The Martyr

During my senior year of college, I moved into an apartment on the north side of Baltimore that was popular among students for its generous square footage. The average resident was old enough to vote but not yet buy alcohol, and the building catered to their demographic, offering amenities such as complimentary Red Bulls and a communal Skee-ball machine. Units came equipped with a bedspring mattress and dung-colored sofa set, and the surrounding neighborhood was praised for having the lowest rate of muggings in a two-mile radius. I’d signed a lease for the master bedroom and private bathroom of a two-bedroom unit, and in order to be matched with a roommate who would occupy the remaining bedroom, I was asked to complete a questionnaire.

“On a scale of one to five, how interested are you in having a roommate that smokes marijuana?” the questionnaire asked. “What opinion do you have on guests of the opposite sex staying overnight? Would you prefer to live with someone who’s quiet in the morning or makes a lot of noise?”

The questionnaire made it sound like I could end up living with a rock star; someone with a ‘Z’ in his name like Zunk or Jizz. This person would spend his evenings self-medicating and hooking up with groupies, yet still always wake up early enough to squeeze in his drum practice before breakfast.

“Have you seen my bottle of urine anywhere?” I imagined him asking. “I’ve got a job interview tomorrow down at the Chipotle.”

I requested in the questionnaire that my roommate be whatever the opposite of this person was, and when Move-In Day arrived I was reminded of a phrase that’s normally reserved for beggars in Arabia who’ve come into possession of a magic lamp: be careful what you wish for.

Short and bald like an Easter Island Moai, my roommate Donald was a Pentecostal Christian who believed that practice couldn’t make perfect because only God was perfect. He’d come to Baltimore to attend medical school despite being uncomfortable with the idea of evolution, and when I asked Donald why he was interested in becoming a doctor, he looked at me with pity and shook his head.

“It’s not an interest,” he said, pointing to the ceiling. “It’s my calling.”

I smiled and nodded politely, silently mourning the life I could have had with Zunk.

A few days after moving in together, Donald asked if I’d like to join him for his daily morning prayer. A couple days later, he invited me to go with him to Sunday service at a nearby church, and by the end of the week I found myself cornered in the kitchen as Donald tried showing me a video that explained how God was the armor I needed in the war of life.

“Please,” he said when I refused to watch the video, “won’t you at least listen to the sermon? It’s only two hours.”

I explained to Donald that I was a non-practicing Catholic, and though I didn’t go to church or say grace at the dinner table, I still believed in a big man that lived in the sky like he did.

“Really,” I said to him, “we’re on the same team here.”

I expected this information to placate Donald’s efforts to evangelize me. It did not, and instead emboldened him to ramp up his operations because from Donald’s perspective I’d just admitted to being one well-timed homily away from becoming a real Christian.

I began to frequently find Donald’s bible sitting on the dining room table, always nonchalantly opened to a carefully highlighted section. The passages were fine on their own but tended to contradict one another when taken together, with one excerpt admiring the infinite patience and generosity that God was well-known for having, and another recalling a time when he drowned the entire world because no one had wanted to listen to him.

Verbal warnings against drinking were issued to me in the same tone that a German fairytale would take to scare children from going into the woods at night, and whenever I left the apartment to run an errand or go to class, Donald would say to me, “Goodbye and God bless you,” as if I was about to be deployed in Iraq.

None of these things were done with any animosity or ill-intent on Donald’s part, but the problem, as my mother pointed out, was that good intentions are rarely an adequate substitute for advice that’s actually helpful.

“He thinks he knows everything, but he doesn’t,” she said after meeting him. My mother is a devout Catholic whose last five vacations included the word “pilgrimage” in their advertising, but even she fell under scrutiny when Donald suggested that the live-streamed church services she’d been attending over Zoom weren’t as spiritual as going to mass in-person.

“He has no right saying what’s spiritual for me or not,” she complained to me afterwards. “That is between me, and God, and no one else.”

Happy to finally have someone to hate Donald with, I agreed with everything my mother said.

“Yeah,” I chimed in, “to Hell with him.”

I’d been suffering under Donald’s Inquisition for a month up to this point, and following the powwow with my mother, I underwent a sudden revelation that there actually was something missing from my life that could give it a higher purpose: not a three-lettered word, but a seven-lettered one; revenge.

I started small, careful to make sure that my actions were untraceable. If Donald baked muffins, I’d throw one out, and insist that he’d simply miscounted them. Whenever his video game hours began to bleed into my sleep schedule, I’d misplace the TV cord, and take a week or month to relocate it. When the light in my bathroom suddenly died one day, I switched it with Donald’s, taking satisfaction not in the fact that I now had a working lightbulb, but in the fact that Donald didn’t. My desire was not to gain more for myself, but to take away from Donald as much as was possible, and as my schemes escalated I began to imagine myself as the star of my very own injury attorney commercial; a victim who’d been wronged through the negligence of others, and was now laying claim to the enormous compensation that I was rightfully entitled to.