“So my question for you tonight is this.” His tone is abruptly serious. “What do you see when you look in the mirror?” He paces the stage, giving the audience a moment to sober up. “Do you see what you want to see? Or do you see what is?”
Silence.
“Do you see a ‘good person’ who’s ‘beautiful on the inside’? Or do you see an apathetic slug sinking into the couch while the war rages outside your window? Because I’m sorry to tell you, but that’s what God sees when he looks at you.”
Somber nods.
“He sees a broken, hopeless fuck-up who’s inherently incapable of doing anything right. But for reasons we’ll never understand in this life…he loves that broken fuck-up.”
Paul smiles wryly and the audience mirrors him.
“Or at least he wants to. But we make it hard, don’t we?” He nods to himself, strolling back and forth across the stage. “We resist his love. We reject it. He offers us a position in his kingdom and we whine about the long hours. We sleep through our shifts and fail all our assignments and then act surprised when God fires us.”
He stops in the center of the stage and pivots to face the crowd, straightening his shoulders. “My friends, there is nothing we can do to earn God’s love, but there is plenty we can do to lose it. Anyone who says God’s love is unconditional hasn’t heard of a place called Hell. Because he sure as Hell stops loving you on the day he sends you there.”
Paul is looking right at me, but he doesn’t see me. His eyes are feverish and distant, like he’s exulting in some infernal vision just above my head. His face has more crags and creases than it should at his age, as if he spent so many years holding it stiff that it’s starting to split open. It clings to his skull like an ill-fitting mask.
Is this what I should look like? Is this who I really am beneath my mummified skin?
“We stand on a tiny island of mercy surrounded by damnation, because we are not ‘good people.’ There is no such thing. We offend God with our very nature, every instinct and inclination, every silly dream and self-indulgent whim.” Another wry smile. “We are God’s shit. Just because he made us doesn’t mean we don’t disgust him.”
The crowd chuckles, and I hunch over in my chair, holding my stomach.
“R,” Julie whispers, touching my shoulder, but I cringe away from her. I stand up and rush toward the foyer, crouching as low as I can, but something forces me to look back at the stage and Paul’s eyes fall on mine. I see him squinting into the stage lights, an awkward pause in his polished delivery, but I’m gone before my presence can fully register, squeezing through the overflow crowds in the foyer, and everyone is too fixated on Paul to notice me.
I move along the walls until I find the restrooms. A paper sign says Out of Order but I push through the creaking door, expecting perhaps a clogged toilet or a broken faucet. Instead, I find myself in a dim, damp chamber of cracked tiles and rusty steel urinals, lit by one flickering light above a cigarette-filled sink, the air thick with the stench of sewage. My nausea feels stalled, balancing on the brink of release without quite tipping over. I stumble toward the sink on wobbly legs and brace myself against it. I look into the dirty mirror.
Whose face is this looking back at me? Which of my many lives does it represent?
My cheeks are smooth. There are no lines to mark my journey. I have seen things both horrible and beautiful, I have lost hope and found it, learned new lessons and let go of old ones, I have wandered into Hell and fought my way out—but where is the evidence? My face is the blank canvas of youth, preserved through all these years like a mocking dismissal of my experiences. I am a man stitched into the skin of a boy cadaver. A twisted experiment in the laboratory of the plague.
I feel it coming. The nausea has deepened into pain.
I stagger into a toilet stall and open the lid. A bowl of dark sludge greets me, an aged septic liquor off-gassing an aroma that’s sublime in its awful complexity. And still the vomit won’t come.
I shut the lid and sit on it, fighting back tears from the methane and ammonia and grief.
“R?”
Her voice echoes in the entryway. Her footsteps are soft as she approaches the sound of my ragged breathing. She doesn’t knock. She opens the stall door, sees me hunched there, sweat dripping from my forehead, and she kneels down on the filthy tiles.
“What’s wrong, R? Talk to me.”
Does she even notice the stench? She should be gagging, but her eyes are calm as they search for mine.
“Tell me,” she says, putting a hand on my knee, and although I don’t know if she means it as such, I take it as permission. No more “slowly.” No more “easing her into it.” I fill my lungs with the putrid air and I breathe out the truth:
“This is mine.” I wave my hand around, indicating the filthy stall and everything around it. “This is me.”
She squints. “What?”
“This church. The Fire Church.”
“This is the Fire Church?” Her eyes dart; she’s afraid for all the wrong reasons. “R, we need to—”
“Julie, listen. I built this.”
She pauses. Her head tilts and her eyes squint. “What are you talking about?”
“I founded the Fire Church. Me and my friends, when we were kids.” My eyes drop to the floor. “We hated the world. We wanted to burn it down.”
I can’t look at her while I’m speaking, but I feel her eyes pressing into my forehead like dull blades as my life spills out of me.
“We tried to avoid killing anyone, but people died. We spread misery, ruined lives. And then my grandfather pulled me out, and I…” My tongue locks up, trying to hold back the flow, but it’s too late to stop now. “I helped him run the Axiom Group. I helped him poison the world. Axiom wasn’t my employer…it was my inheritance.”
I force my eyes to rise. I let hers pierce them. “I was a monster before the plague. And whoever I am now…that will always be part of me.”
Her face is utterly blank, eyes wide and empty. And I suddenly realize that I’ve made a mistake. I should never have been so eager to tell her or so certain she’d understand. Time rounded my memories like beach pebbles until they seemed too smooth to hurt anyone, but now that I’m hurling them at Julie, I can feel their jagged edges.
I run past her to the sink and vomit till it overflows.
“Now you’ve met me,” I gasp when I’m empty, wiping acrid drool from my lips. “Now you know who I am.”
“How?” she whispers. Her voice is shaky with compressed emotion. “How could that person become you?”
I catch her eyes in the mirror. She is blinking back tears.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, wishing I could offer more than this, my standard response to every question that matters. “I don’t know.”
Slowly, she backs away. She pushes through the door, and I hear an echoing bang when it closes. I am locked up once again, alone in my cell surrounded by piss and shit, the years scrolling backward to darker and darker prisons.
WE
“THERE IT IS,” says Team Manager Abbot as the town comes into view, glowing faintly on a steep hill. “Take the next exit.”
The driver steers the Hummer off the highway and the rest of the convoy follows, a small army of buses, SUVs, and one large RV, all hastily stenciled with the Axiom logo.
“Stay out of visual,” Abbot tells the driver. “That road there. There’s a spot around the back.”