Panorama City

by Antoine Wilson

  I was staring at the words when Scott Valdez walked up, I hadn’t spoken to him since I had first met him, I had spent more time with JB and others. Scott stood in front of me with his pineapple of a head and said that he had noticed my studiousness, my seriousness of purpose, his words, and my interest in the Old Testament. And then he said the name of the chapter I was reading, which I realized as he said it was pronounced like Joe with a B at the end, and not like a job you would work at. Which is the thing about reading, just when you think you’ve solved a word, it turns out to be wrong. He asked me what I thought. I told him I was doing my best to understand. He said that God tests us each in our own way. I agreed with that, everyone was different. It wasn’t until later that I was able to absorb the words of Job, right then I had no idea what Scott was talking about, really, and I don’t lie, I don’t like to have to keep track of an alternate universe that doesn’t exist, but in that moment I didn’t feel like telling Scott I wasn’t getting anywhere with the Bible, I didn’t want to disappoint Scott, I wanted to understand the Bible. But as I said before, Scott was a thinker.

  Scott waited until I was about to leave, I hadn’t made it much farther in the Bible than where I’d started. He asked me to come into his office, which in some ways reminded me of Roger the manager’s office at the fast-food place, I mean it was about the same size, except that instead of being cluttered and full of piled-up things it was neat and organized. Scott sat in his chair, which looked adjustable but was locked in an upright position. His short arms moved a computer monitor to the side so we could see each other. I was terrified that he wanted to talk about Job, I felt like I had been caught in a lie, a lie I hadn’t really told, but a lie that had settled on me, like a pigeon. He told me how much he appreciated my help around the Lighthouse Fellowship, how much my enthusiasm meant to him, how despite my short time at the Fellowship so far I’d become a part of the family, thanks in large part to my friendliness and can-do attitude. He thanked me for all of the light-bulbs I’d changed and apologized for taking advantage of my height, of my being the tallest person in the Fellowship. Getting down to brass tacks, his words, he wanted to give me a token of appreciation. I let him know that I enjoyed being helpful, that I didn’t need anything. He handed me a tape recorder. I thanked him, I didn’t know what to say. He told me the gift would make sense in a moment. He pulled open a file cabinet, grabbed a thick zippered binder, something a businessman might carry around, and set it down in front of me. I unzipped the binder and looked inside. A dozen plastic pages with four cassettes on each page. I didn’t know what they were for, I spent a minute counting them up, waiting for Scott to talk. He told me that it was the King James Bible, old and new testaments, with music and atmospheric sounds. He didn’t say anything about me not being a strong reader, he didn’t say anything about how I would be able to get through the Bible on tape but not on paper, he never said anything about my reading skills or lack of reading skills. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to say that since I obviously struggled with reading, I should listen to the Bible on tape, it would have been completely natural to say that, but Scott didn’t say that. Juan-George, I did not yet know that the Lighthouse Fellowship was a hotbed of philosophical and spiritual perversity, I did not yet know that while I was trying to be faithful, while I was trying to understand, I could not be, and I would never understand. But I want you to know that regardless of his beliefs, independent of his beliefs, Scott Valdez was not only kind to me, but kind to me in a way that involved thinking and use of the imagination, he had taken a moment to picture the world through my eyes, and he had seen that my gift was gab rather than the printed word, he had come to that insight, he had acted on it, and yet there was no sense of victory. He wasn’t interested in gloating over his powers of perception, he wasn’t interested in stepping into my shoes and then stepping right back out, it was more important to him to help me achieve what I was trying to achieve, which at the time was to read the Bible.

  So began my religious education. It wasn’t your grandfather’s wish that I should have a religious education, he had always felt that religion had done him no good and that he had been lucky enough to have the mental fortitude to escape it, he didn’t want to trap his son in the same situation, which Aunt Liz thought was a shame, which Aunt Liz thought was throwing the baby out with the bathwater, all of which I learned after your grandfather died, all of which I learned from Aunt Liz over the dinner table on those rare occasions when she felt like sharing a piece of family history, which usually had to do with being exasperated with her brother, my father, your grandfather, and the life he had led and the way he had brought me up, triggered by her concerns that through situation and weak will and lack of religion your grandfather had single-handedly brought the family line, the Porter family line, to an unnecessarily premature end, to a collapse, what Paul Renfro would scientifically call submitting to entropy, to a collapse she would realize, as she was saying all of this, was embodied by me, embodied by her nephew, a realization that would be followed by a series of apologies for the implication, her word, that I represented some kind of Porter family dead end, an implication physically refuted, I can now say, by you, Juan-George.

  That night I listened to the first tape, where God spends a week creating everything and Adam and Eve get kicked out of the garden. Some later sections sounded like a telephone directory without the numbers, just name after name, I wondered why God had left them all in. It is a confusing book, Juan-George, it contradicts itself, I don’t know why anyone would found a religion based on it. But I can’t really say, I wasn’t there. It took a while before I got to Job, before I understood what Scott meant about God testing each of us in our own way. Job was a rich, happy person and a great believer in God. Satan, who is the villain in the book, seemed to think that the only reason Job was so faithful was that he was lucky and rich. What if, Satan wondered, what if you made Job’s life miserable? Would he still believe? It was a sort of experiment, a clinical trial he wanted to run. Now, I’m not God, I’m not working with all of the information God had, but if I was God I would have stopped everything right there. For some reason, though, God tells Satan he can do whatever he wants. So Satan takes Job’s riches away and kills his children, which is a terrible thing to do. And Job remains faithful to God. He passes the test. But his children stay dead. The Bible doesn’t get into what kind of test they were undergoing, they just die, that’s it for them. People are always being tested in so-called biblical times, God and Satan can’t seem to leave them alone. Another time God tells a guy named Abraham to kill his own son, and then just when Abraham is about to do it, God tells him not to. Another loyalty test. And again, the guy’s son has no say in the matter, his job is just to lie there and be killed.

  TEMPTATION

  O: Are you asleep, mi amor?

  [No response.]

  O: There is a spider on your face.

  [No response. Breathing.]

  O: That’s a little trick, Juan-George, to make sure someone’s really asleep. There’s no spider.

  When Maria the Psychic walked into the Lighthouse Fellowship coffee shop she didn’t walk in like a member of the church, but she also didn’t walk in like a coffee shop customer would, she walked in as if she was walking into a stranger’s house, she tiptoed across the threshold, one hand on the doorjamb, and said hello like it was a question. I had never seen her before. It had been what people liked to call a slow day for God, nobody had come in for coffee or flyers or guidance. I’d been peeling address labels and applying them to envelopes, Jan and Mark were doing the stuffing and sealing. They were longtime Lighthouse members, always together, pale, they looked like they never went outside. Jan had Band-Aids on her fingers from all the paper cuts, Mark had strange, wiglike hair, I mean it was big and dark and curly, but more than that, there was a strip of stubble at his hairline, it looked like he’d shaved his head and plopped a wig on over it and the wig had fallen back on his head ex
actly one quarter inch. I waited for him to say something, typically Mark did all the talking when he and Jan were together, I don’t know why, Jan’s voice was more commanding, Mark’s words always sounded like they were going into his mouth rather than coming out. I waited, Mark said nothing. He and Jan pretended that Maria did not exist, which surprised me. I walked over, I left the labels and envelopes, I introduced myself and asked her if there was anything I could do. She told me her car wouldn’t start, she asked if we had any jumper cables. I turned to Jan and Mark, I assumed they had heard the question, she hadn’t whispered it, neither of them looked up, I asked them if they had jumper cables and Mark mumbled that they did not. I couldn’t understand why he was being unfriendly. The coffee shop existed for situations like this, to draw in strangers, to attract with the promise of familiar things people who might listen to a word or two about Jesus and the church. I walked back to Scott Valdez’s office and asked him if he had jumper cables. He did. He made sure that I knew how to use them, which I did, I’m not a driver, I don’t drive, but I have always been handy with cars, there was always some repair work for me to do around Madera. Scott threw me his keys and went back to doing whatever he was doing, reading the Bible, probably. When I emerged from Scott’s office back into the coffee shop area, Maria had retreated to just outside the doorway of the coffee shop, she was barely visible. Jan and Mark kept their eyes down, they reminded me of the people at the bus stop the time I brought fries and a Coke for the skateboard kid who hadn’t showed up. They were paying intense attention to nothing in particular, you could see it a mile away.

  Once I got outside, once I stood in front of this small Latina woman with dark hair, once I saw her in the light of day, I realized she was making my heart pound, which took me by surprise but also made me more inclined to help her and more confused about Jan and Mark. I suppose you will have heard by now of the expression inner beauty, people like to talk about inner beauty to make sure that everyone doesn’t fall for outer beauty, which can be deceiving, which often isn’t an indicator, really, of what someone’s going to be like. But you know, there are certain women, when you see them, when they enter a room, it doesn’t matter what their personalities might be like, it doesn’t matter if they are thinkers of depth and sophistication, it doesn’t matter if they are just plain mean, you still have to, you’re compelled to, pay attention to them. Whether you like it or not you know where they are in the room at all times. Maria was one of those women, and once I stopped worrying about Jan and Mark, it was difficult for me to think of anything or anyone else. This is known as love-at-first-sight, which Paul Renfro later called romantic love, which he said many poems and songs had been written from, and which was in fact a tactic of future generations reaching back through time to assert their right to exist, his words.

  You can expect to suffer from it at least once in your life. Your mother and I, as I’ve already mentioned, didn’t exactly begin our relationship with love at first sight, in fact we did not experience that at all, which does not mean we are not in love, which does not mean we didn’t find true love, lasting love, love which had I not ended up in this hospital bed would have gone on into old age. But when Maria looked at me, looked at the keys in my hands, and smiled, well, that was something different. In some ways Maria reminded me of your mother, an imaginary younger version of your mother, your mother as she might have been had she not had to work so hard her whole life, she was about the same height as your mother, though thinner, and her hair was the same color, though more evenly so, and she was Mexican, though from, I would discover later, a prominent family, and she was beautiful, as your mother had been once, as I could still see in your mother, or, I don’t know how to say it, Maria’s outer beauty reminded me of your mother’s inner beauty and in some ways her outer beauty too.

  Her blue Camry was at the other end of the parking lot, I had the keys to Scott Valdez’s white Mustang. I opened the trunk and pulled the jumper cables out, prepared to hand them over. Maria shifted her shoulders and said that she would need the jump, from the Mustang, not just the cables but the actual boost to get her car started. I wondered aloud how we might bring the Camry close enough for us to jump-start it. She suggested that I could drive Scott’s Mustang across the lot, to bring it alongside the Camry, I mentioned that I didn’t drive, and so she suggested she could do it. I was sure Scott wouldn’t mind, after all, Jesus would have moved the car, if he knew how to drive, which he wouldn’t historically, but divinely he could figure it out. Maria got behind the wheel and started the car and put it in gear, I think, I was standing next to it, holding the cables in my hand. Suddenly Scott appeared, throwing his short arms across the hood, red-faced and yelling at her to get the hell away from his car. I explained that she was the woman who needed the jump-start, but Scott didn’t seem to hear me, he was entirely focused on her. She told Scott that this had nothing to do with him, she just wanted to get the Camry started. He demanded his keys, he put out his hand, he demanded them. Then he told her he was happy her car wouldn’t start, it served her right, his words. Maria looked at me, I was frozen where I stood, she looked at me and said at least someone around here knows how to behave like a Christian, then she turned to Scott and said that he had just bought himself a karmic ticket to a living hell, her words. I explained to Scott that I was just trying to help. He told me that I had no idea what I was dealing with, that Maria did the devil’s work, that it always starts with a little help here, and a little help there, and next thing you know you’re out in the desert being tempted, did I remember the part where Jesus is out in the desert being tempted? I hadn’t gotten there yet. He told Maria to stay at her end of the parking lot, to leave his flock alone, he told her to call the auto club. She walked away, toward her car, then into the storefront at the other end of the mini-mall, the one with the neon pyramid in the window. She disappeared behind rustling doorway beads, like a fish jumping back into water. Scott asked for his keys. He pulled me into his office and explained that while naturally it wouldn’t be obvious to me, Maria had refused to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart and had instead pursued a path of necromancy and devil worship. She had followed a black path, his words, and I should avoid her at all times. The battle between good and evil played itself out everywhere, he said, and our mini-mall was no exception.

  I could not comprehend how someone so naturally beautiful and seemingly kind could be aligned against all of the values that Scott Valdez held in high esteem but I didn’t say anything. I went back to Jan and Mark and the labels, and when I heard the tow truck in the parking lot, the auto club tow truck coming to give Maria’s dead Camry a jump-start, I felt a pang in my heart. At the Lighthouse Fellowship I had come to understand what was proper and what was improper, what was holy and what was unholy, what was good and what was bad, and yet my heart was going in the exact wrong direction. I wanted more than anything to ride a bicycle around the block. Riding a bicycle is the way my head figures things out, the pedals go around in circles, like thinking, but the bicycle moves forward, like an idea.

  The next day after work I headed to the Lighthouse again, but when I got to the mini-mall some mysterious force drew my eyes to the other end of the parking lot. Some mysterious force told me that I shouldn’t enter the Lighthouse but instead go talk to Maria. Some mysterious force needed to know what was going on behind the bead curtain and neon pyramid in the window. At the time, in the moment, I felt like I was experiencing temptation, I felt like something ungodly was tempting me over to the other side, if anyone had asked me what I was doing as I walked over to Maria’s storefront I would have said that I was succumbing to temptation. I would have used the word temptation rather than the words some mysterious force, in part because I had begun to see life as a test, I had begun to get the feeling that I was being tested by God, that rather than testing things myself, rather than being the lead investigator in my own clinical trial, God was running a clinical trial, in which I was the lead subject, whic
h is no way to live, Juan-George, anyone with half a thought in their head could have told me that God wasn’t organizing a whole universe simply for the purpose of testing me. And yet there was the Bible, in the Bible God was always testing everyone, over and over again God took time out of his busy schedule of earthquakes and athletic conquests and glorious sunsets to put individual faithfulness to the test. Such thinking seems absurd to me now, Juan-George, it seems preposterous in about five different ways, but at that moment it was very real. You will no doubt go through a period in life when you believe that you are at the center of everything, it is an interesting period to go through, it is good for the development of one’s thinking, but it is also one of the most important periods to come out of. The moment I walked into Maria’s place of business, the moment I passed through the bead curtain, I believed, or I felt, or I thought it possible, as I once had felt or believed or thought possible in the early parts of my childhood, that I, Oppen Porter, was at the center of the universe, that I was being tested by God, that I was up there next to the judge, so to speak, being put on trial, and I was terrified, I knew that by walking into Maria’s place of business I was betraying Aunt Liz, and God, and Dr. Rosenkleig, and JB, and Scott Valdez.