Deus Irae

  “Tell me,” Lurine said, smoking away on her cheap Algerian briar pipe—it was all she had been able to purchase from a peddler; the U.K. rose briars were too dear—and watching him acutely, “What it was like that time you took those methamphetamines and saw the Devil.”

  He laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “It sounds like,” he said, “you know. Forked tail, cloven hoof, horns.”

  But she was serious. “It wasn’t. Tell me again.”

  He did not like to remember his vision of the Antagonist, what Martin Luther had called “our ancient foe on earth.” So he got a glass of water, carefully selected several assorted pills, and swallowed them.

  “Horizontal eyes,” Lurine said. “You told me that. And without pupils. Just slots.”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  “And he was above the horizon. And unmoving. He’d always been there, you said. Was he blind?”

  “No. He perceived me, for instance. In fact all of us, all life. He waits.” They are wrong, the Servants of Wrath, Pete thought; upon death we can be delivered over to the Antagonist: it will— may—not be a release at all, only the start. “You see,” he said, “he was so placed that he viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze, like a laser beam, traveled on without end, forever. It had no focus point, such as a lens creates.”

  “What did you take just now?”

  “Narkazine.”

  “Nark has to do with sleep. Zine is a stimulant, though. Does it stimulate you to sleep?”

  “It dulls the frontal lobe and permits the thalamus free activity. So—” He quickly swallowed two tiny gray pills. “I take these to hold back the thalamus.” Brain metabolism, the vasodilation and -constriction, was his hobby; he knew the map of the human brain and what a little-too-slight supply of blood to this or that portion could do—that it could forever turn a kindly, warm, perceptive man into a narrow, rigid, suspicious, brooding quasiparanoid. So he was so careful; he wanted primarily to affect the hormonal secretions of his adrenal-class glands without too much vasoconstriction. And the amphetamines were vasoconstrictors and hence dangerous; they could permanently damage the personality on a physiological basis.

  All this the great ethical houses had discovered and duly made available, ter-wep-wise, to the Pentagon in the ’60s and ’70s—and had seen used in the ’80s.

  But on the other hand, the methamphetamines inhibited the secretion of adrenalin, and this, for some personalities, was vital; schizophrenia had at last, like cancer, been unmasked; cancer consisted of a virus and schizophrenia had turned out to be an overproduction of serotonin which the brain could not handle; hence the hallucinations—true hallucinations, although the dividing line between hallucination and authentic vision had become thin indeed.

  “I don’t understand you,” Lurine said. “You take those goddamn pills and then you see something just awful—Satan himself. Or that hook you talk about, that gaff that penetrated your side. And yet you go back. And you’re not just bored; it’s not that.” Puzzled, she regarded him.

  Pete said, “I have to know. That’s all. To experience, to know, is to be. I want to be.”

  “You are,” she pointed out, practically.

  “Listen,” Pete said. “God—the authentic God, He of the Bible, Whom we worship, not that Carleton Lufteufel—is searching for us; the Bible is a chronicle of God’s search for man. Not man’s search for God. Do you understand? And I want to go as far toward Him, to meet Him, as I can.”

  “How did man and God get separated?” Like a child, she listened attentively, awaiting the true tale.

  Pete said cryptically, “A quarrel so old that the story is garbled. Somehow God set man up where He could reach man daily, regularly; they were in direct touch, the way you and I are now. But something happened and somehow they wound up like Leibnitz’s windowless monads, near each other but unable to perceive anything outside; only able to scrutinize their own beings. A sort of schizophrenia evidently set in, on the part of one of them or both; autism—separation. And then man—”

  “Man was driven out. Physically away.”

  Pete said, “Evidently man did something, or anyhow God thought he had. We don’t know precisely what it was. He was corrupted, anyhow, through nature or some natural substance; something made by God and part of His creation. So man sank out of direct contact and down to the level of mere creation. And we have to make our way back.”

  “And you do it through those pills.”

  He said, simply, “It’s all I know. I don’t have natural visions. I want to take the journey back until I stand face to face with Him as man once did—did, and elected not to. Beyond doubt, some thing or some one tempted him away and into doing something else. Man voluntarily gave up that relationship because he thought he had found something better!” Half to himself he added, “So we wound up with Carleton Lufteufel and the gob and the ter-weps.”

  “I like the idea of being tempted,” Lurine said; she relit her pipe, it having gone out. “Everyone does. Those pills tempt you; you’re still doing it. Men—people like you—have prairie-dog blood; they’re insanely curious. Make a funny noise and out you pop from your burrow to witness whatever’s taking place. Just in case.” She pondered. “A wonder. That’s what you crave and he— the first of us in the Garden—craved. What before the war they called a ‘spectacular.’ It’s the big tent syndrome.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know why you want to be at ringside? So you can be with them.”

  “Who?”

  “The big boys. Hubris. Vainglory. Man saw God and he said to himself, Gee whiz, how come He gets to be God and I’m stuck with—”

  “And I’m doing this now.”

  Lurine said, “Learn to be what Christ called ‘meek.’ I bet you don’t know what that means. Remember those supermarkets before the war; when someone pushed a cart into line ahead of you, and you accepted it—that’s your faulty idea of ‘meek.’ Actually meek means ‘tamed,’ as in a tamed animal.”

  Startled, he said, “Really?”

  “Then it got to mean humble, or even merciful, or long-suffering, or even bad things like weak and soft. But originally it meant to lose the quality of violence. In the Bible it means specifically to be free from resentment regarding injuries done to you.” She laughed with delight. “You stupid fool,” she said, then. “You prattle but you don’t know a thing, really.”

  He said stiffly, “Hanging around that pedant Father Handy has hardly made you meek. In any of the senses of the word.”

  At that, Lurine laughed until she choked. “Oh god.” She breathed. “We can have a ferocious argument, now: Which of us is the meeker? Hell, I’m a lot meeker than you!” She rocked with amusement.

  He ignored her. Because of the stew of pills which he had taken; they had begun to work on him.

  He saw a figure, suddenly, with laughing eyes, whom he supposed to be Jesus. It had to be. The man, with white-thatched hair, wore a toga and Greek greaves. He was young, with brawny shoulders, and he grinned in a gentle, happy way as he stood clutching to his chest an enormous and heavy clasp-bound book. Except for the classic greaves, he might—from the wild cut of his hair—have been Saxon.

  Jesus Christ! Pete thought.

  The white-haired brawny youth—my god, he was built like a blacksmith!—unbuckled the book and opened it to display two wide pages. Pete saw writing in a foreign language, held forward for him to read:

  KAI THEOS EIN HO LOGOS

  Pete couldn’t make it out, nor the jumble of other words which, although neatly inscribed, swam before him in this vision, snatches meaningless to him, such as koimeitheisometha … keoiesis … titheimi … he just could not even tell if it was a genuine language or not: communication or the nonsense phantoms of a dream.

  The flaxen-haired youth shut the great book which he held and then, abruptly, was gone. It was like, his coming and going, an old wartime laser hologram
, but without sound.

  “You shouldn’t listen to that anyhow,” a voice said within Pete’s head, as if his own thought processes had passed from his control. “All that mumbo-jumbo was to impress you. Did he tell you his name, that man? No, he did not.”

  Turning, Pete made out the bobbing, floating image of a small clay pot, a modest object, fired but without glaze; merely hardened. A utilitarian object, from the soil of the ground. It was lecturing him against being awed—which he had been—and he appreciated it.

  “I’ll tell you my name,” the pot said. “I’m Oh Ho.”

  To himself, Pete thought, Chinese.

  “I’m from the earth and not superior to mortals,” the pot Oh Ho continued, in a conversational way. “I’m not above identifying myself. Always beware of manifestations too lofty to identify themselves. You are Peter Sands; I am Oh Ho. What you saw, that figure holding that large ancient volume, that was an entity of the noosphere, from the Seas of Knowledge, who come down here all the way from Sumerian times. As Therapeutae they assisted the Greek healer Asclepiades; as spirits or plasmic lifeforms of wisdom they called themselves ‘Thoth’ to the Egyptians, and when they built—they are excellent artificers—they were ‘Ptath’ to the Egyptians and ‘Hephaestus’ to the Greeks. They actually have no names at all, being a composite mind. But I have a name, just as you have. Oh Ho. Can you remember that? It’s a simple name.”

  “Sure,” Pete said. “Oh Ho, a Chinese name.”

  The pot wavered; it was shimmering away. “Oh Ho,” it repeated. “Ho Oh. Oh, Oh, Oh. Ho On. Think of Ho On, Peter Sands, someday when you are talking with Dr. Abernathy. The little clay pot which came from the earth and can, like you, be smashed to bits and return to the earth, which lives only as long as your kind does.”

  “‘Ho On,’” Pete echoed dutifully.

  “That which is benign will identify itself by name,” Ho On said, invisible now; it was only a voice, a thinking, mentational entity which had possessed Pete’s mind. “That which won’t is not. We are alike, you and I, equals in a certain real way, made from the same stuff. Peter Sands. I have told you who I am; and from old, I know you.”

  What a silly name, he thought: Ho On. A silly name for a transitory, breakable pot. Well, he liked it anyhow; it had, as it said, treated him as an equal. And somehow that seemed more important than any vast transcendent significance which the weighty foreign words in the huge book might contain. Words he could not fathom anyhow; they were beyond him. He, like the clay pot Ho On, was too limited. But that was Jesus Christ I saw, he realized. I know it was Him. It looked like Him.

  “Anything else you wish to know before I leave?” Ho On’s thoughts came to him, within his head.

  Pete Sands said, “Tell me the most important thing that, under any circumstance, could be told. But that’s true.”

  Ho On thought, “St. Sophia is going to be reborn. She wasn’t acceptable before.”

  He blinked. Who was St. Sophia? It was like telling him that St. Vitus was going to dance again … it was a joke. Keen disappointment filled him. It had simply ended up with something silly, like its name. And now he felt it leave … on that meager, if meaningless, note.

  And then the drugs wore off. And he now no longer saw or heard; again he surveyed his living room, his familiar microtapes and projector, his tape-spools, and littered plastic desk; he saw Lurine smoking her pipe, he smelled the cavendish tobacco … his head felt swollen and he got up unsteadily, knowing that only an instant in real time had passed, and for Lurine nothing had occurred. Nothing had changed. And she was right.

  This was not an event; Christ had not manifested Himself. What had occurred was that which Pete Sands had hoped for: an augmentation of his own faculties of perception.

  “Jesus,” he said aloud.

  “What’s the matter?” Lurine asked.

  “I saw Him,” he informed her. “He exists. To save us. He’s always there, always will be, has always been.” He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a small quantity, perhaps two thirds of a shot, of bourbon from the precious prewar bottle.

  When he returned to the living room Lurine was reading a badly printed magazine, a mimeographed newsletter circulated from town to town here in the Mountain States area.

  “You merely sit,” he said, incredulous.

  “What am I supposed to do? Clap?”

  “But it’s important.”

  “You saw it; I didn’t.” She continued reading the newsletter; it came from Provo, Utah.

  “But He’s there for you, too,” Pete said.

  “Good.” She nodded absently.

  He seated himself, feeling weak and nauseated; side-effects from the pills. There was silence and then Lurine spoke again, still absently.

  “The Sows are sending the inc, Tibor McMasters, on a Pilg. To find the God of Wrath and capture his essence for their murch.”

  “What in god’s name is a ‘murch’?” SOW jargon; he did not ever understand.

  “Church mural.” She glanced up. “They speculate he’ll have to travel well over a thousand miles; it’s Los Angeles, I believe.”

  “You think I care?” he said furiously.

  “I think,” she said, laying aside the newsletter, then, and frowning thoughtfully, “that you ought to go along on the Pilg and then about fifty miles from here cut a leg off that cow that pulls Tibor’s cart. Or short out his metabattery.” She sounded perfectly, composedly serious.

  “Why?”

  “So he can’t bring back the essence. For the mural.”

  “It couldn’t matter less to me if—”

  He broke off. Because someone had come to the door of his meager abode; he heard footsteps, then his dog Tom Swift And His Electric Magic Carpet barking. The bell clingled. Rising, he strode to the door.

  Dr. Abernathy, his superior, the priest of the Charlottesville Combined Christian Church, stood there in his black cassock. “Is this too late to call on you?” Dr. Abernathy said, his round, small, bunlike face gracious in its formal concern not to be a bother.

  “Come in.” Pete held the door wide. “You know Miss Rae, Doctor.”

  “The Lord be with you,” Dr. Abernathy said to her, nodding.

  Immediately, correctly, she answered, “And with thy spirit.” She rose. “Good evening, Doctor.”

  “I heard,” Dr. Abernathy said, “that you are considering entering our church, taking confirmation and then the greater sacraments.”

  “Well,” Lurine said, “I was—you know. Dissatisfied. I mean, who wants to worship the former Chairman of the ERDA?”

  Dr. Abernathy passed into the tiny kitchen, and put the tea kettle on, to boil water for coffee. “You would be welcome,” he said to her.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Lurine said.

  “But to be confirmed you would need half a year of intensive religious instruction. On many topics: the sacraments, the rituals, the basic tenets of the Church. What we believe and also why. I hold adult-instruction classes two afternoons a week.” He added, with a trace of embarrassment, “I have at present one adult receiving instruction. You could catch up very quickly; you have a bright, fertile mind. Meanwhile, you could attend services … however, you could not come to the rail, could not take Holy Communion; you realize that.”

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “Have you been baptized?”

  “I—” She hesitated. “Frankly, I don’t know.”

  “We would baptize you with the special service for those who may have been baptized before. With water. Anything else—such as rose petals, as they used to do it before the war in Los Angeles—that does not count. By the way—I hear that Tibor is about to set forth on a Pilg. It’s no secret, of course; my hearing of it verifies that. The Eltern of the Servants of Wrath, the rumor-mill says, have provided him with maps and photos and data, so that he can find Lufteufel. All I hope is that his cow holds out.” Returning to the living room, he said to Pete Sands, “How about a little poker? Three doe
s not seem to me enough, but we can play for genuine old copper cents. And no crazy games such as spit-in-the-ocean and baseball, just seven-card stud and straight and draw.”

  “Okay,” Pete said, nodding. “But let’s allow one wild card, dealer’s choice, since there’re only three of us.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Abernathy said, as Pete walked off to get the deck and the box of chips. He drew a comfortable chair up to the table for Lurine Rae and then one for himself and at last one for Pete.

  “And no chattering during the game,” Pete said to Lurine.

  They were dealing a hand of five-card draw, jacks or better to open, when the cow-drawn cart of Tibor McMasters, batterylamp sweeping ahead of it, pulled up at the door and tinkled its hopeful bell.

  Studying his hand, Dr. Abernathy said thoughtfully in a preoccupied and abstracted way, “Um, I—uh—fold. So I’ll go.” He rose, to go to the door: to answer the presence of the well-known inc SOW artist.

  On his cart, Tibor McMasters surveyed the progress of the poker game, and the conversation had that unique equal quality: everyone said as much as everyone else, although each player had his idiosyncratic mumble; and none of it, Tibor realized, meant anything—it was merely a noise, a banter, as their collective attention kept fixed on the play itself.

  So only later, when a pause came, could he talk with Dr. Abernathy.

  “Doctor.” His voice, in his ears, sounded squeaky.

  “Yes?” Abernathy said, counting his blue chips.

  “You heard about the Pilg I’ve got to go on.”

  “Yep.”

  Tibor said, aware and thinking out his words, knowing intensely the meaning of them, “Sir, if I became a convert to Christianity, I wouldn’t have to go.”

  At once Dr. Abernathy glanced up and said, scrutinizing him, “Are you really that much afraid?” Everyone else, Peter Sands and the girl, Lurine Rae, also stared at Tibor; he felt their motionless gaze.

  “Yes,” Tibor said.

  “Often,” Dr. Abernathy said, and took a fresh deck and began to riffle and vigorously shuffle the cards, “fear or dread is based on a sense of guilt, not experienced directly.”