The God Of Many Masks Chapter 2 -- the chapters are short.

"Neat trick out there, setting up those snipers to shoot around you."  Jay and I are in a back room of the church.  I kept the dark motorcycle helmet on until we were alone, my face covered by the opaque plastic to hide the changes in my looks.   I take it off and look at James, the spy who acts like a sceptic who is not....   I never have understood why they gave him these orders, years ago, before we met...  though I have seen enough signs of his belief in me to know he watched the webcam with the others, believing a deity had arrived on the planet.    Jay is six seven, the muscles he pumped up with iron and steroids during his two tours in Iraq have lost their definition.   He still looks monstrous.  Classic rich boy handsome, blue eyed with curly blonde hair, a hard core Irish rebel at heart, proud his family starved during the potato famine rather than bowing before the British monarchy, he comes from one of the powerful families that once ruled the mid-west. 

Two of his uncles started in special op's and ended up doing work known only between them and the president, shadow warriors Jay had been pumping for information on how the world really worked since he was a kid.  He used to get them drunk and hear about the world behind the curtains;  what they didn't tell him he figured out with his 186 IQ and occasionally slipping into an aunt's computer that had a direcct link to CIA eyes only files.  He had been sent to me years ago, my first human contact with someone who outed himself as knowledgable about the shadow war;  before that they had sent me vague messages on the tv, occasionally muttered a message on the streets.   I was under heavy surveillance, knew as much, but not why.


 I was being worshipped by a group I did not know about, the CIA and others who I never heard the names of had told them I was giving them non verbal messages thru the way I arranged my apartment...    His mother had been hell bent on keeping him out of shadow war and he was all for it, a stoner like I was, a hippy kid who slept on the beaches in the summers in Chicago, until his family decided he needed to go into the army, straighten out his life, give him some direction.   He was fit for that life on the outside only.  Used to walk around the neighborhood with a kitten on his shoulder, Max...  they took out his family because of his association with me.  I barely stopped him from going out in a blaze of glory.  Just barely.  Kept him drunk and on mushrooms for a couple weeks with three hookers.  Not the conventional ways of a son of God, not that I fit any of the myths they attributed to me, for the most part.  A few had come all too true.

Vera has a wig made from the actual long hair that I was known for wearing, and hairs from my beard.  She  sits me down and begins  carefully putting the blonde/grey hair back onto my face.  She is going beyond the goutee I had, giving me a full beard to hide my weight gain.

Jay is become worried about me.   Knows that I have held the groups together, by my fame from the webcam, the favors I have done for certain groups, including saving a few of their lives. "Did you have them all killed -- sent for a reset, as you say?"   He thinks I set up the snipers who fired down on us while we motorcycled in.  One of the vet's had taken a bullet in the ankle.

"Jay..."   I have to play along with his cover, he has some reason for it, adds to my credibility I guess with those who are fighting with me despite how I am looked at -- one group had told me, ALL WRITERS THINK THEY ARE GOD, though they knew it benefited them to work with me...   I shrug, laugh as much as I do, short and fake.   "I would not have...   well, maybe they were just bad shots, you know how gang bangers are... they fire for some target and end up magic bulleting three year olds."

Vera is quiet.  She knows Jay knows I AM...  we talk around the topic, Jay's cover story intact as the cynic.  Vera herself grows more terrified of me by the day;  the miracles are convincing some that I am there to end the world, after defeating evil.   I cannot honestly tell them this is not true... or convince myself it is not true, much as I  wish I could. My Father will make that decision.   All I can do is fight the deluded elitists and pray that we win, usher in a new age that pleases my Father enough that he decides a mercy killing is not required.

Jay hands me a white robe  with a hood.   I rear my head back and roll my eyes, 
'Gotta hide that you've become a fat ass."
"Being told to eat a lot cake, man...  you get an order like that, you jump in.   A robe, though.... loose clothes would have worked."
"Not on me."
"Okay."   I take it and begin to slip it on over my clothes.
"Undress, man.  You gotta look all Mick Jagger for this show, like they know you.  I gotta say, man, you do look like a plain old man without all the hair, and fat."   Jay is the most blunt person I have eer met in my life, used to offend everyone in my family back in the day when the shadow war was being played out as a fight between sheperds who were afraid to let the sheep know, fearing the inevitable stampede.   I was sick with learning of what was really happening in the world, but  I look back on the time and know I had it so good that if I could go back... living a block from the beach, with a woman I loved, a husky who raised the cats.... just writing, smoking weed, listening to Christian music written for me.... and loving the feeling, the loyalty, the knowledge that some believed in my  leadership, even as the FBI interrogated me for crimes the CIA was trying to pin onme, and I was learning about the murder of peaceful protesters who came to Chicago, who I had basically ignored, writing in the voice of Jesus and knowing the words were the mission, not the protests...   a decisiion that proved correct, even though thinking of the agents beating young college girls to death on a golf course...   I have so many memories now like that I have to compartmaentalize them away to keep back the tears.  Had to show a front.  A hard warrior.  As I wrote in my Jesus trance, God's do not war.  God's slaughter.   And this has proven all too true..

I have a surprise for all of them.   When I went into hiding to change my appearence, a CIA defected scientist gave me two false eyes;  tech they have been working on for fifty some years, perfected and in use by the enemy, no doubt...       hooked up to the muscles surrounding my eyes, I had went thru two painful as all hell months learning to control the features;   I can focus almost like microscope -- close enough for my purposes;  I can now hear thru my skull from two miles away.  The reason the CIA had spent only God knows how many hundred millions plus on the eyes, I would be using on a human for the first time tonight...  I am fairly stoic about death, in the midst of battle, when I am wound up preaching to soldiers.   I am not a cold bloodied killer.   It takes the heat of the fire of God to change me from my usual soft spoken, half professor/half stoner sounding self;  tonight there would be traitors with equipment to track the meeting.   We have a damper going for a two miles around the church, no one was getting anything in or out electronically.   Two miles was enough for a nuke and they would try that on me if they could, though I knew I would be standing amidst the death unharmed, I have people I value too much in the area to sacrifice.

The blue lasers coming from my eyes would surprise the hell out of even James.  Learning how to control the features had been easier for me than any soldier they had tried it on, of course, and they kept trying to test me to figure out why.... there is not telling a scientist and a group of shrinks who I really am;  they figured belief in a reincarnating guide was something for the soldiers to spur them.  I have had a headache since the surgery.  I take handfuls of pills, which I did sometimes anyways due to the back surgeries, which they tell me resulted from the wings growing, and what they had to do to pull them out during the year they hospitilized me when I was five.... maybe I took too many at times, my little cross, though I tried to be careful.   The lasers had caused a lot of damage when I was training with it.... out in a field learning to subtly manipulate the muscles around my eye that controlled the features.  The eyes are connected to a computer placed in my guts, which allows me access to gps, infra red and night vision, the ability to contact phones, computers, ham radios...  They took out everyone associated with the surgeries, then each other.  Hard core groups.  I had no control over any of it though I accepted their deaths over the layers of dry blood on my hands, my arms, chest, face...  soul. 

"So, you know we are going to have hinkey assholes out there?  You're going to trust them?"   Jay sounds cynical, acts like I am an idiot a lot, too much at times, with his IQ it has come a bit too natural to him,  and I act like one enough to welcome someone around me who is not afraid to put me down, for the good of the soul.  Maybe that was part of why his cover included being sceptical of my divinity?   I knew he knew from a couple slip up's he made when he was either wasted, or seeing if I wanted to act like Jesus around him -- something I had never done.  The five years plus I had been worshipped, they kept them from me, or if we met, and they did bring a lot of people to Chicago who just wanted to be in my presence, see me in person.

 I have a hard time relating to people on the other side of the mirror.  I envy them.   When I was 24 and married, I had a prophetic dream while living in Toledo Ohio and having no memories of Chicago other than the art musuems our high school took us to every year, I was downtown on State street -- which I recognized years later when i saw it, and down thru the thin strip of blue sky between the skyscrapers, a cloud was approaching... and I knew Jesus was back.  I was euphoric, running throough the streets screaming out, "JESUS IS BACK.  Look into the sky.... see?"  Then I was in a Catholic church, telling my wife that no matter how many women I had been with since we split up, that she was my only wife...her clothes fell off, she rose up into the air and then backed onto my hard dick...   afterwards I ran back intot he streets, and watched as the thin could begam to descend right in front of me. The happiness was more than I have ever felt awake.   But when the cloud reached the ground there was simply a glam rock band playing, skinny and painted up, jammingon a guitar, drums...  That dream seemed like God giving me a slight idea of how people had once felt about me.

They forgot the part of my return saying the nations would be broken with an Iron Rod, that I would return with a sword.  Peace and love had been expected when they first introduced me... they tried to get me to go on stage with Yoko Ono at Wrigley Field, but a spy planted in my life, who I thought was a friend and was always there to front me weed, steered me away from going.   I was still half thinking maybe I had gone mad, that I was not who this voice seeed to make me out to be.  Jim.  He was among those planted around me to make me not believe in myself, so the CIA could manipulate me.   Another regret, the peace and love that I thought I was bringing to all inthe world, that my even existing was the proof of God I had always sought, and was forever changed by having...   universal truths had long been shattered by my post modern philosophy classes, truth something subjective nd ever changing;  but the first few weeks, anything seemed possible -- if a CHRIST existed.

Now I am hated and hunted, actually turned a lot of people away from religion, drove others to kill innocents, leap from skyscrapers to protest my jailing, form into an army, taking over the white house...   nuke outside of Japan and cause a tsunami that shattered a nuclear power plant, which was slowly killing the pacific ocean -- unintended consequences.  Killing the English Royal family....  various actors who played characters based on me that mocked me.

That all came later, after I knew how they were looking at me, after the years of feeling like I was being taunted by more powerful people on tv...  and was surprised anytime something I did came up on a show, or mentioned on the news, always coded enough that other than my wife, who witnessed it all, I was afraid to bring it up with anyone...  I once wrote that they should do their worst and burn me with jokes, because I would them... having no idea the next week the tv broadcast practically nothing but shit about me.  I was stunned by how people saw me, humiliated...   my first taste of the humility that was to come when I learned there were cameras even in my toilet.  Saturday Night Live did a show bout me that even mentioned the church I went to, not even funny just practically a list of things... talking about how poor I was, pretending my dealers were my friends and mocking then, showing me they even had cameras there.   Afterwards I learned how deadly my supporters were when   I had to step in and stop the entire cast of saturday nght live being put to death.  The CIA was keeping me isolated from all the acttion, so my life seemed normal, even poverty ridden.  The schizophrenia of one world goingon the tv and then going out into the streets and everything seeming normal, other than the occasional strange words uttered to me by people I did not know, I felt entirely alone. I was alone, no one around in my life.    My day to day life usually seemed normal, a guy whith a broken back who wrote a blog and kept himself stoned from morning to night, ate handfuls of pain pills.  IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN...  is a thought I have had millions of times it seems, but God had not wanted me to know.  I opened the bible seeking a random passage, which was a game the Father and I played, where he usually gave me what I needed, not what I wanted.   The passage talked about how God would beffudle people at times to get his way.   I also found the passage talking about how the women following me would become barren the same way, after being told the same thing on the tv. 

'Yes, well, I think I know how to figure out who is with us, and who is not.  In fact I have a little surprise for you all tonight.   You stoned?"
'You want a bowl?"
"Nah, I just think you'll like this better stoned."

Part of my training with the eye was to focus in on others flesh, looking for signs of distress like sweating, flushing;  hands for the slightest shaking;  eyes for fear or cunning;  basically to note those who were playing a role, or reacting in ways incoherent with the situation.   I would use the eye to identify them first, before I said much of anything, then....  show them the brutal power of the son of God.

The gathering does not know I am going to be here.  Most of the world thinks I am in a bunker underground, on a submarine in the arctic...  all the places they tried to get me to go in the beginning, when they thought they were protecting me.  My resourcefullness in protecting them was nothing they would ever understand.   No life I had ever lived fully convinced anyone 24/7 what I am.  I understood, the doubts...  I had them once, on a cross, when I thought I was going to win a revolution and instead He made me a symbol, the day I took the worlds sins as my own and knew what it truly was to be human.  The day a God's son was humbled, and a Father turned away from the pain and the cries of his son...


"I have a surprise for the enemies in our midst, Jay.  Trust me for a change, alright?"
'Yeah, right.  I'm trusting these."  He waves over at the small arsenal he has been travelling with, ak-47, grenade launcher, a shoulder held anti-aircraft missile...  I know nothing about weapons.  Never owned one.  When you can pull lightening out of the sky the only reason you would need a gun is avoid over-kill.... and over-kill kind of goes along with what I do.   If I did not know all souls go to Heaven, I would not be the most deadly creature in all of creation.  I do.  And I am.

"I will have a hit off that bowl."   Jay hands me the bowl he has been puffing on since I came in, I take a long harsh hit and hold it until my heads go light....  blow out the little bit of smoke that is left, take another, do the same...   "Alright, let's go."
"You want some visine?"   Vera has been quiet the whole time.  She is terrified even with the valium she pops like candy.  
"Uh...  No, they all know I smoke."


Jay picks up an ak-47, slips an uzi over his shoulder...  opens the door and waves and looks down the hall both ways.  There is plenty of security in the church, though he has stayed alive by trusting no humans, a line from the bible we shared a great respect for.