The Life of Hope (8 page)

Her hand, emerging from within the shroud, was enough to start Hope’s poor netherparts screaming. The hand was so pale that it seemed to glow. The other hand appeared, and Joseph doubled over.

The Veiled Lady caressed the sphere gently. After a few moments the volunteer, her eyes closed, her words soft and dreamy, said, “Smooth. Round.” There was a smattering of applause. The Veiled Lady was next handed the pin. She pricked her finger with it, producing a small crimson dewbead. The volunteer and Joseph said “Ouch” simultaneously. Then the treebark was touched. The young woman whispered, “Rough. Hard.”

Then the Veiled Lady reached within her own silver cocoon and touched something. The subject said, “Soft. Warm.”

Joseph Benton Hope’s crotch exploded with pyrotechnical fury. His lower half was immediately soaking wet, so wet that he imagined rivers of jism flowing down his legs and collecting in his boots. This ebullition was so intense that it drained the whole of Hope’s body.

Having worked at being pure in all things, Joseph had never before consciously experienced orgasm. He avoided his nagging erections with a deep-seated fear that they were not good things—being, as they were, wildly uncontrollable. Yet when he came, for the first time wide awake and aware,
more
aware, it seemed, than he’d ever been before, the feeling was an old one, recognizable. It seemed to recall times and lives he had no present awareness of. It linked him strongly to something
he could only understand as human, but felt must be divine. His erections had to be from God. He even checked his Bible, but it seemed obscure. There were references only to “his staff” and “his rod” which shall lead them.

This liquid from his loins, Hope thought, there was something to this.

Joseph Benton Hope devised the following theory: the word wasn’t made “flesh” at all, this being somehow a mistranslation. (The etymology Hope would work out later.) The word was rather made “liquid.” Liquid is the basis of the Lord’s creation, after all. Did not the Spirit of God move upon the face of the waters? And—this was all preached in a sermon, one of the last that J. B. Hope delivered—when the men of Ai smote them thirty-six men, did not the hearts of the people melt, and become as water? And hearken to the words of the twenty-second psalm: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels.” Liquid is the basis of human life, Hope contended. And thus, ye should drink deeply.

Joe Hope became the town drunk, no mean feat considering he had recently moved to the city of Boston. His face was known in every tavern within a twenty-mile radius; known, laughed at, resented and often feared. Joe Hope took to wearing black clothes, and these in turn made his pallor so white as to seem lifeless. Joe Hope would lunge into an establishment with his
Bible held high, and as he drank Hope would quote from the Good Book endlessly. “Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets!” Joe Hope would shout. “All my bones shake! I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the Lord, and because of the words of his holiness!” Joe Hope shouted so loudly and for so long that his voice broke in the most literal sense; it collapsed into his throat, froglike and inhuman.

Alcohol seemed to be the only thing that could heighten his awareness and expand him the way his first orgasm had. He seemed to learn new things and be open to the voice of God. He thought things he had never thought before. He did things he would never have done before. He also bumped into things, broke things and generally found himself wrestling more often with the reality of the physical world. It took its toll. During one drunken rampage Joe Hope lost his right eye. Various rumors circulated as to how this had happened. One story had it that he’d been hexing a milk-maiden beneath the moon, forcing her through Phreno-Mesmerism to dance naked and to copulate with bulls—according to this tale, the girl’s father still had Joe Hope’s eyeball impaled on one prong of his pitchfork. Another story was that a discomfuddled Hope had become over-exuberant during one of his barroom sermons. “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out! It is better to enter the king … dom … oh-oh.” Most likely Joe Hope had stumbled into something, for he had no resistance to alcohol; one or two sips and he began weaving, and by his fourth or fifth drink he was spastic. So, although his Christmas Eve tumble off the ropewalk and into the icy Boston Harbor was widely regarded as an attempt to commit suicide, it seems equally probable that Joseph Benton Hope had but tripped over his own two feet.

Joseph Benton Hope was having a strange dream (although from around that point in his life forward, he would acknowledge nothing so petty as “dreams”) wherein his body was stripped naked and began to float. Joseph realized that he was entering Paradise, although the journey was bumpier than he’d expected, accompanied by little grunts. The Gates to Heaven also screeched like a door with hinges long deprived of grease. And instead of being blinded by a glorious radiance, Joseph Hope found it increasingly difficult to see, things getting dimmer and dimmer. Hope discovered that he could turn his head to the side, and having done so, saw that his fellow Angels were old men, old gray men from whom Time had stolen body parts; teeth, eyes, even arms and legs. These old men lay on little cots, motionless, and Joseph would have thought them devoid of life except that their collective breathing sent out a great, wheezy wail.

Joseph began to suspect that he wasn’t in Heaven, if only because he couldn’t imagine that it was necessary to breathe in Paradise. Experimentally, Hope held his breath. For many a long moment Hope was satisfied that he had no need of air. Then his lungs shuddered and forced his mouth open, and Hope pulled in great drafts, more smoke than anything else. Smoke? thought Joseph Hope. Quickly he turned his head the other way, and there in the darkness roared a great red fire. J. B. Hope hadn’t truly expected eternal damnation, but he accepted
his judgment immediately. He was lowered on to a cot, one just beside the fire, and covered with a sheet.

“Theah,” said a voice, “that should keep him all toasty.”

At one point Hope opened his eye (this was the ultimate irony of Hell, apparently, that you still had to endure corporeal tediums, your eyes opening and closing, your heart and lungs thudding along without desire or end) and suspended above him was a face. Oddly, this was a kindly face. The man’s eyes were huge and slightly crossed, and made the face look a little addled, perhaps even stupid. But the smile he wore seemed genuine and heartfelt, framed on either side by healthy red cheeks. The face moved closer, more of the body coming into view. Hope got the impression of outlandish largeness, for the man’s head (which had in itself seemed big) looked dwarfed upon his massive shoulders. Hope closed his eye again, and didn’t open it for a good long while. When he did, the face was still there, but now it had transformed itself into a hideous parody of femininity, a wig of girlish blond curls attached to the skull. The eyes, still slightly crossed, had been ludicrously adorned with long lashes, which were being batted rapidly. The face loomed closer, and Hope saw that the mountainous body had been stuffed into female attire, although the musculature threatened to rend the garments to tatters. Hope shuddered, rammed his eye shut and refused to open it again, afraid of any further transmogrifications.

“ ’Ey!” came a voice. “This ’ere is Joe Hope!”

“Joe Hope?” came another. “What’s he doing here?”

“Not bloody much!” the first voice returned with a phlegmy cackle. “Looks like he’s got the ork-orks.”

Joseph’s body had begun to twitch convulsively, his limbs lashing out, his toes and fingers trembling. Hope had stoically accepted this as some brand of punishment, but this diagnosis of “ork-orks” made sudden sense. Someone gave a second opinion. “That’s the whoops and jingles if ever I saw it!” J. B. Hope became almost deliriously happy. He had the whoops and jingles, the blue horrors, alcohol dementia. Joseph Hope opened his eye and announced, “Then I’m alive!”

An old man stood next to his bed, a man whose right arm had been reduced to a tiny stump. “Oh, you be alive, all right, Hope. But once you’ve had a bowl of Miss Martha’s chowder, you’ll wish you warn’t!”

The old men explained it all to Joe Hope. They were ensconced in the Harbor Light Mission, an establishment operated by George and Martha Quinton. All of them, the old men admitted sheepishly, had been fished out of Boston Harbor by the Quinton siblings. The Quintons (twins, the old men pointed out, although Joseph had deduced that) were fervently religious and, moreover, literalists. They accepted everything in the Good Book at face value, and so, being instructed to become “fishers of men” they’d bought a dinghy and a huge seining net and begun to search the water for unfortunates. These were always nocturnal searches (“That’s where they are now,” an old man pointed out, “looking for poor buggers who’s stumbled in.”) and catches were brought to the Mission with amazing frequency. “It’s strange,” commented one ancient, “t’ think that so many are clumsy and wrong-footed,” for none would admit to having jumped.

George, they went on, was all right, a large-hearted though somewhat simple man. Miss Martha, on the other hand, was terrifying. The old men recounted beatings they’d suffered at her hands. Joseph listened to each tale patiently, without much real interest; without interest because he knew what the story would be as soon as an old, wrinkled mouth opened. The one instant he’d spent staring into Martha’s face had told him much. Joe Hope lay on his cot and waited patiently.

It was around six o’clock in the morning. The men were in a huge room without windows, so that time was suspended like the firesmoke, but J. B. Hope, with his sensitive ears, could hear a bell, somewhere, tolling hourly. The door opened, and the Quinton twins entered. George came first, and Joseph saw that his impression of largeness had been well-founded, although not at all adequate; Quinton was some seven feet tall, massively built. The full-grown man George held cradled in his arms appeared almost baby-sized. George rocked the man slightly, occasionally cooing, “Theah, theah,” into his ear, because the
man was blubbering incoherently, drowning in emotion. George looked at the room’s occupants. “Do you know what it is?” he asked gently. “It’s when it wains. Then the docks get all slippy, and no one can keep a toe to them. Now, Mr. Opdycke was just out foh his constitutional—isn’t that so, Mr. Opdycke?—and all of a sudden found himself in the wateh! But it’s all betteh now.”

Joseph Hope found himself wondering why the waning of the sunlight should affect the surface texture of the docks when he realized that George Quinton had a speech impediment and could not enunciate an R. George went to a cot and gently set Mr. Opdycke down on it.

Opdycke was a man in his early years, Hope guessed, although he looked to be the veteran of many deaths, wrinkled on the outside, wasted from within. He was a shocking scarlet color, all brandy-faced, his nose redder than blood and severely grog-blossomed. He wore ludicrously large mutton chops, which gave him the appearance of a baboon.

Martha followed behind, a presence of furious energy. Hope tried not to be alarmed. George wore his grotesque size well, seeming at least natural if monstrous, like a whale or an elephant. Martha was distinctly freakish, every bit as big as her brother, even bigger for her breasts and derriere.

“Don’t coddle him!” Martha barked. Her voice sat in a lower register than her twin’s. Martha cleared her throat. “Proverbs. Chapter ten. Verse eight. ‘He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth his ways shall be known.’ ” Martha crossed to Mr. Opdycke, whereupon she roughly and methodically tore off all of his clothes. Despite his blubbering state, some vestige of modesty forced Opdycke to cover his parts frantically. Martha pulled away his hand and glared at the open sores. “And Mr. Opdycke has patently perverted his ways!”

George covered Mr. Opdycke with a sheet; Opdycke pulled it up over his head and whimpered in a tiny way.

Hope swung his legs over the side of the cot, sitting up. He fixed Martha Quinton with his eye and said, “Verse nine.”

Putting her massive hands on her hips Martha demanded, “I beg your pardon?”

“The scripture you quoted. It is not verse eight. It is verse nine.”

“Is that so?”

“You shall find that verse eight reads: ‘The wise in heart will receive commandments, but a prating fool shall fall.’ ”

Martha and Joseph Hope stared at each other for almost a full minute. Finally, Martha averted her gaze.

“It seems odd,” said she, “that one in your sorry state should be so well acquainted with the Holy Word.”

Inwardly, Joseph Benton Hope had to agree with the woman. He’d certainly been in a sorry state, drunk continually, tearing off great jagged pieces of his heart and soul.

Joseph Hope rose to his feet. “I, like our Lord Jesus, was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death.” Hope had no real idea of what he was going to do. He only knew that he had to do something, and he’d known that since the old men had first mentioned the names of George and Martha Quinton. His biggest consideration was this: he had risen with his sheet drooped over his shoulders, for beneath it he was naked. Yet, for whatever he was going to do, he needed his hands, and whatever effect he was going to create would certainly be diminished if he had to waddle around clutching a sheet. This was not a problem of simple modesty, for everyone had been made naked by Martha Quinton, probably in the same ruthless manner she’d disrobed poor Opdycke. (Mr. Opdycke, Hope noticed, was still blubbering beneath the bedsheets.) The problem was that Hope’s root was erect.