Toward the End of Time (17 page)

The clerical collar gleamed white on the slender girlish throat of our sermonizer. It seemed a provocation, like the forms of mutilation, nipple and tongue rings and livid tattoos, with which the young scorn their own flesh and announce their scorn for us, the unpunctured and tattoo-free. Above the rustle and whining of the children I heard her preach, “Mary answered the angels that she wept because they had taken away her Lord and she did not know where they had laid him.”

One can see Mary Magdalene, over the gap of a decade less than two full millennia, giving way to a fresh gust of tears with this confession of confusion. They were young, all these disciples and camp followers of the youthful Messiah—younger than many a contemporary rock group.

Then the question was repeated, by a new figure, a man standing behind her. “Woman, why weepest thou?”

Supposing this new presence to be the gardener, in this garden near the place of crucifixion, Mary said—steadying herself now into a certain dignity, drying her streaked cheeks with the backs of her hands, not really looking at this man—“Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him, and I will take him away.”

This carnal passion of hers for the body, though a dead body, our female exegete glides over, her little hands gracefully flitting from the sleeves of her robe.

“The strange man, whom she has mistaken for the gardener in this disorienting place, says her name: ‘Mary.’ She turns and says,
‘Rabboni,’
which is to say, ‘Master.’ At this
point, she must have reached out in the joy of recognition, for He says, ‘Touch me not.’
Noli me tangere
, Jesus spurns her instinctive attempt at contact. Why?”

In her expectant silence we could hear the children squirming in the creaking pews and one infant whimpering against the pressure of his mother to keep him quiet.

Superposition, I thought. Before Christ ascended, He was in what quantum theory calls superposition—neither here nor there, up nor down. He was Schrödinger’s cat.

“A little later in the same chapter,” our inquisitor preached, “Jesus invites His disciple Thomas to touch Him, to ease Thomas’s doubts. Thomas has said he will not believe in the risen Jesus unless he sees in His hands the print of the nails, and puts his own hand in the wound of sword-thrust in Jesus’s side. Jesus obliges. He lets Himself be intimately touched to ease the other man’s doubt. It is a guy thing. For Mary Magdalene, seeing must be believing. Jesus tells her not to touch Him because He is not yet ascended to the Father. He is in a fragile in-between condition. Still, He has some orders for Mary: she should go tell the disciples that He is risen. Mary obeys. Like so many women in the Bible, she accepts her subservient role and obeys. But because she needed to weep, to stay at the tomb and come to terms with her feelings, it was she and not Peter or the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, usually identified as John, son of Zebedee—it was not these but
Mary
who first sees the risen Christ and who hears her name pronounced by Him: ‘Mary’ For the people of Biblical times, spoken language was as good as a touch, each word lived in their ears. They didn’t have TV, they didn’t have MTV or animated holograms, for them the spoken word was the hottest entertainment around. ‘Mary.’
‘Rabboni.’
‘Touch me not.’”

The child in the pew ahead of me, a toddling male with :
runny nose and hair much the same translucent lemon color as his snot, had become fascinated by me, and distracted me from the minister’s concluding peroration, her parallel between Mary’s confusing Easter experience and the way in which Christ sneaks up on all of us, in the morning mists, in the semblance of a gardener. Amen.

As we bowed our heads in the post-sermon prayer I was intensely conscious of the body beside mine, familiar and yet not, Deirdre’s meekly bent back sheathed in a stiff purple dress I had never seen before. I moved my elbow on the pew-back to touch hers and she pointedly moved hers away.
Noli me tangere
. I pictured her tan skin and supple half-shaven underparts beneath the vulgar shine of her crocus-colored dress with its starchy white collar. Her submission to this service, to the giant male ghost it bespoke, roused me. Like many of the younger women here, she wore no hat, no Easter bonnet: her “big” hair, its oiled curls inflated by a hairdresser’s patient teasing, was her headdress. Somewhere, Saint Paul devotes many verses to the vexed matter of how women should shave or cover their overexciting hair.

The clergyperson was stationed at the door, though the day was cold, alternating spells of pale sunlight with unseasonable spittings of snow. She greeted Deirdre by name, but after a hesitation that showed a long gap of attendance. When introduced to me, she darted her sensitive bright eyes back and forth between our ill-matched faces before granting me a firm little handshake and an abrupt smile I must call boyish. Her teeth were as straight and neat as her bangs.

I like these contemporary females, stripped of so much of the devious nonsense the rise of capitalism imposed upon women.

I liked, too, my drug-raddled consort’s dragging me to church, this homely brown church out of Protestantism’s
fading, working-class middle range. There was a nakedness in that, a bared need. Gloria had been an old-style Episcopalian, resenting any tampering with Cranmer’s prayer-book language and any evangelical or feel-good pollutions of the service, such as a homily at morning prayer or the passing of the peace at any service. Perdita had drifted from Unitarianism into Buddhism and settlement-house good works. Both women were religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing. For primitive Deirdre, something existed, hot, in the knots of her nature, that she was unashamed to bow to. Though I
was
ashamed, I was also somewhat primitive, and had willingly attended as an extension of my worship of her body.

We walked arm in arm out of a swirl of snow into a pollen-colored cloud of sunshine on the way to the parked car. I felt better for having done this—put Easter behind me. Perhaps Easter is my problem with spring—the unreasonable expectation of it. That distant spring when I was too paralyzed by dread to build little Mildred’s dollhouse, I went, gigantic in my numbness, out on a warm day and marvelled to find little swarms of tiny winged ephemerids already active in the air, jiggling together in some obligatory procedure, offering themselves as a humble rung in the food chain, though it seemed too wintry still for spiders to be stirring and for swallows to have migrated north. Snowdrops— an early small amaryllis,
Galanthus nivalis
—have always worried me: if flowers exist to attract insects, where in this just-unfrozen world do the insects come from? Well, here insects were, in my muddy backyard, and if these gnats were not oppressed by death, why should I be? A vast camaraderie of living cells, all doomed to disintegrate back into insensate
dust, cheered me for a moment. I shouldered my life—my house, my four and a half children, my two cars, my half-acre—and moved on, toward this present moment in time.

Tax time. Though no one takes it seriously—the District of Columbia is entirely given over to deserted monuments and warring gangs of African-American teenagers, who have looted every office of its last stapler and photocopier refill cartridge—a ghost of federal government exists in Maryland and Virginia, too weak to do anything but send out forms, which I sentimentally file in the drawer along with my prewar returns. Deirdre is very upset that I have allowed Phil and Spin to raise the protection money again—from an even grand to thirteen-hundred fifty. Spin explained that their own expenses have gone up, what with the teenage competition coming out from Lynn, moving up the coast. “They don’t go by any rules, Mr. Turnbull,” he explained to me. “To them killing is nothing—it’s not a last resort, or taking care of business, it’s for sheer entertainment value. You don’t want those babies to get into your pocket—they’ll take it all, and then hang your hide out to dry.”

Macho, rumpled Phil was offended by his partner’s betrayal of fear. “They’re kids,” he said, “for Chrissake. Fifteen, sixteen. Some even, Jesus, like ten, eleven. Kids can’t stand up to experience. We’re professionals, right? We provide a service, we keep our bargains. Our clients trust us, right, Mr. Turnbull?”

“Right, Phil.”

“Any of those Lynn kids show up on your hill, you know how to reach us. You have the phone numbers.”

“I do.”

Phil’s eyes slid over to Deirdre, who always comes out-of-doors when she hears men’s voices on the driveway. “How’s she treatin’ you?” he asked me, as if she couldn’t talk for herself. “She keepin’ in line?”

“She’s my little lady,” I told him, not liking his tone.

“I could tell you some stories,” he said, “from the old days. Huh, Dee?”

“Tell all you want. It still leaves you as a A-1 asshole.”

His eyes did a dance from her face to mine to Spin’s, and he held his tongue, with an effort that pushed his head forward like a bison’s. They didn’t want to offend me, they wanted to keep the scrip flowing.

But Deirdre was roused. She asked me, “Whaddeya give these guys anything for? They couldn’t do anything if you really needed protection. Look at ’em—they’re scared shitless of these little kids from Lynn. Wait’ll the Russian gangs from Mattapan get here. These are two-bit punks, Ben, and you’re their only patsy.”

“They’ve taken good care of me so far,” I told her.

Spin seemed startled by my support; his toothpick bob-bled under his mustache as he said to Deirdre, “Hear that, smart cunt? And this is one smart former financier talking. Outsmarted his way up the ladder from utter nowhere out in the western part of the state.”

“How’d you know that?” I asked, startled in turn.

Phil smirked, checking if Deirdre took this in. “We know everything about our clients,” he said, “we need to know.”

“Fuck you two,” she said. “When those kids from Lynn get here you’re both going to wake up plugged some day. Or with a smile cut into your throats that’ll make your mouths look like assholes.”

Phil took this in and winked at me. “You watch her, Mr.
Turnbull. Back in high school everybody said she could suck dick all right, but that’s not the same as dependable.”

Spin was pocketing the April money. To end the conference, he said, “Trust us,” but the words had a shaky ring even in my ears.

Back in the house, as their rusty old Camaro wheeled down the driveway, I explained to Deirdre that what they charged was so much less than what the government used to extract that it was a bargain, regardless of how real their alleged protection was.

“Yeah, but when there was government, there were things like the FBI and the Federal Reserve Board to keep things stable. There was structure,” she told me. “Structure is worth paying quite a lot for. Without it, you get just survival of the brutes.”

“Where did you hear all this?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

“A program on television the other night, when I couldn’t sleep. I get jittery; it’s too quiet here at night. You were dead to the world. It talked about the Roman Empire. You know how, before it broke up, it made the spread of Christianity possible? All those roads and soldiers—Christianity would never have gotten out of Jerusalem without those roads. And it needed to get out of Jerusalem. It would have been squelched by the Jewish establishment. The Jews hated it, though it
was
Jews at first.”

I was amused; this young person under my roof was trying to grow, to learn, to orient herself in the world as it now was. She wanted to live a life. My amusement was cruel, of course. I said, “I have to tell you, Deirdre, that I don’t much care what happens in the world. I’ve had my years in it, by and large. You’ve arrived as a late kicker, one last joy, and I’m grateful. But time is running out for me. What Spin and
Phil and the kids from Lynn do with the world is up to them. I just want to buy a little peace, day by day.”

“You
can’t
just cop out,” she said, getting wild. “What about
me
?”

“What about you, my dear? You’re comfortable, aren’t you? You’re fed and housed up here. You’re a lot better off than when you were turning tricks three or four a night and getting ripped off by the escort agency and terrified of being slashed or strangled by some sicko who could never come to terms with his own libidinous impulses.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s not enough here for me to
do
. Everything I want to do to change the place you resist, because Gloria wouldn’t have done it that way. Gloria, Gloria. Ben, it’s
boring
for me here. Even banging you, you seem to want it less.”

“I’ll want it more,” I promised, “when it stops being spring. I just get down in the spring, I don’t know what it is. We’ll be fine, eventually.” Some of that ancient dollhouse panic began to rise in my throat, thickening it. “Stick with me, darling. There’s nothing out there but—”But what? Paganism. Imported Oriental gods, fraudulent magi and seers. The decline of Rome.