JohnLocke
09-16-2009, 05:53 PM
In Power and Glory
I heard a story once, when I was young. Maybe seventeen, eighteen. My older brother told it to me. He said, as I walked in the door, that he had just seen a terrible clip on the news. A couple of teenagers poured lighter fluid on a dog and set it on fire, right in the middle of the street, in front of everybody. And all I could do was turn around and roll my eyes - not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t really know how to. What the hell do you say to something like that?
My brother, without knowing it, answered me. He said that no matter what I’d learn, about religion, or God, or what is good and what is bad, no matter what I’d ever been told or what I’d see in the future, that some people on this planet deserve to die. Then he apologized with his eyes and walked away. I am now at the point in my life where I wish he wouldn’t have said that. He died forty years later, of a heart attack. I am dying now.
I don’t want to die.
I’m one hundred and nine years old, and I haven’t seen anybody in about thirteen years or so. This made seeing a man in my loft today quite surprising. Its fair to say that I felt a little like my brother’s heart over half a century ago.
My loft style apartment is grungy and unkempt. This is due to the fact that I haven’t been able to walk in over thirteen years. Cleanliness is not an option.
That would make me perfectly ungodly. And a dying man should not be ungodly.
I have an old couch, a kitchen, and a bathroom with dried out rat **** on the ground. I can’t clean those either. My bed is my abode, my home within this messy loft. There’s dirt in that, too, but not as much as else where. I can clean between the mattress and the box spring with an old toothbrush. That’s often what I do.
That’s often all I do.
And I haven’t seen anyone in thirteen years.
Why is that?
I heard a loud crash last night. Painfully loud. I was in one of the deepest sleeps I’d ever been in, and that damn crash woke me up. What a dream it interrupted, too. I was in some African village, walking around under the sun, on damp dirt with patches of grass growing here and there. As in most dreams, even the most mundane seemed amazing. I stared at the patches of grass. They grew one hundred times their normal speed, like in one of those time lapse videos. Then some liquid fell from the sky, in strange, undulating streams that frequently changed color: black to white and back again. Some kids ran over, yelling in gibberish to one another - I couldn‘t make out what they were saying. I couldn’t walk, just like in real life. They lit the grass on fire. All I could do was stand there. And as soon as the flames crept near me, I woke up.
I felt heat, and I heard the crash.
I couldn’t sleep until early that morning.
At six a.m., the man entered my room. I looked up and saw a shadow walking forward, unashamedly, as if it owned the loft. It hadn’t reached my bed yet. That was my true home. My true home, which I couldn’t protect. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but I squinted and watched him. I could see his full face now. He was dark skinned, with a short tangled beard. On his head he wore a jumbled mess of brown hair, and his eyes were brown as well. They were apologetic and fiery.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I quivered under my sheets, and in my fear, spat out two words:
“For what?” I asked.
“For being so late.”
Then he left the room as quietly as he entered. The door scraped the ground on the way out, and I did all I could think of doing.
I rationalized.
I forgot the crash.
I settled down.
And I slept.
In the morning - which to me was nine a.m. - I awoke to a subtle creaking. I looked over, and in the rocking chair adjacent to my bed sat the bearded man. His appearance was quite startling. I screamed, but he comforted me with the look in his eyes. Interrogation lent no similar effect.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am Jesus of Nazareth,” he calmly replied.
“Jesus of Nazareth…” I responded, half or maybe no-heartedly. I don’t want to die. Not at all. This did not reassure me.
He then began to cry, as any good God would. After a long stream of waterworks, he got up and walked toward the door.
“Wait!” I yelled through fits of coughing. “What were you late f-”
That’s as far as I got before he exited the apartment. The wooden door scraped the floor - pardon the rhyme - as it would have with anyone, whether God or man.
I cleaned my mattress, and thought of my brother. At this age, Jesus was just a farce. I was dying, after all.
One day later, and the gleam of sun rays poured over my curtains, saturating the wall behind the window. I hoped that my dream of Christ was over, but alas, it was not.
I need more sleep.
He walked toward me again, but his eyes lacked their fire.
“Well,” he paused. “It looks like… you’re the only one left here.”
“Left where?” I asked.
“In this area, at least. I don’t really know what happened, how I missed the date. But I’m here now, for you.”
“Listen, whoever you…” I paused, thinking. “…whoever you say you are… I don’t want to be bothered like this. How can you taunt an old man?”
“I am not taunting you. I am trying to reassure you. I am here now, it is over. My arrival was delayed, but I think it can still end now.”
“What can? Are you here to take me away, to the Pearly Gates or some other bull****?” I asked, sardonically. “Is this some trick? Do you just get off acting like the herald of death around old people? What the **** is wrong with you?”
“Please, relax. Everything will be fine now.”
“Fine? I haven’t seen a soul in thirteen years, and you saunter in here as if you can do anything!”
“Get up.”
I felt mocked.
“Stop it! Shut the hell up!”
“Get up and walk.”
He grabbed my arm and I felt only panic. Who was this, taunting my paralysis with his religious delusions?
I yelled.
“Help me! Please help me! Stop! He’s a ****ing psychopath, he’s grabbing me!”
My words danced irrationally as I drooled things obscene. Finally he let go, moved toward the exit, and left. I sat in my bed, while the door scraped shut. It was old. As was I. My eyes rolled back.
And I felt my legs move.
But I had nowhere to go. I had nowhere to want to go.
So I cried. Thirteen years of stagnation were ended too abruptly. I turned over and fell asleep. What else can one do in a situation like that?
In my dream I could walk. It was one of those overtly surreal dreams though, since I could move my legs, even though I wasn’t going anywhere. I was in a brightly lit forest, which was speckled with black and brown trees. The trees had blue leaves, and they dripped a sticky ooze. The multicolored denizens spoke to me in a multitude of languages, all of which I understood. Their words were inexplicable, yet they comforted me:
“Indulge not in the guilt of thy God: all delinquency rests in the Son of the Most High.”
If dreams really can be interpreted, I would say that the trees were angels. But I have a feeling their words were as upfront as they could be.
After my angelic encounter, I cleaned the rat feces off of my bathroom floor. I squinted to find the pieces that escaped me, and the black and white checkered tiles blended harshly together.
I didn’t really like walking. But the knowledge that I could made me uneasy when I wasn’t.
As I picked up the last rat pellet, Jesus Christ himself reentered my apartment. I don’t think he uses the door when he comes in - I only ever hear it scrape when he leaves. Maybe he likes to balance his godliness with his manliness.
Speaking of godliness, I feel a little bit closer to it, now that my bathroom is finally clean.
He approached me once again.
“Do you trust me yet?” he asked.
“Depends,” I said.
“On what, my son?”
“On whether or not I’m dreaming.”
“Why should you believe that you are dreaming?”
“I guess I’ve been having these very strange dreams recently, and… well, being able to walk is pretty hard to believe.”
“Please believe it. I… I need you to trust me right now… Please.”
There was a hint of desperation in his voice. His manliness was showing. After the shock of my recent experiences began to wear off, my impatience began to grow. Whether I was delusional or completely sane, I wanted answers of some sort.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
He paused.
“I am here to end time, to begin the tribulation of sinners and the exoneration of the faithful.”
“To end time,” I replied blankly.
What the hell do you say to something like that?
A teardrop slipped out of his eye and mingled with the hair of his beard.
I shook myself out of shock, and continued my interrogation.
“What’s… uh… what’s with the hastiness… the distress?”
“I was late.” He fumbled out, through cowering lips.
“Late?”
“As it is written: ‘of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.’”
I would later find it strange, that even while crying he could quote scripture so frankly, so assuredly.
It was as if he didn’t want to know it.
“So… you didn’t know to come?”
“I did not. It was a test… a test provided by my Father, and I failed it. I don‘t know how, I don‘t… I don‘t know.”
“That’s not a… not an exactly tiny thing to miss!”
Maybe he didn’t deserve to hear that, but I continued rambling anyway.
“People have been waiting for it for-”
“Four-thousand twenty-eight years,” he said blankly. “The end of the world was to occur… if I am correct… of course… in 2028.”
“That was so long ago.”
“A little over two thousand years. A blink of an eye for… for my Father.”
“But an eternity for me.”
I stared into his face, his eyes. They were empty now.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
“Right, an eternity for…” he paused. “An eternity for all of you, I suppose. Or at least everyone here that is left to be impatient.”
My stomach churned at the sound of his last words. My leg, in a subtle response, twitched gently.
“What, um, what do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Based on everything I have found, it seems that something… well… something particularly gargantuan happened to the earth about eleven years ago.”
“What… what - well what was it?” I stuttered.
“I do not know. Maybe a war, maybe some cosmic event. Either way, you are one of ten people left on this planet.”
My stomach was in knots now. Incredulity passed to unacceptability, to impossibility.
And my brother… if he was with me…
Just one more person.
Make it eleven, God damn it.
Make it eleven.
I keeled over the side of my bed, in a panic. And I remembered everyone. All the faces. Thirteen years ago, and all the faces still shine in my mind, like the face of Christ does now. I looked at him, and I spat and fell and vomited. So many millions of people, compounded over centuries through culture and development and love. For what?
Only bones in mud.
And I grew angry.
“If you would have come…” I cried. “If you would have known…”
“I am so sorry…” he replied.
His last words imparted leagues of knowledge to me. I understood the emptiness of his eyes now. If you would have missed your only goal, one that would affect millions of people, you would be empty-eyed too.
Then I thought, as men often do after acting.
“Those people…” I gasped, through tired wheezing. “All those people… aren’t they in heaven anyway?”
“They are not.”
I was not a religious man, even after staring Jesus in the face on multiple occasions. The illogic in his last sentence seemed evident, however.
“So there is no heaven then? Or what?”
“There are monumental forces at work in this universe, some present only in the mind of my Father. The Kingdom of Heaven is one of those forces. The opportunity was missed, and the force of Heaven can no longer cohabitate with earth. No one is in Heaven because no one was ever supposed to be in Heaven. Heaven was supposed to be here, at my discretion, on the correct date. It is too late now.”
I paused. And I thought.
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.
Just a bit too late.
“Then… ever-everyone is just damned then, just stuck in the ground, rotting?”
“I am sorry…”
“Answer me!” I yelled.
“Yes. Everyone that ever lived on this planet, save you and the nine others, will never continue living. There is no resurrection, no everlasting life.”
I shuddered, and asked what I shouldn’t have.
“What about me?”
“You will live only until you die, and no longer.”
I don’t want to die.
“Why doesn’t God do anything about this - the Father I mean?”
“He views the universe apathetically, not even as an anthill to men, but as… as the dust men accidentally inhale whilst breathing. I am cursed in that I understand his apathy, yet feel compelled to sympathize with your kind. And I am not your kind, yet I have crushed your anthill. I… have failed. All delinquency rests in the Son of the Most High.”
I recalled the last line, and the angelic trees that imparted it to me.
There was me, Christ, and nine others. This was one of many conversations he had had today, all of which were no doubt met with similar reactions. An empty planet, with an empty country, city, and district, all swirled gently around one man and one God in a dirty apartment. Every now and then, the God would utter something senseless, and the man would flail and complain. The God would apologize, and the man would feign acceptance. This was a pattern, as any statistician or theologian would tell you.
I was that man, in that apartment, with that God. The most important date in this universe was missed, and I had no purpose now but to console an inconsolable being.
We continued our conversations every other day it seemed, well into the next year. He spoke of ancient Rome, and Judea as well. He spoke of water-walking, and wine-changing. He spoke of the angels, and the beautiful one that my brother would have been.
He is underground now.
And at age one hundred and ten, I was too.
The last face I saw was that of a metaphysical chimera, with brown hair, skin, and eyes.
If the ramblings of a dying old man are worth any ears, let them know what I have learned:
That there are no resolutions in life.
That no dogs need be set afire for the above fact to be realized.
That men of age often see in dreams and speak in odd tongues.
That other old creatures may understand them plainly, whether man or God.
And that no one deserves to die.
Except for that damn Jesus of Nazareth.
By Jacob VandenHombergh
I heard a story once, when I was young. Maybe seventeen, eighteen. My older brother told it to me. He said, as I walked in the door, that he had just seen a terrible clip on the news. A couple of teenagers poured lighter fluid on a dog and set it on fire, right in the middle of the street, in front of everybody. And all I could do was turn around and roll my eyes - not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t really know how to. What the hell do you say to something like that?
My brother, without knowing it, answered me. He said that no matter what I’d learn, about religion, or God, or what is good and what is bad, no matter what I’d ever been told or what I’d see in the future, that some people on this planet deserve to die. Then he apologized with his eyes and walked away. I am now at the point in my life where I wish he wouldn’t have said that. He died forty years later, of a heart attack. I am dying now.
I don’t want to die.
I’m one hundred and nine years old, and I haven’t seen anybody in about thirteen years or so. This made seeing a man in my loft today quite surprising. Its fair to say that I felt a little like my brother’s heart over half a century ago.
My loft style apartment is grungy and unkempt. This is due to the fact that I haven’t been able to walk in over thirteen years. Cleanliness is not an option.
That would make me perfectly ungodly. And a dying man should not be ungodly.
I have an old couch, a kitchen, and a bathroom with dried out rat **** on the ground. I can’t clean those either. My bed is my abode, my home within this messy loft. There’s dirt in that, too, but not as much as else where. I can clean between the mattress and the box spring with an old toothbrush. That’s often what I do.
That’s often all I do.
And I haven’t seen anyone in thirteen years.
Why is that?
I heard a loud crash last night. Painfully loud. I was in one of the deepest sleeps I’d ever been in, and that damn crash woke me up. What a dream it interrupted, too. I was in some African village, walking around under the sun, on damp dirt with patches of grass growing here and there. As in most dreams, even the most mundane seemed amazing. I stared at the patches of grass. They grew one hundred times their normal speed, like in one of those time lapse videos. Then some liquid fell from the sky, in strange, undulating streams that frequently changed color: black to white and back again. Some kids ran over, yelling in gibberish to one another - I couldn‘t make out what they were saying. I couldn’t walk, just like in real life. They lit the grass on fire. All I could do was stand there. And as soon as the flames crept near me, I woke up.
I felt heat, and I heard the crash.
I couldn’t sleep until early that morning.
At six a.m., the man entered my room. I looked up and saw a shadow walking forward, unashamedly, as if it owned the loft. It hadn’t reached my bed yet. That was my true home. My true home, which I couldn’t protect. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but I squinted and watched him. I could see his full face now. He was dark skinned, with a short tangled beard. On his head he wore a jumbled mess of brown hair, and his eyes were brown as well. They were apologetic and fiery.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I quivered under my sheets, and in my fear, spat out two words:
“For what?” I asked.
“For being so late.”
Then he left the room as quietly as he entered. The door scraped the ground on the way out, and I did all I could think of doing.
I rationalized.
I forgot the crash.
I settled down.
And I slept.
In the morning - which to me was nine a.m. - I awoke to a subtle creaking. I looked over, and in the rocking chair adjacent to my bed sat the bearded man. His appearance was quite startling. I screamed, but he comforted me with the look in his eyes. Interrogation lent no similar effect.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am Jesus of Nazareth,” he calmly replied.
“Jesus of Nazareth…” I responded, half or maybe no-heartedly. I don’t want to die. Not at all. This did not reassure me.
He then began to cry, as any good God would. After a long stream of waterworks, he got up and walked toward the door.
“Wait!” I yelled through fits of coughing. “What were you late f-”
That’s as far as I got before he exited the apartment. The wooden door scraped the floor - pardon the rhyme - as it would have with anyone, whether God or man.
I cleaned my mattress, and thought of my brother. At this age, Jesus was just a farce. I was dying, after all.
One day later, and the gleam of sun rays poured over my curtains, saturating the wall behind the window. I hoped that my dream of Christ was over, but alas, it was not.
I need more sleep.
He walked toward me again, but his eyes lacked their fire.
“Well,” he paused. “It looks like… you’re the only one left here.”
“Left where?” I asked.
“In this area, at least. I don’t really know what happened, how I missed the date. But I’m here now, for you.”
“Listen, whoever you…” I paused, thinking. “…whoever you say you are… I don’t want to be bothered like this. How can you taunt an old man?”
“I am not taunting you. I am trying to reassure you. I am here now, it is over. My arrival was delayed, but I think it can still end now.”
“What can? Are you here to take me away, to the Pearly Gates or some other bull****?” I asked, sardonically. “Is this some trick? Do you just get off acting like the herald of death around old people? What the **** is wrong with you?”
“Please, relax. Everything will be fine now.”
“Fine? I haven’t seen a soul in thirteen years, and you saunter in here as if you can do anything!”
“Get up.”
I felt mocked.
“Stop it! Shut the hell up!”
“Get up and walk.”
He grabbed my arm and I felt only panic. Who was this, taunting my paralysis with his religious delusions?
I yelled.
“Help me! Please help me! Stop! He’s a ****ing psychopath, he’s grabbing me!”
My words danced irrationally as I drooled things obscene. Finally he let go, moved toward the exit, and left. I sat in my bed, while the door scraped shut. It was old. As was I. My eyes rolled back.
And I felt my legs move.
But I had nowhere to go. I had nowhere to want to go.
So I cried. Thirteen years of stagnation were ended too abruptly. I turned over and fell asleep. What else can one do in a situation like that?
In my dream I could walk. It was one of those overtly surreal dreams though, since I could move my legs, even though I wasn’t going anywhere. I was in a brightly lit forest, which was speckled with black and brown trees. The trees had blue leaves, and they dripped a sticky ooze. The multicolored denizens spoke to me in a multitude of languages, all of which I understood. Their words were inexplicable, yet they comforted me:
“Indulge not in the guilt of thy God: all delinquency rests in the Son of the Most High.”
If dreams really can be interpreted, I would say that the trees were angels. But I have a feeling their words were as upfront as they could be.
After my angelic encounter, I cleaned the rat feces off of my bathroom floor. I squinted to find the pieces that escaped me, and the black and white checkered tiles blended harshly together.
I didn’t really like walking. But the knowledge that I could made me uneasy when I wasn’t.
As I picked up the last rat pellet, Jesus Christ himself reentered my apartment. I don’t think he uses the door when he comes in - I only ever hear it scrape when he leaves. Maybe he likes to balance his godliness with his manliness.
Speaking of godliness, I feel a little bit closer to it, now that my bathroom is finally clean.
He approached me once again.
“Do you trust me yet?” he asked.
“Depends,” I said.
“On what, my son?”
“On whether or not I’m dreaming.”
“Why should you believe that you are dreaming?”
“I guess I’ve been having these very strange dreams recently, and… well, being able to walk is pretty hard to believe.”
“Please believe it. I… I need you to trust me right now… Please.”
There was a hint of desperation in his voice. His manliness was showing. After the shock of my recent experiences began to wear off, my impatience began to grow. Whether I was delusional or completely sane, I wanted answers of some sort.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
He paused.
“I am here to end time, to begin the tribulation of sinners and the exoneration of the faithful.”
“To end time,” I replied blankly.
What the hell do you say to something like that?
A teardrop slipped out of his eye and mingled with the hair of his beard.
I shook myself out of shock, and continued my interrogation.
“What’s… uh… what’s with the hastiness… the distress?”
“I was late.” He fumbled out, through cowering lips.
“Late?”
“As it is written: ‘of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.’”
I would later find it strange, that even while crying he could quote scripture so frankly, so assuredly.
It was as if he didn’t want to know it.
“So… you didn’t know to come?”
“I did not. It was a test… a test provided by my Father, and I failed it. I don‘t know how, I don‘t… I don‘t know.”
“That’s not a… not an exactly tiny thing to miss!”
Maybe he didn’t deserve to hear that, but I continued rambling anyway.
“People have been waiting for it for-”
“Four-thousand twenty-eight years,” he said blankly. “The end of the world was to occur… if I am correct… of course… in 2028.”
“That was so long ago.”
“A little over two thousand years. A blink of an eye for… for my Father.”
“But an eternity for me.”
I stared into his face, his eyes. They were empty now.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
“Right, an eternity for…” he paused. “An eternity for all of you, I suppose. Or at least everyone here that is left to be impatient.”
My stomach churned at the sound of his last words. My leg, in a subtle response, twitched gently.
“What, um, what do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Based on everything I have found, it seems that something… well… something particularly gargantuan happened to the earth about eleven years ago.”
“What… what - well what was it?” I stuttered.
“I do not know. Maybe a war, maybe some cosmic event. Either way, you are one of ten people left on this planet.”
My stomach was in knots now. Incredulity passed to unacceptability, to impossibility.
And my brother… if he was with me…
Just one more person.
Make it eleven, God damn it.
Make it eleven.
I keeled over the side of my bed, in a panic. And I remembered everyone. All the faces. Thirteen years ago, and all the faces still shine in my mind, like the face of Christ does now. I looked at him, and I spat and fell and vomited. So many millions of people, compounded over centuries through culture and development and love. For what?
Only bones in mud.
And I grew angry.
“If you would have come…” I cried. “If you would have known…”
“I am so sorry…” he replied.
His last words imparted leagues of knowledge to me. I understood the emptiness of his eyes now. If you would have missed your only goal, one that would affect millions of people, you would be empty-eyed too.
Then I thought, as men often do after acting.
“Those people…” I gasped, through tired wheezing. “All those people… aren’t they in heaven anyway?”
“They are not.”
I was not a religious man, even after staring Jesus in the face on multiple occasions. The illogic in his last sentence seemed evident, however.
“So there is no heaven then? Or what?”
“There are monumental forces at work in this universe, some present only in the mind of my Father. The Kingdom of Heaven is one of those forces. The opportunity was missed, and the force of Heaven can no longer cohabitate with earth. No one is in Heaven because no one was ever supposed to be in Heaven. Heaven was supposed to be here, at my discretion, on the correct date. It is too late now.”
I paused. And I thought.
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.
Just a bit too late.
“Then… ever-everyone is just damned then, just stuck in the ground, rotting?”
“I am sorry…”
“Answer me!” I yelled.
“Yes. Everyone that ever lived on this planet, save you and the nine others, will never continue living. There is no resurrection, no everlasting life.”
I shuddered, and asked what I shouldn’t have.
“What about me?”
“You will live only until you die, and no longer.”
I don’t want to die.
“Why doesn’t God do anything about this - the Father I mean?”
“He views the universe apathetically, not even as an anthill to men, but as… as the dust men accidentally inhale whilst breathing. I am cursed in that I understand his apathy, yet feel compelled to sympathize with your kind. And I am not your kind, yet I have crushed your anthill. I… have failed. All delinquency rests in the Son of the Most High.”
I recalled the last line, and the angelic trees that imparted it to me.
There was me, Christ, and nine others. This was one of many conversations he had had today, all of which were no doubt met with similar reactions. An empty planet, with an empty country, city, and district, all swirled gently around one man and one God in a dirty apartment. Every now and then, the God would utter something senseless, and the man would flail and complain. The God would apologize, and the man would feign acceptance. This was a pattern, as any statistician or theologian would tell you.
I was that man, in that apartment, with that God. The most important date in this universe was missed, and I had no purpose now but to console an inconsolable being.
We continued our conversations every other day it seemed, well into the next year. He spoke of ancient Rome, and Judea as well. He spoke of water-walking, and wine-changing. He spoke of the angels, and the beautiful one that my brother would have been.
He is underground now.
And at age one hundred and ten, I was too.
The last face I saw was that of a metaphysical chimera, with brown hair, skin, and eyes.
If the ramblings of a dying old man are worth any ears, let them know what I have learned:
That there are no resolutions in life.
That no dogs need be set afire for the above fact to be realized.
That men of age often see in dreams and speak in odd tongues.
That other old creatures may understand them plainly, whether man or God.
And that no one deserves to die.
Except for that damn Jesus of Nazareth.
By Jacob VandenHombergh