My mouth forms a frown. The silence stretches up through the dark lines of the jail.
We were still in trailers when the Prophet taught us about God. We weren’t saints yet, just a bunch of fleshy forklift drivers and foremen beside their children and meek wives in old dresses. Everyone sat on couches inside our metal-walled house while the Prophet spoke, me on the carpet playing with alphabet blocks. I remember the look of my fingers, inflated with fat, bent around letters and spelling gibberish.
The Prophet stood before us in my living room. “What you are about to hear is strange and wonderful. It is a story nobody has ever heard until now.” He drew a large breath. “It is the story of God.”
God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas.
Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean man with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He leaned down and peered in.
A spark. An alien pulse of light.
He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. The rings of Jupiter. The broken, sunburned back of Mars. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. He could touch each one, if he wanted. He could control them.
There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. They are wrong. Charlie was God before he was even born. It was only a matter of him finding out.
Charlie lives in every generation. When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. At any moment, you might meet him. He has been a Confederate soldier. He has been a bank teller. He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day’s growth of beard graying his cheeks. He has cooked dinner for his mother. He has driven to the ocean. He has fallen in love.
The Prophet met Charlie once. Only once, but it was enough to transform his life forever, to transform all our lives.
That incarnation of Charlie was a seventy-five-year-old janitor at the only mall in Ogden, Utah. The Prophet was seventeen, needed to pee, and ran into the mall to find a restroom. Charlie was mopping the floor when the Prophet entered the bathroom, sprinting toward a urinal. Charlie whipped out a bony hand and clutched his bare wrist.
“Be careful, you,” Charlie said in a low croak. “Floor’s slippery.”
The Prophet looked into Charlie’s face, taking in the name tag pinned to his uniform and his eyes, a startling, bottle-glass green. The teenage Prophet couldn’t know that the touch had transferred something so powerful into his body that, in the coming years, he’d possess the ability to hear the ministrations of God. He relieved himself, jiggled himself dry, and left.
It wasn’t until years later, when the Prophet found a glyph-printed foil in the mountains, that he realized he’d been touched by God. When he heard God speak through the earth, it was in the old croak of Charlie the janitor from all those years before.
We never knew when Charlie would die. This was the precarious thing about believing in a human God. At any moment, he could pass on and the world would be without a God until he was born again.
A day before we left for the wilderness, the Prophet called for a final meeting, each of us wearing our newly constructed blue garments that sat up around our bodies rigidly. I could sense the significance of this day, so I sat quietly with my hands folded in my lap. The Prophet swept through our front door, tears streaming down his face.
“Why are you crying, Prophet?” my father asked.
“I am crying, Deacon Samuel,” he breathed, “because God is dead.”
The room gasped.
“Oh, yes! He has died a dozen times. You have felt it. When He dies, the earth mourns. Catastrophe reigns until He can be reborn. Five years ago, the great wildfires overtook Montana. The flames of hell pushed through the crust of the earth while God gestated. When he was birthed, the heavens opened up, and the fires were doused with sacred water. All became right with the world again.”
“So, God isn’t really dead?” asked Deacon Timothy.
“God is always both alive and dead. His great sorrow is dying, always dying.”
“Who is God’s mother?” asked Deacon Sean.