Salvation

“The Messiah himself speaks through me, you must believe the end is coming. We must all be ready, for he is ready to receive us,” my father’s voice boomed from the living room, waking me up two hours before I had to be up for school on the day of my physics final. He was actually right in a way.

I have been waiting for enough time to pass to be able to tell this story. As the years have gone on and I have aged, I have spent more and more time worrying about any of my father’s followers who might still be alive, and how they were affected by the way things turned out. My therapist, despite being one of the only people in my life I have fully trusted, thinks I am doing this to unburden my own conscience and has been unable to understand that I truly have never held any regret in my heart for what I did, only for the unknowable collateral damage.

My childhood before age 10, like many, is not a clear linear timeline in my memory but instead a series of disjointed flashes into the past. The snap of the garage door beginning to open to admit my father’s Mercedes, and my luminous angel mother rushing me to my room before he could walk in, reeking of liquor in his rumpled suit…. Moving to a bigger house farther up the canyon because my father had gotten a promotion but bawling my eyes out because I would have to leave my elementary school friends down in the valley…. The noise of shattering dishes and my mother’s tears, followed by my father bellowing to Luisa to come sweep them up as his heavy footsteps stormed out the front door…. The worst day of all of it, the day my father came to pick me up from school in the middle of the day, sober with red-rimmed eyes, to tell me that my mother had gotten very sick very quickly and despite the best medical care in the world, had died that morning. It was two days after my ninth birthday. The most important moments in my life have always been on multiples of nine.

After losing my mother, everything in the house changed. I was still fed and clothed and sheltered, by his money and by Luisa, but never again was I loved. I tiptoed around my father, wary of being the target of his drunken rage now that my mother wasn’t around to shield me, but I never smelled the sweet rank scent of whiskey on his breath again. After a few months, he sat me down on the couch one Thursday evening, and started talking to me about someone named the Messiah. We had never been a religious family – my mother was Italian Catholic, but only culturally, and my father had been raised Southern Baptist but had shed those “country beliefs” when he moved to Los Angeles from Alabama in his 20s – but I understood this generally had something to do with church. 

He started bringing me to services in a large white building which were surprisingly fun than the long, boring speeches or Sabbath fasts my friends occasionally mentioned sitting through. There was singing, wild unchoreographed writhing, and frequent nonsensical wailing. I sat quietly, which seemed to be acceptable as well. I alternated thinking about baseball or school or what Luisa had made for dinner and being entranced with the spectacle surrounding me. The strangest part of it all was that after a year of sitting quietly next to me, my father started participated in the unusual noises and gyrations and moved further towards the front. This move coincided with him talking to me more at home, both in general and specifically about my “relationship with our Savior”. I never had any idea what to say, but I think he chalked my lack of excitement up to my generally awkward disposition. I was much happier that he was praying for my soul constantly than drinking and throwing glasses, so things were weird but stable for a while.

The summer before I started high school, he sat me down for another big talk. He discussed “being called” and “being needed by the nonbelievers” and started harping on me to “give myself over to salvation”. I finally agreed, mostly because I was tired of talking about it, and because I didn’t realize this involved a public near-drowning officiated by him in a white robe and three similarly-dressed middle aged men. Fortunately, my baserunning conditioning helped me survive that experience. As I became a teenager and wanted to do things on Sunday morning besides spend 3 hours listening to psychotic wailing, things became more tense with my father. He had ascended to a high position in the church, and eventually quit his actual job to devote all of his energy and attention to his ministry. He fired Luisa for being “a filthy sinner”, and started having groups of men and women over to our house late into the night and on the weekends. He also became paranoid and suspicious about what I was learning at school, encouraging me to stay home so that he could teach me instead. He would go on hour-long rants about the coming “end of days” and the importance of making sure I would be taken care of for eternity. Sometimes he spoke to me calmly, almost like a peer seeking advice, about how he feared for all of his brothers and sisters who did not agree that the world as we knew it would soon end.  In these candid moments, he talked about discord with the large congregation, and his frustration with not being believed about what he knew to be true. 

One of the final straws came the spring of my junior year of high school when he made me quit the baseball team, the only reliable non-school excuse I had left to be out of the house and away from his friends and ranting. His personality had evolved to the point where I wished for the alcoholic version of him instead, because at least that father would explode for an hour or two then pass out for at least eight hours. I was old enough to not need very much in the way of parenting but was increasing left to fend for myself for dinner as he ate less and less. He never discussed our personal finances with me, assuring me that soon he and I would be free of these petty earthly worries, expressing pity for the people he knew who continued to stive to buy cars and purses and clothes they would soon have no use for. It was clear we were running out of money. 

Things got so bad with him that I considered leaving but he was long estranged from his family, and I hadn’t stayed in touch with any of my mother’s family. I had no money of my own because I wasn’t allowed to work and held onto hope of walking onto a college baseball team so knew I needed to graduate high school. He escalated in his talk of the coming rapture, and I developed a plan for my eighteenth birthday.

My birthday passed unacknowledged by him, which at that point was not surprising. He had three women over for hours, and if I hadn’t been so anxious I would have fallen asleep to their voices like I usually did. Finally, around 2am, they left. I waited another hour to be sure he would be asleep and tiptoed into his room. His face was peaceful in sleep, and I paused for a moment. The physical resemblance between us was stronger now than ever, and I had a transient sensation of looking in a mirror at my own sleeping face. I had been craving the freedom from his psychosis and the entreaties of his followers, and I knew I had to proceed. 

“I’m sorry Dad,” I whispered, as I drew the freshly sharpened knife from behind my back in my gloved right hand. With my left hand I pulled the adjacent pillow over his face a millisecond before passing the knife in my right hand through his trachea. I turned away while he bucked and gurgled.  When I no longer heard any air moving, I turned back to see his body still. In stunned disbelief that it had been so easy, I stumbled into the bathroom in a daze. I wiped the handle of the knife off with a hand towel and crept back into his bedroom to place it into his left hand, wrapping his fingers around the black handle. 

I would discover him in a few hours when I got up for school. His world had ended and therefore I would be saved.