City of God

The narrative becomes fragmented here as Everett moves through several ideas: lullabies as the first songs, containing both the joy of new life and the knowledge of mortality; Noah’s ark’s need for dung beetles; the Biblical desert of Moses and Jesus imagined as the actual wilderness it would have been rather than the symbolic place it represents in the Bible. He then returns to his narration of Sarah Blumenthal’s father, who spends several days locked in the pitch-black boxcar with the living and dead. He begins mindlessly gnawing at the piece of wood his face is pressed against, and he is able to breathe and occasionally have rain water through a slat in the boxcar. When the girl next to him dies without warning, he is dragged down a few inches, and he is suddenly able to see outside. He begins announcing what he sees to the people in the car, and he tries to recall who is in there with him. He knows the journey is reaching its end, and he realizes that they have all been fully stripped of their humanity.

The draft of the ghetto narrative finished, Everett meets Sarah for lunch. She has read his draft, and they are going to talk about it, but this is the first time Everett’s seen her without Tom around, and he sees Tom’s attraction. When he is wondering how she ended up in the rabbinate, she anticipates his question, and he makes a joke, saying he was about to ask her if she liked Frank Sinatra (who will come up later as another of Everett’s monologue subjects). Sarah reveals that she turned to learning Yiddish when her mother died, which led her incrementally to the rabbinate.

The conversation turns to the ghetto narrative, and Sarah says it was moving, though it was full of simplifications and inaccuracies that she couldn’t help but notice. She says that it feels true, though, and speaks of her father, who now suffers from dementia, which she sees as a blessing: He never learned of Joshua’s murder while he was trying to recover the lost ghetto archive, which is something Sarah’s father didn’t ask for and could not bear to do himself. She reveals that Tom has taken it upon himself to seek out the archive; he has written her from Moscow to tell her as much.

Everett thinks of his friend, who was so changed by his stolen cross appearing on Joshua and Sarah’s roof that he has truly become a theological detective. Everett wanders Tom’s neighborhood and ends up at his old church, which has been converted into a theater company.

Everett meets with his friend B., a director who wants Everett to write a particularly convoluted screenplay from B.’s life. B. had, on instinct, cast an unknown actress in a slasher film that features her mutilation; the film does well, but her career fails to take off, and one night she comes home to an intruder in her home who bites off her nose. B. is concerned about the instinct that led him to cast the woman, thinking he might have some prophetic capability, which is what the movie he wants Everett to write is about. Everett says that the central conundrum is who to cast as the woman, and B. says he will cast against his instincts this time; Everett asserts that’s only what he thinks he will be doing.

The narrative returns to Everett’s Wittgenstein monologue; it takes place as Wittgenstein is a professor trying to work out his philosophy while being alternately idolized and mocked by his students. He tells his students they should leave philosophy and do something practical, that he intends to do the same and has before. Then he speaks of his love for movies as art made from the literal materials of the world.

There is another midrash, this time of “Dancing in the Dark,” which compares the struggles of the Depression to the glamorous dancers up on screen; it implies that the real tragedy is what the poor were willing to pay to feel connected to the romantic world of film.

Everett meets with Tom’s bishop, who professes concern for Tom and claims that his problem is he’s “never quite shaken the sixties” (161). He says that Tom’s absolutism comes from an incident with his father, John Pemberton, who was also a member of the clergy and agreed to sign on to the heresy charges against a radical bishop, James Pike. Tom’s bishop says that the conflict between these two men is what made Tom who he is.

Everett puts down some notes about this, rethinking the way he will write Tom as a figure from the radical sects of the Catholic church. He also thinks about Tom’s first wife, Trish vanden Meer. They met at Yale, and Everett says that Tom’s attraction to her is rooted in both her and the fact that her father is an official in the Johnson administration that Tom hates.

This is followed by a letter from Tom’s ex father-in-law to Tom (though it is unclear if this is the actual letter of Everett’s reconstruction of it). In it, he writes that a veteran in a wheelchair has taken to picketing his home, and he does not know what to do. However he responds, the veteran has won, and he wants to know what Tom would do in that situation.