Ido not know if other sects of the cult exist—if the cult can be found in Sapporo, Saint Petersburg, La Paz, Bruges—or if the cult in our village was the cult itself. If it was, then I am all that is left of it. And perhaps it could have emerged only in a landscape like ours, in a village teetering along the glacial waters of Lake Superior, a village whose cottages and mailboxes were buried under snow most months of the year, a village in which there was rarely ever anything to do. The cult was seldom referred to as the Cult of the Deathself, most often instead the Yooper Cult, which seems to suggest that it was an invention of our village alone. But our father—a mustached Dutch American, with knuckles the size of my kneecaps, droopy earlobes fatter than my thumbs—he often spoke of the cult otherwise, as if it were something very old and far-reaching, something far bigger than just our twenty-cottage village in the Upper Peninsula.
My sister, on the other hand, often spoke of the cult as if it were something either very funny or very fake. Like me she had been adopted by our father, but from Jamaica instead of Korea. I loved her, not like a brother loves a sister, but like a boy loves an older girl with dark curls and an upturned nose and a mask of dark freckles. At bedtime I would chant her name to myself—Kayley, Kayley, Kayley—as if whispering a spell to make her stay. Kayley said the cult was bogus, but I believed our father when he said that it was real. Like all of the cult’s followers, he referred to it as Temple. I loved him, not like a son loves a father, but like a soldier loves a general who will teach him to be strong. He was the lighthouse keeper for our village—he wore black snow boots I could stuff both legs into and then, bending over, both arms. I was stunned by the size of him. If I’d had any friends, I would have told them all.
Ours was a harmless cult. If a cult is destructive, then that is its downfall—if a cult is harmless, then its downfall is that. A more destructive cult might have died by a twenty-car police raid, by the mass suicide of its followers. Ours was simply smothered by more compelling cults—by the Cult of Meth, the Cult of the Internet, the Cult of Everything That Somehow Found Us Here. It was already happening when I was a boy—Kayley hated our cult only because her friends belonged to another, the Cult of Meth. They lived in villages beyond our cove, came for her in a minivan with snow chains and a rusted hood. Owen Puck had a tattoo of a handprint on his face—the black palm under his jaw, the black fingers pressed into his cheek—as if he’d been handled by a demon. The others didn’t have names, just hooded parkas with missing buttons and broken zippers, pants stained with the salt from the roads, seeds whose shells they’d spit out into our sink. After school Kayley and I were supposed to do our training, but Kayley trusted me not to tell our father that she hadn’t, and not to tell him that Owen Puck and the parkas had come to our cottage, and not to tell him that Owen Puck had taken her into her room and locked the door. Before our father got home Kayley would claw the slimy seed shells out of our sink and fling them into the garbage can beneath it, rake the coffee grounds and meatless ribs over the seeds so our father wouldn’t see them, and when he got home I would say I had done my training for three hours with only a ten-minute break and so had Kayley. Our father would ruffle my hair and tickle my sides and fling me onto the couch and leave me bouncing there, still giggling, as he shut himself into his bedroom to do his own training. Kayley would throw a book at me from the chair where she was pretending to read, then shut herself into her bedroom to call Owen Puck.
Brought her here for a new home.
Left too soon, but not alone.
— from the gravestone of Kayley Groot
Like many cults, the teachings of ours—as I was taught in the school bus driver’s basement where its followers met, the school bus driver standing with chalk between his fingers at the teacher’s blackboard shoved against his boiler, chalk dust wiped into his beard—revolved around the afterlife. I was taught that after dying I would meet my deathself, an identical doppelgänger. If I had died that first night in the basement, for example, my deathself would have had bony arms, a hairless stomach, and a missing tooth—one of my teeth had fallen out that morning while I was chewing my toast. If I died tonight, however, my deathself would have flabby arms, a pouchy stomach speckled with hair, and all of its teeth, now coffee-stained. As I was taught, after dying I would have to compete with my deathself in a series of mental and physical challenges. Only the winner would pass on to the afterlife. For the other—oblivion, nothingness. Because of this, followers spent much of their lives training for these unknown contests, so as to better their odds of defeating their deathself. Kayley referred to the deathself as the bitchself. We’d had a mother, but she’d taken a train to Newfoundland to study Wen-Do as part of her cult training. Kayley said our mother had only said that to get away from the cult and our father and that she wasn’t coming back, but I believed our father when he said that she would.
The things I was taught in school—a squat building inland from the lake—were minor compared to the things I taught myself after school for cult training. In school they honed my English, taught us how to multiply numbers, taught us how our fathers’ ancestors had slaughtered the natives of this peninsula before building oak cottages where the natives had kept their birch wigwams, before shoving oak sloops out into the lakes where the natives had kept their birch canoes. After school the kids from other villages would stay—for chemistry club, theater rehearsal, basketball training—but Kayley and I would take the bus back to our village, our school bus driver wearing black headphones and listening to recorded language lessons while he drove, preparing himself for any deathself feats that might require a fluency in Italian, Korean, Danish. Kayley and I would check the mailbox for letters from our mother and then knock the snow from our boots and go inside empty-handed. Days when our father was inside—if he had no more lighthouse duties, and if the yellow-sailed sloop we kept at the boathouse on Lake Superior somehow needed no repairing or repainting or tweaking whatsoever—Kayley would have to do her training. She’d hang the stuffed bear she still slept with from the cord of her window blinds, leave it strung up by its neck in her bedroom window—her warning sign to Owen Puck that it wasn’t safe to come. Then she’d sit on the couch with me, our backs to the arms, our legs sharing the middle cushion—never did I love her as much as when our knees were touching—and we would quiz each other with whatever puzzles our father had assigned. When bedtime came I would cocoon into the blankets our father had given me, hyper with fantasies about Kayley and me dying—our school bus careening through a guardrail, a house fire liquefying our cottage with us trapped inside, Owen Puck killing us for fun—and meeting our deathselves together. In my fantasies I would have to fight both my own deathself and Kayley’s deathself for her—I would wriggle around my bed, pretending to struggle against Kayley’s deathself in a riddle-solving competition, against my own deathself in a breath-holding match. From her bedroom across the hall, her own cult keeping her sleepless, Kayley would shout at me to stop rustling around. I wanted to stop rustling, but when I thought about fighting for her, I just couldn’t help it.
That winter Owen Puck’s brother came to our cottage. He was an elder in the Cult of Meth, jittery and chatty, his tongue slurring words. The meth had already taken teeth from him. I kept doing my jumping jacks while the Elder Puck stared at me. I was at one hundred and seven.
“What’s his name?” the Elder Puck said.
Kayley told him.
“Simon,” the Elder Puck said. His eyes were more yellowish than brown. “A new Simon. The dark Simon.” He looked at the parkas. Apparently one of them was named Simon, too. They shifted, none of them looking at me, the fabric of their parkas crackling. “Simon the dark.” I kept doing my jumping jacks. “How many jumping jacks can you do?”
I told him.
“More than I can count?” The Elder Puck shook out a bag of ice that was not ice onto our table. “You could do twice that on this shit.” Somehow he was even skinnier than I was. His face was like what Owen Puck’s would have been if Owen Puck had been buried alive as a baby and then dug up just now still alive. “Kayley, you going to work with us in The Factory tonight?”
Kayley told him.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean I can’t.”
“You mean you don’t want to,” the Elder Puck said.
“E, I told you,” Owen Puck said. “She doesn’t want to get caught up in that. You don’t want her to get caught up in that. Her dad is one scary guy.”
“Caught up like that,” the Elder Puck said. “Caught like that. Caught up in the up in. Like that, caught that, like.” He fingered what wasn’t ice. “Simon the dark, want to do some crystal?”
I didn’t say anything. I wanted to tell them to leave but they were Kayley’s guests and I wanted her to love me—not like a sister loves a brother, but like a girl loves a boy who has tiny ears and huge teeth and a scar on his neck given to him in a far-off land. So I kept doing my jumping jacks. I kept doing my jumping jacks even as the Pucks and Kayley snorted powder at the table, just as I had known Owen Puck and Kayley had always locked her bedroom door to do. I kept doing my jumping jacks even as the Pucks took Kayley into her room and locked the door, even as I realized that whatever Owen Puck and Kayley had been locking her door for, it was for something more than the powder. I kept doing my jumping jacks even as I heard the Elder Puck laughing, even as the parkas spit shells into our sink—kept bringing my arms down and then up and then down and then up, as if I were getting robbed again and again and again and again.
A bird, a man, a loaded gun.
No bird, dead man, your will be done.
— from the gravestone of Eric Puck
Our lakeshore was littered with the burned-out husks of abandoned sheds and barns, holes blown through the sides of them. The chemicals used when cooking the Cult of Meth’s sacraments were unstable—the cult’s followers had been trained to handle them, but even then, sometimes the lakeshore would be shaken by a far-off boom, the plates rattling in our cupboards, and a dark plume of smoke would come unfurling from the pines. Before the Elder Puck, there had been the Elder Bakkers—one of the Elder Bakkers had been taken away in a three-car police raid on the shed in the woods behind our school, and after that the other Elder Bakker had moved their chemicals to a pink-sailed sloop, where he had kept their chemicals in the sloop’s cabin, until one day we felt the far-off boom, heard the plates rattling in our cupboards, and Kayley and I stood at the window with our mother and waited for the dark plume of smoke, but when it came, it came unfurling from the lake instead of the trees. Our mother made a noise, then went back to cooking divinity at the stove, spooning lumps of it from her pot and then dropping them onto her cookie sheet, Kayley and I standing at the counter, waiting for them to cool.
God you will be missed.
— from the gravestone of Jonah Bakker
Months before Kayley announced that she and Owen Puck were turning runaway, our father brought me to the boathouse. We kept our sloop berthed alongside the mail carrier’s black-sailed sloop, the gravestone maker’s white-sailed, the three of them strung up by metal chains on metal pulleys. While our father adjusted the rudder’s fittings, he muttered geometry proofs and astronomy facts to himself, and I scrubbed the hull of the sloop with a sponge soaked in bleach.
He had caught me telling Kayley about my birth parents. “Forget your birth parents,” he’d said. “They weren’t followers—they’ve already met oblivion.” I had cried when he’d said this, and so he had taken me here to work the memories out of me, to erase them with the fumes of the bleach. As bleach ran between my fingers into the sleeves of my jacket, I tried to be strong like our father—tried to unremember the smells of my birth parents, the shapes of their faces.
Our father would be proud, if he were still alive, to know I now have no memories of my birth parents. I have only the memory of forgetting those memories, and even that has faded.
What I do remember is driving back to our cottage with my fingers reeking of bleach, clutching a pinecone I’d found that I wanted to give to Kayley. When we got home I ran to her room and threw open her door, where I found Owen Puck and the parkas dropping out Kayley’s window, one by one, Kayley giving each of them a boost. As our father dropped the boathouse keys onto the kitchen table, Owen Puck dropped to where the parkas were waiting, and as the floorboards in the kitchen and then the hallway creaked under our father’s feet, Kayley slid her window shut, and then our father walked past her doorway, glancing at us as he did.
That was the closest our father had ever come, I think, to catching them.
She came and left and came and left.
This leaving now, no coming back.
—from the gravestone of Emma Groot
I stopped doing my training, but unlike Kayley, I was not willing to pretend. When we next came home and found our father hunched at the kitchen table—his notes on labyrinth designs, the Rand index, M-theory sprawled out between his coffee mug and a half-eaten venison pasty—Kayley hung the stuffed bear in her bedroom window and pretended to do her balance training on the living room floor, but I did not pretend. I went to my room and squeezed between my bed and the wall and propped a book on my knees, a book about enchanted kingdoms and talking animals, a book that could not possibly help me in the fight against my deathself.
I heard our father’s chair scrape. I stared at the words on the pages.
He stood in my doorway. “That’s not a training book,” he said. “Come do your training.”
I told him I wouldn’t.
“Yes, you will,” he said. “Have you ever known Kayley not to do her training?”
I lied to him.
“Then do like your sister does.”
I told him I wouldn’t. He plucked the book from my hands, stooped down between my bed and the wall—his hips jostling my bed—and palmed my knees. His sweatshirt had faded from the bluish color it’d been to something almost colorless. “What’s going on?” he said.
I didn’t want to tell him my question—I was afraid of what he would do if I did.
After I told him he just stared at me.
“That’s a lot for a little guy like you to be carrying,” he said. “When you have questions like that, don’t sit in here worrying yourself. Just ask me.” He let go of a knee, flattened his mustache with his thumb. “A lot of followers struggle with that—if my deathself is identical to me, won’t training just strengthen my deathself too?” He palmed both knees again. “We teach that although the deathself is identical in appearance, it must somehow be different—otherwise it would be impossible for one to defeat the other. I know that’s not a good answer. We don’t always have answers. I thought you were too young to bring to our theology debates, but maybe you should come. It’s not part of Temple training—it’s extra. But you can come if you want.”
He said the theology debates were at the school bus driver’s too, just on a different night from the regular cult meetings. I felt so relieved that I hugged his leg. I had thought that all of my training had made my deathself only the more clever, only the more strong—had worried that with all of our father’s training he had made his deathself too brilliant to ever be beaten, that our father would lose and become nothingness and there would be nothing I could do to save him.
Kayley said he was lonely without our mother. I said he still had us, but Kayley said our mother was the one who’d wanted us, not him, and that to him we were followers, not children.
An envelope had come from Georgetown, Maryland, the writing on it like our mother’s but loopier. We thought it was from her but when our father opened it and read it and tore it up and threw it away, he said that it wasn’t. He shook the garbage can, mixing the paper with coffee grounds and lumps of gristle, getting the shreds too soggy to piece back together. Then he said he was driving to Republic to go to the Crowley’s.
“Tonight?” Kayley said.
“I need a suit,” our father said.
“Since when?” Kayley said.
Our father’s car shadowed its headlights out into the road, its tires spinning in the fresh powder from that afternoon’s flurry. Kayley called Owen Puck. The Pucks and the parkas came slinking into our cottage before I’d been doing my training for more than ten minutes.
“Simon the dark, what’re you reading?” the Elder Puck said.
I told him.
“Nursery rhymes?” he said. “Better lay off that cult shit, before it fucks you up for good.”
I ignored him and did what our father had told me to do. I was supposed to memorize the nursery rhymes, develop the memory skills our father was so famous for in our village. “Humpty Dumpty,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” “Ring Around the Rosie.” Kayley stared at me—I knew she could tell I was afraid of the Elder Puck, as much as I was trying to feel strong.
“The Yooper Cult,” the Elder Puck said, prodding the spine of my book with his boot. “The Cult of Data. The Data Cult. The Cult of Books and Numbers.”
“Owen,” Kayley said.
“The Homework Cult. Cult of Work at Home. Cult of Home at Work at Home at Work.”
“Owen,” Kayley said.
“E, shut the fuck up,” Owen Puck said. “You’re doing that thing again. Just relax, man.”
The Elder Puck stared at Kayley. Kayley stared at the kitchen counter. The parkas stared at the Elder Puck, chewing their seeds. I whispered “Ring Around the Rosie” to myself without looking at my book.
Then the Elder Puck shoved Owen Puck, who tripped backward over a chair. The Elder Puck palmed our father’s coffee mug from the sink, and when Owen Puck hauled himself back standing, the Elder Puck hammered Owen Puck in the forehead, the mug leaving a trail of leftover coffee hanging in the air, which then fell—with Owen Puck—onto the carpet.
Owen Puck coiled up under the kitchen table, his knees at his face, his fingers spread over his forehead trying to keep the blood in. “Fuck, E,” he said.
“If you didn’t misbehave, I wouldn’t have to hit you,” the Elder Puck said. “I told you not to embarrass me like that. Owen. Like that, me. I told you.”
“You can’t even talk like you’re not tweaking anymore,” Owen Puck said.
The Elder Puck mustered the parkas at the front door. “If you’re big enough to boss me in front of some nobodies,” the Elder Puck said, “you’re big enough to walk yourself home.”
They piled out. Kayley peeked out the blinds of the door’s window.
“The Factory gone?” Owen Puck said.
Kayley told him.
Kayley told him.
“He should not be driving with that shit in the back. Especially while lit.”
“If it blows,” Kayley said, “at least you won’t be in it.”
“He’ll be in it,” Owen Puck said. “He’s my brother, K.”
They sat on our couch, Kayley asking Owen Puck about his head. I whispered “Jack and Jill” to myself, memorizing the illustration that went with the words. Kayley muttered questions about the meth that Owen Puck couldn’t answer. He said his brother was only like that because he used too much and sold too little—that it’d kill him the same way it’d killed their uncle.
“Owen might have a concussion,” Kayley told me. “I’m walking him home.”
“You can’t leave Simon here alone,” Owen Puck said. “He’s like seven.”
I told him how old I actually was.
“Okay, nine. Still.”
I hated Owen Puck for caring about me like I wanted Kayley to. Kayley said to him, “And what if you pass out in a snowdrift somewhere between our house and yours?”
“If you come, he comes with us.”
“Our dad comes home and I’m gone, he’ll freak. But he comes home and both of us are gone? He’ll freak and then kill me. How long’s it take to drive to Republic and back?”
Owen Puck told her.
“Shit. We’re going to have to walk fast. Simon, you going to keep up?”
I told her I wasn’t going. I wanted to be good.
Owen Puck hunched over the closet anyway, tossed my boots back at me.
“If she’s coming, you’re coming,” he said.
We left the door unlocked—Kayley and I wearing our boots, Owen Puck wearing our father’s boots and carrying his high-tops with the laces undone—and followed the minivan’s tire tracks, which were already filling with snow. I was zipped into the black down jacket our father had given me, Kayley into her pink. Winter in our village was a dead world, all of its smells—the loamy dirt, the pollen-spitting wildflowers, the rotting compost heaped in crates behind the cottages—muffled under the snow. All sounds replaced by the soundlessness—the pines empty of birds, the yards empty of women hatcheting firewood and men hoeing patches of herbs, the lake itself empty of sloops, motorboats, freighters, its shallows empty of waves, glacier instead from the sand as far as the lighthouse. Everything white or gray or brown—the cottages’ yellow and pink siding scabbed with snow, the pines white, the birdfeeders and wound garden hoses white, the mailboxes white, the cars buried, the sky murky with gray snowclouds, whether it was snowing or it wasn’t. Nothing for any of our noses or ears or eyes to feel, aside from the sound of our own boots making their marks in the snow. My boots I dragged, wanting our father to beat us home, wanting us to be caught so that I wouldn’t have to lie anymore for Kayley.
“I thought you said you’d keep up,” Kayley said.
I told her I hadn’t.
“It’s hard when you’ve got those shorter legs,” Owen Puck said. “I remember. Come on, little man, I’ll give you a boost.”
I didn’t want to but he hiked me onto his shoulders anyway. I was trying not to have fun. Owen Puck pretended I was too heavy. He sank onto his knees. I didn’t want to laugh but I knew he wouldn’t get up until I had, so I did. He got up and we kept walking. I held his jaw to keep my balance, my hand upside-down over his tattoo’s hand. I had never been to the Pucks’ village. It looked like our village, except the cottages were on hills and more of the driveways had snowplows parked in them and they didn’t have a lighthouse. On the Pucks’ road, through the window of a cottage, I saw a bearded man’s face lit white by a glowing screen. I didn’t know it then, but the man was of the Cult of the Internet—the first I ever saw, though I would see many more.
In a lit-up window of the Pucks’ cottage we could see Owen Puck’s mother wearing a plaid button-up and gray sweatpants, folding laundry. The Elder Puck was standing next to her, chewing something. Owen Puck kicked into his high-tops and Kayley and I hid behind the minivan to make sure he made it in. He did. He reappeared in the lit-up window to kiss his mother on the cheek. The Elder Puck came to the door and knocked it open with his hip—a leafy sandwich in his hands—and squinted out into the dark. Then he shouted, “The Cult of Infinite Chores.” He tore a mouthful from his sandwich, shut the door, and reappeared where their mother was poking at the gash on Owen Puck’s forehead and Owen Puck was pretending the gash didn’t hurt him and hadn’t been given to him by someone who was standing right there in their living room. The Elder Puck lobbed what was left of his sandwich onto their mother’s pile of laundry and wrapped Owen Puck in a chokehold, tickling at Owen Puck’s sides. Their mother pretended to be mad at them for roughhousing, but once her back was to them—facing her laundry, and us out hiding in the snow—a tiny smile surfaced, a tiny dimple at one cheek.
Kayley and I walked back to our cottage and sat on the kitchen floor and ate Brigham’s vanilla bean out of the carton. Our father still wasn’t home. Kayley called Owen Puck, but he didn’t answer, so Kayley got out markers and paper and flopped onto the carpet and stared at the lifeless ceiling fan, trying to remember every memory she still had from Jamaica. Whenever she found one she said it and I had to write it down. I gave each a different color. In pink I wrote birds outside the window with eggs with spots on them. In yellow, before someone an old woman leaning over me talking holding something in her hand. In violet, the smell of the mattress Ayla and I slept on sort of indescribable just a human smell the humanest smell I’ve ever smelled. In blue, the cracks in the wall where I would feel them in the dark in this closet where I would sometimes hide. Kayley let me keep the paper with her memories. She said having them written down wouldn’t help, that she kept losing more and more of them and soon she wouldn’t have any memories left from that place where she’d been happy, only memories of after, of here.
Sometimes at night while I was trying to fall asleep I would talk to my deathself, as quietly as I could, with my eyes shut and my face in my pillow. I would imagine it, myself but with darker eyes, and then once it was looking at me, I would taunt it—whisper something like, “You’re not as good as I am,” or, “I’ll beat you, you stupid fake thing.” But that night I just asked it questions. I whispered, “What did you do today? Did you learn anything I never have?” I asked, “Did you ride on someone’s shoulders?” I asked it, “Did your father ever come back home?” When we woke up our father was back and eating burnt toast in the kitchen. When we got home from school he was gone again. When the Elder Puck came over with the parkas, he told Kayley that from now on she was working in The Factory with the rest of them, and this time Owen Puck didn’t stand up for her, and so she left in their minivan; they took her away.
Forty years you drove our buses,
now you are a box of ashes.
— from the gravestone of Peter Boor
Whenever our father put on his suit from Crowley’s—it looked like it’d been tailored for a smaller man—we knew he’d be gone at least until dawn. After our father left in the suit, the Pucks would come for Kayley and she’d leave in their minivan.
“Don’t you get bored?” she’d say. “Go somewhere. Go do something.”
I told her I wasn’t supposed to.
“He doesn’t care. He’s too busy trying not to get divorced.”
When our father asked about her I lied to him, like always. While you were gone Kayley did her jumping jacks and practiced drawing perfect circles, I’d say. I’d say, we read what you left us to read. Whenever Kayley heard me lying for her she’d walk through later and touch me on the back of the neck, at the spot where my hair turned to skin, like a way of saying thank you. Her cheeks had hollowed out. Her undereyes were purpled like bruises. She had burns on her hands now almost always. Our father hadn’t noticed.
She was working hard in the minivan but I was working hard in the school bus driver’s basement. Our father and I would shovel the driveway, then sputter off to the weekly theology debate. Sometimes the Pucks’ minivan would go spinning around a bend in the road, off to our cottage to go nab Kayley from where we’d left her. Our father would wave—like he’d wave at any car in our village—as if he knew them. The Elder Puck wouldn’t, as if he didn’t.
Then for a few weeks Kayley didn’t go anywhere.
“We messed up a batch,” she said. “Some people Owen’s brother sold it to ended up in the hospital, people from only a couple towns over. So we’re shut down, least until we hear if anyone died. If they do, we’re down for good. No way anybody’d buy from the Pucks after that.”
I imagined these followers from the Cult of Meth strapped into their hospital beds, in comas, not understanding what they were seeing—seeing nothing but this black lake they were going to have to cross, and beyond it, perched on a black rock spotted with gold moss, someone who looked just like them. The teachings of their cult revolved, like ours, around the afterlife—that there would be none, that the bliss their powder gave them was the only eternity they’d ever have. They held no funeral rites for the dead. None of our cult had died since I’d come, but I’d been taught that when someone did die that we would hold a sending for them—each of us lying in the snow, arms and legs spread star-like, boots facing the inside of our circle—with the school bus driver singing, a throaty rasping, a song of words that were not words. Kayley said that when she died to just get it over with, skip the bitchself rituals, mail her ashes back to Jamaica.
“It’s too easy to mix up the chemicals,” Kayley said. “Whether we’re driving or even just parked. They tried to say it was me who messed up, but Owen said it wasn’t, that it was Simon, and even then only because he couldn’t say that it was his brother, even though it probably was.”
I asked Kayley if she’d come with us to the theology debates, at least while The Factory was shut down, but she only laughed. Usually at the debates we’d argue about the particulars of our teachings, sort through the facts. But the first night I went, all they did was listen. I had so many questions. What was the deathself? Was it a fake me—just an animated double? Or was it a who, and would oblivion for my deathself be just as much of an oblivion as it would be for me? Or was my deathself a me from another place—another universe, maybe, or the me I would have been if I had never left Korea—and was I destined both to be destroyed and to pass on to the afterlife? And the question I worried about more than any other: how could I know that Iwasn’t the deathself, and that the deathself I’d see wouldn’t be the actual me? The basement was littered with empty seats—those were the chairs the stooped gravestone maker, the gap-toothed schoolteacher, the manure-smelling apple farmers, the apple farmers’ straw-haired children, the wrinkled dentist, the acne-spotted convenience store cashier, and Kayley occupied at the regular cult meetings. The school bus driver, the retired snowplower, and the mail carrier were the only ones who came to the theology debates, but they came every week. They sat on rickety mismatched folding chairs just listening—the school bus driver nodding, the retired snowplower leaning back and squeezing his stubbly chin between his thumb and his fingers, the mail carrier rolling the sleeves of her shirt to her elbows, our father saying nothing, just rubbing his temples with his thumbs.
“We haven’t had a child like this since I can’t even remember,” the mail carrier said. “Since before I was even born. Someone actually excited about Temple. Wanting to learn.”
I told them another one of my questions.
“Dreamself?” the school bus driver said. “What do you mean, dreamself?”
I meant the person I was when I was dreaming—what if my deathself was the same as my dreamself? Would I be able to steal my deathself’s training time by keeping myself awake? They stared at me. “Simon,” our father said, smiling, not like a smile that was just a smile, but like a smile that was an I’m sorry to the others in the basement. “Questions are one thing, but you can’t start making things up. That goes against—”
“No,” the school bus driver said. He wiped chalky letters from the blackboard, then pinched the chalk between his fingers, staring at me. “We need to start writing these down.”
Owen Puck came over sometimes when our father wasn’t home, just like he used to. He and Kayley would cuddle on the couch, kissing each other’s noses in the lamp’s twitchy glow. Sometimes he would come talk to me, do jumping jacks with me to keep me company. I hoped the meth would make him dumber, make him unlearn everything he’d ever learned. He was the only person I knew I hoped would lose to his deathself—Owen Puck had used to be scary, but now he was always nice to me, and I hated him for making it so much harder for me to hate him.
My baby, our clown,
some nights I talk to him,
pretend he’s still around.
—from the gravestone of Owen Puck
Our mother wanted a divorce from our father. She’d met someone in Newfoundland, was living with him in Maryland. Our father told us he was going to bring her back.
“She’s not coming back,” Kayley said, shaking her head. “I knew she wasn’t.”
Nobody had died and The Factory had been open again for weeks. Kayley was getting worse at pretending she wasn’t a student of the theologies of the Cult of Meth. That night instead of yelling at me from across the hall to stop rustling around, she just kept hacking and coughing.
She called me into her room.
“Stay in here tonight, with me,” she said. “I want to go through my memories again.”
I told Kayley I wanted to sleep—I knew our father would hear us if we kept talking.
“I can’t sleep. My insides feel like stuffing,” she said. “Like cottony stuffed-animal stuffing that’s all fluff and too much of it.”
I lied to her.
“I know it’s not nothing, Simon. Fuck those fucking fumes.”
She was turning into someone else—some other Kayley, one who looked the same as the Kayley before, but her face sort of misshapen, her eyes seeming deader. I was afraid of her. I hated myself for being afraid of her, but I was. Back in my own bed I said my spell over and over again like I had before—Kayley, Kayley, Kayley—crying but not wanting to, chanting her name into my pillow, trying with my spell to turn her back into the Kayley she’d been.
The next cult meeting they assessed our current skills. They made us chant the sending song, testing us on the words that were not words. Then we took tests at the blackboard with everyone watching, the school bus driver showing us colored flashcards, quizzing us for facts, giving us mazes to solve. I was a second-class linguist, second-class acrobat, third-class mathematician, first-class mesmerist. Kayley was seventh-class everything. The mail carrier wouldn’t even look at her while Kayley was doing her tests for memorization. Kayley was shaking the whole time.
“I don’t understand how Kayley could have scored so low,” our father said. “Are you sure she’s been doing her work?”
I wanted to tell him the truth so he could keep the Pucks away and turn her back into the Kayley she was supposed to be. But lying was the only thing I could even do for her anymore.
“Then again,” he said, “I don’t understand how you could already be a first-class mesmerist either.”
He thought we needed photographs of us, photographs of me and Kayley to send to our mother to make her remember who and where she really loved. We’d drive into Republic, get them done at the Crowley’s, he said. Mail them to her first-class.
Kayley had scissored a notch between the legs of her stuffed bear, kept a wad of hundreds fat as a blackboard eraser inside it, her pay from The Factory. She’d made Owen Puck promise he was going to take her away from here. Neither of them had learned yet what I’ve learned since—that the cults weren’t for those of us who were leaving, but those of us who were never going anywhere other than where we already were. Owen Puck said they would move to Florida, live on the Gulf, eat peppery shrimp for breakfast lunch dinner. Kayley had said okay, but to me she said she’d do Florida for a year tops, and then she’d be moving back to Jamaica and taking Owen Puck with her, whether he liked it or not. Kayley couldn’t wait until the Elder Puck was dead. If they left beforehand, she said, he’d haul his twitchy self after them wherever they went, come tracking them down, not for any reason at all, just out of boredom, out of spite.
When you meet your other you,
give that fiend what it is due.
—from the gravestone of Tom Groot
Our father drove me into Republic to buy me a suit for the photographs we were going to take. He wore his own suit so I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about trying them on. He bought me one on clearance. Like our father’s it was a size too small. It could’ve fit the me I was when I’d first moved into our father’s cottage. We drank vanilla milkshakes and ate vegetable pasties and then drove back to our village for the theology debate at the school bus driver’s cottage.
When we pulled into the driveway, ours was the only car. The school bus driver’s minivan, the retired snowplower’s pickup, the mail carrier’s pickup—none of them was there. Our father went trudging through the snow to the school bus driver’s door, pounded on it with his fist, waited, pounded on it again. At the theology debates they talked as if I were a prophet—as if I would bring about a new era for the cult, bring its teachings to villages and towns all over the Upper Peninsula, the Lower Peninsula, the states somewhere beneath us. But they had not been sent a prophet. They had been sent a eulogist—they had been sent someone who could not save the cult, someone who would someday have to watch it die.
Our father said, “Maybe they left a message for us at home.”
We drove back toward our own cottage. Farther down the lakeshore, I saw a dark plume of smoke above the trees—we’d been too far away to feel it when it had happened, the smoke already going to gray from black. Neither of us said anything about it. It didn’t seem like a fact we needed to memorize, a fact either of us would ever need to know.
Then the gravestone maker’s rusted car swung onto the road behind us, flashing its lights and honking its horn. Our father braked and the car came skidding up alongside of us.
“Tom, I’m sorry,” the gravestone maker said, shaking his head, not looking at us. He said they had tried to call us: once just as a formality—the same as he had called everyone in the cult to tell them at which part of the road to come gather—then again, a few minutes later, when the school bus driver had spotted Kayley’s pink jacket in among all of the parkas.
“Follow me,” the gravestone maker said, and he cranked his window back up and went spinning off down the road, the same way we had already been going.
My father and I drove not talking. The medics had cleared the bodies away already when we arrived. The school bus sat just off the road—between the school and our village, where the trees stuttered away into a blank stretch of snowy lakeshore—a few windows along the back of the bus shattered, its tail ashy with black. Overturned on its side, just shy of the lake’s frozen shallows, the Pucks’ minivan spewed smoke from where its rear doors had been. The Elder Puck and one of the parkas sat next to the school bus driver on the curb, the Elder Puck’s hands and cheek smeared with black, the parka’s parka with burn marks up and down its arms, the hood with a face-sized hole burned through the back of it. The school bus driver had a bag of ice taped to his neck. A police officer sat in her patrol car waiting for the tow trucks, her heat on, windows foggy. Everyone from the cult was already there, huddled around knee-deep in the powder.
“Were you driving, son?” the mail carrier was asking.
“No, no,” the Elder Puck said, his twitching blending in with his shivering, the snow doing to him with cold what the meth had done to him with chemical. “I was in the passenger seat. In the, I was. I wasn’t driving. Simon was driving.” He was holding Owen Puck’s high-tops to his chest. He wouldn’t look at me—he was staring across the road at the trees beyond it.
The mail carrier asked the parka, “Are you Simon?”
The parka shook his head no, staring at his boots.
“He was one of the ones they took away,” the Elder Puck said. “With my brother.”
The retired snowplower noticed us. He tried to hug my father but my father backed away.
“She was supposed to be at home,” my father said. He wasn’t crying—wasn’t even upset.
“I was on my way back to the garage when it happened,” the school bus driver said, his beard tipped with snot-and-tear icicles. “The kids weren’t on it, I was done with my drop-offs. The van got into the other lane to pass me, and in my rearview I saw them hit a pothole and the back of the van bounce from it, and then my windows blew out and their van was on the beach.”
“What was Kayley doing in your van?” my father said.
But the Elder Puck just muttered, “I can’t ever go back home. My mother will blame me for Owen forever. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Can’t go, ever.”
“You can go home, son,” the mail carrier said, but the Elder Puck just shook his head no.
I hadn’t yet found the page of my own memories I’d given to Kayley—in yellow, a deep rattling noise that came from underneath our floor, in violet, a friend whose name I’ve forgotten stealing some food from me, in gray, the chicken wire across the windows and the burnt smells from the kitchen, in black, all of the aloneness—where it had slid between her garbage can and the wall behind it. She hadn’t even bothered to make sure it had made it into her garbage.
My father and I stood behind the bus where the others couldn’t see us, his gloved hand clutching my mitten, my new tie flicking with the wind. I told him it was my fault.
“This had nothing to do with you, Simon,” my father said.
“But she’s probably already failed,” I said.
“The tests don’t mean anything,” my father said. “Seventh-class doesn’t mean she wasn’t ready. You know how hard she worked. Every day. She’ll beat her deathself, Simon. She will.”
I used my other mitten to cover my eyes.
“It’s okay, Simon,” he said. He squatted down and drew me to him. “She was ready.”
“But she wasn’t,” I cried, “she wasn’t, she wasn’t.”
The rest of the cult came to where we were standing, bringing the Elder Puck with them.
The school bus driver said, “Simon, do you want to lead us?”
“He’s never seen it done before,” my father said.
But I told them that I would.
So my father took one mitten, the school bus driver my other. Then we walked beyond the school bus, beyond the billowing smoke of the minivan, trudging through snowdrifts out onto the frozen shallows—the Elder Puck never singing, just muttering to himself, clutching the laces of Owen Puck’s high-tops, his fingers tangled up with them—where we lay in our circle, and I sang the hymn they had taught me, first alone, and then with my father, and then with everyone who had come for Kayley’s sending, all of us singing out into the soundlessness, singing a hymn of luck to her, a hymn of ruin against whomever she now was facing. And as we did, I took all of the love and the hurt for Kayley that I was feeling, and I killed them both then and there. I knew my deathself could use that love against me. It would use any weakness, and I would give it no advantage.