It’s hands. Human hands. Dozens of them, stewing in a febrile broth.
They are small hands, one could even say child-size.
The woman turns. Her eyes are filled with teeth.
Simon wakes in the van to find the Prophet sitting over him. Behind him is the glow of the setting sun.
“He’s talking to you,” says the boy formerly known as Paul.
“Who?”
“God.”
Simon shakes his head. His mouth tastes woolly.
“Who is Uriel?” he asks, unclear of where the name has come from, just that it is in his mouth.
“Some say he is a cherub or a seraph, but most believe he is an archangel. When the ten plagues descended on Egypt he was known as the Angel of Death. It was he who wrestled Jacob, he who told Noah of the coming flood. Did you see him?”
Simon thinks of the woman stirring her pot of hands, shakes his head. “No. It’s just the—withdrawal. Must be. All the pills.”
“You still miss them,” says the Prophet. “Klonopin, Zoloft, Adderall.”
Simon rubs his eyes. “I never took Adderall. That’s for kids with ADHD.”
The Prophet takes a Twizzler from his shirt pocket, takes a bite. “The feeling though,” he says. “That medicated distance. The artificial quiet.”
Simon looks out the window. The sun has set, but the horizon is still aglow. They are thirty miles from Fort Stockton. Scrubland and asphalt, pump jacks nodding in the gathering darkness. Three pills in the morning. Two at night. Day after day, year after year? Does he miss them? Is he the same person without them? And if he isn’t, which Simon is the real Simon? The medicated one or the raw boy?
“People talk about freedom,” says the Prophet, “but how can we be free when we are sicker and poorer and more afraid than we’ve ever been? Free to do what? What about freedom from poverty, freedom from health care debt, freedom from the drugs we have to take to numb the pain of all the freedom we don’t have?”
They come around a curve and the buttes become a silhouette. Simon closes his eyes.
“Who is Javier?” he asks.
The Prophet offers him a Twizzler, but Simon shakes his head.
“Did you know that two-thirds of Americans believe that angels and demons are active in the world?” asks the Prophet.
Simon yawns. “That seems high,” he says.
“Meanwhile,” the Prophet says, “only one-third of us are certain that global warming is real and caused by CO2 emissions. One-third is also the number of human beings who believe that our earliest ancestors were not apes, but other humans. So much for the theory of evolution.”
He smiles. “Not the same third, I’d imagine.”
“What about you?” Simon asks. “Do you believe that angels and demons are real?”
“I believe that suffering makes us long for meaning but it also pisses people off. They feel wronged. Never have so many claimed to be victim to so much. And what does the Bible tell us? In times of strife, we can be saints or we can become martyrs. Turn the other cheek or pick up the sword. Which—you tell me—does this feel like, the Age of the Saint or the Age of the Martyr?”
“What’s the, you know, difference?”
“Martyrs believe their suffering makes them holy. That sacrifices made in this life will gain them reward in the afterlife. They get romantic when they talk about dying for a cause. His name was Duncan. Her name was Ashli. His name was Timothy McVeigh. This is the difference between the martyr and the saint. Sainthood requires selflessness. One cannot aspire to sainthood, because the very desire to be a saint is in and of itself unsaintly. But people are angry. They feel abused. And so we go back to a God of wrath, a God who smites his enemies, who pulls down walls and kills the unbeliever.”
He returns his glasses to his face. “As it is written—Saint Oswald of Worcester died on his knees washing the feet of twelve poor men. Saint Ida of Toggenburg was accused of adultery and thrown from the castle window by her husband, but angels saved her and she became a nun.”
“He threw her out the window?” asks Simon.
“A martyr dies for a cause, in other words, thus the phrase to martyr oneself. There is no similar phrase for saints.”
Simon thinks about this.
In heaven all the angels are named Claire. They smile at you with kind eyes, wiping the tears from your cheeks, and say with music in their mouths, What took you so long?
“You ask if I believe,” says the Prophet, returning to his original text. “What I believe is irrelevant. In the last year, belief in Bigfoot rose from eleven percent to twenty-five percent. Here’s another figure: thirty percent of Americans believe that aliens have visited Earth in the not-too-distant past.”