The door slid open and a soft light came on.
Inside was a smaller corridor, and the air in it was distinctly warm. The dogs were left outside and we walked down it, toward another door. It became warmer as we walked. I was beginning to perspire and would have liked to wipe my forehead but my hands were still tied behind me.
We came to the door. The sign on it was in large orange letters:
The man held a different card to this door and when it opened the heat was palpable and intense. There was another door just inside this one and the man this time put yet another card into a slot beside it and the door opened about two feet wide. There was a brilliant orange glow behind it that illuminated some kind of enormous room. A room without a floor. Or with a floor of orange light. The heat was overwhelming.
Then the man’s voice said, “Behold the eternal fire.” And I felt myself being pushed from behind, and my heart almost stopped beating and I could not speak. I looked down and was able to hold my eyes in a squint for only a split second, but long enough to see that a great circular pit was directly in front of my feet and that down, incalculably far down in that pit, was a fire like that of the sun.
And then I was pulled back, limp, and the man’s hands turned my body around to face his and he said, quietly, “Do you have any last words?”
I looked at his face. It was impassive, quiet, sweating. “I am the resurrection and the life,” I said. “He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”
The woman shrieked, “My God, Edgar! My God!”
The man looked at me firmly. “Where did you learn those words?” he said.
I groped for something to say, and finally found only the truth— which I felt that he would not understand. But I said it anyway. “I have read the Bible.”
“Read?” the woman said. “You can read scripture?”
I felt that I would die from the heat at my back if I did not get away in less than a minute, I could see that the man’s face was showing pain from the heat, or doubt.
“Yes,” I said. “I can read scripture.” I looked him directly in the eyes. “I can read anything.”
The man stared at me with his broad face twisted for one more horrible moment and then, abruptly, he pulled me forward, away from the fire, and pushed me through the outer door and then closed it. Then we went through the second door, and it closed itself, and the air was bearable. “All right,” the man said. “We’ll go to the book and see if you can read it.”
Then he took his knife and cut the ropes that held my hands.
“I must find Biff first,” I said.
And I found her, halfway to Sears, and took her up in my arms.
We had passed another fountain on my frightened way to the Lake of Fire; returning to Sears, as we approached the fountain again a scene from an ancient film came into my mind: in King of Kings the actor H. B. Warner asks a man named John to “baptize” him, by wetting him in a river. It is clearly a moment of great mystical significance. My steps down the wide and empty corridor of the Mall seemed light. The man and woman flanked me, but this time without restraint; they had untied me. Their dogs were silent and submissive; all that could be heard was the regular pattern of our footsteps and the music that came from invisible speakers and bathed us in airy sound. And louder now came the splashing of the fountain water, returning to the pool from its graceful arcing toward the high ceiling.
I thought of Jesus, bearded and serene, in the Jordan River. Abruptly I stopped and said, “I want to be baptized. In this fountain.” My voice was clear and strong. I was staring at the water in the great circular pool beside me and there was a light spray in my face.
Out of the side of my vision I saw the woman, as if in a dream, sink to her knees, her long, full denim skirt slowly ballooning around her as she did so. And her voice, weak now, was saying, “My God. The Holy Spirit told him to speak them words.”
Then I heard the man’s voice saying, “Get up, Berenice. He could have been told about that. Not everybody keeps church secrets.”
I turned to watch her as she got up from her knees, pulling her blue sweater back down over her broad hips. “But he knew the fount when he saw it,” she said. “He knew the place of holy water.”
“I told you,” the man said, but with doubt in his voice. “He could of heard from anybody in the other six towns. Just because Baleens don’t backslide don’t mean the Graylings don’t. Manny Grayling could of told him. Hell, he might be Grayling—one they been hiding from Church.”
She shook her head. “Baptize him, Edgar Baleen,” she said. “You can’t refuse the Sacrament.”
“I know that,” he said quietly. He began taking off his denim jacket. He looked at me, his face grave. “Sit down. On the edge.”
I seated myself on the edge of the fountain and the woman kneeled and took off my shoes and then my socks. She rolled up my pantlegs. Then she sat on one side of me, and the man, jacketless now, on the other side, and they both took off their shoes and socks. They had released the dogs and the two white animals just stood there patiently, watching us and watching Biff, who had curled herself on the floor.
“All right,” the man said. “Step into the fount.”
I stood up and stepped over the edge into the water, which was cold. Looking down, I saw that the pool had its tiles arranged into the shape of a giant fish, much like the one I had found on the shore and eaten—a huge silver fish with fins and gills. The water came up to my knees, and the rest of me was drenched by the spray, and it was very cold. But I felt no discomfort.
I was staring down at the giant fish on which I stood when the two of them came up beside me. The man bent, cupping his hands together, held them under water for a moment and then raised them, dripping, to my head. I felt his hands, open now, on my head and then the water from them was streaming down my face.
“I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said.
The woman reached out and placed her large soft hand on my head. “Amen and praise the Lord,” she said softly.
We stepped out of the fountain and I waited, with the man, the dogs, and Biff, while the woman went to Sears and came back with towels for our feet. We dried our feet and legs, put on our shoes, and continued walking, in silence.
I felt even lighter than before, more remote and yet more truly present at the same time, extremely alive to what was outside me and inside me at the same time. I felt that I had crossed some invisible line, one that had been waiting for me ever since I had left Ohio, and had now entered some symbolic realm where my life was light, “like a feather on the back of my hand,” and where only my own experience of that life, my own undrugged experience, was all that I was living for. And if that experience meant death in the Lake of Fire, it would have to be acceptable.
I wonder now, writing this down, if that is how those who immolate themselves feel when they decide to do it. But they are drugged, unaware. And they cannot read.
Could baptism really work? Could there be a Holy Spirit? I do not believe so.
We walked in silence down the wide hall and back up the broad staircase, and the lights behind us dimmed and darkened, and the music became silent and the fountains stopped as we left.
Near the top of the stairs I was able to turn for a moment to look down on the vast and empty Mall, with its chandeliers dimming and its fountains dying down, and its storefronts still bright as if waiting for customers who would never come. I could sense the sad dignity of that place, of its broad, clean emptiness.