My film degree and my undistinguished career as a newspaper film critic have been crushed to dust beneath the jackboots of the current occupant of the White House and his battalions of faithful Christian Brothers. The newspaper I used to write for was closed by the government; the films I reviewed have been banned; and my heroes, Pasolini among them, have been declared Enemies of the Lord. So, all legitimate employment prospects having disappeared, and despite my initial reluctance, I’ve managed to parley paternal influence into a teaching appointment at Wildmon High School where I lecture quasi-illiterate teenagers about Biblical History, Intelligent Design, and the Prophetic Sciences. Pasolini would spit in my face.
My grandmother would have chosen a more lady-like way to express her contempt, but she would be no less appalled by my life in hiding, the mindless curriculum I peddle, the civil war that’s ripped her beloved country apart. If she were still alive, she would urge me to take to the streets and fight. She would say I bear particular responsibility because of my intelligence, my sexual orientation, and my father’s princely position among the ravenous wolves.
And she would be right.
But she’s not here. And I’m facing the wolves alone.
On the morning of her death Margeaux lay in her hospital bed, entangled in tubes and monitors like a butterfly captured in a spider’s web. I stood beside her looking down into her sad, distant eyes and wondering when it would be over.
She took my hand, bringing my fingers to her dry, papery lips. She kissed me and, as if her vision had already telescoped beyond the crisp September morning to the events that would unfold over the next few years, she said, “For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.”
She held my hand tightly for a long time, her eyes suddenly as clear and blue as the sky outside the hospital window. “The wolf will tear you apart unless you fight it. You must fight the wolf, Joshua,” she said. And then she died.
Margeaux was a woman who knew how to deliver an exit line.
When the bedside alarms sounded, the nurses who should have responded instead stood immobile in front of the television, eyes tearful, ears deaf to everything but Charlie Gibson’s matter-of-fact description of a second plane striking the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
I heard bits and pieces of the commentary and thought someone was watching a movie. Die Hard, maybe, or Airport ’77.
I stood at the window for a long time looking out over the slow-moving Potomac, numbed by my own grief.
I picked up the bedside phone and called my father.
“She’s dead,” I whispered.
“Who’s dead?” he demanded.
“Margeaux, she just–”
My father roared into the phone. “The whole world is going to hell and you’re worried about that stupid whore? You are fucking pathetic!” He slammed the phone down. I stepped back and stared at the receiver, puzzled and a little disoriented. I looked out the window and saw a streak of silver hurtling down through the sky in the direction of the Pentagon. There was a flash and then flames and smoke. A wall of sound rushed across the river, slamming against the brick and reinforced glass and shaking the hospital complex like an earthquake. I stumbled and grabbed the bedside table for support.
Margeaux’s death was lost in a sea of destruction and grief that immobilized everyone for weeks. On the afternoon of her burial, I stood alone beside her casket, a funeral home representative standing a discreet distance away listening to Oprah Winfrey’s Yankee Stadium speech on a pair of black earbuds. Despite the distance, I could hear her voice ringing clearly through the stillness: “What was meant to divide us has brought us together. And we shall not be moved.”
I felt guilty and hollow, as if my own grief, unconnected to Oprah’s public outpouring, had somehow been contaminated by her steadfastness and her sincerity. I felt something die inside me; felt my soul turn black and hard as obsidian.
I stood immobile for a long time. And we shall not be moved.
As a young woman, Margeaux had worked under contract to Warner Brothers, chain smoking, drinking, and swooning with the likes of Jimmy Cagney, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson. She usually played mobster’s girls—‘furniture molls’ she called them—the kind of girls who perched on the arms of sofas or leaned against bars cracking wise and maybe getting slapped around by one of the boys. She once shared an apartment with Mae Clark, a bit player like herself whose claim to fame was that crazy breakfast scene in The Public Enemy where Cagney smashes a grapefruit into her face. Mae went on to have a long career in the business, but Margeaux, an inveterate troublemaker, was eventually fired and escorted off the Warner lot for public drunkenness.
Leaving Hollywood behind, Margeaux secured the greatest role of her life, that of the flamboyant third wife of a powerful southern preacher. Whether she married my grandfather for love or money is anyone’s guess, but she attacked the role with a vengeance and she was the first wife to survive the good reverend’s wrath.
Margeaux referred to their decade-long marriage as the “glittering détente,” a phrase that, while typical of her irresponsible theatricality, also hinted at the relationship’s violent undertones. The détente shattered one night in 1973 when Margeaux phoned her brother-in-law Tommy to tell him that “Wilson’s gone downstairs to meet Jesus on the Carrera marble and I’ve only got one martini left,” by which she meant my grandfather, uncharacteristically drunk, but characteristically enraged, had been chasing her with a baseball bat when he had stumbled on the stairs, flown over the balustrade, and plummeted to the marble floor below, crushing his skull, and shattering his spinal column. She once told me the sound was like a thousand blackjack dealers cracking their cards at the same time, a sound so violent and mercenary that it had made her spill her drink.
When Uncle Tommy and the deacons arrived, she met them at the door, handed her empty glass to one of them to refill, pointed to my grandfather’s body, sprawled in a sea of dark, congealing blood, and said, “I guess I’ll be going on for him in the morning.”
And she did.
She took over the ministry for several months, giving drunken, incomprehensible sermons in her glittering couture gowns and teetering high heels. To the consternation of the deacons, she filled the churches and left her audiences breathless and penniless. With the pews and the collection plates overflowing, she took her final bow, selling the ministry to Uncle Tommy and the boys and stepping out of the limelight to watch them drive it into the ground.
And they did.
When a reporter from the Atlanta Journal called her for a response to the bankruptcy announcement, she said, “Sometimes great things come to an ignominious end.”
But from the sprawling wreckage of the embattled Wilson Roberts Ministries stepped the blandly ruthless visage of my father, Reverend Vigilance Roberts. He rebuilt his father’s lost empire, diversifying into television, futures trading, manufacturing, and agriculture. By the end of the twentieth century, the renamed Vigilance Ministries claimed a tithing flock that numbered in the tens of millions and the good reverend had a personal net worth that was estimated to be around fifteen billion dollars. Praise be unto Him.
“Praise be, Joshua.”
I look up at the sound of his voice. My father is standing beside my table flanked by a pair of crimson Cee Bees with side arms, muscles, and dark glasses.
“Hello, Father.”
“What are you reading?”
I rattle off the title and wait for him to challenge me. He raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I have a meeting nearby and thought I’d treat the boys to coffee. Want a refill?”
I shake my head.
My father hands the blond thug a card and nods toward the counter.
“May
I sit down?” he asks.
“Sure.” I push a chair toward him and he sits.
I look at the Cee Bee goon.
“He’ll stand,” my father says.
We sit in uncomfortable silence for a few moments.
“We live in trying times,” he says finally.
“Yes, we do.” I watch the blond Cee Bee lean over to stir sugar into two coffee cups. His pants stretch tight against a perfect, round ass. I look back at my father, but not before he realizes I’m looking at something, glances over his shoulder, and then scowls.
“You are going to be the death of me,” he says.
“Or me,” I say.
He sighs and shakes his head, laying his hands flat against the table as if he’s about to push himself up and leave.
“I saw you on the news,” I say.
He freezes and looks at me. “And?”
“It was a good sound bite.”
“I’m setting the stage,” he says.
“For what?”
“We have video this time. The techs are working on it right now, coaxing his face from the static like God coaxing the stars out of nothingness. Fiat lux, Joshua.”
“Well then you’ll catch him,” I say.
“Oh yes. We’re going to catch him, Joshua. And we’re going to execute him publicly.”
“He’s a terrorist,” I say.
“He’s a dead man.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” I whisper.
The vein on the side of his neck pulses angrily and I can see the color of his skin shifting from pink to red to that dark, angry purple. He pushes himself up from the table and starts to walk away.
I look down at the table, trying to slow my pounding heart.
“You need to read further, boy.” His voice again, close and soft.
“What?”
He moves even closer. I can feel his breath on my face. “You need to keep reading. The Sermon says many things, Joshua. Many things.” He draws in a deep, controlled breath. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”
I look up at him.
“They will not bring him down,” he says. “This president will lead us to the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Right. And remind me. When is that supposed to happen? Soon? During his fourth term? During his fifth?” I raise my arms above my head. “I’m Rapture-ready right now. Where should I stand?”
My father’s face tightens.
“There is only one place for the righteous to stand,” he says.
“Now that, I do know,” I say.
And then he is gone.
I sit for a long time staring at pages on the table before me. My anger rises until it dances hot and hungry behind my steaming eyes. I drop my head into my hands, clamping my palms over my ears, trying desperately to stifle the sounds of other people: the mumbled litany of prayers from the next table, the crying of a stroller-bound infant, the angry whispers of arguing women behind the counter. I want them to be gone. I want them to be gone.
“Josh?” The hand on my shoulder startles me so badly I jump, slamming my knee into the underside of the table and spilling the coffee.
“Whoa. Take it easy, man. It’s just me.” Peter smiles down at me. “Can I join you?”
“Fine,” I say. I work to rein in my anger, imagining the blood pulsing backwards through my arteries, receding into my pitch black core.
He sits opposite me, beautiful hands reaching out as if to touch me, but then shrinking back and lying flat against the table where my father’s had been moments before.
“I saw the old man,” he says.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “He’s all over the news.”
“No, I mean here, a minute ago.”
“Oh, right–”
“What did he want?”
“Coffee, I guess. For his bodyguards.”
Peter eyes me speculatively. “What else?”
“He said they’ve got clear video of the Inheritor’s face,” I say. I can feel my hands trembling so I put them in my lap, out of sight beneath the table.
“Do you think they really do?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they already know who it is.”
I glance around and drop my voice. “Then why not do something about it.”
“How could they?” He’s whispering now too, leaning close across the small table. “Think of what it would look like; the son of the Chief of Staff…”
“Then why not something… quiet,” I say.
This stops him cold. “You sound like you want to die,” he says finally.
“I’m not sure that’s fucking possible,” I say in a loud clear voice. Several people at neighboring tables glance in my direction.
Peter’s face flushes. “I’m gonna get coffee,” he says. “I’ve got extra rations. Want anything?”
I shake my head and watch him hurry away from me.
The second time the fire engulfed me I accidentally took out the V.I.P. viewing stands at a public execution on the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. But I learned from the experience. This time I could feel it coming and I reached out into the building energy, feeling around for control. As the outer edges of the explosion touched my skin, I was able to halt the reaction for a moment, burning off my shirt and sending shafts of light out of my eyes and mouth and nostrils into the surrounding crowd. The light began to swirl like a hurricane of fire. And out of the midst of the amber fire, out of the center the effervescing light and heat tearing through my body, came four words, delivered to me in Margeaux’s voice. The meek shall inherit. Terror pulsed through the crowd, the bleachers quaked under the force of a thousand stampeding feet, and then I unleashed the power that had been building inside as an intense, deadly explosion.
Images of my transformation were broadcast live across the nation, but by the time the cameras located me, my skin was so transformed by amber light and swirling fire that I was unrecognizable. I saw the footage on CNN. The camera panned the crowd and then zoomed in on my bare chest and light-contorted face. I heard the words so distinctly, the words that everyone was talking about, the words that boomed forth from my throat like human thunder.
The meek shall inherit.
The media coverage started so quickly the government had trouble reining in the on-air speculation. The fact that this had occurred during a live national broadcast seemed to place it beyond the reach of government censors. The pundits were divided about the reasons for the Lincoln Memorial bombing, but they were unanimous in their assumption that it has been a suicide bombing and that it had been the work of godless U.S. sympathizers and secular humanists.
I began to experiment with my powers, bringing my body to the edge, letting the energy ripple along my skin and then backing off, absorbing everything back inside. I discovered that my body needed at least three days to fully recharge. I also learned to protect my eardrums, and in a bit of gratuitous theatricality, I learned to burn off my clothing layer by layer. I assembled a prototype of a flowing white costume with a large blood red cross slashed across the front to wear beneath oversized street clothes when I went to a performance. I thought of myself as a showman, orchestrating a series of theatrical extravaganzas in which I destroyed strategic government targets: office buildings, Cee Bee training facilities, an Army induction center, and finally the sprawling Homeland Security complex on Nebraska Avenue. When I reached the site, I would burn off the outer layer of clothes, let myself be seen in the costume, resplendent as a Medieval Crusader, and then, when I unleashed the final explosion, I would burn off the costume leaving myself unrecognizable in a pair of tight blue jeans and a T-shirt.
The media inflated civilian ca
sualty figures and downplayed the strategic importance of my targets. The government used the ensuing panic to raise the domestic threat level to red. New Executive Orders extended the curfew, produced a new list of spot warrant capital crimes, and closed synagogues and non-Christian schools. The Cee Bees rounded up hundreds of known secularists and resident aliens, loading them into tractor trailers and shipping them south into Virginia.
Speculation in the press escalated as the bombings continued. The first person to assert that the bombings had been perpetrated by a single individual was a FOX News anchor who read a passage from the Old Testament on air and began referring to the bomber as Ezekiel. There was a hasty retraction issued by the network, but the damage was done. In the popular imagination, and among the more unruly media outlets, the group of bombers had become a single, indestructible super-bomber. Names were bandied about in editorials and on afternoon talk shows but the one that stuck was the Inheritor.
I never intended to tell Peter that I am the Inheritor. We met about a year ago in a men’s room at Union Station. He sucked me off and slipped me his number. In a country where an Executive Order has made it legal for deputized members of the Christian Brotherhood to kill gender traitors or suspected gender traitors in public, cruising has all but disappeared. There are no bars, no gay bookstores, no bathhouses or video stores. Most gays have either made a run for the border or hunkered down and married women. The fact that Peter was willing to go down on me in the stall of a public restroom when half a dozen Cee Bees were patrolling the train platform outside made me so horny I couldn’t think of anything else.
The Lavender Menace Page 6