8 | Psychopomp Magazine
Dylan Krieger
[R]AM
I will know God when I see him. All moist fangs and silver starlings. A hoary thistled beast—his face and thighs tattooed—pricking the earth. Since I was born my mother’s told me what to look for: There will be a great machine-like rushing of wings, the heavens will black, and half of his children will die.
She says I was still tucked away in her belly when David Koresh died a martyr and saved her soul in one fell swoop. She first found him lurking underneath the static of her little neon-buttoned AM radio in ’91, his crackly tenor stressing words like anointing and exile. But somehow I doubt she loved him until she saw his sulky sun-drenched face staring back from a local newspaper article alongside the (obviously misguided!) allegations of statutory rape.
Sometimes even our idolatries God can use for good, she says of her Koresh crush now. But then I wonder whether she would have rather had it reversed—and used God’s goodness for her idolatry—if there had been more time before he died.
Instead, Mount Carmel burned. Government whirlybirds whirred down the clouds, combing the fire’s black curls. There were almost no survivors, and my mother was careful to show me photographs of all the little dead tow-headed children. In one leaked recording she owns, Koresh can be heard shouting after the first siege: I stood in the doorway holding my son in my arms—just now—and yelled, "Don’t shoot! There are women and children in here!" They shot anyway.
But my mother obeyed. When he died, she sat and punched those neon buttons until she heard again his stifled timbre and finally followed along in that salvific prayer he was always urging her to pray. Today she still transcribes his sermons, word by word. Because his name ought to be cleared, tenor or no.
Well I suppose. But in the meantime, her head is full of ghosts.
I swear they speak to me sometimes—especially when blood’s been drawn. Like that