MOSES. wakes up to roaring silence. His eyes flit open, gaze lights upon the liquid bands of diluted gold that are strengthening along his bedroom wall. Morning has come, is mute. No: hushed. Waiting. Making room for a voice that will peal and blast and crack in the softest of ferocities.
In this instant, he knows. He cannot move at first, from the incredible mass of knowing that he. He, of all the people, of all the men, of all the unworthy. Has been chosen. He slips from his bed, leaden-footed, and drops to his knees, pressing his palms into dingy oatmeal carpet, forehead meeting its frayed fibers as he whispers: Lord, here am I. Send me. The sunlight igniting across the wall is quiet, watery, but somehow, inevitably, it is a soft blaze. Burning with a native fury.
JUDAS. meets Lucifer for the first time in the guise of a blue-eyed blonde wearing too much hair gel. In the young body, the angel is loose-limbed, loose-laughed, loose-tongued; xe flops down next to him on the park bench, making snide comments about the son Judas adopted in the days after the betrayal. Judas sees xem more often than he wants to, after that: in the soup kitchens where he volunteers, as a scraggly old man with impossibly dark skin; across the street from the orphanage he donates to, as a hunchbacked Guatemalan lady; in the threshold of Judas’ bedroom door, as xemself, and that is most terrifying and honest of all.
It is Lucifer, in the end, who convinces Judas back into a church pew. Who teaches him to forgive himself, to stop waiting for a sacred pardon that may never arrive. Who teaches him to kiss his son goodnight without feeling like a traitor in the act.
HAGAR. is short on cash, but she thinks she would have accepted the job even if she was a millionaire; the feeling of the life rising within her is enough. The women in her family crinkle their mouths at her, call her leavened bread, moon belly, liar-life; they grew up in villages where science was a bedtime story, a wisp of a part-forgotten dream. They don’t understand the phrase surrogate mother through in vitro fertilization.
But even they cannot deny the wonder of the puckered lips and tiny pink fingers that Hagar brings forth on the final day; Isma’il, she calls him, and looks up from the bundle in her arms just soon enough to see a flash of feathery white hair disappearing from around the hospital door.
Thirteen years later, when her son’s adoptive parents abandon him for a child of their own, Hagar finds Isma’il in the arms of that soft-haired person with fiery eyes and brass throat. Hello again, old friend, xe whispers, and the voice is like iron on flesh, it is like lightning embodied. It is like coming home.
JONATHAN. has wet dreams about the servant boy and looks the other way too quickly when they pass each other in the hallway. His father is a Southern tycoon, owns four mansions: one for each season. The Saul family industry is fat off the oil it markets so well, but Jonathan does not have ears for words like CEO and comprehensive board meetings and primary stock options; he is first in line for a commercial kingship he does not want.
He blushes when he sees the servant boy, bites his tongue when he realizes his father is standing a few feet away. It is only puppy love, he knows, but oh, the servant boy sings as he cleans and thinks no one is around to hear, and Jonathan tells him, shyly, that it sounds as if there’s a songbird in his throat whenever he opens his mouth. Their first kiss is hesitant and pink-cheeked in a bathroom stall; years later, it is only as Jonathan’s body slots with David’s, mouth wet on his collarbones, breath hot and fast and pleading against his neck, that he first tells him he loves him.
JESUS’ favorite class is Catechisms; Sister Rosemary has learned to call on him last, after all the other children have given their answers, for the way her pupil speaks seems to open doors and eyes, makes the sky seem not bluer but brighter, the air crisper. He sits at a round table with a motley dozen of students of all ages, eats ham sandwiches without the crust but is privy to handing out everything in his lunch bag to any child who is hungry.
The older kids - the ones who buy basketball sneakers for far too high a price and crow their narcissism through the hallways - tried to beat him up once, after he confronted a girl for mocking a younger student’s haircut. Sister Rosemary swears, it looked as if he just vanished into the air. It is a mystery how he managed to escape, even to this day.
But everyone goes to his funeral, even the principal, who stayed up long hours while Jesus talked circles around him on his disciplinary procedures and inevitably forgot why the boy had ever been called down in the first place. Even the bullies, even the philosophy teachers, too - (it seems that, in the wake of the tragedy, the number of times Jesus has pointed out flaws in their curricula is now deemed irrelevant.)
The suicide note leaves a short explanation: It had to be. I always knew that. I love you all. I will see you again soon. For months afterward, the air seems supercharged with something no one can name. The sky seems not bluer but brighter, the air crisper, but Sister Rosemary reasons that it is fall, and tries not to be reminded of the boy’s blood smeared across his friends’ hands when she sees the autumn leaves scattering the school lawn.
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