THE HORROR OF GOD

“They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and
believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype;
their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead
leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between
him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“Thus spoke the devil to me, once on a time: "Even God has his hell: it is his love for man.” And
lately did I hear him say these words: "God is dead: of his pity for man has God died."
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“abyssus abyssum invocat”

― Psalm 42:7

A theologian once wrote to me that, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when
God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” Our correspondence yielded much axiomatic
wisdom, which he would later harvest for publication, but no matter what wonderful words
we’ve woven into the fabric of our philosophies, I remain in a state of doubt without courage,
God still absent from the practicality and banality of each day. It has been that way since the war,
and it especially remains that way when I hold the gun. I am someone who is desperately seeking
answers, so they, too, call me a theologian. The only difference between a theologian and a
philosopher isn't a belief in God, it's a belief in hope. The latter seeks truth at all costs, even if the
price paid is the death of truth itself and a negation of everything good in the world; the former
seeks truth at all costs but one— the price tag of hope, even if it’s only hope against hope. This is
what I had thought, anyhow, until the name Angeline Fleuric entered into the offices of my home
and mind. 'The theologian of hell,' they call her. She didn’t peddle hope; there was no room for it
in hell. Somewhere deep inside, her name calls out to me.
I have been conducting interviews and research for a book on the state of spirituality after our
Second World War, but the truth and meaning of it all remains unfathomable even with six years
of haunted hindsight. I fear that this book will span the longevity of my doubt, chronicling a
crisis of faith which could end in suicide. I purchased the M1911 Colt off of a soldier, and for
nearly a year have been holding it at night, my hand gradually bringing it closer to my temple.
The interviews I’m conducting are helping, as I notice we are all wrestling with the same abyss.
Everyone may tell me a slightly different story in mostly different words, but they all seem to be
threaded together in the same boundless knot, a void in their vernacular and a kind of breakage in
the backdrop of their language, a very real and very deep abyss in which the sunlight of meaning
can never shine. It is this abyss which persists for us all now, ever since our collective calamity
came into the world and we were shown Shoah, the nightmare from which there is no waking.
Something is changing in communities of faith, where silence has become louder than ever, and
it is this which must be explored, and yet... Is this obscene? I fear that in dissecting the tragedy
for the pursuit of meaning, I am committing some cruel offense against humanity, and yet...
Attesting to the sudden popularity of the Book of Job, which is now history’s biography, we
demand understanding, because even a bad story is preferable to nonsense.
Several of my interviewees are survivors of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in
Oranienburg in Brandenburg, just north of Berlin. Though the name means ‘House of the
Saxons,’ that demonym of such Germanic pride, the camp held international prisoners of all
types, and several of the ones I speak to mention this strange, French Fleuric fellow. They talk
about her with a trepidatious reverence reminiscent of the phrase “fear and trembling,” speaking
of the awful and the awesome simultaneously in sentences stiffened by something sinister. I hear
her in hushed tones, and for once in halfway to eternity I feel a stirring of curiosity and
excitement. She was summoned up by my very first interviewee, a homosexual Anglican
journalist of a muscular build yet also with a pale, practically pink complexion, a lightness to his
limbs and a lisp woven into his language. His eyes seemed permanently widened, as if in a state
of perpetual epiphany.
Q: Did you pray in the camp?
A(1): I did and I didn’t. At first, yes, oh yes, every day, every day I prayed the hours. It kept a
better rhythm to the day, that way. That’s the thing about liturgy, isn’t it? Comfort in the
predictable … I made a mistake with prayer, though. You know how things get associated by
accident? A song is playing the moment you lay eyes on … And the song’s forever that person. I
prayed at the wrong time … Well, they thought hard work could ‘free’ us of these … desires, or
at least Himmler did anyway, and what Himmler did they all did. They sent all of us with the
pink triangles down to the stone quarry. Those triangles, those stupid little pink triangles, those
three points … pointless … those were responsible for so much pain. It wasn’t just the SS doing
the beatings, you know, a lot of us triangles were killed by other prisoners, people who had what
you might call ‘beliefs,’ and they could single us out that way, so it wasn’t just the officers, it
was everyone … But anyway, they sent us to the quarry, and I was lucky enough to still have
some muscle on me, most of the others couldn’t lift forty pounds if you put a gun to their head ...
Well, that’s what they did, anyway, put a gun to their … Not their head, really. They started
using us for target practice and I just started praying, instinctually really. I suppose a moving
target allowed for better practice or what have you, but there was nowhere to run to, not really,
so I kept working, and praying None, and just working while the others, friends, some of them,
screamed and ran and for the first ten or twenty shots I flinched each time but then the worst part,
the worst part, was that I stopped flinching to the gunshots, I heard them and I heard the
heaviness … bodies dropping, and I prayed without ceasing, eyes open, unflinching. They didn’t
shoot me. Why me? Why not me? After a while, you learn to accept that there’s no human
answer to that. No rhyme or reason. You learn not to question what happens. They force you to
accept a theodicy you never would’ve agreed with. To accept evil. I couldn’t pray after that, not
for a while at least. The flinching would come back. I’d kneel to pray Terce and just shake,
hearing the heaviness all over again. Each prayer is a relived trauma.
Q: Did you still believe in God after that?
A(1): Yes, I did, but in a different way. It hurt. It was a God that hurt … is hurt … hurts. I wasn’t
sure how to verbalize that.
Q: Perhaps you could try to characterize your faith now? Have you attempted to pray after
Sachsenhausen?
A(1): Not for a couple of years. As I said, prayer became traumatic, but after the camps every
moment of life seemed like a tiny trauma, or bits and bobs of one big one. When existence itself
is traumatic, it’s all a prayer. So, I quit the liturgical hours, if that’s what you mean, but it seemed
like I was praying every single second of every day. Until I met this fabulous gitan, anyway. She
was at Sachsenhausen also, although I never spoke to her at the time. I suppose she’s helped me
verbalize … or alphabetize prayer … give shape to the thing, anyway … separate prayer from
the rest of the mess.
Q: And what does that look like?
A(1): What’s that?
Q: Prayer.
A(1): Oh, I don’t know … like a dream … It’s radix malorum. That’s what the gitan calls it.
Q: Radical evil?
A(1): The embrace of that evil, yes … but not evil like ‘evil,’ not where your mind goes
automatically … Re-storying evil, that’s the important thing now, after the war, anyway.
Q: Could you explain?
A(1): Well … most of the world thinks that I’m evil … for being a homophile, you know. Even
if I never really... Well, anyway, I think it’s evil that they think I’m evil. They see a corruption in
my love, and I see in their love corrupted into hate, and it’s a vice-versa, topsy-turvy thing. So,
there’s that matter of perspective. Evil becomes that thing which violates your ‘hallowed’
morality, which antagonizes the ‘precious little protagonist’ you think you are … but we’ve seen
a deeper evil, haven’t we? Something diabolical, anyway, calling out to everyone, laughing at the
response … I’ve seen evil for the sake of evil, and it’s so much more powerful than good for the
sake of good. The tortures, the humiliations, the experiments … Where was the ignorance there?
There wasn’t any! There was man staring into deep, deep evil, and there was evil catching his
eye … There was a purposeful power which seemed … intentional …
Q: Okay … Could you elaborate on your motivation to embrace this, or how it’s shaped your
faith after the war?
A(1): … Well, what if God is evil? Again, not the kind of evil people tend to think of, anyway.
What if God is evil but still God, still the Truth and The Way? Would you worship that God?
Would you rebel against God? Try to fight God off?
Q: I’m not sure, but it’s completely understandable that you’d ask these questions … we all seem
to be asking them now, after what’s happened. Theodicy is the phrase du jour.
A(1): Do you know what they named the first detonated atom bomb? Trinity. The site of the
Trinity … The Trinity explosion. I learned that they named it after a John Donne poem. “Batter
my heart, Three Person'd God, overthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and
make me new.” … Trinity, the God in Three Persons used to murder all those Japanese … the
God that blew up, the mushroom cloud of God … that God reigns. When I pray now, I thank
God for the camps. I thank God for the bomb. I thank God for the SS doctors who surgically
remove my friend’s hands and then sewed them on backwards just for kicks. I praise God now,
because I’m on God’s side, and God’s side hurts. You want to know why people’s faith has been
so shaken? Why you’re writing this book? It’s because we all believed in the wrong God, and we
were all on the wrong side. You know what the war was? It was a theophany. It was ‘God
shining forth,’ that’s what it literally means. Shining like a bomb. Mademoiselle Fleuric proved
this to me.
Q: I’m sorry, is this the woman who helped you pray?
A(1): ‘The great gitan,’ yes. You could say she’s … turning evil into good … that’s what they
say about God, anyway, isn’t it? That God spins gold from straw, so to speak? The mademoiselle
has helped a lot of us because she embraces what should scare us … and now, when everything
scares everybody, she seems … crucial. Anyway, I’ve said too much.
At the time, if I had been aware of a Mademoiselle Fleuric, I would have eagerly gathered all the
information from the young journalist that I could. Now I can’t seem to find him anywhere—
after several unsuccessful attempts at contact, I rang at his apartment only to find that he'd
vacated without any notice or trace, leaving behind only impersonal furniture and a large, black
triangle painted onto a wall. I had stared at the otherwise empty wall, my vision seemingly
becoming narrower, as if I was slowly moving closer into the triangle even while my body
remained still. This was two months ago, when the nightmares began.
I wake up screaming nearly every night, halfway through what should and used to be a calm and
detached slumber. Before this, my body would drift off, unbeknownst to me, into sound sleep,
and dreams were never recalled. Now, however, somewhere around three in the morning, I
startle myself awake with sweaty shrieks and eyes staring straight to a silent ceiling. I’ve learned
to control my breathing, on my back; inhalations have become less desperate, and exhalations
smooth. I sound like a hospital machine.
In my dream I’m drowning in light, colorful light as filtered through myriad stained glass
clerestory windows, light shining through the Virgin Mary, through the magi, through the dove,
through our Lord Jesus Christ. I am in some gargantuan Gothic cathedral, similar to the one off
of Amsterdam Avenue, except it’s downright dilapidated, dusty and dark despite the angular rays
of light creating a spectral geometry above me, illuminating the dust, dots of debris floating in
the light like little angels. The great organ plays solemnly, one sad note at a time, sounding tired
despite the strength of eight thousand pipes, though no one appears to be playing it. Below it,
however, hooded and hunched figures stand motionless in the wooden choir, their black robes
obscuring any sign of humanity beneath them. Another hooded person stands on the chancel near
them, head bowed down to the high white marble altar, and near it a final figure hidden in robes
sits tied to the cathedra, thick ropes binding it to the ornate bishop’s seat. There is so much
breathing here, slow, wet breathing, heavy ins and outs heard even above the organ’s mournful
music. I begin walking through the nave toward the altar, hearing B flat and breathing, and
notice that each step I take seems slicker and slicker, a damp squish sounding beneath my shoes
each time. I slowly look down to the floor I’m traversing, to the wetness underneath, and in the
tiles I see veins, pulsating and protruding slightly above the surface, a venous network pumping
blood through the body of the building, and I realize then just what is breathing—the church, it’s
the church, the walls contract gently and expand with trembles, and in a panic I grasp onto the
wooden seat in the aisle only to find that it is not wood at all, no, it’s some kind of muscle,
something with a reflex reacting to my touch, the seats flinch, dear Lord, the seats flinch, and
blood is dripping from the buttresses, and strong, wet arteries are reaching out of the ground and
twisting around my feet and legs, and I see the seated man tied to the cathedra, the hood has
fallen off of his head and I see him now, Professor Wexner, and he tries to scream but his mouth
is sewn shut and the bloody stitching travels up to his forehead and … and … and God...
And I wake up screaming, and then breathing, like a hospital machine. I get down onto my knees
near the bed, hands clasped atop my sheets, and whisper prayers into a darkness which slowly
seems serene again and finally emptied of everything except endless prayer, my own and that of
unheard millions in their own darkened spaces. I think that if I only finish this book, the
nightmares will finally cease and I can regain the peace I once had.
I began this project because of Israel Wexner; yes, it is an important subject which we must
explore to keep the war from killing the (my) faith altogether, but it was Wexler’s predicament
which spurred me forward, both in my research and in my ideation. It was my father who taught
me the faith, but when he passed, Israel who became a kind of father to me. Originally my well-
connected professor of Jewish Studies, he became the one who fought for my total deferment
from the draft, eventually taking me under his wing in the Divinity faculty and even securing
publication for my first book. He is the most Christlike being I’ve ever met. He joined the Va'ad
ha-Hatsala in 1939 to help rescue Jewish Europeans from Axis powers, saving the lives of
hundreds; in 1946, he returned from his final voyage a paranoid and ill man obsessed with
looking over his shoulder for the horror sneaking up behind him. The formerly loquacious
teacher no longer speaks but can still scream and sob, his eyes darting around in a hyperalert
panic toward unseen things in every corner and his hands quietly shaking to themselves. He has
been in a mental asylum for six years now, and hasn’t said a coherent word the entire time,
unless he speaks to me today, that is. I received a phone call from his doctors who are claiming
that Wexner has written a note requesting a meeting with me which I plan to record to end this
book, and I can’t help, despite all of history and human experience, remaining optimistic.
Another time I had heard Angeline Fleuric’s name was from a Japanese-American man who had
been drafted for Korea two days prior.
Q: Now, you’re one of several participants in this study who has actually found more faith after
the war. Could you explain what changed?
A(2): Witnessing evil. Evil demands a theology, you know?
Q: Could you elaborate?
A(2): Well, if you believe in evil then you have to believe in the good, and if you believe in good
and evil then you need to have a theology, at least that’s what I’m being taught. You can’t just
say ‘suffering is bad and I want to decrease suffering,’ because … well, why? Why is suffering
‘bad?’ Animals suffer. Everything suffers. Nature is built to suffer, since you have to kill to
survive and since everything dies. Catfish don’t have morality, do they? So, I would think, if
suffering is natural, then why do we get all twisted up trying to prevent it, you know? … But I’ve
seen absolute evil now, an evil beyond suffering, a uniquely human evil... I never used to believe
in evil, you know … I never used to believe in much. My parents were Buddhists, and they
believed in suffering as a result of attachment, but there is no real evil in Buddhism, as there’s no
real self or purpose, only sunyata and dukkha; we have dependent origination, we’re all
connected, and so on? Actually, I don’t know, I never really subscribed to anything, but I believe
in evil now. I believe in real, incarnate evil, and it doesn’t just look like a German. Evil has no
borders. It doesn’t care where you’re coming or going from … You know, I always thought I
was an American. I’m an American citizen, my folks are American citizens, so I’m third-
generation, what they call sansei. It didn’t matter though. What did Bendetsen say? ‘If they have
one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to the camps?’ I remember watching a parade
after the war, ticker-tape, you know, and just thinking— ‘Look at these monsters celebrating
themselves. Oh, what unvanquished heroes they must be! How utterly heroic they are, to fight
the Nazis and save the world!’ Baka! Meanwhile, America and Canada kept 150 thousand people
in concentration camps, shooting their own citizens, forcing 25 people into a space meant to
contain four … Meanwhile, they refused ships of refugees filled with the very Jews they were
literally meant to save, sending them back to Europe … Meanwhile, our great American
Congress rejected a bill to let in 20 thousand Jewish children from oversees … Meanwhile, we
writhed in the dust of these camps, infected with malaria and dysentery and God knows what
else … God knows … And now this government, this very government which forced my family
out of our house, the house that was later sold to ‘real’ Americans without any reimbursement to
us, the very government that put us all out of work and wouldn’t trust us as far as they could
throw us, now this government drafts me to Korea so I can torture and kill more Asians for
them?! Didn’t they just do this!? It’s been five years of racist, prejudicial treatment, five years of
people treating me like dogs, my father committing suicide, the government refusing to help us
in any way, and now they want to draft me to ‘serve?’ That’s evil, you know? … I never used to
believe in a Hell. Now I hope there is one.
Q: Does that mean you believe in a heaven?
A(2): There is no heaven. There is only Hell, and we’re in it. That’s what my teacher says.
Q: Do you believe that?
A(2): … I don’t know. I’m still not sure what I believe, or if it actually matters what I believe in
any cosmic sense, you know? I used to subscribe to karma, where there isn’t any divine or
purposeful order to any of it, it’s just this beautiful, self-sustaining law of spiritual physics where
what we do actually matters and has repercussions … where what you do is what happens to you,
where there are consequences to the ignorance and suffering you create... but now … Now I see
how unreal that is. The Jews knew this, they wrote the Book of Job, you know; maybe that’s how
they survived all this without losing faith … When she says that we’re in Hell, it makes sense
somewhere deep inside me. It explains the world, explains what happened to me and people who
look like me … Have you heard of Unit 731?
Q: I haven’t.
A(2): It was an experimentation camp. It started in Manchukuo, where the Japanese were
invading China, you know? Hirohito and the secretary of health called it a ‘water purification
plant,’ and then a ‘lumber mill,’ but really it was just a torture chamber. They purposefully
infected human test subjects with syphilis and gonorrhea to study vaccines … They vivisected
people, without anesthetic, just cut them open on a table to look at their insides and remove some
organs, just to see what happens … the Japanese were testing biological warfare, so people were
sprayed with bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, whatever … they put botulism in the food …
put prisoners in low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out … hung them upside down
and bled them, or starved them or froze them, just to see how long it takes to die … women
were raped and their babies taken away for experimentation … nobody survived that camp.
Hisato Yoshimura, keep your eye out for him ... He tortured so many people, and now he has a
cozy job at a public university. You see, the Americans and the Soviets wanted those test results,
so nobody was ever arrested or tried, the same way the Americans helped thousands of Nazis
escape so that they could use their research … So, there you have it—evil. Japanese, American,
Soviet, doesn’t matter … We’re in hell. Hearing myself talk, you know, I’m starting to believe
her more and more. We’re in hell.
Q: Who’s ‘her?’
A(2): Our teacher, Angeline Fleuric.
Q: I didn’t think you were a student. If you are, we can get you deferred from the draft.
A(2): I’m not exactly a student, not at any of these corrupt universities … and she’s not exactly a
teacher, she’s a nomad, a gitan … and don’t worry about the draft, she’ll get me out of it, and if
she doesn’t, there’s a good reason. That’s something she taught me. She taught me about God’s
Will. She calls it ‘teleological evil.’
Q: This Fleuric woman … How did you come to meet her? Do you happen to know more about
her? Where she works, for instance?
A(2): Oh, she works everywhere … She’s very interesting. I was introduced to her by a friend, a
survivor from one of the camps in Germany, Sachsenhausen. I was … suicidal, and my friend
knew all about that. He brought me to her, since she’s helped so many people after the war, you
know?
Q: Do you know where I could find her?
A(2): No, I have to get going now, I hope you got what you need.
I didn’t. When I sought her out, she was nowhere to be found, at least not in the directory; I
expanded my search to include certain terminology which I had heard from various interviewees,
such as ‘radix malorum’ and ‘teleological evil.’ I was eventually led to a document at a small but
basically bibliophilic bookstore in the crowded reference section, a pamphlet entitled The
Teleology of Evil by a group named The Philippians. The front page introduces the pamphlet
with a passage from Scripture just below the title and authors, Job 7:13-16— “When I say, ‘My
bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,’ Then You scare me with dreams and
terrify me with visions, so that my soul chooses strangling and death rather than my body. I
loathe my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone, for my days are but a breath.” Below this
is a picture by William Blake, a reproduction of the engraving Job’s Evil Dreams, in which God
hovers over Job in the night; only, instead of anthropomorphized feet, God has cloven hooves
A block quote from Arthur Schopenhauer covers the first interior page—
“Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we
only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even
when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him
but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for
what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the
very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no
such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for
nothing. But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for
something; and then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it
would satisfy us—an illusion which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied
with some purely intellectual interest—when in reality we have stepped forth from life to look
upon it from the outside, much after the manner of spectators at a play. And even sensual
pleasure itself means nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is
attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast upon existence itself, its
vain and worthless nature is brought home to us; and this is what we mean by boredom. The
hankering after what is strange and uncommon—an innate and ineradicable tendency of human
nature—shows how glad we are at any interruption of that natural course of affairs which is so
very tedious.”
A downright disturbed abomination of the Nicene Creed fills the next page, under the title The
Philippians Creed.
We believe in one Dying God, the Suicide Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible,
Of all instruments used in God's Suicide.
 And in one Lord Jesus Christ, who was indeed God for all ages,
Who evolved from Creation in order to truly die,
Dark from dark, death from death, deep from deep,
Through him, all death was made.
For us and for our salvation, God exploded heaven;
God became incarnate through Creation, evolving from amoeba to monkey,
And was made a human male so that He could be crucified, suffered and buried.
God is dead but rose again in our minds, ascending to our consciousness,
So that with glory God will turn the living into the dead, and the Kingdom of Hell
will end.
We believe in the Holy Dying God, the Lord, giver of death,
Proceeding from Creation and evolution,
And with suffering and evil is worshiped and glorified.
God spoke through the prophets,
Job, Solomon, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Blake, Bahnsen, Milton, Crowley, and our
Messiah Mainlander.
We believe in one holy teleology of evil,
We affirm The Will-To-Death for the Redemption of sins,
We look forward to the death of all, and to the peaceful beauty of the lifeless world
to come.
Amen.

The fourth through seventh pages contain an essay credited to one A.F., who I assume to be
Angeline Fleuric. The essay is as follows—
“I am doing a new thing. Consider entropy. Consider suicide. Consider that nature must literally
devour itself in order to progress, that organisms eat and prey upon each other in a violent
dialectical dance. Consider gases, which have only one striving—to separate in all directions, to
dissipate until becoming practically nothing. Consider the margay. This wild cat has remarkable
mimicry skills; it can perfectly imitate the pained cry of the pied tamarin. The tamarin hears its
own baby, or a child of its kind, screaming out in need of help, and answers this distress call only
to discover its predator the margay, hungry and pouncing. Consider also the short-tailed shrew,
which secretes venom from its salivary glands to paralyze its prey. The point of the paralysis is
not to kill the prey; instead, the prey is kept alive for an extended length of time, prolonging the
feeding, keeping it still for days at a time while it is slowly, cruelly eaten to death. Consider still
the lancet fluke, which infects snails and ants, hatches eggs inside of them, and controls their
nervous systems; in their puppetry, the lancet fluke leads the ant out of the colony at night (only
at night, or else the prolonged sunlight would kill the ant and thus the fluke) and onto a blade of
grass, where it waits to be eaten by a grazing animal, unable to control its own actions. The
lancet fluke is carried into a new animal, laying thousands of eggs within them. Finally, consider
the parasitoid wasp, which stings and lays eggs into a host organism; the eggs hatch and the
larvae slowly and painfully consume the organism (spider, caterpillar, what have you) from the
inside out. Charles Darwin, surely the greatest scientist of our past century, considered this final
example to be legitimate proof of the non-existence of a benevolent God, writing— ‘I cannot
persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic
wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.’
“These select examples (from possibly thousands of others) illustrate precisely the nature of
‘nature.’ It is designed with cruelty, dependent upon suffering, obsessed with death—in short, it
is proof that our Creator is not some liberally loving Father Who cares about what those
Enlightened Humanists deem ‘morality’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ The very fact that we are
in a constant state of need and desire which is never truly satisfied is a testament to the Hell we
are in. If anything, the wars of this century are even stronger testaments to this fact, the fact that
God’s intentions are not our intentions, that God’s will is defined by what us Moderns consider
to be ‘evil.’ We believers have forgotten the revelations of the Old Testament, God’s Word as
handed down through the ages. Is our God not the One Who created death? Is our God not the
One Who flooded the earth and extinguished all of mankind, save for one drunk and hateful
family? Is our God not the One Who slaughtered the firstborn of Egyptians, massacred the
Canaanites and Amalekites, the Hittites and Amorites, and annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah? Is
our God not the One Who ‘sent a plague on Israel,’ killing ‘seventy thousand people from Dan to
Beersheba,’ according to 2 Samuel 24? God demands death and suffering, the sacrifice we all
make, the sacrifice our God showed us to make with Jesus Christ. We Philippians are the New
Moses; in accordance with Numbers 16, we state—
“‘This is how you will know that the Lord has sent me to do all these things and that it was not
my idea: If these men die a natural death and suffer the fate of all mankind, then the Lord has not
sent me. But if the Lord brings about something totally new, and the earth opens its mouth and
swallows them, with everything that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the realm of
the dead, then you will know that these men have treated the Lord with contempt.’ As soon as he
finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and
swallowed them and their households, and all those associated with Korah, together with their
possessions. They went down alive into the realm of the dead, with everything they owned; the
earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community. At their cries, all
the Israelites around them fled, shouting, ‘The earth is going to swallow us too!’ And fire came
out from the Lord and consumed the 250 men who were offering the incense.’
“We have recently seen the earth once again swallow up God’s people, the Jews. We have seen
bodies piled atop bodies in landfills and graves. We have seen mountains of dentures and gold
teeth removed from the ashes of incinerated victims. We have seen trains filled with rotting
cargo, gassed humans covered in flies and maggots. God is dying, and we have seen God’s
rotting corpse. God is dying and, as our Messiah says, ‘God’s death is the life of the world.’
“Messiah Mainlander has finalized God’s revelation for us in his Philosophy of Redemption. You
see, in God’s infinite wisdom, God knew that non-existence is preferable to existence; existence,
to God, is a cruel eternity ensnared by perfection, a pointless and boring suffering through
endless days in the abyss before Creation. How long was eternity before Creation? How long did
it take God to resent and despise such a perfect, self-contained, purposeless and banal existence
without anything outside of Godself? And so, God sought Suicide, but as there was nothing
external to God and no means by which an eternal and perfect being can kill itself, God devised a
Great Plan—Creation itself would be God’s Suicide. God, in absolute unity with Godself, could
not create something perfect, for then it would not be Creation, but rather simply more of the
Creator, an extension of God; God needed to create something imperfect, something with evil, in
order for it to be separate from Godself and thus achieve God’s Will, the Will-To-Death. God
poured Godself out into Creation, exploding the eternal and perfect singularity with what Fred
Hoyle has called a ‘Big Bang;’ this cosmic kenosis scattered the corporeal, bodiless, heavenly
God into Creation itself. The debris of God’s chaotic burst developed over billions of years into
our planet, where the Spirit led evolution to culminate in the only vessel through which God
could take God’s own life—a human being named Jesus Christ. The perfect God could not kill
itself, but strove toward death with the Will-To-Death, and was indeed eventually tortured,
crucified, and buried. God, hanging bloody on the cross, had nearly achieved non-existence. But
God’s Creation remains and God’s carcass festers, a Creation which is, by necessity, Hell, since
God could only create something imperfect and evil if it was to indeed be something separate
from God. Fear not, however! This Hell, this rotting corpse of God which is reality, will find
perfect annihilation when God’s Will is complete, and we are God’s agents of fruition. You see,
Hubble tells us that the universe is expanding, just as gas naturally expands into near
nothingness; in time, all of God’s detritus will be so fragmented and scattered from each other
that any future, any life, any existence at all will be impossible, as each atom in the universe will
be beautifully alone. You see, God is taking us to where God went, ‘where neither moth nor rust
destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal,’ a perfect and unconscious Heaven called
Death where the suffering and boredom of existence can never appear, and we are God’s agents.
“To the feeble mind, God’s Will appears radically evil, opposed to human interest because it
includes human suffering, but in fact what never includes suffering precludes God’s Will. It has
been suggested that faith must be the teleological suspension of the ethical, something which the
countless deaths of these recent Great Wars have proven, but this does not go far enough; we
need a teleological evil. The Dying God is sovereign; evil, therefore, is strictly teleological. A
teleological evil pursues the Will of God through suffering, which is God’s chosen path to
annihilation. As Messiah Mainlander writes— ‘But at the bottom, the immanent philosopher sees
in the entire universe only the deepest longing for absolute annihilation, and it is as if he clearly
hears the call that permeates all spheres of heaven: Redemption! Redemption! Death to our life!
and the comforting answer: you will all find annihilation and be redeemed!’”
The final page, essentially the back of the pamphlet, has a reproduction of Blake’s Satan in His
Original Glory, depicting what one assumes to be a winged and shining Satan, looking eerily
beautiful yet dignified with an orb and scepter, dressed as the prince of this world. Below
Blake’s Satan is a quotation from Philipp Mainlander, apparently their Messiah, stating that “The
knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom … Life is hell, and the sweet
still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
This troubling text took a toll on me, sending deep shivers into the depths of my spirit. Just what
kind of research had I done, and have my interviewees been insane? What madness has come
over these people, and who would choose to live with such horror? Was this really another result
of the war—fresh insanities sprouting up wholesale, victims of post-traumatic stress and
existential ennui believing all sorts of things to cope with what they’ve seen? Is it really much
different from the new philosophies triggered by the war, systems like structuralism, nihilism,
absurdism, existentialism, or any other desperate attempt to deal with the horror we’ve
witnessed? Is it so different than the new far-right Christian fundamentalism of John Rice, Bob
Jones, and Frank Norris? Perhaps it’s the similar form of fundamentalism disguised by differing
content. Regardless, the pamphlet seems to be the most extreme example of the post-war
manipulation and distortion of faith I’ve been researching, and I desperately but cautiously
yearned to learn more.
I conducted more interviews after that day, appreciating the content for my research but secretly
disappointed whenever Fleuric’s name failed to be mentioned. The general gist of the responses
seems to corroborate what independent polling has already found—Americans weren’t extremely
religious, but the years after the war have led to a sharp increase in religious affiliation, unless
you were already very religious; people who formerly had a strong faith, however, found that
faith tested by the war. I interviewed both types of individuals, though I tended to focus more on
people doubting and questioning their faith, as I had been, as this wounded century bleeds
forward in time. The interviews were almost like therapy, a way to communicate and
commiserate with other members of the broken body of Christ, people in search of truth and
comfort, just as I was. I felt weightless after each interview, sad but light, unless, of course, her
name was mentioned. Her name always burdened me, bringing me down with gravity back to
where I was before, but keeping me interested.
Now, I plan to interview Wexner. I place my Aristocrat in the typewriter case and locate a reel of
blank quarter-inch magnetic tape. The asylum is allowing me to use their Magnetophon to record
my time with Wexner; more precisely, they seem to be forcing me to record the requested
conversation, perhaps for his doctors and therapy, or merely to keep him in the asylum. I wonder
if they realize that the Magnetophon is a recent Nazi invention; I wonder just how much of the
future will be a result of Nazi and wartime innovation, inventions built by and for blood, thanks
to my government’s Operation Paperclip. I gather my things and leave the office, hands full,
door unclosed behind me. I walk down the halls of the university and realize that they aren’t
worth describing. What is the state of exposition, after the war? It is a state of futility. We see
this in all art forms, not just literature—representing and picturing the world has become almost
obscene, an offense to post-war sensibilities; we don’t want to see or hear about the world, we’ve
had enough of it. Nothing, neither landscapes, rooms, meals, nor even people, seems worth
describing. The interior is all that matters now. It is the last mystery and the final horror … and
so I walk down the hallway, and it is a hallway, just that, and I enter my Continental Coupe, and
even that is too much to mention.
I believe I am being followed on my way to the asylum. A black Thunderbolt Roadster stays a
few car lengths behind me but turns whenever I turn. I keep glancing into the rearview to catch a
glimpse of the vehicle and possibly its driver, wishing I had brought the Colt with me for
protection. This happens six times, this upward gaze into the reflection, staring at the tail behind
me, but on the sixth time I see something in my backseat, something which certainly wasn’t there
before and likely isn’t there at all. In the mirror is a creature, some humanoid with mantis-like
features—great, unseemly, yellow compound eyes with thousands of small red dots within them,
eyes protruding from either side of its stretched, almost black and triangular head, eyes which
see all; it has a human chest, hairy and muscular but covered in a dark and inky fluid, except its
torso extended outwards into non-human arms and legs, into raptorial, grasping, spiked forelegs,
also covered in a dark, bloodlike liquid; when I catch its gaze with mine, its initially human
lower jaw juts outward into a toothy, greedy mandible, and every iota of its eyes are directed to
my own, and I look away instinctively out of sheer fear, I look ahead at the road and immediately
slam my foot fast down onto the brake pedal to stop myself from crashing into the car parked
ahead of me and my automobile stops with a loud, screeching jolt and it all feels like a
nightmare, oh God, it feels like my nightmare...
I brace myself and return my gaze to the rearview mirror, but there is nothing else in the car. I
turn around and examine the entire backseat but find nothing at all and then, in a cold sweat,
collapse my head backward onto my car seat headrest, my headspace cluttered with chaos and
confusion, cramps coalescing around my neck and head. Automobiles sound their horns behind
and ahead of me, so I pull myself together and continue the drive with deep breaths learned from
my time with nightmares. Perhaps the madness is catching.
I have been to the asylum to see Professor Wexner many times over the past half decade. He
never speaks, not even when I’m there, but I can tell that he always appreciates my company. I
would read him the latest publications from thinkers he once followed—Ignaz Maybaum, Karl
Barth, Eliezer Berkovits, Paul Tillich, Milton Steinberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Viktor Frankl... I
would recite Scripture to him... I would keep him up to date with my latest projects and with the
state of the university. He listened, I know that he did, but I could tell that there was always some
distraction lurking beneath his surface, some awful, obfuscated terror which he truly felt and
always optically searched for, eyes darting to doors and corners, his pupils frightened and
dilated. Now he wants to speak, and I feel as if his fear has spread to me; between the nightmares
and this demonic hallucination, between how I suicidally grip the gun and how I deeply obsess
over Fleuric, I fear that I may not be the best person to communicate first with Wexner after his
period without speech, which was not a vow of silence as much as it was the body shutting down
from fear. His conversation with God seemed to have ended not with a dial tone but with
screams of madness. Nevertheless, I am here now, screams in my head too, exiting my
automobile near the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, visiting one of their many suffering servants,
unsure of just how sane and coherent my professor will be. The Pilgrim population has soared to
thirteen thousand since the war, a trend which is being replicated at mental asylums across the
country. The U.S. War Department had to take over hundreds of institutions, since ten million
people fought in the war out of the fifty million drafted, and apparently my interviewees and I
aren’t the only ones who have been traumatized.
Pilgrim is a vast complex spread out across eight hundred acres, much of it used to force the
patients into colony farming, and with too many buildings to count. The asylum is like a little
insane city, a self-contained nightmare with its own cemetery, sewage system, heating plant,
electric light plant, and water works. The patients work without pay making furniture and
mattresses, sewing clothes, farming the land, and cleaning the facility, and those who protest are
generally put into an insulin coma or receive electroshock therapy; they say that at any given
moment, upwards of two hundred people are being subjected to electrocution here, so I forgive
myself for hearing screams as I enter the premises, since they could just be real. I enter building
twenty-three as a light rain begins to fall, using my back to open the door since my hands remain
full until an orderly takes my typewriter case and tape reel off my hands and arranges my
visitation while I wait. Dr. Brill approaches me after several minutes, shaking my hand and
pantomiming small-talk. He expresses his surprise and curiosity regarding Wexner’s letter and
request, telling me that I will be alone in the room with my professor but that the conversation
will be recorded and watched through a glass darkly. He boasts that he and his team have
performed over 400 prefrontal lobotomies in the past two years, since Egas Moniz won the
Nobel Prize for inventing them. My head pounds and I feel my blood, five or six quarts a minute
being pumped through my heart, I actually feel my blood under my skin as if it was boiling. I
force a sideways smile at Brill and accompany him and the orderly to the room where Wexner
sits across from an empty chair, the large Magnetophon on the bolted-down metal table between
where he is and where I’ll be, flickering fluorescence buzzing above us. The orderly arranges my
empty reel with the recorder and I hear the spindle scraping while I unpack the Aristocrat. He
leaves us in a hurry, shutting the door behind him. I suppose this is an interview.
Q: Professor Wexner, this is quite a surprise.
He clears his throat and takes a deep, guttural breath. His first few sentences are weak and he
speaks with fear. Occasional secretive whispers, during which he leans forward toward me in a
locked-eye stance, pepper his panicked speech.
A(3): Oh hell, please call me Israel. Everybody calls me Professor here. It’s become a sick joke.
Q: It’s been so long. I feel like there’s so much to—
A(3): Listen to me. Come here. I don’t want to die, okay? I am not suicidal. If anything happens
to me, it’s murder, okay? Okay?
Q: … Okay. Why do you say that?
A(3): Because I’m hearing things. They have people inside here, and I’m no use to them
anymore. I can’t be sure but it sounds like they’re going to kill me, that’s what I think I’m
hearing.
Q: Has anything happened? Have they done anything to you?
A(3): No, no, not like that. I behave. I see the kind of evil that happens when you don’t.
Q: Then what are you afraid of?
A(3): Lucifer … Her …
Q: Who?
A(3): A cult leader, Angeline Fleuric, she—
Q: Fleuric!? You know Fleuric?!
Wexner straightens up and tilts his head, eying me suspiciously. He is suddenly quiet and still.
Q: What is it?
A(3): How do you know her?
Q: How do you know her?
A(3): Oh no … You’re one of them, aren’t you?
Q: Israel, listen to me, I’ve never met her but I’ve been seeking her out for months now. The
interviews I’m conducting … I don’t know how lucid you were when I visited but—
A(3): I know, I know, go on!
Q: Her name, I keep hearing her name, from people all over the world, American, British,
French, Japanese, German, they’ve all mentioned her, she was in one of the camps and
somehow, she’s … well, I’m not sure, but she’s dangerous
A(3): Thank goodness … Now you may just believe me.
I give him a cigarette, and our pale smoke ascends in blue wisps toward the fluorescence above.
He spins me a story which I’m not sure to trust, although somewhere between insanity and real
terror lies an exaggeration which may be true. It all began after departing for his final
humanitarian voyage in November of 1945. Half of Europe was in shambles, with nearly fifteen
million refugees displaced by the war. Imagine yourself suffering in the camps, or hiding out, or
fighting in the resistance for years, before finally coming out into the peacetime daylight only to
find that your home, your place of business, your family, and all your possessions and wealth
have been destroyed. There is no future. There is no past. There is only the present tense. The
past and the future have been destroyed for us. What do you do?
Wexner, working with the Jewish organization Va'ad ha-Hatsala, was using his connections and
skills to help teams in Germany and Western Poland with bureaucracy, maintenance, translation,
and anything else he could. He had developed many connections by doing nearly the exact same
thing twenty-five years ago in the other Great War, and now he and the familiar others were
having depressing déjà vu in ships and beds similar to the ones form before. He’d always
believed in orthopraxy over and above orthodoxy, but with so much to do, the world was worn
out.
Once in Germany, he was assigned the task of gathering several groups of people over the course
of a month, individuals and families who had been in correspondence with the rescue committee
and whose paperwork had been processed. He was to bring them back to the base near port,
where they and others would board a ship headed to Canada and America, where Wexner would
return for Christmas and then the Spring semester. Those early days were chaotic; East and West
Germany hadn’t been divided yet and four different countries and their respective militaries were
occupying it while hundreds of organizations and groups were camped out doing their best to
help. Wexler worked his way north from Potsdam in Brandenburg, where the Soviets seemed to
gather before abolishing Prussia altogether, and with it a type of premodern, uncynical and
faithful history we will now never know.
There was an old Protestant church in the district of Oberhavel which was sheltering six
individuals Wexner was to transport, but when he entered the boxy, gray building he discovered
dozens of individuals, kneeling by candlelight, murmuring prayers with their heads bowed to the
altar where a crosses and triangular modern art hung. He was thanked by the people on his list
but told that he would have to leave unaccompanied, that everyone in the building had been
rescued by a group called The Philippians, which Wexner assumed was a Christian organization
taking its name from the Pauline epistle. After further discussions and emphatic refusals, Wexner
continued on his travels, crossing off names and making phone calls and arrangements as he
went. Strangely enough, however, The Philippians seemed to have gotten ahead of him at several
stops—numerous individuals on the rescue committee’s lists had already either been resettled,
were awaiting resettlement, or were perfectly happy where they were; most of them had joined
this group and were working for them in Europe. After many bribes and days, Wexner learned
several surely exaggerated stories about their international operation, the address of their New
York headquarters, the names of wealthy patrons, and the political connections they had, taking
mental notes all the while before finally being led to their elusive leader, Mademoiselle Fleuric,
who some of the Germans called Der Sinti.
At first, he thought she was leading a legitimate international humanitarian effort, since the entire
operation seemed rather professional and people all over the world had become members. Most
convincing of all for Wexner was the fact that many people, Jews included, had trusted The
Philippians over Va'ad ha-Hatsala with their lives and futures. Yet there remained something
vague about it all, something unsettling which simply didn’t sit right with him. Something about
her name ominously clouded the deepest atmosphere of his mind, the same way it had haunted
my office. Yes, the bombed-out cities, the orphaned children, the starving refugees, the armed
soldiers on every corner—these things were nightmarish, but there was something else about her
name and the way people spoke it as if from some hidden depths, something both lugubrious and
reverent, which bothered him, prompting his investigation.
They met at a cathedral near a makeshift camp of tents, shacks and medical equipment which
had been set up. She was waiting for him outside the front doors and when they entered, he
realized that a service was taking place. They walked down the center aisle, people turning their
heads one by one to look at him as she led him by the arm to a back office, and he felt as if this
was an intimidation tactic. Wexner continued to take mental notes the whole time, recognizing
some of the faces as Haakon Chevalier, Jack Parsons, and Gen. R.L. Walsh. In the office, one
man took Wexner’s hat and coat and another offered him a drink while the woman sat behind a
desk, smoothing her beautiful black dress down along almost too-thin thighs. They exchanged
momentary pleasantries while a man brought them each a Fruchtsaft and placed a loaf of bread
and dishes between them before joining the other man near the door. It wasn’t long before
Wexner realized that he wasn’t there to learn more about her, but for her to learn more about
him. It was a kind of interview, which is always about power.
Fleuric was a middle-aged, tan and beautiful Romani woman, a French gypsy with a modest coin
headband stretched around her midnight black hair and shining black bracelets balanced about
her wrists. Her dark eyes pierced Wexner deeply, calling out to him, reading him as he answered
her questions, and she would interrupt him before he could ask his own. She eventually seemed
satisfied, satiated with answers, and then tore the bread with her hands while telling Wexner that
he could be very important. She said that she’d seen unimaginable horrors, and that every time
she thought that she’d witnessed the apotheosis of human misery, a new paradigm would form
and she’d have to adjust accordingly. She said that her mission in the world was to redeem
humanity dialectically and to bring them to salvation through suffering, which was when things
took a turn for the bizarre and Wexner knew something was deeply wrong. As an emissary of the
Dying God, she was inviting him to join The Philippians, the angelic messengers who tend to the
septic cadaver of the Lord and who cultivate the Will-To-Death. She offered him bread and he
called her mad, called them a perverse cult and lamented the insane terrors of the war which he
believed had unleashed a new nihilism. He stood up to leave but his legs wobbled in a room now
spun round, streaks of light like tails of dragons, so he clutched the chair and collapsed back into
it. His vision blurred and squinted past Fleuric at some new noisy body in the room, some large
and monstrous insectoid engaged in what seemed to be a buzzing prayer, bowing its head down
above the woman before some appendage, perhaps an antenna, brushed across Wexner’s cheek
and he faded out.
He never fully faded back in. Initially, he awoke on a rooftop somewhere, but the experience was
dreamlike and may not have happened at all, everything remaining surreal but somehow
straining to be real. He could recall Fleuric speaking to him, overlooking whichever city they
happened to be in; near the end of ‘45, so many cities were similarly decimated, simply war-torn
and halfway rubble. Nauseated and dizzy, he could hazily see the images of her words when she
spoke, as impossible as it seemed. When she mentioned Lazarus, he could see the man rising
from the dead and his years of life afterwards, the strange years of a man who had seen and
experienced days of death before being called back. When she spoke of it, Wexner could see
Lazarus, Martha, Maximin and the Three Marys, Mary of Bethany, Mary of Clopas, Mary of
Salome, he could see them all leaving a boat along the Saxon Shore in Gaul, and he could see
Fleuric on the beach lit by flames, a pyre beside her. He began to pray, but once spoken his
words seemed to die, and he felt their decomposition, he felt the dirty decomposition of
everything, the rot in everything, and once again he faded out. The unconscious darkness
dissolved into reality several times while days and weeks passed by. Finally, he awoke on an
operating table below a large bright light, faces with medical masks hovering above him, and
when he looked down, he realized that he was open, cut open down the middle as if in an
autopsy, and their hands were inside him, touching his exposed organs, and he saw the
monstrous creature in the dark corner and it said to him, “Look, and behold your God.” Wexner
felt it, then, not just the pain on the operating table but the pain all around him. He blinked his
eyes; when they were open, he was on board a boat, wearing his trench coat and Trilby, aghast
and Godless.
A(3): They used me for … something … they used me for something awful, I just know it. I
can’t remember it clearly, though. I can only really remember the fear, the absolute terror … I
saw it, or rather, I felt it, I really felt it … not just an atheism I’d never known, but something
worse … something far worse than no God … the horror of God!
Q: No, that’s insane! Israel, a cult drugged you and assaulted you … it sounds like they may
have even done something surgically … You’re traumatized, you mustn’t believe any of this!
A(3): I don’t want to believe it! I don’t want anyone to believe it! That’s why I haven’t opened
my mouth in years! That, and … because I’m afraid of them. I’ll admit it, I’m afraid of what
they’ll do. They told me I’d be important in their plan, but I don’t want to be! I thought it’d be
safe here, miserable but at least safe.
Q: And you’ve never told the authorities what they did to you? We could have them arrested and
can shut down this whole perversity.
A(3): What if they’re stronger than that? What if they are the authorities, the same ones who use
violence and start wars? What if … what if they’re right? I think they were in the war, and now I
think they’re in the asylum, watching over it, lobotomizing and shocking and hurting people.
You have to get me out of here. I’m afraid. I’m a coward.
Q: No, no … Listen, Israel, I want to help, and I’ll see what I can do, but you can’t get out of
here overnight. I can try to get you moved, and get an appeal going, but I need to know where to
find this Fleuric woman.
Wexner believes there is a mansion in Poughkeepsie they use as their church headquarters, about
two hours north of the city. He gives me all the information he had garnered from his time in
Germany before once again pleading with me for help. Despite his suffering, despite the ravings
emanating from whatever trauma he’s experienced, it is nonetheless a joy to hear his voice again.
I tell him so, that speaking with him reminds me of why it’s worth living in the world, and he
smiles for perhaps the first time in years. Though he doesn’t ask for it, I say a prayer.
I enter my apartment and unload everything, the typewriter, my briefcase, the tape reel, my coat,
and my sighs. I pour a drink, light a cigarette, and browse my notes, rubbing my temples and
pondering our hallucinations, praying mantises, prayerful maniacs, and monsters, not simply the
monsters in corners and backseats but the monsters everywhere, the collective hallucinations we
all subscribe to, the illusions which may keep the world turning but cause so much hurt and fear.
I open my desk drawer and take out the gun for my nightly ritual. Thunder rumbles in all
directions. I stare at it and hear Israel’s voice, I hear my own thoughts racing, I hear Fleuric’s
name, and am suddenly not interested in the gun. I place it back in the drawer and go to bed.
In my new dream, everything is different. I am outside the church in a moonlit cemetery,
standing with Israel over a gravestone, which is more like a stele since it nearly meets our chests
and is clearly ancient. The professor tenderly traces his hands along the words inscribed into the
stone slab, and I hold a bouquet of red roses in one hand, my gun in the other. Church bells
chime six times, a deep sound calling out, as I kneel down and lovingly place the flowers and
gun on the grave. My professor and I turn to walk toward the church, but it has become the
mental asylum. Israel smiles at me, and the church bell rings just once more.
I wake up cool and it’s actually morning. I’m energized, feeling the finality of the book in my
bones as if I’m on the edge of completion with my research, playfully considering the new dream
to be a harbinger of this. Later, at the university, I retrieve their Magnetophon from storage and
bring it to my office, placing the reel of magnetic tape I had used the day before onto the spindle.
I set up my Aristocrat and slide paper behind the cylinder before adjusting the margins and
pushing the carriage, ready to transcribe the rest of my conversation with Wexner. I play the tape
and hear low-frequency static, somehow deeper than white noise, a kind of gray or black noise. I
keep listening, waiting to hear a voice, wanting to hear a voice, the deep part of me calling out to
the deep part of it and pleading for a connection, but the hissing voiceless void continues and I
develop a migraine until the tape suddenly unspools itself and I have to turn it off. They gave me
the wrong reel. Or they sabotaged it.
I telephone Dr. Brill at the asylum but only reach an assistant. I explain my situation, and he
explains the real situation. They say Wexner had hung himself with his bedsheets in the night,
say they’d walked in on him dangling, stiffened, soiled, eyes bulged, tongue sticking out. The
assistant continues to speak but I slowly pull the telephone handset away from my ear and place
it gently over the hooks on the base. I remember my gun first. Then I remember Fleuric.
The New York Public Library has maps and a directory dating back to 1786; it takes me an hour,
but I believe that I have directions to the old mansion in Poughkeepsie which was turned into a
church. I stop at my apartment on the way there, which should take three hours or less of a drive
if the now-forming massive dark clouds don’t empty out into traffic. I pace about for
interminable minutes before pulling open a drawer, giving my gun a pistol press test and placing
it on my desk. I stare at it, this ugly thing, this shiny instrument of human misery, and suddenly
my eyes swell with tears, my heart aches, and I have the deep impulse to take communion. There
is a gold and silver toned woven brass pyx beneath my bed which used to be my father’s; inside
it is a small chalice and a ciborium for the Eucharist. I place these on the desk near the gun and
open the ciborium to find the old Host, those stacked wafers untouched for years yet still pristine.
I pour Merlot into the chalice and kneel in front of the desk. The bread, the cup, the gun. The
bread, the cup, the gun … This is the choice. This has always been the choice. So, then—what is
courage?

Optional Dramatic Ending For Those Who Hope For More

I am on South Clinton St. outside of a massive, dark brown 19th-century house. Vehicles line the
street while others are parked in a small dirt lot near the building, which I pull into. I see a
woman dressed in red, running as quickly as high heels permit toward the front portico and out
of sight. I get out and lean against my automobile, lighting a cigarette. Rain begins its descent; a
downpour is coming. Two more people walk briskly up to the house and in through the tall front
doors, one man holding his fedora onto his head while the wind blows strongly. I get the feeling
that everything in the world is going to change. Even though it always has, this decade somehow
feels different, heavy with some finality. I hear music start to play, a solemn church organ behind
those walls, and I enter the building.
The first floor of the mansion has been gutted, its walls demolished, so that a church could take
its place. It isn’t so much a church as the ghost of one, the memory of what a church used to be.
There are burgundy velvet pews along two sides of a makeshift aisle leading up to a lectern and
four seats filled with people. A large, wooden cross stands by a window behind them, and a
bombastic black triangle is painted on the wall. I sit in the back row near the entrance and take
my hat off. A woman stands behind the front lectern and reads from a book.
“... darkness being necessary for light to serve as its foil as the pedestal is necessary to the statue,
and the brake to the locomotive. ‘There once was a transcendent area – it no longer is. The life-
weary, who asks himself: existence or non-existence? must find reasons for and against in this
world (the complete world: he should take his still blinded brothers in regard, who he can help,
not that he delivers shoes and plants cabbage for them, but by helping them to achieve a better
state) - on the other side of the world is not a place of peace, nor a place of torment, but only
nothingness. This can be a new counter motive and a new motive: this truth can draw one person
back into the affirmation of the will, pull others powerfully into death. The truth may however
not be denied. And if up until now the idea of an individual continuation after death, in a hell or
in a heaven, has kept off many from death, whereas the immanent philosophy leads on the other
hand many into death – so must it be from now on, since every motive, that enters the world,
appears and works with necessity.’”
She speaks the words “God may it be so” as she steps backwards, and the entire congregation
repeats the words. Once this woman is seated, a woman in a black dress stands and approaches
the lectern. The congregation bows their heads in prayer and I can hear a collective breath being
taken, with a controlled inhalation and a smooth exhalation, like a hospital machine, as if we are
all trying to find peace after the same nightmare. The people raise their heads and the woman
says, “Thank you, Beulah, for that spirited reading. Beulah Jones, everybody.” The crowd
mimics her as she applauds slowly, her bracelets quietly clinking with each clap. This must be
her. She clears her voice and gives a sermon. *(See Below)
The congregation stands and I stand with them, looking around the crowd, recognizing a
celebrity, the dean of a university, and some minor politicians. I notice one man turn near the
front, stretching his neck while standing up, and he locks eyes with me. It is the Japanese-
American man I’d interviewed before, except now half of his face seems horribly burned, the
skin like melted wax, and one of his eyes is missing and a glass ball sits in its place. He turns
quickly back to face the front after spotting me. The group begins singing a hymn, ‘Jerusalem’
by William Blake, and while they sing of “dark Satanic mills” and the “bow of burning gold,”
the young man walks up to the front and whispers something in what is undoubtedly Angeline
Fleuric’s left ear. She glances up directly at me while he speaks to her before he sits down. When
the hymn is finished, the congregation is seated and Fleuric speaks loudly to them.
“I know that this is very unfortunate news, but it seems that we have an intruder in our midst.”
Murmurs echo across the aisles as Fleuric points me out and people turn their heads to look at
me. ‘What’s your business here?”
“It doesn’t matter what his business is, he knows too much!” shouts my interviewee, who
appears to have escaped the draft at a cost. Others shout indistinctly in a hostile chorus.
“Silence!” Fleuric shouts. “Everyone is God’s child. Everyone is graced with the beautiful gift of
death. We know this as God’s universal salvation. In this Hell, everyone deserves a chance at
redemption … Are you here to play a role in God’s Will, child?”
“Your idea of the will of God is a last will and testament. It’s a disgusting disgrace!” At this,
some individuals shout out while others stand straight up like bodily exclamations, anger
washing over them. “You murdered my friend! You destroyed a beautiful faith!” I shout at her
like she’s more than a woman, as if in that moment she manifested all evil. I shout at her like she
is the war, like she is the mental asylum, like she is government and guns and corporations and
ideologues and even suffering itself. I shout at her like others shout at God.
“I redeemed him!” she screams back at me, waving her left hand in a strange signaling gesture.
“You’re wrong! And even if you’re right, is it worth it? Is this worth it?!”
A man on my left lunges at me and wrestles with me before another man helps him pin me to the
pew and before long, they are on top of me, so close to me; I imbibe their breath, hearing the
breathing, feeling the wet warmth, smelling their bacteria and tasting it in my mouth. Sweat drips
from a forehead onto my face. Panic is in their eyes. They’re human beings. Desperate, clawing,
frantic and fearful human beings. Realizing this, I suddenly feel light, like levitating, if only they
weren’t on top of me. I cease the struggle and tell them that it’s okay, it’s okay, don’t worry
about it, it’s okay, and I feel a letting-go. While the rest of the congregation backs away
concentrically, a man approaches me and jabs my arm with a syringe, holding the barrel while
pushing down the plunger. I’m not fighting, I’m just lying on the pew. The man moves away
from me and they all just stare. I turn my head lazily to the left and see the cross, lit by a window
from the back. It shines brighter than it should, brighter than it has any right to. Fleuric slowly
walks down the aisle toward me, speaking maliciously while I grow drowsier and drowsier.
“Did your friend Wexner tell you all the things he did? I doubt it. He earned his redemption with
such things, bringing God’s corpse closer to annihilation. It’s amazing what a little bit of drugs,
Nazi surgeons, and some witchcraft can do. He’s lucky. He got to be an agent of God, an angel,
really, and you will, too. With his help, and of course the participation of certain higher-ups, we
got thousands of war criminals out of Europe. Now your government has some of the best
scientists of the Third Reich working for them. Can you imagine the progress we’ll make, now?
Because it’s not about who wins the war, it’s about what’s learned. More sophisticated ways to
end our species develop, war after war, conflict after conflict. We have the bomb now. Truly, can
you imagine what the Nazis will come up with, now that they have American protection? After
all, we got Korea started. There are millions of us, child, all fulfilling God’s Will, and now you’ll
be one of them. You’ll be important.”
For some reason, everything seems simple. There is no theology now, no philosophy, no doubt,
no belief. I seem to be the only one noticing how bright the cross is behind her. It illuminates a
beautiful half-truth coursing through the fanaticism around me, and I almost believe her,
everything she’s saying, except one thing, one radiant thing she’s too caught up in her own light
to see. Before I fade out, before I become their puppet of evil, I pull out my gun from the interior
of my coat and point it at Fleuric’s head. I know that she’s not the only one, that a whole
congregation is around me, that evil surrounds me. If it isn’t her who uses me, if it isn’t her
insanity which ruins me, it will be one of theirs. Some people gasp, and her eyes widen, her face
freezes. I see it now, in her eyes, and she sees that I see it—cowardice; she’s still afraid. I see her
former certainty crumble and a doubt without courage form around her quaking lips. I see what
she’s wrong about, and it breaks her. I see the cross behind her and it seems so simple. I forgive
them. I forgive myself. I am forgiven.
I move the gun to my forehead and pull the trigger.
There’s a simple second or two, an eternal slipping synthesis, when there is no thing within
everything and nothingness fades into itself. Joy is glimpsed for a moment, but it too fades into
the rest, a weightlessly heavy and swirling but still dark light, a negation negating negation, in
infinite serenity, everyone’s home on the other side of horror, and I am not afraid, I am simply
not.

* The history of humanity is a journey from the meaningful to the meaningless, a dialectical
dance in which we waltz away from our illusions and into the dark chamber of truth. We began
with polytheism, believing everything to be of purpose, assuming that the future was fixed, that
the gods fashioned fate, and that everything continues causally. We moved to early monotheism,
positing that the One True God ordered the universe and that the actions of believers will align
with this God’s Will, while those unbelieving heathens can stray from God’s Will and thus
wander into damnation. This was our introduction to freedom, a freedom only for the damned,
freedom granted to man at the cost of evil, because freedom creates contingency, the realization
of rebellion, the disposition of disobedience against God’s Will. We believed that freedom was
the root of all evil, but what kind of freedom is this? The freedom to do whatever you want, so
long as you do what you’re told or else face hell? The machinations of monotheism melted
across centuries singed by science, rationalism, enlightenment. We then moved from
monotheism to atheism, where we are condemned to freedom, total freedom, where Life is
ultimately meaningless. You see, God’s Will is the development of fatality, the gradual
understanding of our own futility, millennium-long nudge into extinction, with God guiding us to
suicide. Except, friends, I tell you that we have not gone far enough! I tell you that the Dying
God demands we delve deeper! We must from atheism to mortutheism, a belief in the Mortuus
Dei, the Dead God. Here, we are only condemned to the illusion of freedom! Here, life is less
than meaningless, it is a malignancy which must be annihilated according to God’s Will!
Brothers and sisters, you have prospered from this gospel. I see amongst you friends in the
military, in government, in business, in science and in philanthropy, people of all nationalities
and creeds, united together by death and the Dying God. I see the work you’ve already done, and
your admirable efforts to edge our God into a final and peaceful extinction has not gone unpaid,
even in this kill-or-be-killed World we know as Hell. Yes, we have been entrusted with this work
since God’s Crucifixion, and we have been commissioned as apostles of the Dying God to travel
through this Hell and bring it to absolute annihilation. Yet, I cannot conceive of a time which has
been more fortunate and fruitful for us than this century, and the best is yet to come.
Vasectomies and abortions, anti-natalism and suicides, global war and pandemics, ecological
catastrophe and political division, better weapons and better bombs—you are truly fulfilling the
will of God, the same God Who designed nature as a suffering machine, Who created things in
order for them to hurt and perish with constantly unsatiated desires, Who unleashed in humanity
a radical evil over and above the terrors of the natural world, Who killed Himself as a man on the
cross, and Who not only allows holocausts and genocides but demands them as God’s Will. This
is what it means to trust in God—embrace evil as a duty, as the rule and not the exception,
understanding that everything happens for a reason and that God is in control, God is our co-
pilot, God is Good and God’s Good as revealed in Scripture and Nature is Evil, praise the Lord,
Amen!
For those of you who still harbor doubts, know that you are displeasing God. God wants us to
place everything in God, to abandon and despise the World, to take up our cross and suffer as
Christ did because to live is Christ and to die is gain, to bring the sword, to burn the weeds, to
hate our parents and family, to subjugate ourselves, and to love this Lord our God with all our
hearts, souls, minds, and strength. If you do not give yourself over and decay with the body of
Christ, if you do not surrender to the decomposition of the world, then there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth. You have seen what has happened to those who deny us. This is a Holy War,
brothers and sisters. We are God’s Army. God revealed our meaninglessness on the cross and
showed us the true suffering and cruelty of this Hell we call The World; God ruptured our petty
moralities while God died, and showed us how to die, too. I praise the Lord. May God’s Will be
done. Amen? Amen.