Nigel: You pronounce “clothes” as though it were “close.”
Woman: Well, aren’t they the same?
Nigel: How about “morning” and “mourning”?
And then away, to the bar, where some decent hock burbled out into his uplifted glimmering glass. He sipped. A riesling? Too sweet. Gewürztraminer? Possibly.
The room was unsuitably warm. He moved through the heavy, cloying air. Crescents of sweat had blossomed under his armpits. He made for the rec room.
Vacant. The 3D. He thumbed it on. The screen flickered wetly at him and melted into an overview of the two annular circles. Bodies laced together. A voice boomed out over the crowd. Bread and wine. Come to fullness.
No communion rail and wafer, not here. No baptismal dunking, no empty Jewish phrases muttering about a Pharaoh in a tongue they can’t understand. No ritual. The real religion straight from the wellsprings. Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever. Sic transit, Gloria.
Nigel reeled away to the opposite wall, yellowed by a spotlight. He punched at a button, stabbed another. Family Music Center, it said.
Good, right. Try for a bit of Eine Kleine Krockedmusik.
He dialed. Wellsby’s choral improvisations swelled out of the speaker. He stabbed again. Jazz: King Oliver. Brassy trumpet, drums. But where was the Bach? The sixties, one of his favorite Beatles? Or did he have to settle for some modern cacophonist?
He turned back to the 3D. Stabbed once more.
The writhing New Sons, again. Make a joyful noise unto the horde.
He punched at the buttons.
The black swastika vibrated against the orange uniform. The gleaming tip of the sword bit into the girl’s stomach. She begged, crying. The man shoved upward and the sword sank deep. Blood spattered from her. She lunged against the cords binding her hands but this only made the sword slice crosswise. She screamed. The crimson laced down her legs.
Nigel wrenched it off. He was sweating; it ran into his eyes. He wiped his brow and wheeled away.
He paused in the hallway to steady himself. Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man. Welcome to the 21st century. Sic transit, Gloria. Or was it Alexandria?
He made his way to the patio. Cool air washed over him. The fog below had layered above the jacaranda trees, haloing the lights of Pasadena. Nigel stood, breathing deeply, watching the gathering mist.
“Mr. Walmsley? I wanted to continue our discussion.” Fresnel advanced from the opened slideway, framed by the murmuring party beyond.
The frog comes in on little flat feet, Nigel thought. He tossed his wine glass away and turned to meet the man.
“Surely you understand, don’t you, that we have all, all of us, come at last to terms with ourselves? With our finiteness? Our little amusing perversions? Mr. Lubkin’s Three-D was demonstrative. It illustrates how far we have come. Progressed. Econometrics—”
Nigel watched his fist blossom in midair and home with elliptical accuracy on Fresnel’s forehead. There was a fleshy smack. Fresnel staggered. Lurched. Did not fall. Nigel set himself and estimated the geometry of the situation with a precise eye. Fresnel was wobbling, a difficult, challenging target. The man’s face beaded with perspiration in the silvery light. Nigel launched his left fist along an ascending parabola. Angle into angel. There was a jolting impact. Flesh colliding, wetly. His hand went numb. Lick the lips: salty. Fresnel melted away. His nostrils sucked in a rasping new breath. Nigel tottered. Relaxed. He studied the fog layer. It was tilting. Tilting in the smooth air. It seemed to take a long time.
TEN
His Immanence resided in a recently purchased Baptist church. The building squatted on a scruffy, midwestern-looking street corner among the flatlands of lower Los Angeles. Nigel squinted at it skeptically and slowed his walk, but Alexandria and Shirley, on either side of him, tugged him on.
They’d never have gotten him here but for a moment of contrition over Fresnel. Scarcely anyone at the party’d noticed except Alexandria, who glimpsed Nigel tipping over. Fresnel had been insulted but surprisingly, dismay-ingly unhurt; the women had been shocked; Nigel had rather enjoyed the whole bash, and still relished the memory of Fresnel going down, ass over entrails.
He braced himself for the ordeal to come. They entered through a side door and passed through a large auditorium packed with saffron-robed figures being lectured. Shaved heads, bright garlands of flowers. The salty tang of Japanese food. Through a clicking beaded curtain, out the back door, around the temple. They entered a small garden through a bamboo gate, nosily slipping the latch.
A small, browned man sat in lotus position on a broad swath of green. A breeze bestirred the trees overhead. The man regarded him with quick, assessing yellow eyes. He gestured for the three of them to sit and Alexandria produced three round yellow pads for them. Nigel sat in the center.
They exchanged pleasantries. This was a wing of the New Sons, those who felt in tune with the eastern roots of man’s religious heritage. This seated man with his face of sagging flesh was an Immanence, for there was no one sole Immanence, just as a universal God had an infinite store of representations.
Nigel explained, with long uncomfortable pauses, his own rational skepticism about religion in any form. Most men sought some undefinable something, and Nigel admitted he did too, but the grotesque distortions of the New Sons—
The Immanence plucked a leaf from a bush and held it to Nigel’s eyes. He blinked and then stared at it steadily.
“You are a scientist. Why would anyone spend his life studying this leaf? Where was the gain?”
“Any form of knowledge has a chance of resonating with other kinds,” Nigel replied.
“So?”
“Suppose the universe is a parable,” Nigel said uncertainly. “By studying part of it we can read the whole.”
“The universe within a grain of sand.”
“Something like that. I feel the laws of science and the way the world is put together can’t be accidents.”
The Immanence pondered a moment.
“No, they are not accidents. But except for their practical use, they were always unimportant. The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.”
“Not if you understand them.”
“The central point is not to study the bars. It is to get out of the cage.”
“I think the act of reaching out is everything.”
