Those Strange Cults, a paperback given a library plastic coating so it would last, but falling apart anyway, much read apparently, unlike the Atlas, which it seemed Pierce was the first to crack. The Powerhouse in this one’s index too: two entries. Pierce’s spying heart tapped faster.
Cults that claim Christian identity but actually promote nonorthodox teachings, like Jesus Freaks, Powerhouse, Church of God Universal, etc., which believe variously that Jesus is not God, that the Second Coming has already occurred, that believers can do miracles or drink poison without harm, tend to immerse followers in “study groups” that last for hours or days and whose object is not knowledge but “experience” which bonds the followers to the group leader. Universally condemned by recognized theologians, these “churches” have skyrocketed, draining resources and piling up memberships vis-à-vis mainline religious groups.
Good grief, Pierce thought or breathed, buffeted by the hurrying metaphors, trying to think. One other page:
to be stripped of the “nonprofit,” “charitable” or “religious” tax-exempt status they share with genuine churches, they have begun to fight back. IRS agents arriving to seize records have been turned back by gun-toting adherents. At the Powerhouse World Center in Indiana, home of the Powerhouse exceptionalist/healing cult, rumors of illegal weapons stockpiling and Last Days survivalist training have the sheriff’s office worried and prosecutors swapping warrants and suits with the group’s lawyers.
No no no. Pierce closed the repellent thing and pushed it back into its slot. Impossible in this atmosphere, this moment of this time, to learn anything reliable about such matters; he could imagine the chain of events, the reports and rumors that had led to that book’s statements, the fears too that animated them, but not the realities behind them. Could not.
He went out again into the pale day. Maybe he would go see Beau, ask him.
He had heard it said that Beau’s peculiar household, where Beau lived with (or above, in his own apartment) several women of various ages, some with children, and the occasional lone male, was itself a cult; if it was it was a failed one, for the population kept changing; Pierce thought it resembled more an ancient Irish monastery, one of those kinds where cheerful ascetics male and female gathered to live in stone huts out of the world, Beau their indulgent bishop. There are cults and cults.
When he came before Beau’s big three-story house, though, the bare yard where grubby children played, a waiflike woman sitting abstracted on the porch step, he was struck with a species of shyness or dread that was new to him. He waved, and went on.
Inside the house, Beau and Sam Mucho and two other children played Chutes and Ladders on a board almost split along its folds. For tokens they used chessmen from a broken set Beau had gathered at a tag sale; they all knew their own pieces, and Beau kept them separate for them, because, he said, they’re still learning the game (the pieces, he meant) and would find change disturbing. Sam’s was a tall Queen; Beau’s a white Bishop. Sam liked going down the chutes as much as climbing up the ladders, and grieved when she sailed past one uncaught; which made Beau laugh.
“If you don’t go down sometimes the game will be over,” she said.
“Right,” said Beau. “If you don’t go down you can’t climb up.”
The white Knight was just tumbling down the longest chute when the door opened and Mike Mucho came in.
“Daddy Daddy!”
“Hi Mike,” Beau said, and glanced at the black-cat clock in the kitchen. “You weren’t due till noon.”
“Well we’ve got big plans,” Mike said, not looking at Beau but grinning at Sam.
“Okay,” Beau said, arising from the floor. “But she was winning.” He touched Sam’s curly head. “Like it or not.”
9
“Happy, happy, happy,” Rose Ryder said. “So happy. Pierce sometimes I just.”
Morning light in the room, she still in the storm-tossed bed; he in the doorway in his overcoat, bag of fresh doughnuts from the Donut Hole in his hand, food of the gods for an hour or so, inedible thereafter.
“You seem happy,” he said. She did. When she described to him how well it was all really going, her classes and the apartment and her new life, her eyes seemed to melt at last and shine soft and liquid. Fabulous, wonderful, she said, sounding to him like the druggies of old (himself one of them) who would recount in such terms some concert or film or street action when what their words and grins in fact referred to was their own sensations at the moment of telling. Stoned.
And what was this blackness in his own breast, in his face too he imagined?
She smiled at him and for him, and laughed lightly, and pushed his too-long-uncut hair behind his ears. “Aw,” she said. “Pierce. I miss you though. I mean I miss it around here. The city’s not so nice. Oh look, look: a heron.”
Belated maybe, standing slim and patient in the shallows, which they could now see since the jungle greenery had turned to nothing. It opened its blue wings as they watched, and with a few delicate steps got aloft, impossible as it seemed; rose and with unnatural slowness went away down the river.
“Pierce,” Rose said. “I’ve spoken in tongues.”
Pierce’s back hair rose. “You what.”
“I’ve spoken in tongues. I can. I found out I can.” Shy to tell him, obviously, but pleased too with herself; almost sly, confessing to something, as he had heard her confess before, but now to another kind of exciting thing altogether.
“You, one day you just.”
She laughed. “No, no. It’s a thing that can be learned. You can do it, with, you know, help. Anyone can. You know who can? Mike Mucho.”
“No.”
“It comes at the end of the training. Like, well not like a final, but.”
She looked at him, still bright, and he could see reflected in her face the confusion, the sudden repugnance he felt, as though she had told him—had told him what? That she had learned to vomit at will like a cat? To bleed from her eyes like a horned toad? Why did he feel this horror?
“It’s in the Bible. It’s a gift of the Spirit. It’s promised. And if it is, it is.”
“Not everything promised in the Bible is to be taken exactly literally,” Pierce said. “Of course.”
She regarded him, her newly open face so luminous, that had been so recently shadowed and closed.
“You don’t,” he said, “believe in Biblical inerrancy. Do you?”
“What’s that?”
“I,” he said. He had himself never heard the phrase before this very morning. “Well. Basically, the idea that there are no errors in the Bible. No contradictions or false ideas or statements. I guess.”
She considered. “Well why would there be.”
“What do you mean? Why would there be? How could there not be? In what book aren’t there?”
“Scuse me,” she said, slipping from the bed and quickly making the two or three steps to the bathroom, shutting the door between them. Pierce stood regarding it. Listening.
“How could there not be?” he asked again.
“Because if. If it’s the word of God, which is what they say, then why would God let mistakes into it?”
Flush.
“What they I think believe is,” she said, returning, finding her panties and stepping into them, “is that it’s like a powerhouse. It gives out energy to the world all by itself, through the words and the stories that are in it. That’s what it’s for, why it came into the world.”
“It’s a book,” Pierce said. “Just a book. A good book. Not the only book.”
“Well,” she said. “It says itself, In the beginning was the Word.”
“Sure,” he said. “And the Pope says he’s infallible.”
“Well what they say is …”
“The book can’t certify its own primacy. That’s stupid. That’s saying that the book existed before it came into existence. That it came into existence so that it could assert its own prior existence.”
“Didn’t get that.”
“Anyway,” Pierce said, “what the text says is that in the beginning was Logos. Logos can mean lots of things; it can mean Reason, or Plan, or Thought, or Study, or Sense—almost anything but Word. I think the best translation is Meaning.”
“In the beginning was Meaning?” she said.
“And meaning was with God. And meaning was God.”
She ceased buttoning the big flannel shirt she had put on. “Well,” she said. “It’ll all be clearer later. ‘Cause they have a big project under way, to retranslate the Bible. The New Testament.”
“There are lots of translations.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling wisely. “But. What they’ve figured out is that even though everybody thinks the New Testament was written in Greek, it was really written in Aramaic. Jesus’s language. And then translated into Greek. So to get closer to the original meaning …”
“They’re going to translate it back again.” Pierce, stupefied, saw no irony or even plain amusement cross her face. “Oh Lord.”
“Don’t you want your doughnut?” she asked him, indicating the bloated and glossy things he had placed on a tray between them.
“Yes. No. No I guess not. I haven’t been able to eat lately.” He drew his unremoved overcoat around him. “I might,” he said, “be coming down with something.”
When night came they went out. In his little house they had only each other and the one topic between them; everything they might speak about seemed to lead one way or another toward it, here we are again. His work; her studies. The news. Life on earth. None of them able to be spoken of as they had once been.
The Sandbox, on the Cascadia road, was where Val’s regulars went when Val closed; when Rose and Pierce entered he could see Val herself at a far table, with Rosie Rasmussen. There was a bad loud band on the tiny podium, making music that to Pierce negated rather than enhanced the meager pleasures of the place; anyway they weren’t asked to pay extra for it. He drank Scotch, she a Coke.
“You’ve wanted power,” she said. “You have. Well I want it too. On my side.”
“No,” he said, his cheeks suffused, his heart bloody, for it was what he had tried to have, though only over her and her spirit, to get which it had been enough—for a while—to pretend to have it. “No I have not.”
“Didn’t you think you could do things?” she said. “Magically.” She inserted this word within quotes made of four fingers waggled in air. “You said. We tried. Were you just …”
“Actually,” he said, “I have done things. Certain things. Yes I have. Sometimes I’ve found myself thinking of having a power—to fly, or lift heavy things, or draw things to me—and I know, I remember, that once or twice in the past, maybe many times, I have done those things, and if I try in the right way, if I believe what I know, I can again.”
“Yes.”
“And I do. And it’s easy.”
“And?”
“Then I wake up.” He began to roll a cigarette for himself. “In dreams,” he said, “I can reach my own cock with my mouth. I’m always surprised to find out I can. I always think, Gee I thought I could only do this in dreams.”
“Oh Pierce. Jeez.” She lifted her head and smiled a little smile for a passer-by, a trill of fingers.
“Who was that?”
“Just a guy.”
“What’s he to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
The band whanged and the singer blared. Down down down into a burnin ringa fire. In not a long time Pierce found himself being provoking again, the lake of fire, the Four Last Things. “Death. Judgment. Heaven and hell. That’s what we were taught. No Purgatory I guess for you.”
“I was never sure just what that was.”
“It’s a lot like here. And it doesn’t last. In the end there’ll just be heaven, where you’ll be, and hell.”
“Listen,” she said, her eyes roaming, looking for something, something else for them to do or say.
“Well,” he said, and drank. “At least you’ll get a kick out of my damnation.”
“What! Oh I would not! Even if.”
“Of course you will. St. Thomas proved it. The contemplation of the torments of the damned is going to be one of the big pleasures of you people in heaven.”
“God what a creepy horrible idea. What a Catholic idea.”
He laughed, wolfishly, and told her no no, it was just logic; now we see as through a glass darkly, and maybe we feel pity for the suffering of the damned, because we can imagine it could be our own; poor slobs like us, suffering forever. Forever. But then we’ll see it as the perfect expression of God’s justice, left hand of His power as Mercy is the right, of which we ourselves, the saved, are the beneficiaries. One more thing about Him to praise.
“Dumb, Pierce,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re insisting on this.”
“Because you’re sending me there. I’ll be one of the ones down there that you know.” He pushed toward her the cigarettes she was obviously seeking. “The big payback, Rose. No rejection more final.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.”
“Well,” Pierce said. “It has to be so. If all the other stuff is. Doesn’t it. Has to be. Right?”
Her lips parted as though she wanted to speak, and her eyes stopped flitting and looked at him. But she didn’t speak.
“Come on, Rose,” he said. “Remember. Parhesia. Openness, frankness.”
She opened her mouth then, and as her face became still she spoke: a gout of language came from her, definite and clearly said but sounding like nothing he had ever heard before, invocation or curse or. Something not belonging to her but using her to be said. It was a second or two in length; entered the air, and was gone.
He stared at her in fear. “Rose.”
“What,” she said.
“You did it,” he said.
“Did what.”
“Spoke in tongues. You did it just then.” A psychic block or lockout that was now installed in her brain or soul, put there by them, designed to kick in when she was questioned or tempted fiercely enough. He had heard of such things. “You opened your mouth and said something meaningless. “
“Well gee,” she said, and laughed.
“No I mean this was. It was. You did it.”
“I didn’t. What do you think, that it’s not under my conscious control?”
He didn’t know: He couldn’t say. He knew what he had heard and seen. “Well,” he said. “Well what did you say then.”
“It doesn’t just take over and happen,” she said. “It’s not like that. It’s not …”
Magic, he supposed her next word was to be, but she didn’t say it. Her eyes then lifted to see something approaching behind him, and he spun in his chair to meet it, whatever it was. It was Rosie Rasmussen.
“Wanted you to know how it came out,” she said. “Hi Rose.”
“Yes,” said Pierce. He pulled with his forefinger at the somehow strangulating collar of his shirt, realizing even as he did it that it was a gesture he’d seen a thousand trapped comic characters in movies make, what was wrong, what. “You guys know each other.”
“Oh sure,” Rosie said; she leaned with both hands on their table, and smiled a nice smile for Rose. “Sure.”
“So,” Pierce said, “how, how …”
“Nothing,” Rosie said. “No news. Nothing was revealed.”
“Is that …”
“That’s good, supposedly. I mean it’s better than the worst, which would be to find a tumor or something. It turns out it’s, probably it’s—what’s the word. The thing where it’s got no cause. It sounds like ‘idiotic.’”
“Idiopathic,” said Rose.
“Right. So I guess that leaves possession.”
Pierce looked toward Rose, as Rosie still did: Rose’s face was unreadable.
“I’ve been thinking, by the way,” Pierce said to Rosie. “About your Halloween party.”
“Yeah, sad huh.”
“You wanted a reason for a masked ball, and spookiness. Ghosts.”
“Well the place just seemed so perfect …”
“Yes. I was thinking that if you wanted those things, masks and ghosts, you could have a Christmas party just as well.”
“Yes?”
“Sure. A long tradition of ghosts at Christmas. It’s a ghostly time of year.”
“Oh it’s a ghostly time of year,” Rosie sang, like a carol. “Really. Why?”
“Celtic ghosts,” Pierce said, “appear at times and places that are somehow neither here nor there; not this, not that.” He looked into his glass, astonished to find it already empty. “They appear at solstices, and at equinoxes, and on the nights when one of the two seasons of the Celtic year turns into the other—those are May-Day night and Halloween night. Christmas is the winter solstice; it’s a solstice feast. It used to be you told ghost stories at Christmas. Still a tradition in England. Like Dickens.”
“Dickens?”
“Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. A moment between Now and Then. A moment when you choose.”
“Oh yes.”
“So you could have solstice ghosts. And holly, for the old gods.” He lifted his glass so that the waiter could see it, see his need. “And you could have costumes—mummers, masks, cross-dressing, all very popular at Christmas once; a Lord of Misrule, everything upside down. People could be Saracens, Knights, Doctors: at the solstice the Knight, the Sun, is slain by the Saracen, darkness, and then brought back to life by the Doctor. Born again.” Rose was toying with her Coke, the smile on her face a leftover one, unremoved.
“Three kings,” Rosie said.
“Right.”
“Okay,” Rosie said. “Christmas. Or near it. If it snows …”
“Big fires.”
“Or cancel.” She lifted Pierce’s fresh drink and took a sip. “Costumes may run to the heavily furry.”
“Good. It’s a beast’s night. On the solstice night, you know, you can hear the animals talking, and understand them.”