City of God (15 page)

There is one more thing: The Germans had ordered that the body be left hanging on public display for twenty-four hours. An Orthodox rabbi found this an intolerable impiety. He came to the council office
and demanded that something be done about it. Mr. Barbanel lost his temper. “An impiety!” he shouted. “Tell me, what isn't an impiety! To have murdered him, what was that—you have another word for that?” The rabbi turned on his heels and ran off. He went to the square along with another man, a helper who carried a white shroud. They climbed the platform and were in the act of cutting down the body when a German guard raised his carbine and shot them both dead.

—The planet earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoffs, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle, and mineral crust. We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granules salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life. Dead cellular matter flung up from the seas fertilized the rock soil. We are a blue oasis in black space, cocooned in our atmosphere of nutrient gases. We look peaceful but we are not. We are a planet of water and rock, sand and silt and soil. The tectonic plates under the earth's crust move and shift about, breaking the landmass into continents that float and change their shape over eons. The plates collide, ride one over another, crack, and great upheavals of the sea floor rise gasping into mountain ranges, enormous volcanoes in the seafloor create islands that bob up in the oceans, the earth's crust quakes, shivers us into different shapes, we buckle and cleave, storms assail our heavens, our mountains shake thunderous avalanches of snow down upon our valleys, our Arctic and Antarctic ice floes crack like the bones of God, our wind-worn dunes of desert pile up to bury us, maniac tornadoes fling us about and thump us against the ground like rag dolls, great floods of viscous burning lava bury our villages, and in all this fury of planetary self-fulfillment, we
spin about an axis and roll around the sun, and our oceans are pulled and pushed by lunar tides, our oceans roll in waves which exist apart from the water they pass through, our atmospheres are shot through with electromagnetic frequencies, and we stand abroad our terrains totally magnetized by the iron core at our center, with our skies at night tumbling with asteroids and flashing with the inflamed boreal particles of solar winds that flare like the luminous eyes of saber-toothed tigers circling the darkness beyond our fire.

What a merry planet, everything said and done. For isn't it, after all, livable?

—belted kingfisher, a small diving bird with an overlarge, probably swelled, head and an absurd regal bearing conferred by the black band around his neck: he has beaked a baby bluefish and now whaps it several times on the piling. Whap whap. Kills it dead. Tosses it in the air and catches it on the vertical so that it slides down his gullet smoothly. Given his competence, the little kingfisher has a right to be self-important. Certainly not disposed to make invidious comparisons with diving birds five times his size, the osprey, for example, who can hover high up, wing-beating in place, and, seeing a shadow in the water, drop out of the sky like a stone.

—Of course there can be no secular Amphitryon. The credible impersonation of the husband can be possible only via a species of magic given to a mischievous, horny god like Zeus. To attribute such ambition to a man, even one as malign and talented as this fellow is, is to grind your way into a tank story clumsy, top-heavy with armament, and clanking forward on the treads of its plot. That's why it's a movie. It concludes something like this: Our seducer-usurper during the course of his life of covert adventure had spent some time with the Jivaro tribe of headhunters in the upper Amazon country near the Peruvian-Ecuadoran border. He had learned their ways from one of
the elders. Now, with the unseated husband a constant annoyance, a vengeful fighter, unwilling to accept his defeat, having among other things found the means to buy a secondhand van to live in which he parks on the street in front of the dark-hearted couple's estate, and successfully representing himself in court as having that right as a citizen of parking on a public street in daylight hours, and having legally argued his further right to picket the house with placards and handbills explaining his unjust fate, and in all ways having managed to promote a continuation of the story, even to the point of getting a feature article written about himself as an interesting eccentric in the local suburban newspaper. . . he summons forth from the imposturing husband a degree of retribution inconceivable from someone who had not spent time off the edges of civilization.

The generous usurper invites the aggrieved and beggared CEO into the great house and without ceremony kills him. He decapitates the corpse and discards the body. Never mind the details of that. The details of what he does with the head are more interesting.

You don't want the skull, of course. You run your knife up the back of the neck to the crown and then you peel off the face and scalp, a time-consuming process when done right, because you don't want to pull the features out of shape. The skull, including teeth and eyes, discarded, you are left with your basic material.

You turn the face skin inside-out and sew up the eyelids. Then you stitch the lips together and, last, after turning the skin right-side-out, sew up the incision you made up the back of the head until you have a pouch about as big as the original head. You drop this into boiling water, to which some herbs I cannot name lest this become an instruction manual for some idiot. . . are added to keep the hair from falling out. After several hours the pouch is approximately one third its former size.

And in this shrunken manner the beggared CEO is presented on an outstretched palm as a trophy to his stolen and enslaved wife, who, just before committing suicide, calls the police to tell them her husband has murdered the derelict camped outside their house and that they will have all the evidence they need hanging from a string of beads around her neck. Ironically enough, the shrunken head now resembles the dark-hearted impostor as he was before his cosmetic surgery, more than the husband before his shrinking, so as if God is an
épée of irony, this sharpest of points is delivered posthumously to the impostor, who, having been established as a missing person since his cosmetic crossover, is now brought to trial as the murderer of himself.

And what was proposed as a tale of subtle existential horror turns out after all to be a simple waxworks melodrama, wherein the author, like his villain, gets his just deserts. And if it is true that a sociopath can never show restraint but must go on and on in ever greater amplification of his evil until he is destroyed, so must an author honor the character of his idea and allow it to express itself in all its wretched insufficiency until it too reaches its miserable

end.

—1. I number my thoughts for the sake of clarity so that each thought rings clearly and in its own distinct pitch, like a bell.

1.01. In other words I propose to think only in facts. (This in itself is not a fact.)

2. I have the name Ludwig Wittgenstein.

3. Ludwig is a common German name.

4. I believe, however, I was named after Ludwig van Beethoven.

5. While the truth of (4.) cannot be verified, my belief that it is true is a fact.

5.01. My belief is a reasonable inference from the fact that my mother was a pianist and believed it a fact that music was essential to life. . .

5.11.. . . and that my older brother Paul became a concert pianist. . .

5.21.. . . and that my older and suicidal brother Hans was a musical prodigy. . .

5.31.. . . and that my sisters Hermine, Helene, and Margarete were all gifted or musically literate. . .

5.41.. . . and that Brahms and Mahler were friends of my parents and came to play music in our home.

5.51. Brahms, Mahler, my parents, and everyone I knew believed it to be a fact that Beethoven was the greatest of all musical geniuses.

5.61. I believed that in being named after a genius, I myself was a designated genius.

6. It is a fact that my parents and siblings did not share my belief.

6.01. They were led to their conclusion by the fact that I did not speak until I was four years old.

7. I was able to speak long before this but was so appalled by the world in which I found myself that I chose silence.

7.01. Ever since, in all the philosophy I have done, I have distinguished the truths that can be spoken from the truths that exist only in silence.

7.02. Ever since, in all the philosophy I have done, I have argued that the truths of silence, when spoken, are no longer true.

8. My first memory is of the grand staircase in my home in the Alleegasse, Vienna.

8.01. It rose on thirty-four marble steps ten feet wide.

8.02. It was carpeted in a luxurious red, green, and white nap—the colors of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

8.03. The carpet was held to the bottom of each riser by a shining brass rod.

8.1. Railings with alabaster balusters in the shape of slender vases lined each landing.

8.12. Side walls of pink Carrara marble provided reflections, to infinity, of a person ascending to the great foyer.

8.2. The ceilings were framed in carved and gilded cove moldings.

8.21. They were frescoed in patterns of Persian elements.

8.3. At the top of the staircase hung an immense tapestry of gentlemen in silk tights and ladies in broad-brimmed hats and hoop skirts and parasols posed before a woods, with thick pink clouds and a pale blue sky over them.