Travel Bug (26 page)

Some of the members argued about who deserved to receive what each according to his righteousness, each according to his… need? It was starting to be a haunting reminder of another system of government that had taken millions of lives and then… had many intellectuals make… well… thousands of excuses for its evil.

“They’re discussing the upcoming economic collapse, they said that it’s inevitable,” said Harold. “This twisted version of America is very similar to……”

“The worst forms of socialism that will crush free will and the spirit of freedom, Harold. The spirit of rationing care for the masses is based upon who happens to be the most brainwashed and obedient.”

“You’re right,” he answered.

“The secular philosophers who claimed God and Jesus were invented to keep people obedient now have the last laugh. It’s sad because it was the faithful who transformed Jesus into big brother.”

“They have gotten what they wanted,” he said.

“Only the compliant will receive what is necessary to live in this life, only the righteous,” said the head of the council.

“Let’s get one thing straight, I don’t believe this horrible version of my beloved country and the faith I cling to have to be like this. A twisted marriage of dangerous nonsense is not the American dream!”

“Many men have died, to make sure something like this never happened, you know.”

“Yes, Harold, I know that. They are turning in their graves as we speak!”

“No doubt,” he answered me.

“Why does this happen?” I asked my great grandfather.

“People need others to believe that what they can’t prove, mainly their faith in God and the afterlife, is really true,” he said. “We need to see one more thing, Andrew.”

“Dear God, what do we need to see now?”

“Andrew, we need to go see her.”

We did.

“Keep a move on here,” said the grimmest of garbage men.

They were treating human bodies like trash here in the future world of the righteous. Piled on top of each other, they were, one by one by ten by a hundred by a thousand and from a high enough point of view or perspective-a million or so.

“My God,” said my great grandfather.

“There is no God here,” I said. “At least not here in this place.”

There was no end to them. The bodies, I mean, you know, the corpses piled upon one another, over and over and over again. Hideous, insidious, evil, these are just words, dear reader. This was the real deal, what our four eyes were seeing, right then and there, nothing can take the place of it and nothing can ever, ever make us forget it. The horror of it all was…… overwhelming.

“Do we really need to wait for… her?” I asked.

“She won’t go away and she’s not far.”

“Okay but please not much longer.”

“If we told anyone that the Judeo/Christian ethic of America would lead to the Cambodia’s killing fields, they would think us mad, Harold.”

“Yes, no doubt.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes when people need answers to questions that have no answers-they will fall for-anything.”

“There she is,” said my great grandfather.

“Yes,” I answered.

The Rapture woman or the woman from Rapture was right there with us. She was almost mocking us. She was… watching the bodies being buried, in mass graves and laughing he head off about it. Standing there, nude…

“Christ, I hate her…”

“Harold, I hate her, too…”

“You and I will only stay here if she says something…… …”

We did.

“The bodies, the corpses of the unrighteous are here with us today. They are finally meeting their lord Satan in hell. I have no interest in this. Final death should have come for all at once but it does not. I was a fool. I saw him… I saw him… I saw who he really was……”

“Well, Christ, if she thought she actually met him she is crazy,” said Harold.

“It’s a thin line you know…”

“Yes, I know it is,” said the dead man, who I loved.

“I wonder if she has seen us at some point.”

“Oh, I believe she has,” he answered.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Now, Andrew?”

“Yes.”

“Where and when are we going?”

“Picture her meeting the real deal, Harold. We’re going to go see the real Jesus.”

“I knew you would come around…”

“Yes, let’s go see him…”

We did.

The last supper had a few surprises in store for the woman from Rapture. It featured the very long haired Christ drinking wine with his disciples. Quite a few other intense statements were made in addition to the famous one about the Eucharist being his “body” and “blood.” They were statements more along the lines of helping the poor and the downtrodden at all natural costs. Then there was some more good stuff.

“Never judge, I have said this before, brothers,” said Jesus.

“Never?” asked his future betrayer.

“Not in a condemning way, Judas. That is the worst sin of all. The ones who claim to be God’s favored often deceive themselves.”

The Rapture woman was in a state of utter shock and horror. A radical in favor of the poor who taught not to judge, not to mention the hair and beard…

“No, this is a lie…” she said.

“You’re an imposter,” she said, accusingly. “Lord, take me to see your real son, I’ve passed the test now. I can tell that this is the work of the devil, a false messiah who spits out nonsense of peace and love……”

There was, of course, no reply.

Christ now asked all of his disciples to pray with him and she… watched them… drink their wine. Her sanity was visibly disappearing from her face as she broke out into uncontrollable tears.

“So this is how she lost it, Andrew?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She cried and cried her little insane eyes out… then… uncontrollable, raging, frightening laughter…

“That’s worse than…”

“Yes, Harold. Much worse than the crying, much worse.”

Our spiritual leader spoke some more about helping others at any cost. Then he prayed some more with the twelve men. One of them spoke up.

“What about those who have doubts, lord? Are they condemned to suffer the second death?”

“No,” Jesus said.

Now she was pulling out her hair. She was shaking her head in utter disbelief or perhaps sheer contempt. This was not, after all, her lord. It couldn’t be. Pastor Fred certainly would have not approved. This was a cultural war between the false Christ of man and the real Christ who came to save very, very selective elite who would become his oligarchy in the hereafter.

Now she was in tears again, her wicked laughter had died out at last. She stood in a mocking, accusing way. She was, as a matter of fact, waiting, impatiently for this nightmare, this bad trip to finally come to an end.

“You just want me to get out of biblical times so that I can save my faith…”

“Well, has it been hurt by this, Andrew?”

“On the contrary, there is certainly no proof he’s God but Jesus the man is awesome! The philosophy of helping others and not being proud and judgmental, think … imagine a society where people had Christian values. Even those who were unbelievers could be made to believe…”

“They tried to do it, that’s why we saw a naked lunatic in front of all of those stacks of human bodies.”

“Yes, of course, you’re right.”

“Andrew, do you really want to stick around to see if there was a resurrection or not?”

“No.”

“You can learn about it at the seminary when Easter is discussed.”

“Yes… I can.”

“Well, Harold…”

“Yes, son, what is it?”

“I think our little faith jaunt, this field trip is finally over.”

“Okay.”

We didn’t.

“I knew you would wait for me here,” she said.

“My God!” said Harold.

“Andrew, Harold, you shouldn’t have followed me here but you did. You wanted to see the lunatic lose all of her faith while you could sit back and laugh. Well, the joke is on you two. I would have loved that theocracy, as you called it but not now. Now I know better. If this man was the lord then he was never worthy of belief in and neither was the one faith that brought light to a world of darkness.”

“She’s talking to us,” I said.

“I know, Andrew, like a pre-recorded message.”

“You will lose guys. The world is going to come to an end, the real end of all things known and unknown. You can’t stop me any more than you could stop me from murdering your mom and dad, Andrew. The end is nigh.”

“Well, you fucking bitch, I…”

“She’s gone, Harold.”

She disappeared.

“Neither can I, son.”

I could only imagine the horrific images of what I would see when I returned home. Ironically, the man known as Jesus would be my salvation from this trip. If I could think of him, I would be happy. If I thought of the self-righteous maniacs, I would have bad dreams of the worst kind.

“Who was the real Jesus Christ?” Harold asked me. He was a complete fraud, a fictional character, the son of God or a raving lunatic. The last one was sort or borrowed from C. S. Lewis, one of my all-time favorite Christian apologists. Modern day atheists hate this point of view because they believe it to be simplistic, especially coming from an intellectual professor who was an atheist. This was obviously prior to his Christian conversion. Had he been proven to be any of these things, my spirit, and my faith in anything would have been shaken forever, I mean until the end of time. It didn’t happen that way. It makes me pity the Rapture woman all the more. The man I saw made faith in God and man strengthened, not weakened at all and not even close to being vulnerable to some fundamentalist cult. I was a true believer but… the Rapture woman was not…

“Can we go home now please?”

“Sure thing, son, you bet.”

We did.

The parents, mom and dad, they were the real unspoken social engineers of society and tomorrow. Now to be perfectly honest, there was always a very large part of me that despised the folks who blamed everything on mom and dad. Were they really responsible for other people that according that according to our faith had an active free will?

Time was a train and no one got off for very long. The bug was calling to me again after a very brief break. I had to know the answer. What had the dark lady messed up now? How had she ruined civilization again… ?

It was time to get off the train and see the future again…

We did.

“Do you think mom and dad can be blamed for everything or what can parents take full responsibility for?” I asked.

“Don’t become like the blame mom and dad culture, please. I mean parents fuck up their kids…”

“Okay.”

“What causes foul language like mine?”

“Mom and dad, you know lousy parents.”

“I see.”

“If families could keep each other in line, we wouldn’t need religious extremism to begin with,” I said.

“Okay, Andrew. Moms and dads, out of control, is that it?”

“That’s oversimplifying it but basically, Harold, yes.”

“What’s this place called now?”

“America,” I answered him.

“No…”

“The Islamic Republic of America is where or more specifically when we are now.”

“Dear God,” he said.

“Indeed,” I answered him.

“Why?”

“Christianity just wasn’t strict enough.”

“I… can’t understand……”

“No, Harold. We can’t grasp this but we certainly can make an effort to understand.”

There was no one left to declare jihad on, the entire world was now one religious faith. Well, even in countries where that were so in the past, it never stopped fighting between tribes or religious sects. Still, the sick thing was the world seemed to be at relative peace. This shook my philosophical foundation to the very core; what was going on here in this current version of brave new world.

There was no book burnings now because the religious oligarchy had already chosen all books allowed to exist. These guys made The Taliban look like they were Unitarians performing a gay wedding ceremony. They were fanatical and they meant business and you bet they would be more than happy to use violence. The worlds we live in, the worlds we create. We are a fallen race, even if the great tale of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is pure fiction.

“I can’t imagine,” said. Harold.

“Try,” I said.

We did.

Regular life, folks selling merchandise like on the streets of any Moroccan city; At the same time everyone from atheists to Muslims have declared Christmas and nativity scenes offensive. It was only a matter of time before this anti Christian hypocrisy took over. It reached an absurd level of reaction against secular tyranny with a so called Christian theocracy and now we had this nightmare.

“Looks like New York to me,” said Harold.

“It is.”

“What is the…”

“All the cab drivers are devout…”

“Once again, son, what the hell is the difference?”

The first scene we enjoyed was yet another delightful public flogging. Apparently, a man’s twelve year old son drank two sips of beer. The man in question had been beheaded with something one might find in a kitchen to say cut a piece of bread off. It was slow and painful but I’m sure he got what he deserved for drinking alcoholic beverages.

“Moms and dads are spoiling their children and just perhaps a whole lot worse. The indulgences and passiveness of parents in American brought on, I think these past two revolutions or theocracies. The father and mother figures just allowed things to happen rather than taking an active interest and perhaps even changing the fates of their offspring. We are not talking about teenagers going through one of life’s proper rites of passage; we’re talking about having no control over their children and of the future of their society.”

It was not a brave new world but like the one prior to it, a cowardly new world of dread and religiously induced fear. The sins of the fathers and mothers would catch up on their unsuspecting victims and only the state could save them. Like many other countries where faith ruled over reason, the country once called American would suffer once again and let go of any previously held ties to reason.