I hardly recognize the person I was, back when I believed this.
The pages that are covered with prophecies are more flexible and stained slightly from where the Prophet held the book up during sermons. I set it down on the cushioned floor and, on its own, it falls open to an entry near the end.
Thus Saith the Lord unto My acolyte the Prophet Kevin. Thou art unto Marcus, the first man, who did My will by engaging in spirit marriage with many women. It is my Commandment that ye do again this task, with Minnow, daughter of Samuel, for she be in need of spiritual intervention of the kind that marriage provides. Curb her rebellious mind and carry her in your loving arms to the Great Infinity. My Will be done. So Saith the Lord thy God. Even so Amen.
Slowly, I push the book away and slide backward so I’m wedged in a corner between two cushioned walls. I put my head on my knees, muscles slack.
“His name wasn’t always the Prophet,” I say. “Why do we call him that, still?”
“We could call him by his real name.”
“Kevin?” I ask. “How could that be his name, really?”
“I agree, it seems incongruous,” he says.
“I don’t like to think of him that way, you know?” I say. “Calling him anything other than the Prophet makes all this . . .” I hold up a stump, as though that represents all the harm the Prophet had done to me, which it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. “It makes all this less meaningful somehow.”
“How do you mean?” he asks.
“Sometimes I wish he actually could talk to God. I want this to mean something. I want it to be special for more than that it hurt me.”
“It was special,” he says. “But not because of him. It was special because of you.” And when I shake my head to tell him he’s blowing smoke, he continues. “It was special because you survived.”
“But why was it on me to survive?” I ask. “Why couldn’t my parents have stopped this? They believed him. They didn’t have to.”
“It would’ve been difficult, Minnow. People want to believe. It’s all any of us wants.”
“I want to believe, but not at any cost. Not at the cost of reason. Not at the cost of human life.”
“I think they thought they were doing what was right for their families.”
I glance at the Book of Prophecies. “I can’t believe that.”
I stretch out on the padded floor, my back turned to the doctor. I close my eyes and breathe. Above, the blinking fluorescents cut through my eyelids.
“My father used to gamble,” I say, eyes still closed.
“Oh yeah?”
“At the greyhound track in Missoula. Outside, they had these big halogen lamps that moths flocked to. They threw themselves at it, killed themselves over it, because they were confused.”
“They thought it was the sun,” he says.
My head nods. “I think about those moths. They would fall down dead on the stands, and I’d pick them up and stare at their white bodies, their feathered antennas, their strange soft wings, and wish they’d thought a little bit before they did that. Before they gave it all up for a lie.
“And I think about my parents. They followed the Prophet, but they weren’t the ones who got burned. It was us, the children. And the girls in here are mostly the same. Their parents abandoned them, gave them up for drugs. Abused them. And now look at us.”
I hear his shoes creak on the padded floor as he stands from his stool. The fluorescent light goes dark, and I can tell he’s standing over me.
His voice winds down from high above: “So how do you avoid becoming a moth?”
“You tell me,” I say.
“No.”
I look up. His face is shadowed against the light. “What?”
“That’s how you avoid becoming a moth,” he says. “Stop asking others what to believe. Figure it out for yourself.”
Chapter 42
When I’m released from solitary, I am so relieved to be back in gen pop that everything is suddenly beautiful: the dirty grouted tiles in the showers, the clinking sound of cell doors opening and closing, the girls with their angry scowls and snaggleteeth. I even manage a small smile when, at lunch, one of the lunch ladies sees me coming and places my customary soup in a stainless steel bowl on the end of the lunch counter.
“That was crazy what happened with Krystal,” Rashida says, her mouth full of half-chewed corn dog. “You got that girl good. Oh man, that was a sight to behold.”
“Yeah, it was—”
“Why do you get soup when no one else does?” Rashida interrupts, her attention pinging away at blinding speed.
Angel answers for me. “Minnow’s nutrition has been seen to by the government. She got a pamphlet from the Association for Americans with Disabilities that explained that jails can’t discriminate against inmates with chopped-off hands.”
“That means that the lunch ladies make me a different powdered soup mix every day that I can suck through a straw,” I say.
“Today looks like Neon Orange Surprise,” Angel observes.