Under Radar (9 page)

The need to help these men met the fear that he would fail them and be hated by them for the rest of his life in this prison. He had no memory of the hanged man, no memory of the fight. Tom wanted to throw up, but then the menacing sickness and fear he felt from this flashed in his soul like lightning, exposing the shape of the story. Then the fear subsided into confusion, and he lost sight of the thing the hanged man had placed there.

“I need to sit down.”

“Do you remember something?” someone asked.

“Maybe. I saw something, but it disappeared.”

Word of Tom's recovery spread through the prison. The crowd outside his cell grew larger.

A guard with epaulets and a chevron on his white sleeve asked Tom his name.

“Tom Levy.”

“And do you need a doctor?”

“No,” said Tom. “I'm fine.”

“Why did you not speak for so long?”

Tom looked the man in the eye and knew how to win some time for himself. He answered with a smile, “I had nothing to say.”

The guard laughed, and then everyone laughed, not for long but in relief. There would be no investigation, no interruption, Tom would stay in the cell.

The guard told the men to clear the corridor.

I owe these men. They have protected me during my deep trance.

In losing his body, he had gained the astral, with an immediacy so complete that for seven years he knew time as a single instant with no voluptuous surges advancing and retreating, so nothing to gauge position, so no reflection, so no memory. How to explain his triumphant return to the shattered world? Something rescued him, but what, or who?

“I want to help you,” said Tom. “Where do I begin?”

“Tell us the story of your life.”

“Why?”

“To protect his message against its enemies, the hanged man wove his story into you. As you tell your own story, we will find that knot among the threads of your life. You might remember an ordinary moment, a moment of no obvious consequence to you, when without warning you will begin to tell a story you could not possibly have lived.”

“Then I'll start with the story of the murder, because nothing else in my life was ever so exciting or coherent,” said Tom.

And so he did, as best as he could. He told them about the hotel, and the people there, and the sour mood of his week, and he told them about his daughters, how much he loved them, how beautiful and true they were, how he disdained to call them special, to give them any higher worth. He remembered Perri's warm damp hand, and Alma's cool grip, the night he walked with them, the night before the murder.

He told his prison mates about the band, and about the singer's tawdry pleasure in dancing with a four-year-old. He told them about Barry Seckler, and the trip to Nine Mile, and the struggle in the waterfall, and the blood. He told them about the last visit with his wife, and then he told them of the early days in the prison. He told them the story of Paul Farrar and his conspiracy of educated professionals.

It was an interesting story, and he told it honestly. It was certainly filled with more drama than any of the stories he might have heard at his high school reunion, but every man around him could tell stories of violence. He saw how they listened with full attention, because their lives depended on him. He related each detail simply, trying to press the redeeming angel's oil of sanctification from every word. When he paused for breath, or a sip of water, he waited with his audience for truth to fill the room, for the twinkling instant of boundless change.

He finished the story up to the beginning of telling this story.

“So I was asked to tell the story of the murder and what I remember of everything that followed. Now I'm in prison in Jamaica, telling you a story, and I've reached the end. I'm sorry,” said Tom. “It's not there.”

“It is there,” said the old man, “and you have only begun. None of us is going anywhere quickly. When the time comes, you'll call us together.”

It was morning. Tom followed these friends, old to his life but new to his awareness, to the prison mess hall. Tom marveled that he had survived for so long in his trance, walking these gloomy halls. His escort led him to a table where other prisoners, having already heard the news of his awakening, urged a share of their food on him, hoping, by selfish kindness, to provoke the hanged man's legend from its living tomb.

The guards, for whom Tom's trance had advanced him, over the years, towards invisibility, saw him chatting and laughing with the crowd at the table and promptly put him in a cell, alone. They feared nothing but any sudden difference in the air, and Tom's new state of being scared them like a hurricane.

The cell was wet and dark. There were rats in the corner, and large bugs, which he could feel as they crawled over him, but none of this bothered him, because he was thinking about the missionary, and Phineas. He wondered if someone had ever printed Yael's photographs. Were the pictures fine enough for the book she dreamed of? If there were good pictures of the orgies, he supposed so. There was a market for artful sex books.
What would her friends do with that picture of the church garden?

Tom called out, “Can anyone hear me?”

There was a voice from the cell next to his. “Yes, I can hear you.”

“I just remembered something that never happened to me.”

“A dream?”

“No. I have a story to tell. The men in my cell block are waiting for it.”

“Tell me and I will pass it along. There is a pipe in my cell. It carries my voice.”

“Tell them I remember what the hanged man told me.”

Word was passed along the corridor for everyone nearby to be quiet. A wave of silence moved through the prison until the only sound was of the guards' batons ringing the bars of the cells, because the quiet made them nervous.

“A few years ago,” Tom began, “an American missionary came to rebuild the church in a Jamaican hill town, so remote that some of the villagers had never seen the ocean. The missionary wrote a letter to his bishop….”

...

“They are extraordinarily skillful in using their hands, and they have a fantastic and I think impeccable visual taste, considering their poverty and the poverty of their materials,
but their faith and intellectual notions are archaic in the extreme. They find it difficult or impossible to grasp the general concepts that might lead to their liberation. They have little sense of cumulative, as opposed to repetitive, time, and they cloud their history with Rastafarian fantasies that Haile Selassie was the messiah. So the notion of progress, I should say linear progress, is incomprehensible to them. Their conceptual distinctions between life and death, among the human, animal, and vegetable worlds, are fragile and insecure. Heaven and earth are different to them in degree, not kind. The source of the problem is obvious: in such a static society, there is no room for a sense of an impersonal law flowing from a personal God. They pray, but scatter their petitions. I remember what you taught me, that my spiritual needs will be filled when the poor are not hungry, but if the poor here are not starving, what am I to do?”

Some days later the missionary wrote, “I have met an extraordinarily sensitive young boy named Phineas. I imagine he is what you must have been like when you were discovered on your island. He understands so well the deep nature of service. Phineas loves our Sunday meetings, not as much for the prayer and song as for the congregation of people and the chance to count heads. And this is what makes him so special: the boy does not keep his list of absentees for the purpose of chastisement, only to know who among the regular attendants is missing so that he might visit them, to see after their health, or to learn if there is something about our services that
loses their attention. He cherishes his visits to the sick, and every day he walks through the church garden, swinging his machete to cut for them one of our delicious mangoes. Then he might talk to them a bit about my sermon, and I'm certain that he compensates for my shortcomings. He lives by example.

“Phineas knows that no one will come to God except by the coercion of his own soul. You and I have talked about the terrible mistakes made by the early divines. No branch of any church in the tropics is blameless. Your final sermon to my class at seminary has been my beacon. If it might have been better to leave the natives to their own multiple gods, and let them add to their pantheons with every new twist in history for which the old gods were unprepared, Jamaican Christianity is exhausted, and it is our duty as servants of Christ to repair the damage done in His name by the friars and devouts of earlier centuries, serving different crowns. I feel so often as though the crosses of Jamaica have become for the people as useless as any memory of a Congo river god. Look at the success of this ridiculous Rastafarianism. Marcus Garvey casts a metaphorical prophecy—that a king who will redeem the black diaspora shall be crowned in Africa—and when the slums of Kingston heard the news that Haile Selassie was the new emperor of Ethiopia, they mixed him into the gumbo of Caribbean slave religion and declared him the living God. Do you know that Haile Selassie once came to Jamaica? A hundred thousand Rastafarians (named for him, he was Ras Tafari,
Duke
Tafari, before he was Haile Selassie) surrounded his airplane, and he hid inside for an hour. He had no idea what he meant to them. But I know what they mean to me, and I know my mission: to bring Christianity to the Christians, to find the cure within the poison.”

After a cautiously encouraging reply from the bishop, the missionary wrote back, “You may remember that I mentioned Phineas in an earlier letter. This week has been difficult for him. His brother Aston (nineteen) comes to church every Sunday, but I don't know why. I suspect him of amusement. He is probably smarter than Phineas. I see him smile at his own thoughts, to which he doesn't give voice; he keeps himself entertained by the flow of his private observations.”

The missionary wrote later, “Yesterday Phineas told me about an American woman who bought a small farm a short way from here. I suppose it is inevitable that the world's respect for the beauty of Jamaica would extend inland from the sea. Already the land near the water is too expensive for the locals. What will happen if the interior is colonized by the rich? The Jamaicans will be evicted from their own island, like Cherokee Indians!

“Her name is Yael. She visited me this morning, carrying two cameras. I predict she takes good pictures. She's an attractive woman, with a sort of familiar urban face, a certain type, clever and thin. She told me her story, or enough of it to explain what she is doing so far from the tourist colony. Her mother died a few months ago, leaving Yael too little money to support herself in New
York City without a job, but just enough to pay the rent and buy food if she lives in a poor country. She was tired of the life she had, and frankly admitted an affair with a married man, her third. Remembering Jamaica from a vacation six years ago, remembering the wistful tug of the countryside, the people, the possibility for discovery, she came here expressly to investigate a new way to live. She believes, as do I, that our world of surplus and luxury will soon be overwhelmed by the reproaching tides of history. Moving here, she says, gives her a head start on adapting herself to a new historical condition.

“She is interested in me, more interested than I am in her. She's not Christian, and she really doesn't need my ministry. Her hunger is emotional, and I have only so much time. She may imagine that I am grateful for the company of someone who makes sophisticated conversation, but the longer I'm here, the less I'm interested in urbane babble about ordinary unhappiness and ordinary cures. She said to me, ‘I was unhappy.' I told her that the realization of unhappiness, as Thomas Merton said, is not salvation: that it may be the occasion of salvation, or it may be the door to a deeper pit in Hell. She greatly wanted to hear more about Merton, but I put her off. She wants to chat. I don't have time.

“And we have different missions. She came to Jamaica for art, she wants to make art and make of herself a work of art. She has in mind a photographic essay on her life in Jamaica. She says the church is beautiful and wants to take a picture of the garden. She promises
that if any are sold or published, she'll make a contribution. I said that I would happily accept it now. She gave me fifty dollars, which I thought was fair. She wants to take a picture of
me
, but I said no. I said, ‘You give me the impression that you're probably a good photographer, and if your work is published, I don't want to find myself immortalized as
Missionary in Jamaican Church
. She asked me, ‘Is that your only reason?' I said, ‘No. You may show more of me than I care to know about or have others know about.'”

Sometime later he wrote to the bishop. “Bad days. Aston (Phineas's brother) and Yael have discovered each other. She has been taking his picture, naked. She has him stand in waterfalls or on rock ledges. She poses him in profile before the sun and then the moon. He obliges. A pastor can't afford an easy moral shock at the varieties of human needs and pairings, but for her to prey on someone so young and so disposed towards sin makes me sick. A white woman who comes to the Jamaican hills for a lover is like the old slave traders casting an appraising eye on sturdy, dark flesh. I feel badly for Phineas.”

The bishop did not respond. A few weeks later the missionary wrote to him again. “I should have known. Yael worships Gaia. Surely you've met Gaia the Goddess, Gaia the single organism we call Earth, Gaia the essence, Gaia the great female source of power, Gaia the Earth Mother, Gaia the land, Gaia fertility, Gaia fecundity, Gaia that part of the dual nature of divinity abandoned by men,
not humanity but men, in favor of the sky god. Yael told this to me. She then asked if she could tape the singing at our Sunday service. I told her no. I said that the singing is sacred and there is no good reason for me to transform private ceremony into public performance. The next day she came around again and told me that the more she thought about it, the more she agreed that the incredible singing of the choir should never be recorded by someone who was not here to get closer to God. She said this with all sincerity, and then I sinned, I made a joke. When she said, ‘closer to God,' I responded, too quickly, ‘You mean closer to Goddess.'