“You know it. Me. School book: So?”
“Un-huh, Obie. Look again.” She handed him the book and crossed the room again, this time to mix a drink. She heard his strangled gasp and came back, holding out the glass to him. Obie took it and drank deeply.
“It’s that kid. Our class book,” he said. He turned accusingly to Merton. “Did you fix this?”
“Didn’t touch it,” Merton said.
Dee Dee took the glass and refilled it. Obie drank again. His hand was shaking. The scotch hit him hard. He hadn’t had a drink in ten years. “That lousy goddamn horse doctor! He switched them! Blake…” He drank again.
“Blake is the alien,” Dee Dee said complacently. “We have to find him and kill him, Obie.”
“My kid up there with all them atheists, with them U.N. monkeys, locked in day and night, year after year, hating them all, wanting out. And Blake… running around free, laughing, happy, getting rich…. Them trust? All that money in his name?” He turned furiously to Billy Warren Smith, who was drinking steadily. “He can’t have it!”
“I don’t know, Obie, It is in his name, you know. He never claimed to be your son. He denied it, as a matter, of fact. If it comes to a court case… I just don’t know.”
“Shut up,” Merton said then. “This isn’t going to come to a court case. Obie’s the boy’s legal guardian. If he dies, Obie inherits. I think he’s already dead, we can put in a claim. Seven years without a trace of him should be enough to satisfy a court….”
“We can’t do that,” Obie said. “I’ve hinted too often that he is studying and that we are in touch. I can’t come up now and say that he’s been dead all these years.”
“Use your head, Merton,” Dee Dee said smoothly. “What Obie really needs is a martyr. Blake’s young, beautiful, undefiled body to exhibit, to have come to life, ascend to heaven, issue proclamations to Obie, to the masses. You know the bit.”
Obie stared at her with narrowed eyes, nodding slightly. He smiled.
A new phase in the Voice of God Church was begun. Obie was relieved. He could drink again. He no longer feared his own kid, and he faced it now, he had been afraid of him. When Blake had looked directly at him, he had felt himself shrink, and had remembered how little he had read, and how little he knew about most things. He didn’t know where Auldand was, for example, once when Wanda had asked while doing a crossword puzzle. Blake had waited for him to supply the answer and when he couldn’t Obie had felt put down because the kid knew it. And him only six or seven then. A goddamn smart aleck. That’s what he’d been. Laughing at Obie for believing he was the father of the real alien, while his own boy, the boy of his flesh, with his hair and his eyes, was tortured daily by the atheists, Then when Blake had started to heal…. Obie shuddered. That had scared him. He had believed that he really was a God-child, and he, Obie, the father of God. That was a bad time. He thought of his mother, locked up in the sanatorium, calling herself the mother of God, screeching for him to come and make a miracle so the attendants would believe her, writing her weekly letters full of prayers, and wishes, and demands. The letters always started the same, addressed to him, headed, To My Son, God. Dee Dee laughed at them, but they made Obie very uneasy. What, he had wondered, if the old bat was right? Secretly at night, in his room with the door locked, he had tried to make a miracle sometimes. But he never had succeeded. The ashtray that he tried to float simply sat there. The window he tried to close or raise without touching it didn’t budge. When he tried to summon Dee Dee to him, she resisted. What was the good in being God if he couldn’t do simple things like that? So he had been forced to go along with the opinions of the doctors who said it was a psychotic delusion that his mother suffered. And when he had come to believe the same thing about his son that she had believed about him, he had worried. He had visions of being put in the same sanatorium along with her, and having her point him out to visitors: “See, my son God! Do a miracle, son God! Make a miracle! ”
All this and much more passed through Obie’s mind very quickly that night when he learned that his son was only human after all. A thin adolescent, slow to mature, not terribly bright, afraid and feared, but human. He got very drunk that night.
“Find me the kid,” he said to Merton, waving his glass, sloshing Scotch all over the thick Persian rug, and the antique couch. “Bring him up here to me and let’s see him heal himself. Physician heal thyself, that’s what we’ll say to the little bastard. And we’ll write our own passion play. Thats it, passion play. He has the passion and we have the play. ’’N we’ll spring my kid out of that fancy prison. My poor little boy in prison all his life.” He wept noisily, was sick noisily, drank some more and finally took Dee Dee to bed, where he did things with her that he hadn’t done for years. Not being God or the father of God any longer made a difference.
When Obie finally fell asleep Dee Dee crept from his bed, aching, bruised, and happy,. and made her way to her own room again. Merton was waiting for her. She said, “You’ve gotta be kidding!”
“Relax, honey. I want to know one thing only. Is the old Obie back with us for good?”
Dee Dee simply nodded. Merton grinned. “Okay, baby. See you in the morning. This changes everything, kid. But everything.” He opened the door and stopped to look back at her appraisingly. “Boy, that sure must have been a ball!”
Dee Dee looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was a mess. Her loins ached. Her back ached. Her breasts were sore, her jaws ached. There were red marks from pinches and bites, and a bruise on her thigh, and another on her shoulder. When her gaze reached her face she was startled; she never had looked prettier.
She soaked in a tub of sudsy water and gradually the aches faded. She started to think of Merton’s remark that everything was changed now. It was true. Obie had been his own convert, and now he was a backslider. She didn’t know how that would affect the movement. She found that she didn’t really care right then.
Actually the movement was not to be affected very much at all. During the time that it mattered, while it was being formed, the leader had been a believer, and that is necessary for a successful movement. He had been a high-powered salesman who believed in his product. After selling the customer it doesn’t matter if the seller loses faith. The payments are not his concern. The machinery was set up, operant, swelling day by day; this was the concern for the administration now; the buyers would bring in others without his help. If he stopped all public appearances immediately the movement would continue to grow through its great momentum, and through the machinations of the businessmen who were the actual organizers. A man of spiritual mien is the needed ingredient at the beginning of a spiritual movement, but after it is under way, his mysticism and fuzzy thinking are a hindrance. It’s fine to produce wine and bread for the masses in the beginning, but as a daily occurrence it is better to organize tithing and bank accounts and the purchase of tax free bonds and real estate, and rules governing the official hierarchy and its exercise of power.
It is wise to provide a martyr now and then. Let the people concentrate on him and they are less likely to try to see behind him to the organization of the business called religion.
The nearest to a martyr the Church had produced as yet was in the person of a young draft dodger back in the beginnings. He had been a drug user: LSD, pot, tobacco, bennies…. He had tried everything. He had given Everett Slocum the formula for RUT, the first psychedelic aphrodisiac that never failed to produce the desired effects, and shortly after this the FDA had closed in on him and he had leaped from his tenth-floor window, flying all the way down, to end in a landing that was less than perfect. His martyrdom was short-lived because it was found that the ingredient that made RUT different from other psychedelics was the bacteria that swarmed on the hands and under the black nails of the young alchemist. It wasn’t the staph so much as the antibodies he produced against staph, and this was such a personal, unique product that with his solo flight the secret was lost.