Christian Nation Page 2

  “You’re asking me to commit suicide. No.”

  A few days later, I changed my mind. You may think that I harbor some kind of self-destructive urge. Perhaps so. Not sure what I was going to do or why, I decided to do what Adam had asked. It had been a long time since anyone had asked me to do anything, and it felt odd to be asked, for someone to suggest that I was needed. Saying yes suddenly seemed easier than saying no. You should know that. Coming here was not an act of courage.

  Adam and I departed Manhattan by train. We were met at the station in the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill by the owner of a small inn located in the nearby hamlet of Putnam Valley. After both of us scanned in as guests, Adam wordlessly handed his Device across the counter to the innkeeper. They both looked at me, silently indicating that I should do the same. The day I left Governors Island, the outplacement officer informed me that I was required to have my Device with me at all times. In the five years since then, I have obeyed. So I hesitated. Although not a suspicious word passed between them, the owners of the inn, Adam said, were “friends.” I had stopped asking about FM. The feds denied the existence of the Free Minds movement, and even I, on balance, assumed it was more secret longing than reality. After all, with the Purity Web encompassing every possible means of communication, observing every meeting and movement, analyzing everything one read or wrote—with the big machines knowing us better than we knew ourselves—how could a movement like that organize or function? But Adam was real, and Adam had “friends.” I handed over my Device and immediately felt more abandoned than liberated.

  We walked out the back door of the inn and entered the woods on an old dirt road, now a narrow path kept open by deer. I was overwhelmed by the smell. The woodsy air, damp and infused with the dusty fluff kicked up by our steps, carried odors of mold, decay, fungus, and scat. The only nature I had known after Governors Island was the little wild garden behind our communal house on Commerce Street. It had been sunny and dry. When had I last smelled the woods? I couldn’t remember. I inhaled deeply, and my head felt light. Adam gave me an odd look.

  “You OK?” he asked. “Don’t worry about your Device. I’ve gone up to five weeks without touching, and didn’t go pink. My friend knows what he’s doing. He’ll take care of us.”

  I nodded, distracted. The smells of the woods told a story, the story of an approaching hemlock stand, of a distant carcass, and of granite ledge rock radiating back the heat of the morning sun. I had forgotten how rich, complex, and without judgment were the smells of nature. For the moment, I was glad I had come.

  We hiked for three miles, until the path ended abruptly. The rocky cut, through which the old road crested the hill, had been blasted closed. It appeared impassable. Adam led me through dense brush down along the ridge to an ominous-looking gap between two large boulders. We squeezed through, crawled under the corner of another enormous rock, and emerged on the far side of the ridge, where I saw a gem-like lake at the bottom of a steep valley.

  We scrambled down the boulder-strewn slope to the lake’s edge. The water was clear. I could see the algae-covered stones on the bottom, and tadpoles swimming erratically among them. We walked along the shore for about a half mile and suddenly came upon a decrepit two-story cedar cottage, set into the side of the hill, with a partially collapsed covered porch running along the water side of the building. From the outside, it gave every appearance of being abandoned. Inside, it was clean and dry, powered silently by solar panels that looked at least twenty years old.

  This is the second day I have sat in front of this machine staring out at the lake. I have underestimated the difficulty of this project. A great stone seems to have been rolled across the only door to that part of my brain in which the past resides, and I don’t have the strength to push it aside. It protects me from memory, keeping the demons behind it from penetrating my consciousness. It even keeps them out of my dreams. I realize that not once have I dreamt of the past. And now Adam says I must remember. Recollection, synthesis, and meaning he repeats like a mantra.

  I close my eyes. This time I suddenly remember opening them that warm summer day in August 2020. Only nine years ago. The feds had finally ended the siege of Manhattan and invaded through Battery Park. When I came to I was lying facedown on a lawn. My eyes and cheeks were caked with dried blood, and I could see only a few blurry blades of grass beside my nose. I could hear the sound of the harbor waves, and knew that I was still in the park. My wrists were secured behind my back with a thick plastic zip tie. My shoulders ached, and I surmised that I had been lying there, hands tied, for at least a few hours. My ankles were also secured with a zip tie, but I didn’t care. I was too exhausted to move in any case, and quickly slipped back out of consciousness.

  When next I woke it was nighttime. A soft warm August night. I hadn’t been moved, but this time my eyes could focus. I later learned that almost six thousand secular fighters had been captured and brought to the Battery. During the day, teams of army medics had performed triage, evacuating the seriously wounded to hospital ships in the harbor. While I was passed out, my shallow but bloody scalp wound had been cleaned and bandaged and the blood wiped off my face. My arms by this time were numb, and the pain in my shoulder had disappeared, replaced by a sharp headache centered on the place where the bullet had gouged a neat pencil-thin groove in my skull. I shifted my legs and managed to roll onto my side. I could see only bodies. Seventeen acres of bodies. The white plastic zip ties shone with a weird iridescence in the moonlight, an effect that was oddly decorative. Some of the prisoners had managed to turn over and sit upright, arms behind their back and legs stretched out front, but most remained facedown and still. Other than the sound of the harbor waves against the Battery breakwater, all I could hear was the occasional stifled sob. No one screamed. No one spoke. Regular fed army and marines stood casually on guard, looking bored. When I closed my eyes, I daydreamed that I was an African deep in the hold of a slave ship. Shackled. The sound of waves slapping against the hull. Silent stinking African bodies my companions and only comfort.

  My mind was sluggish, like an agonizingly slow computer. Churning and churning, and ultimately failing to put the thoughts and words into coherent order. I should be dead. These four words repeated themselves in a demented feedback loop. I should be dead. I, a corporate lawyer with no aptitude for violence, stood up and shot at a company of charging US Marines. They wanted me dead. I stood up to die. I should be dead. And now they had bandaged my wound.

  Later that night, civilian Red Cross volunteers were allowed into the Battery with drinking water. A solidly built Chinese lady who looked about seventy years old squatted beside me and dipped a battered paper coffee cup into a large bucket of water. She gently lifted my head and gave me a drink and a sad smile. On the side of the blue coffee cup I saw the familiar white Greek key rim and the large gold letters “WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU.” This offbeat symbol of New York City’s cheesy, ironic culture reminded me of all that we had just lost; and bound and facedown on the ground, for the first time since the shooting started, I wept.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sanjay

  1998

  [S]incerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.

  —Confucius,

  Doctrine of the Mean, chapter XXIII

  It is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow.

  —Confucius,

  Doctrine of the Mean, chapter XXIV

  “THIS IS GOOD,” ADAM SAID. The “but” was left unspoken. It has become clear that I am not to have the usual privacy enjoyed by a memoirist at work. Adam is careful not to interrupt when I am typing, but if I leave the desk he picks up the typed pages and reads them. If catharsis is what Adam is pushing,
erupting memories and sudden insights should be just the thing. But he is insistent in his call for order.

  “One thing leads to another,” he said. “Think dominoes.” Order is hard for me to find. The last twenty-five years sometimes seem to be a singular moment, the beginning not appreciably more distant than the end, like a single point of collapsed time. Like time suspended during an intense conversation, or immersion in a poem. That single point of collapsed time is dense and heavy, like a netsuke with tightly wound grains, turning and looping in three dimensions, its superficial features providing only subtle clues to its inner meaning. It is not, for me, a thing easily deconstructed. But deconstruction is what I must do.

  Looking out the window, I see Adam standing on the shore of the small lake, which he tells me is named Indian Lake. He is casually skipping stones across its calm surface and then staring at the ripples as if they tell a riveting story accessible only to him. For the first time in over five years, I force myself to activate that part of my mind that sits apart, and observe the wisps of recollection as they arise and drift across the rest of my brain. And for the first time in a long while, I allow myself to think about my best friend, and the finest person I ever knew, Sanjay Sharma.

  We met on my first day of college in 1998, moving into the freshmen dorm room we shared. I could tell that my parents had doubts. Not that they were prone to racial prejudice, but aristocratic Indians were simply outside the scope of their experience. Sanjay’s mother wore a beautiful purple sari. His father’s English tweeds seemed not very practical for hauling in boxes from the Land Rover parked outside. We quickly learned that this task was delegated to a darker-skinned Indian man introduced only as “our helper.” I think my dad, who was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, felt outclassed. But Sanjay himself—putting aside his Indian ethnicity and striking good looks—seemed to me like an ordinary eighteen-year-old American, his choice in brand of jeans, polo shirt, and sneakers the same as mine. As I soon discovered, there was nothing ordinary about him.

  MY FINGERS HAVE hovered over the keyboard now for a good five minutes. I am surprised at how much the Sanjay I met that day in Princeton was the same as the Sanjay who, fourteen years later, I worked with, fought with, and then did not die with. He was the same person at ages eighteen and thirty-two. I used to try to imagine him as a child—thinking he may have been one of those bizarre old-men children, a Little Father Time from Jude the Obscure, unnaturally wise, scarily seeming to know what children should not know. But he assured me he was not like that as a child, and I believed him. He was not that sort of saint.

  Sanjay spent most of his childhood in the United States. His English was unaccented but slightly formal in the manner of his parents, including an aversion to contractions. He retained a ghostly trace of the Indian head wobble and a more pronounced shadow of the typical Indian mannerism in which the head is slightly cocked to one side when considering a question. Few people noticed these habits in Sanjay, but everyone noticed how he looked at you. He had an unusual gaze that was completely attentive. His eyes were a deep warm amniotic brown, and these soft liquid eyes stared out at you as if you were the focus of his world. And you were, at that moment. This is easy to misunderstand. Sometimes attentive people seem to skewer you with their eyes. It can feel aggressive and unnerving. Not so with Sanjay. Although his focus was complete, his attention was tender, neither judgmental nor threatening. I don’t know anyone who ever met him who was not affected by the way he looked at them.

  I didn’t have the words when we first met, but I later realized that these qualities—of being present, focused, and “mindful”—were not natural attributes of his character but qualities carefully cultivated over his short lifetime. When he was a child, his immigrant parents urged him to shun all things Indian and become completely American. So with the typical contrarianism of precocious children, he insisted on taking up yoga at age ten. By thirteen he had mastered the full Ashtanga series of yoga poses.

  One night early during freshman year, a female friend called and asked if Sanjay wanted to join her for a drink after an evening lecture. He demurred, and she asked why. I overheard his strange reply: “I hope you will forgive me, Patricia, but your conversation, although entertaining, I generally do not find intellectually stimulating. It may be selfish of me, but tonight I am looking to be intellectually stimulated, not simply entertained.”

  “San, buddy, you can’t say things like that,” I admonished him after he hung up.

  “Like what?”

  “Like telling a friend that you don’t find her conversation stimulating and that’s the reason you won’t go have a drink with her.”

  “But it is absolutely true.”

  He eventually learned that minor falsehood is a lubricant without which social life cannot run smoothly, and he mastered it to that minimum extent. But Sanjay remained a natural truth teller. This complete sincerity, more than anything else, was what later made him such an effective leader at Theocracy Watch. And, as it turned out, his enveloping focus and obvious sincerity survived the intermediation of the television camera. He was spectacular on TV.

  It didn’t hurt, of course, that unless someone was the type who could never see beauty in a person of another race, people usually thought that Sanjay was one of the most handsome men they had ever seen. Over the years a great deal of airtime was devoted by the media to the subject of Sanjay’s extraordinary face, in which all elements were in perfect harmony—“super-symmetry,” joked one of our physicist friends at Princeton. His skin was the color of warm polished cinnamon except below the perfectly defined edge of his beard, where a fine pixilated black shadow was visible even though he was always clean shaven. His jaw and cheeks were strong and slightly wider than usual for a Brahmin. The resulting face straddled, or perhaps combined, the elegance that Indians celebrated in their aristocratic men and the more robust masculine qualities that were considered desirable in the West. His hair was a black so luminous that all other colors were visibly collected up in each strand.

  For our fundamentalist opponents, this perfect face was evidence of dark forces at work. This was because the Antichrist, according to prophecy, would take the form of a handsome young man. Sanjay was the popular champion standing against the establishment of the Godly Kingdom. The fact that he was also Indian (which they always referred to as “pagan”), and gay, certainly seemed to them to complete the satanic profile.

  Before the time that President Palin first cited Sanjay’s physical appearance as evidence of his demonic nature, it was a feature that he wore lightly, neither viewing it as a burden nor deliberately wielding it for effect. He never denied he was good-looking, but neither did he use his looks to charm or flirt or persuade. He was too honest and too confident of the power of his words for that. This unself-conscious innocence merely magnified his appeal to women and men alike.

  Sanjay told me the first night we met that he was gay. It was news he delivered without drama as we got to know each other over a beer. I told him about my sister and my parents, my undistinguished career as a high school jock, and the casual high school girlfriend I had sensibly broken up with over the summer. He told me about his family’s life in India, why his parents emigrated, what it was like to be an only child, that he was gay, and that he did yoga. I confess that I worried for a few days that having a gay roommate might impair my own social life. To my shame, I felt compelled to have a very public fling with a cute girl in the next entryway to ensure there would be no room for speculation about my own sexual preference.

  In a few days, I realized how stupid I had been. Sanjay was extraordinarily popular with men and women alike. He had an ease that allowed him to circulate among the different circles of college social life in a way few other students could. And from freshman year on, it was I who was carried along in the wave of friends and fans who gathered around my roommate.

  I’ve often wondered why Sanjay chose me for his most intense and long-lasting friendship. After f
reshman year he could have switched to any number of accomplished and fascinating roommates. But he never waivered. By October we were best friends, and no one—neither the occasional boyfriend of his nor my girlfriend Emilie, with whom I lived for six painful years—changed that. Ultimately, that is. Emilie came close.

  One thing about me that I know did interest Sanjay was this odd gift that I have. In another age, I might have thought of myself as some sort of seer or clairvoyant. But it really is just a knack for sudden, sometimes extreme situational awareness. It’s not a habit of mind that I can call up at will; it just happens.

  “It feels like a kind of out-of-body experience,” I told Sanjay one night in the dorm after we had watched Saturday Night Live and had a few beers. Thinking about it today, I remember the sounds of the campus on a late Saturday night floating in through our open casement window.

  “The first time it happened, at least that I can remember, was the day of my first middle school football game,” I told Sanjay. “We were in the locker room, dressed in brand-new uniforms. I was excited, but mostly just scared—not that we would lose, but scared that I would do something stupid or embarrassing, like run down the field in the wrong direction or fumble. You know how it is.” Sanjay looked empathetic, but he was too honest to signal that he did indeed have experience with that type of anxiety. It seemed clear that he didn’t. Anyway, I continued.

  “Just before we ran onto the field, San, the coach told us to get down on our knees. We all knelt. Then he said a prayer.” I did a bad imitation of the coach’s flat midwestern accent:

  “Lord, as we prepare to join the field of battle, we ask you for strength, we ask you to lead us to victory. Victory in your name, and in the name of your son, Je-sus. Help us to vanquish our foe, to defeat our enemy, to …, you know, to defeat evil. Take the field with us, Je-sus. Well, you know. Screw the other bastards. Amen.”