California(50)

“I need sunglasses,” he said to Frida. “I feel like I’m stepping onstage.”

In each corner, an industrial light, the kind used on construction sites, was connected to a car battery. How wasteful it seemed. The lights emitted a terrible droning buzz. Such a noise would’ve been normal just five years ago, but now it struck Cal as insidious—unbearable, certainly, should they have to sit near one. He looked at Frida, who had placed her hand on her abdomen, as if to palm their child’s ears. Cal’s stomach dropped. The sounds of technology, the insistent whirs and hums and sighs of motors, computers, lights, clocks, cooling and heating systems, masked an entire, secretive universe, a world beneath the world. Their child would be, could be, should be, a creature capable of discerning the smallest shifts out of silence. Like a woodland creature, ears pricked to the slightest movement miles off, he would truly be able to listen. Listen. He imagined Micah, or his suicidal dupe, saying that word, and his stomach dropped farther.

“Our meetings can’t run too long for this reason,” Micah said, and nodded to the lights. “We don’t want to waste our resources.”

“Resources,” Cal repeated. He didn’t bother asking why they just didn’t use candles for the meeting. Clearly, these lights played into Micah’s theatrical streak.

“Follow me,” Micah said.

People were already packed into the pews that began just a couple of feet from the entrance and continued in orderly rows toward the front of the large square room. The walls were made of plaster and blank, without iconography. The ceiling was high. Micah had said that they weren’t a religious group, and Cal was relieved.

The second floor was most likely accessed through the unassuming door behind the raised stage. There was a podium on that stage—a pulpit? Was that the correct term? Frida would probably wonder the same thing, but the difference was she wouldn’t be embarrassed that she didn’t know for sure. Both of them had been raised heathens; that had been Frida’s father’s word, said with a snobbish little guffaw—but it was true. Cal’s parents weren’t believers, so neither was he. He occasionally prayed, as he had done before their journey here, but it was a pitiful begging to no one in particular. He didn’t see the point of worship.

This was probably only the fourth or fifth religious establishment Cal had ever set foot in, including the tiny storefront church down the block from their apartment in L.A. That place had low ceilings, and three rows of plastic patio chairs had faced an altar covered in a disposable tablecloth. There were spelling errors in the literature (even in the Spanish text), and about as much atmosphere as a Laundromat. But the people there had been so taken with the Lord. Jesús es Dios, they told him, clutching their Bibles, their babies. An old woman had led him in; he’d been on his way home from work, drunk from the homemade cider a coworker had brought, and he’d thought, Why not. “Pues,” he’d said to the woman, Well, and walked inside. Those churchgoers had spoken of end times, which would have made Cal uncomfortable when he was in Cleveland or at Plank, but by the time he lived in L.A. such talk was commonplace. Before CNN had gone dark, he’d heard the phrase tossed around by most of the pundits. Pundits, pulpits. What was the etymology of these two words?

Frida brushed against him as they moved down the line of pews. The aisle was narrow, and yet they walked side by side, as if in a wedding procession. Not that this building had seen one of those in a while. Even so, this was just a church, in the end, clean and unadorned. The Land had kept it as uninteresting as the bedroom he and Frida were staying in.

“Where’s Sailor?” he asked as they got to the first pew, left empty.

“At the lookout Tower,” Micah replied. “On duty.” He ushered them to a seat.

“Is that his punishment?” Cal asked. He wanted to add for spilling the beans, but Micah’s confused look made him shake his head. “Never mind.”

Cal slid into the pew first, then Frida, and then Micah next to her. Cal faced forward because he didn’t want to seem too eager to sum up this group of people. They believed in containment, which probably meant they were skeptical of curiosity as well.

The women behind him were talking in hushed voices. He leaned back to listen.

“If you want to keep that shirt, you’ll need to retrieve it from the line while it’s still damp, before anyone else takes it for themselves. Not everyone here is as crazy about wearing the same clothing all the time as you are, they like to mix it up. And then you get upset.”

“I know, I know.” This woman gave a little laugh. “I shouldn’t care.”

“But you do. We all have those things. We can’t help it, even Mikey admits that.”

“True. I should just wash it already. It stinks!”

They both laughed and fell silent.

Cal placed his hand on Frida’s thigh and kept his gaze ahead. Micah had been right: this couldn’t have been how the Church looked originally. Surely, the ghost town’s stage would have been built of rough wood planks like everything else, or maybe bricks. In its place, the developers had built a smooth sanded stage, with a piping of metal around its soft edges. The door behind the stage matched.

Who was waiting behind the door? What was on the second floor?

A few people ventured to the front of the room to see Micah. One asked about something called Morning Labor, and another came to apologize for drinking the milk Micah had requested. “You never came for it. It was on its way to curd,” the man said, and laughed, trying to catch Cal’s eye and, when that didn’t work, Frida’s.