Cribbed from Dimock’s Through Other Continents.
Patrick frowned like he was gravely concerned for her sanity. “What’s your point, Stace?”
“People have other ways of looking at things.” Besides through Christ, she did not add. “Like there’s this idea of Deep Time. So the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 is right there in the historical memory of anyone living between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Until 2003, when it all happened again. Then our government—which knows or cares about none of that—sends this kid from New Canaan, Ohio, and he’s patrolling streets that probably existed in some form all those centuries ago.”
Patrick slathered peanut butter across wheat bread, examining the knife’s sworls skeptically. “Stace, what does that have to do with not coming home for the parade?”
In the back of Vicky’s All-Night Diner, a waitress banged out of the kitchen carrying a full tray, and the blue lobster slipped from Stacey’s proxy grasp, gripped between a pink elephant and a normatively colored killer whale, stuck in a quicksand of its peers. She decided to forgo the lobster and focus on a more malleable character, a purple pig the size of a softball. By the eye test, it seemed the pig’s proportions would fit the spindly claw much better. She pressed the red button on the joystick, and the claw dropped. She hissed victory through her teeth as it lifted the pig skyward.
Then Clawmaggedon issued a broke-ass mechanical-clunk fart, and the lights of the game went dead. The claw slipped opened, and her piggy dropped right back into its plush prison.
“What the fuck,” she hissed without hearing herself. And banged plexiglass.
“It does that.”
It was the scrubby kid, bearded, unwashed, and holding a plastic bag with a Styrofoam container of Vicky’s to-go.
“They might give you your dollar back,” he said, nodding to the two waitresses, now occupied. “You know, if it means that much to you.”
“Just wanted that pig,” she declared, slapping the plexiglass again. She kept her back to him to indicate that she did not feel like getting hit on right now.
“You’re Patrick’s sister?” At that, she turned to finally assess him. He had acne scars on his face and the yellow smile of a man happy to be working in a slaughterhouse or a prison. Crooked teeth and a tattoo of a cross on his arm, same spot as hers. “I was a year behind you in school,” he explained. “And I go to the First Christian Church, so I know your brother pretty good.”
“Oh,” she said. “Nice to meet you—or see you again.”
She wished for the game to fix itself, so she could turn her attention back to it.
“Do you live here or—”
“No,” she said quickly. “Just passing through.”
He nodded. She gestured to the register. “Gonna get my dollar back.”
“Yeah. Hey.” He reached out and touched her arm, and she tried not to pull it away too quickly or obviously. “I just gotta say—your brother is one of the best things to ever happen to me. I know you probably get that a lot, but I was in a real rough place when I met him. He helped me get clean and helped me find Christ again.”
Sure he did. Maybe she’d acquired the bad habit of academicizing her memories, of trying to render them inert with the books she read and the theories she considered, but she recalled the days of her early twenties when her faith molted off like the dead skin of a snake. What a mystery everything suddenly seemed now that she was certain her dogma had been bogus. Creation, death? These were now free-floating, oppressively heavy possibilities. Where did one even begin to look? The answers she found were horrible in their lack of poetry. Socializing, organizing, family—all an adaptation to survive, accidentally sparking ingenuity, creativity, the creation of tools, and finally representations: codes, stories, art, culture. Experience distilled to essence. All she had believed as a child—all anyone believed, from the broken-hearted Muslim journeying to Mecca to her own devout family—was nothing more than the descendent of a hodgepodge shamanism, passed on, toyed with, whittled at, but ultimately the same nonsense. She wanted to ask this young man: Because how else to explain the inexplicable, dude? How to explain that we all show up to this party with no invite and no apparent host, and we can depart from it at any moment for no reason? The time she and Patrick had argued about Rick and Deep Time had been the same visit when she’d purposely taken Dawkins’s The God Delusion into the open–floor plan living room to read in front of him. She kept her nose in it as he began preparing dinner, and when he finally asked what she was reading, she said the name of the book as if it tasted like a bite of velvety vanilla ice cream. Patrick only chuckled, half-amused, half-distracted, searching the fridge for something. What a title, he’d said. Can you believe clowns like that? Scientists, I mean? They discover the quark or the gene and suddenly they decide they can write off what ninety-eight percent of humanity feels in our bones.
For her brother’s admirer, Stacey now put on a smile like a dress two sizes too small. “That’s awesome. Yeah, he’s great.”
“Sorry to bother you, I just… I go to that church, and he’s always talking about you actually. It’s so funny running into you, but boy, you look just like him.”
“Yeah, we get that a lot.”
“He’s just such an inspiring guy.” He clearly wanted to say more, but she didn’t let him.
She didn’t care about the dollar but went to stand by the register. She waited until she saw him get in his car and back out into the square. Before she could find a seat in a booth, though, the door chimed. Her breath caught. Bethany scanned the diner until she spotted Stacey and gave a tepid little wave. All the years since she’d last seen Lisa’s mother descended. The space between herself as an adult and as a child threatened to collapse, and she hated the rising pressure of the cold lump of fear that she thought she’d rid herself of long ago. How familiar, how endlessly reclaimable it felt now.
When Stacey was a child, she very much believed in Hell.
It kept her up at night, the sheer staggering bigness of suffering for eternity. She clutched the blanket over her head and wondered what that suffering would be like. She’d had pneumonia once as a little girl and abstractly recalled the pain that radiated from her chest down to her toenails, but even that seemed insufficient to that which was described. Heaven, conversely, was of little concern, the specifics always muted, uninteresting. Jesus was there, sure, but more importantly, it was the place you went that was not Hell. Pastor Jack (“Call me Pastor John. Johnny. Jack. Just don’t call me late for dinner!”) broached the issue as this regrettable addendum that he, unfortunately, was required to address. He didn’t dwell on it; he wasn’t much for fire and brimstone, but that made the instances he did bring it up all the more unsettling.
Because they were Grover Street Elementary peers and went to church camp together every summer, she was best friends with Tina Ross for a long time. As a girl, Tina was part of the reason she worried about Hell day and night. Tina could describe it so vividly: the sensation of burning alive, spears and knives run through you, demons taking out their sexual frustration on the damned. She had no clue where Tina got all this, but during sleepovers, she would describe it to her as clearly as if it were the Wyandot Lake water park (one of the few places for which the two young girls had the layout completely memorized).