M.R. Lehman Wiens
1 And then on the fourth day of his solitude, the Prophet heard the voice of God.
God spake thusly:
“Thou art a rotten worm, Braden. Be grateful that I speak to you, and do not banish you from my sight.”
“Oh LORD,” said Braden, “How am I a worm if there are so many people that love me?”
“Fool! Those that speak kind words to you at dawn curse your back at sunset. You must show them the truth.”
Braden bowed low, pressing his head to the carpet of his Chicago apartment.
“And what must I do, LORD?”
“Thou must die, Braden. Take the pen in thy hand, and stab it through your eye.”
And Braden did hesitate, unsure in the LORD.
“Why do you tarry? Do you not believe?”
~
Braden twirled the pen in his fingers, spinning it around and around his thumb, the weight perfectly balanced. It was too easy to think of the pen piercing his eye, popping it like an overripe grape. Past the eye, further into his skull, more pressure would be required to break through the layer of bone protecting the brain, a shattering he would feel echoing through his body.
He set the pen down, and it rolled away from him, sliding across the desk to clatter on the uneven floorboards below. It kept rolling until it hit the baseboard, and he left it there.
Braden shivered, blinking to clear his mind.
Outside, the rain was still coming down, a dull drone on his window that made the apartment feel like a womb. He could barely see downtown through the deluge, whole towers hidden by the unrelenting storm. When he’d moved in, he’d audibly said,
“Wow. I’ll never get tired of that view.”
But now, three weeks into lockdowns and working from home, the landscape outside his window was forcing his window in, the glass almost bulging, shrinking his already small apartment. Window, door, walls. It was all part of the same cage. He didn’t want to work, didn’t want to relax, didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to run.
His computer chimed with a company email, and he turned off the oscillating fan that kept his mouse moving back and forth, maintaining his status on ‘Active, online’.
“Braden, do you have the Q2 internal reports? We need them for tomorrow.”
“Yeah, they’ll be there by EOD.”
He ran the macro he’d built his second week of work, and the report appeared before him in an instant. Attaching it to a fresh email, he scheduled the send for 4:43, a six hour delay. The first time he’d created a quarterly report, it had taken him nearly a full work day to gather the data. He saw the advantage in continuing to cultivate that expectation.
He tossed a breakfast burrito in the microwave, and turned on the Playstation.
~
2 And yet before the midday sun rose, God did speak to his prophet again, and the prophet did hear.
God spake thusly:
“Braden, thou shalt open the window, and fall to the ground, descending to the earth like the rains I send from heaven.”
“But LORD,” said Braden, “I am not a bird. Surely if I am to leap from the window I will perish.”
“Does my prophet not trust? Have I not provided for you, blessed you with a television and a PS5 and cushy work-from-home employment in these trying times?”
“You have provided, LORD.”
“Then jump.”
~
He was lost in New York City, swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper, a flash of blue and red spandex that traveled higher and higher. At last, he came to a tower that dwarfed the others, a shining behemoth that cast its shadow far across the city. He scaled it, running up the side in a feat of super human ability, reaching the observation deck in seconds. Soon, he was balanced on the top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.
Braden pulled up the menu, scrolled to ‘Save’, and named the file.
DO NOT DELETE
Then, he closed the menu, and jumped.
The edges of his vision blurred, wind that had been barely a whisper growing to the roar of a freight train as he sped towards the earth. He could save himself, the entire nature of his character placing salvation a single spider-web away.
I just want to see how close I can get, Braden thought, his thumb hovering over the button, ready to push it, waiting for the moment just before the inevitable.
When the character hit the ground, the screen flashed red. The body bounced on the sidewalk, rag-dolled into a pedestrian, and lay still. His thumb hadn’t moved.
He pulled up the menu, scrolled down, and hit ‘Load’.
He was balanced on top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.
He jumped.
~
3 And the LORD did speak in the dark and the stillness of the night, His true voice coming to his prophet on the whiskers of a mouse.
“Braden. Write down what I am to tell you.”
And the LORD’s prophet did scramble through his bedside table, retrieving a pen and a stained Chinese takeout menu.
“My prophet, you have weathered my trials and remained true. Now take my message to the masses, deliver it unto them, and spread my word.”
Then Braden the prophet did write, and write, and write, until the morning sun birthed a new day.
~
“You know the homeless people that you see that are talking to themselves?”
His therapist raised an eyebrow. The expression froze, but Braden couldn’t tell if it was his crappy internet or Dr. Long’s sustained skepticism.
“I mean, most times they’re people who are sitting quietly with a sign or a cup, or they’ll play music, what’s that called, bussing?”
“Busking,” the video unfroze and jumped ahead, allowing Dr. Long’s lips to form the last half of the word.
“Yeah, busking. But sometimes they’re talking to themselves, or even yelling, and when you get close, it’s all nonsense, not even a cogent conspiracy theory, just words strung together.”
“What’s your point here, Braden?”
“They don’t know they’re crazy, do they? I mean, whatever they’re saying, it makes sense to them.”
“Well, I think we’re all doing what makes sense to us.”
“Exactly! How is that not terrifying? We’re all just doing what makes sense to us, but how do we know that our senses are right?”
“Are you worried about your sense of right and wrong?” Dr. Long’s eyes darted to the notepad that Braden suspected was just offscreen.
“No,” Braden said, and then paused. Was he, though? If he wasn’t sure what was real, didn’t that equally mean that he didn’t know what proper behavior was? “I mean, yes, but not in the sense that I’m going to do something to hurt myself. More in the sense that I’m worried that what I’m experiencing is…real.”
“You don’t trust yourself? Your own perceptions?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Long,” Braden said. This was the thing he hated about therapy. Sometimes he wanted to vent, but Dr. Long, who always insisted that Braden call him Brian, constantly pushed him to resolve things. Braden would much rather wallow. “I guess I’m just confused.”
“It’s a confusing time.”
“And what am I supposed to do with that? Just live with the confusion?”
“If you can. If you can’t, you need to find something else to help you make sense of things.”
“Like a hobby?”
“No, Braden. More of a reason to keep pushing, something outside of yourself that deserves your attention. Something that hasn’t been derailed by whatever’s gone on the last three weeks.”
Braden considered this. There was a stack of papers on his desk, within reach but outside of the view of his webcam. It was an uneven stack, a combination of napkins and takeout menus and toilet paper and whatever else had been at hand in the middle of his late-night writing frenzy. He hadn’t read it since that night, but what he remembered of it scared him.
“And I believe our time’s up. Same time next week? Hopefully we’ll be past this flatten the curve stage and we can meet in person soon, but I think for now, we’ll stick with video chats.”
~
4 In those days, a plague was upon the land, a sign of the LORD’s displeasure with an evil ruler and a complacent people.
The LORD’s prophet Braden heard the call of the LORD, but he did not heed it, and the LORD’s displeasure came upon him as well.
~
“I can’t get a test, Mom, but yeah. I think I’ve got it.”
“Haven’t you been masking?”
“With what, Mom? I’m not a seamstress. I had to get groceries somehow.”
“Did you even bother to sanitize them once you brought them home?”
Braden tried to say that there was growing evidence that fomites weren’t the transmission vector people thought they were, but his mother’s voice carried on, an unstoppable wave of sound.
“Mom, I gotta go — therapy with Dr. Long is in a few minutes,” Braden said, breaking in as soon as his mother paused for a breath.
“Oh! Well good. Tell him I say hello.”
It was a lie. His next session with Brian wasn’t until Tuesday. His head was pounding, though, and it was hard to talk without coughing. A lecture might have been tolerable before he was sick, but now it was torture.
He took a few swigs of orange juice he couldn’t taste and collapsed into bed.
~
5 “Braden, my prophet, why do you run from my call?” spake the LORD.
“Go away. I’m sick,” replied the LORD’s prophet, with more than a hint of annoyance.
“Ye be sick because I have made it so,” said the LORD. “Receive my call, spread my word, and ye shall be healed.”
And lo, the LORD’s prophet was sickly indeed and turned in his bed toward the face of the LORD.
“You have refused to sacrifice yourself as I have commanded. You have written my words but refuse to spread them.”
And the LORD’s prophet did curse, and blasphemy was full on his lips.
“Despite this, my prophet, I am faithful. Read what you have written, and ye shall be healed. Spill the blood from your wrists, and ye shall be redeemed.”
And then the prophet did sleep.
~
Braden woke up coughing, a deep hacking cough that gripped him like an electric shock, the muscles convulsing and rippling with a demanding power. He reached a shaking hand to the bedside table.
His fingers touched the piece of paper there, and he read words he didn’t remember writing.
~
6 The LORD’s prophet Braden descended to the street with the papers he had written, and he began to declare the LORD’s word in a loud, clear voice, and the people gathered, and were much amazed.
But as they heard his words, they began to whisper among themselves, saying:
“Who is this man that speaks as though he knows the will of God? Isn’t he the schlub from my building, the one in apartment 6F?”
And still others were disgusted, saying:
“He dares to shout on the street, unmasked when sickness lies on the land? He is at best a fool, and at worst he means us all harm.”
Then the anger of the crowd was stirred to action, and they began to stone him. Braden fled from their sight, running to the DuSable Bridge. There he climbed the railing and prepared to jump.
But the spirit of the LORD descended, and carried him away, and the LORD’s prophet thereafter resided in heaven.
~
“Jesus, get him out of there!”
“Oh my god! Call 911!”
The pedestrians on the bridge stared down at the man treading water in the Chicago River. Some pulled out cell phones and dialed emergency numbers. Most continued recording the videos they had started when Braden climbed the railing. The video of his 16-foot plunge and eventual rescue would soon go viral, with the title “Worst Suicide Attempt Ever.”
“What was he shouting about before he jumped?” said a woman to her friend.
“Something about the will of God. Look, one of his papers!”
She grabbed a Chinese takeout menu from its place floating on the wind. Between prices for veggie lo mein and General Tso’s chicken was an untidy scrawl, words thrown onto the page with abandon, connected only by threads of madness.
“My god, that’s sad,” said the first woman. Her friend nodded.
The man in the river below waved his arms, shouting not at any approaching boat, or at the onlookers gathered on the bridge. His quarrel was with heaven.
M.R. Lehman Wiens is a Pushcart-nominated writer and stay-at-home dad living in Minnesota. His work has previously appeared, or is upcoming in F(r)iction, Short Édition, Consequence, and others. He can be found at lehmanwienswrites.com.
