“What I want to know,” said Patrick, “is what you did with my kid sister.” He spun the top off the Sam’s Club tub of peanut butter.
The arrogance of a wannabe academic humming sub-audibly beneath her every sentence (not to mention a burgeoning wish to hit back at her oldest brother), she did what most undergrads do, which was to pass off the very last thing she’d read as her own idea.
“It’s like there’s this simultaneity of the years 2003 and 1258. In 2003 we invaded Iraq, which kicked off the destruction of Iraq’s museums and archives and all the looting of priceless pieces of art and artifacts in the aftermath. Which isn’t that different from 1258 when Genghis Kahn’s grandson rolled with his Mongols into town, sacked the city, and destroyed the archives of that same civilization. For Iraqis, 1258 and 2003 might as well be one generation removed.”
Cribbed from Dimock’s Through Other Continents.
Patrick frowned like he was gravely concerned for her sanity. “What’s your point, Stace?”
“People have other ways of looking at things.” Besides through Christ, she did not add. “Like there’s this idea of Deep Time. So the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 is right there in the historical memory of anyone living between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Until 2003, when it all happened again. Then our government—which knows or cares about none of that—sends this kid from New Canaan, Ohio, and he’s patrolling streets that probably existed in some form all those centuries ago.”
Patrick slathered peanut butter across wheat bread, examining the knife’s sworls skeptically. “Stace, what does that have to do with not coming home for the parade?”
In the back of Vicky’s All-Night Diner, a waitress banged out of the kitchen carrying a full tray, and the blue lobster slipped from Stacey’s proxy grasp, gripped between a pink elephant and a normatively colored killer whale, stuck in a quicksand of its peers. She decided to forgo the lobster and focus on a more malleable character, a purple pig the size of a softball. By the eye test, it seemed the pig’s proportions would fit the spindly claw much better. She pressed the red button on the joystick, and the claw dropped. She hissed victory through her teeth as it lifted the pig skyward.
Then Clawmaggedon issued a broke-ass mechanical-clunk fart, and the lights of the game went dead. The claw slipped opened, and her piggy dropped right back into its plush prison.
“What the fuck,” she hissed without hearing herself. And banged plexiglass.
“It does that.”
It was the scrubby kid, bearded, unwashed, and holding a plastic bag with a Styrofoam container of Vicky’s to-go.
“They might give you your dollar back,” he said, nodding to the two waitresses, now occupied. “You know, if it means that much to you.”
“Just wanted that pig,” she declared, slapping the plexiglass again. She kept her back to him to indicate that she did not feel like getting hit on right now.
“You’re Patrick’s sister?” At that, she turned to finally assess him. He had acne scars on his face and the yellow smile of a man happy to be working in a slaughterhouse or a prison. Crooked teeth and a tattoo of a cross on his arm, same spot as hers. “I was a year behind you in school,” he explained. “And I go to the First Christian Church, so I know your brother pretty good.”
“Oh,” she said. “Nice to meet you—or see you again.”
She wished for the game to fix itself, so she could turn her attention back to it.
“Do you live here or—”
“No,” she said quickly. “Just passing through.”
He nodded. She gestured to the register. “Gonna get my dollar back.”
“Yeah. Hey.” He reached out and touched her arm, and she tried not to pull it away too quickly or obviously. “I just gotta say—your brother is one of the best things to ever happen to me. I know you probably get that a lot, but I was in a real rough place when I met him. He helped me get clean and helped me find Christ again.”
Sure he did. Maybe she’d acquired the bad habit of academicizing her memories, of trying to render them inert with the books she read and the theories she considered, but she recalled the days of her early twenties when her faith molted off like the dead skin of a snake. What a mystery everything suddenly seemed now that she was certain her dogma had been bogus. Creation, death? These were now free-floating, oppressively heavy possibilities. Where did one even begin to look? The answers she found were horrible in their lack of poetry. Socializing, organizing, family—all an adaptation to survive, accidentally sparking ingenuity, creativity, the creation of tools, and finally representations: codes, stories, art, culture. Experience distilled to essence. All she had believed as a child—all anyone believed, from the broken-hearted Muslim journeying to Mecca to her own devout family—was nothing more than the descendent of a hodgepodge shamanism, passed on, toyed with, whittled at, but ultimately the same nonsense. She wanted to ask this young man: Because how else to explain the inexplicable, dude? How to explain that we all show up to this party with no invite and no apparent host, and we can depart from it at any moment for no reason? The time she and Patrick had argued about Rick and Deep Time had been the same visit when she’d purposely taken Dawkins’s The God Delusion into the open–floor plan living room to read in front of him. She kept her nose in it as he began preparing dinner, and when he finally asked what she was reading, she said the name of the book as if it tasted like a bite of velvety vanilla ice cream. Patrick only chuckled, half-amused, half-distracted, searching the fridge for something. What a title, he’d said. Can you believe clowns like that? Scientists, I mean? They discover the quark or the gene and suddenly they decide they can write off what ninety-eight percent of humanity feels in our bones.
For her brother’s admirer, Stacey now put on a smile like a dress two sizes too small. “That’s awesome. Yeah, he’s great.”
“Sorry to bother you, I just . . . I go to that church, and he’s always talking about you actually. It’s so funny running into you, but boy, you look just like him.”
“Yeah, we get that a lot.”
“He’s just such an inspiring guy.” He clearly wanted to say more, but she didn’t let him.
She didn’t care about the dollar but went to stand by the register. She waited until she saw him get in his car and back out into the square. Before she could find a seat in a booth, though, the door chimed. Her breath caught. Bethany scanned the diner until she spotted Stacey and gave a tepid little wave. All the years since she’d last seen Lisa’s mother descended. The space between herself as an adult and as a child threatened to collapse, and she hated the rising pressure of the cold lump of fear that she thought she’d rid herself of long ago. How familiar, how endlessly reclaimable it felt now.
* * *
When Stacey was a child, she very much believed in Hell.
It kept her up at night, the sheer staggering bigness of suffering for eternity. She clutched the blanket over her head and wondered what that suffering would be like. She’d had pneumonia once as a little girl and abstractly recalled the pain that radiated from her chest down to her toenails, but even that seemed insufficient to that which was described. Heaven, conversely, was of little concern, the specifics always muted, uninteresting. Jesus was there, sure, but more importantly, it was the place you went that was not Hell. Pastor Jack (“Call me Pastor John. Johnny. Jack. Just don’t call me late for dinner!”) broached the issue as this regrettable addendum that he, unfortunately, was required to address. He didn’t dwell on it; he wasn’t much for fire and brimstone, but that made the instances he did bring it up all the more unsettling.
Because they were Grover Street Elementary peers and went to church camp together every summer, she was best friends with Tina Ross for a long time. As a girl, Tina was part of the reason she worried about Hell day and night. Tina could describe it so vividly: the sensation of burning alive, spears and knives run through you, demons taking out their sexual frustration on the damned. She had no clue where Tina got al
l this, but during sleepovers, she would describe it to her as clearly as if it were the Wyandot Lake water park (one of the few places for which the two young girls had the layout completely memorized).
“But it won’t be us,” Tina assured her. This was when they were maybe seven or eight, cocooned in the blankets of Tina’s bed.
“But what if it is us?” she persisted. “We can’t possibly do everything right.”
“Sure we can.” Even that young, Tina was already becoming gorgeous, and it was no secret at Grover Street that all the boys liked her. She reminded Stacey of a Siamese cat, her wide cheekbones giving her face the shape of a heart. She had flawless, seductive skin—some ancestor having added a dash of bronze. Maybe it had to do with envy, but she felt like Tina never lost an argument, certainly not about their faith. “We’ve accepted Jesus,” Tina said. “We believe in Him, and we do His work. The only people who are in Hell are the ones who are supposed to be. They get their skin cut off in big strips and have hot needles put their eyes out over and over.”
Tears came crawling to the corners of Stacey’s eyes, and she wanted to tell Tina to stop but couldn’t. She needed to know. Tina’s dad ended up having to take her home that night when she refused to sleep with the lights off. A few nights later, Stacey’s parents had Pastor Jack over so he could issue some corrections about what Hell meant and to reassure her that she had nothing to fear. The entire time, she could only picture Tina’s descriptions.
When they got to high school, the two girls had the goal of taking over Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Stacey never attained higher office but Tina became secretary when she was just a sophomore. The school’s largest extracurricular club met once a week in the cafeteria. It hosted speakers, shared stories, and prayed for various things (sick family members, sports victories, the usual). Members had locker signs with large crosses and Bible quotes (Stacey recalled only Lisa’s: Paul’s take on Romans 5:8, I loved you at your darkest). You didn’t even have to be an athlete to attend. Every once in a while a troublemaking parent would protest the use of school property for religious organizing, but New Canaan was the wrong community in which to pick that fight. It wasn’t until her senior year when she was agonizing about Lisa that Stacey heard the Sexual Purity Policy on the ministry leadership application form: “Neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternate lifestyle acceptable to God.”
Tina, who colored the cross on her FCA locker sign pink and soon took up with the football team’s co-captain, led the group in stridently, unapologetically earnest prayers. She wanted you to know the love of Jesus Christ so badly it made her ache at night. By high school, not only had their friendship withered and vanished, but for the first time Stacey had doubts.
It was hard for her to pin down when it started, but she remembered very well what Ben had to say during a double date to Columbus with Rick and Kaylyn.
“We’re not Catholics,” Rick said, in regards to Kaylyn being on birth control. Stacey had been plotting to do the same herself, but the thought of broaching the topic with her parents was semi-horrifying. “Premarital sex is one of those sins you can definitely get forgiveness for when the time comes. Jesus probably spends half his time rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, premarital boning. Got it. Forgiven. Let’s keep it moving.’ ” Rick was joking but not.
“Or it’s all total horseshit malarkey, and you can have all the sex you want,” said Ben, gazing out the window at the flat expanse of cornfields, barns, and country homes that peppered the drive south to Ohio’s capital. Rick was behind the wheel, and his eyes fixed on Ben in the rearview mirror.
“Better be careful talking like that. A lightning bolt might hit the car, and I don’t wanna get taken with you.”
Ben sniggered. “If that’s how it all works, maybe we should get God some Prozac or something.”
“So wait.” Kaylyn turned around and leaned all the way into the backseat. She never wore her belt. “You’re with Ashcraft? You don’t believe in God at all? Like, no God?”
“Him and Ashcraft believe in each other’s buttholes,” Rick chimed in.
“Bill’s wrong about almost everything ever except this,” said Ben. “I’m not saying there’s no way, no how not a God, but the way they tell it to you? Like there’s this omniscient dude watching us CIA-style and—you know—doling out rewards and punishments based on obscure, occasionally incoherent moral programs . . . Pretty dumb if you think about it.”
Rick gave him a stupefied look. “Lightning is definitely striking you, Harrington. Stacey, you hearing this?”
She felt the clammy-palmed sensation of being asked to choose a side. This was early in her relationship with Ben, and all three of them were older, more popular, ready to judge her answer. She wanted to melt into the gray fuzzy material of the backseat.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s Ben’s choice what he wants to believe.”
“Yeah, it’s just your eternal soul, dude. No biggie.” Rick pushed back the Cleveland Indians hat on his skull and scratched at his hairline. “My question, I guess, is why not just believe anyway? Better safe than sorry, right? You pray a little, go to church enough, get right with God no matter what—and then what do you got to lose, Harrington?”
“That’s Pascal’s Wager, Brinklan. Someone already thought of that.”
“So? Doesn’t make it not true.”
Ben shook his head, hair slipping across his brow, and he tossed it off with a buck of his head. “I’m saying this guy Pascal thought of that idea in like the seventeenth century. If that’s all you got—better safe than sorry?—I’d start worshipping every other god you can. There’s a long list of people out there who might be right about their god instead of yours.”
“Jesus, please don’t strike my car,” Rick said to the roof. “Just because my sinning friend is in it. Wait till he’s outside to get him.”
They moved on to other topics, but that thing about Pascal sat with her. Later, at home, she looked it up and couldn’t believe that Ben was right. She’d had this same theory, this wager, put in her head by Pastor Jack in different form, as the airtight case for why it’s best to believe past all doubts and skepticism. For the longest time she’d thought it bulletproof. Many years later, she found herself unable to stomach her teenage naivety.
Even as an adult, Hell would return to her on occasion, unexpectedly, with violence. Like when her oldest brother sat her down in his kitchen and tried to save her. Patrick and his wife, Becky, had an unambiguous position about her “lifestyle,” which they never brought up when the rest of the family was around. This began in 2005. After she came out to them, they were unfailingly polite and loving in the moment and then began to forward her the most offensive material one could possibly send a gay family member: the hard-core electroshock-the-fag-outta-you websites and “therapy” centers operated in Evangelical circles despite increasing ridicule by the mainstream.
“I’m not trying to hurt you. Or be cruel to you.” Patrick wanted to know what she thought about seeing one of these therapists. “I love you. I’m concerned for you.”
What she wanted to say—If anyone other than you sent me a link to “therapy” like that, I’d set their fucking car on fire—dangled on the tip of her tongue. And it stayed there. Becky had left the room on purpose, off pretending to fold laundry in the basement. Stacey’s nieces, Jamie and Elyse, were in bed. After dinner she’d played with them, their blinding blaze of adorable so acute, she knew she’d never risk estrangement.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” she told him. “This is just the way it is.”
“It’s the ‘No Exception’ clause, Stacey,” he said gently. “You can’t call yourself a Christian and then pick and choose which parts of it to follow. You commit to following Christ in every aspect of your life.”
Her brother Matt was home when she came out, while Patrick was not, and sometimes she thought this explained the difference. Othe
r times, she wondered if Pat’s three years on Matt actually amounted to a generational separation on this issue. When Patrick, the primogeniture, became an adult in the late nineties, he hadn’t known a single gay person (probably because they were all still in the closet). Then again, Matt had always been the family hellion—drinking and sneaking off with girls from the time he was in eighth grade—whereas Patrick and Becky actually had waited until their wedding night.
“I want you to take a look at this,” he said, sliding the pamphlet across the kitchen table. It had a picture of a man and woman on a hike, holding each other’s waists, staring into each other’s eyes with the stupid smiles pamphlet people give each other to demonstrate true commitment. “Just look it over.”
Both of her brothers inherited what Lisa called Mr. Moore’s “Squaryan” looks: tall, chiseled, boringly handsome. Pat hadn’t changed his haircut since he was ten: a helmet of stiffly gelled hair combed to the side. Fatherhood never softened his physique. Like Stacey, he was tall, athletic, and he still worked out, according to Becky, every day. He had virile, vein-bulging arms and looked impossibly hale and healthy. For some reason this made Stacey’s surety flutter. Like, Look at him. Maybe I have strayed. And she felt her ancient fear of how long eternity could be.
“All you need to know for now, though, is that you’re my sister and I love you.” He beamed that resentment-incinerating smile. Then he leaned over and hugged her fiercely. These “recommendations” of Pat’s had always been their secret. She had never told her parents about any of it.
* * *
“Stacey. Thank you thank you thank you so much for coming.”
Before Stacey realized what she intended, Lisa’s mother was hugging her, smelling like a room after it’s doused in cleaning products and scrubbed. She received the embrace awkwardly, tried not to reciprocate, but found herself unable to be rude enough to pull away. This woman she hadn’t stopped dreaming about for nearly a decade.
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