Nobody wanted to embarrass their family. And nobody wanted a lifetime of removing asbestos.
The church elders were going to stand you in one place and you'd have to read a chart at the far end of the meeting hall.
The church elders would give you a needle and thread and time how long you took to sew on a missing button.
We knew about what kind of jobs we were headed for in the wicked outside world from what the elders said to scare or inspire us. To make us work harder, they told us about wonderful jobs in gardens bigger than anything we could picture this side of Heaven. Some jobs were in palaces so enormous you'd forget you were indoors. These gardens were called amusement parks. The palaces, hotels.
To make us study even harder, they told us about jobs where you'd spend years pumping cesspools, burning offal, spraying poisons. Removing asbestos. There were jobs so terrible, they told us we'd be glad to run up and meet death halfway.
There were jobs so boring, you'd find ways to cripple yourself so you couldn't work.
So you memorized every minute of your last year in the church district colony.
Ecclesiastes, Chapter Ten, Verse Eighteen:"By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through."Lamentations, Chapter Five, Verse Five:"Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest."
To keep bacon from curling, chill it a few minutes in the freezer before frying.
Rub the top of your meat loaf with an ice cube, and the loaf won't crack while it bakes.
To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper.
We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament.
We thought all this teaching was to make us smart.
What it did was make us stupid.
With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger's children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets.
Forever and ever.
Work without end.
We were all of us so excited about passing tests, we never looked beyond the night of the baptism.
We were all so worried about our worst fears, squeezing frogs, eating worms, poisons, asbestos, we never considered how boring life would be even if we succeeded and got a good job.
Washing dishes, forever.
Polishing silver, forever.
Mowing the lawn.
Repeat.
The night before the baptism, my brother Adam took me out on the back porch of our family's house and gave me a haircut. Every other family in the church district colony with a seventeen-year-old son was giving him the exact same haircut.
In the wicked outside world, they call this product standardization.
My brother told me not to smile, but to stand straight up and down and answer any questions in a clear voice.
In the outside world, they call this marketing.
My mother was putting my clothes together in a bag for me to take with me. We were all of us pretending to sleep that night.
In the wicked outside world, my brother told me, there were sins the church didn't know enough to forbid. I couldn't wait.
The next night was our baptism, and we did everything we'd expected. Then nothing else. Just when you were ready to hack off your little finger and the finger of the son next to you, nothing happened. After you'd been poked and felt and weighed and questioned about the Bible and housework, then they told you to get dressed.
You took your bag with your extra clothes inside, and you walked from the meeting house into a truck that was idling outside.
The truck drove out into the wicked outside world, into the night, and nobody you knew would ever see you again.
You never found out how high you scored.
Even if you knew you'd done well, that good feeling didn't last very long.
There was already a work assignment waiting for you.
God forbid you should ever get bored and want more.
It was church doctrine that the rest of your life would be the same work. The same being alone. Nothing would change. Every day. This was success. Here was the prize.
Mowing the lawn.
And mowing the lawn.
And mowing the lawn.
Repeat.
Joke.
On the bus on the way to our third date, Fertility and I are sitting in front of some guy when we overhear the temperature is eighty, ninety degrees, too hot for June anywhere, and the bus windows are open, with the smell of traffic making me a little sick. The vinyl seats are hot the way touching anything will feel in Hell, hot. The bus is Fertility's idea for going downtown. On a date, she told me. Downtown. It's the afternoon so only people without jobs or with night jobs or crazy people with Tourette's Syndrome are going anywhere.
Here's the date she has to take me on since she won't sleep with me and won't even kiss me, no way, no day.
Who's sitting behind us I can't imagine. He was nobody to notice, just a guy in a shirt. Blond hair. If you pressed me, I'd have to say ugly. I don't remember. The bus comes by the mausoleum every fifteen minutes, and we just got on. We met at Crypt 678, the same as every time.
I do remember the joke. It's an old joke. Houses of the city are going by outside the bus, behind cars parked along the curb and between fences to mark the property lines, and the joker leans his head between Fertility and me and whispers, "What's harder than getting a camel through the eye of a needle?"
These jokes are all over. No matter how not funny they are, you can't not hear them.
Neither Fertility or me says anything back.
And the joker whispers, "Buying life insurance to cover a Creedish church member."
The truth is, nobody laughs at these jokes except me, and I only laugh so I'll fit in. I laugh so I won't not fit in. The main thing I worry about in public is maybe people can tell I'm a survivor. The church costume I got rid of years ago. God forbid I should look like one of those stupid crazy people in the Midwest who all killed themselves because they thought their God was calling them home.
My mother, my father, my brother Adam, my sisters, my other brothers, they're all dead and in the ground getting laughed at, but I'm alive. I still have to live in this world and get along with people.
So I laugh.
Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It's all just different ways to vent.
These jokes are everywhere this morning, and you have to do something not to start crying all the time. Nobody laughs harder than me.
The joker whispers, "Why did the Creedish cross the road?"
Maybe he's not even talking to Fertility and me.
"Because he couldn't get any cars to hit him."
Behind everybody is the roar of the bus, pushed down the street by its engine in the back, putting out stink-colored smoke.
Today, all the jokes are because of the newspaper. From where I sit, I can see the headline below the fold on the front pages of five people hiding behind today's morning edition. It says:
"Cult Survivors Dwindle"
The article says how the curtain is almost closed on the tragedy of the Creedish church mass suicide ten years ago. The article says how the last surviving members of the Creedish church, the cult based in central Nebraska that committed mass suicide rather than face an FBI investigation and national attention, well, the newspaper says only six church members are known to still exist. They don't name names, but I must be one of the last half-dozen.
The rest of the story jumps to page A9, but you get the gist. When you read between the lines, it says, Good riddance.
They don't write anything about suspect deaths where it looked like murder. There's nothing about how a killer is maybe stalking those last six church survivors.