One Shining Image

Bombs fell like burning demons from the deep dark. It was as though the cosmos had been turned upside down and hell was being emptied onto us. Hell. Nobody said a word. All playful banter had been left somewhere irretrievable: in another life. It was as if a joke had never existed or been uttered. I had only one image in my mind, one shining image that kept me alive but at the same time, I wished to hold all things equally and at once in front of my consciousness then and there; to give all that was most dear to me equal room on my own little psychic stage, and what was shocking was that there were only a few truly meaningful characters and set pieces with which to occupy space, which was far less than I would’ve thought had someone asked me three years ago, but still I could only hold one at a time, and that became a sort of desperation–being able to only hold one precious image at a time–not knowing if that one image, at any moment, would be the final one. That caused my thinking to intensify into a frenzy, which caused that single, life-giving, shining image, that I did not want to lose–because to lose that image in that moment would’ve been to have lost my own life–to fragment and so painfully come and go and fade and distort. As the onslaught of those demons continued their bombardment, I struggled to keep that image present. There had never been anything as sweet as that image. Nothing as tender and life-giving. Nothing as heart-rending…I knew that some of the other men had been paying prostitutes for sex in preparation for this very scenario. So far from home and under such life-threatening stress that they said it was not only permitted but necessary for their survival. Under these conditions of such great uncertainty, anything was permitted they said. “What else could be expected?” they said. Some of them were believers, well, men who I thought once to be believers, but they had turned their backs on God and admitted that their belief was only ever a show; that when it came down to it, when it really came right down to it: their final urges triumphed over any posturing or creed they’d held while warm and at home. In fact, many admitted that they never believed at all, not really. Some of them even admitted that they had done the same before: slept with other women. Even in their own homes while their wives and children were asleep in other rooms. One man I knew, a friend of mine then, a regular at certain Maisons Tolérées, said he went in early one day, however, I can’t remember quite why, either he became very drunk and showed up by accident on account of being drunk, or he wanted to become drunk later but needed to have sex first, but so he went in early and he saw his prostitute there, on her knees, praying with a lit-candle before an icon of Christ that caught the light just-so, so that the gold background that all icons–especially ones of Christ–were painted with, reflected a sort of iridescent fiery sheen, and he said that she was embarrassed and stood up and blew out her candle and turned the icon away, and immediately sat on the edge of the bed with a smile and crossed her legs. He said that he just stood there for a moment and watched the smoke from the candle hang briefly in the air…and all was still for a moment before he fell down to his knees and began weeping uncontrollably, and he has said since that in his heart, in that moment, with the prostitute he’d paid a dozen times before sitting on the edge of the bed like that with her legs crossed, that right there in that moment: he believed. He said that anything he considered before to be rational had at once flown from him. He said in that moment he wished to die for what he’d done to these women, to this very woman who was before him sitting with crossed legs, and to his wife who was many thousands of miles away; actions he’d justified, things he’d enjoyed. He’d dishonoured everything he said, he realized that he’d dishonoured everything. He said that to everyone from then on, “I’ve dishonoured everything in my life and I should die because that’s what I deserve!” and it started to rain that night, which continued for many days afterward, and in the dark of the room with rain coming down, he said that the woman read to him from the gospels in a language he did not understand while he openly wept at her feet. And now, here, in the wet dark with the only light coming from hell-fire, I wonder where he is among all these men who wept. Though their faces could be seen only in mere flashes, they did not weep openly. They desired so much to weep openly, and to scream, but could not. Would not. They would not dare let out what had built up in their hearts, for they maintained an even deeper fear of being seen even until death. And so they wept inside. They wept and screamed in silence despite the fact that the greatest of screams could never be heard under the sound of such death and blazing-fire. Believers or not, this was the apokalypsis we’d all read about: here and now in front of our eyes.