Under Radar by Michael Tolkin Page B

to press the redeeming angel’s oil of sanctification from every word. When he paused for breath, or a sip of water, he waited with his audience for truth to fill the room, for the twinkling instant of boundless change.
    He finished the story up to the beginning of telling this story.
    â€œSo I was asked to tell the story of the murder and what I remember of everything that followed. Now I’m in prison in Jamaica, telling you a story, and I’ve reached the end. I’m sorry,” said Tom. “It’s not there.”
    â€œIt is there,” said the old man, “and you have only begun. None of us is going anywhere quickly. When the time comes, you’ll call us together.”
    It was morning. Tom followed these friends, old to his life but new to his awareness, to the prison mess hall. Tom marveled that he had survived for so long in his trance, walking these gloomy halls. His escort led him to a table where other prisoners, having already heard the news of his awakening, urged a share of their food on him, hoping, by selfish kindness, to provoke the hanged man’s legend from its living tomb.
    The guards, for whom Tom’s trance had advanced him, over the years, towards invisibility, saw him chatting and laughing with the crowd at the table and promptly put him in a cell, alone. They feared nothing but any sudden difference in the air, and Tom’s new state of being scared them like a hurricane.
    The cell was wet and dark. There were rats in the corner, and large bugs, which he could feel as they crawled over him, but none of this bothered him, because he was thinking about the missionary, and Phineas. He wondered if someone had ever printed Yael’s photographs. Were the pictures fine enough for the book she dreamed of? If there were good pictures of the orgies, he supposed so. There was a market for artful sex books.What would her friends do with that picture of the church garden?
    Tom called out, “Can anyone hear me?”
    There was a voice from the cell next to his. “Yes, I can hear you.”
    â€œI just remembered something that never happened to me.”
    â€œA dream?”
    â€œNo. I have a story to tell. The men in my cell block are waiting for it.”
    â€œTell me and I will pass it along. There is a pipe in my cell. It carries my voice.”
    â€œTell them I remember what the hanged man told me.”
    Word was passed along the corridor for everyone nearby to be quiet. A wave of silence moved through the prison until the only sound was of the guards’ batons ringing the bars of the cells, because the quiet made them nervous.
    â€œA few years ago,” Tom began, “an American missionary came to rebuild the church in a Jamaican hill town, so remote that some of the villagers had never seen the ocean. The missionary wrote a letter to his bishop….”
    ...
    â€œThey are extraordinarily skillful in using their hands, and they have a fantastic and I think impeccable visual taste, considering their poverty and the poverty of their materials,but their faith and intellectual notions are archaic in the extreme. They find it difficult or impossible to grasp the general concepts that might lead to their liberation. They have little sense of cumulative, as opposed to repetitive, time, and they cloud their history with Rastafarian fantasies that Haile Selassie was the messiah. So the notion of progress, I should say linear progress, is incomprehensible to them. Their conceptual distinctions between life and death, among the human, animal, and vegetable worlds, are fragile and insecure. Heaven and earth are different to them in degree, not kind. The source of the problem is obvious: in such a static society, there is no room for a sense of an impersonal law flowing from a personal God. They pray, but scatter their petitions. I remember what you taught me, that my spiritual needs will be filled when the poor are not hungry, but if the poor here