Stranger in a Strange Land
I continued on to campus, my first time returning since my shaming in front of my biology class. Roland had copied two dozen of each flyer. Before I left he gave me a circle of Scotch tape and a small box of thumbtacks, which rattled on the passenger seat beside me now. I felt my vision narrowing, casting the falling snow in a blue light. My aura had returned. Sometimes these auras could last for a day before the migraine struck, and when it did it would be a doozy. I didn’t know why the migraines were coming more frequently. I was supposed to be healing, but the dark wings of a migraine, ever present, beat at the edges of my sight.
By the time I made it to NMSU the clock radio read 2:45, which meant classes would let out soon. I considered if it would be better to hang up the flyers among the milling masses hustling between classes, their shoulders burdened by backpacks heavy with textbooks, or to wait until 3:00 when everyone was safely in their classrooms. I decided on the latter. I was doing this so I would continue being accepted by the people of Rose of Sharon, a new recruit, but I sure as hell didn’t want to get caught. Elijah was right about that. My time at Northern might already be done, but any further black marks on my academic record might quash any hope of ever finishing my degree.
So I was tempted to open my window and just toss the papers right out here in the parking lot, or drop them into the dumpster where they belonged, but I felt certain Roland had assigned me this task because he was testing me. If I succeeded, we might make the news. Stirring up the hornets’ nest was part of the goal, he told me. That way we might draw others with our “sensibilities” from out of the shadows to join us. I just didn’t want my name linked with these stories, didn’t ever want to have to try explaining this to my mother, or anyone else I loved. Yet, were the messages really so wrong? Why shouldn’t white people take pride in their heritage?
A few minutes before 3:00 I left my vehicle and crossed the icy parking lot, trying not to slip, the flyers bundled inside in my coat. My eyes watered, the world around me soaked in aquamarine light, and I knew this wasn’t from the cold. The most intense migraines were like being dunked deep underwater, intensifying pressure that made it feel like my frontal lobe was going to explode, all while being held under by an unforgiving hand. It was coming.
I penguin-walked my way across icy patches in the parking lot where the wind-whipped snow gathered, and ducked inside the first brick building, which happened to be the largest and oldest on campus, Zebulon Hall, where even now someone in admin was likely processing academic suspensions, the dim green monitor spelling out fates for students like me. At this drowsy hour in the middle of the afternoon there were few people about, so I managed to pin the flyers to bulletin boards on the lower levels, passing only a couple of maintenance guys in the hall. From Zebulon, I made my way to Jackson and Patterson Hall and then to the science building and the MLK Library. Whenever I passed newspaper stands for the campus paper, The Voyageur, I slipped flyers on top of copies, aware of the irony that this very paper might be carrying a news story about us in the coming days.
I knew I only had about ten minutes before classes let out. I was down to a handful of the flyers and should have cut my losses, but I am nothing if not dedicated. So I kept going within the MLK Library, pinning two to a bulletin board right outside the front entrance. A librarian with a frizzy brown perm, a woman so short only her head peeped above the counter, watched me curiously. I doubted she could read the words from her distance, about twenty feet away, but there must have been something suspicious about my presence, my boots squeaking on the marble floor. “Young man,” she said, without approaching. “You need to get those stamped by Student Life before you hang them up. Otherwise, they’ll get taken right down.”
“Sure thing,” I called out. “I’ll do that.” I bundled the rest against my coat, my hands shaking, and hurried away, hoping she didn’t notice I’d left them up. My head down, my hands tucked in my coat along with the remaining flyers, I was so intent on getting out of there, I didn’t see him until I nearly ran right into him.
Noah loomed before me, alone in the halls. Rarely was this man ever alone—Noah one of those extroverts who couldn’t stand to be by himself for more than a few minutes. I stopped so suddenly that I lost my grip on a few of the flyers, and to my horror they fluttered out before me, landing at his feet.
Noah’s face broke into a wide grin. “Are you going to throw confetti at me every time I run into you?” He bent to pick up the pages. I watched his face, watched as his smile vanished as if he’d just swallowed something bitter. Wormwood on the tongue. “Lucien? What’s this?”
“Hey, Noah.” My face flushed with heat. I felt like a kid caught looking at porn by his mother. That sense of wrongness was quickly followed by a contradictory sense of outrage, at myself and at Noah for intruding into my life once again. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
He looked back down at the pages he held, his lips moving as if puzzling over the words.
“Just give those back,” I said, my face coloring. I could have told him that it was all an act and I was only pretending, so I could investigate the people of Rose of Sharon. Noah knew some of my situation. But I was tired of explaining myself, weary of justifications. “There’s nothing wrong with either of those messages.”
“This is like . . . it’s like some kind of white supremacist shit,” he said. As he spoke the aura surrounded Noah, haloing him like a dark angel. His low voice rumbled out. “I mean, what the actual fuck? Are you one of them now?”
“So what if I am?” I shuffled my feet, looked away. “I mean, you’re half white, too. Why not be proud of who you are?”
Noah looked at me the way he would at something unpleasant caught between the treads of his shoes. Classes had let out so a crowd of students were coming our way. Noah, with his feet planted firmly in the middle of the hall, practically barred the way. His lips peeled back to show his teeth. “You think you can say that because my mother is white? Because of some fucking percentage? People aren’t percentages. I’m black. You have black skin, that makes you black. Christ, Lucien.”
“There’s nothing wrong with having pride in your heritage,” I said, parroting one of Roland’s lines. The words sounded hollow. The students began to stream around Noah and me in the hallway, edging around us cautiously.
I’d never seen him angry before, his nostrils flaring, and I thought for a moment he might hit me. I could feel others in that hallway turning toward me—obviously wondering if there was going to be a fight—and I dropped my eyes, my defiance leaking out. I wanted him to run into me, to shove me against the wall, let him show his anger. But when I looked up again, tears slid down his cheeks. His tears shocked me worse than any blow. He let the flyers he held drift to the ground. “You’re not worth it,” he said. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were.”
I felt rather than saw Noah move past me, and as he walked past without touching me, his indifference hurt worse than any violence. Maybe violence was what I craved. I wanted someone to hurt me. I wanted enough pain to fill up the great hollow space inside me I had felt ever since Maura vanished.
No one stopped to pick up any of the pages. I left them where they fell.
After the long, cold walk to my car, I sat behind the wheel with the heater on full blast. Already my vision was pinching down to a dark and narrow eventuality. The migraine was going to hit soon, like a storm grinding out from the furthest corner of my mind. Solar flares and dark wings. I fished in my glove box for the spare sumatriptan I kept there and came up empty. I started the car, gunned the engine, and left Northern for what I hoped was the last time. The cassette player hummed with Morrissey’s “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” ordinarily suitable for my dreary mood.
I didn’t realize until halfway into the drive that I wasn’t heading home—not to the place where I lived with a mysterious girl and a geriatric German shepherd—but toward The
Land, toward the people who had just alienated me from one of my few remaining friends, toward a place where I didn’t have any medicine or bulwark against the coming pain. Morrissey crooned from the speakers. I shut him off before the music made things worse. The first boiling dark wave was coming and I didn’t know if I could make it the whole way.
By the time I made it inside Mother Sophie’s cabin, I’d already vomited once, so intense was the pain in my skull, emanating to every part of my body. Elijah had just been backing out his tow truck when he saw me pull into the rough lot, parking sideways. I don’t remember the drive there, but I remember how he took me by the arm and helped me up the hill to Mother Sophie’s cabin.
Half-blinded by pain, I only saw the silhouettes of people hovering around me. Elijah set me on the couch and then Mother Sophie floated over me, the white nimbus of her hair like a cloud. Some of my vomit had dribbled and dried on my shirt collar. I smelled it against my skin. When another wave of pain wracked me, spikes driving into my forehead, I twisted there on the couch. I may have even cried out. I don’t know.
What I know is that I felt her hands, sure and steady, part the hair on my crown. She pressed down with her thumbs, hard as if trying to drive the pain from my head, and then I heard a distant murmur as she began to pray in an unearthly tongue I have never heard again since.
The pain was like an explosion behind my eyeballs, a blizzard of snow and shadows. My throat burned. It felt like the only thing holding together my skull was the pressure of Mother Sophie’s hands. She went on speaking in tongues, sometimes using English to call on the Holy Spirit and the healing hand of God. My mind was full of dark beating wings. I had a vision of that day in the woods with the ravens, driven mad by the voice of the Enemy, but this time Mother Sophie stood beside me. The birds whirled all around us, a maelstrom of death, but she was there, too, and I clung to her as the Enemy called out for me, and the birds, their beaks like blades, could not touch us.
I don’t know how long she prayed for me, but I heard a crack in my brain, an audible snapping sound, a void opening that I might fall into if a hand did not hold my own, and in my mind’s eye the storm passed and the last survivors of the raven massacre were climbing those ladders of clouds into heaven and she was there with me, untouched in the carnage, and then I could see again, and I could breathe again, and the pain was gone. Not just gone, but wiped clean. I felt a freedom from pain so pure and total that I wanted to weep. I gasped.
“Mother Sophie,” I said, because her hands were still pressed against the crown of my head, “it’s okay. I’m fine now.”
She stepped away from me. When my eyes focused, I saw Elijah was still there in the room. “I’ll get you some water,” he said and he went over to the tap.
“I get migraines, sometimes,” I said. “Pain so bad I black out.” I swallowed dryly. I was afraid of talking about the migraines too much, afraid their mere mention would cause the pain to come back.
“I felt something else inside you, child,” Mother Sophie. “A darkness that needed tending.”
I remembered that sense of evil I’d felt watching the birds kill each other. A supernatural darkness that reached for my mind. I had been haunted by a demon and now that demon was gone? Impossible. But how could I explain that I was sitting up on the couch, clear-eyed and free of pain? When my migraines hit, they could last for days. They didn’t just suddenly vanish, and the most powerful of my medicines sometimes only blunted the edges of pain. She had healed me. She had called upon God and made me whole.
“I can’t feel any pain,” I said. “It’s gone. Is this a miracle?”
Mother Sophie rubbed her hands together and spread them out, palms up, her smile beatific. Elijah, still dressed in his work coveralls, who surely must have ignored the call to watch over me, sat down beside me and handed me the glass of water. “Do you want to keep praying?”
I drank thirstily. “About what? I feel fine. Better than fine.”
He leaned forward and there was an eagerness in his expression that looked nearly like hunger or thirst. In time I would understand. A new believer is like wine poured into a golden chalice. They carry with them the flush and fire of pure faith, undiluted by doubt. It’s a little like falling in love for the first time. Old believers, those more mature or wise in the faith, only get rare glimpses, an occasional reminder during an inspired moment of worship, but with new believers they can drink again from the chalice and remember afresh what it means to be reborn.
“Your body and mind are fine,” he said. “It’s your soul I’m talking about. Your relationship with God. I’m asking if you want to be saved.”
There were tears in my eyes, so relieved I was to be free from the migraines. Please God, let this be real. How could I possibly say no to the chance of being reborn? Who hasn’t wanted to be carried, whole and unbruised, from the wreckage of their lives?
I didn’t return to the house until early afternoon the next day. After praying with Elijah and Mother Sophie, I ate dinner with them and ended up sleeping on one of the floral sofas in Mother Sophie’s cabin. We had talked a lot about my newfound faith and the Bible, and from Mother Sophie I learned some of the more bizarre tenets of their particular sect, such as how they considered themselves the “true Jews,” while the Zionists who controlled our media and our government were the spawn of Satan and had been oppressing us for centuries.
I didn’t want to hear any of this from her. I wanted the poetry I had discovered in Isaiah, the healing of my mind. The more she talked the more I doubted the miracle of my own healing. When I prayed with her and Elijah for my personal salvation I had longed to feel something. God’s presence like light at the base of my spine. An assurance that I was not alone in the universe. But what I felt was nothing. Nothing at all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. And that sense of nothingness was incredibly frustrating because in that moment I wanted to know God, the Maker who had taken away my pain.
In the kitchen with Arwen later that afternoon I tried to make sense of it while she busied herself making a peanut-butter-banana-mayonnaise-raisin sandwich on toasted oat bread. Arwen hadn’t slept well the night before, up worrying about my absence, and she listened quietly while I spoke.
“So you think it was some kind of miracle?” she said with her back to me while she whisked the mayonnaise and peanut butter in a separate bowl.
“How else would you explain it?”
Arwen gave a small shrug, not bothering to turn around. I told her about my salvation and waited for her to mock me. She didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all. She carried over two plates with thick sandwiches cut into triangle slices, banana chunks spilling out. I got up to pour us each a cold glass of milk and then rejoined her at the table.
Neither of us ate right away. “You don’t have anything to say?” I asked.
Arwen gave another small shrug. “Why does it matter whether you felt anything? Feelings come and go. They don’t make a thing real or not.”
I scratched at the two-day-old stubble on my chin. “I have this sense that faith is a matter of intuition and not intellect. So the feelings matter.”
Again, she didn’t say anything. I hadn’t told her about my public humiliation at Northern. I had already lost one friend. I didn’t want to lose another.
“I find myself in a curious state of doubt,” I said.
“That would describe most of us,” Arwen said, “except those people at your church.”
It even described some of them, I thought, thinking of Elijah and how he’d remained silent while Mother Sophie talked about Jews belonging to the devil. “No, I mean about this sandwich you’ve fixed me here. I’m having trouble understanding the dubious decision to add mayonnaise. It feels like a mistake, the way you can ruin pizza by adding anchovies . . . or the 1988 movie Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise . . . or Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in World War II.”
Arwen raised one eyebrow. “Try it,” she said.
I hadn’t eaten breakfast, so despite my doubts I raised the toasted bread to my lips, inhaling the scent of banana. I held the sandwich poised there and looked at Arwen over the top of it. Was this a trick? Mayonnaise and peanut butter were an unholy union. I nibbled cautiously. The taste did not immediately repel. I took a larger bite and chewed. “Huh,” I said, after swallowing.
“I know,” she said.
“I didn’t say it was good. The textures are . . . interesting.” I kept eating.
“The mayonnaise, right?” Arwen said, between bites of her own. “It’s like the secret sauce at Jack in the Box.”
“It is like that. Exactly.”
“It adds just a touch of sourness,” she went on, covering her mouth with one hand. “A hint of it at the back of your tongue to balance the sweetness. Plus, it makes the peanut butter creamier.”
“How have I gone through this life without fully understanding the wonders of mayonnaise?”
Arwen smiled and took a drink of her milk. “You don’t have to eat the rest,” she said.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I do like it. Before the world ends, more people need to know about the invention of this sandwich.”
We continued to eat in companionable quiet. I drew in a heavy breath. I could have told her about Noah, but there was something pressing on me even more. If Arwen was my sole remaining friend, I needed to be straight with her. So instead I told her what I’d seen a few days before, the stag and Kaiser giving chase and the cemetery at the edge of the world. “There was a grave there,” I finished, pausing before the words tumbled out. “With your name on it.”
“Ah,” she said, dabbing at her lips with a napkin. “That explains your strange comments when your friend visited. So, that would make me what, a ghost or a liar?”
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