Flare (17 page)

“I agree,” said Colm before turning to Zeke. “Have you anything in that rucksack of yours that will help …
free
brother Archangel from his fate?”

Zeke thought a moment and then nodded grimly. He had just the thing, and it would take the prisoner to the sky gently, as if he were falling asleep into the clouds above.

/***/

Brother Colm had made sure Archangel knew what he was drinking, and what it would do. The man was lucid enough to understand what he was about to take, and in sufficient discomfort to ask for it
now
, over and over again.

The mushroom tea had been heated enough to release the natural chemicals and oils, but not enough to denature them. The mixture turned a cloudy white, and Colm dropped four painkillers inside the tincture for good measure. They brought it to the lips of Archangel, who immediately took a drink, coughed and then drank some more, again holding the liquid in his mouth so that he would absorb it faster. The prisoner then relaxed and nodded his head.

After fifteen minutes his eyes began to dilate, and it was clear that he was entering another world. Colm insisted that they stay with Archangel until he was gone, and the old man whispered softly above the prisoner’s ecstatic body.

“You’ll sleep gently but deeply, son,” said Brother Colm. “You’ll dream, but not of the privations and hardships you’ve faced in your life as Archangel. You’ll dream of yourself as you once were, as
Ignacio
, as a child filled with joy who found happiness in his family, and in play, and in life. You’ll go back to your purest form, the form uncorrupted by this world, and that’s how you will be. How do you feel?”

“F-flying,” said Archangel.

“Perfect,” said Brother Colm. “Do you see a white light? Be honest.”

“No.”

“Visualize one. Bring it into existence. Do you see one now?”

Archangel’s dilated pupils darted back and forth, as if he were tracking tiny insects dancing in front of his eyes.

“Thousands,” said Archangel. “
Como
stars.”

“Bring them all into one,” said Brother Colm. “Have them all join until they are one light. Can you do that?”

The prisoner’s eyes darted back and forth again, and his breaths became quick as he seemed to enter an even higher state of euphoria.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is the path to heaven,” said Brother Colm. “It’s there for you, Ignacio. It doesn’t care for your past misdeeds, so long as you are penitent for them. Think back to all the times you have wronged another, be it another person, an animal, or even the world itself.”

Brother Colm let Archangel ruminate on this for a moment.

“Now,” said Brother Colm, “do you truly feel bad about what you have done?”

“Yes,” said Archangel.

Tears rolled from Archangel’s distended eyes and down his cheek, and soaked the muddied dirt on the back of his head.

“You are saved, Ignacio,” said Brother Colm. “For we are all imperfect creatures, but once you pass that white threshold, all your imperfections will be left behind, and only your soul will pass through. Do you understand this?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel your soul cleaving from your body, and bringing only your purity, your holiness into the afterlife, to exist in the ethereal firmament unsullied, as you once were, and as you should be again?”

“Yes,” said Ignacio, whose eyes were now completely dilated, still and unblinking.

“Then you are already there,” said Colm. “Continue on the path, let God take you into his eternal arms, and you will be rewarded. Stay the course, Ignacio, just stay the course.”

Colm said a prayer in Spanish, and then in Latin, and then knelt down behind Ignacio’s head and held it, as if to cushion it. He then beckoned Zeke and Foster to hold the man’s hands, and they did so, holding his arms straight out as his breaths became shallow and quick.

They stayed that way for ten minutes, and then Ignacio was gone, his eyes still open, but his chest unmoved by breath. Colm nodded at Zeke and then at Foster. None of them were happy, but they now had a resolution to this tale, perhaps the best resolution that could have been.

“We need to bury him now,” said Colm. “Perhaps cremate the body instead.”

“No cremation,” said Foster. “We’re in a dangerous area, and they’ll find us. I suggest we bury him, and do it as quickly as we can, then get some space between us and that building over there.”

“I agree,” said Colm.

Zeke was happy to hear this. Colm may have been a mystic but when push came to shove, he wasn’t a fool.

/***/

They put a good ten miles between them and the prison before sunrise, and they all gathered around to eat dried plant material and jerky that Zeke had gathered during their walk. They sat in Colm’s tent. Foster didn’t have the strong silver tent of Zeke and Colm, but rather a homemade shelter built of several layers of strong black cloth. It was small and he asked to stay in Colm’s tent, and Colm of course accepted.

Zeke was glad to have Foster with them but couldn’t understand how he had survived this long. The young man’s tent was only made of black rags and resembled Archangel’s body bag.

/***/

They ate without conversation, too filled with the day’s events to develop the quick chatter in which men around a campfire are so easy to engage. After ten minutes of quiet, Foster broke the silence.

“Some show you put on back there,” said Foster.

“It was indeed,” said Colm. “But it wasn’t a show, I assure you of that.”

“I bet it wasn’t,” said Foster with a friendly nod, not taking the bait.

Colm took a bite out of his jerky and then looked at Foster grimly.

“It was real, son,” said Colm.

Foster nodded quickly, trying to appease the old man.

“You don’t believe me?” asked Colm.

Foster took a deep breath.

“I’m sharing your tent, and eating your food, and following in your path, Brother Colm,” said Foster. “But no, I don’t believe it was real.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was finding a man on the brink of death, drugging him and then sending him off without pain,” said Foster. “Which was great, and I’m glad we did it. But that’s it. If this was six months ago, we’d have taken him to a hospital. They’d have given him morphine, and he’d probably still be alive.”

“It was real, Brother Foster,” said Colm. “And though I do appreciate your honesty, I assure you it was real.”

“The guy was high off his ass,” said Foster. “I’m glad we spared him some pain, but he didn’t see God. We didn’t have morphine so we gave him some mushrooms, he got high, and that’s it.”

“It was more than just that, son,” said Colm.

“
How
was it more? Can you explain that to me?”

“He was dying,” said Colm. “I’ve read hundreds of stories from those with near-death experiences, and heard many of them firsthand. The one common theme is that it’s different from a drug-induced hallucination. From what I’ve heard, even from those who aren’t that spiritual, is that it’s different. You’re there and it’s real.”

“It’s not real,” said Foster. “Our friend wasn’t ascending to the fluffy clouds, en route to meet his haloed family sitting behind a gold fence. He was dying, we got him high, and now he’s dead.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t as prosaic as you described,” said Colm. “But he was experiencing something deep, something profound, and we can’t discard it as delusion.”

“I can,” said Foster. “And by your logic, if our man here hadn’t been there with the mushroom tea, Archangel wouldn’t have ascended to heaven in the first place. He’d be muddling around in Purgatory right now, or maybe crisscrossing the planes as a spooky ghost.”

Colm frowned and then thought about this.

“Let’s take a step back,” said Colm. “Before I try to show my perspective, I’d like to see yours. Could you help me understand where you’re coming from?”

Foster considered this for a moment, and then laughed in response.

“Man,” said Foster. “I never thought I’d hear those words from a guy like you. In general, the more religious a guy is, the less likely he is to want to hear another’s opinion.”

“Well, I’d like to hear yours. Hold nothing back.”

Foster took a deep breath and prepared his argument as he scratched the back of his neck. Zeke could tell that Foster had strong ideas, loosely held back by the fact that he was in Colm’s tent. But Foster was a young man, perhaps twenty-four, too old to be shy about his beliefs and too young for them to be tempered by a full life’s endless incongruities.

“Listen,” said Foster. “I appreciate your philosophy, I really do. I like your tolerance of other religions, how you’re
doing something
instead of just preaching, and I like the fact that you’re willing to see everything around you for what it is, even things that don’t quite fit with what you believe in. But at the core of your philosophy, you’re wrong.”

“How so?”

“Since the dawn of time, religious folk have been fighting science tooth and nail. Every step of the way, science does something, and it takes a few hundred years of torture before the church realizes that science was right. Galileo proved Copernicus’s theory that the sun was the center of our solar system, and the church arrested Galileo for heresy. They suppressed the teaching of Darwin, and scoffed at anyone else who thought the earth was more than six thousand years old. The church pardoned Galileo a few centuries after he died a sinner, and guys like you accept the real obvious stuff in time, but religion as a whole fights science for as long as it can.”

Foster paused a moment, and Colm nodded in understanding.

“Religion goes through three stages with science,” said Foster. “First, they ignore the truth; second, they burn those who espouse it. Third, when the evidence is insurmountable, religion claims that they knew it all along.”

Foster looked up, and spoke slowly.

“You’re at stage three, Colm. You’re making a lot of sense, but only because you’re accepting the truth around you and shaping your beliefs to fit it.”

Colm nodded, but then shook his head.

“I disagree.”

“All right,” said Foster, laughing. “I gave it a shot. Let me make one more blunt point to show you where I’m coming from, and then you can talk. Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

“First of all,” said Foster, “do you believe the Bible is the word of God?”

“I do,” said Colm.

“Can you read to me Deuteronomy 22:20
and
22:21?”

Colm took the Bible from Zeke’s hand and opened it up to the correct page.

“
But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel
,” read Colm, “
then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from you
.”

“Explain in plain English what’s meant by that glorious passage.”

“If a woman isn’t a virgin when she marries,” said Colm, “she should be stoned to death.”

“Now, I ask you this, Colm,” said Foster. “What part of that sentence is not complete and utter bullshit? What part of killing a woman who has sex before marriage, even if it was only allegory, what
part
of that isn’t
complete and utter
bullshit?”

“You are mixing the concepts of
facts
and
truths
, son, and the Bible doesn’t have facts,” said Colm. “There are inconsistencies even amongst the books. What it holds is
truth
, the truth that compassion is our only salvation …”

“What’s so compassionate about executing your neighbor because she’s not a virgin? There’s no compassion and there’s no truth because it’s all bullshit,” said Foster. “It’s bullshit because the text was written for the times, and guys like you ignore the parts that no longer apply and call the rest gospel.
You
aren’t gonna kill your neighbor because she has a boyfriend, though God knows some backwards places did that before the flare hit. We learn to disregard those archaic passages, and we become better for it. You want truth? I’ve got a truth for you: it’s that a fundamental part of progress is humanity gradually ignoring bigger and bigger parts of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and pretty much every other religious text that exists.”

Foster let that comment hang in the air for a moment.

“And I’m grateful that you aren’t a fundamentalist, Colm,” said Foster. “I think that you kept your faith’s compassion and let go of the rest. I might not be so lucky with the next religious guy I come across. He might use a line from whatever text he has to justify letting me burn for the infidel that I am.”

“I’ve been around religious folks all my life,” said Colm with a laugh, now defensive. “I assure you none of them would let you
burn
, even if you were an enemy and—”