Series: The King in Yellow — Section 3 of 4
The charges
For a long time I’d have told you the line was just true. That the verdict was earned. Because by the world’s measure, I really am a fraud — and I could build you the case myself. I’ve built it a thousand nights running.
Watch how it goes, because all the charges are the same charge wearing different clothes.
I didn’t really read those books. I listened to them. I claim to have read Dune more than once and I’ve never read a word of it — I’m lying every time I say “I read.”
I don’t really work. I look back at a day and I did maybe an hour of real output. My boss thinks I’m in high-level meetings, my developers think I’m doing high-level work, and I’m just standing in the gap between their assumptions. A manipulator running a con.
I don’t really write any of this. I use a tool to catch my thoughts and lay them in order. So I’m publishing under my name what I didn’t produce alone.
Every one of those gutted me, for years. And every one runs the identical play, which I only saw once I laid them side by side: each one secretly redefines the word, narrows it down until the way I actually do the thing falls outside the definition, and then convicts me for being outside a line that was just drawn to exclude me.
Take reading. The line defines reading as eyes moving across print — a mechanical act — so that listening doesn’t count and I’m a liar. But reading was never the eyes. Reading is the book getting into you. And Dune is so far into me that I map my own soul onto it, that I reached for Paul and the golden path in Section 2 to explain the deepest mechanism of my interior. That’s not a man who didn’t read Dune. That’s a man who read it the way almost nobody reads anything. The audiobook is the ramp. A man who took the ramp still arrived at the building. The method was never the point.
Take work. The line defines work as visible grinding, hours on the clock, sweat, so an hour of high-leverage seeing doesn’t count and I’m a con man. But here’s the fact the line will not look at, because looking would kill it: I get worse reviews when I grind and better reviews when I work the way I’m built to work. If I were a fraud, grinding harder would improve my output. It does the opposite. And that only happens for one kind of person — the kind whose value was never in the hours but in the seeing. I’m not paid for time. I’m paid for the eye. Of course it feels like cheating. It feels like cheating to everyone whose worth isn’t measured in sweat.
And there it is, the root. Sweat equals real. That’s the ruler. Where did I get it? The assembly line. The freezer at the food-delivery job. A whole world, the one I come from, that measured a man by his visible labor. I absorbed that ruler before I could question it, and then I built a mind whose best work is invisible — an hour of pattern-sight that took forty years to make possible — and I’ve spent my life measuring that mind against a yardstick it was designed, from birth, to fail. The fraud feeling isn’t evidence of a crime. It’s the friction of a gift grinding against a ruler that was never built to measure it.
I’ll tell you where this got really clarifying. I tried to check the ruler against my faith. I’m a Christian — forty years, with a lot of doubt mixed in, which I think is the honest kind. And I reached for the verse: you’ll know His followers by their fruit. I asked myself, am I producing fruit, or am I just self-absorbed, putting myself first, not really submitting? And it felt like I’d finally found the higher ruler. The holy one. The one that would tell me the truth.
It was the same ruler. It was the sweat-equals-real ruler with a cross around its neck.
Because go read what the fruit actually is. Galatians names it: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Look at that list. Every single item is a quality of character. Not one of them is a quantity of output. There is no fruit called “shipped a lot.” There is no fruit called “worked eight visible hours.” The vine in John 15 doesn’t strain — the branch bears fruit as the natural overflow of staying connected to the vine. The fruit comes from the connection, not the grinding. The moment I started measuring fruit by volume, I’d walked out of the vineyard and back onto the assembly line and called it holiness. The verse I reached for to convict myself, read straight, acquits me on the exact ground the line was prosecuting.
That doesn’t fix me. Knowing your leg is broken doesn’t set the leg, and knowing the ruler is borrowed doesn’t stop my hand from reaching for it — I still measure myself with the thing even now, most days, because a ruler you’ve held since before you could question it doesn’t drop out of your hand just because you finally read the label on it. But knowing it’s borrowed is something. It means that on the nights I can manage it, when the fraud verdict comes back, I have a second thought available that I didn’t used to have: that’s not the true measure. That’s the assembly line. I don’t have to accept its reading. Sometimes that second thought wins the battle. Sometimes it doesn’t arrive in time. But it’s another tactic, and in this war a tactic that works some of the time is the difference between losing every battle and losing only some.
The tool I use to write this
I have to say something plainly before I go further, because it’s woven into how I do all of this and holding it back would be its own kind of dishonesty.
I use AI. Not as a ghostwriter. As a prosthetic — the same as the vault, the voice-to-text, the talking-out-loud. My mind serializes slowly and the tool catches thoughts as fast as I produce them and lays them in order so the web can land on a page in a line another person can walk. The thinking is mine. The corrections are mine. The refusals are mine. The tool is the ramp.
I know how that lands in some rooms, especially in some Christian rooms. I know the reflex — that’s the beast, that’s man playing God, that’s the mark, throw the machines away. I’ve heard the sermon. I don’t agree with it and I’ll tell you exactly why, and also what I think is genuinely happening in the encounter between human minds and this new kind of thing, and why I’ve come to suspect it’s pointing somewhere more interesting than any of the reflexive readings allow.
But that’s a whole piece of its own, and if I try to cram it in here it’ll become a footnote in someone else’s argument, and it deserves its own room. I’ll write it. For now what I want on the record is just this: the tool is disclosed, the thinking is mine, and I’m not ashamed of the method. If that costs me a reader who was going to sort me into a bin, that reader was going to sort me into a bin anyway. I’d rather lose them here than pretend for their comfort. (That dedicated piece is coming. When it’s up I’ll link it back to this one.)
The watchman in the room full of citizens
I want to tell you about church, because that’s where I feel least like a piece that fits and most like — and this is the only image that’s ever been right — a spatula somebody dropped into a box of jigsaw pieces. Not the wrong piece for the puzzle. Not a puzzle piece at all. A different category of object entirely, sitting in the box, while everyone around me locks together into a picture.
A few things happened that’ll show you the shape of it.
I was talking with someone about the Council of Nicaea — about how badly The Da Vinci Code mangles it. The popular story that Constantine invented Christ’s divinity or hand-picked the canon is just wrong, and here’s what actually happened. A teaching moment. The kind of thing I love. And the response I got was not oh, what did happen? It was: “I would never watch something like that.”
She didn’t engage the point. She didn’t hear the point. All she registered was that I had been in contact with the contaminated object, and she recoiled from the contact. Underneath it, unspoken: and I wouldn’t, because I keep myself clean.
Here’s what struck me. You cannot refute an error you refuse to look at. I can take The Da Vinci Code apart precisely because I read it, watched it, and then checked it against the real history. The person who would “never watch something like that” has no defense against it at all — if it shows up in her kid’s college dorm, she’s got nothing, because she quarantined herself from the very knowledge that disarms it. Her purity is also her defenselessness. And somehow I’m the suspect one, for having touched it.
That’s the inversion. In that room, knowing the enemy’s argument well enough to defeat it reads as being too close to the enemy. Engagement reads as contamination. And it’s exactly backwards from how the whole thing is supposed to work — Paul stood on Mars Hill and quoted the pagan poets back to the Athenians. He’d read their altars. He’d walked their city. He could only preach to Athens because he had looked, hard, at Athens. “I’d never watch that” would have left him standing mute in front of the Areopagus.
So I know how it goes. They’d never read The King in Yellow. They’d never sit through True Detective — too much sex, too much language, an actual cult that hurts children, and worst of all, Rust saying out loud that he doesn’t believe in God. To that posture it isn’t a meditation on evil and what survives the truth. It’s eight hours of poison. And so they’d never reach the only thing that matters about it — that Rust, the atheist, is the only one who goes into Carcosa. The only one who looks straight at the thing all the institutions exist to keep unseen. And comes back.
I have to be honest about the trap right next to all this, because it’s my own trap and it’s the ugliest thing I’ve got. The next move, the one I make automatically, is: they won’t look at the hard things, so they’re shallow, so I’m above them, so something is wrong with this whole room. And that’s the line again. That’s me flattening a whole person down to “shallow” so the verdict fits. It’s the exact thing I hate when it’s done to me. And I don’t actually know why she said what she said. Maybe it’s incuriosity. Or maybe she got genuinely wrecked by something once and learned she has to guard what she lets in — which isn’t shallowness at all. It’s knowing her own frame. Some people genuinely can’t hold the dark material without it lodging in them and doing damage. For them, quarantine is wisdom, not cowardice.
That reframed the whole spatula feeling for me. The watchman stands on the wall so the city doesn’t have to. That’s the whole arrangement. The people inside who don’t want to look at what’s coming over the horizon aren’t failing at their faith. They’re the city. They’re the ones the watchman is for. The watchman is a specific calling, not a general command — not everyone is built to go to the wall and look, and most people are right not to.
So maybe I’m not a defective congregant. Maybe I’m a watchman standing in a room full of citizens, feeling like a freak because I can stomach — and sometimes need — the contact with darkness that would genuinely hurt them. The not-fitting is real. But the defect part is the line’s editorial. The truth isn’t “I’m too dark for church.” The truth is “I’m built to look at what most people are right not to look at, and I keep landing in rooms that have no role for that.” It’s a job mismatch in the seating chart. That’s all.
The most expensive word
There’s a smaller thing that tells the whole story, and it’s a single word: brother.
In my church everyone is “brother.” Brother this, brother that, on first contact, as a greeting. And it sets my teeth on edge, and for a long time I couldn’t say why without sounding like a jerk. Here’s why. I hold that word as nearly sacred. There’s one man I call brother — we fight and we come back, we keep each other’s secrets, he’s the man I’d actually talk to if I talked to anyone, the brother I’d have had if my brother hadn’t died being born. That word costs me something. It’s the most expensive currency I own. I keep it in a vault, and I spend it maybe twice in a lifetime.
So when I walk into a building where everyone spends it freely, on strangers, as a hello — it doesn’t land as warmth. It lands as a counterfeit of the most expensive thing I have. And my alarm goes off, the same alarm that went off about Nicaea, the same one that flinches when a sermon says something that isn’t true — this isn’t real, this is performance. And the alarm is right that something is being cheapened. But here’s the catch I can’t get past: I can fact-check Nicaea. I cannot fact-check a person’s sincerity. So the alarm runs, and runs, with nothing to resolve it, until it curdles into everyone here is fake.
Except — and I have to hold this honestly or the whole exercise is worthless — I can’t actually know who means it and who’s performing. Most of them are probably doing exactly what I do. They’ve got a church-self, a mode, a vocabulary they put on when they walk in, the same way I have a warm easy version of myself I hand to people so they never reach the real one. Theirs just speaks fluent Christianese. They’re not frauds in some evil sense. They’re scared, or running on habit, or they never developed a language of their own so they borrowed the one everybody handed them.
Which means when I watch them perform their church-self, and I feel like a fraud for performing my church-self right back at them, we are doing the identical thing. I’m not the one fake man in a room of authentic people. I might be the one man in the room who can’t stop noticing that everyone, including me, has the mask on. They get to wear it and forget. I wear it and feel every seam. The awareness is the whole burden. It always has been.
The workshop
If you came into my office you’d understand the problem in about four seconds.
I have skulls. Ceramic ones, models, not real — but skulls, a lot of them, and shirts with skulls, some of them with trees growing up out of the skull. I have a poster from The X-Files — the one from Mulder’s office, the UFO, two words underneath: I WANT TO BELIEVE. On the shelf there’s Dune and Fight Club and The King in Yellow and a stack of things that don’t look like what a Christian’s bookshelf is supposed to look like. And there’s the music, which is its own flashpoint — the kind of thing people decide about before the first verse is over.
People from church walk in and recalculate me. I can watch them do it.
Here’s what they’re getting wrong, and it’s the same thing they get wrong about The Da Vinci Code and everything else — they’re reading the surface as the meaning.
The skulls aren’t morbid. The skulls are the gospel. Memento mori — remember that you will die — was a Christian devotional practice for over a thousand years. Monks kept skulls on their desks. Saint Jerome is painted with one. There’s a crypt in Rome built out of the bones of dead friars, arranged into art, with a sign that says what you are, we once were; what we are, you will be. The Puritans carved winged skulls onto their gravestones — the soul taking flight from the bone. A skull with a tree growing out of it is the most concentrated image of the entire faith I can think of: death is real, death is not the end, life grows up out of the grave. The cross itself is a torture-execution device that we cast in gold and hang around our necks. A person who can’t look at a ceramic skull without flinching cannot really look at the cross either. They’ve traded the actual gospel of death-and-resurrection for a Hallmark version where you’re just supposed to not think about dying.
I’ll tell you how deep that one goes for me. I cannot stand to see an animal hurt. It’s close to the deepest thing in me. And yet I can still sit with the hard truth that life comes from death — that something’s death feeds my life, that the whole sacrificial system runs on it, that the Lamb runs on it. That’s not me being callous about the death. It’s the opposite. It’s me refusing to look away from the weight of it and refusing to pretend it doesn’t sit inside a larger frame where death feeds life. The skull on my desk is me keeping my eyes open at the exact spot the gospel actually happens.
The music is the same lesson. People hear the first note of “Number of the Beast” and turn it off, certain it glorifies Satan. But listen to the song. It doesn’t glorify the devil and it doesn’t glorify God either. It’s a man witnessing something horrifying, a dark ritual in a nightmare, terrified, not joining in, not endorsing — witnessing. Reporting back what he saw. Which is — and you can see this coming now — the watchman. Again. It’s Rust going into Carcosa. It’s the boy in an old recurring dream of mine, standing at a toll booth, watching people walk confidently toward something wrong and trying to warn them. Turning the song off at the first note is the “I’d never watch that” move set to music. It mistakes depicting darkness for worshipping it. By that logic you’d have to tear half the Psalms out of the Bible, and all of Revelation, and most of the prophets — because Scripture depicts horror constantly. It just never once bows to it. Depiction is not endorsement. That’s not a distinction I picked up from a pastor. I worked it out the long way, on my own, defending things I loved against people who’d written them off at the first note.
And the poster — I want to believe — is the truest thing on the wall. It’s the honest seeker’s whole creed: I want it to be true, and I will not pretend I’ve seen what I haven’t. I won’t say “I have a personal relationship with Jesus” the way the church-fluent people say it, because half the time I don’t know what they mean by it and I won’t fake a thing I don’t understand. I’d rather sit in the discomfort of not understanding than perform an intimacy I can’t verify. That’s not weak faith. I’ve come to think it might be the strong kind.
Because here’s what nobody told me: wrestling counts. They sold me a version where the relationship is warm feelings and easy understanding, and I don’t have that, so for years I assumed I didn’t have the relationship. But Jacob didn’t get the warm feeling. Jacob got the limp. He grappled with the figure in the dark until daybreak and walked away wounded and renamed, and he is the archetype of a man who has met God. The relationship isn’t the lobby buzz. It’s the all-night grip in the dark that leaves you walking funny for the rest of your life. The office full of skulls and aliens and cursed books isn’t a worldly man’s den. It’s a workshop — the workshop of someone who insists on looking at everything, testing all of it himself, because inherited certainty was never going to be good enough for him. I went down the rabbit hole of “is any of this even true” instead of running away from it, and the going-down is what built whatever faith I’ve actually got.
Continues in Section 4: The Wall and the Fork