The Apocalypse Reader (17 page)

All these were flung into the fierce and riotous blaze; and then a mighty wind came roaring across the plain, with a desolate howl, as if it were the angry lamentations of the Earth for the loss of Heaven's sunshine, and it shook the gigantic pyramid of flame, and scattered the cinders of half-consumed abominations around upon the spectators.

"This is terrible!" said I, feeling that my cheek grew pale, and seeing a like change in the visages about me.

"Be of good courage yet," answered the man with whom I had so often spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle, with a singular calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an observer. "Be of good courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is far less both of good and evil, in the effect of this bonfire, than the world might be willing to believe."

"How can that be?" exclaimed I impatiently. "Has it not consumed everything? Has it not swallowed up, or melted down, every human or divine appendage of our mortal state that had substance enough to be acted on by fire? Will there be anything left us tomorrow morning, better or worse than a heap of embers and ashes?"

"Assuredly there will," said my grave friend. "Come hither tomorrow morning-or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite burned out-and you will find among the ashes everything really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames. Trust me, the world of tomorrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds, which have been cast off by the world of today. Not a truth is destroyed-nor buried so deep among the ashes, but it will be raked up at last."

This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it; the more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a copy of the Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being blackened into tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness, as the finger-marks of human imperfection were purified away. Certain marginal notes and commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test, but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the pen of inspiration.

"Yes-there is the proof of what you say," answered I, turning to the observer. "But, if only what is evil can feel the action of the fire, then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the world's expectation of benefit would be realized by it."

"Listen to the talk of these worthies," said he, pointing to a group in front of the blazing pile. "Possibly, they may teach you something useful, without intending it."

The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and most earthy figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows-the hangman, in short-together with the Last Thief and the Last Murderer; all three of whom were clustered about the Last Toper. The latter was liberally passing the brandy bottle, which he had rescued from the general destruction of wines and spirits. The little convivial party seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as considering that the purified world must needs be utterly unlike the sphere that they had hitherto known, and therefore but a strange and desolate abode for gentlemen of their kidney.

"The best counsel for all of us is," remarked the hangman, "that-as soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor-I help you, my three friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer."

"Poh, poh, my good fellows!" said a dark-complexioned personage, who now joined the group-his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire. "Be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There is one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes, though they had burned the earth itself to a cinder!"

"And what may that be?" eagerly demanded the Last Murderer.

"What but the human heart itself!" said the dark-visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. "And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery-the same old shapes, or worse ones-which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by, this livelong night, and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!"

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened thought. How sad a truth-if true it were-that Man's age-long endeavor for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the Evil Principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of the matter! The Heart-the Heart-there was the little yet boundless sphere, wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inner sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward-and which now seem almost our only-realities will turn to shadowy phantoms, and vanish of their own accord. But, if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully described, were what we choose to call a real event, and a flame that would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance, and a parable of my own brain!

I ALWAYS GO
TO PARTICULAR PLACES

Gary Lutz and Deb Olin Unferth

"YOU THINK THAT'S gonna fall?"

"It's got some give in it yet."

The lower surrounds look patched together now, stapled over, squared in spots. He and she wade coastways. Overhead, a slummy sky, heaped up somehow, junked.

"Thing's gonna hold for us?"

"It doesn't look directed."

A plate of sea. Broken stems, shingles. She shimmies a smithereen from the cave-in, throws it back, says, "A commotion like this might have once been to her liking."

"Perhaps."

"Last I'd seen of her, she'd had it with any misprints, retractions, bashful second thoughts, any thinking better of. She looked ready to tear down the whole assembly. Drive me or I call a taxi, she said. But could I? I stood stock-still where the earth was at its widest."

A straight lace of cement. Many empty perfect houses, scarred over. A few dogs mocking the totter of the turrets. He bends his hair half back.

"Think there's any off chance that there's some instability in the fundamental structural integrity of that outcropping?"

"It's humped. It won't."

"So there's no tumble in that wall of rock?"

"Nature is rarely that frank."

She shoves a body out of the way.

"This would be her idea of a collapse worth a once-over. Any last words? she'd say. That one, she'll talk to anyone when she has to talk. She'll kneel."

"You drove her?"

"She just gave me that panned-gold glare of hers. She'd gotten herself spruced up for somebody, all right. That was no shopping frock. And there was one man definitely glad of her. The cuss could scarcely keep those hands in his pockets. He looked strapped and lacking. Must have gone defect years before. The eyes were the thing about him, though. I scanned the yellowed windows of them for any ameliorating sense. You can't stop wondering how paths come to cross like that."

Out a ways, another line of buildings sinking into the chunked earth.

"Goes to show," she says. "The devil drops nothing that rises, and falls down on nothing that is standing up straight."

He makes a clear, factual sound. He loads his left hand into the crevice, says, "Does it look as okay to you as it does, I imagine, to me?"

"It looks native enough."

He grasps his shorts. "Any reason to shift our relations with respect to said geologic massivity?"

"It's just fussing," she says. She swims up to a suitcase, fiddles with the fasten.

A few schools of clouds dismissing into the western districts of the sky. Things more clipped in the eastern parcels. His leg comes to the surface. She skims the topping of the water. One bobs up triumphantly. Another flees from them, holding its breath.

"Watch it!" Her hand goes down the air. "That was an especially gruesome one, that runner."

"Get up off your fanny and help me clear these customers," he says. "Come on, hold my dead."

He has them by the anatomy now. The cladding comes away.

Two are still gurgling. Sections of one's face relocate.

"Probably just need more push."

"That one caboodled with jewelry? Throw it a little closer. I like the doze on it."

She mixes her foot over it. The underwater darkens and relumes. Entrailia; a smooth panel of torso; a physiqued entirety of teenager; an arm unrelated; swank stretches of hair, barretted and ornamented; a testicle at large; a quantum of fingers, slenderly elderly. A mush of shut eyes. Unseamed insides.

She spools an arm thinnedly around. "Where were her others? I wondered. Who were they ferrying out of there with no thought of her?"

Above, the rock leans-a sideward view, a foreslide.

"She didn't miss him, if that's what you're wondering. The woman has a heart like a bare slat. She has some kind of wire arrangement over any big talk she comes out with. She showed me the leftovers she'd managed to push into her pull-to-the grooming agents, the getups. Getting out of a life isn't the sort of thing you line up for. Mostly we try to get in."

"So she'd been out of his life, onto the avenues. Got herself tossed about the terraces and foundations. More than two years by my count."

Traffic moving west in both the east and west lanes. An odd unhurriedness to the movement, a unifying lack of purposive dispersal. Slattery formations all about the two of them. The horizon looking snatchy, pivoted.

"I mean, it hadn't been working before any of this, either. It wasn't exactly a curtsy and a handshake farewell."

Personages appear on the outgrowth-tour groups, probably-shout mutely, wave, wane. Farther out, a town belittled by prying fires.

"How she got me to do it, I'll never know. So I drove, yes. I always go to particular places. I'm nobody's conscience now."

"You're never exactly lacking indecisions, are you?"

Beyond, a streak of storm stirring the rest, crushing it.

"When I dropped her, finally, and saw her make off, I naturally thought of a jar opening, the ending of the thing being shut, and then the ending of the hand covering it, the hand lifting (the beginning of that) and the end of no-air over whatever's inside. Then I thought of the end of being in there, and the coming out of there and onto, say, a plate, or depending on what's in there, onto a car, etc., who knows. Then the end of it all getting together and staying like that, pushed up against each other and the beginning of the slow spread away, each one from each one, granule or drop or piece-part, the working oneself out from the center to where it will wind up (end up), to whatever ends, to the very ends, as they say, of the

"She was a passing one, all right," he says. "But to affect the quality of the day is no small achievement, no? I knew her mostly only from memory. She often had a little body. She was ever due a lullaby. But I panted after fiasco. I rooted up some rummage from her slumbers."

Trees abstracting themselves rankly from the palisades. She undoes the distance in her eyes, conserves her footing.

"When I came out to pump it, she, my passenger during all this, was nowhere I could see."

She takes a fresh, unprejudiced breath of it.

Then a curt quiet, then a peaceable one, then a swinging underneath, then tulippy plumes for an instant, then a dither to the trees, then, farther off, the forever it had coming, the land of a piece with the sky.

"And the next note about it is what?"

"She lived."

AN ACCOUNTING

Brian Evenson

I HAVE BEEN ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing, events for which I am, I am willing to admit, at least partly to blame. I know of no simpler way than to simply begin.