NINETEEN

The World

[Winter Solstice, 2005]

Harleys by the dozens lined parked along the highway, taking every space formerly left open over the downtown strip of Main Street, their kickstands deployed, frames leaning, chrome bits gleaming, rubber in dark black rings twinned, thick or thin, back ends back and fronts forward, extended, long and thin; all in militaristic formation, perfect, precise. This was how the Ceres clan did things: like they knew what. Several of the bikes, most in fact, had rear seats and sissy bars outfitted with custom-made child-carrying devices. Some even had sidecars with special hampers installed. And now that the air had stopped thrumming, and every loose thing settled from shaking, in the dim confines of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! it was First Wife or perhaps first widow Shulamit who said, “What this town lacks is a doughnut shop.”

Ignatius nodded his sad agreement. “There’s taffy at the confectioner’s up the road a bit,” he offered helpfully, though his pride may’ve been wounded a bit by this failure. “Granted,” he said, “it’s not the same.”

“Taffy,” Shulamit expressed, “schmaffy. Who comes to a town like this looking for taffy?”

“You’ve got me there. But since you are in town – and the whole, eh, family as well – should the need arise, well, such as it is, the thing is available.”

She looked around the abysmally dark room and reconsidered. “You may have a point.”

Ceres children of various sizes and indefinite number bounced loudly about, most of them with a bright mess of blond on top, though a fierce and nearly feral-looking two or three (Proteus couldn’t count – they moved too fast and never stopped for long) with red ragged brushy mops were mixed in among the others, and all ran, weaving patterns throughout, wearing off the colored stain and fixative sheen from the concrete floors. They ducked beneath tables, they popped back out, they hid behind chairs or shoved past them, and occasionally threw small objects into the air. Wherever they were or whatever they did, they were shouting. One girl, barely yet old enough to stand and say her name, hovered just outside the front door. She stared enrapt into the eyes of the ownerless golden retriever who, tongue bouncing with each quick breath it took, stared back at her in existential detente.

“Still, this is no doughnut,” said Shulamit.

“No. No doughnut. It is true.”

I… that is, Proteus… damn it… worked behind the espresso machine, arms swinging in double time, trying to keep up with a mountain of orders, failing miserably, though I’d (he’d) not yet pulled (and wouldn’t) a single shot of coffee. All was milk, foamed, and lots of it, with a squirt of chocolate sauce – make that several squirts; the Ceres clan liked it sweet – stirred vigorously and made into hot cocoa. Rosettes of whipped cream were piped atop, which in short while deranged themselves to mere blobs, melted, bled, the mass of chocolate sprinkles liberally applied left to float on the mottled surface.

Teenage sons Nephi and Laman, in unusual dress (considering how the rest of the family appeared), wore simple, clean suits – dark jackets and trousers both, white shirts, little ties – and had grouped to flank the Professor, who, between them, with his arms folded over his chest, sat stiffly chair-bound, his legs stretched forward and spread slightly, his feet wagging side to side as if keeping their separate time, and whose beaming, toothy smile and head, in a constant slow nodding, may have indicated deep consideration and interest in what these two were saying. Or not.

“Our father has prepared a home for us in the Celestial Kingdom! We know this!” said Nephi, getting a little short of breath. “We saw him ascend into Heaven… and that… is where… he waits…?”

“He’s been appointed his own planet to rule over,” added Laman, somewhat less excitedly, “and now it’s only a matter of time until we all get to join him. And a matter of keeping the Covenant, of course.”

“Yes,” nodded the Professor, who beamed magnificently, his head nodding up and down. “Yes…”

“Have you heard about the Covenant?”

“And the… the structure of the Godhead?”

The Professor, saying nothing more, only continued to nod and smile, white teeth reflecting more light than there was in the room.

“Hey, wait,” said Nephi. “Does that make father our Heavenly Father? Since he’s our father in heaven?”

“No,” answered Laman. “Heavenly Father is different. Our father in heaven is just our father. In heaven. Like. I think…”

In a back corner farthest from the door, Amanda was deep in conversation with a Ceres wife whose red hair – she was, no doubt, mother to the mismatched non-blond children in the room – and whose deep-lined, leathery skin seemed to Proteus, even in this unnatural, dim light and from this distance, especially familiar. He imagined – no, he remembered – that she’d once stood beside a raging bonfire, under stars, the full, heavy canopy of the night sky – or was that the red hair that made him think that? She’d had something… she’d had something for him. Or no: she’d had something of his. Wasn’t that what she’d said? That was different. It seemed so long ago. And just as he realized he’d been staring at these two, they in turn abruptly stopped talking and turned to look directly at him, their expressions each firm and severe. He quickly looked away and returned to what he’d been doing, to pouring yet more foamed milk into the row of small paper cups he’d lined up along the counter, one after another. But he could feel it, how they watched him now. He knew they’d not resumed their conversation, but still studied him. He doubted they’d ever had a “conversation” at all, such as it was – yet he couldn’t even explain to himself what he meant by this. As if in sympathetic response, he felt an itch burning deep inside of his right thigh, an itch so fundamental he knew he could never reach far enough down into his own flesh to scratch it.

Outside, through the window, on the walk, tall Davis stood in place in the sun, long and willow-like, twisting his body from side to side at the hips, letting his arms flap limp and boneless, centrifugally. Windmilling. His form was reflected in the face of the machine; a shape in motion, vertical, smeared and bent, that hovered at the upper edge of Proteus’s eyesight. This annoyed him. Maybe it was the relentless repetition. Certainly, it was this. He tried to ignore it, though this was impossible.

“Here you go,” Proteus said, reaching across the machine to hand the first couple carry-trays of cocoa drinks to the women who waited. Halfway, he hesitated – the two wives stood as still as trees. They even looked a little bit like trees: similar, dark-haired, oval-faced, and youngish. Their arms could easily become branches, he thought, were they lifted up and draped, should they grow out just a little, should they change, by chance to fork, finger, and spread… and… and… their large eyes, the two pairs, glimmered, almond-shaped, the same, the same, earthy, unearthly.

“Uh…”

But these two girls themselves broke the spell they’d cast. They reached the rest of the distance across to accept what he half-held and half-withheld, as if they also shared a single thought.

“Thanks,” and, “Thanks,” they said at the same time, smiling politely.

Proteus twitched his lips back in what he hoped was a grin.

“We do not remember you,” the slightly smaller of the two said.

His grin tightened.

“But we wonder how you’ve come to this name, Proteus?” asked the slightly taller.

“This is not a normal sort of name,” commented the first.

“My name…” he hesitated, trying to remember when he’d told them his name, “is not Proteus.”

“No. Of course it isn’t.”

“Of course it isn’t. But why?”

“Why?” he echoed uncertainly. “I seem to have lost my name.” But he knew perfectly well this was not an explanation that made any sense. “I don’t know where, but any name I used to have is gone now. It’s just gone. This is the only one that’s left. Even though it’s not really mine, I have to use it as if it were. So does everyone else.”

“Yes, gone…”

“Not your own.”

“Everyone else.”

“Does that mean that you can’t remember your normal name? Is that why you need this new and special one?”

“Something like that, I think.” he explained. “It’s less that I don’t remember; more that it was taken from me.”

“Yes, that’s right. Your name was taken.”

“And so you have to use this other one you’ve got now instead.”

“Like a farmer’s forgotten hat, left abandoned on a fencepost.”

“That you found there, and put onto your head. So that it won’t get burned by the sun.”

“Yes,” said Proteus, “yes, exactly!” He began to work on another batch of small hot chocolates, an order that seemingly would never be finished. When he chanced to look up again, the two women remained, smiling at him. Again, his lips twitched and stretched back over his teeth, skull-like. He couldn’t help it.

“Our husband,” said the taller woman, “has gone into the sky. He went to heaven, you know.”

“I do,” said Proteus. “I was there. I saw it happen. But…”

“But we don’t remember you.”

“We were supposed to follow him,” said the second woman, “only we couldn’t.”

“We couldn’t.”

“So we’re here now instead. Still on Earth. On this mountain. Amidst the troubles and sorrow.”

“It isn’t like that in the Celestial Kingdom. Not at all.”

“Are you sure…?” began Proteus, glancing up from his work of foaming a large pitcher of milk, having to talk – that is, shout – over the machine’s terrible squeal of tightly focused, pressurized steam. “Are you sure that’s where he’s gone to?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Where else could he have gone?”

“I don’t… exactly know,” shouted Proteus, “but wouldn’t there be, maybe, other possibilities? Maybe?”

“You mean, like another place?”

“Like maybe somewhere else?”

“Right.”

“No…”

“No…”

The two looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No, we don’t think so.”

And reflected in the chrome face of the espresso machine, bent, tall Davis, twisting outside, presented his own face, knob-like and warped across its surface. His was a miniature face, framed by the front window and darkening somehow, gathering the darkness to himself, ruining the sky with it – what once had been hot and bright, not even five minutes before – twisting the month of December into, onto, and at once past this cusp of winter, so that the sun was lost, the color quickly drained away, and all the birds were shocked into silence, if only for a moment. Soon they, unnoticed, resumed their bird-screaming while meanwhile rain threatened, at first distant, and then not so distant, yet still not quite upon the mountain.

“I was there,” Proteus said again, finishing and stirring this last and latest batch of hot cocoa drinks, “I saw it happen. I saw your husband disappear.”

“As you said.”

“But we don’t remember you.”

“My point,” he continued, “is that so many people in this town have disappeared too, and in the same way.”

“While at the time, you weren’t here.”

“No, I mean, that’s right, I wasn’t here at the time, but I’ve heard stories. Lots of stories.”

“People love stories.”

“The people,” struggled Proteus, “who disappeared weren’t like your husband, Zedekiah. They weren’t holy men. O-or women.”

“Our husband was our prophet. He still is. He has been transformed and gone into the sky.”

“But these other people… they were just people. It was the sheriff who made them all go away, the same as he did to your husband. He was here, on the mountain, then he was there, down in the valley, where we met.”

“We don’t remember –”

He cut them off with a wave of the spoon, whipping a glob of milkfoam inadvertently into the air. “Something happened to him when he was up here, on the mountain. Now the people around him all vanish if they get too close. Or they would, but he’s gone now too. He’s vanished himself away, like… like so much mist. But do you understand what I am trying to tell you? That where Zedekiah went to might be the same place all these other people have gone also, and that might not be heaven.”

The two women looked to each other for a moment, then the smaller one said, “We don’t know about those other people. We only know about our husband, and it was he that went to the Celestial Kingdom and is there now. He’s preparing our home for when the rest of us are ready to spend eternity…”

Shulamit wedged her way in between that dark-haired pair of wives and the counter, pulling out her rag purse, shoving the women back a step. “Don’t worry yourself about these two,” she said to Proteus. “They’re very sweet, but hardly a lick of sense between them, heads all aflutter with sweet visions and words and the wind. What do we owe you?”

“Er, let’s see… thirty-two small hot cocoas, a dollar-fifty each, plus tax…”

While some few shorts steps over, at the table where those other twinned spirits Nephi and Laman had bookended themselves, standing to either side of the Professor – who in this case was the book – he, seated, pulled at his frayed collar, sat stiffly upright and began to expound, responding perhaps upon some finer point of theological speculation the boys had brought up: “The Higher and the Lower? Yes… This was always the story being told, so far as anybody knows, really, among any discourse whatever. As the two reach toward each other, in their intersections, in the ground between Earth and heaven, we hear their voices… That’s it, isn’t it? We’ve heard the voices and often wondered – we know that we have, though we’ve been unwilling to admit it, if even to ourselves alone – just what was being said? We listened… oh, yes, we listened very carefully, indeed. Every voice, a particular instrument; each, a perspective, each with its own phrasing. We remove value from the considering and find ourselves, first and only, just considering. We merely listen. We pay them the attention required, knowing it’s the price. Yet we’ve never understood just what was being said. We could never make that part out. It is what has driven us mad. Perhaps it was the absence of value, that value was the only meaning. We only knew that the voices were talking, that there should be meaning, and that this was the division between what was and that Platonic ideal of what was meant to have been. The High and the Low remain ever thus, separate, even when conjoined. Otherwise, wouldn’t it be the case, always, ever after, that we should understand the words, and we should have the knowledge, and follow these conversations of our holy guardian angels? And was this not the promise that we were given in the first half of life, so swiftly, so ruthlessly snatched from us in the second?”

The boys, while standing there, drifted with their eyes and seemed lost, maybe a little scared. The Professor looked from one to the other of them, then sneezed.

Outside, the rain had arrived. Broken concrete, formerly dry, released long-contained dust-smell with the first thick drops. Every animal for far around had known that this was coming, had known full well what season it was. “Winter’s here! Everything dies!” called one black raven from a barren tree, while the ownerless retriever, having left behind the small girl to relieve himself against a tire of one of the few parked cars downtown (he knew instinctively better than to mess with any of the Harleys) looked up toward the bird, lolled out his tongue, and said nothing, the reproach in his eyes enough to remind this bird of the rule against using human speech.

Shulamit, inside, returning change to her purse, thought again and poured some coin into the open jar on the counter before her. She said to Proteus, who stood there smiling, oafish, “You’ve taken up the mantle, I see?”

Proteus took a moment to consider what she meant, then realized that he still wore the sheriff’s accessories. “Er, um, I,” he answered.

“He fitted you with these things,” she added. “I remember it. Then you are this instrument of the law, the subject of prophecy.”

“Prophecy?” I said, astonished. And then, “Subject?” I mean: he said. Damn it.

“Zedekiah was our prophet, yes,” she explained, “but hardly the only one capable. In fact, most of us can see into the future, of the seven sister wives. Many of the kids too.”

“Oh,” Proteus said. “You make it sound… common.”

“Kinda,” she told him. “The littlest don’t remember the future as we do, but that’s only ’cause they don’t know what it is. Lack the perspective, see. We’ve seen you, though.”

“Was that,” started Proteus, “before or after –”

Yet she wouldn’t let him finish: “The law was laid upon you, not your choice, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t ever yours. How would you think that you found it, otherwise? Or that it should find you? Law makes its own choice, in this case chooses you. See. You accept or don’t accept, little difference. You wear the magic, and so you change. You see the future.”

“It’s not something I like to talk about.”

“We’ve been looking for the new land of Zion. We think we may have found it. We await the signs of confirmation, soon to come, yes, very soon…”

And there came a sudden flash, and it came to pass soon after, a crash of terrible thunder, and then, momentarily following this, something not so clearly nor so readily explained: the blazing trumpet-horn sounds, of wrath and terrible thunder, as if from the sky itself, as if from heaven, and the impact sounds, the metal sounds, first of one, then another, then the next and the next and another, and so on, like so many dominoes, falling over…

•

“They…” said Albert, his face aflush with blood, “were in my way.”

“Albert?” began Proteus, head protected somewhat from the rain by his wide-brimmed and ill-fitting sheriff’s hat. “Albert. You’ve hit every last one of these motorcycles.”

The old man remained at the wheel of his little electric hybrid car, which again had jumped the high curb and mounted onto the sidewalk. This time its angle had wedged across the walk on other side of the street, stopping finally with a fender stuck partway through the door of Lily’s Antiques. Its frame and glass were in ruins.

Lily, smiling, stood atop a step-ladder, dusting at one end of a shelf, cat-corner from the wreck of her door; she turned and waved at them, “Afternoon, Sheriff! Hello, Albert!”

The rain fell in floods and doused the two men outside, rat-drowned.

“Ma’am,” said Proteus.

“My dear, hello, once again,” offered old Albert flirtatiously with a tip of his black fedora.

From the door of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! and onto the street had come streaming out those of the Ceres clan who’d been inside, their jaws now all dropped open in disbelief at the level of offense to their rides. Others of the family had appeared from their corners and crannies and nooks and various shops and where-all else they’d got to in town, and when those also saw what had happened, they stood about and stared in shock.

“Albert,” said Proteus, turning back to the white-haired fellow inside the car, “first you rammed every bike to that side, then you swerved wide around and knocked over every bike to this side. They were all legally parked. How could they have possibly been in your way?”

“All it took,” the old man protested, “was a tap to the first in the line. Then they all collapsed and knocked over the next. Nothing to it. Nothing at all.”

“That isn’t the point. The point is… I don’t know what the point is. You shouldn’t be driving.”

“I would like some coffee.”

“Albert, I have to take you in. You give me no choice. I’m revoking your license. I’m impounding your car. Again. This is unacceptable.”

“You, sir,” declared the old man, “are a flat-faced fake. You’re a washed-up dead dog of the sea and, future-seer or not, I do not recognize your authority to do this. Nor to do anything, for that matter. Now bring me some coffee and be gone!” He waved back-handedly at him with haughty contempt.

“YOU,” said Proteus, his tolerance driven to the limit, “ARE UNDER… ARREST!”