Billy Was Billy

They were spacious studios for rent, suitable for a young man who had just passed the bar exam and had begun work for the state. In fact, he noticed another Tulane graduate across the street occupying what he assumed was a studio apartment identical to his own. His name was Mark, something or other, and he was seeing a beautiful woman.

Chris commuted to the downtown office where he had just begun working on the case of the death row inmate Jack Stowe. He returned home in the evening and sat out on the balcony and watched Mark, he couldn't remember his last name, sit out on the opposing balcony across the street with the beautiful blond woman, perhaps actually a red head or brunette who had taken measures. He had the suspicion that Mark did something in patent law, although he wasn't sure.

One night, laying in bed, he thought of what it might be like to be laying with the beautiful blonded woman. What a luxury it seemed to lay next to this woman nightly.

The following day, a Saturday, he passed her up close in the grocery store which lay at the ground floor of the studios. They passed each other. Up close, he noticed how angular she was, as if she was all elbows and knees. Her face was angular. Yet, there was nothing objectionable about the angularity. The angularity made her all the more appealing, was like a promise that she would always be pronounced and present. That and her beautiful skin and this trace of an idea that she was concealing something, a need, a sorrow.

That evening, he saw them sitting on their balcony across the way. They were drinking something red out of a pitcher. Sangria? Through Mark's curtains, music wafted into the night. Latin music.

That night while drifting off, Chris closed his eyes and imagined laying next to her. It seemed like such a luxury to count on being able to come home to Mark's girlfriend every night.

***

Chris drove out through the marshland to the state penitentiary. The land seemed haunted by the ghosts of dead Indians. The marsh Indians had lived in a perpetual damp Utopia marred by occasional bloody warfare with the Indians of the north. He had read up on the region. Where the Indians of the north were farmers, the marsh Indians remained hunter gatherers until the bitter end. They ate cat fish, wild boar and grandfather moss.

Chris had studied anthropology in college and had read up on the Marsh Indians before moving down south, and as he drove to the penitentiary, in his mind he populated the landscape with the ghosts of the Marsh Indians.

After passing through an endless green corridor of impenetrable forest, the pen loomed in front of him with its towers and turrets. He was ushered into its darkest depths where he met with Jack Stowe, who had been sentenced to death for the double homicide of his wife and his wife's lover Billy Le Blank.

"I hated that Billy Le Blank from the start. He seemed, I don't know how to put this, blank."

"Like his name."

"Yeah, like his name. Billy Le Blank, pulling up in that pick up truck."

Jack Stowe had a grisly quality Chris associated with being in the Pen for 10 years. He had no hair and seemed excessively gaunt. He kind of looked like Ben Kingsley, the English actor, although his face was pale. Suddenly, and with a knife-like intensity, he thought of Mark's girlfriend's skin.

"And so you're telling me that he would come and actually sleep with your wife while you were in the house."

"Hells yeah, he did. That no good Billy Le Blank made me a cuckold in my own home."

"What did you do?"

"What do you think I did? I cursed them out. I told him to get out of there, but he wouldn't leave. They just laughed at me. Once I came home and found em there..."

"Having sex?"

"Yeah, having sex right on the living room couch with the TV on."

"That's fucked up, man."

"Damn right that's fucked up."

"How long did this go on for?"

"2 years."

"2 years? That's fucked up. Why didn't you leave?"

"Had no where else to go. Besides, it was half my house."

"Why didn't you get a divorce?"

"I was afraid Stacey would take the house and that was all I had to my name."

He had a point there. There was something overly fragile about Jack Stowe. He could imagine Jack's wife Stacey getting the house and getting everything, leaving him out on the street.

Back at work he asked his boss Hank if he had heard Jack Stowe's story.

"It's real fucked up," said Hank.

Jack Stowe was slated to fry in the autumn. He had exhausted all his appeals. The rest of the legal process was mere of a formality.

Driving home in the evening from the pen, Chris stopped at the liquor store and got a small pint of Bim Black. He didn't buy full fifths because he knew that if he did he would drink half the first night and then half the second night and would be at half mast for the entire work week.

He stood in his spacious kitchenette and emptied the contents of the whiskey into a glass, and then went out on the balcony to watch Mark and the beautiful blond woman drink sangria and dance to salsa music. After the day of listening to Jack Stowe discuss his fucked up relationship, he felt happy to be alone. But at night, he couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to come home to Mark's girlfriend, to crawl into bed with her, to know that she was there. The thought helped him drift off to sleep.

***

In the morning, he drove out to the state pen with the turrets and the towers like a panopticon presiding over the marsh, the evil spirit of the marshland itself embodied: the soul sentient eye. The guard ushered him into the inner sanctums and depths, the areas of little rooms of solitary confinement in which the lights were always on day and night, where television sets were still black and white and drinking fountains were attached to the backs of toilets.

Finally, they allowed him inspect the Chair itself.

The Chair had always been a significant part of his life. Ever since a child, ever since discovering the evil men do to their fellow man in a thinking, rational fashion which poses as goodness, he had been both fascinated and terrified by the idea of the Chair. A firing squad seemed more humane. Even a hanging seemed like preferential treatment to the Chair electrified, a thing of both comfort, for sitting, and for dying. It was an absurd parody of justice, with the viewing window, the switch, the executioners abnegation of culpability. Any child could see.

And there it was, the destiny of Jack Stowe, the contemporary crucifix.

He rain his fingers along the smooth, wooden arm. Oak?

"You should have left, Jack."

"But I couldn't leave."

"You could have, Jack. You could have left."

"Where could I have gone?"

"Anywhere, Jack. You could have gone someplace else, started over."

"With what? I don't have any skills or abilities. I don't have any talents. That house was all I had. Allison was all I had, and I loved her," he began to cry.

***

"So, when did you first get the idea?"

"They idea of what?"

"To, you know, to kill them..."

"That's what I've been trying to say! It wasn't premeditated. At least it wasn't premeditated for a long time. I just came home one night and found them in bed and it occurred to me that I could do it and suddenly I found myself doing it! It was like my mind was being controled by some evil force! It was like I had no control over my actions, and so I just went to the kitchen, got a knife..."

"That's horrible, Jack."

"I know! I know it's horrible."

"Once I came home, and they were having a barbecue. Billy Le Blank and his friends and some friends of Allison who had originally been our friends. I saw them through the window in the kitchen. They were hanging out in my yard grilling burgers..."

Jack Stowe had a kind of high pitched plaintive country boy way of talking.

"I went out there and everyone said hi to me and I realize that, hell, these people who I thought were my friends think I'm a piece of shit! You know when you're in a situation that's so fascinatingly horrible, you don't want to leave because you are fascinated at how horrible it is? I cracked a beer, sat down and just watched everything. And it was like everything going on was for my benefit. Everyone was looking at me when they spoke, like they were all shitting on me. I couldn't take any more and started to cry. Then I stood up and said, 'why do you people hate me so much? Allison's best friend Sarah said, 'we don't hate you. We just think you're kind of a bummer is all, Jack!"

"A bummer?"

"Yeah, they thought I was a bummer!"

"That's fucked up."

"Hell, yes, it was fucked up! And there's Billy Le Blank grilling burgers using my barbecue. He's got these sunglasses on. He looks like fucking Alec Baldwin standing there, smoking a cigarette grilling burgers."

"A bummer."

"Yeah, a big bummer!"

"Weird."

***

"Have you ever heard Jack Stowe's story?" Chris asked Warden Jones.

"Yes, I have," said Warden Jones.

Warden Jone's office seemed like a Warden's office from the movies. Lots of books. A picture of Jesus. It was like the theosophical center at the heart of the panopticon.

"What do you think of it?"

"That's a fucked up story," said Warden Jones.

"Yeah."

"But it's no reason to kill someone."

"That's true. But it definitely supplies a comprehensible motive."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I don't think Jack Stowe deserves to die."

"That may be the case, but what are you going to do about it?"

"At this point, I'm not sure what I can do."

"Would you like a peppermint?"

"Ok."

Warden Jones handed Chris a peppermint. They sat there, sucking on peppermints looking out over the marshland.

***

It was the regularity of the event that seemed the most momentous thing. As far as he could tell, she was always there every single evening when Mark came home. She had committed to being there in the evening. At the end of the day, they had committed to coming home and sleeping with each other every single night.

He had long since received the impression that he probably wouldn't get along with his neighbors across the street: with the woman or with Mark himself for that matter. He read this notion in the things of their lives, the hybrid car Mark drove, the Sangria, the salsa music, and the Avocados he saw piling up in the woman's grocery cart. Always Avocados. The things of their life seemed to appose his things, which consisted primarily of a 1992 Grand Am, Johnny Cash and ingredients for spaghetti sauce.

But he still thought about what it meant to come home to her in the evening. The coming home and the falling asleep seemed infinitely preferable and more important to the kind of sex life you were supposed to have. He wondered if they reallized that.

As he drifted off at night, he began to think that imagining sleeping with her was in fact even a greater luxury than actually sleeping with her. It was perfectly safe, for one thing. There was no chance of Billy Le Blank entering the picture. There was no chance of her realizing his metaphysical condition dangling on a rocky outcropping above the Sea of Japan. There was no chance of him becoming Jack Stowe.

***

Billy Le Blank had been married to Sandra Le Blank and had two little daughters. At the trial, apparently Sandra Le Blank and the daughters had all testified to the fact that they wanted Jack Stowe to fry. The two little daughters said they wanted Jack Stowe to die.

So, for Billy Le Blank's two little daughters, the Chair was the instrument of revenge. They possessed a totally different vantage that he had had onto the Chair as a child.

He pulled up in front of Sandra Le Blank's house one Tuesday morning to try to broach the subject of clemency.

"Well, as long as you're here, you'd might as well take a seat. Billy always approved of hospitality and you're just doing your job."

"Thank you Sandra, that's awfully cordial of you."

"You're welcome."

Sandra Le Blank busied herself in the kitchen with coffee. She had even fastened a little apron about her slender waste. She was a pretty woman in her mid 40s with a hairstyle he associated with people living in the country who appeared on talk shows.

"What's a nice young man like you mixing with trash like Jack Stowe for?"

"If there is going to be prosecution, there has to be defense."

"Well, I guess that's true."

"How are your daughters?"

"They're staying with my mom. You know how it is. They've got lots of space and are getting ready for college and I stil haven't gotten over my husband's death, after all these years."

She broke down weeping. She rested her head on his shoulder. Suddenly, they were kissing. Chris fell into the act of kissing Sandra Le Blanc with a passion he never knew he possessed. It was like the years of toil and isolation, like sentries, finally stood aside revealing Sandra Le Blank's body. It was not angular, but was rather full and firm. It reminded him of the foothills in the countryside somewhere. She was clean and sweet smelling. The couch was scratchy. He wanted her totally in every aspect without reservations.

After, laying in each other's arms, he didn't broach the subject of clemency.

***

"So, how did it go?" Jack Stowe asked him.

"She wasn't home."

"Wasn't home? Well, where was she?"

"I don't know. I'm going to try on Friday."

"You do try! You go and try! We're talking about my life here! My life. Shit."

***

"Care for a peppermint?" asked Warden Jones.

"Sure."

"You know, I never planned on becoming a warden."

"It doesn't seem like the kind of job you plan on," Chris said.

"I wanted to become a baptist minister."

"What happened?"

"Fear of public speaking."

"Do you ever feel guilty?"

"About what?"

"About executing people?"

"If I didn't, then someone else would."

"Why don't you just let someone else do it?"

"Do you mind if I get a bit personal?" asked Warden Jones.

"Ok."

"You're a young man. Young men think they can change the world. But once you get a little older you realize the world is just an evil festering thing. It festers. Do you know about the Indians that used to live around here?

"A little."

"They ate babies."

"They ate babies?"

"The baby eating tribes. Fry them up and gulp them down."

"That can't be true."

"Don't believe me, look it up."

That evening, Chris looked it up. Sure enough, it wasn't true. It was a popular myth concocted by Christian missionaries to justify the murder of Indians.

***

On Friday after making love, Chris and Sandra went driving around the town.

"I hate this old place," said Sandra. "I've always hated it."

"Where would you rather live?"

"I don't know. I've never been anywhere." Everything she said came out in the form of mild protest, as if she were protesting her lot in life. In an eerie way, her way of talking reminded her of Jack Stowe's. Everything couched in the form of mild protest. He tried to put the similarity out of his mind.

"Billy always said that anywhere was as good as anywhere else."

"Was Billy good to you, Sandra?"

"Billy, oh. Well, I suppose so. I mean, he wasn't bad. Billy was wild! Billy always had this thing about him. He wasn't the most popular, the strongest, the smartest, but he was Billy Le Blanc and we all wanted him."

"Who is all?"

"All of us. We went to school together. Everyone wanted Billy Le Blank. Everyone."

They drove down a gravelly trail and in view of the swamp, made love in the front seat of his Grand Am.

***

Dropping Sandra off, stopping off at the liquor store for a pint of Bim Black, sitting on on his balcony, he realized that he despised his neighbors across the way. He hated them intensily. There they were, spending another evening with that mindless Salsa music playing, that jug of ridiculous fruit-doctored wine. But he still couldn't fully wrap his mind around their commitment to each other just as he couldn't understand Sandra's commitment to the scoundrel Billy Le Blank. Jack Stowe's position on the other hand seemed infinitely comprehensible.

As he visited Jack Stowe weekly, he kept on putting off the question of asking Sandra about clemency. It was the best sex he had ever had. He realized that he was just factoring into Jack Stowe's life as another scoundrel, but it was as if he couldn't stop, as if he had lost control.

"What do you mean, she isn't giving you an answer."

"She says she can't make up her mind."

"What do you mean she can't make up her mind? It's either clemency or not? What's the big decision?"

"I don't know, Jack."

"Who are these people?"

"I don't know, Jack."

"It's either life or death, clemency or revenge. What's the big problem?"

"I don't know Jack." He felt mildly annoyed and then ashamed by his annoyance.

In the evening, Chris the state appointed attorney of convicted murderer Jack Stowe, went to visit Sandra Le Blank. He sneaked up to her house in the evening and lay with her in the darkness. At 29, he felt as if he had entered into his first mature adult relationship. It was a relationship with no set boundaries of commitment, revolving around the bed and spending aimless afternoons watching the rain pass over.

When he returned to his place, he did not think about what Sandra Le Blank was doing. He did not ask her if she was seeing someone else or if she wanted to go steady. He didn't care. He observed himself not caring. Not caring was something new.

***

"You've changed," said Warden Jones.

"You think?"

They were staring out over the marshlands. Chris did not hate Warden Jones as he hated his neighbors the salsa dancers. He knew that he should hate him, but for some reason he didn't.

"You know, I met my wife Jerry when I worked as a garbage man. I used to take out her garbage."

"Really."

"Then, one day she asked me out. We were married the following Tuesday."

"What?"

"We drove to Las Vegas, got married, and got busy real quick."

The marshlands were endless. The only sound was that of their mouths working the peppermints which Warden Jones kept in a carved, wooden box on his desk.

***

Sandra Le Blank's body unfolded before him this insatiable landscape daily tuning itself with his own landscape of desire. Being with her required absolutely no effor, the opposite of effort, whatever that was. Being with her, he felt transformed, alive.

"You've changed," said his boss Hank. "I don't know what it is."

"What do you think of me?" he asked Sandra one evening as they lay in bed. "I mean, in comparison with other men you know, have..."

"Have been with?"

"Well, yeah."

"Well, for one thing you're not really what I'm used to."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for one thing, I usually prefer, you know, big men, and you're more, just, well average."

"Oh thanks."

"And for another thing, you're not like Billy."

"In what sense."

"Well, Billy. Who was like Billy? We all wanted him, you know, oh, don't take offense when I say that! Please don't take offense. You're real. You're the first real thing I've ever had I think, and you're smart, but Billy was Billy and we all wanted him."

"Do you ever think of clemency?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, clemency. I mean forgiving him. You know Billy wasn't exactly a saint."

"What are you saying?"

"I mean, perhaps he doesn't deserve to die."

"You're talking about Jack Stowe? You think he doesn't deserve to die? You're saying that the killer of the father of my children doesn't deserve to die? He deserved to die before he was ever born!"

"How is that possible?"

"How is that possible? It's possible because sometimes demons are born into this world that should have never been born and deserve to die before they ever see the light."

"I'm sorry."

"What do you mean, you're sorry!"

"I'm sorry," Chris said.

Drifting off to sleep, he imagined laying next to the angular woman. The angular woman! He had missed her fragrant non-presence, her permanent angularity, the sense that she was hiding something, a secret state that she didn't show anyone, even Mark who over the course of the last 4 months, had suddenly gotten fat but who had improved as a salsa dancer.

***

Finally, the day of the execution came. Jack Stowe was handling it as could be expected: with a great deal of tears, rage and repentance. Although, Chris felt distant from Jack Stowe now, distant from Sandra Le Blank sitting next to him in the gallery who he had stopped seeing casually. He felt distant from Warden Jones who stood in the execution chamber and threw the switch, causing a certain amount of volts or watts to flow through Jack Stowe, putting him out of his misery. But when Jack Stowe died, Chris felt something inside himself die. That night, laying in bed, he felt blank.

The Prismatic Cathedral

There were so many different kinds of churches, first of all. There were the really old ones he had seen in movies, and then the not so old ones, and then the brand-new ones, like the First Church of God he went to Sundays now in Westwood next to Fleetland Park. Then there was the Prismatic Cathedral, a Cathedral like no other, made of pure glass, where Pastors Roy Hillenborn and Jeremiah Youngblood preached the gospel Sunday mornings broadcast on channel 14. Christoph tuned in to their services every Sunday morning.

Now, he was riding the bus, recounting to himself what he knew about churches. There were what you'd call old churches, then there were churches that really weren't churches - were more like stadiums. He readjusted his coke bottle glasses and scratched his chronically sweating scalp, exercising his taste and knowledge of churches with relish. First of all, a stadium isn't a church. It's just a place where people play football. And there were so many people in the audience that it made the ceremony seem like a kind of sport. The Prismatic Cathedral on the other hand was just the right size. Christoph wanted to ravish Jeremiah Youngblood and to be treated kindly by him and be his disciple.

Certain churches suited him, like others didn't. And church was his favorite subject when we spoke with the grocery store checkout clerks and Stan Swank, the kindly hardware store owner. He told the clerks and nice old Mr. Swank all about the guest pastor at the First Church of God, Andrew Wield. The regular pastor, Gate Hagen, had gone on a mission to South America and was off the map somewhere out in the jungle with the vines and the apes. Christoph remembered how everyone gasped for breath when they found out that Gate was going to South America. He had told them that God was calling him to go and preach the gospel in a place called the Amazon River Basin. He said that even the deepest jungle couldn't keep Jesus out, and everyone nodded in agreement. It was very impressive.

Before Christoph fell asleep at night, he had fantasies about joining Gate in the jungle, rescuing him from some natives who had held him hostage and escaping down the river in a canoe made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. Lying in bed, he adjusted his coke bottle glasses. Then he thought about Jeremiah Youngblood.

The Hatches win and make plans

The Hatches won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, and what no community expected would happen to it, happened to the community of the First Church of God: one of their own finally won the big money. Gate Hagan used the occasion to remind everyone of the power of prayer and the necessity of charity. The Hatches were very good at praying and were some of the most vocal prayer artists in church. Christoph would pray in his silent way, couched behind his coke bottle glasses, asking God for little things like a chance to go to the Prismatic Cathedral in the southern dessert, or for the reintroduction of an old variety of cereal onto the grocery shelves, but the Hatches were very vocal with their amens and their rocking back and forth, making the whole pew sway. They were a very large couple, and it only seemed natural to Christoph that they prayed about large things, like peace, love, and the President of the United States. It was no wonder that God chose them.

When Gate Hagan asked them what they were going to do with their money, Mr. Hatch, who had been a carpenter before he went on disability, said he would remodel the kitchen for Mrs. Hatch. Gate Hagan said amen to that and that he knew that Mr. Hatch had been a carpenter and that Jesus was also a carpenter - so there was this kind of parallel being drawn there. While the end effect of what Gate said was lost on Christoph, it had the rest of the congregation murmuring on the steps of the church in the springtime.

But secretly, the Hatches had devised other plans. They planned to relax and to do exactly what they always wanted to do. They wanted to see how large they could get. It was some sort of infernal, satanic need that they couldn't deny. Sitting on the couch, looking into each other's eyes, they mutually knew that this was what they both wanted, and they made love to each other quickly, quietly in the missionary position on the stained, living room carpet with the television blasting the Religious Friends Network.

The fatter they became, the more aroused they became and the more their bodies enmeshed, creating a perfect, erotic circuit. As if embroiled in a satanic paradox, their libido increased in proportion to their weight. As they grew larger, they mutually felt to be the embodiment some kind of glorious, arousing perversion that neither of them could resist and that preyed on them endlessly. When the Publisher's Clearinghouse money came, they went to Cosco and bought a whole bunch of bulk food. "Alls I's saying is that God gave us this money for a purpose, and when the rapture comes we'll be ready," the glowing Mrs. Hatch told Gate Hagan apropos of her burgeoning foodstuffs.

"Well, I hope you leave some room for me!" said Hagan, at a loss for words.

That night, Gate Hagan tossed and turned, dreaming that he was hiding from God inside Mrs. Hatch's stomach. As much as he never fully realized it himself, this is when his relationship with the divine began to change.

* * *

While Mrs. Hatch occasionally fantasized about other men, Mitt Romney, television wrestlers, she really only had eyes for her husband, Denderman. Dend was from northern Utah, an apostate from the church of Joseph Smith. He breezed into her life 21 years ago at a Fourth of July Picnic in Beaverton, a booming New Haverford suburb, the projected site of the outlet mall and the latest Sequoya Technical College franchise. They had been relatively thin back then. It was all a haze. The first church they joined had been the Church of God in Christ's Love, but for some reason after they were saved they moved on to other churches and other people.

They had originally been saved by Pastor Erik LeBaron Brian Washington who had left the Church of God in Christ's Love to take over the reins of a youth reform center called Jonas Asylum. When Erik LeBaron Brian Washington dunked them beneath the frothing waters of the plastic baptismal tank, it had been like a weight had lifted. One negative side effect, however, was that the lessening of spiritual weight translated into an increase of mundane, real-world weight. Being saved initiated a slippery slope of eating, sex and forgetfulness, so that occasionally when they tried to talk about it, they would immediately forget what it was they had wanted to say. "Remember the time when, the time when..." and Mrs. Hatch could see the tears in her husband's eyes as he struggled to articulate. Then, she felt something inside her, something very old and irrevocably previous, desperately reaching out, trying to touch the thing that was reaching out of Dend. Like hands reaching across outer space. But then she forgot what she had wanted to say and felt hungry.

They had come to the First Church of God by way of a brief interlude at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Christoph, that retard with the coke bottle glasses had been there. The Church of the Immaculate Conception in general wasn't for them. It just wasn't – godly enough - and was too old, and the people there had attitudes and other sorts of names.

So then, weighing a collective 450 pounds, they had settled at the First Church of God and had taken Christoph along in tow, even as they couldn't understand a word he said. Whenever he would speak in torrents of drooling blather, they would just nod their heads. The post-salvation forgetfulness had already begun to set in, and sometimes they felt like they were wandering around in a mist.

Advertisements for toothpaste mesmerized them and were their favorite. Once, when they were watching an infomercial about a special anti-bacterial toothpaste hosted by a wild, dentally obsessed Texan, "Cavities don't come from eatin'! Cavities come from bacteria!" Mrs. Hatch actually directly commented on their situation, "It's like a mist!" she said.

"I know!" Mr. Hatch replied, but then they rightly didn't understand what they were talking about, and even though it was a clear, warm night, they both mutually thought that it was raining and chilly out.

"It's raining outside," said Mrs. Hatch.

"I know," replied her husband.

But it wasn't raining. Mrs. Hatch shut the windows and turned on the heat.

Sometimes the Hatches combined eating and sex in sprawling, raucous, messy binges, and sometimes they went at it for weeks, so that the sun made them squint when they came out of the house. Once they hired a prostitute who said, "I have never done anything quite like this." They both felt wonderfully monstrous and their sense of being monstrous was never more delicious than when they went to the First Church of God and listened to Gate Hagan's sermons. They found Gate Hagan delicious – almost as tasty as that Jeremiah Youngblood who was the pastor at the Prismatic Cathedral which was somewhere down south.


Gate Hagan questions his faith

Deep within the rainforests, Hagan traced his memory back to the initial events of his apostasy. It had all really come to a head while making love to his wife Barbara. "Look at me!" she kept on saying. "Look at me Gate! I love you! I love you!" They stared into each other's eyes. "I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! Don't stop looking!"

He had abruptly stood and walked outside. Naked, out on the deck, his erection subsided in the cool night air. The stars were out. Something was horribly wrong, and the universe was fractured. He didn't like the feeling of the wooden banister beneath his hands. He didn't like the feeling of the wood on the deck, nor had he enjoyed the sensation of the carpet beneath his feet as he had traversed the living room toward the sliding doors. He didn't want to touch anything because everything was contaminated, and he felt unbearably small beneath the impossibly large sky. It was as if the sky was pressing down on him and he had the strength of a blade of grass. Then he knew what he had to do.

He went to the refrigerator and took out the celery and began eating stalk after stalk, fresh lettuce, apples, bringing the fresh fruits and vegetables up to his face, breathing them in. He went to the bookshelf and picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment which he read until he couldn't hold his eyes open any longer.

"What are you reading?" Barbara, sensing something wrong, had emerged.

"Crime and Punishment."

More than the fact that he had inexplicably gotten up in the middle of love making to stand naked on the deck, the words "Crime and Punishment" scared Barbara.

"I love you!" she said.

Gate didn't reply. Barbara retreated in tears to the bedroom, reeling from the title of her husband's book.

That night, Hagan didn't praise God even when he had turned the lights off and lay there in the night on the candy striped couch. He didn't praise God because what was the use? God knew what went on inside of Gate, but you couldn't use words to describe what God did or did not know, and you couldn't really use words to communicate with God.

Instead as he drifted off he thought of Willy Nelson.

***

At the Hagan household, Friday was intercourse night and Saturday was the evening for guests. Barbara had invited the newly rich Hatches over for dinner. The Hatches sat at the living room table. The feeling Gate had the night before had not evaporated with the dawn.

His children, who bore the weight of first names that were last names – Mason and Dixon - were at Lee Norwick's house playing with Norwick's children who were blond, had bowl cuts, and were named Kobe and Kai. Sitting directly across from him, Dend Hatch was saying something about his time in the Church of Latter-day Saints and the polygamists he met. "You're telling me you have 27 wives? How do you afford that?"

Barbara laughed and played footsy with Gate. "I knew I was going to marry him the first time I saw him," Barbara said, or was it Mrs. Hatch that spoke.

"Now we have this money and we aren't sure what to do with it."

"The secret is not to change. We'll never change." "No, we'll never change." "We were thinking of moving somewhere nice." "Maybe Beverley Hills, but then we thought LA probably isn't for us." "She's just a country girl." Gate didn't lose track of who was talking: he truly couldn't tell. Mouths. Mouths moving. "So we decided to build a house here. Why move? We'll just tear down the old one and put up a new one. And it's right near to church. Why should we move?"

Gate became absorbed in the original Misuzake hanging on the living room wall. He had never seriously considered it as anything other than one of Barbara's overpriced obsessions. It was an oil painting of a soulful Jesus with a brown beard and vaguely Semitic features: just enough of a Jew to seem modern but just Nordic enough to hang on one's wall. Perhaps that was what Barbara meant by 'soulful.' It had cost 25 thousand dollars, not including shipping and handling. It was an investment, painted by the famous, Japanese child prodigy, Misuzake, who had sprung up in the heartland and painted like a litany delivered by the collective American unconscious.

He sat, looking at the Jesus looking back out at him, and the Jesus was in total agreement with everything the fantastically obese Dend Hatch was saying. "Why move? We'll build it here. Near to church. Denderman wants to by a Hummer. He deserves it. Last Tuesday we met another clearinghouse couple and they said it changes you. But we don't change, do we Dend? The original Misuzaki Jesus was following the things the Hatches said. No, don't change Mr. and Mrs. Hatch. Live near to church. That's right. Don't move away. You deserve it.

***

Gate Hagan's Jesus looked like one of those strange bachelor habitual churchgoers who let their beards grow out – one of those guys that tries to physically emulate Jesus's appearance even as though no one really knows what Jesus looked like. The Jesus emulators wore tight blue jeans with flowing, white linen shirts unbuttoned at the top. They usually had beautiful wives or if they were single only brought trouble and were venerated during their time, but never stayed for long, moving on to be venerated elsewhere. The single Jesus men always eventually migrated out to the dessert of New Mexico, or to the Colorado Rockies, or at least they told everyone they were going someplace like that: Clear Water Gorge, or Crazy Horse, – Indian places where, Gate speculated, they lived in their own communities, forming worship groups of their own before seducing younger disciples, remarrying, and moving back home to start construction companies.

Everything was surface for the Jesus emulators, and while they never said anything of note, they managed to project auras of spiritual authority by virtue of their appearance coupled with crypto-religious smugness. They had names like him, like Gate or Dend or Gob, which was a couple of letters away from God - a bizarre homage to the Lord. These were the names given by people who didn't know what a name was. Names like Treek. Gate remembered that he had once had a congregant by the name of Treek – a commercial painter who looked just like Jesus and had to leave the church after two beautiful married women fought over him, ripping each other's billowing, ensconcing floral dresses in the warm sunlight on Easter Sunday.

Gate calmly arose. They paid no notice to him as he went to the kitchen for the lighter fluid. He cracked the Misuzake over his knee, and Barbara screamed when she saw the ritualistic-seeming indoor flames leap up.

The following morning he shaved his mustache and bought a plane ticket for Sao Palo before heading over to the church. He had the suspicion that the Hatches had already told everyone about last night. Several prominent members of the local gossip community blushed and turned away. Wendell Rove went as far as patting him on the belly and telling him about his brother's barbecue.

The incident with the Russian

The Hatches' palatial mansion went up over night. What they lacked in horizontal space, they made up in vertical. The most distinct feature of the house was its antennae. After noticing the antennae sprouting on the roof, it was in fact impossible to focus on the rest of the house, which was built of old growth redwood and had two huge marble antebellum columns in the front. Looking at the antennae, one got the impression that the house was reaching out to communicate with people across the oceans, perhaps listening for sounds from outer space. The people walking to church would look up at the Hatch's roof, and the men would wonder what kind of electronic equipment Denderman Hatch had in there. In reality, Denderman had nothing in there. He had merely purchased the array for its looks. He had always liked the look of an array, but with the Internet, there was really little reason to have a ham radio setup.

At this point, neither of the Hatches could remember where they had met Christoph. They knew they knew him somehow and at church they always said hi to him for some reason, but they didn't remember where they had met him. They also knew they could never understand a word he said. Gradually they came to believe that he was a foreigner – a Russian immigrant. There were lots of Russians in church. They were old and wore old clothing with little cabby hats and were grateful for their freedom. The Hatches thought that Christoph was one of those Russians.
They found out more about him when they emerged from their dungeon one Sunday morning to find him materialized in the living room, masturbating to one of the sermons of Jeremiah Youngblood broadcast from the Prismatic Cathedral. They both blushed because they too had often masturbated to the sermons of Jeremiah Youngblood and had done other things in his televised presence with what they took for the vile abandon of those certain of eternal damnation.

Christoph mumbled something totally garbled and the Hatches felt their own sense of overpowering perversion so strongly that they immediately cast aside their rubber moomoos and formed their circuit on the living room carpet. Mrs. Hatch tilted her head back to look at Christoph. A bead of sweat ran down Christoph's temple. Mrs. Hatch said, "Russian. Russian. Russian. Russian - oh you fucking Russian!" Christoph said something lost within a confluence of saliva. After the frenzy had passed, the Hatches got dressed, called the police, and had Christoph carted off.

Gate Hagen had gone to South America. The Hatches discretely told Andrew Wield, the interim pastor, what had happened. They felt in no danger of recrimination because the boy with the coke bottle glasses was Russian and couldn't speak English and who would believe him if he told everyone that the Hatches were, in fact, servants of Satan? Andrew Wield nodded his head. "Poor Boy. He has Manheim's, syndrome you know."

The following Sunday, Andrew Wield delivered a sermon about sexual desire and how it was an expression of love between a man and a woman and that this love was impossible without first having a relationship with Jesus and then meeting a man or woman who also had a relationship with Jesus. Everyone somehow knew that he was talking about Christoph because at that point Andrew Wield had told everyone. Trouble in the parish was a boon for an up-and-coming pastor, and Andrew Wield started a fund to send Christoph to the Jonas Asylum, run by Erik LeBaron Brian Washington, in the peaceful community of Fork. With the Hatches' generous donation, the First Church of God had no problem raising the money.

Christoph and Erick LeBaron Brian Washington at Jonas Asylum

Christoph had no idea what the people at Jonas Asylum were saying half the time. He remembered Erik LeBaron Brian Washington from his days at the Church of God in Christ's Love, but somehow the Erik of the present and the Erik of his memories were different. This man looked different. His clothing was casual now and he hadn't the same scent. Brian Washington checked up on Christoph now and then and said things that Christoph didn't understand, like, "How do you feel?" What did this mean? Christoph could never make it out. He told him how he felt. "Kind of sick. My underwear is too tight."

"We're just tying to help you, son," said Erik LeBaron Brian Washington.

But help him do what?

They had given him this too-tight underwear that he had to put back on after the timed bathroom breaks. After five minutes, whether he was done or not, the bathroom door popped open. He slept in the underwear. It cut off his circulation and made it feel like he was walking on pins and needles. One evening while checking him in for the night, Nurse Paula exclaimed "Oh my God!" and sent for another nurse who looked at Christoph's blue thighs and said "Oh my God!" Since then, they gave him slightly looser underwear, but after a while it felt just as tight as the old pair.

He couldn't understand what he was doing at Jonas Asylum or what anyone else was doing there. He had a vague intuition that it had something to do with pastor Jeremiah Youngblood and the Prismatic Cathedral, so that suddenly, with a rush of blood, it dawned on him that they were preparing him to go to the Prismatic Cathedral: to take the long journey out into the dessert where the cathedral had forced its way out of the ground, an angular, divine eruption amidst the cacti and the lizards sitting on rocks. But he still wasn't sure, so that once he asked Erik LeBaron Brian Washington, "Am I going to the Prismatic Cathedral?" Smiling kindly, Brian Washington responded. "Absolutely. If you're a good boy and you do everything we say."

Since then, Christoph happily anticipated the day they would drive out to the Prismatic Cathedral and meet Jeremiah Youngblood. Jeremiah Youngblood would take him on a tour of the Cathedral. They would walk around with their hands clasped behind them, and Jeremiah would say things like, "I know what you're thinking. It's funny how the Prismatic Cathedral is out in the dessert." Or, "The Prismatic Cathedral is made of one hundred percent solid glass." Christoph would nod his head, then after pausing in front of a lifelike painting of Pastor Roy Hillenborn, who was getting on in years, Jeremiah Youngblood would invite Christoph to live with him in the Prismatic Cathedral in the southern desert as his disciple. "You will be my disciple until someday you will have disciples of your own."

After Christoph took his meds in the morning, he had breakfast with the other residents of Jonas Asylum. Most of them were a good deal younger than him – mostly teenage boys.

"Do you wear the tight underwear?" Christoph asked a boy named Mike who sat across from him in the morning.

Mike started laughing hysterically. "We all do!"

"Why are there no girls here?"

"They live in compound two," said Mike.

"Do they wear the tight underwear?"

"I imagine so!" Mike laughed hysterically.

After Erick LeBaron Brian Washington's breakfast sermon, they would all go out to the quad to do jumping jacks and pushups with Sergeant Bob. Sergeant Bob had been a sergeant in the army before Erick LeBaron Brian Washington had told him that he had important work to do at the Jonas Asylum. Sergeant Bob had come to get their bodies in shape so their spirits could follow.

This is how Christoph's day went. After lunch, he had a man-to-man with Erick Le Baron Brian Washington, who kept on asking him if he still thought about Jeremiah Youngblood and what his little guy felt about Jeremiah Youngblood. Christoph felt like he was receiving mixed messages. He felt like Erik LeBaron Brian Washington wanted him to think about Jeremiah Youngblood in as much as he was being prepared to go and live with him out in the desert. At the same time, he wasn't supposed to admit thinking about Jeremiah Youngblood and that somehow his future life in the Prismatic Cathedral was related to his response to a trick question.

He had no idea what Erik LeBaron Brian Washington meant by "little guy," so that he began to conceive of an actual little fairy creature – a little guy - who was present in his life as a reoccurring theme of conversation, but also as a concrete possibility in as much as there may have been a little person somewhere on the premises that Christoph would eventually meet or perhaps spot out of his peripheral vision, scurrying down the hallway.

They would look at magazines together, and Erik would ask him how his little guy felt. At this juncture, it was important that Christoph would say "Randy," or, "Horny as a horn dog," when it was a woman. When it was a man, it was important that he say, "A little weird," or simply "Gross." The response that Brian Washington seemed to like the most was "I have one of those too!"

Christoph would say these things even as he had a hard time focusing on the glossy pictures in the magazines through his coke bottle glasses, and he actually felt nothing distinct. At breakfast, he asked Mike if he also had an illusive little guy. Mike, hysterically laughing, said, "Of course! Everyone does!" This confused Christoph. How many little men could there be at the Jonas Asylum, and where did they sleep at night?

The array, the reinforced sex swing, the good life


Denderman Hatch continued to add to his array until his house looked like it had sprouted black, stringy hair. He purchased the wire from the sporting goods store and occasionally stopped off at the junkyard to scavenge for iron rods. After a while, it got hard for him to climb up onto the roof, and so his project came to a halt.

The Hatches sprawled poolside, drinking daiquiris out of aluminum cans and eating microwavable chicken potpies. Their house had fallen into utter disrepair. They had a hard time getting around and cleaning up after themselves, but they didn't want to hire a maid because it was important that no one found out that they were 'of the devil's party.' Each relished what they interpreted to be the evil of the other, and the prospect of internal damnation spiced their world and helped them plan their days.

They purchased Mexican prostitutes and had ungodly ménages on the living room rug with the Religious Friends Network blasting in the background. They bought a reinforced sex swing that Mrs. Hatch sat on as Denderman, clad in oversized leather bondage gear, penetrated her roiling, lubricated flesh. They soaked in the hot tub together and took turns pretending to drown the other before dissolving into each other's arms. They ate the most expensive of microwaveable meat pies and gourmet roasters they had delivered now from a chicken farm two towns over. They had a strange life together, and eventually that sense of forgetfulness – of perceiving life through a fine haze - was subsumed by crystalline awareness of their possessions.

As their lives congealed, they built a pool in the shape of a cross in their backyard, and after hiding their pornography, they hired a Mexican maid from two towns over to come and clean up. Then, they invited the entire parish over to a pool party that lasted all day, which Andrew Wield called unprecedented, where some of the Russians got drunk and started doing silly little dances with each other. They never once thought of what happened to Christoph.

Yet even if their life had finally crystallized around them, and they were at last happy, the array that Denderman had prized began to fall into disrepair, its spikes sorrowfully wilting, casting ominous, spiky shadows on the gables and the Doric columns, giving the house an odious air that the neighbors secretly remarked on.

An escape south, Flora, regrets, Jeremiah Youngblood's disgrace

Gate Hagan went to live in Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo was apparently crime ridden, but it somehow felt much safer than life in the United States. He rented a little room in the center and started giving English lessons. When people asked him what his job was in the States, he told them that he had recently had a spiritual experience and was searching for himself. They nodded their heads and told him they understood in a way that made him feel as if they actually did understand. They were the most present people he had met in his entire life. "Well, I hope you find what you are looking for in Brazil," they said.

One of the strange things about coming to Brazil was how the change of country affected his self-esteem. He bought some new clothes. The clothes here fit his gangly frame. It was the first time in his life when his clothes fit. He looked in the mirror at his stubbly, tan face, and that constant feeling of innate, physical ugliness evaporated. Sometimes women smiled at him in the street. He had never experienced this before. Romantic contact with women before his marriage had been limited to the lascivious come-ons of congregants and a feverish, confused dream life. But here he sensed a new possibility that felt at once natural and wholesome.

In Sao Paulo, he had absolutely no contact with the news and had no idea how the war was going. Sometimes he saw the most unflattering images of American politicians plastered on newspapers, and he recoiled, laughing, disgusted, feeling vaguely soiled yet free.

He didn't find his way into an English language newspaper until he saw Jeremiah Youngblood's picture on the front page of one of the regional English publications. He felt ashamed of how he had once behaved around Jeremiah Youngblood on his visit to the Prismatic Cathedral around ten years ago.

He had been personally invited out to one of the televised sermons. Like Arab sheiks, they had taken a limo caravan out through the desert. He had sat in the backseat with Jeremiah Youngblood, feeling carsick, pandering to the young megalomaniac. "You're doing a great thing for the Lord," Hagan had said. In Sao Paulo he read with glee of Youngblood's twin entanglements with a male prostitute and meth in Las Vegas. He kicked up his feet on his sweaty little mattress and laughed hysterically.

Eventually the teacher-student relationship with his Portuguese instructor dissolved into a romance. She was the smartest, most present woman he had ever met. She said the most amazing things about life, God, contemporary politics, and when he had divulged to her the awful nuances of his life as a pastor, she had said, "Organized religion is shit." He had never heard his own burgeoning beliefs put so bluntly.

Flora talked a lot about books. In particular, the writings of Sartre and Camus. At an English language bookstore, Hagan purchased a Dover Thrift Edition of the Plague, but he couldn't get past the first chapter. It was like he just wasn't smart enough. He began to suspect that his problem was that he simply wasn't as intelligent as he had always considered himself to be, and that his entire life had been geared in a way to keep him from thinking deeply: to teach him to accept shallow platitudes as a fundamental reality.

Like the Jesus men with their billowing shirts and beards who eventually migrated south and said things like, "God is in the details," or "God helps those who help themselves," so his former life seemed to be the sum of these ancient, stupid axioms. It was as if he had always adopted the form and scaffolding of knowledge, but without the content. For a moment, Hagan became afraid that he was just following a pattern in Brazil - tracing the lines of another superficial thought structure - but then he reminded himself where he was, in Sao Paulo, in Brazil and not in an Arizonian Baptist church or kneeling by the banks of the Crazy Horse River or having dinner beneath Dendermen Hatch's array.

***

Flora was not beautiful like Barbara, but parts of her were amazing. Barbara had been brittle yet pliant and totally, intellectually opaque; but Flora was rounded, active, willful and communicative. While she was not the traditional beauty, Gate began to see her through the window of her beautiful parts, her maturity, confidence, rapacious intellect, and random, unexplained moodiness.

His love of Barbara had from the start been protective and slightly pitying, but with Flora his feelings were beseeching, confused, insecure, grasping and alive. He wanted Flora to love him and didn't understand why he wasn't certain she did. She never told him in words that she loved him. These were new experiences for Hagan.

Sex with Flora was also different than it had been with Barbara. There was no mandatory staring into each other's eyes and no constant declarations. In fact, in the beginning, Flora had expressed distaste for the things that Barbara had always wanted, and she seemed to like Hagan the best when he was slightly remote, bent over his writing desk or sitting out on the balcony, pouring over the first chapter of The Plague.

They went on walks through the city and in the evening went out dancing. Gate Hagan felt those exciting new feelings of insecurity – like he had absolutely no idea what would happen next. Finally, Flora told him that they could no longer meet because she couldn't handle all of his psychological baggage and that she hoped that with the help of a good therapist, eventually life in Brazil would cure him of the experiences he had accrued in the United States. But it may take several years, and in the meantime she had to get on with her life. He felt grateful for the time he had spent with her, and gratefully, but with no small regret, agreed to whatever she said.

After a year, the initial effects of his life in Brazil wore off and he began to see the place as any other place and began to feel an old sense of stress at the core of his being creep back up inside him and paint his world with the hues of fear. He tried to exorcise the stress by drinking red wine and sleeping with women. It worked. He struck a balance within a hedonist, bookish existence. He felt better and better, until finally he decided to take a tour of the villages around the Amazon.

They were little mud-caked villages. There was such poverty there, but the people were happy. It was only when he encountered the missionaries – swarming, carrying bibles, with vaguely ominous names like Pastor Franklin French, the man from Boise Idaho that he had met on a night bus, did he hear rumors of a vast, spiritual despair pervading the sunny little villages of the Amazon.

When the missionaries asked him what he did for a living, he told them he was a coffee scout. He didn't accept any of their invitations, and gradually his consciousness became welded to the Amazon itself as a living, geographic formation that snaked back into the green depths as he himself snaked back through the terrifying layers of the past. He lay in little rooms, struggling through the pages of the Stranger, dreaming about the canoe trip he would take into the inner rain forest, through the living, breathing jungle.