Divine purpose

Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.

Issue No. 381

Out of Space
Sam Thielman

Out of Space

by Sam Thielman

In Leupp, which is close by, a pretty woman and a tall man with dark hair are walking out of a children’s film. She tells him she moved to New Mexico from the Florida panhandle after she’d had her juvenile record expunged and ended up working for a mining concern in Albuquerque, but now she’s here in Arizona for a few days to help a colleague with a new site. She picks an imaginary piece of lint off the shoulder of his jacket as he asks her a question. “It was just vandalism,” she says, and then giggles. “Plus some other stuff.” When he presses her for details she pretends to need to go to the bathroom, and when she comes back she says he has to take her to a scary movie next time. Her name is Penny.

It is two years later, in July. A blue church building stands by the side of the highway next to a one-armed saguaro; there are no telephone poles close by. A cell tower is visible in the distance. A man with a young face and white streaks in his dark hair is leaning on a cane by the door; he greets parishioners as they leave the chapel. He wears a long black robe and a bright, alert smile and is somehow even taller than he was walking out of the movie theater. He tells each old lady and young mother and drowsy father how happy he is that they came to fellowship with him. He radiates a kind of humility that seems at odds with the robe and the hair. On the podium, instead of a pulpit, there is a large easy chair upholstered in blue fabric, taken from the preacher’s own house and placed there after it became clear that he was no longer capable of standing for more than a few minutes at a time, even leaning on the pulpit. The pulpit itself now stands awkwardly to the side like a groom watching the door of the sanctuary for his bride. There will be a storm late this afternoon, or perhaps overnight.

The preacher is at home now, standing in his bedroom with the door open so he can continue talking to his guest. He is squeezing some ointment from a white tube with a trade name printed on it onto the gauze pad of a flesh-colored bandage the size of a playing card. A woman with sun-blond hair and a leathery tan is perched uncomfortably on a white fabric chair patterned with blue flowers in his living room, staring into the middle distance. She confesses that she asked Satan into her heart on a dare when she was a teenager, which was not as long ago as you might think, and it was around that time she started doing all kinds of other bad things. The preacher reaches into his shirt and applies the pad to his sternum and thanks the woman for her patience. He tells her she seems like a perfectly fine person to him, and ducks so as not to hit his head on the lintel as he enters the room where she sits. 

“I smoke meth,” she says tonelessly. He says that lots of good people smoke meth. She turns around and looks at him like he’s told her the sky is orange. Outside, the sky is orange. Penny comes in with some soda for her and they all sit and talk. It’s a nice evening until the preacher begins to cough into a handkerchief and can’t stop, and they look outside and see that fat round drops of rain are beginning to paint the mossy bricks on the patio a darker shade. Penny asks the woman if she can drive her anywhere. As the woman leaves she looks at the handkerchief, expecting to see spots of red, but instead the spots are blue.

The preacher’s church is funded by something called Blaustine Minerals, which is nondenominational. Blaustine is not purely a mining operation; it’s something like a religious denomination, though it is not affiliated with any seminaries or church schools. It is also a philanthropic endeavor, and its employees are required to take part in disaster aid trips in order to receive promotions and bonuses. This year the company will send a team from the church’s Young Adult ministry to the gulf coast of Mississippi for hurricane relief work, which Penny will oversee. 

Now it is August, and sweltering, but the volunteers must don plastic suits and masks and descend into the basement of a ruined house and smash out the drywall and laths with eight-pound hammers. The ground floor is already gutted to the joists. The refrigerator discovered by another team the day prior is the talk of the whole volunteer group. 

“He threw up in his mask when he opened that thing,” laughs one young man who is leading this division of the team. His name is Skip. 

“He didn’t follow procedure,” Skip adds reassuringly as his coworkers’ eyes grow wide. “It was down at the community college. They had a big old washing station in the same building so he could get clean. Just scared him is all. All the others, they put duct tape around and put ’em in the truck without opening. That’s what we’re supposed to do with the fridge here, too.” He nods toward the basement. 

Penny isn’t working inside the house today, but she has lunch for everybody. She has been back at the base camp, in a primary school gym with a gas generator for lights and clean water brought in daily on this same blue repurposed U-Haul truck, which she drove all the way from Arizona. The internet is spotty and she has had trouble communicating with the preacher, who is telling her where the Lord has showed him the team must go to find the next refrigerator. She thinks he said tomorrow’s unit is in an industrial fridge at a Sonic in Gulfport, but he might have said Gulf Hills. She is preoccupied, because to go to the wrong town would be to risk a rupture. It’s in the Lord’s hands, she tells herself. He’ll see it through. She steps out of the truck’s air conditioning and leans against its hot blue door, squinting through the grimy cracked windows of the house at its clean white skeleton. The Young Adults gather around the back of the truck and begin to unload ham sandwiches from coolers. Penny insists on saying the prayer, which is one sentence (“thanks for the food, Dude”), despite glares from Skip and another sweaty guy who feels Called. One of the coolers in the cargo bed is filled with little smooth azure rocks, which the preacher calls seeds. The Lord has told him to scatter them on good soil.

An old man shuffles up to the truck and asks Penny if maybe he could have a sandwich and she says sure. After a few bites his eyes get wide and he looks at Penny and they recognize each other. He says something absolutely filthy to her and they both laugh and hug. The Young Adults are astonished. Everyone agrees that he should come with the church group when they go down to the beach for the pyre service. Maybe he will even help with the planting.

The trip to Mississippi is over. Behind the blue church near Leupp, there is now an incongruous hexagon of chain-length fence with razor wire on top of it and spotlights at each vertex. Just outside the door back into the sanctuary, Penny is chewing out Skip for not keeping track of all six of the Mississippi refrigerators. “That one was getting squishy, like a waterbed or something,” he says lamely. “It was sorta slumped over on the others. And we could see some shapes inside through the door, like it was made of greasy pizza paper. I think the truck wasn’t cold enough.” Penny is stone-faced. She had raced all the way from Gulf Hills to Gulfport for that one. “Next morning it was just popped,” Skip says pleadingly. “We didn’t do it. It was just like an old balloon. You saw it. We were almost home, though. Just down the road in Flagstaff.” Penny tells him he’s an asshair away from fired and he looks shocked by her language but he knows he’s off the hook. The playground is close by, and, since it is September and the heat of the summer has mostly passed, it is in vigorous use. The preacher is watching the children, resting between the door to the chapel and the gate of the fence. One girl has a little toy fairy with helicopter-bladed wings and a toothy plastic strip that makes them spin when she pulls it out of the housing. It flies higher and higher, and a breeze catches it and pushes it over toward the razor wire. Now the little girl will never see her fairy again. She scrunches up her face to cry but then the preacher reaches up and plucks it out of the sky with the hand that does not hold his thick black cane, and hands it back to her. She smiles, delightedly, and says thank you very much. He smiles back, and hobbles over toward the fence, where a man who does not go to church opens the gate for him. He descends into the pit painfully, though the ladder has been made with him in mind. He does not come out for a while. When he does, it is dark.

The playground is still there, but no one comes. The fence is now a cylinder of concrete, like a cooling tower. Next to it are five refrigerators lying on their backs with their doors open to the sky. They are arranged haphazardly, as if dropped there by a giant. Plants that look like they ought to grow only underwater sprout hugely out of each white box. They seem to have too many angles or sides. They grow high, yes, and wide and not too deep, but they seem to have other dimensions, as well. It hurts Penny’s eyes to look at them, but the preacher continues to stare. She sits on a swing and he sits at the top of the slide, his feet resting gently on the ground. His gigantic hand holds hers. He will be dead soon. No one knows why. His skin is now a perfect blue. She thinks about how beautiful he is, still. She wonders if she should tell him that she is pregnant before he passes, or if that would only grieve him in his last days. Flagstaff is a long way away, but they can see the light from the flower that has taken up residence on top of Sechrist Hall. It shines up into the sky. Lots of scientists have come to study it; it is forty feet across, like a radar dish, but it is shaped like a zinnia or a daisy. 

It is December. The leather-faced woman is saying a few words from behind the pulpit, which is now at the center of the podium again. She has to stop to collect herself a few times. The coffin is closed, but it is almost comically huge. After the service, Penny gives her a big hug. “He was so good,” says the woman. “He did so much for us.” Penny wishes they’d turned that damn TV off in the fellowship hall, just for this, but with the world the way it is all she could manage was a promise to keep the volume low. She looks over at the screen and a rich-looking man is talking about a new one coming up out of the ocean off the coast of Mississippi—the same thing he talked about last night and the same thing he’ll talk about tomorrow. It’ll scream and die just like the last one, or the one before that? One of them, probably the most recent, is still alive and growing, like an island the size of an apartment building and all made of blue coral. The news has changed to a live shot; a blond woman in a fashionable raincoat is shouting into a microphone. Behind her, Penny can see the silhouettes of people walking across the island. Like everybody else, she sees her people—her late mother and father and brothers, and poor Michael. She wonders who the leather-faced woman sees. Some people won’t tell you, though. It’s considered rude to ask. The liberals are all saying there’s not going to be any more livable territory for normal vertebrates in five years—maybe fewer. She supposes it’s just something you have to get used to and wonders whether anyone has remembered to water the trees.

Now it is long ago, outside Leupp, and there is no church here yet. Your life has gone wrong. You want to be a fireman, or a preacher, or a doctor if you could get into school somehow, but the road ahead of you seems short. You have a date tomorrow night, and after that, you might just leave town. You might just fill your pockets with stones and walk into the sea. You might just buy a box cutter and a bottle of whiskey and check into a motel room with a bathtub. The desert is black under the new moon, though the descending stars are bright. A saguaro grows one-armed and freakishly tall. The only other light is a corpse-blue shine from a stone that lies about twenty yards from the side of a highway so disreputable that not even telephone poles will go near it. Though the light the stone emits is blue, the surface is black and bubbled, as though it froze the moment it boiled. The stars sink lower, their light growing bluer, too. In a wide ring around the stone that reaches all the way to the highway and across, birds of several species and some small rodents lie dead. An enormous bear is still moving, trying to get away from the stone, but it limps and wanders dazedly, as though it is not sure in which direction home lies. Insect corpses trace a fine lattice between owls and shrews. Inside the circle of their bodies there is only glass, separating and cracking as it cools under your bare and callused feet. Some instinct told you to take off your shoes; they sit respectfully next to a dead possum. Pick up the stone. It is cool to the touch. You are filled with purpose. Yes.

A FLAMING CHAT IN BOSTON

Sloppy, by Rax King

Luke O’Neil spoke with fellow Hydra Rax King at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts to celebrate the publication of Rax’s new book, Sloppy. Luckily, those of us unable to attend can read a transcript of their highly entertaining conversation at Welcome to Hell World, Luke O’Neil’s newsletter, which is also reliably great (by turns heart-shattering and filled with recommendations of songs by Weezer).

Rax King in conversation with Luke O’Neil

DON'T FORGET TO PLAY HYDRANYM NO. 12!!! lol

ABLAZE IN THE SKY

Jonathan M. Katz

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Maria Bustillos

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