10

We check and repress the divinity that stirs within
us, to fall down and worship the divinity that is
dead without us.

Journal, November 16, 1851

The unctuous voice was back on the line. “Good morning, Mr. Grandison, sir. How are you this morning?”

Jefferson Grandison bared his teeth. What right did this interfering fool have to ask him how he was? “I am in good health.”

“Good! What I was calling about, Mr. Grandison, sir, I was calling to ask if you could tell us when you will be taking Lot Seventeen off our hands. I mean, when they stopped burning these things down in Connecticut because of the smell and the air pollution, we relied on you to fulfill your contract, because you said you’d take away anything and dispose of it, right? Anything, you said. And you said it would be soon.”

“I will be calling shortly to announce a date.”

“Thank you, Mr. Grandison, sir. That’s all we ask. Thank. you so very much, sir. Good-bye, sir.”

Grandison put the receiver down softly. “Idiot,” he said, enraged.

Jack Markey laughed. “Lot Seventeen?”

“Look here,” said Grandison, summoning Jack to the map table, “this is the only place.” He pointed. “It makes perfect sense. I mean, look at it. It’s right next to the landfill. We dig a pit, a deep pit.”

“Right you are.”

“So keep working on it.”

“I am. Oh, I am.”

“Those other people out there in Concord, they’re doing what they can?”

“Oh, you bet. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, let’s get on with the other thing.” Together they bowed over the assessors’ map, quadrant H16 of the town of Concord, Massachusetts, and after that Jack displayed his preliminary sketches of Walden Green. “Good,” said Grandison, well pleased. “But this part of the complex doesn’t look right to me. Look at this access road, the grade’s too steep.” Stretching out his arm over the map, Jefferson Grandison separated the light from the darkness. He had never actually set foot in Concord, Massachusetts, and Jack sometimes wondered about his intense interest in the town. Whimsically it occurred to him that a man like Grandison didn’t actually have to appear on the scene in person. After all, wasn’t he universally omnipresent at every moment at every point in the universe? All he had to do was dispatch someone like Jack to take his place on the spot, to carry out his will as a local avatar of the deity.

So Jack went back and forth between Concord and the glassy high rise on Huntington Avenue, riding up and down in the glass elevator, zooming up into the sky and plunging earthward again as if on wings. Sometimes he couldn’t believe his own good fortune. Why had Grandison chosen him as his confidant and principal assistant?

His rise had been so rapid! Jack had begun at Grandison Enterprises as a mere draftsman, but soon he was designing bathrooms and closets, and before long he was a full-fledged architect of suburban malls and urban high rises, and finally he had become a senior planner, privileged to sit at a huge table with the others at meetings attended by Grandison himself. And at last he had been plucked from all the rest to sit at Grandison’s right hand. How on earth had it happened?

The truth was beyond Jack’s power of guessing. At the planning meetings around the big table, Jefferson Grandison had noticed a certain audacity and brashness in the good looking kid whose name was Markey. The boy had a way of running a bold finger across the plan of a shopping mall and saying, “Scrap it. Turn all the units the other way.” Or he would suggest something crazy—“Why not put it in the water? Build it on pilings, the whole thing, with islands and bridges and catwalks”—and everybody would gasp and laugh and say, “Why not?”

There was something in Jack Markey’s eye that Grandison was drawn to, a certain wildness, as though he had been brought up by wolves in the forest.

Actually Jack had been reared in a respectable working-class household as the son of a fundamentalist minister. Respectable was certainly the right word for the Markeys of Chester, Pennsylvania, but there had been wildness there as well, a boisterous delirium that came straight from the last book of the Bible.

The book of Revelation had been the holy of holies to Jack’s father. Its intoxicating prophecies had enlivened all his sermons with a savage vitality. Little Jack had grown up with them. The passionate phrases were as normal to his life as sofa cushions, the Mother of Harlots was as comfortable as Mother Goose, the wild poetry of the blood from the winepress no more shocking than the pail of water fetched by Jack and Jill.

As a pudgy little child Jack had been precocious, a quick learner. He had stood on a table at the front of the church in his tiny white suit, and the mad verses had come out of his innocent mouth, and everyone had smiled and clapped and praised him.

It couldn’t last, his acceptance of the world he had been born into. In adulthood he had come to his senses, he had repudiated church, mother, father, Bible, and his own little white-suited self.

And yet that childhood had branded him. Perhaps the odd fervor that Grandison saw in Jack’s eyes was a light put there by the falling stars of the Apocalypse, and the star called Wormwood, and the scorching fire. Jack’s logical adult mind had long since put aside the stars and the fire and the beast that spake as a dragon and the terrifying horsemen, but they were engraved on his collarbone and his elbow. They were coiled within liver and spleen.

Now, working for Jefferson Grandison, riding up in the glass elevator to the seventieth floor, Jack Markey couldn’t help seeing the door that was opened in heaven, he couldn’t help hearing the voice of a trumpet talking, which said, “Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”

And whenever he rode down again and walked once more on the lowly ground where others walked, whenever he saw someone like the bag lady in the doorway of the Grandison Building, Jack remembered the bottomless chasm and the smoke rising out of the pit, “as the smoke of a great furnace. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.”