The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [106]
The woman looked up and said nothing. I looked down at the letters WDJD written on my hand and recited:
“Would you consider yourself a good person?”
The woman was probably in her late forties and looked like she had a few hard mothering years behind her. She was carrying an Image Trends-wear bag.
“I don’t know,” she said finally.
“Have you ever told a lie?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know that it’s against the Ten Commandments to lie?”
She hung her head. “Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Now, have you ever hated anyone?”
She stared at me with blank eyes, confused.
“Because you know,” I said, “the Bible says that if you’ve hated, it’s like committing murder in your heart.”
She looked away for a moment, then looked back.
“I have done many bad things,” she said.
“Well, God’s going to forgive you for that,” I said. “But first, you have to—”
“I did this thing with a car,” she said.
I looked at her carefully.
“What kind of thing with a car?” I asked.
“I drive the car away,” she said absently.
“Away from what?” I asked.
“I have to go,” she said, and started to walk off.
“Wait!” I said. “Away from what? What did you drive the car away from?”
She glared back at me and hurried down the mall aisle.
A few minutes later I walked over to Janine’s seat in the food court.
“I’m trying,” I said, “but it’s tough sledding out there.”
“We’ll do better someday,” she said.
THERE WAS no next time. Other business took me out of Texas, and after a while I became increasingly sloppy, continually forgetting to water the Matthew Collins plant. I was in Washington one afternoon in the reception room for Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern when Laurie called. I picked up; she wanted to have lunch. I told her I couldn’t, I was at the gym. Later on I got sick and decided to go home to New York for a few days’ rest. Laurie called repeatedly; I just lay there in bed, piles of Japanese and Thai food containers on my desk, letting her call go to voice mail. I missed one cell meeting, then the next. I was a lapsing Christian, but in what direction was I lapsing? To nowhere, to nothingness. As absurd as the church was, it was an improvement over my actual life because there was at least a pretense of meaning there. Back in New York, I was just eating and taking up space, a depraved postmodern creature on the job, carrying pebbles up the media anthill. As I convalesced in my Midtown apartment, I began, weirdly enough, to feel a strong urge to get back to Texas.
Finally I recovered and booked a trip back to San Antonio. When I arrived, I pulled out of the freezer a cone of henna tattoo mix that I’d bought from an Indian family some weeks before. Using a tourist’s guide to Israel I’d bought in D.C., I traced a brown blotch on my left forearm in the shape of the Holy Land. Later that day Laurie called and invited me to lunch—she sounded bad. We made a date for the next day.
I found the restaurant—coincidentally, yet another Chinese place, this one a sit-down joint—and walked inside. We talked for a while about Laurie’s problems. She was having some issues at work; a client was trying to stiff her out of a real estate commission. The client was a fellow Christian, someone she’d met through the life coach orientation. “And she calls herself a Christian,” she said. “Of course, in reality, they always turn out to be the worst ones.”
She got sad after that, then, a few minutes later, returned to her story about her conflict at work. She went on about it; it really was a sad story. The poor woman was being shunned by people from the church, and much of it was her own fault, because she didn’t know how to keep quiet, how to be political. It was typically ugly human-being stuff, the kind of thing that happens in all communities, Christian and non-Christian alike, but what was so difficult about it was Laurie’s belief that the church was supposed to be a refuge from this sort of thing. That it turned out not always to be so was, I could see, very painful for her.
My heart sank as she