I move the stars for no one. . .
I - The Antichrist
Character: Justin
Words: 666
Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. 1 John 2:22
He rarely puts pen to paper, preferring instead to read his sermons on the backs of his eyelids, blinking between paragraphs and full stops. The desert sun beats down even through shade. Gazing at it beforehand, he can read more easily, for the words become burn-outs in the black, glowing obvious as neon signs (Mr. Chin's, and a fiery cross). They have always been inside him; his Bible is more memory than prophecy.
Behind his tangled lashes (lank hair obscuring vile features), his pupils expand, growing wider than the whites of his eyes so that he may better see in his own darkness. He writes today at Bishop McNaughton's request, his letters the copperplate clay out of which he is shaping a false prophet. Was Adam made so easily of dust?
Already he is bored, and he wonders if Man was not created last out of love and the painstaking desire to sculpt a flattering self-portrait, but was rather a product of procrastination, a chore lethargically accomplished by idle hands.
Original sin. All children are born to it, be they conceived in holy wedlock, in the christening of marriage beds, or amidst pleas for mercy, with their mothers forcibly halved over cluttered kitchen tables. God took no bride, and favors bastards: Adam, Jesus, Cain.
He is the legitimate son of the Morning Star (for Lucius Belyakov was aptly named): the Left Hand of God whose first rebellion at six minutes old was grasping his father's finger in his right. With that same hand he now turns wine into water, gold into brass, for those who would have all gospel filtered through aged, half-deaf ears, diluted in mortal minds, regurgitated from imperfect mouths. Explaining God as one would explain sex to a child, slowly and simply and omitting the pain of virginity. The pleasure begins only after innocence has been torn in the body and pared from the soul; thus to ascend, must one not first sin?
(He remembers penetrating eyes and a grisled beard of pitch, greasy with food and a woman's lust; the rhythmic thumping of a maid and a holy man rutting against the wall; Mama praying in the next room, Papa sobbing; Irina holding him in the playroom, singing, "Ochi chernyj, ok nedarom vy glubiny temnyj¹. . .")
No, not in vain.
He removes his reading glasses and presses his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, rubbing away the tension that has collected between his eyes. A part of him would like to think that he will miss Bishop McNaughton's friendship, but that part is only the remnants of yet more falsehoods recently expelled in the inked words before him, exorcized for the freer reign of the truths inked in the vellum of his skin.
Justin preaches with his eyes closed, and leads the faithful blind. In the Braille branches of his body greedy fingers seek salvific scripture; more memory than prophecy, he knows well the summit to which he guides them. His journey began on a ledge, and he has already ruled one asylum (in their tongue, it is called 'sanctuary'). He has driven mad a trinity of maids (Virginia, Regina, Celeste; the Virgin Queen of Heaven), teaching them through repetitive motions until by rote his doctrine was notched upon their psyches, his snarling discourse bitten into their flesh.
He toys with the idea of crumpling the papers into the trash, and sending instead one address and three patient numbers. With what notes then would the supervisory committee wish to mark His Word? what would McNaughton himself suggest, in the bruise of a fingertip, in the taut grip of shorn hair?
Smiling to himself, he neatly folds the papers, pressing their edges off sharply with his thumbnail, and places them in an envelope. They will be returned to him in type, he is certain, made pristine by the bishop's secretary's fingertips bruising lettered keys. Innocence must be torn, after all, and in their free rain shall he ascend.
¹Dark eyes, darker than depth you are, not in vain. . . E. Grebenka