Pale Fragments

of God

"As a kid I would listen to him stay up late through the thin walls separating our rooms,"  Anders will say, crackling in front of a fire with white robes swaddling him. The Robot sits across the intermediary flame. They have been sitting here for the last five hours after he surprisingly washed ashore to an uninhabited island.

His brother Xadrin had come up.

"He would watch comedy specials and R rated movies and listen to music that I had never heard before at Stake dances. R rated is bad in Mormonism. You know this, I know. At first, it made sense to me...the sounds came from my closet, and that's one place the monsters hang out. I stopped fuming under my pillows once I realized some things: I am not a child anymore; I could just go and get some ear plugs or listen to music; I was punishing myself with lack of sleep for what I deemed his unabashed sinfulness; and I enjoyed doing so. Righteous anger feels good."

"Oh, you have no idea how good it can feel," says the Robot.

"I can imagine."

"Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime."

"You may have mentioned it at some point, it kinda sounds familiar. But my memory isn't the best."

"Mine is. I haven't told it to you before. Anyways, you were saying?"

"And then I realized I liked staying up late and listening. Even the bits I heard were more interesting than The Book of Mormon. Well, I accepted it slowly. First I told myself it was because I couldn't sleep with a pillow on my head; it was too hot, and I like sleeping with two pillows."

"It's better for your neck."

"You have no idea how much better zero gravity feels on--never mind."

"Continue with your memory immediately and I won't magnify your humilia--"

"Okay, um, yeah, well. Well, then I became suspicious that it was Satan making me think that I was too hot, and did I really need two pillows? If I did, I could've gotten another. But I just went back under, and still couldn't sleep because, yeah, it was hot. I tried listening to music, but I can't fall asleep when there's something engaging happening. It wakes me up."

"You're listening to the wrong music, what do you listen to when you go to sleep?"

"The Strokes--"

"Are you fucking..? That's at the top of your sleeping playlist, The Strokes?"

"Well, and Chopin."

"Nocturnes?"

"No, just Chopin in general. Maybe his best hits or something."

"Well I see your issue."

"Huh. Well, that's exactly my point. I was subconsciously doing it on purpose."

"Aha, you rebel."

"Could the bishop find fault in me, deem me unworthy because my brother stayed up all night watching things which I could hear clearly through the thin walls of our room? The speakers were right on the back wall of my closet. I suppose I could have asked Xadrin to wear headphones. Loan him some of mine if he didn't have any. Move my bed to the other side of the wall and put things there to muffle the sound. I could have asked him to stop or to watch his stuff somewhere else. Maybe this is what the bishop would have asked me to do if I had told him.

"But I gave the responsibility of sinning to my brother, and I allowed him to pull me with only a little bit of protest down the "wrong" path, tying me with loose cords to the back of his own ferry as we floated down the Styx. And what I found was beautiful on that ferry he had built himself. It was real. I didn't catch on fire or feel a demon's mist force its way through my ears and take root in my soul. I saw that "the world" was made up of sincere, intelligent, wise human beings.

"And that made me wonder why my bishop didn't want me to see what was so clearly of God."