On the Run with Jesus' Son

I was rescued from purgatory by Jack, the Son of the Son of God.

After I was murdered by St. Peter's henchmen, I reincarnated into purgatory, where I spent twenty-three years living the life of a medieval peasant laborer. Jack saved me by killing me again, causing me to resurrect directly onto his airship. Now I was back in my original body, but I still had all my memories from that second life.

And all my feelings.

But what's done was done, so like any good man, I shoved those feelings deep down, to be dealt with later. Maybe.

"Welcome to the Eagle's Wing!" Jack said, showing me around the airship. "Designed by heaven's top engineers. You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get my hands on it. It's only capable of atmosplanic travel, nowhere near as fast as a flying saucer, but it's got a cloaking device and a strong Network connection, and it will keep us off Peter's radar while we figure out what to do next."

The interior of the Eagle's Wing was made of a smooth material called sacracement that somehow managed to be incredibly easy to clean without being slippery. It was so brilliantly white that every edge needed to be outlined with a blue stripe to help you see it.

There was a cockpit up front, but the ship seemed to fly itself. A long hallway ran from the cockpit to the back of the ship, with cabins on either side. There was an observation lounge in the middle of the ship with a window stretching like a canopy overhead from one side to the other, giving the feeling of an open deck.

Instead of a kitchen, the ship had a dining room with display cases that contained a wide variety of gourmet foods and desserts.

"The ship uses a replicator to generate food," Jack explained, "but it needs an original to make a copy, so everything you see is suspended in a preservation field. Give it an original, though, and this one replicator alone could feed a crowd of four or five thousand!"

At the back of the ship was the Networking Chapel. The Network itself was wireless, consisting of direct psychic connections between minds. This meant that going online basically looked and felt a lot like prayer. The room was dimly lit and had only a pew and a table. Jack called the table an "apocalyptic display," but it looked a heck of a lot like an altar to me.

"So," Jack said when the tour was finished, "want to go smoke up?"

I was struck by the realization that I had not gotten high in over two decades. I didn't think marijuana even existed in purgatory. Even if it did, though, the kind of person I'd been there wouldn't have smoked any. That is to say, the kind of person I'd been about an hour ago.

"Yeah," I sighed, "I think it might help."

The dining room also had a decent selection of weed, so we replicated ourselves an ounce of Genuine Illinois Homegrown Blueberry and headed for the observation lounge. I coughed for a couple minutes after taking my first hit, but then quickly remembered how good it felt as the divinely inspired couch locked me in.

We were flying over a jungle at that moment, with ziggurats jutting out through the treetops. In the distance, the setting sun cast gradients of pink and orange over towering clouds.

"Wait, how can the sun set if the earth is flat and extends infinitely in every direction?" I asked Jack.

"I'm not exactly sure," Jack said. "Something about light triflecting off the aetheric waves? I'm not a cosmologist, dude."

I supposed I didn't have to understand it to enjoy it. My body grew heavy with exhaustion as everything I'd just been through caught up with me. As I began to fade, I felt Jack put his arm around me. I curled up against him and fell asleep.

Days passed, and we continued our flight over the unending expanse of Atlantis. We didn't need to stop and refuel, because the Eagle's Wing was powered by God. Landing would risk Peter tracking us down, anyway.

St. Peter had spent two millennia in a twisted attempt to unify all the great stories of the world and all the discoveries of science into one totalizing ideology he called the Canon. And according to this philosophical frankenstein, death would be conquered entirely if Jack cast himself into the legendary Lake of Fire. This would prevent Jack from ever resurrecting again, utterly destroying his soul, but Peter considered it worth the price. We did not. Now that Jack had rescued me, he could turn his attention to stopping Peter.

Jack reached out to every person, daemon or idol he could trust to find out everything they knew about Peter's plans. It turned out we weren't flying aimlessly, we were flying into comm range.

"You can't just instantaneously communicate anywhere," Jack explained. "The Network is decentralized. It's a chain of messages being sent from one router to another. It takes time, and sometimes there's no route from where you're at, especially if you don't want your messages traced. Some idols have larger ranges than others, but you've always got to be in range if you want to establish comm union. It's pretty much an ironclad law of nature, you can't be everywhere at once."

"But what about your Grandpa?" I asked.

"It's not easy to explain," Jack said, "but it's like, Grandpa isn't everywhere at once, Grandpa is everywhere at once, if that makes sense. It doesn't mean the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing. Spacetime's gonna spacetime."

As always, Jack insisted it was all just technology, but from my vantage point, it looked like he spent his every waking hour praying in front of an empty altar.

Which meant I had nothing to do.

I replicated pounds of Illinois Blueberry. We passed over painted deserts, crystal mountains, truffula forests and other utterly alien landscapes. There was a time in my life when I would have considered that observation lounge itself to be heaven, content to get baked and take in a different view each day. As the weeks passed, I realized that time of my life was never coming back.

I convinced Jack to at least let me listen in on his conversations.

"I'll need to install a display adapter in you," he said, "but it will give me a chance to update your firewall. Get on your knees."

This was only the second time I'd ever downloaded anything from the Network, but I knew what to expect this time, which kind of took the edge off the whole experience. I kneeled, and a pentecostal flame flickered above my head.

SANCTUS SPIRITUS!

SANCTUS SPIRITUS!

Software update complete.

The display adapter allowed me to see what Jack was seeing on the altar. All sorts of different beings and creatures would appear to be standing right there. Nobody needed to know I was there, so I kept my mouth shut and just listened and watched.

I never really noticed until then that the translation software in my head had not only been altering the words I heard, but also the lip movements I saw. Over time, I had stopped hearing native languages completely, and it had gotten to the point where it just seemed like everyone I met spoke English.

I had a pretty good understanding of how perception works, having spent years pharmacologically breaking my own. I knew that we actually perceive very little about our surroundings, with the brain stitching together the disparate bits into a continuous conception of the world around us. This is, for instance, how you can have a blind spot in your vision without constantly being aware that it's there—your mind fills in the details it expects. It can be a lot of fun playing around with this effect when you're high.

So as I sat there quietly listening to Jack, I tried to look past my brain's handiwork to hear and see the languages actually being spoken. This was mildly entertaining, right up until the day that Jack was talking to some kind of humanoid insect. Jack dislocated his jaw in order to properly pronounce the creature's name, and the body horror put me off the eavesdropping endeavor entirely.

Sometimes it's better not to see what's actually there.

When I slept, I dreamed of my wife and children from my life in purgatory. Ex-wife? Hannah was my faithful companion for years, and I would always love her, but those feelings were already starting to fade into memories. I dreamed that we were fighting, I'm not sure over what. We never actually fought much. As a man, I was the one to make all the decisions for the family—that's just how things worked there. And when we had problems, life was too difficult to spend time placing blame. But in my dream, I yelled that I would happily trade her for a man, and she threw a ladle at me and screamed at me to leave. When I woke up, I was alone in my cabin. I wasn't sure if I really missed her, or if I just hated waking up alone.

I could still remember having the strength and vigor of someone who dug ditches for a living. Now I just felt fat. I grew annoyed that the dining hall didn't have any chicken breast and broccoli to replicate. I'd never paid much attention in gym class, so the only actual exercises I knew were sit-ups, jumping jacks and running. God help me, I wished the ship at least had a bench press. But the body I had returned to wasn't up for any of that, anyway, so I ended up just pacing back and forth in the ship's long hallway.

Most of my family and friends from my first life were probably still out there, possibly including my parents. The afterlife wasn't some other dimension, just another physical place in the world. I could seek out any of them. But, they all believed I'd been dead for decades. Which I realized I had been, and still technically was. I wasn't even sure if I was allowed to return to the globe. Presumably, not everyone could. Whatever was coming next, I knew it was irrevocably severed from everything I had known before. Except Jack.

I certainly couldn't hate him for that. I...

I was pacing the hall one day when Jack came out of the Chapel with a look of frustration on his face, stomping right past me and into the cockpit.

"Dude, what's up?" I asked, following him. He was sitting in the pilot's seat, entering coordinates into the control panel.

"Nobody knows a damned thing," he scowled. "Everyone insists the Lake of Fire is made up, and Peter is probably just insane. There's one more idol I can ask. I really didn't want to ask her, but she's my last possible lead."

"Who's that?" I asked.

"The Weaver of Fate," Jack said ominously.

Yeah, that didn't sound good.

"It's going to take a couple days to get there," he said, spinning his chair to face me. "Let's go get stoned."

For the next couple days, that's all we did. We had twenty-three years to catch up on, after all, so we smoked, shared stories and laughed. The dining room had originals for all the best munchies. Jack pointed out landmarks as we passed them. We played video games on the altar. And I finally started to feel like myself again.

There's no doubt I learned a lot in purgatory—diligence, a solid work ethic, the value of a strong body, and the satisfaction to be found in supporting others. But there's also a lot to be said for a life of mild hedonism, just spending the day getting toasted, absorbing the beauty of the world and relying on God to provide. In any case, though, this was what I had been missing. This was what made anything else worth doing. Spending time with a friend.

You've got to party while the groom is at the wedding.

Jack giggled, ran to his cabin and came back bearing a four-foot-long bong.

"I call it the Steamroller!" he said with a grin.

We nearly killed ourselves with that thing, but it got the job done. We sat on the couch watching the sun rise into a sky cloaked with clouds, over an ocean larger than the globe. We were stoned off our gourds, and for the first time in decades, I was truly at peace.

"Hey, dude," I said, pausing until he was looking me in the eye. "Thank you for rescuing me from purgatory."

"Well, yeah," he smirked, "of course I was going to come get you, I..."

He blushed.

"I missed you."

"I...didn't remember you," I admitted. "I'm a little bit glad I didn't, though, because it would've been a lot harder to be there if I did. So, thank you for remembering me, and thank you for saving me. I should have said that the day I got back, and I'm sorry I didn't."

"I mean, it was purgatory, not hell," Jack said. "It had its good parts. That's kind of the point. I get why you needed time to process things."

We kept looking each other in the eyes.

I wanted it to last forever, but of course it couldn't. Though if I had known this was our last time getting high together, there's one more thing I would have said.

A flame appeared over Jack's head, and his expression fell.

"We're here."

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Next: Facing Fate with Jesus' Son

Doing Drugs with Jesus’ Son is always free.