“Should we inform him of the existence of computers?” Mara whispered.
“Thirty-one bucks. Cash only.”
“My dear Arty here will be paying,” Mara informed both of us. “Say, my husband and I”—she jerked her head back—“we’re fairly certain his grandfather stayed here a few years ago and we’re a bit curious. Is there any way we could see that logbook of yours, just to check and see?”
“Customer information is private,” he mumbled.
“Even for his dear old grandfa—”
“It’s private.” He took the logbook off the table and handed us our key. “Have a good stay. Don’t bother me.”
The common area of the hostel reminded me of the basement of my parents’ church. There were random pieces of furniture throughout the room; couches of assorted colors, likely gathered as second- or thirdhand donations, looking far too comfy to be safe from disease. Each wall had a different type of wallpaper that was chipped or fraying, as if twenty years ago, four different interior designers had finished their respective walls and said, “Fuck it.”
Mara marched across it with purpose, her head down. I stopped, realizing, “Hey! Room six is over here,” but she kept going. “Mara, our room is—”
She spun around and her facial expression stopped my sentence. She wasn’t smiling or being playful. She was almost timid and totally focused. “Right, then, Arthur, it’s time I tell you something. I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.”
Without clarifying, she continued across the room and I followed, a few steps behind. “Okay,” I asked, heart starting to race my footsteps. “What do you have to tell me?”
She stopped abruptly in front of the farthest door in the farthest corner, ROOM 16: DORMITORY. “I know this place because I’ve been here before. Several times, actually.”
My heart pounded inside my head. I smelled smoke, and from behind the door, I heard muffled voices.
“Wait, what? Why?”
Without answering, she tapped lightly on the door, a very specific rhythm:
knock, knock-knock, knock knock, knock
The voices behind the door went silent. Smoke slid under the tiny crack in the bottom of the door. Mara closed her eyes, either concentrating or trying to avoid mine. The pulsing in my head got louder.
“Mara, what’s going on?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, just swayed back and forth.
In an instant, I noticed how silent and deserted the hostel was, how remote its location was, and how little I knew about it, or the girl that had led me here. My eyes searched for an escape, increasingly aware that I might need one, but the windows were all boarded. My only hope was a dead sprint back across the open room and out into the wide-open, run-down inner city of Denver.
The door opened hesitantly. What felt like a silent eternity came to an end with the clattering of the lock chain behind the door tightening.
There was a face in the darkness behind the door, but I couldn’t make out any of its features.
“What do you serve?” its voice asked.
I looked to Mara frantically and she didn’t react. I wondered if she wanted me to answer—what do I serve? God? The devil? This fucking British girl?
But she didn’t expect me to answer. Her eyes opened calmly and met mine.
“I serve a Great Purpose,” she whispered, and from behind the door, I heard the latch slide off.
Part Five.
The Great Purpose.
1.
may 1, the 1970.
we’ve reached our hideaway at melbourne, for what must be the hundredth time; but this time, it’s all new again.
our feet know where to go when our minds do not, as if they’ve been biblically trained. we’re walking, not by sight or information or instruction, but by faith in the feet themselves.
this building’s warmth will forever stay unfamiliar, foreign now & then; i feel my body outside itself, looking in.
some days i’m the passenger; some days i’m the captain; & some days, i let chemicals steer the ship.
it’s the same routine. every time we gather for these holy meetings in the back of unholy buildings, we remind ourselves of our birthright to a Great purpose, our desperate search for the Greater love, & this time, i’m certain we’re close to it. closer than we’ve ever been.
but this time, it’s all new again. it all feels different, greater, because this time, we stand in the face of greater evils, at the bottom of their waterfalls.
we know what they look & sound like; we know who they are, unambiguously killing our brothers, trying desperately to kill our spirits.
this time, we have an answer, or so everyone is convinced.
so we worship at the altar of chemical alteration,
baptize ourselves in liquor & perfume,
drink the ideas of many
in communities of few,
preparing to converge on the grandest, most central stations,
congregations of the damned.
we’re the gods we pray to,
we’re the righteous truth,
& we doubt nothing.
we stand in the face of the great evils,
& this time, we’ve brought a Greater purpose.
this time, we will be heard.
or so everyone is convinced.
but in my heart, i fear the evil may be too great.
i fear the evil may already be among us, inside of each of us.
i fear we may have lost our better intentions to our lesser desires.
i fear the worst.
—arthur louis pullman
2.
A CLOUD OF smoke rolled from behind the door and disappeared, thin and wispy, into the open air of the common room. I lost Mara in it as she launched herself through the door, her brown hair bobbing and disappearing into the haze.
I could hear voices, soft and low, too many piling on top of each other to hear any single one. Batting smoke from my eyes, I picked the spot I thought I’d seen Mara and walked blindly forward, step after step after cautious step after—
My foot connected with a mass on the ground. It was dense and lively, the thud of fiber against fiber, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’d kicked a pair of tattered blue jeans, with legs in them. I’d kicked a body.
“Whoa, easy,” the body said slowly, and it tumbled over, away from my foot and back into the abyss.
I couldn’t tell if it was smoke or my overwhelming confusion but the room was less visible from the inside, only stray fragments of light catching pieces of color to interrupt the unending gray around me. “Close it!” a voice shouted loud and clear over the tunnel of steady conversational noise. The door was my only source of light and my only way out. “Close it!” and I slammed it shut. The room was dark.
Music was playing, a familiar beat with a familiar jazz melody on top, piano climbs played soft and loose, a trumpet and an 808 kick drum that thumped against my spine. I knew the voice—“Fuck Your Ethnicity,” Kendrick Lamar. The room slowed down to the swing from the bass and drums; it was as if he commanded the smoke with his voice through the speakers.
My pupils contracted and adjusted, clinging to the bits of detail they could find, and as my hands cleared the smoke around me, I began to put together the room I had walked into.
There were people, and they were everywhere. Too many to count, spread across the floor, seated at rows of tables along the walls, or lounging across one of the eight dormitory-style bunk beds pushed into the corners. The only people not hunched over laptops were hunched over in conversation, every face glowing electric, MacBook blue.
The first faces I found were young; they caught the low light and radiated in it, men and women, somewhere between their late teens and twenties, from what I could tell. Their colors were dark; intentional and interesting, in long T-shirts and tight jeans and crop tops and baggy sweaters. There were older faces, too, people I guessed to be nearly forty; less frequent, less noticeable, but very present, almo
st like they were fixtures of the room themselves.
The room seemed to get bigger the farther I walked into it. It was pulsating, waves of sound breaking over me every measure when the sub drop landed. I couldn’t believe they could concentrate with the music so loud and the room so dark, but they did. Some people laughed, others clouded up the air with smoke, most stared intensely at the screen in front of them.
My head was spinning.
“Arthur!” I found Mara’s beanie in between two bunk beds, surrounded by three men in long white scarves. “Come here. Don’t linger, you weirdo.”
I had to step over three people on my way to her, trying to smile but mostly focusing on remaining conscious. I could feel the stares of strangers around the room. I was sure I could hear Mara apologizing for me.
“Lucas, Marcus, Jack, this”—she turned to present me as I approached—“is Arthur. Arthur, meet Lucas, Marcus”—she stopped and smiled—“and Jack.”
“Wait—”
The man closest to Mara’s left towered over her, tall enough to watch me approach from above her head. His mouth fell open as I came into the light.
“I know you.” Jack Thompson, the anarchist from the corner of the train, reached a hand out to grab me by the shoulder. “I know you! What’re you doing here?” he asked loudly. He wore a blue button-up hanging over tight gray jeans, and a white scarf around his neck, embroidered with some kind of fist symbol with green flowers that I didn’t recognize. “What’s he doing here?” He turned his attention to Mara before I could respond.
“This is Arthur Pull—”
“What are we doing here?” I asked to interrupt. “Where the hell are we?”
All four of them heard me, but none responded.
“Mara?”
Jack continued speaking to her, and right past me. “He doesn’t know? I literally met this kid on the train the other day!”
“No! I don’t—”
“Relax.” She put her hand against my shoulder. “He’s important,” she whispered to Jack, but it sounded like an apology. I couldn’t stop myself from watching him watch her. “Let me introduce him to the room. You’ll understand.”
“Mara, I can’t let just anybody speak to the room, and besides, this kid is . . . not one of us.”
I watched them have a conversation without speaking: Mara pleading, Jack hesitating, Mara assuring, Jack agreeing. Finally, Jack turned to me, his right hand finding mine. “Bygones, brother. Bye and gone. Maybe you’re more on it than I thought. I appreciate you showing up.”
Before I could tell him I didn’t know what he meant, he paused the music, and the conversation in the room halted. My eyes had fully adjusted, and without the mystique of smoke and darkness, the room was much less intimidating. There were too many people; it was hot and cramped and the bins of trash in the corner overflowed. Everyone was dressed comfortably, not fashionably, and many of them looked like they hadn’t slept. Across all the screens I could see were coding programs I didn’t recognize.
“Movement.” Jack’s voice was soft, but carried to every corner. He must have been the leader, the way everyone looked at him. “We got a new presence.”
“Hello, everyone. I’m Mara, Leila’s sister, in case you’ve forgotten.” Mara’s ever-present poise made her perfectly comfortable with this kind of attention. “She certainly always was more of the one in the family for speeches, but I’ll do my best.” The room laughed.
When she spoke again, it was louder and more deliberate. With this many eyes on her, her voice sounded revolutionary.
“The greatest movements of human history are experiments in truth. Movements in which the righteous few are compelled against their powerful oppressors, not because what they’re doing seems easy or even possible, but because they understand that they are closer to the righteous, the almighty . . . the truth. And when you’re closer to that kind of truth, then you are, undoubtedly, closer to the spirit. In movements of truth such as this, there’s no room for doubt.”
Nodding and drinking and light applause around the room.
“The trouble, of course, is that proper reason dictates we must question every truth, including our own. Only a foolish man is certain of anything, and true intellect is the ability to doubt. What an impossible paradox the universe offers: to know what is right, we must doubt what is right. Fortunately, the universe has created one, and only one, precarious way of validating truth: it sends a sign.”
Word after unquestioned word, the Mara I knew grew, to a bigger, emboldened version. She stared her audience in the face as she spoke, rather than looking past them.
“Before Moses could free the Israelites from their oppression in Egypt, he was visited by the great truth, coming to him in the form of a burning bush, a message from the divine that his path was true. The story of every great movement is littered with examples of this: people reaching for what is holy, and what is holy reaching back.
“The trail to any great revolution must be marked by these signs, these mitzvahs, these hallmarks of either great fate or great coincidence, whichever one you put your faith in. Without them, the truth remains questionable. But with them, a movement becomes a revolution.
“I speak to you all directly now—your purpose is great, your path is righteous, you are closer to the truth than the powers that oppress you, and today, I can prove it. Today, I bring you a sign.”
The room was so silent you could hear the old wood in the walls bending. Every face in the room was reaching toward her, expectantly. Mara, the revolutionary. Mara, the leader. Mara, turning to look directly at me.
“His name is Arthur,” she said.
Fifty-some faces turned to me.
If there were ever a moment that I was so overwhelmed by fear and self-consciousness that I’d lose control of my bowels and shit where I stood, it would have been that one. I clenched my stomach, but nearly fainted under the weight of her introduction. She was talking about me. I was the burning bush.
The room felt twice as hot and I became suddenly aware of every line on my face, every spot on my hoodie, every out-of-place curl in my uncombed hair. They could see the sweat forming on my forehead, the uncomfortable bend of my smile. I could feel eyes burning holes into my chest.
“Arthur.” There was Mara’s face, a calm in the storm. “Tell them who your grandfather is.”
I almost choked on spit before speaking. “Hello, I, uh, I’m, my name is Arthur.” Stares intensified. I looked to her for help.
“And—” She spoke for me. “Your grandfather is . . .”
My eyes widened; I tried to jerk my head in a quick shake, to let her know there was no way in hell I was telling a room full of people that my grandpa was—
“Arthur Louis Pullman.” She spoke for me.
I heard every tick of every wristwatch in the room. No one raised a bottle or even a cigarette, they just sat staring, every pair of eyes begging for an explanation. I tried to concentrate on sinking into the floor beneath my feet.
“I’m sorry.” Jack’s voice came from behind me. “Arthur Louis—the Arthur Louis Pullman?”
Mara nodded.
“Our Arthur Louis Pullman?” Jack asked, and I twisted to face him, several minutes behind the conversation—their Arthur Louis Pullman?
“Mara, I appreciate the dramatics, but the odds . . . I mean, do you have any kind of proof, or—”
“Arthur, show him the photo.”
I didn’t, right away. I clutched it to my thigh inside my pocket, trying to catch up but running circles in my head instead. I looked from Jack to Mara, back to Jack, and then to Mara once more, painfully aware of the mob of strangers waiting silently in just-visible darkness. She didn’t waver in her expression, but nodded to where my hand twisted in my pocket. I did as she asked.
For a full minute, Jack inspected it, glancing up occasionally, comparing the wide-eyed, full-haired eighth grader in the photo to the unwashed and sullen eighteen-year-old in front of him.
&nb
sp; Finally, he raised his head and whispered, “Jesus Christ. You’re his fucking grandson.”
The room burst into wild and frenzied applause. I half smiled, unsure of what I had done to be so celebrated. “Someone get these kids some chemicals!” someone hollered over the noise of Kendrick Lamar firing up the speakers once more, and a cup was thrust into my hand, a suspicious silver carbonated mix that smelled a lot more like liquor than it did like Sprite. It was a mess of celebration. People swarmed around me, my drink spilling onto several black shirts.
“What is this?” I shouted over the noise at Mara. “Why am I a . . . bush?”
“You didn’t tell him?” Jack stepped between us, raising his own red Solo cup to avoid having it knocked out of his hand. “He really doesn’t know anything?”
A beautiful blonde girl in black sweatpants and a tattered pink sweater grabbed my arm. “He gave you his name?” Her face was less than a foot from my own.
“Uh, yeah. I mean, he, I guess he, like, gave it to my dad and, then, my dad gave it to me.”
She swayed into me, her hands against my chest for support. “Wow.” Her breath was warm cigarettes against my cheek. I imagined it was Kaitlin’s breath against my cheek and I wiggled away from her.
“Would you like some answers?” Mara pulled my arm, delighted, watching me. “Or are you rather enjoying being a mitzvah?”
“Answers,” I said, and she yanked me through the crowd to a quieter, smaller dormitory room through a door on the back wall. Jack was already waiting.
“Why didn’t you tell me that when we met?” Jack addressed me, then turned to Mara. “How’d you find him? How’d you even know he existed?”
“He found me.” Mara sat cross-legged on a lone desk. “I told you, it was a sign.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s . . . incredible. Leila and I looked it up once, early on. We knew this kid existed but all we could find about him was some tennis shit?” Jack glanced over to me every few seconds in the low light, reading and judging and cataloging every line of my face and muscle on my body. “And you’re sure we can trust him?”
A Lite Too Bright Page 14
