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twice life-size and a green light flashing inside it, and she said, Father—because she already called him Father—Father, the faithful are already asking about the chapel and the times of services, and I told her that we’d put them up on the door next week, so you have to think about that, and he, still prostrate on the floor, listened to her without looking at her, surrounding her with a great silence, as if the church were his body, a temple where the priests officiated from silent cubicles.
    Miss Jessica looked at him affectionately, recognizing in him a divine being: his bare chest with the rippling muscles, the trapezoid formed by his back and the back of his neck, his prominent vertebrae, and the long hair cascading over his shoulders like a waterfall; she waited reverently by his side, because she knew that when Walter was at prayer he often reached an extremely deep state, such was his devotion and closeness to God, who without doubt was his father; that was what Miss Jessica was thinking, my friends, she’d already gotten it into her hypothalamus and cerebellum that Walter was none other than the son of the Master, the Big Enchilada, the Man Himself, how does that grab you? and so, after all that silence, seeing him start to move, she said: you’re ready, Father, you have to begin and the people are waiting for you, and he replied, we’ll put up the schedule on Monday.
    With the conviction that Miss Jessica gave him, Walter started holding services at the Ministry of Mercy, which in those early years created quite a stir, my dear brothers, because Walter dispensed with hosannas and had music videos in the background, playing rock and even rap, and invited dancers up on the stage behind the pulpit, because he said that in order to preach in today’s world you had to take your inspiration from today’s world, the world of the street, with its music and its harsh, sometimes violent but very real images, and he’d say that if his enemies were drugs and violence and promiscuity, which indeed they were, then he had to fight them with the same weapons, turn the lyrics around, you know, those modern urban songs don’t exactly inspire the noblest of feelings, they’re all about killing blacks and Jews and shooting up and sodomizing your sister and murdering your father, and those are just the gentler ones, but Walter was good at extracting other messages from them and using them to his advantage, because at the end of the day they were what he’d listened to since he was a boy on the streets and in children’s homes.
    In addition, he’d appear at his services stripped to the waist, his upper body covered in tattoos that depicted Christ, not only in Nazareth but also in the back streets of an industrial slum, preaching to alcoholics and heroin addicts. His back was covered with an image of the crucifixion, but instead of Mount Golgotha, my brothers, the Redeemer was hanging in an old basketball court on Syracuse Drive, surrounded by potholed streets and smog-blackened buildings with God knows what dramas happening inside, young girls raped by their stepfathers, minors having sex for hard drugs, sweaty men in a drug-induced stupor on foul-smelling carpets, old men with prostate cancer groaning with pain, and women trading their anal virginity for doses for their husbands, anyway, my friends, all this could be sensed in those grim tenements surrounding the basketball court where the new Christ was crucified, the Jesus of the slums, the Redeemer of the people sent by the Man Himself to save us from our sins, and that was the central image that Walter had tattooed on his back: the mystery and paradox of evil.
    From the pulpit, with rap music in the background, Walter would speak of God and the virtues of suffering and what a great thing it was to be one of Christ’s marines and that voice that says to us a second before we fall into the abyss, stop, dammit! what are you