PROLOGUE

The only way to bear the pain was to quit believing it was a part of me.

I was soaring. We were all flying headfirst like Superman but moving only to tremble. Ropes held us by hooks in the skin of our backs. All night long, our naked bodies, which the Afrikaner had told us weren’t ours and had never belonged to us, had been hanging above a fire on the hill he called Calvary. The sensation was agony, but pain was local to bodies and we weren’t bodies. We were only awareness.

I was aware of my cramping muscles. Of the blood trickling out of my hook-wounds to sizzle on the bonfire. The fire’s glowing coals, we’d been told, were as much a part of us as our pain, which was another way of saying that nothing was a part of us. The coals and the hooks and their throbbing tug were appearances in consciousness, drifting across our minds like clouds across the sky. My pain wasn’t mine any more than the frozen crystals gathering beyond the Rio Grande were my thunderheads.

Not my clouds. Not my clouds. Up on the hooks I chanted this mantra, trying to fathom how it could be true. Whatever the truth, I needed to believe in it. We all needed to believe. If we didn’t come around to the belief on our own, the Afrikaner and his men were going to torture it into us.

PART ONE: ATLANTIS

—1—

I wound up on Calvary Hill by telling lies about what I believed. Because my father was the first person I lied to, I’ll begin with him, Sheldon Sultan.

Sheldon was an airport taxi driver, the only atheist in the fleet. Before dropping out of college, he had founded the Florida State University Apostates’ Society, where he met my mother, Ann. As the romantic story goes, Sheldon and Ann spent their first date cackling about religious nonsense until their bellies hurt. By the time they were raising me, they were still laughing. "I ever catch you praying, I’ll call the school and have them put you with the retarded kids,” Sheldon told me in jest from time to time, the joke being that no son of his could be stupid enough to pray. His words left me stewing in shame over what I’d been doing in bed every night.

The trouble had started on my seventh birthday.

This was 1984. The widow across the lane gave me an illustrated storybook for a birthday gift. Published by the Watchtower Foundation, the volume retold the Old and New Testaments through the eyes of their handsome heroes. In one bright painting, a shepherd boy named David cradled the lamb he’d saved from slaughter. Two pages later, an older David, blond and bronze, was aiming a stone at a giant. Wanting to know more about this brave boy I’d never heard of, I took the matter to my father.

Sheldon gaped at the book, appalled. "This is from Mrs. Ogle?"

Before I could answer, he began reading aloud.

"’Everything they thought about was bad all the time, and the earth became filled with violence! Do you know one of the reasons why there was so much trouble on the earth in those days? It’s because Satan had a new way of getting the people to do bad things.’ Christ, Jachin!”

Everyone but my father called me Jake, the short version of my unusual name. “Did I do something wrong?”

“How much of this have you read?" His tone made the right answer clear.

"Only a few pages,” I said.

"Thank goodness. Let’s find you something better to read." Sheldon walked away with the book. Through the bedroom door I heard him telling my mother, "It’s child telling kids this stuff. Might as well chain Jachin to a hot radiator and whip him."

Later, after my father gone to the airport to work his shift, I asked how stories could be child abuse. My mother, a state tax auditor, answered, "Can you remember how it felt when you tasted the burnt sugar candy?"

Solemnly I nodded. Helping to mix the caramel, I had stuck my finger in the boiling pot.

Ann said, "Imagine me and Sheldon burning like that forever, all over our bodies. That’s what Christians think will happen to us when we die. Not to worry, it’s just make-believe, and I don’t mind what the neighbors think, but your dad’s different. When folks want him burning in hell, it gets to Sheldon."

I had lied to my father about reading only a few pages. I had read every word of the storybook. For the first time, I knew why Jesus had let himself be nailed to the cross: he’d done it for me, to absolve my sins. Days later, he’d risen from the dead with word of Judgment Day, which was coming soon, not just for the believers but for the infidels, too, like Sheldon and Ann.

That night, I put my hands together and pled for their souls. "Please, Lord, accept my mother and father into the kingdom of heaven," I said anxiously, knowing that the betrayal, if Sheldon caught wind of it, could send him into one of his dark spells. Sheldon was a tormented soul, as he put it. For days at a time, he would barely rise from the sofa, where he lay in blank, open-eyed silence. Almost nothing could get him moving, once he’d grown that thousand-yard stare, short of Mom naming the problem.

"Manic-depressive?” he cried out one day, after Ann had voiced the term to my aunt over the phone. “Keep up that jargon, you’ll sound pretty daft in the future.”

“It’s right there in your medical chart. I saw it on the insurance statement.”

“In the age of phrenology, you’d have been feeling my scalp for bumps. ’What have we here? A bump of rage! Pity the poor man’s family. This schmuck must loathe the world, oh my, and here’s a bump of spleen. Quick, get social services out to the Sultanate of Atlantis."

That was Sheldon’s name for our dead-end street and the state-owned cypress swamp beyond it. Years before, having learned what our surname meant, I’d asked what we were sultans of. “Atlantis Lane, last cul-de-sac in Fountain of Youth Estates.” What did Atlantis have to do with the Fountain of Youth, I’d asked, and Sheldon had said, "Fellow who built this neighborhood believes the lost continent’s hiding underneath the swamp waters. Our kingdom."

So there we were, sultans of a kingdom. Dwelling in it too were my half-sister Celeste, daughter of my mother’s first marriage, and our majestic Samoyed, Yukon. Celeste was nine years older than I was. Yukon was my age, born in 1977. Florida summers were too hot for a double-coated Siberian dog, but seventy-seven was a lucky number and I still believed we were lucky souls. Yukon stuck by me on the swamp trails, charting our sultanate. Every Sunday we went to Toys ’R’ Us to buy a new toy. That store sat across Crawfordville Highway from the Mt. Zion Church of Christ, where there was always a new clever message on the marquee. "The evolutionist will look like a monkey on Judgment Day." "Sin is a mousetrap: free cheese, gotcha!"

"Sin is a mousetrap," Sheldon read aloud. "I guess heaven’s a rodent wheel in a cage and Satan is a fat Siamese cat."

I laughed along with him. My half-sister had been dating a crucifix-wearing boy whom I’d overheard Sheldon belittling along with Celeste. In the sultanate, the way to earn admiration was to come off as an atheist. Eager to please my father, I read the following week’s church message aloud derisively: "What if Jesus said, I don’t love you anymore, you don’t make me happy, I’ve found someone else?"

Instead of laughing, Sheldon shook his head in disgust. "Imagine trying to make your parishioners feel jilted by Jesus. What sadist comes up with such cruelty, and in what world are we supposed to thank God for it?" I pretended to share in my father’s incredulity. In my head, I was praying for his salvation. "Forgive him, forgive Mom too," I whispered, and tacked on a line I’d heard on TV: "They know not what they do."

—2—

Like the eponymous hero of Sheldon’s favorite novel, my father was a letter writer.

"He wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead," Saul Bellow had written of his disappointed hero, Moses E. Herzog. Waiting for fares at the Tallahassee Airport, Sheldon took Herzog’s quixotic campaigns as a call to arms. While the other taxi drivers chewed Skoal and shot the shit, he sat in his Caprice with a yellow pad and a pen, firing off retorts to famous Christians.

The syndicated columnist Cal Thomas. The writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Former president Jimmy Carter. The game of Whac-A-Mole was never-ending; for every foe of secularism whom Sheldon struck down with a letter, two more would pop up. What my father couldn’t abide was that these men were wealthy from their ideas while he worked evenings driving a cab. It was cold comfort when fares who’d expected some redneck slob remarked on his erudition. Chopin on the tape deck; Nietzsche in the map compartment. Affixed to the door panel, an arch plea for tips, "Support Reaganomics: Trickle." In Sheldon’s mind he wasn’t a driver so much as a public intellectual. His ambition during the manic times was to pen Christianity’s authoritative negation. Rebutting every devotee in the canon wouldn’t be quick work, but two thousand words a day by the end of the decade would make for a ten-thousand-page book. The years crept by, though, and by the summer of ’89, he hadn’t written one page of The Atheist’s Bible. He was too busy playing Whac-A-Mole.

Every wrong idea Sheldon encountered, he hit with his mallet. In 1989 the wrongest ideas of all came from Morgan Conrad, the famous mythologist. Ever since PBS had adapted Morgan Conrad’s Myth Cycle into a documentary series, the books in that trilogy—The Death of Myth, The Birth of Myth, and The Truth of Myth—had remained on the best seller list. The success had scored their author a job as a screenwriter. One October day, I came home to find my father watching TV.

"What’s going on?" I asked warily. Sheldon hated TV.

"This huckster Conrad’s expanding his reach." Across my father’s lap lay his three-in-one Myth Cycle, its cover image a caduceus of dead, rotting snakes. On the television screen, a blond boy was staring at me with eyes like a raptor.

The boy was about two years older than I was, fourteen to my twelve. Like others in his jungle tribe, he wore only a loincloth, but he alone had light skin. His sweat glistened; scowling brutes in warpaint were staking him up by a bonfire.

They were going to burn him alive.

The men chanted and beat drums. "It’s a puberty rite; they’re turning him into a man," explained Sheldon, as flames lapped at the boy’s feet. Now came the shaman, bearing leaves crawling with fire ants. The boy’s eyes widened in terror, as mine widened in awe.

The ants swarmed onto the boy’s writhing body. As they bit him, I felt like I had when I’d beheld brave King David: I wanted to be this boy. I wanted to be naked in the field of battle, testing my courage. Proving how much pain I could take. The desire scared me; it had arisen from nowhere. The ants were onto the boy’s face. They were devouring him. The chants quickened, my skin tingled, my body hummed, and the screen went dark.

Remote in hand, my father stared past me, eyes as blank as the TV.

"Turn it back on,” I said to him.

“No, I don’t need to do that; I can save you two hours. This kid’s parents were so effete and bourgeois that his life back home was all but worthless. In the nick of time, he got lost in the jungle. Now that the noble savages have made a man of him, they’ll teach him to worship their jungle gods and be happy. Modern life, bad! Primitive life, good!"

The TV Guide gave me the title and summary: Boyhood’s End (R), starring Kellan Jackson. After the son of missionaries goes missing in the jungle, tribespeople put the boy through the rites of manhood, inducting him into the Way of the Warrior. The film wasn’t scheduled to run again. With no VCR at the house, I couldn’t rent it. Only by accident, watching Late Night while Sheldon was working and Ann was asleep, did I reencounter the boy.

In a sleek sport coat, his blond curls slicked back, Kellan Jackson had the same raptor-like eyes as when he’d been staked to the bonfire. Beside him, the host leaned in for the next question. "How long did you spend out there in the jungle?"

"Nine months," said Kellan; already I was using his first name in my mind.

"Nine months, frolicking with naked girls and waging war on your enemies. In other words, eighth grade. Roll the clip?”

The studio scene gave way to a naked, writhing Kellan, covered in ants. The host said, "That looked pretty real.”

"It hurt a little." Kellan’s bashful smile couldn’t mask his pride.

"And what was the effect on your psyche? This guy claims undergoing the rites of manhood can change a boy forever."

Up came the image of a professor in tweed alongside the rotting-snake cover art from The Myth Cycle. "The screenplay is by Morgan Conrad, who claims that without access to myth, our very psyches will atrophy. He says the murder and crack epidemics might vanish if we had puberty rites like primitive cultures used to. So, Kellan, after those ants bit you, did you feel more like a man?"

With the wisdom of fifteen years, Kellan Jackson smiled craftily. Whatever secrets he possessed about naked girls and manhood, I felt on the verge of attaining too. All I had to do was read The Myth Cycle. But when I went to find it on Sheldon’s alphabetized shelf, there was a four-inch gap between Joseph Conrad and Pat Conroy. When I asked where he had put the book, he held my gaze before saying, “I lent it to one of the other taxi drivers. It’s full of nonsense anyway; you’re better off to stick with Tolkien.”

That was who I’d been reading by Sheldon’s side while Ann watched TV. Every evening on the living room couch while he progressed through the complete works of Nietzsche, I’d been sitting next to him with The Lord of the Rings. Now and then, Sheldon would ask how Frodo was faring on his odyssey. Listening to my answers, he beamed with pride. I knew I was fulfilling his hopes for me. I decided to take up Nietzsche myself once I was done with the trilogy about Middle Earth. Anything to make him proud.

The day after Frodo arrived in Mordor, I got home from school to find a torn letter envelope on the porch postmarked Anchoret, New Hampshire.

The single sheet of folded Exmouth College stationery inside the envelope read, "Dear Mr. Sultan, I must decline your request. One can choose a mentor for only himself. Should you wish for a mentor of your own, here is lesson number one. Your sharp wit is your own worst enemy. Irony suppresses joy. Move out of your head and into your heart, where intuition can guide you like it did in childhood."

The signature below this strange advice was Morgan Conrad’s.

Impressed, I turned the famous scholar’s words over in my head. As far as I knew, no recipient of Sheldon’s letters had ever written him back before. Expecting Sheldon to be happy about it, I went inside, where he lay empty-eyed on the couch, Yukon resting by his side.

"Everything all right, Dad?"

"Never better. What a lark it is to live," Hearing the clipped and distant words, my heart sank. Sheldon had lain around for three listless weeks during his last dark spell, and I didn’t want to go through that again.

"This letter says you’ve got a sharp wit," I pointed out by way of a pep talk.

Sheldon said, "I haven’t taught you the right things, have I? For the rest of your life, with every new thing you learn, you’ll be building it onto a base of wrong things."

The petulance suggested he was sore about Morgan Conrad’s letter. I said, “Look, who cares what some stranger thinks?"

"Everyone, including you, Jachin. Why, you already took the side of my archnemesis, that day you begged to keep watching his movie."

"I wanted to know what happens to that boy," I said in defense of myself.

"You wanted to experience the truth of myth.” Reaching for a bottle of Jim Beam, my father nudged our aging dog awake. “Do you know what Christianity really is?"

I petted Yukon’s thick white coat. "It’s a myth?”

My father’s muscles tightened. "That’s right, it’s a myth, Jachin," he said, clutching the bottle. His tone of mad conviction reminded me of a line from his favorite film. "You broke my heart, Fredo," Michael Corleone had declared in that same voice before giving his brother the kiss of death. What Sheldon kissed was the Jim Beam. He guzzled it until I lost my temper.

"It’s a movie! Are you going to lie on the couch for a month because I liked a movie?" I cried out. Too wound up to stop, I added, “Movies are fake! You’re being stupid!”

Sheldon set down the bourbon. "Don’t turn on me, son,” he said, chastened. “I need you on my side when you write The Atheist’s Bible.”

I didn’t understand. "That’s your book.”

“Not anymore. I thought so, but I’ve failed, which means it’s yours now. Your inheritance."

"You’re talking like you’re on your deathbed," I said.

“You’ve got enough of your mother in you to move out of your head into your heart. When you write it, it should be the size and shape of the real Bible. Two testaments, a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. Will you remember?”

"A covenant of works and a covenant of grace," I repeated, alarmed. In his right mind Sheldon would never be giving Bible lessons.

"You’ll need to refute all the religions on earth, though, not just one."

"Can we talk about it tomorrow?" He was drunk; he wouldn’t remember.

"First, accept your inheritance. Two testaments, two covenants. Gospels, apocrypha. Promise me,” said my father, reaching for Yukon, who backed away, evading Sheldon’s touch, or fleeing his neediness, as I was doing when I replied, “I promise.”

—3—

The spell was a bad one. Sheldon went off his Prozac. He quit going to work. To cover the bills, Ann took on some extra shifts at the Department of Revenue. With no other kids to play with in Fountain of Youth Estates, I wandered the woods alone. Yukon was too old and frail to want to follow me outside anymore; his hips hurt him on the porch stairs. I was rooting around in the garage for wood to build him a ramp when I spotted two rotting snakes, their bodies coiled into a braid.

It was the cover of The Truth of Myth, lying on the cement floor behind our oil-drum trash bin. Sheldon must have been lying when he said he’d lent it to a taxi driver. After wiping the cobwebs off, I paged through the hefty hardcover. In chapter after abstract chapter about dark forests and wastelands, I couldn’t locate one sentiment worth getting worked up about, let alone spending whole days horizontal. Not that Dad’s behavior that fall seemed so abnormal; as far as I knew, veering between mania and anhedonia was what grown men did. I quit paying much attention. Fall gave way to winter. For the first time in my life, snow entered the forecast, predicted for late on Christmas Eve.

In years to come, I would replay the events too often to know if I was recalling December 24, 1989, or only stories I’d told myself about the holiday. By that point Sheldon had returned to work; he was pulling eighteen-hour shifts and even sleeping in his taxi at the airport. On a busy travel day like Christmas Eve an airport driver stood to net $150 after he’d given the owner his cut. Before sunup Sheldon was headed out the door when Ann, predicting impassable roads on Christmas Day, moved up our family gathering to that afternoon at 12:30.

“Dallas flight’s landing at 12:30. Negative, Ann.”

“My holiday bonus is catching us up on the bills. You can stay home.”

“Two hundred bucks to listen to your sister make fun of me.”

“Sounds like you’re eager for the excuse to ditch us.”

"Bingo, Ann: the very reason why I dropped out of college and took up driving a cab. To get out of one family meal."

Sheldon left. Celeste, a college senior now, drove up from Gainesville. My aunt Sue arrived from Jacksonville. Seeing Sheldon’s taxi missing from the driveway, she chuckled.

“It’s one of the busiest travel days,” said my mother.

"I’m sure Sheldon’s grief-stricken to be missing a holiday," Aunt Sue replied.

"Nothing Sheldon loves like a ceremony," Celeste said, and then everyone was laughing but me.

"What ceremony?" Mom gestured to the green beans, cranberry sauce, and ham. "Christmas isn’t a ceremony," I said, to more giggling. I didn’t get it. Were they laughing at me, at Dad, or at us both?

We sat down to eat. Celeste told us about the future of socialism, then Aunt Sue asked me how I was liking seventh grade. I said I liked it fine. In between bites of pie, Aunt Sue said, "Good thing Sheldon’s not home to hear such treachery.”

I asked, "What’s treacherous about liking seventh grade?"

"Nothing at all. Tell Sheldon you’re enjoying school, then see what he says. Ann, can the dog have some scraps?"

"Sure, but Yukon’s too frail to come fetch. Jake will have to take it to him.” Happy for an excuse to leave the table, I carried Aunt Sue’s plate into the laundry room and knelt where Yukon lay. The food didn’t entice him to stand, so I fed him from my hand. When the scraps were all gone, Yukon kept licking my palm. My dog won’t make it much longer, I thought as he shut his eyes. He went on licking me in sleep, while I sent a prayer to heaven. Please let Yukon have two more years, I whispered, because three felt greedy and one wasn’t enough.

The National Weather Service was advising Floridians to be off the roads before dark. We exchanged gifts and said goodbye to our guests. The sky darkened and the winds picked up. One hour past sunset, there’d been no sign of Sheldon yet when Yukon bolted upright and put his twitching snout on the windowsill. His black pearlescent eyes widened and his tail wagged. Sensing something strange in the air myself, I cracked the front door.

Yukon trotted outside. Like a dog half his age he jogged down the porch stairs. Years had passed since he’d moved with such brisk intention. Shivering in the cold, I followed Yukon to our property line. Out here where the pines thinned out, the night sky was gray-green and twinkling with energy, energy that became snowflakes.

They melted on my face. I looked up in wonder at the first snow I’d ever seen. It was falling steadily, collecting on the drive and tufting the grass. Standing erect, Yukon raised his snout skyward and let out a primal sound.

Arroooooooooo-ooooo. Never had Yukon howled before tonight. His lonesome cry sent chills down my scalp. The snow was waking him up to where he belonged: not in the subtropics of Florida but on the frigid steppes with the other wolves. He was calling out to them, I thought, calling for rescue. Silent once more, my arthritic pet took two steps backward across the white lawn and pounced like a cat.

Minutes ago, Yukon could hardly walk; now he was darting in figure eights, displacing the snow. He rolled onto his back, pawing at air and smiling my way. My parents’ smiles were conscious smiles, smiles to suggest happiness was to be doled out little by little, but Yukon’s smile was total like mine as I lay down beside him.

Snow crunched beneath me. Yukon nuzzled up and licked me, lapping up flakes as they melted on my face. The world was full of magic, I thought, hugging him. That’s what I was doing when two headlights came shining down Atlantis Lane. Between and above the headlights, a third light glowed like the moon and went dark. It must be a taxi bubble, I thought; Dad’s shift is over. Eager to show him Yukon’s miracle, I stood up. Through the wet glass of the windshield, I thought I saw a pained grimace. With a knot of dread, I sensed the reason for it. We had stolen a wolf from the tundra. We had imprisoned this wild Arctic beast in the heat of Florida because it had made us feel good. We were evil.

We’re not evil, I prepared to tell my father. Yukon loves us. He’s happy. The taxi, its insignia still too far off to make out through the storm, slowed by Mrs. Ogle’s driveway and did a three-point turn. It receded from me, vanished, and couldn’t have been Dad after all. At that hour, according to the medical examiner’s report, Sheldon Sultan was miles from his sultanate, in the taxi garage with a shirt in his tailpipe, suffocating on carbon monoxide.