Ten Days in the Hills (69 page)

“The soldiers show up with the witch, planning to burn her at the stake in a clearing. The knight is quite excited by her reappearance, because this time she’s lucid, and able to tell him about the Devil. She asks him to look into her eyes, and she says that she sees the Devil everywhere. But in her eyes, he only sees terror, and all around them, he only sees the usual scene. Then the soldiers build the pyre and set it alight, and it’s clear that the girl will not be saved. They’ve broken her hands and tortured her, and she doesn’t want to recant, anyway. You have to say to yourself that of course the soldiers must look exactly like devils to her. After watching until they can’t stand it anymore, the knight and his friends leave. The girl is lashed to the framework, staring in horror at the bonfire, rigid with fear, and suddenly she relaxes and slumps to the side, and below her you see Death kneeling. It is he who has had mercy upon her, and preserved her from more agony. That’s when I realized that
The Seventh Seal
is a comic masterpiece.

“Pretty soon, it’s back to the chess game. By this time, the knight knows Death has him beaten. They play, and chat, and then Joseph notices them, and realizes that the knight’s opponent is Death. And the knight sees that the actor knows, so the knight happens to knock the pieces off the board, and while Death is replacing them, Mary and Joseph and the baby escape. Later, in the midst of a storm, the knight, the squire, his girl, the smith, and his wife come to the castle, where the knight’s wife has been waiting for them, and in the last scene, while they’re sitting at the table, reading from the book of Revelation, Death comes knocking at the door, and they all rise to greet him. Only the knight can’t stand it, and he can’t understand it, either. He puts his face in his hands and calls out to God, but the others stand quietly, and pretty soon, a shadow comes over them, one by one. In the very last scene, Joseph sees them dancing on the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the sky. And I saw why everyone loves this movie. It’s incredibly comforting, because it tells you that if you are in the presence of death long enough, it doesn’t matter whether life is meaningless or meaningful.”

Delphine looked at Cassie and said, “The knight, I could see, was reared like I was, to always be thinking about God and always be praying for the will to obey and do the right thing, because that’s how they disciplined us girls in those days. It was especially important for us little ‘Negro’ girls to be perfect, because, as far as we could tell from the behavior of the teachers, God was already not well disposed toward us. They said that God was merciful—that even though we were Negro girls, and not English girls, God was willing to take care of us if we did every single thing we were told. If we did every single thing we were told, and things still went wrong, well, we must have missed some little, crucial detail, and surely it was that very detail that God cared about above all others.” Her voice was even. “We were told that God had infinite mercy and was infinitely forgiving, but I realized even then that if we were to judge by the way our teachers treated us, that certainly could not be true, because ‘strait is the gate and narrow is the way.’ So of course the knight was afraid. He was afraid of God, not Death. But the others were smiling, because they didn’t have to worry about God.”

“It’s true,” said Paul, “that Jesus has a lot to answer for. My own view is that monotheism has been a pretty toxic idea for humanity. There is a lot of debate right now about whether humans have an inborn, biologically based propensity to belief in the Higher Being, or Beings, and if so, why that would be.”

“We talked about that in one of my anthro classes,” said Isabel. “I wrote a paper about how it’s all nurture. My theory was that since young humans require nurture and authority for such a long time, they can’t help constructing an image of authority in their minds that amalgamates all the authority figures that they experience early on, and then culture provides them with a method of naming that image and cultivating it. I tried to devise an experiment that would test if there is an inborn propensity to worship God, but my professor and I couldn’t think of a way to remove the presence of authority. I did get an A on the paper, though. She said it was ‘carefully thought out.’”

“There’s no real evidence that human civilizations do any better under polytheistic systems,” Paul went on in his usual careful, or, you might say, pedantic, way. “But it could be that the ritualized displays of human sacrifice that seem to have been ubiquitous in pre–Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions were more about poor technology than anything else. I guess I see the Trade Center victims and the bombing victims in Iraq as types of human sacrifice, the altar being the world stage, and Allah and God being the bloodthirsty deities who require propitiation. Did we talk about fetishes at one point?”

“We did,” said Zoe. Elena realized that she no longer called him “dear one.”

“Oh, good. Well, that idea seems to me apropos whenever religion comes up as an organized, public institution.”

Now everyone was quiet, as well they might be, thought Elena. A sigh came from Max, then from Isabel. Elena herself thought she might sigh, but what sort of sigh? Exhausted? Relieved? Uncertain? Silverware made little clinking sounds as it was placed on dishware. Elena looked at Simon. He had picked up the wine bottle and was perusing the label. He put the wine bottle down and smiled at her. She smiled back at him. Charlie was being quiet. Apparently, Charlie had approached Mike and Al with his investment proposal yesterday afternoon and been turned down not very graciously. Elena didn’t know what she felt about that. At any rate, Charlie was being so quiet that Elena was surprised when Cassie said to him, “Whatever you think about the war, do you really want to be all alone for it?”

And Charlie answered, “No.”

Max caught her eye.

Stoney said, “What did all you guys say when Jerry died?”

Right then, Cassie, who was sitting beside him, looked at him, then put her arm around him. She said, “Honey, we said, ‘Thank God.’ We said, ‘Thank God he lived, and thank God, given his illness, that he died, and thank God we knew him, because he was one of a kind.’”

Stoney looked at Max. Max said, “I would agree with that.”

Now Stoney burst into tears. After a moment, he put his elbows on the table, to either side of his plate, and put his head in his hands. It was sudden. Joe Blow passed the door, and everyone sat very still for a moment. Elena glanced around Paul at Isabel. Isabel was staring at Stoney, but not in shock or horror—more, Elena thought, in relief.

“Here’s a story, Stoney. And actually, it fits right in with this whole discussion,” said Max. He arranged his utensils neatly on his plate, then pushed his plate away. “When Jerry was your age, and I think you were about six—when was that? Early seventies sometime?—anyway, we all had bushy sideburns and lots of hair. I think I had a swashbuckler’s mustache myself. I didn’t know Jerry very well then. He’d picked me out as a hippie type, but a hippie from New York, one he could trust. This particular Saturday morning, he showed up at my apartment. He had on neatly pressed jeans and a nice shirt and polished shoes. I let him in anyway, and he said you had gone to Disneyland for the weekend with your cousins from New York, and since he had two whole days to himself, could we score some LSD? Somehow, he’d decided that I was the LSD type.”

Elena glanced at Simon, who was looking at Max with considerable interest. What was she going to say when he asked her directly if she had ever taken LSD? She tried to look unfazed by this aspect of Max’s story.

“I wasn’t as tuned in as Jerry thought, but I knew a guy in the music business who lived out in Malibu, and so we got into Jerry’s car and drove to his place, which was a ramshackle ranch house on a nice private piece of ground. As we drove, Jerry started looking neater and neater, and less and less cool, and I just kept wondering if my friends would think he was a drug agent or not, but it turned out, when I told my friend that Jerry was a
movie
agent, he practically fell to his knees in gratitude that Jerry should come to his humble abode, and so there we were. I remember they had these tiny orange pills, and they called them ‘sweet tangerines.’ We each took one.

“The house was full of people. Some of the girls were smoking marijuana and baking chocolate-chip cookies, which of course the guys were eating practically off the hot baking pans. Anyway, I kept my eye on Jerry, who was walking around the yard and the gardens, staring at the poppies and the ceanothus and the Indian paintbrush and oohing and aahing the way you did. I would go out the front door, walk around with him for a while, then come in the back door, and every time I came in, one of the girls would be opening the oven and pulling out a fresh pan of cookies. I thought it was a miracle, and what was especially miraculous was that on each pan the cookies were fewer and bigger, until I was amazed to come in one last time and discover that she was opening the oven and pulling out a pan, and on it there was
one big cookie
!”

Paul and Charlie laughed.

“I took this as some sort of sign that we were supposed to leave, so we got into the car.”

“Oh dear,” Elena could not help remarking.

“Well. We didn’t get far. Maybe a mile, because Jerry wanted to stop and wander around a small park. So we did that for a while: we lay down and watched the clouds. For me, they kept turning into pyramids. Jerry kept talking about glaciers, so I think he was seeing something different. He couldn’t believe how slowly they moved. Anyway, we were just sitting there, letting the time pass, and I saw a guy come into the park with a couple of dogs. Jerry had taken off his glasses, so he didn’t notice them for a bit, and then he did. Jerry liked dogs, so, as soon as he noticed them, he called out to them. They were Dobermans, and they were friendly. When he hailed them, they turned and came running over. I saw that there was something wrong with the one right away, but Jerry was tremendously nearsighted, so it wasn’t until the dogs were right next to him that he saw that one of them was sleek and muscular and gorgeous, black and tan, while the other one was a skeleton. You could count every rib and every vertebra. And it came right up to him and licked him on the face. He just sat up and started yelling, ‘What’s the matter with this dog? What’s the matter with this dog?’

“The owner was way behind the dogs, and when he got to us, huffing and puffing, Jerry was about out of his mind, petting the skeletal dog and almost crying, he was so upset. The owner apologized, and said that the dog had been poisoned, and had gotten out of the pet hospital a few days before, and hadn’t gained any weight back yet. So Jerry shut up, and the owner walked away with the dogs. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Jerry fell back onto the grass, panting, and when I got around to asking him what was going on, which always took a while when you were doing acid, he said, ‘That was Life and Death! I saw Life and Death! I called them to me without knowing which was which, and they both came running! And Death was the friendlier one!’ I think I said, ‘Death was the female,’ and he said, ‘Exactly!’ But he was really shook. Finally, I said, ‘They were dogs. One of them was poisoned.’ And he said, ‘That doesn’t prevent them from meaning something.’”

Stoney had stopped weeping while Max was telling this story. Now he said, “I never heard he did anything but hit the bottle every so often. Well, that and smoke three packs a day.”

“I don’t think LSD suited him very well. Anyway, he was older than I was, and he had responsibilities. I don’t know exactly what that day meant to him as the years passed, but he asked me if I remembered it every so often. That’s all I know.”

“That doesn’t prevent it from meaning something,” said Zoe.

Stoney looked at her.

They had finished their main course, and now Monique and Marya came in and began clearing the plates. Elena scrutinized Monique for a moment, then decided for the millionth time in her life to stop being self-conscious. But then, as Monique passed behind Simon, she touched his shoulder. It was just the briefest, most fleeting touch, but it was definitely intended, and it gave Elena an uncanny feeling. She thought right then that Simon probably had seen a dead body, but that he would never tell her about it.

Joe Blow said, “May I bring anyone coffee?”

Elena looked around the table. Delphine was shaking her head. Cassie said, “Not for me.” She was reaching under her chair for her handbag. Simon was already getting up from his seat. Isabel and Stoney were gazing at one another. Paul had folded his napkin and placed it on the table. Zoe took a deep breath and then released it, all the while staring out the window. Max leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, which pushed back his chair. Charlie said, “Well, I…” Elena shook her head and gave Joe Blow a cordial, and grateful, smile. She said, “No, thank you, Joe. You-all have been wonderful.”

Simon said, “Well, yeah!”

Stoney said, “We really ought
to take one last stroll around, given the fact that we might not come back here, and even if we do, it won’t be the same, and even if it is, we won’t be the same.”