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John taking time out of his work to find Jacob in the mountains where his older brother more and more often retreats means submitting to a high school physical fitness exam. There’s always something to do that involves lifting equipment for Eden’s Gate’s growing woodland outposts or hiking no less than twelve miles. One time, hiking seven miles of terrain not yet plowed by ATVs with a full complement of equipment, which John has unilaterally ruled out being invited along again for.
Today, half on foot and half by quad, they’re checklisting supplies in the camp sites scattered across their territory in the region of the forest where Jacob has begun raising a new breed of warriors, wolves to guard their flock. Making sure those supplies are secure. The area is more densely occupied with bears than men, and bears have clever ways of cleaning campsites out.
The stench of a pierced and mutilated body suspended and left to putrefy until a recovery team arrives to expose themselves to its advanced decay coats John’s sinus before he sees the gruesome display. He’s watched these effigies being made, the bag pulled over the living victim’s head to teach prospective Chosen to see no more than sinful meat. They ignore their prey’s cries while they skewer alive these vessels of wrath marked for destruction by the hands of butchers blessed by the potter.
He understands the necessity of soldiers prepared to rescue them from the onrush of the starving, desperate survivors of the Collapse who made neither preparations for this life nor peace with God, but it’s all a little gauche.
Bodies bleed and bodies break, they rot and return to the soil from which they came. Brute force is simple to apply. He has no compunctions about the repurposing of the body after death. But souls can only be saved through the beautiful unfolding of the mind seated within the meat. While there is pain, it demands a more restrained and delicate touch. Some rare, vast minds are unique enough to plunge him into ecstasy as he dissects not just their bodies but the cancer of their sins.
The way he gets nervy at the idea of Jacob picking up on his aesthetic opinions of his men’s work has nothing to do with not being as able to perform the same labors and everything to do with Jacob coming across fucking terrifying in the calm, good humored way he ends human lives, something his classically conditioned Chosen don’t reflect.
It’s hard to deal with how much Jacob’s changed, but not so hard John would stay away.
*****
They take turns driving the four-wheeler on and off the trails weaving paths between the Montana mountain hemlock on account of the fact Jacob wants to keep watch by binoculars for the hunters Eden’s Gate has been discouraging from the woods his allotted portion of the communion is mastering. John’s unpracticed eyes aren’t useful to the task, but sometimes the terrain they run up on requires Jacob to take over. He has a better sense of how steep or rugged a terrain the ATV can handle, too.
It’s like being attached to a yappy dog, but he doesn’t much mind. When John’s seated behind him, memories of carrying him on his back all over their hometown of Rome reappear from the traumatized blankness of his mind. John was a noisy, inquisitive kid. When Jacob wasn’t hauling him to save his stumpy legs from tiring out, he would crouch down next to him to explain this and that. He’d get on his level and let him pepper him with follow up after follow up.
He had been the only thing with a passing resemblance to a father that John had with their old man constantly soused. Joseph’s coping mechanism, which years of his own post-traumatic stress have led him to retrospectively identify as dissociation, left him poorly equipped to step into a parental role.
Joseph is the subject constantly coming up today. As they comb over the inventory of the current cache, John can’t shut up about how their brother’s busy itinerary means he’s only been alone with him three times — he won’t stop repeating it — this month. In part because he himself was out of town, in part because he came home to Hope County to a breakthrough in the east that’s placed Joseph in Faith’s company, though John drove over once for dinner.
John’s never liked losing Joseph’s attention, but it’s the way it’s tied up with the only possibility of a sexual outlet has him going cuckoo. Jacob doesn’t have much of an opinion on that, no judgement to pass, as he watches the anger build over the course of completing their checklist.
“He’s seen more of you than he has of me, lately.”
“Some months will be like that.”
Lurching suddenly into motion, John closes the distance to and begins kicking out at a tree’s long corpse. Five blows. Old bark cracks. Wood chips spit into the air.
His anger disappears as abruptly as it appeared. The tension slacks. He tosses Jacob a smile.
“You’re right. Some months will.”
The ragged shreds of the young man Jacob had been when he condemned himself to juvenile detention trying and failing to spare his brothers further abuse distantly tug at him to pull his little brother into an embrace, to restrain him until fraternal love soothes him, whether or not he resists.
His hollowed body stands unbudging.
“We each have our places. Yours is at the river. Don’t forget how much he trusts you with.”
He wonders if this thing is good for them.
They’ve packed the supplies back up and just secured them. John has taken two steps back and wiped his palms on his jeans when the torrent of words Jacob’s watched building inside him break their dam:
“He says they are all our brothers and sisters. I have tried to feel that the way he feels it. I don’t feel anything. Not even for Faith. I can’t feel for them what I feel for him. That isn’t a sin, is it? I cannot open up somebody’s chest and carve nothing out of them.” Jacob silently concurs with this much, the very reason his own body has been unmarked by their knives. “He fills me like the drugs couldn’t, like the pain couldn’t, like the women I’ve fucked don’t, the men I’ve fucked and who’ve fucked me don’t. I need him with me.”
“Sit down,” Jacob orders. John locks onto the fallen tree he just abused and he obeys. John has always been obedient. Jacob wonders if he’d thrive in the mountains under his command, if sweating it out as a soldier could preoccupy him. Going to bed exhausted from a twelve-hour patrol through underbrush, over scree and through talus is a hell of a sedative, even for a man as high strung as John.
The problem with abducting his brother into the rugged Whitetails is that they have no one else to fill the role he fills with the same mesmerizing talent and intensity with which he fills it. Yet for John to apply himself to his task means constantly encountering the razor edges of the world that mutilated his once innocent soul into the fractured, monstrous chameleon he now embodies. With each new cut, either from contact with that world or into sinful flesh, his self-restraint shreds further.
The Collapse and with it the obliteration of the diseased nation that wounds John cannot come soon enough. But the US empire whose sadistic, strangling hand Jacob tightened on those who would be free of the predations that sate its rapacious economic appetites remains teetering on the brink despite the growing tensions pulsing across its radio towers.
John taps his toe, already sick of sitting.
Joseph could do the better job of stitching John’s frayed mind back together, whatever strange avenues they’ve chosen to travel. Jacob would still be remiss to send him back to the communion in this state.
“Two hundred pushups,” Jacob says.
A kaleidoscope of emotions shifts John’s face from expression to expression, varieties of confusion, glimpses of indignation bordering on rage, various flavors of daunted and disbelieving.
Jacob nods toward the open, detritus-littered ground of the campsite.
His brother rises to his feet. He unbuttons his vest, smooths it out, and lays it folded in half upon the fallen tree. He unbuttons his shirt, taking his time folding and straightening it. He reaches up for his habitually pushed back glasses.
“I’d leave those there. Your hair gel won’t last.”
John looks fit to complain. To his credit, he holds his often-exercised tongue.
He gets down on the ground and situates himself with excellent form. It won’t last for the duration. He’ll begin to struggle somewhere after a hundred, begin to slip. Jacob will be here to correct him and prevent injury.
John’s show pony fitness focuses more on appearances than efficient muscle groups. He has built a hiker’s endurance, but not a soldier’s.
“You counting?”
“You lose count, you start over.”
His pupil looks sick at the idea, but nods. He gamely starts off in reps of twenty.
Physical exertion puts a swift end to John running his mouth.
At eighty-six, elbows start to bow too far. Jacob abruptly toes John’s wrist out of position. John buckles sideways to collapse in the soil to avoid the risk of strain.
“Bad form.”
“Already?” John mutters, without arguing it.
He rests a moment and then applies himself back to it. Jacob experiences approving emotions that don’t rise to the level of identification watching his only just rancorous brother so diligent to his command.
“You even told Joseph you need a quickie?”
“Do we talk about that?”
“If we can’t talk about it, then there’s something to hide. We don’t hide from each other.”
John barks a laugh.
“I can tell you all about it. Where we’ve been together, the positions.”
“If you want.”
It’s not the rise John wanted.
“No, I haven’t,” John says glumly. “I told you I flew into Butte to acquire real estate. The timing’s been all fucked up before that and after.”
It’s getting real hard for him to talk and talking is making talking harder and harder.
For a while the escalating difficulty of lifting his own body weight quiets John back down.
Collapsing again at a warning kick to his boot, John curses between gasps for breath.
“There’s no fucking finishing this with good form,” he mutters, slack and panting on the soil, dirt sticking to his sweaty skin.
“I’ll let you sleep right here so you can pick it back up when you’re fresh.”
His brother rolls onto his back, compulsion toward cleanliness forgotten. He gazes unfocused into the light filtering through the close bunched needles of the many-branched hemlocks toward the disappearing sun. With sweat beading into little rivers, running over his temples and off the sides of his torso in quickly disappearing waterfalls, exhausted, he doesn’t muster up the energy to look as sullen as he sounds.
“I want to sleep beside him tonight. Is that so much to ask? ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’”
Jacob demurs from pointing out the Bible was unlikely to be describing John’s specific arrangement.
“If you have the energy to complain, you’ve got the energy to get back in form.”
John groans; moans a little rolling over. He gets back up on his arms glaring at the forest floor, all stuck with debris, a leaf poking out of his hair.
Another twenty. The sounds eking out of him get real pathetic. The salt stings his eyes red. His glasses fall off, eventually. Jacob carefully cleans them and sets them with his clothes.
He falters onto his face, forehead pressed to the ground trying to bring that soil coolness into his body, fingers clawing into the dirt.
He breathes through it, voicing no complaint. He loathes being embarrassed more than any other indignity Jacob could visit on him.
However lily soft he looks there’s a killer under his groomed exterior. He’d be liable to kill any person who tried to put him through this besides Jacob – or Joseph, if Joseph had inclinations he doesn’t.
He supposes if he had inclinations that ran Joseph’s way, somebody as needy as his little brother might take him as a substitute.
Of the lengths he would go to for John, that one doesn’t seem especially realistic. Not that he’s interested in concepts like sin, but maintaining an erection is a different question before it even comes around to who he’s getting it up for. He lost his desire for other bodies as his mind deteriorated on the streets his government had left him to die on after spending every functioning part of him inflicting regimented violence.
But speaking in purely theoretical terms, he doubts with or without his dick in the equation he could actually feign interest to John’s satisfaction to start with.
John turns weakly onto his side, as sapped as Jacob wants him.
“What are you thinking about?”
“What positions you’d put me in,” Jacob says.
Eyes as shockingly blue as his own momentarily widen before falling shut as if John might lapse into the sleep Jacob suggested.
“This is the first time I’m not thinking about running around. I’d tried to sleep with… less people since Joseph found me back in Georgia. I see a beautiful body. I get hard. I can see they know, and they’re willing. I didn’t need more than that. That still happens, but I don’t want to act anymore. –sorry to disappoint you.”
Jacob rests assured John understands the lack of desire writ large on his burn scarred body.
“Twenty-seven more,” he says.
The smallest most pathetic sound he’s ever heard whinges from John. For an uncanny moment, splinters of history form a constellation of memory and love engulfs him. Not remembering the last time he felt an emotion, he savors it for the moments he can before it dissipates into the buoyant stillness of dissociation.
“Twenty-seven,” he repeats.
“Thank our fucking brother you didn’t hold me to remembering,” John grits through the strain.
“Thirty-fi—“
John interjects a wheezy “Shut it.”
He splits it between several reps, having taught himself to stop and fix his posture and stop when he begins to shake before he has to catch a boot.
He looks like shit. Tremors shudder through his aching arms when he lies down for the last time.
“I could make a soldier out of you.”
“I’d actually prefer you didn’t.”
Jacob takes a seat on the log and lets John recover in silence. In the fading light casting long shadows across the clearing he can see John considering the idea.
“Mostly, I don’t feel anything when I kill. Sometimes, I hate them. I don’t have to know them. I hate them for being alive. Did you ever feel that way? Do you?”
A memory rises of stopping John from throwing rocks at cats. There was also the one unfortunate box turtle. As much as he loved the child John was, he can lay out a path to why John’s capacity for human care isn’t on the level of others’.
“I never hated them. It became mechanized, imperative. The state leaned on me for their war crimes because I continued to act without impairment through the dissociation. Hate wasn’t part of it. Still isn’t. I’ve made myself back into a tool. This time, I chose it.”
His brother’s impaired by attention drifts off topic.
“I’m so fucking tired.” He scowls through sweat matted lashes. “And I’m filthy.”
“There’s a cataract not a mile from here you can wash at.”
“Carry me?”
There’s a world inaccessible to Jacob where he’d do exactly that.
Instead, he packs up John’s clothes and then claps his hand to John’s and hauls him up, escorting him to the ATV. He takes the terrain carefully, in case John falls asleep at his back.
They bivouac a ways up the rocks from the river. Jacob lapses between napping, keeping an ear out for animals, and studying the moonlight casting John in shadow and silver as he rests his head on Jacob’s folded jacket.
His brothers have entered a foreign country few people dare to. Jacob doesn't pretend that today he’s taught John anything about navigating it that will stick.
*****
Presently a repurposed fly shop is the center of Bliss distillation, surrounded by some of Eden Gate’s first planted fields. Her duties split between ministering and administration, this place is where Faith spends many of her days. Today, Joseph has joined her work.
Faith understands the basics of chemistry and plant breeding, but not to the extent she participates in making agronomic decisions. Her strength is in her self-taught understanding of pharmaceuticals, both their processing and administration.
She has led her chemists in mapping the process of extracting tropane alkaloids from the harvests of their bliss fields to easily procurable commercial beer brewing equipment. Joseph has rewarded her with the currency of his company.
Only liquid Bliss can saturate bodies at the controlled rate necessary for liberating angels, more rarely inducing complications which cannot be recovered from – like the rapid, unstoppable breakdown of muscle tissue or circulatory collapse – than high doses of powder.
Though many will not live through the Great Collapse, those souls who will not be with them in Eden need not abdicate all stake in humanity’s future.
In lower doses, the Bliss remains essential for granting clarity to the afflicted who may yet be rescued.
The more impactful the nightshade itself and the more efficient their productive capacity, the larger part the liberatory effects of Bliss play in their operations. What was the communion’s farmland at the time Faith entered the convent is being given over acre by acre to the production of Bliss even as the number of mouths to feed multiplies.
It won’t be an issue as long as their expansion into Holland Valley proceeds smoothly. Joseph has had this time to lend his personal encouragement and support to the reorganization of Bliss production exactly because John’s recent efforts in concluding the current stage of that endeavor have been an unmitigated success.
He has a sense from John’s shortness on the phone and three nights ago after dinner that he would have liked him to make more time to welcome him home from Butte. It seems all the time they’ve spent together, and spent together, in the weeks preceding the pursuit of their separate obligations has accrued him no credit whatsoever with his impulsive lover.
Curious to even think it. He has given more time to physical congress in the past handful of months than he had in the past thirteen years summed.
He hasn’t yet found a means to convey to John how dearly he misses his lips when distance separates them, no matter how often he finds himself dwelling on him in quiet moments. John’s moods resist all reassurance but proximity.
Yet he has reason to hope he can work a change in his brother. Factoring sex into the difficult equation of their relationship has balanced it beyond moments of carnal immediacy. Confidence in their closeness transforms John into a relaxed and enthusiastic conversation partner who sheds all his neurotic preoccupations when he makes his interests Joseph’s. Mostly, right now, he speaks of airplanes. He has a pilot’s license, and flies his own reconnaissance, but that pales in comparison to the prospect of raising his own hanger and clearing his own airstrip on the land coming under his ownership. Joseph can’t follow half of it, but he likes to listen and to watch John gesticulate with tattooed hands.
Standing with Faith reviewing their present limited distillation capacity, he sees his sister pick up a folded piece of paper from the steel counter, running the crease through her pinched fingers to sharpen it further.
“Another letter from Tracey?”
She passes him the paper.
“She hasn’t come any closer to repenting. I encouraged her to return to John and confess. It’s mostly invective.”
He unfolds the college rule paper to be met by Tracey’s familiar hand. He startles imperceptibly while silently dismissing certain claims that John’s more erratic behavior comes from what amounts to disparaging descriptions of his genitals.
They’ve been in Hope County for years, many times unclothed at lakes and rivers, diving into the waters of their adopted home, summer swimmers enjoying God’s creation, not thinking of the coming dissolution of the present world order. His knowledge of John’s body has not changed in kind but in nature.
He wonders how long John viewed him through the filter of desire before he became desperate enough to bleed over it. He hasn’t felt the need to ask. He hopes if he does ask, they will have been intimate long enough for John not to feel he’s being accused of past impropriety.
“Is she that interesting?” Faith says with a light and grounding touch upon his arm, gently leading him back to the present where he’s standing holding the letter and staring into the middle distance.
He’s caught in a pause.
Nervous energy prickles along his body hair, more urgent than the last time words he chose not to speak rose to his throat. He does not feel shame. He feels apprehension building into fear. He does not want to commit the acts he must if she divides herself from him.
He has to speak his piece before he is unable.
“I’ve taken John as a partner. I’ve hesitated to tell you, on account of your father. Yet for you to find out except from me would be unacceptable. I believe this thing is good, but don’t wish to impose upon your peace.”
Faith withdraws from him without moving, shuttering to become stillness itself.
Her words cross a great distance.
“Would you stop if he asked?”
“Yes.”
She whispers, as fragile as a child:
“Then I think it’s probably different.”
He would embrace her. He senses he should not.
Moments of standing together in silence pass. She’s spurred into motion, she searches the room for a place to sit, the whites of her eyes exposed, moving like the blind. She collapses the last inches into the chair as if her legs all at once lost the strength to hold her. He makes himself gentle and realizes with a lurch of his stomach that though his charge of her may at times call for discipline in this moment standing over her, too, is incorrect.
He comes to her to take one knee before her. She has folded her hands in her lap. She doesn’t seem to see him. His lungs are filled with the scent of divine flowers clinging to her skin and clothes.
“Speak your mind.”
However far she’s wandered, whatever nightmare of him she might believe she’s speaking to, she obeys:
“I know I’m not perfect. I know sometimes you have to correct me. But I still don’t want to be touched that way.”
“I promised you won’t be. I didn’t approach him. It was the opposite. Believe in me, Faith.”
Her vulnerable hazel eyes come into focus. He has not seen her in this way in years. Since she discovered the Path, she no longer gets lost on the paths of her childhood. The longer she’s worked with the flowers, the greater the peace she’s been delivered into.
An empty pantomime of a smile turns up the corners of her lips.
“I had all the privileges the world denied you. A big house. Jewelry. Birthday parties at restaurants booked months in advance. I had a horse. I was a princess in a beautiful prison. And I cried, and suffered. I begged, until I didn’t have to anymore, because I made the pain go away. John is just like me; he’s seen the castle prisons where children are emptied to make wives and executives. I know his was even more grand than mine, if he has so much money, now.”
So I worry remains unspoken. Joseph hears her as clearly as if she gave the words voice.
“I wish he could understand you care for him.”
“He can’t. It’s alright, though, because I understand him.”
*****
Even as the Father knelt at her feet, it had been as if she was in a distant place, alone. A little at a time she comes back into her body, recognizing that while he can be a hard man he is not her father. She has been safe from the one predation she most fears in this place, with an important duty to perform at the precipice of the end of the world.
She dwells in reflection upon her youngest brother and upon the life she chose from which she can no longer depart.
John has made her laugh flirting in a circumscribed way, shifting his colors to become sweetly boyish. She’s sure this must be the kind of person she’d have loved, should she have ever met them. People see her how they expect to see her. John becomes who people want to see.
Sometimes she imagines Tracey just as sweet as the fiction John conjures.
Had they really been such good friends, for Tracey to keep writing and writing her? Would they have been something else if they hadn’t been so very young and kissed only when they were high? Tracey doesn’t understand why she won’t step away from Eden’s Gate even for a night. She never knew what demons haunt her mind. Nobody knows, except the Father.
She tried to run once, her head filled with fearful visions of used up women falling through the air. Of heat and acid sulphate dissolving Lana atom by atom until she disappeared into the Angel’s Grave, though she never set eyes upon her. Of Selena, crushed from the impact, her blood spreading over feet of concrete as she gazed down upon her from on high. She tried to run to the young woman who in her crudeness and her insults still holds her in her heart after years of separation, though the letters grow further between.
She understands now why it was so cruel of her to spurn the trust she herself had asked for and had been given. But more than that, she now knows without the Father’s love the pathetic girl who first slouched to Eden’s Gate waits to claw her back into the abyss. Obedience is no price at all for freedom.
She wouldn’t fight if he chose to hold her down. She loves him.
She’d be unhappy that he lied.
The Father touches the outside of her knee with two fingertips, drawing her to him just as she called him back from the letter.
“I want to know what you’re thinking. I won’t be vexed, whatever you say”
Confidence unfolds its petals inside her. When he says he won’t be mad, he never is — at least, if she disappoints him at these times he demands no penance. Remembering that, she loses her fear he might someday touch her in ways she doesn’t want. He’s promised. The single thing he needs from her body is for her to contain his Faith, and she is.
“I think the reason we don’t look to our families for intimate love is because the love of family is brutal. No one knows how to hurt us like our family. Nobody else knows all the hidden ways to cause us pain.” She leans forward and near to him to whisper conspiratorially. “We know that.” As she straightens a true smile spreads across her lips, her delight in his company returning to her. “Have I kept your name the longest because I showed you how much I love you? All your children love you. I still have your name because you let me hurt you.”
He takes her hand in silence and lingers fondly, holding it without pressing his lips to her knuckles as he might on another day. He lets her go.
Tracey is her family, too, because they haven’t stopped writing although each letter inflicts new wounds.
John could be. He doesn’t know how to let her into his heart because he fears pain.
He hadn’t taken the idea that she would be a sister to him seriously, at first. Everyone except the Father underestimates her. He thought she would die like she killed Selena, like Joseph killed Lana when she broke faith with him. But John had known not to try and touch her like he might the other women. She had never been sure if Joseph threatened him. Reconsidering their relationship now learning John sometimes initiates their choices, she thinks it must be different than that.
She only isn’t speaking of her eldest brother, Jacob, who has no path open to his heart at all but has earned her trust in his infinite reliability. If she was to disappear by his hand, even that would be simple. He would tell her to give herself over to him, and she would know better than to flee. He’s already tracked and apprehended her without malice before. She thinks, briefly, of the ride back to the convent in the passenger’s seat of his truck, watching flat and empty Montana fields passing by, and his secular inquiry if she was familiar with omertà that led her to an understanding that’s kept her safe, since. Their own small secret.
“I’m alright, now.”
She is. Really is.
“I’d like to have dinner with John on Sunday,” she says. “He never spends time with me unless you tell him.”
She’s possessed by the urge to see him though she’s certain they won’t discuss anything at all.
“He’ll eat with you,” the Father says.
Whatever sentiment he lacks, John never resists her company. It’s as simple as saying Eat with your sister — she’s seen it before, with and without the Father joining them.
Of course she would worry, she realizes. John doesn’t know how to say no. Not to anything. She would have no trouble winding him around her finger if she chose that for him. But Joseph, Joseph didn’t sound like he was deceiving her that John chose this for himself. She doesn’t understand enough about what she’s just learned to decide if he’s deceiving himself.
Her legs are still weak as she musters herself to rise and return to their review. The Father stands, letting her rest a hand upon his forearm until she’s steady. They return to the counter, where a sample of one of Dr. Feeny’s new strains, his gift to her, blooms white.
She lifts the blossom of one of her flowers. The angel’s trumpet. How loud it’s growing.
The Father, now standing behind her, rests his hands on her shoulders.
“Look at the good you are doing with the knowledge you stole from your wicked father taking the flowers of God’s garden and gifting salvation to those who would never otherwise escape the torture of their sin.”
She knows the history. That the communion first employed scopolamine to relieve those in suffering so acute that love was no remedy until they could find their conviction. The first Faith and her brothers and sisters received scopolamine from glass ampoules. The need soon outstripped their ability to source the drug. Angel’s trumpet reproduces itself.
She didn’t know much about gardening, but she learned so much about compounding from watching her father and in her private experimentation since it was easy to take over the direction of processing the Brugmansia shrubs when Selena disappeared from the picture.
“Maybe someday even Tracey can be free. She’s so unhappy. Full of rage. She could live in joy if she’d stop being so selfish.”
Her angel.
He gives her shoulders a reassuring squeeze with hands so much stronger than hers.
“Will you need something to help you rest?”
She doesn’t like the idea of being left to her own lonely mind. She doesn’t like the idea of losing hours, either.
“Maybe I should keep working.”
She makes peace with the fact she won’t have her own way before she is even denied.
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving you knowing in my absence your memories may bring you distress.”
“Of course, Father.”
She knows how to say ‘no’. She’s simply smart enough not to.