The exorcism was successful, they say. I will be back with my company within the month. The restraints are merely a precaution. I will be free of them soon, as I am free of the demon.
“Bring me to God,” I croak. My throat burns like a desert.
They hold a prayer wand to my head. I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
The wand is in working order. The batteries are fully charged. It’s probably nothing, they say. A temporary aftereffect of the exorcism. Give it time. Probably best to leave the restraints for the moment, but there’s nothing to worry about.
Of course they are right. I have dwelt in the Spirit, I know the mind of the Almighty—after all, were not all of we chosen made in His image? God would never abandon even the least of his flock. I do not have to believe this, it is something I know. Father, you will not forsake me.
It will come back. It will come back.
They urge me to be patient. After three days they admit that they’ve seen this before. Not often, mind you; it was a rare procedure, and this is an even rarer consequence. But it’s possible that the demon may have injured the part of the mind that lets us truly know God. The physicians recite medical terms which mean nothing to me. I ask them about the others that preceded me down this path: How long before they were restored to God’s sight? But it seems there are no hard and fast rules, no overall patterns.
Trajan burns on the wall beside my bed. Trajan burns daily there and is never consumed, a little like the Burning Bush itself. My keepers have been replaying his cremation daily, a thin gruel of recorded images thrown against the wall; I suspect they are meant to be inspirational. It is always just past sundown in these replays. Trajan’s fiery passing returns a kind of daylight to the piazza, an orange glow reflecting in ten thousand upturned faces.
He is with God now, forever in His presence. Some say that was true even before he passed, that Trajan lived his whole life in the Spirit. I don’t know whether that’s true; maybe people just couldn’t explain his zeal and devotion any other way.
A whole lifetime in the presence of God. I’d give a lifetime now for even a minute.
We are in unexplored territory, they say. That is where they are, perhaps.
I am in Hell.
Finally they admit it: none of the others have recovered. They have been lying to me all along. I have been cast into darkness, I am cut off from God. And they called this butchery a success.
“It will be a test of your faith,” they tell me. My faith. I gape like a fish at the word. It is a word for heathens, for people with made-up gods. The cross would have been infinitely preferable. I would kill these smug meat-cutters with my bare hands, if my bare hands were free.
“Kill me,” I beg. They refuse. The bishop himself has commanded that I be kept alive and in good health. “Then summon the bishop,” I tell them. “Let me talk to him. Please.”
They smile sadly and shake their heads. One does not summon the bishop.
More lies, perhaps. Maybe the bishop has forgotten that I even exist, maybe these people just enjoy watching the innocent suffer. Who else, after all, would dedicate their lives to potions and bloodletting?
The cut in my head keeps me awake at night, itches maddeningly as scar tissue builds and puckers along its curved edges. I still can’t remember where I’ve seen its like before.
I curse the bishop. He told me there would be risks, but he only mentioned death. Death is not a risk to me here. It is an aspiration.
I refuse food for four days. They force-feed me liquids through a tube in my nose.
It’s a strange paradox. There is no hope here; I will never again know God, I am denied even surcease. And yet these butchers, by the very act of refusing me a merciful death, have somehow awakened a tiny spark that wants to live. It is their sin I am suffering for, after all. This darkness is of their making. I did not turn away from God; they hacked God out of me like a gobbet of gangrenous flesh. It can’t be that they want me to live, for there is no living apart from God. It can only be that they want me to suffer.
And with this realization comes a sudden desire to deny them that satisfaction.
They will not let me die. Perhaps, soon, they will wish they had.
God damn them.
God damn them. Of course.
I’ve been a fool. I’ve forgotten what really matters. I’ve been so obsessed by these petty torments that I’ve lost sight of one simple truth: God does not turn on his children. God does not abandon His own.
But test them—yes. God tests us all the time. Did He not strip Job of all his worldly goods and leave him picking his boils in the dust? Did He not tell Abraham to kill his own son? Did He not restore them to His sight, once they had proven worthy of it?
I believe that God rewards the righteous. I believe that the Christ said Blesséd are those who believe even though they have not seen. And now, at last, I believe that perhaps faith is not the obscenity I once thought, for it can give strength when one is cut off from the truth.
I am not abandoned. I am tested.
I send for the bishop. Somehow, this time I know he’ll come.
He does.
“They say I’ve lost the Spirit,” I tell him. “They’re wrong.”
He sees something in my face. Something changes in his.
“Moses was denied the Promised Land,” I continue. “Constantine saw the flaming cross but twice in his lifetime. God spoke to Saul of Tarsus only once. Did they lose faith?”
“They moved the world,” the bishop says.
I bare my teeth. My conviction fills the room. “So will I.”
He smiles gently. “I believe you.”
I stare at him, astonished by my own blindness. “You knew this would happen.”
He shakes his head. “I could only hope. But yes, there is a—strange truth we are only learning now. I’m still not sure I believe it myself. Sometimes it isn’t the experience of redemption that makes the greatest champions, but the longing for it.”
On the panel beside me, Trajan burns and is not consumed. I wonder briefly if my fall from grace was entirely accidental. But in the end it does not matter. I remember, at last, where I once saw a scar like mine.
Before today, the acts I committed in God’s name were pale, bloodless things. No longer. I will return to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will raise my sword-arm high and I will not lay it down until the last of the unbelievers has been slaughtered. I will build mountains of flesh in His name. Rivers will flow from the throats that I cut. I will not stop until I have earned my way back into His sight.
The bishop leans forward and loosens my straps. “I don’t think we need these any more.”
They couldn’t hold me anyway. I could tear them like paper.
I am the fist of God.
HOME
It has forgotten what it was. Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there’s nothing around to use it? This one doesn’t remember where it came from. It doesn’t remember the murky twilight of the North Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back below the thermocline. It doesn’t remember the gelatinous veneer of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It doesn’t even remember the long, slow dissolution of that overlord into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even those have fallen silent.