Faith Seminar

I do mass for the other infected. Every Thursday and Saturday. We don’t do Sundays. Seems like something from the Old World. The Previous. When I do mass, they come up with their scabs and their grimy eyes and their loose teeth and I bless them. Each of them knows me by a different name. Some call me Father Timothy. Some call me Father Chris. Some just call me Father. The mass is held at a church that is not my church. The priest from this church died in Wave 2, and last I heard, he was seen eating a parakeet under a bridge up near Scovie. I have seven fingers left and one is looking dodgy. I can’t answer any of your questions and I can’t grant you any kind of peace. I can do mass and you can do with the mass what you like. The spirit is no longer a slowly dying fire. Now it’s a freight train. It’s barreling along. And we’re running out of track.

This is a seminar on faith. I thank you all for coming here today. Conferences seem like the kind of thing that would have expired along with steamed milk and herd immunity, but here we are. A small herd, but a herd nonetheless. Jesus said “Those who gather in abandoned hotels and fashion nametags out of the postcards they used to sell at the hotel gift shop will inherit the earth, but will do so with one ear and barely any toes.” If that sounds blasphemous, I can assure you, I’m not having a crisis of faith. It’s just that faith is now ninety percent laughter whereas Before it was somewhere between seventy and seventy-five.

I am having a crisis of faith. I lied to you. A priest lied to you, but most of you will be dead in the next few days. Some of you might die right here at this conference. If you do, I’ll say a prayer over you, but I won’t move your body or attempt to bury you. I’m forty-eight years old, but I may as well be a hundred and ten. There is no physical strength left in my body. On the way here, a man attacked me screaming about food, which leads me to believe he would have eaten me, but as he ran towards me, another man and a small girl ran towards him and tackled him to the ground. I kept running, but I could hear the man screaming that guttural scream that the infected scream when they go from being predator to prey. My crisis of faith didn’t stay on Quarantine Day all those years ago. It started the day I saw a baby a little under a year old bite down on his mother’s neck so hard he drew blood. We didn’t think babies could be infected at first. Once we knew it was possible, it didn’t change much. An infected baby that can’t be cured. What do you do? There were suggestions. Each suggestion chipped away at my faith a little more and a little more, and now there’s just enough left to conduct a mass and attend a conference about rediscovering religion in the After Times and frankly I think this is all nonsense, but I’m here, because where else would I be? It’s going to be a hundred and thirty degrees outside tomorrow, and it’s the middle of January.

Hard to believe in Heaven when the fire’s this hot. I bit down into an apple today and it tasted like unseasoned potato shavings. Some think losing your sense of sight or hearing would cripple you. I think losing the ability to taste is the cruelest. Take my sight, but let me taste my grandmother’s tomato sauce one last time. Take my hearing, but let me take a sip of coffee. Let me send myself into my memories using only taste. Faith, when I had it, was popping a grape in my mouth and knowing it would always be a grape.

Because, you see, that was a lie.

Everything you were ever sure about was an act of faith. The very presumption that there could be an established reality was, in and of itself, even to non-believers, a belief system. Now, without it, who knows what kind of world we would have been living in. A world like this one, I guess. On the third floor of this hotel, every room is filled with seven or eight men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three. They’re all beating their chests and cutting themselves with razor blades and singing rock songs from the mid-90’s. They don’t shower and they don’t cut their hair and when one of them cries, they all mock him and scream at him and he stops crying and tries to find someone else to harass.

I don’t advise going up to the third floor.

They’re here, because they heard we were all going to congregate. They thought we were going to do Bible study and chew on communion wafers and I was going to serve you semantics about the Good Word and His Plan and that we’d be relishing in our softness. They were going to come down here and jeer at us, but when they did, all they saw were a bunch of infected people licking their lips over and over and picking at their nail beds. Chanting who knows what, but certainly not prayers. When I walked in, one of the Third Floor Boys looked me up and down and said I looked more like a swamp monster than a priest. He thought I came from a swamp.

He’s not wrong. There are all kinds of swamps.

This is the last seminar of the day. From what I’ve heard, it’s the only seminar of the day. Of the whole conference. I don’t know who put up the flyers. I don’t know who set up the folding chairs. I don’t know who got us all here. I just know that we have another hour or so before those of us who still have recognition and coherence start to chew on our own wrists. I don’t have a Bible so I can’t read from it. I can’t say a prayer, because all the ones I remember don’t seem to end correctly anymore. It’s never “Amen” anymore. It’s only ever “Please.”

“Please, please.”

That’s how all my prayers end these days.

Not with grace or wonder, but with a request for leniency.

“Just a little less.”

That’s all I pray for.

“My God, just a little less.”