Chapter Six. Jonah
CHAPTER
SIX
Jonah
The music died down and the camera swept over thousands of worshipers before focusing on the preacher. He was a tall man, or at least the way he was being filmed made him seem tall, and he welcomed us to the presence of the Father with a passion and an authority I knew from childhood.
“Oh, my friends,” he was saying from the screen. “Oh, my many, many friends, are you ready to praise?”
A cry of yes went up from the crowd on the screen, echoed from the pews in front of me.
I echoed it with them, because when the call goes up, you respond.
And as always, when I responded, I felt that sense of connection and isolation all at once, of belonging to something but not really knowing what my place in that something was meant to be.
Often, when I sit in a church or watch broadcast masses from the Golden City, I wonder how many of the other parishioners feel the same as me. And I can never tell which thought scares me most: that all of them do, or none of them.
“Remember, friends,” the preacher continued, “the Father teaches that whatever you give unto him, he will return unto you tenfold, and you can begin giving unto him right now at the low, low starting price of nineteen ninety-five per standard month. Friends, there is no investment better than righteousness; there is nothing the Father cannot give, and he will give it to you for ten cents on the dollar.”
A record of offerings began scrolling up the screen, with names and prayers and values attached. None from our own chapel, of course, those were still winging their way across the interwell gulf at the inviolable speed limit of the universe.
Services always began with collection, and the mark of a good preacher was how well he gave the faithful the opportunity to demonstrate their faith and thereby maximize the opportunities for the Father to reward them tenfold.
For what greater good could there be than giving the poor and the helpless a means to decuple their money?
Which they surely would. Any minute now.
And although I speak like a bitter ex-believer, I made my contribution with the rest. Because sometimes a little hope is worth the price.
“The lesson today,” the minister said, when the offerings had slowed to a trickle, “comes from the Book of Jonah. And like always, friends, when you think of the Testament I want you to think of Old Earth, about how that ancient Eden was lost to sin and perdition, how it has now become a nest of serpents and cannibals—”
My thoughts went back to Q. I didn’t think she was a cannibal. Then again I’m not sure how I’d know unless she actually tried to eat me. And it’s testimony to the hold my not-quite-former religion still had on me that I had those thoughts without my mind drifting once to oral sex.
The minister was recounting the story now.
How in a place called Joppa the Father had called Jonah to go to a place called Nineveh, and how Jonah had tried to flee from the calling.
How the Father had sent storms to harry him.
How Jonah had been cast overboard and swallowed by a whale.
And then, most bizarrely of all, how there’d been this bit with a gourd and then the whole thing had ended incredibly abruptly with no real resolution.
You might be thinking to yourself that it was a mighty coincidence, my happening to stumble upon a preacher telling the story of a man swallowed by a gigantic aquatic beast just as I was about to go hunting for Leviathans myself.
Would you believe me if I said it never occurred to me at the time, even though I had voyages and monsters very much on my mind?
The truth is that I’ve always identified with Jonah, but the Leviathan was never the part of his story that spoke to me.
It was always the flight, the desperate need to escape a fate he’d been told was inevitable.
So it wasn’t really the creature that I thought of in that moment, but the man.
Willing to run and hide and lie and cheat to get out from under the Father’s shadow.
The words of the sermon washed over me, and I tried to take comfort in the familiarity. Except not all familiar things are comforting.
“And that, friends, is the real lesson of Jonah,” the preacher concluded. “You know, people always ask me, they ask me what that last verse, the very last verse means. Because it seems like the Father leaves us and leaves Jonah—if you’ll pardon some salty language—in a heck of a funny place.”
That much was true. And I’d always liked that about the story. Life, in my experience, doesn’t end neatly. It just ends.
“This is the last thing the Father says. He says: Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”
I shut my eyes and tried to be saved. It never worked.
“What’s he saying there, friends? He’s saying to Jonah, he’s saying to Jonah, Why’re you sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, when I’m trying to give you so much more?
He’s saying Why’re you—and again I’m sorry for my ungodly speech—why’re you bitching about some plant when there’s a city full of people, full of cows, full of opportunity that I’m trying to guide you to.
He’s saying Son, get off your butt and go get you them cattle. ”
As far as I understood, that was orthodoxy. Plutonian orthodoxy at least. It had never quite sat right with me, but I’d never been able to work out why. Then again, that was true of a lot of things.
“Because, friends, that’s what the Father wants for you. He wants you to be happy. He wants you to be free. He wants you to get those cows. To get that promotion. To get that house on Ganymede. To get that private ship. But he can’t give it to you if you close your heart to him.
“Friends, I’m going to show you how to open your hearts now—”
The subscription details popped back up on the screen and the minister began to lead those members of the congregation with the means in premium prayer.
I tipped a nominal amount for the betterment of my immortal soul and, trying not to draw the eye or the judgment of the other celebrants, I slipped out the way I’d come in.
I always felt after church the way I sometimes felt after sex: wishing it had been more, not knowing why I expected it to be. I swallowed the hollowness and set back out into the city, hoping for better fortune.