Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Mama,” Elsie whispered. “What happened to us?”

  Elsie was afraid she already knew the answer. There had been another hospital, bright lights. People lifting Elsie onto a rolling bed, the endless floating of drugs in her bloodstream…

  She reached for the medicine cabinet, to turn it around, but a sound from down the hall stopped her. It was her father’s voice, deep and soothing, and he was saying, “Elsie, are you awake? Come here to me, girl.”

  “Daddy?” she asked, sticking her head out of the bathroom. It was slightly frightening to hear him in the stillness of the basement. She’d been hoping for her mother’s voice, she realized. Or Teddy’s.

  “Daddy?” she called again. Elsie was fourteen years old. Calling her father Daddy was beginning to sound childish. Yet that was the only way she’d ever been allowed to address him.

  He didn’t say anything else to her, but her father’s voice continued on in a murmur. She followed the sound down the hall and found him in the old storage room, among the props for the Christmas pageant and the Easter decorations, the extra folding tables and chairs, and stacks of out-of-date paper hymnals that had long since been replaced by tablets. The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd, Elsie’s father, was kneeling in one corner of the room, facing a large plaster Jesus that had once hung on the wall in the room where Elsie had woken up, before one of its feet had fallen off. Elsie had thought the Jesus looked more roguish with one foot missing, and perhaps more historically accurate, considering his injuries on the cross; however, most people were not looking for roguishness or perfect realism in their Savior, Elsie’s mother had explained, and so the broken Jesus had been relegated to the storage room.

  Her father, turned toward the wall, was murmuring to himself, with his personal Bible open in his hands. Elsie could catch only a word here and there. He might have been saying, “We are all the fish….You tried to tell me….Fish of different sorts, the fish…” Which made no sense, since her father did not care to eat fish of any kind. And yet he sounded as though he were holding up one end of a quite serious conversation with God.

  His hands and arms, like Elsie’s, were scratched, but she could see nothing else amiss from where she stood.

  Tentatively, she asked, “Daddy, what are we doing here?” She didn’t like the idea of interrupting, but her father sometimes spoke to God at such length that it wasn’t practical to wait until he was done.

  “They never changed the door codes,” her father said, without turning from the plaster Jesus. “I didn’t want to bring you home just yet.”

  “But how did we get here?” Elsie asked.

  “Joel helped me. We got you released and brought you here so you could wake up in peace.” Joel, a doctor, had been one of her father’s parishioners and his best friend, before the Reverend’s fall from grace.

  “But…Tshikapa, the Congo,” she said.

  “Yes, Africa,” her father answered heavily. And then, as if to explain, he added, “Airlift and two hospitals.”

  Yes. That. The mirage in her head was taking on solid form. The mob, and the rocks.

  Elsie had been standing just inside the doorway, but now she got closer. Hoping the words were wrong, she asked, “Mama and Teddy are dead? I didn’t dream it?”

  One of her father’s hands went to his face, and when it came away, Elsie could see that it was wet. He was crying. He turned his head slightly as he said, “You didn’t dream it, baby girl.”

  She wanted to feel shocked, but she didn’t. Part of her had known the moment she woke up.

  Elsie took a seat on an aged footstool with the stuffing coming out of it. A broken hymnal tablet shared the stool with her. When her leg brushed against it, a four-inch-high three-dimensional Japanese woman sprang up from the tablet’s screen, lifted her arms, and began to sing the Japanese version of “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” A crack down the center of the tablet caused half of the woman’s body to be a smudged rainbow of disconnected colors. Elsie switched off the tablet.

  “Are they gone?” her father went on. “In a sense, yes. My beautiful wife and beautiful little boy, but—”

  “But they’ll live on in heaven at the end of time?” Elsie interjected automatically, because that was the sort of thing her father would say at a moment like this one.

  “Yes, they will. But they don’t have to wait, because they are living on already.”

  A rock to the back of her mother’s head. Teddy trampled. She had seen those things.

  “How?” she whispered.

  The Reverend had his forehead leaned against his Bible in an attitude of most fierce prayer, and Elsie wondered if it was possible that he had conjured up a miracle. She imagined a mural of this very moment, herself and her father and God hovering above them in his radiant robes, and she saw the speech bubble above her own head: “Excuse me, Lord God? Have You got something remarkable up those flowing sleeves of Yours?” But the God in the imagined mural looked as curious as Elsie was to hear what her father was going to say.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve always said,” the Reverend told his daughter, “it’s that a man who cannot admit he’s wrong is not much of a man.”

  It was true, she’d heard him say that, but—

  “Do you mean you, Daddy?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  This surprising admission took several seconds to unfold within Elsie. Her father was criticizing himself?

  “What—what were you wrong about, Daddy?” she asked.

  In the mural, God gave Elsie a look of disappointment. “You know what he was wrong about, Elsie,” His speech bubble admonished her.

  Elsie’s speech bubble said, “I need to hear him say it.”

  The Reverend Tadd said, “A revelation, my sweet girl, is like turning on a light or opening a window. Have I told you that?” Elsie still couldn’t see his expression, but she imagined that it looked as it often did during the most ecstatic portions of his sermons—one part joy, one part pain. “You’re in a dark room and then—poof!—the sun floods in. And what you thought were formless shapes and terrible shadows are not. In God’s light, you understand that they’re something else entirely.

  “Do you want to know what I’ve been shown?” her father asked. “Should I try to put it into words, even though words won’t do it justice?”

  “Sure, Daddy.” If there was one thing Elsie understood about her father, it was that he knew how to use words that would do his ideas justice. His pride in his verbal skill burned intensely. In the mural in Elsie’s mind, she saw that pride like a glowing coal where his heart should be. Her father’s skill with words was the only thing that had buoyed him in the face of his lost ministry, his failure with the church board, his public humiliation. And his skill with words was part of that tight grip the giant had around Elsie’s chest.

  “I’ve been shown that my expulsion from the Church of the New Pentecost was fair. I was as wrong as a man could be,” he told her, the words coming out in a toneless stream. “I went on the radio all those years, I stood at the pulpit before my congregation and told them they were defying the Lord. Changing themselves, growing new hearts and lungs and now even eyeballs!” His voice grew more resonant, as if he were in rehearsal for a public performance.

  In the mural in her mind, God said, “He impresseth Me greatly with his beautiful voice! At least he’s got that going for him.”

  She silently agreed with the Lord; she’d always loved her daddy’s voice. But would he say the things Elsie could feel caged up inside her own chest?

  The Reverend continued, “But what if I am the one who defied the holy design? I can still see the look in that boy’s eyes, Elsie, years ago, when I told him he was turning himself into a demon!”

  He stood up and reached for Elsie’s hand without turning toward her. Elsie got to her feet and slipped her hand into his. She thou
ght they were going to pray together, but instead he led her out the door and back into the hall. The Reverend moved swiftly, pulling her along in his wake as he walked up the stairs, through the vestry, and out into the church itself. The lights were off, but late-afternoon sunlight came in through the stained-glass windows, turning dust motes into burning stars. He walked to the very edge of the dais, still holding Elsie’s hand, and there he faced the empty pews as if they held a Sunday’s worth of worshippers. He raised his arms toward heaven, and because Elsie’s hand was clasped in his, her arm was lifted too.

  Addressing those empty benches, her father spoke with full sermon resonance: “When I was a young man, we were made to accept the doctrine of evolution. We came to terms with it by telling ourselves that the Creator could use evolution as part of His grand design, could He not? We said this, but I never believed with my full heart.” His voice was the sail of a great ship full of the driving ocean breeze, and the words he emphasized were the snaps of that sail in sharp gusts of wind. Elsie, his parishioners, radio listeners across the country—all became passengers on the Reverend Tad Tadd’s ship when he spoke like this.

  She looked up at her father as he slowly lowered his arms, and her own lowered along with them. She could see only the right side of her father’s face—in fact, she had seen only the right side of his face since finding him in the basement—with his dark hair falling in loose curls around his ear and just a few strands of gray to show that he was forty years old. Only his right eye was visible from where she stood, but that eye, with its piercing black iris, almost glowed in the sunlight.

  “But let me tell you,” the Reverend continued, addressing that empty church, which felt, under the assault of his deep and lovely voice, full of sinners ready for salvation, “evolution is not a side note. It’s not something to be accepted begrudgingly. It is the sun to our Earth and moon.”

  There was a pause, during which he let go of Elsie’s hand.

  “Why?” she asked him timidly. Her full question was probably longer: Why is that the important point? Why aren’t you talking about the things that matter?

  In the mural, God’s speech bubble said, “It’s time to ask all of your questions out loud, Elsie.”

  “He’s been telling us since the beginning!” the Reverend boomed out to the empty pews, startling his daughter. He held up his Bible in his left hand, open to the beginning, where the word Genesis was written in fancy script at the top of the page. “We know the story of creation so well, but we’ve been gliding over the meaning. We read about swarms of birds and fish and whales and cattle and insects. But what God created was the potential to become all of those things. He blessed the essence of these creatures with the breath of life, with the ability to become all the wild and tame things of the world.”

  Her father shook his Bible at the empty pews and his invisible congregation, that congregation that had been wrested from him eighteen months previously because of his years of constant radio attacks and protests against anyone—sick people, surgeons, desperate parents, World Health Organization volunteers—who dared to get tricky about altering the human body.

  “The Hebrew word for living being, do you know what it is?” he asked Elsie and the empty pews. Elsie opened her mouth to tell him that she did not know, but he wasn’t looking at her, and he didn’t wait. “The Hebrew word for living being is Nephesh.”

  “Ah, not fish at all, then,” Elsie whispered next to him, now understanding some of what the Reverend had been saying back in the storage room when he’d been talking with God.

  “God calls us all Nephesh—the spiders and the eagles and the starfish and the humans. He gave humankind dominion over all creatures. But we’re all Nephesh, living beings of the same stock and origin. He gave us the capacity to evolve, even beyond natural selection. And now, we can evolve deliberately and together!”

  Elsie’s father turned away from the phantom congregation to look directly at his daughter for the first time since she had found him in the church. The sunlight through stained glass hit him full in the face, and she took a step backward, and then another, as a gasp escaped her mouth.

  In the mural in Elsie’s mind, God was looking just as startled as Elsie felt, and the speech bubble above his head asked, “What manner of creature is he?”

  The right half of her father’s face was just as it had always been, weathered, tan skin, dark eye, dark hair falling over his forehead, the beginnings of dark stubble along his jaw, but the left side…the left side was not.

  “She is beginning to see the possibilities!” the Reverend boomed out to the invisible audience. He knelt in front of Elsie and took both of her hands in his. Quietly, just to her, he said, “Can you see what I’ve done?”

  Elise felt like the Jesus without his foot, distressed and yet able only to stare in mute astonishment. The left half of her father’s face was smooth and pale, covered in different skin entirely. Even the stippling along his jaw was gone from the left side, as if no beard would ever grow there again. His left eyebrow was light brown in contrast to the dark hairs of the right, and his left eye…

  Her father’s left eye was a pale green, the green of her mother’s eyes. It was even slightly smaller than his right eye, the proper size to fit into her mother’s face.

  “You’ve taken Mamma’s eye,” Elsie whispered. To look at the left side of his face was to look at a twisted version of her mother, trapped in her father’s body. “Did you need her eye, Daddy? Was yours missing?”

  “No, mine wasn’t missing. You and I were lucky, Elsie,” he told her. “Twelve killed by that godless mob, yet we survived. But your mother…her eyes were undamaged. I couldn’t throw them away. And feel—”

  He brought one of Elsie’s hands up to stroke the skin on the left side of his face. It was soft to the touch and delicate.

  “It’s her skin too?” Elsie felt as though she were slipping backward, out of her body, away from this man with mismatched eyes.

  “Now it’s our skin,” he told her. “And feel here.”

  He pushed her hand through the hair on the left side of his scalp, which Elsie noticed was a shock of light brown curls, baby soft to the touch. She combed her fingers through that delicate hair as she had done hundreds of times before, when it had been growing out of her little brother’s head. Elsie felt as though she were plastered against the far wall of the church, trying to escape from this moment.

  “You took Teddy’s hair?” The words were hardly audible.

  The Reverend nodded solemnly. His eyes—their eyes—pierced Elsie with a kind of ravenous ecstasy.

  “We are wonders of potential, Elsie. They took your mamma’s eyes and her skin, and your brother’s hair, and they bathed them in the essence of life—my life, her life, all life—”

  “Stem cells?” Elsie asked. She knew about the sorts of things doctors could do; it was impossible to avoid such knowledge, even if it went against her father’s beliefs.

  “Whatever you might call them—stem cells, cultured cells, mixed cells, cells that have been stripped down and reprogrammed, nanobots wrapped in cells. Doctors quibble over details, but it’s all the evolved essence of life. They put the eye, the skin, the hair into me, me joined with them, to live on.”

  In the mural in Elsie’s mind, the speech bubble over God’s head was blank. He was looking down at Elsie, mystified. Her father was in a state of rapture, holding his Bible in one hand and touching his new half-face with the other.

  “No,” Elsie said. As she spoke the word, she stopped trying to escape. She felt a strength in her own body as she faced her father.

  In the mural, God’s robes had changed from a bluish white into a majestic purple. His speech bubble read, “You have put a name to that feeling in your chest!”

  The image of Elsie in the imaginary mural said, “It’s not a giant crushing me, Lord. It’s doubt an
d hatred. They’ve been squeezing me for a while now.”

  “Give them a voice,” God said, “and they will crush you no more.”

  In a series of almost comical stages, the Reverend Tadd had shifted from ecstasy to curiosity to annoyance as he focused on his daughter.

  “What do you mean, no?” he demanded. The Reverend Tadd’s black eye and green eye were both fixed upon Elsie.

  “You know how we would listen to those other preachers on the radio together sometimes?” she said. Her voice sounded different in her own ears, older than fourteen. “You would hear those other preachers say something wrong, Daddy, and you would tell me, ‘See there, Elsie. He had a notion in his mind already, and he found a way to twist the words of the Bible to suit what he was already thinking.’ That’s what you’re—”

  “You think I’m twisting God’s words to suit my own thoughts?”

  “I think you’re missing the point, Daddy!” she said. She discovered that the words she wanted to say were already there. Perhaps they’d been there for years. “You’re missing the whole point! You’ve changed your mind now because someone you love died. But—but—kids in hospitals, that little girl in Tshikapa—they’ve been dying all along. You made us protest removing diseases, making their lives better. You drove them to attack us. You and Mamma kept that hole in Teddy’s heart—you—you told him he needed that hole because that was how extra love got in and out!” They had said that to Teddy, and Teddy had proudly repeated it to others: I don’t mind the hole, it makes me extra sweet. “But now it’s your loss that bothers you.”

  “Do you think I would change the holy book to suit me?” the Reverend Tadd asked, with an indignation that appeared to inflate his entire body. “Elsie, I was wrong, but now I’ve seen what God intended all along.”

  In that mural in Elsie’s mind, God’s speech bubble said, “That’s what every self-centered preacher hath always claimed!” His radiant robes had turned to a deep red.

  The Reverend Tadd knelt before his daughter, leaned closer to her with his hybrid face, and took her gently by the shoulders.