Finally he spoke softly: so softly Beloff had to strain to hear. Something about the Devil, the Devil’s presence. But it was a presence inside him, he knew, and he could not blame anyone else. “. . . which makes me wonder if . . . if . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . if I should continue with my work, because I . . . I don’t think I am worthy . . .”
He fell silent again, not meeting Beloff’s eye. His features had the strain of those of a high-wire aerialist.
Beloff sighed, and leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair, and clasped his hands carefully behind his head. The living fingers of one hand slid precisely into place and locked with the sensationless fingers of the other hand in a routine, automatic gesture Beloff found comforting.
“Well. That’s a farfetched thing for you to say, you of all people!” he laughed. “Absolutely farfetched . . . If it’s impure thoughts or whatever, that sort of thing, well, if you think the Devil is singling you out for temptation, why would you want to surrender? Turning aside from the Lord’s work would be exactly what the Devil would wish most, wouldn’t he? You don’t know his psychology as I do! Haven’t lived as long! . . . And anyway, Nathan, we don’t teach as the Roman Catholics do that the least little thought will plunge you into hell eternally: the least little thought or deed, even. Don’t you understand and accept our doctrine?”
Nathan continued as if he had not been listening: “The Devil isn’t a person, but a presence. The Devil is a way of seeing. Sometimes he has me entirely—my soul. And when I look out into the world I see the world through his eyes, and it’s unclean and contaminated and ugly and graceless and . . . and God has abandoned it . . . and God has abandoned me. That is the Devil. He’s with me now, sitting here with me now. He’s jeering at me. I can almost hear him. Sometimes when I preach I can hear him, a voice running alongside my own. It’s like an echo. It’s my own voice he has taken over and altered to suit his evil intentions.”
He shook himself unconsciously, like a dog.
Marian Miles Beloff remained leaning back in his chair, smiling. He felt the need for a smile: he dare not let it fade.
“Yes—Well—I’m not sure I follow you exactly, but—Isn’t it thoughts you have, or feelings—about women, maybe? Isn’t that it?”
“That’s just the smallest part of it,” Nathan said coolly.
“It is?”
“Like my littlest finger to my body,” Nathan said, raising a hand and extending the smallest finger at an awkward angle. He held it there for several seconds, contemplating it.
He might have been miles away and staring through a telescope, Beloff thought. Regarding his own flesh and blood with a look of utter detachment and unrecognition.
“If it has maybe to do with my daughter,” Beloff said, faltering at first and then resuming his hearty tone, wanting Nathan to know he didn’t at all judge him: for who was he to cast the first stone, when it came to lusting after women? “If it has to do with Leonie . . well. . . . Well then: she’ll be married in three weeks, won’t she? And Harold is taking her on a nice long honeymoon trip. So maybe the problem will disappear . . . ?”
Nathan flicked his hair out of his eyes and looked shyly at Beloff. “But I still might think of her,” he mumbled.
“You won’t see her nearly as often, you know. She’ll be changed, she’ll be very busy running that big house of Harold’s, she just won’t have time for any of us, you know; isn’t that a comfort?”
“I still might think of her,” Nathan said.
“But you must think of someone, after all,” Beloff said benignantly. “It’s your age, it’s your time of life, you must think of someone—a girl, a young woman—after all! Maybe you’ll meet someone else—”
Nathan stared at him, shocked. “But I don’t want this weakness,” he said.
“It isn’t a weakness necessarily,” Beloff said, faltering.
“It certainly is a weakness,” Nathan said, his lips twisting in contempt. “It isn’t me. It gets in the way of my God and casts an ugly shadow on Him.”
“But God would understand, you know—I mean God does understand: the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Isn’t that a comfort?”
“I don’t care if God does understand,” Nathan said. “I’m the one that is afflicted, not God. I don’t like it. I don’t like anyone or anything coming between me and God.”
Beloff ran a hand through his hair, perplexed. “But it’s written that the flesh is weak . . .”
“I’m not flesh,” Nathan said curtly.
Beloff guffawed in honest surprise. “What? Not?”
“I’m spirit. We’re all spirit.”
“But housed in bodies, aren’t we? Mortal bodies? Aren’t we?”
“Yes. But the bodies are insignificant.”
“They are? . . . Well, I suppose they are, in a sense. But God gave us these bodies. He gave his only-begotten son a body, didn’t He?”
“Not really,” Nathan muttered.
“What?”
“He didn’t give Jesus a body: He gave Jesus the image of a body.”
“What’s that—the image of a body? The what?”
“He gave Himself in the form of Jesus the image of a human body, so that He could appear on earth and be seen by our eyes. That’s all.”
Beloff stared at the young man’s pale, intolerant face. Was this heresy?
“Nathan, my boy, just what are you saying? I never heard of such a—a tongue twister—”
“Christ merely used a human body,” Nathan said in the slow, rather melancholy, rather eerie voice that was his preaching voice, though he spoke much more softly. “Just as we all use human bodies. It was the flesh He was crucified on: His own. The Romans who crucified him, the Jews who betrayed him, everyone who witnessed His agony was Him. Us. We are not two, we are not multiple; we are one. Christ is here. I am Christ while He abides in me and speaks through me. I am never not Christ even when He is distant to me . . . Christ abides in you, Reverend Beloff, and is listening to me, to my words, and understands the truth of them at this very moment: He was never flesh and blood, He was spirit from all time, before there was flesh and blood or creation itself. He was—”
“Wait,” Beloff said, sitting forward now, bringing his elbows firmly down onto his desk. “You are talking, my boy, about our Saviour: about Jesus Christ Who died for us on the cross, Who suffered and bled and died so that we might be reborn. He descended into hell and on the third day rose again, and afterward ascended into heaven to sit on the right hand of—”
“God doesn’t have a right hand,” Nathan murmured. “He doesn’t have any hands.”
“He does,” Beloff exploded. “If the Bible says so, He does! He can have all the—He can have all the hands He chooses—”
“Christ was crucified on the cross of His own flesh, which wasn’t really His,” Nathan said slowly. “The Romans who nailed him to the cross, the Jews who betrayed him, and we who live afterward—we are that flesh that crucified him. But we are more than flesh. We’re proverbs.”
“And how do you know all this?” Beloff said.
“I don’t know anything you don’t know,” Nathan said.
“This business about Christ not having a body—If someone heard you—Don’t you accept Him as your living Saviour, Who died for your sins? He was born of Mary, wasn’t he, and lived in Nazareth, and John the Baptist baptized him—? Didn’t that all happen?”
“Yes,” Nathan said.
“It did? But—”
“He took on the image of a human body so that what had to be fulfilled was fulfilled. He could have been an animal, or a flower—He could have been vapor—He had a form the way water has a form as liquid and can change into steam or ice or snow. The form changes, the essence doesn’t. He was spirit. Beneath his appearance of flesh was a terrible, unshakable reality. He was spirit, like us! He was just like us!”
“Nathan, I think you’d better leave my study. I think you’d better
spend some time today on your knees, asking God to help you. The things you’ve been saying—Why, if any of our followers heard you, how confused they would be, how frightened and angry—You can’t say such things, Nathan!”
“You certainly know all these things yourself,” Nathan said curtly. “But you’ve forgotten. Or you’re pretending to have forgotten.”
“Know all what things?” Beloff cried.
“That the Spirit of the Lord is not material.”
“Are we talking about the Spirit of the Lord—?”
“The Spirit of the Lord gives us breath, and sustains us, and without it we would not exist in the flesh,” Nathan said. “But the Spirit of the Lord isn’t bound up in flesh.”
Beloff reached nervously and absent-mindedly for something to hold: a paper clip, a fountain pen. He was sitting now with both feet pressed firmly against the floor, like a sprinter about to jump into motion. As Nathan spoke he guarded himself against nodding, as he usually nodded, in his warm willingness to agree with nearly anything that was said. The words Nathan Vickery spoke seemed, one by one, absolutely reasonable and compelling, and the young man’s stony certitude was mesmerizing; and it was possible that he did know something Beloff did not, for wasn’t he in the habit of praying hourly?—constantly? “Jesus inhabited the body as we inhabit the body,” Nathan repeated, “but He was not contained within that body. Ye are from beneath; he said to the Jews, I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. When we take Jesus into our hearts we ascend with Him into the realm of the spirit—when we allow lustful or unclean or egotistical thoughts to enter us, we are weighed down back to earth and lose His blessing. God and Christ are one. God and Christ and I are one. God is outside of time, Christ entered time, I took on my physical form accidentally in time and must transcend it if I want to be saved . . .”
“If you want to be saved,” Beloff repeated blankly. He was fussing with his fountain pen, turning it around and around between his fingers. Nathan’s hard-edged voice was intimidating: in fact, it was rather frightening. Though perhaps it wasn’t the young man’s voice, or even his queer urgent manner, but the possible truth of his words that was frightening. What if Nathan were right? What if it were actually Christ Himself speaking at this very moment, using Nathan’s voice? Marian Miles Beloff would be utterly ignorant, utterly bereft . . . He was unaccustomed to arguing with other people in any logical, systematic way, pitting his beliefs against other beliefs. It had never been necessary for him to argue, since he knew the Scriptures as well as anyone. But Nathan’s knowledge of the Bible was different from his own, and far different was the young man’s raw, ungiving soul, which seemed to be peering through his eyes from a great distance, detached, somewhat contemptuous. It was the very spirit of Jesus of Nazareth Himself, Beloff thought suddenly, involuntarily: imperious and princely.
“You said—If I want to be saved. Do you mean you aren’t saved?” Beloff cried. “In your heart, after all these years of spreading the Gospel, you aren’t saved?”
Nathan regarded him with the same fixed, remote gaze. After a long moment he said: “No.”
“Now, Nathan, that’s just—that’s just talk: farfetched talk. Even if I can’t agree with this strange idea of yours, I know you are one of us and always have been. There’s no doubt in my mind that—”
“No one is saved,” Nathan said flatly. “Not until his life on earth is finished. He’s got to walk the razor’s edge every day—one misstep and he may be plunged into hell. That’s obvious.”
“It is—?” Beloff said, letting the pen fall from his fingers. “But I thought—I—Now you wait,” he said, confused and stricken, “you just wait, my boy. According to Christian doctrine we believe in the sacrifice of Christ and the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body—the human body—on the Day of Judgment. And we believe—Of course there’s a hell, Jesus speaks of it quite frankly, a hell of brimstone and suffering where sinners are cast—But—But through His sacrifice, and through baptism—total immersion—Through His sacrifice we are redeemed of—”
“God is a spirit that abides in each of us,” Nathan continued, “and so we are all one. If I narrow my eyes just a little I can see through the eyes of my brothers and sisters—I can see through their eyes almost as easily as through my own. In Christ there is no male or female, there is only Christ. There is only spirit. So it’s the Devil that comes between us, making us strangers to one another so we can lust after one another. The Devil distorts our vision while pretending to sharpen it.”
“The Devil does what?” Beloff asked, his voice rising as if he were close to tears. “I don’t follow a word of that. Not a word!”
“The Devil causes us to lust after one another’s bodies,” Nathan said softly. “To confuse us. To come between us and God. To make us think we’re not spirit but only flesh—trapped in something that drags us down.”
In his agitation Beloff groped about his desk top, staring at Nathan, trying to think: how should he reply, what should he say? He was not accustomed to being contradicted. He was not accustomed to feeling himself so outmaneuvered, so manipulated. In fact, he did not know whether Nathan was contradicting him now. The young man’s concepts were so bizarre, his vocabulary so strange, it was impossible to know what he meant. A heretic, was he; or a fanatic of the sort Beloff had always feared; or perhaps he was an atheist—? A deathly temptation to Reverend Beloff’s lifelong faith?
“The Devil wants us to think that Jesus Christ was really a man and that He really died,” Nathan said, “to blind us to the fact that Christ came before our idea of Him, and we came before our own idea of ourselves, and Christ is us. To blind us to the fact that Christ only happened to take on the form He did—as if He couldn’t have taken on any form at all! It’s the Devil who gives us sexual feelings, to blind us to the fact that we’re all one substance—”
“All one substance? What do you mean?”
“Before Christ was, God is. Before my fleshly being came into the world, I was. Reverend Beloff, you know very well the truth of what I’m saying: you know God is a spirit and that our souls are always with God and never not with God. Even in hell it’s God hiding behind the flames and the big black snakes and the jaws that snap at one another and the howls of the damned, who only believe themselves to be lost—Even in hell it’s God, it’s Christ, it’s a form of us behind the visions—as if we were hunters sighting our prey through a scope but the prey was us—looking through what we thought was a telescopic lens when it was only a mirror! Reverend Beloff, you know that you know. Everyone knows in his deepest soul. Once the Lord Jesus Christ rid me of my false pride by forcing me to tear off the head of a living chicken with my—”
Beloff rose with a shriek. “No more! Stop!” He could bear it no longer: he snatched up an object from his desk and threw it at Nathan. “My God, stop. Do you hear! Do you hear!”
The object struck Nathan’s left knee and fell harmlessly to the carpet. It was a jar of Carter’s midnight-blue ink; fortunately the top was screwed on tightly and the ink didn’t spill.
Standing behind his desk, Beloff looked like a cornered steer. His chest heaved, his eyes were wide and bright and glaring. He tried to speak but could not. His hands shook. It was a terrible moment, but with a crestfallen dignity uncharacteristic of him Nathan merely picked up the jar of ink and set it carefully atop the desk and left the room without saying a word, without even glancing back over his shoulder.
IX
What day it is, what time, what year—I have no recollection. I walk in the cold-glaring winter sun, partly blinded, one of my eyes pitted with darkness. There shall be time no longer: so it is promised. But we are not yet delivered. Why standeth thou afar off, O Lord? You have not yet raised us out of the vaporous world; You keep Yourself from Your children these many centuries.
Carelessly dressed, shoes without socks, shoes chafing damply at my heels. I am a figure now of mirth: of shabby terror.
Em
pty of spirit.
If the sun penetrates the armor of my skull, if my sluggish bone-brittle body is warmed, what does it mean? Is it You stirring at last in me? A blessing? A new voice?
The hands clutching at me, seeking redemption. Faces swollen to the size of clouds, staring, gaping, with ulcerous eyes. A woman’s distended belly—great drooping bulbous lardish breasts pressing down upon the earth. In the sanctity of rocks there are sudden shifts and creases: hideous wounds. A scarred oak fairly howling with the memory of an old pain, an old humiliation. The whorls and labyrinths of the ear, the intestines, the genitals . . . A new blessing, this nightmare? A new voice, this guttural murmuring that rises on all sides of me?
Look at him!
Who is he?
He’s drunk—watch out!
Who is he? Where did he come from?
What is he trying to say?
By Your breath is frost given to our earth.
ON THE MORNING of Good Friday, shortly before the morning service he was to lead, Nathan Vickery found himself in the kitchen of the house he and his grandmother rented; he had pulled open one of the cupboard drawers and with both hands was groping inside.
His Grandmother Vickery came into the kitchen. She was dressed for church: she wore a handsome, somber dress of mauve and gray, with a white lace handkerchief folded several times and tucked into her belt, and a small black hat with a black veil and a bird’s silky jet-black wing, poised as if to dart away. She smelled harshly of soap.
What was she saying?—what did she want of him on this morning of all mornings? Sounds flew about Nathan’s head but did not coalesce into words. Broken bits of noise, insubstantial and inconsequential. Whatever made them human Nathan could not have said.
She was a tall, erect, wide-shouldered woman, rather mannish, her skin still remarkably smooth, even taut across the cheekbones, her eyes intelligent and rueful. She had held him as an infant against her large, soft, formless breasts, she had rocked him and sung to him and brought him to life. Perhaps he would have lapsed into death had it not been for her: perhaps he would have lost interest in life, would have sighed and faltered and become extinguished. My dear one, my sweet little mouse. My love. In a sense Nathan remembered quite clearly, as if it had been yesterday and not nearly nineteen years ago. In another sense he was forced to reject the experience altogether: for it had happened to a mere form, a creature of piggish bawling flesh he had now transcended.
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