The Coming of Momette

With a touch, she came to me on a screen. I knew she would never visit me in person, so I saved her dance on videotape. I needed only to go to the deluxe colour television and its recording device in my study to watch her dance. Through this media, in my view, I felt us reaching a sort of communion from a distance.

Momette is in a nightclub. Her black harem pajamas of sheer cloth in a modern cut accent her figure, honed sleek by dancing. She has put on the face of a woman of sin⎯all lipstick and eyeliner and powder⎯and she wears jewelry of sin, too … see, those are scapulars and medallions of Our God and His angels coiled into pearl necklaces that jounce around her neck and along her breasts as she circles the dance floor. Her partner in the dance is impeccable. I have seen his type in men’s fashion magazines. The slickened-back hair, the rugged yet clean face, and his midnight black evening suit and white satin shirt signify a celebrant of a world ordered through material schemes.

In past episodes, I have sounded sincere on this same television when I alerted my viewers to the dangers of such a world and how its idle revolutions corrode the soul. During my talks this season, however, I must hide that my mind is being disturbed by repeats of Momette and her partner dancing together, drifting especially to the moment when she coyly pushes off him to raise her hands up toward starlight globes and rattle her bracelets. As full, red lips part and almond eyes wink, she dances alone to electronic music with undertones of jungle rhythms and sings, in the voice of a little girl, of flirting and money, lust and jewels, golden trinkets, and the hunted who hunts the hunter. At this moment especially, I, grinning madly to myself like a smitten schoolboy in my study, catch myself tapping my hands on the knees of my robe to the music.

I should have abhorred all this. I should have rejected her playback when I first saw it long ago, then replayed my condemnations of such sins as I prayed to ask Our God’s forgiveness for me⎯and for her. Instead, I ended up working the controls on this media to slow her body and to watch each instant, each movement, of her solo dance coming together, until Momette’s partner gathers her into his arms, and sweeps her off the floor.

From here, the media moves forward to a close up of Momette’s smooth and tawny face. Follow me, she sings, and I will be your guide into a house with many rooms. She swivels on spiked heels away from the camera, licks her fingertips, and opens and closes her beckoning palm, again and again. The purple T-shirt she wears is a cut too small on her in my eyes, so her midriff can show bare and trim above the scanty black leather skirt that fits snug around her hips and her long legs in patterned hose. She is still wearing those scapulars and medallions around her neck, still bedecked with our blessed adornments of sanctity that she has taken to ornament her rude act.

She strides down a corridor to the beat of this music that has me tapping my hand on my robe again, involuntarily. She is entering a bedroom done up like the tent of a prince of the desert. Bundles of furled canvas hang across the ceiling, and mountains of colourful pillows are heaped on the floor at the center of the interior. Momette, lip-synching the song lyrics, dives into the pillows and arches her back. She rolls around in the pillows, kneels on them, and tugs the T-shirt over her right shoulder, where she rests her chin. She waits … and then she grabs the collar of the T-shirt and rips off the garment. Keeping firm round breasts, the lace brassiere she has uncovered is a black stripe against her tan skin. Now her eyes fix on the camera. Now she stands, and, wetting her lips, she waves us out of the room and into the corridor to another door.

Momette escorts us into a bedroom of knightly royalty. Heraldic shields covered with griffins, serpents, and dragons line the walls ... but it is a canopy bed that dominates this room. Momette looks over her shoulder at her viewers and makes her move to the bed, her silhouette gliding over the orange heart of a blazing stone fireplace. She unzips the brief skirt and drops it down her legs to her ankles, where she jabs a spiked heel into the leather, and, without tripping herself up, slides the skirt behind her. She lies back onto the bed on her forearms, and nods her head in time to the slow scissor kicks she performs. Garter belts and clips holding the patterned hose tight, her legs pump energetically, as if she is pedaling a bicycle, until she thrusts them out and carries herself off the bed onto her feet. She has brought down her hair, curled tresses that settle around her face like the folds of a holy cowl.

And so we continue our profane advance through the chambers of history behind this Momette. She slips off her spike heels and the patterned hose in the parlors of a luxuriant king. In the sleeping room of an emperor, she sits cross-legged on a bamboo mat, brushes her hair behind her ears, and reaches back to unclasp the brassiere … though the scapulars and medallions fan out to veil her breasts. In the rococo bedroom of a prince, she runs her fingers over marble cupids suspended in flight on doorways and along wall columns, before easing her hand down and hooking her thumb into the band of the panties. But, in twisting the band neatly off her thigh, her thumb seems to give and the band snaps back: ow, she pouts, and she rubs her fingertips on the sore … wait, she laughs again: She is teasing us, yes, she is just too whimsical, how can I continue to stand for this?

The tour stops in a futuristic den she calls a chic bachelor’s pad in her song. She climbs onto a mammoth waterbed with black satin sheets and a black vinyl spread. The music builds to a synthetic chatter of hums and thumps. Her eyes lift to the ceiling; she sings her last notes. Layers of mirrors above her and along the walls reflect the room’s chrome-encrusted furnishings and, within the metallic gleam, Momette herself afloat on the waterbed. Though I know this viewing by heart, I can still picture the tease going so far as to strip away the medium’s recording of the past and free her now to wriggle out of those panties, finally shed the debased adornments, and wind up naked⎯lithe and statuesque. But no. The medium ends with a shot of her eyes penetrating the mind of the viewer, taming the imagination into pulling practical jokes on itself, practically feeling her skin and stroking her hair, and tonguing open her mouth. Momette, meanwhile, can remain beyond the grasp of the average viewer. To distance herself is her power.

After switching off the television, I would sigh and press the tips of my forefingers together onto my lips and regard the blank screen. I would feel dwarfed by the walls of my study, and at odds with the atmosphere of sacred scholarship and profound meditation from which I had once breathed so freely. Blessed scriptures and theological tomes, august oil paintings and statues of Our God accompanied by His angels and saints; the mementoes of my pilgrimage to this holy office had been companions who had once buttressed my spirits, and who now loomed above me like dark judges on lofty benches. The comforts of home⎯a warm hearth, snow outside the window, dinner dishes waiting to be carted away by a novice priest⎯would have sealed me into my study before and inspired my work; this winter, they were the niggling reminders of my commitment to a marriage with the Church of Our World, this chaste ideal Momette served to scorn in her videos.

I had believed that my faith would have armoured me long ago against her ilk. I though I had won over my base desires to the causes of Our God while in training to become a priest. After all, I had ministered in a Church of Our World in my homeland during the trials of war, when my people had been invaded and enslaved. I suffered those scars and wounds on the body that temper the soul, as the tormentors of Apex baited and tortured me and my congregation, forcing atheism onto the land where I had learned to love Our God. They did not break us. We worshipped underground, and were supported in secret by the World Congregation. For years, we endured, until the elders of the global community asked me to serve in the Church of Churches; they said they saw in me a leader who could nurture along the development of our religion. I was reluctant to leave behind my homeland, but Our God, I felt, was inviting me to my true home. After several difficult years, I was humbled to discover Our God’s ultimate intentions, for I was favoured with the supreme seat of the Church of Our World; I was to represent Our God to believer and non-believer alike, yes, this meant that, at remarkable moments, my voice became the voice of Our God’s, and no one in the hierarchy of the Church of Our World, even I, doubted this truth.

Who, then, in this world could challenge the sure righteousness of such a life? A glorified harlot who’d come off the streets to dance out to me through a lens. This Momette.

The instruments of modern communication Momette had turned to use for her televisional seductions had also led me to this exalted post. I had been the principal ideologist of a movement within the circles of the Church of Our World to use those advanced methods of broadcast that now brought her to me. I had observed the mass projection of images running its course around this world on a fuel of sensational newscasts presenting history to excite the senses rather than the spirit, and entertainments offering up a plateful of sweets from the material world, just to dissolve them into so much static whenever the viewer reached out for the prize. In seeing through these falsehoods, I was nevertheless convinced of the hypnotic force of these impressions behind glass. Television lit up rooms everywhere. A grid of antennas and cables had been laid out upon the skies and into the earth above and below mansion and shack alike. And where was the Church of Our World in this complex of messengers? We were faint, scarcely heard. We presented talking heads of priests in front of blackboards marked with the chalky steps to heaven, or our ceremonies of worship⎯joyous rituals on an altar that culminated in a visit by Our God⎯viewed through the dull eye of a single camera bolted to the studio floor. Our religion’s missionary duties, I would argue to the Council of Our Elders, could be facilitated by television if we availed ourselves fully of the technology. We should be employing experts to teach the clergy … even dedicating an order of priests solely to the practice of communications.

Then I would prophesize the holographic arts. In a few years time, I would say, households throughout our world would be entertaining images that appeared to walk on their floors and sit in chairs and speak to them, like a guest, face to face. Think of our main ceremony in such a household, I told the elders. Animate icons that had been sculpted through holography could bless the viewers, as if apparent in the flesh. Here was an opportunity to put behind us our backward programming, suitable only for early mornings when most of the audience was asleep or at a Church of Our World anyway. By pioneering in the holographic arts, we would be ushered into prime viewing hours. Crime extravaganzas, garish comedies, advertisements repeatedly promoting the newest material possessions would be up against a striking likeness of what we knew to be the living truth.

Still, I encountered strong resistance from those elders who believed our religion might be distorting its message to satisfy an earthly pleasure. While we could easily meet the expenses of researching into holography, how were we to explain the costs of “going prime time” to our branches of the Church of Our World and their congregations?

To this, I reminded the elders of the passion plays that our followers had staged during the early days of our religion, when few could read the books of Our God. Theater troupes wheeled carts with simple platforms from town to town, regaling, and enlightening, audiences with plays about Our God’s parables, and tales of the saints. These plays’ festive costumes, their songs and dance, their innocent sentiments and drama charmed the senses. They did not insult but glorified Our God and His Church of the World.

I recalled the printing press next. The press had delivered Our Godly books and pamphlets to people throughout our world for hundreds of years. With your thinking, I told the elders, we would still be copying out pages by hand: a vigorous spiritual exercise for the writer and his brethren, a loss to those truly in need of the words. Granted, tools such as the printing press had multiplied and strayed from our influences and had been misused by those with the stuff of Hell and APEX on their minds. All the more reason to master holography, and position ourselves, once again, at the center of the communication world. Television would add a three-dimensional quality to our message for the soul.

The elders, thin-lipped and cold-eyed, had grave doubts over my proposal. They insisted on a test. If the results were seen as worthy, we might go further from there. I was not angry with them. No, I understood their concerns. The sacred past and its institutions in the present had served them faithfully, enduring the ruthless and secular advance of the history of our world. So far, our church had remained stoic, defying the vagaries of fashion; however, this stance had lost its influence on a modern world spinning out of the range of our voice. Within time, we would regress to that age of ignorance when we talked to ourselves, repeating old words and adding nothing new. In this test, I had to somehow provoke in the minds of the elders a dramatic revelation of the hand of Our God in the modern age.

Because we had studied the project for several years before my talk with the elders, my selfsame thinkers and I had already prepared the groundwork for our mission. We hired temporarily communication experts who ad advised and convinced us, among them, several believers in Our God asking only room and board in the city of the High Church so they could, as they vowed, concentrate their talents on bringing Our God closer to His worshippers. Our team then started constructing the video laboratory we had foreseen in the lower chambers of the High Church. The rooms were divided into studios and booths, and the floors veined with tangled wires and cables. These areas soon pulsed with the light illuminating their flat figures into apparitions of the third dimension. After awhile, the images began to move, to walk in a stiff and hobbled manner, as the kinks were worked out of the system. The effect was crude, and hardly any better than if we had been animating cartoons. Realizing now the hardships of the task ahead, we devoted longer hours, without rest, to the mission, and we thought on Our God and prayed to strengthen ourselves. Yet the images always seemed to resist, stubbornly, their passage into the next dimension. We had to admit that we were tiring from our efforts. We did not have forever.

Then, one night, at some time during my rounds of the video laboratories, another vision of light flashed in the corner of my eye. The light was dancing on one of the studio consoles. Finely formed, as vivid and adroit in third dimension as I was seeking for my sainted images, the body of light whirled like a musical box ballerina in a haywire spin, before dispersing into a spray of beams. I blinked. I looked around the studios. How could a dancing girl intrude so nakedly on these saints and angels? Our technicians were unable to explain her. Perhaps a scrap of videotape accidentally spliced into the reels of the sacred. Maybe a signal from another source crossing into our frequencies. Though she did not appear again during our work, the figure of a woman troubled me with the very idea that this had been our first clear success.

No, I had not seen the coming of Momette.

Yet the dancing girl had, at the same time, introduced herself as a sign of progress. In the months following, we experienced success upon success. Our laboratories were soon crowded with the lifelike doubles of angels and saints stepping, one after another, from the light of laser and camera. I could walk among them and listen to them speak from sacred texts and watch them act out the histories of their service to Our God. I could even debate the image of our pioneering theologian, which had been programmed with everything from the original’s proofs for the existence of Our God to the arguments that our religion represented Our God’s true Church of the World. I was overjoyed to see the perfect twins for these hallowed spirits filling with animation, like balloons inflated with air. In the way that their namesakes had done when I was a child, these images were introducing me to a closer relationship with Our God.

We were ready for the test. We invited the elders into the chambers of Our Altar in the center of the Church of Churches. The Our Altar was a relic from the birth of our ceremonies in primitive churches and, as such, stood at the very heart of our religion. Confronted with the wall of projection screens that we had erected around the sacred area, the elders hostilely objected with cries that we were enclosing our holiest of holies in a pall of evil, and they demanded we stop, or all would be desecrated.

Our answer was to dim the lights of the Church of Churches to solemn organ accompaniment. Banks of golden clouds in a silver sky shown on the screens, then issued out in a holographic effect that flooded the chamber in the imagery of glistening atmosphere, swelling around the elders. Their heads were soon in the clouds, and their eyes swam with sky. The atmosphere continued to gush from the screen, but, instead of taking up the entire span, the font receded to the edges, parting to create a celestial gateway for the angels and saints. We then had choruses of angels, chanting in mixed tongues, growing out of the screens until their haloes were scraping the ceiling of the Church of Churches; with tender countenance, the angels looked down sweetly at the elders, then leaped out of the screens to shrink themselves to human size and to huddle around the elders. They sang paeans to the leaders who tended to our world church. The elders were dazzled … we had set them up beautifully for the parade of saints next. Gathering their ivory robes at their sides with their left hands, right hands raised in gestures of blessing, the saints drifted over the billowing atmosphere toward the elders. The elders pointed at them in recognition: there was the saint who had established churches in deserts and jungles; over there, the saint who had been martyred for his missionary work and there were his wounds, red and gory; here was the saint of colored peoples and, near him, the saint of the chastity who would transform houses of ill repute into nunneries and taverns into shrines; and he was followed by the saint who had battled Apex, with an Apex Head stuck on the saint’s lance tip, and then the saint who had established the site for our Church of Churches. The parade marched past the elders, with each saint halting to identify himself and wish the elders well. And, approaching behind them, the college of elders⎯from those who had governed the early church in caves and tunnels, to those wise administrators of our Glory Age⎯joined their hands together and walked over the clouds to the Our Altar where, in single file after file, they bent their knees to today’s elders and prayed for Our God to aid them.

As I stood on a balcony above the show, I could see that the elders had been delighted and impressed. And we would have ended our presentation here, too, had not the test pattern interrupted.

Yes, from out of nowhere, a great test pattern cancelled out our images of atmosphere, saints, and angels before we could react, then even the vitality of our very own souls caved in to the droning intruder. Our exposed souls squirmed as they were thrown into a pool of tumultuous dimensions we had never known to have existed. Droning test patterns towered above, enclosing the pool in a galvanic ring where our souls were contorted into unfamiliar shapes and colors. Our bodies were separate from, yet with, our souls, and we feared the test pattern for making us so. We were submerged into the pool, this metaphysical quicksand, and we slid to the bottom to rest on an infinite reach of test patterns that droned, on and on and on.

In body and soul, we meshed on this plane. The test patterns vanished, and a boundless smiling mouth took their place. “Where are you?” the mouth demanded to know. “Somewhere, nowhere,” we heard ourselves say. “You got it!” the mouth yelled. There was artificial, distant applause to our response. “Our next question,” spoke the mouth, “is . . .who are you?” “I, I …” we stuttered. “Right again!” the mouth blared, generating more applause. “And now we’re ready for the bonus question. No help please from the audience: This is important,” said the mouth. “All right, here it is: what religious entity has just completed its millennium and embarked on its exalted hour of change and growth?” What was this supernatural mouth saying? what riddle was this? We thought on this so-called bonus question. We could not answer. The mouth and the mechanical source of the applause laughed and laughed. The plane was tilting. We were in danger of tumbling off, until the mouth swallowed us and absorbed us into the plane itself.

Inside the plane, we materialized on the screens I had installed around Our Altar in Our Church. We could sense us being watched below by the elders and me, who were witnessing ourselves as myself. We, the audience in Our Church, genuflected before a test pattern cast within a human frame⎯the torso, the arms, the face molded of spectrum fields. The lips of the boundless mouth that had questioned us on the plane wriggled about on the face, babbling in a tongue like the drone of the test pattern, but with the accent and flow of our own language. Awestruck, we as an audience paid strict heed to this being, who related commandments and prophecies in this ethereal voice that buzzed meaninglessly in our ears while speaking clearly to our souls. The being placed his hand on my and our shoulder on the screen. With this sign, the being we saw as Our God pronounced the closing of the college of elders: from this day hence, I was to be on the supreme seat and this would be manifested around Our World by the authority over television granted to us: go forward, spoke Our God, and the world and the church will be as one again. The omnipotent, intoning being then bowed out. The screens were empty. I stood on the balcony, the elders gazing up toward me. We had returned to our natural state, neither separate wholes nor whole separates.

Instantly, we started to go over our instruments of divination, thinking we could somehow confirm through them Our God’s direct intervention in our media mission. A terrific fire, we saw, scorching the wirings. We had to shield our eyes from this cauterizing fire that burnished our instruments until they were sparkling. When the fire had subsided and we could test the machines, we were greeted by immaculate models of angels and saints, actualized with qualities like Our God’s own creations, emerging from the system. Our mere efforts alone could have never accomplished this feat: why, the images were so advanced that they were even capable of being broadcasted through existing televisions and their channels, without need of special adaptors. Our religion in holography could go on the air tomorrow, if we so wished.

Thus Our God the All Mighty, Our God of the Test Pattern, had lived up to His promises. I and those once known as the elders could no question the overwhelming rightness embodied in Him, the screen presence. There could no longer be any dispute concerning our religion and television, indeed, how could we talk about one without the other? And Our God of the Test Pattern had televised Himself to us with the wish that our maiden broadcast would brim with the kind of momentous drama certain to draw scores of enraptured viewers to our religion: transmitted by this divine holography, I would be installed at the supreme seat or Our church, the New Order that I and the former elders now understood among Ourselves … while making sure to withhold the official announcement for the sake of the drama of the global broadcast.

The kinetic guise of Our God of the Test Pattern, however, still clashed in our own minds with that sublime patriarch we were accustomed to revering through statues and paintings. Consequently, I saw that my first doctrinal edict had to deal with the very nature of Our God to be broadcast. The shocking image of the God of Our Revelation would surely traumatize a viewer already confronting a breakthrough of epic dimensions into his living room. This viewer, I stated in an edict for private church knowledge alone, would be more familiar and comfortable with the fatherly image of Our God. Because Our God had as many faces as people themselves, we would not be deceiving the worshipper; on the contrary, we would be addressing Ourselves to Our original intentions, to bring Our God closer to His people.

But I had another reason, as well, for the edict: I had sensed, for the first time, the secret droning in my soul that I could be giving voice to. Our God of the Test Pattern had, truthfully, authored this edict. Once again, He had inspired Our private minds. The public was next.

We set about planning a premiere screening for the benefit of those most in touch with public tastes, namely, the chief executives of the world television networks. Our preparations went easily, and soon we were communicating invitations to studio headquarters around the planet. The answers we received were in keeping with the cynical temper of men who had dedicated their years to the material world. Several just ignored us. Others claimed they were too busy: what could you possibly offer our medium, they told us, that we couldn’t do better ourselves? Religion, they said, will never play to a sophisticated mass audience. Those executives who accepted Our invitations politely, in deference to our Godly agency, still expressed doubts over our claims.

Of course, they could only change their minds, and their spirits, once those golden clouds swept across silver skies about their heads, and saints and angels paraded past their eyes, and their ears rang to a thunderous speech from the image of Our God, yes, these men of marketable visions could see the light after all of this. Every last one of the hardened souls went to his knees before the projection screens; indeed, two men who’d practiced another religion converted to Our God right there. These executives, I felt, had been even more affected by the screening than those formerly known as the elders, for the executives could recall the painstaking trials that they had endured in evolving their complex of mechanisms that had gone on to inculcate the televisional impulse into the mind of world culture. On witnessing the sublime technology promoting the sacred instead of the vulgar, and the mechanisms reacting by operating beyond themselves, the executives sensed that our religion in holography would create a spiritual upheaval in their industry. They were, therefore, all too eager to grant us the hour in prime time that we sought for our debut, and they lent us their studios, their personnel, and their offices totally to our project. Like their technology, the executives, too, wanted to become instruments of the divine.

Our program, and my elevation to Our Supreme Seat, was scheduled for a live broadcast on that day that our religion had, by tradition, set aside for prayer and sacred ceremonies. Even prior to the showing, we had caused all manner of talk: there were thousands of complaints that we would be interfering with favorite sporting events or tawdry dramas, those distractions from worship. On that day, I am sure, many viewers moaned their displeasure when they were told that our debut was about to start, and went to switch through the channels to avoid us … only to stop, dumbstruck, at the transformation of the glow off their screens into a sterling replica of the gilded inner sanctum of Our High Church, and to wonder at the sight of the coffee tables and couches in their living rooms bearing the image of Our Grand Altar, laid out like a table at dinner with goblets full of the consecrated nectar that we sipped during our ceremonies of worship, and to behold the chromatic steps of an iridescent escalator approaching their living rooms from a faraway horizon, radiant with the sunburst of a crystalline dawn. I stood upon the first steps of the aerial escalator. On the other steps were arrayed the former elders and the figures of those who had served in the past⎯to represent the rank of succession in Our Church that would culminate, this day, in the personage of a single, guiding force. I waved my arms to Our Viewers, and I declared “I will be as one with you at this hour” for our world to hear. At the sound of my voice, murals and statues of angels and saints gracing the walls of Our High Church⎯and the walls in the homes of our viewership⎯awakened into life, with joyful songs and clapping hands, as the chain of escalator steps rolled me to Our Grand Altar. I alighted from the escalator at the foot of Our Grand Altar and stretched my arms out so my robe resembled fluttering pages from a holy text, whose words welled out at our viewers in bold letters: OURGOD IS ONE FOR ALL TIMES, ONE WOMAN FOR ONE MAN, FOR ONE FAMILY OF OUR GOD, THE HOME OF OUR GOD IS A GARDEN OF LOVE THAT NO APEX CAN TRAMPLE, WHERE THERE IS PEACE, THERE IS OUR GOD, ONLY THE PUREST OF THE PURE CAN KNOW THE MIND OF OUR GOD. The angels, the saints, and the elders chanted these words and massed around Our Grand Altar, while swarming into the many living rooms with precise duplications. I closed my robe and walked to the back of Our Grand Altar and spoke the first words of the ancient incantation that opened Our Ceremonies of Worship. With this, Our Grand Altar expanded out to beyond the boundaries of the glimmering horizon, the goblets multiplied into miniature fountains with sprays of nectar, and the angels, the saints, and the elders seated themselves at Our Grand Altar, all eyes on the head of the skying platform where I stood, uttering the invocation and gesticulating over the goblet before me. I dipped my hand into the nectarous spray, and the guests at the table did the same with their goblets. I bowed at the waist over Our Grand Altar, as did the angels, the saints, and the elders. My eyes downcast, I whispered the words that Our Church had used over all time to summon a visit from Our God: COME TO US, OUR LORD, COME JOIN US AT OUR GRAND ALTAR OF ALL LIFE. COME. NOW, COME to signal for the image of the noble patriarch as Our God to be directed out toward us from a field of screens in front of Our Grand Altar, meaning that, in nearing us, the stately body of transparent lightness was emanating simultaneously out of the back walls of the living rooms to pass through the viewers, and into their televisions. He turned to them. The grizzled hair of a wild mane and dense beard surged about the great old head, blown by an unearthly wind that was driving banks of clouds across the horizon in fast motion, into quick changes of color too, from silver to gold as the sky went silver, to silver again when the sky had gone gold. Against this backdrop of racing clouds, Our God’s big face stood out in severe relief, with the irises of black eyes straining heavenward and his mouth agape, as if he were entrancing himself as his mesmeric visage overawed the viewers. Now this godhead, its countenance immutable, began to spin to the movement of the clouds to stream, merge into the entity until the whole of the atmosphere was swirling inside the body, thus sending the image off in flowing spirals to the position over the head of the altar. The image hovered in eminence above me. “This man beneath is brought to you by me,” spoke the godhead. “As I cover him, so he and his church shall cover you. You shall view him as you are viewing me, and you shall receive him as you are receiving me. I have picked up this man to head my church, as I am the church. This church shall be with you every day and every night: this man shall be right with you too.” Our God’s eyes stayed fixed on the heavens. His mouth never closed as the words came out “All the teachings, all the laws of this church shall be relayed to you when he grants you an audience. He shall show himself to you at the best hours without interruption. Through him, through his church, you shall be entertained in heaven. I leave you now with your moderator and your new host.” Then, the face of Our God peeled off from the head and, to the trills of angelic voices, wafted downward to mold over my face. “Glory to the face of truth,” the angels sang. “Glory to the head of Our Church.” I arose from my chair. Our Grand Altar swung open like a gate so I could stride toward our viewers. They saw my face of Our God waxing larger into their rooms. Larger. Ever larger as I stepped forward. I was soon upon our viewers. We left them, Our World, in the face of the relentless eternal. The show was over.

We did not have to wait out polls or survey results to gauge reactions. The force of our message through television was soon made evident in the cities, the towns, the villages of Our World. Streets and plazas were congested for days with converted viewers who had been sent milling around in a joyous daze by the visitation of the face into their living rooms; many in the crowds had taken to wearing cheap masks, rushed onto Our World market after the show, which copied the look of the broadcast God upon my face. The largest religious pilgrimage in recorded history, millions upon millions, thousands in masks, roared into the environs of Our High Church like rising flood waters, and clamored for me to present myself on the balcony of Our High Church and to bless them all. Our Reformed Church was the only news of the day in Our World media, overshadowing war and poverty and government and the existences of the famous. My face was everywhere. I was a star, but not in the sense of a selfish and degrading celebrity, rather, a star only on high above the world to deliver light into the darkness, to serve as a beacon toward the sky for those bound to a material world.

On the strength of repeated broadcasts of our premiere⎯so adored that God masks became everyday, stylish wear among all peoples⎯we quickly built upon our success in three dimensions by producing programs about the history of Our Church and the lives of the saints. Our most-watched program featured priests who, instead of merely describing the joys of heaven, summoned up bucolic landscapes of clouds inhabited by angels and saints dwelling among the rewarded, the audience participating in the televised heaven in their homes. I became a demanded guest on television interview programs: I would stand out from the talk given over to apish lusts and vanities as our guest cameras broadcast my image onto living room couches and chairs where, directly to the viewer, I could expound on the mysteries of the spiritual cosmos, and the mercies of Our God. With these efforts, Our Church was, in television parlance, the latest thing. And to myself, in my study after hours, I would reflect on the pertinent fortune Our God of the Test Pattern had bestowed upon us, channeling us into the very heart of knowledge in Our Age, so truth could supplant the falsity of material obsessions … and we could be popular, that is, entertaining, at the same time.

That is, until she came into the picture.

With her dancing, her extravagant posing, her lascivious bearing, she would infiltrate the medium we had blessed and subvert all of Our Works. Her story is the stuff of popular myth in Our World: a girl who had learned her art in the sex cabarets and fleshpots records a song that, although mimicking the musical conventions of the day, not only could be heard but sensed in the sexual nerve endings of the listener, and without an obscene word or utterance. Soundtracks from our programs had dominated the sales charts of recordings ever since Our Premiere Broadcast, that is, until her slight tune wormed its way into the bottom reaches of the charts, then moved up them like a vine of poison to gain preeminence. Soon, Our World was Momette’s plaything. She released more songs, with the same success, and performed her lurid ballets to them in televisional presentations that spoke of rich excess and indulgent passions⎯you know, incensed bedrooms and silken sheets, a bare finger on black leather, modern palaces on moonlit estates, the backstreet liaisons between muscular men and svelte ladies in furs … that sort of thing.

Though her broadcast medium was in two dimensions, the television executives we had so patiently cultivated were canceling our three-dimensional programs to make time for Momette. “Born of the Apex,” I would mutter under my breath as I watched her career through television. Her creamy voice would narcotize the brash chatter of the talk shows until the guest and the hosts, of either sex, were hapless courtiers. The depths of her eyes, in a wink, would draw in the camera and sink into the screen. Her gracile legs, her nimble feet, would transform the very airwaves into her dance floor, polished by a light carrying her into cities and homes around Our World.

Our Church, of course, condemned her. Our Media Priests warned their viewers off her, this lie cast into their midst. We said she was a trick, an illusion, the corruption of true love between man and woman in a family. Besides, we added, she comes to you in two dimensions, because she could never hope to obtain the three dimensions we had shown to be of Our God.

How did this slattern answer us Our Objections? By using us. In her costumes, she adopted the symbols of Our Church, for example, those scapulars and medallions of the saints and the angels that she tugged at and brought to her mouth to kiss and bite during her routines. She danced among replicas of Our Holy Ones and pretended to flirt with the images; she took them for her dancing partners and, as they remained upright in dignity, she hugged them to her breasts and swung them around her … then, near naked, she would dive into fountains spouting the nectarous spray of our ceremonies and, licking her lips, come up glistening from head to toe in liquid motion. And, throughout these blasphemous revues, Momette would be wearing the God mask⎯the opened mouth, the eyes to the heavens, the transcendent proportions debased to being a false face that fit into her act. This performance sold her across. Momette became a word that had meaning in any language. The Momette. The unreal real made real unreally, yes, the love of the Momette.

Finally, those once known as the elders implored me to speak out personally against this Momette. Until then, I had preferred letting Our Media Priests counsel the viewers, but I had to agree with those once known as the elders that, after her latest affront to the symbols of our religion, I was obligated to take to the communication outlets to denounce her in three dimension myself. I owed this much to the medium that we had sanctified, and which was now being corrupted by the whims of a Momette. On the balcony of Our High Church, then, in a special edition of a global talk show, I would issue an edict pronouncing Momette as a sin unto herself, I promised those once known as the elders. Anyone who entertained this sin would risk banishment from Our Church, and a denial of heaven.

I steeled myself through prayer for this crucial talk show. Inside me, Our God of the Test Pattern ordered me to watch the television, go watch what I was up against. Though I had certainly seen excerpts from the videos of Momette during the course of her career, I had never desired to sit through one of them from start to finish; I had long ago purged myself of such base desires, remember, to do the work of Our God. But now I had to pin her down, in the privacy of my study, and dissect her imagery, so I could expose the true Momette to Our World audience of the talk show.