Jim lies on his back on the floating dock at the end of the green pier. The four pillars rising around him darker shadows in the greater dark, reminders of the apostles.
He has scaled the chain-link fence again and climbed the barrier of spikes and dodged every sand trap and wall of poison darts and swinging grindstone, leapt through fire and over snakes and outrun demons. The apostles not so far removed from that. He has seen photos of their pillars at Ephesus in Turkey, waved in Sunday school to prove these men were real and known, walking among the ancients. Maybe a couple thousand years more, though, to the Egyptians and pyramids. He was never great with dates. All of it pancakes into one dusty ancient day, one day in which the Egyptians rose and fell and also the Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Persians and all the others. Really that’s what has happened in his mind. All of that remembered as essentially the same day, the same one point of memory. The ancients can provide myth only, not history.
Even seeing the photos of the pillars he has never believed the apostles were real. Accounts of their voyages along the Turkish coast and sending letters, but impossible to believe. And so boring. I bring good news. The Good News Bible. News, brother, in which nothing happens. Your soul is saved. John arriving on some big beach and telling the kids playing in the sand, hey, your sins are erased. All you have to do is hand over your cash and let him into your heart. A fund-raising trip for the early church. You have no idea our plans. We’re going to find new shores, maybe a whole new world, and sell Jesus for gold. We’ll build chandeliers hung by golden ropes, all paid for by kids as poor as you, wearing scraps, because there will be a billion of you.
But that’s not really his church. His mother Lutheran, and technically he’s Lutheran, though he has no idea what it means. In all those hundreds of days in church, not once did they talk about what they were. Not once did they say, here’s the Catholic Church and what they believe, and now here’s the Lutheran Church and what we believe, and here are the reasons for the differences. And the Old Testament and the New Testament. He knows they’re following the new, but what are they supposed to do with the old?
Never any explanation for what he is supposed to believe or for the culture that made him. Only requirements were to sing, stand at the right times, hand over cash, and be polite.
Why it matters is that religion is the closest he can come to some sense of how he was made and who he is now. It’s the thing we all agree on without ever knowing what it is. And that must be the cause of the problem, because where else can he look?
The float is rocking him now, small waves come from where? Who is on the lake in the middle of the night? No sound of any boat. The waves were made by something and have to be explained, but nothing we know of fits. Too small and close together to be boat waves. Too sudden and brief to be from wind. Too large and too many to come from a swimmer. So there must be something larger swimming in the lake, breaking the surface for a moment and then submerging again. Not breaching but quieter than that, just lifting some enormous mass above the surface and then submerging quickly, and that causes a ring of small quick ripples to go in all directions, and Jim happened to be here to register them, perhaps the only one to do so. Otherwise God would not have been known. Jim the only priest, and he will have to walk now back to McDonald’s, a pilgrimage. He should lose a shoe along the way to create more struggle, a bit of drama. He’ll throw open the glass doors one-shoed and breathless and shout proof finally of God. His ripples felt, his existence. As far as I can tell, he’s like a carp but maybe a hundred feet long. Smell of rot, just like in the tules. Living in the deeper sections because these waves were small and smooth and regular so they had traveled far. If we go depth charge the middle of the lake, we might finally see the face of God.
The tattooed masses will follow him out kissing their arms for luck. Talismans everywhere across their skins because they knew this moment was coming, knew all previous pantheons would have to rise up together to defeat the one larger god. Snakes and anchors, Ashleys and Marias and more mysterious gods known only by initials. Hearts and skulls and other body parts that have transcended flesh, brightly colored birds and crosses, swastikas, blood, and even golden-scaled fish, closest gods to this one and most able to form a sacred net. The navy won’t get here in time. It will take days for even the most modern cruisers to plow their way through land, Lakeport not close at all to the sea, so this fairy ring of inscribed gods will be the first attack.
Into the water, all of them, swimming in dark night toward God, fearless, wanting to finally touch. No thought of whether they’ll have enough strength to return to shore, and so they venture on for half a mile, shedding shoes and jeans and shirts to not be dragged down, and all light is gone this far out, only occasional flashes as water is flung, and still they swim, slower now, a mile out, their numbers slimmer perhaps by a few but no less committed, throwing each arm forward toward knowledge, kicking, impatient for the body to catch up, the body always a weight and barrier and better shed. The last swimmers can no longer raise their arms but only stroke slowly beneath the surface, all quiet, the faithful still buoyed by hope and watching the darkness ahead for any sign, expecting something to surface until they’ve gone below, limbs locked and breath gone, and even then as they descend they are waiting for the embrace.
Word has spread about God and the faithful who have gone to find it and capture or destroy it. A new crowd gathered at the shore, and someone has thought of all the Fourth of July fireworks and the fireworks barge, so they’re hooking up a jet boat to it now, one of the supercharged jobs sounding like a Harley and spitting smoke into the air. Actual sparks coming out its exhausts, raised like fires to heaven. Slick orange paint job and “69” decaled on the side. The plan is to depth charge God with this payload, delivered right now at high speed. The driver is upset he won’t be able to display his magnificent rooster tail of water behind the boat, because that would get the fireworks wet, but he’s otherwise pleased to have been chosen.
Others want to be the chosen, also, and they’re swimming out to the barge and trying to climb aboard, so the whole thing is dangerously low and heaving and the already chosen are kicking others in the head to keep them from boarding. Screams of the faithful in the wakened night, and all of Lakeport brightening, lights along the shore, other boats arriving, the beach awash in crisscrossed wakes.
His mother’s church group will be there, in their sixties and seventies, carrying dishes for a potluck. Her famous tuna casserole baked with an entire bag of potato chips to feed the faithful.
One of the local kids is selling bread crumbs to feed the ducks, who must think night has passed and it’s now day. A man is offering five minutes on his binoculars for five dollars. Prostitutes are offering one last embrace before the end. A local minister has appeared to explain none of this is true, but he’s being ignored.
The jet-boat driver has pulled the towline taut and then suddenly guns it, engine splitting the air, a crackling sound. The fireworks barge lurches forward and the masses on board all shift aft at an angle, hitting like dominoes and going down, the ones at the rear thrown overboard, a great splash and then moans and shouts of lost providence.
The barge creates an enormous wake, and the jet boat’s bow is pointed skyward, the driver unable to see where he’s going, but he keeps it gunned anyway and the chosen battle for handholds, the losers falling away into the water.
The jet-boat driver guided by faith, view blocked and night too dark anyway, and no signposts to where God might be. Derelict pervert boat owner transformed into high priest, and he clings to the wheel as gravity pulls him backward, keeps the big accelerator plate pinned until he blows the engine, a final shot of fire into the sky and the bow comes down with a slap and the barge glides forward and slows until it bumps his boat gently, companionably.
New leaders now emerging on the barge, fights over what to do with the fireworks: strap them to the bodies of divers to take down as low as possible, or sink the barge after one big fuse is lit, or aim each rocket downward and let it torpedo. The recurring problem in all the discussions is that the fireworks can’t get wet. They don’t move or explode or work in any way once they hit water. Reaching God very frustrating in this way. Why can’t he come to the surface again?
In the end there’s nothing to do except light the fireworks from the barge and have a show, Fourth of July early. Brilliant constellations in the sky above, mirrored on the water, and perhaps God will be impressed and want to see. But of course he never surfaces again, and Jim’s one contact with him was the only contact, so Jim is burned alive and his bones sawn into pieces afterward to keep a small relic in each house of the faithful. This is the best use of his life he can think of.