The Open Curtain (11 page)

H
e did not remember how he got home after the grave digging; he remembered nothing other than Lael’s darkened body coming toward him. He awoke in his bed, his hands sore, dirt under his fingernails. It worried him.

Later still, he could not remember how he had reached a point where he had begun to see some value—strictly theoretical, of course—in blood sacrifice. He was not sure whether he had convinced himself or whether Lael had convinced him. There was no sorting it out afterwards, though he knew this too tied back to the desecration of his father’s grave. He supposed that once that taboo had collapsed between him and his half-brother, nothing else seemed insurmountable. It was as if they were capable of anything. He understood for the first time how Lael must have felt driving the scooter, knowing it would run out of gas but rejoicing precisely in that. It was perhaps Lael’s voice, dim and quiet as they sat on a large iron-rich slab up the canyon, speaking slowly of the Lafferty brothers who had sacrificed one of their wives and her child, of Ervil LeBaron, who at God’s command had two dozen people (including his own daughter) killed, of a man in Salt Lake City who had slit his child’s throat and then hung the child from the laundry line by its feet to let the blood drain out.

“Morbid,” said Rudd.

“Sure,” said Lael. “But that doesn’t make the act any less powerful. You do something like that and it takes you completely outside the world.”

“Seems to me digging up a coffin does the same.”

Lael shrugged. “It’s not a bad start.”

Rudd did not respond, but kept listening as Lael kept talking. There were people, Lael claimed, who had sinned so greatly it was a mercy to kill them. Killing them did them a favor.

“I’m just explaining the logic,” said Lael, stretching indifferently.

Were there sins for which you could not be forgiven?
Rudd wondered, late at night, alone. His thinking had become confused when he had met Lael, and he was not certain how to straighten it out again.

“Before the age of eight, what are you?” asked Lael.

“What?”

“Mormons don’t get baptized until eight,” said Lael. He stood up and brushed his pants off, then straddled the scooter. “Before eight you’re not accountable for your actions. You can’t sin. Why else would they wait to baptize you?”

“So?” said Rudd, taking his place behind him.

“So, it’s better to die before you’re eight. The biggest favor you can do for people is to kill them young.”

“You’re saying we should slaughter everybody under eight?”

“Theoretically speaking,” Lael said. “Only in theory.”

There were dreams in which Lael consumed him, chewing off pieces of his limbs. Rudd felt simultaneously disturbed and gratified. He daydreamed of the Prophet bringing about the Millennium and the return of Christ Jesus by ordering all children under the age of eight slaughtered. It seemed sound in the abstract, as long as he could constantly envision a line of children streaming to heaven, but it started to break down when he started picturing the ax chunking through the back of each child’s skull.

“No,” said Lael, when Rudd mentioned the ax. “Knives. Slit throats, like a sacrifice.” But that didn’t seem to help much.

The traditional method, Rudd learned from one of his father’s books, an old spiralbound typescript called
The Confessions of John D. Lee,
was to dig the grave and then slit the throat and hold the man up a moment so that, dying, he fell forward and into the grave already dampened by his own blood. This was described as baptizing the grave.

He became distracted. His grades slipped. Mrs. Madison had him stay after class, scolded him sternly about responsibility. Mr. Burnside told him that if things did not quickly improve, his mother would be receiving a telephone call. He found himself standing in the principal’s office with no memory of how he had gotten there or what he was there for. Ever since the grave digging, there were gaps like that, odd moments when his body seemed to run on its own and he couldn’t remember where he had been or what he had done. It all went back to the night in the graveyard, something that had happened or that he had done. He
wanted to ask Lael about it but couldn’t admit to another person, not even Lael, what was happening.

There were times, during the evening, when he became conscious and saw his mother regarding him strangely, her penciled eyebrows arched, waiting as if expecting something from him or waiting for the answer to a question. Strange minute drawings of disembodied human hands began to appear in the margins of his schoolbooks, and a series of lines that he recognized as the sacred marks on Mormon undergarments: a v and a right angle next to each other, a straight horizontal line centered beneath them, then below and slightly to the right another straight horizontal line. He did not know what they meant—their significance was never discussed with those too young to go to the temple. In his pockets and in the folds of his clothing were scraps of paper with words scribbled on them in a script that he couldn’t read. In his drawer there appeared a burnished rudimentary brass pipe hardly longer than his thumb. There was an aching in his head almost all the time, his life was slipping away from him and what was left was blurred on the edges and fading, and the image of the coffin opening was always with him: the brief flash of his father’s collapsing face.

He would go see someone, he would go talk to someone, he told himself. A counselor at school perhaps. Only he didn’t go. What would he say? How would he explain it? It wasn’t rational. There was his bishop at church, church wasn’t rational: it appealed to other systems, other logics. Even though he hadn’t been to church in months, he could go to his bishop, tell him the problem. Would he believe him?

Sometimes I am not in my body.

What do you mean?

I don’t know.

Where do you go?

I don’t know that either.

No, he realized, it was not a conversation it would be wise to have with a bishop. He thought about going to another faith, Catholicism perhaps, and confessing, but at least with his own Church he knew when to keep something hidden. In another religion, there would be no context. He could get himself into serious trouble.

Walking to school, walking home, he began to feel he should tell someone on the way, a stranger, someone he might never see again. He would employ some sort of disarming smile, sidle suavely close, take the stranger’s arm and begin to talk as they walked, explain both to the
stranger and himself his problem, letting go of the arm before he had given too much away, moving along to someone else.

Sometimes I am not in my body,
he heard.

Just what I need,
he thought,
to have that phrase stuck in my head.

He woke in the middle of the night to find a blurred blue ink stamp on the back of his hand reading, “FDA approved Grade A Beef.” He hadn’t been near a grocery store or butcher’s shop that he could remember.

“What’s that?” his mother asked at breakfast.

“This?” he said, staring at the stamp on his hand. “I don’t know. Some kind of joke.”

“What makes it funny?”

“It’s not the kind of joke that’s meant to be funny.”

The whole evening was lost.
Sometimes I am not in my body.
There was an element of panic to it all. He racked his brain to try to retrieve memories that seemed not to exist.

One minute he was riding on the scooter, down to Lael’s house, the next moment, as if no time had passed, Lael was in front of him and they were halfway up the canyon, Lael’s hair whipping back against his forehead. He would see a psychiatrist, he told himself, but did not, could not: had no money for it, and couldn’t ask his mother. The last thing he needed was someone to confirm the seriousness of his condition.
So what?
he thought. So what? This probably happened to everybody, he was O.K., not crazy, fine, he would be O.K. So what? Everybody was walking around, furtive, with the same dilemma. Everyone was blacking out and thinking they were the only one.

There was no pattern or consistency to the blackouts. The blank spaces came sometimes several times a day for several days in a row, at other times not at all for as long as a week. Each time he grew concerned enough to bring himself to do something about them, they would temporarily stop.

“What happened to you?” Lael asked when Rudd arrived to pick him up.

“What do you mean?”

Lael tugged him down to one of the scooters’ round mirrors. He saw his face, pale and flaccid, his eyes couched in dark circles.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” Rudd said.

And then they got on, Lael driving. He could feel himself sliding out of consciousness, a strange disequilibrium. It was too late to do anything about it but close his eyes. When he opened them, he was sitting cross-legged on
the grass of a park he didn’t recognize, on a treeless hill. Lael was holding a small pipe to his mouth, and Rudd could smell the sweet thick smoke. Lael extended the pipe toward him and began to cough, smoke flooding out of his nostrils.

“No thanks,” said Rudd. “I don’t smoke.”

Lael looked at him oddly, head cocked to one side. “You’ve been smoking it all afternoon.”

And only then, suddenly, could he feel the numbness in his face, his dry mouth, a faint scratchiness in his throat. Confused, he stood, slightly woozy, then sat down again.

“It wasn’t me,” he claimed.

Lael watched him, cupping the pipe in one hand, smiling. There was a wrinkled and creased Ziploc bag at his feet and out of it Lael packed the pipe, pushing the marijuana tightly against the screen with the tip of his thumb. He held it out to Rudd, a lighter in his other hand.

“Then who was it?” he asked.

“It wasn’t me,” said Rudd again, dazed, but taking the pipe just the same. He took the lighter, flicked it on with his thumb, surprised he could manage so easily. He did not know what to do next but his hands knew and he watched them hold the lighter near the bowl of the pipe, the flame angling and then, when he sucked, striking downward, the green shreds glowing red and writhing, then running pale. He felt the smoke fill his lungs. He began to cough.

“No more excuses, brother,” said Lael. “That was you.”

What you do is you dig the grave first and then you lead the sacrifice to it and call upon it to confess and give itself over to God. You slit its throat from one side to the other so that the blood spills out and into the pit and baptizes the grave. Then the sacrifice is allowed to fall into the pit and is buried just as it falls, without being straightened or arranged. It has been baptized in its own blood along with the grave, and it will arise from the grave in the Millennium renewed.

But what, he wondered, if the victim is killed when he is not in his body? Then the wrong one is killed and arises refreshed. And where is the victim left then?

There were the notes in his pockets. He took them out to read them but still could not read the script. He had in his hands not notes at all, he saw, but a small blunt pipe and a lemon-yellow disposable lighter.

“This isn’t just pot,” he said. “There’s something more in this.” His voice sounded distant to him, more subdued somehow. Lael was looking at him, unblinking, from the other side, reaching for the pipe.

He dug his hands into his pockets again and felt paper there and pulled out some notes. They stayed notes this time. He unfolded them one by one, smoothing them flat on his thigh. He could not make them out, the hand too obscure and tortured. He kept turning them over and looking at them.

“What are those?” asked Lael.

He did not know how to respond. Finally he said, “Notes.”

He expected Lael to ask what notes. Instead, Lael hesitated, nodded. The notes were still in Rudd’s hands. He could feel them and he was looking down at them again, trying to remember what they were. He tried to read them but was quickly distracted.
But what,
he wondered,
if the victim is killed when he is not in his body? Where does the soul go then? There
should be a handbook on blood sacrifice, he thought, something to keep you from making mistakes. If you did it right, not in error, it was an act of mercy.
Where are these thoughts from?
Rudd wondered.
Who is crammed in here with me?
Within him someone was speaking, leading him further and further out. And there was, outside of him, his half-brother.

Lael gestured to him with the stubby stem of the pipe. Rudd stood up and stumbled about, then sat down again.

“What is it?” Lael asked, as if from a distance.

“I don’t know,” Rudd said. “Something’s happening to me.” He stopped and looked at Lael, expecting him to say something, but Lael said nothing. It was not just the drug, he felt, but something about Lael. He could feel his skull pressing against his skin. He felt desperate and missing, the gaps of the previous weeks threatening to unveil themselves.
Who is crammed in here with me?

Lael was before him and he felt something in his hands, realized he was still holding the wrinkled and crumpled notes, and when he brought them closer to his face it was as if he had now a sense of the words though he couldn’t exactly read them. And then, at the end of one, a single line, he picked up the letter “W” and next to it an “H,” a “Y,” all capitalized. William Hooper Young, he thought, the man’s initials, but maybe it wasn’t Young, maybe it was simply “why?”
W. H. Y.
—
why?
He had never made that connection before. And then, as he looked further, the letters themselves struck him as dubious, a function of the drug, and he was unsure of what he had actually seen.