Deus Irae

“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.”

“What did you take just now?”

“Narkazine.”

“Nark has to do with sleep. Zine is a stimulant, though. Does it stimulate you to sleep?”

“It dulls the frontal lobe and permits the thalamus free activity. So—” He quickly swallowed two tiny gray pills. “I take these to hold back the thalamus.” Brain metabolism, the vasodilation and constriction, was his hobby; he knew the map of the human brain and what a little-too-slight supply of blood to this or that portion could do—that it could forever turn a kindly, warm, perceptive man into a narrow, rigid, suspicious, brooding quasi-paranoid. So he was so careful; he wanted primarily to affect the hormonal secretions of his adrenal-class glands without too much vasoconstriction. And the amphetamines were vasoconstrictors and hence dangerous; they could permanently damage the personality on a physiological basis.

All this the great ethical houses had discovered and duly made available, ter-wep-wise, to the Pentagon in the ‘60s and ‘70s—and had seen used in the ‘80s.

But on the other hand, the methamphetamines inhibited the secretion of adrenalin, and this, for some personalities, was vital; schizophrenia had at last, like cancer, been unmasked; cancer consisted of a virus and schizophrenia had turned out to be an overproduction of serotonin which the brain could not handle; hence the hallucinations—true hallucinations, although the dividing line between hallucination and authentic vision had become thin indeed.

“I don’t understand you,” Lurine said. “You take those goddamn pills and then you see something just awful— Satan himself. Or that hook you talk about, that gaff that penetrated your side. And yet you go back. And you’re not just bored; it’s not that.” Puzzled, she regarded him.

Pete said, “I have to know. That’s all. To experience, to know, is to be. I want to be.”

“You are,” she pointed out, practically.

“Listen,” Pete said. “God—the authentic God, He of the Bible, Whom we worship, not that Carleton Lufteufel—is searching for us; the Bible is a chronicle of God’s search for man. Not man’s search for God. Do you understand? And I want to go as far toward Him, to meet Him, as I can.”

“How did man and God get separated?” Like a child, she listened attentively, awaiting the true tale.

Pete said cryptically, “A quarrel so old that the story is garbled. Somehow God set man up where He could reach man daily, regularly; they were in direct touch, the way you and I are now. But something happened and somehow they wound up like Leibnitz’s windowless monads, near each other but unable to perceive anything outside; only able to scrutinize their own beings. A sort of schizophrenia evidently set in, on the part of one of them or both; autism-separation. And then man—”

“Man was driven out. Physically away.”

Pete said, “Evidently man did something, or anyhow God thought he had. We don’t know precisely what it was. He was corrupted, anyhow, through nature or some natural substance; something made by God and part of His creation. So man sank out of direct contact and down to the level of mere creation. And we have to make our way back.”

“And you do it through those pills.”

He said, simply, “It’s all I know. I don’t have natural visions. I want to take the journey back until I stand face to face with Him as man once did—did, and elected not to. Beyond doubt, some thing or some one tempted him away and into doing something else. Man voluntarily gave up that relationship because he thought he had found something better.” Half to himself he added, “So we wound up with Carleton Lufteufel and the gob and the ter-weps.”

“I like the idea of being tempted,” Lurine said; she relit her pipe, it having gone out. “Everyone does. Those pills tempt you; you’re still doing it. Men—people like you—have prairie-dog blood; they’re insanely curious. Make a funny noise and out you pop from your burrow to witness whatever’s taking place. Just in case.” She pondered. “A wonder. That’s what you crave and he—the first of us in the Garden—craved. What before the war they called a ‘spectacular.’ It’s the big tent syndrome.” She smiled. “And I’ll tell you something else. You know why you want to be at ringside? So you can be with them.”

“Who?”

“The big boys. Hubris. Vainglory. Man saw God and he said to himself, Gee whiz, how come He gets to be God and I’m stuck with—”

“And I’m doing this now.”

Lurine said, “Learn to be what Christ called ‘meek.’ I bet you don’t know what that means. Remember those supermarkets before the war; when someone pushed a cart into line ahead of you, and you accepted it—that’s your faulty idea of ‘meek.’ Actually meek means ‘tamed,’ as in a tamed animal.”

Startled, he said, “Really?”

“Then it got to mean humble, or even merciful, or long-suffering, or even bad things like weak and soft. But originally it meant to lose the quality of violence. In the Bible it means specifically to be free from resentment regarding injuries done to you.” She laughed with delight. “You stupid fool,” she said, then. “You prattle but you don’t know a thing, really.”

He said stiffly, “Hanging around that pedant Father Handy has hardly made you meek. In any of the senses of the word.”

At that, Lurine laughed until she choked. “Oh god.” She breathed. “We can have a ferocious argument, now: Which of us is the meeker? Hell, I’m a lot meeker than you!” She rocked with amusement.

He ignored her. Because of the stew of pills which he had taken; they had begun to work on him.

He saw a figure, suddenly, with laughing eyes, whom he supposed to be Jesus. It had to be. The man, with white-thatched hair, wore a toga and Greek greaves. He was young, with brawny shoulders, and he grinned in a gentle, happy way as he stood clutching to his chest an enormous and heavy clasp-bound book. Except