4. Jaxson
4
Jaxson
I wait for the notification that Snow White has checked into her hotel room. I don’t know why I’m so stirred by her impending arrival. I’m supposed to make sure she’s not a threat to the Sovereignty. If she is a threat, I silence her by any means necessary, and then go about the rest of my life.
I ignore the voice in my head that tells me that I knew after listening to her podcast that she wasn’t a threat. I ignore the voice telling me that I’ll never just be able to go about my life again. My life irrevocably changed course the moment Snow White showed her face on video.
As soon as she checks in, I get ready to make my way to her room from the bar and longue only to see her walk in and head straight to the bar. I listen to her order a drink and put it on the tab I left open for the room for her use before making her aware of my presence.
“Taking advantage of my generosity already, I see,” I state.
She turns to me. If I thought her features were striking through the computer screen, they’re even more striking now. And God. Those lips. They really are that red naturally .
I can see her now. Me sitting in my father’s seat after he’s dead while she sits adoringly by my side. What a striking wife she’d make for me. What a striking queen priestess she’d make for me when I’m Oracle if only she weren’t so determined to be an enemy to the Sovereignty. Why does she have to be an enemy to the Sovereignty? Why does she seek to destroy the foundation of my future power?
“I thought we agreed I would call you when I was ready to start,” Snow White finally says.
I was right. She was using a voice modulator. Finally hearing her voice without any filter just adds to how captivating she is to me. She has a beautiful voice, even in her no-nonsense, mildly exasperated tone. If I had to describe it. I’d say it sounds like a gentle breeze coming off the sea.
I reply after a beat to re-center myself, “I got the notification that you’d checked in and thought why not go ahead and get started?”
“Here?” she asks
I shrug. “Why not? Your interviews are solely audio. I’m sure you have a recording device on you.”
I pointedly don’t nod to the carryon she’s pushing around with her. The carryon she could have given to the baggage handlers. There’s a variety of reasons she wouldn’t have. But based on the way she immediately came to get a drink and put it on the hotel room tab, I doubt it’s because she’s too self-conscious to take advantage of the novelties and luxuries this hotel has to offer. A little paranoid, maybe? Or maybe not paranoid. Just realistically cautious. Or maybe she just doesn’t trust me? All valid reasons .
Rather than address my statement, she says, “I was hoping we’d get to go someplace private. Editing the background out is going to be a bitch.”
“Your hotel room then?” I ask.
She visibly hesitates, clearly wary of taking a strange man into her room. As if I don’t already have a key. As if, if I wanted to, I couldn’t just wait until late at night when she’s asleep, let myself in, and have my way with her or whatever horror her brain has thought of.
But I don’t want to.
I’m only assessing if she’s a threat and neutralizing her if she is.
I haven’t wondered if those red pouty lips of hers are as soft as they look. I haven’t wondered what her hair would look like haloed around her head as I touched her most private and sensitive places. What color her nipples would be between my fingers as I pinched them. If her eyes would roll in the back of her head as she orgasmed.
I haven’t wondered any of these things at all.
Even if I had wondered, I’m not going to throw away years of disciplinary training and self-control on a whim that could spell disaster for the Sovereignty’s future and my plans for it.
I’m exaggerating. It wouldn’t be disaster. Just an inconvenience to clean up afterward.
Finally, she answers, “Fine.”
She starts to lead the way, but I grab her arm and say, “One last thing. Your name.”
“I told you. You can call me—”
“You really don’t expect me to call you Dr. Cult or Cult this entire time,” I ask. Even saying it now, I feel ridiculous .
She hesitates here too. This time, her cautiousness not only born out of wariness of me but also because she doesn’t want her identity getting out. Hence the whole anonymous podcast on cults. Hence insisting that she pay her own way here and putting the room in my own name. But there’s no reason for her not to give me her name. Even if it’s just her first name. It’s not like I can track her with just that. My people are good, but not that good.
She decides to be stubborn and says, “Yes. I expect you to call me Cult, Mr. Devine.”
“Jaxson,” I correct. Then, “Fine. I’ll just call you Snow White.”
Snow White suddenly turns on her heel to lead me to her room. But it’s only so abrupt to hide that she’s amused by the nickname and not annoyed, if I interpreted the huff of laughter she let out correctly. When we get to her room, she struggles to maneuver her purse, carryon, and drink to open the door. Her jacket and shirt shifts, giving me a glimpse of the gun holster under her clothes.
“I can hold something,” I suggest.
“I got it,” she says as she manages to wave the key in front of the door.
She’s either fiercely independent, more paranoid than I thought, or a little bit of both.
She pauses for a second or two in the entrance of the room before continuing on, which tells me that this room is more luxurious than any other hotel room she’s been in. Maybe bigger than her own home, complete with a bedroom with a king-sized bed, a marble en-suite bathroom, a living room with a marble fireplace, sturdy dark wood coffee table and leather L-shaped couch, and mini-bar, and, the best part, a gorgeous balcony.
She must agree with me about the best part being the balcony because she takes one look at it and says, “Let’s do our interview there.”
Snow White doesn’t give me the option to say no. She was already headed in that direction when she spoke.
She sets down her purse, her carryon, and her drink before she leans on the railing to take in the view. Based on the way she makes sure to keep her things in her line of sight as she does makes me believe that she’s definitely a little paranoid. Whether she’s always like this or if she’s only like this because she’s wary of me still remains to be seen. I hope it’s the latter. I hope she understands that I hold her life in my hands and not even that gun on her back could stop me.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I ask, coming to stand next to her. I add wryly, “When it’s not winter and snow hasn’t blanketed the city and gotten all dirty.”
“I always thought I’d want to move somewhere with snow,” she mutters without looking at me.
“It gets old after a while. I’d much rather be somewhere warmer.”
“Which is exactly what I remember every time I see northerners walking and driving through a virtual blizzard the same way I’d walk and drive during a severe thunderstorm,” she says. She turns to me. “A guy like you with enough money at his disposal to afford a room at a hotel to talk about his cult with an anonymous podcaster? You could move anywhere you want. Get away from it. ”
“I have responsibilities,” I state vaguely. That is usurping my father’s place as Oracle and shaping the Sovereignty in my own image.
“I’m assuming that has something to do with the Sovereignty. Which is a great segue into our interview,” she says. She must have started the recording before I followed her onto the balcony.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“The beginning.”
“We’ll be here a while if you want to start from there,” I say dryly but get ready to give the spill that’s been indoctrinated into me since I could talk. The approved and sanctioned bullshit of what the Sovereignty is, what it’s about, and what the aim is. “The Sovereignty started with the first Oracle. J—”
“No. I don’t want the sanctioned bullshit that’s on your dot org. I wanna know about you,” she says.
“I thought this interview was about the Sovereignty?”
“It is. But I like personal stories. And if the founding of the Sovereignty informs your story in some way, then we’ll talk about it.”
I pause, considering. Every time I’ve done something like this, no one has ever wanted to know my story. It’s my father’s story. His teacher’s story. The first Oracle’s story. The Sovereignty’s story. What the Sovereignty is or isn’t doing and trying to trip me into a corner and a scandal. But just me? Snow White would be the first to wonder about that.
This feels like a lot more than just my own curiosity and a meeting of providence. Clearly, I intrigue her as much as she intrigues me .
Finally, I huff. “As far as the Sovereignty is concerned, me, the individual, doesn’t matter.”
“The individual always matters. It’s the individuals who make up the c—excuse me. high-demand religion,” she says, trying to keep the mocking out of her tone but failing.
“You can call it a cult. By the strictest of definitions, it is. But that’s not a bad thing,” I say with a shrug.
“Do you want the list of incidents that demonstrate why that is absolutely a bad thing alphabetically or chronologically?” she asks.
“I think most casualties tell a more interesting story,” I reply. “But every organization and structure, cult or not, has casualties.”
Snow White shakes her head. “I’m not going to argue with you about how wildly problematic that is. Let’s get back to you.”
“You still haven’t told me where you want me to start.”
“How about we start with something like a memory or event that left the most impact on you when it comes to the Sovereignty?” she asks.
That’s easy.
“I had just turned six,” I begin. “I snuck out of bed to go get a snack because I was hungry and my mother hadn’t fed me enough. Or… well, she tried to. As much as she could get me to eat in two meals.”
“Two meals?” she asks.
“Yes. The Oracle before my father received a divine vision that children only needed to eat twice a day with no meals in between and once a day for adults. My mother was very strict about it. So I used to sneak into the kitchen to get more food,” I say dismissively. “ Anyway, I got the food, ate it in my room and hid the empty bowl in my closet, and forgot about it. Until ants found it two days later and my mother confronted me about it. So I lied. For the first time ever.”
“You lied? What about that is so memorable?”
“Because above all else, in the Sovereignty, we aren’t supposed to lie. Ever. A liar can never be a vessel or helper of the Oracle. And our god especially hated lying children. Children who began to lie young were guaranteed to be damned to eternal darkness and nothingness should they lie. They told us tales of children who lied and were killed shortly after. All kinds of anecdotes and evidence.”
“You do know that’s awful, right? All children lie. All adults lie.”
For someone who thinks I’m an evil cult leader, she sure is concerned about me. From her concern that my mother was starving me as a child. That my psyche may be damaged from being told some mostly passive force would kill me for lying. It’s especially surprising considering just five minutes ago she was mocking the idea that I might respond better to “high-demand religion” as though I were so indoctrinated and brainwashed that I couldn’t admit the Sovereignty was a cult.
If I were trying to convert her, I’d jump at the chance to use her compassion against her to convince her why the Sovereignty was the right place for her. But I’m assessing and neutralizing a threat.
It's certainly not the lie I used to convince myself that seeing Snow White in person had a purpose today.
“Either way, I was more afraid of my mother’s yard stick than eternal nothingness, so I lied. With a straight face. Even managed a few tears that it wasn’t me,” I say with a chuckle as I reminisce over it. I was so stupid and terrified. But at six, your parents’ word is like the word of the Supreme Force. “Then I said it had to be one of my father’s other children.”
“From his other wives?” Snow White asks.
“They aren’t wives. The Oracle is only allowed one wife. The others are spiritual conduits,” I correct automatically, having had the language and reasoning drilled into me since I was a child.
“You’re… going to have to explain that to me before we move on,” Snow White insists.
“My mother isn’t the Oracle’s wife, but his first spiritual conduit. A spiritual conduit receives the excess spiritual and meditative energy that one body, not even the Oracle’s, can't contain. The only way to release all that energy is through sex. Through both men and women. The same-sex intercourse being an unfortunate but necessary evil.” I internally cringe at the latter part even though I’m only parroting nearly word for word what they taught us at Sovereign University. “But even then, women are better conduits because they can manifest the excess energy into children.”
Complete nonsense, but being a supposed physical manifestation of the Supreme Force has it’s perks when you’re raised in the Sovereignty.
“So an excuse to let the Oracle have sex with who they want and when they want while still enforcing the Sovereignty’s homophobic, sexist, and outdated marriage and dating rules,” Snow White correctly assumes. “But okay. Keep going with the rest of the story. ”
“Anyway, I don’t know exactly what my mother did. But eventually, she let it go and apologized for accusing me of lying, and I waited for an eternal nothingness that didn’t come,” I mutter.
She laughs and says, “Is this the part where you tell me that the reason you weren’t killed is because your god has special plans for you and forgave you? Or that they placed your punishment on another child who was close to you?”
That’s exactly the part this is supposed to be. But I hadn’t thought that far ahead when she asked me what my most impactful memory is as it relates to the Sovereignty. I just gave her the truth. Ultimately, without context, the story is harmless. Just the story of a child getting away with mischief. Except it’s not. And not for the reason that Snow White thinks.
I’m faced with two choices.
The first is to go with her assumption. To tell her that’s exactly what happened. Some other poor child died days later because my father prayed and meditated for forgiveness to spare his son. It’s what she expects. It’s what’s expected of me. We’ll then spend the rest of the day together. Finish this interview. And I’ll prove all her assumptions correct. She’ll see me the same way I see my father. A delusional man with a lot of power and with, thankfully, no clue how to use it. She’ll spend the rest of the weekend here, racking up an incredible bill on the open tab, go home, probably never post this interview because it’s not the type of story she platforms, and I’ll never see her again.
The second option is telling her the truth. The truth, which is counterproductive to the goal of making sure she’s not a threat. An answer on record that would make her the exact threat I was told to make sure she’s not. But also, it’s an answer that would spark her curiosity, prove her wrong, and, when she goes home, have her thinking about me the same way I’m going to be thinking about her after all this. The same way I’ve thought about her since I laid eyes on her image.
There’s only one choice.
On a good day, I’m cruel. A sadist. A manipulative liar. But what I’m not is delusional. What I’m not is the creepy old man who donated the sperm to make me. I am smarter than that. I am more intelligent than that. I am more evil than that.
I want to make sure that Snow White knows it.
“No,” I say. “That’s the end. I waited for a punishment I never got because, clearly, I’m still here.”
Snow White is silent, and as I look out onto the city, the city I was born and raised in, I feel those almond-shaped dark eyes on me. Contemplating me.
“So what’s the punchline?” she asks.
“The punchline?”
“The part where you tell me how this all solidified your faith. The part where you tell me the story was right and you never lied again.”
I chuckle. “No. This is the part where I tell you that after I realized I could get away with lying once, I kept doing it. And I’m still here.”
“So what are you saying?”
“You’re smart. What do you think I’m saying?” I ask .
She frowns. “I think you’ve all but admitted that you know the Sovereignty and everything you’ve been taught to believe in is a sham. But that can’t be true.”
I grab her drink off the table. Untouched since she began interviewing me. I hand it to her because she’s about to need it.
“But it can be true. Because it is a sham,” I finally answer. “All of it. It’s all made up lies.”