Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  Her name was Valerie. She was twenty years old, small, dressed in an oversize sweatshirt, her face pretty but deliberately plain, her pale lips and her dark almond eyes set motionless beneath a widow’s peak. Her parents had homeschooled her up to fourth grade in the strictest interpretation of Christianity they could imagine. Then they gave her a computer and told her to educate herself. The last thing they taught her was that puberty was sin, physicalized. When she was seventeen she kissed a boy; they told her it was time to leave home. She called her youth pastor, but he was busy. “Try me next week,” he said. So she slept outside for three days. This was in Florida. She was not too cold, but it was lonely. She huddled in an empty swimming pool behind an abandoned house, until finally, stripped of her shame by loneliness, she called the boy she had kissed. That night she moved in with him and his family. They had separate beds, but that didn’t matter. Everyone thought she was having sex, she decided, so she might as well play the role they’d chosen for her.

  She loved it. She was good at it. It came naturally to her, which should not have been a surprise but was, since she had thought sin was a lesson you learned from the world. She wanted to have sex as often as possible. But she worked two jobs, and when she enrolled in high school she discovered that homeschooling had only gotten her through the equivalent of eighth grade. So she studied and waited tables, working time and a half and taking literature courses through a local college because she didn’t want to feel stupid. She might be the equivalent of an eighth grader, but she was an eighth grader who had read Crime and Punishment.

  When she wasn’t working or studying or reading, what she wanted was sex. She wouldn’t call it “making love” or “sleeping together.” She wanted sweat and grabbing and heavy breathing, not so much an escape from the world as full immersion in it. Her man—the boy—grew afraid of her intensity: She wanted so much from him. Sex, every now and then, was sin from which he could recover, but desire, constant and deepening? He refused, but she tempted him, and he succumbed, and he was ashamed. So he prayed, and God granted him a solution. He could kill himself. Or he could kill her. Which would she prefer?

  This was a hard question for a Christian.

  Valerie never answered. Again she ran, but she took her desires with her, to other boys. There seemed to be no cure, so she kept moving, trying to outpace her lust, until, finally, she arrived at the Honor Academy.

  Valerie’s girlfriends, sitting around the cafeteria table, were silent, staring at her not with judgment but what looked more like envy. Not for the sex; for the arc. She had been more lost than any of them, and thus she was more found.

  Valerie reached down into her backpack and came up with a Bible. “I have to read you something,” she said, ignoring her friends. She leaned across the table to make sure I understood, propping herself up on her elbows, and began reading from the Book of Proverbs. “Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies.” She went on, her voice low, through twenty verses. “Charm is deceitful,” she finished, “and beauty is passing, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.”

  Valerie closed her Bible. This to her was the law of obedience and purity, and she knew it to be true from hard living.

  THERE WAS AN INTRAMURAL football game that night, but I said I wanted to see the hell house in Tyler, the closest thing to a city near the academy. Hell houses are like haunted houses, but instead of scary scenes from the imagination, you see what are meant to be scary scenes from reality: abortion, suicide, lesbians. The academy’s drama team, Shattered Clay, had helped produce the one in Tyler. Valerie said she’d tried out for the team but hadn’t made the cut, so she wanted to see who’d beaten her. Since it would be wrong, by BattleCry standards, for a man and a woman to be alone in a car together, Valerie recruited her roommate, Gabrielle, a gorgeous Canadian with caramel skin and waves of cinnamon brown hair who was another one of the Honor Academy’s brightest interns; she’d passed up a full ride at McMaster University in Ontario to study under Luce. Two women and one man was still a problem, they told me, so I found an Honor Academy man named Johnny.

  Johnny wore a giant gold cross and a pink hoodie that said “New York” in baby blue letters, but he was from South Boston. He was, he said, crazy haht for Gahd, and there was no doubting him. He was a living foghorn of lurid stories that all ended with Johnny getting saved.

  Johnny was, by his own admission, not very bright and not very handsome. His yellow buzzcut looked as if it had been compressed in a vice, and his face was as pink and splotchy as a pig roast. But back in the day, he said, he could have any girl he wanted. That was due to the Hummer his father bought him for his sixteenth birthday. “That Hummer, man,” he said. He missed it. But he’d given it up for God. At the Honor Academy he tooled around in a more sober-minded Cadillac Escalade. He was careful about letting girls ride in it, because he remembered what the girls back home had wanted and offered for rides in his Hummer. “Boom, boom, boom,” he said, one girl after another, “if you know what I mean.” He guffawed; he had renounced his sins, but he felt no call to give up his memories.

  Johnny was more honest than most about his salvation. There had been no special signs, no spiritual lows. It was simple as this: He was on a ski trip, and Jesus got him. Shouldered into Johnny’s heart and said, “You’re mine, buddy.” It felt wicked awesome, better than a girl in a Hummer in South Boston.

  Johnny and Gabrielle and Valerie and I squeezed into my little rental and drove off to the hell house. Valerie took shotgun, and while Johnny blasted his past into Gabrielle’s ear, Valerie spoke quietly of hers into mine. “I struggle with it. I mean, sex. I think about it. All the time. Always.” Her most recent boyfriend had wanted to be pure, but he’d told her she made it impossible. He didn’t want sex, he’d told her, but she forced him. He wasn’t being a jerk, she assured me. It was true. “Giving sex up, it was like my sacrifice.”

  Gabrielle heard us talking and leaned forward, anxious, I think, to stop Johnny’s tales. She had her own. “Me, too!” she said, listening in on Valerie’s confession. She had kept having sex right up until she left for Honor Academy. Not “sex-sex,” she said—“I’m a technical virgin”—but everything else she could think of. Everything else she could think of had consisted of little more than blowjobs at keggers. The thrill was the reward. “But it was false,” she added. Johnny shouted that sex no longer tickled his pure heart, “Thank you Jesus amen!”; Gabrielle declared that she, too, had overcome years of “oral.” Her sin now, she said, was being judgmental. Valerie was quiet, but we all knew what was on her mind.

  When we arrived at the hell house Valerie and Gabrielle knitted hands, while Johnny and I walked a few paces behind. At the head of a path into a scrub forest, a little girl veiled in a black burka met us and walked us through a series of scenes staged in prefabricated rooms dropped into the woods. In between them we were in the dark, where drunkards with slashed throats and lean, effeminate men with fangs slipped among us, whispering in our ears: “Do as you please. Live for yourself.” We watched a drunken husband punch his wife and throw his daughter to the floor with a frightening thud. A demon with a tail that dangled between his legs like the phallus of a dead porn star told us that this was what happened to women when liberals took God out of the schools. Inside the wife beater’s house the demon cackled and read us another girl’s instant messages with a stranger she’d thought was a boy across the country; he was a man who lived a few blocks away, enticed to kick down her door and rape her, a scene performed for us just shy of penetration. We saw a teen mother addicted to meth scream as her son was dragged from her in a mock courtroom. “Come closer,” growled a fat demon with a syphilitic nose.

  In a hospital room a girl lay on a delivery table while one nurse reached between her legs and another assured her that what was being removed were “just cells.” The demon laughed, bwah-ha-ha-ha, but the crowd took it very seriousl
y. When the girl screamed, a middle-aged man, his eyes wide with alarm, shouted, “Jesus loves you!” His wife squeezed his hand.

  Johnny wore an uneasy smirk. Gabrielle shut her eyes at all the right cues. But Valerie absorbed the scene with careful scrutiny. “I almost had an abortion,” she murmured. Gabrielle closed her eyes. Johnny went pale. “Well,” he said. Valerie said, “I had a miscarriage.” She turned toward me and said, for the sake of my secular ears, “I don’t think it’s murder.” Then the hell-house nurse pulled two big handfuls of bloody tissue from between the pregnant girl’s legs and put them on a silver tray. She held the gloop beneath our noses, as if we were to sniff the remains. “See?” she said sweetly. “That’s not a baby—not anymore.”

  Near the end demons herded us down a rocky path into an underground tomb illuminated by fire, and then into closets shaped like vertical coffins. Johnny sandwiched himself between Valerie and Gabrielle; I got my own closet. The demons locked us in, and there we stood for several minutes, sweating in the dark after the cold night air. Then, the backsides of our coffins fell away, and we stumbled into blackness, everyone groping the dark, and, inadvertently, one another, giggling wildly. A light shone from above. We walked toward it, up another rocky path into a bright white tent, where a fat boy in white robes and feathered wings and blue Chuck Taylor sneakers told us that we were about to meet the only man who could save us from our awful selves. We filed into a room made up like a dungeon. There he was: chained to a stump, naked but for a rag, his back raw and bloody.

  A lanky long-haired teenager from the Honor Academy’s drama team, dressed as a Roman centurion, stood over him with a whip. “Sex and drugs and rock and roll!” he hooted. “You did this to Him, man!” Down came the whip. “You did it, man!” Blood splattered the front row. Fake, I assumed. Gabrielle swallowed a scream and pushed herself back against the wall, sobbing. Valerie held on to her as the whip continued cracking.

  We ended the tour in a large, brightly lit hangar. Counselors took us each by the arm, a matronly woman leading a sniffling Gabrielle and a blank-faced Valerie to what seemed to be a corner for stricken girls, and a man in a golf shirt quickly drawing Johnny off to a huddle of the hale and already saved. A young guy in black eye shadow and raver pants laced with chains—a costume of evil, he said—grabbed me. “You’re the writer,” he said. He’d been warned by the administrators of the Honor Academy, who had discovered my abduction of their charges. They weren’t angry with me, they just wanted him—his name was Caleb, and he said he was a preacher—to save me. I told Caleb I had to get the interns back to campus before curfew, but he said the academy, and my companions, wanted me to be saved as much as he did. He pointed: From one corner Johnny beamed his Dorchester man-child smile, from the other Gabrielle nodded at me. Valerie wouldn’t meet my eyes. There was no escape. Caleb sat in a folding chair across from me and spread a Bible across his knees and pulled me so close our foreheads almost touched, and he told me stories. His own and the Bible’s, interlaced like fingers around my neck: about how his eyes had once been full of poison desire that he had “spread” over the bodies of innocent girls. About Psalm 137—“By the waters of Babylon,” it begins so beautifully. “Happy shall he be who takes and dashes your little ones against the stones,” it ends, with the judgment of God—and about the whore of Babylon, and about the time he’d crashed his motorcycle at ninety-five miles per hour and walked away without a scrape, because, he said, “God loves a pure man.”

  “Jeff, do you want to be a pure man?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Are you ready to put your lust on the altar?” Caleb meant the altar of sacrifice. Just like Valerie had. “Like Abraham did with his only son Isaac,” Caleb said. He assumed I didn’t know the story. “The miracle child born to Sarah’s withered loins,” he said. He wanted to show me. He flipped through his Bible for a while, wandering toward the New Testament.

  “I think it’s in Genesis,” I said.

  “No. . . .” He kept thumbing through.

  I reached over and slid my finger between the opening pages of the book in his lap, an awkward gesture, I realized too late. “Can I try?” I asked. Caleb let me.

  I flipped his Bible open to Genesis 25—through luck or divine intervention, the middle of the Abraham story. Caleb looked confused. His face flushed. “I must’ve been thinking of a different Abraham,” he said. I agreed that it must have been so. “But you understand, right?” he asked me, his voice imploring. “Sacrifice,” he said, “that’s all it is.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  He rallied. There was one more thing he wanted me to know. The whip that cracked on Christ’s back in the tableau I’d just seen? “That’s real, brother.” He said they didn’t know how else to tell the story: It had to be in the flesh, just like the first time.

  IN CLEVELAND I WANDER the arena, certain I’ll find kids who resent the frequent intrusions into the show of sermons and video presentations on culture war and other dull subjects. I’m looking, I guess, for Valerie. But everyone I speak with wants to tell me about what we’ve both just heard. In the earnest, cautious voices of high school freshmen who’ve just learned new facts, they rattle Luce’s statistics back at me with as much certainty as they join Lacey Mosley, the lead singer of a “screamo” band called Flyleaf, in her arena-shaking tribute to Cassie Bernall, the seventeen-year-old “martyr of Columbine.” The killers pointed their guns at Cassie and asked her if she believed in God; years later four thousand kids scream “She—said—yes!” The official investigation concluded that she didn’t, but when I mention this to the couple of chaste teen lovers with whom I watch Flyleaf’s performance, they shrug. “I think she’s a symbol,” says the girl, an honor student from a liberal family who has come to Acquire the Fire for the first time this year at her boyfriend’s behest.

  But a symbol for what? A defiant faith? Never-ending culture war? That’s what Luce would have his followers believe, but when I meet Mosley backstage, she tells me she relates to Cassie Bernall not because she’s ever been held at gunpoint by evil agents of secularism, but because, like Luce, she grew up hard, very hard, until she found a faith that promised not answers but an end to questions. That’s the meaning of a battle cry: Turn down the volume, and what you have is a statement that leaves no room for discussion. Luce’s BattleCry gives kids a concert, a T-shirt, and a conviction, a universe as broad as the consumer culture it’s meant to replace. That is, a very small world, after all—a cramped little country in which there is not enough room to be lost or found, only “saved” as a static condition.

  In Cleveland I meet only one dissident, if that term can be broadly defined, a slouchy, curly-haired boy who calls himself John Fire and who is slinking around the perimeter of the arena looking for some action that’s more exciting than the three-movie-screen diatribe against the teen-clothing line Hollister then playing. He seems stoned, but before I can ask he volunteers that everybody always thinks he’s stoned. “But dude,” he says, “I am not.”

  But he surely is snared in Satan’s web of deception when he swears to me that he’s totally into the sermons. How can I tell he’s lying? Because he doesn’t know who Luce is.

  “The guy who keeps interrupting the music,” I explain.

  John Fire nods. “The pigpen dude.” John has been coming to Acquire the Fire for several years now. Has heard it all before. Loves hearing it. “Love the learning.”

  He cannot, that moment, recall what he has learned—something about “secularism,” which he cannot define. He doesn’t need to. His world is complete without it.

  10What They Wanted

  ON THE SUNDAY of the big protest march that lassoed Manhattan from Union Square up to Madison Square Garden, there was, mixed in among the crowd, disguised in polo shirts and madras, a contingent of true believers whose faith was so pure that they didn’t need the media, didn’t wan
t it, and rejected it as a matter of religious principle. Or maybe it was political; it was hard to know what they believed, since notebooks and cameras shocked them into silence and casual questions elicited mysterious responses. These were the anarchists the papers had promised were coming to destroy the city, although they were nothing like the official accounts—“Anarchy, Inc.,” the Daily News screamed, warning of paramilitary alliances between old Black Panthers and young tree spikers.

  They carried umbrellas to protect their plans from the all-seeing eye of the Fuji blimp, pressed into actual paramilitary service by the NYPD, and they hid within a float, a giant papier-mâché green dragon head snorting up the avenue, sheets sewn into curtains for flanks, black boots peeking out from its underbelly. The sheets would ripple and open, and yet another member—shucking off street clothes to be born again into ragged, fierce couture—would join the black mass within.

  As we approached the Garden, faces that had been visible inside the dragon disappeared behind ski masks and bandanas. A knife’s edge of vinegar—protection from tear gas—spiked the breeze that eked through the crowd. The dragon tamer, a big, pigtailed woman in a gold vest and genie pants, cracked a bullwhip in each hand as she somersaulted on the blacktop and bellowed at journalists who clicked and fluttered away from the whip tips like a flock of nervous sparrows. Amps in the dragon’s head blasted crust-punk anthems; black-and-red flags unfurled but hung limp in the muggy air. The dragon started steaming. I wondered: Do they have a fog machine? The whip snapped at the cameras. Black-clad youth tore through the sheets like angry dragon babies, crying, “It’s happening!”