Smokingboot

The first five chapters are here.

CHAPTER SIX

They stashed me in what must once have been a servant’s room back when the mansion was first built in the 1880s, with a steeply sloped ceiling, scarcely big enough to fit a cot. It was oppressively hot. I'd always been a restless sleeper, tossing and turning on the king-sized mattress in my apartment, but here I would wake up in the same position that I'd lain down in. For the first few days, I slept deeply. And I had no dreams.

But you can only sleep 16 hours a day for so long. One afternoon, I woke up sufficiently rested to feel restless, so I wandered down the narrow back stairs. The treads were warped and buckled under my weight.

The stairs led straight down into a kitchen dominated by a massive cast-iron and enamel range; the enamel, once white, was now yellow, as was the ancient hood that loomed over the stove. The hood hadn't worked in many years; I could still smell the faint rancid note of all those decades of congealed grease.

A small group of New World Millennium Kingdom acolytes stood around a scarred pine table, scraping and slicing some kind of root vegetables. I wasn't up on my root vegetables. Turnips? Rutabagas? Who knew?

The acolytes didn't speak. To me or to each other. But one of them cut me a hunk of bread and pushed a bowl of soup at me, root vegetable soup. I was hungry. I ate it all.

Sunlight struggled to make its way in through a row of tall, grimy windows that looked out onto what I imagined had been a kitchen garden back in the day. I pushed my way out a small back door. No one tried to stop me.

The garden was now a weedy half-acre, overgrown with crabgrass and foxtail grasses. In a very real sense, this was the culmination of all my adventures in economic geography with Neal, wasn't it? A knee-high tangle of ragweed and bindweed choked the packed earth of the old paths. Little shamrocky clumps with tiny yellow flowers clustered in the rusted remains of a once-ornamental wrought-iron fence. A clump of rhubarb had held on through all the neglect, not quite a memory, but still a reminder of the way things had been back when the garden fed the house's inhabitants. In what had been the garden's center stood an ancient fountain with a cracked basin. The Ozymandias factor prevailed. Always and forever.

When I went back into the kitchen, Brother Malachi had returned from his daily rounds. He eyed me appraisingly. "You have a new life, you need a new name," he told me. "I've chosen one for you: Sister Beholden. We'll try it out for a few days before your baptism to see if it's apt."

###

In real (ha, ha, ha!) life, I used to make a hundred decisions a day. Choose what time to get up, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, which bill to pay first, which friend to disappoint, which bad habit to pretend I'd break next month.

But as an initiate of the New World Millennium Kingdom, I made no decisions at all.

It was very relaxing.

Rise when it's still dark to a bell rung at one end of the house's crackling intercom system. Twenty minutes of prayer, kneeling on a bare floor, staring at a bare wall. Cold water splash at a communal basin, no mirrors allowed. Breakfast of oatmeal, half an apple, and herbal tea, followed by ten minutes of collective confessionals, structured more along the lines of classic Marxist criticism/self-criticism than cozy Christian spiritual reflection.

The group confessionals could be very amusing. Sister Penury routinely accused herself of all sorts of crimes. She took an elevator when the hard-and-fast rule was to mortify the flesh by walking up the stairs! She served herself a slightly larger portion of lasagne than she served the others!

Sister Penury's most antisocial behavior, though, was a schoolgirl crush on Brother Malachi. The signs were unmistakable: overlong glances, a desperate need to please, spite toward anyone who monopolized his attention for more than two consecutive sentences. Strictly verboten, this: The members of the New World Millennium Kingdom practiced radical celibacy; they lived together as brothers and sisters in a sexless, peaceable kingdom. I had to believe in her former life as a Goldman Sachs trader, Sister Penury had done some serious boinking. Most likely, it had been part of her job description. Try as she might to deny the flesh, the lizard brain remembered. She lusted in her heart after Brother Malachi.

The crush went unacknowledged and unrequited: Brother Malachi, I was quite sure, disliked boinking. Once I got to know him, I recognized that Ted Kaczynski vibe. If only he'd been able to scrape together a down payment on a remote cabin in Montana with no running water or electricity, he'd have had a satisfying life UPS-ing homemade explosives to random strangers. As things stood, Brother Malachi had to let God have all the fun of smiting and slaughtering because he was only the rag-tag prophet of a fringe apocalyptic sect.

"Where's my car?" I asked that first day after breakfast.

"It's safe," Sister Penury smiled.

"They'll be expecting me in the ICU," I said.

"That's been taken care of," Sister Penury said. Still smiling.

I could have left the place at any time. They didn't zip-tie my ankles and wrists or anything. They hadn't chained me to a wall. Only I found I didn't want to leave. There was nothing for me in the outside world. There was nothing for me here, either, but at least I didn't have to pretend to myself that there was.

###

After a few days, Brother Malachi summoned me into his office, a grim little room off the kitchen that had once been a butler's pantry. Pine cupboards that used to hold silver and table linens were now stacked high with crumpled envelopes and pads of unidentifiable forms. There was only one chair in the room behind a folding table, and Brother Malachi sat in it. That meant I had to stand in front of him, a supplicant by default.

"Let the world's money serve God now, Sister Beholden," Brother Malachi said and pushed a bunch of forms and a pen at me.

I recognized the short-term disability insurance claim form and the paperwork to apply for family and medical leave. At the bottom, someone had already filled in the “health‑care provider” section in a spidery hand: DR. ETHAN MALAKOWITZ, M.D., PSYCHIATRY, with an office building address. I knew the address; half the ER attendings ran their side practices out of it. A neat little license number followed.

There was also a form for setting up direct deposit and a smudged printout in an ornate Gothic font entitled "Covenant of Stewardship." I picked that last up off the table and began scanning: "In gratitude for my new life, I place my worldly resources at the disposal of the New World Millennium Kingdom and submit to the Community in the direction and administration of all assets in my name—"

"Do you suspect God of trying to scam you?" Malachi thundered.

I dropped the form and picked up the pen.

###

After that, I was cleared for active service. There was a hierarchy. Like all hierarchies, it existed primarily to make a small world feel big. New recruits were assigned to labor in the garden, a purely symbolic exercise since the New World Millennium Kingdom didn't actually plant anything. For food and other household supplies, we relied on dumpster diving and monthly trips to Walmart. But tugging out crabgrass by its stubborn roots was understood to be a physical counterpart to wrenching out wayward thoughts, the one sustaining the other.

If your jihad on crabgrass, plantain, and the stray clover was relentless enough, you moved ahead into kitchen duty. In the New World Millennium Kingdom, there was no such thing as meals per se; instead, there were canonical offerings: a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, the late afternoon Discipline Hour, and, if God was feeling generous, a thin Evening Portion.

We spent hours peeling and chopping vegetables. We boiled pasta that passed from rigid to rubbery without ever pausing on edible. We simmered beans in gigantic, industrial pots; the whole house stank from our farts, and the house's ancient plumbing system suffered. We washed mountains of mismatched plates and cracked cups in greasy, lukewarm water.

There were other responsibilities to aspire toward, too, of course. Responsibilities that lay outside the house. There was dumpster-diving behind supermarkets and collecting roadside bottles and cans for the deposits. There was walking to the laundromat, two miles there and two miles back, with sixty-pound bags of dirty clothes, a trek that Brother Malachi had dubbed "The Pilgrimage of Purification." There was working prayer tables at hospitals and strip malls. But you didn't qualify for these until you had renounced the world, and you couldn't renounce the world until you'd been baptized, received your new name.

In the evenings, we did Bible studies. Brother Malachi skewed heavily toward the Old Testament, though from time to time, he did make selective raids on Revelation and a few of the more colorful sheep and goats passages from the Gospels.

"Proverbs, chapter twenty‑three, verse two," he'd announce. "Sister Penury, you will read it for us."

A host of invisible seraphim, brandishing bright pink Mylar party balloons, descended from the sky to sprinkle fairy dust on Penury's head. “‘Put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite,’” she intoned.

"Amen," Malachi said.

A synchronized chorus of "Amens" rose from around the table.

I stayed quiet.

Malachi noticed. "What does the outside world try to make us think about appetite, Sister Beholden?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I mean, are you talking end-stage capitalism? Supplier-induced demand? Appetites should be fulfilled. That's how the GDP keeps expanding."

He smiled at me. The mouse was lying down in front of the cat! “Exactly. The world says indulge. The world says, ‘You’ve had a hard shift in the ICU, you deserve a venti caramel abomination.’ The world says, ‘You are owed.’”

He tapped the page with one long finger. “But the Word says, ‘Put a knife to your throat.’ Now—does that mean we're supposed to slit our own throats over a bowl of oatmeal?”

A couple of the acolytes chuckled dutifully.

“No,” said Malachi. “It means we are to be as ruthless with our appetites as a man with a knife is with a rope. Appetite is the rope. The knife is discipline.” He let the image hang there. “You cut the rope, or the rope drags you.”

He gazed down the table, where a plump young man named Brother Asaph sat hunched, hands folded. “Brother Asaph, when you were living in Babylon, what was your favorite meal?”

Asaph looked uncomfortable. “Uh. Baconator combo, supersized.”

I knew exactly what a Baconator combo was. I also knew the precise number of grams of sodium and the approximate number of patients I had admitted with heart failure who’d thought it was a perfectly reasonable dinner four days a week.

“And when the craving came,” Malachi continued, “how many minutes did you spend resisting?”

Asaph stared at the table. “Uh... None?”

“None.” Malachi pounced on the word. “Because appetite was your master. You were the dog, appetite was the leash. You think that leash only pulls you to Wendy’s?” He snapped his fingers. “Today it’s bacon, tomorrow it’s fornication, the next day it’s walking out of the ICU because you’re tired of watching people die.”

The room seemed to tilt. Everyone’s eyes flickered toward me and then away.

Malachi went on, silky. “Appetite is not only for food. Appetite is for comfort. For control. For being seen as a ‘good nurse,’ a ‘good friend,’ a ‘good little citizen of Babylon.’ The knife to the throat is the willingness to say, ‘No more. I would rather die than obey appetite instead of God.’”

He snapped his Bible shut with a little gunshot crack.

“This is why,” he said, “we take only a Morning Measure, a Midday Sustenance, a Discipline Hour, and—if the Lord smiles—an Evening Portion. This is why no one chooses their own plate. This is why Sister Penury confessed to taking an extra spoonful of lasagna.” He nodded approvingly in her direction. “She felt the rope tug at her neck. She reached for the knife.”

Penury’s cheeks glowed with fervent, humiliated pride.

Malachi’s gaze landed on me again. “Some of us are still clinging to appetites the world programmed into us,” he said softly. “Appetite for praise. Appetite for decision‑making. Appetite for the illusion that we keep people alive by our own hands.” His smile sharpened. “Those are the throats that most need the knife.”

He opened the Bible again and slid it toward me so that the single line of Proverbs sat squarely between us.

“Read it again, Sister Beholden,” he said. “And this time, ask yourself which appetites you’re willing to cut. Or else you can't be baptized.”

###

Personally, I didn't care whether I was baptized or not. Oh, I was perfectly willing to humiliate myself for hours pulling crabgrass out by the roots, debase myself in the kitchen washing mountains of greasy plates, but I felt no particular desire to belong, no yearning to merge my identity with the collective.

The Universe evidently wanted me here, and I was just going along with it. My entire life, I'd fought the Universe; now I was resigned to the fact that something bigger than me was running the show. You can spend years lining all your ducks in a row, but then out of nowhere, your husband trades you in for a button-sewing hausfrau, or a Chinese bat virus hitchhikes its way across the planet to ride you like an evil voodoo god. Everything about the New World Millennium Kingdom was ridiculous, and yet here I was. I had faith in something but belief in nothing.

Malachi was bewildered by me. I could tell. None of the usual control techniques worked. Not the carrot (invitations for one-on-one counseling walks), not the stick (threats of punitive fasts). I had become a kind of test for Malachi—though a test of what, I wasn't sure. I was obedient, but I wasn't submissive. Still. He was eager to see me baptized, and ten days after I arrived at the New World Millennium Kingdom's decrepit mansion, he announced that the Lord had revealed to him the appointed time had come: I would be baptized the following evening.

###

They used the cracked fountain in the overgrown garden for baptisms. A pipe connected the fountain to an old well through which running water could be coaxed.

Sister Penury went to some pains to prepare me for the ritual, describe the ordeal, so I wouldn't freak out: "At first, it feels as though you might be drowning. Brother Malachi puts a sacred vestment over your face; the water goes into your throat through that. For a moment, you'll choke and gag, you won't be able to breathe. You'll feel like you're suffocating! And that's the moment your old life leaves you. When you're finally able to breathe again, you'll be filled with the Holy Spirit! Your old reality will fall away."

It sounded like being intubated to me. Or possibly, like being waterboarded.

I should have walked off the property right then and there, right? Sprinted down that driveway, thumbed a ride back to Babylon. But passivity is its own narcotic, so I didn't.

Penury gave me a helpful New Testament passage to think about while I waited. Romans 6:3–4: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.”

But instead, I thought about Debbie Reynolds. I'd been the nurse operating the defibrillator during that final code. The first shock—200 joules—did nothing. The line on the screen stayed straight, the cardiac monitor continued to alarm. "No change," I'd shouted. "Resume compressions."

At 260 joules, Debbie Reynolds' body jackknifed off the hospital bed, then flopped back down, and for three glorious seconds, we had a coarse V-fib squiggle on the screen before she flat-lined again.

By the fourth shock, we'd stopped pretending. We ran the algorithm for the sake of CYA. Every time I said, "Resume compressions," I knew I was participating in an elaborate ruse. The defibrillator might still be firing, but Debbie Reynolds had already been baptized into whatever reality came next.

###

In the Hudson Valley, the summer night is never sudden. Darkness began pooling in the garden's hollows while the sky was still pink; the trees turned to silhouettes before the first dim scattering of stars flickered. Penury had helped me into a white shift, crying a little as though she was dressing me in her own wedding gown.

The pipe from the well shuddered when Brother Asaph cranked its ancient valve. Water filled the fountain's basin in a series of brief gushes, carrying the scent of deep, stale earth. The acolytes, holding hands, formed a circle around me; "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it," they chanted in unison over and over and over again till the words turned into meaningless singsong.

Malachi was wearing a thrift store suit, the folded cloth resting on his palms like an offering. When he got closer, I saw Penury's sacred vestment was actually a dish towel, the kind you buy for fifty cents at the Dollar Store.

Malachi's eyes locked on to mine. "Do you renounce the world of your own free will? Will you consent to killing Grazia so that Sister Beholden may be born?"

The acolytes' chanting seemed to crescendo and then die away, though I could still hear their voices. When the crescendo effect started again, I realized I was hearing something else through the voices, an approaching siren. Malachi could hear it, too. He started and frowned.

In another second, I made out the crunch of tires on gravel out front, the squeal of a car door opening. Indecipherable squawks from a radio. A familiar voice came through an open window, claiming the last word in an argument that had started inside the police vehicle miles before: “No, officer, what we have is a complaint and probable cause. His public defender can argue voluntariness in front of a judge. But I can tell you one thing: His public defender won't be me."

Red and blue lights were flickering against the mansion's dirty windows. A cop stepped out of the car.

Followed by Neal.

Neal took in the fountain, the dish towel, the hand‑holding acolytes, my off-brand sacrificial virgin outfit. One eyebrow jerked up a millimeter, and the corner of his mouth twitched, like someone trying not to laugh in court. I suddenly saw the whole scene through his eyes—a low‑budget community‑theater Rapture—and I giggled.

Malachi flinched as though someone had slapped him. He regrouped by snarling at the cop. "This is private property."

“We’re here on a welfare check, sir," the cop said. "We have information that a woman is being held here against her will.”

Then two more cop cars zoomed up the driveway, lights ablaze. Doors opened, disgorging more officers and a woman in a neat blue pantsuit whose jacket tried but failed to conceal the bulge of a holster.

"No one is being held against their will," Malachi spat. "Tell them, Sister Beholden."

"Paul Ethan Malkowitz?" the woman in the pantsuit asked. "Detective Ruiz, Ulster County Sheriff’s Office. I have a warrant for your arrest for falsifying business records in the first degree, in connection with fraudulent Family and Medical Leave certifications, in violation of New York Penal Law § 175.10. I’m going to need you to step over here and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Malachi's hands began to shake so violently, he dropped the dish towel. His voice was high and thin. "Falsifying business records? The system abandons people; I give them what they need to endure. That isn’t fraud, it’s ministry.”

“Save it for the arraignment,” Ruiz said. She produced a pair of cuffs from her belt. “Hands behind your back, Dr. Malkowitz.” Then she nodded at one of the officers. "Grab a blanket for her."

One of the cops popped a hood and snagged a comfort kit from the black-and-white's trunk. Neal went over and grabbed a blanket. In another moment, the blanket was around my shoulders, and Neal was hugging me.

Have I mentioned yet that Neal was the best hugger in the world?

Neal was the best hugger in the world.

"How did you know?" I asked.

“Divine revelation,” he said. “Burning bush, booming voice, God spoke. Very Old Testament.” His arms tightened around me. "No, actually, your hospital filed a Family and Medical Leave form signed by Malkowitz claiming you were under his psychiatric care. The name lit up a fraud investigation involving a client of mine who's gotten burned by fake disability forms. Discovery can be useful! The DA’s office looped me in when the warrant came through, and I begged and pleaded and otherwise humiliated myself to be in on the car ride."

"You could have called," I said.

"I did call," Neal said. "It went straight to voicemail. You were too busy joining a death‑by‑dish‑towel cult to pick up the phone."

"It wasn't a death cult," I snapped. "It was a poor life choices cult—"

We were bickering again. Good times! I wanted to cry.

###

Wiltwyck Hospital gave me an extra week off. With pay! They didn’t know (and I wasn’t going to tell them) I’d spent the ten days following Debbie Reynolds’ death at a DIY apocalypse spa specializing in artisanal malnutrition. Nurses were dropping like flies; if the administration didn’t at least pretend to be sympathetic, those nurses would quit, and then the hospital would be stuck shelling out for travelers at twice our salaries. So the hospital pretended that being overcome with grief was a legitimate justification for dereliction of duty. And who knows? Maybe that was true.

I spent that week at Neal's cabin in the Catskills. He gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the ladybugs in the spare bedroom, but not before I spent more than three hours trying to coax them into empty yogurt containers like I was running some kind of underground railroad for insects.

The weather stayed glorious. During the day, I lounged on Neal's front porch, reading "The Name of the Rose." When Neal was around, we hung out in the evenings, counting the fireflies and chatting animatedly about shoes and ships and sealing wax—and death. Neal wasn't always around, though. He had his work as a public defender plus the polycule to attend to—Flavia in the City, with whom he spent most weekends; Mimi, who'd just moved into an old motor lodge just outside Woodstock that some of her friends were refurbishing into the ultimate cannabis spa; Daria, who lived in California, and with whom he mostly communicated over FaceTime.

I could have written a monograph about the ecology of Neal's front porch. The daily Battle of the Birdfeeder, kamikaze bluejays versus goldfinch guerrillas. The breezes playing the windchimes. The way the shadow of the chestnut tree brought the temperature of its side of the porch down ten degrees.

And I perceived what I had never realized before, to wit: that much of Neal's conversation was about death. Had always been about death. He was fascinated by it.

"It is what it is," Neal told me. "You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes you don't, and by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they've changed the rules.

"But in the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets, and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your personal narrative can compare to those stories. So all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is."

"Jesus, you're making my head hurt," I complained. "You spend a lot of time thinking about this shit, about death."

"Oh, only about five hours a day," he said. "The rest of the time, I think about sex. And parking."

It was this conversation I recalled when I drove to Neal's house that afternoon with the chicken salad and roast beef sandwiches from Neal-Palooza to commune with the other sister wives and say goodbye to Daria.

How did people do this survival thing anyway?

It hit me suddenly with the stunning force of a full stop at a hundred miles an hour: Every single fucking one of the eight billion people on this planet has an inner life every bit as complicated as my own. All those auras competing for God's ambient sunlight, twisting upward, a veritable jungle floor of egos straining to flourish and be noticed. Debbie Reynolds. Sister Penury. Brother Malachi. Dr. Pellegrini. Flavia, Daria, Mimi. Neal—

I'm just another frightened mammal scurrying for cover when the dinosaurs' giant feet come crashing through the mud.

How am I going to protect myself?

"Group hug!" squealed Mimi, intercepting me on the way to my Prius. She threw herself on me, soft and plush and comforting. Daria laughed, and then she and Flavia ran down and enveloped me, too. A sudden breeze shook a shower of ballerina flowers from the chestnut tree onto us, and I forgot to notice how long we stood that way.

END PART I