Zara and Billie exchange a look, briefly allied in mutual dismay and amusement. Billie leans in to look at the screen.
“Don’t touch that,” Dina snaps.
“You draw comics?”
“Sometimes. I draw lots of things.”
“My sister’s an artist.” That could be a career change for Cole. She could make herself useful for once. Forging passports. Paintings too, by the looks of it.
“You don’t say. Maybe next time she can make you up a Brunei passport or three. I knew it was here somewhere!” She pulls out a thick padded envelope. “Here we go.”
But Zara intercepts before Billie can reach for it. “Thanks,” she says and slides it into the waistband of her pants under her jacket.
Oh, is that how it is?
53:
Cole: Motherlands
The busses disgorge a rainbow of Sisters onto the streets of Miami Beach, en masse (or rather, en Mass, she wants to quip, but Mila is still keeping her at arm’s length), and the chapters that were already on the beach flow up to meet them. It’s a spectacle, Cole will give them that, this procession through the evening light, singing pop-song hymns. They’re currently violating A-ha’s “Take On Me,” but it’s strangely beautiful.
I know just what
I’m to say
Sorry every single day
Today is another day to find peace
Don’t shy away
God envelops us in His love, okay?
Repent with me
(Repent with me)
Say the Word
(Say the Word)
God’s here for you
Forgive me too
Laser lights in the night guide their way, crisscrossing the sky above their procession. She watches Mila ahead, swaying and dancing, raising her voice to sing along, her alto still sweet. Her beautiful daughter. Who will be a son again in a few short hours.
He is risen! Hallelujah.
They come up between the apartment blocks to 1111 Lincoln and collect on the street, flowing into the cobbled avenue that runs between luxury shops. Bystanders have their phones out, filming, making way for them. The Starbucks baristas are gawping from inside their window. A group of Sisters are selling merch, like this is a rock concert: simple gold necklaces that spell out the word “Sorry,” t-shirts that read “Repentance Is My Jam” or “Forgive,” scented candles.
The Temple is a brutalist former open-air parking lot, designed by an architect being obstreperous, stark clean lines, a hulking presence. There are Sisters gathered on every level of the parkade, flowing robes bright against the hard concrete. They’re swaying and singing and clapping their hands as they segue into a version of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”
Clap along with me, Sister, if you’re ready to hear the truth.
Generosity takes Mila by the hand and presses through the crowd to tie a prayer ribbon to the fence, Faith behind her, on tiptoe, murmuring a prayer. The ribbons flutter and ruffle against the struts. Shit. Was she supposed to bring one? So focused on what happens after, she’s been paying scant attention to all this.
Someone hands her a candle. She steadies her nerves by picking wax off her candle, softening it between her fingers, molding it into stubby birds, the kind who are going to fly away from here.
Generosity is conspiratorial with Mila, pointing out the women in white standing on the balcony above them. “Those are the Named. That’s Esther, with the dark hair, and Ruth on her left, Hannah and Magdalene. She performed my Mortification.”
“I can’t wait to be Mortified,” Mila says, loud enough for Cole to hear.
Winding you up. He doesn’t mean it.
Is it okay, Dev, that I don’t like our son very much at this particular moment?
A string quartet wearing black dresses and carrying electric instruments, all sci-fi curves and impossible shapes, steps forward on the second level of the garage, a spotlight swiveling toward them, and then onto a young soloist on the level above, dressed in white like an angel. She breaks into a hymn, her voice an astonishingly powerful soprano: “God is our strength and refuge…”
Another hymn, “Jerusalem,” a sing-along for everyone, more candles being handed out. People who are not part of the Church, innocent bystanders, are accepting candles too, with smiles, caught up in the moment. When the last notes fade, the spotlights sweep to the very top, the Named parting to make way.
The crowd shuffles and murmurs. Next to Cole, a Sister she doesn’t know starts crying. A soft spot swoops across the balcony above them, following the Mother Inferior as she walks out toward them, above them, off the edge of the building. The crowd gasps. And then giant screens mounted below the balcony come on, revealing her in glorious close-up, revealing that she’s standing on a Perspex walkway that creates the illusion that she’s floating. She’s wearing palest blue, her long strawberry-blond hair sleek across her shoulders, her own gold “Sorry” necklace twinkling on her breast. It’s old-school Hollywood glamour, Katharine Hepburn in the role of Mother Mary. She raises her hands, and the crowd swoons and roars.
“Welcome, Sisters! Celebrate with me, for you are blessed, you are loved, and by God’s holy grace, you are forgiven.” Her voice rings out across the street on the PA, soft and strong, the way mothers are supposed to be, always bending, like the reeds in the river, or the tree in the storm that gives and gives until there is nothing left.
“Sisters and souls, it’s a wonderful day to have you here. Such a wonderful day. A joyous day, even.” There is a ripple of laughter. They’re hanging on her every word.
“And it is with joy that we welcome the new faces here. Thank you. We are blessed. We’d like to invite those who are not already part of the Church to come stand with us. Light a candle. We don’t bite, I promise. And no one is going to try to sell you anything. Unless eternal salvation is on your shopping list! Please, I’m kidding.”
“It’s easy to forget on such a beautiful day, isn’t it? With the sunshine out and ice cream and the waves crashing just over there. But we hold it, don’t we? Even in the best times, we hold the grief, we hold our memories. We hold our men.”
The perfect mother figure, “inferior” only in that she’s not a father, Cole thinks. The one who always knows what to do, what’s best for you, how to guide you, who holds you at all costs, who tends to her children: but so that they are only ever allowed to be children. Wendy in Peter Pan. Fine for some.
Not you, boo.
Yeah, sorry. Turns out that I’m a full human and fallible as shit, she thinks. You need to hold yourself, too. It’s not a calling, not for everyone. It’s one aspect of being a mother, but to do the job properly you have to be a person first.
“They’re here with us, now,” Mother Inferior continues. “They live through our memories, through the way we honor them every day, in our hearts. I want to encourage you to hold that memory of your loved ones, those who are gone, the men you knew, who walked through the world, to allow them to walk through you, now. I want you to a light a candle in your heart, and keep it burning through the good times and the bad, especially the bad. When you are drowning in doubt and fear and questioning every decision, let that light shine the way. One candle is nothing. Barely enough light to see, but one candle can light others, and if everyone lights a candle…”
Ushers move through the congregation, lighting candles off their own. The lights are dimming, dusk is rushing in. It’s perfectly timed, Cole realizes, worked out so that as the last candle is lit, darkness has settled.
“Then we have enough light to face any darkness. So let us pray, my sisters, for forgiveness for the mistakes we’ve made, the sins we’ve committed, for the times we have strayed from the path of righteousness. Let us pray to find the good within our womanhood, to be modest, humble and kind, virtuous and gentle, to curb our desires, our anger, our frustration, and raise our voices only in supplication, in prayer, in praise. God forgives us everything. But you have to ask. Peace be with you.�
� She blows out her candle.
“And also with you,” they echo, both her words and her gesture, and for a moment they stand in darkness.
“Now. The perfect moment.” She reaches for Mila’s hand, but she’s tugging back.
“Mom, can we? Can we, please?” she implores. “Generosity says the blessings are commencing. We can go up to meet her, she can lay hands on us.”
Not on my watch.
“Sorry kid. We came, we saw, we prayed, and now we’re out.”
54.
Miles: Compound Sins
Mom yanks open the pneumatic door of the bus and scrambles inside. She’s feeling around the ceiling like a crazy person. And then she pops a hidden cubbyhole and takes out a cloth bag, lumpy with bundles. Cash.
“We’ll be needing this,” she says, and then she takes his hand and runs with him, down the street, away from the Temple and the whole life they’ve built.
“Mom, what the fuck? I mean, what the hell, what the heck,” Miles overdubs himself.
“We do what we gotta do. Besides, the U.S. government confiscated all my worldly goods. It’s karma.” She yanks him into the lobby of a hotel. It might even be the same one with the mammoth skeleton out front.
“It’s a sin, Mom.”
“Hi there,” she says, to the concierge. “Could you call us a cab, please and thank you.” She’s acting like a maniac.
“Are you residents here?”
“No, but we’re doing the Lord’s work. A phone call? For a cab? God’s blessing upon you.”
“All right,” she sighs. “Where are you going?”
“Little Havana—that’s party central, right?” The concierge raises an eyebrow.
Mom winks at Miles and whispers, “Decoy.”
Five minutes later, a green-and-white taxi pulls up out front. “Thank you! Have a blessed day!” Mom shepherds him into the car and declares, with maximum unsubtlety. “Little Havana, daughter! Aren’t you excited?”
“We’re not going there, are we?”
She taps her mouth, shh. And the blister bursts, dribbling clear liquid down her lip, over her chin. “Ow. Shit. I’m going to take that as a sign.”
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
“Not yet.” She’s completely hopped up.
“You can’t make this kind of decision without me. You have to tell me what’s going on.”
“I will. I promise. Later. I’m sorry, driver, we’ve changed our minds, could you take us to Wynwood?”
“You’re the customer,” the driver says. She looks old enough to be someone’s granny, hunched over the steering wheel with horn-rimmed glasses. Not the ideal getaway car.
Wynwood is even more high-octane at night, and they find themselves in the festive air of a street market, with food trucks, live music, and a skate ramp, girls doing tricks, the scratch of wheels over the wood.
“Where are we going?!”
“Little Haiti—but first we have to ditch the smocks of shame.” She buys a soda at a tiki-theme restaurant with money materialized from her bra, and then she pulls him into the bathroom.
“Off with your Apologia. Off-off-off.”
“I’m not wearing anything under it!” he protests.
“You’re wearing a shift. It’s fine.”
“It barely covers me.”
“It’s a warm spring night. Get a grip. We’ve passed women wearing much less!”
He tugs at the hem of the shift, which is not much more than a long t-shirt and looks insane with only their white sneakers. His mom bundles up the fabric, inside out, so the sorrys don’t show, and shoves it deep into a trashcan, pulling some of the other garbage over it, so her hand comes back gloopy with unidentified takeaway sauce.
“Hungry?” she offers her hand to him, grinning.
“Ugh! No.” She’s trying to shake their imaginary tail, still living in her crazy spy novel where someone actually cares where they are.
She waves down a different cab, and he wants to die of shame with his bare skinny legs, out on the street, in public.
“I wanted to hear the sermon,” he protests.
“Next time.”
It takes ages for the taxi to nudge its way through the foot traffic, and then they’re speeding along another highway, a different off-ramp. The air smells like flowers. The neighborhood gets more run down again, which makes him think she’s had a change of heart, and they’re heading back to the Sisters’ commune island. But no such luck.
“This is good,” Mom tells the taxi driver.
“This is the middle of nowhere!”
“It’s where Aunt Gillian lives.” She’s over-enunciating.
“Who?”
“Get out the car,” Mom whispers. “Thank you, here’s a tip.”
They clamber out. A mural of Black Napoleon is looking down on them with inscrutable ambivalence.
They walk down the dark and empty street, past a botanica and a warehouse church, all shuttered up, and a little green house with rough walls where a woman is watering her lawn at 10 p.m., as if it hadn’t been raining earlier that day.
“Hi,” Mom calls over to her. “We’re looking for Blood & Sweat Records?”
“No parlais American,” she says and turns her back on them, muttering.
Miles pulls up short. He’s had enough. “Did you stop to think maybe I didn’t want to go? I was happy, Mom. You didn’t even ask me! Everything is fucked and you keep making it worse! It’s like we’re drowning in quicksand and you think, oh, I know what would help, how about we dump some flesh-eating fire ants on our heads!”
“I’m trying my best,” she says, but she’s not even listening. “It’s got to be around here. I checked the cabdriver’s GPS over her shoulder.”
“Maybe you should stop trying. Just stop.”
“There!” A neon sign. Dimmed, because it’s late at night and record stores aren’t open.
But the place next door is. A bar with a lit sign, a rocket ship, and the name, Barbarella’s, blinking.
The bouncer standing beneath the sign is everything that is wrong with the world, and it makes him feel even more lost. Her face is full of rainbow piercings, and she’s wearing a white mesh vest with no bra, so you can see the glint off her nipple rings. This is so distracting that it takes him a moment to notice the codpiece with a giant, erect purple dick that she’s wearing over her jeans.
“That’s not quite the dress code, ladies,” she shouts over the thudding house music leaking onto the street from the neon-lit doorway.
“Do we need to hate ourselves more?” he says. It comes out tough and sneering and cool, and he latches onto the anger, a wind-kite that will carry him away.
“Mila!” his mom snaps. “That’s enough.”
“Also, no under-eighteens.”
“I’m sorry. We’re looking for Dallas. She works next door at the record store.”
“That’s her girlfriend. Dallas is the owner over here.”
“Can we see her?”
Miles inches away, staring intently at a cigarette butt as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world, but the bouncer’s giant purple joke of a penis is wobbling in his peripheral vision.
Another pervert, only way to describe her, he thinks fiercely, emerges from the club, dressed like a dancer out of a cheesy musical in a black linen suit with slicked-down black hair and glitter in her fake stubble, lighting up a cigarette. “Hi, cuties, I’m Luna. Charlie here giving you a hard time?”
“We’re looking for Dallas.”
“Oh, I think she’s expecting you! Weren’t you supposed to be here two days ago? Never mind. Come with me.”
Luna leads them through a beaded curtain and down a corridor tiled with screens, all showing clips of men looking brave or sexy or something. Some of them Miles recognizes: Han Solo with his gun, and that actor who played Captain America, and Idris Elba, bare-chested, laughing, holding a puppy licking his face. But a lot of them are plain weird, a skinn
y guy with glasses and a pigeon chest, a fat man in a steampunk suit and top hat, twirling his mustache, the old Canadian prime minister. It’s all so random. And the slideshow is interspersed with ones that make him feel sick and confused. Sexual ones, like a man worshipping the high heel at the end of a lady’s extended leg, or a man’s veined hand around a woman’s throat, her lips slightly open, a black-and-white photograph of a man’s butt with a whip sticking out of it like a tail. Gross.
They emerge out of the corridor of sexual creepiness into a plush bar with red leather booths and a karaoke stage where someone is massacring the Cure. All the servers are cosplaying men in sharp suits with boy-band hair. He squirms when he realizes that the glass display case that fills the wall behind the bar is filled not with bottles but dildos.
“Is this a sex club?” he demands.
“Kyabakura,” Luna says. “Drinks, cabaret, karaoke, a handsome hasuto to hang on your every word, delight and enthrall you with their conversational wit. All tastes, we don’t judge. And if you want to go in for some pillow business, that’s strictly between you and your host to arrange.”
“Dallas?” His mom is wilting, running on empty.
“This way.”
She opens a door to the left of the stage, which Miles would never have noticed, and they go up a flight of stairs and into the wings, where a troupe of women dressed like stripper plumbers are fixing their dungarees over the artificial bulges.
Afterland Page 35