Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas Read online

  They have been doing this seven times a week since the beginning of the year, this fateful, terminal year, but only in the week since the Day of the Sign have they drawn much of an audience. At the outset, in frozen January, no one would bother to come to watch a dozen madmen capering on the windswept ice. Then the cult began getting sporadic television coverage, and that brought a few curiosity seekers. On the milder nights of April perhaps thirty dancers and twenty onlookers could be found at the lake. But now it is June, apocalyptic June, when the Lord in all His Majesty has revealed Himself, and the nightly dances are an event that brings thousands out of Cleveland’s suburbs. Police lines hold the mob at a safe distance from the performers. A closed-circuit video loop relays the action to those on the outskirts of the crowd, too far away for a direct view. Network copters hover, cameras ready in case something unusual happens—the death of a dancer, the bursting loose of the mob, mass conversions, another miracle, anything. The air is cool tonight. The sun, delicately blurred and purpled by the smoky haze that perpetually thickens this region’s sky, drops toward the breast of the lake. The dancers move in frenzied patterns, those in the front rank approaching the water, dipping their toes, retreating. Their leader, slapping the lake, throwing up fountaining spumes, continues to exhort them in a high, strained voice.

  “People … holy people … chosen people …”

  “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

  “Come and be sealed! Blessed people … persecuted people … Come! Be! Sealed! Unto! The! Lord!”

  “Hallelujah!”

  The spectators shift uneasily. Some nudge and snigger. Some, staring fixedly, lock their arms and glower. Some move their lips in silent prayer or silent curses. Some look tempted to lurch forward and join the dance. Some will. Each night, there are a few who go forward. Each night, also, there are some who attempt to burst the police lines and attack the dancers. In June alone seven spectators have suffered heart seizures at the nightly festival: five fatalities.

  “Servants of God!” cries the man in the water.

  “Hallelujah!” reply the dancers.

  “The year is speeding! The time is coming!”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “The trumpet shall sound! And we shall be saved!”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Oh, the fervor of the dance! The wildness of the faces! The painted stripes swirl and run as sweat invades the thick greasy pigments. One could strew hot coals on the shore, now, and the dancers would advance all the same, oblivious, blissful. The choreography of their faith absorbs them wholly at this moment and they admit of no distractions. There is so little time left, after all, and such a great output of holy exertion is required of them before the end! June is almost half-spent. The year itself is almost half-spent. January approaches: the dawning of the new millennium, the day of the final trump, the moment of apocalypse. January 1, 2000: six and a half months away. And already He has given the Sign that the end of days is at hand. They dance. Through ecstatic movement comes salvation.

  “Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His Judgment is come!”

  “Hallelujah! Amen!”

  “And worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters!”

  “Hallelujah! Amen!”

  They dance. The music grows more intense: prickly blurts of harsh tone flickering through the air. Spectators begin to clap hands and sway. Here comes the first convert of the night, now, a woman, middle-aged, plump, beseeching her way through the police cordon. An electronic device checks her for concealed weapons and explosive devices; she is found to be harmless; she passes the line and runs, stumbling, to join the dance.

  “For the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?”

  “Amen!”

  “Servants of God! Be sealed unto Him, and be saved!”

  “Sealed … sealed … We shall be sealed … We shall be saved …”

  “And I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the Earth, holding the four winds of the Earth, that the wind should not blow on the Earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree,” roars the man in the water. “And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the Earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the Earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

  “Sealed! Hallelujah! Amen!”

  “And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.”

  “Sealed! Sealed!”

  “Come to me and be sealed! Dance and be sealed!”

  The sun drops into the lake. The purple stain of sunset spreads across the horizon. The dancers shriek ecstatically and rush toward the water. They splash one another; they offer frantic baptisms in the murky lake; they drink, they spew forth what they have drunk, they drink again. Surrounding their leader. Seeking his blessing. An angry thick mutter from the onlookers. They are disgusted by this hectic show of faith. A menagerie, they say. A circus sideshow. These freaks. These godly freaks. Whom we have come to watch, so that we may despise them.

  And if they are right? And if the world does end next January 1, and we go to hellfire, while they are saved? Impossible. Preposterous. Absurd. But yet, who’s to say? Only last week the Earth stood still a whole day. We live under His hand now. We always have, but now we have no liberty to doubt it. We can no longer deny that He’s up there, watching us, listening to us, thinking about us. And if the end is really coming, as the crazy dancers think, what should I do to prepare for it? Should I join the dance? God help me. God help us all. Now the darkness falls. Look at the lunatics wallowing in the lake.

  “Hallelujah! Amen!”

  Three

  The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT seven years old, which is to say somewhere in the late 1960s, I was playing out in front of the house on a Sunday morning, perhaps stalking some ladybirds for my insect collection, when three freckle-faced Irish kids who lived on the next block came wandering by. They were on their way home from church. The youngest one was my age, and the other two must have been eight or nine. To me they were Big Boys: ragged, strong, swaggering, alien. My father was a college professor and theirs was probably a bus conductor or a coal-miner, and so they were as strange to me as a trio of tourists from Patagonia would have been. They stopped and watched me for a minute, and then the biggest one called me out into the street, and he asked me how it was that they never saw me in church on Sundays.

  The simplest and most tactful thing for me to tell them would have been that I didn’t happen to be Roman Catholic. That was true. I think that all they wanted to find out was what church I did go to, since I obviously didn’t go to theirs. Was I Jewish, Moslem, Presbyterian, Baptist, what? But I was a smug little snot then, and instead of handling the situation diplomatically, I cheerfully told them that I didn’t go to church because I didn’t believe in God.

  They looked at me as though I had just blown my nose on the American flag.

  “Say that again?” the biggest one demanded.

  “I don’t believe in God,” I said. “Religion’s just a big fake. My father says so, and I think he’s right.”

  They frowned and backed off a few paces and conferred in low, earnest voices, with many glances in my direction. Evidently I was their first atheist. I assumed we would now have a debate on the existence of the Deity: they would explain to me the motives that led them to use up so many valuable hours on their knees inside the Church of Our Lady of the Sorrows, and then I would try to show them how silly it was to worry so much about an invisible old man in the sky. But a theological disputation, wasn’t their style. They came out of their huddle and strolled toward me, and I suddenly detected menace in their eyes, and just as the two smaller ones lunged at me I slipped past them an
d started to run. They had longer legs, but I was more agile; besides, I was on my home block and knew the turf better. I sprinted halfway down the street, darted into an alley, slipped through the open place in the back of the Allertons’ garage, doubled back up the street via the rear lane, and made it safely into our house by way of the kitchen door. For the next couple of days I stayed close to home after school and kept a wary watch, but the pious Irish lads never came around again to punish the blasphemer. After that I learned to be more careful about expressing my opinions on religious matters.

  But I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. I was willing to accept neutrinos, quasars, the theory of continental drift, and the various species of quarks, because I respected the evidence for their existence; I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses. When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc.—sorry, no. I clung to the path of reason as I made my uneasy journey toward maturity, and hardheaded little Billy Gifford, smartypants bug collector, remained unchurched as he ripened into Professor William F. Gifford, Ph.D., of the Department of Physics, Harvard. I wasn’t hostile to organized religion, I just ignored it, as I might ignore a newspaper account of a jai-alai tournament in Afghanistan.

  I envied the faithful their faith, oh, yes. When the dark times got darker, how sweet it must have been to be able to rush to Our Lady of the Sorrows for comfort! They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is, is that Entropy Eventually Wins.

  There were times when I wanted genuinely to be able to pray, when I was weary of operating solely on my own existential capital, when I wanted to grovel and cry out, Okay, Lord, I give up, You take it from here. I had favors to ask of Him: God, let my little girl’s fever go down. Let my plane not crash. Let them not shoot this President too. Let the races learn how to live in peace before the blacks get around to burning down my street. Let the peace-loving enlightened students not bomb the computer center this semester. Let the next kindergarten drug scandal not erupt in my boy’s school. Let the lion lie down with the lamb. As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational. Call it stiffneckedness, call it rampant egomania: no matter how bad things got, Bill Gifford wasn’t going to submit to the tyranny of a hobgoblin. Even a benevolent one. Even if I had favors to ask of Him. So much to ask; so little faith. Intellectual, honesty über alles, Gifford! While every year things were a little worse than the last.

  When I was growing up, in the 1970s, it was fashionable for educated and serious-minded people to get together and tell each other that western civilization was collapsing. The Germans had a word for it, Schadenfreude, the pleasure one gets from talking about catastrophes. And the 1970’s were shadowed by catastrophes, real or expected: the pollution escalation, the population explosion, Vietnam and all the little Vietnams, the supersonic transport, black separatism, white backlash, student unrest, extremist women’s lib, the neofascism of the New Left, the neonihilism of the New Right, a hundred other varieties of dynamic irrationality going full blast, yes, ample fuel for the Schadenfreude syndrome. Yes, my parents and their civilized friends said solemnly, sadly, gleefully, it’s all blowing up, it’s all going smash, it’s all whooshing down the drain. Through the fumes of the Saturday-night pot came the inevitable portentous quotes from Yeats: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Well, that shall we do about it? Perhaps it’s really beyond our control now. Brethren, shall we pray? Lift up your voices unto Him! But I can’t. I’d feel like a damned fool. Forgive me, God, but I must deny You! The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

  And of course everything got much more awful than the doomsayers of the 1970s really expected. Even those who most dearly relished enumerating the calamities to come still thought, beneath their grim joy, that somehow reason ultimately would triumph. The most gloomy Jeremiah entertained secret hopes that the noble ecological resolutions would eventually be translated into meaningful environmental action, that the crazy birth spiral would be checked in time, that the strident rhetoric of the innumerable protest groups would be tempered and modulated as time brought them the beginning of a fulfillment of their revolutionary goals—but no. Came the 1980s, the decade of my young manhood, and all the hysteria jumped to the next-highest energy level. That was when we began having the Gas Mask Days. The programmed electrical shutdowns. The elegantly orchestrated international chaos of the Third World People’s Prosperity Group. The airport riots. The black rains. The Computer Purge. The Brazilian Pacification Program. The Claude Harkins Book List with its accompanying library-burnings. The Ecological Police Action. The Genetic Purity League and its even more frightening black counterpart. The Children’s Crusade for Sanity. The Nine Weeks’ War. The Night of the Lasers. The center had long ago ceased to hold; now we were strapped to a runaway wheel. Amidst the furies I studied, married, brought forth young, built a career, fought off daily terror, and like everyone else, waited for the inevitable final calamity.

  Who could doubt that it would come? Not you, not I. And not the strange wild-eyed folk who emerged among us like dark growths pushing out of rotting logs, the Apocalyptists, who raised Schadenfreude to the sacramental level and organized an ecstatic religion of doom. The end of the world, they told us, was scheduled for January 1, A.D. 2000, and upon that date, 144,000 elite souls, who had “sealed” themselves unto God by devotion and good works, would be saved; the rest of us poor sinners would be hauled before the Judge. I could see their point. Although I rejected their talk of the Second Coming, having long ago rejected the First, and although I shared neither their confidence in the exact date of the apocalypse nor their notions of how the survivors would be chosen, I agreed with them that the end was close at hand. The fact that for a quarter of a century we had been milking giddy cocktail-party chatter out of the impending collapse of western civilization didn’t of itself guarantee that western civilization wasn’t going to collapse; some of the things people like to say at cocktail parties can hit the target. As a physicist with a decent understanding of the entropic process, I found all the signs of advanced societal decay easy to identify: for a century we had been increasing the complexity of society’s functions so that an ever-higher level of organization was required in order to make things run, and for much of that time we had simultaneously been trending toward total universal democracy, toward a world consisting of several billion self-governing republics with a maximum of three citizens each. Any closed system which experiences simultaneous sharp increases in mechanical complexity and in entropic diffusion is going to go to pieces long before the maximum distribution of energy is reached. The pattern of consents and contracts on which civilization is based is destroyed; every social interaction, from parking your car to settling an international boundary dispute, becomes a problem that can be handled only by means of force, since all “civilized” techniques of reconciling disagreement have been suspended as irrelevant; when the delivery of mail is a matter of private negotiation between the citizen and his postman, what hope is there for the rule of reason? Somewhere, somehow, we had passed a point of no return—in 1984, 1972, maybe even that ghastly day in November of 1963—and nothing now could save us from plunging over the brink.

  Nothing?

  Out of Nevada came Thomas, shaggy Thomas,
Thomas the Proclaimer, rising above the slot machines and the roulette wheels to cry, If ye have faith, ye shall be saved! An anti-Apocalyptist prophet, no less, whose message was that civilization still might be preserved, that it was not yet too late. The voice of hope, the enemy of entropy, the new Apostle of Peace. Though to people like me he looked just as wild-eyed and hairy and dangerous and terrifyingly psychotic as the worshippers of the holocaust, for he, like the Apocalyptists, dealt in forces operating outside the realm of sanity. By rights he should have come out of the backwoods of Arkansas or the crazier corners of California, but he didn’t, he was a desert rat, a Nevadan, a sand-eating latter-day John the Baptist. A true prophet for our times, too: seedy, disreputable, a wine-swiller, a cynic. Capable of beginning a global telecast sermon with a belch. An ex-soldier who had happily napalmed whole provinces during the Brazilian Pacification Program. A part-time dealer in bootlegged hallucinogens. An expert at pocket-picking and computer-jamming. He had gone into the evangelism business because he thought he could make an easy buck that way, peddling the Gospels and appropriating the collection box, but a funny thing had happened to him, he claimed: he had seen the Lord, he had discovered the error of his ways, he had become inflamed with righteousness. Hiding not his grimy past, he now offered himself as a walking personification of redemption: Look ye, if I can be saved from sin, there’s hope for everyone! The media picked him up. That magnificent voice of his, that great mop of hair, those eyes, that hypnotic self-confidence—perfect. He walked from California to Florida to proclaim the coming millennium. And gathered followers, thousands, millions, all those who weren’t yet ready to let Armageddon begin, and he made them pray and pray and pray; he held revival meetings that were beamed to Karachi and Katmandu and Addis Ababa and Shanghai, he preached no particular theology and no particular scripture, but only a smooth ecumenical theism that practically anybody could swallow, whether he be Confucianist or Moslem or Hindu. Listen, Thomas said, there is a God, some kind of all-powerful being out there whose divine plan guides the universe, and He watches over us, and don’t you believe otherwise! And He is good and will not let us come to harm if we hew to His path. And He has tested us with all these troubles, in order to measure the depth of our faith in Him. So let’s show Him, brethren! Let’s all pray together and send up a great shout unto Him! For He would certainly give a Sign, and the unbelievers would at last be converted, and the epoch of purity would commence. People said, Why not give it a try? We’ve got a lot to gain and nothing to lose. A vulgar version of the old Pascal wager: if He’s really there, He may help us, and if He’s not, we’ve only wasted a little time. So the hour of beseeching was set.