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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Renegade Winter” Down in the Dirt, v154 (the February 2018 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

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The Wellspring

James N. Thomas

    I stare at the fresh mural on the wall with an admiration that I wasn’t anticipating. In the flesh, the man has incredible ears, and the artist really nails it here. Impressive for a teenage shithead with a rattle can. I follow the lines and the wrinkles and the excited, nervous eyes. Cartoonish beads of sweat trickle down the ten-foot tall face and his mouth twists into a scowl. Beside his mug are two dates crossed through with Xs—one from twenty years ago, and one from three months ago.
    “Motherfuckers,” I say to myself.
    I sigh and force my thumb and forefinger into my eye sockets and rub back and forth, trying to scrub the image from my mind. This is not going to come off. We’re going to have to paint over it, which means we’re going to have to coat the entire building for consistency. I can’t even imagine what maintenance will say when I tell them. The donations have reduced to a trickle since the latest bungle. Missing the rapture once is bad enough, but at least it happened in the nineties before the internet could bounce it around. People forget, and people move on. Now, however, the entire world is laughing, and there is a ten-foot reminder to greet you as soon as you pull into the parking lot. I turn my attention to the security box and walk over.
    Ricky, the enormous night watchman, has already fallen asleep again, and I can hear the gurgling from his sleep apnea a good ten feet away. Worthless.
    I survey the surrounding land. Loblolly pines and small, rolling hills everywhere. I wonder why people would drive across states or hours from the nearest airport to such a shitty little town, but the faithful are always willing to fork over cash to watch depictions of the damned writhing in torment. I am here because I was born here. My parents would drag me every Sunday to that same place, back when it was just a church and the engineer-turned-reverend, Josiah Arlington, had not yet taken over and turned the place into Six Flags Over Jesus. His ministry centered on a divine calculus he claimed to have discovered in a book written in a time when understanding basic arithmetic would’ve been a luxury.
    I peer to the east towards the blacktop road cutting through the trees and over the center of the hilltop. The sun throbs and boils over from behind it, fuming a red veneer over the morning sky. A woman steps out onto the blacktop in front of it and seems to stare at me and into me. She wears a simple black dress and wrapped around the sides of her purple-gold hair I can see a headdress of antlers. No longer able to hold my gaze against the light I snap my eyes closed, leaving an imprint of the scene shimmering in shades of green and gold behind my eyelids. When I open them again she’s gone, and a doe is standing in her place. I shrug.
    To my right, I see that my boss, Mr. Whittle, has pulled into the parking lot. There goes plausible deniability. With Ricky snoozing in the security box I could have gotten away with claiming that I hadn’t yet heard the frantic voicemails, and this could be somebody else’s mess for a couple of hours. But really, where else am I going to be? I’m sure as shit not in the mood to go home to my parents and their post-rapture mania. They believed Arlington when he said that the rapture had occurred on schedule, but it had been a spiritual event, and the end is still coming, right on schedule. And there I was, looking forward to being caught up in the air. Personally, I sometimes wonder if maybe it really has already happened, but it was so long ago that no one remembers and such few people were worthy that no one even noticed. This is our tribulation, to make sense of it all.
    I walk over to Mr. Whittle, trying to force a smile, but I’m just too tired.
    “Jesus Harold,” he says looking at the masterpiece on the wall. “What a shit show.”
    “You’re telling me,” I respond stupidly, wishing I’d not said anything.
    “We have a way bigger fire to put out,” he tells me, frowning.
    I glance around over the fence, wondering if the animatronic First Angel had malfunctioned overnight and set something on fire with his fiery trumpet again. It was always acting up, but that one was a real crowd favorite and brought in too much money to shut down for repairs. Then it hits me that he wasn’t talking about an actual fire, and I feel like an idiot.
    “What else could possibly be wrong?” I ask him.
    “It’s Arlington,” he says. “He’s missing.”

#

    Mr. Whittle fumbles with his keys at the lock, cursing. He tries six or seven before the correct one slides into place with that familiar bone-on-bone grinding sound. We step into the portable building, and immediately the scent of sickness floods my nose. I choke down the urge to gag. In the middle of the room sits an empty hospital bed, and a braid of discarded tubes and wires hangs from the side, pooling on the floor.
    “The man’s been unconscious for a month,” I say, wishing I could evaporate on the spot. “Where the hell is the overnight nurse?”
    He throws a meaningful look my direction. It isn’t exactly a secret that Mike, the kid who plays Tortured Man #24 on the weekends, sneaks past Ricky at night to hop the fence and slip one in with her. But really, who else are we going to get to sit with his heap? We can’t exactly fire her, lest she tells the world what the ministry elders have been hiding out here in the back forty. And she knows it. She pulls a better salary than mostly everyone except for Mr. Whittle.
    “Right,” I say. “I’ll track Tanya down.”
    “Aaron,” he says to me, gripping my left shoulder in his meaty paw. The dried-bark flesh of his finger looks as if it is trying to spill over his gold wedding band the way a tree does to barbed wire. “We need to figure this out quickly. If word gets out, this’ll be the end of everything. Just think of the good we do here.”
    I try to conjure up in my mind exactly what exactly it is that we have left to offer. Josiah’s whole schtick was trying to win souls by hanging a looming deadline over everyone’s head. Haven’t gotten right with God yet? That’s OK, there’s still time to become a new creature in Christ, but supplies are limited, so act now. But the horse is already out of the barn, and the only people still buying tickets or sending donations are the ones with Stockholm syndrome, the ones like my parents. Then I think of the people who work at the park, most of them I grew up with. With the sawmill closed last Spring, there just aren’t any jobs left.
    I nod, and he half pats me on the back, half pushes me through the door. I start walking towards the gates of New Jerusalem.
    Arlington was especially proud of New Jerusalem. It’s designed to be the centerpiece of the park, and just like Rome before it, all roads eventually lead back to it if you just follow them long enough. He built it at the zenith of his movement and it was meant to serve as a beacon of God’s glory in the coming world. I figure if it’s a good enough hideout for the night crew to sneak off and smoke pot, then it’s more than adequate for a wayward nurse to boff her boyfriend.
    I pull open the gates and the hinges moan, sending puffs of blood scented, carmine colored particles past my face. Walking down the cobblestone streets, I note the sticky feeling the gold paint is leaving on the soles of my shoes. If there’s anything good about fewer visitors, I think to myself, it’s that we’re saving money from not having to repaint the streets as often.
    Standing on top of the little bridge that crosses over the river of life—a creek we rerouted to run through the park—I can see the distorted image of two people running through the temple of the Throne of God. Through the clear jasper walls, their bodies bend into carnival mirror shapes. I walk around to the entrance, and they nearly knock me over on their way out. A bleachy smell still oozes from their clothes and my nose wrinkles up.
    “Tanya,” I say to her. “Arlington is missing. You’re supposed to be watching him.”
    Her eyes widen. “Missing?” she asks incredulously. “The man has been catatonic for months.”
    “Did you notice anything that may help us find him?” I ask her.
    “Well, he did say—”
    “Say? He spoke? He was awake when you left him?”
    “No,” she says. “People with catatonia still mumble stuff from time to time, but it’s just gibberish.”
    “Just spit it out.”
    “I don’t know, something about a sign.”

#

    After unsuccessfully combing through every possible corner of the park I can think of, I sit in the parking lot, counting the cars. Three, and we’ve already been open for four hours. In the months before the rapture failed to make an appearance, this place was so pregnant with the faithful and the curious that the fire department made us start turning people away for safety reasons.
    The security cameras are no help. As head of security I had protested to both Mr. Whittle and Reverend Arlington that if anything serious ever happened at the park, our camera coverage was so bad that we’d be lucky to ever really get anything useful from them. Arlington just smiled and told me that this was a place of God, and that would be enough to keep such things from happening because the Lord provides for the faithful. I can’t help but laugh when I remember this, turning the key in the ignition.
    It takes me all of fifteen minutes to drive across town and outside city limits to Josiah’s home office. As I slow down, looking for the red dirt of his driveway, I notice the familiar sign on the side of the road. JESUS IS COMING, it says on one side. Passing it, I glance in the rear view mirror and notice that painted over the normal text of ARE YOU READY? are the words LOOK BUSY. I nod in approval at the change. At least they had the decency to maintain the palindrome quality of the sign.
    His house is a total disaster on the inside. Ricky is supposed to come and check on it once a week, but it’s obvious that no one has set foot in the place in months. Glass from the busted patio door litters the floor, and the moldy carpet already looks like it’s trying to compost. I don’t bother to contemplate who among the thousands with cause might have wrecked the place.
    I walk around inside of his office, looking for anything that might give me a hint that he’s been there or what kind of prophetic sign he was mumbling about in his delirium. I lift a fallen bookcase back against the wall and push the books around on the floor with my foot. No longer in a heap, I can see a timeline of the evolution of Christian thought. At one end of the spiral is the Bible, this particular copy is thick, printed in the original languages and in English. Then comes commentary on Paul’s letters, then Ignatius, Augustine, and Aquinas, and at the inner end, modern evangelical authors. Crouching down, I flip through one and turn to a page with a painting of a seven headed abomination rising from the ocean.
    I try to retrace the steps in my life that lead me there. It would be too easy in hindsight to say that I was just looking to please my parents, or it was the job. The truth is I was looking for something, and I had taken the easy way out, taking a prepackaged platitude instead of doing the hard work of really searching for myself. And this is where it had gotten me. I shut the book and stand up with it in my hand, ready to toss it through the red stained glass window in front of me and curse the good Reverend’s name, when I catch the sound of something moving in the living room.
    I push the door open slowly, unsure of what to expect. A doe stands in the center of the room, her ears twitching and rolling over while she stares at me through two enormous orbs of onyx. I stand there, staring back at her—the prospect of moving from the spot seems to me as ludicrous as anything I can imagine. The evening sun is sliding down the Western sky, casting the room in flickers of purple light through the pine needles. She looks outside towards the tree line, and bolts out of the house through the empty frame of the patio door and towards the woods. She stops and cuts her head towards me, almost beckoning, and the wind blows the tangy perfume of her camphor around the room.

#

    In Mr. Whittle’s office the next morning, I stand in front of his massive mahogany desk. I inhale deeply and hold it in, expecting his normal abuse. He heaves an enormous hock onto the desk and exhales a wheezy plume of stale breath as he reclines in his chair.
    “These could be the end times, Aaron,” he says to me. I’m not sure if he’s trying to be funny or not, so I default to not. “We’ve got to get this under control or everything we’ve built here is doomed. You know how difficult it is to find a job around here, and with your name forever carved into this fiasco...” he tells me, trailing off at the end.
    I try to think of things I can add to my résumé. My parents don’t have anything tucked away for rainy days anymore, and without my income, we would probably lose the house long before I could find another job. I nod to him. I’m at a total loss for what to do next, but I need to say something so that he doesn’t fire me on the spot. “I’m going to search the bayou to see if he got lost or, God forbid, he fell in,” I tell him.
    “Good boy,” he says, shooing me away with a few swipes of his elephantine hands.
    The bayou is actually on the land adjacent to ours, but the threat of being homeless supersedes the slim possibility of getting shot by the ancient rancher who owns it. I step over the fence and start walking in what I think is the correct direction towards the bayou. I crane my neck side to side as I walk, looking and listening, hoping for any sign that Arlington has been through recently. I shudder when I consider the possibility of him turning into alligator shit. The thought of being eaten alive is bad enough, but the prospect of never getting any answers causes a dark swirling pit to sink to the bottom of my stomach. I picture him in my head, out in the void beyond, laughing and leaving all of us bewildered and beggared.
    At the edge of the green, sulfurous water, I scan through the cypress trees and the swollen trunks sunken into the sludge. One of the trees is swallowing a prehistoric-looking NO TRESPASSING sign that’s nailed to it. A few egrets stalk around, looking for frogs and skinks. No signs of Arlington, but no alligators either. I wipe sweat from my forehead with my palm and sling it to the ground. I tilt my face towards the sky, the cool breeze of early Autumn rolling over me. The pines above my head sway like the outstretched arms of spirit-drunk parishioners, exalting an ancient force, older and truer than any imagined by man.
    I start making my way back, hoping to find somewhere out of sight to hide for the rest of the day.

#

    On my way to the park the day after, a doe bolts across the road in front of my car in a streak of red. I force my foot down hard on the brake pedal, and my car skids straight into one of the park’s giant billboards. The saccharin smell of antifreeze steam floats in through the open windows. Tears well up in my eyes, and I am at my most degraded. I curse the deer and Arlington and my parents and even the morning sun. I try to kick the underside of the dash, and with my limited range of motion, even this seems pathetic.
    I get out and walk around my car to take in the damage. Directly above me, I pick up the sound of a voice mumbling. I look up through the perforated metal floor of the platform running the length of the billboard and see the shriveled, sunburned face and wild eyes of Josiah Arlington staring down at me. He’s wrapped up in an ad hoc robe made from bed sheets. I take a few steps back to let it all sink in. The billboard reads: 000 DAYS LEFT UNTIL THE RAPTURE — WHERE WILL YOU BE? The sign, I think to myself with a pitiful laugh.
    I retrieve the Reverend and we head back to the park in my ruined car, the temperature gauge pegged out in the red the entire way there. On the main stage, Mr. Whittle is delivering the bad news to the staff: in light of recent developments, the elders have decided to shut down the park. Some people are groaning; some are crying. He sees Arlington and develops a sudden case of aphasia. The sea of people part as the Reverend walks onto the stage. Mr. Whittle steps down and stands with the others at the front. Arlington lifts a shaking, leathered hand to his chest and lets out a laugh that cuts right through the center of my chest. He doubles over, cackling. Confused faces and murmurs spread through the audience.
    Stage left, I hear a pneumatic hiss and the First Angel of the Lord hoists his massive trumpet in his metallic hands. Arlington turns his head and stares straight into its bell as the bellows within bathe him in flames. The crowd looks on in silent horror until someone near the front screams: “Look! He’s laughing and dancing, just like an angel of God!”
    In front of me, the crowd surges forward, planting their feet in each other’s spines to rush towards the fiery spigot. Through the laughing and crying, I can hear people speaking, saying things in a language not meant for human ears, tapping into something so arcane that words fail to frame it.
    I run straight through the front gates and across the parking lot onto the blacktop. My legs pump like pistons and the breeze carries the greasy, sweet scent of burning barbecue. In front of me, the morning sun rolls through shades of green and pink. I try to force reason onto it all. In front of me, a familiar figure steps out, a dark silhouette against the great luminous disc. My eyes adjust, and I can make out antlers wrapped around her purple-gold hair.
    She reaches out and places a hand against my chest, and a powerful heat grows within. The world spreads out before us like a great ring, smooth and golden. I can see the cord that penetrates everything and hems the world together—the light that shines not only upon the world but in all things, just beyond the periphery of human knowledge. I extend my hand and clasp my fingers around this thread of light. I see now that Josiah, like so many failed prophets before him, had simply set himself on a hopeless quest; understanding the world is impossible without first grasping this thread. My anger melts from me in globs, sliding into the ether. I realize that this is our lot in life. Such knowledge was never meant for man, and its possession means personal annihilation.
    My body trembles, separating at the seams, and I return to the wellspring of life.

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