Page 57 of On Your Knees

The sermon is free to entice new viewers, but at the end, it will cut off with prompts for viewers to subscribe to access the pastor’s post-sermon interviews and chats and all the other extra content. The live bands. The reality TV access to the Castle family dinner.

Fortunately, that shit didn’t begin until after Paul’s death, when Ruby had to get creative to retain subscribers. By then, I’d been sent away to boarding school.

I think Ruby was glad to send me away. She never liked having me in the spotlight with Paul. I’m an ugly reminder of the children she couldn’t have. I’m an ugly reminder of other things too.

I’m sure this moment is sickening her as much as it’s sickening me. But that sickness is always with me. This is only a flare in a chronic disease.

Eventually, the lights dim.

The crowd quiets to a murmur.

Footsteps ring out in a measured tread across the darkened stage. The figure is shadowy in the track lighting. Silence falls when he reaches the lectern, four perfect heartbeats of it. Then a spotlight blazes on, revealing Paul’s nephew, Peter.

The last time I saw Peter was at a family dinner the week before I murdered Paul. He was scrawny then and just starting to get pimples. We were always seated next to each other, and he always found some moment to whisper some shit to me when no one else could hear. His favorite subject was my mother, who was in Hell, he said, because she killed herself.

I wish I would’ve hit him. Maybe if I’d unleashed some of my anger on him instead of locking it up, I wouldn’t have stabbed Paul six times.

“Sin,” Peter begins, “cannot be hidden from God. What use, then, to bury it inside yourself and pretend it isn’t there? God is not fooled, and you have made it impossible for the Holy Blood to cleanse you. So draw it up now, into your mind. See it, as God sees it. Know it. You cannot prosper until you are cleansed.” Peter allows a moment of gravid silence as his eyes sweep across the congregation. His gaze settles on me for a moment then he looks to one of the cameras and delivers the High Castle line: “Praise Him that you are here.”

Peter drops his head in practiced reverence as the congregation echoes, “Praise Him.”

I do fine for a solid twenty minutes, long enough that I think I’m going to make it, long enough that I’m not even sure what triggers me. I’m not actively registering the words. I’m not really even here, not in the present. There are so many layered pieces, so many places in this room that I’ve been. I see from a dozen vantage points. The choir, where I used to sing. The pulpit even, where sometimes Paul brought me to stand beside him as he spoke about good works.

I was Paul’s good work. My adoption was the proof of his charity and his commitment to bringing people to God.

But I was also his sin, and he was mine.

He kissed me there at the pulpit once, when I was eleven and it was just us here on a Saturday night, rehearsing. He said he would help me repent later, for tempting him.

That was the first night I spent in the cellar of the Castle mansion, when Paul was still on his knees beside me instead of behind me, when he was still fighting the Devil.

It was another year before he started fucking me.

I have no recollection of standing up. All I know is that I’m on my feet and Ruby is hissing at me to sit down. When she grabs my hand, my whole body convulses. I yank free, and my feet start moving. They carry me up the steps, past the murmuring, shifting crowd, past all the cameras. The ushers sway in front of the doors like they’re going to stop me, but they change their minds and skitter back as I fling open the double doors.

I don’t know why I don’t simply walk out of the building. I could. The exit is right in front of me. But I find myself walking through the atrium in some kind of fugue state. I’m not really feeling anything. I’m not even fully in my body as I walk past Paul, immortalized in gold. I’m so detached that I realize I’m moving toward the bathroom before I’m even aware of the nausea rolling up inside my gut.

I make it.

Out of habit, I even save my tie as I throw up into the pristine toilet. I’ve thrown up here before, plenty of times.

When it’s over, when there’s nothing inside me but an empty twisting, I flush away the sickness. Then I scoot back and back and back until I find the wall. My phone starts vibrating in my jacket pocket. I feel it, vaguely, through the numbness. I can’t make my hands work now, so I don’t check it or even silence it. I just let it buzz until it stops.

I don’t close my eyes because I know what’s behind my closed lids. Instead, I let them unfocus. I let everything unfocus until all that exists is the vague, numb grayness that filled me that night when I was sitting naked on the floor in his blood.

NINETEEN

Levi

My knee is bouncing as the train finally starts moving through the subway again. One more stop. I’m still watching the High Castle Church broadcast, just in case there’s some further sign of Ethan. I know there’s some chance that he’s headed home and that I could end up missing him, but I saw his face when he got up from his seat. They zoomed in on it. He was in shock. He wasn’t focused enough to escape. He was upset. Like yesterday but worse.

I felt the feelings deep in my body as I watched him, and I know that what he needed was a small, safe space.

I wish I had Patrick’s number, but I don’t. I only have Ethan’s number, and he wouldn’t answer. But I’m almost there.

The sermon is ending as the train reaches my stop. I’m sitting by the doors, so I pop up and dart out ahead of the other passengers. I race across the platform, darting around people, and bolt up the concrete steps to the sidewalk.

I hesitate for just a second because I don’t know this part of the city, then I spot a street sign and figure out which way to run.