I’m Sorry, You’ve Reached the Wrong Messiah

Paul’s Tomb

After I died, I came back out of the earth. The acolyte asked for my approximate date of death and said, “Wow, you’ve been gone a while.”

It had been hundreds of years since I’d been buried beneath a bunker in Iowa. This was in accordance with the wishes of the church, of which I had been a member.

“It’s been bad,” the acolyte said. The church was just him and a dwindled congregation in Syracuse. He made space for me in a storage area. Iowa was in something called the “radiation belt,” which caused the air outside to glow at night. He was right; it seemed pretty bad.

In the prophecy, a man would emerge reborn from the burial chamber and lead the sect to Jerusalem to await the end days. For the first week I was there, the acolyte didn’t bring it up. 

The church had no name. I hadn’t professed. Profession involved a series of statements and dedications to labor in life and in the afterlife for the church. My wife had, but I hadn’t. It had been a point of contention.

Paul asked me questions about baseball games I’d gone to in ’72 and ’73. The church at the time forbade attendance. “I remember the light and also the smell. Boiled peanuts and grass. At one point, everyone was singing. I wasn’t supposed to be there,” I said.

I asked Paul if I could go down into the chamber to visit my wife. “The records from back then burned up in a fire,” he explained. “I can let you in, but I don’t know which one it is. The only reason I know you’re you is because you told me.”

The next night, Paul said that he didn’t know how we’d get to Jerusalem. The radiation belt had worsened, and removing us would be expensive and dangerous. The Syracuse congregation was noncommittal at best. I took that as an opportunity to tell him I hadn’t professed. “I don’t think I’m the person you’re looking for,” I said, and his lips curled in on themselves. “I don’t know how I ended up in the burial chamber. My wife must have cut a deal. I don’t know, I wasn’t there for it.” I meant the last part as a joke, but his lips bit in harder.

A few nights later, I snuck down into the chamber. Paul was right; it was just row after row of unlabeled, anonymous coffins stretching deep within the Earth. I picked one at random, sat on the cold concrete, and bowed my head. Over time the air grew heavy. It pressed down on my neck like a dumbbell, pain blooming as my vertebrae compressed. I imagined their voices, thousands of them. “You’re alive,” they whispered, their tone at turns accusatory and affirmational. I opened my hands. There’s this strange thing where your life can feel like it isn’t fully attached to the background around it, like a piece of paper stuck to a wall with a single short strip of masking tape. When my wife would bring up the matter of profession, I would try to explain the lack of solid attachment, the weakness inherent in it—the tape and the paper and the like. Color would rise in her cheeks and forehead. “At what point,” she’d ask, “are you expecting to come alive?”

“What do the people in Syracuse think about me?” I asked Paul one night. He wiped his forehead. He muttered that the Syracuse congregation had gotten mixed up with another religion. They’d lost the faith, the true faith, and mostly just sat around and sang all the time, a practice they called PERFECT LANGUAGE FOREVER. “How long have you been out here?” I asked, and he just stared back out at the glowing air.

A week passed without sight of Paul, then another. He eventually stumbled from his room, eyes wild, and asked, “When you came back through the tunnel of fire, which angels did you see? In the chamber of judgement, what was the name of the arbiter’s wife?” His face was red and wet. He demanded, “Who sits to the left hand of the throne of god?” I’d never seen him like this, like his sadness was on fire. I told him I was sorry. I didn’t think Jerusalem was going to happen. 

“False messiah,” he said, and, “Where’d you bury the real one?” He spoke too quickly to understand. He started shoving me, quick jabs to my shoulder. I didn’t give him any warning. One blow and he was down. I hadn’t realized he was such a thin thing.

He came up in a daze. His eyes were soft like incandescent bulbs. “Alright,” he said, and then he went through the door between his room and my room and down the staircase that led to the burial chambers.

Weeks passed. I have seen no sign of Paul since.

In the mornings, through a speaker in Paul’s room, I hear the church in Syracuse singing. I don’t understand their language, but the shapes of the words, the forms made by human voices—they’re a comfort nonetheless. 

I’ve been mapping out the songs they sing. The phonetic pronunciations, the rise and fall of their pitch. I’m making progress to PERFECT LANGUAGE FOREVER. I hear them in my head as I try to fall asleep, mouthing along until all effort leaves me.