City of God (9 page)

Christ, how wrong to point out the Brooklyn Bridge or Soho or the row houses of Harlem as examples of our continuity. Something dire has happened. As if these photographs are not silent instances of the past but admonitory, like ghosts, to be of then and of now simultaneously, so as to prophesy hauntingly our forfeiture of their world, given such time only for our illusions to flourish before we're chastened into our own places in the photographs, to stand with them, these strangers of our dreams, but less distinctly, with faces and figures difficult to make out, if not altogether invisible.

—So I hear from Tom Pemberton and we meet for a drink at Knickerbocker's, Ninth and University Place.

He doesn't wear the collar these days, he's not defrocked but more or less permanently unassigned. Works at a cancer hospice on Roosevelt Island. He's grown heavier, the big face is more lined than I remember, but still open, candid, floridly handsome, the light, wide-set eyes moving restlessly over the room as if looking for someone to gladden his heart.

You write well enough, he says, but no writer can reproduce the actual texture of living life.

Not even Joyce?

I should look at him again. But now that I see the dissimilarity from the inside, so to speak, I think I'll be wary of literature from here on.

Good move.

You're offended. But I'm telling you you're exemplary. It's a compliment. After all, I might have chalked you off as just a lousy writer. It's unsettling reading about me from inside my mind. Another shock to another faith.

Well, maybe I should drop the whole thing.

You don't need my approval, for God's sake. I agreed to this—that's it, there are no strings. I wouldn't even ask you to keep that
mention of my girls out of it. They're older now, of course. Apartments of their own.

Consider it done.

Trish is remarried.. . . Why didn't you say who her father is?

That's to come.

I still hear from him. The usual smirk from on high, though I have to say he enjoyed having a peacenik priest in the family.

Good for the image.

I suppose. But now, listen, you're using the real names. You told me—

I know. I'll change them. Just now they're still the best names. On the other hand they used to be the only possible names. So that's progress.

And it wasn't the
Times
that picked up the story of my stolen crucifix. It was only one of the free papers.

Well, Father, when you compose something, that's what you do, you make the composition. Bend time, change things, put things in, leave things out. You're not sworn to include everything. Or to make something happen the way it did. Facts can be inhibiting. Actuality is beside the point. Irrelevant.

Irrelevant actuality?

You do what the clock needs to tick.

Well there are some things just plain wrong.

Oh boy. Like what, Pem?

I'm not telling you what to write, you understand. It's hands-off. But it wasn't a sermon at St. Tim's that got the bishop on my back. And what you have me saying is not really the cause. Really it was a bunch of things.

You told me a particular sermon—

Well yes and no—I've thought about this—and I think it could have been a guest stint I did over in Newark that he felt was the last straw. But I'm not sure. By the way, it's different in that diocese, they are broad church over there. Bring in the women, the gays. . . the liberal side of the argument. My side. You don't want to oversimplify. The Anglicans are all over the lot. There's actually more leeway for people like me than you give the church credit for.

What did you say?

What?

Your bishop's last straw.

Oh—it was simple enough. I merely asked the congregation what they thought the engineered slaughter of the Jews in Europe had done to Christianity. To our story of Christ Jesus. I mean, given the meager response of our guys, is the Holocaust a problem only for Jewish theologians? But beyond that I asked them—it was a big crowd that morning, and they were with me, I could feel it, after the empty pews of St. Tim's it seemed to me like Radio City—I asked them to imagine. . . what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn't some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau. So what would that be? I went into some possibilities. A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I said to them I didn't know what the proper response would be. . . but I was sure I'd recognize it if I saw it.

That's what you said?

For starters.

I see.

Yeah. That was the doozy.

—The simplest digital invasive techniques deliver the husband's brokerage and bank accounts, insurance policies and medical records, mortgage payments, school and service records, credit ratings, political contributions. All available for study and eventual confiscation. His support services, legal, accounting, investment counseling. Who and where they are. Means of communication with. Handwriting analysis. Voice analysis—an easily rendered Philadelphia twang. Analysis of a typical month's credit card and phone bills for the secrets in his life, a girlfriend, a dependent mother. Nothing. No undue trade with jewelers, florists; the husband is a squeaky-clean narcissist, the only affair, though all-consuming, is with himself.

Some ten or fifteen years older than either of them, the husband is something of a corporate wonder, the CEO of a computer manufacturing corporation, who is being courted by a Japanese conglomerate with international holdings in satellite communications, electronics, and the soft drink industry. The lover understands that at this level, effective management does not require any special knowledge of the nature of a business. He instructs his mistress to persuade her husband to accept the challenge—life in another city, regular trips to Japan, new fields to conquer.. . . This is done. Then, while the husband is busy wrapping things up at his old job, taking care to maintain cordial relations, even advising the board on his successor, the essence of corporate life being volatility and no bridge ever being burned, the wife/mistress travels to the Pacific coast in order to familiarize herself with the lay of the land, find a new house in the right neighborhood, and so on.

The lover flies with her to the new city, chooses the house, the furnishings, everything down to the smallest detail. At this point in her mind she is so in thrall to him that everything they are doing seems entirely natural and normal.

She has come up with several photographs of the husband, from snapshots to formal corporate portraits. The lover flies to Budapest with the digitized photographs translated into holographic representation for a cooperative surgeon he knows from the old days and, without representing that he is still with the intelligence community, lets the surgeon think he is, so that the code of ultimate discretion will be in force. You are not that far apart, the doctor says, studying the holograph. And it's true, thinks the lover: After all, her attraction to me had to have been somewhat directed by our being more or less the same lean morph type, both of us having called up in her mind someone she loved as a child. I don't mean oedipal governance necessarily, all of us look for reprises of the pure attachments installed in us in our unconscious youth. There are transferences even then in those tender ages when model people imprint themselves as lifelong loves so deeply indelibly that you are heliotropic in their presence.

My nose will be broken and enlarged, the hairline brought down via transplants to a widow's peak, I will have to keep my hair close cut and grayed at the temples to add ten years or so. The jaw will be widened
slightly with implants. I will have to gain about twelve to fifteen pounds, wear a shoe lift.. . .

But this cannot be a story about details. It cannot depend on a realistic presentation of thoughtfully worked out details to prop up its credibility. All of that can be passed over lightly in montage. The movie should operate in the abstract realm where practical matters give way to uncanny resonances with everyday truth. Because evil as it is most often committed comes of the given life, it takes not only its motivation but its form from the structure of existing circumstances, it is not usually a thing of such high-concept deviance and requiring such extensive planning to perform.

In fact the movie can be said to begin only with what in the lover's mind is the culminating scene, a work of performance art, in which an American business success, a man for whom he has no feelings whatsoever let alone dislike, will be dropped precipitously into material and psychic dereliction. He will come to a door he thinks is his own and not be recognized by his wife. She will deny that she knows him. A duplicate of himself will ask the police to take him away and charge him with stalking. Security guards will prevent him from entering his office. Hotels will not accept his credit cards. Old friends will back away from him in fear. Lawyers will not take his calls. His passport will be confiscated as a forgery. Disoriented, and only imperfectly understanding that something has been done to him, he will be left ranting and railing in a mad state of total self-displacement, a deportee from himself.

Perhaps, thinks the lover, he will go crazy. Perhaps he will attempt to kill me and end up in some hospital for the criminally insane. Another delicious bit of suspense is the measure of my control over her, calculable to the extent to which she can be trusted. If residual feelings of affection in the form of pity or terror will operate in her, perhaps to the point of revealing the truth to him, so that even at risk of criminal indictment to herself, she will bring down the whole beautiful work of art to a crashing conclusion.

What is most likely, of course—and how can I claim I did not suspect this of myself from the beginning—is that having brought about this crime of usurpation, I will discover that even this cannot stave off my profound, chronic lassitude, which can now be alleviated, if only
for a moment, by abandoning the woman who has committed herself so obsessively, adoringly to me, so that all she has left for the life of her is the shattered husband whom she has betrayed.

And so we have the secular Enlightenment version of Amphitryon. And all of it from the lovely, self-assured young woman I sat next to at a dinner party. This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. . .

—Crows on the dock? So they're here now too. I have never heard of crows coming to saltwater. This is very bad. Look at them, three or four, hopping down from the piling to the dock, pecking away at the crab legs and clamshells left by the gulls. An advance party, a patrol. If they like what they find, the flocks will follow squawking and croaking in the waterside trees, raising hell like a goddamn motorcycle club. Jesus. I've got orioles here that flash in the blueberry, finches who like to balance on the tips of water reeds when the wind is up, I've got redwinged blackbirds, mockingbirds, cowbirds, cardinals, wrens, flickers, swifts, I've got skimmers, sandpipers, and bad-postured night herons like old ladies with hump necks.. . . Crows are smarter and bigger and noisier and they commune. They take over, they will drive out all the others, this is serious, I will have to watch them closely. You must go back to the suburban woods of Westchester, crows. You are inlanders, you flock in the big maples and come down to the street to eat the car-casses of squirrels. You don't look good against an open sky. Crows on the dock are a mixed metaphor.