by James Ryke
It was when he was studying in the depths of Virgil’s work the Aeneid when he came up with The Severance, the plan that would alter the world’s structure forever. It took a while for the idea to grow and mature in his mind; it took a while longer for those ideas to turn into action. But just as roots of a noxious weed spread despite the worst conditions, so did his idea dig into political thought and theory. Publicly he did not wholly support his plan, but privately he was the catalyst that drove it.
Within only a few years, The Severance had moved from the fringe of political conversations to the forefront and, like his wealth, influence, and power, no one could quite trace the roots of the idea back to Marcus. Indeed, by all accounts, he was a genius, a fact that reasserted itself every time an independent legislator began to push Marcus’s agenda without even knowing it.
The Undivided West, Marcus thought. What a glorious and brilliant idea. What a perfect solution to my situation.
Marcus was standing on his hotel balcony, his hands fixed firmly to the rail. He was looking over the city of Blackburg, a small sleepy town just inside the state of Virginia. He was visiting his grandfather, who was the oldest surviving Korean War vet still alive. Except, he was not still alive, and he was not a war veteran. It was just another thread that was part of the tapestry of his kingdom. He needed a prominent veteran to support one of his new bills, so he created one. It was absolutely astounding at how powerful and influential one could become when few people knew how powerful and influential you really were.
His cellphone rang.
He answered quickly. He did not have to glance at the caller ID to know that it was one of his many informants. This call was one he had been waiting for.
“Speak,” Marcus said.
The person on the other line only said three words. “God is here.”
This sent a thrill through Marcus’s body that shook him to the core. He hung up the phone, his perfect smile fixed to his face. Years of preparation and planning and now it was happening. He breathed deep and closed his eyes. Slowly the breath slipped from his lips, and his mind focused on the plan. He needed to be here, but he could not stay long. His timing was critical.
Despite the late hour, he felt much too alive to sleep. He returned to his room and shut the glass door. After drawing the curtains, he settled into his bed. A moment later, a thin book was in his hands, The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. He tapped the novel against his head, as if the small impacts would transfer the wisdom into his skull. But even if it did, it would not be necessary, for Marcus knew this small novel word for word.
And turning off the lamp beside the bed, eyes closing, he softly recited. “Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.”
FIVE
“We are nothing in this life if we are not charitable,” Isaac said, his firm but gentle voice filling the congregation hall. “In Isaiah it reads, ‘If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.’”
Isaac had his audience right where he wanted them. They sat on the edge of their seats, leaning forward to soak in the words from the Bible. Most of the time, he did not care for being a preacher, did not care for the nagging thought in his head that people were always scrutinizing his actions. But, it was moments like these, where he was testifying about something he genuinely believed in, that he felt vindicated in his chosen profession. Now, more than ever, as Isaac often said, religion is what America really needs. Ironically, however, despite many religious leaders calling for revivals in a belief in God, Christianity was now a minority religion. The vast majority of individuals now considered themselves Atheists or Spiritualists—a line of thought that asserted the existence of a higher being but completely rejected any organized religion.
A hand in the back of the room went up.
Isaac looked confused, almost as if he was not familiar with the gesture and, in this context, he was not. There were only a few times hands had been raised during the formal Sunday sermon, and those were usually by people that were not accustomed to church. This time, it was by Brother Southernly, a stalwart member of the congregation for the last six years.
“Isaac,” Brother Southernly said, his face slightly flushed. “I mean to say, Pastor Savage, I don’t mean to interrupt, but you always talk about charity and compassion.”
“Yes,” Isaac replied, “without charity, we cannot be truly happy.”
“Sir,” Brother Southernly continued, “I don’t mean any disrespect, but no one is charitable anymore—no one can afford to be. There’s no compassion anymore. No other preacher talks about charity. Preachers don’t talk like you anymore. It’s like you’re reading from a different Bible than they are.”
Isaac raised his eyebrows, “I preach from the King James version. What version is everyone else using?”
“It’s just your focus is completely different. They don’t talk like this. They don’t talk about charity and giving up what little you have.”
“What do they talk about?”
“The end of days,” Brother Southernly replied. “Armageddon. I’m sure you’ve thought about it, especially if you’ve watched the news. If this is not the end of everything, I can’t imagine what is. Learning about charity is fine and dandy, but I think the world is beyond that. I can’t remember the last time anyone has done anything charitable for me or that I have done for someone else. I don’t have anything to give.”
Isaac nodded, “Thank you brother, and I think I see your point—”
“We,” Brother Southernly continued, “need to learn about what is going to happen to us. When is the Lord coming in his glory? When will the wicked be wiped off the planet and the righteous be granted their paradise? The Bible talks of specific plagues and diseases, explosions in the shape of palm trees and wars, and rumors of wars. But I’m no Bible scholar—you are. I bet you could turn us all in circles with everything that you know about the book of Revelations. I want to hear about my future. Why don’t we ever talk about the end of days?”
Isaac nodded his head repeatedly with each assertion Brother Southernly made. After a final pause, Isaac smiled broadly, “That’s a great question, brother, and one that has weighed on my mind for many years. Remember, however, just as assuredly as all of us were born, all of us will die. Whether we all die at once in some sort of apocalyptic scenario or individually, it does not matter; we will meet our Maker, who will open the Book of Life and judge our hearts. Everyone before us, everyone that lives with us, and everyone after us will be judged. What I preach is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I believe it is more important than knowledge of the Apocalypse. As the Lord says in Mark 8:36, ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?’ It would profit us nothing if we knew the exact time of the Lord’s arrival, and in the end, lost our soul. The things I teach matter for your salvation.”
This answer only seemed to offend Brother Southernly, who stood up abruptly, his Bible so tightly gripped in his hands that his knuckles were white. He walked towards the back of the room. As he went, he scanned the audience, locking eyes with everyone that would look at him. “This is not what we should be learning. Pastor Savage, I love you as a brother, but I can’t spend my time in this chapel talking about things that don’t matter.” With this, he disappeared, his absence leaving a thick sense of awkwardness behind.
Isaac swallowed hard, his eyes blinking in slight disbelief. He continued with his sermon, but, like a dying candle, his words and energy seemed to flicker out as time passed. After he finished, the rest of the church service turned into a blur.
That afternoon their home was eerily quiet. It was apparent to anyone who knew her well that Rosemary Savage had something on her mind. She busied herself cleaning and re-cleaning until the home sparkled with polish. She rarely cleaned on Sundays—after all, Sunday was a day of rest—but when she did, it was only with one purpose:
To show how annoyed she was with her husband, Isaac.
In response, Isaac would make a show of making a mess on the dinner table, scattering mounds of papers that contained scribbles of sermons. The more she cleaned, the more alive Isaac’s mess became. He had some illogical and unconscious notion in his head that his messiness counterbalanced his wife’s cleanliness and, thus, allowed them to keep the Sabbath day as a day of rest. The nonverbal conversation always followed a predictable pattern until it culminated into an intense cleaning of the kitchen table where Rosemary would precariously wipe around the edges of Isaac’s sermons, forcing Isaac to straighten the piles of paper to prevent them from being ruined by water. This stacking exposed more room on the table, allowing her more surface to clean, which in turn forced Isaac to restack more papers. This would continue until one of them broke the silence.
Tonight, neither one had the opportunity to speak first. “You know, Mom, Isaac is right.”
The statement was so unexpected that it took both Isaac and Rosemary by surprise. Jane rarely called her father by his first name, and she never intervened when her parents were having one of their silent fights.
“What?” Isaac asked.
“Right about what?” asked Rosemary.
“It’s not the end of the world.”
Isaac gave a light laugh, much like he did when she was a little girl and did not understand something. “Don’t worry about what Brother Southernly said….”
“Brother Southernly was asserting that it’s the end of the world and, Mom, just like most others in the congregation, wants to know about the end of the world. Am I right?”
Mother blushed and forced her face into a smile. “I never said that…”
Jane’s jaw tightened. “You were on the edge of your seat when Brother Southernly asked about the Apocalypse—everyone in the congregation was.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Isaac said. “The point I was trying to make is that we all die, and so, in essence, we all have our own ‘last days.’”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Jane said. “Things are getting economically better. Mom, I’m just like you—I’m worried—but instead of relying on scriptures, I started to do my own research. I wanted to figure out if our society is just slowly dying and would eventually rot away, or if we could ever make a comeback.”
“Sweetie,” Isaac said, “you don’t need to worry about those things.”
“You don’t need to worry about those things, Dad. Things are getting better. We’re on the cusp of an economic renaissance. People call this the ‘Perpetual Recession,’ but we’re on the verge of an economic explosion.”
“Oh, honey,” Rosemary said. “No one can know that for sure.”
Jane frowned at her mother, “No, but we can have a pretty good idea. This is something that I had to find out before I went to college because I’m not going to spend four years of my life in school if the best job I can get when I get out is at the grocery store. I wanted to find out if there’s a chance things could get better—and I believe they will. There’s a great quote by Tomas Macaulay that reads, ‘On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we’re to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’”
Jane looked up to see blank expressions on every face in the room. She sighed and continued, “The last two hundred years have seen an explosion of wealth and prosperity. The standard of living has grown exponentially. We might be in a lull, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll stay there—far from it. Here are the facts: Since the 1800s, life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen by a factor of nine. Since 1955, a mere seventy years ago or so, the average real worldwide income has tripled; the world consumes an average of 33% more calories per person; parents around the world have buried one-third as many of their children; life expectancy is 33% longer. The likelihood that a person will die of murder, war, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, or any major sickness is significantly less.”
Isaac frowned, “How do you remember all these numbers?”
She continued, undaunted by the interruption. “Life is getting better across the globe: The average individual from a third world country now lives longer than the average Briton did in 1955; infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951; despite a doubling of the population, the raw number of people living in absolute poverty has fallen to less than 18% since 1955. I've only covered a few statistics, but the list goes on and on. The point is we’re getting healthier, more environmentally responsible, and smarter every year. Yes, we’re facing the longest back-to-back worldwide recession, but if things continue to get better, even a little bit, then I call that progress. Even in this ‘Perpetual Recession’ that we’re in, we still have had a growth rate of .01% a year. We have more, not less. We have beaten the Corona Virus and every strain that followed.”
Rosemary returned to her cleaning. “That’s good to hear, sweetie.”
Jane folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t patronize me, Mother. This is what you wanted to know. This is what you wanted Dad to preach about, but just because the answers come from me and not him, you don’t want to listen.”
Rosemary stopped scrubbing the counters and narrowed her eyes, her lips on the verge of a biting comment.
Jane stood up, her body animated by her words. “Mom, just think about the opportunities that we have today that humankind could never have dreamed of eighty years ago. Our family has traveled all over the United States—something that few from any generation have been able to do. We have the opportunity to learn about worldwide events instantaneously through technology that we don’t even understand. When we look at the stars, we know exactly what and where they are. When we feel a pain in our chest, we can find out exactly what is wrong. Things are better now than they ever have been.”
Isaac smiled. “You are one smart girl, Jane.”
“I don’t know,” interrupted Jacob, “did you hear about the latest outbreak in South Carolina? I don’t think they have everything figured out.”
“Yes,” said Jane, “As of yet, 20 people have been hospitalized, 15 of them are critical, and 3 of them have died—all of them are military personal except for one. They initially misdiagnosed the strain, and as of yet, they have not figured out what type of virus it is. But, we’ve learned a lot since the last pandemic, and we’re much better prepared. A company based out of California has already synthesized a super vaccine, which should treat most of these types of viruses. As we speak, they’re already actively giving it to the military. Jacob, this sort of outbreak happens all the time. The only reason this one is getting more attention is because there’s nothing better to report. This is exactly my point.”
Jacob turned slightly red, his momentum in the conversation gone. He did not care to have his younger sister so easily show him up. As usual, he tried to use humor to hide his embarrassment. “Well, we’ll see who’s right after this spreads across the United States and turns half of the people into Zombies.”
Rosemary ignored her son and looked at her daughter. She gave half a smile, as if she was trying to decide if she should pity her daughter or be proud. “That’s good to know, Jane. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.” Despite the kind words, her tone betrayed her insincerity. She very much sounded like a schoolteacher who was only agreeing with a child to avoid an argument.
Jane rolled her eyes and slumped down into a kitchen chair. “Is that all you have to say?”
Rosemary walked out of the kitchen, picked up a collection of clothes, and walked upstairs, pretending not to hear. For her, the conversation was finished.
“Why does she do that?” Jane asked.
“What do you mean?” Isaac said.
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation about things that she cares about, and she won’t even give my ideas a second thought. It’s like she doesn’t want me to use my head or something. Sh
e treats me like I’m a blabbering kid. I’m seventeen for heaven’s sake.”
Isaac picked up a sheet and began to look over its words. “I don’t know, sweetie.”
“She thinks I’m different. She wants me to be a certain way.”
“That’s just who she is.”
“Sometimes, I don’t think anyone listens to me.”
Isaac had begun to study the sheet of paper with earnest. “Yes… you’re probably right.”
Jane furrowed her brow and frowned at him. “You’re not even listening to me.”
Isaac laughed and smiled. “I was just teasing you, sweetie. Yes, I was listening to you, and so was your mother.” He stood up and walked behind his daughter’s chair, planting a kiss atop her head. “I love you the way you are—both of us do. This is just a stressful time for your Mother and me…” Isaac’s words drifted off, his sentence unfinished. He had managed to forget about the foreclosure papers, but this sentence had brought back the painful stab of reality. As he looked down at his daughter, his mind could not help but drift to the moment when he would have to tell her that they would have to move—the moment when he would have to face the reality that he could no longer provide for his family. No father should ever have to be forced to have that conversation with his daughter. This realization startled him, like a hand full of needles that had just been jabbed into his heart.
The kitchen blurred before him. He pictured how his wife would react to the news: She would first let out a burst of Irish rage towards the members of the congregation, who had failed in their tithes; then her anger would transform into a rush of energy that would send her on a mission to save the church through fundraising. She would fail—all of the church fundraisers did—and then her energy would turn into a flurry of packing and planning. Somewhere between the cleaning and packing, she would break down into a mess of tears. It would take several hours and boxes of Kleenexes that they could not afford before she would compose herself. When she would finally calm down, she would be ready to take on the new challenge. Isaac had seen her go through this emotional roller coaster a dozen times before. Jacob would also be caught up with rage but, unlike his mother, the anger would deplete his energy and turn him into a barely breathing beanbag.