The Programme

CHAPTER SEVEN-2

“Where is Helen?”

“In Boston. I thought, perhaps,” Cassandra glanced at Carey and let the sentence trail away.

“I wanted to see her,” Matthew said, treating the excuse with disdain: people regularly, even routinely, changed partners in The Programme without embarrassment or jealousy.

A youngster - head bowed - brought iced tea.

“Brother Anthony,” Matthew said.

“I am one, Teacher,” the young Rockworth mumbled.

“We are many. How are you, Anthony?”

The boy glanced at Caleb, as if he needed permission to answer.

“I’m fine, Teacher.”

He started to go, but Matthew took his arm.

“You’re nervous, Anthony. Why are you nervous of me, Anthony?”

Anthony shook his head, could not answer aloud.

Matthew let him go, waited until Anthony was out of earshot.

“The idea was to calm him down, Caleb; not destroy his spirit.”

Caleb sipped his tea before he answered.

“I know he’s special to you, Teacher, but we’ve got a lot of new members. There were risks.”

“He has a place in The Programme, too.” He was more than rent on Chesterfield Gardens.

“He’s all right, Matthew,” Cassandra intervened. “I keep an eye on him.”

A man in dirty shorts and sweaty T-shirt was walking towards them from the work-party, waving at them with one hand while wiping his forehead with the other. It was Father Nahum. Matthew rose to greet his old friend, stepping down from the porch and striding towards him, they threw their arms around one another, Nahum’s red-framed spectacles flashing in the sun. Matthew introduced him to Carey.

“We should talk about the case,” Cassandra said. “Before this afternoon.” She tossed her head at Carey, reminding Matthew that she would not be attending the meeting: she was, after all, only an Acolyte.

“I thought it might be better to talk without her,” Matthew answered realising at once that they were already talking as if she wasn’t there. He apologised. “I thought there were things you might not want to know.”

Carey answered cautiously, slipping on her legal shoes.

“I wouldn’t want to know about anything, er, illegal.” It was difficult as never before to be his lawyer, sitting on the deck in the powerful American sun, barefoot, bare-legged, her blouse open as low as hung The Programme medallion around her neck, witnessing - and being subjected to - the mind-wars that passed for casual conversation within the group’s hierarchy. “Short of that,” she did not care.

Matthew asked Nahum:

“Where is Amanda now?”

“Here,” he answered flatly.

“Here?” Matthew did not try to conceal his surprise. “Where?”

Nahum looked at Cassandra but, after a moment, admitted:

“Downstairs. In the basement.”

When last Matthew saw the basement, it had been nothing more than a bare, damp cellar with an earth-packed floor. Nahum reassured him.

“We’ve done a lot of work. She wanted it,” he said. “Really,” he added in an almost aside, quiet and for Matthew’s ears. “She wants to see you, Matthew. She thought, well, if she was left to herself.” That she might run away again.

“I’ll see her, then,” Matthew announced. “Now. Downstairs.”

“I’d like to see her with you,” Carey said, to her own as much as to everyone else’s surprise.

Huw guffawed.

“Even your lawyer doesn’t trust you, Matthew.”

“Should you be part of this discussion, Huw? I don’t remember your answer.” To the question whether he had re-joined the group.

“Huw was re-initiated a couple of months ago,” Cassandra said. “He’s about to take the name Paimon.” Paimon - fallen angel - king of Hell who answered to Lucifer, who commanded 200 legions of spirits, part angel and part potentate, and who commonly took the form of a crowned princess astride a dromedary. The androgynous and ambivalent image suited Huw.

“But you forgot to tell me?”

“I’m sure his name was somewhere on a list.” They kept in touch on-line: cursors flashing in a darkened room, dancing about unknown names, many more than expected; Brother George Cohen - who was monitoring USA income and expenditure through the same medium - had taken responsibility for drawing Matthew’s attention to significant information. The name had meant nothing to him.

Unexpectedly, Matthew reached across to grip Huw’s hand.

“We’ll be friends again, then, Paimon. Remember?”

Equally unexpectedly, Paimon - the re-naming instantly effected by The Teacher - gripped his in return and smiled.

“Of course I remember, Matthew. I was there.” At the beginning; on their journeys in Latin America. “We vowed, whatever we made of it, that was what we were supposed to make of it. Remember?” he repeated.

“Show me,” Matthew commanded Nahum, gesturing Carey to accompany him.

The wooden stairs to the basement were rickety, the ceiling low, in the main area at the bottom there was only a tiny window, the light-bulb was dull and shade-less. Yet the floor was clean and hard, recently concreted over. The walls were likewise finished and white-washed. On one of them, a painted symbol was in progress.

Carey asked artlessly:

“Is this to be The Temple?”

Father Nahum shook his head.

“No; that’s what I’m building. This is for,” he hesitated, then finished, “punishment. And worship amongst them.” Those being punished. He studied Carey’s expression with frank interest, to see how she reacted. Carey nodded but did not say anything.

There were two doors on each side of the main area, three of them ajar, the fourth closed but with a key sticking out of the hole. There was a light switch outside each. Carey logged the row of air-bricks between them, feeding each of the four rooms beyond. It was a cell-block for punishment inflicted not only by The Programme but also by members on themselves.

Father Nahum twisted the key to Amanda’s cell and stepped back.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“No.” Matthew waited for Nahum to retreat up the stairs before he opened the door.

Inside, it was too dark to see. Matthew flipped the switch. The cell was tiny, its ceilings even lower than in the main basement area, barely high enough to stand up straight, especially not Matthew who had to bow his head to enter.

The cell was unfurnished. There were no chairs, no table or mattress, not even a bucket; just a single blanket scrunched up and lying disused against a wall. In a comer, on the floor, squatted Amanda Kroger. The smell of her hit them in a solid wave. She was dressed in a simple - once white - shift, and both it and she were filthy; around the crotch, the shift was soiled. She was a small woman, overweight and with brown curly hair badly in need of a wash; her fingernails were bitten to the quick. As soon as she realised who it was, she flung herself at Matthew’s feet, crying:

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, forgive me, Teacher.”

Matthew gestured Carey to help her up. For a split second, Carey was disgusted at the thought of touching her, then disgusted with herself for hesitating.

Amanda recoiled.

“What are you doing? Leave me alone.”

Forced to crouch to her level by the ceiling, Matthew placed his hands on her shoulders, looked into her eyes as if he could read her mind, asked:

“Amanda, do you believe?”

The woman nodded fervently.

“I am one, Amanda. Remember?”

“I am one,” the woman mumbled. “We are many. Together we shall be whole. I told myself that, every day, in that place, a hundred times a day,” she babbled. “Even when they did things to me - they gave me pills, they gave me, you know, shocks. They made me cut my hair. It was down to here,” she held her hands to the middle of her rib-cage. “They were trying to make me change. They brought a man to see me. He tried to get me to tell stories about you; claimed he knew you; I knew he didn’t. When I wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they gave me more pills, more shocks. I didn’t tell them anything, Teacher. I didn’t,” she babbled.

“I want you to come outside with me, Amanda,” Matthew said. “I want you to come out with me and go with Carey. She’s a friend; she’s going to help you clean up; she going to help you be whole again.”

Amanda shook her head violently.

“I have to stay here. I can’t go out. If I go out, they’ll come after me. Like before, when I left” The Programme. “I’m not safe. I’ll run away, I will, I will,” she threatened like a seven-year old. “Punish me, Teacher; punish me for what I did.”

“It was done to you,” Carey spoke for the first time. “Don’t blame yourself.”

Amanda looked at her in confusion, then back at Matthew.

“It was what I wanted. If it happened, I must have wanted it to happen.” Purpose and counter-purpose.

“It’s all right, Amanda,” Matthew said patiently: “Sometimes, we need to go one way to find out we wanted the other. You came back.”

“Clean me, Teacher,” Amanda begged. “You clean me.”

“Come out now, Amanda, come with me.”

The woman allowed him to take her hand and lead her out of the cell. None of them spoke as they mounted the stairs. They made a pitiful procession: Matthew in the lead, tall and Christ-like but sombre; the waif-like Amanda bearing demons on her shoulders like a cross; Carey in the role of warden. At the stairs, Matthew left them.

“If you need anything, ask,” he told Carey. “I’m sure you’ll get along fine.” Getting along meant preparing her for the hearing.

“You get what you want, don’t you, Matthew?” Carey said, mostly in admiration but not without fear.

“We all get what we want, Carey. Does it bother you?”

“No,” she murmured. “It’s just, er, unfamiliar.” She squeezed his hand, to remind him - or perhaps herself - that he was what she wanted, and had got.

From Programme and Progression:

If you ask someone what is the first quote they can think of from the Bible, most will say: “I am the Lord thy God” - it appears in just that form in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, and Zecheriah, and in mildly different forms in many other books. The image is of a being - God - speaking to someone, whomever it may be on the particular occasion but let us say now you and me.

Does the voice come from without or from within? What The Programme is about is the God within; the God of The Programme is the God that is created by a shared vision, based on a shared experience, the experience of seeking out and realising the God within -in all its contradictory aspects -and defining God as we then can see. Is there a great difference between this God and the God we have been brought up to recognise and obey? No and yes. No, because we may yet call him “God,” and worship God as that which gives meaning to the material of our lives; yes, because God belongs to us, and has been created by us, not the other way around.

“We must be disciplined; we must take control. With so many new members, they cannot be left to their own devices - we are one but they are too many,” The Seer made a joke. “They must have time to learn how to relate to each other and to us. We must have the time to absorb them, organise them, to build enough space for them all. We must be able to use their energy now, to build the room for them, but they are not yet ready to draw on it themselves. We must explore them, find their hidden pockets, bring them to the surface.”

“Discipline? Control?” Matthew enquired. “We’re a community, not an army- salvation or otherwise.”

“We need to take that direction for the moment, to carve out more territory, for yet more people.”

“Where do we stop? When we’ve put the rest of the world onto a reservation? The impossible task that is never achieved? It’s implosion every time.”

Only a half-dozen of the members attending the Council could follow the argument. If you set a task that can never be achieved, commitment to it becomes a way of life in itself. The world becomes the enemy instead of a harmless flock. Build-up of paranoia follows - aggression, frustration, energy spent getting nowhere - which finally demands an attainable target. The only target within their reach is themselves. The energy turns inwards and upon each other, all that is left that is within their control; destruction by implosion, no fire beyond.

Mother Jemima, Nahum’s fellow-Superior of the vanguard mission, spoke:

“Some of these new ideas - I understand the theory - but, Teacher, they’re capable of considerable misrepresentation. Maybe dangerously so,” she added. “The contact rules.”

She was a striking woman with eyebrows either so faint or so plucked that they were barely discernible, and a prominent nose that could none the less not spoil the matriarchal beauty of her face: somehow haughty yet somehow warm.

Contact was euphemism for s*x. The Seer had told of a period of constancy to come. It would not be total abstinence: that would be as unattractive as it would be unenforceable; but s****l hierarchy, members available only to their seniors.