Strange Animals

by Chad Kultgen

  His memory settled on a specific event in his life. It was the time he first truly understood just how great God could be. In the seventh grade, all of the students in James’s American history class had been partnered together by the teacher. The pairings were arbitrary but mandatory. The partnerships required that the students paired would sit with their desks pushed together throughout the school year, helping each other with assignments and doing class presentations together on various subjects. James was paired with a girl named Natalie Chambers. She was one of the popular girls in the seventh grade, and James remembered initially dreading his required interactions with her. Most of her friends openly made fun of James for being strange or quiet or any of the submissive personality traits he had developed as the result of inadequate foster care and constant moving. But James was surprised to learn that Natalie wasn’t like her friends. She seemed to be genuinely nice to him, and she never made him feel bad about himself.

  They developed a relationship in which James found a great sense of worth. He had only ever had acquaintances throughout his life, and, although he and Natalie never spent time with one another outside class, he considered her a friend. And, beyond the friendship, he found that she was the first girl for who he formed romantic feelings. So, when the spring dance was announced, he waited after school one day near the parking lot exit where the students were picked up by their parents. When he saw Natalie walking out, he asked her if she’d like to go to the dance with him.

  She was polite but refused him, claiming she had a boyfriend. She told him she was sorry, and that if she didn’t have a boyfriend, she would have loved to go to the dance with him. James considered this a victory, and for the rest of the night, even though Natalie had turned him down, James felt good. For possibly the first time in his life, he felt like he was normal.

  That night, James had prayed to God that his actions wouldn’t alter the relationship he had with Natalie. She was really the only thing he looked forward to at school, and he genuinely hoped nothing would change between them. As they sat down next to each other the following morning, James was relieved to find that his prayers had been answered. Natalie was just as polite and nice to him as she always had been. They were still friends, and for that James was grateful.

  Leaving school that day, he was happy. He knew that if God wanted him to have a girlfriend, a girlfriend would appear for him, and Natalie simply wasn’t meant to fill that role. As he walked home, thinking about what the girl God chose for him would be like, three older boys approached him. They didn’t go to his middle school. They claimed to be in the ninth grade at one of the local high schools, and one of them claimed to be Natalie’s boyfriend. It was this boy who threw the first punch. Then the rest joined in. They threw James to the ground, kicking and punching him while Natalie’s boyfriend called him a faggot and told him to stay away from his girlfriend or he would find James and attack him this way every day.

  When they were finished, Natalie’s boyfriend spat in James’s face and threw his backpack over a fence into the backyard of a nearby house. He could hear the boys laughing as he lay there crying. With no other recourse, he prayed to God for retribution. As an adult, he realized that this kind of prayer should only be used in the direst of consequences, but in the seventh grade he had lacked the understanding to restrain himself. So he conjured in his mind Leviticus 24:20: If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; just as he has injured a man, so it shall be inflicted on him, and he asked God to uphold this biblical law.

  As he watched the boys cross the street, still laughing at him, a car struck two of them, including Natalie’s boyfriend. Not knowing what to do, and feeling guilty that he had somehow caused the accident, James ran all the way home. He found out the next day that both of the boys would be fine. Their wounds were superficial, some bruises and bumps, not a single broken bone, much like the injuries that James suffered at their hands. James saw no way that those boys could have avoided serious injury after being hit by a car—except for divine intervention. God had answered his prayer. And from that day forward James knew, in a concrete way, that God was capable of anything and that he was listening.

  As the afternoon of the first day of James’s three-day weekend stretched on, he tried praying and asking God to speak to him. He assured God that he was ready, that he was listening, just as he knew God had listened to him on that day in seventh grade. Even in his assurance he felt foolish. He realized that God knew him better than he knew himself, and he stopped praying immediately. He apologized to God for having been so arrogant as to tell God what he already knew, what he himself had created. James reminded himself that God had created every atom in his body, every thought in his mind, and every emotion he would ever feel. It must be insulting to God, he thought, when people told him that they were ready to hear his voice. God knew when they were ready, and he must have known that James wasn’t ready yet or he would have spoken. He vowed to remain silent for the duration of the three days, and he vowed never again to tell God what God already knew.

  The rest of the first day was long. James became very hungry and thirsty that evening, but he wanted to prove to God that hearing his voice meant more to him than the discomfort of fasting. He knew plenty of people had gone through far worse than giving up food and water for three days in God’s service. An image of Jesus on the cross materialized in James’s mind. Jesus was writhing in pain, but his face was at peace, and he was glowing with holy power of the divine. James thanked Jesus for his suffering and for saving himself and the entire human race.

  Eventually the shadows on the wall grew long and then bled into the darkness of night. James could hear people returning to their apartments from work. He heard the man who lived next to him unlock his door and then lock it again behind himself before turning on the television in his living room. James didn’t know this man, but he saw him from time to time. They’d exchange pleasantries every now and again, but they’d never had a conversation that lasted more than a few seconds. James wondered why he had never talked to this man at length or about anything of import. He lived only a few feet from this man and knew nothing about him. He vowed to God that he would be a better neighbor after this weekend.

  He listened to his neighbor for a few hours before he heard the television go silent and the door unlock and lock again, followed by his neighbor’s footsteps heading off into the night. James wondered where he was going and what the night held for him. His neighbor was roughly his own age, so it stood to reason that he was going out to a bar to meet women. He wondered if his neighbor was Christian. He decided he would ask him the next chance he got.

  As the first night wore on, he could hear his downstairs neighbor, a girl who was also around James’s age, having sex. He felt ashamed for listening, but he knew she wasn’t married based on her lack of a ring, which he noticed the first time he saw her, and James thought that it was necessary for a good Christian to be aware of the world of sin so that he or she could avoid it. When she and her partner finished, they stayed awake talking for an hour or so. James couldn’t make out what they were saying, but at one point he heard them laughing. Laughter after committing such a sin made James more than uneasy. He was disgusted.

  He eventually felt his eyelids getting heavy, but he fought off sleep. Sleep, like food and water, was just one more of the basic human necessities James had vowed to give up during these days to prove to God that he was ready to hear him. He was tempted to lie down on his couch, but he knew that temptation was likely the Devil’s work. Most Christians made the false assumption that the Devil worked on a large scale, that he was responsible for only the largest-scale sins, like the terrorist attacks on September 11 or shootings at schools, but James knew better. He knew that Satan was certainly responsible for the worst atrocities in human history, but he also knew that the Devil’s most heinous work was done on the small scale. It was the little temptati
ons to which people were more likely to give in that eventually accumulated and corrupted a person’s soul until they no longer had a relationship with God. And the worst part of that satanic strategy was that the temptations were so small that most people didn’t even notice them until it was too late.

  It could be anything from tempting a person to cheat on a diet until they woke up one day obese to tempting a person to cheat on their spouse until they woke up one day and were HIV positive. In this case, James knew that Satan was tempting him to recline on the couch, then he’d tempt him to close his eyes, and then he’d wake up the next morning having missed his opportunity to hear God’s voice. He rebuked Satan’s attempt by going into his bathroom and splashing cold water on his face. James remembered staying awake through the night a few times at different church camps in his youth, but he hadn’t done it as an adult. It was more difficult than he remembered, especially with no other outside stimulation to hold his attention. But he knew that the promise of God’s voice was all the stimulation he needed. He didn’t want to disappoint God, so he did some jumping jacks to get his blood pumping, and then returned to his living room and took his seat on the couch again.

  Listening closely to the world around him, James created small games to keep himself awake. He’d count the number of passing cars in multiples of seven. He’d trace the indentations on the top of his mouth with the tip of his tongue and try to count how many distinct shapes there were. He’d stare at the wood grain in his coffee table and try to determine how many individual trees were used to make it, by the placement and direction of the rings he could make out.

  Eventually the sky outside began to lighten. The first night was nearing its end. James went to his window and looked out at his apartment complex’s parking lot. His eyes were tired, and he had some doubts about his ability to stay awake for another forty-eight hours, but he cast them out of his mind as he saw the sun peeking above the tree line in the distance. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual sunrise, and it was clear to James that this was God’s way of recognizing his efforts, of letting James know that he was doing the right thing.

  James closed his eyes and let the sun hit his face as it rose in the early morning. He felt its warmth, and he knew that this was the embrace of God. It seemed unlikely to James that anyone else was up at that hour, enjoying this sunrise as he was, and so it stood to reason that this specific sunrise was designed by God just for him. It was the handshake before the conversation to come.

  As the morning of the second day wore on, hunger, thirst, and fatigue tested James at new levels. He knew he had peanut butter, jelly, and bread in his apartment. It would be very simple to prepare himself a sandwich and a glass of water. But he fought off the urge. He couldn’t let Satan win.

  By noon of the second day, if James stared at one spot on the wall long enough, he was able to see small white spots at the edges of his field of vision. He knew this was induced by the lack of food, water, and sleep, but he took some pride in it. He kept reminding himself that plenty of others, Jesus included, had suffered far worse in the service of God. He could do this. He would do this.

  Early on Saturday afternoon, James’s next-door neighbor returned to his apartment, leaving James to wonder where he might have gone for that long, where he might have slept. Within a few minutes James could hear his neighbor’s television, and this time he could make out every word of what was being said. It was some kind of news program and they were discussing the website that Pastor Preston had mentioned in his sermon the prior Sunday. James hadn’t given it much thought since that sermon. He decided that his strategy would be to ignore it totally. This was, he estimated, the best strategy against a satanic attempt to foul the world. But he welcomed the chance to have something to occupy his mind other than forcing himself to stay awake, and he reasoned that God wouldn’t have made the volume loud enough for him to hear if he wasn’t meant to listen.

  The news anchor was reporting that the identity of the girl who made the site had been discovered. Her name was Karen Holloway, and she was a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Philosophy. She had yet to give an interview about the matter, but the news anchor promised that they would have an exclusive one-hour conversation with her the following night, Sunday. The anchor went on to report that this girl was being both condemned for her actions by religious communities worldwide and idolized as a hero of feminism and secularism by smaller groups of people. James found it difficult to understand how anyone could view what she was doing as heroic. Even beyond the religious aspects of his objection, James thought that all people should have a basic human level of disgust for what she was doing, based on the involvement of an unborn child. At some point the anchor moved on to another story about American troops being officially drawn down in Afghanistan or some place near Afghanistan, and James lost interest.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Karen Holloway and what she was doing. He knew that ultimately God would see her punished, but he wished that this punishment would be far more immediate. He was confused as to why God would even allow something like this to happen at all and then he reminded himself that God worked in mysterious ways. It was not for any human being to understand what he does, or when or why he does it. It was only to be accepted as his divine plan and not questioned. God had some specific purpose for Karen Holloway’s website, and that purpose would be revealed when God decided it was time.

  Eventually James heard his neighbor leave again, but he failed to turn off his television before doing so. James first found this terribly inconsiderate, but then he realized that this must be part of God’s plan for him, so he began to listen very closely to everything being reported on the news. Reports on wars, disasters, murders, police brutality, and worldwide civil unrest seemed to James like clear evidence that the end times were close at hand, and he began to understand why it was that God had guided his neighbor to leave the television on. James felt that God was giving him a special warning, a context that would help whatever message God had for him make perfect sense.

  Aside from the stories of the various types of strife and misery in the world, the story of Karen Holloway and her upcoming interview on the network seemed to be the news item discussed the most. Her story seemed to push through the others, taking on a central importance. For James, though, Karen Holloway’s story was linked to the other stories. Her actions were evil and spiritually damaging to society, and James was surprised that none of the reporters made the connection between her actions and the other news reports.

  The second night came and passed, but James’s neighbor didn’t return, leaving James to wonder again where he might have stayed. His disappearance, however, meant that his television droned on, exposing him to a full night’s coverage of Karen Holloway and her website, with news reports and commentary in constant rotation. By the time the sun rose on the third day, James was in a state of extreme hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. He stood at his window and felt the sun on his face, as he had the day before. He closed his eyes and imagined God’s warm embrace as the light hit his face. It was difficult to open his eyes after closing them. But he did open them, and when he did, the sun looked more glorious than it ever had before. The colors were richer and brighter. The sky itself seemed to hum and pulse. The clouds moved faster than usual, and he thought he could see angels shining in the far distance above them.

  The smell of someone cooking bacon in his apartment complex snapped him out of his visions. His stomach ached, but he had become used to the pain. It was almost comforting to him. He knew that pain was just an obstacle to God’s voice, and the more intense it became, the closer he was to hearing God speak.

  He was dizzy as he walked back from the window to his couch again and he felt that his lips were dry and cracking. But like the hunger, James knew this pain to be evidence of his spiritual journey to God over the course of these three days. As he sat back down on his couch he realized something that should have been obvious to him but th
at he had overlooked. God had given him three days. He knew there was nothing left to chance in God’s plan, nothing arbitrary. He was reminded of Luke 18:33: They will flog him with a whip and kill him, but on the third day he will rise.

  This was in reference to Jesus’s resurrection. James knew he wasn’t as important as Jesus, but he thought it was logical that God would use the period of three days to prepare a person for change. Jesus’s body had remained entombed for three days before he rose again, proving his divine nature and ascending to heaven where he remained by his father’s side for eternity. James saw himself in this way. He had remained entombed, in a way, in his apartment for three days, awaiting his transition into a new realm, a new understanding of the world and his place in it. In his exhaustion he felt more certain than ever that God would speak to him on this third day.

  The hours stretched on and James listened to his neighbor’s television as the various reporters counted down to their network’s exclusive interview with Karen Holloway. James was curious to hear it, curious to see what possible reasoning she would give to justify her actions. He would listen carefully, though, so as not to allow Satan’s thinking to take hold in his own mind. He was certain that this interview could be nothing less than Satan’s attempt to poison as many unsuspecting minds as possible with his foul propaganda.

  The shadows grew longer as the afternoon faded, but James didn’t question why God had not yet spoken to him. He knew it would happen before the sun set, because it had to happen on the third day. It simply had to. He looked at the clock on his phone and saw that it was 5:49 P.M. The interview with Karen Holloway was to begin in eleven minutes. James moved on his couch to the spot where he could best hear his neighbor’s television and settled in, welcoming the pain in his stomach and the dried skin on the top of his mouth. As he scraped his tongue across the back of his teeth he heard it: the voice of God.