by Joseph Fink
“Who says we’re up to anything? I’m just trying to find the bathroom.”
“Who cares what anyone says?” said Pamela. “Let me tell you what I say. Somewhere in this galaxy is a moon. And it is filled with holes, that moon, and inside those holes are microbes. Life. A wisp of life, but life nonetheless. And the microbes do not know we exist. They do not know anything because they are uncomplex. They consume water molecules and other microbes, and then they expel air molecules and divide into new microbes. They do all of that without knowing why, without knowing that we are here in the same galaxy as them, and without even knowing that they are there. They don’t even know about themselves.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Pamela smiled.
“If you find out, please let me know.” She winked and snapped her fingers to the officers behind her. The handcuffs were cold and dry.
“What do you know, Pamela?” Nilanjana raised her voice as the Secret Police carried her through an exit, outside to the cruiser.
The car door closed. Pamela stood unmoving in the doorway, her face placid.
“What do you know is in the otherworld?” But Nilanjana’s words were lost in soundproof glass as the officers drove her away.
Charlie Bair left City Hall with the Haunting License clutched to his chest. He had been so anxious about whether he would get one. There had been a tightness in his chest when he tried to sleep. And then he was worried he was having a heart attack, and that worry made the tightness get worse. This cycle had left him terrified that he would die without the ability to become a ghost, and his years of journaling cool ideas for hauntings would have gone to waste. He walked with the license to his job as weekday shift manager at the Ralphs supermarket downtown. He was late, because the wait at City Hall had been way longer than he expected. But who could care about something as insignificant as scheduled work times when he had gotten something as significant as his license? The door hissed open for him, and he entered a world of filtered air, and pyramids of oranges, and a boss who had just about had it with him, but it was a world that was, unlike him, temporary. He would feel a fluttery elation for the next two days, until the floor got hot, and the ground opened up, and one of the mysterious pits appeared in the dairy section, taking out an entire case of lactose-free milk along with Charlie, who, looking up at a constellation of milk cartons in free fall above him, thought, At least I get to be a ghost now, but who was totally wrong about that.
18
Darryl looked at the fox, with its toothy smile. The other foxes sprawled around it. This was his favorite window in the church. Community. That said it all for him.
He smiled back at the fox, separating his lips and showing as much of his teeth as was possible. Smiling was an important part of worship and praise, and so teachers at church school would take everyone through the steps on a weekly basis, a fun way of starting the class.
“Step one: Separate your lips,” Ms. French, his church school teacher would say.
“Step two: Use facial muscles to pull back the corners of your mouth,” they would all chant together. “Step three: Expose as much of your teeth as possible. Step four: Widen your eyes.”
“And that is . . .” she would finish.
“That is how to be happy!” they would all shout, showing each other their teeth and feeling happy, in the simple way children can and adults spend years and much of their money trying to recapture even a moment of.
Here, as an adult, he showed his teeth to the window, and felt somewhat happy, in a complicated grown-up way. There was a lot on his mind, worries and, Smiling God help him, even doubts. And so he returned to this image of community, and he smiled at it, in order to try to quiet something that was happening inside him.
“Hey, Darryl,” said a voice. Gordon was behind him, with his teeth showing and the corners of his mouth pulled way back, in order to demonstrate how happy he was to be talking to Darryl. “Pastor Munn wants to see you.”
All the calm of his meditation on community slipped away from Darryl. Pastor Munn rarely had time to speak to individual members of the community. That’s what Gordon and the junior pastors were for. Being asked to talk to Munn was, well, Darryl had never heard of it happening before. Short of waving fists and saying “Believe in a Smiling God” at each other after services, he’d never had a conversation with her.
He hid his nervousness by showing even more teeth.
“Sure thing,” he said. “Lead the way.”
Pastor Munn’s office was one of the largest rooms in the church besides the worship hall. Darryl had only been in the office once, during an orientation meeting for church volunteers. They had sat in the front sitting area and the pastor had not even been present. Now he was ushered past this area to the intimidating desk, made from repurposed old oak. He marveled at the art on the pastor’s wall: original concept paintings for the stained glass, and a framed needlework piece stretching nearly the length of the office that said JOYFULLY IT DEVOURS! in old-timey script.
The pastor sat behind the desk. Her huge square yellow hat covered much of her face, but she was wearing her day clothes instead of the robes she wore at services.
“Darryl,” she said, with the same warm voice she delivered her sermons in. A voice that made the sermons feel like they were directed individually to each member of the congregation, rather than collectively to them all. “We don’t get to talk with one another often, do we?”
“No, Pastor.”
“You’re busy. I’m busy. We both love our work in the church so much. We sometimes forget the people who make the church what it is. Thanks for coming in for this chat.”
“We appreciate it,” Gordon said. He stood behind the pastor. His smile hadn’t changed a bit since he had approached Darryl outside.
“No problem,” Darryl said. “I just want to say how much this means to me. I mean, the Congregation is my family.”
He paused. Pastor Munn was looking right at him but somehow beyond him, several thoughts ahead.
“I mean,” he continued, “thanks for, well, I don’t know what this is about.”
The pastor smiled, not the step-by-step smile of the church, but a fluid, natural smile. She removed her hat and handed it to Gordon, who carefully placed it on a hook on the wall.
“This doesn’t have to be about anything,” she said. “I like to check in with people occasionally. Make sure that their journey with the Smiling God is going smoothly and happily.”
“She wants to check in with you,” said Gordon.
“You’re a shining example of the kindness and energy we like to see in the church, Darryl, but I hope your faith remains as strong as when I first welcomed you as an official member. Do you remember that day?”
He did. He was ten. His parents were still alive, but they traveled often. They themselves rarely went to church, using the Congregation and all of its various classes and groups to serve as a kind of babysitter for Darryl. It was during a youth class that he had met Stephanie. They became best friends. She and her family were devout practitioners of the faith, while Darryl really needed a place to be when his parents weren’t home, which was often.
Stephanie got Darryl interested in the faith itself, all of the many blessings of the Smiling God and the way It could devour all of the pain of your life. It was a beautiful story, especially when it was told to you by someone you trusted and cared for. A story never stands on its own, but exists in the context of the storyteller.
Once a year, the church holds its Youth Culling, where children can choose to become full members of the church. Stephanie convinced Darryl to join her in becoming a member. He remembered Pastor Munn’s boxy, yellow hat and flowing robes. He remembered her distant eyes as she waved her fist over his forehead. He remembered the entire Congregation singing the famous hymn:
Bring them in
Cull the children
Lead them toward the sacred Teeth
Cull them
Devour their minds clean
Ooooo Oooo
Bring them in.
“I remember it well, Pastor Munn,” Darryl said.
“Wonderful. But I am concerned,” said the pastor, frowning to demonstrate her concern. “We are all concerned. About whether you keep good company. About whether you do good things.”
“It’s concerning,” said Gordon.
Darryl didn’t say anything at first. He wasn’t certain what they knew. Were they alarmed that a scientist came to investigate the church? Did they know he and the scientist were dating (or whatever unlabeled thing they were doing)? Did they know what his time with Nilanjana had led him to do?
Some deep, childlike part of him felt that they knew everything, but he was grown-up enough to know that even if the Smiling God could see into his heart, the pastor and Gordon were as human as he was.
“I’m sorry to have concerned you,” he said carefully. “I definitely don’t want to be concerning. Maybe if you could let me know what behavior it is that is causing the problem, I could correct it.”
Pastor Munn cocked her head at him. Gordon, seeing this, cocked his head too, but by the time he had, the pastor had straightened up again, and he hurriedly followed along.
“I’m not mad. We’re not mad. Certainly the Smiling God isn’t mad. What does the Smiling God feel, Darryl?”
“Happiness,” he said, the answer he had been taught since he was a child.
“And why is It happy?”
“Because It gets to devour our sins.”
She nodded, as though pleased he was getting so many of the answers right.
“And what are your sins, Darryl?” she said.
So they knew. Darryl had been secretly reading up on the church’s history, trying to understand if and how it was connected to this other desert world. Nilanjana’s explanation of this otherworld had sounded a lot like what he knew of heaven, and he had started to wonder if heaven was a physical place, one that Carlos had apparently been trapped in. This had led to an investigation of his own. Looking into the church’s history was intentionally difficult. There were few books about the church available to members, because it was important to Pastor Munn that the traditions of the church be studied only by Elders and then shared orally, rather than allowing any literate person to interpret the religion independently.
“I just wanted to deepen my faith.”
“Deepen your faith by doing what?” she said, her voice genuinely curious.
“By understanding where we came from. And what we have to do with the otherworld, the one on the other side of the house that doesn’t exist. Is the otherworld heaven? Does the Smiling God live there?”
“That is not for you to ask!” Gordon shouted, and the pastor waved him down without looking. He crossed his arms and returned to his place behind her.
“Gordon’s right,” she said. “That is not for you to ask. An otherworld? A house that doesn’t exist? Where have you been reading these things? Why have you been reading? Who have you been talking to?”
She didn’t give him time to answer, demonstrating that she already knew.
“You exist to do what the Smiling God asks of you. No more or less. Isn’t that wonderful? Having every responsibility taken care of by a being much greater than any of us?”
“Yes, but . . .” he said.
“Do you know the difference between faith and science?” the pastor said. “Here we believe. We believe in each other, and in our community. Ours is a way of trust, of loving honesty. In science, they are taught the opposite. They are taught to doubt. Every aspect of the world, a scientist must doubt it, and test it over and over, and even then they must doubt what they’ve learned. Each thought that enters their head, they must try to disprove. Can you imagine the distrust that creates? How can there be an honest community when the entire structure of their thought is based on disbelieving the inherent truth of everything they hear?”
She shook her head sadly at the plight of scientists. Darryl searched the office for anywhere to rest his eyes that wasn’t her eyes. Bookshelves lined the walls. If only he were allowed to read some of these books, he might have the answers he was trying to find. The seven-volume A Brief History of the Congregation of Joy, which took up several feet of the bookshelf. The slim book entitled The Aspects of the Smiling God, Enumerated and Explained, for the Lay and Expert Reader Alike. There was even the controversial bestseller What’s with All the Stuff About Teeth?: The Joyous Congregation Exposed, which Darryl was surprised to see, as a normal member of the Congregation would likely be excommunicated for owning such a libelous book.
Any of those books probably held the answers he sought, but it was like the pastor said. The answers were given by the church, and members of the Congregation did not need to go looking into books for more. To do so indicated doubt, and to indicate doubt was to be unfaithful to all that the Joyous Congregation had done for him. And they had done so much for him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to understand our history better. It seemed like maybe our Congregation might have made contact with this otherworld, and brought something back with us.”
JOYFULLY IT DEVOURS! the framed needlework said, carefully hung, and centered on the wall.
The pastor laughed, a short, performative laugh. She held out her hand, and Gordon passed her the hat. She placed it, big and square, so that it shadowed her face.
“There is no otherworld, Darryl. There is only Heaven, and the will of the Smiling God. Can you follow that will?”
“Son, can you?” Gordon repeated.
“Of course,” Darryl said.
“Wonderful!” the pastor said, her voice warm and intimate again. “I’m glad we had this chat. Please drop by anytime you need to talk.”
“The pastor is busy.” Gordon gestured him out the door.
Darryl’s friends were waiting for him in the lobby.
“You spoke to the pastor? What was it like?” Jamillah said, still holding the power drill. She liked to always carry it, just in case she found herself in a situation where it would be useful. And when you always carry a power drill, almost every situation seems like a situation in which a drill would be useful.
He felt embarrassed, a little angry that his first one-on-one conversation with Pastor Munn was a reprimand. He loved his church and its people, and he understood that digging for information in banned books was bad behavior deserving of rebuke.
“It was nothing,” said Darryl.
“How long have you known us?” said Stephanie. She had worked her whole life to become a Church Elder. It was important to her to learn how to help fellow members of her Congregation through personal difficulties. It was also important to her to make sure her friends weren’t involved in anything that could hinder her goals. “Tell us what’s going on. Are you in trouble?”
Darryl thought about Nilanjana, and her investigation into the church. If she continued doing what she was doing, she was a threat, even if her questions were well intentioned. Her vague theories were a threat to Darryl’s faith in the church. She was a threat to his community. All because she believed that the church might be involved with something dangerous from the other desert world. And Darryl had believed her and wanted to help her because he liked her. A story never stands on its own, but exists in the context of the storyteller.
“I need your help,” he told his friends. “There’s a problem, and I need you to help me fix it.”
19
They kept Nilanjana overnight in the abandoned mine shaft outside of town, where they keep people who drink too much in local bars and also people who vote incorrectly in municipal elections. The cell she spent the night lying down in (sleep never came) was not bad in comparison to the dark hallway she had been arrested in. At least no one was trying to eat her.
The next morning, a hood was pulled over her head and she was put into a car. The car drove for hours. Most of it, she felt, was in circles, but she couldn�
�t tell for sure. When her hood was pulled off, she was in Old Town Night Vale, near the bus station. A man who wasn’t short was in the driver’s seat.
“Pamela wants you to know she’ll be watching you,” the man said.
A man who wasn’t tall opened her door and pulled her out.
“Pamela wants you to know that you won’t be leaving next time,” the other man said. “She wants you to know that people have been in that abandoned mine shaft for a long time. She also wants you to know that the mine shaft has free HBO.” The man shrugged. “In case you do end up there forever. Just so you know it’s not completely terrible.”
“Take care, Ms. Sikdar,” the man who was not short said, as his partner got back in the car.
“That’s Dr. Sikdar,” she said, but he was already driving away. She took stock of where she was. She was outside of a fancy salad place (WE DUG YOUR LUNCH OUT OF THE GROUND! said the sign in the window). Across the street was the Last Bank of Night Vale (FREE CALENDAR OF THE END-TIMES WITH EVERY NEW CHECKING ACCOUNT!). Sitting on a bench outside the bank was a familiar person.
“Have some ice cream,” Carlos said as she approached. He was holding two cones and offered her one.
“No thanks,” she said.
“You had a rough night. You could use ice cream.” He waggled the cone he was offering. She took the ice cream. It was her favorite, chocolate with just a little dried pasta mixed in to give it texture.
Hypothesis: Ice cream makes nothing better, but makes things feel like they’re better.
“This is my fault,” Carlos said, once she had sat next to him.
“It’s no one’s fault,” she said. “It’s not even a problem. This just means I’m getting closer to the truth.”
“But I should be the one doing the investigating. Nils, I’m sorry I dragged you into my struggle with City Hall. I wrote Pamela a note explaining it was all a misunderstanding and that you thought you needed to prove yourself to me. And that I already had all the data I needed for my one hundred percent legal scientific learning. And that it won’t happen again.”