Chapter 29
The Fire Next Time
This is how peace stood on Earth, that time we had to leave her. In Earth-time it was April, before the Maying or the summer equinox of the wife of the king Roman god, before the July of Caesar or the dog days so August, knights or days, august or not, dogs or not. Before that falling or rising September, this is how it stood in the heritage of humanity, in humanity’s inheritance, outside itself, self-alien. It was the cruelest month, with its sweet showers. It was Easter, 2003.
At nine of the clock of that part of Earth post meridiem, we strolled through Jackson Square. The azaleas, not rhododendrons, bloomed to bid us farewell, as Old Hickory high on his horse waved his hat. In front of St. Louis Cathedral, Lev sat waiting on a bench, as Theresa sat on one side of him and I on the other, as Mary Stuart queen of Scots beamed us up, to our waiting ship, to sail away.
This is how war stood on Earth, as wind kept moaning through the pipes while claiming grace amazing! How long, oh Lord?
Maybe now I should offer you some cosmology, the actual order of your universe. The first thing you need to know is that it is vast, and the second thing you need to know is that the variety of life is also vast. Some people outside Earth are physical and so somewhat like Earthlings, and some people inside Earth are nothing but thought and so less constrained than Earthlings who read books as you do. But easier for you to understand must be the hierarchy of the physical divisions of the stars, the dispersal of the galaxies to array conscience, to place peace and its alternative.
All in all, there are fifteen galaxies, including the Zero Galaxy where God feels most at home. Life as an open mystery exists in the second through the sixth galaxies and in the eighth through the twelfth galaxies. The seventh galaxy, in the middle of those ten galaxies of living mystery is what English-speaking Earthlings call Heaven. It’s in the middle because people can come and go from there.
Persons can stay in Heaven for eternity, if they wish. But often they get antsy and wish to go on visits to loved-ones still in the surrounding galaxies or wish to travel back to a previous place of their life to get something right they feel they got wrong before. If God or Bob thought they needed to do that, they wouldn’t be in Heaven. But sometimes good people have more shame than necessary.
The fourteenth galaxy is where people go at the end of a mystery life, if God or Bob feels they don’t deserve to go to Heaven. There they suffer pangs of conscience in proportion to how inconsiderate they have been for others’ happiness. In other words, the fourteenth galaxy is everyone’s worst nightmare.
But the fourteenth galaxy does not quite kill a person’s spirit. When the person’s spirit becomes so burdened with shame, with so much despair of conscience that the person simply can’t stand it anymore, the person bursts to one of the mystery-life galaxies again. There, the person gets another chance.
What makes the mystery-life galaxies mysterious is that most of the people there have no memory of their previous lives, only a vague feeling of the shame they realized in the fourteenth galaxy. God creates new life in the mystery galaxies also, as he chooses to expand the possibilities of the retries.
In case you’re wondering, the reason God created life is that she was lonely, being the only person and the whole universe, all in herself and of herself. Being love, she felt a need of some other lives to love, and so she created the galaxies and people with some creativity of their own to make themselves loveable.
So she made for herself a challenge, and she increased the challenge for herself and her people by creating the thirteenth galaxy, where the clingons live. Clingons are people who don’t make it to Heaven after 49 lives, people who just keep being bigots and hypocrites over and over, seven-times-seven times.
Of course God could solve the whole problem by obliterating all the galaxies and all the people, but she’s a hopeful romantic and no kind of quitter, and a firm believer in freedom. So she lets the clingons do their worst, but she curbs them a little by way of people like Theresa and Slavey and Oliver and me.
Our home base is the first galaxy, where Bob rules unquestionably. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the numbering of the galaxies is not chronological. In fact, they’re not numbered at all, since they preexist numbers. I’ve given them numbers for your reference.
Because of who and what you are on Earth.
Anyway, after Mary beamed us up to Theresa’s waiting ship, we skipped off to the seventh galaxy to pick up Norma Jean, and on back around to the first galaxy for our mission review with Bob, where Slavey and Oliver awaited us. Theresa parked her ship off-site, and we materialized in Bob’s conference-center.
Bob’s conference-center was a replica he’d built of the hill over the Sea of Galilee on Earth where he’d delivered the Beatitudes. Christians call it the Mount of Beatitudes, and Semitic people call it Karn Hattin, but it’s beautiful either way. Bob keeps it always spring, with its wildflowers and the mist over the lake.
“I don’t understand cathedrals and building-funds,” she once said to me. “This is so much more beautiful than hewn stone or molded gold.”
So we gathered among the rocks beneath three old eucalyptus trees at the very top of the hill. Lev and Norma Jean and Slavey and Oliver and I each took a seat on a separate rock and waited for Bob to begin. On another rock, two lizards were making love in the spring sun. None of us knew whether we’d met them before.
“Isn’t that pretty?” said Norma Jean. “Where’s Theresa?”
Theresa had disappeared without my notice, as far as I could see.
“Over there,” said Slavey, pointing toward a little blue flower.
“The flower?” asked Lev, following Slavey’s indication.
“Just this side of it,” said Oliver. “Go and look.”
I still didn’t see her, but I knew what they meant now.
“Go over there,” I said to Norma Jean, “and scoop up a handful of the soil just this side of that little blue flower.”
She did, and stood, and peered into her hand, in which now was a little grass and some eucalyptus seeds and a handful of the dust that the topsoil was on this sunny afternoon. She did that without question.
“Open your fingers just a little,” said Slavey, “and shake out the seeds and the dust and blow out the grass and see what’s left.”
“Oh there she is,” said Norma Jean, finding left in her hand a tiny shining polished black onyx reflecting Bob’s sun.
She returned to her seat on her rock, holding Theresa in her hand.
“So where’s Bob?” asked Lev.
“There,” said Oliver, pointing to the rock with the lizards on it.
“The lizards?” asked Norma Jean.
“No,” said Slavey. “The rock.”
“Good thing the lizards were there,” said Lev. “We might have sat on her.”
Slavey and Oliver laughed out loud at that, and so did Lev.
“You’d better not sit on my lizards,” said Bob, hardly a voice but more a sweet mood, exuding from the sun-dried rock beneath the sparkling lovers, their tongues flitting out to lick each other’s neck in tiny tender flashes.
“You know, you sound like Bob Hope?” said Lev.
“Don’t kid around,” said the rock.
“You do sound like Bob Hope,” said Norma Jean.
“You can kid around all you want to, kiddo,” said the rock.
“I never noticed lizards are so pretty,” said Norma Jean.
“Thanks,” said Bob. “I made ‘em myself. Well, let’s get started. I heard your conversation at the Café du Monde, and I concur. So we don’t need to repeat any of that, but I would like to say that freefalling out of that airplane as an eighty-year-old former-president of the most free and powerful people on that earth was a nice touch.”
“Thanks, Bob,” I said. “Even that yahoo Clingon was impressed.”
“I know,” said Bob. “That’s what he said: ‘I am mightily impressed.’ I wonder how impressed he’d be if he knew you’re immortal and know it.”
I bowed my head in shame, but Bob glowed up a little.
“It’s alright,” he said. “You did a good job. All of you did well, excellently. Norma, you’re a beauty, and Lev gave great advice to Mr. President in how to handle receptions, besides being a great barometer of the problems. But that’s what troubles me most about your mission, that you all did well but accomplished little. What in hell is it going to take to get God’s Earth-people to love each other?
“I mean, look what God does. People are total scumbags through 49 lives, and the worst thing God does to them is to make them clingons. Then look what Earth-people do, putting a person in an electric chair after one act of desperation, and often doing it in the name of God. What can the religious right be thinking?
“What Earthlings commonly call the religious right is sacrilegious and dead wrong, blasphemous bigotry thriving on hypocrisy. Such Earthlings say they read the Bible literally, but they don’t forgive anyone anything, much less promote a seven-times-seven-count repeat-offender law, like God does. And, if they did read the Bible that literally, it would be 49 counts and then pull the switch, to vindicate their weakness.
And then there’s that homeless-shelter in the name of our friend Claire, acquiescent from her love. What can those alms-thieves be thinking?
“The only difference between a beggar and a thief is that a thief doesn’t ask. Both are in the business of getting something they haven’t earned, and the executive mismanagers of L’Amore de Santa Clara are both, and worse than the beggars and thieves they’re supposed to be caring for, because the homeless people beg and steal from any people anywhere, while the do-good marketers selectively beg and steal from generous people and in churches. They’re worse than the gangsters calling themselves union-leaders. And in the name of Claire? For holy shame!
“I had a lot of hope for the World Wide Web. I hoped it would be a means to spread truth, beauty. But I’ve discovered an Internet newsgroup moderated by someone coincidentally called Bette, like the director of funding development of that homeless-shelter. I don’t know about Betty Sue, but that other Bette’s notion of moderating seems to be protecting the begging and stealing. She professes her newsgroup to be for nonprofit, while she lives up to her last name, which is Craven. That is, as in cravenly cowardly, afraid of the truth. And she’s a woman?
“The fire next time,” said Bob, “won’t be for a nineteen-year-old French girl or for six million Jews indiscriminately. It’ll be for every liar on Earth, and now I don’t know anyone on Earth whom that could exclude, and that clingon claiming to have presided over the land of the free is one of the worst. His making a question of what the definition of “is” is shows that the definition of his existence is obfuscation.
“Earthlings are a mess. I chose the Israelites to show them I love humanity by leading them out of Egypt to their former free nomadic life, and I told them reward for their goodness would be a land of milk and honey, and Oliver told them nothing different. But, as soon as Oliver left them to come home, they took it upon themselves to violate the most important commandments for goodness I had given them, by treating Canaanites worse than the Egyptians had treated them. And they’re still doing it, after I went down there myself, partly to remind them that the humble of heart shall receive the land I promised them. How much can even God forgive?
“I told them they should forgive one another not seven times but seven-times-seven times, meaning infinity by that because they had no word for eternity then. But people of Earth, calling themselves Christians and saying they interpret the Bible literally, ignore my other commandments and interpret that commandment to forgive to mean that they should pull the switch on an electric chair not later than after someone passes the 49 points in their sinning. Immediately, if the sin is being black.
“And none of it could happen, were it not for lies. If all people were honest with themselves and with one another, they would never be able to blame one another for anything. Forgiveness would be unnecessary, because all people would thereby find the compassion that makes it unnecessary. But I don’t know how to stop the tide that’s running now, except by fire next time, except by conflagration.
“But that would be fighting fire with fire, an eye for an eye. And, if any honest people remain and see what I have done, they may interpret it that way and fear me more than they fear their own failings, which is one stupid part of the problem already, and they’d start the cycle again. All of us know God knows better.
“How can Earthlings read the Bible and sell their souls for pride? The answer is that the crassness of humanity is in its capacity for hypocrisy, its ability to hide its soul from itself, in its mind. If he or she will look, every human can see in her or his own heart that religion is loving one’s neighbor, that salvation is nowhere on Earth, except in compassion. Yet Earthlings build golden calves and hobbyhorses and bandwagons and bury their souls in their worship of those idle idols.
“Colonialism! That’s what Europeans called taking America from its natives.
“Settlements! That’s what Israelis call their colonialism in Canaan.
“It’s a sad testament that we need a drug-addict beaten indefensibly in a city named for angels to ask Earthlings why they can’t all just get along, the saddest part being that the question was so original to be attributed to that one person.
“I guess Sugar Fits’ momentum still rules in Boston. I can’t see how else a brother of a mob hit-man on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list could be president of the University of Massachusetts. Part of Fits Jr.’s legacy is that he was the first Roman-Catholic President of the United States, and so part of his legacy is that the Archbishop of Boston has to resign because of a pattern of priest pedophilia that thrived for decades after the Fits Jr. Presidency, while the Archbishop pretended to look away, as voters looked away from dear Norma here, or gloated in admiration.
“What Hitler did was human, not beastly. What Clingon did was beastly, not human. One of the weirdest things about how humans think is that they attribute human attributes to beasts and beastly attributes to humans, and as sick as is saying that the Holocaust was beastly is trying to excuse Clingon’s conduct by saying he’s only human. Unlike most beasts, who neither would nor could kill millions of their own species but screw whomever they can whenever they feel like it, humans kill proudly for sport and are mostly monogamous and confine their coitus mostly to beds. But, then, on the other hand, oral sex is mostly human, except a little sniffing and licking to find the more productive way to making love and more life.
“Some of that silliness comes from more of that illiteral reading of the Bible. I said humans shall have dominion over the beasts, but I didn’t say it’s a good idea. And I said Peter would be the rock on which my church would be built, but I didn’t say that was a good idea, either. A fact is a fact, and a judgment is something else.
“Then there’s what Earthlings call economics. In the land of the free, since relative world peace created relative prosperity to the point that people didn’t have to work hard to get paid, humans are looking to lottery tickets and lawsuits for their primary hope for wealth. They’re scared to death of foreigners, people from less free and wealthy lands coming to their country to take their jobs by being willing to earn their keep, rather than suing McDonalds for letting their greed and laziness make them fat. The main danger to the United States is the decadence that comes from complacency. It’s the me-generation leading the nation into the ditch, as did Rome’s. Theresa, your conversation with Kate Plate pointed straight at all of that. Besides much else.
“Lev, I don’t expect people to know what they’re talking about, but I wouldn’t have a problem with their paying enough attention to the obvious to understand that history is a long process, and that part of it is economic cycles. The simple fact that a presidency at best initiates cycles for the future of economic and other history, rather than creating them at hand, shouldn’t be hard to convey.”
And Bob paused. By then, all heads had bowed, and in that second of silence, all heads came up, except Norma’s. Even the lizards stopped licking and looked around at the others there. Slowly Norma raised her head and looked at Bob’s rock.
“What’s the matter, kiddo?” asked the rock.
“What’s the big deal about being dead?” asked Norma. “I haven’t had much of a problem with it, except that I missed my mom and Jimmy and his mom before they came to Heaven. I visited them before, but it wasn’t quite the same.”
“That’s the whole thing about death,” said Bob. “But I don’t like to talk much, since hardly anyone listens to me anyway. Even some of my best operatives lose their hearing from time to time, like Oliver with Rachel. So I’ll let Theresa explain that to you. She likes your hand. You’ll understand.”
“You already said most of that,” said Norma Jean, feeling Theresa’s warmth in her hand. “I mean, what about life? I mean, what if you’re full of love and things don’t go quite right, like star-crossed lovers? I mean, what if you’re still alive after your lover has passed into the night, so darkly you can find no light to find him or her?
“You mean like Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” said Bob. “That’s a special case, and Tess answered it rightly. In such a case, everything goes beyond war and peace and anything sectarian. All the goodness of the living blends with the goodness of the loving, so all that’s left is love, no difference.
“All marches on in the grandeur of the spirit, the love of God. God was sad, because he was alone, and so she created you to love. So the special people, like Tess and Theresa, have no way of dying.”
“When will there be another mission to Earth?” Norma also wished to know.
“That’s a tough question,” Bob replied. “What troubles me most is the hippies of the sixties. Sympathy arose on Earth for the dead burnt babies in Vietnam, and Earthlings began to speak of love and peace. But more Earthlings turned that compassion into an excuse for promiscuity and drugs.
“With that hypocrisy, they spawned a new bigotry, a division between debauchery and sensibility that the so-called baby-boomers still celebrate, and turned into the clingonism called the me-generation a generation later. While you all were doing the best you could, Earthlings were creating more problems.
“How could Joshua have done what he did, and how could Gandhi have been assassinated? How could Hitler’s atrocity have turned into the situation raging in Canaan now? We could blow them all to kingdom come, but that isn’t a method of mine. It isn’t, because it isn’t good. Nor is subterfuge.
“Good helps those who help themselves, and most Earthlings devote their lives to self-destruction. At the rate things are going, the thirteenth galaxy will be full of Earthlings soon, and we’ll have to form another galaxy for the rest of the screw-ups in the universe, no matter what good we do, I guess.
“So,” said Bob, concluding, “the question is what’s the use.”
“A quitter never wins,” answered Theresa, shining from the warmth of Norma’s hand. “Anyway, there’s your prayer, your saying that praying for anything other than God’s will shows no faith in God, no faith that God knows what we need before we do. I mean I understand you to have meant that telling God how to run his universe is the ultimate arrogance, the ultimate taking of God’s name in vain”
“God bless you, my child,” agreed the rocky voice. “We just have to keep doing what we find in our hearts and hands to do. I guess I worry too much sometimes, but there is something now to watch on Earth.”
And Bob went on, as Norma’s tears flowed to her hands.
“Humans speak and write of things that happen around Earth as though they were separate incidents, but they aren’t. The strife in Canaan may be the oldest ongoing piece of the problem on Earth, but it’s only a part of what humans do all around that world, from the Yankees to the Angels, from Ireland to Iraq.
“Like the situation in Ireland, the situation in Iraq involves many factions while the main division is between sects of a religion with the same founder. In Ireland, Catholic Christians are fighting Protestant Christians. In Iraq, Sunni Muslims are fighting Shiite Muslims. That part is bigotry, and there’s more.
“Your boy Quincy is invading Iraq with many motives. One is that he wishes to vindicate you for having been voted out of his office for not invading Iraq. That, of course, is no worthy motive, and hardly either is his motive to have Iraq oil shared more than it is with France’s contracts with the current regime.
“But a worthy motive is how Saddam Hussein and his sons treat the citizens of their nation. Yet, in the eyes of citizens of the United States, neither is that sufficient motive, because it doesn’t hurt them. So Quincy is using the excuse that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction able to hurt them.
“The free people of the United States don’t care that halfway around Earth a ruling family practices rape and other torture recreationally. They don’t care that that regime kills people by hundreds and buries them by thousands in mass graves with their hands still tied behind their backs for their assassination.
“But they do care if the regime may be able to send anthrax halfway around Earth through the mail or send a nuclear warhead halfway around Earth on a missile. They care about that, because they are halfway around Earth from there, trying to enjoy their freedom. So, what if Quincy can’t prove the weapons exist?
“He can show the facts that they did exist and plenty of indications that Sadist Hussein has every intention of developing them in the future. But, for the me-now generation of the land of the free, the future seems as distant as the other side of Earth. So, neither do they see that consideration as valid motive.
“Nor do they see the connection between your Star Wars project and developing nuclear missiles in Iraq. So, Quincy is likely to be voted out of your office for invading Iraq for the posterity of all of Earth, as you were voted out of his office for not invading Iraq for the posterity of all of Earth, to end the Cold War.
“Earthlings say they agree with my notion of brotherly love, but many of them interpret that phrase so literally that they leave out sisterly love. So, hardly can they see the scheme of things broadly enough to see that humans halfway around Earth are their brothers and sisters. And who cares about a bunch of rag-heads?
“You do. You see, as John Donne said, before his love for Anne Donne did in his clerical career, that you’re all a piece of the main, as is each Earthling. But, lovely Norma, I’m evading your question, from the rare pleasure of talking with you.
“No one knows better than you, Norma Jean. The most democratic nation on Earth could have nothing to fear, if the majority of its people cared more about their neighbors and their self than about excusing their inability to be married, and used their democracy to elect such presidency. Learning that is how you went to Heaven.
“So the answer to your question lies in whether humans’ heads can ever accede to their hearts. Iraq and Canaan, America and the cedars of Lebanon, and each crying or smiling human heart, are all microcosms much larger than Earth.
“So, now, I’ll try to be succinct, to answer your caring question.
“How shall Earthlings deal with the situation in the Holy Land? The answer lies in the warm small hands of one tiny human living in West Virginia. A residuum of that hippy thing was a fine singer singing that West Virginia is almost Heaven, and dying trying to fly, maybe on drugs. Almost Heaven?
“Not even close! Remember that the Virginia colonists named their colony for the virgin queen who decapitated the catholic queen Mary, the chief engineer on your flight here for this meeting, whose head and heart are still hers, of course. And remember that the quarter of Earth west of the quarter of Earth where the majority of Earth’s population lives seems now to call most of Earth’s shots from Chinese powder.
“Heaven isn’t taking shortcuts through psychoactive substances, not even through alcohol while it’s called moonshine in Virginia and made only of what humans need to breath and drink to stay alive and what chemists call the basic element of life, and it isn’t dying of black lung disease in or out of the mines for carbon beneath Virginia.
“Heaven is in the spirit of a poor child of the hills and foliage of West Virginia, who joined the army for a ticket to college so she could teach kindergarten. The question is whether she eventually will grow to the grandeur and beauty of those hills and that foliage, or fail the test God’s given her.
“Injured in battle near Baghdad in the mess in the Middle East, she’ll become what people who call the United States America might well call America’s sweetheart. By risking her life to earn her right to help children, she’s earned that title. But her injury shall gain her questionable fame.
“The question is whether, as the United States’ most responsive name in news suggests, she’ll use the wealth that will come from her fame to wallow, rather than to do what she can for the children.
“So that child of America may be the last French corporal.”