The Saline Avenger (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.



So I've been wondering: who is the figure that will wreak vengeance on all of us? It can't be Carlton—he's too evil. Maybe suffering the fallout of colonialism would qualify him to play this role, but he's just not innocent enough. I don't think Steffi can do it either.

Then it occurred to me: I want to pattern our vengeful angel on Gianna Jessen. Watch this recent clip of her testifying before Congress.

Burned alive in the womb at 7 months, she survived and now is one of the most terrifying people I have ever heard speak. Regardless of your viewpoints on the topic of abortion, no one can say anything to Gianna Jessen. She has a carte blanche for her entire life. Truth be told, she impresses me as an extremely loving and forgiving person. But who would be more justified in killing everyone than an innocent who was burned alive for 18 hours and survived?

So who would this person be in the narrative? I think I have an idea.

It's Steffi's unborn child who Farthington, as part of his regimen of emptying his novices of all traces of identity, attempts to abort and discard in the tunnels. I'm not sure whose child it is: maybe Will's, maybe Farthington's, maybe someone else's. As we know, Will has gone down into the tunnels to kill Farthington at this point. In the chaos of that encounter, is the baby born alive and left in the tunnels? Who saves the child? I'd like to think it's Steffi, who with her now jawless, speechless mouth, raises the child in darkness.

Now, again, these ideas are all within the puerile Puritan tradition that, like the Socratic Euripides, requires a deus ex machina to resolve the entanglements of the plot. And as I've mentioned before, this kind of approach belies a latent atheism, a disbelief in the omnipotence of God. Thus, we need to help God. Like at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we have to help a rotting, moribund Grandpa kill Sally with a sledgehammer.

At some point, we should transition into the mature Catholic view, namely, that we don't need a deus ex machina when we have a Deum de Deo, one who gratuitously takes the punishment we deserve. And it is only when we refuse this grace that we implode in on ourselves and suffer the results of our sin: the collapsed reality of hell in which we become next to nothing.