Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

‘ “Yeah, I think she should do it. I mean, the folks on the boat, a lot of them got kids, you know? She ain’t got no kids. It’s tough on her, I guess, but she’s the one in the position to save all those lives.”

  And what about you? Lady in the red sweatshirt.

  ‘ “I think she’s got very little choice. I mean, if she does nothing and the bomb goes off, she ain’t gonna have much of a life that way either. This is her chance of, I dunno, some kinda redemption, you know? She’s someone who has broken God’s laws in front of anyone perverted enough to be watching these porno tapes. What kind of example has she given society? That’s actually the second part of the Fifth Commandment: avoid scandal and bad example. If she did this it would set a more Christian example: selflessness and repentance.”

  ‘ “Yeah, that’s right. She’s right. Nobody makes the news for doin’ somethin’ Christian-like, not normally. You make the news for doin’ the opposite. She made the news for doin’ the opposite. This could be one time somebody does somethin’ Christian-like and the world pays attention. Besides, if she’s suicidal anyway . . .” ’

  Click.

  It had been the same all day. People weren’t talking about terrorism, they were talking about morality. They weren’t discussing the violence at the Pacific Vista, they were discussing violence in the movies. And instead of scrutinising the morality of the anonymous bomber, they were scrutinising the morality of Madeleine Witherson. Sure, there had been the occasional liberal popping up and trying to reroute the agenda, but it was like trying to stop a freight train with a bicycle. That woman in the red sweatshirt had summed it up, talking about the second part of the Fifth Commandment. The first part seemed to have been bypassed way back.

  He couldn’t have hoped for such a boon: it was his agenda, Luther St John’s agenda, all over the networks. Neither could he have hoped for such a primer to illustrate how what he was planning was likely to work, how people were quickly going to cast off their modish accoutrements and turn back to God for warmth, shelter and security.

  The only worrying aspect about it was that it had absolutely nothing to do with him. He had no more been expecting it than the poor suckers who’d got blown up that morning.

  For it to have proven so fortuitously efficacious should have assured him that it was a gift from God, a vote of confidence in what he was about to do. He should have been thanking the Lord for it with a grateful and happy heart. And he should have been asking why he hadn’t thought of it himself.

  But what was disturbing him was that he had.

  ‘Reverend, will you hear my confession?’

  A conversation, a crucial, pivotal conversation. The development of logic and ideas through discourse, like a kind of fertilisation, helping him reach junctures and conclusions within himself that he might never have reached alone, in even the most reflective solitude. A conversation wherein the embryo of his great plan was formed.

  Only now he realised it had a dizygotic twin.

  ‘Reverend, will you hear my confession?’

  ‘I’m not a Catholic priest, son, but if it would do you good to unburden yourself, go right ahead and shoot.’

  If there were two foundation stones on which Luther St John had built his career, they were, firstly, the will and ability to be all things to all faiths, and secondly, a reverent respect for communications media. The second was why Daniel Corby was there. The first was why Luther was listening.

  There were just so many denominations of Christianity, you had to widen your definitions or you were restricting your market. There was only so far you could go if you were too vividly identified as a Baptist preacher, or a Methodist preacher, or even more broadly as a Protestant preacher. You had to let all good Christians know that your message was relevant to them, and that you were on their side. Because in the end, it was all the one God, all the same Jesus. The hardest market to break into, obviously, was the Catholics, as they had been brought up to be suspicious of anything not endorsed by their own organisation. However, shows of solidarity with them on the right issues worked well to assure them that whatever theological small-print you might disagree on, you were both coming from the same place, and both heading for the same goals.

  The tricky balancing act was in courting the Catholics to tune in – whether it be radio in the early days or TV later on – without alienating the Protestants who might fear your message was getting too Papist. Many members of the various Protestant factions were happy to overlook that you weren’t one of their particular number long as they knew you weren’t a Catholic.

  Again, the secret was in sticking to the right issues: there were plenty of things that everybody agreed on. Course, it had sure helped having JP II in the Vatican all that time, giving a good, conservative, fundamentalist hard line to his multitudinous flock. Otherwise they might not quite have seen eye to eye with Luther on a lot of things, and he’d have missed out on a whole host of subscribers. It scared him to think what might have happened had the first guy lived longer, having read about some of the stuff he was planning to do. Luther had heard plenty of debate over whether JP I was murdered, but as far as he could see there was no argument: nothing as convenient as that ever happens by accident.

  He’d always admired JP II. Like himself, the man had appreciated that we were living in the Communications Age, where it wasn’t about letters and missives that would filter down gradually through your dioceses, but about words and images that could go global in an instant. Instead of letters that would be read out before somnolent and dwindling church congregations, the Pope issued press releases that would go on every front page in the world. And unlike his predecessors, boy, did JP II know how to exploit the World Religious Leader franchise. What a showman! All those outdoor deals, hundreds of thousands of people going nuts as he got driven around in his Popemobile, and pictures of it relaying across the planet. Forget mass, this was mass adoration, and the man didn’t just know how to get it – he knew how to package it, label it and sell it to the media.

  But to stay ahead of the game, you didn’t just have to know how to work the communications media, you had to keep pace with its own evolution. When something new developed, you had to be able to recognise its potential without waiting for it to be demonstrated by someone else’s success. Luther had been in radio since the early sixties, from the licensed local station that had grown out of his Sunday-night broadcasts, through syndication of hour-long slots across the major cities, to the development of nationwide affiliates and the establishment of the Christian Radio Network. But when cable TV came along in the seventies, all that had gone before became a warm-up exercise for an opportunity of breathtaking magnitude. Within two years the Christian Family Channel’s annual revenues – subscriptions, donations, advertising – were more than all the CRN affiliates were accruing cumulatively.

  In the eighties, CFC embraced satellite, which gave the channel another means of delivery as well as access to more remote, non-cabled areas. Then in the nineties came the Internet.

  Luther St John was never going to be described as a technophobe, but neither did he have any illusions about the extent to which he could understand the workings of the electronic beasts his organisation harnessed. Television worked on simple principles. You pointed the camera at something. You recorded the image. You edited it. You broadcast it. You knew exactly what you were putting into people’s living rooms, and you knew how they were going to perceive you through it. As long as you had control of the camera, the editing suite, the transmission, you didn’t have to worry about how it all worked.

  Computers were a different deal, because in Luther’s experience you were never sure whether you were in control, or even quite what you were in control of. And the whole subculture surrounding them had always been ridden with a juvenile sense of mischief, like these guys couldn’t resist making a monkey out of anyone unwary enough to play into their digital-electronic hands. So when he launched plans for the CFC Superhighway to Heaven, he resolved to p
ersonally vet whoever was going to be in charge of setting the thing up. There had been a CFC website for a couple of years, but so what – his local hardware store probably had a website too. If you wanted to get noticed you had to up the ante. For the Superhighway to Heaven, Luther envisaged something a lot more elaborate, an interactive deal that incorporated music, video clips, animation, credit-card subscription facilities: something that pretty much jumped through every hoop a modem computer could hold up. But he knew that the more complicated it got, the more chance there was of people hooking up to the CFC homepage one day and finding Luther’s face superimposed on the body of some guy with his manhood up a black hooker’s ass. He needed someone he could trust, someone committed to the Christian cause.

  And the winner was: Daniel Corby.

  Corby was a scary-looking character, with half his face so disfigured it looked like he used a waffle iron for a pillow and always slept on the same side. Luther was used to meeting the mutilated. There was just no end of people who had lost a body part but found God.

  ‘It was after the accident with the threshin’ machine, Reverend, I started lookin’ at my whole life again in a different light. After I lost my arm I felt so incomplete, but watchin’ CFC made me realise that God could put me back together again, at least spiritually.’

  People got a lot less arrogant about their place in the Divine Plan – and about whether there was a Divine Plan – when God knocked them off their high horse. ‘I thought I had no one to turn to after I lost my Marsha in the automobile crash. But you can always turn to Jesus. I only wish I’d been less blind to that before.’

  But Corby didn’t turn out to be one of those cases. Sure, God had helped him through the trauma and pain of getting caught up in that fire in the chemical plant where he’d worked, but he’d always had his faith. And if Luther was in any doubt over how long ‘always’ was, the accounts department was able to assure him that Daniel Corby had been subscribing and contributing for a good few years. He was in the Communion.

  Luther reckoned his periodic flesh-pressings with members of the flock must be a lot like what rock musicians and movie stars experienced when they encountered the general public. He had to smile, pass on good wishes, look pleased to be so adored, then move on. It was part of the job, but it was also very boring. And what the rock and movie guys didn’t have to contend with (except for the occasional competition winner) was having people presented to you who you couldn’t walk away from after shaking hands and signing a book. Luther had an endless string of Good Christians on his daily show, who were there to tell the viewing public how God had changed or assisted their lives. Luther was the host, prompting and probing for the emotional highlights of their stories, and generally putting them at their ease in his famously genial company. The problem was that these bovine crackers didn’t realise his interest in them lasted only until the recording ended, so backstage or on-set once the cameras were off, they insisted on sharing their views on the Lord with him. He didn’t know what made them think they had the right. If they met Jack Nicklaus, would they start telling him about their short play?

  He’d smile, laugh and volley off a standard gift-set of platitudes in response to their banal musings about God, Jesus, Love, Heaven, etc, all the while thinking there was something impolite about their imposition on him. They were effectively regurgitating the product he had sold them. If they did that in McDonald’s they’d soon be shown the door; he had to grin and let them barf away until the next guest was ready.

  So the first time he got talking to Daniel Corby it was like coming up for air. Any time a conversation with a tech-guy strayed from the matter at hand it was the usual familiar ‘Golly Reverend, I’d just like to say what an honour’ stuff, followed by the regurgitation routine. It was reassuring to know that employees gave that measure of commitment, far more than you bought with just their pay-cheque, but it was hardly inspirational. Corby was different. He didn’t talk about the Bible or about any touchy-feely crap. He talked about what was wrong with America, and not in the usual hand-wringing way: he talked about it like a plumber talks about what’s wrong with your pipes. He talked about it like it could be fixed with the will, the know-how and the right tools.

  Corby did all this Internet stuff freelance, setting up websites and homepages for companies and organisations. His involvement was never long-term with anyone: it was, in his own analogy, like he set up the billboard then left you to put up whatever posters you wanted. Luther spoke in-depth with him about just what kind of billboard this was going to be, then Corby went home and got to work. They were both busy men, so they didn’t get to talk much in the mean time, but they still communicated via e-mail, and not just about the job either.

  The day Corby delivered the finished package, Luther flew him out to Arizona to make his presentation to the people at CFC, and when the beer and Twiglets were done, they found themselves alone in Luther’s executive suite.

  ‘My face,’ he confessed. ‘My injuries. I was never in any chemical fire, Reverend.’

  And so Corby began to tell him the truth about his past. About how Life Guard California had come about, what they had done and how the group met its demise. He told Luther about how angry he had become then and how the events following the arrest of his comrades had begun to test his faith: not in God, but in America. This was the country he loved, this was God’s country, but it was being taken over by forces of evil, to the extent that people were being persecuted for trying to protect unborn innocent lives. Watching his Life Guard buddies be arraigned and humiliated was painful enough; watching them surrender and give up the fight was crushing. It had left him feeling so impotent and so angry that he felt he had no option but to fight back, not just to show the anti-Lifers his defiance, but to show God’s people that they could get tough too.

  Corby was the only one hurt when his car-bomb went off in Pocoima, brought into the nearest hospital as a John Doe because his wallet and all its identifying contents had fried and melted like a Doritos packet under a grill.

  With nothing to connect him to the car or even to the disbanded Life Guard, he was the Innocent Bystander. He was scarred and maimed, but he was still alive, and he wasn’t under suspicion. God had both spared him and punished him.

  ‘You’re the only person I’ve ever told, Reverend,’ he said. ‘I’ve been carrying this around with me on my own, and it has been a heavy burden. A heavy, heavy burden. I’m not telling you to lay it on you, though. I was just hoping you could help me make some sense of it. You see, I know God was angry because He smote me, like in the Old Testament. But He didn’t kill me, and He didn’t deliver me into the hands of the authorities for them to take away my freedom.’

  The man’s story set Luther’s mind racing with excitement and fascination. Interpreting God’s intentions was the gasoline his evangelism ran on, but this stuff was untreated crude: raw, unrefined, with its truths suspended in a dark and murky solution.

  ‘This really must have been a burden, son,’ Luther told him. ‘Because there seems so little doubt that God did have a message for you, and it must weigh heavily when you don’t know what the message means. God sends little messages to people all the time, but it’s usually real clear: do this, don’t do that. Like candies and spankings to a kid.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Corby replied. ‘That’s the burden, not knowing what God was trying to tell me. For a while I thought it was simply remorse because I tried to take the lives of the people who were in the clinic that day, and God said Thou Shalt Not Kill. In time I learned it was more complicated than that. The remorse wore off, but the burden stayed.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed. Because you were attempting to save lives primarily, weren’t you? The lives of poor defenceless children in the womb. Now, God struck you down, of that there can be no doubt, but as you say, he also saved you from discovery. God punished you for trying to break one of His laws, but He didn’t let the authorities of this country punish you for breaking theirs.’
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  ‘So you think maybe God was trying to remind me whose law was the more important?’

  ‘Very possibly, Daniel. This is one of the greatest questions that we face in these difficult times, when the laws of the land seem ever more at odds with the laws of the Lord. We all want to be good citizens as well as good Christians, but is it one day going to come down to a choice between one or the other?’

  ‘Well if it does, I know which side of the line I’ll be standing.’

  ‘I hear you, son. And God hears you too. Because it must break God’s heart that America is becoming His enemy, and it is up to us, as Americans, to turn that around.’

  ‘Yeah, but how can we do that, Reverend? What can we do that we aren’t doing already? See, that’s how I felt when I decided to bomb the abortion clinic. I wanted the women who were considering going into one of those slaughterhouses to think: what if it gets blown up like that place in Pacoima? Maybe they’d start thinking a bit harder about their other options, you know? I wasn’t setting out to kill people; that was just a necessary evil. I was setting out to make a statement, and unfortunately, these days, folks don’t listen until somebody gets hurt.’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘Folks don’t listen unless there’s consequences, you know? They don’t listen unless they’re scared of something.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Luther agreed. ‘People who’ve long ignored Him turn to God when they’re scared, but nobody feels they should be scared of having ignored God. People aren’t afraid of God any more, and that’s why they won’t listen to His Word.’

  ‘Damn straight, Reverend. And they ain’t scared of Christians, either, which is why they think they can piss all over us, if you’ll excuse the language.’

  ‘Strong thoughts sometimes need strong words, son.’

  ‘I mean, look at these Islamic guys. Everybody’s been peeing their pants at the thought of offending them since they passed their death sentence on that Rushdie guy. Nobody’s ever worried about offending Christians. Their faith is getting more respect than ours, and it’s because folks are scared of them. You diss their God and you better be ready for a fight.’