On a clear fall afternoon not long after the explosion, I came home to the Hill. As I stepped out of my car into the driveway, my wife and children rushed the door of the house so fast they got jammed up in it together. Then they broke out one at a time and came hurtling toward me. Chad and Nathan were racing in the lead with little Terry running behind. As I stepped out of the driveway onto the front walk, they flung themselves at me. In a moment, I had a boy in each arm and the girl wrapped around my leg, and Cathy, smiling and crying at once, moving in among them with a kiss.
I wanted to weep when I saw them. I wanted to fall to my knees and press my forehead to the flagstone and sob enormous racking sobs until I heaved up some portion of the thick, strangling mass of my self-revulsion. I wanted to slobber over the goodness of those children's heads and wallow in the sweetness of my wife's bosom and grovel on the earth in front of them. I wanted to rip open my shirt and bare the ugliness of myself to heaven and beg their forgiveness for what I was inside.
But no. I was Cathy's husband, the children's father, and they were all of them in my care. If I wept, they would weep. If I showed them my misery, they would be miserable, too. I had no business bringing my moral nausea to their happy occasion. I settled instead for many misty-eyed kisses and embraces all around. Then, with what I hoped was insouciant Dad gallantry, I said, "So- what's for dinner?" They all laughed and we headed together into the house.
It was the beginning of a very hard winter. A black depression soon settled over me. My old joy of life seemed to seep through my fingers as I desperately tried to hold it fast. At last, it bled out of my life entirely. I walked through the days hollow-hearted and soul-dead. Day by day, hour by hour, I used all the strength of will I had to hide my emptiness from the children. I went through the motions of driving them to school and playing with them in the snow and taking them to movies, but that's what it was: just going through the motions. Joking with them, wrestling with them, setting rules for them, hearing them out. None of it seemed real to me. My life did not seem real.
I told my wife how I felt, but I tried not to show it to her too much. I tried to describe it to her without complaining or moping or carrying on. One night, I confessed to her what I did to Arthur Rashid, forcing myself to remain dry-eyed as I described pulverizing his kneecaps with the hammer. Cathy reached across the table and took my hand.
"That's awful. What an awful experience," she said.
But I could see the doubt and horror in her eyes. I could see her hold back the question: "Wasn't there anything else you could have done?"
I couldn't bring myself to tell her the rest, to describe the pulsing excitement that went through me as I brought the hammer down, or about how I hid in the theater closet, ready to lay hands on Maryanne.
I tried to pray about these things, but I couldn't somehow. I tried to ask God to forgive me for what I'd done and what I'd felt, but I couldn't. The truth was: I was too angry at him to pray. I felt he had asked too much of me. It wasn't that he had asked me to sacrifice my decency or my complacency or even my joy of living. Those were his to give and his to take away; I understood that. But before he would allow me to save those thousands and thousands of innocent lives-his damn lives, his creations-God had demanded that I know myself, and for that I could not forgive him. I could not forgive him and so I could not ask him to forgive me.
So what else was there? I tried going to a psychiatrist. He listened to me talk for fifteen minutes, then wrote me a prescription for pills-some of those anti-depression pills I'd seen advertised on TV. I was so dejected at that point I actually filled the prescription. But I never took them. Listen, to each his own. For all I know, you could pop a couple of those suckers and spend the rest of your days dancing in the sun. But the way I saw it, my problem wasn't chemical, it was spiritual. The spirit has to have its journey, has to go through its stations, you know; that's how it's shaped finally into a soul. I took the pills down to the lake and hurled them in.
Now I guess you may say to me: Well, that's all very well and good, but what if you can't make it through the stations of the spirit, what if the journey's too much for you? What if you get so depressed you go out and buy a rope and hang yourself? And I guess I would answer you: Them's the breaks, pal. There's no freedom without the possibility of failure. And I'm not afraid to die.
I thought about it a lot, in fact: killing myself, I mean. I took long drives to deserted country lanes, parked in the grass by the roadside, and thought about ways to do it. After months of considering various methods, I settled on a gun as the surest and quickest. I even began shopping around for a gun and had my eye on an elegant little Beretta 9mm. With that, I figured, if I decided to live, I would still have something for home protection.
So it went, through Christmas, into January, February, March. And all in spite of the fact that most of my worst fears of what would happen in the aftermath of The End of Civilization never actually materialized. For instance, I had worried quite a lot early on that I might have to go to jail for what I did to Rashid or at least stand trial for it. I had worried that I might even still be a suspect in Anne Smith's death. For weeks I had bouts of paranoia during which I imagined that all the details of my sordid earlier life would somehow become news and so become known to my children and my neighbors on the Hill. Even the idea that my children and neighbors would hear about Rashid-how I had taped him up and gagged him and shattered his knees with a hammer to make him talk-haunted and sickened me and kept me awake at night.
But none of the things I worried about happened. What happened instead was this:
I was questioned for nearly a week after the explosion. Police officers, FBI agents, spies, lawyers, people who for all I know were just dropping by to deliver Chinese food-everyone seemed to want to hear my story. As I had with Detective Curtis, I stuck to the truth with all of them no matter how awful or embarrassing it was. I told the tale day after day, again and again and again.
Then, after I don't know how long, Detective Curtis himself showed up. I was relaxing between interrogations in a pleasant room on one of the upper floors of One Police Plaza. It was a conference room, with a long table and a wall of windows looking out at the big white clouds over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was sitting at the head of the table, swiveling in a chair, reading about the explosion in the Times. There were the usual angry and fretful stories asking the usual angry and fretful questions that arise after such an incident: How had the terrorists infiltrated security? Where had they gotten the C4? Which conservative politician was to blame? Which American policy had driven the murderers to act? And how could anyone call Christianity a tolerant religion after the Crusades? And so on. There was even a piece demanding to know how Patrick Piersall had gotten into the building with a gun. I knew the answer to that one: celebrity. He'd wangled a ticket to the show from his manager, then found a die-hard Universal fan among the guards, one of those guys who attends Universal conventions dressed up as a Borgon in his spare time. He'd convinced the guard to let him in early so he could tour the theater, and made sure the idiot neglected to put him through the metal detector. Piersall was clever, I'll say that for him. It was a good thing he was on our side.
I was still paging my way through the stories when the door opened and in came Curtis.
His tough brown face went wide with a shockingly friendly smile. It didn't suit him. It looked foreign to his features. Even as I stood up to meet him, even as he swung his hand to me for a friendly shake, I could see in his eyes that he was the same, that he discounted any illusion of decency in me or in anyone. I was just another squirrelly felon who hadn't been caught out yet, that's all. He knew a lot about people, Curtis did, but all of it was bad.
He gestured me back into my chair and sat in a chair beside me. He laid a manila folder on the table between us, but he never opened it. He just liked them, I guess, those folders. He always seemed to have one around.
He pointed casually to the Times open on the table in front of me. "So? What do you think of the coverage?"
I shrugged. "Seems like you haven't told them much yet."
"Not too much. They just get it wrong anyway."
"I notice, for instance, you haven't told them about Rashid." That was foremost in my mind. I figured once the press found out he was involved, the whole incident would become public start to finish.
"Well, we will," Curtis said. "We're going to tell them today."
"All right."
"We're going to tell them Rashid is gone."
My reaction must have looked comical, a comical imitation of surprise. I bolted straight up in my chair, opened my mouth wide, blinked my eyes. "Gone? What do you mean?"
"I mean gone," said Curtis, smiling again beneath those suspicious eyes. "We've searched his office, his apartment, his weekend place: no sign of him."
"But he was in his office. That's impossible. How could he get away? He couldn't walk."
Curtis seemed to consider it. "I don't know. Maybe he had some help. Maybe you didn't hurt him as badly as you thought you did."
I added a few moments of comical sputtering to my ridiculous facial expression. "I… I…"
"Anyway…" Curtis slid the folder off the tabletop into his hand and rose from his chair. I was too flummoxed to stand up myself. I just sat there, staring up at him. "We're gonna tell the media we suspect he may have been smuggled out of the country by his masters and possibly executed for betraying the Wall Street operation. That's it. Anything else you want to tell them is up to you. It's a free country."
He was at the door before I managed to say, "Is that really what you think happened? You think someone smuggled him out of the country?"
Curtis snorted. It was quite a sound. It was hard and mirthless, and yet it registered a deep, genuine amusement of a kind I don't really like to think about. It made my balls tighten and go cold. For a moment, after the door shut behind him, I just sat where I was, swiveling slightly, trying to think. I thought: I'm free then. They're not going to prosecute me. I'm free. But I didn't feel free or, if I did, I didn't feel much joy about it. I just kept thinking about that sound, Curtis's short, snorting laugh. A deep feeling of pity welled up in me-pity for Rashid-and maybe a sense of awe and terror, too. I did not think he had left the country. And I did not think his life was going to be very pleasant from now on, or that it would be pleasant ever again until its end.
So the rest of the story-the story of how I tortured a university professor on what was essentially a hunch-never came out-not until now, at least; not until I told it here. In fact, after that week or so of questioning, the law was more-or-less done with me.
The media, on the other hand-they were a different story altogether.
At first, they treated me as a hero-a second-string hero maybe, next to the celebrity, next to Patrick Piersall, but a hero still. The newspaper writers and TV and radio commentators compared me to characters in movies, guys who hunt down the truth when the authorities suspect them or won't believe them, who stop the killers in the nick of time, and so on. Some of the praise started to sound pretty overheated, even to me.
Then one day, Piersall and I were interviewed on a television show together. It was one of those morning news programs with a sort of domestic feeling-you know, some perky female and some housebroken male acting almost like husband and wife as they chat with newsmakers and celebrities.
Anyway, it was the perky female interviewing Piersall and me. And she was basically asking the same sorts of questions all the other journalists I'd spoken to had asked. "Were you scared?" and "How did you feel?" and "What was the first moment you realized this was really happening?" Even with the bright lights and with the cameras swirling around me and with the perky female's face uncannily sharp and distinct in front of me because of her makeup and celebrity, I grew bored with the whole thing and my mind began to wander. I began to think about the television room in my mother's house. About the fact that I'd programmed the TiVo there to record every show that had Patrick Piersall in it. I wondered if my old friend the enormous TV was recording me right now.
Then, unexpectedly, the perky female interviewer put on her Serious and Thoughtful Face. She leaned toward me over her crossed knees and asked, "When you look at a situation like this, do you have any thoughts about what the root causes of our current troubles in the world might be? Do you think America might share some of the responsibility?"
She was giving me a chance, you see. A chance to show I was deep and nuanced like herself and could understand that sometimes the victim of an attack is really the perpetrator and vice versa. Unfortunately, the question caught me off guard. I had no prepared response. I just began speaking and I said, "You know, Perky (or whatever her name was), I saw one of these fundamentalist imams on TV recently. And he said that when the Soviet Union fell, the forces of faith had triumphed over the forces of atheism. And he said that now, we had to fight a holy war to decide which faith would rule. The more I think about that, the more I think maybe he got it exactly right. Maybe in some sense, this is a holy war…"
Now, I was about to go on to say that, with atheism a discredited force in the world, there were basically two different ways in which you could believe in God. You could believe in a God who had spoken one time and then demanded submission ever after to his Word. Or you could believe in a God who was still speaking, still unfolding his creation to us in the strange equation of every soul and in the unfathomable design thrown up by all our souls together. That God-that second God-requires not submission but liberty, so that every soul can speak, even the errant and foolish ones. Ultimately, I was going to say, one of those two versions of God has to triumph over the other. They obviously can't live side by side.
But before I could go on, before I could say any of that, the perky female interviewer interrupted me. Her startlingly present features were suddenly far less perky, far more dark and fierce.
"So what are you saying? Are you saying this is something like Smackdown: Jehovah Versus Allah? Either believe in our Judeo-Christian God or we kill you?"
"Oh, no," I said, horrified. "No, not at all, what I meant-"
"You believe this is some kind of New Crusade-because many in the Muslim world are afraid of exactly that."
"No, that's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is-"
"Are you a Christian?" she asked me accusingly.
"Well, yes-yes I am, but-"
"So you believe your religion is the right one and other religions are false?"
"Well, yes, I suppose in some sense I do, but-"
Too late. The perky female interviewer rested her case. She swiveled her crossed knees away from me decisively and re-pointed them at Patrick Piersall, where he sat fat and kingly in the chair beside me.
"Patrick, do you agree with that?" she said-and I thought there was a clear tone of warning in her voice.
But Piersall knew the ropes of these things far better than I. "No, no, no, no, no," he said in deep, mellow, almost Santa Clausian tones. I noticed he had carefully tucked the tail of his sports jacket under his buttocks so it wouldn't ride up to his shoulders when he leaned forward. And I noticed he leaned forward whenever he talked. This, I learned later, gave him a more animated, active appearance onscreen. He leaned forward and began to cut the air with his hands in that Patrick Piersall way of his, speaking in those patented Patrick Piersall syncopations. "With respect to my friend-if anything-I think what happened this past week shows"-and his expression here became almost mystic, his hand trembling like a trapped bird in the air in front of him-"It shows the-the need for greater-sensitivity-understanding-among peoples of the world. Because war-war is-not the answer."
The perky female interviewer turned from him to look directly into the camera. "We'll be right back," she said.
The bright lights dimmed and we sank into a duller shade of existence.
Patrick Piersall turned his bloated face toward me and winked broadly. "Kid," he said. "I don't think you're quite ready for TV."
Well, that didn't say the half of it. After that interview-that's when the attacks started. The endless op-eds and editorials in the Times. The subtle but unmistakable shift in the tone of coverage on the networks. The honk of that jerk on cable news, the one with a voice like a traffic jam, going on and on about me. Before the interview with the perky female, I was a "hero," a "heartland entrepreneur," an "unprepossessing everyman." Now I was suddenly a "racist," a "rabid right-winger," a "fundamentalist theocrat, as bad as the terrorists themselves." And those were only the opinions. In the news reports, I went from being "handsome with an ironic smile" to "short" and "bland" with "a receding hairline." I went from having no political or religious affiliation to speak of to where journalists seemed unable to mention my name without pointing out that I was a conservative or a Republican or a Christian. Juliette Lovesey, Todd Bingham, and Angelica Eden all condemned me publicly. "It was exactly to change bigoted attitudes like Mr. Harrow's that we made our movie," Juliette said, her eyes growing damp. "This makes me feel the entire project was in vain." For a while, a group called Arab-American Rights got big headlines by demanding an apology from me, and calling for anti-hate-speech legislation to prevent "such dangerous incidents from occurring in the future." Fortunately, the group's leader was soon after indicted for having ties to Palestinian terrorists-whereupon the story vanished from the news altogether.
Conversely, the "true hero of the New Coliseum" (Times), "beloved TV star Patrick Piersall" (CBS Evening News), was soon signed to "light up the airwaves once again" (CNN) with a featured role as "a former sixties revolutionary now turned heroic defense attorney on the surefire hit False Convictions " (Sally Sterling). Hey, I was happy for him. He had not spent half a lifetime trying to claw his way back into the limelight for nothing.
The media attacks went on forever, but I hardly minded. My attention was taken up by my other nagging anxiety, which was, of course, Serena. I did not see how she could avoid going to prison. I was fearful that her role in the murder of Casey Diggs would get her a long sentence, possibly even life. She was in custody much of the winter as her case dragged on. When I wasn't lying awake at night thinking about suicide, I was lying awake at night worrying about her. I had a half-acknowledged sense that prison was what she deserved, but I was certain it would be the ruin of her.
In the end, again, the outcome was nowhere near as bad as I feared. I helped Lauren pay for a good lawyer, and I spoke to anyone and everyone I could on her behalf. Serena's youth, her role in alerting me to the plot at the theater and a convincing argument that she had been used by Jamal and never fully understood his plans won her some sympathy from both the authorities and the media. She had valuable testimony to trade, too, and some good intelligence she had overheard while in Jamal's company. The feds wound up giving her a suspended sentence on a conspiracy charge and the state finally made a deal that got her one and a half to three years in a juvenile facility in Dutchess County, with time served and a strong possibility of parole after only six months. It was a hell of a break for her, far better than I'd dared to hope for.
And, in the end, as it was Serena who had gotten me into all this in the first place, so it was Serena who began to bring me out.
It happened early in May, early on a Sunday morning after a particularly bad night. With the coming of better weather back east, my mother's house had finally sold the day before for a decent price. I had approved the deal in the afternoon and barely thought about it for the rest of the evening. Then, shortly after midnight, I awakened with a crushing sense of grief and loss. I felt as if that week I had spent in my mother's house had been the last real thing that had happened to me. Here in my own house, I felt I was living in a kind of delirium, a kind of running fever dream. With my mother's house gone, I could never escape from here, never go back to that reality again. It felt like a great weight was sitting on top of me. I felt very sad, very heavy, very terrible.
Somewhere around 3:00 A.M., in this agony of sadness, I reached a decision that, yes, I would buy the gun I had chosen. The decision gave me a sense of certainty and direction and it offered the promise of an end to this depression that had drained the joy out of me since my return. I felt energized and excited by the finality of it and I couldn't get back to sleep.
Finally, as dawn began to lighten the windows, I slipped out of bed. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and went downstairs. As an act of-I don't know-nostalgia, maybe, I turned on the television in the living room. I sat slumped in an armchair with the remote control held slack in my hand, my chin on my chest, my eyes peering up at the screen from under my eyebrows.
There was a news program on. One of those Sunday talk shows where a moderator sits at a table and interviews a newsmaker or a pundit face to face. As a lead-in, they were showing video of the wars in the Middle East, quick cuts of American soldiers braving bullets flying out of gutted houses; car-bomb blasts and the bleeding injured wandering dazed among the ruins; an Arab woman fallen to her knees before the corpse of her child, her hands uplifted to the sky as she keened for the dead.
When the video ended, the show returned to the moderator and his guest at the table. The moderator was a rather dapper middle-aged man, and his guest was a solemn but still-dynamic fellow of sixty or so with silver hair atop a pug-nosed and rather mischievous face. He had been a senator once, but had been thrown out in the last election. Ever since then, he'd been making the rounds of talk shows, having a good old time saying whatever came into his head.
"These wars in the Middle East-they're like treating a disease with too short a dose of antibiotics," he was saying now. "The disease comes back stronger and adapts to the medicine. You have to snuff it out completely before you're cured."
"Which means…?" said the moderator.
"Well, it means in this case," said the former senator, "that we have to conquer these people, literally take over their countries and run them until they can run them themselves, if ever. Look, the attack on the New Coliseum-an attack in which no one was killed only through the sheerest, blindest good luck-that attack should stand as a warning that they're going to strike at us again and again and again until we stop them or they destroy us."
The dapper moderator sat back in his chair and smiled mildly with lofty patrician disbelief. "But aren't you getting dangerously close to talking about a kind of… imperialism?"
"I am talking about imperialism," said the former senator with the cavalier self-assurance of a man who has no job left to lose. "Empire is a phase in the life of great nations. It's like adulthood. You can either embrace it or die. The question is whether this particular generation, that hasn't even been able to grow up on an individual level, is going to accept the responsibility of growing up on a national level."
The commercials came on. In the middle of an ad for tomato soup, I narrowed my eyes. Wait a minute, I thought. Had I actually just heard that? Empire is a phase in the life of great nations. Wasn't that one of the things my mother had scrawled in one of her Spiral Notebooks? I was no longer sure. I could no longer remember. Maybe I had it wrong, or maybe I had just fallen asleep in my chair and dreamed the man on TV had said it. I couldn't tell.
After a time-a long time-I became aware that the rest of the house had awakened around me. The boys were on the floor in their pajamas, playing with a computer game of some kind. Cathy was in the kitchen, banging the coffeepot around.
Now my daughter Terry climbed into the armchair beside me. She worked her way under my arm to snuggle warmly against me.
"Daddy," she said, "can we watch cartoons?"
I hugged her to me and pressed the buttons of the remote control. I found a lot of cartoon ponies with feathery wings. Terry seemed to like that.
I sat with her there and stared at the television set, lost within myself. When I finally heard Nathan speaking to me, I had the feeling he'd been trying to get my attention for some time.
"Dad? Dad?"
I shuddered out of my reverie and turned to him. He was on his feet now, looking out the big window at the backyard. In a voice hushed with mysterium, he said, "There's somebody on our swing set."
"Who?" cried my daughter. Affronted that any stranger might be on a swing set that was largely hers, she wriggled out from under my arm, and jumped off the armchair to have a look for herself.
I rose heavily from the chair and joined the children at the window. The morning light was spreading over a sweet blue spring day. Small white clouds were sailing past the sun and over the pale green of the budding treetops and over low bushes white with flowers. I could see their reflections moving stately across the lake beyond.
Through the last faint trailing remnants of mist off the water, I saw Serena. She was down there at the bottom of the grassy slope. She was sitting on one of our swings, one hand slack in her lap, the other loosely holding the chain. Small and forlorn, her eyes turned down to the ground, she rocked herself gently back and forth, pushing off the sand with the tips of her tennis shoes. There was a canvas bag on the lawn by the side of the swing set.
"Who is it, Daddy?" Terry asked me.
"Cathy!" I called. "Could you come here a second, please?"
My wife came in from the kitchen, looking fresh and cheerful in her opalescent quilted bathrobe. She saw us all standing there-because Chad, curious, had come up off the floor to get a look out the window as well.
"Oh, boy, what are we watching?" she laughed. She moved to stand with us, looking out over Terry's head.
"Serena," I told her.
She took a long breath. "Did you know she was getting out?"
I shook my head. "She didn't say so in her last letter. She never does say much."
"How on earth did she get here?" my wife wondered.
One corner of my mouth lifted. I gazed out the window at the girl on the gently moving swing. "She walked," I said quietly, after a while. "She's a good walker."
There was silence between us another second or two. Then, "The poor thing," Cathy said. "She must be hungry. Go bring her in. I'll start breakfast."
I nodded as she headed back for the kitchen. I stood another long while at the window, watching Serena rock herself. Finally I let out a sigh between pursed lips.
Nathan caught that. He caught my mood as a ten-year-old will. He imitated my quirked mouth, my expression of knowing cynicism.
"Well," he said up at me, "this can only mean trouble."
I laughed. "All my children are trouble," I said. "Go turn off the TV and get ready for church."
I pushed out the back door and walked down the hill toward her. What a beautiful morning it was, I remember. The mist kept the air cool, but there was a sweet scent of blossoms and the breeze off the lake smelled of trees thick and green with full summer foliage. I breathed in deeply as I crossed the grass.
Serena didn't see me. At least, she didn't look up as I approached. She just went on swinging gently back and forth, studying the tips of her pink sneakers as they pushed off the sand. She had a cheap blue windbreaker on, but it was unzipped. I could see the dull gray sweatshirt underneath it and the brand-new jeans. Her hair was a little longer than it had been the last time I saw her, pulled back and tied up in a ponytail. Even from a distance, her face seemed very pale, very thin. I don't think she was wearing any makeup.
Finally, when I was standing directly in front of her, she lifted her eyes to me. It hurt me to see how gaunt her face was. Her skin had gotten bad, too. Her cheeks were patched with acne. Her eyes seemed dull as if a film lay over them. Her mouth was set in a tense, grim line. She gave off a sickbed air. Prison had done this to her. Prison had worn her down.
I didn't say anything but I smiled at her. She got up out of the swing. We stood facing each other. I reached out and put my hand tenderly on her shoulder.
At that, Serena's chin bunched, her lips trembled, and she dissolved into tears. I pulled her to me and held her. Her crying grew more violent. She pressed her face into my shoulder and her whole body bucked and shivered as she sobbed. The sobs were very loud, raw, and hoarse. I kept my arms around her and rubbed her back and kissed her hair.
I looked out over her head to the sky and the water. Strangely, after my long, miserable night, I had a sense for the first time then-just an intimation really-that it was going to be all right. You know? That I was going to be all right, that I was not going to shoot myself with any damned gun, that I was going to damn well live-I was going to live a good long time and meet my grandchildren. I had a faint but sure and certain sense that this sadness was going to lift finally and that there was a kind of peace waiting for me beyond it, not as far off as all that, a bearable distance, a journey I had the strength to make.
My daughter sobbed against my shoulder and shivered in my arms and I held her. And I felt something that had been closed in my mind open again like a child's cupped hands. I felt something fly up out of me and I don't know why but I felt it was my spirit and I was almost visionary. For just a second-just a second or two-I could imagine myself moving above the Earth as it was, above everything, I mean, the mothers and the murderers, the idiots and empires, the spinning patterns and fractals of history developing endlessly out of the few simple equations of the human heart. I imagined myself sailing above and beyond the whole of it until I reached a blazing presence at the source of it all. I felt my spirit yearn toward that unfathomable blaze until it was thrown back at me like a fiery reflection, so that I thought I saw one approaching in the sky like a Son of Man, his arms outstretched over the tear-stained, bloodstained world beneath him as he declared,
Behold: the Kingdom of Heaven, which is Love;
Love-in all its majesty and madness.