Anthea’s warning bells started to ring, and her body instinctively moved into a more defensive posture.
“Sorry,” he said, “that came out really badly.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I need a new assistant. Feather is a lovely person, but she has… ideas about our relationship that I don’t share. I was hoping you’d be interested since you’re new and obviously non-judgmental. It’s just… important to have new people around. I would pay you of course, and it’s a really minimal commitment, very flexible with scheduling. Do you think… could you see yourself in her position?”
Anthea’s instinct was to refuse him outright, but she hesitated. Wearing ridiculous robes and moping about in circles in after-hours yoga studios? Throwing salt and water on people and choking them with weird herby smoke? Chanting and droning about demons and energies and pathways and other incantations and spells? It sounded hilarious.
“Yes,” she said, “I’ll be your assistant."
Chapter 4
Secret Treasures
Anthea awoke early the next morning and immediately began her morning inspection. She completed her circuit as she always did and then sat down at her small breakfast table to enjoy a cup of half-hour old coffee. Anthea kept her coffeemaker programmed to brew a half-hour before her alarm so that her sense of smell would alert her immediately upon waking if someone had cut her electricity in the night. Her gaze lingered, as it often did, on the large world map that dominated one wall of her kitchen, and she was drawn briefly into a hazy morning reverie.
Despite being almost constantly surrounded by people at the camp, Anthea often felt that she was completely alone in the entire world. She was very good at keeping sweet, hiding her thoughts and feelings from her face. So good that sometimes people forgot she was there, even when she was being punished. Punishment frequently took the form of reading aloud from The Book for her mother or another of the camp’s brides as they cleaned and cooked. For several days. From sunrise to sunset. Without breaks for food and water.
Other times, she was locked in a room to copy verses for an entire day. She was expected to memorize most of The Book by the time she was an adult, and this was considered a most holy method of strengthening her witness and purifying her heart.
When she was younger, she remembered being allowed to check out books from the local library, as long as her mother approved. She wasn’t sure if this was in Las Vegas or not, but her mother repeatedly told her she’d been born in the camp and raised there her entire life, and that there was no local library. Privately, Anthea reasoned that someone must have become polluted from the materials there, and that her mother was trying to make her forget to protect her from the pollution of covetousness.
On one of the rare outings when Anthea was allowed to go into town to get supplies, Heavenly Father provided for her a miracle. They had pulled into the busy Costco parking lot next to a large family vehicle, and Anthea remembered feeling the pollution of greed when she glimpsed the brightly colored toys and books strewn about inside. When she and her mother had returned, shopping carts weighted down with massive bags of flour, pallets of canned foods, and bolts of cloth, Anthea spied something left behind by the other family.
Before her mother noticed, she darted over and snatched up the objects, hiding them in her spacious pockets in one swift motion. She then helped organize the heavy load into their vehicle, heart beating furiously. On the ride back to the camp, she thought she might confess the entire thing, but she kept her nerve.
She hardly knew how to classify the sin she had committed. Lying by omission, certainly. Theft, probably. Greed, covetousness, and blasphemy were all extremely likely.
Pollution, not yet, but maybe.
Late that night, she removed the secret objects from where she’d hidden them in her bedsheets. She had debated the rest of that day about whether or not Heavenly Father had provided these polluted items as a blessing, or as a temptation. She had decided that she would look at them first and then decide.
In the dull quiet of her small room, her small eyes grew wide and began to shine at what she beheld. A world map and a child’s encyclopedia of animals. Heavenly Father’s creations of the third and fifth days. This is a blessing, Anthea decided.
In those next few weeks she spent hours breathlessly poring over her treasures. She hadn’t really had much experience with maps, so orienting herself had taken some time. She didn’t entirely understand all the lines and colors, but had eventually found places she had heard of like Israel, Egypt, and Rome. She even found Las Vegas, but it wasn’t where she expected. She knew that she lived in New Mexico, and had been very surprised to see that it was next to ‘old’ Mexico. Anthea had always assumed that Old Mexico had been destroyed by Heavenly Father and that the camp had been built in New Mexico because it had been purified.
She’d never seen so many new words all in one place in all her young life. She was constantly trying to sound them out and wracked her brain for any memory of another adult saying them. Because she had no one she could ask, she very quickly became an extremely attentive listener at prayer meetings.
If the world map was a frustrating but thrilling find, the book of animals was even more so. Anthea was no great lover of animals. She knew that godly brides must maintain constant vigilance against demons, but she didn’t exactly know how to identify them. She lived in constant terror of The Deceiver’s snakes and most other reptiles, as well as the many large and terrifying bugs that cohabited the camp. The camp had a healthy population of chickens, goats, and guard dogs, but pets were forbidden.
All that had changed after she found the animal encyclopedia. The book had introduced her to outlandish creatures that she could hardly believe existed, and she was sometimes moved to tears at the complexity of creation and the immensity of Heavenly Father’s love in creating them all for the pleasure of man. She began to look closer at the chickens, dogs, and goats, searching for evidence of their cousins the ostriches and flamingos, wolves and dugongs, moose and zebras.
Her book never once mentioned The Deceiver’s many demons, where they might be found, or what they might look like. As her knowledge of the real animals of the world grew and grew, her fear of demons diminished until she had nearly forgotten it.
Anthea had had a few other sacred possessions, things that held the secret potential of entire worlds as only a child’s imagination could provide. Her most prized possession had been fished from the garbage after Anthea had overheard of its existence from a tearful bride whose polluted child had been sent to the Holy House. She’d gone to check out of simple curiosity, and had been overwhelmed to find a battered plastic pink pencil case with a rainbow-colored cat, bedecked in glittery, liquid-filled hearts.
It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Inside her impossibly colorful pencil case she kept a small collection of business cards from various doctors’ and dentists’ offices she occasionally visited, or that she found on the ground, or in the rubbish. Some had portraits printed on them, others had been drawn on by the imaginative Anthea herself. She used these cards in the way that most children played with dolls, which were naturally absolutely forbidden in the camp. She gave them voices and backstories, danced them around and walked them through the various scenarios of her make-believe world.
Some days Andrew McWilliams, M.D. was the hero, saving all the children from the evil Jaime Walker, D.D.S. who had been sent by The Deceiver to pollute them. Other days, Heavenly Father transformed Jacinta “Jackie” Zavala, M.D. into a ravenous mountain cat who hunted all the other card-people, who had themselves been transformed into the animals from her book.
Mostly, though, Anthea imagined herself as a member of one of the imaginary families she concocted, moving about the outside world to do polluted things like go to a government-run school, play games with other children, or visit the library. She told herself that she imagined these scenarios so that she could face the temptatio
ns if they ever came to her, and that it was strengthening her witness. But even as a child Anthea wasn’t sure if she believed her own justification.
In the present, Anthea considered the significance of these small objects in shaping her young mind. Her curiosity had always been brutally discouraged, but no amount of punishment had ever put the slightest damper on her bright mind. She thought again about the fallout after her disappearance. If her mother had known about any of these hidden items, she had never let on. Even though she trusted her mother, Anthea kept this small collection of her most secret treasures wrapped in a pillow case in her pristine dresser drawers. They would certainly have been discovered after she left. Her mother would have been furious, but would have ultimately used it to her advantage somehow. Anthea was sure of that.
Thinking about her mother always made her nervous and she jumped so hard that she spilled her coffee when her kitchen phone rang out and cut through her sad reverie.
“Hello?” She answered it reluctantly, heart in her throat.
“Anthea!” Cyrus’ voice sounded relieved, “I tried to text you, but I kept getting an error. Is everything ok with your phone?”
“Oh, good morning Cyrus. This phone, well, it isn’t a mobile phone,” she explained slowly. “It’s a landline."
“Wow!” Cyrus exclaimed, but to Anthea he seemed to be faking being stunned. “You’re something else, truly. So, I’m sorry to spring this on you but are you able to begin today? I promise we’ll do some training beforehand, but only if you have time.”
Anthea thought ahead to what she had planned for the day. On Saturday, she usually went back to the library where she spent a half hour scouring the internet for any news of her mother, Joel, Las Vegas (New Mexico, she now knew), or of the Apostolic Oneness Chapel of the Holy Pentecost. Then she checked out a stack of books and spent the rest of the weekend reading them, voraciously learning about the world and the souls of its inhabitants. It was a lovely routine, but lately it had grown a tad tiresome.
“Today is just fine,” she answered finally. “What will we be doing?”
“Well," Cyrus said, "how would you like to help me summon a demon?"
Chapter 5
The Baby in the Big City
Los Angeles is famous for many things. Its public face was sun-kissed and gleaming, effortlessly cool, self-assuredly worldly, and quietly confident that everyone in the world wanted to be there, but only the best were actually there. The allure of Hollywood, the glamour of countless professional sports, the fabulous night spots, the bohemian beaches and boardwalks; all of these things promised to show you the good life, that if you made it this far, you had really made it. LA was the perfect postcard of the American dream; work hard, wait your turn, and you too would be plucked out of lowly obscurity and rise to dizzying heights.
The reality, of course, was that LA was exactly as bad as every other major city in America. Poverty, drug abuse, violence, and homelessness ran rampant. Covert racism coupled with the indifference and ineffectiveness of a bloated, self-congratulating government normalized and prolonged these realities. The gilded institutions that drew in the greedy, grasping crowds teetered precariously on the backs of the great masses of faceless normals who lived one injury, one illness, one car repair away from total destruction. The best way to survive in LA was to keep your head down, find your niche, not expect too much, not hope too high, and just blend in the best you could. Just like every other city in the world.
From her first day, even in her fragile state and confusing circumstances, Anthea had known she was home.
It had only been a few months since she escaped the Holy House when Anthea finally ended up in LA, but she learned a lot in that time, and quickly. Boulder, Reno, Salt Lake City, these places were just cities, just dots on a map, but she learned how to move through them without standing out. LA had a mythology attached to it that she couldn’t penetrate, and it frustrated her. She didn’t know the stereotypes, the jokes, the legends, the highways. She’d never heard a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, she didn’t know what Rodeo Drive or Beverly Hills were, she’d never heard of basketball or surfing or Rodney King, and despite briefly working in a video store, she’d never actually seen a Hollywood film.
Her caseworker found her a discrete, furnished apartment in a place called Van Nuys, which Anthea had misspelled numerous times as Vaneyes, reasoning that she would attract less attention if she was not in a shelter or group home. She had never had so much space to herself in her entire life and hardly knew what to do with it. There was even a television and DVD player, which took all of Anthea’s courage to learn to operate. Once she did, however, she made assiduous use of the public library system, checking out any available movies indiscriminately. She took in all of these things with wide-eyed wonder, and sometimes terror, but nothing ever satisfied her ravenous curiosity.
Soon Anthea found a job, and after about two years of aggressive saving, she found that she could afford to purchase a small, 2-bedroom Spanish-style home in a place nearby called Burbank. It seemed almost too easy, and Anthea often wondered if she was being set up by the FBI in some kind of long game to trap her mother. She’d been able to save because she paid no rent or utilities, and the government even gave her a small stipend meant to offset her transportation costs. Anthea relied on the LA public transit system, never ate out, and made very few efforts to expand her wardrobe. Everything she spent money on was marked down or second-hand. She was so effective at this that her monthly budget for food and personal expenses was under $100. When she moved into her new home, her kitchen comprised a single cooking pot, one bowl, two spoons, and a hand towel. Her toiletries comprised one bath towel, one jumbo sized bottle of shampoo, and her toothbrush. Her clothing and personal items could fit into a single duffel bag. A nun probably had more stuff.
Those two years in the apartment had been torture for Anthea and she had been constantly on edge. She hated sharing walls with strangers, not knowing if they were a danger to her or not. She washed her clothes in her bathtub because the confinement of the laundry facilities made her panic. She hated that she could only enter from a single door, always had to ascend the same staircase, could only see outside in one direction. The cramped hallway where the mailboxes hung on the wall unnerved her so much that she began renting a post office box. She varied her routine as much as possible, but she still had to take the same bus to work, so she would often get off at random stops and walk, or re-board the next bus. She felt vulnerable and unsafe at all times.
But there were many quiet joys in those first years as Anthea became acquainted with her new home. The nightly film-viewings were a major happiness, and highlighted to her just how much there was to learn in the world. The first time she heard someone speaking Spanish, a shot went through her gut. The only time in her life when people in the Camp hadn’t spoken in English was when Heavenly Father touched them, intimately, and they cried out in the language of heaven, ululating and thrashing and in pain. She had never seen anyone actually converse during these moments. Watching the two men outside on the sidewalk casually speaking Spanish had filled her with fear and wonder, and she longed to know more about this strange phenomenon. She spent several months surrounding herself with strange words, seeking out signs and restaurants that she couldn’t understand, just to marvel at the complexity. Anthea determined to find out how many dozens of languages were spoken in the world and was alarmed and delighted to learn that it was over six thousand! She had grown up believing that there were only 144,000 true souls in the world and simply couldn’t imagine that languages could number that high. This glimpse of linguistic diversity in LA brought to mind her childhood animal encyclopedia and she was awestruck again at the beautiful strangeness of the world and its inhabitants.
And then there were the people themselves. Reason told Anthea to be very cautious with strangers, but curiosity often overrode her paranoia. She had never known so many different kinds of people could exist in the world. She
attended as many free events and classes as her schedule and anxiety would allow her, but sometimes she spent more time staring at the people than absorbing the content. Her local library had something on their schedule every single day, and Anthea lived for these events like a drowning man lives for air. At a job-seeking workshop, she’d had a black teacher. She had always known that there were black people in the world because one of First Prophet Noah’s sons had been cursed by Heavenly Father for his doubts so that he and all his generations would wear the stain of his sin. Along with almost everything else, she was now forced to re-examine that long-held belief. The woman who taught the workshop didn’t seem cursed, stained, or sinful, and Anthea could detect no traces that the woman was aware that she was supposed to be so. To Anthea, the librarian looked tired, squishy, and delightful. And she had freckles! Anthea looked down at her arms and was surprised to notice that she, too, had a few freckles. That she had lived so long and never noticed her own freckles depressed her considerably, and prompted Anthea to do the bravest thing that she had perhaps ever done. She checked out a DVD on yoga, went home, stripped naked, and did the entire video. When she was finished, she turned and flexed her body in front of a mirror, inspecting every inch. At the camp, nakedness was frowned upon, and Anthea was determined to heal some of this internalized self-hatred.
For the first few months, Anthea approached her interactions with other people as though she were an alien anthropologist with an encyclopedia of human culture. She met an Asian person, quickly realized that there were many different types of Asian people and expanded her taxonomy. She learned that most Black people were not African, and that there were people from Africa who weren’t black. She began to notice that her English was not the same as everyone else’s, and then she began to notice that there were more types of English than she’d expected. Anthea was an infant, emerging into the real world with an adult body. As the major external traits of the people around her began to fade into normalcy, Anthea began to notice her own whiteness. It was present in the way people talked to her, the way they looked at her, the way they made space for her in the world. The people she spoke with assumed that she was educated, that she had money, that she was a serious and capable adult. It made her feel uncomfortably exposed and unfairly privileged.
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