Caliban Upon Setebos, Robert Browning

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.”

’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,—
He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.

’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breath,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

’Thinketh, He made there at the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole—He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be—
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if He begin to plague.
Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,—
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;
Last, throw me on my back i’ the seeded thyme,
And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.
Put case, unable to be what I wish,
I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
Able to fly?—for, there, see, he hath wings,
And great comb like the hoopoe’s to admire,
And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
There, and I will that he begin to live,
Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
Of grigs high up that make the merry din,
Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And he lay stupid-like,—why, I should laugh;
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,—
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg,
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will? So He.

’Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

Well then, ’supposeth He is good i’ the main,
Placable if His mind and ways were guessed,
But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
That they, unless through Him, do naught at all,
And must submit: what other use in things?
’Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint
That, blown through, gives exact the scream o’ the jay
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone’s throw, glad their foe is hurt:
Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth
“I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!”
Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?
Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that,
What knows,—the something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought;
Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
’Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought nor care that way.
It may look up, work up,—the worse for those
It works on! ’Careth but for Setebos
The many-handed as a cuttle-fish,
Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
Looks up, first, and perceived he cannot soar
To what is quiet and hath happy life;
Next looks down here, and out of very spite
Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,
These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
’Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.
Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ’stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter’s robe
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
’Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;
Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o’ the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
’Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.

His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint,
Like an orc’s armor? Ay,—so spoil His sport!
He is the One now: only He doth all.
’Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.
Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why?
’Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast
Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose,
But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate
Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.
Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,
Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,
By no means for the love of what is worked.
’Tasteth, himself, no finer good i’ the world
When all goes right, in this safe summer-time,
And he wants little, hungers, aches not much,
Than trying what to do with wit and strength.
’Falls to make something: ’piled yon pile of turfs,
And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
And crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull a-top,
Found dead i’ the woods, too hard for one to kill.
No use at all i’ the work, for work’s sole sake;
’Shall some day knock it down again: so He.

’Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months’ hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as He favors Prosper, who knows why?
So it is, all the same, as well I find.
’Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,
Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,
Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
And licked the whole labor flat; so much for spite.
’Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
Where, half an hour before, I slept i’ the shade:
Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!
’Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone.
Please Him and hinder this?—What Prosper does?
Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
There is the sport: discover how or die!
All need not die, for of the things o’ the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
Those at His mercy,—why, they please Him most
When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice!
Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.
You must not know His ways, and play Him off,
Sure of the issue. ’Doth the like himself:
’Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence:
’Spareth an urchin that contrariwise,
Curls up into a ball, pretending death
For fright at my approach: the two ways please.
That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and the next day and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
“Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute,
So must he do henceforth and always.”—Ay?
Would teach the reasoning couple what “must” means!
’Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

’Conceiveth all things will continue thus,
And we shall have to live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change,
If He have done His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this,—
If He surprise not even the Quiet’s self
Some strange day,—or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

’Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for the worst,—with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy. ’Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
’Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives:
Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

Even so, ’would have Him misconceive, suppose
This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
And always, above all else, envies Him;
Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,
Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
And never speaks his mind save housed as now:
Outside, ’groans, curses. If He caught me here,
O’erheard this speech, and asked “What chucklest at?”
’Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song
And sung it, “What I hate, be consecrate
To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?”
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!

Workshop with Kwame Dawes

Workshop Commentary
Kwame Dawes
8 January 2010
Stolen Art: Chameleon of Suffering

Kwame started with a reaffirmation of Claire’s workshop. He told us to be empathetic of our surroundings. This was great continuity of the day, but he went on to say that we need to be so empathetic that we should let the setting change us. We need to feel the outside and then feel our inside.
In this way are jobs, as good writers, is to steal experiences from the people around us. We need to make them our own. We steal these vital experiences and put them on the page, but we can not feel that we are recreating the people in the story. We are telling the story. The story is the important part. The truth is the story, not the facts. We can change the facts as long as the truth remains.
It doesn’t matter if the story repulses us as long as it remains true. The end result of a story is not the important part. The important part of the story is the process getting to the truth. To support this statement he told us that “It’s not the amount of suffering one goes through that is valuable to a reader, but the way we write about our suffering”. We let go of our sense of importance and find that it is not the author of the story that is important, it is not the characters of the story that is important, and it is not even the facts of the story that is important. The truth is what is important and let the truth dictate the form of the story.

Workshop with Claire Davis

Workshop Commentary
Claire Davis
8 January 2010
Landscape Damn it, it’s not just setting.

Claire has a no nonsense approach to teaching the workshops. She admits that it is not her favorite part of the residencies but she does it well. The excerpts she chose and the points she made imparted priceless information. She started her talk on setting by reading a description of a room and a situation that was similar to the one we were in. This familiarity makes her topic instantly relatable. Once she has us at ease she hits us with the big stuff.
Landscape is not setting. Although I have a small feeling that this may be true I never paid enough attention to it. She goes farther to say that setting may be a device sublimated by the needs of the plot but it can help give our story depth. We can use the setting to reflect the emotion, motivation, feelings, or needs of our characters. We should not go so far as personifying the clouds or the mountains, unless it fits for our story, but we should use how we describe them help tell the story.
My brain is still soaking this in when she tells us that not only should a writer use the landscape to reflect the characters feelings but the landscape helps create the character. That is, the place a person is from helps makes that person who they are. Conflict will come from a person leaving his home and going to a foreign land. This is very relevant to my writing because I draw on my military experiences. I spent half my life moving from one foreign land to another, sometimes that means other countries and sometimes that means living in different regions of our country.
She tells us that we need to change the way we look at stories. A whole story is not just the hero’s conflict and what is he has at stake. If we only write about our hero he ends up acting out his journey in a vacuum. We need to use the landscape to help tell the story, not only the landscape the hero is in at the present time, but where the hero came from. We need to examine the history, the geology, the mythology of a place and explain to the reader the effects this all has on the character and the story.

Greek Lyrics from the Archaic Period – Archilochus

7th Century Greek Poetry

Let him go ahead.
Ares is a democrat.
There are no privileged people
On a battlefield

Shield against shield,
Keep the shield-wall tight
And the gift of death
They bring, let no man take.

Broken Man

Broken Man
By
Sean Davis

Port Au Prince Haiti in mid day, early January 1995, the revolution had ended only months before. I was a nineteen year old private in the U.S. army. It had only been a week since my unit had stepped off the plane. We were given seven magazines of 5.56mm rounds and our army issued cultural training all within two hours after landing.
The First Sergeant told us we had to go with the Captain for a patrol of the hills around Les Cayes. We drove through Port Au Prince to get there. The market bustled. Women in bright colored robes balanced impossible loads on their heads in wicker baskets. The older women didn’t even need to use their hands to steady the weight. The men bartered with each other, their arms waving wildly, noses flared, their teeth bared. I had never seen skin so dark. Their skin was so dark it made their eyes and teeth glow. I looked over the crowded market and dilapidated buildings to see the shore of the bay filled with bloated bodies.
I was told that the dead were from the coupe. The political problems had been mounting for decades. It started with dictator called Papa Doc. His real name was François Duvalier. Papa Doc had the good fortune to be educated. He learned medicine and even studied a year in the United States. When he returned to Port Au Prince he steadily climbed to power until he became president in 1957. In 1964 he publicly anointed himself with the new title of President for Life, which actually worked out for him because he stayed president until he died in 1971. When he died his wife took over the presidency. After her, their only son took power.
When Papa Doc lived he had put together and ran a private military called the Tonton Macoute which many described as being somewhere between henchman and state sponsored terrorists. In English the name meant Uncle Gunnysack. It was from Creole mythology. Uncle Gunnysack walked the streets at night grabbing kids that stayed out too late and throwing them into his gunnysack. They were never seen again.
Uncle Gunnysack walked the streets throughout Papa Doc’s reign, and then through Mama Doc’s reign. They kept walking through their son’s presidency as well. Baby Doc used Uncle Gunnysack to help him stay in power until 1986.
Ten years after the ousting of Baby Doc, he still had followers high of military rank. Uncle Gunnysack chased out President Aristide. Our president wasn’t going to let Haiti go back to being a dictatorship so they sent the U.S. Infantry on a mission they called Operation Uphold Democracy. I was a small part of that mission.
I asked my squad leader how Baby Doc was removed from power back in 1986.
“Pigs and the Pope,” Sergeant Primaux said in his deep voice, “I’m not shitting you. That’s why. The people came down with African Swine Fever. It was an epidemic. Baby Doc’s solution was to kill all the pigs in Haiti. No swines, no swine fever, but the problem was that most the people on island bred pigs for a livin’.” Sergeant Primaux was as oblivious to the smell as the people in the market. This “wasn’t his first dance”, as he liked to tell us.
I took my hand away from my nose and mouth for as long as it took to say, “I don’t understand.”
Sergeant Primaux was a light skinned black man from Louisiana and he was my first squad leader on my first real world mission which made him synonymous with god. He leaned toward me again, but this time his smile was wider, “These people live in filth and in poverty. That’s bad enough, but when you take away how they make a livin’, so they can’t even buy no food, well that makes for some unhappy people.”
“Oh, so they revolted.”
“Not until the Pope’s visit.”
I wrinkled my forehead.
“The Pope came and gave them hope. Once they got a little hope in them, that’s when the revolution happened. They’ve been fighting about who would run this place ever since.”
“Why don’t they burry the dead?” I pointed out to the bay.
“I don’t know but they probably threw them in the bay because of the dogs.” Sergeant Primaux said.
Corporal Turner laughed at that. Corporal Turner had been in the military a few years longer than I had. He was a white kid from Tennessee with a mustache impeccably trimmed. Every morning he would trim his mustache as if it held some sort of Southern Dignity handed down from his ancestors.
I asked, “What do the dogs have to do with it?”
“The wild dog population always grows when there are bodies on the streets,” Sergeant Primaux said, “The food supply is so good.”
This military deployment was my introduction to cultures other than my own. I was happy the government saw fit to give me a loaded weapon.
Captain Polowski sat in the cab of the truck. Before his military career he played as an offensive lineman on the Notre Dame Football team. Now he commanded a company of around fifty infantrymen, but for this mission he was leading a patrol. Each mission in a real world deployment was a bullet on a future résumé. He wanted to get his hands dirty so he volunteered. He volunteered all of us.
From what I understood our mission was to walk through the villages in the hills around Les Cayes to show the people that order had returned to the country. Nothing says national stability like highly armed foreigners walking through your neighborhood.
The five-ton truck stopped in a city intersection.
“Looks like we’re here, let’s go,” Sergeant Primeaux said.

Captain Polowski walked around like a kid not being able to hide his smile. He took point as if this revolution happened only to give him the opportunity to lead this parade. Sergeant Primaux took up the rear. He never got too close to any of the Haitians. He made sure we didn’t either.
The Haitians came out and greet us as we walked through their streets. They spoke their version of French. Each village had at least a few houses, but most of the people lived in small shacks of whatever building material they could get their hands on. Some shacks had walls built from old tires, some used ten-gallon cooking oil cans, others used aluminum siding, and I know I saw truck axles holding up a couple walls. Very few had glass windows.
It was long after night fall when we walked into a village that probably didn’t have a name to anyone except the people that lived there. As soon as we took a step into the place we heard the people screaming and shouting. Something big was happening. Captain Polowski took off like a pulling guard into the village. We all ran after him.
When we got to the middle of the village Captain Polowski was nowhere to be seen. Every man, woman, and child that lived there were in the little square massed together. I didn’t know what to do. Sergeant Primaux yelled for me and Turner to get into the middle of the mob. He said something about seeing the Captain going in. I grabbed people and moved toward the middle. Each time I touched someone I remembered what they told us in our cultural training, that sixty percent of the Haitian population had a communicable disease. HIV and AIDS ran wild. I wanted to stop and put my gloves on but the urgency I felt wouldn’t let me.
The people on the fringe of this mob grunted and howled with their hands swinging over their heads. I recognized a few words. They kept yelling, “Tonton Macoute! Tonton Macoute!”
Their faces reflected anger and indignation. Something had been done to them.
I used the stock of my rifle to pry tangled limbs apart and I drove myself into the mob. I could smell the oils of their skin and the odor of their unwashed bodies. As I pushed closer to the center I could see flashes of Captain Polowski squatting down in the eye of this hurricane. I couldn’t figure how he got in the middle so quickly. I had to turn my body, push and pull. I felt hands tearing at my ammo pouches and rucksack. Finally I screamed for them to get the fuck out of my way. I thrashed violently back and forth. As the mob moved I could see small windows of what was going on in the middle. I saw faces of hatred and disgust. People kicked and gnashed their teeth.
“Tonton Macoute!”
“Tonton Macoute!”
The wall of bodies parted and I made it through to see the captain kneeling over a beaten Haitian male in his twenties. I had never seen anything like this broken man at the Captain’s feet. His face was plastered with blood. A deep split in his scalp revealed yellow bone. His eyes, nose and lips were discolored and swollen. My eyes went to the fresh gaps between teeth as he spat blood and cried.
“Push these people back,” the Captain said.
I didn’t react. I couldn’t take my eyes off the broken man.
“Private Gallagher,” He called but I still didn’t move.
Turner made it through the crowd at my left side and froze when he saw the broken man. Then Sergeant Primaux made it through.
“Sergeant, move these people back,” Captain Polowki said.
“You hear the Captain? Move these goddam people back. Set up a fucking perimeter, now!” Sergeant Primaux yelled.
The tone and pitch of his words made our bodies move. Me, Turner and the rest of the squad started pushing the people back. The captain called the medic into the ring we created.
“What’s wrong with him?” I heard the Captain ask.
“What’s not fucking wrong with him sir? He’s fucking dead,” The medic said.
“He’s still breathing,” The Captain said.
“Sure, and he probably will be for a half an hour tops, he has a fractured skull, arterial bleeding, hemorrhaging…look at him sir, he was curb stomped by a whole village.”
We did what we were told and cleared the area while the Captain and Sergeant Primaux went off to talk to the villagers. The broken man screamed in pain. As minutes went by his wails became weaker. Our squad surrounded him and the medic. The medic started to do what he could. A couple sobs and wails escaped the split and bloodied lips as the medic moved different parts of his body to apply bandages and to stop bleeding.
The mob had dissipated. Most went back to their shacks and a couple would come out but they weren’t coming to look at the broken man on the ground. They came out curious to see us. I kept my eyes on them, but I would look back every once in a while. The wails and cries died away. Instead, clicking came from the back of his throat. The sound was so terrible it cut into my head. I looked at the medic but he only shrugged, “That’s what happens. He’s a goner.”
I stood there freezing my ass off in a foreign land, a witness to a level of violence I had not before believed possible. I was homesick, my feet had pruned, and I figured that most of my equipment that I did not tie down was gone from the mob. All of this I could deal with, that clicking sound I could not. He would not stop.
The Captain came back and addressed the squad, “There is a flat bed humvee on its way up here. We will take the prisoner to the nearest hospital.” Then he turned away and spoke on his radio to battalion.
“What happened sergeant?” Turner asked Primaux.
“This shit head tried to steal the village television set and got caught. Then someone decided he was Uncle Gunnysack and they worked themselves up,” Sergeant Primaux said.
“Where are we taking this guy sergeant?” I asked.
“There aren’t any working hospitals on this island as far as I could tell,” Turner said.
“I know, but the Captain thinks we can take him to a hospital. He says he saw one on the map. Charlie Company Engineers sent a humvee up here to pick him up.”
“Why would we take him to a hospital?” I directed my question to Corporal Turner because I was too low a rank to ask such an insubordinate question to my squad leader.
“We are trying to win hearts and minds.” Turner said back annoyed.
“By helping a thief they beat?”
“At ease,” Sergeant Primaux said. That was the army way of telling a person to shut up.

By the time the humvee arrived the clicking sound had slowed, but persisted. He would roll his broken head with his eyes showing only white and cough up blood. The medic had run out of field bandages and could do nothing else.
“Sergeant, have your men load the prisoner,” The captain said.
“Gallagher, Turner, load the prisoner,” Sergeant Primaux said.
“Well come on then,” Corporal Turner said.
We put our rubber gloves on this time because there wasn’t a place on his body to touch him that wasn’t wet from piss, blood, or snot. I followed Turner’s motions. When he grabbed under an armpit I did the same, but when I started to lift I heard a crack and the choking turned to a grunt. I dropped him right away and the grunt turned to a scream.
“I guess there’s some life in this guy after all,” Turner laughed.
He laughed. This was a man’s life. Worse, this was a man’s death. I looked at him. I couldn’t do anything but look at him.
“Get him on the truck goddammit, we don’t have all night,” Sergeant Primaux yelled and I bent down right away.
I lifted and he tried to yank himself away but he had no strength. Turner and I dragged him toward the humvee. One of the engineers opened the tailgate for us. A long flow of saliva and blood ran from the broken man’s lips and nose all the way to the ground. I smelled then that he had shit himself. We got to the truck and didn’t know how to get him up there.
“Hold him up and I’ll jump up on the bed and hoist ‘em,” Turner said as he dropped his half and the broken man fell. His weight pulled me forward. I stumbled but I didn’t fall. Blood, piss and snot oozed on to my uniform at several spots. Turner stood on the bed of the truck with his weapon slung on his back. He had a smile on his face and his hands signaled me to lift the man up to him.

Captain Polowski rode up front with the driver. The engineer that was riding shotgun had to ride in back with me, Turner and the broken man. Sergeant Primaux took the medic and the rest of the squad and walked back to the abandoned hotel we were using as our assembly point in Les Cayes.
We drove down a bumpy road, and then we drove around the pot hole ridden roads of the small town. The clicking never stopped. It was low and guttural unlike any sound a person could make purposely. It came from the bottom of the throat. It was sudden and violent as a head wound. The sound made my eyes fall on him every time. His chin moved up like it had some purpose, some need unmet, as if maybe a cup of water could make it better, or maybe stop his misery. His arms shook pathetically. I tried like hell to look at the countryside as we drove. Then I looked at Turner and the engineer. Turner didn’t seem to mind the sound. As far as I could see he didn’t even hear it. The engineer was bothered but it didn’t grate on him like it did to me.
There was no hospital or anything even resembling a hospital. We drove in circles, then in figure eights. Whatever the Captain had seen on his map wasn’t really there in real life, but he insisted we keep driving. We drove for what seemed to me hours. We drove until I couldn’t take that sound anymore. I suddenly became filled with anger. I was furious with the broken man for taking me away from my home and to this miserable place. I hated him for making me carry all the heavy weight and giving me trench foot. I hated him for not being able to run his own country. I hated him form making me fear this place. I hated him for making me see a world I never knew existed.
I kicked him. I kicked him hard and then I kicked him again. I kicked him as tears welled in my eyes.
“Whoa, whoa cowboy,” Turner said, “Hey now.”
I stopped, surprised at what I just did. I couldn’t catch my breath right off so I turned and spit over the side of the truck bed. We drove around for another thirty minutes before dumping the body at a makeshift police station against the protest of the one Haitian policeman on duty. He had died at my feet sometime before we got there.

Irony Feeds Divinity: The Book of Resolution

The Book of Resolution

Chapter 1

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas A. Edison

I knew as soon as I started writing this book that this was the book. It was the fall of 1989 and soon the Berlin wall fell, the Cold War ended, Brazil held its first free presidential election since 1960 then Chile does the same, communism fell in a number of Eastern European nations, Nelson Mandela was released, and the world prosperity seemed to be in our grasp.
Then in 1991 my son left home to join the department of defense. He didn’t even say a word. I woke up one morning and he was gone. He called later and told me he was accepted into the military intelligence crowd like uncle Ish and he was going to make something out of himself. He also told me I was a lousy father and he never wanted to return to this ‘hellhole’. It hit me hard. I got a bad case of messiah’s block.
He was the main reason I was doing this. He was the only reason I decided to save the world and he hated my guts. He never wanted to see me again. What an ungrateful little shit.
Needless to say the Gulf War started, yeah that was my fault, there was a soccer stampede in South Africa that killed 42 people, Pete Rose was banned from the Hall of Fame, Rodney King was beaten and caught on tape to start a national uproar, over seventy tornados broke out in Kansas, a tropical cyclone hit Bangladesh killing over one hundred and thirty-eight thousand people and Sonic the Hedgehog was created.

A short time later I had another flash. It was Ish, his wife had cheated on him. It wasn’t the same woman in the earlier vision. This woman was pretty but superficial. Ish was older in the first vision as well. This vision was going to happen soon. He got really drunk and drove his car into a brick wall. I couldn’t tell if he was going to make it or not by the end of the vision. The doctors were operating on his head.
I couldn’t get back on track after that no matter what I did. I had become quite the alcoholic and I took this excuse to drink to the extreme. I sat in my torn recliner in a near death state surrounded by empty bottles of cheap tequila. This is how Bertram found me. He had been circling like a vulture ever since he realized that little Ish was gone. He walked right in through the screen door and squatted down next to me.
“Master, what hast the devil done to thou? Thou art not safe. What must I do to restore you to your former self?”
I looked at him and mumbled something about how stupid it was he talked in King James English. My eyes were half shut and I couldn’t keep them open. I could hardly make him out and the room was spinning. My stomach juices kept squirting into my mouth filling my jaw full of acidic saliva that spilled out over my bottom lip. I sat up and spat on the carpet until nothing else came out. I was nauseous, and I was going to be sick.
“Master, we must get through this. We still have our Holy Mission. All distractions are gone. We must go out and save the masses. We must punish all heretics.”
A story book cackle shot from my throat without me realizing it. “Save the masses? I’ve already saved them. I save them every time I come to Earth, and the motherfuckers kill me every time. They need to save themselves this time around because I’m not making another trip.”
He squatted there submissively looking at the floor. Then a second later he asked, “How will they know that if you don’t tell them?”
For some reason I exploded. I was enraged. How dare he ask me such a question? I was the master. The nerve of him. I screamed for him to leave and never come back. I screamed that he should die and take the world with him. Haven’t I done enough? Haven’t I sacrificed everything? I gave my whole life to this impossible cause. I gave every life I’ve ever had to this cause.

Chapter 2

“Martyrdom… is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple (1901)

He was wearing red again. I’m no fool, I’d picked up on the pattern at this point. He has His roles to play the same as we do. Beer cans were strewn out all around the burnt out stump. He was standing there with a cigarillo hanging out of His mouth. I hated when He was this drunk, but I marched up to Him anyway. “I need to understand your plan Hank. I can’t do this unless I understand it!”
“Plan? Why the hell do you think I have a plan? I make this shit up as I go. HAHAH!” The laugh was more for His benefit than mine.
“How can you kill my mom, my uncle, and my son? My son? Come on, he’s your grandson.” My voice boomed through the forest.
“I kill everyone kid. Haven’t you noticed, no one gets out alive? When the game’s over its over.” He gulped down the rest of His beer and threw it to the ground. Then He produced another one from somewhere.
“You know what I mean. You play this game like you’re not pulling the strings, like you’re not holding all the trump, like everything that’s happening is just one big coincidence, but it’s not. You’re behind it all. Why did you let Ish die in that car accident?” I yelled again, sizing Him up, thinking that I might try to take Him down this time. Maybe I could take over the family business. I knew that I could run it better.
“Oh, you think so huh? You don’t know shit kid. You think this is really me? You think I’m really a man? It’s human arrogance to think that I created you in my image when it’s you creating me in your image. You want to run reality? You wouldn’t last a second before going utterly and completely mad. Yes, everything happens for a reason, is that what you want to hear? Would it give you that warm-blanket-feeling to know that I have a divine plan? Well then what happens to free will? If everything is a part of my plan than everything you choose to do is already chosen for you. When there’s no free will everything is predestined. You think people are going to swallow that one? Then why do anything? There would be no point to life. On the other hand if there is free will and nothing is predestined then that means I’m not all powerful, or maybe I don’t even exist and suddenly they are living in a terrifying universe full of confusion and chaos, and they think why do anything? There would be no point to life. That’s what Thomas Aquinas didn’t get. You can make your list of why I exist and why I don’t but I’m not saying a word. I thought that you, out of all of my sons, would get that. Don’t you see that it’s a mixture of both? That’s how it has to be, a mixture of my divine plan as well as chaos. It’s one big Jackson Pollack painting, wild, random, and beautiful but if you examine it enough there are complicated and intricate patterns overlooked by the average observer.” He was crinkling his hands to try to illustrate an intricate pattern. Then he paused for a second. “But then again maybe not. I have to keep you all guessing. It’s the only way to keep your attention, to keep you interested in life. If I told anyone any definite answer it would end the world as surely as if I came down with Armageddon.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was just chastised by God. Now I know how Moses felt. It was awful and I felt like a jackass, but it was the most genuine I’d ever seen Him. It showed me that I was special to Him…somehow.
“And your son isn’t dead. I didn’t show you that so you would come storming out here, let me yell at you so you would feel like a jackass and you’d see that you’re special to me…somehow. Ish will have brain surgery, pull through and move back to collect on your insurance claim and make millions…it’s a whole other story. That kid has more lives than a cat.”
“So the deal still stands? All I have to do is write it, that’s what you said, I finish the book and you spare the world?”
“Yeah, but that’s still a simple way to look at it.”
“Well then I guess this is it. The next time I see you I’ll probably be on your side of the fence.”
“Yeah well, you know how it goes.”
“I only have one more question.”
He sipped His beer and looked at me like He didn’t know what the question was going to be.
“What’s to say that if the book makes it big and people all around the world read it, what’s to say they don’t start wars over it? What if they find something in there that I didn’t write, what if they interpret it how they want and in their interpretation they see that I wanted them to kill a whole race of people, what will keep them from displacing a nation or starting a series of wars that kill billions? What will keep them from killing in my name?”
“That’s more than one question kid.” He said as He faded away until he was gone. I was left standing in the middle of the forest, alone.

Chapter 3

“Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.”
-H. H. Williams

I found that after much practice I was able to control these visions. Once I embraced them I could use them like people use a research book or the internet now-a-days. Once I did that I was able to control more things, like watching the occasional Giants game on my broken television. Anyways, I peaked in on Ish. The kid was going to pull through and in a couple months he was going to come back home. He was going to have more difficult times in his life, but who doesn’t?
He’d be back soon. That meant the end was near for me. The book is almost done. I just have to make a couple preparations, like saying good bye to Ferdinand. He certainly was a good sport about the whole thing, letting my uncle shoot him in the chest and all. He moves to LA later on for some reason. He dies in his sleep.
Ironic.
Bertram will go on to play a small part in Ish’s life, then he will become a very popular televangelist that will be a household name around the globe. He finally backs the wrong side politically and gets assassinated in a very weird way.
Ironic.
I never looked into what happened to Cathy. I decided that I should keep it a mystery. I’m sorry if you don’t like that, but I never blamed her for leaving and she was the only woman I ever loved. I knew I couldn’t have her so I let her go and by doing that I had to really let her go.
I did look into where mom and Uncle Ishmael went. I can’t go into it here, but I’m sure there will be a story written about that. The creepy secret agent Chin is in it. It’s a good one, I’ll just tell you that neither of them died, they were just ‘not with us anymore’.
Speaking of interesting stories, little Ish is going to have one. His life gets very complicated very fast, but it wasn’t my intention to tell you the life story of all these people, I only wanted to clear up loose ends before I do what I’m going to do. Before I go I want to reiterate my message; organized religion is detrimental to the continuation of the human species. If I go door to door and tell you this you won’t listen to me. You wouldn’t believe me and the thing is, I don’t want you to.
There’s no winning this game. I was set up for failure from the start, but I’m keeping the deal with Dad. I’m going to finish this book and buy you guys some time, but you’ll never get to read it. Ironic, huh?
As soon as I’m finished here I’m going to destroy it, and myself. Yes this holy book may very well be the longest suicide note in history, but you have to see my side of the story by now, you must see the burden I bare.
These are sad times when a martyr has to kill himself. When I have to climb up onto the cross, grab the hammer and start nailing myself up, but that’s the price we pay for this age of convenience, for the digital age.

White Flash

“What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

We’re way up in the sky again looking down. This time we don’t see a desert, we’re over the trailer park/Holy Land in the great North West, thirteen miles east of Sweet River Oregon. As we come in lower we see State Highway 20. We’re low enough to see the writing on the sign over the driveway. ‘Starlight Overniters Mobile Estates’. The dirt road winds through the trailer but if you were to take the first left you would find yourself in the driveway of the old Shannon House. We’re above it now. Let’s focus on the young man digging up the septic tank in the back. He’s only a few feet from the back of the house. There is a heard of assorted farm animals huddled around the fence above the kid. The animals are conditioned to believe that they will get fed at the sight of a human so they aren’t wary of the kid with the shovel. The kid stops and looks around like he hears a voice, but can’t find where it came from, but that’s not the important thing here, look over his shoulder there, at the propane tank and it’s decrepit coupling, the pliable metal is all eaten away by time.
Something has made the kid very angry. All the anger that had been suppressed for years sets off little Ishmael. Suddenly he jumps out of his hole and jumps the fence. He finds one of the sheep that is frozen in fear and releases all of his wrath from the blade of a shovel. He beats the sheep until it is a bloody pulp of wool and meat. Afterwards he is so disgusted with himself he throws the bloody shovel away from him.
He runs away from what he’s done and doesn’t see that it knocked the coupling from the propane tank. The propane leaks and since it is heavier than air it leaks, and leaks, and leaks into the septic tank hole. This was what was supposed to happen. Ish couldn’t do anything else at this point although he is very remorseful of what he did and unsure of what to do next.

I understand all of these visions now. This won’t happen for another couple weeks now. It’s a sort of future memory to explain the very end, and a beginning for others. It will take an hour for me to drink myself enough courage to carry out my plan. I will walk out of the wood line where I watch little Ish beat the sheep to death and I will stand over the poor little thing. I think about bringing it back to life, but then I think there is some lesson in not being a sheep, bad things happen to sheep. I stare deep into that mess of pink wool and glistening internal organs and somehow I see the possibility that the human race will survive this rite of passage into adulthood.
I will then climb over the fence into the hole. This will be no easy task considering how drunk I will be, not to mention the fact that I know what will be coming next. The fact that I’m wearing all of little Ishmael’s clothes and have this book in my armpit will make it even that much more difficult.
Once I get settled in the pit I take a cigarette out of the pack and put it in my mouth. While I’m waiting for little Ish to notice me down here I think about when Dad wanted to know when I started smoking, then he said that it was bad for my health, He knew didn’t He? That’s when I realize that the aftermath of what is going to happen here was my very first vision.
I laughed.
Suddenly Ish leans out the window of the upstairs bathroom. He yells something about the gas I suppose, but I already know that. I yell something mean back, I have to stay in character. He darts back in the window and down the stairs to try and save me.
The kid has potential.
I hate to do it to him, to make him think it was his fault, but there is a reason for everything, in a chaotic sort of way. I can hear him bust out the front door and dash across the creaky porch. That was my cue to strike the match against the rough sandpaper strip.

BOOM!

I’m your martyr of the unknown scripture. Believe me it’s better that you don’t read this book, but since I did finish it and that was the deal I bought you a little bit of time. I hope you guys get your shit together.

You’re welcome.

Postlogue

Sorry there won’t be any clever quote on this page, although I felt that it was a good touch. I know that this book has been called a lot of things; an instrument for destruction, a suicide note, a cult cookbook, et cetera, well I think at the very least it is entertaining and that’s what books should be. Most books today are fast food for the brain, no point, no theme, no importance. I personally think that is because of this damned digital age. You’ve lost your attention spans at the cost of instant gratification, but I guess that is beside the point. This book is a good book. I’m not saying live your life by it, but at least think about the message. I can tell you that it was a pain in the ass to put it back together after it was blown up, even for me.
I guess by saying that you have to know who I am, well I wanted to talk about that too. I’m not telling you that I really am who you think I am. We went over why a little while ago. I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Maybe I am the father of all time and space, all powerful creator of this universe, maybe I’m just a cynical writer that tends to be optimistic despite everything I’ve seen in this world and researched in history, or I guess that I could just be a loony heretic bent on blacking the eye of all the contemporary religions.
The thing is that it shouldn’t matter. You’re going to take from this book what you want, maybe you won’t take anything at all. There are a few things that I would like you to think about after you put this book down though, here are a few; look up the word schism and see how it applies through religions through out history, why would I start the only religion a person must believe in if they want to go to heaven, thousands of years after humans as we know them have been on the planet. Why would I damn millions of people to hell simply because they were unfortunate enough to be born before the rules were made? Why do you need a church to talk to me? What does the Pope actually do other than own massive amounts of land? Why do people get so irrationally angry when you question their religion? Why don’t people do research before blindly giving eternity to a religion? Schopenhauer once said that ‘religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.’
Now think of a couple of your own questions and then do some research, or go the other way with it; debunk this book. All the facts in the book are true, from the motorcycle crash in Bakersfield in the fifties to the evil deeds of different church officials.
That’s the point of the whole thing; think for yourself, question dogma. The fact that it’s been around for a long time doesn’t make it right. Choose what’s best for you and live by it. Whatever you do remember; don’t be a sheep, bad things happen to sheep.

Irony Feeds Divinity: The Book of Roles and Realizations

The Book of Roles and Realizations

Chapter 1

“Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man”
-Sigmund Freud quotes 1856-1939)

Cathy shut the door behind her and leaned against it. She sighed deeply feeling that sharp pain in her chest she always had whenever there was this much stress in her life. It had been only six months since the fire. She really thought that she and Ishmael had figured it out. She always questioned whether her coming back to this place was a good idea. Sure they didn’t know each other that good at first but she thought they had a real connection when they did.
She knew it back then but she couldn’t handle all the complete weirdness that surrounded life at the park. I mean the boy she was in love with thought he was some sort of Jesus figure and it made it a lot worse that there were a bunch of drugged out hippies that believed him too. The night she decided to leave terrified her. The angry mob of conservative Christians with pitchforks and torches with murder in their eyes (that’s how she remembered it). Then there was that business of someone getting shot, the riot between the mob and the drugged out hippies, then the strange lights in the sky the night that Ishmael’s incestuous parents disappeared. That would be enough to scare anyone off.
Even with all of that she missed him completely. Then when she found out that she was pregnant she had an excuse to come back, even though the thought scared her again. It was almost a relief that when she talked to the Frenchman she found that Ishmael was gone. The Frenchman, despite his rude exterior, had a good heart. He set her up in the main house and some money to start out with.
If she spent the money Ferdinand gave her wisely she would have a few months tops. She had to figure out something. She would get up in the morning and think about it while sitting in her kitchen drinking coffee. During this time at least three or four cars would pull into the driveway and park. The people would get out and walk around for a while, some times a few hours, and then leave again. It would be people of all walks of life. They all seemed lost.
One day Cathy had enough and decided to go out and talk to the next person and see what the deal was. A half hour later a big boat of a car pulled in. Cathy walked out of the house, across the creaky porch and into the dirt driveway that spurred off of State Highway 20 to talk to the lady that had just gotten out of her park car.
“Excuse me.” Cathy said, but she really didn’t want to be excused, she said it in a way that meant ‘Hey’. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m asking you what you’re doing. Why are you here? I live here and I see all these people park out in front of my house and walk around for hours on end. Why are you doing this?”
The woman looked away into the tree line. “I’m sorry, I’ll go if I’m bothering you.”
Cathy calmed down. She felt like she over reacted. People must think this place is a State Park. “I didn’t mean to come off as being mean or anything. I just don’t know why everyone thinks that this is a hiking trail. Usually State Parks would have signs. I think there is a Park further up the pass toward Sororis.”
“No, that’s not it. I know this is the Shannon Place. He helped me out a few years ago. He healed my Troy when he was a baby. I’m not here to ask for anything, it’s just when I feel bad I like to come up here and walk around. It makes me feel better. There is something magical about this place. You must feel that right? You’re lucky living up here. I wish that I could.”
That’s when the idea hit her. There was so much land and people came up on a daily basis. If there was a sign saying they could move in, a trailer park sign, then she could start making a sustainable income. Then when Ishmael got back he wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job for a while and he would be proud of what she had done. Then she wouldn’t feel bad about living on the land without his permission, she wouldn’t feel bad if she had something to give to him when he returned. It was perfect, but where would she get the money? The Frenchman made it pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to give her anymore. She sure as hell wasn’t going to ask that freak that lived in the woodshed. She looked over at the silver trailer. It was still there. It was obvious, the old woman in the silver trailer had been living on the land since Cathy had brought her there. She had been living there rent free apparently. All Cathy had to do was to ask her for the back rent, and she wouldn’t feel bad about asking either because Cathy had done her a favor by bringing her to the park in the first place.
Getting the money from Ms. Katzenberg was easier than she thought. The old woman was eager to give the money, and she gave twice what Cathy asked. All she wanted in return was to talk. She was a very lonely old woman that had led a very hard life and she didn’t mind sharing all the sorted details of that hard life.

When Ishmael finally returned it caught her off guard. He came back in the middle of the night without any prior notice. The homecoming didn’t go as she expected it to. In fact nothing went as she expected it. Ishmael had turned into a drunk. He spent all of his time drunk with very brief periods of sobriety. She convinced herself that she could fix the situation because she really had no other option. Plus she didn’t want to abandon what she had built. She was really proud of Starlight Overniters.
She really believed that when she gave birth to their son that he would realize that he couldn’t live like an irresponsible drunk. He would be forced to stop feeling sorry for himself, but he didn’t. It seemed like an eternity had went by. She had put up with his behavior for years. She kept telling herself that she could change him. There were times when he was so loving. She could see the person she needed him to be, but those times came after the worst episodes. His angel only followed the devil in him.
Then he went and set fire to the forest on Christmas Eve. Who does that? That was her real wake up call, but even then she gave him a couple more chances to talk and explain. He didn’t. He’s just gotten worse. She couldn’t do it anymore. She realized, as she leaned against the inside of the door, with that sharp pain in her chest, she realized that it had always been fear keeping her there, not love. She was afraid to leave, she had nothing else in this world. Then she thought that fear was only half of it. She had falling into her rut, no she had dug her own rut with the yoke of trying to make this work around her neck. She had falling into the role of a battered wife in a trailer park. She could not believe she let herself get to this point. The younger, independent Cathy would have kicked this guy in the balls and told him to go fuck himself, but time and circumstance has a way of chipping away on you, changing who you are, without you even knowing.
She knew now, and she was going to do something about it, but what? She had to think of little Ishmael. She rested on the door with her hand to her chest. The pain was slowly going away. They just had another argument. Little Ish was napping upstairs. She should check on him. Her breathing returned to normal. She would decide what she should do later. She started up stairs.
Her brain betrayed her and thoughts of Ishmael floated into her head again. She started breathing heavy and her eyes stung. She was tough and she wasn’t going to cry. She was tough, she had been through worse in her life and gotten through it. She was fighting a terrible case of post partum depression with little Ish. She was determined not to let Ishmael see it though. That wouldn’t do anyone any good. She felt bitter that she was the one that had to do everything with the baby. Why didn’t she feel that instinctual love that a mother is supposed to have? Her experience with the child has been more of a ritual than an act of motherly love, and she had long since started to resent it.

She makes it to the top step. She walks down the hall to his door. The floor boards creak a little under her feet. She opens the door quietly in case he’s still sleeping. There he is, still napping, so innocent. She feels no love. She quietly closes the door and walks back to the stairs. She thinks about what to do now, maybe hash it out with Ishmael in the never ending struggle. That was hopeless but how else could she get out of this deep of a rut.
Suddenly there is a creak behind her. The wood of the floor whined from some sort of pressure. There was no one else in the house that she knew of. She turns around but what she sees doesn’t register at first, a huge man in a robe with black rimmed glasses. His face distorted, demonlike. He runs at her, he breaths in grunts. Her hand goes up instinctively to catch his arm as it comes down but she doesn’t have the strength to stop the knife from entering her chest.
His momentum brings both of them crashing to the floor. He lands on top of her and the knife pushes in deeper. She can’t tell if she is screaming or not. There is no sound. She looks down at the knife handle sticking out of her chest. She uses all of her strength to keep it from going in any more, but the huge hands are too strong. Slowly it keeps going, another inch, she feels it grate between her ribs, an exploding excruciating pain. Tears are running down the sides of her face into her ears and hair. The pain is so bad but the worst part of it is knowing that this is a wound that she will not recover from. She is going to die. She can’t watch the knife go in any more her eyes dart up to her murderer. Why is he doing this? His face is hideous. Her muscles give out and the knife goes in all the way to it’s taped up handle.
Her last thoughts aren’t what she expected. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes. There was no white light, the only thing that goes through her mind is that she didn’t remember there being a puddle at the top of the stairs. She didn’t see it when she checked on little Ishmael but she was laying in it now.

Chapter 2

“Religion condemns religion. It is not the school that is without God, it is the Church that is without God.”
Alain, Propos sur la religion

I was out with my animals, feeding them, watering them. It had been a good thirty minutes since our last fight. I knew it was my fault this time. I felt like an asshole. I felt like an asshole a lot in the last couple of months. I was just about to do what I usually did when this happened; go back in and apologize, but then it hit me, the white flash. I hadn’t had one for such a long time that I had started to wonder if I made them up. But there was no doubt now, they were real and this one hit me hard. It brought me to the ground grabbing my head with both hands, rolling around. I kicked wildly, dirt flew everywhere.
I wasn’t at the trailer park anymore. I was standing on a street corner with a young blonde woman dressed in a very promiscuous red blouse with plenty of cleavage and a mini, mini skirt. I look around and realize that I’m not in Oregon any more, I’m not in the seventies either. Looking at the cars I decide that it’s the fifties. A 1951 blue Chrysler pulls up. After a brief conversation with woman gets in the car.
Suddenly I was above a desert looking down at a man digging a hole. The body of the young blonde woman was sprawled out beside it. As I got closer I realized what you already know. It was Bertram.
Then I flashed through his life. He was raised by an uncaring mother and no father. He was sexually abused a number of times by some of her many boyfriends. I stood there and watched him kill his mother then I was there at every other murder he committed. My words couldn’t describe how terrifying it was. He enjoyed killing them. It gave him a sense of relief from his constant urge.
Why hadn’t I seen this before? I was there with him in the Sands Hotel room while Ferdinand slept in the next room as Bertram painted the walls with the prostitute’s blood. The last scene was the most horrifying. I was in my house, upstairs, unable to stop him as he killed Cathy.

Chapter 3

“There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.”
Seneca, Mid-1st century AD

Remorse. He knew it had to be done and wanted to do it so badly so many times before, but he still felt bad about it. He was only doing the work of God. He may be feeling remorseful now, but everyone had to make sacrifices. He looked down at her. That’s what she was; a sacrifice, a little lamb.
This was his mission, that is why he had been tormented his entire life, so he could fulfill this mission. “Yes, there is a reason for everything.” Bertram said to himself as he bent down to wipe the blood off his forearm with her dress. He felt justified now, there was a reason for everything, there had to be. He had always asked himself why the bad things always happened to him, why his mother was such a whore, and the men… Now he knew that he was always being conditioned by God to become a useful tool. “The most beautiful roses are cultivated in the vilest of fertilizer.”
The corners of his mouth curved into a smile. He finally understood that there must be evil, there had to be evil in order for good to exist. There was no other way, why couldn’t the rest of the world understand that. What would the saint do if there was no sinner? He had always been doing the world a favor and all he got in return for it was persecution.
Then he heard movement in the other room. It brought him back to what he was really doing there. His smile faded. He wasn’t done yet. He hadn’t removed all the obstacles yet. He needed to erase everything that kept his master from becoming what he most become.
Slowly he turned toward the bedroom door. The blood stopped dripping, it was sticky now, almost annoying. It was warm any more either, but the knife was. It was searing, burning his hand. He stepped on the creaky boards of the hallway. All his emotions disappeared. He was going to kill the four year old boy. It was hideous, somewhere inside he knew it was, but it wasn’t the first time God had required this type of action for the greater good. God asked Abraham to kill his son. All of the first born of Egypt were killed. All 12,000 children of the last crusade were killed or sold into slavery. Sometimes life is just harder on the innocent. It was sad but true. This fueled him. He was finally getting the chance to go biblical. He would definitely rate a book of his own now. The Book of Bertram, he liked the sound of that. He pushed the bedroom door open.
One the wench he had punctured the lung right away so she couldn’t scream too much. She just laid there on the floor with her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, the red frothy blood spilling out. He was smart, after all he was the youngest school teacher in Kern County at one time. His students used to love him, at least that’s how he remembered it. At any rate the first part of the mission was quiet enough to keep from waking the child. He walked right up to the bed without making a sound. The knife was white hot now. He had to strike or his hand would go up in flames. He raised his arm and gathered his strength, but before he could bring it down he heard the front door burst open. It was Ishmael, he was screaming for Cathy.
Bertram knew that his master was going to be mad. He lost his nerve and his courage wavered. He changed from Holy Crusader to scared little boy in seconds. He was going to be punished, that’s how it worked. He was just a small timid man ready for his fate. Quietly he walked out of the room to his master.

Chapter 4

“There is no pain as great as being alive, no burden heavier than that of conscious life.”
Ruben Dario, The Swan and other poems, 1905

I wasn’t ready for how I was going to feel when I saw her lying there. I stopped halfway up the stairs. The blood was dripping down the steps. The scene stabbed at my heart. When I gave up who I was supposed to be I knew that everyone on the planet was going to die because of my decision, including Cathy and little Ishmael. I even believed that I accepted that fact, but seeing her lifeless body there made me break down.
I slowly walked up the rest of the stairs and squatted down next to her body, then I fell over to a sitting position. I put her head on my lap. I couldn’t do anything but cry as her dull dead eyes stared into mine. I sat there crying and didn’t move. I didn’t even move when Bertram’s huge frame was standing over us.
When I finally looked up at Bertram I found that I wasn’t prepared for the feelings I had toward him. He killed her. He took her life, but I couldn’t hate him no matter how hard I tried. I knew more about what was happening than he did. I knew that there was no other course of action for him to take. I knew that he was chosen for this specific purpose. All the experiences in his life had made him into the sniveling giant looking down at me with tears of remorse in his eyes.
It took a few moments for me to realize all of this. Then there was the moment of acceptance. Bertram was terrified, standing there waiting to gladly receive my wrath, but instead I said in a calm but sad voice, “I need you to leave Bertram. Just get out of here.”
He didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t expecting that. To tell you the truth neither was I, but I knew I was going to have to do what I was born to no matter what was going to happen later on. It was my role in life. A square peg can’t fit into a round hole, no matter how hard he wants to. I was going to have to write the book. Dad has a way of getting what he wants.
I looked back down at Cathy. It was a moment of acceptance, a pure moment of realization. I was going to write the book. There was no avoiding what I was and what I was supposed to do. I still didn’t know how I was going to do it or what my message was going to be, but I couldn’t fight it anymore.
I looked back up to Bertram. I could see that he was terrified and it should have been the other way around. “GET OUT OF HERE!” When I yelled he all most jumped out of his skin. Then he put his head down and walked past me down the stairs.
There was no sense in my promise not to perform miracles anymore. I put my hands on Cathy’s chest and there was a white flash. I pulled the whole Lazarus thing. The blood was gone, she gasped and her perfect intact lungs filled with air. Her eyes opened and her pupils rolled down from inside her head to focus on me. She was completely confused. We stayed there for a few seconds, staring at each other without a sound. Then she grabbed her chest, “Am I dead?”
“Not anymore.”
“How…That old freak stabbed me.” Her fingers examined the knife hole in her blouse. “How is this possible?”
“I brought you back.”
“Oh my God.”
“Nope, I’m not even a second rate messiah.”

Chapter 5

“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start a new religion.”
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, quoted in the New York Times, 1984

She wasn’t the same after that. Near death experiences, or in this case fatal experiences, have a way of giving a person the motivation they had lacked to do what they really wanted to do. It’s a sort of involuntary liberation, a forced realignment of priorities. She never wanted to be a mother and a wife, but she felt obligated because of the social norms of our times. She came to believe that she was duped into some weird role in a sick game that involved religious fanatics, UFOs and unexplained phenomenon.
She stayed in a confused state for weeks, not knowing what to believe. I didn’t know how to handle her. She might have stayed if I actually tried to help her through it, but since I had decided that I had to be the savior of mankind again I knew that I couldn’t get involved with her.
I was standing in the doorway when she said goodbye to little Ish. She apologized for bringing him into such a messed up family. She said that she had no where to go and she didn’t know what she was going to do, but she knew she had to leave. It was a heartbreaking scene to witness. I really felt bad for the kid. His mom was leaving and I knew that I wasn’t going to be a good father to him.
I did do something for him though. I figured since I was back in messiah mode that I would pull another miracle to keep him safe from Bertram. I made it so every time Bertram laid eyes on Ishmael he saw the most horrifying demon his demented brain could conjure up. It worked too, it scared him shitless to be within a quarter mile of the kid.
So, on my second take at my holy mission I spent the first six months feeling sorry for myself and drinking like I wanted to die. I finally stopped the self destructive behavior when I woke up one afternoon and saw little Ish pouring all the unfinished drinks into one bottle in the corner of the filthy living room. No matter how much I hated to do it, I loved the kid. That just made everything worse somehow.
I had to get my shit together. I decided to keep up the animals. I would even buy some more, chickens, calves and shit you could eat. It would be practical, plus it would help with the whole shepherd mindset. To kick things off I helped out the people of the trailer park by giving them a break on the rent. Every once in a while I killed a cow and handed out the meat. Things were going well.
The only thing left to do was to start the book. It seemed simple enough. I knew I had to do a little more research before I did though. I had forgotten most of what I learned before, but all and all it seemed simple enough. I knew it was going to be difficult but it did seem within reach. I was just going to have to wait until little Ish was all grown up before I went and got myself crucified or something. Hopefully that wouldn’t be a problem.

Of course I couldn’t rush into this so I spent the next five years researching the ingredients I would use to make my pizza. I’ll take a slice of Catholicism but hold the guilt, um how about a topping Buddhism with some Hindu sauce. The dough? I’ll go with Zoroasterism but not too thick. Just a dash of Islam, I hate having to pick out the Jihad. Thanks.
I read extensively on every religion I could find a book on, and that is more than a sane person would count. I’ve memorized text from the holy books you’ve never heard of. Here’s the Wiccan Rede;

Bide you the Wiccan laws you must, in perfect love and perfect trust.
Live and let live, fairly take and fairly give.
Cast the circle thrice about, to keep the unwelcome spirits out.
To bind the spell every time, let the spell be spake in rhyme.
Soft of eye and light of touch, speak little and listen much.
Deosil go by the waxing moon, chanting out the Wiccan rune.
Widdershins go by the waning moon, chanting out the baleful tune

These neo religions are the worst. They use an old language dialect and strange words to give their personal sect gravitas. When in reality they are simply making their take on an old pizza recipe. For example who the hell uses the word deosil or weddershins? The pagans do, and they both mean to move counterclockwise, but I guess that wouldn’t fit into their little poem.
My main goal was to study every religion I could and find a common theme I could build off of. I would combine all of them I could, because if I didn’t then I would have to discredit them and that meant making people convert and that wouldn’t be easy even on the threshold of the age of convenience. People simple were too lazy to change without a near death experience or persecution, but even that is fifty/fifty because half the time those types of things strengthen faith. It was going to be near impossible.
I spent countless hours outlining, drafting and rewriting chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and even phrases. If one word was out of place that meant that it could be misinterpreted and people would be killed, wars would start, genocide would spread in my name.
Now you’re beginning to see the burden I bare.
The pressure was on and I had to make this a masterpiece, something complex enough to challenge the smartest people and yet simple enough that a village idiot could digest it. Eastern philosophy, Western thought, modern yet traditional. I hit it from every angle. I polished the first couple pages until I could see my reflection. But despite it all I still didn’t have a message, just a Frankenstein’s monster full of holy words. I was working as hard as I could at this and couldn’t get any further than a couple pages. I poured over it for days perfecting it, but I still knew inside that it was wrong.
Months would go by and I would still be staring at these three or four pages. It was maddening. I was at my wits end to try to make something happen. I had to try to write the damned book and I couldn’t do it. This was frustrating enough, but then in 1980 I finally realized that there was a deadline, and believe me this word had never had a more literal use.
Dad had started the end of the world. Gay men in Sweden and in the United States as well as heterosexual men in Tanzania and Haiti were being diagnosed with a disease that would later be diagnosed as AIDS. The pale horse was riding. It wasn’t anyone’s fault if they got the disease. It didn’t pick out evil people to infect anymore than the Bubonic Plague or Cholera did. It wasn’t big yet but I knew it was coming. The end was coming.
The Iranian consulate was overran with hostages taken, deadly tornadoes rampaged through Nebraska, seven people were crushed to death in a crowd while trying to see Pope John Paul II, Turkish Prime Minister Erim was assassinated, the heat wave on 1980 killed 2,000 people and caused 44 billion dollars of damage, and a dingo ate some woman’s baby. This was happening because I couldn’t write the book. I’m not sure how but I think Culture Club was my fault too.
The news poured out of my television even when the wind howled and it snowed I got a crystal clear picture. I got a picture somehow when the power went off. I couldn’t turn the damn news off, there were no other channels. The news poured out of the war starting in the Middle East and everything else. It was all my fault.
Now you’re beginning to see the burden I bare.
I also realized that beginning in nineteen-eighty video games became a staple in our culture. IBM, Hewitt Packard and Macintosh were on the brink of mass producing personal computers. Cable and VCRs were becoming common in every household. Philips and Sony proposed a new standard of selling music; the compact disk. In 1980 microwave ovens out sell gas ranges.
The end was coming and it corresponded with what Dad had called the digital age. Every new milestone in technology and there was a disaster, war, or tragedy. Every time we made something more convenient for us through science we were punished by an outbreak of disease, an act of large scale violence, or an assassination of a world leader.
This helped add to the stress I felt. I couldn’t even hold a pen in my hand for weeks without shaking uncontrollably and starting to cry. The pressure doubled, tripled, maybe more and along with that so did my drinking. I became bipolar, another disease that was probably my fault.
I had to hurry with the book but the more I tried to hurry the more it wasn’t right. One week I would stress ‘love thy neighbor’, the next week it was ‘fill thy sandbags against the flood’, then I would try ‘don’t let thy children watch too much television’.
Each draft was steadily worse. I had no idea what to do so I tried anything. I even consulted Bertram but he was no help, all he wanted to do was punish infidels. I told him I would get back to him when I was trying to tie in Islam. There was no hope. I finally wanted to do the stupid book and it was impossible. I was going to have to swallow my pride and try to find Dad. I put on my coat and stepped out into the colder January weather. I had to find that fucking burnt stump.

Chapter 6

“Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.”
Nelson DeMille quotes

It was the first time I returned to the tree since the fire. I had my notes stuff under my arm. Some were typewritten, but most were hand written. If I were to look at them objectively now I would say they were the scribblings of a mad man. I hated the fact He forced me into writing the stupid book so I had made a point not to talk to Him, but now there was no other way. He had to give me a direction to go into, a new way of looking at it, He had to have some sort of wisdom to through down to me. I had nothing else.
I noticed, as I walked to where I thought the stump was that the forest did look a lot healthier. It had been six years and there was no trace of the desolation the fire created. The air was fresh, birds flew from tree to tree singing, rabbits scurried through the underbrush. I thought whether or not there was a lesson there that I didn’t catch.
After ten minutes or so I found Him. He was sitting on the charred, black stump of his tree. He had a PBR in His hand and a cigarillo in His mouth. He was wearing His white slacks, white and red pointed wing tips, a white shirt with red suspenders. He gave me a big smile as I walked up.
“Look at you,” He said, “You’re all grown up. You look like a farmer, denim jeans and a plaid shirt. Your eyes are a little bloodshot. You’ve been hitting the sauce a little too hard though, huh kid?”
“Listen pops, I’m having trouble with your book.” I handed Him the mess of papers.
He took them from me and looked at the top couple, set them down at the base of the tree and turned back to me. “You want a beer kid?”
I lit up a cigarette, “Aren’t you even going to humor me and look through them?”
“I already did, I’m all knowing remember? It’s a nice start, I guess. It might have a chance, who knows?” He handed me a can of Pabst.
“Well that’s funny you should say that, because I would think that you would know.” I took the beer. “Talking about that all knowing business, that’s why I’m here. I need some help or it’s not happening.”
“When did you start smoking? You know it’s bad for your health, it causes cancer. They could kill you.” He said with a slight smile.
I took a sip and looked at Him. I couldn’t figure out what the hell He was trying to pull. All I could think was that Ferdinand was right; Dad was completely insane. “What am I doing out here? You never answer any of my questions, maybe you’ll burn down the other side of the trailer park to try to teach me a lesson I don’t get. Maybe you’ll have Bertram kill the kid. Maybe you’ll inflict cancer on everyone I come in contact with. Well here I am, give me that amusing anecdote that doesn’t have anything to do with anything and think that I’ll figure it out later. What do you want from me? What is your plan? Just let me know where I fit in. Why don’t you just fucking help me out?”
He didn’t react. There was no emotion, just a cold look from half open eyes. I wanted to choke Him. After a couple of seconds He finally spoke, “Listen to yourself kid. Don’t you think I hear that crap a million times an hour? What do you think would happen if I answered all those questions? What would happen if I worked out everyone’s problems for them?”
“Oh, I don’t know you’d have a planet full of happy content people I guess.”
“Shit kid, haven’t you learned anything? The Ying and the Yang, the murderer, the doctor. Contentment doesn’t exist outside the dictionary. It’s not real. A penniless bum can find a miracle in a Ham on Rye. The highest suicide rate in the world is from rich people. There is no heaven and hell, just a mixture of the two and everyone lives in them every moment of there lives. That’s what makes them heaven and hell. You can’t have one without the other. What do you think son, when you die you check into a five star hotel with free room service, a chorus of angels singing holy, holy, holy? How long do you think a person would be happy if he never had anything to make him sad? The emotion would lose meaning, life would lose meaning.”
I stared at Him. He was hitting me with too much. I couldn’t make out what He was really trying to say. “Did you happen to make me with a learning disability? Cause you’re speaking Greek pops. Are you talking about reincarnation now? I asked you for help writing the book. Should I add more of a Hindu flavor?”
“I’m not going you to hand you the answer, but think about this. Why do moths fly to light? Wouldn’t central heating and indoor plumbing be heaven to a twelfth century peasant? Wouldn’t the Torquemada’s rack be hell to the CEO of a corrupt conglomerate? Do Hindu’s bleed differently than a Buddhist, a Christian? The world wars were teenage rebellion. The kids have all grown up, this age of convenience, the digital age, that is stepping into adulthood.”
“None of this is helping me write the book. There is no way to combine all of those religions. There is no way to save all of these people. What the hell was that thing about the moth?”
“No one told you to combine all the world’s religions. I told you to write the next holy book before the digital age. Hurry up, you’re running out of time.”

He was right. He was always right. Apple computers were going strong. Every school kid had a digital watch, some even had calculators on them. Not only were video arcades the cool thing but there were a series of home video games that would hook up right to your television. The digital age was knocking at the door and along with it the Four Horsemen were coming too.
Sally Struthers was on all four channels asking for money to feed the worlds starving children. Her appeal for help was an accusation, to make the well off feel guilty. Some how I could hear her say it was all my fault. In a drunken rage I stood up and finally beat the console television until the bulbs in the back blew up. I thought that would finally keep the outside world out, but it didn’t. I could still see the programs even thought the television was broken. The news channels still streamed through crystal clear even though no one else could see them.
Sleep came in fits at best. I might catch an hour or two per day. I wrote in a perpetual state of inebriation. I quit every other week and in the weeks in between there were school shootings, the space shuttle blew up, the condors were on the brink of extinction, and Van Halen broke up…it was all my fault.
My unique view on life didn’t help. If I concentrated on it I could tell you history from any point of view. I could tell you the complete life story of a tree, flower, frog, sheep, anything, at any place in time, but none of it helped. The truth is not an easy sell. I thought I was supposed to show how all the religions are wrong and everyone should follow me. People should only believe in what I was telling them. Oh, and by the way there is no heaven and hell, just moths flying into candles, whatever that meant. There is no ultimate punishment for sinners, not for the guy that cut you off in traffic or the mass murdering tyrant that committed genocide. There is no reward for someone that lives there entire life without sin.
I can tell right now that this book will be on every coffee table. Knowledge is power my ass. Understanding is what really counts. A person has to want to understand. I could give Corky the cure for cancer and he’d probably use the paper to make a pretty fire and burn McDonalds down. I had the sour disgusting horsepill of human survival and no one was going to swallow it.
My first attempt at the holy book was completely categorized. It looked like some sort of scientific reference book, like Darwin’s Origin of the Species or Isaac Newton’s book ;Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. The latter being a real page turner I assure you. He might have known mathematics but he was not a riveting theological writer. I tried to show how each religion was a schism of the one prior. It took me five hundred and seventy nine pages to do back then what I could have summed up in a twenty page power point presentation today, but if I would have waited and done that it would have been self defeating.
Meanwhile cigarettes were linked directly to cancer and it was my fault. Alzheimer’s disease became mainstream and it was my fault. Hamburgers were proven to cause heart disease and obesity and it was my fault. I had to hurry and write the damned book before apple pies caused spontaneous combustion. I had no time to lose.
I completely neglected little Ish this entire time. I would feed him in the mornings before school and send him off. That was the last time I was cognizant of him being in this world, because I would surely be drunk by the time he got home. I cooked dinner sometimes, other times he would take money from my wallet while I was passed out and he would walk to the Hilltop market and get himself a pizza pocket.
There were small pockets of weeks and maybe months that I wasn’t so bad at being a dad. I remembered what it was I was doing this for. I helped him with his homework and whatever else dad’s do. I didn’t have a clue how to be a role model. I was only nineteen years older than the kid was. The kid was eleven years old a little after I turned thirty for Dad’s sake. Listen, I tried.
The ironic part of all this was that I was doing this all for him and by doing so I completely neglected him. I was going to save the world for my son, but I was making sure it was going to be very difficult for him to live in the world as a normally adjusted person by how I treated him. I often wondered how his life was going to unfold, but it couldn’t be that bad because he had really become resourceful by going through what he did with me. He was a survivor.
He made friends with most of the people pilgrims that came to the trailer park, and they came all the time. I didn’t like the interruption but I felt that I had to help them out or entertain them because I was playing the role of the messiah. If I did like I wanted to and told them to pound sand or piss up a rope they probably wouldn’t have put too much stock in my book, so I did begrudgingly help out these lost lunatics whenever the need would arise.
Weeks, months, and years passed like this. I was doing a very inept job of saving the world and because of my failures the world suffered, but because I didn’t give up all together the world went on. It was hell for me to see my failures on a daily basis being broadcasted into my home on my broken console television. It stressed my out, made me go faster and as a result I failed more. It was a wicked cycle of complete absurdity.

Chapter 7

“Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.”
-Winston Churchill

“What do you mean?” I asked into the phone. I still had a rotary phone with an extra long cord. I refused to buy the wireless phone. I paced back and forth in my living room with the receiver to my ear with one hand and the other holding a mason jar full of beer.
“I mean that I don’t think that I can effectively represent your work. I wish you luck in your literary career, but I’m sorry.” Said the voice on the other end.
“Yeah, I heard you say that and that’s what your letter said but I’m telling you that you have to. It’s the new Holy Book, like the bible.” I told him.
“I’m sorry sir, but I really have to go now. Why don’t you try another literary agent? There are a number to choose from that may be better suited-”
“No! You should all be banging my door down, begging to publish this book you shitgoblins. This is your last chance before the cockroaches inherit the Earth. You’re dooming the entire human race to be completely obliterated.”
These conversations never went well in my experience. The man on the other end of the phone was noticeably agitated. “You know what? I was the one that actually screened your submission and I’m glad I recommended that we rejected it. No publisher in his right mind would ever print that…that cult cookbook. Good bye to you sir!”
I threw the phone down spilling my beer in the process. It spilled all over my last copy of the book. I had to let my anger go and quickly squat down and tried to limit the damage. It wasn’t that bad it only soaked through the first ten of fifteen pages.
I let myself get pissed off again. After years of killing myself, of sacrificing any semblance of a normal life for me or my son, of stress filled days and sleepless nights, I was finally done with what I thought was the new Holy Book for the world’s population…and I couldn’t get a literary agent. I couldn’t get any publishing house to talk to me because I was an unknown author with no degree and no credentials. I had the key to man’s salvation and it wasn’t going to get published because it didn’t have a ‘marketable feel’ to it. I received form letter after form letter of polite rejections from every publishing house in America, as well as every literary agency.
“FUCK!” I threw the pages to the ceiling, immediately regretting it. The thing that pissed me off the most was that I felt that the little shit was right. The book did seem like some sort of cult cookbook. Even if I did get it in stores for a reasonable price no one would buy it. No one would take it if I gave it away. I would have to promote it somehow. It was in the marketing.

My brothers gave hope to groups of desperate people. They gave people what they weren’t supposed to have, a sort of spiritual contraband. People ate that up, but today there’s nothing like that…except maybe snuff films. No one was desperate anymore, not here in the new Holy Land. Maybe it wasn’t too late to write it in Ethiopian. The papers floated to the floor and I kicked at them. I noticed little Ish staring at me with that look of disappointment in his eyes. He was a teenager now, almost a man. He had taken care of himself for most of his life. I knew that he saw me as a disappointment, some crazy old drunk. He didn’t know I was doing it all for him. If I would have told him it would have just given him proof for his hypothesis.
I wish I could have been a better father to him. That is the one regret of my life and it is also my biggest failure. It’s the one thing I can’t blame on anyone else. He looked away as soon as he realized that I noticed him there. Then he walked upstairs.
Fuck it, I fell down into my torn recliner and thought about what I was supposed to do now. This couldn’t be impossible, I mean I had the backing of God. I thought about it until my head was going to burst. What was I going to do? That led me to think about who I was. A repeated theme, a reoccurring role in the ultimate sitcom, a scapegoat for the entire human race, that’s what I really was. I was the martyr needed to make everyone feel guilty enough that they would change their ways.
You see, the world today is turning too lethargic to kill me. The digital age is the epoch of convenience, it’s making everyone soft. Society today is too lazy to crucify their savior, but if they won’t then how am I supposed to die for their sins?
The old days was filled with the good sins, pride, lust, wrath, envy, and greed. Man, people would kill for any of those, but today we’re left with the other two; gluttony and sloth. Those sins end up killing the sinner, or so says the surgeon general. Well something has to happen, I’m not going to crawl up there and nail myself to the cross. I’m too much of a lazy coward myself to do anything like that. I am a product of the times just like anyone else.
So it was a stalemate. I was too scared, lazy and drunk to do something drastic enough to get people’s attention and they were too blissfully ignorant and lethargic to help themselves. We are perfect for each other.
My inaction caused the disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. Iran and Iraq were locked in a bitter war and my broken television told me that the US government was selling weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua.
Every Christmas the old lady in the silver trailer would bring us fig treats. I would laugh drunkenly and wonder if there was ever going to be an Ishmas. My hair and beard grew wild. The house fell into a dilapidated state. The wallpaper was curling off the walls, the tile floor was dirty and broken. I busted the mirrors periodically in drunken fits of rage.
I could tell that little Ish hated his existence. He would play sports all year round and stay at practices until he was told to go home. His grades were good despite all of this. I couldn’t figure that out until he told me that the school in Sweet River was eighth grade level tops and he was getting good grades so he could use them for a scholarship and get the hell away from me. I couldn’t blame him, I wanted the hell away from me too.
The only time I ever left the house was to tend the animals. I had little Ish help me build a fence around the yard in back of the house so I could move them there after they ate all the grass from the west field. I called it the Grand Exodus of the Masses. It was my little inside joke.
People would still come to the land but I stopped trying to help them. I didn’t want to see anyone. I felt like the people I was trying to save were directly responsible for my misery just as much I was responsible for theirs.
One day there was a knock at the door. I sat in my torn recliner drinking my jar of beer watching my broken television. Ish came downstairs and answered it. I stood up and looked over his shoulder to see who it was. There was a man in a black suit with mirrored sunglasses.
“Ishmael Shannon?” He asked.
“Yes.” Ish answered.
The man cocked his head mechanically then straightened it out. “I believe I’m looking for your father.”
I stepped u and Ish stepped back. By his reaction he wasn’t ready for a person of my appearance. “Yeah, well what do you want then?”
The man looked at me. I could see myself in the reflection of his glasses and it wasn’t on e of my good days. I looked run down, wild, insane. The man didn’t lose his composure. He just continued talking in his monotone voice. “I am agent Chin. I have brought your uncle’s belongings from when he was in the employ of the United States government.” His head snapped down at a black foot locker at his feet.
I hadn’t thought about my uncle or my mother for a long time. Suddenly for reasons I couldn’t explain, I was ashamed. I wondered where they were and what they would think of me if they could see me now. “Where are they?”
Agent Chin picked the trunk up and walked into the living room. He had such an awkward way about him.
“Well, where are they? Can I call them? How’s my mom doing?”
“Sorry sir, that is a classified matter.” He said as he set the trunk down in the living room and stood up very straight.
I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, there was no emotion in his face. For some reason I felt ashamed again.
“I don’t care if it is classified. I need to know where they are and if they are doing okay. Is my mom still alive?”
“Please give me a moment. We will talk about that shortly.” He told me in that same voice. Then he motioned to Ish.
Ish stepped up and asked. “Where do you work?”
“Far away.” Then he bent down and gave the kid a business card. “We’re always looking for good men. Your great uncle was a legend in the business. When you’re ready call this number and ask for Doctor Paul Seneca. If you are willing, he will find a place for you.”
Ish’s eyes lit up and he smiled. Agent Chin walked outside. I followed him. He didn’t get off the porch before I asked him again about mom. He turned around very clumsily. There was something weird about this guy. He didn’t look Asian at all, what kind of name was Chin? “I am sorry sir, but your uncle is no longer with us.”
The words slapped me across the face. I guess I suspected it but I wasn’t ready for it.
“And my mother?”
“She is with your uncle.”
I sat down on the steps of the porch with my head in my hands. It was horrible. I was ready for the entire world to go up in flames for the past fifteen years but I couldn’t handle this news. I felt bad for not doing anything with my life. My mom had sacrificed so much when she found out she was pregnant with me, they both did and for what? So I could grow up and be an alcoholic recluse? I was in tears when I was hit with another vision.
I was looking down at a beach and there was my son, but he was a man. He had to be twenty years older than he was at that time. The waves were crashing, I could smell the sea mist. It was such a beautiful day. There were seagulls squawking, they were hovering in the wind over a woman and a little boy as they threw pieces of bread up to them. The seagulls would catch the bread in their beaks and swallow them down hungrily. Ish walked up to the woman, he put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a kiss. She was his wife. They boy was their son. He was the cutest little boy I had ever seen and when I looked close at his face I could see traces of my mom and Uncle Ishmael, but the most important thing I saw was potential.
I decided right there that potential was the only thing that made mankind worth saving. Dad made sure we all had free will, but when we choose to exercise that freedom we usually chose the path of least resistance. It’s called Occam’s Razor. He meant it a different way but it meant the same thing. At any rate, the easiest way is not the best way all the time. It is if you’re trying to solve an equation but not if you’re trying to do something good in this world. It’s easier to steal than to earn, it’s easier to destroy than to build, and it’s easier to let people die than it is to save them. I was disgusted by the decisions people made every day from the news, and it ends up that I was just as guilty as everyone else. Each of us was born with an angel and a devil, but they don’t live on our shoulders, they live in our heads, in our souls.
Good and bad are irrelevant, it’s the potential that is everything, the potential to save the world or end it. That is why I started that day to write this book. It all became clear. I couldn’t reorganize all world religions and combine them all into one that was a fool’s errand, I had to do it my way, the way of a man born in this world that has made all the mistakes. I wasn’t some holy figure trying to save the sinners of this world. No, I finally saw that I was trying to save myself as well. We are all the same here. Anyone could have written this book, it’s not even that great of a book.
I was cynical in the beginning and I wasn’t sure what I was writing. It simply flowed out of me like a trip on the couch with a psychologist. All the research was there in my head, from experience and visions.
The world didn’t need another pizza, organized religion does more harm than good in today’s world, especially in tomorrow’s world when we have bigger weapons to hurt more people. Organized religion has lost its purpose and usefulness. It ends up being a justification for horrendous deeds.
Dad was right; kids need rules. They need rewards and punishments, but what I didn’t get until just then was that the digital age was the beginning of adulthood for all Dad’s children. This book is to tell you that we’re all grown up now. We need to take personal responsibility for our own personal actions. We don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to keep us from doing bad things. We don’t need the promise of eternal paradise so we do good things. We are going to bring our own Apocalypse if we keep fighting over things like religion. Don’t you see? It’s stupid to fight over religion. All religions are right! Dad is big enough and powerful enough to make them all true. You have to believe that if you believe in an omni present all powerful God. It’s up to pick the best one suited for you. If you’re going to trust your eternity to something, do the research. Fit it, suit it to you, personally, and once you do that, live by it without exception. If you don’t like any of the ones out there, that’s okay, make up your own!

That is my message.

DON’T LISTEN TO ME, FIGURE IT OUT FOR YOURSELF!

Dad is big enough for all of us and He can be whatever you need Him to be.

Irony Feeds Divinity: Book of Procrastination

The Book of Procrastination

Chapter 1

“There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Why don’t we talk a little about Heaven and Hell? That is what the contents of any good Holy Book should hold. I’m like anyone else on this one. I’ve always been curious what comes next. Are good people rewarded in the afterlife if they live with as little sin as possible? Are those evil bastards that have so much more than you get their just deserts after they die? I did some research on it and being that I have an inside connection, I was able to find out a little more than most.
Before I let you in the know let’s talk about other beliefs. Most people are born into a religion and don’t do anything to learn about the other people’s belief systems. This is complete ignorance. If you are going to trust the rest of eternity to a certain system you should at least do enough research to know, to know, that your system is the right one. I don’t think it’s the individual’s fault at all. The religion they were born into tells them not to look into the other belief systems. They say ‘don’t waste your time, they’re wrong anyway’, or ‘if you do you look into it there is always the danger that you will be pulled into the other religion’s evil’, or ‘it’s a sin if you do it’. So you see, you’re ignorant but it’s not your fault. Don’t take offense, I’m saying it’s not your fault, so did Christ e.g. “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.”
What I suggest here is that you cast aside your religion’s dogma for a couple pages. Don’t feel guilty if you find some of this interesting, it is, I mean millions of people believed in each scenario. There has to be something keeping all of these people believing. I know it’s a heavy yolk, placed on you when you were born, but just set it aside for now, you can put it back on in a bit.
Let’s talk about Hell. I know I mentioned it before as a Norse concept, but this is how the Greeks saw it. Hell was a place everyone went after they died. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades were all brothers. They came to Earth and ridded it of these horrible giants called the Titans. After all the Titans were gone the brothers split up the world. Zeus was the oldest so he had first pick and he chose the land. Poseidon chose the oceans. Hades was shit out of luck, he got the underworld, but back then it wasn’t a fiery pit of torture. It was more like a giant subway in a foreign land; everyone lost and wandering around aimlessly except in this subway everyone felt hopeless. The place was cold, dark and humorless. Back in those days everyone went to hell when they died, it wasn’t that they were all evil bastards, that’s just the way things went back then. Zeus’ mountain was reserved for gods and heroes.
Now Zoroastrianism (number 17 on the list with 2.6 million followers), was at least 1000 years before Christianity. They thought that the soul stayed in the head of a person’s dead body and all the good and bad things they ever did are written down in a book. Then the soul walks to Chinvat or Accountant’s Bridge. They stop in the middle of the bridge. If they are good a beautiful young woman takes them to heaven, if they’re bad an ugly old hag knocks them off the bridge into hell. Their hell is a dark place where people only get to eat the grossest, most disgusting food. Zoroastrianism also believed in resurrection, but only after the apocalypse, another thing that Christianity took from them. They believed after the final big battle between good and evil all the people that were sent to Purgatory would come. They would come back to life and live in perfect harmony where everyone’s family will be there and no one will have any more children.
I have a point here, stay with me.
Meanwhile the East had a very unique system going on. This is due to the geographic boundaries. That is also the reason that their language is so different then the Western countries. We’ll start with the oldest. There are three very distinct branches of Hinduism (number four on the list with 900 million). The Eastern religions had offshoots just like the Western. Everyone thinks they can make a better pizza. First we’ll talk about Vedic Hinduism.
The Vedic Hindus are unique because they don’t believe in reincarnation like the other branches. They believe once you’re dead and your body is burnt in a death ritual, you need to find a new body to travel to Sivaloka. This is a place where Dad lives with only the most highly evolved souls. It’s a world of super-consciousness and everyone walks around in bodies made of light. There are two other worlds, which sounds familiar, but instead of hell and purgatory their worlds are Earth and purgatory. That was interesting to me that their lowest after life plane was Earth.
I have a point here, stay with me.
The other two major Hindu religions are Upanishadic and Devotional Hinduism. Upanishadic were the first to decide to make their own pizza around 800 B.C. Devotional made their pizza around three or four hundred years before JC. Between these times lived a very popular pizza maker by the name of Gautama. He was a rich middle aged man. He was married and had kids, successful in his career. He was the son of a chief of a popular tribal group called the Shakyas. He had it all, but one day he sat under a tree and decided the best way to go was to give everything away and wear some robes. His pizza wasn’t about tasting good, just average. He invented Buddhism (number six on our list with 376 million) and the Golden Mean. It seemed that everyone wanted to be average and He gained a huge following.
Going back to Zoroastrianism (number 17), the good versus evil idea was quickly picked up by Judaism (number twelve on our list with 14 million), but their pizza was different. They didn’t stress the after life at all. They focused on a living relationship with Dad, that’s why they have such strict dietary habits and rituals. All of their doctrine concentrated on living life, so they Jewish people had more theories on what happens after you die than almost anyone else. Not surprisingly their concepts of heaven were paradise and their idea of hell was a fiery pit of torture. The Book of Daniel talked about resurrection, look at chapter twelve, verse two.
I have a point here, stay with me.
Now we come to the big dog (number one on the list with 2.1 billion that is one third of the people on this little blue marble). Christianity’s view of heaven and hell is very well known. I shouldn’t have to go too deep into it since at least 33% of the people that will read this book should already know about it. The other 67% were probably forced to learn something about it.
The New Testament was written over a period of a hundred of years by almost a dozen people. All of them wrote it in Greek and Hebrew. They didn’t have the organization to find all the holes in the story.
I have a point here, stay with me.
Christianity begat Islam (number two with 1.2 billion), which begat Shiite and Sunni, which begat smaller sects. Christianity begat Lutherism, Orthodox Catholicism, Baptists, Pentecostals, Snake Handlers, Mormons, etc…
Here’s my point; they’re all right. Sounds insane doesn’t it? That’s how Dad runs things. That’s why Einstein couldn’t figure out his Grand Unified Theory. He thought there was an order to everything, he couldn’t accept chaos. Well that’s the thing. This place is chalked full of both. I know it is hard for a person’s brain to comprehend. I may be the son of God but I have to admit that I don’t get it either, but that doesn’t keep it from being true. We make our own heaven and hell, and we are our own judges. Dad thinks its better that way. Like He said, He doesn’t like to micromanage.
What better proof do you need that reincarnation exists than how bugs swarm around light bulbs? Let me make the connection in case you don’t see it. Only a real asshole would feel bad enough to sub consciously turn himself into an insect. No one would want to be a disgusting bug that eats shit. It’s complete hell. Their born as slimy worms and the best they could hope for is maybe a butterfly, but even then you have those gross segmented bodies and webbed eyes. Their little insect brains can’t formulate too many thoughts but they know they don’t want to be bugs anymore. They have the survival instinct to stay away from the swatters but they always, instinctually go to the lights don’t they?
Living today, in this age of convenience would be heaven for one of those people that died on Torquemada’s rack. Can you imagine what track lighting and central heating would be for a thirteenth century European serf?
Let’s tie it all together now, this whole spiel was to let you know where I was in this time. I was right there with Noah and Moses in limbo, or Purgatory. Nomine patre a fila, spirit asante.
I walked through my life lost and hopeless, a shadow of who I used to be. I wanted everything to end but at the same time I was dreading it. I came to hate the future. The future shouldn’t have existed at all as soon as I decided that I wasn’t going to write the book. I looked out the window at nights expecting the fire to fall from the sky. Nothing I did had meaning, I suffered through my existence with a hallow feeling in my chest. This is not dissimilar to how the majority of the world has lived since the beginning of time.
Thanksgiving came and went. I couldn’t even recall when it was. I spent most of my days drinking to the point of ruin. I don’t even think I knew that it had past until Christmas. I remember the decorations on Christmas day. It snowed. The old lady in the silver trailer brought us over some fig treats. They were some pretty fucking good fig treats. I passed out around four o’clock that after noon in my recliner surrounded by empty Vodka bottles. I was the king sitting on my throne of misery.
It happened a couple weeks later. I remember the night that Cathy told me that the kid was coming. Her water broke and she was having contractions. Without excitement I called for Ferdinand, then I went for a walk. I thought about the futility of being born in this time and place. That was my first and only parental feeling then, I felt sorry for the little bastard. Why did Dad decide to send the kids down when the best they could hope for in this world is to avoid pain and suffering, carve out a small niche, keep their heads barely above water, and die while most of their lives were lived in silent desperation. There were so many choices, so many decisions, so many questions in life and Dad held the answer key, but never shared it.
I walked through the Holy Land. She did a good job turning it into a trailer park. It seemed to fit somehow. I had no idea who lived in the new trailers and I didn’t care. We had twelve new shining, white, single wide trailers. The pines and firs made the winter air fresh. The grass was greener than I had ever seen it. There were birds chirping, flying from branch to branch. It was a beautiful picturesque scene. I smiled, thinking how it would all look on fire.
I crawled into the middle of the rock formation Uncle Ishmael made. It was the first time I had even inspected it. There was definitely a method to his madness. The rocks were fascinating, the shone an unearthly blue. I crawled into the dead center. It was set up in a way that you could see out through all the nooks and crannies in the rocks but no one would be able to see you. I wondered how often he stood in the middle. I missed them.
I laid there in the middle of the rock formation in the cold grass. I would shut my eyes tight and wish for a tsunami, an earthquake, swarms of locusts. How would He do it this time? Why is He taking so long? I thought about trying to find Him out by his big tree, but what was the point? Instead I cursed Him for bringing me into this mess and letting me fail.
After I pulled myself out of my ocean of self pity I climbed back out of the rocks and headed for the house. I had been gone for a couple of hours, maybe the worse was over. As I walked up the creaky stairs onto the porch I was met by Ferdinand. He told me that I was the proud father of a baby boy. Ishmael Hieronymus Shannon the third. It was a knife in my side, she named the kid after me.

Chapter 2

“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – This is a somewhat new kind of religion”
-Albert Einstein

The park wasn’t the only thing that Cathy remodeled. The house had been newly wallpapered with a floral pattern and every window had curtains. There was new furniture and a console television. The kitchen had a nice self cleaning oven. In fact we had a fairly modern kitchen. The same thought ran through my head, ‘what a waste’. I pictured it after the archeologists found it in a million years. What a discovery it would be way out here on this dead planet.
That’s where my thoughts always went. I either saw things being destroyed or things being long since dead and rediscovered by some weird alien race a million miles away. Those were the only comforting thoughts that crossed my mind. The rest of the time I felt guilt for not giving in and playing house with Cathy and the kid. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What was the point anyway? The world was going to end any day.
This time in my life was wasted and I feel a loss for it. I can’t remember much, but I do recall one day in the spring. I was sitting on my chair, passed out with a mason jar of beer on my lap. I don’t know how long Cathy shook my before my eyes rolled from the back of my head and focused on her. Suddenly I was aware of the kid crying and her angry face inches away from my own. “Is this how it’s going to be? I don’t know the last time I saw you sober. No, yes I do, it was the night that you came back from where ever the hell you went to while I was back here trying to build us a future.”
She was waiting for me to say something back to her, but I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She was right to be angry at me. She spent her days running the park and taking care of our kid while I spent everyday drinking and waiting for the end of the world.
“I can’t take this anymore Ishmael. Why do you hate us? Why do you hate yourself? Can’t you control yourself for one day, be sober for one day and then maybe you could go over there and get to know your son?” At this point the baby started crying, and immediately after so did Cathy. I still couldn’t do anything but stare at her with my big glazed over eyes. I had no emotion in my face.
We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, until her crying turned to sobs that shook her small frame. She stood there sobbing with her hands to her face, standing over me as I stared at her with no emotion, the baby crying somewhere in the background. Then I stood up and grabbed my flannel shirt and went outside for a walk.
My stomach felt sick, and it wasn’t from the alcohol. My eyes were swollen and raw, but there weren’t any tears. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t change who I was. I couldn’t change the world. She wanted me to be someone that I wasn’t. I would have given anything to be what she wanted me to be. It just wasn’t who I was. I had a very defined role in this world and it didn’t matter what she thought my responsibilities were.
My breath came faster and faster. I could feel the cold air in my chest cavity. I tried to clear my head. I couldn’t even think what day it was. How old was the kid? How long had I been in that coma? The end of the world hadn’t come yet. Why hadn’t the end of the world come? Didn’t Dad believe me when I said I wasn’t going to write the book? I wasn’t going to save the world. Even if I did write the book it wouldn’t have saved the world.
“My Lord!” It was Bertram from out of nowhere. He scared the hell out of me. I hadn’t seen him since I’ve been back. In fact the last time I saw him was the day of the riot. He seemed to have aged ten years since then. I’m sure I did too. I felt like I’ve aged ten years. His hand was on my shoulder, touching me as if he wasn’t sure if I were real. His eyes were trying to burrow into my soul to ensure it was still me inside my body.
“Bertram.” I answered him with the same urgency.
“My Lord ist it truly thou?”
“Seriously Bertram, stop with ye Olde English. Yes it’s me, so what?”
“What a joyous day my Lord. I was praying to God that you would return.”
“Yeah, so I’m here, good job.”
He stared at me unsure of what I was saying. I wasn’t the person he wanted me to be. I recognized the look immediately because I had been getting it since I was born. I could see in his eyes that he was trying to reshape his reality, take what I said and reshape it into what he wanted to here. After a few seconds he smiled. “My Lord, you’re back and that’s the important thing. Now we can get on with our work.”
“No, you just don’t get it do you, you Goddamn pole choking jiz goblin, there is no work. I’m not writing the book. The cards were stacked against me from the start. Don’t you get it? Dad never wanted me to win, He’s a sadistic creep that feels obligated to give us one more chance before giving the planet to the bugs. I was never meant to win. It was one big fucking…farce!! Why can’t you get that?” I blew up at him. I felt bad for a second, and thought to myself whether or not I had ever used the word ‘farce’ before.
His entire countenance changed. It wasn’t what I had expected. He went from desperation to determination. “My Lord, you have lost your faith. I understand this. I too, have recently had the same dilemma,” a disgusting smile oozed across his pock-marked face, “I know what we need to do in order to get it back.”
I looked into his face and there wasn’t an ounce of uncertainty. I was curious, I was hypnotized. “What do we need to do?”
“Oh, my Lord, it will not settle well with you, being so pure and so righteous, but that is okay. I know my role and I know that I must do it anyway.”
“Do what Bertram?” I asked.
His tone and facial expressions made me nervous. He kept smiling and didn’t attempt to answer.
“Do what Bertram?” I asked again.
“My Lord, some of us have strengths, at first we don’t know that they are strengths. I had my reckoning with God. He told me what I must do. Sometimes a heavy hand is needed. I can’t tell you any more.”
For some unexplained reason I exploded on the old man. I was filled with rage that I had no idea where it originated, “Bullshit Bertram, there is no ‘heavy hand’ here. I don’t know what sick scheme that you have hatched in your fevered brain, but you will not even look at Cathy or my son! Do you understand me?”
He shrank back instantly. He looked like a vampire seeing the sun for the first time. He had no idea what to think of my sudden outburst. He had always influenced me before, he had always led me where he wanted, but now he was aware that I had my own opinion about things. He back peddled into the woods until he almost tripped and then ran away.
I was still panting when I lost sight of him. ‘My son’ I had yelled out. I couldn’t understand any of this. Maybe it was because I hadn’t drank in a while but things started to become clear to me in that instant. I had already given up. I wasn’t going to write the book. The world was going to end. I thought it was going to end as soon as I decided not to write the book, but it didn’t. Maybe Dad was going to wait until the dawn of the digital age. That’s what it had to be.
Well if the world wasn’t going to end until a certain time period anyway, which could be decades into the future, why couldn’t I try to be the best father I could be to little Ishmael, and a good husband to Cathy? I had already turned my back on my role in this life, I might as well try to live up to my responsibilities, at least until the world ended. That was as good of a deal that anyone else ever got. But I also knew that if I did that I would only fan the fire of whatever plan Bertram had. I wasn’t sure how far he would go but I knew it was going to lead to no good.
I inhaled deeply, the cold burnt my lungs. I decided there that I was going to do the best I could to raise this kid. Maybe, somehow, Dad would decide to put off the end of the world for a couple hundred years, after all what was time to Him?
I walked back to the house in a hurry with my hands in my pockets. I was nervous. I was scared. It suddenly dawned on me that the decision to be a father was easy, it was living it that was terrifying. My pace started to slow. I thought about Uncle Ishmael. He was a good example, but he was a freak of nature. He gave up everything for his family. He gave up having a family of his own to raise his sister and her bastard son. Maybe I had a little of his good genes in me. I was going to give it a try. I got to the steps of the creaky porch. I took a deep breath and climbed each step, walked to the screen door, and paused for a second. I tried to think of something to say. I could picture her there on the other side of the door, with her head in her hands, crying. Then I got angry again, but I stifled it right away. I opened the door and went in.
She was in the kitchen feeding Ish three. As soon as I entered she stopped feeding Ish and glared at me. She watched me intently as I walked up to them. I was so small she could have stepped on me and swept me under the rug. “Listen…Cathy. I, I uh, well, I just wanted to say that you’re right. I’ve been going through some things…for the last year or so…and I, uh, well I think maybe I’m through them. You know, it’s just that coming back here utterly defeated and hating myself was hard enough, then I find that you’re here and you’ve changed every familiar thing I’ve ever known, plus you have a kid. I mean it’s hard to deal with.”
“So what are you saying?” The words darted out of her mouth before I could finish the sentence. “You want us to leave don’t you? Just say it. Don’t be such a fucking coward.”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. You’re not listening.”
“OH, I’m listening. I’m standing three feet in front of you. I would have to be deaf not to hear you.”
“Yes, yes, you can hear me but you’re not listening to what I mean.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I sighed because I didn’t have any words in my mouth, and that didn’t go over well with her.
“Well why don’t you tell me what you’re trying to say Ishmael, quit stammering and just tell me man.” The baby could feel our tones and started whining a bit.
I gathered my thoughts and words. A part of me couldn’t believe that I was going through with this. Why would I put myself through this torture when none of it mattered anyway? I pushed that small piece of ugly hopelessness away into a small corner of my brain. I pushed it way down and continued. “I am trying to tell you that I am sorry. I am also trying to say that I would like to do what I can so you forgave me. I would like to be a father to the kid.”
She was stunned. I have to honestly say that I was too, or at least that small piece of ugly hopelessness was stunned. We stood there looking at each other not knowing how to react. We were after all, basically strangers. She had known the young, naïve, simple me, and I never got to know her at all. I was too busy trying to figure myself out. All I had ever gotten acquainted with was her tits and ass, and I knew that I liked it.
I took a step closer and tried to smile but couldn’t. I coughed instead and looked at the kid. He was cute enough. He had mashed carrots or something rubbed all over his face. He had stopped whining. I looked over at Cathy. She swept her bangs out of her face and tucked them behind her ear. She was still very pretty. She looked back at me not knowing what to say either, then she looked down. I think that she tried to smile as well, then looked back at me. I had taken a couple steps toward her and I was now on the border of her intimate zone. I didn’t know whether or not I should take another step. I could tell she didn’t know whether or not to reach out. Finally she put her hand on my shoulder and I gave her a very awkward hug. She hugged me back, equally as awkward.

Chapter 3

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”, 1854

Every couple of years we think we’ve come to some revelation. We think we got it together and we laugh at the person we used to be. We scoff at the fact that we could have actually been that stupid during the previous period in our lives. Well when you get to that point your only a couple of years away from being laughed at again. I don’t know what I was thinking trying to be a father and husband. It was immensely more difficult then I had first imagined. The difficulty only compounded when you factored in that I wasn’t ready for it and I didn’t really like who I was stuck with. That’s what it felt like, I was stuck, and it only took a couple months for it to feel like that.
I kept at it. I kept at it because that’s what Uncle Ishmael would have done. Well that’s what I thought. The fact is that Uncle Ishmael would have never gotten into this situation. But I kept at it, even when it seemed impossible. Alcohol and pot helped incalculably.
Cathy decided that I needed to do something to bring in some income. It wasn’t that we really needed it. She did well with the rent, but she wanted Ish Three to go to college when he grew up. She wanted me to work so that the kid could go to college someday in the future, the future that would probably never get here.
I couldn’t think of any job that I would want to do. I was the son of God after all, and even though I decided not to go into the family business, I couldn’t see myself working at Busy Bee Burgers, the fast-food place in Sweet River down the road. In fact I couldn’t see myself working for anyone. But if I allowed myself to think down those lines, it didn’t look to good that the only thing our modern messiah did religiously was watch One Life to Life and General Hospital.
I had no skills to speak of. I vowed to never perform another miracle and I damned sure wasn’t going to miracle someone’s tires rotated at Les Schwab. I thought about all of this as I sat in my brown recliner drinking my beer from my Mason jar. That was the only miracle I did any more. I poured tap water into Mason jars and turned it to beer. My brothers had jobs. Gautama was a set to be a mayor of a province, Confucius was a Statesman, Mohammed was a merchant, and JC was a carpenter.
Well I wasn’t going to run for governor of Oregon, I wasn’t going to train presidential candidates, I definitely wasn’t going to work at Safeway, and I damned sure wasn’t going to build cabinets. That’s when the Walton’s came on TV. It was an episode about Daisy, Mary Ellen’s new born lamb. That’s when I got it. I was going to be a shepherd. Then I would be outside all the time and not in the house getting yelled at for being a lazy drunk. Plus, if the animals were going to inherit the world I could give them some pointers for not screwing it all up like we did.
I got up and told Cathy. She was thrilled that I was excited about something. It didn’t matter what it was. She told me that she would get the money to start us out with the animals. She went and borrowed it from the rich old lady in the silver trailer, Mrs. Katzenberg.

Well of course I found out very soon that I should have thought the shepherd thing through better. That was one of the things I would laugh at in a few years, but the real punch line was that I picked out a bunch of different animals I had no idea how to care for. I picked a couple cows, a couple pigs, a bunch of sheep, a couple llamas (I picked them because they were exotic and I had never seen them before), and a couple males of every species I got. All the farmers I had bought the animals from shook their heads in disgust at me without exception. It may have been from my extreme inebriation, or it could have been from my limitless ignorance on how to take care of the animals. They all gave me their phone numbers and offered to come to my farm to see how the animals were doing in a couple days. They took that opportunity to inform me of their buy back policies.
I have to admit that it would have made the entire experience easier if I would had built my fence before bringing the animals to the park. It would have been easier if I had known anything about feeding, keeping, or caring for the animals. For some reason I kept at it, but those days were hard. Not only were the days long out in the fields but the nights were equally as long with Cathy and the kid. I wanted the world to end as soon as possible. I had unintentionally slipped into hell without knowing about it. I was living a life I hated without seeing any way out. My only release was the Mason jars of beer, chain smoking cigarettes, or the occasional joint. I finally knew how the majority of people in the world felt. No wonder they were so into religion. What was the use of going on unless there was something better coming up after this shitty life?

Chapter 4

“A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”
Anatole France
French novelist (1844 – 1924)

The animals took most of my time. They were easier to deal with than people. I didn’t want anything to do with running the trailer park. That was Cathy’s job. I didn’t like any of the people that lived there, except maybe Ferdinand and that was because he kept to himself. The rest of the people that populated the park would wave to me or say hi. I would grumble something back and keep minding my animals. They weren’t worth getting to know. The world was going to end any day.
Besides, this trailer park seemed to attract the weirdest most desperate people. It had to be the fact that it was the holy land, the holy land always attracted the weirdoes. I mean look at Bertram. He would follow me around the park all day, hiding in the bushes thinking I didn’t see him.
Then there was the old woman who lived in the silver trailer close to my house. I guess she was the financier of turning the Holy Land into a trailer park. At Cathy’s insistence I went over to thank her for giving us another lump some of money to buy the animals. I’m not sure what I had to thank her for. I had been busting my ass for the last eight months, waking up early to feed them, building a fence to keep them in, and general livestock maintenance that comes from keeping so many different types of animals in the same pen. All of this and I still had no idea how the hell I was supposed to make money from them. All they did was eat, sleep, shit and make my life more miserable. I think the only reason I kept at it at first was that it took my mind off of the coming of the end of the world.
I had successfully put off thanking the old lady for months. I thought that I wasn’t going to have to do it, but then Christmas time came around and she brought over her damned fig treats. This reminded Cathy that I hadn’t went over to talk to her so I didn’t hear the end of it the rest of the night. The next day I walked over to her small trailer.
It was a frosty December day. The sun was breaking through the clouds but it still had to be in the low forties. I noticed as I approached her trailer that she had set up a small lawn directly in front of her trailer. On her small manicured lawn there was a ceramic mama duck followed by a trail of small ceramic baby ducks. I’m not sure why that struck me as odd until I got to the doorway. That’s when I realized that someone had thrown bread crumbs all around their ceramic feet.
I sighed deep and opened the screen door and knocked. I could hear big band music playing inside. There was no answer so I knocked louder in case she couldn’t hear over the music. As I waited for her to answer I tried to remember the last time I had talked to anyone other than Cathy. I hadn’t talked to anyone since returning to the park. Suddenly I became apprehensive. Then the door opened.
“Hello dearie.” This white haired elderly woman looked up at me with dull cow eyes behind oversized square bifocals. The headlights were on but there was no one behind the wheel.
“Hi there. My name is Ishmael, Ishmael Shannon.”
She walked back into her house before I finished. She left the door open as an invitation. I watched her waddle her way back into the living room and sit down on the couch. After she sat down she picked back up her yarn and crochet hook. It seemed like she was going to start crocheting when she put it all down on her lap and waved at me to come in. As she did this the loose skin hanging from her upper arm swung back and forth. “Come on in dearie. It’s so cold out there.”
I raised my eyebrows and cleared my throat and stepped in to her living room, shutting the door behind me. A new song started on the phonograph to my right. It was just loud enough to be uncomfortable. “So, uh, I’m Ishmael, Ishmael Shannon and I live in the house over there.”
She just stared at me with a smile. I couldn’t tell if she could hear me and she made no effort to let me know.
I tried to continue, “I live in the big house right there with Cathy…Well I wanted to come over here and thank you…can we turn the music down?”
She continued to look at me with that same smile.
“Can we turn the music down?” I asked louder pointing at the phonograph.
“Sure, sure dear.” She placed her yarn and crochet hook on the couch beside her and struggled to get up. Then she waddled over to the phonograph taking the needle off of the record. “Glenn Miller. I loved Glenn Miller, did you know that that song there, Chattanooga Choo Choo was the first ever gold record? I remember hearing his radio show back in February of 1942. I also remember playing train of a different kind with some of his orchestra…hee hee, that’s my little joke.” My face crinkled into a confused expression. Then she waddled right up to me and put her hand on my arm. “Now what were you saying dear?”
As soon as she touched me my mind was launched through time. I lived her hard and terrible life with her. She lost her father at an early age and was forced to move into a brothel with her older sisters during the depression. She had a long and terrible career as a prostitute. She serviced the rich and powerful of her time until she was used up and thrown out. Not knowing any other lifestyle she experimented with all sorts of sexual deviance until she racked up enough physical ailments and she couldn’t do it anymore. Luckily she had invested her money from the latter half of her career and had done quite well in the stock market. Her hard and horrible life had scarred her mentally and physically, not to mention it had left her all alone in this world. That was the worst thing I felt, a terrible hole inside of her, complete loneliness. Then I was in the future. She was even older. Someday she will use her money to buy her happiness, but in the end she dies under suspicious circumstances, killed by someone living in this park, with no one mourning her.
Then I was back, staring into those dull cow eyes behind oversized bifocals. “Fuck I need a drink.” I said to her.
“I have some prune juice dear.”
I turned around and left without another word. After closing the door behind me I heard Chattanooga Choo Choo being put back on. The song had a new meaning to me now. I felt nauseated. I remembered how I was there the first time the pimp sold her to a John, and then every time after that when she lost her dignity, her humanity, a piece at a time. Why do the innocent have to suffer? Most the time the innocent suffer more than the guilty. Where is Dad then? This poor creature will live most of her life in complete loneliness until finally she is able to use her money to buy happiness just to have it taken away from her too soon in foul play. Why would Dad let that happen?
How was I supposed to fix this? It happened all around the world thousands upon thousands of times every second. It was totally overwhelming. They were killing, raping, molesting, exploiting each other at every opportunity, it’s a part of human nature. I couldn’t change that no matter how many books I wrote.
So you see, it wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was the fact that I cared too much. I couldn’t watch the news or read the papers without feeling tormented. Every headline, every story was a reminder of how horrible we are to each other, a reminder of how humanity seemed to be taking itself out of the game, a reminder of my failure. The thing was, I did watch the news and read the papers. It was an addiction. I loved to hate the people committing these atrocities. I used every excuse I could to drink. In my mind I wasn’t giving into weakness, I didn’t have a disease, I simply didn’t care and nothing mattered. If I stayed drunk there wasn’t a chance of feeling. I didn’t want to get attached to Cathy or the kid. That way when I lost them or when I disappointed them it wouldn’t hurt.

One day I woke up and found that I had actually slept in the bed upstairs. Usually I passed out in my torn recliner downstairs. It was the mornings that were the worst. I always felt like my insides were rotting. My stomach always hurt and the horrid odor of my breath smelled like it came from deep within a moldy cave. I got up, put on my robe and walked to the bathroom. My teeth all felt loose as I brushed my teeth and when I spit in the sink the toothpaste was mixed with blood. I rinsed my mouth and spit one more time, then I did something that I rarely did, I looked in the mirror.
There were dark circles around my eyes. My pores were deeper and more pronounced. My dilated pupils looked like they were being struck by red lightning from every direction. All of a sudden there was a feeling on top of the nausea. I thought about it involuntarily until I realized it was remorse. When was the digital age coming?
I needed a drink. I walked downstairs. Cathy was in the kitchen making breakfast. The kid was in a highchair playing with some oatmeal of something. The whole situation was warm and homey. I sighed, feeling the old heartstrings pulled. I walked to the window without saying a word and looked out the window. It was a beautiful dry winter afternoon. It was a hideously perfect picture.
“Good morning.” Her usual dejected and disillusioned tone was missing. I wondered why until she said, “Merry Christmas.”
I looked to the sky and wondered if Dad would pick this day to end the world. I knew that he loved irony, but that was just too obvious.
“I know things haven’t been going that well lately, but why don’t we put that behind us and try to have a good time, just for today. What do you say Ishmael?” She turned around with an awkward smile wiping her hands with a kitchen towel. She walked over to the kid and wiped his mouth. The damn kid was being too cute.
I could feel something stirring but I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to save them. I was going to stick to my guns. “This isn’t going to work pops.” I said to myself. “This house could be full of starving orphans with missing front teeth on crutches and I wouldn’t change my mind. I wouldn’t give two shits if Mother Teresa and a convent of nuns were tending a puppy farm in this kitchen and it still wouldn’t matter.”
“What’s that hun?” My eyes widened. She hadn’t called me ‘hun’ before, or if she did I was too drunk to notice it. I don’t know why she would call me hun. I didn’t treat her well. The only time I was ever nice to her was when I wanted a piece of ass. For some reason this made me feel even worse. I started to think how much she put up with. She should be furious with me on any day of the week and here she was with a big breakfast on Christmas morning.
“Fuck, that’s a nice tree there.” I didn’t want to appreciate it, but the ornaments and lights were set up very aesthetically pleasing. “Did you set that up this morning?”
“Nope, that’s been there for about a month now.”
“Right. I meant the ornaments, they’re new right?”
“Nope, they’ve been there the whole time.”
“Yeah, I mean I, it looks nicer today.”
She let me off the hook and set my plate down on the table. I sat down behind it. We had breakfast, drank some coffee and actually talked. We even laughed a little bit. Afterward we sat down by the tree and opened some presents. Cathy had bought some for the kid and even one for me. She got me a framed picture of her and the kid.
Listen, I know that JC was born in the spring. I know Christmas was put in late December to quash the pagan holiday. I know that the Christmas Holiday is nothing but a farce, but there is something magical about it. It doesn’t have to mean that you follow a certain religion. It could simply be a time where you forget about all the bad stuff in life and have fun with family. The day was excruciatingly pleasant. We had hours of painful fun.
I couldn’t let myself get caught up in this. It made no sense. Even if I changed my mind because I wanted to be with my family I wouldn’t be able to. That would mean that I would have to write the book, go out to preach what I wrote, and die a horrible death at the hands of the people I was trying to save. The more I thought about it the angrier I became. Why was He showing me this? Why was He torturing me? I couldn’t take it any more. I got up and put my coat on.
“Where are you going hun?”
“I, uh, I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Go for a walk? It’s almost dark and it’s freezing outside…”
She trailed off and I couldn’t hear her anymore after I shut the door. I marched across the creaky porch and into the woods.

Chapter 5

“There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.”
Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

I hadn’t talk to Dad since I’d been back. It had been over a year and I never even tried. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Him in my life anymore. Even though it had been so long since I’d been there I found it right away. I saw His silhouette under the tree, sipping on His beer, smoking His cigarillo.
I walked right up. He was leaning against the trunk of the tree. I wanted to say so much to Him but I couldn’t get it out. He had his dark red suit on with a white shirt and black suspenders. His belly pushed out over his black leather belt. He had a good buzz going. “Hey there kido, long time no see.”
That’s when I realized that I wasn’t the same person that I was the last time we talked. I wasn’t that naïve kid off to save the world. I had gone out and found true humanity. “I’m not going to do it pops. You put too much responsibility on me. You gave my brothers small parts of the world when I have to change it all. There are almost four billion people alive today.”
“Three billion, eight hundred and seventy nine million, four hundred and five thousand, nine hundred and fifty three, fifty seven, sixty one, oops, fifty nine, sixty four-”
“Yeah I get it, the point I’m trying to make is that when my brothers were doing this there were less than one billion people on the planet. I’m set up for failure. The best I can hope for is to start a small movement with a bunch of crazy dissidents and die a painful death. The message would die off after I was gone because people are too comfortable with their routines and have no need to change. The dogma of their religions keeps them too scared to take a chance on changing their minds. And peace and love are against human nature. Why did you even create this species? You and I both know that if by some miracle I found a message and people actually did listen to it soon there would be offshoots to my religion and the groups would wage war against each other in my name. You can’t just part a sea and expect to get people’s attention. I don’t think that would even get news coverage, not with Nixon resigning and Hank Aaron beating the home run record, Muhammad Ali beating George Foreman, and whatever else. They would rather see Magnum Force or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“Why don’t you sit down and have a beer boy?” He motioned for me to sit down next to Him.
“It’s freezing out here.” I didn’t feel like sitting down and being calm but I did grab a beer. We stayed there sipping our beers in silence for a while. “You know boy, I shouldn’t tell you this, but here it goes, I didn’t directly create human beings. Nope. Sure I created the universe and the stars, the planets, molecules, atoms, and a ton of shit no one’s ever heard of, but not humans. That’s why I’m so damned interested in them.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course you did. Are you trying to say there are other Gods? Are you telling me that it was all evolution? Is this a cop out?”
“I’m the only omnipower around.” He took a sip from His beer and burped. “I’m telling you that out of everything in this universe, and all the other ones for that matter I’ve taken a special interest in mankind. You’re unpredictable, to a point…no that’s the wrong way to put it. It’s like reading your favorite book over again and finding things in it you didn’t see before.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I looked at Him with a scowl.
“You’re not supposed to boy. I’m God. Do you think you’re the only one that gave up?” He pulled a book from His pocket, opened it to a certain page and read aloud, “This is from the Gospel of Thomas, a very good book that didn’t make the cut the Fifth Gospel. Thomas 1:13 ‘Jesus said I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the spring I tended’. Do you think Thomas and Jesus were on a bender or was he foreshadowing what the world would do with what he was going to teach them?” He flipped through the pages. “Some of these verses don’t make any sense at all; Thomas 1:56 ‘Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass’, or 1:71; ‘I will destroy this house and no one will be able to rebuild it.’ There’s not many ways to interpret that.” He laughed as He took one last drag from His cigarillo. Then He dropped it on the ground at His feet.
“I don’t care what any of my brothers did. I don’t care. Do you understand? I quit. So start with the end of the world stuff. Bring it on. Do it! There is no saving this mess!” I looked up at the sky ready for it all to start.
“You can’t hard ball me kid, and you can’t make me change my plan. I’ll start with the end of the world stuff all right. You’re going to see it everyday. It’s going to be long and drawn out. I’m hitting you with all four barrels; war, famine, pestilence, and disease but not all at once. It will be hell on Earth and the thing is that it will happen so gradually that no one will even notice it. So thank yourself when you see a big eye grabbing headline buddy, because none of it will stop until you write the book and they start to understand.”
The ground was smoldering. It must have been his cigarillo. It was so cold that I didn’t pay too much attention to it. There’s no way it would start a fire. I turned my attention back to Dad. He just gave me a good scolding but I was determined not to back down. I was a man now. “Hell on Earth? I got news for you it’s not the greatest place right now. I get a head full of disgusting vices, horrible crimes, and incredible suffering. The world is full of evil people and I there is no way I can save everyone.”
“He was unimpressed. He took another pull from his PBR. “You still don’t get it Einstein, who do you think put all the evil there? And why do you think you have to save them all? You better reexamine your role here.”
The smoke burst into flames. It started to spread around the base of the tree. I tried to stomp it out, but it jumped to the dense brush. I looked back to Dad but He was gone. The fire turned to a blaze and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. The whole grove started up. I was barely able to get out of there. I sprinted back to the house and called the fire department.

The forest burnt until dawn. The tree line was ash and ruin and as much as I tried I couldn’t even see where Dad’s tree had been. It had been something that had been so familiar to me, that I walked to instinctively in the dark, now I couldn’t even remember where it had ever been. The landscape was so different.
“Good God’s Cross.” I heard someone say off to my right. I tore my eyes away from the burnt and blackened trees and turned to the young fire fighter. He was covered with soot and dirt from his flame retardant boots to his yellow helmet. “That was one heck of a fire there sir. Something I never saw before.”
“Yeah, one heck of a fire.” I repeated slowly.
“She just wasn’t going to go out. The weirdest thing I’ve seen. It’s the dead of winter and here we have a fire that’s not going out. Then suddenly it just dies. We thought somebody had used propellant, but we can’t find any signs of that. It’s the kookiest thing.”
“Yeah, kooky.”
“I know it looks bad now, with the property damage and all, but no one was hurt and even though it may seem like a bad thing it’s not really.”
I turned to look at him. “Why’s that?”
“Well it’s like they say in the wilderness fire-fighting school; you see forest fires benefit the entire ecological system. It clears out the junk so the young trees can get the nutrients they need from the soil and the proper sunlight. So you see, it may seem like a bad thing, but it’s not really. Every forest needs a good cleansing once in a while.”
I just smiled at this wealth of knowledge. What a weird person, he just busted his ass fighting a fire all night and now he was giving me a biology lesson. The worst part of the whole thing was that I felt Dad was teaching me a lesson somehow. I don’t know why but I became very angry. “Listen you shit goblin, I appreciate your goody two shoes attitude and your Boy Scout naivety, but right now I don’t feel like being in science class. Why don’t you go off and practice being a firefighter or something?”
“Good God’s Cross man, what is the matter with you?” He walked off toward the fire engine. I heard one of the veteran firefighters tell him that strange things always happened at ‘the Shannon Place’. They continued to load up their trucks and the drove back into town.
Cathy walked over the creaky porch and over to me with the kid on her hip. “Why are you always rude to everyone?”
I didn’t answer her, she didn’t want to hear my reason anyway.
“We had such a good day yesterday. I thought we were really taking ‘us’ to the next level, but then you run off and burn half the trailer park down. What am I supposed to think Ish? Where do we go from here?”
I looked up at her and met her eyes. I needed a drink; I was such a coward, scared of everything. I was scared of the end of the world. I was scared of being with her. I told myself that I didn’t want to be with her, that there was no reason to do it since the world was going to end soon anyway, but that wasn’t it. I never had any normal relationships in my life and I didn’t know how to even try to make this one work. The other thing was that I didn’t know who this girl was. So we had sex a couple times a year ago and she had a kid, does that mean we need to be together forever. I wasn’t the same guy that I was when we were together back before the riot.
If I wasn’t such a coward I would have told her that I didn’t want her there any more and wrote the stupid book. I could have simply left myself as well. I could have actually tried to make things work with her and not think about the end of the world. I would have picked any of these options if I was worth a damn. But I didn’t, I decided to live in the gray area in between all of these. I took the most cowardly option and didn’t make any decision.

Chapter 6

“Irony is the hygiene of the mind.”
-Elizabeth Bibesco

Bertram walked up the steps of the cottage. He was far from the man he was when we first met him n the desert. He had changed so much, he wasn’t even a faint echo of the young schoolteacher. These last three years had aged him as much as the ten years prior. He had believed himself to be the miserable hermit so much that he turned into a reflection of that persona. His posture looked like he was physically carrying the enormous burden he felt. His face was covered with wrinkles and scars, he picked them up like trees pick up rings, year after year. He had also gained at least fifty pounds. His clothes were thread bare and he had a disheveled appearance. He still had his hair cut into a flat top even though it was gray and his hairline had moved to the middle of the top of his head. He wore the same black rimmed fifties-style glasses. When he moved he had almost an insect like scuttle and he scuttled up t the door of Ferdinand’s cottage. Like a child expecting a scolding he knocked timidly on the door. A couple of seconds went by with no answer and he knocked again.
“Begone…I’m done with visitors.” A yell came from inside followed by an awful meow that turned into a pitiful whine.
“Dr. Destouches, It’s me, Bertram Olds, the school teacher.”
There was a sigh and then some footsteps to the door. Bertram could hear the latches being unlocked and the door opened. Ferdinand stood there in his tidy black suit. There was still a bullet hole in the jacket. The doctor on the other hand had not changed a bit since we first met him in the desert. He was definitely the same man we met in Las Vegas. “And what need do you have that is so dire that you think you must talk to me?”
Bertram became even more fidgety and uneasy under Ferdinand’s annoyed gaze but he managed to stammer, “I was only wondering whether or not you wanted to go into town, you know, for some groceries.”
“You know that we stopped our tandem grocery shopping years ago…I have all of my sundries and assorted needs delivered…you know this.”
Bertram was staring at the floor. He opened his mouth but then closed it again and flared his nostrils.
“Out with it scoundrel…tell me why you are really here.”
Bertram tried to look at him. He really did put forth an effort, but he couldn’t. Instead he looked past him into the house. He started to speak several times but failed before finally he said in almost a whisper, “He’s been back for almost four years Ferdinand, and he won’t see me to discuss our destiny.” Slowly the volume of his voice grew louder and louder as he lost himself in the thought. “He won’t talk to me, and I know it’s because of the wench and her little devil seed. And I’m torn because, can’t you see that the reason I was picked was because I remove the sin, I take away the distractions? I was going to do it, years ago, but he told me not to, but he doesn’t know what’s good for him. I have to do this to get us back on track and I needed to talk to you…I needed to talk to you to make sure that I wasn’t going insane. I need to know that this isn’t part of my illness. So you must see what I have to do, it’s obvious, right? That’s all I really wanted to say, so I will go and leave you alone now.”
“Quit that nonsensical talk…I honestly cannot see how you believe in any of this business…it’s all madness.”
“No, don’t say that. How can you not believe? You haven’t aged a second since that day in the desert. You blew your brains out twice, you were shot in the heart and here you are still. How can you not believe? You are the blessed one, look at me! I am the one that believes and I’m shunned, I AM DAMNED! The master talks to you, I’ve seen him come over here. I’ve watched him from those bushes over there. What did he say to you? YOU MUST TELL ME!”
“Ha! You see…the madness will not end…All you want is to talk to the boy…you want to ooze your sickness into his ears to make him ‘believe’ in some sick dribblings from a fevered mind…but you can’t do it…and all I want is it all to end…to be able to leave this horribly sad dance…and I can’t do it…We stand here with each others needs unable to trade them…HA! Faith does not feed divinity…no my friend, it’s irony! Irony feeds divinity!”
“Tell me please, tell me what he says.” Bertram begged. “I must have something to believe in.”
“I will tell you that you are as mad as your God…now go away and die in your filthy shack.” Ferdinand went to close the door but Bertram stopped it with his foot and took a menacing step inside. His arm whipped over his head and the eight inch diver’s knife glistened in the morning sun.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me!” This time his voice wasn’t that of an insolent child, no, it was rougher, lower.
“And what will you do now you putrid toad?” The two men stared at each other for a moment. Finally a smirk spread across Ferdinand’s face. “Fine…I will tell you what your master said…he said he finally realized that he agreed with me…He said his Father is an insane tyrant that needs to have His golden pig belly rubbed…He told me to expect the end of the world because he will do nothing to stop it.”
Bertram froze as the words invaded his ears. He knew Ferdinand was telling the truth, people that wish for death are fatally honest. Bertram melted back onto the porch. He tried to think what those words meant for his reality. His master had given up. What was he supposed to do?
He dropped his arm and put the eight inch diver’s knife away and took a step back. He was lost in thought. His world was melting away in front of his eyes. The sound of the door slamming made him jump. Then he heard the latches being locked again and footsteps walking away.

Chapter 7

“What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?”
Irv Kupcinet

I sat on my bed looking out the window, into the sky. I pictured swarm of locus whizzing over the horizon, across the land, consuming everything in their wake. I saw huge balls of flaming space rock a half mile wide screaming through the sky and crashing into the earth. I saw a wave five miles high scattering the trees like toothpicks and washing every trace of civilization away. Why couldn’t it be that easy? I stood up and walked to the window and looked down at the ground outside. I weird fog had moved in, but unfortunately it didn’t look world threatening. I heard Cathy enter the room behind me.
“Ishmael, we have to talk.”
My shoulders and spine shuddered. The violent and total devastation of the planet I was ready for, a ‘talk’, I was not. I slowly turned around. She wore a flower sun-dress. Her black hair was to her shoulders now. She looked very much looked the part of the house wife no matter how much she despised it. It’s funny how we grow into our roles.
She was the one that wanted to talk, and I didn’t have anything to say so we stayed there staring at each other for a couple seconds.
“What are you doing?” She asked.
“Honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“Waiting for a sign that the end of the world is coming, but unfortunately I don’t’ think it’s going to happen today, but that’s a good thing because as I understand it, it will only come when we least expect it. Maybe it won’t come at all, maybe it won’t be the end of the world as we know it, it will be something completely different, no rapture, no apocalypse, but some sort of age where everyone is in hell and they don’t know it.”
She crossed her arms half way into my tirade. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Honestly?”
“No. Jesus Ishmael, it was cute in the very beginning, but that time is over. It’s not the sixties anymore.”
“We met in seventy-two.”
“I can’t put up with this anymore. I don’t think anyone would. I thought you were getting better for awhile but you’ve been like this for over a year. You stare out the window for an hour after waking up, you hardly say two words to me, if you pay any attention to little Ishmael you end up yelling at him. I think you should go see a psychiatrist. You have this weird thing going on. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but you are not the son of God.”
I had no intention of arguing, but her tone and inflection made me defensive. My words came out before I realized it, and they were incredibly loud. I was releasing all my built up anger. “Why? Because you say that I’m not? Don’t you think that I don’t want to be the son of God? Fuck! Why can’t it be you instead, anyone? I wish that I could be some ordinary guy with some sick neurosis that could talk to some counselor and take a couple pills and be ordinary again. I wish I was that guy. That guy lives in paradise compared to me! How can you think I’m making this up? Because I haven’t talked about it for three years? Well you and I both know that I’ve been thinking it. Can’t you see how I’ve been living life like a zombie, barely alive, drunk all the time?” I paused for a second to let my words sink in. Neither of us knew what to say. Then I thought about those earlier days, “You must have seen me heal those people years ago.”
“Why are you hurting us like this? Why are you doing this? You must see that all of this is crazy.”
I looked down at the hardwood floor. She was right, it was crazy. All of it was absolutely mad. I wished with all my heart that she was right. All I wanted in life was to finally realize that I was mentally ill and seek treatment. Maybe I was just a little mixed up for the past couple of years. I did take those drugs in the desert. Could it all be some sort of complicated flashback? The times I was living through were huge drug eras. What if I was just some drugged out loon for the past five or six years? My reality could have been unraveling since I was a child. Maybe there was led in the water source.
I looked up at her again, wanting to be the man she expected me to be. Maybe I could be that man if I believed enough. She was a very beautiful and intelligent woman. She had built this whole park by herself. She deserved better. I did everything I could to convince myself that this whole messiah business that had spanned the last couple of years of my life was all some sort of weird drug episode like she said. I thought if I tried hard enough that I could live in her reality. Was I committing blasphemy by not believing in myself?
I was so incredibly confused. It’s funny how the mind works. You can convince yourself of anything if you have a bad enough need. You can make yourself ignore the true facts and believe in anything someone else tells you. Most people do it to believe in a certain religion, I was doing it to not believe. I examined all my childhood memories and I could see her point of view through all of them. A new angle where I was merely a child born out of wedlock by a teenage mother and a father that never stuck around. I was home schooled and because of the isolation of this place my imaginary friend was a little more real than He should have been. I went out into the world and couldn’t deal with it because my social skills were never developed.
“So what do you want to do Ishmael? I know that you own the land but I’m the one that borrowed the money from Miss Kitty and turned it into what it is now, besides I don’t think that it would be healthy for little Ishmael to move right now.”
I needed to come to a decision. I had been living in that gray area for too long and it was certainly a misery that had been killing me. I needed to be a normal guy. I decided to be a normal guy and have nothing to do with religion or world saving. I would be the good atheist my mom raised me to be.

A couple good months went by. I tried to look at life differently. I saw us as a young couple. I was twenty-three years old with a three year old son. My live in girl friend was twenty-one. Cathy ran the finance part of the park and I did the long over due maintenance and tended the animals.
We both did housework and raised little Ishmael. The kid was pretty smart too. It was a comfortable life that anyone would want, the stereotypical American Dream. I should have been happy, but I couldn’t be. Contentment only exists in the dictionary. I had that uneasy feeling in the back of my head, that feeling that there was something more, that sense that I should be doing something more.
It was a drive to be something more, but why did I have it? I didn’t want to be anything more. I had everything that people said I should have in order to be happy. It had to be something Dad put there. I didn’t want to do anything about it, so I ignored it for those couple of good months, but it didn’t go away, it grew. It double, tripled inside and every day that I ignored this feeling I felt guilty. I had this guilt I didn’t know what to do with, or at least I told myself that I didn’t know what to do. That was me being a coward again. I could have made one of those decisions I rattled off early, but again I am a coward. I lived with my guilt and put on the mask of the happy father and husband.
Unfortunately wearing that mask was harder than I thought. It slipped every time I drank too much or had a bad day, and when it did all of that guilt spilled out of me like a dam bursting, but the guilt had changed into anger and hate. I hated Cathy and the kid for making me live this lie. I hated them because I couldn’t do what Dad wanted me to do. I hated them for any reason I could pull from the heavens. During these episodes I would scream and cuss, and some times I even hit them. It’s hard for me to admit that on these pages but I did. I always felt bad afterwards and I did a good job of convincing them and myself that I would never do it again. I was so sorry, so loving, and these were emotions they wanted me to show every day. They wanted me to show these emotions toward them so much that they forgave how we got to that point. They ignored the means for the end, but that would only start the cycle over again.
No matter what I did the drive in me grew bigger and as it did my patients with Cathy, the kid and life in general shrank. The cycle we had going turned to a spiral, the time between my hate sessions would get shorter until I was blowing up every day. At that point they questioned the authenticity of my loving and apologetic side. It wasn’t working but we were all trapped in this sick ritual and both I and Cathy were too scared to change it.
The only thing that made me feel better was going through my notes late at night when they were sleeping. I didn’t want to put the book together for a couple reasons. First off it was completely impossible, secondly I had told Dad that I wasn’t going to do it and if I changed my mind that would mean that He won, and finally I was scared that if I did start it I would fail. The reason why I wanted to do it was that it would fulfill that drive in me to do this and be something more than a trailer park maintenance man, and honestly I really missed the attention, even if most the time it was Bertram giving it to me. After being a messiah, even if it was in my own head most the time, everything else I did seemed trivial.
I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to straighten all of this out on my own. I had to talk to someone. Cathy would get instantly pissed off, Dad was gone after the fire, Bertram would agree with anything that I said and offer to kill someone, the crazy old lady next door with bombard me with gross stories of her debauched life, so that only left one person; Ferdinand.

Chapter 8

“When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.”
-Marquis de la Grange
(1639 – 1692)

I could feel Bertram following me through the woods. I knew he was there in the bushes watching me. He always was. It seemed to be his favorite pastime. I ignored him and knocked on the cottage door. It took him a second to answer. When the door opened there was Ferdinand, the same he’d always been.
“What is it then?” He asked.
“Sorry, I was hoping that we could talk.”
He didn’t move from the stoop, still holding the door. “And what is it that you wish to talk about?”
I didn’t really think about that. I looked up at the ceiling as though the answer would be up there. “I guess I wanted to know what you think about..well about-”
“Yes, yes…the same topic…the only topic…the reason we’re all here. You want to talk about God, dog, Hank, whatever he calls himself today.”
“So you believe in Him?”
“Of course…how can a person not believe Him…He put us all here…He placed this curse on me…the question isn’t whether I believe in God…the question is whether or not I believe in His ability to be God.”
“Well?” I asked.
He looked at me like he felt sorry for me. He pitied my stupidity. The answer to that question was obvious. “This eternal fool spoils my plans at a well thought out ritual suicide meant to spit in his eye…He tethers me to a fanatic buffoon and puts me on an absurd mission regardless of what designs I have. Now I am stuck here in the middle of some low class mobile estate to live out the rest of eternity delivering children named Ishmael.”
“Sorry.”
He grunted and crossed his arms. His ancient gray cat walked up between his feet and rubbed on one of his legs. The sound of a creaking door came from its mouth.
“I guess a better question would be,” I asked, “do you believe in me?”
He looked me up and down like he was seeing me for the first time. His posture changed. He became less aggressive. He saw me now as a boy seeking advice from the only father figure left for him. He looked down at his ugly cat. “Bebert, get out of here. I can’t remember how old this cat is…if it had any sense at all it would die…but it has in its head that its role in life is to be my pet…how absurd…at any rate I’m sure that is what it believes…I don’t want it here…in fact I thought about putting the wretched creature out of its misery and I have told it so a number of times…so you see it’s not sticking around on my account…so you see everything has a role…the rain is there for the plants to drink…the fly must feed the spider…this mass of gray hideousness must continue its painful existence in order to be my pet and you are meant to do what you are meant to do whether people believe in you or not.” He pushed his long wild bangs out of his face with one hand and put the other on his hip. “Well…there you go…that is my advice. Don’t ask for any more.”
“A simple yes or no would have been good. Everyone in my life thinks that their sage-like advice has to come in riddles or analogies. You know what? I came here so you could tell me I’m full of shit and get over it. I don’t know what you’re trying to say but I don’t care any more. I’m not doing it. I’M NOT DOING IT!”
“Fine…you’re full of shit and get over it…and go screw yourself while you’re at it.” He slammed the door.

Irony Feeds Divinty: The Book of Starlight Overniters Mobile Estates

The Book of Starlight Overniters Mobile Estates

Chapter 1

“They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat a recluse.”
-Emily Dickenson

It was late into the evening when the rusty old pick up truck pulled into the dirt driveway off of State Highway 20. The rocks and gravel crunched under the tires. The driver put the truck in park and turned to his less fortunate passenger. “Well, here you go. This is where you wanted to go, right?”
“Yeah, this is the place.” The passenger said in a rough voice filled with cynicism beyond his years. He still made no motion to get out of the truck.
The driver looked at the young hitchhiker’s profile as he stared straight ahead. It was as though he was weighing the pros and cons of getting out or going on. “You said the Shannon place off of twenty, here we are.”
“Yeah, yeah.” The young hitchhiker reached down and grabbed his duffel bag. He still didn’t look at the driver as he opened the door and jumped out.
The driver put the truck back in drive and yelled, “Your welcome!”
“Eat shit fuckwrench.” The young hitchhiker yelled after the truck. Then he took a deep breath and looked up at the moon. It wasn’t yet full but it did still give off enough light to give everything a blue tint. He started down the dirt road and didn’t get far before something completely took him by surprise.

I’m sure you get it by now. I was that young hitchhiker. There I was back at home, but it wasn’t like I remembered it. I stood there staring up at it for a minute or so. It was so surprising that it took me that long before I could trust my eyes.
It was a big white sign over two rows of mailboxes. It read, ‘Starlight Overniters Mobile Estates’.

The Holy Land was now a trailer park. I hung my head and rubbed my temples. It took another minute for me to compose myself. I needed to get my bearings. I looked over to the dark blue outline of the rock formation and sighed. Then I walked toward the big house. There was something different about that house that I couldn’t place. I didn’t try to figure it out. I dismissed the thought all together. I was happy that it was kept up. Hopefully Bertram or Ferdinand were living in it. I was tired and the only thing I could think of was a nice soft bed.

It’s funny how the mind and body work like that. Have you ever noticed how hunger turns ravenous when you smell food? Or how when you have to take a leak it hurts ten times as bad when you’re close to a toilet? I was weary from traveling and being that close to a bed magnified my exhaustion to the point that I could think of nothing else. That may be why I dismissed the black figure of a man quickly running off in the corner of my eye. That’s why I didn’t care about what looked like the moonlight reflecting off a piece of metal in the black figure’s hand.
I walked up the creaky steps to the house and opened the screen door. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. Of course it was going to be locked. I sighed in desperation and tried to think where a key would be.
I had no idea. I was going to have to find Bertram or Ferdinand. I was so tired that I really didn’t want to do that. I grabbed the doorknob again out of frustration and jiggled it, then pounded on the door. I finally decided to head to Bertram’s first, but before I could get a foot away from the door a light inside the house went on. A couple seconds later the door opened the width of the security chain. The silhouette of a woman’s head peered out. “Who is it?”
“It’s me Ishmael.”
“Oh my God!” The woman said excitedly. She unlocked the door and swung it wide open. She stepped out onto the porch in her nightgown. She was obviously pregnant, about seven or eight months along. “Ishmael, you’re home!”
“Hi Cathy.”

Chapter 2

“Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.”
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

“I cannot do this O’ Lord. Thou hast made this task too difficult. This little harlot has come back and is contaminating our Holy Land with the infidels she brings to the park.” Bertram wailed into the ceiling of his small shack. He had been suffering ever since his savior left him. His faith was wavering again. “This little bitch came back thinking that she had some claim on the Holy Land, spewing her lies about having my master’s baby. Knocked up in some back alley by some godless heathen, no doubt. OH! But the apostle Ferdinand let her settle in the sacred house of our master! Oh dear Lord, I’m so sorry that the killer instinct that you placed in my heart wasn’t hungering the night she arrived. Why! Why did I wait this long to do anything? I’m so sorry, and I’m sorry that my convictions wavered when I saw that man walk toward the house tonight.” He had turned to a blubbering mess, a pile of misery crying onto the wooden plank floor of his candle lit room.
When things were good, when his master was testifying to the masses, Bertram felt good enough to order indoor plumbing and he had some contractors build him a kitchen, but other than that his house was still without insulation. The planks still had gaps between them. Bugs infested it in the summer months and rain dripped in the winter. It was a miserable existence, but he felt he deserved it for failing his mission.
Now the small shack was filled with sobbing and the loud crack of a leather strap landing on the Bertram’s old scarred back. The wick of the candles flickered with the wind from the blows of the strap. It made his shadow seem like it was quivering with pain as well, but that was okay, he needed to suffer to show the extent of his devotion.
The wench had returned, with offspring, to ruin the sanctity of the Holy Land by letting the unbelieving masses live here. He allowed it to happen. What was he supposed to do? He snuck up to the house that very night with the hopes of slipping in through a window and ending her reign, but then that man came. Did she have some sort of security force? It couldn’t have been a coincidence, what were the odds that someone would show up to the house the very day, hour and minute he decided to kill the harlot? Was there some sort of plan at work?
“WHY!? Why didn’t I have the strength to stop these atrocities?” He rammed his head into the uneven floor boards. The dozens of imperfect wooden sculptures watched him with their empty eye sockets. “Am I doing the right thing O’ Lord?”
He proceeded to whip himself more and more, faster and faster, harder and harder until blood splattered. He whipped himself then writhed on the floor, looking like something out of Revelations, gnashing of teeth, tangling of limbs. Then suddenly he stopped and his body went limp.
He had thrown such a fit that he had lost consciousness. His body laid there in the candle light finally in peace, but his mind was racing. His consciousness wasn’t there in that shack anymore it was somewhere else. Whether this was a divine act or a delusion from the fevered mind of a lunatic who’s to say? Really what is the difference?
However you would like to look at it, Bertram found himself in a dark room. The walls were made of carved stone. The floor was packed mud. By the dankness in the air he somehow knew that he was underground. It was cold, but up ahead there was a fire burning. He walked to it. There were other people there too, but before he got a good look at them his attention was diverted to a huge wooden wheel. Bertram wondered what the hell it could be used for. It was directly over the fire, but far enough away that the wheel didn’t start on fire. Just as he tried to figure out what the mechanism would be used for he heard the screaming. The wheel was being turned and the person tied to it was being placed directly over the fire, between it and the wheel. There were men in robs all around this poor victim. Two men were at the handle that turned the wheel. Two other men had quill and paper, another man was over watching the whole event. The man watching over all of this was a tall bald skinny man with sunken eyes. He had on priest robes.
Suddenly and inexplicably Bertram knew what was going on. This was Tomas de Torquemada, first Inquisitor-General of Spain. He and his fellow priests were torturing a man, and by the way, they were doing it with full consent of the Catholic Church (Pope Innocent IV passed a Papal Bull in 1252 that sanctioned the use of torture to church officials). This man was accused of being a religious dissident or what Torquemada and his priests called a converso. The accuser was anonymous, it could in fact have been one of the priests torturing him, but that didn’t matter because this converso is obviously guilty. It is only a matter of time before he confesses. A person would confess to anything if you spend enough time over an open fire. After he is found guilty all of his possessions go to the men torturing him. That is where the Inquisition got their funding. It seems like a Catch 22 if you think about it.
Tomas de Torquemada supervised this Auto-da-fe, or ‘act of faith’ with a smile on his face. Another disbeliever has fallen. He motions to one of his priests to pump the billows to fan the fire. The converso screamed accordingly. He screamed that he was a Jew, he screamed that he hated the Pope, he screamed that he killed Jesus. He confessed.
He wouldn’t be the last one. In his reign as the supreme authority over the Spanish Inquisition Torquemada killed more people than the rest of the Grand Inquisitors for the next 200 years. Tomas acquired a great deal of wealth despite his vow of poverty. He killed as many as 8,800 people and was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. He burnt people alive at the stake, he pioneered the toca. That is when water is forced down a victim’s throat for long periods of time, sometimes until the person’s stomach bursts. There was the potro or the rack where a person is pulled apart by straps on their wrists and ankles. Another good one was the garrucha where the victim was hung by their wrists by a pulley and weights were tied around their ankles. They would be pulled up slowly then dropped a couple feet before stopping suddenly. Most of the time an arm or a leg would be ripped out of the socket or ripped off all together depending on the hardiness of the victim. This was done in the name of God, and it was not only done to men, women and children also suffered.
After his years and years of ‘purifying the dissidents’ Torquemada retreated peacefully to his monastery in Avila Spain and died in his sleep in 1498 at the age of seventy-eight. The Catholic Church will never say he did wrong. If you do some research into it you’ll see that they say ‘the figures are highly exaggerated’. The church will say that Torquemada was only trying to keep the Muslim and Jewish converts (Marranos and Moriscos) converted in order to keep peace in Spain.
Bertram smiled as he watched the converso go limp over the fire. The guilty needed to be punished, and it was a lot easier to do it if he was the one that decided who was guilty. He understood his bloodlust a little better now.
His consciousness shifted. He was somewhere else. His stomach was nauseous. Was God trying to show him something else or was this whole thing a delusion from a fevered mind of a fanatic. The world was spinning, he wasn’t inside anymore. He could smell the fresh odor of a jungle. He stood there as Spanish conquistadors crowded around an Indian tied to a stake. No he wasn’t Indian at all, he was Incan. He was Atahualpa, the last native ruler of Peru. He was considered the Sun God to his people, now he was about to be lit on fire by a man in holy robes.
In 1493 Spain and Portugal decided to go to war over who would be able to cross the sea and conquer the New World. In order to keep the peace Pope Alexander VI divided the unknown territory in half using an imaginary line called the ‘Line of Demarcation’. He gave the northern half of a world to Portugal and the Southern half to Spain. It didn’t matter who owned it now, obviously God made it and the pope was God’s representative on Earth.
Bertram somehow knew that he was in Peru, on July 16, 1533. Just outside Cajamarca, a small city in the great Incan Empire. The Spanish born explorer Francisco Pizarro had crossed the ocean and traveled down the coast from Panama. His force included 3 ships, 180 men, and 27 horses. They had come to conquer the Incan Empire of 380,000 square miles and 300,000 soldiers in the name of his God. Of course he had no idea how out numbered he was, if he had I wonder if his faith would still have been so unwavering.
The Incan King, Atahualpa, was himself a God. The Incan Nation’s leader had always been a God. The people knew them as the Sun God. This Sun God let this small group of strangers into the heart of his land with the naivety of a child and the confidence of a deity. It was his curiosity that got the better of him. He had to go talk to this group of aliens, to see the rumors circling around his kingdom first hand. He went with 6,000 unarmed men thinking their meeting would be civil, not wanting to intimidate this small force by bringing an army. Atahualpa went to Pizarro. After he closed in on Pizarro and his men, he felt that precaution may be the best way. He set up camp and called for some of his army. Pizarro instantly sent a messenger telling the Sun God that he obviously lacked the courage of nobility. The Sun God, not wanting to make a bad first impression and letting his pride get the best of him, decided to go ahead without his army.
The first minute the two met one of Pizarro’s Dominican Friars forced a Bible into the Sun God’s hands telling him to denounce himself and receive Jesus Christ as his savior. Well, the Sun God acting accordingly to the insult threw the Bible down. This was all the reason Pizarro needed to scream to his men. “SANTIAGO!” This was the signal.
The slaughter of the unarmed Incans lasted into the evening. Either everyone was dead or they ran off to disappear into the jungle. They went to tell everyone of the merciless strangers that took down the Sun God. The only Spanish casualty was Pizarro himself. He took a slice to the arm keeping one of his men from killing Atahualpa. He wanted to do that later, in a civilized manner.
That brings us to where Bertram had found himself, or at least imagined himself to be. He was a school teacher after all, maybe he had covered all of this in one of his classes and was simply hallucinating. Whatever it was Bertram could feel the heat when the fire below the Sun God’s feet started. He could smell it when the flames ignited Atahualpa’s white robe and first burned the hair of his arms and legs, then the flesh. He could hear the inhuman screams of pain until the King’s body was fully consumed. This is how, Pizarro, an illiterate pig farmer from the poorest part of Spain became ruler of an ancient empire and representative of the Christian God in South America for eight years.
Bertram smiled as he watched the heretic burn. He felt a new justification of his actions. He was not the only tortured soul that worked for God. There were certain jobs that only men with his weakness could achieve. Weakness? No, it was a strength, a strength that most men were lacking. His faith was renewed…but what if this was all just his mind playing tricks on him? What is the difference between a holy vision and a mental illness?
Joan of Ark heard the voice of God. She saved Orleans. She refused to believe that she made up the voice and was burnt at the stake for it. Muhammad had visions of talking to the angel Gabriel and he started a whole religion. Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel called Moroni and no one had ever even heard of that one before. He ended up starting a religion that millions of people bought into. Bertram thought real hard. He came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter whether it was a holy revelation or a delusion brought about from lunacy. God was the one that put that lunacy in his head and that had to be for a reason. One was just as good as the other.

Chapter 3

“If the prodigal son had never left home, the fatted calf would still be alive.”
-Chuck Palahniuk

All I wanted to do was sleep, but the situation clearly called for a discussion. Cathy was back and living in the house, she was very pregnant. This must have been Dad’s way of trying to change my mind, but I was steadfast. I was going to let her die with the rest of the world. Everyone dies anyway. If Dad was evil enough to kill us all than so was I. Besides all children go to heaven, right? I was doing him a favor. I’m sure if the kid grew up than he would eventually lose his innocence and mess up his life enough to go to hell. I was playing the odds.
Hell doesn’t exist anyway, not in the way you think. Hel was originally the Nordic Goddess of a frozen underworld. Christianity got a hold of it, they liked the term and used it as a topping for their pizza.
“I really didn’t know where else to go.” She called from the other side of the bathroom door. I was drying my hair. It had been a while since I had a good shower. She was still talking to me. “So I came back here, but you were gone. I hope this isn’t too much of a shocker for you.”
I didn’t answer. Instead I lathered up some soap in my hands and spread it across my face.
She pushed the door open a little more and peeked in. “Can you hear me?”
“Oh, yeah, uh, the sign was cool. Mobile estates huh? That sounds better than a trailer park. It’s all about the advertising, that’s what someone told me a while back…do you have any razors?”
“In the drawer to your left,” She pointed, “I was thinking about the future Ishmael. I mean I didn’t have any money, and like I said, you were gone. I had no idea how long you would stay gone. I had to do something.” She hurried through the end of the sentence like she was embarrassed. “I was looking out for our baby. I noticed that people would just show up here every couple of days. I decided to start charging them rent. It made sense, right?”
It was true, people came to the land all the time. It was the Holy Land. People with problems would simply find themselves there, they were in an unconscious state of pilgrimage. It was the one place endorsed by the father of all creation, hell, why not capitalize on it?
She wasn’t satisfied with my nod so she continued. “I borrowed the money from Mrs. Katzenburger, the old woman I brought here in the silver trailer. She’s loaded and she’s very nice once you get past all the weird stories she tells. Anyway I made a deal with her that she doesn’t have to pay rent since she gave me enough to get all the septic tanks dug and installed, and the propane tanks and the electricity hooked up for the lots. Right now we only have twelve lots, but my goal is to have twelve times twelve lots. We have enough land.”
She said ‘we’, she said ‘thinking about the future’. My head was reeling. I tried to concentrate on shaving. She was trying so hard to win my approval and I wouldn’t give it. She wanted me to tell her that she did the right thing, but to me there were no right things. I didn’t care about anything. I thought the end was coming any minute since I quit. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. What did she expect? ‘Hey great to see you, wow you’re pregnant. Do you want to get married and raise our kid? Great job on turning the Holy Land into a trailer park.’
Finally I turned to her, “Listen, I’m sorry, I uh, I’ve been through a lot since I saw you last.”
She looked at me like I knocked the breath out of her. She was amazed by my audacity, by my nonchalant attitude. “You’ve been through a lot? Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t know that you’ve been through a lot. You know what? I’ve been through a lot man. I am pregnant with your kid and I have no family. I have no money and nowhere to go. I built this park from nothing…from nothing!” At this point she started crying. Her head was in her hands. She started again but this time her voice was softer. “What was I supposed to do Ishmael? Did you want me and our baby to live out on the streets? Huh? Did you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then why are you being such a dick?”
“I’m just trying to shave, that’s all. How is that being a d-…you know what, I don’t care. You live here, you can have the park, it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to be here much longer anyway. I’m not writing the book.”
“Are you talking about that messiah thing again? Do you still believe that stuff? Shit man, that was just some sort of mass hallucination from all the hippies that were living out here. They must have put something in the water supply. Remember what that got you. Don’t you remember the angry mob that chased you out of town? You are not some sort of Holy figure. Get your fucking head out of the clouds and realize your responsibilities. And that’s another thing, we need to tell that Bertram freak to get out of our park. He’s creepy, we have to think about our baby.”
I stood up and walked out of the room. That took the cake. She was preaching to me about responsibilities and I left. The worse part was that I felt like I did something wrong. I had a steel block of guilt in my stomach and it had sharp edges. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to write the book. I wasn’t going to play family man. I was going to sit back and laugh at the oncoming Apocalypse.

Irony Feeds Divinity: The Book of Failures

The Book
Of
Failure

Chapter 1

“Religion is less a matter of holiness than an excuse for dispute.”
Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 1721

Reverend Burnham was beaming with pride. His congregation was bigger than ever. He thought back a couple weeks to when he was ready to pack his family up and move to a town up in Washington. His life had taken a turn for the worse since that false prophet showed up with his magic tricks. Most of his flock had left, leaving only the elderly that were so close to dying that they couldn’t gamble on changing religions. When he was younger he used to tell himself that it didn’t matter how many people sat in the pews, all that mattered was saving souls, and if he had to do it one at a time that was fine with him. It wasn’t the quantity, it was the quality, but now that he had a family, he realized that a congregation on a government pension or welfare meant that he couldn’t live the life he and his family deserved. He had given up everything to preach the word of the lord. He had dreams of going to Hollywood and becoming an actor, but he gave that up to become a reverend, a holy servant, and he damned well get something for his sacrifice.
At any rate he was glad that he weathered it out. There was nothing like opposition to bring the flock together. He had to admit though, that after those ‘miracles’, his own faith started to waiver, but he was able to get through that. Nothing reaffirmed faith more than having it tested. There’s always an answer for every question, if you just take time and interpret it from the bible.
When everyone saw those tricks being performed they were confused. It took a while but the good revered was finally able to turn their confusion to fear, then it was only a matter of months before then fear was turned to anger. He stirred the pot and he stirred it good. That night he delivered one of the best sermons ever on false prophets. He quoted scriptures;

Mathew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Matthew 24:24 – For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
Mark 13:22 – For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.
2 Peter 2:1 – But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
1 John 4:1 – Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

By the end of his very emotionally vamped monologue he had all of his followers ready to stamp out the false prophet, they were ready to kill if needed.
He couldn’t get his mind off it as he drove. If he pulled this off he would definitely be able to pull some new blood into his church. His congregation would be bigger than ever. It could even be bigger than that non-denomination church down Main Street with all the good parking and young, good looking pastor.
He was sure to gather all the sheep from the other faiths, if he were the one that drove the demon out. Reverend Burnham could hardly contain his excitement. A real life demon, or a cunning pagan magician, either way it didn’t matter. The people were riled, ready to go. He didn’t have time to think about his accomplishments again, he was almost there, but in the back of his mind, he wondered how Ishmael really did those things he did.
Bah, it wasn’t God’s work, that was for sure. The whole thing was ridiculous. A man in this age claiming to be the one and only son of God? It was insane. People don’t talk to God anymore, not literally. The whole burning bush stuff, that was thousands of years ago. Reverend Burnham never really questioned why God hadn’t made an attempt to talk to people anymore. It wasn’t his place to ask God anything. His job was to teach the word to the ignorant.
That’s when he realized that this whole thing must have been a personal attack! That’s what it really was, a personal attack from some occultist because of how he humiliated the kid when he was eight. The whole thing was so clear. The kid must have learned some black magic spells in some pagan book. That inbred brat was using his pagan tricks to take his congregation, and as a result taking his income and his livelihood. Well, reverend Burnham, and the town of Sweet River, wasn’t going to take it anymore.
He led the thirty car convoy into the dirt driveway off of State Highway 20, onto the Shannon property. Reverend Burnham parked his blue 1965 Dodge Dart Station Wagon in front of some sort of half built Druid occult rock formation grabbed a flashlight and his bible and got out.
It was reverend Burnham’s first time out at the Shannon place. He knew where it was, everyone knew where it was, and everyone heard stories of what went on out there. It was dark and extremely foggy, but he did see the two story house. He knew that was where the brother and sister lived, that was where they did their unspeakable acts. How could the messiah be a product of inbreeding? It made him laugh out loud.
Reverend Burnham got out of his car and watched the other cars as they parked on the grass. This was his first mob, he was a little nervous. Most of his congregation pulled out baseball bats or some other type of bludgeoning tool as they gathered around the reverend. The reverend’s plan was only to tell this abominable young fake that the town was no longer interested in his false preaching or miracles, but he wasn’t opposed to scaring him off either. That would be the best possible scenario. Then the town would be there for the saving, and the lone reverend that spotted the façade would be in a good position to gather all the lost sheep into his field, and that meant a better life for him and his family, maybe even a 17 foot fishing boat with an outboard motor and one of those new fish radar things.
“All right folks, first we must find this…this aberration then tell him that we don’t need any false prophets in our midst! Follow me!”
The group cheered. His words sent a beautiful adrenaline coated strength through all of their bodies. It was incredible. He walked over to the two-story house with pride in his step. Never once in his thirty-year career as a preacher did he ever think he would get the opportunity to do God’s work, real God’s work, like persecution of heathens, like in the bible. It was great, it was something out of the Old Testament. They were a wave of righteousness sent to drown the unholy.
When they got to the front porch of the house he turned to his followers and motioned to them to stay where they were. He put his hands way over his head exaggerating every movement, every syllable. He looked out at them and had to choke back a tear, they were so beautiful. “Stay here my children, I will walk into the lion’s den myself and summon the snake!”
He walked across the creaky porch with his bible in one hand and a flashlight in the other. When he got to the door he opened the screen and knocked defiantly.
A man with peppered hair and intelligent eyes opened the door. He didn’t say a word. He only waited for what the reverend had to say.
Reverend Burnham didn’t expect this. He momentarily lost his enthusiasm. He was brought back to reality by the man’s eyes. Suddenly the witch hunt seemed a little ridiculous, but he went on, “We have to come to talk to your son sir.”
“If you mean Ishmael he’s not here. He’s in the east field. That’s where he stays nowadays.” The man with the peppered hair said in a calm voice as he inspected the crowd.
“Oh.” Reverend Burnham looked down, his eyes darting back and forth trying to think of his next move. He licked his blue lips and looked up again. “Okay…we’ll go there, um, where is that from here?”
The older Ishmael took a couple steps onto the porch. He looked again at the crowd. They didn’t look like the type that needed a place to stay. He paused as he inspected them when he saw their flashlights, bats and other mob tools. Then he looked over their heads and pointed a finger past the rock formation. “It’s right over there about three hundred yards…to the east.”
Reverend Burnham looked in the direction indicated. He couldn’t see anything past the rocks due to the fog. He squinted anyway and then when he felt he looked enough, he turned back to the peppered haired gentleman. “Thank you.”
Old Ishmael watched the reverend walk back to his flock and say a couple of words. After a few moments he saw them walk toward the field. He watched them until their bobbing flashlights disappeared.
“What was that about Ish?” A feeble voice asked.
“Looked like trouble kid.” Ishmael shut the door behind him.
“Are they here for my son?” She asked and coughed a bit.
“Yeah, but don’t get yourself worked up. I’ll figure something out.”
“But what if they mean to-”
“Come now Cosset, I said don’t work yourself up. You can’t afford to get all excited. I’ll deal with it.” Ishmael said as he put his coat on.
“Where are you going?” Cosset walked up to him. Her posture bent a little more and she looked half the size she used to be. She put her long bony fingers on her brother’s coat to get his attention.
Ishmael stopped and met Cosett’s eyes. “I’m gong to deal with this kid.” The tone of his voice softened. “Now don’t worry, I have an idea. I have to get the doctor.”
Her deep sunken eyes remained calm but were full of sadness. “Please be careful. I don’t have a very good feeling about this.”
“It’ll be fine kid.” He put his hand on the doorknob. He opened the door and stepped out into the night. The door shut leaving Cosset there alone staring after him.

Chapter 2

“If God lived on Earth people would break His windows.”
-Jewish Proverb

All I did was try to help these people. I healed illnesses, fed the hungry, I even tried to save the town from bankruptcy. All I wanted was for everyone to live in peace. Dad picked the wrong guy if He wanted a teacher. I am the worst teacher in the world. I know this because the people I tried to teach to live together in harmony, the people that I tried to teach to tolerate all, well they were an angry murderous mob filled with hate and armed with bats and other assorted weapons standing in my field ready to bludgeon me to death.
We’ll skip the bird’s eye view from the clouds this time and focus on me standing outside my tent at 9:42 PM on a foggy winter night. Bertram was there standing in front of me with his eight inch diver’s knife warding off potential attackers. Three feet in front of him stood the chubby pink man in a burgundy three piece suit holding a bible and a flashlight. Behind him there is a wall of angry townsfolk, and all around them in the dark fog was a horde of hippie pilgrims sacked out in their tents and sleeping bags. The thick fog prevents us from seeing anything but dark outlines of the closest sleepers stirring form the noise.
“What do you want here reverend?” I asked from behind Bertram’s bulk.
“We came here to tell you that we are no longer interested in hearing any more of your lies. We want to let you know that we have realized that you are a deceiver sent to test our faith, sent from the depths of hell!” His voice got louder until his finger was in the air and he was almost yelling at the top of his lungs. His followers grunted encouragingly.
I have to admit that I didn’t understand. I wasn’t very inexperienced with humanity back then. I really didn’t preach anything to them. I was still trying to find my message. All I said was that everyone should be nice to each other because everyone is praying to the same God. “What lies reverend?”
“Your lies and your evil deeds of devilry!” He continued like I hadn’t said anything.
“All I ever did was try to help everyone.” I told him the pitch of my voice raised with my confusion.
“HA! Everything you done was part of some evil plan, every one of your so called miracles was a curse in disguise. Didn’t you think we’d see through it sooner or later, or did you think we was too simple to see the work of Beelzebub? His southern accent was more prevalent now and he was bouncing on his toes again.
I put my arm on Bertram’s shoulder to move him aside. He reluctantly gave way and moved beside me. I turned to tell him that everything was going to be okay and that’s when I saw that Ferdinand was there. He was standing behind me next to the tent. I was happy to see him after such a long time despite the circumstances. He must have heard all the commotion and came out to see what was going on. For some reason I couldn’t understand, his presence gave me confidence. It was a sort of validation in my mind, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I turned back to the mob. “We can resolve this easily reverend. Just tell me what it is that is bothering you.”
“OH, I am sure that you’re reada ta spin me some more yarns boy. You’d go ahead and say anything to git yerself outta this trouble, but the Lord sees through all!”
“Just tell me what you’re talking about.” I said in a stern tone.
“Marcy Granger for one!”
“What?” I had to think for a second before I remembered. “The girl I cured in your church?”
“Oh, you cured her all right. Now she doesn’t even want to come to church anymore and she’s running all around town having premarital sex!” The last part of the sentence caused some of the mob to gasp. He could have said she sprouted horns and a tail and gotten the same reaction. “You’re black magic turned her into a heathen and a harlot! You’re pagan sorcery turned her into a trollop.”
“What? No, I turned her into a healthy teenager. All I did was fix her body, it was up to her parents to mold her mind.”
“You also planted the demon seed of greed into Mayor Johnson!”
“Wha-”
“Everyone knows,” he turned to talk to his audience, “that he was a good church going man up until you turned that rock into gold. After that he took that gold and left his town, his wife and kids.”
“I had no control over that. I was only trying to help the town’s economy.” I tried to explain to the crowd, but no one heard me. I was drowned out by the reaction of the crowd. It sounded like the loud baying of hungry sheep.
“You put a devil in me as well!” A shout came from inside the mob. The ocean of people parted revealing Lloyd Koenig. “I came to him with a horrible painful bladder infection and when he touched me it went away but there was something in its place.” He pointed a long bony finger at me. His eyes were scanning the crowd for sympathy. “A demon! A lustful demon that made me commit unnatural sex acts…with young men!” He trailed off into sobs.
The reverend stepped up to Lloyd and patted his back. He shook his head with theatrical sadness then looked up again. “You see? We can see thr-”
“And now I dirty myself uncontrollably because I have the syphilis.” Lloyd continued.
There was an awkward pause.
“You see?” Reverend Burnham asked again, slowly stepping away from Lloyd. “And we can see through it all. We see the curse you put on Maynard Dagget.” The reverend put his arm around a young man with a scraggly beard and wild hair sticking out from under a red mesh baseball hat.
“His legs were crushed in a logging accident. The doctors said he would never walk again. I let him walk again.” I said indignantly.
“Oh yes, you fixed him right up, you fixed him good. You fixed them so good that the mill hired lawyers to sue the Daggets for insurance fraud and he had to give back all that compensation they gave him. They said that he faked the whole thing and now he’s penniless and his wife left him. He is even being investigated for dodging the draft.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to explain to them that everything that happened after the miracles were up to them. I had genuinely wanted to help them. Back then I was sincere, I thought that I had a chance to pull it off. I was about to try and make peace but I seized up with pain. My mind was filled and was overflowing with more intense memories and problems that came to me from the people around me. The episodes were coming more and more frequently. There were flashes of the future, of the past, so much information crammed into my skull that I fell to my knees with my head held tightly with my hands. I was in someone’s house, a hospital, a back alley, an airplane crash. I started to shake and spasm.
I could hear them scream that I was possessed. They sounded like they were a million miles away but I could hear them. They said the devil was inside me and for the most part they were right. It was their devils, their evil deeds and heartrending events. The more riled up they got the more I felt their rage and fear. It was piercing my mind. I started screaming.
They surged forward. Bertram jumped in front of me with his knife out. I looked up through my fingers. The situation was about to get very ugly. The reverend incited the crowd by telling them that I had to be stopped. Maynard Dagget stepped to the front of the mob and raised his bat over his head. Bertram’s eight inch diver’s knife was seconds away from being buried in Dagget’s gut.
A single gunshot made everyone freeze. Everything was silent except for the loud echo of the shot. The whole scene could have been an oil painting until Ferdinand staggered forward. He was holding his stomach with both hands. His eyes were huge and they were staring blankly into the faces of the mob. Then he looked down to the blood leaking out between his fingers. “You all are cowardly worms…I will wait for you…in hell!” He fell to his knees and looked at the mob again, a line of drool spilled out of his mouth. He stayed like that for a few seconds before falling over on his side; face down in the dark cold grass.
“Holy shit! Someone killed the Frenchman!” A voice yelled from the crowd. After that the crowd disbursed. They immediately started sprinting to their cars to get the hell away from the crime scene, but the problem was that none of them remembered which way they came from. Not knowing which way to go didn’t stop them from running as fast as they could into any direction.
They all made it about five feet in every direction before tripping over sleeping bags and running full speed into tents. The fog was so thick that none of them could see two feet to their front. I got to my feet and looked around. The hysterical mob flailed the sleeping hippies as they ran for their lives. The sleeping hippies were terrified by being woken up by a stranger bludgeoning them so they fought back with terror-fueled panic. The field was filled with a confused horror, a bewildered riot of contrasting participants.
The sirens made it even worse. The red and blue lights from the police cars lit up the land like a multicolored strobe. The hippies thought it was a bust of some sort because most of them had various drugs and the congregation thought they were going to be arrested for murder. It looked like a disco in the seventh circle of hell and they were all dancing.
The field had the kind of carnage you would expect to see on a medieval battlefield. There were people that had probably never been in a fight in their lives locked in mortal combat. I saw black figures run at full speed into trees, people, tents. The flashes of pain started again. My legs failed me. Bertram ran over and pulled me into my tent. He helped me to the cot. I couldn’t take it all and finally I blacked out to the sounds of groans, screams and sirens.
Then I forced myself back to consciousness. “Ferdinand, we have to help Ferdinand!”
“There is little need for that…I am unharmed…I will remain here in the tent until the chaos around us subsides…that is if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t mind?” I tried to prop myself up on my elbow to get a better look at him but I couldn’t do it. I lifted my head and there he was sitting on a fold out chair. His blood soaked shirt was open revealing a bullet wound slowly shrinking. I passed out as I watched him inspecting his shirt.
“Damn it…this was a very nice shirt…I wish he would have shot me in the head instead.”

Chapter 3

“I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.”
-Oscar Wilde

I don’t know how long I slept but when I woke up Cathy was sitting over me. She had a gentle smile. For a second there was nothing else in the world other than her eyes. She asked me how I felt.
“Better.” All the memories of what happened the night before started coming back to me. My spirits sank. “Where is everyone? What happened?”
“I don’t know. You’re uncle came her to see how you were doing a couple hours ago. He said he’d be back. Other than that I don’t know, everyone’s gone.”
I propped myself up. “Everyone? Did they get arrested?”
“No.” She said in a gentle voice. “No one was arrested as far as I know. I didn’t see everything that went on, but I don’t think anyone was arrested. I do know that everyone is gone, the religious mob, the people that were camping, Bertram, and that French guy, they’re all gone.”
“Wow, what an awful night.” Everything I worked at since I took on the role of savior had failed terribly. I didn’t see how things could get much worse. That’s when my uncle came in. He looked horrible. Leaves were sticking out of his wet overalls and his peppered hair was all messed up. I followed his eyes from me to Cathy then back to me. “I need to talk to you Ish.”
Cathy understood and gave me a kiss on the cheek as I sat up before she left. I went to stand up but Uncle Ishmael told me to stay seated. I never saw him so anxious before. He looked down at me. His eyes were calm despite his outer appearance. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you kid.”
“Can you start with what the heck happened last night?” I asked.
He looked off to the side and thought about it. There was something big he had to get off his chest but he saw that certain things needed to be addressed first. “Okay, what do you want to know?”
“Uh, well who shot Ferdinand and how did he live through it. How did the wound shrink and disappear? Where did the mob go? Where did the hippies go? Where are Bertram and Ferdinand? What’s going on?”
“Hmm.” He rubbed the gray stubble on his chin.
“Sorry, let’s start with who shot Ferdinand.”
“I did.” He said flatly.
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s a long story and I really don’t have time to get into it boy.” He looked at me and saw that wasn’t going to be an acceptable answer. “Here’s the skinny kid, you must have noticed that Ferdinand hasn’t aged a day since you’ve known him, right?”
“I thought that he was just…aging well, you now how neat and tidy he is, and he’s a doctor.”
“No, it’s some sort of weird curse. He said some weird shaman from the desert put it on him when he was in Las Vegas. He doesn’t die and he can’t leave the property without having Bertram within arm’s distance. I don’t know why that is, but they had to go together to the sheriff’s office.”
“The sheriff? Why?”
He sighed. I could tell he didn’t want to explain it all but he answered, “They are trying to tell him that I didn’t kill anyone.”
“What? Why?”
“Well because the mob saw me shoot Ferdinand last night and told the police and now I’m wanted for murder.”
“What? Who did you kill?” None of this was making any sense to me.
“No one, I didn’t kill anyone, just Ferdinand, but I only shot him.”
“WHY?” I yelled.
“All of this isn’t important kid, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“What? Of course it is. I need to know what’s going on!” I stood up and paced the tent with one hand at my temples.
“When that mob came last night they were set on killing you son, I knew about Ferdinand’s condition and thought if I shot him everyone would get spooked and leave. It worked but it was so damn dark and foggy that none of them could manage to get very far before tripping on someone sleeping out there. Your mother was so worried that she called the cops right off. When they got here they found a damned riot. They called for back up and caught most of the congregation. They interviewed them and got the same story over and over again. They all said that I shot Ferdinand. But like I was trying to tell you, none of this is as important as what I’m trying to tell you.”
I sat back and shook my head. “That’s not important? Well what the hell is more important than my uncle wanted for murder? You’ve probably got the two worst character witnesses you could possibly have. I could see Bertram right now telling the sheriff that he’ll burn in hell if he tries to arrest God’s brother-in-law, and Ferdinand, he hates everyone and everything. He’s probably telling them to go to hell and cursing at them the way he does.”
“Ishmael, your mother is sick. She’s dying.”
“What?”
“She’s got cancer boy, inside her chest, she’s had it for almost a year now.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I sat there quietly thinking about it. I hadn’t even noticed her illness. What kind of son was I? My thoughts raced. I hadn’t even been to see her more than a couple times in the last six months. “Why didn’t she tell me? I could help her! I could heal her. I’ll do it right now.”
I stood up to go to her but Uncle Ishmael stopped me with his hand on my chest. “You know you mother boy…she doesn’t want that.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand anything. Everyone else’s life threatening diseases flashed through my mind uninvited every day why didn’t my mother’s? Seeing a stranger’s loved one die right before my eyes was excruciating but now it was happening to me and it was unbearable. My nose stung from the emotion pushing up in my throat. My breathing was rapid between clenched teeth. I tried as hard as I could to keep my voice from cracking and asked, “She would rather die than believe in me?”
It was a question so big that Uncle Ishmael had to wait for it to fill the room before he answered. “No, it has to do with a lot more than you son, she loves you very much, but you know how stubborn she is.”
“I can’t let her die.” I lost it on the ‘die’ and started balling like a newborn. I tried to continue, “I can’t let her die Uncle Ishmael.”
He moved to my side and patted my back like he did when I was a kid.
“We’re not going to let that happen. I got us a place to go where she will be well again, but that means that we have to go away. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for so long. We’ve been planning on leaving for months. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to leave you, but now it looks like we’re gonna have to. All the preparations are done.”
“Where?”
“Huh? Oh, where are we going? Well I can’t really say, I’m sorry kid. I can tell you that it is far away, with friends I made while I was in the service, and you know how they are, all hush hush. That’s the bad part.”
“You mean you can’t even tell me? Why not? Is it some sort of witness protection program?”
He gave me a small smile despite the severity of the situation. “Yeah, it is something like that.”
I could tell he wasn’t telling me the truth, but I couldn’t make it any harder for him. I know the decision to leave was burning him up. His behavior lately had been so weird. It had to have really gotten to him. He must have tried to occupy himself with building that rock formation. My mind floated to other things. There was no cure for cancer, how was Uncle Ishmael taking my mom somewhere where she would be okay? Where was he going? I know that he worked with a bunch of top secret stuff in the War Department, what does that mean? What does any of it mean?
“We will do our best to send you a letter here and there kid, but whatever happens just trust me. Trust that I will take care of your mom and she will be just fine.” He gave me a more authentic smile and slapped me on the back.
I sniffed back the tears and wiped my eyes. “Okay, okay, when are you leaving?”
“Tonight.”
“Well let me go say goodbye now.”

Chapter 4

“For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 1843

That night I was alone in my tent. I couldn’t bare being at the house when they left. I said my good byes and my mom had cried. She looked so frail and weak. I wanted so badly to take her illness away. That’s when she told me that she may not believe in a god, but she definitely believed in me and that she knew I could cure her if anyone could. She told me that if I did that she would be cheated out of the fight and it was the fight that makes the person. She told me that I just couldn’t throw miracles around and think that it will make the world better. The miracles I’ve been giving out were just band aids to problems that people needed to experience. Everything is a part of something bigger. There are reasons for all of it even if we can’t understand why at the time.
It gave me a lot to think about. I was exhausted. I’ve seen so many horrible things in my life and it may seem to some people that don’t experience these horrible things that everything happens for a reason, but for the people that have a child raped and killed, does that happen for a reason? There are atrocities that shouldn’t happen no matter what lesson it may teach people. What was this supposed to teach me?
Was Dad killing my mom to teach me a lesson? I should have just cured her myself. Touched her and cured her without her permission, but I know that she would have never forgiven me for saving her life. I decided right there that I would never perform another miracle. They brought nothing but trouble. Mom was right; I can’t solve these peoples’ problems. They have to solve them themselves or come to terms with them. Just like me, I had to come to terms with never seeing my mother or my uncle again. What kind of existence is this? What the hell was Dad thinking?
I told Cathy that I couldn’t see her that night. I didn’t want to see anyone. I had lost everything I was building. What was even worse was that I put all this time and effort into building the wrong thing. I was naïve, I started too soon. Why didn’t Dad tell me? I was so mad at Him that night. I blamed Him for my failures, I blamed Him for putting this burden on me, and I blamed Him for my mother’s illness. What did I do to deserve this?
I think He felt how mad I was at Him because the wind started to pick up and it came out of nowhere. I could see the sky light up through the tent and there were loud strange noises. My papers were flying around in a small tornado inside the tent. The deep sound of the sky cracking was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. I stood in the middle of the tent and screamed at the sky, “I don’t want to talk to you tonight, leave me alone!”
After a couple more minutes everything went back to normal. I thought about my two apostles and I wondered what was taking them so long. Then I thought about Cathy. She was great but what would happen to her if we got too close? Would another angry mob come and wake her up in the middle of the night? Would Dad choose to afflict her with some other terminal disease? I decided that I couldn’t see her anymore. I decided that I was going to go out and see the world I was supposed to save.
That’s right, I wasn’t going to give up. All the other messiahs’ had their problems too. At least I didn’t have to deal with leading a holy war or being nailed to a cross. I could go out in to the world and observe it. Then once I understood humanity I could write a religious doctrine to better suit the human race. It seemed easy enough. I was looking over some maps when Cathy interrupted me.
“Ishmael?” She pulled the flap back to the door and was standing there. “Did you see those lights? It was a UFO! I swear I saw a UFO! A giant space ship came down, and, and…This place is so weird.”
I looked at her. She was really shook up, poor girl. She was the epitome of humanity, so small, and when faced with divinity she was wild eyed and lost. I had to save the world, for her I had to save the world. I wanted to go to her and comfort her but I couldn’t. I had resolved to break it off with her.
We stayed there like that staring at each other for a couple seconds. We were both very uneasy and unsure of what to say next. I told her to come in. I was going through our conversation in my head. I was thinking about how I was going to tell her that I had to move on and it wasn’t her fault. I was trying to figure out how I was going to let her down gently, but then she cut me off.
“Ishmael, I’m really sorry but even though I really feel like we have this, you know, like this connection and all, I just can’t deal with all of this insanity. I really can’t. I’m sorry, but when there is like, a riot between the hippies and the squares in the middle of the night, miracles, and now UFOs…man, this place is too wild. I don’t want to hurt you, but, like I don’t think we should see each other any more.”
“What?” I stood up angrily, “Are you breaking up with me?” Sure I was going to do it but it felt a million times worse than I thought it was going to now that she was doing it. Suddenly I didn’t think it was a good plan anymore. I wanted us to be together forever. Screw my responsibilities to the world. I wanted to be with her. She saw the devastation spread across my face.
“I’m really sorry babe, but it wasn’t like we were going to stay together forever. It was all, like some mad summer love, that’s all. We had a great time together, we shouldn’t ruin it now by getting all bummed out.”
“Upset? I’m not upset.” I couldn’t think, my brain was one big mass of white hot iron. I didn’t think about religion or the book I was supposed to write. The only thought on my mind was how I could fix our relationship. What did I do to deserve all of this? How could Dad let this all happen to me? I was his son and He was setting off mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud in my life, my life!
“It’s not you as a person, it’s just all of these weird things. I can’t deal with them. You have that big scary looking guy in bed sheets as your body guard and you like, live in an army tent in the middle of a field, people are getting shot but not dying.”
“But all of this is who I am. I am the son of God, weird things are going to happen around me.”
“You see, that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t really believe that and it’s kind of weird how you do, you know?” She took a couple steps away from me and her voice lost that loving tone.
“What? You don’t believe in me? Didn’t you see the things I’ve done?” I was boiling with rage.
“No, I really didn’t see anything. I’m a strong believer in the untapped potential of the human brain man, I think all those things you did were just like, placebos.” All affection was gone from her voice now. She had picked up a parlance that I recognized as hippie-talk. She could have been arguing with a stranger. “I mean like, I can’t stick around here. Your parents, the only normal people around, if I can call a brother and sister shacking up normal, they took off.”
“Get out! Fine, I was going to break up with you anyway. Get out!” I screamed at her.
She went back to the door and lifted the flap but before she left she turned to me and held up two fingers in the shape of a V. “Good luck, peace man.” She was being vindictive. Then she left me there sitting alone on my cot.
I was furious. She was just like everyone else. I didn’t know how I could be duped so easily. There was nothing in Sweet River worth saving and I wasn’t too impressed with humanity in its individual wrappers.
My heart was beating so hard I could feel the veins pulsing down my arms. My adrenaline kept me from sitting down. All I could do was walk around in circles. After the third or fourth lap I shook my head and decided that I had more to say to her. I started after her but Bertram cut me off. His big bulk entered the tent with his eyes cast on the ground.
“The Holy Mother and your uncle have returned to the heavens.”
“What?”
“And all the followers have left as well.” He stood there blocking my way as if he knew where I was going. When his words sank in I changed my mind. He brought me back to the bigger situation. Everything was falling apart and I was the only one that could fix everything. I stumbled back and when my calves hit the cot I collapsed in a heap. I sat there with my head in my hands. I realized that I had only one option. I couldn’t escape my role.

Chapter 5

“He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.”
-Albert Camus

I left Sweet River to save the world on April 12th Nineteen Seventy-two. I had recently turned nineteen. Most of my brothers waited until later in their lives to do this but I was supposed to be the new and improved model, messiah 2.0. I was going for the whole world at once. My plan was to go to the east and stop the Vietnam War single handedly. Maybe that would get everyone’s attention. I had a tool my brothers before me didn’t have and I planned on using it. I had the worldwide mass media. Every television in the United States was glued to the war coverage. I was sure it was the same way in other countries. All I had to do was get on the television and preach to the masses. It was a simple enough plan. My biggest problem was the fact that I still didn’t have a message. Sure I had started writing a couple different drafts of a speech but nothing new or noteworthy.
I got to the dirt driveway of the park and looked at State Highway 20. That was the first time I realized that I had no idea how I was going to get anywhere. I stuck my thumb out and started walking. Even though it was a couple years after the summer of love I was still able to get rides. An old man gave me a ride from our land to Sweet River. I ran into three people that had slept out in my field. They had just packed up their VW bus and were ready to head out. They had been camping up at the Green Woody camp grounds only a couple miles out of town. They were really excited to run into me and excessively receptive to taking me to spread the word to the American public.
The two men were twin brothers but it wasn’t too hard to tell them apart. They were both tall and lanky corn-fed Minnesota boys but Art was serious and passionate about things. He had a critical personality, while his brother introduced himself as Butterfly. He had a nervous tick or a reoccurring spasm from some sort of drug overdose a year back. He wasn’t completely with it. The third member of their party was a young vivacious woman. She had beautiful thick long brown hair and a free spirit. Her name was Rachel. They were all in their early twenties.
I’m not sure they believed in me. After being with them for a couple days I wasn’t sure if they really had any core beliefs at all. They had a lot of opinions and seemed very sincere, but there was something missing, something between experience and credibility.
They told me that their ultimate goal was to drive to Washington D.C. to help stage a huge protest. They wanted to stop the war, they wanted to stop Governor Wallace and his bigotry, they wanted to stop President Nixon, they wanted to disband the National Guard because of their actions at Kent State, they wanted to stop the world from spinning.
It was quite an experience riding with those three. It was unlike anything I ever had to deal with while living on our land. Not only did they feel the need to share every opinion they had, but they had the need to make me believe in each one of them. It was a sort of validation for them. Art was really down on the government. He talked for hours at a time between and during acid trips, on the great evils of the ‘powers that be’. He especially harped on the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times had broken the story a year ago and now they were being investigated. He went on and on but I wasn’t interested in the power struggles and ideas of the world leaders. I wanted to talk about religion. I was still looking for my message.
“Peace and love man.” Rachel said. She was sitting in the back of the van with me.
“Yeah, peace and love.” Butterfly echoed. He was in the passenger seat twisted around to face us.
“Peace and love? That’s it? Shouldn’t I throw some commandments in there or something? I mean if we have peace and love here what is there to look forward to when you die? Maybe I should throw in some harsh consequences for not being peaceful enough or loving enough.”
“No way man, peace is enough. Don’t you think love will conquer all?” Rachel asked.
“Yeah, love will conquer all.” Butterfly agreed with his stare resting on Rachel’s half naked body.
Peace and love, it seemed like it was the core to many of the other religions, but it seemed too simple. I wasn’t sure, and I was only nineteen at the time. I was just naïve enough to think it would work. Didn’t everyone in the world desire peace in their hearts? Didn’t everyone want love?
“Hell yeah, if those fucking war monger Nazi’s in the Pentagon believed in peace and love, hundreds more Cambodian children would still be alive today.” Art spat as he pounded at the steering wheel. “Those fucking murderers.”
I looked at him with a raised eyebrow. He was staring down the road lost in his own thoughts. We all let a minute go by in order to let that feeling dissolve. I liked the idea of everyone living in peace and loving each other, but could it really be that simple? Was it possible?
“What about those people that don’t want to live in peace?” I asked.
“Every human being wants peace and love Ishmael.” Rachel explained to me. “All we need to do is show the rest of the world we’re serious and I’m positive they’ll follow our example. We need to take our bombs apart and just live. That should be your message; ‘just live baby’. With that she leaned over and gave me a big hug. I was surprised but it felt good, and coincidentally I started to understand her message at that exact moment. A big warm feeling of love came over me and I smiled. Then I looked up over her shoulder and saw Butterfly look away real quick, he touched his chin to his chest couple times and squinted his eyes shut.

Chapter 6

“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”
-Voltaire

Let’s jump ahead a couple days. We’re looking down on a New Mexico prairie right after dark. There’s a big bonfire three or four miles off State Highway 64. Shadows from the fire stretch out over the patchy landscape in all directions. Behind the bonfire at a distance we see Art and Butterfly’s van and next to it there is a converted school bus, painted blue with several different amateur murals on it. Most of them, if not all, have to do with either flowers or rainbows.
Art and his party met the people in the school bus in Farmington that morning when they were waiting in the huge line for gas. Rachel went over to talk to them and they hit it off. The people in the bus told her that they were on their way to start a commune on the North Eastern New Mexico-Colorado border.
Sitting there around the fire they looked like some sort of cave man tribe. They were all dirty and half clad in old patched clothes. They were all wearing strange and colorful jewelry made from things most people wouldn’t see as very valuable. I couldn’t decide if they knew how different they were from the rest of the world or if they took great pride in it. I would have to lean toward the latter but they definitely owned a sense of either ignorance or naivety.
A couple of them played the bongo drums and Rachel strummed a guitar. I watched them talk to each other and laugh. I learned that there was a certain sense of gratification in being a part of a minority. There was satisfaction in being part of a righteous struggle against a wicked foe, even if the reason for the struggle was unclear. I wanted to be part of their movement, but I didn’t feel like one of them. I couldn’t let myself go and believe in their philosophy. I had learned too much about history, and read too many holy books, too many philosophy books, or maybe I didn’t read enough of them.
I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in the peace and love way of life. Whenever there were long periods of peace in history a dictator springs up somehow. There are so many examples, starting from the beginning of our history with the Minoans. They were an advanced culture, the very first ones to get their shit together, agriculture, bartering, sea travel, everything. They were hundreds of years ahead of their neighbors. They lived a long time in peace, over a hundred years, but then in 1450 BC a Mycenaean tyrant wiped out the entire island and took over their land. This only lasted until 1200 BC when the Trojan War started, then in 1100 BC the Dorians conquered the Mycenaean. The Dorians lived in peace as shepherds until they were conquered by the Greeks, and they were conquered by the Romans. There was the Pax Romana which was a period of peace that lasted from 27BC to 180AD. Then the Huns, Goths, Visisgoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks and every other barbarian tribe had their part in overthrowing the Roman Empire. Then there was the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, British Empire, it just goes on and on. Hitler, Edi Amine, Ho Chi Mon, it never stops.
Not everyone in the world wants peace and love. There is always that little devil and he seems to want power over others and the people that want peace and love are easy to get control of. They appease and forgive until it’s too late. We let Hitler take Austria and Poland before we did anything to stop him. We let him usurp the governments of two countries in the name of peace.
My head was full of the complications of life while right in front of me there were all of these people trying to show me how simple life was. Song, love, drugs, dancing, it was that simple. I sat there dressed like them, with the same type of hair style and trying as hard as I could to believe life was easy. Despite all my efforts I still stuck out.
I guess they had asked about me because one of them leaned toward me and asked, “So you’re supposed to be Christ or something?”
Everyone kept talking, laughing or playing music but they all shot a glance or two at me. The guy that asked me introduced himself as Ken earlier. I could tell that he was the leader of the tribe, the driver of the bus. The others respected him and I knew they were all listening even if they were pretending not to.
“I’m not Christ, he was my big brother. God is my father.”
“Wow man.” He straightened up like the fact physically hit him. He had a smile in his eyes like he was about to enjoy our conversation. Ken’s hair was down to his shoulders and looked light brown in the fire light but I wasn’t sure. He had a headband, a bead necklace, and jeans but no shirt. He took a second to choose his next words. “Well like, aren’t we all children of God?”
“I suppose so, but I was born from Immaculate Conception, my mother was a virgin and my biological father is the creator of the universe. I’ve left the Holy Land in Oregon on a mission to find a message to tell the world in order to unite all religions and save the world from Armageddon, you know the end of the world, wrath of Dad stuff.”
A serious look passed over Ken’s shadowy face. He scratched his week old beard trying to figure out if I truly believed in what I was telling him, and how he should proceed if I did. Everyone else’s conversation had either stopped or got a lot softer. Finally he asked, “How can you say that man?”
A woman who was sitting behind Ken leaned forward. Her long straight blond hair fell over his shoulder onto his chest. She had a big smile. “Yeah man, that takes some balls.”
Now everyone had stopped talking. There was no sound except the crackling of the fire. I could tell Rachel and the twins were getting nervous. Butterfly kept twitching nervously with his chin to chest thing. I could feel their discomfort in my head like all the other flashes. Having a lunatic ride with you with delusions of divinity could be seen as uncool by their new friends. I looked around at everyone’s stone faces. They were expecting some sort of answer but I wasn’t sure of the question. I thought about it, then said, “Sure I suppose it would take some big balls to say that sort of thing if I were lying but the truth is that I am the new messiah and I’m here on Earth now to save humanity from itself.”
I don’t think I won them over with my sincerity or my confidence in the truth of what I was saying. I think the real reason that they laughed it off was the fact that they were all very stoned, drunk or tripping. I was the only sober person there. Ken was the one that started laughing first. Then he addressed our audience, “Far out man, we have the son of God here at our campfire.”
The festivities started up again and although they laughed off the tension of the moment, no one mentioned Dad, the devil or religion again for a while. They all sang, laughed, kissed, and took more drugs. After a while I couple of authentic goat skinned wine flasks started to float around.
After a couple hours people started to disappear to either exercise their philosophy of free love or simply to go to sleep. Soon there were only six people left at the fire; me, Rachel, Butterfly, Art, Ken, and the blond girl that sat behind him. Ken pulled out some Kool Aid. He passed it over to me. I only drank it after he assured me that it didn’t have any alcohol in it.
“So, do you have any particular message in mind?” Ken asked me.
I was thirsty. I really hadn’t had anything to drink all night because wine was the only thing around and I didn’t drink. I really gulped the Kool Aid. “It’s hard you know? Whatever I pick has to be good. I have to convince the entire world. If I say the wrong thing or lead people to believe the wrong way it could really be disastrous. There will be wars for thousands of years, genocide, crusades, inquisitions, nuclear wars…I mean it’s a huge burden.”
“Sure, sure, I dig that man, I mean look at the world now. That war for no reason. I mean why are we even there?” Ken said.
“Fucking war monger!” Art added. He went on to say more but we couldn’t understand him. The words wouldn’t fit through his mouth. He muttered a bit then trailed off.
I looked over to Art for a second then back to Ken, “Yeah, but I really prefer to stay out of politics.”
“Stay out of politics? Man religion is politics twin brother. They are almost the same thing. Politics is religion for the non-imaginative. Politics is the religion of the modern intellectual. Laws are the new commandments and social norms are our new belief system. Richard Nixon plays God all around the world. All I’m saying is look at the big picture before deciding on your message.” Ken talked with a lot of charisma. He really seemed to know what he was talking about.
“I think I’ve decided on peace and love, hanging out with you guys has kind of convinced me, but there is still a problem.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” He seemed genuinely interested.
“It’s going to be difficult to convince everyone. Most of the world’s population is comfortable believing what they had been raised to believe. There is such an incredible dogma hanging over their heads you know…maybe I’m not using that word right.” I started to feel a little tingling in my stomach. I tried to shake it off. “I’m just saying that the threat of eternal damnation is a hard thing to chance, you know?” But I think I can do it. I’m up to the challenge. I believe that I can really get everyone to live in peace, but even then there will still be bombs and guns and big knives and…” My head was feeling a bit dizzy. I blinked my eyes a couple times to try to get rid of it.
“I see what you’re saying, what if they get used? Even by accident. You’d have a bunch of meek peaceful types, what’s stopping someone from coming in and exploiting the situation.” Ken said thoughtfully.
Art lurched up. I thought he had passed out but obviously he was listening to the whole thing. “Why don’t you just turn all the weapons, and everything else that can be used to harm people into…into…I don’t know…”
“Bunny rabbits.” Rachel blurted out. Butterfly laughed with his eyes half shut as he leaned on an elbow at Rachel’s feet.
“Bunny rabbits.” Art said and then he passed out with very little grace.
“I really don’t think that I could do the whole world at one time. It’s just too big. I don’t even know where the weapons are or what they look like. Plus there are so many distractions.” I continued, “I have these crazy flashes in my head every couple of seconds.”
“Yeah, like what?” Ken asked.
“People’s lives, the future, atrocities, problems.” My lips felt numb.
“What do you see out here?” Asked Rachel.
I looked over at her. I could see colors coursing through her hair I never noticed before. I focused in on that but my mouth kept talking mechanically. “I find irony in a lot of it, like for instance we are here under Huerfano Mountain, well it’s more of a plateau but what is significant about it is that it is Holy Ground to the Navajo Indians. That mountain there,” I said pointing to a big black outline off in the distance, “is where the Changing Woman was born. The Navajo believe the Changing Woman to be the creator of life. I got a flash of the entire scene, past, present and future when I got out of the bus. I saw all the ancient rites and rituals held on the plateau. They were absolutely amazing how detailed the ritual costumes were back then. They danced with a huge bonfire in the background. The people were full of happiness and holy rapture. Then the flash took me to April of 1992 when the federal government will bury 50,000 cubic yards of asbestos and other toxic materials up there, right there in the middle of their sacred ground.”
The others listened to my story but didn’t understand it.
“Don’t you see the irony? It’s the site where the creator of life was supposedly born and in the future they are going to use it to burry toxic chemicals responsible for killing people since the early 1900s. I have shit like that violently invading my skull every couple seconds. Most are much worse, child killers, train wrecks, assassination attempts…what am I supposed to do about them? Stop them all? I DON”T THINK SO!” I stood up and swayed. I had to take a step backward to stop myself. “I CAN’T PERFORM A MIRACLE WITHOUT GETTING CHASED OUT OF TOWN.”
“Come on man, keep it down.” Ken said.
I sat down. “I’m sorry, I just feel a little weird.”
“It’s cool…so you do miracles huh?” He was very curious. “Let’s see one.”
“I don’t do them anymore. The last time I did one it ended badly.”
“Yeah, we were attacked by an angry mob of uptight torch carrying Pentecostals.” Rachel told him.
“With pitchforks and everything.” Butterfly added.
“What is a miracle anyway?” I asked suddenly feeling philosophic, “I’ve thought about it a lot since that night. I don’t think the things I did were really miracles, maybe just…helpful magic tricks. I will not use my divine powers to help people ever again, never again.”
“What did you do?” Ken asked even more curious.
“He made a sick girl walk and he turned Spam into fish.” Rachel said.
Butterfly looked up at her.
“Sure, but that’s not what it was about. The physical part was easy. The real miracle is changing the way people think. My main mission, when you boil it down, is to change the mindset of as many people as possible in order to change the world for the better. It’s a sort of revolution, how about a revolution of the mind? But how do I get people to revolt against how they’ve always lived? Do I tell them that my way is better? How do I convince them of that? What is my way? Peace and love? Just because I’ve seen things, powerful life altering things, does that mean everyone should understand?”
Ken listened to me but I could tell he was thinking about something else. As soon as I was done talking he turned to Rachel and asked, “Did you see him do any of these things?”
“No.” Butterfly answered quickly.
“Come on, can you really do stuff like that? Show us something, there isn’t any angry mob out here.”
I sighed. He obvious missed my whole heartfelt point. “I promised I would never do another one. People don’t deserve it. Every time I helped someone it would come back and bite them in the ass, and when they were bitten in the ass they usually chased me.”
“Well I don’t want you to help anyone. I just want to see whether or not you can do these things. I want to know if you’re real.”
He made it sound so trivial, maybe he didn’t understand what he was asking for. He wanted affirmation of faith, every human on the planet asks for it a million times and never gets it, but here he was asking for it like you might ask for a double scoop at the local ice cream parlor. I should have been outraged but for some reason I was feeling very accommodating. I stood up and the landscape wobbled. “Fine, what do you want to see?”
While they were thinking about what kind of trivial magic trick they wanted the son of God to use his divine power to perform I realized two things; the first thing was that I was definitely stoned, tripping or whatever they called it and the second thing was that I hadn’t had one flash since I drank that Kool Aid. No one came up with any good ideas, but I was feeling social enough that I took the opportunity and ran with it. “Now as far as the Confucius and Hindu view goes everyday is a miracle, our relationships with each other are miracles, so I guess you guys perform miracles all the time, but you can’t do cool ones like I can.” I paused with a big smile on my face, but I could tell they wanted me to get on with it so I continued, “Not many people here in the west know that Buddhism is the religion that claims the most miracles, sure they heal the sick, make the lame walk and there are even tales that Gautama, the first Buddha, walked on water. They say when he was born the mute sang, the lame walked, all the candles in the land suddenly lit themselves, and birds froze in mid flight.” As I said this I raised my hands dramatically. Everyone looked around trying to see what I did. They did this for a couple seconds and I could tell that they didn’t see anything. “If there are any birds flying right now, they’re stuck, hahahaha.”
They all looked at each other with skepticism in their eyes.
“Okay, okay fine. There were also tales of how he would levitate sometimes.” I started to float three feet off the ground. They were a little more amused, but not impressed. They were a tough crowd and I couldn’t fathom what they’ve seen before on the drugs they took. They probably seen things I couldn’t imagine. What was I supposed to do? There weren’t any lepers around to cure. I scratched my head, thought for a minute, and then burst into flames.
It felt good to have an audience, to have a group of people looking up at me with amazement in their eyes. I was bigger then them. They were lower than me. I floated up above their heads and stopped five feet off the ground. Neither my flesh or clothes burned, but my flames burned bright and I lit up the desert. Everyone and everything was basking in my light.
We were all in a dark hopeless universe and I was the bright shinning star, so I burned. I burned and their awe was my fuel. I burned brighter and brighter until it seemed like the sun already came up. I turned the night to day. I looked down on the little group of followers as they shielded their eyes. My flames were so hot they started moving away. Others that left earlier were waking up confused and frightened. I was going to have to stop even though I didn’t want to. I almost didn’t. I wanted to consume them all with my righteous fire. Maybe that was the best way to save them. Salvation through total destruction. Was I starting to understand how Dad saw things?
I fought the urge to cleanse. That would have been too easy. Instead I descended. I was sent to save them, not kill them. I had the hard job.
I touched down and was one of them again. I felt good. I thought I impressed them. I saw it as a symbolic way to get across the difficulty I faced. I was showing them the burden I bore and I really thought I finally reached some people. I thought I was finally on the right path. I could almost see in their eyes that they understood, maybe they could be my new apostles.
Unfortunately they all chalked it up to a group hallucination from the LSD they put in the Kool Aid. There was no connection, no understanding, but it wasn’t a total loss. I did learn that if I gave them too much that it would burn them or kill them altogether, and the ones that don’t understand what I’m trying to give them will be scared and confused, even fear me. The whole thing was a snap shot of religion as a whole. I waved my hand and the bonfire started up again. I walked into the light expecting to be praised but that was the last thing they had on their minds. They had completely other emotions; fear, jealousy, confusion, denial, but no praise.
Ken said that he had to turn in. Then everyone else followed suit. Rachel looked like she wanted to stay but Butterfly fluttered around her until she left too.
I was still pretty wasted. I didn’t pay too much attention to the strange vibe everyone gave off. My mind wouldn’t focus on anything except for the greatness I felt while in the sky. I was above the masses. They were all sheep, yeah, sheep for me to lead. I thought about that for a while and tried to determine whether I was a shepherd or a wolf.
I don’t mean to keep going on about how great it felt to use my power but I can’t really explain it correctly. It felt so good that I instantly missed having an audience. I wanted to do more. I wanted to save the world right then. I think the drugs added to that feeling or at least made it feasible in my mind. I really thought I could do it all that night. Boom, one more great big miracle and the entire world would be worshipping me in the morning for achieving global peace. Yeah, that sounded good. My delusions of grandeur reached heights never paralleled.
I wandered off a little bit from the fire and rolled up my sleeves. I decided to take Art’s advice and change the world right then. I was going to do something about all the weapons, bombs, guns, and anything else that a person can use to harm another person.
Yeah, I know how it sounds, but remember I was pretty high at the time. Keep reading, it gets worse.
I raised both of my hands over my head into the night sky and closed my eyes. I gathered up every little bit of power I had in my body and focused it. I harnessed it and molded it and when I felt it was ready I let it all out.
“SHAZAAAAM!” I screamed and opened my eyes.
What a moron. I’m sorry but this is pretty embarrassing. It was the only word I could think of.
I looked around. Nothing had changed. I wasn’t sure what I expected but there was nothing. I was very disappointed. I thought about trying again but I was drained. I walked back to the bonfire, going over the whole process trying to see if I did anything wrong. I was surprised to see that there was someone else up. I thought it was Ken at first wanting to talk more about religion and politics, but as I got closer I saw curves, nice curves. It was Rachel.
Her being awake gave me a better feeling than I thought it would. I didn’t know why. She and I had never really been alone before and I was a little uneasy. That’s when I realized that I was attracted to her. I was nineteen years old, I was attracted to almost every woman. I sat down next to her with a boldness that comes with having your inhibitions numbed. She was drinking from one of the wine flasks. I took it from her when she offered it and drank from it.
“Where’s, uh, Butterfly?” I asked.
“He’s asleep over there. He follows me around like a puppy.” She scrunched her face up with a tint of annoyance.
“You don’t seem to mind sometimes.” I said as I noticed that she had laid out some blankets by the fire.
“Well being worshipped is nice at times, you should know that.”
I laughed a bit. Then there was a silence. We both drank more wine then she scooted closer to me. I looked over at her. Her eyes were so big and comforting. Her thick brown hair framed her face. I was stuck in a moment, appreciating her beauty. That’s when she leaned over and kissed me.
I went with it. We started getting into it pretty good and we slowly made our way to the blankets. She was definitely a firm believer in free love. Not only was she completely confident in herself but she also had all the paraphernalia set up ahead of time. She put the condom on and produced a tube of lubricant from out of nowhere. It was all very systematic and she was running the show. Sure it was well rehearsed, but I didn’t think it took away from the whole thing.

Chapter 7

“Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or is God a mistake of man’s?”
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows

I woke up the next morning with a pounding in my skull and I had to piss really badly. Standing up caused even more pain. I felt hollow but filled with guilt and remorse simultaneously. I walked away from the camp to relieve myself. I had to go so bad my teeth ached and my forearms clinched. When I got far enough away I closed my eyes and let it shoot out over a small clump of Yucca plants. I can’t believe how good it felt to urinate. It wasn’t a positive stimuli, it didn’t add any good feeling to your body, not technically. The good feeling came from the elimination of pain. I thought about that for awhile. That was very interesting to me, or maybe I wasn’t aware how hangovers direct the mind to the trivial.
As I walked back I noticed that other people were up too. I was pretty out of it but I could tell they were upset. Then I had to rub my eyes to make sure what I was seeing was real. There were hundreds of little green bunny rabbits pouring out of the painted school bus.
I stood there watching it all unfold. The hippies didn’t know what was going on. They were talking heatedly with one another. Then I saw Ken. The girl with the long straight dirty blond hair walked up to him. The bunnies were hopping all around their feet. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the ringing in my ears and the pounding in my head. The girl was moving her hands around frantically. Ken looked over at me and put his hand out to stop the girl. He started to walk over to me.
I must have been a sight. My hair was all messed up and my eyes were swollen. My posture illustrated the severity of my hangover. I wasn’t used to coming down from drugs or alcohol. I stood there swaying in the morning sun. Ken was fine and unphased by the debauchery the night prior.
“Is this some sort of joke man?” He asked with anger in his voice as he pointed at the green rabbits.
“I’m not sure wha-”
“Is this supposed to be some sort of message against our lifestyle? Are you trying to get even for the electric Kool Aid.”
“I, uh…I really don’t know what you’re mad about.” I told him.
“Just because we tripped last night doesn’t mean we’re best buds. We’re nowhere close enough for you to go and take our whole stash and replace it with…with green fucking rabbits. We brought that shit all the way down from Canada man. Now give it back.”
Stash? Green rabbits? I had no idea what the hell he was talking about and I didn’t have the mental capacity to try and think about it at the time. “I’m sorry Ken but I really don’t-”
“Know what I’m talking about. I heard that tune, I’m not buying it. Tell me where the dope is right now before I have to take this to another level.” Ken said as his stance changed to that of a boxer. His group of hippies started to gather around behind him. Some of them were holding the green rabbits.
“What’s going on?” Rachel asked stretching as she sat up from our little bed.
Everyone ignored her, everyone except Butterfly. He came over to see where Rachel was and to see what the raised voices were about but he found the worst possible scenario in his mind. Not only had Rachel spent the night away from him, but she spent it sleeping with someone else, and there was no hiding what we did, not with the used rubbers and lubricant tube lying around.
“Yeah, what’s going on?” Butterfly echoed but his question was aimed at Rachel.
I really had no clue what was going on. The whole situation was very uncomfortable and my head was killing me. I saw Art walk up from the corner of my eye.
Ken was speaking not only to me now but to Rachel and the twins too. “We woke up this morning to find all 150 pounds of our weed and 500 tabs of acid missing and in its place were these rabbits. We don’t think this is very funny. Give our shit back man.”
“My stuff is gone too man.” Art said defiantly. “All of it, I had pot, smack, and acid. It’s all gone.”
“Hey you were the one talking about rabbits last night.” Ken pointed to Art.
The two men walked menacingly toward one another.
“Come on, come on.” Rachel said getting between them. “Let it go. Let’s talk about this rationally, like it’s all a misunderstanding. We can solve this peacefully.”
That’s about when the fighting started. It was ugly too. None of them really knew how to throw a punch or even make a good fist, but that didn’t stop them from brawling. It was a big mass of scratches, bites, kicking, hair pulling, and eye poking. All their action kicked up dust from the desert floor. Rabbits were darting around and being thrown. It was something out of a cartoon. It didn’t take long before I was in it too.
After the four of us were sufficiently beaten, Ken and his gang got on their bus and drove off. They grabbed all the bunnies they could before they left. I think they decided to go start a rabbit farm on someone else’s commune. I really don’t care.
I had a split lip, nail scratches on my cheek and several bite marks on my arms and side. The others were about in the same condition if not worse. Rachel’s top had been torn off. It wasn’t sexy at all, just embarrassing for all of us. Butterfly went and got her a T-shirt. We all stood there not talking to each other as the dust settled. The painted bus disappeared on the horizon.
Finally Art spoke up, “What the fuck man? Why would you go and start trouble like that? And where the fuck is my stash?”
My head was really pounding now. There aren’t too many more pathetic creatures in this world than the man that had just got into a fight with a hangover. My shirt was ripped and the scratch on my face was bleeding. My lip hurt when I talked, but I tried to be as sincere as possible. “I really don’t know where anyone’s stash is.”
“Fuck this guy. Let’s go.” He walked over to his van pressing his finger to his nose to see if it was still bleeding.
Rachel looked at me, but only a glance from behind her thick messed up hair. She walked over to the van. She was completely humiliated and pretty women don’t handle that too well. She jumped in without saying a word to me.
I was only seconds away from being left out in the middle of the desert by myself. I tried to protest. “Butterfly, come on, you guys can’t leave me out here. Peace and love man.”
He stepped toward me and gave me a right cross that connected with my left eye. His wrist buckled as he hit me but it still sent me sprawling to the ground.
He cradled the hand he hit with. “My name is Ben asshole.” He twitched a couple of times as he stood over me triumphantly, then he jumped in the van and slid the door shut. I sat there in the dust and watched helplessly as the van drove off to the east.

Chapter 8

“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”
Gautama, The first Buddha

We are in the sky looking down at the desert again. There is a definite pattern here. This desert is in New Mexico. This is just a few days after we proved that peace and love will not always work. If we look down we can see a lone figure walking along side the highway. We are looking down at State Highway 666 that runs from Shiprock to Gallup New Mexico. Talk about irony. Yes there really is a State Highway 666 in New Mexico, I know, I was there, all the highway signs are stolen now-a-days. Why would someone steal a highway sign with the number of the beast on it? That gives you a certain insight to our society doesn’t it? Here we are looking down at me. I was trying to hitchhike out of there, but no one would pick me up. I looked awful. I looked like a dirty, smelly, beat up hippie.
I had a lot of time to reflect in my two day walk. Every couple hours I would come to a bird frozen in flight. I would look at them and it would remind me of how much I didn’t understand. I did come to a conclusion about my message. I concluded that peace and love is a great and wonderful philosophy when talking about problems and world affairs that do not directly concern or affect you. When it’s all happening right in front of your face, all that shit goes right out the window. I also concluded that I had no fucking idea what I was doing and the next time I decided to try to help the world I would stop, punch myself repeatedly in the nut sack and call it good, at least until I had a better idea of what was going on.
I wasn’t all powerful. I knew that because I saw rifles in the gun racks of a couple trucks that passed me by. So much for changing the world. I had walked all the way from Farmington in the two days I was abandoned in the desert. It was freezing at night so I jogged. On the third day I had only slept a couple of hours. I hadn’t eaten at all and I was dehydrated, but I kept going. I was proud and determined despite what happened. I tried to go on but I found that everyone has their limits. When the sun started to set on that third day I broke down.
There weren’t any cars around to see me fall to my knees. There weren’t any people around to see me cry. I thought I was the savior of the human race. It was arrogance never seen before, so you could imagine the degree of self pity I was feeling. I was worthless, I was small, I was empty. Why in the world did I think I was capable of bringing peace to the world? I had to go tell Dad He had the wrong guy. I had to tell Him that I couldn’t do it.
I lifted my face from my hands and looked around while there was still enough light to see. I spotted the closest hilltop. It was three miles away across a patchy desert floor filled with clumps of mesquite and scattered cacti. I got up and started walking toward it.
There was no moon that night so after a mile into the walk I couldn’t see where I was going. I tripped over the sage brush and fell down a couple times. Once I fell into a cactus. I stayed heading the same direction. The hills around me made a sky line on the horizon but I couldn’t tell if the bump in the skyline was my hill until the landscape started to get steep. Then I knew I was still going the right way.
It took me another hour of stumbling around to get to the top. Once I was there I looked around for the nearest bush and although I was very hesitant to perform anymore miracles I had to call Dad. I waved my hand over the bush. It instantly burst into flames.
“Hello?” The bush said.
“Hello, Dad?”
“Ishmael, how are you doing son?”
I hesitated for a second. I was trying to think of a good way to tell Him I wasn’t the right guy to save the world. I’ve been on my own for four days on my mission to save the world and I started a riot in the midst of people that preached peace and free love as their only philosophy. I wasn’t the right guy for the job.
“Are you sure about that?” He asked.
“Dad, I would appreciate it if you didn’t read my mind and let me tell you what I’m feeling in my own words.”
“Sorry son, but it comes with the all-knowing bit.”
“So you know what’s been happening down here…well, I mean how can you let that stuff happen to me?”
“Oh shit Ish, do you know how many times I hear that every second? Come on boy, I expected more from you.” The bush said.
I paused again trying to think about what I was going to say next but I quickly remembered the futility of that course of action and just blurted out everything, “I can’t do it, there’s too much weight on my shoulders, plus all of those fucking visions, I’ve tried-”
“Everything? Come on, you can’t just flip a switch and make everything better. What do you think would happen if I appeared to the world looking like a five hundred foot Moses with a big white beard wearing a robe and carrying a staff and I told everyone that I was God and they better behave or I’ll destroy the world? I’d get a couple nukes shoved up my ass, but even if people did behave they would start to resent me for taking their free will away. Divinity cannot be a dictatorship boy. No matter if I were to make heaven on Earth, human nature would still fuck it up. It’s a prerequisite to having free will. You can’t change people by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or changing their dope into little green bunnies.”
I sort of resented that last part.
“Hey don’t take offense. I’m just telling you it takes time.”
“But you said that if I don’t save the world before the digital age you would bring down the apocalypse.”
“Now who’s putting words in whose mouth? I told you if you don’t write the book before the digital age I would start with the end of the world shit.”
“I tried to combine all the religions, that’s impossible, I tried peace and love and that didn’t work, I don’t know where to go from here.”
“So try something else. You can’t try to save the whole world and quit after two tries.”
“But I really thought that peace and love had something to do with it.”
“Shit, you’ve read the Koran right? Or how about the Veda text? Read the Old Testament, Moses spent all of Lamentations whining about how he got a raw deal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out and see humanity, I think that’s a good idea, what I’m telling you is that you shouldn’t have a preconceived notion on what you’re going to write just yet. Don’t rehash what’s in all the other books, I’m tired of that shit. I haven’t had an original writer since Zarathustra.”
I let His words sink in. I didn’t understand all of it but that’s how it goes when you’re dealing with Dad. He sees the big picture every moment and all we get is our little corner that very second. “Okay Dad, I’ll try again, thanks.”
“No problem kid, bye.”
“Bye.”
The bush went out. I took a deep breath and looked out into the night. My outlook didn’t seem that much better. I started to walk down the hill and looked down. There was a tall glass of water and a ham on rye.

Chapter 9

“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.”
-Graham Greene

“All right buddy, you’re not supposed to be here. Let’s go.” Officer Martinez said to the vagrant. He was minutes from being off duty when he got the call. He was in the vicinity so he had to take it. The rich people that owned and frequented the country club didn’t appreciate bums on their golf course.
“I am supposed to be here!” The bum slurred trying to stand up. He was obviously drunk. Officer Sam Houston Martinez hated dealing with hobos, there were not many things worse on his shittiest call out list. These human wastes refused to get jobs so they would go around panhandling and living off others’ guilt and pity.
Jorge and Maria Martinez trucked into Texas from Mexico before their son was born. They had nothing in there small village of La Mancha. They lived in poverty in a third world nation. They wanted to start a family so they looked north. They were illegals at first. They were persecuted by police and Americans lucky enough to be born in such a beautiful country. This went on for years and they really had to suffer for their existence until Jorge fought and received his citizenship.
After receiving his citizenship Jorge Martinez started a cleaning business. Maria was soon expecting the first of five sons and two daughters. Sam Houston Martinez was the first born. They wanted to show everyone how devoted they were to their new homeland and named their first born accordingly.
Officer Martinez knew first hand how many opportunities there were in this beautiful country and he was furious at people who didn’t appreciate it. “This is private property…sir. You were sleeping on the ninth hole green.” The drunk didn’t seem to understand. Officer Martinez tried to explain. “This is Oak Hills Country Club…in San Antonio Texas…on the planet Earth.”
“You see! I am supposed to be here!” Animation flowed through the drunk’s body. “San Antonio, Saint Anthony, he was the patron saint of the lost and wandering. I am lost and wandering, therefore I must be where I belong.” He spread his arms and looked skyward, “I am awaiting guidance Dad.”
“Let me get this right, you’re lost, therefore you are exactly where you’re supposed to be?”
“Exactly.” The bum stumbled backwards. He didn’t have the equilibrium to look straight up for too long.
“Listen buddy, the owners and golfers don’t want you here at their club and frankly I don’t want you in my city, so you can either leave right now or we can take a ride downtown.” Officer Martinez looked this bum over again. He was going to be trouble. He was too young to be your run of the mill hopeless, homeless bum. Then there was the way he was dressed, he must have been one of those burnt out hippies, the type that took too many drugs and fried his wiring out.
“Saint Anthony, the patron saint of the blind! Well here I am Tony! Let me see what I am supposed to do now!” The bum was twirling and yelling into the sky.
“Four Lincoln Two, what’s your status?” The brick shaped radio from Officer Martinez’s belt called out. He unclipped it, brought it up to his face and answered, “Dispatch, this is Four Lincoln Two, I have a possible mental-”
“Ask and you shall be answered! Seek and you shall find! KNOCK AND IT SHALL BE OPENED TO YOU! Well Ima knockin’ Hank!” The drunk pulled the flag out of the ninth hole and waved it around like a man stranded on a deserted island trying to get an airplanes attention. Then he collapsed on the ground and pounded his fists into the ground. “KNOCK KNOCK!”
“-I’ll be apprehending.” Officer Martinez continued.
“Do you need back up?” The radio asked.
“Negative, I can handle this.” He clipped the radio back on his pistol belt and took out some handcuffs. “Okay buddy, I want you to stand up and put your hands behind your back.”
The young hobo hesitated but finally did what he was told. The fact that the kid was intoxicated was obvious due to the smell in the patrol car. 12-51, drunk and disorderly in a public place. Officer Martinez thought how it was a shame that he couldn’t book the bum for failure to shower as well. He looked the kid over in the rear view mirror and for some reason he felt that the kid was familiar, although he knew that he had never laid eyes on him before. There was something about the kid that pulled at your heart strings. Looking at him burp and sway as he sat in the back seat, made a person feel sad. “How old are you kid? You can’t be much older than eighteen.”
The kid turned his drunk, kind eyes to meet Officer Martinez’s in the rear view, but when he opened his mouth to answer he only burped and gagged.
“Don’t you throw up in my car boy! Why in the world would you throw your life away like this? You’re young, you have your whole life in front of you. You have all kinds of opportunities here in this country, believe me I know. You can be anything you want.”
The kid started laughing. “No, I can’t.”
“I’m sure you have problems, but it’s not the end of the world.”
The kid laughed harder, “That’s what you think.”
“All I’m saying is don’t let the problems ruin your life.”
“My Dad ruined my life!”
“You know I hear that a lot in my line of work…and personally I think it’s a cop out. You control your own destiny.”
The kid wouldn’t stop laughing. He laughed harder and harder until he started coughing, then the coughs turned to gags. Officer Martinez took this as an insult. He was going out on a limb trying to talk sense into this bum. He never did that before, but this time he took the chance and that’s what he got for his troubles. No good deed goes unpunished, that’s what his dad always said. ‘Oh well’, he thought, ‘a small infraction like this snowballs and soon there’s a record and all of a sudden all you can do for a living is be a fry cook at some dive bar’. Officer Martinez shrugged his shoulders. ‘I guess the world needs fry cooks’.

Have you ever felt completely lost? Not physically, I mean in every other way. Have you ever felt that you were a total failure? Try to think back to when all of your dreams were lost and everything burnt to ashes. Think about someone you love and respect giving you a task and believing in you to accomplish it, but you fail and disappointed them, disappointed everyone. All you had left was the sinking feeling that there is no possibility of achievement. The realization that you let everyone you cared about down. It starts like a small bubble in you chest then it grows and grows until you are completely hollow. No matter how hard you try to place the blame somewhere else, it won’t stick. You know it’s your own fault.
That’s where I was. That’s how I felt sitting in the San Antonio detention cell. My tailbone hurt like hell as it drove into the hard wooden bench, but I refused to readjust myself or get up because I deserved the pain. The booze was wearing off and that just made the sadness worse. The plain cement floor was wet in the corners, making it darker where the water pooled. The cinder black grey walls were rough and poked into my back. My head was pounding, like nails sloshing around in a washing machine. The worst part was that the flashes were going to be back soon if I didn’t get a drink.
In the brief periods that I wasn’t totally absorbed by self pity, I tried to think about my next move. Where was the next foothold in this impossible climb? I shouldn’t have started thinking, that just brought in a wave of hopelessness. The weight was becoming unbearable. I had to try to put it on someone else. It was Man’s fault. How do you save people that don’t want to be saved? And the one’s that do want to be saved want you to think for them, the sheep, the sheep aren’t even worth saving, they put a drain on the world. They are the ones that only live right for the reward, if you’re not looking they’ll do something evil the first chance they get. The end is so close and they don’t see it. We are all lemmings running happily toward the cliff.
I hated everything. I hated mankind. I hated Dad for putting me in this position. I was so full of hate that it was going to spill out of me. I had to vent. There was only one other person in the cell with me. He was a crumpled old man. The folds of his long gray overcoat almost looked like they were an extension of his wrinkles. I couldn’t tell if he was even awake, his eyes were squinted slits. He sat there with his Fedora hat on his lap. I looked at the old man and tried to decide whether or not I should talk to him. I couldn’t tell if he would be a sympathetic ear or just one more of the mindless herd. After a minute of inspecting him I decided against talking to him.
“Bobby.” He said in a raspy voice. I looked at him. He hadn’t moved at all. He was so immobile that I wasn’t sure if he was the one that spoke. Maybe I had imagined it. I didn’t know whether or not I should reply.
“Bobby Meek, that’s my name.”
“Oh, I’m Ishmael.” It was the only thing I could think to say. I had lost my entire train of thought from the unexpectedness of his displaced introduction.
“You looked like you had something to say.”
“Wha- Oh, well, not really.” When we started talking I realized the futility of trying to discuss my problems with anyone. “It’s just that…well I just don’t normally talk to people.”
“Why the hell would you?” He slid back on the bench and readjusted his posture. “Nothing good ever comes of it. No one really listens to anyone else, perceptions rarely change with verbal discourse. Advertising, that’s where it’s at. Coke, it’s the real thing. Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun. Ask a person to name a famous philosopher or their favorite literary character and all you get is big cow eyes, but they can sure as hell tell you who’s playing in Super Bowl VIII. I’m so old now; it’s all going to kill me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Not only was I stunned by his sudden outburst, but I was also thinking about his words. I mean the old guy was right. A conversation in today’s modern world consisted of two or more people waiting impatiently to impart their wisdom. A person tolerates what others have to say in order to tell their story. The irony is that when they finally get to tell their hilarious anecdote, heart-breaking story, or maybe even a cleverly put together soliloquy, the other person is not listening, they are going over their own stories in their head and impatiently waiting for their turn to talk. They only listen to what is being said when the information will benefit them. That’s the skill of advertising. Were holy books big advertisements? Wouldn’t that grab everyone’s attention? It seems that is what the preachers, imams, priests, pastors, ministers and various other ‘holy men’ were doing. They take one well known line from a holy book and ‘interpret’ it as they see fit. King James ‘interpreted’ the entire bible from Hebrew, Greek or Latin to English.
Advertising, it was one of the things I was overlooking, I’m sure of it. This digital age thing was coming and the times were changing. I would have to force it on them, drive it down their throats, burn it into their brains with a neon branding iron. I would compel them to memorize it by endless repetition, like a commercial on heavy rotation.
I almost felt I could do it, but then I looked at the old man. He brought me back to reality. Even if I thought I could do it that meant that I would have a lot of work to do and I didn’t want to do all that work. It had felt good when I thought it was impossible. Being in a hopeless situation meant that it wasn’t my fault, there was nothing else I could do, but that little spark of hope upended my reality. It broke the damn. I started talking to the old man and couldn’t stop.
“The whole thing is impossible. I mean you’re right, there’s no telling anyone anything. Once a person gets comfortable believing how their grandparents and parents believed they won’t change unless they have no other choice, but what they don’t see is that they have to change. Time doesn’t stop! That old stuff was for the old times. Don’t they see? It’s the third Golden Truth in Buddhism; suffering comes from trying to hold on to things that change. Now Gautama had it right man. He was on his death bed and told all of his followers that he had no clue what was going on. He said, ‘I have not yet found the truth or light…don’t pray to me after I die, I will be nowhere around.’ I mean there you go man. He failed his mission right? And Dad didn’t come down and destroy all life on Earth. He didn’t kill all the Chinese did he? No, Gautama failed his mission and died an old man, now look at my brothers that succeeded. Zoroaster came off his mountain to spread enlightenment and they stoned him. Look at Jesus, he had all his ducks in a row, he had a message and everything, and he still ended up nailed to a cross. Muhammad was poisoned and killed by an invading army. There’s not a good track record for my line of work, most my brothers were killed by the people they were trying to save.
“Maybe I don’t want to find my message. Listen, even if I find this message and write the book, and it’s the best book ever, and everyone just gets it, mankind would just kill me in some horrendously painful way and distort what I was trying to tell them anyway. It’s all one big hideously deformed pizza man! I mean pizza was never meant to have pineapples or anchovies. Fuck, anyone can see that, right? WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE DAD? I KNOW YOU’RE WATCHING ME!”
Bobby Meek was still looking at me. He was like a statue the entire time and didn’t even flinch during the wild hand gestures, or when I screamed into the ceiling. When I was done he just sat back and said, “I favor the Chiefs, although the Niners have been my team for years. Who knows?”
“You know”, I continued on without paying much attention to what he was saying, “I don’t think I’m going to write that book. Fuck it, sure it means the end of the world but I’m going out either way man. It’s just a matter of how painful my death is going to be. This country is supposed to be the best system humanity has come up with so far. Freedom of religion? I can’t change anyone’s mind. They’re born into a religion, Proverbs 22:6 ; Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it, it should read; when he is old he will be too afraid of the dogma of hell and damnation to depart from it. You see Bobby, you see? It doesn’t matter. Why the hell should I put my testicles on the block to be hooked up to the car battery when I’m going to die anyway. At least I know that there is a God. Oh, and you know something else? As far as I can tell there is no hell, the only hell that exists is the one we’re living in now man. Hahahahhaha, I’m not doing it.” I was hysterical from the weight lifted off my shoulders.
“Well you certainly are a unique man with definite issues. No wonder you don’t talk to people. They probably all run away screaming.” He said in his dry raspy voice while subtly scooting toward the cell door.
“Did you know that in Arabic the word Islam literarily means ‘surrender’? It’s the most militant religion out there. Shit, Jihad is one of the fundamental parts of the entire faith. Oh and the Jews, Ha! They are supposed to be the chosen people, look what keeps happening to them! Hahaa!”
Bobby stood up and walked to the cell door. He looked both directions through the bars for a guard.
“This world needs a whole new vernacular, the language of the modern age. We are now accepting callers! The tenth caller will receive full redemption! Aid is available for those that qualify! Come on down, anyone that attends will receive eternity in paradise! Free balloon animals for the kids! See printed material for details! For a limited time qualified parishioners will receive salvation or you can pick what’s behind door number two! All offers are subject to change without notice! Mail back unused portions of product for full reimbursement.”
“Guards!” Bobby yelled.
“Charges and restrictions apply, no purchase necessary!”
“Guards! Help!”
“All it will cost is your immortal soul, you’re not using it anyway, taxes and disposal fees extra!”
“Guards!”

The guards came in and left. They told me to shut up and that was it. They also brought lunch. We were still the only two people in the cell. I didn’t touch the food on the metal tray. All I wanted was the tin cup. My hangover was clearing and if I didn’t start drinking soon the flashes of other people’s broken lives were going to start up again. In a city the size of San Antonio I knew I would have a headache two years long. The late great J.C. turned water into wine, I put my finger in the cup and turned my orange Tang to Scotch. I took a sip and sucked my teeth. “I’m sorry Bobby, but I’m not doing it. I swear I’m not.”
“Listen kid, I’m sorry you’re having a bad day, but let me eat my food and shut the hell up or I swear by Sartre’s lazy eye I’ll take this tray and smash it over your numbskull head.” Then like a defiant hero he dug his fork into his powdered eggs.
“All I wanted to do was save the world and everyone wants to hurt me. I guess that’s just par for the course, huh? Did you know that Noah wasn’t the first to build an ark and fill it full of animals because of a world cleansing flood? Nope, according to an ancient Mesopotamian religion, the Earth was flooded thousands of years before Noah’s time. Utnapistim built an ark, same story.” I told him while I paced back and forth in the cell.
“SO WHAT?” Bobby asked with his mouth full of egg and toast.
“So I would visit the lumberyard if I were you. I hope you’re not allergic to animal hair. Hahaha.”
“Leave me alone you freak.”

Chapter 10

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

Texas Penal Code, Chapter 49.02; ‘Public Intoxication’, is a Class B misdemeanor. The penalty is confinement in jail for a term up to but not to exceed 180 days, the fine is a dollar amount up to but not to exceed three-hundred dollars. This was passed by the 62nd legislature in March of 1968, page 883, chapter 399.
After hearing officer Martinez’s opinion of me Judge Jonathan Sternridge of the 144th Criminal District Court decided in his sagacious way that I needed to think about the path my life had taken. He decided that I should think about my life for a total of six months in the Bexar County Correctional Facility on the outskirts of San Antonio.

All of this out of the way, there I was. In an 8” by 9.8” by 9.8” cell. My soul was lost, my life was empty. Everything that I had been trying to do was futile. Everything seemed so trivial and meaningless. I was scared and there was no direction. I had no friends and no family. All I had was the concrete walls, a hard bunk and a steel toilet sticking out of the wall. My goals meant nothing any more. I felt a complete feeling of loneliness and despair.
I had come to believe that all the problems in my life happened to me for a reason. They were there so I could use all of those experiences and what I learned from them in order to make it easier to get to my ultimate goal. I had felt that everything that I had lived through I needed to in order to do what I was meant to do, but now I didn’t feel that anymore. In that cell in Texas I felt that there was no plan for me. I was only fooled to think that I was supposed to be someone, to do something. The joke was on me and I was the only one not laughing.
The days passed by, days filled with humiliation, days filled with physical and mental pain. What was the use of anything? The worse part was that I now felt completely abandoned and had no one to blame. I kept the hate with me in my chest. This ball of hate was nothing that truly existed in nature. It was perverse and it distorted me. I felt myself change. My soul was decomposing, it had been long dead.
I was surrounded by criminals and despots. The county jail is a unique experience. Of course you can’t let anyone see that you’re afraid when you first arrive, but it’s hard not to. The criminal’s day is well structured. Breakfast is always at the same time every day, recreational time is always at the same time every day, lunch, dinner, shower, laundry, everything is always at the same time.
In the morning, they let me out of my cell to enjoy the recreational activities of the day room. There were numerous tables in the day room and each of them was filled with a different group of deviants, each group was a different ethnicity. I was one of the few white men in the jail. I couldn’t tell you whether the judicial system was prejudice against minorities or if they tended to commit more crimes, all I knew was that the only other white people in the jail had shaven heads and white power tattoos. The Blacks were separated themselves into several different gangs. You couldn’t tell them apart by the color of their skins, just the color of their clothes.
The majority of the inmates were Mexican. They made up a good seventy-five to eighty percent. They also separated themselves, but I couldn’t tell how they knew who was in what group. As far as I could tell, the northern Mexicans hated the southern Mexicans and called them ‘dirt eaters’. I couldn’t understand what the Southern Mexicans called the Northern Mexicans.
There were a couple other groups. There were Koreans and one other small group of descendents from some other Asian country. It didn’t matter what color they were, they were all mean looking, meaner than I had ever had to deal with before.
I thought about how they separated themselves and those groups would fight over silly reasons. For example, one of the white power groups was annoyed with how one of the black groups would be loud while playing Dominoes, so one of the white power guys waited until the very end of the day and while no one else was looking he hid the double six and double five dominos. This really pissed off the black group the next day and they decided to antagonize all the other groups. Finally the white power domino hider gloated and the black group found out who hid their domino. There was a fight and the guards let it go for a while. When the guards did come in they beat everyone in the room relentlessly, whether or not we had anything to do with the domino debacle. A week later the original domino thief was knifed in the shower.
The point is that I saw a microcosm for the entire human race there in that prison. They separate into different groups according to the color of their skin, then they separated into smaller groups for no real reason. After that they fight each other for ludicrous excuses.
Every day I saw how ridiculous my dream of uniting everyone was. Being in there was a daily reminder of how much of a failure I was. I stayed to myself and I stayed drunk. I turned water into vodka so the guards couldn’t smell alcohol on me. There were a couple times early on when I woke up sober and my mind was invaded by the criminals around me. It was hell being there at these miscreant’s crimes during my visions. I couldn’t bear to see anymore. After that I doubled my efforts to stay drunk all the time.
This made my days easier but it also made them hard to write about. Most of it was a blur. I tried my hardest to keep to myself and stay out of trouble but there were times when I was forced to fight, and was subsequently beaten like a red headed step-child. I was never a good fighter. Toward the end of my time there I could tell that I was a different person. I had unintentionally picked up different mannerisms. My language was much more colorful and coarse. I even picked a fight a month before my release date. When I first was put in jail I couldn’t think of anything else but my release date. I would count the days but after a couple months I didn’t care about that anymore. My release day wasn’t real anymore. I risked staying in longer over the last three pages of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable.
Some jackass spent his time ripping the last three or four pages from every books available in the jail library. There was no reason for him doing this, just complete boredom.
Out of some miracle I got an intact copy of Les Miserable. One day there was a fight in the day room and we were all put back in our cells in a hasty fashion. I was forced to leave my book on one of the many tables. The next opportunity I had to go back I found my book again. I didn’t think too much about it until I got to the end. Marius had just found out that Jean Valjean was innocent and dying. What then?
I didn’t have much in this world, but I had my books. I truly enjoyed my books. It was the only sanity left in my life. I was so upset that I thought for days what I would do with the guy when I found him. I watched the book shelf for days until my diligence paid off. I finally caught him. He was a small dirt eater that probably couldn’t read English any way. I was so mad and he was so small that I felt I had to confront him. I went right over to the son of a bitch. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing shitgoblin?”
He turned around and looked up at me with a blank stare. He didn’t say a word. There was no fear in his eyes. I saw no sense or remorse. He didn’t care. He was doing it because he was bored and he wanted to mess with people.
“I’m going to kick your little spick ass.” At this point he realized that I was actually pissed off at what he had done. To this point he had no idea who he was terrorizing by tearing the last pages out of books. As soon as he realized that I wanted to fight him he wasted no time and punched me right in my mouth. Getting punched in your teeth is a very singular feeling with its own unique pain. To my credit I did throw a couple punches before the guards got there.
I sat in my cell with toilet paper held up to my fat lip to stop the bleeding. This was reflection time. I had become what I hated and I didn’t know how it happened. I hated that little man because he was small and brown, not because he defiled my book. Sure that is what it started out as, but I felt it inside me. He disgusted me by being what he was. He disgusted me to the point where I needed to do him physical harm. I was tired of trying to figure it out. I wasn’t going to do anything to stop the end of the world. The world should end, people shouldn’t be allowed to live with each other.
So my plan was to return home and do what I could to speed along the apocalypse. I was going to sit and laugh at the world’s suffering from my house in Oregon. I was released from prison in September of 1972. I hitchhiked back to Oregon. It took me three weeks.