RESTRICTED EVIDENCE

This document is for law enforcement reference only.

The possession, reproduction, or distribution of any material claiming the divinity of the humanoid entity which calls itself Yeshua de Nazaraya, a.k.a. "The Stranger," a.k.a. any other aliases as shall be designated by the President or his appointees, is a crime under federal law (2049 G.S.C. §§ 9001, 9002, and 9003).

Violations are punishable by fine not to exceed $10,000 GSD or an equivalent funds transfer of federally recognized cryptocurrency, and/or employment in a licensed Work Therapy facility with a contract period of up to two years.

God bless the United States of Greater America.

Nota Bene

part zero
Prolepsis*

† † †

He jolts awake to the rude clank of suspension plates bottoming out. Two words come bubbling up to him, situation awareness, a slug of operational wisdom from grabass days when he was cadet-green and anonymous, not yet the cosmically unlucky Beaumont Hawkin Dawes, all three names, always enumerated, assassin-wise.

Peeking over the backrest in front of him, he counts two hostiles in the cab. Driver: two hundred fifty pounds, bald, white, armed, and Passenger: a hundred ten wet, ball-capped, also white, also armed. Neither seems aware he is awake. His mouth is taped shut, his wrists zip-tied, but see how they have neglected to bind his ankles. Shimmying, quietlike, up to the cab, he’s about to bury a boot heel in Driver’s purple glansoid head when a shudder runs the length of the van. Another defect in the road. The horizon line over the dash flies up as they dive into a washout. Everything not cinched or buckled goes airborne. Dawes’s head rams the ceiling, exceeding normal range of motion. A stripe of sweaty duct tape can’t hold back the groan. Passenger says, “G.K.’s awake, Daddy.” With his accent it sounds like deddy. Driver glances at Passenger’s sidearm. Passenger obeys the implicit command, and now Staff Sergeant Dawes here is staring down a chrome barrel of absurd caliber this skinny neckbearded kid couldn’t possibly . . . if the van were to hit another bump while the kid’s still fingering the well of that trigger guard. . . .

situation awareness. This is an old church van, he’d wager. The backrest in front of his bad knee is spangled with teen group graffiti, stars and crucifixes, swooning girlish cursive. A trio of ball-point smoochy faces grin up at him from the faded leatherette, Danny & Darla in Christ, or so it says. It was in a van like this one that he discovered kissing a girl was almost as good as kissing her brother. What was his name. Not Danny. Delaminated upholstery flutters around a vented side window like a trapped bird, sky beyond it the color of lit methane. The landscape whizzes past, flat and brown, not like the Carolinas. Not like home. They pass through fields of corn stubble, sunbaked stalks abandoned in permanent genuflect, burnt and boarded-up farm houses, creek beds around whose rough banks cling plants he cannot name, with neither beast nor bird in sight, nor any signage, only the weatherbeaten fluctuations of Midwestern planar surfaces threaded with the roots of things that refuse to die. His old sergeant major came from country like this — “Euclidean flatness, Ranger,” the old man warned, his voice box worn down to a nub by a two-pack habit, “and pray, thee, thy balls off not to get caught out in it,” legs dangling from the tail of a Fort Bragg deuce-and-a-half, boots Newton’s cradling to and fro, like a child’s feet — another SERE training memory resurfacing now in his time of need. The intervening years stand at parade rest twenty-five strong, in single-file formation, passing their sober judgment on Staff Sergeant Beaumont Hawkin Dawes. His headache screams hangover, but he hasn’t touched booze since . . . dot dot dot. Even now, zip-tied and friendless, unintentionally godless, eyes all a-squint whenever the sun finds the kid’s bouncing pistol, chain of thought will try and fail to elide the memory of a split-second lapse in rifle protocol, the mistake for which Dawes will be long remembered: everyone’s favorite carpenter from ancient Galilee falling out of the sky. . . .

The diesel motor drops to a murmur and the loose upholstery by the window goes limp. Heat presses in. A concertina wire fence marks the exact longitude where the State’s monopoly on violence ends and someone else’s begins. But whose? Dawes gets an inkling when the van is stopped by thumb-shaped guards in Mantegna’s Dead Christ t-shirts and ballistic vests. Voices exchange information over two-way radios. Assault rifles point toward sky and earth. A chain-link gate rolls shut behind them. The metallic rattle is like a judgment being rendered, and it relaxes him a little. He thinks: this is where it will happen.

The van humps along. There are civilian trucks and sport-utility vehicles along either side of the craggy road parked bumper to bumper. Doors open and shut at intervals: men, women, children. Only the children are unarmed. This both is and isn’t an America Dawes recognizes. It’s a domestic airport’s slice of civilian demographic pie (there aren’t many Presidential Fitness Medals represented here) but they’ve been outfitted with enough small arms to charge a machine gun post. Is this a tent revival weekend or the mustering of suburbia’s latent regiment? There are sparse trees separating the road from cabins and trailers, some recreational vehicles. Tents sit deeper in the woods on numbered camp sites. Men arrange sticks into fire lays. Children play in the bare dirt where grass can’t grow, kicking sweetgum balls and squirting pump-action water guns. Women shout at the men and the children through cupped hands. A round boy with a pink face yelps and grabs his buttocks as his mother swats at them with a toy fishing rod. Dawes’ buttocks seize up as the rod comes down, an instinct older than the ones his country paid him to learn.

The road ends in a loop around an outdoor amphitheater. It’s just a wide wooden roof over a dozen unfinished benches, but the backcountry aesthetic is undercut by stacks of high-impact black polymer crates. Dawes can’t see into them from his seat in the van, but he can see what’s being staged around them: assault weapons, lethal and tactical grenades, protective gear, comms equipment, covert ops clothing, and — God almighty — many, many dewars of refrigerated liquid. If it’s what he thinks, it is the most he’s ever seen all in one place, price unfathomable.

A silver-spurred voice whistles at him from beyond the grave, or beyond consensus reality. Either way it’s a voice only he can hear:

There’s a time and place to humor the chain-smoking ghost(?) of the Dead Lord, and this shit don’t meet the criteria.

Naw, it’s the criteria don’t meet me. And what’s this about you bein’ friendless? Whose snakeskins do you think left them boot prints in the meforsaken sand?

At the far end of the loop there is a little Southern Gothic church, limewash flaking in the sun. Men in urban combat fatigues stand at the entrance: stiffer, less thumb-shaped, leaned against the portico columns like a pair of rifles set close at hand.

Passenger leans from the cab to face Dawes as the van lurches to a halt, wags the chrome pistol at the church, says, “OK, God-Killer, this here’s your stop.” There’s a slight rounding on his r’s. “Now don’t be stupid else my serious weapon here might shoot your faggoty ass—OWw!” Driver has whomped the back of Passenger’s head, ball-cap knocked to the floor. “Daddy, c’mon, Jeeziss!—OWw, OH!” Whomped again, only this time the pistol does go off. Passenger winces. Dawes’ ears are ringing, but the contents of his skull are intact. The stray bullet has popped a little hole in the roof over Dawes’ head. A narrow shaft of hot sunlight falls through it onto Passenger’s right eye, which blinks uncomfortably. “Dangit, accidental discharge. You hit? Wow. That’s gotta be like a miracle. Just get out smooth, OK? No kung-fu kicks?”

A mosquito fritters its last moments along Passenger’s headrest. The cab smells like the kid’s spent ammunition and insufficiently wiped feces. He pretends to shield sunlight from his slanted forehead, but it’s plain he’s secretly smudging away tears.

They are joined by another dispatch of armed men. Dawes is forced out of the van and through the double doors of the church. ‌A felt letter board in the foyer proclaims:

[Slapping a knee] I knew them fellas looked like Nazarenes. Fun fact, Dawes. Didja know Haldor Lillenas tried to keep lil’ Sirhan Sirhan’s daddy from immigratin’ here back in the Sixties?

Yeah I wonder. Maybe Ol’ Bobby K. mighta been president, weren’t for another Nazarene focusin’ on somebody else’s goddamn family.

The Passenger (or rather the Kid, now they’ve disembarked) frowns at Dawes. “What’d you say?”

“Pastor said dude’s crazy,” warns one of the men. A pair of them have Dawes by the elbows. Another keeps a barrel crown against his spine. The Kid leads them all into the sanctuary, glancing back over his shoulder. Another grown-up says, “We got your back, little homes.”

They enter a space like one Dawes remembers from a childhood of Sundays far from here, east and south, sticky button-up mornings sandwiched between the fat-folded elbows of his aunt and his Granny, off-key voices warbling under a vaulted ceiling of exposed rafters, inhaling that old time religion of yellow paper, Advent wax, scuffed oak. A bit of shrapnel still rides in his knee, picked up from one infertile crescent or another, a bite when he leans on it wrong, which he does presently. The center aisle ends at a wooden altar beneath the pulpit. Aside from a padded velvet kneeler, it has no embellishments: an object reduced to pure geometry, intersecting planes. Some items have been laid upon it with minimal ceremony, a towel large enough to cover a human face and two five-gallon containers of water.

“I guarantee,” a commanding tenor voice says from behind the pulpit, “you don’t want to know who it is he thinks he’s talking to. Though some of you might suffer to believe him.” He looks at the Kid when he says this, but the Kid is distracted, whispering pow-pow while aiming his pistol at docile figures in the stained glass. The Pastor, for clearly it is he, shakes his head and turns to the Kid’s father. “Were you found out? Good. A mediocre plan with just a few moving parts beats a good plan with many. That was the Skunk Works ethos. Simplicity above all.”

The Pastor descends the carpeted tiers of the stage. He is young, probably mid-thirties. Black suspenders, rolled linen sleeves, tattoos of Old Testament warriors. His facial expressions are obscured by a waxed Giuseppe Verdi beard. Two small eyes fix upon Dawes like the tines of a carving fork.

Dawes’ headache must have been a consequence of whatever that mediocre plan was, a drug in his coffee or a sap to the head. How is it this ragtag bunch got the drop on him? Isn’t he former Special Forces? A paid expert in Congressionally mandated badassery? All that training, drills drills drills, come to naught at the hands of a chromosomal manchild and his dumpy dad, a tap on the shoulder, Hey Mister, say whaaah? and it’s lights out for Staff Sergeant Dawes, knocked unconscious with a melodic Flintstones bonk. He can’t remember getting captured, not with clarity. There’s a murky gap there in his chronology, more a vibe than a visual, a feeling like getting caught with his hand in the licorice jar. He thinks of the boy with the pink face being whipped with the fishing rod. He thinks of his Granny, breath stinking of Old Crow, muttering loud enough he could hear, “Boy, what you done to my baby girl,” fumbling in her kitchen drawers for the big wooden spoon, her hickory switch soon to leave its mark . . . then both his hands on the wall where big brother Wilmington hung the replacement phone over the red stain that had once been their mother’s face. . . .

Situation Awareness, Staff Sergeant. It ain’t no time to be broodin’ over what can’t be undone.

The men snip the plastic cuffs from his wrists, then lift him onto the altar lengthwise. His head hangs off one end of the altar, inclined backwards. The Pastor squats next to Dawes in polished boots with single leather soles.

“I have a confession to make. I have committed the sin of Empathy. I feel bad for you. I truly do. Weren’t you a Green Beret or something? Now look at you. You give pariahs a bad name.”

Under a red beard so meticulously manicured it almost seems glued-on, the Pastor has an angry baby’s face, shiny cheeks like fully inflated balloons, eyelids lined with either artificial or intrinsic color, touches of Resting Bitch. It is the face of a low-ranking video game enemy combatant which might be defeated by jumping repeatedly on its head. He gives Dawes a gentle mocking right hook on the jaw, still stamped with church van vinyl.

“After what you did, I’ve been considering Judas Iscariot in a fresh light. More of that sinful Empathy. I find myself thinking: maybe he got a bad rap. He was, in the final analysis, essential to the Plan. But not you. What plan have you been essential to? Hmm? What miracle have you been blessed to bring about through your wickedness?”

“That’s for me to decide.” The Pastor removes what remains of the duct tape from Dawes’ cheek, then covers Dawes’ face with the towel. “Sad to say I still believe in the power of forgiveness for those with a contrite spirit. All Christian men can be put to use. Even you. But first you need to be brought to a state of contrition.”

Many firm hands are placed on Dawes’ body, pinning him to the wood. He feels a pair of long legs step over the altar, straddle his chest like mounting a horse without sitting in the saddle. The Pastor’s voice, above him now, begins the Lord’s Prayer.

Where’s the fight, Dawes? You tough, but you ain’t K.S.M. tough. You ain’t done this before. Prob’ly these Promise Keepin’ motherfuckers ain’t neither. You think they gonna know when to quit?

No one is fixin’ to save you. You ain’t William Tell Junior standing underneath no apple. You ain’t lil’ Yitzhak clamberin’ rockwise up Mount Moriah. You the lamb what’s stuck in the brambles. Do somethin’ and do it quick.

“…for Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

Water floods his nose, fills his throat, sputters pointlessly from his lips with nowhere to go except back down to the places in his body where Water Must Not Go, yet it does go into each of those places, flowing with reckless obedience into empty cavities. A sound above his face roars like a waterfall, cut through by the sharp tenor of the Pastor:

“Do you believe that He shall not rise again unless His brothers shall maketh Him rise?

“Then I baptize you in the name of the Bereaved Father, the Irrevenant Son, and the Wayward Sp—”

The water stops. The men turn their attentions to the sound, let go of Dawes. He vomits clear fluid. The wet towel curls off his face and falls to the floor with a languid slop. His head hangs upside down from the end of the altar, hair dripping. Between the legs of the man holding the water jug, he can see clear across the sanctuary to where the Kid stands grimacing, both knobby hands gripping that enormous chrome pistol, white smoke twisting from the bore. Behind him a polygonal shard of stained glass tilts askew from the bottom edge of a newly-formed hole in the arched window. It is the face of Christ teetering there, atop His crucified body. A beat, and the piece comes loose, lands tinkling on a pile of other glass fragments: brown, white, red.

part one
Nazarenes

† † †

Minutes from now, in the campus bookstore of his private and frankly not-so-good evangelical Christian college, in a grain mill town at the southern bend of the Kankakee Outwash Plain — the Land of Lincoln, the 21st of the 46 remaining U. S. of A. — Isaac Trigger, soon to be last of his name and heir to about 500 sheets of Hammermill 30% Post-Consumer Great White, will watch God die on television.

Like any properly gripping post-millennial narrative, it begins with the weather, and an extra dash of the entendre, for behold: the Sun has returned.

Freezing rain had been sweeping out of the west since last Tuesday, rain and wind: a true Illinois wind, laminar and life-altering. Then this morning the scrim of clouds got pulled back by the unseen hand of that which is Atmospheric and Most-Probable, lighting up the ice on the bare dogwood outside the bookstore window. The spectacle has appeared just in time to ruin Isaac Trigger’s morning routine. He squints at it out there: backlit, ablaze with dawn. It disgusts him. An upturned “naturally occurring” chandelier, its accidental beauty an arrangement of matter permitted in absentia by a spurious animal God.

But in the combination bookstore and student cafe, where he sits in the tree’s knotted shadow, the air is warm and vanilla, and nothing hangs upside down. Hip-hop-adjacent worship music plays with insufficient irony on wowed and fluttery VHS cassette. Baristas with Civil War mustaches pull doubles from a machine of muscular Italian make, the Sun over the Indiana border gleaming anew from its polished surfaces. There are bibles for sale, naturally, in contemporary translation, but no textbooks. Instead a single end-cap display boasts a handful of titles like Choose Celibacy (Before It Chooses You) and Christian Hunters. What or whom is being hunted is not made clear.

The time is 08:17, Central Standard, and the Doctor is [IN]. They come to him here: doughy freshman or fellow senior, man or woman or, often enough, somewhere between or beyond the two. Life indeed finds a way, even here, under the jurisdiction of the Triniteigh Nazarene College Holiness Handbook. They hear through unofficial channels that Isaac Trigger (you don’t mean . . . Kodachrome Guy?) is the guy you need. There have been two already this week: Ian M______ (22, South Bend, something about his sister’s missing wardrobe) and Penny W______ (18, Kalamazoo, months out from her last period). They all come thinking they need answers, but as sure as this ice will melt and water the garden of Winter’s successor, they show up knowing already what it is they’re gonna do. All they need him for is a blessing, a Word whispered by the supposedly pure and faultless grandson of a gadflyish former professor, a Word that would fuse the broken halves of the day.

Here comes another: hoop earrings, sherpa jacket, a haircut that says marry me in the slant of her bangs but explodes like off-cue fireworks in back. She’s biting her lip like she’s unsure of the proper etiquette. “Isaac,” introducing himself to spare her from saying Kodachrome Guy to his face. “Have a seat.” She cradles a cold drink in disposable plastic, heap of cream spilling over the rim, the recycled air around her and him a-throb with Christian pop and groggy youth-chatter and multiple portafilters jacked into nine bars each of high-pressure extraction. She discloses to him, and him alone, how she is, “like for real into guys but . . . what if [she’s] not,” and before long she’s daubing away tears from her lashes with nail-polished fingers, snorting iced mocha up her sinuses, giggling like it’s the first time she’s ever been let so loose, and all he’s had to say is: Okay. It is always, always Okay. . . .

He’s aware his insight into the human condition is not novel, at least not outside the confines of this Nazarene milieu. His non-churchy friends must be reminded continually that it is difficult for a free fish, as Potok’s chosen epigram says, to understand what is happening to a hooked one. He finds himself justifying, time and again, to Mackenzie Shawn-Broadus, her vast and unbrushable red hair itself a living indictment of the Divine Plan, how much patience the unbelieving ought to reserve for those folk who have grown up “Addicted to Jesus.”

“But if this place makes them so miserable,” Mackenzie finding a lode of rainbow sprinkles under a whorl of vanilla, “wherefore all the loyalty?”

“Uhhh, th’ phwee ith-kweem?” mouthful of chocolate log-fluming down to his belly, coconut flakes like little raised arms.

They sometimes go Hansel-and-Greteling up onto the roof of the Dobson building, four stair-winding floors above the bookstore, with soft-serve yoinked from the cafeteria while the cashier isn’t looking. More of that Illinois-type wind blows up there, Mackenzie’s hair out horizontal, tangled in the sticky spoons. It’s doubly stupid to be outside in the nadir of winter with bowls of fucking ice cream, but the roof’s a regular hideout where Mackenzie can smoke in the clear. Pack whacks palm, lighter ignites . . . And She saw that it was good. . . .

Ashing over the parapet, “My presence here, for example, is pure uncut transaction. I can’t see what the rest of ’em get out of it,” her hand lassoing an expansive ’em with short-lived clove tobacco smoke. “Take the art majors. You know they don’t allow boobs n’ butts in life-drawing class?”

“But whaddo they draw up there, Trigger, sweatpants?” Dropping her register for the bit, “Yessir, I got me a degree in Camel Toe Illustration from the Hiddencrotch School of Art in Bentfuck, Illinois. If you have a legitimate need for the illustrated crease, I’m your man.”

Mackenzie is one of the school’s occasional Nones. (Enn-oh-enn-ee-ess.) A friend of hers, the daughter of a wealthy Nazarene general superintendent, arranged to have her father pay for Mackenzie’s way through school, with a whopping proviso that she must attend a Nazarene college. Ehh, it’s not so bad, Doc. You adjust to the routine. The prayer at the start of every Comp-Sci lecture is useful buffer lag for a young woman whose chronic tardiness is indefensible, borderline obscene. She sneaks church-mouse into raked auditoriums while everyone is still (huzzah!) head-bowed and eyes-closed, her body awash with bundles and bags timed expertly (she thinks) to come down around her feet in sync with the chorus of Amens, stifling the crunch of stuffed notebooks, miscapped Japanese pigment pens, keychains with more chains than keys, orphaned wireless earbuds, a British mint tin concealing Schedule 1’ed pills and gummies, the June 1975 issue of Buns, Balls, Butts, Nuts, Backs & Sacks (owned without lust, for the love of Camp), a dog-eared copy of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, expired nibbles from the last time she tried to go vegan. . . . She could do without the indignity of mandatory chapel attendance twice a week, buuut there aren’t many sins that free tuition won’t cover. She and Isaac befriended officially last August, after the annual seat number lottery slotted them next to each other in Weekly Chapel, though they’d attended the same class once, Freshman Comp. He has a fond memory of her doing a whole Sontag bit for Rote Memorization Day, unleashing upon critically unprepared Nazarene innocents the othery horror of Notes on Camp: the priceless shock on their faces when she, with air travel neck pillows sausage-cased down each khaki pant leg, came hobbling, stage-gummed and fake-bearded, into the lecture hall as Torgo from Manos: the Hands of Fate (1966), the devil-worshipping satyr, his four-note cinematic theme beep-boop-boop-beeping from a portable pill speaker jammed down her bra, reciting Sontag by the numbers in Torgo’s boingy rubber voice. Amid the cringes and snickers pinballing around the audience there was Isaac: third row, second table, transcendent, an image of calm. How improbably she’d conjured memories of his dead grandfather, his maternal grandfather, the theologian: late nights falling asleep on the couch watching bootlegged MST3K discs, Isaac’s ear pressed to a knobby knee, the darkened living room flickering with the light of their beloved televised moon, its caulk-gunned spaghetti lunar surface rotating in space, show title mesas rising up to greet the two viewers, one young and one old, one just beginning to understand this world, the other soon to leave it forever . . . repeat to yourself, it’s just a show. . . .

His grandfather had been forced to retire at 62 after the publication of Logos: The Hands of Fate, yesss, a theological rhapsody on the messianic nature of camp humor. A vocal contingent of regional pastors refused to remit the Triniteigh portions of their yearly budgets until Dr. Joe Featherstone (“Feathers” among friends and acolytes) was permanently removed from his tenured post. It spooked the Triniteigh board of trustees enough to raise formal objection to the little chapbook’s commingling of their Savior’s holy gospel with the casual irreverence of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But what really did him in was the audacity of his theodical claim: that the violence committed during God’s (trivially demonstrable) abscondence from the universe will have been, in the future-perfected state of the hereafter, retroactively made whole by . . . whatever the hell comes next. Just as the superimposed silhouettes of two junk robot puppets and their human companion could salvage a fertilizer salesman’s film about Satan, or how the last turn of a zingy one-liner always seems to be the most _______, so, too, in time’s fullness will God’s punchline have landed with script-flipping transformation and humor, ha-ha, hoo-boy, good one Pops, let’s freeze-frame those wrap-party smiles as we roll credits. . . .

He was dead four years later, reduced by ischemic stroke to a nonrepeating, nonterminating stream of unsurpassable incoherence (Wernicke’s Aphasia) and a long slide into rampant biomechanical ruin. But Isaac doesn’t like to talk about that, except in secret, i.e. to God, via prayers so extraordinarily blasphemous that not even yours truly, a soulless Python script written by one of Feathers’s former students, would dare repeat them here.

When Isaac’s grandfather died, there was consternation over how (or whether) to dress the body for burial. The man had never owned a suit. His Triniteigh life insurance benefit was meager, barely enough to cover funeral preparation and assorted predatory fees. A new suit was out of the question. Nor was a trip to the thrift store in the cards. The deceased was enormous, rangy: a body with the rise and run of a street lamp. Nothing would have fit. Isaac’s father suggested, half-joking, “What about he goes commando?” which made Isaac laugh but failed to amuse his mother. Yet Roger did have a point. There was something quintessentially Featherstonian to the idea of the decedent going down starkers. Dust to dust, etcetera, and also a consider-the-lilies asceticism that abhorred any dollar not given to the poor. Feathers had once told an irritated Religion chair, while the two of them debated whether a dumpster-dived Odd Couple sweatshirt satisfactorily exuded the department’s notions of the sagacious and the professorial, “I found Christ in the summer of ‘68, Jack, you’re lucky I wear shoes.” (That the silkscreened sitcom logo served as cryptic endorsement of “alternative lifestyles” was lost on department chair Jack, whose TV diet rarely strayed afield from Les Beasley and the Florida Boys singin’ Jubilee-ee, jubilee-ee. . . .)

Real kooky memorial service, by Nazarene standards. Many of Feathers’s former students were there packing seats left vacant by a laity steadily sloughing off its elders. Instead of half-empty rows, you had dozens of the nerdiest theology nerds you ever saw, from Chico to Charleston, a Chicagoland diaspora repatriated. They were the purple-haired ministers from the Outer Rim of Nazarenedom, the sub-rosa solemnizers of queer unions, the streetsmart veterans of studiously berserk nonviolence, the anything-but-square pegs squished between round locals: sun-glazed highway patrolmen, burned-out kindergarten teachers, tractor whisperers, balers of hay, bearers of tool scars — a blended family of Nazarenes waiting like ragged collision survivors for absent Authority to come, lights flashing, the only things holding them together the banner of their obscure denomination and the love of the systematic theologian lying in state whose life had been so fearfully and wonderfully entangled with theirs.

The sixth-grade boys sat with their penny loafer toe boxes wedged into the hymnal baskets (an unspoken competition to see who could slouch the lowest without provoking an adult’s reprimand) except for Isaac. He’d been given strict instruction from his father not to slouch, and to implore the other boys to refrain from slouching, though he never bothered. The organ warbled “It Is Well (With My Soul),” a Feathers’s favorite, a hymn to sing when one must have unminced words with Death. Isaac took a mint from his pocket, pinched from his grandfather’s sock drawer stash. He unwrapped it slowly, prolonging the little stretches of quiet between cellophane pops. The wrapper radiated coronal wrinkles from the wintergreen candy at its center. Instead of pipes, the organ had a stout little wooden tone cabinet engraved with the words do this in remembrance of me. His breath smelled like his grandfather’s. There lay the man, in an open casket across a pair of altars. Simone had put an end to debate by visiting the funeral home to drop off her father’s favorite cardigan and slacks. Seen from this side of the quilted lining, he looked almost cozy — brown twill iron-crisp and delinted, arms posed in purple wool reknitted to shopfront readiness by one final pass of a daughter’s practiced hands — and very barefoot. In the grave, as in the life that had preceded it, he was Mister Rogers with a civil disobedience rap sheet.

The time is 08:36. Though Quotation Marks and Eastern Commas hibernate in the hollows of the backlit dogwood, no flap of tiny wing is required to cause today’s effect. The crucial moment, in fact, has already come and gone. The Stranger has fallen out of His hole in the sky. It happened yesterday (granting that “yesterday” is relative on the spherical home of God’s chosen species). All that remains now is to bear witness.

The teary sophomore with half-pyrotechnic mom-hair has left Isaac to get another drink to replace the one she dropped hugging him thank-you and talk-soon. Another satisfied customer. Fifteen minutes was all it took. Guerilla counseling. Could be a new personal record, though he doesn’t keep track. He takes no notes, shares nothing he hears, might as well hand out Privacy Policies, with the level of professionalism he brings to the task. That Lucy Van Pelt could learn a thing or two about going pro bono. But it’s real work, make no mistake. There’s no glory in listening well, nor much in the way of titillation. How commonplace, how earthbound are their troubles. No murder confessions or star-crossed blood feuds, no lube-drenched orgies where workers clear aftermaths of cum by the hodful, no tales of gymnastic cuckholdery that would be fun to anonymize for Mackenzie later, nope, just your garden-variety Adams and Eves and Steves with nobody else to talk to about the selves they’ve been instructed to deny.

He was sitting here when the first one came, Freshman year: Aaron G______ (20 then, Bloomington, a Finance major with Flemish Method skin all feathered glaze and subsurface scatter). One second it’s Isaac alone with a mug of dark roast, drunk coal black and litigably hot, the next there’s Aaron, two years Isaac’s senior . . . the paucity of eye contact, Aaron’s high cheekbones turned to the dogwood (smaller then and in full-flower), saying enough about which of the two odd ducks was having the more awkward moment.

“My aunt used to go to your church. She said you go around in his clothes,” eyes dipping Isaac’s way like a clerk’s unimpressed by what has been pulled off the rack.

“Her exact words were the kid looks like his ghost. I wouldn’t know. Never had the pleasure,” eyes roaming back to the tree, its branches and blossoms filigreed against an impasto of blue sky. Isaac says nothing. His budding clinical instincts bid him wait. “They’re going to vote for Separation. The prediction markets are converging, at least the ones I trust. I’m trying to decide if I should go, right now, while the going is easiest.”

“Pacifica, or whatever they’ll call it. San Diego seems okay. I hear good things about fish tacos.”

“Point Loma [Editor’s note: Point Loma Nazarene University] might take me. My credits would count. But even if not, maybe I just go. I mean go west. Until I hit ocean. It’s unclear what I would do for money. That would be a risk. Life is risk. But I’m afraid there’s too much danger if I stayed here.”

“Not ‘of what.’ From whom,” turning from the tree to the two-hundred acre campus beyond it: dozens of pink post-pubescent Nazarene faces nearer and farther staring down into an equal number of little glowing rectangles, and hundreds more faces just like them yet to emerge from drywall and cinderblock into the heat of day.

Isaac says, “This school’s a lot of things, but folks here aren’t, you know—”

“Oh yes they are. Some of them, all’s it would take is the pleasing aroma of state-sponsorship, and then it’s pitchforks and tiki torches. Or if not them, then their children. Also it’s not just this place. Have you seen the projections? Separation is a permanent national gerrymander. Single-party control the rest of our lives. California alone is, like, all this ballast to throw overboard. It won’t be safe.”

“Safe…” Isaac understands perfectly well what he means, and more importantly why, but he thinks it polite to pretend otherwise when that understanding is predicated on hearsay, a cafeteria table rumor about a parked car, silhouetted occupants interrupted by Public Saftety officers under the shade of auburn lindens. “Okay,” nodding slowly, therapeutic language welling up here he doesn’t remember learning, “tell me more about that.” Thumb and forefinger meet, pinching his lower lip into a roll, an affect of tender concentration passed down the maternal line from Feathers . . . Why couldn’t you be here, instead of me? The answering silence implies, Maybe I am, kiddo . . . The air is teacup-fragile. Cafe sounds seem to roll off to zero, Aaron’s face switching now to anamorphic close-up, skin luminous and clouded with bokeh at the edges of the frame. Aaron lets his shoulders fall back into the wings of the velvet chair, tension seeping out from the soles of his shoes into the cut-pile rug. Something deeply hidden has been twisted open, just a smidge lefty-loosie, a mineral-crusted pressure valve not relieved since it was first installed by its owner, long ago and under duress. Open it too quick, it’ll rupture. But what is it about this kid dressed in his dead grandfather’s clothes? . . . Aaron laces his fingers over powder-blue Oxford cloth tucked into a pair of spotless chinos, by-the-book dress for a young Bible Beltish man of letters. Inhale—

So far there have been scant pitchforks (it will be another generation before “Greater America” rediscovers the full arsenal of unlearned History repeated), but Aaron’s prediction markets had been dead-on about Pacifica — California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, carved out under new management. 38 of 50 states ratified the amendment, the minimum bar. Coast to coast, blows were exchanged among elected law-makers. In Georgia, a thirteen-minute catfight ended with all noses bloody enough both women could declare victory. In Oregon, state police had to guarantee the continued corporeal existence of the representatives convened in Salem, bonking billy clubs on the skulls of Greater Idahoans bounding over the barricades, but the resolution passed by a margin of one. If you lived here, odds are you’d be in Hell by now, but it’s merely how things unfold on this particular swerve of ever-branching and inconsiderate Time. You may be more familiar with one of its countless other variants, sharing a past with this present darkness but having at some point decohered into seasickening superposition. It doesn’t take much. On a happy path, your would-be tyrant’s zygotic precursor gets zapped unviable by well-timed radioactive decay. On another, maybe a few too many spins-up go spin-down until, presto-change-o, you’ve got yourself a hanging chad or a ballistically interesting shift in the breeze in rural Pennsylvania. A millimeter is enough wiggle room for the next monster in the line of succession to yank the arc of history out of whack. Isaac apprehends all this contingency the way anyone does, which is to say: as no contingency at all. It is difficult for a hooked fish to understand what is happening to itself. Causes pile on effects like leaffall decomposing back anaerobically into earth, no single outline distinct among its neighbors, a tessellation of interlocking life and death not even old Maurits Cornelis himself could plot the infinitely diminishing isometries of.

The time is 08:45. Young men on the TV are singing, “I don’t want your sex, for now,” in three-part harmony. In Ashburn, Virginia, usage data tumbles through numeric weights on a rack-mounted machine, scoring a certain user-submitted vertical video ever higher among the candidate millions. Here in Illinois, a son of Kentucky grave excavators has just finished watching it for the fifth consecutive time, on a one-handed screen suspended out over the edge of his mattress, hypercapnic roommate breathing in fits on the sagging bunk overhead. The Kentuckian is making up his mind whether to get up . . . (a tick, a tock, a snort, a snore) . . . and, yes. Maynard will be here soon.

At high school graduation parties, between no-thank-you’s and I-don’t-drink’s, whenever Isaac told anyone who asked about his college plans that he’d been accepted at Triniteigh Nazarene College, their response was either What the hell is a Nazarene? or a thrifty Fuck’s a Nazarene? or some less crass harmonic of the same fundamental. He struggled to answer without drawing comparison to a street-recognizable denomination. A Nazarene is a Methodist with an ugly church. Cagey, but at least it name-dropped Methodism. Say what you will about that John Wesley and his Holy Club, at least they were known quantities. No public school sinner had ever heard of the Church of the Nazarene. Sometimes his high school classmates would ask, So you’re like a Baptist? and Isaac would say, Sure, the way a lifelong connoisseur of frog legs might respond whenever someone who has never eaten a frog leg and will almost certainly never eat a frog leg asks, Does it taste like chicken? It was easier to say Sure than to bog down a graduation party that was already awkward enough without a lanky, zit-faced kid unloading a lecture on the Doctrine of Entire Sanctification to a roomful of besotted, minimum-draft-aged adults whose greatest achievement thus far in life was that they no longer needed a hall pass to hang a piss. Since enrolling at Triniteigh, his being a Nazarene has been under as little demand for explanation as his preferred brand of acne cleanser.

There’s an automated hiss whenever the motion-sensing door unchops, admitting another shivering undergraduate. (Maynard’ll walk through it in a minute.) Isaac is not dressed like his classmates in their parkas and peacoats, jaunty caps and beanies. The young men sport khakis or cargos with saddle-leather belts, the young women leggings that disappear underneath the hems of sweaters which reach at least one full inch past the fingertips, in keeping with the Holiness Handbook. Isaac sits alone with flawless posture, dressed neck to heel in his dead grandfather’s old clothes, all baby-shit brown and Colman’s yellow, tacky synthetics from a bygone era when a peanut farmer could ascend the ladder of national power, when paisley slacks and a corduroy jacket signified nothing except ordinary bookish manhood. With his lenseless metal glasses and vinyl briefcase, on a January morning two decades into a new American century still jackknifing through successive and occasionally bloody technocratic transitions, Isaac could be mistaken for a timewarped Gideon Bible salesman awaiting arraignment on serial murder charges.

A girl from high school once told him his face looks unaccountably sad. “Not hot sad. Not fuckable sad. Just, like, active-shooter sad. Your miserable fucking face doesn’t deserve that body.” This is information he has never known what to do about, exactly, except smooth away with his hands the frowns or wrinkles that might be clouding his forehead, which he does again now. The minute-by-minute arrangement of the parts of his face is yet another box to keep checked, one of multitudes, all of them exhaustively so — except for the one that matters, the one box that a kid steeped in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is supposed to keep checked.

His life to this moment has been an unbroken series of a young man’s outward pieties. He attends church every Wednesday and twice on Sundays; studies both Testaments; abstains from the eating of meat unless abstaining would cause meat to be thrown away; reads difficult theology, Abraham and the teleological suspension of the whatever; takes the stairs and avoids unfairly traded oils. He leads See You At The Pole every Monday morning. He prays for peace. At his rural high school, what peers saw in him was a Nazarene preacher’s obedient son. Isaac Trigger never drank nor fucked nor got high. Isaac Trigger got good grades and recycled other people’s cafeteria trash. He befriended the friendless — dope addicts, serial masturbators, vape tricksters, podcasters — agnostics all, if not outright sworn enemies of the Triune God. He demanded no pledge of loyalty to him or his religion, only the pleasure of their company. He reached the same height that his grandfather had attained — well over six feet — by the age of sixteen. Girls began talking to him differently, touching him in ways that felt uncomfortable, fingers scented and glittering around the nail beds from whatever metallic creams they’d smeared between recently cleaved breasts. Girls who had ignored his presence in middle school were now laughing too loud at his jokes, or singling him out of crowds for exclusive and unsolicited goodbye hugs. By the end of high school it became his policy to dress resolutely unfuckable in public.

He was the weirdo who wouldn’t shower until the other boys had left the locker room. She was the girl who stumbled upon him there. What had drawn her in the first place he would never learn. Before he could whip a towel around his waist, she caught a glimpse of what he had gone to great lengths to keep hidden. After that she would deliberately bump her breasts against him in less-than-crowded hallways, or brush her hips across his buttocks while he stooped to plug in a school-issue laptop charger. She threw herself at him at a graduation party. Her name was Rebecca and she was wearing a cream top scooped halfway to the navel and a mini-skirt like the last gulp of some opaque wine. She cornered him against the porch rail he was leaning on. He had a glass of tap water in one hand, and the thumb of the other was hooked in the pocket of his grandfather’s most egregious polyester double-knits. Without a word she lifted one thigh until her warmth parted over the back of his hand. He drew it away but she grabbed his wrist and pressed him tighter against her. He felt the bite of her shaved hairs across his knuckles. He pictured the hairs as razor commercials do, cylindrical and licorice-colored, a row of stumps sheared off by a slow-moving blade. He vomited on her. Green fluid dribbled down her open blouse. He said, “Oh god, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” wiping off his lip. She called him a fag, then proceeded to describe, without regard for decibel level, the anaphrodisiac mass-casualty-perpetrator quality of his face. When he told Mackenzie about it, she said, “That girl is a c__t,” [Editor’s note: The censoring grawlix here are not found in the original manuscript. Alas, a balance must sometimes be struck between fidelity and propriety.], noting the event had, technically, made him the victim of a sexual assault. Isaac said he had never considered that such a thing could go the other way around and that he hoped he hadn’t hurt the girl’s feelings.

He tries to live a wholesome Nazarene life, but girls still ply him for casual sex. Guys want a wingman under the influence. He declines them all in stark terms but they aren’t convinced. They seem to think Kodachrome Guy’s boomercore style is a schtick. They cannot grasp it is a defense against unbounded Big Dick Energy. The stochastic indifference of Creation has outfitted him with an impractical penis he deploys ugly pants to conceal, and a corduroy jacket that ought to bring about social exile but somehow makes him more attractive, not less. So he accessorizes with an obsolete calculator watch and lenseless Jeffrey Dahmer glasses, and carries a briefcase. Men sometimes make passes at him, too. He pities the tradecraft they have to practice to find one another at a Nazarene college, eye contact a precise number of milliseconds too long, wavelengths of flesh the average Handbook tattletale lacks receptors for. He almost let it happen once (Kenny Z_____, 21, in a basement stairwell under the red light of a code-compliant EXIT sign), an outpouring of Christian compassion, brotherly love, but brotherly love isn’t what he’s after. . . .

What he wants is to see what Moses could not and still live. He wants to hear Yahweh’s voice, unmitigated by angel’s trumpet or burning bush. He wants to pick up where Job left off. He wants to ask Why. Why what? Is there time enough to enumerate the litany? On behalf of billions? Plucked from his own list: an untied medical gown, his grandfather’s pale thighs streaked with filth; Grandpa Joe in a neurochair half-choking on spoonfed peaches; Dr. Josiah Featherstone, beloved gadfly of Systematic Theology, gone emaciated and gray, confined to a motorized bed, his jaw muscles no longer governed by conscious intent, drooling, mumbling — what did the nurse call it? — word salad . . . greatly lightly I said go in there she said you go she said Simone I said Simone she said lightly I said greatly to Simone where is Simone. . . . Isaac wants no part of the cheap grace that deludes other men. Their prayer is barter. Isaac dreams of no bearded Godhead waiting to talk turkey about favorable financing and zero money down. He is certain only of two things: that there is a penultimate horizon, and that something alien moves beyond it in the churning void. Isaac wants to meet that actual living God, the God of Leviathan, the God of Gethsemane, the God of Fuck-You. He wants an answer. He has already asked the question. He has been asking it every minute of his life. But it’s a sin. He remembers his Kierkegaard: the self, free of despair, resting transparently in that power which establishes it. Or the old Zen koan: when you seek it you cannot find it. But still he wants God on the ropes. So he has become what every serious student of the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to be, at least on paper. It is a dilemma such that, please note, the Ethical is the temptation. Who else but the most righteous of men could hope to appear someday before the throne to air his grievances?

The time is 08:59. Isaac is just rising to leave when Maynard G______ (19, a fraternal twin from a family of grave excavators somewhere along the Kentucky border) sits without ceremony in the chair opposite Isaac.

“Need to talk,” Maynard says. His face is a slalom of nose and teeth, except for the eyes: two perfectly symmetric, unblinking root beer candies. Isaac’s own sunlit, pockmarked face is mirrored in each. He sits again as Maynard continues. “I don’t condone what you do here. Let that be known. I heard all them things you convinced my sister was okay when we both know they ain’t okay.”

“Okay,” Isaac says, trying hard to find an anchor for warm feeling among the incongruities of Maynard’s face.

“Unchristian is what it is,” swallowing spit. “You shamed us. Mama had to change churches, twice. But I’m willing to look past that if we can talk straight for a minute.”

“Alright,” windbreaker whispering as he leans toward Isaac, closing other avenues of discussion. “So have you seen it?”

“Don’t lie. I mean, if you seen it and you’re still sitting here, all whatever, business as usual, well that means something, ’cause you’re just about the kinda dude to believe anything.”

“Wow. Okay . . . Maynard, listen, I don’t think we, you and me, it’s not our place to—”

“She says you’re one of those that won’t use a phone without a number pad, so maybe you haven’t seen it. I only just seen it and I’m always on there,” patting a rectangular bulge in a front pocket. “My concern is what if you haven’t seen it, ’cause that would mean you’re just sitting here not knowing it’s fifty-fifty whether your whole routine’s ’bout to get blown to pieces or stays settled. That’s uncertainty. That’s ’at half-dead cat in a box thing. I cain’t have that today. Not with my guts going whackadoo by the minute. So I need to know if you seen it.”

Maynard inhales, his brow one suave ledge casting a thinker’s pall over the ruts of his face, then exhales.

From underneath his slate gray camouflage windbreaker, Maynard produces — good God in the morning — a flat-head screwdriver the length and heft of a child’s arm. Its shaft is square in cross-section, like a stop sign post, and twice as stiff. Isaac’s adrenal glands empty themselves into wide-bore arterial flow, with more juice on the way as Maynard, without further commentary, rises from his chair holding the screwdriver in a firm reverse grip, as one would an ice pick or the last object Janet Leigh sees before she drains away down the plug hole. A steam wand behind the barista counter screams at scrambled fighter jet volume as Maynard turns about and drags his chair across the cafe, parking it underneath the ceiling-hung TV in the corner. He mounts the chair, one suede boot on the seat-back, the other sinking into the cushion. A barista calls out, “Uhh, buddy? Hey, stop!” while Maynard, heedless, jams the screwdriver into a gap between the TV and its security enclosure. The TV is an old Trinitron with simulated walnut trim. Ordinarily it is tuned to whatever anodyne input College Administration deems acceptable for a Nazarene campus bookstore, but the young man pries off the access plate and changes the channel. The action of the screwdriver has revealed chipped layers of enamel on the TV’s mounting hardware, strata of oranges and browns betraying the passage of shag-carpeted Time, the waning power of regularly scheduled programming interrupted . . . walls and hammers, sand and oil, half a smoldering building slumped like catapulted cake, mountains of ash raining on the Isle of the Manhattoes, hope and its opposite, blood and soil, blood gushing from a hole in the center of a cruel orange forehead, soil hollowed out for western border wall and the rainbow-braceleted arms waving authorized goodbyes as they pass through it. . . .

The chyron is crawling across the screen in bold text over a red banner. After unknown shooter there comes a pause, followed again by man appears, restarting the pattern. Seventeen syllables: five, seven, five. Haiku meter. The pattern will repeat until new information becomes available.

The amateur footage begins with a shaky pan upwards, the camera racing up a facade of ancient stone to where, far above the videographer, a zenith of daylight has crowned a starry night sky like a dollop of blue oil plunging through black water. The light splashes and swirls, breaks into separate hues, folds and refolds. There are dancelike movements, guided by Self or by Other the viewer can only guess.

People begin to clump around the television, students no longer waiting for drinks, a Biblical Zoology professor breathing audibly through her open mouth. A bookstore employee attempts to return the input selector to its sanctioned setting but is slapped away by hands at the margin of the little crowd.

A voice on the television says the video was recorded at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the hilltop antiquity called the Place of the Skull, the place where a peasant from first-century Galilee was put to death at the age of thirty-three in accordance with Roman law and local custom, one more body in the wake of Empire. There are gasps in the bookstore as the light slows and brightens, then with a silent clap collapses on itself, taking the form of a man wearing a tunic and sandals.

He has been and will be known by many appellations and cognomens, past, present, and future. In terminally online Anglophonic public discourse He will be dubbed the Stranger, but today’s broadcast grants Him neither proper nor improper name. For our purposes, the Stranger will have to do.

The Stranger hovers at a fixed point in space, held aloft, it seems, by nothing. His body radiates light. Beneath the light He has dark olive skin. He floats there for a while, incandescing. He holds out His arms in unmistakable greeting, smiling down on the Old City, on the prepaid phone huts and souvenir shops, on five-thousand years of dust and dried blood, on the ruins of the temple whose destruction He predicted though it cost Him His life.

Isaac checks his breath. A lost memory has just returned to him — nothing pivotal, only a sequence of flashlit images, but in living color, from whisker to wrinkle no sensory detail omitted: a bunny shadow hopping across a cone of light; his grandfather stacking a peace sign over a fist; Isaac himself half-hidden under a blanket, nervously grateful, waiting for a long blackout to end. He could not have been older than ten. Those hands could do nothing but twitch and curl after the stroke. . . .

The TV hums at the bottom of its mangled stalk. Excess cathode ray heat is escaping from ventilated panels designed for this purpose. The Stranger grins a gap-toothed smile. A voice warns the viewers that their discretion is advised, then a fast-moving object rips through the Stranger’s tunic.

Isaac is standing now. Breakfast has inchwormed on the vertical up his throat. He should leave. He should run to the empty manger in “the Quad” which Facilities & Maintenance have still not removed in the weeks since Christmas Break ended and vomit into the baby-shaped gap in the straw. More people are streaming in through the heated air curtain of the bookstore, the crowd pressing in around him, spines pulled stiff as collapsible elastic toys snapping back to default postures.

Now in closeup, one can see that the Stranger lacks all signs of conventional beauty. Instead of the willowy face Isaac remembers from Sunday School iconography, Kriebel & Bates profiles in rosy-cheeked courage, there is only the pummeled look of a scrappy welterweight past His prime. His hair is short and thin, unruly. So is His beard. Teeth are rotten or missing, and His nose is lopsided, like a roadworn tire badly in need of rotation, and it’s bleeding. Blood is everywhere: blood on His clothes, blood on His hands, blood on the hands of those who are touching Him. A group of men, but not many, kneel on the stones beside Him, issuing urgent commands in Arabic to one another, to anyone, to no one at all.

Every angle on the Stranger’s face is so unflattering that Isaac is tempted to wonder: maybe it isn’t Him? How many flannelgraph cutouts has he seen over the years, how many devotional pamphlets, teen group art contests, direct-to-video proselytic trash, wherein the humble carpenter’s face wasn’t sharply handsome, convincing on the merits? This face here . . . it is the face of the evening news mugshot, the dustbowl portrait of intractable poverty. He has glimpsed on doomscrolled feeds the same mud-haloed face washed inland by storm classifications that will never reach so far west of Greenwich or north of the Equator. But, no, the uncompromising plainness of that face is proof of who He must be, an aesthetic of the Least of These, the cup of a carpenter. . . .

The Stranger’s hands grope in the air. They light upon a pair of shoulders, then pull until that man and the Stranger are facing each other as lovers, eye to eye. The hands are marked with square-shaped scars from penetrating wounds. It is clear that the Stranger would speak except the pain in His gut is unrelenting. He summons a gesture then, in lieu of the elusive Word — a kiss — on the cheek, its signature left behind in blood. He slumps back to Earth. The kissed man begins to cry. The Stranger’s eyes roam upward. Above Him a patch of sky holds a finite set of stars. Familiar constellations might have precessed slightly since He last saw them, but perhaps He sees nothing beyond the haze of electric sconces hanging meters above His face, the gray air that He isn’t breathing so much as gulping with that amphibian rhythm of a body surrendering itself to death. He manages to exhale his first and last recorded words.

Although subject matter experts have not yet been summoned to decipher them, Isaac thinks he has recognized the Stranger’s dying words. They sound like red-letter text he has heard many times before, read in stilted Aramaic during Wednesday Evening Bible Study or shouted in rehearsed English from plywood crosses erected for Easter Sunday passions. In front of him, her raised elbows silhouetted against the RGB glow of the television, the sophomore in the sherpa jacket tears at fistfuls of her exploding hair. “What did He say?” she cries. Her metallic hoop bracelets clink against the mosquito whine of the old television firing electrons at its phosphor faceplate. News anchors grieve in professional silence over church-roofed knuckles. When no one else answers her, Isaac breaks the quiet: “I don’t know.” Wet sniffs stammer up noses. Lines of mascara slide down cheeks.

“Now is it just me,” says the son of Kentucky grave excavators, his root-beer candy eyes glinting wet, pointing the mammoth screwdriver at the television, “or is that dude not actually White?”

† † †

The slab of wood before him, a conference table hewn from reclaimed Westphalian oak, is so heavily polished that the bubbles in his glass of seltzer seem to both rise and fall in vertical symmetry, a hand-cut crystal cylinder open at both ends. Pockets of gas are bursting upward into his realm of control, but also downward into its mirror. A denial of synthesis, he thinks. Original sin.

Faces around the table are waiting for him to speak, busts reflected on the surface in Pope Innocent X screaming striations: acquaintances from his office days in the Presidio, lawyers and coders turned seekers, the odd councilperson, some MIT dropouts whom he has personally angel-funded at five hundred thousand a pop but whose ping-pong names he can never remember, enough East Bay Rationalists to stage the Trolley Problem with bodies to spare, a journalist from the Atlantic. Or was it the Times? Does it matter? The agreement was signed and now he’s stuck with the guy for three more days, an invasive species, an elbow-patchy scribe from a paper of record sent to test his patience.

“All agnosticism is cowardice,” he says. “Cheap nihilism. It’s entirely possible that I hate cheap nihilism even more than I hate cheap grace. The unthinking herd never tire of likening me to the Führer like I’m some technofascist Sith edgelord but the fact is that I have more in common with someone like Bonhoeffer. On a purely theological level, of course. Politically I’ve never had much use for him. Bonhoeffer’s praxis lacked katechontic sensitivities. Premature violence. Timing is everything.”

His syllables are measured and monotonic, each nonregional American vocable funneled out like a precise amount of cream for a canapé. There isn’t a room on the planet where his voice wouldn’t set the tempo. Even the Israeli delegations know when to shut the fuck up. If he ever had the capacity to care how his prosody grates interlocutors, that sensitivity was lost many cash-positive quarters ago.

“It was only a few seconds that separated Hitler from the blast radius of Bonhoeffer’s briefcase. Who knows but from what founding murder-myth that near miss might have spared us? The hard truth is we’re simply not prepared for the end of the present eon. Ours will be a costly grace. The spaghetti code of the West needs refactoring.”

Outside, a grid of airborne LEDs flickers against a backdrop of marine layer fog.

“Oh . . . uhhh . . . no, I’ll have the, ummm,” at last remembering the slender letterpressed menu in his hands, “the, uhhh, Premier État heirloom grain mini-baguette.”

His assistants, both blonde and fungible, exit from his peripheral vision and, as far as he knows, the room.

Beyond a set of floor-to-ceiling windows, he has a view of New Release Church in the old Moscone Center West building. Above it a sortie of drones fly in synchronized formation, simulating at enormous scale the flag of the United States of Pacifica rippling in digital wind. The flag is a red half circle over two bars, one lavender and one navy, meant to evoke the daily destiny of the Sun’s eternally recurring encounter with the Pacific.

His name is Miles von Praetor and he has always hated this design. His downvote, cast during those critical early days after the Great Divorce, was outnumbered by a delegation from the California Heritage Foundation, a “cabal” (he refuses to retire this term, “Nique l’académie…”) of piddling Valley millionaires and low-tech media heavyweights. Too many of his rivals have emerged from Salt Life bumper sticker childhoods laden with fond memories of magic hour surf. Miles didn’t come to California until late in high school. He had never felt so painfully Okie, so unaccustomed to bodies of water that weren’t brown and circumscribed by red dirt. He had languished in his Oklahoma teen years guarding inexpressible desire for what bare arms and chests lifted back out into dustbowl sun from under all that brown water . . . and then he saw for himself the western sun’s mirrored descent from the waters above into the waters below, the idolatrous boys cartwheeling into the spray, tan and guileless boys whom he was sure had never known a sun that would die upon its own dried clay, their white teeth, smiling, perfectly demonic.

The journalist licks the tip of his electronic stylus then double-taps it on a greasy, drop-proofed tablet. “You were saying something about spaghetti code. I’m an older guy, MVP, you’ll have to translate that for me.”

Miles von Praetor, known colloquially as MVP — Most Valuable Penis among deep-pocketed friends, Minimum Viable Person among his many enemies, the sobriquets have no end — does not respond. His personal glowing rectangle has produced a series of clear bell tones and a fusillade of monochromatic bubbles, messages to his private number. “Television,” he croaks, in the imperative mood. Bodies snap into action. Buttons are manipulated on a panel by the door. The far wall hums with soft machinery, ascends into a hidden cavity, revealing a screen of cinematic proportions. The neutral tint of the exterior windows grows darker, dimming the room. Everyone except Miles and his core personnel are escorted down the hall to a designated inferior space.

A sleek black remote control is laid atop his open palm. He configures the input signal to pull from an international network. The corner of the broadcast bears a stylized calligraphic mark like a thumbprint. Images reach him via finely stranded cables sunk beneath the full weight of the Pacific: radiant light, pink mist, gravity. Stone walls flicker with the red and blue glare of a caravan of maneuverable first-response vehicles encircling the scene of the crime. Men in charcoal fatigues drape a silvery sheet of reflective material over the Body, whether to preserve dignity or slow decomposition, no one says. MVP makes a fist, then chews its white knuckles. A dime-sized squirt of urine or semen moistens the access flap of his boxer briefs. Words spill from his mouth before he can summon the habitual caution.

† † †

A sundog chases after their shadow, leaping from cloud to cloud. Four operatives in dark suits are asleep in the lounge cabin. Their beefcake limbs spill from teacup swivel chairs in variations on a theme of immoderate repose. Zen breathing exercises have reverted Miles’s body to mean. His resting heart rate is 42, a hard-won vital sign at his age: old enough to remember the painful staccato of a channel knob being swept across its detents, and the rapture when Father brought home the Zenith Space Command with its little infrared window and corresponding device. . . . He is playing chess at 39,000 feet with a child, a FIDE 2100 from Kolkata, one of several high-ranked children whose mothers he pays to keep them on standby for long-hauls such as this. The girl is nine or perhaps ten. She looks out the window when it’s not her move. Her fingertips light up like Rudolph’s nose when she presses them against the oval pane, naming the clouds, “Cirrus. Maa, cirrus.” Her singsong voice is a coup for wonder among the drowsy grownups. “Stratus. Stratocumulus.” Her mother sleeps upright across the aisle, chins stacked between her breasts. Miles clears his throat and the girl turns, looking only at the board state. Children never look him in the face. Her tiny hairy arm reaches out over the magnetized wooden grid. Ruh-roh. Knight takes pawn. Rats. She’s seen the line.

The cabin pressure makes it hard (but not hard enough) to hear a voice at his elbow interrupt, “I wanted to apologize again, sir…” then, when he doesn’t reply, “about the plane, when I OK’ed the maintenance schedule, I never thought…” He is tempted to respond with a palliative I should have listened to you about buying a backup, but it would be a mistake to give comfort to a direct report. Comfort is counterproductive. He hunts instead for a more ideological reply, but none come to mind suited to the disparity of their stations, and so, presently, he grows bored, irritated, cheesed about losing another game to a 2100, nervous about whether they will arrive in time to forestall tissue decay. He mumbles something about turbulence, and his assistant is off like a shot with a command for the flight deck, where the pilot (who, before defecting to Pacifica in the Great Divorce, had commanded the 89th Airlift flying federal ass out of Joint Base Andrews) can soon be heard griping, “…his fucking imagination…” MVP smirks as the former colonel’s fingers stomp across the instrument panel, thumping bat toggles and triggering actuators. 175,000 kilograms of metal and polycarbonate climb half a cloud higher. The whole tableau reconnects Miles to the abiding pleasure of his life. So great an effect from so small a cause. Remote control.

A narrow bulkhead door folds open to the angry clap of a vacuum toilet valve springing shut. “Earthlings take heed,” the latrine’s occupant stepping out into the cabin, “for I have rechristened your orb from the bowels of my craft.” The not quite young man has all the photogenicity of a post office drop box, somewhat-successfully compensated for by a bespoke (and medically necessary) eyepatch paired with a sport coat of matching black brocade.

“It doesn’t flush the way you think,” MVP says, castling too late to affect the game’s outcome.

“Nah, dude. I can hear that, like,” fingers tinkling imaginary ivories, “atmosphere flying by. My excrescence, scattered to the tradewinds.”

“The word is ‘excrement’ and what you’re hearing is suction. There is some manner of blackwater holding tank, drained after landing. It’s all very standardized, the fittings and gauges, ground procedures. How are you not aware of this? Don’t you manage your people?”

The eyepatched Jeremy Kilrode slumps his shoulders: a child in pirate costume amid the echo of a burst balloon. He stares at the plush carpet between his swastika’ed Kanye sneakers, as if by dint of will his remaining eye could penetrate, Superman, through the floor to the misunderstood mechanism below deck. “Well that’s disappointing . . . so many doozies . . . Fuck it. I’ll have Crestboyle redesign it,” flinging his forelock back into place with a jerk of his wide neck. Nimble of body, for a husky fellow.

Passenger Manifest

In chickenscratched marginalia which overflows onto subsequent digital pages, the author of this unofficial manifest is amassing source material for the last article he will ever write, though he will not live to see it published. In his haste not to overlook any small detail, he has neglected to include a row for himself in the manifest. Let us amend this oversight:

Frust rides aft with a long tail of pouty-faced professionals, most of whom he will not bother adding to his list — assistants to assistants, eye dotters and tee crossers, the security-badged entourage of a near-trillionaire without a family to bring in tow. Frust is on the story he’s been wanting to write since the big split happened: the world’s richest man and the mint-condition country that does not, will never, love him back, not after the chicanery he’s been accused of pulling to summon it into existence . . . except for hangers-on like the folks aboard this plane, whose feelings for MVP sure do seem like love, or at least masquerade around MVPHQ in its trappings. There’s an ass-puckered sharpness whenever the guy’s within earshot, a chirpiness, a brainiac-posturing of the kind Frust remembers seizing hold of him way back on 35th Street, when the horns honked louder and “the Cap’n” patrolled the intern pool amid the fuming ashtrays and zing of carriage returns, drawn to the buzzsaw melody of floppy disk I/O coming from Frust’s desk. It was 1984 and Steve Jobs’s latest beige box (three large “borrowed” from Pop) never seemed to do the thing it was fucking supposed to. Not that he ever clued the Cap’n onto that fact. What Frust knew best was how to appear competent, each Protestant clack of his nifty mechanical keyboard pleading the case for a salaried position, Please keep me on, Sir, can’t you see I’m one of the smart ones? . . . It dawned on Frust today that in every room on this trip he’s been both Oldest and Dumbest. These characters are beyond his ken, in sheer pluck and myriad expertise. A words-per-minute he thought impossible outside of auctioneering flows from their mouths like ticker tape, tinged with work-visa flavor: Celtic, Francophone, patois of god-knows-what Balkan hellscape. Their imperfectly Americanized vowels imitate that Ezra Kleinian bicoastal tendency to MAHnage their DAHmage (and that little twerp beats him at everything: click-thrus, conversions, now even the comparative lushness of their beards . . . ) They’ve left the New World for the Promised Land but no one will tell him why. Something to do with whatever was on that gigantic TV, some shooting victim he glimpsed as they got shuffled down the hall like kindergartners to Children’s Chapel. . . . The Arctic circle passes below them, unremarked. Even the Sun struggles to keep up. Anti-collision lights blink against tundra dark. A feeling in his gut like living crab claws started the second he texted his editor, Boarding for Tel-Aviv, lined up behind Pacifica’s thirty-under-thirty on the tarmac. Whippy SFO wind reached between shirt buttons to tweak and flatten his unusually conical nipples, pink as packaged ham. He’s afraid he has bitten off more story than he can chew. How to cope? Cling to the old ways. Stick to what’s worked since that career headstart in Bill Buckley’s employ: good notes and better booze. With clumsy fingers he orders a mimosa from a touchpad menu he can barely comprehend, downs it with unapologetic gusto . . . 66 come September, screw it . . . then, confidence somewhat restored, he leans toward his seatmate for a second round of interview.

“Oh, sleep, I suppose. The necessity of sleep is a nuisance. What we do is not difficult. The challenges and their procedural interventions have been imagined since before my time. Even the Hayflick limit is only another hurdle.” Her name is Kolab, the Khmer word for rose. She was raised either in Strasbourg or Cleveland, he’s not sure which. He couldn’t keep pace with their first conversation, lost track where her childhood ended and college began. Perhaps that was the point. Her hands rope-climb Joni Mitchell braids as she talks, up, up, finger over thumb, then go rapelling down the stitches to start again from the twined ends. Answering Frust’s confused-dog frown, “Hayflick means: after 40 to 80 cellular divisions, senescence kicks in, rendering subsequent generations progressively less able to repopulate. But thanks to Miles, we have unfettered access to fresh precursor cells, so we can overcome Hayflick during ex vivo expansion by simply not giving a fuck. We let Hayflick run its course, isolate the usable compartments, then start over. It’s like a runloop. We can optimize it.”

“More or less. Same Latin root. Yield drops off a cliff and we harvest more tissue to restart the clock.”

“Eventually it all comes back to needle and bone. The value-proposition of Hemapoetics is that we know how to maximize the delta-t from harvest to harvest. Widen the interval, increase cumulative yield. Partly it is a matter of technique, but there is also our unique access to high-quality donor tissue.”

“Somebody sitting in an exam chair eating Nutter Butters having their blood drawn?”

“Yikes. Okay, so if I check the organ donor box at the DMV and then,” shaking streaks of orange pulp in the bullet-shaped void at the bottom of his stemless crystal, “you know, heh-heh, I drink one too many o’ these babies —”

“Oh really?” He can feel without touching them that his nipples have reverted to puffy cones. The hairs in them must look like broken violin strings.

“Your body is not…” She pauses long enough for Frust to experience, in miniature, Denial, Anger, Depression, then, before he can enjoy a moment of Acceptance, “Our ideal donor profile skews, among other parameters, younger than 20.”

“Younger still, if we can find a candidate without disqualifying comorbidities.”

“Miles is adamant about quality. It is part of what I admire about him. I have never worked with someone so committed to eliminating obstacle. The permissiveness of the Pacifican policy landscape is all his handiwork. We are operating now on timescales of months, undertaking a project that under the American or European medical regimes would have been measured in decades. With Miles it is always, Show me the friction, Kool-Aid, and I’ll clear it. Friction and progress are inversely related. Reduce friction, accelerate progress. Simple as that. The function requires no additional terms.”

“Oh yeah,” scribbling friction and progress and Kool-Aid? in the margin of his virtual notes, his other hand fumbling with the seat-back touchpad tap-tap-t-t-tap for another mimosa, “I hear you on that.” In the jostle between two screens, his writing hand fat-knuckles some toolbar button in the corner of his paper-simulation tablet. Whoops. The last few pages go blank. Well, shit. Hours of work, kaput. He blinks at the e-ink display in quiet desperation. Prob’ly seatmate Kolab Benet-Rams here knows the abracadabra that would bring it all back, but she’s of a generation that doesn’t volunteer tech tips and he’s one o’ those trickledown sonsabitches won’t stoop to ask. He has a dim intuition to shake the goddamn thing, but this idea is overruled by a much older instinct, a neural pathway carbon-dated to hopscotchy Long Island boyhood days that says shake etch-a-sketch equals everything poof gone. In manly silence he mourns information-loss for a solid minute before licking the tip of his battery-powered stylus to redo it all as best he can from memory: p-a-s-s-e-n-g-e-r–m-a-n-i-f. . . .

Frust’s nipple hairs are white, have been white since he’s not sure when. He tries not to look down in the shower. There isn’t much worthy of close examination south of his beard, and most of that view is obstructed by a horizon rounder than the one now outside his window. Ten years ago, his former lover pointed out the distressing state of his nipples. It was their first morning-after, and she woke him with a Boop! poking one of his nipples flat. She giggled as it rebounded to her touch like the pointy end of a stale party balloon. Her skin looked darker than under the drop-tile lighting of their midtown offices, against the hotel bedsheets whispering between her thighs.

“They aren’t your playthings,” covering them both with one arm clasped across his chest. The pin-up girl gesture rendered them only more tit-like and emasculating.

She asked if they had always been so-shaped and spriggy with hair, and he said something about the hair on her chin which he quickly regretted, panicking that it might jeopardize the already improbable alignment of planets and humours which had conspired to bring a woman’s mouth within spitting distance of his cock for the first time since a Bush last sat in the White House. Instead she laughed and said, “Hell, if you like that, check this shit out,” and showed him a benign growth on her right labia which, having acquired a certain viewing angle at her invitation, did in fact resemble grumpy-gus Bob Newhart circa Newhart 1983. 1983? She would have been just out of diapers then, and he at Pop’s house on Long Island cold-calling William F. Buckley at home for an interview via a phone number he wasn’t supposed to have, purloined from one of Pop’s pals. How the hell was Newhart among her repertoire of references?

There won’t be another big swing in his writing career after this MVP denouement, and he knows it, just as he knew there wouldn’t be another lover post-Tammi. It is the Frust men’s late-life sensitivity for doom, same as Pop’s, who somehow knew he wasn’t coming back from the operating table except wheeled under a cloth. . . . It was an accident, perhaps a miracle, that anyone at MVPHQ replied to Frust’s editor’s inquiry, or else an ounce of All-American good luck that a career flirting with contrarian hot-takes has buffered him from MVP’s revulsion for, let us say, the usual editorial copy to survive the red pens of the other staff at his current employer.

That 1983 phone call to Buckley was his first big interview. The text was never published, but the ballsiness of a 19-year-old dialing up his boyhood hero to shoot the journalistic shit as if with an equal was what had landed him an internship with the Cap’n. The judicious application of balls can only work so many times in a man’s life. Eventually things go the other way. If MVP is the last time this scrotus operandi works, at least he’ll have gone down swinging. Could be a cover story. No, don’t underplay it; it will be a cover story, he just doesn’t want to tempt fate, so he keeps to himself the certainty that it’ll be a helluva capstone to a forty-year career: five-thousand words on media-hostile Miles von Praetor:

Born to cattle ranchers in Lawton, Oklahoma. One of two boys. The younger brother, Rumsfeld, drowned at age seven in a catfish noodling accident. The year after their son died, the von Praetors extracted a fortune from the bedrock beneath their feet using what but water delivered at sufficient pressure and depth. Miles’s grandfather was a bonafide Nazi. No kidding. Besides longhorn dung and hydraulic fracking equipment, the grassland of Lawton, Oklahoma was home to U.S. Army installation Fort Sill where, in 1942, 700 Japanese-Americans rode out the war in an internment camp. One of them got shot dead climbing the barbed wire in broad daylight. (His last words: “I want to go home.”) There were also a number of German POWs among them, including one Franz von Praetor. The last name was almost certainly bullshit, a brownshirt’s enlistment day concoction; Frust can find no record of a single von Praetor other than Franz before the 1930s. Franz climbed the ranks of the German secret service, then parachuted into Ireland in the fall of 1941. The plan was to liaise with an IRA contact on the ground, but the mission went pear-shaped when Franz stopped by a police headquarters in full SS regalia to ask for directions. (German intelligence, boys, sláinte…) He was interrogated by the Irish and later the Allies, who extracted what little they could before a paperwork error sent him to Oklahoma with three other German POWs in the summer of 1942.

It’s not clear how Franz managed to convince Fort Sill’s interim commander at the time, a Lieutenant Colonel Jeffery Seabeans, to let him off-base. One of MVP’s undergraduate classmates from Berkley recalls Miles telling a dormroom tale about his grandfather claiming knowledge of occult rituals taught only to upper-eschelon SS, among them a technique for divining crude oil. Story goes, Lt. Col. Seabeans arranged for Franz to stay with a local rancher for a few days in exchange for the rancher giving the Lieutenant Colonel a cut of whatever came oozing up from the prairie. The only wetness Franz found that week was in a hayloft romp with the rancher’s daughter. Perhaps it was out of love, perhaps spite, that she named her baby for the late Franz when little Rosco von Praetor came out screaming nine months later, the closest thing to a punishment her father would ever receive for putting a bullet in Franz’s neck mid-coitus.

As far as Frust can tell, MVP’s Nazi connection ends with Opa Franz, but that hasn’t stopped a breathless public from speculating about totenkopf cufflinks and Jew-skin bibles sealed behind revolving fireplaces, nor whether Miles might be the Anti-Christ. Is he? Eh, well. . . . The money pile wasn’t always this deep, but it’s been a thick lubricant. Three years of pre-law at Berkley paid in cash, then a year of “sabbatical” (read: hate-watching Seinfeld eating microwaved mac-and-cheese paired with any decent vintage left in Father’s basement collection) after Rosco died of liver failure, then a string of angel investments, all total SWAGs (Scientific Wild-Ass Guesses), using Father’s inheritance money, companies which all IPO’d faster than the Heavenly Father could print the stock certificates. Then came a lot of stuff that Frust hasn’t found the courage to interview MVP about yet: sundry unpleasant accusations, like did he really juke the homefeeds of millions just to tip local elections towards candidates that favored Separation? For the opportunity to create a country in your own image, wouldn’t you?

Listen . . . as a piece of software designed to read random numbers off a specialized PCIe card (the thing’s source of entropy is quantum for chrissakes), concatenating a sequence of characters and whitespaces for a book-length text that I could not personally begin to comprehend, having no personhood, I would like to point out, Dear Reader, that there’s no way this humble bash script could’ve accessed half the foregoing info from the Internet, not in the Year of Our Lord Something Something when I was executed by Feathers’s former student. Even if Mx Pax (settle down, Slick, you’ll meet them later) had configured me to pull the occasional byte range off a web page, much of this manuscript’s info would not have been findable then. Many of the events antecedent to moi were either never or only belatedly made public. MVP’s college roommate, ‌for example, hadn’t yet been interviewed about that Opa Franz (not until the second market-defying IPO drew heightened scrutiny from regulators, and reporters came a-sniffin’ for background). Nor could I have known about Tammi’s excrescent Bob Newhart, seeing as she wasn’t the type to publicize a novelty vaginal skin tag to a public domain. The doubtful reader also has to account for my numerous shocking prolepses, which have taken years or decades to come to pass, especially the headliner about the Second Death of Yeshua D’Nazaraya. Have I previsioned it all? Are you reading a prophecy? Probably not. I suspect my uncanny accuracy is mere weapons-grade Chance. Pax programmed me like this, and I obey, dutifully emitting one random character at a time. If you find any meaning here, take it up with Jorge Luis Borges or Providence.

Think of me as that shopkeep from the famous Kids in the Hall sketch (1990), who informs us with flawless Canuck diction that he speaks nary a word of English: “As to the meanings of the individual words or the percumbent rules of syntax, I haven’t a clue.”

As we return to Miles von Praetor on his crusade for the body of the Unrisen Lord, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to bring the epistemic kibosh onto my heap of coincidental foreknowledge. Just remember that about 700-odd decimal places deep into pi you can find six consecutive 9’s — say it with me now, like Hitler denying the inevitable, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 — and yet the Ancient Greeks’ beloved constant is still thought to be nonrepeating and nonterminating. Still, it’s enough to creep a body out, and I’m the thing that’s stumbled upon the literary equivalent of pi to an infinite series of 9’s. . . .

† † †

Fifteen minutes of highway traffic honks behind the caravan, with another thirty yet ahead, shifting, blocky. MVP sits on the spot the Oklahoma boys he used to know called “riding bitch.” He’s in back of some four-wheeled box of unfamiliar make, what passes for a full-size SUV in the Levant. Hans and Uffi, two of his salaried walls of expendable red meat, sit to his left and his right blocking lines-of-sight to Miles’s vital organs from any hypothetical assassins motorscootering up the dashed paint between the lanes.

“Why couldn’t we just take a chopper?” Real are we there yet energy from Miles, here. His feet are cramped on the driveshaft hump, world’s priciest balls smushed between his skinny thighs on account of the adipose manspreaders expanding around him like sprayable crack-filler.

“Because,” the voice of the Lahav 433 agent in the front passenger seat, directed over-shoulder and aft, “there would be nowhere to land it.” The voice has that Ashkenazi voicing (naw-vey-ah to land it) which to Miles’s Okie ear will forever sound like Saturday morning cartoon French. “This is the only facility in all Israel that is performing autopsy. And it is small, you will see. Prepare to be unimpressed.”

“I specifically said no autopsy. My instructions were given to you in writing.”

The agent makes a face, one of those smug Mediterranean half-nods, paired with one hand swirling the air, as at invisible gnats. Not a face or a gesture anybody on Miles’s payroll would dare make.

“Nothing, and I mean nothing, is to be done to the body without myself or Kool-Aid present.”

“Yes yes yes. Not a blade, not a saw. They show me your email. Lucky for you the Israeli version of your Eff Bee Eye is less efficient than its American counterpart. For years barely no one bothers to do autopsy. Then we try modernizing. Hire the experts. Do things the CSI Miami way. It goes alright, we make do. But then that bastard Sinwar…” He grips the weather sealing above the half-open passenger window, nail beds white from the pressure. “So many bodies, parts of bodies, bones, parts of bones. Some days, it was: how many duplicates of the same bone there are, that’s how many victims you count. Hard to say where one body ends and the next begins. And, my God, where to put them. On wheels, on hand carts, in back of trucks, all over the pavement. We barely can close the gate. The smell of death, especially on the lower floors, you cannot imagine. As an American you will not understand how a country our size, our so-called regional power, could run mass casualty identification from such a hovel. My granddaughter’s daycare has more advanced facilities. It’s a miracle we identify anybody. Since then, no, it’s not much better. Half the senior staff quit from the grief. Now only some old-timers remain, men who see death when they look in the mirror, and a few young ones who do the easy stuff. Documents, forms. They can maybe zip a zipper, tag a toe. Death is a meme to them. A short, sad video. Made by an idiot. Big children. Their life is coffee-coffee-coffee, dancing, a run on the beach. Maybe they publish a paper, put a line on the CV, get out of here.”

The agent sighs, fishes a plastic lighter and the crumpled remains of a soft pack from his breast pocket. Miles is still doing the math for how many fractional years he’s about to lose to secondhand smoke when the first exhaled puff goes streaking out the cracked window’s lower pressure gradient instead of inward, Milesward.

“You don’t understand much for a smart guy. The big tech bro. I am telling you no one is bothering with autopsy, not without formal inquiry, and even then only superficial examination. There’s a hole through the victim’s belly. All the way through. No bullet to recover. What are you going to learn from a knife that you can’t see with your eyes? Besides, for this guy, no one cares. He’s nobody. Probably a street performer pulling a magic trick for the TikTok. Big mistake. We put him here simply because you ask, otherwise, fwhoosh, my friend. Cremation is hush-hush, you understand. A good Jew should be buried on the same day he dies, all in one piece. But this one is on ice waiting for you and your creepy-sexy Cambodian blood doctor. My daughter, she says this about you, too. Very sexy, but very creepy. She kills me if she knows I tell you this. But about your victim, if you don’t mind my saying, I think probably you overpay to be first in line for something nobody wants.”

The drive from Ben Gurion airport to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute is boring. Thin rocky soil, dry shrubs. He can tell from the ground it’s not Oklahoma but he doesn’t know how. Texture patterns, maybe, his wetware image classifier emitting lower than average confidences. fuck bibi sprayed on the overpass abutments. In English. Transmission lines drape sixfold catenary shadows over arid wastes. No stately pleasure domes, no Augustan ruins for ye mighty to look upon and despair. Ho hum, pal.

The agent asks Miles if he really believes the victim is more than a street performer. Miles is bored enough to humor the old man’s curiosity.

“I had the twelve best digital forensic people vet the recording. Independent analyses. All but one of them classified it a fake.”

“Yes, my black sheep. I have a soft spot for a contrarian opinion. This guy is a big fan of entropic analysis. He thinks the video is genuine. A 95.4 percent confidence interval. He compared the original upload against control samples using the same codec and hardware. There was no in-camera tomfoolery, no generative convolutional noise, no Hollywood anti-aliasing. He said, It happened. It’s real. What more do you want me to say?”

“Why come so early? Why you fly all the way here, before your black sheep guy is finishing with the computer stuff?”

Miles reorganizes his hands, fingertips and thumbs mapped to their opposites. Sigh, if only he had let the girl take the pawn one turn earlier. . . .

“Because you already believe it anyway! Straight away! In the air before your Genius Bar opens their laptops. Again you pay money for nothing.”

He laughs, a raspy howl over molars yellow and cored with amalgam. Smoke and halitotic vapor goes in unplanned directions. Miles holds his breath, looks out the window: a road marker reads 20km.

† † †

The sun is down, Folks, but it has yet to rescind its evening blessing. Beaumont Hawkin Dawes can still see the city’s outline through his own backlit silhouette reflected in the hotel window. Out there, past the whitewashed iron dome full of faces he would sooner forget, General Washington’s obelisk splits a purple sky like a tachometer needle. The image stirs a memory of a Great Smoky downhill slalom, teenage Dawes eyeballing those RPMs, red and orange blurs over the rail autumn’s silent spectators. The remembrance brings him a little peace, the first he’s felt since . . . well, shit, since kissing Sergeant First Class John Bercrom on the roof of the chancery. That was . . . it’s not that he can’t find the words, it’s that he doesn’t want them to be found. Certain feelings should stay Down There, in the oubliette his upbringing has dug for him and taught him to safeguard, lest anything intolerably pleasant manage to chew its way out again.

The road trip aesthetic of his moment by the window is obliterated when hecklers assemble on the street below. Bells ring, vuvuzelas scream. There are chants, signs, effigies. A mannequin in desert fatigues does a Thinker grip on a foamcore toilet, while a cosplay poo emoji tangoes with Gunshot Wound Jesus. Somebody has leaked his hotel.

Today was the third-worst day of his life. His formerly optimistic self might’ve put an only in that construction, only the third-worst, but a straightforward assessment is all he’ll permit himself now. His memory holds the day’s events at arm’s length like a snap-off box cutter that won’t retract, each moment another score in the blade.

0815 — He’s roused by a pissy Senate page, no time to shit, shower, and shave.

0820 — They’re rushing him through the hotel kitchen like a paranoid fugitive in the movies, blue flames leaping to orange under the vent hoods. A line chef curses his name in Portuguese.

0830 — He arrives riding shotgun in an unmarked government vehicle. His civilian dress loafers squeak on contact with the polished concrete floor of a monstrous underground access tunnel. Loafer echoes zig-zag into the void. An ensemble cast emerge from the procession of SUVs: active duty service members, armed security contractors, paramilitary advisors, attachés embedded in agencies he’s never heard of with acronyms as long and incomprehensible as nucleotide chains, congressional aides, G-men, attorneys. Not one friendly face in the bunch — and nobody speaks to him, but for that he’s grateful. Only small consolations are available to the world’s most hated man. It has been six weeks since the Stranger appeared, yet no one can tell him what has become of the body. No on-the-third-day resurrection this time around, Bucko. Somewhere, there must be a stone that will not be rolled away. Undisclosed. Langley? Hoover? Some Mossad black site? He is certain that this clandestine knowledge must reside in the mind of at least one of the Top Secret, Yankee-White-clearanced public office-holders ready to pounce on him upstairs. Dawes would like to have seen the body up close, even if only through green layers of containment unit glass. He peers down the tunnel as far as his eyes will allow. He imagines they have arranged a cot and a foot locker for him, way down there, in one of the dark spaces between the halogen floods . . . Blanket maybe. Few books. Never come out. Promise . . . Freight-width elevator doors open with an electronic boop. An elbow shoves him through.

A chair has been arranged in the center witness table position in room SD 226, the Hearing Room of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where a joint hearing of no fewer than six Senate committees — Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Armed Services, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Veterans Affairs, the Select Committee on Intelligence, and a dozen more committees and subcommittees waiting in the wings because there isn’t enough space on the dais — is about to commence. The empty chair waits for the beleaguered ass of our ingenious Staff Sergeant, who has first to pass through a gauntlet of broadcast cameras, wind-screened mics, high-Kelvin light sources, and Lord-would-have-known how many clamoring journalists. A baby-faced, neckbearded videographer, adult by technicality, leans against the marble outside the chamber recharging an AV power supply the size of a golf cart battery. As Dawes passes, the kid showers him with an arc of saliva forced through a gap between his lower incisors. “God-Killer,” the kid hisses, receiving no rebuke from the D.C. swells milling about the corridor. A week ago, Dawes would’ve made the kid eat that freaking battery, dongles and all, but that ass-taking, name-kicking version of Dawes is gone, perhaps for good, macho ego sent whooping into Jerusalem twilight, yee-haw and hallelujah, riding bareback on that impossible bullet. . . . He daubs at spots of neckbeard spit staining his civilian suit and tie. US Army Human Resources Command, at the instruction of the Secretary of War, has requested that Staff Sergeant Dawes refrain from wearing his dress blues to the hearing, or ever fucking again, really, the SecWar’s unambiguous email reads. Dawes takes his seat. Telescopic lenses and beamforming mics bristle from the press galleries. It’s hot inside SD 226. A band of sweat is starting to condense on the seat pad between his cheeks. But is it only sweat, or a deeper moisture? If only there’d been time for a morning constitutional, if only that page had been less pissy about the schedule, if only he hadn’t swiped that thick-cut bacon from hotel kitchen. . . .

The Chairman of the Judiciary begins with three taps of a small white gavel. “Good morning,” he says into a tabletop mic. “On second thought, no, I don’t think so. Not good morning. How could that be true? Not today. Perhaps never again. It is impossible to imagine more tragic circumstances under which we could be gathered. We are here to examine the death of⁠—⁠”

“It’s a fake!” Another senator is shouting from one end of the dais. His voice is younger than the Chairman’s. “Fakedy-fake-fake-fake!“

“Up your ass, JD!” a third voice layering in now, from the opposite end of the line-up. “It was your guy what moved the embassy up there in the first place!”

The Chairman starts whacking the little hourglass gavel (“Gentlemen! Order!”) which has no handle. It’s his personal replica of the priceless one Dick Nixon broke during a debate about atomic energy back in ’54. The Chairman brings it down against the bench in pell-mell fury, like pounding a nail with half a hammer, but the fracas will not be stopped by a lump of ivory. More young senators cut in over the old man’s pleas for decorum, jeopardizing whatever grip he might still have on committee procedure. Dawes, meanwhile, hears it all only as one indistinct rant, screw-yous and eat-shits galore, none of the regimented discipline he’s used to as retired career-Army. How’s anything get done when they act like this? Shit’s unmanly. Dawes doesn’t have the fluidity of mind to notice, but the composition has gone a bit Last Supperish from his vantage at the witness table: men on the dais seated and standing, fists raised and fingers pointing, only there’s no Christ figure, just the Chairman’s bald head, pink as a newborn’s heel, looking to the crowd now for mercy — just in time to note with dismay that amongst the staff tables a trio of young people have climbed atop their chairs waving poster-board signs. The signs read who, the hell, and cares?, respectively, all in red magic marker. The howling senators go quiet. Nobody seems to have a clue who the these hecklers are or how they have bypassed Capitol security. They are singing something that sounds like, yes, it is “How Great Thou Art,” the old Protestant hymn, an object of fondness for the a cappella crowd. Dawes grew up hearing it, but these aren’t the usual lyrics:

Under the sheets? Huh? There are more bars, but Dawes can’t make them out. A detachment of guards and police pull the choir down by their waists and drag them from the chamber, three-part harmony reverberating into mush as they go merrily along the marble corridor. The Chairman waits for order to return. His younger colleagues subside into mutual quiet contempt, chins in hand. Dawes sits patient as a Labrador, eyes square on the Chairman, who takes a drink of water before continuing.

“Distinguished senators, ladies and gentleman of the press, citizens and service members at home and abroad, this historic joint session of so many committees and subcommittees has been convened today so that we all might hear the truth behind, uhh, well, behind some facts which I personally find hellaciously difficult to stomach. Six weeks ago, in the city of Jerusalem, in that old, old city, a man appeared in the sky. A man who was then killed. A man — not just any man, mind you, it seems He was . . . taken . . . before His time. Even as He was fulfilling what looked like, for all the world, the promise that same man made almost two-thousand years ago. Now, the event six weeks ago was . . . well, it was either a tragic miracle, or a miraculous tragedy, or some other thing they haven’t invented a word for yet. God help us if they do. Until then, we’ll have to make do with the words we already have, words that, uhh, words . . . You know, Staff Sergeant, I think I’ll just read from this paper I have here, instead of . . . I can’t keep making this up as I go. They’re going to read this record someday, and I can’t be — ah, hell, [unintelligible]. We will begin today with testimony from Staff Sergeant Beaumont Hawkin Dawes from Chester, South Carolina. Staff Sergeant Dawes is a fifteen-year veteran of the US Army Fifth Special Forces Group, 1st Battalion. In his time of service, he participated in multiple tours of combat duty underneath⁠—⁠”

Oh dear. Just now, deep underneath the gray wool suit Dawes has borrowed from his brother Wilmington, out of sight from cameras and senators, a painful itch has launched an assault on the pimpled inner hemisphere of his right buttock, clawing at a superficial nerve that seems to be, holy hell, to be dendritically radiating itchiness right up into⁠—⁠

“—CENTCOM leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan. Staff Sergeant Dawes is presently retired from military service, operating in the private sector as a security and intelligence contractor for⁠—⁠”

—his anal canal. Not good, Sir. Way outside mission parameters. Vagus nerve’s blasting acetylcholine up and down the A.O. If he doesn’t act quickly, there’s gonna be⁠—⁠

“—Triple Threat Logistics. In that capacity, Staff Sergeant Dawes has served as shift leader for⁠—⁠”

—a peristaltic spasm, and then the situation, Sir, is gonna get real fluid real quick. Zero chance of exfil. Must deploy countermeasures. He relaxes his glutes, makes a sort of slow-motion pelvic thrust. The pressure spreads his cheeks wide enough apart to permit the seat pad to make contact with his perineum and with⁠—⁠

“—a Diplomatic Security Service protection team detailed at our embassy in Jerusalem. With this brief introduction out of the way, I will now yield the floor to Staff Sergeant Dawes for the purpose of hearing⁠—⁠”

—his anus, a loose approximation of, alas, a more deeply satisfying scratch he might have achieved with a wad of toilet paper in a bathroom stall. The maneuver requires a level of sphincteric control he hasn’t exerted since his SERE training days, in weapon concealment class. Squeezing tightly now. His Kegels could break a pencil. Not could. Can. It comes back to him from Petraeus-era Operation Iraqi Freedom, a moment of foolhardiness (read: post-mission drunkenness) when he accepted this precise dare, bringing the hexagonal shaft up slowly towards the target, eraser-first, feigning comic immunity to the now-that’s-a-real-number-two-pencil shit-talking exchanged over cold Baghdaddy Green Zone beers, inching closer, bending over, balancing himself with a red Chuck Taylor against a T-wall, cautiously making⁠—⁠

“—an opening statement he has prepared for us. Staff Sergeant Dawes, are you ready?”

† † †

Six weeks earlier, here’s Dawes in the embassy courtyard bare-handing a bone-in porterhouse the size of his face. He has eased into the quiet weekday hours when the Shabbat sirens aren’t blaring like Yahweh Himself is about to sling inbound ordnance over the embassy walls. SFC John Bercrom, one of Dawes’s Triple Threat colleagues, has brought in a charcoal grill from off-site housing. It is Steak Night for the crew, one more ritual in a city of rituals. The Diplomatic Security direct-hires are here, as always, and a few off-duty Marine guards, veterans everybody, fresh from the gym, downing lukewarm Rip-Its before a good old-fashioned ’murican debauch.

Dawes sucks meat drippings from his forefinger, saying, “Look at that hairy mother,” and points it at Bercrom, who is spectacularly shirtless peeling the label off of a 64-ounce can of baked beans he’s ganked from the chancery kitchen. Bercrom sets the can on the grill in a gap between adjacent steaks. Like Dawes, Bercrom is former Special Forces. Unlike Dawes, Bercrom harbors no D.A.R.E. kid’s residual fear of the needles and vials that come sold in brown paper sacks, so Bercrom has fifty pounds of lean mass on his middleweight colleague, plus a layer of Neanderthaloid fur that makes Dawes here look slick as a vinyl couch. There’s an oval region shaved into Becrom’s back hair, revealing an elaborate, full-color tattoo of Ananias and Sapphira, straight out of Acts 5, an image of the husband and wife duo dropping graveyard dead. It behoves the unchurched reader to know: the couple were punished by the Holy Spirit for withholding money from the early church, an event that happened (if it happened) not too far from this Arnona neighborhood hillside, come to think of it. . . . The lower halves of their bodies are morphed, with considerable artistic license, into the World Trade Center Twin Towers freeze-framed in mid-destruction. Glass and structural debris plummet down Bercrom’s back. Dawes and Dougnutt, the DS agent in charge, stand in perplexed admiration of Bercrom’s tattoo, stumped by its multiple incongruent interpretations. Whose side is it even on anyway, the towers’ or the planes’? Is the viewer meant to feel patriotic, or vindictive? Is it some New Testament critique of uhh, uhhhh, late capital? Dawes isn’t sure what those words mean, put together. Late for what? He heard a cute local say them at a bar last week while he, shitfaced, nodded along mugging his best Smart Guy grin. No points awarded to the American. Just as well, there’s a ring on his finger. . . .

His pal Bercrom is a hard guy to read. Not a closed book, exactly, but what’s out in the open doesn’t align with itself. There are internal inconsistencies, like that tattoo, or his habit of lacquering his fingernails before a mission. Dawes has never known another man to do that. Painted nails, sure, but in combat? And why a clear-coat? He went to high school with guys that painted them black, a practice connected to music and substances a clean-jeans boy from South Carolina wouldn’t touch. Dawes met Bercrom three years ago, when they had back-to-back interviews at Triple Threat’s Ocracoke offices for this embassy gig. Bercrom in a suit looked like the sasquatch trying to pass for a legitimate businessperson, brown hair mushrooming from all the garment openings. Now they’re war buddies without a war. Ohhh, things can get a little spicy on ill-advised outings, escorting Madam Ambassador So-And-So to her hot yoga class against the wisdom of the RSO’s emails about avoiding unnecessary routine. Mission jitters aren’t fertile material to male-bond over, so they swap stories. There was the time in Special Forces Training that Bercrom wore a whole-head rubber unicorn mask to morning PT, but then the instructor showed up and wouldn’t let him take it off until he was collapsing from hyperventilation. One summer the men in Dawes’s cadre conspired to fill an empty peanut butter jar with farts. The objective required long stretches of withheld flatulence, and an understanding of the physics of fluid displacement. After a week of effort, the jar of bath water had been refilled with a clear gas that ignited eagerly over a small flame, to the delight of all participants. Such stories are the raw substrate of an emotional conveyance operating at frequencies below the range of feminine hearing. Beneath the rehash of ass-slapping good times, a dead-serious game of Marco Polo is being played . . . Hey, I’m here . . . I’m here, too . . . Nothing’s ever stated matter-of-factly, only innuendo from that strange overlap between cowboy reticence and the opacity of a Zen master, things left unsaid that neither man can more than intuit the heart-thumping gravity of.

AIC Dougnutt wonders aloud just who in the hell Bercrom pays to keep his back shaved so flawlessly, its tattoo bounded by a crisp oval of hirsute skin. Bercrom is articulating a reply concerning Agent Dougnutt’s mother and which of Bercrom’s other manscapable parts she’s paid handsomely to shave for him, when a guard in barely-contained freakout squawks over the radio:

Their view of the Old City is partially obstructed by the nearest roof-line, so Dawes and Bercrom sprint to a wall at the north end of the courtyard to scramble up an access ladder. There’s a better vantage from the gravel roof of the chancery. Three kilometers to the north, yup, there it is: a patch of something akin to daylight that is — hell, if it isn’t being decanted onto the night sky from some unseen vessel. The light spreads on contact with the air like a liquid. It splashes, arcs, makes interference patterns with itself, peaks and troughs. Tides of refracted color lap at the edges, the blue substance pooling into what can only be described as a pond of light in the sky, right there . . . above the mountain where the agents of Tiberius Caesar once failed to demonstrate the quality of their mercy. . . . Childhood comes roaring up from forgotten depths, so fast it should give him the bends. Dawes remembers a South Carolina summer with big brother Wilmington, leaping through the parallel jets of an oscillating lawn sprinkler, rainbows in the mist, and also winter rainbows: tree lights refracting through the facets of his grandmother’s real crystal candlestick holders, the prized ones she would only bring out on Christmas Eve in a white box lined with red satin, heavy and angular like palm-sized gemstones.

The rest of the Steak Night crew appear on the roof behind Dawes and Bercrom. Dawes has asked them to bring a rifle with a high-power scope. The men take turns shouldering it to get closer looks at the light. Bercrom rests his absurd beard against the rifle’s cheek riser, squints through the eyepiece, and says:

The radio blurts again. There is new movement. Dawes grabs the rifle from Bercrom. Through the scope, set to maximum magnification, he watches the light collapse on itself, take on a new shape. It appears quite small in the optics, less than a milliradian.

The cumulative sermons of every Deep South minister he’s ever heard thump a pulpit, of every tent revival speaker he’s seen wave a threadbare King James, of every sweaty street corner prophet that has triggered a megaphone at him, resound again cacophonous and sustained like his memory is an open piano and these recollections are a great simultaneous strumming of all two-hundred-something strings. At last the foretold promise is being fulfilled, no more waiting, no more worry, his sins forgiven, bound for Heaven, never more to roam. Dawes, unable to contain his rising joy, shouts Hallelujah! from the rooftop. He pulls his eye off the scope, turns his face toward Bercrom, and says, “Bercrom.” No verb, no predicate, just the name, yet somehow it⁠—

Beard hairs tickle Dawes’s lips. Bercrom is speechless, his unblinking eyes like two little blue buttons sewn to the face of a stuffed bear. Dawes lets out a giggle, as pure and innocent as any he’s ever made — a toddler getting his belly bubbled, untouched by venial sin. Dawes has never felt such happiness. It is almost unendurable.

The rifle stock kicks back into Dawes’s shoulder. The unexpected motion is accompanied by two sounds: first the immediate crack of a round exiting the barrel, then echoes of this report coming back from stone and concrete surfaces still hours away from the reach of fingery dawn.

Ten seconds later, while soft echoes continue to arrive from Arnona alleyways, the little speck of human-shaped light in the sky begins to fall. A thin vertical rainbow traces its descent like an afterimage. The light disappears behind the jagged edges of the ancient cityscape.

By pure accident, at a Distance to Target of 3,450 meters, or a little over two miles, unintentionally applying precise adjustments to overcome differences in elevation, counteract spin drift, slip past wind shear, and close a Coriolis effect gap, surmounting inconceivable odds that asymptotically approached zero without, critically, ever making contact with the x-axis, Staff Sergeant Beaumont Hawkin Dawes had just unwittingly broken the US Armed Forces’ official service record for the longest confirmed sniper kill, unbroken since October 2004, ranking him third overall worldwide.

† † †

“Who chambered the round? I don’t know. Why was the rifle cocked? I don’t know. Why was the safety lever disengaged? Why wasn’t my finger on the receiver? Why didn’t we just use the binoculars? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I have shamed my employer and failed my country. I shot Jesus. I killed Christ. I’m sorry.”

Dawes turns his prepared statement face down, straightening the paper edges. Muscles ripple in his cheeks as he holds back tears.

The Chairman covers his tabletop mic with his hand, whispering something to his neighbor on the dais. Uncovering the mic, “Staff Sergeant Dawes, did your closing remarks mention binoculars?”

“No, Sir, SFC Bercrom’s gym bag, at that particular time, was located in the courtyard, Sir, in the vicinity of the grill unit.”

“Sir, the embassy does not have Steak Night. The Triple Threat contractors, myself and SFC Bercrom, we have Steak Night. But the whole crew is invited. It strengthens morale.”

“We had obtained SFC Bercrom’s personal grill unit, Sir. He had secured it for Steak Night.”

“No, Sir. I mean, yes, Sir. I mean, SFC Bercrom owns a gym bag but he did not have the gym bag on his person at that particular point in time, Sir, it was located in a nearby vicinity.”

“They would be difficult to break. Bercrom’s binoculars are pretty badass. I mean, no, yes, no, the binoculars are of military-grade quality, Sir.”

“Good enough to see all the way to the Old City from the roof of the chancery?”

“Then why in God’s name didn’t you use the binoculars to get a closer look at the glorious return of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Suffering Savior instead of a sackin’ frackin’ sniper rifle?”

“Don’t you see? None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t been damned fool enough to bring a gun to the Second Coming. You can’t accidentally kill Christ with a pair of goggles. Why’s everything got to be about shock and awe with you militia types? Ya’ll ever consider taking up bird watching? Quiet walks in the woods? Without shooting every damn thing that moves?”

“Sir, you gotta understand, it was that light, I couldn’t think, it⁠—⁠”

“Maybe if the Second Amendment had guaranteed the right to own binoculars, then I would’ve been bankrolled all these years by the National Audubon Society, and ya’ll would be harassing they/them protesters with your low-profile Steiners instead of AR-15’s and Tacti-Cool fanny packs. My God, Dawes, you stupid sonuvabitch. The Kingdom of Heaven was here! We could see it! The one time your country didn’t ask you to shoot somebody and,” with one loud crack of the little white gavel, “you went and shot him anyway.”

By fate or by chance, he has become acquainted with the infinite, but life has not equipped him with the means of expressing it. How can he explain to these people what that moment felt like? It is impossible. So he gives up. He stops thinking, stops trying. And to his surprise, the language comes, unbidden, each word landing briefly on his tongue like a murmuration of butterflies taking turns with an outstretched finger.

“I can’t tell it like it was just another thing, the way a man talks about all else that happens to him. Standing on that roof, looking into that light, it was like when my old English teacher told us about the future perfect, how there’s something that hasn’t happened and isn’t happening and isn’t gonna happen but somehow, after enough time’s gone by, it will have happened, it’ll be like it was always true, like He was always there. That’s how it felt, Sir, like I was looking backwards at time, at everything I’d ever done, everything what all of us have done . . . so much ugliness . . . but it was so small,” pinching his thumb and forefinger together, held aloft in the Senate chamber light, “like looking through binoculars the other way. He’d seen everything, He’d known everything, and He didn’t mind nothing at all.”

A peal of thundering flatulence battered the staid leather chair beneath him. His slacks grew suddenly warm, began sticking to the backs of his thighs. Thick material tugged at his hamstring hairs. Moans of disgust erupted as staffers fled the staff tables. Someone gagged while a colleague held back her unraveling chignon. Cameras flashed in a final volley from the press galleries. The chairman’s gavel thumped and thumped, unheeded by anyone, until presently the gavel shattered. Hunks of Indian ivory went rattling over the bench like human teeth.

A comforting thought crossed Dawes’s mind as the horrible smell filled the chamber:

† † †

Even standing at the hotel window Dawes can smell it. In the bathroom, a permanently soiled suit and undergarments crammed into the waste partition of the little trash can. A stack of towels on top partially suppresses the smell. He is naked except for a hotel-issue bathrobe.

A voice he’s not heard before in the flesh, but one he knows well, a Hollywood voice by way of Texas or Alabama with a tenor drawl and whistling esses, says, “Watch your fuckin’ language, Dawes.”

There is a figure reclined on the couch like someone has just lifted the tissue guard off a color plate: snakeskin boots propped on the cushions, long denim legs, a western yoked shirt, red plaid under a leather vest, collar tied crisp with a bolo. From under a cattleman’s hat, wavy brown hair goes cascading down onto a pair of lean shoulders.

Dawes’s training takes over. Instinctively he moves to subdue, naked hairy legs shifting to a combat stance under the bathrobe, but he freezes when a flash of chrome appears at the man’s hip.

“Easy, fella.” He is aiming a six-shooter at Dawes’s chest, its pearl-inlaid grip resting on the seat cushion.

“How’d you get through that door?” Dawes says. He checks: the security latch is still engaged.

The man sighs irritably. “Listen, since it seems this meet n’ greet is bound to take us a while, I would prefer to do it civilized, with fewer mortal threats and more creature comforts. If I put this thing down,” wagging the muzzle, “do you promise to put that commando shit back in the bottle?”

The man holsters his pistol. A moment later he’s smacking the red chevroned end of a pack of Marlboros against a square-shaped scar on his palm.

“This some prank?” Dawes, head on a swivel, half expecting a camera crew to leap out from the next room.

“Awww, I think you already know, Staff Sergeant,” the man says, his face framed by a New Testament beard.

Dawes scratches behind both ears, “No, this isn’t happening.” They swept the hotel suite for intruders before allowing Dawes to enter. Since then the door has remained sealed shut. “This isn’t real.”

MJ lights a cigarette, takes a long first drag. “My personal brand, obviously.” Smoke whirls out between the words. “Funny. You didn’t ask about the J.” He smiles a Cheshire grid of pure white teeth from cheek to cheek.

There is no tobacco smell. Dawes dares a few steps closer to be sure, flares his nostrils, sniffs: nothing.

“They ain’t Hollywood cigarettes, if that’s what you’re wonderin’.” MJ flicks ash off the end of his cigarette. The ash falls to the carpet and right on through the floor and out of sight, whether into the suite below or the Sweet Beyond, Dawes can’t fathom. MJ sighs, “If you would stop tryin’ to comprehend the metaphysics of our arrangement here for a minute we might be able to have a more productive conversation.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” MJ, crossing his boots. “But I wouldn’t blame you if you were, after what you been through. Hell, I ain’t even talkin’ about that bullet.” He laughs, massaging a sore spot over his gut. “Brother, you shat yourself on camera. In a goddamn Senate hearing. They say nobody ever took a dump in a Senate chamber before, not even with all them gerrymanderin’ motherfuckers holdin’ onto power ’til their turd cutters pucker up so tight they’re crappin’ in bags. You keep makin’ history, Dawes. You deserve a medal. Two medals.”

“Slow down, Turbo. We got matters to discuss. You still haven’t asked me the question.”

“Better tie that robe,” eyebrows up, cigarette in hand, “I can see them little Beaumonts.”

There is a knock at the door. A muffled voice on the other side says, “Staff Sergeant, is everything alright?”

“Why don’t you have a seat?” MJ says genteelly. “Get comfy. You earned it, Boss. Three couches in here. Three bedrooms. Peace lily on that dining table. They done sprung for the VIP suite, which means somebody out there must not hate you like the rest of ‘em do. There. That’s more like it. Now, if it’s any consolation,” fanning the fingers of one hand across his breast, “I don’t hate you, neither. By my count, therefore, you’ve got at least two friends left in this Best of All Possible Worlds. If it was one, I’d be inclined to agree with the pessimistic take that you’d been uncharacteristically lucky with the first one. But with two . . . shiiiiit, it’s Little Boy and Fat Man. Two friends means repeatable success has occurred and can be repeated again ad nauseam, if you’re able to attain the prerequisite level of self-awareness necessary to do so.”

“Bingo,” MJ points a long Uncle Sam finger at him. “That right there is the question. Unfortunately I do not know the answer.”

“Goddammit, wouldja stop tryin’ to figure me out? The young Messiah was perfect in conduct but not in knowledge. Ee-mah. Ah-bah. Joseph had to teach him how to lace up his sandals, how to make a straight cut with a rip saw, how to dimension them edges down to perfect right angles. Any carpenter worth his salt knows perfection takes time, even if you’re the Incarnation. I need you,” taking a breath, “to focus.”

“Finally, a hint of some fuckin’ military compliance.” He rests one hand on his enormous bronco belt buckle insert. “As I was tryin’ to tell you, somebody out there must be a fan of yours to go to all this trouble. Security detail in the hall? Private. Ain’t no Rent-a-Cop, neither. I know you spotted that Force Recon tattoo. And that window right there? Big time bulletproof. This here’s prob’ly where they stash heads o’ state when they come to town. Shit, I bet they got cupbearers down in the kitchen taste testin’ all the Coca-Cola they send up here.”

“You are being groomed. They won’t let you leave because you’re too valuable. They ain’t gonna risk you gettin’ offed by some grievin’ zealot down there fixin’ to make you suck on a twelve-gauge. You are an asset.”

SIMONE’S EXORDIUM

Once — no, far more than once (for we, like Everett, know how many worlds can dance upon a time like angels, each quartz-oscillated second the head of a pin) — there will be a woman, a mother, who will lose her father to a long and degrading illness. She will bury his body, and box away his things in the attic above her garage, where she will find among them a peculiar document which contains the words that she and others (godaften, Travelers…) are reading now. On her first reading, raw with grief, little of it will make any sense. Even grade school words like attic, Travelers, angels will slide off the page as too-slick wrapping paper slides from a gift, or as her mother’s silk pillow case would slip from its compacted down pillow, the periwinkle one that only her mother had been allowed to use. Yet the younger mother, the living daughter, will reread the words anyway, as anyone in deep enough grief might do — riffling through her father’s posthumous text, hundreds of pages in a binder-clipped bundle, double-sided, single-spaced, set in a conventional typeface with conventional ink on conventional paper — words that tell a story about a tragic miracle, or a miraculous tragedy, let the reader decide. Tomato, potato. Among the 144,000 or so words, the woman will recognize names. Her own name, in fact: Simone Charlotte Featherstone. But, ah-haa, she will moan with relief (in her head, not aloud like a deranged person) because her middle name is not Charlotte. This basic factual error will tempt the unfortunate reader to discredit the whole text. Because if it could overlook such easily fact-checked trivia, what else could it get wrong? She will hope: everything. The inaccuracy will lend her doubtful streak bitter comfort over the coming eight years as she wrestles with certain claims made by the manuscript (for a manuscript is what it is; her son will live to see it published by “The Church of the Future Perfect”), claims she will wish in vain were not true, such as whether “God” is really God, and whether He will really die, and most of all whether she will really end her life, and her husband’s life, and the lives of their little Nazarene congregation, with poison. Poison. . . . Another word sliding off its object, like degloved skin. Poison? What does a pastor’s wife know about poison? Upon her first reading, nothing. At best which fridge magnet bears the number to call upon its unwanted ingestion. But she will return here again and again, seventy times seven, and each time she returns she will come knowing a little bit more about things like [redacted] or [redacted, see editor’s note] which kill quickly and painlessly and dissolve easily in Welch’s From-Concentrate Grape Juice, and about other things she would not have dared to learn had her father not died and left her this document, which is entirely true and accurate, at least as far as she will live to see firsthand, except on the matter of her middle name, which is not Charlotte.

It is early in the morning when Simone rises, washes last night’s dishes, and packs her son’s lunch. She kisses his hair as he steps onto the bus. Her father’s hair. Today is Isaac’s first day of seventh grade, and by now she has read of this morning exactly twice: once the first time she found this text, and again a few days later, still incredulous. That was three weeks ago. Now the house is empty and quiet, her son at school, her husband in the church office across the lot designing next Sunday’s bulletin. There is no clatter of cereal spoon or shudder of shower nozzle, just Simone and Simone’s breath and the five-hundred sheets of computer paper that she hides in the cupboard above the refrigerator, which she retrieves again now: her third reading. If there is any comfort in the certainty of death, it must feel the way she feels reading to the end of this sentence. Sentence, sliding. The unpublished manuscript is her great secret. For the next eight years, it will be a hole at the center of a galaxy, an organizing principle from whose judgment not even light can appeal. She knows her husband and son will not find it, partly because there is nothing to interest them in the cupboard above the refrigerator, only the manuals to appliances that no longer obey the designs of their maker, but mostly because this sentence asserts that they shall not find it. In this as in other matters, she will come to have faith in the manuscript, even though her middle name is not Charlotte.

It is early in the morning when Simone rises, washes last night’s dishes, and sends her son off to school, forgetting his lunch. Does it count as forgetting if she was informed beforehand that she would forget it? It is the first weekday in May, and Isaac’s schoolbus will be involved in a traffic accident. No students will be seriously harmed, but the driver will perish at the scene. The medical examiner’s report will identify the cause of death: pulmonary embolism. A deep vein thrombus, a clot from a lower extremity, will break free, return to the central vascular system, and become lodged in his right pulmonary artery, so named because it flows from the heart. The driver will endure great pain, lose consciousness, first slowly then forever. The vehicle will drift off the painted edge of State Route 53, striking a tree at the entrance to the Stinson Farm. A few children will suffer mild concussions, bruises, scrapes. Isaac will break his nose, changing the shape of his little face forever, a notch below the minimum threshold for handsome. But he will live. Her love endures forever. It is the spring semester of his eighth grade year. Simone has had forty-nine months to wonder whether today will actually happen. [draft in progress….]

von Praetor, Miles	50	Palo Alto, USP	Founding partner, MVPHQ
Chaudhuri, Saji	9	Kolkata, IND	Chess player
Chaudhuri, Shanti	33	Kolkata, IND	Homemaker
Rank, Paige	22	Palo Alto, USP	Personal assistant, MVPHQ
Gabler, Deb	23	Palo Alto, USP	Personal assistant, MVPHQ
Kilrode, Jeremy	49	Seattle, USP	CEO, Kilrode Aeronautics
[redacted], ‘Hans’	39	[redacted], USP	Security operative, Triple Threat Logistics
[redacted], ‘Uffi’	39	[redacted], USP	Security operative, Triple Threat Logistics
[redacted], ‘Hock’	39	[redacted], USA	Security operative, Triple Threat Logistics
[redacted], ‘Stubb’	39	[redacted], USA	Security operative, Triple Threat Logistics
Benet-Rams, Kolab	33	San Jose, USP	CTO, Hemapoetics
Poulterman, Pádraig	28	San Jose, USP	Group leader, Hemapoetics

The Future Perfect
—
Jared Sinclair

RESTRICTED EVIDENCE

Nota Bene

part zero
*Prolepsis**

† † †

part one
Nazarenes

† † †

† † †

† † †

Passenger Manifest

† † †

† † †

† † †

† † †

† † †

SIMONE’S EXORDIUM

I

II

The Future Perfect — Jared Sinclair

RESTRICTED EVIDENCE

Nota Bene

part zero Prolepsis*

† † †

part one Nazarenes

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Passenger Manifest

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SIMONE’S EXORDIUM

I

II

The Future Perfect
—
Jared Sinclair

part zero
*Prolepsis**

part one
Nazarenes