It looked like the outside of the Church had been painted professionally, and though its surface was chipped and stripped in sections, patched here and there with mismatched colors, it certainly wasn’t a nineteenth-century undertaking. Roaming bands of settlers must have defaced the building in the years since the town had closed, and the Land’s solution to this vandalism had been to paint over it; here and there, the Church’s stark white surface was marred by squares of beige, eggshell, and even pistachio green. It looked a little sloppy, but Cal liked the bedraggled quality it lent the building. Now it was less somber church and more local high school. Besides, the steeple rising into the sky looked as unscathed as it must have been two centuries earlier; the barbed wire around its body merely confirmed its glory, made its pierce into the heavens more powerful.
A sign at the front welcomed visitors. In the fading light, Cal couldn’t read the text clearly, but it was obviously for tourists, most likely describing the religious life of the town before it had been abandoned. Micah pulled him along, said, “You’ll have plenty of time to read that later.” With his thumb and index finger, he flicked the air between him and the sign. “Besides, those moron amusement-park developers didn’t care about this place’s history. They fucked this building up. It doesn’t look as old as it should, as it is.”
Inside, it was so bright that Cal’s eyes watered. He hadn’t seen light like this since leaving L.A., and even then, electricity had been scarce. He thought of gas stations in the middle of the night; of his mother’s desk lamp, which she’d fed with high-wattage lightbulbs, despite the threat of fire; of the streetlight that used to burn into his bedroom window unless he secured the curtain closed. All that, years ago.
“I need sunglasses,” he said to Frida. “I feel like I’m stepping onstage.”
In each corner, an industrial light, the kind used on construction sites, was connected to a car battery. How wasteful it seemed. The lights emitted a terrible droning buzz. Such a noise would’ve been normal just five years ago, but now it struck Cal as insidious—unbearable, certainly, should they have to sit near one. He looked at Frida, who had placed her hand on her abdomen, as if to palm their child’s ears. Cal’s stomach dropped. The sounds of technology, the insistent whirs and hums and sighs of motors, computers, lights, clocks, cooling and heating systems, masked an entire, secretive universe, a world beneath the world. Their child would be, could be, should be, a creature capable of discerning the smallest shifts out of silence. Like a woodland creature, ears pricked to the slightest movement miles off, he would truly be able to listen. Listen. He imagined Micah, or his suicidal dupe, saying that word, and his stomach dropped farther.
“Our meetings can’t run too long for this reason,” Micah said, and nodded to the lights. “We don’t want to waste our resources.”
“Resources,” Cal repeated. He didn’t bother asking why they just didn’t use candles for the meeting. Clearly, these lights played into Micah’s theatrical streak.
“Follow me,” Micah said.
People were already packed into the pews that began just a couple of feet from the entrance and continued in orderly rows toward the front of the large square room. The walls were made of plaster and blank, without iconography. The ceiling was high. Micah had said that they weren’t a religious group, and Cal was relieved.
The second floor was most likely accessed through the unassuming door behind the raised stage. There was a podium on that stage—a pulpit? Was that the correct term? Frida would probably wonder the same thing, but the difference was she wouldn’t be embarrassed that she didn’t know for sure. Both of them had been raised heathens; that had been Frida’s father’s word, said with a snobbish little guffaw—but it was true. Cal’s parents weren’t believers, so neither was he. He occasionally prayed, as he had done before their journey here, but it was a pitiful begging to no one in particular. He didn’t see the point of worship.
This was probably only the fourth or fifth religious establishment Cal had ever set foot in, including the tiny storefront church down the block from their apartment in L.A. That place had low ceilings, and three rows of plastic patio chairs had faced an altar covered in a disposable tablecloth. There were spelling errors in the literature (even in the Spanish text), and about as much atmosphere as a Laundromat. But the people there had been so taken with the Lord. Jesús es Dios, they told him, clutching their Bibles, their babies. An old woman had led him in; he’d been on his way home from work, drunk from the homemade cider a coworker had brought, and he’d thought, Why not. “Pues,” he’d said to the woman, Well, and walked inside. Those churchgoers had spoken of end times, which would have made Cal uncomfortable when he was in Cleveland or at Plank, but by the time he lived in L.A. such talk was commonplace. Before CNN had gone dark, he’d heard the phrase tossed around by most of the pundits. Pundits, pulpits. What was the etymology of these two words?
Frida brushed against him as they moved down the line of pews. The aisle was narrow, and yet they walked side by side, as if in a wedding procession. Not that this building had seen one of those in a while. Even so, this was just a church, in the end, clean and unadorned. The Land had kept it as uninteresting as the bedroom he and Frida were staying in.
“Where’s Sailor?” he asked as they got to the first pew, left empty.