A Creed for the Third Millennium (17 page)

'I would tell them to get started on
tomorrow, Judith! I would tell them only they themselves can throw off this
millennial neurosis, by thinking positively and living positively. They have to
realize that today we must suffer, because more passed away with the old
millennium than just a milestone passed. Today we must suffer, and nostalgia is
the common enemy. I would tell them that the tomorrow of our children's
children's children can be more beautiful and more worthwhile than any age since
the dawn of Man —
if
we start to make it so now. I would tell them that
the one thing they cannot do is produce their pitifully few children in the old
mood of indulgence and relaxation. Our children and their children and every
generation thereafter must be
strong.
They must be reared to obtain their
pride out of their own accomplishments and their own hard work; they must not be
reared to rest on their parents' laurels. And I would tell every American of
every generation, including my own, not to give away too freely what they have
worked so hard to win. Because it will not earn them the gratitude and
friendship they imagine it must, even from their own children.'

'Well and good. You're advocating work,
self-help, and a positive attitude towards the future,' she said thoughtfully.
'So far not very original.'

'Of course it's not!' he snapped,
nettled. 'Common sense never is original! And what's so
desirable about originality, anyway? Sometimes it's the oldest and hoariest
commonplaces that people see least clearly, because everyone who ought to be
guiding the people is trying so desperately hard to be original! Common sense is
common sense is common sense, men have owned it since men were!'

'Granted. Bear with me, Joshua, I'm not
playing Devil's advocate for kicks. Go on, what else would you tell
them?'

His voice dropped to rumbling, purring
warmth. 'I would tell them they are loved. No one seems to tell them they are
loved any more. That's a large part of the trouble. Modern administrations are
efficient, caring, dedicated. But they dismiss love the way an insecure and weak
man will neglect to tell his wife or his mistress that he loves her because, he
will say defensively, surely she ought to know that without being told. But oh,
Judith, we
all
need to be told we are loved! To be told you are loved
lights up the day! So, I would tell them they are loved. I would tell them they
are not evil, they are not festering with sin, they are not beneath contempt,
they are not simple nuisance value. I would tell them that they already have
every resource they need in order to save themselves and make a better
world.'

'Concentrate on this world rather than
the next?'

'Yes. I would try to make them see that
God put them here for a purpose, and that that purpose is to make something of
the world He put them in, not channel their thoughts into an existence they can
only enter by leaving this world, by dying. Too many people are so busy earning
salvation in the next life that they only end by screwing this one
up.'

'You're drifting from the point,' she
said, mostly to needle him; she wanted to see how well he coped with extreme and
niggling scepticism.

'I'm groping, I'm groping, I'm groping!'
he said between his teeth, pounding his fists on his knees three times in time
to his words. Then he sucked in a huge breath, which seemed to calm him, and
when he spoke his voice was stern. 'Judith, when people turn to me for help,
they look at me with a plea for help in their eyes, and that's so easy! Where
you are looking at me the way you'd look at a specimen under a microscope, and I
don't even know why the hell I sit here putting up with it! You're not
interested in my views about God or Man, you're only interested in — what exactly
are
you interested in? What kind of things do
interest you? Why do I interest you, because apparently I do, and I shouldn't!
You seem to know so goddam much about me, and I know nothing about you! You're a
— a — a mystery!'

'I'm interested in setting the world to
rights,' she said coolly. 'Maybe not the whole world. Just our part of it,
America.'

'I can believe that, but it answers
nothing.'

'There will be time later to worry about
me. Right now it's what you are that's important.'

'Why?'

'I'll tell you in a minute, if you'll
tell me more about you and what you are and what you think.'

He gave a Bronx cheer, loud and derisive.
'Well, if you insist on tagging me, call me a meliorist.'

It hurt to admit he had used a word she
didn't know, but her curiosity was too great for her to salve her dignity by
letting the word go by now and looking it up later. 'A meliorist?' she
asked.

'One who believes the world can be made
an infinitely better place through the efforts of Man rather than through the
intercession of God.'

'And you believe that?'

'Of course.'

'Yet
you also believe in
God?'

'Oh, I'm sure there's God,' he said very
seriously.

'I notice that you never preface God with
the indefinite article. Never "a" God. Simply — God.'

'God is
not
indefinite, Judith.
God just is.'

'Oh, fuck all this, I'm getting nowhere!'
she said violently, and leaped to her feet so that she could look down into his
face, her own face pointed and wide-browed because she had tilted its chin
down.

He laughed up at her joyously. 'Oh,
fantastic! I've found a chink in your armour at last!'

'No you have not!' She was angry. 'I
don't have any armour! Do you want to hear a riddle?'

'A riddle about what?'

'If you answer it, Joshua Christian, you
will know everything there is to know about Judith Carriol.'

'This I've got to hear. Hit
me!'

'Bright is the ring of
words

When the right man rings them, Fair
the fall of songs

When the singer sings them. Still they
are carolled and said
—

On wings they are carried — After the
singer is dead

And the maker buried.'

He looked blank, said nothing.

'Stumped?'

'You're just getting back at me for using
a word you didn't know,' he said, only half joking.

'Not at all. Can't you solve
it?'

'I'm no Oedipus. It's pretty, but
unintelligible.'

'All right then, I'll be less abstruse.
But not about me. About you. Why I'm so interested in you.'

He grew immediately attentive and
serious. 'This I've got to hear. Shoot.'

'You're a man of ideas, Joshua Christian.
Important and I venture to say imperishable ideas. I'm not a person of that kind
myself. Oh, I do have ideas, but

130

mostly about how to implement and channel
other people's original thought. I want you to write a book.'

That surprised him. He got to his feet
and stood not beside her but lower on the slope, so that they saw eye to eye. 'I
can't, Judith.'

'There are ghosts,' she said, turning
away and commencing to walk carefully down the slope.

He followed.
'Ghosts?'
He
interpreted the word in its supernatural sense, so far from her train of thought
was he.

'Oh, Joshua! Not spectres! People who
write books for other people.'

'A ghoulish word for a ghoulish
occupation.'

'You have a great deal to offer people,
and you should be offering it to more than the small amount of people you can
see in clinic. So, since you feel you can't write, why not a ghost?'

'I do have a lot to offer people, I know
that. But only in the flesh.'

'Nonsense! Think of it this way. At the
moment the only people you can help are a small number in Holloman. I agree, you
did exactly the right thing in not making your clinic larger and your patient
intake so big you'd never be able to keep track of them all yourself. Your kind
of treatment programme is intensely personal, and it depends on you rather than
on any training you could give to other therapists. I exclude your family,
because they're a special case, they're really offshoots of you. But a book —
not a textbook for the experts, just a simple book for the people out there who
desperately need to hear the message you
want
to disseminate — such a
book would be a godsend! You can put yourself into it in a way you can't in any
other form except personally, and we have already admitted the limitations of
that approach. A book can reach literally millions of people. With a book you
could have a profound effect on millennial neurosis throughout the country. And
maybe the world when it's ready to hear. You say they
need desperately to be told they're loved, and that no one is telling them?
Well, you tell them! In your book! Joshua, a book is the only
answer!'

'A fine idea, I'll give you that, but
impossible! I wouldn't even know how to begin.'

'I can show you how to begin,' she said
persuasively. 'For that matter, I can even show you how to end. Oh, I don't mean
I would write the book for you! But I can find you a publisher, and a publisher
will find exactly the right person to collaborate with you on a
book.'

He chewed his lip, torn between eagerness
and fear. A chance at last. And what a chance! How many people might he reach
through a book? But if it didn't work, would he only succeed in making matters
worse? Wasn't it better to continue to help the little number he did help in
Holloman than to interfere with the lives and welfare of many thousands of
people he would never even know by name? A book could reach people, yes, and it
was personal provided he made sure it said what he wanted to say, yes. But it
wasn't like seeing people in a clinic situation.

'I don't think I want that kind of
responsibility,' he said soberly.

You do, you know! You love
responsibility, you thrive on it. Be honest with yourself, Joshua! What really
turns you off the whole idea is that you're not sure it will truly be your book,
because you'll need help in physically writing it. That's understandable,
because you're as much a doer as you are a thinker. Look, the reason I want this
book from you is because your ideas are so worthwhile. And you've got the guts
to carry a spiritual message. That's rare these days, and I agree with you, I
think people need spiritual help more than any other kind. I don't blame you for
being scared,' she said, her eyes and her face earnest as she turned them up to
search his. 'But you
must
produce that book, Joshua! It is the beginning of the
way to reach the people.'

Such a beautiful world! He gazed around
it, trying to give himself new, innocent eyes. This was the world he had tried
and would try his hardest to help preserve, to see it at some distant date in
the future once again the paradise of loveliness and comfort it should be and
probably used to be before Man overran it. Man could learn! Man must learn! And
underneath his fear and doubt he knew that he, Joshua Christian, had a very real
and very significant contribution to make. He had always known that. When they
wrote of men like Napoleon and Caesar they referred to it as a 'sense of
destiny'. He had that sense, too. But he didn't want to think of himself as a
Napoleon or a Caesar! He didn't want to feel chosen and special and privileged.
He didn't want to think that he could be mistaken enough to interpret his own
ability as better than anybody else's. Fatal, to start manipulating the lives of
others in the belief that your own role as a chosen one qualified you to do so —
nay, demanded that you do so! And yet and yet and yet… What if this opportunity
being offered to him now was the right opportunity, the golden knocking
one-and-only opportunity that if ignored would never come again? What if he
turned this chance down and as a result his country went down into ashes? When
maybe — just
maybe
— he could have helped significantly to save
it.

Did he dare think of his future in those
terms? But had he not already thought of such a mission, time and time again in
his dreams and of late in his waking hours as well? Oh yes he had, but only, he
told himself, now frantic for excuses, as a child dreams of chocolate factories
and no school and a self-exercising self-feeding puppy. Not as a reality! Not
out of a sense of his own exclusiveness, except deep inside where surely every
man and every women ever born also thought of himself and herself as uniquely
exclusive and precious.

What if he did turn this opportunity down
and his country did perish because its people wandered alone and unguided too
long? When maybe — just maybe — he might have made the contribution that saved it
and them? Or maybe he was meant to serve as a precursor for some other man, a
stronger and better man than he, but for whom he was necessary to pave the way…
After all, he thought, chewing his lip and staring out at dogs and birds gambolling in the sunny park, could any contribution he possibly had to make
screw the world up worse than it already was? Could anything he was capable of
doing possibly make so much difference? Wasn't thinking it might merely another
form of exclusivity? Oh, could could could could could might might might maybe
maybe maybe maybe…
If!