Church of Nowhere
One day when we were kids my brother and I found a church in the woods. When we told our parents later they didn’t believe us of course but what happened was my brother and I were horsing around in the woods one sunny afternoon and we came across a church that hadn’t been there before — an old fashioned one. Small and modest. One room. 4 white walls and a door. There was no walkway or path to entrance, no rhyme or reason for why it was there. It just was. We cased it, peering in through the stained glass and saw the pews, and it was empty except for a man sitting alone at the front pew. Frail form, black suit, grey hair. This frightened us. He turned and saw us looking at him through the window and smiled and waved at us in slow motion, like he was stuck in time. This frightened us, too. We ran the whole way back home.
I mention this now because I had trouble sleeping that night and so did my brother. The church we found in the woods had left us with a clear sense that something was amiss, and something was about to happen. And then the next day it did. The signal began transmitting on the televisions first. To my brother and I it sounded like a faint hum, just a bit more high-pitched than a fridge. But our parents heard something else. They were glued to the TV and we couldn’t shake them out of it. They remained silent for a bit and then our mom sighed “I am so worried.” Our dad repeated “I am so worried.” Neither sounded like themselves. We were listening to impostors who had found their way into our parents’ bodies and had forced their brains to become something different. “I worry about the light here,” the thing pretending to be our mom said, “I worry about home and the light here.” And then she turned to my brother and me, with a vacant expression that suggested the world was going to be transformed for us very soon, whether we were ready for it or not, and she asked, “Do you think you’re home now?”
A couple months ago my brother crashed his motorcycle and broke his leg pretty bad. Bone protruding from the skin and all that. When they brought him back to the shelter he was crying and screaming something delirious. His girlfriend and a couple other guys gave him some stuff to knock him out and then they got to work repairing him. He should not have been riding so fast in the rain, is the point, but he was reckless that way, and most of the time it wasn’t a big deal. In fact, a few times his lack of concern for his own personal well-being had saved some lives, so a compound fracture seemed like a small price to pay in the scheme of things.
I told him as much when I brought some whisky to his cot that night. He probably didn’t need any, given the drugs he was on, but I did. I was starting to go a little stir crazy, waiting for the next thing to happen. I had found myself growing punchy and mean.
We talked about our folks for the first time in a number of years. “With a gun to your head,” he asked me, slurring his words a bit, “could you venture a guess as to where they all ran off to?” I drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Of course I’d thought about it a lot, but without any real resolution, there just hadn’t been much to say. I stood up and walked across the room and pulled a pair of wings from the wall with my name on it. The children had made us all wings out of construction paper, as part of some art project. My pair was light blue with some glitter glued haphazardly along the edges and a crudely drawn heart next to my name. “When they got on the boats…” my voice trailed off. “I don’t know, I’ve always thought South America for some reason. Is that weird? I just have this idea that they put all our parents in South America to get ready for whatever it is they’re planning or experimenting on us about or, I don’t know, whatever the plan is. They’re not in fucking Maryland anymore, that’s for sure.” I noticed my brother’s breathing had grown heavier. He was passed out.
Yesterday I was on a run for supplies alone in the woods near our shelter. I like it out here in the light and the quiet. I like it far more than the hum and clamor of the people and equipment powering the compound. At the foot of a hill I came across an old church pew — a little decayed, unused, no indication why it was there. It might have been abandoned during the evacuations. Maybe there was a little church around it at one point and it had been sucked up into the sky with a loud POP and ripple of electricity.
I sat on the pew. Maybe my posture resembled that of my grandfather’s in old photographs I’d found in my mom’s closet. Maybe a signal winds its way through the universe and disrupts the light that defines the curve of the Earth and my tiny place on it until it becomes something unrecognizable and my brain, like all brains now, is forced to absorb and assimilate or get left behind.
But what are my intentions here, on this church pew in the middle of the woods? What sunlight am I meant to subsume until the next event occurs and our definitions are once again scrambled into something grotesque and new and this place in the woods is nowhere?
I stood up and ran my fingers along the edge of the pew, ready as ever to become a believer. Ready as ever to visit violence upon who I once was, if it came to that. Ready for you to find me and tell me all about where you’d been.
