Faith of Tarot Page 5

  Maybe so. Brother Paul would have to sort it all out more carefully at another time. "Therion—he served you well, if selfishly. Why did you kill him?"

  "I did not kill him. There is no death in Hell. That's the Hell of it! Death would represent escape from retribution. I merely tortured him a little. A well-deserved humiliation, preparing him for the penance he must do."

  Again Brother Paul wondered who was playing the part of Satan. It had to be Therion—yet how could he talk about himself this way? Unless this whole Animation really was guided by some Godly power, and this role was part of Therion's penance. Was there any way to be sure? "But if he made a bargain with You to bring us all here—"

  "The Horned God makes no bargains! All souls that are My due will come to Me in due course. Why should I bargain for what is already Mine?"

  "But you accepted my bargain—to spare Carolyn."

  "Not really. She is innocent—not even a clothespin mars her record. She is as yet unborn. I cannot take her. And you—were already in My power."

  "Then why did You torture me by threatening her?"

  "This is Hell," Satan said simply. And of course that was true. Brother Paul realized that he had taken too narrow a view of Hell. Torture came in many forms—and the worst of these were internal.

  More rustling of papers. "Why don't you computerize your damned records?" Brother Paul inquired irritably. Satan merely chuckled, and Brother Paul realized: this, too, was Hell.

  "Sexual and/or scatological repression is not after all the root," Satan said. "Let's try the racial motif. You are of mixed ancestry—"

  "Let's leave my ancestors out of it," Brother Paul said, fearing what would come out. "They are not on trial—" But the review was upon him. One did not get to argue much in Hell.

  It was 1925. She was a young black woman too intelligent to remain in the ghetto. She had come to the high-rise district seeking quality employment. She had not been successful. This was not entirely racism; the fact that she was female had a lot to do with it. Now she was walking back to the apartment which she shared with another aspiring woman, because her money was running low and she still had to eat. It was early evening.

  "Well, now!" A white man stepped out in front of her.

  Instantly she reversed, fleeing him—but another man was behind her. He caught hold of her. There was the gleam of a knife. "You jus' be quiet, Brown Sugar," he said. "We ain't goin' to hurt you none—if you know your place."

  She knew her situation, if not her place. She did not struggle or cry out. And they were true to their word. They did not beat her; after both had raped her, they let her go with only a perfunctory admonition about keeping her mouth shut if she didn't want them to come back and squeeze the chocolate milk out of her tits. They were pleased; they had saved two dollars apiece for a cleaner lay than the local house would have provided.

  She kept it quiet. There was nothing she could do about it, for she didn't know either man. And if she had, it was the word of one nigger gal against two white men: forget it. She was a realist. She bought herself a good knife as insurance against future episodes, continued on her quest, and got her job. It was a good one as maid to a wealthy white family; they treated her well.

  Then she learned that she was pregnant.

  Her livelihood was destroyed, but not her life. She went home to her family and birthed her bastard son, and his skin was much lighter than hers. She raised him well with pride, for that light color was a mark of distinction. He was handsome and smart, and he married an open-minded white girl. Their daughter was lighter still, and race was less of a barrier than it had been. She married a white man who claimed to have some Indian blood somewhere in his ancestry; he was a career diplomat. Their son was Paul. He was no darker than a pure Caucasian with a summer tan—but he was one-eighth black. They went to Africa, partly because it was a prestigious, well-paid position. There was a political flare-up, minor on the world scene but quite serious for Americans in that region. Paul was hastily shipped out at the age of four; his parents wanted to assure his safety, if not their own.

  Paul's paternal uncle took him in. Man and wife were conservative with an image to maintain; that little bit of Indian blood in their ancestry was a secret blot. They never told Paul he was black though this was the age when black was beautiful. Paul went to a white private school and associated only with whites. There was, of course, token integration at that school, but the occasional presence of blacks made no difference to Paul. He was not of their number. He had "passed."

  He started school—with the snickering girls—but before the year was out his foster parents moved out to the country in the north. Paul had trouble in school, not so much with the teachers but with other children who teased him with the special cruelty only children understood. When he came home with a black eye, his foster father acted: "That boy is going to learn self-defense. We'll put him in a karate class."

  There was such a class at a community center in a neighboring town; Paul and his foster father walked in and saw the people practicing in their white pajama-like outfits, landing on mattresses. "How much?" the father asked the instructor who was a young man in his mid twenties, mild-mannered and not large—hardly the type one would fear in the street. The rates were cheap. The man paid the money, completed the necessary form, obtained a pajama uniform called a gi for Paul, and left him there. Paul was about to learn self-defense.

  Paul was nine years old and small for his age. The gi hung on him hugely. But there were other children there his size, and the instructor gave him personal attention for the first classes. The instructor's name was Steve—he demanded a no more formal address—and after Paul saw what he could do, he understood why there was no disrespect.

  This was a judo class, not karate; they had walked into the wrong room. But as it turned out, judo was far better suited to Paul's needs than karate would have been, for it enabled a person to defend himself without hurting his opponent, and Paul did not like to hurt people. Judo was the science of throws and holds and, after those had been mastered, strikes and strangles and assorted leverages of pain. With this science a charging giant could be hurled violently to the ground and held there until he yielded. Two or more attackers could be tumbled into each other. A man with a knife or club could be rapidly disarmed. Yet the salient features of judo were courtesy and self-improvement. Students gave to their instructor and each other the respect due to people capable of dealing death—and of refraining from it.

  It started slowly. First Paul had to learn to take falls so that he could be thrown to the mat without being hurt. Then he worked on basic throws. To his surprise, his first partner was a black girl slightly smaller than he was. But she wore a yellow belt, one grade higher than his white one, and he quickly discovered that she could beat him in physical combat and hold him down so that he could not get up. He developed an instant respect for this martial art; for if a girl who weighed less than he could do that to him, what might he do to a larger boy—once he learned judo?

  At the end of the first class Steve took him aside. "How did you get that black eye, Paul?" he asked as if it were not obvious. He had the girl, whose name was Karolyn, follow Paul's instructions and reenact the way the school bully had stepped forward and punched with his right fist into Paul's left eye. Steve nodded. "Here is what you do for that. First, try to get away from him; step aside and run if you have to. Don't let him get close to you."

  "But then the other kids—"

  Steve nodded. "When, for one reason or another, you can't escape, you must defend yourself. There are many ways, but for you I think this is best." He summoned another boy, larger than Paul. "Nage no kata, second throw, Uki," Steve told the boy. The boy closed his fist and shot a punch at the girl's head. She blocked it up with her left forearm, whirled, caught his arm with her right arm, and heaved. The boy flew over her back and landed with a resounding slap on the mat. "That throw is called ippon seoi nage, the one-armed shoulder throw," Steve told Paul
. "You are going to learn it—now."

  Paul was hurt many times after that—but seldom did he suffer at the hands of his schoolmates, and never again did anyone land a punch on his face. Judo, to a certain extent, became a way of life for him. He progressed from white belt to yellow belt to orange and green and finally brown. He entered judo tournaments, winning some matches and losing others, but he always put up a good fight and was as courteous in defeat as in victory. Never did he seek a quarrel outside of class—and seldom did anyone seek one with him.

  But he always remembered that first class, and how a little girl had overcome him and held him down—and never teased him about it. Paul was somewhat wary of girls in general, but in his secret fashion he loved Karolyn. She left the class a few months after he started, and he never saw her again, but she had left her mark on him in the form of a fond memory.

  When Paul was eighteen, his foster parents were divorced. But by that time he was scheduled for college, and an education trust fund that had been arranged long ago by his parents carried him through. After college he sought his family roots—and for the first time learned of his black heritage.

  "No, no!" Satan said. "That's not it! That's way too late! You have no guilty race secret; you were not even aware that you were passing—and if you had been, you would have been culpable only for the lie, not the fact. The culpability of your society that discriminated covertly on the basis of race was in any event worse than your own."

  "This is Satan talking?" Brother Paul marveled aloud. "The Father of Lies?"

  "Satan never lies. It is the minions of God who lie, cheat, steal and deceive—until the fruits of these iniquities come at last to Me. I am Truth—and because the truth is often ugly, I am called evil." The papers rustled again, annoyingly. "I'm going to try a somewhat random shot based on intuition. I suspect the blocked-out secret of your life occurs in childhood somewhere in the foster-parent era. I think it involves a female, but perhaps not in the sexual or racist way. So I want—one day of your life, at age eight."

  Paul had to urinate. He wanted to continue sleeping as it was cold out there in the outhouse and scary at night, for there might be a porcupine. One thing a dog never did twice was nose after a porky; that first hellish noseful of barbed quills invariably sufficed. Paul did not care to walk into a porcupine by accident. Better simply to piss in the snow just outside the back door. But—he had to go, and that was the place.

  He got up groggily, finding the air oddly comfortable, not cold at all though it was winter. He walked down the hall—and it opened out on a pleasant, modern, tiled bathroom with a flush toilet—how could he have forgotten about this? He stood at the toilet and let go. The sensation was immensely gratifying; the liquid flowed and flowed, seeming to have no end, but rather gaining in force and conviction.

  Then he felt something strange. A wetness about his middle, as if he were standing waist deep in a hot bath. Yet there was nothing visible. He fought off the sensation—but it would not be denied. With slow horror, the realization forced itself upon him: he was standing in brine. Lying in it. For he was still in bed; everything had been a dream. Except the urination.

  As usual, he had wet his bed. He opened his eyes. It was dark. It was still night. Too early to get up. Well, he was comfortable where he was; the rubber sheet sealed the depression of the sagging bed so that his hot bath stayed with him. So long as he kept the blankets on top and dry, he was all right.

  He remembered when it had started two years ago. They had put him in a hospital for observation, and in five days there he had been so tense he never wet the bed, though they "forgot" to bring him the bedpan for as long as 24 hours at a time. One morning there, he had awoken to spy half a dozen nurses clustered just outside his door, whispering with animation. Were they talking about him? "Don't tell him..." but the words trailed into unintelligibility. There was hushed laughter like that of the clothespin girls, only these were big girls. "The way I do it... " Do what! "Just shove it in." Surely not a clothespin! Suddenly he caught on: this was a hospital. They were planning surgery in secret. Don't tell the patient because he might climb out the window and escape. Just take the knife and shove it in.

  Paul lay in the bed bathed in cold sweat that resembled the urine. They were going to cut him open. He had been assured that they were only going to look at him (which was bad enough) in the hospital—but that was what they had said the first time he went to the dentist too. Grownups thought it was all right to lie to children "for their own good," which usually meant something painful or extremely unpleasant. It meant that no adult could be trusted, ever.

  But the nurses dispersed, leaving him alone with his thoughts. If not now, when? All day he cowered in his prison bed, waiting for them to come, for it to start. His appetite decreased. He lost interest in the games provided, in his reading book, in his drawings. What was the use of them in the face of this terrible threat?

  At last he was released. The hospital's verdict: there was nothing physically wrong with him. Presumption: he could stop wetting his bed if he wanted to. So he was encouraged to want to. He had to wash his own sheets each day. The word "punishment" was never used, but the message was plain: You do this awful thing, you clean it up yourself. Somehow that treatment was not effective. Paul needed no extra motivation; he wanted to have a dry bed—and could not. Something always happened in the night, no matter how hard he tried to resist.

  He was drifting back to sleep this morning, fortunately. Nightmares seldom came after his bladder was empty. The hospital memory was fading; it no longer really bothered him. So long as he never had to go back for that lurking surgery. Mornings were not so bad. His feet were cold, but he was used to that. He heard the faint, eerie hoot of some wild animal ranging the forest; he was glad he was not out there. He remembered the prior year at the boarding school, he being the smallest of the small, beaten up as a matter of course in the initiation, fleeing, terrified. Yet even this nightmare was not total. One morning one of the bullies, a boy a year or two older than Paul, came in before Paul was up. "Hey, I hear you piddle in bed!" the bully exclaimed. "Lessee." And he ripped off Paul's blanket.

  Paul had wet the bed. He had kicked off his soaking pajamas, and they lay in a damp wad at his feet; he was naked from the waist down, steaming in urine. The bully looked for a long moment while Paul lay still, not afraid to move but simply having no option. He had long since lost his pride of person as far as his body went. Then the bully replaced the blanket and went away without comment. Later that day, the bully talked to Paul privately "When I piss last thing at night, sometimes I just stand there at the pisser a while, and then a little more will come. Then some more. Maybe if you waited long enough, you could get it all out, and—" He shrugged. He was trying to be helpful.

  That bully never bothered Paul again; his sympathy had been aroused. A few days later, in the presence of a group of boys, another bully came to Paul. "I won't hit you any more," he said, and they shook hands. "And if he does, we'll hit him," one of the larger boys said. And after that no one picked on Paul. Yet, for him, the school remained a horror; he just wanted to get home.

  Now he was home and satisfied. He knew when he was well off. Sometimes he imagined this was all a long, bad dream, and that he would wake up and be four years old again in Africa in his happy real life, but for two years the conviction had been growing that this would never happen. This, now, was his real life; the other was the dream.

  His feet had stopped hurting with cold; instead they were flaming as though a fire blazed about them. That was nice. Paul fancied he could see the leaping flames, gold and yellow, sending sparks up toward the ceiling. He could lie here forever enjoying that bonfire. If Hell were the place of heat and flames, he had no fear of it; better to go there than out into the snow on a windy morning.

  The clangor of the alarm jolted him awake. He hadn't realized he had made it back to sleep. No question about it; the thin cold light of dawn was seeping in. Mornings in winter wer
e so bleak! He lingered for a moment more, than took a breath, held it, gritted his teeth, and threw off the blanket. Oh, it was cold! The floor was wood, but it was so cold his flame-tender feet could not tolerate it; he danced from toe to toe with the acute discomfort of it. He dashed naked downstairs to the bathroom; it had no toilet since there was no running water in this room, but there was a pitcher by the table. Once all houses had had oil heat and city-piped water everywhere, but the crises of energy and water and pollution had driven many families out into the wilderness where the air was still clean and it was possible to be largely self-sufficient. Water that was carried by hand was seldom wasted; that helped the declining water table.

  He sloshed some water into the basin, soaked the washcloth in it, then gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and stabbed the wadded cloth at his chest. The shock was like ice, for winter in an unheated house brought ice very close. Sometimes the kitchen pipes froze, so that water could not be pumped inside, and they had to break the ice and dip it out in a wooden bucket. But soon his chest warmed the cloth somewhat, and he rubbed it in a zig-zag pattern down and around, getting his stomach and thighs. Then another clothful for his backside. He moved rapidly, for his teeth were chattering, his skin blue. Still, this was no worse than swimming in the mountain pool in summer; the water rushed through a narrow channel from its origin somewhere high in the mountains and was so chill he dared not dive in, but had to walk in slowly, letting his feet grow numb, then his shins, and slowly up until at last his whole body was numb and he could swim. Some people could dive in, venting a scream of reaction as the chill struck them all at once—but they were better padded than he with subcutaneous fat. That was the secret of the walrus. Paul was skinny; the cold went right through to his bones, and when he got out those bones radiated it back into his flesh. It took him half an hour to get warm again. But he liked swimming. It lifted him free of the visible ground, making it seem as though he were flying. Flight represented a kind of escape, however transitory.