The Shelter

by Peter Foley

  Drew, for once, stays silent.

  “All right. This is not our first run-in, is it, Drew? But this is your first time on the stand. Drew’s been with us not even three days.” Father looks at the Blue Gowns and waves the report in their direction. Anger rises from his chest. “What motherfucker wrote a report on someone who is so goddam new to the fucking Temple? Who decided that, instead of education, you’d have pieces torn off a new member, who most probably didn’t know the difference between right and wrong?”

  The Blue cluster are admonished.

  “Now, Drew, you are a motherfucker,” Father says. “At least you’ve acted like one so far. I don’t care for strange questions and odd behavior. I don’t know what in the hell is going through your mind, I really don’t. You’ve got thought spaghetti, I never seen a man have it so bad. You might be crazy for all I know but I’ll give you some advice: get in line, get on the team and step into it! Join the people. Join Salvation and salvation shall be yours.”

  Drew is silent, but the hall has become a spirit that needs another sacrifice.

  “Shave his head!” cries a voice. “Yeah!” yells another. “He oughta be punished! Shave his head!”

  Father examines the evidence. “Okay, I see, you want to shave his head, right? Teach him a lesson that way? Well, as you know – we are not a democracy! I’m your father! Sit down! I’m tired of this petty bullshit. This ain’t no barbershop!”

  Father points a finger at Drew. “You’d be one of the best for our cause if you’d get on the team and step in line. Listen to me, don’t give me no more trouble, and start acting like you can be on the team. You could take a place by my side if you get yourself together, or instead, you could go ahead and visit the barbershop and the fuckin’ Blue-eyed Monster all at once! Now, sit down, and Drew… this is the last time I’m going to save your ass.”

  35

  The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists

  Dismissed, the ireful crowd filter silently from the Sermon Hall and return to their beds. Drew is the last to leave. He stands in the middle of the hall gazing down at his shadow, to where Charlie’s blood splatter stains the floor.

  Brutal. Poor Charlie, he should have just kept his head down, play along. There’s nowhere to hide in this place…

  After a time, Drew takes a few deep breaths and turns towards the Sermon Hall’s exit. Back in his room, he finds it as humorless as usual. The walls are cold, his bed is disheveled, the dark dirty ceiling seems darker and dirtier than before, and the speakers; the sight of those awkward trapezoid black boxes mounted on every wall is one he’s grown to particularly despise.

  He looks at Tom’s neat empty bed.

  Tom is real and I know it. He was here and alive only a few hours ago.

  No matter what he’s told, Drew knows that much is true.

  What spell has the Pastor cast on these people? he asks himself. What voodoo is this? How can he erase Tom’s memory from all those people?

  It’s evident that fear is their keeper, and tonight Drew saw its power up close. He ponders fear and its strange bonding quality, its power to erase, its power to form and gather people, and its power to enforce conformity both willing and unwilling, both real and fake. With a heavy sigh, he gives up his attempt to find logic in this place. It just is, such is the power of fear.

  Megan marches into his room. Her blue gown is a shock to his senses. She pins Drew against a wall by his neck and holds her face within biting distance of his cheek. Her teeth are clamped, her breathing is audible.

  “You think you’re so special? You think you’re better than us, don’t you? You’re not special. I see right through you. I see the way you look at us and the way you look at Father. You’re not better than us.”

  Megan screams something unintelligible in Drew’s face and pushes his neck harder against the wall. He feels her nails press into the skin on his spine. Involuntarily, he clenches his cheek and closes his eyes, feeling that a hard slap is, for whatever reason, surely due. But instead, all he feels is the grip around his throat grow tighter. He opens his eyes as Megan presses a thumb into his windpipe. He feels the hard draw of restricted breath. She says nothing, her face is tense but expressionless. Drew closes his eyes again but this time feels a strong, sudden pressure on his lips. Megan leans on his face with an aggressive, crushing kiss. Breaking the kiss, she slaps him hard across the face. He recoils and a red bloom burnishes his cheek.

  “I’m not sure I understand the rules here–” Drew attempts to say.

  “You’re a little bitch! You’re nothing but meat to me. Your time is gonna come. Do you understand me?!” She spits her words, her cheeks flush a vicious shade. In a swift savage motion she withdraws her hand from around Drew’s neck and pushes her forearm into his throat. “You like this, don’t you?”

  She reaches down and forces her hand up Drew’s gown. She takes his penis in her hand and squeezes her fingers tightly around it in a cruel hate-filled grip. She mechanically kneads him. “Yeah, you sicko.”

  She continues to grope Drew and he can’t help but become erect. She stares into his eyes and continues her aggressive endeavor.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it? Yeah?” She’s breathless. Faster and faster her hand moves, more and more she leans on him and makes her grip tighter.

  “You little bitch… If I hear anymore bullshit from you I’m going to snap this fucker off! Do you understand me?”

  Drew nods. Her madness cools to indignation. Her teeth unclench, she removes her hand and releases Drew’s throat. His body slumps against the wall. “Your time is gonna come,” she says as she hurricanes out of the room and vanishes into darkness.

  Finding a seat on his bed, Drew takes a moment to recover. He runs a hand through his hair and wonders what is happening to him. “Is the Pastor right? Could he be right, about picking a team?”

  In Drew’s whole life he had never picked a side to be on.

  The touring crew was hardly a team. I’m not sure they even liked me. Have I wandered my whole adult life from one tour bus to another, from one plane to another, from tour to tour and from drink to drink? If he’s right then inside here there’s only one team to play for, and wouldn’t life be easier then?

  The thought is comforting. It feels like the future.

  The lights snap off. Drew is alone in the dark.

  36

  I feel no light inside me strong enough to resist it

  The restless night becomes a restless morning. Hazel sits in the Common Room eating a breakfast of cold egg slush, just as she had done for the two previous mornings, but this morning is different. To her left, Barbara scoops at her plate, and to her right, Easter and child has joined them in a collective silence.

  Courtney will already be in the kitchen, I suppose, muses Hazel.

  Fretting, she scans the room with her fork idling in her hand between her chin and her plate.

  … and where the hell is Drew? Come on, Drew…

  “Who you waitin’ on, child?” Barbara leans over her fork and blows on her already-cold eggs.

  “You remember… er… no one. Never mind…”

  “Na’, don’t you worry. E’erthing gonna be all right for us.” Barbara’s stilted and automatic reassurance goes unnoticed by Hazel, who’s only just rising out of the shadow of her mind to notice Easter and her baby. Feeling a prang of guilt for being thus far impolite, Hazel attempts some gentle conversation with Easter.

  “So, how’s little Quincy, Easter? Are you well? You look good.”

  “Thank you,” Easter responds. “I still feel exhausted but I’m very happy – look at my little Quincy! He’s my everything now, he’s so precious. You know, me and Sid had been trying for ages.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We tried everything. We tried the medical route, the home remedy routes, believe me, you don’t want to know! But then came Father, and he made it so we could have a baby. It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” Easter l
ooks longingly at Quincy and gently bounces him on her knee. Hazel doesn’t know quite how to respond. She lets the moment pass like a fading fall breeze then leaves the table to scrape the remains of her breakfast into the food waste bin.

  Megan, in her brazen gown, appears by her side like a blue shadow. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “So, Hazel, isn’t it? I’ve been meaning to catch up with you. I hope you’re doing super great here in Salvation. How are you?”

  “Tripping on the vibes of life,” Hazel says.

  “Oh, okay… So, how are you finding Salvation?”

  “It’s an experience,” replies Hazel, emphatically wiping the mush off her plate with a quick swipe of her knife.

  “Oh really? What does that mean?” Megan says through a broad smile.

  “How would you explain it?” Hazel hears sharpness in her own voice.

  “Well, I think it’s paradise. Thank Father we are here, is all I can say! What do you think of Father? Do you see him as God? A prophet? Or do you see him as more of a Lenin figure? What do you think?”

  There is nowhere to escape from the obvious trap.

  “I see Father as the sum of the human condition,” is all Hazel can pull down from her mind. It’s nonsense of course, and Hazel knows it, but it is such fine bullshit it stands half a chance of captivating Megan into silence. It’s a success, Megan stands with narrowed eyes, contemplating the nonsense.

  Two to three days, just remember. The hurricane will last no more than three days, that’s what my data said…

  The clink and clunk of knives and forks on cheap ceramic plates squeak in the sparse morning atmosphere. After the dishes are cleared, the diners, weary from the episode of nocturnal justice, prepare for their day’s work.

  Hazel is to teach in the classroom, which has been prepared by the church for Salvation’s youth; eleven years and under.

  “No Courtney and no Drew. This breakfast sucks.” Hazel sighs and gives up the wait and goes to find the classroom. She doesn’t know what the class is to be. She’s been told all will become clear once she arrives at Salvation’s education facility.

  Upon her arrival, Hazel sees that Salvation has one classroom. It’s large, pretty and decorated in primary colors. A projector hangs from the ceiling, its lens points at a patch of gray wall that has a large yellow picture frame painted on it.

  Hazel has developed a tic. Every few moments she feels an urge to check her phone and observe its dwindling battery and no signal. It proves an awkward habit due to the phone’s new location. Since her gown doesn’t have any pockets, and because she feels the presence of a phone in her hand will cause someone to report her, she decides to smuggle the device around by tucking it in the waistline of her underwear. She has to ungracefully lift her gown to retrieve the phone, which she does in an instant. Once in hand, she powers it on just long enough to check for a signal.

  No bars. Damn. Battery low.

  She walks around the classroom, holding the phone out at different angles, but the sound of footsteps and chatter in the corridor alerts her. She frantically swipes the phone off and returns it to her midriff just before the classroom door opens. The Pastor walks in leading a troop of children. In front of them he looks like a giant leading a pack of red-robed dwarfs. Scanning the children Hazel counts twenty-seven young minds.

  “Now, class, this is your teacher. Say hello to Miss Cox,” Father says.

  “Hello, Miss Cox…” the children reply in discordant unison. Each child smiles before instinctively sitting on their tailbones and folding their arms and legs.

  “I will lead the first class,” Father says, “and I will visit from time to time, but when I’m not around, Miss Cox will teach reading and writing, math and science. I will teach history. Okay, kids? Does that sound like fun?”

  “Yes, Father…” drone the kids.

  “Okay, children. Look around at your new school, isn’t it wonderful? Yes, education, education, education.” He towers over them with a malevolent warmth. “We can overcome a great many challenges with learning. This place will be where you develop your talents and raise your ambitions to make Salvation fairer and stronger. This place will be where you gain the basic tools for life and work. You should learn the joy of life, the satisfaction of math, the beauty of art and the magic of science and the purity of truth.”

  The children, all with mop-top haircuts, some with itchy noses and most with restless wriggles, smile at Father with shiny puffy cheeks and tiny teeth.

  “Today’s lesson is a very important one from history. I’m going to show you all a movie. You all like movies, don’t you, kids?” Father doesn’t let them answer. “Today is a special movie. You have heard me talk about false gods, well this movie is about the false gods of money and the old society. This movie will show you just what they wanted to do to you. This is what they had planned for you, for all of you all sat here right now. So, as you watch, remember this is what was waiting for you, for your fellow students and for your families until Father saved you.”

  Father fires up the projector. A faded blue digital trapezoid appears on the wall opposite. The blue deepens and morphs into a dark image. A grainy black and white title appears on the wall. It reads “The Holocaust of the Jews”.

  For twenty soundless minutes, images of skin pulled tight over bone stretch and cover the wall. Crowds of living skeletons stare at the children from behind barbed wire. Desperate faces tower over the little minds. Pictures showing piles of bodies cause some children to look at their feet, some cry and sniffle. Only when all hearts are clearly broken does Father stop the looped images and speak.

  “Now, I saw you look away, Julie-May. So we’re going to watch that again, and this time everybody watches. It’s important that we all know about this. This is what they were going to do to you, to your mother, your father, until you were saved.”

  And the reel runs again. Hazel doesn’t notice the ghostly light dancing on the wall the second time around. The silence gives her a moment to disappear into the shade of her mind. By now the perversity of Father is fully realized to her, and so is her revulsion to him.

  She considers the outside world and how Hurricane Jason must be at its worst point by now. It will be leveling the land, ripping up houses by the roots, carrying off cattle by the herd, twisting and flattening pylons to lift and choke the dusty sky, but, in Hazel’s mind, her California still exists. Her favorite beer garden still exists, as does the sun, so too does her office, Lara, Sissy, Sunday afternoons. Even Flynn is out there waiting for her beyond these walls. In her mind’s eye they all still exist exactly as they always have done, but in reality, she can’t be sure, and it wearies her to despair.

  After the distortion of recent events; the hurricane, the red gowns, the walls, a flash of freak rationality enters her mind. She can’t just ask Father to let her leave, she knows she can’t just walk out of here, and if she asks she’ll likely end up missing like Tom or beaten like Charlie. She sees the tortured bodies on the wall, the tortured souls. She thinks about the Nazis, of Hitler and of that singular moment when he turned a gun on himself as an act of escape, and how the Third Reich fell soon after. She looks at Father and considers what might have to be done.

  “Stop that! Stop that!” Father leaps to his feet and dashes to the side of a young boy.

  “That bug wasn’t hurting you!”

  Hazel stops the movie, and all of a sudden Father adopts a new tone.

  “I saw you! Don’t you tell me you weren’t. I saw you step your foot on that bug and play with its wings. That’s not fair! That’s not right! You dissect things in biology class, out of necessity, when they’re dead. Why did you do it? Why did you kill it?”

  The child offers no explanation. Father turns to Hazel. “Can you set up some counseling for these kids? We got a kid like this, so please set up some counseling in the teaching program.” He turns back to the child and says, “I’m going to give you a break this time, ’coz teach
er will put you into a class and you can talk about why you stepped on that bug. Do you understand what I’m saying? Don’t torture things. The world is so full of pain, and that poor bug was still alive when you finished. Did you tear his wing off? I’m sick of kids doing this. Hazel, if I’m overreacting, you tell me.”

  “…No,” Hazel says.

  Father continues, “If you don’t learn sensitivity for life as a child, you sure aren’t going to learn it later. I can’t even eat chicken, I’ve seen so many of them die. They can tell what’s going to happen to them. It’s not anthropomorphic, they can tell. I don’t like brutality unless it’s necessary. It tears the fuck out of me.”

  Eventually, Father leaves the children in Hazel’s sole command. Numbed by Father’s teachings she searches her mind for a way to occupy twenty-seven young students. Throwing her mind back twenty years to her own school days, she draws a vague plan of how to waste what remains of the day. She gathers the little red gnomes in a circle on the floor and has them introduce themselves.

  “Now everyone, please introduce yourself to the group with your name and tell us a little something about you,” she instructs the class in what she hopes will be a very low impact end to her day’s duties.

  “Hello everyone. My name is Walter,” says the first bright young boy. “I am eleven and I am, er… a violent… rev-revo… a violent revolution-ship – is that right?”

  The class giggles at once, the very littlest of them laugh so hard they lean and fall to their side. One child says, “No! It’s ‘revolutionary’, dummy!”

  “What do you mean?” Hazel is perplexed by the child’s words and made uncomfortable by the cold floor.

  “I mean I am a violent revolutionary,” Walter repeats with a nod and more flair than he could earlier accumulate.