The Flying None Read online

  Her cell was just like a college dorm room, with a firm single bed, a simple desk and chair, a mini-fridge and a shelf with a random assortment of weathered paperbacks—Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Life Of Pi (proving a long-held unscientific opinion of Gala’s that if you stacked any random books long enough, eventually one or more would turn into copies of Life of Pi or Eat Pray Love), and (proving that if there ever was a God, She was dead) a copy of All Your Angels: A Field Guide, by her mother.

  Mildred plumped down on Gala’s bed and crossed her legs. The braying whine of the leaf-blower seemed to stalk them like all the bees in the world looking for their stolen honey. She cleared her throat and shouted like she was trying to win a hog-calling contest. “I THINK WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT SOMETHING. IF YOU’RE JUST LOOKING FOR A NICE PLACE TO COMMIT SUICIDE . . . ”

  Naturally, the leaf-blower cut out just as she got to the embarrassing part. In the next cell, someone loudly giggled. “What I’m saying is, if you’re in emotional distress, you should seek counseling. We’re not equipped—”

  To Gala’s explosive, “What the fuck . . . ?” Mother Mildred shrugged and tilted her chin at Gala’s wrists. Gala crossed her arms, but they had to cross this bridge sooner or later. “I’m not suicidal. I used to cut sometimes as a coping mechanism for anxiety. Don’t nuns flagellate themselves and all kinds of stuff, to ward off incubi, or something?”

  “Well, that’s different. But I hope you understand that we, as a group, don’t condone self-mortification—”

  “So if God does it to us . . . like stigmata or something . . . like if He puts literal magical bleeding holes in you, go to the head of the class, but if you’re just managing a lifetime of trauma the only way you can, you’re a problem, and you gotta go. I know I’ve only been a bride of Christ for like a minute, but it sounds like He kinda gaslights us a lot, you know?”

  “We’re not judgmental here and we welcome honest debate, but we get dragged into that kind of rhetorical briar-patch.” Mother Mildred steepled her fingers, knitting her brow and shaking her head, as if she was praying for the strength to figure Gala out.

  “Okay, but like . . . and I’m just trying to establish what the ground rules are, and you said there weren’t any, which is very punk-rock, don’t get me wrong, but it sounds like there kinda are, like, a lot of ’em. Rules, I mean.”

  Waving her scarred wrist with a theatrical flourish, she ticked them off on her fingers. “You won’t accept people with serious emotional trauma, but who enters a convent, if they’re not retreating from something? You don’t accept the possibility of miracles, and you discourage spiritual debate. Feel free to jump in any time, if I’m leaving any out . . . ”

  Mother Mildred sat as if posing for a portrait, long enough for Gala to notice that she had a natty little mustache, which she’d bleached. Maybe plucking it would constitute self-mortification. Finally, she said, “I hope you’ll find a way to be happy here,” reminded her that dinner commenced at 6PM and left her to get settled in.

  Gala plugged in her earbuds and blasted Gregorian doom-metal while unpacking her suitcase with the broken zipper and thinking about giving herself stigmata to see if Mother Mildred kicked her out. She put up a few tattered movie posters (Destroy All Monsters, The H-Man, The X From Outer Space) over her bed with Scotch tape and watched them slowly slough off the rough-hewn stone walls like scabs from a scar.

  A text blast from Mildred interrupted her reverie like someone was trying to bleep out the Latin swear-words in the music. NOISE COMPLAINT: 1st notice.

  Wtf! Using earbuds, she replied.

  Can still hear your anachronistic music, Mildred shot back. Neighbors very disturbed. Please turn down or off? Thx.

  Anachronistic? Seriously? Its devotional music composed on Pope Gregory’s scale + performed on Medieval acoustic instruments + r we rly arguing about what’s anachronistic via text msg?

  NOISE COMPLAINT: 2nd notice, came the reply.

  At dinner, she met her fellow brides of Christ. Her heart leapt up into her throat and then subsided into the acid-bath of her stomach as she recognized all of them.

  Galadriel was a cashier at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Books at Larkspur Landing, and as good a reason as any to swear off patronizing that store for life. Gala was named, so her mother told her, for Salvador Dali’s wife, who by all accounts was a tyrannical, pretentious skank, but it flattered her absent father’s artistic pretensions, so Gala could be sympathetic to someone named for an elf in a fantasy novel, if their names weren’t so maddeningly similar, and if she wasn’t such a bitch.

  In a flowing white gown with a garland of day-lilies in her hair, Galadriel was taking very seriously the Renaissance Faire number her parents had done on her, and proudly declared herself the convent’s resident witch, silently adding with an aggressive flutter of her Stalin-mustache eyebrows that she’d defend her title as zealously as she’d defended the local bookshop against browsers with outside coffee beverages.

  Next to Galadriel sat a prematurely gray-haired woman in weird black robes, chewing her nails more vigorously than her dinner. Magda was introduced as a leading scholar of Gnosticism, and Gala recognized her as the crazy lady who chanted, burned incense and occasionally got naked at the San Rafael farmers’ market.

  Wanda, in a faded gray sweater of knitted cat hair, might’ve been Magda’s twin sister. Gala knew her unsettling thousand-yard stare from the Wall of Shame at the library.

  Wanda was the evangelical kook who drew clothes on the pictures of nudes in the art books, blacked out the swears and ripped out the sex scenes in all the novels, and drove around town in a van covered with pictures of third-trimester abortions.

  She didn’t seem to adhere to any religious doctrine beyond condemning every part of the body between the ankles and the shoulders, though the local rumor-mill had it that she slept with a stolen CPR practice dummy for company. She mostly kept to herself unless someone else was having fun, and let all the feral cats sleep in her room.

  Maryelizabeth was the only one who seemed to take this whole nun thing seriously. In a spotless white habit with a winged head-thing, she might’ve been cosplaying Vanessa Redgrave in The Devils. She seemed like a serious, straight Roman Catholic, and the only lingering mystery about her was why she couldn’t find a berth in a legitimate nunnery, instead of this booby-hatch.

  As it was Maryelizabeth’s turn to cook dinner (a bland but hearty vegetable soup and corn bread with honey), she offered a special thanks for their newest member, then invited her to give the blessing.

  Gala looked around for a moment, cleared her throat and mumbled, “Dear Lord, please let this obligatory expression of gratitude free us from guilt for the suffering and exploitation of the natural world and human labor that gave us this meal.”

  “So . . . you’re an intellectual,” Galadriel put in, the same way she might point out a rabbit with its leg in a trap.

  They ate in blessed silence. When they were done, they started the freeform sharing session, which was their word for arguing. Gala would’ve loved to take part in a serious theological debate, but the arguments seemed to revolve around the chore assignments, garden planting, dietary shit like whether it was possible to ethically steal honey from bees, and whether or not they should get premium cable TV. Gala scoffed at the last question, which seemed to unify the whole room against her. “I mean, if we’re here to renounce the outside world, maybe we don’t need TV?”

  “I’m not chipping in for anything that supports that upright copulation stuff,” Wanda snipped.

  “She means Dancing with the Stars,” Maryelizabeth explained.

  “All things of this world are shit and snares of the Demiurge,” grumbled Magda, “so you might as well enjoy them.”

  “In what meaningful way have you renounced the world, dear?” Galadriel sniffed, reaching across the table and touching Gala’s hand like she was healing a leper.

  “Well,” Gala fumbled, “I’m here . . .
and uh . . . I deleted my Facebook profile—”

  “Social media is the devil’s day-care,” Wanda declared.

  “I know, right?” Gala said. “Like, I don’t even know when people type ‘LOL’ after a bad joke, are they telling you they laughed at their own bad joke, or ordering you to laugh at it . . . ?”

  “So what are you,” Magda purred, “a Satanist? When Mildred said someone was moving in, we were hoping for a Satanist. It’d add vibrance to the conversation. Isn’t that right, Wanda?”

  “I’m not living under a roof with a dark-sided sister,” Wanda said, reflexively drawing a protective pentacle around her place-setting, which didn’t stop a feral cat from coming over to lap soup from her bowl.

  “Actually,” Gala said, “I’m kind of an agnostic . . . ? But I thought I’d give God one last chance to make His case . . . ”

  “But what do you believe?” Magda demanded.

  “Well if I could just pick out my God like at a Build-A-Bear Workshop, I’d want the one in this little picture book my mother used to read to me, about how God is in every flower, every sunset, every skinned knee and broken balloon. I thought that was really beautiful and I looked at the world as this father-mother who loved their creation so much that they inhabited it. I used to ask God’s permission before I picked a flower. Then Sunday school told me he was this pissed-off incel way up on a cloud, silently judging everything you do, and I kind of checked out . . . ”

  “Splendid,” Galadriel said. “We have our first Spinozan animist.”

  The fractious group had finally found true sisterhood in unanimously laughing at her. Gala asked to be excused.

  Splayed out on her bed with her earbuds in, Gala wrestled with the thorny question of whether or not she’d made a mistake. It would be no hardship to go back to her job at the library and her bachelor flat in San Rafael, reactivate her profiles and tell the world what a crackpot snake-pit this place was . . . but she’d be repeating the destructive Green Gargantua pattern of her life, clinging to the self-imposed hell of the Everlasting No when she had been so sure only yesterday that this was, if not the path to the Everlasting Yes, at least the purgatorial Center of Indifference that would impel her, sooner or later, to some measure of harmony, if not true enlightenment.

  Was that too much to ask?

  Of what happened next, not even Gala could say afterward, what was true and what was fancy. She was quite certain, however, of two things. She did not simply fall asleep and dream it all, and she did not touch herself.

  Focus on breath, filling and feeding your body. Be your breath, flowing out into the universe. She never could stick with it for thinking of the transcendental yoga sessions in the park with Guru Gary, or his tight OP shorts that allowed his ball-sac to loll in plain view like a hairy snail when he sat criss-cross-applesauce. Or how close Gary came to being her stepdad.

  This time, perhaps the music and the urge to escape this place, and the anxiety about her new direction in life and the superabundance of nutmeg in the soup all combined to lull her into a deep hypnotic trance.

  She felt a quickening tingle between her legs and an alien wetness welling up in her hand. When she held it up in front of her face, blood dripped in her eye from a hole in her palm. Her eyes widened in horror as she stared into the hole and saw another eye looking back at her from the stigma.

  Gala let out a scream so loud, she seemed to tumble right out of her own mouth.

  The cracks in the ceiling, at which she’d been staring for some unmeasured span of time, drew closer with alarming speed. Thinking the ceiling was collapsing on her, she tried to roll off the bed, but executing this maneuver only made her more fearful. Looking down, she saw her gawky, Olive Oyl body still sprawled across the narrow bed.

  Even more alarming, her legs were kicking, her hands snarled in the sheets, spasmodically clutching fistfuls of cheap floral-print fabric, her breath coming in panting gasps. If she didn’t know better, she’d think her body was experiencing an orgasm.

  Figures that it’d happen the moment she left.

  4

  Gala tried to swim back into her body but she battled a river of marmalade, its sluggish current too thick to resist.

  It lifted her through the tiled roof of the convent, over the hills of San Anselmo and the Tiburon Strait, Sausalito and Angel Island. She broke through the misty canopy rolling down from Mount Tamalpais to swaddle all of Marin County, and climbed until the whole Bay lay far beneath her, a lukewarm cauldron of fog. Higher still she rose, soaring over plateaus and spires of clouds, tumbling into the stars.

  She recalled the first time she flew in an airplane, how awestruck she was by the cloudscape, a magnificent world unto itself, somehow more solid and real than the land below. When the plane sliced through the clouds to skim over them under the naked sun, she remembered thinking this must be the Heaven that her mother made such a big deal about, and she searched for angels and harp-strumming souls in white robes.

  She asked her mother where were they? And her mother told her that she couldn’t see them because they were all underneath the plane, carrying it to its destination.

  She flew so high above the clouds that they were but a layer of shaving cream on the face of the earth. Far beyond the faintest wisp of atmosphere, she reveled in the perfect silence of the vacuum. The world dwindled to a finite globe and then a pale blue pixel and she flew faster rocketing into the perfect black of the void.

  The sun crowned the silhouette of the Earth in spears of light, but soon it and all the outer planets were just twinkling motes in her wake. She stormed the center of the galaxy, diving into a cluster of nebulae dripping with newborn stars, thinking surely, if He was anywhere, it would be here. But she found only more dumb clods of mindless matter. No throne of creation, no gigantic workshop, not even a lousy fucking flying saucer.

  She could go deeper, into the center of the universe itself, but she knew she could search until her body wasted away in a hospital bed without finding any sign of the Almighty. And even if she discovered that all the galaxies were merely atoms and molecules composing a crumb in His beard, what would that prove? The universe was as empty of engaged prime movers as she’d always suspected, and even less interesting.

  She might as well go home . . .

  And no sooner had she voiced this thought in whatever she was using for a brain at the moment, than she was falling through stars and planets and unfathomable gulfs of emptiness, plummeting like a bungee-jumper snapped back by the elastic band of her ego, downwards into the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way, to her solar system, her planet, her continent—

  But not her body.

  She found herself, or at least her living ghost, in a little chapel with beautiful rosy cedar paneling, gold fixtures and a big electroplated cross backlit with psychedelic LED lighting that cycled through a rainbow of two million colors, bathing a handsome older gentleman kneeling before it in a lush raw silk bathrobe and monogrammed satin boxer shorts. He stared so fixedly into her “eyes” that Gala was sure he could see her. As the sound of his lips moving grew louder, she imagined he was praying to her.

  Lord, he said, I know you been real good to me and I am sorely grateful, and as your humble servant, I have hearkened to your signs and portents, seen your hand at work in lifting up our ministry, helping us spread your word. And you’ve been more than generous, so I humbly ask that if I’m doing wrong, just give me a sign . . .

  Gala floated in place, impaled on the feverishly blinking chrome cross. She kind of recognized the man praying to her from TV. He was the guy on the news whenever there was a disaster, telling America who God was angry at this week, and why He did what He did. On his own show—which was on BET, which was weird, because he was whiter than Twinkie filling—he was always speaking in tongues, casting out demons and demanding money.

  At last, the evangelist got off his knees, raised his hands in the air and said Amen. He turned and opened the door to the tiny closet-sized chapel,
opening on a grand state room in what must be a motherfucker of a huge yacht, decked out like a Turkish seraglio.

  As big as the state room was—bigger than Mom’s entire houseboat—nearly all of it was taken up with a bed, where lay a boy and a girl, and neither was old enough to have a favorite band, let alone to be part of some redneck Taliban harem. “Thank you Jesus,” said the evangelist, and moved to shut the door.

  Gross.

  It was like googling “Holy Grail” and accidentally clicking on 2girlsonecup.com. And what brought her here? To leave her body and search the universe in vain for any sign of God, and then to find herself witnessing this . . . this. But perhaps it was not her search, but the evangelist’s prayer that summoned and bound her to this cross. Perhaps there was a divine providence at work here, after all.

  You want a sign, asshole? I’ll give you a sign—

  The door had just slammed shut in its custom-carpentered frame when Gala flexed her will as forcefully as if her own body were nailed to the cross. Though it had no bones, muscles, joints or nerves, the ghastly neon crucifix stirred and tipped from the shelf upon which it was enshrined. The thud of its weight on the deck resounded through the yacht.

  The evangelist, now stripped of his robe, well-tanned belly swinging pendulously between his bandy legs, tried to cover the waning boner projecting out the flap of his silk boxers.

  Gala beamed all her righteous wrath at him, but it passed right through him like smoke through cheesecloth. Billowing across the stateroom, she clawed at anything she could take hold of to make herself heard, and found herself looking out the eyes of the underage girl.

  She pulled the sheets up over her naked body and screamed at the top of her lungs, “For shame, you mendacious sack of simoniac worm shit! Woe unto you, thou cradle-robbing vermin, that taketh my name in vain!”