Under Radar (10 page)

“‘What is that supposed to mean?' she asked.

“‘It's just a silly joke.'

“‘No, it's an insult.'

“‘If you think so, then I'm sorry.'

“‘No. I don't accept your apology. If I were to make silly little jokes about Jesus, would you let them pass?'

“‘By training and prayer, I think I've learned to do just that. I hope I have.'

“‘But it would hurt if I made a joke about Jesus.'

“‘I'm not at a high enough spiritual level for it not to.'

“‘So we're supposed to transcend our pain.'

“‘I think so.'

“‘To be big tough men, big cruel men for whom pain is not the primary message of distress but a personal challenge to overcome, to endure the agony.'

“‘Like our Lord Jesus Christ.'

“‘Instead of weeping like the Goddess, instead of weeping and wailing and trying to set things right, like Gaia. Motherfucker.'

“That's what she said, and you should hear it, too.

“‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘that was wrong of me. I was behaving like a Christian. I should have expected this. You think I'm overreacting, don't you?'

“‘I don't think so.'

“‘Yes, you do. You think that a little joke about the Goddess is just that, a little joke.'

“‘If it hurt your feelings, it wasn't funny.'

“‘But if I'd laughed, and only later realized how much you hurt me, you might have prided yourself on your own wit and maybe even respected me because I could take it, because I could take your teasing, take it like a man instead of weeping like a woman, weeping at your feet like the Goddess, the inconsolable Goddess.'

“‘I can see your point.'

“‘I didn't make a point. Men make points, not women. Men make points because that's the world to them, spears and points and pricks, that's the world of men, a battleground. I didn't make a point. I just spoke from my heart. I let down my guard. I tried to be friendly with you. You're an educated man, you want to be a wise man, so I took you seriously. But your little joke makes me see my own mission in the hills more clearly. Yes, my own mission. We're competitors, aren't we? You represent the embassy of the sky god, the god of the tourists, the god
of money. I have to try a different way of being. I have to let my life be like a whisper to them. I have to build a cathedral invisible from the air. You teach them that the body, the land, the woman, all of this is only in the way of the mission, all of this has to be redeemed. You teach them to burn the sacred trees. It's not that the land is profane, you're too modern for that, it's not that the poor are godless and heathen, you're too sensitive and guilty to keep reading that sermon over and over. The world knows that story and doesn't want to hear it anymore, so now you say that the poor have so much to teach us, but their wisdom has to be transubstantiated, it has to be changed, it can't be what it is, you won't permit anything to just be what it is. I'm glad you made your little joke, maybe it was Gaia speaking through you, warning me that you're the one who has to be tamed, you're here for the Father in Heaven, but that wild beast you serve so blindly is really the demon of all demons.'

“And then she left. I was a broken man. In my sermon that week, I could say nothing without hearing the long insipid warble of my voice. I took as a humiliating patronage the kindness of my parishioners. I couldn't tell anyone what was the matter with me, which forced an estrangement. And what did I give them? I looked at my congregants and saw them trapped with me, trapped by me. Yael knew she would offend the balance here by recording them singing because the tape would show that my flock uses the church not to be closer to God but only for the acoustics.

“They come to me because they have nothing left. Maybe this is the way faith begins, but I don't like it. I'm sick of the language of faith. We tell them: Yes, you have been degraded; Yes, in part by the religion I want to revive for you, because nothing remains of Paradise but your faith; Yes, faith alone won't feed your children, but without faith their bread will turn to ash. I know all of that. And I hate it. I hate the rhetoric of the religious party line, the stickiness of professional compassion, the tone of consolation ensorceled by greed. Greed for congregants and converts.

“I stopped talking. I wrote Phineas a note, telling him to tell the people that I was on the warpath against gossip. My silence, to avoid all that steams out of me, appeared to them as a sensational achievement. I wrote ‘hello,' ‘good-bye,' and ‘thank you' on three white file cards. When a few small boys threw rocks at me so I would yell at them, I showed them ‘thank you.' I kept this going for a week, and I felt much better.”

It was two months before the missionary sent another letter.

“I am not naive. I know the ways that people deform themselves. If I didn't, I would have no claim on wanting to make the world better. And I admit that I probably know some aspects of the world only by rumor or refraction through magazines, television, and public scandal, but if I don't have the experience of sin, I can smell it. The world of sin clings like smoke. The fires are here in Jamaica.

“I heard the story from my laundress's husband, who heard it from someone else. I knew this much already: a few weeks ago Yael and Aston moved into a village some miles deep in the bush, where the people have no enemies and few gods. There's no television there, the only entertainment is community. That's why she wanted to go. One night, so I was told, everyone was stoned—on ganja from Bob Marley's personal plantation, where else?—and they built a bonfire. The people banged on drums of their own design and danced.

“According to the story, Yael commanded the center of the circle around the fire. She invited Aston to join her. You've seen the Jamaicans dance, you know how unrestrained they are, how sexual. Couples here dance close enough to be hanged in Arabia.

“Their dancing progressed beyond simulation. Yael, so I was told, made love to, or at least had sex with, Aston while everyone watched. And apparently, while she was having sex with him, she offered herself to one of the men nearby, and if what I heard is true, she took Aston and the other man together.

“Here's a surprise: that's not what bothers me. I'm telling you, I know about group sex, I know about the orgiastic current in the world. The horror of this episode is not what happens among some stoned fools wasted in the hills. Let them stay there. But the people in my town know the story and treat the event as just another episode made of the world's bundled energies. They don't
particularly care. And Phineas! Phineas asked me, ‘Sir, what is an orgy?'

“‘An orgy. Yes. Well. Let me tell you that ‘orgy' is a way of saying ‘contradiction of God's desire.' Or the perversion of God's desire as a rampancy of desire. We speak of an orgy of violence, or an orgy of shopping.'

“But the boy knows what's going on by the bonfires. I fear he may already be lost, because even hearing about such hot, radioactive desire will itself begin a chain reaction of desire.”

...

The bishop called. “Leave the woman alone. Draw a circle around the church and the people in the community whose faith you count on, and become the lighthouse for everyone else. Ignore Yael and her people. You've heard of witches? Yael is the real thing. This woman enchants her people with pleasure they cannot afford. The more you engage with her, the weaker you become. This is the formula for her success. We can't burn her, so ignore her. If witch burning would end witchcraft, I'd build the pyre myself, but it doesn't.”

“What about her followers?”

“You have to ask yourself why people take such risks with their souls, and then ask yourself why some people protect themselves, why some people are faithful.”

“Out of fear of God.”

“Fear of God, yes, respect for terror, yes, but not love for Him. Discern who among your flock are faithful out of love. For the rest, they'll always be torn between opinions. Their faith will always be a battleground of resentment for bad luck and prayers not answered.”

The missionary asked the bishop how he should proceed among the contradictions in his advice.

“I don't see contradictions.”

“You'd kill her if you could.”

“No, I'd kill her if her death would stop the plague.”

“But if I ignore her and she continues …”

“She will.”

“Then what do I do? I need a sign.”

“She is the sign.”

...

There was a long silence after this.

Tom heard a rat in the corner of his cell. “She is the sign? She is the sign of what?” It was the man in the next cell. The sounds of the prison were coming back. The man in the next cell called out, “Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“What happens next?”

“I don't know.” He had heard the story as he pronounced it, and nothing new was coming to him. “That may be the end.”

“That's not how a story ends.”

“I'm sorry. I don't remember anything else. It's not my story. It's the hanged man's story.”

The light went on overhead, the naked bulb in a wire basket. The guard pushed a tray of food through the slot in the door: meat patties, a few bananas, coffee.

The guard looked in. “You don't know what happens next?”

“No.”

“I think there's more.” The guard went away for a few minutes and returned with another plate of food. “Eat this. You've been talking a long time.”

“Thank you,” said Tom.

“Everyone is listening,” said the man in the next cell. “I pass it along as you tell it.”

Tom finished his meal and lay back on the cot, floating in a mood of calm regret.

When he asked himself, “Why is this story part of my punishment?” he heard himself answer….

...

The bishop's command to leave Yael alone sent the missionary into a week of dejection. He wandered through the village, inviting himself into the hovels of the poor and overstaying the tentative welcome offered him by the community. Because he returned their hospitality with so listless an effort at making them understand what he was doing in their houses and in their lives, the little goodwill he was earning for himself and his mission eroded
with every meal he begged. When he understood this, he wrote another letter. “A terrible week. I became fogged with an obscure, interior confusion, and my happiness perverted by a sad, lost restlessness. My crisis was less about faith than my ability to honor my convictions. I am here to serve the poor. I reject the cheap piety that would have me say, ‘I am here to learn from them.' I will earn redemption in the fight with a community's sin. You are wrong about my staying away from Yael. When Alaric, in his march on Rome, was told of the great army massed against him, he replied, ‘The thicker the grass, the easier it is to mow.' I need Yael. I need an enemy. I need a battle.”

...

Late that night, the missionary followed the beat of drums to Yael's camp. The moon was waning, and he brought his lamp and stayed off the trail. He pushed his way through ferns, through patches of wild pineapple. Countless fireflies blinked amid the pines in unison.

And then he was there, on the hill above Yael's camp, watching men and women he knew, some from church, on blankets surrounding the bonfire. The couplings were faster than he expected. Men and women met, fell into each other, were supported by others, and in turn supported them. People were quiet and, when finished, retreated to the edge of the circle. Yael put a blanket on a man's shoulders, brought beer to another. Then she entered
the circle. Three men and a woman wrapped themselves around her, filling her body.

It was something like snakes, and something like archery, each of them pulling the other as a hunter pulls the bow, Yael alert to the pleasures of the others until it was her turn, when she coiled her arms tight around her lovers, and the missionary saw and was certain that Yael felt conscious of nothing else, faces, skin, wet fingers, the hair that brushed her breasts; her body seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped farther and farther, beyond thought, and then her voice took flight like an arrow.

At Yael's release, eight arms rocked her. Rejecting their consolations, she twisted into misery, sobbing. Her friends held her tight. After a time, and how much time passed the missionary could not say, she hugged the men and the woman one at a time, speaking quietly to each, offering and accepting assurance.

The missionary stepped into the firelight.

“What did you see?” she asked. She opened herself to him. He looked.

“I saw you flung out of space.”

“Did you see me cry?”

“Yes.”

“Because I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself. As embarrassed as you would be.”

“I doubt it.”

“You think it's easy? Begging for release with the group brings up every embarrassing torment of compulsion and all the energy we use to deny that compulsion.
When the orgy ends, we hold each other with our two bodies, the etheric and the physical, and this hug means more than coming five times in one night; all of the frenzy builds for nothing more profound than these delicate hugs. In times of trouble, we have to affirm our trust; how we do that is a matter of custom. Do you understand the etheric hug?”

The missionary did not.

“The soul remembers what impresses itself on the body,” she said. “And the etheric body makes itself known through conscience. But conscience cannot always be trusted.”

“Why not?” asked the missionary.

“What feels like conscience is not always so. Sometimes the fear of freedom speaks in the same voice. Fear tells you that it's my fault you want me. That your wanting me is a sin. But let's take this apart. You want me, but you're afraid of losing yourself in me. You could be married and be afraid that if you want me and I give myself to you, then you can't have your marriage, because your wife won't be able to share you. But if the whole community drops that drama of jealousy, and we all respect one another's compulsions, and overcome them together, and spread love and trust, then we can tame God's fearful voice. The Lumarians are training the fear of God out of his little red shell.”