Prologue
(disputed territory, area of detail)
In a cemetery beyond the Badlands, twenty-four of the original members of the Church of the Long Tomorrow lie in unmarked graves.
In the summer, the grass above them is dry, and the dry wind blows it as it grows, and a man on a riding mower cuts it short. He is not thinking about the people who died there. He is thinking of how he will get bread, how the rolls at the next party will be warm, and there will be another cigarette, and there will be music, because the speaker on the stereo in his trailer died and now all he has is the music in his head, which is better sometimes (isn’t it?) than the music we’re allowed to hear.
Sometimes his front bumper grazes one of the wooden crosses, and if he remembers, he will right it before he goes, but he doesn’t always remember. In this way, by thinking of bread and cigarettes and music, he consigns himself to the status of perpetual enrollment candidate. He will never graduate to mowing the graves of the identified in the field across the street, sprinklered green, marked with granite which glints a little in the sun, and surrounded by crowd cams so people can be seen paying tribute to people who were trapped by beliefs that were not their own. Such a habit to breathe in those words before we have words, and make them thoughts, a thought worm, decomposing us while we are still alive.
Under the wheels of his mower, bodies inside their boxes puff and bloat, leaking enzymes, releasing gases, doubling from the pressure of these things we carry inside, and then the flesh is eaten by the worms beneath our feet, the ones we make children cut in paraffin trays to teach them, and unearth with diggers to erect buildings that will someday fall, and toxicologists feed pathogens to study the virulence of smaller things. If you cut a worm in half, the upper half doesn’t die. The child who escaped the church fire had a vision once of herself falling to pieces from the waist up, and the feeling was one of ecstasy. No more thinking, just a gut to follow. The worm brain was gone.
In the graveyard the man will never be allowed to mow, lie her parents. She has never visited them, not once, why would she go after she got away from them, but oh how good it would be for her to lay down on her belly on their graves and scream, release a single wail from her diaphragm, out from inside her like a snake, the scales scraping her throat, up and out and into the world where she can cut off its head and then cut and recut and recut it until it is nothing. Her father used to beat her in front of the other children and afterward take her into his bedroom and tell her she was good. Good girl he would say. She was a good girl for what she never asked of him. For being an example, an outlet, a sink for his anger, a thing he could obliterate, a showcase for his power, a warning, compliant, for letting him see she was his, for letting him call his misery love, for feeding the hole inside him, being a thing he could take and use however he wanted, and see how she hated herself for. It was the transfer of hatred he loved. Look how she takes that part of me inside herself every time. Never says no. Bends over (did she bend over?) Pulls her pants down (did she? did he? did her mom?) When he was six himself, his own father took his face and smeared it in the urine pooling at his feet. He had done this many times, his young head sometimes bouncing on the concrete, and his last thought when he died was of the float of some woman’s arms like an angel flying across the parking lot to save him, and of his belly tensing with the foreknowledge that this would only make his father hit him again. He did not remember what made him pee as his last pee left him, maybe nothing, maybe it was fear of the look on his unhappy father’s face, maybe just at his joy, a thing his dad had no access to anymore in his own body, so he wanted to snuff it out.
The church’s expatriate rarely thinks of the things her own frightened parents said to her. She has banished most of them into a lockbox of dissociation she cannot not unlock with any key she can find. In high school at the halfway house, she would be amazed when she’d try. She would picture her father’s face at the commissary table, but when she tried to picture him hovering over her in the place where he beat her, or in his bedroom where he laid with her later, she couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see herself there either. Could remember only dreading going to meet him there when she had done something wrong (what was it?) Could picture, perfectly, the carpet fibers of the rug beneath the stool. The wavering label on the juice box he gave her to reward her with in his bedroom after. But she could not remember herself, or him pulling her pants down, or the air from his hand moving to strike or touch her where later she would try to let someone love her if only her brain would unlock the memory and let her see it. If she recognized the voice she hated herself in all day as theirs, she might have been able to exorcise it, but she doesn’t know. If you sliced open the brains of most people, it would just be thought worms arranged in the shape of gray matter, mother-father-teacher-culture, feeding on whatever separate thing tries to grow.
In winter, in a hooded parka, the tender of unmarked graves walks a pattern that looks like baskets. His snowshoes are old, made of gut and wood, and as he rights the tips of the wooden crosses in the December snow, he is not thinking of the people buried beneath him either. He is not thinking of the tribes who fished nearby with baskets shaped like his shoeprints. He is thinking of rolls (warm) and cigarettes (lit) while he sways beside a glittering tinsel-strewn tree to music that portends some kind of Christmas. This week there is a party he believes he’ll be allowed to go to. He does not know that by Sunday, the locus of authority over his movements will once again have shifted. That every seven days, he-and-everyone-he-passes godlike builds a world that is an atom of the world we all live in. That every mind in these disputed territories tells itself a story that takes us somewhere new.
