The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  “I’m sure you’re familiar with Dr. Kimball’s scholarly work,” Sérgio had said to me.

  In the split-second before responding, I’d noticed Dr. Kimball’s narrow face tensing up slightly, as if she were bracing herself—whether for disappointment or something else, I couldn’t tell.

  “I’m sorry,” I’d said. “I’m afraid I haven’t,” and her face had relaxed instantly.

  “No need to apologize,” she’d said. “And please—call me Harriet. As far as my scholarly work goes—I study Mormon history and do some cultural criticism as well. That’s why I’m in town—a conference at Claremont on millenarianism in the twentieth-century Church. I presented a paper on the ways in which mid-century Mormon preparedness rhetoric positions food storage as a metaphorical bridge between temporal and spiritual salvation.”

  “That sounds very interesting,” I’d said, unsure how I felt about this new acquaintance.

  Now, standing at the door of Roger Ash’s storage unit, Harriet dialed a combination of numbers into the hefty lock and then pulled down. The shackle came free of the latch, and Sérgio gave an enthusiastic “Ha!”

  Handing the lock to Sérgio, Harriet grasped the dusty rope affixed to the base of the door and lifted it open, the metal segments rolling together with a sloppy clatter.

  “Well,” said Harriet, “it looks like we have our work cut out for us.”

  Morning sunlight streamed into the storage unit, illuminating hundreds, maybe even thousands, of yellowing bankers boxes stacked from floor to ceiling all the way from the back wall. And while thoughts of our task’s likely futility muscled their way into my mind, Sérgio looked appreciatively at all the boxes and said that he had a good feeling about this, that the path to Salgado-MacKenzie often intersected with eccentric archives such as this one.

  I did my best to embrace Sérgio’s optimism. After all, there were three of us, and we had all day. Maybe we would find Salgado-MacKenzie’s contact information inside one of these boxes. Stranger things had certainly happened.

  “No time to waste,” said Sérgio, removing his linen blazer and draping it over an abandoned hand truck. The short sleeves of his Ziggy Stardust–era Bowie T-shirt revealed meaty arms that immediately set to work removing the top box from the nearest stack.

  And so, with meticulous haste, we began sorting through the boxes, searching for any record Roger Ash may have kept of his correspondence with Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. Box after box yielded nothing we could use, although it quickly became clear that the contents of Roger Ash’s storage unit could stock a whole library devoted to Cold War paranoia. We discovered hundreds of fliers, pamphlets, broadsides, and paperbacks that explicated with splashy rhetoric the key tenets of the Grandsons of American Liberty. It was fascinating stuff, and in spite of the urgency of our search, I couldn’t help but peruse every fourth or fifth item that passed through my hands.

  In one box, I found a pamphlet titled “Danger Drips from Your Kitchen Faucet,” which alerted its readers to the perils of water fluoridation, warning that such mass drugging was only the first small step in a process that would eventually lead to the distribution of mind-control chemicals through the drinking water, chemicals that would set the stage for a global takeover by the collectivist New World Order.

  In another box, I found a slim paperback called The Inadvertent Arsonist?, which accused former president Dwight D. Eisenhower of aiding and abetting the advance of Communism during his tenure as commander in chief by instituting policy after policy containing hidden and malicious socialist agendas. The cancerous damage these policies inflicted on American freedoms and the integrity of the Constitution was undeniable. The only thing up for debate, claimed the book, was whether Eisenhower committed these treasons knowingly, or if he was merely a patsy under the sway of Soviet controllers posing as American patriots.

  On a more celebratory note, a framed poster-sized poem I found sandwiched between two stacks of boxes told a story of all the flags of the world attending an international flag convention. They’re all mingling and talking to each other, but then the American flag arrives and all the other flags go silent. The American flag, which is a little worn and dusty, clears its throat and gives a speech about being just a simple flag for a simple country, and he may not be as sophisticated as all these other flags, but what he does know is that he loves freedom and is trying to do the best he can for his country. The poem ends with all the other flags of the world, duly humbled, bowing down before the American flag.

  I saw the poem a second time on the back cover of a book making the case for the illegality of America’s involvement with the United Nations, an organization second only to the Soviet Union in depravity and antipathy to the principles of democracy.

  Another box contained a pamphlet from the early sixties—“The Problem with Civil Rights”—warning that figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were Soviet agents trained by their communist overlords to unfairly besmirch American democracy with slanderous claims of injustice and oppression. If these complaints were heeded, the pamphlet warned, the very fabric of our Constitution would be imperiled, and the way would be paved for the arrival of a dangerous New World Order.

  “You know, a lot of Mormons really went in for this kind of stuff,” said Harriet. She hefted a cardboard box down from the top of a chest-high stack, the ensuing cloud of dust further graying her faded jeans and worn flannel work shirt. She’d been tirelessly attacking boxes since morning, barely breaking a sweat and never breaking her rhythm—open, sift, close, repeat. She’d also been talking nonstop, delivering an incessant series of micro-lectures on selected topics from the world of Mormon studies.

  “In fact,” she went on, “a lot of Mormons produced material like this for similar organizations. It was a pretty wide-ranging phenomenon. I mean, I’m sure you’re aware of Ezra Taft Benson’s involvement with the John Birch Society when he was an apostle”—I was not aware, had never even heard of the John Birch Society, in fact—“but what a lot of people don’t realize is that he was never actually a member. He aggressively supported them, but President McKay asked him not to join, so he didn’t. It was a similar situation with a handful of other Mormon ultraconservatives—they were very interested in the Birch Society, but never actually joined. So instead, some of them founded little organizations of their own that promoted many of the Birchers’s key claims, and then fused them with Mormon pseudo-doctrines. There were maybe a half a dozen of these little societies during the height of the Cold War. I don’t think the Grandsons of American Liberty had Mormon roots, but it’s a similar deal.

  “Anyway, the effect was, you had these organizations bringing some very, very far-right-wing ideologies into the mainstream of Mormonism, fusing them, like I said, with supposed doctrines and passing them off as revealed truths.

  “The craziest part is, we’re still seeing the ramifications of that today in the Church. It’s been—what?—twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so much Mormon political thought still has one foot in Cold War paranoia. It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, although really it wasn’t, at least not to me.

  As tiresome as I was beginning to find these mini-lectures, though, I did get a stronger and stronger sense the more time I spent with Harriet Kimball that I probably should have heard of her before then (a suspicion that would be confirmed later, as you’ll see). I hadn’t heard of her, though, and here’s an oversimplified but useful dichotomy to explain not only why I hadn’t but also why our interests diverged so sharply.

  There are two kinds of Mormons in the world: Mormons who care about Mormonism qua Mormonism (to use the most pretentious preposition I’m aware of) and Mormons who don’t. What I mean is, the first type of Mormon not only practices the religion but also spends a lot of time and energy thinking about Mormonism itself and participating in extracurricular Mormon-related activit
ies. They might attend Church-history-themed pageants around the country, or listen to treacly Mormon pop music produced for summer youth camps. They might take Book of Mormon tours of Central America. They might blog about Mormon history or sing in regional Mormon choirs. They might take summer road trips retracing (in reverse) the westward migration of the Mormon pioneers. They might also, if they’re of a certain ideological stripe, attend Sunstone conferences, or read the complete works of Hugh Nibley or lobby for female ordination to the priesthood, greater transparency from Church leaders, or changes to Church policies regarding, say, gay marriage. Whatever the focus, though, Mormonism permeates every nook of these people’s lives.

  So that’s the first type. The second type, the more laissez-faire Mormons, may be very devout, but they also compartmentalize their Mormonism to a much greater degree than the first type. It’s like they have their professional life, their personal life, their social life, their religious life, etc., but the religious part doesn’t bleed into all the others. I don’t mean there’s a hypocrisy there, or a lack of devotion—that’s not it at all. Instead, it’s more like there’s a holistic concern with being a good person, but the Mormon-specific elements of that concern stay primarily in the Mormon compartment.

  It’s hard to explain in the abstract, so I’ll use my parents as a concrete example. They attend church every week, they go to the temple pretty often, the whole thing. They’re fully practicing Mormons. But they’re also extremely unlikely to spend much of their leisure time doing Church-related stuff. Instead, especially these days, my dad will either be watching the History Channel (he’s becoming an armchair expert on the Kennedy assassination) or trying to get my mom on board with some DIY scheme he’s just read about on the Internet—for instance, saying that they should raise chickens out on the balcony of their condo, because wouldn’t it be great to have fresh eggs whenever they wanted?

  And my mom, when she’s not talking my dad out of running down to the farm-supply store right away to buy some baby chicks (or whatever the scheme is on any given week), is probably playing or watching tennis with her friend Barb, or if that’s not an option, rockhounding (as she loves to call it) out in the red hills of St. George just after sunrise, a newfound passion of her empty-nester days. Point being, Mormonism is not the overwhelming focus of their lives. It’s one facet among many.

  And like my parents, I just wasn’t plugged into the kinds of conversations and debates that occupied people like Harriet Kimball. In terms of our shared religion, then, we actually didn’t have that much to talk about.

  In all honesty, though, my ambivalence toward Harriet grew less from her long-windedness on arcane points of Mormon history and culture, and more from an irrational fear that her presence had somehow rendered me superfluous in the quest to find Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and his Infinite Future. I brought so little to the table to begin with—mostly I think Sérgio enlisted me because I was willing to listen to him talk—and now here was someone with significant experience as a translator, with legitimate academic chops, and with a general enthusiasm to rival even Sérgio’s. I was redundant, although what the larger implications of that supposed redundancy might have been, I really couldn’t have said. There was so little actually at stake, and yet I regarded Harriet with wariness, probing her persona for weaknesses like we were two neck-and-neck presidential candidates, and not just collaborating members of an amateur research team.

  And as the day wore on, my gimlet eye did detect a weakness in Harriet. Though she spoke freely about her scholarship, she kept her private life—and especially her past—under heavy wraps.

  For example, at one point late in the morning, I was sorting through a box of leaflets that warned of the perils of automobile safety regulations. At my side, Harriet sorted through a box of her own while delivering a disquisition on Joseph Smith’s fascination with city planning and utopian sociality. At a conceptual break in this lecture, I jumped in, hoping to divert the stream of conversation away from the topic of Mormon studies.

  “Did Sérgio say you live in Danesville?” I said to Harriet.

  Setting aside her current box, which she had finished searching, Harriet opened a new one and explained that actually she lived in a cabin at the mouth of Danish Fork Canyon, where she did her translation work (“My bread and butter,” she added), primarily from Spanish but also from Portuguese, Italian, and sometimes French. Apparently the texts she translated ran the gamut from technical manuals to comic books to novels to poetry.

  “You have to be flexible if you want steady work,” she said.

  “That makes sense,” I said, opening a new box of my own. “I bet you come across some interesting stuff.”

  “I do,” she said. “Last month I was working on the memoirs of one of the first female bullfighters in Spain—a remarkable story, really.”

  “And remind me,” said Sérgio, wiping the sweat from his face with an already damp handkerchief and treading unwittingly into forbidden conversational territory, “what led you to pursue translating as a profession?”

  Harriet had been pulling a new box down from an eye-high stack, but now she froze, arms extended, the box hovering at her chest.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” I said, noting the extreme look of discomfort on her face.

  “No,” she said, unfreezing. “I’m fine. It’s fine. You want to know why I translate?”

  “Not if that would make you uncomfortable,” said Sérgio, looking panicked.

  “I said it’s fine,” said Harriet. “I got into translating when . . .” She shook her head. It was strange to see her so flummoxed. “I used to be a history professor, but then I got fired. I’d studied Spanish as an undergrad, so . . .”

  She shrugged and set the box down on the floor, turning away from the two of us.

  “My apologies,” said Sérgio. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s fine,” said Harriet, over-cheerfully, but she didn’t say anything more on the subject.

  The more we talked that day, the more clear it became that Dr. Kimball was a woman of many secrets. If our conversation ever veered toward details of her past, she would steer it sharply away, like a ship’s captain avoiding a series of jagged rocks just below the water’s surface.

  There was another topic, though, that all three of us were avoiding—the possibility that we might not find anything Salgado MacKenzie–related in all these boxes of papers. We’d been working nonstop since morning, not even breaking for lunch, and that whole time the usually voluble Sérgio had been a picture of stolid absorption, moving with a barely contained agitation, his energies so concentrated on the search that he’d uttered only a sparse handful of sentences over the course of many hours. Sérgio’s frenzy became less and less contained as box after box yielded up nothing pertaining to our search. His T-shirt grew more sweat stained. His long, normally neat hair became increasingly disheveled. And his eyes grew wilder until he became a picture of quiet desperation.

  Harriet, too, seemed more affected by our failure as the day went on, her speeches growing less impassioned by the minute, so that by late afternoon she was speaking in a bleary monotone, her lecture on pre-Correlation-era Sunday school manuals sounding more than anything like a perfunctory filibuster against impending disappointment.

  I myself was feeling lousier with each passing hour. Just being in Roger Ash’s storage unit meant spending money I didn’t have, and if our search through the dusty memorabilia of the Grandsons of American Liberty led nowhere, I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

  Morale seemed to be at a breaking point on all sides, but then nine hours into our excavation I justified my presence on the three-person team when, at the bottom of a box of anti-OSHA pamphlets, I found Roger Ash’s old Rolodex, its circle of cards yellow with age.

  “Look,” I said, holding up the Rolodex like a stone idol.

  When they saw what was in my hand, S
érgio and Harriet literally dropped what they were doing, their cardboard boxes hitting the ground with papery thuds as they bounded over the cluttered ground to reach my side. With Sérgio at my left elbow and Harriet at my right, I flipped the dusty cards to the S section. Four cards in, and there it was, typewritten in faded black letters:

  EDUARD SALGADO-MACKENZIE

  127 MAIN STREET

  FREMONT CREEK, ID

  “Wonderful,” said Sérgio. “Wonderful, wonderful!”

  X

  A little before 3:00 a.m. we made it to St. George, Utah. I’d been driving Harriet’s near-pristine 1989 Toyota Celica since Bakersfield, and both Harriet and Sérgio had been asleep since Vegas. The streets of St. George were dark enough that I got turned around a couple of times before finally finding my parents’ housing community. I’d only been to their condo twice before, so I might have had trouble finding it even if it hadn’t been the middle of the night. They’d moved there three years earlier after my dad had retired and they’d sold their house in Salt Lake. The condo was a newish one-bedroom property, which was great for my parents but had precluded my moving back in with them during my post-college swan dive. Not that I would have been thrilled at the prospect, or that I’d expected them to put me up. All I’m saying is, the timing had been unfortunate.

  As the car turned and slowed down, Harriet and Sérgio both stirred awake. I pulled into an open visitor spot, and we stepped out of the car into the chilly desert air. We got our bags from the trunk—we’d all packed light—and crossed the parking lot, shivering under our thin daywear. I’d called ahead, explaining the situation as concisely as possible, and my mom had said it all sounded very interesting and they’d be happy to have us.

  I found my parents’ spare key under a potted cactus and opened the door. They’d left a lamp on in the living room, and just inside the door was a neat pile of blankets and pillows. A note in my dad’s handwriting on top of the bedding welcomed us and told us to make ourselves at home.