Passiontide, Pt. 1

“Why the fuck did you bring him here?” Steve Hall asked, furious.

“Look at me, Rev,” I said. “Where else would I take him?”

We were in his office. There were boxes in large piles all around and behind his desk. Each box had, in large, hand written red letters, the word “ReNcarn8" written on the side. When I came in, he had stood up and thrown his chair back with such force, he’d almost knocked a stack of these boxes over. Now he was leaning over the desk and his face was red with anger. I had other things to think about. I took a rag from the corner of the office and tied it around my upper arm. I pulled it tight, the knife wound was deep. It would heal quickly, but that wouldn’t matter if I lost too much blood.

“I don’t rightly give a fuck, Tucker,” Steve screamed. “Anywhere but here.”

“Steve, c’mon. I don’t have anywhere else to go. You know that. Can you please just trust me?”

“And what if they come looking for him?” Steve sat down. He was still angry, although a little defeated. What had happened, had happened.

“They won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because we don’t exist, Rev. The ones that can even remember us are sure we’re dead. They don’t have protocols for this situation.”

He started to say something, but just put his head down on the desk.

“Rev, you gotta trust me.”

“Why?” His words were barely a mumble with his head down, but I understood him.
“Because I’d never do anything to betray that trust.”

He lifted his head to look at me.

“I wouldn’t, Steve,” I said. “I owe you everything. I wouldn’t have done this if I wasn’t absolutely sure it was necessary. Or if I thought we’d be in any danger whatsoever.”

Steve chuckled. “You see the irony, right? We’ve been stuck down here so long because we tried to keep him out, and you go and bring him down here.”

“That hadn’t escaped me, no.”

“Christ, Tucker. I’ve got enough shit to deal with without all this. You picked the worst fucking time.”

“I know, I know. You won’t even notice him. Just keep him where he’s at. I’ll have him out by the end of the week.”

“God love you, Tucker...”

“...no one else will,” I said, finishing his tired sentiment. I motioned to the boxes behind him. “You got any of that in the Lite?”

“Yeah. In Store Room C. Why?”

“If I don’t get some rest, I won’t heal so well. Just need a day.”

“Will he be okay?” Steve asked.

“Sure, Rev. He’ll be fine. I go feed him as soon as I wake up.”

“Hey, I know they’re Lites, but take a half a one. We need help with the show.”

***

I headed out of Steve’s office and walked back to the back of the church. The church, Followers of the Unbound Redeemer, was housed in a large gutted warehouse. The first half was offices and the narthex. Now, in preparation for Passiontide, the pews had been thrown in storage and there were families and parishioners setting up attractions for the festivities. I moved to the middle of the midway to see the Aberdines.

John and Alice Aberdine were performers. The family had four tents all in a row and at the first one, John was laying out a mound of coal that he would later set ablaze and walk across. He stopped to wave a nail-pierced hand in my direction. His wife was setting up equipment near his coal bed for her fire-eating and juggling act.
The next two tents in the Aberdine line-up were also open in the front. Each was a game of skill run by John and Alice’s youngest children. James and Ruth, twins, were twenty one, and easily the youngest survivors of the riots that had sealed us all in Lowsi. James ran a sharpshooting booth, and he was busy hanging prizes on the walls. The prizes were a sad, dystopian mix of rat traps, zipper seal plastic bags and packages of batteries. I wasn’t sure where he got the batteries, but taking them as a prize would be a gamble. If they were good, they’d be very, very valuable, but the odds were against it. Ruth blushed and looked away as I walked past. She was setting up a table of old bottles for a ring toss.

The fourth and final tent that the family occupied was closed up. Outside, the oldest Aberdine child, Marla, was hanging a sign that bore the words “Palms and Cards Read.”

“Hi, Marla,” I said.

She turned, saw me, and gave me a sad little smile. “Hey, Tucker.”

“How are you?”

She sighed, “You know, well.”

“I got you a present.”

Her smile widened, but her eyes were still so sad.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Can’t tell you. But I’ll show you in a couple of days. I think you’ll really like it.”

“You can’t keep secrets from me, Tucker. I can see the future, remember?”

I smiled. “Yeah, and I can pass through the eye of a needle.”

“If anyone could, it’d be you.”

“Alright, I need to get going,” I said, dodging the compliment.

“Coming back around tonight? Can I read your palm?”

“No, no. I need to get some rest. But I’ll swing by tomorrow night.”

“Tell Salome I said hi.”

“Will do. “

I continued heading towards the back half of the church warehouse, which was divided equally into storage units and living quarters. Several people I passed waved and said hi. The church’s strongman/bouncer stopped me so he could show me the ride he’d made. It was a series of five crates set up along a track in such a way that they would spin when he turned a crank. Each of the crates was set up on it’s own fulcrum so that the riders could spin them. He asked if I could help him out. I offered to give him a couple hours each night, since I was the only other one of the congregation strong enough to crank the crates around.

Passiontide is a huge week for the churches of Lowsi. Of the four churches in the city, Unbound Redeemer consistantly boasts the largest congregation and much of that credit is due to the amount of work they put in to this one week each year. A larger congregation means more power, so each year we try to push it further and further.

Another one of Unbound Redeemers attractions is that it has the only prostitute in Lowsi to claim to be a direct descendent of Mary Magdalene. There’s no way she can know this is true, but no one has dared question her. I know she’s pulling it out of her ass, so to speak, because she told me. I had to marry her to get that level of confidence, though.

I stopped by storage to get a bottle of Lites and headed back up to the dorm that Salome and I shared. She was getting ready for the evening. The first night of Passiontide is always a busy one at Unbound Redeemer, and this seems to go double for the women who do what Salome does. I stood behind her and waited for her to notice me in the mirror.

“So, you did it?” she asked when she looked up.

“Yeah. He’s here.”

“Everything went smoothly?”

“I took a knife to the shoulder. Made it nearly impossible to get back down the Needle.”

She stood up and came over to me. She kissed me deeply before unwrapping the rag I’d tied on my arm and looking at the wound.

“Let’s put something on that, shall we.” She went to the medicine cabinet and got some salve and some antiseptic.

“He’s incredible, Sal. You gotta see him.”

“I will, darling,” she said. She began to apply the ointments to my wound. I sat down in a chair and let her do her thing.

“He’s got genitalia.”

“I don’t even want to know how you know that,” she laughed.

“He was in the shower when I took him. I put some clothes on him before I brought him down, don’t worry. It’s was just unnerving to see a penis there.”

“Who stabbed you?”

“One of his guards. They’re making them stronger and faster these days. Plus, his guys are part of the elite.”
“They’re no match for my baby, though, are they?”

I reached over to the table and grabbed a cigarette and lit it. “No, I guess they weren’t. They’re making them dumber these days, too. That’s what stacked the odds, I suppose.”

She finished cleaning me up and began to wrap my arm in some clean gauze.

“Steve was pissed,” I told her.

“Of course he was, Tucker. He’s worked hard to build all this. He’s taken some risks, but nothing as big as what you’ve done here.”

I popped open the bottle of pills I’d gotten from the storage room and pulled one out. I broke the pill in half. I dropped one half back in the bottle. The other half I swallowed.

“Goodnight, baby,” I said and then kissed my wife.
“Was that a Lite?”

“Yeah.”

“See you tomorrow then.”

***

Waking up from a ReNcarn8 sucks. Lites, regs, half, whole. Sucks. At least the first three minutes. I came back to life suddenly, and my head felt like my brains had been removed and my head had been refilled with pillow stuffing made of dark matter. The contrast between lightheadedness and the fact that your head feels heavier than a black hole added to the extreme sensitivity to light, the nausea and the empty stomach is almost unbearable. It’s enough to make you wish you were dead sometimes, which is ironic. Then I coughed up fluids for a full minute, a murky black, gray substance. Then it wore off. My head was clear and I felt aware and calm. I unwrapped the gauze on my arm and found the wound was completely healed, as if it had never been there.

I got dressed quickly and prepared something to eat. I pulled on some shoes and headed up the offices. The office directly above Steve’s is completely soundproofed. It used to be a jail, and then a choir room, and then a jail again. I opened the door, walked in, and closed and locked the door behind me.

I turned on the light and he was sitting in the chair where I’d left him. His arms tied behind his back, his legs tied to the legs of the chair. He was blindfolded and gagged.

“Hi.”
No answer, obviously.

“I’m going to take your gag off.”

I did so.

“GO FUCK YOURSELF,” he screamed. “GO FUCK YOURSELF AND DIE!”

“Are you quite finished?”

No answer. He was so used to getting his way, and things just weren’t working out for him. I could feel his surprise. It was just going to get worse. I took off the blindfold.

I was never born. I was created. The lab that created me, created the man who was in front of me. We were identical in nearly every way. There were a few key differences. I was bred to be a soldier. He was bred to tame the masses. I was genetically altered to be stronger, faster, and smarter than any human born. He was created to be more charismatic and to control minds with his voice. I was bred to have a natural suppression to base desires. They gave him a cock. I was created to fight and die for my government; he was created to be a newscaster. I lived in group homes for my entire life before coming to Lowsi. He was kept separate from everyone. I could only imagine his shock. He fainted.

***

When he came to, I was sitting in front of him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He blinked a couple of times, tugged on his ropes. “Tom Brokaw.”

“Not that name. The one they call you.”

“I don’t know wh–“

”Mine was Pointman Alpha-8,” I interrupted. “But there were three dozen of me.”

“They call me Highchair.”

“Do you know why?”

He nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I hold up the ‘babies.’”

“Those are people you’re talking about. Real. Live. People.”

“I know!”

“Do you?”

“I keep them happy.”

“You keep them docile.”

He looked away from me.

“You keep them stupid.”

This infuriated him. “Do you have any idea how miserable they would be without me? Do you?! I make a difference. I make them happy and I keep them working and working together.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Where am I?” he asked.

“In Lowsi. In the choir room of a church.”

“Lowsi? What’s that?”

“It’s a city buried five hundred feet below Upper Seattle, where you live.”

“There’s a city–?” his voice trailed off.

“You really don’t remember us?”

“No.”

“We’re down here because of you. Do they tell you anything about what goes on in the world?”

“Only what they want me to tell everyone else. I have a lot of responsibility. They don’t want to burden me with too much.”

I laughed. “They want to keep you as stupid as everyone else.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because I kidnapped you and brought you here.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to kill you. Drown you, actually.”

“What the fuck?!”

“But first, I need you to something for me.” I tossed the food I'd prepared back at the apartment into his lap. "Now you need to eat. It's going to be a long week."

To be continued...

Solomon Says

This is how it will go. I will no longer, by omission, pretend to know things I do not know. Lana makes an obscure reference, I nod my head. I didn’t know she was breaking up with me. Lord knows, I probably had an inappropriate expression for the situation. Lana and I standing in a phone booth, waiting for the rain to ebb, her wondering why I’ve suddenly borrowed Ethan Hawke’s tick of smiling when his character is sad, or doesn’t understand something. Then, the rain subsided a bit, and she ran off to the steps of her apartment and I walked in the drizzle towards the covered bus stop.

Here is how it went. She bought me a present. A book. Not a first edition and not by anyone I’d heard of or could be bothered to feign interest in, but still a beautiful book. Exquisitely bound in some young animal’s skin and with gold gilded pages. She wasn’t used to giving books. I could tell by this one’s complete lack of inscription. Nothing to personalize it from her to me. On the inside I wrote, “A gift this beautiful can only be returned.” And I gave it back to her after a respectable amount of time. I should know by now that nothing lasts and that I need to appreciate everything fully, in the moment.

Even in the moments of pure bliss, the two red punctuation marks of our cigarettes after love making, the time she turned to me as the clouds rolled over the sun and the wind blew in cold as a front passed over us and kissed me hard with her eyes closed, the way she wore her scarves to lose them, even in those moments, I am reminded of how everything is transitory. "This, too, shall pass." I think the intention of that sentence is that it works for sadness, too, but its effect is more sobering and momentous in the happy times. When I’m good and sad, and letting my sad wear on me like clothing, wear on me like the water on the rock, at best, these words are a pat on the shoulder from an old friend. Because even as the sadness passes on to happiness, that happiness will move on in its own time.

This, too, shall pass. I used to drink cheap whiskey by the handle. Cigarette chaser. Drag, shoot, exhale. These days, I sip. Even so, it’s usually watered down with melted ice. Two weeks ago, my friend Irish asked me to call him Kyle. Said it was his name. I think I knew that, but I might not have. There was no need to know his name when he would always be Irish. I don’t know the names of trees or flowers. I don’t know the names of clouds, or the parts to an airplane. I don’t read T.S. Eliot because I don’t think poetry should have book length annotations. These are things I will no longer pretend to know. I have not decided whether I will make an attempt to know them, spending hundreds at the bookstore or even more in late fees at the library, or if I will remain ignorant. There’s a certain bliss in ignorance. I will try not to be proud of my ignorance, but I will not be ashamed of it, either.

Having said that, I wonder how many times I’ve said “I love you” without having any idea what that means. Every time?

“I love you.”

Really? Have I ever even stepped outside myself long enough to know anyone well enough to love them? Have I ever let anyone know me well enough for them to be honest in saying those words to me? Has anyone ever, in the history of everything that is and was and will be, ever known anyone well enough to make love anything more than a very uneducated decision?

The day after Lana broke up with me, I slept with her sister. Well, two days after. I keep forgetting she actually broke up with me in the phone booth, not directly, but using a baker’s dozen of filthy rodent birds to deliver the news instead. Lana’s sister, Helen, was so similar to her sister that when we got done, naked and sweaty, I stared at the ceiling and told her I loved her. God, what a sap. In my defense, she was just a softer, more handsome version of the woman I’d been saying those words to for the better part of a year before that day. She smiled a polite smile, or the smile of a foreigner who just didn’t get the language and wants to impress the native, and said nothing. I smiled back, but mostly because I’d won the contest every broken relationship has of who can sleep with someone else first. I’d hoped.

Even break ups are contests to the wooden boy who doesn’t know he could be real. After Helen left, I realized that Lana had left the book we’d exchanged back and forth on my bookshelf. I took it out to the grill and lit it on fire. Petty as fuck, but another victory. I went back in and got dressed to meet Irish...Kyle at the bar.

Evenings at the bar are getting old, but that's okay, so am I. The mix of people is good. Twenty somethings shooting pool and enjoying the night off. The old timers that have been there since noon visiting their two best friends, the bartender and what she serves. I usually offer to buy the drinks if Kyle can quote ten lines of Shakespeare or something equally British and literary. Young kids come in and try to pass off their fake or “lost” IDs, and we jeer them for their smugness. We ridicule their youth and offer to buy them a round on their twenty-first. If they ever make it, we say, because they’re so stupid for bringing that weak shit in our bar. Kyle and I talk to the barflies, and send them drinks and haiku written on napkins and half-heartedly try to sleep with them. We are the missing link between the billiard kids and the elderly alcoholics. For some reason, we are very proud of this, the way Bigfoot must be proud that his knuckles don't drag.

Nearly six hundred years ago, on St. Crispin’s Day, Henry V led a vastly outnumbered gaggle of British knights against the French. And won. Everything I know of war, I know from literature. WWI goes to Hemingway. Vietnam to O’Brien and Wright. Korea wasn’t a war, but it was still hell. I like seeing the big pictures in the smaller stories. But I still know nothing of the bigger picture. All I know of war is the smaller pictures that attempt to make a mosaic, but my eyes refuse to see it. WWII was a wild, fantastical time-traveling journey. Thanks, Vonnegut. I understand the Holocaust happened, or it didn’t. If it did, it was horrible. And “horrible” doesn’t do it justice. “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” The Holocaust. Even if it didn’t happen, it still trumps everything.

This is why, whenever the subject of the war comes up, I can’t provide facts and figures. I don’t read a newspaper, but I hear in random conversations about soldiers coming home and killing their families. I don’t know how many died there and aren’t coming back. I don’t. Does this stop me from pretending like I understand and joining in the conversation? No. But it damn well should! Instead, I take a page from Ernest and quote John Donne. I use sermons from religions I don’t believe in to feign like I even give a shit about the war. Wait, wait. Let me clarify. I don’t care about the war because I can’t do anything about it, other then to write letters to people who care even less than I do and won’t read them. I used to care, but then I realized how bad the form letters I got in return were for the environment. But that doesn’t mean I don’t tell people that “I am involved in mankind.”

Here’s the point: I’m a shitty person! I got broken up with and didn’t know it. Is there a higher shame then showing up at your ex-girlfriend’s apartment and have her explain to you that she broke up with you like you’re a child being taught phonics. Sound it out: “bro-ken up.” If there is a greater shame, it’s probably not in having a gift you gave burned or your sister fucked. It’s not a shame you can give back. It’s not some beautiful book that you can write a note in and hand back to the person. And the worst part is that I couldn’t even admit then that I had no God damned clue what she meant by her reference.

“Pigeon...oh, yeah. Yeah. I thought you meant something else by that. I thought you were talking about Shari and Sheila,” I said. She wasn’t buying it. You could see it in her face.

“I’m so sorry, Tucker,” she said. And then she bit her lower lip. She used to do that in bed, too. I thought it was sexy. I didn’t know it was her go-to expression for Pity.

Gracious as she was, I left there and walked home. Three days later I found myself walking in to an internet café near my house. I looked up “The Thirteenth Pigeon.” After several pages of links to hunting events and the use of military pigeons in the twelve hundreds, I finally found it. A poem. By the author of the book I’d given Lana back to one-up her. The book I’d burned. The book I hadn’t even bothered to fucking read.

Everyone struggles with themselves and with change, and even more so with trying to change themselves.

Only fools think it’s easy. But fools die for want of wisdom.

Never again. What’s worse than the shame of this? The Holocaust. This isn’t so bad, relatively speaking. Like everything else, this, too, shall pass.