Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Nathan read none of the news stories about himself, and after a while Lund stopped urging them upon him. He learned not to distract or trouble Nathan with trivial, worldly matters—the exact number of people who showed up at a service, the exact amount of money they contributed, rental charges for halls, insurance payments, traveling expenses. After the publicity in Yewville Nathan had been rather upset, for so far as he knew God had not called him to a healing ministry yet, and possibly He never would . . . and the news articles seemed to be centered on healing; why was that? “The principal thing is to awaken people to the presence of the Holy Spirit, and to get them to welcome Christ into their hearts,” Nathan said earnestly. “Curing headaches or making warts disappear or easing arthritis, why, that’s just secondary, that’s just the consequence of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it . . . ? It has nothing to do with me! God has never instructed me to go out and heal the sick and cast devils from people, God has never hinted a word . . .”

  “But you have the power,” Reverend Lund said, puzzled. “It’s obvious that you have the power and you’re not exploiting it.”

  “The Lord guides me in all things,” Nathan said. “I do only what He wishes.”

  “Maybe the call has come to you and you haven’t understood . . . If you have the power to cure sick people, why not exploit it? There isn’t any better witness to the world than miracles! Christ Himself . . .”

  “I’m not Christ,” Nathan said sharply.

  Reverend Lund’s expression shifted, like a child’s; for a moment he looked as if he might cry. It had been with pride and excitement he’d shown Nathan the news clippings: so much excellent publicity! “I really don’t understand,” Lund said softly. “It seems to me . . . If a fellow Christian is suffering . . . It might be the case that God has given you this talent and He assumes you know what to make of it. Isn’t that possible?”

  “Someone once advised me to stay away from healing,” Nathan said, frowning. He could not remember who. Had it been a man, or had it possibly been Christ? Years had passed since his last communication from God, and though he thought often, eagerly and wistfully, of those visitations, he did not allow himself to hope that another would come soon, or at all; and his obsessive contemplation of the experiences tended to confuse them. In some ways the earliest visions were the most vivid. And the one in which Christ had taken him to hell. But these were jumbled with the more frequent, almost daily, intuitive flashes he had of God’s presence, and the remarkable dreams he had almost every night, empty of content or instruction but filled to bursting with the presence of the Divine. And he spent much of the day in solitude, studying the Bible, allowing his mind to drift to a pure, perfect emptiness, above the world of material shape and form, above even his own body and his “personality.” At such times all earthly and human images were obliterated and forgotten; the vision in his good eye went dead; his senses, one by one, became extinguished; he was no longer Nathan Vickery, no longer finite. In this state God communicated with him silently, neither in words nor in sensations, and when he woke from his trance he was never able to remember precisely what God allowed him to know: yet he knew nevertheless. So it was difficult for him to judge not only what he knew but why he knew it, and whether it had come to him by way of a human or a Divine agency. (But he halfway thought that the Divine might occasionally use the human, and that possibly the two were one: which further complicated things.)

  “Who was it? A fellow minister? He was jealous,” Lund said flatly.

  “I don’t remember,” Nathan said.

  “If it was another minister he was just jealous and to hell with him,” Lund said. “Look: you’re twenty-six years old. You have the maturity of a much older man. The things people say about you, the absolute gratitude they feel . . . It’s amazing. In a few years you could be known throughout the country, maybe even the world . . . Other ministers will try to hold you back, they’re afraid and jealous because they know the power in you and where it may take you! I might have been that way myself. I saw you and heard you speak and a kind of devil leaped up in me, wanting to push you aside, wanting to ignore you, or even impede you—yes, really! But I conquered it. I think the Lord conquered it for me. So I understand that meanness, that jealousy, and I don’t think we can ever let it stop us, Nathan. I don’t think we can ever let anything stop us.”

  Nathan nodded slowly. He had not been following Lund’s words with much concentration. (Lund talked constantly, as if he were thinking aloud; and this “thinking” was both a kind of dialogue with Nathan and an interior monologue of his own, centered about plans for the future. Even when he was with his son Mark, or his wife, or others among the Seekers staff, he talked in this rapid, groping way, sometimes using the word we as if he and Nathan were both speaking.)

  “The call from God might come through another person,” Lund said suddenly. “How can you know? There’ve been people who have told me about dreams of you, and seeing you in places where you weren’t; and all sorts of . . . all sorts of things. Like seeing your hands and your face glow. Like seeing Christ where you’re standing. I know you don’t like to hear it, but . . .”

  “Seeing Christ where I stand?” Nathan asked quizzically.

  “Yes. Just the other morning a woman came in, after services Wednesday night, and told me there was no mistaking it: she had seen Christ right where you were standing: and it upset her so, she went right home to bed but the next morning she accepted it and was all excited, so she thought she’d better tell me. She wanted to tell you in person but I said you were busy.”

  “She saw Christ where I was standing . . . ?”

  “She certainly did. But you’ve been told this before, haven’t you?”

  Nathan rose. He ran both hands through his hair; he dug into his scalp with his fingernails. For a strange moment he felt he would laugh. There was the danger of laughing. But it passed, and he merely smiled at Lund and made a gesture that could not be interpreted. He wanted now to be left alone and to contemplate his situation, and it was a measure of the older man’s rapport with him that he understood at once, and apologized for having taken up so much of Nathan’s time, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

  “If I am Christ, then who will save me?” Nathan murmured aloud.

  V

  Everywhere he went he discovered the Spirit of the Other already present, waiting for him.

  In the quizzical expression of a shopkeeper, a stranger. Yes? What do you want? What are you doing here?

  In the unsettling, vaguely mocking dogma of his most cherished professor, a Pole who had emigrated to America nearly forty years before: “All of mankind’s convictions are merely temporary holding actions—plunges into diversion. They allow us to forget that we’re here rather than where we feel we ought to be.”

  In the loose, casual gathering of acquaintances on the street, or on one of the sidewalks on campus: four or five or six young men who, when he hurriedly approached, would materialize into people already known to him, and no one of them the person he sought.

  In the ringing of the telephone in his room, in the somnambulist space of time during which he moved to answer it: sluggish, his legs near-inert with the dread of encountering—of encountering whoever it was he wished not to encounter.

  “There’s a curse on me,” he said cheerfully when, at lunch with friends in a pub near the university, his fork slipped from his fingers and clattered to the table and to the floor—and not for the first time, either, in recent days. (Rising to go to the bathroom during the night, he had banged his forehead hard on a door frame, having unaccountably turned in the wrong direction; in his haste to get to a class on the third floor of an aged building, he had slipped on the smooth-worn steps and had stumbled upstairs and fallen, practically on his face, his notebook and books flying in all directions. Most perplexing and alarming of all, he had had a freak accident while peeling an orange—he’d torn at the rind so fiercely that one of his fingernails had ripped into
the flesh of his left hand, just below the ball of the thumb where there was a vein close to the surface of the skin: the bleeding had been remarkable for so shallow a cut.)

  As long as he could articulate his condition and express it in concise, witty language, he believed he was safe. So he took notes on his own dilemma. Fancifully he imagined a film—it would have to be a short, rather amateurish, but artful film—that dealt with the comic predicament of an accident-prone individual whose accidents become increasingly comic and increasingly dangerous. It pleased him to think of himself in the third person, especially as William Japheth, or as Japheth (with no last name), who was an original invention. No one knew this Japheth: not his mother, not his family, not his girl Audrey, none of his friends and acquaintances, none of his professors. A secret, a stranger. (Or was it the case that someone somewhere did know him, and awaited him? But he shied away from thinking of that.)

  Invited to afternoon tea at the home of one of his professors, he heard himself, Billy Sproul, chattering knowledgeably and wryly about Craveri’s Life of Jesus, which he supposed to be a classic of its type; he made several halfway intelligent remarks about Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus, though he had, in fact, never finished reading the book. His bright, boyish face was set to advantage in the book-cluttered, dark-paneled room with its framed charcoal rubbings from a Buddhist temple in Ceylon and its unused pewter candlestick holders and its air of pleasurable weariness. His host had written, in his youth, a nine-hundred-page study of the infuence of Greek ideas on Christianity; a study of Greek cosmogony; and innumerable essays and reviews. He was an altogether admirable scholar whose very habit of pausing between words Japheth had once discovered himself fondly imitating, but this afternoon everything seemed slightly amiss between them: the man talked, Japheth talked, words coiled about one another and sank beneath their own weight, but nothing was said.

  The older man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of many religions but he believed in none of them. Having such knowledge, how was it possible to have faith as well? While he talked Japheth grew more and more uneasy, sensing the presence of the Other. His heart beat; his face grew warm. He glanced surreptitiously into the corners of the room.

  And when he was alone with Audrey, finally, it seemed to him he was not truly alone with her. Instead, a third party was close by, witnessing and judging. “Why are you so nervous?” she asked impatiently. “I can practically feel your mind racing.” They wished to marry, but it struck them as preposterous: how did two individuals finally marry? How did they exclude all others from their lives? In her small tidy room in Quincy, lying on her bedquilt while the day thickened soberly to dusk, Japheth felt his consciousness drift inexorably back to that drafty sports arena . . . to the barred windows and the raised platform and the row upon row of earnest, staring people who wished merely to have their sins lifted from them and to be assured of life everlasting. He lay with his face pressed against a young woman’s fragrant hair, and in his mind’s eye there appeared an image of a pacing, improbable figure, his long lean face pale with passion, his eyes glittering.

  “You’ve been distracted all day. You aren’t yourself,” Audrey said.

  “But who else can I be?” he asked, startled.

  “I don’t know you at all. I don’t know what we have to do with each other.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he whispered. “There’s only . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . only you.”

  BUT IT WAS not true, and in the end there was nothing to be done: so he surrendered.

  He joined the Seekers for Christ at a weekend convocation in Fort Gambrell, making his way forward with the other newly converted souls, unashamed, though tears streamed down his cheeks. Kneeling, he bowed his head before Nathanael Vickery, who paused long enough to lay both his hands on Japheth’s slender shoulders and to give him a welcoming squeeze: a joyful childlike gesture of triumph.

  He handed over seventy-five dollars and made a pledge of several hundred more. And volunteered his services. How could he help their mission? What sort of work might he do?

  “It’s utterly ridiculous,” he said, laughing hoarsely. “I haven’t any money left and I have nowhere to go and I don’t for an instant truly believe in any of this . . . Nevertheless I’m here, far from home. What do I do next?”

  They saw that he was exhausted; they helped him to his feet.

  “You can stay with us,” they said warmly.

  “What about him?—Nathanael? Will I see him?”

  All the new converts wished to see Nathanael, but naturally this wasn’t always possible. He was very busy; he rarely had time to talk.

  “I’ll wait,” Japheth said. He wiped his eyes, not wanting them to see that he wept. “I have the rest of my life.”

  VI

  Though there was scarcely an hour, scarcely even a minute, when Nathanael Vickery did not hold himself in trembling readiness for You, eight years were to pass between Your manifestation on the eve of Good Friday, 1959, and the fifth of Your manifestations in late September of 1967.

  It was in Windigo Falls, at the headquarters of the Seekers for Christ, at that time housed in a twenty-five-room mansion built in the 1890s by one of the lumber mill owners (and in the 1940s and 50s allowed to tumble into disrepair): there, in the plain, ascetic, rather cell-like room Nathan had chosen for himself at the very top of the house, overlooking the river, You manifested Yourself to him in a vision that appeared to consume several days of his life, though in earthly time it was to be measured in terms of an hour and twenty minutes.

  This was the Vision of the One.

  (OF WHICH I am terrified. From which I retreat. For how can I be equal to Your uncanny power, using mere words to represent You? There are times when I despair even of suggesting Nathan’s response to You. I despair even of suggesting how he despaired when it became evident to him that he could not communicate the power and brilliance of his visions to anyone else—not even to his most adoring, uncritical followers, not even to the young man who was to become his closest and most devoted disciple. When he woke from his sweat-drenched trance, when he shook himself free of his speechlessness, he wanted only to bring to others Your message . . . he wanted only to impress upon others the incontestable fact of Your existence. But though they listened to him, and appeared to honor his words, it was transparently clear that they did not comprehend. For if they did . . . why weren’t their lives revolutionized, why wasn’t the world transformed?)

  THE ONE: THE Spirit of Absolute Illumination: the Many-in-One: You.

  HE STAGGERED INTO a room and someone arose immediately and went to help him, gripping his arm tight, saying, “Where have you been? What has happened to you?” in a voice of terror. (For it seemed at first that Nathan had been physically attacked, or had suffered a violent seizure of some kind.)

  The voice was Japheth Sproul’s, the warmth and the terror were Japheth’s. From the very first he would have preferred that his Master be attacked by enemies than that he risk the closeness of the living God: which was like the fury of a blast furnace.

  When Nathan was able to speak he told him in a hoarse, faltering voice, “He—it—The One—The—”

  And how weakly his voice dropped on that weakest of words The—!

  THAT WAS IN Windigo Falls, where the first Seekers’ Home was founded: the first of the many hundreds of homes Nathan envisioned as one day spreading across the continent so that his people could live in seclusion, in simplicity and celibacy and mutual charity, with no need to defend their beliefs. Indeed, he envisioned a network of Seekers’ homes so that it would be possible within a few years to traverse the entire United States without being forced to spend a single night with strangers. It was necessary, he taught, for them to take care how they mingled with others. All unbelievers were strangers: and most strangers were unbelievers, the not-yet-baptized.

  Curiously enough, many of the unbelievers were Christians, so-called. In a way they
were more troubled spiritually than those who considered themselves agnostics or atheists. They imagined that they were Christians when in fact they were nothing at all: empty shells out of which the Devil had sucked life. “They are not evil,” Nathan taught, “but only ignorant. We must free them of their ignorance by showing them the love in our hearts, and we must be very careful not to seem impatient with them. For they are God’s own children, like us . . . At the same time we must be very careful not to be contaminated by them.”