If All Else Fails (18 page)

I used to think it
funny, at night, in the cell; the circus of trying to go to sleep in the loving arms of Jesus
Christ was more elevated than I ever imagined it would be. I dreamed about noble things mostly.
Horse hooves and people falling off the back ends of steamboats. Canals and anthracite-coal
mines. The Pope with matched luggage. Forest fires and vast fields of potato chips. I dreamed
about all the people
who loved Jesus
Christ. These people, they disappear for­ever. Forever.

Just like Gene
Autry: A Foxtrot. It disappears too. Jesus Christ was cowboy to my Indian. She'll disappear too.
(The truth is a dude.) Licorice lights swallow up nights of cowboy and Indian fights. It's all
over, the cavalry is rescu­ing in reverse. The horse needs new hubcaps. It's all over. The
Indians are gone, the cowboys are gone, and every­body's saying it, "Gee, they don't dance like
that anymore."

JUST LIKE GENE
AUTRY: A FOXTROT

And Jesus Christ
was buried in a shallow grave. We had to bury her because she died. The grave was shallow
be­cause she was.

Jesus Christ,
daughter of virgin, son of man, no sex life to speak of, a saint, impotent like all the rest. She
died of mer­cury poisoning. This may come as a surprise to some people. Not many because not all
that many people remember who she was. And a lot of them who do remember, just plain don't
believe a word of it.

How quickly they
forget, we might say, if this story wasn't set in the future, the vast dim future, maybe three
whole years from now, maybe ten, hardly more than that. I'd tell you the exact date but the
closest I can come to imagining it is the day when all the cowboys and Indians die. The day when
all the cows come home and there is nothing to come home to. (When the world throws itself
up.)

How did Jesus
Christ die? She got hold of a couple of loaves of bread and that's, indirectly, what killed her.
How, you ask, did that kill her?

She turned those
loaves into fishes, or she turned the fishes into loaves, the story is a little garbled in the
transla­tion from a nonhuman language (English) to a human one (Sonar) but, anyway, she turned
out a lot of fishes. Some say she netted them, some say Jesus Christ got them by a miracle. Maybe
they were rented; does it matter? As the
missionaries were so fond of saying, let's not clutter this up with facts.

Let's just say she
had fish all over the place. But, and this is where the death of Jesus figures in this narrative,
those fish she passed out, those fish she ate and ate and ate (Jesus was quite a consumer in her
time; whole cultures imitated her) were from a polluted river.

They were Jesus
Christ fish, that's for sure. They had a mercury count twenty-four times higher than a safe level
for human consumption. She was hardly human but she was very susceptible. Her mercury level bit
seventy on the same day she felt her first foreshadowing of encroaching meno­pause. When her
mercury count reached 289, it gave her tunnel vision and she carried that throughout her life,
through all her good deeds and war crimes equally, through all her policy decisions and surprise
disembowelments. Tun­nel vision followed her right down into the grave and she was buried in
it

Jesus Christ spoke
her own funeral oration, a speech well received by local mourners (glad to get it over with) but
panned by literary critics as lacking social significance. Her last words, officially, as Jesus
Christ were, "If my crown of thorns fell off, I couldn't find it unless it landed right in front
of me. If it's to the left or right, I can't see it. This tunnel vi­sion is murder."

After her death,
she became a tax write-off and credit to us all. I can personally vouch for the truth of
everything I have just told you. The coming of Jesus Christ into our lives was Just Like Gene
Autry: A Foxtrot. It happened exactly as I say. We reported it just this way in our tribal
news­paper. If you call me a liar, I will be offended.

And believe me, you
don't want to offend me. I've been around. I've seen a three-headed dog at the circus. I've seen
naked Japanese people through bombsite peepholes in Hiro­shima. I've seen Jesus Christ. I've seen
Jesus Christ and I know where all the bodies are buried.

They played the
game, the hatred of centuries, the love of only a few moments, the never-ending dance of man and
woman.

"My pretty
precious," crooned the fishwoman, lips mov­ing to mock him.

"You don't have
blood in your veins, just seawater. You are blinded by old oceans," said the reptile. "You move
at me on an ocean without waves. Blind. Lie with me again."

She spat at him,
grinding her hips against the ballroom floor, moving to accommodate the weight of
centuries.

The cold hissing
caresses of the lizard dim the vision, slow the blood. The drums pick up the slow surge and rise
into the air, soft wingbeats, slow animal ages.

The master of
ceremonies crawled across the symbol-inscribed ballroom floor. His segmented legs rustled in the
dark like dry leaves. His thin Halloween face boiled in riv­ulets out at them like melting
tin.

"The day of the
dead," whispered the dancers, bleeding from their feet. "The day of the dead."

The moon, thunder
driven, careened across the sky and all the dancers moved like shadows beneath it, moved like
flights of ghosts across the ballroom floor.

The reptile
glittered in his shiny skin. Eyes cold with remembered ages of being, he released her. The
fishwoman
fluttered away in a tattered
gown. "Crystal," whispered her shoulders as the light of the stars touched her. Her flesh writhed
against the tide of the moon. The stars. The stars moving through her hair, writing her history
in the rivers of woman dust. Always the stars.

The reptile, rising
in the dark, moves after her. His eyes are hollow and unblinking with want and the dust drifts
across him, unchanging. Move. Motion. The legs in halting motion, following the dust of her
passing. He too dances under the dead moon, the age-old dance. His dance stirs the pools of blood
on the floor.

The warrior king
with the same tale on his lips rules in the ancient doorways. The windows are locked shut against
morning.

The dancers, all
through the long night, they whisper. "Raven is coming! Raven is coming!" Little spider voices.
Cold stone spiders climb memory webs.

"Raven is coming!"
It's written in the webs. It's written in the blood. In the blood.

The wind blows into
the room through the dead windows and the desert comes inside and drifts across the hearts of the
dancers. The moon rules, it shrieks in the sky, and men of the conquered night wave flags from
the craters. The world sits on a tripod and the rockets break through the skin of the living. The
sun. Where is the sun?

"This thunder shall
swallow us," says the fishwoman and she wriggles, stuck on barbed fear. The ballroom is loud with
the ocean. The dancers weave across the floor, sliding through the blood, deepening the pools
with their waning bodies. "Bleed! Dance and bleed!" cries the fishwoman.

"Have to touch the
earth, have to touch the sun," moans the fishwoman, lashing out at the reptiles, striking back at
winter in the blood. But the moon pulls her hair in amphib­ian circles around her face. The moon
moves restlessly at the night. The ocean is coming back.

"To dream is to
look at the night and see things," whisper the dancers and they touch the wind and choke. And
they touch the wind and it is dying within their breasts.

The fishwoman tears
her dress away from her body and slides down into the blood. What the dancers see. She's not . .
. young . . . anymore. An aged thing of flesh trapped outside a gleaming skeleton for all the
time of the world. Old, so very old and in that wisdom, ageless. The bones dance within her. The
ocean is in her. The stars. Always the stars.

"I promised to
drown myself," cries the fishwoman to the night and the dancers move untouched beside her. The
blood moves in ancient waves across the ballroom floor, pushed by the tides of the
moon.

The ocean is alive
with the memory of things who have crawled from the sea and learned disorder. The green hotel of
Me continues, stirs anew with life, life hidden in the deeps. In the deeps. The stars. Always the
stars, seen from the deeps.

The blood of winged
lizards moves through the burning bloodstreams of the dancers. The scorpion dances in his shadow.
Fishwoman caresses the sting. It is the time when reptiles, arising, dream.

"I want to dance
with you!" shrieks the Halloween man, bringing his horror face through the night. "My eyes see
through the realm of pain."

His jointed legs
scrape across the floor. She turns away, still dancing.

An unearthly wind
moves through the room and touches the dancers. Each dancer, becomes a window, dipped in an
underocean of sleep. The birds of slaughter fly in red circles above the center of the room, set
free by the last dances of the world. Ice forms on the fishwoman's empty maternal shelves but she
dances on. The dance. To dance until the
blood goes. To dance until the world at the center of her heart stops.

The cornfields pull
up the ground and shake their empty bones. The wind of the dance is almost over. It is soon
finished and the rain waits to punish the bleeding wood shaped by unlasting men of the world. The
rain waits. The fishwoman lies opened like a crack in the side of a mountain and the ocean drowns
in her.

The dancers move
restlessly against the unyielding night. Their eyes look into the dark and, dreaming, they see
the shadows climbing into the strange women of the islands. The strangers and the conquered
night. They see the rockets and the dying.

"Go away, easy
death!" is the fishwoman's cry and the master of ceremonies, frightened by the strength in her
cry, scuttles away to hide in the corners, to wait. To wait. And above, the stars, mute witnesses
above the punishing world. Always the stars.

Eternal night
beckons the dancers. But they dance on, unheeding. The light of day is in a big round box hidden
from the eyes of men. Blackness and living death is the world being made for all but still they
dance. Eternal night.

Raven is coming.
Raven is coming. That is the dance. The last hope for magic. Raven is coming.

"Dance and bleed!
Awaken the gods with dance and death!" cries the fishwoman.

"The day of the
dead," whisper the dancers.

Raven awakes. Raven
of the old times. Raven stirs in the blood of all the centuries of mankind. Raven moves,
breathes! Raven from the stars. His eyes speak in secret al­phabets! Hideous syllables! What does
it mean? The chant? Thunder drum song. It is enough, he speaks!

"Tomorrow I enter
the time of my birth. I want to be ready."

Raven is
coming.

He was little and
he looked up at the moon and then down and in that motion, his face became impaled on the moon.
It fell on the dust plains of the moon and grew there in the rich soil of imagination and there
was no getting it back.

It grew there until
it covered his heart and he had no other love than the moon that had stolen his face and cov­ered
his heart. It drove him. It made him the top of his high school graduating class; it made him
first at the Air Force Academy. It pushed him through rules and rituals beyond any of his
kinsmen's understanding. He became a stranger among his own people. He wore no braids. He kept
his hair cut short and he spent no long, learning afternoons of the summer with the old people.
He saluted his superiors smartly, wore neatly pressed uniforms, and when he came home, which was
seldom, all the people avoided him. He had lost his people, they all said. His heart is covered
with some awful black thing and his life is cold.

His father's native
tongue was lost to him and his father did not understand aerodynamics. It made his trips home
pointless, embarrassing. How often a look of shame would steal across his face when he saw his
father and mother, still talking of the old ways, still living by the old ways. That they shunned
him mattered little.

He lived for one
day and one moment. And it came to him. He was the first one of his race chosen to be an
astro­naut. It did not surprise him. It was a part of his plan, a nec­essary step in the system
of his longing. He exercised, stud­ied, flew simulated missions, endured endless rounds of tests
without so much as a complaint. No questions, no doubts, no looking back, just a grim
determination that ruled his life.

He took no wife,
brought no children into the world. He dated women, sustained normal relationships. Part of the
plan. His personality file had to show him normal. And he
was normal, perfectly conditioned to it. No high periods, no low periods, a
carefully regimented person.

The reporters and
cameramen were there, tramping the squash, ruining the grass with their heavy cameras.

"And this is the
place where it all began. And here is his father," said the commentator and he held the
microphone in his father's face. "Tell me, sir, I expect you're very proud of your
son?"