“God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe say, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

God say, "No, " Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but

Next time you see me comin', you better run"

Abe said, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God said, "Out on Highway 61"

The radio, a martyr’s relic from a bygone era, sounded half as faded as I was.

I reeked of vodka and middy weed. I didn’t care. This lonely stretch of highway belonged to no one as far as I was concerned, and you gambled taking the curves in the dark.

It was your fault if you choose to gamble with me. Least, that’s the way I saw it.

Texas felt so far away.

“Well, Cowboy Dan's a major player in the cowboy scene

He goes to the reservation, drinks and gets mean

And he's gonna start a war

He's gonna start a warrrrrr

And he hops in his pickup

Puts his pedal to the floor

And says, "I got mine

But I want more"

Because Cowboy Dan's a major player in the cowboy scene

He goes to the reservation, drinks and gets mean

He goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky

And says, "God, if I have to die, you will have to die"

I hacked up what felt like part of a lung. My hand was stained, the oxidized rust of old blood mixed with a fresh coat of red, a fresco that highlighted a life poorly lived.

Wait.

What happened to Bob Dylan?

Or was it Johnny Cash?

Wasn’t I just listening…

Gaps in time. I prayed I hadn’t taken the ketamine.

That was for later.

If you want proof time is just a strongly worded opinion, just slip into a k-hole.

That was for later.

My eyelids felt heavy.

There were no stars.

Endless pines, only shadowy outlines in the dark, still cover for the night’s starving predators, were all I could make out.

I just guessed at where the road kinked and turned and straightened.

I was playing a game with God, and I wanted to lose.

I wanted us all to lose.

“Dance, Dance to the radio

While the, Devil takes control,

Dance, Dance to the radio,

While the, Devil takes control…”

The warm hug of oblivion, a feeling like endless cookies and Saturday morning cartoons, began slipping its infinite arms around me.

Come and See, and I saw.

It was still the witching hour when I woke with a startled gasp. I could feel the claws of need, withdrawal, dragging up my arms, burrowing into my skin, making the back of my eyeballs vibrate.

Every day the need grew stronger, and every day, I killed off a little bit more of me.

One is too many, and a thousand is never enough.

I was in a ditch.

This wasn’t new or news. I tended to wake up in a lot of ditches. Beats Motel 6. Fewer roaches and you could smoke in every room.

My truck wouldn’t start.

Not even the wheezing gasps of a machine trying to cling to artificial life. Just a click and utter silence.

The battery couldn’t be dead. I checked my watch.

5:55 A.M.

I figured I’d tried to hit the eternal snooze button around 3 A.M. It had only been a few hours. Battery should be fine.

A cursory inspection showed no external damage. No blown tires, no misbegotten wires or missing spark plugs. Hell, it seemed like I’d just slowly cruised into this dark little corner of the universe.

It was as though the truck just gave up the ghost and said, "I’m done." The thirsty horse dropping to the ground in an endless desert, done with the death march.

I bear crawled up the small ravine and onto the highway.

A generous term for a lonely road in whatever the Hell backwater burg America had shit out here.

All I could see were outlines in the dark.

Fitting, I thought.

And then an explosion stole my vision.

Let there be light.

And there was.

And it was good.

Especially good.

Because it was a bar.

A ramshackle of a spot, dive joint meets biker meth hangout, from the looks of it, and it was just powering up.

Shit, if you couldn’t drink on Sunday morning, were we really free? Were we really God’s children at all?

I started ambling toward the light, my eyes adjusting to the deep gloom.

“The Man from Capernaum.”

Hell of a name for a spot in the middle of BFE.

Hell of a name.

Hell.

Hell, I needed a drink.

My watch read 6 a.m. but it was 5 o’clock somewhere, and this place had electricity buzzing it had to pay for and didn’t much strike me as the sort of establishment that probably saw the law as anything more than a nuisance.

I sauntered up to the door, my black boots clicking loudly against the rotten wooden porch.

Into the lion’s den we go.

Unsurprisingly, it was empty as a church on Friday night. Why kill the Son if you can’t have the sin, after all?

But it was unlocked and music was softly crooning from somewhere.

“As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that Good Ol’ Way

And who shall wear the robe and crown

Good Lord, show me the way”

Fantastic. No bartender and proselyting in a shit joint. That’s just what my migraine and itchy skin called for.

I considered hopping the bar and grabbing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, but this struck me as a place where your head might become acquainted with a shotgun right quick and nobody would kick up much fuss.

I was going out, a lamb among wolves, but on my terms. I’d had enough violence. I wanted to feel the void swallow me whole, not feel a hole swallow my head.

Plopping down on an empty stool, I risked lighting up a smoke. Certainly they wouldn’t get bent out of shape over a cowboy killer or two.

And shit, who was there to kick up dirt anyway? A ghost town without the spirits, save the ones just behind the bar and out of reach.

The tantalizing fruit in the garden.

God, I need a cold one, now.

“Till armageddon no shalam, no shalom

Then the Father Hen will call His chickens home

The wise man will bow down before the throne

And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns

When The Man comes around”

The hairs on my arm stood up.

That wasn’t the gentle croon of some A.M. gospel channel. That was someone singin’ in the bar.

In the furthest stool at the left end of the bar, a wild looking man sat, intermittently taking greedy gulps of amber beer and singing loudly, his other arm flailing frenetically as though conducting an unseen orchestra.

Ah, good, a ninja crackhead. That’s just what I need.

He looked over at me and I leapt from my chair and damn near outta my boots.

Ancient as the hills, this man looked like he’d just come down the mountain from communing with the darkness itself.

God damn.

A wild, grey, patchy beard splayed out in every direction, as though the hair itself was trying to escape the vessel that grew it.

The crown of his head was bald but the rest was shaggy white hair, matted in some places, errantly sticking up in others, as though it couldn’t choose between electrocution and submission.

He wore what looked like a white robe, but it was stained with all manner of mess. Copper, brown, yellow, black. Blood, shit, piss, and Heaven only knows what. A fetid robe of many colors.

Tattered, rudimentary sandals held in dirty feet with long, yellowed toenails.

The man reeked worse than sulfur. Worse than death. It was like the pungent stank of the human stain clung to him with reckless abandon.

He was chubby and withered and maddened.

But none of that held a penny to his eyes.

Orbs of the purest white, ringed with seared, blackened flesh around the edges.

Nothing but endless, empty white that somehow felt like it saw nothing but what we all couldn’t see. Nothing of this world but everything we hide in it. Our lies, the horrors behind the masks, what we do in the dark, this tattered, horrible amalgam we have the audacity to still call “a soul.”

Fuck this.

I went to run but found I had no will to do so.

My boots had become one with the earth, like the leather was finally gonna join the cattle that had to die for me to feel like a man.

A crash of thunder stole my hearing, a tiny whirlwind began lifting and smashing bottles from behind the bar.

The seals of the bottles came open, spraying spirits everywhere.

The bar was alight with white fire and a light blasted through the bar that would embarrass the Sun.

Then all was silent and still.

“Nice hooves,” the man said in a velvety baritone.

I looked down at my black boots and back up at him.

There is probably a drug cocktail somewhere in existence where, if mixed properly and taken with utter scientific precision, probably unlocks the gates to Heaven in the human consciousness.

I think I might have found the one’s that unlocked Hell’s.

The man wore a wide, warm grin. Authentic and inviting, the jovial visage of every TV grandfather. Creature comfort. He no longer looked like a raving maniac.

Far from it.

The man was now young, maybe late 20’s.

Golden, feathered locks elegantly curved just behind his ears.

A black cardigan, dark jeans, and new Grecian sandals graced a well-kept temple, a body of with seemingly perfect porcelain skin.

Sapphire blue eyes, pools of painful beauty, the kind that feels like a knife twisting your gut, looked at me with compassion.

I could smell lilac and some spice that seemed reminiscent of a world long gone by but made me what want to curl up with a blanket and read a good book by the fire wafted my way.

A single, marred tattoo of a small cross ran down the index finger of his left hand.

The man sat down and said, “why don’t you and them hooves join me, Pappy?”

I go by a lot of names to keep myself safe in this shithole world, but I hadn’t gone by my real name since I beat a kid black and blue in elementary school for mocking me for it and my daddy had told me he was proud of me. Put a cigarette out on the back of my neck later that same night after a few too many for causing trouble.

The duality of man or whatever the Hell the academics prattle on about, I guess.

“They’re boots,” I snarled, playing at bravery, bluffing like I did every day of this wasted life, hopin’ it might but him back on his heels.

I didn’t know if I was messing with some damned creature not of this world or was just higher than a kite and seeing nonsense. While the latter seemed far more likely, I wanted to prepare for the former.

“Sure,” he said kindly, “sure.”

I sat down on the tattered stool.

“Where’s the bartender? And how the Hell do you know my name?”

“Calm down, son. You look like you could use a drink of the old blood. Sure beats those poisons you keep sticking in that body we gave ya.”

A wine glass appeared before each of us, filled to the brim. The man, or whatever it was, sipped away, humming some forgotten hymnal.

“I ain’t much of a vino fan. Got any Irish whisky?”

He lifted his glass as though to toast me and said “Sure. And you certainly will need that later. For now, the grapes of wrath, as it were.” A soft chuckle left his lips.

I sipped the wine. No sense bucking the bull when you don’t know how big or angry it really is.

It tasted like nothing I had ever had before. An indescribable, wicked deliciousness.

It warmed me up and filled me with light and hope and covered up all the dark holes that had punched through me by others.

Even plugged the ones I’d punched myself.

“We?”

The man took a small sip. “Sorry?”

“You said ‘the body *we* gave ya. *We*.”

It was only then I noticed he was crying.

There were no sobs, no audible gasps, no tremors or shakes, just slow, steady tears of blood dripping from those perfect blue orbs.

“Name’s Arah. I’m an Angel.”

Arah downed the goblet of wine, flecks of his bloody tears caking the glass’s rim.

“Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.”

This obvious machination of my drug addled brain chuckled louder this time, a slight slur and anger tinging his words.

“I’m even less for all that religious babble than I am for wine. Though this shit’s pretty damn good, I gotta admit.”

“LIAR!” Arah screamed, shaking the whole bar. His eyes were wide and obsidian and his chest heaved heavily.

“Liar.” This, a quiet whisper.

“You spent your whole life in church.

You soaked up every hopeful word, every promise of redemption and fixing, and the truth of that still rattles around inside you.

You can stick all the needles you want into that arm so you can lie to yourself and take away the pain you were meant to bear, but you can’t lie to me. We see everything, for we are many.”

Arah refreshed his glass with a small flourish of his hand before downing it again, his disposition getting slightly wobblier.

“DRINK!” he screamed, and when the world stopped shaking and those eyes turned blue again, I sure as shit started pounding the fermented fruit.

Ain't the time to be picky.

“You aren’t having a bad trip. I'm having a bad trip.”

The endless tears of blood fell quicker, like a swift red river coursing from a deep blue waterfall.

Small pools of it began forming of the bar. A slight acrid smell was on the air, barely noticeable behind all the wonderful aromas.

I felt warm and real and firm. I felt human again. My glass had been refilled and I downed another.

Okay, so I was getting wasted with an angel. Admittedly a first, even for my winding and warped road, but getting blitzed on Jesus Juice sure beat pissing off some emotionally unhinged cherub motherfucker.

“I can’t find Him. I can never find Him.”

Slight groans left Arah’s lips and he gulped down another glass.

With a minor twitch, the glass flew and smashed against the wall.

A nanosecond, if even, after the sound of shattering, it reappeared anew, full of the deep blood wine, before him, and he slurped it down his gullet.

I was trying to keep pace with him.

Shit I could drink a fifth of whisky and make it home alive but something in this good good had me slippin’. A part of me knew I should be petrified to ask, but the rest of me was too faded to care.

“Find who? What brings you here, cryin’ tears in yer beers?”

Now I was the one slurring.

“Take them.”

I looked down at the bar.

A belt. A syringe full of something brown and beautiful.

All the gear.

And six shots of what I prayed was Jameson.

“But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

Arah was slurring hard now, slowly spinning in his chair, laughing and crying.

“Have a taste. At least there’ still manna.”

I shot the whole thing and downed that beautiful Irish whisky. Warmth and light filled me up and stole me away from this putrid rock.

Somehow, as wrecked as I was, I felt I could see Arah all the clearer, like the Sun pushing out the remnants of a storm. His hands looked withered, and those blue eyes looked heavy and tired.

“I miss Him. God. Father.”

I began to mumble some apocryphal question, but a raised hand silenced me.

“We’re taking communion here, son, an act of contrition, of grief, celebration and loss. I’m not giving about to give you a seminar on the finer points of how you all bungled what we gave you and called it ‘religion.’ Just shut the fuck up and drink.”

We downed a glass of wine in unison, a broken human and clearly a broken angel, performing a ritual at the alter we were left with.

“You wanna know why I’m here drinkin’? I know you do. I can hear it rattling around in that little rat brain of yours, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing.

Well, here’s why. GOD LEFT.

You remember your Bible.

Like a schizophrenic mother when the voices just crept too far in, he drowned all his children in the bathtub. He felt regret.

You apes can’t come to terms with the fact that it isn’t cognitive dissonance to be perfect and make mistakes. Your binaries and absolutes are the pathetic crutches you rest on, the prisons you build for yourselves. You think you live in the grey but you don’t. You are the simple minded mistake of something far greater than you could possibly fathom.

Hell ain't nothin' but a door locked from the inside.

He was right to drown all of you, ya know.

You’re an abortion that didn’t take.

You’re the science experiment gone wrong.

You’re the motherfucking poisonous residue left over when the manufacturing process goes the slightest bit awry.

He TRIED. He gave you EVERYTHING. And you chased him away.

He wanted to put you all down. Wipe the slate clean. Shoot the wolf with the broken leg caught in the trap. Mercy. But He had made those fuckin’ rainbows, and He kept his word.

You all sit and pout and scream and gnaw and gnash and blow each other up. Always the same shit in this horrible flat circle.

"My god is real, your god is fake! "

You never once consider you’re all talking about the same damn thing, and more to the point, you're spend your entire lives debating His existence. What a catastrophic waste to be so far from the mark.

Is He real? Is He a fairy tale?

Is there a big bearded man with a sword in the sky or is it just what some primitive apes told themselves to explain the lights in the night sky, a mechanism of control and purpose in an entropic and meaningless world?”

I felt frozen listening to Arah rant.

Somewhere, between the distant sound of brutal words, I heard that radio kick on.

“The Third Planet is sure that they’re being watched

By an Eye in the Sky that can’t be stopped

And when you get to the Promised Land

You’re gonna shake the Eye’s hand”

“You won’t.”

Arah spoke quietly and sipped and audibly sobbed.

“I…I won’t what?”

“Shake his hand. He’s GONE.

You all fight with words and books and swords and shells and atoms about whether he exists. It’s your relentless, simpleminded addiction to dichotomy. It would be so boring if it wasn’t so sickening.

You think He exists, and if He does, He is here and He loves you and hears your stupid little prayers about football and bone cancer and bank accounts and AIDS.

And if He doesn’t exist, well, it’s just a bunch of conmen working over some fools with a fairy tale.

Any of you shitbirds ever consider He exists and LOATHES you? That he cut the cord to that existential phone line and ain’t nobody on the other side of that line anymore?

You live in an infinite universe that is forever exploding and expanding. He exists outside of even that.

You think you’re special? You’re one tiny experiment among so fucking many, I couldn’t make the smartest mathematician in the history of this planet understand how infinitesimally numerically irrelevant you are.

The question isn’t, is God real or is it all a hoax, a self-delusion?

The salient question, Pappy, is whether He’s here. And He ain’t.

He kept his word and let you all live and fester and replicate and mutate like the virus you are. The fruit that ate itself.

But daddy split. Went out for smokes and He ain’t never coming back. Moved onto a new family. Just like He's done again and again and again. And I'm guessing will keep doing 'till He decides He got it right. Ain’t been here for a long time. Long, long time.”

6 glasses of wine appeared before Arah and he downed them all with lightning speed, spewing blood, sobbing and gasping and drinking.

His hair greyed and whitened and fell to the floor.

His nails began to decay and yellow.

The smell of shit and piss and bile crept up and began to make me nauseous.

“And you know who got really fucked? US. The angels.

God gave us instructions and we followed it. We knew what we had and we didn’t deviate. We did our duty. And He left us behind, too.”

Arah’s clothes began to whiten and dirty.

The enrapturing blue of his eyes began to fade, growing paler and lifeless. A wild, twisted beard and belly began to sprout.

“Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation."

Arah began shrieking.

"Fucking humans.

I AM AN ANGEL OF THE LORD YOUR GOD, AND I AM BOUND FOREVER TO THIS SHITHOLE OF A ROCK, ENDLESSLY SEARCHING THE COSMOS FOR A FATHER I CAN NEVER FIND, TRAPPED IN A PRISON I CAN NEVER LEAVE, FOR A CRIME I DIDN’T COMMIT.

YOU ALL DID THIS.

YOU ALL DID THIS.

YOU DID THIS.”

Arah leapt up and grabbed me by the throat, lifting me on high.

Fire scorched his eyes, leaving empty pale pools singed to a blackened crisp at the edges.

The wild, infested thing I’d seen before held me as though I weighed less than the judgment feather.

He was sobbing.

“I…I just did what I was told.

Do you know what Hell is? There’s no fucking lake of fire or torture rack with goats.

It’s this.

An endless existence having tasted God’s grace and love and then forever being separated from it, eternally searching for that one drug you know you can never find.

'Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss.'

This, this place, is Hell.”

All the opium in the world couldn’t save me from the stark terror of this celestial’s tortured judgment.

I was quaking and pissed myself.

“Now I got ya shakin’ in your boots. Nice hooves.”

He threw me and I slammed against the wall and I felt every ounce of wine and heroin and whisky spill out of my body and onto the floor.

In that moment, I felt the unmitigated suffering of absolute sobriety, and I’ve been sober every moment since.

This wild, unfettered thing inched closer to me.

It was only then I noticed the tattoo on his finger more closely. It was…clearer to me now. Everything was. That little cross on his finger was upside down as it faced me.

“What does your name mean, Arah? What did you do that made God leave all his angels behind?”

Arah opened his mouth and two snakes, one a viper, the other a colorful coral, slid out of his mouth and began encircling his head and neck, never striking, never squeezing, simply coiling infinitely.

“YOU FUCKING APES. I’LL RIP THE SOUL OUT OF EACH OF YOU AND EAT IT FOR LIFE ETERNAL.”

Arah, this manifestation of man’s worst nightmare, leapt at me, blood spewing, snakes dancing, the bar shaking and burning and reeking.

Alas, Babylon, for me.

Inches from me Arah froze, held still by some unseen force, his mouth snarling words that only came out as unintelligible, wet squelches.

A voice from the bar’s door whispered a single word.

“World.

In the first tongue, 'Arah' meant ‘World.’

At the door stood an older black woman with the kindest eyes I’d ever seen.

She wore a bracelet of thorns and a dress made of every flower my mind could conceive.

Golden eyes flecked with amber looked at me lovingly.

She quietly sauntered up to Arah and shook her head wistfully, a disapproving but loving mother wishing her child would just behave.

“You would do well to accept your place here, Arah. The Father may be gone, but this is where you and your lot stay. It was not man’s fall that bound you here.

Tell him what you did...Angel.”

Arah fell suddenly to the barroom floor, all the strength clearly sucked out of him.

“I..I did what I was told. I followed the orders I was given. It was for Him, Uriel.”

Uriel tutted her tongue as though an impudent child had told her a silly, obvious fib.

“You can lie to yourself all you want, Arah, but you cannot lie to me.

You, who whispered endlessly to Herod.

You, who dwelt in Caligula.

You, who served Qin Shi Huang.

You, who sought refuge in Robespierre .

You, who possessed Mengele.

‘And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.”

Uriel helped me to my feet, brushed me off, and lightly put her hand on her cheek. It was the only moment in my life I knew what the word “home” meant.

“And you won’t lie to Man, either.

You remember the deal you begged for, Arah? Let remind you:

'They began to entreat Him, saying, “If You are going to cast us out, send us into the herd of swine.'

You had the gall to call his creation, however staggeringly imperfect, swine.

You got what you asked for, then.

And you will have it for all time.

Get behind me.”

Uriel picked me up as though I were a mere baby and carried me to my truck. She laid me gently in the passenger side and started the engine.

The radio kicked on.

“I’m a rolling stone

All alone and lost

For a life of sin

I have paid the cost

Take my advice

Or you’ll curse the day

You started rollin’ down

That Lost Highway”

As she pulled away, I looked back at The Man from Capernaum one last time.

It was consumed in fire and the squeals of pigs shrieking carried through the cool night air.

“Do not pity him.

‘You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.’

God may have left this world but let the Demon burn.”