RESISTANCE: A SAMPLE

CHAPTER 4

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, not any powers, neither height not depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

One...two...three...four...five...six... 

He made it into the building. Should he start counting again? He stopped walking, head down, pondering his feet. The warning bell sounded. Time to get to class.

Twenty-seven...twenty-eight...twenty-nine...thirty...thirty-one...

Dr. Paul reminded them all of the paper that would be read aloud and judged on Tuesday. Today was... Friday? Yes. Friday. 

Steven tossed his black hair out of his eyes. “It’s friday, friday...” he sang that obnoxious radio song in a quiet, whiney voice, closing his eyes and beating his head. His peers laughed in that nervous way that they do. ‘Was that a joke for us to laugh at?’ they wondered, looking at the weird boy they had all known for years.

Steven smiled to himself, enjoying how puzzled they were by him. He took advantage of the momentary focus of attention on himself to shoot a death glare to his enemy Bobby, a more popular boy who picked Steven’s last nerves on a regular basis, so that he knew that the joke was for everyone but him.

Days went in a haze to Steven. Most of the students assumed he was on drugs. Like he was constantly high. Most of the teachers who didn’t known any better suspected that he was mentally unstable and therefore constantly on prescribed drugs.

Neither of these were the case.

And then he wrote poems:

No one’s here; It’s only me

So I have to only be

No need to challenge; No need to expect

When I’m alone I never fret

Only listen; only learn the sounds outside my window

The fern

A bird, a tree, a fox, the sky

The entire world passing me by

Only me in a chair thinking of things that were never there

Imagining what the day might have been like

Had I been a little tyke

Not knowing what it meant to experience a curious event

In which my love would say goodbye

And I was sad

And I would cry

For when you’re young you believe you can fly

And most of your life quickly passes you by.

Yes,

When I’m alone I imagine these things

Without a care

No binding rings

No endless fights

No mounting fear of futures that are far too near.

When I’m alone I do not think

I do not need to have a link to the world outside

It isn’t there

I need not care about the people everywhere.

I don’t like being alone.

He wandered to his next class. An art class with Mrs. Young. They were given a free period to work on their portfolio, which would be judged at the end of the semester.

Steven continued his work. It was only a sketch at the moment, but would become a painting. The image was a large demon. He was naked and wrinkled. He had lines about the eyes from the stress of Hell, but confident evil in his hands as he dragged a small boy by the scruff of the neck like a kitten. Mrs. Young was a Baptist Christian, which every student in the school unofficially knew. Steven’s parents were of the same variety of Jesus fans. A lot of rules confined his life, but, no matter how bad his grades got, he would not let them confine his art.

So Steven was misunderstood by his peers and his teachers and his parents. But what kid isn’t? Honestly, I could have picked any kid in this school for this key character and created the same effect. Steven turned to me, puzzled, “You just broke the third wall,” he said appreciatively. That’s exactly what Steven did. His approval of this encompassed who he was: a rule-breaker, a boundary-pusher. He had yet to understand what he stood to gain from his provocative nature. But when it came right down to it, all Steven wanted was attention.

He wanted to be special to his teachers, and an only son to his parents; he wanted his class-mates to secretly admire him. But it had to be a secret. He couldn’t actually be liked by everybody. Their admiration for him had to be for his own treasure, and his treasure alone.

“Hey Steve!” a boy yelled at him. “That demon looks like your grandpa!” The boy laughed and turned aside to his friend, “Look at his wrinkled ass.”

“Bobby, don’t use that language in my classroom or, Lord have mercy, I will call your father again,” Mrs. Young scolded the boy, who didn’t seem to hear. 

“Damn, ‘cause I was going for your mom’s ass. Maybe if I make it fatter,” retorted Steve. Bobby lunged at him with the knife he was using to trim paper. Mrs. Young slammed her hand on a call button which sent a signal to the nearest hallway Patrol Officer. 

Steve did nothing to impede the boy’s attack. Bobby, sliced the utensil across his chest, reddening the object immediately.

“Are you done?” Steven asked him, unfazed. The kid hesitated. “C’mon man, I would sooner kill you -- Hell, I would sooner kill myself before you would really hurt me. So why don’t you go back to your fucking fruit basket black and white sketching bullshit and let me sit here and imagine painting an angel with your blood.”

An officer entered the room. He observed Steven with blood on his shirt, Bobby with a terrified yet disgusted look on his face, and Mrs. Young kneeling in the corner, crossing herself. The officer was familiar with Steven’s situations, so went immediately to him, grabbed his arm, and began escorting him out. Steve stood up casually, picking up his bag and pulling the strap over his head and across his wounded chest, licking off the blood he accidentally got on his fingers. As he sauntered past Mrs. Young, he couldn’t help adding, “You’re not Catholic, Bitch.”

Steve spent the rest of the day confined to an office by himself, forced to do homework without a break. His teachers, guidance counselor, and parents had all had a meeting a while back on how best to handle his behavior. They were intelligent adults who recognized that everything he did was a call for attention. They decided that the most affective method of training for him would be to not give it to him. At least, not when he did anything ‘negative.’ ‘Negative’ behavior would not even warrant a lecture. They would not engage him in conversation or even give him a reproachful look. When he got home, his parents wouldn’t ground him or send him to his room (not that he would go anywhere but strait to his room) or read scripture at him the way they used to. They would just ignore him.

This counsel of adults also agreed that the moment he did anything ‘positive’, every single one of them would give him exactly whatever kind of attention Steve wanted.

The trouble was that Steve had yet to do anything that any of the adults considered ‘positive’ behavior. Maybe if they had let Steve in on the scheme somehow, he wouldn’t have felt so hopeless. He had gotten this treatment from every single adult around him for months, and it was wearing on him. What did he have to do to make even one person care about what he had to say? Could not one person just forgive him for who he was?

He spent the last two hours of his solitary time slicing lines into his finger prints and squeezing blood onto paper. He then used the blood to paint. He painted a face with impressive accuracy. The face had a small smile, only visible if the artist told you that the face was smiling. The face had no hair and a strong jaw, but gentle eyes and full lips. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female. The smile was so faint, that it was not entirely improbable to think that it was one of those final, exhaustive smiles of sorrow or loss, but the smile was also so small that it was not unreasonable to believe that it was the beginnings of quite a much larger smile of love and, what one might prefer to assume to be, rightly earned pride. 

Steve titled his painting “The Face of God.”

Then the bell rang, and he walked out (one...two...three...four...five...six...) and headed home.

Sitting in his room, he wrote:

Please don’t cry

Please don’t fight

Please don’t turn out the light.

Darkness is quiet

Darkness is calm

Like death hidden in a beautiful song.

Like a dream when it seems you are able to fly

It’s a trick

It doesn’t stick

You can kiss your dreams goodbye.

Death is quiet

Death is calm

And it makes people care.

It makes me wonder if I could die, would this guilt still be there?

So in this darkness I can wait for dreams to creep on in.

Until I wake that dream is real.

It brings me home again.

He read his work. It wasn’t his best, but it said what he meant and he meant what he said.

He read it again, and wasn’t satisfied. He crumpled it and tossed it aside, never again to be seen. Steve had this longing that he didn’t understand. His plan tonight was to end his life. He imagined lustfully dragging the knife up his wrist, watching the blood flow onto “The Face of God,” washing it away entirely.

Steve took his pen to the paper again and began to write. And as he wrote, he forced himself to admit that his last statement to his parents, teachers, and classmates couldn’t be one of spite. No, he needed it to be a prayer. So finally, after finishing this last labor, he set it down away from his work area so as to not get even a drop of blood on it. Then he dragged a razor up his arms and slowly bled out.

The next day, his mother came in, thinking that he had already left for school, to search his room ‘just one more time’ for illegal substances he might be abusing. She fell to her knees at the horror scene in front of her. She held her son and picked up the paper that seemed set aside so deliberately, with a pen set next to it perfectly parallel to the paper.

Cold as ice from my head to my toes

Frostbite bites at the tip of my nose

Please come and find me so I might continue my flight

Take me home before the end of the night

For I will be forgotten if frozen alone

Down here in the cold

Too cold to speak

Or to say a prayer

That heaven will find me and that soon I’ll be there.