The God of Salt & Light

by Logan Ryan Smith

  That was the Word of the Leviathan. I asked for their obedience.

  With their own shame, they told me that their pupils had abandoned them for The People of the Leviathan. They were ashamed they hadn’t told me, but they, nor the Sea, could hold the hearts and minds of our initiates any longer. Not in the shadow of such a ferocious beast. But soon Angela, that gentle soul, stood from her lawn chair and stepped forward. She looked me up and down and scowled, then spit in my face. She slapped me just as I was about to complain. Jasmine grabbed her hand, pulled her away from me, and calmed her. Jacob and Curtis looked on, perhaps embarrassed at the display. Perhaps unhappy to see their leader humiliated. I waited for someone to speak. Jasmine finally told me that if I felt shame, it was because I was shamed. That shame should be the only thing I was feeling. That at least Marcy had the conviction to leave this earthly plane during The Drowning. At least Marcy had reason to have her faith shaken. And that reason was me, not the Sea, for having given our child away. Before I could protest, Jasmine asked me how, after The Drowning, could I possibly worship a false idol, such as the sea serpent. How could I, after everything the six of us had shared, veer from Her Truth?

  I was flabbergasted. I likely stuttered. I stood from my seat and even looked over my shoulder in hopes of seeing a few from The People of the Leviathan coming to stand beside me and defend me.

  When my people realized I could get no words out, they turned and walked back to their shacks or shanties or cardboard homes. Jasmine, Angela, and Jacob, but not Curtis. He looked over his shoulder and watched them walk away, then, hesitant, he asked if I truly believed in the Leviathan. I told him I did, then took him by the hand and led him into the camper.

  Immediately I took him to bed where we lay and touched each other for hours, my soul hurting at the loss of my people, though thousands slept on the beach that night dreaming of me and the monster. As those thousands slept, I’d speak to them in their dreams, fill their hearts and souls with hope for the creature’s return.

  Once we were ready, I asked Curtis to make us drinks while I retrieved cold cuts, cheese, and bread from the mini-fridge and made us sandwiches. Curtis asked how I could so drastically change my beliefs and I asked him if it really was so drastic. Perplexed, his face went doughy, almost expressionless. I said, After all, the creature is part of the Sea, isn’t it? And it was magnificent to lay eyes upon.

  Curtis showed his wild yellow teeth, nodded enthusiastically, agreeing with me.

  Though he hadn’t confessed conversion, I asked him what made him convert to The People of the Leviathan. He told me it was the video. I shook my head, confusion now softening my own features. I said, But you were there. How could the video make a difference? He said, No no no. Then went on to explain. You see, when he had bashed the cameraman’s camera, he wasn’t sure of anything. Not even the Sea. I must admit, it hurt my soul to hear such a thing. I never had reason to doubt his faith before, but now he confesses his faith was never secured? And if that was the case, how much did he ever truly believe in me?

  He went on to tell me that he even wondered if we all weren’t suffering group hallucinations. That perhaps the things we’d seen, the miracles of the Sea, and the Leviathan, were products of damaged brains, damaged by chemicals and genetics. He said we’d all become so close, so intimate, and had done so many drugs, he wasn’t sure which way was up. He said the murders kept him up at night. He said he wonders how we were ever capable of such a thing.

  I stepped behind him then, rubbed his shoulders, and corrected him: Those were sacrifices. Or, if you want, you can think of them as wartime deaths. We all did what we had to do as God’s soldiers. Those deaths, though they may have been at our hands, were not the same as murder. I was reminded then of Jim and his Bible. How God was supposed to have forgiven him for cutting down men in battle. Why then would God shun us?

  Curtis gave me an exaggerated nod, placed a hand over mine, which rested on his shoulder, and took in a great lungful of clean air.

  He went on. You see, when he bashed the cameraman’s camera, the tape dropped out and lay on the beach. When the rest of us were occupied with the body, he secreted it away, only to watch it later and cement his new belief. He really believed we may have hallucinated the whole thing, but now he had proof. But proof of only one thing: that monsters exist.

  Fearing he’d be known, he posted the video to an online message board, and the rest is history. How quickly word escapes. Whether truth or lie. You couldn’t keep anything to yourself in those days.

  So, when the people began arriving, busload after busload, Curtis knew he had done the right thing. There’s power in numbers, he had once said to me, and he said it again, there, in the dim light of the camper.

  He grabbed my hand resting on his shoulder, squeezed, and said, There’s power in numbers.

  That’s when Curtis began to weep. His shoulders shook beneath my soothing hands.

  So you are the seed from which The People of the Leviathan grew? I asked.

  He patted my hand, then told me how relieved he was to know that I too was a true believer. That, along with him, I had finally found a true and righteous path. Something real to believe in. For, look, there’s video proof! And it’s on the internet! And our flock, our flock, our flock had grown so quickly in such little time! He told me he understood why the others were upset, but surely they’d soon see the way and join us, with me still at the head, still their leader, still the only vessel through which God speaks.

  Curtis let out a massive sigh of relief and grinned stupidly to himself.

  I thanked him before I wrapped my hands around his throat. My face was so red, the vein in my forehead threated to burst and spray the camper walls with dark adrenaline. Curtis grabbed at my wrists but I’d shut off his windpipe just after he exhaled his final breath, and his strength was quickly drained. He kicked out once, twice, disrupting the table, spilling our drinks, dropping our sandwiches to the floor. Next, I too fell to the floor, Curtis atop me. I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled back until I felt his windpipe crack and collapse.

  Then all was still. Still and silent. Silent until I heard the murmur. I heard the hum. It was the Sea. She was singing again.

  twenty-seven

  It saddened me that my people had left me, and now two were gone forever, no hope for the reuniting of our souls for they died from a lack of faith. True faith. The real faith. Some might think I strayed, myself, but the Sea has Her ways, and She had Her way with me. And She wasn’t done with our little play. Not yet. She had more in store for me.

  The stage was set.

  I sought out Jacob, asked him why he had ever followed me in the first place. He said the Sea told him to. He said he never heard the words, per se, but in his dreams he knew what the Sea was telling him. And the Sea was telling him to follow me. I asked him, then, why would he stop now. It was my faith in the Leviathan, of course, he told me. For how could I believe in one and the other? I told him to never mind that. I asked Jacob why he would stop listening to the Sea. I asked Jacob if, in his dreams, the Sea had told him to stop following me. To distrust me. To disobey my bidding, or the bidding of the Sea, even if it included the hideous beast freeing Her skin of rotted, bloated fish.

  We sat in plastic chairs outside his plywood shack nestled next to a wiry ocotillo. Gulls and cormorants flew overhead, returning to the Sea, no longer fearing the absent beast’s reach. The sun had set and the temperature had dropped. A warm breeze calmed our skins.

  Jacob wanted to appear hard to convince, shaking his head, running dirty hands through his long hair as he sighed. He broke up his sentences with long pulls on a bottle of cheap whiskey that he gripped tightly. He wanted to give the impression that returning to me was a struggle, but we both knew he was one of mine, part of the inner circle, one of the first People of the Salton Sea. Turning one’s back on that was not an option. You either walked the true path or perished.

  I told Jacob that the Sea’s
truth had not changed and after half the bottle was gone he agreed and finally shared it with me, though to drink goes against my nature, as you well know. Turns me, sometimes, into something ugly, just as I’ve told you. But to make amends, I shared his bottle, felt its warmth envelop me. We talked of old times sitting around a fire, Marcy or Angela playing that nylon-strung guitar, keeping the world calm and in focus.

  After polishing off the bottle, I realized the Sea’s purpose was not only reunification. Excited, I jumped from my plastic chair, clapped my hands together. Jacob laughed, asked what bug had bitten me. I ran into his shack, found some scratch paper and a pencil and brought those back, handed them to him. Again he chuckled, asked if I wanted his autograph. No no no, I said. We needed something special. Something that could uplift the souls of thousands. I ordered Jacob, who has always cooked up something to uplift ours, to do so, and to write it down. I told him to make it potent, for I wanted eyes to open!

  Jacob was then bitten by the same bug that bit me and his eyes were afire. He scribbled down notes, ideas, then finally, a recipe for something really special. I asked him if he thought he could make it and he said it would be no problem. I said we would need a lot. Would it be simple enough for me to make, as well? He said he believed it was a unique composition, but that anybody with half a brain could put it together. I hooted, smacked Jacob on the back, and told him that he’d done well. I took the recipe from him, folded it up, and slipped it into a pocket in my robe. Grabbing Jacob by the hand, I led him back to the camper to celebrate.

  At the camper, we lay and we played and we drank some more. I said it was a shame we could not go to our usual beach, for it was currently overpopulated by The People of the Leviathan praying for a glimpse of the sea creature. They would sleep under a sky of spilled stars, atop a beach of brittle bones, and wake to a sun that baked their skins, but they were determined in their desire to have their faith made whole by viewing with their own eyes the miracle of the fearsome Leviathan.

  Jacob then reminded me of our times at Her mud volcanoes when we would cover ourselves in Her clay and be remade, again and again. How just before we were made whole again, our bodies would entwine, making our little group one, corporeally. I told Jacob that the mud pits were probably free of worshippers this time of night, so under the midnight moon we strolled to Her mud pits, hand-in-hand, passing droves of jealous People of the Leviathan. They ambled restlessly around the region more and more so lately, having waited a long time for a sighting of the shy creature from that viral internet video.

  We found the mud volcanoes gurgling and burping as always, as if the Sea had just had Herself a satisfying meal. It made me reminisce about the times we fed Her. It made me worry that perhaps we had not been feeding Her enough. Perhaps if we had, Her strength wouldn’t have faltered and She could have prevented the Leviathan’s invasion. But it didn’t matter. The Leviathan came to be an important part of Her story, and the two were intertwined forever. There’s always a plan. It was merely up to me to see the plan through.

  Immediately, we applied the mud to our skins, talking gently of old times, kinder times, quieter times. I even talked about Marcy and our child, let Jacob in on the secret of the boy’s importance. Though the boy’s importance, itself, remained a secret. He nodded as though he understood, but eventually asked me how I could be so sure I was the boy’s father. He had procured a second bottle and were still drinking, though the stuff was a foul enemy of mine, as I’ve already confessed. I guzzled it down all night with Jacob, feeling a mix of euphoria and sadness. But I reminded Jacob that the Sea had told me the truth. The boy had always been mine. Jacob nodded again in a tired way and said: But couldn’t She have been speaking metaphorically? Or symbolically or something? You’ve said She often speaks in poetry. He was serious, but wore a lazy smile. Under moonlight, and beneath a skin of mud, that smile glowed, as did the squint of his eyes.

  Covered in glistening yellow-brown mud from head to toe, myself, I laughed. Slabradors howled and growled in the distance, fighting over some scurrying desert creature or dug-up bone. Owls soared overhead. Stars went dark and never returned. The moon wrote down their names, promised to remember them.

  I laughed and reminded Jacob that the Sea speaks only to me, and that only I can interpret Her. That my interpretations are always true the moment I speak them. He nodded, looked up at the moon, and said, Yeah, but, and was cut off by the whiskey bottle I broke against the side of his head. Because the mud had slickened my grip, the blow wasn’t as solid as intended and Jacob’s dazed eyes quickly glowed red. He tackled me in the mud and my drunkenness nearly killed me, had me flopping and flailing beneath him like a suffocated fish. Though it was blasphemous, I thought perhaps I was the whale in the Leviathan’s jaws. But because the mud had slickened our bodies, as well, I slipped from beneath him, latched onto his back like a lesion, and pulled his right arm behind him, pushed it up until I heard the crack, then smothered his scream by shoving his face into the burbling mouth of a mud volcano. I put his face to Her squirting nipple and had him drink.

  It wasn’t long before Jacob was no longer and I could finally swear off drink forever. No longer would I touch the stuff. The only intoxication I would allow myself from there on would be from Her Word, Her song, and the anatomy of Her land that I could smoke or ingest.

  As always, through the haze of pain, one finds clarity. That was Day One of me being totally free of alcohol’s tyranny.

  twenty-eight

  The following month was laborious. The Imperial Sheriff returned three times with the same three questions, but received the same three answers each time and there was nothing he could do but return to the place from which he’d come. Jasmine and Angela avoided me, seemed disinterested in the disappearances of Curtis and Jacob. Our once happy family was no longer and I wanted to feel guilt, to accept some of the blame, but the Sea, and Her Leviathan, wouldn’t allow it. In dreams they told me this was the only path to salvation. To everlasting freedom. So daily I would wander down to the Salton Sea and wash those ugly feelings away. I’d walk several feet into Her thick waters, splash my face, let water cascade over my shaved scalp, my underarms, my penis and testicles. I’d dip my hands over and over again, and watch them crystalize. Behind me, on the bone-sand, countless People of the Leviathan watched in awe and wonder and dread. Dread because they, themselves, would not step foot in Her waters, so fearful were they of the monster lurking within them. It was in their nature to love a god they feared.

  It had been so long since my daily baptisms that it took a week or more for my hands to re-crystalize. When they had, I would walk into the masses of people on the beach and when they would reach for me I would reach for them, pull them in, and use my crystal hands to mark their faces. I would leave the same mark on them that I gave to my own people, and that I wore myself. I told them it was The Mark of the Sea, The Salt, The Light, and The Leviathan, and many would faint after the last artful incision. But not a one of them refused The Mark. Hungry for belief, hungry to belong, ready for the pain of my touch that brings forth the blood of their heart and turns it holy.

  Soon I convinced them it was safe, and I welcomed them into Her waters for their Baptismal Day. I told them they shouldn’t fear what they loved. That they shouldn’t love fear. I told them all the story of The Drowning. How I and my people strayed from Her shores to walk dry land, only to collapse and choke and vomit saltwater until we blacked out. How I was transported from the side of a dusty highway and reborn in Her rich waters. They gasped, found it all so hard to believe. I raised my crystal hands, caught the Light to silence them. I explained it was a miracle, but also an allegory. We were all once dead flesh on the side of some road going nowhere, but now we’re here, reborn in Her waters. Cheers and murmurs rose upward into a blue desert sky, full of birds and wispy clouds. The droves of new believers raised me upon their shoulders, singing songs of the Sea, chants of the Leviathan.

  They carried me for so long along H
er beaches, I was convinced they intended to haul me on their shoulders the entirety of Her circumference, something like one-hundred-and-sixteen miles! But it was such a jovial occasion, all smiles and song and cheer, that I would never have stopped them.

  And I didn’t. It was a loud crack that did. It was not unlike the crack of water from the Leviathan breaching the Sea. That crack quieted their mouths and halted their steps, though they kept me upon their shoulders. That crack also sent birds fleeing into the sky.

  From my vantage point upon my people’s shoulders, I soon spied the source of the disturbance.

  Up the beach and atop a dune stood a lone soldier. A soldier sent to destroy me and everything I created. A soldier that the Sea had prophesied. This soldier wasn’t so tall or heavily armored. He stood with his right hand out, shakily pointing a pistol at me. His shoulders quaked and saltwater streamed down his face. His quaking lips broke up all his words into pure babble. It was my boy. Not the toddler that Marcy’s and mine had become. But the boy who so quietly sat with his mother in my luxurious camper when I explained that I wasn’t the man they were looking for.

  Though my confusion at the situation clouded everything, I knew that She had meant this. The Sea had sent my son. That this was yet another test upon a test. For She was masterful at hiding truths within deception.

  The boy stood in the west, atop that little dune, backlit by the high sun, and yelled Stop! though we had already stopped moments ago. I hardly recognized the voice, for it had been such a long time since I heard him speak, and, furthermore, the boy was a teenager now and owned a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

  When my people saw the boy with the gun, a couple dozen people or so, mostly naked, scattered. Yet I was still surrounded, cocooned by people now baring The Mark of the Sea.