The Christian: A Comedy – Part Three
A novella in four parts
This month, I am serializing on Substack my tenth book, a novella called The Christian: A Comedy. The paperback is available on Amazon. Here is the front cover:
THIRD DAY
Giving your car away: sure. Giving all your money away: a bit much, but okay—commitment. But this? This was my first attempt at vetoing Mike’s plans.
We sat in his small dining room. Traces of Kate were everywhere but were covered by the dust of neglect. Or: the place had nice stuff in it but looked like shit.
“This puts you in ‘will get arrested’ territory.”
Mike laughed. “And?”
I felt dazed, perhaps still punch-drunk from almost having been shot. It was ten in the morning. The Jesus experiment was cratering me.
Mike finished his coffee. “Jesus got into legal trouble, I think.” He smiled. “Session starts at eleven.”
I looked at him. He had no job. No car. No money. His house—if he continued to try to live in it—would be repossessed. In a handful of days he’d blown up his life. All for a dumb fucking book.
But he had a friend. The guy drinking his coffee and doubting him.
City hall was a boring brown building. We paid to park and approached the government.
I had been arrested once. Technically: I had been detained. I was participating in a protest in New Mexico’s state capitol building. There were maybe twenty of us. We were committing the crime of sitting on the ground in the lobby after hours, refusing to move until we could speak with the Governor. We were surrounded by fifty state police officers who did not let us use the bathroom. Then I had to go to court and watch judges and cops humiliate poor people for a few hours. I no longer enjoy activities that attract the attention of deputized individuals.
“Mike. Do I have permission to… if things get crazy. Can I just… not know you?”
Mike stopped walking and looked at me. I saw the sting in his eyes. I’d hurt him. Then he tried to look okay. “Yeah. Of course.”
The lobby was nothing special. The general aesthetic was underfunded junior high. Mike approached the receptionist. “Morning. How are you?”
She stared at him as if he were an alien. “Fine and you.”
Mike smiled. “Good.”
They maintained their standoff. Another battle in the ur-war between sincerity and cynicism, light and shadow, life and death.
She broke. “How can I help you?”
“We want to attend the council meeting in a few minutes. It’s public, right?”
“Mhmm.”
“Cool. Do we need anything? Badges, or—”
“Security’s through the double doors.”
“Excellent. Thank you.”
Cynthia did not look up.
The security guard was a big guy with a mustache. Determined weaponless, we were let through.
City councilors sat at a long desk curved into a half-circle. Only a few seats in the audience were occupied. At the public podium, a man in a black Underarmor shirt tucked into sand-colored tactical pants spoke.
“We put out an RFP for that, councilor, but uhhh we couldn’t, we didn’t yet hear back from the usual vendors.”
The man kept talking but my body refused to metabolize his speech.
Mike walked us to chairs near the front. Mercifully, he gave me an aisle seat. I had already clocked the exits.
On the drive over, Mike had mentioned “flipping the tables.” I knew the scene. Jesus sees guys doing business in the temple, freaks out, rebukes them. What would that look like in 2025? Particularly since Mike did not have on his person an automatic weapon and thousands of rounds of ammunition? Was Jesus spontaneous? A reader of vibes? I did not like existing planless. Mike, however, seemed okay.
“—but we inquired about that possibility. So far it looks like capital expenditures in FY 2026 will be uhh about the same. More or less the same.”
Maybe it would be better to be jailed. Then something would have happened.
The room was frigid and tactical man’s intonation did not vary. I leaned over to Mike and whispered, “Can I sleep? Until the public comment section?”
He looked at me with an expression that conveyed Do what you want, I’m not your dad. I nodded and with a grimace tried to convey back that it would be a short nap. I slumped down in the uncomfortable chair and closed my eyes.
In came a slow warm vacancy.
Mike’s voice woke me from a dreamless void. He was mid-sentence. He was standing at the podium. The city councilors were seated before him.
“—and, well, I don’t know. It’s hard to say what exactly the problem is.”
I sat up in my seat and my heart started pounding.
Mike looked up at something; I followed his gaze to a bright red digital clock hanging from the ceiling. It was ticking down. I thought it showed how much time Mike had left to live. But no: he had that many more seconds and minutes to address his city government.
I could feel him struggling. He was sweating. His cheeks were red, as if he’d just been slapped. He was shifting his weight back and forth. The clock did not slow for him. Had Jesus been nervous before the powerful?
Then Mike grew still. He stared down at some invisible point on the ground.
I looked at the councilors. All appeared bored. Seven out of nine were on their phones, tablets, or laptops. One had his eyes closed. The remaining councilor, a young woman, watched Mike, looking both sincere and deeply tired.
Forty-five seconds left.
He began.
“A government is meant to help people. We have a city where people wander the streets without shelter, or food, or warmth in the brutal winters. People don’t feel safe around police officers. We have so many empty houses. Most of my neighbors aren’t neighbors, most of them aren’t here because they just rent their places out. And there’s so much money everywhere… money in big businesses, in this building. But most people struggle every day to live—”
“Thank you for your comment.” Cut off by a male councilor with cropped black hair. He was already looking at his phone.
No one was standing in line behind Mike; no one else wanted to speak. He was the only person the officials had to consider, the only interloper who had to be tolerated.
For three seconds, nothing changed—the room static, a perfect sad picture of itself. Then Mike put both hands on the podium and pushed. It dropped with a boom; something crunched. The long mic wobbled rapidly, hilariously. A security guard appeared out of thin air and put his right hand on a bright yellow taser. I wanted very badly to laugh but I was frozen again. The mic was still doing its boingy wobbling. Mike hadn’t moved. The security guard said something, Mike responded—maybe “I’m sorry”? maybe “We are all going to hell”?—then turned around and began to walk toward the door. Eight out of nine councilors now looked at him (one guy’s eyes were still closed). Mike walked past my row and avoided eye contact. The security guard kept one hand on his taser and followed a few steps behind. Then the doors closed and Mike was gone.
A moment of quiet—soon punctuated by councilors snickering to each other like children. Two of them looked disgusted. The woman who had watched Mike the whole time was staring at the door, her face inscrutable. The security guard returned then wrenched the podium back in its place. The microphone started wobbling again, but this time I did not want to laugh.
After a few minutes I got up and left the building.
Mike stood out front staring at clouds. I stood beside him and waited, listened.
“In there I felt like I knew what to say all the sudden. Now I’m not sure I made any sense.”
I felt tempted to assuage his doubts—you did a good job, or they wouldn’t listen anyway, or you told the truth—but instead I kept quiet.
Mike sighed. “It just… it feels impossible to say. To name all the pains. You know?” He squinted as the sun emerged.
It was at that moment that I knew I would write this book.
I had never seen it before—a hidden shimmer, as though the air around him was ennobled by his simple presence. I wondered if this magic had something to do with Mike’s pure intention, his singular focused will. I don’t know. I really don’t. But I saw it then.
Then Mike hiccuped. And laughed. “Sorry.” He looked sheepish, like a kid who’d just gotten away with something.
I suspected then a possibility that not many Christians talk about: Jesus had fun.
We decided to walk around.
The day got hot and hallucinatory. Light on the sidewalks seemed a sheet of white obscuring all sense. I tried to talk with Mike while we walked, but nothing stuck; he just stared and plowed ahead. Eventually noise bled into the air of a crowd far away. Mike followed the call. As we neared the group, heat cracked whatever facade I believed I needed to be a sociable, functional animal. I felt sweat on my sweat. The phone in my pocket burned my thigh.
We turned a corner and saw the rally.
Red, white, blue. Posters and stickers and shirts, eagles and skulls and guns. Trucks belching black exhaust honked and pulled flapping flags. These were people I preferred to avoid, but Mike walked straight ahead. He would prove his love egalitarian, I guess. Dudes with rifles and military gear walked around. Would I talk with these folks? Could I?
We walked with true believers and passers-by, white guys with crewcuts and women with big shirts painted patriotic, laughing cops and college kids in polos. I saw jeans, khakis, Oakleys. Three men surrounded another man and watched him showcase the mechanism by which his pistol magnetically detached from its holster then became attached again; the man with the gun was the smallest of the four. I saw two thin people—a couple, maybe—wearing Uncle Sam top hats and selling small clear plastic cans of white liquid.
Mike plunged in. I could only follow.
The crowd’s sounds were now more distinct. Some played patriotic bangers on shitty boomboxes; others shouted slogans through bullhorns. The crowd talked, chanted, clapped, cheered, laughed, booed. A block back I had felt scared, knowing that this group did not like many of my beliefs and friends. In fact, some of these people worked as citizens to make the world harder and deadlier for me and mine. Yet my mind also supplied an image of this crowd stripped of its slogans and paraphernalia and even clothes. In the fantasy they stood strange and arbitrary and naked, a nudist colony’s tragic block party. I felt tired. If all our ideas and allegiances were rendered null and void, what were we? And could we really be otherwise? I started to feel my fear wash away in a salve of non-judgment. I wondered if Mike felt similarly. Then I saw him getting yelled at by a large man with a gun.
I hustled over.
The bear was midway in: “—but that’s not how it goes! The liars and cheaters in Congress couldn’t work with him, so they did everything they could to push him out! We fucking know that! The real people know that! It’s the media who can’t know that! And who won’t fucking get it. But the longer they go like this, the more they’re gonna fucking get it. You know what I’m saying!”
The man was leaning down and shouting loudly and inches away from Mike’s face. I intervened. “Hey! All good here?”
The big man with the rifle stopped shouting and looked at me. Mike introduced us. I shook the guy’s hand. His name was Trevor. He turned back to Mike and started yelling again. “It’s the pedophiles in the media class who can’t afford to let the man govern! Because he’s gonna get rid of them! He’s gonna route them the fuck out! And we know it! That’s why he won the popular vote! Huge margin! HUGE! The state electors lied, the recounts were bullshit, it was all a big show! A DISTRACTION! They want us to not look at the fact that illegals—the criminals, rapists, thieves—are pouring over the border and taking our fucking jobs!”
“I don’t judge them.” Mike stood still and looked the man in his eyes. “I don’t know their lives. I wouldn’t judge them even if I did.”
I watched the yelling man go through a handful of the seven stages of grief. Then his face reflected his brain undergoing some protocol by which self-doubt is eradicated. His right eyelid twitched. He started yelling again: “That’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying the fact that illegals are pouring in! We have to save this fucking country! We can’t make it with this woke propaganda tearing everything apart! We are hardworking decent people! It’s NOT RIGHT! WE FOUGHT HARD FOR THIS SHIT!”
I sensed that this man was capable of yelling at Mike for at least twelve more hours. I interjected. “We wanna walk around!”
Trevor stopped yelling and looked confused. I raised and shook a fist. “Fight the good fight!” Then I remembered the gesture’s association with the Black Panthers and panicked. So I raised my other fist and shook it a little. I stood with both fists raised, like Richard Nixon with fingers amputated. Trevor looked me up and down, then found some other wall at which to yell. I looked at Mike. He looked serene. How?
We meandered through. I learned that the couple selling jars full of white liquid were selling representations of jars full of the President’s cum. It was too hot outside to question their business model. We walked and looked up at signs that said BLOCK THE BORDER and 40 MORE YEARS and ONLY HE CAN FIX IT and SOCIALISM IS SATANIC and FREEDOM!!!!!!! and KEEP EM ALL OUT and NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and TRANS LIES MAKE KIDS DIE and MOMMY LOVES DADDY and GUNS SOLVE PROBLEMS and NO MORE PEDOPHILES and AMERICA: THE GREATEST and JESUS LOVES US MORE and WHEN I HEAR THE WORD DIVERSITY I REACH FOR MY GUN. Then I saw a wheelchair-bound elderly man sucking oxygen while holding aloft a sign that said PAY FOR YOUR OWN DAMN SELF. I felt lost in a maze.
Mike approached an old woman reclining in a lawn chair in the middle of the rally. She looked ninety. He leaned down. “Do you need anything, ma’am?”
She took off her sunglasses and looked up at him, her pancaked makeup melting in the heat. “What?”
Mike yelled over the crowd, now riled up by an invisible voice through a bullhorn. “DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?”
The woman smiled and shook her head. She patted Mike’s forearm twice, reached into her massive red leather purse, pulled out a sweaty bottle of water, then offered it to him. He took it wordlessly.
Mike straightened up, cracked the bottle, and drank it all in one go.
The bullhorn guy droned on, the crowd shouted, and tears welled in Mike’s eyes. I let him be for a moment then leaned in and asked, “Are you okay?”
He nodded, tears dropping in unison. “I’m tired,” he said quietly. I couldn’t hear what he said next over the crowd, but I read his lips: “I want to go home.”
Mike turned back to the old lady and thanked her for the drink. She smiled, serene in her chair, an empress of heaven.
I led us out.
It was a long walk back.
It was dark by the time we got to the house, the night warm and breezeless, and Mike’s neighbor stood in his front yard. I could barely see her in the faint golden light off rundown sodium lamps, though she looked old and wore a nighty.
Mike got out of the car and approached her. I followed suit, intending to get him to his door.
“Hi Phyllis.”
The woman opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, pointed at her yard, then closed her mouth again. We stood and waited. After a few seconds of frustrating silence, Phyllis spoke. “I’m worried about something.”
Mike nodded. “Okay.”
She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, then pointed down at the grass. “Right. Here. They were right here, Michael.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
She crossed her arms again. “The bums.”
Mike cocked his head. “The bums?”
She uncrossed her arms and pointed at the earth emphatically, finger stabbing down thrice. “Here, Michael!”
“I understand that, but… who do you mean?”
Phyllis scoffed. “The bums!”
Mike sighed. “You mean unhoused people?”
“Oh, enough of that crap. Yes, homeless bums, Michael. Probably drug addicts.”
“Okay. What were they doing?”
“Well…” Phyllis trailed off, as though trying to mentally fit a straight picture in a crooked frame. “God in Heaven, Michael. You know what these people are up to.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
Phyllis stared at us. Then she smirked. “You’re liberals.”
Mike shook his head. “Phyllis…” I could feel his exhaustion. I could certainly feel mine. “I don’t know what I am. I just don’t want to cause trouble for other people.”
“Trouble?” Phyllis laughed. “’Trouble’ is homeless drug addicts breaking into both of our houses, Michael. Taking our stuff. Doing drugs in there. They might hurt me. I’m alone next door, you know? They might take our televisions. They might rape me!”
“Jesus Christ, Phyllis…” Mike took a breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be dismissive.”
“Just do the right thing, Michael.”
“Which is?”
“Call the cops when you see them here.”
“For what?”
“Loitering! Threatening the neighborhood!”
“By standing on my front lawn?”
“YES. Are you dumb?”
Mike grimaced. There was an excruciating moment of quiet; the insects offered no music, the wind no solace. Just empty stillness in an American neighborhood. “Maybe I am, Phyllis. But I hear you. I’ll do something next time, okay?”
Satisfied, she turned around, walked quickly back to her house, then hid herself away inside it.
We stood under the yellow light of the lamps. I put my hand on Mike’s shoulder. “You gonna be okay tonight?”
He looked at me, but shadows obscured his face. “Yeah. Thank you for being with me today. I know it was tough.”
Thank you for being with me today—the words hurt, though I didn’t know why. “Happy to, Mike. Tomorrow?”
He gave a half-hearted thumbs up, then slowly went inside.
I waited to see Mike’s silhouette in the living room before driving home.
FOURTH DAY
I didn’t text Mike. I didn’t call him. Instead I sat on the couch of my living room, my mind blank, arid, a desert. I drank water as if the sun were burning me alive. I kept telling myself: I need a day off. I need a day off. From what? From being with a good person? From seeing how much that person stood alone?
My wife and I walked our dog. The clouds looked like they were crumbling into Earth.
She asked about Mike and asked how I felt. I struggled to speak. The dog followed plants and piss. The sun was gone. We lingered in the half-light. Then I found myself saying aloud: “I don’t feel like I understand what life is for anymore.”
We stopped walking. I let the dog inhale a crazed-looking bush. My wife met my eyes, obviously worried and frustrated, but also sympathetic. She showed me how to look, how to see. “I’m sorry.” And a moment later: “I get it.”
We didn’t watch TV that night, didn’t go on our phones, didn’t even talk much more. We just lay in bed and held each other and waited for sleep.