James Burke - Light of the World

“Why are you doing that?” Bertha asked.

“I’m gonna wear it in the snake dance.”

“Why are you sharpening it?”

“I used to do this when I was a little boy. I’d take my bicycle way out in the woods, along with my pocketknife and a piece of soap rock I dug from a riverbed. That’s when I learned not everybody has the same clock. I’d disappear and go somewhere I wouldn’t have no memory of later, then come back and still be sharpening my pocketknife.”

“You mustn’t talk about these things anymore,” she said. “We need to go on a trip, maybe to Denver. We could stay at the Brown Palace. The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy stayed there. Did you know that?”

“I think some things are starting to catch up with me, Bertha. In my dreams, there’s something I ain’t supposed to see. I got a feeling what it is.”

“Don’t talk about it. Let go of the past.”

“Something happened when I was about fifteen. I can almost see it, like it’s hiding right around a corner. You know what all this is about?”

“No, and I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her voice starting to break.

“I picked the wrong goddamn parents,” he said. “Either that or they picked the wrong kid to use a horse quirt on.”

The room reverend Geta Noonen had rented was located on the second floor of an old frame house at the far end of the hollow, below a slit in the mountains through which he could see the evening star from his window. Geta, as his host family called him, had a backstairs entrance and his own bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub. There was a nostalgic element about his new home, a hint of the agrarian Midwest and the immigrant farm families who plowed the prairies and planted the land with Russian wheat. Everything about the house reminded him of the world in which he had grown up: the glider on the front porch, the linoleum floor in the bathroom, the freeze cracks in the paint around the window, the stamped tin ceiling, a stovepipe hole in the wall patched with an aluminum pie plate. The upstairs echoed with the sounds of the teenage girls running through the hallways, slamming doors, giggling about the boys who called them on the phone, not unlike the way his sisters had carried on during adolescence. Geta thought of all these things with great fondness until he began to remember other things that had occurred in the foster home west of Omaha, a house in which one room always stayed locked and no one ever asked what was beyond the door.

It was not a time to reflect upon these matters. The world moved on and so did he. As he soaked in the tub, his chin barely above the gray patina of soap that covered the surface, he could see the sun setting beyond trees that grew out of the rocks, its orange glow as bright as a burnished shield hung on a castle wall. No, it was not a shield, he told himself. It was a celestial talisman, a source of enormous natural heat and energy that was about to be transferred into the hands of a man the world had too long taken for granted.

Many a night he had studied the heavens through a cell window and had seen his destiny as clearly as he saw the Milky Way, a shower of white glass on black velvet trailing into infinity, not unlike the magical light that he sometimes felt radiating from his palms.

The greatest gift he possessed and that others did not was recognition. He saw a universe that was not expanding but contracting, a vortex at the center sucking all of creation into its maw. The goal of the physical universe was the reverse of what everyone thought. Its goal was annihilation. What could equal nothingness in terms of perfection? Those who could accept such conclusions became the captains of their souls, the masters of their fate, the puppeteers who looked down from above at the stick figures jiggling on the ends of strings.

Did he cause pain in the world? So what? Moses executed hundreds if not thousands; during the Great War, the kings of Europe dined on pheasant while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths. No one dwelled upon the damage a boot print did to an anthill. The strong not only prevailed over the weak, they deliberately freed themselves from the restraints of morality. In so doing, they became weightless, able to float loose from their earthly moorings. It wasn’t a complex idea.

He shut his eyes and slipped deeper into the water, luxuriating in its warmth, his hands clasped on the tub’s rim, his phallus floating to the top of the water. Half of the upstairs had been ceded to him by the family, along with keys to the back entrance and the bathroom. He kept the bathroom door locked whenever he was not using it, in part so no one else would see the photos he had taped to the walls, in part to conceal the odor he left twice a day clinging to the sides of the tub, the bar of soap he used, the brush he scrubbed his skin with, the towel he wiped under his armpits.

The problem was a parasite, he was sure, one he had ingested by eating off a dirty plate in prison. It had laid its eggs in his viscera and cycled its way through his system and hidden in his glands, filling his clothes with an odor that made people move away from him in elevators and on public transportation. He was not the only victim. A blind inmate who had murdered his wife and children and stayed in twenty-three-hour lockdown had the same syndrome. So did a pederast who worked in the prison laundry. The prison psychiatrist said the problem was caused by either an obstructed bowel or food poisoning, and the odor associated with it was only natural; he said it would pass. When the psychiatrist excused himself to use the restroom, Geta spit in his coffee cup.

Now he drained the tub and washed himself again, this time with ice-cold water, sealing his pores, then sprayed his body with deodorant. He dressed in clean slacks and a white shirt and combed his bleached hair straight back in the mirror. He had lost weight and browned his skin and added bulk to his upper arms by splitting firewood in the sun, taking ten years off his appearance. Maybe it would be a good evening to do a little trolling downtown, visit a college bar or two. Just for fun. Nothing serious. A test of his powers. His own kind of catch-and-release program. He smiled at his sense of humor.

All the photos on the walls had been shot with a zoom lens after he decided to reopen his career in western Montana. Of the twenty photos, eight of them contained a diminutive yet buxom middle-aged woman who affected the dress and indifferent air of a 1960s flower child.

He touched one of the photos with his fingertips, then breathed on it as if trying to fog a windowpane. He stroked her face and hair and wet his index finger and drew a damp line across her throat and another one across her eyes and another one across her ribs. There was a whirring sound in his ears, like the hum of a crowd in a giant stadium, the sun boiling down directly overhead. He thought he heard the cry of wild beasts, a rattling of chains, an iron grille sliding open, the crowd roaring. He could have sworn he smelled the raw odor of blood and hot sand and the sweaty stench of people held captive in underground rooms.

He patted the photo affectionately, his cheeks dimpled with a suppressed smile. Our time is almost at hand, he thought. It will be a grand event announced by trumpets and dwarfs beating drums and a costumed Chiron waiting to dance around the dead and soldiers thumping the shafts of their spears on stone.

He began to experience a sense of arousal so intense that he had to close his eyes and open his mouth, as though he were on an airplane that had lost altitude in the midst of an electric storm.

Through the door, he heard the two girls hurrying down the wood stairs and out the front of the house, their father telling them to be home early. Geta went back to his bedroom and bolted the door behind him, then took four clear plastic wardrobe bags from his footlocker and laid them on the bed. Yes, be home early, my little ones, he thought. And you, Mommy and Daddy, enjoy your menial, insignificant lives while you can. Your embryonic sacs await you.