The Acolyte (20 page)

Swift made a pirouetting motion with his finger. The giant obediently turned to face the wall.

“His name’s Porter Rockwell,” Swift said, “but we call him Golem. You know about Golem?” When I shook my head, he said, “Why would you? It’s a heathen Jew myth. A Golem was a giant shaped out of clay. Its maker wrote orders on slips of parchment and placed them in the Golem’s mouth; at night, the Golem came alive and did whatever it was commanded. Swept the hearth, mended the fence, murdered his maker’s enemies . . . anything at all.”

“Why make him turn around?”

“Porter’s deaf. He did it to himself—screwdriver. It’s partially my fault. I told him he was better seen than heard and he misinterpreted it.” Swift guided an index finger toward his ear with aching slowness. “No thought, all action—that’s a Golem for you. But he has learned to read lips quite well.”

I thought:
How could he have placed a call from that payphone if he was deaf?

I said, “How do you know him?”

“Oh, I picked him up along the way,” Swift answered, as though the giant were a stray dog who’d opted to tag along out of loneliness or fear.

“Do you really want The Prophet’s head on a stick?”

Now Swift smiled. “That was crass of me. What I meant was that your Prophet is a coward and a snake and I suppose it’s my wish for people to see him in his proper light.”

“How’s that—by encouraging them to blow themselves up?”

“Your Prophet is a figurehead,” Swift went on, ignoring my question. “Most people are such herd animals they’d prostrate themselves before anyone so long as he’s been certified a holy mouthpiece by your divine council. They need a little enlightenment, is the thing.”

“And you’re just the man to spread that good word.”

“I don’t see anyone else stepping up.” He spread his hands, as if in hopes that someone might absolve him his dreary burden. “I wish for people to think for themselves. Right now their lives are governed by a book of fairy tales.”

“Your conviction is admirable,” I deadpanned. “There are plenty of soapboxes on Preacher’s Row.”

He stood and walked to the empty patio window. We were high up—no lights, no rooftops.

“I do wonder,” Swift said, “why it is we think so highly of ourselves. Why we’re the only species with enough . . . gall? Yes, gall, to think that some part of us, some essence, must live on after we die. We are unique in this view that something within each of us is so valuable it must exist forever in some form, on some plane—heaven, hell. Insects, animals: their existence is finite. Ours, infinite. Why should we be so special?”

I had no answer to that.

“I do understand our need for belief in a clinical way: we’re so fragile, our existence so uncertain, we need a centrepiece around which to orient our moral selves. One perfect being to look up to in a world where others so often act in their own self-interest. But what if there’s nothing to be pious for, sacrifice for, abstain from, look forward to?”

Wind skirled between the panes of the hurricane lamp, blowing the flame slantwise. I could hear Porter Rockwell breathing heavily. When the flame licked up, I saw Swift had returned to his chair.

“My fondest hope is to be wrong. Should I die in such a manner that spares me a moment to address my sins, I promise you I’ll recant. Do you want to know what the final words to pass my lips will be?” Throwing his hands heavenward. “Take it all back, Lord! I
believe
!”

The tower whipsawed in the wind.

“Something about you greatly puzzles me,” said Swift. “Tell me: why don’t you visit your mother, Jonah?”

My breath locked up, this feeling of cold steel bands clapped over my ribcage. How did he know these things?

“If you do anything to her . . .”

Swift’s upper lip curled back to reveal teeth white and straight as organ keys.

“You must think me a rare scoundrel! What have you ever done that I would seek revenge upon your mother?”

“Then why do you care?”

He said, “My own mother is gone. Murdered. It happened long ago, when I was a boy. Yours is not. That you would let her rot away in that house of ghouls . . . promise me you’ll visit her.”

I said, “I will.”

“I’ll know if you don’t.”

“I recognize that. Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Why are you here in New Bethlehem?”

“A reclamation mission,” was his simple answer. “Reclaiming the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten and the damned.”

“You want what happened in New Beersheba to happen here.”

“Whether I want it or not, yes, it will happen. As it was bound to before long—if not me, some other catalyst. Tell me, Jonah. What is it you want for Angela?”

“I wish for her to be happy.”

He cocked his head. “That’s not exactly true, is it? You wish for her to be happy with
you
.”

“And you think she’d be happier with who—you?”

“She’s beyond the possibility of happiness altogether.”

“You’re wrong.”

He stood and tapped Porter Rockwell’s shoulder. The giant lowered his head while Swift massaged Porter’s neck above the fringe of close-trimmed hair. Rockwell made a noise approximating the nicker of a satisfied horse.

“Golem’s going to pop a pill in your mouth,” Swift said. “No lasting effects, I promise. Please don’t fight it; Golem’s been known to break jaws.”

I obeyed, thinking I’d stash the pill in my cheek until I could discreetly spit it out. But it dissolved like spun sugar the moment it hit my tongue. Swift retrieved the ukulele and plucked a couple off-key notes. I concentrated on the photo of the missing child on the milk carton. Who
was
that kid? I knew the face.

“Once a man arrives at the conclusion that humanity is a sinking ship, can he be blamed for drilling holes in its hull?” Swift said. “The question becomes: How to make an entire species self-destruct? What is the most effective system of annihilation? Religion. It’s a tool, and any tool has a right and a wrong use. And this particular tool has already been mishandled and manipulated by a thousand different masters. Fear, obedience, sacrifice, fanatic loyalty: these are the fruits religion cultivates in a nurturing hand. And the greatest part is that the nurturer doesn’t need to promise anything tangible: the reward is only delivered in death. It all rests on the bones of belief. And those bones are unbreakable.”

I focused on the milk carton and finally recalled where I’d seen that face before. My last glimpse of it had been framed by the glass of a yellow school bus, that child’s stoic expression so much different than the young smiling version that graced the carton, that long-missing boy waving stone-faced as the bus pulled away. The boy. Jeremiah.

The pill kicked in. My mind kicked out.

Orgy

I dimly recall being carried downstairs, Rockwell cradling me like an infant. He set me in the van, on a pile of stinking rags in the back. It jounced along the road leading from the Damascus Towers and smoothed out as we hit the main thoroughfare. Rockwell was scrunched into the driver’s seat like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard. Swift rode shotgun.

The van halted, a buzzer went off, and we sawed down a series of switchbacks. Rockwell killed the engine. He opened the rear doors and tugged a black satin hood over my head. He picked me up again—the man’s strength was terrifying.

“What’s the best way to grow a religion?” I heard Swift say. “By
fucking
, my dear Jonah. Loads and loads of fucking. Look at the Mormons: Joseph Smith assembled a dozen virile gents and their docilely fecund wives and told them it was their sacred duty to mint as many ankle-biters as possible. With nothing else to do on those cold Pennsylvania nights, those Mormons got down to some heavy-duty fucking.”

The echo of their footsteps suggested we were in a cavernous space. Warehouse? Underground parking garage?

“An exponential equation. Joseph begat Joseph Jr., who begat Joseph the third. It’s strictly a numbers game. The more you have, the more you can afford to sacrifice.”

We passed through a doorway. Dark, moist, hot. Gnashing tribal music. The pill was running roughshod over my nervous system. My extremities had gone numb, or nearly so: this sensation like a million ants tunnelling through the veins of my arms and legs. Rockwell set me down. The hood came off. My eyes adjusted. I was splayed out on a bed of plush pillows; ringing the pillows were chaises whose ergonomics seemed to suit an erotic agenda. The chaises were surrounded with people. None of them spoke a word. The silence was funereal.

Swift knelt beside me and began to unbutton my shirt.

“This is my clan.” His fingers worked through the sparse hair of my chest, cold as winter steel. “And while none of them are destined for this earth long enough to bear or raise anything that might be conceived tonight, I see no benefit in robbing them of that joy.”

He unbuttoned my fly. Tugged down my trousers, my underwear.

“Tonight we indulge the pleasure principle. Fuck and be fucked. All those things you’ve been told are immoral and sinful.”

. . . the world phased out for a while and when it re-solidified a naked woman was sitting on my face. Couldn’t see her eyes with her thighs vised round my skull and my tongue buried inside her but she was moaning in a way that suggested I was doing something right so I ran my tongue over her wondrous geography until she gripped my head, steadied it as though it were a tool contrived for her pleasure and ground herself on my face, the knob of my chin, my nose.

She whimpered, kittenish mews and said: “Do you like this?” and while none of it seemed to be designed with my enjoyment in mind, I mumbled the affirmative.

An anonymous mouth fastened over my penis—
oh!
—taking it down to the root and I grunted, my abdominals constricting and I would’ve sat bolt-upright if not for this implacable woman on my face. The faceless mouth was fiercely talented, a sacred whore’s mouth, coaxing me toward climax while another stranger mashed herself over the busted contours of my face.

My orgasm was so head-splittingly intense it felt as though a solid rope was being sucked out of me and for a panicky drug-fused moment I feared the lion’s share of my small intestines had been hoovered out through my urethra. The woman slipped off my face, slithered off to join another snaking ball of limbs and mouths. A voice came, hot and close in my ear.

“Better for one man to perish than a whole society to dwindle in disbelief. . . .”

I turned to see the Immaculate Mother wearing only a slattern’s grin, body of no more substance than a wet rag hung on a hook. Her fingers skeletal, icy, breasts a pair of speckled coin purses hung off her chest and her face a macabre travesty.

“I fucked the little astronaut.” She rubbed against me, her eyes fixed on some indeterminate point. “Fucked that tiny bastard and
loved
it.”

For the first time that night, the first in a long while, real terror stole into my heart. She was the embodiment of our values and to see her opiated and horny and so tragically human . . . Christ, the veneer was gone.

“You’re . . . you’re my daughter’s friend,” she said, staring at me.

She began to cry, or at least was trying to, face contorting but no tears coming. . . .

“. . . and everything you’ve ever been told is a lie. All your gods are dead.”

Swift’s voice addressing all of us.
Everything you’ve ever been told is a lie. All your gods are dead.
Perhaps this was so.

The blackness burst into sudden incandescence. That effigy of The Prophet had been soaked in lamp oil and set alight. It burned in the centre of the room, a solid cone of flame licking to the rafters. The Prophet’s face pocked and bubbled, fire eating his head as that socketed meat grilled down to char.

Everybody cheered. The Immaculate Mother loudest of all.

Mom Again