The Losers: The Preacher, Part One

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.