Under Radar (11 page)

The name stopped him. “The Lumarians?”

“That's what we call ourselves. The Lumarians. The Light People. We have returned to the beginning of the
journey. Adam and Eve were Light People, automatons guided by Messengers of Light.”

“The Messengers are separate from you? You're puppets?”

“Stop making fun of me. The intimidated fearful conscience, the image of God, turns to violence, and then the scarred etheric body drowns the physical body in blood.”

“You're elevating sex to a level of worship.”

“Oh, stop it. We're using sex as a ritual in the service of worship, not as the object of worship. You've seen how strong we are, how beautiful. They're different now, my people, you can see that, can't you?”

“You're not worried about disease?”

“We're clean.”

“Then fine.”

“You don't think it's fine.”

“What can I do? What are we supposed to have, a soccer match between your side and mine?”

“They're the same side. I'm trying to bring them together. I want to heal the split between night and day, between waking and dreaming. I want to heal the world of hallucination, the projection of fearful desires. I want you to stop thinking of me as a succubus.”

“Kind of hard not to.”

“I see you're still flip. You know I find that offensive, but given that I've changed, I'll tell you the truth, it's kind of attractive on you. Your sarcasm is sexy. You should join us.”

“You know I can't.”

“I know you think you can't.”

“I won't, then.”

“You could if you wanted to. You should see what I'm doing. I've given them the power of the feminine. Jesus and the wound on his side, the labial wound, the wound made by the point of a spear, by a point, by one of those manly points. I want to bring them together. A return to androgyny. There's a universal religion inside all of us. Look at the people who are with me. You can see the power they have now. This is the power that starts a real revolution, because it starts from a necessity that's larger than the usual struggle for land and resources. Jamaica is the place for this revolution to begin. The people are so broken and so holy. Why did reggae become so popular around the world? Bob Marley was the kind of man who comes along every two thousand years! The Africans, at home and in their diaspora, are the great challenge to the world now. No other group is so low. No other group needs so much help, and the reason they are beaten down is that the first world knows what threat they carry within themselves that they don't even know they possess.”

“Then good luck with your Lumarians.”

“Your problem is obvious and pathetic. You want to experience the spiritual, but you can't let go of your ego. You won't face the power of your instinct.”

“I know what's there. I control it.”

“Then you'll never have illumination.”

“Illumination is a luxury. I'm just here to feed some hungry children.”

“And you want them to stay children. Let me show you what else we do.”

...

The missionary returned to his church and wrote a letter to the bishop, describing some of what he'd seen.

“She brings all the members of her new community into a circle every morning. She asks them to share their dreams of the night before. When a dream is particularly strong, she asks everyone to make that dream into a play. She assigns them roles to perform the dream's allegory of desire, impulse, apprehension, sensation, and memory.

“She tells them, ‘Now we will find out what our dreams really mean. Shared and acted out, our private dreams become our collective dream. If we share one another's deepest connections with open hearts, with love, the day will come when we all wake up together having dreamed one dream. We will know what to do. Each will take her part in the pageant without assignment. Each will make his mask or costume, and all of our words and music will come together as we dreamed them, without rehearsal, without script. And then we will spread our message across the island, and then around the world. And this will be like love.'”

...

The missionary read the letter and then sent it, knowing that the bishop would recognize madness. He reflected on his insanity, which was really nothing more than an inconsistency he refused to resist or hide.

Phineas was in the chapel when the missionary went to pray.

“I've bewitched myself, Phineas. This isn't Yael's fault. This is my fault. I'm in trouble. I feel like I'm cured now, but it's too late for what's about to happen to me. If I confess my errors when I go home, if I am rational and clear about all of my mistakes, if I tell them that jungle fever deranged me, I'll never get another church. I have ruined myself. I entered the ministry with fantasies of the same success that Yael dreams of, the kingdom of heaven on earth. I had spiritual fire, and I wanted to burn all the deadwood in the world. I had such contempt for the old men and their droll caution against religious excitement. Now I'm wise. Failure begets wisdom. Did you know that? But what do I do with my wisdom?”

“The bishop doesn't want you to see her anymore.”

“You've been talking to him?”

“Every day.”

“Is he coming here?”

“This is bigger than you.”

The missionary wrote this letter to the bishop: “What are you telling the boy? Fine, I accept your private
connection with him. Phineas will come to the seminary, eventually, of course he will. I've been grooming him, and you see what I see. He'll become important, I'm certain of it, probably of greater meaning to our movement than you or I. I know your limits. I respect you and I love you, but I know your limits. Just let me finish here. Let me find a way to limit the damage. This is a laboratory. The methods we discover in Jamaica to thwart the demons raised by this woman can be our ammunition everywhere.”

The bishop did not respond, and the missionary knew that his silence meant that he was now observing the situation through Phineas.

...

The more he thought about the poor Jamaicans and ministered to them in the most basic ways—visit the sick, read to a child, clothes for the family whose shack burned down—the more he hated them.

His hatred of the Jamaicans spoke in the same tones as his voice of conscience, as the still small voice he answered on his way to ordination, as the voice of his vocation. Was God calling him to racism? Did God hate the Jamaicans? Why else make them suffer?

The missionary started a letter to the bishop: “They're cursed. I've been here for six months, and I know this now. There's no other explanation. There's no reason to stay. They're cursed. They won't change. They
can't change. They shouldn't change. God cursed them, but I'm not on His side this time. I'm on their side.”

He tore up the letter and burned it in his sink and washed away the ashes and then scoured the sink.

This is not the obvious story, he told himself. I am not just a repressed man of the cloth who can't control himself when a whore makes herself available. It can't be that simple. There has to be something more, I can't be the victim of such an old story.

But what else is there? he asked himself. There is no other story. It's the same old story, and if it is, and we know so much now about ourselves, then I should be able to control the story. I want to know both endings.

He started another letter: “Between Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss, what's left? I believe in God in spite of the academy's evidence that faith is a social construct, that religion fills needs that are purely—what, social? The study of religion thinks itself clever for taking apart all of the pieces of religion, but the scholars miss the evidence that's in front of them, that religion is made of broken pieces because the infinite God could not express His infinity in the physical world without shattering. So God shattered, and the pieces were worshiped instead of God in His all-embracing singularity. I understand that, I understand that, I understand that. Fine and good. Fine and good.”

He burned that letter as well, and buried the ashes.

But he wasn't going crazy, he also knew that. He was exhilarated by his stupidity.

He started another letter: “I have reached the limits of intelligence. I don't mean that I have solved the problems of physics, well, actually, perhaps I have, and all I lack is the math. But never mind that, I don't mean that. This is what I mean: there is a God. I know there is a God. And we cannot do what He asks of us, because we're an experiment that failed.”

And then he burned that letter, mixed the ashes in water, and drank them.

He wrote another letter.

“I went into the chapel and prayed. I prayed for strength and guidance. I prayed for my parish not to be destroyed for the sake of my weakness. While I was there, in the church, on my knees, I heard the first drum of the evening from the Lumarian village.

“The breeze rose from the shore. Cars coming back up the mountain brought home the women who worked as maids for the hotels. I am surrounded by people who have never left the island. This is when I feel the age of the people here, their exhaustion, their resistance to change, their enslavement. Night falls, and the air carries the sound of a motorbike, and a guitar, and someone screaming, and I am in love with the matter of their helplessness, of my absolute inability to help them, and my sure knowledge that no one can help them. So I am in love with their ancient souls, and jealous of them for still owning a vitality that in my ancestral line was sapped probably by the end of the Middle Ages, when my forebears left the farm for town. I don't see anything here to
save. I see people alive, in their lives, making whatever of their lives they can, and that their attention to me and attendance to my mission reflects only on the basic human goodness that calls for decent treatment to strangers. I reflect on this goodness and loathe the whole system that takes advantage of someone else's life and says of it that I know better than you what will give your life meaning.

“I stayed up last night, sitting on the porch, listening to the drums, waiting for them to come down the hill. I thought about sex. I thought, Perhaps she's right. There really is an aristocracy of sex, you see. When you cross the line into this Versailles of the mind and body, you enter the world of permission, and permission is privilege, and privilege bestows grace, and grace imposes itself as an oppressive force on everyone not directly touched. Like religion.

“Here they are.

“With steel drums and whistles, with tambourines and flutes, Yael and her cadre of sex warriors return to the town. I am drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I opened, then poured out half the soda, and filled back to the top with rum.

“They greet old friends with the gracious calm of the wealthy returned after a summer in Tuscany. They have lost their quiet misery. I would say that there is nothing impoverished about them anymore, they have lost their beaten patience, the perception that time is stopped around them, that everything in their nature is
old and exhausted; no consolation, no resuscitation possible.

“In their return to the town, I see such confidence. How can I make sense of this? It is all in the way their hands move in the air. Here, picture the daughter of a very rich man, the teenage daughter of your wealthiest supporter. You're in the living room of his mansion. You're there for dinner. The man is a bit of a monster, filled with his own importance, and his personality is impenetrable though charming. You visit her father because he has enough money to build a new wing for the seminary. He'll support you because he wants his daughter to meet you, to learn about God from you. He believes that you're a man whose presence might shine on his daughter's life. Now the rich man's daughter, all seventeen years of her, sits beside you on the arm of a beautiful couch. As you teach them a bit of Bible, the rich man is curious about God and has many opinions, all of them ordinary though sincere. And then his daughter asks you about God, she asks you about God and faith, especially your own faith, the story of your faith, your struggles with faith. She looks you in the eye. This rich girl's insult is that she appreciates you, she listens to your answers, she considers the implications of what you have to say, but her gracious smile, her strong posture, and the smooth skin on the inside of her wrists are all violent, disgusting assaults on you. She likes you! She tells you so, that she likes you! There's the insult, appreciation. And how are the Lumarians like the daughter of a rich girl? They have
the same hands. How does the daughter of a rich man move her hands? At table she sits with one hand in her lap while she eats, unless she needs them both to cut something. The unused hand rests patiently on the napkin in her lap. When walking, her hands, like a Lumarian's, move freely in the air, sometimes reaching away from her in sheer delight of the flow of things, fingers spread to catch more of the air, even the smells of the air. When she goes to Paris, her hands catch the aroma of the bakery. I had never seen that gesture from a Jamaican before Yael came to the parish. Her followers were used to more activity, harder work. And this is what has changed in them, they have lost all their necessary, justified fear of the world. Lumarian hands move freely.

“My thoughts have turned angry instead of sullen, and I like them for that, instead of my self-inflated piety, always trying to feel the way I think I should feel. It is all so simple to me now; emotion, a moral life, what matters, what can slide.

“A small cloud passed over the town and rained on the parade. No one in Jamaica prepares for the daily rain, in destitution's rags, everyone is always ready for whatever the sky god offers. There's nothing to say about the mountain rain that isn't obvious, but Yael looked up at the clouds and called to them, ‘Not today!' And everyone laughed and joined her, pointing to the sky and calling out, ‘Not today!'