He replied to Saint Francis Xavier: I'll be there. And I'll cover you back again, as a clean cat covers its shit.
He stared at Saint Francis Xavier, but Saint Francis didn't shrink. He was dead.
He went back to the black waterbuffalo wallowing in swamps. He saw his white churches, green trees. His arch still crowned a palm mountain.
His remaining worshippers gnawed him, like a cow nuzzling the side of a thatch house.
Houses went up, too, in the new town, roofed with red rusted tin. Churches went up. Saint Francis's church they built of porous lat-erite, its black brick arch rough like lava. Tall narrow windows capped old arches of the old black stone. Its roof-long timbers were parallel like those of a ship, then gold. The sun of Jesuit initials, I.H.S., un-derlooked two cherubs above; then beneath the sun, standing on a big gold pyramid (the child Jesus between his legs), stood Saint Ignatius with his hand raised, a silver crown upon his head, his belly plate widening like that of a beetle. He was bearded, radiant, distant.
And Saint Catherine's church, that was a white church, with a white dog, a big white arch, plaster behind hot cruciform. Inside, it was cool, white and gold. It was floored with gravestones. There were white summery muscles and tendons and arches on the ceiling. There were shell strips on her windows. She was shuttered with translucent shells.
He said: There are too many gods here now.
They gave him parrotfish in brown rivers and he gave them nothing. Girls and old ladies stood at the side of the road. They tried to sell his flowers to him in the temples, but he wouldn't buy them. They were his flowers anyway. On the hillside the angry worshippers knocked down the stone phallus. So he denied them cashew apples, palm tree suns, tiny black birds skittering over the swamp, houses tucked under palm trees. They stopped giving him anything. They stopped asking him for anything.
He walked the narrow tongue of beach, divided by palm trees from the bare ocean and the horizon-ridge of someday.
He paced among the slow vulture-shadows where the Moslems had once built a deep-moated fort. Trees grew on the walls. Grim black rocks. Shadows between the walls. Narrow windows. Turrets and sky. Night clouds like white stars. Gray trees. The smell of distance. The smell of dirt. A grasshopper. The feeling of an island. Dark gray water, light gray sky.
Occult philosophy once pleased the yearnings I had in adolescence to produce terrifying effects, thereby flowering into someone superior to others. Shouldn't we grant everyone a pardonable time of life? The white supremacists who firebombed our city councilman's house yesterday, the black gangsters who shot two Jews for their sports jackets the day before — heaven's sake, they didn't mean it! — And that is just how I was. I wanted to fly not because I had anywhere to go, sought to raise the dead not for instruction or care for their clammy friendship. Hence the failure of my suffumi-gations. What if the liver of a chameleon, being burned upon a rooftop, did not incite thunderous storms? That was a lesson from the TETRAGRAMMATON: I'd trusted to corrupt procedures to fulfill shallow ends.
