The Pure of Heart

K- this story needs help. I need help. I think I've got a promising premise, but I don't know what to do with it. So this version has a lame ending. I've written three versions of this: one with an omnicient narrator, which was dull; one all in pseudo-scripture-ese, which was mostly odious; and this one, where it have the notion that the first-person narrator's voice moves from eccentric religiosity through relative modern American normalcy and back into eccentricity, but the plot remains elusive. So I'm asking for what you have called "ruthless exfoliation", and ideas about narrative arc or plot or whatever you think. Anyway, at nearly 10,000 words, I'm asking for some patience and that you keep your eye-rolling to yourself. Thanks!

The Pure of Heart

I wish with every fiber of my being that I could start this epistle My beloved brothers and sisters but you have been infected with the Rust and the Canker and scattered upon the face of the Earth and I am the lone witness. Every plain place is made rough now but yet the profane is not entered into my heart and I long for the LORD to restore the Pure to our rightful place in the Holy of Holies at the heart of America, what place now is corrupt and ungodly. Therefore I write this epistle that the Pure may have a record of the destruction of my people in the New Zion and about how they abandoned the Sacraments and now the Gospel hangs as it were by a thread.

The Church and the Brethren and the Society of Mothers and every Pure of Heart, all of us kept detailed records which every day we wrote in our journals. And so the Church since the Restoration thereof has its history written so many times and it was our law and honor to make all the records totally agree in our orthodoxy in which all our faiths were one perfect faith inasmuch as each and every one of us could understand the Doctrine each according to his ability. But yet it came to pass that the Church fell into the hairy mitts of Lucifer, that great salesman, and I am left here alone, the last of my people, to speak into the Wilderness the story of the last days after which I will hide away this record for a future righteous people to unburry and bring to light in I hope and pray a less corrupt time the LORD sees fit.

I, Yeshua, was born in the Mothers' Hospital to a Sister Hamblin, a Churchmother. Brother Sorenson presided. He put his smooth white arms under the Purell dispenser and the deacon pumped the lever. He inserted his forearms into the special gloves that allowed him to reach Sister Hamblin inside the bubble. He washed and anointed her belly with iodine. The Twelve, their smooth gleaming heads lined up in the window, turned their backs according to the ceremony. Brother Sorenson made the incision. There was the Clean Issue of Blood. Brother Sorenson spoke into the intercom and the Twelve turned back around, each in his dark suit and white shirt and business tie representing complete agreement. Brother Sorenson pushed his gloved hand into the incision and pulled me out.

This is what happened, the same as we always did it: Sister Hamblin was taken away and I was left in the bubble. Sister Hansen, the attendant who cared for me till school, swaddled me and fed me formula. I was born on the Sabbath, an auspicious sign. To spend a week in the bubble uncorrupted we considered the longest possible Grace Period. So I began my life a full week without corruption, cared for through the bubble. There is no greater induction into the World: to be spared the defilement of the birth canal through the Clean Issue of Blood and to spend a full week in the bubble is to linger at the very feet of the LORD for as long as the Ordinances permit before entering into corruption.

The following Sabbath Sister Hansen fed me my last untainted bottle of formula and unzipped the bubble. The air of the World, teeming with corruption, entered and I became mortal. Thus must we all begin our Mortal Probation, drinking unto ourselves the microscopic seeds of death. It is our calling to remain free of blemish and sin despite our infection. The cunning plan of the Devil is to infect all men, and the Sacraments of the LORD are the Way to Purity. Sister Hansen dressed me in the white jumpsuit. She walked me down the corridor from the Mothers' Hospital to the chapel. The Twelve were waiting in solemn silence outside the chapel doors. Each in turn, Elder Nebecker last, touched their right hands to the panic bar and then to my lips. Several of the men wept in silence, grieving their complicity in my corruption. Then a deacon opened the door and Sister Hansen carried me into the chapel where the assembled Pure sat in near silence, heads bowed. The Twelve gathered around us, standing in a circle, and each placed his left hand on the shoulder of the Elder to his left. Their right hands they extended into the center of the circle, and Sister Hansen placed me on the twelve white upturned palms. Then she left to sit with the women. None knew which of the Twelve is the father. The deacon drew lots, and there was a sudden fervent murmur of surprise and reverence as once again Elder Nebecker was chosen to pray. A great and portentous sign that God had chosen me for a marvelous work and a wonder. The Deacon held a microphone to Elder Nebecker's mouth. The ancient Patriarch spoke, low but sonorous, his voice shaking slightly with age and emotion. He was moved by the Holy Ghost. He prayed: "Dear Heavenly Father, in the name of the Son, and by the power of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood which I bear, I lay my hands upon this baby boy to give him a name and a blessing. The name by which he will be known throughout his childhood upon the corrupt Earth is" he paused for a few seconds, his breath raspy through the p.a. system, his forehead creased in deep meditation, and then he spoke with great, voice-shaking emotion "Yeshua". The congregation gasped, and some glanced around with their mouths wide open, but quickly returned to reverent silence. Elder Nebecker continued: "And the blessing I bestow upon you, Brother Yeshua, is this: that you will live a long and dutiful life in the service of your Heavenly Father and the Church of His Son, and that you will find great joy in your purity, and in the fatherhood you will merit, and that at the end of your days you will pass from this corrupt Earth into the whiteness of your Father's Mansion without delay, and take upon yourself the mantle of Incorruption. Amen."

Elder Nebecker then presented me, Yeshua, to the congregation, holding my tiny body high. Then he took the vial of Gentamycin off the silver tray and blessed it and used the dropper to put it down my throat. I cried. Then the Streptomycin. Then the Meropenem, the Cefalexin, Cefoxitin, Cefotaxime, Ceftobiprole, Vancomycin, Lincomycin, Daptomycin, Azithromycin, and the several other Sacraments of Purity, and thus was I, Brother Yeshua taken by the Brethren onto the path of Incorruption.

On my twelfth birthday, I was brought to the temple school to be presented to the Teachers and was inducted into the Scouts. By this time I had grown as required: my head was a flawless dome of shining white, never exposed to the sun; my body likewise white and hairless, and my belly round and soft. I had earned all ten CTR rings and wore them on my flawless pudgy fingers. I recited the Ten Commandments perfectly, then the Articles of Faith. I pledged allegiance to the Church. The Teachers were impressed, and elected me President of my class of eleven other boys. I received the phylacteries and the Teachers hung them as required on my forehead. Then they placed the Urim and Thummim on the bridge of my nose and snugged the elastic behind my ears. I performed the washings and anointings, kneeling before each classmate's feet with the boiled water and the Purell. As President, I spent each sabbath in prayer and washing, and was responsible for the disinfecting of the dining table every morning. My hands became red and raw, a sign of great responsibility and attainment.

I showed promise as a student, always popular and accomplished, but never proud. I rose through the levels, and, in my sixth year, I was called to be President of the student body, and was the first of my class to be ordained an Elder of the Church. By my eighteenth birthday my purity was so highly regarded that I was chosen to serve as a missionary. After the training, six intensive months, I was given the Garment, the Gloves, the Boots, and the Mask, and was sent, with brief ceremony, through the gates and into the World. To avoid speaking impure words, the Teachers had told me little of what to expect, so, as all Elders before me, I was dismayed by what I saw: stretching away before the gates were buildings of all kinds, each with its own color and design, and cars of every description, and people with coarse, hairy, brown skin and angular builds and full heads of hair. Powerful smells assaulted me. I gagged behind my mask. But I took strength in the Lord and walked forth to do His bidding.

The following two years were full of disappointment and trials, but also of joy and certainty. I came to love the World, and to feel at home with its people. I loved their customs and their language, and I loved to sit with them at mealtimes. I loved the smells and colors of their food, though I could not eat it. I taught hundreds of them, and loved speaking their language with fluency and precision, and I baptized three of them into membership. My finest moments were when I administered the Sacraments of Purity to these fine converts, and I found joy in imagining the antibiotics going about their work of cleansing. I lived with the new members in the Terrestrial Apartments that flanked the gate. Their year of purification and isolation and inculcation was a challenge to behold, but I felt buoyed by the Work. As the converts' skin whitened, and their hands and bodies softened and their hair fell away I felt deep gratitude to have been called to be an Elder of Zion and witness the Hand of the Lord as He scrubbed the converts of sin.

It came to pass that my efforts were rewarded with a most prestigious calling to the Outer Darkness, the zones so far from the compound's gates that few servants of the LORD had ever been called that far to bear the Lamp of the Gospel to the sinners.

Of the few hundred missionaries, only twelve were called to the Darkness. The Church prepared us with exacting lessons on the more holy and secret forms of purification. We performed these most sacred rites inside the temple and there received new names, never to be revealed in the Corrupt Earth. In these ceremonies we also received the name of our Earthly father, and I was deeply humbled and thrilled to learn that Elder Nebecker, now very old, was my father. In deference and humility I continued my mission as Elder Yeshua, and kept the great name Nebecker close to my heart.

***How does everyone know the last names of the Elders if those names are never to be revealed?***

I learned that I would be going to the ends of the Earth, so far that the umbilicus of the Church would be stretched dangerously thin. The Sacraments of Purity would be delivered to me only once a month, and I would live without contact with the Ordained. I would take the Gospel to a place that had not seen Purity since before the Fall. The thought came with a frisson of fear and righteous pride. I contemplated my sacred role as intermediary, as the chosen Lamp-bearer to the gentiles.

After a month a white bus came for the twelve Elders. It drove us out beyond the neighborhoods we'd known and along a highway above flat miles of potato fields. The smell of dirt welcomed us to the outer lands. After many hours the bus stopped and one of the Elders got off. An attendant handed him a white case and re-boarded the bus. The Elder, as instructed, turned his back on us and marched briskly into the small town, showing no hesitation. We slept that night on the bus. The next day three more Elders were delivered to towns in the Darkness. We drove through a large city. After several days I was the only Elder left on the bus. We drove and drove until we came to the sea, where we turned up the coast into a forest of dark and dripping trees. Finally, the bus stopped in a tiny town, a mere crossroads in the woods, the sea faintly visible down one of the roads. I disembarked between a faded service station and a tiny, moss-stained house. I took the proffered white case, turned and walked. I listened to the bus hiss and groan back onto the highway. When it was gone, I took the instructions from the case and unfolded the map. It directed me to a low house in a garden. An elderly woman, her skin deeply and repugnantly wrinkled, her hair white and brittle, came out, and avoided staring at my gloves and mask. She greeted me politely and handed me the lease agreement, and I signed. It was all prepared. I settled into a small cottage behind the garden and allowed myself a look around before Homecoming Prayers. The garden smelled of sugar and rot, but it was beautiful. I smiled at the leaning white lilies. Purity in corruption, I thought. A dog watched me through a fence, and I palmed my pepper spray. The night darkened and I went in to prayers.

For several weeks I pushed through my shyness and introduced myself to the people of the small town. Most were polite. Some were aggressive in asking about my Protections and asked if I was sick, but without solicitous concern, just hostility. Some Mexican boys laughed at me every time I walked by, but I practiced forbearance and just smiled in what I felt was an aloof and dignified way. One Friday night some drunk girls teased me and asked me up to their apartment, but I politely declined, to much snorting and giggling. I found few opportunities to teach. People made excuses, or turned indoors from their summer evening drinking to avoid me. I endured homesickness and isolation but I did not feel shame, for the LORD had said that His servants shall be reviled for their purity.

One night a family that had been polite called to me from their porch as I walked by. I had seen candles, but hadn't seen people in the dusk depth of the porch. They invited me up and sent a boy to open the gate. I imagine the smooth dome of my head, my starched white shirt, and my mask and gloves glowing in the moonlight as I walked toward the dark porch. Candlelight danced on the porch ceiling. Moths and bats darted. The boy jumped up the stairs, and I spoke into the the near-black "Good evening". Several voices answered. A glass clinked down. A woman stood into the light. Tall, straight, a long dark braid slung under her neck like a noose. She held her hand out over the parapet. "I'm Jenny", she said. "We've seen you walking." Without thinking, I reached my gloved hand to her, my first handshake with a sinner. As our hands touched I felt, and suppressed, an urge to recoil. But I squeezed back to the pressure of her grip. I admit I felt a sudden wave of shame at the big white glove, so exaggerated and disembodied in the moonlight. I laughed quickly, awkwardly. "Germs", was all I managed, to my chagrin. She and her invisible companions laughed lightly, uncertainly. I felt a sudden, unaccountable warmth and affection, maybe for being invited so kindly after these weeks of isolation. I spoke into the dark "sorry, I can hear you but I can't see who's there." I pointlessly, dramatically, shaded my eyes with a gloved hand. There was soft laughter and several chairs scraped back and dim shapes stood into the candlelight. Two men, another woman, others behind them. For the first time in my life I felt warm gratitude and shame side by side, and marveled at the mysterious workings of the Spirit.

That night we sat together on the porch. I spoke little. They drank a bit. I could smell the wine. They passed a fragrant pipe around, and I caught glimpses of them in the red light that surged when they inhaled. Hair; wrinkled skin; sharp, angular shoulders and arms; one man missing two fingers. I told them a very brief version of my mission, and they were polite, but I didn't want to say more, and they changed the subject. The woman, Jenny, went in and came out with ice cream. I declined, as always, but I felt a wave of homesick regret.

Weeks and then months passed. I saw Jenny often, and she was always friendly. I walked by her house weekend evenings hoping to be invited back, but it never happened.

Every month a white refrigerator truck met me at the service station and I got a new cooler of Purity Sacraments. I walked farther and farther afield, knocking on doors, trying to teach the Gospel, but I had little success. I used highlighters on my map to keep track of where I'd been. I kept appointments on a little weekly calendar. I rarely said much about the Gospel at all, though I tried from sunup to sundown every day, stopping only for prayer, rote-learning, meals, and laundry.

One day I went to meet the refrigerator truck at the appointed time, but it didn't arrive. I waited all day. I called the emergency contact number, but there was no answer. Finally, I went home and opened the first day of my emergency backup supplies. I went back and called every day, but the truck never came, and there was never an answer. One day, a recorded voice told me the number had been disconnected. I panicked. I was down to less than a month of antibiotics and Purell, and knew no way to be in touch with the compound. I had only a few masks left, and I began to treat the few remaining protections very carefully. I taped a torn glove. I glued soles from an old pair of boots onto my newest ones, to extend their life. For the first time since Sister Hansen had unzipped the bubble, I skipped a dose of the Purity Sacraments, and began to take them every other day. Then I cut the doses in half. One morning I awoke early to itching on my arms. A red rash quickly spread up my arms and around my torso. My eyes watered. The itch was a torment, but I dared not scratch, lest sin enter the skin. My stomach began to cramp. I went two days without eating and became delirious with fever. A putrid taste filled my mouth, and the stench of corruption arose from my body until I resorted to the shower. The soap was an agony on the broken skin, but the water was soothing. I ran out of bottled water, and drank straight from the shower. The cramps became debilitating, and I spent hours on the toilet. The fever ebbed and surged, a tide of nausea and weakness. When I was lucid, I was filled with dread at the progress of sin through me, and longed to be rescued. I prayed to God that the truck would return bearing the Sacraments. Emerging from delirium one day I was horrified to find myself in bed, soiled and reeking, with the old woman, my landlord, leaning over me, washing me with a cool cloth. My impulse was to recoil, but I had no strength. She shushed me, and continued her cleaning with obvious distaste. Soon a doctor arrived. Then an ambulance. I awoke sometime later in a hospital, clean and fresh, but with tubes in my arms. I was strapped to the bedrails. I spent hours obsessing in terror at the punctures in my arms, at what must be entering my lungs with each inhale, at the thought that people, sinners, had touched the skin while I slept. A nurse entered, wearing a mask. She avoided eye contact, just took some notes and then left. Later a doctor with some staff, also masked. The doctor told me I was stabilizing after some very serious infections. A few days later they removed a tube from my arm. Then the tube from my nose. I drank the water they offered, through a straw. Then juice from a foil box. Gradually, I strengthened. I felt small and hard, bony and angular. One day a nurse helped me into a wheelchair. The contact was intensely intimate, almost excruciating. She wheeled me out to a rooftop deck in the sun. I didn't protest. I didn't want to do anything embarrassing near her and shame wracked me. I sat for a short while, enjoying the sun and breeze, till she wheeled me back inside, explaining that the skin wasn't ready for more. They did this every day. I began to color, first pink, then a brick red. I didn't recognize my own arms. I could see veins protruding, and the underlying bones, and the new color. I noticed hair. Short blond wisps at first, then, slowly, brown and coarse. I ate their food, similar to what I'd always known, but prepared by sinners. I began to walk and exercise.

One day a social worker came, to talk about family support and payment for the hospital stay. She knew the rudiments of the Church, its doctrines and practices. They had tried to contact the Church, but there was no way. Then they'd found news of an FBI raid on the compound. The members of the Church were taken into special medical care, and no real organization remained.

Eventually I made it back to the compound. I hitchhiked, ate with strangers, spent days crossing the country. When i arrived i found the compound sealed, with notices of legal proceedings on the rusting white gate. The local newspaper reporter who had covered the story directed me to several members of the Church, all of whom were still in medical care. Many members, especially the old, had not survived the transition to sinfulness. The germs had overwhelmed them. I met with as many Church members as I could. I was not allowed to meet with the surviving High Priests, who were in detention. My appearance shocked the members. In outward appearance I had crossed over completely, and my tan and hair and leanness made me unrecognizable. It is always a grave shock to the Pure when one of the Chosen takes on Corruption.

The government set up a tent in front of the gate and staffed it with social workers. Some of the healthiest members of the Church congregated there every morning. With some others, I approached the social workers with questions about food and the future, prompted by a gradual realization that the Church no longer existed to protect and provide for us. Approaching the social workers as supplicants required a humility we could barely muster, and each of us broke down sobbing at what we saw as a profound reversal of roles, in which the teachers had become students, the Elders had become revealed as juvenile, the Chosen had become like beggars outside the gate. The social workers spoke an impenetrable jargon we were slow to understand: they used a brisk, relentless vocabulary of words that appeared nowhere in the scriptures. "Job" or "employment" meant work, more or less, but we came to understand that, in the Darkness, each would work for his own money and would prosper according to his own merit. They spoke of nutrition, healthcare, housing, transportation, the law, support groups, shopping, jobs, education, government programs, race, poverty, neighborhoods, distant cities, voting, the news, foreign countries, the draft, the wars, drivers' licenses, taxes, fees and penalties, bank accounts, credit. We required patient explanations for each topic. I had never experienced such anxiety in my life. I woke up every night panicked about my new life without the Church. With my experience in the World, no matter how narrow and sheltered, I gradually became a sort of unofficial translator and mediator between the social workers and the members of the Church. Eventually, the director of the government program offered me a job. I got a Social Security number and an identification card, and for the first time revealed my secret surname, Nebecker. I enrolled in a driving class. When I received my first paycheck I opened a bank account and spent hours comparing the balance to the prices of items in the grocery store, until I began to get a sense of what my money was worth. I became friendly with a few of the social workers, and one of them helped me make my first purchase, a can of cola. I took out my account book and made an entry deducting the cost of the drink from the balance. The social worker laughed and slapped me on the back, and I felt a wave of warmth and gratitude and momentarily forgot the prohibitions against fraternizing with sinners.

As the months passed, our Protections failed. Masks tore, boots wore through, and our gloves became so reinforced with tape that we eventually had to abandon them. There were no replacements.

As the members of the Church gradually dispersed to new jobs and group homes and lives they had barely begun to imagine, my work in the tent tapered off. By then, my talents as a communicator and organizer were widely appreciated, and the Director took me aside to encourage me to go to college. This felt like the kind of accolade I had so often received from the Church, and I treated this new possibility the same way I had prepared for my mission: with humility and tremendous focus and reverence. All that summer I carried the course catalog of the nearby state college, and read over and over the descriptions of every course of study until I came to focus on just a few. I passed over nursing and pre-med, with all of their daunting science requirements, and enrolled in psychology. On the Director's recommendation, and with government assistance, the college accepted me with the condition that I spend an intensive year remedying the deficiencies in my education. In the compound I had entirely missed the sciences, literature, and history. I was amazed to learn that my Gentile peers could barely memorize, that they wrote in the colloquial, that almost none had read the scriptures, and that most seemed to hue to an unconscious scientism and an equally unreflective and dogmatic racial and religious relativism. My pieties and habits of thought were in constant tension with the unspoken assumptions of my peers and teachers. I felt embattled and afraid for my faith. But I studied hard. I took the advice of my guidance counselor and focused on learning the material whether I agreed with it or not. I saw my education as a very serious game, with arbitrary rules and requirements, and grades as the score. I studied hard every evening, and was determined to win. My peers partied and flirted and chased entertainment while I forced an entire high-school education into a single year. The psychology department accepted me as a regular student when I completed this trial year with straight A's.

It is true that this success went to my head. I saw it as evidence that, as a mere novice, I could beat the Gentiles at their own game. I saw them as lazy, complacent, aimless and so undermined by the Spirit-sapping exhaustions of lust, gluttony and loud laughter that the collapse of the Church could only be explained as a Judgment of God. It is true that pride precedes a fall. I fell.

I think it began when the student newspaper asked to interview me late in the spring semester, right before finals. I had received a call from the editor in April, asking if I'd grant an interview. I kept my guard up, the same well-practiced defense the Pure always used when, for example, a sinner offered us food: we had elaborate manners around protecting ourselves from corruption. When the editor called I reflexively brushed her aside because my time was precious. All my focus and energy that year were bent toward perfect grades. I studied every day well into night. And the student paper was so amateurish and concerned with the liberal pieties and the entertainment media, which I have always abhorred. So it gave me some satisfaction to disdain the paper and refuse the interview.

The next day I was walking to class, alone crossing the quad as usual, when I turned at the sound of a person jogging up behind me. A gangly young woman in what looked to be an oversized and masculine brown corduroy suit approached at a good run. She met my eyes and I understood she meant to talk to me. I was almost immobilized by a sudden susceptibility, as though my well-practiced defenses had suddenly collapsed. I felt almost naked, as I do even now merely writing these words. I was in the middle of the quad, effectively alone, and I longed for the mask and gloves. My reflex was to hug my book bag to my chest and sidle off the walkway and look away, hoping she would continue past. But she stopped and fought for breath for a few long seconds and then spoke.
"Sorry. Sorry. You're Yeshua Nebecker?"
"Yes. I. Yes."
"Sorry. June Orr. The editor sent me? From the Steward?"
"I. Yes. I thought..."
"I'm sorry. Is this a good time?"
I angled away from her. Tried to find something to look at. She kept circling to stay in front of me, and I kept turning toward the psych building.

"I have class. In a minute."
"It's okay. I can walk with you."
"I. I think."
"I won't take up your time. I'll just walk. You've got, like, ten minutes before class."

And so we walked. This allowed me to look somewhere not at her, which was a relief. Her shoes were eccentric. Square-toed boots, some kind of caricature of dressy boots. She wore sky-blue fingernail polish, though her nails were short and ragged. I saw these things in glances. She continued:

"I was hoping I could ask you some questions? For the paper?"
"I told your editor I am too busy right now. Finals. And..."
"That's okay. I can do it later. Like next week? I can just make an appointment."

I don't know why, but I agreed. Maybe just to make her go away. I was so uncomfortable I had to suppress an urge to just run. We made an appointment and I immediately began thinking of ways to get out of it. She thanked me and backed away, smiling. Her teeth were very big. Black curls around here head. Very tall and gawky.

I kept this last image in my head all week. Or, rather, it kept me. I couldn't get rid of it. In my trig final I thought about her. While studying the French Revolution. While falling asleep. In the shower. One morning at the end of midterms, a couple of days before our appointment, I was donning the Garment when I thought of her and I felt shame. I hadn't worn the gloves, boots, or mask since they'd worn out. The phylacteries I kept mostly flipped up on the brim of my hat. But the Garment, the crucial Protection, I had kept as a secret reminder of my calling as one of the Pure. Nobody knew but me. I washed it in the sink when nobody else was around, and wore it damp after each washing because I had only one, and no way to get more. It had begun to fall apart. My brothers and sisters, it shames me to admit that I stood there naked with the unmediated air on my skin and looked at that pathetic gray and worn-out rag and I was ashamed. For the first time in my adult life I went out without the Garment, just my coarse gentile clothes against my skin. And it is with great humility that I confess to you that the cool zipper against my Procreator, and the freedom with which it swung and its visibility, as I imagined it, through my pants all combined to bring me to a great state of excitement many times that day. My mind wandered from its proper contemplations of the Glory of God and I did entertain a great lust in my heart. Picture, if you will, a young man barely in his 20s, on a warm spring day when many female students were in shorts and tank tops, freshly freed from the long hours of midterm exams and newly aware of the complete autonomy and excitability of his Procreator. I was ecstatic. Beside myself. My mind was utterly addled with sex, unable to settle on anything else.

And it still was two days later when I went to the student union to meet June Orr. My mind had changed. I no longer felt irritated or intruded upon. In fact, I had started to look forward to the interview. And then, early that morning, to long for it.

Crossing the quad the hundreds of bare brown legs were a torment to me. I couldn't redirect my eyes. My heart pounded, my mouth watered, my Procreator tried mightily to push its way out of my pants, and my mind pictured only skin and big white teeth and black curly hair. My hands shook and I panted. I limped across campus grinning like a dog. My tongue likely lolled. A kind of unreflective confidence guided me through the doors and into the central lounge, and I instantly picked June out from the crowd, sitting hunched over a sticker-bedecked laptop at the far end of the busy room. The sight of her brought a moment of fear or caution, but I was able to suppress it and cross the room with my new certainty. I stood before her. She looked up at me through comically thick glasses. Her eyes, enormously magnified, showed something I interpreted as submission or fear. Her lashes radiated out from pale blue. She blinked. She smiled her toothy smile. She stood like a ladder unfolding, her shoulders bony and narrow in the manly brown jacket. Heat came off her, and humidity. I inhaled and leaned toward her. She, my dear brothers and sisters, leaned away.

We found a quiet corner and sat and talked.

"We want to feature you in our Student Profiles section in two weeks, so I thought I'd ask you some questions."
"Okay."
"This usually takes an hour or so."
"Okay."
"Sorry I tracked you down like that. On the quad?"
"That's okay."
"Okay."
"..."
"Alright then. So. You grew up in the compound?"

And the shame returned. In my few days of constant turgid arousal I had somehow forgotten the obvious reason June had this assignment: I was a freak, one of the Pure, and I was the first ever to attend State U. Other Student Profile pieces I'd seen introduced the son of a Somali warlord, a Tibetan monk studying physics, a 90-year-old great grandmother who wanted to become a poet, and other exotic outliers. Of course the questioning would go immediately to my strangeness. Diversity, they called it. The condition of being invited into mainstream society because of your exotic type, not because of any personal attainment. I sat there with my shrinking Procreator, blushing and suddenly shy. It occurred to me in that moment that the Garment, the Sacraments, the temple, the compound, the Church itself were microcosms of the Doctrine of Chosen Separateness, and each one was a kind of barrier that forbade contact and stifled desire. Or a kind of prophylactic. We are in the World but not of it. Germs and long brown legs cannot be entirely avoided, but we, the Pure, can put on the Breastplate of Righteousness and protect our purity from infection. I dared a long, direct look at June's face as she waited for me to speak. She blinked. Her smile tightened to hide her big white teeth. She looked down. I saw her in that moment: skinny, angular, gaunt. She licked her lips. Her hair shifted across her forehead. She drew her frail shoulders forward. Color spread up her neck, blotchy and pink. Shame shallowed my breath. It is possible to encapsulate a worldview so compactly that you can hold it in you as you'd hold a book. I held it one last time. I saw its nacreous round perfection. I heard its ponderous amens. I smelled its antiseptic whiteness, its chlorine inertia. One last moment I held it and then I dropped it and I turned to her mouth, red and chapped and full of teeth, and I was, forgive me, born again.

So I look back on a red vinyl lounge chair in the noisy student union as the fulcrum of my life. There was before. There was that moment. There was after. A construction of memory, of course. In the moment I knew I'd chosen a new way, but I couldn't feel it. There had been shame. There was that moment. There would be years of dread and second guessing. But that moment was silent, unmoving, pivotal.

I looked at June's mouth. She looked at the floor. She shifted to cross her gawky legs. Distractions returned. The noise of the room intruded. June's assignment nagged. I needed to adjust my Procreator where it was pushing painfully against my zipper.

June continued:

"Can you tell me something we'd like to know about yourself? Your story?"
"Umm. This may take a while."
"That's okay. I've got like a week."
"It may take longer than that."
"Oh."
"I mean. I am. Okay, so, it is not what you'd say is a story that is just, how do you? tellable? About how. With beginning, middle, end? I mean linear? Linear."
"..."
"I'm sorry. So. Okay, picture here I am like a house with no foundation. Or no. I'm sorry."
"I just want you to start. I want to help you start saying this."
"..."
"You have a story and we are curious about it. I mean"
"My story is not something"
"Sorry."
"Okay."

I said let's go outside and walk. She said ok. She looked relieved. She smiled, which relieved me. We went out. She had to lean hard to push open a door, that is how skinny. She was my height. I followed her out and close behind her I smelled soap. We walked around the quad. I told her a little about my birth and she was silent, and in her silence I thought I understood for a moment the grave strangeness of our practices: the hidden father, the assigned mother, the surgical birth, the bubble, the row of plump white witnesses looking on from the window, the gloves, the Purell, the prayers, the antibiotics. I had a good idea. I suggested she tell me parts of her life and I would follow up with the corresponding parts of mine. This might highlight differences, but it could also help her understand my reticence.

That hour, and then another, we talked about her family and my Church congregation, her hometown and the compound, her dog and my fear of dogs. And the next day we spoke more. And soon I dropped my guard. I trusted her. She didn't mock me or make fun of me, of course. She seemed genuinely curious and interested. She was gentle. A few times she laughed at what I said and then apologized and I took this as a sign that, though she felt my story was strange, she was tolerant of its strangeness and disinclined to judge. Soon it became obvious that the newspaper article had become a thin pretext for our conversation, which had moved far beyond what a brief profile piece could cover. One afternoon a few days into our walks she said

"I told them I'm not writing the piece."
"Oh. Why?"
She kept looking at the ground and her voice took on a new tone. "I recused myself."
This was a new word to me.
"Recused. Like a judge? I said. I mean, I just think journalistically and objectivity-wise I am not writing a profile about a friend."
"Oh. That's..."
"I mean, so, it's like it's not my story to tell now? Now that I'm. I feel too in it. To write it like a reporter at this point. These walks and telling me all that now I can't write it. In good conscience. Or really feeling good about it?"

This is where the awkwardness and the longing came together in one sharp point. This flitting around friendship, her shift of allegiance toward me and away from her assignment, left me flustered and happy, both. I couldn't think of a word to say. Then I worried she would think I was rejecting what she'd said, so I just said "Thank you.".

We walked. She wanted coffee, so off we went. I don't remember what prompted me to tell her about that night almost two years before when strangers had invited me up to their porch. Maybe it was a way to explain my loneliness. I described my Protections seeming to float in the dark that moonlit night, and the first hint of shame that I think was prompted somehow by Jenny's voice, her friendly invitation, her offer of food, my inability to really join the group because of my separateness and strangeness.


***
It is a mystery to me how some people move so quickly from nice-to-meet-you to intimacy. June and I moved incrementally. so much of our conversation was oblique that sometimes I wasn't entirely sure what we were talking about. We spent more and more time together. We studied for finals together, though she found my focus and drive exhausting, and cause for some amusement. Somewhere in those weeks she had begun kidding me gently, telling me jokes. She had a sense of humor I found challenging. It was filled with references to popular songs and shows I didn't know. It involved contorted faces, wild and abrupt gestures, mimicry, silly noises. I had never known a grownup who did any of this, and I had trouble, sometimes, taking her seriously. But her humor was a welcome to me. It dissolved my loneliness. It minimized my strangeness. In the Church we used to have a ritual that I never understood till June started joking with me: once a year, right before Resurrection, we would gather with the youngest children at the outer gate of the temple and remove our boots and throw them in a big pile by the gate. Then we would throw the gates open and let the kids run around the forecourt for an hour in their white bare feet. We called this Profanation. It was a way to introduce the kids to the temple, but to do so I guess we had to ritually defile the place, because kids weren't usually allowed in. I told June, and she said, simply "Fuck", and laughed out loud. I was shocked for a moment, until she said "I just profaned you.". I admit I blushed. Later, at home, I pictured myself as the temple. In my mind I opened the gate and let her in. I know. But, like I said, we moved incrementally. This was a big step for me. It took me down a notch, loosened me up, and I was happy.

That summer we fell into a comfortable pattern of eating lunch together in her apartment. I worked in the library shelving books. She spent mornings making healthy snacks for a vegan coffee place next to campus. She liked to dress up. Every day she wore a long skirt and a high-buttoned ruffed blouse and a frilly apron, like a Victorian matron. But always those ugly square-toed boots. I walked in every day when she was clocking out and we walked the block to her place and had sandwiches or soup. the guy who owned the cafe, a sort of white Rastafarian who feigned affability but was known for sudden, spectacular rages, took to calling me Elder, which I found irritating. I asked him to call me Yeshua and he apologized in a way that struck me as insincere. Over tomato soup and grilled cheese I mentioned this.

"You got nothing to be jealous about with him, you know." She said.
"I'm not jealous."
"Okay."
"I just think he's a hypocrite."
"Of course he is."
"He is self-righteous about his ethics. His ideas about animals and his ostentatious way of telling customers how he splits his earnings with his staff."
"Which he doesn't."
"Right."
"So he's just like everyone else and you don't have to let him rile you."
"Okay. He's just irritating."
"I know. So am I."
"You're not"
"And so are you."
"Okay."


I met June's friends. They accepted me right away. It was easy. I had expected endless awkwardness. One night there was a party after a gallery opening. We left the gallery as a loud group. Some of them had been drinking wine. They were very boisterous and lewd and there was much hilarity. June was in on it, so I was at the edge of the group with my hands in my pockets feeling left out and unliked. June was telling some kind of joke that included many sound effects and silly voices. She had her arm draped over the shoulders of a girlfriend of hers, a stocky woman who played on the University soccer team. While everyone was laughing at the punchline, which I didn't get at all, she swung her other arm over my shoulders and lifted her booted feet off the ground. We walked on with June suspended between us, her skeletal frame dangling like a marionette, almost weightless. Brothers and Sisters, you will understand, but the World will not, that we had never before touched, except incidentally. Her arm around my neck, her hot ribs against my arm, her laughing in my ear, her smell of soap and patchouli from the cafe brought me to abrupt and sudden arousal, so that I had to put a hand in my pocket to hide it. We went a block or more like that. Then June dropped her far arm off the soccer-player's shoulder but kept hugging me. She made a show of mirroring me. She matched my pace, and, to my shame, put her hand in her pocket. I thought she knew, but she just kept joking. I could see the late sun through her teeth. I could smell the wine. The wine in her disinhibited me, too, and when we got to the party June handed me a plastic cup of vinegary wine and I drank it, quickly. Without hesitation.

That night I drank a few more glasses, of course the first alcohol of my life, and was very drunk. I even danced. A loud hilarity continued for hours until one by one the partygoers sunk into chairs too drunk and exhausted to keep dancing. June and I danced slow. I put my hands on her hips, sharp and bony through her clothes. She pushed her forehead into the bridge of my nose, and her nose against my lips. And we slowly adjusted this closeness until our lips were together. I shook. My hands on her hips fluttered. She whispered shushing noises to me. I felt her teeth with my tongue.

At her apartment she pulled me by the hand upstairs. We fell asleep pressed together on her bed. I woke up in the night spinning and desperately thirsty and sick. I gulped water and let myself out as quietly as I could. I stood in the hall. I leaned against her door for a long time. I was reeling. My sacred calling, which I'd been neglecting for several months, pulled me toward the stairs, but the thought of June's kiss held me there. Brothers and Sisters, I opened the door. I returned to June's bed.

**

The following winter a public radio host approached me to tell my story. I no longer felt as protective and freakish, and I agreed to a series of interviews. Eventually, after months of editing and research, I sat with June in the cafe, in a circle of by-then dear friends, and we listened to the show. The narrator added brief explanations and linkages to what was mostly my voice. There were a few seconds of our old hymns interspersed. The strangeness of my story came into focus for me, as though I were hearing it for the first time. As though I were a witness to my own peculiarity. We were nearly silent. The roomful of people sat and stood, each turned inward, and strained to catch every word. The story progressed, in that wondering and non-judgmental way that is the voice of modern public radio. The narrator, as I heard myself speak, came to sound more and more like an anthropologist, and I suddenly pictured the radio as a kind of magnifying glass through which I, the subject, could look up and see the vast leering eye of the curious staring down at me, observing. Riveted. Amazed. Entertained. Educated.

This, looking back on it, Brothers and Sisters, was another fulcrum in my life. In those thirty minutes I began to see that I could never be one of them. That no matter how much we liked each other and no matter how much I'd been assimilated into their carefree culture, I may as well have been wearing the Protections. There I sat, lean, hairy, tanned, and dressed in the same kind of second-hand clothes the others wore, but I could almost feel the heat of the Garment, the sweaty white rubber of the Gloves and the Boots, the itchy pressure of the Mask, and the ubiquity of the Phylacteries. I may as well have been sitting alone in a corner pretending to not notice the furtive glancing of the Sinners. There I was between a world I had chosen but could never truly know, and a lost world of rigid certainties and orthodoxies, where I had been a child of great promise. I remembered Jenny on the porch that night, her kind invitation, and her offer of ice cream that I could not accept. When the show ended there was a surge of noise. My friends hugged me and slapped me on the back and told me how awesome it was. At the first chance I slipped out and returned to my room. I looked in on it as though from a great height: the battered goodwill desk with its straight-backed chair, the rows of textbooks, the narrow bed, the tiny refrigerator. I packed a change of clothes, put on the Phylacteries, made myself a sandwich, and walked away.

It took me a day to return to the compound. It was padlocked. Weeds grew around the Gate. The plaque bearing the logo of the church was missing. The tents we'd gathered in during those days after the church failed were long gone. I called some of the social workers who had helped, and they helped me find other church members. One by one I visited them. I stayed on their couches. Some were happy to see me, and told me what an honor it was to have Yeshua Nebecker under their roofs. Others were gracious but uncomfortable. Some longed for a restoration of the church, while others had assimilated as best they could. Many more had left the area entirely. But the reverent believers rallied around me, and a month later we met as a congregation, in a local community center. We appointed a clerk, and he walked up and down the aisles between the rows of folding chairs and counted us. He handed me a slip of paper with the number. I rose and spoke with great emotion: Brothers and Sisters, there are here among the faithful one hundred and forty-four. The congregation murmured and then sobbed with emotion, and the Holy Ghost did dwell among us that day.

In the following months we re-established the church. We received permission from the state to use the chapel in the compound, and on the first anniversary of our numerological miracle we re-dedicated the temple.

And now, these several years later, my dear Brothers and Sisters, I admonish you to hold fast to the Gospel. Gird up your loins. Take courage. For the LORD hath seen fit in His wisdom and mercy to spare His people one more time. For if He find but one Pure believer upon the face of the Earth he will spare it, and where he find but two he shall establish His church and the Burning of the Earth shall be held in abeyance yet a little longer that His goodness and mercy yet abide within the World of Corruption. I so testify, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen

Me and Rodney, This One Time

I grew up in a small Northern California town called Yreka, in the mountains about 12 miles from the Oregon border, in a pristine version of America with nearly no history.

It's also true that, one late fall day in eighth grade, as I rode in the back of the school bus on my way to a basketball tournament, I was sitting next to Rodney Grant, a full-blood Yurok Indian. There are two large reservations just down the Klamath River from Yreka. His people had been in this country for ten thousand years but that didn't in the least conflict with my version of an America with no history. I was a sharp kid; I could keep several completely contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time and not be bothered by it.

In my memory, me and Rodney bounce along in the bus, our hands inches away from each others.
I look down, say to Rodney, "Look how much darker your hand is than mine."
Rodney looks at me with this deadpan smile. He says, "That's because I'm Indian, stupid."

I didn't know details, really, and I didn't much connect it with Rodney but I did know that a couple years before a young Kurok man named Hooty Croy had gotten drunk one evening, tried to rob the liquor store on the north end of main street and shot a local sheriff's officer named Bo Hittson when he gave chase.
Here's how LA Times David Talbot tells the version related by the prosecution at trial:

"Shortly before midnight on July 16, 1978, a band of young Indians, riding high from a weekend of weed, whiskey and late nights, looted the Sports and Spirits liquor store in Yreka, Calif., a lumber town near the Oregon border, jumped in their getaway car and sped north, chased by the screaming sirens of the Yreka police department. As the carload of Indians raced down Route 263 in their aging Pontiac sedan, one of them, Darrell Jones, leaned out of the window and took a shot at the pursuing lawmen. The driver of the Pontiac, Jones' 23-year-old cousin, Patrick "Hooty" Croy, then took a sharp left up a deeply rutted dirt road known as Rocky Gulch and headed for his grandmother's house, an old miner's cabin in the foothills of Badger Mountain. When they got there, three of them--Croy, his sister Norma Jean and Jones--jumped out of the car and ran up a chaparral-covered ridge; from that vantage point they rained bullets down on the growing posse of Yreka police officers, Siskyou County sheriffs and California Highway Patrol officers below. During a lull in this hail of metal, Hooty Croy stripped off his shirt and shoes and, like a half-naked Indian warrior of old, made his way stealthily around the moonlit ridge, his .22-caliber lever-action magnum rifle in hand, and crept to the rear of the cabin, where he knew he could find extra ammunition. There he ambushed 27-year-old Yreka lawman Jesse Joe "Bo" Hittson, shooting him fatally through the heart"

That was the story I grew up with. Hittson was a fallen hero. Hittson's little sister was a gym teacher at my high school. His widow was prominent in the community. There was an annual stock car race to raise money for his family and there was a BMX park dedicated to his memory.

So there we are: me and Rodney, and there's Bo Hittson in the cemetary and there was Hooty Croy serving life in the state penitentary. Rodney and I were friends and I didn't really think he was upset with me, even if I had said something stupid. But I did notice that I didn't know what he was saying, and it bothered me. Something big had opened up in that moment and I didn't know what it was. Rodney was Indian, stupid. So he stopped playing basketball after 8th grade and I didn't see him much. I did the white kid thing--took college prep track classes, and went off to UC Davis, and a few years later my parents moved away. So it's been 34 years and I'm still wondering what he might have meant. 

In 1989 Hooty Croy came to retrial. This time his lawyer Tony Serra told a different story about the events of the evening: Croy was trying to buy beer and was refused by a white store clerk who then called the sheriff claiming attempted robbery. And more importantly, Serra told the story so that it revealed an Indian history of fear that I knew nothing about: the violence of that night hadn't begun at the liquor store but during the frenzied, land-grabbing days of the Gold Rush, miners and settlers slaughtering local Indians for land claims or collecting scalps or heads for bounties offered by local governments, including the city government of my own town. Sometimes Indians were killed for sport or to check the sighting on a gun. Indian children were kidnapped and sold as laborers or sex slaves, women were raped with impunity. In Serra's telling, Hooty Croy crept back down the hill not to ambush Bo Hittson but to protect his grandmother from a hostile occupying force with a long history of savagery. Hittson shot Croy twice in the back while Cry tried climb into his grandmother's house. Whirling, Croy shot Hittson through the heart with a single desperate shot in self-defense. Late in '89 Hooty Croy was released on time served.

I didn't know any of this, if indeed anything can be known with any confidence.

About a year ago I got a call from my childhood best friend Mark Yaconelli, who has returned to live nearby in Southern Oregon. He was doing research for a novel set in the 1880's near Yreka, and he was terribly upset by what he had been finding out. We talked about Rodney, and Mark reminded me of one summer when we were 19, when Mark was working along with Rodney on the same Forest Service work crew. They were out cutting brush with chain saws, walking roughly parallel about 200 yards apart in a line of about 6 guys. Mark's chainsaw kicked back on a rock and cut a deep gash in his knee. He went down bleeding hard, already in shock, he felt so sick that he couldn't call out well into the wind. One guy and then a second disappeared over the next ridge. Just before Rodney was about to top the ridge, he stopped, stood completely still for several seconds and then turned and looked, Mark says, exactly into Mark's eyes, and began running straight for him.

But so, all these stories: sentimental colonialist claptrap? Spooky Indian shit? Mark told me that night, "You didn't grow up in a pristine wilderness, dumbass. Those hills by your old house, they're soaked with blood."

When I was home last summer everything seemed the same. The Bo Hittson BMX park has fallen into disrepair but the memorial stock car race is still held every July. The mountains are so high and the land seems so huge as to be untouchable by history, undefileable by human cruelty. I thought of me and Rodney bouncing along at the back of the bus, two boys with skinny muscles and little fuzzy mustaches and big floppy hair.As the bus passes through a landscape dense with human hope and savagery, we sit there side by side, happy in each others company, no real idea what to say.