by Brian Hodge
I’m not sure when it happened, but I’ve realized I’m not writing this for my own benefit after all. It’s not so much a tool for understanding my path as it might be a tool for others to find theirs. I’ve always suspected that I was a part of a current that runs beneath the surface of everyday life. Once, I had enough of an ego to think I was a big part of something big. Now I think it’s more like I’m a small part of something even bigger.
I’m not unique that way. I can’t be. There have to be others like me.
The ones who’ve gone before…maybe early in my life I admired their work, in a way, without ever understanding what it actually was, that it was so much more than what it appeared on the surface to everyone who looked at it and could only see blood and misery.
So if there were those who came before, then there must be others who will come later, and others exactly like me, who right this moment are at one stage or another of coming into the full bloom of their purpose. Maybe they understand what’s happening, even if it’s just a little. Maybe they’re not far enough along to understand one bit of it. I don’t claim to understand it all myself yet. But I will.
One problem, though: You can’t talk to just anyone about things like this. So if I can leave something behind for the rest to make it easier to find their way toward what they’re meant for, then I’ve done a good thing. It’s an act of faith, too…writing this without any idea how it will get to the ones who need its guidance most…just trusting that it will.
Because our god works in mysterious ways.
Just not the usual mysterious ways the sheep believe in.
Does any of this sound familiar yet?
Maybe, like me, you grew up hearing it all the time…THOU SHALT NOT KILL…except you always understood that you were one of the special few it didn’t apply to.
Maybe, like me, you grew up where there were as many churches as fast-food joints, and your parents took you to theirs every Sunday. It was expected. There was no other way to live, or even consider living. But that was okay, because if you were like me, you enjoyed almost everything about it…even the car ride there, because you got to see all the other churches and how full their parking lots were too. You loved seeing the orderliness of it, the obedience of it, the by-rote reliability of it…even as you found yourself despising the preachers and elders and deacons for their weaknesses as men. You knew you would never grow up to be one of them.
And maybe, like me, you sat with your parents once a week and sang the songs and listened to the preacher talk about God, and felt touched by It in ways you never expected. It told you things that nobody else could hear: that even though all those people around you fed It with their devotion and prayers, what It felt for them wasn’t love, but a hungry, ferocious need. Down deep inside, you understood that It needed their tears and yearning and fears as bad as any junkie shaking in an alley, waiting for the pusher. But because It needed them so much, It despised them a little, too. Maybe a lot. As you stared past the preacher to that giant crucifix on the wall, you knew that God wasn’t above concealing Itself behind it, and the bloody man hanging there, to get what It needs.
In fact, that’s Its best trick ever.
If you were anything like me, you appreciated God all the more for letting you in on this secret, and even though you were just a kid, you instinctively knew that this was a secret you couldn’t share with anybody else.
How could you? Everyone else…these were the people that It was telling you to keep in line.
It just didn’t tell you how. You had to figure that part out on your own. Which didn’t seem fair, really, because now that you’re aware of this anointed feeling, you’re waiting for marching orders and all that’s on the radio is dead static.
I’ve come to believe that’s part of the selection process. You have to take that next step and demonstrate the initiative all on your own. You have to find the rest of the puzzle pieces and fit them together yourself…because only when you hear them click will you know.
Am I tampering with the natural course of that process by writing this for you? I really don’t think so. By the time this epistle makes its way to you, you should already have found your path. I suspect we manage that when we’re pretty young. For me, it happened when I was thirteen.
I wrote earlier about the boy I killed the summer I was nine. This taught me a lot…how to kill, and that I could, and get away with it…although it didn’t indicate how to put this talent to any greater use, or even whether or not I should.
For that, I had to wait another four years.
It was a broiling summer day in the middle of the week, and I dropped by unannounced at my family’s church to see the youth minister, because things had been building up inside me for a long time and I needed to talk to somebody about the signals I’d been getting from God, how different they were from just about everything else I was hearing coming out of the pulpit. Even if I knew I couldn’t come right out and explain what was going on under his nose, I still needed to talk to someone in charge. At that point, I was still trying to reconcile the disconnect.
Except the youth minister wasn’t there. He’d taken some of the older kids on a day-trip to a lake. Neither of the secretaries were there, either. They were away for their lunch hour. It was just me and the big man, the senior pastor, who said he’d be happy to see me…the two of us all alone.
I’m not sure how long we talked. Five minutes, maybe? Time didn’t seem the same for the next few days.
Our preacher was in his sixties, and must’ve been grossly fat when he was younger, then lost most of the extra weight, because he had loose waggling jowls, or maybe just one giant jowl, hanging underneath his chin like an orangutan’s throat pouch. I kept watching it quiver as he talked. The skin was so thin and dry it looked like paper. So I started wondering what it would look like, and feel like, if it tore.
That’s when I understood what I was really doing there.
I grabbed the letter opener off his desk and found out everything I wanted to know about his throat, inside and out. I got as far as slicing through a few of the rings of his trachea before deciding that I’d learned enough for one day.
Don’t let anyone tell you that God hasn’t smiled upon you when you get away clean from such a messy kill.
The day’s final lesson didn’t kick in for another day or two, when I realized that I must have been seen leaving the church by the secretaries, on their way to work back from lunch. They each gave a detailed description to the police.
One had seen a heavyset white man, middle-aged. The other swore it was a tall, skinny Hispanic guy, couldn’t have been much over twenty. Two witnesses, one sketch artist, two totally different portraits.
God smiled, all right.
There was no room for guilt over the next few days, but I did wonder why I’d done it. The man had never done a thing to me…never said a cross word against anyone, as far as I know. It was an experiment, I eventually decided. It was done so I could observe how the rest of the congregation reacted to it…and you know, a funny thing came out of the chaos of their shock and grief and disbelief.
When you’re a thirteen-year-old boy, you can see a lot, because you’ve achieved a temporary but strange kind of invisibility. You’re no longer the cute little kid you were before, but you’re not yet the budding young man that people expect great things from. You’re lost in the middle somewhere, beneath notice as life goes on around you, and it’s amazing what you can see if you just keep your eyes open.
At the funeral and the burial and at formal services and informal gatherings that I couldn’t help but witness as the son of devout parents, I watched a congregation of over 500 people come apart at the seams, their faith tested and stretched to the breaking point like a rubber band on the verge of giving way…and then they all snapped back tighter than ever, clinging to their faith just that much more tenaciously to keep them safe and warm, to shelter them from whatever they were afraid might stalk them.
> There was a rightness to this. An overwhelming sense of purpose. The thing I was meant to do. I knew that God smiled on this because what I had done was drive Its flock closer to It than ever before, as the proxy of a harsh shepherd.
Just as I’ve done so many times since then.
So if you’ve read this far and something about it all sounds familiar and makes you nod with agreement, then it just may be that you and I are alike on a fundamental level, and that my path is yours.
Although I now suspect that I’ve been summoned to an even higher calling, and don’t have any choice but to follow where that leads.
And if by some twist of fate this epistle meant for the edification of a select few has fallen into the hands of someone else who doesn’t recognize any part of his or her life in this, I have good news to tell you, too: The God you believe loves you could just as easily have a plan for you too…not as honored as mine, or those like me, but a related role, an entwined destiny that’s just as important.
What good is the shepherd’s knife without the mutton for it to cut?
Rejoice in that, and be glad.
* * *
No matter how many times he read the transcripts of those nightly conversations that had taken place across 2,000 miles of wire and a web of hopes, he kept returning to a single passage of Andrei’s. It was only a couple of lines, three quick sentences, so short and to the point that it might have been easy for someone else to overlook their importance.
From the age of thirteen onward, Bruce had known the importance of learning through experimentation. Here was a prime opportunity to further the education of them all, its methodology established by Andrei’s inviting words.
He would have to put in for some vacation time at the station. This could be no quick trip, there and done and back again. This would require an investment in time and guile and boundless creativity.
A world of possibility lay ahead.
He would squeeze the secrets from it until it screamed.
VII
One could sit only so long with a crowbar for company before seriously wanting to bash something with it, Andrei had discovered.
Night and day and night again, and day once more after that…he waited and watched and ticked away the hours with speculations of how it would feel, sound, look, to shatter someone’s skull, or crack an arm in two. He had rehearsed killing blows so many times that the real thing would probably be a letdown. Nothing that might come through either of the house’s doors could be any worse than waiting for it, stitching faces onto its absence.
From the living room he could watch the walkway approaching the front door, moving from one window to the next for variety, and keeping an eye on the back door by remote. He’d rigged up an old camcorder for the job, affixing it high, where the wall met the ceiling, and training it down so it could see anyone on the other side of the glass. He’d then run a length of cable through the house and to the living room, into a small TV whose picture hadn’t changed for a week, other than the slow cycling of daylight for darkness.
Daytime felt safer, naturally, but it was autumn now, and each dusk seemed to come noticeably earlier, each dawn pushed a little farther away. If for no other reason than to cope, Andrei began to love the night, too, because if threats could hide in the night, then so could he.
Except he didn’t want to hide. Hiding had been killing him the slow way, a day and a year at a time. If death was coming, he wanted to see it, wanted it to see him, so there could be no mistaken identities.
If it didn’t show up soon, maybe he could go on the move, spending half a year above the Arctic Circle, holding his ground on a windswept plain where the sun never set, and then, once the pole’s long night finally fell, drifting south to the bottom of the world, where another six-month day was just beginning.
And when he nodded off and dreamed, he dreamed of running, faster than any man and most machines, 1,000 miles per hour, running east to west ahead of the setting sun and the line called, appropriately enough, the terminator, keeping himself forever in the daylight, ahead of his own cowardice, and whatever might emerge from the dark.
Did sane people think like this, dream like this?
At least he could sleep, and dream, trusting that Manon would wake him in time should the moment catch him unaware.
He hadn’t yet figured out why she’d been so insistent on staying with him. Really, all he’d done was exchange one person to worry about for another. Corey, bless him, had succeeded at what Andrei had begged him to do: convincing his sister to leave the house and bed down at Corey’s apartment for a while. Although Andrei wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t been some sort of group consensus: Humor the paranoid brother a little longer, and if we’re lucky, his delusions will play themselves out now that they’re coming to a boil.
Then again, nobody doubted the reality of Kimmy’s death, or its savagery.
With that lingering threat, he still didn’t know what Manon thought she could accomplish here, small as she was. She seemed half Janika’s size, the only conceivable advantage being that she presented a smaller target. Yet she’d been adamant: “Let me stay with you, let me help you,” she kept insisting. “I can help you.”
“Yeah?” he would ask “How?”
But Manon would never come right out and say, simply telling him that maybe things would never come to that after all, and fixing him with that penetrating gaze of hers until his doubts began to crumble and he suspected that she really could, or at least that she knew something he didn’t, and it would all become clear in time.
It crossed his mind, briefly, that maybe she was more than mortal, and here for a reason, and had been all along, coming into their lives three years ago looking ahead to this very day. Stupid. Andrei didn’t know why, if he could so readily believe in killers who reclaimed the resuscitated dead on behalf of a malevolent Heaven, it should be so much harder to believe in the possibility of someone coming to stand on his behalf…but it was. It was always easier to believe in the worst.
More likely Manon was just one more piece of the conspiracy to humor him, agreeing to act as Janika’s eyes and make sure he didn’t completely lose his grasp on reality.
Which didn’t mean for a moment that, worries for her safety aside, he was averse to having her here.
The days and nights were like stepping stones of quiet moments when they ate or talked or found something to laugh about or one simply sat vigil while the other slept, and at times Andrei felt himself on the verge of pretending that this change in domestic arrangements was something altogether different from what it was. Still, even in the most agreeable moments he couldn’t surrender to the fantasy, because those were the times when he saw most clearly how much he must have wanted a normal life, and how elusive it seemed.
He would watch her while she dreamed, and sometimes it was obvious that the dreams were not good ones, and his hand would fall just short of touching her, to reassure her that everything would be all right. He couldn’t believe it himself, for one thing, but worse, somehow, was understanding his heart in such a moment, and how his head kept getting in the way.
Why did it have to get to this point before I…
…before we might have…?
But he knew already, and had all along: No one could have loved this kind of life, or could have loved him as a part of it, and if she did, then he wasn’t sure he could respect her for being willing to settle for so little.
“Last week I asked Corey if he thought I was crazy. That was easy,” he told Manon one afternoon. “I’ve never asked you that because I don’t think you’d lie and I might not like the answer.”
She joined him on the couch and tucked her legs underneath her. “Is this why you never told me what it was like when you died?”
“I never did? Really?”
“Don’t pretend it was an oversight,” she said. “You know you didn’t.”
“How come you never asked, then?”
“How do you know it
didn’t happen to me too, and I know already?”
Looking her in the eye, and at what passed for a smile on her face, Andrei honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Circumstantial evidence, I guess. You seem too well-adjusted.”
“Oww,” she said. “What a backhanded compliment.” Leaning forward and punching him lightly on the knee with her knuckles. “Tell me. Died and gone to Heaven.”
He looked out the windows, at the homemade closed-circuit TV, as if thinking about it would summon something that meant him harm, and would finally mete out his overdue punishment for the impertinence of having survived.
“Some of it I’m still kind of shaky on,” he said, “because my theory is that when they realize they’re losing their grip on you—because your body’s functioning again and it still has some sort of gravitational effect on your spirit—when you’re getting pulled back and they can’t stop that from happening, they bombard you with thoughts and images and whatever else that might get turned into a memory. It’s like being brainwashed, except it happens instantaneously. You come out of it with a false memory that sustains the lie, and it’s a really pleasant lie, so you’ll look forward to returning, and tell the rest of the world how wonderful it is. Which they’ll believe anyway, because they already want to. So I don’t know if that’s where the white light comes from, and the reunions at the end of the tunnel, or if there’s really some basis for that. But once you’re there…
“There’s no love waiting for you. There’s something massive, and powerful, you can feel it…but I still don’t know how to accurately describe how you feel it, because it’s more than just knowledge. It would be physical, too, if you had a body, except you don’t. Or maybe it’s a different kind of body, or maybe you just haven’t yet shaken off the memory of the one you had, so it feels like you’re still subject to the same expectations of gravity and pain.
“Even though there’s no love, you are wanted there. The main thing you’re aware of is this pervading sense of greed. You’re like one gold coin in a vault full of them, spilling over with them. You’re there to be hoarded. I don’t know why, I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it only wants you because it can have you. Or maybe it’ll have some other use for you eventually, and for now you’re in some kind of holding pen. But…the sense of claustrophobia, and betrayal…they’re just devastating. You can feel that all around you, too…like a scream that got so loud you can’t even hear it anymore, it just rips through you like an electric current…