Tibor said nothing. He waited with the intention of lasting it out, however unpleasant and protracted it might be. Priests, after all, were generally odd, intense people, especially the Christian ones.
“You do not,” Dr. Abernathy stated, “in your Servants of Wrath Church, have either public or private confession.”
“No, Doctor. But—”
“I will not try to argue or compete,” Dr. Abernathy said in a harsh, absolutely firm tone. “You are employed by Father Handy and it is his business if he wants to send you.”
“And yours,” Lurine added, “if you want to quit or go. Why not just quit?”
“And go,” Tibor said, “into a vacuum.”
“Always,” Dr. Abernathy continued, “the Christian Church is ready to accept anyone. Regardless of their spiritual condition; it asks nothing of them except their willingness. I would, however, suspect that what I can offer you—I acting as a mouthpiece of God, not as a man—is the opportunity for you to shirk your spiritual duty … or, put more precisely, the opportunity to acknowledge to yourself and to confess to me your deep desire to shirk your spiritual duty.”
“To a false church?” Lurine Rae protested, her dark red eyebrows raised in astonishment. To Tibor she said, “They have a club; they’re all members. It’s what’s called ‘professional ethics.’” She laughed.
“Why not make an appointment with me?” Dr. Abernathy asked Tibor. “I can accept your confession without your joining the Christian Church; it is not tied in, as the ancients put it.”
With utmost caution, his mind very, very rapid in its work, Tibor answered, “I—can’t think of anything to confess.”
“You will,” Lurine assured him. “He’ll assist you. Even further.”
Neither Dr. Abernathy nor Pete Sands said anything, and yet they seemed in some mysterious sense, perhaps by their mere passivity, to acknowledge what the woman said to be true. The father confessor knew his trade; like a good lawyer or doctor of medicine, Tibor reflected, he could draw his client out. Lead him and inform him. Find what was deep inside, hidden—not plant anything, but rather harvest it.
“Let me think this over,” Tibor said. He felt entirely hesitant now. His intentions, his decision to do this as a solution to his horror at the idea of the soon-coming Pilg, seemed swamped with the second guesses of severe and fundamental doubt. What had seemed a good idea had been, to his disbelief, returned as unacceptable by the man who stood to benefit most—at least most after Tibor McMasters, who stood at the head of the line … for obvious reasons: reasons palpable to everyone in the room.
Confession? He felt no burden of guilt, no sting of death; he felt instead perplexed and afraid; that was all. Admittedly, he feared to a morbid and obsessive degree the proposed—in fact ordered—Pilg. But why did guilt have to come into it? The Gothic convolutions of this, the older church … and yet he had to admit that it somehow seemed appropriate, this interpretation of Dr. Abernathy’s. Perhaps merely the unexpectedness of it alone had overwhelmed him; possibly that accounted for it.
Since he had nothing to say, the girl friend of Pete Sands naturally spoke up. “Confession,” Lurine said meditatively, “is strange. You in no way feel free in the sense that you can sin again with license. Actually, you feel—” She gestured, as if they all really understood her—which Tibor did not. However, he nodded solemnly, as if he did. And took the opportunity—were they not discussing giddy, interesting subjects such as sin?—to scrutinize for the millionth time her sharply amplified breasts; she wore a shrunk-by-many-washings white cotton shirt and no bra, and in the shaded light of the living room her nipples cast a far, huge shadow on the far wall, each one in the process becoming enlarged to the size of a flashlight battery.
“You feel,” Pete Sands declared, “your evil thoughts and deeds articulated. They take form and assume shapes. And are less fearsome because they become—just words, suddenly. Just the Logos. And,” he added, “the Logos is good.” He smiled, then, at Tibor, and now all at once the powerful thrust of Christian meaning struck at Tibor’s mind. He in return felt soothed; he felt the healing rather than the philosophical quality of the older church: its doctrines admittedly made no sense, but neither did very much else in the world. Especially since the war.
Once more the three persons at the table, like a mundane and bisexual trinity, resumed their game. The discussion on the vital topic which he had come here for—vital at least to him—had terminated.
But then Dr. Abernathy said abruptly, lifting his eyes from the hand he held, “I could all of a sudden have three adults in my religious-instruction class. You, Miss Rae here, and the rather odd fellow currently attending, whom I know you all have met at one time or another, Walter Blassingame. Practically a renaissance of the primordial faith.” His expression and tone held no evidence of his feelings—perhaps as a direct result of the game spread across the surface of the table.
Aloud, Tibor said, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott.” By speaking in German he spoke to himself; as far as he knew, anyhow. But, to his amazement, Dr. Abernathy nodded, obviously understanding.
“The language,” Lurine Rae said acidly, “of Krupp und Sohnen. Of I. G. Farben and A. G. Chemie. Of the Lufteufel family all the way back to Adam Lufteufel—or, more accurately, Cain Lufteufel.”
Dr. Abernathy said to her, “Erbarme mich, mein Gott is not the language of the German military establishment nor the industrial cartels. It’s the Klagengeschrei of the human being, the human cry for help.” He explained to her and Peter Sands, “It means ‘God save me.’”
“Or ‘God have mercy on me,’” Tibor said.
“Erbarmen,” Dr. Abernathy said, “means ‘to have mercy,’ except in that one phrase; it is an idiom. The suffering is not from God; therefore God is not asked to be merciful; He is asked to rescue you.” He all at once, then, threw down his cards. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in my office, Tibor. I’ll see you privately, explain a little about the act of confession, and then we’ll go into the chapel where the Reserve Sacrament is; you will of course be unable to genuflect, but He will not hold that against you. A legless man cannot kneel.”
“All right, Doctor,” Tibor agreed. And felt better, strangely, even at this point. As if something had been lifted from the sagging grasp of his combined manual extensors, a load which overstrained the metabattery and made the ominous black smoke rise from the transformer, gear box, and bank of selenoids of his cart.
And up to now he had not even known of its existence.
“My three queens,” Dr. Abernathy informed Pete Sands, “beat your two pairs. Sorry.” He collected the meager pot; Tibor saw that the minister’s little pile of chips was growing: he had been steadily winning.
“Can I play?” Tibor inquired.
The players glanced at one another in a mild way, as if barely conscious of his presence, let alone his request.
“Takes a dollar—in silver bits—to buy in,” Pete said. He tossed one chip to an empty spot on the table. “That represents the dollar you owe the banker. Have you a dollar? And I don’t mean in scrip.”
The priest said mildly, “Show Tibor how you back up your talk, Pete. Show him your arsenal.”
“This is how people can tell I’m never bluffing,” Pete said. He dug down deep into his pocket and brought out a roll of dimes, so marked.
“Wow,” Tibor said.
“I’ve never lost at blackjack,” Pete said. “I just double my bets.” He undid one end of the roll of dimes to show Tibor that within the brown paper actual silver coins existed: genuine money, from the old, old days.
“You sure you want to play?” Lurine Rae said, raising her eyebrow and eyeing Tibor. “Knowing this?”
He had, in his pocket, the one-third initial advance from the SOWers for the proposed murch. He had not spent a bit of it—just in case at some dreadful future hour of reckoning it had to be returned. Now, however, he took out six silver quarters, displayed them in the grip of his right manual-extensor?
??s claws. And so, as he rolled his cart closer to the table, Pete Sands counted out the red and blue chips which his dollar and a half bought. It had now become a four-person—and hence a better—game.
FOUR
Later that night, after pretty red-haired Lurine Rae and Tibor McMasters on his cow cart had respectively walked and rolled off, Pete Sands elected to discuss his vision with Dr. Abernathy.
Dr. Abernathy did not approve. “If you keep on having visions, I’m going to advise you that you be forbidden to approach the rail.”
“You’d cut me off from the greatest of the sacraments?” Pete could not believe it. Surely the short, roosterlike, red-faced, round little old priest was merely in a temporary—and for him quite normal—dark mood.
“Well, if you’re having visions, you don’t need the intercession of the priest and the saving power of the sacraments.”
Pete said, “You want to know what He—”
“His appearance,” Dr. Abernathy said, “is not a topography which I care to discuss, as if you’d seen a rare butterfly.”
Plunging in, Pete said, “Receive my confession, then. Now.” He knelt, hands clasped together, waited.
“I’m not dressed properly.”
“Balls.”
Dr. Abernathy sighed, departed, and presently returned in the white robes necessary; pulling a chair into place, he seated himself with his back to Pete. Then, crossing himself, after praying inaudibly, he said, “May Thy ears receive the humble confession of this, Thy servant, who has erred and wishes to be received back into Thy bountiful grace.”
“Here’s how He looked,” Pete began.
Interrupting, Dr. Abernathy, slightly more loudly, prayed, “Cause this, Thy servant, now puffed up with vainglory and imagining in his dustlike ignorance that he has direct access to Thy Holy Presence through what is a chemical and magical process devoid of sanctification—”
“He is always there,” Pete said.
“In confession,” Dr. Abernathy said, “do not recount the actions of others, even of Him.”
Pete declared, “I most humbly confess that I deliberately ingested drugs of an intricate nature for the purpose of transcending ordinary reality for a glimpse of the absolute, and this was wrong. Further, I confess that in all honesty. I believed in and still do believe in the veracity of my vision, that I genuinely saw Him, and if I am mistaken, I beg Him to forgive me, but if it was Him, then He must have wished—”
“From dust thou art come,” Dr. Abernathy interrupted. “Oh man, how small thou art. Lord God, open this idiotic fool’s inner heart to the wisdom of Thee: which is that no man can see Thee and announce predicate adjectives as to Thy appearance and being.”
“I confess further,” Pete said, “that I did harbor and still harbor resentment at being told to desist from my personal search for God, and that I believe that one man working alone can still find Him. Without the mediation of the priest, the sacraments, and the church; this I confess most humbly to believe and although I know it is wrong I nonetheless still believe it.”
They sat in silence for an interval and then Pete Sands said, “Funny you should say that ‘dust to dust’ thing. It reminds me of what Ho On said about being made from the clay of the ground.”
Dr. Abernathy stared at him fixedly.
“What’s the matter?” Pete said uneasily.
“‘Ho On’?”
“Yes. In my vision—the ceramic pot gave that as its name. Silly pot, silly name. Must have been a silly hallucinogenic; probably had some of those wartime disorientation chemicals in it that—”
Dr. Abernathy said, in a surprisingly grave voice, “That is Greek.”
“Greek!”
“I’m not positive of precision, but it’s a name God gave Himself in the Bible, in the Greek part. Yahweh, as a Hebrew verb, means something in the older part, when He talks to Moses … it’s a form of the verb ‘to be’; it describes His nature. ‘I am He Who causes to be,’ is what Yahweh literally means. So that Moses could report back to his people the nature—that is, the ontology—of his God. But Ho On …” The priest pondered. “The Essence of Essence. The Most Holy? The On High? The Ultimate Power?”
Laughing, Pete said, “This was a little clay pot. Anyhow, as you say, I was tripping out on drugs. At first it said, ‘Oh Ho,’ and then it went, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ and finally, ‘Ho On.’”
“But that is Greek.”
Pete asked, “Who was St. Sophia?”
“There never was any St. Sophia.”
At that, Pete started laughing in the fashion of a man joyfully flashing back to what had been a good drug trip. “No St. Sophia? A pot that calls itself God, and a revelation about a nonexistent saint—that was some mixture I took. Once in a lifetime. You’re right; it is black mass. A saint is going to be reborn—”
“I’ll look it up,” Dr. Abernathy said. “But I’m sure there was no such saint….” He departed for a time, then, abruptly, returned carrying a large old book with him, a reference book. “St. Sophia,” he declared loudly, “was a building.”
“A building!”
“A very famous building, destroyed of course during the smash. The emperor Justinian had it personally constructed. The name for it, Haggia Sophia, is Greek. Also Greek, like Ho On. It means ‘the Wisdom of God.’ She—it—is going to be reborn?”
“That’s what Ho On told me,” Pete said.
Seating himself, Dr. Abernathy said carefully, “What else did this Ho On, this ceramic pot, say to you?”
“Nothing important. It complained a lot. Oh yes: it said that St. Sophia hadn’t been acceptable before.”
“And you derived nothing more?”
“Well, nothing that—”
“‘Haggia Sophia,’” the priest said, “can also refer to the Word of God, and hence by extension is a cypher for Christ. It is a cypher within a cypher: Haggia Sophia; St. Sophia; the Wisdom of God; the Logos; Christ; and therefore, according to our Trinitarian beliefs, God. Read, ahem … ah: Proverbs 8: 22–31. Most fascinating.”
“A saint that never even existed,” Pete said. “The pot put me on. It was a gag. It was pulling my leg.”
“Are you still sleeping with Lurine Rae?” The priest’s voice had a sudden, hardly expected sharpness to it; he blinked.
“Um, yes,” Pete muttered.
“So this is the road our converts travel to reach us.”
Pete said, “When you’re losing you’re losing. I mean, you take them as they come.”
“I order you,” Dr. Abernathy said, “to stop sleeping with that girl, whom you are not married to.”
“If I do that she won’t join the Christian Church.”
There was silence. Each man regarded the other, heavily breathing; faces flushed, the two of them glared disapproval and masculine authority, with overtones of some deeper, higher mandate, obscurely articulated but nonetheless there.
“And the visions,” Dr. Abernathy said. “It is time you gave them up as well. You confessed the use of vision-inducing drugs. I am instructing you to turn all such drugs over to me.”
“Wh-wh-what?”
The priest nodded. “Right now.” He held out his hand.
“I never should have confessed.” His voice trembled and he could not, for the life of him, keep it steady. “Listen,” he said, “how about a deal? I’ll stop sleeping with Lurine, but you let me keep—”
Dr. Abernathy stated, “I am more concerned with the drugs. There is a satanic element involved, a vitiated but still-real black mass.”
“You’re”—Pete gestured—“out of your mind!”
The hand remained. Waiting.
“‘Black mass.’” Disgusted, he said, “Some deal. I can’t win; I either—” Too much, he thought gloomily. What a mistake it had been to slip over into the formal relationship with Abernathy; the priest had ceased to be a man, had assumed transcendent power. “Penance,” he said aloud. “You’ve got me. Okay; I have to give up my whole goddamn supply
of medication. What a victory for you, tonight. What a reason for joining the Christian Church; you have to give away everything you like, even the search for God! You sure don’t want converts very bad—as a matter of fact, it strikes me as weird, the way you discouraged McMasters; my god, you as much as told him right flat to his face that he ought to go back to Handy and do his job and not be a convert. Is that what you want? For him to stay there with the SOWers and go on his Pilg, which he’s trying so darn hard to get out of? What a way to run a church; no wonder you’re losing out, like I said.”
Dr. Abernathy continued to extend his open hand, waiting.
Just that one thing, Pete Sands reflected. Not picking up when the inc asked to join us so as not to go on the Pilg; why didn’t you pick up on that? It wasn’t that difficult a decision; normally, Dr. Abernathy would have conscripted Tibor into the Christian Church instantly: Pete Sands had witnessed such abrupt total conversions many times.
“I’ll tell you what,” Pete said aloud. “I’ll turn over my supply of medication to you if you’ll tell me why you blocked McMasters when he tried to duck in here. Okay? A deal?”
“He should have courage. He should stand up to the duties imposed on him. Even by a false and profane mimic-church.”
“Aw, you must be kidding.” It still rang wrong; in fact even more so, now. Asked outright for his reason, Dr. Abernathy revealed that he had no reason. Or rather, Pete realized musingly, he isn’t telling.
“The drugs,” Dr. Abernathy said. “I told you why I abstained from the temptation of enticing one of the finest murch painters in the Rocky Mountain area into the Church of Christ; now give me—”
“Anything,” Pete Sands said quietly.
“Pardon?” Blinking, Dr. Abernathy cupped his ear. “Oh, I see. Anything else instead of the—medication.”
“Lurine and anything else,” Pete said in a voice that almost refused to be heard; he was in fact unsure whether the priest had caught all the words or only the tone. But the tone by itself; that would convey everything. In all his life, even during the war, he had never sounded quite like that. At least so he hoped.