Slippage (47 page)

"Remember that," the man from northern Alabama said, and drove away into the night, knowing that if there was a memory that would last, it would be of the lesson in the moment; not of an older brother who had never existed.

Across the aisle an elderly black couple, deep into their fifties, were trying to spoon-feed their mentally impaired daughter. To the man from Beloit she appeared to be in her middle thirties. He tried to ignore the General Six Principle Baptist minister in the middle seat beside him, apparently a vegetarian or simply finicky beyond belief, who kept trying to give him foodstuffs off his flight tray. "Are you sure you wouldn't like this nice bit of roast beef?" the Reverend Carl Schrag said. "I haven't touched it. Here, you can take it with your own fork if you're concerned."

The man from Beloit turned away from the sight of creamed asparagus drooling from the side of the girl's mouth, to smile at the minister. "No, thank you very much. I have the fish. I don't eat meat."

The minister's face lit with camaraderie. "I agree absolutely completely! Flesh of the beast. Poor things. Stand all day and all night in tiny cubicles, in the dark, just fattened and fattened, all their color leached out, till they're slaughtered."

"Just like the women in the whorehouses in Kuwait," the man from Beloit said, noticing with impish pleasure the look of the affronted, the look of the doltish, the look of the utterly appalled that blasted the minister's composure.

"What did you say?!"
he demanded, fork trembling an inch from his mouth, speared baby carrots now forgotten.

"Oh, I'm awfully sorry," the man from Beloit said,
certainly
didn't mean to offend. It's just that the hideous parallel you drew...but perhaps you're unaware of the slave trade in white women that continues to this very day in many of the southeast Arabian sultanates..."

The minister's eyes rolled in his head. He had lost control of his motor functions. The man from Beloit reached over and gently pressed Carl Schrag's wrist. The minister's hand, bearing fork, slowly lowered. Transfixed, he simply stared.

The man from Beloit continued eating, and continued talking. "Yes, you see, slave-holding is still practiced in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Muscat, Buraimi, Kuwait, even Ethiopia. Oh, of course, in some of those places the practice has been legally and publicly abolished, yet in most of them the slaves have never been freed. In most of them, slave-buying, selling, holding, whipping, violating—perfectly acceptable by local law. Your food is getting cold."

The minister took a mouthful, continued to stare disbelievingly, like a bumblebee at the end of an entomologist's straight pin. What was this man
saying
to him!

Across the aisle, the young woman was trying to wrest the spoon from her father's hand. The elderly black mother wore an expression of stunned acceptance. They had been at this chore for at least half of their lives. The man from Beloit recognized the slope of shoulders, the caring and determination and futility in eyes and expressions, the practiced maneuverings of hands and implements around flailing body.

"But for the harems and brothels of these countries," he said to the minister, though still watching the people across the aisle, "Western women are highly prized. Blondes, redheads, Nordic types with incredibly long legs and blue eyes like cool fjords. Some of them are lured to the Middle East through ads in newspapers,
Variety,
that sort of thing. You know, 'Wanted: Dancers and Showgirls for chorus lines in Road Shows. See far places, high pay, exotic companions,' that sort of thing. And they just vanish. Or they're kidnapped right off the streets in European cities, often Marseilles. Next time you see them they're at a slave auction in Yemen."

The minister was gasping. "Why, I've never heard of such—"

"Oh, yes, absolutely," the man from Beloit said. "
Very
common. And many of them are sold into these harems, or dens of sexual fleshliness, where they're kept in pitch-black cells on soft mattresses, and they're fed a lot of carbohydrates to fatten them up—apparently these Arab potentates lust after pale pale suety vessels for their disgusting pleasures."

Rev. Schrag had gone the color of his glass of milk.

"And once they're kidnapped, well, that's it," the man from Beloit said, as he finished his fish in sauce. "We have almost no extradition recourse in such places; and the United States government, well, you can forget it; they can't chance offending one of those oil barons. You can imagine what value they place on some nameless eighteen-year-old farm girl from Iowa, stolen while visiting Berlin, as against the cost at the pump of higher gas tariffs."

He wiped his mouth, took the last sip of coffee light, and smiled sadly at the minister. "So you see, it was the awful parallel you drew with the roast beef." Rev. Schrag was bereft of response. "And what takes you so far from home, I presume you're going on somewhere after Paris?"

They were on a jet liner out of New York, bound for Paris, with connections to Jeddah, Riyadh, Cairo and Dubai.

Across the aisle, the girl in her middle thirties was mumbling to herself, playing with her hair and trying to figure out the swing latch that lowered the tray table. Her mother was looking out the port; her father was trying to mop up baby food from the seat and the girl's dress.

The minister was having difficulty righting himself. This man in the aisle seat beside him
seemed
to be spiritually kin, but in the name of Jesus what horrible obscenities! He tried to convince himself that it had been innocently spoken; he was always willing to give the benefit of the doubt. The man was very likely unsaved, but if we were to cut off all social congress with the less-than-righteous, why, we'd never be able to snag
anyone
from Satan's claws. He mustered a smile and replied, "I'm going to the Holy Land. I had several weeks I could have taken anywhere and, well, I've been meaning to do this journey for so long..."

"I understand perfectly," the man from Beloit said. "And where are you from? Where is your parish?"

"Senatobia, Mississippi," the minister said.

"Ah!" the man from Beloit said, with familiarity.

"Do you know it?" the minister asked, pleased now that he had given him the benefit of the doubt.

"Northwestern part of the state? Between Memphis and Oxford? Near Lake Arkabutla, isn't it?"

"Why, yes! You
do
know our little place!"

"No, sorry," the man from Beloit said, unbuckling his lap belt and standing. "Senatobia. Must be very small." He turned and went aft to the lavatory.

When he came back, ten minutes later, he walked past his row, noticing that Rev. Schrag was trying to work the crossword puzzle in the airline giveaway magazine, and he stood in the service alcove as the stewardesses racked and sent below the used dinner trays. He stood there and pretended to be selecting a magazine from the rack, but he studied the elderly couple and their child.

They had hooked her up with a Walkman, the earphones tied with a ribbon under her chin so she could not inadvertently knock the little gray foam earpieces loose. She was rocking back and forth, licking her lips, her eyes closed. Her mother and father were trying to complete their own meals, the food long since grown cold. He watched them and felt a great sadness take him. After a while, he returned to his seat.

Carl Schrag looked up as the man from Beloit buckled in. "That was in very poor taste, sir," he said. Stiffly.

"I agree," was the reply. "But let me ask you something. Just as a matter of theoretical surmise."

The minister closed the inflight magazine on his prolapsed tray-table, marking the crossword's location with his ballpoint pen. He sighed with resignation, turned halfway in his seat, and fixed his traveling companion with a look that had often commended rectitude to his parishioners. "Yes, and what would that be?"

"You believe in God, no doubt," he said.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I ask that only as a point of departure. I can see you're a man of the cloth, and so I know the answer is yes. But what I want to ask you is about gods, other gods, not God as
we
know Him."

"There is but
one
God, and His Son."

"Yes, I understand; and I agree absolutely. But let us for a moment consider those poor, benighted helots of heathen beliefs. Egyptians who believed in Ptah and Thoth and Amon; Mayas who worshipped Pepeu and Raxa Caculhá, the Thunderbolt; Vikings with their Odin and Loki and the rest; the Yellow River peoples and Kuan Ti, the god of war, and Kuan Yin, goddess of mercy; Altijira and Legba and Kwatee and Kronos. Gods, all of them. Strong gods, personable gods, effective gods. What about them? What do we do with them, now that their times are gone?"

Rev. Schrag stared at him evenly. He was on firm footing now. "I have no idea what you're talking about, sir. As I said: there is but one God, and Jehovah is His name; and His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior. All the rest of this is primitive demonology, cheap superstition. Pagan idolatry."

"Yes, of course," he said, reaching into the aisle to retrieve and hand back to the elderly black man the soft, frayed "blankie" his daughter had thrown to the industrial-strength carpet. "But let me have the benefit of your thinking on this, as a theologian, as a man of God who's pondered about such things. I need, well, some guidance here; some clear thinking, if you get my meaning.

"Take, for instance, the transition from Graeco-Roman polytheism to medieval Christianity. When we read of this momentous watershed in the history of the Western World, there is such a smug sense of
triumph,
whether we encounter it in Christian historians like Eusebius of Caesarea or Christian apologists such as Augustine, who got sainted for being a flack for Jesus—"

Rev. Schrag's eyes popped open, he tried to speak, coughed; he made inarticulate sounds; he foundered on a sound that was the fuh-fuh-fuh beginning of
flack;
and the man from Beloit made small of his abashed behavior, dismissing it with an impatient flutter of his hand and by continuing in the same tone: "We're men of the world here; we needn't pussyfoot around it. Augustine was nothing more nor less than a p.r. man for the politics of orthodoxy. These days, the belief that the elevation of Christianity to the position of an official state religion, instantly embraced, brooking no competition, was total, complete, immediate...well, it's monolithic. But it wasn't, as I understand it. I mean, even as late as 385, the emperor Theodosius was having a rough time interdicting belief in the pantheon of gods—"

His words had been coming so fast, so smoothly, that only now was the Rev. Schrag able to
interdict
the rococo syntax.

"Paganism! That's all it was! Ignorant savages sloughing through darkness toward the light of Jesus Christ!"

"Ah, yes certainly, no question about it, I agree absolutely wholeheartedly," the man from Beloit said, slicing through the minister's fustian so coolly it was as if Schrag had taken a breath mint rather than having popped his eyeballs. "But you see how driven you are to use the word 'paganism? Which was not, at least in the first instance, a concept that the 'pagans' applied to themselves, but one that evolved as a way of distinguishing the non-Christian survivals after the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine and subsequent..."

"These were
barbarians.
..barely able to tie their shoelaces...they painted their fundaments blue and ripped out each other's hearts and danced around campfires naked and ate each other's entrails...pagans...bar-
bare-
ians!"
His voice had spiraled to a level that was drawing attention from other passengers. The man from Beloit smiled awkwardly at the elderly black man across the aisle, but his attention could be held only an instant: his daughter was singsonging, over and over, "Ma'y tinkle, ma'y tinkle, ma'y tinkle."

He turned back to Rev. Schrag and said, "Well, there is
certainly
no condoning such behavior, particularly the part about painting their asses blue, but when you call them barbarians, I'm not sure you're aware of all the facts."

"Whuh
-what
facts?"

"Well, for instance, archaeologists working in Peru at sites such as Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeke and Sechin Alto, ten thousand freezing feet above sea level in the Andes, have found a culture that predates the Mayas by 2000 years and the Aztecs by 3000 years.

"Huge U-shaped temples ten storeys high; an enormous warehouse, bigger than a baseball field, it served as a food storage complex; the buildings gorgeously decorated with painted friezes of jaguars, spiders, serpents." He leaned in and whispered, "Their vivid colors preserved intact by the dry cold of the Andean atmosphere. Why do you think they would settle at that altitude, build a sophisticated civilization at the same time the Egyptians were building pyramids and the Sumerian city-states were flourishing, in such a grossly hostile region?

"Perhaps to get closer to the gods they deified? Do you think that's possible? What do you think about that, dropping the 'paganism' business, ass-painting notwithstanding? What do you think?"

"Will you
kindly
stop saying that!"

"Which part of it, the
paganism?"

"No, the other."

"Oh, you mean the part about how they painted—"