The woman spoke up. “Mister, in about ten minutes you’re going into the lake of fire that burneth forever. I’d take ever damn one of them pills.”
I said nothing.
The man shrugged. He took one of the pills himself, handed one to the woman, and put the rest in his pocket.
We walked out of the shop, leaving its rows of hundreds of bottles and jars of pills, and as we left, the automatic lighting in the shop went off behind us.
We turned a corner and a new fountain came on, with lights and with new, softer music. It was, if anything, larger than the first.
On either side of us now were stainless-steel walls, with occasional doorways. Over each doorway was a sign that read:
SLEEPING CHAMBER B
CAPACITY: 1,600
or
SLEEPING CHAMBER D
CAPACITY: 2,200
“Who sleeps in those places?” I said.
“Nobody,” the woman said. “They was for the ancients. Those of old.”
“How ancient?” I said. “How old?”
The woman shook her head. “The ancient of days. When they was giants in the earth and they feared the wrath of the Lord.”
“They feared the rain of fire from Heaven,” the man said. “And they didn’t trust Jesus. The rain of fire never come, and the ancients died.”
We passed by more and more sleeping quarters, and by at least a half mile of stainless-steel walls merely marked STORAGE, and then, finally, we came to the dead end of the corridor, where there was a massive door with a sign in red: POWER SOURCE: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
The man had taken a small metal plate from his pocket. He held it against a matching rectangle in the center of the door and said, “The key to the Kingdom.”
The door slid open and a soft light came on.
Inside was a smaller corridor, and the air in it was distinctly warm. The dogs were left outside and we walked down it, toward another door. It became warmer as we walked. I was beginning to perspire and would have liked to wipe my forehead but my hands were still tied behind me.
We came to the door. The sign on it was in large orange letters:
YOU ARE APPROACHING AN ARTIFICIAL SUN
´FUSION PROJECT THREE: MAUGRE
The man held a different card to this door and when it opened the heat was palpable and intense. There was another door just inside this one and the man this time put yet another card into a slot beside it and the door opened about two feet wide. There was a brilliant orange glow behind it that illuminated some kind of enormous room. A room without a floor. Or with a floor of orange light. The heat was overwhelming.
Then the man’s voice said, “Behold the eternal fire.” And I felt myself being pushed from behind, and my heart almost stopped beating and I could not speak. I looked down and was able to hold my eyes in a squint for only a split second, but long enough to see that a great circular pit was directly in front of my feet and that down, incalculably far down in that pit, was a fire like that of the sun.
And then I was pulled back, limp, and the man’s hands turned my body around to face his and he said, quietly, “Do you have any last words?”
I looked at his face. It was impassive, quiet, sweating. “I am the resurrection and the life,” I said. “He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”
The woman shrieked, “My God, Edgar! My God!”
The man looked at me firmly. “Where did you learn those words?” he said.
I groped for something to say, and finally found only the truth— which I felt that he would not understand. But I said it anyway. “I have read the Bible.”
“Read?” the woman said. “You can read scripture?”
I felt that I would die from the heat at my back if I did not get away in less than a minute, I could see that the man’s face was showing pain from the heat, or doubt.
“Yes,” I said. “I can read scripture.” I looked him directly in the eyes. “I can read anything.”
The man stared at me with his broad face twisted for one more horrible moment and then, abruptly, he pulled me forward, away from the fire, and pushed me through the outer door and then closed it. Then we went through the second door, and it closed itself, and the air was bearable. “All right,” the man said. “We’ll go to the book and see if you can read it.”
Then he took his knife and cut the ropes that held my hands.
“I must find Biff first,” I said.
And I found her, halfway to Sears, and took her up in my arms.
We had passed another fountain on my frightened way to the Lake of Fire; returning to Sears, as we approached the fountain again a scene from an ancient film came into my mind: in King of Kings the actor H. B. Warner asks a man named John to “baptize” him, by wetting him in a river. It is clearly a moment of great mystical significance. My steps down the wide and empty corridor of the Mall seemed light. The man and woman flanked me, but this time without restraint; they had untied me. Their dogs were silent and submissive; all that could be heard was the regular pattern of our footsteps and the music that came from invisible speakers and bathed us in airy sound. And louder now came the splashing of the fountain water, returning to the pool from its graceful arcing toward the high ceiling.
I thought of Jesus, bearded and serene, in the Jordan River. Abruptly I stopped and said, “I want to be baptized. In this fountain.” My voice was clear and strong. I was staring at the water in the great circular pool beside me and there was a light spray in my face.
Out of the side of my vision I saw the woman, as if in a dream, sink to her knees, her long, full denim skirt slowly ballooning around her as she did so. And her voice, weak now, was saying, “My God. The Holy Spirit told him to speak them words.”
Then I heard the man’s voice saying, “Get up, Berenice. He could have been told about that. Not everybody keeps church secrets.”
I turned to watch her as she got up from her knees, pulling her blue sweater back down over her broad hips. “But he knew the fount when he saw it,” she said. “He knew the place of holy water.”
“I told you,” the man said, but with doubt in his voice. “He could of heard from anybody in the other six towns. Just because Baleens don’t backslide don’t mean the Graylings don’t. Manny Grayling could of told him. Hell, he might be Grayling—one they been hiding from Church.”
She shook her head. “Baptize him, Edgar Baleen,” she said. “You can’t refuse the Sacrament.”
“I know that,” he said quietly. He began taking off his denim jacket. He looked at me, his face grave. “Sit down. On the edge.”
I seated myself on the edge of the fountain and the woman kneeled and took off my shoes and then my socks. She rolled up my pantlegs. Then she sat on one side of me, and the man, jacketless now, on the other side, and they both took off their shoes and socks. They had released the dogs and the two white animals just stood there patiently, watching us and watching Biff, who had curled herself on the floor.
“All right,” the man said. “Step into the fount.”
I stood up and stepped over the edge into the water, which was cold. Looking down, I saw that the pool had its tiles arranged into the shape of a giant fish, much like the one I had found on the shore and eaten—a huge silver fish with fins and gills. The water came up to my knees, and the rest of me was drenched by the spray, and it was very cold. But I felt no discomfort.
I was staring down at the giant fish on which I stood when the two of them came up beside me. The man bent, cupping his hands together, held them under water for a moment and then raised them, dripping, to my head. I felt his hands, open now, on my head and then the water from them was streaming down my face.
“I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said.
The woman reached out and placed her large soft hand on my head. “Amen and praise the Lord,” she said softly.
We stepped out of the fountain and I waited, with the man, the dogs, and Bi
ff, while the woman went to Sears and came back with towels for our feet. We dried our feet and legs, put on our shoes, and continued walking, in silence.
I felt even lighter than before, more remote and yet more truly present at the same time, extremely alive to what was outside me and inside me at the same time. I felt that I had crossed some invisible line, one that had been waiting for me ever since I had left Ohio, and had now entered some symbolic realm where my life was light, “like a feather on the back of my hand,” and where only my own experience of that life, my own undrugged experience, was all that I was living for. And if that experience meant death in the Lake of Fire, it would have to be acceptable.
I wonder now, writing this down, if that is how those who immolate themselves feel when they decide to do it. But they are drugged, unaware. And they cannot read.
Could baptism really work? Could there be a Holy Spirit? I do not believe so.
We walked in silence down the wide hall and back up the broad staircase, and the lights behind us dimmed and darkened, and the music became silent and the fountains stopped as we left.
Near the top of the stairs I was able to turn for a moment to look down on the vast and empty Mall, with its chandeliers dimming and its fountains dying down, and its storefronts still bright as if waiting for customers who would never come. I could sense the sad dignity of that place, of its broad, clean emptiness.
They took me back outdoors into what had become evening, and led me, still silently, to one of the large buildings that flanked the obelisk—a big, official-looking building with a well-trimmed lawn and no weeds around it. We went to the back of the building and I saw a garden there and, added on to the building itself, an incongruous back porch made of wood, looking like one I had seen in Birth of a Nation.
We entered by a door on this porch and I found myself in a huge, high-ceilinged room with perhaps thirty people in it, all plainly dressed, all silent, sitting around an enormous wooden table as though they had been waiting for me. The people at the table had been silent when we came in; they remained silent as the old man and his wife led me through the room and around the table—as silent as the eating rooms of a dormitory or of a prison.
We went down a narrow hallway into another, equally large room, with rows of wooden chairs in it, facing a podium. Behind the podium was a wall-sized television screen, now off.
Baleen led me up to the podium. There was a large black book on it and, although whatever lettering might have once been on its cover was now completely worn off, I was certain the book was the Bible.
The lightness and strength I had felt in the Mall were leaving me. I stood there, slightly embarrassed, looking at this quiet old room with its worn wooden chairs and its pictures of the face of Jesus on the walls and the big television screen, and before long the people from the kitchen started coming into the room and sitting down, men and women walking in quietly in twos and threes and sitting wordlessly and then looking at me with a kind of shy curiosity. They all wore jeans and simple shirts, and a few of the men were bearded like me but most were not. I watched them with a certain hope that I might see young people, but that hope was disappointed; no one was any younger than I. There was a couple holding hands and looking like lovers; but they were obviously in their forties.
And then when all of the chairs were full Edgar Baleen stood up and suddenly threw his arms out wide, palms upward, saying loudly, “My brethren.”
Everyone watched him attentively; the lovers let go of one another’s hands. Most of the people were in couples, but in the second row was a woman of about my age, sitting alone. She was tall and, like all of them, simply dressed, wearing a denim shirt with a blue apron over it, but she was striking to look at. Despite my nervousness I found myself watching her as much as I could without being obvious about it. She really was, I began to see, a beautiful woman; it was pleasant to look at her and to get my mind partly off what I had just been through at the Lake of Fire and of what might be in store for me. Whatever might happen, I felt that the crisis was past now; and I deliberately made myself think about the woman.
Her hair was blond, curling slightly around the sides of her face. Her complexion, despite the roughness of her clothes, was clear white and flawless. Her eyes were large and light-colored and her forehead was high, clear and intelligent-looking.
“Brethren,” Baleen was saying. “It’s been a good year for the family, as all know. We’ve been at peace with our neighbors, and the Lord’s provisions at the Great Mall have continued in their bountiful abundance.” Then he bowed his head, thrust his arms forward and upward, and said, “Let us pray.”
The group bowed their heads, except for the woman I had been watching. She inclined her head only very slightly. I bowed mine, wanting to take no risks. I had seen meetings like this one in films and I knew that the idea was to bow and be silent.
Baleen began to recite what seemed to.be a memorized, ritual prayer: “God grant us safety from the fallout past and the fallout to come. Preserve us from all Detectors. Grant us thy love and keep us from the sin of Privacy. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
I could not help being startled by the words “the sin of Privacy.” It was completely contrary to my teaching, and yet something in me responded favorably to the phrase.
There were a few coughs and squirmings from the group when Baleen finished, and everyone looked up again.
“The Lord has provided for the Baleens,” he said, in a more ordinary tone of voice now, “and for all of the Seven Families in the Cities of the Plain.” Then he leaned forward at his lectern, grasping its sides with what I suddenly noticed were small, white, womanish hands—hands with well-manicured nails—and spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. “And it may be that now the Lord has sent us an interpreter of his word or a prophet. A stranger has come into our midst, has passed an ordeal of fire before my own eyes, and has shown a knowledge of the Lord.”
I saw that everyone was looking at me. Despite the new calmness I had seemed to find in myself, it was very disconcerting. I had never been an object of attention like that before. I felt myself blushing and had a sudden wish for the old rales of Privacy that forbade people to stare at one another. There must have been thirty of them—all of them looking at me with open curiosity or suspicion. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them from trembling. Biff was at my feet, rubbing herself between my ankles. For a moment I even wanted her to go away, to stop paying attention to me.
“The stranger has told me,” Baleen was saying, “that he is a carrier of the old knowledge. He says he is a Reader.”
Several of them looked surprised. Their stares at me became even more intense. The woman I had been watching leaned slightly forward, as if to get a closer look.
Then, with a dramatic wave of his arm in my direction, Baleen said, “Step forward to the Book of Life and read from it. If you can read.”
I looked at him, trying to appear calm; but my heart was beating powerfully and my knees trembled. All those people assembled in that one place! I had expected something like this to happen, but now that it had come I seemed to have reverted to the person I once had been—before Roberto and Consuela, before Mary Lou, before prison and my escape and my new, rebellious self-sufficiency. Even as a shy professor, lecturing on mind control by repeating words I had memorized and said many times before, I would be nervous in the presence of my largest classes—of ten or twelve students at one time. And students were all properly trained to avoid my eyes while listening to me.
Somehow I managed to walk the few feet to the lectern where the book sat. I almost tripped over Biff. Baleen stepped aside for me and said, “Read from the beginning.”
I opened the cover of the book with a trembling hand and was grateful to be able to look down, avoiding the eyes of the congregation. I stared at the page for a long time, in silence. There was print on it; but somehow the letters did not make any sense. Some were very big and some were small. I knew that I was looking at a title
page, but I could not make my mind work. I kept staring at it. It was not a foreign language, I knew that somehow; but I could not make my brain assemble the letters into coherence; they were just inked marks on a yellowed page. I had stopped shaking and was frozen. This lasted an intolerably long time. Into my mind had come a frightening image blanking out the page on the oak lectern in front of me: the yellow-orange fire at the bottom of the pit in the mall; the nuclear core that could vaporize my body. Read, I told myself. But nothing came.
I could feel Baleen moving closer to me. I felt that my heart would stop.
And then, suddenly, a clear, strong female voice from in front of me spoke out: “Read the book,” it said. “Read for us, brother,” and I looked up, startled, and saw that it was the beautiful tall woman who was sitting by herself and was now staring at me pleadingly. “You can do it!” she said. “Read to us.”
I looked back to the book. And suddenly it was simple. The big, black letters that filled most of the page said, “Holy Bible,” in capital letters.
I read it:
HOLY BIBLE
And then, under that, the letters were small:
“Abridged and updated for modern readers”
And at the bottom of the page:
“Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Omaha. 2123”
That was all that page said. I turned to the next, which was filled with print, and began, more calmly now, to read:
“Genesis, by Moses. At first God made the world and the sky, but the world had no shape and there was nobody living on it. And it was dark, too, until God said, ‘Give us some light!’ and the light came on. . .”
I went on, more and more easily, and calmly. It was not at all like the Bible I had read from back at the prison, but that one had been much older.
When I finished the page I looked up.
The beautiful woman was staring at me with her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. On her face was a look of wonder or of adoration.
And I was peaceful again, inside. And suddenly so tired, so worn and used andovercome, that I dropped my head there at the podium and closed my eyes, letting my mind become blank, empty of everything except the words: