HIS PALATIAL ESTATE outside Macon, Many Mansions, all white and silver with slashes of crimson, stood calm and cool in the waves of Georgia summer heat. To me it looked like the last place I’d seen the Reverend—just another jail.
All through the trip down, on his old Gulfstream, the somber Risen Lamb eunuch at my side, my mind had been churning with fear. No good could come from this summons. Had he already gotten wind somehow of the stories of resurrection? Was I to be given a new mission of betrayal? Or was I just in deep shit of some kind, finally about to get mine like the other Jayistas?
Wrong as usual, intrepid reporter.
He sat on a simple Shaker church bench with no cushions, probably the only uncomfortable item of furniture in the voluptuously appointed living room.
He was subdued, or at rest anyway, the bristling need to act that usually came off him quite absent. Beside him sat Jeanie. They were holding hands.
The Reverend had a story to tell me.
He is spending the night in the Pluribus. He sleeps fitfully, as he often does on Sunday nights, what with planning in his mind for the upcoming week. Finally, he falls asleep in the wee hours and wakes a couple of hours later in the very early light, just a little gray coming through the shaded windows.
And he knows there’s someone in the bus.
There are guards outside in the compound. But somehow, someone’s gotten in.
Quiet as he can, he gropes for the gun on the bedside table. As his eyes adjust, he realizes it’s too late. A man is standing at the foot of the bed silhouetted against the window. A big man.
“Jimmy . . .”
He knows that voice, surely?
“Come to me.”
But it can’t be.
The voice is not threatening. No weapon is evident. The Reverend believes in angels and knows they often take human form, but he’s never seen one. There don’t seem to be any wings. Are there wingless angels?
He gets up off the rocking water bed and, as much as he can in the cramped sleeping area, keeps a healthy distance between himself and the dark figure. He wonders if he’s dreaming and bends his will within the dream to wake from it. Nothing happens. It’s no dream.
He sees that the figure is naked from the waist up. A terrible fear begins to grow in the Reverend’s belly. As he comes slowly around the bed, the figure turns to face him and therefore the window. And the gray morning light reveals the man it cannot be. The face poisoned with three poisons and burned to ashes. The powerful arms with deep, long gashes inside the elbows, still raw and unhealed. The gashes he made.
“Come to me, Jimmy,” says the husky voice. “All is well.”
The Reverend feels as though every part of him, every last cell, is being sucked out of his body, leaving only the empty balloon of his skin, standing there as if he were an inflatable Reverend, with nothing inside but air. And then, with a rush, a new person enters that same balloon of skin, inflating it with radiating warmth and light and love, the love he felt so long ago as a boy down by the riverside. Love he’s been without for so long. Love for this man. The man he met that day.
He takes Jay’s hand. He can’t take his eyes off the wounds that his cruelty and rage dug deep into those arms.
“I hunted you down and killed you. I burned you to ashes. How can you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing that cannot be forgiven, Jimmy. When you know that, you know everything.”
Jay pulls him into an embrace, and he can feel the strong arms, their solidity and warmth, the blood that is flowing through them, the life in them, the new life flowing from them into him. He is lost in the present, weeping like a baby, with tears of relief and joy.
How long the moment lasts he has no idea, but when he finally reenters time and space, he realizes that Jay is gone.
The Reverend sat looking at the floor for a long time after his tale, a little smile on his face. Then he said, “I was the Antichrist, not him. But he even forgave the Antichrist.”
“Jeanie, here, she was way ahead of me. Evan too. They knew who he was long ago, without needing a miracle.”
She squeezed his hand back. “Pigheaded.” She smiled. “Always were.”
The Reverend spent an hour or so with me, open as a faucet, filling me in on whatever he could think of: Evan, Jeanie, Pastor Bob, his dreams, answering whatever I wanted to ask. He told me the whole strategy that was supposed to unfold in Operation Armageddon. He’d already called the White House to alert them to his change of heart; he’d left the clear message that if the mad scheme wasn’t aborted, he’d do it himself by publicly spilling the beans.
He and Jeanie were going to Colorado to do the last Prayer Breakfast Club together, at which they both intended to make public their conversion. He was resigning all involvement with the Risen Lamb. What he and Jeanie were going to do after that, they hadn’t decided; obviously it would involve going to work for the new faith and obviously it would involve getting back with Evan. Jay would tell them how in his own good time.
And he’d remembered to have my intravenous shackle deactivated. It should have self-destructed by now. Thoughtful of him.
I decided not to return to New York. I had my passport and I was halfway to Mexico, and I badly needed to get away from all this. Religion, doctrine, old law, new law, miracles, and resurrection were all exhausting—and dangerous—things. Plus, I wasn’t at all happy I was to have inside info on triple-drop-dead top-secret matters of national security. My concern, as I think the diplomats say, was not unfounded.
The Reverend and Jeanie didn’t allow their newfound faith to make them careless about air travel. They quietly hired another jet to take them to Colorado Springs, leaving Gabriel on the ground in Macon, where, an hour after their scheduled departure, the bomb that had been secreted in the massage room aft destroyed the old Gulfstream completely.
Somehow this information didn’t find its way to the happy couple, or they would have been more cautious that evening. Stayed home, not gone out to dinner at the Risen Lamb’s three-star restaurant, the Upper Room. The long arm of the Guard got them in its kitchen; soon after they’d finished their appetizers, both experienced violent convulsions and were rushed to the hospital in Denver, where they died later that night, Jeanie a few minutes after the Reverend. The exact cause of death was never determined; I was probably the only person outside of the White House inner circle who knew that the toxin’s name was Armageddon.
In the event, Operation Armageddon never came to pass. Assuming the plan did actually exist, there could have been all kinds of reasons it was aborted: the Reverend’s threats, Admiral Kubrick’s concern (or pique), a momentary attack of sanity in the White House. Or even the anonymous tip I sent Kaminski—which I was never able to check, as Ted went to his reward not long after (of natural causes for once).
Or the Reverend could’ve made the whole thing up.
I wouldn’t have put it past him. I may have given the impression in observing the terms of my deal that I believed or sympathized with the Reverend’s account of his conversion or re-conversion or re-re-conversion.
Spare me. If my mortal enemy believes Jay rose from the dead and is the authentic Second Coming of Jesus, fine. But why should I believe a word my mortal enemy says? The man who killed the kid? Yes. Jay’s central message was, There is nothing that can’t be forgiven. But Jay was a much better man than I, and forgiveness is a lesson I have learned only imperfectly. To forgive the Reverend, I’ll need to attend a far more advanced class.
Who knows whether his “conversion” wasn’t some brilliant preemptive move to get yet another wing of Christianity under his control, to co-opt a promising new sect while it was still a-borning? Maybe his fellow power mongers just couldn’t let him do that. Maybe it wasn’t the White House who had him killed, after all, but Pastor Bob, plotting his return to power. Which certainly came to pass.
Why aren’t these explanations as plausible as that he saw, alive and well, a man whom he’d murdered and cremated? The political explanation for his actions is within the realm of credibility. Whereas resurrection, alas, my good, brave, but ultimately gullible friends, despite all your longing for it, simply isn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the sweetness of the vision. Resurrection, were it ever to occur, would be the miracle of miracles. That the mourned face could stir and smile, the lost child walk and play again: a joy impossible to measure. Death is like a sea, relentlessly eroding the shores of your consciousness, its distant roar a reminder that your oblivion is inevitable. To be able to build a permanent seawall against it, shut out the roar forever, is the oldest dream of humanity—and the beginning of all religion.
I was lucky. I didn’t need miracles. Even when I saw a couple they did little for me. Jay was right: Miracles are tricks, wizardry, meaningless except in the eye of the beholder. What I learned from José Francisco was far more precious, the simplest of his lessons: that we waste a colossal amount of our lives avoiding contact with life. There is no substitute for flesh-and-blood touching flesh-and-blood. His presence was worth a million miracles. To rest in its shadow was to be at peace. How he did that, I don’t know and never will. Perhaps it’s just what happens when someone’s really good at being good.
Are you’re thinking that I feel this way because he didn’t appear to me? I feel excluded? I didn’t get the Big Nod?
No. He won’t appear to me because he’s dead. Not just dead, cremated. He’s not even bones in a box, which might spook some atavistic fear of spirits in me. He’s ashes. He’s gone. He ain’t coming back. There’s no him to come back.
He’s returned to the atoms from which he came, and when his ashes—or, rather, the ashes, for they have no person or gender—are strewn in the earth or the air or the sea, a year or a century from now, those atoms will spin out into the void of material things to form, at some distant time, some other material thing, with no more meaning than this cold hard rock on which we pass a few years, spinning round the other cold hard rocks, exploring the nothingness of what we touch and see and smell and hear, until we cease to exist and our senses do too and we become the same atoms in the same endless, pointless rigmarole and roundelay. With no chance, folks, of that particular lumpy face and those particular long dark lashes—and that particular ratty old green fleece—ever reappearing.
He was here for a while. And now he’s gone.