Nelson was worried about his balls, and because Nelson was the kind of person who tended to put his thoughts into words, he leaned over to the cubicle next to him and said to his friend/coworker, Jürgen, “I’m worried about my balls.”
Jürgen held up a finger, signaling that Nelson should wait. Jür-gen spoke into his headset mouthpiece, asking if Mrs. Luffnagel was home. “Hello? Hello? Mrs. Luffnagel?” He punched the ESC key on his computer and leaned back in his chair to look Nelson in the eye. “Answering machine,” he said. Nelson and Jürgen worked as interviewers for Survey Circle, Inc., Marketing Researchers. The computers in front of them were engaged in predictive dialing, calling many numbers at once, trying to find one with a live human on the other end so Nelson and Jürgen and the twenty-five other workers on their shift could ask questions. Tonight the questions were about fast food; how much, how often, what kinds, degrees of satisfaction, when they anticipated visiting next. Nelson sometimes thought about inserting “having intercourse” into the script wherever it said “eating fast food,” but he knew that would be juvenile, and besides he needed the job.
Each week fewer and fewer of the numbers seemed to hit, so Jür-gen and Nelson had plenty of time to talk.
“Why are you worried about your balls?”
“Radiation,” Nelson said. “From cell phones. Turns out they cook your balls if you keep your phone in your pocket. I’ve been carrying my phone in my pocket every waking hour for the past four years. The rats in this study I read about got ‘marble-sized’ tumors in less than three months. I can’t even look at what’s going on down there. I shower with my eyes closed.”
“How did the rats keep the phones in their pockets?”
“I dunno. I guess they like taped the phones to their junk.”
“Sounds cruel. You know what you should be worried about?”
“What’s that?”
“Your deodorant.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Aluminum chlorohydrate—it gives you Alzheimer’s.”
“Fuck.”
Lance Riggins, one cube over from Jürgen, leaned past the cubicle walls, showing his cinder-block head, face as broad as a cereal box, and glared at Nelson. Nelson flipped him the bird in return and mouthed, “Screw you.” Survey Circle, Inc., was owned and operated by Mormons, which made sense because they were located in Provo, Utah. Ninety-five percent of the employees were Mormon, almost all of them students at BYU, which meant nasty looks if you said “Fuck” and no coffee machine in the break room. Nelson and Jürgen got hired because Survey Circle, Inc., needed to keep a certain percentage of non-Mormons on the payroll so the federal government didn’t come down on them for discrimination. Nelson and Jürgen had, for all practical purposes, total job security, since there were very few non-Mormons in Provo, and an even smaller percentage of the non-Mormon Provoians had a desire to work for Survey Circle Marketing Research, Inc. A Venn diagram would show a very small intersection, with only Nelson and Jürgen inside.
Nelson and Jürgen were supposed to be in Park City, not Provo, teaching snowboarding to hot college chicks on vacation, but Nelson and Jürgen failed the drug test because they both liked pot, because— what the fuck?—they were snowboarders. They didn’t anticipate the piss test, but there’s insurance involved and shit, and they took it anyway, certain they would fail on the merits, but hoping for some kind of clerical error in their favor. But now they were “flagged,” as in no jobs teaching snowboarding in the state of Utah, period. The work they could get was at Survey Circle, Inc., which didn’t have a drug-testing policy because Mormons don’t do drugs because if they did they wouldn’t have any space reserved for them in the celestial kingdom, which Nelson understood to be a kind of endless family reunion lit up by the very bright light of God.
Nelson had no truck with the Mormon view of the afterlife. He had zero interest in meeting up with most of his relatives for an afternoon, let alone eternity, except his mother, who died when Norman was three, so it’s not like they’d even recognize each other anyway, unless in the celestial kingdom everyone has name tags, or somehow just knows who is who. Norman left home just under a year after his father had sneered at the long hair coming out from under his ski cap and said he looked like a “faggot.” Jürgen came with because why not? Sure, Jürgen had been accepted to Dartmouth, but Dartmouth was older even than the United States of America and wasn’t going anywhere, and the chance to move three-quarters of the way across the country with your best and oldest friend to teach hot chicks snowboarding presented itself exactly once.
Vermont was good for snowboarding, but bad for Nelson because it was filled with people who did not understand him, most specifically his father, who knew Nelson wasn’t a “faggot” because Nelson’s father had walked in on him having sex with Nelson’s father’s (presumably now ex-) girlfriend. Nelson’s father had been understandably upset on that occasion, but while it was the two of them (Nelson and Christine) doing the horizontal mambo, it was Nelson alone who got his ass kicked because his pops was an honorable man who wouldn’t hit a broad.
Nelson wasn’t in love with Christine, but he thought he might be in love with Chelsea Stubbins, who happened to be Lance Riggins’s girlfriend, and also happened to work at Survey Circle, Inc. Nelson understood that one of the reasons he smoked a lot of grass was that he liked to get high, and that another one of the reasons he smoked a lot of grass was because he possessed a barely suppressed rage that only a nice indica/sativa blend could tamp down to manageable levels.
The rage, Nelson was sure, was thanks to his father, who used Old Crow as his own suppressor of choice, but Old Crow only worked when he’d drunk so much that he passed out. Up to that point, the alcohol seemed to be a rage amplifier. Mostly his father raged at things on the television, but every so often, Nelson got caught in the crosshairs.
Leaving helped.
Except that he found himself thwarted in his desire to date and make love to Chelsea Stubbins by the likes of Lance Riggins, whose very blond perfection kindled Nelson’s rage. Lance Riggins had a jaw, prominent, and abdominal muscles, also prominent, as illustrated by his offer to let anyone who wished to punch him in the stomach. Chelsea Stubbins had the face, beautiful, and the tits and ass, incredible. Also the Mormonism, which meant nobody save her husband was going to be making love to Chelsea Stubbins, particularly not Lance Riggins since that was a double Mormon whammy. It’s not like Nelson was eager for Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins to have sex, but for Chelsea Stubbins not to be having sex really was a shame, like owning a Ferrari but keeping it in the garage, which was the kind of dumbass thing Nelson’s old man would say, which didn’t make it wrong.
Nelson saw Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins get up from their adjoining cubicles and head for the break room. Lance Riggins bumped his shoulder into Chelsea Stubbins, sending her briefly off stride, and she laughed and skipped to catch back up with Lance Riggins. Nelson watched this and felt the rage boil in his fists. He pulled a sheet of scratch paper from the printer on his desk and started drawing on it with a marker.
“What’s up?” Jürgen said, peering past his cubicle wall.
“We’re having a party.”
“Cool, when?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Nice. Who’s coming?”
“Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins and anyone else who wants to.”
Jürgen raised his eyebrows and whistled but didn’t say anything else as Nelson finished with the paper and marker and went to the break room where he slapped the notice on the refrigerator using one of the many smiley-face magnets affixed to the surface. Lance Riggins and Chelsea Stubbins sat at a small circular table, sharing a Splenda-sweetened Sprite, Chelsea Stubbins’s hands wrapped around the can, Lance Riggins’s hands wrapped around Chelsea Stubbins’s hands.
“We’re having a party,” Nelson said, waving at his flyer. On it he’d drawn a crude heart with the initials LR + CS inside, plus the party information: time, place, hosts.
“What’s the occasion?” Lance Riggins replied, releasing Chelsea Stubbins’s hands and kicking back in his chair.
“For you, and her,” Nelson said, jerking his thumb at Chelsea Stubbins. For some reason he didn’t want to say Chelsea’s name. “You’re the best couple ever, and me and Jürgen thought we should celebrate your example to the rest of us.”
Chelsea Stubbins’s face pulled in on itself, and she went, “Awwww,” in a manner so perfectly sincere that to Nelson it seemed insincere, but he knew that Chelsea Stubbins was incapable of insincerity. Lance Riggins, on the other hand, was well acquainted with Nelson’s hostility, with the kicks to the back of his chair as Nelson walked by, with the middle finger salute for no good reason, and so he might’ve been rightfully suspicious of Nelson’s motives, but Lance Riggins was also extremely confident, had life by the short hairs, as Nelson’s old man would say (though Lance Riggins would never be so crude), so he didn’t particularly give a poop if Nelson was mocking him. The Nelsons of the world were flies off the backs of the Lance Rigginses. Lance Riggins smiled at Nelson. He always smiled at Nelson, and everyone else for that matter. That smile made no sense to Nelson, where it might come from, what it was rooted to. Nelson thought he might be able to boot Lance Riggins in the balls and he’d still smile about it.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Lance Riggins said. He shot forward in his chair, grabbed the can out of Chelsea Stubbins’s grip, and drank the rest of it in two large swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing manfully up and down. Finished, he crushed the can in his fist and lobbed it for the recycling bin, turning his back with the can still midflight. The can glanced off the rim and skidded across the floor toward Nelson’s feet.
Chelsea Stubbins yelled “Hey,” to Lance Riggins’s retreating form, but he never broke stride on his way back to his cubicle. Nelson stared down at the can as Chelsea Stubbins plucked it from the ground and tossed it into the bin in a flawless motion.
“Nice shot,” Nelson said, and Chelsea Stubbins smiled at him and Nelson felt like he’d been tasered.
That all happened on Friday, so on Saturday, the day of the party, Nelson spent his time on two things.
One was looking in the mirror and willing his face to change into some different, more Lance Riggins–esque shape. He was fresh out of the shower, enjoying how the Utah air dried him all by itself. The acne had cleared up, at least, but he could still see purple ghosts of the worst eruptions. His father had named one that cropped up on his forehead junior year. “Here comes Vesuvius,” he’d say. “And look, it brought Nelson with him,” and then he’d laugh like he was the fucking funniest dickhead on the planet.
Nineteen years old and Nelson still didn’t need to shave, save a couple of long boys that cropped out of his neck, but despite his boyish face, he felt as though he had the capacity for love of someone much older and wiser, and that love was for Chelsea Stubbins. He flexed his chest muscles in the mirror. Not terrible, physical condition–wise, and he was a hell of a snowboarder, but he was no Lance Riggins in the overall-human-being category. Judging from the stock he came from, he never would be.
Nelson looked down at his deodorant, the ingredient list, and damn if Jürgen wasn’t right, “Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex.” Jürgen was smart and also trustworthy about these things, so Nelson sniffed his pits, which at least for the moment smelled good from the vanilla-scented bodywash, and tossed the deodorant in the garbage. He pulled his favorite hoodie over his head and stuffed his phone in his sock. They were doing amazing things with prosthetic limbs, but as of yet the balls were irreplaceable, and he wasn’t going to live without his phone.
One thing Nelson did not spend his time doing was reading up on Mormonism, because he’d already done that a couple weeks earlier to see if it was something he could get on board with for the sake of Chelsea Stubbins, but that was a definitive no-go. Nelson considered himself spiritual, and though he had some general suspicions about God/religion of the organized variety, he wasn’t quite ready to go full atheist. But this Mormon business was such transparent bullshit, a bridge he could not cross, even for Chelsea Stubbins. This Joseph Smith character reminded Nelson of one of his and Jürgen’s buddies from back home, Stinkfinger, who did not care for the pot but loved the mushrooms, and when he was peaking could be very convincing about seeing shit like his past lives or the true color of Nelson’s aura, or the twin that Bobby Longkiss had eaten in the womb, living inside Bobby’s body. Once or twice Stinkfinger gave Nelson the shivers with that shit, but afterwards, with a clearer head, Nelson looked at the guy who got his nickname because he claimed he was the first in school to get to third base and walked around telling everyone to sniff his finger. It was Jürgen who called him out, declaring that Stinkfinger (who had been Daniel up to that moment) had just rubbed his finger around the inside of a tuna can, and Nelson went and retrieved just-about-to-become-Stinkfinger’s brown lunch bag out of the trash and brandished the evidence above his head for all to see, and that was that. Stinkfinger was then, and forever, full of shit.
Like this Joseph Smith with his visions, a direct pipeline from God, messages coming direct, like through one of those pneumatic tubes at the bank drive-thru, one of which just happened to be a thumbs-up on plural marriage, because how awesome that God wants you to bang multiple broads who are also totally subservient in the sack and otherwise? Now, Nelson had grown up in Vermont, where there were plenty of liberals, his father being one of the few exceptions. Nelson had been conditioned not to mind if a chick didn’t shave her legs, or even her pits, and as far back as middle school, he’d learned about the patriarchal hegemony, the cultural reign of the phallocracy, and could sniff out white male privilege when he saw it.
It bothered him to think that Chelsea Stubbins bought into this horseshit, but Nelson figured it was rooted in the cloistered life— born, raised, surrounded by Mormons. We are who we are with, he figured. He was an exception, he was sure, nothing like his father, the close-minded, reactionary, abusive asshole, but for the most part environment rules, nurture over nature. Once Nelson was able to remove Chelsea Stubbins from the atmosphere of Provo, which was indeed his plan, the Mormonism would fade, like a tan starved of sun.
The other thing Nelson did in preparation for the party was bake. Chocolate brownies with walnuts. Peanut butter cookies with deep fudge swirls and brickle. Rice Krispie treats. All laced with hash. Lots and lots of hash. Nelson had spent the better part of his most recent Survey Circle, Inc., paycheck on hash, which can be acquired anywhere, including Provo, Utah. Jürgen sat in the living room rooting against BYU basketball, occasionally asking if Nelson was sure he wanted to do that.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because these kids don’t do drugs like we do drugs. They don’t do drugs at all.”
“That’s the point.”
“I don’t follow.”
Nelson removed the latest batch from the oven and began flipping the cookies to the counter for cooling. “It’s time for them to snap out of it, to have their minds altered, to realize that things are not always as they seem.”
“That’s probably illegal,” Jürgen replied.
“If truth is a crime, then lock me up,” Nelson said.
There’d been a plan, but then things stopped going according to it. The first thing that went wrong was the number of people who showed up. The Survey Circle, Inc., work crew came in bunches and drank Nelson and Jürgen’s uncaffeinated soda and ate their salty snacks and even danced in the middle of the small living room to Jürgen’s iPod mix of house music. Eventually the salty snacks ran out, and someone went looking through the cupboards and found Nelson’s stash of psychotropic baked goods and promptly dug in.
The second thing that went wrong is that seeing this, Nelson had an immediate attack of conscience about these nice people who had been speaking to him in friendly fashions and enjoying Jürgen’s music being dosed by him and his hash-laced brownies/cookies/Krispies. However, he knew he could not tell these nice people that the delicious treats were “special,” because then when Chelsea Stubbins arrived, they would warn her and she would not partake, so thinking quickly but probably foolishly, he made a joke out of grabbing the brownie/cookie/Krispie out of each individual’s hand, shouting, “Cookie monster!” and then shoving them in his own mouth. This got a lot of laughs, and some people started taking a brownie/cookie/ Krispie just to see Nelson do it again.
I am taking a tremendous amount of drugs, Nelson thought while he was doing this, which would spur him to the bathroom to purge, after which he would come out only to find that even more people were eating the treats, rinse and repeat, until one of the times he came out of the bathroom and found himself face to face with Jürgen, who gripped him by both shoulders and said, “You are tripping balls, my friend.”
“I am tripping balls,” Nelson replied, nodding. Jürgen pinched Nelson’s wrist between this thumb and two forefingers, counting his pulse. He tilted Nelson’s head back to grab the light and looked closely into each pupil one at a time.
“You’re OK,” Jürgen said. “But no more.”
Nelson nodded.
“This is,” Jürgen said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the increasingly strange scene behind him, “what it will be.”
Nelson nodded again, and tears filled his eyes. He hugged Jürgen and wept into his best friend’s shoulder. “I love you so much, man.”
Jürgen squeezed back. “Love you too, dude. Now, I gotta go do something about this.”
Nelson watched Jürgen go back into the living room, where he turned off the music and in his best cruise director voice asked, “Who wants to watch a movie?” To which just about everyone, at least those that weren’t already completely engrossed in studying the lines on the backs of their hands, cheered.
“Get comfy, friends,” Jürgen said, and then he grabbed his and Nelson’s bootleg copy of Koyaanisqatsi, which they liked to break out for special hallucinogenic occasions. “I think you’re going to enjoy this,” he said, sliding it into the DVD player. When the Philip Glass score kicked in, jaws dropped and eyes saucered, and Nelson saw Jür-gen grin and give a big thumbs-up.
This was the moment when Lance Riggins and Chelsea Stubbins decided to show up.
It’s hard to say if this was the third bad thing or not.
Lance Riggins walked through the apartment door chest out, like he expected a hale and hearty greeting, but his friends were piled like puppies in front of the big screen, their minds being blown by video of an imploding building and the surround sound. One or two of them might have been openly weeping at the beauty of the whole thing, which was the point after all. Chelsea Stubbins edged in behind Lance, peeking around his arm. Nelson saw the golden blond of her hair against her navy-blue parka.
“What’s going on here?” Lance said.
Jürgen stepped forward. “They’re having a religious experience,” he said. “Here, let me take your coats, and help yourselves to the brownies.”
Chelsea Stubbins slung her parka over her arm and shook her long hair free and Nelson could see little static lightning bolts arc from strand to strand.
I am tripping balls, he thought. Lance Riggins handed his coat to Jürgen and took a big bite of one of the brownies. “Good stuff.”
“Indeed,” Jürgen replied. “And for the lady?”
Chelsea Stubbins held up her hand in defense. “I’m not one for sweets,” she said.
Nelson’s spirit sank to his shoes. He watched Jürgen try again, and receive a second demurral. Nelson couldn’t bear it anymore, so he did the final bad thing and went outside to the balcony, the cold air sucking the breath from his lungs to the point they hurt, and then he looked up at the stars.
Whoa, he said to himself. I am tripping balls. Vermont had lots and lots of stars, but Utah, somehow, had more. Maybe it was the altitude of Provo or the lack of humidity or the limited light pollution, but from Nelson’s balcony, it looked like there were more stars than there was darkness, so the whole firmament was like snow on the television, and that’s when Nelson had the visions.
It wasn’t clear if the stars were plunging toward him or he was zooming into space, but either way, Nelson was among them. They were impossibly bright, but he, Nelson, could look directly at them. They were impossibly hot, but he, Nelson, could touch them.
Joseph Smith also had visions, which he called revelations because he was founding a religion. While touching the stars, Nelson realized that Joseph Smith might not have been a con man or crazy, but instead might have been tripping balls on some kind of native wacky weed, and this started to change Nelson’s perspective on the man, in that Joseph Smith and Nelson had something important in common, namely that they were both capable of traveling in space without a rocket ship. That’s got to be an exclusive club.
Nelson waited for his revelation, the message that would catapult him to a raised consciousness and turn him into a leader of men and women across the plains of the country to a promised land where there were so many stars. What a place to guide your people to!
He felt capable of withstanding the skeptics, their slings and arrows —which were literal in the case of Joseph Smith—but would more likely be words in Nelson’s. Nelson had withstood these things already, truth be told. Nelson’s body swelled with importance as he imagined the multitudes with which he would be filled. Nelson knew Mor-mons believed that with sufficient devotion and dedication, man could become God, and in that moment, zooming among the stars above, he thought they were probably very wise.
“You’re, like, super-high, aren’t you?” Chelsea Stubbins said to Nelson.
“I am tripping balls,” Nelson replied. He was flat on his back on the concrete slab of the balcony. His eyes were closed, but he sensed a figure looming over him. He knew he was cold, but at the same time couldn’t feel it. Maybe he was not flat on his back on a concrete slab but was still floating through space, and Chelsea Stubbins was floating with him. He squeezed his eyes more securely shut in case Chelsea Stubbins speaking to him was a dream.
“It’s in the brownies?”
“And the cookies and the Krispies, and everything else,” Nelson said.
Nelson heard Chelsea Stubbins put her parka back on before sitting down next to him. The Gore-Tex rubbing was like tires squealing in his ears, and he winced.
“Things feeling a little… enhanced?” Chelsea Stubbins asked.
“I am fully alive. I extend to every corner of the universe.”
“That sounds like a lot of work.”
“I like hearing your voice,” Nelson said because it was true. It soothed. “Are you here, or am I there?”
“I’m going to take your hand, OK?” Chelsea Stubbins said.
Nelson nodded, but he was afraid. He didn’t think he should be touched under these circumstances, but the warmth of her skin and then her thumb rubbing over the tendons on the back of his hand felt good. He considered opening his eyes, but then reconsidered.
“I’m filled with rage,” Nelson said.
“What does that feel like?”
“Bad, mostly. Sometimes good, potentially useful.”
“Useful how?”
“Rage has potency, at least that’s how it seems.”
“You’re lucky,” Chelsea Stubbins replied. “I got sorrow.”
“I don’t believe you. You are sunshine.”
“It’s hard to fathom, I know,” Chelsea Stubbins replied. “I didn’t believe it myself for a long time.” She cupped Nelson’s hand in both of hers, applying firm and even pressure. “How’s that?” she asked.
It was wonderful. “It’s wonderful,” Nelson replied. “There are things in this world that are full of wonder, and this is one of them.”
Time passed. Maybe eternities, maybe seconds. You can divide every moment into an infinite number of smaller moments, so both those things can be true simultaneously. Nelson concentrated on the one part of his body that felt real, his hand in Chelsea Stubbins’s hands. He kept his eyes closed, but he pictured it in his mind perfectly— her blond hair brushing down along the sides of her coat, their breath clouding the air together, their fingers entwined—which felt like the kind of thing only a God could do.
“You seem to know a suspicious amount about drugs,” he said.
“Yeah, well…”
“Mormons don’t take drugs.”
“I haven’t been Mormon all that long,” Chelsea Stubbins replied. “Technically, I’m still a Mormon in training.”
Nelson concentrated on keeping his body still even as his heart leapt. Separating Chelsea Stubbins from the Mormonism was going to be cake; the ties binding her to the nonsense were both fresh and weak. “You’re going to have to explain,” he said.
“We married into it—my mom, I mean. I’m from Jersey originally. I had some issues back there.”
“Because of the sorrow,” Nelson said.
“That was the start, sure, but then it became its own thing. A greater weight than the sorrow, even.”
“I’ve not experienced that,” Nelson said. “I am weightless when I’m like this.”
Because in that moment Nelson was so in tune with the world, he could hear Chelsea Stubbins’s lips stretch past her teeth as she smiled. “It’s different for everybody. You probably have not sucked some guy’s dick outside a 7-Eleven for a rock of meth, have you?”
Nelson winced. “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way. That was a violence.”
“My therapist says it’s important to name things as they are, so I try to do that now.”
Chelsea Stubbins slid her hands under the sleeve of Nelson’s hoodie, rubbing his forearm. “Is that OK?” she asked.
“It’s heaven.”
“You’re coming home.”
“I hope not. I like it better here.”
“You’re a funny kid.”
“I’m no kid,” Nelson said. “I am a man among men. I have the heart of a stallion and the courage of a lion. I am an unstoppable force combined with an immovable object.”
“Then I’m very fortunate to have met you,” Chelsea Stubbins said. She removed her hands from under Nelson’s hoodie sleeve and moved to straddle him, slowly lowering her entire body on top of Nelson’s; he felt the pressure of her everywhere at once, and he was warm. She turned her head and rested her ear on his chest. Eyes still closed, he breathed deeply and smelled her hair.
“Lilacs,” he said. “Just as I figured.” Nelson felt her rib cage rise and fall against him. His breath joined hers. “The universe is ordering itself around my thoughts because I am at its center.”
“That sounds interesting,” Chelsea Stubbins said. “But not necessarily unique.”
Nelson wanted to give some thought to this, but not right then.
“Why Lance?” Nelson said. “Surely Lance Riggins does not help with the sorrow. He is no lion. He is a peacock.”
Nelson felt her sigh ripple through his body. “No, not really.”
“Then why?”
“Sorrow doesn’t exist in Lance’s world, so I figure maybe it’s worth me trying to live there.”
“I would use my rage to destroy your sorrow,” Nelson said. He was starting to feel the hard concrete of the balcony on his back. “It could not withstand my fury. I would batter it into submission.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good plan.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t anger and sadness seem related? Like after you’re angry, don’t you feel sad?”
Nelson pondered this. He thought about waking up one morning not long before he left home for good, one of the nights he gave as good as he got from his pops. He had a knot above his brow, tender to the touch. He kept kneading it all day, reminding himself it was there. For two days, his father wore a shirt crusted with his own blood thanks to a blow to the nose from Nelson, like some kind of martyr, until Nelson sneaked into the old man’s room at night, grabbed it off the floor, and threw it in the laundry.
“It’s the smile, isn’t it?” Nelson said. “What is up with that? It seems to mean something.”
“That’s Lance knowing that he belongs to the only true and living church on the face of the whole Earth. He is one of the Chosen, and that joy can barely be contained, and so he smiles,” Chelsea said.
“And you believe that?” Nelson felt another sigh, this one longer. It was the sorrow. It waved through him. It felt far more potent than rage.
“I do not, but I would like to, so I’m going to try. They say it comes to you if you let it in.”
“Are we breaking up?” Nelson said.
Chelsea laughed into his chest. Is there anything better than a beautiful girl laughing into your chest? Nelson could not think of anything better. “We were never together,” she replied.
“Au contraire,” Nelson said. He raised his arms, wrapped them fully around Chelsea Stubbins’s body and squeezed her to him. “Do you feel how strong I am?”
“I do.”
Nelson held Chelsea Stubbins until his arms grew tired, his grip slackened. His whole body was tired. It had been quite a journey.
“I’m leaving soon,” Chelsea Stubbins said. “Lance ate a brownie.”
“It’s not going to work out, you know,” Nelson said.
Chelsea Stubbins raised her head from Nelson’s chest. He felt her chin press at his sternum and knew that if he opened his eyes, there she’d be, but he did not.
“You’re probably right,” she said. “I’ve got my doubts, but it’s the plan for now.”
“I have nothing,” Nelson replied. “I have nothing but a phone that is trying to kill me.”
“Life is a disease that only death can cure.”
“Who said that?” Nelson asked.
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“You’re not the first.”
“Nor the last.”
“I can make you laugh,” Nelson said. “Lance may be filled with joy, but he is without mirth.”
This time Chelsea Stubbins nodded into Nelson’s chest, her chin digging hard. “He’s going to be pissed if he figures out you dosed him.”
“I could never be afraid of Lance Riggins.”
“I’ll tell him it was food poisoning. We had fish tacos before we came.”
“What kind of asshole orders fish tacos in Provo, Utah?”
Chelsea Stubbins laughed again.
“You see? See?” Nelson said. He tried to keep the pleading out of his voice. He’d removed that tone a long time ago, when his pops had told him that whiners got no place in the world. “And he has terrible taste in music, I bet.”
“Nickelback rules.”
Nelson felt some small measure of the rage return. “This is what I’m talking about. It’s what’s wrong with America.”
“Nickelback is Canadian.”
“We’ve infected them too.”
“What makes you so sure we’re right?” Chelsea Stubbins asked. “Who, exactly, is on top in this world? Where do you see the rage and the sorrow? Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It’s just all so ridiculous,” Nelson said.
“Isn’t it?”
Another of those moments subdivided into smaller and smaller moments passed. Nelson tried to count them.
“I’m getting up,” Chelsea Stubbins said. Nelson felt her rise until she was kneeling between his legs. “I think you’re OK now,” she said “You have Jürgen, and your phone that is trying to kill you. That’s something.”
Nelson suspected that her kneeling that way in front of him might have been the most beautiful thing he’d ever have a chance to see, but he kept his eyes closed just in case it wasn’t, because he couldn’t bear to know something like that.
“Will I see you again?” Nelson asked.
“Probably Monday, right? Third shift?”
He nodded at Chelsea Stubbins and raised his hand in farewell, gesturing from the wrist like a king.
Nelson heard the balcony door open; a blast of heated air washed over him. The chant Ko-Yaa-Nis-Qatsi, Ko-Yaa-Nis-Qatsi reached out from the living room. Nelson knew on the screen a rocket was exploding, its flaming pieces drifting beautifully to the ground.