Junkyard Dogma (The Elven Prophecy Book 4)

by Theophilus Monroe

  Layla nodded. “Do what you need to do.”

  “Just keep an eye on Aerin,” I said. “Make sure she doesn’t do anything foolish. If we can find where the bodies are, maybe there’ll be something we can do to help.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I portaled myself to the spot behind the dumpster at the AA clubhouse. I’d used that spot before to portal in and out of meetings, back when I had Ensley’s power. Trixie’s power was the same.

  It was a relatively safe spot to teleport myself. Of course, there was always a risk that some kind of object might be in the space I visualized. When Ensley was first teaching me how to use this power, I inadvertently portaled myself right into one of the pews at my former church. My butt cheeks were, literally, stuck in the wood of the pew.

  Jokes about butts going “pew” were begging to be told. For once in my life, though, I had withheld my tongue. Ensley had a sense of humor, but it wasn't the sort of joke my late fairy friend would have appreciated. He was a connoisseur of practical jokes. Not dad jokes.

  Thankfully, no mishaps happened on this occasion. Though, it was purely by dumb luck. Someone had tossed an old sofa that used to be in the entryway of the AA club behind the dumpster. I was about six inches away from having a leg stuck in one of the sofa’s arm rests.

  A leg stuck in an arm. Probably room for another joke there. Not as good as a butt stuck in a pew, though.

  I made my way to the meeting room in the AA clubhouse. Rusty, my sponsor, was already there. He had a habit of arriving at most meetings about a half-hour in advance. He usually made the crappy coffee that was always flowing at our meetings. Our group had one of those massive Bunn coffee makers. The thing could make a pot in just a couple minutes, so I wasn’t sure why it warranted him arriving a half-hour early. A bit ironic, actually, that the group spent so much on an industrial quality coffee maker while we never served anything above the grade of Maxwell House.

  I once brought in a bag from Kaldi Coffee House, a St. Louis original and some of the best coffee ever roasted anywhere. People bitched about it. Pearls to swine, I suppose. Not that AA members were pigs. They were good people, but when it came to their taste in coffee, they were lowbrow.

  Not that I was too good to refuse a cup. I grabbed the carafe and filled up one of the styrofoam cups that were stacked beside it.

  “Been a while, Caspar,” Rusty said as I took my seat. “I’ve been worried about your sobriety since you lost your church.”

  I nodded. “That’s fair. I should have probably let you know what was going on. Surely you’ve seen some of it on the news.”

  Rusty shook his head. “I don’t watch the news. It isn’t good for my sobriety.”

  I chuckled. “Again, a fair point. I don’t watch much of it myself anymore.”

  “So you were on the news? Usually, when people in these rooms make the news, there’s more rather than less reason to be concerned.”

  I smiled. “You’re right. And you wouldn’t be wrong. I was in a bit of a legal mess for a minute. Blamed for something that was really someone else’s fault. But I still had some responsibility for what happened.”

  “Did someone get hurt?” Rusty asked.

  “Someone died,” I said. “If I hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “You had that on your conscience, and you didn’t find a way to get your ass to a meeting?”

  I sighed. “I should have. I don’t know. I was just so overwhelmed with everything I had to do.”

  “I can imagine,” Rusty said. “But you’re not drinking?”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t even have the desire, really.”

  Rusty smiled. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “One day at a time,” I quipped, reciting one of the many AA platitudes that we often quoted in meetings as if they were Bible verses.

  “But are you still working your program?” Rusty asked.

  I took a sip of my coffee. “I’m here, aren’t I? What is it they say, meeting makers make it?”

  “Meeting makers who are communicating with their sponsors and working the steps,” Rusty said. “You’ve seen as I have a lot of people who just show up to meetings and don’t do the work.”

  “Very few of those stay sober for long.”

  Rusty nodded and took a sip from his own cup of coffee. “When’s the last time you did a fourth step?”

  I shrugged. “When we did it. Like, five years ago.”

  “What’s the tenth step, Caspar?”

  I sighed. “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

  “I’m not going to ask you about this legal situation since it seems you’ve found a way out of it. But have you taken a personal inventory over it?”

  “Like I said, I wasn’t primarily responsible.”

  “But you said it yourself, Caspar. If you weren’t there… You’re still blaming yourself.”

  “Which means I’ve taken inventory!”

  Rusty shook his head. “Wallowing in guilt is not the same thing as taking inventory. We blamed ourselves for all kinds of shit when we were drinking. That wasn’t the same thing as doing a fourth step, of taking inventory of our role in things that happened.”

  I took another sip of coffee. It wasn’t just Fred’s death that was weighing on me. It was the deaths of the drow warriors. I wasn’t even there. Again, Brightborn was probably the one who owned the lion’s share of guilt. But the drow had come to fight at my side, and when the battle came, I wasn’t there.

  Sure, I had my reasons. I did what had to be done, going to New Albion to find the giants. I’d probably saved them from the eventual devastation of their fallen world. Their magic wouldn’t have sustained their village forever. But the prophecy had said that Earth would be immersed in blood. I was anxious that, given what I’d done, I’d simply brought the giants to Earth to die…as half the drow had died.

  Rusty had a point. I already had more blood on my hands than I could ever wash off. Not to even mention the hundreds of thousands of giants on New Albion whom I’d never met, who didn’t make it to the village. Then, there was B’iff and Ensley. Again, not my fault, but I still had a role in their deaths. I was there. I couldn't save them.

  We started the meeting. Rusty was chairing. We said the Serenity Prayer. Another member recited “How it Works” from the Big Book.

  “Does anyone have a topic they’d like to talk about today?” Rusty asked.

  I raised my hand. “Yeah, I’m Caspar. I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Caspar,” the rest of the room said in unison.

  “Shit happens,” I said.

  “Shit happens?” Rusty asked.

  “Yeah. How do we deal with shit that happens in sobriety? I mean, I’ve read the promises in the Big Book. Hell, sometimes we read them aloud at the end of meetings. It makes it sound like sobriety is all unicorns and rainbows. But it isn’t. Shit still happens. Sometimes the shit is deeper than anything we ever dealt with while we were still drinking. How do we handle that and stay sober? How can we deal with shit happening without, at the very least, spiraling out of control in a cycle of shame and guilt?”

  Rusty smiled. “A good topic. Who’d like to start?”

  We went around the table clockwise, each person sharing their thoughts and experiences. No one had any magic answers that made my problems disappear. No one ever did at meetings. AA wasn’t about solving our problems or making them disappear. It was about helping us through the piles of shit in our lives without drinking.

  Holy hell, I didn’t realize how true it was. Shit really does happen. Members talked about how they’d lost loved ones, spouses, and even their children, in sobriety. One member expressed his frustration that after he’d been sober for six months, he’d still had to go to jail for things he’d done in the past. Another member, an older woman named Cathy who had double-digit years of sobriety, revealed that when she was eight years sober, she wa
s fired from a job that she’d somehow managed to maintain even when she was drinking.

  Sometimes, in meetings, the topic leads into drunkalogues. People trying to one-up each other with stories about the awful things they have done or who’d been through the most crap. Those meetings aren’t usually all that helpful. This wasn’t like that. These were stories of people who’d had to deal with all kinds of suffering even while sober. It wasn’t a matter of sizing up one’s tribulations compared to others. It was about solidarity.

  I wasn’t unique. Sure, none of the members had so many deaths weighing on their shoulders. But who was I to argue that the shit I was dealing with, that my experience of frustration, guilt, and pain, was worse when hearing the perspective of someone who’d lost a child, or gone to jail for more than a few hours, or lost a job that had defined them for years?

  That last one, I could relate to. I’d experienced that, and the wounds were still fresh. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even tried to deal with that. I’d lost my ministry. With so much going on, I hadn’t had a moment to mourn that loss.

  I knew I wasn’t going through all I was facing alone. I had a wife. Okay, I had two wives. I had a cat and a bodybuilder friend who often surprised me with his insights.

  But I was reminded, now, that I also had my group. Other alcoholics who actually understood the way my alcoholic mind worked.

  After introducing the topic, I didn’t share in the meeting. I’d gotten off my chest what I needed to when I talked to Rusty before the meeting started. Sure, I was vague on the details. But sometimes, we can get lost in the peculiarities of our situations and miss the forest for the trees. This was a meeting where I got more out of listening than talking.

  I needed to be honest about how I was responsible for what happened. I couldn't undo the past, but I could learn from it. I could let go of the guilt, which wasn’t helping me at all, and mourn what needed to be mourned. I needed to feel the pain of loss. Not drown it out with booze.

  Only then would I find any clarity.

  How, exactly, would I do that? Nearly everyone made the same suggestion. They had to turn it over to the God of their own understanding. The only way to cope with a guilt that is larger than oneself is to allow a power higher than oneself to assume the burden.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said a prayer. Hard to believe that a former minister would forget to pray. Really, I always struggled with maintaining a constant prayer life. Seminary was more about gaining head-knowledge about my religion than developing helpful spiritual disciplines.

  I had one more stop to make. I didn’t know for sure if he’d be there. I knew I could portal myself there. I’d done it before. It was the first time where I learned to use a fairy portal.

  Yes, the place where my butt got stuck in the pew.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  From the back of the dumpster at the AA club to the Church of the Holy Cross, where I’d served as minister for the better part of the last decade. Where my former bishop, Philip, now served. I wasn’t going there for nostalgia’s sake. I wanted to see Philip. Sure, I might be persona non grata in my denomination, but he’d always supported me. He even seemed to believe, unlike the other powers that be, that there was something to this whole elven prophecy thing.

  I only had a few days to figure out what to do about the earthquake.

  I appeared in the chancel of the sanctuary at Holy Cross. It was the place where I’d often stood when I preached. Again, sort of like at AA, when I was a minister, if I made any mistake at all in my early years, it was that I thought being a good one was more about talking than listening.

  Only when I used my ears, and bit my tongue, did I start to see real progress—at either AA or in the church.

  Philip wasn’t in the sanctuary. Not a surprise. It wasn’t a place where I ever hung out. Some ministers, I supposed, would spend time there in the morning to pray. The atmosphere is more conducive to spiritual things than sitting behind a desk in the office. Even if, ultimately, God could show up wherever the hell he wanted.

  The office that used to be mine was down a hallway behind the chancel. It was a handy arrangement. I could easily duck in and out of the service if I forgot something, or had to pee, or whatever.

  Just so long as I remembered to turn my mic off before using the bathroom. I’d once, inadvertently, offered an embarrassing accompaniment to How Great Thou Art with the sound of pee hitting toilet water, followed by a flush.

  To this day, I hadn’t lived that one down. I half-expected that even if I ran into one of the congregation and we started reminiscing about old times, that would be one of the first stories that come up. “Hey, Pastor! Remember that time you peed over the P.A. system?”

  I made my way back to the office door. Hearing the sound of classical music coming from the room, I was relieved to find that Philip was there. You never know. Minister’s office hours are usually pretty uneventful. I often ducked out on mine to make hospital and nursing home calls.

  The door was open, but I still reached across the opening in plain view and knocked on it for some reason. I don’t know why. It was sort of dumb. But people did that to me all the time when my door was left open. I suppose appearing in an open doorway unannounced is a bit awkward. You can’t just stand there randomly and be like, “Hey!” It feels like the appearance demands something more than that, an action, a gesture of some kind… If not a pointless knock, perhaps a song-and-dance number, or a walk-in song like professional wrestlers get when they walk on stage, or baseball players have when they walk up to the plate.

  At the moment, mine would probably be Green Day’s Basket Case—do you have the time to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once? With all the thoughts swirling around my cranium, it would be fitting. But instead, I settled for the knock accompanied by a “Hello, Philip.”

  “Caspar!” Philip said, standing from his desk. “What are you doing here?”

  I sighed. “I know it’s probably not appropriate for me to be here. I just don’t have a pastor of my own, and I sort of need one.”

  Philip gestured to the empty chair on the opposite side of his desk. I pulled it out and sat down. Philip pulled his desk chair around to the front of his desk so that he was sitting beside me.

  A real pro move. One they told us to try in our counseling class at seminary. Sitting behind a desk is too formal, almost business-like. People coming to talk to a pastor aren’t usually there to talk business. Sitting on one side together communicates unity, the idea that we’re on the same side with whoever we’re counseling rather than an adversarial posture.

  Until now, I figured I might have been the only one who used the two-desks-same-side strategy. Of course, now I wasn’t the counselor; I wasn’t the pastor. I was the one seeking counsel.

  “I suppose you saw me on the news?” I asked.

  Philip nodded. “Of course. Well, I didn’t see it myself. But I heard about it almost right away. You know, people in the congregation talk.”

  I nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “What was that all about anyway?” Philip asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I said.

  “I believe that the son of a carpenter was the Son of God who rose from the dead. I’m used to believing in the unbelievable.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose there’s that. Believe it or not, we did it primarily as a public relations move. The President threatened me with charges related to someone’s murder, and we sort of figured that if I did something big and great, it would make it less politically expedient for him to blackmail me.”

  “The President of the United States?” Philip asked, raising an eyebrow.

  I chuckled. “Yeah. Told you it’s pretty unbelievable.”

  Philip shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Because he’s a politician?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s that,” Philip said. “But because he’s a human being. A fallen soul. A
sinner, like the rest of us. From what I read about the depth of human depravity in the Bible, there’s enough potential for evil inside each of us to destroy the world three times over. And with great power…”

  “I know, comes great responsibility. A bit cliché, Philip, don’t you think?”

  “I was going to say comes great temptation, Caspar.”

  “Okay, not quite as cliché. I suppose that makes sense why the President might succumb.”

  “I wasn’t talking just about the President. But there’s that. I’m talking about you, too, Caspar. I’m not going to pretend to try and understand what this power is you have, but I know it’s beyond the ordinary. Great power. Great temptation.”

  “But the whole great responsibility thing, even if it is cliché, is true, too,” I said. “If you knew something bad was going to happen and you had a unique ability to stop it, but by doing that, you’d potentially cause more suffering in the long run, what would you do?”

  “I think it depends on how strong that potential is,” Philip said. “Here’s the thing. Remember, when we took our theological ethics course, and they asked us to consider whether it would be just if we had the opportunity to go back in time with the knowledge we have about what would happen, to kill Hitler before he came to power?”

  I snorted. “Yeah. The answer was that it’s still wrong to kill, even if you’re saving more lives. I think it’s mostly bullshit, though.”

  “Why do you say that, Caspar?”

  “I think I’d have a hard time justifying that decision if, after passing up the chance to travel through time and prevent the Holocaust, I went to the future and talked to a Holocaust survivor.”

  “The issue isn’t about whether you justify your actions,” Philip said. “In theological ethics, we don’t subscribe to the idea that the ends justify the means. But remember what Martin Luther once said about sinning?”