Under Radar (12 page)

“They pound their tom-toms and chant their own songs and the sky clears. But this is no miracle, the sky
clears after every rain, the people here are not stupid, but the villagers are—I don't want to say superstitious—I want to say … I want to say that a people eager for entertainment will accept an event as a miracle if their commitment to the idea increases the entertainment value of whatever follows. Here's a thought for you, my teacher: faith offers better drama—or comedy!—than skepticism. Skepticism shatters the possibility of coherent meaning, leaving a collection of pointless shards strung together only by mathematical coincidence, and no valid mystically obscure significance to induce revelation. So, for its own amusement, the town gives the credit for the sunshine to Yael.

“The Lumarians applaud her, and shyly she curtsies. She offers her hands to the children, who join her in a circle. She teaches them a song:

O sun, O sun …

O giver of life …

O sun, O giver of life …

We are all one …

O sun …

Spirit in the flesh,

We are made of woven clay,

In the hands of the sun,

In the fingers of each ray,

We find we are one,

In the hands of the sun,

In the fingers of each ray,

We are all one.

“They have such beautiful songs here, and she gives them something so dreadful, and they take it; why? Everyone is singing along with her. Do you understand how awful that lyric is, how empty? There's a reggae song, ‘Jah Penetrate to a Tenement Yard.' How can anyone exchange such powerful immanence for such weak transcendence?

“‘Let us bring our gods together,' said Yael, leading the children across the road to the church, where I sit on the porch.

“She's singing one of our old hymns, ‘And Did He Walk on England's Shores?,' but for England she substitutes Jamaica. The crowd takes it up. I have never heard it sung so beautifully before; the hymn that belongs to this church, reinvigorated with sex. There's no other word for the new element. Religion defiled and then made sacred again. I'm crying.

“Now she's telling everyone about a dream that she had last night, and a dream that Aston had.”

...

“I had a dream last night,” said Yael. “I dreamed that God was frightened, but in that dream my name for God, the image of God, was nothing more than my own intimidated conscience, and this frightened image of God wanted to kill. I saw God's carapace of fear behind God's blinding light, I saw God from a cleft in the rocks, and that cleft was but a crack in God's carapace of fear. God
let me see God's creation through God's eyes, but God's red, dimmed tide of jealousy obscured the beauty God had made. I wanted to coax God, and patiently teach God, that the fear of universal love is God's enemy of life, and that the enemy of life is also the enemy of God, and that God could be the enemy of God's own creation if God remained in fear.

“And then, in my dream, God answered from inside God's cloud with a dream, because God was too frightened to speak directly. God could answer only with another story, since God's creation is just another story God told the empty universe, like a melody in the dark, for comfort. So God presented God's new story, and when I woke up, I told Aston the dream, and he stopped me as I began, and finished the story as I had dreamed it, because God had given Aston God's same dream. God wants us to show you God's new dream.”

The Lumarians formed two circles behind Yael. “God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley. God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley when his mother was living in Delaware. God dreamed that I dreamed that I was Bob Marley and I was nineteen, and God dreamed that I dreamed that I went to Delaware to be with my beloved mother.”

And one of the circles gathered around Yael.

“God dreamed that I dreamed that I worked in a factory.”

Yael imitated the rigid movements of a young man trapped in repetitive motion, the slave of a machine,
repeating a sequence of gestures, passing something along, tightening a bolt, returning to the first piece of the sequence.

One of the old Lumarian women stood before the second circle. “But why did Jah send Bob a ticket? Why, at that moment in his life, did God want Bob off from his native island of Jamaica?”

The second circle opened, and within it, two Lumarian boys held the poles on which they'd mounted an Ethiopian flag, ten feet long and six feet high. And on the flag they'd sewn the outline of an airplane, and on the plane the royal crest of Ras Tafari, the emperor Haile Selassie. Aston was behind the flag, wearing an army uniform and a stiff-brimmed officer's hat with gold braid.

The woman said, “Because when Bob left Jamaica to be with Bob's mother herself, who came to Jamaica but Ras Tafari?”

The circle around the flag broke into two lines, making a landing strip for the emperor's plane.

While the plane landed, Yael as Bob toiled on the assembly line, without feeling the vibration of what was happening in Kingston.

When the plane stopped, the two men raised the poles, and Aston stepped out into the Jamaican sun. The Lumarians knelt, crying, “Ras Tafari! Ras Tafari!”

Aston played the emperor's confusion and his fear. When the crowd moved towards the plane, he hid behind the flag. Now Aston started to sob, loudly, like a child.

And then, in the other circle, in Delaware, Bob Marley stopped working on the assembly line. Yael raised her head, not as though she heard the cry but felt it deep in the soul of the planet.

Ras Tafari cried, and Bob Marley answered him with a song, “Three Little Birds,” everyone knew the song and hummed along with Yael until she took the reggae out of the song and brought in the lullaby. Yael, as the Psalmist of Trenchtown by the command in God's reverie, Yael, in song, told the timorous emperor not to worry about anything because everything was going to be all right, no strange sentiment to a song, but had the dread savior ever considered the simplicity of such an assurance? Selassie stopped crying. Now quiet, he searched across the sea, across the horizon, for the source of his tranquillity.

When he found the direction of the heavenly voice and his eyes met Yael's, it was her turn for silence, and her turn to kneel.

Rising on the power of the sweet singer's devotion, Aston assumed the full dignity of Ras Tafari, the emperor Haile Selassie, the living God, the redeemer of Babylon. The crowd of Rastas at his feet formed again the two ranks that became his airport, and the banner-as-plane took off for that part of the churchyard that was Delaware incarnate.

The circle around Bob formed the two parallel lines that matched the rows of the other group, and now the four rows joined into two and then squared, then bent the square into a circle as the banner gathered Yael and
wrapped around her as she must have dreamed it, joining her, joining Bob Marley, God's salvation, with Ras Tafari, God's salvation, two high beings, two nodes of perfection, discerned by the poorest of the poor in the worst of Jamaica's shantytowns, all living prophets, forged from a poverty of everything but spirit.

The circle became two long lines again, now leading the plane with its joined holy cargo up the steps of the church towards the pulpit, and not just the players but everyone in the churchyard joined the lines.

When the couple wrapped in the Ethiopian flag passed the missionary on the steps, the ranks broke and the ragged crowd followed. The missionary, not moving, split the crowd like a memory splits attention, and like a bad memory, he was kicked and knocked off the steps to the ground.

He grabbed his notebook and, looking up, saw something he had to write down: “A van with tourists stops. Someone takes pictures. I know what they're thinking, it's a festive day, they're seeing natives follow a pageant into a rustic church, and they see a man on the church steps, writing in his notebook. What a colorful fellow.

“And here's Phineas with a machete. He's chasing the plane into that rustic church. The mob runs after him. The tourists are taking pictures of this. I can see inside the church, the couple on the floor, the boy with the machete. He's telling them to stop. They won't listen. He's just a boy. They're laughing at him. I'm going in.”

Later, he wrote, just for himself, not in a letter, “The bishop had told me that if he thought burning the witches would make a difference, he'd light the match. It was easy for him to play with medieval fantasies, he was on the phone. As I tell him from time to time, I was on the ground. I did what I could, and I'd do it again. I can't say I love being back at the seminary, but I suspect that if I stay here and make myself indispensable, I might find a place in the church's High Command, and if not, I'll ask for a second chance on a mission, and if they're smart, they'll let me go. What happened in my parish would never happen to me again. Couldn't let a boy do my job. I've got experience now. The challenge will never go away. The next time I'll tell her to keep to the hills, and don't bring the party to town.”

...

When the story was finished, Tom was taken to his cell, where his friends were waiting.

“So that's it,” said Tom, bewildered by this encounter with the mystery of inspiration. “Do you think the hanged man was Aston? Or was he Phineas, telling the story with the ending he wanted?”

“That's not the story,” said the old man. “That's not the end of it. There's more. That was for you. The missionary's story freed you from your dungeon, but nothing changes for us. That was not the story for which the hanged man died.”

“How do you know?”

“Listen,” said the old man. “The ordinary sounds of the prison have returned.”

Tom opened himself to the world around him, the familiar frightening sounds of boredom and agony made of competing music, the screams of beatings, the tragic howls of the deranged, blasts of rage from guards, their occasional casual gunfire, the dramatic hustle of the soccer yard, and the infinitely shaded implications of belligerence and supplication that formed the context of most prison chatter. The rhythms of the place, silent while the story flowed from him, now broke into those interfering tempos. This signaled the prisoners' noisy submission to their ordinary sadness.

“But that's all I can remember,” said Tom. He tried to remember something else, but his mind was gray. He thought of making something up but feared his own hanging for fraud.

The old man had an idea. “Tell us about your childhood. Tell us who your parents were. Tell us about your work. We'll find the story buried in your childhood.”

“But my story is dull,” said Tom. “I have no good story except for the murder. Everything else in my life is small, fragmented. I have nothing elemental. In my family, we were never hungry, we were never poor, we were never rich. I didn't join the army. I watched television, I went to the movies, I listened to music. I never made love to an heiress or a great beauty.”

The translator expressed this to the old man. The old man responded to the translator, “You have seen the clown in the circus, he tells us the story of pride and ineptitude. It doesn't matter that you think you have no story worthy of the name, this is only your bad judgment. We believe in a God whose Word is not boring. If, as you say, you have nothing interesting to tell, then it shouldn't take too long to pull the hanged man's story from off your tongue. Come, let's hear your boring tale now.”

Tom started: “I was born in 1960. My father wrote songs, but no one sang them. He had enough facility with music to …” Tom couldn't finish the sentence. He wanted to say something about his mother. “My mother was a travel agent, and then she sold houses. My father was disappointed in himself, but my mother loved him and encouraged him. Are the barbs of the hanged man's story caught somewhere in the tangles of my parents' life, as it comes to me?”

“Hatred for yourself will push the hanged man's tale further away,” the old man said.

Why not let go and tell his story, with all its pockets of boredom and dull shame? These poor men possessed the gift to comprehend him better than all the world. What a help and strength it would be if he could give them freedom. He was one of them, he was a criminal. Our illegal pursuits insulate us from the common business of life, we share that sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver. We are here to contemplate our
crimes, regard them as sins, and make a fresh start. And, failing that hope, as we have, then the second purpose of all of this, of isolation, is also right. We are dangerous angry men. We are not ready to return. We will only disappoint and hurt the world.

“Tell us your story now,” said one of the men.

It was so hard to talk about his father, a creative man thwarted by— by what? How would these poor men, whose fathers lifted heavy things for a living if they worked at all, follow the story of a musician who made enough money for a house in Los Angeles and a condominium in Aspen? Even these words as he thought to phrase them made him sick and embarrassed.

But he pressed on.

“My father was competent. He could not sell his songs, but he understood other people's melodies, and he adapted them to fit different singers.”

Was this even a story? What he had just said was commentary, not chronicle.

“There used to be these variety shows on television, they were like high school talent shows, with a host who sang and did comedy sketches with a group of regulars and a guest star.”

This made him almost retch.

“I can't do this,” said Tom. “My life story makes me sick.”

“You must,” said one of the men.

He breathed again.

“My father surrounded himself with successful failures. They made money but hated themselves. Cynical men who wrote comic songs. They wrote song parodies.”

My father used to sing,

“Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok