Chapter 10: Miri's Ministry to the Misbegotten

"What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?" - Tao Te Ching

“We still need the informed consent spelled out,” Callum reminded everyone, sipping his coffee. He was my work husband on the most ambitious project of my career, and we took turns carrying the other’s weight.

We were holed up around a conference table on the fourth floor of a building that was as forgettable as the operation needed to be: no identities public, no records found, none of the women we move traceable to their destinations. A bowl of bananas, apples, and clementines that no one ate sat in the center.

The nondescript anonymity of these rooms was a gesture of diligently curated guardianship: the whole point was that no sign out front announced what happened here. No plaque, no fanfare, and nothing a person could photograph and hand to the wrong party. The fruits were part of it, too. You offer lightweight variety at reception — enough to invite, not enough to overwhelm — so that a body starts remembering it is allowed to choose things as soon as it’s in the room.

…just like I chose to set aside my book and go with him and listen to him prattle on about baptisms and rebirths and burning and how I was the bane of his very existence — before he worshipped me in streetlight.

But here’s the thing: I could well have imagined it. I had nothing, nothing at all, to prove to myself that the night at Elysium — and what happened outside of it — actually happened. He gave no number. No last name. No object by which to know him. Was I really so certain I had been worshipped, or was it just that I hadn’t prayed and my faith was slipping?

There was only my mind’s memory, and minds lie.

The body — that was another thing.

“Yes, I gave mine,” I answered through the haze clouding my head as I mindlessly rifled through the papers in front of me. I did consent to it, I thought. I did ask for it.

Then again, could a please drawn out during a blistering heatwave while going on my fifth night of interrupted sleep be informed? Isn’t that just manipulation?

“Not yours, Miri. We already papered the partnership and it’s with the lawyers. But the HSI Task Force will need the handover framework documented. Survivors can’t very well ship off to the northeast after arriving at intake without the consent and confidentiality procedures cleared,” Callum pointed out.

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Free Harbor will send the proposed structure along before EOD. The team was already working out the particulars before I flew down. They’re just making sure we have translators on call.”

“Good. And Lantern will be fully present for first contact and recovery, so no concerns from the Austin side,” Callum added, throwing me a look.

Did breath count as contact? I floated out of the room and across the city to Red River Street. Had I fabricated it all? Was I any more present at that scene than I was here, now, half-awake and discussing people about to take their first steps into freedom while I sat here fantasizing about a man who might have been a monster or might have been nothing at all? Who was the real monster in the room, if not the one in a fugue state with lives at stake?

“Yes, no concerns at all,” I offered through pursed lips, returning Callum with a weary look of my own.

“Uh, can someone remind me why we’re shipping them halfway across the country?” Jeremy, the Texas AG’s office liaison, asked of no one in particular.

“Because recovery doesn’t happen in a hot zone. You live in a border state,” Alina, the Homeland Security Investigations representative, quipped, “and their corridor runs right through your jurisdiction. Haven’t you got your hands full with ICE before gunning for more casework?” She lobbed the immigration fiasco at Jeremy the way you’d name a black sheep in the family — HSI’s oldest reflex.

“I’m staying clear of your mess, personally. Just asking,” Jeremy mumbled, embarrassed at looking green after his recent promotion. I jolted awake, wide-eyed — thinking “your mess” was directed at me — and noticed that Alina didn’t miss the jab. She glared at him but let it go.

“Texas has the muscle, but Boston’s not on anybody’s route to anywhere. Not with New York nearby, so it’s a bit more peaceful,” Callum covered for him, as he does for most people he takes under his wing — even the lawyers. That’s what makes him special: he doesn’t do this work for himself, so his emotional resources appear bottomless at times — making him an easy target for extra work.

Still alert from taking the bureaucrats’ turf war personally, I felt the deeper meaning land in me like the accusation it carried: Callum was overextending himself to deflect a stranger’s embarrassment while I acted like an absentee landlord, not a guardian of real souls with real lives that had been stolen from them.

I made a mental note to be more present for Callum the next time we were on Webex — the studiously beige FedRAMP-approved version of Zoom — which would probably be sometime this week. I had to figure out how to get some sleep, fast.

Alina quickly changed the subject. “Who’s anonymizing the victims’ identities before the transfer?” She was serving as the department’s Victim Assistance Coordinator on the task force — and was personally responsible for ensuring all the confidentiality details were stamped before everyone could go home.

Her task force had contracted Free Harbor after our successful aftercare deployments in Ukraine and Myanmar with the Red Cross, and they wanted us at our most exacting now. This was the largest national effort to interrupt a trafficking ring in the Americas corridor since the collapse of Epstein’s network scattered his clientele underground. But they still operated, so identities had to be stripped to alphanumeric case codes because a name traveling with a file is a thread any trafficker can pull. The crosswalk lived in her office under strict need-to-know — and the handoff between Lantern and Free Harbor had to be pristine.

“They’re survivors — can we stick to the truth and not the label? And yes, we have the, uh, their numbers, and the predators are out of reach,” I stammered, wondering if mine was out of reach, too. He never even asked for my number!

“Cryptic, Miri, but I guess the project calls for it,” Callum nodded, reaching for a clementine.

“The predators are very much not out of my reach,” Alina corrected, looking at me as if I’d insulted her vocation. “Just ensure the line of sight between victim and identity runs through my office. Is that clear?”

Victims. Was I one? And whose — this man’s, who could very well have been an apparition, or my own mind’s?

“Yes, of course. That’s what I meant.”

“Well ok then,” the AG liaison huffed out, closing his binder. “Free Harbor’s got it. And no one’s beyond the reach of DHS. Good enough for me. Let’s get to work,” he decreed, recovering his earlier wobble.

Was he? Was he out of reach? I wondered silently, keeping my seat while the others stood.

“You ok?” Callum rounded the conference table to my side and leaned in. He was my counterpart in Austin and my eyes and ears handling the intake before Free Harbor would take over transfer, aftercare, counseling, and placement.

Eyes.

“Yes, fine, thanks. It’s been hot and I didn’t get a good night’s rest, but we’ve got it covered. Logistics probably in your inbox as we speak. Call me if anything. I think I’m running late for my flight,” I hurriedly excused myself, threw him a brisk hug, and gathered my belongings.

I set my bleary-eyed musings aside just long enough to take care of the essentials: pack my clothes, call a cab, sleepwalk through the airport onto my plane, and pass out from exhaustion in the middle seat all the way to Boston — where I had a date with my bed. Finally my bed.

It was mid-morning Wednesday before I was lucid enough to handle people. My unreads were a crime scene of red dots next to bolded subject lines, but the only person I had the stomach for was Father Thomas. I needed to figure out what was real. And to sort through the nagging sensation that I would never know, because three days had gone by since I last felt him on my skin and seven since I saw him in my mind, and I needed to find solid footing before the ground operation commenced on Friday.

Some demon from before the jungle ayahuasca exorcism peered through a crack in my composure as I washed my face: He never wanted you, girl. No one does, and now you’re conjuring a man craving you so madly he’s driven to self-mutilation. How deliciously desperate of you. You’ll fail those women as you’ve failed everyone else in your life.

“Christ!” I screamed into the mirror. “Get out of my head!” and the intruder dissipated — but its insinuation didn’t.

I would fail those women if I kept this up. And he hadn’t called — hadn’t even asked if he could. Stuffed me into that cab like I was the one imposing on his peace of mind. And didn’t he tell me clearly that he wanted to get as far away from me as possible?

Yes, I was quite possibly the problem. I even sealed my own fate. No mind games, I practically told him — and I had tested him, dropping into meditation the morning before my flight, just to see if he would seek me out.

He did exactly as I asked, only not as I wanted. I had told him not to meet me there, and he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to. How stupid of me to think he’d actually make an effort. Stupid to expect his kind, whatever it really was, was even awake in daylight. Stupid to sit through an interagency task force session daydreaming like a schoolgirl — as if I wasn’t assisting the most significant intervention since the Red Cross work.

I had to get to Father Thomas.

I sat in his waiting room while he closed out the Morning Office and launched at him almost before he’d cleared the door.

“I need you to tell me if I’ve lost my mind.”

Father Thomas hung his stole on the hook with unhurried precision. “Good morning, Miri.”

“I’m serious.”

“You always are. It’s your most endearing quality. Have a seat. Would you care for some tea?”

The couch in his office is old and green and has absorbed hundreds of people arriving in distress and leaving with a blessing. Pretty sure I was the first to arrive with a curse.

“The eyes,” I started. “From my meditation. The ones I called about.”

“I remember. Ceylon or are you avoiding caffeine?”

“Caffeine, Father, please—”

“Milk, sugar, or straight?”

“Straight, and I think—”

“How was your work trip, Miri?”

It was a fair question, and Father Thomas was fair to ask it. I was the one who enrolled our parish as Free Harbor’s placement partner — with the Episcopal City Mission agreeing to provide transitional housing, volunteer support, pastoral care, and crucial community anchoring after stabilization.

“It was fine, I think. Honestly, I can’t tell. I was barely in my body by the time the final coordination meeting took place.”

He smiled gently. “That’s why I’m encouraging us to sit awhile and sip some tea first,” he said, setting the teacup on the coffee table with the teabag neatly tucked into the saucer.

“Do you mind if we pray first?” I asked in a voice thinner than I intended, realizing it had been some time since I was the worshipper.

“I was worried I’d have to remind you to ask,” he said with all the warmth that his twenty years in ministry afforded him — and moved his chair closer to take my hand in his.

“Almighty God,” he began, and I followed suit, “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets—” and I tripped over the words.

“No secrets are hid,” he prompted me. “Cleanse the thoughts…”

“Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts,” we continued together, “by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

“There. Now what secrets have you brought back from Austin that have you in such a hurry?”

I paused to think about what filled me with more shame: being absent for survivorship, or too present to the aching hollowness that had no place in the vestry office behind our chapel. I wanted to start with the less flagrant of the two — but the distinction had become cosmetic.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I took the middle way out.

“You know exactly what’s real.”

I knew what he meant, but it wasn’t where I was going. “The problem is, I’m not doing my job well, and I’m not sure I’m doing dating the right way, either.”

“You’ve started seeing someone?”

“No, I saw someone.”

“In Austin?”

“In my mind — and in Austin.”

“You called me about the eyes — and I’m eager to hear how your contemplative reading is going. But tell me about the new development: this…gentleman in Austin—”

“No, they’re the same guy!”

“The Gospel of Mary is your guy?”

“No, the eyes in the Fourth Power are, Father, come on! I met them! The eyes were at the bar in the hotel after I stopped meditating — even stopped closing my eyes — and then a nightclub where he couldn’t dance and was falling so he breathed at me. At. Me. And then outside, it was so hot while we were walking home and he breathed—”

“Miri…breathe, child. Yourself, remember to breathe.”

“They belong to a man. Or something — I dunno — wearing one — and so beautifully, Father. Only I don’t know if it really happened, or—“

“I believe you. Something happened.”

“Of course you believe me. Only I don’t know if I believe myself. He told me he was born in 1226, for Christ’s sake!”

“Not the Lord’s name in vain again.”

“Right, sorry.”

“And 1226? Beg pardon?”

“He’s not from this century! He…waltzes!”

I knew how that sounded. I expected him to laugh and ask if I was well. But he didn’t. His face turned grave and he rose to walk over to his bookshelf, where he stood a moment before retrieving a worn copy of the Book of Common Prayer.

“He gave you the year himself? Unprompted?” he asked as he turned back.

“Yes. Well — I kept asking him what was going on and he started telling me about all his empresses in Kyoto or something.”

He narrowed his eyes at me — a woman envious of an imaginary ghoul with an impressive body count was not the average vestry meeting. But he ignored my slip.

“Miri, will you tell me exactly what happened?”

In broken half sentences and mixed metaphors about being out of my depth grasping at straws and biting off more than a devil’s bargain could chew, I told him about the dance, the touch, even his erection, and the wall — everything. I held nothing back. I was past secrets and wanted answers.

“Miri, we have to talk about something. There are accounts. Accounts of this sort of thing.” He set the book on the coffee table between us unopened, his hand flat on it as if to press his point into it, and pushed it toward me.

“What sort of thing? You have to be very specific here because I don’t know if I believe his account, either. He told me crazy things about what he was but he had the coldest, most scintillating breath and that wasn’t fucking normal.”

“Miri—”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s more than alright, my dear. What I was going to say to you is more important right now. This is no longer about the Fourth Power or your gnostic tales. There are actual sightings.”

“You’ve seen this?”

“I’ve only read of this. It’s letters, mostly — rector to rector, passed down among the entrusted. Every old parish has a drawer like it. There’s a word they use. Revenants. The Vatican likely has a whole archive on the matter.”

“So you’re telling me you know.”

“I’m telling you the church knows.”

He opened the book then, not searching for the page — it fell open where his thumb had lived for years — and pointed at a passage. “Read me the second question. Here.”

I read it. “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”

“Again. Slowly. Mind the last half.”

I read it again. “…corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

“I don’t know what your — waltzer — is, Miri. But if your vow means anything, then you are a creature of God facing down the evil powers of this world. The church in her wisdom wrote the distinction into the first promise anyone makes at the font. Unfortunately, she then spent several centuries doing her best to erase how to do the actual facing. But we do have Ephesians 6.”

“Armor of God? Wait, that’s actually exactly it! I stood my ground! The air between us was like a shield he couldn’t penetrate. And the flaming arrows? Father, he practically ignited anytime he got too close!”

I kept the other part of the verse to myself: With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying. Because so long as I also prayed, meditation was always what kept me the most mindful and alert…

“That’s right. You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever. For ever, Miri.”

“So there’s a way to…”

“Yes, Miri. You were purchased long ago, and the mark does not expire. Whatever sat across from you in Austin…it can court you. But it cannot claim you.” His eyes came up over the glasses.

“But the creatures of God—”

“Can make themselves vulnerable, yes. This has been my entire ministry to you. What the seal will not do is close a door you open yourself. A covenant that overrides your own will wouldn’t be much of a covenant, now, would it?”

“That’s everything we renounce. I’d have to invite it.”

“That is why I implore you to fashion your will after the Lord’s. The entire question of your safety, dear, rests, however inconveniently for your priest,” he gestured with his palms up to indicate his powerlessness over the matter, “inside the one castle no one else but Christ should be able to breach: your own heart. Become as Him in all things. Let your heart be transformed — and your eye be single.” He carefully emphasized both words to make sure I caught his meaning.

“I know you believe me, Father. I just don’t know if I even believe myself. I could have imagined the eyes and the whole thing. I can’t verify anything that happened. It might have been a fever dream from four nights without sleep after I spooked myself, and a heat wave cooking the rest of my sanity.”

“Believe yourself, Miri. You did not imagine Christ in the jungle, either. I believed your testimony then, and I believe it now. What you see in your mind’s eye — it’s true.“

“So what do I do? What does the church do? Isn’t there a provision for…” I gestured at his shelf, the whole building, our two thousand years of saving souls, “for those among us who need help the most?”

And here Father Thomas, who I had never once seen frightened — not at protests, not at deathbeds, not at the vestry meeting where the treasurer wept when an accountant ran off with three months’ tithings — looked positively aghast.

“Miri, no. This is not your ministry.”

“The creatures of God. You had me read it out loud. The Resurrection belongs to all His creation.”

“Of God. I’m not going to say what you want me to say, which is to rule unequivocally that it is either from God or it’s from the devil, because you’d take the first as permission and the second as a professional challenge, so I’d be encouraging you either way.” He folded his hands. “Let me rather counsel humility. Because there is a chasm between the two categories, and a very under-slept parishioner in front of me who I doubt — however much I admire your ambition — is quite up to the challenge of taking on the church’s oldest adversary. If that’s what your…admirer…even is.”

I shifted in my seat at the idea that he admired me.

“Your discernment is at its weakest now, Miri — when you need it most. Do you know how I can tell?”

“Mm?” I snapped out of my reverie.

“Because you’re usually the one preaching to me about embodiment and somatic healing, but I’m the one of us reminding you to take care of yourself first. You are so dysregulated you’ve hardly even touched your tea.”

I quickly took a sip and offered him no resistance.

“Please, slow down, and take care of your body, child. St. Paul reminds us in First Corinthians that it is a temple, and ours to discipline and keep under control, for we only have it on borrowed time from the Lord Himself. He trusts you to return it in good condition. So strengthen it — and don’t go chasing ghosts from ancient vestry records. Go where you are strongest.”

“And where is that now?”

“Saving people.”

I felt a pang in my heart. He was absolutely right. There were real people in front of me, and an apparition that doesn’t even call did not hold a candle to the monumental task ahead. He’d probably just burn himself trying…

I got up to leave and thanked Father Thomas for his wise counsel and his favorite Ceylon. As I moved toward the door, he called after me.

“And Miri? What keeps you strong are the people around you, not just saving them. Seek out your community. Go be among them for a little, not buried in your paperwork. The church is the body of Christ. That is why I need yours healthy. We need you, and not only this Friday.”

The next day was long. I did my job unusually well — revived by my own guilt and incessant pangs of rejection at his never reappearing in my meditation Wednesday night before bed — and it held about ninety percent of my attention. The other ten stood at a wall in Austin having its every inch inventoried. My body kept its own liturgy of the hours: cold air from an office vent and my skin resembled a plucked chicken’s; a stranger’s cologne in the elevator — nothing like his, he didn’t seem to wear any, smelling only of a cathedral’s cool interior — and I’d flinch from exactly the wrong kind of sensorial assault.

And then — then came Thursday evening.