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Godsent

Page 37

by Richard Burton


  Damn, I really do hate this job, Rita thought.

  “Too late for what?” she asked meanwhile. “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “The Bible is pretty clear on that,” said Maggie. “It’s all there in the Book of Revelations.”

  “So you think Ethan is the Antichrist?”

  “All I know is that he’s not who and what he says he is. Just look at the kind of people he surrounds himself with, Rita. Papa Jim Osbourne, one of the biggest crooks on the planet, a man with his own private army and network of concentration camps. Is that the kind of thing that Jesus did? Did he hang out with Pontius Pilate and Herod?”

  “Well, to be fair, Maggie, Mr. Osbourne is his great-grandfather.”

  “Yes, that’s all very convenient, isn’t it?”

  “Are you suggesting he’s not?”

  “I haven’t seen any proof of it, have you? And even if it’s true, what does that prove? That Ethan puts family loyalty above everything else? Besides, everybody knows Papa Jim’s reputation. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that this is all part of some plan of his to take control of the country.”

  “The man just resigned from the cabinet, Maggie. That’s hardly the move of someone who’s looking for more political power.”

  Maggie smiled sweetly. “I pray that you’re right, Rita.”

  Score one point for you, Rita thought as she returned the smile. “Let me go back to something you said a moment ago, Maggie, about the Miracle at Olathe Medical. I just want to be sure. You’re not disputing that a miracle took place, only Ethan’s claim of responsibility for it.”

  “That’s right, Rita.”

  “So if Ethan didn’t perform the miracle, then it must have been God, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why? I mean, Ethan explained how he caused it, and why. It was to bring his mother back. But what reason would God have to intervene at that place and time? Why Olathe Medical and nowhere else?”

  “Rita, far be it from me to ask God to explain Himself. I don’t need to know His reasons for that or anything. It’s called faith.”

  That’s two, Rita thought. Now it’s my turn.

  “But how can you be so sure that it wasn’t Ethan?” she asked.

  “Well, for one thing, because there haven’t been any more miracles. Jesus didn’t perform just a single miracle and then call it quits. Why should Ethan? And yet he hasn’t lifted a finger to help anyone since that day. Not even Lisa. If he brought her back from the dead once, like he claims he did, why not do it a second time?”

  “There have been reports of miracles in the cities where Ethan is preaching.”

  “Not one has been corroborated, Rita, as I think you know very well. There have been all kinds of reports from those cities. People claim to have seen Ethan walking on water, floating on air.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on. It’s just hysteria.”

  “But what if there was a miracle that could be traced back to Ethan? What if there was proof that he was responsible? What then? Would you continue to speak out against him?”

  “I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question like that, Rita.”

  “But it’s not hypothetical,” Rita said. “There has been such a miracle. There is proof.”

  At this, Maggie glanced nervously at Father Steerpike, who didn’t look too comfortable himself. “What—what do you mean?”

  “When I first interviewed Ethan, I was as good as dead. A brain tumor. Malignant. Inoperable. Nobody knew about it except my doctors and me. They gave me no more than a few months to live. Then, the next time I went in for a checkup, a couple of days after the interview, the tumor was gone. Vanished. A medical impossibility, according to my doctors. But true nonetheless.”

  “I . . . I . . .” Maggie gulped, swallowing down whatever words she was trying to say. Father Steerpike was looking on openmouthed. Hobie, who was also hearing this for the first time, looked equally surprised.

  “I’ll be releasing all my medical records today,” Rita continued, “along with sworn affidavits from my doctors.”

  Maggie looked stricken. She had turned even paler, which Rita wouldn’t have believed possible.

  Father Steerpike lurched to his feet and stepped in front of the camera. “This interview is over,” he said angrily.

  Hobie kept right on filming.

  “What are you afraid of, Father?” demanded Rita, who had risen to her feet as well.

  “I told you that I wouldn’t permit you to browbeat this poor girl. I didn’t expect you to sandbag her like this. Shame on you.”

  “People deserve to know the truth,” Rita said.

  “Your truth,” said Father Steerpike.

  “Ethan cured me. Why does that threaten you so much?”

  “Please leave now.” Father Steerpike stepped past Rita to put a comforting arm around Maggie’s shoulders. The young woman was huddled in the chair, her face buried in her hands, sobbing.

  Rita felt as if things had slipped out of her control somehow. The interview had gotten away from her. She’d had Maggie on the ropes, perfectly set up for the revelation of the miracle that had saved her life . . . but she’d forgotten that this wasn’t a typical interview. Usually reducing a subject to tears was an interviewer’s dream. But while a crying Maggie might be good for the ratings, it wasn’t going to win any hearts and minds. There was nothing to do now but try and cut her losses. “Pack up, Hobe,” she said. “We’re done here.”

  Hobie gathered his equipment quickly under the glowering eye of Father Steerpike. Not another word was spoken until Rita and Hobie were just about to exit the rectory. Then Maggie suddenly spoke up from behind them. “Tell Ethan . . .”

  Rita stopped and turned.

  The young woman’s face was stained with tears. Father Steerpike stood frowning beside her. “Tell him I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.

  Rita nodded. Outside, heading back to the van, she groused to her cameraman. “If only we could have caught that last bit on camera!”

  “Give me some credit, boss,” said Hobie.

  She stopped short. “You mean . . .”

  “I always keep one camera going,” he said.

  She felt like kissing him. “Hobie, you’re a genius!”

  “Was that true what you said back there?” he asked after a moment, as they were loading up the van. “About the tumor and all?”

  “Yeah, it’s true,” she said.

  “You could have told me,” he said, sounding hurt. “I thought we were a team.”

  “I’m sorry, Hobe. I was scared. I thought I was going to die.”

  “We all die, boss. But we don’t have to die alone. Or live that way, either.”

  Rita nodded. For once in her life, she was at a loss for words.

  The crowd for Ethan’s first night in Miami was the biggest and most enthusiastic yet. There were also more protestors than ever. Rita’s interview of Maggie had just aired that day, and the flames of controversy surrounding Ethan had been fanned higher not only because of Maggie’s accusations and tears, but also because of Rita’s claim that Ethan had healed her. When questioned by the media about this latest miracle, Ethan refused to confirm or deny responsibility, stating only that he was happy for Rita and wished her well.

  One consequence of all this was that the route back to the hotel after the sermon was thronged with so many people that the thin line of police and munchies seemed to be holding them back only with difficulty. Even Papa Jim, normally unflappable behind the bullet-and-bomb-proof windows of the limousine, was nervous, repeatedly urging Denny to speed up. Sitting in the backseat with Kate, Ethan watched the faces stream by the one-way glass, illuminated in the beams of streetlights and searchlights from the Oz Corp helicopters pacing them overhead. He saw faces distorted with hate, screaming what he knew to be threats and obscenities despite the quiet of the soundproofed interior. He saw other faces filled with hope and faith, crying out in prayer, begging to be saved
, or healed, or just noticed. Some of those gathered here wanted to see him dead. Some would have been happy to do the killing. But there were others who had come in search of a miracle for themselves or their loved ones, who would have given their lives to protect him. Here and there he saw fights break out between groups or individuals, but in each case, before the spark could ignite a larger conflagration, the helicopters responded with targeted microwave bursts and other weapons from their arsenal of nonlethal crowd-control measures. Even so, a more or less steady rain of hurled objects thumped against the roof and sides of the limo. There was an inescapable sense of walking on the razor’s edge of a riot. Kate clutched his arm tightly but said nothing. Ethan too watched in silence, the burden of what he witnessed weighing heavily on his soul.

  It was hard. Harder than he had imagined it would be. He had been given power over these people. God had sent him here to watch, to witness. To judge. But the more he saw, the less certain he felt about his right to judge anyone. He was human, yes, but he was also divine, God’s second Son. He possessed abilities and knowledge that these people had no access to. Just as he had decided that his ability to perform miracles did not give him the right to do so; that miracles, however well intentioned, trespassed in a fundamental way upon the dignity of the very people he sought to help, trivializing their sufferings, sacrifices, and hard-earned triumphs, so too did the idea of judging them strike him as misguided somehow. What, other than his superior power, his superior might, gave him the right? Surely God hadn’t created these people in his own image, gifting them with free will, self-consciousness, and intelligence, the ability to love and the capacity for kindness, even if all too rarely achieved, simply in order that He, or His sons, could sit in judgment over them for all eternity. That was childish, absurd. And Ethan knew his father was neither of those things. He had prayed for guidance, for answers, but none had been forthcoming. It seemed that he was expected to figure things out for himself.

  So be it, he thought.

  That night, while Kate tossed and turned in bed, worrying about the crowds they had passed through, and Papa Jim composed a reply to a coded message he had received from the Vatican, Ethan sent his spirit soaring up out of his body, high above the brilliant towers of Miami, and flew northwest through the night, into what had once been desolate swampland and—despite having been drained and dredged and built upon—remained in essence a swamp, albeit of a very different sort: the Okefenokee Internment Center, one of the more than fifty such facilities across the United States owned and administered by Oz Corp under contract to the federal government.

  It was visible from a long way off, an island of harsh white light in the midst of a lambent darkness. The facility was purposefully isolated from the civilization it had ostensibly been built to protect, both to make it difficult for internees to escape, and to keep the camp and its occupants hidden from the public eye. Once, thought Ethan, other camps had posted the infamous words Arbeit Macht Frei above their entrances: “Work Will Make You Free.” Now, decades later, in another century, another country, a more appropriate slogan might be “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” Thus did humanity learn from history as it strode into the future.

  With high walls topped by coils of barbed wire and guard towers that gazed down on rows of bland barracks as brightly lit as a baseball field during a night game, the camp looked indistinguishable from a prison, though the majority of people held here or in the other internment centers had not been convicted of any crimes. There were illegal immigrants and their families, including children, but most of the detainees were held under the draconian anti-terrorism laws, which required only “reasonable suspicion” and gave the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security the right to order the arrest and confinement of “persons of interest” without recourse to judicial review, and the right to delegate that authority to subordinates as they saw fit. The result was that there were now more people held in the internment centers than there were in the prison system itself. While internees were “repatriated” in a steady stream to their designated “countries of origin,” where many of them hadn’t set foot in decades, or indeed ever, for it was no longer enough to have been born in the United States to be assured of the rights of citizenship, even greater numbers continued to flow in, as the dragnet widened and the definition of “persons of interest” became ever more nebulous.

  Ethan wandered invisibly through the facility, which had all the antiseptic appeal of a hospital ward, soaking up the stories of all the people he saw, the guards as well as the internees: the brutes and the brutalized, the brave and the cowardly, the hopeful, the resigned, and the despairing. Hanging over everything and everyone was a sense of fear and uncertainty as thick and oppressive as the hot and humid atmosphere of the swamps in midsummer. Only the very youngest children, not a few of whom had been born in the camp, seemed unscarred by it, as even the best among the guards and the detainees had been, the ones whose faith in God and in their fellow humans had allowed them to retain some tattered shreds of their own humanity. Degradation surrounded them. There were the interrogations, conducted by means of “enhanced persuasive techniques,” both physical and psychological in nature, which were emphatically not torture but could not be revealed to the public at large for fear of compromising national security. The work details, in which detainees defrayed the cost of their upkeep by laboring on behalf of corporations that had previously outsourced such work overseas. The random beatings, rapes, and occasional outright murders by guards and the violent gangs that had evolved, unofficially sanctioned by the authorities, to police the camps from within. The forced separation of families. The ceaseless proselytizing on behalf of a militant brand of Christianity that preached a doctrine of American exceptionalism. The relentless pressure to conform and to inform.

  To remain human in such an environment was only a cause of greater torment. Far better, many on both sides of the barbed wire seemed to think, to cast that burden aside and live as a soulless animal—furtive, suspicious, cowering before the stronger, dominating the weaker, equally dead to the past and the future, imprisoned in an eternal now that offered a bleak kind of freedom, a pale imitation of the real thing: freedom from thought, from feeling, from obligation, from responsibility.

  From humanity.

  Unseen, Ethan watched and wept.

  Godcast #17, from The2ndSon.com.

  Hi, everybody. Thanks for listening. You know, I’ve said before that I’m not just here for Americans. My message is for the whole world. But at the same time, it’s not an accident that I was born an American. I could have been born a citizen of any country. But my father chose this country over all others, just as He picked Kate Skylar out of all other women to be my mother. God isn’t an American, but He wanted His second Son to be one. But why should God care about what country I’m a citizen of or who my family is? Did He choose America because it’s the greatest country in the world, the most God-fearing? Because, like the Jews before them, Americans are God’s chosen people, and He wanted His second Son to be born of the chosen people just like His first son was? I love this country, but in all honesty, the answer is no. And what about Kate? Did God choose her to be my mother because she was without sin, like Jesus’s mother, Mary? Or because her family was especially holy, like Jesus’s family was? Again, much as I love Kate and am proud to be a member of her family, the answer is no.

  Don’t confuse me with Jesus. Don’t judge my words and actions by his measure. I’m not him. My mission was given to me by God the same as my brother’s was, but it’s not the same mission. The Son of God came to redeem the world. But the Son of man has a different task. The Son of God sowed. The Son of man will reap. It’s right there in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 13: “The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire.”

  Don’t think for a minute that doesn’t freak me out. I don�
�t want to be responsible for judging who is saved and who is damned. I don’t want to see anybody damned. But I have faith in my father. He didn’t let Abraham slay Isaac. At the last second, He told him to lay down his knife and spare the boy’s life. That’s my prayer. But like Abraham, I’ll do what’s been asked of me because I have faith in the One who asked it. That’s why I’ve been speaking out so urgently across this country and online about all the ways that people have gone against my father’s teachings. It’s not because I enjoy lecturing people. It’s not because I’m perfect myself. God knows I’m not, and so do most of you. It’s because there isn’t much time left. God has given you the freedom to choose how you will live your lives. That choice will determine how you spend eternity. So please, listen to me while you still can.

  Why America? Because the difference between what we Americans claim to believe and how we actually behave is so stark. “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . .” It says that right at the top of the Declaration of Independence. Sacred words inspired by God. But have we lived up to those words?

  No, we haven’t. Where in that document, or in the Constitution, does it talk about judging men and women by the color of their skin or by the religion they practice? Where does it talk about punishing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty, or the children for the sins of their parents? Where does it talk about achieving peace through unprovoked war? Where does it advocate internment centers? For that matter, where in the New Testament does Jesus call for any of these things?

  Nowhere.

  Racism, hatred, terrorism, and bigotry have no place in this country. No place in the world. All men and women are created equal in the eyes of God. All deserve the same opportunities, the same compassion. My brother didn’t teach the value of discrimination, hatred, or lack of compassion. He preached the opposite of these things. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he said. He even said to love your enemies. Understanding, patience, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, love: those are the qualities my brother taught. Those are the paths to God. We stray from them at our peril. But there is still time to return to them.

 

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