City of God (4 page)

The alley door was open. My sense of a bulk of something moving out there. A deep metallic bong sounds up through my heels.
Someone curses. It's me, fumbling with the damn searchlight. I swing the beam out and see a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner.

I ran back into the church and let my little light shine. Behind the altar, where the big brass cross should have been, was a shadow of Your crucifix, Lord, in the unfaded paint of my predecessor's poor taste.

What the real detective said: Take my word for it, Padre. I been in this precinct ten years. They'll hit a synagogue for the whatchamacallit, the Torah. Because it's handwritten? Not a mass-produced item? It'll bring, a minimum, five K. Whereas the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada. No disrespect, we're related, I'm Catholic, go to mass, but on the street there is no way it is anything but scrap metal. Jesus! whata buncha sickos.

Tuesday

Mistake talking to the
Times.
Such a sympathetic young man. I didn't understand anything till they took the cross, I told him. I thought they were just crackheads looking for a few dollars. Maybe they didn't understand it themselves. Am I angry? No. I'm used to being robbed. When the diocese took away my food-for-the-homeless program and merged it with one across town, I lost most of my parish. That was a big-time heist. So now these people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But now I'm beginning to see it differently. That whoever stole the cross had to do it. And wouldn't that be blessed? Christ going where He is needed?

Wednesday

Phone ringing off the hook. One coldly furious bishop. But also pledges of support, checks rolling in. Including some of the old crowd, pals now of my dear wife, who had thought my diction quaint, like hearing Mozart on period instruments. Tommy will now play us a few pieties on his viola da gamba. I count nine hundred and change here. Have I stumbled on a new scam? I tell you, Lord, these people just don't get it. What am I supposed to do, put up a barbed wire fence? Wrap up my church like the Reichstag?

The TV news people swarming all over. Banging on my door.
Mayday Mayday! I will raise the sash behind this desk, drop nimbly to the rubbled lot, pass under the window of Ecstatic Reps where the lady with the big hocks is doing the treadmill, and I'm gone. Thanks heaps, Metro section.

—This just in. . . the elusive invisible heretofore only deduced neutrino has a detectable mass. How is this verified? There's this cult of neutrino physicists, and all over the world they're building great huge tanks to hold heavy water deep inside mountains, under the Aegean Sea, on the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia, in tunnels under the Alps, below the Antarctic ice cap. . . so they can watch the flying neutrinos that can slip so easily, effortlessly through the diameter of the earth, like bats at night flooping behind your ear and lifting your strands of hair with their wing wind—and detect with powerful light sensors the minuscule voltage emitted by the neutrinos plunging through the dark giant tanks of pure heavy water.. . . Some say Enrico Fermi figured out the neutrino had to exist. He may have given it its name, but unknown to all but me, the neutrino was discovered at the Bronx High School of Science, in the study hall one afternoon in 1948, when this fat jerk of a kid, Seligman, borrowed my algebra homework to copy and in return privileged me with the information that he'd proven the existence of a subatomic particle that had no physical properties whatsoever. So excited that he sprayed me with his words, very unpleasant. On the other hand we both got grades of 100 for our homework.

Well if the neutrino is, after all, something with mass and it is monumentally present throughout the universe, why. . . shouldn't that define dark matter? And doesn't it suggest that space is not empty, not merely the capacity of distance between objects, but itself a qualified substance. . . and so far beyond our sensing abilities, like dog whistles, like ghosts, that for all our science nerdwork, we are just beginning to understand we are only at the beginning? I mean, if the universe has such mass, will it inevitably cease to inflate? There'll be this moment of peace, a universe at neap tide, everything still, and then, with a little groan and creak, it will quietly shift into its shrink
mode, slowly and then more quickly sucking itself back in the direction of itself again. And then what? Never mind the Big Crunch. What will it have left behind, vacated? Nothing? How can there be nothing! That was what Leibniz wanted to know: How, he said, can there be nothing? And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe. . . are the souls of the dead? Has that ever been considered by the hotshots of the Bronx High School of Science?

Jesus, I think I am going crazy.

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

ME AND MY SHADOW

Me and My shadow,

Strolling down the avenue.

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

And when it's twelve o'clock

We climb the stair
We never knock

For nobody's there

Just me and my shadow

All alone and feeling blue.

The song speaks of oneself shadowed by loneliness

The singer of the song may be a shadow of himself

He could be singing, “Me and the me that's a shadow of me,

We are here in this nameless avenue

We don't see anyone else in view,

Must be they're under the apple tree

Left the whole damn city to my shadow and me.”

He is saying the Fall of Man is misery:

“I hear no footsteps but my own

And the avenue goes straight on down between the tall buildings

For miles and miles, and the lights turn green

And the lights turn red,

As if it mattered, as if there were metered taxis and trucks and cars and buses

Bumper to bumper, hellish ruckuses

Of horns blowing, cops blowing their whistles

A river of people, eddying souls

The avenue flowing as far as you can see with millions of folks none of them me.

But that's not what I see. I'm all alone

I'm casting my shadow on a sunny pavement

Scuttling along in the street of my enslavement chained to my shadow, bone by bone.”

And then the singer hears the clock strike twelve— is it noon or the midnight hour?

Is it the end of time, the end of the time of His patience?

The singer's way to heaven is an open door in space.

He thinks, If there's no heaven beyond this door—

If there is nothing more for this poor mortal, why have I been brought here,

What is this life for?

(
tentative applause
)

But think for a moment what a shadow portends

The sun is in its heaven, that's what that means,

This may not be the world that's on your string

But this is God's world, there is goodness there is sin

We have to learn the difference again and again

Your shadow is the Good Lord's light not passing through you,

You are dense, you're opaque

that ought to tell you something, for God's sake!

At twelve o'clock when my time comes to an end?

I know that I will climb the stairway to heaven!

I will hear them say, Don't bother knocking the gate is open!

I will feel His warm celestial light shine down upon me

And when I turn around my shadow will be gone!

Sent back down to bring another soul along!

O happy day, when the bell begins to toll for all the world's poor souls—

I can tell you they won't be feeling blue

When they find out it's His glory they've been strolling to!

(
enthusiastic applause
)

The singer is saying, “Of all the troubles I've seen

The last and worst is the trouble of never again having someone to tell my troubles to.”

In fact he's saying, “I'd be trouble-free

If I had someone to listen other than me.”

This is a mourning song of love lost

Remembering a time of past happiness

When he was one half of a fine-looking high-stepping couple enjoying a walk on the day of rest

Where now he has only his own pale shadow for company.

And it's not as if this isn't some festive scene everything in color, alive and humming with other fine-looking high-stepping couples on their Sabbath walk under the flags in the warmth of the morning sun

So that it might be an Easter parade of the city's population—

Not at all. The rest of this city is turned out in its best

Whereas for him, singing a dirge of his soul's lost romance

Alone, independent, he's atonal, he is dissonance.

And when he reaches the destination of all shadowed beings,

the most silent and mysterious of buildings,

Before he can knock the door swings open

And he steps into the darkness of the shadow cast by God.

And the singer has to acknowledge as he steps through the door,

“In His shadow I am nothing, don't even have my shadow anymore.”

(
a few hands clapping
)

Shadow me,
shadow you,
what's a shadow
gonna do. . .

Up at dawn,
hides at noon,
evening comes
does the moon

Go to ground,
make no sound,
mourners done,
shadow's gone.

—What if there's no heaven, just a door?

—I don't even have my shadow anymore. . .

—We don't know the glory we are strolling toward. . .

—Gone, shadow's gone.

Me and My shadow,

Strolling down the avenue.

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

(
wild acclaim
)

—That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated. . . is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.

Einstein was one physicist who lived quite easily with the concept of a Creator. He had a habit of calling God the Old One. That was his name for God, the Old One. He was not a stylish writer, Albert, but he chose words for their precision. One way or another God is very old. . . because archaeologists in the fifties discovered a sacred ossuary cave of the Neanderthals on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Pomptine Fields in western Italy. They found the skull of a male buried within a circle of stones. The cranium had been severed from the jaw and brow and used for a drinking bowl. That's how old God is. So Einstein is right about that. And
One
. . . because God is by definition not only unduplicable and all-encompassing but also without gender. So the phrase is really very exact: the Old One. Not much in the way of a revelation, of course. Albert thought of his work in physics as tracking God, as if God lived in gravity, or shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, or could be seen now and then indolently moving along at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. . . not exactly the concerned God people pray to or petition, but, hell, it's a start, it's something, if not everything we have if we want to be true to ourselves.