Free Falconer by John Cheever Page B

hear the cruel laughter of those men and women to whom we look for love and mercy; I mean the pain of fire and ice; I mean the desolation of being buried at a crossroads with a stake through one’s heart. I truly believe in One God the Father Almighty but I know that to say so loudly, and at any distance from the chancel—any distance at all—would dangerously jeopardize my ability to ingratiate those men and women with whom I wish to live. I am trying to say—and I’m sure you will agree with me—that while we are available to transcendent experience, we can state this only at the suitable and ordained time and in the suitable and ordained place. I could not live without this knowledge; no more could I live without the thrilling possibility of suddenly encountering the fragrance of skepticism.
    “I am a prisoner. My life follows very closely the traditional lives of the saints, but I seem to have beenforgotten by the blessed company of all faithful men and women. I have prayed for kings, presidents and bishops, but I have never once said a prayer for a man in prison nor have I ever heard a hymn that mentioned jail. We prisoners, more than any men, have suffered for our sins, we have suffered for the sins of society, and our example should cleanse the thoughts of men’s hearts because of the grief with which we are acquainted. We are in fact the word made flesh; but what I want to do is to call your attention to a great blasphemy.
    “As Your Grace well knows, the most universal image of mankind is not love or death; it is Judgment Day. One sees this in the cave paintings in the Dordogne, in the tombs of Egypt, in the temples of Asia and Byzantium, in Renaissance Europe, England, Russia and the Golden Horn. Here the Divinity sifts out the souls of men, granting to the truly pure infinite serenity and sentencing the sinners to fire, ice and sometimes piss and shit. Social custom is never in force where one finds this vision, and one finds it everywhere. Even in Egypt the candidates for immortality include souls who could be bought and sold in the world of the living. The Divinity is the flame, the heart of this vision. A queue approaches the Divinity, always from the right; it doesn’t matter what country, age or century from which the vision is reported. On the left, then, one sees the forfeits and the rewards. Forfeiture and torment are, even in the earliest reports, much more passionately painted than eternal peace. Men thirsted, burned and took it up the ass with much more force and passionthan they played their harps and flew. The presence of God binds the world together. His force, His essence, is Judgment.
    “Everyone knows that the only sacraments are bread and water. The hymeneal veil and the golden ring came in only yesterday, and as an incarnation of the vision of love, Holy Matrimony is only a taste of the hellish consequences involved in claiming that a vision can be represented by thought, word and deed. Here, in my cell, is what one sees in the caves, the tombs of the kings, the temples and churches all over the planet being performed by men, by any kind of men the last century might have bred. Stars, dumbbells, hacks and boobs—it is they who have constructed these caverns of hell and, with a familiar diminishment of passion, the fields of paradise on the other side of the wall. This is the obscenity, this is the unspeakable obscenity, this stupid pageantry of judgment that, finer than air or gas, fills these cells with the reek of men slaughtering one another for no real reason to speak of. Denounce this cardinal blasphemy, Your Grace, from the back of your broad-winged eagle.”
    “Oh, my darling,” he wrote, with no pause at all and to a girl he had lived with for two months when Marcia had abdicated and moved to Carmel. “Last night, watching a comedy on TV, I saw a woman touch a man with familiarity—a light touch on the shoulder—and I lay on my bed and cried. No one saw me. Prisoners, of