Witness For A New World

The last time I saw Angela was the day I confessed that I didn’t believe in God. She had taken my hand in hers, looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t owe me an explanation. I’m not Christy or Rod, I'm your therapist. I won’t judge you.” Still, the revelation tormented me.

26 years ago, Christy had lifted me from a throng of screaming Vietnamese orphans to her Dolce and Gabbana scented breast, cooing, caressing my tuft of black hair. She flew me back to her husband Rod, who was waiting expectantly in the marshy, rural bit of south florida for his new daughter. Back then, the Choose Life! Church was still contained to Christy, Rod, and the neighbors. The Associated Press had not written that article about them yet. In fact, cultivation of the flat earth movement would take several years to catch on to the mainstream. I was still an infant too, maybe smaller, maybe not yet born, really. Christy would give me the luxurious womb that outsiders called “The Flat Earth Cult”, where I lived well into adulthood, wanted for nothing. The room she gave me would be decorated with sequined throw pillows and macrame, all in the strange fleshy pink that was her favorite.

Angela didn’t say much, but between my sobs I could see something like pity in the way her head was angled and the fold of her brow. I wondered if I was the strangest client she had. Maybe not of all time, but certainly this past year. Everyone I'd met had gaped at me in disbelief and wonder, told me I absolutely had to write a memoir, or they had a friend who was friends with a Netflix executive, who could get me a miniseries. I didn’t think much of this, ignored the occasional email requesting an interview. From the reactions of others, my life became a sensational, exceptional, exciting show. Since leaving Christy, Rod, and the church, I had been acting out a kind of life. Got a job as a receptionist. Took the bus and bought a new pair of shoes. A year passed; I spoke to Anglea each week. Then the bombs hit.

Angela must be dust now. After I picked myself up from under the collapsed drywall and made my way to the stairs, I surveyed the studio I had lived in for so little time. A decrepit thing further destroyed by the crumbling ceiling and layer of white dust. They had dug it out from the floor as storage space sometime in the eighties, turned it into a studio plus bathroom after the economic crash of 2008. My body felt strange and light as I made my way up the stairs to ground level, where the building above had been blown up—or down—to its steel skeleton. The dull white air obscured everything within 20 feet, and there was a metallic scent in the air. I walked down what used to be the sidewalk.

Billy picked me up somewhere just east of the obliterated county mall, hollering from his hyundai elantra. The door swung open and arms pulled me inside, then quickly closed, nearly missing the skin of my forearm. He gave me a handkerchief to tie around my nose and mouth, asking how long I’d been breathing in the air. How long had I been walking around like that? I didn’t know. Also in the car was Laurie, a woman with red hair. Hilde was older and had a speech impediment. Mike and Dina were just teenagers in best buy vests. Billy hit the gas and we sped down what used to be a street. It took much longer to get out of the city, as we kept having to make detours around the wreckage. Laurie was shaking and pale, Mike had thrown up in the felt of the floor, responsible for the acidic smell that filled the car. We couldn’t roll down the windows because god knows what toxins were in the air, Billy said. He thought it wasn’t just the area, that everything had been blown to bits. It was absurd. I ran my hands across my body, checking for pains, but there wasn’t anything besides some bruising where the ceiling had crashed into me. I found myself thinking of Chisty. Her hair in particular, which was like a blond shell. The cans and cans of extreme hold hairspray she had stockpiled. If Billy was right, had she burnt up? Had Rod held her?

We stopped many miles up north, where the air had cleared from smoky to lightly hazy, and there wasn’t any debris to drive around anymore. Part of a fence still stood beside the paved part of the road. I was out at once, clutching to it. Mike followed me after a brief hesitation. There’s the cape, he pointed out into the whiteness and there was what must be the sea, except it had the same pallor as the sky, giving the illusion of endlessness. A landscape with no features, no edges, no perspective, no vanishing point—Or perhaps during the explosions it had shot towards us and now we were in it, vanished.

Christy took me out to get breakfast one morning, when I was a teenager. Her jewelry, all turquoise and silver jingled and from our booth they appeared glowing, all layered on her sun spotted decolletage. Have you ever seen the edge of the world? I asked her. Christy shook her head. I guess I always thought my faith was all the evidence I needed, more than whatever my eyes could tell me, she chirped. I thought about it for a while. Would it be like a beach, with a barrier of sand to smooth the transition from land to nothingness? Or perhaps a clean edge of earth, sharp and sudden. I walked my index and middle finger across my plate, springing on the spongy pancakes and dredging through the sticky syrup until it reached the very edge.

Billy was telling us to get in the car unless we wanted to get sick. Mike ducked back in, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the cape. It was so beautiful. Billy succumbed and got out of the car to grab my arm. I shook it off, You guys go ahead. I’m gonna stay here. I said. Billy had the same pale blue eyes that Crystal was famous for. The reporter from The Associated Press had described them as “disturbing” and “magnetic”. He couldn’t spend more time exposed, turning back, somewhat hesitant. I didn’t move, turning to the cape again, listening to the hum of the car getting fainter as they drove away. If Billy was wrong, they might find a way to survive. I walked down to the beach.

It started as the kind of pain that you can just barely take. Little sores on my ankles and chest. They were rosebud pink, stinging against the sand and pebbles. This was when I started to feel lightheaded.

A seagull landed next to me, fixing it’s beady eye on me. It opened its beak and coughed like an old smoker, regurgitating out a brassy locket. My red hand closed around it. Inside was a picture of a couple smiling at me. Forever yours was engraved on the other side. I clutched it close and thanked the seagull. They’re gonna come, right? I asked. Just wait, you’re my witness, It said.

I lay on the beach for seven days. I was waiting for the couple who never did come but I continued to feel strangely euphoric. The seagull remained by my side, squawking like a normal one at times, and hacking like an old man at others.

On the last day, the sores had converged into a single wound. The pain was intense but appropriate. I dug my raw red hands into the sand, felt it both dry as well as damp with the substances of the beyond, milky, lapping and smelling of chemicals, I walked into it and the pain vanished along with my body, which disintegrated into the milkiness. I watched the seagull watch me dissolve. I watched it fly.