Paige swallowed.
Evelyn eyed both girls, then. “That was scary enough,” she said. “My own son keeping so much from me. I demanded to speak with a superior, only to be told that the counselor had already provided more information than they were legally able to give me.” Evelyn drew in a sharp breath, steeling herself against her frustrations. “Well, those assholes didn’t know who they were dealing with. I can understand some bureaucratic chicken-shits at a university not wanting to say something that might get them fired, but that sure as hell wasn’t going to be the end. So, I went down to the police station, looking for the report that was filed that night.”
Evelyn shook her head again, as though she still didn’t believe what had followed. “I thought they were incompetent at first, because they couldn’t pull up any public record regarding anything to do with my Jonathan. A violent attack and hospitalization with life-threatening injuries and no record? Not even a 9-1-1 call. I went to the emergency room. Same story. They wouldn’t disclose medical records, but I was at least able to get one of the nurses to confirm that there was no record on file to disclose.”
Paige was getting a sinking feeling in her stomach. She felt herself starting to look as troubled as Evelyn the more she listened.
“Is this possible?” the mother finally asked, her voice trembling. “This is the kind of thing you see in conspiracy movies. Files getting removed by clandestine government organizations, some type of cover-up. It’s ridiculous! How could Jonathan be involved in anything like that?”
Paige faltered. It was all new information to her as well. Added to what she did know, she couldn’t look the mother in the face and tell her she was being paranoid. The most disconcerting of all of it were the things Paige knew she could trust. The 9-1-1 recording, for instance. Collin and Hayden had made that call, had spoken to the police and EMTs, told her that they had been present when Jonathan had told his story.
“Paige, if it’s dangerous, I understand,” Evelyn said. “But if I am crazy, please just tell me I’m crazy—tell me I’m paranoid.”
She couldn’t think fast enough with Evelyn staring at her. Was it possible? She had always assumed that Jonathan cutting himself off from the world was his unhealthy way of dealing with what had happened to him that night. Had he been lying to them to hide something far bigger than they had imagined?
Had he been trying to protect them?
Paige’s storming thoughts came into focus. She found the words creeping out of her mouth before the warning that they were safer unsaid. “Grant Morgan,” she said, looking at Leah. “What if he wasn’t crazy?”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MONDAY| OCTOBER 10, 2005 | 9:30 PM | SEATTLE
“IT’S A MORAL gray area,” Jonathan heard Collin saying to Hayden on the other side of the door.
Rylee had been following Jonathan out into the living room from the garage, only to have him stop on the last step as he reached for the door handle. He retracted his hand and turned to her.
“So, before we go in there,” Jonathan said. “Where do you stand on the whole Christianity thing?”
Rylee frowned at the question. “Well, my parents are fairly religious, but I never really took to it. Why?”
Jonathan’s face contorted as he deliberated on how to answer. “Well, you’re free to do as you please, of course, but when Collin and Hayden get into it, they tend to try and get you to take sides. I caution a strict non-engagement policy.”
“Oh, got it,” she said. “We’re Switzerland.”
He nodded and grinned before opening the door for her.
“I guess it’s believable,” Hayden said. “But it bothers me.”
Collin nodded. “I think it’s because, ethically speaking, the antichrist might be in the right. The only reason it seems otherwise is because Jesus shows up and performs a miracle.”
Hayden’s hand rubbed the back of his head as Collin noticed Jonathan and Rylee entering.
“Hey, can you two spare a moment?” Collin asked.
“Sure,” Jonathan said, exchanging a look with Rylee. “Superhero-Jesus comic book problems?”
His roommates nodded thoughtfully while Rylee, noticing a stack of library books and DVDs on the table, started examining the various titles and subject matter. “Plague and zombie outbreaks?” she asked. “I don’t remember zombies in the Gospels.”
“Well, technically, Jesus rises from the grave…” Collin stopped himself. “Never mind, it’s not what we need to get your opinion on.”
“We’re working on what we call the ‘trigger event,’” Hayden explained. “Heroes and villains all need an experience, the onset of their moral journey. Right now, we are working on the moment that Damian starts down the road to antichristhood.”
Jonathan looked back and forth between Collin and Hayden. “Okay,” he said, holding up a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus. “But I don’t think the bubonic plague was around at the time either.”
Both roommates nodded at him.
“The event we’re working on starts with a pestilence. We’ll probably be vague on the specific illness,” Collin said. “Leprosy would be more thematically biblical, but we were thinking it should be something that kills faster.”
For the next few minutes, Jonathan and Rylee listened as Collin and Hayden launched into a CliffsNotes version of the storyline they had been playing with. It started out with Jesus as a teenager, before the ministry recorded in the Gospels. Christ and his followers travel to a small village where the inhabitants are suffering from a lethal disease. This is where Damian and Jesus first cross paths.
Damian, despite his youth, has been placed into a leadership role. The people he governs respect him for having shown wisdom beyond his years in the past. On arrival, Jesus finds that the villagers in the town who are sick have been quarantined on Damian’s authority. The townspeople tell him that Damian has been ruthless in enforcing his quarantine—that loved ones are forbidden and forcefully kept from caring for their sick family members. Any contact with the sick results in immediate quarantine, even if those making contact show no symptoms.
The roommates stopped when Jonathan started giving them a skeptical look.
“What?” Collin asked before proceeding.
“Damian’s insight into the spread of infection seems like a stretch for a Hebrew guy growing up in, what?” Jonathan asked. “17 C.E.?”
Collin nodded. “Yeah, we figured that Damian and Jesus, being who they are, will have insights into things that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to learn from their elders. It’s part of why Damian has control of the town in the first place. He has shown wisdom in the past—it’s the only reason a seventeen-year-old kid would be taken seriously when he tells the village’s leaders how to do their job.”
“It’s all setup, really,” Hayden said. “We want Christ and the antichrist to travel together for a portion of the series. They’ll be like Lex Luthor and Superman, seeking each other out and debating their moral differences. In a world looking for a savior, they’ll be the only two who grasp the realities of the problems they encounter. But, of course, Jesus and Damian always come to different conclusions.”
Jonathan and Rylee nodded their heads in an okay-whatever sort of acceptance, and Hayden continued.
“Learning of this harsh segregation of the sick, Jesus seeks out Damian to hear his reasoning,” he said. “But their first encounter turns into a debate over the quarantine, and it draws a crowd.”
“There is a twist at this point,” Collin said. “Trying to hold onto command of the village….” He paused for effect. “Damian tells a parable.”
Hayden and Collin stared at Jonathan, seeming to expect some reaction.
“Um, what?” Jonathan asked.
The expectant looks fell off their faces, becoming more like the looks of parents who expected more from their child.
“Come on, Tibbs,” Collin said. “Parables are pretty much Jesus’s wheelhouse.”
Jonathan looked to Rylee, and both roommates followed suit. When she noticed everyone looking at her, she said, “Uh, yeah, Tibbs, it’s totally his wheelhouse.”
Collin and Hayden turned to him as though their point had been made. Jonathan lingered on Rylee, his eyes narrowing.
Finally, she shrugged at him and said, “I don’t know, everyone was looking at me. I panicked.”
Hayden was going to press their case, but Collin shook his head and launched into Damian’s parable.
“Imagine two towns, both with a population of a hundred people. The town to the north lives on fertile soil and has more food than they know what to do with. However, the town to the south has discovered that their farmlands are poisoned. They cannot grow crops, and fear they will starve. The northerners have compassion. After all, they have more than they need, and they feed their neighbors to the south.
“The southerners praise the north for their generosity, as they now have enough food to survive another season, but the next year, the same situation occurs. Now, the southerners have been sustained, they’ve had babies and their population has grown—yet their lands will still not grow crops. So, again the northerners come to their aid, and again, their population grows.
“This cycle continues—until one year, a horrible truth is realized. Both the populations have grown so large that the north can no longer feed their own, let alone their neighbors in the south. As a result, hundreds die in the north while tens of thousands starve to death in the south. Now, if the northerners had shown forethought before the situation was out of control—not given into their compassion—it merely would have resulted in the death of the original hundred in the south, says Damian. Sometimes, by giving into our nobler inclinations and ignoring our reason, we create more suffering than would ever have been necessary.”
“Well, that does sounds like the Devil’s argument,” Jonathan said.
“This is where things get interesting,” Collin continued. “We’ve made Jesus two years older than Damian, and as a result, he has come to realize that he is in command of powers that Damian has yet to discover. Basically, they both are able to make of reality what they wish, to a certain extent, through their connection to either the Holy Spirit or the—” Collin coughed, clearing his throat. “Unholy Spirit”
“I thought it was their Holy and Unholy Smart Phones?” Jonathan said, recalling the last conversation of theirs that he had overheard.
Collin smiled and nodded while Hayden’s face became a glare—Rylee just looked at him, confused.
“We are not committed to that analogy,” Hayden said.
“Anyhow, knowing he can save the villagers if he can enter the quarantine, Jesus responds to Damian’s parable with a simple question,” Collin said. “He says, what if you and your family lived in the south, Damian? Would your reason hold sway over you then? At this point in the story, it comes to light that Damian has no sick family in the village, and therefore his quarantine becomes a cruel act of self-preservation for him and his kin in the eyes of the village.
“In the end, the townsfolk are swayed. Jesus calls for their faith and insists that he be allowed to enter the quarantined area to cure the sick. Damian forbids it one last time and is ignored as the townspeople, desperate to save their loved ones, are willing to accept Jesus’s solution. Damian offers them calculated reason, while Jesus appeals to their hope. Jesus doesn’t do this out of malice, of course—he sees what Damian is trying to do, but he finds his choice of action unconscionable.
“Of course, Jesus being able to cure the sick, he saves the town from the plague by calling on the forces of the Holy Smar—Spirit,” Collin said.
Rylee sighed, her expression still confused. “Guys, this sounds—well, boring. I mean, for a comic book?”
“You have to see the panels,” Collin said. “When Jesus cures the sick, he pulls the pestilence out of villagers in the form of demons. After that, he takes them out with his staff in a martial-arts-style action sequence.”
“Ahh.” Rylee raised an eyebrow. “And people actually read this?”
Jonathan snorted, which Collin ignored as he finished.
“Anyhow,” Collin said. “Damian is shamed by the village that previously respected him. The simple villagers only see the results, and care little for the reason behind it. Jesus is seen as the savior, and his call for faith is proven to be the moral choice over the harsh quarantine. Damian’s reputation is essentially marred as Jesus has unintentionally turned him into the villain. The villagers see him as the man willing to let all who were infected die alone.”
Jonathan nodded and picked up a copy of one of the zombie outbreak DVDs. “So, where do the zombies come in?”
“Oh, right,” Collin said. “Zom—”
“Zombie and plague films almost always have the same basic plot,” Hayden interjected. “You have a small group of survivors trying to hold onto their humanity in a deadly world.”
“One member of the group will usually take control of the situation,” Collin said. “Said person will ruthlessly enforce whatever rules they must to keep the rest of the group safe. To accomplish this, he or she usually has to abandon their compassion—sacrifice their humanity bit by bit. The thing that always bugs me is that this individual almost never ends the story as the hero. He almost always becomes the villain. The stories, while busy appealing to the audience’s compassion, cast the morally outraged survivors as the heroes. What they almost never show is that the guy they labeled the ‘villain’ was keeping the group alive in the first place.”
“What are you saying?” Jonathan frowned. “That they should be rooting for the villain?”
“No,” Collin said. “I’m saying it’s never that black and white. That they never acknowledge the fact that the person playing the villain is the one making it possible for everyone else to feel self-righteous. They all feel justified hating him for doing what was necessary as they stand aside—never give any credence to the fact that they wouldn’t be there to judge him if he hadn’t done what was necessary.
“This will be Damian’s first lesson in that harsh truth. What sneaks up on him is that playing the villain so everyone else can feel good about themselves eventually blurs the line. The human mind cannot bear being outcast by its fellow Man indefinitely. At some point, choosing to play that role, Damian will eventually lose sight of what situations require extreme measures. That’s when he becomes the villain for real.”
Jonathan looked up at Hayden and noticed how much this storyline was bothering him.
When Collin noticed as well, he let out a heavy sigh. “Well? Out with it.”
Hayden looked at all of them, thinking for a moment, then threw up a hand. “I don’t like the underlying message,” he said. “The villagers only side with Jesus because they believe he’ll save the situation with magic. Christ isn’t wrong, but he’s right for all the wrong reasons… and the villagers, they see a situation that can only end in suffering and turn to a savior because it keeps them from having to make an impossible decision themselves. It’s degrading to their faith in God somehow. I’m just having trouble figuring out why.”
Collin nodded his head sympathetically.
“Well, it’s because you’ve left something out,” Rylee interjected. “Desperate people will look for hope, but no matter how desperate, there has to be a foundation to support it. No one would believe a man if he said he could deliver a miracle without having seen him do so before.”
Jonathan paused, thinking for a moment. “The people following Jesus must have seen something in him by now or they wouldn’t be listening to him in the first place.”
Hayden nodded, but he didn’t seem to like that angle much either.
“Damian isn’t wrong,” Jonathan said. “He is making the best decision he can with what he knows. The truth doesn’t change just because no one likes it.”
Collin thought about what Jonathan had said for a bit. “Maybe it’s a false dichotomy?” he eventually aske
d. “The reason we don’t like this story is because Jesus and Damian are forced to choose between black and white options: forfeit your humanity, or pray for a miracle.”
“The only middle ground is letting the family members enter into the quarantined area, but with the knowledge that they wouldn’t be allowed out,” Rylee said. “It’s noble, the family members can still choose to take care for their loved ones and keep their humanity—but at the same time, Jesus and Damian have to be willing to let them choose a death sentence.”
Hayden signed heavily. “I need a break from this.”
They watched him leave, each noticing he seemed out of sorts, a development that left Jonathan irritated with Collin. “This storyline,” Jonathan said after a moment. “Paige came up with it.”
Collin frowned. “Yeah. How did you know?”
“She’s an environmental science major and that whole parable was based on Malthusian Population Theory,” he said. “She probably has to hear about it in every ecology class she takes.”
“Yeah. She told me about it.”
Jonathan sighed. “And what, you just couldn’t resist? Collin, this comic book isn’t as easy for him as it is for you. Can you lay off his faith for a while?”
Collin looked to Rylee and then back to Jonathan, clearly caught off guard and starting to get defensive. “Look. First off, the whole idea of this comic book was to put Super Jesus in moral dilemmas where the choice wasn’t simple. Hayden and I both wanted it that way. Second, next Christmas break, come along and have dinner with Hayden’s family. Watch what happens when they expect you to come to midnight mass and you tell them you don’t believe in God. No, I’ll save you the trouble—no one walks on egg shells to protect an Atheist’s feelings. Hayden and I agreed it was a double standard a long time ago.”
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 38