Theophany

by Ben Lathrop

Sixty-six thousand souls turned to ash. 

That was what the man on the radio said. Sixty-six thousand didn’t survive the night. More than seventy-thousand reported injured, but that doesn’t count everyone suffering from radiation sickness. Or the bodies yet to be found beneath the rubble. 

I heard the cries that the city should have been evacuated. That the fishermen’s stories should have been believed. That the warnings from Odo Island shouldn’t have been ignored. As I write this, I hear cries still. The cries of children who have lost their mothers. The cries of mothers who watched their children burn. Cries of a city that miraculously rebuilt itself from devastation only to be laid again to waste. 

When Mark wrote of John, he said The Baptist preached, “There cometh one mightier than I. I have baptized you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.” I have seen this ghost. It haunts the ruins of the city. Its traces are frozen shadows, cast forever against the few walls that still stand. Like them. Like Luke, like Matthew. I have borne witness to His works and am called now to write my own gospel. 

#

I grew up in the prairies and timber that lined the Wapsipinicon on the edge of the Mississippi Valley. The farthest I’d ever been from home was when I attended seminary in Evanston, Illinois, less than two hundred miles from where my family lived. Afterwards, I came back to Iowa and led Sunday services for farmers and their families in a handful of the little towns along the Des Moines River. I baptized babies, officiated weddings, and performed funerals. It was a fine life of service, and one that I’d felt called to, but I also felt that there was something more for me. Then I learned of the mission. 

It was a small article, only the bottom quarter of the back side of the Wesleyan Newsletter. But the moment I read it, I felt a calling stronger than I had since I dedicated my life to the church. The war in the Pacific was fearsome, but now it was clear the people of Japan were no longer our enemies but God’s children, just as we are. With the occupation over, The United Methodist Church was sending missionaries there to continue the good work other Christians had started since the surrender. I was born at the start of the First World War and was too old to enlist in the Second. I believed in the power of peace and saw this not only as a chance to serve my faith but also now to serve my country. To strengthen the bonds of brotherhood. To show America’s capacity for compassion, and share the teachings of Jesus to a land that had not yet accepted him. 

I sent a telegram that afternoon. Two weeks later I was on a train for San Francisco, and from there an ocean liner destined for Tokyo. 

#

Know that there is beauty in His desolation. Stone and brick and concrete, all crushed to powder finer than silt dances in the wind. Shattered glass, fused into prisms by unfathomable heat casts a spectrum of colors across cinder-black ruins. As I walked through the city today, there was only the sound of the sea, from whence He returned, but I could still hear His steps echo through the shells of buildings that once stood proud. The ruined cars of a train lay like a metal snake that had slithered too close to the gardener’s shovel and paid the price. I followed along its broken spine through the street for two blocks until I reached the point they drape over a bridge. The last of the cars coiled in a nest that used to be a market. I once bought a souvenir there to send home to my sister. A paper fan.

The wind changed and I turned to look over my shoulder at the massive black shadow on the horizon. Other eyes looked on from broken windows and blasted gutters. We watched together, some ready to flee, others to meet their fate. My heart skipped a beat and I felt a new feeling. Like fear, but not unlike love. The shape we saw blotted out the sun, but it was only the smoke from the fires that still burned.

#

In the days before, the city was buzzing about the discovery. A new animal, unknown to science, had been sighted by freighters in the shipping lanes near the Izu islands. Nearly nothing was actually known about it, other than that it was believed to have caused two shipwrecks in as many weeks and made landfall near some small fishing villages. Scientists speculated it may be an uncatalogued survivor of the prehistoric age, but all they had to go on was a grainy photograph purporting to be the creature’s head and a handful of near hysterical eyewitness accounts. The more sensational of those were printed in the papers and repeated in the markets and tea rooms. That it was larger than a blue whale. More ferocious than an African gorilla. 

Depth charges were set off in the waters to the south of the mainland to kill the creature, or at least drive it back into the deep ocean, and the authorities assured us their plan had worked. Yet, sightings persisted. The Self-Defense Force mustered and took up defensive and observation positions near the coast. Towers strung with high-tension wires were built all along Tokyo Bay like a massive electric fence charged with fifty-thousand volts. The engineers swore it wouldn’t fail. The scientists told us nothing that lives could survive contact with it. We were safe. 

#

I was reading a letter from home when I heard the thunder. I didn’t pay it any mind. After a long day of teaching English, I had retired to the modest room I shared with a fellow American on the fourth floor of a hotel that had become the mission’s headquarters. The city hummed outside my window. Its vastness had always caused me unease until that night. Looking out at the million tiny lights that speckled the buildings which sprawled over the city, I realized that each one was like the light in my own room. I felt that connection suddenly and very deeply. Jesus told his disciples they were the light of the world, and commanded them to shine it on all men. And here, in this foreign land as I tried to shine my own light, so many others were shining, too. A million lights, a million lives. All here together, thriving, such a short time after the blight of war had been scrubbed away. The thought so filled my heart with love that I was inspired to write a sermon. I left the window and returned to my desk to write it, when suddenly the light went out. Every light. 

In the darkness, car horns blared and distant voices screamed and cursed. Still, I heard the thunder. I realized then that not only was it louder — it had a rhythm. It echoed through the earth like the tolling of some massive bell that made the windows shiver and squeezed the breath out of my lungs. Suddenly a cacophony of explosions rang out from the harbor. I naively thought of fireworks. 

“Sounds like artillery,” my roommate said. His voice an even mix of curiosity and panic. And then there came another sound. 

A searing screech like hot magma breaching the surface of the earth and then swelling into an unfathomable groaning roar that echoed for miles. It was a sound that silenced all others. An announcement played on seven trumpets by seven angels. 

The silence was broken by a flash of light from on high. Brighter in that moment than the center of the sun. 

#

That morning was clear, fair, and warm. A young man named Minoru who was attending our classes offered to give us a tour of the harbor. I suspected he was more interested in our free English lessons than our Bible study, but he was very affable and I was encouraged by his offer of friendship. We walked together and amiably struggled through the few words we each knew of each other’s language, heavily supported by my dog-eared phrase book. Minoru showed no small level of pride in the pristine new construction all along the path from my rented room to the waterfront. 

At the shore, some older men stood with cane poles watching the waves. The scene reminded me of spending afternoons at the river with my grandfather and I felt a pang of homesickness. Minoru helped me introduce myself and, I think, relay what Jesus said about “fishers of men.” The men listened politely but were distracted by what was in the water below. Hundreds of dead fish, their skeletons poking through decaying skin, rode the gentle sway of the waves. 

I was reminded of those fish today as I gazed upon fourteen naked school children that lay stretched out on mats in the alley. Their tender flesh seared raw. A nurse moved among them, putting salve where their clothes had melted into their skin, branding patterns of leaves or flowers. Some cried, others tried to be brave. 

#

I was running before I was thinking. All of us were, together. Running to get out of the rain of glass. Windows shattering in their frames with every clap of thunder, cascading down on top of us as we crowded the stairways. Rushing down, rushing out. No thought, only instinct. Escape. Flee. 

I pushed myself out of the stairwell desperately searching for shelter. The ground slowly pulsed with the echoing beat I’d heard from my room. I’d read of earthquakes before, but that explanation didn’t seem right. A childish thought, but a pure one, flashed through my mind as I hesitated at the front door. It sounded like footsteps.

The streets were in chaos. The air-raid sirens called out their warning over the skies. Fire brigade bells and burglar alarms clattered and clanged. People ran in every direction. A police car whipped around a corner, sliding out of the roadway onto the sidewalk before it crashed into a hydrant. A group of men rushed to the car’s aid, and I started to make my way over there to help, too, but stopped. A beam of pure light descended from the heavens, and rested gently on the cruiser and the men. It was beautiful. Its radiance burned brighter than any light I had ever known. I was so awestruck I didn’t even feel the heat until the tires exploded. 

Skin blistered into white flakes that rode the air currents, rising into the air like cherry blossoms. Bones were blackened, then bleached white again, and then simply disintegrated before my very eyes. When the light faded, there were only shadows burnt into the slagged wreckage of the cruiser and pavement beyond it. 

A tidal wave of dust and debris crashed through the street behind me. A building collapsed, as if swept up in the current. Then another. I ran again, barely aware of the terrible drumbeat that rang out closer and closer. I ran past panicked faces. Past smoldering husks of ruined buildings. I ran over crushed tunnels and past sundered bridges. I ran as the air around me baked in the heat of a hundred suns. I ran as the thunderous drum pounded louder, and louder, the earth shaking beneath my feet until I could run no more. 

It looked like a mountain had erupted from the earth in the middle of the city. A steep and steady incline covered in massive crags and jagged rocks that stretched for a quarter of a mile. And then, the mountain turned. The block of buildings in front of me exploded, smashed into oblivion as if by a choir of wrecking balls. Through the fire and smoke, I beheld His full majesty. 

Much has been made of His size since that night. Estimates were made and formulas used. Facts and figures strained to put His stature into a context easily understood by those who were not there to witness. Some poetic observers described a colossus that shamed the largest prehistoric fossils so vainly displayed in our museums. But the clipped and rational descriptions that went out over the news wires told nothing of the truth. No beast that walks or crawls on the earth or that swims in the ocean depths is His equal.

He passed over me. His great legs reaching over my prone body in a mighty stride. I scrambled to my feet and felt a rush of air as His tail whipped past, following him as He waded through the city’s proudest towers as easily as I had passed over the long grass that grew in the summer fields of my boyhood. 

I looked then, upon the face of God. 

I did not see forgiveness. I did not see vengeance. I saw…indifference. 

After a time, He returned to the sea. 

#

I have walked the ruined streets of Tokyo since that night pondering the lesson He meant to teach us. His truth has finally been revealed to me, and I am called to evangelize. 

What came ashore was not a reckoning for man’s sin. It was not a curse against the Pharisees of our age. Nor was it The Flood come again to wash clean the Earth. It was devastation incarnate. Destruction without motive or pity. 

He does not hear our prayers. Our labors do not please Him. We were not made in His image. 

His will be done. 

Amen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Lathrop has written and taught on the history of cinema with a focus on the horror genre and cult audience behavior. He is a native Iowan, former television horror host and present librarian. He lives with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio. His novel Midnight Horror Show is available now through Crystal Lake Publishing. Learn more and connect with him at BenLathrop.com.