Coming Together: With Pride (15 page)

"God damn Father Raphe and his God damn penance," I muttered as the car droned along the empty road. The blasphemous words sent a wicked thrill that ran down my spine and straight into my cock. Still, it didn't help me shake the feeling of dread that had hung on me since the night before.

"I want you to go back to Bible Land," Father Raphe had instructed me after we were done praying. "I want you to see your mother."

I remember gaping at the vid screen with its impenetrable grille pattern. My hands and cock were still sticky with come. "You're kidding me!"

"No, I'm not. You need to see your mother."

"Why? So I can forgive her?"

"No," Father Raphe had replied. "I doubt she wants forgiveness, just as I doubt you're ready to give it, so what would be the point? But I think it's high time you realized that she no longer has any power over you, and the best way to do that is to go see her."

"I already know she doesn't have power over me anymore," I argued hotly. "That's why I'm not going. To prove that she can't force me to do something I don't want to do."

"No, the reason you're not going is because you're frightened." I could see him shaking his finger at me behind the darkened screen. "Even after all these years, you're afraid that the moment you see her, you'll become a helpless child again and be right back under her control. But that won't happen, Daniel. Oh, I expect she will say some things that will hurt you. Being rejected by one's parents is always hurtful because our parents are the people who should love us no matter what. But you're a grown man now. She can no longer control you unless you let her. It's time you realized that. It's time you faced her and took the reins of your life into your own hands."

Easier said than done
, I thought. But penance was set, and Father Raphe refused to listen to any further arguments. I had asked for it, he said, and he was right. But I still wasn't happy about it.

"God damn it," I whispered, watching the yellow-gray world slip by.

My mother's house was set deep in the heart of Bible Land, at the top of an artificial mountain. At one time, the place had been a church, the now infamous
Sermon on the Mount
, where the late great Reverend Robert Thorpe had tried unsuccessfully to convince two thousand people to leave behind a world of sin by ingesting cyanide pills. Poor Reverend Thorpe. He had been an old time Bible thumper, a former tent preacher wildly popular among the small but rabid Moral Minority, that exclusive club whose members believed that they and they alone would enter into God's Kingdom. Unfortunately for him, there was a limit to how far people would follow. Being a martyr was all well and good, but if they all died, who would be left to carry on the fight?

In the end, Reverend Thorpe bit the big one all by his lonesome while his congregation bravely stayed on to continue his work. My mother was a card carrying member of the Minority, said card having been handed down to her from her father, who had gotten it from his father. My great-grandfather had been the chief financial officer of
Sermon on the Mount
during Thorpe's reign and had prudently decided that since the good Reverend no longer needed his church, there was no reason why it should go to waste. So, the old man set up house in the place and kept it running until the day he died, at which point it passed to his son and so on down the line. Thus,
Sermon on the Mount
, along with all the hate-filled religious psycho-babble of the Minority, became my mother's birthright, and she had planned to pass it all on to me, except that I had turned out to be queer, which really fucked up her plans.

I hit the wipers to clear some of the dust off the windshield. Way, way off in the distance, I saw an ugly dark hump rise out of the hills like a big black boil on the ass of the world.

"Stop the car!" I ordered.

The hydro-car slowed to a halt. I popped the door and stepped out into a lazy swirl of dust. There it was,
Sermon on the Mount
. Just looking at the place made me want to puke. I was so going to get even with Father Raphe when I got back. I'd call his ass for Confession every night for the next two months, and I didn't care if he knew I was jerking off when we prayed. I needed something to look forward to in order to make it through this road trip to Hell. Praying with Father Raphe was pretty much the best I could hope for.

****

The hydro-car arrived at my mother's house less than an hour later. It pulled up to the big bronze gates at the base of the mountain and rolled down the window for me so I could lean out and shout at the security vid.

"Hello? Anybody home? This is Daniel Cain. I'm here to see my mother, Althea!"

The vid screen stayed blank. I sat in the front seat, tapping the dash board. Minutes crawled by like ants over my skin. Maybe Mom didn't want to see me after all. Or maybe she was already gone. Maybe I'd made the trip for nothing and should just tell the car to turn around and head home. I'd call Father Raphe up and tell him I did my best, and nobody could ask for anything more than that. I'd—

The bronze gates squealed as they swung open. My head dropped to the dash.

"Drive," I muttered to the car. "Let's get this over with."

The hydro-car puttered up the mountain, moving slowly. The road was filled with pot holes, its edges giving way to the steady encroachment of weeds and wild flowers. I opened the window and took a deep breath. The air was thick with the scent of honeysuckle and wild strawberry. Mom had really let the place go.

The road circled around the mountain seven times before finally reaching the old church at the top. I got out and looked at the hulking structure. Like the rest of the place, everything was overgrown and starting to decay. Wild ivy trailed up the walls, in some places completely covering the old stained plaz windows. Cracks riddled the faux-stone siding, where it could be seen, and the creeping flora took this as an invitation to invade the house of God. Only the stairs leading up to the huge, arching double doors were free of the entangling vines, but even they sagged with age. I was almost afraid to try the first step, for fear my foot might go straight through and wind up poking into the bowels of Hell, which I believed must surely reside beneath my mother's demesne.

"Nope, this doesn't look safe at all," I quipped to no one in particular. "I'll have to go back, tell Father Raphe I couldn't risk injuring myself going up those steps. He'll understand."

Yeah, right.

I sighed and climbed out of the car. I was about to test the steps when the church doors swung open, and I saw a face that I hadn't expected to see again in a million years.

"Hello, Daniel," a heavenly voice called to me.

"Gabriel?"

I gawked. Standing in the doorway was a creature so divine it took my breath away. He was over two meters tall with long golden hair that fell in graceful waves to his broad shoulders. His face was long and lean, with full lips that immediately brought to mind Father Raphe. In fact, there was more than a passing resemblance between the two, if you put aside the fact that one was a priest in his late forties and the other was a robot-angel.

Gabriel held out his hands and smiled down at me benignly. "Your mother feared you would not come. But I had faith."

I scowled. "You can't have faith, Gabe. Faith is for humans. You're just a walking, talking piece of junk made up to look like an angel."

"I have faith," he insisted. "It is part of my programming."

"Programming be damned." Forgetting my earlier fear, I mounted the steps, taking them two at a time. I was moving fast now. I wanted to get this over with. Dealing with my mother was one thing, but dealing with Gabriel was something I was not prepared to do.

"Must you use profanity?" the robot-angel asked with a frown.

I stepped past him, heading through the door. "As a matter of fact, yeah. If you don't like it, stay the hell away from me."

"I cannot do that, Daniel. I am your guardian angel. Your mother sent me to watch over you. I must do as she says."

"So she's still alive, I take it?"

"Yes, but you must hurry. God will soon gather her into His arms."

Gabriel moved ahead of me and led the way through the church. I followed him up several flights of stairs. He hadn't changed a bit in the last nine years. He still wore the same flowing robes of blue and gold, the same rosewood crucifix belted around his waist. He didn't have wings like real angels were supposed to have. Wings on a robot-angel wouldn't have made much sense. They weren't expected to fly, just to watch over people and make sure they behaved. Parents of the Moral Minority usually bought them to spy on the kids and to teach Bible lessons and stuff. Mom bought Gabe when I was twelve, shortly after the first time she caught me masturbating.

"This is Gabriel," she told me, introducing me to the impossibly tall, impossibly beautiful creature. I fell in love immediately. "Gabriel will make sure you don't do anything sinful, like touch yourself or say bad words."

Oh, if only I could have fallen out of love just as quick. Gabe was easy to look at but hell to live with. There wasn't any place I could go on the mountain that he couldn't follow. Not even to the bathroom, especially after the second time I got caught jerking off.

"You should not touch yourself, Daniel," he said, gently pulling my hands away from my aching cock. The bathroom walls echoed with his admonitions. "God and your mother will not be pleased."

And that's pretty much all I heard for the next six years: Don't swear, Daniel, because God and your mother will not be pleased. Don't steal Communion wine from the pantry, Daniel, because God and your mother will not be pleased. Don't draw pictures of naked men in your Bible, Daniel, because God and your mother will not be pleased. Oh, and don't stain the bed sheets at night while calling out my name, Daniel, because God and your mother will not be pleased.

That fucker Gabriel. He had to be so damned beautiful and yet still be such a complete prick. I wondered what he would think if I told him he was what finally made me realize I was gay? Not that I even knew the word gay meant anything other than 'happy' back then, but he was how I figured it out. A kid can only have so many wet dreams about another guy before he finally figures out that he's really not into girls the way God and his mother intended for him to be.

"What made you so sure I would come back?" I demanded as we climbed the stairs up to the top floor of the church. I was breathing pretty hard, trying to keep up. The building was five stories tall, with the top story having been converted to living space for the family. The place was huge, a maze of empty rooms, and yet somehow Gabriel always knew where to find me whenever I tried to sneak off.

"I just knew," he said, smiling. "God and your mother will be pleased by your return."

Christ Almighty.

The room he took me to was the largest one of all on the top floor, maybe twenty meters in length by ten meters wide. It was my mother's room, the sanctuary where she stayed closeted most of the time when she wasn't busy punishing me. The place was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves filled with Bibles and prayer books and hymnals, collected by the family over several generations. There were no fiction books to be seen, unless you thought the pre-Egalitarian Bible was fiction, in which case there was nothing but fiction in the room. There were no magazines, no newspapers, no tech manuals, no history or science or math books; just old time Bibles and devotional literature, all of it approved by the Moral Minority. In the center of this vast antediluvian library was a narrow bed with a simple wrought iron frame. A crucifix was attached to the top of the headboard and beside the bed was a small table with yet another Bible resting on it. This was the family Bible. I recognized the frayed cover even from a distance. My mother used to preach to me from it at every meal.

Two men in non-descript gray suits stood on either side of the bed. I didn't recognize them. Gabriel walked toward them and announced, "He is here."

I traipsed over, ignoring the men. All my attention was focused on the figure lying beneath the white sheet—a frail bundle of bones wrapped in papery skin, with hair so pale and sparse it looked like spider's silk draped about the scalp.