by Sigrid Nunez
And if Jesus could cure Tracy of cancer and the flu, why couldn’t he cure Cole’s mother and father of just the flu? Why couldn’t he cure even one of them?
Which one? A voice so silky and sly it had to be the devil’s, and Cole was afraid. He knew he should have called on Jesus then, he should have started praying. But he could not. He was too angry, and Jesus was too far away.
Instead, he did something he had not done in a while. He went to the upstairs bathroom and took from a shelf the jar of cream that PW used on his hands. He felt sneaky and not a little disgusted with himself, noiselessly unscrewing the cap and taking deep whiffs, like some kind of junkie. Not for the first time, he wondered how many secrets a person could have and still be a good person.
But the magic worked. The familiar vanilla balm spread through him. The splinter was still in his heart, but for a moment, at least, he felt comforted.
Besides the group classes, there are other activities, like softball and swimming, that bring homeschooled children together each week. There are field trips: the Creation Museum, Old Settlers’ Village, the House of Rocks and Minerals, the snake farm. In good weather they go hiking or spelunking, and now that the baseball and racetrack museums in Louisville are open again (they’d been closed during the flu), there are plans to visit them soon.
Cole doesn’t usually enjoy these outings. (In the past he’d always tried to get out of class trips, and these days he’d rather stay home and draw.) But better to be with the others than alone with Tracy (herself only too glad not to be teaching on her own).
Cole gets along with the children he meets in Salvation City, though he has yet to make best friends with any of them. He has never been the kind of person who makes friends right away or has more than one or two close friends at a time. Once he’d started middle school his parents had worried that he was too shy. One day his father said, “You know, they have some great medications for shy people now, especially shy kids.” The very suggestion had brought on revulsion and paranoia (pharma mind control? no thanks), and Cole was relieved that his mother had not been on his father’s side in this. But it had always bothered him. He had always thought it was his father’s way of saying he wished Cole was more popular.
There had been an even worse period of time, before Cole got to middle school, when it seemed that almost everything he did got on his father’s nerves. It was during this time that Cole began to suspect that when his father was a kid, he might have been a bully. His mother tried to explain. “Dad’s one of those people who’s never quite sure how to be around children, maybe partly because he was an only child himself.” The good news was that as Cole grew older, things would be different. “You’ll see. You and Dad are just going to get closer and closer.” And Cole had believed her. He knew what she was saying, and that lots of men couldn’t connect with their sons until the sons were almost men themselves. And now he felt bitterly cheated.
But—in his own eyes anyway—he had never actually been the pathetically shy loner his parents were worried about. If he hadn’t been exactly popular, or even part of any crowd, that didn’t mean he was a total reject, either. The hardest part had been knowing how disappointed his father was that Cole wasn’t the kind of kid he had been: good at school (not a grind but a great tester), good at sports. Cool. He knew that both his parents would probably have been less worried if he’d cared more about being popular himself, but most of the time he did not. He saw himself as part of the large herd—one of those kids, in between the mad cool and the loser geeks, who might as well have put on magic invisible-making hats when they got up in the morning—and he accepted that.
In Salvation City, things were different. To be sure, not all kids were equal. There were apocalyptic girls, there were alpha boys, and there were rapture children. But that didn’t make everyone else invisible. And the ones who would have been called rejects and dweebs and skanks and PBs—those kids weren’t taunted. No one bullied or excluded them.
“You won’t find any bullies or gangbangers here,” PW had promised. “And just in case I’m wrong—in case I might be missing something—all you got to do is let me know. Or better yet, go to Mason. You just point out any bully to Brother Mason, and I think it’s safe to say you won’t have anything more to worry about.”
But there has been no reason to go to Mason. No bullies—and no stoners or goths or super-annoying emo types, either, except maybe Michaela’s sister, Clover, who wasn’t permitted to watch The Passion of the Christ with everyone else, not after what happened at the snake farm. It was the sight of the snakes being fed live mice that started it. At first they thought it was the gift of tongues. But that wasn’t ecstasy Clover was feeling. She had raved all the way home on the bus, terrifying the other children.
The closest thing to a bully Cole has met in Salvation City is Tracy’s niece, Starlyn. But Cole would never say anything bad about Starlyn. And besides, he can’t point to anything specific Starlyn does that could definitely be labeled bullying. It’s more of an attitude. Darlin’ Starlyn, people call her. Apocalyptic and a rapture child: how could you not have attitude?
In the same way that PW never corrects the mistakes Tracy makes when she speaks, Tracy doesn’t correct Cole’s written assignments. Every one is handed back with Eggsssellent!!! written across the top. No other comments.
“He’s plenty bright and he knows so much already. And he reads the Bible all the time, God bless him. But he isn’t into the lessons, I can tell, and he does bad on some of the tests. Honestly, though, I don’t see the point in his spending so much time and effort on most of this stuff. It would be different if we were living years ago.”
Adele has to agree with her friend. “Back in the day, I always thought about how I was preparing my kids for a chance at a good job. But it’s doubtful Cole’s going to have to worry about that.”
“Be that as it may, there are rules and Christians still have to play by them,” says Pastor Wyatt. “I do believe we are living in the end times, but the way to prepare isn’t by changing our daily lives. We should go on living right, treating others with respect and kindness, witnessing, and of course praying. But the rest should be left to God. And I don’t believe he’d appreciate us trying to second-guess him. I’d also like to remind everyone that among the highest Christian values, along with faith and purity, are accountability and self-control. And for those out there who are thinking, Guess there ain’t much point in fixing the roof, now, is there? or Hey, maybe I can stop paying my mortgage or credit card debts—well, I believe such folks are playing with hellfire.”
But Cole figures PW must also believe school isn’t important anymore, because he pays almost no attention to what Cole and Tracy are doing.
“I’m not the one to ask about academics. I was a lousy student myself.”
Cole remembers his parents saying that they could never fall in love with anyone who wasn’t smart; they couldn’t even be friends with people who weren’t smart. And though they insisted that Cole, though unfortunately lazy, was very smart, too, he used to worry that he wasn’t as smart as either of them wished.
“I married Miles for his brains,” his mother always said.
Cole doesn’t think PW would bless a marriage like that.
“Think Jesus cares how many IQ points you got?” Pastor Wyatt asks his congregation. “Remember, in this world the sharpest knife in the drawer could well be Satan.”
Cole has noticed that people in Salvation City don’t talk much about college. And he has noticed that a lot of parents don’t seem all that concerned about how much their children know about things like square roots or medieval times.
“I’m totally down with the idea that I’m not gonna grow up,” says Clemson Harley, a boy who, though a whole year younger than Cole, has already been allowed to preach (causing Cole, who has no desire whatsoever to preach, to suffer attacks of envy).
Cole doesn’t care if he never goes to college, but he finds it hard to accept never
getting to be a grown man. He’d been in a hurry to grow up for as long as he could remember. Not that he is sure what he’d do with himself as an adult, besides create comics. PW says that between Cole’s desire to explore the world and his devotion to the Word, he has the makings of a missionary. Cole knows this is something he will never be, but because he also knows that this is PW’s highest compliment, it makes him happy.
Cole has been living in Salvation City for about four months when, one day, on their way downtown to get haircuts, he and PW stop for gas. The gas station is next to a convenience store. While PW is filling the tank Cole drops into the store for a Coke. When he comes back out he glances up the road and sees a man running in their direction. Cole stands still, waiting for the man to get closer, his heart inching its way up his throat.
The same height and weight, the same tan and orange running suit, the same powerful but easy stride. Cole cannot believe his eyes, nor can he stop the bolt of maniacal joy that knocks the soda can from his hand. And then the man is there, the man is running right by him.
“Let’s go, son.” Cole thinks PW hasn’t noticed anything, but when they have driven about a mile he asks very quietly if Cole is all right. Cole says nothing; his throat is still blocked. “It’s okay, you don’t have to say.” PW reaches for Cole’s hand. “It’s not just you, son,” he tells him. “Everyone sees dead people.”
BOOTS LUDWIG, owner of the local radio station and creator and host of Heaven’s A-Poppin’!, wanted Cole to be on his show.
“I want folks out there to hear your story.”
PW agreed that anything that brought attention to the plight of orphans was a good idea.
The flu had hit most children’s homes hard, but for every empty bed there was a long waiting list of new orphans, and while they waited they slept on the floor. In most cases, there wasn’t enough staff to care for half the number of children they already had. (With the flu, the large pool of volunteers had evaporated.) Food, blankets, and medicines were also in short supply, and for lack of these things, even once the flu had waned, children died.
At the height of the pandemic, thousands of young children began showing up, sometimes without so much as a slip of paper to say who they were. Identifying and reuniting them with surviving family would take time; in some cases it might not even be possible. Those who’d grown up in the homes, or who’d been there a while, often hated the newcomers. Very quickly some homes began to resemble those Dickensian hellholes of people’s fears. The worst were almost perfect replicas of the vicious world of adults behind bars.
But real bars, at least, would have protected the children from the outside. In a real prison, a stranger would not have been able to walk in off the street, slip a baby girl into a pillowcase, and carry her off with him.
And a real prison would not have been so easy to escape. But, alone or by twos or in groups, children trooped out of orphanages every day. When they did, the best thing that could happen to them was to be caught and returned (in fact, many returned voluntarily). Usually such children went unpunished, but to help discourage others from taking the same risk, runaways were sometimes asked to tell their stories. And there were children who would have done so but found they could not; they could not find the words. (Some had lost the ability to speak at all.)
The pandemic had caused major interruptions in the production and distribution of goods, and that included the illegal ones. At the same time, it had created hordes of unprotected boys and girls. As a growing number of these children—many more girls than boys—began to disappear, it was clear that they were falling into the hands of human traffickers, whose own numbers kept growing now that other illegal trades, like drug dealing, had become much harder to ply. Evil, too, has to eat. The traffickers kept their eyes on the children’s homes, and runaways were sometimes overtaken within yards of their own front door. Sometimes the foxes didn’t wait for the chickens to fly the coop. In Boston, a man, his wife, and their teenaged daughter all volunteered to work in the same children’s home with the purpose of procuring minors for a porn ring.
Long after the last case of pandemic influenza had been diagnosed, the bodies of young people would keep turning up, victims of hunger, exposure, various infections, murder, and (more and more) suicide. But the pandemic had inured people to the sight of young corpses. Far scarier to many Americans were the living: kids of all ages who’d banded together and were surviving by their (criminal) wits, often under the head of one or more nefarious adults. Fierce and sometimes murderous gangs that had come to menace every city and suburb and many small towns, where they often outnumbered police.
In the wake of the pandemic, there was no shortage of places to hide out or squat. Houses and buildings and sometimes entire streets stood abandoned. The flu had even turned some rural villages into ghost towns. There were plenty of ordinary citizens who’d survived the virus but whose lives had been ruined by the pandemic in one way or another and who now found themselves squatting side by side with criminals. Those who’d seen the slums and shantytowns and refugee camps in countries crushed by warfare or poverty compared the new settlements to such places.
Though their house, like their income, was small, Pastor Wyatt and Tracy would have liked to take in more than one child. But, as Tracy put it: “The authorities keep banging us into walls.” In fact, they now considered it a miracle they had managed to get Cole. Even in his case, there’d been so many questions and hesitations that Pastor Wyatt had lost his temper—only to be shouted down by a child welfare official who informed him that, bad as things were, they weren’t so bad yet that people could just drop in and pick out a kid like a puppy.
“And let’s face it,” he told Pastor Wyatt unapologetically. “It wouldn’t exactly be the first time a man of God turned out to be a you-know-what.”
Boots Ludwig, though he was past seventy and had eighteen grandchildren, wanted to adopt “a whole football team and all the cheerleaders.” He spent a lot of broadcast time thundering against the system. “Let my children go!” It was a matter of urgency in more ways than one: many of the orphans were unsaved.
“If it weren’t for those godless pigheaded fools, we could get those kids right with God before it’s too late.” In which case, they would be spared the great tribulation.
Boots Ludwig liked to say the reason he loved radio so much was that he was too ugly for television. In fact, it wasn’t so much that he was ugly as that he looked as if he’d been slapped together in a rush: one of his shoulders was higher than the other and he had tiny dark eyes, like coffee beans, stuck unevenly on either side of a nose that had been broken in boyhood and had healed askew. He always dressed Western, from the boots that gave him his nickname to his hat, and he wore several chunky rings, like brass knuckles, on each hand. Of all the people Cole had drawn, drawing Boots was the most fun. PW said Boots was only joking about the reason he preferred radio. The truth was, both men regarded it as the superior means of spreading the Word.
“The idiot box has a way of putting everything on the same superficial plane. Plus the remote encourages a short attention span.”
Contempt for TV was one thing PW and Cole’s parents had in common.
“Televangelism,” said PW. “To most folks today it’s a dirty word. I can’t tell you how much I hate the word myself. Oh, I can see how it looked like a great idea at first, preacher’s dream, beaming the Good News into millions of homes—where’s the downside? But just look what happened. Greed, theft, false testimony, megalomania, cult of personality. I’m not saying Satan created TV, I’m just saying he really knows how to work it.”
Also like Cole’s parents, PW thought people would be better off with a lot less “e” and “i” in their lives.
“I’m all for Christians connecting online, sharing stories and music and videos and such. But remember, it’s always better to be together, in church or some other safe place, worshipping or doing Bible study or community service—whatever—than to be sitt
ing home alone clicking away.”
Cole had always thought it was lame the way so many ordinary people wanted to post pages with photos of themselves and lists of all their favorite things and have everyone follow their every dumb move—like, who cared? He’d never kept a journal, but he was sure if he ever did he wouldn’t want it to be where the whole world could read it! What would be the point? Still, it was way strange at first, living in a house where the only computer you were allowed to use was in the breakfast nook (he was still in the hospital when he learned that his laptop, along with his parents’ laptops and everything else of value, had been looted from their house in Little Leap) and set up so that every site you browsed could be checked by someone else. His parents had never done that, but they would have approved of PW’s preaching a gospel of a less noisy and distracted life. They would have given an amen to his call for the need to break the hold the Internet had on people’s lives, especially young lives. Say what you would about the pandemic, at least it had helped slow down the rat race. It had also got people thinking more about the world to come. In communities like Salvation City, life had become simpler and more purpose-driven. People were sticking closer to home, spending more time with their families. And everywhere church attendance had soared.
According to Pastor Wyatt, what Christians had needed to figure out was that they’d had it right before. Dirtying their hands in politics, trying to influence the government and change the laws—all that he and many other Christians now declared a mistake. “We only made fools of ourselves. Everyone seemed to forget the saying that politics is the art of compromise, and that’s just not where our church is at. What do we care how we look to the rest of the world? What matters is how we look to God. Why should we waste energy trying to win other folks’ respect? Don’t we got a more important job than that? I want my flock to care less about what secular folks are up to and more about their own spiritual lives.”