Читать книгу King - David S. Faldet - Страница 15

The bass of Hutch Hutchinson was shaking his windows. Bonnie Raitt was rasping out “Feeling of Falling,” its blues lyrics pitched from the musical sweet spot somewhere near her spleen. With a slender paring knife Mikesh cut earthy-smelling peels from parsnips, carrots, potatoes, and turnips. He was hungry, and grass-fed beef was browning in the pan.

Earlier, doing chores he noticed the ground softening. In less than a month he would be checking for the first calves. Through the window the yard light glowed hazy; the night was going to turn into another fog. But the animals were fine, Mikesh was inside, and he was doing the point check Mary Towers taught him on the places where the tension used to be. A used-to-be refrain, running through his own mind, meant that, no matter how unhinged the healer, his therapy session was money well spent.

After his meal, he sat down with a glass of pale ale and turned on his computer, thinking of Mary Towers’ scorn, but typing the words he should have tried out two days ago: Joshua King. A few news stories, a few discussion forums, a page warning him that Shekinah would send him to hell, then a Joshua King video: my brother had an Internet movie presence.

My brother’s presence. A British scientist once said that the universe is not only stranger than we know, it’s stranger than we can know. That in part explains why, the autumn before the accident, I left my work in contract archeology for the uncertain future of life on a commune, following a brother whose charisma I always, in part, resented. My brother Josh’s charm came from his keen sense for where the Spirit is at work—almost everywhere, as it turns out—and of sad corners where people so easily get trapped: the lifeless places where the Spirit has been nearly sucked away and where evil starts to grow and elbow its way around.

I have a life of experience witnessing Josh’s success in drawing people to him.

Twins might look like copies of one another. But don’t be fooled. None are. Starting in the womb, one fills out the space the other fails to occupy. If Josh was head up, I was head down. If, as my mother informed us, Josh came into icy air above the bed of that sleigh without crying, so much more startling the silence for me to shatter with howls. Josh’s quiet gained him more worried attention from Dr. Razavi, the EMT, and my grandmother than my squalling. In school, when no one raised their hand or volunteered a response, the teachers called on Josh. What he said sparked discussion. Girls wondered, secretly and aloud, whether Josh noticed them. Boys repeated, in their banter, the astonishing utterances that darted from my brother’s alien-visiting-earth lips. My brother was like a black hole; you couldn’t avoid the gravitational attraction of presence, even when he was out of sight and thousands of miles away. Realizing that as an-almost-thirty-three-year-old adult, I decided to join Josh’s fold.

Seeking is the pole star of animal urges, the source of all the rest, just as pride, they say, is the source of all evil. Josh sought people out. Then he redirected their seeking impulse toward what mattered to him. My twin brother sought the Spirit, and with his last breath he asked Arnold Mikesh to join him. Josh had a force that drew people to him. Mikesh was my first evidence that, in his death, my brother might not have lost that power. In turning up at Mary’s door, Mikesh traded his knotted-up back for a tiny, hot, Josh-King coal in his brain. Why not admit it? At this same time, even with Josh dead, I was finding some heat of his life burning in me too. To my wonder, in spite of Josh’s death . . . no, rather because of his death, this would be the first spring in years that I would not return as planned to summer fieldwork in contract archeology.

The clip Mikesh pulled up, titled “Root of Power,” had been posted by someone whose address was sunnybob4. The setting was a social hall: the camera positioned perhaps ten rows back. The video came on with a low-level murmur of white noise and my brother—Mikesh guessed it was him—was walking to the front of the room, his narrow back to the camera. Neither the brightness nor the resolution was good. The camera was hand-held, unsteady. Mikesh was startled when Josh took the low platform and turned to the people seated in chairs. Mikesh was looking at the whole, clean, right-side-up face he had found buried in that wreck, and the zoom was careening in for a close-up. Mikesh wished he could have slapped sunnybob4’s finger from the control button and kept the distance. Instead, he could now read the features of the speaker, my brother, a young man with a mop of wavy, sand-colored hair, firm dark eyebrows that almost met, protruding brown eyes, and Roman nose. His shoulders hunched as he raised his arms out wide toward the audience to talk.

“Brother Randy and Sister Maxine called us together tonight, joined us together here in the Spirit,” he began, his voice steady. The words tripped Mikesh’s recollection: “Mikesh . . . join.”

“They asked me to answer a question. Who do I say I am?”

My brother was looking into faces directed toward him. He turned from the camera. The zoom backed out, and Mikesh could see my brother, dressed in loose khaki slacks and black t-shirt, an unbuttoned white oxford shirt open and hanging free at the waist. From the back, with his rumpled clothing and slightly messy hair, my brother would not have caught anyone’s attention. His face, however, and the way he measured his words had power Mikesh could feel, even from a blurry video on a low-bandwidth Internet signal.

“Because Brother Randy comes to us from the Christian Action Fellowship, and Sister Maxine is Catholic, they have asked me to speak tonight. They want to know who I am.”

Josh gestured to a woman in the front row. “Sister Maxine, tell them what it is you want to know.”

The camera focused on a middle-aged, whey-faced woman. She stood with great self-possession. “I just want to know about my old church. Can I still be a Catholic and also be a part of Shekinah?”

Josh called on Brother Randy. The camera panned back and forth before finding the profile of a thin man with close-cropped hair, wearing a red plaid shirt and sweater vest, who stood up uncomfortably. Mikesh could not see his face.

“I’m like Maxine. I want to know, Joshua, if you mean to drive me from my Christian faith.” The questioning man looked at Josh, turned to nod at the person seated at his side, and sat back down.

My brother was looking down at them. “Randy, Maxine, thanks for speaking from your hearts. I am not here to come between you and the Spirit. I’m here to point you back to the root where each of us began, back to the root of Action Fellowship and the Catholic Church, back to the root of Christianity and the ministry of Jesus.”

He walked closer to the man who asked the question. “Randy, did Jesus put aside his Jewish heritage to bring his message to his fellow Jews?”

The camera could only catch the back of the man’s head: “He can’t have been too good a Jew,” it sounded as if he said. “They killed him.”

“But did he forget Jewish teachings? The Jewish scripture?”

“No,” the man shook his head emphatically. “He knew his scripture.” The fuzzy, muffled sound quality made Mikesh think, at first, he’d said, “He knew his picture.”

“I’m here to tell you to read your scripture, too. Read your Christian scripture. Read the Jewish Old Testament. They carry you back to the root that still sustains us, the place, that small infinitude, where we each look face to face with the Spirit, feel her presence, her breath, the force of the Spirit’s words on our own hands and lips as she wakes us each morning. You’ve dedicated your Christian lives to Jesus. Jesus returned again and again to that presence. In fact, he lived every moment of his earthly life in it. That place, our beginning as well as our end, is also where we are, Shekinah, though as we sit in this room tonight it is easy to forget that.”

Josh told a story he said was familiar to Jesus, about the garden, the place where the Spirit and people walked together. When the people tasted the fruit of false knowledge they turned from the Spirit. He said this act of turning from the Spirit had been replayed throughout time, billions of times each hour around the planet.

“The error is to think that this was once upon a time: as some have said, the history of our first father and our first mother. The story is happening this moment . . . and this: the distracting fruit, our hand reaching out, our desire propelling our hand, the knowledge of what has been and, suddenly, the desire ever stronger of what might be! That desire, like a drug, makes us forget that here we are, in the garden, in this infinitude, made not to waste away, not to suffer or die, but made instead in the likeness of the divine to know Shekinah—the presence of the divine in this instant, the eternal moment that is without limit, and without death.”

My brother’s hand extended out as if holding the apple. He brought the hand to his mouth, poised as if to taste. His strongly colored, full lips, loomed in the close view to which the person with the camera zoomed. But the camera backed out. Josh dropped his arms and stood with his hands out and open at his sides, like a person on a beach, facing the sun, his body drinking in its heat.

“Desire, fills you with images of what you do not have, what has been, what might be. Desire is a thief, distracting you with his right hand as he picks your pockets clean with the left.”

“Brothers, Sisters, we have never left the garden. The old story tells it like a fact that we were cast out, a wall of fire placed behind us. That wall is there only in our imagination. The curse that we must labor and suffer in pain repeats itself over and over like a constitutional law, cancelling out everything else. But why?

“You were made by the Spirit to see the never lost, never absent, true and shining fact—that you are a child of the Spirit, an extension of the breath that gives each of us life, a living emblem of the Spirit before others.

“Jesus himself said there was only one unforgivable sin: to deny the Spirit. It’s in the Biblical gospels. Look also at the Coptic gospel, saying 44: ‘Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.’ That is why I stand before you, affirming her. I am her child. I’m an apostle of the Spirit. I am, and you are, a vessel of the Spirit.

“The Spirit, what Jesus in his own language called the ruha, is what was breathed into us at the moment of our creation. She lives in us in this instant, in this infinity.”

Here my brother stopped and closed his eyes, inhaling suddenly and loudly, “Spiiii,” holding the breath for a still moment before exhaling with equal noise, “riiiit.” He repeated this movement, the loud inhalation and exhalation of his breath. Then he opened his eyes again: “the divine breath—Spiii—riiit—Spiii—riiit—the breath in and breath out—from which the living Spirit, the ruu—haa takes her name.”

Since Mikesh only heard him whisper at the accident scene, he found himself mesmerized by Josh’s full voice. Mikesh was thinking about the weak flow of air he felt with his finger in my brother’s throat. He felt the last issue of what my brother was calling “the Spirit” as it left him.

“Ignorance distracts you with its idols. The Bible itself, for many of our brothers and sisters, becomes an idol to distract us from the message we were made to know, that the Spirit within us speaks with every breath, calling us with her name to remember, even now, breathing out and breathing in, who we really are, to remember our true name as it is breathed out to us by the Spirit.

“Brother Randy and Sister Maxine have asked whether I mean to call them away from their Christianity, whether I am the serpent who comes to separate them from God. No, that is not what I mean to do. I am here to do the opposite: to call them to the message . . .”

Mikesh’s screen froze and went silent. Over the top of the image a little clock dial appeared, the hand sweeping round and round to show that the signal had been lost, that the machine was working to reconnect. Mikesh explained it in his head as the work of soupy atmosphere between the dish that angled from the exterior siding of his house and the distant satellite that provided him with Internet. Just as he considered rising to bring his empty glass to the sink, the image snapped back into action, and the sound continued, “of Jesus, to perfect the promise he brought in his time by uttering it again in the present, in the here and now.

“Look in your Bible. Read what Jesus says about himself. ‘The son of man,’ he calls himself, a person just like you and me, but at the same time ‘the son of God,’ pointing to what you might call a higher kingdom, the kingdom of the Spirit that is ever at hand, ever at the edge of being born. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand,’ Jesus told his followers. And he would say the same today, if he was in this room, sitting next to Sister Maxine or in the chair behind Brother Randy, leaning forward to whisper in his ear. ‘The kingdom of the Spirit is alive between us!’”