The stars are thick above us in this kind of darkness. You can see how the moon is rough with mountain ranges and etched with rivers and smoothed with oceans.
On a night without the moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.
At least that's how I remember.
My mother was inside the kitchen ironing and folding the clothes I'd be allowed to take with me. My father was I don't know where. I'd never see either of them again.
It's funny, but people always ask if she was crying. They ask if my father cried and threw his arms around me before I left. And people are always amazed when I say no. Nobody cried or hugged.
Nobody cried or hugged when we sold a pig either. Nobody cried and hugged before they killed a chicken or picked an apple.
Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they'd raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread.
My brother was just cutting my hair. My mother was just done ironing and she'd sat down to sew. She was pregnant. I remember she was always pregnant, and my sisters were all around her with their skirts spread on the kitchen benches or on the floor, all of them sewing.
People always ask if I was scared or excited or what.
According to church doctrine only the firstborn son, Adam, would ever marry and grow old in the church district. When we turned seventeen the rest of us, me and my seven brothers and five sisters, would all go out for work. My father lives here because he was the firstborn son in his family. My mother lives here because the church elders chose her for my father.
People are always so disappointed if I tell them the truth, that none of us lived in oppressed turmoil. None of us resented the church. We just lived. None of us were tortured by feelings very much.
That was the complete depth of our faith. Call it shallow or deep. There was nothing that could scare us. That's how people raised in the church district colony believed. Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God; a task to be completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra; a luxury.
That was the definition of our faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything was to be expected.
In the outside world, Adam said it was a bargain with the devil that powered automobiles and carried airplanes across the sky. Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy. People put their dishes back in the cupboard dirty, and the cupboard washed them. Water in pipes carried away their garbage and shit so that it was someone else's problem. Adam pinched my chin with his thumb and forefinger and leaned down to look me straight in the face, and said how in the outside world, people looked in mirrors.
Right in front of him on the bus, he said, people had mirrors and everyone was busy seeing how they looked. It was shameful.
I remember that was the last haircut I got for a long long time, but I don't really remember why. My head was a bristling field of straw with just the short hairs that were left.
In the outside world, Adam said, all the counting was done inside machines.
All the food was fed to people by waitresses.
The one time he left the colony, my brother and his wife and the church elder who escorted them stayed overnight in a hotel in downtown Robinsville, Nebraska. They didn't any of them sleep. The next day the bus brought them home for the rest of their lives.
A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.
Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.
He said a lot more I don't remember.
That haircut was sixteen years ago.
My father had sired Adam and me and all fourteen of his children by the time he was the age I am now.
I was seventeen years old the night I left home.
The way my father looked the last time I saw him is the way I look now.
Looking at Adam was as good as looking in a mirror. He was my big brother by just three minutes and thirty seconds, but in the Creedish church district there was no such thing as twins.
That last night I ever saw Adam Branson, I remember thinking my big brother was a very kind and a very wise man.
That's how stupid I was.
Part of my job is to preview the menu for a dinner party tonight. This means taking a bus from the house where I work to another big house, and asking some strange cook what they expect everybody to eat. Who I work for doesn't like surprises, so part of my job is telling my employers ahead of time if tonight they'll be asked to eat something difficult like a lobster or an artichoke. If there's anything threatening on the menu, I have to teach them how to eat it right.
This is what I do for a living.
The house where I clean, the man and woman who live here are never around. That's just the kind of jobs they have. only details I know about them are from cleaning what they own. All I can figure out is from picking up after them. Cleaning up their little messes, day after day. Rewinding their videotapes:
By the time my bus drops me off here, the people who I work for are gone to work downtown. By the time they drive home, I'm back downtown in my housing voucher studio apartment that used to be just a tiny hotel room until somebody crowded in a stove and a fridge to raise the rent. The bathroom's still out in the hall.
The only way I ever talk to my employers is by speakerphone..,. This is just a plastic box sitting on their kitchen counter and yelling at me to get more done.
Ezekiel, Chapter Nineteen, Verse Seven:
The house I've been cleaning the last six years is about what you'd expect, big, and it's in a real tony part of town. This is compared to where I live. All the studio apartments in my neighborhood are the same as a warm toilet seat. Somebody was there just a second before you and somebody will be there the minute you get up. The part of town where I go to work every morning, there are paintings on the walls. Behind the front door, there are rooms and rooms nobody ever goes into. Kitchens where nobody cooks. Bathrooms that never get dirty. The money they leave out to test me, will I take it, the money is never less than a fifty-dollar bill, dropped behind the dresser as if by accident. The clothes they own look designed by an architect.
Next to the speakerphone is a fat daily planner book they keep full of things for me to get done. They want me to account for my next ten years, task by task. Their way, everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
'I want to be able to look at your planner,' the speakerphone yells at me, 'and know exactly where I can find you at four o'clock on this day five years from now. I want you to be that exact.'
Seeing it down in black and white, somehow you're always disappointed in your life expectancy. How little you'll really get done. The resume of your future.
It's two o'clock Saturday afternoon so according to my daily planner, I'm about to boil five lobsters for them to practice eating. That's how much money they make.
The only way I can afford to eat veal is when I smuggle it home on the bus sitting in my lap.
The secret to boiling a lobster is simple. First you fill a kettle with cold water and a pinch of salt. You can use equal parts of water and vermouth or vodka. You can add some seaweed to the water for a stronger flavor. These are the basics they teach in Home Economics.
Most everything else I know is from the messes these people leave behind.
Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a fur coat.
