Mission to America (7 page)

“I'm full of hot fudge and ice lard and I'm sluggish.”

“Insulin overload from simple sugars.”

Lauer was my model as a Human on Earth.

He asked me for our “location” in Wyoming and then why we hadn't “entered” Colorado yet, where “the population” was “denser and more affluent.” I was used to his word ways, but “affluent” still nicked me. In the Church of my childhood, money stayed out of sight behind the things it bought, which weren't much to look at. Most were things to eat, and most things to eat were obtained with Virtue Coupons, which weren't even money, at least to my eye. But when Lauer let rip with his mansion, it cut a string in us. It released some new balloons. Women began to lounge around on sofas that were actually two sofas shoved into an L-shape, or even three sofas joined to form a U, reading catalogs issued by merchants we'd never traded with who dealt in fripperies we'd never needed, such as a wondrous clock one lady fell for that displayed information about the weather—the weather right outside her kitchen window, whose sill was where she'd put the clock! Bluff's men flew off in much puffier balloons. Street by street and block by block, they started building additions out of redwood, that showy lumber unwelcome in our midst since the time of the fire in the 1960s, when a mine foreman used redwood for a deck that obliterated his front yard and swept out to the border of the sidewalk. When the Seeress kicked the monstrous projection during one of her weekly Spirit Strolls, and when a young girl who'd spied the kick (my mother) larked through the co-op singing out the news, the deck reinfolded faster than the Discourser turning into an aphid on a rose, taking a class of lumber with it. Decades passed and everything was fine, but then, thanks to Lauer, our resident Human on Earth, redwood unreinfolded with a vengeance, billowing out in hillside-castle form and then popping up as gazebos and extra bedrooms and backyard sheds for storing an old sofa.

Sometimes I wondered if Lauer had sent me here to give himself a freer hand back there, maybe to erect a tall new guesthouse. I'd been awfully loose and loud around the co-op with my views about his redwood.

I had the phone up flat against my ear as Lauer praised the team of missionaries whose region was the Northwest and California for gaining a meeting with a young executive from an expanding computer firm. After taking the Well-being Quiz, the man had signed up for a twelve-week course of classes, to be conducted through the mail, in Edenic Nutritional Science. The missionaries had hooked him, Lauer said, by postering a natural foods store—a trick that he said we should try. He said that the people who shopped in these establishments were just the type we wanted as AFAs. This put me on edge. I'd thought the people we wanted were the people who wanted us. Or who needed us, but didn't know it yet.

I decided to hold Lauer back by talking more. I felt he'd forgotten the central truth with telephones. They only work in pairs.

“We met some Wiccan youth in a Casper sweetshop. I'm there right now. I'm in the parking lot. I just stuck our prettiest tract, the one on friendship, on the window of a scraped-up Volvo. That's one of the car makes we've been zooming in on.” I summarized the system then, playing down the poor cars stuffed with rucksacks whose drivers might be headed for the nuthouse as cars we primarily tracted out of fairness, to balance all the dented Cadillacs. Lauer didn't comment. He didn't peep. I shifted to explaining about Wiccans. I built them up some, maybe quite a bit. My aim was to portray them as worthwhile prospects, good people who'd slipped a little in the sand but could easily be transformed into allies. I hinted that Casper was one of their new footholds, although they'd spread through Colorado, too.

“Give away many copies of
Luminaria
?” It was as if he'd just picked up his phone after letting it cool on a table for a while.

“Not boxes and boxes. A few. A healthy few. In a minute I'll take a copy to the Wiccans.”

“Save that. Save that copy,” Lauer said. Then he stopped. He didn't pause—he stopped. A pause means the person has something more to say.

“Can I be completely honest with you here?”

In the instant before I asked this question, before my mind sent the order to my lips and while I still had time to say some other thing, my higher mind—my Etheric, floating mind—reasoned out, composed, and signed a pledge never again to ask it in my lifetime, and not to ask it now, if possible. The pledge was swiftly delivered to my lower mind and its logic thoroughly explained (requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along—and eventually it always brings on a fight) and my lower mind agreed to take the pledge as well, and did. Which is the whole mystery. Right there. The reason we had a Seeress. And books. And a town in a place where a town did not belong.

Because I asked the question anyway, after both my minds had promised not to.

“Can I be completely honest with you here?”

My bafflement over violating my pledge brought on more rushes of Etheric Reasoning. There's a rock up ahead; if you don't watch out, you'll trip. The hazard's as clear as day. And then you trip. That's your mystery—but here's your error: glaring at the rock like it's the rock's fault. And here's your next one: kicking at the rock, because now you've decided it's
your
fault that you tripped and that you and your foot deserve a little pain.

Which entitles you to a dish of ice cream afterward, or a platter of fried potatoes glopped with cheese.

Instead you should have looked up at the sky and wondered at the fact that you have a foot.

My partner and the Wiccans needed me. I had their answers for them.

“No,” said Lauer. “Let
me
be honest with
you
.”

A biting lecture on perseverance ensued, but I didn't listen to most of it. I wanted to ask Lauer about Sarah, whom I'd dreamed had already found another man—a widower in his late thirties named Layman Markey who lived up the street from my parents and kept trim by lifting barbells on his redwood deck. His tiny blond wife had been killed two winters ago when a Highway Department sand truck hit her Plymouth, and Layman was living comfortably off the settlement—one of the only single men in town capable of buying Sarah her Saab. I'd noticed her watching him in the co-op one day as he was scooping bulk dog food into sacks, the muscles in his forearms like wind-carved sandstone.

“If the Church has any financial future at all,” Lauer said, “it's as a human growth enabler.”

“Elder Stark isn't eating right,” I said.

“That's expected. That'll die down. I'd like to talk with him.”

“He's with the Wiccans in the Sweety-Freeze, except I don't see them at their tables now. I'm in the parking lot looking at the window.”

“Kids have parents. Try to meet their parents. Their parents might be professionals. Find out.”

“I get a feeling their parents aren't around much.”

There was a surge of static on Lauer's end, suggesting that he wasn't calling from Bluff, where the Church's First Council had forbidden cell phone towers out of a fear that their transmissions warped the ether. He might have been calling me from anywhere: while boarding an airplane, pacing in a hotel room, or waiting in the lobby of a TV station to give another inspirational interview. Five days ago he'd phoned us from a sailboat but hadn't specified which lake or sea. When I'd asked where he was, all he'd said was: “Nine miles out.” This made me think it had to be a sea.

The static cleared and I heard him say, “. . . to Jackson. Jackson Hole. I'd rather have you there.”

“How far is Jackson from Casper? It's still Wyoming?”

“Or maybe one of the Colorado ski towns. I'll be blunt: you're plowing barren earth. And the women you're meeting aren't of any consequence. Tell me about that aspect. I'd love to hear.”

I lifted my downcast eyes from my cheap shoes, whose style, I'd realized the other afternoon, marked me as a young man to be pitied and only approached for favors like driving directions or change for a dollar, not growth enablement. Across the lot Elder Stark and the four girls were standing around an old white Pontiac sports car whose flame-decaled hood was propped up. My partner leaned over the engine, reached his hands in, and grabbed ahold of something that didn't move but probably was meant to move. The girls seemed glum. They wanted to be somewhere. The top girl sat looking annoyed behind the wheel, a lovely bored sourpuss like on the dating shows.

“Snowshoe Springs, Colorado,” Lauer said. “I'm looking at my atlas. It's four hours south. I spoke at a conference there once, at the big golf course. Lots of fine stores and second homes. Gentleman ranchers. Retired medical specialists.”

“If that's your preference, sure.”

“This system of yours for selecting cars to tract?”

“Yes?” So he'd listened. I warmed toward him a bit.

“This is the social, geographic version. The people who tend to cluster in prime locales, in the towns I've just mentioned, they constitute a network. Open one door, it opens other doors. Many, many doors. Along a hallway. Just move down that hallway and keep on knocking and don't get discouraged if most times no one answers. All you need is a fraction, a percentage. Go to Snowshoe Springs. Get out of Casper. All you need is half of one percent. But not of Casperites. Of Coloradoans.”

“Do you ever see Sarah around? My Sarah? Kimmel?”

No answer. He'd covered his subjects. He'd drifted off again.

“I shouldn't call her mine. You're right,” I said. I was acting like he was still there to bring him back.

“No,” said Lauer. No to what, though?

“I had a nervous dream. She'd met a man.”

“Life progresses predictably. I'm sorry.”

“Sarah Kimmel's life or general life?”

“It's all one tide,” said Lauer. “It's all one flow.”

“Layman Markey?”

“Here's some sage advice. You're there, on the road, on your way to Colorado. Bluff is in Montana, far away. Be where you are. Let others be where they are. ‘What should be, is.' Remember.”

“What should be, is.” Our great motto came out like a single word, as always. “So where are you right now?” I asked the Human. Besides on Earth. In a brain aquarium.

“In transit,” it responded. “I'm in transit.”

The top girl did have parents,
as it came out—they just weren't in town that night, she said. They'd driven to Denver with friends to see a concert, of what sort of music the top girl wasn't sure, although I guessed from looking around the home—constructed from two identical chipboard half-homes whose joint was visible in the stucco ceiling as a long yellow splotchy line of water damage—that it wasn't the opera or one of the great choirs. The parents did appreciate their art, though. They'd hung it everywhere, on all their walls: photographically accurate paintings of Indian chiefs, misty sky scenes of migrating white geese, and above the toaster, a barbed-wire Jesus cross with a whittled twig Jesus glued to a barnwood plank. The art collection was reaching, in its way, toward some whispery spacious statement about courage, or maybe grief, or gratitude. Whatever the broad intent, it touched my bosom. Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.

The top girl, named Sherri, and her followers (after some phone calls, the tribe had grown to six) were heating a pan of dark broth that they believed would grant them the power of invisibility, which they'd promised to demonstrate for us if we came home with them. Elder Stark had said “Lead on” for both of us and tried to convince me in the van, as we followed the Pontiac up a cracked state highway marred by swooping, scary-looking skidmarks that might have been the results of vain attempts to spare the lives of death-intent small beasts, that tonight was our chance to begin our mission in earnest.

“We've let ourselves get too inner, too snailed up. The people who cross our trail, it's for a reason.”

“You had a ‘prompt.'”

“I have them all the time.” He rubbed his nose, which was red and drippy suddenly, and cleared his sinuses by loudly snuffling, though Apostles are taught that it's preferable to blow.

“You bought that old gambler's anti-hunger drug.”

He didn't deny a single word.

“You eat ice lard for supper and now you're some sad drug crook.”

“Illumined All-in-One,” my partner said, as if he was setting out to really pray. But that was as far as he took it. Pretty weak.

“How much did you pay?”

“Not half of what it's worth. I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind. Does that squeeze ever bother you? That lack of skull space?”

“Does it feel like it's wearing off?”

“I damned well hope not.”

The Wiccan girls set out barbecue potato chips and opened a case of room-temperature beer that Elder Stark and I declined in favor of glasses of tap water with lemon slices. My partner did accept a cigarette, though, taking advantage of conflicting teachings on tobacco use, which Little Red Elk permitted for special ceremonies but Mother Lucy had abhorred. He stood in the doorway, exhaling complex blue clouds into the orange radiance of a bug light mounted on a pole beside the steps, and talked fancy doctrine with Sherri's sister, Karly, a thin brunette whose disfiguringly large breasts caused her to keep her arms crossed and hump her back.

“Who's trying this with me? Volunteers?” asked Sherri. She held out the hot pan with padded oven mitts and two of the girls bent over to sniff the broth, which had pine needles floating on top and smelled like drain mold. One girl backed away but another got a coffee cup, dipped it half full, and raised it to her lips. She couldn't quite do it, though. She poured it back.

“Come on, all you chickenshit witches,” Sherri said.

“Yucky.”

“I tried it last Friday. It's someone else's turn.”

“I have to go pick up my stepdad from drunk-driving class.”

Everyone but Sherri had some excuse. She, though, partook directly from the pan, tilting it back until nothing was left but grit. Afterward, she joined me on the sofa, where I'd turned on a show about two fashion models who'd been forced to survive in the Arctic for a month eating seal fat and sleeping in army tents. I was glad to have TV again. Its shapes and colors changed faster than those in nature and seemed to reach a deep layer inside my eyes that had gone unused since I was born. I suspected that there were other parts of me, other organs, other faculties, awaiting unreinfolding by Terrestria. I felt curious about what they were but my hope was they'd take turns emerging, not come in gangs.

“It takes a minute, you don't just vanish,” said Sherri. “Also the moon might not be right tonight. Ideally, you want it either new or full.”

“Your parents aren't Wiccans,” I said. “They're Prince of Flocks types.” I caught my old habit then. “Christ Jesus folks.”

“That cross by the toaster? It was there when we moved in. They're actually nothing. Just fun-and-money people. My dad works on oil rigs, murdering the earth, and Katrina, my stepmom—really, she's just Dad's girlfriend; maybe they're legally married, but I doubt it; she came here one night for a threesome with my real mom but then, when my dad liked her better, my real mom left; we hear she deals Pai Gow poker in Reno now—just sits in the kitchen drinking Cokes all day and blows my dad's paychecks calling psychic hotlines. Like anything's ever going to change for her until she loses thirty pounds. And waxes.”

“But you think there's more to life, don't you?”

“I sure wish.”

“That wishing part of you?” I said. “Try to keep it a certain size. I'm not saying go get rid of it, just . . . keep it walking. Don't let it gallop and buck and toss you off.” I turned on her one of the Person One hypnotic looks that Lauer said were irresistible.

“Was that from that Indonesian man on
Oprah
?”

“A woman named Lucy. Apostles call her Mother. She lived a life of quiet charmed attainment. She mastered the whole Hebrew language in one daydream. She reattached a farmer's pointer finger by holding it against the stump and humming. Mostly she taught the idea of smoother wishing.”

“What did she think about the Bible?”

“Which?”

Sherri came to believe I'd told a joke, but it took a minute, and when she laughed it took me a minute to know why she was laughing: because she thought I'd been funny, obviously. The problem was that I couldn't remember how by then, or even precisely what I'd said. I laughed along with her, though, because it's pleasant. Things had grown very pleasant with the two of us, as if we were both Person Ones at the same time—or two Person Twos against everybody else.

“What about sin and redemption and all that?” she said.

“The Serpent? You mean the Serpent?”

“That's where it starts, I guess.”

“What does?”

“Evil.”

“Why? Which one of the evils? You mean the Follies?”

“Just explain it, okay? Don't make me poke around.”

“I didn't mean to do that. I hate that, too. Like when somebody smiles just to make you ask how come? Is that what you think I just did about the Serpent?”

“Fuck the fucking Serpent. Let's just drop it.”

“I think I just realized what Bible you meant back there. Here's the tale on that one. They wrote it backward, using opposites. Original sin? It's original redemption. That's the way it used to read, at least, before they had to put it into code. You know why they did that? I'll tell you.”

“I believe you.”

“You don't want the reason behind it?”

“I don't need one. It's a cool weird idea and it's neat you think it's true.”

“Well, good. Okay. Can I tell you something, Sherri?”

“What?” she said.

“That was a pleasant gesture there. I like it when young women just believe me.”

We'd drifted in across the sofa by then, drawn toward a mushy low spot in its center where the springs had given out. Not once had she looked away while I was speaking, and by the time I thanked her, our legs were touching, not with pressure but lightly, thoughtlessly, like the legs of two schoolmates sitting on a bench. Having never held someone's attention so thoroughly, nor felt it being offered to me so freely, I wasn't prepared for the tenderness it roused. A mission didn't have to feel like work.

Sherri let go of a question she'd been holding: “If you're saying there's nothing wrong with us . . . ?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Then why does it feel so fucked up?”

“Comparison. I'm this, you're that. I'm tall, that makes you short. It doesn't make you anything at all, though. Unless you have a stake in Fake Esteeming, like maybe you think you're the prettiest in town and think if you're going to stay the prettiest, that's a fair trade for believing that you're short. That's how it operates. It's a marketplace. I'll be the strongest so you can be the smartest and in return I'll also be not rich, because money is not what I care about. It's strength. And on and on and round and round.”

Sherri had the Child look in her eyes. Not all the way, but it was creeping in.

“I get it,” she said, “and it's cool, but why's it bad? It sounds like it kind of works out for everyone?”

“Not for the ugliest,” I said. “It doesn't work out for the girl who's stuck with that one. Or the dirtiest. Or the biggest nincompoop. Or fish mouth and pig butt—”

“I know, it's really sick. Still—and I'm not being mean here, or stuck-up—there aren't a lot of those people. The bottom types. It's horrible, sure, and grotesque and sad and everything, but—”

“It's just the price we have to pay? One or two fish mouths, a hundred Cinderellas? I'll be pig butt, you can all be . . . ? I'm out of examples here. You give me one. Something lots of people love to be.”

“So did Christ have to die? It sounds like maybe not.”

“Why does a Wiccan care? What are you, anyway?”

“I live in Wyoming. A lot of people care here. I have to talk to them every day at school.”

“Can I maybe finish up on my thing first? On why it's not just bad because of fish mouth, even though that's really pretty bad?”

“I want you to. Go ahead.”

“I'd like some beer now. Apostles drink sometimes. I'm parched. I'm dry.”

“Maybe instead of a beer you'd rather kiss me? Get your mouth wet that way?”

“Maybe so.”

“So go ahead and try. What's stopping you?”

First, there was the matter of Sherri's youth. Because I'd seen her drive a car, I guessed that she had to be at least sixteen, but age was hard to judge here, and I was antsy. Young women in Bluff could be dated by their hairstyles: bobs and pigtails until they reached eleven, bangs and ponytails until fifteen or so, and then a stretch of growing their hair out long until after the Frolic, when they tied it up, not letting it down again until they married, when they tended to experiment a little before their children came. Here, though, everything was flexible. I'd seen thirty-year-olds who dressed like they were twelve, in cheap plastic sandals and T-shirts much too small for them. I'd also seen twelve-year-olds who wore dark glasses and carried credit cards in leather purses with clasps and hinges that could have been true gold.

Sherri held out one hand and said, “I'm shimmering. That's how it starts. If you slit your eyes, you'll see it.” She rested the hand, palm up, on my left knee, and though its crosshatched lines were indistinct, showing, perhaps, that her life would not be long (the lifelines in my palms were not so promising either), the rest of the hand looked as solid as before.

“Do you have a girlfriend back home?”

“I did. Not now.”

“You shouldn't buy shoes made of vinyl.”

“I've determined that.”

“You're sweet,” said Sherri. “I like your thoughts. Your games. That one you tried when we first sat down together? Being short at first, then rising taller?”

This horrified me, if it was true. And it might have been true. I'd proved that earlier, when I'd asked permission to be honest.

I adjusted myself to Sherri's exact same stature, a fussier procedure than it sounds. Also, when she seemed to notice me doing it, she arched away a tad. Measurably so.

I'd meandered into some contest I couldn't win. All Lauer's fault. I despised that man sometimes.

My partner and Karly stepped in from the porch and joined the other girls at the kitchen table, where they were reading one another's tarot cards by the light of a stout red cookie-scented candle left over from some festive day, no doubt. He pulled up a galvanized trash can for a chair and said to the card reader, “Do mine next. I need one.” Given who his mother was, he probably already understood his fortune and intended to discredit Wiccan by comparing his mother's predictions with the girl's. Still, I harbored some interest in their findings. My partner's life was so yarned up with mine now that if he was headed for something, so was I.

“Do you still want to kiss me? Remember, I'm a Wiccan.”

“You'd be more invisible by now.”

“Your call,” said Sherri. “Your call, your fall.”

Half an hour later, in Sherri's parents' bedroom, where most of the art involved circuses and whales, a powerful light beam washed the windows white. “The neighborhood watch,” said Sherri. “Just ignore it.” I couldn't ignore it, though. Too near, too bright. I put myself back in my pants, rezipped the fly, and sat up against the pillows in a position that made things look more formal, as though we'd merely reconvened our spirit talk in slightly softer, quieter surroundings. Through the wall I could hear Elder Stark and Sherri's sister discussing Geofibrillation, a theory propounded by Swift Aunt Patricia concerning slight hiccups in the earth's rotation that led to various civil wars and such that she was very concerned with at the time. The topic had first arisen at the tarot session and had absorbed Elder Stark and Karly so fully that the other girls had left the party.