“Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan, gazing across a few yards of gravel to the massive concrete foundation from which the cross’s steel verticals erupted. Bracketed neatly to the structural members were the tubes carrying the natural gas from an underground pipeline. The actual burners didn’t start until maybe twenty feet above ground level, maybe because they didn’t want to roast parked vehicles. But there was a connection to an outlying altar, already dark with blood and buzzing with flies, including a sort of open crematorium that looked like it could get pretty hot.
“Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes.
“There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—that’s like saying supposedly Muhammad Ali was a boxer. Supposedly Ford makes cars. It’s—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point.
“If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced.
Sophia said, “Okay. And that is?”
“So-called Christianity, as it existed up until recently, is based on a big lie,” Ted explained. “The most successful conspiracy of all time. And it was all summed up in the symbolism of the cross. Every cross you see on a mainstream church, or worn as jewelry, or on a rosary or what have you, is another repetition of that lie.”
“And what is that lie exactly?” Phil asked. He already knew. But he and the others all wanted to hear a living human actually say it, just as spectacle.
“That Jesus was crucified.”
There. He’d said it. No one could speak. Ted took their silence as a request for more in the same vein. “That the Son of God, the most powerful incarnate being in the history of the universe, allowed Himself to be scourged and humiliated and taken out in the most disgraceful way you can imagine.”
“‘Taken out’ means ‘murdered’?” Anne-Solenne asked. It was a rhetorical question that Ted answered with the tiniest hint of a nod.
“The church that was built on the lie of the Crucifixion,” Ted continued, “had two basic tenets. One was the lovey-dovey Jesus who went around being nice to people—basically, just the kind of behavior you would expect from the kind of beta who would allow himself to be spat on, to be nailed to a piece of wood. The second was this notion that the Old Testament no longer counted for anything, that the laws laid down in Leviticus were part of an old covenant that could simply be ignored after, and because, he was nailed up on that cross. We have exposed all that as garbage. Nonsense. A conspiracy by the elites to keep people meek and passive. The only crosses you’ll see in our church are on fire, and the symbolism of that has nothing to do with the KKK. It means we reject the false church that was built upon the myth of the Crucifixion.”
“So, to be clear, all Christianity for the last two thousand years—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, evangelical—is just flat-out wrong,” Phil said.
“That is correct.”
“The four gospels—”
Ted shook his head. “That’s the first thing the church did, was enshrine those gospels. Telling the story they wanted to tell. About the meek liberal Jesus who gave food away to poor people and healed the sick and so on.”
“And was crucified,” Sophia prompted him.
Ted nodded.
“And … resurrected?” Anne-Solenne asked.
“They needed some way to explain the fact that He was still alive, so they invented all that resurrection stuff.”
“So where’d Jesus go after that? What did He do?”
“Fought the Romans. Went back and forth between this world and heaven. He has the power to do that.”
“Where is He now?”
“We don’t know! Maybe here. He has been in eclipse for two thousand years. The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.”
“So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia stepping on his toe, under the table.
He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.”
It was a reference to one of their teachers at Princeton who had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on:
1 Speech is aggression
2 Every utterance has a winner and a loser
3 Curiosity is feigned
4 Lying is performative
5 Stupidity is power
They spent another quarter of an hour strolling about the hilltop, craning their necks to behold the outstretched cross arms, studded with nozzles that would soon hurl flame into the sky from sundown to sunrise. They gave the altar a wide berth; another Son of Aaron was in there whetting a long knife in preparation for today’s bloody oblation. Julian, unable to meet the gaze of his new lamb friends now that he understood that they were only here to die, instead tended to look out over the surrounding countryside. North of them a few miles, he saw a blue water tower, and, near that, a Walmart sign.
The two-lane road was a chute between walls of corn that were already, in early June, as high as a man’s head. Tom and Kevin’s pickup blocked the view forward. In the rearview loomed an even higher pickup truck whose driver very much wanted them to know that they were not going fast enough. None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart’s lot.
“I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore.
“Blast radius? Could you unpack that mysterious statement please?” asked Anne-Solenne.
“It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”
They clambered down out of the SUV and tried to find a walking speed that would get them into its air-conditioning as quickly as possible without causing them to get hotter because of exertion. Phil was walking backward, staring curiously at the water tower: a thing he understood conceptually but had never seen on such a scale, since he had spent his life in places with hills.
Apparently cued by Sophia’s reference to a graveyard, Julian had pulled his glasses down over his eyes and begun conducting research. Her grandparents had died and been put in the black soil sufficiently long