Gospel. The scribes of the Roman Empire co-opted Christ’s message.
Re-wrote whole passages of it to serve their own decay-denying
purpose. Only small fragments of the actual words of Christ and the
Apostles survived the purge – those quoted above.
God has decided to interact with the world in a new fashion. After
Christ’s mission failed, He decided to enter the world through more
than one portal. A single Mary would not do. Instead, there must be
one mil ion. Rather than telling people about the blessings of
degeneration, we must show them.
Al of the new Marys shall be bound in servitude to their husband,
the Lord. All of them shall give birth to one monstrous offspring after
another. This, the Lord has decided, will be the Degenerate Gospel – a
Living Gospel to be seen and heard and felt and experienced, rather
than merely read. A Gospel that will create even more Gospels after it.
A living, breathing testimony to the broken-freakishness of the
universe! A testimony the world will be unable to avoid!
If you would like to be a vessel for the True Gospel, all you must
do is fall to your knees and call out to the angels: “I give my womb to
the Gospel!” They wil then begin to observe you from behind the
curtain of infinity. If they deem you degenerate-enough for God’s plan,
they will bring Him down from His Palace of Abominations to lay with
you.
This part seemed particularly strange. She didn’t understand all of it, and she wasn’t
sure she wanted to. She considered tossing the tract in the trash, but decided not to
because it had used that sentence: “The arc of history is long, but bends towards
degeneracy!” The last time she’d seen that, the note had disappeared. So she felt uneasy with the idea of just throwing it away.
Her intuition told her something valuable might be lost if she threw it away. There
might come a time when she’d need it – if for no other reason than to confirm that she
had, in fact, seen it. To confirm that she wasn’t crazy. The fact that the sentence had
disappeared once made its reemergence almost-miraculous.
She flipped this page, the last, and read the back cover.
HE SEEKS AN ARMY OF ANGELS!
New angels shall be needed to serve as God’s ambassadors to
humanity. Like conquering worms, they shall wriggle into the ears of
the public and whisper God’s message for the world. This is not a
mission without peril. Our enemies will endeavor to slice the angels
apart. But when they do so, the amputated aspects of our conquering
worms shal move of their own volition! Thus, in severing us, our
enemies will only help us grow. Like the hydra, we shall grow. And
Brokenness, and Freakishness, and the Blessings of Decay and
Degeneracy shal grow in our wake.
Then, a final pen-and-ink drawing: a man-sized worm riding a heavily-armored war
horse into an ancient city. A crowd of well-wishers were depicted in the foreground,
dressed in robes. They tossed palm branches and flowers at the horse’s hooves. A close
inspection of the background revealed more sinister images. Men in togas falling on their swords. Women in nooses dangling out of the high windows of distant minarets and
battlements. A gang of children crouching over the body of a dead dog, devouring it.
A mailing address (to a P.O. Box in New York) and an email address (to a gmail
account) were written in smaller print at the very bottom of the back cover. Ellie ignored those, though. Focused, instead, on the war horse and the worm. Traced her acrylic
fingernail over the lines of that drawing, until she fell asleep.
Faith
When Ellie awakened, she felt hungover. She lay in bed longer than she should’ve,
gathering up the gumption to start her day.
A heaviness and an achiness lingered in her skull. She was exhausted (despite having
slept). She felt sick to her stomach (despite the fact she hadn’t drunk alcohol). She felt restless (excessively restless, even by her standards). But she didn’t feel dehydrated, as she had the two times in her life she’d actually been hungover. Nor was she trembling, as she had been during that first hangover, when she was seventeen.
That was the time her friend, Melanie, had smuggled a jug of gin out of her parents’
liquor cabinet. They’d drunk it together and had a sleepover – just the two of them – in the basement. Under the cover of darkness and sleeping bags, they’d held hands and
made out. She remembered that part. Even all these years later, she remembered it.
Melanie hadn’t remembered it, though. (Or at least, claimed she hadn’t remembered it.) Said she’d gone into a blackout. Ellie had resented that fiercely. There’d been
closeness, confessions. Hell, they’d said they’d loved one another. But then it had all
been yanked away from her when Melanie said she didn’t remember any of it. And then
she’d said she had homework to do before Monday, and she’d packed her things and
drove away in her little piece of shit Corolla.
And, after that day, she wasn’t Ellie’s friend any more. All of a sudden, she stopped
talking to her.
Ellie’s cell phone was on the nightstand, charging. She reached over, picked it up,
and checked the social network. No new message from Lori. She clicked on Lori’s name,
curious to see if she’d posted anything new on her timeline. She hadn’t. The last thing on there was a picture of a shirtless hunk – some movie star, apparently – posted yesterday morning.
She’d said she was bisexual. Ellie remembered that. But seeing that she’d posted a
photo worthy of a romance book cover was discouraging. She’d claimed to have had
more sexual experience with women than Ellie had. And yet, that picture she’d posted
looked like the sort of thing a bored housewife would post.
The buff dude’s picture was another piece of evidence to support the narrative that
had been incubating in Ellie’s mind since last night. Lori hadn’t been serious about any of this: it was just a game. Hell, it might be even worse. Not a game, but a malicious trick.
Maybe Lori was laughing her ass off about it. Ellie wondered if that was exactly what she was doing that very moment.
She’d slept in her clothes. There was still an unattractive smudge of ash surrounding
the pin-prick hole that had been burnt in her jeans. There was also a sour scent around her armpits. Her hair must have looked messy, out of place, and neglected. But she decided
she wasn’t bothered by such things.
She’d brought nice clothes for this trip. She’d packed business clothes, of course, to
render the charade realistic. But she’d also packed sexy clothes – or at least, as sexy as she let herself get. Some jeans that she thought hugged her hips provocatively. No tops
with plunging necklines, but some that provided at least a decent hint of cleavage.
Clothes that were only five years out of fashion (which was a favorable contrast to the
rest of her casual wardrobe, which was – on average – at least ten years out of fashion).
And yet, she decided to not change into them. Part of her liked the fact that road
grime and sour sweat still clung to her. It suited her mood. Maybe it suited her.
She smelled foul, yes. But maybe she was foul. Maybe God had made her that way,
and delighted in her foulness. When she finally rolled out of bed, she noted with a lazy lack of surprise that she’
d somehow managed to sleep on He Wants Us Broken. It was crinkled and creased, but was otherwise undamaged. She lurched to the edge of the
mattress. Sat and skimmed the tract to make certain it read as she remembered it.
It did.
She tucked it in her back pocket.
She wondered where the Gideons’ New Testament was, and didn’t find it until she
had already packed, put on her shoes, and was ready to check out. It had somehow,
during the course of her tossing and turnings, migrated under her pillow. She only
discovered it when she examined the bedding for lost earrings. She could no longer
remember if she’d worn earrings the day before or not. So she erred on the side of
checking. She always erred on the side of checking.
She replaced the Gideons’ New Testament in the nightstand, back where it belonged.
She imagined the maid would appreciate things being returned where they belonged. But
she decided to take the cigarettes and lighter with her. Smoking soothed her.
She had a ritual whenever she left a hotel room. She would scour it, over and over, to
make certain she’d left nothing behind. Jesse always hated when she did that. Told her
she had OCD, and cited the fact that even she knew she never put clothes in a hotel’s chest of drawers, but always checked them anyway to be certain she hadn’t – for some odd reason – abandoned her practice of leaving all her clothes in her suitcase. And
checking once wasn’t enough. She felt the need to do it three times. After all, she thought, when I leave this hotel room I’ll never, ever return. So I need to make certain I don’t lose anything.
After all the checking was through, she picked up the receipt the hotel had slipped
under her door during the night. Ninety-five dollars. It hardly seemed worth it.
Then she rolled her bag to the door, to the elevator, to the front desk. The young man
from the night before was no longer there. A heavy young woman with dyed-blonde hair
stood where he had. The television in the lounge area played The Weather Channel. The
young lady on the screen was reciting the temperature in Tucson. Her neckline was far
too high to be pleasing, but Ellie could tell there was a bounty underneath the dress. The hemline stretched down to her knees. Too far, in Ellie’s estimation.
But she wore makeup fit for a harlot, and that led Ellie to suspect the modesty was a
charade. She daydreamed about ripping that dress off. Cutting it off with a knife, to be exact. Daydreamed about pulling her hair and forcing her to the ground. Forcing her to
stay there. Making sure she could never, ever leave...
“Ma’am? Ma’am?”
“I’m checking out,” Ellie said.
“Yes...you mentioned that. And I asked you...are the charges on your receipt
correct?”
“Huh? Oh...oh yeah.” Ellie tried to force a cordial smile, but felt her face resisting.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Oh...no.”
“Then you can go.”
She wheeled her bag out to the parking lot.
There was something about being outdoors that felt uncomfortable, even disturbing.
The temperature had plummeted overnight and the chill hadn’t yet been burned away by
the sun, but that wasn’t it. Maybe it was that she could see the mountains now – yes, they were only foothills but they seemed like mountains, to her. They encircled her and the
hotel and the small city. Their presence affirmed that she’d traveled so far the geography had changed. That she was really trying to pull this off. This secret sex. This suicide.
She’d come all this way, had made this degree of commitment to the enterprise, and
she still had no guarantee that Lori had done the same. She opened the Scion’s back
hatch, heaved her bag up into it, and slammed it shut. Then she opened the driver’s side door, heaved herself up onto the seat, and slammed it shut. There were errands to attend to. Eating. Gassing up. Her car and her body were both machines that needed fuel.
Cracker Barrel was the closest place, and she’d always liked their food. It wasn’t
such a bad restaurant. The décor was familiar. But she was young and by herself and a
sinner and everyone else there on that Wednesday morning was old and gathered in
groups and pious. She observed more than one table bowing their gray heads to say grace
before devouring their plates of eggs.
She took He Wants Us Broken out of her back pocket. Re-read it. Who were the old people praying to? Jesus, the compassionate Christ (who healed the lame) or another kind of Christ, entirely (to whom healing was blasphemy)?
Sure, they thought they had been praying to the compassionate Christ. But who were they praying to, really? She looked at the tract again. Its claims, on the one hand, seemed so unlikely. So out there. And yet, if you looked long enough at the arthritic, wrinkled, praying hands that surrounded her, it was impossible to refute certain points.
If we live long enough, our body will break down.
One of the old women looked up after praying and spotted Ellie staring at her. She
glared back. Ellie pretended to look toward the kitchen instead. A moment later a
disembodied arm and hand appeared in front of her, pouring water into the waiting plastic cup. “M’name’s Ronnie,” the man said with an Appalachian twang, “and I’ll be your
server this mornin’. Can I get you some coffee? Orange juice?”
Ellie flinched and instinctively slapped her hand over He Wants Us Broken. It was still her secret. She wasn’t yet ready to let anyone else see it. Besides, the picture of the sorrowful amputee on the cover was bound to lead to misunderstandings.
Ronnie had the same build and complexion as the waiter at the chicken house in
Winchester. Round and ruddy. Only he had thick glasses (and the one in Winchester
hadn’t worn glasses at all). Also, he wore a crew cut, while the other had a fuzzy head of hair approximating a woman’s perm.
Ellie asked for coffee.
Ronnie smiled. “And will you be takin’ any cream and sugar with that, ma’am?”
Ellie shook her head.
“Alrighty then, I’ll be gettin’ that right out to you. And are you ready to order?”
For two or three seconds, the words didn’t compute. Order? As in “order around”?
As in “tell someone what to do”? Yes, she was ready to give orders. Especially to the
weather girl on the TV back at the hotel. After cutting the dress off her, Ellie would order the skank to get on all fours and crawl up into her lap for a series of rough over-the-knee spankings. Ellie would set a rule that the spankings wouldn’t stop until the weather girl got wet. Ellie would really wail on her, and that tight ass would bear the mark of her
palm. It would be warped with welts, too. And the weather girl would start crying. And
Ellie would remind the weather girl that if she wanted the spankings to stop then she had to fuckin’ get wet. And when the weather girl finally got wet, Ellie would stop the spankings but start laughing at her. Laugh, and tell the skank that – despite all her
protestations to the contrary – she’d actually been turned on by it all. And then Ellie
would handcuff her and gag her and take duct tape to her ankles, because the weather girl would probably be the kind of filthy whore who was into that sort of thing. And the
weather girl would never ever leave her. And...
“Ma’am...?”
Ellie jerked her head up
“Have you had a chance to look at the menu?”
Ellie didn’t make eye contact with the waiter. Glanced, instead, at one of the tables
of old people. “I’ll have eggs,” she said.
“Broken,” she said.
“Beg pardon, ma’am?”
She felt her cheeks flush. What had she just said? It really was like she was
hungover. Confused. Restless. Scatterbrained. “I’m sorry, I mean, scrambled. I’ll have
the meal deal with the biscuits, too.”
“Would you like grits with that?”
“Why not?”
“Alrighty then,” Ronnie said in a voice that was way too energetic, “one country
mornin’ breakfast, comin’ right up!” He waddled off to the kitchen.
At the nearest table, a lady so wrinkled she looked like a shar pei started loudly
denouncing the president. “You wanna know what Obama stands fer?” the lady said. She
was worked up. So excited, her shar pei wrinkles were flapping against one another.
“One Big Ass Mistake, America!”
The rest of the table let out raspy, old-people cackles. All of them, male and female,
sounded like witches.
“He’s a secret Muslim,” one of the older men (a chubby, bald fellow) said. “At least,
that’s what I think. Maybe he’s not, but I think that explains everything.”
“Why, yes, of course he’s a secret Muslim,” the shar pei woman said. “I can’t see
how people don’t see through that. I think he’s doing things to control the weather. Then he’s blaming it on coal, because he doesn’t like Kentucky. He knows Kentucky will
never vote for him, because we’re good Christian people and not Muslims.” There was
another idea the shar pei woman was trying to verbalize. She stammered to get it out.
There was some urgency in the matter. She shook her shar pei jowls again, as though
trying to shake out the word she was looking for. ”S-s-so he’s trying to put coal out of business. And he’s messin’ up the weather...with some sorta weather machine...to do it. I guess what I mean to say is that he’s...well...you know... framing coal for this global warming thing.”
Ellie didn’t have an opinion, one way or another, about the president. Like everyone
else in the church, Jesse had put up a yard sign for Romney. He’d gotten very excited
about it. He loathed Obama. But he never once referred to the president as a “secret
Muslim”. And even he would have thought it sheer lunacy to accuse the president of
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