‘When we are filled with the Holy Spirit,’ said Peter, ‘we can be more than ourselves: we can be God in action.’
Jesus Lover Five was unconvinced. ‘God never die,’ she said. ‘We die.’
‘Our bodies die,’ said Peter. ‘Our souls live for ever.’
Jesus Lover Five pointed a gloved finger straight at Peter’s torso. ‘Your body no??? die,’ she said.
‘Of course it will die,’ said Peter. ‘I’m just flesh and blood like anyone else.’ He certainly felt his flesh-and-bloodness now. The sun was giving him a headache, his buttocks were going numb and he needed to pee. After a some hesitation, he relaxed his bladder and allowed the urine to flow out onto the soil. That was the way it was done here; no point being precious about it.
Jesus Lover Five had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg one of those Lutheran-flavoured fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies – magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure – and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was death, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.
‘Tell me,’ he said to those assembled. ‘What have you heard about life after death?’
Jesus Lover One, in his self-appointed role as custodian of the Oasans’ history in the faith, spoke up.
‘Corinthian.’
It took Peter a while to recognise the word – intimately familiar to him, and yet so unexpected here and now. ‘Corinthians, yes,’ he said.
There was a pause.
‘Corinthian,’ Jesus Lover One said again. ‘Give word from the Book.’
Peter consulted the Bible in his head, located Corinthians 15:54, but it wasn’t a passage he’d ever felt moved to quote in his sermons, so the exact wording was indistinct – something corruptible something-something incorruption . . . The next verse was memorable enough, one of those Bible nuggets that everybody knew even if they ascribed it to Shakespeare, but he figured Jesus Lover One wanted more than a one-liner.
With a grunt of effort, he got to his feet. A hum of anticipation went through the crowd as he walked to his rucksack and extracted the Book from its plastic sheath. The gold-embossed lettering flashed in the sun. He remained standing, to give his muscles a change of tension, as he flicked the pages.
‘So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,’ he recited, ‘and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’
Reading the words aloud, Peter reconnected with why he hadn’t ever used them in his sermons. The sentiments were sound enough but the rhetoric was a bit more bombastic than he felt comfortable with. To do those words justice, you’d need a highly dramatic delivery, a touch of thespian pomp, and he just wasn’t that kind of orator. Low-key sincerity was more his style.
‘What Paul is saying here,’ he explained, ‘is that when we give our souls to Christ, the part of us that dies and decays – the body – is clothed with something that cannot die or decay – the eternal spirit. So we have nothing to fear from death.’
‘Nothing,’ echoed several of the Oasans. ‘Fear.’
Peter’s second sojourn in the place USIC called Freaktown was as bewildering and exciting as the first. He got to know the Oasans better – that was to be expected – but he also saw changes in himself, changes he couldn’t articulate but which felt profound and important. Just as the atmosphere penetrated his clothes and seemed to pass through his skin, something unfamiliar was permeating his head, soaking into his mind. It wasn’t in the least sinister. It was as benign as benign could be.
Not all of it was enjoyable, though. Halfway into his stay, Peter went through a strange phase which, looking back on it afterwards, he could only call the Crying Jag. It happened during one of the long, long nights and he woke up somewhere in the middle of it with tears in his eyes, not knowing what he had dreamt to make him weep. Then, for hours and hours, he continued to cry. Upsurges of sorrow just kept pumping through his bloodstream, as if administered at medically supervised intervals by a gadget inside his body. He cried about the weirdest things, things he had long forgotten, things he would not have imagined could rank very high in his roll-call of griefs.
He cried for the tadpoles he’d kept in a jar when he was a kid, the ones that might have grown into frogs if he’d left them safe in their pond instead of watching them turn to grey sludge. He cried for Cleo the cat, stiff on the kitchen floor, her matted chin stuck to dried gravy on the rim of her plate. He cried for lunch money he’d lost on the way to school; he cried for a stolen bicycle, recalling the exact feel of its rubbery handles in his palms. He cried for the bullied classmate who killed herself after her tormenters squirted ketchup in her hair; he cried for the swallow that flew against his bedroom window and fell lifeless to the concrete far below; he cried for the magazines that kept arriving for his father each month, shrinkwrapped, long after his father had left home; he cried for Mr Ali’s corner newsagency and off-licence that went out of business; he cried for the hapless anti-war marchers pushing on through the bucketing rain, their placards drooping, their children sullen.
He cried about the ‘Quilts For Peace’ that his mother sewed for charity auctions. Even when her fellow Quakers took pity and put in a few bids, those quilts never fetched much because they were gaudy patchworks that clashed with every décor known to civilised man. He cried for the quilts that had gone unsold and he cried for the quilts that had found a home and he cried for the way his mother had explained, with such lonely enthusiasm, that all the colours symbolised national flags and the blue and white could be Israel or Argentina and the red polka dots were Japan and the green, yellow and red stripes with the stars in the middle could be Ethiopia, Senegal, Ghana or Cameroon depending on which way you were sleeping.
He cried about his Cubs uniform, eaten by silverfish. Oh, how he cried about that. Each vanished thread of fibre, each pathetic little hole in the useless garments, caused a swelling in his chest and stung his eyes anew. He cried about not having known that the final time he attended the Scout hall was the final time. Someone should have told him.
He cried about stuff that had happened to Bea, too. The family photograph of her when she was six, with a livid rectangular rash across her mouth and cheeks, caused by the adhesive tape. How could someone do that to a kid? He cried about her doing her homework in the toilet while the kitchen was full of strangers and her bedroom was out of bounds. He cried about other incidents from Bea’s childhood as well; all of them from before he met her. It was as though different vintages of sadness were stored in different parts of his mind, stacked chronologically, and his tear ducts were on the end of electrical wires that didn’t touch any recent decades – just went straight to the distant past. The Bea he wept for was a pretty little ghost conjured up from his wife’s stash of photos and anecdotes, but no less pitiable for that.
Towards the end of his weeping fit, he cried about the coin collection his father had given him. It was shop-bought but serious, a handsomely packaged starter set that included a French franc, an Italian lira, a 10-drachma bit, a German 50-pfennig with a woman planting a seedling on it, and other commonplace treasures which, to a clueless boy, seemed like relics from an ancient epoch, the prehistoric empire of numismatics. Ah, happy innocence . . . but not long afterwards a schoolfriend murmured in his ear, serpent-like, that this prissy little collection was not valuable at all, and persuaded him to swap the lot for a single coin that had been minted, he said, in 333 AD. It was misshapen and corroded but it had a helmeted warrior engraved on it and Peter fell under its spell. His father was furious, when he found out. He kept saying ‘If genuine . . . ’, ‘If genuine . . . ’ in a fastidiously dubious tone, and lecturing Peter about the extreme commonness of Constantine copper coins, and how damaged this one was, and how the whole damn business of collecting was infested with fakery. Peter kept protesting, hotly, ‘You weren’t there!’, referring not just to the reign of Constantine but also to the moment when a small, impressionable boy was defeated by a bigger, cleverer one. For years, that poisonous repetition of ‘If genuine . . . ’ festered in his mind, proof of everything that was creepy and cold about his father. By the time Peter was ready to understand that the quarrel was bluster and that his dad had simply been hurt, the old man was in his grave.
About all these things and more, Peter wept. Then he felt better, as if purged. His raw eyelids, which would have needed careful pampering if he’d been anywhere but here, were soothed by the oily moistness of the warm air. His head, which had started to pound towards the end of his crying jag, felt light and pleasantly anaesthetised.
‘A very long ??ong,’ said Jesus Lover Five, sitting with her back against the lectern. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. This wasn’t the first time she’d come to the church to visit him, at an hour when most others of her kind were sleeping.
‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he asked, heaving himself up on one elbow. He could barely see her; the entire church was lit with nothing more powerful than a couple of oil flames floating in ceramic soup-bowls: toy braziers.
‘Awake,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.
He replayed her comment in his head. A very long song. Evidently, to her, his weeping sounded no different from singing. The distress in his voice was lost in translation; she heard only the horn-like music of whimpering, the rhythm of sobs. Maybe she would have liked to join in, but couldn’t make out any words.
‘I was remembering things from long ago,’ he explained.
‘Long ago,’ she echoed. Then: ‘Long ago, the Lord ??aid ???o I??rael, I have loved you, my people.’
The quote from Jeremiah surprised him, not because she had managed to memorise it, but because it was from a more modern translation than the King James – the New Living, if he wasn’t mistaken. Did Kurtzberg pick and choose between different Bibles? In the King James, ‘long ago’ was ‘of old’, while the original Hebrew meant something more like ‘from afar’.
Long ago and far away . . . maybe they were the same thing after all. Rousing himself from his scholarly fog, he opened his mouth to ask Jesus Lover Five why she had quoted that bit of Scripture, what it meant to her.
But Lover Five’s head was slumped onto her chest. Whatever the reason for her insomnia at home in her own bed, she had found sleep here, with him.
It was during his second sojourn with the Oasans, also, that Peter experienced his first death. His first dead Oasan, that is.
He still had no clear idea of the size of the settlement’s population, but was inclined to think that it might be a few thousand, and that the Jesus Lovers represented only a tiny minority of the souls living in this great hive of dwellings. Birth and death must surely be going on as normal inside those amber walls, the same as in any other big town, but he had no access to it – until, one day, Jesus Lover One came and told him that his mother had died.
‘My mother,’ he announced. ‘Dead.’