American Afterlife, page 21
And at that moment, I know what she means. “No,” I say. “The Collection is finished. There are only the two of you now.”
“Is that what you think?” Witness Andreas says. “That we are few? That there are no more of us, no more witnesses to the eternal?”
The way he looks at me, I know how wrong I am. I know the difference between what I hope to be true and what is real.
Witness Andreas sees me understand, and smiles. “There are so many of us. Maybe not in this room, but in this city, yes, and in this state, even more, all waiting just to the south of us, an enormous Collection of Redeemed Souls.”
“You’re lying,” I say, but I know he isn’t.
He smiles again. “That is the great failing of people like you, of the misguided, college professors, high school teachers, foolish reporters. You think there are few, you who call us ‘a fringe movement.’ But God is never on the fringe. He is always in the center. And the center is always growing.”
“You’re not with God. God wouldn’t like any of … this.” I make a sweeping motion with my hand.
Witness Andreas rubs his beard. Looks at the wall, then back at me. “The other thing you said was wrong as well. You said two. But there are three of us in this room,” he says. “You are with us as well.”
“Me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No,” I say, “you’re wrong about that. I’m definitely not with you.”
“Aren’t you, though?” he says. “Please show me your left hand.” He tilts his head and smiles.
“Fuck you.” I cock the pistol, aim right at the middle of his face.
He blinks slowly. Keeps smiling. “What people believe is that we feel and we choose in this world. But as your mother said, we are chosen. So it is”—he points at me—“in your case. You have been chosen—in heaven and on earth—regardless of your current … feelings.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t choose anything, and you know that. I also wasn’t chosen by anything other than you, just a short, weird, delusional, angry man.”
“I am short,” he says, “but since God has chosen me, I am clearly enough.”
“No,” I say, “since nothing has chosen you, but you’re obsessed with that nothing, you are clearly nothing. You’re just a worthless little piece of shit.”
“¡Cállate!” My mother points at me. “You stop your filthy mouth in his presence!”
“Really? Then fuck you too!” I say. “You’re nothing as well. Just a crazy person who abandoned her own daughter.”
Witness Andreas is still smiling. “What is and is not true is not for you to determine,” he says. “It is not for any of us. Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. But let me assuage your fears: it was never up to you.”
“Oh, you know what I fear now?”
“Yes,” he says. “I do. Because I am the bridegroom—the church—I know a great many things that other people do not know. And as the bridegroom, I helped you choose what was already chosen for you. Therefore, you should be filled with gratitude.”
When he says that, my hands start to shake. I say, “This is the real truth: you kidnapped me and cut off my finger. There’s no other way to look at it.”
“Someday,” he says, “I will uncover your eyes and help you to see that there is another perspective. I will help you to see the true perspective, the angle from God’s perspective: the truth.”
“No, you won’t,” I say. It feels like there’s a faint aftershock underneath me, like the world is shifting under my feet once again. I’m shaking and I’m crying a little bit. Trying not to cry, but I can’t stop myself.
Witness Andreas says, “And even if I am gone, even if I leave this physical earth, there will be another witness. I have prophesied as much already, and he is rising in the fields of harvest even as we speak.”
My vision is blurred by my tears. I wipe at them with my injured hand. Try to clear my head. The gun is shaking out in front of me, so I step forward and put the barrel of the pistol against Witness Andreas’s forehead.
He smiles because he thinks I won’t pull the trigger.
My mother knows me better. She says, “You do not do this. She clasps her hands to pray. “Dios todopoderoso, por favor …”
But I don’t wait for her to finish the prayer. I hold the gun as steady as I can, hold it steady against his forehead as I pull the trigger.
The back of Witness Andreas’s head spatters across the wall behind him.
CHAPTER
59
THE RIGHT CHOICE
THE SOUND OF the shot dissipates, and I can hear screaming now, my mother’s screaming as she lays herself across the body of The Witness, covering his body with her own. She turns and yells at me, “¿Por qué harías? … You killed The Witness, the prophet of God!”
“No,” I say, “he was never any of that.”
I feel so tired now. I want to sleep—not sleep here, but somewhere. I’m exhausted. I want to close my eyes and sleep for a long time.
My mother pulls him close. His blood is dripping onto her shoulder.
“Let go of him,” I say. “He was just a crazy person, a loser.” I want to break the spell.
But she’s cradling his face, the hole in his forehead circled by a burn mark. The back of his head is drizzling onto her, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“It’s time.” I try to take her hand. “Let’s go.”
But she brushes me off. “How could you?”
“Mamá, get up. We’re going now.”
“No,” she says, “I will stay here.”
“In this house? There’s nothing to stay for, not anymore. That was it. Look at him now.” I point at Witness Andreas. “It’s finished. He’s dead.”
“No, you are wrong.” She rubs her stomach. “I have the future of The Collection right here.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Try to breathe in enough air to deal with this. I feel so tired that I could almost lie down on this bed, right here, right now. But I force myself to open my eyes wide. Shake my head.
My mother says, “You cannot stop The Collection because The Collection is the people of God. And if God is inside of us, then we are God.”
“Oh no.” I look down at the revolver in my hand. It’s as if the gun is in someone else’s hand. I lift it like a stranger lifts a gun. The world is so hazy right now.
“What can you do?” my mother says. “What can you do?”
I lift the pistol. Point it at her.
She says, “Are you willing to shoot your own mother as well?”
“I need to,” I say. I keep the pistol pointed at her. “I should.”
“But you will not”—she shakes her head—“because of what I have inside of me. You will not kill a child.”
“No, you have it backward. The child is why I should kill you,” I say, “but that’s not …” My hand starts to shake again, and this time I can’t keep it steady.
“Will you put the gun to my head as well?” she says. “¿Me matarás?”
My hand is shaking so wildly. I try to cock the revolver, but my thumb slips off the hammer, and it’s already cocked anyway.
My mother touches her stomach once more. “Con el niño, continuaremos, m’hija. Seguiremos. Nosotros. Porque te conozco.” Her eyes are blazing.
It’s true. She does know me.
I’m crying and my vision is watery. I point the gun at her. I know I have to pull the trigger. I want to end this.
I need to.
“Like this,” my mother says. “It will be like this?”
I want to shoot, but I can’t. I lower the gun.
“You will do what is right for the future,” my mother says. “You will allow for this. You will step aside in your own life because you are not a wise girl.”
“I’m wiser than you think.” I’m holding the pistol, but it’s pointed at the floor. I can’t make myself raise it again. I can’t point it at my mother again.
She says, “Sólo Dios da sabiduría.”
I say, “What’s right and what I can do are two different things.”
My mother glares at me.
I can’t do anything else here, so I turn to leave the little makeshift room. Move the red sheet to the side, ducking through, walking to the stairs, and heading back up into the main part of the house.
CHAPTER
60
CLEANLINESS
I WRITE THIS JUST as I learn it—word for word from his mouth—as I hear him speak the truth:
“We become washed for God. Pure white. None of the filth of this world can cling to us. As with baptism, we lower in sin and rise in perfection. I keep us in this perfection—this state of holiness—as the fourth part of God:
God the Father
God the Son
God the Holy Spirit
Plus The Witness to the eternal. And me with him.
“It is God’s revelation to me that keeps you clean from the world. It is my anointment that cleanses you. It is my consecration that saves this church, the one and only true church of the living God of the universe. Stay with me and remain clean. Stay with me and remain in the pure, white goodness of The Almighty.”
CHAPTER
61
AWAY
I FILL A CANVAS duffel bag with food from the kitchen, grab another gun and two clips from bodies in the hall, don’t look at any of their faces. I walk out of the house into the early morning, through the neighborhood to where I left my second backpack by the wheel well of the car. I pick up that second pack and hike over to Moss Street, where I stashed my canoe.
When I get to the boat, I slide it out from behind the hedge, and drag it down to the water. The morning light hits the foam sticking to the divots in the curb. The cement is zigzagged above a drain that doesn’t drain anymore.
I’m about to push off into the deep water when I think of everything I have stored in my garage, how stupid it would be to leave everything I stashed there. So I walk up the street, turn at the big house, and go back along the little path to my old apartment.
The Collection men threw everything around when they discovered this place, but they didn’t take much. There’s still a pile of food and water. Other things too.
I pack everything I want to keep in plastic bins: chlorine tablets, a Coleman stove, fifteen green propane bottles, Quick Ties, cooking pots, raft straps, and kitchen utensils. Then I fill a bin with mixed nuts, a case of Powerade, thirty cans of tuna, a box of Luna bars, and a few sixteen-ounce bags of beef jerky. I put two tents in another bin in case one of the tents gets torn in a future storm, then a sleeping bag and a pillow. Three different kinds of shoes and a pair of Chaco sandals only one size too big. Finally, I pack a bin full of warm clothes, two warm hats, and a raincoat for the winter that will arrive in a few months.
I have to carry each load down the block to the canoe, and I’m sweating hard, resting between trips, rehydrating on each return trip to my garage. Packing and carrying loads takes a couple of hours, and it’s hot by the time I finish, the sun roasting the asphalt and the yellow grass. I still haven’t slept, and I’m so tired after I carry the last load down to the canoe that I consider lying down in the grass and taking a nap right there. But I want to leave the neighborhood today, get out of here before I let myself relax.
I try to push my canoe into the water, but it’s too heavy. I heave and pull, but it won’t move anywhere. I try sliding the nose sideways, moving half of the canoe at a time—to walk it back and forth to the water—but it’s stuck, and I have to unload it again.
Once the canoe is half empty, I can just barely push it, move its weight, and I slide it halfway into the water to take the weight off, leaving only the stern to rest on the grass and the lip of the curb. Then I start to load the boat again, carrying the plastic tubs into the water and heaving them into the canoe, centering them carefully, balancing each one’s weight, then going back for more. I’m so tired now—beyond exhaustion—wading in and out of the water with my heavy bins, and I don’t hear her walk up behind me.
She says, “Listen to me,” and I spin around. See her standing there with a gun in her hand, a black pistol.
I feel for the gun in my waistband, but it’s not there. My revolver and Taurus pistol are both sitting on a bin in the bow of the canoe, less than ten feet away but too far to reach.
My mother says, “You have to choose to stay with me. I gave you too much free will for a long time, but I will not make that mistake any longer.”
I say, “I’m not staying here.”
“You do not understand me.” She shakes her head, keeps the pistol pointed at me. “It is a choice, but it also is not a choice.”
“You sound like him,” I say. “Like that creep.”
“If you mean I sound like Witness Andreas—The Witness to the God Almighty of the universe—then thank you. That is a compliment.”
I’m standing next to the water. I look out over the flood. Say, “He was crazy.”
“¿Quién dice?” She tilts her head. “¿Tú?”
“Yes.” I look her in the eye now. “Me. And anyone logical would agree with me.”
She is not the mother of my childhood. Or maybe she is. Maybe she was always this way, some other kind of thing, some animal with eyes that see different shapes in the dark. I don’t know why I didn’t see that when I was younger. Or maybe I did. I never felt safe.
She says, “¿Qué te da a ti la autoridad para juzgar? ¿Y qué es la lógica comparada con la fe?”
“Faith?” I say, “You think you believe in something real?” I take a step toward her.
She raises the gun.
I say, “And now, are you gonna shoot me?”
“If I must.”
“No,” I say, “you won’t. We were just in this same position a little while ago. One of us had a gun, and the other did not. And no one got shot.”
I take another step toward her.
“But there is a difference,” she says. “I have the gun now.”
“It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t shoot a family member, and neither can you.”
“So are you choosing to be my family?” she says.
“What?”
“So,” she says, “you’re choosing to be a part of The Collection?”
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s not family. But you and I, we’re blood. We’re real. We’re something that does not require faith.”
“Earthly blood is nothing. Witness Andreas taught us that earthly treasures cannot compare to the treasures laid up in heaven.”
“Stop,” I say. “All of what he said was manipulation. Now that you’re—”
“There will be another man,” she says. “They’re coming here, and we could … repopulate. Maybe God will speak to me as a new minister. Or maybe I will be a future prophet.”
“You think they’d let a woman be in power? You really believe that?”
“God has always been with me,” she says. “I have always heard his revelations. From before you were born.”
“This is crazy,” I say. “All of this.”
She raises the pistol, points it at my head. “I do not need anyone to doubt me. Doubting me or doubting God is the same thing.” Now it is her hand that’s shaking. Her face is flushed and tears are leaking down her cheeks. Her eyes look like an electrical fire.
I hold my hands above my head. I say, “Look at me. I don’t have a gun. I don’t have anything. My hands are empty.” I take another step toward her. Her pistol is only two feet from my face now. I say, “Don’t pull the trigger. I’m your daughter. I’m your family.”
“No quiero matarte.” She takes a deep breath. A tear drips off the end of her chin. “And we need you because you are … fertile, because you could be …” She closes her eyes. Shakes her head.
The gun is raised but she lowers her head.
And that’s when I jump forward, knocking the gun to the side. She pulls the trigger, but the bullet travels up through the trees.
My mother tries to punch me, and I grab her as we slip. Then we’re wrestling on the ground, rolling in the grass, across the sidewalk, into the bark mulch of the next yard. I try to hit her, but her face is too close and we’re still moving, rolling. I don’t get a good swing at her, and my fist goes through her hair. Then her fingernails are gouging my cheek under my eye, and I scream as I squint my eye closed. The gun is between us—somehow still in her right hand—and I push it, push the barrel away from us, angle the pistol up and to the side. It goes off again but neither of us is shot.
We roll over—I’m underneath her now—then we roll over again. I’m above her once more, in the bushes, and there are rocks next to us. I’m holding the wrist of her right hand, her gun hand, and I beat that hand against a rock. The gun comes loose, flips and slides down a small gulley in the side yard.
I watch the gun settle in the rocks, stare at it for a second, and that’s when my mother punches me, when she really connects, her fist hitting me directly in the eye. My head snaps back and I lose my balance, tilt, and gravity takes me over the embankment. But I have ahold of my mother still, one of my hands caught in her hair, and I rip her down with me. We roll twice, and there’s a crack sound as we land in the bottom of a dry pond.
Then everything stops.
She’s not fighting anymore.
She’s not moving.
I untangle my hand from her hair, push up to a sitting position. Look at her.
The back of her head hit a rock, and she’s unconscious. But she’s still breathing. She’s taking loud, short little breaths, whimpering a little bit, whispering something in Spanish with her eyes closed.
I see the pistol next to her in the rocks and I grab it, toss it over by the canoe. Then I feel my eye where my mother punched me, feel the swelling, the bruise rising. I can feel a small cut at the corner of my eye as well.
I lean down and roll my mother over, see a large egg-sized lump growing on the back of her head, a spot of blood on the rock that she hit. I let go of her and stand up. She opens her eyes and says something I don’t understand, then closes her eyes again.
