Coffee and Sugar by C. Sean McGee (ready player one ebook .txt) 📕

“Ladies, gentlemen, if you will. I think before we make any decisions, we should wet our lips and warm our bellies” The 13th Apostle said, handing each of his guests a cup and inviting them into a toast.

“To charity, to profit and to Jesus Christ. May our discord be, not what divides us, but what brings us together” he said, raising his cup.

His guests looked vaguely at his wavering arms and lifted their cups out of educated prudence, nothing more. And as they touched their lips against the rim of the porcelain, their perspectives changed, along with the condition of their engagement and focus and whatever decision they thought they had come to, dissipated in the measure of decision they would all uniformly make, without schismatic debate.

Joao thought about the things he had seen, the truths whispered to him and while looking at The Apostle and his guests shaking hands, he thought again of the devil, and he cried and when he snuck away, he went unnoticed for The 13th Apostle and his guests were busy; undressing themselves.

As he walked blindly through the winding corridors, feeling sicker with every step, he anchored his drifting attention on one of the hundreds of large televisions that draped the walls and above the passage of doorways, their screens all flickering with the same image; an overweight woman, maybe in her fifties, taking the whole of the screen as the camera zooms in on her bulging eyes and her trembling lips, with every dimple on her face looking like a cavernous and aged, earthly fracture and every mole like a mountainous rock, purging from her converging, molten core.

Joao stood still in wonder and watched the screen just above an entry to a set of toilets. The woman on the screen was reaching for a microphone with her short stubby fingers which were twitching away, the white of her eyes widening as her crazed and hungered stare feasted upon the hands on a man in a brown suit; still off camera, reaching forwards over a crowd of rubber necking preachers who twisted and turned their heads and their bodies to follow the line of the camera’s sight.

The woman; now nattering her teeth and salivating from the corners of her stretching mouth, wrenched the microphone from the man’s hands and pulled it towards her mouth as if she were a hungry bear, snatching a salmon in its flight upstream. It looked like she was about to swallow it whole as she opened up wide and thrust the microphone towards her rapacious looking expression.

“Praise Jesus” she said.

A roar ripped up through the auditorium, thousands of people, tens of thousands, scores of thousands, all chanting and cheering into the air with their hands shaking on imaginary tambourines; rattling the attention of the gods or shaking off the dusted shrill of the devil.

“Praise Jesus, thanks be to god” they shouted and sang to the air.

Joao mouthed the words himself, silent, but involved in the effect of the woman’s initial plea. He stood still and dumbed but his lips spelt out every word as the crowd ascended their glory and spirit in the name of their savour, eschewing their fears and impelling themselves; by the grace of god, from the pit of their depressions as their voices echoed through the heavens.

“Glory and thanks be to god indeed, for all of us, for this church, for our health, for this life; saddled with challenge but so worth the turning of every grain of sand, for every desert we turn” he said shouting, “to find that single speck of gold. And it is in god that we trust but it is in Jesus that we bear our arms and we carry in our hands, belief as our weapon, that we can dig until our hands are blue and our fingers fall off, that we can dig well after we have been cursed us to stop, that we never stop digging, we never stop turning the sands, because the gold that we search for, the light of this world, is not buried by the sands of time, by the desert of desperation and spiritual desiccation, it is in all of us, in our hearts, in our souls. It is our wounds that we wear as a symbol of our diligence, of our devotion. It is the cross that each and every one of us are willing to bear for the sake for our lord, just as his was borne for everyone in this room, everyone watching at home now around the world; hello by the way to our new viewers in Myanmar,” The Apostle said, lowering his zest and speaking in a more welcomed breeze before building again to a cyclonic, biblical howl, “everyone who takes Jesus Christ as their one and only true saviour, for every other religion is an outright lie and an infernal sin, for only Jesus Christ walks with love, without violence, without vengeance, without abysmal fear, without archaic tradition, without child molestation, without robes, without mystic, without darkness enshrouding his step, without shadow, with only light, for Jesus Christ is one and only and every man, woman and child who carries Jesus in their heart and who carries no scorn for the cuts on their hands, the sores on their feet, the disparity in their life or for the troubles that they see, no man with Jesus in his heart shall ever suffer alone; for Christ will suffer for you, for each and every one of you. The love of Christ can prove all and cure all. If you have Jesus in your heart; if you truly believe, Jesus will heal you. He will cure your cancer, he will make you walk again…. He will even bring you back from death. Jesus is that powerful. He is not a wizard. He is the son of god” yelled The Apostle, to the rousing reception of the scores of thousands of sweaty and pressed upon people in the auditorium, crammed together like thoughts in a madman’s head.

Joao was immured in stagger, his mouth busy catching flies while his eyes threatened to fall out and roll along the floor. He felt hardened and inspired, hardly the feeling he had after just giving himself to what felt like a wrong bidding and leaving the suited men and women, to their drunken, carnal orgy; oiled on what dismay and debauchery he had conjured for them.

As he stood there in awe, watching the taped service, a line of people came walking through the corridors, some heading into the two toilets below the television and others standing beside Joao, with the same headlighted trance, opening their mouths as if to better their soul’s antenna and consuming the emotion and passion from the service as if it were crack cocaine, their eyes glazed and their want for more, increasing with their exhilaration and spiritual infirmity.

“Jesus saved my son’s life, my boy, Jesus saved him. Stand up, come here son” said the woman, ushering to a large man with a shaven head, tattoos running from the corner of his eyes, across the side of his head and running down his back somewhere under the obscenely large shirt that he wore with the words ‘gangsta’ embroidered on the front and ‘Jesus Christ, The Original’ embroidered on the back.

The man stood up and took the hand of his mother, pulling it slowly towards his own brutish and emotionally anorexic face.

“Jesus touched you?” asked The 13th Apostle.

“Yes sir, Jesus touched me” said the man.

“Where did he touch you?” asked The 13th Apostle.

“In the prison sir, Jesus touched me in the prison”

“And what did you do, when he touched you, what did you do?”

“I cried sir.”

“He cried. By the grace of god, he cried. You tell everyone here, you look into that camera and you tell the world, you tell us how Jesus touched you in that prison. Don’t be afraid now. We’re no strangers to Jesus’ touch here. We’ve all been touched, isn’t that right?” said The 13th Apostle in frank cant, nodding his head in self concurrence.

The man bowed his head, foundering by an exigent shame that he was carrying with in his soul and he lowered himself so that he could garnish the strength to dig his hands deeply below that promethean rock of sufferance of which bound his soul and cast it out, into the erasure of the amnesty of the lord.

“What were you in prison for?” asked The 13th Apostle.

The man shook his head as if the truth were screwed into his soul and he were unwinding it, up and out into the light.

“It was drugs sir and on account my wife is missing and I beat my boy, there was also that” the man said.

The 13th Apostle pressed his hand over his face and spread his fingers slightly, so his weary eyes could just been seen through the ravine on his mountainous appendage. He held the microphone close to his shaking head so the sound of disbelief expelling from his heavy heart would settle like a black cloud on their heavenly horizon and as he did, the scores of thousands standing; sweaty body to sweaty body, all puffed their faces in emotional stout and readied for a coming storm.

“Keep going my son. What happened next?” said The 13th Apostle.

The man’s mother pressed her open stubby hand against her son’s back, stretching up high so she could reach; like an ant trying to lift up a cloud, holding her other hands over her flooding eyes, weeping loud and supporting as her son arrested the maniac of his normal defence and spoke instead, in the voice of the frightened child that had been willowing away somewhere beneath that bank of anger.

“You took drugs?”

“Yes sir.”

“And you hit your son?”

“Yes sir.”

“You beat our son.”

“Yes sir I did. I beat him good. I’m not proud of it either.”

“So you took drugs and you beat your son and you didn’t have Jesus?”

“No sir, I did not”

“And prison? What were you arrested for?”

“Homicide. The police arrested me. They said I killed my wife”

“It wasn’t true” shouted the mother, “the police lied. They pick on my boy because of his past, they just lie” yelled the mother.

“Because of your past”

“Yes sir” said the man.

“Because you beat your boy?”

“Yes sir. I beat him good. And I mean good like bad, not like good”

“And because you beat your boy, they think you killed your wife?”

“Yes sir. They arrested me without cause. I’m not a violent man. I never done no-one a lick of violence”

“Except your boy”

“Yes sir.”

“You beat your boy.”

“Beat him good sir.”

“But not violent?”

“No sir, discipline sir”

“And the police just locked you up? Did they have any evidence?”

“No sir. Just my neighbours sir, but they’re not good people”

“They’re Catholics!” screamed the man’s mother.

The scores of thousands of people standing sweaty back to sweaty back understood; lazy religious zealots, heaven’s part time subscribers.

“When I was in prison, I was real angry. Cause I didn’t kill my wife and I fought some guys and I didn’t want to see anyone.”

“Not even his mother” cried his mother.

“Not even your mother?” asked The Apostle.

“Not even my mother” said The Tattooed Man.

“What changed?”

“I read the bible. There was one in my cell and I opened the first page and I started to read and I must have read sixteen pages before Jesus, he spoke to me.”

“Jesus spoke to you? Oh the grace of god. And what did Jesus say? Did he answer your prayers?”

“Yes sir he did. Jesus, he told me to keep strong and have faith. He spoke to me every night in my cell. He said if I just have faith, everything will be ok. And I didn’t believe him at first. I was real scared. But then he touched me.”

“And you felt different.”

“I felt different sir. I believed. I prayed every day. I prayed for Jesus to show the police and everyone the truth, that I didn’t hurt my wife, I loved her, I did no wrong” he said.

“And what happened?”

The man wept