Sinless

by Sarah Tarkoff

  Though none of us were Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim anymore, my father still quoted the Bible—all he knew at the time, all he knew most of us knew: “The Great Spirit of all religions Forgives you. In the words of Ecclesiastes 3:11: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity into man’s heart, so he cannot find out what God’”—he caught himself—“‘Great Spirit, has done from the beginning to the end.’”

  My father knew the question we’d all been asking ourselves since those first images emerged from Pakistan—we wanted to know just how we would fare in Great Spirit’s Great Judgment. Ushers came down the aisles with mirrors—not nearly enough, since no one had expected a crowd this size, but we took turns—and when a mirror came to me, I was shocked. I had never seen myself healthier, more vibrant, more perfect. It wasn’t that any of my features had changed shape, just that they somehow worked together better. I looked healthy. I glowed like the people around me. That was the first time I was conscious of what beauty was, and immediately I understood its power and importance. “You are the blameless ones,” I heard my father say. “By coming here today, you have rid yourselves of sin and blame, and you have all been declared pious in the eyes of Great Spirit.” One look around proved this to be true. Not a single person in that room had been Punished. Getting to my father’s worship center had saved us all.

  The high, that feeling of everlasting peace and contentment, continued for several days. But through that haze of bliss, one thing still concerned me—my mother’s continued absence. My father explained that one of his junior clerics had intercepted her returning from the bathroom. She was urgently needed for a matter of great importance. She was running an errand on Great Spirit’s behalf, but she’d be right back. The way he said it—that was my model, in later years, for what my father looks like when he lies to protect me.

  Finally, nearly a week later, my father broke the news. I don’t know how long he’d known, or whether he’d simply given up hope. My mother wasn’t coming back.

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  My father hates to be direct, hates to say things that scare him out loud. But for me, he had to try. He nodded, and my heart broke.

  “What happened?”

  “She’s been in the hospital. She was very sick. The doctors did everything they could.”

  I was angry with my father for not taking me to see her, not giving me one final goodbye. But as I grew older, and he continued to evade my questions about her death, I thought of another possibility. Perhaps she hadn’t been taken down by some mysterious calamity, coincidentally at the moment of the Revelation. The only logical explanation I could think of was the one I was afraid to imagine, the one my father would have been too ashamed to tell me. She must not have been Forgiven. She must have been purged, Punished, like so many in the weeks before her, and so many in the years to come.

  Great Spirit had taken my mother from me. Years later He would take Jude from me. My father, the cleric, was at a loss to explain either. Weeks after Jude’s crash, we found out that the woman who’d been driving the sedan, the mother of the child who died—that woman lived. She’d remain an Outcast for life, surely, but she had not been Punished as severely as Jude. Why? I asked my father. How could that be? He babbled platitudes about surrendering to Great Spirit’s will, that we aren’t meant to understand why He chooses to Punish who He does. But I saw through them. My father, too, was thrown. He, too, was confused. He, too, wanted answers.

  Maybe if he’d found the right words, he could have eliminated that seed of doubt that had taken root in my mind. But no, I can’t blame my father. However this story might turn out in later years, it began in the most banal, superficial of ways. I ended up where I ended up because I was a seventeen-year-old girl, and seventeen-year-old girls will always be weak when it comes to one thing: seventeen-year-old boys.

  Chapter 2

  I don’t know what dating was like in the pre-Revelation era. I’m sure looks were always important. But for the girls in my class, it was all we talked about. Did Aiden’s dreamy eyes mean he was a better person than Devon, with his sexy biceps? The debates raged endlessly. There was Henry, who’d lived in Africa for a year tutoring orphans and had the most amazing six-pack. Thomas, who carried around a prayer mat and faced Mecca during the school day, and who had the most envied shiny blond surfer hair.

  I don’t know if the boys judged us with the same scrutiny. Jude was my only male friend, and he was too embarrassed to talk about that kind of thing with me. Sex was the one thing the prophets never really touched. For all the time they spent railing against murder and theft and unkindness, they always managed to avoid passing judgment on the one thing everyone my age wanted to know about. Sure, they advised against adultery, and Prophet Joshua made a strong statement in support of homosexuality, in contradiction to some of the more conservative prophets, but sex in general? You’d get a peep about personal choice, or you’d hear something from a prophet in Asia or Africa promoting abstinence before marriage. Prophet Navid was even in favor of polygamy. For the most part, the prophets said that all was Forgiven prior to Great Spirit bringing His heaven to earth, but to exercise caution in the future. That sex was about procreation and expressing love, a kind of vague monogamy-is-good stance.

  And indeed, Great Spirit seemed inconsistent in His application of Punishment when it came to sex. In big cities, I’d heard that people lived similarly to the pre-Revelation era. More monogamy, more marriage, but plenty of cohabitation and hookups. But where I was from? In Virginia, I saw girls “go ugly,” and over the next nine months you’d realize why. My dad had an easy explanation for this one—it had to do with love, with the virtuousness in your heart. If you entered a sexual encounter with the purest intentions, of staying with that person, of devoting yourself to him or her through thick and thin, then Great Spirit condoned your liaison. If the encounter was of a carnal nature, if it was selfish, if you thought of yourself and your own pleasure and not your partner’s well-being, if you were using him or her in any way, then Great Spirit saw fit to Punish you in relation to the severity of your crime. My father said that’s why the rate of Punishment among teenagers having sex was so high—we were more driven by our base instincts than adults, more likely to have sex for selfish, impure reasons than those older than us.

  All this is to say—my friends and I were not having sex. It was too risky. How were you supposed to know if you were having sex in a truly devoted way? And what if your boyfriend wasn’t? By giving in to intercourse, were you dooming him to life as an Outcast? Or worse, tying yourself to someone who was now less attractive? Because if he hadn’t truly devoted himself to you, he’d become uglier. And then what? You couldn’t break up with him, that would prove you weren’t devoted, which meant you were stuck with this ugly sinner. It was complicated.

  Of course I’d already analyzed all of this to death with my best girl friend, Macy. Macy got a lot of attention from guys. She was pretty, of course; I wouldn’t have been friends with anyone who wasn’t. But she was the one with personality. She had a biting wit, but she delivered her jabs softly, so you felt even as she teased you, that she really cared. In our friendship, I think I followed her lead on just about everything. When it came to Great Spirit, I had loads to say, but when it came to school, to anything in the social spheres, taste in music—I deferred to Macy. She had strong opinions, and I found it easier to echo hers than to formulate my own.

  When it came to dating, Macy had the strongest opinions of all. I couldn’t date Thomas, ugh, that prayer mat was so pretentious. I mean, it’s nice that he’s pious, and yes, she’d love to run her fingers through his hair, but really, has he washed that thing? She heard he used it to pray in the boys’ bathroom, gross. And on and on. She was one of the ones who teased me about Jude while he was alive, but after he died, of course, she told me she always thought that we were soulmates. Great timing, thanks, Macy.

  After Jude died, honestly, I wasn’t i
nterested in dating. Or eating. Or moving. I’d been through this once with my mother. For months after she died, it was like living life through a fog. And in some ways, that fog never really lifted. The one thing that got me through that grief was Jude. He showed up at my door the day of her funeral, dressed in his little black suit, to give me his condolences—coaxed over by his parents, no doubt. But no one instructed him to sit with me day after day, no matter how sullen I was, no matter how un-fun to play with . . . until finally, months later, he convinced me to sit next to him in our imaginary rocket to Jupiter. And as we explored the stars, I started to experience joy again. Even at ten he had a compassionate heart—and once he was gone, I couldn’t find another quite like it. Macy tried to understand my grief, all my friends did, but I could see their frustration mount when I said again that I wasn’t in the mood to go out, or when I’d get distracted and space out at the lunch table. And as months and then years passed, I thought I would feel better, but I felt worse. I missed Jude’s empathetic presence in my life, and that made me miss Jude himself even more. Every night in my dreams, I clung to that kind-eyed EMT, breathing in the sharp, floral scent of her perfume as I watched Jude roll away in that ambulance.

  My dad, despite having no spiritual answers, had some pretty good secular ones to get me back on my feet. Like, “If you get out of bed and go to school, I’ll burp the ABCs in the middle of my sermon on Sunday.” And he did. It’s still on YouTube; it’s pretty funny.

  I don’t mean to make such a big deal of my grief. I know I’m not the first person to lose a friend, and I’ve lost many more since. We all have. I simply mean to set the stage for the fact that eventually, I got better. And it’s when I got better that I met Ciaran.

  Chapter 3

  As much as being pious helped your skin tone, no one could deny that Great Spirit had not stopped the aging process. And while plastic surgery had fallen out of fashion as both a selfish waste of money and a dishonest cheat, many other industries cropped up to take its place. More than ever before, middle-aged women spared no expense trying to regain their youth.

  Macy’s mother went to Haiti every year, part of a regular group doing charity work with orphans. My dad let me go with her once, and the missions on the ground were incredible. You’d see women, mostly from the U.S. and Canada, building a housing project like trained pros, yelling to each other over the sounds of chainsaws. They’d wear these big veils to protect themselves from the sun—no point going all that way just to get sun damage. Looking around that island, you’d think Haiti had been turned into an all-female penal colony.

  Like Macy’s mom, they’d arrive a little worn down, tired from their jobs on the mainland. After a week of distributing water and teaching and prayer (nothing beautified you like prayer) they’d leave looking five, ten years younger. No one understood why I came. “You’re so young,” they said. “You don’t need to be here. You’re beautiful already.”

  That experience did not deter me. After that, I began volunteering regularly at a care home for Outcasts. These were people whose lifetime accumulation of Punishments kept them ostracized from mainstream society, and often incapacitated them. Many had difficulties breathing or walking, as their muscles had atrophied or seized. Often they couldn’t get jobs and had been abandoned by their friends and families out of shame or necessity.

  Quite a lot was misunderstood about Outcasts. They were seen as worse than homeless—they were assumed to be criminals, deviants, hopeless causes. My father thought differently—he had done quite a bit of outreach to their communities. While I didn’t have my father’s courage to go to every street corner and talk to strangers with mangled faces, I was inspired to do that work in a much safer environment. Care homes gave Outcasts much-needed medical attention, a community, and the kind of prayer they needed to maybe, possibly, get better.

  I saw only one man fully heal while I volunteered there, a middle-aged former truck driver named Clint Ramsey. He had been an alcoholic prior to the Revelations, and he couldn’t break the habit once Great Spirit commanded moderation. He’d destroyed his relationships with his wife and teenage son, and a series of small sins slowly eroded his physical body. Clint confided that his wife, Rowena, had filed for divorce after Clint, in a drunken stupor, had verbally accosted their son. Near the end, Clint couldn’t walk, and luckily, he couldn’t lift a bottle to take a drink. So he found his way to the Harrisonburg Care Center. The women there prayed with him, they made him feel safe, they told him how Great Spirit Forgives. And little by little, Great Spirit Forgave Clint. By the time I arrived, six months into his rehabilitation, he already looked like a person again. He probably could have gone out into the real world, but he wasn’t ready. He wanted to stay and heal as much as he could before exposing himself to the temptations of the outside world.

  By the time he was leaving, not that I was interested in fifty-year-old men, I had to admit that Clint was quite the looker. All the single women in the center were head over heels, but he was single-minded. He wanted to reconcile with his wife.

  Rowena had come to the center a few times during the year Clint was there. He was hopeful, he told me, because she still hadn’t filed the divorce papers. He believed that in spite of everything—and I could tell from his tone that “everything” was something much darker than he was willing to admit—he believed she still loved him. I was there the day he was released, and she came to pick him up. It was just Clint and me sitting at a table in the common room when Rowena Ramsey walked in. I’d never seen a picture, but I knew immediately who she was. She was pretty despite her frown lines, in her forties, a powerful presence. She looked at me with sharp, untrusting eyes, and I was wise enough to skedaddle when I saw her coming. I wished Clint my best and slipped out the door—and in doing so, bumped into a tall, dark figure—a handsome seventeen-year-old boy.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, startled. It was mostly older women who worked at the care center. Rarely did I see a non-Outcast my own age there, and never one as good-looking as him.

  He didn’t respond as I expected—most people apologize profusely for any possible trespass, afraid of offending Great Spirit. But he just looked at me with his deep blue eyes. He resembled Clint enough that the first words out of his mouth didn’t surprise me. “You know my dad?”

  I nodded. “Clint? I’ve been working with him for a while.” I peeked into the common room—Rowena and Clint were deeply engaged in conversation. I turned back to their son, who had gone quiet. I chimed in again, hoping to engage him. “Your father speaks very highly of you. He regrets the mistakes he’s made.”

  “What kind of mistakes did he tell you about?”

  The boy watched me closely. I knew quite a bit about this stranger’s private life, which I worried might make him uncomfortable. “Oh, just sort of in general, that he was sorry.”

  His voice held a challenge. “So now that you’re the expert on my family—you think my parents are gonna get back together?”

  I didn’t know a lot about divorced people, so I answered the question I did have a depth of knowledge in. “Your father’s developed a really beautiful relationship with Great Spirit.”

  He seemed amused by that. Many things, I noticed, seemed to amuse him. “Guess that can’t hurt,” was all he said.

  “It must be hard for you, all this stuff with your parents,” I said, trying to prove how compassionate I could be.

  “I guess. You talk to them more than I do. Why do you come here?”

  This launched me into a long spiel—that the most important thing you can do in life is to cultivate a relationship with Great Spirit, and to help others do the same. “You have to do as much as you can, because you never know how much will be enough, and the difference between success and failure . . . that’s someone’s life.”

  “Who did you fail?” It was like he’d read my mind.

  “Why do you assume that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I found t
he words tumbling out of me. “I lost a friend.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “He caused a car crash. Two years ago. Great Spirit didn’t Forgive him.”

  “That sucks.” He must have seen he’d hit a nerve, and changed the subject. “You live around here?”

  I told him I went to school about an hour away. That my father was the cleric of Tutelo Valley Worship Center, formerly the Tutelo Presbyterian Church, if he’d heard of it?

  “Cleric’s daughter, huh?” For some reason, his smirking smile gave me butterflies.

  “You should come to services sometime. Though I’m sure you already have a worship center.” I gestured to him sort of stupidly. Great, I’d just told him he was hot. The little I knew about the mating game told me that was a terrible move.

  But he just laughed. “I’ll try.”

  At that moment, Rowena Ramsey came out. Gave me that same suspicious glare. “Ciaran! Let’s go.”

  She looked at him expectantly. He ignored her. “What was your name again?”

  “Grace.”

  He gave me a wink as he headed off after his mother. “See you around, cleric’s daughter.”

  Chapter 4

  Of course, after an interaction of that magnitude with a boy of that level of hotness, I immediately downloaded with Macy. We sat in her living room snacking on veggies and hummus, dissecting every moment, every pause. I worried that he didn’t like that I was a cleric’s daughter.

  “Grace. Everyone likes that you’re a cleric’s daughter.” I started to protest, but Macy cut me off. “Seriously. You should hear people talk.”