Revelation

by Wilson, Carter;

  Harden had no idea if what he was now thinking would free him or seal his fate, but it somehow felt right. He needed to poke a stick at the creature in the forest. The one hiding behind the tree with bared teeth. The one watching him all this time.

  He opened his eyes and wiped away her words, then scribbled new ones. He could barely read them himself, and could only hope Emma understood.

  She peered at the ground and squinted.

  When she finished, she looked up and nodded, and in that moment Harden knew she understood what he was going to do. Emma stood and walked toward the small desk.

  “Harden,” she said. Her voice was now at normal volume.

  “Yes, Emma?”

  “No matter what happens to us, I want you to know I will always love you.”

  The words stirred in him something he couldn’t identify. He wasn’t sure of the entire mix, but the ingredients of excitement and fear were certainly present.

  “I know,” he finally responded. “I love you, too, Emma.”

  It was only moments later that the light in the cell went out, and they came and took Emma away. In her place they left a fresh typewriter, the same style as the first, removing the one Harden had broken.

  Harden wasted no time. The story had to continue, because it was the only hope they had.

  The campus only showed struggling signs of life; between the bitter weather and the winter break, the snowy sidewalks crisscrossing the quad were cold and lonely, tread upon only occasionally by those who remained behind . . .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  JANUARY 1990

  The campus only showed struggling signs of life; between the bitter weather and the winter break, the snowy sidewalks crisscrossing the quad were cold and lonely, tread upon only occasionally by those who remained behind.

  I was no longer on break. I had no school to return to for another ten days, but Coyote was intent on spending our time before classes formulating his plan. His plan to become God.

  I didn’t completely understand how serious he was until our second night back. Over Italian takeout in the apartment, Coyote said, “It’s going to be called the Revelation.”

  “What is?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Your plan?

  “Our plan.”

  “You really want to do this?”

  He ignored my question. “No fancy name. Nothing tricky or cute. The title of your story captured it perfectly. Just enough to connote something religious, but nothing in the name should give away what the Revelation is all about.”

  I bit into a warm breadstick soaked in garlic butter. “And what exactly is this Revelation going to be about?”

  “It has no meaning.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the whole point—the meaninglessness of it all. It’s where you left off in your story.”

  “I didn’t say religion was meaningless.”

  “You argued the difficulties of starting a new religion in modern time. You didn’t consider the message, but I say the message isn’t important. It’s the sense of belonging that drives people to faith. The sense of wanting to believe in something they can’t control, which, ironically, is what people need to feel in control. Religion isn’t about salvation or enlightenment. It’s just about getting the word out.”

  “But there has to be a word. There has to be something.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” I said. “How can the message not matter?”

  “Look at Scientology,” he countered. “The foundation of the religion is science fiction. Their belief system revolves around a person’s thetan regaining a state of total freedom. I mean, what does that even mean? It’s completely nebulous, but they’ve ironed it out into a full-blown religion with tens of thousands of members, many of whom are hard-core devotees willing to spend their life savings—or even die—for their belief system.”

  “What’s the point?” I asked. “Why do you really want to do this?”

  Coyote plunged a fork into a Styrofoam container of pasta. “To see if I can do it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I hadn’t forgotten that Coyote was a murderer, or so he had confessed to us. When he smashed in the head of a boy in the woods, he held all the control in that moment. He could decide whether the boy lived or died, and he chose death. What reflection is it on me that, even after all I learned about Coyote, I still wanted to be close to him?

  His eyes narrowed in the slightest. “I want to see what it takes for someone to follow someone else. I want to see what kind of people will follow me. Do whatever I ask of them.”

  “What are you going to ask them to do?” I almost feared the answer, and was a bit relieved when he didn’t have one.

  “I’m not sure.” Though I suspected he was sure, but not yet willing to share.

  “And what’s your goal?” I asked as I poured some wine into one of the crystal glasses Coyote had contributed to the apartment. Without those, I’d be drinking from either a Solo cup or a Steelers coffee mug. “I mean, how will you know if you’ve succeeded?”

  There was no hesitation. “A thousand members.”

  “Are you serious? You think you can just make up a religion and get a thousand students to buy into it?”

  “No. Not just students. It has to spread, even if just a little. It has to multiply like a virus. We’ll have meetings, post flyers, make phone calls, even go door to door if we have to. If I can get a thousand members, I’ll know my experiment worked.”

  “And how will you define a member? If you make them give you money, wouldn’t that be fraud or something? You’re basically presenting yourself as a faith healer.”

  “No,” he said. “No money. Nothing like that, though I imagine donations will be important at some point. I was thinking a member will be someone who takes an oath. An oath of allegiance.”

  “Allegiance to what?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew the question should have been phrased allegiance to whom.

  Coyote didn’t answer. Instead, he pointed his fork at me. “I want you completely involved. You will be the secretary of the Revelation, and I want you to document every step of the process. I want you to write down everything we do, and help establish the Rules.”

  “The Rules?”

  “We need a gospel. Something that outlines what the Revelation is all about. It needs to be beautifully vague, with just enough words of inspiration to make people think all of it means something. Like I said, it doesn’t have to really be about anything, but it’s meaninglessness has to be well stated. Like a politician’s speech.”

  “You want me to write a catechism,” I said.

  He looked at me, as if surprised I knew what that even was. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Then you don’t want me to be a secretary,” I added. “You want me to be an apostle.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “I know you do.”

  He looked at me with a slight twinge of threat, as if I looked deeper inside him than was permitted. “What does that mean?” he asked.

  I took a large enough sip of the Chianti for it to be a gulp, then choked it down. “This is crazy. You drove all the way to Pennsylvania to bring me back here. At first, I thought you were just bored and wanted some company. Now you’re sinking all your energy into this idea that . . . I mean, shit, Coyote. It was just a story I wrote. An idea. A random thought that I wanted to squeeze a few thousand words from.”

  “Sounds like the way most really good ideas start,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I can’t tell how serious you are about this.”

  “I’m completely serious. I fully intend to do this.”

  “But . . . but if you really want to do what you’re talking about, it’s going to take a lot of your time.”

  “I realize that.”

  “You’ll probably
have to sacrifice school time to do it. I mean, Christ, a thousand members?”

  Coyote nodded. “A thousand.”

  “And what if you can’t get your schoolwork done?”

  “That’s a worthy sacrifice.”

  “It is?” I had lost my appetite at this point. “I mean, is this all just an ego thing?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s a part of it. There’s a part of me that wants to see how far I can take this. A part that wants others to follow in a path I’ve laid out for them.” He gave a small smile, the kind usually meant to hide something else. “I want to see if I can get others to do what I want.”

  “Like me being your secretary?”

  “I was hoping you would want to do that. You should be involved. It’s your idea, after all.”

  “But you don’t want me to be the Messiah.”

  “I won’t be the Messiah. Just a salesman.” Coyote had also stopped eating. “You will be the secretary. But I need someone else who can play the role of convert number one. Someone who can be the test subject, because my word won’t be enough. It’s like those commercials telling you how to make all kinds of money working out of your own home. They need to show you the actors claiming to make twenty grand a month.”

  I considered this. “Emma?” I hoped he would say no, because I didn’t want to see her involved in this. I didn’t want to see her as one of Coyote’s apostles.

  He dismissed the idea almost immediately. “I don’t know if she would want to be involved. She’s not always so . . . supportive of my ideas.”

  I wondered what that meant.

  “You have someone in mind?” I asked.

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “Who?”

  Now he gave me a genuine smile. “Someone who has a huge sense of adventure with little regard to consequence.”

  “Shit, Coyote. You just described yourself.”

  He shook his head. “Not as smart.”

  I looked at my half-eaten food and conjured names in my head. It only took a few seconds before I realized about whom he was speaking. I looked up.

  “Jacob.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  AUGUST 1990

  Harden didn’t know how much time had passed since Emma had been taken from the cell. If he had to guess—which was all he could do—he would say two weeks. He could only base that on his writing.

  The words on the paper were the metronome of Harden’s existence. He clicked and clacked, and with the mechanics of a decades-old machine and a fading ribbon the letters were born on the crisp white pages. They were reliable. They always came. There was no writer’s block in the cell. There were only thoughts, fears, and the punching of ink-laden metal on paper.

  A couple thousand words a day, Harden figured. Not a lot, but they were solid. Vibrant. They told the story he was expected to tell. He fed the pages to Baby Face every day, making sure they were as clean as his conditions would allow.

  Harden thought it important the reader had little difficulty with his prose.

  As he sat on his only chair, he closed his eyes, just for a moment. Watching the swift and flickering sidesteps of imaginary monsters along the inside of his eyelids, he searched for what would come next. There was little left to say, but a well of words awaited him to reach down and scoop them up. He dipped, then pulled. Dipped, then pulled. And then he had them.

  Harden opened his eyes and resumed typing. As the words flowed slowly but with ease, he thought that it didn’t seem so cold in the cell that day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  JANUARY 1990

  The idea of taping Coyote was an easy one. Innocent, even. He wanted me to record everything that happened so we could eventually shape all of his words in The Book, whatever the hell that was going to be.

  I bought a Sony Walkman, a small microphone, and a stack of blank cassettes at the campus store. I thought about making Coyote pay for it—he wouldn’t have objected in the least to the request since I could tell him I was doing this all as part of my secretarial duties. Then I decided I didn’t want him to know I was taping our conversations. I didn’t want him biased. I wanted Coyote to be Coyote, inasmuch as he ever was around other people. Truth be told, I’d rather have a machine that recorded thoughts, but even if such a device existed, I’d probably be too scared to use it with Coyote for fear of what I might uncover. The Walkman was fairly small but not invisible, so I would have to use it with caution if I wanted it to remain a secret.

  It was late on a cold and still January night that I almost recorded one of the turning points of my life. Funny how the word “almost” seems to spring up on me like that. I’m an “almost” kind of guy, and I think that’s one of my biggest flaws. Coyote was never an “almost” guy. Coyote always just did. I always almost did.

  That night, I was alone in my apartment, Coyote being out somewhere unknown by me, and my other roommates a few days shy of returning for the spring semester. A lonely night. I had the energy to do a lot of things, but my mind kept drifting toward nothingness. I hacked away at my computer for a while, trying to establish my secretarial duties for the Revelation. To me, it was still just a joke, and my efforts to help Coyote organize it were halfhearted.

  As I floundered over the words on the screen, I had a sudden urge to crack open the front door of my apartment. Most of the other students were not yet back from break, and leaving the door slightly open might let anyone around know that I was here and bored out of my skull. Opening the door, I figured, might actually summon a friend. It sounds stupid, I know. But sometimes those things work out for me.

  That night, it did.

  I soon tired of my writing and played a little with my new recorder, testing the sound quality from different distances. It picked things up pretty well, I discovered. The moment I heard the knocking at the door and single word “Hello?” echoing throughout the apartment, I turned the recorder off.

  I wonder if I would have listened to that tape if I had kept the machine running that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Emma.”

  I said her name the way I always heard it in my head when I thought of her. I wondered if she could sense the change.

  “Hey, Harden.”

  She stood in the open doorway but asked me permission to come in. It was possibly the silliest request I had ever heard. I told her to please come in.

  I had almost forgotten that, like me, she had returned to campus well before classes began. I wondered why she was here, but I didn’t fret about it. Looking for Coyote, probably.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “I know. I was with him for a while, and then he . . . he went out.”

  “By himself ?”

  She shook her head, and the way her hair jostled gave her a devastating sexiness.

  “I don’t know. He just didn’t seem to want to be with me anymore.” The words floated at me laced with melancholy. “He’s obsessed with this religion thing,” she said. I realized I had only seen her once since I had been back, and I hadn’t really considered that Coyote would have told her of his plan.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s all my fault, too. I wrote that stupid story.”

  “If it wasn’t this, it would certainly be something else.” She walked to the center of the small living room before turning around. “It’s all he’s been talking about since he’s been back.”

  I shut the door, happy I’d cracked it open, and kind of amazed leaving it ajar actually seemed to work. But now I didn’t want anyone else coming over. I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I offered Emma a drink. She asked for a beer, but we didn’t have any, so I opened Coyote’s bottle of Merlot. I decided to join her, and we sat on the couch together as we slowly sipped our wine. There were three cushions on the couch, but the unoccupied one wasn’t between us.

  “This isn’t just some kind of stupid prank, you know.” Her cheeks were still flushed from the cold outside. “He’s been writing down a who
le business plan for this thing. How he’s going to do it, who he’s going to target. Jacob is going to be his first convert. The one who’s supposed to show what happens when enlightenment occurs.”

  “It’s a good choice,” I said. “If Jacob can suddenly demonstrate any kind of humanity or intelligence, a lot of people would start believing in miracles.”

  She laughed feebly before lapsing into silence for some time, lost in thought. When she spoke again, her voice was hardly above a whisper.

  “I’m lonely.”

  Such a simple phrase. But goddamn, did my head start spinning from it.

  She turned to me.

  “I think I’ve been playing a role ever since I started dating Coyote. I don’t love him. I never have. I’ve never been myself with him.”

  “I think Coyote likes to have his friends be exactly as he wants them to be,” I said.

  She nodded. “For some reason I can’t bring myself to break up with him. Not yet, at least. And I think he knows that.”

  Her words dug at me. “You can do anything you want to.”

  “With him, that doesn’t seem to be true.” She took another sip of wine. “Do you really want to be a part of what he’s going to do?”

  “I don’t really have anything better to do.”

  “That’s not a good answer. You’re in your final semester of college.” She circled the rim of the wine glass with her finger. “I think . . . I think you’re scared not to.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “We’re all this way with him. I think we’re partly scared of missing out, and partly scared of angering him.”

  I wanted to tell her it wasn’t true but I couldn’t. It made me feel weak, but at least I now knew I wasn’t alone. I was scared of Coyote. Yes, some of it was that I was afraid to miss out on what happened in his life; I was, honestly, infatuated with him. Life was more interesting when he was around. Yet I couldn’t deny that the idea of defying him gave me serious pause.