Saul drops the weighty book on the table before me, the loud rattle making me jerk. “Spiritual study,” he reveals, returning to his seat. “Prayer.”
I stare at my host awkwardly. “Wait, after all this, you still believe in prayer? You believe in God?”
“You don’t?” Saul counters with a laugh. “There’s a demon attached to you, Darling! Are you really saying the devil is out there doing his wicked work, but now God is a bridge too far?”
I open my mouth to respond, but the words catch in my throat. He’s got a fair point. I’ve been so wrapped up in my disillusionment with the church itself that I didn’t even see what was sitting right in front of me, the mountains of evidence that something else is out there. Of course, it’s difficult to tell what that something is, but throwing out the whole cosmic realm might not be the most logical course of action.
I haven’t been pushing through this journey with as much balance as I’d like, mostly because swinging hard to the opposite side of belief feels so good right now. I’m angry, after all.
Deep down, however, I’m analytical enough to know this isn’t the best approach.
The results speak for themselves. I still haven’t found the answers I’m looking for, and it appears the missing pieces were waiting in the last place I wanted to look: the realm of faith.
“You’ve got a point,” I finally admit, “but I’m a little burned out on God.”
Saul nods. “That’s fair.”
“I’ve seen demons, but the tethering ceremony is not spiritual,” I continue. “They’re not possessing people with ancient rituals and secret prayers, they’re doing it with computers and coordinates. They have this machine…”
“A machine?” Saul repeats, his engineering brain now taking hold as he starts pacing back and forth. “What did it look like?” At this point a cartoon lightbulb may as well be flickering on above his head.
It suddenly occurs to me that Saul is having a similar revelation to the one I just had. He’s been working to unravel this mystery through a lens of faith, and he’s made great progress, but at the end of the day a complete solution has managed to elude him. His point of view is too narrow to encompass the whole mystery, just like mine was.
The key to both of our journeys lies somewhere in the middle.
“I couldn’t really see it, I was strapped to a table,” I admit. “I saw the tear, though. Some kind of hovering doorway ripped wide open.”
Saul is nodding along. “That’s how they climb through,” he blurts, synthesizing the information out loud. “They’re travelers arriving from somewhere. They phase through space.”
“Exactly,” I say, picking up the slack and offering a riff of my own. “If you stop thinking about them as spiritual entities and realize they’re just creatures, it starts to make a little more sense. Animals have abilities we can’t comprehend, like how sharks can sense magnetism. It’s beyond our understanding, but that doesn’t make them supernatural.”
I can’t help standing as the cogs in my mind begin churning at record speed. The information is coming too fast for me to sit still, joining Saul’s movements as the two of us pace around the dining room like circling boxers. He’s growing more animated by the second.
My fingers drum against my thigh.
“But they’re coming from hell,” Saul counters. “That’s a spiritual place, not a logical one. There’s no science behind hell.”
“Why not?” I retort, dropping the reins completely and allowing my mind to run wild. “According to Hugh Everett III, there’s infinite layers of reality stacked on top of one another. What we call hell might just be another layer.”
Saul bristles at the suggestion, but I push onward, surprising even myself as words continue to spill from my mouth. I’m discovering my own sense of balance in real time, testing the edges of inspiration.
“That doesn’t mean hell’s not real, or that God’s not real,” I continue. “It’s just a shift in our understanding of what that means. We’re so used to looking at these things like they’re outside the realm of science, but maybe they’re just parts of the universe science hasn’t gotten around to yet.”
While the merits of these spiritual perspectives are clearly still up for debate, at least one of my burning questions has finally been answered. I now fully understand why this long-lost friend and I got along so well, despite seeming like polar opposites. We’re both deeply inquisitive, different sides of a similar coin.
We complement each other.
This predisposition for deep analysis might also explain why we seem to be the only ones who’ve managed to remember our time at Camp Damascus, albeit faintly. We haven’t been blessed by some incredible superpower from the great beyond, we’re just curious.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
* * *
After years in a household built around stifling my excitement and curiosity, it’s surreal to spend the afternoon here with Saul. Ideas spill out of me in a flood that ranges from diligently tested theories to half-baked flights of unbridled science fiction. We dive deep into everything we know about Kingdom of the Pine, laying it all out to understand where our knowledge overlaps, and where it doesn’t.
Saul’s right there to bounce these notions back at me, jumping in with thoughts of his own.
Like most everyone I meet, Saul’s brain is quite different than mine, but he has the same drive for understanding and analysis. He can’t help his deep craving for understanding the greater mechanics behind all things, which is likely how he’s managed to make a living repairing cars and taking shop commissions.
We’re on the farmhouse roof now, sitting just outside one of the upper bedroom windows where a gentle overhang provides space to watch the first blossoming colors of a glorious Montana sunset. Between us sits Saul’s enormous tome of biblical mystery, a book I’ve been hesitant to crack open just yet.
Ancient religious texts and I aren’t on great terms.
It’s taken a moment to fully relax out here, and I was just barely convinced when Saul assured me the roof is stable and the few missing shingles are nothing to worry about.
Once I settle in, however, there’s something picturesque about it, like a scene from one of the teen dramas I was never allowed to watch. The aching loss of my family remains, churning away at the pit of my stomach, but in this moment I detect the slightest bit of assurance through some other nurturing force.
What that force actually is, I have no idea.
Saul and I are posted quietly, our thoughts and theories finally simmering down in separate internal dialogues. His property stretches before us in the dying light, rows and rows of vehicles laid out in various states. Some cars are infected by long tufts of yellow grass, the weeds popping up through rusty hoods, while others are kept clean and fresh for pickup.
My eyes aren’t on the cars, however.
A troop of prairie dogs has moved in, and Saul doesn’t seem to mind as these little critters make their way through his metalworks. The animals pop out from various holes in the dirt, glancing around a moment and then diving back in on some unknown prairie dog mission I can’t make heads or tails of.