This is the story of a spiritual experience and the dismantling of a man of power. Did it happen in this way? It always does. This is not a unique event. It happens all the time, though not usually so dramatically as with an angel at your bed.
Nonetheless, thousands, maybe millions, of people reach a moment in their lives and are shown … what? What cannot be spoken of, and so they don’t. Many hesitate even to share it with their best beloved friends, perhaps especially not with them, not with mother or father or husband or wife or lover or close friend. For one thing, what is there to tell? That for a moment a curtain fell before their eyes, exposing them to light? Or to knowledge they have no language to describe? Sometimes this experience comes soft as mist, curling slowly into consciousness over many years, seeping through the chinks in their protective doors until they are filled, though there is no single event with which they mark a revelation. Grace. To others it comes as glimmers in the night, half discerned from the corner of an eye and gone when they turn their head to look—except, with a shudder, they realize that in that moment everything has changed. The world is no longer as before. They are different, though they cannot say how or what exactly is new, unless it is a kind of lightheartedness, a luminous equanimity that they carry with them even in distress.
To still others, this knowledge comes bowling over them in a vision or a voice—Epiphany!—Moses on the mountaintop, the burning bush and all that. It tears the blinkers of the material world from their eyes, cracks open consciousness. Some go mad with God-consciousness. Some are saints, and others are just ordinary people who try the patience of family and friends by talking about God, or Christ, or Allah to any stranger who sits beside them on a bus.
There are a lot of them out there.
You would think this thing, happening to so many people, would change the world. You would think that this man or that woman—become a god now, a goddess, having been given this glimpse of immortality—would trumpet it from the rooftops. Ladies! Gentlemen! Thieves! Clowns! Brothers, sisters mine! Listen to what I find!
You would think that people would hear about an angel, or a burning bush, and tell others, and they in turn would pass the good news on, so that whole populations would convert. Isn’t that what should have happened when the papers printed how a little girl had seen an angel in the Presidential Palace over the holidays? True, some of the papers reported it as a cute Christmas tale, a human interest story, but with no more significance than you would give to a recipe for cheese soufflé.
Why did readers not become inflamed with the meaning of the news? Because they couldn’t. It is part of the Law. Oh, if you tell your dearest friend about an angel that you saw, then she might believe. She might believe because she would hear the softening and passion in your voice, see the trembling of your body. She would catch your emotion and be moved by it, and, because she knows you, she would suspend disbelief and let her heart lift up in trust. And if she continued, defying doubt for days, or months, a year, her faith would be replenished by experiences of her own, so that she’d have her own stories to pass on.
But if she tried to tell the news about the angel to a third party, the whole thing would fall flat. The angel wasn’t hers, and the third person is left untouched.
Why is that?
I think it is to save us. It is a protection for the material system in which we live. Because the whole world would go mad with God-knowledge. People would run out into the streets laughing and dancing and throwing their arms around one another in their joy. They would stand weeping at the vision of a flowering crab-apple tree. And as for a sunset … can you imagine!
Everyone in the world would run outdoors on that day the News was known. Drinkers in bars, and commuters on their travels home, and lovers in each other’s arms, housewives cooking dinner, and mothers feeding their little children, torturers in prisons—they would all run outdoors at once to see this miracle, the gorgeous violent choir of a sunset; and like a great hum this marvel would pass right around the world, so that an observer on another planet (if he had a strong enough telescope) might think that the scurrying of footsteps as they hurried after the view, the populations running west, was turning the globe on its axis, millions of moving feet. And a cry of wonderment would burst from every throat, a great sigh, a sound equal to the visual adoration spread before them, if they knew the News; and the cry would ripple westward all the way around the world, till it hit us in the back again at dawn.
Oh, we’d all go mad with God-knowledge. And that is why the News can only be received shyly, one-on-one.
Otherwise it would destroy the game. The game of hide-and-seek, that is, in which each individual gets to make up the rules of whichever game he wants to play. Hide-and-seek with intellect. Or warfare. Or with fame and glory. Hide-and-seek with hunger and starvation, death and disease and grief. Jealousy, rejection, isolation. Hide-and-seek with material possessions. Or sex. Or loss. Or love. It’s all one game, the hide-and-seek with God.
And what of the person, man or woman, who is smitten with God-knowledge, either glimpsed through mists or seen in revelations?
The spiritual journey is a serious pastime.
It is undertaken alone, in secret, and each person sets off, like the Pilgrim with his pack, and leaves behind (to his dismay) his family, friends, engagements. Nothing satisfies. Not music or books or art or theater. They are suddenly tasteless to one who is thirsting for the spiritual.
Then it’s as if he is on a picnic with his loved ones on the side of a hill, with the city lights spread out below, and all the others in the family, the rest of the picnic, are exclaiming at the twinkling little city lights, while he sees at the top of the hill the light of the Universal Force. “Come on,” he says. “Hurry. Do you see it? There! Come on!” But he cannot get their attention, because they’re admiring the lesser lights of the little human city down below.
Once struck with spiritual hunger, once you set out on the Path, you are lost to the world that displays itself to others. A wise man once said that we, Homo sapiens (so termed), are driven by four goals only, four great desires. Some people want one and some another and some want combinations of the four. In one category are all the sensual pleasures, of food and sex and silks and luxuries. Second is money, the miser storing up raw gold (or oil or real estate or art). The third is lust for fame and glory, the immortality that comes when your name rings through the corridors of history. And last is power over others. It is true that some people want knowledge, mistaking it for wisdom, and artists want desperately the conditions to create. But they want recognition too, acknowledgment, which is another form of lust, and they take bites of all the other three.
Those people on the spiritual journey, however, want none of them. Only the direct experience of God will do, of the love that moves the sun and stars.
Later, as their journey proceeds, they come back to the physical world. They get pleasure again from music or art or sensual delights, sex, status, security, and even enjoy their successes, but never again do they want power over another, and never again do they lust after personal fame or feel the need for sex or food or possessing people in the same way as before. They appear to drink from the same fountain, but the water they taste is different, infinitely sweet.
That was the state of the President, Matt Adams. He did not know yet (though Emily had said it right out loud) that he was on a Path. His emotions were horses, one minute bolting in panic and the next whickering as they stepped into the first green dawn of the world. His staff noticed how often he muttered aloud. As if (Jim said with a sneer) he were talking to someone over his shoulder.
“What should I do?” he’d say, or, “What do you want me to do now?”
And still he vacillated on the war. One last time he tried to stop it. “I don’t want to do it,” he said openly in the middle of a strategy meeting. “I don’t want to kill all those poor kids.”
There was stunned silence. The General coughed into his hand.
“It’s not respectful.”
“Respectful of whom, Mr. President?”
“Respectful of them. Let them have their war, I say, without our—”
“We have our defenses to maintain, sir,” the General explained patiently, wondering why the President didn’t understand.
“They’re our allies,” interrupted Jim. “If we don’t go in, then ….”
But a buzz went up in the President’s head, a host of bees. He was no longer listening, for he knew the argument: if not them, us. He frowned at his laced fingers on the tabletop and tried to concentrate. Only a few nights earlier he had thrilled to the perfection of the universe, the planets swinging in their arcs, the people pursuing pleasures and pains, and it had all enchanted him. Even the suffering of life—the cruelty and violence, hunger, sickness, loneliness, humiliation—had all seemed balanced by the wealth of joys; not one terror would he have given up, not one that did not seem to have its own reward.
And now he was being swept to war. And where was God in this? Where was the perfect order of the universe?
He sat in the rich surroundings of this meeting, his hands reflected in the glossy surface of the mahogany table. Was warfare part of God’s desire? Was death and killing? What about lies, destruction, famine, fear? If his armies joined the fight, did that act upset the balance of terror and constitute by the purity of his intent a good? Just as he was ready to open his mouth and ask outright—but does belligerence bring peace?
“Think of Munich, Mr. President.”
“Think of Chamberlain.”
He passed one hand across his eyes.
“Hitler.”
“Stalin.”
“Democracy.”
“It’s really not an option, sir. If we don’t protect our interests, we lose the … Domino … Sikhs … oil … madman … Democracy … foothold in … Fireball.…” Again his mind began to buzz. Somehow he could no longer hear the words that in previous times had brought him to arms, made his heart crouch, like a tiger, tail lashing, ready to attack. A hive of bees was burrowing in his brain.
No wonder the vice-president and Jim, two members of the military, and various others felt betrayed. No wonder they were planning the coup. The President was cracking up. They could prove it. He was no longer compos mentis.
And all the while, the march of war continued, and Jim and Scotty faced each other in open combat, as did Susan and Jim; while the children, like refugees in their own rooms, hugged their stuffed animals and sucked their empty thumbs for sustenance.
The fact is, Jim loved his wife. He wanted her back. That was why he made life miserable for her. One day he asked her to have dinner with him.
“Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Just to talk, for Christ’s sake. Can you give a little, Susan?”
She relented guiltily. “Because he’s the father of my children,” she confided stiffly to her best girlfriend. “Because we’ve lived together thirteen years.”
They went to a restaurant. Jim was determined to show her a good time, to demonstrate that she was wrong to cast him out: he, on the White House staff, a man of status, power, charity.
He shaved before he picked her up. He put on aftershave. He brought her flowers and laughed aloud when he saw his girls and opened his arms for them to run into—
“Ceci!” he called. “Ginny!” And the girls fell into his warm embrace. He picked them up and kissed their fine hair, felt their arms around his neck and knew suddenly that everything was going to be all right.
Call it intuition. Clarity. He knew with every fiber of his body that he and Susan would be together again, one happy family, with Scotty forgotten, or better yet, dead; Jim would win her back. Courtship. Another kind of war.…
He gave her the flowers. “You look nice,” he said. “New dress?”
“No.” She felt confused, because he’d seen it a dozen times over the past two years, and why was he courting her when he knew she wanted to marry Scott?
“New haircut? You look terrific.”
“Jim, it’s exactly the same.”
He was annoyed that his gesture was not accepted.
“Well, it’s very nice,” he plowed on anyway. Courtship. War. “You look good. I‘ve made reservations at …”
They sat at their table, Susan rolling bread pills between her fingers with intense concentration. The pills spilled out of her bread plate onto the white linen as Jim talked, and she gathered them into little piles and reorganized them into rows. Jim ordered wine at fifty-six dollars for the bottle of red: nothing too good for his wife.
He talked about himself, his hopes, the President, the political situation. He talked about Steve, who annoyed him with his nitpicking micro-decisions; and about his new secretary, who could not find the simplest files; and the Border Treaty, which the Ambassador had put back on the track; and Susan still said nothing, but ate quietly, eyes on her plate, never looking in his eyes as she twirled her bread with fretful fingers. Jim grew expansive under the influence of the red, and then he told her in a lowered, intimate voice of his concerns about the President, and finally, proudly, of the coming coup.
“There’s a group of us. It’s all legal. We’re following procedure.”
“But what’s he done?”
“It’s what he hasn’t done,” cried Jim, and explained the peril of the situation. “No one knows what’s the matter. He’s not interested in anything. If he doesn’t want to be President, he ought to step down,” he said (but in a suitable whisper). Then, because now he really had her attention, he laid out the plan to her. Then he paid and got her coat from the cloakroom and put it over her shoulders politely and drove her home and parked. Then he rested his arm on the back of the seat, fingering her hair:
“Can I come in?” he asked, congratulating himself on giving her such control.
“Not tonight.” She looked at her fingers. “Not tonight,” she repeated and opened the door. “Thank you, Jim. It was nice.”
He was surprised. “Is that all? It was nice?”
“You want more?” By now she was half out of the car. He started to grab her arm, then caught himself and opened his own door and walked around to her.
“Of course I want more,” he said, following her up the walk. “I want you. I want my home and kids. I want us to be together. I got mad. I admit I haven’t been the best husband, but we can make it. I know we can. If you give us a chance. We have a good marriage, Susan.”
For a moment her heart opened, seeing him so boyish and appealing. Then he said: “Get rid of the guy. Promise you’ll never see him again, and I‘ll forgive everything.”
Like a box, her heart clicked shut. You could have heard it lock. She shook her head. “Good night, Jim.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Wait!”
“No, I can’t.”
“You can’t! Can’t what? Can’t stop screwing him? Or won’t, you goddamn whore!”
The door closed in his face. In the car, Jim sat behind the wheel, blinded by his tears. His shoulders shook with sobs.
Who can say why things happen as they do? We ascribe a motive and neglect to see the other causes there. The President had organized his winter weekend for the single purpose of talking to one little girl, five years old, and it resulted in her father’s attraction to a married woman, their kiss, another link in the chain of events.
The next morning, Susan told Scotty on the phone everything that happened on her date with Jim. “It was awful. There’s nothing between us now. I never want to see him again.” That’s what she thought was important. As an aside she remembered to pass on the news about the coup.
He whistled. That’s what he thought was important. “Who’s in on it?”
The cat out of the bag.
“God bless you, Susan,” said Scotty before putting down the phone, and she was touched by both the words and the feeling with which he delivered them, and spent the afternoon drifting and dreaming about him. She took it personally. But when Scotty dropped the phone onto its cradle, he took a quick turn around the desk in his excitement, for now it required only an energetic, resourceful journalist to confirm the facts and break a Pulitzer Prize-winning story on page one above the centerfold. Susan never entered his mind at all.
The question was, what to do with the information? Print it? Let the traitors know he had a leak?
“I think you should take it to the President first,” said Susan a few days later.
Scotty laughed. “The President!” Her innocence.
“I think he’s nice,” said Susan. “He sent me flowers once. I yelled at him and he sent me flowers.”
“That’s no reason,” he said, shifting her head onto his shoulder. But he had softened toward Matt now that he, Scott, had authority to topple his authority.
“Also, if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have met,” she said.
“Tell you what,” said Scotty. “I’ll print it. But two hours before it’s on the stands, we’re going to warn him, how ’bout that? To get a reaction. I‘ve already talked to the editors. He can avert the coup and I‘ll get my Pulitzer both.” And he hugged her to show it was a joke.
“Jim will be fired, you know,” he added.
“Let him,” said Susan.
“He won’t get another job easily,” warned Scotty. “You may have trouble getting child support.”
“He’s not giving it now,” she said fiercely. “Let him suffer.”
War.
“I love you,” said Scotty.
“I love you too,” she said, not knowing—how could she yet?—of the misuse of her verb; that you cannot love one person and wish harm to another. It is a paradox, but at least she meant at that moment that she needed Scotty.… What goes around comes around. Did she have any idea how her hatred would boomerang back onto herself, as war will always do?
“Let him suffer,” she said fiercely, and never imagined how only days later Jim would burst into the Oval Office and sweep the President’s papers on the floor, try to hit Matt, his idol, his ideal, knock over the flag in a scuffle with the staff, and then dash out of the Palace and down the drive, shouting as he wound through traffic to his old home.
“Adulteress! Adulteress!” he repeated to himself, weeping as he remembered his beautiful mother bending over his dead father, and his own sense of abandonment. He wiped the tears from his angry eyes.
He found Susan in the kitchen with Scott. “Adulteress. You whore!” He took a fireplace poker and broke his house apart, in his effort to reach Scotty, his wife, his very heart. Scotty and Susan ran to a neighbor’s house. They called the police. The children, thank God, were in school.
He tore the books from the shelves, the groceries from the kitchen cabinets, the goose down from the living room pillows, so that feathers billowed and floated through the house, merging on the upper floors with the stuffing from the huge mattress off the bed that he slashed with a knife and threw down the front stairs.
The police took Jim to a hospital for observation. Susan’s house was wrecked.
That same night, as Scotty and Susan lay in bed together, happy in their pillow talk and bonded by lament, the President had his final dream. In his dream the beggar approached. He was barefoot. In rags. At his side was a large black dog. The beggar held out the paperweight to Matt, who took it, at which the man changed before Matt’s eyes, was clothed in waves of white so brilliant that the President had to look away.
When he turned back, the beggar was gone, but in his hand Matt held the paperweight. He turned it over and a storm of snowflakes fell over the earth, or white joy, like angels flying everywhere, and they filled the air with a song so sweet that he knew he was dreaming in the dream. He was ravished by the music in his dream.
When he awoke he knew … everything.