The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  I got down on my hands and knees to inch around the space like a worm, one square foot at a time. The floor was filthy. There were dust bunnies and metal shavings, pieces of food and stray hairs. I worked slowly, clearing piled-up dust and debris around each piece of equipment or table leg, feeling for openings in the concrete floor. It took a long time, but it slowed my mind down, cooled my body. At least until I got a screw wedged into the fat of my knee and I took a little pent-up something out on a box of drill bits. Then I had to collect the bits from where they’d scattered around the shop. I did that on two legs, like a human at least.

  Finally I worked around to the corner where a couple trash cans were lined up against the wall. I’d been avoiding the spot. I’d hoped to find what I was looking for before I reached it. Now I couldn’t. This was where Mike’s body had fallen, after the bullet opened a hole in the muscle of his heart. This place, one week ago. Mike, who loved his wife, fucked his way across Southeast Asia, served his church, hated his job, but liked to waste time with me and call me a cocksucker while we hit robot pitches in the batting cages. Here I was, and here he was not. None of these were mysteries I was going to solve.

  It was only a corner: a slab of concrete where two walls happened to meet. I pulled the trash cans out of the way and got back on all fours. I ran my hands along the floor, sweeping for dust and debris with my fingers, searching for a seam or hinge. Instead, my fingertips felt what I told myself was the charge of static electricity. But something of belief was still alive in me. Some wish for it. Hidden within this fragile, scattered excuse of a self, it had bided its time—this something beyond the desperate hunger not to die, which racked a body’s worth of stupid, selfish cells into working together. God didn’t exist; Jesus was at best a decent but long-decomposed person; all that remained of my sister and parents were components of their bodies’ molecules, long-since broken down and rebonded in new forms, attached to new bodies. These were irrefutable truths. Yet my hand on this cold concrete reached for some trace of Mike. It reached so hard it felt that trace and began, through mute physiological signals, trying to communicate this to my conscious mind. And my mind, fool that it was, began to hear them. The hairs on my arms rose. That static charge settled into a premonitory tingle in the back of my neck. Nausea gave my insides a once-over.

  I pulled my hand away. The concrete was smooth. Its pattern of stains was inscrutable, but like the urn into which Mike’s remains had been poured, the floor suggested a wide, interior space, like a child’s marble seen up close. It was a trick. It was an illusion caused by the meeting of visual phenomena and errors in my brain’s evolution to process them. It was the influence of unconscious desires on mutable powers of perception. But knowing it was a trick didn’t make it feel any less like truth.

  About a foot away, there was a small chip in the polished concrete that was unreflective. I felt it with my finger, wanting a sense of what a break in this continuous surface felt like, a way to recognize it by touch. The concrete at the bottom of the quarter-inch chip was darker than the rest. There was too much shadow to be sure, but it appeared to be stained a coppery brown-red. I was sure this was Mike’s blood—long dried, near fossilized, but missed by the mop in every cleaning of the spot—even if I had no way of knowing. Knowing didn’t matter. I knew it another way.

  Was I taking this as some kind of sign? If I did, it was a difficult one, but it woke up my eyes. I began moving things around, anything on casters first: the tool chest, the shop vacuum, the stools. I dragged the worktable away from the wall. When I leaned into the mill, which was old and made of heavy blue-gray steel in the shape of a massive KitchenAid mixer, the sound it made was loud and deep, run through with a piercing screech. Then the tone of the screeching began to rise in pitch, to become more resonant.

  After I’d shifted it a foot and a half, I stopped and got down on the ground. I’d exposed a length of the concrete joint that ran wall to wall beneath the mill. I tried to hook my fingernails in the joint, but there wasn’t anything to get purchase on, no way to pull. I shifted to a new spot, tried again, failed again. But there was something different in how the two spots felt. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. They looked identical: polished concrete, steel gray with little flecks of white in the mix.

  I moved back to the first spot and felt around. It wasn’t as cold. That was the difference. Everywhere else, the floor had acted like a heat sink in reverse, storing the chill from the heavy air-conditioning that ran during the day. The AC was shut off at night, and the Santa Anas brought warmth into the shop through thin cracks around the corrugated-steel roll-up door at the back. Most of the floor retained the day’s cold. When I felt the seam where the mill had been, it was warmer.

  Maybe the mill’s base had insulated it from the cold air during the daytime, I told myself, as I shifted the mill a few more feet over. I picked at the joint some more, to no avail. I tried pounding on it instead. Nothing. Then I stomped with the wooden heel of my father’s shoe, and the floor sank almost imperceptibly. There was a muffled warble, the hollow bump of metal depressing somewhere beneath.

  I should have been self-righteously pleased. Instead, I felt like I was going to throw up.

  They must have left that part out of the Bible, how a person would react to the hoped-for but impossible thing to come to pass, for what might be delusion to be confirmed as truth. Mary Magdalene had witnessed this person nailed to a cross and impaled, consigned His cold body to a cave without hope of ever seeing it with gelatinous, earthly eyes again. Then outside the sepulchre, she heard Jesus sayeth her name, and He appeared before her. She responded, “Rabboni,” but the authors tactfully avoided describing how she vomited up her breakfast in the same breath. Which would explain why Jesus said, “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father,” wanting to be in reasonably puke-free garments for that paternal reunion. Think of poor Thomas, who needed to touch before he would believe—and then reached into that wound and felt those resurrected intestines.

  When I’d stomped on the spot, I had seen a ghostly image of a rectangle, thin depressions in the concrete for three of the sides and the joint as the fourth. I felt along these. The three sides weren’t concrete at all. They were covered in a thin material painted to look like concrete. I could peel it up with a fingernail along its outer edges, but I couldn’t pull it back completely.

  I needed a crowbar, so I searched the worktable for one. Because I needed one, one was there. That was how I was thinking.

  With the crowbar wedged into the seam, I leaned into it with my full weight. The bar flexed, but the floor resisted. I leaned harder. There was a thunderous, mechanical crunch, and then I was falling backward.

  From on my side, I looked over, and there it was: an entrance. A square hole in the floor. The three-by-four-foot covering lay on the ground where I’d pulled it free of its supports. For so long I’d felt like I was close to something that kept eluding me. Now I was here. Elusion wasn’t the base fact of life itself, like I’d long held, and it fell onto the heap behind me with the other myths and fantasies, friends and acquaintances, discarded selves upon selves.

  I crawled over to the opening. The uppermost part was framed in metal, giving way to a tidy hole through the sediment and rock below. A hydraulic arm, ripped from its mount on the covering, groped out into the open air. Just visible inside the opening was a ladder bolted to the inner wall. It proceeded down into the pitch black. There was nothing to do but climb in, no other option and so no room for debate or second-guessing.

  I took each step slowly, making sure my footing was solid. My heart was so high in my throat I could feel it humping my brain stem. The machine shop disappeared above me, except for the cat’s pupil of the fluorescent tube that hung directly over the hatch. I went farther down into the darker and darker inner recess. After descending about ten or twelve feet, my foot found ground. My eyes struggled to adjust, reaching out for scraps of light and the features of things. Even though I c
ould only see vaguely in the gray-black, I could tell this space was long, if not especially wide—more a passageway, it seemed, than a basement.

  The light from aboveground helped while my pupils widened their apertures. The walls nearest to me were bare compressed earth. Wood-and-steel framing girded them every few feet. A small steel cook’s table was pressed against one wall. Running along the other, disappearing into the blackness, was eight-foot-tall commercial kitchen shelving, baker’s racks. The place felt like a dungeon for prep cooks.

  But the shelves I could see weren’t piled high with produce. Instead, on each were stacks of vacuum-sealed bags, and each bag’s contents were a different pastel shade. I picked one up. It was full of pale yellow pills, a four-digit number scrawled on the bag in black ink. I’d never won a jelly-bean-counting game in my life, and it was too late to hope my luck would change, but there had to be at least two hundred pills in the bag I held, about twenty or thirty bags on each shelf. All the bags were numbered the same way.

  None of the pills were marked in a way that would allow me to confirm what they were, but they had to be prescription narcotics, the popular ones like OxyContin, Vicodin, benzodiazepine. I’d heard Sammy had gotten away from the dirtier drugs, but if he was pushing something—like he’d done with the kids at my old church—it would be those kind. This place was connected to the one in Sammy’s garage. They were part of a network, a means to distribute them to the right small dealers, something.

  For a while now it had felt like I was possessed by a new kind of sight, which was an old kind, in which everything radiated with interconnectedness—shafts of light only I could perceive slicing the air in every which direction. They were overlapping, though, and impossible to trace, like a single page that has been printed on over and over again. There was something buried in there, I knew, even if the fundamental message was obscured. Now it was as if those layered golden lines of interconnection had parted, and I could clearly see a few of the important ones: the line running from here out to Ramona, the ones connecting Emily to Sammy, and Sammy to Mike. It made the world feel small and me feel the other way. I moved along the baker’s racks, pulling down random bags to study them closer. It got darker and darker the farther back I went, but I didn’t notice that much. If anything, this room had become the radiant center of the newly visible world. A world that had nothing to do with my eyes, or the world.

  After about twenty-five feet, I reached the back wall. Not a passageway, it turned out. The bare earth was roughly chiseled away and hard as stone. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would have been to build this, or what the value of these bags were on the street, but I wasn’t thinking about difficulty or value. I was thinking about how I’d slipped through the surface of this secret. I was the only one who knew this was here besides the people whose work depended on it. I was the only one who knew this was what Mike died for—to ensure this value could be preserved and actualized, to make sure this system could continue. The anger I felt was different from the one I’d grown used to, the one I’d depended on. That anger had been low and mean, targeted and physical, even if it came out only in words. This one had a measure of glory in it. It wasn’t godly or metaphysical, but still it was filled with a kind of mad righteousness over the disclosure of a new, hidden layer of the world’s wickedness. There’s power in that kind of awareness—too much—and it left me floating, disembodied. It would have taken a Mack truck to knock me off my center of gravity.

  Along the ceiling I noticed the lightbulbs: six of them in pairs with insulated wire running between them. I hadn’t seen a switch, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t one. I started to look at the same moment I heard a voice say “Jesus.”

  I thought it was in my head, the usual rendition of the word halfway between gratitude and the disgust at something disgraceful, disclosed. Then came a sound, a thin clanking from down the corridor. Hairs did something credulous and stupid on my neck.

  The voice had sounded too young and dumb to be in my head. At the end of the room, the light from the open hatch flickered. Angular fluorescent patches moved along the floors and walls. Metal snapped into place, and the entire room went dark.

  I was frozen in place. A statue facing the slow, approaching arc of a sledgehammer would have been more responsive. Overhead, through layers of earth and concrete, something heavy was being moved. The mill. It was being dragged back over the hatch, rumbling. I couldn’t see, but I’d been facing the right direction when things went dark, and I had enough memory of the space, so I ran with my arms out. I hit the ladder hard, didn’t stop to consider the pain, and climbed. I climbed fast and tried to push open the panel that had been dropped back into the opening. It shifted an inch or two, but then something forced it down again. I banged on it. I shouted. I cursed. I begged a little. The only answer was the muffled grinding of the mill’s feet as they were dragged over the hatch. Then silence. It was so perfectly quiet. The silence filled the darkness, and the darkness filled the silence. Then the terror rose up.

  31.

  NOTHING. I WAS ADRIFT IN NOTHING. NOTHING TO SEE. NOTHING TO DO. Nothing to hear, except my own breathing and whispered profanity. It was cold. I was scared and small again. It wasn’t long before I began to shiver, and then my teeth made a sound, too. The click of enamel on enamel. Vibrations in tense jaw muscles sounded like a boat’s hull groaning in rough seas. I’d like to say I exhausted myself shouting for help, banging on the underside of the hatch for hours, but it seemed well insulated down here and I’d already been exhausted for days. It wasn’t long before I gave up.

  I sat on the floor at the far end of the room, back against the wet-smelling earth, though it was dry to the touch. The smell seemed to grow stronger as time dragged by. Such a living, rich smell. Where seeds might sprout, if there had been a little sunlight. A smell you might bask in lying facedown in the grass on a spring afternoon. Wanting that grass, that yellow warmth on my back—it tore at my insides, pulled at them from above. I let it, didn’t try to suffocate the desire with bare hands or bitter thought. I didn’t kill it, but I didn’t give it any hope either. I let it crawl like a bug across my lens. The autofocus never rendered it more clearly than a fuzz ball with buried desire and random volition, until the thing decided to fly away and find some other place to shit.

  I started talking to myself, as much to figure out what to do as to keep those more abstract thoughts at bay. Someone had found out what I was doing. Then he’d closed me in this place. There wasn’t anything else to know, but I had some guesses. He—whoever he was, but I pictured one of Andy’s shouting surfers—would leave me here until he figured out what to do. Or he would leave me down here until dehydration did the job. It wouldn’t even take that long. My best bet was that he’d barricaded me in so he could call Sammy. No one else would let me go. No one else would leave me to chance.

  The weight of exhaustion settled into my bones, but my bones refused to settle on the cold concrete floor. If I lay on my stomach, my ribs and hips and knees ached. On my back it was my shoulders and spine. On my side, the ache moved deeper, into the joints of my arms and legs, arrested in unnatural positions. The best I could do was lean against the wall, one elbow propped on a knee and that hand holding my head. There was nothing to do but wait, it seemed, so the science of getting comfortable had been a worthwhile distraction.

  I tried to sleep, to force sleep on myself. Anything to pass the time between this waiting and whatever would come. Anything to quiet this neurochemistry evolved and hardwired for activity, for industry. But I was too exhausted, too uncomfortable—and, though I was trying to overlook it, there was a fire inside that was burning, far enough down to cast wild, elongated shadows on the backs of my unseeing eyes. It wasn’t just that I knew about this place, knew something about the operation that made use of it. It was that I had the ability to expose it, to end it. I still had a kind of power, once poured down the sink by a person who’d sworn off the stuff but burbling back up from the septi
c system.

  It was this that kept my mind moving in slow circles, like a shark: sniffing out the Jesus Freak kids, whether they were the same ones who found a way to rationalize dealing drugs, putting a bullet in Mike, burying me in here; Lambert, ladling dyed Karo syrup masquerading as blood of the lamb, overserving himself; Emily, raised on the same; Sammy, still believing it was transubstantial blood but unable to change his shameful ways. Each had believed themselves the recipient of unmerited but sanctifying love, one that bestowed a simple, delusional self-confidence that had nothing to do with who they were, what they’d done. These churches were nothing if not a venue for proving that each member deserved to be accepted, loved, trusted—without doubt. Sermons in compact words, none over three syllables, all accompanied by easy pictures. You can’t build a community on a message of scathing and endless self-scrutiny, on bottomless skepticism of each person’s goodness and motivations, or doubt about the ultimate meaning of the workings of the world and its evils. You can’t even build much of a self on that, and I’d been trying long enough to know. But when that love turns on you, it turns hard. Sammy knew that, in a way. I bet Emily knew that, too.

  Places like Lambert’s liked to talk about the mysteries of the faith, the doctrines beyond human comprehension: that God made something from nothing; that the Bible is divinely ordained but written by men; that God is one and three, and also the union of man and God in the corporeal form of Jesus; that God is omnipotent and omnipresent but allows us and the devil to make such a fucking mess of everything. But these mysteries are recited as prompts for a response of “Wow!” or “Beautiful!” or “Isn’t He amazing?” Dumbstruck, overawed, and then quickly moving on with the unthinking smile and shrug of the satisfied and the saved, for whom mystery is about as humbling as the Grand Canyon printed on a poster about hard work.