminary because he loved God in exchange for God’s loving him. His love for God was indistinguishable from his love for life. He was ordained and went first to assist another man and then to a congregation of his own in a suburb of Philadelphia where he was welcomed as our handsome young minister. He acquired a minister’s wife and his congregation was pleased.

  Yet as he preached his sermons and practiced his love for God, something happened to him, beginning perhaps as a strain between the minister and his young wife. He was drawn to other women. The attraction of certain women in his office was so compelling that it could only be the voice of God telling him clearly not to refrain but take lustily what was offered. Which he did, with the scandal that ensued. Nor would the scandal die as the voice of God encouraged him to replenish it. He mistrusted this voice of God that now seemed so full of contradiction. The more he spoke to his congregations about the word of God the more he wondered if he knew what that word was. The fatherly God of his childhood withdrew. The God speaking in his sermons now sounded like an automaton invented by himself.

  He lost touch with the God he used to know. This did not kill the idea of God in his heart but it made him wonder where God was. He envisioned God now as deep in the universe among the stars and dispersed in life through geological ages from the sea. He read philosophers and scientists and listening for the voice of God he could no longer distinguish between what he heard and what he wanted to hear. The voice grew more remote until it seemed like no human voice at all but the stars speaking.

  Ousted from his church, he took his best followers to support him in the Philadelphia apartment while he tried to find God to tell him what to do. He no longer knew where the voices in his head came from. Some urged him to forget a God that perhaps did not exist and utilize his charm to advantage as by becoming an automobile salesman in a well stocked modern dealership. Others told him to confront the abyss. They said the voices he heard were noise generated by his head. The universe made itself and h
e was its accident as perishable as a paramecium on a slide.

  The truth or what he took to be the truth came to him while he sat on a park bench a few days after he had been attacked by a mugger on the waterfront. He was slashed in the eye but struck back with such rage that he killed his attacker, leaving him in the street. He expected to hear from God about what he had done, but no word came, nor was he apprehended by police. On the bench with a bandage where his eye had been, he brooded about the silence. This was the moment known in the Miller annals as the Revelation, although the total revelation was more gradual than a moment. The first step was a vision of the absence of God, the emptiness of the universe. The paramecium revelation. Which would have filled him once with despair but now with relief except for the followers who thought he had a private line to God. Now they were stuck with him for something in which he no longer believed. It occurred to him that an ordinary person in such a situation would think of suicide, but not he because he enjoyed everything too much. This first light did not look like light, it looked false, like visible darkness, an opportunistic idea rather than a godly revelation. He did not yet realize that he had been the victim all his life of Divine Amnesia.

  No God above or within, the universe an abyss, this was freedom, for if no one is watching he can do what he likes, even the most radical and amoral things. Look up to see who’s in charge. If no one’s there how high can he rise? If he wants to rise, what constitutes up? What formerly constituted up was God on a throne. If there’s no God what’s to keep him from claiming the throne himself? That’s how he began, a game, a gesture, an act. Suppose I were God, with appropriate explanations easy to invent for why I take this embodiment in this time and place. He brought his followers into the game, or mystery, tactfully nurturing their love to try it out, see what it was like. Suppose I were God, what would we do, how would we live, how would we explain ourselves? He lost a few of them that way. They said he had gone mad or they took it too seriously confusing sport with fraud, but enough remained and were persuaded just as he was persuaded.