God on the l

Dominic Viti

After an emergency stopped the train in a tunnel I decided to sit next to God. I’d been watching her closely since I’d boarded in Brooklyn because she announced herself as Eternal Light and it’s rare you meet a New Yorker with optimism, especially on the morning commute. She was smiling, a glow about her, greeting passengers with a soft-spoken hello as they squeezed in, turning their heads and hiding behind their Monday papers. And while I am reluctant to open up to strangers, moreover closed to religion—I come from a family of doctors whose shelves never made room for the Good Book, the most persuasive piece of bullshit ever written, said my father, who railroaded my sister into medical school, prompting her to drop out and run off to who knows where, never to be heard from again—I simply could not help myself. 

That’s not true. I knew where she went, just not why. 

Normally I slept during my travels (Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Sis’s favorite) but if the individual sitting next to me wanted to talk I would deal with pictures of their kids long enough to tell them my story, how police didn’t take the missing person report seriously, so I took leave from MPC to look for my sister, using her credit card history to trace her whereabouts, always one step behind her: a campsite in Virginia (fire pit still smoking), a motel in Florida (room smelling of her perfume), a farm in Colorado (nothing to say here, except the lady tried to sell me a goat) to a remote gas station on a long stretch of highway in California, where the teller recalled a mousy girl maxing out her credit card and talking about going to find God. And here she was. 

God, if you were wondering, was tan. She had an extra set of overlapping canines, a smooth broad forehead and blond hair piled high, somewhere between Valley Girl and heaven. Her clothes smelled heavily of thrift store and she wore sandals on feet that were a testament to the tunnel, dark and dirty and cracked. But what God lacked in appearance she made up for in kindness. Every few minutes she reached into her bag to offer me a tissue or snack, like a PTA mom from above. She said I looked tired and gave me a Starbucks gift card. She gave me her shoulder to sleep on. In the hundreds if not thousands of miles I’d logged in my travel book, I’d never been so loved by a complete stranger, the pacifying warmth of Eternal Light. 

That’s when God told me her story. 

Funny, she too was traveling the country for her sister, her fellow brothers and sisters (I could feel her avoiding the word “followers”) to prepare for their next ritual transcendence, absolving lost souls of their sins and delivering them from evil. Here’s a pamphlet. 

This is probably my father speaking, but there’s something disquieting and self-righteous about religious people. Even ill. Delusions of grandeur, hearing voices, talking to a person who isn’t there—they call it praying. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, my father’s bible, calls it schizophrenia. If I sat down to a pancake and spoke to Batman, you’d call the hospital. Replace hotcake with wafer, insert Jesus, and peace be with you. I’m not railing on religion—we all worship something, or someone, on some level—and there’s nothing more disquieting and self-righteous than a vegan atheist, but when you consider Christianity’s long and prosperous record of rape, war, tyranny, torture (not to mention all the Kool-Aid) it’s safe to say their “next ritual transcendence” was not be a hairlift. 

It was a sacrifice. Lost souls were vulnerable. Her brothers and sisters were victims. At this point I didn’t need a venti latte. What jolted me awake was next. This had happened before, and when the lights flickered off in the train, there was only darkness. 

There was only her voice. 

“Tell me, my son. What have you done?” 

The feeling was similar to being in a confessional where the barrier was shame. It’s true, my time in The City That Never Sleeps had thrust me into my Late Night Drunken Period, which led to my Denial Period, which supplanted my Self-Loathing Period, which was itself an improvement over my Self-Harm Period and its predecessor, my Suicidal Period, all of which fell under the umbrella of my Escape Period, the common belief that leaving yourself—or in my sister’s case, finding a new place to live, where nobody knows you, so you can “start over”—will solve the majority of your problems or at least provide temporary relief to the real solution, which, at this point in time, was to tell God the truth. I was lost. Period. 

In the dark, I told her I was assigned to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center (MPC) for a year and a half. Before that it was Bellevue for six months. I described to her the long hours, the unsafe conditions, the white walls that were forever. The doctors didn’t accept me as one of their own—my methods were unsound—which hurt, because I wanted to make my father proud. And yet I hated Him. In a paradox of parenting, he was lording over me and my sister. Telling us when to sit. Telling us when to stand. Forcing us to believe in his beliefs and methods over all else. He pushed her away. In the dark, I told God something I wouldn’t admit to myself: I envied my sister for losing her mind, because at least she had the chance to go and find it. 

The L flickered back on and God was gone. The people sitting across from me were watching me closely. I glanced up and down the carriage. Two policemen stood by the doors. A baby cried before relenting to the hushing of its mother. The train picked up speed and passengers pretended to read, looking up at me from their morning papers. 

Later I found out why. I was in it. 

At the station, the two policemen would grab me by the arms and hurry me across the platform, where other cops were waiting. They would walk me up the stairs and out onto the street, lower my head into the car and drive me in silence back to MPC, where doctors would remind me of the bracelet around my wrist, and that she was never coming back. 

But for now, I could still make time for the pamphlet, the picture of God and my sister on the cover, the California ranch where she walked into the light. 

Dominic Viti has written for Harvard Review, USA Today, New York Journal of Books, Beloit Fiction Journal and Chorus, a collection published by Simon & Schuster. He lives in Philadelphia.