by Brian Hodge
With coaxing, with the stiff awkward care only a new father could exhibit, he accepted the bundle. Smiling and cooing at his son—
And oh, such a change of temperament. The baby didn’t like leaving his mother’s breast at all, not this soon, and he let out a wail, yet even that sounded like music. One little arm squirmed free of the makeshift jacket bunting, waving with infantile rage.
One tiny hand coming to rest upon his father’s throat.
His eyes widened, her husband, the father of their child … and for a moment, without knowing precisely why, intuition said that something beyond knowing had passed between son and father. In that instant she knew fear, something that had no place here, not this day, of all days…
Children were such strange creatures.
All that unformed potential. Open to anything.
He gave the baby back.
And rubbed his belly as if it ached.
V
REDEMPTION
Perfection is this: On seeing a leper, you feel such compassion for him that you would rather bear his sufferings yourself, than that he should.
— Saint Bernadino
Chapter 43
The aftermath of that first Sunday in November followed a pattern tried and true. Saturation news coverage was immediate, on every TV station, front page, and news magazine cover in the nation. The second wave soon followed, editorial columns and reflections on megalomania and unsatisfactory attempts by people who did not understand the situation to make sense of it. And since no one understood, since a definitive explanation was the most elusive component of the entire matter, theories sprang up like weeds in springtime.
Some thought it a terrorist attack, though no group or individual came forth to claim credit. Some thought it an aerial bombing, though that didn’t explain the final images of the telecast before the satellite uplink was terminated. Others speculated that a rival evangelist may have commissioned an attack out of jealousy over Donny Dawson’s newfound, unprecedented fame. While others, making the inevitable Jim Jones/Jonestown Massacre comparison, accused Donny himself of being the mad architect.
Coverage eventually dwindled, shifting out of the spotlight and steadily further from consciousness and conversational mentions, until few spoke of it at all, except to shake their heads and say, “Wasn’t that awful?” It was old news, with fresher catastrophes pressing to fill the void.
There were those, however, who would not so easily dismiss it, had they understood their connection to it at all. Tens of thousands across the country, as surprised as their doctors at a sudden onset of illness. Sometimes treatable, sometimes not, sometimes stubborn in responding to medication. More patients went into the isolation of quarantine than at any time since the early years of the twentieth century and its flu epidemics.
But perhaps the strangest — yet most inevitable — irony was the underground cult that sprang from the flames. Entrepreneurs managing to scrounge recordings of the final show, before abrupt termination, with grainy dubs commanding handsome prices. Human vultures lost no time in descending upon the site itself, and shortly thereafter, ads began to appear in the backs of less savory publications such as The National Vanguard, offering for sale holy relics from the devastated chapel. Ashes, wood, and masonry chips. Even genuine fragments of bone rumored to have come from the Arm of the Martyred Apostle himself and possess special healing powers.
In truth, all such bodily fragments — and there were many — had been whisked to forensics labs, then cemeteries. But when there was a market, a chunk of beef or pork bone, artfully charred, would do just as well. And true believers would gladly pay for the delusion.
In death, Donny Dawson became even more of a commodity than he’d been in life.
As a rule, holidays alone sucked, but these days, a lot of former rules were now exceptions.
Personal mail, for one. He used to read it once, then throw it away. But for the third time in as many days since its arrival, Mike slowly read the letter, replaced it in the envelope, saved it for tomorrow. As if it took daily reassurance to believe that, all things considered, Amanda was getting along all right. Or so she let on. He supposed it could be a false front. When it came to deception by mail, she’d had an opportunity to learn from a master. But he believed, for now. And wondered when she would be well enough to come to south Florida and he could judge the success of recuperation for himself.
Thanksgiving, dinner for one, preferring it that way. Tacos and beer, hardly traditional fare — picture Pilgrims and Indians powering that down — although he supposed it wasn’t so much the food that was eaten, rather the spirit in which it was swallowed. He trusted he had the right idea this year, where it counted.
The football games had been a constant fixture on the TV, for hours, but he didn’t know who was playing, much less who won, who lost. No bets placed this year, another holiday tradition dying without a whimper. Only newer priorities, newer questions.
Why me? Why did I live? Why not Ramon? No closer to answers than the day after the Dawson Ministries Meltdown; catchy moniker, and damn whoever coined it, and every callous pair of lips that repeated it with a smug thrill. And most of all, why were we the ones that laid it all on the line to begin with?
Why? Ramon might have answered. Know anybody else we could’ve talked into it? As good an answer as any; they’d been the ones handy, and to think about it in retrospect was pointless.
But the trouble was, when you had little else but time, you had room for a new obsession. And time he had plenty of. He was jobless, had lost a best friend, needed his own recuperation time, and could no longer engage in those meaningless trysts of rampant hormones that had once occupied so much time and energy.
Money, that too was a worry, though ironically by his own choice. In the weeks since the Meltdown, the offers had come pouring in to tell of his part in what had happened. All the major tabloids had come sucking around, and plenty of magazines and electronic media types, and would-be co-writers claiming book deals, all sniffing like hungry mongrels and many waving cash promises in hopes of exclusive rights. And some of those amounts looked attractive, the more zeroes the merrier.
But it was money he could never have spent with a clear conscience, that would have swelled his bank account like a malignant cyst. He told what he had to, what he chose, to the officials of justice who demanded it, and spoke to no one else.
Then there was the other thing the jackals wanted. Word had gotten out, somehow. Word always did. So Mike hobbled into his kitchen. Plunked a metal bowl onto the stovetop, started a small fire in it. On went the exhaust fan, out went the smoke.
And into the flames went the first of nineteen photos.
In the gratitude of Thanksgiving, he knew that the attention paid him, however unwanted, was already on a rapid wane. Amanda Dawson had been less fortunate, her life and sorrows given microscopic scrutiny on a national level.
Sometimes she was painted as a prima donna, spoiled rotten by years of luxury. Other times as a cunning harridan who controlled her husband as a puppet. Still other portrayals depicted a spineless victim, walled into hiding by a husband and tyrant who fashioned himself a demigod.
If she had even once spoken out in self-defense, Mike was unaware of it. But as one who vehemently avoided the press, he wasn’t surprised. Maybe she knew the same thing he did: that in the end, people would believe exactly what they wanted.
In which he was no different. But he knew her truth better than anyone, and that all those other assholes had gotten it wrong. And that he could hold this truth close to his heart, where lies could not taint it, where the past could not break it.
Two more pictures went into the bowl, curling brown at the edges, then blackening, falling to ash and powder.
Somebody had learned of the photos he’d taken of her in mid-coma. Tempting sums had been offered. And refused.
Two more up in smoke, and he hadn’t felt this good about a simple act of selflessness in far too long.
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It won’t set you free, he thought, hoping she could hear, but at least it breaks one more chain.
Amanda had come through her fire, and lived to refuse to talk about it with those who didn’t matter. More power to her. So as he watched the pictures burn, one by one and two by two, Mike knew that, at the very least, she’d earned the right to be known for what she now was.
Not remembered for what somebody thought she had been.
The widow Dawson — it had such an ugly ring to it. She no longer even wanted the name, and pray God she could better cope with a new one.
As the weeks passed, back home with her parents in Little Rock, Arkansas, Amanda wondered if she hadn’t already grieved the loss of her husband long before he had died. She had no experience in knowing how becoming a widow should feel, but this couldn’t be it. Not that she didn’t hurt. Not that the pain didn’t run all the way to the core — all the things she should have said, all the things she’d never done, all the things they had wanted for each other and forgotten or ignored. These would not go away.
But the overall feeling was more like hearing that an old and dear friend with whom she’d lost touch had died. A friend who had lost touch with her and himself at the same time. Which was the more tragic of the two, she didn’t yet know.
Since release from the hospital and returning to her private life — plagued by intrusion though it was — she’d spent a lot of days pondering the triumvirate that had brought about the catastrophe that bore her name. Donny. Gabe. Paul. Abuse by organized religion and the church had a long, inglorious history, and each of these three seemed to embody a larger truth that Amanda had come to despise.
Donny, so wrapped up in gain and glory that he used the church for profit and self-deification. The latest in a long line of those who had earnestly longed to illuminate God, and then, after somehow getting the priorities confused, could illuminate only himself. He could never have done it without the aid of his believers, though, and for this she knew she was as much at fault as anyone.
Next, Gabe, revamping the church into his own vehicle for defining himself by destruction. Fundamentally no different from the gilded savages of the Crusades and the Inquisition. Gabe had merely updated, and turned it inward.
And, lastly, Paul. Coming along with the purest of motives, only to have them subverted by the others. An innocent with no true grasp of his nature, who might have found a path of truth if only his desperate bid for sanctuary hadn’t led him straight into exploitation. Which happened all the time, only the results were rarely so spectacular.
Surely Paul was its ultimate casualty, and she supposed it was for him she grieved as much as anyone.
If he was even dead.
He should have been, by all rights. Her imagination still quaked in awe over the magnitude of the explosion that had leveled the chapel. But doubts lingered.
In mid-November, a man in Oklahoma City, a volunteer rescue worker from that day, had spoken up because he claimed he could no longer keep silent. Dreams and conscience demanded it. Telling anyone who would listen about a young man who had crawled from beneath tons of debris, naked as the day he was born, then stolen his coat and forty dollars, and run off. Unharmed.
General consensus said this rescuer had been suffering too much stress by midnight. He was routinely dismissed as confused, deluded, or, by those with more cynicism than charity, as a self-serving publicity hound.
But Amanda hungered to believe, wondering how this Samaritan would respond to questions she would have liked to put to him.
Did he look like he was trying to carry the weight of two worlds on his own? she would ask. Did he have these shy eyes that could still cut through your soul? Did he look like he didn’t completely belong in this world?
Amanda thought she knew what the answers would be. Hoped would be.
But she possessed far more questions, and they plagued her daily life, her bed and table and the air she breathed. What of the future, and why could she not feel nearly so confident of its answers? Her parents’ home was a temporary solution at best. Someday soon, her life would be her own again. For the first time in years.
God alone knew how enormously frightening that was.
And while Florida may not have all the answers — or any — it would at least be as sensible a place as any to begin looking.
Even in the heart of desolation, bad news was still quick to arrive. Gavin Bainbridge knew this, that it would always find him.
Late November in the Scottish Highlands, where the winters were wet. Warmer than might be expected, so far north in the world, but so long as those Gulf Stream winds blew in from the southwest, he would have no complaints.
After all, he got a longer golf season out of it.
Damnable game, this golf. He didn’t even truly enjoy it, in, say, the same sense as he could derive enjoyment from hearth and fire, book and brandy. But the game was so bloody addicting. Always trying to do better, shave off a stroke or two.
Gavin played alone, mornings. Standing on the estate’s nine-hole course, sometimes pausing between holes to stare off the distance. Barren rocky summits, sculpted by age, by the rain of eons, by glaciers that carved this land when humanity was still a new idea, ripe with potential.
One acquired an appreciation for the passage of time in land like this. The inveterate patience of an earth whose seasons could be neither rushed nor bargained with. They could only be counted upon to occur, with or without you, to them it made no difference. Of man they took no notice.
Sometimes he liked to remind himself that he was looking at the same land that had been farmed and fought over by the early Scots from centuries ago, when they had divided into fierce clans for protection against one another, against the land itself. Groups that were no longer needed, because times had so drastically changed.
Yet, meanwhile, The Quorum had continued.
Gabriel Matthews — could they have been so blind a decade ago, not spotting problems with that fellow? Or had all his passion for truth and his potential been genuine, and then been twisted by the years of solitude and deceptions engineered to maintain secrecy? Warped by those years the same as centuries changed the land. Stable at any one glance, the differences visible only when one was able to compare then and now.
The erosion of a soul.
While The Quorum went on.
Gavin had long ago given himself over to the Kantian philosophy that ultimate good came out of doing one’s duty, and that the recognition of inconsistency served as a basis for knowing that duty. In his experience, it had melded with all things Quorum remarkably well.
How dreadful, this late in life, to be forced to rethink his very reasons for existence. Wondering if perhaps the world no longer needed Scapegoats and the Quorum, that these two minuscule factors of humanity continued as self-perpetuating anachronisms for the amusement of gods who thought them all fools. Because humanity’s evolution had rendered obsolete a spiritual bargain made forty-five centuries past.
A Scapegoat of disease was no longer needed when such godlike power was now manifest in a different way. The human intellect was now sufficient to understand the complexities of physiology, chemistry, biology, and more.
And what of the others? What of famine? Given the advancement of agriculture, no society need starve. Ethiopia was more a victim of economics and bureaucracy than drought. And what of war? Perhaps war was needed still, given man’s refusal to outgrow it. Hegel had speculated that the end of wars would bring about a stagnation far worse than fighting, that only conflict spurred continuing development — and Gavin feared that he was right.
Finally, what of death? That most fundamental mystery, with no more solid answers known now than at the dawn of civilization. Perhaps there would always exist the need to appease death.
The only problem was, death had a tendency to go by so many other names.
Chapter 44
Rush hour, morning drive time as they used to call it in his onetime professio
n. Heavy commuter traffic despite the weather, and he was the only pedestrian on the eastbound shoulder of I-70. A solitary figure hunched inside a parka against gusting snow and wind that bit to draw blood. Weighed down by a backpack that looked to be holding every bit its limit. His tennis shoes were pitifully inadequate for a late February as cranky and vindictive as a bear roused too early from hibernation.
One more weak smudge of color against a world gone white and gray, he stopped to readjust the weight of his pack. Staring at these fringes of the city proper, enough of those suburbs, and still Paul didn’t feel as if he were really in St. Louis again. This could be anywhere.
He should know. He’d been there.
There had been a lot of cities, a lot of towns, in the near-four months since he had, like Samson, brought the house down atop his head. All running together into one mental megalopolis. Maybe because of the people, all the same, wherever they were.
At least the ones he was looking for.
Paul hadn’t kept track of how many he had healed since leaving Oklahoma City in smoke and dust and ash. Healers didn’t count, he’d decided when this thing felt new again even though it wasn’t, but by now his tally must have reached into the thousands. He had wandered a winter landscape, grimly accepting the fact that he couldn’t end his own life, and with that the case, he could at least commit to atoning for all his sins, culminating with the first Sunday of November. Seeking out the national refuse and trying to do one little thing that might give the most hopeless a fighting chance against a life as transient as his own. Soup kitchens and free clinics, back alleys and wretched taverns, the dismal clubhouses of people who hurt, who’d given up on life, who were waiting only to die.