Schism

He remembered waking in the crisp night air to his father snoring and his brother face-up beside him dead asleep. His eyes opened to the inside of the plastic tent, the crinkling of it with the softest disturbance of wind. Lying on an air mattress and beneath it the bare dirt and grass ground of southeast mountain country. Camping, yes. A long weekend right after the end of tenth grade. Memorial day, it must've been. And still it was near freezing. Teeth clattering and fingernails blue even this late in May. In this remote wilderness, this high precipice. 

He recalled some subversive curiosity animating him that night. Considered an arbitrary whim of hormonal post-adolescence, perhaps something else. He’d gently risen from the air mattress and tiptoed to unzip the tent. A slight rustling from dad but nothing more. Hunched over he stretched his legs in long circumspect strides over him and his brother and stepped outside in not much more than his socks and orange sweatshirt into a night strangely illuminated. The waxing moon casting a pale shadow behind him as he trembled and his feet shuffled onto dewey grass. About him the season’s early pilgrimage of nightbugs were in faint harmony. They scored the wet squishing sounds of his footsteps and the swaying of the tree branches enshrouded as they were and contoured in the soft moonlight. It was dark out. At this early hour a quality of darkness you could never know in the city. Where even the faintest pilot light could be a beacon unveiling a part of the complex forestry surrounding him. Gesturing to the depth of it, the danger. And yet he could remember no fear there, even as he continued out toward the edge of the grounds where behind him the silhouettes of the tent and the stone ring of the campfire could barely be outlined. He stopped and breathed heavy breaths through his nose and took in all that lay around him. He laughed and was satisfied with himself. There was an ownership over the moment to be enjoyed. Neither his dad nor his brother nor anyone else on the earth held sway over it, this place, this time. Grey plumes of his breath expelled from his mouth like a smokestack as he cocked his head back and from the bottom of his throat blew. He could see it then, his face toward the sky. 

The great open firmament lay before him unsullied by electric pollution, that vast black canvas pin-pricked by so many speckles of backlight. The innumerable stars each a glimpse to worlds and worlds beyond. He craned his neck back further, further. At some point he noticed himself going to his knees and then laying on his back. Another canopy now occupied his view. The heavens. Beholding its glory he felt for the first time in his seventeen years of living the sheer insignificance of himself, the smallness. This tiny stick-figure man planted upon a styrofoam globe, an anonymous little kid riding an infinitesimal partition of rock hurdling through such an overwhelming ocean of space. It was one thing to be told and another to see for yourself but nothing could compare to the knowing, the revelation. It seemed to him in that moment all the truth of the universe lay bare in that expanse, even the curvature of the earth visible in this grand spectacle of which he was the lone audience member. And in all of that magnitude, in all his awe and wonder, his efforts could see no God present there. No infinite nor transcendent being that could be bigger than these cosmos, no creator greater than this creation. And he felt alone in his smallness, his frailty, his finite humanity. Alone and yet inseparably of a part with the night sky and the cold mountain terrace and his family members who slept unaware near him. Part of a whole with one common material denominator. They were all each other had, he realized, he knew. 

Head bowed, his eyes refocused on the carpet in front of the stage deemed an altar. Where they’d call their supplicants to come up and to kneel and prostrate themselves before the band and the ringleader platformed above them. He shuffled in his pew. Why had it come to him now? He hadn’t thought of that night for a long while. But it had always been there, hadn’t it. Some vague and amorphous specter in the back of his mind. In the interim he’d written it off as unimportant, as a misremembered myth that he wouldn’t allow to hold any sway over him. Years passed, near a decade, and that ghost of a memory stowed away grew in its size and every so often would crack open its door and whisper to him doubts and confirmations of all the worst, most pitiable assumptions he’d make about his family, his fellow congregants, himself. That they were all liars, and deep down knew that they were. He looked to the stage and the man standing on it. The liar of all liars, a snake oil salesman with his bag of props and well-ironed suit and a plastered rictus grin performing his magician’s tricks and rehearsed trivialities. He loved him more than anyone else in the world. Inside him was a heart that ached for no longer stifling its rage, no longer abiding by a cognitive dissonance that like a springleak in a dam had slowly eroded a barrier of faith that only now showed itself to have never been durable to begin with. What a waste of time, of years. So many toiling hours. Every Sunday from 7:00am to noon at least and Wednesday nights and liturgical holidays and small groups and morning leadership meetings. It was called service. Called holy, vocational, privileged. But it was never called voluntary. That open wilderness sky. The mountain breeze at play in the tree limbs. How much he wanted to be there. How tempted to have stayed on that promontory, to have not gone back to the man that now some eight years hence he saw less as a father and more a kind of alien zealot, as an imitation of a real person whose mask betrayed all his hypocrisies. As though inside he were only sewn together by self-determined delusion. 

Sweat was on his hands, his feet. Even as he ruminated the last of the dam was quitting, that barrier of faith being carried away by the tide. The day before he might’ve fought in knowing futility to hold onto it but that Sunday morning there was no fight left in him. He was tired, exhausted. It seemed true he’d put in more than enough of his share of work and it was about time to resign from his station, from this character he’d become the expert at performing. This morning he was an honest man at last. There was relief, a great slouching of his shoulders as a weight falling off him, then there was fear dawning. Fear and trembling. Could he dare speak it aloud. Could he confess to the mother whom he loved, to his brother the heir apparent. To the man on stage who was escalating his cadence to drive his oration towards its formulaic conclusion. His fist in the air, his voice rising with deep inhales of breath between declarations. The exhortation followed by the call to action. Same frame as it ever was, same structure that had raised him. What structureless sea lay roiling before him now, what mystery. Something once owned had been lost to that sea, but a thing that never truly had belonged to him. A thing having no shape, no form with which to grasp. Like water, like air. Like memory and the visions that lay within.