"The Chute"

But I have a white stone with a new name written on the stone, the word which no one knows except him who receives it.
– Hal Duncan, from his work “violent eRa”

I sit with Stephen on the beach, holding his stone in my hand, the white stone now bloodied and Stephen unconscious on the sand beside me. It feels as though I have been here a thousand times before, in a thousand different guises: a nude unconscious girl and her drugged drink in my class-ringed hand; an unconscious war veteran and in my hand the vintage grenade which made him cry in hoarse terror as vicious flashbacks cracked his whittled mind. A red-robed wizard on a field of death, staring up into a shaft of his God’s unwavering light, defending the choice to cut down His chosen ones. The “why” becomes the same for each of these seething visions—to assert the basest freedom by bucking the laws of a narrative world. To spit in the eye of my captor.

Up the beach an out-of-shape woman in a heavy coat is running for her car, looking over her shoulder to witness the killer’s face one more time, the better perhaps to give a description over the phone when she calls the authorities. Her little dog keeps up easily, thinking it all a game, and maybe it is. Celestial fingers could even now be checking off this series of events, an invisible smile turned up at the corners in pleasure at seeing the narrative sequence fulfilled, but ah… fuck it. I really think not—I think this time I’ve really jumped the rails; tied them into Tex Avery knots, like bows on a Christmas package, and right now His oh-so-omnipotent fingers are busily fussing with the strands, trying to figure out where to go with me next. He trusted me; I was one of his creations. Every second he spends fiddling with the briar I have wrought allows me another few free lungfulls of air on this chilly autumn beach, a few unregulated thoughts and the peace that comes with them. These passing minutes where He casts about for a plot are my green garden of leisure, and if Stephen had to die for them, well, call it my cost of rewriting.

Have you considered… that God does not merely wish us to execute His will, but that He utterly depends upon it? There are strange maroon amoebas in the sand between Stephen and I where the blood splatters have soaked up the silicate granules. His half-naked chest flares and gutters in rapid, shallow blue breaths. His veins stand out strongly beneath his pale white skin. I turn his stone over, the one he handed to me moments ago, the same one I used to bludgeon his skull without a word of explanation. All my life these words have been haunting my existence, pinned to me by my behavior: kind, loving, friendly, gentle, trustworthy, honest, sincere. These adjectival spectres spoke to me over time, and I realized that in order to shake His watchful gaze I would need to move beyond every single one of them. To dodge His omniscience I could not be fully aware of this plan, yet it lived inside me for years, until a few minutes ago on this beach. Stephen handed me that stone and I knew—I knew—in this perfect act of trust I would find my opening.

“Here, Adam—you’ll like this one,” I heard his sweet voice say. “Keep it for your collection.”

“Thanks,” I replied. Gently. Friendly. Trustworthy. And in the space of a few synaptic firings I had wheeled about and brought the solid object smashing against his temple. I felt the giving flesh and in the same instant I felt the shocked giving way of divine providence. Stephen fell and God dropped me in horror. With His cosmic stupefaction I came loose upon the torrent of reality and for the first time in my young life took a breath that was not by design. Or so I thought. So surely I thought.

But now… now I sit here in the sound of surf, turning over this chalk-white artifact, Stephen’s stone, perfectly smooth and fitted to my palm, and I see carved into the underside a word, engraved upon it somehow, one word that causes my whole body to quake until the stone falls from my hand and shatters a blood amoeba. Like a painter’s signature, like a trademark stamp, like the cordite cough marking a pistol’s ejaculatory revelation, I witness the word on the back of the stone and feel the jailor’s cosmic fingers twist an eternal key in the lock: BETRAYER, it says. Nothing left to chance.