Whispers and Ashes

It’s an ineffable feature of my life that the most striking insights arrive in the bathroom.

Sometimes just because that’s the only time I slow down and let thoughts settle. But other times, it’s because the world intrudes where it should not. 

I was sitting quietly in the stall, and I heard footsteps enter the one next to me. That alone is unremarkable. But as the mystery man sat down, I picked up on a harsh, rhythmic whisper ringing off the tiles. At first indistinct, just mouth sounds. I deduced that he had his earbuds in and didn’t realize his breathy lip-syncing was audible, or that anyone else was even around. 

Most times, this sort of thing would simply be an amusement. But as the intensity of his chanting picked up in that quiet room, I began to discern words. It was clearly a heavy song, and appeared to draw very heavily from the Book of Revelation. That meant it was either metal or some derivation of Christian rock. Probably harmless if I’d heard it on speakers. 

But as the whispers got more frenzied just on the other side of that thin wall, and as the apocalyptic imagery bounced off of every hard surface into my ears, the whole scene took on a sinister cast. It started to feel like a horror movie. 

It’s a sensation that’s become unnervingly familiar, living in red country over the past several years. And if I’m honest, it has been the background noise of my life. 

Since birth, I have been surrounded by people who live in a different world than I do. People who prize conformity and mistrust the noncompliant. People who chase power and money with a thirst that drowns out empathy. People for whom allegiance to an organized faith or some offshoot thereof takes precedence over earthly laws. People who tolerate democracy when at their core they believe the universe is a monarchy. 

People whose rants about miscarriage of justice and promises of retribution I tuned out in hallways and grocery stores last Thursday when the verdict was read against their golden idol. People who live in a world in which an oily con man is the embodiment of freedom, and the herald of heaven. 

Back in the twenty teens, when I foolishly believed that social media was an ideal place to discuss political and social issues, I had a lot of scripture quoted at me. I say ‘at’ me rather than ‘to’ me, because the tone always made it clear the words were weapons, meant to pierce the veil of worldly morality and enforce the Truth, by violence if necessary. 

In these exchanges, the sort I’ve had all my life, either in person or digitally, there was always a moment when I bumped into the invisible wall. The one that separated their world from mine. Assumptions which were axiomatic to them were platitudes to me, and tidbits of wisdom I’d collected over years of reading and discussion clanked against the force barrier like a spoon bouncing off a rock. 

Post-Twitler, post-pandemic, and wading in the mire of climate crisis, horrific wars, and an absolute Groundhog Day of an election, I have pulled sharply back into myself and my creative pursuits, desperately grasping for things over which I have any measure of control whatsoever. My vote is meaningless in Texas, as it always has been. I am impossibly outnumbered by the denizens of these other worlds, even as they contrive fevered fantasies of their oppression in a landscape they rule completely. 

And even here, in the quiet of a public restroom, fierce whispers of bloody rivers and holy carnage close in around me, until I begin to wonder how long before it happens. How long until their world becomes THE world. Until those of us left clinging to our banned copies of The Handmaid’s Tale huddle together, wondering how we could have stopped it. 

I know, intellectually, that I should be out on the front lines, vocally opposing every slip back into the Dark Ages. And for a while, I did.

And then I found myself screaming uselessly at a man in a sandwich board of the Ten Commandments on my courthouse square, who belched Leviticus through a megaphone at a crowd of young women whose bodies he felt his golden idols entitled to govern. These are not people who will be persuaded, and moreover, I am no longer interested in persuasion. I have become too much like my enemy, exasperated and incapable of even hearing their words without going apoplectic with rage and bewilderment that they are completely serious when they tell me that a grifter who sells golden sneakers to pay his legal fees against charges too numerous to catalog is ushering in the kingdom of heaven in our lifetimes. 

I am surrounded, I am outnumbered, and they are winning. 

Maybe not nationally. November may not bring the total victory they seek. But here, in the belly of the beast, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Summers will get hotter, water more scarce, rights more arbitrarily distributed as the ‘right’ murderers are pardoned and the omnipresent surveillance of our age is aimed more squarely at the ‘wrong’ people. At period trackers, event RSVPs, book purchases, and medical records. 

Last Thursday, I heard it again and again: Just wait. Just wait until we turn it back on them. 

The shotgun I bought in 2020 lays ponderously in my closet as the neighbor across the street yells on his porch and slams doors, cursing his neighbors and the evil that courses through their veins. I didn’t own a gun until I heard him shouting in the street about shooting Democrats. 

The whispers pound against my eardrum: The power, the glory, the vengeance of God…

This is not okay. None of this is okay. 

I retreat into my car, steering well clear of the news stations. Of slaughtered children, of thinkpieces on why the blinkered poor can’t see how well the economy is doing, of an island off the coast of Panama being abandoned to rising sea levels. 

I choose music. I choose stories. I choose to pretend that it’s all going to be all right. That we can still have vibrant creative communities amidst the collapse of civilization. If we have to go back to cave paintings, so be it. Can’t stop the signal, Mal. 

Am I hysterical? Heroes who gathered their nut stash in headier times assure me that times have always been hard, don’t let the Cassandras get you riled up. 

Except that Cassandra was right. And watching rumpled scientists and historians clearing tables and pointing madly at maps and figures, I get the unsettling impression that we are live-laugh-loving our way into oblivion. 

And now we have a soundtrack. That pulsing, doomsday verse, whispering with the power that a scream could never muster, telling me: 

Just wait. 

Just wait until you see what we have in store for you. 

They've come for my family before. Why wouldn't they do it again, once their power is consolidated? Once they can kill anyone they want and claim self-defense? He had a gun, after all.

I should leave. I should find a way to generate money like loaves and fishes, and abandon everyone I love to escape to greener pastures, where no one knows me and rent is even higher, and getting hired at fifty is just as uphill. 

Just wait. 

I've been hearing about Texas turning blue for at least a decade. 

Just wait.

Inflation can't last forever. 

Just wait. 

The blood of the nonbelievers, the shining kingdom to come, the whispers, the hissing, the ticking clock behind everything, the Truth, wielded only by the worst people you know. 

I fear we won't have to wait much longer.