“But the city is no longer ruined, Charles,” said Amelia, walking her tone perfectly along the line between perplexity and helpfulness.
“Have it your way,” said Charles. “I would think, though, that you of all people, you and Tom, would know that all the cities of the pleasure planet are ruined, that there are many who actually like wholesale destruction for its own sake, that is to say, someone honestly if hideously committed to, how shall I say . . . to change. ‘Thou (the human being) are that which is not. I am that I am. If thou perceivest this truth in any soul, never shall the enemy deceive thee; thou shall escape all his snares.’ Can anybody tell me who said that? No? Saint Catherine of Siena. My theater will be a rough and immediate theater, but it will above all be a holy theater. A holy theater in an empty space.”
“Empty space: of that there can be no doubt!” said Mother. As for holiness, I think rather ‘spitefulness’ or ‘mean-spiritedness’ is the word you are looking for.”
“No, ‘holiness’ is the word.”
“Boring,” said Mother. “Boring, mean-spirited theater in an empty space.”
“Well,” said Charles mock-amiably, “I sure hope not. But people will be bored no matter what you do.”
“Wrong side of bed, Chick?” asked Father.
“No,” said Charles. “I levitated.”
“You know I don’t care for sarcasm,” said Father, smiling, “especially from my sons.”
“You have been taking jabs at everybody here,” said Mother. “You have hurt everybody here with your nonsense. Can you please tell us why you have embarked on such a course? I want to blame Sir Edwin because I am surprised and disappointed at what a stinking drunkard and fraud he is, but you cannot be so easily—”
“—and swiftly replaced?”
“—excused.”
“I am rehearsing my life.”
“I asked you once before,” said Mother quietly. Then she really let go with everything her extraordinary voice had to give: “STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!”
Because she had sung it, Charles applauded, briefly, politely. And said, “Father, if I hurt your feelings with what I said about destruction and change, please forgive me. It wasn’t meant to hurt you or even refer to you. Everything I know about the world I’ve learned from you and I am grateful for every last bit of it.”
“Of course I forgive you,” said Father.
“The sarcasm is a weakness I hope I can learn to do without.”
“I’d rather you were sarcastic,” said Mother, “than humorless.”
Amelia wiped her eyes and smiled. Tom nodded. The twins veiled their interest somewhat successfully. Mother glared and trembled, so finely that it could not be seen by the others save the strange rigidity. Socially Darwinian Christians, thought Charles, laboring for the glory of a Socially Darwinian Jesus Christ and the Socially Darwinian Regeneration of Socially Darwinian San Francisco when—and this was the kicker—they didn’t know the first thing about Darwin! Everything was an accident. Father paid lip service to the idea when he said everything that was lost could easily and swiftly replaced, but he didn’t understand what he was saying. If he did, he would save his numerous foes the trouble and shoot himself in the head.
Though Germany had declared the North Atlantic a war zone, Father and Mother left the next week for New York, where they boarded a ship that took them to Iceland. For the fly-fishing, Father had said, in no mood to talk to Charles about anything serious, or anything at all, really, even though he said he had forgiven him. For the salmon. Indeed it was possible they were going for the salmon and the sea trout. There was a joke in there somewhere about brown trout and German submarines, but no one felt like making the effort. Charles had fished with flies a great deal when they had lived in Paris but summered in Scotland—not to mention golden days camping with Andrew and Alexander and even Father on the rivers of northern California—and if he could not help but continue to remember it as a pleasant pastime, indeed as golden, he could no longer find the time or rather the inclination to find the time to go fishing. Strangely, he could no longer even imagine himself standing in a river making a cast. He could see such a picture—could not help but do so, but it wasn’t himself he was seeing: it was a kind of photograph of Charles Minot, someone he had once known but lost touch with. An old friend, if he could be said, as the quaint old saying had it, to have had any friends. A character he had played, more likely, the idea of which still made him nervous, alert, ready for performance. He knew he ought to examine that inability to truly imagine himself fishing, but chose not to—or rather, he could admit it, was afraid of it—as it appeared to have something to do with wishing to fish in the dark. The dazzling dark of the Sufis, the dark light of the Gnostics, he thought. Was that a good, true image, from Zoroaster’s Good Mind? Or was it a bad image, from the Destructive Mind of a Person of the Lie? What he believed, secretly and more deeply than he thought possible, was that in the pitiful understanding of men, universal darkness was called celestial light.
Because they were afraid of the dark.
Because they were Bronze Age bullies and nitwits who worshipped the sun.
The Devil lives in darkness because he hates the light? Demons crouch in dark corners? He begged to differ: the Devil lived in merciless light, light that showed through bodies, that exposed everything to everybody, that extended into space, a line, a bit of geometry that winked out once it left a man’s weak and suffering mind and entered the super-abundant emptiness of the heaven he could not imagine, could not perceive, but which he would come into, be born into, just as he had been born into life and light.
He had seen this light at work: it had destroyed Little Joe. He was crouching in the dark and he was not a demon and the light had destroyed him.
He could quote Tennyson, if anybody wanted to get tough with him:
“Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
Forever and ever when I move.”
Heaven was dark.
Heaven was a dark theater.
A dark theater, the lights of which picked out Evil.
The mounted policemen began cantering toward the little platform stage that the antiwar people had erected. The crowd, entirely pro-war as far as Charles could tell, was either unwilling or unable to disperse. People, mostly young men and boys, ran here and there and shouted. Charles thought he heard screaming as well. Distant screaming, which was hard to be sure of. In all likelihood it was feigned screaming, coming from behind and below him in the brand-new theater that Mother and Father had built for him—it was nearly impossible for them not to, if you understood that it was simply a consequence of rebuilding the city—exactly where the old theater had stood. He stayed with his arms spread and his hands on the handles of the French windows as if he had just flung them open and was going address the nation, until the crowds, dispersing and gathering and dispersing, were gone. Everybody seemed to be laughing, no matter what they were doing: getting smacked with a baton across the back of the head, watching someone else get smacked with a baton across the back of the head, smacking someone with a baton across the back of the head. It made no sense. Mounted policemen had made their way through group after group, but it had seemed like a carnival. He had heard screaming, he was sure of it, but had seen no one lying in a pool of blood, within a circle of strangers. The sun was setting, and in the deep clear twilight some fireworks