There Unconscious Mental States and Processes, For Example, How This Very Second You Are Symantically and Syntactically Processing This Title
I’m almost fully covered in aluminum foil by the time
the police are pounding on my door.
I try to listen to what they are saying. “Open your door for
Christ; four out of five doctors recommend it!”
I can’t get any privacy since the day I found Jesus. Before
that, I was just a regular guy trying to avoid human contact like
any other decent God-fearing individual.
The day in question, I was cowering. Cowering is my mode of movement.
I cower back and forth from my apartment cubicle and my work cubicle
daily. I cower from bosses and supervisors and coworkers and files
and anything else that seems to slowly destroy me.
So: the day in question, like every day in question, I was cowering,
and Jesus was slouched against the door of my apartment, wearing a
ragged trench coat and an “I’m with stupid” hat.
He kept saying he didn’t know why he came back. He begged me
for sanctuary. What am I supposed to tell the Son of God?
The cops are still pounding, still yelling to Jesus and other deities
representing failed cultures.
“He’s already in here! I suggest you return hitherto.
I don’t need your four out of five doctors. Even if I was sick,
your clinic couldn’t cure something as conspiratorial as the
common cold!”
The cops can’t hear what I’m saying, because the television
is sitting behind a bullhorn in front of a microphone plugged into
a 1200-watt amp attached to 15-inch subwoofers placed strategically
across my apartment.
For security purposes.
JC says I’m being over cautious, that nobody knows where he
is. I say, “Tell that to the radio antennae in my left nostril.”
The glued-and-nailed board keeping the door shut is now being loosened
from its grip. I’m too busy wrapping more foil around my testicles
to notice. I’ve been learning from JC. I don’t have to
worry about cubicles and unauthorized wireless taps and false prophets
and true prophets and nuclear wars and biochemical warfare and things
going on in my mind and other people’s minds.
Everything is simple and miraculous, like turning water into wine,
which he hasn’t stopped doing in my bathtub since he got here.
Jesus knows what happens next isn’t pretty. Maybe that’s
why nobody wants to listen to him. Everyone’s too afraid to
lose what they believe because moving on means too much sacrifice,
too many readjustments to the stitch work of the social fabric.
I meditate on the television god promoting wisdom:
“Ask your doctor why you should use Cialis.”
“You’re a Cialis,” I say to Jesus, who’s on
the couch, feet propped on a speaker. “You called the fuckin’
cops, JC?”
He smiles in that holier-than-thou way. What a bastard. It’s
his fault I’m in this mess, why my nose is tapped. He claims
he’s been crashing with me since his return because “everyone
else is crazy.”
I try to tell him times have changed, he just asks for more Xanax.
He knows he can’t change people’s minds, but this time
he doesn’t want to be crucified.
Tonight, he told me I could transubstantiate back to heaven with him,
hence the aluminum foil and speakers. We don’t want anyone following
us, but in a world of six trillion people, there’s bound to
be tag-a-longs.
The door bursts open.
I look to JC. “What would you do now?”