Gospel

by Jared Sebastian

The kingdom of heaven is like this: a curious child is one day playing in the garden while his mother drinks a martini on the patio. The child’s father is down in Boca Raton, riding jet skis, defending oil companies in court, and nursing tenderly a never-ending hangover. The child finds a fuzzy, pulsing caterpillar on a half-chewed leaf. He picks it up and toddles over to his mother. He is four years old.

The child thinks for a moment. There is a gleam in his eye—the brightness of ingenuity. Then he drops the caterpillar into his open mouth and swallows it whole.

It takes a minute for the mother to begin to panic. She drives the child to the hospital. She neglects to buckle him in, and swerves all over the road. The child goes rolling across the backseat of her sporty SUV, laughing all the while.

Several hours later, X-rays are conducted. The child is divinely calm. He has accepted his predicament. A doctor comes in to explain the results. Over his left eye he wears a patch that is the same pale color as his skin. The mother resists the temptation to ask about the eye, but something about it bothers her.

The doctor tells her that, to the best of their knowledge, the caterpillar has lodged itself towards the bottom of the child’s esophagus. Furthermore, it has begun—and at this the doctor looks down at his feet, searching for the right words—somehow it has begun to form a chrysalis.

The mother is disturbed, understandably. She is still clutching her empty martini glass. There is only a toothpick and a shriveled olive remaining. She keeps telling nurses she is saving the olive. The doctor says surgery in this case is far too risky. The wisest course of action would be to simply let the pupa stage proceed unobstructed, until the caterpillar has fully metamorphosed into a butterfly, at which point it should simply fly out of the child on its own.

The mother is disappointed, to say the least. She leaves, dragging the child by the hand and threatening lawsuits, but she knows she will never ask the child’s father for help.

The mother puts the child to bed early that night. A slim line of light lays on the wall opposite the bedroom’s western-facing window, a protrusion of sunlight through the blinds. The mother reads the child one of his little books, one about a lazy bee who drowns in honey. She also tries to pray but gives up halfway through. Prayer has never before been a part of their nighttime ritual. She has begun to sober up, and her head is pounding. That night, she watches the child until he falls asleep, and then she stays there for several more hours, watching his little chest rise and fall. She sits in a wooden rocking chair, the same rocking chair in which she used to nurse the boy in the middle of so many interminable nights. She wonders if she will ever understand the world again.

Years pass without the exit of the butterfly. Eventually, the mother stops taking the boy to see specialists and various holy men. The boy grows up. He is quiet and watchful. The careful attention of his mother ever since that day in the garden has given him an air of something delicate placed upon a particularly high shelf. He becomes a great friend to gossips and those who carry hidden shames. They see him as a well to drop their secrets into.

In high school, he unfortunately discovers the joy of making music. His teachers see almost immediately that he will never be an adept. Nevertheless, he goes to college in the city to learn music composition, with an emphasis on the piano.

At the end of his first year, he is asked to perform a recital of a selected piece. The room is mostly empty—just his professor and a few students attending for extra credit. He stumbles for a good ten minutes through the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, before slamming both his fists down on the keys in exasperation. A collective gasp sounds out in the darkness. In the front row, he sees a glint in the eye of his charming professor Dr. Johanna. The boy slams his fists down on the keys once more, creating a reverberating cataclysmic mash of sound. He does it again. A couple of the students in the back rise to their feet. The boy thinks for a second that they might rush the stage, but they begin applauding. He punches the keys again, over and over, and even stands from the bench to begin kicking the nearest leg of the old Steinway. Everyone in the audience is on their feet. There are whoops and whistles. A solitary tear falls down the cheek of Dr. Johanna. The boy walks proudly up to the front of the stage, and delivers a deep bow.

In the hall afterwards, they rush to shake his hand, tell him how moved they are. Dr. Johanna waits for the students to finish. She hides, almost, behind her shining mass of dark curly hair. She congratulates him, and asks if he would like to come back to her apartment to discuss his plans for the following year. She opens a bottle of champagne for them, but is dismayed to find a floating blob of a moth trapped within its golden liquid contents. She makes love to him, almost as an afterthought. The young man has waited so long to walk through this particular door, but he finds on the other side only a sense of strangeness, in relation to the older woman and in relation to his own body. He thought it would fill him with wisdom, but he lies there in bed beside those curls smelling of lavender and cardamom and feels that the inner world of his mind is somehow dimmer, as if its aperture has closed slightly, allowing in less light. Neither of them will ever speak of this night again.

The next year, there is another recital, and this time the auditorium is full. The young man has spent all year practicing, has spent long nights in the college’s studios haunting the janitors with his jangling output. He wants so badly to will his fingers into the music, to come alive inside of the chords, to partake in something larger than himself, but the black notes on the white page swim around in his vision, and he is now, on the night of his sophomore recital, completely lost.

This time he gets only a few minutes into a Debussy piece before he registers the blanch of disappointment on the faces of Dr. Johanna and the others in the audience. This time, the young man takes his performance further. Dropping the Debussy, he picks up a pair of scissors from a small backpack he’s brought along, and, reaching under the lid of the Steinway, he begins cutting the piano strings. There are whoops and hollers from the dark void. The strings each give a little yelp as they’re severed. He ends the performance by selecting a hammer from his bag and banging it against a leg of the piano for much longer than he would’ve assumed, until the leg of it is bent inwards and the whole baroque monolith crashes to the wooden stage. The audience is on their feet screaming. The young man does not bother with a bow—he simply walks off the stage.

The video of this performance goes viral, which is the only thing that prevents the young man’s school from expelling him and suing him for damages. They love the publicity. The young man is contacted by talent agents and managers. He leaves the mess in the hands of Dr. Johanna. Now she looks at the young man and sees the warm glow of early retirement. The young man is told they want to take the show on the road. Concert halls all around the world will be lit up by his name. He does not take much convincing to drop out in his junior year.

At countless venues, the young man gets on stage with a variety of power tools and destroys a grand piano in increasingly meticulous ways. At one stop in Las Vegas he is asked to set the piano ablaze. The young man acquiesces. Members of the fire department wait in the wings for their moment in the spotlight.

The young man eventually grows tired of destruction as art, and feels very sincerely that it is becoming less and less distinct from the destruction of art itself. In a short video posted to all of his social channels, he announces the end of his piano destruction act.

He coasts for a while on royalties, speaking fees, and ad revenue. He writes a memoir, which nets middling sales. Nobody much wants a peek behind the curtain. Dr. Johanna leaves him for a tenured professorship in Turin. He finds himself relieved. He drifts, mostly into the beds of different women. He tries to give himself a solid weight in this world. Even after all the fame and morning talk shows, he never hears from his father. One woman he ends up marrying. They are together for five years and have no children. They decide that five years is a nice round number and call it quits.

The man is no longer young and finds a deep void within himself that cries out for solitude. He takes up as a park ranger in the Badlands. The desert answers all of his questions with a dry and ancient silence. At some point his mother dies via telephone. He can’t remember why they ever stopped talking and he weeps.

One day he sees a bald old man he is convinced is his father. They lock eyes on one of the wooden paths laid down through a broad meadow, and as soon as they do the old man has a heart attack and falls to the ground. The younger man radios for paramedics. Somehow the old man’s sunglasses are still on. The young man kneels down, elevates his head, and tries to get the old man to drink from his canteen.

“This is my fourth rodeo,” says the old man. “And thank Christ it feels like the last.”

The young man thinks of all the monologues from countless showers and empty hotel room nights he’s saved up for his father. None of them seem to quite rise to the moment.

“Do you have religion?” the old man asks.

The younger man shakes his head.

“I’m worried I brushed it off too easily,” the old man says. “I should’ve learned the strictures. I should’ve read the fine print of this world. That’s how they get ya.”

The old man’s flesh seems to be glowing a deep and venomous red. Sweat pools in the young man’s hand as he kneels there, elevating the head.

“I’m worried, when I receive my new soul, that I’ll be given a cracked and dusty one from the back of the shelf. I’m worried the clerk will scoff at me. I’d prefer something shiny and new. A soul innocent enough to give wickedness a real good try in the next go-round. That’s my problem is I never learned how to be wicked enough.”

The other visitors on the wood-plank path stand around awkwardly, mumbling, occasionally turning sheepishly away to take pictures of the frankly stunning sunset occurring just then. The young man realizes beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man dying below him is not his father.

“Tell me something kind. Tell me something gentle,” the old man says. “Lie to me. Do what people do when other people are dying. Sum it all up for me. Tell me about the gates of pearl. Tell me about a carpenter. Tell me about the great prophet. Tell me about the quenching of the three fires. Do this for me.”

The young man opens his mouth to speak, and staggering out wetly comes a butterfly with wings of a deep and glacial blue. It perches on his bottom lip a moment to get its bearings, then it drops, without much ado, into the waiting and open mouth of the old man. His mouth closes around the glowing, wriggling thing. The wind picks up for a moment, rustling the heather, then all is still.

The kingdom of heaven is like your heart: bloody and broken, tender and trembling. Such a strange vessel for a world without end.

Jared Sebastian was born and raised in southeast Michigan and graduated from Western Michigan University. His work has previously appeared in Funicular Magazine and God’s Cruel Joke. X: @jared_seabass IG: @medijare4all