Deus Irae

Two

Neither man knew who had written the old poem, the medieval German words which could not be found in their Cassell’s dictionary; they together, the two of them, had imagined out, summoned, found, the meaning of the words; they were certain they were right and understood. But not exactly. And Ely sneered.

But it was, I see the light-stricken thicket. In green—and then they did not quite know. It somehow stood in greenness. And we will all go there… was it soon? The summertime to—but to what? To reach? To find? Or was it—the summertime to leave?

They felt it, he and Tibor; a final truth, and yet it was, for them in their ignorance, without reference sources, both leaving and finding the summertime, the sun-struck woodland; it was life and the leaving of life fused, since they did not quite make it out rationally, and it frightened them, and yet they turned and returned to it, because—and perhaps exactly because they could not understand—it was a balm; it salved them.

Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power—mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself—to come from Above and aid them… on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above, Ubrem Sternenzelt, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes, beyond the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.

But it was strange, depending on a poem whose meaning one did not actually grasp; he wondered, as he unfolded and searched through the old stained gas-station maps once given out free in prewar days, if this was not a stigma of degeneracy. An omen of badness… not just that times were bad but that they themselves had become bad; the quality was lodged withinthem.

His conference now was with the Dominus McComas, his superior in the hierarchy of the Servants of Wrath; the Dominus sat, large and tepid, with strangely cruel teeth, as if he tore things, not necessarily living, in fact much harder—as if he did a job, a profession, teethwise.

“Carl Lufteufel,” the Dominus McComas said, “was a son of a bitch. As a man.” He added that because of course one did not speak of the god part of the god-man, the Deus Irae, like that. “And,” he said, “I’ll give you ten to five that he made martinis with sweet vermouth.”

“Did you ever drink sweet vermouth straight or with ice?” Father Handy asked.

“It’s sweet piss,” McComas grated in his horrid, low voice, and, as he spoke, cut into his spongy gum with the tail of a wooden match. “I am not kidding; it’s nothing but horse piss they’ve bought.”

“Diabetic horses,” Father Handy said.

“Yeah, passing sugar.” McComas grunted a ha-ha; his round, red—red as if they had short-circuited and the metal in them had heated up, dangerous and improper—eyes sparked; but this was normal, as was his half-zipped fly. “So your inc,” McComas grated, “is going to roll all the way to Los Angeles. Is it downhill?” And this time he laughed so that he spat onto the table. Ely, seated off in a corner, knitting, stared at him with such flat hate that Father Handy felt uncomfortable and turned his attention to the creased gas-station maps.

“Carleton Lufteufel,” Father Handy said, “was Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration from 1982 to the beginning of the war.” He spoke half to himself. “To the use of the gob.” The great objectless bomb, a bomb which detonated not at one particular spot on the Earth’s surface but which acted so as to contaminate a layer of the atmosphere itself. It therefore (and this was the sort of weapons-theorizing that had gone on prior to World War Three) could not be headed off, as a missile could be by an antimissile, or a manned bomber, no matter how fast—and they had gone quite fast, by 1982—by, incredibly, a biplane. A slow biplane.

In 1978 the biplane had reappeared in the D-III. Defensive III, a flap-flap man-made pelican which held within it a limitless fuel supply; it could circle, at low altitude, for months, while, within, the pilot lived off his suit as Our Grandparents had lived off trees and shrubs. The D-III biplane had a tropic device which directed its efforts when a manned bomber, even at fantastic altitude, came; the D-III began to ascend when the bomber was still a thousand miles away, releasing from between its wings a sinkerlike weight of vast density which pulled the plane to the proper altitude; the D-III and its pilot were actually jerked high, where no atmosphere to speak of existed. And the sinker—it had actually been called that even though it did just the opposite; it in fact lifted—carried the biplane and the man within toward the manned bomber, and all at once the two objects met. And everyone died. But “everyone” was only three men in all: two in the bomber, one in the D-III. And, below, a city lived on, lit up, composedly functioning. .While other D-IIIs circled, circled, month after month; like certain raptors, they hovered for a seeming eternity.

However, it was not truly eternity. The antimissiles and the D-IIIs had kept off the fatal wasps for a finite time, and then at last the Dies Irae had come—for everyone, because of the gob, the great objectless device which Carleton Lufteufel had detonated from a satellite at an apogee of five thousand miles. It had been imagined that the U.S. would in some mysterious fashion survive and prosper, perhaps because of a New Year’s Eve funny-hat artifact distributed to the multi-millions of patriotic USers; it connected to cephalic veins and gave restitution to a bloodstream rapidly losing red corpuscles. The vacuum-cleaner salesmen’s convention-style headgear, however, had been finite, too; it had failed for many people long before the Krankheit—the sickness—had faded. The great, grand corporation which had sold the Pentagon and the White House on the funny hats—it too had disappeared, gotten not by bone-marrow-destroying fallout but by direct hits from missiles which ducked and wove faster than the anti-ms twisted and darted. Don’t look back, Satchel Paige had once said; something may be gaining on you. The missiles from People’s China had not looked back and the things gaining on them had not reached them in time; China could die with the happy knowledge that out of their miserable underground “backyard” factories they had developed a weapon which even Dr. Porsche, had he still been alive, would have shaken his head at—nodded at with admiration.

But what, Doctor, Father Handy thought to himself as he shuffled and unfolded the ancient gas-station maps, had been the authentic really dirty weapon of the war? The gob of the Deus Irae had killed the most people… probably about a billion. No, the gob of Carleton Lufteufel, now worshiped as the God of Wrath—that had not been it, unless one went by mere numbers.

No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night’s dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon.

It was a nerve gas.

It caused the organs of the body to eat one another.

“Well,” the Dominus McComas growled, picking at his hardy teeth, “if the inc can do it, fine. If I was an Elter I wouldn’t give a damn if it looked like Lufteufel or not; I’d just get a good fat wicked bloated pig-face up there; you know, a swilling face.” And his own swilling face beamed, and how strange it was, Father Handy thought, because McComas looked like one would imagine the Deus Irae to look… and yet, the color photo had shown a man with pain-smeared eyes, a man who seemed ill in a deep and dreadful way even as he gorged on roast chicken with a lei around his neck and a girl—not pretty—to his right… a man with shiny, heavy, tumbled black hair and too much stubble, even though no doubt he carefully shaved; it was subdermal, showing through: not his fault, and yet it was the mark. But of what? Blackness was not evil; blackness was what Martin Luther in his translation of Genesis had meant when he said, “Und die Erde war ohne Form und leer.” Leer; that was it. That was what blackness was; when spoken it sounded like “layer”… a film negative, which, having been exposed to unshielded light, had, due to chemical action, turned to absolute opaqueness, to this quality of feerness, this layer of glaucomalike blindness. It was like Oedipus wandering; what he saw, or rather what he failed to see. His eyes were not destroyed; they were really covered: it was a membrane. And so he, Father Handy, did not hate Carleton Lufteufel, because that billion who had died had not gone like those who had been gassed by the U.S. nerve gas; its death had not been monstrous.

And yet this had ended the war; there was, after the toxic rain had ended, insufficient personnel to continue. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, he thought: Of the dead only say good things, such as—well, he thought, perhaps this: You died because of the idiots whom you hired to rule you and protect you and collect terrible taxes from you. Therefore, who was the ultimate cretin, you or they? Anyhow, both had perished. The Pentagon had long ago gone; the White House, the VIP shelters… de mortuis nil nisi malum, he thought, correcting the old saying to make it come out the more wisely: Of the dead only speak evil. Because they were that stupid; it was cretinism carried to the dimension of the satanic.

–Carried to the point of supinely reading the ‘papes and watching the TV and doing nothing when Carleton Lufteufel had given his speech in 1983 at Cheyenne, the so-called Numerical Fallacy speech in which he had made the inspired, brilliant point, much head-nodded at, that it was not so that a nation needed a certain number of survivors to function; a nation, Lufteufel had explained, does not reside in its people at all but in its know-how. As long as the data-repositories are safe, the time capsules of micropools buried miles under—if they remained, then (as he had phrased it, equal, many in Washington said, to the “blood-sweat-tears” speech of Churchill’s, decades before) “our patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic patterns survive because they can be learned by any replacement generation.”

The replacement generation, however, had not had the wherewithal to dig up the data-repositories, because they had a more important task, one overlooked by Lufteufel: that of growing food to keep themselves alive. The same problems which had lashed the Pilgrims, those of clearing land, planting, protecting crops and livestock. Pigs, cows, and sheep, corn and wheat, beets and carrots: those became the vital patriotic idiosyncratic ethnic preoccupations, not the aural text of some great American epic poetic stupidity such as Whittier’s Snowbound.

“I say,” McComas rumbled, “don’t send your inc; don’t have him do the mural at all; get a Complete. He’ll roll along on that cow-cart for a hundred or so miles and then he’ll come to a place where there’s no road, and he’ll go into a ditch and that’ll be that. It’s no favor to him, Handy. It just means you’re killing some poor limbless fart who admittedly paints well—”

“Paints,” Father Handy said, “better than any artist that SOW knows of.” He pronounced the initials as a word, as “sow”—the female pig—so as to plague McComas, who insisted it always be spoken as three initials or at least as “sow” to rhyme with “mow.”

McComas’s short-circuited red eyes focused malignly on him, and he searched for a cutting, tearing, oral return remark; while he did so, Ely said all at once, “Here comes Miss Rae.”

“Oh,” Father Handy said, and blinked. Because it was Lurine Rae who made into fact the dots, jots, and tittles of Servants of Wrath dogma; at least as far as he personally was concerned.

Here she came now, red-haired and so small-boned that he always imagined that she could fly… the idea of witches entered his mind when he saw Lurine Rae unexpectedly, because of this lightness. She rode horseback constantly, and this was the “real” reason for her springiness—but it was not merely the lithe motion of an athletic woman; nor was it ethereal either. Hollow-boned, he had decided, like a bird. And that connected once more in his mind women and birds; hence once more Papagano, the birdcatcher’s, song: He would make a net for birds and then he would make, someday, a net for a little wife or a little lady who would sleep by his side, and Father Handy, seeing Lurine, felt the wicked old ram-animal within him awake; the evil of substantiality itself manifested its insidious being at the heart of his nature.

Distressing. But he was used to it; in fact he enjoyed it—enjoyed, really, her.

“Morning,” Lurine said to him, then saw the Dominus McComas, whom she did not like; she wrinkled her nose and her freckles writhed: all the pale red, that of her hair, her skin, her lips, all twisted in aversion, and she, too, bared her teeth, back at him. Only her teeth were tiny and regular, and made not to grind—as for instance the prehistoric uncooked seeds—but to neatly sever.

Lurine had biting teeth. Not the massive chewing kind.

She, he knew, nipped. Knew? Guessed, rather. Because he had not really ever come near her; he kept a distance between them.

The ideology of the Servants of Wrath connected with the Augustinian view of women; there was fear involved, and then of course the dogma got entangled with the old cult of Mani, the Albigensian Heresy of Provincal France, the Catharists. To them, flesh and the world had been evil; they had abstained. But their poets and knights had worshiped women, had deified them; the domina, so enticing, so vital… even the mad ones, the dominae of Carcassonne who had carried their dead lovers’ hearts in small jeweled boxes. And the—was it merely insane, or rather more perverted?—Catharist knights who had actually carried in enameled boxes their mistresses’ dried dung… it had been a cult ruthlessly wiped out by Innocent III, and perhaps rightly so. But—

For all its excesses, the Albigensian knight-poets had known the worth of women; she was not man’s servant and not even merely his “weak rib,” the side of him who had been so readily tempted. She was—well, a good question; as he got a chair for Lurine and poured her coffee, he thought: Some supreme value lies in this slight, freckled, pale, red-haired, horse-riding girl of twenty. Supreme as is the mekkis of the God of Wrath Himself. But not a mekkis; not Macht, not power or might. It is more a—mystery. Hence, gnostic wisdom is involved, knowledge hidden behind a wall so fragile, so entrancing… but undoubtedly a fatal knowledge. Interesting, that truth could be a terminal possession. The woman knew the truth, lived with it, yet it did not kill her. But when she uttered it—he thought of Cassandra and of the female Oracle at Delphi. And felt afraid.

Once he had said to Lurine, in the evening after a few drinks, “You carry what Paul called the sting.”

“The sting of death,” Lurine had promptly recalled, “is sin.”

“Yes.” He had nodded. And she bore it, and it no more killed her than the viper’s poison killed it… or the H-warhead missiles menaced themselves. A knife, a sword, had two ends: one a handle, the other a blade; the gnosis of this woman was for her gripped by the safe end, the handle; but when she extended it—he saw, flashing, the light of the slight blade.

But what, for the Servants of Wrath, did sin consist of? The weapons of the war; one naturally thought of the psychotic and psychopathic cretins in high places in dead corporations and government agencies, now dead as individuals; the men at drafting boards, the idea men, the planners, the policy boys and P.R. infants—like grass, their flesh. Certainly that had been sin, what they had done, but that had been without knowledge. Christ, the God of the Old Sect, had said that about His murderers: they did not know what they were up to. Not knowledge but the lack of knowledge had made them into what they had been, frozen into history as they gambled for His garments or stuck His side with the spear. There was knowledge in the Christian Bible, in three places that he personally knew of—despite the rule within the Servants of Wrath hierarchy against reading the Christian sacred texts. One part lay in the Book of Job. One in Ecclesiastes. The last, the final note, had been Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and then it had ended, and Tertullian and Origen and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—even the divine Abelard; none had added an iota in two thousand years.

And now, he thought, we know. The Catharists had come bleakly close, had guessed one piece: that the world lay in the control of an evil adversary and not the good god. What they had not guessed was contained in Job, that the “good god” was a god of wrath—was in fact evil.

“Like Shakespeare has Hamlet say to Ophelia,” McComas growled at Lurine. “ ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ “

Lurine, sipping coffee, said prettily, “Up yours.”

“See?” the Dominus McComas said to Father Handy.

“I see,” he said carefully, “that you can’t order people to be this or that; they have what used to be called an ontological nature.”

Scowling, McComas said, “Whazzat?”

“Their intrinsic nature,” Lurine said sweetly. “What they are. You ignorant rustic religious cranks.” To Father Handy she said, “I finally made up my mind. I’m joining the Christian Church.”

Hoarsely guffawing, McComas shook, belly-wise, not Santa Claus belly but belly of hard, grinding animal. “Is there a Christian Church anymore? In this area?”

Lurine said, “They’re very gentle and kind, there.”

“They have to be,” McComas said. “They have to plead to get people to come in. We don’t need to plead; they come to us for protection. From Him.” He jerked his thumb upward. At the God of Wrath, not in his man-form, not as he had appeared on Earth as Carleton Lufteufel, but as the mekkis-spirit everywhere. Above, here, and ultimately below; in the grave, to which they all were dragged at last.

The final enemy which Paul had recognized—death—had had its victory after all; Paul had died for nothing.

And yet here sat Lurine Rae, sipping coffee, announcing calmly that she intended to join a discredited, withering, elderly sect. The husk of the former world, which had shown its chiltinous shell, its wickedness; for it had been Christians who had designed the ter-weps, the terror weapons.

The descendants of those who had sung square-wrought, pious Lutheran hymns had designed, at German cartels, the evil instruments which had shown up the “God” of the Christian Church for what he was.

Death was not an antagonist, the last enemy, as Paul had thought; death was the release from bondage to the God of Life, the Deus Irae. In death one was free from Him—and only in death.

It was the God of Life who was the evil god. And in fact the only God. And Earth, this world, was the only kingdom. And they, all of them; they constituted his servants, in that they carried out, had always done so, over the thousands of years, his commands. And his reward had been in keeping both with his nature and with his commands: it had been the Ira. The Wrath.

And yet here sat Lurine. So it made no sense.

Later, when the Dominus McComas had ambled, trudged off on foot to see about his business, Father Handy sat with Lurine.

“Why?” he said.

Shrugging, Lurine said, “I like kindly people. I like Dr. Abernathy.”

He stared at her. Jim Abernathy, the local Christian priest in Charlottesville; he detested the man—if Abernathy was really a man; he seemed more a castrato, fit, as put in Tom Jones, for entry in the gelding races. “He gives you exactly what?” he demanded. “Self-help. The ‘think pleasant thoughts and all will be—’ “

“No,” Lurine said.

Ely said dryly, “She’s sleeping with that acolyte. That Pete Sands. You know; the bald young man with acne.”

“Ringworm,” Lurine corrected.

“At least,” Ely said, “get him a fungicide oinment to rub on his scalp. So you don’t catch it.”

“Mercury,” Father Handy said. “From a peddler, itinerant; you can buy for about five U.S. silver half-dollars—”

“Okay!” Lurine said angrily.

“See?” Ely said to her husband.

He saw; it was true and he knew it.

“So he’s not a gesunt,” Lurine said. Gesunt—a healthy person. Not made sick or maimed by the war, as the incompletes had been. Pete Sands was a kranker, a sick one; it showed on his marred head, hairless, his pocked and pitted face. Back to the Anglo-Saxton peasant with his pox, he thought with surprising venom. Was it jealousy? He amazed himself.

Nodding toward Father Handy, Ely said, speaking to Lurine, “Why not sleep with him? He’s a gesunt.”

“Aw, come on,” Lurine said in her small, quiet, but deadly boiling-hot angry voice; when she became really terribly furious her entire face flushed, and she sat as stiffly as if calcified.

“I mean it,” Ely said, in a sort of loud, high screech.

“Please,” Father Handy said, trying to calm his wife.

“But why come here?” Ely asked Lurine. “To announce you’re going to revert, is that it? Who cares? Revert. In fact, sleep with Abernathy; a lot of good it’ll do you.” She made it meaningful; she put over the significance of her words by the wild tone alone. Women had such great ability at that; they possessed such a range. Men, in contrast, grunted, as with McComas; they resorted, as in his case, to an ugly chuckle. That was little enough.

Trying to sound wise, Father Handy said to Lurine, “Have you thought it over carefully? There’s a stigma attached; after all, you do live by sewing and weaving and spinning—you depend on goodwill in this community, and if you join Abernathy’s church—”

“Freedom of conscience,” Lurine said.

“Oh god,” Ely moaned.

“Listen,” Father Handy said. Reaching out, he took hold of both of Lurine’s hands, held them with his own. He explained, then, patiently. “Just because you’re sleeping with Sands, that doesn’t force you to accept their religious teachings. ‘Freedom of conscience’ also means freedom not to accept dogma; do you see? Now look, dear.” She was twenty; he was forty-two, and felt sixty; he felt, holding her hands, like a tottering old ram, some defanged creature mumbling and drooling, and he cringed at his self-image. But he continued anyhow. “They believed for two thousand years in a good god. And now we know it’s not true. There is a god, but he is—you know as well as I do; you were a kid during the war, but you, remember and you can see; you’ve seen the miles of dust that once were bodies… I don’t understand how you can in all honesty, intellectually or morally, accept an ideology that teaches that good played a decisive role in what happened. See?”

She did not disengage her hands. But she remained inert, so passive that he felt as if he held deceased organisms; the physical sensation repelled him and he voluntarily released her. She then picked up her coffee cup once more, with tranquility. And she said, “All right; we know that a Carleton Lufteufel, Chairman of the ERDA of the United States Government, existed. But he was a man. Not a god.”

“A man in form,” Father Handy said, “made by God. In God’s image, according to your own sacred writ.”

She became silent; this she could not answer.

“Dear,” Father Handy said, “to believe in the Old Church is to flee. To try to escape the present. We, our church; we try to live in this world and face what’s happening and how we stand. We’re honest. We, as living creatures, are in the hands of a merciless and angry deity and will be until death wipes us from the slate of his records. If perhaps one could believe in a god of death… but unfortunately—”

“Maybe there is one,” Lurine said abruptly.

“Pluto?” He laughed.

“Maybe God releases us from our torment,” she answered steadily. “And I may find him in Abernathy’s church. Anyhow—” She glanced up, flushed and small and determined and lovely. “I won’t worship a psychotic ex-official of the U.S. ERDA as a deity; that’s not being realistic; that’s—” She gestured. “It’s wrong,” she said, as if speaking to herself, trying to convince herself.

“But,” Father Handy said, “he lives.”

She stared at him, sadly, and very troubled.

“We,” he continued, “as you know, are painting him. And we are sending our inc, our artist, to seek him out; we have Richfield Station and AAA maps… call it pragmatism, if you want; Abernathy once said that to me. But what does he worship? Not anything. You show me. Show me.” He slammed his flat hand on the table, savagely.

“Well,” Lurine said, “maybe this is—”

“The prelude? To the real life to come? Do you genuinely believe that? Listen, dear; St. Paul believed that Christ would return in his own lifetime. That the ‘New Kingdom’ would begin in the first century A.D. Did it?”

“No,” she said.

“And everything that Paul wrote or thought is based on that fallacy. But we base our beliefs on no fallacy; we know that Carleton Lufteufel served as the manifestation on Earth of the Deity, and he showed his true character, and it was wrathful. You can see it in every handful of dirt and rubble. You’ve seen it for sixteen years. If there were any psychiatrists alive they’d tell you the truth, what you’re trying to do. It’s called—a fugue.” He became silent, then.

Ely added, “And she gets to sleep with Sands.”

No one said anything to that; it, too, consisted of a fact. And a fact was a thing, and words could not retort to a thing: it required another and greater thing. And Lurine Rae, and the Old Church, did not have that; it possessed only nice words like “agape” and “caritas” and “mercy” and “salvation.”

“When you have lived through the ter-weps,” Father Handy said to Lurine, “and the gob, you no longer can live by words alone. See?”

Lurine nodded, troubled and confused and unhappy.