Fiacre and Dr. Sharon Sloan the Warrior Queen eye one another from opposite sides of the Great Hall. He is pleased at what he sees, and makes a note to congratulate John on his choice of Deus Machina. Dr. Sloan, on the other hand, is wary: she is unimpressed by Fiacre’s attire and stature and thinks he resembles a bum she used to dodge near the parking lot of the college where she used to teach.
As he stares at Sloan, Fiacre is oblivious to the commotion surrounding the collapsed Lulu Cooker—the show’s frantic director has to get her on her feet and bubbly for the television cameras in eight minutes. Sloan does not yet know Lulu—although she will come to know her well—and remains fixed on the totality of Fiacre’s tackiness.
“Is that what a saint of the Holy Roman Catholic Church looks like?” she sarcastically inquires of John. “I’d say he’s been basting in alley wine for a while.”
John shrugs. “No one knows what saints look like. When the Holy Ghost appears in the church garden his appearance runs the gamete from burning bush to Chicago Cubs fan. It is much the same with saints.”
“Holy Toledo,” Sloan mouthed quietly. “You weird me out when you talk like that. Holy Ghost. Why not say Hannibal Lector or Pecos Pete?”
“You despise me, don’t you?”
“If I gave you any thought, I probably would,” Dr. Sloan replied. “Especially now that I’ve been reduced to stealing dialogue from Casablanca.”
John nodded appreciatively. “I’m impressed though, that you got the Ugarte-Rick-Heartbreak-Sloan dichotomy so quickly. It’s one of the things I love about you.”
“As long as I’m Rick,” she said. “Meanwhile, tell me why Fiacre is here. Isn’t he supposed to be back in the garden while I do the Fandangoing and you’re the wheelman?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll critique you for future missions. Pastor Cooker isn’t the only counterfeit hell robber in town. It could be that Fiacre wants to set you loose on even bigger game. Maybe we’ll fandango Benny Hinn next time.”
Dr. Sloan glowered. “I’ll critique him,’ she said brusquely. “If I don’t see some money out of this you’ll both walk home.”
The Warrior Queen presents something of a problem, Fiacre admitted to himself. He had no doubt that she was capable of Fandangoing Jay Cooker, whatever that meant, but he hoped that she could focus less on Cooker’s ill-gotten $6,000,000, and more on John’s goal of Saving Normal Christianity—and not for God’s sake, but her own.
Fiacre didn’t care, and he knew that God didn’t care—or wouldn’t give a pig’s whistle—about Jay’s dough or John’s nobler goal. Neither did they care if Dr. Sloan succeeded; the whole money slash church thing was a human thing and neither amounted to a hill of beans in the Mind of God, nor in the consciousness of a Time Traveler like Fiacre.
What God cares about is how she plays the game. Both He and Fiacre want her to have fun playing it; they care about the story and want the story to end happily. A few bumps along the way are expected—Jake Cooker and Hiroshima are bumps—but it is the ending that matters.
Christianity is teleological and apocalyptic. It presents the lives of individuals alone and of human kind collectively, as a linear story moving towards an End followed by timelessness: you die (so sorry!), get judged, and go to heaven—or hell. Life is all preparation for eternal life which justifies and makes this life meaningful.
To the question “Why did God make me?” we are taught that “God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next world.” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that God designed humans to be Time Travelers.
Of course, the concepts and images of travel to (and from!) the next world haven’t resonated with thoughtful people for a while. The idea of Time Travel and simultaneous recumbent and forward movement between planes and spaces is regarded with skepticism and embarrassment when eternity, that mystical place, is considered a destination. Fiacre believes this is because most Christians are afraid of becoming what they are intended to become, Time Traveling Christian mystics, because they’ll have to give up all their stuff if they do. It is easier to dismiss the place.
Nearly every legitimate 20th Century theologian—at least the ones Fiacre met—ignored the idea of survival and time travel after death. Bultman, Barth, Bonhoeffer, horny old Tillich, even the Jesuit Karl Rahner, considered the concept of a heavenly world of light where the traveler receives a heavenly vesture, to be not only incomprehensible, but irrational. They reached that conclusion, not because they were competent theologians, but because they were incompetent mathematicians. Faith is a zero sum game, but it is a Boolean game that cannot be played by the incurious, or by those fearful of going beyond the saying that God is not the fact of things existing, but the basis of all things seen and unseen when, in fact, God is simultaneously the fact and the basis, making the logic of God a lattice work of an infinite number of dimensions. Zero is just where you start. And still...
. . . Rahner wrote, “The soul by surrendering its bodily structure in death becomes open towards the universe and, in some way, a co-determining factor of the universe in the latter’s character as the ground of the personal life of other spiritual corporeal beings,” thereby accomplishing the nearly impossible: turning gold into lead.
Fiacre knew that that was so much metaphysical canoodling, a mere preference for self-abuse over the sweaty fun of a more anthropomorphic love affair. It was no wonder that crap artists like Jay Cooker and his Television Evangelist peers flourished.
Up on the stage, Lulu was helped to her feet, and onto a blue velvet settee center stage. A young stagehand type was patting her on the shoulder while another young person administered smelling salts. Lulu’s head snapped back when the ammonia capsule broke under her nose.
“Oh goodness,” she whined, confusedly looking around the set. “I saw that terrible man again. He was in…”
“Just how many pills did you take this morning?” the stagehand asked her. “Are you going to be able to do the show?”
“Five minutes!” Jay Cooker yelled. “Everybody on the set! We’re on the air in five minutes! Do I have to do everything myself!?”
Fiacre and Little Biggs started moving along the wall toward the doorway in which Sloan and Heartbreak took refuge. Fiacre was out of place among the crowd of elderly fundamentalists and youthful television production staffs, but the Eveningside security force was off somewhere chasing the naked Chet Chandler so he was, at least for now, unmolested. True, he earned a few hard stares from the church ladies he passed, but they were unarmed and not disposed to interfere with his progress along the wall. They were about to…
“…Organ Boy!” screamed Cooker. “We’re on the air in three minutes…”
…when Pastor Cooker spied Little Biggs scurrying along the wall with what looked like a wino. “Get me cued up, you moron! We’re on the air in two and half minutes!”
Little Biggs looked at Fiacre and shrugged. “I guess I better go,” he said. “Can I still leave after the show?”
Fiacre nodded and smiled. “Sure you can. Why don’t you start Pastor Cooker off with your favorite tune? I’m sure he’ll be surprised. Then, I’ll help you bust out of here.”
Little Biggs grinned shyly. “Will you introduce me to the Warrior Queen? She looks interesting.”
Fiacre nodded again and slipped past Little Biggs. “Yup, we’ll do it. Now go get ‘em.”
John and Dr. Sloan left the safety of their doorway refuge and inched through the crowd toward Fiacre. Sloan was pleased to see that John was walking normally and had given up the serpentine subterfuge. She glanced approvingly in his direction and considered the possibility that he would behave well under pressure.
Jay Cooker took his place on the television set and took his place in the host’s chair. He looked at Lulu and shook his head. Tomi Raye had been a nightmare to work with, and she had her own drug problems for sure, but looking at the spaced out, disheveled Lulu as she wobbled on the velvet settee made Jay miss Tomi Raye’s risible stream of consciousness regarding everything from why a giraffe might make the perfect birthday gift for Sandra Z. Windermere’s husband Raymond, who wrote in from Tulsa asking for advice about what to get a hard to please husband, to how Jesus was simply waiting to be asked to supply a winning lottery ticket number so why in heaven’s name didn’t you ask?
Even before Jay had been released from prison for tax fraud, he knew he needed a wife, at least a new television wife, to regain the abundant audience he’d had when he and Tomi Raye had been at the height of their The Lord Loves You television ministry. Without a photogenic helpmate by his side, the majority of his audience, 50 year old or older lower income Caucasian women married to or widowed or abandoned by unreliable blue collar Appalachian American men, might suppose he was a player or gay or afraid of commitment and could not then, authentically relate to the sufferings endemic to the state of holy matrimony.
The fact that the majority of Television Holy Men (yes, add ‘em up and they are a majority) were married but also happened to be players or gay or afraid of commitment added an element of suspense and drama to Christian Broadcasting that is a terrific boost to ratings; everyone knows that it is only a matter of time before Jay or Jimmy or Joel or Billy James gets his zipper caught on some errant lip.
And oh[!], how the audience suffered along with Tomi Raye, along with poor Betty Jean Hargis, along with sweet abused Frances Swaggart, and along with Tammy Faye Bakker, as one by one their husbands—so like the rats they were married to, cheated and swindled and fell into the laps of painted whores, some of them even Catholic. It was fantastic TV!
Jay knew that Lulu was necessary to his success because he, like all of his evangelical preacher-brothers, needed the possibility of a sacrificed lamb for his audience to worry about. This audience, these armies of aggrieved, menopausal and post menopausal women knew it was only a matter of time before Tomi Raye, Tammy Faye, Frances, Betty Jean et al, would be humiliated, sullied, and betrayed—just as they were. How could they not tune in?
But would people care when—not if—Jay betrayed Lulu? She lacked the sort of presence that Tomi Raye had exuded. Where Tomi Raye had appeared vulnerable, Lulu was merely abstracted. Where Tomi Raye convinced you that she and Jesus personally discussed what she would wear on that afternoon’s program, no one really believed that Lulu was in close communion with the Lord, especially about clothes.
Neither Jesus, nor the TLLY television audience, could be found culpable for the fashion crimes Lulu committed daily, even with the advice of a Wardrobe mistress who was a holdover from Tomi Raye’s days.
“Lulu wants to dress like she’s a teller in a bank,” complained the wardrobe mistress. “Tomi Raye wore organdy and ruffles and stiletto heels with spaghetti lacing. This one,” she said dismissively, “dresses like she really believes that the world is going to end. And her make-up? Forget about it. At least Tomi Faye wasn’t afraid of eye-liner.”
As Jay looks Lulu over, now just 15 seconds from air time, he wonders what he can do with her. Yes, he can cheat on her, beat on her, lure her into liaisons involving small boys and large poodles—these are all fantastic sub plotting opportunities and sheer fire ratings boosters—but he can’t do the one thing she has been talking about: divorce her. Every old bat in every financed mobile home in America would dump him, just as fast as their unreliable, rotten, cheating, first, second, and third husbands had dropped them. He was stuck with her. Unless…
…
The TLLY director shouted “Places!” and began the countdown to air: “ten, nine, eight…”
Little Biggs waited for his cue. He was excited about the piece he was going to play, and felt a pleasant tremor of nervousness that he was ignoring Pastor Cooker’s Old Time Favorite in favor of a little hog killin’ music.
Toccata!
