The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (10 page)

“Yes,” Paul said, feeling like he was emotionally gasping for breath.

“People read to know that they are not alone, that others have had the same doubts and thoughts and fears as they. That others are alive, too. It's that first step, again.”

“Loneliness.”

“Yes, Paul. And then comes love. You realize that all the love you feel is really the love of God, shining through the cracks opened by contact with others. Just like all light on this Earth started as the light of the sun, even the fire there,” he pointed to the wood fire that Juan was tending, “which first fell as sun light on the ground to grow the trees. Al light is from the sun. Al love is from God. There is no love which is not God's love.”

“But what about God's wrath?” Paul said, remembering his years attending church.

“What father, if his son asked him for a fish, would give him a stone?” Joshua said, and Paul recognized the quote from Jesus. “God's wrath is a concept that comes from the Gnostic beliefs, from the anthropomorphic gods men create. The Mystic knows that God's grace–another way to say God's love–is infinite. Only those who think that grace is finite and limited tremble before the choices of life. But when you realize that grace is infinite and absolutely unending, and you learn to listen to your heart for the peace that comes with knowing and loving your Creator and the creation, then the road of life is infinitely full and without fear.”

“But so many people say we should fear God.”

Joshua smiled. “They are the ones who have not touched the soul of The Creator of the Universe. As Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love.”'

“But if God made everything, then there are evil spirits as well as good, aren't there? Isn't it like two sides of one coin?”

“That coin thing is a poor metaphor,” Joshua said. “A better one is light. Or sound, as in The Word. Evil is not the opposite of good any more than darkness is the opposite of light, or quiet is the opposite of music. Evil is the word we use to describe the
absence
of that love which is how God manifests. It's a lack of something, not a presence of something else. People who behave
evilly are not seized by evil, but have lost their connection to good. They are cold because they are lacking warmth, and do not realize that there is an infinite supply of warmth, if only they knew where to look, how to hear, how to open up to feel.”

“That's an astounding thought,” Paul said. He took out his notebook and wrote,
It's not two sides of a coin; it's light and dark. The Creator of the Universe is love and good-period. Evil is not ‘another god' or another side of the Creator-it's the absence of a connection to the Creator, just like darkness isn't the opposite of light or the other side of light, it's the absence of light.

He looked back up at Joshua, who was smiling, and said, “What, then, is sin?”

“Sin is not an act against God,” Joshua said. “It's an act against yourself. The best definition of sin is that it is any behavior or thought which causes you to forget or lose your connection to the love, the ever-present and in-dwelling presence of the Creator of the Universe.”

Juan stood up, pointed past Joshua, and said, “Somebody's coming.” Everybody turned to look except Joshua, who said, “It's Mark.”

“Hey!” a voice came from the tunnel, and Paul could now see a middle-aged white man dressed in at least two pairs of pants, the outer one gray flannel slacks, army boots, and a grease-stained thick winter coat with faux fur lining the hood. He limped out of the tunnel, holding
a Mason jar half-filled with wax and a wick, a candle-in-a-jar, in one hand. The other hand was clutched to his side, where, as he approached the light of the fire, Paul could make out a spreading red stain.

Pete and Juan jumped up and ran over to Mark, loudly asking him what had happened. He clutched his side tightly, his thin long face twisted in pain. “I been stabbed, man,” he said in a croak. Juan took the candle from his hand, and Pete put his arm around him and helped him to the fire, sitting him on the ground next to the chair where Joshua sat.

“Ain't no good,” Pete said, looking up at Joshua. “He bleeding bad.”

“What happened, man?” Matt said, rushing over to Mark as Salome arrived. Only Paul and Joshua remained seated.

“Punks,” Mark said, his breath ragged. “They jumped me as I was coming back from Can Do, turning in a bunch of cans. Knew I had some cash.”

“Robbed you?” Matt said.

Mark nodded. “They got twenty-three bucks.” He turned and looked at Joshua. “I'm hurt bad, man. Can you do something?”

“Do you believe I can?” Joshua said.

Mark nodded and said, “Yeah.” Everybody was looking at Joshua, as if expecting some extraordinary thing to happen.

“You're sure?” Joshua said.

“I know you can heal me,” Mark said.

Joshua nodded and waved his right hand in the direction of Mark, as if he were polishing a window in the air. Mark gasped and squinted his eyes, then looked at Joshua with a bug-eyed expression of shock.

“Wha' happen, man?” Matt said, his voice thick with worry.

Mark sat up in a single smooth motion. He looked down at his jacket, at the stain, and moved his hand and examined the slash in the fabric, the wet blood on his fingers. Then he slowly unzipped the coat and peeled it off. Under was a bloodstained brown UPS shirt with “Mark” embroidered in a circle over the pocket; below the pocket was another slash. Mark shrugged out of the shirt with the help of Matt, revealing a tom and bloodstained thermal underwear top. He hooked his thumbs under the waistband and pulled it up and over his head, and sat, shivering, naked from the waist up in front of the fire. There was a smear of fresh red blood on the right side of his upper abdomen, just below his ribcage, but no sign of any injury.

Paul watched with a growing sense of alarm, the love he'd been feeling in his heart replaced by a growing turbulence in his mind and stomach. They'd gone to a lot of trouble to stage this, and that had to mean it was part of a Big Con. He felt that the stakes must be very high:
perhaps they'd try to take him for everything he owned. He wondered how many people had been approached in how many coffee shops over the past months. Had any of them been killed after this little band had taken all they owned? Were bodies buried in the dirt all around them? He pushed his hands, balled into fists, into the pockets of his jacket.

Mark stood up with an astonished look on his face, and said to the group, “I was stabbed! I mean real bad, I was stabbed!” He pointed to the center of the blood smear. “Right there; kid musta stuck that thing in five, six inches. I could feel that he'd punctured something big inside, I was leaking on the inside and the outside, I could feel my heart beating all around in there, every time it beat it hurt.”

Joshua was smiling and nodding. Matt and Pete were nodding, as if it was just exactly what they'd expected. Juan looked frightened, as if he was thinking about running away. And Salome slowly walked back to her chair and sat down, her thoughts unreadable.

“Was Joshua healed you,” Matt said. “He stretch out his hand, he heal you, jes like that.” He snapped his finger. “I tell you, you don't believe me. I tell you. You believe me now, man.”

Paul was amazed at the quality of the acting, but then reminded himself that good acting was at the core of every con. A million cons a day were run in New York
City, from guys playing Three Card Monty, to guys in boardrooms setting up strip-mines on Indian lands out west, to Susan's ad agency making schoolchildren's happiness depend on their parents buying them the newest video games.

Mark leaned over and put his arms around Joshua's knee, which extended over the edge of his chair. “Thank you, Joshua,” he said, his voice cracking. “You saved my life. I was dying, I know it.”

“I didn't do anything,” Joshua said, his voice matter-of-fact. “It was your faith that healed you, not me.”

“But you waved your hand at me, you asked me if I believed.”

“If you have faith just as small as a mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible for you. My wave simply brought out your faith.”

Paul stood up. “This is wonderful,” he said, “and I'm really impressed.” Everybody turned to look at him. “I think I've got twenty or thirty dollars on me I'd like to contribute to your work here. But I've gotta get back upstairs, 'cuz if I don't find a job in the next few days, I'll be out on the streets.” He looked around, suddenly embarrassed at what he'd just said, wondering if they took it as a value judgement, a negative assessment of their lifestyle. And, if they did, would they use it to move the Big Con along? Did he just open the door even wider, make himself even more vulnerable?

“Who's this guy?” Mark said.

“Friend of Jim's,” Matt said, sitting next to him, handing him back his clothes as he re-dressed himself.

Joshua nodded and it seemed that Paul's comment had gone unnoticed by everybody. “We don't need your money, Paul,” he said. “In fact, we don't
want
your money.” He looked at Jim. “Jim, will you escort Mister Abler back up to the surface?”

Paul felt a sudden dread. “How did you know my last name?” His mind raced back through the morning; he was quite sure he'd never told Jim his last name, and certain he hadn't mentioned it down here.

Joshua shrugged. “There are no secrets when you've touched the soul of God.”

It had to mean that the con was set up in advance, that Paul wasn't just the first person who didn't shoo Jim away from his table, but that he'd been set up well in advance. It meant they knew more about him than he'd realized, that he was more vulnerable than he'd thought, that they had their sights on him, their plans lain for him, even before Jim had walked into the coffee shop an hour earlier. Maybe they'd been stalking him for days, maybe even weeks, planning whatever they were planning.

He remembered Rich and his certainty that he'd been given a hallucinogenic drug. What if the same had happened to him? It could explain Noah's popping up,
and the whole weird experience of going back in time. But who? When?

Then he remembered the evangelist on the street the afternoon before, the man who'd grabbed his arm just before he'd gone sailing across the street to save the little girl.

That had to be it. The guy was in with them; he even dressed like he was homeless. When the man grabbed him, he must have had some sort of pinprick device that could penetrate Paul's jacket, administering the drug.

He put his left hand over his right upper arm, rubbing it slowly to feel for any sensitive spot, the place where his skin had been punctured. Was it there? He couldn't tell.

“Never no secrets,” Matt said, echoing Joshua.

Chapter Eight

The Power of Belief

Paul looked around at the expectant faces, feeling like a trapped animal.

He scanned his surroundings, and noticed with a shock of realization that the wooden boxes along the tracks were not packing crates, as he'd originally assumed, but individual residences. The one to his left and behind him had a door half-covered by a blanket, and inside he could see a mattress on the floor, a painting on the wall, a table covered with books and an oil lamp.

These people live here, Paul realized. No rent, no taxes, living off what they could scavenge from dumpsters, getting money by collecting cans and turning them in to recycling centers. Running gauntlets of punks and street gangs to get into and out of their underground
world, to get their money safely home from the recycling centers.

They're poor beyond imagination
, Paul thought,
and they want whatever it is I have.

He did a quick inventory, remembering that his driver's license, MasterCard, and American Express Card were in his shirt pocket, where he transferred them every morning, along with a gold Cross pen, when he got dressed. It was better than carrying a wallet in a city filled with pickpockets. In his right pants pocket was about fifty dollars in cash; there was another hundred or so back in his apartment…if they hadn't already gotten it. Maybe bringing him here was just a ruse to get him out of the way while they stripped his apartment?

“You okay, man?” Jim said, pulling Paul back to the conversation and people around the fire.

“I'm fine,” Paul said. “I just need to get back home right away.” He pulled his hands out of his jacket pockets, pushed himself out of the recliner, and stood up, flexing his cramped fingers. He'd been clenching his hands in tight fists without realizing it.

Jim glanced at Joshua, who made a tiny gesture, a slight lifting and dropping of his shoulders. “I can take him,” Jim said.

Joshua said to Paul in a soft, compassionate tone of voice, “What are you worried about?”

“I need to get back to my life,” Paul said. “My apartment, my girlfriend, gotta find a job. I was fired yesterday.”

Joshua scratched the smooth skin of his chin. “You're a man of principle.”

Paul wondered if their casing of him had included his job at the
Tribune.
“I like to think so.”

“You believe in journalistic integrity, and in your own integrity. You believe in the importance and power of truth, although you've also recently come to believe in the importance of power itself.”

“I suppose so.” That was it, they'd even checked out his employment. He stomped his feet as if he were cold, feeling impatient. “I've gotta go.”

Jim stood up.

Joshua said, “Like that time at Richter's store.”

“What?” Paul said. The name was familiar, but from a far distant time and place.

“When you were ten. And Alvin Christian stole the little toys off the cereal boxes in Richter's General Store. And you told your father, who called Mrs. Richter.”

The memory flooded back over Paul; he hadn't even thought about it in at least a decade, much less ever told anybody about it in his life. Alvin had been so sure it was Paul who'd “squealed” on him that it ended their friendship, and Paul had been tight-lipped about the incident ever since.

He leaned forward and put his hands on the back of the recliner, holding it for balance. “What are you talking about?” he said to Joshua, still unwilling to admit he'd turned in his friend, still certain it was the right thing to do. Alvin wasn't hurt by it; if anything, it was a good thing for him, because it stopped him from going down the road of a lifetime of stealing. Alvin got a spanking from his father when Mrs. Richter called him and he'd found the toys under Alvin's bed. His father had taken him down to the store to return them and apologize, but that was it. It wasn't like Paul had sent somebody to jail or anything.

“You don't remember?” Joshua said. “Your old friend, Alvin Christian?”

“Do you know him?” Paul said, the thought occurring to him that maybe all of this was an elaborate plot by Alvin to get even after nineteen years. Maybe Alvin was one of the homeless himself. Maybe he'd hired them. Maybe he'd written a story or article about it—perhaps titled “My Childhood Betrayal” or “My Humiliation”–and published it in
The New Yorker
or some more obscure publication, and Joshua had read it, seen Paul's name, and sent Jim to check him out, and then bring him here. Stranger things have happened.

“I've never met him in my life, Paul,” Joshua said. “Or the time when you were fifteen and your friend Vlado Stevic gave you the answers to that math final
exam, and instead of looking at them you thanked him for them and then took them home and burned them, unopened. You are a man of principle.”

“How did you know about that?” Paul said, gripping the chair even harder. “I never told
anybody!”

Around the fire, everybody sat and watched intently, but none seemed shocked. “That, Paul, is another thing you must learn.”

“How to read minds or do miracles?”

“How miracles are done. To do them is your fate and your choice. Just as it's your fate and your choice whether or not to join us here, to learn my truths and understand the Wisdom teachings, and then to go out into the world to teach them.”

Paul said, “You really do know Noah?”

“Before Noah was, I am.”

“You know what he and I did?”

“You visited Nippur.”

Paul shivered involuntarily. “He told you?”

Joshua ran both hands through his long black hair, flipping it over the back of his shoulders, and sat back down in his chair. “Do you want to know how to perform miracles?”

“Yes,” Paul said slowly, concluding there was another answer for Joshua knowing his last name, his story, his childhood. This was all real. He swallowed hard and pulled his notepad and pen from his shirt pocket.

Joshua looked around the circle of people. “Salome?” he said. “Would you care to tell Paul how miracles are done?”

The young woman stared into the fire for a moment, then looked at Paul. He felt the force of her gaze, and it drew him back around to the front of the recliner, where he sat back down in his former seat. He settled into the soft fabric, feeling his muscles relax and his mind clear.

“You understand about matter and energy?” she said.

“They are the same,” Paul said. “Matter is slowed–down energy.”

She nodded. “Have you ever blown against a leaf or a blade of grass?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“It bent or blew away,” Paul said.

“Because?”

“Because of the pressure of my breath.”

“Your invisible breath.”

“Yes.”

“Although that, at least, was invisible matter, being propelled by energy, the energy of the force of the muscles in your lungs.”

“I understand that.”

“What are your thoughts?” Salome said.

Paul was caught off-guard. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the stuff that runs through your mind constantly. All that talking to yourself about the past, the future, and even the judging of the present. Your
thoughts
, the products of your thinking brain. Are they matter or energy?”

“I don't know, for sure. I'd guess they're energy, right?”

“Can they be weighed? Put in a box? Carried around in the hands of others when you are dead?”

“I don't think so.”

“Then they are energy. Do you agree?”

“Makes sense to me,” Paul said.

“And all of this around us,” she waved at the tunnels, the packing-crate homes, the fire, the people seated in the circle, “is matter, which is also made up of energy, just like your thoughts.”

“Yes. It all began as energy, then became hydrogen, then matter, then, eventually, this.”

“And thought is a form of energy.”

“Right.”

“And belief?”

“Isn't that thought? I mean, you have to think that you believe.”

Salome shook her head. “No. I'd put belief into a category like love. It's qualitatively different than thinking. You can think
about
belief, but to believe is not to think. It is to believe. Do you understand?”

“Like I can't think love, I can just love?”

“Right.”

“Ok, I'm with you. Belief and love are both forms of energy that can run through my brain and body, just like thinking, but they're not thinking. They're different from thinking.”

“Right. Just like your breath coming out of your mouth is air, and the room is filled with air, but the breath coming out of your mouth can bend over the leaf you hold by its stem. But the air in the room isn't bending the leaf, because it's not being moved by the energy of your lungs and diaphragm. So your brain can carry the energy of thinking, or the energy of love, or the energy of belief, but they're different.”

“Right.”

She scooted forward to the edge of her lawn-chair and rested her elbows on her knees. “Actually, thinking pretty much resides in your brain, whereas belief and love encompass your entire nervous system. You feel them in your heart, your stomach, and your muscles. All through your body. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Paul, thinking about Susan and feeling his stomach twist. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“So love, that energy we call love, that is the connection you have to God. If you've absorbed the Wisdom teachings you've already been given, you understand that. Right?”

“Yes, I figured that out last night.”

“Ok, here's an eternal truth: ‘With faith, all things are possible.' Belief is the energy that allows you to manipulate other forms of energy. Even those forms of energy which have congealed into what we call matter.”

“If you had faith you could say to that mountain, ‘move over there,' and it would move,” Paul said, remembering the teaching of Jesus from church. He wrote down
With faith, all things are possible
in his notepad, and put it back in his shirt pocket.

“Exactly,” Salome said. “Faith and belief mean the same thing, in this context. If you have faith, you can move mountains, heal the sick, raise the dead, and the whole shootin' match.”

Paul thought back to a discussion in a philosophy class he'd taken in college about something similar from the end of the eighteenth century. “I remember,'' he said, “a debate about something like this. Wasn't there a British mathematician who wrote that reality was all energy, and Samuel Johnson got quite upset about it?”

Salome held out her hands. “You gone beyond me.”

She glanced at Joshua, who said, “It was George Berkeley, and he was an Anglican bishop and mathematician. They named Berkeley, California after him. He was a friend of Halley and Newton. He suggested that all physical matter was just an idea in our minds. He said, ‘
esse is percipi
', or, ‘to be is to be perceived.' He was
close, but he got stuck thinking that the work of the thinking mind was the same as all other forms of consciousness, and that we're the only ones the universe cares about. It was essentially the old, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?' argument. It assumes the primacy of humans, which is incredibly arrogant, like the Greek notion that if humans vanished, the entire universe would vanish. And so Samuel Johnson challenged Berkeley by kicking a stone hard enough to hurt his own toe, shouting, ‘I refute it thus!”'

“So if we vanished, the universe would continue?”

“It was sure here before we came along,” Joshua said.

Paul laughed. “Yeah. Got it. So with the power of my mind I can create miracles?”

“Not
the
power of your mind,” interjected Salome.
“A
power of your
being
, your
soul.
Miracles are among the many things your soul can do, but just one of them. This isn't about thinking or understanding or knowledge, which are all
other
powers, and are pretty much limited to your mind. It's about belief, or faith, which involve your mind, your heart, your entire being. You can't do miracles with thinking, but you can with believing.”

Paul looked at Salome, at her soft brown face, her ragged clothes, and said, “Can you do miracles?”

She shrugged. “I'm here. I consider that a miracle.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Frankly, I've never tried. At least the way you mean. Been no need. But I have faith that it's within my ability.”

“How'd you come to be here?”

She scratched the side of her face, and brushed her hair back. It was thick and curly, what was called an “Afro” back in the 1960's. “I grew up in a middle-class home in Atlanta. Lot of middle-class black folks down there, people go to good schools, make a good living, talk like white folks.” A mischievous grin crossed her face. “'Course, I kin talk jive, too.”

“You're bilingual,” Paul said.

She laughed. “That's truer than you realize. America has become many different nations, maybe always was.”

Paul nodded. “So you came here from Atlanta?”

“Yeah, I came to the Big Apple. Right after I graduated from college, got my degree from Morehouse in marketing and communications, minored in philosophy. And thought I'd come up here where the big money was, good jobs with the big ad agencies, you know the drill. But what I found instead was crack cocaine. Within a year I went HIV positive, then lost my place and was living on the streets, tried the shelters but they're a hellhole, and ended up here. That's it in a nutshell.”

“You have AIDS?” Paul said, feeling a deep sadness at Salome's story.

“No, just the virus.”

“But it'll come?”