From the moment David staggered out of the Kamtoey Theater for the first time, he lived a divided life. There was his life as a Walker, in which it was understood that preparing the Dyalo for the Rapture was the absolute and overwhelming goal of his young existence. Then there was his other life, his real life, the life at the Kamtoey Theater, where every Tuesday at five he forgot entirely for two hours to pray. For almost six years David kept his two lives strictly separate. Sometimes when he left the Kamtoey Theater, having seen policemen and lawyers, doctors and politicians, hippies and pimps and gangsters and adventurers and detectives and reporters, sometimes on the way back home to the big pink house with the brass placard that read south china christian mission, he thought he was barreling down a dark tunnel so narrow and confining he could not even lift his arms.
Thomas's sister Sarah was on the subscriber list to a newsletter called Christian Family Alert!, a mishmash of advice on Christian living and snippets of biblical commentary and interpretation, mixed up with stories about cute things the kids and pets did, together with household tips and advice. When she was done reading Christian Family Alert!, Sarah usually passed it along to her sister-in-law Nomie, who, in those few calm quiet moments that she could steal from her household, liked to read the newsletter at the kitchen table, sipping green tea and clipping out the recipes, because the thing she had been meaning to get for the longest time was a good cookbook, in English, filled with the kind of midwestern recipes on which she had been raised, and the recipes in Christian Family Alert! were actually pretty darned good. When Nomie was done, she left Christian Family Alert! in the kitchen, where her husband read it over his morning tea.
Now, the ironic thing was, Thomas tended to dismiss most everything in Christian Family Alert! If people in America would get half as upset about the unconverted masses of the world, half as upset as they seemed to be about what was on the dang television, if they'd get so upset that they'd just get down on their knees for twenty minutes a day and ask the Lord to save the Dyalo and all the other lost peoples of the planet — that, Thomas figured, would achieve something useful. Thomas read Christian Family Alert! more out of sociological interest than anything else, to see what the folks in the Home Country were thinking these days, and having read the magazine, he usually spent a good forty minutes once a month at the dinner table complaining that he didn't see why Nomie read that thing anyway, until Nomie pointed that in the first place, she didn't subscribe, Sarah did; in the second place, he was eating a very fine zucchini casserole thanks to that magazine; and in the third place, she didn't think Christian Family Alert! made its way out of the kitchen, up the stairs, down the hall, and beside the toilet every month all by itself, thank you very much.
On the release of Star Wars, Christian Family Alert! sent out to its subscribers a "Special Action Bulletin" warning Christians of the danger that popular film posed to their children, what with its vaguely messianic slant, its mysterious magical "force," its Manichean battle between good and evil, and its complete omission of any deistic references. The Walkers were all very eager to assure me that the odd thing was, this was precisely the sort of thing about which Thomas usually could not and would not get himself all lathered up. Nobody knew just why that film, which he had never seen and had no intention of seeing, rubbed him so the wrong way. But he had read about Star Wars in Christian Family Alert!, and the movie stuck in his throat like ashes.
"What is going on back home with this Star Wars stuff?" Thomas asked his family over the dinner table. America was always "home" to the Walkers, although of all those at the table, only Nomie had ever spent more than eight consecutive months there. "Can somebody just tell me what people are thinking? Don't they know what is going on over here?"
Long silence at the table. With Dad, sometimes the best strategy was just to stay quiet.
"Do you know what they said in China when we first came with the Word? Linda-Lee, what did they say?"
" ‘Two thousand years,' Dad. They said, ‘Two thousand years we've been waiting for this Word, why didn't you come sooner?' "
"That's right. Exactly right. We cried because they wanted to hear the Word so badly. There wasn't a minute we weren't out there preaching, your uncles, your grandfather, me, because the people were so eager to listen." Thomas shifted to his didactic mode. "So what we are seeing now, you see, is a complete and total reversal of roles. Even as the Dyalo people are going toward the Lord, the people in our own country are turning their backs on Him. Sad, really. Crisscross, you see. A film like this one, celebrating everything that we have spent such a long time fighting, a film like this one would have been unthinkable when I was a boy, when America was still a Christian country. When I first started working with the Dyalo, we had a whole country praying for us, and you could feel the difference. It was like having wind in your sails. Now it's not the same. A boat can't sail without wind. And you know who suffers? Paul, tell me who suffers because of this."
"The Dyalo, Dad. The Dyalo are suffering because of this."
"That's right. That's exactly right. People in America go around watching your Star Wars or what have you, and thinking that there is something else in this world more powerful than Jesus Christ, and they forget to pray. Just forget, if you can imagine that. I remember when I used to go up in the mountains and tell the people about Jesus. There wouldn't be enough hours in the day to baptize all those who were ready to be baptized — we'd have them lined up — and now, well, just look at the difference. Still the same Gospel, same as it's been for two thousand years. Still the same people, same old Dyalo. I'm still me. What's the difference? I'll tell you all the difference. Not the same prayer backing in the Home Country. They're sending us out to fight the battle and not giving us the tools we need. And you know why not? Because their minds are being filled with trash. David, are there kids at your school who have seen this movie?"
David looked down at his plate and made a little rice mountain with his fork.
"David, that was a question for you. I asked if there were kids at your school who had seen this movie?"
"Yes," David said.
"And what do you say to them?"
" ‘May the Force be with You.' "
The fight that followed was a turning point in the Walker family dynamics. David, frustrated to the point of tears, tried to tell Thomas that Star Wars had nothing to do with the Dyalo, nothing to do with demon worship, that it was just a movie, a good one, that he had seen it three times and loved it, and that if his father wanted to know why the Dyalo didn't listen, perhaps, just perhaps, it was because he kept pointing at his son, and saying that his son wouldn't ever grow as big as him on account of the end of the world, when his son was two inches bigger already; and Thomas, hurt and angry, wondered just how David could be wasting his time on trash like that when he had grown up himself in a Dyalo village and seen those hurting people who needed his prayers and love, and how long had he been lying to the whole family? It took Nomie two days of shuttle diplomacy to make the peace, which was finalized over breakfast two days later, when Thomas asked David if he'd be going upcountry with him the next day. That Thomas had asked and not presumed was a sufficient gesture for David, and he said that he would. Nomie thought to herself that boys were so much easier than girls: had the offended party been Ruth-Marie or Linda-Lee or Margaret and not David, she would have been staring at two months of sulking, pouting, and slammed doors, minimum. David really was a good, calm kid.