Chapter 13 #2
"That's the reputation, yes. Here's the résumé.
" She held up one finger. "Ancient Jewish text.
Older than Christianity. The first section's called the Book of the Watchers, and it tells a whole story that Genesis only mutters about — you know the verse, sons of God, daughters of men.
It's still in everyone's Bible, Genesis six, they couldn't scrub it, it's load-bearing.
Enoch is the book that tells you what actually happened: a company of angels — Watchers, they were called, because that was the job, they were set to watch — came down.
On purpose. Because they wanted. And it names them, Cat.
It's not 'some angels.' It's a roster. Twenty officers, chiefs of ten, name by name, like a crew manifest." Second finger.
"And the book was buried. Not lost — excluded.
It didn't make the canon, east or west, with exactly one exception: the Ethiopian church kept it, in Ge'ez, which is the only reason we have the whole thing at all.
For everybody else it just quietly stopped being copied, which is how you kill a book without ever holding a trial.
And then in the nineteen-forties" — third finger, and she was grinning now, the ambulance grin — "fragments of it walk out of the caves at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The buried book physically came back out of the ground.
That part's not a theory, that's carbon-datable. "
"Tara. I restore paintings. I came here for iconography, not a conversion."
"Relax, it's history, not church. History can't hurt you.
" She sat back down. "That's a lie, actually.
Forget I said it. Because here's the part I need you to sit still for, and I need you to remember I'm the most boring kind of scholar there is, I check footnotes for fun.
" She snapped the rubber band off the Bible and went to a flagged page like a hawk dropping.
"The Epistle of Jude. In the canon. In every Bible in every drawer of every motel in America.
Twenty-five verses long, and in verses fourteen and fifteen, Jude — canonical Jude — quotes Enoch.
Directly. By name." She read it out, low, and the little office got littler: "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying: Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints.
That's First Enoch one-nine, Cat, near enough word for word, quoted as true prophecy.
And two verses before that, Jude mentions the angels who didn't keep their proper domain — who left their station.
He's citing the case. He assumes his readers know the book. "
My arms did the thing. Both of them, wrist to shoulder, and I put my hands around my tea so they'd have something to do.
"So follow the logic," Tara said, "because it's not my logic, it's two thousand years old — Tertullian was making this exact argument around the year two hundred, this is a documented fight: if Jude is scripture, and Jude vouches for Enoch — then the canon authenticates the book the canon buried.
The thing in your Bible points at the thing they took out of it.
They sealed the building and left a window open, and the window has been open for two thousand years, and almost nobody looks at it, because it's twenty-five verses long and it's shelved behind Revelation like a mop closet. "
"People will say Constantine did it," I said, because the crazy shelf lives in my neighborhood too. "Cut the books. At that council."
"People will, and people are wrong, and the truth is creepier.
" She waved it off. "Nicaea wasn't about the canon.
Nobody cut Enoch in a smoky room in one afternoon — there's no villain and no decree, there's just…
centuries of quiet. It stops being copied.
It stops being cited. Whole languages' worth of it evaporate.
If one man banned it, you could blame one man.
" She looked back down at my angel's ruined face.
"Nobody banned it, and it vanished anyway, everywhere, except one mountain church that wouldn't let go.
You're the conservator. You tell me: what does it usually mean, when damage that thorough has no documented cause? "
The tea had gone cold in my hands. I was hearing my voice, five days old, alone in a basement, talking to the saints: You weren't damaged. You were censored.
And the word for what was happening in my chest wasn't fear.
This was the other thing, the drug thing, the thing from the loupe — being the first witness, except the panel had gotten bigger than the panel, and it was still growing, and somewhere at the bottom of it a man was sitting in my basement not looking at it.
He had until Monday.
It was Monday.
"Cat." Tara had her chin on her fist, watching me with those X-ray eyes they should never have let out of the archive. "You went somewhere."
"I'm here. I'm thinking."
"Want to hear my last piece? It's small." She slid the raking-light print into the middle of the desk. "Whatever your angel is — somebody spent four hundred years making sure nobody saw him. Ask yourself who has that kind of patience."
The radiator clanked. Eleven teenagers were waiting somewhere to hear about Botticelli.
She walked me out through the barricade, and at the door she pressed a warm sheaf of photocopies into my hands — pages from her own Enoch, a translation older than my house, her marginalia climbing the gutters like ivy.
"The roster's in there. Chapter six. The cast list." The Christmas was back in her face, and under it, way under, one flake of something that wasn't. "Call me the minute you can tell me more.
Or the minute you can't. Broke scholars are cheap dates, we accept crumbs. "
"Tara." I stopped in the doorway. "Off the record. All of it — the book, the window they left open. Do you believe it?"
"I believe the seams," she said. "That's the whole discipline. You don't have to see the thing to see where it was cut out."
The D goes elevated after the bridge, and I rode home over Brooklyn with the folder on my knees, and somewhere past 36th Street I stopped pretending I wasn't going to open it and opened it.
Chapter six. The cast list. And these are the names of their leaders — and there they were, twenty of them, transliterated out of dead alphabets by a man in 1912, footnoted, ordinary as a union roll: Semyaza, who was their chief.
Arakiba. Rameel. Kokabiel. Names like weather I'd never been out in.
I read down the column with the train swaying and the sun going down the way it does over the yards, and the names kept being names — somebody's officers, somebody's crew, name by name by name — and every hair on both my arms stood straight up, and I folded the list closed before I got to the bottom of the column.
Not because it was nonsense.
Because it wasn't.
I looked out the window instead. Brooklyn scrolled by in its long gray inventory, the auto-body places, the cemetery, the cemetery.
A book buried so quietly nobody had to ban it.
A painting censored so well nobody could bill for it.
A window left open in the canon for two thousand years that almost nobody looks through.
Speaking of names.
He had until Monday. It was Monday. My stop was next.
I put the folder in my bag and went home to go get what I was owed.