Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  “I don’t feel comfortable with you like this,” said Fraser, using the language of analysis that Carl had taught him. “I find it difficult to confide in an entity that may rip my head off and drink my blood at any moment.”

  “Sorry,” growled Carl through his massive saliva-dripping fangs, and promptly returned to the stately European gentleman he had been in the latter years of his life.

  Carl slowly got to know Fraser and Fraser got to know Carl. Through the dream therapy, the two became rather friendly.

  Carl explained to Fraser that, since he had died, his challenge had been to stop becoming extremely smug because he had guessed so much correctly during his lifetime. He told him that even Freud conceded that he had been on the money and, after death, the two men had rekindled their friendship, enjoying regular Pictionary evenings with Socrates and Tony Randall.

  Fraser was curious as to why Jung had singled him out for treatment. One night, in a fitful sleep instigated by an excellent lamb pasanda from the Crème de la Crème Indian restaurant in Argyll Street, Fraser met him by the statue of Dostoyevsky outside the Lenin Library in Moscow.

  “You are a perfect patient for me,” said Jung, who had appeared this time as a beautiful young English actress named Emily. “You are the totally dual entity. You are an amoral boor with the potential for sainthood. An intellectual moron. An atheistic priest. Plus I don’t really get to choose my patients these days. I can only treat people who dream about me. You seem to do so on a regular basis. Can you explain that?”

  “Not really,” shrugged Fraser. “Although I read about you a bit when I was shagging a psychology student at Glasgow University. The only books she had in the house were by you and Freud and Adler and all that bollocks. She said you were a bit of a Nazi.”

  “Oh dear, where do they get this nonsense? Freud was convinced I was anti-Semitic because I disagreed with him on certain theories, and also, I made a couple of mistakes politically in the thirties, but no, never a Nazi. Simply because they were spiritually dead. Of what possible interest could they be to me?”

  “Point taken,” Fraser concurred. “You know any Nazis? Must be a lot of dead Nazis around.”

  “No, not many. Like I say, they were spiritually dead, so when the body goes, well, that’s kind of it.”

  “So there’s only spiritual people in the afterlife?”

  “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that but you’re on the right track. If the spirit is the only thing that survives, then there’s not going to be much left of you if you have no spirit.”

  “What about evil spirits?”

  “You’re not ready for all that yet. Let’s talk about you.”

  Fraser couldn’t resist Carl’s beautiful blue eyes, his high cheekbones, his full breasts pushing at his bodice. He kissed him on his soft, womanly lips.

  “Hey, it’s still me,” said Carl.

  “I know, but you’re so beautiful.”

  Fraser woke up embarrassed and guilty that morning. He took a long shower before going to work. Jung’s appearance in the taxi to the airport was unusual. Fraser had not been abstemious for the required time and Carl had never appeared during a catnap. This was a change.

  Fraser was unnerved, hung over, and anxious about the long flight ahead. He brought out the invitation and looked at it again, feeling the raised golden letters beneath his fingers. From the Holy United Church of America.

  Dear Fraser Darby

  Your name has been selected by the Lord.

  Working through our committee, Our Heavenly Father

  has chosen you as the top religious media figure in your region.

  You are most cordially invited to a gathering of Christian

  believers in Birmingham, Alabama. Christian Broadcasters will

  come together in celebration and discussion of how better to serve

  God through the media.

  We pray that you will attend.

  Pastors Leon and Saul Martini.

  There was a 1-800 telephone number to make hotel and flight reservations at discount rates for the faithful. Fraser had already called. He had to get out of town for obvious reasons, and Birmingham, Alabama, although nobody’s first vacation destination choice, was as good a place as any.

  No one would have heard of him there, there would be no Press Bar or Sunday Recorder, and who knows, he might just be able to wrangle some kind of job in American TV. You never know. Fraser figured it was an investment in his future, if he had one.

  SATORI

  GEORGE MUST HAVE SAT LOOKING at Tower Bridge for four hours before he came to the conclusion that today was not the day he was going to jump. Today would not be the day that he offed himself, so he went for a beer instead. Actually he had three before he noticed that he felt pretty good. He felt amazingly good for a terminally ill suicidal vagrant, although he wasn’t technically a vagrant, given the wads of cash he had secreted around his person. He had three hundred pounds sterling in fifties in each sock, five hundred in his wallet in twenties—he liked the way they made his wallet fat, like a Cockney gangster. He also had two thousand in an envelope in the zip-up pocket of his anorak.

  He never thought he’d have time to spend it all but now he was beginning to wonder. But it wasn’t the money that made him feel good. He had plenty more in his bank accounts and stock portfolio and time share in the Algarve.

  It was the freedom. Sheila could keep the money now. Get a new car, get Nancy some ridiculously expensive girly shoes that tubby teenagers think make them look like anorexic television actresses.

  He felt free, he was enjoying the absence of responsibility and routine. He liked being self-involved and thoughtful and alone. He felt honest. Totally honest.

  This is what it must be like to be Holy, he thought.

  It was very good beer.

  He ordered a fourth from the red-faced, mutton-chopped barman, who looked like a drawing of an Englishman on a Napoleonic propaganda leaflet, or an early naturalist’s drawing of an orangutan.

  “You Scots love to drink, don’t cha?” commented the Anglo gibbon as he poured George another pint of the warm, sudsy nectar.

  “Yes we do,” replied George.

  “No offense, mate,” mumbled the monkey.

  “None taken,” said George. “It’s true. We’re a bunch of backward inbred savages whose erroneous self-importance is matched only by our national obsession with intoxication.”

  It was very good beer.

  “All right, mate, keep it down. We don’t need any of that kind of talk,” warned the Saxon simian.

  George nodded, feigning contrition, a delicious tickle of rebellion and cheekiness pushing up his heart rate. He paid for his beer and sat down in the corner of the tacky pretend stabley/countryish, totally imitation pub.

  What now? he thought.

  He looked around at the other drinkers, fat, white men in suits and ties, their open pores oozing boozy heat like New York manhole covers. His eyes rested on the “salad bar” that offered baked beans and croissants.

  Jesus, baked beans and croissants. No wonder the French hate the English.

  That’s it. The French.

  The ghastly nature of English pub meals had delivered a kick in the eye to George and he hadn’t even had to eat one. He suddenly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he couldn’t take his life in this damp and grisly Germanic dump. Why on Earth would he want England to be the last thing he saw? France, the French, the frogs know a thing or two about romantic and tragic death and they have plenty of bridges in Paris, he thought, although for some reason he couldn’t sufficiently explain to himself, he had never been there to see.

  “A man should see Paris before he dies,” George said out loud.

  He drew a few suspicious glances from the surly Londoners around him but no one said anything. The gorilla stroked his facial hair, puffed his chest, and paced behind the bar.

  George downed the rest of his beer and left. He would have liked another, i
t was very good beer, but now he had a mission.

  Paris.

  Like a lover in a movie, George hailed a hackney cab outside the pub.

  “Waterloo Station please, the Eurostar!”

  “Yes, mate,” smiled the Sikh cabbie through excellent dentures. “What time’s your train, guv’nor?”

  “As soon as I can get it,” said George.

  Fuck, I hope this drunken Scottish prick doesn’t throw up in the cab, thought the driver in Urdu.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: ONE

  WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen-lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.

  I-40 runs all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, to Barstow in California, where it joins I-15, which can either take you north to Las Vegas and then on to Salt Lake City or south to Los Angeles and Mexico. For most of the way it follows old Route 66, a highway White America remembers fondly because for them it conjures up a time of innocence before cigarettes gave people cancer and gasoline fumes burned a hole in the sky. A time before homosexuality and drugs, a time when the only threats to the world were Soviet Russia, aggressive extraterrestrials, or perhaps the occasional mutant insect that had inadvertently fallen into a nuclear reactor and grown to five thousand times its original size and was intent on eating Chicago.

  In short, Route 66 was a symbol of what White America is really nostalgic for: a time that never existed.

  Saul and Leon were, of course, White American. They used history, their country’s and their own, and any suitable religious doctrine to suit their own ends. They were survivors. Like roaches.

  Saul and Leon were barkers at the carnival tent catering to the low-income end of America’s spiritually disenfranchised. (Historically, it is better for religions to cater to the poor because there is always more of them. They are more desperate, so therefore will cough up as much money and devotion as they can, plus their life on Earth is unpleasant enough for them to buy the idea that things might actually improve after death.)

  Saul and Leon fell into the arms of the Lord for the first time almost immediately on leaving the orphanage. They had traveled by night, south from Atlanta, through Macon County to northern Florida and the little town of Crawford’s Creek.

  This is true hillbilly country.

  Hillbillies are much maligned, as most of them place hospitality and kindness above cynicism and wit and therefore are deemed intellectually inferior by the cynical and witty who occasionally pass through their domain on the way to somewhere noteworthy and sophisticated. Hillbillies don’t mind this, of course, because they place hospitality and kindness above cynicism and wit and therefore the cynicism and wit of the cynical and witty is wasted on them. No real harm done.

  However, the cynical and witty often think this is just ignorance and, as with all cynicism and wit, there is some truth in it.

  There is a streak of anti-intellectualism, a deep mistrust of smart folks, running through America’s rural population, which is understandable when you realize that intellectual capitalist scientists applied farming methods that led to horrid diseases in the livestock.

  Diseases caused by animals eating reconstituted organ parts of their own parents in the name of smarter economics.

  Therefore the country folks like to keep things simple, so they don’t respond well to metaphor or allegory.

  This can lead to problems when approaching ancient enigmatic scripture, which is almost entirely allegorical.

  For example, in the Bible it says:

  And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name they shall drive out demons; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. (Mark, chapter 16, verses 17–18)

  People who embrace the concept of allegory would argue that this passage means basically accept God—the notion of a benign spiritual entity that controls an essentially ordered and pragmatic Universe—and you’ll feel a lot more comfortable, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. That you’ll be in much better condition to help those around you, and by being of service to those others, not only will they be helped, but you will too. That faith is the lifeblood of the soul, and the world is a lot more dangerous and terrifying without it. Or something like that. What this passage is almost certainly not advocating is the handling of real poisonous snakes and drinking real poison, especially as it was written in a time and place where you could hardly walk a mile without tripping over a couple of utterly deadly toxin-injecting serpents.

  Also, there was probably no talking snake in the Garden of Eden, and for that matter, the existence of an actual place called the Garden of Eden seems unlikely (this, of course, does not count the nightclub in Hoboken of the same name).

  God is probably fine with people eating apples, Eve wasn’t actually made from Adam’s rib, and Jonah wasn’t really eaten by an actual large fish. (Although it is probably true that the people of Sodom loved it in the pooper.)

  It is worth noting that one of the most prominent snake-handling cults, the Church of God with Signs Following, was founded by George Went Hensley, a Pentecostal minister who died tragically, if predictably, from a snakebite.

  This being said, the congregation of the Christian Reformed Fellow ship of Born Again Snake Handling Pentecostal Baptists (not associated in any way with the Hensley group) were a godsend to Leon and Saul. It was from these snake handlers that Saul’s true vision would eventually come. They would be his inspiration for the powerful moneymaking juggernaut the Holy United Church of America, where Leon’s charisma and astonishing singing voice and Saul’s duplicity and greed would finally be joined in a spectacular marriage of Religion and Show Business. Of course, churches don’t spring up overnight.

  It began like this.

  After they left the orphanage, Saul and Leon were technically on the run. Not actually on the run because:

  1. Saul was already too fat to move at anything more than an amble.

  2. No one was really looking for them. Runaway teenagers are not a high priority for any law enforcement agency.

  However, because they were under eighteen—Leon was seventeen, Saul sixteen—they were still wards of the state, so if they got into any kind of trouble, or were reported to the police by any well-meaning do-gooders, then they would be sent back immediately. Which, frankly, on a couple of dark nights, they both secretly wished for.

  The orphanage they had escaped from was not in any way Dickensian, it was a rather sweet two-story Victorian house in Duluth, a middle-class suburb to the north of Atlanta. The home itself was comprised of twenty-three children who were separated into male and female dorms. The whole operation was run by a Mrs. Wolf, a kindly old gray beast who, due to a botched harelip surgery as a child (in an orphanage herself), had the rather alarming appearance of someone who was snarling all the time. In truth, she rarely snarled, she understood the fears of the youngsters in her charge, she had been through it herself. She was patience on a monument.

  From the moment they arrived at Mrs. Wolf’s house when they were eleven and twelve years old, Saul and Leon were inseparable. They had not been quite as close when they lived with their mad mother but when she was removed, and when she died, they clung to each other like never before.

  Mrs. Wolf was sensitive to this and placed them in bunks together, Saul on the bottom for obvious reasons. The children were taken to school in a clapped-out yellow bus driven by Ted Casey, who made sure every child who got on his bus, from the young
est to the eldest, got a Tootsie Roll lollipop. The kids adored him. Tootsiepop Ted, they called him. A few years later, long after Saul and Leon had gone, he became famous as Atlanta’s most notorious serial killer when his double life was exposed. Every two or three months, depending on the position of the constellation Orion in the night sky, Ted would rape and kill an African-American prostitute and eat her eyes.

  Still, he was good with the kids.

  High school is tough enough on anyone, an absolute rule of the Universe being that if high school is not a buttockclenchingly awkward, emotionally difficult, and unpleasant time of your life, then the rest of it will be a crushing disappointment. Academic success is desirable, popularity (the only thing that most students really desire) is not. Those who excel socially in high school are truly damned. The home-coming queen does indeed bear the mark of the beast.

  The irony is, of course, that this information is generally not available to high-school students, and was certainly unknown to the kids on the orphanage bus. Called The Bastards by the rest of the student body, they were as popular as Jewish tailors in 1930s Hamburg.

  There was no way that one of The Bastards could ever be popular. No amount of athletic prowess or street smarts could save you from this leper colony. It was worse than being retarded or having Jehovah’s Witnesses for parents, or even having retarded Jehovah’s Witnesses as parents.

  The Bastards took this stoically, they knew their place, so they shuffled from class to class, heads down, eyes averted. Except Leon. Even then Leon knew what he had. He walked with his head up and looked other students in the eye, which got him beaten up a lot but he didn’t care. He had a sense of destiny, he had a great schlong, and The Voice. But he kept his pants and his mouth shut, biding his time. The legendary timing of his father.

  Saul, being fat and a Bastard, had the most horrendous time. His misery was compounded by alarming red acne that covered his face every few months. No one ever knew, not Ted, not Saul, not Leon, not Mrs. Wolf, no one, that Saul’s acne attacks always coincided with one of Tootsiepop Ted’s homicides. A coincidence that passed by the whole waking world.