Green Eyes

  They were more alien to him now than their previous appearance of ebony flesh and jeweled expressions had been. Lumpy and malformed; protruding bellies, gaping mouths, drooping breasts; clad in all manner of dull cloth; they might have been a faded mural commemorating the mediocrity and impermanence of their lives. Wizened faces topped by frumpy hats; dewy, pubescent faces waxed to a hard gloss with makeup; plump, choleric faces. And each of these faces was puckered or puffed up around a black seed of fear. As he looked them over one by one, bits of intelligence lodged in his thoughts, and he knew them for bad-tempered old men, vapid old women, thankless children, shrewish wives, brutal husbands. But the complications of their lives were only a facade erected to conceal the black ground which bubbled them up. He took a step forward. Jocundra tried to drag him toward the rear flap of the tent, but he shook her off and limped to the front of the stage. Papa backed along the aisle.

  ‘Why are you so afraid?’ Donnell asked the crowd. ‘It’s not just my eyes. That’s not what drives you to seek salvation.’ He spotted a portly, sport-jacketed man trying to push through to the entrance. ‘You!’ he called, pointing, and knew the substance of the man’s life as if it had rushed up his finger: pompous, gluttonous, every dependency founded on fear and concealing a diseased sexuality, a compendium of voyeurism and the desire to inflict pain. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said derisively, the way a murderer might taunt his victim, and was amazed to see the man swallow and inch toward the stage, his fear lessening. ‘Gome closer,’ said Donnell. ‘Tonight, verily, you will bear miraculous witness.’

  He singled out others of the crowd, coaxing them nearer, and as he did, he felt a distance between his voice and his cautious soul, one identical to that he had experienced when he persuaded Jocundra to leave the scene of the murders at Sealey’s. But in this instance the distance was more profound. The element of his consciousness which spoke dominated him totally, and his own fear was swept away by the emotional charge of the words. Disgust, pity and anger met in his mind and pronounced judgement on the crowd, on the culture that had produced it, comparing it unfavorably to a sterner culture existing beneath the flood of his memory like a submerged shoal, unseen, undefined, known only by the divergence of waves around it; but he did not question its reality, rather acted as its spokesman. He could, he thought, tell the crowd anything and they would listen. They were not really listening, they were reacting to the pitch and timbre of his voice, his glowing eyes. Their fear had taken on a lewd, exultant character, as if they had been eagerly awaiting him.

  ‘Lo,’ he said, spreading his arms in imitation of Papa Salvatino, ‘the Lord God has raised me up from the ramshackle kingdom of the dead and sent me to warn you. Not of Kingdom Come but of Kingdom Overthrown, of Satan’s imminent victory!’

  Hesitant, they shuffled forward, some coming halfway along the aisle, soothed by the familiar Biblical cadences, but not yet ready to embrace him fully. The ease with which they could be swayed delighted him; he imagined an army carrying a green-eyed banner through the world, converting millions to his cause.

  ‘Do you remember the good old days?’ he asked with a wistful air, hobbling along the edge of the stage. ‘Those days that always seem just to have vanished or perhaps never even were. Days when the light was full of roses and lovers, when music played out every window and the kids weren’t into drugs, when Granny baked her bread fresh each morning and the city streets were places of excitement and wonder. Whatever happened to those days?’

  They didn’t know but wanted to be told.

  ‘You began to hear voices,’ he said. ‘You began to have visions, to receive reports, all of which conjured against that peaceful world. Radio and newspapers preaching a gospel of doom, a spell binding you to its truth. And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.’ He laughed, as at some fatal irony. ‘Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies.’

  He stared over their heads as if he saw a truth they could not see, staring for so long that many followed his gaze.