Jack rummaged through some cupboards, looking for cups. He found one, went over to the sink, and poured himself some water. Then he took a seat at the middle table, on the end, back facing the door. He took a sip of the water and glanced briefly at the woman. She had long scraggly black hair, a large, crooked nose, and she looked either very bored, very tired, or both. Around her shoulders was a thin, finely woven black shawl. She looked at him and said, “Is this your first day?”
“Second,” Jack replied. He took another sip of water. He was feeling better already. The woman nodded, as if his answer had somehow explained something important. “Yeah, it takes some getting used to,” she said. “Yeah,” Jack agreed. “Especially the heat.”
“Oh, that’s the worse,” the woman said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m gonna feint.”
“I believe it,” Jack said. “How long have you been working here?”
The woman looked up at the ceiling, her face a mask of intense thought, as she tried to recollect the correct answer to his question. “Well, I started in 89 . . . So, I guess about . . . twenty-eight years.”
“Wow, that’s a long time,” Jack said.
“Too long,” the woman said, then went back to her salad.
Jack didn’t know how to respond to that, and the two said nothing more. A few moments later someone else came in the room and said, “Hey Donna!”, then went to her locker and opened it. Jack’s heart leapt in his chest as he watched the girl rifling through her locker. It was her. It was Eve. And when she was done rifling through her locker, she came right over to his table, a bag of potato chips in her hand, and sat down right opposite him.
8
Kanye sat at the desk in the corner of his motel room, an open bible before him. He leafed through it, studying the verses that seemed to give to him a divine confirmation of the horrible thing he already knew had happened to his once beloved church. Everywhere he turned, there was confirmation. Peter warned about it: For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: 1 Peter 4:17
Paul warned about it “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.” Thessalonians 2:3-4
And Matthew warned about it: When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Matthew 24:15-16
He closed the bible, stood up, and trudged over to the bed. He flopped down, resting his head against the headboard, his mind filled with an awful realization. It was all true. The son of perdition was sitting in the temple of God. The abomination of desolation was standing in the holy place. The church that he once loved had been overrun. And its vicar, Christ, had been replaced by Satan. And that is who he, and the entire Christian church, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant, was serving. So much so that they would try to kill a man whose mission was to save humanity from themselves. And they would kill him because a free humanity threatened their own existence.
Kanye took his cell phone off the night stand and looked up his contacts. Near the top of the list was Cardinal Byron Banks. Banks, nearing eighty, was one of Kanye’s oldest and dearest friends, and a trusted advisor. Banks knew about Kanye’s mission; he was one of the men on the committee that had appointed him to the awful task. And yet, in the twenty-two years since the birth of Adam Landers, he had never discussed this mission with him. Perhaps he simply not wanted to believe that the Cardinal, a man of unceasing kindness, who had given his life in service to the poor, could really be in on this nefarious plot, could really have given himself over to serve Satan.
But of course, it wasn’t really that simple. It was not a line that had been crossed boldly, or with careful deliberation. No, it happened gradually, in stages, like a company being bought out by another, bit by bit, piece by piece, until one day the annexing corporation owned a majority of shares and had the deciding vote on matters of corporate policy. This is how the takeover had happened, and good men, like the Cardinal, did not so much make it happen as they failed to actively oppose it. But happen it did. The majority of shares had been acquired by the enemy. And it was something Kanye could not ignore. He called Cardinal Banks, who answered on the third ring. After a brief round of small talk, Kanye, his heart beating fast, got to the reason for his call.
“Cardinal,” he said, “I am in a motel in Silverton, Illinois. The man is in my crosshairs. And I am going to kill him. And not in the service of God. How can this be?”
There was silence on the other end for some time. Then Banks said “Kanye, when I first started off as a priest I worked as a missionary in Africa. We were there to bring them the gospel, but also to bring them food and medicine. I wanted so desperately to help those people. But day after day I saw them dying by the dozens. Little children, who had never harmed anyone, baking in the sun, their bellies distended with hunger, their heads swollen, their limbs like sticks, starving to death in the streets like dogs. I began to realize that if this life were a battle between good and evil, then evil was winning. Darkness was swallowing the light; the devil was stronger than God. But the more I read my bible the more I realized that maybe it wasn’t so simple. Isaiah 45:7 says: ‘I form the light and create darkness. I bring prosperity and create disaster; I the Lord do all these things.’
It’s all of God, Kanye. It is not our job to conquer evil in this life, or even to discern its precise source or meaning. That is beyond our powers. Our job is to help people. To salve their wounds, to bring them food, to visit them in prison, to comfort them in their afflictions, to assure them their love ones are in heaven, and that their efforts do not go unrewarded. Our job is to give them the answers they seek, to simplify things for them, so their minds can process them. And this man, Adam, and his mission, will bring only confusion.”
“You talk about mankind as if they are a collection of infants,” Kanye said. “They are infants,” the Cardinal replied, “And the church is the world’s biggest nursemaid. Who else but infants would believe that you receive forgiveness by confessing your sins to a priest in a dark booth? Or that you receive strength by eating a cookie that’s been transformed into the body of Christ? Or that you receive grace by praying the Hail Mary twenty times on a bead of rosaries? Or that you get your dead relatives into heaven quicker by saying novenas for them, or praying to so-called saints on their behalf? They are infants, Kanye; they are infants, and our job is to take care of them.”
Kanye was shocked to hear the Cardinal talk this way. He had not known that he had grown so cynical. “The church you just described sounds a lot like Satan to me,” Kanye said.
“I haven’t believed a goddamned thing the church has said for forty years,” the cardinal said. “I don’t serve the church. I don’t serve the devil. I serve man. God doesn’t need me; He doesn’t need my praise, my songs, my worship, my flattery. He’s quite comfortable in His heaven without a word from me. But people do need me, Kanye. Those children if Africa; they needed me. The people dying alone in hospitals; they need me. The people forgotten in prisons; they need me. And it is for them, and them alone, that I wear this clown costume, and do the things I do.”
“So, where does that leave me? And my mission? If it’s all the same—God and Satan—then why are we serving either one? Why not just follow our own consciences? Because mine tells me that killing is wrong.”
“Then you should follow it,” the cardinal said. “Maybe if Abraham had said ‘No way’ when God told him to kill Isaac five thousand