He tried to bring his attention back to his body.
‘You remember when we were children? How we stared with such wonder at the sun? So naive. But the sentiment was true. Perhaps that youthful aspiration is the finest thing we have. Truer than our fashionable despair. Truer than the ruins of a life.’
The words went in as they always did with him, soothing, reaffirming, and the year since their last meeting dropped away.
‘You feel it?’ John went on. ‘Why did primeval cultures worship the virgin?’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘Reading. Sufi poems. The Taoists. Gurdjieff.’ He pointed to boxes stacked against the wall. ‘They let me bring a few books.’
‘Gurdjieff was a giant. A shame the Jesuits made a dog’s breakfast of the enneagram.’
‘Yes. The inevitable distortion. It shows how dry our doctrine’s become and how desperate people are to infuse it. Gurdjieff offered practice but most people just respond to his theory. The approach to Being is incomprehensible to most because it belongs to eternity, not time.’
‘May I ask you a daring question?’
‘Daring?’ John lifted something off his desk.
‘Have you abandoned the concept of God?’
‘Why name it? Labels shut you off. Fear God. Why? Because one attracts what one fears?’ A smile. ‘What a creaking construction.’
Cain nodded slowly. ‘Concepts hiding truth? Is that the tragedy of the Church?’
‘That depends on the level of perception.’
‘So there are no steps to the throne?’
‘Too sweeping. Read this — from here.’ He handed over bound sheets of typescript.
Cain took the manuscript and read aloud: ‘Religion is the ruse of the wise. It aims to bring the unsuspecting aspirant to a heightened inner vibration that reasoning can’t reach. So it promotes irrationality — for a worthy aim. It is the only deception that can’t be called untrue.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘I don’t know. But it’s the best of me. The need to express, you see? God’s journalist.’
He skipped a few pages, read on, silently this time.
‘When not “I” then AM. When the observer is abandoned, seeing simply is — an experience that reaches through diversity to unity in an enfolding verticality to time. “And there shall be time no longer.” These words are literally true. Eternity is not duration but the infinite potential of all ages in the sunburst of unified awareness. We need to die to be born to that experience. But who is interested in inner death?’
He looked up, filled with the truth of it. ‘What would the Curia make of this?’
‘The dead would bury the living.’
He read on:
‘Belief is superstition, piety straw and chastity without knowledge mistaking the means for the end. The end is the blind, true probing into that core predating time where knowledge and bliss are made flesh. The resurrection of the body is not a historical event but the central transformation of consciousness. We are asked to incarnate Christ. Not the spirit but the flesh must be transformed. The organism must be afire — the kingdom of God on earth.’
He looked away from the words, intensely moved.
The old pope smiled. ‘You know what it’s saying, don’t you? And to know is a great achievement. But blessed are ye if ye do it.’
So this was what John had been working on through long years — distilling his wisdom far beyond the point of heresy. He knew the manuscript had to survive — for Ray Cain if for no one else.
He handed back the pages with care. ‘Have you read Krishnamurti?’
‘Life begins where thought ends. Yes.’
‘I discovered such a clear expression of his recently. “In attention there is no centre. There is no me attending.”’
‘Exactly.’ The old man put the manuscript into a scruffy padded postbag. ‘Exactly.’
‘Is your book finished?’
‘As much as it will be.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then the pope murmured, ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. The Buddhist view. Everything comes from nothing. Form is emptiness. Emptiness form.’
Cain looked into the wise eyes. ‘Is that how you feel it?’
John’s inward look, as if he were exploring it. ‘The nature of that emptiness is so interesting. Death is the matrix of life. Not the other way around. Do you see it?’
He was trying to comprehend. ‘Not yet.’
‘The only knowing is being. But being is to be nothing. No memory. No anticipation. Blank.’
‘It can’t just be blank.’
‘It can’t and it can. Always the paradox. Everything flowers from nothing.’
He nodded, trying to keep up inwardly. ‘But you say there are no steps to that.’
A bottomless look. ‘Attention — the natural prayer of the soul. Or as the Diamond Sutra says, keeping the mind in its natural state. Remember Eckhart: riddance of goods, riddance of friends, riddance of self. But who understands that precise effort, that intensity? It’s naive trying to be a finer person. Spirituality is not to be derived. That’s working for wages — craving. It’s an infusion of grace — induced by psychological death.’
As usual, with John, vistas kept expanding. ‘I’ve missed this so much.’ How quickly the pope had dismissed the danger they were in. Yet had that danger made this moment — this richness with him — possible? The old man used everything for his aim.
In exactly an hour, a cadet interrupted them.
Cain was taken back to the entrance and met by Zuiden who escorted him across the ice beneath the dome.
‘How’s it feel to be down the toilet?’ Zuiden sneered. ‘You’re rooted, Cain.’
‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’
‘You can forget those days,’ the half-listening man said, focused as usual on his stomach. ‘Now all we get down here is lasagna.’
Cain limped beside him, fearful for the pope, wondering if he’d ever see him again. ‘You have a strange effect on people, Jan. They either hate you or loathe you.’
‘Black bastard,’ the surgeon guffawed. ‘Never give up, do you? Well I hope the old boy saved your soul. Because your body’s soon going to be fucked.’
39
TRIPLE CROSS
At precisely 3.30 pm Hunt and Cain were cleared by the guardhouse. A senior surgeon escorted them up the ramp. He walked ahead as if trying to put them at ease but probably had a weapon beneath his windproofs. They followed him in full kit, lugging rucksacks. They’d been told they were being relocated but didn’t believe it.
Cain let his overmitts dangle from their harness. Gloves and glove liners would do until they got to the warmed Hagg. His limp was bad. He was breathless, felt vulnerable and old.
They walked from shadow into dazzling sunlight. For once the windiest continent on earth offered nothing but a light breeze but it was close to minus 40 degrees centigrade and breathing hurt. He glanced at the crystalline snow. If he removed the goggles it would become a field of diamonds — exquisite — and cause snow-blindness.
The man led them past the vehicle workshop to where a loader, a tractor and a Hagg were plugged into the power cable hitching-rail. The vehicles were plastered with snow, but only on one side, like iced cakes.
A man was uncoupling the cable from the front of the Hagg. It ran the cab-warmer and the in-line coolant heater that kept the engine from freezing. Several people stood around the back of the vehicle, waiting.
Their escort took their bags and heaved them into the front cab. As they reached the group of people, Cain recognised the two old men.
The bent figure was John, glasses beneath his goggles, the familiar smiling upward twist to the left side of his mouth. It was a shock to see him, engulfed in an overlarge freezer suit, standing out here in the snow. No sedia gestatoria now to bear him triumphantly through the crowd. Just an 82-year-old man with swollen ankles and low blood pressure — a man from a working class family who would have liked to have been a journalist. A man of warmth in a frigid hell. A man he loved.