Chapter 475 Scene 3 (or “The Conversion of Matt”)

[Matt deGomme]
     It was the end of the service and the college students had just been called to the altar – that meant him. In his heart, he knew he had no business at an altar; he had no business in a church, at least not the business the congregants expect. He only ever came to church at his mother’s insistence and, even then, only after much insistence. The preacher had requested that his mother sing in the service, so he had come to support her. Now, the preacher – a former lesbian – was calling the youth up for special prayer before they went back to school. Elementary school. Middle school. High school... His turn.
     He had no excuse. “College students” was so general. She didn’t ask for “College Christians” or “College Believers,” though these were probably what she thought she was getting. The words the preacher used made remaining seated next to his mother an act of defiance he did not want to justify to her, so he got up and went.
     He stood and waited for the preacher to get through the rest of the few college students. Eventually she reached him with her bottle of oil. She poured some out onto her fingers and rubbed it onto his bowed forehead while saying a prayer. When she was done, she paused with his hands in hers and looked up at him. “There is a glow in your face,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and raised a thick index finger up to his nose, “Don’t let the Devil steal it.” He stopped short of a full smile and returned to his seat.
     When he sat down, his mother was leaning slightly away from him. She focused on him while he settled. “You looked like your father up there,” she said. Such a statement might seem obvious, empty to most. His father is half of the people you’d expect him to look like. But the statement’s simple, ostensible innocence both shrouded and magnified the vague, though deeply penetrating criticism it conveyed. If you’re an only son whose mother has been abandoned by your father and not replaced in 20 years; if you’re an only son who is always immediately recognized as his mother’s child, you know exactly what that statement means. What prompted such a statement, on the other hand, was as mysterious to him as what brought him into the building.
     At that moment, as he looked into her eyes, he thought about what the preacher had just said about that same face. He thought about the preacher’s spiritual and, therefore, sexual “conversion.” He thought about his mother’s singing and her ability to inspire. He thought of the glow he knew the preacher could see dwindling in his face and the warning she gave before he returned to his seat. He thought about the God he didn’t believe existed; the Authority from which all of these divers inspirations, conversions, and judgments presumably came, and he thought about what such an entity must think about all this. At that moment, as he had these thoughts and absorbed the look in his mother’s eyes, he didn’t smile; but in his heart he laughed. He also knew that somewhere, God was laughing, too.