Disciples

by Austin Wright

  He practiced the part of incarnate God as a gesture to the void. A life-giving act of maximum audacity. As he did so he became habituated. The thick wall of the Amnesia began to leak. Hypothesis became knowledge. Metaphor turned literal. Pretense was reality. So too with His followers who became prophets and disciples. There was never a deception between Him and them. They shared His perception of the abyss and the Original Hypothesis, a deliberate construction of What If? What if?, the basis of the Miller Church. Let Miller be God as given and we His disciples. As supposition turned into belief, fortified with enthusiasm, their numbers grew, they became a community with property, a place to live, an institution.

  Once near the beginning Ed Hansel asked, Aren’t you afraid you’ll be struck by lightning? Thinking it worse to impersonate God than deny Him. To which Miller, who was learning his new theology fast, replied that it’s the idea of God that counts since God is One despite the variety of his appearances to men.

  Soon Miller discovered that this trained belief could do good. Assisted by his original followers, he became a rescuer of people in despair, his community a haven. He saved them in the same way in which he had found himself, by making them name his divinity, state it in words repeatedly until the absurdity disappeared. Strange became familiar, false became true. It was a technique like twelve steps and the rituals of psychiatry. Postulating Miller as God and discovering thereby how to create belief made it easy for the sufferer to make a new world indifferent to whatever had oppressed him, failure, death, and the chains of what ordinary people called reality.

  All this Miller remembered as He lay on the floor with human life draining away. He tried to speak, thinking, This is the arc moment, and my words should be heard. But his body was weak, the words were not audible enough to be taken down.

  He tried to penetrate the Amnesia and was afraid. What if the Amnesia failed to yield? What if the memory loss were permanent? Would the Godhead be lost too? Can God die? Can He die and the universe remain the same?

  No one knows what happened to Miller in the end. So who is this speaking for Him, telling the last moments of the dying mind? Or does the story simply write itself as it always does, pretending as usual to know what it can’t, imagining in this case how the feet of the people and their voices faded as Miller went blind and deaf? Supposing that instead of expanding the universe closed around Him like a box. That He gasped for memory but instead of dispersing, the black Amnesia moved in closer deleting still more memory as if it meant to leave none at all. That drowning He prayed to Himself for the light to be restored. Yet perhaps (for now everything in the record is enclosed in perhaps as certainty grows dim) as the light refused to come His spirit ceased to struggle. He lay where He lay in the dark and wanted to rest. Memory reduced to fragments, (perhaps) He was yet able to remember the boy with the gun who wanted an explanation for the unfairness of life, and (perhaps) He was still able to murmur in the darkness, Forgive him his ignorance. Let’s hope so. (Perhaps) He awoke enough to add, Forgive me too. To whom would He be speaking if he did? He wondered (perhaps) if the godless vacuum in which He had found His divinity were not godless after all, if there were something he had overlooked. And (perhaps) he noticed something skittering around in the box that contained Him, scurrying away like a mouse or other little animal, something that skated over his blood and out of reach like a pronoun, a letter, a capital I, a name like God, disappearing like a marble down a chute, and after it a name like Miller, dropping down the drain, and his long forgotten first name which the women at the orphanage gave him because his father and mother were unknown, the name Christian (Christian Miller) which he abandoned later as inappropriate for a reason now forgotten as the name itself was forgotten, this also scampering away with patter feet leaving him without any name at all. So that ultimately he found himself (perhaps) in a position where he had forgotten everything except that he had a message to tell, or story, or gospel, though he had forgotten what it was, and the tragedy was that he had no teller, no disciple who knew the words, so that if he was dying his message and godhood as well as the universe would die with him and never be known. Except for what we can guess or imagine by looking at him dead on the floor.

  28

  Lena Fowler Armstrong

  The oddest detail in this story is the waterfall murder. I noticed it when Harry told me David Leo’s story. As a murder plan it’s so strange it must have meant something to the murderer. The three murderers. When I returned to Miller Farm I visited the waterfall trying to make it speak.

  I came to Miller Farm to live. I gave the Millerites an endowment asking only that they let me stay with them. I moved in July and have been here two months. I keep Anchor Island for visits, but Miller Farm is my home.

  I am learning how to live, for it’s different from my life before. They gave me a bedroom on the second floor next to Miller’s, which is now a shrine. They treat me like their new leader, though I didn’t ask for that. I’d prefer to live inconspicuously but because I paid for the land and living expenses in perpetuity they regard me as priestess or even a new Miller.

  Maria Garn calls me Saint Lena. I am the saint who rescued the Farm. I told her saints are not named to their face and if she calls me saint how dare I show my face? I couldn’t stop her. It hurts her feelings when I scold her so I let her do it.

  I walked the grounds with Maria and Ed Hansel. We stopped at each cottage, and I spoke to everyone, the children too. They showed me the garage and the padlocked shed where the guns are kept. I don’t like guns, why do you keep them? I asked. Oh my goodness, Hansel said, after what happened last spring? I kept my silence. Let me not be rule maker here. Saint Lena. I have the best room in the big house. I sit at the main table where Miller sat. I open and close the prayer meetings. I look over the accounts. Tradesmen and reporters deal with me, I am the Miller spokesman by default. A group from outside once asked me to make a statement condemning the police for the Miller Massacre. I refused. I don’t like the word Massacre, considering that only three of the seven deaths were actually caused by the police. Though I agree the police response to the Foster panic was excessive, I refused to say they started it or that it was a government conspiracy. I explained this to the people in the Farm and they agreed with me.

  Our walk took us to the pond where Quinn was cremated first and the six victims collectively later. The grass was still scorched, which brought the rites to life for me. I’m an old lady and walking was tiring, even with my cane, but they were kind. Ed Hansel is no younger than I and Maria is heavy, and we moved slowly together. It was healthy and I felt good.

  But when I asked to see the waterfall and Meditation Point, they said it was too hard. Show me anyway, I said. We went into the woods to the base of the falls. I saw the spray over the rocks and the water stream leaping off the cliff into the chute. I saw where the water jumped like a hose off the projecting rocks. Tiger tongue or elephant pecker, I couldn’t apply those colorful terms, but I knew this sight would become a tourist attraction some day unless the people of Miller resist. I imagined how it would look, billboards and souvenir shops and walkways with rope railings and outlook posts for pictures.

  They wouldn’t let me go up, but for two months the waterfall called and I thought until I go I won’t belong. Finally yesterday I went. I went alone, telling no one. In the mid afternoon, sunny and quiet with September insects buzzing while the older folks took naps. I thought this will test whether I was right to come. I was not afraid of the climb. I’m an old lady but if I go patiently there’s no reason I can’t. I took two canes.

  It was steep but not impossible with my canes bracing me at the hard spots. I rested often. At times the path rose almost vertically and I clutched the projecting roots with my hands. Then I came out. I saw the pool and the stepping stones across the narrow current like a tube of glass and I stood close to where David Leo must have been when Quinn fell. I looked down at the mist over the rocks where he landed. I took the path around the p
ool and thence along the top of the bluff to Meditation Point. A bench and wooden shelter, a noble vista of the mountains south. I imagined Miller contemplating his world. I sat and contemplated myself. Thinking Saint Lena, am I trans-figured by my gift? I fought vanity. Lena, I said, always so foolish, your errors and good intentions, why should you be no longer so? I changed my way of life, I replied, does that mean nothing? The argument made me sleepy. I sat in the peace of the destination and wondered if I died here, how peaceful a death that would be. This bench, this forest sanctuary.

  After a while my curiosity about the killings revived, and I went back to the waterfall. I reviewed the story as told me. I thought about the people whom I would never meet, legendary, the quixotic Oliver Quinn, the deprived Nick, that malign mover of events, Jake Loomer. I wondered most about Loomer, whom the good people of Miller Farm blamed most for the tragedy as if he had planned it, even his own death, like a devil. Yet Miller had loved him and intended him for his heir, to be their next leader. I wanted to tell them he was no devil but a man among you like any other, but though I had the authority of Saint Lena such words ran up against their stubborn feelings and had no weight.

  I stood by the pool watching the clear waters converge and roll over the edge. I tried by heavy concentration to waken the spirits of Oliver Quinn and Nick Foster who had died here as well as that of Jake Loomer, hoping they could show me by some spiritual osmosis what they meant by death in the waterfall. I heard no recognizable voice but my own. Maybe because none of them made it across to this side. So I went around the pool back to the other side and stood again where David Leo watched Quinn. Now it was in front of me, the innocent waterfall that never changes, the same as when they died and in the centuries before they died, before the white man or any man in this place, and still the same in the busy short times since. The peculiarity, the idiosyncrasy, the whimsicality of the murders. Ask the spirits why any killer would require so much ritual, in which he and accomplice and victim must all play their parts with timing exact and respect for the rules (such as not to detour behind the pool) if a murder is to succeed.

  If it works, the waterfall will do the job well. It conceals the crime in a mist, so that no one will suspect it was not an accident full of natural beauty. What is a waterfall? Geologically it’s a temporary moment in the erosion of the mountain, the process by which the mountain is leveled step by step until reduced to nothing in the plain. The waterfall is one of those steps. It expresses a discontinuity in time as in the earth, where softer rock is cut away more quickly than adjacent hard rock leaving the latter to stick out like a pecker or tongue for the water to spill over. Water on its way to the sea leaps off the broken edge it’s trying to erase and gouges out the trough below in a spray that will rainbow the sunlight when there is sun and someone to see. People think it beautiful and will come miles to watch. What’s beautiful about it? The swelling in me like music, where does that come from, I ask?

  I strained my intuition and extended my sensors to pick up some residue of Quinn’s remembering soul. I listened for the ghost thought, some words other than my own. I inquired, Is it the image of power in the waterfall, the power of subjecting your victim to it? No answer. Is it the lure of the silence which sucks up human voices and rifle shots? No answer while I noticed that what I called silence was really noise in a rush, the same now as on the day New Hampshire was declared a state, newer only than geology itself. I stretched my sensors to ask the Quinn or Loomer or Foster soul if the use of the waterfall was intended worshipfully to cleanse the deed of foulness.

  Thinking how much murder by waterfall depends on chance, I asked if the waterfall itself created the motive for murder. Making it just Leo’s luck to be in Quinn’s way when the waterfall entered his head. Quinn’s in turn when he told it to Loomer. If there had been no waterfall then no murders and no tragedy. Think Quinn thinking (for example) if Leo crosses the falls I’ll do it, if he doesn’t I won’t. So that if he really does cross you can drop him with the rifle and blame it not on yourself or the rifle but on Leo for crossing after you had given him (in your mind) the option of not doing so. Was this what you meant? I said. But the disembodied memories still have nothing to say.

  Standing over the waterfall I tried to enter a trance. Open your secrets to me. I invoked myself as Saint Lena, saying to the waterfall, speak, Saint Lena bids you tell what attraction you inspired that brought death to this place? I sank my spirit in the cool soaring mist, soaked my imagination wet, rode on the falls to ask, does the waterfall make me want to kill? Is it telling me this is how I would like to die, or am I only asking myself if that’s what it’s saying? How can I distinguish my questions from the answers they imply, how can I tell if those answers come from a source other than the questions? I think this question: am I thinking of riding on the water to the crash below or am I only postulating it as what Quinn’s spirit or you or someone else is thinking?

  Is it my idea which I am asking you to confirm or is it yours spirited into my head by the trance, namely, that the waterfall is a lesson I want to teach you about life, my victim? That it displays what I know about life that you don’t.

  Is it my idea or yours, spirited by the trance, which says the distance between us is the thing about life that you don’t know? Are you telling me or am I telling you what you don’t know that I know (or is it the other way round?) is pictured by the streaming of the falls, whether it comes off the tiger tongue or the elephant pecker, the fall of life free and catastrophic onto rocks? The discontinuity between our souls bleeding down the discontinuity in time? Which only I know. Or only you know, determined as you are to make me know it too. Am I picking this up from Oliver Quinn and Jake Loomer and Nick Foster or am I only asking if I am picking it up from them? That what I know you don’t know will always require me to send you up the waterfall so I can teach you with my rifle what it is?

  I looked into the pool at the leafy bottom where little claws and legs wriggled for cover. At that moment I heard a voice out of the falls, my reply addressed to me, startling and sharp, harsh and real. Saint Lena watch out. I looked up and saw them, not Loomer and Quinn but two men from the path below, running to me. I don’t know their names. One of them with tattoos on his biceps grabs my arm. I thought you were going to fall, he says.

  How did you get here? the other asks.

  Climbed, I say.

  You scared us. We saw you up here. We’ll help you down.

  I descended with them. Still ignorant whether the thoughts by the waterfall were my own or those of the spirits. Never mind. The two men helped me over the steepest parts lifting me by both arms. It’s good they came for I would probably have fallen.

  29

  David Leo

  The bulletin board says Professor Field will teach a seminar called “Writing About Science,” Thursdays at 4. Graduate students, permission of instructor.

  Who’s that? one student said.

  He’s retired, the other said.

  Is he famous?

  Depends what you mean famous, the other said.

  What the students don’t know. Nor I, for nobody told me Harry planned to teach this fall. Proving how out of touch I’ve been, which made me sad. Remembering how I used to go to the house almost every day. How often I went to dinner. Harry’s advice and his requests for my advice. Their friends were my friends, like Joe and Connie Rice. With babysitting for Judy thinking marriage. Thinking of the Field family as my own.

  That was then. When I hitchhiked home after being mugged on Stump Island, I was mean and angry and full of spite. Standing on the inhumane pavement like a rat in a foreign country for the pleasure of two guys of no importance who hijacked me, ran me through their rituals, and left me a refugee. It was impossible not to blame Harry and Judy too. It was all connected, Harry and his daughter and the baby and Miller Farm and the quack god and the thugs and the island and the hitchhiking highway and raw country. Not using Harry’s airline ticket for spite, probably, because
I was fed up with being their boy. Spiting Judy likewise with the obliging gals on the highway before the hypocritical guilt and real sorrow set in. Here was a new way to feel bad, remorse for not being the loyal Dobbin I was meant to be. Mean and ashamed. Dirty and scared too, since I had not protected myself when Veena came to my room naked like a painting, as if paintings were prophylactic.

  Nevertheless, by the time I called Judy I was full of love again. We sat in the living room like a formal call in the afternoon. I described my latest heroics like Othello. Poor David, what you have been through, while I tried to steer her back to her sexy gratitude in the motel. The story continued, and my hitchhike journey brought me into dangerous narrative territory. Three waitresses from Rochester, I said, while the unsayable buzzed louder in my ears. The narrative took over like nausea. A fatal switch in my integrity circuits omitting nothing for David Leo’s honest soul. I told about Veena with a vengeful relish in my voice that I could not for my life suppress.

  I don’t know if I can take this, she said.

  That was the end, though not all at once. She put me on probation. She moved into an apartment. I visited her, even took her out sometimes while Connie Rice babysat. Connie and everybody thought we were lovers and my best friends wondered why I didn’t move in. I didn’t tell them. I was cleared medically. After a while Judy forgave me for Veena but though we didn’t know it right away, it was too late, too much of a strain.

  I lost touch with Harry too. I heard the news about Miller Farm before I knew he had gone back there. It was on television, a gun battle between law enforcement personnel and inhabitants. Miller Farm is the stronghold of a cult leader named Miller, hotbed with a stash of arms. The trouble began when police raided the place to seize the arms. And shot the leader Miller in full view of his followers.