Deus Irae (4 page)

“A man in form,” Father Handy said, “made by God. In God’s image, according to your own sacred writ.”

She became silent; this she could not answer.

“Dear,” Father Handy said, “to believe in the Old Church is to flee. To try to escape the present. We,
our
church; we try to live in this world and face what’s happening and how we stand. We’re honest. We, as living creatures, are in the hands of a merciless and angry deity and will be until death wipes us from the slate of his records. If perhaps one could believe in a god of death … but unfortunately—”

“Maybe there is one,” Lurine said abruptly.

“Pluto?” He laughed.

“Maybe God releases us from our torment,” she answered steadily. “And I may find him in Abernathy’s church. Anyhow—” She glanced up, flushed and small and determined and lovely. “I won’t worship a psychotic ex-official of the U.S. ERDA as a deity; that’s not being realistic; that’s—” She gestured. “It’s wrong,” she said, as if speaking to herself, trying to convince herself.

“But,” Father Handy said, “he lives.”

She stared at him, sadly, and very troubled.

“We,” he continued, “as you know, are painting him. And we are sending our inc, our artist, to seek him out; we have Richfield Station and AAA maps … call it pragmatism, if you want; Abernathy once said that to me. But what does
he
worship? Not anything. You show me.
Show me.
” He slammed his flat hand on the table, savagely.

“Well,” Lurine said, “maybe this is—”

“The prelude? To the real life to come? Do you genuinely believe that? Listen, dear; St. Paul believed that Christ would return in his own lifetime. That the ‘New Kingdom’ would begin in the first century A.D.
Did it
?”

“No,” she said.

“And everything that Paul wrote or thought is based on that fallacy. But we base our beliefs on no fallacy; we know that Carleton Lufteufel served as the manifestation on Earth of the Deity, and he showed his true character, and it was wrathful. You can
see
it in every handful of dirt and rubble. You’ve seen it for sixteen years. If there were any psychiatrists alive they’d tell you the truth, what you’re trying to do. It’s called—a fugue.” He became silent, then.

Ely added, “And she gets to sleep with Sands.”

No one said anything to that; it, too, consisted of a fact. And a fact was a thing, and words could not retort to a thing: it required another and greater thing. And Lurine Rae, and the Old Church, did not have that; it possessed only nice words like “agape” and “caritas” and “mercy” and “salvation.”

“When you have lived through the ter-weps,” Father Handy said to Lurine, “and the gob, you no longer can live by words alone. See?”

Lurine nodded, troubled and confused and unhappy.

During the war many toxic drugs had been developed, and afterward, these drugs—a vast variety of kinds—lay about amid the general chaos and could be found here and there like everything else. And Peter Sands took particular interest in these drugs, because some—a few, anyhow—of them, although developed originally as weapons against the enemy, to impede, disorient, and altogether befuddle his faculties, had a certain positive value.

At least so he believed. If one was careful, one could concoct a potion, several drugs taken in conjunction; one became disoriented, but a certain expansion or heightened lucidity also occurred. Green little methamphets, shiny red ’zines, white flat discs of code segmented sometimes into halves, sometimes when stronger into four parts, tiny yellow elves … he had gathered an inventory which he carefully kept hidden. No one but himself knew of this trove which he hoarded … and, while collecting and hoarding, he experimented.

He believed that the so-called hallucinations caused by some of these drugs (with emphasis, he continually reminded himself, on the word “some”) were not hallucinations at all, but perceptions of other zones of reality. Some of them were frightening; some appeared lovely.

Oddly, he poked and tinkered with the former; perhaps a long Puritan background had made him—he conjectured—masochistic; anyhow, it was into the realm of terror that he liked to venture very slightly … he did not wish either to go too far or to stay too long, but he wished for a fair glimpse.

It reminded him of his dad, who, one day before the war at an amusement park, had tried out a shock machine; you put in a dime, seized two handles, and gradually moved them apart. The farther apart, the greater the electric current; one learned just
how much he could stand, how far apart he could bear to pry the two handles. Watching his sweating, red-faced father, Peter Sands had felt admiration, had seen his dad’s grip on the handles become tighter, more vigorous, the greater the gap became. And yet it was obviously a powerful—too powerful, ultimately—antagonist which his father strove against; finally his father had, with a grunt of pain, let go entirely.

But how admirable his dad had been, and of course he was showing off to Pete, who, at eight years old, thought his dad was great indeed. Himself, he had for one fraction of a second touched the handles—and leaped away in fright; he could not endure an instant of the shock. He was, indeed, not like his dad … at least in his own estimation.

So now he had his leftover ter-wep pills. Which he mixed, alchemist-wise, in proportions of a guarded variety and quantity. And always he made sure that another person was present, so that a standard phenothiazine could be given orally, if he passed too far in, out, down, whatever direction the drugs carried one.

“I’m nuts,” he had said to Lurine Rae, once, in candid admission. And yet he kept on; he inspected the offerings of each peddler who passed through Charlottesville … inspected and often bought. He owned vast pharmacopoeias and could tell, usually at a glance, what a given pill, tablet, or spansule consisted of, no matter how arcane; he recognized the hallmark of every prewar ethical house: in this his wisdom was complete.

“Then,” Lurine had said, “stop.”

But he didn’t want to, because he was seeking something. Not just diddling himself but searching—the goal was there, but obscured by a membrane; and he strove, via the medication, to lift the membrane, the curtain—this was how he depicted it to himself, a rationalization, perhaps, but why else do this? Because often he did suffer fear and disorientation, sometimes depression and even, but rarely, murderous polymorphic rage.

Punishment? No, he had often thought and replied. He did not seek to injure himself, to impair his faculties, to develop liver or kidney toxicity; he read brochures, carefully watched for side-effects … and certainly he did not want to turn berserk and injure another; pale, pretty Lurine, for example. But—

“We can see Carleton Lufteufel with our unaided senses,” he explained to Lurine. “But I believe—” There was another order of reality and the unaided eyes did not penetrate this; if you took ultraviolet and infrared rays as an example …

Lurine, curled up in a chair opposite him, smoking an Algerian briar pipe with a prewar utterly dried-out Dutch cavendish mixture in it, said, “Instead of taking pills, build instruments that register its presence. Whatever it is you’re after. Read it off a dial. That’s safer,” Always she was afraid that he would enter a drug-induced state and not return; after all, the medications were not medications: they were neurological and metabolic enzymes, poorly understood even by their makers … their effects varied from person to person.

“I don’t want to see a reading on a dial,” he answered. “It’s not a record I want; it’s an—” He gestured. “An experience.”

Lurine sighed. “Let it come to you, then. Sit and wait.”

“I can’t wait,” he said. “Because it won’t come this side of the grave.” That enemy which the New Church, the SOWs, craved: their solution. Although at the same time the SOWers liked to think of themselves, the survivors of the war, as the Chosen, the elite whom the God of Wrath had spared.

He saw in their logic the basic fault. If the God of Wrath was evil, as the SOWers maintained,
he would spare not the good but the most evil
. Hence, by their own logic, they were the wicked of the world; like Carleton Lufteufel himself, they were alive because they were too wicked to be offered the healing balm of death.

Such lunatic logic bored him. So he turned back to the display of pills on the table before him, in his little living room.

“Okay,” Lurine said. “What
is
there that you’re seeking? You must have some idea, at least as to its worth … or you wouldn’t be always buying those little placebos for all that silver the peddlers charge. I’m very unhappy; maybe tonight I’ll join you.” Today she had told Father Handy that she intended to join the Christian Church, but she had not told either Pete Sands or Dr. Abernathy. As usual, she was having it both ways … an instinct kept her from making the terminal move.

Pete, his forehead wrinkling, said slowly, “I saw once what’s called
der Todesstachel
. At least that’s what your buddy Father
Handy and that inc Tibor would call it; they like those German theological terms.”

“What’s
ein Todesstachel
?” she asked. She had never heard the word before, but she knew that
Tod
meant death.

Pete said somberly, “The sting of death. But listen. ‘Sting,’ as when a bug or a nettle stings you … that’s the
modern
usage. It now means being touched by a poison-filled stinger, as with a bee. But it didn’t always mean that. In the old days, as for example when the King James scholars wrote the phrase ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ they meant it in the old sense. Which is—” He hesitated. “Like being stung by a remark. Do you get it? Stung, for instance, into rage, hurt by a remark. It meant to be pierced by a dartlike point. In dueling, for instance, they stung each other; we would say ‘pricked,’ now. So Paul didn’t mean that death stung the way a scorpion stings, with a tail and a sac of poison, an irritant; he meant a
piercing.
” Paul had meant what he himself, Pete Sands, had once, under the influence of drugs, experienced.

He had been fighting; the drugs had set off a polymorphic, circus-movement destructiveness and he had strode about smashing things, and, since it was Lurine’s small apartment, he had smashed her possessions and then, incredibly, had, when she tried to stop him, kicked and hit her. And when he did so, he felt the sting—the sting in its older sense: the deep piercing of his body by a sharp-pointed metal gaff, a barbed spear such as fishermen use to secure heavy fish, once netted.

In all his life he had never experienced anything so real. He had, as the gaff entered his side, doubled up in utter pain, and Lurine, who had been ducking and dodging, had halted at once in concern for him.

The gaff—the metal barbed hook itself—came at the bottom end of a long pole, a spear, which ascended from Earth to heaven, and he had, in that awful instant as he rolled doubled-up in agony, glimpsed the Persons at the top end of the spear, those who held the pole that bridged the two worlds. Three figures with warm but impassive eyes. They had not twisted the gaff within him; They had simply held it there until, in his pain, he had begun by slow and gradual degrees to become awake. That was the purpose of this sting: to wake him from his sleep,
the sleep of all mankind, from which everyone would one day, in the twinkling of an eye, as Paul had said, be roused. “Behold,” Paul had said, “I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but shall be changed, in the twinkling of an eye.” But oh, the pain. Did it take this much to awaken him? Must everyone suffer like this? Would the gaff pierce him again sometime? He dreaded it, and yet he recognized that the three figures, the Trinity, were right; this had to be done; he had to be roused. And yet—

He now got out a book, opened it, and read aloud to Lurine, who liked to be read to if it wasn’t too long and declamatory. He read a small, simple poem, without telling her the author.

Closing the book, he asked, “What do you think of that?”

“’Sokay.”

He said, “Sappho. Translated by Landor. Probably from one word, from a ‘fragment,’ But it reminds one of Gretchen am Spinnrade—in the first part of Goethe’s
Faust
” And he thought,
Meine Ruh ist hin. Mein Herz ist schwer
. My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. Amazing, so much alike. Did Goethe know? The Sappho poem was better, being shorter. And it, at least as done by Landor, was in English, and he, unlike the SOWer Father Handy, did not delight in strange tongues; in fact he dreaded them. Too many ter-weps had come for example from Germany; he could not forget that.

“Who was Sappho?” Lurine asked.

Presently he said, “The finest poet the world ever knew. Even in fragments. You can have Pindar; he was third-rate.” Again he inspected the display of pills; what to take, what combination? To strive by means of these to reach that other land which he knew existed, beyond the gate of death perhaps.

“Tell me,” Lurine said, smoking away on her cheap Algerian briar pipe—it was all she had been able to purchase from a peddler; the U.K. rose briars were too dear—and watching him acutely, “What it was like that time you took those methamphetamines and saw the Devil.”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“It sounds like,” he said, “you know. Forked tail, cloven hoof, horns.”

But she was serious. “It wasn’t. Tell me again.”

He did not like to remember his vision of the Antagonist, what Martin Luther had called “our ancient foe on earth.” So he got a glass of water, carefully selected several assorted pills, and swallowed them.

“Horizontal eyes,” Lurine said. “You told me that. And without pupils. Just slots.”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“And he was above the horizon. And unmoving. He’d always been there, you said. Was he blind?”

“No. He perceived
me
, for instance. In fact all of us, all life. He waits.” They are wrong, the Servants of Wrath, Pete thought; upon death we can be delivered over to the Antagonist: it will— may—not be a release at all, only the start. “You see,” he said, “he was so placed that he viewed straight across the surface of the world, as if the world were flat and his gaze, like a laser beam, traveled on without end, forever. It had no focus point, such as a lens creates.”