Holy Terror Read online

  “With all my heart, child, I would dearly love a soda. Do you have orange soda here in Patna?”

  “No. Just Tab. The Blissful Master prefers Tab. If you want orange, go to Calcutta or Paris. Here we have Tab.”

  “I see the Blissful Master has a problem with calories.”

  “It is not a problem. A diet drink is a solution.”

  Reverend Powell saw a flush creep up her soft pale cheeks. For the first time, he saw a strand of her golden yellow hair peek out from under her pink hood.

  “We can leave to spread his word tonight, if you wish, child.”

  “You think I’ve been kidnapped, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  Reverend Powell glanced around the large expanse of the cool, white-walled room, like a horizontal snow pop set in a hot pink and brown dish that was India. Modern luxury in a continent of rancid death. If it were modern, it could have electronic listening devices. Suddenly he noticed cleanliness in the air. He was no longer smelling human excrement.

  “Of course, I don’t think you’ve been kidnapped. As I was telling your father, my close friend, I just want to come and see our little Joleen.”

  “Rubbish. Daddy isn’t your friend. The day I was born it almost cost you your life to get coffee at his pharmacy. Daddy’s a reactionary racist. Always has been. Always will be.”

  “But the letter, Joleen?” asked Reverend Powell, his mouth open in astonishment.

  “Brilliant, wasn’t it? Another proof of the perfection of our Blissful Master. He said you would come. He said Daddy would go to you and you would come here for me. He said you would do this at the request of a man who would have watched you die for a cup of coffee twenty years ago. Doesn’t this prove his brilliance? Oh, perfection, perfection, perfection is my Blissful Master,” shrieked Joleen, and she jumped up and down, clapping her hands in ecstasy. “A perfection. A perfection. A perfection. Another perfection.”

  From doors he had not seen, from drapes he had not noticed until they rustled, from stairways that had blended into the walls until he saw sandals coming down them, came young men and women, almost all of them white, a few black. None looked Indian except one girl who was more likely Jewish or Italian, thought Powell.

  “Let me tell you another proof of our Blissful Master’s perfection,” Joleen announced to the throng and told about Jason, Georgia, and the history of the races, black and white, how distance had always been between them, but the Blissful Master had said his perfection transcended races.

  “And to prove it,” shrieked Joleen, “here is a black man who has come at the bidding of my father, a white man and a hated segregationist. Lo, perfection we behold.”

  “Lo, perfection we behold,” chanted the group. “Lo, perfection we behold.” And Joleen Snowy led the Reverend Mr. Powell through the group of young people to two white doors that slid apart, revealing an elevator.

  When the door shut them off from the crowd, Powell said, “I don’t think deceit is a form of perfection. You lied, Joleen.”

  “It’s not a lie. If you are here, isn’t that a stronger reality, a stronger truth than a piece of paper? Therefore, a greater truth overcomes a lesser one.”

  “You sent a letter with deception in it, child. This deception is still a deception, still a lie. You never used to lie, child. What have they done to you here? Do you want to go home?”

  “I want to achieve perfect bliss through the Master of Bliss.”

  “Look at me, child,” said the Reverend Titus Powell. “I have come a long way and I am tired. Your father is worried about you. Your mother is worried about you. I was worried about you. I came because I thought you had been kidnapped. I came because your letter read like a code calling me to come. Now, do you want to go home with me, back to Jason?” He saw her head tilt and her eyes fix on his chest as her mind put together the intricacies of her answer.

  “I am home, Reverend. And besides, you don’t understand. You think it was what you call your Christian virtue that brought you here. It wasn’t. It was the perfection of the Blissful Master, and I feel so happy for you, because now you will enter bliss with us. And you almost missed it because of your age.”

  The elevator doors opened to a room furnished in chrome and black leather, deep chairs and long sofas, round glass tables and lighting that looked to Reverend Powell as if it had come from the pages of that fancy magazine he had once bought by mistake. He and Mrs. Powell had read it, laughing at the prices. You could buy a house for the cost of some of those furnishings.

  He heard a mechanical “pong” from a far corner of the room, which smelled like lemon-scented Air-wick.

  “We’re here,” said Joleen. “The inner sanctum of the Divine Bliss Mission. Hail perfection, full of grace.”

  “Pong,” came the noise again. Reverend Powell peered into the large, low room. The noise came from a machine. Two pudgy light brown hands twitched nervously at the sides of the cabinet.

  “Pong,” went the machine again.

  “Shit,” said a voice from behind the cabinet.

  “Reverend Powell is here, O Blissful Master,” chanted Joleen in a squeaky sing-song.

  “What?” came the voice from behind the cabinet.

  “Pong,” went the machine.

  “Reverend Powell is here as you predicted, O Perfection, O Enlightenment.”

  “Who?”

  “The one whom you perceived would come. The Christian. The Baptist whom we will show as a convert to our true enlightenment.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Remember the letter, O Perfect One?”

  “Oh, yeah. The nigger. Bring him in.”

  Joleen squeezed Powell’s hand and with a beaming grin nodded to him to come along with her.

  “I don’t like that word. The last time it was used on me, young lady, was by rowdies in your father’s pharmacy.”

  “You don’t understand. ‘Nigger’ in the mouth of the Blissful Master takes the sting and prejudice from the word. What is the word but two insignificant sounds anyway? Nig and er. Nothing.”

  “It is not for you to decide. Nor for your master.”

  When Reverend Powell saw the Blissful Master, he nodded curtly and said, “uh huh,” as if in confirmation. He was beyond shocks in this building. The Blissful Master wore a pair of too-tight white shorts and nothing else on a pudgy light brown body.

  He looked like a knockwurst with a tight white Band-Aid around the middle. A youthful mustache struggled over precisely outlined lips. A lock of greasy black hair hung over his face. He stood before a television-type screen, watching a bouncing white blip and manipulating levers on both sides.

  “Pong,” went the machine, and the blip batted crazily from one side of the machine to the other.

  “Just one second,” said the youth, whom Powell judged to be fifteen or sixteen. The lad’s lips twitched nervously. His English had only a trace of an accent, sort of English, like the white kids who had come down south in the summer to work for civil rights so long ago.

  “Pong. Pong. Pong,” went the machine and the Blissful Master grinned.

  “All right, you’re the nigger. Let’s get to work. I’m Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor. Blissful Master to you.”

  Reverend Powell sighed, a tired sigh, hundreds of miles of dusty Indian roads, he sighed. Nights sleeping in the back of a car, he sighed. Watching the human monuments to famine being carried away, he sighed. The worry about the white girl who had once been so kind and so friendly to everyone. All these things he sighed and felt very tired when he spoke.

  “Turkey, work your hustle on some other street. My soul belongs to Jesus. And you, Joleen, I’m sorry for you. This is no spiritual man.”

  “Good,” said Maharaji Dor. “We can dispense with the bullshit. The deal is this. You and I could jaw for a hundred years on St. Paul versus the Vedantic scriptures or whatever shit goes down nowadays. My deal is this. I know the way you should live to make you happy. That’s it. Your tongue is
designed to taste. Your eyes to see. Your legs to move. And when they don’t do all these things, then something is wrong, right?”

  Reverend Powell shrugged.

  “Right?” said Maharaji Dor.

  “Eyes see and legs move when God wills it.”

  “Good enough. Now ask yourself about the whole package. Are you supposed to walk around with the feeling that you’re unhappy? That something’s wrong? Unfulfilled? Nothing is ever as good as you thought it would be, right? Right?”

  “Jesus is as good as I thought he would be.”

  “Sure, because you never met him. If that Jewboy were around nowadays, he’d be here if I got hold of him. Not hanging with nails in his hands. I mean, baby, what kind of deal is that? I’d never give you that deal.”

  “Praised be the Blissful Master,” said Joleen clapping.

  “Quiet, child,” said Reverend Powell sternly.

  “What I’m laying down is that I make you feel like you ought to feel. Your body is going to tell you I’m right. Your senses will tell you I’m right. Just don’t try to turn ’em off. But if you do, I’ll win anyhow, because I am the way. Dig?”

  “Blissful Master,” cried Joleen and threw her pink linen head wrapping at the two pudgy brown feet. Her blond hair settled over the pinkness of her sari. Reverend Powell saw her young breasts quiver under the dress.

  Maharaji Dor snapped his fingers, and Joleen ripped the sari from her body. She stood pale and nude, smiling proudly. Like showing a tomato for sale, Maharaji Dor squeezed the left breast.

  “Good stuff,” he said.

  Reverend Powell saw the pink crest of her breast harden between brown thumb and forefinger.

  “You think she doesn’t like this?” said the boy. “She loves it. So what’s wrong? Right.” Squeeze.

  Reverend Powell turned away. He was not going to be put upon by arguing with these heathens.

  “Want this stuff? Take it.”

  “Good night, sir, I’m leaving,” said the Reverend Mr. Powell, and the Dor lad smiled. As Powell turned, he felt two hands at his elbows, and as he struggled, he felt a collar being placed around his neck and locked, and his hands were shoved into shackles and pulled down behind him. His head fell backward, and his feet were being tugged. He braced his body for the cracking fall, but he landed on softness. Even the hand shackles were soft as they tugged at his wrists. He tried to get his legs under himself, but they went out in soft bindings to the right and left. Hands worked at his clothes, unbuttoned the jacket and shirt, and in a way he could not fathom, they got his clothes off his wrists and ankles without removing the shackles. He saw the lights from the ceiling and the soundproofing mosaic set around the strips of light.

  He saw Joleen’s face right above him. He saw her tongue dart out and felt it in the center of his head. Her firm breasts brushed his chest, and her tongue moved down his nose to his lips. They parted his lips briefly. He turned his head away and felt the wet tongue on his neck.

  “Some things you can turn, nigger, and some things you can’t,” said Maharaji Dor.

  The tongue tickled the reverend’s belly button, and by the time it reached his loins, he knew he was out of control.

  “I see your body is telling you something, nigger. What do you think it’s telling you? You know what it’s telling you? You think it’s wrong. You think you know better than the body God gave you, you say. When you need air, you need air. When you need water, you need water. When you need food, you need food. Right?”

  Reverend Powell felt the moist hot lips closing on him now. He did not want it to be nice. He did not want it to excite him, to grab him, to move him, to bring him to the trembling edge of exquisite tension. And then the mouth was gone, and he was still wanting. Quivering out there, his body begging.

  “More, please,” said Reverend Powell.

  “Finish him,” said Maharaji Dor.

  As the exquisite, surging, pounding relief consumed him, Reverend Powell began to feel his own wrath upon himself. He had failed himself, his God, and the girl he had come to save.

  “Hey, baby, don’t sweat it,” said Maharaji Dor. “Your body’s healthier than you are. You feel bad, not because of your body, but because of your big, big pride. Pride, Christian. You put your head on the block for a cup of coffee, but it wasn’t for civil rights. What sort of man looks down the barrel of a gun and says, “Shoot”? A man who feels inferior? Bullshit. You knew damned well you were the best sonofabitch in that drugstore. Big hero. Same reason, hero, you came here for the blond twiff, what’s her name? You were being the great Christian. Turning the other cheek to the richest white man in that town, what’s its name? Right? Big man.

  “When the young loudmouths started calling you Uncle Tom, you didn’t mind. You knew they didn’t have the balls to do what you did. Look down the barrel of a shotgun and order coffee, big man. They had the beads and the clothes and the raised fists, but you had God. Wonderful Titus Powell. I’ll tell you what you’re doing here. You came here to prove you’re just the most wonderful nigger in God’s kingdom. Well, you black bastard, you ain’t getting your pride massaged with any shotgun here. You ain’t gonna get martyrdom here. No lynch mob. You’re getting what you’ve run away from all your life. So first, we get rid of the damned guilt.”

  A pricking sensation in his right arm and then a rushing surge of everything being all right filled Reverend Powell. His fingertips felt a tingle and his knuckles felt a tingle and his wrists were alive and calm as were his forearms. His shoulders that had known so much lifting in his life eased into beautiful floating joints, and his chest became like bubbles beneath the ice of a frozen, smooth lake. His legs melted into the floor, and he felt cool fingers apply ointment to his eyelids, and then there were stars, tingling beautiful stars. It was heaven he was in, and there was a voice. A hard, rasping voice, but if you said yes to that voice, everything was all right again. And the voice was saying he should do whatever the Blissful Master said he should do. The bliss continued for “yes” and ended with “no.” Reverend Powell thought it might be minutes or it might be days. The faces above him changed, and once he thought he saw night through a very close window. In it all, he tried to tell God he was sorry for his pride and that he loved Him and that he was sorry for what his body was doing.

  Every time this happened, Reverend Powell felt the bliss leave, and when he cried out Jesus’ name, there was downright pain. His palms felt crushed with heavy needles, and he cried the name again. And his legs felt a snapping of bone and the crushing through of iron, and with the total breath of his lungs, Reverend Titus Powell cried out the love of his lifelong friend. “Jesus, be with me now.”

  And then there was a sharp piercing in his right side, and before the dark eternity of nothing, he thought he heard his very best friend welcome him home.

  Maharaji Dor was at his electronic game, winning, when one of his priests told him of the failure.

  “What do you mean, he’s dead? He just got here.”

  “A week he’s been here, Blissful Master,” said the priest, bowing a shaved but sweating head.

  “A week, huh? What did you do wrong?”

  “We did as you prescribed, Blissful Master.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “What do you know? Huh? Well? Huh? Does the government know about this? Any word from Delhi?”

  “We have no word, but they will know. The passport office will know. The foreign office will know. The Third World representative will know.”

  “All right. That’s 300 rupees right there. Anyone else?”

  “The Third World representative will want more. While the Reverend Powell might have been a United States citizen, by virtue of his blackness he was also a member of the Third World.”

  “Tell the Third World representative that he’s only getting the hundred rupees to keep quiet because what’s his name had an American passport. Tell him if he had been African, there wouldn’t even be a pa
ck of cigarettes for him in this, dig?”

  “As you command.”

  “How’d the twirl take it?”

  “Sister Joleen?”

  “Yeah, her, Jo whatever.”

  “She cried because she said she truly loved Reverend Powell and now he had lost his chance at bliss.”

  “Good. Get lost.”

  “I am still worried about the government.”

  “Don’t be. There isn’t anything 300 rupees won’t buy in Delhi, and besides, we got the prophecy. They’re worried about China. They’re not going to hassle us. We’re holy men, dig? And they can’t pester a holy man in Patna. You’ll see. The bread is just to keep things smooth. They really believe that bullshit legend.”

  “PONG, PONG, PONG.” The machine suddenly moved without a lever being pulled. The blip circled crazily, and the glass of the screen rattled, and overhead the indirect lighting cracked out of the wall. There was sudden darkness and then flying glass, and the priest and Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor were tumbled like apples down a ramp toward the far wall, where they lay for hours until hands lifted them up.

  The Maharaji heard how lucky he had been. Not everyone had survived the earthquake in Patna, and the next day, government officials arrived to examine the bodies of the holy men who had been killed. All of them who had died, however, had died in the earthquake. No holy man’s death had been the cause of it.

  No government official, no policeman or soldier or representative of the prime minister herself, bothered to check the ox carts as they squeaked out of town to the dumping pits. So they did not see the one much-darker body at the bottom of the pile of untouchables, the one with pierced palms and legs and the wound in his side.

  It had been such a terrible earthquake, they had thought at first that the holiest men had died. But apparently this was not so, especially since the border with China remained quiet. There would be no terror from the east.

  But east, even east of China, in a small town on the coast of North Korea, a message arrived. The Master of Sinanju would be returning home soon, because his employment would be bringing him to India, some incident in Patna that was of concern to his employer. On the way there, he would be given, in tribute to his glorious service, a triumphant return to the village his labors had supported for so many years.