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What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.
Neither Charlie Durochie nor his truck was at the little house in town. When Russ found a woman down the street who spoke English, she said that Charlie was gone for the summer and Keith was with his wife’s people, up on the mesa. She nodded in a direction where there was only glare and dusty vacancy, no mesa.
Russ was now additionally afraid that his mission would be a bust, because, in all the vast reservation, he knew only two men to speak to. Inside the baking Willys, he shut his eyes and prayed for strength and guidance. Then he drove in the direction the woman had indicated.
<3
The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from an origin to a destination. It had become, in his mind, the defining engenderer of everything that wasn’t road—stony slopes boiling with grasshoppers, stands of conifers made blacker by the blazing light, seemingly proximate rock formations whose respective positions his progress refused to alter. Either his ears or the air rang so loudly that he couldn’t hear his footsteps. He mistook a hovering falcon for an angel, and then he saw that the falcon was an angel, unaffiliated with the God he’d always known; that Christ had no dominion on the mesa.
“Keith is not good,” Wanda said, “but he is resting comfortably at home.”
“How bad is it?” Russ said.
“He is resting comfortably but I am told that he is very weak.”
Into Russ’s throat came the sadness of life’s brevity, the sadness of the sunless hour, the sadness of Easter. God was telling him very clearly what to do. He had to stay in Many Farms, where Keith had lived since 1960, so he could visit Keith and keep an eye on Perry. In light of Keith’s condition, his wish to enjoy sex with a person not Marion seemed even more trivial, and he’d been insane to imagine it happening in Arizona. He’d let himself forget how bleak the reservation was in late winter, how demanding it was to lead a work camp.
And yet, when he thought of doing God’s will, at the cost of his week with Frances on the mesa, he felt unbearably sorry for himself. It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.
“Thank you for giving us the guitars,” he said.
He beckoned to Frances to go ahead of him on the trail through the pines. Following her and looking back, he saw a complicated smile.
“Fuck you,” Clyde said.
Russ laughed and proceeded up the trail. Halfway up it, Frances stopped and threw her arms around him. “You’re amazing,” she said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“God, I admire you. Do you know that? Do you know how much I admire you?”
She held him tight, and there it was: the joy. After all the dark years, his joy was shining forth again.
Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequelae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities. His rationality was blazing and tireless and all-seeing, and the problem of Larry made him sensible of the cost of ceaseless blazing, the body’s need for a little boost. The emptier of his two aluminum film canisters was in his pants pocket. He could rub sustenance into his gums without a sound, but he was plagued by unknowns, such as whether his sleeping bag would sufficiently muffle the sound of a lid’s unscrewing. Whether he could open the canister blindly without spilling. (Even a microgram of spillage was unacceptable.) Whether it was wise to partake at all from a canister already so depleted. Whether he shouldn’t at least wait until he could give himself a superior boost nasally. Whether, on second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to strangle the person whose interminable throat clearings were standing between him and that boost …
[...] How did an all-seeing Entity end up on a toilet seat without knowing how he’d gotten there? Casting his mind’s eye back over the preceding moments, he encountered an occlusion. The speck of dark matter now seemed larger; could, indeed, no longer be referred to as a speck; was perhaps better described as an uneasy semitransparency, a poorly demarcated blob. He couldn’t pin it down for examination, but he sensed its malignant saturation with knowledge contradicting his own. It was unbelievable! Unbelievable that God Himself should have a floater in His eye! God was very, very wrathful. His wrath, having nowhere else to vent itself, took the form of three further massive boosts in quick succession. If wild excess killed the body, then so be it.
Wiping his ass in a cramped Navajo bathroom stall, shackled by dropped trousers and distracted by the flashes of a thousand splinters, by the choking engorgement of his carotid, he forgot to be mindful of his canister’s whereabouts. As soon as he remembered, he confidently foresaw that he’d capped it and set it aside. But no. Oh, no no no no no. He’d knocked it over on the floor. Its scattered contents were thirstily absorbing a trickle from the toilet’s leaking seal. They’d formed a watery paste that he now had no choice but to urge, with the side of his finger, back into the canister, even at the cost of dampening the powder still inside it. Nothing made any sense. The embodied clairvoyance that had crept down the hallway toward the execution of its masterstroke was now wiping up, with bits of toilet paper, a whitish alkaloid smear contaminated with fecal and perhaps even tubercular bacteria, sullying itself with the question of whether the alkaloid had antiseptic properties, whether the toilet paper could later be applied to his gums without the swallowing of pathogens, and whether, although he still felt close to throwing up, it wouldn’t be better to lick the floor than let any milligrams go to waste.
He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.
Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.
Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.
His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.
A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.
Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.
Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.
Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.
oh god
Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondered if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.