Strait is the Way

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I wish I had stopped my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that rest stop in western PA.

I will stop my mom from talking to the hardcore punk band at that rest stop in western PA.

It’s not a question of how but of when. Or rather, the question of when is one of how and the question of how is one of when.

The fundamental problem—and while it was a problem, it didn’t become a problem until it became The Problem—is that my mother has a habit of collecting strays. That’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a magnetic personality and wanting to help the broken people you attract with that personality. It’s maybe not how you want to go about getting a husband, or, later in life, a series of wives. And, of course, it didn’t make for the most amazing environment for children to grow up in.

To be clear: we were never in any unsafe circumstances. It’s more that, well, our daily life was never stable. So many people drifting in and out of it. So many demands on our mother’s love and attention and emotional and physical capacities.

As amazing as her ability to stretch her energy to meet demands was, it was also, if we’re being honest, a chaotic energy, and the expenditure of it generated a bit more friction, a bit more heat than was ideal for children.

She got stuff done. She helped a lot of people out. She was an angel, a powerhouse, a superwoman.

But it all meant we lived life more often at a rolling boil than a gentle simmer. And when life is lived at a rolling boil, it doesn’t take much for things to boil over. The heat turned up a fraction. One more stray added to the pot.

You get the point.

It’s ironic, really. All that instability leading to this current stasis.

Or maybe it’s not ironic at all. Maybe that’s just how things go when it comes to the operation of eternal intelligences in relation to mortal experience: a desire for experience melds with a craving for security that agglomerates into social, cultural, and technological situations that slow progress (and individual progression) to a crawl.

***

Our co-op board has a lot of (mostly) polite arguments over what our role should and could be in breaking humanity out of the current stasis.

There are those who want us to be the dog nipping at the heels or the electric charge of the prod. There are those who still think we can be the pacemaker or even the beating heart.

My job is to remind them that as self-sufficient as we try to be, we’re still essentially parasitic on the leviathans and the best thing, perhaps the only thing, we can do is maintain our uneasy truce with them and remain beneath their gaze as much as possible.

My spouse thinks I shouldn’t reign the board members in quite so much. Not be so “pragmatic and realpolitik and depressing” about everything.

That’s when I’m tempted to bring up my covert activities for the Church, which wouldn’t be possible if our co-op became a target for greater oversight, but I know that will only add emotional pain to the near-constant physical pain they experience.

They think it should be them out there taking all the risks rather than me.

But sometimes God has a different plan.

Or, perhaps, sometimes God shifts his plans when the randomness of mortality makes the initial plan unfeasible.

We were driving back to Iowa from a spontaneous road trip to visit the Sacred Grove. For once, it was just me, my mom, and my two younger siblings.

We stopped at a rest stop in Pennsylvania to fill our water bottles and eat lunch. Lunch was warm carrot sticks (someone forgot to put them in the cooler), store-bought hummus (someone had bought the chocolate dessert flavor because it looked fun), slices of turkey pepperoni (someone had been craving pepperoni), and a big bag of cherries (someone had stopped to purchase them from a roadside stand and then spent an hour chatting up the orchard owners, which is why we were having lunch at three in the afternoon).

We were spitting the cherry pits into a paper cup. Sometimes they went in. Sometimes we missed. We decided to make a contest out of it. Things got loud and competitive, and so at first none of us noticed the group of five young, clean-cut men slink out of a beat-up minivan and sit at the picnic table next to ours. And when I say clean cut, I only mean their haircuts. The rest was exactly what you’d expect from a hardcore punk band, which is what they were, although none of them looked to be a day over sixteen: black jeans, ripped up white or black T-shirts, a smattering of tattoos, a scattering of piercings, and faces that glowered as if personally affronted by the afternoon sun.

***

I don’t know how spiritual gifts are for you.

How you know you have them. When and how you are able to use them and to what purpose.

I’m struck, though, by the language of “to some it is given to.” Spiritual gifts are selective. Individual. And while I know that the scriptures say that it’s the Holy Spirit that gives us the gifts, it’s not presented as a thing that’s the byproduct of agency on an individual level. Spiritual gifts aren’t earned. Sure, you have to be worthy to use them, but, like, it’s something that just happens to you. Like, it’s less like a specific parent giving a gift to a specific child and more like one of those holiday gift exchanges where you show up with a wrapped gift, and it’s totally random which one you end up leaving with at the end of the evening.

I don’t think you can steal spiritual gifts from others like you can gifts at a white elephant party, though.

Although I’m sure if it were possible, a certain leviathan would have figured out how to do it. Because that’s the way they think: if something exists here in this mortal life, it is a resource to be exploited for their grand plan. It’s one more thing to be deployed to bring about their millennialist vision. Oh sure, no man knows the time of His coming and all that, but we’re going to have the technologies and systems in place so that when He shows up, all He has to do is say, good job, everybody, let’s just keep going down the track you’ve already laid down.

***

My patriarchal blessing said nothing about my spiritual gifts. Only that I had them and was to use them to help build the kingdom (oddly enough, it didn’t specify which kingdom; I suppose it was implied, but which level was being implied? For me, this isn’t a loophole that justifies my plan because there’s no need for a loophole. It’s obvious what needs to be done to anyone with any sort of sense of what the gospel is truly about).

And it certainly said nothing about my gifts that fall into the “many gifts given” category.

I became aware of the gift the day after I turned fifty-seven. It was March. Which meant it was much hotter than normal in some places and much colder than normal in other places, which is to say it was the new normal.

It’s been the new normal for many years now.

I was walking home after church. The air was thick and hazy, the color of Postum or Pero (or the roasted barley and chicory drink available to you and/or found in your memory) with a lot of cream in it.

I should’ve changed the filter on my mask that morning, but I hadn’t realized it was going to be that bad. I had hitched a ride to that week’s meeting place with a group of hedgesaints led by a Seventy who was based out of La Crosse. Elder Fluger and I disagreed on a lot of things but agreed on the main things, and that’s all that mattered.

But they were heading up to Duluth after the quorum meeting, and I needed to get back to my mom (who was not to be trusted with the co-op network I was in charge of maintaining but could be counted on having the energy to cause trouble on it) and my spouse (who was to be trusted with the network but couldn’t be counted on to have the energy to keep mom from causing trouble).

I was soaking in sweat, walking down the median while chains of EV pods whined by, praying my mom wouldn’t cause too much trouble and that somehow the particulates would nourish and strengthen my lungs instead of weakening them further, and just as I said Amen the air went from thick to syrupy, and I was back lying in the bed of a truck, Elder Fluger beside me, both of us hidden under piles of biomass (I believe it was switchgrass), discussing if we should try to reopen the North Branch branch.

I want to be precise about this, about the nature of this spiritual gift and how it manifested: I wasn’t back as if it were happening for the first time. Nor was I back as if I were remembering/replaying the conversation in some vivid, virtual way. Rather, I was back then with the current me as a sort of overlay or underlay on the then me. As a sort of guiding spirit or guardian angel to myself. My past self.

And as we lay there, sweating through our thin dress shirts, breathing heavily but trying to not breathe too heavily through our oxygen masks, the quiet panic of confinement droning in our minds—or at least in my mind—current me knew that I would be able to speak for then me when Elder Fluger asked what I thought he should do about the Sister Whitmore situation and give a different answer that would possibly change what happened to her.

But as the conversation turned from North Branch to Sister Whitmore, I grew afraid, or current me grew afraid, and I let then me say what I said then.

And then I was back on the median, several yards closer to home than I had previously been, and half a foot away from stepping into the EV lane.

***

Joseph Smith said that time is a circle.

No, that’s wrong. Joseph Smith said that the immortal part of individuals—the thing that is us and has always been us and always will be us—is one eternal round.

The implications of that statement aren’t particularly clear.

For the most part, Mormons seems to believe rather strongly that time, or at least causality, flows one way. Eternal progression doesn’t exist otherwise. And we are (or were/think we still are) all about progression.

As we progress, and in order to progress, we change states: from intelligences to spirit children, from spirits to mortal beings, from mortal beings to resurrected, immortal beings, from resurrected, immortal beings to perfect beings, from perfect beings to gods who increase forever.

One can end up stuck in a certain state. But ideally, you continue to progress. And in order to progress, your actions matter. And in order for your actions to matter, there must be some sort of cause and effect in place. To sin is to err is to dam progression. To repent is to grow and learn and restart progression.

Now, I know things get complicated when you start speaking at the philosophical level on how time really works, and especially how God experiences time—does he/they even exist inside of time? Or do they live outside of time? And if the latter, how are they able to affect the time in which we exist?

And some things do transcend time. The atonement of Jesus Christ, for example, is able to time travel in that its effects are retroactive back to the beginning of mortal/human history (and perhaps even stretch beyond this planet’s mortal/human history out into the vast expanse of the universe).

It’s complicated. Our knowledge is imperfect.

But, generally, we believe in the flow of time—that there is a present, future, and past, and that the flow is one way from the present into the future, the past trailing behind, impacting, of course, the present, but only as traces and traumas and consequences.

And that’s all fine, except . . .

What if the flow isn’t one way?

***

Kat and Ollie were arguing about something stupid. My mom grabbed the bag of cherries, said “Sort those two out” to me, walked over to the band, and offered them the cherries.

I missed the first part of the conversation because I was dealing with my two younger siblings, but I was able to convince Kat to explain the plot of The Princess Bride in her telling secrets voice to Ollie, which she had seen and he had not, just as I heard my mom ask, “What does straight edge mean?”

***

When I say I was in a weakened state after what happened to me while walking down the median, do you know what I mean? I’m not talking about something quite to the extent of Joseph Smith Jr. fainting while attempting to cross a fence the day after being visited by the angel Moroni three times in one night.

But something akin to that.

I had not been physically weakened all that much. It was more that I was shot through with spirit, my mind and body so thrilled to the experience I had just had they were vibrating in an exultant state such that neither could quite focus on the physical world, which was demanding that I keep my steps to the center of the median and keep moving forward at a steady pace.

I’m not saying it was like being drunk. I don’t know how it feels to be drunk.

I am saying that I did find myself listing at times as I struggled towards the outer boundary of our co-op.

My mom was quite taken with the notion of the straight-edge lifestyle. This was by no means her first encounter with rock musicians, and in her experience, they tended to drink heavily. They weren’t allowed to drink or use drugs in our house. But she’d let them sleep their drunkenness off if they showed up already blitzed.

“Better here than out in the streets or in a jail cell,” she told me when I complained about having to clean up puke while she cooked piles of flapjacks and bacon to serve for breakfast the next morning.

I want to stress that my mom does have a certain gift of discernment, and none of the people she collected were ever violent. As far as I can recall, none of them posed any danger to me and my siblings.

“Why do you do this?” she asked.

“Do what?” replied the guitarist.

“Be straight edge.”

The band members all shrugged and looked away from her. The drummer, who had been intently studying the ground during the whole conversation, almost seemed to shrink.

I was just going to holler to leave them alone when the lead singer—Johnny, as we were to find out—spoke up: “Thank you for asking this question, Ma’am.” He fiddled with one of the safety pins on his black denim vest. “The best way I can explain it is to ask you a question: do you believe people should be free?”

“I believe freedom is important.”

“So do we. And that’s why we don’t drink and do drugs. We want to be free. We don’t want to be dependent on anybody else or any substance—or any system, for that matter. Being sober keeps us free.”

“I like that,” my mom said. And she had that glow of excitement and brimming love about her when she was in stray-collecting mode. “I also don’t partake of any of that stuff. It’s called the Word of Wisdom. It tells us if we avoid harmful substances, we’ll be healthy. We’ll have the energy we need.”

“Righteous,” said the bass player.

“Hopefully so,” said my mom. “But I have another question for you boys: what do you do with your freedom?”

***

I’m not saying I fully understand the idea of free agency let alone am able to explain it to the satisfaction of someone with a grounding in philosophy or quantum physics. But I had a realization while I was walking down the median: let’s assume I had decided to act during the episode I had just experienced. Would that have violated anyone’s agency?

Does changing the past destroy agency?

Let’s set aside, for a moment, concepts like foreordination, foreknowledge, and God’s omniscience and focus instead on the individual daughter or son of God and their specific context in mortality.

Does current me acting in the past destroy agency?

The first thing to account for is that I’m still me in the past. I can’t do anything that I would not have done. I can only say and do the things I am capable of doing. I can only act as the agent that I am.

So I can say things to other people. But discourse—attempted persuasion—does not infringe on the agency of others.

Yes, I have knowledge of the future. But what is prophecy if not the knowledge of the future? Those who hear my words can choose to believe me or not because even though I know what has happened, they do not, and they don’t know that I know. It’s still a theoretical future state for them.

The second thing to account for is that I can’t take dramatic physical actions.

I might be able to convince my past self to do something slightly different. Spit the cherry pit with a bit more force. But if I try to get my then body to do something very different from what my then me is doing, I get thrown back to the present. This limits how I’m able to directly affect the past.

But let’s say I could find a moment where I could nudge my physical self in just such a way that it’d lead to a much more actively physical change to the past.

Let’s even say, for example, I were to somehow be able to harm someone in the past. Does that destroy agency? It harms mine, of course, in the sense that it puts me in thrall to the forces of evil, and I’m at risk of being bound by them if I do not repent.

Have I removed the agency of the person who I have harmed?

Not completely. I have removed certain opportunities for experience that they could have otherwise had. I have inflicted trauma on them. But I have not removed their agency. They still are able to choose what they think, say, and do in relation to the new state they find themselves in.

If it were not so, then almost everything we do in mortality and everything that happens to us would destroy agency.

Victims do not lack agency.

This is something I firmly believe. This doesn’t mean that we blame victims, shame victims, or pity victims in a condescending way. We should not. We should afford them the dignity that all children of God—all creations of God—deserve. And we should seek to do what we reasonably can to limit harm.

But we are subject in mortality to the negative actions of others, whether intentional or not, and we are subject to the randomness of complex systems, both human systems and natural systems, and, as we all know all too well, we are subject to the effects (positive and negative) of the intertwining of the two.

For example, there are conditions, there are experiences, even a series of choices which concatenate together such that someone contracts cancer.

But no one uses their agency to actively choose to have cancer.

***

When I finally made it home, I discovered that my mother had let a group of radtrads of the premillennialist variety leech onto the co-op’s network.

“Mom,” I said. “We’ve talked about this. Please don’t let outsiders use the co-op’s resources.”

She shrugged. “They are nice people,” she said.

“I’m sure they are. But if they want to use the network, they should make a formal request to the co-op.”

“They didn’t have time. They need to find the site of New Pepuza.”

“I’m sure they do. But if they want to use the co-op’s resources, they need to join the co-op, even if it’s just for a few days. We’ve talked about this.”

My mother’s eyes were cast down, but I knew it to be a sign of calculation rather than remorse.

“How did you come into contact with this group? And how were you able to sneak them into the network?”

“Everybody knows me,” she said, now looking me straight in the eyes. “What am I supposed to do? Turn them away?”

I faltered in reply.

It was no use responding. Perhaps, if they had the energy for it, my spouse could find a way to secure the network in a way that would make it more difficult for my mom to subvert.

***

The members of Indignation Machines, for that is what the hardcore punk band my mom talked to that day in western PA were called, seemed stunned by the question.

So my mom asked them again: “No, seriously. I’m curious. What do you do with your freedom?”

Dylan, the bass player, muttered, “Whatever we want to. That’s the whole point.”

But before my mom could respond, Johnny spoke up. “With all due respect, Ma’am—”

“—Leslie. Call me Leslie.”

“With all due respect, Leslie, we’re more concerned right now with spreading the message of anarchy and freedom and straight edge than anything else. So I guess you could say we’re using our freedom to help more people become free.”

“I like that,” my mom said in a tone of voice I knew all too well.

Because that’s the thing with my mom collecting strays: it was not willy-nilly. She had a certain discernment. Potential collectees needed to pass a certain litmus test known only to my mother (and, perhaps, the Holy Ghost).

Clearly, the members of Indignation Machines had passed that test. Or, at least, Johnny had.

***

In the days the followed, I sorted out the mess with the radtrads—they agreed to donate copies of all electronic texts in their possession to the co-op’s library as well as provide us with a certain number of teraflops of computing power from their devices per megabit of our bandwidth they used in return for access to selected, non-proprietary, legacy GIS/GPS data in our databases. Thus, they leeched on us while we zombied them and it all worked out in the way things do these days where social parasitism has been replaced by a wary, often short-term symbiosis because free individuals and groups are so afraid of being swallowed up by the corporate behemoths that they have no choice but to cooperate with each other.

All of which made me think of Sister Whitmore.

It was the sad cliché of our times: her son grew ill and needed expensive medications. Sister Whitmore saw no choice but to indenture herself and any future selves derived from digital copies of her current self to one of the leviathans in exchange for the medications her son needed.

Elder Fluger warned her not to. I tried to find alternatives for her son. But it was one of those situations where his illness was unique enough that what we could source wouldn’t be able to remedy the underlying condition.

What was she supposed to do?

She signed the contract.

Tragically, her son passed away anyway nine months later. Our legal counsel reviewed the contract, but there was nothing we could do from a legal standpoint. She’d signed it of her own free will. The leviathan (I will not say which one out of an abundance of caution and, indeed, if it’s not already obvious, all names in this account have been changed to protect privacy and maintain safety) had not misrepresented the terms of the contract and had carried out those terms to the letter of the law.

Of course, they hadn’t needed to misrepresent anything. They knew she had no other choice.

Sister Whitmore dropped off our prayer lists a year or so ago, relegated to the “and bless all those in bondage or other straitened and constrained circumstances” category.

We lost track of her entirely a few months ago when the leviathan relocated her to their enclave in Grand Rapids.

I found myself praying for her at random moments during the week.

One evening while assembling sandwiches for the night shift of the co-op’s onsite cyberdefense team, I closed my eyes for a moment to pray and found myself in a mildewing condo where Elder Fluger was pleading with Sister Whitmore to have faith and give us more time while her son languished quietly on a futon, his limbs mummied with bandages to protect the open sores his body spawned like angry mouths to feed.

“But your freedom,” Elder Fluger was saying.

Sister Whitmore held up her weary hands. “What good is my freedom without my son?” she said.

And how were we to respond to that?

Except this time instead of sitting in defeated silence, my current self spoke through my then self: “I’m sorry to put it in these stark terms, Sister Whitmore. But even with the drugs, your son may still not be with us for long in this life. I know you’d sacrifice everything for him. But this sacrifice may not be worth—”

Sister Whitmore’s eyes fixed me with a warning glare.

“I’m not saying it isn’t worth it to sacrifice for your son, but I’m not sure the results of your sacrifice will do him any good, and they may do you a world of harm.”

“But what other hope do I have?”

“There is always hope in Christ,” Elder Fluger said.

“There may be,” Sister Whitmore said. “But not for me and my son. Not in this world.”

***

Indignation Machines lasted as a going concern for another five years, albeit with several inevitable lineup changes along the way (I may have referred to them as Resentment Machines at one point; such a clever teenager I was).

They stayed with us every time they came through the Twin Cities—we moved to Robbinsdale from Cedar Rapids shortly after the Sacred Grove trip; it was because of a guy my mom was briefly engaged to, but part of me wonders if it was really so she could put herself near a regular tour stop for the band. Toward the end of their run, only Johnny would accompany my mom back to our duplex after the show was over.

For the rest of the band, the temptations of minor fame were too tempting.

Johnny was a straight edge hardliner, though.

Going out to a club or going home with someone you fancied after playing a show was fine so long as you were on time the next morning ready to head back out on the road. What was not fine was any whiff of substance use, especially alcohol. Thus all the lineup changes over those five years.

As admirable as this may seem, it should have been the clue, the keystone for what was to come.

After the band finally broke up for good, Johnny contemplated a solo career or starting a new band under a new moniker. He sought out my mom for advice. Stayed with us for a couple of weeks. I was busy with homework and putting the younger siblings to bed and packing their school lunches, so I only heard snippets of the late evening conversations he had with my mom. Nothing in those snippets set off any alarm bells. Most of it was about gospel topics or anarchism or about what Johnny should do next with his life.

Of course, those should have been the alarm bells.

One day I returned home from school to find Johnny gone. After a couple of days, I asked my mom about him. She shrugged and said something about Johnny “needing to find his own way to God.”

I didn’t hear from—or of—him until a few years later when I was in a Deseret Book on a temple trip to Nauvoo, and I saw his face copied-and-pasted across scores of book covers. The memoir was called From Hardcore Punk to Die-Hard Disciple: A Memoir.

I bought it, of course. My mom was mentioned but not referred to by name. Most of the non–hardcore band chapters took place after his stay with us: a whirlwind conversion and baptism, finishing his undergraduate studies at BYU in just three years, and getting accepted to Harvard Business School but turning that down to join a biotech start-up.

The memoir should have been another red flag, but I didn’t read the later chapters. I was only interested in the punk years.

Of course, I don’t know that, barring the gift of prophecy, anyone could have extrapolated what was to come from the memoir alone.

I don’t know if my mom influenced any of Indignation Machines’ lyrics, but whether she did or not, it’s all so obvious when listening to their songs now:

the machines won’t rise / if you’re the machine

Or:

let their legacies of rage / roll off you like you’re a blank page / be the calm in the storm / be your own final boss / take your final form

Or:

all their ideologies burn out / when you burn so bright / not with your own might / but all of us circling around each other / dancing alone but together / united but apart

I have always craved routine.

It should be obvious why that is.

Routine, security, predictability—these are all things I thought I wanted.

I think they’re what most people want.

For all their talk about change and dynamic systems and disruption, it’s also what the tech people wanted deep down. What is immortality, after all, but the ultimate security against the depredations of time on a mortal body?

The problem is that immortality—true immortality—is only the Lord’s to grant.

Other Mormons disagree with me on that.

They feel like it was given to them to bring about immortality—and even a sort of godhoodness—through technology.

What they brought about instead was stasis. They’re so much in control, they’ve compounded everything in one.

***

Johnny turned out to be very adept at business. The novelty of his straight-edge punk background and his ability to communicate in a charismatic way combined with a keen business acumen and the credibility and connections his conversion to the Church provided led him to immediate business success, which he was then able to leverage into high-profile leadership roles in both the Church and industry/culture.

He became the leading voice in the movement to accelerate R&D spending as the only way to combat the effects of climate change. His motto was: “Human ingenuity got us into this mess; it’s also the only hope we have to get us out of it.”

Never mind that the advancements made rarely ever trickled down to the people who were suffering most. Never mind that there was a certain honed, cutting-edge coldness to his transhumanism.

And then when things got bad—really bad—he was in a position to offer security and a clear vision to a large portion of the Church, which then bolstered the talent pool his company had to work with, and as the leviathans evolved out of the chaos of those early years, his was the most well-positioned organization to seize as much power and as many resources (and as many converts) as possible. After all, who wouldn’t want to extend their mortal probation to 120, 130, 140 years as well as out into virtual spaces? So much more time to progress! So much more experience to experience! The Millennium is upon us! Christ will only come again when we have cleansed the earth and made it and its peoples ready for Him!

Mormon exceptionalism strikes again.

***

At first, I traveled back to western PA just to see if I could.

Then it became a bit of an obsession.

The feeling of spewing cherry stones from my mouth a protest, a prophecy.

However, current me didn’t try to act through then me. For one, I wasn’t sure what I should do. For another, I wasn’t sure if I should do it.

I guess this comes down to if you think there is a certain inevitability to the flow of mortal existence.

If the people (almost) always ignore the prophets. If the pride cycle keeps turning like the wheel of fortune. If the rise always has the seeds of the fall in it. If Christ is always nailed to the cross. If not Joseph Smith then some other foreordained figure to lead the Restoration.

If my mom hasn’t changed even now, so many years later, then why even try?

***

It’s less a matter of fate or anything like that and more that when spirits enter mortality we tend to travel down the well-grooved paths, and it takes a lot to jolt us out of the ruts.

We all said we wanted agency back in the Council in Heaven. We all feel the desire for agency once we get here. But none of us seem to really understand it.

In fact, it seems to me like the people most concerned with ideas of freedom and agency tend to be the most controlling, whether by their actions or lack of actions, it is the same. They project some force field, some aura, some power that the rest of us get caught in. They mistake such projection as agency, where they define anything that they perceive as affronting that projection as a violation of agency; whereas, the truth is that agency can only be fully understood and practiced within a community of varied, multitudinous, ever-evolving interdependent relationships.

All of which is to say: my mom really doesn’t like living in a co-op.

***

I once had a conversation with Elder Fluger about why he didn’t stay with the main body of the Saints and flee south or join up with Johnny—excuse me: Elder Robinson.

“I suppose,” he said in that raspy voice of his. “I believe in specific places and people more than abstract ideas and grandiose plans.”

***

As I experience my gift, time travel is only possible in relation to places and people. I can’t seem to travel back to when I was reading a book or hearing a talk or a lecture or sitting alone on the train staring out the window, lost in thought.

It’s as if my soul needs a certain grounding, a certain awareness of the physical world around me and the people in it to find a place in time to drift back to.

I only saw Johnny once after he became Elder/CEO Robinson.

He showed up at the clinic while my mom was receiving a second round of chemo.

“Let me take her for a while. All this is doing is killing her a bit slower than the cancer is,” he said. “I must warn you. It’s a highly experimental treatment. But all indications are that it’s very effective and quite safe. I’d use it on my own mother if she were still alive.”

I wanted to say no, but I also knew it was my mom’s decision.

And, of course, my mom trusted Johnny, so her choice was inevitable.

Whatever the treatment was worked very well. Most days she has more energy than I do.

What I can’t figure out, though, is why she came back to live with me. I’m sure she was invited to stay with him. She could have lived a lifestyle she had always yearned for. Johnny—Elder Robinson—had succeeded where the succession of boyfriends/husbands and then girlfriends/wives, who always seemed to be one stroke of luck, one breakthrough, one more infusion of cash away from hitting it big with their schemes and dreams, never did.

***

One of Elder Fluger’s sources passed on that Sister Whitmore is working ten-hour days with only one day off in ten.

She spends that day off hooked into a simulation that features a representation of her son.

There’s no way it’s a good one.

It’s not like they scanned his brain before he died, and I doubt she’d earned enough computing credits and he’d been healthy enough in the nine months he survived after she signed the contract to record enough virtual interactions for even a semi-sophisticated AI re-creation.

But I guess it’s good enough for her.

***

The sunshine warming my neck and the back of my ears. The faint sweetness of the chocolate clashing with the nuttiness of the hummus and the vegetal sweetness of the carrots. My teeth biting down to split the flesh of the cherry without scraping against the pit. The smell of boys who’ve been cooped up in a van for too long. My mother’s sandalwood rose perfume. The sound of birds I can’t identify. The low roar from the freeway. The whine of a motorcycle leaving the rest area. Ollie’s sticky hands tugging at my bare arms as he asks for more cherries. My mother’s voice saying over and over again: “What do you do with your freedom?”

***

I don’t need this life to be perfect, and I think the Heavens would say Amen to my gift if I tried to use it for that.

I don’t know that I even need it to be better.

But the current state of affairs can’t stand.

Our co-op is treading water, but it gets harder to keep our head above the surface with every year that passes.

Elder Fluger is in his nineties. What happens when he leaves for the next life?

Meanwhile, the leviathans have settled into a détente with each other, confident they can outwait all the holdouts, content to add to their numbers from refugees and independents who tire of the constant battle against entropy.

And now that everything has mostly stabilized, it feels like all of humanity is just waiting around for whatever major calamity or technological breakthrough arrives next.

Maybe this is just the hush before He comes again.

But what if our current stasis is prolonging that day?

And: how long can Johnny and his allies prolong it?

Indefinitely?

Forever?

***

Every time I attempt to pray and ask why I have been given this spiritual gift, I’m met with what I can best describe as an intentional silence.

This is the problem with a God who is intent on preserving agency (contradictions in scripture and history notwithstanding): He can be maddeningly quiet or vague at times.

I don’t know. Maybe He is happy with how humanity has worked things out on its own. Maybe His Son really will only stroll in once Johnny/Elder Robinson has finished up everything he’s working on.

Or maybe He has secret, underground plans in motion to renew the flow of light and intelligence into mortality.

Maybe my spiritual gift is one small part of those plans.

But if so: why don’t I receive more direction on what to do with it?

***

I’ve stopped going back to that day.

I’ve been trying other moments to see if I receive any inspiration on what I should do to change the past.

Nothing so far.

But it’s been a healing experience.

A difficult one to be sure, yet one that’s leading to a glimmer of an understanding of myself, of my past, of the joys and sufferings of mortal existence, of embodiment.

***

Elder Fluger passed away in his sleep last week. It was a sudden but peaceful thing. A heart attack. Or maybe his body was just so worn out, he couldn’t hold onto mortality anymore.

He didn’t pass his keys on to anyone before he died.

***

I’m finally going to try.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Praying too. But, well: see the intentional silence passage above.

There has to be a reason why I can move through time.

I can’t think of any reason for me to be able to do this other than to change that day.

Yes, the trajectories will largely be the same. Removing one man from the scene isn’t going to fix everything.

But I think it will give Church members a better chance at other fates.

Maybe more will flee south. Maybe more will form their own enclaves or co-ops. Maybe some of them will even form co-ops like I have: with people from other belief systems.

And maybe the leviathans will devour each other sooner, and the world won’t get quite so stuck in place.

I wait until my mom and spouse are asleep.

I go for a long walk.

I walk through the gardens that used to be playgrounds.

I walk by the houses that used to be full of children and pets.

I walk along the sidewalks that used to not be cracked and crumbling.

I walk along the county road that used to be full of cars and trucks.

The sudden whine of drones as I reach the boundary of our co-op is what vaults me back.

I’m there with then me’s perception of Ollie’s sticky hand on my left arm.

I hear the van door slide open, and the murmur of male voices complaining, joking, giving instructions.

Current me is poised to communicate to then me.

I will get Kat and Ollie fighting and will join in and that will cause my mom to break off her conversation with Indignation Machines.

Maybe if we’re loud and annoying enough she’ll feel embarrassed and pack everything up and leave. Or maybe the band members will get annoyed by the noise and move to the other side of the rest area.

The boys arrive at the table and plunk a couple of jars of peanut butter and a box of Saltines on the picnic table.

I go to prompt then me to show Ollie and Kat a Jolly Rancher I’d been saving in my pants pocket, and say I’ll give it to whoever yells the loudest,

But then I don’t.

I am constrained.

Or rather: the Spirit constrains me. Palpably, overtly, directly constrains me, muscles bound, tongue unloosened. I can only sit and watch as my mom stands and approaches Johnny and the other members of the band.

I return to current me confused, angry, chastened.

I seek answers and am met with more intentional silence.

But what is this gift for if not to use it?

And how could that man, that boy—Johnny, Elder Robinson—be part of God’s plan?

Is He really looking for such a narrow existence for so many?

Is He protecting us from even greater calamities?

I don’t know, and I hate not knowing.

But the instruction was clear, and I will abide by it.

I will use my gift for other things.

Like saving Sister Whitmore and her son.

If I can.