Art project? Advertising stunt? Really specific color run?

Or just someone in need of help?

Camillo follows them.

Just a little further up the path, someone is wandering barefoot.

The bottoms of his feet peek out occasionally from below the frayed, pavement-eaten cuffs of his baggy pants. The dirt from the brick path clings to the blood on his soles, and collects around the dark wounds in the insteps.

The light shining from behind his head — sourceless, brilliant, golden light — is blinding.

This isn't reasonable.

He's a believer, of course. He's not even the kind of believer who thinks things like this don't happen, that the real miracle is the compassion in every human heart.

He's just not the kind of believer this sort of thing happens to.

"Are you all right?"

He turns to look over his shoulder,

and he's human, unilluminated, in the shadow of the trees.

"—what? Oh, yeah, I'm good. Just, uh...lost."

It catches him violently in the gut. He had it, for a moment -- for one moment of his life, a touch of the divine, and now it's gone, and he's already forgetting what it was like.

Why this? he wonders, why him? as he searches for lingering traces, for the bare feet, the bloody footprints.

His feet are calloused and unbloodied. He’s holding his lace-up boots in one hand, socks stuffed into the top.

“Do you know where…uh…”

“…hey, are you okay?”

"Yeah," he says, reeling. "Where are you going?"

Maybe he can walk him there. Maybe it will come back.

(Maybe he can convince himself he imagined it. Maybe he'll feel like this for the rest of his life -- desperate for another glimpse, clinging to the memory of something he saw once when he was nineteen.)

“I’m supposed to meet some people at, uh…coffee place? Italian coffee place?”

He brushes his bangs out of his eyes, a motion he must repeat a thousand times a day.

There's a lot of coffee places. It's a college campus.

"Do you know where it is? On the Drag, maybe?"

Drag's usually a safe bet.

“Yeah, that sounds right,” he says, hopefully. “Can you point me that way?”

There's no good reason to walk him to the Drag. It's thataway until you hit the street that has cars on it.

"I'll walk you."

“—seriously? Thank you. I’m pretty sure I’d get lost if you told me to walk around the block.”

"It's no trouble."

He's so filled with hope and joy it feels like the light that was around the stranger's head is living inside him now. It's all real -- he always trusted, he had faith, but he can be certain -- and he's wanted, God wants something special enough from him to reach out and touch his life so directly.

His feet are on the ground, as he leads the way, but only barely.

The stranger follows him, content for a while to just stroll and look around at campus life passing him by.

He calls a pause, as passing cars become visible in the distance, to drop onto a bench and pull his socks and shoes back on.

"So — what's your deal?"

"Um."

He's caught up in contemplating what all this means for him -- is this man a great saint? is he being called to something? was it really, definitely not a streetlight behind his head? -- and it takes him a second to remember the mechanics of small talk.

"I'm a math major."

He's a Catholic -- he's a good guy -- he's ready to follow wherever he's called, really, just tell him...

"Nice."

There's a lot of laces on both boots to be picked loose and then tightened again. He walks his fingers up the eyelets with the casual dexterity of someone who's done it a couple thousand times.

"Got plans for what to do with it, or do you just like it?"

Sometimes he thinks about being a priest, but he doesn't think he'd do well in a hierarchy. Yes, there's something appealing about the concept, but the idea of taking orders from a bishop he doesn't respect is appalling, and there's no guarantee that his bishop would earn his respect.

Anyway. That's not -- you can't just say that to a stranger. Even if the stranger is maybe holy. 

"Academia."

"Good luck, man. I'd never make it."

"What about you?" he asks, balancing on the arm of the bench.

(It's occurred to him, with horror, that maybe this guy goes off to his coffee shop meeting and they never meet again and he never knows what this meant except maybe seventy years later there's a cause for his canonization and he gets to say 'oh yeah i saw him once and he had a halo'. What's he supposed to do with that.)

"I don't go here or anything. Just traveling. Talking to people."

He can tighten his laces as quickly as he can loosen them.

"Barefoot?" he asks, instead of any of the questions he actually wants answers to.

"It's not a crime!"

He knots both laces, and stands up, stretching towards the sky.

"Well, all right."

He sets out westwards again, glancing back over his shoulder.

"Talk to any interesting people around here?"

"Dunno if I've ever met somebody who wasn't."

He gives a rock in his path a kick into the grass.

"But — yeah. Met a guy in Houston who came in from Vietnam in, like, the 80s, he basically grew up on a crab boat...apparently his dad helped sue the Klan?"

"The -- oh, like Ku Klux? Cool."

There's a little cluster of students by the stoplight, waiting to cross Guadalupe. Camillo glances around at their ordinary faces, looking for a double-take, for the reflection of heavenly light. There's nothing.

"Right? God's work. I guess they were getting a lot of crab-related harassment on the coast back then — we crossing here?"

The light has turned.

"Yeah. If we walk south down the other side we'll probably see something that rings a bell, and if not we can turn around and walk back north."

The crowds are flowing across the intersection all four ways and across the two diagonals. Camillo joins them.

The stranger sticks close to his side.

As they cross, and turn to make their way down the street, he looks between the storefronts and the faces of passers-by, drawn back and forth fluidly from one to the other.

There's a 7-11 and a pizza place and a Jamba Juice. None of them seem particularly promising. Someone's bike, unwisely parked, is missing its front wheel.

"So who are you meeting?"

He looks sympathetically at the harvested bike as he passes.

“Couple people traveling with me. And maybe somebody’s fellowship group, if they show.”

"Huh. Like a Bible study thing?"

“Yeah, ish. I don’t think there’s an agenda, it’s, like…a church hangout. Somebody just asked me to check up on her people when we got to Austin.”

Camillo is desperately curious about his denomination but can't quite find a polite segue into it.

"Are you, like, a missionary or something?"

"Kinda. I'm mostly doing my own—"

"—oh, Medici coffee," he says, staring up at a sign a few windows down.

He's out of time.

He's a fool. This is it, his one real brush with holiness, and he can't figure out how to ask anything he wants to ask -- who are you? what is it that's special about you? what should I know about God? what are you doing? how can I help?

"--I didn't get your name."

"I'm Z. You?"

"Camillo."

Be normal. Be normal.

"Have a good -- Bible study or whatever."

Don't leave him. He doesn't want to lose this already.

He smiles at him, 

and, then, just before he goes, he takes a step to close the space between them and hugs him, briefly and tightly.

It's a really good hug.

He lets go and takes off before Camillo has a chance to follow up, waving over his shoulder.

By the time he makes it back to his bike, the streetlights have turned on, and the air is redolent with the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

He sings Come Holy Ghost, softly, as he pedals home.

The next time he meets Z, he's sitting up on a backpack under a live oak, addressing a few students spread out on the lawn.

"—because it's not helping anybody. And, yeah, you can do better. Which of the assholes in your mentions need help? Fuck, you don't even have to go there, who in your dorm needs help? Who's sick? Who's broke?"

There's a man watching from the back of the throng, knelt on the ground, who looks like he must hit his forehead on a lot of door frames.

And, from another bench, a woman watches, types on her laptop, occasionally scans the crowd.

Camillo lingers, and tries not to hope.

(It wouldn't be -- parsimonious -- for him to receive another miracle. He's already learned whatever it was that he needed to learn. God has never seen the need to speak to him purely for the sake of comfort and consolation, and seems unlikely to start now.)

As he passes behind the onlookers, he can see the sketchbook of a scrawny boy in the back.

Z is loosely outlined in red pencil in front of a grey crowd, with a halo around his head.

Oh.

Camillo stops by him, touches his shoulder.

"Hey -- sorry -- uh, I like your drawing."

"...thanks," he says, a little suspiciously.

"How come you draw him like that? With the halo?"

“That’s how they drew Jesus, right?”

He’s filling it in carefully with short strokes, outwards from the head, creating the impression of shining light.

"Yeah. And the saints."

He's so relieved to see the little sketch. He's been trying to hold a position of agonizing epistemic caution: sure, he saw something, but people see all sorts of things, right? Muslims, Buddhists ... he shouldn't really be much more certain in the faith he already had. He could still be wrong -- and then he cries at night, because he feels like a caricature of sinful doubt.

"You're one of the people who travel with him?"

“…yeah, I guess I am.”

Camillo sits right down beside him on the grass.

"Tell me about him."

See? He's being careful. He's not leading the witness.

He puts down his pencil, and turns on the grass to face him, sits up straight.

“What do you want to know?”

He glances over at the punk preacher holding court in the quad.

"...what's special about him? What is he doing? Why are you doing it with him?"

“He heals people.”

He picks up his pencil again, and then drops it, deliberately. This is important.

“There was a girl in my class who had really bad seizures. He made them stop. And Cassiopeia had — she’s a chicken — had a tumor, and she was going to die, and he just…touched her and pressed down on it and then it was gone. He missed his bus. So he could come see her.”

Tumors. Seizures. It's the sort of things people would be wrong about, if they were wrong about someone working miracles.

He saw the halo.

He's so lucky. He's so lucky. He's never wanted anything more than this, his whole life, except to be a saint himself. He's worked so hard to never want anything more than this.

"He's -- does he have a church he goes to?"

Not that it matters, necessarily. It's not like you can't be a Baptist and holy. But it's evidence.

“No. He’s making a new one.”

Like St. Francis, surely. There's nothing wrong with building a church.

...no. That's spiritual pride, isn't it? Assuming what he already knows is right, instead of even trying to listen and evaluate things on their own merits? If this man is trying to found a new denomination, he wants to know that, and decide what he thinks about it. Maybe it's right, somehow. Or maybe he's been sent to set it back on the right track.

"A new church?"

He nods.

“Like — not a building. Obviously.”

"What's wrong with the old one?"

If he brings up the sex abuse scandal Camillo is going to flip. That's not a doctrinal objection.

He scoffs.

“What isn’t wrong with the old one?”

"The Apostolic succession," Camillo retorts, a little snippily.

“I have no idea what that is,” he says, glancing aside at the woman typing nearby. “Go talk to Dorothy if you want to argue about how many persons are in God, or whatever.”

"Three," he says automatically. "Why wouldn't I argue with Z?"

“I mean, you can. But he’s kind of busy right now.”

Z has moved on to sitting cross-legged next to a girl on the grass, listening to her.

"I'm not in a hurry."

This is the most important thing that's ever happened to him. He can miss class.

...well. He can be late for class. There's a quiz at the end.

He nods.

“Why’d you decide to talk to me?”

Does he want to provide them with more fuel for this, if it's a burgeoning schism?

After a moment's indecision, he falls back on honesty.

"You drew him the way I saw him."

He nods again, slowly.

“…I don’t see that stuff. But Kyou does.”

"Who's Kyou?"

He's automatically, unreasonably suspicious of anyone who habitually sees that stuff. Not that he has anything against mystics or visionaries, in theory, but realistically there's got to be a lot more people deluding themselves than real saints out there.

He points at the inordinately tall Asian man a few meters away.

He’s watching Z take the girl’s hand, silently. The length of the braid down his back suggests he has never in his life accepted a haircut.

It makes him think of the Nazarites.

Camillo nods to his conversation partner and gets up to drift over that way.

"Hi. You're Kyou?"

He nods.

“Someone sent you?”

"Your friend over there told me your name. He said you see stuff."

He glances over at Cato, and then nods again.

“I have visions,” he confirms.

The guy is gorgeous. Camillo tries not to fight, when he notices that kind of thing, tries to say yes, to the greater glory of God and move on. It's not a sin to notice.

"Visions about Z?"

“Almost always.”

Camillo feels a little like he's being stonewalled. Is that a cult thing? The cult thing is lovebombing, right?

"What kind of things do you see?"

A halo is pretty generic. Two people could hallucinate a halo, especially if maybe he'd seen one of those drawings pinned up somewhere and then forgotten about it. Bloody footprints, when you haven't even seen the barefoot guy yet, are very specific.

He turns back to look at Z.

“A disk of fire behind his head. With patterns of long lines and regular shapes, all moving. The shapes lie down to crown his head and then return.”

“…that’s now.”

Okay. So it's just the halo thing, and this guy is obviously lying. That's fine.

"What do you think it means?"

“He’s returned to Earth.”

"Uh. Okay."

Is he on a holy mission to take down a cult?

No. Probably not. Probably he is a normal human amount of suggestible, and ... somehow got suggested before he even saw the guy ... however little sense that makes. Probably this sort of thing never makes sense from the inside.

It looks like Kyou’s about to respond when Z stands up and picks his way through the crowd, still holding the girl’s hand.

“Hey — her mom gets cluster headaches and they live, like, ten minutes away. Can you guys hold stuff down until I’m back?”

“I’ll let them know.”

That was his miracle. He got a miracle, his only miracle -- his only spiritual experience, it's not like most people get miracles, but most people seem to feel the presence of God, okay, and he just doesn't -- and now it's nothing. It's some stupid cult leader.

"Yeah," he says loudly, "I bet you can heal the invisible thing that stops unpredictably."

(It's a sick, shameful feeling. Doing the right thing feels like that a lot of the time. People get mad at you. Any second, now, he'll get the warm rush that comes after.)

“—I don’t pick the emergencies, man. Believe whatever you want for half an hour, ok?”

He exits the scene with the girl’s hand still in his, half-jogging.

He has everyone's attention. This is his chance to say something really clever, to break the cult leader's spell and spur everyone back to Mother Church. This is why he was brought here today.

"Anyone could say that," he says, to Z's retreating back. "That doesn't mean anything."

He doesn't feel clever.

Most of the people who were watching turn back to talk to each other.

A couple of them don’t. Someone who was passing by stops to ask him about the presumptive grift.

Kyou stands, silently, to go talk to Dorothy.

His initial contact, it turns out, is a little more confrontational.

“I felt the lump. I felt it and then it disappeared. Explain that to me.”

The heat of righteous rage is fading into faint nausea.

(This was the right thing to do, no matter how he feels about it. Buying a homeless guy dinner is just the same way.)

"Lumps go away. Cysts. Or you missed it."

Or you're lying.

“I felt it! I looked! If he’d just — popped something, she would’ve been upset, I would’ve seen —”

“This isn’t going to be productive.”

“I don’t care.”

"Talk to me when he heals a guy with a missing leg. Or with Down's. Or, I dunno, a cleft palate. Chickenpox, if it happens all at once."

Thank God for people who'll fight him.

“Dorothy has pictures of a finger,” he says, in a remarkably accusatory tone.

“They’re not good pictures, and Photoshop is free.”

"Tell your tall friend that we can medicate migraines these days."

This is vaguely directed at Dorothy. Is that racist? He's not sure.

“What migraines,” she says, with an odd combination of weariness and concern.

"Migraine auras. They don't always come with pain. My mom gets them too."

“Migraines don’t do stigmata.”

Dorothy is looking increasingly like there’s something she would rather not talk about.

"Picking at scabs does stigmata."

Even the medievals were wise to that one. Not everyone who wants to be a mystic is one.

“I mean seeing them.”

“You’re not going to change his mind.”

"Whatever. I'm going to class. Good luck with your cult."

He kind of means it, is the thing. He likes this guy.

“Bye. You won’t be missed.”

Well that's just mean. He hates when he makes people mad on purpose and then they're mad.

Camillo retrieves his bike and pedals off huffily.

Two days later, it’s Sunday. Which, under the circumstances, is a mixed bag.

Camillo goes to confession and admits to his usual laundry list: losing his temper with his little brothers, lying to his parents, putting off his homework for Sunday evening, rushing through his prayers, watching a gay porn gif loop a few times before he scrolled past it.

At Mass, he stands and kneels and sits at the appropriate times. Contrition, thanksgiving, petition, adoration. He receives Communion on the tongue, and afterwards, on the kneeler, he tells God what he always tells him.

I feel nice right now. Warm. I think that's the music, and the vaulted ceiling, and the Latin and the incense. I don't think it's the touch of Your hand. Thank You for that. Thank You for trusting me to seek You out through knowledge and wisdom and understanding and the rational soul You gave me. You told Thomas: Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe. Thank You for blessing me with not seeing.

He looks at the veiled tabernacle, and the red flame flickering beside it, and he adds a little postscript.

But seriously, what was up with the halo?

God does not send him another vision. A vision is not, in the end, what he needs.

God doesn’t send him resolve, or hope, or the truth — at least, not directly.

What God sends, as he bikes back home from church, is a Ford F-150 speeding through a stop sign.

Ow.

He's on the ground now.

Nothing hurts, yet. He's pretty sure it's going to hurt in a minute. That's a bad angle for his leg.

“Oh, shit—”

There are boots on the ground, coming from behind him.

“Oh fuck — oh shit—”

He drops to his knees in front of the stopped truck, and throws his arms around Camillo, lifting him up, pressing their bodies together.

He is, suddenly, electrified, as if he’s been stuck in the center of a live wire and his whole body has been reduced to a conductor.

It hurts, when the tear in his liver closes, when his leg twists back into place, when his ribs bend back and the puncture in his lung knits back together, when his vertebrae return to their places. Each of these things hurt individually and distinctly. But they all take a back seat to the overwhelming thing touching him, the finger of blinding energy arcing through his heart and setting it on fire.

He’s struck mute by it, as it happens. He can’t scream, or make a sound — his voice doesn’t do that anymore.

And then it’s over. His body is returned to him, whole.

There's tears on his face and his arms are around Z's neck. The asphalt is hot under him where his jeans are still torn.

The last minutes feel like the black ribbon of a cassette tape, unspooled and tangled in his lap. He's trying to lay them out cleanly in a catalogue before false memories can creep in. It's so important to remember.

"...Z. It's you."

It's shaky, like he's only guessing.

“…yeah. It’s me.”

He gives him a gentle squeeze, then loosens his grip a little, still supporting him with his hands.

“You wanna get out of the road?”

"...yeah. We should do that."

He sort of expects his legs to be wobbly, but they aren't. His legs are just fine. He's just fine.

Z keeps his arm hovering near him anyway.

“Don’t, uh…don’t spread this one around too much, okay?”

He smiles weakly.

“I’m trying to keep stuff a little lower-key right now.”

Camillo picks up his wrecked bike and hauls it towards the curb.

"I'm going to tell literally everyone."

“Fuck,” he says, resigned. “I guess that’s fair.”

It's really funny and he's a little shaken up. He laughs a kind of inappropriate amount, doubling over on the sidewalk.

Z pats him gently on the back.

(The man who was driving the truck is still sitting in it, staring and shaken, with his hazard lights on.)

Camillo will go tap on his window and, uh, exchange insurance information?

The man in the truck would really, really like to avoid contacting the proper authorities about having hit somebody with his car, but is managing not to directly say as much.

On the one hand, Camillo is radically failing to pick up on this. On the other hand, he has at best a vague concept of what you're supposed to do after getting hit by a car. The man in the truck can get away with the authorities uncontacted.

And then he would like to know everything about Z's new church.

Z herds him to a bench nearby before they really get to talking.

“You’re…Catholic, right?”

"Yeah." Either this guy has the ability to miraculously read souls like Padre Pio, or someone passed on the remark about apostolic succession.

“This, uh…isn’t gonna be much like that.”

He smiles, almost apologetically.

“It’s the new new covenant. A lot of stuff’s going to change.”

"You're -- a reformer. Like Martin Luther."

This is the bargaining stage of grief.

He shakes his head.

“Go one further.”

How much of this did he imagine? Is he just in shock?

His pants are ripped halfway off. The skin beneath them is soft and pink.

"You're a prophet."

“Yeah. I mean — that’s part of it.”

He pulls one knee up to his chest, hugs it loosely with one arm.

“The apocalypse thing…didn’t work out like it was supposed to, I guess. So. I’m round two.”

"You're the Second Coming," Camillo says, pulling at a loose thread of his torn pants.

“Yeah.”

Oh.

The Bible covers this. It's really explicit, actually. When Christ comes again, it'll be unmistakable, everywhere all at once, like day breaking. The signs will be there to see for anyone who's looking.

Before that, though, there will be people who claim to be the Second Coming -- people working signs and wonders, people doing miracles, people healing. There's a word for those people.

"Uh."

"Cool."

“…aw, you think I’m an antichrist,” he says, dolefully.

This is suddenly a really awkward social interaction.

"...I still appreciate the heal?"

…he laughs, and stands up.

“Hey, I’ll take it.”

"I'm gonna ... call an Uber," Camillo announces, mostly for his own benefit.

“Good call.”

He shifts his backpack back onto both shoulders.

“You gonna be okay if I take off?”

"...yeah. I'll be fine."

He nods.

“Take care of yourself, man.”

And he sets back out down the road.

Camillo calls an Uber.

Camillo calls a priest.

Priests are not as interested in reports of the Antichrist as he would have hoped.

He fills out the diocesan form to request an exorcist, even though it's not really what he needs.

He starts a blog.

antichrist-tracker.tumblr.com

The next time he sees Z, he has a bigger backpack than usual. And a burrito.

Actually, they all have burritos.

The only follower whose name Camillo never got is peeling the paper on his off in a long spiral. When he sees him walk by the food court table where they’re all parked, he looks like he’s suspicious he might try to grab it.

Camillo snaps a photo for his tumblr, which has six followers so far.

Z grimaces and covers his face with a paper plate.

“Hey!”

"Hey is for horses."

He captions it The Antichrist and his followers at lunch.

“It’s cool,” Z says to Cato from behind his plate, although it doesn’t sound cool. “We’re not sticking around that long.”

"--you're leaving?"

He should have expected this. Z told him the first time they met: he travels around. Probably you can't deceive sufficient elect if you stick around in one place.

“I mean…yeah,” he says, plate still up.

"You can put that down. I'm done taking pictures."

It's unexpectedly devastating. That's it? They came, they're going? The Antichrist is leaving his life just like that?

Is this really all God wants from him?

He lowers his plate cautiously.

“…you seem kind of broken up about it,” he says, inviting clarification.

He needs to think.

No. He can see all the thoughts laid out in front of him like a labyrinth. He doesn't need to trace the path to know it leads to the exit.

"When?"

“Tomorrow morning.”

"Where've you been staying?"

“…you want an address?”

"I'll doxx you on my tumblr."

He snorts.

“We’re at a friend’s. But we’re gonna hit that coffee shop again before we leave.”

“Why would you tell him that,” says Dorothy, resigned.

Camillo is about to make a really stupid decision. It makes him want to pick a fight.

"You guys know he's the Antichrist, right?"

An antichrist, really, but it sounds more dramatic this way.

“I know you think that,” Cato says,

exactly as Kyou says “No he’s not”.

"The Bible mentions this! It really gets into the details actually!! Going around claiming to be the Second Coming is not a good look!"

He's getting worked up, now.

“What am I supposed to do, man? Cross my fingers behind my back and say I’m a normal guy?”

There's no graceful exit from this conversation. Camillo solves this by getting madder.

"You're deluding them! Crack a Bible, people! Just because he does cool healing doesn't fucking mean he's one of the good guys!"

There are a lot of people staring their way now.

Cato gets out of his chair,

but Z does too, and he steps between them — casually, as if it’s just where he happens to be going anyway.

“…look, man, I get where you’re coming from, but nobody here had breakfast and we’ve all gotta eat. So I’m gonna clear us out.”

"Fine. Fine."

He doesn't want any of this. He wants another hug. But the only option that feels open is turning on his heel and storming off, alone.