Full Circle

Full Circle

Prologue

I’d lived in LA five years, give or take, when the Great Recession reached peak “greatness.” Weekly auditions had waned to monthlies. Cash-in-hand “actor jobs” had ebbed from feast to famine. Rock bottom found me bleeding my IRA, tax penalties the proverbial insult compounding injury. Desperation drove me to wait tables at a first-rate Mexican restaurant’s second-rate satellite. There, I met Nayeli.

Corpus

Nayeli, born to working-class Honduran immigrants, came of age in an insular, parochial community more awed by gravidas than graduates. She lived at home. She liked anime. Panic attacks kept her from driving, further delaying adulthood. Absent higher learning, Biblical folklore never went the way of Santa Clause and training bras. 21-year-old Nayeli subscribed to the Bible’s Adam and Eve mythos whole-souled. She could not be convinced that Creationism’s 1st Couple did not exist spawn the whole of humankind.

Per Genesis, God made Eve from Adam’s rib, mad science a miracle that, ostensibly, would have made them twins. By default, Cain and Abel’s only viable sex partners would have been their sisters, assuming their mother didn’t toss her keys in the bowl when they partied. Barking mad, but, I digress.

When asked why so many “men of god” turn out to be chomos, schizos, and genocidal despots, Nayeli blamed God’s go-to scapegoat and get-out-of-jail-free card: Satan. Satan sicced the Yorkshire Ripper on women because he’s sick to his soul; The Lord sicced Abraham on Isaac because he advances his benevolent agenda in “mysterious ways” (ways so “mysterious,” in fact, they’re often downright sadistic).

For those unacquainted with Abrahamic folklore’s greatest hits, Abraham –to whom grade schoolers sing fawning odes- came a hair’s breadth from sacrificing his son to supernal sky fairy Adonai at said sky fairy’s behest. Luckily, the Hebrew Bible’s Zeus rebrand shouted “psych!” last second. Turned out, the whole “Sophie’s Choice” milieu was but a test to see if Abe would put his murder where his mouth was (Why an omniscient god would have needed to see the scene played out to know how it would end is any sound mind’s guess). Barking mad prima facie, stark raving mad when one learns that Abraham’s crucible wasn’t liturgized to pan God’s sadism, but, rather, to praise Abraham’s masochism.

While we’re on the subject of batshit crazy lore conveying batshit crazy messages, why use parables and ambiguous auguries to begin with? Why doesn’t the “figments of man’s imagining’s” GOAT issue simply his orders loudly and in lay terms? Is he a supreme being doling out edicts from his heavenly kingdom or a Bond villain rattling off riddles from his underground lair?

I’ve pressed many self-professed Christians on this point over the years and the self-serving sophistry most often proffered in reply is/was that God’s “coming out” would invalidate man’s free will. In plain English, his sentient Sea Monkeys would switch from feigning faith to avoid a place in Hell to feigning faith to secure a place in Heaven; However, that diaphanous apologia is gainsaid by Book 1, wherein Yahweh spoke to mortals nearly as often as teenage girls texts their besties: He spoke to Cain, Moses, Joshua, and Lord knows how many more before concluding, “Since exile from Eden, Egyptian plagues, fire from the skies, and a global flood haven’t made saints of sinners, maybe the silent treatment will.”

Once, during one of our extemporaneous debates, I impugned the historicity of Moses’ purported 120-year lifespan. “Could be,” Nayeli quipped, “the world was cleaner then.” I held for a “just kidding” that never came: no plumbing, fridges or freezers; no antiseptics or antibiotics; no CDC, EPA or FDA; no hand soap or HAZMAT suits; no pest control, prophylactics, or pasteurization; modern dentistry was still three millennia away and ani were wiped with hands, but the world was “cleaner?!”

Epilogue

Sadly, Nayeli proved the rule rather than the exception. She married in her mid-twenties. Her last social media distress signal was one of many meant to shame her cheating spouse for ghosting his wife and infant. By playing the “product of [her] environment” part with such aplomb, Nayeli came full circle; by bringing a child into her world, she set the cycle in motion anew.