She scanned the room. Most everyone was off their cushion and on their feet now, just in case the mood called for a good old-fashioned stampede. Would it be possible, once the troublemaker was extracted, to restore calm and continue the service?
Jesus dusted himself off, requested that the officers be kind with the beknifed man, and then hurried over to his half-sister. “That was a close one.” He appeared in good spirits.
She flicked off her mic. “A close one? Just because nobody’s dead?”
He nodded succinctly.
“Someone just pulled out a knife in church!”
“And a baseball bat,” he added. “Don’t forget about that. And I think Janice was about to pull out something she calls her ‘defensive dildo.’”
“No.”
Jesus chuckled. “It’s a funny word, is it not? And you should see the thing. Quite intimidating. It rattles like a snake. Don’t know how she thought of it. Mind of an inventor, that one.”
She took a deep breath as all of her misgivings from the last few months danced circles around her, naked and chanting, “We told you so! We told you so!”
“This was a terrible idea.”
“Huh?”
As the action died down, the congregation began to look around for guidance on what to do next.
“I never should’ve believed I could make all these groups work together. I wanted to be loving and inclusive, but I just knew the homeless would cause problems.”
Jesus blinked. “Of course. They are on drugs, Jessica.”
“They’re— You knew they were on drugs and you brought them anyway?”
“Of course. Who needs community and acceptance more than those addicted to drugs?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t deal with you and your love right now. Can you just …?” She waved him away, and he shrugged and obeyed, going at once to speak with the restless transients whose pecking order had been disrupted.
YOU MUST KEEP GOING, CHILD. God’s voice was deeper than it’d been of late, and it was that which dealt the hardest blow to her. She’d failed to tip the scales, but more than that, it seemed that fewer people believed God was a woman now than earlier that day. Had the chaos, the open act of violence, reset the defaults?
Must I? She looked around. She’d have an easier time wrestling 200 greased pigs into a pen. It’s too late. I’ve lost the crowd.
She shoved her palms into her eyes despite the damage it would do to her makeup.
What would Jimmy do here?
He’d cause an even bigger scene, is what he’d do.
But she didn’t have it in her. She wasn’t Jimmy.
Inhaling deeply, she opened her eyes, rolled her shoulders back …
And found the parishioners leaving through the exits in droves.
“Wait!” Her voice was drowned out completely, and she clicked on her mic again. “Wait!”
A few people halted. “The service—” The service what? Was this really the best time to introduce the gluten free offering? Could she capture the attention of her congregation fully enough to be clear about consent? Would any of these people sit still while she read them her commandments?
Not a chance. But she remembered Jimmy’s annoyingly wise advice. They needed to leave feeling better than when they came. She could do that with three simple words—“I forgive you”—but sharing the bonds of forgiveness with so many strangers not only felt disingenuous, but dirty.
Thankfully, she already had something planned to end on a high note. “The service is now concluded. We, uh, we like to keep them short. Please help yourself to the coffee stations out in the courtyard, and I invite you to stick around to get to know your fellow humans.”
She would put her faith in coffee.
Chapter Forty-Six
05:11:25:19 until Doomsday
Not even five minutes after the conclusion of the service, the coffee station more closely resembled a soup kitchen line than the mingling place of the classes that she’d hoped it’d be.
“Don’t be mad,” Judith said, taking a seat next to Jessica on one of the tucked-away make-out benches, “but that went way better than I expected it to.”
“It started so strong.”
“There were no fatalities.”
Jessica looked up from her feet to inspect the face of her friend. “I can always count on you to find the silver lining.”
A small rustle through the dense plant growth, and the grinning face of Jesus appeared. “There you are!”
“You know there are sidewalks built in,” Judith said.
“Oh, sure, but it is so much more fun to cut through! I pretend to be in the jungle! Like a panther!”
He knelt in front of Jessica and took her hands in his. “Sister. You look disappointed.”
“Uh, no shit. I just had to end the service early so the whole place didn’t devolve into a gambling arena for bum fights.”
He tilted his head to the side. “It was only the first service. It takes a lot of practice to love all.”
She wanted to slip her hands free of his grasp, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Or maybe some people make it impossible to love them.”
“No, no, no.” He shook his head firmly. “Not true. I take it you mean the homeless, and you should know that I love them.”
Judith said, “But do you like them?”
“Not always. Sometimes when they call me names or beat me up I do not feel especially charitable toward them. But I always love them.”
Jessica squinted at him. “How?”
“More importantly,” Judith added, “why?”
“There are few things on this planet that you truly should do, but trying your best to love everyone is one of them, and you do it by making the choice that you will.”
“Even the impossible-to-love ones?”
“Especially them. You cannot fully love yourself until you learn to love everyone else you share this world with. Do the homeless smell? Undeniably. But it is not on purpose. Are many of the homeless pumped full of a toxic concoction of chemical substances? Clearly. But no one ever chooses to be an addict ahead of time. They simply make poor choices with the best information they have. Do the homeless carry around improvised weapons? We should all know the answer to that by now. But they do it because they are so vulnerable out on the streets. They know the world does not value their lives equally with the homed and that when something happens to them, they cannot expect anyone to come to their aid. They are terribly alone. I cannot imagine. Even when I was being crucified, I had friends and family around me.”
And she’d had the same. Through all the tough times, she’d had the same, even when she’d done her best to drive them away.
“That’s how you love them?”
“It is. I want to cry for them daily. And I want to cry for those who cannot look upon them and feel compassion. Compassion does not mean you cannot ask the homeless to bathe or that you have to accept that they will die of an overdose, and it does not forbid you from calling the cops when they become violent. You do all those things, and you figure out how to show them love and acknowledge their humanity. It is the lack of acknowledgement that has landed them where they are. The hard-to-love people cannot see themselves in God. You must learn to do it for them.”
She squinted at him. “You mean ‘see themselves in God’ figuratively, right?”
“Yes, of course. Our heavenly parent is … well, you know.”
“Not a great role model.”
“Right.”
Though she wasn’t totally sold on what he was saying being possible for her, she felt like she might be starting to get it.
She’d have to continue pondering it later, though, because, she had somewhere else she needed to be, as she remembered the moment Wendy Peterman and Cash Monet appeared around the bend in the path.
“It’s time?”
Wendy frowned sympathetically and nodded. Cash, not usually one to have their hea
d out of their phone, had the device nowhere in sight. Instead, they hugged themself tightly as if a bone-chilling breeze were blowing through.
Doom settled in around her. Jesus’s message was strangely comforting, but not even Jesus could save her now.
She was a dead woman walking, and everyone knew it. Her inaugural service had been an irreparable disaster. Her message had been incomplete. And she knew what that meant; someone else would pick it up and finish it for her. She would do whatever it took to keep that from happening, but it may not be enough.
The Devil had bested her again. Jesus had been right. It wasn’t a one-and-done with Satan.
As she got to her feet, so did Jesus and Judith. “We’ll come with you,” Judith said.
“I love you, sister. Remember that.”
She nodded, realized she was still wearing her headset, and yanked it off, tossing it aside into a fern. “Okay,” she said, “I’m ready.”
This press conference wouldn’t hold itself.
Chapter Forty-Seven
05:11:17:41 until Doomsday
Wendy led her to a quiet place out of view of the cameras, which had been swarming the parking lot for hours, and brought a small powder compact from her pocket. She dabbed at the sweaty creases around Jessica’s nose and chin and gave a little extra attention to the spot below her eyes. As she dabbed the summer shine away from Jessica’s forehead, she said, “You’ll do fine.”
“And if not?”
She expected a dark and gloomy doomsday type response, but that wasn’t what she received.
“We’ve survived worse. Just do your best.”
“What if I forget the talking points? What if they ask me something we didn’t anticipate? What do I say about the homeless violence?”
Wendy let her hand fall to her side, and she sighed and looked her client in the eyes. “Listen closely to me now. I’ve been coaching you for years, and I’d give you a solid C-plus on following my directions and sticking to the script. But the moment you stepped into the middle of that congregation today and began telling your truth, that part of our relationship ended. Don’t you see? The moment you arrived in your house as the messiah you are, you took back your story. All these years, I’ve been doing the same thing to you as everyone else: telling your story for you. I considered myself a steward of it until you were able to take it upon yourself. And today you did that. I can’t tell you what to say anymore. It’s all you.” She paused. “I will leave you with a little parting advice, though, and that’s this: you’re a female religious figure now. You can’t win their game no matter how you play. So don’t play it. Create a new game.”
As Jessica approached the small microphone stand, the semicircle of cameras and mics shuffled restlessly. But in the crowd, she found her mother’s face, and next to her, Chris. She twisted to look behind her and saw Judith and Jesus waiting a few feet back, out of the shot. Jesus made a heart shape with his hands.
She hurried through with the prepared bit, but the words felt like a sweater tailored to a much smaller body—awkward, restricting. She pushed through them, though, speaking clearly into the microphone as if she didn’t know she was about to get a verbal lashing from the muckraking media. How could Wendy just abandon her like that in her moment of need?
And when it came time to describe how the inaugural service had gone, she paused, considered honestly, but opted to continue with the script as planned.
The service was a huge success! A victory for love and compassion!
She concluded with the phrase she’d said so many times already, it made her want to scream: “Because God is now a woman.”
It was a lie.
She had failed. Her one path toward bringing peace, the one thing she was put on this earth to do, and she had failed. Despair made her blood feel thick in her veins.
Gloria Tatum from Channel Nine got the first question in. “Many know you as Jessica Christ. Does that mean you consider this a Christian Church?”
A planted question. Coordinating this was one of Wendy’s final acts of help, and Jessica hadn’t even known it. “That’s a nickname I’ve received over the years, yes. As most know, my legal name is Jessica McCloud. So, to answer your question, yes and no. Yes, it is a Christian church because if you look at the meaning of the word Christ, it refers to the messiah, and that describes me. I’m a female messiah. But if you look at what many Christian churches have become today, overrun by bureaucracy, structured in such a way that allows for the egos of men to hijack the message of Jesus, and, most importantly, worshipping a God with male pronouns, then no, we’re nothing like that.”
Gloria Tatum nodded, satisfied.
“What are you going to do about the bum fights?” came a booming male voice from the throng. She wanted to ignore it and take a question from the polite Lou Mann with Channel Thirty-Seven, but no one else tossed a question her way. They were all clearly wondering the same thing.
Fucking bum fights. She had no prepared answer for this one. “Besides offering continued financial support to resources for the homeless, we’re already brainstorming ways to ensure the safety of those who come to worship without exclusion.”
She blinked, and a soporific part of her perked up. Hey, that wasn’t half bad. And it was mostly true.
But the same voice, which she now identified as Todd Basserfield from one of the 24-hour news stations, followed up with another question: “Sure, but what are you going to do?”
“We’re still considering it.”
“But how can you keep responsible people safe while also allowing drug-addled miscreants in the same space?”
She glared at him, feeling a slight tingling down her arms to her fingertips. “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind that it’s an impossible task. I guess it’s a good thing you’re not in charge of the effort. As I just said, we’re going to discuss solutions that serve everyone, not just those who can afford the outrageous cable TV fees to enjoy your network.” Oh boy. Probably too harsh. She shouldn’t have come at him like that.
Instinctively, her eyes searched the crowd for Wendy’s, and when she locked onto her target, she found the publicist … stifling a laugh? No. Certainly not.
Finally, Lou Mann chimed in with his pre-planned question. “How is yours different from other religions?”
She felt her shoulders unclench the smallest bit. “How are we different from other religions,” she mused, relaxing back into her rehearsed words. “For one, we’re the only mainstream religion that believes God is a woman. I don’t think that will last for long, though. I think the rest will start to come around. I have a good feeling about Judaism, especially.” A small, unexpected chuckle rose up from the tightly wound crowd, and she allowed herself to wonder if she was actually being charismatic.
She went on, “But another important difference is that no one who attends these services is required to call themselves anything in particular. In fact, we discourage it. Rather than saying, ‘I am a Christian,’ we want people to say, ‘I attend this particular church.’ The wisdom behind that distinction is that once people feel comfortable labeling themselves, they also feel comfortable dismissing harmful behaviors by saying, ‘But I’m a whatever.’ We won’t tolerate any harmful acts in the name of this religion.”
Todd Basserfield shouted, “What about the hobo showers?”
She glared at him. “What about them?”
Before he could formulate a coherent question that would mask his vile classism under a veil of concern for, say, women and children, Fiona Abernathy from the public station jumped in. “Is God a white woman?”
The rest of the reporters fell silent.
“Um, beg your pardon?”
Fiona Abernathy was not a white woman herself. She had umber skin and wore her hair closely shorn to her scalp. Jessica guessed her age at roughly late fifties, and the reporter had a calm air about her that brooked no argument and refused to be ignored. “You’ve stated in previous interviews that the
reason God had a daughter and not another son is so we could begin to see God in the female persuasion. Is that correct?”
Swallowing desperately to wet her suddenly dry throat, Jessica croaked out, “Yes, that’s right.”
“Then following that logic, there was also a reason God made you white, is there not?”
Shame kept her from a firm answer. “I suppose so.”
“So, when you say God is a woman, it might follow that God is specifically a white woman.”
Jessica’s eyes darted around for Wendy, then for Quentin, then for Tamara before she realized why she was looking for those three specifically for moral support. The unnameable shame intensified.
The reporter Maria Flores broke the silence. “Well, she had to be some color, didn’t she?”
A few of her white colleagues laughed tightly, but Fiona wouldn’t be deterred. “Exactly. If God was so intentional about gender, why would She be unintentional with race?” Though the question was a response to Maria’s comment, it was addressed directly to Jessica.
She didn’t have a clue. She’d managed to avoid asking this question in earnest for so long, but it looked like she couldn’t avoid it any longer.
Why am I white?
BECAUSE I MADE YOU THAT WAY.
No help then.
Why was she white?
Well, because her mother was white, biologically speaking.
But why hadn’t God impregnated someone of a different race?
Wait, wasn’t Jesus’s mother Middle Eastern or something?
Her mind continued to run circles, but her mouth opened anyway, and from it, came words she probably shouldn’t have said.
“Yeah, I guess God wanted me to be white. She works in mysterious ways.”
And there it was. That thing so many people were afraid to name was out in the open. She had a brand-new almighty problem on her hands.
Chapter Forty-Eight
The End Is Her Page 28
