Faust in Love

By Hadassah Alderson

The idea is that by electing Donald Trump, a certain segment of the population "sold its soul" for political power. However, this contract was made with the backdrop of structural problems in our society where people no longer agree about what America's key values should be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684861873

Hadassah Alderson

Austin Macauley published my first book of poems, The Bible According to Eve: The Women of the Torah, about the women of the Fives Books of Moses in the Hebrew Bible. It is now out on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. On September 13, 2021 I did a recorded interview with the people who give the Eric Hoffer Award. Through Urlink Publishers, the company through whom she did the interview, I will be putting out three sequels, soon: The Bible According to Eve: Naviim: The Histories: Eve in Search of Adam; The Bible According to Eve: Naviim II: The Seers: Eve Supplants Lilith; and The Bible According to Eve: Kethuvim: The Writings: Eve Wrestles with God and Man and Prevails. The Bible According to Eve has also been in Publishers Weekly (twice); the Frankfurt Book Fair; the U.S. Book Fair and the American Library Association Annual Book Fair. It also has been advertised in the July/August and September/October issues in Hadassah.

Book preview

Chapter

ONE

Meeting the Archfiend

A puff of smoke spreads out before you, coming from nowhere as you sit in your living room watching the news. What is it? You wonder. Yes, I know your thoughts.

It is I. The huge wings and pitchfork should give it away. I am the devil, aka Lucifer, aka Satan, aka the archfiend. If you look up one of my names the shining one, the light-bearer or the bringer of dawn, the Morning Star. This is because before I went badly, I was the most beautiful and beloved of God’s own angels. You know the story, told from the Jewish Midrashic lore (or legends, for the Christian or Muslim audience) to Milton of how the Satan (aka the devil, aka Lucifer) led the angels in rebellion against God. You’ll notice that the parts of Genesis to the rebellion of the angels against God are fleshed out in the stories of the ancients. Nonetheless: Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven. There were those who stood firm with their Creator. There were those who fell away and joined me. And then there those—but that is another story. No doubt I will tell you the story someday.

I am here at your doorstep to find a witness. You see, a being accusing God needs a witness. Israel if she accuses God calls on the mountains and the sea. But me—well, I wanted a credible human being to join me as I look for Kansas to find a man who is already within my power to use him to destroy the city within which you live. In exchange—Come back here. I am not letting you leave.

In exchange when this city is destroyed, you will be allowed to live. You see, God is very angry at the United States. God sees warmongering, racism, corruption, illicit sex and drug use. I know, I know. You think it: but isn’t warmongering only a sin to the left and illicit sex only a sin to the right? Well, that is why God is so angry. Neither side honors God’s Law. And God told me that God is going to give me the chance to corrupt a servant a little on the addled side—one of those about whom that at one time it would have been said, ‘The way to hell was paved with good intentions’—and if he obeys my whims he shall be sent away from his home city in time for it to be turned into a fireball as great as Sodom or Gomorrah.

Now, I have a task which shall prove the corrupt nature of his heart: he is to corrupt the only remaining virgin in his city. What? You doubt there is only one virgin in this city? Well, the only one over eighteen. How could there only be one virgin of that age? The truth is that in this wicked city what was once virtue is now sin and what is now sin is now virtue. So only one person is—secretly—virtuous.

Yes, there are married women. Yet they are all adulterous. You would not believe the corrupt nature of the supposedly respectable matrons. As God spoke through the prophet Amos, Here this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to your masters, Bring, and let us drink. Yes, they either are dipping into the cocaine or heroin or supporting alt-Right groups on line which are known to be oppressors of the Jews in particular, but also the Muslims who acknowledge a different strain of their religion, the Mexicans who believe in the same God and Afro-Americans who are born with a different skin color only.

And I believe they prove—as do their husbands—that humankind is bad, or in the words of Willie Stark, conceived in sin and born in corruption only to die in an ignoble grave. Humankind should never have been made; it was God’s greatest mistake, much as Ingersoll wrote The Mistakes of Moses. I would not bow to that man or woman formed of earth, and I will not give in to my Creator until the end of this mortal universe.

Anyway, this one Margaret Kavanagh—Peggy to her friends—the woman whom Faust is to seduce into evil ways—is the only remaining virgin in a city I am not allowed to name. And she works in a coffee shop as the clerk—what, you think it is the high and mighty who are truest to God’s word? Have you not heard the story of the widow who gave two mites to the Temple? How she gave more to God than the religious leaders or secular leaders of her day? How her place in heaven was greater than theirs?

Peggy has whispered into the night that there is only one man for whom she would give up her virginity, only one man for whom she cries—and this is Faust. Faust alone among all men is the man she loves! There have, it is true, only been a few men who have ever tried Peggy’s virtue. However, since one of them was last month and she stormed away, shaken by the perfidy of her attempted seducer, it is obvious that the only way to corrupt her body is to pick a man with whom along with her body her heartstrings are attached.

After all, in Peggy is special because her heart is great and not because her head is. In my youth I admired clever people, now that I am old, I admire kind ones. She is humble; she is chaste; she is the opposite of fault-finding. And she finds nothing special in herself: she says If I am humble, am I so unique that I would be draw attention to myself? If I am chaste, am I so beautiful that temptation would come my way? And if I am charitable, I had a good upbringing. She is the very example of what Christ’s mother Mary is to devout Catholics: pure and unpretentious. And she works hard in her poverty at The Riverside Perk, showing honest habits to her customers and employers.

Now, admittedly, (and it was indicated above) Peggy is no great beauty. She is plump, her hair is brown, and her hazel eyes are only affecting when she cries, which does easily. She dresses in simple blouses and pairs of blue jeans. She is not, frankly, a Delilah or a Bathsheba. Yet perhaps that is the point.

Many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD, she shall be praised.

This is the type of woman who justifies the creation of Eve to God. Yet in Peggy’s case she has not had a child with the help of the Lord.

In her heart, admittedly, Peggy is no nun. Yet she has told the two men with whom she broke off relations that she is saving herself for marriage. She is saving herself for Faust in her heart. Don’t get me wrong. She thought she loved the other two, she would say. And yet, something wasn’t there. In the first one’s case she was too young and we really lacked any common ground on which to build our home. In the second one’s case, I didn’t like the way he treated me. He never showed up on time and whenever I was angry at him for any because he dismissed my feelings as ‘irrational.’ Yet Faust, she believes, is different.

So, in Peggy’s virtue there is this vice: in her uncritical acceptance of others, she does not see the evil of others. Peggy easily forgave her two ex-boyfriends. Peggy was, however, hurt by their tiny acts of inconsideration and cruelty. More, Peggy is constantly baffled by the unkindness of employers, relatives and friends. And yet in each instance she believes the fault to be her own. Often, she reflects sadly when a customer is rude that she must have done something wrong—but what?

Peggy’s faith, of course, is pure. However, she is—perhaps—gullible? She often thinks if she forgives a friend for being bad to her, they will naturally repent. She truly believes, moreover, that in the case of a bad friend a person should forgive seven times seventy. And yet—and yet—somehow things just don’t always work out the way they are supposed to. Her father left her mother when Peggy when she was seven, and over the years she has written letter after letter, hoping and praying that there will be a letter that comes back in return. There have been small loans to people whom have not paid her back and yet even if she had documents proving they cheated her, she cannot bring herself to confront them. Even while she is the friend of every homeless person who wanders her street, still she sometimes has trouble paying her own bills because of it. The truth is not that Peggy does not give. The truth is that she does not always know how to say no. She stammers and is kind, and this leads to people judging her foolish. And, of course, she loves Faust, thinking that for a girl who works at The Riverside Perk, a college professor is not likely to notice her.

Anyway, you shall see Faust, a student of Kabala and its influence on Christian mysticism, who started his education in learning about the Greeks, Plato and Plotinus, pervert—I hope—himself and Peggy to the point where there is no going back. Faust is not a mean man yet. In fact, he believes he is in the peril of his immortal soul. Yet he doesn’t exactly mean well, either. Faust doesn’t believe in God even though he works at a religious school, but that is not exactly the point. No, Faust is the kind of guy who is described by Muslims—to do a little paradigm shift—as Frivolous Man constantly in the throes of passion without being devoted to one woman or one cause. To quote this religion’s teachings,

Man is forgetful, inconstant, impatient, fickle and frivolous. Without belief man is jabili, a creature of whim, running after shadows and illusions. Man is quick to call on God in misery and abandon him when he is at ease (Quran 41:51). Man is by nature argumentative (Quran 18:54), boisterous, torn in different directions, divided in desires…

What Faust lacks is faith.

And then you will return with the word to the rest of the United States, that as its Jeremiah you report the destruction of the American Jerusalem,

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people has become a widow she that was great among the nations, and the princess among the provinces, she become tributary.

But you shall also be its Jonah in that there is—to God at least—hope of the United States’ repentance. There is a chance that she will remember her better self and become just, kind and chaste. You think this is little. Yet it implies much. Just implies equality under law; kind charitable to the poor and disenfranchised; and chaste disciplined in your private lives. He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.

Now God has been particularly angry at the United States for a while now. We won’t go into every reason why, but the second anti-Christ is among you. His name is Donald Trump. He has all the earmarks of an anti-Christ: outwardly respectable he is inwardly sinful. Frankly, God is a little nonplussed that some of his sins have not been noticed. He has had three wives and countless women in between and by itself this is not really a sign of a servant of the Lord. More, however, he preaches hate against people whom God urges reconciliation and forgiveness towards. He is not a peacemaker. He does not love the widow or the orphan. And he has certainly not been reading his Bible. Just as the first anti-Christ—Hitler—pretended to love religion, so does he. Just as the first Hitler loved children, so he may in his head. Yet this man is a blemish on humanity and God is angry at the United States for worshipping this man for the reason which rich men are the villains of the Gospels. He is vain, egotistical and hateful. He is the very picture of what another faith calls frivolous man. Looked at another way, as the Sadducees protected the Temple at the cost of keeping the people of God outside of it, so this denizen of wealth and fame today keeps all the gold he can safe—for himself.

Yes, Moses knew he was leading his entire people to the Promised Land and not just part of it. Love the stranger, was his word. This generation loves God with the faulty love of Jonah, who wants vengeance and not forgiveness for the guilty. It sees the mote in its brother’s eye and not the mote in its’ own. For truthfully, the situation in which there are terrorist was created half by bin Laudin and half by President George Bush himself. Those who blame the terrorists in America, should recall the atrocities of Sgt. England on a group of helpless Iraqis which should have been persecuted under international law. The gap into which Isis walked was created by the United States.

This is the way of things when humankind rules itself. O ye double-minded humankind, creators of mischief, doers of iniquity from birth.

Let us meet Faust.

Chapter

TWO

The Elixir of Life

Faust is tall and gawky but with a round belly that hangs on the beanpole of his body. He wears thick glasses with plastic blue rims and his disheveled hair can never be fixed to its best advantage. Yes, his hair… no matter how much moose he puts on his hair; no matter how much he brushes his hair; it is always a great bush. Finally, he gets a military-style crew cut which still looks odd but at least doesn’t take much time to fix in the morning. He dresses like math professors did in the old days: long-sleeved shirt, tie, and slacks.

Faust’s ex-wife never was able to reform Faust into the suave, sophisticated person she was convinced he was under his nerdy surface. Faust is talented, after all, and just under thirty. He is always embarrassed that he is already divorced, and even more embarrassed about the woman whom he is divorced from. He never likes to admit that he did not live up to her standards. He was impressed by her at first, and still cannot understand what went wrong.

So it is that Faust is in his lab, muttering; Now it says here in Numbers that the mixture of animal and vegetable is prohibited…

Ahem.

Not now, I’m busy.

Dr. Faust, it is a twenty-two-year-old student whose blond hair is swept up in a ponytail. She would be particularly beautiful, if it were not for the fact that she slathers on make up like a painter painting a house. As for her clothes, she wears a dress which opens in the front with a low neckline and a high leg line.

Oh, hi Salome, says Dr. Faust.

Dr. Faust, says Salome. I got you a candy bar and a Coke.

That’s sweet of you, Salome, says Dr. Faustus. But school policy—are those Valkomilk? Those are my favorite and it’s been so long since I’ve seen them… and that is Vanilla Coke. Oh, I suppose this one time can’t hurt.

Absolutely, Dr. Faustus, and then, with the hauteur of a female spy in a James Bond movie, she sat down across from him, crossing and uncrossing her legs. I was at the Cracker Barrel.

Yeah, it’s a neat little restaurant. They serve great pie.

Would you like a Valkomilk?

Oh, yes! It’s my favorite kind of candy. By the way, I need to talk about your grade—it really isn’t up to snuff—

Let’s talk about it later, Dr. Faust.

Dr. Faust takes a bite from his first piece of candy, Mm. This is delicious. You know, I think I remember mentioning these. It was the day I found out that the bookstore no longer sold candy bars because too many of the students were stealing them.

Yeah. What an inconvenience.

You wouldn’t think that it would be that hard to rustle up the money to buy a candy bar. Oh well… say, aren’t you in the choir? Dr. Faust asked.

Yeah.

I only ask because you guys are supposed to be doing volunteer work for breaking school policy about drinking in Cancun. It seems like some of you got in a fist fight in a bar—

It’s a stupid policy.

Well, I’m not really against drinking. It just seems like if you’re representing the school you ought to be following school policy, Faust said. And some of you were underage.

None of us are under the drinking age of Mexico.

Well, you have me there, said Faust. It’s just that you’re supposed to be suspended until you make up your community service hours… oh these are good. Well, finished.

So what kind of work are you doing? Salome asked.

"Oh… well, what the heck. I’m reading some of the work of the medieval mystics—I am trying to find the Elixir of Life. You see, between you and me, I am afraid of death. I know as an atheist I am not supposed to admit that."

Well, why don’t you believe in Jesus then? You would go to heaven when you died.

"Oh, I don’t know. I know I work here and all, but… well, somehow the Christians I meet don’t convince me. I mean, they have all this interest in God and faith, but it seems like… there’s just something hollow in it. It’s like they think if they believe in Jesus, their whole life is set for them and I don’t quite believe…

I mean… I went to this Baptist Church with a friend and they preached a whole bunch of stuff about the devil and hell… and I guess it convinced them but kind of made me uncomfortable. And then I went back a couple of times and I got the exact same sermon. You were never, finally, converted. And I guess I wanted to think there was something more than that one moment when you ‘came to Jesus.’ Faust shrugs. I just don’t get it.

Salome looks bored. She has heard it all before. So, you are looking for the elixir of life?

"It could be a crock of shit that it could be found, but its newness excites me. And after all, if you never died, well then you wouldn’t have to worry about obliteration or hell or what have you because you would never go to Hamlet’s ‘undiscovered country’." Dr. Faust sighs.

Dr. Faust, I have something to show you? says Salome.

You already turned in your final paper—

No, says Salome. This. And she opened her dress, revealing a black lacy bra and underwear.

Holy shit! Faust cries. Look, I could get fired…

Salome kisses Faust on the mouth and unbuttons his shirt while undoing his tie.

Oh, that’s good, Faust sighs. Look… let’s do it on the floor.

So it is that Faust and Salome lie down on the floor.

Oh, be a man, Dr. Faust, says Salome.

Oh, God, this is one hot date! God, I hope I don’t get fired!

Faust is not particularly skilled as a lover, but Salome is a very experienced young lady, and so Faust barely notices how time slips away. He only notices that they frolic and play in a way he never got to with his wife, partly because Salome is—frankly—more practiced then his wife was and partly because his wife was in some ways rather frigid and controlled and so never allowed him many liberties when they were in bed together. Really, even though Faust had loved his wife, he had always found sex rather… not dull but sterile with her. It always amazed him that when she left him it was partly for another man. Anyway, when God made Adam and Eve, it occurs to him, this is the act as it was meant for them to do when Adam knew Eve his wife—except that knowing the God of those prudish scriptures, she no doubt wasn’t as free and abandoned as what he was doing with a student he hadn’t really noticed much until now. In fact (and Salome had rather hoped it would be over sooner), it takes several hours of Dr. Faust’s