The Stud Book (24 page)

Downstairs, almost noon, her mom was on the couch and on the phone. She was wearing her “sardine apron,” an apron she’d bought at a garage sale and used mostly to keep sardine oil off her clothes. Nyla ate a steady diet of sardines for her health. The house smelled like fish and olive oil. There was an empty tin with the lid peeled back on the coffee table.

She hung up the phone as Arena came down the stairs. Her hair was still in yesterday’s ponytail. Her mascara had traveled beneath her eyes. Nyla said, “Well, that went exactly nowhere.”

Arena knew without asking: Nyla’d been on the phone with Maya Angelou High. Instead she said, “Don’t you have to open the store?”

Nyla said, “I have to go down to your school.”

There was an awkward silence. Arena didn’t want to think about school.

“Maybe afterward, I could take you out for lunch,” Nyla said.

Her whole life, Arena had never spent so much time alone with her mom as in the months since Celeste moved out. Before, she’d gotten by with listening. How did anyone ever know what to say?

“Mom?” Her voice sounded uncertain. Nyla cocked her head and waited. Arena asked, “Can I show you something? It’s near your store.” Arena heard herself say it:
Near
. What did that mean? When did something near quit being near and move into far? What was in between?

The words echoed in her head: It’s near the store, we’re near the store. Uptown, downtown, neartown.

Her mom made as much sense as anything: Expelled + lunch date = good again. She could feel her mother’s brain compute the math. But Nyla didn’t understand destructive urges. Her mother was about preserving the planet and every ecosystem on it. Her mother was about trapping energy, preserving her children as babies in photos all over the house. Arena said, “I want to show you the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth.”

A
line of geese decorated the flat of the gray sky overhead. Each one found a place in the line. Nyla offered her silent blessing:
I love you, geese, stringing together your necklace of selves against the sky
. She wanted to blow them kisses. Her eyes teared up with love for the world, and for her place in that world, her daughters, and the baby in her stomach, and then she knew for sure she was pregnant. Who needs a test? Pregnancy was about being in love in a big way. She was glad to have her sunglasses on. Nyla was in love with the beginning of the life story, the human birth moment.

As she drove toward the temple, she cleared her throat and asked, “You sure it’s not the Temple
of
Everlasting Life on Earth?”

Arena was sure.

Temple Everlasting.

What was really everlasting was the string of cults that popped up in Portland, each one all bright ideas and tax evasion. When Nyla was Arena’s age there’d been the Holy Order of Mans, a mystical branch of Christians with a coffee shop called the Wheel of Fortune. They sold a cheap breakfast all day. In the old days, Nyla had done her high school homework there, where Dulcet could smoke.

The Hare Krishnas were always around town, setting up temples in old houses, offering free vegan curry dinners.

When she was twenty Nyla and a broke date ate gritty lentil soup from a stoneware bowl sitting on the splintered wood floor of the Krishna temple, in a cloud of incense.

The Scientologists brought Chick Corea to play piano outside city hall, in a protest concert.

Nyla didn’t even let herself think about the Love Family, or the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon, as they called themselves, with their evangelical orgies and “cum-unions.” There were grown kids in town now, Nyla’s age, born as “Jesus babies,” from straight-up religious prostitution.

The Rosicrucians were still around. They had a saying: Every potential convert was a “walking question mark.” When they found a seeker, they knew it.

And the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, with his followers, had been Portland’s biggest cult influx until they crashed and burned over a food scandal—intentionally lacing salmonella in a salad bar. What a disaster. It was still the only case of large-scale bioterrorism in the United States.

Nyla had been in Portland through all of it. She’d danced in the Rajneesh disco and seen their used pink clothes filter through the resale stores then clothe the homeless when the cult shut down.

“There it is!” Arena pointed, and tapped the car window.

The Temple Everlasting was in a tight strip of stores on a rundown street. It was another narrow storefront, like LifeCycles. Nyla could guess the rent. They got out and went to the door. It was locked. A white sandwich board inside leaned against the glass. Arena put her face to the window and cupped her hands. “It’s amazing.”

A sign taped to the window read
FOR I AM FASHIONING A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH, AND THE MEMORY OF THE FORMER THINGS WILL NOT ENTER THE MIND OR COME UP IN THE HEART.—GOD, OLD TESTAMENT
.

The Church of the Lousy Childhood. That’d attract a crowd.

In a bid to stay neutral, Nyla said, “So, you’re interested in religion.”

“It’s science, Mom.” Arena scooted along the window. “See Einstein, toward the back? His light is out.”

Nyla put her face to the glass, too.

With a flash of light inside the building, a naked man came through a door further back. His brown hair stuck up in a spiky imitation of Einstein’s style. His chest was more of the same. He scratched his balls and brushed his teeth.

Arena slapped the glass, then waved.

The man took the toothbrush from his mouth. He grabbed some kind of cloth to cover himself.

Nyla pulled her face away fast. She stepped back. “I’m pretty sure they’re closed.”

But Arena knocked again and waved, and soon enough the front door opened. Now the man was in a robe like something from another country, a priest’s robe, or a relic from a seventies wedding. It was floor-length white polyester with a rope of gold swirls along the neck and hem. The Church of Goodwill castoffs. He lifted the hem from the dusty floor, keeping his eyes on Arena. “Come in.”

Arena went first. Nyla followed, but the man in his dress dropped the door on Nyla like she wasn’t there.

The Church of Rude.

He followed at Arena’s heels. “You drink coffee?”

Arena said, “Of course.”

Cult food? Nyla said, “No, we’re fine.” She tried to catch Arena’s eye.

“I’d love a cup,” Arena said.

Pure death. Potentially. Nyla’s palms were sweaty. She followed them both past old TVs on white pedestals. In the back of the store, Arena made herself at home at a chrome dining table. Other mismatched chairs were claimed by books, clothes, dishes. The man ducked behind a wall. There was a crash and shuffle, the sound of pans and glass.

Arena said, “Isn’t this place cool?”

Cool as the Goodwill bins, that grimy last stop where they sold mixed junk by the pound—Nyla had burned out on that scene a long time ago.

What was up with her daughter? First Crystal Light, and now religion? Welcome to teenage-land.

The man came out from behind his wall with a dusty percolator. The cups he found were ringed with stains. “I’ve got coffee here
somewhere,” he said, and dug through a box of jumper cables and aerosols.

Arena said, “This is my mom.”

It was as though he noticed Nyla for the first time. He said, “Hey. Welcome.”

Nyla said her own name. She reached to shake his hand.

He said, “Mack.”

Arena laughed. “Really?”

Mack shrugged. “You expected something more Hindu? It’s short for Macheath. The ’rents were
Threepenny Opera
fans.”

He found a rusted can of Maxwell House. If he didn’t poison them on purpose, he’d do it by accident.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Don’t trust the salad bar. Don’t go to Applebee’s. Sometimes you can trust the lentil soup. Sometimes. This is what Nyla had learned from cults.

Mack said, “A name is a pointless point of separation, when on a cellular level, we’re all one, right?”

Arena beamed at him.

Mack said, “Your name and my name could be the same, right? The name of all life.”

Nyla’s jaw tightened. She wanted to physically push him away from Arena. Nyla took a careful look at Mack’s chiseled face. She said, “Didn’t you used to tend bar?” She’d seen him around.

He was closer to her age than to her daughter’s. Jesus Christ.

He said, “I’ve done all kinds of things.”

Nyla said, “I’m sure.”

Arena picked out a stained mug, like choosing a flower from a garden.

Nyla was determined: We are not drinking that coffee.

Mack said, “Now I’m doing what matters,” and gave her a wide smile, like one of the blessed.

To a lonely teenage girl, what was more seductive, sex or religion?

Arena flipped her hair out of her eyes. She said, “Show Mom your equipment.”

Mack gave a nervous blink.

Nyla said, “I don’t need to see your equipment.”

Arena said, “Can we use the camera?”

“Camera?” Nyla echoed, as her mom instincts kicked into higher gear.

Mack cleared his throat and made his voice deep. “We, here at the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth, are able to document aspects of energy fields. There’s a magnetic field produced by the emotions of the human heart.”

He stopped to find a carton of powdered nondairy creamer under a stack of clothes.

Old white powder that could be anything, really.

“The camera is phenomenal. It shows us we’re not as alone as we might otherwise feel,” Mack said.

Wasn’t loneliness every pornographer’s justification?

He said, “Let’s not set it up now, though.”

“What have you taken pictures of?” Nyla braced for the worst.

“Kindred spirits.”

He turned his religious beam toward Arena. Lust made visible. Yes, this was another cult out to poison babies. If it wasn’t salmonella in the salad bar, it was porn. Nyla said, “She’s in high school.” Her voice was low and steady.

He said, “Really? Why isn’t she there?”

Arena sucked in her breath, a habit she’d had since she was a baby, a flash of anxiety.

“The Temple is about honesty. When we choose to feel our feelings, and share those shared feelings, we come closest to our truest truth.”

Feeling feelings and truest truth? Was this guy kidding?

He lifted the percolator. He couldn’t move far from the wall; it was still plugged in. Arena got up to go to him. This was a man who wouldn’t go out of his way for her.

Nyla said, “We don’t need coffee.”

“Mom,” Arena said.

“Show me the camera.” This was a command. Nyla said it with the conviction learned through years of being a mother. There was an implied threat in her voice: or else. Or else what? She’d start counting? Or else they were in trouble? It didn’t matter. She wanted to see the setup, if only to tell police.

Mack shuffled in his slippers toward the front of the store to the black cloak that covered the machine. “It’s an old machine. Very special. It has to warm up.”

He gave it a pat through the cloth.

Arena followed him. She said, “Mom, everything here is substantiated theory.” She waved a hand at the pyramids, at Einstein and Tesla. “I love substantiated theory.”

“I’m not sure this qualifies.” Nyla almost whispered it.

The photography machine clicked and hummed. Mack said, “I don’t believe in binaries, like religion versus science. It’s about the unifying element: particle theory.” He found a bag of tortilla chips on the floor. “Chip?” he asked.

More food.

No sex, no food, no naked pictures; Nyla took the bag and rolled the top closed, then shoved it in her purse. Nobody would be eating those chips.

“It’s about energy,” Arena said. “You know what this means, right?”

Nyla saw in her daughter the Rosicrucian saying: Arena, with her teenage slouch and her T-shirt that made no sense—uptown is neartown?—she was that walking question mark. She was it.

“No, what does it mean?” Nyla tried to stay calm.

Arena blew stray hair away from her face. The hair settled back across her cheek. Nyla wanted to find a hair clip in her purse, something pink with flowers, something for a kid. She wanted to take Arena home. With one hand she smoothed the hair, and tucked it behind her daughter’s tender ear.

Arena brushed Nyla away like she was shooing off a mosquito. But she smiled, through chapped lips. She’d only just gotten her braces off the year before, but was one front tooth drifting?

She said, “It means Dad’s still with us. He’s not gone. He’s energy.”