Lincoln in the Bardo(34)

The decline, said Richard Crutcher.

It is of interest to us, said Mrs. Reedy.

We watched it last time, said Matt Crutcher. With that gal.

Found it most stimulating, said Mr. Reedy.

Really gave us a boost, said Mrs. Reedy.

And everyone needs a boost, said Mr. Reedy.

In this dung-hole, said Matt Crutcher.

Don’t judge us, said Mr. Reedy.

Or do, said Mrs. Reedy.

Makes us feel naughtier, said Matt Crutcher.



To each their own, said Richard Crutcher, stepping over close to Mrs. Reedy.

Perhaps, said Mrs. Reedy, slipping her hand into his pants-pocket.

The group now fell into a watchful rapacious squat: disgusting vultures drawn here by the boy’s misfortune. And soon got up to some strange cross-handed business, manifesting as one terrible creature, their pumping arms and rhythmic gasping conveying a distinctly mechanical impression.

What do you think? I said to the boy. Is this a good place? A healthy place? Do these people seem sane to you, and worthy of emulation?

And yet here you are, the boy said.

I am different, I said.

From me? he said.

From everyone, I said.

Different how? he said.

And I teetered on the brink of telling him.

the reverend everly thomas





LXI.

For I am different, yes.

Unlike these (Bevins, Vollman, the dozens of other naifs I reside here among), I know very well what I am.

Am not “sick,” not “lying on a kitchen floor,” not “being healed via sick-box,” not “waiting to be revived.”

No.

Even there, at the end, in our guest room, with a view of the bricks of the Rednell house next door, upon which there hung a flowering vine (it was early June), the stable and grateful state of mind I had tried to cultivate all my life, via my ministry, left me in a state of acceptance and obedience, and I knew very well what I was.

I was dead.

I felt the urge to go.

I went.

Yes: simultaneously becoming cause and (awed) observer (from within) of the bone-chilling firesound associated with the matterlightblooming phenomenon (an experience I shall not even attempt to describe), I went.

And found myself walking along a high-mountain trail, preceded by two men who, I understood, had passed only seconds before. One wore a funeral suit of a very cheap type, and looked this way and that, like a tourist, and was, rather oddly, humming, in a way that communicated a sense of vacuous happiness, willful ignorance. Though he was dead, his attitude seemed to be: Ha ha, what’s all this, then? The other wore a yellow bathing costume, had a beard of flaming red, moved along angrily, as if in a hurry to get somewhere he very much resented going.



The former man was from Pennsylvania; the latter from Maine (Bangor or thereabouts); had spent much time in farmfields and often made his way to the coast, to sit for hours on the rocks.

He wore a bathing costume because he had drowned while swimming.

Somehow I knew this.

Periodically, as I made my way down that trail, I was also back here. Was in my grave; was startled out of my grave by the sight of what lay in my coffin (that prim-looking, dry-faced relic); was above my grave, nervously walk-skimming about it.

My wife and congregation were saying their final goodbyes, their weeping driving small green daggers into me: literal daggers. With each sob, a dagger left the griever and found its way into me, most painfully.

Then I was back there, upon that trail, with my two friends. Below us lay a distant valley that I somehow knew to be our destination. A set of stone steps became visible. My companions paused, glanced back. Recognizing me as a man of God (I had been buried in my vestments) they seemed to be asking: Should we proceed?

I indicated that we should.

From the valley below: chanting of some sort, excited voices, the clanging of a bell. These sounds contented me; we had journeyed, had arrived, the festivities might now begin. I was filled with happiness that my life had been judged worthy of such a spectacular denouement.

Then, vexingly, I was back here; my wife and congregation now departing in coaches, occasionally sending forth the random green dagger, the impact of which did not lessen no matter how far they drove. Soon my mourners had crossed the Potomac, and were eating the funeral meal at Prevey’s. I knew this even as I paced back and forth before my grave. I became panicked at the prospect of becoming stranded here, wished only to rejoin my friends there, on that stairway. This place was now entirely unappealing: a boneyard, a charnel ground, a garbage dump, a sad remnant of a discouraging and grossly material nightmare from which I was only just waking.

Instantaneously (with that very thought) I was there again, with my friends, coming off those stairs into a sun-drenched meadow in which stood a large structure unlike any I had ever seen, built of interlocking planks and wedges of purest diamond, giving off an array of colors that changed of the instant with any slight variation in the quality of the sunshine.



We approached arm in arm. A crowd gathered about us, ushering us along. An honor guard stood by the door, beaming at our approach.

The door flew open.

Inside, a vast expanse of diamond floor led to a single diamond table at which sat a man I knew to be a prince; not Christ, but Christ’s direct emissary. The room was reminiscent of Hartley’s warehouse, a place I had known as a boy: a tremendous open space, high-ceilinged and forbidding, made more forbidding by the presence of an authority figure (Hartley himself, in those early days; that Christ-emissary now) seated near a source of heat and light (a fireplace then; a jagged topaz now, on fire from within, upon a stand of pure gold).