The Porcupine of Truth Read online

  I jump up and run out of the room. I swing open the church door and sprint to Aisha’s car. This was a big mistake. Aisha will come out soon, and we’ll say we’re sorry but we can’t stay. I tried and I failed.

  Minutes go by. A lot of them. I check my cell phone. No messages. Why would I have messages? I never do. I turn and look out into the distance, this mountain range with just a hint of snow on the top, framed by a juicy blue sky that makes me thirsty. Across the street there’s a bar, and I get this crazy idea again. Maybe just one drink? Maybe they’d serve me?

  I stare at the bar until my eyes blur and there are two of them, two bars, side-by-side, drifting in and out of each other as I focus and unfocus my eyes. This is how it starts, probably. This is how I become my destiny. My dad. My granddad. A drunk. I make myself turn away.

  And then I turn back toward it. I can do this and no one will know. I’ll sit in a bar in Bumfuck, Wyoming, and drink a beer like an adult who is free to do whatever the hell he wants, because my dad is dying, and my mother doesn’t care, and my best friend is better than I am. Why not?

  I walk to the bar, and again I’m two people. One is saying, What are you doing, Carson? You know better than this. The other is saying, One, shut the fuck up. I’m living my life.

  Inside, the bar is dark and somber. There’s a guy at the far end, nursing a beer. His grizzled, pruned-up face makes him look maybe a hundred and fifty, give or take ten years. A bartender in overalls sits on a stool behind the bar, reading a newspaper.

  He looks up as I approach. He doesn’t smile; he doesn’t frown. He is not the kind of person who rubs your shoulders when they find out your dad is dying.

  “Can I have a beer?” I mumble.

  “Got ID?” he barks.

  “C’mon, man,” I say.

  He gives me the finger. “Out,” he says.

  There’s something really depressing about being given the finger and turned away at the world’s bleakest bar. Like, I’m not even good enough to be a miserable patron there. That’s how it feels as I walk back toward the church.

  The meditation is still not over. I sit on the hood of the car. The minutes pass slowly, murderously slowly, and I need Aisha now. I need to make fun of this bullshit. More minutes pass. Then more. An unbearable number of minutes. I count to 336 by fourteens — up and then back down again. It doesn’t help.

  By the time Aisha comes traipsing out of the meditation area, I want to tear her apart.

  “Was that a lot of fun for you?” I ask, seething in my gut.

  She shrugs. “It was interesting, actually.”

  I laugh. Right. Sitting in silence in a church classroom, listening to God. Real interesting.

  She stretches her arms up. “I liked it. Sorry if you didn’t. It’s okay. It’s not for everyone.”

  I laugh harder. “Oh my God. I know you’re not going to get all holier than thou on me, because I will seriously …”

  She raises her left eyebrow. “Seriously what?”

  I don’t know why Aisha makes me so pissed sometimes. “Come on, Aisha. You’re always making fun of the Jesus.”

  “What does meditating have to do with the Jesus?”

  “Are you going crazy? Is everyone going crazy? Religion is bullshit. God doesn’t exist. We believe in the Porcupine of Truth.”

  “I agree,” she says. “Religion’s the worst. This isn’t religion, Carson.”

  “Um. Meditating means ‘listening to God.’ God is religion. You’re out of your mind.”

  “You don’t have to be religious to meditate, Carson. I’m not even sure you need to believe in God. I don’t think I do.”

  I put my hands over my head. I don’t meditate for the same reason I don’t pray to God. Similarly, I don’t have long, one-sided phone conversations with a dial tone. It’s a waste of time and energy and anyone being honest with themselves knows that.

  “That is the dumbest thing I ever heard,” I say. “So you’re communicating with something that you know doesn’t exist?”

  “I can’t explain it, but it’s not like that at all,” she says.

  I’m disappointed in Aisha. I thought she was this freethinker who came up with her own answers, and now I see that I misjudged her.

  “Okay then. If you say so,” I say.

  As we drive the Neon back to the Leffs’ place, Thomas and Laurelei ask Aisha about her experience, and I feel more alone than ever.

  I flash on an image of young me, at three, sitting on the front stoop of our Billings home. Minutes before Mom and I left.

  Some things you remember, and some you forget. Of the things you remember, you have to wonder what’s real and what’s translated into a memory from a story you heard. Like in this memory, my dad is wearing Bermuda shorts. I don’t think I knew what Bermuda shorts were back then, so how would I know that? Except I remember it.

  It’s early that last morning, and I’m sitting on the stoop outside the front door in my yellow pajamas. Mom is cradling a green duffel bag to her torso. Icy tears stream down her face like rain on a windshield, except there are no wipers to sweep them away. Mom is melting, and moms are not supposed to melt. Dad is I don’t know where, but wearing Bermuda shorts. I know something irreversibly terrible is happening. The earth is shifting below my feet, and there’s a rumbling earthquake like when the subway comes into the Seventy-Ninth Street station, shaking the entire platform. It rattles my entire body, rearranging my insides, changing my chemistry. But that part of the memory can’t belong in Billings at all, because I’d never been on a subway then, so that means it’s not quite true.

  I am holding a red die. Not sure why I’m holding it, or where it came from, but I remember the feeling of its dull corners pressing against my tiny fingers. I remember thinking that if I hold on to the die a bit longer, a bit harder, an all-loving God will make this earthquake stop, will stop the flood of icy eye water that is turning my powerful mom into a puddle. God like the one Grandma Phyllis believes in. The one she says prayers to.

  Dad walks out in his red Bermuda shorts, no shirt, smoking a cigarette. It’s like watching a movie now, because I am not there. Mom and Dad, on a screen, yelling at each other, way too loud for how close they are standing. Mom with tears streaming down, turning my stomach inside out. I remember watching and thinking, No. Let’s stop. Like I’m asking God. Like I’m asking my parents. I don’t know if I say this or I think this. I have no idea.

  And the answer to my words or prayers is that my mom grabs my left arm and pulls. Her hand wets my arm, makes it feel slippery. She says, “C’mon, honey,” and I am dragged away. I scream. I scream to my dad. I scream to the universe. Stop this from happening. The world is ending! The world is ending! Stop this!

  I drop the die. I never get to see how it lands, if it stays on the stoop or falls to the ground. And no one stops the world from ending.

  So no, I’m not gonna just sit here and be like, God is listening.

  Not so much, in my experience.

  YOU HAVE NOT lived until you’ve sat in a rickety old chair outside a trailer at night in north-central Wyoming. This is just crazy beautiful, with so many stars glimmering above me that I feel like if I believed in anything more than the Porcupine of Truth, I’d be praying to it right about now, saying, Thank you Jebus, you amazing son of a bitch. It’s just un-fucking-believably gorgeous.

  I’m half depressed as shit, half in awe of the world. I’m sitting like a fool in a trailer park and I don’t know why. I guess I’m chasing a mystery about my dad, who doesn’t give a crap about me, and his dad, who doesn’t know I’m alive. But my dad is dying. Dying. It scares me for my life. How random is it all gonna be? How do you meet a Laurelei, or a straight Aisha? And even if you do, how do you not let them annoy the crap out of you, or disappoint you to death? What’s the point of it all?

  The door creaks open and Laurelei ambles out, wrapped in a puffy pink blanket. Even though I’m wearing baggy gray sweatpants Thomas lent me and it’s July,
it is chilly, and my teeth are chattering. She sees me sitting there uncovered, and she goes back inside and comes back out with the blue-and-white quilt that I left on my couch. I wrap it around myself, and she grabs a second lawn chair and drags it over to me. The sound cuts into the otherwise silent Wyoming night.

  “Do you know that your grandfather did the same thing you’re doing?”

  “Huh,” I say.

  I hear her smile in her voice. “He couldn’t sleep. Grabbed himself a blanket and sat in a chair in just about the same spot you’re sitting in. Came and looked at the stars, and he cried like a baby.”

  I smile, though it’s hard for me to imagine my grandfather crying like a baby. “That’s cool. Sad, but cool.”

  “He was a good man.”

  I don’t know if I believe her, but it’s nice for her to say. We sit quietly and look at the sky.

  “Goddamn,” I say, and Laurelei laughs.

  “Isn’t it perfect?”

  “Yeah. Sorry about the ‘goddamn’ thing. I know you probably aren’t big on using God’s name in vain or whatever.”

  She flicks me lightly across the back of the head. When I look at her, she says, “God fuck damn shit.”

  I laugh, and she laughs.

  “Don’t idealize me,” she says. “I’m a human fool. We all are, and it took me a long time to become the happy person I am today. A long time. Okay?”

  I look back at the stars, and so does she.

  “So do you believe in God?” I ask.

  “I do.”

  “But you’re not Christian.”

  She sits up abruptly. “Surely you’re aware that not everyone who believes in God is a Christian, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” I say, though in fact I have temporarily forgotten that, like, a majority of the world isn’t Christian. How did I forget? Thomas and Laurelei meditate. They’re probably Buddhists. How stupid am I?

  “So you stopped believing in Christ and started believing in what?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” she says. “I would say that I’m more spiritual than religious at this point.”

  “What does that even mean?” I stare upward at the gleaming stars.

  “To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality.”

  I laugh. “It’s all cheap stuff made in China?”

  “Exactly.” She flicks me in the back of the head again. “Exactly what I meant. I mean it’s prepackaged. Lowest common denominator. People just have to follow the preset motions and rituals and rules. They don’t have to think about how the words reconcile with their own hearts. Their own experience.”

  “Huh,” I say, considering that. “And what do you believe in now?”

  She raises her hands to the sky, then puts them behind her head. “Everything.”

  I snort. “Weak sauce.”

  She laughs. “You don’t believe.”

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I just have trouble believing in things that don’t exist.”

  “What doesn’t exist? The stars? The sky?”

  “God,” I say. “God is a concept used by people who want to feel better about the pointlessness of being alive. You live, you die. The end. Sorry, but that’s what’s real.”

  “For you,” she says, as if to add it to the end of my sentence.

  “Hey, call it what you want. That’s what I know to be true.”

  “So can I teach you something I’ve learned?”

  I look over at Laurelei, who is beautiful in a mom way, who I would be okay spending the rest of my life listening to, even if she’s batshit crazy. “Go for it. Knock yourself out.”

  “I’ve learned that the answer to every question about God is ‘Yes.’ ”

  “What if it isn’t a yes or no question?”

  “So judgmental for such an otherwise delightful young man. I’m saying that whatever it is that a person believes about God is totally, completely, irrevocably true — but only if you add two words.”

  “Check, please?”

  That one earns me another playful smack, and then she stands up and says, “I think I’ll head back to sleep. You?”

  I nod and stand up too. “So you didn’t tell me what the two words are,” I say.

  She opens the screen door and holds it open for me to walk through, and then she follows me. I see Aisha’s sleeping cheek illuminated by the starlight.

  “For me,” she whispers, and she disappears into the darkness of the trailer.

  I WAKE UP to loud clanking above me, like a pinball game played by someone who is seriously bad at it. The pings come in quick succession, and then nothing for a minute. Then more pings. I look over to the other couch. Aisha is gone and her blanket is nicely folded. Light pours into the trailer from the semiopen blinds above me. I must have overslept.

  I find my shoes, check my breath, decide it’s not terrible, run my hand through my hair, and step outside in the sweatpants I slept in. Then I scream.

  A man is crouched on the ground. With a rifle. Pointed at me. I cover my face with my hands and duck.

  “Oh hey!”

  It’s Thomas’s voice. I peek through my fingers as he slowly hoists himself to his feet and puts the rifle down. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “No worries,” I say, as if it’s a typical Carson morning to wake up in a trailer, go outside, and almost get shot.

  “Sorry for the noise. Damn pigeons. Drive me crazy.”

  I walk out to where he is and look up. There on the pitched roof of the trailer are three pigeons, milling around.

  “Isn’t there like a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ rule or something?” I ask.

  He glances at me sideways and laughs. “For pigeons? Don’t think so. Wait ’til one day you have these dirty things pooping all over your front yard. You’ll want to shoot them too.”

  “Hey, I already kind of want to shoot them,” I say, and he grins. “Is it legal?”

  “BB gun,” he says.

  “Oh.” That doesn’t really answer my question, but I don’t care.

  He cocks the rifle, lays it on his right shoulder, and squints one eye closed. I’ve never seen a BB gun before. I’ve actually never seen any gun up close before. We’re not big recreational shooters, we who take the 2 train to school.

  He shoots. The gun emits a little pop, followed by a clank when the BB hits the metal roof … about fifteen feet away from the trio of birds, who don’t look remotely alarmed.

  “Where is everyone?” I ask.

  “The girls went to meditate,” he says, and I feel glad that Aisha found something she likes, even if it’s something stupid. Then I think about the “for me” thing that Laurelei said, and I let it go.

  Thomas aims again and shoots. Oh for two.

  “Aisha is so pretty,” he says.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  We share a look, and it’s like he knows that I dig her. He reloads. “I heard you and Laurelei talked about God last night.”

  “We spoke about God, and we concluded that God is dead.”

  The ends of his thick mustache dance when he laughs. “You’re a tough nut to crack.”

  “When you’re trying to sell me on God, yeah.” I put my hand out. “Can I try?”

  He hesitates for maybe just a nanosecond, and then he hands me the rifle.

  “Nobody’s trying to sell you anything. You believe what you believe. That’s all.”

  “If you say so,” I say.

  “So what exactly does this God I’m trying to sell you look like? What does he do?”

  I fiddle with the rifle, unsure of what to do. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Thomas takes the rifle from me and shows me how to hold it. He places the butt of the rifle against his right shoulder and puts his right hand on the trigger. His left hand holds the rifle steady. Then he tilts his head down to look down the barrel.

  “You see how there are two sights? This little slot near your face and the bead at the end of the barrel? Line ’em up.”

&n
bsp; He hands the rifle to me, and because I’m a lefty, I reverse what he’s shown me.

  “You’re a natural,” he says. “Wanna shoot?”

  “I guess.” I concentrate on aiming at the birds, unsure if I’ll be able to pull the trigger. I’ve never killed anything before.

  “So what does this God look like?” he asks again.

  I put the rifle down and look at Thomas, and I think, You. Which is weird. God doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t look like anyone. But if he did, I realize, to me he would look and act like Thomas. He’d be authoritative and manly, not silly and prone to emotional outbursts like my dad. He’d be kind and serene, or whatever you get from meditating (aside from bored).

  But that’s the kind of thing you really can’t say to a person without having them question your sanity — that he looks like God. So I say something else instead.

  “He’s a big white dude, and he has a white beard and he wears flowing white gowns, but not in a gay way. He has thousands of switches and levers in front of him and they’re labeled, like, ‘Middle East Violence’ and ‘Bali Earthquake.’ Some of them he just flicks on and then laughs, a real deep laugh. Others he can adjust, such as the weather — someone’s gotta control the weather. What with global warming and whatnot, that’s almost a full-time job.”

  Thomas laughs really hard. “That’s quite a busy schedule for God. You’d think he’d have some helpers, like Santa’s elves.”

  “He does,” I say. “They are called God’s leprechauns.”

  He laughs some more. “God’s leprechauns. I like it.”

  “I try,” I say. I pick up the rifle and force a frown, so that I look the way a guy holding a rifle should look. I aim at the roof, and then, before I can think about it too much, I squeeze.

  The pop jolts my head. Dust flies about five feet from where the pigeons are. Better than Thomas, but still a miss.

  “No pigeons were killed as a result of this shooting demonstration,” I say. He grins. I put the gun down and add, “Anyway, I’m cool that y’all are spiritual or whatever, but just for the record, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t exist.”