“Yes, please,” said Tibor.
Dr. Abernathy poured and Tibor looked out the window. Eleven o’clock, that moment of truth, was passing over the world, he knew. For something had just gone out of it. What it was, he would never know.
He sipped and thought back upon the previous evening.
“Father,” he said, finally, “I don’t know who’s right or wrong — you or them — and maybe I’ll never know. But I can’t cheat somebody when I tell them I’m going to do a thing. If it had been the other way around, I’d give you the same consideration.”
Dr. Abernathy stirred and sipped. “And maybe we wouldn’t really have cared if you could not have found us the Christ for our Last Supper,” he said, “so long as you did a good job. I am not trying to dissuade you from doing what you think is right. It is just that I think that you are wrong, and you could make things a lot easier on yourself.”
“I’m not asking for easy things, Father.”
“You are making me sound like something I am not trying to be,” said Dr. Abernathy. “It is only, I repeat, that I think there is a way in which you could make things easier on yourself.”
“In other words, you want me to go away for a time, pretend to have seen the face I should see, paint it, and be done with it,” said Tibor.
“To be quite frank about it,” said Dr. Abernathy, “yes. You would be cheating no one –”
“Not even myself?” asked Tibor.
“Pride,” said Dr. Abernathy, “pride.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Tibor, lowering his coffee cup. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”
“Why not?” asked Dr. Abernathy.
“Because it wouldn’t be right,” said Tibor. “I’m not that sort of man. As a matter of fact, your suggestions have given me second thoughts about your religion. I believe I’d like to postpone my decision with respect to converting.”
“As you would,” said Dr. Abernathy. “Of course, by our teachings, your immortal soul will be in constant jeopardy.”
“Yet,” said Tibor, “you may consider no man damned, isn’t that right?”
“That is true,” said Dr. Abernathy. “Who gave you that Jesuitical bit of knowledge?”
“Fay Blaine,” said Tibor.
“Oh,” Dr. Abernathy said.
“Thank you for your coffee, sir,” said Tibor. “I believe I’d better be going. . .”
“May I give you a catechism? — something to read along the way?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You don’t like me or respect me, do you, Tibor?”
“Let me reserve my opinion, Father.”
“Reserve it, then, but take this,” said Dr. Abernathy.
“Thank you,” said Tibor, accepting the pamphlet.
Dr. Abernathy said, “I will disclose something more to you which you should know. I came across it in a textbook about the religions of the ancient Greeks. Their god Apollo was a god of constancy, and when tested he always was found to be the same. This was a major quality in him; he was what he was . . . always. In fact, one could define Apollo by this, and the Apollonian personality in humans.” He coughed and went on rapidly, “But Dionysus, the god of unreason, was the god of metamorphosis.”
“What is ‘metamorphosis’?” Tibor asked.
“Change. From one form to another. Thus you see, the God of Wrath, also being a god of unreason, like Dionysus, can be expected to hide, to camouflage himself, to conceal, to be what he is not; can you imagine worshiping a god who, rather than is, is what he is not?”
Tibor gazed at him in perplexity. Perplexity, the efforts of two ordinary men, filled the room: perplexity, not understanding.
“These sayings are hard,” Dr. Abernathy said, at last. He rose to his feet. “I’ll see you again on your return?”
“Perhaps,” said Tibor, activating his cart.
“The Christian God –” Dr. Abernathy hesitated, seeing how worn Tibor looked, worn by perplexity. “He is the God of unchange. ‘I am what I am,’ as God puts it to Moses, in the Bible. That is our God.”
Outside, all magic had fled from the noonday world, the sun had hidden its face behind a brief cloud, and Darlin’ Corey had eaten a bumblebee and was ill.
FIVE
He returned to the digs the following afternoon. The door grumbled when he inserted his finger, but it recognized the loops and whorls and slid halfway to the right. He sidled through and kicked it, and it closed behind him.
Adjusting his side-pack, which contained a new supply of herbicides, he paused for a moment to touch the lump which had grown between his left temple and forehead. It throbbed, it drove a shaft of pain through his head, as he knew it would. But he could not keep his hands away from it. The sore-tooth reaction, he decided.
He gulped another tablet from his new supply, knowing that it would have less than the desired effect.
Turning, then, he moved down the perpetually lit, perpetually poorly lit tunnel that led to the bunkers. Before he reached the one in which he was currently sleeping, his foot came down atop a small red truck and he was pitched forward to land upon his shoulder. As he fell, he shielded his aching head with an upflung arm. Activated by the push of his foot, the truck blew its horn and raced back up the tunnel.
After a moment, a short, heavyset figure raced past him, making sobbing noises.
“Tuck! Tuck!” it cried, pursuing the sound of the horn.
He raised himself to his knees, then to his feet. Staggering through the doorway, he noted that, as he had suspected, the room was now a shambles. Tomorrow I’ll move into the next one, he decided. It’s easier than cleaning the damned things out.
He dropped his pack upon the nearest table and collapsed onto the bed, pressing the back of his right wrist to his forehead.
A shadow across his eyelids told him that he was no longer alone. Without opening his eyes or changing his position, he snarled, “Alice, I told you to keep your toys out of the hall! I gave you a nice box for them! If you don’t start keeping them there, I’m going to take them all away from you.”
“No!” said the high-pitched voice. “Tuck. . .”
Then he heard the slap of her bare feet upon the floor, and the lid of the toy box creaked. It was too late to cry out, and knowing what was coming next, he gritted his teeth as she let it fall shut with a crash that bounced from all the walls of his sparse cell and converged upon his head.
The fact that she doesn’t know any better doesn’t alter the difficulty, he decided. Three weeks before, he had brought Alice home to the digs — an idiot girl whom the inhabitants of Stuttgart had expelled from their midst. Whether out of sympathy for her condition or the desire for companionship, he could not say. Probably something of both had entered into his choice. He could see now why they had done what they had done. She was impossible — maddening — to live with. As soon as he felt better, he would return her to the place where he had found her, crying beside the river with her dress caught in a thorn bush.
“Sorry,” he heard her say. “Sorry, Daddy.”
“I’m not your daddy,” he said. “Eat some chocolate and go to sleep — please. . .”
He felt like a glass of ice water. Crazy thought! The perspiration appeared like condensation now, while inside, he was cold, cold, cold! He crossed his arms and began shaking. Finally, his fingers picked at the blanket, caught it, drew it over him.
He heard Alice singing to herself across the room, and for some reason this soothed him slightly.
Then, and the horrible part was that he knew he was not yet fully delirious, he was back in his office and his secretary had just rushed in with a sheaf of papers like a flower in her pink-nailed hand and she was talking and talking and talking, excitedly, and he was answering and nodding, shaking his head and gesturing, pushing Hold buttons on his telephones, stroking his nose, tugging his earlobe, and talking and not hearing or understanding a word that either of them was saying, not even hearing the ringing of the telephones, under whose buttons the little lights kept winking on and off, and there was a sense of urgency and a strange feeling of separation, removal, futility, while Dolly Reiber — that was her name — talked until suddenly he noted, quite academically, that she had the head of a dog and was beginning to howl (this he was able to hear, though faintly), and he smiled and reached out to stroke her muzzle and she became Alice-at-his-bedside.
“I told you to go to sleep!” he said.