Need

by Nik Cohn

  Another man in his position might have been crushed, his spirit shattered, but Maitland was not the fall-down kind. Instead of brooding on his wrongs, he sought the reasons that lay behind them. Studied his Bible day by day, and by night he read another book. The Deaths of Joachim, this second book was called, and in its pages at last he saw the truth clear. His fall had been no accident. Nor was Randall Gurdler a casual interloper. The entire story had been foretold.

  In his cell a vision came to him by night of Gurdler in a telephone booth, dialling a number with eight digits, and those digits spelled 666-BEAST. At that moment the scales fell from Maitland’s eyes and he saw that violet-breathed hypocrite in his true created nature, with his body like unto a leopard, and his feet as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. Then he saw the smiling head wounded to the death, and that deadly wound healed, and he knew that the Antichrist was alive and well in Jay Street, Brooklyn, at the offices of the MTA.

  The thing that puzzled him at first in this revelation was the function of the subways. Why had Gurdler chosen them as his battleground? What could be their hidden power? Then he bethought him of the fiery flood to come when Babylon falls, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of her wrath of her fornication. And everything made sense. By infiltrating the MTA, Gurdler had positioned himself at the heart and core of the city’s nervous system. At the moment ordained, he needed only to throw a switch, and the tracks would be consumed by flame, a holocaust that would burst from underground, from deep within the belly of the Beast, and devour the metropolis above, exterminating all sinning creatures in a torrent of fire; a flood.

  What could be simpler or more devastating? With Luscious Maitland safely confined, the one man with the nerve and knowledge to face Gurdler down, who could hope to deflect his aim? The guards and even the warder laughed when informed, the mayor never answered his letters. The only man alive who would listen was Crouch, and he was given no choice.

  Crouch at that time was a tap-dancer by profession, a forger by trade. Artwork had always been his forte, and he had decorated their cell with many paintings. Under Maitland’s influence, he now drew a figure on a throne, his face like unto jasper and sardine stone, with a rainbow around the throne, in sight like an emerald. And another figure in the midst of seven candlesticks, clothed in a rough garment down to his feet and girt about the paps with a golden thong. And horses with the heads of lions and tails like scorpions, and their riders like angels of the bottomless pit had breastplates of jacinth, and of brimstone. You told my story. You are my eyes, Master Maitland said. My own eyes a flame of fire.

  The first day he was released, the Master returned to the subways that had been his life, scouring the labyrinth beneath them for sanctuary. Crouch thought him crazy to go house-hunting there, so close to the Beast’s own lair. But that was simply because Crouch did not know Physics. Couldn’t grasp the simple fact that a flame flies upwards, and the safest place to shelter is directly beneath its source. When the doomed and damned city overhead was blazing, freed souls five levels down would merely be pleasantly warmed, snug as bugs. And when flame turned to flood, no sweat, they would turn to black swans, and fly.

  By the time that Crouch himself was paroled, he found the Master surrounded by twenty-four elders and their families. Some had been subterraneans when he found them, others had been awaiting a sign. One had been a nurse, and one a schoolteacher. There was a plumber and a short-order cook, an electrician and a whore. All the necessities of life, you’d say, except for Art, and that was where Crouch came in.

  By the wayside one day, fallen off a truck, he chanced on a job lot of mannequins. They had been created in the images of supermodels and Hollywood icons; he turned them into prophecies. Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson and Madonna were transformed into three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. Ava Gardner became a mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud. And to Brigitte Bardot were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness.

  These apparitions lined Mount Tabor now when John Joe stood mumbling in his lateness, and Black Swans watched smirking. Of the original twenty-four, all were still present save three, who had wandered off or perhaps been hijacked by the transit police, Randall Gurdler’s men.

  That was the one great danger in this place—the squads of licensed thugs who swarmed the tunnels some nights with drawn guns, rounding up crack addicts, thieves and freed souls without distinction, breaking heads. Sometimes they sprayed gunfire without even aiming, blasting at rats and anything else that moved. Jerzy Polacki, the plumber, had lost a thumb that way. Marvella Crabtree had lost her son.

  Though that murder had tried them sorely, their faith had endured, and even strengthened. The Boniface brothers, Brulant and Toussaint, had requisitioned a few rifles. Luther Pratt and Joe Easter had added six Beretta 9-mils, 92F, plus a couple dozen snub-nosed .38s, and Burdette Merryweather had chipped in an Uzi. Mount Tabor, which had started as an asylum, was become a citadel: New Jerusalem, Master Maitland said.

  Still and all, John Joe felt easy here. Not so much when the Master called him Ananias, maybe, but as a rule he felt right in his element. And not because of Randall Gurdler and the Beast and 666, that sounded a load of bollix. But who could tell for certain sure? In any case, he wasn’t bothered. What he liked about this spot, citadel or no, was that it felt like a social club, and he was a welcome member.

  More than welcome, honoured. From the first time Crouch had brought him along, and made him display his birthmark, he had been the special guest artiste round here. Though anyone with half an eye could see that was no swan, more like a rook if anything, you’d have thought he was bold Robert Emmet reborn. Any class of treat that crossed his mind, a cup of tea, a ginger biscuit, love, it was his on a dumbwaiter, help yourself.

  Another kind of mascot.

  Well he knew that, of course; he wasn’t blind. At least this time there was no mockery to it, he wasn’t made a freak. A quirk among other quirks only, and where was the damage in that?

  Besides, if he was a mascot, he was also a sign. A patent portent, the Master called him. As advertised and foretold in The Deaths of Joachim.

  That volume was the Swans’ holy book. A battered volume wrapped in canvas sacking, it told a martyr’s tale.

  According to its text, Joachim was born a slave in 1522. Mulatto son of a Venetian trader, a bastard born in Tunis, he had been raised at the court of a local potentate, where he’d showed an aptitude for languages and music, and in due course had been sold to another trader, this time a Genoese, who brought him back to Italy. His master dying suddenly, he had then commenced to wander through Europe, sometimes working as a farmhand or day-labourer, sometimes begging, or making music in the streets.

  His musical talents were many, he played the pipes and stringed instruments and a form of xylophone, but his greatest love was the drum, and it was as a drummer that he earned his keep in Würzburg, playing daily in the city’s central square, while another North African, a one-legged beggar named Emico, accompanied him on the fife.

  The winter of 1545 was bitter hard, and the two musicians almost starved. A great storm swept through the city, freezing all living things. Joachim and Emico huddled against the blizzard in the doorway of Würzburg’s cathedral and prepared themselves to die. At the storm’s height, however, just as Joachim was lapsing into unconsciousness, the Virgin appeared to him.

  She was wearing white robes, and surrounded by a heavenly radiance, but her feet were bound in a supplicant’s rags, and her message was austere. She spoke to him of the fiery flood to come, and the black swans who would survive it, and she told him what his own role must be. Instead of using his drum to make people dance, he was to employ it as the instrument of God. And this he promptly did. Rising out of his stupor, he found that the storm had quite abated, and his hunger
with it. Entirely restored, he strapped on his drum and began to march through the sleeping town, spreading the pure Word.

  Many citizens abused him and showered him with ordure, while others laughed him to scorn. Only one, an apostate priest named Nikolaus, recognized the truth of his vision. Together they formed the original Brethren of Black Swans, and established their own Mount Tabor in a dye-works. Day after day Joachim toured the cities and the countryside, drumming the Last Days, and gradually followers gathered to him. Shepherds and mill hands and unemployed workers, migrants and beggars, they rallied to his call, and waited for the flood of flame to strike.

  At first Joachim merely preached repentance, the ways of austerity. On the prompting of Nikolaus, however, he soon began to lash out at the Church. He accused the local clergy of Avaritia and Luxuria, and foretold dire punishments in the coming holocaust.

  The Bishop of Würzburg, he predicted, was going to catch the blackest roasting of the lot, at which the bishop was not best pleased, and ordered him arrested. But the drummer would not go easily. Through the summer of 1546 he continued to travel the Main valley, drumming and preaching as he went. Only when he returned to Mount Tabor did the bishop’s men succeed in pinning him down. A fierce battle ensued, the streets ran with blood and dye, and in the end Joachim was captured, his drum destroyed.

  Torture failed to make him recant. Incensed, above all, by the description of the Virgin’s feet bound in rags, the Bishop of Würzburg used him so severely that the drummer was pronounced dead three times, and three times revived, until at last he was burnt at the stake, still declaiming his vision.

  Nor did the story end there. The priest Nikolaus had written a full account of Joachim’s crusade, and when he in turn was captured and burnt, the manuscript passed to Emico, who carried it back to Africa with him. For generations the tale remained in hiding, a thing of rumour and fantasy. The manuscript itself was lost or destroyed, and all traces of Emico himself disappeared. Yet somehow the tradition survived, and even spread, travelling from Tunis to Tlemcen and Meknes, Rabat and Mogador, and finally to the Ivory Coast. From there, the slave ships brought Joachim’s memory to the New World, and in that world’s plantations it lingered, one small cult among many, yet indestructible.

  It needed one Hosea Tichenor, a freed man of colour, to bring the wheel full circle. A Natchez barber by trade, ardent in the Negro cause, he’d grown up hearing the tale, and saw potential in it. So he wrote The Deaths of Joachim, a reference to the three resurrections from torture.

  Privately published, its sales were not brisk, and soon afterwards the barber was found with his throat razor-slit. But his work was not forgotten. Frederick Douglass, for one, was familiar with the Deaths; later, Marcus Garvey was known to quote from them verbatim; and Hannah Bradenton, Luscious Maitland’s godmother, kept a copy on her bedside table.

  The volume had meant nothing to the Master then. It was just a storybook, and old-fashioned to boot, with its sacking cover and its scrunched-up type like spider tracks. The only thing that impressed him was the frontispiece—a woodcut of Joachim at the stake, with tongues of fire licking him all over, his legs and arms turned into charred logs. Even then, it was not the suffering that impressed him, or the stoicism with which the martyr endured, but the bunched muscles of his shoulders and neck, the puffy bags beneath his eyes. Put him in trunks and gloves, and you would have sworn he was Joe Louis, and the Brown Bomber, of all men living, was Luscious Maitland’s God.

  Only when he was railroaded into Attica, three decades later, did the text itself begin to make sense. Randall Gurdler, the Bishop of Würzburg—what were they, after all, but two faces of one coin? The deaths of Joachim were the deaths of every freed soul but enslaved body: “Watch the story,” he said to Crouch, and joined the prison band on drums.

  But there was more. On page 63, Tichenor had written: “Beholt the man who bares the mark, he comes in HEAT, in splender he comes with mitie showting. By his BRAND in flesh then know him, my swans. By his coming make an END, and so be freed.”

  It wasn’t much to go on, of course. Tell the truth, when John Joe had tried to read the full text, he had found it tough sledding. All that sin and repentance, and contemplating your own worthlessness, it sounded downright Protestant.

  But the Swans, God love them, were entranced. Every word that Joachim had spoken, they treated as holy writ.

  His vision of Armageddon, above all. In one of his last sermons, the drummer had pictured The End as a wild party. Mount Tabor would be invaded by a plague of uninvited guests, bringing with them loud music and the gaudiest of finery, all manner of boisterous games. There would be jousting and tumbling, carousing, orgies of fornication. But this revelry would be sham. Underneath their fancy dress, the guests would bear deadly arms. Servants of the Antichrist, at a prearranged signal they would throw off their masks and unleash the fiery flood. Many freed souls would perish then, their leaders perhaps among them. But that was no cause for dismay. Dead or living, if they were worthy, all would be saved. Black swans, they would fly away.

  So there it was, plain as plain. Any minute now Randall Gurdler would be making his move, throwing that switch, then Katy bar the door. Many earthquakes will there be, Master Maitland said, and killings in the world, and the sky, the whole sky, will be red, and the blind rain will pour down on the desert, and in the East a star will come in the shape of a moon, and men will prance like racehorses, and women will bet them like men.

  Small wonder, in these conditions, that the Master’s tongue turned sharp at times. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it. And shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. That was no stroll in the park.

  Still, John Joe felt no fear. Looking round the clubhouse in Mount Tabor, all he thought was home. What ease it would be to stay here, lost underground where no parakeets or cockatoos could reach. To sit watching the children playing Power Rangers, and the women hanging out their washing, and Jerzy Polacki fixing the waterbed. Even the sight of the Master’s purple head bent over the Book of Job was solace to him. So was the whisky breath of Crouch.

  That man was dancing up a ladder, creating the Seventh Angel from fragments of Mamie Van Doren. Slapping on papier-mâché for the body, Corn Flakes packets and toilet rolls for robes. Skimming up and down the rungs with that shuffle-footed lightness of his, and winking back across his shoulder. “How’s the patent portent?” he asked.

  “Mustn’t grumble,” said John Joe.

  Master Maitland overheard that, and his head came up with a jerk. “If we don’t grumble, who will?” he said.

  “Anna Crow,” John Joe replied.

  Instantly guilt stabbed him like a hat pin. He’d promised to do some shopping for her. Pick up a rope she needed for a poetry reading tonight. She’d be waiting for him at Sheherazade, and he had clean forgot. Never keep a lady waiting, his mother had always said. Or Anna Crow, either. “A woman’s expecting,” he said.

  “Let her expect,” said Master Maitland.

  “I only wish I could,” said John Joe.

  Out of doors, once he had clambered back up the five levels into daylight, he felt cast out. The man in the hardware store had a boozer’s nose and a quizzical eye, you’d say he was a gobshite. “Would you have a length of rope? Suitable for a noose?” John Joe asked him.

  “Would that be for yourself?”

  “A friend.”

  The way the man cocked his eyebrow, you could tell he had his doubts. Reservations, even. “A young lady,” John Joe explained.

  “I see,” the man said. “Will that be cash or charge?”

  Sheherazade by afternoon, with the chairs upside down on the tables and Roach Motels in every corner, looked more forlorn than ever. Not even Bani Badpa was on hand. Only Anna Crow in leopard-print leotard and ballet slippers with her red hair hidden under a mop of yellow ringlets, standing with one arm held stiff against the bar for support, her left foot on point, her right leg pointed at the ceilin
g. “Did you get it?” she asked.

  “They had hemp just, no silk.”

  “Hard times all over.” Breathing deep and regular, she thrust her leg upwards, once, and twice, and three times, then turned to catch John Joe staring. There was want betrayed in his eyes, he could feel that. “What’s up with you?” Anna Crow asked, not unkind.

  “Could you manage a Starburst at all?”

  Lordamercy that stricken look you’d have thought kidney stones or a hernia at the very least when all he wanted was a candy and not even a self-respecting chocolate bar like a Snicker or a Baby Ruth but a lousy Star-burst at that. “No, I couldn’t,” Anna said, “but you’re welcome to some of my gum.”

  At least he had brought the rope. She had felt squeamish somehow about walking in the store and up to Mister Man and asking for his best necktie herself. A bit like buying your first tampon, it was an embarrassment even if you knew it was only nature. Though nature could be a bitch, a stone killer. But that wasn’t the point; what was the point?

  At least he’d brought the rope, that was it.

  Don’t start her to talking, she had been going round in circles like this for days. A single dull thought would weasel its way inside her brain and set up housekeeping there. Settle into an armchair with its bunny slippers on and refuse to be budged. Like those godawful songs that drove you mad, flowerpots like Feelings or Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head or that cretinous jingle on TV, Dr. Pepper You’re a Part of Me, she was a martyr to that. Though what part would that be exactly? A muscle, a nerve, her sphincter maybe? Still she kept humming it in the shower, she couldn’t seem to help herself, was she losing her mind?