Jesus's stereoscopic portrait

Jesus's stereoscopic portrait is a wedding present whose familiar place above the television becomes the site of an unsettling change: its lifelike figure moves and speaks, revealing Joe Paulson’s adultery to ‘Becka Paulson and announcing that more is happening in Haven. The picture does not merely represent sacred authority; in ‘Becka’s living room, it acts as the voice and instrument of that authority.

Appearance and Place in the Home

‘Becka’s older sister, Corinne, gave the portrait to her and Joe as a wedding present. It had occupied roughly the same place for about sixteen years, first atop two Zenith televisions and, for the preceding six years, on their Sony. The image showed Jesus in three dimensions, wearing a simple white robe and holding a shepherd’s staff. His brown eyes were mild, his hair brought to mind Elvis after his Army service, and a perspective-perfect flock trailed behind him toward the horizon.

The picture’s idealized sheep were conspicuously unlike the animals ‘Becka remembered from growing up on a sheep farm with Corinne in New Gloucester: these were uniformly woolly and white, as if untouched by the dirt of ordinary life. ‘Becka accommodated the discrepancy through religious faith, reasoning that the power to turn water into wine and raise the dead could also make lambs impossibly clean. The image thus depended on both recognizable religious convention and an immaculate, deliberately unreal pastoral scene.

An Object Joe Tried to Move

Joe objected to having Jesus above the television while the couple watched programs such as Magnum and Miami Vice. He proposed moving the portrait to ‘Becka’s bureau and bringing it back on Sundays, when they watched Jimmy Swaggart and Jack van Impe. Their disagreement made the picture part of the household’s everyday negotiations: to Joe it was incongruous beside secular entertainment, while ‘Becka treated its place as worth defending.

She did allow Joe to turn it around on the one Thursday night each month when his friends came over to drink beer and play poker. That limited concession did not remove it from the room or erase its importance to her. After the image began speaking, ‘Becka reinterpreted Joe’s earlier efforts to relocate it. She suspected that he had sensed it was special and feared that it would expose his sin. What had looked like a dispute over religious decor became, in her new understanding, a conflict over the portrait’s capacity to reveal what Joe wished to conceal.

The Picture Speaks

On July 7, the portrait began to speak. The first disclosure came on a Thursday shortly after three in the afternoon. Returning from the kitchen with half a coffee cake and a beer stein filled with cherry Za-Rex, ‘Becka was bending to switch on the television when Jesus told her that Joe was having sex with Nancy Voss at the post office, usually during lunch and sometimes after work. He also described an occasion when Joe had sex with her while they were supposed to be sorting mail.

The disclosure connected facts ‘Becka had already noticed but had not put together. Joe no longer sought her out at night; she had sometimes smelled perfume on his collar; and Nancy had arrived from the Augusta post office after Charlie Estabrooke retired. The picture gave these separate signs a blunt explanation. Its revelation was not abstract religious counsel: it named the affair, its setting, and the circumstances of its recurrence.

The apparition then moved within the three-dimensional scene. Jesus walked halfway across the picture, sat on a rock jutting from the ground, held his staff between his knees, and told ‘Becka that there was much happening in Haven. His movement gave the familiar image a new material presence: the portrait remained a framed domestic object, but its depicted world now appeared to contain an actor who could cross it and address someone outside it.

Authority, Disruption, and Reach

‘Becka screamed and fell to her knees, crushing her piece of coffee cake and spattering raspberry filling onto Ozzie, the cat, who fled beneath the stove and stayed there for the rest of the day. The extraordinary disclosure entered the room through ordinary things—the Sony, a snack, a cat—and disrupted their familiar arrangement. When ‘Becka wondered whether she was hearing voices or going crazy, Jesus insisted that it was simply him and that he could talk to anyone he wanted, in any way he wanted. ‘Becka accepted the claim because she believed him to be the Savior.

The portrait’s authority also came with demands. Looking down at animated salad bowls on the television screen, Jesus asked ‘Becka to turn off the program because they could not talk while it was running and the noise made his feet tingle. She approached the Sony and switched it off. The picture had first made the television its pedestal; now its speaking figure made the television’s sound an obstruction and compelled ‘Becka to act. Its influence therefore extended beyond what it revealed: it reorganized attention in the room and established a channel of communication on its own terms.

Jesus’s first subject was Joe’s adultery, but he immediately widened the disclosure beyond the marriage, saying that there was a great deal happening in Haven and that ‘Becka would not believe half of it. The picture becomes a threshold between private betrayal and the town’s larger hidden story. Its decisive significance lies in that change of function: after years as a still wedding gift on top of successive televisions, it becomes a moving, speaking presence whose revelations begin to draw ‘Becka into what is happening around her.