Kade Takes His Walk, April 26, 2014, Kolob, Utah

He walked and remembered to stay to the edge. This is where he threw the bag of bees. The gravel here at the edge is full of goats' heads is why the boots. This is where the Cruise America with the Californias in it came over the hill at sunrise and he swinged up into the cottonwood but it hit him anyway bet he didn't even get hurt but Mom yelled and cried all day and told him one thousand times never walk in the middle only to the edge. This is where that one summer the renters lived after Old Man Nelson died and he saw her tits in the night but only the one time. He kept going back to put his dink in the fence at her window but he never saw her tits again and then she went to the City. This is also --this same tan house-- where the tall skinny guy lives now and cuts his Coors cans into silver twists and has this like Christmas tree of Coors cans now shining in the porch. He walked to the crossing and stopped to decide which way to go. To proceed. This decision he always made by wind, which way it was blowing, and this time it went to the Mountain that is North. And so but, --however--, another wind, a stealth wind, went East to the canyons and so that is the way he went, stealth now, blending into the roadside grass walking like an Anasazi on just the toes of his boots so that the 2014 Subaru Outback with Thule roof rack out patrolling to sniper him cruised by and didn't even see him til it was too late for them and he squeezed the detonator. And this is the biggest Angus bull in Kolob. He climbed the fence and hooked his heals and sat the top rail, He built this fence with his Mom for the rich City people. The rail is lodgepole pine from Montana which what a wasteful expense had said his Mom. They did not want the bobwire to snag the deer or hurt their bull which however no bull this enormous will get even a scratch from no stinkin bobwire. And this is a cow with Old Man Ferral's brand on it pushing into the fence and the bull's dink is like a red arm so he sits and and watches and the bull humps the cow and he has a pretty good viewing angle and he smiles about how much he can teach that renter with the tits when she moves back to Kolob looking for some cowboy loving. When the bull is done and the cow is back to eating and the Mexican is riding in and the wind goes North he dismounts the fence and walks. Here is the tiller they let rust by the road and he knocked last summer and offered to take away and they said no. This house is also now renters. This is the quakie where the bees was and when he knocked and offered to take the rusty tiller and the renters said no they said but you can take those bees away, only they called them yellowjackets, and they laughed but he took a trashbag and just quick slipped it up over the big nest and over the branch and tied it and then cut the branch off and got stung only once and took the branch with the buzzing bag back up there and threw it in the weeds and they gave him five dollars and a Coke Zero. Here is the tall skinny guy coming in his 2012 F-350 and doing the city wave he does. His hat is not right. He walked through the willows where the road is low. This is where the cougar that night was standing and he surprised him and went through the fence where even a lamb can't fit and so he started carrying his revolver that the renters wanted him to shoot the Coke Zero can but a man doesn't show off with his revolver Mom said and plus he had no ammo they don't sell no .38 over to Cannonville no more but a cougar knows the sight of a sidearm and is very terrified of a cowboy hat even with no horse under it. He came out of the willows on the rise. This is a 2WD in a rut, is what this is. Just a old Dodge as can't get out of the mud where the riser blew last week and it is still wet and soft and tore-up. He walked up to the guy pushing that has mud all over and says I am Kade and the guy's hand is small and soft. They are up to they axle in snot-slick bentonite mud and not doing it right so he goes over to the now-fixed riser and gets a couple rocks and puts them in the ruts and a couple more and the other guy who is driving and has earrings but is probably not a faggot guns it and the 2WD gets on the road and the first guy gets in and says thanks and they drive away slingin mud all over and he gets the rocks out and puts them back by the riser. He remembers that Old Man Nelson's boy bought this pasture so he walks over to his house but he's not in so he tells his new fat wife Lucinda to tell him he can move handlines if he wants two dollars the run. She is not a kindly woman so he keeps it short and all business. This is where the road just goes on with no houses for a good stretch before town and he remembers when he was a boy he raced through here when he was short enough to ride Mom's buckskin Yellow that was then the fastest horse in Kolob and he always won. But now he is tall and that horse is not going to last another winter and is swayback and got no teeth to speak of however is a good horse for Mom to get out on now and then such as Fourth of July Parade when the Relief Society goes riding in dresses they made. There was this one time he was racing and that was when the road was first paved and the buckskin Yellow didn't know paving and lost his feet on the bend and Yellow and he'd almost gone down but he dragged his left boot and Yellow'd twisted like a cat and they come out of the bend at full gallop and won it anyway which is how people still slap his shoulder ten years later and tell everyone he is the best rider in Kolob he that don't even have no horse. He walked and walked. There is his Coke Zero can now pink in the weeds. Here is the Nelson boy's new gate that is hung on a opener that is $600 at the IFA. This is the stumps of the Russian olives with the green kind of herbicide they but on to kill them and the tangle where they threw all the branches and he got the logs for firewood that burns hot as hell but it smells like cigars and is not worth it on account of it's a bitch to split it. In last winter he had got tired of TV and he went to the hippy barn to the Invasive Non-Natives which is this slideshow and a talk by this hippy from over to Arizona and they hooked him up with a job in the canyons cutting saltcedar that they call tamarisk and anyways it was itchy scratchy hot work but the pay was real good and he liked those hippies and the Survival School girls from down at the yurts and there was this one that wore buckskins and had a braid and he saw her peeing in the sand and she did not look one bit shy but he gave her her lady privacy but them last three, four weeks in his sleeping bag when she was over there sleeping pretty in the moonlight just about near wrecked and killed him after he saw her butt and another time one of her tits when she was working a Stihl. Those are things that stick with a man day and night and make him wish he had a wife mostly one with a braid and brown skin but he doesn't like a woman doing chainsaw work. That is too manly. Here is the cottonwood that the hippies put the swing on that is a cedar log on this purple rope that they was going to try to climb out over that high branch and he tied his wrench to and threw it over and they told him that was a great idea Kade and one of them gave him a hug in her swimsuit the one with tattoo around her waist. This swing goes way out over the Nelson boy's pond and they drop in and he likes to watch but no way is he going in that cowshit water and no way is he taking his shirt off with no hippy girls. This is the flat rock. This is the other of those lodgepole fences of wasteful expense. Here is the four walls but no roof of the old county shed with its biggest packrat nest he ever saw. Up here is the new tower for cell phones which he is going to get one. And the bend where another Cruise America came too wide and killed the Lyman boy when he was out to get the mail. He always stops here to think about that and he squeezes the detonator here every time. There was this one time these drunks knocked his hat off and there was five of them and all he could do was squeeze the detonator even though any one of them he could beat and maybe any two as they was weak city boys, just milk-fed. But so, however the detonator is just something he does when what else you going to do. No way you going at a Russian olive with a hatchet you use a Stihl. And no way you going at five drunk college boys with your fists you use the detonator. This is where Bishop Young's Dad shot Old Man Nelson's brother Hyrum for stealing his water with a underground old 4" handline he hidden at night in a ditch he dug and patched up the sod over it which his buddy Stanley Young said why would you work so darn hard to steal water if you could just do some ranching with all that effort and buy your own darn water share fair and square. It is always better to do it fair and square the water thieves get caught sooner than later and can't sleep well neither before nor after gettin put in jail. This is the driveway he needs to get after with the grader the weeds are gettin tall this spring. It is getting blue on the mountain the rain this year is good there will be overflow water through June at least and it looks like a three-cutting year the first they've had in five years. This is his Mom walking up with the healers. What are you grinning at she says and he says hi Mom I did my walk I stayed to the side Old Man Ferral's cows are knocked up the renters is not back yet I got some city boys out of the mud up where the riser broke don't worry Mom it's lunch time.

Letter Demanding a Towtruck, Stat.

Dear Kirk, Nan, and Peter,

This is a letter about my fucked up story, once known to my vast readership as The Pure of Heart, but now stripped of title and lying in a gutter like so much used kleenex (TM). I am writing this letter without regard for your feelings, only mine. This is an act of faith, and, as is true of all such rash absurdities in my life, I am doing it not because I want to, but because I am desperate. And because Anne Lamott, whom I adore, in Bird By Bird told me to write this. Me personally. I was reading that great book again because I want to be a good writer and it's the best book I know on the topic, and I opened the book at random, which is a form of divination all of us ex-Mormons can understand, and there it was: what I needed to know: if you're stuck in the way I am stuck, in slick mud driving a story that is no more capable than a Saturn sedan, the thing you --I mean I-- need to do is write a letter to somebody with a towtruck. I have this informal writing group I belong to of which its other members are happily unaware, and all three of you are idling your big towtrucks and this is my plea for help.

Help. Please.

This story started as the most natural thing I've ever written, almost. The generative idea was that I could say something useful about religion, or leaving a religion --let's say for the sake of conversation that the religion is a weird, provincial, American one that looks suspiciously like a for-profit corporation-- by simply strangemaking the idea of purity. Instead of repentance and sacrament, these cats'd take lots of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and subscribe to a doctrine that equates biological corruption with spiritual corruption. Fine. I find that weird and funny, and one of my hopes is that my readers will find it weird and funny, too, and have a sudden sense of having stepped into the void religion-wise. Or, a little less grandly: that my readers will see, even for a moment, how strange religion really is. The central weird conceit of the story, I like to think, may be able to waken readers for a moment from the sleep of habit, in which religion is rarely seen as fundamentally psychological, desperate, and nightmarish, like Fuselli's horse with its glaucus eyes right there in the bedroom.

However. I am now on major re-write #4 and the story gets farther and farther from what felt natural and right when I first jotted down a draft late last summer. THat first draft had all the reassuring spontaneity and organic gushing-forth that for me indicate a good idea. No struggle. No weeping and wailing. Hardly any effort. Just an indecent gushing. But this time the editing process has been tortuous. I am long into the self-loathing phase at this point. Maybe six months of that. And I'm nowhere near line-editing yet. And every time I revise I start with a feeling that I'm heading in the right direction and end up with the feeling that the story is less interesting and engaging than it was a few hours earlier. I am once again experiencing what I have so many times before: that I write characters and places and things with great alacrity; that I tend to procrastinate big structural decisions, plot, and drama way too long; and that I often get miles into a story before I realize that there is little in the way of central event or logical narrative drive.

To be specific: in this story, there are two fulcra: the first is Yeshua being abandoned in the Outer Darkness when the church fails. The second is meeting June and having a new life open up. I like both of these. But I don't know if they're enough. Or, as Kirk has rightly observed: maybe they're enough but too late in the story. As I originally pictured it, the birth scene, right up front, would be strange and deeply disorienting for the reader. The reader would have the sense of stepping into a place that is full of familiar objects but where everything is driven by repellant, or maybe just bizarre, doctrines. My original hope was that a reader would find this simultaneously distressing and disorienting and fascinating. The language would be a semi-familiar mash-up of modern American vernacular and Old-Testament pseudo-scripturese. The cultic certainties, the hints of persecution delusion, the dogmatism, and the isolating chosenness of the Pure, behind their wall and their Protections would show religion as something maybe scary and coercive and unacceptable. [? Here I'm on thin ice, I think...] Anyway, when I read version 4, which you haven't seen yet, I think I'm farther from that unsettling glimpse of the weirdness of religion than ever. Given tribal human nature and the fragility of minds, we should find cults terrifying, and we should, I think, vastly expand our conception of cult to include any mass movement that hears voices and yearns for something beyond death. But we find all this terribly mundane. uh. uh. uh. and so: THIS STORY NEEDS TO GET MORE AND MORE SAVAGE WITH EVERY REVISION, not more and more polished. And, when Yeshua chooses normalcy, if that's what he eventually chooses, it needs to stretch out into his future in ghastly banality. I think. At least it does for me. The future, I mean. Stretch out into ghastly banality with a vanishing point out on a blank horizon.

[Digression: this is what Don Gately sees at the end of Infinite Jest, BTW. He has his one life, and it is constrained by his isolation in individual experience so that there is no sustained experience of the One possible, there is just "and when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." We invent God to avoid non-endings like that. He's dessert. A resolving chord. But we're good moderns now, and can dispense with all that.]

Yeah but so:let's say for a moment that Anne Lamott was right in telling me to write this letter. It is an act of faith, and the miracle that succeeds it is my moment of clarity up there in ALL CAPS^^^. This story needs to be more savage. What does that mean? It means it CANNOT END WITH GOD OR WITH ANYTHING GOD-LIKE: there is no dessert, no moment of resolution, no gloriously concordant unity of the orchestra, no moral conclusion, no happily ever after. The tide must be way out. Let's say Yeshua chooses June. He must be choosing her because he likes her more than he likes some other way forward, not because she is some kind of Romantic culmination. He has to face the blank horizon just like the rest of us mortals: without the magical ability to prophesy. Without assurances. With the same existential uncertainties we all face. Of course. Duh. Yeshua is in his life. His past is lost. His present is complicated and distracted. His future is unknown. He meets a girl he likes. He chooses to go with her because that is all a person can ever do: try to walk the long walk with people you really love and try not to be waylaid by promises of something else. There are but three limnae: learning, love, and death, yeah? Beware the merely liminoid: drugs, entertainment, religious chosenness, stuff like that. Does Yeshua have a great moment of insight? Does he suddenly understand that his church was nothing but a projector sending an image of God at the blank horizon? Does he commit to a life of radical modern no-bullshit realism? Does this insight creep up on him and remain inarticulate, so that he simply walks forward into his life with [and, someday, without] June on an inarticulate hunch that it's the best path he can be on? I think this is what I mean my keeping the story "savage": it doesn't allow false comforts, just the journey and the learning, love, and death that happen along the way.

ok. That's all for now. I am committed to doing this well. I don't really know how, so I opened Bird By Bird and it told me to write this letter, which I did with little sense that I would figure anything out, but with some faith. And what I think I learned along tha way is that the story needs to be unsparing and that Yeshua must be directed by warmth. Thoughts?
Many thanks,
V.

How I came to Love the Bucktoothed Aztec Maiden - ROUGH DRAFT

In a shabby border city in the 80s, in an ESL high school, in the hall by the front door, across from the laughable-inept mural of the Battle of Puebla, on the radiator, early in the AM I sat with Mike, who, of course, was drawing. With great, precocious fluidity and control, I now know, as an art critic. But back in the day, when we were, what? seventeen? I just inarticulately knew that Mike was good. Very good. I mean, I could draw, and would, a year later, win a scholarship for my drawing, but Mike had a gift. I swallowed my envy. I was practicing my cool. We arrived an hour before school started. A few teachers with coffee, looking vulnerable or candid or human under the fluorescents shambled out of the faculty lounge, trailing clouds of tobacco smoke. The copy machine chugged and wheezed in the reception office behind us. Then the front doors opened and the kids poured in. We sat on the radiator and watched, as though on a rock in a flood. We mocked: those suede loafers the Mexicans wore, and their hairnets and dickies. The jocks' muscle shirts and blow-dried hair and submissive, chirpy girlfriends. The geeks for all the usual reasons. There were very few we never mocked: the beautiful sad girl in the trenchcoat. Her little brother, who I one morning decided had "moral authority", and, at any rate, had a beauty and severity and seriousness that left us silent. For no reason I can remember, we also never mocked the soccer players, who were somehow, in our high-school minds, not jocks the way that players of American sports were jocks. For one thing, they smoked lots of grass. For another, they moved as a synchronized pack and had a reputation for sudden savagery, though iy was delivered with something like affability. The morning I'm remembering right now Mike singled out a short, fat, bowlegged, bucktoothed Mexican girl for caricature. As a defender of the weak, as I saw myself, I saw her as off-limits, so Mike's choice of target made me uncomfortable. But my cool was more important than my compassion, so I watched poker-faced. He did a few quick and economical sketches. Uncanny resemblance. Funny exaggerations. Her thick makeup almost clown-like. Her teeth horsey. Her hair towering and precarious. Her boobs spherical, helium-filled, and in the way. Once he get her right, he began a new drawing: a feather-plumed, muscular, stern-faced Aztec [god? prince?] strode up temple steps carrying, not the voluptuous and swooning virgin maiden of Mexican folk-art iconography, but the bucktoothed girl. The more likely virgin. I tried but failed to contain my laughter. It was a great drawing, a great joke, irresistibly funny.

I don't remember how it happened, but at some point I had learned that I could walk into the reception office and make a copy and would not be questioned. I just acted like I was on an errand: brisk, focused, entitled. When Mike did a good drawing, I took it into the office and copied it. Then we looked for a good place to hang it. My gift to match Mike's drawing was an ability to jump at least two feet higher than anyone else in the school. I could stand flat-footed on the gym floor holding a basketball and suddenly launch vertically and dunk the ball behind my head. I was just about six feet tall at the time. I could reach almost eleven and a half feet. I donated this gift to Mike's art. I took those copies, added a strip of tape to the top edge, found a good display wall, grasped the copy in my right hand, took a long step, leapt, and left the drawings high above the floor. We always did this at the last possible moment before the late bell rang. The halls were nearly empty. We aimed to create a noteworthy mystery.

People noticed. We liked to lean on a wall within sight of our latest "hanging", as we called them, and watch students stop and laugh or shake their heads. We lived for their speculation and comments. Mike lived, I think, for their approval. "That's AWEsome!" could make him smile through his cool. A caricature of our jowly, gorilla-browed and much-loathed Principal was received with such glee that we heard kids talking about it in class days later.

Not all our hangings were well received. Some were notorious. Mike's gift came with a deep undercurrent of anger and aggression. His caricatures were not cute or endearing. They were mean and pointed. He was usually calm and very quiet, but when he mocked someone or something his color rose. He spit. And when he drew to mock, the drawings seethed with bitterness and contempt. They hung in the halls, out of everyone's reach but mine, transmitting unease. Our classmates responded. When they laughed, it was at someone's expense, with adolescent cruelty and schadenfreude. When they didn't laugh their faces contorted. I think they felt disgust and pity. I often did.

One time, Mike drew a massive, turgid, spurting penis wearing a sharp business suit, sitting in an ornate golden throne on a cloud, surveying a small, pathetic Earth. Understand that I was Mormon. I was at school early in the morning not because I was an early riser, but because I was required to attend a 6:00AM youth seminary class every schoolday. The penis-God shocked me. The suit seemed somehow an even graver affront, as I thought Mike meant to attack my Mormonism, with its suited hierarchy and corporate structure. As I sat that morning and watched him draw I was deeply uneasy. I loved my church and longed to be better-suited to it, less inclined to rebellion and suspect interests. But I had developed a real solidarity with Mike over several months of sitting on the radiator. I sat and watched and did not show my unease. And when the time came, as the halls emptied after the first bell, I took the drawing into the office, copied it, taped it, and, without waiting for Mike's input this time, I jumped higher than I ever had before and affixed it to the glass face of the portrait of [********] that hung front and center in the entry hall. As I fell back to ground Mike muttered "Fuck, dude.", the sweetest approval I ever heard from him. It was brilliant. All the tawdry neoclassical ornament and grandiose symmetry and faux-ceremonial axiality of the main hall focused on that drawing of penis-God. He sat up there on his throne judging us. Aloof, unassailable, virile, and contemptuous.

Between first and second periods we stood nearby and watched. A student stopped and looked up. Then a few more. There was no laughter. Some shook their heads. Some looked disgusted. Some asked for explanation. That was girls, mostly. Mike stood with his arms crossed. My hands were shaking. It hung there all day. I felt dread. The next morning it was gone. We figured a janitor with a ladder did the rounds every night looking for our hangings. I liked to imagine him re-hanging them in some dank mop-closet around a girly poster. I wrote a short story for my English class in which a janitor collects these crazy drawings until his mop closet is full of them, floor to ceiling, and then a girl is assaulted on campus, and he is convicted of the crime because of his deviant art collection. I had a shaky grasp on American jurisprudence, but my guilt was clear and focused.

I was a lonely kid. I hadn't wanted to move to the shabby border city. I had lived in Boston, and I hated the provinces. I went through my schooldays in grim-faced silence, suffering no fools. I was depressed, I think, but I kept that weakness hidden in judgmental severity. I became a music snob. I dressed like an east-coast artist, though I was a fine athlete. I wrote twisted and dark stories. It seems contradictory now, but I found comfort and refuge in my Mormonism, to which I had converted early in high school while still living in Boston. So when Mike and I started hanging out I put great stock in our strange friendship. We barely spoke, and we knew very little about each other, but we were tight. Even though I spent that entire year sitting by his side, I knew very little about him. In fact, I never knew why he was at school every morning when I showed up at 7:00. He was a cipher. He always wore the brightest Hawaiian shirts and shorts, all of them heavily mended and patched. He wore cracked old shoes. He stunk of mold and I thought I detected a hint of urine and motor oil. His hair was a wild pile of blond curls, Beneath our very different uniforms we shared a lean ropiness. Now, as an adult I suspect that he came from a bad home. Maybe he chose his eccentricity, but I suspect he wore his father's castoffs and lived in squalor. I don't know.

The entry hall, as I wrote, was grand. At the back, above the portrait of [*********] the hall rose to two high-ceilinged stories and a balcony looked over the entry. A cornice ran around the hall. The morning Mike drew the Aztec [?] carrying the bucktoothed sophomore, I undertook a new feat of hanging. I remember feeling some hormonal recklessness. I took the copy and swung my legs over the railing and walked out along the narrow cornice, kicking wads of gum and dust to the floor far below. I stretched and hung the drawing on a well-lit spot about 25 feet above the entry floor. Mike gave a half-smile of approval. I rushed off to class with my hands shaking.

Later I had to get something from my locker. As I was leaning down I felt an explosive pain in one hamstring and in the top of my head, and found myself a moment later lying on the floor with my head in the locker, reeling, seeing stars. A squat Mexican gangster in hairnet and Barrio Hollywood jacket was standing over me, winding up for a kick. I managed to spin out of the way. He pointed at me and said something I couldn't understand, and turned an walked off in a group of other Mexicans wearing the same jacket. As the crowd thinned out, I sank to the floor by my locker. My head was cut and bleeding, a nerve in my neck was pinched, and the back of my thigh was contracted into a hard knot in which I could feel every heartbeat. I think he kicked me in the hamstring. After a while, I got up and left school and took the city bus home and went to bed.

When I went back to school they were waiting. They didn't dare attack me in front of the Principal's office, but two of them stayed in the hall after the late bell rang. I walked past them pretending they weren't there. They followed me to class calling me a faggot the whole way. They were there after class, too. Maybe five of them. I stayed in a group of students. One of the Mexicans reached in and knocked my books to the floor. I managed to grab them before they could attack me. Later, I was in my art class when something hit me on the head, hard. One of the Barrio Hollywood boys was in the class and had thrown a baseball-sized handful of clay at me. I bent down and picked it up, shaped it into a perfect sphere, wound up, and threw it as hard as I could back at him. It skipped off his desk and caught him on the shoulder as he spun away. His stool clattered to the floor. The teacher looked up, came over, and marched us to the office. The principal knew the Mexican, but not me. The Mexican got three days' detention. I got one. After school. I sat in the cafeteria with the usual miscreants, including several from the Hollywood gang. They stared at me and I stared out the window. A short while before the end of detention I approached the monitor at her desk, nodded my head toward the gangsters, and said, in my most even and matter of fact way "Those guys are going to kill me if I leave school with them." She flinched. I said "I need an escort out of here." She pushed the button on the intercom and asked the receptionist to come down. In a minute I was in the Principal's office, waiting. When he came in, he knew my name. "What's the matter, Mr Lewis?" I repeated my certainty that I would be attacked after school. He expressed doubt. I leaned forward and showed him the two-inch gash in my skull. I told him the story, but left out the drawing of the bucktoothed girl. He asked if the attack was unprovoked, and I said yes, and he seemed satisfied. I stayed an hour past the end of detention sitting in his office, doing my geometry homework. Doing beautiful proofs, vowing to myself to stay out of trouble from then on. When I left his office, I walked down long empty corridors to a back door and walked a back way to a distant bus stop. I didn't go to school for a week. When I did, I avoided Mike and started sitting closer to the front of the class. I had avoided participation before then, but started doing the work and raising my hand. I discovered a gift for geometry proofs and creative writing that before I had only suspected. I thrived in a modest way.

I avoided the Barrio Hollywood boys. They cooled down, but I made accidental eye-contact with one between classes one day and I could see hatred and unfinished business in his level stare. Even after that summer break I could sense their animosity. During my senior year I barely saw Mike. I took most of my classes at the University and applied myself and stayed out of trouble at school. One day a few weeks before graduation I was in the hall with just a few other students when two of the gang came down the stairs and spotted me. They both immediately came down the stairs at a run. I don't remember feeling an impulse to run. I just backed up and swung my backpack off my shoulder in a movement more or less like a forehand tennis stroke. It contained at least two fat university textbooks, which knocked the running gangster's upraised arm aside and collided with the side of his head with enough force to throw him off his feet and headfirst into the wall. His smaller buddy collided with me and knocked me backwards onto the floor. I blindly reached up and grabbed something. His cheek and hair. I grabbed and closed my fist and he screamed. I bounced his head off the floor and got up and he stayed down. The first guy I'd hit squared off and wanted to fight. I said, in a remarkably calm voice, "If you take one step toward me I will put you in the hospital. I will break your face." He spit on my shirt, helped his friend up, and they left. I picked up my backpack and headed home.

News got around school that I had beat up two of the Hollywood boys. There was much glee among my white friends. I just felt exhausted. I didn't want their back-slapping. I wanted to done with high school forever.

The next day I saw the guy who had originally attacked me. The bucktoothed girl's cousin, I had learned. He rarely came to school. I saw him put an enormous burrito in a locker and noted the number. this was nearly a year after the original attack and my neck still hurt. In a moment of inspiration, I walked up to the science lab, and, using the purposeful act I'd perfected in making those photocopies, I walked into the supplies closet, grabbed a fat dry-cell battery and a copper wire, and walked back out. Nobody stopped me. I went and found the gangster's locker, ran wire from each terminal of the battery, and welded the locker shut. Just a few quick touches around the strike plate, and a bead of molten steel on each hinge. The smell of scorched oil paint filled the hall.

At lunch I stood opposite the locker and waited. Pendejo, as I'd come to think of him, tried his lock several times, punched and kicked the door, swore in two languages, then noted the welds and swore some more.

Over the few weeks before graduation a terrific stench developed around his locker. That big burrito must have gone anaerobic. Flies clustered around the vents and flew in an out. I pictured maggots. One morning the door was gone. There were grinder marks where they'd cut my welds and the hinges. A faint odor of putrid meat remained, under the smell of bleach.

A year later the leadership of the Mormon church called me to be a full-time missionary in Mexico. When my friends heard this, they said all sorts of racist things and reminded me of the fight. I had always assured them I had no ill will toward Mexicans in general, and that I didn't care where the Hollywood boys were from, but they never quite took me seriously. The fact is, I shamed a girl, and her cousin defended her in his hamfisted way, and I got lucky defending myself. I was a scared and lonely boy, and it felt good to hang out with scared and lonely Mike, there on our radiator, like a rock in a torrent of other scared and lonely kids. We found solidarity, even identity, in our mockery of them. We had an eye for the grotesque, but we didn't have the experience to feel compassion. Now, that bucktoothed girl, I'd pay for her braces.

The Pure of Heart, v.3

[January 1, Year of Restoration 41] - My beloved brothers and sisters I write in this journal that you may have a record of the tribulations of one humble servant of the LORD as a reminder to hold to the Iron Rod of the Gospel. That many of you have been infected with the Rust and the Canker and scattered upon the face of the Earth grieves my spirit. For the sinners every plain place is made rough now but yet the profane is not entered into my heart and I long for the LORD to keep the Pure in our rightful place in the Holy of Holies at the heart of America, what place is an island in a sea of Corruption. Therefore I write in this journal that the Pure may be reminded that the destruction of the LORD's people in the New Zion is prevented by the righteousness of but a few Pure of Heart.

The Church and the Brethren and the Society of Mothers and every Pure of Heart, all of us keep detailed records which every day we write in our journals. And so the Church since the Restoration thereof has its history written so many times and it is our law and honor to make all the records totally agree in our orthodoxy in which all our faiths are one perfect faith inasmuch as each and every one of us can understand the Doctrine each according to his ability. But yet it comes to pass that the Pure, even the Chosen, can fall into the hairy mitts of Lucifer, and it is with that dreadful fate in mind that I dedicate this journal to the LORD. Amen.

[January 1, later] - 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.

[January 2] - I shall write a brief version of my pre-Ordination life: 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.

[January 5] - 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. [In those days we still kept the women from the men in the chapel, as the LORD required.] 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, [I imagine his voice now: low but sonorous, 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."

[January 9 - I need to be more diligent!] - 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.

[January 10] - 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.

[February 2 - My current responsibilities leave me exhausted every night. I will write when I can.] - 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.

[March 1, YOR 43] - Brothers and sisters, I did not write in the journal during my mission. Now that I am back inside the compound, I will resume my record: The last 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.

[March 5] - My dear brothers and sisters, it is with great humility that I report to you that it has come to pass that my efforts were rewarded this morning 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. More later.

[March 5 - later] - I will be reporting to the Inner Precinct to begin further sacred training within the week. I will continue writing when I have time. I will pause now only to report that the Spirit is working upon me that my every moment the Refiner's Fire burns in my bosom and the veil is very thin for me now, my dear brothers and sisters. I know that the LORD has personally called me to His great work.

[September 10] - Of the few hundred missionaries, only twelve were called to the Darkness. Over the last six months we have been in temple seclusion. the Teachers of the Church have 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, is my father. In deference and humility I shall continue my mission as Elder Yeshua, and kept the great name Nebecker close to my heart.

Tomorrow we leave the compound for the Outer Darkness. Though the LORD continues to calm me with His Spirit, I feel fear at facing Satan, yea that Terrible Devil, in his corrupt and profane Waste.

[September 11] - I learned early this morning at the door of the Holy of Holies that I will be going to the ends of the Earth, so far that the umbilicus of the Church will be stretched dangerously thin. The Sacraments of Purity will be delivered to me only once a month, and I will live without contact with the Ordained. I will take the Gospel to a place that had not seen Purity since before the Fall. The thought comes with a frisson of fear and righteous pride. I ponder my sacred role as intermediary, as the chosen Lamp-bearer to the gentiles.

[September 11 - much later] - I am exhausted, but I cannot sleep, so I will write of today's rushed events: after a last review of procedures and a farewell prayer meeting with the Brethren, a white bus came for us 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.

[September 12] - We slept last night on the bus. Today three more Elders were delivered to towns in the Darkness. We drove through a large city.

[September 16] - Several days have gone by and I am the only Elder left on the bus.

[September 18, Port Townsend, Oregon] - Yesterday 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 this 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.

[October 10] - For the last several weeks I have pushed through my shyness and introduced myself to the people of Port Townsend. Most have been polite. Some have been aggressive in asking about my Protections and ask if I am sick, but without solicitous concern, just hostility. Some Mexican boys laugh at me every time I walk by, but I practice forbearance and just smile in what I feel is an aloof and dignified way. On Friday night some drunk girls teased me and asked me up to their apartment, but I politely declined, to much snorting and giggling. I find few opportunities to teach. People make excuses, or turn indoors from their summer evening drinking to avoid me. I endure homesickness and isolation but I do not feel shame, for the LORD has said that His servants shall be reviled for their purity.

I should tell you how I maintain my Purity. Every month a white refrigerator truck meets me at the service station and I get a new cooler of Purity Sacraments. I do not speak with the driver, per protocol, but it is comforting to have that brief contact with the Church. They also bring boots, gloves, masks, en other things I may need.

[November 6] - Last night a family that has 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, theatrically, 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.

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.

[March 12, YOR 44] - Months have passed. I see Jenny often, and she is always friendly. I walk by her house weekend evenings hoping to be invited back, but it never happens. I spend my days walking every street systematically trying to bring the Gospel to every citizen of Port Townsend.

[May 1] - I have walked farther and farther afield, knocking on doors, trying to teach the Gospel, but I have had little success. I use highlighters on my map to keep track of where I've been. I keep appointments on a little weekly calendar. I rarely say much about the Gospel at all, though I try from sunup to sundown every day, stopping only for prayer, rote-learning, meals, and laundry. I spend hours of every day walking the streets of Port Townsend praying for comfort and guidance. My brothers and sisters, I humbly admit to fatigue, loneliness, and some discouragement but I hereby recommit to not letting Satan get his foot in the door. I find comfort in the Spirit and in this Marvelous Work and a Wonder.

[August 4] - This summer has been the most difficult of my life. In June I knocked on the last door in town. I have prayed for comfort, but Satan puts a nagging thought in my mind: Why do the Brethren keep me here if I have visited every house in town without once teaching the Gospel? I know they know best, but I have wrung this town dry. In my humblest moments I know that the LORD has a plan for me here and I must focus on the comfort I feel when I consider that He knows all and will not keep me here without a righteous plan.

[September 1] - Brothers and sisters, I write today with fear and humility in my heart. Today 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 came home and opened the first day of my emergency backup supplies.

[September 9] - The truck still hasn't come. I've gone back and called every day but there's never an answer. Have they forgotten me? Is it possible that they sent me a message and I didn't get it? Am I supposed to be in a new proselytizing area? I am now nine days into my emergency supplies.

[September 12] - Today a recorded voice told me the number had been disconnected. I panicked. I am down to eighteen days of antibiotics and Purell. I don't know of any way to be in touch with the compound. I have only a few masks left, and I've begun 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.

[September 15] - Today for the first time since Sister Hansen unzipped the bubble, I skipped a dose of the Purity Sacraments. The LORD knows I do not disdain his commandment, but rationing seems prudent now, and of course the Brethren have left me no instructions.

[September 18] - I've been taking the pills every other day. I am not leaving the house, and I pray the LORD forgives me this sloth.

[Sept. 21] - I cut the doses in half. This morning I awoke early to itching on my arms. A red rash has spread up my arms and around my torso. My eyes are watery and itchy.

[September 22] - The itch is a torment, but I dare not scratch, lest sin enter the skin. My stomach began to cramp this morning.

[Sept 24] - I've gone 2 days without eating and am in and out of delirious with fever. A putrid taste and the stench of corruption. Took a shower the soap agony on the broken skin, but the water soothing. Ran out of bottled water drank straight from the shower. The cramps so bad hours on the toilet. Fever ebbed and surged, a tide of nausea and weakness. When I am lucid, I am filled with dread at the progress of sin through me, and pray to be rescued and often I am so sick I cant pray I don't feel hope I prayed to God that the truck would return bearing the Sacraments. Emerging from delirium now

[25] - today 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 unstrapped my arm so I can write, then restrapped me then left.

[September 26] - Later yesterday a doctor with some staff, all masked, came in. The doctor told me I was stabilizing after some very serious infections.

[September 29] - They just 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. I feel some strength. heartened. I feel small and hard, bony and angular my body is like not mine.

[October 2] - Today 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.

[October 9] - Nurse takes me out every day. I've begun to color, first pink, now brick red. I hardly recognize my own arms. I can see veins protruding, and the underlying bones, and the new color. There's some hair. Short blond wisps at first, now brown and coarse. I eat their food, similar to what I've always known, but prepared by sinners. i've done a little walking and exercise.

[October 10] - Today 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 have tried to contact the Church, but there was no way. They found news of an FBI raid on the compound. The members of the Church were taken into special medical care, and no real organization remains. I am crushed by dread. It comes in waves. I feel alone but am trying to remember that my brothers and sisters are still out there though I am deeply saddened to picture them forced out of the compound and into the Lone and Dreary World. I will be released from the hospital soon. I don't know what to do except try to go home.

[December 1] - I'm back at 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, most of whom are still in medical care. Many members, especially the old, did not survived the transition to sinfulness. The germs overwhelmed them. I met with as many Church members as I could. I am not allowed to meet with the surviving High Priests, who are in detention. My appearance shocks the members. In outward appearance I have crossed over completely, and my tan and hair and leanness make me unrecognizable. It is always a grave shock to the Pure when one of the Chosen takes on Corruption.

The government has set up a tent in front of the gate and staffed it with social workers. Some of the healthiest members of the Church congregate there every morning. This 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 exists 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 have become students, the Elders have become revealed as juvenile, the Chosen have become like beggars outside the gate. The social workers speak a jargon we were slow to understand: they used a brisk, relentless vocabulary of words that appear nowhere in the scriptures. "Job" or "employment" mean work, more or less. We're coming to understand that, in the Darkness, each will work for his own money and will prosper according to his own merit. A cold and bracing doctrine. They speak 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 require patient explanations for each topic. I have never experienced such anxiety in my life. I wake up every night panicked about my new life without the Church. With my experience in the World, no matter how narrow and sheltered, I am becoming a sort of unofficial translator and mediator between the social workers and the members of the Church.

[January 1, YOR 45] - 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 have revealed my secret surname, Nebecker. I'm taking a driving class. When I got 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've become 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 contact with sinners.

[March 8] - Our Protections are failing. Masks torn, boots worn through, and our gloves became so reinforced with tape that we eventually had to abandon them. There are no replacements.

[May 11] - The members of the Church have gradually dispersed to new jobs and group homes and lives they can barely imagine. My work in the tent has tapered off. My talents as a communicator and organizer are widely appreciated, and this morning 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 am resolved to treat this new possibility the same way I prepared for my mission: with humility and tremendous focus and reverence.

[August 11] - All 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.

[September 1] - I started college today. Overwhelmed.

[September 21] - I am amazed to learn that my Gentile peers can barely memorize, that they write in the colloquial, that almost none have read the scriptures, and that most seem to hue to an unconscious scientism and an equally unreflective and dogmatic racial and religious relativism. My pieties and habits of thought are in constant tension with the unspoken assumptions of my peers and teachers. I feel embattled and afraid for my faith. But I study hard. I took the advice of my guidance counselor and focus on learning the material whether I agree with it or not. I see my education as a very serious game, with arbitrary rules and requirements, and grades are the score. I study hard every evening, and am determined to win. My peers party and flirt and chase entertainment while I force an entire high-school education into a single year.

[November 3] - I am reading Huckleberry Finn. I like math. History is very hard. I have to adjust my entire way of thinking if this gentile story is true.

[December 25] - Alone in the dorm for Christmas.

[May 21, YOR 46, same as 2014] - The psychology department accepted me as a regular student when I completed this trial year with straight A's. This spring my loneliness has been almost too hard to bear. Very few people even acknowledge me. Eye contact is rare. I am a pariah. I have gone over a month without properly celebrating the Sabbath, and I am afraid this is depression.

[June 21] - It is true that my academic success has gone to my head. I see it as evidence that, as a mere novice, I can beat the Gentiles at their own game. They are lazy, complacent, aimless and so undermined by the Spirit-sapping exhaustions of lust, gluttony and loud laughter that the collapse of the Church can only be explained as a Judgment of God. I must be wary. Pride is a tool of the Devil, and leads to sin.

[October 16] - Things have changed. The student newspaper asked to interview me right before midterms. I received a call from the editor asking for 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 is precious. All my focus and energy are on perfect grades. I study every day well into night. And the student paper is so amateurish and concerned with the liberal pieties and the entertainment media, which I have always abhorred that 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. I replay it like a movie.
"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. Midterms. 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.

[October 20] - I've kept that image in my head all week. Or, rather, it's kept me. I can't get rid of it. In my trig midterm I thought about her. While studying the French Revolution. While falling asleep. In the shower.

[October 22] - Appointment with June's in two days. This morning I was donning the Garment when I thought of her and I felt shame. I haven't worn the gloves, boots, or mask since they wore out. The phylacteries I keep mostly flipped up on the brim of my hat. But the Garment, the crucial Protection, I've kept as a secret reminder of my calling as one of the Pure. Nobody knows but me. I wash it in the sink when nobody else is around, and wear it damp after each washing because I have only one left, and no way to get more. It's 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 today. My mind wanders from its proper contemplations of the Glory of God and I entertain a great lust in my heart. Picture, if you will, a young man barely in his 20s, on a warm fall 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. Today I was ecstatic. Beside myself. My mind was utterly addled with sex, unable to settle on anything else.

[October 24] - And it still is two days later. I'm about to go to the student union to meet June Orr. My mind has changed. I no longer resent this interview. Early this morning I began to long for it.

[October 24, later] - 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 I 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 am a freak, one of the Pure, and I'm the first ever to attend State U. Other Student Profile pieces I've 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 call 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. My hand shakes as I write this. It is possible to encapsulate a worldview so compactly that you can hold it in you as you'd hold a closed 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 close my eyes and see a red vinyl lounge chair in the noisy student union as the fulcrum of my life. There was before. There was that moment. Now there's after. A construction of memory, of course. In that moment I knew I'd chosen a new way, but I couldn't feel it. There had been shame. Then there was that moment. Now there will 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, and 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 is 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.

We spoke for two hours and agreed to keep talking tomorrow.

[October 25] - Yesterday, 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 today we spoke more. I dropped my guard. I trust her. She didn't mock me or make fun of me, of course. She seems genuinely curious and interested. She is gentle. A few times she laughed at what I said and then apologized and I take this as a sign that, though she feels my story is strange, she is tolerant of its strangeness and disinclined to judge.

[November 1] - Spoke w/ June several times this week. Every day. It's become obvious that the newspaper article has become a thin pretext for our conversation, which has moved far beyond what a brief profile piece could cover. Today 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 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.

[January 1, 2015] - It is a mystery to me how some people move so quickly from nice-to-meet-you to intimacy. June and I have moved incrementally. So much of our conversation has been oblique that sometimes I haven't been entirely sure what we're talking about. We've 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 this last month she began kidding me gently, telling me jokes. She has a sense of humor I find challenging. It's filled with references to popular songs and shows I don't know. It involves contorted faces, wild and abrupt gestures, mimicry, silly noises. I had never known a grownup who did any of this, and I have trouble, sometimes, taking her seriously. But her humor is a welcome to me. It dissolves my loneliness. It minimizes 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 move incrementally. This was a big step for me. It took me down a notch, loosened me up, and I felt happy.

[April 19] - This spring we've fallen into a comfortable pattern of eating lunch together in her apartment. I work in the library shelving books. She spends mornings making healthy snacks for a vegan coffee place next to campus. She likes to dress up. Every day she wears 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 walk in every day when she's clocking out and we walk the block to her place and have sandwiches or soup. The cafe owner, a sort of white Rastafarian who feigns affability but is known for sudden, spectacular rages, has taken to calling me Elder, which I find irritating. Today 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 to June.

"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."


[May 4] - I've gradually met June's friends. They've accepted me pretty easily. Not the big deal I'd expected. I had expected endless awkwardness. Tonight 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 plays 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 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.

Over the evening 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, up the stairs i'm sitting on now. We fell asleep pressed together on her bed. I woke up an hour ago, in the black early morning, spinning and desperately thirsty and sick. I gulped water and let myself out as quietly as I could. I stood here in the hall for a while. I leaned against her door for a long time, reeling. My sacred calling, which I've been neglecting for a long time now, pulls me toward the stairs, but the thought of June's kiss holds me here, writing this ludicrous story, drunk, propped against falling in this dark hallway, at the top of these stairs.

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