Touching God

...I get a little warm in my heart...

Doctor Persephone Rosenbaum, at only twenty years of age, was the youngest lecturer at Balliol College, indeed in all of Oxford, and, despite her tender age, a world-renowned authority on the ancient Near East. Her doctoral thesis, The Achaemenian Influence upon the Jewish Faith and Scripture, was considered not only a work of extraordinary erudition but also an elegant and moving piece of prose in its own right.

...when I think of winter.

She was coiled foetally in a large wicker chair within an amnion of plush fleece cushions. She chewed gently on the end of a Mont Blanc fountain pen and listened to the old CD. The room was an opulent studio, converted from the loft of an old farmhouse out in the wilds of Oxfordshire. It was full of naked timbers and elegant stonework. There were a couple of mediaeval panels, illustrating the Day of Judgement, hundreds of tiny nudes shovelled into flaming maws, king and slave alike powerless before the judgement of a wrathful God.

I put my hand in my father's glove.

Lying still, dozing, in the corner on a worn sheepskin, was a venerable Saint Bernard bitch. Her name was Mirabella and she had grown up with Doctor Rosenbaum. Ten years ago she had been given a puppy by her father for Yule. Now the old girl was half-lame and slow but well loved. Persephone looked up at the dog from time to time and it was a comfortable thing.

I run off where the drift gets deeper...

Persephone herself had her long ginger hair tied up in a tight bun. A pair of rectangular spectacles with thick black frames perched on her well-defined nose. She wore a simple nightgown, low-hemmed, pale lavender, split at the front to her navel, at the back to her lumbar. If she had stood it would have given her an ethereal, Pre-Raphaelite aura but, huddled as she was, some of that effect was lost.

...Sleeping beauty trips me with a frown.

Mirabella stirred and looked up from her sleep. A storm was blowing up outside which made it all the nicer being curled up in the farmhouse. The old maid emitted a low, affectionate growl.

"Hello, little brother," Persephone murmured softly and smiled.

...cause I can't always be around.

"Sister."

When you gonna make up your mind...

Persephone slipped out of her cushioned torpor. Stood slowly, gracefully and turned to face her brother, standing at the top of the stairs.

Naked to the waist, his face was a mass of smudged charcoal, his hair a gory mess. His arms were caked with dried blood and visceral slime. His eyes stared, haunted, into his sister, through her. He scrutinised something at the vanishing point of the world.

When you gonna love you as much as I do.

"Our parents are avenged," said Titus, his voice soft, serious, deadly.

When you gonna make up your mind.

"I had assumed that they would be."

Cause things are gonna change so fast.

"Weissmann is dead," Titus volunteered, Persephone's understated reaction drawing him on.

All the white horses are still in bed.

Persephone nodded. She regarded him coolly. "Tell me."

I tell you that I will always want you near.

Titus inhaled, skewed his head and then looked at Persephone again, a half-smile playing on his lips like an uncertain flame.

You say that things change, my dear.

"Having fitted him with a deep CICI, I 'wired' into him. Then I began to bleed him."

Titus paused. He looked at his sister, half uncertainly. He was trying to keep his tone level, impassive, suitably sombre. Yet there was a profound excitement bubbling underneath his measured words. Persephone nodded that he should continue the narrative.

"He knew that he was dying, that he was beaten. I went deeper. He knew that his soul was naked in my gaze. He knew that I was ripping open his most precious places, stealing his most precious secrets."

Titus paused again, breathless.

"It was terrifying, devouring his soul dream by dream. Awesome. You cannot know, 'Sephy. To have that knowledge of death. To have that power. It was as though I was God. It is humbling."

"And what did you see in that soul, torn open to your sight?" Persephone asked impassively.

"Scars. He was woven out of scars. We all are, I think. It is our sufferings that make us. We are trapped beneath the weight of our doubts, our fears, our grievances."

He took another breath. He tried to draw in the words to explain.

"And I saw a universe die. You know that Father said, 'When you destroy a life, you destroy a world.' Well, I saw Weissmann's universe collapse into a fading singularity.

"You can't imagine it, 'Sephy. What it is to kill. To know, truly, what you have done. It is an act of awesome mysticism. It is Samadhi. It is touching God."

Persephone smiled indulgently at her theologian murderer. Mirabella had padded over from her rug, sniffing at the smell of the hunt, the hot blood and sweat on Titus's scent. In her younger days she would have jumped at him, licking at his face, but she contented herself with butting against his leg.

"I spoke to Rockington," said Persephone after a suitably reverent hiatus.

"Oh." The response was vague, indifferent. His mind was still lost to the mystical and the mundane was an unwelcome intrusion into his ecstatic reverie.

"Well, he's coming to the wake, anyway."

"Hmmm." Again, Titus frowned, disapproving.

Persephone tossed her head petulantly.

"Honestly, little brother, you're impossible! David Rockington is on our side, remember."

Titus nodded grudgingly and shrugged.

"Oh," Persephone continued, "and from what he said, it sounds as though Dietrich has Mei."

"Woo hoo! Lucky him! Perhaps he'd like to shove a live lobster in his underpants as well." Titus laughed and looked at his twin in a half-conciliatory way, his distance suddenly closed. Persephone smiled, somewhat relieved at her brother's sudden earthing.

"Very well," Titus sighed. "He's no worse than the rest of them and better than many."

"Little brother, why you are filthy!" Persephone feigned sudden shock, as though she had just noticed his horrific manifestation. "You should go and have a shower."

Taken aback by this dramatic change in tenor by his sister, Titus could manage no wittier a response than, "Why?"

"You are tired. We should get you to bed," was the soft, whispered answer.

Titus smiled slowly and then bowed graciously, extravagantly.

"As my sister wishes."

He turned with a flourish and vanished back down the stairs.

"Agh! You are impossible, Titus." And then, after a pause, "But I love you anyway."

You say that things change, my dear!

Geoff Hinkley, 08/11/00

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