“My son, what’s happened?”
“Just as you said, Reverend. Last night, just when I thought I could go no lower, I was filled with a strange peace. I felt—well, free—for the first time in my life. Where only a moment before there was a most terrible emptiness, there was a fullness, a …”
At this point I teared up and choked, and for the first time I smiled faintly.
“… a joy. And he was here. Just as surely as you are there. Jesus was in my heart. I didn’t have to ask or beg or grasp or try. The moment I was fully open, there he was. And he was pure light, and perfection, and love and grace and … I just cannot describe …”
“Thanks be to God.”
During the next two weeks, a series of camp chaplains and doctors came to interview me. My appetite returned, and I had no physical symptoms. When the room was empty and my only audience was the video camera that I knew must be somewhere, I moved my mouth in silent, and sometimes whispered, prayer. I did not complain, and when the restraints were removed I asked for nothing other than a Bible.
During the balance of my time at GI, I never indicated to a single one of my fellow prisoners, by so much as a wink or grin or raised eyebrow, that I harbored the least bit of skepticism or discontent with the Christian Nation program. I led Bible study and was a model prisoner. I was released two months before the three-year deadline, my death sentence commuted.
Until the last hour, when my fingers tapped out the truth for any reader of these words to discover, I have lived this lie to perfection. My actions and words became automatic. I taught myself to believe that I was saved, to ease the burden of dissembling. For five years I have lived the lie, not half-heartedly, not incompletely, but so thoroughly as to call into question what really happened that night. All the evidence in the world points to the fact that I was born again that Easter Sunday 2023, six months to the day after Sanjay Sharma’s death. Only I, and now you, know it to be untrue.
“
Ordinary,” said Aunt Lydia, “is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary
.”
—Margaret Atwood,
The Handmaid’s Tale
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
—Doremus Jessup,
in
It Can’t Happen Here
, by Sinclair Lewis
A
T THE END
OF MY OUTPLACEMENT
appointment in a small office next to the ferry waiting room, my counselor opened the familiar white box with the embossed Apple logo. “This is an i20 Device. Only the best for our graduates,” he said, attempting a joke.
The top of the thing looked a bit like the iPhone that had been taken from me three years previously, upon arriving at GI. But it was thin and much smaller, like an overscaled wristwatch. And I was surprised to see when he took it out of the box that it was somewhat flexible.
“Is it a phone or a little iPad or what?” I asked.
“I still find it funny that you guys don’t know. Everyone in the country has one now. And I mean everyone. It’s a Device; it does everything. All you need.”
The wafer-like Device had a wrist strap that was dark gray, extremely thin, and made from some kind of woven metal. A golden cross was embossed on the outside of the band.
He saw me looking at the cross. “For born agains. So you know. You know who you can … count on,” he said somewhat cryptically. “You a righty?” I nodded. “Put out your left hand, then.” He continued, “You can take it off, but you need to keep it with you at all times. Do you understand? It’s important. Serious stuff if they find you without it.”
I waited patiently over an hour for the clean white ferryboat, bearing the familiar Faith & Freedom Rehabilitation Facility logo on its superstructure, to return to the dock. The ferry ride covering the half mile from Governors Island to the tip of Manhattan took no more than ten minutes, but I was transported by that short trip from one world to another. As I set foot on the ferry, I thought of all the millions of prisoners in human history who stood before the prison gate, watched it open, and then—with the hesitation and reluctance with which we receive all things devoutly sought—stepped through into a place where all their suffering meant nothing.
The Governors Island ferry terminal in Manhattan is directly across the street from my old office building. Walking down the terminal steps, I looked up at the corner windows behind which my former partners still sat, and the middle windows behind which a new generation of associates, who most likely had never heard of me, strived to become the lawyers that the firm wanted them to be. I sat on the step, gazing up, wondering. I saw a few fleeting silhouettes against the glass and remembered a favorite scene from the opera version of
Great Gatsby
where Nick Carraway sits and watches from outside a party under a tent, seeing on the white sides of the tent the shadows of partygoers dancing. I briefly wondered if I always had been an outsider, like Nick, and then realized that it no longer mattered. I had made my decision and had never once regretted it.
I crossed the plaza in front of South Ferry. The taxis were still yellow. The Staten Island ferry was still orange. New Yorkers still wore black. I saw the Nike swoosh. A breeze brought the sweet, salty odor of the nut cart. I sat on a bench. Things seemed completely normal. Secretaries wore sneakers and carried their good shoes in a fashionable bag. Junior bankers and lawyers, looking impossibly young and glowing with confidence and ambition, wore well-shined shoes and new suits and walked with long and purposeful strides. Normal. Tourists poured from the subway, confused about how to get to the Statue of Liberty. All normal. What was I expecting? Women in burkas? Zealots with machine guns? The call to prayer echoing through the canyons of Wall Street? That was what a theocracy was supposed to look like. This looked like the Financial District at the tail end of morning rush hour.
The siege and Battle of the Battery, however, had happened. I looked closely at the plaza in front of the ferry terminal, remembering how it looked the morning we were marched across the same plaza and taken to Governors Island. There had been concrete barricades and rolls of barbed wire, three crashed helicopters, and long black scars on the sides of the office buildings along Battery Place. And every square foot of the plaza was covered with vegetable beds and hoop houses. Lush ripe tomatoes tumbled from a scaffolding made of wire hangers. Spinach grew at the base of the trees. Zucchini squash climbed the columns of the covered walkway where people now waited for uptown buses. All that was gone. I did not see a forgotten bamboo stake, a piece of twine, or a single vegetable seedling forcing its way up through a crack in the concrete. The Manhattan of the siege was eradicated. It might never have happened.
I wandered into Battery Park looking for any sign of the battle fought there just over three years before. I walked over to the East Coast World War II memorial. Surely, no matter how hard they had scrubbed, there would be a faint shadow of the pool of blood in which my friend Matthew had died. I stood below the tall granite slab engraved with the names of the World War II dead, below the same wall of names that had protected me from the first wave of their assault, at the exact place where Matthew lost half his face, and I found no trace of what had happened at that spot. I turned to the wall of names, looking for the pockmarks that would have to remain to tell the story of the bullets that flew that day in August. Again, nothing. The monument appeared pristine. I closed my eyes and touched the wall. And then I felt it. The slight indentations where the bullet holes had been filled. One after another, creating a rippled cratered surface revealing itself to my touch. I stood with my hand on the cool stone caressing the granite surface until I sensed someone nearby and opened my eyes. A well-dressed man, about my age, was standing close by.
“Are you OK, Brother?” I noticed his glance at the golden cross on my Device. He had one too. I pointed with my eyes to a name on the wall near to where I had been touching.
“My great-grandfather,” I said, easily dissembling.
He smiled with a superficiality that I soon came to recognize and value. “Quite,” he said, staring at my face. He raised his arm and reached forward to shake my hand, unnecessarily thrusting his arm out from the sleeve of his shirt and suit to reveal a deep red scar along the forearm.
“God bless, Brother,” he said upon turning to walk away, briefly flashing his eyes to the small gray camera mounted on the side of the adjacent light.
When I arrived at my halfway house in the West Village, I was warmly greeted by my five housemates, three of whom said they had been released from Governors earlier in the month, but only two of whom I recognized. Two of the men were employees of COGA, the Church of God in America, which provided an umbrella organization for all the evangelical and Pentecostal denominations in the country. Although nominally independent from the federal government, it was charged with the supervision of all cultural, academic, and religious institutions. The two COGA employees explained that the church paid little in salary but provided housing for all its not-yet-married employees.
The house, on the charming small Commerce Street, dated from the mid-nineteenth century. It was all wood construction and had settled alarmingly so that no floor was level or wall perpendicular. With its odd angles and low ceilings, it seemed almost whimsical. In back of the house, an old garden, now gone to seed and dominated by weeds and tall grasses, surrounded a small patio with a wrought-iron table and scattered chairs. The pleasure I would have taken in such a place was dulled by the realization that I was doubtless in a house confiscated by the feds from a gay person or family.
The next day after breakfast, when the two COGA heads of house had left for the office, Tom O’Brien, a tall man roughly my age, whom I recognized from GI, asked if I wanted to see the garden. He took two of the chairs and casually positioned them to face away from the sun and the back façade of the house.
“So how much do you know?” he asked.
“Know? About what?” I answered warily.
“About how things are. The Purity Web, for example.”
“No. What’s that? It sounds good, of course,” I answered carefully. “I prayed a great deal on the island that I would find the country cleansed of all the filth we had before.”
“Amen. Then you’ll be pleased. President Jordan’s great insight was that the nation couldn’t possibly be redeemed if all the depravity were simply pushed underground—I mean, from the real to the virtual world. Remember, before, what the Internet was? Mostly porn. If that had been allowed to continue, well, how could we expect God’s grace and favor as a nation?”
I judged that it was a rhetorical question, and simply nodded.
“Just after the siege began, Congress passed the Purity Web Act, although I understand it was in the works for quite some time before then.” That much I remembered.
“Of course porn sites were made illegal, and all immoral content from overseas was stopped at our borders. That was the easy part—I mean, the Chinese and Saudis and others had been doing it for years. But President Jordan’s real inspiration was not to stop at eliminating temptation—he realized that since we lived our lives on the web, the web could be an active partner in eradicating evil.”
“How so?” I asked, glancing at the Device on my left wrist.
“Yes, the Device is a part of it. Well, the big breakthrough was integration—integration of every webcam, every e-mail and text, every web search, every website visited, every post you make on a social network, everything you watch on TV or listen to on the radio, every video you watch online, every credit card charge, every ATM withdrawal, every cell phone call, every trip in your car or other device with GPS, every digital picture taken—all of it is now integrated and analyzed to discourage and discover evil. It’s truly amazing. Jordan reminds everyone that it was divinely inspired—it came to him in a direct revelation from God. Hate the sin.”
“Amen to that. Most of those things were already linked to the web one way or another. But what exactly does integration mean? That’s a lot of data.”
“Every street camera, every security camera in the country, and everyone’s Device is linked to the Purity Web. Every bit of GPS data, every keystroke or click on any electronic device is recorded and analyzed by supercomputers. But more than that, they now can recognize a face, they can read handwriting, they can understand speech, they can read lips.”
I thought I saw him lift his chin slightly up and to the left, toward the back of the house behind us.
“The big machines look for patterns in the data, changes in your routines, your movements. They look at what you buy, what you say, what you write in your e-mails, what you choose to read, what you search for online. They look for patterns in virtually everything you do. Computers, you know, can predict human behavior better from this data than any person can, and of course only the big machines can handle that volume of information. That part’s not new—it was proven technology back in the first decade of the century. What’s new are all the data sources, especially the cameras, which are everywhere—their integration on the web and, of course, the big machines themselves. And it wouldn’t have been possible without some pretty amazing programming. I heard a rumor that the key algorithms were developed by a Chinese scientist for the Chinese government, but then he was born again and came here and gave it all to the Christian Nation, thank God.”
“Thank God,” I said with a shadow less enthusiasm than I should have, deliberately, to test his reaction. I had no reason to think he was anything other than a genuine born-again Christian who supported, or at least acquiesced to, the new Christian Nation. He had no reason to think anything other than that about me. To give any hint to the contrary could be fatal for each of us. He paused for only a moment to consider what he had heard.