Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  She opened her hands and held them out to me at the level of my hips. “I'm frustrated. We don't touch enough,” she whispered. The gap between our bodies became charged and my scalp prickled as before a lightning strike. The wish flared up. I gave in. I went to her. Her warm, grabby hands crawled into my back pockets and she lowered her face so her lashes tickled my neck. “You never push me to break the rules,” she said. “I wonder why not. Don't you love me? I love you.”

  “I love you but not when you talk about the Saab.”

  Sarah kissed me then. In the kiss I could feel the squirming energies of unborn children impatient to leave the spirit world. Sarah wanted three children, she'd told me—two girls, one boy—but it felt as though at least twice that many souls were swarming up at me through her throat and lips. She moved a hand to my right front pocket, dug deep, and held me through the cloth. Her fingertips moved along me like a flute player's, with meticulous sequential pressure.

  “Fine, then. A three-year-old model. But red,” she said.

  This was the night before the talk with Lauer that freed me to imagine no Saab at all.

  The key was to make everything look like my fault. That was my mother's opinion. She'd thought things over. She'd even secretly contacted Sarah's mother, a second cousin, and discussed the matter. They agreed that although I was leaving Sarah to do the bidding of the Church, my departure might harm her social desirability unless it appeared that she'd rejected me first—and for some clear and fundamental reason that wouldn't scare off future suitors by confirming her growing reputation as a finicky, prickly, demanding shrew.

  I had to be seen as a lost cause, irredeemably unmarriageable.

  Rumors about the disqualifying trait that Lauer, the mothers, and I decided on were planted around town the following week. Within a few days they were rustling all about me whenever I stepped outside the house. When Sarah, as I knew she'd soon feel forced to, questioned me about the troubling stories, I planned to turn surly and evasive so as to head off any urge in her to empathize with me, accept my limitations, and love me despite them—or because of them.

  While I waited for the breakup, I trained for my mission at Lauer's mansion. He taught me to indebt the people I met by sending them off with a trinket or a free book. He told me to think the words “I am now inside you” whenever I looked a prospect in the eye. He told me that an angled stance invites your listener to move in closer while a squared-off stance pushes him away. Then he showed me how to end a handshake. “Person One, who's you,” he said, “loosens his grip slightly, cuing Person Two to loosen his grip in response, at which same instant Person One—the power figure—lets go completely.” Another trick he showed me was to sit with my head a bit lower than Person Two's and then, very slowly, over several minutes, straighten back up until my head was the high head.

  “Person Two feels like he shrunk,” I said.

  “‘Remote Infantilization.' That's the term.”

  “But how does it help me persuade him to join the Church?”

  “In every interaction between two people, one plays the Parent, the other plays the Child. There's no third way,” Lauer said. “But there's an art to this. The Parent can't just dominate the Child or the Child will resist the Parent. To earn the Child's respect and love and trust, Person Two needs to share his power now and then.”

  “Person One, you mean.”

  Lauer smiled at me. He held the smile in the way a person does when he wants you to ask him why he's smiling so that he can reveal a thought he's having that you, if you were cleverer or sharper, would have already guessed or had yourself.

  “Why are you smiling?” I knew what he'd say next and that my response would be “Tell me, I don't know,” and that his tone when he finally explained things would be the parental power-figure tone. I'd never felt so tired in all my life.

  “Why do you think I'm smiling?” Lauer said.

  His secret, when we got that far, was that he'd intentionally erred a moment ago by mixing up Person Two with Person One in order to give me, the Child, a chance to correct him, the Parent, and feel proud and “valued” as a result. Without asking me if I'd actually felt these feelings (which I hadn't, though I would have said I had just to end the session) Lauer declared the experiment a success.

  It was a slip. The Child felt condescended to and erupted with his true thoughts. “If these tricks can really convert people,” I said, “then people aren't worth converting. They're machines. And AFAs are fools.”

  I left the session, my seventh in two weeks, despairing about my mission and my life and unusually eager for Sarah's company. I assumed she'd heard the gossip by then and was weighing the risks of repeating it to me. Our walk the next night was uncomfortable and odd. A porcupine with reflective golden eyes waddled across the road and Sarah said, “Maybe people are nocturnal, too. Maybe we're happiest in the gloomy murk but somehow it's been bred out of us. You think? Maybe we lived in caves because we crave caves but maybe there weren't enough of them eventually so we moved into houses and tried to change.”

  She seemed to be pushing at something, but timidly. There was only one thing to push at by that time.

  “Who can say?” I told her. “I know I do get restless when the sun sets.”

  “Or maybe it's just men,” she said. “You think?”

  “A lot of our primitive hunting took place at night.”

  “And in groups,” Sarah said. “Men hunted in groups back then. No women. Just men and the mammoths. In the night.”

  But that was as far as Sarah was willing to go that evening.

  I figured we had a week before our rupture. I passed it by getting to know Elias Stark, whom Lauer had chosen as my mission partner. His bristly stiff brown hair was more like beard hair than normal head hair and the chunks of gray in it didn't make him look mature, just troubled. His comma-shaped nostrils were the blackest I'd ever seen, as were the holes in his ears. His pupils, too. The impression was that the cavity of his skull was packed with some sort of infernal shadow matter—or maybe it held absolutely nothing and he operated on reflex, not higher thought. Still, Elder Elias Stark was local nobility: his mother was in line for Seeress someday and already endowed with Gifts and Powers. She resembled a female version of George Washington, already white-haired at fifty-two, with a broad unwrinkled polished forehead that looked like the perfect setting for a third eye.

  One day I confided in him about Sarah, and Elder Stark described to me how he'd dispatched his own girl: swiftly, in one slashing cut, by criticizing her looks. He'd told her that her eyes were set too close and that her waist was too long for her short legs. He took a kick to the shins for this, he said, but the kick didn't hurt because it was the last kick.

  “Sarah isn't concerned about appearance. That wouldn't work with her,” I said.

  “I think your plan is screwy. I think it's doomed.”

  “I'm trying to be merciful.”

  “By pretending you've been with men? She won't believe you.”

  “I'll deny it, but not convincingly,” I said. “She'll believe me if she thinks I'm lying.”

  “You're too sloppy, too slouchy. Those boys are fresh and springy.”

  The next Sunday, at last, it came: the conversation. Sarah's mother, who knew what loomed, sighed and stared at her plate during the meal in a way that suggested she felt sorry for us, and not just for Sarah and me but for all of Bluff. Sustaining ourselves had become a chore and perhaps too much of one. Our faith had sequestered us in a mountain valley, drier, higher up, and farther back than anywhere human beings should have to dwell. The helpful talc mines still held tons of talc but the deposits were harder and harder to get at. Yes, we were safe from assault, debased philosophies, bewildering images, and harmful foodstuffs, but in our safety we'd thinned and paled and dwindled. Our blood was weak, like children's milky tea, and though our digestive tracts were scrubbed of residue, it seemed that we'd lost some essential vital filth, some energizing compost
required for growth.

  We retired to the sofa after our iced-fruit puddings. Paul sat on the rug and arranged his fossil insects according to age, assembling a time line that made me feel marginal and indistinct. I sensed that Sarah was working up to something but slipping sideways as she went. The struggle enriched her complexion. It pinked her earlobes.

  “You're eating poorly,” she said. “You yawn and slump.”

  “Because the windows don't open in your house.”

  “Drink some bentonite clay mixed in grape juice.”

  I promised I'd have a glass when I got home. Sarah took my right hand and cupped it on her bare kneecap, its surface creased and pebbled with childhood scars. Kids in Bluff grew up by falling down, by crashing and tumbling, girls and boys alike. The divisions came when we got older. The final division happened at the Frolic, when we were pushed together by our elders. We'd already been together, many of us, but in our own fumbling ways, on our own time, not in the ordained way and on their time.

  “This is terribly hard for me,” said Sarah. She had all the tales and tidbits. She had her case. She'd make it delicately and diplomatically, and then I'd be mean to her, protest, act insulted, and she'd feel well rid of me and want someone else.

  But she took a route I hadn't anticipated. “I need a favor, Mason. An indulgence. Set me aside. I'm not good for you or anyone. Everything you've accused me of is true. I'm greedy and I'm a scold and I'm a needler. I need to repair those weaknesses. In solitude. Not in a house together with a husband.”

  We sat there in silence as Paul replaced his rocks in a tissue-lined shoe box whose lid was marked “Prehistory.” I should have known by his presence that his big sister had decided not to say hard things to me or repeat hard things she'd heard from others. But he needed to go now, because this wasn't over yet. I pointed at him. He knew. He took his box away. We'd given him plenty to chew on as it stood.

  “Is that all you wanted to say to me tonight? I think there might be more,” I said.

  “I wish it weren't so simple,” Sarah said. “I'm wrong for you. Just please don't always hate me.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is nonsense, Sarah. It's me who's not fit for you, and you know why. You're sparing me because you think I'm weak. You think I don't know what people say about me and you don't want to be the first to tell me.”

  A snorty chuckle, rich with nose juice. Sarah covered her mouth with her left hand.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Be serious. Sarah, I am a different kind of man. I am a man who can't . . . I mean who doesn't—”

  Wiping her eyes and trying to hold in laughter. Rubbing away the juice under her nose. Finally saying, “Don't cook things up—just say things. You know what I wanted to spare you from, you goofhead? Wait—just let me laugh and get this over with.” It took about a minute. “Done,” she said. “What I wanted to spare you from, you silly knothead, was this, this whole ridiculous performance. Mason LaVerle, the tortured secret dandy!”

  “Someone told you. Recently,” I said. “Last week, when we talked about mammoths, you thought I was one. And it made sense to you. I use the library.”

  “And then I paid a visit to your proud father.”

  The midwife's thumb.

  “Who hated the plan all along and told me this: ‘I know you don't have any way to judge, but I can assure you, young lady, my only son was specifically crafted in Preexistence to deliver mighty carnal pleasure to the most tender depths of womankind.' He's a poet, your father.”

  “Not usually,” I said.

  “On the subject of his son, he is.”

  “I'd like to leave on a mission. May I?”

  “Do.”

  “You shouldn't wait for me.”

  “I won't. We're incompatible and I want a Saab. The All-in-One made this work out perfectly. Go declare it, Mason. Tell the world. ‘Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been,'” she said, quoting the Seeress, “‘is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.'”

  “I need to memorize that one.”

  “You need to go.”

  We kissed goodbye on the front steps. I thought back to the Frolic, under the mosquito netting, when we'd breathed for each other. We'd managed the feat again. Maybe we can all do it, at certain times—any willing, good-hearted two of us. Maybe we're all fine matches for one another and someone should just throw us in a sack and shake it until we're jumbled up together and then pick us out in pairs and send us off. Maybe everything would come out the same. But things would have to come out somehow, surely, and when they did we'd have the choice we always have, and our only choice, really: approve or disapprove.

  Once I'd obtained my release, events moved swiftly. One half of one moon cycle later, on June 10th, after an outdoor party and a feast attended by every living person I knew, all of whom lined up to wish me well and many of whom stuffed money in my pockets or verses they'd copied out or little charms they'd made, I left my home with another AFA whom I had not chosen or been chosen by to show a people quick to disapprove (or so we'd heard, and so we both believed) that constant approval had a faction, too. We'd invite them to join it. Come along, we'd say. And if they asked us why they ought to, or asked us why we were so few and growing fewer while they were so many and ever multiplying, we'd smile at them in the way that people smile when they want others to ask them why they're smiling—as though we knew something they didn't, something obvious.

  I just hoped my partner could tell them what it was.

  On our seventh night away from Bluff we parked and locked the green Dodge camper van that we were supposed to sleep in to save money, paid for a motel room near the interstate by raiding the box of rubber-banded dollars presented to us by the lady Crafts Fair magnates, ordered by phone two tubs of cayenne chicken wings and two Dr Pepper soft drinks in barrel-size cups that advertised a movie called The Flip Off, and then lay on our stomachs on our queen-size beds, our neckties flipped onto the backs of our white shirts and our discount-store dress shoes kicked off on our pillows, and watched TV for the first time in our lives—seven hours of TV, without a break—until we were satisfied we'd been told the truth and had indeed come to a land of disapprovers.

  “You watch,” Elder Stark said, “she'll pick the federal marshall. Mustache, sidearm, badge—he has it all.”

  “Not the professional golfer?”

  “He wears pink slacks.”

  “He's rich, though. He owns a boat.”

  “It doesn't matter. These women out here want killers. They want menace.”

  The show was one of those real-life dating programs that we hadn't known existed until that night but had now seen three of and couldn't turn off. The women wore blue jeans slung low around their hip bones and kept glancing down at their candy-colored toenails as they strolled along white beaches in floppy sandals, kicking up sand to display their playful natures, followed by panting nippy little dogs that they clapped at now and then to hurry up even though the dogs' tongues were hanging out. The men were suntanned brutes in pretty shirts, with dull, narrow eyes, blond hair peaked up with hair spray, and mouths that didn't quite open when they spoke or fully close again when they finished speaking. They were actual people, supposedly, not actors, but they moved and pulled faces as I imagined actors might.

  “We haven't discussed the teacher,” Elder Stark said.

  “Not going to win. Too serious. Too stiff.”

  “Too much like us, you mean.”

  “We improved today. Especially at the end there. We relaxed.”

  Elder Stark crossed his ankles on the pillow and returned his attention to the program, the last in a series of twelve, apparently, and the one where the woman would select a mate. Decision making fascinated my partner. He'd grown up in a bedroom that shared a flimsy wall with his mother's spiritual counseling office, where she interpreted her patients' dreams, adjusted their diets, and heard out the regrets
that AFAs are encouraged not to have but still need a kind ear for when they do. He'd learned a lot through the Sheetrock—too much, he told me—and the main thing was that we're strangers to ourselves, pointed from birth toward outcomes we resist, even though we've obscurely chosen them. He said that his years of spying had revealed to him the key to happiness and satisfaction: rush at high speed toward wherever you're headed anyway. “Momentum, Mason. It's everything,” he said. “Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”

  As he sucked the wet meat from another chicken wing, I went to the bathroom and peeled a sheet of cling wrap off a water glass. At the bottom lay a curled dead spider. The motel's staff was a band of red-eyed wrecks, like stragglers from a disbanded traveling circus, and I suspected they'd placed the creature there as a tiny act of vengeance on people who weren't as yet in such bad shape. At check-in a girl with a faded neck tattoo depicting a pair of strangling male hands had blown her nose on the shoulder of her T-shirt while she was programming our plastic key cards. I offered my handkerchief and she said, “Ick.” Elder Stark set a tract on her counter but she ignored it, and we didn't press her; we collected our keys and left. On a mission of just nine months we couldn't waste time on those who wouldn't have us.

  “It's rough,” Elder Stark had said when we reached our room, “leaving folks alone like that to suffer.”

  “Tomorrow we'll try harder. We're tired,” I said.

  “You noticed that little cross around her neck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those trinkets discourage me,” he said.

  We'd been seeing crosses everywhere. Also, roadside billboards for the Lord, T-shirts and sweatshirts for the Lord, and stickers on cars and trucks with sayings like, “Believe in Him. He still believes in you.” I wasn't sure how seriously to take these things—some of them seemed to be decorations, or jokes—but my partner regarded them as evidence that we'd arrived too late. These fields had been harvested, harrowed, and replanted so many times that the soil was dead, he feared.