Event in Progress

Chapter Twenty-Three

That night, Sean re-read all of Insomniac. He had worked on it until it was now nearly forty thousand words long. Just ten thousand more words and he'd have another official novel. But for some reason, the well had dried up. He had lost the muse.

The demon wasn't satisfied, but now McKnight had writer's block. To say that was a bad combination would be to state the obvious, and if McKnight was reduced to stating the obvious he would prefer death. A writer who could only convey that which was already known was superfluous, redundant. Unnecessary.

But that word described McKnight fairly well.

Which is why instead of writing, Sean re-read the entirety of his script. It took the whole evening, demonstrating that it had indeed ballooned the way it ought to have. He made a few minor edits here and there as he read the text, expanded a paragraph, deleted an entire chapter and rewrote it. In the end, he lost a total of 400 words from the length. But he still couldn't think of what to do with it now.

A large part of him actually wanted to just delete the entire manuscript so he could pretend it had never been started. But there was another part of him, a more important voice, that informed him if he didn't get the words out on paper he would be deleting himself instead. He knew he had danced around the issue enough. The next time he decided to kill himself would be his last time. It would be over, and that small part of him was scared because of it.

McKnight knew part of it had to do with God. He was a Presbyterian, although not a very consistent one (and he'd be the first to tell you that). Strangely, he never doubted the existence of God. He had grown up in a Christian home where God had always been on everyone's lips, where his parents had instructed him in Bible stories. It was easy enough for them to do: Dad was a pastor, Mom lead the Sunday School. Sean was stuck along for the ride.

He had done the prerequisite "ask the Lord into thy heart" when he was around five years old. He could still remember the day like it had been yesterday. They had lived in their old home in the town of Wood Creek, about twenty miles away from where he lived now. They had been driving home from a day of shopping and the car had been going through a small canyon. McKnight had been in the back looking up through the rear window at the tall cliffs that surrounded the car. Even at that age, his imagination was active and he wondered if a rock might fall from the top of the canyon and land on the car.

On one of the curves, he simply did it. He thought: "Lord, come into my heart." And that had been that. He had never known a day where God was not present.

But that was part of the problem, wasn't it? God had been there when all the kids had pounded on him, and God had done nothing. God had been there when Sean thrashed around on his bed wanting to die, and God had done nothing. God had done nothing for Sean his entire life, nothing that Sean could see anyway. Maybe He had done some things behind the scenes where He'd never get credit for them; but if God chose to work in that manner, what difference was there between God and an After School Friend? When you really boiled it down, what was the difference?

Yet Sean could not stop believing in God. He could pretend that he no longer believed in God, but God was still there. Always there.

It was a curse. McKnight had become a Calvinist as he matured. He didn't believe in libertarian free will. He had studied the issues and had become a compatibalist. He knew that only fourteen people in the world knew what the difference between a libertarian and a compatibalist were. But he was one of them. He knew.

And God did nothing.

McKnight knew that evil things never happened to good people because there was no such thing as good people. Everyone was evil in his or her own way. Compared to others, some were saints. But compared to God, each of us was no better than pond scum. Sean knew this because he knew people were depraved. He was pretty sure that he would have believed this from the Bible alone, even if he had not been tortured by the "innocent" children who "didn't know better."