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?"
From the radio I'm saying, The abuse was never-ending.
"When you were a kid, I mean," Adam says.
Outside, the sun was catching up, making shapes out of the total darkness.
On the radio, I'm saying, The complete way our minds were controlled we never had a chance. None of us in the outside world would ever want sex. We'd never betray the church. We'd spend our entire lives at work.
"And if you never have sex," Adam's saying, "you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel."
And if you never have sex, Adam tells me, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule.
On the radio, I say, It's hard for someone in the outside world to imagine how completely trained we were.
"The Vietnam War didn't cause the mess of the 1960s," Adam says. "Drugs didn't cause it. Well, only one drug did. It was the birth control pill. For the first time in history, everybody could have all the sex they wanted. Everybody could have that kind of power."
Throughout history the most powerful rulers have been sex maniacs. And he asks, does their sex appetite come from having power, or does their will for power come from their sex appetite? "And if you don't crave sex," he says, "will you crave power?" No, he says.
"And instead of electing decent, boring, sexually repressed officials," he says, "maybe we should find the horniest candidates and maybe they can get some good work done."
A sign goes by saying, Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, 10 miles.
Adam says, "Do you see what I'm getting at?"
Home is just ten minutes away.
Adam says, "You must remember what happened."
Nothing happened.
On the radio, I say, It's impossible to describe how terrible the abuse was.
More and more along the sides of the road are bits of smut magazines blown off uncovered trucks. Fading full-frontal nude shots of beautiful women wrap themselves around each tree trunk. Rain-soaked men with long purple erections hang limp in the branches. The black boxes of video movies lie in the gravel along the road. A punctured woman made of pink vinyl lies in the weeds with the wind waving her hair and hands after us as we drive past.