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  For Jack

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  The Parable of the Girl Who Died and Went to Hell, Not Necessarily in That Order

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  The Parable of the Ticking Clock

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Parable of the Million Bad Mothers

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  The Parable of the Child Thief

  Chapter 14

  The Parable of the Man Who Sacrificed Rats

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  The Parable of the Man Who Sacrificed Himself

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  The Parable of the Faithful Atheist

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

  —T. H. Huxley

  And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.

  —Mark 4:11

  THE PARABLE OF

  the Girl Who Died and Went to Hell, Not Necessarily in That Order

  There was a girl who lived on the streets in a northern city. She was sixteen years old when she found God, and had just turned seventeen when God abandoned her.

  She didn’t understand why He would turn His back on her now, after He had saved her life. She’d been living rough for two years. At night she navigated by bunk-finder apps, competing for space in the shelters with the thousands of other teenagers roaming the city. She did bad things to get by. She worked the crowded sidewalks, beaming her profile pic to the dashboards of the trolling cars, climbing into front seats and climbing out again fifteen minutes later. She stole, and she beat other teenagers who tried to steal from her, and once she did something terrible, something unforgivable.

  When she thought of what she’d done, even glancingly, a black tunnel seemed to open up behind her eyes. Anything might trigger the memory: a word, the sight of an old woman, the smell of soup burning on a stove. On those days she thought the black would swallow her whole.

  Then one night, at the end of a week of black days, she found herself in the Spadina station looking over the edge of the platform, measuring the short distance to the rails. She could feel the train coming, growling to her, pushing its hot breath down the tracks. The concrete rumbled encouragement to her feet. She moved up to the yellow line, and the toes of her sneakers touched air. The only way out of the black tunnel, she realized, was through it.

  She felt a hand on her arm. “Hey there.” It was a friend, one of her first on the street, a tall black boy older than her by a few years who maintained a crazy rectangular beard. He said, “You doing anything?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that.

  She followed him up out of the station. A while later, an older man with hardcore prison tattoos picked them up in a rusting SUV and drove them a few miles to a strip mall. Most of the stores were empty. The man, who said he was a pastor, opened one of the doors and said, “Welcome to our little church.”

  People began to filter in and take seats in the circle of folding chairs. The service began with singing, songs she didn’t know but that sounded familiar. And then the pastor stood in the middle of the circle for the sermon. He turned as he talked, making eye contact with the people, making eye contact with her, which made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t remember now what he’d spoken about.

  At the end of the service, everyone stood up and formed a line in front of the pastor, their hands out, mouths open like birds. Her friend looked at her questioningly; it was her decision. She stood up with the others, and when it was her turn the pastor held up a piece of paper with a single word printed on it: Logos. “This is the word made flesh,” he said.

  She wasn’t stupid. She’d eaten paper before, and knew that the ink could contain almost anything. She opened her mouth, and he placed it on her tongue. The paper dissolved like cotton candy.

  She felt nothing. If there was anything mixed into the ink or the paper, it was too mild to affect her.

  That night, as she lay on a bed in a shelter that the pastor had lined up for her, the black tunnel was still there. But there was something else, too: a feeling, as if she were being watched.

  No: watched over.

  She made her way back to the church the next day, and the day after that. The feeling of a loving presence grew like sun rising over her shoulder. The pastor called it the Numinous. “It’s knowledge,” he said. Proof that we are all loved, all connected.

  Her problems weren’t solved. She still slept in restaurant bathrooms, and lifted snacks from gas stations, and gave blow jobs to men in cars. Still struggled with the black tunnel. But she could not shake that secret knowledge that she was loved. She could not yet forgive herself, but she began to think that someone else might.

  One night, a month after that first church service, just a few days before her birthday, the cops swept through the park, and she was arrested for solicitation. Because she was underage, they would not release her until they found her parents. She wouldn’t help the police; the last thing she wanted was to let her parents know where she was. God, she thought, would provide a way out of this.

  But as the days passed in the detention center, something was changing. God’s presence faded, as if He was moving away from her, turning His back on her. She began to panic. She prayed, and wept, and prayed some more. Then a female guard caught her creating her own sacrament, swallowing scraps of toilet paper, and thought she had smuggled in smart drugs. They took her blood and swabbed her tongue and made her pee in a cup. Two days later they transferred her to a hospital west of the city, and locked her up with crazy people.

  On her second night in the hospital, a red-haired woman appeared in her room. She seemed familiar, and then suddenly the girl remembered her. “You let me sleep on your couch once.”

  The woman stepped into the room. Her red hair, the girl saw now, was shot with threads of gray. “Wasn’t my idea,” the woman said. “But yeah.”

  It had been ten below, and the red-haired woman had found her shivering outside a gas station. The girl had thought the woman wanted sex, but no; she’d fed her pizza and let her spend the night, and the girl had slipped out of the apartment before morning. It was the kindest thing a stranger had ever done for
her, until she met the pastor.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman asked. Her voice was soft. “What did you take?”

  How could she explain that she’d taken nothing? That they’d locked her up because she’d finally realized that God was real?

  “I’ve lost it,” the girl said. “I’ve lost the Numinous.”

  The woman seemed shocked at the word, as if she recognized it. Perhaps she was part of the church? The girl told her her story, and the woman seemed to understand. But then the woman asked questions that proved she didn’t understand at all: “This pastor—did he tell you the name of the drug? Where he got it? How long have you been in withdrawal?”

  The black tunnel seemed to throw itself open, and the girl refused to say any more. After a time the red-haired woman went away, and the nurses came to her with pills that they said would help her with her depression, her anxiety. A psychologist brought her to his office—“just to talk.”

  But she did not need antidepressants, or soothing conversation. She understood, finally, why God had withdrawn from her. What He was trying to tell her.

  When she was full of God’s love, she couldn’t do what she needed to do. God had to step back so that she’d have the strength to do what she should have done months ago. So she could make the required sacrifice.

  At her next meeting with the psychologist, she stole a ceramic mug from his desk. He never noticed; she was practiced at lifting merchandise. An hour after that, before she could lose her nerve, she went to the bathroom and smashed the mug against the edge of the stainless steel sink. She chose the largest shard, then sawed apart the veins in her left arm.

  God, she knew, helps those who help themselves.

  —G.I.E.D.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “So you want to leave us, Lyda?” Counselor Todd asked.

  “It’s been eight months,” I said. “I think it’s about time, don’t you?”

  Dr. Gloria shook her head, then made a note on her clipboard.

  The three of us—Todd, Dr. Gloria, and I—sat in Todd’s closet-sized office in the NAT ward. Three chairs, a pressed wood coffee table, and no windows. Todd leaned back in his chair, flicking his smart pen: snick and the screen opened like a fan; clack and it rolled up again. The file on the screen appeared and disappeared too fast to read, but I could guess what document it was.

  Todd liked to portray himself as a man of the people. A white man who favored work shirts that had never seen a day of work and work boots that had never touched mud. This in contrast to Dr. Gloria, who occupied the seat to his right. She believed in the traditional uniform of doctors: white coat, charcoal pencil skirt, femme heels that weren’t so high as to be impractical. Her nondigital clipboard and Hot Librarian glasses were signature props. I did not want her in this meeting, but neither Todd nor I had the power to keep her out.

  “Lyda,” Todd said in a knowing tone. “Does your desire to leave now have anything to do with Francine’s death?”

  Francine was the girl who had killed herself with Todd’s mug. I presented my I’m-not-quite-following-you frown.

  “The transfer request was placed two weeks ago, on the day after she died,” Todd said. “You seemed upset by her death.”

  “I barely knew her.”

  “You broke furniture,” he said.

  “It was a plastic chair,” I said. “It already had a crack in it.”

  “Don’t quibble,” Dr. Gloria said. “It’s the display of anger he’s worried about.”

  “I was mad at you doctors,” I said. “I told you to put her on antidepressants—”

  “Which we did,” Todd said.

  “Too Goddamn late. Jesus, her symptoms were obvious. I couldn’t believe no one had taken steps. Her parents should be suing the hospital’s ass off right now.”

  “We haven’t been able to find them,” he said.

  “Perfect. Homeless orphans can’t sue either.”

  Dr. Gloria put down her clipboard. “Insulting everyone who works here isn’t going to help you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just—she was so young.”

  “I know,” Counselor Todd said. He sounded suddenly tired. “I tried to talk to her.”

  Todd could be an idiot, but he did care about the patients. And as the only full-time counselor on the ward, he worked essentially alone. The neuro-atypical ward was a lab for the hardcore cog-sci docs, the neuropsych researchers. They didn’t much care for talk therapy, or for talking therapists like Todd.

  So as Todd became more isolated, he couldn’t help but grow attached to the people he spent the most time with: The patients had become, without him realizing it, his cohort, his troop. I knew that my degrees intimidated him. He suspected that because of my résumé I was more aligned with the neuropsych folks—which was true. But my highfalutin background also made him secretly desire my approval. Sometimes I used my power to get the lab to do the right thing for the patients, but I wasn’t above using it to get myself out of here.

  Todd did his best to pull himself back to counselor mode. “Were you disturbed by Francine’s symptoms?”

  “How so?”

  “They were so similar to your own. The religious nature of her hallucinations—”

  “A lot of schizos have religious delusions.”

  “She wasn’t schizophrenic, at least not naturally. We believe she’d been taking a designer drug.”

  “Which one?”

  “We haven’t figured that out yet. But I was struck by the way she talked about God as a physical presence. That was how you used to speak about your angel.”

  Dr. Gloria looked at me over her glasses. This was her favorite topic. I stopped myself from glaring at her.

  “I’ve been symptom free for months,” I said to Todd. “No angels. No voices in my head. I didn’t think the antipsychotics you prescribed would work, honestly. My hallucination’s been so persistent, so long, that…” I shrugged. “But you were right, and I was wrong. I’m not too proud to admit that.”

  “I thought they were worth a try,” he said. “When you showed up here, you were in a pretty bad place. Not just your injuries.”

  “Oh no,” I said, agreeing with him. “It was everything. I was fucked up.” I’d been sentenced to the NAT after creating my own drive-thru at a convenience store. I swerved off the road at 60 KPH and plowed through the wall at three in the afternoon. My front bumper crushed a woman’s leg and sent another man flying, but nobody was killed. The owner told a reporter that “somebody up there was watching out for them.”

  God gets the easiest performance reviews.

  I said, “I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on my problems.”

  I glanced up. I’d delivered this statement with all the sincerity I could muster. Todd seemed to be taking it in. Then he said, “Have you been thinking about your wife?”

  A question as subtle as a crowbar. Counselor Todd trying to pop me open.

  Dr. G said, “He noticed that you’re touching your ring.”

  I glanced down. The wedding band was polished brass, six-sided on the outside. A friend of ours had forged a matching pair for us.

  I placed my hands on the arms of my chair. “I think of her every day,” I said. “But not obsessively. She’s my wife. I miss her.”

  Perhaps this struck him as an odd thing to say about a woman who had tried to kill me. Instead he said, “It’s interesting that you use the present tense.”

  “She has been dead almost ten years,” Dr. Gloria said.

  “I don’t believe that there’s a time limit on love or grief,” I said. A paraphrase of something Counselor Todd had told me very earnestly in my first month on the ward. I was detoxing then, vulnerable and wide open, sucking in Todd’s bromides as if they were profound truths. When you can’t get the heroin, take the methadone.

  “And your child?” he asked.

  I sat back, my heart suddenly beating hard. “Are you working through a checklist there?”
>
  “You’re sounding angry again,” Dr. Gloria said.

  Todd said, “You mentioned her only once in our therapy sessions, but according to your file…”

  If he flicked open that damn pen I was going to leap across the table at him.

  “I don’t have a child,” I said.

  Dr. Gloria looked over her glasses at me, the Medical Professional version of an eye roll.

  “Anymore,” I said.

  Todd pursed his lips, signaling disappointment. “I’m sorry, Lyda, I just can’t sign off on this. I think you’re trying to get out of here so you can score, and you still haven’t addressed some key issues in—”

  “I’ll take the chip.”

  He looked up at me, surprised.

  “The terms of my sentence give me the option,” I said. “All you have to do is sign. You know I’ve been a model patient.”

  “But you’re almost done here. Two more months and you’re out. If you go on the chip, that’s a mandatory year of tracking. You won’t be able to leave the province without permission.”

  “I understand that.”

  He gave me a long look. “You know they can’t be spoofed, yes? Not like the old chips. Your blood alcohol levels will be sent to us every ten seconds. Anything stronger than aspirin throws up a red flag. And any use of a controlled substance, other than those prescribed to you, gets immediately reported to the police.”

  “Any drug can and will be used against me,” I said. “Got it.”

  “Good. Because the last time I brought up the chip, you told me I could shove it up my ass.”

  “Well, it is very small.”

  He suppressed a smile. Todd enjoyed being joked with. Made him feel part of the troop. And as the least insane person on the floor (if I said so myself), I was the person he could most easily talk to. The only question was, would he be insecure enough to keep me here, just so we didn’t have to—sob—break up?

  Time to seal the deal. I looked at my feet, feigning embarrassment. “I know this may not be technically allowed after I leave, but…”

  “This room is a safe place to say anything,” Todd said.

  I looked up. “I’d like to keep in touch with you. If that’s all right.”