Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  I rinsed out the spider and purged my sticky mouth of the cayenne and Dr Pepper tastes with three or fours swallow of neutral tepid water that made me miss the water back in Bluff, so hard and sharp, like icy liquid stone. I considered making myself vomit as I stood at the sink and faced the mirror and probed my belly with my fingertips to feel the hard, engorged outlines of my intestines. I'd mistreated them and I vowed to stop. We'd dined responsibly for the first five days, relying on almond slivers to keep from snacking and seeking out dinner spots with salad bars featuring radishes, beets, and turkey cubes, but then two nights ago, desperate for hot showers, we'd pulled into a truck stop west of Billings. I ordered the fish but the waitress wouldn't serve it, explaining that the freezer where it was kept had been contaminated by a busboy who'd urinated on the floor and walls after learning that he'd been fired. To be safe, we ordered sourdough pancakes. The corn syrup and white flour sapped our wills, and we'd been craving garbage ever since.

  I opened my toilet kit and removed the products I'd picked up that morning at a Sheridan drugstore where I'd gone to buy razors and shaving cream while Elder Stark handed out pamphlets in the parking lot. The store's health-and-beauty aisle had overwhelmed me. I'd filled my basket with lotions, creams, and gels that I knew full well I couldn't afford but whose labels made claims I was powerless not to test.

  “It's the golfer,” my partner called in from the bedroom. “I'll be danged. She picked the golfer. Frick.”

  “You can use bad words. It's only me.”

  “Damn it, she picked the golfer. Watch with me.”

  “I'm getting ready to whiten my teeth,” I said.

  “What's wrong with your teeth? They're fine.”

  “You've seen the teeth here.”

  Even after seven days in the van, my partner and I were still learning about America. The Church's founders had called the place “Terrestria,” refusing at first to vote in its elections, supply troops for its armies, or recognize its currency, and though they capitulated in 1913 in a bid to escape imprisonment, Bluff had remained a world apart. As schoolkids, as part of a secret curriculum we were forbidden to mention to nonmembers, we'd learned to refer to our incorporation as “the Arrangement” and think of it as temporary, lasting only until that fateful day when Terrestria succumbed to chaos and the Apostles were left to sift through the wreckage and usher in the New Edenic Covenant foretold by Mother Lucy. Elder Stark felt this day might come during our mission and he'd joked that the prospect excited him because it would offer us a chance to loot, starting with the luxury-auto lots. Elder Stark wasn't satisfied with the sluggish camper van that never seemed to shift out of second gear. He wanted a Range Rover with a V-8 like one we'd seen parked in Missoula our first day out.

  “I'm eating your next-to-last wing,” he said. “Also, I'm switching to news. We need to pay more attention to the news.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The worse it gets, the better the chance they'll give us a fair hearing.”

  “That's a mean thing to wish. The news is bad already.”

  “It's hard to tell. We don't know what they're used to.”

  I pricked the plastic tube of whitener open with its pointed cap. The instruction sheet promised results that you could see in only fourteen days, but I hoped to cut this to seven by applying a thick double coating. I couldn't wait two weeks. Women who struck me as fine potential mates were already passing me by without a look. They seemed to sense it when I looked at them, though, and yesterday one had reached into her bag as if for some instrument of self-defense.

  “They're broadcasting a hostage difficulty. Texas clinic. Disgruntled young male nurse. The SWAT team, whatever they call it, has bulletproof breastplates and some kind of scope or camera that sees through walls. Watch this thing with me.”

  “Once I'm done in here.”

  “Should I whiten my teeth, too?”

  “That's up to you.”

  “Why don't I stay natural and you go whiter and whoever has more luck in meeting people, he'll be the leader. We need to choose a leader.”

  “You go ahead. You're older.”

  “You're clearer headed.”

  Elder Stark was being disingenuous. He knew that he'd been in command since we set out and that he had no intention of yielding power. How he'd assumed control I wasn't certain. I only knew that the first time we'd bought gasoline he'd insisted on premium, for better mileage, and that was that—the pattern was set. Next he was pointing out which passersby we should try to talk into taking the Well-being Quiz and which ones we should allow to meet their fates.

  “My mom had a man she counseled who took a hostage once. He dreamed it before he did it,” Elder Stark said. “He tied up his wife with twisted plastic trash bags to keep her from leaving him for another man, then locked her in a shed behind the house while his neighbors searched the woods. After a week he set her free and she refused to report him. They're still together. That tying her up with trash bags did the trick.”

  “This happened in Bluff? I never heard a word.”

  “It happened when we were little. You've heard of ‘angel babies'?”

  “Never.”

  “They're the newborns who don't come out right. The Church owns a house in Spokane where people care for them. Big heads. Short arms. Stubby fingers. Angel babies.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I heard about them through the wall.”

  “You make stuff up,” I said. “It isn't that funny. A lot of it's danged disgusting.”

  “Say it: ‘damned.'”

  When he bantered this way, out of sight, without direction, I knew what Elder Stark was really doing. He'd unhitched his belt. One hand was in his underwear. It had happened after lights-out in the van on our second night and again the following night. I'd done it, too. An agreement took shape. We could carry on as we pleased in our own bunks as long as we spared each other the sights and sounds.

  I dipped a small wand into the plastic tube, drew back my lips so they wouldn't spread saliva, and covered my incisors and bicuspids with a layer of bleachy-tasting gel. The tooth discoloration was due to diet, and particularly the “strong digestives” such as anise jelly and sweetened pine pitch that we took after heavy fatty meals. The results of this regimen, for me and others, were clear, unusually elastic skin, urine that sometimes smelled strongly of burning leaves, and tooth enamel scored by hairline etchings that I feared were the beginnings of ruinous cracks. Eating as Adam was thought to have was perilous, but at least it warded off the bloating that I was suffering from that night.

  “They're saying there's no sign of life inside the clinic. It's over. The SWAT team is taking off its breastplates. I feel like we should go back to the lobby and give that poor girl with the cross another chance.”

  “This stuff needs to sit on my teeth for fifteen minutes.”

  “Shiny beautiful teeth look strange on men. That blond guy in Bozeman—the one who bought us coffee and said we could stay anytime in his spare room—his teeth were so white they were almost clear, like glass.”

  “I'll stop before that.”

  “Come watch with me. I'm lonesome.”

  “So sleep, then. Turn it off.”

  “I can't,” he said. “I'm lonesome without it. I don't know how that happened.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “It's hard to put it into words. You forget how quiet it was before, or something. The quiet scared you, but you didn't know it. After you turn off the screen, you know it, though.”

  “We've never turned it off.”

  “It's a prediction.”

  Lonesomeness was a problem with Elder Stark. I'd known him before as a schoolmate and a Church friend but I'd only grown close to him during the last few training seminars, after we'd moved into Lauer's house so we could spend more time practicing being Person One. I'd learned that my new friend couldn't sleep in stretches longer than two hours due to nightmares, and sometime
s, in the middle of the night, waking up on my bunk in the makeshift basement dormitory, I'd hear him sucking cough drops or crunching almonds as though trying to drown out troubling thoughts. A few times I heard him talking to himself in a croaky old man's voice. I got the tones and the rhythms but not the words. When I asked Elder Stark about this in the morning his face tightened up and he told me I'd been dreaming. A few hours later he confessed, “The Hobo paid me a visit. He keeps me company. Was he being critical or kind?” I told him the voice sounded very faintly critical and asked him what the Hobo looked like, afraid to ask him how real the Hobo was.

  “He wears an old floppy hat. It shades his face. I made him up when I was five or six to look in a barn I was scared of going into for a cat I'd lost.”

  “The Hobo went in and you stayed outside?” I said.

  “No. He made fun of me for being scared until I had something to prove. We went together. Afterward, he clapped me on the back and I felt prouder than I ever had, so I asked him to stay. He promised to pop in sometimes. My mother told me when I was twelve, once I was old enough to understand, that I didn't really invent him, either. She used to see him standing over my crib. The same floppy hat. You probably have one, too. She told me most boys in Bluff do.”

  “I don't have one.”

  “Maybe a sea pirate or a cattle rustler?”

  “Why are these types all vagabonds or crooks? Do they have to be?”

  “They just always are.”

  I let the gel dry and watched the nighttime interstate out the recessed, cell-like bathroom window. Each car and truck represented another soul out of reach of our influence, lost to its true nature. Growing up, it had always bothered me how easily we consigned non-AFAs to lives of dissatisfaction and insignificance. The universe pivoted on our heads solely, even though we'd just recently organized ourselves. The older I grew and the more I read, the more confusing it all seemed. How could a settlement tucked up in the woods at the edge of the power grid and the zip code system have a bigger lever to shift history than the millions of people who voted for the government, farmed the Great Plains, and administered the markets?

  “How white are they?” Elder Stark asked me from the bedroom. His voice had brightened; he must have finished his business. With me it took forever, but he was quick.

  I bared my teeth in the mirror: no improvement. Besides a nice smile, I wanted some other things. A suntan that didn't end partway up my arms and at my collar line. Hair that poked up a little, or puffed out, and didn't just lie sideways and dead flat. My mother had always told me I was handsome, and compared to the boys in Bluff I might have been, but within a few hours of leaving I discovered that they weren't much to judge by. Framed in the windshields of the cars we passed were young male heads so symmetrical and pleasing I feared that Lauer had underestimated the degradation of our physical stock. My partner showed no sign of such concerns, though, and I couldn't very well bring them up without insulting his own appearance.

  “No whiter,” I said.

  “I'm glad I didn't bother then.”

  “You're supposed to be patient. It's a gradual change.”

  “Maybe I'll reconsider if I notice it. Right now, my brother, I think you bought a lie.”

  There were still a few things to do before I slept. The training course had taught us to end our days by swallowing a one-ounce dropper of filbert oil as prescribed in our six-page manual, “The Alchemy of Evangelism,” which also included a recipe for mouthwash made of melon-rind juice and muckweed pulp. The nut oil was thought to condition our vocal cords and cause them to resonate at secret frequencies that listeners would find calming and appealing. The next step was to gargle with the mouthwash, which was said to ward off canker sores. Finally, we were told to shut our eyes for a five- or ten-minute Thought Retreat during which we were urged to picture a belt of pink radiation swaddling the earth and neutralizing its poisons and malignancies.

  I sat on the edge of the tub and did the exercise. It had originated forty years ago in response to a pleading letter to the Seeress—the current Seeress's predecessor, who we called Swift Aunt Patricia, because we rename them when they're dead so we don't confuse them with the reigning ones—from the Peruvian Minister of Health, a secret longtime subscriber to Luminaria, the monthly AFA journal of ideas that our leaders hinted was widely read, in secret, by enlightened powerful outsiders. According to the minister's letter, northern Peru had recently been identified as the source of an epidemic, ROGA, rapid onset gonadal atrophy, which had sterilized hundreds of young men in the Lima slums. The bug or germ behind the outbreak was mutating too quickly for vaccines and might soon cross the border into Bolivia. Could Swift Aunt Patricia offer help or guidance?

  That very day, the story went, she sent her staff home early, fed her birds, and shut herself up in the Blossom Room of Riverbright, the turreted official residence that Mother Lucy had sketched while she lay dying but failed to render the rear side of, causing its builders to leave it flat and windowless because early Apostles were strict abstainers from what Discourses calls the Bridegroom's Folly, defined as trying to guess another's desires in the absence of unmistakable evidence. (We grew less stringent about this as the years passed.) She prayed in the time-honored manner of her office, kneeling on an unplaned cedar plank, her feet unshod, her right palm open and up, her left palm flat across her forehead. After three sleepless days and several Etheric Contacts with Lom-Bard-Ok-Thon, the virility entity of the Pyramids, Swift Aunt Patricia discerned a trembling radiance around the globe atop her desk. The glow turned rose-colored, intensified, and hovered over South America as the Blossom Room warmed to ninety-nine degrees (or, as in my grandmother's account, was whipped by a sudden, fierce cyclonic draft that stripped its houseplants bare of leaves). Exactly four months later, under the spring moon we know as Snake Emergence, another letter came in which the minister confirmed the miracle: Peru was whole. The plague had ceased.

  Such stories were hard to credit, yet I cherished them. What I couldn't imagine was telling them to strangers, even though I had little else to offer them. Ours was a church of tales, I'd come to realize, and we accorded anecdotes and gossip a higher place than formal doctrine, which we didn't really trust. It was no wonder our movement had failed to spread. Unless you grew up with us, soaking up the lore, how could you hope to understand or join us? It was all so sloppy, so disheveled, a huge loose stack of fables and fourth-hand yarns clipped to a modest sheaf of creeds with a lot of health advice tossed in.

  I stripped to my shorts and T-shirt, washed my face, went back to the bedroom, and slid in under the blankets. Elder Stark's state of awareness was hard to estimate; his eyes were open, lit by the TV shine, but didn't seem to be taking anything in. We'd been asked to recite an old verse before we slept—“All-in-One of Aspects Manifold / Maker Not Admirer of Gold / One Day Red or Violet, Another Green / Ever Heard, Perpetually Seen / Mind the Turnings That We Take / And the Actions We Forsake / Help Us Never to Compare / Perfect Presence Always Everywhere”—but tonight we'd have to skip it.

  “Are you awake or not really?” I asked my partner.

  He rolled himself on one side to face me, the waffled print of the bedspread on his cheek. The pale areas exposed by his fresh haircut made him look boyish, vulnerable, unformed. In Bluff he'd been an ox, a horse, running loaders and graders at the talc mine and coaching boys in grappling, but Terrestria had diminished him somehow.

  “That girl with the blue hands around her neck? I think we should go back to her,” I said. “I'm worried she was sicker than she looked. Maybe if she completed the Well-being Quiz and she saw it right in front of her, the proof . . .”

  My partner thought for a while. He watched TV. From somewhere he mustered the gumption to shut it off but he stuttered the button on the handheld button board and the wide blue eye blinked right back open, showing some kind of government reminder about how fathers who ignore their children hamper the kids' ability to read and write. Or maybe
it was a movie; I couldn't tell yet. I'd heard that sometimes they made movies which seemed like news here, and also that the news showed lots of movies. It was one of the reasons the Seeress banned TV, which Swift Aunt Patricia had allowed because she'd enjoyed the humorist Milton Berle, whom she'd sent copies of Luminaria to in the hope that he'd discuss them on his show someday, perhaps not in words but allegorically. Whether he had or hadn't was still debated, and there was no way to settle the debate. A lot of Apostle debates were like that. People took sides depending on their temperaments and because if they didn't take sides they couldn't debate, which passes the time in a town with no TVs.

  “I should tell you this now,” Elder Stark said. “I get ‘prompts.' Faint little nudges. They give me information.”

  “Hobo nudges?”

  “He told me they're not him. My nudge on that girl, from just a minute ago, said, ‘Leave her be, Elias, she's contagious.' Her germ doesn't just cause a fever and a cough, it shreds the gall bladder from inside out. She's fighting it off because people here are used to it, and that keeps it weak for some reason, but you and I, if we ever caught it, we'd be crippled. Invalids.”

  “That's more complicated than a nudge.”

  “Let's pass her over, just in case.”

  My partner lay back down and shut his eyes, crossed his hands on his chest, and swallowed loudly. One lamp still burned. The lamp was closer to his bed, making it his duty to switch it off, but I suspected he'd left it on on purpose, spooked about going to sleep in a new place that you couldn't forget was a new place even with your eyes squeezed closed and a pillow bunched around your ears. The odors from potions they'd used to scrub the carpet. That slippery dry fabric on the quilt that felt as shiny as it looked. The shudderiness in the box springs from the trucks that also vibrated the walls, which didn't seem solidly fixed to the whole building, perhaps so they could be moved or taken out to change the shape and dimensions of the room. To me, the most bothersome newness was a thought, though. Who owned the motel, and where were they? They couldn't be here or they'd have sent the clerk back home to bed and told the maintenance people not to suffocate spiders with plastic film. The idea of a place where strangers bathed and slept having no one watching over it or taking an interest in its goings-on as long as the money it earned was counted correctly left me feeling hollow and preyed upon.