As the night grew later, the Crooked Leg drew a larger crowd. We had found the center of Cheyenne nightlife, such as it was. A DJ appeared, unshaven and tattooed; between requested country hits he encouraged patrons to ride the mechanical bull, an ugly hunk of hide and machinery tilted up at a hysterical angle under a halo of colored lights, surrounded by a padded floor.
“Ride the bull, X!” X declined.
I had reached the bottom of my second beer. My limbs felt loose, alive with vibration. “It’s either the bull or me.”
“Good God! What a mouth. You’re cut off.”
“Am I drunk?” I asked him, trying to process the prickling in my arms, which were, unaccountably, resting still on the table beside my empty glass and not floating as I had initially thought.
“Not very,” he said, “but drunk enough.” He paid the tab. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand. You ought to get some fresh air, lightweight.”
By now the bar was rowdy around the seams. Men in Stetsons laughed a little too loud, hunched a little too close over their drinks. Women moved too loosely. Their skirts were very short, and I was slightly dizzy; my mind crept along uncertainly after my body. X put his arm around me, guided me out into the windy night.
In Cheyenne we bayed like dogs at blinking traffic lights. We did cartwheels in an abandoned, silent park. X collided with the dark form of two statue boys, frozen in a run, invisible in the darkness. I climbed onto the back of one and rode him like a racehorse, whooping, then shrieked when I realized I couldnt get down again. X pressed against me and I slithered back to earth, my face and chest against the cold metal, my back hot against his skin. When we had run enough that our legs began to shake we climbed onto the stage of a great wooden amphitheater and watched the flicker of distant headlights through a line of windbreak trees, trucks passing on the Interstate.
I felt loosened and calm enough to ask the question that had haunted me since I had talked to Brian in Nebraska. I was able at last, in fact, to frame the question in words – to understand the dragging weight of dread and bleakness in my gut, and to name it.
“So if there is no God, then what do we believe happens after we die?”
“We?”
“People who don’t believe.”
“I’m not a physicist,” X said carefully. “And I’ve had a few beers. I’m just an artist. But there’s this principle in science, a way nature works. Matter and energy can’t be destroyed. Can’t be made, either. It’s all here from the beginning, taking different forms.”
“Reincarnation?”
“I don’t think so. Not the way most people think of it. Everything that has form...” he kissed my neck “...came from some other form that fell apart.”
“Where is this going?”
“I said I’m not a physicist. When you die, you die, and that’s it.”
“That’s terrible.” Unthinkable. I had been raised my whole life to expect the white place, the Veil, the faces and hands, eternity. “That’s it? You die? You fall apart?”
X read the tension in my body. “What’s so bad about that? I think it’s poetic.”
“It’s depressing.” Desolation and nothingness.
“Was it depressing before you were born? It’s the same.”
“All right. So things fall apart, and after you die, you’re nowhere.”
“Don’t sound so sad. Look. When you die, you fall apart, you revert to all the little bits that make up you, all the atoms. And those atoms are re-used by nature, and they make something else. Everything else. Animals and trees and storms. You transform.”
“And your thoughts? Your consciousness? Your mind?”
“Energy. All that’s nothing but energy, the action of your brain cells. The energy that was you goes out into the world and becomes wind, and lightning.”
“That is not poetic, X.”
“I’m not a poet, either. This is the way I look at it: if there is nothing after I die, then every second of life I have means so much more. I’ve got to fit it all in now. And I’ve got to appreciate it, because it’s not permanent. When I’m gone, I’m gone.”
“You find that comforting?”
“I find it horrible, and beautiful, and true.”
I stared at the distant illuminated line of the Interstate. The flicker of headlights scored bright lines into my vision. I saw them when I closed my eyes and leaned my head on X’s shoulder, a vivid echo of movement, lines crossing lines innumerable as stars, as bright and inviting as neon across a highway.
2.
Interstate 80 rescued us from the plainness of the Plains, restoring us to a familiar mountain landscape. To the west the horizon broke in a blue haze, and the haze solidified into mountain peaks as even as spread fingers, and before too many more miles the foothills of the Wyoming Range resolved out of a distant dust of antelope herds and truckers’ convoys. By afternoon we were on the downward slope of a narrow mountain pass, switching back, descending into a canyon where, in the heat of the brief Rocky Mountain summer, cottonwoods were beginning to yellow in patches of blurred-leaf motion. When the highway leveled out we sped long the banks of a stream, rapid and pencil-blue, smelling cold as under-ripe apples through the car’s air vents.
Suburban Utah greeted us with a wide sweep of road, white slashes of church steeples blinking at regular intervals along distant hills. Being among the civilized again made me feel ponderous with guilt. All the houses we passed, built in proximity to good schools and shopping centers, were a tally of my failures as a Mormon, as a wife, as a woman. The satellite towns circling the orbit of Salt Lake brimmed with happy families, kids playing with dogs in yards, wives cooking supper for husbands stuck in traffic. This was a population of men and women who had faced down their personal adversities and had made it all work – something James and I had failed to do. This was a population that knew the white place was real, that would not fall apart after death and dissipate in a sparkling shower of atoms. As I held X’s hand on the glove box between our seats I cringed inside with the force of my shame and fear. I loved the hand I held, I loved X’s smile, his laugh, everything. But I had taken James as my husband, and I owed my allegiance to him. Only by returning to our life together could I set my wrongs to right.
And only by returning could I shake off the torment of X’s afterlife. He called it beautiful, but I could not discern any beauty in falling apart. Maybe I didn’t believe in God, but in Rexburg I could perhaps soothe my fear of an eternity of disintegration. Surrounding myself with people who believed in the Celestial Kingdom might somehow make that part of religion, at the very least, real.
These were my only clear thoughts as we had our early dinner on the second-story patio of a restaurant in Salt Lake City’s red brick shopping square. I floated somewhere above the conversation, though I let X think I was as engaged as ever, as with him as ever. But all the while I was thinking I ought to run back home and beg James to forgive me, and we would go on once more as if none of this had ever happened, until we died and went to Heaven, which had to exist. It just had to.
Two women sitting at a nearby table complained delicately over their salads. I tuned in to their conversation through the static fuzz inside my head. “I couldn’t bring Madison with me because they don’t let kids under five on the patio anymore. Some baby got its head stuck in the railing and now there’s liability issues.”
Perhaps I ought to stick my head through the railing, I thought. The change of perspective might do me some good. By the time X has figures out how to unstick me I’ll have come to a decision.
Sunset was approaching, and X, who had never seen Salt Lake before, wanted to explore before it got too dark. We paid our tab and I led him toward the heart of downtown, the castle spire of the courthouse with its white clock face mimicking the pale heads of the Wasatch peaks behind. Beyond, the triplicate towers of the Salt Lake Temple soared into a flawless blue sky, the statue of golden Moroni poised with raised trumpet above the precision grid of t
he city’s streets.
“I’ve got to see that up close,” X said, emphatic, staring at the temple.
I figured the very heart of Mormonism was the most poetically satisfying place to end my all-too-brief freedom. This is the place, as they say.
I agreed.
Since finishing dinner I could not seem to get the image of the dog in Driggs out of my mind, brittle bleached fur, twist of twine. My decision had been made for me. Foreordained, Moroni whispered from his perch.
We made our way past dress shops and spaces for lease in the old quarter, past a gay bar where a handsome man was setting tall tables and bar stools outside the old stone building. Its pale blocks were set firm and straight by good Mormon masons in the days of Brigham Young, the founding days, and now it was a place for men to meet men. What irony, you Saints. While X chattered happily about something – some art technique, some school of thought – I nodded automatically and watched the bartender bend over his work. There were lean long muscles in his arms. He caught my eye and smiled, friendly. I smiled back, resigned. I wondered whether James would find this man attractive. When I came home. When I picked up and dusted off the good life from where I had dropped it. Moroni’s trumpet was tootling in my ear, a victory march that drowned out the sweet soft music of X’s voice.
I don’t believe in fore-ordainment, I told myself and Moroni firmly. My thoughts sounded very small and frail against the squawk of his horn.
We arrived in Temple Square just as the sky began to burn orange. Lights came on around the grounds and atop the temple walls, floods pointing upward to bathe the angular layers of steeple on steeple with an ascendant white glow, a light that seemed to stretch the very architecture, the bone of stone and steel, up toward heaven.
X removed a small sketch pad from his back pocket and frantically, rapturously drew the great elongated lines of the temple, its overhead lean, its custodial glower. I kept my eyes on his hands, his lovely long hands, how they moved over the paper, the sound the skin of his knuckle made as it dragged softly across the surface. Oh God, I would miss his hands, and this was how I would always remember them, delineating the bars of my prison.
X handed me his camera and posed between the immoveable bronze statues of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, who gazed steadfast and unseeing into a distance of city blocks while X pointed both his forefingers like guns at the camera, at me, and winked. I thought, I must remember to ask him for that picture later. It will be nice to keep, so I can remember his smile, too.
“I want to come back here and paint it in the morning,” X said.
I just wanted to get away from the place. It was taunting me and my pathetic spring for freedom. Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails... or something to that effect. Proverbs? Word of Wisdom? I should know this. A good Mormon would know. But in spite of my readiness to surrender and retreat, the prospect of one more night in one more hotel room skin to skin with X was a stronger lure than I could resist. And what was the harm? The Greyhound station would still be waiting for me in the morning; the price of a ticket back to Rexburg would not have changed over the course of a single night. I would set him free then to find Rebecca, to chase that wisp of a ghost out across the West.
And I still hadn’t asked him for that picture.
One last night.
3.
I made our final night last as long as I could. The hotel was not quiet. Somewhere on the same block loud music played, an aggressive beat upside-down over the muted tin fuzz of blown-out speakers. Occasionally voices would raise in brief shouting matches or a bottle would break against the black pavement with a small hollow burst like a Christmas light dropped on a floor. So we couldn’t fall asleep anyhow. And even after the police arrived to restore some semblance of propriety, hours after dark, I kept X going, so that at first he laughed in disbelief at my appetite, and then he begged some time to recover, and finally he fell asleep altogether, murmuring something that was half apology, half protest, while his fingers, at least, tried to stay awake for a minute or two more.
His hand twitched lightly where it lay against my thigh. His breath was deep. It sighed over his parted lips. A police car drove a warning circuit around the block; through the crack in the heavy dullcolored curtains of our room the patrol car’s lights flashed red-blue, red-blue; the light flickered across X’s face, over his exposed teeth, the slope of his shoulder. Then the car was gone, and the room lapsed once more into near-darkness. From somewhere – the street lamp? – a wan, gray light illuminated the fine hairs of X’s body, so the line of his arm and side, even the folded edge of his ear, stood out just barely from the night. I wondered if he dreamed of Rebecca. I wondered if he would try to stop me tomorrow when I insisted that he take me to the bus station. I wondered if his dreams, like his memories, would become someday a wind storm, lightning. Particles of me, my energy, the electricity of X’s nerves, flashing in the sky before it rips and groans with thunder.
I don’t remember ever approaching sleep that night, but I woke, the sheets tangled around my legs, the blanket gone altogether (found, after a moment, on the floor on X’s side of the bed). A thin bar of intense yellow sunlight split the curtains. I squinted at it. I had jolted awake on some memory, some old lesson, and now I struggled to catch whatever stray image had roused me and examine it, a pale moth in a dirty jar. Dogged, it evaded me. I retraced my first strange thoughts back through waking into whatever dream-state I had been in, a realm between sleep and sorrow. I saw the ghosts of men standing on great white blocks, scaffolding, blurred old photographs – a Sunday school project, a trip to the Rexburg library. Dimly I recalled writing notes on the construction of the Salt Lake Temple. I must have been twelve years old then. While I worked I had chewed an enormous wad of grape bubblegum, secretly and slowly, because gum was not allowed in the library. Facing X’s naked back, the remembered taste of the gum suddenly filled my mouth. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva.
It had taken forty years to build the temple. Forty years of labor, part of it during a war with the United States, who had not wanted to yield Mormon country to the Mormons. All that work, all that danger – for what? For a building. A pretty one yes; sublime, even, but can’t a religion survive without a forty-year construction project? Can’t an almighty God dwell wherever the hell he likes?
Grape bubblegum. A spiral notebook with a pink cover, filled with my childish handwriting, all curlicues and great round circles to dot the Is. Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. All that fuss over a building. All that fuss over cathedrals in Europe, pyramids in Egypt. All the fuss X makes when he draws and redraws until he gets the lines just right, the shape just right, the expression on my face just right when I take off my garments and lay them on a chair in a hotel in Rexburg, a world away. There is a cave in Southern France where, thirty-eight thousand years ago, ancient men drew by torchlight the images of animals in motion. There is a rhinoceros drawn and redrawn so that its horn rises just so from the face; behind the stark lines of the animal’s shape you can see the erasures where some long-dead man wearing only furs fussed and played until his painting looked just right. The voice of my art appreciation professor rose up in my mind like a vapor: Van Gogh once said, The world is a study of God which has turned out badly. We are all trying so hard to get something just right; even God, if you would believe Van Gogh, and for my part, I believe him more than I believe any prophet.
What drives us to press on for forty years, or a hundred, or a thousand, to create something so precise and true? What is the magic spell in the act of creation? I felt the answer was just at my fingertips where they rested tingling a millimeter from X’s skin. I touched him lightly. I ran my fingers up the length of his spine to his hairline. This was a new circuit beneath his skin, a new faint memory that would fall apart one day. He held his breath in his sleep for what seemed an eternity. Then he resumed, sleep hardly interrupted, breath audible and animal, and I stopped breathing instead for as long
as I could, until my lungs and throat burned.
4.
X found a likely spot and set up his easel, tied on his green half-apron with its burden of brushes and rags. I spread a blanket on a well-tended lawn beneath a mother and her children, petrified in bronze, dancing below the temple spires. We were surrounded by the most riotous, transient colors, X and the statue family and I: pansies and mums just getting started, intense deep violet and orange; creeping ground cover with tiny stars of white and pink; coleus with leaves like shreds of citrus peel, tart in the sun. The spring planting of tulips had mostly been excised by the Temple groundskeepers, but here and there a missed stalk stood above its quivering blade leaves, a few pale petals drooping from the white ring below the lone pistil and the ragged, spent anthers. The crush of color was intimidating. So much life here, so may bees rising and settling amid the garden beds, so many birds dashing across the grass just out of reach of the people wandering the paths in their smart Sunday clothes (though it was, in fact, Tuesday). There was a frantic feel to the garden. After a moment I realized why: most of these flowers were annuals. The tulips would sleep beneath the snow, but the rest would sigh and give up and wilt in the fall, and gardeners would dig them up and replace them next spring with more of their kind. In the meantime they did what they could to make their mark and make their seeds, to progress into their own small eternity. The great disordered shout of color wound all around the statue, Bronze Mom and Bronze Brood, dull even in the sunshine, halted mid-whirl, statuestill, while every petal of every blossom vibrated with life and with the breeze. Ring around the rosie, we all fall down – except if we’re made of bronze. Then we may be eternally perfect, sure enough, but we’ve got to watch the flowers try and die every year, year after year.
In a mood like this it was a good thing I stayed far from X. God knows how his painting might have turned out otherwise. Little black rainclouds hanging over the temple.
Baptism for the Dead Page 13