THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: BAPTISM

It all falls apart pretty quickly. Your life, I mean. One moment it’s there. You can see it. More than that, even. It’s everywhere. Something that just is. And then it’s gone. Like it was never there (and more and more I’m certain it wasn’t) and like it is never coming back. Life is word we use to describe the things we imagine go on with us, as well as without us. But I know now, that’s not entirely true. It might not be true at all. I’ve been other people. I’ve seen the gaps in the world.  

And I’ve come such a very long way from St. Margaret’s.

What is the first principle, Carolyn?

The first principle, sister, is that Jesus loves us. 

It’s been so long since I knew what it was to be free. In those days before all of this, the world was just boxes of days that you opened, one to another, stepping through and finding what was on the other side. A room of a quiet Sunday. A room filled with hectic shopping, cooking or cleaning. Rooms upon rooms of reading, alone, and in the dark. My childhood was a rambling, sometimes darkened house, filled with people I never saw, and rooms I never went to. Big and tumble-down, and mildewy and lonely.

And finally, I came upon a door to the outside. My escape. 

The service. Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, the briefing. At first I thought it was like…holes in the world. Passages that led somewhere else. Things that waited just on the other side of it all to come and get us. Monsters. Boogeymen. It made sense. Us vs. them. Light vs. dark. Heroes vs. devils. It fit my third-grade fantasies. A child’s primer on power. A supernatural war.  

A joke. 

But it’s not that at all. 

I’ve been in the show for just short of 9 years now (September 5, 2010). In that time I’ve seen the other side of the conflict. And on that other side is a force that doesn’t even know we exist. Here we are, giving our all, spending agents like pieces on a board, while they are limitless; an expanse of black pieces that goes on for miles, for years. It’s eternity over there. 

Second principle, Carolyn?

Sister Eugenia, the second principle is that confession grants forgiveness. 

What can I confess? There’s too much really. I killed a child once. That’s a big one, but I don’t even feel bad about that one. I watched a woman drown, tied to a steel chair in a bathtub filled to the brim. It took two hours, but she drowned, finally. That doesn’t make it right. I shot my best friend and chopped him up and dumped the parts in an industrial cement building counterweight. But it wasn’t him anymore, anyway. What else?

Oh, yeah, I gave up on this world. 

When you see enough of the other side of things you realize it’s not the other side. We’re the other side. A reflection — and a dim one at that — and just as substantial as light on top of water. We’re just a mirage on some big, dark, lake that goes on forever and contains all manner of terrible, vast, things that move in absolute blackness. We are the mistake. We are the things that shouldn’t be. How do I know?

Nothing can stop them. You can’t kill them. You can’t even close the doors. You can’t lock them away. Nothing humans have ever done can affect them, or even approach a level where they might notice us. We are the side effect. 

Third principle, Cary?

If you give yourself over to God, he will welcome you in his heart.

I know now that when you die, something goes on. A power. A thought. A mind. A string. I don’t know. You can’t just check out and escape. The world is a maze of loops. We’re as trapped as anything that ever was. The maze is consciousness, and consciousness floats and flutters and settles like a bird, never still or bound to the earth.  

So I’m going to go. I’m tired of this life, and this place and the things we pretend we are. I’m going through to find out how deep the darkness goes. I’m going to give myself over to a god, and I will see, once and for all, if he will welcome me in his heart.