The Last Western (51 page)

“Today,” said Herman Felder, “with the Marxist countries and the capitalist countries united in the JERCUS alliance, with the same basic holding philosophy, the same greed, the same selfishness, there is little to be won by the pope’s conversion to Marxism or to any other economic philosophy, including monism. The social problems of man are partly economic, but economics is not the place to look for answers. We have to start more fundamentally.”

So the discussion had gone back and forth and up and down and around and about for more than three hours. At 3:30 in the morning, Father Benjamin addressed the community.

“Brothers and sisters, let us bring to mind certain fundamental ideas. Man is a box builder. He needs boxes to put things in—the various experiences of his life, his plans and his ambitions, even his dreams. We do not deny that men need boxes. We only know that boxes must not be taken seriously.

“At the present time we have a world where instead of men carrying boxes, the boxes carry the men. The boxes and arrangements men have made have cut them off from life, from one another, from what they knew as children. Our mission, brothers and sisters, is to overturn the boxes so that men can breathe again. The boxes at the moment are suffocating human life, turning people into spirits on the one hand and beasts on the other. These are matters we have all known and understood.

“The question before us now is quite simple. What strategy can we propose for a pope who is a brother of the Society that might enable him to lead the church and indeed the whole world to question the boxed-in character of modern life? What can he do, as pope, to help men drop the boxes for a moment, then pick them up and turn them over in the sunlight, so that they see that they are after all just boxes, and to cause men to ask the question, Which boxes shall we keep and which throw away?

“Many worthwhile suggestions have been made here tonight. But the things that have been suggested are ideas, programs, methods, procedures which have come to us out of our past background and experiences. This is natural. Each of us sees things in a special way, depending on what we once dreamed and once knew, and depending also on how we suffered and how long and whether the suffering opened our hearts or closed them. The things we think, the things we believe, seem most important to us because of the needs that have been born out of our own experience, and this also is natural. But then comes that subtle stubbornness, that unconscious pride, that causes us to prize our ideas above the thoughts of others. And the more we talk, the more persuaded we become that our view is the right one, and we tend to close our spirits to those around us, so that even the desire to rid men of box-death becomes itself a box.

“Our well-loved brother, Sam W. Wilson, of Cicero, Illinois, who lost his life in an impersonation in the early 1990s, says in our Guidebook,
What do you know when you’re not thinking
? Those words are important for us now, for we all know what we merely think. Now it is time for us to turn to what we know, or rather what the Knower wishes to share with us.

“So then, my sisters, my brothers, let us enter the silence. I ask you to enter the silence with the special sense of Sister Margot of Trieste, who observes in the gloss of Recommendation 57 that one listens not only with one’s ears, but with one’s hands and feet and stomach and legs and all parts of the bodily arrangement. I join you in the silence with love and humility.”

At the conclusion of these remarks the ninety-one brothers and sisters of the Society had given Father Benjamin the thrive sign and commenced the listening.

Willie closed his eyes, listening with the others. He did not know that they watched him. And they, as they watched, did not see him going away from them, his spirit gravitating to that territory he loved so well and that was his natural home, where he felt his partness with the wholeness of things and through the partness, the wholeness of all.

What was that place he went to? He never thought to describe it to others, believing that everyone moved to the same place themselves, at will, and he never thought it was extraordinary that when he listened to his breathing he could hear the turning of the world, and he did not think it remarkable that he understood certain matters before he knew them and that knowledge always came later, if it came at all, and that it did not matter.

He was both entirely enclosed in himself and at the same time open to that enormous person stirring in the universe, opening a hand—or was it only turning, smiling in its sleep?

For a minute or so he was in the old dream then, soaring towards the sun, yet not so far away from earth that he could not see the steeple of the church in Delphi, the enormous bowl of the Regent Complex in New York, the colonnade of Saint Peter’s.

Then he was standing in a field, a farm lot, it seemed, with dim buildings in the distance.

As he stood there, he had the sense that the Friend was there, and he turned around and saw him robed in fire with light pouring through his body. And Willie beheld him as he came nearer, stretching out his arms, and Willie went toward him and then he was gone.

Willie opened his eyes. There were his brothers and sisters listening and opening to life.
He has gone
, he thought,
to one of them
.

He resumed the listening. Once again he found himself in the same dark field, this time at a greater distance from the buildings. Trees. Other shapes that finally became tents. The faint glow of a lantern.

Someone laughed and he heard men talking somewhere beyond one of the tents.

It was very cold and there was snow on the ground. He began to walk toward the tents. The wind gusted suddenly and he felt snow cutting his face. He stopped under a towering tree.

Two figures, bundled in overcoats, came up from the tent area. They moved like bears. They were carrying something, a pole or stand of some kind. When they came to the tree, they paused and eased their burden to the ground.

“Only an hour now. Where is the idiot?”

“Praying.”

“Will he come do you think?”

“Regent?”

“Who did you think I meant?”

The other man laughed.

“What are you going to do if the idiot is right? You don’t know the Lord’s Prayer.”

Laughter.

“Come on, it’s colder when you stand.”

They went on, carrying the pole on their shoulders. Willie watched them go and then he saw the mansion for the first time. It was an enormous affair at the far end of the field, in the direction the men were walking. Its dark gables stood between the snow steppes and the sky. There were amber lights in the windows, and the light spilled out into the night and fell in oblong patterns on the ground.

As he stood there gazing at the mansion that was surely a palace from a childhood book, there was a commotion to his left, in the tent area. Shouts. The sound of motors. A powerful searchlight switched on and sent a white finger up to the sky. Into that column of light a helicopter floated—it was like a wasp with red eyes, fuming and buzzing and seeking a victim.

Willie came around the tree and immediately tripped over something, a dark shape he had not seen, and fell forward into the snow.

Angry grumbling. A man stood up.

“For God’s sake, watch where you’re going!”

“I’m sorry, I—” Willie got up. His hands stung from the fall.

“Where are you headed?”

“I just got here.”

“From where?”

“Rome.”

“With them?”

“I—came here by myself.”

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. What’s going on?”

“
What’s going on?
This is L-Night.”

“What is that?”

The man drew closer, but it was too dark to see his face.

“You’re from the village maybe.”

“No, Rome.”

“Then you’re with them.”

“No. What is L-Night?”

“You know—what the idiot has arranged. Everybody making up with everybody. Can’t you find anyone in the village?”

“No sir. Who are you making up with?”

The man laughed. “My credit union.”

Willie tried to see the man’s face. The voice was raspy, big city.

“Why are you pretending like you don’t know anything?”

“I’m not pretending,” Willie said.

The man came closer still. He was only a yard away now. His voice dropped as he went on.

“Are you the second man—in case I fail?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You can tell me,” the man said, almost whispering. “I know there’s a backup somewhere. I also know there’s someone to take care of me after it’s over.”

“Sir—”

“Let me tell you something though, just for your own personal guidance. I have a man with me—someone to handle the ape who’s taking care of me. Understand?”

“No.”

The man laughed a nonhumorous laugh.

“But what does it come down to, brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“It comes down to this. If you aren’t with them and you aren’t my backup and you’re not the man I paid to settle the difference, there’s only one answer.”

“Sir?

“You’re the one they hired to get me after it’s over.”

“No one hired me, I just arrived, I don’t even know what—”

“Please, please, why insult my intelligence? Why work up a sweat? It doesn’t matter anyway does it? I mean, there’s so many people tied into this thing, who’s to know you’re not just an extra that somebody threw in?”

“I—”

“Let me ask you, brother, are you a man of faith? Do you believe in things? Do you believe, let’s say, Jesus was a little lamb who took the rap for sin?”

“I believe in Jesus,” said Willie.

“And the coming of Jesus? Do you believe that too, brother?”

“Jesus came and will come,” said Willie into the cold wind, and he felt the cold now in his voice and the cold was coming up through his legs and taking over his body.

When the man laughed now, it was the laugh of a man who had been put into prison for life and would never be released and who found happy things sorrowful, and sad and terrible things that could not be helped, funny and gladdening.

“With such faith, brother, what shall you fear? What can harm you on L-Night, when according to the teaching of the idiot the J-bird comes again? Why wait, brother, why wait? There’s only an hour left now anyway, if the idiot
is
right, and you believe he is right. That is what the Director also is thinking—the Director with the silencer that can help a man greet the Lord halfway.”

The man raised the black shadow of an arm, motioning to something or someone behind Willie.

Willie turned, and there stood the other man, very close, and the scent of roses came to Willie and there was a sudden flame lighting up the face and then the fire in his stomach—and he woke screaming.

To the same face.

“Don’t!” he cried softly.

“Easy,” said Herman Felder. “You were dreaming.”

The brothers and sisters were looking at him from far away. He palmed his eyes in embarrassment; his heart beat wildly.

Felder smiled and Willie felt the horror coming toward him from the eyes.

“You want to speak?”

“I have nothing to say,” he said, trying to calm himself.

“You said you wished to speak.”

Willie said, “What is L-Day?”

Felder looked nonplused. “It is for you to answer.”

Dizzy, his blood racing, Willie got to his feet. For a moment the dark fields stretched before him once more. Something had been said to him, he knew, but that grotesque face obliterated it.

What is it
? he asked.

He moved into the circle of his brothers and sisters.

“Beloved,” he said. “Let us listen for one more minute. Then we’ll try to say what needs to be said.”

In that minute, the longest of his life, he saw the whole plan clearly and fully—what he would do and what would be done—and he saw it all at once, as if it were a tapestry of living beings, and he saw himself throughout it and he saw it all and he knew it all, and in the tapestry he saw the beginning and he saw the ending and he saw how the figures who were living beings in the beginning became shadows in the end, strange quick-darting vapors, fishlike ghosts propelled by whispers and unearthly signals, creatures that turned continuously about a changing point of illumination that set fire to the whole piece.

A cloud lifted then, and for an enraptured moment he saw with human eyes the unutterable mystery that had always been buried in his heart, saw the abounding glory of life, the diversity of being and the kinship of being, the measureless lands and the bright-breasted seas, the blue fields and the green streams, and he saw the creatures of the world in all their numberless varieties and he saw the creature man in the rich raiment of his flesh—now red, now brown, now white, now golden—and he saw the tinctures of many faces glowing in a transforming light that lent fire to the sun and seemed to impart a pulsing energy to earth and beyond earth to worlds beyond, the luminous galaxies stretching away, Wedded by that same radiance to one another and wedded also to earth, and he saw the incomparable majesty of being, its ceaseless becoming, its luxuriant playfulness, its opening-closing, rising-falling, lightening-darkening, striving to be one.

His lips parted and he tried to speak, but a shadow scuttled across the vision, and when it passed, he saw only the miniature of the immediate future and the tangled scenes of the agonized present.

He saw then the conventions of death coming down like a grid upon the living figures of this smaller tapestry, and he heard the cries of the trapped victims—murderers and murdered, starvers and starved, warriors and mutilated children—and he heard the low mourning of the world beneath the tumultuous discord of understood emergencies. Speeches, epithets, curses rang in his ears, and the flowing-together of life ceased and fell into chaos, and the eyes of man turned to the void.

Here!
he whispered fiercely,
Here!

But they would not listen.

Silence. The grand universal image came back a second time. Again he saw what he would do, what would be done. Then the vision slipped away forever. As it left him, he knew he had reached a limit of the structures that the world contained, and he knew too that the box that would carry him now was meant to be the nonbox of the world and was in truth the tarnished, forgotten sign of what he had just beheld, and he felt indistinctly the fear, which he tried to deny, that the box would be a coffin, and he tried to erase that earlier dull flash and the face of the man it identified as assassin—in that detail, he told himself, the dream had been mistaken.