For all you New Yorkers who aren’t afraid of the R train, I’ll be the featured guest this Saturday evening at Book Karaoke in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Book Karaoke is a monthly event at the BookMark Shoppe, a terrific independent neighborhood bookstore. Hosted by Alexander Scott, Book Karaoke invites audience members to come prepared to read a passage from a favorite book.

If it’s a draw at all, you’ll also get a chance to hear me read from an unpublished story that will hopefully show up next year in my new short fiction collection.

But here, I’ll let Alex pitch you further, and provide the details:

Howdy all,

Boy, April is really flying by, huh? Seems like I turned away to check my email and suddenly two and a half weeks went by.

And that means there’s less than 10 days until the next Book Karaoke at The BookMark Shoppe! Are you coming? Did you book a sitter? Have you chosen what you’re reading? Tick tock, time’s a-wasting!*

This month’s event also happens to coincide with Independent Bookstore Day, so you have no excuse to not come out and support the Shoppe!

As always, we will be getting together at 6 PM on Saturday the 25th. Everyone is welcome to toss their name in the bucket and take a turn reading aloud a favorite passage from any published work. (Novel, Memoir, Repair Manual, etc, anything goes!)

And we have another great featured guest: Novelist, Memoirist, Essayist, Manuscript Formatist, Spelling Bee Solverist, and all-around “Friend of the Pod” William Shunn!

Save the details!

Date: Saturday, April 25th
Time: 6:00 to 8:00 pm
Location: The Bookmark Shoppe - 8415 3rd Ave, Brooklyn NY

Tell your friends! I look forward to seeing you there.

Just take the R train to 86th Street in Brooklyn, and I’ll look forward to seeing you there too! ∅

Previous: And That’s Why We’re Doin’ the Wenatchee Rap

First, I lied a little in yesterday’s post. I said that when I play “The Wenatchee Rap” these days, I hardly hear the flaws. This is not exactly true. The mistiming of that drum track drives me out of my flippin’ gourd.

That’s why I was so excited last year to learn (in a post from Expanding Dan) about MVSEP, an AI tool1 for separating recordings into their constituent parts, or “stems.” That prompted me to dig out my old “Wenatchee Rap” cassette. MVSEP made short work of it, spitting back individual tracks for the drum, bass, keyboard, and vocal lines.

In Adobe Audition, it was fairly straightforward to fix the drums. They only needed a little stretching to bring them into sync with the other tracks. I also chopped the vocals up into segments so I could nudge the verses a little closer to the beat where possible. Not every missionary needed the assist, but I did my best to make everyone sound … well, a little less white-bread. A couple of clips from old answering machine messages I found on the flip side of the cassette were just the pièces de résistance to finish things off.

And now I present, in all its awkward glory, “The Wenatchee Rap (Somewhat Less Painful Mix).” Listen below, and read along with the thoroughly annotated lyrics. Think of it, if you like, as an anthropological profile of a specific subculture in a specific time and place. Then next time the missionaries cross your path, be sure to picture them huddled in a dim studio digging deep to mine some elusive vein of rhythm. They won’t understand why you’re laughing, but at least they’ll back away quickly.

The Wenatchee Rap (Somewhat Less Painful Mix)

All
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!2
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!

Udall and Shunn
Wenatchee Zone3 is number one,
’Cuz we’re workin’ hard and we’re havin’ fun.
We’re workin’ together to reach our goal,4
From Omak down to Moses Hole!5

So stop the presses and hold the phone.
It’s time for you to meet the zone.
Now pay attention, don’t take a nap,
’Cuz we’re about to do the Wenatchee Rap!

Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
The time’s at hand—
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
—to meet our band!

You’ve seen ’em all before and you’ll see ’em all again
With the black tags that signify they’re dignified men.6
Now they’re nothin’ fancy and they’re nothin’ mystic.
You’re about to meet the Ephrata District!7

Church
My name is Church, that’s “Elder”8 to you,
And you’d better know that this Church is true.
I’ve got the best companion you could ever have.
Let me introduce my good friend Cav.

Cavaness
I’m-a Cavaness in Moses Hole,
With a great companion, God bless his soul.
If you need help in your gospel search,
Just drop on by and go to Church.

W. Brown
Taylor’s not here but he likes to jam,
Because he’s on his mission in Coulee Dam.
Together they make up Squirter and Tay,9
But if Squirter were here, this is what he’d say:

Church
“If the dam should break, you’d warn your neighbor,10
And that’s why we’ve been called to labor.
If the Spirit ’round here gets any hotter,11
Then everybody’s gonna be in the water.”12

Williams
I’m the Green Machine,13 I’m Elder Williams,
And my comp14 and I are gonna baptize millions.
We’re the best there is from here to Montana.15
Here he is, Mister Dole Banana.16

Dole
My companion thinks he’s pretty cute.
Though my label17 says Dole, I ain’t no fruit.18
I don’t know who wrote these lines,
But if I find out, I’m gonna kick their behinds.19

Ephrata District
We’re spread all over the flippin’20 map,
And that’s why we’re doin’ the Wenatchee Rap!

Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
We got no fears—
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
—for two whole years.21

Zone Leaders
Now we’ll say goodbye to Dole, and we thank you very much.
Y’all told your stories with-a such a nice touch.
Now we’re takin’ you back off the beaten track,
To a tiny little district by the name of Omak!

W. Brown
My first name’s Wally and my last name’s Brown,
And I’m servin’ up here in Omak town!
You can call me Tom Cruise22 if you’re so inclined,
’Cuz me and Jeffords leave the bogeys23 behind!

Jeffords
Hey, gimme that mike! Your time is through.
My name is Jeffords and I got me some rappin’ to do.
When our investigators24 start to pray and read,25
Then the dash to the font26 will beat the Omak Stampede!27

Olsen and Wood
We’re Olsen and Wood, and we’re servin’ in Brewster!

Olsen
It makes me so happy, I could crow like a rooster.
We’ve knocked on every door like a good elder should,28
And if you’ve got a complaint, just knock on Wood!

Wood
Hey, don’t knock on Wood! I’ve done nothin’ wrong,
And I don’t know why we’re singin’ this silly song.
The English language, it’s got no soul.
We should all be rappin’ en español!29

Omak District
Some people think this job is a snap,
But that’s why we’re doin’ the Wenatchee Rap!

Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
We’re on a mission!
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
It’s men we’re fishin’!30

Udall and Shunn
Those Omak boys like to rap, the bums,
But we got another set of brothers flappin’ their gums.
Now we’d like you to give a big hello
To the mellow yellow fellows from Othello!

Lewis and Clark
We’re Lewis and Clark,31 and we’re explorin’ this turf,

Clark
But in a couple of weeks, he’ll be hittin’ the surf!32
In a couple of months, when you’re tied to a wife,33
Then you’ll really start to miss the best two years of your life.34

Lewis
We’re livin’ in the humble little town of Othello,
And we’re shakin’ this place like a bowl full of Jell-O,35
’Cuz we’re knockin’ on doors and a-fillin’ up churches,
And our converts could populate the Louisiana Purchase!

Dean
My name is Dean, and my partner is Hamblin.
When the demons see us comin’, they all start a-scramblin’!
We came to this town to speak some Spanish,36
But when the people see us comin’, they all seem to vanish.

Hamblin
My companion’s Dean, and it’s easy to see
That he’s the smoothest37 elder in Othello history.
When the folks here see us a-headin’ their way,
Why, the Mexicans all shout, “¡Ándale!”38

Othello District
The Tolmans39 couldn’t make it to perform their take,
’Cuz they’re tearin’ it up in-a Moses Lake.
They’ll stick together down every canyon,
And they’ll never get transferred40 from their companion.

The powers of heaven are what we tap,
And that’s why we’re doin’ the Wenatchee Rap!

Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
Plantin’ seeds in the sod!41
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
We’re on a mission from God.42

Udall and Shunn
Well, that’s three groups down and one to go,
So let’s move along and get on with the show!
The Model District43 is this group’s name,
And we’ll start off by hearin’ from Brown and Payne!44

R. Brown
My name is Ryan Brown, and I’m the guy in town
Who’ll never get down, never wear a frown!
I’m a Utah boy, and I’d get more respect
If my companion wasn’t such a big Payne in the neck!

Payne
Hey, watch it, son. Who you callin’ a Payne?
I’d better never catch you takin’ my name in vain,45
’Cuz I’ll take you down in a wrestlin’ match,46
And I’ll emerge on top without a scratch!

Slater and Lear
We’re Slater and Lear, we’re the Leavenworth sisters.

Slater
We’ve walked so far that our feet have blisters.47
I’ve been here for not much more than a week,
So I’ll step aside and let my companion speak.

Lear
I’ve spent seven months in Leavenworth.48
I feel like I’ve been here since I came to this earth.49
The members say: “We hope the transfer bug50 doesn’t catch you.
If you stay here any longer, we’ll erect you a statue!”

Udall
My name’s Udall, and my man is Shunn,
And he’ll pound on your piano if you gotcha one.
This piano stuff’s great but it’s gone a bit far—
He uses eighty-eight keys to unlock the car.51

Shunn
Yes,52 my name is Shunn, and my blessings aren’t meager,
’Cuz I got me a companion from a town called Eagar.53
When we’re walkin’ down the street or walkin’ down the hall,
The girls54 cry out, “Come here, U-doll!”55

Model District
You won’t catch us in any trap,56
And that’s why we’re doin’ the Wenatchee Rap!

Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap
Is what we’re performin’!
Wenatcheeeeeeee Rap!
It’s in the Book of Mormon.57

Udall
Now, you’ve all heard of the Chicago Bears,
And you’ve heard that silly little shuffle of theirs,58

Shunn
But when we rap it’s plain to see
That there’s just no toppin’59 Wenatchee!

When this rap hits the charts, it’ll flatten ’em,
’Cuz we’re gonna go golden60 and platinum!
But now our voices are tired and our throats are scratchy,61
So that about “raps” it up from

All
Wenatchee! ∅

If you’re truly a completist in need of punishment, find the original mix and the demo version too on Bandcamp, Spotify, Amazon Music, and many other streaming platforms.

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My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I’d encourage you to order it from your local independent bookstore or a retailer like Bookshop.org or Powell’s.

Basketball, basketball, basketball. In the spring of 1988, this was the stuff of which zone activities1 were made. Once every month or two, a score of missionaries would gather to rub shoulders, forge tighter bonds of brotherhood, edify and uplift one another, and, well, shoot some hoop.

Few questioned this natural order. Few worried about the fact that zone basketball games often excluded the sister missionaries, and always excluded the senior missionaries. Few realized that it might be possible for a gathering of elders to climax in anything other than a rousing orgy of jump shots and slam dunks.

Few, that is, besides my visionary companion, Elder Brian Udall.

Udall served as my companion for three months in Wenatchee, Washington, during the waning days of our missions. We were zone leaders, entrusted with power and authority far beyond that of mortal men, and we were each close to entering the ranks of the grand old men of the Washington Spokane Mission, nearing as we were the advent of double-digit midgethood2.

Udall was the ideal picture of Mormon missionarydom through and through. By this I don’t mean that he was the most spiritual companion I ever had, or the hardest-working, though he was no slouch in either of these departments. What I mean is that, in Brian Udall, the eternal verity of basketball found no greater exponent. He understood that hoops were really halos, and a man could get nearer to God abiding by the precepts of the shot clock and zone defense than through any other game.

But even so, Udall recognized that there could and should be more to zone activities than mere basketball.

It was late in April when Udall laid this confession at my feet, and I admitted to him that I shared his conviction. But whereas for him, this was a honorable and selfless concession, for me there was no great nobility in it. While I was passable at passing and shooting, basketball would never have made my list of 101 Fulfilling Activities for One’s Leisure Time. While the other elders were tearing up the court (or rather, tearing up the short abrasive carpeting in the most convenient cultural hall3), I could almost always be found tickling the ivories on the baby grand that inevitably occupied the dais in the chapel. For me, saying that zone activities should consist of something other than basketball was akin to saying that childhood should pass free of abuse. I took it as a given.

But determining that we should do something different for our next zone activity and actually figuring out what that something different should be were two entirely different things.

For days we batted ideas back and forth, fruitlessly. There was always something objectionable or unworkable or otherwise prohibitive once we began turning our notions over in the cold light of day. The next activity was slated for May 2nd, and that date was drawing perilously near. It was beginning to look like basketball would win out by default. We needed inspiration.

And it finally struck, from an unexpected quarter. Fascinated by synthesizers and sequencers, I had taken to dragging Udall along to a little music shop for an hour or two on our P-days4, where the proprietor, a pleasant and attractive woman in her thirties, would let me noodle around on the keyboards to my heart’s content. After a few weeks of this, and of secretly auditing my performances, the woman let me know that she and her husband ran a small recording studio in their basement, and if I ever wanted to lay down some tracks, they would give me a discounted rate on studio time. I thanked her, filing this bit of trivia away in the “I’ll have to do something about that someday” department.

When I apprised Udall of this offer later in the week, however, it set him on fire. “That’s it, Shunn!” he said. “We should get the whole zone together and make a recording! You know, a rap or something, like the one the Chicago Bears did before the Super Bowl a couple of years ago!”

My companion. Didn’t I say he was a visionary? Who else would have thought to make a silk purse from “The Super Bowl Shuffle”?

Needless to say, I didn’t take much converting. I glommed onto the idea like a wino onto a bottle of muscatel. I took the ball and ran with it. I made the idea my own—at times to Udall’s dismay and frustration.

First, I called the studio to make sure that we could reserve some time on the 2nd. Once I had a three-hour block secured, Udall and I began drafting the lyrics for what would become known as “The Wenatchee Rap.”

Our object was to compose a verse for every missionary in the zone—some amusing chunk of doggerel tailor-fitted to his or her personality, which he or she could rap out in front of the mike with rhythmic abandon. This would truly be a zone activity in which everyone could participate equally.

Udall would have preferred to have had every missionary write his or her own verse, but by the time we got cracking on the idea it was too late for that. We were throwing things together at the last minute, and if it was going to come off we would have to do the bulk of the preparation ourselves. That was just as well, in my not-so-humble opinion, because I trusted myself to write something clever more than I trusted my fellow missionaries. Udall’s way would probably have resulted in a more honest sonic portrait of our zone, but I think the way we actually did things produced a final package more entertaining and slick than it would have been otherwise.

(Not that it was all that slick, in truth, but I’m speaking relatively here. And I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Udall and I locked horns a-plenty while writing of the lyrics. He went in for simple homilies and straightforward rhymes, while I was determined to make every outrageous pun and leverage every strange circumstance I possibly could. For instance, I couldn’t let the fact that we had an Elder Lewis paired with an Elder Clark slip by without trying to work some reference to the Louisiana Purchase into their lines. (And oh my heck5, did it take some time to find a rhyme for “purchase”!)

Udall was willing to be more in-your-face and rebellious in his lyrics than I was. For instance, he wanted one of our refrains to go: “We ain’t gonna take none of Bruce’s crap/And that’s why we’re doing the Wenatchee Rap.” Bruce was our mission president’s first name, and I successfully argued that a copy of our little rap might someday find its way into his hands, at which time we would be better served if that particular sentiment were absent. (I preferred a subtler and more subversive approach to rebellion.)

In the end, we reached a somewhat comfortable accommodation, and I turned my attention to the music. Earlier that week, Udall and I had brought a small Casio keyboard home from the local church, and I stayed up into the wee hours of the night working out a series of musical riffs suitable for rapping over. In the end, time and imagination failed me, and for one segment of the piece I was obliged to appropriate a bit of music written by my childhood chum David6, because—well, it just seemed to fit better than anything I could come up with myself.

I laboriously copied out my music that night, practicing over and over until I could play it in my sleep (and probably did), then managed a few hours of slumber before the big day.

Apparently I also used a couple of tape recorders to layer together a full demo version of “The Wenatchee Rap” that night. Here’s a snippet.

Udall and I arrived at our local church building early enough for me to photocopy everyone’s part and highlight their lines. The missionaries trickled in from around the zone, all a bit mystified by the little we had told them about that day’s activity. I set up the Casio keyboard in the cultural hall, and we conducted a quick rehearsal so the missionaries could overcome their inhibitions and so we could work out the kinks. A few of them complained about their lines and rewrote them, while others volunteered to fill in for the four folks who had failed to show. As the rehearsal proceeded, I recognized with a sinking feeling something I had failed to anticipate—that most of our charges had about as much rhythm as a lumpy rock.

Oh, well, I thought, swallowing my frustration. The purpose of this is not to make high art. It’s to have fun. And I almost managed to convince myself of that.

At eleven-thirty, we piled into a few cars and convoyed over to the studio. When we knocked on the basement door, the fellow who greeted us said, “You must be the twenty rapping missionaries I was warned about.” I had the distinct impression that, unlike the owners of the music store, he was not a member of the church.

We trooped inside and got started.

The initial work took place between me and the recording engineer alone in the control booth. We selected ninety beats per minute as a good tempo and proceeded to record a basic click track while I silently read along with my musical scribbles. The click track would not be part of the final mix, but it would play out over the studio headphones during recording to help the performers keep the beat. When this was done, we had about seven and a half minutes of clicks.

After the click track, I recorded the full bass line I’d written, playing it on a synthesizer in the control booth. We got the bass line on the first take, and then we were ready to start recording the vocal tracks.

We worked one district at a time, recording each group on a separate track to simplify things when we had to go back and redo things. Even with me counting off the beat and mouthing the words along with them, many of the elders strayed woefully far from the rhythmic straight and narrow. One would take a beat too long with his verse, the next would start a beat too late, and things would cascade into sonic chaos. Sadly, we usually couldn’t go back more than once to try to get a better take since we had limited time in the studio.

That was okay, though, because we were having fun. We were definitely having fun.

Here’s a snippet from near the beginning of the track, which essentially provides the thesis statement for what’s to come.

Originally, most of the connecting lyrics—the bits that introduced and concluded the number, as well as the bridges between each district’s verses—were split evenly between me and Udall. As the session progressed, though, Udall grew more weary and mike-shy. The longer the session dragged on, the more of his lines he pushed off on me. I think he may have resented the way I was dominating the proceedings.

Laying down the vocals took a couple of hours. When we finally had that in the can, I pulled my handwritten sheet music back out and recorded the main keyboard line. Last of all, I programmed the drum machine with a simple rhythm so we could put the percussion track to bed.

Udall was not the only one getting cranky by this point. The other missionaries were bored and restless, and the engineer was well past ready for the session to be done with. He queued up the master tape and hit record on a new track. The click track counted me in and I tapped “Start” on the drum machine, which kicked off in perfect sync with the beat. I was as happy as anyone to be so close to the finish line.

A minute went by. Two. Three. I was listening to the full mix in my headphones as the tape spun away, slowly realizing that something going wrong. The percussion was going out of sync with the music and the click track. It was subtle at first, but toward the end of the tune it was bad enough to grate on my nerves like fingernails on slate. I looked at the drum machine. We had recorded the click track at 90 bpm, but somehow the tempo now was set to 92.

I took off the cans and pointed this out to our engineer. “The drums are way out of sync at this point,” I said. “We have to go back and record them again.”

The engineer disagreed. “It sounds fine. No one’s gonna hear the difference.”

“I can hear the difference.”

We were four hours into a three-hour recording session. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, eager to get us out the door.

So, that crazy-making percussion track played through to the end, gaining a beat every thirty seconds and sounding worse by the moment. When it was all down on tape, the engineer mixed the tracks down to a single cassette, slapped it into my palm, and kicked us out of the studio.

This snippet, which comes after the six-minute mark, demonstrates just how far out of sync the drum track slipped over the course of the recording. It’s a sonic mess.

We all went out to eat afterward, and it began to feel more like a typical zone activity day, full of jokes and trash-talking and horsing around. In the days that followed, Udall and I made copies of “The Wenatchee Rap” and sent one to each of the missionaries who participated. (I also sent a copy home to my family, and when I returned to Utah in August at the completion of my mission, I was greeted by a houseful of younger siblings who knew all the words and could rap along perfectly, rhythmic stumbles and all.)

Second- and third-generation copies spread virally through the mission. One eventually found its way into the hands of our mission president in Spokane, Bruce Lloyd, who called Udall and me up one day to tell us—much to our shock—how much he liked it. At the next series of zone conferences, he held up “The Wenatchee Rap” as an example of one of the more creative strategies he’d ever seen for building unity and trust between the members of a zone. (Thank goodness we didn’t keep that line about “Bruce’s crap.”)

In short, “The Wenatchee Rap” was a hit. And do you know what? When I put it on the stereo these days, I hardly hear all the stumbles and silliness. Maybe it’s just overfamiliarity, but the “The Wenatchee Rap” sounds right to me. Not right like I once thought the Church was right, but right in the sense that I did a good thing. I really did have a good time making it, and so did the rest of the zone, and I smile when I hear those cheesy synthesized notes start to play. For where I was at that point in my life, it was the right thing to do. In fact, given our indenture to an institution determined to stamp out any spark of individuality or creativity we still possessed, I consider it a miracle that “The Wenatchee Rap” exists at all.

But next time I’m recording a song, dammit, the drums will be in sync. ∅

Tomorrow: The Eighteen Rapping Missionaries You Were Warned About

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My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I’d encourage you to order it from your local independent bookstore or a retailer like Bookshop.org or Powell’s.

Donald William Shunn, my father, died on March 10, 2008, after (as the saying goes) a long battle with cancer. After many different long battles, in fact, but cancer is the one that notched the victory in the arena. I always thought it was his heart that would get him. I know he had one, though he usually exiled it to Siberia when dealing with me. He was 72.

Despite the number of words I’m about to spend on him, this story is not primarily about Don, as people called him. But you do need to know about his tendency to speak his mind without a filter. As a freshly minted Ed.D. from UCLA, he moved his family1 to Utah to pursue what he expected to be an upward trajectory in public school administration. Instead he spent thirty years mostly as a shop teacher, blaming nepotism in the school district for keeping him down. It probably also didn’t help that he couldn’t stop telling the higher-ups what idiots he thought they were.

He spoke his mind inconveniently in church too. When a Mormon is offered a church position such as Sunday school teacher or chorister, the entire congregation is asked to approve the calling by a show of hands. My mother had been asked to lead our ward’s Relief Society, the women’s auxiliary organization. (It’s a demanding spare-time job, and of course it does not pay.) That Sunday in sacrament meeting, the bishop announced the calling and asked those in favor for a show of hands. Nearly every arm went up. The bishop asked if anyone was opposed. One hand shot into the air. My father’s.

You have to understand, this almost never happened. No one ever opposed a calling, not unless someone knew about a terrible disqualifying sin. I was away as a missionary at the time so I didn’t witness this event myself, but I can well imagine the scandalized thrill that ran through the congregation. My mother must have been mortified.

When summoned to the bishop’s office after church, my father was typically blunt about why he’d raised his hand. “I’m the head of the household,” he told the bishop. “This affects my family, and you didn’t run it past me first.”

Two or three weeks before the end, with my father in home hospice care, I flew to Utah from Chicago to take my turn sitting up watching him through the night. I didn’t want to. My natural difficulties with illness and suffering were compounded by the decades of misunderstanding and enmity between us. I loved him, of course I did, but I hated him too—for the physical and emotional abuse, yes, for the impossibly high standard to which I was held, but most of all for being raised by a man who spoke bluntly and questioned authority but beat me down mercilessly when I followed his example.

I think part of him hated me too, for turning my back so thoroughly and publicly on the religion he had drilled into me from my earliest memories, and which he often claimed had saved his life. From 1995 to 2005, I was one of the better-known ex-Mormon firebrands on this new frontier called the World Wide Web, with the explicit mission of guiding other miserable Saints to a better life outside the Church’s influence. Of course, the miracle of the Internet meant that everyone in my home town knew what I was about, and the humiliation this caused my parents must have been intense. He may have been off his meds, but on a phone call once when I was living in Brooklyn he mused about hauling his shotgun across the country and “taking care” of me.

So I sat up with him, forty years old, wishing I could ask him a million questions about his life and adventures before the sun came up, wanting to excavate what made him the way he was—so generous with others, so harsh with his own family—but also hoping the intravenous drip would just keep him asleep. Because when he did wake up, his primary concern was to denounce my beliefs and call me to repentance. I did not expect an apology for the leather belt, but I still couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

I flew back to Utah for the memorial service not long after. My mother seemed curiously animated and light—not glad he was dead so much as relieved of a burden now that his pain was over. The first part of the service was held at the church I attended through much of my youth, a plain and prosaic building with the same simple spire you could see on churches all over town—all over the West, really. As a pallbearer I deliberately chose to be listed in the program as “Donald William Shunn II,” a name I had not acknowledged for well over a decade, probably because it gave me a claim on a connection with my dad that no one else had. (Though I would have much preferred making that connection over a beer.)

After the church service, I rode to the town cemetery in a limo with some of my siblings, including my two younger brothers. They were also pallbearers, and they both spoke at graveside. Their remarks were excellent, though I frequently found myself wishing I’d known the person they were eulogizing. My brothers are the fifth and sixth of eight2, which means they grew up in a different era of family history. I’m not going to say it was easier, but I do think the vibe had relaxed a good deal by then.

Next, a former bishop of ours spoke, Cal Harris. At all but the highest levels, Mormons have a lay clergy. Bishops are plucked from the congregation to lead for maybe three to five years, doing an immense amount of work every week in addition to their day jobs and family responsibilities. Bishop Harris3 was a well-loved high school history teacher (unfortunately not at my school) with a firm command of the classics, and was always interesting and engaging to talk with. He had a knack for understanding teenagers, too. He was a Scoutmaster and a priesthood quorum leader to me before I eventually became his home-teaching companion.4 After my mission, when he was a bishop, I spent many hours in his office trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me that I couldn’t get my life on the straight and narrow path. His insight was always keen and perceptive, and he somehow managed to never sound judgmental.

At graveside, Bishop Harris too spoke about a man I didn’t know well, but whose generosity of spirit I had certainly witnessed from afar. My once-wayward father had that same gift for connecting with troubled and disadvantaged youths, which Harris as a fellow educator could recognize and appreciate and convey to the huddled crowd. I only wished that was the man who had showed up for me in the job of Dad.

After the 21-gun salute—besides his original tour, my father was an Army National Guard veteran with decades of service—and after the casket had been lowered, mourners circulated through that little patch of the Kaysville Cemetery. Many stopped to tell me stories, including stories of my father as a young man. I wish I’d had a tape recorder, because that hour is now a blur.

Then Cal Harris approached, one of the two leading candidates in my life for the role of substitute father figure.5 This bishop who had just spoken to the assembled mourners, a man I really did love and respect a great deal, and who I’m sure had many times heard my father agonize about my own apostasy, held me firmly by the arm. He expressed his sympathy for my loss, then fixed me with an intense stare and said:

“It’s true, you know. Deep down you know it, don’t you.”

He meant the Mormon gospel, and he didn’t make it sound like a question.

I had spent my life respecting authority, giving in to authority, averting my eyes from authority, even when it chafed, even when it applied vicious spurs, even when it lashed out in the guise of love, or under the delusion that love is what was really driving the train. In that moment I rebelled.

“I don’t,” I said, and I could hear the steel in my voice.

Bishop Harris swept me into a tight embrace—was he afraid to look me in the eye?—as I went on, dispensing with titles:

“Cal, I’m like my father that way. I can’t say words that I don’t believe, and I don’t believe it.”

He looked up at me. I had at least six inches on him. “Think about it for me from time to time.”

I had studied the history of the Mormon movement thoroughly, read and dissected everything I could get my hands on, weighed and judged it against the authorized line from Church Headquarters. I had mastered the material in a way I hoped he as a historian might respect.

“I think about it all the time,” I said.

He let me go and nodded. He put out his hand. “We can still be friends, though, right?”

“Of course,” I said, and we shook.

It was one of the proudest moments of my life. My friend Cal Harris rose to meet it in a way the man in the ground never had.

I’m glad to report that I crossed paths with Calvin Harris one last time. It was at my mother’s funeral thirteen years later, April 27, 2021. We had a lovely conversation, and I’m glad we did. Less than four months later, he was dead too, from COVID-19 complications. I had a tree planted in his name.

I never stopped thinking about it, Cal. And I never changed the conclusion I reached. ∅

Previous: The Scouring of the Shelves

The day of my mission farewell—Sunday, August 31st—dawned clear and hot, an unambiguous sky brimming with azure light and cheer. The house on Westbrook Road was bursting at the seams; not only did it contain the usual army of inhabitants, but my mother’s parents had driven up from their new home in southern Utah the day before, various other relatives had settled in for the day, and meats, breads, casseroles, cakes, and cookies occupied every available horizontal surface.

But despite this bounty of food and family, my first destination of the day was a little church across town, where my friend Nelson Slater was offering his homecoming address. Nelson was almost exactly two years older than I, but thanks to the vagaries of school enrollment we had graduated from high school at the same time. He had been one of our school’s star wrestlers, but had bypassed the offer of a four-year athletic scholarship to leave on a mission to Japan shortly after our graduation. The fact that his homecoming and my farewell fell on the same day was too wonderful a coincidence for me to resist. I had to be there to hear him speak.

I had no trouble recognizing him in the foyer of his church, shaking hands with all the friends and neighbors he hadn’t seen for two years, but when the service got underway and he mounted the stand to offer his remarks, the man who spoke was someone I didn’t recognize at all. It looked like Nelson, and it sounded like Nelson, but the words coming out of his mouth, the conviction with which they were delivered, the maturity of their content, all underscored the fact that this Elder Slater was a man born on the spiritual battlegrounds of Japan, and only a distant relation of the boy I knew from Kaysville.

How I wanted to return from my mission so grown-up, so distinctively mellowed and improved! And how desperately I feared it!

I was back home by noon, shooing relatives out of the living room to clear a rehearsal space for the little choir that would start trickling in at any moment. Clasping hands across a great gulf of time with the luminous stranger Nelson Slater had become had shaken me, but there was too much still to be done that day to dwell on it.

Before long my friends had arrived, and we gathered around the console piano to practice our number. Kevin Kilmer was there, and David Moss, and Joel Zimm and Burke Tanner, and Rachel and Naomi Osbourne and half a dozen others. I had recruited my friend Lucy Pratt to sing the soprano solo, but Kevin Kilmer had declined to take the tenor solo. “It’s your farewell, dude,” he told me. “Your voice is fine. You should do it.”

Katrina arrived while we were practicing. After we had run through our song a few times, my father hustled us all out the door: friends, family, and hangers-on alike. It was time for the show to begin.

The roles of the speakers in a farewell sacrament meeting are so well scripted by tradition that my father, as we sat in church two weeks earlier, had taken the sheet of notepaper on which I was arranging the program for my farewell and in his aggressive but precise handwriting added a topic beside the name of each speaker:

• Grandpa: “What a Good Boy He Is”

• Mom: “Not My Little Boy Anymore”

• Bishop: “He Will Be a Good Missionary”

• Dad: “He’s Not Ready, but It’s Time; or, Tanja Really Needs His Bedroom Badly”

• Bill: “I Will Bear My Testimony to You All”

As it turned out, the talks at my farewell did hew rather closely to these acerbic prognostications. My grandfather, in measured tones, quoted statistics on how much the Church had grown in the twenty years since he’d spoken at the farewell of a young man who was now a doctor at one of the local hospitals. My mother was reaching for the tissues long before the close of her remarks, despite her stated determination not to cry. And my father, recounting my long preparations for mission service, managed to work in digs at just about all the friends I’d ever had.

“Things were going well,” he told the congregation, “until Bill heard about this science fiction writing workshop in Michigan, and he wanted to use some of the money he’d saved for his mission to go. Well, finally we relented, and he took his three thousand dollars out and went—and boy, were those friends of his weird! If you think all these friends of his here in the front row look weird, you haven’t seen the pictures he brought back from Michigan. Those people were weird. But I guess it worked out, because here he is, still going on a mission.”

Quite an object lesson, for me if no one else.

Interspersed between the remarks were three musical numbers: my five youngest siblings singing “I Hope They Call Me on a Mission”; Seletha and Tanja performing a flute duet called “O That I Were an Angel,” with my accompaniment on the piano; and of course my little choir, composed of my only somewhat weird-looking friends from the front row, performing our number from The Falcon and the Snowman.1

And then it was time for me to speak.

My seat was in the first row of the choir on the dais at the front of the chapel, facing the congregation. I’d been making haphazard notes all week, and in my few free moments during this meeting I’d attempted to pull these together into some semblance of coherence, trying not to draw attention to myself as I rifled through my scriptures and scribbled hasty thoughts on a series of three-by-five cards. Now, still not entirely certain what I was going to say, I retrieved my materials from beneath my seat as my dozen friends filed off the dais and back to their seats in the front pew.

At the pulpit, I squared my note cards and surveyed the crowd. Our chapel with its twenty or so rows of pews could hold perhaps five hundred people, and regularly did. The great accordion-fold dividers of metal and plastic that formed the back wall of the chapel had been thrown open, slid into their niches, and tied back, exposing an overflow area filled with padded folding chairs that could hold another sixty or seventy, and this too was a regular occurrence. But there were enough visitors that day that the dividers at the back of the overflow area had also been opened, exposing the cultural hall, where ten or twelve more rows of folding chairs had been set up, and effectively doubling the size of the room that stretched in front of me.

I always felt a certain nervousness standing before my congregation to speak, as I had on several previous occasions, but that day a nest of snakes in my gut were fighting for the privilege of slithering up my windpipe and strangling me out of my misery. The crowd was huge, at least by sacrament meeting standards—upturned faces like a field of expectant flowers, fading from sharp singularity to a riot of visual static as it spilled across the carpeted sward of the cultural hall. Everyone I knew was here, everyone—with the glaring exception of my Clarion friends, of course, and of the high-school buddies who, like yesterday’s draftees, had preceded me into the mission field. It was like a vast tapestry woven from strands of all the lives that had ever intersected mine, and when viewed like this seemed to form a pattern or picture I could almost but not quite grasp.

But one presence outshone all the others. Close to the back of the chapel proper sat Katrina, edgy and restless, with her parents and her friend Michelle Bannister nearby. I tried not to let my gaze linger, nor to let her obvious discomfort unsettle me, but I never stopped being aware of her, and of the fact that this performance would be for her benefit more than anyone else’s—a demonstration of my fitness as a good Mormon boyfriend, and a foretaste of the spiritual rewards of a lifetime together.

Not that I was putting any pressure on myself.

When the members of my choir were all settled in their seats and staring up at me—Kevin Kilmer flashing me a smile and a thumbs-up—I opened the rusted pipe at the back of my throat and began to speak.

In preparation for writing this chapter, I dug through my stacks and stacks of old cassette tapes until I found a recording I hadn’t listened to in more than ten years. I’m an inveterate pack rat, a habit that compels me not only to preserve every scrap of paper that passes through my doodling hands but also to bottle and mount the sound waves associated with every possible major event in my life. This is why I was able to spend one recent remarkable morning in my Brooklyn apartment in a sort of time warp, listening to my own young voice as I addressed my ward on the occasion of my mission farewell.

In fiction, when a character listens to a recording or watches a video or hears an unexpected voice from the past, you’re apt to see a turn of phrase like this: “The years melted away, as if Elbert were transported back in time.” I’m here to report this as complete fiction, at least in my case. As I listened to my tape, the thirty-two-year-old2 me did not find himself back at the pulpit of a new-smelling chapel on Crestwood Road, reinhabiting the nineteen-year-old’s shoes as that day’s sights and sounds and scents came flooding back like rainwater through a dry wash. What startled me was how distant those songs and voices sounded, as if the tape recorder had been under a pew in the middle of the congregation and not on the floor right beside the pulpit. And even more so, I was amazed at how alien the whole affair seemed.

I have a pretty good memory for the details of my childhood and adolescence, or so I’ve always thought, and I believed I’d been painting a pretty accurate picture in this book of my early life. That was until I put on the tape. Now I recognize that, while my account may indeed be accurate up to a point, it can’t help being incomplete. It’s as if I were in the middle of painting a landscape and I stepped back from the canvas only to realize that I’d left out the sky. And not only had I left it out, but now I realized there was no blue in my palette at all. Once there was blue, but now it’s gone—or maybe what’s missing is that indigo color we’ve all heard of but never seen. Whatever. The point is, I’ve seen sky, and I can describe it to you, but I can’t paint it.

Let me tell you about the tape.

Today I remember a certain set of thoughts, feelings, and events that were important to me in the weeks before my mission. These mostly had to do with worry and dread and resentment. The voice on the tape—thin and reedy where I remembered resonance, tentative where I remembered boldness, mildly funny where I remembered comedic genius—that voice reports a completely different set of thoughts, feelings, and events. These mostly have to with humility, acceptance, and anticipation.

It’s not that I’m remembering wrong, I’m sure. It’s just that I’m not remembering everything. That voice is speaking in church. I didn’t expect it to go on about its bitterness at being robbed of two years of its life. But I also didn’t expect it to go on about how through reflection and prayer it had come to embrace its posting to the Canada Calgary Mission as an inspired calling from God.

Was I simply overcome in the moment? Was this an isolated moment of piety, a capitulation, an effect of the same mass hysteria that’s been producing visions and tongues and seizures in congregations since the beginning of time? Was it a lie?

I don’t think it was any of those things. I think I was telling the truth. I don’t remember experiencing any great conversion—hell, I barely remember praying for anything but Katrina’s devotion in the weeks before my mission—but the voice says I did, and I have to believe the voice. It was there. I wasn’t.

I’m thinking a lot about Joseph Smith these days. According to church doctrine, Joseph received his First Vision in 1820, at the age of fourteen. The story goes like this: Joseph’s family and friends were all attracted to different churches, and he didn’t know which one he should join. One morning he repaired to a grove of trees near his home in upstate New York, seeking a quiet spot to commune with God and ask his burning question: Which church is right?

God gave Joseph more of an answer than he expected. God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ—two separate and distinct individuals—descended from heaven in a pillar of light and told Joseph that no true church could be found on Earth, Christianity having fallen into apostasy within the first century or so after the Crucifixion. “They draw near to me with their lips,” said the second personage, Jesus Christ, “but their hearts are far from me.”

Jesus instructed Joseph to join no church, because God’s true church would one day be restored to the earth through Joseph himself. Recording these events in 1838, Joseph wrote: “It seems as though the adversary was aware, at a very early period of my life, that I was destined to prove a disturber and an annoyer of his kingdom; else why should the powers of darkness combine against me? Why the opposition and persecution that arose against me, almost in my infancy?”

He wrote this eighteen years after the First Vision was supposed to have taken place, and you can almost see the gears turning in his head as he tries to make sense of all the tribulation and pain he’s endured in the interim. You can also see him trying to reclaim the myth that his life had become: “I have been induced to write this history, to disabuse the public mind, and put all inquirers after truth in possession of the facts, as they have transpired, in relation both to myself and the Church, so far as I have such facts in my possession.”

This account from 1838 seems to be the first complete telling of the First Vision. Historians can demonstrate that Joseph told portions of the story (or variations on the story, to be less charitable) as early as 1831, but that was still eleven years after the event itself. Back then it was an angel Joseph had seen, according to those who heard the story, or God alone. No mention of two personages was made until much later.

Scholars, of course, are interested in discovering how Joseph’s telling of the First Vision—the central event in Mormon history—did or did not evolve over the years leading up to his written account of 1838. How reliable are the witnesses who claim to have heard different stories before then? We can’t really know. What does it mean that one person heard “angel” and another heard “God”? We all know how garbled information can get as it passes from one person to another. Humans are not reliable conduits for error-free transmission.

All I’m trying to do here is put myself in Joseph’s place. Here I am, fourteen years down the road from the events I’m recounting. I’ve told this story dozens of times in all sorts of situations, always with a different level and choice of detail, whatever’s appropriate to the circumstances. Every person who hears it walks away with a different set of impressions, depending on his or her relationship to me, familiarity with Mormonism, age and interest and so forth, and the ones who pass the story along no doubt mess up some of the details. (I know because the garbled versions sometimes get back to me.)

Now the time has come to set down the definitive account of my mission. I’m going to tell it exactly like it was, with all the pathos and wit I can muster, because I’m the one who knows exactly how it was. Only now there’s this tape, cluing me in to the fact that I don’t really remember as much about how it was—how I was—as I thought I did. What do I do?

I have an ex-girlfriend—let’s call her Genevieve3—who would rather shave her thighs with a cheese grater than admit to anything less than crystal perfection in her memory of who she is and what she’s done. God help the person whose memory differs from hers even to the smallest degree. (All too often that person was me, which should have been a sign to break off the relationship much sooner than I eventually did. Interestingly enough, the institutional memory of the Mormon Church seems to work the same way—”It did happen that way, and we’ll excommunicate you if you say otherwise”—and I stayed in that relationship way too long as well.) I wonder how ol’ Genevieve would have reacted to a recording like this, one to contradict her ambered conception of herself? Every blood vessel in her brain would probably have burst.

It’s interesting as well to imagine how the Joseph Smith of 1838 would have responded to a recording of himself from 1820. (Besides as a miraculous occurrence, I mean, or as evidence that there really was power in his seerstones.) I wonder how different he was after years of acclaim as a prophet, after years of fugitive existence, after years of beatings and prisons. How many gaps in his memory had he papered over in colors bright or dark by the time he sat down to record his history? How significant or inconsequential had he come to regard himself in the history of America, or the world? How far out of proportion had he magnified whatever event did or did not take place in the copse of trees Mormons now know as the Sacred Grove.

Who can know? But I’m willing to bet there would have been at least something in that recording to give him pause, to make wonder whether or not he was really once the boy he thought he was.

I don’t know what he would have done about it, but it’s probably not what I’m about to do. I’m going to tell you straight out that you’re hearing a biased account. I won’t pretend that what I’m writing is the word-for-word truth. I want to make sure you understand that, like a cheap stereo speaker, there are notes I can no longer reproduce without a nasty rattle. I can tell you that I was once a boy who prayed to God for an understanding of why He was sending me to Canada, and I can tell you that I once felt my prayers had been answered, but I can’t make you believe it, I can’t make you feel it, and that’s because I can’t feel it myself.

That kid on the tape, he sounds like a nice kid, a devoted kid, but he may as well be from outer space. I don’t know him.

And that frightens me.

In this new atmosphere of honesty and openness, I realize there’s a confession I need to make. Remember when I was talking about selling my record collection? I lied.

That’s right, I lied. I never owned a record by Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark. I liked some of their stuff but I never bought any of their records. I just threw that in because I wanted an excuse to use that cool, exotic œ ligature in my book.

I feel much better now that I’ve gotten that off my chest. Thanks for listening.

After church, the Mormon equivalent of a cloud of locusts descended on our house. What a crowd of people! Our home had never seen that much excitement! I tried to spend time with my friends—particularly the non-Mormon ones like Gary and Connor and Elsa, who I now realize I may have insulted in my talk by expressing the hope that they would someday come to know truth like the rest of us—but there were so many people to greet, so many folks who had come specifically to wish me well on my mission, that I couldn’t spend more two minutes at a stretch in any given conversation without having someone break in with an outstretched palm and a word of praise for my wonderful speech in church. (And the interruptions were worth my while. Often the outstretched palm contained cash or a check.) Even Katrina, who hung about on the fringes of the affair like a wraith in sunlight, couldn’t manage to hold my attention for any length of time.

All in all, it was a successful afternoon. Most of the food disappeared, and most of the Kool-Aid-and-Sprite punch, and most of the green Jell-O casseroles too. (Stephen King, in Utah for the filming of the television miniseries The Stand a few years back, raised hackles by joking that Jell-O is Mormon soul food. I don’t know why everyone got so upset. It’s true.) Most of the flowerbeds survived, and I walked away with three or four hundred bucks in my pocket. I also walked away with a stomach full of ham and cheese sandwiches on floured soft rolls, and more chips and salsa than any one human should eat.

I was standing out in the driveway with my father and some of the last straggling neighbors when my mother called to me from the front door of the house. “Bill! Phone!”

I hurried inside. Katrina had left a little while before. Maybe she was calling to arrange to get together later that evening.

But when I picked up the phone, I didn’t immediately recognize the voice on the other end. “Bill? Hi, this is Sally.”

Sally? I racked my brain. Sally? Did I know anyone named Sally? “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sally who?”

“Sally Gwylan, from Clarion.”

“Oh, my heck. Sally. I’m sorry, I was trying to think of any Sally I knew close by. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks,” said Sally Gwylan from Clarion. “I’m actually in Salt Lake with my friend Anne-Marie. We’ve been visiting family in Oregon, and we’re on our way home to Taos, and we thought we’d stop for a look around. Do you think you might be able to join us?”

It was still early evening, but the party here was pretty much over. “Sure,” I said. “Give me an hour or so.”

I hadn’t known Sally particularly well at Clarion. This was a result not just of my natural reticence but also of my inexperience in dealing with anyone openly gay. I’d been so sheltered, in fact, that I never would have guessed she was gay if it weren’t for the T-shirt she wore the first or second day of class: “Hip Hooray, I’m Glad I’m Gay.”

So I was more than a little nervous to hang out alone with Sally and her friend Anne-Marie—not because I didn’t like Sally, but because I didn’t want to do or say something stupid and come across as an ignorant boob. That’s what was on my mind as I told my father I was heading to Salt Lake to visit a Clarion friend.

“You can’t leave, young man,” he said. “More people might show up, and they’re sure not coming to see me.”

“If they’re coming at this hour, they deserve to miss me,” I said. “And how often do I get to see my friends from Clarion? I’ll be back before it gets too late.”

When I met Sally and Anne-Marie by the east gate to Temple Square, my nervousness vanished like ice on a stove. Thin, myopic Sally greeted me with a surprisingly strong and enthusiastic hug, as did her rather zaftig companion Anne-Marie. I showed them around Temple Square, and over dinner (back then I could eat and eat and stay as thin as a soda straw) I explained the significance of the day they had chosen for their visit.

Sally had asked me where she and Anne-Marie could find vegetarian food in Salt Lake, and I had taken them to the Training Table, a fancy hamburger joint where you could also get a hearty portion of salad. (I guess I assumed salad was all a vegetarian could really eat. Silly me, but they didn’t complain.4) We were having a lovely conversation, but when I told them about my farewell sacrament meeting and open house, Sally peered up from her dish of greens with a look of distress.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We shouldn’t have taken you away from all that.”

“Sally, it’s fine. This is exactly what I needed. I was starting to think I’d never see another face from Clarion again. I’m glad you’re here.”

And I was. I’d been wishing for a Clarion reunion and now I had it, along with the reminder that there were still people who cared about me in the wider world outside of Utah. I would need that in the months to come. I would need it a lot.

I don’t remember whether or not that visit was an answer to another prayer, but it might as well have been, so thanks, God. Thanks for bringing two lesbians into the heart of the Mormon stronghold to remind me about friendship and acceptance on the day of my mission farewell.

I really appreciate it.

The only thing that would have been better, in fact, is if they’d been wearing name tags, just like two missionaries.

I like my symbolism piled high and deep. ∅

Coming Soon: Girlfriend, Interrupted

Dedicated to the memory of Sally Gwylan (1953 - 2021).

My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I’d encourage you to order it from your local independent bookstore or a retailer like Bookshop.org or Powell’s.

When grappling with works of genre fiction, most mainstream literary critics can be counted on to demonstrate a peculiar tone-deafness. Take the case of The New Yorker‘s James Wood, who calls David Mitchell’s new novel The Bone Clocks “weightless,” “empty,” and “demented.” So “frictionless” does Wood find it, in fact, that it prompts him to call into question the soundness of such earlier Mitchell works as Cloud Atlas.1

Upon reflection, I have to admit that The Bone Clocks is probably my least favorite of Mitchell’s novels (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet being the only one I haven’t yet read2). But I found it for the most part extremely engaging, even thrilling, and I dispute Wood’s contention that “the realism—the human activity—is relatively unimportant” when stacked up against the novel’s science-fictional premise.

The Bone Clocks is built, like much of Mitchell’s work, around a structural conceit that passes the duty of first-person narrator, like a baton in a relay race, to a new point-of-view character every hundred pages or so. Each of the book’s six sections becomes, in essence, a novella of its own, conveying the overall narrative from its intensely realistic beginnings with a runaway teenager in 1984 to its apocalyptic, post-oil conclusion in 2043.

Each subsequent section shows us earlier characters through new, illuminating sets of eyes, while in the background we get glimpses of a long-running secret war between two groups of more-or-less-immortal combatants. The fifth section immerses us fully in this ancient conflict before the sixth returns us to the point of view of our original narrator, Holly Sykes, though 59 years have passed since we first met her.

Critic Wood finds the novel entertaining enough, and skillfully written, though he complains that the supernatural shenanigans rob our lowly mortal heroes of their agency. The story turns these sad “detectives of drivel” into mere puppets marched here and there at the whims of their scheming author-god.

It’s true that some of the genre material clunks and clangs, most particularly the fifth section’s climactic battle between the good Horologists and the evil Anchorites. (I found it perversely reassuring to see that Mitchell doesn’t do everything well.) But this does nothing to rob any of the mortal characters of their agency. Far from being puppets, they continue to love, hate, yearn, rage, seek vengeance, and forgive, just like real people, even as they struggle to resist the larger conflict that periodically disrupts their lives in ugly ways. Yes, sometimes the irresistible forces of the novel alter the trajectories of ordinary lives, but no differently than might a traffic accident, or a job loss, or a chronic illness. A narrowing of options does not imply a loss of agency.

Wood insists that the larger-than-life conflict drains the rest of the story of meaning, that what happens “in the novel between people has meaning only in relation to what occurs in the novel between Anchorites and Horologists.” I disagree. Mitchell has plenty to say in this book. It’s just that critics of Wood’s ilk miss it because it’s rendered in a register they can’t hear (the register of ideas), not the one they’re listening for (the register of the human heart). (The irony is, The Bone Clocks is filled to the brim with matters of the human heart.)

So what is Mitchell up to in The Bone Clocks? The key, for me, is in that strange sixth section, depicting the days when our teetering civilization finally teeters too far and slides irrevocably toward collapse. This is when we realize that the battle between Horologists and Anchorites, like all mankind’s internecine battles, is what is truly insignificant. Holly’s lifelong struggle to ignore the battle waging around her, to carry on with her life despite everything, is the entire point. It mirrors humanity’s own struggle to carry on while helpless to oppose the gargantuan forces dismantling our ecosystem and our very society. How often do we raise our heads above the parapet, survey that epic destruction, then do our best to pretend it isn’t ever really going to affect us?

It’s a bleak view, yes, but one not devoid of hope. The last few pages of the book remind us that, even if our own generation is doomed, the fight is still worthwhile—perhaps only worthwhile—if there’s a chance of saving the next.

James Wood closes his analysis by implying that humanity since Milton has had no need of the good-versus-evil story. “The novel takes over from the epic,” he says, “not just because inwardness opens itself up as the great novelistic subject but because human freedom asserts itself against divine arrangement.” But from where I’m sitting, as feckless, sluggish governments battle titanic, rapacious corporations with the fate of our species and countless others in the balance, human freedom seems as illusory as ever, and an epic like The Bone Clocks every bit as necessary. ∅

Update: In response to this post, my friend posted a reminiscence on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, his favorite David Mitchell novel.

The Divergent Panorama

Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

(In reaction to Bill Shunn …

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2 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jetse de Vries

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They battled on my father’s mantel,
the porcelain youth with broken blade
astride his rampant steed,
its hooves upraised to evade
the gnashing teeth of the dragon beneath.
Word was, it was my grubby fingers
that had snapped off the sword,
my fault he found himself caught out,
ill-equipped for the fray.
The blood on those inevitable jaws
would bloody also my white hands.
How could righteousness prevail?

They battle now atop my desk,
boy, bay and beast, that lowly trinity
locked in their deadly labors,
begrimed by half a century’s exertions.
Someone at some point sent them out
for repair, the phantom blade
reincarnate and solid as bone.
The fever of youth is on the boy,
his sword a hard promise.
The horse’s hooves are poised to crush
the serpent’s rolling eyes in its skull.
It won’t be long. The snapping dragon is weary.
How can it think to fight on? ∅

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It did. You can roll your eyes or laugh or make apparent your disdain however you like, but it did. I am not a man given to premonitions, and until I felt one I would have scoffed too. But there is no arguing or rationalizing away the utter certainty that falls from a clear blue sky, transforming you in a heartbeat with the knowledge that death is at hand.

I had taken my third cup of coffee out to the deck at the back of my apartment. The morning was cool but suffused with that loamy smell that even in the city means a pleasant, bearable heat is coming. The only clouds overhead were flat, ridged, and orderly, like giant, rough-woven welcome mats. Birds flitted around the feeder in the tree in the landlady’s small back yard below. The dog had followed me out with a tennis ball in his mouth and I was just reaching for it when—I knew. I knew.

Nothing had changed. The morning was just as glorious as before, but I knew. Death stood at my shoulder like a swift shadow, vanishing when I turned my head but present nonetheless. I met the hopeful eyes of my Black Russian terrier, a large and powerful beast with a ball of green fuzz clamped in his jaws, and I began to tremble. I took a sip of coffee, but it tasted like oil in my mouth. I began to realize how exposed I was on my deck, how very many perils threatened me there.

My wife and I were relatively new to the neighborhood. I didn’t know which of our neighbors, with their little squares of yard marching off in each direction, might hoard a secret cache of guns and decide that sunny morning to get in some target practice from the vantage of his own second-level deck. Our own deck was newly rebuilt; some member of the railing I leaned against might choose that moment to give up the struggle for immobility and give way, sending me tumbling backward to break my neck on the stairs below. A squirrel could dance chattering across the high-wire at the back of the yard, and Ivan, heedless for once of my commands, might bolt down the steps and into the alley where, as desperately I followed trying to keep him in sight, some reckless driver in a salvage pickup might run me down like a cat.

Cooling coffee sloshed onto my hand, and I gripped my mug more tightly to still the shaking. The crosstalk of the birds was deafening. I could not stay outside, where the open, yawning sky could at any moment hurl down a scrap of metal torn from the fuselage of a jetliner on its descent path, or a flaming iron meteorite, to throw me out at home. I shooed Ivan inside, his rear half wagging uncertainly, and locked the door behind us.

My wife had already left to catch the bus to the train, but my design job was not so rigid in its demands. Still, I had rarely missed a day, even if that day started at ten. Ignoring the breakfast dishes in the sink, I found the cordless phone and called in sick. Then, as I found I could not stop shivering no matter how I chafed my hands or hugged myself or swaddled my hunched shoulders in another flimsy blanket, I ran a bath as hot as I could stand. Ivan watched all this activity with head cocked, raising first one eyebrow then the other like signal flags requesting clarification. I stripped and settled by degrees into the bath, and the dog settled down on the mat beside the tub, furry black head resting on his paws.

The water provided some relief from my chill, but not for long. The heat soothed my eyelids into relaxation, and I sat bolt upright as my lashes met. It was as if the shadow behind me had tapped my shoulder. Ivan, sodden, barked. I couldn’t stay in the tub; what was I thinking? I would nod off, slip beneath the surface, and drown. I might slip standing up and crack my skull like a rotten coconut on the edge of the sink. The weight of all this water would be too much for the old floor joists beneath me and they would give way, dropping my tub into the apartment below, if not all the way to the basement, where I would fracture my spine on impact, if, that is, the recoil of the torn and flanged copper pipes I passed on my way down didn’t disembowel me, or severed power lines not electrocute me before I could roll clear of the bathwater torrent.

I dried and dressed in a panic, upsetting the dog, I’m afraid. The brilliant sunbeams reaching like fingers through the curtains only reminded me of the myriad ways death could strike there: carbon monoxide poisoning, gas explosion, prosaic housefire, food poisoning, home invasion, dog going crazy, the list went on. I could not stay inside any more than I could stay outside, but at least outside would put me far from Ivan when the inevitable came.

I shied away from driving the car that lurked like a trapdoor spider in the alley garage. Instead I wandered the streets, fearful every moment, hesitating to cross at intersections, flinching from every bird shadow and backfire, hungry but not hungry enough to risk choking, despising the happy passersby in the warm city sunshine too wrapped up in their own cocoons of delusion to pay heed to the swarming shadows at their own backs, or mine.

How the day passed without mishap I cannot say, but by early evening I’d meandered so far that I would not reach home again before dark if I remained on foot. I considered just continuing vaguely southeast, as loath to expose Martina and Ivan to the time bomb I was as to vanish without ever seeing them again. In the end, torn with indecision, I ascended to a crowded rush-hour train platform, thinking to end the debate by letting the shadow push me in front of an oncoming train.

The warm evening air was heavy with weariness and the anticipation of home, with the promise of cool hours to follow. I shouldered my way gingerly through the throng toward the edge of the platform. A train was arriving, and already I was picturing the vision of asphalt far below through the elevated track, the last thing I would see before the sizzling wheels cleaved me like a sausage. But that vista was not yet in view when I stumbled on someone’s foot, or briefcase, or shadow. I flung a hand out. Was it to grasp the arm of the woman in the red blazer whose back loomed in front of me? My palm struck her square in the spine. I pushed.

Did she see the view I had imagined, the squares of street between suspended railroad ties? I don’t know. I did not even see her face. All I know is that as the brakes shrieked, as commuters screamed, as metal buckled, I landed face down on the splintery planks of the platform, and the shadow did not land with me.

I see you don’t believe me. I see you think I’m crazy. That’s fair. But after my pilgrimage today through the valley of the shadow, after six hours in a hot interrogation room, after winning back my life, do you think I’m handing anything over to some punk with a knife in an alley? Do you really think that’s my name inscribed on your blade?

If you don’t, these shadows aren’t keeping you here.

But if you do, then come on. Try me. ∅

I was sad to learn a couple of months ago that the Trump administration has canceled three of the five commemorative U.S. quarters that were supposed to be issued in 2026:

Quarters that were meant to honor the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement will no longer be produced, The Wall Street Journal reports. Instead, the Treasury Department will replace those with designs honoring the Mayflower, the Revolutionary War, and the Gettysburg Address.

One of the scrapped designs would have featured Frederick Douglass, while the other two would have featured a women’s suffrage marcher and school integration icon Ruby Bridges. This comes despite a law passed during the first Trump administration that requires at least one quarter released for the country’s semiquincentennial to commemorate women.

I feel a small personal connection to this issue, though it takes some explaining. It goes back to the year I lived in Denver, Colorado, from late 2022 to late 2023. I had an apartment near the home of my cousin C., with whom I have long been close1. She is a corporate lawyer, while her spouse Q.2 worked at the time as a lawyer for the Treasury Department.

C. and Q. had lived in Washington, D.C., for years before the pandemic made remote work feasible for them both. Their apartment was not all that far from the Capitol, and after January 6th they decided it was high time to move back west and buy a house.

When I arrived in Denver, I spent a lot of time with C. and Q., and I was finally able to get to know Q. better. It turned out they and I shared many interests, including dogs, whiskey, martial arts movies, science, politics, and travel. (A regret of mine is that a family reunion3 prevented me from accompanying Q. on a trip to France that summer.) We toured distilleries, threw a couple of dinner parties, and even took a stirred cocktail making class together at Death & Co. Denver4. They became one of my best friends.

All the while, Q. was still working for the federal government, taking on greater and greater responsibilities. Even under the Biden administration, things were not as rosy for queer employees as you might expect. In fact, one of Q.’s biggest accomplishments at Treasury—pushed through despite opposition both passive and hostile—was the implementation of a more detailed and expansive policy on the treatment of LGBTQ+ employees than covered the government generally. It affirmed, among other things, the right of Treasury workers to specify the name under which they chose to identify5. I remember toasting Q. with some very fine whiskey on the day Secretary Janet Yellen approved the policy.

As you can see, Q. was deeply involved in issues of concern to their community, and was always looking for ways to support and nurture their peers. Chatting on a message board for federal employees in the Denver region, Q. and a few other people came up with the idea of a monthly LGBTQ+ meetup where folks who worked in a wide variety of government agencies and services could get together, have a beer, and talk about the kinds of challenges they faced every day in their jobs.

Q. organized the first meetup to test the idea. They were excited but (like me) had a certain amount of social anxiety. C. was unable to go with them because of work, so Q. asked me if I would tag along.

“But I don’t work for the government,” I said. “Will I even be welcome?”

I was really asking if a cisgendered straight dude would be welcome at the meetup. It was a needy question, and Q. knew it. They rolled their eyes at me.

“Of course you will,” they said. “But more importantly, I need my security blanket.”

That settled it. “Then I’m all in.”

If I recall correctly, that first meetup took place at Blush & Blu, a venerable lesbian bar on Colfax which has since closed. Only about half a dozen folks were invited, but everyone seems to have a good time, myself included. Q. introduced me as their “ride or die,” and I was accepted just like that. We stayed a little longer (and taxied home a little tipsier) than we had probably intended. The evening had been a success.

More people made it out the next month, and even more the month after that, each time at a different women-owned establishment. I met and chatted with a lot of very interesting people—folks from the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, Internal Revenue, and more.

These were dedicated employees who loved what they did, and who did it despite the difficulties they often faced on the job just for being who they were. It was humbling to hear their enthusiasm for their work, and I left every meetup grateful that people like them were in the trenches not just fighting for their own rights and dignity but doing their damnedest to make our country a better place to live.

One person in particular, whom I’ll call G.6, I recall vividly. G. was an older woman who could not have been more proud to discuss her work at the U.S. Mint. In fact, at her own expense, she had brought with her more than a dozen sets of six of the quarters the Mint had issued as part of its new American Women Quarters Program. She distributed the coins to anyone who wanted a set, thrilled to share the fact that the government was finally doing something concrete to recognize a few trailblazing women from American history.

I was only able to make it out to the first three meetups. Travel plans interfered with the next two, and then I busy getting ready to move out of Colorado. As I was packing, I took special care not to lose the quarters from G. They sit now in a display rack on a shelf in my office, a reminder not just of the good people I met in Denver but that the federal government is largely staffed by committed civil servants who want to work for a better nation, despite the obstacles that might present to them personally.

Or was, I should say. Q., for one, saw the writing on the wall long before the vandals and marauders of DOGE arrived to put a stop to those good intentions. When the buyout offer came, Q. took the severance package and packed out. I don’t blame them one bit for that. When I look at those quarters now, I wonder how many of the people from those meetups did the same, faced with a workplace environment even more hostile than it had been before. I wonder how many of them stayed, and I wonder if they’re okay.

I wonder what we’ve lost as a nation when we drive the best of our civil service out of their jobs. I wonder what kind of people would celebrate an injury of that magnitude and call it an improvement.

Actually, I don’t need to wonder. I know. It’s the same kind of cowardly bullies who are afraid of putting women and Black Americans on the backs of quarters. ∅

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11 January 2016

This morning we wake up to a world without David Bowie.

It seems impossible that he’s gone. If anyone on Earth seemed otherworldly enough to transform himself into something eternal and transcendent, it was Bowie. But even he tried to remind us in 1997 that he was not really an alien but an Earthling.

His death hit me harder this morning than I would have expected (as is no doubt true for all of us). I haven’t felt this devastated at a musician’s death, in fact, since 1990, when Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash. (And is it coincidence that Bowie had helped raised Vaughan’s profile, as he did with so many other musicians?)

I came to Bowie “late,” as I didn’t really start paying attention to his music until 1983, when I was 16. Let’s Dance ruled the charts, but it was generally held that his important work was all behind him and he was now selling out. None of that mattered to me, though. I knew some of his earlier music because he was one of the few ’70s artists who was played on my favorite Utah new wave station. But Let’s Dance was a perfect album for my generation—consummate pop you could move to on the dance floor while still feeling smart. And Bowie himself seemed the epitome of suavity and cool.

A year later, when I was starting college, I remember sitting in the foyer of the Student Union at the University of Utah, where a large screen TV that showed MTV all day was set up in front of about twenty folding chairs. That’s where I watched the debut of Julien Temple’s full 20-minute short film “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean,” in which Bowie played two roles, including the Byronesque pop star Screaming Lord Byron.

I so much wanted to be David Bowie that I tried painting my face like Screaming Lord Byron that Halloween. Despite the ubiquity of the shorter “Blue Jean” video, not many people could tell what I was going for, and I spent a lot of time explaining who I was supposed to be.

(Another fond memory I have from the U.’s Student Union is the time I dragged my ultra-Mormon pal Steve there to see a showing of the The Hunger, which featured Bowie as a sexy vampire. I think it may have scarred him for life.)

I next connected with Bowie when he formed the grungy hard-rock band Tin Machine. I was a huge fan of their 1989 debut album—maybe the only fan—but then Bowie sort of fell off the map for me again. I reconnected permanently in 1997, as Earthling was being released. This was also just as I started working at N2K Entertainment as a web developer for a site called Rocktropolis.com. The company was partnered with Bowie in launching his forward-looking Bowie.net ISP, and we helped stream a groundbreaking live webcast of his Earthling concert from Boston that March. I played Earthling incessantly, and from then on I kept up with all his new releases, and began exploring backward to start understanding what I’d missed.

Sadly, I only saw him play live once, at the Beacon Theater on October 20, 2002, on his New York Marathon tour of all five boroughs. It was a tremendous show. More recently, I was lucky enough to be able to fly to Chicago to see the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. That was an amazing experience, filled with immersive sound, video, costumes, handwritten lyrics, and more. I spent at least four hours wandering back and forth through all the rooms, trying to take in everything. I do not exaggerate when I say it was the best museum show I’ve ever seen.

His productivity and restless experimentation have long been an inspiration and example, to the point that in my short story “Subterraneans” (published in the Glitter and Mayhem anthology) I crammed as many Bowie references, both overt and oblique, as I could. (You can hear a soundtrack to the story here.)

Just this past Friday night, I went with a friend to see Holy Holy play at the Highline Ballroom. This tribute band, of sorts, was created by Bowie’s former drummer Woody Woodmansey and his former bassist and longtime producer Tony Visconti, to play The Man Who Sold the World in its entirety. (Woodmansey and Visconti both played on the original album.) Since Friday was Bowie’s birthday, not to mention the release date for his new album Blackstar (which Visconti produced), I think everyone in the audience secretly hoped he might show up to sing a couple of songs.

That didn’t happen, but at one point Visconti took out his cellphone and called Bowie so we could all sing him “Happy Birthday.”

Did Visconti really get him on the phone? I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters. If it was only an illusion that Bowie could hear us singing, well, much about David Bowie was an illusion. And I would rather that illusion than the reality that, as we sang, Ziggy Stardust lay dying.

Today, all of Planet Earth is blue; most of us, I’m sure, can tell the stories of our own particular relationships with David Bowie. But as my friend Miguel texted to me a little while ago (quoting a tweet by Dean Podestá that was itself widely misattributed to Simon Pegg):

“If you’re sad today, just remember that the world is four billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.”

Amen and amen. ∅

One last thought. Much has been made today of the allusions to mortality and dying in Blackstar and especially “Lazarus.” But lest we forget, death and horror have always played a big role in Bowie’s art. He was always conscious of his mortality, even if we were not.

As I rolled into my last full week of freedom, there were enough necessary tasks vying for my attention to drive thoughts of Katrina far, far from my overwrought head. I had scriptures to study, a wardrobe to assemble, a farewell sacrament meeting to prepare, friends to bid adieu, books to finish reading, affairs to put in order. All these things would keep me sufficiently busy that I’d waste no energy fretting over circumstances outside of my control. In theory.

In practice, no matter how much I had to do I still couldn’t stop thinking about her, worrying the problem she posed like a wolf with a femur between its jaws. Was there sweet marrow waiting inside for me to suck down, or would I only find only dust within? Would the bone break open cleanly, or would the ragged ends leave me with a mouth full of splinters? Should I really be comparing myself to a wolf, when I felt more like a sheep bound for the slaughterhouse? If you stretched a metaphor far enough to break, could the recoil do any damage?

I think I sensed even then that events in my life couldn’t possibly work out the way everyone said they were supposed to. It would be a few months still before the reality behind that premonition starting slapping me in the face, but in the meantime, conflicted as I was, things seemed to be going just about as swimmingly as they could, at least on paper. I had a mission call in hand, a steady girl on my arm, and two years of college behind me. In terms of the script for the life of a good normal Mormon boy, I was even a little ahead of the game.

Which of course meant that I wasn’t really normal. But that wasn’t something I wanted to think about any more than I wanted to think about the two years of monkish asceticism that lay ahead.

I tackled my record collection first.

I sometimes marvel that I had managed to collect any records at all, given my father’s prejudices against rock music. Growing up, we were forbidden to listen to rock because my father persisted in believing, along with most church leaders, that it was all a sinkpot of carnality, sensuality, and devilishness. (If I’d had a dollar for every time I heard from the pulpit that a propulsive backbeat had no purpose other than rocking the hips and inflaming the libidos of young people—well, I might not have been able to retire on it, but at least I could have bought a really good David Bowie LP.)

My early musical tastes ran toward classical and ragtime, mainly as a consequence of what I rehearsed for my piano lessons. I found pop and rock so irrelevant that once in junior high when a fellow student was conducting a survey of favorite music groups, I answered him with the Utah Symphony. That didn’t take long to get around school, and it certainly didn’t keep my books tucked safely beneath my arm in the hallways between classes.

In high school I joined the marching band, on clarinet, where we performed compositions like Joe Zawinul’s “Birdland” and Chuck Mangione’s “Legend of the One-Eyed Sailor.” That shifted my attention to jazz, although I had a hard time at first figuring out how the catchy tunes we played in band fit in with the indecipherable noodling I heard when I switched my radio over to the nighttime programming from the public station at the University of Utah.

By the end of high school, I was writing my own little compositions for piano and driving into the city to search out sheet music by composers from Liszt and Debussy right up through Chick Corea. But at the same time, friends like Andy and Glen were breaking down my resistance to pop bit by bit, inoculating me with measured doses of ska, dub, and New Wave. To my surprise and delight, I began to realize that not only was some of this stuff fun to dance to, but there was even some musical and lyrical sophistication in there from time to time.

My greatest education, however, came at the hands of my friend David Moss’s older brother Joshua. Joshua had an amazing record collection, but even more amazing was his willingness to play those records for us and explain what was cool or noteworthy about them, where they fit into the hierarchy of rock. Everything from Pink Floyd to Grandmaster Flash spun under Joshua’s diamond needle, and I learned more about embracing worthwhile music in that half-finished basement after school than I could have in a hundred lectures or sermons.

Finally I made the plunge myself. I bought my first rock album early in 1984—a cassette tape, actually, not just because Seletha1 had the only working turntable in the family and didn’t like to share, but also because it was so much easier to smuggle into the house than a record. That was Synchronicity by the Police, and I played it so incessantly that before long it became the only thing that could lull me to sleep at night. I followed that soon after with Joe Jackson’s Night and Day, entranced by the combination of his wry, cerebral lyrics and tasty, tasty piano licks.

But still, there were bit and pieces of both recordings that didn’t sit well with me. Joe Jackson sang about wanting to be undressed and caressed, while Sting quite passionately challenged God to explain Himself. I knew these weren’t sentiments I should be exposing myself to. I knew I was opening myself up to the influence of Satan, letting him stamp his shiny lies deep in the fabric of my brain through the seductive medium of music. How many times had my seminary teachers warned me that it was easier to pick up song lyrics through casual listening than it was to memorize scriptures through concentrated effort? And why? Because music is one of the most powerful spiritual forces there is—a puissant and pure form of worship and solace at one end of the spectrum, a carrier wave for insidious and destructive mind viruses at the other.

Makes you want to burn your record collection, doesn’t it?

Mormon leaders are big (or at least they were when I was growing up) on the idea that music can make you do things you wouldn’t normally do, like some kind of mind-control ray. I recall a prominent official, during one of the church’s semiannual televised conferences, recounting the story of a plane trip he spent seated next to a famous rock musician. (Mick Jagger is the name that leaps to mind, but don’t quote me on that.) At any rate, this church official reports that this rock musician told him that his band makes music with one goal in mind—to get young people fucking. That wasn’t the phrasing he used over the pulpit, of course, but that was the gist of the idea, which also reminds me of a statement of Frank Zappa’s that one of my seminary2 teachers paraphrased during our annual lesson on the evils of rock music. According to Brother de Windt—a young, red-haired fellow who seemed to take a mischievous delight in playing us such evil songs as Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”—Zappa once said that he could write music to make a person do anything: love, hate, dance, fight, copulate, kill, whatever. This statement left me feeling cold inside, but not nearly as cold as I felt when I recently tried to authenticate that quote. What I came up with instead was this rather different assertion: “There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.”

It disturbs me that the fundamental truths I was taught growing up so often turn out to have had their basis in misinformation and hearsay. It disturbs me that my church leaders would pay lip service to the idea that I should learn correct principles and govern myself, and then in the next breath try to dictate what I should and shouldn’t listen to or watch or read. It disturbs me that a DJ at one of the church dances I attended in my misspent youth felt he needed to point out to us that the song he was about to play, “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News, had been approved for play by the general authorities of the church, who had determined that it was actually an anti-drug song. It disturbs me that anyone found the topic worthy of examination, almost as much as it disturbs me that these same leaders couldn’t see that the song really takes no advocative stance on the topic of drugs either way. And these were the people interpreting scripture for my benefit?

It reminds me of another statement by Frank Zappa, who Brother de Windt never bothered to tell us was a confirmed anti-drug crusader: “Don’t do speed. Speed turns you into your parents.”

So, when confronted with the irreverent and immoral content of my new music purchases, I knew the right thing to do: pluck the evil, offensive eye from its socket and throw it in the trash. This was required of me ... but when push came to shove, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just couldn’t get rid of those cassettes. I loved them too much, so I taught myself to live with the guilt. I taught myself to pick and choose, to decide which sentiments in the songs I agreed with and which I didn’t, but to let each side have its say.

In other words, I became a rationalizer. (Interesting how a term so pejorative has the word “rational” as its root.)

As college rolled around, I grew bolder. I started buying actual records and storing them on the top shelf of my closet, taking them over to David’s or Glen’s to record them on cassette. I started attending concerts, even working up the nerve to announce at the dinner table that the professor in my music appreciation course had encouraged us to attend the upcoming Rush show at the Salt Palace. “I don’t care what those liberals try to tell you at that godless school, young man,” said my father, jabbing with his fork for emphasis, “but you’re not going to any rock concert.”

His tone said the subject was closed, but I soldiered ahead: “Glen and I already bought tickets.”

“I don’t care if you sold a kidney. That’s not an appropriate event for anyone who lives in this house.”

I put down my utensils. “Do you even know what Rush is about?”

“I don’t need to know. I see the kids who listen to it, every day at school. The burnouts and the dope addicts, the partyers and the dropouts. I see where they end up.”

“Well, if that’s true, then it wasn’t Rush that did it. Rush is about living up to your potential and improving your mind. It’s about responsibility, and making the world a better place.”

“It’s loud rock crap, and you’re not going.”

“Dad...”

“I know what that heavy metal stuff’s all about. I’ve seen the magazine.”

“What magazine?”

“Heavy Metal! I took that filth away from a couple of burnouts in my class just last week. Tore it up and threw it in the trash.”

Groaning, I sat back in my chair. “Listen, don’t you think I’m smart enough to figure out which music is good and which is bad? Do you see me out drinking or doing drugs or sluffing church or anything like that?”

“Young man...” This was the warning growl of a dog about to bite.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll bring you the lyrics of every song from the new Rush album, and if you can convince me that any of it is bad or destructive, then I won’t go.”

But he didn’t go for it. In fact, when I tried to push the freshly typed lyric sheets on him the next morning, he wouldn’t even look at them. Later, after the concert, I tried to show him the report I’d written, and the A it received. He wouldn’t look at that, either.

And since I couldn’t get any validation from him, what could I do but turn to my records for solace?

I didn’t choose my music by default. I didn’t listen to it just because it was what everyone else was listening to. Every record in my collection was a friend. Each meant something to me, something significant—but if I were brutally honest with myself then I had to admit that they were like real friends in more senses than one: they had brought me nearly as much trouble and guilt as they had pleasure.

That’s why, when it came time to part with them, I may have gone a little overboard.

I could have just boxed them up and left them in my closet. My father might have thrown them out while I was gone, but probably not. To be extra certain of seeing them again, I could possibly have left them with Katrina—though I had to face the possibility that she might be married or otherwise not speaking to me in two years’ time, and that could make it tricky to get my records back. The surest solution would be to leave the collection with a friend like Kevin (which is exactly what I did with my stacks of pirated cassette tapes). Kevin would be gone on a mission of his own by the time I returned, but Andy3 would be back and I could get the records through him—no muss, no fuss.

That would have been a splendid plan, but it’s not what I did. Instead, I drove down to Cosmic Aeroplane4 and sold all thirty or forty of them, not to mention many of my prerecorded cassettes. I walked away with a traitorous sixty bucks in my pocket.

Why did I do it? A lot of reasons. First, the compact disc was just coming into its own. I figured that by the time I got back from my mission, everything I had on vinyl would be available on aluminum and plastic, and I’d want to upgrade it all anyway. Second, I was running awfully low on funds—at least on the non-consecrated funds that weren’t earmarked for my mission—and I needed a little scratch if I were going to keep going out with Katrina for the next week. And finally...?

Well, I couldn’t have articulated this feeling at the time, but on some level I sensed that a sacrifice was in order. Not just any sacrifice, either, but something above and beyond the call of duty. I had spent so much time and energy simply dreading my mission and resenting the necessity of it that some grand act of propitiation seemed requisite, some token of appeasement more significant than just hauling my smiling face down to the Missionary Training Center on the appropriate day and reporting in. This seemed to fit the bill.

All of which is just an elaborate way of saying I felt encrusted with guilt, and that I had to find some suitably caustic solution with which to scour it all away.

So off they all went, into the used-vinyl bins: Talking Heads, Stan Ridgway, Tears for Fears, Pat Metheny, R.E.M., Alan Parsons, Thompson Twins, Alison Moyet, Branford Marsalis, Depeche Mode, Gene Loves Jezebel, INXS, Spyro Gyra, Fine Young Cannibals, King Crimson, General Public, Herb Alpert, U2, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark, Pete Townshend—my best friends, my cherished enemies, all washed down the drain with less fanfare than murky bathwater.

It tore my skin. It sluiced me clean.

Lye soap would have been too gentle. ∅

Next: I Was a Teenage Space Alien

My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.

	you can’t go to Los Angeles
	you’ll die if you go to Los Angeles
	you can’t go to New York City
	New York City will kill you

so declares the voice of your God
so let it be written, so let it be dumb
the gutters run with tainted blood
every home an inoperable lump

the mailman carries a switchblade knife
a suicide pill in the bus driver’s tooth
the prophecy leaves the details vague
you won’t see it coming, that terminal truth

	you can’t go to Los Angeles
	you’ll die on Eagle Rock Boulevard
	you can’t go to New York City
	Alphabet City will kill you dead

so stay where you are, go to church, pray to God
your feet can’t grow roots in a city of dust
don’t move a muscle or bat your third eye
chain your wax ears to the flag’s sturdy mast

where the holes in the street are not festering wounds
the wind at the door not the Devil’s foul breath
a day to your God is a thousand awed years
the day you walk out is the hour of death

	you can’t go to Los Angeles
	in the city of angels you’d find yourself
	you can’t go to New York City
	Avenue C might could save your soul ∅

A couple of decades back, I wrote a science fiction story set in Los Angeles. I called it “Observations from the City of Angels,” though when it appeared in Salon it somehow became “Love in the Age of Spyware.” It grew from related soil, and I’m pretty proud of it. Check it out.

Do you feel sick? I sure feel sick.

Reasons to feel sick

There are too many horrible things happening, things we never thought could happen in America, not to feel sick. Inept clowns in the most consequential offices. Masked terrorists kidnapping our neighbors in broad daylight. Tariff insanity throwing the economy into chaos. Wall Street inflating an AI bubble. AI sucking up all available electricity and stiffing us with the bill. Armed forces invading U.S. cities. Women like Tierra Walker dying from easily treatable pregnancy complications while doctors practice under threat of prison. Supreme Court justices cosplaying as constitutional originalists while crowning the king the Founders warned us against. Congress standing by while the Executive Branch undermines science, medicine, education, justice, military order, and international law. Missiles for alleged drug boats but pardons for proven drug lords. Ukraine gift-wrapped for Putin. Climate goals abandoned and already vanishing in the rearview mirror. Venezuela in the crosshairs as a distraction from all of the above.

Democracy dismantled not brick by brick but with a wrecking ball. Destruction and theft only accelerating as cracks finally begin to show among the enablers. And still Metamucilini refuses to succumb to the massive cardiac infarction he’s been chasing his whole life like it was a Slavic fashion model.

When it finally hits him—that most beautiful and perfect of all embolisms, a veritable Rajaratna Ruby of aortic ruptures—he’ll have an army of competent doctors on hand to Roto-Root his pipes and fetch him Big Macs and swab out his diapers and cover it all up with the public. You and I should be so fortunate.

Reasons to fear feeling sick

If all this makes you feel sick too, imagine actually being sick on top of it all—or at least being afraid to feel sick because of how much it will cost.

In a more enlightened country—or in most any other developed nation—you and I would have access to the same medical care our government leaders get. Instead we live in a place where the healthcare industry and the insurance companies have more power than we do as voters and consumers. Health insurance is quite literally too expensive for most people to afford without either an employer or the government to pay for most of it.

This is why the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare) was such a miracle, and why the looming expiration of its pandemic-era subsidies are going to be such a disaster. A whole lot of Americans covered under the ACA through state insurance exchanges have already received notice that their premiums are going way up in 2026. KFF1 estimates that enrollees will, on average, see an increase of 114%, more than doubling. For some people those premiums will quadruple, exceeding rent or mortgage payments. At those levels, one family in four would likely drop their coverage.

Either way, these costs put too many Americans one illness away from financial ruin.

Feeling sick about the options

Since it’s currently open enrollment season for health insurance, I’ve been taking a look at my own options to see whether or not I can afford a better plan than the one I have.

I run my own online content company, and I’m the sole employee. I purchase my insurance individually through the New York State of Health marketplace. I earn enough income that I don’t qualify for any subsidies. I’m currently enrolled in the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Gatekeeper X Bronze plan, at a cost of $769.90 per month. That’s just for medical coverage2. Dental and vision coverage run me another $26.53. Per year, that works out to $9,557.16 in premiums alone. My annual deductible is $4,600, and my out-of-pocket maximum is $9,450.

I’d love to switch to a better plan for 2026, but living in New York City my rent is high enough3 that something more expensive is not really in the cards. Under the insultingly cutesy system of “metal” levels, I could trade up to a Silver, Gold, or Platinum version of my current plan, each one lowering my copays, deductible, and out-of-pocket max. But Platinum, for instance would cost me about twice what I’m paying now in premiums, and even Silver would make the belt too tight to consider.

For 2026, my medical premium alone will go up to $805.30. Not a horrible increase, I know, but then again I’m not benefiting from any subsidies that are about to get slashed4. Still, I’d love to either get more bang for my buck or pay less for what I’m already getting. Also, I see several specialists so I’d love the convenience of a PPO plan5, but unfortunately the New York state exchange does not offer such a thing.

When I started hunting around for alternatives to my current plan, the first place I looked was the Freelancers Union, which is where I already get my life insurance. For New York, the union offered individual PPO plans through Solo, so I filled out an online questionnaire to see what that would cost. I got back $828.71 for a plan with a $10,000 deductible, $946.67 for a plan with a $5,000 deductible, and $1,135.41 for a plan with a $2,500 deductible.

Those were all higher than my current plan, but I didn’t dismiss the two lower options out of hand. I really, really wanted to get on a PPO, so I selected the middle option and continued. Next were questions about my medical history. Was I or a family member pregnant? No. Did I take any of a few dozen listed brand-name medications? No. Within the past five years had I received any medical or surgical advice, consultation or treatment, including medication, leading to diagnosis of any heart issues?

Oh, fuck. Yes.

That was all it took. My application was rejected out of hand6.

In their oh-so-apologetic boilerplate text, Solo directed me to an outfit called Catch, which might offer options more in line with my needs. When I filled out their questionnaire, all I got back was the same list of plans available through the New York state exchange.

Feeling sick about the odds

I kept looking. I use QuickBooks for my business accounting and payroll, and I remembered that they offer employers the ability to provide health plans to their employees. I figured I should check those options out.

QuickBooks partners with Allstate Health Solutions, so I hopped over their site. Turns out that in New York, my business would only qualify for an MEC or MVP plan7. Here is how they were described, nonsensical punctuation and all:

MEC (Minimum Essential Coverage) and (MVP) Minimum Value Plan, harness the collective power of multiple small businesses to create a larger risk pool. This helps stabilize premiums across the wider pool, resulting in lower costs.

At first glance the plans looked really good! The better MEC plan, MEC Elite Health Plus, would cost my business only $368.86 per employee, and offered a deductible of only $1,000. The better MVP plan, MVP VAULT Silver, cost $599.34 and had a deductible of zero.

I set up a call with Allstate to ask more questions. My most important question was whether the employee needed to contribute any payroll deductions to the cost of the insurance8. No, I was told. The employer cost would cover everything.

These were sounding like great options, but as I asked more questions I realized there was a very big catch. Certain benefits that sounded good came with strict limitations. For instance, under MVP VAULT Silver, the copay for primary care visits was only $15—but only ten visits per would be covered. X-rays were $350 with a limit of two. An emergency room visit would be only $350, but only one would be covered.

I’ve never had more than one emergency room visit in any given calendar, but dammit, I’m getting older and I have high blood pressure. I could easily end up in the ER twice in one year. What would happen if I needed to spend more than the allotted seven days in a hospital? What if I required more than three surgeries?

Those were not odds I was willing to risk.

Feeling sick about America

I kept looking, notably at providers like Oscar, but it was becoming more and more clear that I wasn’t going to find anything better than my current Anthem plan. And that is profoundly depressing.

I want to be clear that, for the most part, I’m not depressed on my own behalf. I don’t like paying $800 a month for health insurance, but I can afford it. What I’m depressed about is that we live in a nation that places so little value on the health and economic well-being of its citizens that it can allow a system like this to continue.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has an excellent post out just today describing what’s about to happen when expanded ACA subsidies expire:

[T]he legislation providing these enhanced subsidies expires at the end of this month. And Republicans in Congress are adamantly opposed to maintaining them. Even Trump has pleaded with his party to agree to a temporary extension, but seems to be getting nowhere. Visceral GOP dislike for anything that helps ordinary Americans may be partly to blame. Moreover, bolstering the ACA would be an implicit admission by the Republicans that they have been wrong all along about health care.

So let’s think about the politics of what’s about to happen: Millions of Americans are about to see a sudden rise in health care costs—not a hypothetical future rise, but a sudden jump on January 1.

Too many people are days away from a choice between keeping their health insurance and paying their rent or continuing to eat. They won’t have the luxury of shopping around for a better deal, like I did. There are no better deals.

By rights the stench of this catastrophe will stick to the Republican Party for a generation, but it should stick even more indelibly to the health insurance companies and executives whose greed and inhumanity are the inertia that makes our whole system so impossible to change. These corporations don’t care about our health or well-being. They care about extracting every possible cent from our pockets, while erecting so many barriers to the care we really need that it’s a miracle our healthcare system manages to work at all. They care about keeping us chasing referral forms from our PCPs so we can see that nephrologist, or keeping us working three jobs, so we’re too busy and demoralized to agitate against such shitty conditions.

In 2020, a study published in The Lancet estimated that 68,000 Americans die every years because of systemic barriers to healthcare access. This, as Qasim Rashid points out, is a crime that should be prosecuted every bit as zealously as the murder of a health insurance CEO.

I used to work for Humana. Back in 2021 I posted the email I sent its CEO the day I quit. It was the most popular thing I ever posted here at Substack. I concealed his name and the name of the company, but now I wonder if that was the right thing to do. I wonder if naming and shaming isn’t more appropriate. I wonder, now that he’s stepped back to an advisory role at Humana, if Bruce Broussard ever has trouble sleeping at night. I wonder if he’s capable of shame.

I hope so. I hope his share of those 68,000 annual deaths haunt him to the end of his days. I hope it makes him sick. As sick as his greed makes the rest of us. ∅

This musical coda from The Coup is not a suggestion or an incitement or a call to arms, but it is pretty damn entertaining.

Since I’ve posted here before about the long process of writing and publishing The Accidental Terrorist, I thought it might be interesting to reach back even further to see what I was thinking at the end of what turned out to be merely the first phase of that project. As I sat down in 2001 to detail all the ways the story had evolved at that point, I had no earthly clue how many more versions lay ahead (including but not limited to a 60-episode podcast series). From this late remove, I find the optimism of the closing paragraphs below almost unbearably naïve.

In observance of today’s milestone, all e-book editions of The Accidental Terrorist will be discounted 50% to $4.99 for the rest of the week. Grab a copy now! Sale ends November 16.

Good stories beg to be told and retold, and the story of my arrest in Canada on charges with interfering with the lawful operation of a passenger jet is no exception. In fact, I’ve been telling it again and again for nearly fifteen years—and often I’m not even the one who brings it up!

This is satisfying to me because in 1987, when my legal difficulties were finally behind me and I was transferred back to the United States to complete my term of mission service, my church leaders, my lawyer, and even my father advised me not to talk about what had happened in Canada. But it had been a traumatic experience for a young Mormon missionary to endure—I spent time in jail, after all—and I had to talk about it with somebody.

The first listener was a mission colleague of mine who didn’t quite buy my cover story of a medical transfer. After some cajoling, I related the story to him over our traditional evening snack of Tostitos and Pace Picante Sauce. While he received the tale with ever-increasing incredulity, I delivered it with a sense of guilt that changed gradually to grateful unburdening.

As the story subsequently spread through the mission, though, my feeling of liberation turned into a burden once again. Now, everywhere I went my fellow missionaries wanted to hear the “Canada story.” It started getting old after a while. I began to dread the words, “Hey, Shunn! Elder Jones hasn’t heard the story!”

At last, since a proper telling took at least an hour, I sat down one day in 1988 with a tape recorder, a 90-minute cassette, and three other missionaries and narrated my experiences before a live studio audience, as it were. I called the tape “Terror on Flight 789: The Elder Shunn Story.” I seem to recall that each of the three elders in attendance went home with a copy. (I’m not sure whether or not I ever distributed any other copies of that recording, but I do still have the original in my possession.)

I returned home to Utah from my mission later that year, and while the requests for my story diminished in frequency, scarcely a party or social gathering went by without someone bringing it up. The events had been covered on the Salt Lake news channels, and it seemed that my resulting fifteen minutes of fame were dragging on longer than I’d anticipated, at least in sleepy little Kaysville. (Not that I’m complaining at all—being a convicted felon was a great way to impress Mormon girls.)

A watershed moment came in 1989 at my five-year high school reunion, when I was asked to stand up and give a brief account of my arrest. I got nervous with the mike in my hand, forgot the meaning of the word “brief,” and flopped like a trout on dry land. I realized I was much better telling the story to a small group that could ask me clarifying questions than to a large audience. Still, I wanted to be able to communicate to a large audience, and that was when I started to consider seriously the idea of writing a book about my mission experiences.

When Mormons talk about their missions, it’s the joyful times they tend to concentrate on, the triumphs. “Oh, a mission is hard work,” they say knowingly, “very hard. Sometimes it’s very discouraging. But the blessings make the trials worthwhile.” Still, the happy events, the uplifting stories, are the ones that get related in detail, while the bad are left as formless generalities. This only makes sense among a people trying to encourage their sons to serve missions, but that kind of story didn’t interest me. Inspirational writing rarely makes for compelling literature. I wanted my book to paint a true and unromanticized picture of mission life.

And therein lay the problem. An honest book would necessarily embarrass the church, because for Mormons, in personal as well as institutional history, if it isn’t affirmative and faith-promoting then it isn’t considered worth repeating. An honest book might very well jeopardize my church membership—which in 1989 was still something I cared about—but anything less than an honest book was not something I could bring myself to write. So I shelved the project before I even started, with the idea that one day I’d reexamine it.

I continued hauling out the story as a party trick, and that seemed to be all the life left in it until 1993, when I began an E-mail correspondence with a fellow science-fiction writer on the West Coast. My first professional short story, “From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left,” had just appeared to some acclaim in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I was feeling full of piss and vinegar. Hoping that it would make me sound dangerous and mysterious—perhaps like a young Harlan Ellison—I dropped a little reference in one letter to my inability to reenter Canada. My writer friend, with what seemed like great interest, asked me to elaborate.

So I sat down to start recounting the story for her. I typed and I typed, but since the woman was utterly unfamiliar with Mormonism and missionaries, I found that after an hour or so all I had managed to do was sketch in a little background and set the scene. I had barely even begun the story itself. I broke off at a convenient stopping place, promised to continue the tale soon, and hit SEND.

My writer friend replied quickly. The prologue had intrigued her, and a day or so later I sat down at my computer to finish the story. After two hours, however, I realized with a sinking heart that I again had not gotten very far. I composed a short apology, typed “To be continued,” and hit SEND again.

To make a long story short, this went on for months. When I finally reached the end in 1994, the tale had stretched to 34 installments and over 50,000 words.

That’s a lot of writing for a writer to do without getting paid.

It’s also a lot of writing for a writer to do for an audience of one, even an attractive one he’s striving to impress. I had joined the Science Fiction Roundtable on GEnie—one of the many former online services that AOL would eventually put out of business1—and after some of the other writers in that forum learned that I’d been pounding out installments of the Canada story, popular demand forced me to begin posting them there. And believe me, the others really had to twist my arm.

I posted installments to the SFRT every day or so, and it caused something of minor stir. Most readers agreed that it was an entertaining and harrowing story, but plenty of folks took me to task for what they perceived as its moral failings. I had written, of course, as a Mormon apologist addressing an audience of non-believers, and most of those non-believers held uncharitable ideas about Mormonism that I hadn’t helped soften any. I probably fielded more challenges to my beliefs in that one month than I had in any equal period of my life.

But at least no one seemed to stop liking me, and in fact several people urged me to try to publish my story. I didn’t think the story as it stood was ready for publication, and I still wasn’t prepared to tackle a full-length book on the subject, so, like Mary in the New Testament, I simply took those things and pondered them in my heart.

Meanwhile, my fortunes took several unexpected turns, and by the end of 1995 I found myself living in Brooklyn, New York, completely uprooted from my old life and entirely estranged from the Mormon church. Some kind of feverish battle over the church had been going on in my head for years, mostly without my conscious acknowledgment, and as I had finally come to realize that I no longer believed the doctrines of Joseph Smith and his successors, I had snapped like a giant rubber band. The recoil catapulted me all the way across the country, as far as I could get from the Mormonism-steeped climate of Utah.

Under the not-very-secret nom de plume of William Perry Shunn2, I became a vocal critic of the church, founding a Web site called “Mormon Matter“ where I posted a variety of rants and diatribes and generally attempted to poke as much fun at Mormonism as I possibly could. I also began posting three or four installments a week of the Canada story—suitably rewritten to reflect my new take on Mormonism. A small but rabid coterie of fans followed my missionary saga as devotedly as young boys once followed the serialized adventures of Flash Gordon at the movies.

Terror on Flight 789, as I continued to call the story, generated reams of email—from fellow apostates happy to learn that someone else’s mission had been as miserable as theirs, from rabid Mormons who predicted for me an eternity of hellfire and damnation, and from ordinary folks who knew nothing about Mormonism but had gotten sucked into the story anyway. Through the medium of the Web, my story had probably reached more readers than had seen any one of my magazine stories.

One of the most interesting responses to Terror came from a writer in Hollywood named Christopher J. Rivera. He’d been so fascinated by my story that he tracked me down at the giant Manhattan insurance brokerage where I was working at the time and called me up. It was August 15, 1996, the day after my twenty-ninth birthday. “Hi,” said Christopher when I picked up the phone. “I loved your story on the Web, and my partner and I think it would make a terrific movie. How would you like to write it with us?”

And thus was born a lightly fictionalized screenplay called The Accidental Terrorist3, written by Christopher, James Callan, and myself. For a few days in 1997 we even managed to get it optioned, although the production company pulled out of the agreement just as we were signing the contracts4. (If you’re looking forward to seeing the adventures of Elder Shunn at your local metroplex, don’t despair. We still intend to get this movie made ... someday.)

But if there was one thing the screenwriting experience taught me, other than how to write a screenplay5, it was that I still wasn’t satisfied with any of the ways my story had been told. There was still a full-length book inside me, waiting to be born. The prod that finally forced it out came in 1999.

After years of trying, I had finally snared a literary agent, and as she and I were going back and forth about what to do with a novel I’d written called Silvertide, I impulsively asked her if she represented any non-fiction. “Sure,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

I summarized my mission story for her—by then I had learned to tell it very briefly, when necessary—and she flipped out. In a good way. “Write it now,“ she said. “That’s the kind of book that can be a bestseller.”

The time must have been right, because that’s all the spur I needed. I set right to work. And over two years later, on September 30, 2001—much to the relief of my wife6, who can barely remember a time when I wasn’t working on this book—I wrote the last line of Missionary Man and, with a blessed sense of relief, turned the manuscript over to my agent.

It weighs in at a quarter of a million words. It’s huge, but finally I’ve written the version of my mission experience that satisfies me. At last the story is through begging to be retold7.

Although if someone asks Christopher and James and me to rewrite the story, I can probably be convinced to take yet another crack at it. ∅

The actual published version of my memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online. For the print edition, I’d encourage you to order either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org. It’s not a short book, but it’s nowhere close to a quarter-million words anymore.

This short story began as an exercise in a college writing class at the University of Utah in late 1988. The instructor asked us to write a little scene set in darkness entirely in dialog. I scrawled a couple of pages—much more than the exercise called for—of two characters talking in a dungeon. I liked what I had done, though I couldn’t think where to take it next.

A year or two later, I was going through my class notes and found this scene. As I read it over, I could suddenly see how to move things forward. Over the next few days I raced through Colin and Ishmael’s subterranean confrontation, polished up the result, and started sending it out to the big genre magazines.

No one bit until I tried Scott Edelman at a glossy new rag called Science Fiction Age. In those early years of Age, Scott would buy exactly one fantasy story for every issue; mine was apparently the right fit for the hole in issue six. I was delighted that “Colin and Ishmael in the Dark” had found a home (though I found my original title more evocative than the truncated one it ran under in print). Appearing in the September 1993 issue, the story was just my second professional fiction publication.

I’m grateful to Scott for buying this (and more stories too), and I’m glad we’re still friends today.

In the total darkness, the incessant drip! drip! of limewater on stone was the only sound to be heard. Steady as the beating of a heart, ceaseless as the motion of the stars, that sound filled the darkness, fed the darkness, became the darkness. It stitched the seconds together loosely into minutes, the minutes into long ragged hours, and the hours into great tattered sheets that flapped like ghosts in an unseen wind, leaving behind only gray threads of time to mark their passage as they unraveled. In all of creation there was only dripping water, and beyond the reach of its echoes the world no longer existed.

This changed only twice a day, when metal ground harshly against metal and the bolt sprang back from the rusted lock with the sound of a crossbow quarrel being loosed. This particular day began like every other—the resonant creak of the hinges, the crushing reverberation as the door slammed shut, the tread of steel-toed boots crossing the damp stone floor and then pausing. “Breakfast, Ishmael,” said a voice worn into a sing-song by the repetitiveness its daily routine.

“Just put it there on the settee, will you?” This dry voice spoke wryly and precisely.

“Of course.” The first voice chuckled, and those ringing footsteps crossed the remainder of the distance without hesitation. “Would you like your serviette tucked into your collar, as well?”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary.” Stoneware clinked as the tray was set down. “Now, what have we today? Oh, feels like ... eggs ... fresh, I’d say, and over-easy ... hmm, but bigger than usual.... Colin, you haven’t been dipping into the goose nests again, have you?”

“Who, me? Why, of course not.”

“Goodness, man, what will the lieutenant say? And this ... my nose tells me it may be bacon, but the texture is not coarse enough. It can’t be ham, can it? Eh, Colin? And this carafe is too heavy to contain mere water.”

“Go on. Taste it.”

A clink and a faint slurping carried through the darkness. “By thunder, Colin, this is fresh cream. You’re certainly taking risks today, my friend. To what good fortune do I owe this morning’s sumptuous feast? Have you taken a mistress?” A note of sly complicity entered the voice. “Is that why you feel so ... expansive today?”

“Hardly, you degenerate. We’re celebrating you today, Ishmael. It’s your anniversary.”

“Anniversary? Why should I want to celebrate my anniversary? Didn’t you tell me—two, three years ago?—that my wife had finally set her back to this sad little duchy?”

“Not that anniversary. A more important one now. It’s five years today that you’ve been with us as a client.”

“Oh. That. A hollow cause for celebration if ever I heard one. Am I to be fêted then with nothing more than extra rations, Colin? Come, why not unfetter these poor ankles and let us dance to the occasion?”

“Because the duke no longer entrusts that particular key to my keeping after the uproar you created last time.”

“Colin, that was over two years ago! Where is your compassion, my good friend?”

“Don’t start with me, Ishmael. And if you’ve nothing better to do than complain after I risked another reprimand on your behalf, then I have other clients to attend to.” The metallic tread receded.

“No ... wait. I apologize. I know you do all within your power. I am ... grateful for it.”

The footsteps halted.

“Have you any news today, Colin?”

A sullen pause followed. “Have you any new stories for me?”

“I asked first.”

“Oh ... all right.” The footsteps returned. “Old Bradford Smith lost his hand in a cauldron of molten lead last afternoon.”

“Goodness.”

“He did not actually lose the hand in the cauldron, of course, but it had to be removed nonetheless. Oh, and the scrivener’s daughter was found with child.”

“Yes? What a disgrace to poor Benjamin. No connection with Bradford’s hand, I presume. No, of course not.” A light sniffle could be heard in the chill darkness. “Anything else? How is your father’s dropsy?”

“As nasty as ever.”

“And your lovely wife?”

“Serena is quite well, thank you. Oh, by the way, the captain of the guard still inquires after you daily.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. He hopes you’re alive and well and rotting in your torment.”

“Send him my regards, as well.”

“I shall. I only wish I knew what that whole business was about. Now, to our business...”

“What, Colin? Oh, of course, of course, today’s tale. You are an insatiable one. But first—oh, my, this is excellent ham—first, would you be good enough to help me set the stage?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Colin, you know this corner of the dungeon quite well, do you not?”

“Oh, yes. Twenty paces wide, forty long, just enough distance to provide the appropriately sinister echo effect. Twenty-seven paces from the door to your pallet, with a bit of a turn at—”

“Very good. Tell me, do you know the location of the three sconces set into the wall away from the door?”

“The east wall? I haven’t lit those torches since the order three years ago...”

The dry voice snorted. “Measures to reduce my mischief. As if I should be satisfied with this lot.”

“Em, I believe I still recall where they are.”

“What? Oh, oh, yes, the sconces. Would you be so good, Colin, as to walk directly toward the southernmost one.”

“Walk—? What for?”

“Trust me, Colin. You will require the cold touch of brass beneath your hand if you are to fully appreciate the tale I will spin for you this morning, which I call ‘The Sad History of the Nobleman’s Son and the Brazen Chatelaine.’”

“And how late did you stay up devising this story, Ishmael?” The tread echoed off in the appropriate direction. “How many nights— By the gods!” This last exclamation was accompanied by the resounding crack of bone on stone.

“Dear Jove, Colin, that sounded like a nasty fall. Are you hurt badly?”

The response was snappish and gruff. “Who says I’m hurt at all?”

“Tsk, tsk. If I needed any confirmation of the fact, the strain in your voice would do quite nicely. It tells me you are in pain as plainly as if you had spoken it outright. And that sharp cracking sound of a moment ago, combined with the fact that your voice is coming from about knee-level, would lead me to believe that you may have broken an ankle. Colin? No need to hold your tongue, my friend. Your silence speaks more eloquently than any words.”

Indrawn breaths hissed with pain in the darkness. “There’s a hole here in the floor the size of an infant’s casket! I certainly don’t remember this being here!”

“An infant’s casket! How very imaginative and descriptive! I had never supposed you so clever, my dear friend! What a delightful surprise!”

“You mock me, Ishmael. I helped to bury poor Goodwife Miller’s tiny son not a fortnight past, in case you had forgotten.” Bitterness filled the voice. “And you must have known the hole was there. You directed me straight to it.”

“Really? And how would you substantiate such an accusation? How could I have known of any hole in the floor?”

“It was never there before.”

“I don’t see how you can state that with such certainty, Colin. But wouldn’t it be wise to see about getting that ankle attended to?”

“I see what you’re about, Ishmael.” There came a heavy sliding across the stones of the floor, and a grunt. “You’ve managed to get free of those shackles somehow. You want me to believe you’re locked up nice and tidily over there on your pallet, while in reality you’re free to rove about in the dark at your pleasure.”

“Is that so? I believe we have established on more occasions than one, dear Colin, that you are not a clever man. Then how is it that you persist in spinning these elaborate little fantasies? Why, you seem almost to want to usurp my rôle as storyteller!”

“You can’t escape from here, you know.” The slidings continued, and the voice receded in the darkness. “Mock me if you must, but even if you could wrest the key from me and get through that door, you could never pass the guards at the head of the stairs.”

“I have no intention of escaping. Nor do you, obviously, or you would be groveling your way in the direction of the door, rather than following your current heading.”

“I am heading for the door, you pompous ass—and I’m not likely to forget that this ‘pitiful groveling,’ as you call it, is your doing.”

“Ah, but are you certain of that? Are you certain of either point, Colin? First, that your sadly broken ankle is, in fact, my doing—in which case I must be free of my fetters in order to have carved that foot-deep hole out of the floor—or second, that you are really on a heading for the door, since you seem to be orienting yourself solely on the basis of the origin of my voice—with the assumption, of course, that I am still seated in my accustomed spot on the pallet.”

“I don’t need any voice to guide me.” The voice was curt, brusque. “I know where I am.”

“Then you are wiser than the wisest man among us, who would never presume to claim such knowledge. And it therefore puzzles me greatly that you changed your course even as you spoke. This would seem to contradict your statement.”

“You’ve moved, damn you, Ishmael! I can tell from the sound of your voice!”

“I won’t deny it. But neither will I confirm it. Conversely, however, I can tell from the sound of your voice that your ankle is not growing any more well. In fact, I’d judge that you’re not doing it much good with your aimless wrigglings through the dark. Is it beginning to swell yet, do you think, Colin? Are the jagged ends of the bone sawing their way through tendons and ligaments with every desperate move?”

“Stand still!”

“Really, Colin. The beginnings of panic?” The dry voice was suffused with condescension, with stern disapproval. “How very, very unbecoming you. I would have expected better. Especially seeing as I haven’t moved an inch.”

The heavy, labored breathing gradually slowed, but still hitched in pain. “I’ve been your best friend these past five years, Ishmael—your only friend. Is this how you repay me for the extra rations at breakfast? For letting you stretch your legs when I used to carry the right key? For listening to your bloody stories every day when I have other duties to attend to? I’ve endured reprimand after reprimand for your sake, Ishmael. What more do you want from me? What sort of game are you playing?”

“Steady on, Colin. Try not to cast about this way and that as you speak. You need feel no compulsion to address all four walls at once. I assure you that I exist in only one location a time. And I fear that if you keep up this way, your ankle will never forgive you the punishment. I fear you may walk the remainder of your days with a limp.”

“Just answer my question!” A sharp rasp had entered the voice. “And for the love of God keep yourself put!”

“You know, Colin, you’re no great fool, but you certainly do lack that elusive spark we call imagination. Answer your own question, for heaven’s sake. Here we find ourselves, trapped together in a darkness from which you yourself say there is no possibility of escape—”

“None for you, you thankless bastard.”

“Granted, none for me. That being so, what could I possibly gain from playing any sort of game?”

“As you say, Ishmael, I haven’t the imagination to answer that.”

“Do I detect a note of bitterness in your voice, my friend? A note of sarcasm, perhaps? Think on this. Why should I seek to throw off these fetters of mine when it gets me no closer to escape? What would ever drive me to such lengths, which would require that I shatter the bones of my own feet against the stones of the floor in order to slip them through their iron collars?” A rattle of chains penetrated the darkness. “What power would enable me to sit here perfectly still for the perhaps close to a year necessary for my misshapen feet to mend, however imperfectly, and what unimaginable compulsion could impel me to teach myself to walk upon those deformed lumps of flesh once the mending was complete, let alone teach myself to move about silently on these wet stones?”

“God in heaven.”

“Yes, Colin, I find it difficult to imagine it all myself—as it would also entail betraying none of this to you on your twice-daily visits to my little hell.”

“Surely you haven’t—”

“Nothing is sure in this world, Colin. This chamber was carved out of limestone, and the floor filled in afterward with broken rock and mortar to a depth of at least eighteen inches. Surely I haven’t located a place where dripping water has eaten away at the stone and softened the mortar? Surely I couldn’t have managed to pry one of those stones loose from the floor? Surely I wouldn’t have persisted in such a mad task to the point that there now exists a hole—how did you put it?—the size of an infant’s casket in the floor? Surely I haven’t littered its bottom with my bloody fingernails, and I most surely have not retained any of those stones—particularly not for use as a weapon.”

“You’re mad, Ishmael. I hope you realize that I carry ... both a dagger ... and ... a club.” This sentence was punctuated with short, pain-born gasps of air.

“How very nice for you, Colin. Yes, I would have to be mad to oppose a man such as you with only stones in the darkness. And I would have to be especially mad to have gone to such trouble as I’ve described with no reasonable hope of escape, wouldn’t you say? By the way, you should know that I hear you inching your way toward the wall. I hope you realize that if I did happen to possess a cache of stones, those sounds of yours would lend me as clear a target as if we stood under a noon-day sun.”

“Then kill me and be done with it!” The breaths came hard, short, and fast. “Have your fun and get it over with!”

“Oh, how you misjudge me, my friend. We have so much still to discuss. You really wouldn’t want to miss out on it. Tell me, Colin, you’re not beginning to hyperventilate on me, are you?”

“Of course ... not. Don’t be ... ridicul— Aaaaah!”

The cry echoed away into silence.

“Ishmael!”

“Yes, Colin? Did something frighten you?”

“You—you touched me! You touched my face!”

“I don’t see how I could have, not seated all the way over here with these bothersome fetters shackled ‘round my ankles.” The chains rattled once again. “No, I don’t accept that. I don’t see how it would be possible.”

“You lie! You crept ... all the way ... over here and you ... you brushed my face ... with the back of your ... your filthy hand!”

“Shall we take a moment and calm ourselves down, Colin? Did you hear me move at all?”

“No, I didn’t ... didn’t bloody hear you ... move, you ... you bastard!”

“You’re going to have to get that breathing under control, my friend, or you’re liable to pass out right where you lay. Now think for a moment. I can hear you perfectly well when you move. If I were able to move, wouldn’t it be true that you’d be able to hear me as well as I hear you?”

“I don’t believe that ... for ... for a moment!”

“Don’t you? Do me a favor, Colin. Take a deep breath ... let it out ... and turn your head toward the sound of my voice.”

“Go bugger yourself.” But the breathing slowed nonetheless.

“I’m afraid I can’t quite visualize such an act, Colin. Perhaps you’d care to demonstrate it for me sometime?”

“I’ll demonstrate my club dancing a jig on your skull.”

“Colin, Colin, you’ve turned your head the wrong way. Toward the sound of my voice, I believe I said.”

“You’ve gotten behind me!”

“That’s ridiculous. Now, toward the sound of my voice.”

“I’ll do no such thing!” The sound of rough sliding began again.

“Suit yourself. And if that’s the direction in which you’d really like to move, then certainly I won’t stop you.”

“I’d like to see you try, anyway.”

“Not just yet, Colin, not just quite yet. First I’m afraid I may have a bit of bad news for you.”

“What—smashed all the bones in your hands to little bits and can’t feed your own flapping gob?”

“Mmm, you’re getting better, I must admit. You’re certainly getting better. But no, I’m afraid it’s even worse than that.”

“Do tell.” There came a grunt, and a vertical sort of sliding sound.

“Yes, worse even than the fact that you’ve managed to prop yourself up against the wall on your one good leg, precisely opposite to the place you would most like to be.”

“Oh, and where ... where would that be?” This sentence was divided by a deep intake of breath.

“I smell your sweat, Colin. Play brave for the moment, but your sweat is filled with the stink of fear. On a diagonal line, you are precisely opposite the door to this chamber.”

“Which would place you somewhere other than the pallet where you claim to be shackled.”

“Take my word for it or not.”

“I’ll take your word for nothing.”

“Easing your way along the wall now, are you? Try not to fall.”

A sudden brassy clang rang through the darkness.

“And watch your head on those sconces. Now take my word for this: your delectable wife Serena seems to have developed a fancy for that ogre of a butcher—what is his name? Oh, yes—Fat Jack Chesley.”

“How could you claim to know such a thing?”

“Oh, I assure you that I know this, Colin. I see it, even now. That brute Fat Jack and your dear Serena are even at this moment engaged in a bit of an early-morning ... pas de deux, shall we say? ... on that ratty old cot he keeps in the room behind his shopfront. How it ever supports his weight... How Serena ever supports his weight...”

“Ishmael...”

“The smell of slaughtered meat wafts all about them, mixing with the smell of their sweat—which only inflames the passion of our good friend the butcher.”

“That you would stoop so low as to drag the good name of my wife into this...” The voice was an enraged hiss. “I should kill you for that.”

“Then, pray, why don’t you?”

“Because I see what you’re trying to do.”

“And what, my clever friend, would that be?”

“You would love nothing better than for me come at you, to step away from this wall, to lose my balance again. No offense, but I don’t believe you’re worth that.”

“Then hear this, and know yourself for both a fool and a cuckold: I can see quite plainly that peculiar birthmark on your wife’s delightful ivory skin, placed where no eyes but yours and God’s should gaze upon it. And Fat Jack Chesley’s, of course.”

“Liar!”

“I hear the panic lurking below the surface of your voice, Colin. You’ve done an admirable job of reining it in since it last betrayed you—but I just wonder how much prodding it will take to bring it out again? Do you deny that Serena has such a birthmark, Colin? Would you like me to describe the shape of it to you? Or possibly to describe the way it moves beneath our friend Fat Jack’s ungentle ministrations? Colin? Dear friend?”

“You spied on her, you bastard!” There was strenuous breathing, and the sound of cloth sliding roughly across stone. “Before you were arrested! You spied on her at her bath!”

“Did I, now? Shall I describe the sounds of her ecstasy, Colin? My ancestors came down from the North Countries, you see. The Sight has always run in our family. You remember the Sight. It figured quite prominently in that tale of mine you loved so dearly, ‘The Improbable Friendship of Jolly Roger and Sir Thomas More.’ Oh, yes, the Sight is real, Colin, and were it not for that blessed gift I’d have gone mad in this darkness long ago. As it is, I spend my days gazing down on the streets and the fields, the homes and the shops, of our humble little village. I watch the doings of our townsfolk, their comings and goings, their honor and their shame, their joys and their sorrows, and it is almost as if I walk among them again. Were it not for that blessed third eye, Colin, I would long since have surrendered my mind to this black hell, and done it gladly.”

“If this is true, then why ask me the news of the village every day? Eh?”

“To confirm that the scenes I gaze upon are true! Don’t you see, you cursed blind fool? Don’t you see?”

“I see nothing, Ishmael! You’re a storyteller! That’s all you’re telling, is another one of your bloody stories!”

“I am a teacher, Colin! I have always been a teacher first and a storyteller second! Gods above, can no one in this cursed duchy grasp that simple fact?”

“Ishmael, you—”

“Silence! Do you know the scenes I am most compelled to gaze upon in my misery, Colin? Do you? I gaze upon the grounds of the castle! I gaze upon the green lawns and the cool gardens and the stone benches where once I sat and taught the children of the duke himself! He entrusted me with the education of his children, Colin—with their alphabets and their adding-tables and their addled little brains—and I in turn entrusted him with a secret which I risked all my standing and position to relate! I risked it because it was true, and the truth is the only thing in this world which has ever been of any importance! I still gaze down upon that foul labyrinth of shrubbery in which I first chanced to spy the duchess ... and the captain of the guard ... flagrante delicto, as they say. Still I follow the twists and green turns of those hedges to the center of the maze, to the accursed, inviting bower there at its heart...”

“I should not hear this, Ishmael...”

“You shall hear this! You cannot cover your eyes in the darkness! Do you know that the duke refused to see, even as you refuse to see? Even as I am not allowed to see? Surrounded only by light, and you both refuse to see! You all refuse to see! Here is Ishmael, the disinherited son! I am not a storyteller, Colin! I am a teacher!”

This assertion reverberated into silence.

Quiet and dangerous, a voice broke the stillness. “Perhaps you should not seek to teach men lies about their own wives.”

A sudden loud crack resounded in the darkness, followed by a ringing clatter across the stones of the floor.

“Had your dagger out did you, Colin? Good luck finding it now. I’ll teach you about your beloved wife. Oh, yes, there is much I can teach you about the winsome and welcoming Serena.”

“You struck me, you bloody bastard.” The voice was nearly inaudible, lost in wonder. “You struck my face. Why, you...”

“I will teach you what the butcher has learned, what the baker has learned, what the thrice-damned candlestick-maker has learned. I will open your eyes, Colin. You are far too trusting, and I will teach you to trust no longer. I am a teacher, my friend. My life is worth living only when there is a lesson to impart, and the sole remaining lesson I have to share with you today concerns the complete ... and utter ... folly ... of ... trust!”

Another sharp crack, like a shot in the darkness.

“Bastard!” Two quick metallic footsteps sounded, only to be followed by a cry of pain and a heavy crash.

“Forgot about that ankle for a moment, did you, Colin? Now roll over! Roll over, you worthless sack of dung!”

“Get off me, you—”

“Do you feel this below your eye? Do you?”

“For the love of God, Ishmael, let me up!”

“Ah, it seems this dagger of yours has turned out to serve a useful purpose after all. Better than letting it rust in the dampness, don’t you think?”

“What are you doing? What are you doing?”

“Nothing ... yet. And if you will only cooperate, I will need do nothing. We shall recite your lessons now, Colin. You will repeat after me precisely what I say, and we will repeat these lessons until you know them by heart. Do you understand? Won’t this be amusing?”

“Don’t take my eyes please in the name of God don’t take my—”

“Hold still and get a grip on yourself or there may be an unfortunate accident. You are certainly the least clever pupil I have ever had the misfortune to keep in my charge. Now, are we ready? After me, then: ‘There is no power on earth I may safely trust, not even my own.’”

“Ishmael, for the love of—”

“Colin...”

“No more no more no more no more no—”

“It’s only a small cut at the side of your nose. Merely a bit of incentive. Now let’s try this again: ‘There is no power on earth...’”

“‘There is no bloody power on earth...’”

“‘...I may safely trust, not even my own.’”

“‘...I may safely trust, not even my own.’”

“Very good—though this might be easier if you try to relax a little. Good. Now, second: ‘I may never trust any person in authority, for authority cripples the mind and cankers the soul.’”

“‘I may nev—’” A deep, shuddering breath was taken. “‘I may never trust any person in ... in authority, for authority...’”

“‘...cripples the mind and cankers the soul.’”

“‘...cripples the mind and ... and ... and cankers the soul.’”

“Very, very good, Colin. You may just turn out to be a successful student after all. Now, third: ‘I may never trust the fairer sex, particularly when bearing a birthmark shaped to resemble—’”

“Enough!”

There followed a quick whisk of air, a sickening crunch, and a hoarse cry of outrage and pain. Metal clattered upon stone.

“Gods, Colin, you—!”

“Ha! You left one out, Ishmael: ‘I may never trust a student with a club’!” The voice cackled with harsh laughter. “I hope your wrist will forgive you.”

“You’ve sewn it up for yourself now!” Footsteps stumbled drunkenly backward across the stones. “I can move like a ghost in this darkness, Colin! I’ll take you apart piece by piece! I’ll do it at my leisure! You’ll never know what direction—”

This sentence ended with the resounding crack of bone on stone.

“Dear Jove, Ishmael, that sounded like a nasty fall!” The voice cackled wildly. “Are you hurt badly?”

“You ... you...” These moans degenerated into torturous gaspings for air.

The rough sliding sound of earlier resumed, punctuated at times by mad giggles. It proceeded to the wall and then turned left, angling left twice more as it reached corners in the walls. A rusty scrape followed shortly, metal ground harshly against metal, and the bolt of the lock shot back with the sound of a musket being fired in a small room. The door creaked as resonantly as if it opened into the throat of some monstrous bullfrog.

“The saddest part of this all, Ishmael, is that you were scheduled for release this week.” The giggles ceased, and the voice was filled with a sudden deep weariness. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, but...”

There was a heavy rustling of fabric, and then the door slammed shut.

“You lie, Colin.” The dry voice was weak and reedy, but gained strength rapidly. “Any child could see through such a transparent fabrication. It’s a story, it’s a story, it’s only a funny story!”

A tired, muffled voice found its way back through the door. “You know me, Ishmael. I’m not clever enough to make up stories.”

“Colin! Colin! Come back here, Colin! ... Colin?”

But the only answer forthcoming, steady as the beating of a heart, ceaseless as the motion of the stars, was the incessant drip! drip! of limewater on stone. ∅

When my friend José Oseguera—author of the wonderful poetry collections The Milk of Your Blood and And This House Is Only a Nest—invited me to participate in an online protest reading he was organizing, I was honored. I also knew I’d need to write something new for the occasion. The event, “100 Days of Protest,” took place this past Tuesday evening on Zoom … and, typically for me, I sat down to write “The Details” just a few hours prior. Watch below. (The video is queued up to the start of the poem.)

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On a sunny afternoon late in the summer of 1987, I stood on the U.S. side of the border crossing between Eastport, Idaho, and Kingsgate, British Columbia, looking north. On the Canadian side stood a group of my fellow Mormon missionaries, lustily beckoning me to cross.

I wanted to but did not dare. My heart was pounding just being so close to the border. There was every chance that if I did join them, I’d be arrested.

True, in those days border enforcement was rather more laissez-faire than today. In many circumstances you didn’t even need a passport to enter Canada. In all likelihood I could have strolled over the line, snapped a few pics, and strolled back with no interference whatsoever. But if a border agent did happen to ask for my i.d. and run a check on it, I would have been in boiling hot water.

Only six months earlier, as a 19-year-old American missionary, I had pleaded guilty to felony mischief in a Calgary courtroom. I’ve told that story many times and in many ways over the years. Suffice it to say that after my brief sentence was served, Canada Immigration issued me a “departure notice”—less severe than deportation, but still a pointed invitation to leave their country of my own volition and never come back.

Rather than sensibly pulling the plug on my mission, the geniuses at Church HQ in Salt Lake City decided to transfer me to the Spokane Mission to serve out the remainder of my tour. Then the geniuses in Spokane decided to make me a district leader and post me to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a mere thirty-mile drive from the border. I already had a record of making disastrous decisions. I’m not sure what any of them were thinking putting me that close to such a flashing red danger zone.

I had lived in Canada on a work visa for nearly six months before my ignominious departure. One of my former partners from back then, a go-getter named Elder Snow1, was promoted to the supervisory position of zone leader a couple of months after I left. He called me one day from his posting in Lethbridge, Alberta. “Hey, Shunn! Vickers and I are swinging through Cranbrook, B.C., to check up on the elders2 there next week. What do you say we all meet up at the border and hang out?”

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Elder Vickers was the best friend I’d made at the Missionary Training Center before our posting to Canada3 , and now by random chance he and Snow were assigned as partners, supervising the only corner of the Calgary Mission that shared a border with the Spokane Mission. It was technically against the rules for them to leave mission boundaries, but Snow had never been one to let rules get in the way of having a good time, as long as no Commandments were broken. I quickly agreed.

Over the next week, as our plans firmed up, I accrued a posse of other missionaries in the area who wanted to get in on the border run. It was a novelty to get to meet people serving in a different mission, and everyone who heard about it thought it sounded like a fun time. When the big day arrived, my group had swelled to six, while the gang from Canada numbered four.

We met up in Eastport, on the U.S. side of the border, around noon. Everyone got along like a house on fire from the start, comparing notes about mission culture and slang and rules and leadership. We descended on a little cafe for lunch, where a few table were hastily shoved together to accommodate us. Over buffalo burgers, Snow caught me up on all the hot Calgary Mission gossip. It was great to see him and the others (though I sorely missed Elder Vickers, who had been detained in Cranbrook dealing with a personnel issue).

As we were finishing our boisterous lunch, Elder Snow insisted I regale the table with the story of my strip search.

“I can’t, I can’t,” I said, waving him off.

“Tell it, buckfart, come on. Stand up. Do all the, you know, the actions.”

It was a story I’d told time and again during my last few weeks in Calgary, a reenactment of the most humiliating episode of my booking into jail4. It never failed to bring the house down. Every missionary who saw it wanted me to repeat it for someone who hadn’t yet had the pleasure.

I gestured around us at the other diners. “Not here, not with all these people.”

But Snow was soon leading the rest of the table in a chant of “Strip search! Strip search! Strip search!”

What choice did I have? As the other diners looked on in confusion and probably horror, I stood at the head of the table and told the story, pantomiming a process over which the threat of a cavity search loomed like a swollen thundercloud5. I’m not sure what anyone else made of it, but my missionary posse dissolved in gales of laughter.

After that we settled up and hurried outside for photos. It was the best day I’d had since arriving back in the United States.

Why am I telling you about these frivolous few hours at the Canadian border? I’ve been thinking a lot about Canada lately, what with this pointless trade war and all of Agent Orange’s demeaning and dangerous talk about annexing our ally to the north. My Canadian friends have been posting on social media and emailing me for weeks, unsettled and angry at the increasing perception that the Mango Mussolini is trying to soften them up for some kind of takeover bid, if not outright invasion. Too accustomed to Hair Furor’s hot air, we’ve been slow in the U.S. to recognize just how seriously Canadians take the threat.

(How seriously? Seriously enough to completely reverse the fortunes of the ruling Liberal Party in the past few weeks. Seriously enough that it may be boosting military enlistments. )

That day 38 years ago was the last time I came anywhere close to the Canadian border. I’ve missed out on a lot being unable to travel there—the chance to visit friends and family, major science fiction conventions and other professional opportunities, at least one epic wedding bash, not to mention the simple pleasure of experiencing more of that remarkable country than the relatively small slice I was able to see during my short stint in Alberta.

I have a deep and abiding love for Canada. It’s true that my time there was not the happiest period of my life, but that wasn’t Canada’s fault. The people I met there were for the most part welcoming and kind. That includes not only the general populace but also the law enforcement and government officials who dealt with me during my arrest, incarceration, and trial.

Speaking of which, the swift and efficient trial was the exact opposite of what I would have expected as a criminal defendant in America. I was arrested on a Monday, and the whole proceeding was complete by that same Thursday. True, it helped that I pleaded guilty, but can you imagine the legal process running so smoothly here? I can’t.

And unlike the Grifter-in-Chief, I also can’t think of a single good reason any Canadians in their right minds would want to be part of the United States—as if a country that confederated in 1867 in part as a way of preventing annexation, and which is now routinely being taunted as the “51st state,” should be expected to slobber with gratitude at … what exactly? The right to be subjected to our world-class healthcare system? Why would they want to shoot themselves in the head? (Or rather, to let someone else do it when America’s unwillingness to control firearms spreads north?)

For the past three years I’ve been working with an immigration lawyer in Ontario—remotely, of course—to prepare an application for a suspension of my criminal record in Canada, as prelude to applying to reenter the country. After so much time, it seems absurd that I can’t visit friends and relatives in Calgary, Saskatoon, Toronto, Montréal. I’d like to be able to do all that while I’m still able to get around.

As part of the process, I’ve been trying to write an essay about what makes me a good citizen, one who is rehabilitated and stable, and who poses no risk to public safety. I’ve been struggling with this assignment, not because I think I do pose any risk to public safety but because for a variety of non-legal reasons I’m having a hard time applying the word “good” to myself.

These days, though, it feels like I could just assert my fervent belief in Canadian sovereignty and my fierce desire for the U.S. to keep its filthy hands to itself and start behaving like a decent neighbor again. I think that might just do the trick.

Missionaries love to take pictures, and we took plenty that day at the border. Some of the more amusing photos include one with my five Spokane Mission colleagues lined up on one side of a border marker while I stand alone on the other side, or one where I’m apprehensively inching a toe over the line in defiance of my own better instincts.

A photograph I don’t have in my collection is the one taken when a bunch of the other missionaries grabbed me and dragged me across the border struggling and bucking. They thought this was hilarious. I did not, and I raced back to safety the second they let go of me.

A Canadian friend forwarded an article to me recently speculating that plans are in the works for an American invasion. He rather archly suggested that the day may soon come when I won’t need to jump through any hoops to drop in for a visit.

Sorry, but if that’s the only way I have to get there, I’d rather stay home. If I can’t reenter a sovereign Canada the right way, then the only way you’ll get me there again is to drag me kicking and screaming. ∅

My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.

There seems to be some confusion these days among Christians about what constitutes acceptable and moral behavior. Not among all Christians, of course, but among enough to constitute a worrisome trend. And look, I get it. When what you read in the New Testament or maybe learn in Sunday school conflicts with what you see good, churchgoing people doing in the world around you, it can be confusing. It can set your head spinning, like Regan in The Exorcist. I’ve been there myself.

The Ritual of Holy Confusion

At the church I grew up in1, I was taught that I should love and welcome all of God’s children, but then when I made friends with people who didn’t believe the same things I did, I was told to stay away from them. At the church I grew up in, I was taught that pride was a sin, but then we would all take turns standing in front of the congregation and patting ourselves on the back for being favored enough by God to know the One True Gospel. At the church I grew up in I was taught that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven2, but then we would we all idolize and suck up to the wealthy old men among us and act like they were the holiest and most blessed of us all, and not just jerks who caught some lucky breaks.

The church I grew up in had a lay clergy, which meant that our local ecclesiastical leaders did their church jobs for free in addition to their regular jobs. One of those leaders, a stake president3 named Robert Mouritsen, worked in the real world as an investment consultant—a modern-day money changer. He was a man so forbidding and judgmental in manner, so sanctimonious in his pretentions to saintliness and erudition, it was like he was auditioning for the role of God’s clenched asshole. I was taught in church by people like Mouritsen not to steal, and I don’t mind using his real name here because in 2018 he was indicted for fraud by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He used his status as a church leader to bilk investors of $1.5 million, and he was sent to federal prison in 2020. Talk about mixed messages!

What I’m saying is, it can be hard to know what it means to be a Christian. And if it’s hard for an individual to know what it means to be a Christian, just think how much harder and more confusing it is for an entire country to try to be Christian! It’s no wonder we here in America seem to be getting it so wrong.

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Caveat Christianus

Now, I know what some of you are saying to yourselves right now. You’re saying, “Hey, dummy! The United States of America is not a Christian nation!” And you would be correct. In case this wasn’t already clear from the Constitution’s establishment clause, our federal government said it out loud in 1796 in Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion … no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”4

However, since so many of us here labor under the misapprehension that this is a Christian nation, it’s worth reviewing a few of the precepts we might expect to figure into policy if we as country were in fact dedicated to following the example and teachings of Jesus Christ.

Imagining a Christian Nation

The most basic of Jesus’s teachings was to love all people. What would that mean for a Christian nation? To respect all people and recognize their right to exist? To favor all groups, tribes, and congregations equally, none more than the rest? To help everyone succeed, thrive, and be happy? Those sound like good starting points.

I’m pretty sure Christian nation would not foment hate against its neighbors, attempt to legislate or dictate other communities out of existence, or exclude refugees from seeking safety within its borders. That would be the opposite of love.

Time and again Jesus made clear through words and actions that his followers have an obligation to help the poor, to feed the hungry, to heal and minister to the sick, to clothe and shelter the needy. Some people will tell you this commandment applies only to faith groups and other private entities, not to governments, but that’s a specious argument, aimed at dodging the cost of responsibility. In a truly Christian nation, the obligation would necessarily apply to the government as well.

Contrast that with current U.S. government policies. The president and his cronies are on a rampage, revoking funds to fight starvation and prevent disease around the world, sending vulnerable refugees at our borders to prisons overseas, gearing up to slash Medicaid and Social Security, waging war on vaccination while a measles outbreak worsens, and much more. None of which strikes me as very Christian.

Jesus instructed his followers to turn the other cheek and to love those that hate them, while the president obsesses about retribution—and delivers on it5. Jesus exhorted his followers to render Caesar his due, while the president plots to shift more of the burden of taxation from the wealthy onto the shoulders of the weak. Jesus stood with the oppressed, while the president stands with the bullies and monsters of the world.

How would a Christian nation behave? Not like this. What should a Christian nation tolerate?

Not this.

I’m not saying it was perfect, but our government was behaving in a far more Christian fashion just a couple of months ago.

Is that a confusing way to put it? A more correct way would be to say it behaved in a far more decent and moral fashion just two short months ago. We shouldn’t perpetuate the fallacy that Christianity has any corner on the morality market, just as we shouldn’t forget that, for all its problems, the United States has been a remarkable force for good and stability around the world, in part through agencies like USAID.

In What Do We Trust?

Speaking of which, the U.S. may have no state religion, but I do believe we have something akin to one. Spoiler alert: it’s not Christianity.

Our de facto state religion is democracy.

Democracy is the axiomatic principle of our Constitution, as fundamental to our national ideals as loving one another is to Christian doctrine. Democracy requires faith in order to work—faith in the wisdom and good intentions of our fellow citizens, and faith in the representatives we elect to lead us. Democracy requires everyone’s involvement. Democracy is fragile. It demands vigilance against those who would warp it, break it, or blow it to smithereens.

If we lose it, we all go down together.

Money Changers in the Temple

While the putatively Christian president is consumed by violent posturing and rhetoric, on only one recorded occasion did Jesus himself indulge in anything approaching violence. Upon entering the temple in Jerusalem, he saw merchants selling animals for sacrifice and grew angry. He fashioned himself a whip, overturned their tables, scattered their coins, and drove them out with their animals. “Take these things hence,” he said, according to John 2:16. “Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.”

The temple of our democracy is infested by rapacious billionaires and their enablers. Jesus never had much that was encouraging to say about the rich, and these are some of the richest pricks ever to sully our poor little planet. He didn’t only say it would be hard for them to get to heaven. “Go thy way,” he told the wealthy man in Mark 10:21, “sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor.” Can you picture Trump, or Musk, or Bezos following this admonition?

No, instead they’re intent on pulling down the pillars of democracy and making it a house of merchandise, no matter the cost to the rest of us—to the rest of the world. They will snap the neck of democracy like it was a dove. They will slit its throat like it was a lamb and drain its blood for money, and for power. And then they’ll look for another sacrifice, and another. Mammon is hungry.

Confused Christians, is the situation coming a little clearer? What would you do if you were truly intent on following the example of Jesus in all things? Would you fashion yourselves whips? Would you overturn the tables of the money changers, scatter their riches? Would drive them from the temple like the animals they are?

The rest of us can’t do it without you. Are you ready? ∅

If you’re feeling as much despair about America’s direction as I am, one resource I recommend is Jessica Craven’s excellent Substack Chop Wood, Carry Water, which is full of actions you can take every day to promote change and stave off darkness. Plus, I just donated $50 to help Ukraine purchase military defense hardware. You can direct a donation to any of several different Ukrainian support initiatives!

My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.