Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  “But I count one hundred fifty-eight titles here,” Maya complained.

  “That was fast! You see that, Wharton—you are good with numbers.”

  13.

  THERE WERE 3,436 STUDENTS enrolled in Rancho Cucamonga High School that August. Fifty-one percent of the “Cougars” were Hispanic, and 13 percent Afro-American, with a late addition of two more students in the junior class, Deuce and Pearl Powers, bringing the percentage of white kids to 14. Eleven-year-old Hyrum was enrolled in a nearby middle school, Etiwanda Intermediate, starting seventh grade. Deuce and Pearl had only one class together, AP History. The days were long, but the weeks seemed short, and the months even shorter. There was so much to do and so much that was new that before anyone could assess all that had changed and all that had not changed, it was already early December.

  Janet Bergram seemed prophetic when she’d said it doesn’t matter if it’s Mormon love, Muslim love, Jewish love, Black, white, straight, gay, cis, or trans love—kids who have been loved are adaptable and resilient. Because that’s what Deuce was going to need—resilience. Deuce wasn’t a cool kid by any means, he didn’t know how to act cool, but he had a natural ease and goodwill that was in serious danger of being suppressed by his new peers. He had a huge heart for his fellow man, in the abstract till now; it was as if you had distilled all the best qualities of the late-’60s campus radicals like Abbie Hoffman, Mario Savio, and Jerry Rubin, and bottled their cock-eyed optimism. He was smart, he was a socialist, but he was no humorless scold like Bernie Sanders—he was funny and charming with adults. The kid could’ve been a walking advertisement for homeschooling and polygamous parenting. Upon getting a midterm update on his academic progress, Janet had texted—“You are f—ed, glad they’re well;) Deuce for Pres lol.” His teachers loved him, though; he was obviously brilliant, and they were pushing him to take more AP classes. No fewer than three teachers independently gifted him a copy of Tara Westover’s Educated for Christmas. His English teacher asked him if he was interested in writing such a memoir. Deuce answered humbly and slyly, “Not yet.”

  Though he was on track for a 4.5 GPA easily, and he was catching up to his peers in the sciences where he had been lacking, he was also being bullied. Over six feet tall, weighing less than 120 pounds, Deuce presented with a very bad case of acne vulgaris about a month into the move to Rancho Cucamonga. Whatever the stressors were—the shock of relocation, the breakup of the family, the first exposure to the antibiotics in the meat and the preservatives in his food—Deuce’s face was a sore, mottled, bumpy mess. This, of course, had drawn the scornful attention of an anti-academic strain of jock in his history class when he had tried to initiate a Howard Zinn study group to counterbalance the more traditional historical view taught by this school’s textbook—Thomas Bailey’s antiquated, unwoke American Pageant.

  Deuce began receiving notes in his locker addressed to “Scarface,” “Pizza Face,” and “Master Pimp,” and fake prescriptions for Accutane, which Deuce had to google. He had never really thought about his skin before, never been forced to think of his face as something that would attract or repel. One afternoon, a 250-pound offensive lineman from the football team had walked up to him in the hallway between classes and simply slapped him across the face so hard that Deuce almost lost consciousness. The boy’s hand came away with pus and blood on it from Deuce’s zits. This led to the nickname “El Slimer.”

  Deuce played out his feelings on the electric guitar Maya had given the family. Mary could hear him wailing away in his room night after night, the volume knobs and effects pedals all new playthings to a kid who’d only ever had a nylon-string department store acoustic. He was a soulful player. One night, Mary found Deuce crying in bed, and he confided his confusion and hurt over what had happened. Mary was disgusted by and angry at these interactions, but assured him he was a very handsome young man and to mirror Christ by turning the other cheek, to put his head down, do his work, and that the year would soon be over. Hyrum argued for vengeance. He encouraged Deuce to “man up” and give the football player a “beatdown.”

  Deuce spent hours in his bathroom staring and squeezing at the angry pustules on his cheeks and forehead. He became quite withdrawn, and, not taxed enough by his schoolwork and uneasy about whatever money was being spent on him by Praetorian, he had taken a job at a local fast-food franchise called BurgerTown. BurgerTown was, as it sounded, a kind of homey, minor league McDonald’s with about twenty-five franchises up and down the West Coast. Raised with no sense of time but the rising and setting of the sun and all the hard hours in a day of desert farm life, Deuce loved work, having a job, punching a clock, and hitting the pillow with the tired body and guiltlessness of an honest workingman.

  BurgerTown became an unlikely refuge for the boy. It was at BurgerTown, among the mostly immigrant Mexican, less-than-minimum-wage employees, that Deuce began to feel at home. No one made fun of him there. With a bit of a language barrier, the other BurgerTown workers looked easily beneath the mask of carbuncles to the sweet, humble, hardworking soul beneath.

  They taught him Spanish. They introduced him to soccer and made him play with them out back behind the restaurant during breaks, and even on weekends. Deuce had never played with a ball of any kind and was as uncoordinated as a puppy. The other guys affectionately nicknamed him “Dos a la izquierda,” shortened to “Dos” or “Izzy” because, like a dancer who is said to have two left feet, he could control the pelota with neither of his. But Deuce was so eager and tried so hard, they stuck with him and eventually put him in goal, where, with his height and length, he began to shine a little. He loved laying his body all out, even on the asphalt, to try to make saves. He was really quite good, a bit of a natural, in fact, and it led to another work nickname that he secretly cherished, “Salvador,” which morphed into “Sal” and “Sally.”

  Whatever he had learned about the “darker races” in Mormon scripture did not translate into his practical consciousness once he talked and interacted with actual folks of color, and his Mexican co-workers, whom he assumed were the “Lamanites” Bronson had taught him had come from Jerusalem around 600 BC, among the original inhabitants of the Americas. But the more Deuce learned at school, the more he began to perceive the historical limitations of Joseph Smith and the Mormon bible in an immediate and clear-eyed way. He spent many an hour googling Mormonism on his phone and on the school computer, and while its obvious intellectual shortcomings and the occasion it gave his classmates to make fun of him may have filled another soul with rage and accusations against the father who had inculcated him, he understood both sides intuitively—the disorder of this big, beautiful world he was now entering and his father’s rage for order in his retreat to a rigidly circumscribed desert existence.

  Made invisible by his own skin, he spent much of his free time alone in the school library, which was often quite empty. He was not only an exceptional student, he also had the wide-ranging, free-associative autodidact tendencies of Bronson. Late one night, reading on his phone under the covers so Mary wouldn’t know he wasn’t sleeping, he came across these words about Joseph Smith’s bible by one of his favorite authors, Mark Twain, in Roughing It—

  The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity … Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

  That, as they say, was that. Deuce saw no argument or remedy against Twain. A giant of American intellect had summarily vanquished
a giant American con, with humor. Twain had struck through the root, with the blade of rationality, and the tree was felled at once. And it came to pass that Deuce lost his faith.

  What was it like to realize that your spiritual education had been a joke? You could be bitter and strike back, claim abuse, victimhood. That would be most people. Or you could laugh along with the joke, and be thankful that your parents had cared enough about your spirit to cultivate it at all. He looked around and saw all his peers, and their untended spirit lives, the passionless lip service paid to the God of their parents. Tepid God the Friend. The American God of Prosperity from John Calvin to Oral Roberts to Paula White. Insufficient as he now felt it to be, Deuce had been handed down from Bronson a genuine spiritual religious passion for a wild and untamed, unreasonable deity, and even if the object of Bronson’s fiery faith was now seen as misguided by this seventeen-year-old boy, Deuce was circumspect enough to treasure the brute fact of his enlarged spirit at home in the wild, which he now could empty and refill with a faith more appropriate and enlightened for him, whatever that might be. He’d been enlarged, that was a gift, and now emptied, another gift, and he was ready to be refilled.

  Bronson had worked Deuce’s heart out, expanded it under theological pressure like a muscle; now Deuce would empty it of dead and unworthy teachings and fill it with a more modern, fact-based, social gospel that he was in the process of devising. From Joseph Smith and from Bronson, Deuce had been raised without the nattering electronic distractions of today and, in that holy, human silence and peace, had received the ability to believe in latter-day miracles for himself, a forward-looking attitude, and he felt a miracle was happening with him now, as his spirit drained of content, and in this sacred pause he waited for a new god, a new purpose. He had been built by God the Father and his stepfather for obedience and service, but he would be the author of the new cause; in the ruins, salvaging what was useful, the child was giving birth to the new man. And though he would leave Bronson and Joseph Smith behind, he would always cherish as his life’s motto a Smith quote his father had taught him when he was thirteen: “deep water is what I am wont to swim in, it all has become a second nature to me.”*

  And just like that, the angel Moroni packed his peep stones and funky underwear, and took the last flight back to a more welcoming Salt Lake City. Deuce’s belief would no longer be pure like that, it couldn’t be, but what this wise child knew without being able to put into words was that his ability to believe purely, his personal, radiant purity, was intact. He knew that his father had filled him with shiny lies and dodges, sure, but now that he’d emptied that place, he knew that’s why his heart was so large, reverberative, and hungry.

  Deuce spent one roller-coaster afternoon in the library watching The Book of Mormon on YouTube, and he laughed his ass off, but he also cried, because he knew he was the butt of the joke, he and his belief, and he knew his belief had been pure; he believed that silly shit with all his heart. But he also came to see that he’d never really been a Mormon, that his belief system was way more idiosyncratic and anti-institutional. He came to know that he was raised in the religion of his father, Bronson Powers. So the barbs stung, but didn’t go too deep. He looked forward to talking about all this with Bronson. Hey, Dad, guess what … you’re not really a Mormon. Uh, maybe not.

  And, as the final number of the hit musical pivoted harmlessly from ruthless irony to something approaching a sincere celebration of personal imagination as the Book of Mormon was replaced by the silly Book of Arnold, Deuce came back to a great appreciation for what had drawn his father to this religion in the first place. Deuce wondered if other Mormons could look beneath the easy contempt of that musical to its ultimate respect, as the fantastical-world creators of South Park embraced, storyteller to storyteller, a kindred writerly spirit in the world creator Joseph Smith. Yes, the actual Book of Mormon was unscientific, derivative, and obviously improvised by a charismatic leader, organizer, and mythmaker, but at its restless heart Mormonism sought relief from the crushing weight of the past, the old stories, and a willingness to embrace the new—new gods, new peoples and heroes, new stories. Brilliantly and falsely describing his new religion as a restoration of the old, Joseph Smith had escaped history through his imagination, lies, and will. Though he could follow him no longer, Deuce felt like he understood his father far better than he ever had and loved him even more.

  Thus liberated spiritually, Deuce turned his attention to spiritual praxis and action, where the rubber meets the road, which took the form of a new obsessional trinity—climate change, gun control, and Donald Trump. Friendless, at night, he bonded with Mother Mary watching All In with Chris Hayes and then The Rachel Maddow Show as they both stoked their hatred and disbelief of Trump through these snarky MSNBC proxies. Mary was proud of the adjustment Deuce was making in seeming to overcome some initial hazing. She was way more worried about Pearl and Hyrum. And Trump.

  14.

  THOUGH THEY SHARED A WOMB and 50 percent the same DNA, Deuce and Pearl could not have been more different souls, and that difference was drawn into stark contrast in the Hadron collider of adolescents that was Rancho Cucamonga High School. First, Pearl was homesick, at least that’s what it felt like, but what she missed was the burgeoning and explosive secret sexual attachment that she had felt for Bronson in the months before she left the desert. She felt an emptiness in her gut that nothing could fill. She didn’t quite know it, but she was heartbroken. She’d lost her mother and her lover.

  She was easily distracted, not into any schoolwork, and to make matters worse, because she was so beautiful and the “new girl” and got lots of unrequited attention from boys, girls started to ostracize her. Alone, without any alliances, she was given a crash course in mean-girl dynamics. Having grown up only with siblings, Pearl was unfamiliar with this petty social Darwinism and shaming culture. But her strong sense of natural independence kept her head above these waters. She didn’t feel an overwhelming need to join the herd, or the smaller subset herds like the jocks, the preps, the druggies, or to align by race or sexual orientation. It all seemed ridiculous to her, like so many masks, none of which fit her well. Unlike Deuce, who found the companionship he needed among his BurgerTown co-workers, she didn’t care if the other girls made fun of her. She wasn’t vain, but she knew she was beautiful, she had been loved and desired by a man, and that was a strong secret weapon. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel lonely sometimes, or ostracized.

  In the first few months of the year, unfriended by the girls because of her standoffish and mysterious sensuality, and appearing unapproachable to the boys because her heart was palpably still out there somewhere in the desert, Pearl came off as haughty, aloof, and disinterested. A “stuck-up bitch.” She was friendless. And unlike the more methodical Deuce, she could not rationally jettison her faith, for that would mean jettisoning Bronson. In her secret heart, she could link up with Bronson through dwelling on doctrine; some nights she imagined them both reading the same scripture at the same time.

  But cracks in her religious devotion were beginning to show. Her childish belief had been contaminated by Bronson’s sexual love, and her removal from his daily attention and affirmations had, in turn, fatally weakened her faith. When Bronson took her as a lover, he had made himself all too human and compromised the purity of her relationship with God that existed through him. Ironically, by loving her, he had crossed too many lines between authority and attachment and had destroyed her as a believer. She was lost, but she didn’t know that yet because she had no destination in mind. Her faith now, such as it was, had been hollowed out by her anger and confusion. She could no more lean on it for support than one could lean on the wind. She felt broken and needed a fix.

  Like in many schools of its type, along with the bullying problem during school hours that could extend to 24/7 courtesy of social media, there was a thriving drug culture at Rancho Cucamonga, and Pearl aimlessly drifted into its slipstream. It was the only thin
g that made her feel whole again, and made this yearlong exercise in killing time bearable. She drank coffee, the Mormon gateway drug. She bought herself a Juul to vape, and was given some free Adderall as a kind of stoner starter kit by one of the dealer kids who wanted to fuck her. That was the clincher. The Adderall made her feel like Bronson had, focused and free simultaneously. The comedown sucked, but the weed and nicotine helped with that. Even though she was often high and didn’t work very hard, she was able to get B’s and C’s because she was a couple years ahead of her peers in most subjects.

  One afternoon, in late November, Pearl was juuling in the girls’ bathroom and ditching AP History. She took comfort seeing Deuce during the day, but recently the way he looked at her, like he knew she was tanking, made her feel guilty. She knew she was projecting, but that didn’t make it feel any better or less real. So she was skipping the one class she shared with her brother. She had a good forty minutes more to kill in the toilet.

  She daydreamed a little about Bronson, what a grown man he was compared with these little boys here, how hairy his chest was, and how one day she had just noticed that and it made her swoon, the way he smelled, his funk.

  That killed about ten minutes. She thought about praying (“thank Thee, Heavenly Father for Thy hidden, forbidden, holy jewel”), but she really didn’t feel like giving thanks at the moment. She thought of masturbating half-heartedly, but didn’t quite feel like that either. She took another hit off the Juul and began singing “The Long and Winding Road.” Like a few of her siblings, Pearl had perfect pitch, but unlike them, she sang with a depth of feeling that belied her age. She sang like she knew what she was singing about. She sang like a woman of experience.