Bible Stories for Adults (21 page)

“It distresses you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Because it's a sphere?” A cough ripped through the delicate netting of my lungs.

“Every picture I showed you is a sphere.” Izzard stuck the Unisphere in my file. “I would like to speak with Donald Puce,” he said abruptly.

“Who the hell is that?”

“Director of international security policy for Sovereigntia's Department of Defense. Just give him to me, Gunther. The situation is deteriorating rapidly.” Headache . . .

Fugue state . . .

“Exactly as I feared,” said Izzard after I was restored to myself.

“What is?”

“You're not going to like it.”

“I don't like anything you tell me these days.”

“It would appear that . . .”

“Yes?”

“It would appear that Sovereigntia and Proletaria have both started crash programs to develop a thermonuclear bomb.”

 

D
ECEMBER
13, 1999

 

I black out constantly.
Antichrist
is a lost cause. I awaken to find my diary defaced.

 

CAPITALIST PIG!

COLLECTIVIST BASTARD!

WE SHALL DANCE ON YOUR GRAVE!

WE SHALL EXHUME YOUR CORPSE AND SPIT ON IT!

 

D
ECEMBER
17, 1999

 

The rumors are true. Izzard has checked and rechecked, talking with dozens of high-level officials in my Politburo.

Proletaria has the bomb. Bombs, actually. Dozens of them, plus delivery systems. If Sovereigntia does not surrender unconditionally within the next seventy-two hours, an all-out attack will ensue.

“An all-out attack?” I said, shivering with the pain of my newest burns. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I'm not sure,” Izzard replied. “But when I look at what
conventional
war has done to you, Gunther, I incline toward a grave prognosis. I pray that Sovereigntia sues for peace.”

“This is crazy.” A dribble of blood exited my right nostril. “It's like I'm committing suicide.”

“True, true.”

“What can we do?”

Izzard offered his handkerchief. “I want to delve into your Unisphere phobia.”

“I'm about to blow myself up, and you want to talk about the 1965 New York World's Fair?”

“Normally I would have you free-associate over the course of several sessions until the truth popped up. But time is—”

“I'm dying.” I pressed the handkerchief against my nose.

Ever so slightly, Izzard nodded. “We must act quickly. For all its crudity, hypnosis is our best card now. So with your permission . . .”

“Do it.”

No hypnotic crystals, no gold watch swaying before my eyes. Izzard merely told me to relax. Fat chance, I thought, but the gnome persisted, and finally the world dropped away . . . .

And I slept . . . .

And slept . . . .

And the world came back . . . .

Izzard's eyes, those popping gelatinous transplants from Peter Lorre, told all.

“You've learned something,” I said accusingly.

“You will too, shortly. During your trance, I instructed you to recall the whole scene, every detail of your sister's murder, the moment I tap on the desk.”

Izzard pulled Spencer Tracy from his mouth.

Every detail? Did I want that?

Izzard inverted the pipe, using it as a mallet.
Tap, tap, tap.

Floodgates opened, releasing not water but my mind's foulest effluvium . . . .

Brittany and I hurry through the nocturnal park.

Moonlight.

Thick summer air.

“What park?” Izzard demanded.

“Kissena Park in Queens. You know all about it.”

“Might it have been Flushing Meadow Park?”

“Kissena, Flushing Meadow—they're contiguous. What's the difference?”

Something catches Brittany's eye. She runs. I begin my fruitless search. Her screams come. They are wild and oddly metallic. They crack the moon. I turn and run . . . .

“Home?” Izzard asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” Izzard insisted.

“No?” I winced. Izzard was right. “Deeper into Flushing Meadow Park,” I said.

Flushing Meadow Park. Site of the 1965 New York World's Fair.

“I see the Unisphere,” I told Izzard. “But it is 1970.”

“They kept the Unisphere after the fair closed,” Izzard explained.

So I truly see it. A huge hollow globe flashing blue-white in the full moon, seven continental slabs affixed to its weblike shell.

The screams have stopped.

Four boys, youthful monsters in thrall to God-knows-what narcotic, stand inside the Unisphere, balancing on the network of steel girders. They have hauled Brittany up with them. Her clothes are gone. I have never seen all her skin before. She is supine and spread-eagled, tied to the back of Argentina, a bandanna on each wrist and ankle, another in her mouth.

I am ten. I do not understand. One gang member seems to be getting dressed. Another is lowering his trousers. From the posture he assumes, I believe he intends to urinate on her. Then he presses forward, kneading her breasts. I avert my eyes. I seem to hear my sister's bones grinding against Argentina. At last I look up. Another boy is doing the same terrible thing. He finishes. A third boy works himself into her, laughing as she rolls and twists on the torture rack that is the world.

And now, suddenly, I do understand, because knives have appeared, flashing in the moonlight.

“I've seen enough,” I told Izzard.

“Not quite,” he replied.

The knives enter her quivering flesh from everywhere, and blood spills out, quarts of it, staining the continent's underside, blood on Argentina, blood on Chile, now raining through the vast interstice called the South Atlantic . . .

And I am off, running, tearing out of Flushing Meadow Park, careening wildly down Roosevelt Avenue, my psyche a breeding ground for dissociation.

“Shattered,” I said.

“Shattered,” Izzard agreed.

So now you know why I ripped Izzard's couch apart this morning, dearest diary. He was polite about it. He simply carried his wastebasket over and filled it with the scattered gobs of stuffing and upholstery. “The question, of course, is where this gets us,” he said.

I made no reply.

“Knowing the source of a multiple's dissociation is only the beginning,” said Izzard.

I pulled more stuffing from the couch, wadding it as if molding a snowball.

“I'll tell you where I think this gets us, though I don't like it,” Izzard confessed.

I remained silent.

“Weeks ago, Gunther, I informed you that a multiple typically suffers from repressed hatred. Normally the object of that hatred is a family member. In your case, however, the nemesis lies elsewhere. I believe your psychoneurosis is focused on . . . do you want to know the object?”

I said nothing.

“Gunther, your psychoneurosis is focused on the Unisphere in Flushing Meadow Park . . . and everything it stands for.”

 

D
ECEMBER
19, 1999

 

So I hate the world. There is no hope. Proletaria has the bomb, and I hate myself, the world.

The voices know it. Their chatter has decayed into a single wail coursing through my brain. Tomorrow, despite Izzard's noble effort to cure me, I shall hold a nuclear revolver to my temple and pull the trigger.

 

D
ECEMBER
20, 1999

 

YOU WILL NEVER GET RID OF US, GUNTHER BLACK, OUR BOMBS ARE INEVITABLE, BUT YOU ARE NOT
.

TEN . . . NINE . . . EIGHT . . . SEVEN . . . SIX . . . FIVE . . . FOUR . . . THREE . . . TWO . . .

ONE, GUNTHER
.

ONE, EH?

 

J
ANUARY
1, 2000

 

And so I am born.

I, Gabriel White, have come to stay.

Now that the terrible hole in my head has begun to heal, I can get down to business. I wish the doctors would release me. My wound troubles them far less than their fear that I might still be a pathetic psychoneurotic. I am not. Gunther Black is dead.

Oh, to have seen Izzard's expression when Proletaria detonated its atomic bomb! But, alas, self-awareness did not reach me until after the shock wave had fissured Black's skull, and by then Izzard sat huddled in the corner, his face buried in his arms. A most spectacular advent, mine. The blast tore a piece of Black's brow away. It flew across the office like a pebble from a slingshot. Some brain dribbled out. Nothing crucial, the doctors tell me. French lessons, they think.

I am doing fine. The explosion has welded my fractured self whole. I am in command. Jeremy Green, Thomas Brown, Angela Lavender, Harry Silver . . . all five million of them know me and love me.

Happy New Year, everyone.

I must get to work. My people need direction and discipline—and occasionally a bit of torment. I'm going to start with Bernie Gold and his family.

Are you there, Bernie Gold? This is Gabriel White. I am the Lord thy God, who brought you out of the house of bondage. First of all, you will have no gods except me . . .

Are you getting this, Bernie? Do you hear me?

Yes?

Good.

“W
HAT
did you do in the war, Mommy?”

The last long shadow has slipped from the sundial's face, melting into the hot Egyptian night. My children should be asleep. Instead they're bouncing on their straw pallets, stalling for time.

“It's late,” I reply. “Nine o'clock already.”

“Please,” the twins implore me in a single voice.

“You have school tomorrow.”

“You haven't told us a story all week,” insists Damon, the whiner.

“The war is such a
great
story,” explains Daphne, the wheedler.

“Kaptah's mother tells
him
a story every night,” whines Damon.

“Tell us about the war,” wheedles Daphne, “and we'll clean the whole cottage tomorrow, top to bottom.”

I realize I'm going to give in—not because I enjoy spoiling my children (though I do) or because the story itself will consume less time than further negotiations (though it will) but because I actually want the twins to hear this particular tale. It has a point. I've told it before, of course, a dozen times perhaps, but I'm still not sure they get it.

I snatch up the egg timer and invert it on the nightstand, the tiny grains of sand spilling into the lower chamber like seeds from a farmer's palm. “Be ready for bed in three minutes,” I warn my children, “or no story.”

They scurry off, frantically brushing their teeth and slipping on their flaxen nightshirts. Silently I glide about the cottage, dousing the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins' room, like the campfire of some small, pathetic army, an army of mice or scarab beetles.

“So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their beds.

“Oh, yes,” says Damon, pulling up his fleecy coverlet.

“You bet,” says Daphne, fluffing her goose-feather pillow.

“Once upon a time,” I begin, “I lived as both princess and prisoner in the great city of Troy.” Even in this feeble light, I'm struck by how handsome Damon is, how beautiful Daphne. “Every evening, I would sit in my boudoir, looking into my polished bronze mirror . . .”

 

Helen of Troy, princess and prisoner, sits in her boudoir, looking into her polished bronze mirror and scanning her world-class face for symptoms of age—for wrinkles, wattles, pouches, crow's-feet, and the crenelated corpses of hairs. She feels like crying, and not just because these past ten years in Ilium are starting to show. She's sick of the whole sordid arrangement, sick of being cooped up in this overheated acropolis like a pet cockatoo. Whispers haunt the citadel. The servants are gossiping, even her own handmaids. The whore of Hisarlik, they call her. The slut from Sparta. The Lakedaimon lay.

Then there's Paris. Sure, she's madly in love with him, sure, they have great sex, but can't they ever
talk?

Sighing, Helen trolls her hairdo with her lean, exquisitely manicured fingers. A silver strand lies amid the folds like a predatory snake. Slowly she winds the offending filament around her index finger, then gives a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing all her lovely tresses out, every last lock, not simply these graying threads. If I have to spend one more pointless day in Hisarlik, she tells herself, I'll go mad.

Every morning, she and Paris enact the same depressing ritual. She escorts him to the Skaian Gate, hands him his spear and his lunch bucket, and with a tepid kiss sends him off to work. Paris's job is killing people. At sundown he arrives home grubby with blood and redolent of funeral pyres, his spear wrapped in bits of drying viscera. There's a war going on out there; Paris won't tell her anything more. “Who are we fighting?” she asks each evening as they lie together in bed. “Don't you worry your pretty little head about it,” he replies, slipping on a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.

Until this year, Paris had wanted her to walk Troy's high walls each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he would insist. “An airy kiss from you is worth a thousand nights of passion with a nymph.” But in recent months Paris's priorities have changed. As soon as they say good-bye, Helen is supposed to retire to the citadel, speaking with no other Hisarlikan, not even a brief coffee klatch with one of Paris's forty-nine sisters-in-law. She's expected to spend her whole day weaving rugs, carding flax, and being beautiful. It is not a life.