SEX REBELS OF JESUSLAND, chapter 156 (the 2nd last chapter)

156. ADAM’S RAGE.

“What about them?” Eve pointed to the door behind which lay the others.

Now Adam felt the rage, the old unfulfilled rage that harked back all the way to 9/11. It rushed back into his head. He heard Sarah’s last words. “I’m falling, Adam.”

His voice grew hard as he spoke. His rage had a final shape, a terminal plan. He felt it relax in him as it anticipated its final satisfaction and hopeful resolution. Now it could leave him free, now that it could at last slake itself.

“These bastards,” he said. “I’m going to shoot them full of drugs and then crucify them for real. Then I’m going to wait for them to wake up. Then I am going to watch them die. Then I’m leaving.”

“No, Adam,” said Eve.

He looked at her. What was she saying?

“Your hate is just part of the indifference of the universe,” she said. “We have to do something out of love, out of responsibility to the world. In the end we are all responsible. Because the universe is indifferent, we are all responsible. We are all independent. We have our own minds. We must use them against indifference. That’s what being human is, to make a society that is unlike the world, that is not indifferent.”

“Your responsibility is like their religion, Eve. Another opium of the people. I am through with all that. I’m with Gay Rectal Revenge on this one. I want my revenge, too. That’s something real. That’s my answer to indifference.”

“It’s the wrong answer, Adam.”

“You don’t know how I suffered. I was a frozen lake of suffering until you came and chopped the ice open.”

“We should not answer their violence with violence. Not with death. We should try a new answer, something that bears the mark of the intelligence of nobility.”

“I want revenge. Their death. They deserve it. They deserve excruciating pain. They deserve helplessness. Stalin died peacefully in his own bed. Not these two. They will die fully conscious, aware of my answer to their indifference, to their dictatorship.”

“I have an idea.”

“I don’t care.”

“I want to tape them sleeping. Then I want to plug that video into the media. Show them alive, Joshua and Jeremiah, on all the networks. Ezra has all the equipment here. We can blow their religion sky-high, expose all the fakery. Show Joshua and Jeremiah, the beheaded and the crucified, peacefully alive and sleeping.”

He carried Joshua and Ezra to the studio, and plugged them full of drugs. Then he watched Eve tape them sleeping, beside Jeremiah and Hagar, first with their faces fully made-up, and then with Eve wiping the make-up off on camera. He taped the empty crosses, taped a newscast to show the date, that all this was filmed after Joshua’s beheading, and after Jeremiah’s crucifixion.

Then he watched TV as Eve played the tape, interrupting the networks and cable shows. The announcers tried to make sense of what they had seen. He watched as Eve interrupted them again and played the tape again, over and over. The so-called USUC struggled with this real news, like real people, without spin, without propaganda, trying to make sense of a landscape that had been utterly changed, an entire worldview upended, with nothing but their own minute-by-minute struggle to replace it.

“Now I’ll crucify them.”

Eve was implacable. “If you do, I’m not coming with you, Adam. To be precise, it will be over between us. I used to believe firmly, the Bible is to humanity what gravity is to matter. Now I can place my faith only in our love. That is our new gravity, yours and mine. I won’t be able to love a man who is capable of such a deed, to crucify people. Bible promise.”

A scale. Two weights.

In the one, love. Eve. In the other, hate. Unfulfilled rage. Fidelity to the ashes. Revenge.