V.

“I’ve killed him,” said Marc Uriah with a gasp.

His eyes scanned the aisle to see if anyone was watching. No one was. For a moment, he stood panicked, looking at the boy. Then, a decision came, firm and gripping. He bent down near Romel and whispered in a rush, “I’m sorry for doing this to you but I can’t be caught here. I have a family, and they need me. You understand, I’m sure. You must. You must!”

Then, with determination, he stood up and ran away.

Outside, he went in search of a church. To what end, he didn’t know.

He’d been raised in a nominally Presbyterian home. When he was thirteen, he’d had a science teacher, an elfish looking man who wore green tinted glasses and combed the patch of hair he had left on his head all twirled up like an ice cream swirl, who’d helped rid him completely of the few religious ideas he carried in his head. It was all very straightforward, the teacher had taught him: in the beginning was a primordial earth, bathed in chemicals and water, and from there emerged the first amino acid strain. Life proceeded from here by purely mathematic means, amino acids bound together until a single celled organism came to be, and this organism replicated and mutated, in response to its changing environment, until history spawned human beings in all our self-perceived complexity. What need was there for religious interpretation of these events when reason more than sufficed?

Marc Uriah had agreed with this. He spent his life living very happily and comfortably under the governance of these ideas. But now, he was panicked. He’d encountered something that could not be explained by reason and he’d perhaps thrown his whole life away in obedience to it. He may even have killed someone, for God’s sake!

He saw an old parish coming up on him. It wasn’t Presbyterian, it was Catholic, but he figured they were all the same. He walked into their parking lot, hot, sweating, itching, feeling very desperate. He approached the steps leading up to the narthex of the church and was about to climb up when a voice called to him from his side.

“Are you looking for someone, sir?”

Marc Uriah turned to see a priest sitting on the lower steps, a younger man, maybe in his thirties, smoking a cigarette.

The priest repeated: “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

“I…” Marc Uriah began, realizing only then that he wasn’t sure. He tried to answer the question posed to him but instead all that came out was, “Should you be doing that?”

“Doing what?” said the priest.

“Smoking?” said Marc Uriah.

“Where does it say I can’t?” the priest said back.

Marc Uriah was again left with no response. He walked over by the priest and said, “I guess I’m trying to figure something out and this was where I was lead to find answers.”

The priest laughed, bitingly.

“Lead to find answers, huh? Well, sit down, I’ve got some answers for you.”

Marc Uriah obeyed.

“I’ve been doing this now,” the priest began, expelling smoke as he spoke, “for going on five years. I started off all darling-eyed, thinking I was serving some higher good. I tried to help people, addicts, couples in bad marriages, ‘the poor’ (whatever that means in our culture), and it was funny, because, see, all these people, it felt like I cared more about their problems than they did. I’d spill myself into their lives trying to fix them but it’s like they were happy being broken.” The priest here paused to take another drag, a deep one, as though the cigarette were his source of life. With a furious exhale, he hissed the smoke from his nose like a dragon. Then he went on, “You know what made all this worse? I’d turn to my superiors, the bishops, the archbishop, and ask them for support. Instead, they’d answer me with accusations, tell me to focus on what matters, growing the fellowship, insuring the building costs are covered, making friends with important people.”

Marc Uriah was all thrown off. He didn’t understand where any of this was going.

“Aren’t you,” he questioned, “supposed to…you know, have God available to you?” He said “God” in a whisper as though he were uttering a curse word in uptight company.

The priest responded to the author’s question with a shake of his head. He drained his cigarette down to a nub, then chained a fresh one using the dying embers from the first. The nub he flicked away while whistling out a trail of smoke, the other he slipped between his lips and started smoking.

“What do you do?” the priest said.

“I’m an author,” Marc Uriah said.

“I bet when you were young, you’d read for pleasure, right?”

“Yes,” Marc Uriah said, nodding.

“But then what happens is, you start studying writing. All the technical aspects, the grammar, the punctuation first, then characterization, plotting, story beats, all that. You start to see the formula. The mechanics of it all. Suddenly, stories aren’t fun anymore. The magic is gone. You’ve seen behind the curtain and all that’s there is a little man, plugging in numbers where they go.”

Marc Uriah furrowed his brow. This was not his experience at all, in fact, the opposite. He’d marveled at the grandeur of effort and discipline it took to write. It’d humbled him, inspired him to sacrifice, made him a better man. He couldn’t relate at all to what the priest was saying. He didn’t interrupt him, though, and so the man went on.

“That’s the sort of thing that happens to us religious professional types. We come in in love with this so-called God, all fiery to do His bidding, and then, we’re taught in our classes about the history of man, about his philosophies and his politics and his religions, and just like for you writers, the formula begins to emerge. You realize God, and gods for that matter, they’re all part of the mechanics. We invent Him, or them, or what have you, because we need them. But they’re not there. They don’t speak when we call for them, they don’t help when we’re truly struggling, they’re not there when children suffer or die. They’re just illusions, like your stories.”

The priest here pinched his cigarette between two fingers to take it from his mouth. He gazed up into the sky, staring at it like an enemy, and spit out a long, steady stream of smoke, as if it brought him purpose to, in some small way, bring damage to creation. Afterward, he turned his face to the author, and with a cynical and hateful glare, he asked, “Got your answers yet?”

                

“No,” said Marc Uriah pensively, for he was unsure of what he was about to say, “no, but I think I may have some answers for you. Up until very recently I believed just like you, about God that is. But then I…saw something that made it very difficult to persist in such thinking. I had an experience with the supernatural, an encounter that, for reasons I’ll leave unstated, robbed me of my ability to doubt its veracity. And now I’ve been lead here, to you, and maybe…” here the man began to pick up steam, to become excited, as though he were a scientist speaking of some new discovery, “…it’s to say to you that you’re wrong. But not just that, also that you’ve been wronged, by your teachers, your institution, even those you tried to aid. And that if this is true, that bleakness in you can pass, and your initial passion can be restored. You can be…”

                

“What?” the priest asked. “Saved?”

                

“Yes, saved, that is the word I was about to say. Saved from your malaise, aye!”

                

Again, the priest laughed bitingly, only now it lasted long. His face turned red and hot, smoke swirled about him like an aura; he took on the appearance of a devil enraptured in amusement at the suffering of man. And just as suddenly as the laughter started, it stopped, signaled by a spit, all black and tarred, at the feet of Marc Uriah.

                

“Who the hell do you think you are? Some kind of prophet? I suppose that’s what you writers purport to be…or is that, pretend to be? But here’s news for you, old man. You’re not a prophet, you’re not important. You’re manure that by some dumb stroke of luck became somehow self-aware, and in so many years you’ll be doing what you’re made to do: compost the earth. Now get out of here, off my property, before I call the cops.”

                

The author stood so quick it made his knees crack. Backpedaling, with arms stretched out, he tried to assuage the priest. “Look, father, I’m not sure what’s happened here, but I never meant you harm.”

               

“You haven’t harmed me,” the priest retorted, besetting Marc Uriah as he spoke. “No, you’ve harmed only yourself, tricking your mind into believing in ghosts. You’re broken, more broken than all those others, and there’s no place for you here.”

                

After reinserting his cigarette in his mouth, he rushed at Marc Uriah, and grabbed him roughly by the arms. He shoved the old man backward, turning him around. All the while the priest was shouting, “You hear me, writer? You hear me, prophet? There’s no place for you here! You’re a blasphemer! A blasphemer, dammit! A blasphemer against reality!”

                

Marc Uriah nodded, his hands up in surrender, already walking off. He was soon passed the parking lot and back on the streets he’d been on before. He walked them, sullen, wondering what had just gone on.

                

Was he to take some meaning from this? Was he to take meaning from anything? In the past, he’d never looked for any. All of life was an arbitrary set of happenstances, random events, and coincidences dictated by the whim of chemicals moving about the human system, causing us all to do this or that thing, all in the interest of our own self-perpetuation and survival. But then the vision, it had changed all that. Now, he wondered if there was a purpose to things. But if there was, why was the purpose so unclear?

                

He stood before a window. He saw his reflection, ragged and disheveled. It disturbed him. Before today, he’d always been so neat, so prim, so well put together. The sight of himself like this angered him. It caused his blood pressure to rise, like the crescendo of an orchestral piece. It’s funny, he used to be such a calm guy. But now…his rage, it threatened to rule him. This realization only made things worse. Without thinking, he thrust out his fist toward the glass, striking it with all his force.

                

“Ahhhhhhh!” he screamed, letting out all his frustrations. It felt nice. It felt good.

                
But just as he was coming off the high of his outburst, just as his dopamine transmitters had begun to do their duty, the store owner came crazily up to the glass, yelling, in a rabid Hispanic accent, that he was going to kill him and call the police. Marc Uriah, nervous and Canadian, said back, “No, no need, aye, I’m heading out now!” Then, with fumbling feet nearly tripping over each other, he went running off.