Page 25 of Original Sins
I wanted to cry, right there in the press pen, because I could see what ten thousand of them couldn't.They saw the kingmaker stride out into the god-ray, immaculate, anointed, the charcoal suit and the easy hand lifted to quiet the storm of their love.I saw a man holding himself together with both hands.The agony in him was plain as print—the set of his jaw, the thing behind the eyes, the careful way he moved like a man carrying something cracked and trying not to spill it.I'd held that man in the dark.I knew the difference between his real face and the one on the screens, and the screens were lying.I was apparently the only person in a room who could read it.
“What a weekend,” Harrison said with a half-smile.“What a glorious gathering of the faithful.”
He started the speech.The stump sermon, the one I'd watched him give the first morning, power and the ballot box and the nation made godly again.It was all there, every cadence in its place, and it felt dead.I don't know how else to say it.The words came out polished and hollow, a player piano running the song with nobody at the keys.
The crowd didn't notice because it was having the time of its life.But I'd heard this man's voice crack open in the dark, I'd heard what it sounded like when it was carrying something true, and this wasn't that.This was a man reading his own eulogy off a teleprompter and watching thousands of people applaud it.
“And that's why,” Harrison said, “that's why this movement needs warriors in Washington.Men of conviction.Men like my good friend—a man who's going to carry this fight all the way to Congress from the great state of South Carolina—Byron Judd Pem—”
And his eyes found me.
I don't know how.Thousands of people, a wall of light in his face, a press pen full of cameras—but his gaze swept the house and it caught on me and stopped.I watched it land, and saw the speech die in his throat.
Harrison stopped talking.
Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead under the lights.Senator Finch, at the edge of the stage, tilted his head.The audience held a confused, expectant breath, and the silence that came down over that arena was the loudest thing I'd heard all weekend.
Don't,I thought.Don't you dare.Not for me.Get out, get on the plane home, be safe, you idiot, you beautiful idiot, I told you to forget me.
He looked right at me, and I swear to God he heard me.
Harrison didn’t listen.
“I can't do this,” he mumbled.
It came out quiet, almost to himself, but the mic caught it and threw it forty feet tall.A ripple went through the crowd—a nervous laugh here and there, people assuming it was a bit, a setup, the great orator pausing for effect.
“I'm sorry.”He stepped back from the podium, out from behind the plexiglass, to the bare front edge of the stage where there was nothing between him and them.“I can't stand up here and give you this speech again.I've given it a thousand times.I cannot—” his voice caught, found itself, went on “—I cannot be a lying hypocrite for one more minute of my life.”
The laughter stopped.
“That's what I am,” he said, and his voice was gathering strength.Not the preacher’s voice, the other one, the one I'd heard in the dark, and it was the most powerful thing I’ve ever heard come out of a human being.“I've stood on stages like this one my whole life and told you how to live.Who to fear.Who to vote against.Who God loves and who God can't possibly care for.And I’ve been lying to you.Every single time.”He looked out at the frozen audience.“I can't be a lying hypocrite like all of you.Sitting in this room cheering for lies, when half of you spent this weekend doing exactly what I did, and hating yourselves for it the same way I’ve hated myself.”
The gasp went through the arena like a wave.Somewhere a woman cried out.Finch was moving at the edge of the stage, gesturing at someone, the band, the lights, somebody do something—and Harrison just stood there at the lip of the stage in the full glare with his hands open and empty and his entire life burning down around him.But he wasn’t finished.
His eyes found me again.And this time he didn't look away.When he spoke again the whole cavernous room fell away and it was just the two of us, the way it had been in a beige room twelve floors up.
“I met someone,” Harrison said.
My heart stopped.
“This weekend.Here.I met someone, and he is—” his voice broke clean in half and he let it, let them all see it break, “—he is the most honest person I’ve ever known.He sparked something in me I’d spent my whole life being told didn't exist, or was sick, or was sin.And he has been teaching me—without even trying, just by being exactly who he is—how to be honest.Radically honest.”
My own words.My entire identity, my brand, the only thing I'd had instead of a heart, said back to me from a stage in front of thousands of people, and I felt the first tear slide down my cheek.
“His name doesn't matter.I won't do that to him.”Even now, even here, with everything on fire, he was protecting me.“But he is the reason I'm standing here telling you the truth for the first time in my life.So here it is.Here's the truth.”
He took a breath, and he stood up straight, and he stopped being Pastor Cole.
“I'm a gay man,” Harrison said, to thousands of people who had paid to believe he was something else.“I have always been a gay man.And I am done—I am so tired, you have no idea how tired—of pretending to be the lie that all of you needed me to be.”
The arena came apart.
It was pandemonium.People on their feet, shouting, a roar that had nothing of love in it now.Cameras were everywhere.The press pen around me erupted into motion.Senator Finch stormed the podium with his hand over the mic, the LED walls cutting frantically to a flag.Somewhere in the wings I caught one flash of a lacquered blonde head and a face white with a fury.The entire machine convulsed, trying to swallow what had just happened and unable to do so.
And in the center of it, alone at the front of the stage in a column of light, stood Harrison Cole, who had just set fire to a billion-dollar empire.He was staring through the chaos, the cameras, and the roar of the crowd, directly at me.
He didn't look ruined.That was the thing that took my breath away.Secretary of State Mullins under the streetlight in that photo with the hustler had looked happy, and I'd thought that was the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever see.But I was wrong.Because Harrison, in the middle of the worst and bravest moment of his life, with everything gone, didn’t look like a man who'd lost it all.
