by Walter Kirn
“I've given the Quiz.” He reached out for the dashboard. “I'm dialing a new station. I know this one sounds like drumbeat rock and roll, but if you listen, the ‘you' in all the songs, the person they love so much and can't stop cooing over? It's not a pretty girl.”
I nodded. I'd already noticed and didn't mind. But my partner was more competitive. He minded.
“It's not so bad,” he said, “when it's a woman singer, but when it's a man, a full-grown man, some fellow who maybe has a beard himself—”
“So dial a new one.”
“This one's crisp and strong; I think I'll suffer. These big clear signals are tough to find out here.”
For supper we stopped at a Sweety-Freeze in Casper that Elder Stark claimed to remember from a car trip he'd taken with his father when he was twelve. This journey—to Colorado to see a doctor who'd reopened his father's blocked left kidney—seemed to have been the high point of his youth, its gas stations and lunch spots and roadside lavatories a series of luminous mental monuments. He spoke of the trip so often that I felt bad for him, aware that his father had left his family soon afterward to work on a holiday ship in Florida as a stage magician, a vocation he'd been secretly preparing for in a locked basement room stocked with cups and scarves and playing cards. He'd never returned and he'd fallen out of touch, which was what generally happened when people left Bluff. Terrestria consumed them. They never wrote. We liked to imagine that they were miserable, and sometimes someone would boast of having proof they were, but in most cases there was just no way to tell.
“Try coffee,” Elder Stark said when we ordered.
“I hear it makes you jumpy.”
“That's overblown.”
Apostles frowned on the caffeine alkaloid. We thought it promoted stones, or made stones harder. “How often do you have it?”
“Now and then. Whenever I need a surefire rapid purgative.”
We prayed before eating our sundaes, but unobtrusively, still feeling conspicuous in our new outfits. They were based on Mormon missionaries' uniforms, except that we wore khakis instead of dress slacks and ties that weren't solid but had intriguing patterns. Mine was of bluish crescent moons and my partner's was Indian-based—arrowheads and tepees. Lauer had said that patterns put people at ease by giving them clues to your inner personality, even if the clues weren't accurate. The Mormon boys looked like pallbearers, he said. Still, if people confused us with them, fine, he said. They'd built up a lot of goodwill over the years that he felt we might as well take advantage of, which is why our lapel badges didn't name our faith. First get in the door, was Lauer's rule. You can talk about Lom-Bard-Ok-Thon later.
At a tippy aluminum table across the aisle from us four teenage girls in belly-baring T-shirts were picking at an enormous paper-lined basket of fried potato fingers glopped with iridescent-yellow cheese. Their flimsy plastic combination spoon-forks could only stab up a finger at a time. The girl who appeared to be the leader, the tallest and prettiest, with the lightest hair, nodded at Elder Stark's dish of swirled white ice cream.
“You know there's no actual dairy in that,” she said. “It's totally animal fat whipped up with air.”
“Sweety-Freeze is ice milk,” Elder Stark said. He was an expert now—he knew his treats.
“Let it sit for ten minutes if you don't believe me. The stuff doesn't melt. It's lard.” The other girls nodded. “Never eat Jell-O, either. It's made from cows' hooves.”
“We're vegetarians,” said another girl. “What are you two?”
I tried a joke. “We're starving.”
I've never been good at jokes. They wilt on me. I feel them wilting even before they start to and it changes my voice a little, which hastens the wilting.
“Jehovah's Witnesses?” the top girl said. “Seventh-Dayers? Seventh-Dayers are hot.”
“Because they watch their weight,” another girl said. “They're way into fitness. They don't snarf lard for lunch.”
The tips of Elder Stark's earlobes pulsed bright red as he set down a spoonful of chocolate sauce and pineapple. During our training course I'd heard it said that after his father left he developed a temper and was sent for a summer to El Dorado Farm, the Church's disciplinary youth retreat, where troublesome boys built fences, tore them down, and put them back up in the same place. The boys were allowed no red meat there, just fish and chicken, and supposedly they drank ice water all day to neutralize what Church healers called their “heat points.” We all had our heat points, even normal children. Mine, a healer once told me, were in my groin.
“You tell us first. What are you?” I asked the girls.
“We're Wiccans. We worship nature,” one said.
“How?”
“We run around nude in the woods,” the same girl said. “Nude and completely shaved.”
Her girlfriends cackled. The top girl looked angry and shushed them by pointing her spoon-fork. At the table behind theirs an old brown woman looked up from the job application she was working on. From the moment I'd noticed what she was doing, and how earnest and strenuous she seemed, I'd been feeling anxious on her behalf.
“Bethany's still a novice,” the top girl said. “She hasn't learned respect yet. Excuse her language.”
“It's her imagery, not her language,” my partner said.
The top girl ate a cheesy finger. She fascinated me. I couldn't stop staring at her lipsticked mouth—at the perfect alignment between its wet red corners and the corners of her pumpkin-seed-shaped eyes, brownly outlined in pencil and bluely shadowed. Apostle girls used makeup, too, but without any flair or conviction, to mask their flaws. This girl, though, was a master of lavish effects beyond those required for basic facial smoothness. She belonged in a tent in a land across the sea, an amusement for warlords gathered around a fire. Looking at her I sensed for the first time that my return to Bluff was not assured, or at least not my happy, safe return.
“And don't try to tell us that Wicca is Satanism,” said a girl who hadn't spoken yet. “We get that from our pastor and it's BS. Anything that empowers women, he hates. He knows that the planet's alive and that it's female and he knows that Jehovah is just some masculine fear god the Jews stole from the Persians to keep their wives in line. Read archaeology. Read history.”
“We don't have any dispute with that,” I told her. In fact, Mother Lucy had made quite similar points back in the early 1880s. The difference was that the Wiccans of the Sweety-Freeze were stern and resentful, while the first female Apostles were glad and buoyant. Could we correct these prickly girls? It felt to me unlikely. They were just children, children who wore paint, spraying big foggy ideas in people's faces to make the people wince and hold their noses. They weren't whatever that thing was they'd just called themselves. They were bouncy, flip-tailed little skunks.
I rose from the table and threw away my sundae cup, aware that my partner intended to stay and scrimmage. I'd tract a few dozen windshields in the parking lot, which also served a drugstore and a supermarket. We'd worked out a system for using our shrinking tract supply to what we hoped was good advantage. This system worked off the appearance of the vehicles. Dented ones and damaged ones, if the damage appeared recent and the car looked costly and new, were the ones we tracted first. Our reasoning was that their owners were shaken people who'd thought that handsome purchases would spare them the reversals and disappointments that people here seemed so paralyzed about. We wanted to hit them while they were still bewildered. Next were very old miniature dusty cars with lots of belongings crammed in their backseats and, ideally, lots of stuck-on decals whose messages and sayings didn't quite harmonize. The best example we'd found so far was a tiny Chevrolet that we knew wasn't manufactured anymore full of pillows and laundry and camping gear whose driver was eager to push the following three sentiments: “A Duck May Be Somebody's Mother,” “Back Off, Asshole,” and “Ask Me About the LifeZone Path to Health.” What made such people so promising, we felt, was that they were so obviously con
fused yet also, it struck us, striving not to be.
I went at it in the Sweety-Freeze parking lot, spotting two nice but wrecked cars in the first minute. If Elder Stark wasn't finished when I got done, I'd drag him back to the van and turn us east. I'd been thinking the East was a better place for us. My impression from books I'd read was that people there had manners, traditions, guidelines, and good sense. In the West people made their lives up on the spot, with whatever materials were lying nearby and looked the most curious or colorful or easy to pick up. In some ways, that's what the first AFAs had done, and it didn't pain me to admit it, since I didn't feel these inclinations were necessarily harmful or inferior. I approved of them wholly, in fact. They'd made my soul. The problem was selling what these habits had wrought to people who shared them and knew full well what they led to, by and large. Piles of scratched-clean prizeless sweepstakes cards. Homesickness that gets worse when you get home. Endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak “pop” at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for baby snakes.
My sense of the more prudent eastern people was that they'd wised up to these perils centuries back and buried them pretty deeply in their cemeteries under big tombstones inscribed with somber wisdom about how not to stumble in the future. My other sense was that over the years the easterners had gotten awfully cocky and shed a lot of their ancestral vigilance. We might just be able to go in there with wheelbarrows and take them out in bales and bushel loads.
I was tracting a wee green Ford of the confused type when my pocket phone started buzzing inside my trousers. The sensation was just a few days old for me and still felt like a blast from the far future that I loved to research in the Bluff library, especially the domed cities beneath the oceans and growing our heads back if they got cut off. According to the more daring authors, in fact, we humans (people were “humans” in those books, which made us sound, to me, after a while, like something sleeker and kinder than we are) might have two other choices for saving our heads, or at least their inner contents. Carefully scoop out the brain and set it floating in a special brain aquarium or drain all the memories and moods into a computer with your old name on it. Both ideas sounded lonely, but maybe not if the tanks and computers were pushed up close together.
The future could take many paths, the books insisted, and might even vanish before it came if we badly imbalanced or despoiled Earth. Earth, the habitat of Humans. The words felt slightly greasy in my ears.
The buzzing stopped when I didn't answer the phone. The sound still jolted my dreamy thought side before it affected my hands and fingers. Lauer knew I had this problem. As quickly as phone electronics would allow, it seemed, the future buzzed again.
Lauer announced himself by saying, “Lauer.”
“Greetings, Lauer. Person Two. The Child.” This was how Mason Plato LaVerle would sound after he became a Human on Earth.
“Perverse phenomenon, just then. Not what the mind would rationally expect. Even though you were ready for my call then, there was a considerable lag. Was the unit right there in your hand?”
“I'm full of hot fudge and ice lard and I'm sluggish.”
“Insulin overload from simple sugars.”
Lauer was my model as a Human on Earth.
He asked me for our “location” in Wyoming and then why we hadn't “entered” Colorado yet, where “the population” was “denser and more affluent.” I was used to his word ways, but “affluent” still nicked me. In the Church of my childhood, money stayed out of sight behind the things it bought, which weren't much to look at. Most were things to eat, and most things to eat were obtained with Virtue Coupons, which weren't even money, at least to my eye. But when Lauer let rip with his mansion, it cut a string in us. It released some new balloons. Women began to lounge around on sofas that were actually two sofas shoved into an L-shape, or even three sofas joined to form a U, reading catalogs issued by merchants we'd never traded with who dealt in fripperies we'd never needed, such as a wondrous clock one lady fell for that displayed information about the weather—the weather right outside her kitchen window, whose sill was where she'd put the clock! Bluff's men flew off in much puffier balloons. Street by street and block by block, they started building additions out of redwood, that showy lumber unwelcome in our midst since the time of the fire in the 1960s, when a mine foreman used redwood for a deck that obliterated his front yard and swept out to the border of the sidewalk. When the Seeress kicked the monstrous projection during one of her weekly Spirit Strolls, and when a young girl who'd spied the kick (my mother) larked through the co-op singing out the news, the deck reinfolded faster than the Discourser turning into an aphid on a rose, taking a class of lumber with it. Decades passed and everything was fine, but then, thanks to Lauer, our resident Human on Earth, redwood unreinfolded with a vengeance, billowing out in hillside-castle form and then popping up as gazebos and extra bedrooms and backyard sheds for storing an old sofa.
Sometimes I wondered if Lauer had sent me here to give himself a freer hand back there, maybe to erect a tall new guesthouse. I'd been awfully loose and loud around the co-op with my views about his redwood.
I had the phone up flat against my ear as Lauer praised the team of missionaries whose region was the Northwest and California for gaining a meeting with a young executive from an expanding computer firm. After taking the Well-being Quiz, the man had signed up for a twelve-week course of classes, to be conducted through the mail, in Edenic Nutritional Science. The missionaries had hooked him, Lauer said, by postering a natural foods store—a trick that he said we should try. He said that the people who shopped in these establishments were just the type we wanted as AFAs. This put me on edge. I'd thought the people we wanted were the people who wanted us. Or who needed us, but didn't know it yet.
I decided to hold Lauer back by talking more. I felt he'd forgotten the central truth with telephones. They only work in pairs.
“We met some Wiccan youth in a Casper sweetshop. I'm there right now. I'm in the parking lot. I just stuck our prettiest tract, the one on friendship, on the window of a scraped-up Volvo. That's one of the car makes we've been zooming in on.” I summarized the system then, playing down the poor cars stuffed with rucksacks whose drivers might be headed for the nuthouse as cars we primarily tracted out of fairness, to balance all the dented Cadillacs. Lauer didn't comment. He didn't peep. I shifted to explaining about Wiccans. I built them up some, maybe quite a bit. My aim was to portray them as worthwhile prospects, good people who'd slipped a little in the sand but could easily be transformed into allies. I hinted that Casper was one of their new footholds, although they'd spread through Colorado, too.
“Give away many copies of Luminaria?” It was as if he'd just picked up his phone after letting it cool on a table for a while.
“Not boxes and boxes. A few. A healthy few. In a minute I'll take a copy to the Wiccans.”
“Save that. Save that copy,” Lauer said. Then he stopped. He didn't pause—he stopped. A pause means the person has something more to say.
“Can I be completely honest with you here?”
In the instant before I asked this question, before my mind sent the order to my lips and while I still had time to say some other thing, my higher mind—my Etheric, floating mind—reasoned out, composed, and signed a pledge never again to ask it in my lifetime, and not to ask it now, if possible. The pledge was swiftly delivered to my lower mind and its logic thoroughly explained (requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along—and eventually it always brings on a fight) and my lower mind agreed to take the pledge as well, and did. Which is the whole mystery. Right there. The reason we had a Seeress. And books. And a town in a place where a town did not belong.
Because I asked the question anyway, after both my minds had promised not to.
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br /> “Can I be completely honest with you here?”
My bafflement over violating my pledge brought on more rushes of Etheric Reasoning. There's a rock up ahead; if you don't watch out, you'll trip. The hazard's as clear as day. And then you trip. That's your mystery—but here's your error: glaring at the rock like it's the rock's fault. And here's your next one: kicking at the rock, because now you've decided it's your fault that you tripped and that you and your foot deserve a little pain.
Which entitles you to a dish of ice cream afterward, or a platter of fried potatoes glopped with cheese.
Instead you should have looked up at the sky and wondered at the fact that you have a foot.
My partner and the Wiccans needed me. I had their answers for them.
“No,” said Lauer. “Let me be honest with you.”
A biting lecture on perseverance ensued, but I didn't listen to most of it. I wanted to ask Lauer about Sarah, whom I'd dreamed had already found another man—a widower in his late thirties named Layman Markey who lived up the street from my parents and kept trim by lifting barbells on his redwood deck. His tiny blond wife had been killed two winters ago when a Highway Department sand truck hit her Plymouth, and Layman was living comfortably off the settlement—one of the only single men in town capable of buying Sarah her Saab. I'd noticed her watching him in the co-op one day as he was scooping bulk dog food into sacks, the muscles in his forearms like wind-carved sandstone.
“If the Church has any financial future at all,” Lauer said, “it's as a human growth enabler.”
“Elder Stark isn't eating right,” I said.
“That's expected. That'll die down. I'd like to talk with him.”
“He's with the Wiccans in the Sweety-Freeze, except I don't see them at their tables now. I'm in the parking lot looking at the window.”
“Kids have parents. Try to meet their parents. Their parents might be professionals. Find out.”
“I get a feeling their parents aren't around much.”