A la Node

I grew up in the same town as Jacob, went to the same school and became friends with him at some point, though I couldn’t say when exactly. He was always just kind of there, a charismatic troublemaker a lot of us fell into the orbit of. He didn’t tell me he was the Antichrist until high school, on the occasion of the senior prom to which he had invited two different girls, and by then I simply took it in stride as the sort of thing Jacob would say.

“So shouldn’t you have horns or red scaly skin or something? And the Mark of the Beast, right?”

“Don’t be a idiot.”

I had forgotten about it when, weeks later, he pointed matter-of-factly at his forehead and said “Anyway, the whole six-six-six thing is all wrong. Bad translations, it was supposed to be one-one-one. And even then, why do people think it would be in arabic numerals?”

We were sitting at the local Wendy’s after school, I stared across the table at him, lost. “What is what-what?”

“You asked me about the number of the beast. Look.”

I followed his finger to the three small scars on his forehead, normally hidden by a shock of shaggy black hair.

“Acne scars?”

“I’m Marked. I’ve known for a while, so have you if you think about it.”

“I’ve always said you were evil, but I just meant you were an asshole, not Lord of the Darkness.”

He just laughed, infuriating and charming.

Animals are supposed to be able to detect evil, so the movies would have us believe. Cats arch their backs and hiss, dogs howl or whimper, birds take to the air in panic. Boffo, eight months of golden retriever enthusiasm, either didn’t recognize it or was too dumb to care. My vote was for dumb, based on significant other evidence, but to be fair Jacob would throw the ball endlessly for him, scratch his ears and always shared his food. Boffo was easily swayed by this canine-oriented charisma and became the  model for many more of Jacob’s devoted followers in the decades to come.

Jacob met my dog many years after that strange post-prom admission. I was renting a little house not far from campus, where I spent my time working hard to get a degree that I suspected I would have to work hard to find a use for. I hadn’t seen Jacob in a couple of apparently eventful years for the Antichrist.

“There was another Antichrist, you know. Picture it, nineteen twenties, a brilliant young man on his way to power and influence, until one day Bam! Black Thursday and suddenly he’s broke.”

“So you’re like, the second coming of the Antichrist?”

“I think so, I can only remember Henry. That was the guy’s name, in the twenties, Henry Atkins. I remember him… as if I -was- him. Strange feeling, horrible, horrible memories, memories of things that didn’t actually happen to me.”

I looked at my old high school friend. Boffo insinuated his nose under Jacob’s hand, intent on having his ears scratched whether Jacob cooperated or not. He didn’t seem insane. His words notwithstanding, Jacob appeared completely stable, calm, poised. Golden dog hair clung to expensive black slacks and silk shirt, clean manicured hands massaged Boffo’s head.

“You sound like you mean that.”

“Did you ever wonder who the Antichrist -was-? I mean Jesus was the Son of God, apparently, and Satan was a fallen angel, but the Antichrist?”

“Son of Satan? Hell, I don’t know, theology is not my thing. I am sure the bible says, doesn’t it?”

He looked at me, just a calm, steady look, several seconds longer than felt natural.

“He’s a man. Just a man. Not a demon, not Satan’s offspring, not even a Prophet, really. He’s just a guy. He rises up from the people, and drags the world into Armageddon. I find that interesting, don’t you?”

“Are you saying you’re just a guy, Jacob?”

“Well, maybe not -just- a guy.”

Again, the look. He had a way of saying things that were clearly not meant to be taken seriously, but which somehow gave you a shiver and a nagging feeling that it wasn’t a joke, that the only real delusion involved was your own belief that he wasn’t serious.

“They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn’t exist.” I knew it was stupid as it came out of my mouth, but while my fore brain had been involved with the feeling of the joke not being a joke, my hind brain had filled in the awkward silence.

“So you’re saying that believing in the devil is necessary because not believing in him plays right into his hands? Tautology much?”

“Seriously, though, being the Antichrist necessarily implies the whole structure of Christianity is true? I mean, you can’t have an Antichrist without a Christ, which means a God, which means a Devil, etc, etc.”

“If you are stupid enough to believe everything in the Bible, maybe. Look, it’s a book. All the stuff written about Jesus was written long after his death, by people with a lot of political reasons to exaggerate.”

“So, God? No god? What does it mean to be the Antichrist if the whole premise of Antichrist-ness was made up by a bunch of old men two thousand years ago?”

“Oh, those old men were prescient, at least. What they really saw I don’t know, and who knows how much of it they could have understood, but they knew something. The world will burn.”

And then we had pizza, and ran Boffo to exhaustion with the Frisbee. Jacob went back to his home upstate and ran for mayor, which he won easily. I’d like to say that I put it out of my mind, didn’t think about his anti-messianic delusions or his uncanny ability to charm and sway those around him. But I did.

All those years ago, the night of the prom, both of us half-drunk and standing outside to get out of the insidious music and cloying air, he had leaned against a wall and managed to make his rented tux look tailored and natural. His two dates had come out, beautiful girls whose names I can’t even remember now. Two of them. If it had been anyone else, I would have felt like my own pathetic datelessness was being rubbed in my face, but it was Jacob, so I simply absorbed the humiliation and it never occurred to me to resent him for it.

The truth was, that while I had always assumed it was a joke, just part of his personal myth-building, I had never exactly -not- believed him. My mind wandered back to that night, to the two girls fawning up at him, tangling themselves around him with a mutual relish that was shocking to me at the time. This guy, with his acne scars and two dates who hadn’t even acknowledged my presence, had told me he was the Antichrist. And the world will burn.

I saw Jacob off and on after he became mayor, and it felt strange to see him on TV and in my living room. Then he was campaigning for Senate, and then as a Senator he was never far out of media attention. Trouble was brewing, as usual, in the middle east, and my friend Jacob was there – talking, charming, being the center of attention. He found time now and then to call, and I found myself invited to dinners with ambassadors and ceo’s.

The week before a terrorist cell detonated a Russian nuke on the Temple Mount and incinerated Jerusalem, Jacob and I sat on the beach, watching Boffo chasing sea foam.

“I am starting to believe you, for some reason.”

“That’s a pity, I liked you not believing.”

“So what, you’re going to lead the world into darkness? Preside over the collapse of humanity? Drag us all into Hell? Oh, and wasn’t there supposed to be a Rapture at some point?”

“I never quite figured out the Rapture, I think that was all pretty much just made up. I’m pretty sure souls aren’t immortal.”

“What is a soul, anyway?”

“Oh, that one’s easy. That part of you that seeks and experiences joy. That part of you that is you.”

“Huh.”

“Look at her.” I followed his eyes to a young woman sitting on the sand not far away. She had earbuds in, and was bobbing her head along to some inaudible tune.

“She has a beautiful soul. Look at her, the joy wells up out of her, unselfconscious, free, open. Beautiful.”

I looked at him and saw something close to longing, out of place on his handsome self-assured face.

“That doesn’t sound like the voice of Evil to me, Jacob.”

“I don’t know. You want to know what the real evil is? That our brains, such beautiful machines for rational thought, are lashed together out of a bunch of reproductive instincts and hormones. Look at her, look at those curves.”

I looked, the woman had laid down on the sand, her breasts prominently displayed.

“Yeah, she’s cute enough, I guess,” I volunteered, though she seemed too young to me, vapidly bopping along to her pop music.

“Just a couple of simple curves in the right proportions and arrangement, completely undermines rationality and control. Just a bit of cleavage, and the hind brain takes over.”

“Somehow I just don’t believe that you turn into a slobbering fool whenever you see a nice ass.”

“Oh, no, I don’t lose the ability to think. I just can’t not desire.”

“I guess the Antichrist has a soul after all. Anyway, what do you expect? We got here by mating, of course we’re hard wired for the visual cues.”

“I am glad that you agree with me.”

“What did I agree with?”

“That Natural Selection is the source of true Evil.”

I laughed out loud, startling the girl and relieving a knot of tension I hadn’t realized was there.

“But humanity has to grow up. We can’t be children any more, can’t abdicate reason for feelings -”

“Or cleavage.”

“- or cleavage, anymore. It’s my destiny to see the world burn. We learn by making mistakes, but the mistakes grow too dangerous now. One last big mistake, one last chance to grow up. One last lesson. We either take responsibility for our mistakes and the power we have, or we die.”

“I liked it better when you were only my weird friend who said crazy things sometimes just to get a reaction out of people.”

“Me too.”

We sat for a while. I don’t think Jacob took his eyes off the girl the entire time.

“Take care of yourself, it’s going to be a lousy year.”

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The Second Coming of the Antichrist by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.