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Editor’s note: For too long, leftists have flaunted their hegemony over the artistic, literary and cultural spheres, and as we know, their objective is to always destroy what is beautiful. There has been far too little pushback from patriots on this front — and Frontpage aims to serve as the vehicle to allow them to do so from time to time.
Besides running Jihad Watch for the Freedom Center for over twenty years, Shillman Fellow Robert Spencer is also an accomplished fiction writer. It is an honor for us to publish, below, the fourth of several of his short stories that will appear in these pages. We hope our readers will enjoy them — and let us know what you think in the comment section!
Early on, however, Richard had had enough. Just a few years after the persecution, Richard grew tired. One night in the mid-Eighties he came in from work. It was cold, and it was already dark. Richard turned on the bare ceiling light and looked at the phone, an old-fashioned black one with a number dial, for a long time. Finally he picked up the receiver and dialed.
A voice said, “Hello?” The voice sounded comfortable, and bored.
Richard hadn’t expected such simple directness. “Is this the Church?”
“Yes.”
“Listen, this is Richard. I’ve called to recant.”
“What?”
“This is Richard. I’m a heretic. But I give up. I recant.”
Then he heard the click of the other receiver being put back in place. The comfortable man had hung up.
Still, the call seemed to work for a while. A good while.
The heavy Latin treatises denouncing him stopped coming from the Vatican. Drunk Irish Churchmen on Christmas stopped trying to punch him in the jaw. The calls for his execution appeared in the paper less and less frequently. Eventually they stopped altogether.
Richard was no longer a heretic.
Thirty-five years passed. A lifetime. He lived a life. It was not unlike every other life. He met people. He made friends. He lost friends. He had a few minutes of happiness. He found grandeur and weakness. Splendor and wreckage. There was nothing remarkable about Richard. There was nothing remarkable about his life.
Mostly, he did a lot of waiting. And he passed a lot of wasted time. A lot of TV shows and movies that took hour upon hour of his life and never seemed to leave him anywhere other than where he started.
He worked jobs. In one, he typed at a computer all day, ensuring the accuracy of invoices. He moved to a new job. Now he sat at a computer all day, ensuring the accuracy of purchase orders. It paid better than the first one.
Richard spent the money on two failed marriages and a few kids. One night he was alone again, an eventuality he had always expected and which he approached matter-of-factly, without surprise or terror.
He got a new apartment. It was a fine apartment. It made him happy to look at. The walls were white. The appliances were blue and shiny. The windows were clean.
Richard sat on his new couch and sipped a whiskey and thought about it. Forty years. He remembered when he was eight or ten, and he would express impatience, and his grandmother would look at him with her face tight and gray and grim, and say, “Richard. One day you’ll be old. Take your time. It will all go by so fast.”
This made no sense to him. He was at that time marooned in the endless hours and eternal days of early childhood, and his grandmother was older than the ages, older than time. It wouldn’t go by fast. He had enough common sense to know that it couldn’t possibly go by faster than it was going already. If there was anything he would have, he would be rich in, it would be time.
But now he was 62. Over forty years had passed since Pope John Paul II issued Contra Ricardum: Against the Abominable Heresies of Richard. Grandma was right. It had all gone by in an eyeblink. At least, he mused to himself as he took another sip of his Chivas Regal, he had recanted his heresy. His life, for all its moronic irritations and lamentable turbulence, for all its loneliness and absurdity, had been free of the Church’s opprobrium. He had come in from the cold. He had an apartment. A good apartment. And a car. A good car.
The next morning he was hung over, and wanted coffee. There was no coffee. Slowly and stiffly he dressed, not bothering to shave or comb his hair, and threw on his old rat-colored overcoat and went downstairs. The wind was cold and biting. Christmas was coming, and out in front of the coffee shop there was Santa Claus, ringing his bell and wishing people a Merry Christmas.
Reflexively Richard reached for his wallet and began to draw out a ten. His hangover made his movements slow. So slow that he didn’t hear what the bell-ringing Santa was saying until he repeated it.
“Sorry, sir, we don’t take donations from heretics.”
Richard blinked and looked at Santa’s face for the first time. “But I’m not –”
“I know who you are, heretic,” Santa said, already starting to turn away. “You’re Richard.” He moved between Richard and his big copper begging bowl and turned his back.
Richard said to the back, “But I’m not— But I recanted—”
But Santa gave no sign that he was still listening.
There are always nuts, Richard thought, and walked down the street. There was another coffee shop where he could get his coffee. It was just past the church.
Outside the church was a handsome woman, heavy and busy with authority. She was shepherding a group of children, maybe ten or eleven years old, all done up in winter coats and hats, singing Christmas carols.
Richard glanced at them as he passed, and saw out of the corner of his eye the woman look at him with revulsion and horror. She turned her back on the children, backed toward them and threw out her arms in front of them. “Don’t sing for that man, children,” she instructed. “He’s a heretic.”
Richard turned toward her, dumbfounded. “Now look, ma’am,” he said, trying to keep his voice level, “I’m not a –”
But she also turned her back, and he could see it was no use.
Richard stepped away and took out his cell phone. He called the same number he had called so many years earlier. A voice answered quickly and brightly, with practiced but unforced warmth. A young woman. “Listen,” Richard said without preamble, “I was a heretic, but many years ago I recanted –”
“Is this Richard?”
Richard stepped back as a gaggle of Christmas shoppers jostled against him on the street. “Yes, yes it –”
“Please don’t call here again,” said the woman crisply, ice suddenly coating her voice. “We have no interest in hearing from heretics.”
“Heretics? But – Wait, I can expl—”
She hung up.
Richard walked on. It was getting colder. He drew his coat more tightly about him.
Previous parts of the series:
That’s actually pretty close to real life, like Kafka.
I don’t think Richard should have recanted. He probably didn’t mean it, anyway. And his life would have been no worse by standing by his beliefs.
Or have I completely misunderstood the meaning?