It had been Lacey’s idea to settle into the wooden pews and wait for something to happen. She’d read about some experiment where a bunch of people got high for Easter Mass and had a transcendent religious experience, so we swallowed and closed our eyes and—for purely scientific purposes, she said—waited for transcendence.
Lacey always said that other people’s drug trips were almost as boring as other people’s dreams, but when it finally kicked in, inside that church, I’d never felt more wildly and indelibly myself. As if the world were re-creating itself especially for me, the walls whispering a sacred message, the minister’s voice blue light and warm coffee and slipping down my throat to my secret self, and I was an I like no other I had ever been, life was a question and only I knew the answer, and if I closed my eyes, the world outside, the colors and sounds and faces that existed only to please me, would vanish.
Inside that church, I didn’t discover a god; I became one.
The minister said the devil walks among you.
The minister said evil is in this town and the wages of sin is death.
The minister said cows were dying and chickens were slaughtered and dead cats were hung from flaming trees, and this is the evidence you need that these are the end times, that hell is upon you, that Satan’s cold fingers hold you in their grasp, that here and there and everywhere children are dying and children are killing and children are danger.
The minister reached out across the congregation, reached for us, and I could feel his cold fingers on Lacey’s lips, because her lips were my lips, because what was hers was mine. The minister said the devil will sing you to hell, but when he raised his hands, the choir sang in Kurt’s voice, hoarse and longing, their robes white, their eyes black, and Kurt’s voice sang my name, said you have always belonged to me. The minister’s eyes glowed, and the walls bled, and the people, the good, churchgoing, God-fearing people, they all turned to us, eyes hungry, and then Lacey’s hand was hot against my mouth, as if she knew before I did that I was going to scream.
She rested her other hand in my lap, fingers tight in a fist, then blooming open, and there was a flower she’d inked on her palm. I stopped screaming, then. I watched the flower. Its petals leached color from her skin. They glowed green like Lacey eyes and red like Lacey lips and pink like Lacey tongue. The flower whispered to me with Lacey’s voice and told me there was nothing to fear. Believing her was like breathing.
When the service ended, she held my hand tight and led me out of the church. Her lips brushed my ear and she smelled purple, and when she whispered “Having fun yet?” our laughter tasted like candy.
Fun was meant to be beneath us. Fun was for Battle Creek, for the losers who dragged their six-packs into the woods and groped each other in the dark. Not for us; we would get high only for a higher purpose, Lacey had decreed. We would be philosophers; we would devote ourselves to all forms of escape. After the service we would retreat to an empty field and spend the hours until we came down groping for Beauty and Truth. We would lie in the grass, search the sky for answers, make art, make something to make ourselves real.
That was the plan before, when everything had seemed clear—but now was after, silvery and strange. And when we went to the field, bumping and sloshing in the back of a pickup, we didn’t go alone.
Boys: some of them in church shirts with shiny shoes, some in flannel with jeans and dirty boots. All of them with sticky beer fingers and grubby breath, all of them boys we did not know and would never like, with faces that blurred and shifted, strangers determined to stay strange. I couldn’t keep track: Were there many or few? Had we begged them to bring us or did we beg them to let us go? I waited for Lacey to tell me it wasn’t happening, but Lacey only complained about tramping through the mud and breathing in the shit, then asked if, until it was time, she could carry the axe.
One of the boys, I saw then, had an axe.
The sky was pinking and the lowing cows breathed fire like fairy-tale beasts, and I heard my voice saying you can’t.
“You eat burgers, don’t you?” a boy said.
I heard Lacey laughing and knew I must be imagining it.
“They’re my property,” another boy said. “I decide if they live or die. I’m their god.”
I knew that wasn’t quite right, but the words to prove it were slippery. Before I could snatch them from the fog, an axe whistled through leathery hide, and blood spurted, and with one voice, the beast and I screamed.
Sticky beer, sticky blood. Laughing boys, giving the finger to an imaginary face in the sky. Laughing Lacey, asking to hold the axe. Lacey’s hands on the axe and my hands on the axe. What’s hers is mine. Someone’s voice saying don’t be a pussy, someone’s voice saying please don’t make me, someone’s knees in the dirt, someone’s fist in a steaming wound, someone’s bloody fingers inking a five-pointed star across the grass, someone’s breath, someone’s whisper, someone’s tears. Someone’s voice pretending to be Lacey, impossible words carving fire across the sky.