Messiah Online

How are u, brother? My name is Urbantu.

I sigh, audibly, awakened from sleep.

Damn it. I left Facebook on all night again.

It is approximately seven o’clock in the morning. I’ve just woken up to the enthusiast banter of another earnest believer, another seemingly ignorant violator of the international date line. These seekers never identify themselves beyond their name; they are invariably cheery, full to the brim of the Holy Ghost. They quote Bible verses the way that many of us do from memorable movies from our teenage years.

They fail to understand that I can’t get to all of them in a timely fashion. I don’t do well, neither efficiently nor accurately when I have to multitask, and my work requires it. And, like all businesses, even peculiar non-profits, with correspondence comes no promises of goats, assorted crops, and microdonations of rare roots in lieu of money. 

You are well today, yes?

It is too early for questions, but I indicate that yes, I am for the moment doing well. 

Most of them are from Kenya, but some are from neighboring countries in East Africa. Rwanda is one of them. Some live perilously close to Uganda, where Idi Amin once reigned with maniacal paranoia. Gratefully, he has been dead for decades. The region has never really recovered, but it’s bad luck to say so. In keeping with local custom, I refrain.

Speaking of which, I looked at Uganda on a map not long ago. It’s very tiny in land area. I always thought it was much larger. In any case, the area is peaceful now, thanks be to God. Now it’s full of Westernized Christian converts who memorize their scriptures by rote and repeat the same liturgy over and over again to anyone with ears to hear them. I am called brother or holy man the way some people say “yes, ma’am” or “yes, sir.”

Yes, I do know that God is love. Yes, I do know that Jesus loves me. I find it impossible to pray for fifty different souls unless I write them down first, and I do. I copy the ways of my college English professor, who kept his office hour assignments on a note card in a breast pocket.

Some of my fellow ministers find something comforting in the “primitive” form of worship that these baby Christians have fashioned for themselves. There’s something disquietly racist in characterizations like these, but I bite my tongue and say nothing. I have no patience and tend to stay away from worship services and outward sacraments regardless of when and where they are held. I’m a minister, yes, but not where active Worship is concerned. These black men and women, these people of color, have a kind of childlike faith, which is something Jesus calls us to experience, but on one level. 

Yet, I might add, never does Christ say we ought to be naïve or lazy in our faith. My audience goes for the easy parables, the bumper sticker slogan statements of faith. I beg for a challenge. Problem: even religious people don’t want to be challenged. Here, I would not be challenged, only looked at with perplexed faces begging for explanations. Once, years ago, I tried this very tactic. I have since refrained.  

I looked down at my cell phone.

God will show us the way, yes? You are there right?

They will not leave me alone. I wrote one apparently moving and inspiring essay eight years ago, put it up online, and learned years later that it had obviously been taught en masse to several houses of worship. Since then, many clamor to be my friend, to cling to my robe, to be healed. This is why I refrain from outwardly proselytizing to them, stirring them up into a religious frenzy of repetition when they can barely speak competent English. My work here, for better or for worse, is cut and dried. Though I never wanted it, I’ve become a respected minister, a scribe, with a base of black voters for Jesus. You might call them my firewall.  

I’m not the Christ, though some people think I have healing powers. For one thing, I couldn’t be Jesus if I tried. They nailed him to a cross at the age of thirty-three. I’m now forty. Who wants a middle-aged Messiah? He did an awful lot of physical exertion, which you can only do if you are young and supple. I’m not sure I could walk as much as he did. But at least he only had to carry that heavy cross for a little while until someone helped him out.  

It flatters my ego at times to be called minister, but I am no seminarian. I have never learned Greek or Latin or Hebrew and never will. I’m a fighter for Jesus on the front lines, but I never courted this much attention. It unnerves me. I expected to spend my days in the wilderness with wild honey and brambles, but now, in between online epistles, I find I have to say my pleasantries to yet another new convert. The process starts again. I don’t have to, you understand, but I remember how much I appreciated feeling acknowledged when I was the new kid on the block.

If I were Saint Paul, and this were thousands of years ago, I’d feel obligated to make frequent journeys to visit different churches. The thought of a leaky boat, powerful storms, and seasickness does not appeal to me. Instead, I write to make my bread. My lifestyle is monastic. I never took a wife or a partner of any gender. People tell me I live in my head most of the time. They’re probably right. But it’s strangely soothing up here in the cerebellum, in ways only the severely introverted can fully fathom.

I almost joined the Peace Corps but decided against it at the last minute. I would have been teaching English as a Second Language to students in Eastern Europe. As for where in Eastern Europe, I haven’t a clue. My name and information never stayed in the system long enough to uncover my exact placement and where it would have been. The Peace Corps was a move made of desperation, a means of rebounding from a bad relationship and trying to find a greater purpose to my life. Some people buy flashy new cars. Some join the military. I guess I could have done those things, instead, but I opted for adventure. For a while, anyway. 

Instead, I went back to church and decided I’d do my work for the Lord instead. The going was slow at first, but even starting out I had some allies. Daily essay writing, with pay per work so low that it demanded constant output, improved my craft. Suddenly, people wanted to read what I wrote, and I developed an audience. Then the Africans arrived, a trickle at first, then ten or more a day. 

I’ll admit I’m a hypocrite. If someone doesn’t respond to my treasured private message or e-mail or text message within a few minutes, I consider it a severe slight. When I’m the one that others are seeking, I find I often must ignore them. They can’t have all of me. I have to keep some things for myself. This is why I demand solitude and usually receive it. I know I have frustrated at least one well-meaning seeker, but this is how it must be.

I have to set sharp boundaries with these East Africans. It makes me wonder what Jesus would have talked about in therapy if he’d lived now, as opposed to two thousand years ago. I am pretty sure he’d have mentioned caretaker fatigue. That whole thing about being fully God thing—would that have given him superhuman reserve energy? If so, I wish I had some of that stuff. I thought that when I struck it big that it would be the answer to my problems. Now, the reverse is true.

My boss wants me to work overtime more often, but he fails to comprehend the enormity of the task before me. I don’t see him tapping madly on a computer keyboard, trying to find a way to transport a yurt or make a grass hut. Though I am neither Catholic, nor a priest, I hear confession from a thousand tormented souls. Most of the time, these anecdotes are rather banal, and what I wouldn’t give for a juicy piece of gossip to stimulate my mind. News of crop failures and stillborn children grow dull with time.

I do have one friend, Asra, a woman I have courted for nearly a decade. She lives in the UK. We have never met. Her severe phobias keep us apart, but I feel as though I know her. We both know she could never manage a multi-hour plane ride to a faraway land. But our letter correspondence has continued. Sometimes we write each other actual letters on paper, despite my messy scrawl. Most of the time we exchange five-page long e-mail full of romantic longing. Invariably we idly discuss the cost of transportation for a week-long journey in a third-world country.

My job often intervenes. My phone chimes. 

YOU ARE LOVED, says the person I have nicknamed “all caps man”. The reasons why must be obvious.

I wait instead for the true intention of this joviality. 

I KNOW I AM BEHIND ON MANURE DELEVERY BUT GIVE ME 10 OF YOUR DAYS.

This is a long-time member, Zanidar, now in his early sixties, who is notorious for tithing late, if at all. He is a master at using guilt to avoid paying his dues. I remind him again that we can’t function and provide needed services without contributions and suggest he consider giving ten percent of his income. He agrees with me, as he always does, but I know that he will put me off as long as he can.

A woman contacts me next, asking me to pray for her severely sick son. That is easily accomplished and can be achieved without twisting arms or resorting to guilt trips. They so rarely give their names or identifying details when they reach out to me. I used to impress upon them how important using names from person to person is to build effective community, but they go about their ways regardless of what I say. In the minds, perhaps I am so powerful that I know their names already.

I will say that the language barrier cuts down greatly on bullshit. Their English skills are poor, as are mine in their indigenous tongues. You can’t easily manipulate people with an understanding of only a few words of a largely unfamiliar language. French seems to be a common denominator with some, but I took Spanish in school and the Gallic tongue might as well be gibberish to me. Beautiful language, though.

It’s now my job to escort some new missionaries around the grounds and to give them a grand tour. Once, when I first started, I did this with zest. Now I am pleasant, but unmotivated. I’ve seen that kind of fire in the belly before in myself, twenty years ago. These days, I encourage them in the hopes that the natives might decide that their choice in Messiah is, in fact, the wrong one. I used to want to compete with my fellow ministers, to be the most correct, to win the race. 

I never thought of myself as the Messiah before taking this position, but if someone must obviously believe that he exists today, it surely won’t be me. Now I mostly want to be left alone and return to civilization to live out the rest of my days. I haven’t been back to the West in twenty-five years, or what’s left of it. And then there’s always her, of course.  

I must make one of my rare physical visits to the center of the compound. I walk outside of the main building, which looks so strange, placed as it is in the middle of nowhere with no billboard, signs, or trees. Up towards the red dirt roadway, an older white man, the village crank, driving in an old white car, is verbally chastising a native for forcing his wife to carry sticks for kindling. He does this a lot. In his way of seeing the world, such tasks are and should be exclusively for men. 

Once upon a time, I might have intervened in this ultimately petty struggle, but this Caucasian newbie will quickly understand for himself the futility of the gesture. The native couple freezes in front of the car for thirty seconds or so, perceives no imminent harm, and continues on. The white man will learn our customs with time. Once upon a time I might have introduced myself and exchanged a few pleasantries, but I have a destination in mind, and nothing will distract me from it.

We get our clean water from a well, which has a peculiar taste to it and stains the bowl a rusty color. Still, it’s cleaner than anything you’d ever find in the river. Even when I lived in the First World, I was never a cook, so I subsist on canned goods. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t trust what is being cooked and whether proper sanitization is being practiced. And it could be tainted with another yet another viral strain. Who knows where our food is really coming from?

The virus didn’t touch this part of the world, remote as it is. In the beginning, it was awful. We had no internet service, spotty electricity, and minimal hot water. I couldn’t yet check in with the pockets of Americans, mostly in the Midwest, who survived the first wave. After a while, a while being four months, they reached us in person. We explained our dilemma with online communication, and much to their credit, they helped us out. 

Two burly men with an excess of body hair and sweat arrived. They took a week to do their work and then left, claiming we owed them no money. We were then able to communicate with the outside world. Western Europeans began to arrive within weeks. They had survived whole months of quarantine and discovered how cheap airfare to our continent really was. Most of them were elderly or infirm, out for warmer climate, not necessarily for much in the way of adventure.

But like modern day pilgrims, most of the people who made it (and stayed around) were Evangelical Christians. I am a man of God, but I differ greatly in their political and theological views. They took a risk in visiting us, of course, leaving within days of the date quarantine lifted, but, as I said, they had a particularly transparent motive. Still, I was no fool. I signed up with the Evangelicals as quickly as I could. They’d retained contact with and control of what remained of the United States. 

Over two or three years they’d put together online communities, mostly in rural areas, because Western cities were decimated by the second wave. Their zeal was familiar to me, and I admit for a time I almost entertained their strict creeds and dogmas as a welcome change from the isolation I had experienced for such a long time.

They paid me a decent wage and as long as I kept up my quota of the faithful, my paychecks kept clearing. I felt as though I was living on a perpetual camping trip. With very little to buy, I saved up an enormous amount of money and purchased the parts to make and take an outside shower. My skin is oily and going days without bathing made me feel gross and unfit for contact with the outside world. I am thankful for small favors.    

George Snead was the leader of the Evangelicals who served as my immediate supervisor. The first time I talked to him, I asked for the full run-down. It sometimes took a full year to receive news from the old country. As it turns out, the first pandemic took out most of the West Coast. The second wave, six weeks later, took out the East Coast. But the South and Midwest were mostly spared. Chicago was left as the last truly big city remaining. China tried to suppress its body count, but fully half of its population died. Operating on one-third power, it was now up to the United States to start making all of its supplies again. Doing so was possible, but the delays were incredible. We relied on volunteer labor and were glad to have it.

I asked if it would be possible to take a trip back to America, to see what remained. I was, after all, a son of the South and wanted to see the impact for myself.

A lot of empty stores, kid, George said. He bowed his head mournfully. 

Atlanta made it through due to God’s grace. His affect changed. He smiled, for once.

A ton of people from the immediate states moved there. No one’s sure how many people live there now, but it’s at least twenty million or more.

I couldn’t imagine. Actually, I could, if you’ve ever seen Atlanta traffic, but I imagined that there were shortages of everything, and that rationing had taken place long beforehand. 

George was sure that the pandemics were the reincarnation and reintroduction of the Old Testament God, the one who waged war with great purpose. The three or four hundred men, women, and children he brought with him believed the same thing. They had commandeered two ancient commercial airliners and recruited trained pilots. They made a supreme guess that Africa was safe. 

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was a Quaker and believed in a wholly benevolent God. I did not see this tragic catastrophe as God’s punishment. We tend to shy away from violence in any form, for whatever reason. I wasn’t sure if the intentions of these Evangelicals were entirely friendly to a heretic like me, but that could have been paranoia on my part. Yet, I kept my mouth shut.

I took the job offered me, without complaining. I didn’t really believe in the crap I was supposed to be earnestly espousing, but it was more important to keep myself fed and busy. It wasn’t until I’d been employed for six months that I realized that my sense of privacy was an illusion. Not in a 1984 kind of way, you might say, but when I recognized that one member of the community maintained a web presence to vet and scrutinize all essential personnel. They’d brought along a handful of laptop computers, one per family, and a server or two. He was their webmaster.

The man’s screen name was Bluebird. I never learned his Christian name.

Bluebird’s job was to ensure that everyone was a genuine Christian. I could certainly quote Scripture, but so could the Devil, as the saying goes. The Evangelicals used a rudimentary listserv based somewhere in Nebraska to share information, and Bluebird posted his observations daily. 

At 5 pm, everyone knew to set up shop in front of their computers and listen quietly. Often, the details shared were rather ordinary, like how much food was consumed that day and when the next trip to Chicago was planned. I tended to block them out, as they were most often dull and had little to no relevance to my chosen field.

And there were other problems as well. I was supposed to use their e-mail server alone but kept a personal account for my own private use. Mostly it was to talk to my lady without being plainly observed writing genuinely smutty poetry. That was a no-no apparently. I got in a little bit of trouble that way, but in all fairness, I wanted some privacy, which always came on their terms. Instead, I abandoned the private e-mail and worked out an elaborate system of codes to communicate with family via the acceptable e-mail server. No one was the wiser. As was part of the code, they were glad that I prayed for as many people as my words indicated that I did. Prayer in code meant something very different than its literal translation.

In time, I began to grow very impatient with having to cover my tracks as assiduously as I did. If only I could mobilize the Africans against their colonial masters, I would win freedom for myself and everyone else. And, who did they, these Evangelicals, think they were? I was here first!

The Africans were docile and unthreatening. I could never see them taking up arms against the Evangelicals. All they ever talked about was God and what they were eating for food. I wasn’t going to play John Brown. But I did have the trust of the Evangelicals for now, and enough understanding of their entire system to dismantle it if need be. That said, I knew I was playing a zero-sum game. If I played ball, the hope was that I’d get to return to the United States eventually and see my family, the memories of which were beginning to fade in my mind.

Or, even better, I’d convince my girlfriend that physical company wasn’t all that weird.

Maybe I could turn Bluebird. He seemed like a straight arrow, but I wondered how much of that was a guise. I sent him an e-mail, asking if he’d be willing to meet over coffee. I resolved to not show my cards, but to let him talk, to do my own private recon. He toed the party line, full of God talk and Providential authority, and little in the way beyond it. I began to assume he was a lost cause. He had drunk the Kool-Aid for so long that he couldn’t see beyond it. That said, he did thank me for the meeting and let me know that he’d put me on his prayer list. 

I had learned, long before, that putting someone on the prayer list was not a benevolent gesture. It implied deep concern and perhaps suspicion of some misdoing. Best to lay low for several more weeks before sabotaging the system. And in the meantime, there were always more Africans to lead into the Promised Land. 

A month passed. 

I awoke from a vivid dream one morning. It was Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, just before he blows himself up.

Top of the world, Ma!

It was like a mantra. All the way to work it played in my head. God had ordained that today was the day that everything crumbled. If the Evangelicals could play it that way, I could too. Whose God was real? Time to find out.

In this new world, which in many ways was an old one, no one carried a gun or anything more than improvised weapons. The most destructive thing that could be done was to completely fry the internet connection that serviced the area. The drawback: eventually everyone would starve to death except for the Africans, unless they could learn how to search for and locate food from the natives. It would disrupt everything, every shipment coming from the United States, everyone’s travel plans, the local economy, nearly the whole shebang.

Bluebird usually kept to himself but decided to pay me a visit as I was contemplating all of this. He entered my room, the one with the multiple computer screens and the cheap projector. This had been my office for years.

I want in on this. 

I was shocked. And my face must have shown it, too.

How long have you known?

He smiled.

Long enough.

And as I sat in my chair, I saw Bluebird usher in at least fifteen Africans through the door, all armed with sharpened sticks, like shivs, eager to get going. They knew the art of fire and knew that the Evangelicals had made their houses out of wood, the only available materials they could find on site. It would be too expensive and too much effort to transport fewer flammable forms from America. 

We could have launched a surprise attack that very moment, but self-preservation is a very intense impulse in human behavior. We knew we had to kidnap at least one of the pilots, contain the rest of the Evangelicals under guard, and then make our way to our final destination. All we could do now is launch a suicide mission that would only decrease the ranks of humanity a little bit more. 

Bluebird was sure he could find a pilot. Keynsatta, the largest and most powerful of the native men, was promised a guaranteed spot in heaven in return for his services. The other fourteen wanted to fist pound Jesus Christ and have their photographs taken with him. We assured them that such a thing was possible, as a few were skeptical that such a thing was even possible. 

The invasion of the Evangelicals went by the book. We tried telling the native warriors that Jesus had espoused turning the other cheek, but somewhere along the line those lines got garbled and they slaughtered the Evangelicals wholesale, casting their bodies in heaps next to the huts that had been their primary residences. We were horrified but had no choice but to leave immediately.

The pilot’s name was Simon, and he gave us no problems whatsoever. I indicated that I wanted to land as close to Heathrow Airport in London as possible. Past e-mails had informed me that it was still functional. The rest of the crew would be eventually dropped in Chicago. Though I was no expert in London geography, I’d been told specifically how and when to find her. She knew that my coming could be at any time, like a thief in the night. 

But it turned out to be three o’clock in the afternoon. I found her neighborhood, her green door, and two brass numbers in sequence. 22. I told her I’d be wearing the vestments of a vicar. Sure enough, she was there and took me for who I was. For the rest of our time together, the years that remained, she left the flat approximately twice, but I knew what I was in for the moment I began to talk to her.

I did my writing and she puttered in the garden. It was as if we’d been together forever. And in the meantime, I wrote my memoirs, entitled Messiah Online. People said that I must have surely made the whole story up, but I was adamant. And the National Geographic Society launched a special mission, an exploration to back up my claims, which were returned nearly a year later as quite valid indeed.

Evangelicals took a severe hit after the book was public, and I received some very Un-Christian hate correspondence. Fortunately for me, I’d always been reclusive, so I hid my address, did not advertise my phone number, and conducted remote online interviews only. I’d always had simple tastes, and so had she. I died at the age of 84, leaving behind an impressive body of work, but leaving the account of my life to a sympathetic biographer. Which is how you must have heard of me, of course.