The Apocalypse Reader (4 page)

And here's one last interesting equation! The first Olivians, the followers who made pilgrimages to his grave, were burned at the stake for heresy somewhere between 1314 and 1318. If we take these dates (instead of 1300) as indicative of the onset of
the sixth age
(the beginning of the reign of Antichrist before final judgment), and add to them the 666 years signifying the beast, then we can see, of course, that the Apocalypse arrives between 1980 and
1984
.

The Book, Its Seven Seals, and an Angel

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT in Revelation is that John, in the throne room of heaven, is given a chance to view the great book of prophecy spread wide on an ample table there. "No man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon" (5:3).

I've told you about my own reading habits-mostly s.f. and light psychology books, although I am also a big fan of the writings of Ayn Rand. And there is this little "book" I'm writing here, this book of my own life, which I hope will top out around the required twenty-five pages and be done about three hours from now. But none of these books seems to resonate with the book described above in Revelation.

In fact, I would submit to you that a real book is not intended here. Sometimes you have to admit that Revelation has both a literal and symbolic level. The truth of Revelation floats between the two registers like a mostly submerged iceberg. In the case of the book referred to here, I think we can confidently speak of the symbolic. The book John intends to anoint as the highest book of prophecy and the book of Judgment is not a regular book, a product of the printing press. It's the ancient and all-powerful book of the affections. The book of life, as described in 20:12, is
the book of love
.

I know a little bit about it, about love. For example, my roommate Tony Nicholas and I had had a few drinks one night. At the Tap Room. End of fall semester 1980. After Tony had moved out. And we had smoked some pot, which was always bad for me, since in its clutches I imagined not only that people but tables and chairs, all the objects in the cosmos, were secretly passing messages about my mood and complexion, my family, or my sickly childhood. That night I had smoked this marijuana and was suffering with the predictable
referential mania
. A malefic world spun out around me. I was powerless over it. I drank to cut the edge of this bad noise. Tony was telling me in some litanical and repetitive way about a stylish mystery film he wanted to direct. The eternal globe-trotting semiotics of mystery. The hermeneutics of murder and power pop. It all sounded the same. I was drinking faster. I had aphasia. I was nuts.

The music in the bar, some fusion of punk and funk that was going around then, obliterated all the ambient noise. I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't see anything. But I could tell, suddenly, that Tony wasn't talking to me anymore. It dawned on me. Through some sixth-sense heartache. He
hated
me. He was five or ten minutes into a conversation with a woman in the next booth. Five or ten minutes? Or longer? He had actually slid into the next booth and was chatting her up and I hadn't even noticed.

That was Judith. That was the first time I laid eyes on Judith. What did she look like? In the dark? Greater forces than my brute desire directed me at the moment, so her beauty wasn't uppermost in my mind. I can't tell you what she looked like, therefore, and her face was mostly turned away. She was chatting amiably with my former roommate. Still, I knew her immediately for who she was.

She was the angel of the seventh seal
. She was Mary and Mary Magdalene, she was my mom before my mom got sick, but that's not all, she was like Christ, she was Francis or Gandhi or Thomas Merton, she was the grinch after his heart got bigger, she was Patti Smith after the broken neck, she was the transcendental signified, she was the thing that rid me of Tony Nicholas, she was the thing that was going to thaw my ache, and I
knew
. I'm aware that it sounds pretty sudden. But consider the evidence: "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon upon her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (12:1). Judith's address at the time was 1212 Rodman St., Philadelphia.

My head cleared when she turned-from where Tony was yelling something in her ear. They were in the next booth. Backs to me. And she turned. As if according to some higher purpose. She turned and looked at me. My head cleared. Something tricky was going on in my life. There was contempt in the air, Tony's contempt, but contempt couldn't last in that furnace. I felt the absolute and irrefutable faith in an instantaneous bond. Love at first sight. My feelings would be boundless and exact and I would grow fat and bald cherishing memories of Judith. I would comfort her even when she was really wrinkled. I knew all of this by the time she was leaning over the booth:

-Hey ... Hey, what's your name? You're a friend of Tony's, right?

She screwed up her face. Her smile was dimpled, uneven, overpowering. She evidently thought she was really having some fun. I nodded.

-Tony here says you were raised by wild animals.

She started to laugh. Couldn't stop laughing. And I could see Tony looking away, too, shaking from the effort to control himself.

Look, I know when I am the object of fun. Often I can laugh right along. But the little romantic skirmishes of the past, the meager recon missions of my heart in which I risked nothing and lost less, they didn't prepare me for this. This was a comment like a blow dart. I had to respond. I got right up in her face, leaned toward her and took hold of her bangled wrists. Tightly.

-Listen, you don't go in for this bait-the-misfit stuff, do you? Because you don't look like the kind of person that would, right?

Then I bowed my head in a prayerful way. I was wobbling and bowing.

-I dare you to treat me like a human being, I said. That's my dare for you and Tony ... I dare you. And I'm sorry you're both so hard up for fun. I'm sorry about your
empty lives
, okay?

I knew how it would turn out, you know. I knew she would overcome my barb. She thought she didn't care about me, but when she turned nervously back to her conversation with Tony there was no conversation. Tony and she sat there, backs to me, like they'd never met at all. The space between them had widened. My chatter, meanwhile, was with the stars.

Believe it or not, this is how the book of the affections gets opened. It's right there in the Bible. Deep calls unto deep, across expanses of loss. In the course of my stupid life, I've tried to crack the seals of this great book, the way a kid might, six times I have, with six girls I guess you'd say, each with her different lances and charms and sadnesses, a woman with balances, a woman with hell behind, a woman who carried the souls of the dead with her, and a woman who felt earthquakes when we made
love
.

The seventh was Judith.

Now I'll tell you the number of those lost to heartbreak in all of history because this number is worth remembering:
a hundred and forty-four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel
.

The Half-Hour of Silence

ON THE WAY back home from the Tap Room I had another blackout. Or this is my guess. They were getting worse. I was slipping into bad situations the way others in my family had. The next morning, I showed up for Semiotics Twelve coming in and out of consciousness. I was still tanked. I napped facedown on my desk. Migrainous auras, flares, and lights burst from the margins of the passage we were reading (in Saussure). And the worst thing was that I regretted what I'd said to Judith. Not only that, I knew I was going to be troubling her again in the future.

St. John: "And when he had opened the seventh seal [of the book of love] there was a silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."

The Seven Trumpets

WE'RE DOWN TO only a couple of hours remaining, so I'm going to have to summarize the five months that followed. In December 1980, in a sudden display of collegiality and mirth, Chapin House, where I live, anointed me dorm president. I was elected by acclamation. Unopposed. In my new post, I would be making a number of important decisions, such as what parties we would be giving, how to deal with communal problems like loud stereos, whether to have special study hours, and so forth. I called meetings on these subjects, which we held in our ample, unfurnished common room, but I could never get a complete set of officers to show up. No one would come to the dorm meetings either. In the absence of consensus, therefore, I went ahead to make a few decisions myself.

My first act was to propose a house party entitled Inquisition Night. It was to take place in January, after Xmas
break
.

The party would feature period costume. We could burn effigies on the lawn in front of the dorm. Crucifixes everywhere. Drinks dyed red to simulate the running blood of heretics. We'd haul up people on false charges.

Not surprisingly, the other dorm officers wouldn't agree to the party, especially when it became clear I was serious. They would, they said,
have to run it by the deans, health services, security
. And then they told me that my election had been a big joke in the first place; they told me that I had misunderstood a simple prank. My powers as president were thereby completely revoked. But I simply proceeded without my housemates. I printed up fliers. The design, if I do say so myself, was lovely, featuring a photocopied woodcut (from an art history text) of Francis bleeding from his stigmata. I stapled these fliers to locations far and wide, including 1212 Rodman Street, which I had learned was Judith's address-from Tony Nicholas, in one of our last conversations. I plastered her street with handbills. Inquisition night!

Rodman Street, a barren lane of overturned grocery carts, blind cats, and leafless trees, provided ample surfaces for my literature.

And though I had been forbidden to hold the party, the night on which it was scheduled to take place eventually arrived. I purchased, for the occasion, some luminous food colorings and in my empty dorm room I mixed up a shaker full of red vodka and tonic and crushed Valium. While no one joined me for my advertised party, I managed to have a good time-

That is, until I found myself in a bathrobe dyed black and worn backwards-apparently to simulate priestly garments-at a party miles from my dorm at which a venerated local band, The Egyptians, was playing. (They turned out these angular dance tunes, really loud-one of which, "Ancient Times," can still move me powerfully: "Oh, I wanna get a boat and go to ancient times; / Go any farther gonna lose my
miiiiiinnnnnd
." Luckily, however, Judith was at the party. Wearing black paint-stained jeans and a white thrift-store dress shirt. She also had on a white leather jacket. Her hair was a long hennaed tangle, madwoman-in-the-attic style. She looked like a go-go girl ten years into a devastating nervous illness. I reminded her that Tony had introduced us a month or so earlier and she was obviously happy to see me again. I gallantly volunteered to walk her home (though, in my bathrobe, I was a little underdressed), but she said she wasn't going home. She was catching a train that night to Trenton or Pittsburgh or something.

-What's with the bathrobe? she asked.

-I'll take you to the station.

-I'm taking a cab.

-I'll join you.

She smiled.

-Look, I slurred. I'm not going to hold you down behind a bush and assault you or anything. I just want to have a conversation.

There must have been some credible or deeply heartfelt catch in my voice, because she suddenly changed her mind and admitted she
was
going home. I won't try to excuse my behavior. I remember, unfortunately, every garbled sentence of this encounter. I know, for example, that at one point I quoted Revelation to Judith: "And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth" (11:3). I told her that our association, therefore, was circumscribed by Scripture. This line was supposed to be romantic.

She said:

-Even if you weren't completely nuts I would still say you are expecting too much, you know? I've talked to you, what, two times?

Okay, this was probably true. But I must not have cared then, because soon we were in the laundry room of the apartment house on Rodman that Judith shared with three other Tyler students. We were sitting on the cement floor-it was really cold-and I was trying to persuade her, in a language that was awkward and desperate, that she shouldn't go upstairs to her apartment. In fact, I told her she couldn't leave until she agreed to let me hug her. I asked for this hug many times. Seven times.

-Forget it, Judith said. Look, I don't want to be rude or anything, but if you think this is the way to get through to me, if you think this'll win me over ... you're completely wrong, okay? Do I have to be clearer?

-Just a hug, I said. A hug, not anything ... more than that. Just a hug.

-Come on, she said. This is embarrassing. It's stupid.

Mine was a sad story, but it didn't move her. I remember when she moved up onto the coin-operated dryer-still warm from a recent load, she fell into banging the backs of her heels against the front-loading door.

-It's cold, she said. How long do we have to sit down here?

And then she said the worst possible thing, a sentence of death and confusion. These dismal, lacerating words banged around in that reverberant space:

-And anyway, you know, I'm seeing someone else.

I brushed it off at first.

-One hug? I mumbled. One little hug ...

You want to know why it was so important, that hug? May I answer a question with another? Why does the wilted house plant need its weekly flooding with the Philadelphia Phillies plastic pitcher? Why did St. John look for the resurrection to come? Why was Judith still in the basement with me? She had her reasons. I had mine.