Sacrifice

Mornings are holy, or so I am told. I wouldn’t know. I snooze till noon, when the temple opens for business. I suppose that if I got up at dawn, I might be more authentic and less rich. But I don’t agonize over my choice, not like my murderous old man God.

Or my only child Pol. At age 16, he is more of a Chief Priest than I. In the damp Augustan temple, he kindles the mammoth afternoon candles teetering 20 feet high on the ornate roof of the nave, the candles that I always remember to forget to light. And he leads the nightly prayer for his grandfather, who is about as divine as a termite. “He’s divine if people think Him so,” Pol says. But then again, Pol was raised in a priest’s household (mine). I grew up on a snowbound wheat farm, where my father was absent by choice and every kid looked out for himself. Today, the only clerical duty that I volunteer for is the collection of bribes (“special contingency taxes”). Ninety percent goes to God, but I hold back a tithe as a finder’s fee. After all, I’m the guy whose televised sermons pull in the pilgrims from the sticks, the folks who pay richly for the eternal forgiveness of sins too terrible to contemplate.

No time to gabble. The sun is high and accusing, and the barefoot pilgrims are cramming the temple. They will want a consoling word. “God hears you in this annus horribilis,” I lie.

“I am stone broke,” croaks a young blonde, Bak, who elbowed her way to the head of the sweaty line. She spoke freely to me because she was a friend of my ex-wife and sometimes more than a friend to me (which may help explain the “ex”).  Her figure was svelte, but her manners and voice rough-hewn; she was macho enough for this macho planet. She wore the flashing red scarves of Rutr, the main farm province. “Our crop failed in the drought. We can’t afford the taxes this year.”

“God will grant you an extension.” If your skirt is short. 

She genuflected a bit and left. The next pilgrim, an unkempt geezer of debatable wealth, was also from the tropical provinces, which grow the artu fruit, the mainstay of the planet’s table, sour-sweet and delicious but delicate. Since the hot, dry year had desiccated the harvest, the tropical farmers were abandoning their plows to set out on their compulsory lifetime pilgrimage. Why waste time? I assured them that God would postpone their tax deadline—an easy promise for me to make, since I knew full well that He knew nothing of their arrears.

I might as well come clean. The tax moratorium was my idea. You know that everyone on this godforsaken globe must come to Sun City at least once, to ‘fess up and belly up. Their payments are the lifeblood of the Disciples of the Sun, the sect that rules the city and thus the world. But God has been raising the tax rates for years—because people are becoming more wicked, He says—and the tropical farmers, at least, have turned their pockets inside out. So I tell them to forget the taxes. The Disciples’ coffers are already jammed, and I could use an occasional smile from the faithful.

The afternoon shadows deepened. I could barely make out the face of the last dusty pilgrim. Over his mouth was the thick blue ceremonial muffler of veteran pilgrims. His voice was low and grunting. “You don’t have to pay just yet,” I said, guessing at what he was trying to say.

He ripped off the muffler. Young Rukan, God’s little enforcer. “I want to pay. It’s my civic duty, and I revel in it.” His burly bodyguards, androids known universally as Tippecanoe and Tyler2, bobbed and grinned. 

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“What do you think? Your attendance is required at dawn.” 

Since the name of the planet, Atakent, means “dawn” in the lingo of the Disciples, you would expect the sunrise to dazzle. It doesn’t, which is why I doze through it. But this time, I walked nervously across the temple grounds, garish red under the ascending sun, to the Inner Sanctum: odiferous, cavernous, furnished with all the tact of a TV game show. In theory, God lives there: A tough hypothesis to test, since He is more or less invisible. “You disappoint me,” He said.

“I’m not a morning person.”

“I mean the taxes. You haven’t collected them for six months.”

That bastard Rukan.  “I regret the force-majeure,” I said. “I’ll collect double in six months.”

“I must punish you, or no Chief Priest will collect them again. Fortunately, the penalty won’t burden you.”

“I am grateful for your forbearance.”

“Just rip the heart out of your son’s chest,” God said.

I couldn’t breathe.

“It’ll take only a few minutes. You can use the sacrificial scalpel under the altar, as long as you wipe it clean.” And God was gone.

I staggered out of the Sanctum at dusk. The analee finches, which warble eerily in moonlight, were silent. Despite my embarrassing girth, I half-ran to my son’s modest apartment in Riverbend, the posh enclave of God’s flunkies, where I had paid for Pol’s pad over his objections. Now he was trying to shave a bit of down on his alabaster chin. He turned toward me, his black brow furrowed.  

“Your life is in danger,” I said.

“Not as long as it’s in God’s hands.”

“Well, it is. That’s the problem. No questions. Just pack.”

He resumed shaving. For months I had barely looked at him, and now I could not get enough of his sullen face.  

My son thinks me sacrilegious, and I think him a fool.  But I am selfish enough to love him: He is my living mirror. I had to spirit him away—not to mention me, since I could lose my head for thumbing my nose at the Deity, like my cousin Johannes III, the late Chief Priest who accurately accused God of sexual harassment twenty years ago. My obvious refuge was the family farm, but that was also Rukan’s obvious target.

So I called my ex-wife, as I do when I need to talk: You know that no two men in this angry city are capable of exchanging confidences. True, I have no right to demand that Arna listen to me; she divorced me because she needed a spouse. But that was the Disciples’ fault. Under their sexual apartheid, the wife of a priest should just reproduce—for the good of Sun City, which no longer grows rapidly, thanks to the aging of its residents and the decline in its fertility.  The better half of a priest doesn’t raise her kids (a school of the sect will do that), and she doesn’t live with her husband (he’s too busy for hand-holding and too important for family democracy). Of course, this freedom from the usual wifely duties doesn’t justify my claim on her time. But Arna listens. It’s in her genes.      

Her live-in Erno was nigh, so we had to talk fast. “Where are you?” she said.

“In a deep hole. I must hide somewhere with Pol.”

“Nowhere here to stow you.” She paused, with that corkscrew smile that meant she was thinking. “I have a friend in the tropics, Bak.”

“I just saw her.”

“I can imagine. Her farm is 100 acres.” I knew that, but I kept my mouth shut. “Room enough for you and Pol to skulk.”

Like most poor pilgrims, Bak was staying at a rank hostel run by the underground Opposition to the Disciples, a movement that was more of a business proposition than an expression of faith. “I’d offer you coffee,” she said, “but I’ve already poisoned it. The Disciples drop in for a drop sometimes. You can go to my farm now, but you’ll have to fend for yourself. I have a few more Disciples this week to entertain.” She blew me a kiss.

—

Sun City lies in a northern plain, surrounded by more arable soil than you would find in even Rutr. In the old days, when the city was the size of a flea, wheat farms nearby fed it in exchange for machine-made chairs and tables, simple surgery, and the occasional tome like prehistoric Latin. The city is still girded by precipices just beyond the plain. Leaving the city is toil unless you take the paved roads. But these are blockaded by the Opposition, drunken roisters ruled by pooh-bahs who decapitate the penitent.  

Pol and I gave the roads a wide berth and walked to Rutr. In winter, the province is a twisted range of pointed ice mountains, as crooked as teeth, impossible to trek alone. Pol hadn’t wanted to come, but I pointed out to him that, being doddering, I would break my fool neck without his grip to steady me; or maybe somebody would break it for me. Besides, I said, God commands the son to obey his father. That clinched it.

We hiked for a week through knee-deep sawgrass, with toothy brown snakes draped like spaghetti on the aspen branches just overhead, and with armored deer gamboling in the matted oak forests beyond. You know the folk tale of the impatient giant from Rutr’s mountains who drove his fine bay horse to exhaustion. When he pulled out his whip, the horse vanished. In its stead stood a tiny armored doe, impervious to whips and in no particular hurry.    

Through the sawgrass, the sandy path was pocked by arrows carelessly carved into the tree trunks to show the way out, although we got lost twice on the first day alone. We could have taken a jitney, propelled by the muscular miniature horses that roam the northern hills, but the Disciples keep tabs on transport out of Sun City. One city priest was caught AWOL in a jitney and sentenced to five years of riding the circuit of primitive parishes in the hills.  

Besides, the long walk showed Pol the planet. Had he remained in town, he would have stayed indoors, reading the gloomy missives of Disciples past and imagining a martyr’s glory. Scuffing across Rutr in snowshoes, with the forbidding mountains before him, crowded and bright like a reliquary, in sunlight chilly and hale, would draw him away from his compulsion and neurosis. And the code of the road, the natural etiquette of displacing slower walkers on the narrow trails threading the ravines, was a set of simple rules that could only captivate a youth who doted on same, amid the chaos that is Atakent. I knew that much about him.

I didn’t meet Pol until after my breakup with Arna, which had invalidated the Disciples’ assignment of him to a communal school.  As they saw it, a school could shape a youth only if his parents had a strong marriage; otherwise, family dysfunction would distract him. When Arna and I divorced, the Disciples gave up on Pol, who was then 12. So he began living with me, albeit precariously. I cannot resist an example. I am fastidious about my floors, and I refuse entry to anyone who does not remove his shoes. I gave Pol a pair of calfskin slippers. But he would not wear them uninvited. Each evening, despite the numbing cold, he padded about barefoot until I heaved myself out of my easy chair, fetched the slippers, and lay them at his feet. Was this his way of maintaining a polite distance from me? Or instead to force me to serve him? I shouldn’t care, but a Chief Priest learns to obsess on the small to avoid freaking out on the large.      

On the trail, we whiled away the hours with groping chat. “Do you understand that God is not divine?” I said. “It’s a dog-and-pony show, designed to fleece the Great Unwashed. God isn’t even truly invisible. The Inner Sanctum has a false wall.”

“The Great Spirit can imbue a human, if his faith is strong.”

“God is your grandfather. The only spirits that imbue him are 192-proof.”

“Blasphemy!”

“More like lèse-majesté.  Anyway, he has always lived by his fists.”

“Then so should I.” He was indignant.

“You don’t understand. He didn’t inherit the Divinity—he invaded it. Rukan led his coup. All male, of course. God exposed your baby aunt to the elements to avoid an expense.”

“You’re not a believer, and I am.”

I thought of the red carcass in the back weeds of the family farm, shrunken to the size of a fist and half-digested by prairie wolves.

“Are you a reader?” I said. “Check out Mann’s prohibited history of the planet. The Disciples were political leaders of a muddy hamlet that liked to call itself Sun City. To raise money, they created a religion requiring pilgrimages to town.”

“They saw the Light.”

“More cheat than light. They hadn’t expected millions of rural pilgrims to stay, for good preaching and bright neon signs.” Pol nervously peeled away an aspen twig. “Sun City metastasized into the world’s metropolis.” He impatiently tossed the twig aside. “Your grandfather was its leading smuggler before launching the coup. He has always been a bon vivant, tipsy with power. But the city’s prosperity depends on the cult’s credibility. If people stop believing, they’ll stop coming, and Sun City will collapse. Hence the dog and pony.”

“But the book is prohibited, so it must be a lie.” Checkmate.

A small boy, breathing noisily and dusty from the road, caught up with us. “Please, sirs, I must have water.” I gave him my spare bottle. “Where are you walking to?” I said. He smiled and skipped away.     

As our week of walking dwindled to a stroll, the ochre hilltops gave way to a private pebble trail that led to the vast, empty acres of Bak’s farm, populated only by the scolding analee. The grizzled overseer greeted us like long-lost brothers and escorted us to a well-scrubbed log shack, surrounded by a trim fruit garden in the nether corner of the wild bull pastures. I remembered the shack from my annual rendezvous there with Bak. Those times were totemic: pole-fishing in the morning, bird-watching in the afternoon, the insatiable Bak at night. “You’ll be safe here,” the overseer said.

“When can we begin work?” Pol said.

“Work? Your job is to hide. The Disciples are combing the roads.”

“Where are they? I want to give myself up.” 

The shack had one bedroom, which I immediately claimed. Having a teen’s supple muscles, Pol could sleep comfortably on the tattered couch in the pint-sized living room. For supper, he prepared artus that he had picked in the garden, ripe to the point of almost unbearable sweetness—which, he knew, was how I disliked them.

He set the smelly black dish before me. “Do you want to say Grace?” he said.

“Why? Who’s listening?”

“Don’t be facetious. It’s your worst trait.”

“What’s my best?”

“Old age.”

He had just finished Grace when the overseer returned. “Lights out. The Disciples are in the neighborhood.”

“How did they find us?” I said.

“Remember the thirsty small boy?” Pol said.

The door of stout oak began heaving within. Gloved fists hammered and cultured voices cursed. “Go to the bedroom,” I said. Pol shook his head.

The door hinges burst into a screeching, glowing fusillade. There stood Rukan, daintily scraping the mud off his boots and onto the heap of splinters. “Good evening,” he said, and motioned Tippecanoe and Tyler2 to seize my son.

I stepped in front of Pol and clobbered the smaller of the guards, Tyler2. I broke my wrist but felt his jaw give way, like marmalade. I turned to Tippecanoe, who stepped back, slightly shaking his head. But then I felt my own jaw melt, thanks to Pol’s right hook from behind. “Why me?” I said, and checked out.

—

When I came to in the cold daylight, I was lying face up under a bedcover of wild roses. My jaw throbbed. “You’ll feel better with a breakfast in you,” Rukan said.  He rose from his squat and dusted off his pants sedulously. 

“Where’s Pol?”

“Your son is safe.” 

“That’s a contradiction in terms.”

“No, really. Not all of us are faithful to God.”

“What?”

“I’m an employee, not a devotee. I don’t believe in corpses.” Rukan pushed the door cautiously. Snow blew in. “The coast is clear. We’ll be in touch.”

“How can I reach my son?” But Rukan had left.

For a priest, I have a rather limited demand for divine mysteries. Was Rukan arresting my son or protecting him? I returned to Sun City, where, naturally, Pol was in his apartment. “I am under house arrest,” he said proudly. “I am to appear before God in three days, to show my fidelity. Rukan will take me to the tabernacle.”

“No, I will.”

“As you wish. Will you keep your oath?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Then I will go with Rukan.”

As my last resort, I called Arna and pleaded her to persuade our son to stay at home. “He won’t listen to me,” I said. 

“He’s been listening for years. He just doesn’t know whether to believe you. You’re the absentee landlord in his life. Erno is here, I must go. Let me know.” 

Three days sped by. At the appointed hour, in the rainy dawn, the tabernacle glistened spasmodically, as if repainted by a tot. Rukan met me at the giant iron doors. “Go home, priest,” he said. “I’ll handle this.  You lack finesse.”

“Tu quoque, buddy.”

“God wants a sacrifice. You won’t provide it, so your son must. A tiny sacrifice. I negotiated it.”

“In exchange for what? My job?” 

He didn’t answer. 

“How little?”

“Your son is willing.”

“Answer my question.”

He turned and passed through the doors. I forced my way in and shoved him aside.  

Pol, in billowing robes of white, sat on his heels, just outside the Sanctum. He held up a long, curved, gleaming knife.  “Just a finger, Father.”

“You will not mutilate yourself!”

He sneered. Or did he smile?

A soft light suffused the Inner Sanctum. “You are forbidden to enter, Nullity,” God said to me. “Come, Pol.” I began to follow, but Rukan and Company bolted the doors.

I stood without, listening to the indecipherable, minatory cries. Suddenly the inner light exploded, and all fell silent. I ran to the far side of the Sanctum and battered open the false wall with my fists. Rukan was sallow and shaken, my son astonished, chagrined, unharmed. “Hello, Father.” His first civil words to me in years.  

And God was prone on the marble floor, orange-skinned and triple-chinned, shivering as if with the ague, breathing His last.

—

Since then, in this annus mirabilis, the secret events have taken their normal course. I am God, reluctantly. Pol is the joyful Chief Priest, instructing me on every intricate ritual, which only strengthens his inexplicable faith. Arna, relieved of the stigma of divorcing a Chief Priest, married her live-in and happily forgot me.  Bak is still poisoning coffee and blowing kisses. And Rukan is Rukan, a slave to his work; ensuring, as I had ordered—by writ of mandamus, just in case—that the tax moratorium continue.

Once or twice I have asked him what happened. He only shakes his head. But I think I understand. I am not a diehard believer; but who can say that no Being ever intervenes? I could look this up in the Scripture, but it does not matter to me. I am content with the sacrifice.