APOSTATE

by Theodore Lee

Chapter One

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS

The landscape shifted by, and the greenery that I had once known so intimately, that I had always taken for granted having been raised in only woodlands, had transformed into a drab, barren shade of brown, like dried-up dirt in the midst of a famine. Empty plains extended outward, further and farther away—a naked, stark contrast to the all-encompassing safety of a forest.

The relentless sun bore down on the white moving truck, and reflected off the metal hood directly onto my face. Summer had returned with malevolent vengeance, and the autumn I had anticipated all season was absent once more. Sweat ran down my nose, my back was drenched, and the open windows did nothing to alleviate the heat.

Worse of all, though, was the emptiness, the utter desolation.

So different from home.

Or whatever I had once thought of as “home.”

An abstraction that was ever-changing.

Someday, I would come to love the desert and treasure its majestic solitude. But that momentous day, in particular, I was blind to its beauty; it’s so easy to overlook beauty, isn’t it? Especially when it’s right in front of us. Or when our sense of “beauty” is skewed, limited by semantics and a restricting worldview. Oh, if only I could experience again all the times I’ve overlooked, or wasn’t fully present for, the special moments that can never be experienced again.

But the mountains loomed in the distance.

And somehow, despite the unprocessed grief for my life as it once was, as it would never be again, I still knew that everything would be okay. It would always be okay, wouldn’t it? God would never give me more than I could handle, or so I believed at the time; “He” had a plan for me, and whatever plan that was, or wherever it would take me next, I knew that it was for a reason, something greater than myself. Besides, it wasn’t good to dwell on what I couldn’t change: I had to give it all to God; surrender all to Him, and He’ll take care of the rest.

Still, I missed my friends.

I missed my home.

Neither of which I would probably ever see again.

Yet even so, life goes on.

Life always goes on, and we must go on with it.

I glanced from the arid scenery to my dad sitting beside me in the driver’s seat. He sang Keith Green’s “To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice” in an off-key, high falsetto, which—as was custom when he sang—was as far from the lyrics as possible; he kind of just hummed along to the song, actually, and sang quasi-words that somewhat resembled the actual thing but, if you were to only hear his singing and not the music, made him sound more like a slightly deranged man muttering loudly to himself (it’s okay, we’ve all been there, I’m sure). I often found him doing that, in fact, even without music—just muttering to himself: praying, though speaking in “tongues” (a language only he could understand, and even he didn’t understand any of it).

My father, Isaac West, had always been a multifaceted man. He was a self-proclaimed “Jesus freak,” and though he loved his family with every fiber of his being, Jesus ranked even higher on the totem pole. At first glance, you would never know that he had served over twenty years in the military. You would never know that he had once sat me down when I was only seven, right after returning from the war, to tell me that he had gunned down a boy my age who was about to throw a grenade at his convoy truck (what had happened next to the boy, I won’t even tell you: some days, I still wonder about him, what his name was, what he was like, and how he would be like at my age). You would never know that in a fit of rage my dad had once broke my dog’s back and later that night had to put him down, reliant on my help to dump the carcass in a Dollar General dumpster (why we didn’t just bury him in the backyard, I will never know). Why, you would probably only see the love in his eyes, and the crinkles from years of laughter.

I didn’t see my dad often—probably three months out of the year, give or take. If he wasn’t overseas, he was usually somewhere else in the States doing training. I think I used to resent my mom more than my dad solely because she was around more than him; but looking back, at least she had been there. And it was because of my dad, now, that we were moving again. Not that I blamed him for anything; I was grateful for all my parents gave me, and knew I had something special when all the neighborhood kids only had single mothers.

My parents had originally met in Washington through my mom’s cousin whom my dad had met in Ranger School. Despite their eventual, strict, God-fearing parenting, they had sex on their first date and had conceived my oldest brother, Felix, out of wedlock only a few months later. I never got to meet Felix, however—he passed away when he was only six, just months before I was born. I think, somehow, my parents had blamed themselves for having him out of wedlock; they hardly talk about him anymore, really, but my siblings and I, being as close as we are now, sometimes speculate about it; in many ways, though, I think our parents kept themselves busy to never have to think about him. During their twenty years of marriage, they had also lived in California, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky.

I was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, fourteen years prior to our move to El Paso, Texas, where we were now headed. Out of all the states, we had lived in Fort Campbell, Kentucky the longest, somewhere between six to seven years—which, if you’ve ever been in a military household, you would know is quite rare, far longer than usual—and another reason the move to El Paso was more difficult than the other moves to say goodbye to all that we left behind. Seeing my mom and sister driving behind us through the sideview mirror only seemed to cement that fact even further. No matter how many times I moved, I still never got used to it; it’s like a part of myself was lost every time.

The song ended, and my dad eyed me with a warm smile. “You doing okay, partner?”

I glanced back at him, meeting his hazel eyes with mine, and nodded. “Yeah. . . .”

“You’re going to like the new house,” he said, trying to cheer me up. “It’s two-stories.”

I tried to smile, tried to be optimistic and upbeat, but failed miserably, knowing I could never be anything other than honest, that it wasn’t in my nature to be anything other than true to myself. “I’m excited.”

But he could see my mind was elsewhere. “God has a plan,” he reassured me. His eyes returned to the road, squinting from the sunlight and surveying the distant, hazy horizon like Clint Eastwood on horseback or John Wayne atop a tank, before his hand suddenly rested on my thigh. “I really feel that He’s calling us out here, and we need to listen to Him.”

I nodded again, but I couldn’t think of anything to say; my mind was drawing blanks.

My dad squeezed my thigh and set his hand back on the steering wheel, with his eyes still scanning the looming mountains ahead. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I could see the beauty, but I couldn’t feel it. Not yet, anyway. “Yeah,” I repeated. “Beautiful. . . .”

Once more, the silence enveloped us—interrupted only by the next worship song in the queue.

We didn’t often play secular music, but when we did, it was usually oldies my parents had grown up with. My name, Creedence, had actually derived from Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band my dad had been a massive fan of prior to being a Christian; ironically, he didn’t like to play them anymore because they reminded him too much of his past—eliciting “sinful feelings,” as he liked to put it—even though he had still named me after them. In fact, it was almost an unspoken rule that my siblings and I only consumed Christian media; it’s why we were homeschooled, after all, and why we only had a DVD player and no cable network. Were you to see our homeschool curriculum, you’d probably laugh your ass off; I’m pretty sure all the videos they sent us were filmed in the early eighties, and the women in it, supposed to teach us math, biology, and English, were all dressed like 17th-century pilgrims with outdated hairstyles.

In the silence, I thought of my older brother, Kory, and I wondered how he was liking it in New York. He was three years older than me—almost four, minus a few months—and he had moved out just before we left Kentucky. My parents had been too preoccupied with our own move that they hadn’t even celebrated his graduation; in fact, as it would also be for me in a few years’ time, there had been no graduation for him at all (why even bother?). Nor had there been any fanfare to send him off. His move to New York had been so sudden that I still had a hard time grasping it. To not have him there with us felt like another loss I could hardly fathom.

Now, it was just my little sister and I.

And our parents, of course.

But how long until the next deployment? I wondered, watching as my dad tapped his hands against the steering wheel, backing the music’s melodramatic rhythm. It always felt sudden whenever he got deployed, and whenever he was around, I constantly had it in the back of my mind that it wouldn’t last much longer. But at least I didn’t have to worry yet about him not coming back—that feeling would come later; it always did.

“We’re almost there,” my dad said, glancing at the GPS displayed on his phone. “Only an hour left to go.”

I glanced out the window, back at the desert plains, and wished that we were moving elsewhere.

Somewhere greener, perhaps. Less bleak.

My dad eyed me again, and, as if reading my mind, he said: “I know Texas was the last place you had in mind, but you’ll like it here more than you think you will.” He smiled with his eyes, and there was something disarming about that smile, resolute yet humble, full of utter conviction. “You’ll just have to trust me on this.” And of course, I couldn’t help but believe him. “Better yet,” he added, “you’ll just have to trust in God.”

#

When we arrived at the new house, I was surprised by how large it was compared to our last house. The architecture was much different, too. An adobe, South-Western style, its rooftop lined with curved, rustic tiles, and a sloped concrete driveway with an unkempt palm tree. And just like my dad said: a two-story house.

Can we afford this? was the first thing I wondered.

But there was no grass on the lawn, merely rocks, nor were there any trees in sight (aside from the palm tree, that is, though at the time they still belonged to another category in my undeveloped mind). Situated near the end of a cul-de-sac, our new house was nearly identical to those surrounding it. And as I got out of the moving truck, I was immediately dismayed by the heat, alleviated only slightly by the resurgent wind blowing dust in my face.

My dad was overjoyed to be there, however, as I watched him exit the moving truck right after me. I couldn’t help but feel selfish for not sharing his enthusiasm. Guilt often plagued my conscience—still does, in fact—and I sometimes wonder if it’s because of my religious upbringing or if it would have been there regardless: the fear that I’m not living to my full potential, perhaps—the nature to my nurture.

Back then, I still believed in Original Sin: that mankind is inherently evil because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve, if you don’t know, were the “original humans”: the first of a very long—seldom mentioned, incestuous—bloodline. The very same Adam and Eve created only six days after the Earth was created; actually, only Adam was created six days after the Earth was created, whereas Eve was created an indeterminate time later when the omnipresent God had suddenly decided that man wasn’t meant to be alone and had fashioned Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs (unless that was supposed to be a euphemism). But because of their disobedience to God, God had cursed Adam and Eve and all their descendants. (He also cursed the Earth, too . . . which I find rude and unnecessary).

And what was that curse, you ask?

The curse of sin: the separation of God and man.

Is the tenet a lot to take in? That’s okay, you can go to church once a week and be educated all about it. Or you can go to church more than once a week, if you like, just like I used to, because they certainly love to accept lonely, yearning souls who need community and purpose, and you’re just the right person (no, really, you are). But if you only read Genesis, you won’t understand it all: you have to read the other books in the Bible, too, and analyze the text through a revisionist lens—so you can understand exactly why Jesus died for our sins an entire four thousand years after Original Sin to finally end a millenniums-long curse separating humanity from God—and don’t forget, evolution is a hoax, and the Earth is only six thousand years old.

And I’m a sinner.

Inherently evil.

But if you believe that God impregnated a young virgin with His son, Jesus (Who was also God Himself), to live as a human—a sinless human, to show those feeble humans how it’s done—and be the ultimate sacrifice: the lamb who was slain, who died for the sins of all—and if you accept Jesus into your heart and soul, and acknowledge that he’s the son of God (and God Himself)—you don’t have to be a slave to sin anymore, separated by God, and your soul won’t be punished for all eternity. Except if you don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God, or that he died for the sins of all, and if you even think of anything remotely sinful—a lustful image, for example, or an involuntary, envious pang, you selfish bastard—and even if it’s something you don’t act upon, lest you think that makes any difference, you risk eternal damnation.

And I was always one thought away from going to hell.

(ETERNAL DAMNATION)

I guess, looking back, I had no other choice than to feel guilty for feeling selfish. And really, I can always be less selfish. I’m pretty sure I only thought of myself that day, as my dad and I stood in the driveway, side-by-side, watching my mom park the family’s green RAV4 along the cul-de-sac. It didn’t cross my mind to check on my ten-year-older sister, Reina, as she opened the passenger door and quickly got out of the vehicle.

Out of all my siblings, Reina resembled our mom the most, though she had our dad’s lighter complexion. She was short, feisty, and delightful. And I could see in her black, Eurasian eyes—the most like our mother’s eyes—the same reluctance as me while scrutinizing the new house; but unlike me, her face was far better at hiding it—that, or she was preoccupied with something else on her mind. “I have to pee,” she told my dad, confirming my theory, as she strove up the driveway wearing soft pink travel-worn pajamas and a white oversized t-shirt while clutching her yellow Patagonia backpack closely to her chest. “I’ve been holding it in for hours.”

My dad laughed. “No time to waste, then.”

We walked to the front door, no longer waiting for my mom, and my dad pulled out the keys from his pocket, before searching for the right one. As he worked on unlocking the door, I noticed a boy my age watching us from a couple houses nearby while fixing the chains on his bike. But my dad swung the door open, and my attention quickly diverted back to the house as Reina ran past us. He continued holding the door open for me with a smile. “After you, partner.”

I took a step inside the house, and the first thing I noticed was the carpeted staircase leading to the second-floor. Not only was the house two-stories tall—unlike any other house we had ever lived in, unless you want to count an unfinished attic—but the opening room was far vaster than our last living room and kitchen combined, with a high ceiling and an adjoined railing for an upstairs foyer where the staircase led up to.

But it was the old piano against the white wall that held my attention.

“It came with the house,” my dad said, noticing my gaze.

I sauntered to the aged, mahogany piano and lifted its heavy lid. The weighted keys were wooden and dilapidated. As I pressed my forefinger down on the middle, chipped C, its note reverberated like thunder preceding a storm, and butterflies fluttered violently in my stomach. Striking that key was like plunging into the depths of fate, of discovering something always meant to be, waiting just for me. That feeling was destiny, perhaps—or God Himself.

(Or perhaps years of stimming.)

“It probably needs to be tuned,” my dad voiced. “I’m sure we can do that ourselves.”

My mom entered the open doorway and shut the door behind her. She held two large bags and set them down by the black door and onto the wooden flooring. My dad and her exchanged a look, and he ambled to her and wrapped his arms around her waist, kissing her forehead. “You doing okay, love?”

She nodded, and her dark Indonesian eyes scanned what would possibly be the living room or dining room, where I stood by the piano. “It’s nice,” she said, nodding some more. “There’s no carpet, but that’s better. Cleaner. Easier to keep clean.”

“The kids are all grown up now,” my dad replied, shrugging curtly, and his tone was borderline defensive. “And we have an extra room now for your sewing.”

My mom nodded again, but the light in her eyes somehow sparkled less.

My mom was an entrepreneur. She sewed, knitted, and created jewelry, soaps, and bath scrubs from scratch, and sold them all to her friends and acquaintances whom she met at church. She would even sew quilts for girls that Kory had a crush on, despite him asking her not to (but she did it anyway because I think she liked to embarrass him, and she had always wanted more daughters—nor did Kory actually like any of the girls that she thought he did, not that any of us would ever know for years to come). Making and selling quilts was her way to stay busy, too, when my dad was gone. And like any art form, it sometimes became an obsession. The latter months before Kory had left for New York, my brother constantly complained to my mom about how uneducated my sister and I were, and how she relied too much on us to do the work ourselves. But like I said, I think my mom was resented more solely because she was there more. Nor could I blame her for the way she processed my dad’s absence.

When Reina returned from the bathroom with wet hands, the two of us explored the house together. A four-bedroom house, with three rooms on the second floor, one room—excluding two adjoined rooms and a kitchen—on the first floor, and three bathrooms overall, which was two bathrooms more than we used to have. My parents had sold their other car so they could make a downpayment on the house. I was glad the upstairs had carpet, and I called dibs on the room farthest from all the others. Perfect, really, because Reina loved the room she chose, right next to the master bedroom.

“What color are you gonna paint your walls?” she asked me as we climbed back down the carpeted stairs together.

I shrugged. “Don’t know yet,” I admitted; I couldn’t really visualize what color I’d want my walls to be until all my stuff was inside (visual design wasn’t my cup of tea). “Maybe black.” But when my sister frowned at that, I added: “Or dark red.”

She made a disapproving sound with her mouth. “That sounds awful.”

“You have any better ideas?” I asked as we exited the house to start bringing in our stuff.

“Neon pink,” she joked, before darting her tongue at me. “It fits you so well.”

I noticed the boy from earlier again, now riding his bike in a circle around the cul-de-sac. As soon as he noticed Reina and I watching him, he stopped at the bottom of our driveway with a foot on the gray pavement and nodded at me. “Hey,” he said, perhaps trying to seem aloof.

I nodded back. “Hey.”

“You moving here?” he asked, despite the obvious moving truck parked in the driveway.

I nodded again. “Yeah,” I replied, not knowing what else to say to that; as you probably know by now, I’ve never been good with my words.

“Cool,” he said, nodding again slowly. “I was friends with the kid who lived here before.”

“Was his family brutally murdered?” Reina asked him bluntly.

The boy shook his head. “No,” he replied, perhaps not getting her joke at first, until he added: “I didn’t have time to kill all of them.”

I chuckled, noticing the subtle smile on his lips. He was good-looking, I thought, with dark eyes and dark, unkempt hair, that made him look like he had just woken up. Perhaps a year younger than me, or maybe more. His tan skin and attractive Latin features made me wonder if he had a sister; my last crush looked somewhat similar to him.

“What’s your name?” Reina asked the boy, getting straight to the point.

“Joaquin,” he answered, and his smile grew. “And you?”

Reina momentarily blushed. In her moment of hesitation, I spoke for the both of us: “Creed,” I said, “and this is my sister, Reina.”

Joaquin’s face made an expression that most kids my age made when I told them my name. “What kind of a name is ‘Creed?’ Sounds like an old man.”

I shrugged, almost defensively—the same defensive way my dad had responded to my mom earlier. “What kind of a name is ‘Joaquin?’”

Joaquin chortled. “Blame it on my grandpa.”

Reina spoke again: “I like ‘Joaquin,’ actually.”

He smiled at her, a bit of rebellion in that smile. “Me too.”

Reina blushed once more, turned away self-consciously, and strode back to the RAV4 to get more of her stuff, probably so he didn’t see her face reddening even more. And yet Joaquin’s dark eyes remained on mine, and we continued eyeing each other with mutual curiosity. “You like living here?” I asked him, feeling the ice breaking more with every word spoken.

He shrugged this time. “It’s better than at my dad’s.”

“Creedence,” my dad said, now eyeing me from the back of the moving truck as he began to slide it open, with an awful metallic screech like the end of a fork scraping against a car. “Come on, I want to get this done before it gets late.”

“Need help?” Joaquin asked, glancing from me to my dad.

I eyed my dad momentarily, as if asking for permission, even though he was no longer looking at me but directly into the truck, before glancing back at Joaquin and nodding with a smile. “Yeah, that’d be awesome.”

“Awesome.” Joaquin dropped his bike on the rocky lawn and went to join us.

#

By the time the moving truck was empty, the sun had set in a purple and pink haze, and I was too exhausted to fully appreciate it. My dad had insisted that we finish unloading everything into the house before bed, so he could return the moving truck the next day, first thing in the morning, despite us having it for the rest of the week. But I never questioned his judgement. If my dad put his mind to something, it had to be done, and there was no question about it. The more questions asked, the more discipline was instilled.

(“This hurts me more than it hurts you”)

I lay on my bed that night amidst a room full of unopened boxes, and my mind raced with the many possibilities the future had in store. I don’t know if it was part of being raised a Christian, or being a hopeless romantic, but my mind went to my “Future Wife,” and I wondered if she was also awaiting me in Texas. I often thought of my Future Wife like an abstract deity, as divine as God Himself. My “soulmate,” the one I’d spend the rest of my life with, to make everything better and take away all the pain. Such longing gave me hope. The same kind of hope I got from God—another abstract concept just as real to me. When I prayed to God at night, I often prayed for her, too, whomever “she” was, hoping that she was also thinking about me while I thought about her.

What a hopeless dork I was.

And what wonders belief can create within our hearts.

When I was younger, my dad used to pray with my siblings and I every night before bed. Prayer became integral to me, and it defined a lot of my character. Prayer was speaking to God, the creator of the universe—Divinity Itself, really—and building a relationship, a rapport, that only I and Them could share, as intimate as any relationship I’d have with my Future Wife. And many thoughts of mine had even been framed as prayers, as if I was never alone and always shared my thoughts with another, like a thought police, perhaps, though with far less “policing” (or more tolerable policing, that is). After a while, though, I started wondering what the difference was between thinking and praying for an omnipotent, omnipresent God who was experiencing the past and present simultaneously and knew the hearts and minds of every one of us. But hey, praying was intentional, right? And any questions at the time warranted the risk of

(ETERNAL DAMNATION)

and more than just words in my head, I wanted my life to be a prayer to God. A personal devotion, lived through my thoughts and actions. Prayer was always meant to be private, anyway, and never for virtue signaling.

Besides, I felt far less alone when I prayed.

That night, in particular, I prayed for my friends left behind, the potential friend I had now, and even my crush I would never see again (I still remember her birthday after all these years). But most of all, I prayed for God’s will to be done above my own. That wherever God took me next, and whatever it was He called me for, that I would be just and true and always do the right thing.

(“First shall be last, and last shall be first”)

But only silence enveloped the dark room.

Still, I felt God’s presence all the same.

And I fell asleep feeling less alone.