#weaponized prayer

part 1

A fresh sheet had been pulled across the bed for him to sit on. So sanitary: a diaper to catch the human stain and erase the evidence of all those before him, living and dead, who’d waited and idly read the fine print on the posters plastered on the opposite wall. The central diagram labeled his insides, placing them where they ought to be; clean, functional, ordinary. But he knew that off-paper an open chest was anything but ordinary. Parts missing. Parts rejecting the placement of their bilingual designations. Tear-wet pieces refusing to stay in until help arrives.

Gripping his knees—two white mesas jutting out of a pocked white medical gown—he studied the pictorial lie. Focus waning, saliva teeming at the corners of his gaped mouth, he withdrew from the room, from worry, from himself, and passively interned the muffled prescriptions and conclusions being offered ceremoniously in the hall.

“Psychic break. Yes, well, people grieve in different ways. Mental states can bring about physical states. The tragedy of his brother’s—yes, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine. The trauma alone…He should take these twice a day. We’ll put off weekly visits with Catharine until he begins to speak on a regular basis again. I want you both to come by in two weeks…No, the third. The fourth? It’ll have to be the ninth then. Okay, splendid… I hope it’s just temporary, but time will tell. All we can do is hope and pray.”

Pray. Kevin, disembodied, but still tethered to his useless, pale, sinewy vessel, had prayed. Prayed it’d all be over. Prayed for the safety of his family during Obama’s troop surge. Prayed he’d keep his job. Prayed they’d roll back the curfew in his sector so he might be able to take Arthur to the quarry at nightfall; teach him how to bait his hook and fish the foreign species introduced to the pond before the war’d started. Now? What’s the Christian alternate for jihad? If the words could find him, he’d pray for justice: for blood. For the whereabouts of the man who drove to war April 4th, 2012, to murder his kid brother, safely, from the comfort of an ergonomic office with a smart bomb, stupidly employed and uncritically guided.

The drone strike that had rendered Kevin a mute, quietly raging alcoholic, and teary-eyed only-child, would ultimately be the bomb that turned the tide—the mistake that’d transform Canada, from an occupied, bankrupt, and anarchical wasteland, to the northern fury that would inspire fear in its aggressors, reifying it in the global imaginary as the true north, strong and free.

She’d left instructions on the fridge, held up by an empty picture frame magnet. Notes a mother’d leave a five-year-old. The kind of notes his own mother had left for Arthur. Kevin was no longer the yes-man, good-son, however; he took liberties with the instructions. Instead of milk, he stocked up on whisky—easier because the man at the liquor store knew his sad story and didn’t ask questions, whereas at the grocery store, the adolescent bagging his dairy and bacon would eyeball him and pry, disquieted by his ostensible stoicism and nauseating disfigurement. (Well aware of the immaturity of the grocery clerks slinging Kevin timely perishables under cold florescence, his estranged girlfriend made sure that his pantry was always stocked with beans and canned ravioli—Arthur’s favourite.)

With his weekly shop complete, he parked his grocery kart in the garage and slumped into his groove. The couch seemed to devour him. It was womb-like. It felt safe. But deep-down Kevin knew, nothing was safe—not a womb, not his couch, not his dreams of another country.

The warm cathode rays lit his expressionless mug, highlighting the unkempt grey barbs in his beard, and the bean curds crusting on his jeans. Familiar voices delivered the news, so-called—always a mix of bad and not-so-good.

“In yesterday’s attack on a Montana border prison housing suspected terrorist facilitators and political prisoners, Sprite rebels murdered two American soldiers, and wounded dozens more. This is the fourth and only successful prison break in the last two months. Among the escapees is The Network’s former war correspondent, David Danson. The governor is expected to issue a statement later this afternoon…Experts are saying that the attack is simply one of a string of desperate attempts to rejuvenate the Sprite insurgency, petering out since Kalnychuk’s execution in 2011.”

The red and blue graphics flickered, making the pink, ribbed mounds on Kevin’s forehead and arms rise and fall, and illuminating the Louisville Slugger keeping him company. His paranoia was evidenced by the bungalow’s ongoing metamorphosis from an off-ramp, stucco, suburban villa into a frightening barricade. In addition to the bat, rudimentary killing devices freckled the house’s countertops, which, though seemingly innocuous, were to Kevin—whose tainted paradigm turned everything into a threat or defensive implement—the needed illusion of safety. Hammers, knives, sickles, bats, lacrosse sticks, novelty brass-knuckle coffee cups. A crowbar, nestled by the front door, cast a question mark. The answer Mary dared not offer, knowing it’d mean Kevin’s claustrophobic demise. His unspoken answer: “Just in case.”

 His next-door neighbour had died two months after Kevin’d been released from the hospital. As his social network shutdown more and more and his world became increasingly insular, the comforting presence of another lonely soul nearby was a godsend. But death had a funny way of following Kevin to new places; into his dreams—finding him at his happiest, or his least uncomfortable. They said the cause was natural, but everyone, including Kevin, knew that no longer did anybody die of natural causes in Canada. And they were right. The veteran—aged forty-five—died of uranium poisoning. Bullets had a bad habit of coming out of retirement to kill retired fighters, Canadian and American.

When the moving trucks started to spiral in and out of the cul de sac, Kevin moved the TV and the couch closer to the front window, so that he might glimpse the next in line to die. The basics were lugged out—a couch; a few black crates; suitcases; cardboard boxes; a bed frame—with a young man in tow. Unlike his predecessor, this new contender seemed to have a leg up: he was still young, in his mid-twenties, and didn’t look much like a fighter. As the man waved away the moving truck, he likewise gestured to Kevin, perched by his bay window, who—save for a twitch of the eye—failed to reciprocate. The unrequited waver smiled, and trudged across his new lawn, choked with weeds.

 Kevin didn’t see much of the young man after he moved in. The only aperture oriented Kevin’s way on his neighbour’s house was a half-buried basement window. Since Jay, the previous owner, had never used his basement, it was, so as far as Kevin was concerned, nothing more than an ornament—a portal into an empty realm. Which was good, because Kevin had begun to indicate serious symptoms of an obsessive compulsive, spending hours organizing the garbage in the pales stored between their houses—potentially off-putting to a potentially benign stranger. Apart from the old man selling him whisky, and Mary, who’d moved back in with her parents after Kevin had gone catatonic, the specter next door was the only human contact he didn’t really have. It was important, therefore, not to alienate him, at least not right away.

 One night, after Mary had stocked his pantry and raped him—loving the memory of a strong-willed and determined young investment banker—they sat silently on opposite ends of the couch and watched two jarringly abrasive idiots mince words on The Network’s “Nightline.” Defensive after having two of their senior journalists go rogue while covering the Sprite campaign, the CEO strived to out-bullshit CNN and CBS. The talking heads, both cycling through absurdities and lies about the success of Obama’s “ethical” war in western Canada—both shot-gunning Jersey accents—got onto their favourite topic: the efficacy of using drones instead of troops. Mary quickly turned off the television and attempted to calm Kevin, who’d begun to tremble and groan.

“It’s okay Kevin, it’s going to be alright,” she reassured.

Kevin convulsed with violent promise, and geared to his feet, tearing at his hair and chest, screaming, growling, yelling.

“Kevin, please. Please sit down.”

“G-get out! Get the fuck out!” He threw his tumbler at the wall, just missing the television set.

“Kevin, calm down. It’s me. Baby—it’s me, Mary.”

He began swatting his hands in the direction of her voice. “Shut up! Just go!”

“I hate when you get like this,” she shrieked, and then she was gone.

Kevin, still shaking inside and out, walked to the front door, left ajar with his question sliding out. Putting the crowbar back in its nook, he peered out into the suburban nightmare. A US humvee idled up the road, smoke off the gunner’s cigarette arcing up into the cancerous yellow of the lone street lamp. Door closed, he slumped down. The tears were there—dammed and ready—but there was not enough verve in him to animate any emotion but rage, and his rage was blind and dumb.

 Wednesday night was garbage night. Since Mary stopped coming over, Kevin could properly devote a full hour to arranging and separating his recycling from his litter. Half-lit in the alley between the unknown and the unpleasant, he sorted whisky bottles and canned casserole from bloody tissues and other refuse from a live unlived. The usual monastic quiet was rudely interrupted by shouting in his neighbour’s basement, provoking him to curiosity—a trait normally suppressed by his regime of pills and doctor’s orders. Closing the garbage bin, he ambled over, and crouched down by the window, squinting binocular vision through a dusty pane in an attempt to locate the source.

Several men were huddled around a black canvass bag, perched on a luggage rack over an oily stain, arguing about something or other. Two of the men held automatic rifles, and those with their backs to Kevin appeared haggard and broken—their shoulders onerously bearing the burden of heavy leather jackets, and doing a poor job filling them, as if their bones were nothing more than bent and twisted wire hangers. The man doing the shouting—Kevin’s neighbour—was silenced by the presence of another, out of view, whose voice, though a crackly, middle-range, shook the glass.

“One always has enough troops if he knows how to use them,” bellowed the man as he stepped into view. His face was a palimpsest of worry and scar tissue. His left eye—or what remained of it—was buried beneath purple folds of bruised and battered flesh. He cut through the crowd like a shark through a school of fish; all shifting away out of fear, reverence, or both.

Kevin’s neighbour stepped forward. “Sir, they’re putting the squeeze on the underground. We’re not going to be able to rely in the Sovereignty Movement for much longer. We should strongly consider heading back to the Old Crow base to rearm, reorient, and regroup.”

“James?” The man approached him, lighting a cigarette. “I’m surprised. I’ve seen men who talk big and fail to act. You, my friend, act as if a mile high, and think small.” The tobacco smoke formed a corona around the shark. “Not a fucking chance. If we head west, that’s the end. We’ll do our country loss, and have wasted our greatest opportunity yet. If we’re to make a stand, and stand we will, we’ll be doubly victorious. We’ll simultaneously reveal the truth to the world and put the occupiers in their place.”

“We’re completely cut off from Charlie Company and—”

“We have all that we need. The fewer the men, the greater the share of honour! If you need more men, go outside and ask the first you see to join us in Canada’s greatest hour. But I’ll tell you this: I would rather chortle into battle with a few gods, then war at the head of a million men.”

The men bowed their heads, mulling over the sensationalism, and the vituperative homeowner shrugged his shoulders apologetically. He surveyed the ceiling for a response to the alpha, catching Kevin’s lurking form out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh shit,” he gasped.

One of the misshapen leather forms in the fore turned around—likewise glimpsing the voyeur’s invasionary stare—and then bolted up the stairs. Kevin, petrified but uncertain why exactly, fell back. “No, no, no.” Lifting himself up by the hydro metre, he sputtered out of the alley and around the corner, where he worked frenetically to open his front door.

Two men erupted out of the neighbouring house with a thwack, and barrelled towards Kevin. They seized him by his shoulders, and dragged him back into the alley. Mouth covered, and arms locked, his struggle was futile and inaudible.

The taller of the two aggressors stood back, took off his jacket, and drew a buck knife out of a concealed sheath. “Wrong place, wrong time, friend.” He motioned to disembowel Kevin when a prayer landed a response. A fifth hand seized the executioner’s knife, and then spun and hurled him against the wall. The sound of wet punches silenced the surprise, grunts, and expletives.

“What the fuck, Andrew?”

“Touch him again and you’ll lose that goddamn hand.”

The shorter man let Kevin go, who began to stammer, “Ar-ar-Art?” Reeling back, he scampered further into the darkness.

“It’s okay, relax,” barked the man identified as Andrew.

Kevin, looking through and past his saviour, dashed around the corner, and after a noisy fight with the backdoor’s lock, disappeared into the house.

Andrew turned to the oxen breathing heavily in front of him with snouts down, shamed. “You fucking idiots.”

“But Andrew—” whined one.

The other, grunted. “Sloppy. Really sloppy, Andy. Can’t start leaving witnesses.”

“The guy’s onside. Keeps to himself. He’s not a problem.”

“Getting soft, powder puff?” said the taller man, feeding his knife back into its sheath on his belt.

“Ask me again when your lip stops bleeding, asshole.”

The bloody ox spat and smiled.

“Head inside,” Andrew commanded.

“What are you going to do?”

“What I should have done yesterday.”

Andrew directed the men back into his bungalow, closing the door behind them emphatically. He trampled the dandy lions and traversed the labyrinth of snake weed greening his lawn. He walked up onto Kevin’s threshold, and rung the doorbell twice. Failing to elicit a response, he spoke loudly, “Mr. Riley. It’s Riley, right.” The muffled voice boomed through the door. Kevin, now armed to the teeth in his little garrison, sat listening, turning the crowbar in his hands as if marking countdown to dismemberment. Andrew rung the bell again, and poised as if to knock, but saw Kevin’s form reflected through the designer glass. “Listen, Riley? Your mailbox says Riley...Anyway, I’m sorry the boys roughed you up. They’re particularly private individuals, and thought you were a lurker. I should have stopped them sooner…” Andrew noticed Kevin’s blur move ever so slightly. “I’m throwing a party Friday night. It’d be cool if you came over; if we got formally introduced. We’ll pound drinks instead of each other.”