One more page... Only one? She was starting to wish there were more. Oh well. At least there was still the playlist. And oh, how hilariously weird that sounded, coming from her own mind... The old her would have wondered what she was smoking. She turned the page. "Psalm 37:3-6".
Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday.
Below, she read:
Qa saab sun duosh qaba úvs ûs, huv Á ërr duosh en huv kue. Qaba kakuvek qa fukken nu Ék, dívas id Á daan hen.
***
She saw life in unspeakable detail as recounted in books written by those who had lived under Soviet rule. She saw midnight raids, interrogations, false confessions, denunciations, beatings, filthy work camps, fiendishly creative tortures involving everything from hot metal to anthills, mutilation of the dead performed just to make sure they were dead.
She saw the inversion of justice, with thieves and murderers treated better than and protected against the common man, justified by the doctrine that enemies of private property were friends of the State.
She saw celebrities, politicians, and ordinary Americans happily waving the Hammer and Sickle, herself nauseous with the knowledge that by doing so they were endorsing all of those atrocities. The problem was not so much that they didn't know as it was that they didn't want to know. The information was right at their fingertips; people had risked their very lives to give it to them...but they were too busy indulging their own petty grudges to want it. And they accused her of moral depravity for failing to share in their hatreds, for putting them on the back foot.
She saw a hard choice between the short-term relief of easier immigration and the long-term responsibility of keeping the country free enough to be worth immigrating to in the first place. The question could not be ignored: What use did anyone have for easy access to hell?
She saw "Antifa" comic books on prominent display in the public library, glamorizing domestic terrorism.
She saw talking heads on a sea of screens, attacking the previously beloved Donald Trump and his supporters as "extremely dangerous to our democracy," at length and in unison, echoing each other verbatim.
She saw the famously klutzy Joe Biden, who had eulogized Robert Byrd as his mentor, hailed Barack Obama as unique among black people for being clean and articulate, and given himself the right to evaluate your blackness based on how you voted, "defeat" Trump with 81 million votes in the dead of night, illogically turning the tide on a dime and dwarfing the totals of the far more charismatic Obama. Immediately thereafter, she saw the birth of a label for everyone who questioned this result: "election deniers".
She saw President Biden behind a podium, fists raised against a red-lit background, branding "MAGA Republicans" as threats to democracy.
She saw gunfire in Butler, Pennsylvania from which Trump emerged bloody but defiant, followed by the building of a potent coalition and a sound rejection of the Biden/Harris/Walz ticket at the polls, savored with the words, "You missed."
More personally, she saw the Wogbas, her in-laws, slowly come to share her position concerning events in America despite being predisposed against it.
She saw a long paramilitary tradition: the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Shirts, the Sturmabteilung, the Red Guard, and Antifa, all serving the same political function and two of them for the exact same party.
She saw Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, describing "human weeds" to an audience of Klansmen.
She saw three men: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with his written testimony, Danzig Baldaev with his drawings, and finally Yuri Bezmenov with his interviews and lectures, staring through his glasses into a camera.
"Understand what's going on around you. You are not in a time of peace. You are in a state of war, and you have precious little time to save yourself."
***
At the beginning of this project, Sophia would have found a paradigm shift such as this one impossible, even unconscionable, but here she was. Now she couldn't rid herself of her old attitudes fast enough. Even so, this knowledge was a very heavy weight to bear. How had Lazarus carried it all those years? She supposed that he had grown up with it and so had been used to it, but to carry it into such hostile territory... That must have taken a lot out of him.
Now she understood why he had been so tired in those early visions. Skin and genitalia were not the only theaters in which he'd been forced to fight uphill; there was an entire world of truth of which he had been aware but which he had been forbidden to share in full by a silent but palpable default, having to weigh every word in advance before he uttered it and decide if it was worth risking the fallout. So much to say, so few opportunities to say it. This, perhaps, was his personal Dream Deferred: to finally be fully heard, fully understood, fully embraced, not by the outside world but at least by his family.
She knew now that he had tasted some of that simple reward before he left the earth, and for that she was glad, but she also knew with an agonizing twist of the heart that a lot of it had gone unpaid. If he had told her these things in person, would she have listened? Probably not. Only by feeling his emotions directly had she even begun to understand how deep his love had run and how many hits he had quietly taken in the line of duty, on her behalf as well as on his own.
Words would not have been enough; she had needed to feel it, and he had seemed to know that this would be the case, hence his decision to confide in an inanimate object, in a language that could not be directly deciphered by anyone else, to an audience of One.
Though she couldn't literally read the text, she had gotten a whiff of resignation from it, of surrender and conscious release. He had committed his memories to God, seemingly, and God had given them to her. What did He want her to do with them? What would this knowledge cost her?
In some ways, her position was easier than his, but in other ways, it was harder. From a position as exalted as hers, the potential fall would be a long and hard one. Conformity was strictly enforced and deviation likewise punished, by society if not by the family. Did she know how to deal with a fall from favor? Perhaps old Lazarus had some pointers waiting for her in the playlist. There was not enough time for it tonight, but tomorrow... Tomorrow, she would have to look.