AND THE SEA SHALL GIVE UP ITS DEAD

AND THE SEA SHALL GIVE UP ITS DEAD

The clangor of Judgment Day’s last trumpet dies away in the remotest pockets of space, and time comes to an end like a frayed ribbon. In the nave of creation the diaphanous amphitheater is already building for the trial of all flesh. Several miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, the spirits of the drowned rise through the water like bubbles in a neglected wineglass.

A WOMAN

[To the gray weeds of whose soul still cling the vestiges of color, some stained purples and some wasted reds.]

At last I could struggle no longer. My head and lungs were under intense discomfort by reason of the water with which they were filled. I said to myself: “Only think, Gertruda, you have actually arrived at the moment of death!” Even then I was unwilling to believe it, though my lungs were on the point of bursting. One is never really able to believe that one will die. It is especially difficult for sovereigns who seldom, if ever, confront inevitable situations. Perhaps you know that I am Gertruda XXII, Empress of Newfoundland from 2638 to 2698?

A STOUT LITTLE MAN

Your Imperial Highness’s experience is much like mine. I lived about five hundred years before Your Imperial Highness. I had always dreaded the moment of extinction, yet mine was less painful than a headache.

THE EMPRESS

We know now that the real pain comes to us in the ages that have passed since then. Have you too been swinging in mid-ocean, tangled in a cocoon of seaweed, slowly liberating your mind from the prides and prejudices and trivialities of a life-time? That is what is painful.

THE LITTLE MAN

I was a Jew and very proud of my race. Living under what I took to be the aspersions of my neighbors I had nourished the arrogant delusion that I was notable. It has taken me five hundred years of painful reflection to disembarrass myself of this notion. I was a theatrical producer and thought myself important to my time, wise, witty, and kindly. Each of these ideas I have shed with a hundred times the pain of losing a limb. Now I am reconciled to the fact that I am naked, a fool, a child.

THE EMPRESS

In my life I believed fiercely that everything of which I said MY had some peculiar excellence. It was impossible to imagine a citizen proud of any country save Newfoundland, or a woman vain of any hair save the golden. I had a passion for genealogies and antiquities and felt that such things merely looked forward to myself. Now these many years I have been wrapped in barnacles, divorcing my soul from all that it once loved. Even my love for my son and my son’s love for me have vanished through sheer inconsequence. All this is the second death, and the one to be dreaded. I was afraid that when I had shed away my royalty and my beauty and my administrative talent and my pure descent and my astonishing memory for names, I was afraid that there would be nothing left. But fortunately, underneath all this litter I have found a tiny morsel of ... but dare we say the Name?—But what was yours?

THE LITTLE MAN

Horatio Nissem.

THE EMPRESS

Speak to that man who is rising through the water beside you.

HORATIO NISSEM

Who are you, and what particular follies have you laid aside?

A TALL THIN DREAMY MAN

I was a priest of the gospel and a terrible time I have had taking leave of my sins. I tremble to think how but a few moments ago I still retained a longing for stupidities. Yes, sir, for the planets. I felt sure that they had personalities and I looked forward after my death to hearing their songs. Now I know that sun and moon and stars have fallen like dust into the lap of their maker. I told myself, also, that after death I should sit through eternity overhearing the conversation of Coleridge and Augustine and Our Lord; there I should embrace my loved ones and my enemies; there I should hear vindicated before the devils the great doctrines of Infant Baptism and Sacramental Confession. Only now have I been delivered from these follies. As I swayed in the meteoric slime I begged God to punish me for certain sins of my youth, moments I well remembered of rage and pride and shame. But these seemed of no importance to him: he seemed rather to be erasing from my mind the notion that my sins were of any consequence. I see now that even the idea that I was capable of sinning was a self-flattery and an impertinence. My name was Father Cosroe: now my name is Worm.

THE EMPRESS

We still cling obstinately to our identity, as though there were something valuable in it. This very moment I feel relics of pleasure in the fact that I am myself and no one else. Yet in a moment, if there is a moment, we shall all be reduced to our quintessential matter, and you, Mr. Nissem, will be exactly indistinguishable from me. God Himself will not be able to tell the Empress of Newfoundland from the Reverend Doctor Cosroe.

HORATIO NISSEM

[In mounting terror.]

I am afraid. I refuse to give myself up.

THE EMPRESS

Do not cry out, fool. You have awakened all my rebellious nature. O God, do not take away my identity! I do not ask for my title or my features; do not take away my myself!

HORATIO NISSEM

Do you hear? I refuse to give myself up. O God, let me not be mistaken for a Gentile.

FATHER COSROE

Your screaming has aroused my madness. Let me keep my particular mind, O God, my own curious mind with all I have put into it!

[The three panic-stricken souls reach the surface of the sea. The extensive business of Domesday is over in a twinkling and the souls divested of all identification have tumbled, like falling stars, into the blaze of unicity. Soon nothing exists in space but the great unwinking eye, meditating a new creation.]