Page 11 of Original Sins
I set up in the press pen—a roped-off corral of folding tables along the house-left wall, half-empty, exactly as Hallie had predicted.The national outlets hadn't bothered sending reporters to Nebraska.Hell, that’s probably why Crossroads chose this place.I screwed the long lens onto the body of my camera, found a sightline through the bodies, and started scanning the crowd.The crowd is always the real story, reflecting back the bullshit the guys on stage were feeding them.
And the faces were hungry.Ten thousand people leaning forward in the haze, lit up and yearning, wanting so badly to be told that they were the chosen and the righteous and the last good people in a country gone wrong—and someone up there was about to take that hunger and hand it back to them at a markup.I snapped a photo of a woman with her eyes closed and her hands raised.Then I caught a kid, maybe nineteen, in a blazer two sizes too big, mouthing along to a song that hadn't started.The lanyards and the flag pins and the open, upturned, trusting faces, and I thought about the desk clerk from yesterday, on her feet since five in the morning so these people would have a cathedral to be fleeced in.
The music swelled, the lights dropped, and ten thousand people roared in the sudden dark.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.”A disembodied voice, the voice of God by way of a Vegas fight announcer.“PLEASE WELCOME—THE SENIOR SENATOR FROM THE GREAT STATE OF ALABAMA—SENATOR.RAY.FINCH.”
He came out of the haze into a single spotlight with both arms already raised, and the room came apart at the seams.Finch was built for this—silver hair, big shoulders going soft, a flag pin the size of a silver dollar, the practiced grin of a man who has never in his life paid for his own lunch.He stood in the god-ray of light and let the applause wash over him, and only when it had crested did he lean into the mic.
“Are we ready,” he said, low, “to take this country BACK?”
The arena detonated.I had the lens on his face and I watched him drink in the adulation.
“Because I'll tell you what, folks.I have traveled this great land.I have been from Mobile to Bakersfield.And everywhere I go, the good, God-fearing, hardworking people of this nation come up to me, they grab my hand, look me in the eye, and they say the same thing.Senator.We are going to make this country GREAT.AGAIN.”
Again?
There it was, that word doing all the heavy lifting, and I felt the familiar sour taste in my mouth.Like, what did that even mean?When had we been so great that we needed to go back in time to recreate it?
“But before we begin,” Senator Finch’s voice dropped into a register of buttery reverence, “before we do one single thing—let's do the most important thing.Let's bow our heads and talk to the Man upstairs.”
Ten thousand heads went down.I kept mine up, and the camera up with it, because I'd be damned—a figure of speech; I'm a nice Jewish boy from a long line of people these rooms have historically not been crazy about—if I was going to close my eyes in this particular crowd.
“Heavenly Father,” Finch began, eyes squeezed shut, one hand pressed flat to his own chest.“Lord, we just come to You this morning with grateful hearts.And Lord, we know—we KNOW—that You did not make Your children to be poor.You did not make us to be small.You did not make us to be ashamed.”
“Amen,” the room breathed.
“You are a God of ABUNDANCE, Lord.You are a God of the open hands.And we know, Father, that when Your faithful sow into good ground—when they give, Lord, when they give generously to the work—You return it to them thirty, sixty, a HUNDREDfold.Because You reward the faithful, Lord.You bless the bold.”
And there it was.I'd heard it hundreds of times and it still turned my stomach: the prosperity gospel.It was the great American heresy, the one where the Almighty runs a hedge fund and your tithe is the buy-in.I wasn't a religious man—I'd had exactly enough Hebrew school to disappoint my grandmother and quit—but even I knew enough to know this was upside down.Whatever that bible actually said, I was fairly sure it was something about a rich man, a camel, the eye of the needle.Oh yeah, and the moneylenders getting their tables flipped, and blessed are the poor.Not this give me your money and the sky daddy will make you rich, bullshit.They'd taken a two-thousand-year-old story about the meek inheriting the earth and refitted it as a pyramid scheme with stage fog.
“And so we ask You, Lord,” Finch rolled on, building now, the cadence climbing toward its tent-revival peak, “to bless the generous givers in this room.Open the windows of heaven over THIS house.Pour out a blessing they will not have room enough to receive.In the mighty, the matchless, the moneymaking name of Your son—”
I nearly laughed out loud.I didn't.But I got the frame—Senator Finch in the spotlight, hand to heart, ten thousand faces tipped up toward him in the haze like sunflowers toward the only light in the room—and I knew it was a good one.Set dressing, Hallie would say.But God, what set dressing.
“—amen, and AMEN,” Finch finished, and the room amened it back like a wave breaking.“Now.”He gripped the podium.“I could stand up here and talk all morning.But you didn't come to hear me.”Laughter.“You came to hear from a man who needs no introduction.A man who has built—with his own two hands and the grace of Almighty God—the single most powerful ministry in this nation.A man who has the ear of presidents and the heart of the people.The shepherd of the Citadel of Faith, the conscience of this movement, the future of this whole great fight—”
I was already swinging the lens toward stage left.
“—PASTOR.HARRISON.COLE.”
The arena went supernova.
Through the viewfinder the whole left side of the stage was still a smear of fog and gold haze, and a tall dark shape was walking out.I did what I always do, what my hands know how to do without me: I found the shape, framed it, and I turned the focus ring to bring the man out of the blur.
The blur sharpened.
Jet-black hair, pushed back clean.A charcoal suit cut so close it had to have been built on him.A jaw I had felt under my own mouth hours ago.Pale blue eyes—even at this distance, even across the heads of ten thousand strangers, I knew the exact pale blue of those eyes—lifting now to the crowd, calm and certain and luminous, the eyes of a man who owned the room and knew it.
And at his throat, catching the stage lights and throwing back one small hard point of gold: a tiny cross on a thin chain.
My finger came off the shutter.
The roar of the arena went strange and far away, like my head had gone underwater.The lens was still up and I was still looking through it.Hell, I couldn’t have lowered it to save my life.Because the man in my viewfinder—the man with his hand raised now in humble acknowledgment, dipping his head with that practiced, godly modesty while the screens two stories tall threw his beautiful face across the dark in radiant high-definition was my stranger.
The man who'd knelt on a beige floor and wept when I kissed him.The man who'd said I don't get to stay.The man who'd told me, in the dark, that he was the fakest man I'd ever meet, that he'd been performing a character for so long he'd forgotten where it stopped and he started—and I'd held his hand and thought it was the saddest, sweetest, most honest thing anyone had ever said to me.
Now I knew what the character was.
