Scorch by A.D. Nauman

Author:A.D. Nauman [Nauman, A.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-05-17T07:00:00+00:00

four

For three weeks she tried to reach him. His private numbers were inaccessible, of course; she had to message his public site. Then she had to wait for a reply, which took a week, thanking her for being a fan and regretting that Doctor Drane couldn’t respond personally to all his wonderful fans. No human had read her message. She tried again, marking the next note “PERSONAL,” and in another week came the same standard reply.

“Shit!”

In the meantime, she tried to have ideas for Hampton Drane, Part Three. She’d dug through the boxes of old books to find something about religion, but all she could find was a Bible—a dense thing with minuscule print and narrow margins and a strange extra space down the middle of all the pages, which turned out to be another margin. Her eyes ran down the first page, transmitted no meaning to her brain. She tried reading aloud: “Let there be an expense—expanse—between the waters to separate water from water so God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it.” This not only confused her, it made her thirsty.

“Expanse,” she said out loud, thinking perhaps she didn’t know the definition of this word. She accessed Mini-Meanings—“a lot of”—and put her head down. Why did nothing fit together? She sat up, cleared her throat, trudged on: “and so God called the dry ground land and the gathered waters he called seas.” Nine hundred and eighty-one more pages to go.

Every evening she forced herself through pages, the sounds of the words streaming through her brain and evaporating, cutting no deep ravines, not connecting to the existing landscape. Until Doctor Aslow, no one had talked much about God. She recalled her mother saying something about organized religion but not about God in particular. Eight hundred eighty-four more pages to go.

She flipped ahead to the middle, then passed the middle, to trick her brain into thinking she was almost done. She began to read again—short sections with little titles that started like stories but were instead about seeds and weeds and vines and sheep. Her attention was caught by a mention of tax collectors, after which Jesus Christ says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick,” which didn’t seem terribly profound, but then he says, “Go and learn what this means,” as though it meant something different, and she was lost again, adrift on a sea of syllables—sins, yeast, seeds, weeds, vines, sheep.

Then she came to a passage she liked:

the Father will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.

I will not leave you as orphans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.