Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  “Come on, kids! Hold hands! Run!” Mary shouted. The barn was on fire now, beams crackling and shifting. Mary gathered the remaining children and ran them out a wide berth around the burning house toward the policemen by the cop car in position directly about fifty yards away. Even so, they could feel the heat of the flames. Beautiful stopped, frozen, staring into her burning home like she was seeing the future unfold. Mary picked the panicked child up in her arms. The girl was almost her size, but Mary had the mother strength born of unfolding catastrophe.

  As she hobbled carrying Beautiful, herding the rest of the children in front of her, for the safety of the cop car, Mary noticed a large dark form loom over her shoulder, like a man, or a demon, like an avenging angel. She gasped, stumbled, and turned to look back—it was an ostrich, sprinting at 45 m.p.h., passing her easily. She felt its weight and power brush by her, followed by two more of the huge birds. She met the cartoonishly large, bulging two-inch eyes, and saw nothing but a mirror reflected back to her—the mad instinct for self-preservation. She glanced farther back and saw the crazy wave of freaked-out animals behind her veering off in all directions—the pigs, the chickens, the horses—like watching a world come apart at the seams. She pulled the children into a tighter configuration so as not to be trampled by the stampede.

  Mary turned and looked ahead again. She could see the two remaining cops about twenty yards away now, one down and bleeding, the other standing in firing position, eyes wide with panic, gun trained, but wavering nervously between sights. He had his finger on the trigger, confused as to what was the greater threat, what to shoot at, the 300-pound sharp-taloned prehistoric birds bearing down on them as fast as cars, or on Mary, who still had a gun in her hand, and her children. They didn’t cover this particular Jurassic scenario at the academy. Mary closed her stinging eyes. Her legs felt dead, but she kept pumping them. She heard the pop of automatic weapons, she heard the children and the animals screaming in terror, and still she kept churning her family toward the sound of the guns.

  44.

  THE SUNSET GLOWED UNEARTHLY today because of the still raging fires. From the amount of smoke in the distance, Bronson assumed that the blaze near the house had not been contained. What he didn’t know was that because of intensely dry conditions and the new extremes of global warming (hotter air = stronger wind), and firefighters who were undermanned and overworked because so much money and manpower had been diverted to other disasters and fires in the state, what would become known as the Joshua Tree Fire of 2020 had begun, and would not be fully out for almost a month. X acres would eventually burn, X lives and X dollars lost. It would dwarf the Camp Fire of 2018.

  The police helicopters that had been flying low over the endless desert searching for Bronson and Hyrum had eventually given way to the fire department choppers dumping water and red PHOS-CHEK on the hungry conflagration. And then even those choppers and small planes had disappeared, called back to defend areas that were populated as the fire searched out more nourishing fuel, finding it in the nitrogen-enriched (thank you, creeping LA smog) invasive grasses.

  As he watched the distance burning toward him, Bronson thought—Beautiful was right all along. The fire this time. She was the true prophet. She was Jackie’s spiritual daughter. Jackie. He could no longer feel her in his head. His headaches were gone. The fire outside had put out the fire inside. He was where he was supposed to be, in the desert fulfilling the law. He leveled his eyes to civilization in the flat distance somewhere beyond the horizon. You screwed it all up. All of you. God gave you this planet to be stewards and you tore it up and gorged on its innards, its oil and its gold, and raped it till there was nothing left but dry tinder. “Fuck mankind,” he thought, a scourge upon the earth. “Burn.”

  But it wasn’t burning at the new sacred place, the second temple, where Bronson and Hyrum made their camp, where Jackie, Carthage, and Nauvoo were now buried. Though he could not feel them, Bronson hoped their spirits were still here hovering, their baptized and saved souls. Bronson was a saver of souls. He thought briefly of the men in the traps, dead or dying out there at the other place, the ruined first temple; they would be silent soon, their short sojourn on the planet over, their longer trip just begun. He would learn their names too, and baptize them by proxy, and save them, in time.

  Though the air was hard to breathe and the sky looked like medieval renderings of Hell itself, by the time father and son had built their own small campfire and finished their meal, it was getting colder. They lay back to watch the apocalyptic sky turn from red to black. Though cloudless, there would be no stars tonight in the smoke-obstructed heavens. The desert world would soon be dark as a crypt.

  “They’ll be coming for us,” Hyrum said.

  “They’ll be coming for me, Hyrum, not for you,” Bronson answered. “They won’t come for a child. Not like that, and not too soon, they got their hands full right now fighting that fire. I’m sorry it’s burning like that. I didn’t want that.”

  “I’m scared,” Hyrum said.

  “Of what?” Bronson asked. “The fire? Those men?”

  “No. Of you. Of the way you look right now.”

  “How do I look?”

  “Like you’re on fire, too.”

  “You have nothing to be afraid of, son. I have only the welfare of your eternal soul in mind.” Bronson stood up. “But you do sense my concern. I’m afraid because of your murderous action. I’m afraid you are headed for spirit prison.”

  “Spirit prison?”

  “There are some sins that put you beyond the merciful blood of Christ. Sins like murder.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “… But you’ve never been afraid to kill, have you, son?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Neither beast nor man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  Hyrum thought awhile, and then said, “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough. But you said, ‘Die, Lamanite.’” Bronson let the quoted threat hang swinging in the silent night, like a noose from a scaffold, he thought. He squinted at Hyrum, who seemed surprised by the reference and perhaps taken aback for a moment, but the boy was just remembering.

  “Yeah, I did,” Hyrum said, guilelessly. He shook his head at the memory, trying to take it back.

  “Why ‘Lamanite’?”

  Hyrum shook his head again, trying to recall the exact moment.

  “I think I was gonna say the ‘N’ word.”

  “Nephite?”

  “No, not Nephite,” he said with a laugh. “The other ‘N’ word.”

  Bronson had to think for a moment. “Oh, right.”

  “Yeah, but then that came out.”

  “Hyrum, I need you to tell me the truth now.”

  “That is the truth, Dad. It’s just what came outta my mouth. It’s just a word. Why is everyone so hung up on words? I dunno why I said it.” The boy was an innocent or a cold-blooded killer, a simple wild angel or Satan his dissembling dark self. There was nothing in between.

  Bronson nodded and said, “I don’t know, either. Something in your nature. Something you came here already carrying, premortal, maybe something you carried for me, something you need to unlearn, something to atone for.”

  “It’s just me, I guess.”

  “Yes. And I’m afraid, too, afraid that when they come for me, then I can no longer care for you and make sure you will dwell with me in Heaven. I’m afraid of what I must do in the short time I have. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.” The boy looked up, seemingly unconcerned for the moment with his father’s struggle. “Not gonna be any stars tonight,” he said, and then stood up with a smile. “I got some chocolate in my knapsack, you want some?”

  “It’s got caffeine in it.”

  “Come on, Dad, live a little.”

  Bronson watched his boy, backlit by the fire, rummage through the knapsack. They could be any father and son camping anywh
ere, anytime. Bronson smiled too; sometimes the cheesy archetypes come through on their own, like a possession, and they feel good, for a moment.

  “You don’t have to be Supermormon all the time, you know,” Hyrum needled him. He was growing up, growing a sense of humor, embracing irony, tentatively challenging his father.

  Bronson smiled again, welcoming that archetype too. For one short moment, he allowed himself to revel in the bullshit tropes handed down from generation to generation. The comfort food of father-son bonding. “Ha. Okay. I’ll have a small piece.”

  Hyrum dropped the bag, walked back to Bronson, and handed him a piece of chocolate. Bronson ate it. First piece of chocolate he’d had in decades.

  “Damn, that’s good.”

  “Father, your language,” Hyrum joked again.

  “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? That’s a bad motherfucker.”

  “Ha! So close. Mom gets the Trader Joe’s ones. Says they’re healthier. That’s my jam.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  Already the archetypes were fading, losing depth and dimension, turning into memes, commercials. Capitalism corrupting truth. Bronson sighed. He was no longer able to enjoy, just enjoy a piece of fucking chocolate. That would not change. Hyrum grinned. He had no problem with any of that.

  “It’s a whole new world out there, Dad.”

  Bronson laughed. “Yeah. Did you like the world, Hy?”

  “Parts of it.”

  “The chocolate parts?”

  “Haha. Dad joke. There’s plenty more here if you want it.”

  “Thank you, son. No, thanks.” Bronson nodded again, slowly, sadly, then asked of the air itself, it seemed, “How can you atone to nature for your nature doing what it does?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “How do you atone to God for being as He made you?”

  “Sounds like that’s on Him, not me.”

  Bronson nodded. The kid had a point. “Does being able to kill for an idea make that idea true?”

  “It wasn’t my idea to kill. I didn’t mean to,” Hyrum said.

  “So you say. Does dying for an idea make that idea worth dying for?”

  “Is that like a real question? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe I don’t either.” Bronson sighed.

  After another while, Hyrum spoke. “But you forgive me?”

  Bronson blinked, a tug on his heart. “Oh yes, my beautiful boy.” And he did, he really did. But he could not speak for God the Father. He was trying to listen to what He wanted, and his God had always spoken in mysterious code and tongues. The goal was so far away, he could barely see it. It seemed he stood on an endless football field and way off in the distance, a goalpost with arms upraised, like a Joshua tree. He had to get his son from here to there. Bronson got lost in this football analogy, didn’t know what play to call, couldn’t take that first step, but he knew the ball, his son, was in his hands. He knew that much.

  “First things first,” Bronson said. “Fetch me my water, son, we need to baptize that boy you killed. Add his name to the Mountain of Names.”

  “Hermano.”

  “Yes, Hermano. Hermano Ruiz. We will make sure eternal life is his. It may not be enough, but it’s the least we can do.”

  “How you gonna do that?” Hyrum handed his father the canister of water.

  “I’m gonna baptize him through you. You will be the agency of his salvation, and maybe that will be the agent of your salvation. You will stand in for him. You will be him.”

  “That feels weird, Dad.”

  “Bow your head.”

  Bronson began to chant the words for the Mormon baptism of the dead. The same words he’d spoken for his tragic babies, Carthage and Nauvoo, the same words he planned to say soon for Dirk Johnson and the men he’d killed today. He had no fountain, but he felt this land here his sanctified temple. He sprinkled, then poured some water over Hyrum’s scalp.

  “I don’t know that he would want this,” Hyrum said.

  “I don’t care. Say his name.”

  “Hermano Ruiz. I don’t know that his family would want this.”

  “I’m not concerned with his family. Say his name.”

  “Hermano Ruiz. Water’s cold.”

  “Be quiet, Hyrum, you’re doing a holy thing. Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you for and in behalf of Hermano Ruiz in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  When Bronson was finished and convinced that the soul of Hermano Ruiz had been given eternal life vicariously through his wild son, he lay back on the sand. He had made the first move toward the goal, toward forgiveness and restoration. He was vigilantly listening for his God now, scanning the horizon for a new sign, to see if that was sufficient. With the shadows attenuating, and the sun angling down farther to the west by the second, the arms of the Joshua trees looked one moment like they were welcoming an embrace and the next as if they meant to push him away, like a trick photo oscillating. Back and forth like that as night finally fell on this murderous day.

  They watched the stars try to grow brighter, only to fade and twinkle out in the waving smoke. They stared up at the black blank sky. “That’s how fathers and sons make peace, Hyrum, through baptism for the dead. The present is the son and the past is the father, and in that moment they face each other with love. The present saves the past.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  Bronson laughed at his boy’s prosaic honesty. He had always thought of him as a perfectly made but alien thing, organized differently from the other children. It’s not that he’s disorganized, he used to advise Mary and Yaya, it’s that he’s organized differently.

  “That was fun today, wasn’t it?” Bronson asked.

  “Respect.”

  “Righteousness is always fun, to feel God’s hand in your hand.”

  “True dat.”

  “You would’ve made a helluva stuntman.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Better than me.”

  “Yeah? I liked being on fire. That was fire.”

  “Yeah, of course it was fire.”

  “No, Dad, fire means, like, really good, like hot, or, you know, good. Anything can be fire if it’s good.”

  “Oh, okay. Cool. And you’re a tougher man than me, at eleven, already you’re more of a man than just about any man I’ve known. But you don’t wanna be a stuntman—that’s just a shadow of an actor, and an actor is just a shadow of a real person making shadows on a silver screen in the dark. A shadow of a shadow. It’s a bullshit existence, but you coulda aced it.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Big ups.”

  “Big ups?”

  “Means, like, thank you.”

  “Ah, okay. Up being a positive,” the autodidact in him pushed forward, “used as a plural noun and big meaning a lot, or in this case, many. That’s fire. Many thanks.”

  “Okay, boomer. Way to kill it, Dad. I’ll never say it again.”

  Bronson laughed. He was happy that, as soon as he’d gotten back to the desert, Hyrum, for the most part anyway, had stopped relying on all that stupid language and macho posturing, as if he’d spoken a foreign language in a foreign land, and now he was getting back to his native tongue. He was just using it to tease the old man now. It’s like the city boy had been a changeling, and now he’d been returned to himself. This boy was his.

  “Close your eyes, Hyrum.”

  “Why?” Hyrum began to breathe heavily. It was the first time Bronson had ever seen the boy show any sign of distress. It gave him pause. Their identities strobed back and forth in the flickering firelight from lame father and son in a TV commercial to biblical father and son from the oldest stories of man.

  Bronson intoned, “‘The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’”

  “He wasn’t my brother.”

  “All men are your brothers.” Bronson stood, hi
s old knees crackling like the fire. “Do you trust me to deliver you from evil, to close this distance from your God? For, as the prophet said, in Alma 42, ‘God ceaseth not to be God, and mercy claimeth the penitent, and mercy cometh because of the atonement; and the atonement bringeth to pass the resurrection of the dead; and the resurrection of the dead bringeth back men into the presence of God; and thus they are restored into his presence.’”

  “I feel restored out here with you, Dad. We did the baptism thing. I think that’s enough for today. I feel fine.”

  “You may feel that way, but it is not so. I shall restore you to His presence. We preach to the living and the dead. We teach revelation to the dead and we baptize the dead, Hyrum—there is no difference to your soul between the estates of life and death. It’s just a body. Hyrum, your eyes, please close them.”

  “You get mad at me for the way I talk. Why do you talk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a movie. Like a book. That’s not you either.”

  “Pray with me, Hyrum.”

  “I don’t want to pray.”

  The boy was right. The words were speaking him, not the other way round. The words sounded crazy and fake, but Bronson believed them. He had to. He had to regain his faith through sacrifice and through the law. It was all he had left, his lack of certainty and his duty; the only way to regain his certainty was through duty. Bronson knew what he must do, but he couldn’t meet his boy’s eyes. Bronson was too weak. Burying Jackie, and then Nauvoo and Carthage, had been the hardest things he’d ever done. Till now. This felt impossible, like he was trying to breathe underwater, his instinct at war with his mind.

  “Stand up, Hyrum,” he ordered. Hyrum stood slowly. “Do you remember the story of Abraham and Isaac?”

  “Yeah.”