Adam looks at me and shakes his head.
He says, "That's how stupid you are."
How Adam looks in the dark is how I'd look if none of this chaos had ever happened to me. Adam is what Fertility would call a control group of me. If I'd never been baptized and sent into the outside world, if I'd never been famous and blown out of proportion, that would be me with Adam's simple blue eyes and clean blond hair. My shoulders would be squared and regular-sized. My manicured hands with clear polish on the nails would be his strong hands. My chapped lips would be like his. My back would be straight. My heart would be his heart.
Adam looks out into the dark and says, "I destroyed them."
The Creedish survivors.
"No," Adam says. "All of them. The entire district colony. I called the police. I left the valley one night and walked until I found a telephone."
There were birds in every Creedish tree, I remember. And we caught crawdads by tying a lump of bacon fat to a string and dropping it into the creek. When we pulled it out, the fat would be covered with crawdads.
"I must have pressed zero on the telephone," Adam says, "but I asked for the sheriff. I told someone who answered that only one out of every twenty Creedish children had a valid birth certificate. I told him the Creedish hid their children from the government."
The horses, I remember. We had teams of horses to plow with and pull buggies. And we called them by their color because it was a sin to give an animal a name.
"I told them the Creedish abused their children and didn't pay taxes on most of their income," Adam says. "I told them the Creedish were lazy and shiftless. I told them, to Creedish parents, their children were their income. Their children were chattel."
The icicles hanging on houses, I remember. The pumpkins. The harvest bonfires.
"I started the investigation," Adam says.
The singing in church, I remember. The quilting. The barn raisings.
"I left the colony that night and never went back," Adam says.
Being cherished and cared for, I remember.
"We never had any horses. The couple chickens and pigs we had were just for show," Adam says. "You were always in school. You just remember what they taught you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. Hell, a century ago everybody had horses."
Being happy and belonging, I remember.
Adam says, "There were no black Creedish. The Creedish elders were a pack of racist, sexist white slavers."
I remember feeling safe.
Adam says, "Everything you remember is wrong."
Being valued and loved, I remember.
"You remember a lie," Adam says. "You were bred and trained and sold."
And he wasn't.
No, Adam Branson was a firstborn son. Three minutes, that made all the difference. He would own everything. The barns and chickens and lambs. The peace and security. He would inherit the future, and I would be a labor missionary, mowing the lawn and mowing the lawn, work without end.
The dark Nebraska night and the road slipping by fast and warm around us. With one good push, I say to myself, I could put Adam Branson out of my life for good.
"There was hardly anything we ate that we didn't buy from the outside world," Adam says. "I inherited a farm for raising and selling my children."
Adam says, "We didn't even recycle."
So that's why he called the sheriff?
"I don't expect you to understand," Adam says. "You're still the eight-year-old sitting in school, sitting in church, believing everything you're told. You remember pictures in books. They planned how you'd live your whole life. You're still asleep."
And Adam Branson is awake?
"I woke up the night I made that telephone call. That night I did something that couldn't be undone," Adam says.
And now everybody's dead.
"Everybody except you and me."
And the only thing left for me to do is kill myself.
"That's just what you've been trained to do," Adam says. "That would be the ultimate act of a slave."
So what's left I can do to make my life any different?
"The only way you'll ever find your own identity is to do the one thing the Creedish elders trained you most not to do," Adam says. "Commit the one biggest transgression. The ultimate sin. Turn your back on church doctrine," Adam says.
"Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage," Adam says. 'You'll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple."
I've eaten the entire apple. I've done everything. I've gone on television and denounced the church. I've blasphemed in front of millions of people. I've lied and shoplifted and killed, if you count Trevor Hollis. I've defiled my body with drugs. I've destroyed the Creedish church district valley. I've labored every Sunday for the past ten years.
Adam says, "You're still a virgin."
With one good jump, I tell myself, I could solve all my problems forever.
"You know, the horizontal bop. Hide the salami. The hot thing. The big O. Getting lucky. Going all the way. Hitting a home run. Scoring big-time. Laying pipe. Plowing a field. Stuffing the muff. Doing the big dirty," Adam says.
"Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue," Adam says.
"Little brother," Adam says, "we need to get you laid."
The Creedish church district is twenty thousand, five hundred and sixty acres, almost the entire valley at the headlands of the Flemming River, west-northwest of Grand Island, Nebraska. From Grand Island, it's a four-hour car trip. Driving south from Sioux Falls, it's a nine-hour trip.
That much of what I know is true.
The way Adam explained everything else, I still wonder about. Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you. Eunuchs, they're called. Just short of that, some cultures make it so you don't enjoy sex so much. They cut off parts. Parts of the clitoris, Adam calls it. Or the foreskin. Then the sensitive parts of you, the parts that you'd enjoy the most, you feel less and less with those parts.
That's the whole idea, Adam says.
We drive west the rest of the night, away from where the sun will come up, trying to outrace it, trying not to see what it's going to show us when we get home.
On the dashboard of the car is glued a six-inch plastic statue of a man in Creedish church costume, the baggy pants, the wool coat, the hat. His eyes are glow-in-the-dark plastic. His hands are together in prayer, raised so high and out so far in front he looks about to take a swan dive off the passenger side of the dashboard.
Fertility told Adam to look for a green late-model Chevy somewhere within two blocks of the truck stop outside Grand Island. She said the keys would be left in it, and the tank would be full of gas. After we left the Casa Castile, it took us about five minutes to find the car.
Looking at the dashboard statuette in front of him, Adam says, "What the hell is that supposed to be?"
It's supposed to be me.
"It doesn't look a thing like you."
It's supposed to look really pious.
"It looks like a devil," Adam says.
I drive.
Adam talks.
Adam says, the cultures that don't castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind. They make sex so filthy and evil and dangerous that no matter how good you know it would feel to have sexual relations, you won't.
That's how most religions in the outside world do, Adam says. That's how the Creedish did it.
This isn't anything I want to hear, but when I go to turn on the radio, all the tuning buttons are preset to religious stations. Choir music. Gospel preachers telling me I'm bad and wrong. One station I come across is a familiar voice, the Tender Branson Radio Ministry. Here's one of a thousand canned radio shows I taped in a studio I don't remember where.
The abuse of the Creedish elders was unspeakable, I'm saying on the radio.
Adam says, "Do you remember what they did to you?"