by Unknown
Static brayed loudly.
A few metres away, a policeman held his radio in the air, confusion apparent on his face as he searched for a signal in the warm summer air.
THE YEAR OF OUR LORD
BY A.J. FRENCH
“Sex is the enemy of consciousness.” “Where’d you hear that?”
“In a book I’m reading.”
“Do you agree?”
Sixteen-year-old Faith thought long and hard before answering. Finally she said, “Yes, I agree. Except I’d add that consciousness is the friend of sex.”
“Sex is the enemy of consciousness, but consciousness is the friend of sex?”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
Russell rested his head on the pillow and thought about the statement. He liked sex. He didn’t see how it could be pernicious, an enemy - aside from those instances of rape and abuse.
There, he’d just done it again: used his rationality to justify a miserable outlook on life. It was what Faith called ‘resistance to change’, and yet he understood that the reason most people had sex was for reassurance, to know the other person liked them, to know they were desirable.
He couldn’t let it go. But so what? He was only seventeen. He had time aplenty to achieve enlightenment.
Throwing back the covers, he got out of bed and padded over to the hotel window. He pulled open the blinds and gazed at the parking lot. Cars lay silent in the moonlight, glowing silver.
He saw her reflection in the dim glass - lying in bed, back propped against the pillows, blond hair tumbling down her shoulders, reading.
Who the hell was she? Sexually-abused hypersensitive shamanistic sixteen-year-old from Las Vegas, Nevada, whose prophetic dreams were ninety-eight percent accurate.
Not too many of those running around.
He focused his attention on the starry sky, and a feeling of dread took hold of him. He could see the rip – the rent in reality that spread its blinding white light across the sky. It seemed to get brighter as time progressed.
“You’re looking at it?” Faith said.
He grunted. What else would he be looking at? The tear had appeared two years ago, and everyone had gone bonkers over it. Pretty much everyone on earth had been staring at it ever since. That first week, there’d been massive riots in every major city. People thought the messiah had returned. Others thought it was aliens trying to make contact. Some believed it was a government mind control device.
The media - along with most leading scientists and the spokespersons for NASA - claimed it was a cosmic disruption, scattered stardust or space debris caught in a sort of time loop. The official prevailing theory was: “Suspended cosmic debris causing distortions in the electromagnetic spectrum.”
But nothing was certain. The world’s governments were locked in a heated race to perform further studies, leaving the populace at large to form their own opinions.
As usual, there were plenty of folks who believed it was the end of the world. With 2012 just two days away, this seemed as probable a theory as any.
“Don’t look too long,” Faith warned. “You’ll let too much get inside your head, have a heck of a time falling asleep.”
She was right. Prolonged exposure to the light on the retinas had been shown to produce disorientation and transient dementia - not to mention lucid, terrifying, vivid dream activity. It was like staring at the sun, only on the opposite side of the spectrum, staring into the abyss.
Faith had her own ideas about the rent in the sky. Strange, formidable, occult ideas. He had listened to her speak about it at some length. She liked doing it on street corners, like some kind of stump preacher, with a gathering of half-bewildered spectators watching.
“Come back to bed,” she said, marking her place in the book.
Russell turned from the window and got back into bed. He still wanted to have sex with her, but he knew it was out of the question. He settled for cuddling - her lying on her side and him on his, with an arm draped over her. They drifted off to sleep. Which then, of course, brought the harrowing, nerve-shattering visions of the end of time.
“Information, knowledge, wisdom - word, sound, and power.”
They were downtown among the freaks, parasites, junkies, thieves, shoppers, and businessmen. Faith had posted in her usual spot on the corner of Fifth and Alberton. High-rise buildings towered over her. Cars roared down the street; pigeons pecked in the grass. Only three people had stopped to listen: a homeless man and a couple in their mid-thirties.
“From the inception of the New Age,” Faith continued, “events and circumstances have occurred in perfect order to engender our present state. Only a select few will pass on into the Next Age. Those who are ignorant, cowardly, and blind will be dashed into the bottomless pit of holy refuse.
“All these soda cans you pop, these Styrofoam containers you eat from -come tomorrow you’ll be lying in a grave of them. Those of you who manage to survive will be left to wander in a world of darkness. Your lives will be ruled by fear, until you starve to death, die of thirst, or get killed by wild animals. Today is the final day of your present reality.”
“Keep the doomsaying to yourself!” shouted a passing businessman. Three more people and a group of teenagers dressed in black came over to listen.
“How could anybody survive a catastrophe like that?” one of them asked.
Faith - a thin blonde in blue jeans and tatty Keds – lifted her arms over her head, focusing on the teenager. “For you - for any of you - I’m afraid there’s no way you can survive entirely. You would’ve had to have been contacted by now. To survive what’s coming, one must be partially awaken already, already in the process of shedding man’s skin. After tomorrow there will be fifty-percent less three-dimensional space, and fifty-percent less material reality. The other fifty percent will be pure spirit, pure infinity. So even if you do survive the initial transition into this fifty/fifty world, you’ll soon perish from maladjustment. I’m sorry, but there is no hope for your continued existence as a human. All that remains is the transmutation of your physical body into perpetual energy. As for your consciousness, that will be absorbed and reintegrated into the universe.”
More people stopped to listen. Faith went on and on, covering everything from the return of myth-shrouded Atlantis to the arrival of aliens from Galaxy X, via the philosophy of existentialism, the concept of the Overman, and Babylonian astrology. She would close with some of her ideas about the rent in the sky.
It amazed Russell how much she knew. The strangest thing was hearing it delivered from the mouth of this girl, a scrawny little thing with scarcely enough fat to hold her jeans up. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to it.
Around twenty people were watching now, their eyes wide, their faces blank. Ears twitching like radio antennae.
Faith continued to speak until she was exhausted, at which point she collapsed and nearly fell off the stump. Having spent the past year following her around, Russell had anticipated this. When she dropped, he put his arm around her and escorted her to safety - much to the chagrin of the crowd, who had worked themselves into a frenzy.
To escape, Russell used the trick Faith had taught him. He imagined they were invisible, like nonexistent blips on the crowd’s radar, cloaked beings who could move freely without being noticed.
“Where she’d go?” the people asked.
“She can’t say all that then just vanish!” said a man in coveralls. “It’s irresponsible!”
“What do you know about responsibility?” asked the woman next to him. “You look like the type who beats his wife.”
“What’d you say?” He lunged at her - “I’ll show you, you self-righteous bitch!”
Similar exchanges transpired until everyone was fighting; they destroyed public property, smashed cars and shopfront windows, all screaming with triumphant rage.
Russell hastened the catalyst, the human oddity that happened to be his girlfriend, away from the pandemonium. Before lo
ng, a fully-fledged riot had developed. But that didn’t concern him. What concerned him was getting his relic, his Faith back to the hotel room. Nothing was more important.
In a red and white barn on a farm in Kansas, a Pentecostal preacher and twelve of his neighbors stacked boxes of food and jugs of drinking water. The preacher, a man in his fifties, whose name was Jeremiah, had been stockpiling the food for months. When the food shortages began, and the country started to panic, he was in good shape thanks to his preparations.
He had his father to thank for his good work ethic. As a boy helping the old man around the farm, he’d been beaten with a switch whenever his chores weren’t up to par - that is to say, if his father was displeased in any way.
Of course he’d hated it at the time, wishing every imaginable torture on the old man. But thinking those kinds of thoughts was sinful and now that he himself was an old man, he could recognize the benefit of the beatings. They’d taught him not to be lazy, to take pain like a man, to get the task completed at any cost.
He had employed the same parenting techniques with his own son, Daryl, but for some reason an equal but opposite reaction had occurred. Daryl had grown up to be a bum in one of the many degenerate American cities.
This made no sense to Jeremiah.
“Where do you want the canned peaches?” Marila asked.
He pointed to a clear space on the shelf and watched as she hoisted the box into position. Tough old gal. Survived the death of her husband and the destruction of their house by fire. She now lived in one of the rooms at the church.
“Jon Baskin, could you help me with this last water jug?” he said. “My back is starting to hurt.”
“Sure thing, Jay,” replied the young lad, padding across the hay-covered barn floor in his usual flannel attire. Things went on this way for the next hour or so: folks lending each other a hand to put away this or that. Afterwards, they started on the cots and the bedmats. By evening, everything was much to Jeremiah’s liking.
Jeff Reynolds and his wife Betty-May prepared an early dinner of corn, potatoes, brown, sugary beans, and sausage links. They gathered around the two wooden picnic tables near the back of the barn. When everyone had been seated and served, they clasped hands for Jeremiah to say grace:
“Lord, bless this meal we’re about to receive. And bless the people who have chosen to leave the comfort of their homes and be here tonight. On this, the Eve of Rapture, we humbly ask your forgiveness, and give thanks for this fine meal. Amen.”
The others echoed the word, then began to eat. They spoke little. A cloud of dread hung over them. Long shadows covered their features and bags darkened their eyes. Jeremiah knew they were scared - and God Almighty, right they should be. For come tomorrow . . . The End of Days would be upon them.
When they had finished, one of the younger women, a girl named Valerie, made coffee and tea, while the others got settled in their sleeping bags.
Only a single child - Randy and Margery’s boy, Timothy - had joined the group, and this was only because of his parents. Jeremiah had hoped to see more children.
The rest of the group ranged from their mid-twenties to their golden years, but it didn’t really matter how old they were. The imminent catastrophe wouldn’t be the Great Flood; this wasn’t Noah’s Ark. This was something quite different.
By nightfall everyone had a mug or thermos in hand. They were stretched out among the cots and bedrolls. Their faces, strained with fear, gazed toward the front of the barn, where Jeremiah was pacing anxiously on a wooden platform. He was dressed in black preacher’s garb, with a black hat. A gold crucifix dangled from his neck.
In one hand, he clutched a King James Version of the Bible. In the other, a secret: a small bone, a divine talisman of great power, something no one else knew about.
Something God had given him.
“Saint John, the mad, rambling Saint, was delivered the vision of The Armageddon, which he compiled into the Book of Revelation. I tell you now, this book was misinterpreted.”
A collective gasp swept through the group.
“I believe,” Jeremiah continued, feeling the secret bone vibrating in his palm, “John the Mad Saint was given a vision, just as I, Jeremiah Burckhardt, was granted a vision.”
“Praise Jesus!” shouted old Marila.
“Glory be to God!” shouted another. Hands lifted to the ceiling.
Jeremiah slowed his steps, his eyes burning into the audience. “In a dream - a dream in which I was not asleep - the Creator came to me to deliver His divine prophecy. He showed me the world encased in a glass ball. Inside it, mankind languished in decadence, as in Sodom and Gomorrah. I looked upon Mystery Babylon, the Great Harlot ruling the Pillars of Creation with seven slobbering heads. I saw oceans and oceans of blood - leaking from the sky, soft as tears, filling up the world and its scientific inventions and grand cities. Man is drowning in a pool of his own stupidity and ignorance, for he has not accepted the One God, nor embraced His Son, who was sacrificed to cleanse man’s sin. For these transgressions, Father God told me, mankind will be wiped out.
Margery cried out from her cot, an orgasmic wail: “Who’ll save us, ifn’t the Almighty? We must beg for His mercy!”
“Margery’s right,” Jeremiah said. “We must plead for our tainted souls, so that we may be spared the coming disaster. In the vision, God showed me those who would be saved. Those who have not accepted Christ into their hearts will perish as the material world melts away. Those left will linger like sores on the skin of existence. They will be driven mad, and die like dogs in the street. Christ will then descend in His Golden Chariot to carry us aloft, where we might walk the streets of glory and sit at His right hand for eternity.”
“Glory!” shouted James Wheaton, proprietor of the farm two plots over.
“Hallelujah!” responded Margery and Randy.
“Praise Jesus!” sounded Bruce, the only colored man among them.
“Praise Him!” echoed Jean and Harry, a married couple of fifty-odd years.
Jeremiah loomed over them like a black, lifeless scarecrow, silently admiring the result of his words. His fist tightened around the tiny magic bone as it thrummed against his palm. He grinned, a knife gash exposing false teeth.
Outside the barn, crows gathered in the dogwoods and sycamores while up above, the stars twinkled, their firelight ringing the heavens like Christmas tree ornaments.
“Feeling any better?” Russell asked.
Faith nodded from where she lay curled up on the bed. Their television, set to mute, flashed images of reporters, large groups of people, an ongoing riot. The curtains were pulled back, letting in the night. The rent in the sky was clearly visible.
Russell sat at the table, nursing the whisky shot he’d taken from the minibar. He’d been sitting there for three hours, ever since they’d escaped the crowd. Faith had been so exhausted that she’d gone to sleep the moment she’d hit the bed. With nothing else to do, Russell had killed time by getting buzzed.
But now she was getting to her feet. She wrapped a blanket around herself and joined him at the table.
Russell retrieved more bottles from the minibar, along with a liter of Coke and what was left of the ice. He mixed the rum and Coke in one of the half-clean Styrofoam cups and handed it to her. She took a whiff, wrinkling her nose, but thanked him and started to drink.
“You got us out of there,” she said, finally.
“I did. They were ready to devour you.”
She grunted in a thoughtful way. “They might’ve, if you hadn’t rescued me. They’re so starved for human interaction and they don’t even realize it. They feel their emptiness, sure, but they don’t understand that they’re starving. Instead they distract themselves with every possible vice - food, drugs, shopping, alcohol, video games, television, movies, romantic pastimes, rape, consensual sex (which is still just rape) - they shove all this into their emptiness, hoping it will fill the void, but it never does. Earlier this evening they w
ere going to try and put me into their void, but thankfully you got us out.”
Russell took a swig of alcohol, watching as Faith did the same. He wondered why in the hell she couldn’t ever say anything normal. Why she always had to go on and on about this crazy stuff that made his stomach hurt when he thought about it. It was like someone else was inside her, some strange being that spouted esoteric knowledge and made uncanny observations.
They drank in silence, listening to the distant sirens and city noises. It was only going to get worse the closer it got to midnight. People were going to panic, become desperate. And by morning … who knew?
Russell felt as scared and as helpless as those people looting and burning buildings on the television, the ones fighting with the National Guard. His only consolation was Faith - this strange, all-knowing, spiritually-connected being.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked.
She blinked small, round, pretty blue eyes set into flesh that was warm and pallid and soft as honey. Sometimes when she looked at him, he felt as if she were seeing into him, seeing his soul, maybe.
“Talk about what?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Must be the whisky talking.”
“Not the whisky. Your daimon.”
“My what?”
She chuckled. “We talked about this before, silly. Your daimon is your Intuitive Child’s voice, the one in your head that guides you, your Guardian Angel. Daimon is synonymous with daemon, or demon. However in this case it is not the sort of demon of which you are thinking. The daimon is your link to higher spiritual worlds, to the eternal. It must be heeded at all costs.”
“Now I remember,” Russell replied. “You said that Socrates, the Greek philosopher, was the first to speak about it.”
“That’s right. His connection with his daimon was strong. It was almost ninety-percent accurate on all matters. He consulted it frequently. Why don’t you try it? Go on - what’s your daimon telling you right now?”