City of God (35 page)

—Follow the Bouncing Ball

Young scientist Louis Slotin was testing the bouncing ball by halves, using simple screwdrivers to nudge its two cored hemispheres toward each other on a steel rod. At a certain point he must not go beyond, the spherical closure of the hemispheres would give indication of being about to happen. This was the moment of synapse, the precise critical measurement he was looking for. He was a daring fellow, as well as a brilliant biophysicist, he'd flown for the RAF in the Second World War.

He was hunched over the apparatus, peering at the minute incremental lines of measurement on the steel rod, when one of the screwdrivers seemed to jump with a will of its own. For that one bobbled instant it sprang up and knocked the hemispheres together.

In his hospital bed, Louis Slotin would remember through his searing agony the intense blue light that had flooded his eyes. He thought in that moment a clamping of the hemispheres should make a hard sound. Instead, there was a terrible hiss of transfiguration. With his
bare hands, he grabbed the bouncing ball and rent it in half. And all at once the quiet room filled with normal daylight.

Out in the desert, near the village of Oscuro, or Darkness, the scaffold was built to hold the Bouncing Ball. Louis Slotin's colleagues, wearing black armbands, drove out to the desert near the village of Oscuro where the two halves of the Bouncing Ball, primed now in their casing, were attached to a pulley and slowly hoisted to position on the scaffold.

At a discreet distance, Louis Slotin's colleagues hunkered down in their trenches awaiting the dawn.

—Oh, Lord, our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, once more I dare to speak to You and of You and inevitably from You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonative systems of clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trills. But truly how can this be different from the macaw's cry, from the broad-leafed fronds ticking with green snakes, or from the sun splotches on the riverbank appearing as swift, elusive jaguars.

I remember the village people with their laughter, how they refilled my gourd with more of the fermented manioc. They were familiar with my scholarly circumspection, my prudery, the importance of my notebooks, but gently led me to the thatched hut where she waited, childishly singing, where she waited to be made serious and attentive to herself. And around the camp now they danced, with their innovative system of clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trills, it was a glorious language, speech that was sung, speech that was danced and drumbeaten, powerfully evocative of You, my Lord, plashing and eddying like the swift river while I untied the nuptial skirt, unfolded it to a squared marriage cloth of the finest weave washed for generations in the flood tide of the surging rivergod, upon which she lay back in the ritual fashion, all limbs reaching outward to the four points of her lateral heaven, and when I touched the insides of her thighs the soft skin prickled, her feet arched and pointed, her fingers curled, and when I smelled her skin it was the smell of the sweet tubers and roast plantain, the cocoa of the earthen riverbank washed in the water of the fresh
rainbowed fish. And her hands lighting on my shoulders were of the infinite wife's understanding, she was blind to me in all but her hands, I was blind to her in all but my lips upon her lips, the village spins with the dance, we rise on the singing system of grunts and trills, we whirl about, the great trees bend, all life flies off the broad fronds sparking through the black celestial universe, the jaguared stars, the star elephant, the hanging monkey of the lit heavens, falling endlessly outward, voluminizing the vault of the universe forever. . . yet absolutely fixed, silent, peaceful, and motionless.

You will understand my impertinence, Lord. I beg this because we are so ritualized in our faiths: You are a special concern, and we think to address ourselves to You only in special ways, at prescribed times in architecturally induced states of mind. Usually we wear our best clothes. We sing our hymns of desperate expectation. We appoint one of us to petition You without embarrassment, on behalf of all of us. I have petitioned You from my office: Speaking to You from a pulpit is deemed appropriate, whereas speaking to You unhoused, unshaven, at an ill-chosen time, everyone rushing by on business, is a piteous form of madness. We must have a title, a pulpit, a day, to speak aloud, my Lord, to You.

And months later the community gathered to help her love me. She had turned inward, lost her vitality, as if my love for her were a slow poison. She sat about, she could not stir herself. Her mother came to sit with her, her father, her aunts and uncles. She is possessed by a demon, they counseled. Do not put her from you, it is an illness, it is not her true soul speaking. I will not put her from me, I assured them. In fact I wanted to confess to them my aching adoration of her moment-by-moment existence, that I adored everything about her, that her being was in every moment of its life appropriate and to be worshipped. She was thoughtful, withdrawn, and I loved her for that too. I imagined the purity of her thought, I knew it was incapable of anger or guile, this was the season of the rains and I knew her thought was as truthful as the rain. I would stand in her thought as I stood in rain. But the affronted husband does not say such things. The affronted husband folds his arms across his chest.

She could not love me, she tried but was dry for me, she was so small, she wept, but her pale brown body was intransigent, with a will of its own, and you cannot in love force into her, not in love, and I
loved her, she was my completion in this life on the wide river, she was of my ultimate concern, excluding from my mind everyone not living on the wide river in the shade of the tree vaults with families of monkeys passing by like puffs of wind in the leaves, passing like clouds, like rain showers, and the tree snakes embracing the tree trunks, and the birds of primary colors inquiring, always inquiring, step by step, each branch a proposition to be tested, a doubt, till they dropped, clawed to my hand.

She had such dark eyes, rounded to the brim with their brown blackness, ripe as fruit waiting to be bitten, to be tasted, but the shadows curved under them and set them back in her broad, troubled brow, her hair hung lank, she did not wash her hair in the river until her mother led her there, she preferred to go every day where the children were and sit with them and play and sing their songs. I think I missed most her laughter, she laughed with a deeply melodious helplessness, her voice breaking like water on rocks in a New England brook.

By this time I had mysteriously received a letter from one of my teachers at Yale, how our letters make their way, smeared, torn, crumpled, lost, found, and then quantum-delivered eight thousand miles, the final mile by the hand of someone who does not read. Come home, all is forgiven, a gentle ecclesiastical joke. But the community had been busy. In my sorrow I was called to ceremony. She was there. She removed her girdle cloth and danced around me, she was high-breasted, unchilded, long-waisted, round-calved, and where the parts of her joined, as where the buttocks met the backs of the thighs, the junction was uncreased. Oh my, oh my. I have seen bodies like this only in the Hermitage, on the three dancing Graces sculpted in white marble by Canova, with their arms entwined, their lovely looped arms, and their slender hands arched from the wrists.. . . Her straight black hair swung out behind her, her arms led the way, the fingers swimming ahead into the night, it was a raucous dance, a nightclub hooch of a dance, I found myself laughing, I knew more of her now, if she was not just my incredibly beautiful native child bride but funny, there was a moral adulthood I hadn't perceived, I was learning, my heart like the drum beating and the whole town chanting her to health. And all of it was prelude to the removal of my shoes and kneesocks, my walking shorts, my underdrawers, my shirt, neckerchief, my hat, and,
going around me dancing, the manioc sweet fermented milk of the jungly mother flowing from the gourds and drowning my blushing protests. The stars came out over the wide river, the light of our fire lit the sides of the great trees, the fibrous vines ran up, ran down, and piece by piece she donned my clothing, strutting around with greater and greater assurance, until finally, galumphing in my shoes to the great merriment of us all, she was me, a cartooned white prudish would-be missionary American Peace Corpser with anthropological pretensions, every gesture perfect, excoriating, and when she imperiously removed from my face my precious spectacles and placed them upon her nose, the lenses resting on her nostrils, her head lifted and the corners of her mouth turned down under my stained and lanyarded sun hat, and she stroked her imaginary red beard, great drunken waves of revelation came over me, blowing up the flames of the fire, and she fell on me and kissed me on the lips and we were laughing through our kisses, she was so relieved, so happy, that I knew her at last, and we sat naked side by side and ate with our fingers the roast wild boar and sweet yam paste, drank the jungle milk liquor and sang their song of deliverance. And then the shaman raised his arm in blessing and declared her soul no longer possessed, and wished everyone a good night, and everyone wished him a good night, and repaired to their huts for a great bout of communal lovemaking like the chattering monkeys of the forest, like the uhn-huhnking green hyenas and the snake ticking slithers of your forest, Lord. And she, when I slid lubriciously into her, took my demon and bit my lips and swallowed my blood, I became her heaving screaming demon, we clashed like warriors in their armor, I killed her and she killed me. We were never again who we were on that night, neither my missionary love, unlettered, not the future Reverend Pemberton, B.D.

. . . oh, Tommy, telling these dirty stories, confessing life's momentous fucks. Augustine doesn't go into details, but he had that girlfriend of the lower class, his
consuetudo,
Latin for habit, who was bad for his career. The sex is in the disparity, from the fourth-century olive-eyed slave dancer of the dusk to the little bought Victorian girls of the working class thrown across the madam's bed eeyowing to have their hymens torn with the shirttailed gentlemen's shilling clutched in their moist hands. Lord, we cannot begin to account Your injustices. The numbers are exponential, we examine them one by one and
they crush us in waves, and if we let them hurl us over ourselves crashing and turning with their incredible breathtaking multiplicative fury we find only one at a time available to our comprehension quietly sitting there like a gravestone. The quantum of the unjust dead of the earth is given to our study. Can it all be as simple a mechanical law as we have in our depth of need attributed to You—our best, most famous, never to be duplicated one and only original sin?

. . . now she really is possessed, this story has a moral of sorts. I have in front of me on my desk her packet of letters going back years, some with color photographs. I did not attend her ordination. Here she is in her whites before the island altar, the silver cross upon her bosom, the collar around her neck, the hair cut short for propriety, the black shining hair. The lovely tan face, heavier than I remember. Serene, blissful. She wears rimless glasses, eight-sided, very fashionable. The church wall behind her is the curved, corrugated steel of a Quonset hut. She holds the staff aloft with Jesus crucified, my native wench, who took everything I had to give, the Reverend Tonna mBakita, missionary plenipotentiary to the disfigured, lymphomaed Tobokovo Islanders of the A-test range. She writes me every Christmas in my own language: Father Pem, she calls me. Dearest colleague, Father Pem. I look at her handwriting and think of letters addressed to country-music stars asking for the meaning of life.

—Movies began in silence. The early filmmaker learned to convey meaning without language. The title card that was dropped into the sequence only nailed down the intelligence given to the audience nonverbally. (Young couple on porch swing at night. He removes a ring from his vest pocket. He gazes into her eyes. Title card: “Milly, will you be my wife?”) That is true also of sound film today, where the dialogue is like the old cards—needed only for the final touch of specificity. When sound came in, talkies were more talky. Screenplays derived heavily from theater and books, and so films of the thirties and forties, even action films, swashbucklers, noirs, are more talkative, endlessly so, than they are now. Now films work off previous films, they are genre-referential, and, with the possible exception of
come-dies, talk less. After the set is lit, the camera is positioned, the actors have taken their place, costumed, their hair dressed to indicate economic class, education, age, social status, virtue or the lack of it—ninety-five percent of the meaning of a scene is established before anyone says a word.