Prayers to Broken Stones (10 page)

Bremen glanced toward the glove compartment, thought of the rag-covered bundle there. Once, long ago, he had fantasized about the gun. He had half-convinced himself that it was some sort of magic wand—an instrument of release. Now he knew better. He recognized it for what it was—a killing instrument. It would never free him. It would not allow his consciousness to fly. It would only slam a projectile through his skull and end once and for all the mathematically perfect dance within.

Bremen thought of the weakening, quiet figure he had left in the hospital that morning. He drove on.

He parked near the lighthouse, packed the revolver in a brown bag, and locked the car. The sand was very hot when it lopped over the tops of his sandals. The beach was almost deserted as Bremen sat in the meager shade of a dune and looked out to sea. The morning glare made him squint.

He took off his shirt, set it carefully on the sand behind him, and removed the bundle from the bag. The metal felt cool, and it was lighter than he remembered. It smelled faintly of oil.

You’ll have to help me. If there’s another way, you’ll have to help me find it.

Bremen dropped his mindshield. The pain of a million aimless thoughts stabbed at his brain like an icepick. His mindshield rose automatically to blunt the noise, but Bremen
pushed down the barrier. For the first time in his life Bremen opened himself fully to the pain, to the world that inflicted it, to the million voices calling in their isolation and loneliness. He accepted it. He willed it. The great chorus struck at him like a giant wand. Bremen sought a single voice.

Bremen’s hearing dimmed to nothing. The hot sand failed to register; the sunlight on his body became a distant, forgotten thing. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight. The gun fell unheeded to the sand.

From down the beach came a young girl in a dark suit two seasons too small. Her attention was on the sea as it teased the land with its sliding strokes and then withdrew. She danced on the dark strips of wet sand. Her sunburned legs carried her to the very edge of the world’s ocean and then back again in a silent ballet. Suddenly she was distracted by the screaming of gulls. Startled, she halted her dance, and the waves broke over her ankles with a sound of triumph.

The gulls dived, rose again, wheeled away to the north. Bremen walked to the top of the dune. Salt spray blew in from the waves. Sunlight glared on water.

The girl resumed her waltz with the sea while behind her, squinting slightly in the clean, sharp light of morning, the three of them watched through Bremen’s eyes.

In America as we enter the “discount decade” of the Twentieth Century ($19.90–$19.95, etc.), one is so used to thinking that progress equals improvement that it is almost heresy to be confronted with the absolute refutation of that premise.

For instance, take current theology.
Please.

One can view Dante Alighieri’s
Inferno
section of his
Comedy
as a personal venting of spleen mixed with a liberal dose of S&M, but to do so would be to see it only from our current, somewhat obsessed point of view. Dante was also obsessed, but his objects of obsession—besides the lovely, lost Beatrice—centered around Virgil’s
Aeneid
and Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica.
Little wonder then that the
Inferno
is a staggeringly complex theology, at once an exploration of cosmic structure and of the all too personal fear of death—that fear “so bitter—death is hardly more severe”
(Inferno, 1,7).

Dante saw that fear of death as the one sure source of poetic and creative energy. In that respect, little has changed since the early 14th Century.

But let’s turn on the TV and see what passes for theology these six and a half centuries later. In lieu of the poetry of the
Aeneid,
we have the south-baked howl of the sweating televangelist. In the stead of the intellectual cathedrals of the
Summa Theologica,
we have the entire cathode-ray-tubed, satellite-relayed, hair-sprayed and
cosmetic-troweled message boiled down to two words:
Send money.

Agreed, televangelists aren’t the theologians of this century, and they
are
excessively easy targets after the revelations of the last few years—the Jimmy Swaggart vulgarities, the Rex Humbolt absurdities, and the Jimmy Bakker adulteries and breakdowns. If it’s any excuse, the following story was written
before
these sideshows.

But the revelations were to be expected. As long as we live in a world where “theology” has become a mixture of P.T. Barnum and Johnny Carson, where we invite these parasites into our home via cable TV and satellite dish and radio … well, as the kid said in the classic
New Yorker
cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.”

On his last day on earth, Brother Freddy rose early, showered, shaved his chins, sprayed his hair, put on his television make-up, dressed in his trademark three-piece white suit with white shoes, pink shirt, and black string tie, and went down to his office to have his pre-Hallelujah Breakfast Club breakfast with Sister Donna Lou, Sister Betty Jo, Brother Billy Bob, and George.

The four munched on sweet rolls and sipped coffee as the slate-gray sky began to lighten beyond the thirty-foot wall of bulletproof, heavily tinted glass. Clusters of tall, brick buildings comprising the campus of Brother Freddy’s Hallelujah Bible College and Graduate School of Christian Economics seemed to solidify out of the predawn Alabama gloom. Far to the east, just visible above the pecan groves, rose the artificial mountain of the Mount Sinai Mad Mouse Ride in the Bible Land section of Brother Freddy’s Born Again Family Amusement Complex and Christian Convention Center. Much closer, the great dish of a Holy Beamer, one of six huge satellite dishes on the grounds of Brother Freddy’s Bible Broadcast Center, sliced a black
arc from the cloud-laden sky. Brother Freddy glanced at the rain-sullen weather and smiled. It did not matter what the real world beyond his office window offered. The large “bay window” on the homey set of the Hallelujah Breakfast Club was actually a $38,000 rear-projection television screen which played the same fifty-two minute tape of a glorious May sunrise each morning. On Brother Freddy’s Hallelujah Breakfast Club, it was always spring.

“What’s the line-up like?” asked Brother Freddy as he took a sip of his coffee, his little finger lifted delicately, the pinky ring gleaming in the light of the overhead spots. It was eight minutes until air time.

“First half hour you got the usual lead-in from Brother Beau, your opening talk and Prayer Partner plea, six-and-a-half minutes of the Hallelujah Breakfast Club Choir doing “We’re On the Brink of a Miracle” and a medley of off-Broadway Christian hits, and then your Breakfast Guests come on,” said Brother Billy Bob Grimes, the floor director.

“Who we got today?” asked Brother Freddy.

Brother Billy Bob read from his clipboard. “You’ve got Matt, Mark, and Luke the Miracle Triplet Evangelists, Bubba Deeters who says he wants to tell the story again how the Lord told him to throw himself on a grenade in ‘Nam, Brother Frank Flinsey who’s pushing his new book
After the Final Days,
and Dale Evans.”

Brother Freddy frowned slightly. “I thought we were going to have Pat Boone today,” he said softly. “I like Pat.”

Brother Billy Bob blushed and made a notation on his thick sheath of forms. “Yessir,” he said. “Pat wanted to be here today but he did Swaggart’s show last night, he has a personal appearance with Paul and Jan at the Bakersfield Revival this afternoon, and he has to be up at tomorrow’s Senate hearing testifying about those Satanic messages you can hear on CDs when you aim the laser between the grooves.”

Brother Freddy sighed. It was four minutes until air time. “All right,” he said. “But try to get him for next Monday. I like Pat. Donna Lou? How’re we doing with the Lord’s work these days, little lady?”

Sister Donna Lou Patterson adjusted her glasses. As comptroller of Brother Freddy’s vast conglomerate of tax-exempt religious organizations, corporations, ministries, colleges, missions, amusement parks and the chain of Brother Freddy’s Motels for the Born Again, Donna Lou was dressed appropriately in a beige business suit, the seriousness of which was lightened only by a rhinestone Hallelujah Breakfast Club pin which matched the rhinestones on her glasses. “Projected earnings for this fiscal year are just under $187 million, up three per cent from last year,” she said. “Ministry assets stand at $214 million with outstanding debts of $63 million, give or take .3 million depending upon Brother Carlisle’s decision on replacing the Gulfstream with a new Lear.”

Brother Freddy nodded and turned toward Sister Betty Jo. There were three minutes left until air time. “How’d we do yesterday, Sister?”

“Twenty-seven broadcast share Arbitron, twenty-five point five Nielsen,” said the thin woman dressed in white. “Three new cable outlets; two in Texas, one in Montana. Current cable reaches 3.37 million homes, up .6 per cent from last month. The mail room handled 17,385 pieces yesterday, making a total of 86,217 for the week. Ninety-six per cent of the envelopes yesterday included donations. Thirty-nine per cent requested your Intercession Prayer. Total envelope volume handled this year is 3,585,220, with an approximate 2.5 million additional pieces projected by the end of the fiscal year.”

Brother Freddy smiled and turned his gaze on George Cohen, legal counsel for Brother Freddy’s Born Again Ministries. “George?” Two minutes remained until air time.

The thin man in the dark suit unhurriedly cleared his throat. “The IRS continues to make threatening noises but they don’t have a leg to stand on. Since all of the ministry affiliates are under the Born Again Ministries exemption, you don’t have to file a thing. The Huntsville papers have reported that your daughter’s house has been assessed at one million five and they know that it and your son’s ranch were built with a three million dollar loan from the ministry, but they’re just guessing when it comes to salaries.
Even if they found out … which they won’t … your official annual salary from the Board comes to only $92,300, a third of which you tithe back to the ministry. Of course, your wife, daughter, son-in-law, and seven other family members receive considerably more liberal incomes from the ministry but I don’t think …”

“Thank you, George,” interrupted Brother Freddy. He stood, stretched, and walked to the color monitor attached to the computer terminal on his desk. “Sister Betty Jo, you said there were several thousand requests for the Personal Intercession Prayer?”

“Yes, Brother,” said the woman in white, laying her small hand on the console next to her chair.

Brother Freddy smiled at George Cohen. “I told these folks I’d personally pray over their letters if they’d send in a love offering,” he said. “Might as well do it now. I’ve got thirty seconds before Brother Beau goes into his intro. Betty Jo?”

The woman tapped a button and smiled as the list of thousands of names flashed by on the color monitor. After each name was a code relating to the category of problem for which intercession was requested according to the checklist provided on the Love Offering form: H-health, MP-marital problems, $-money problems, SG-spiritual guidance, FS-forgiveness of sins, and so on. There were twenty-seven categories. Any one of Brother Freddy’s two hundred mail room operators could code more than four hundred intercession requests a day while simultaneously sorting the letter contents into stacks of cash and checks while cueing computers to provide the appropriate reply letter.

“Dear Lord,” intoned Brother Freddy, “please hear our prayers for the receipt of Thy mercy for these requests which are made in Jesus’s name …” The list of names and codes flashed past in a blur until the suddenly blank screen held only a flashing cursor. “Amen.”

Brother Freddy turned on his heel and led the suddenly scurrying-to-keep-up retinue on the thirty yard walk to the Hallelujah Breakfast Club studio just as the program’s opening graphics and triumphant music filled the sixty-two
monitors in the Broadcast Headquarters’ corridors, offices, and board rooms.