Somehow, I think I always come back to writing about religion, despite not being religious. I'm envisioning the Preacher as a grey character, someone more sympathetic than I had originally planned. I don't have much of the plot in my head at this point. Books tend to write themselves.
...
Preacher
leaned back in his chair and watched the clock tick seconds of his
life away. The room was large and empty, save for a cross or two
hanging from the plain brown walls.
A monotone environment, one that sapped energy and scuttled attempts
at productivity and self-betterment. A piece of paper lay on his
desk, blank, its whiteness an affront to the amount of time he had
spent sitting before it with a pencil in hand. A preacher for ten
years now, and still he had never mastered the art of composing a
sermon. Every metaphor, every pained attempt at humor came from hours
of contemplation, if you could call it that. Contemplation implied
deep thinking. What he did was sit in a chair and let his mind wander
through the minutia of existence. Time was a frequent subject.
Preacher didn’t believe in time. It was a human illusion, a sleight
of hand, a way for the Divine to force humanity into acting in His
morality play. God was omniscient and omnipresent, which meant that
time did not exist for God. If He knew what
names
were
written in the Book of Life, then the future was already set in
stone. What
were the implications for human sinfulness? God must know every sin
you will commit; your choice was preordained, and therefore not a
choice at all. What could Preacher tell his congregation regarding
these matters? He didn’t think the deterministic nature of
existence was a good topic for a sermon. People didn’t want to hear
theological philosophy; they wanted reassurance, confirmation that
goodness and altruism were universal truths. They wanted something
brief and comprehensible, using words that were easy to digest. They
had expectations that he had trouble meeting, and he knew that the
decreasing attendance every Sunday had more than a little to do with
his charisma as a preacher. Sin was universal, but the preacher was
supposed to be a paragon of virtue, an example of a righteous man,
not a hypocrite or a bumbling fool. He could be vengeful, petty,
inconsiderate, and even weird. His
house, a sprawling brick construction inherited from his mother, was
in disarray. His backyard was full of trash, garbage strewn
everywhere by animals, due to the half-hazard pit he tossed refuse
into and periodically lit on fire. The neighbors had
passive-aggressively complained, yet he did nothing. Why he was not
sure. He had never liked Nick Prentice ever since high school, and
his wife Gretchen was a forceful and domineering woman, which made
him afraid of her.
He
had his issues with women. Despite a brief experiment (in seminary,
no less) with bisexuality, he was predominantly heterosexual, or at
least, he considered himself to be. Although he found their bodies to
be attractive, he’d had problems connecting with women on an
intellectual level. There seemed to be some deep and unfathomable
gulf between him and the female sex, the kind of divide that might
exist between human beings and an alien species.
Women were more empathetic, more attune to social harmony, less
tolerant of stupidity and boorishness.
He did not consider himself to be a modern man, a product of social
liberalism and secular developments, and thus his true debilitation
was his conservatism, although he certainly wouldn’t have thought
of his personal views as a deficiency. The world was sinful and
corrupt, irrevocably on a path of civilizational
decline.
What
was old was better; what was ancient was nearly divine. God had
delivered his true testament over two-thousand years ago, not
yesterday, and if God was omniscient, then that must mean there was a
reason he chose to lay the seeds of Christianity during the ancient
world. The New Testament foretold the coming of the Anti-Christ and
the Whore of Babylon, and as far as Preacher could fathom, those
bleak days were drawing ever closer with every passing year. So he
wove his antiquated ideals into his identity, and almost everything
he did was an expression of those ideals. He was not a man to change
his mind on something. His mind was as inflexible as granite.
So
when his eyes saw Silica in his doorway, Preacher was immediately
uncomfortable. Here was a buxom woman before him, clad in a tank top
and short shorts, eyes
wide and green, hair the color of black silk, skin a tawny sun-kissed
shade. She seemed less a woman than a temptress sent by the
Adversary, perhaps the very Whore of Babylon herself.
“Hello?”
he managed, not letting his eyes off of her.
“Hello,” she replied, eyes
moving rapidly, taking in the surroundings, lingering on the image of
the crucifixion above his head.
“Are you in need of council?”
he asked. She did look disturbed; face flushed, arms tensed at her
sides.
“There are men chasing me… I
need a place to hide,” she said.
“We should call the police.
Here, let me…”
“No. One of them is a police
officer.”
“Oh,”
he said. Now
this is a fine situation.
Regardless, he had to perform his Christian duty.
“Let’s try a woman’s
shelter.”
“Can I stay here?” she
asked, looking at him directly. He felt something seize in his heart,
and he almost clutched his chest.
“Well,
I suppose…”
“Thanks,” she said, sitting
down in a chair. She sat awkwardly, as though her legs were foreign
objects unaccustomed to bending.
“What is your name?” he
asked.
“Silica. You are a priest.
This is a church? You worship a god of resurrection?”
“Yes… I am a Christian
minister devoted to the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one true god,
who died for our sins to guarantee the salvation of all.”
“What sins did He die for?”
she asked.
“Every sin, no matter how
large or small.”
“For what purpose?”
“So that believers can attain
eternal life after death.”
She was silent for a moment,
staring at him with an intensity that caused him to look away. The
vividness of her eyes was unreal, and he felt like he was viewing a
touched up product, an image that had been altered and sharpened
digitally.
“That’s a false promise,”
she said. “There is no life after death.”
“You don’t know that,” he
said, though he sounded unsure.
“I’ve never seen anything
come back to life. Nothing wants to die. Everything fights and
struggles to the last second, desperate to earn another breath. It’s
bred into us, the instinct to survive. It is a commonality that we
share with all living things.”
“That’s because we’re
sinful and full of doubt. We have to trust the word of God. We have
to have faith,” he said.
“Why should I trust you and
not my body’s own intuition?”
“It’s not necessarily me
that you should trust, it is the Bible that you should put your faith
in.”
“It’s a book. An inanimate
object.” She looked at him as though he were stupid, and he felt
himself blushing, as though he had tried to fool her in some manner.
“Silica, I am sorry that I am
not able to explain myself sufficiently. Conversion is not really a
specialty of mine. If you are interested in the Christian faith, I
can give you a Bible and you can draw your own conclusions.”
She
reached for the book and picked it up, flipping through its pages
momentarily before placing it in her lap and resuming her staring.
Her
breathing was short, choppy, strangely arrhythmic. The more he viewed
her face, the more he felt as though it was made of rubber or
silicone. He wanted to touch her, to make sure she was real in order
to dispel the uncanny feeling that she off
in many small, hard to define ways. Maybe
she is a demon in human form.
A ridiculous thought, spawned from Christian mysticism, which he
typically discarded.
The Bible says that evil spirits are real.
Of course, the Bible also stated many things that were easily
disproved; a religious man had to trust the substance of what was
being said, if not the literal words.
Heresy.
He
pushed away his thoughts and folded his hands together on his desk in
an attempt to present himself as a rational actor, a compassionate
priest.
Across
the wide expanse of the parking lot he saw two figures moving in the
dark, illuminated by the blue glow of their cell phones. He watched
transfixed as they grew closer; they pounded on his door, their
voices rough and demanding. Silica rose from her chair, eyes
searching for a place to hide, but a peaceful calm came over him, and
he stayed her with a hand.
“Shut
yourself in this room. I will go and talk to them,” he said. She
stared back at him, her face not registering any comprehension.
“It
will be all right,” he said, trying his best to sound convincing.
He left the room, shut the door, and went to the front entry, where
much to his surprise, the Cretin and Officer Larry stood.
He
hadn’t spoken to the Cretin in a long time, about as long as it had
been since he’d been friends with Know-it-all Nick. He looked worse
for wear; his effeminate face was covered in a shaggy black beard,
while his hair was peppered with silver and looked as though it had
been self-cut. Their personalities were not compatible; they had
managed to be friends during their high school years, when vague
similarities and close proximity trumped meaningful
connection. The Cretin had always hated every opinion he had ever
possessed, from his conservatism to his religiousness to his general
views on the day’s weather, and after a time their conversations
had devolved into petty squabbles. He also couldn’t stand the pure
self-destructiveness of the man, how he drank, how he smoked, how he
ended relationship after relationship with no end in sight, how he
complained about his lot in life, as though his difficulties weren’t
the product of his own labor.
God helps those who help themselves.
That was the last thing he’d said to the Cretin. Looking at him
now, after several years, he found he didn’t really have anything
more to say.
“Father,”
said Officer Larry. “Sorry to bother you at this hour, but my
friend here has lost somebody, a woman in fact, and he blames me for
scaring her off. You see, he was selling me a… piece of equipment,
and I came to pick it up, and I guess this girl’s scared of the
cops, who knows why, hah, might have to check to see if she’s got a
warrant, eh, but anyways, he thinks he saw her cross the parking lot
and enter into your church, and we were wondering if you knew
anything about that.”
“Preacher,”
said the Cretin, sullenly. He looked combative—his fists were
balled up at his sides—but he stared down at the ground, as though
unable to cope with the current degenerative situation.
