No Further Than the Oak

I walk up to the temple with a heavy pit in my stomach. This is what I’ve been prepared for practically my entire life. So why do I feel as though suddenly, I know nothing at all?

Because it’s true, of course; in the One Language House of God, no one is permitted to speak of the Commitment Ceremony to anyone who’s not yet completed it. What happens within a Ceremony is between the Recipient, the Alter Hand, the Bishop, and the all-knowing everpresent eye of God.

The starkness of the temple still strikes me every time I approach it, and this evening, it practically glows under the light of the full moon. The imposing tower of ice sits in the garden of Eden, immaculately planted flowers surrounding every inch of the base of it, red and purple and gold and deep, velvety green leaves enveloping it into the Earth, welcoming it unto itself. The two lakes sit on either side of the slightly ovular structure. Algea threatens to suffocate the fountains in the center, which still haven’t been fixed.

I enter the tall iron gates with the tap of a few buttons on the keypad lock, and approach the large glass wall that overtakes the entire front side of the first floor lobby. The small stone fountain which sits inside, front and center, is still functional. I walk inside the grand double doors to the side and take a glance into the basin below. The ripples of the water obscure my view of the coins at the bottom. A passing thought has me wondering if the Leadership uses people’s wishes to pay for their big, icy building.

I walk over to the right, to the front desk, to check in. Eva’s working the front today. Should’ve figured my best friend would figure out a way to be here for me today.

“Calli! Happy to see you, hun, we really should talk more, you know?”

“You’re right, ha, like usual.”

“So, today’s the big day! Been waiting a while, you excited?” She’s right, again: most people get Committed at eighteen, and I’ll be twenty two in less than a month.

“Yep. Stoked.”

“You okay, hun? You’re looking a bit green, you want a sip of water?”

“Yeah, that’d be great actually, thanks E.” I take the styrofoam cup she offers me and swallow the water in two swigs.

“So, how do I get upstairs, and all that?” I stick one hand in my jean pocket and scratch my neck with the other, rocking back on my heels and eyeing the doors which I’ve never entered— one on the left, one on the right.

Eva flips her long dark hair in front of her shoulder, the golden tones in it matching the hue of her tan. The thick, straight strands hide one of my favorite moles of hers, the one that looks a little like a heart above her right collarbone.

“Oh yeah, right. You gotta pick a door.”

“Pick a door?”

“The right leads to a staircase, and the left leads to an elevator. Either one leads you to the top, so I’ll just have to inform your Committers of which door you’ve chosen. That way, they can meet you there and go over the next steps.” She says it robotically, like she’s done it a thousand times. And she probably has.

“Alright. Well, I didn’t sleep much, so I’m not really in a stairs kinda mood. You said the right one’s the elevator?”

“No, the left. You sure you’re alright, Cal?” She reaches across the worn wooden desk and places her hand on my shoulder. The feeling of her long, strong fingers, trying perhaps to ground me into the cool white floor beneath us, sends shivers through me. She pulls away. I know she forgets I don’t like to be touched, so I don’t sweat it.

“Fit as a fiddle. To the left, to the left, I go. See ya on the other side!” Turning and walk off to the left, past the benches that sit outside the Meeting Room, I hear the sound of E’s walkie reciever clicking on. I turn the door handle, and am shocked find that it isn’t locked. They told us that it was always locked. Did they just unlock them for today? Must have. That’s only logical.

On the other side of the pure white door is a linoleum cube of a room, a sickly gray colored speckly tile on the floor and the walls, the only break-up in the pattern being the beige drop-ceiling. There was a missing ceiling tile right in front of the steel death trap of an elevator. Outer appearances don’t always match the inner, it seems.

I press the only button on the elevator, which says “Up.” It calls to mind the button for the other elevator, the one I’ve been in, which has only ever said “Down”. Finally. Going up.

The elevator jams. After hitting the glowing phone button over twenty seven times, I’m convinced that it’s part of it. I scratch at my neck again. I can feel the bugs. I always feel the bugs now.

A hymn begins playing over the speaker in the corner, and I sink to the ground in the corner, trying to recall when I didn’t feel the bugs. See the bugs. Live amongst the bugs.

I didn’t feel the bugs when I first moved to Tonywood. Momma and Matt practically had her copper Saturn and his “Big Bird” yellow truck packed to the brim with our lives before I or the boys really realized what was happening. We’d only ever known our feral lives running around in the woods of Missouri.

Only wearing shoes when it was really dangerous not to, we’d leave our shared bedroom in the trailer in the early hours of the morning in the summers, trying desperately not to wake Matt or Momma. We’d run down to the creek. I’d give the boys shovels and they’d dig holes to China or play construction, and I’d bring a book and a pencil and climb up on the best boulder I could find, dipping my toes into the cool water to escape the already suffocating heat of the day. Just a moment of reprieve. And I’d do my best to read my book, and draw on the inside cover if Paul and Casey caused too much of a lapse in my focus. We’d stay out as long as we could, usually forgetting to bring food. We’d race sometimes, running back home for lunch. I always won, being three years older than the boys.

We’d buried our first dog under a tree on that land. Lived a dream of a childhood on that land. But every dream ends, and even if you try to go back to sleep, the dream always changes a bit. The best dreams are the ones you can never return to.

Mrs. Richter was the first and greatest person that I met when the car finally rolled through the seas and seas of cornfields and beanfields, all the way up to Tonywood. I wish I could have known her longer than I did.

Only knowing its name and that it was in Illinois, I had hoped it might be Illinois’ attempt at a Hollywood-type city. The sleepy looking residential homes I saw once we passed the railroad tracks and the police station, painted sign peeling so it only read —lice -tat—, tempered my expectations pretty immediately.

“This place looks— cozy?” I said to Momma from the passenger seat, boxes on either side of my legs and the lizard stuffie I used as a pillow propped against the door.

“Opie! Don’t startle me like that. I thought you were still sleeping, Jesus.”

“Sorry, Momma.” I rolled my eyes at the nickname I thought I was far too old for.

“Yeah, this place ain’t the sticks, but it sure ain’t fancy either. Main road is the only in and out, all the farmhouse roads lead to dead ends, and the only lights are the ones we just saw at that crossing and the ones at other side of town, where the other tracks are.”

“Do we come from the sticks?”

She laughed. My Momma’s laugh could light up a whole room, and it lit up the car almost as much as the setting sun, filtering in and turning her pale blonde hair into a ring of gold. It nearly blinded me, the light and the fuzz and the glow.

“Yeah punk, yeah we do. Alrighty then, almost there, just gotta turn left here,” she said to herself, turning the car into a cluster of houses and through a labyrinth until we got to what I could only assume was the center of the cluster, onto a street called “Cicada Road.”

Pulling into the driveway of the pale blue two-story house on the corner, I saw that we had two kinds of company. Matt had gotten there ahead of us, and was talking to an older lady. Both were standing on the porch steps, white paint peeling off slightly around the edges. In the gravel driveway stood two deer, a buck and a doe; I’d never seem a buck so large before, not in all my days of sitting in trees. They were so beautiful.

And they wouldn’t move. Momma refused to honk the horn or startle them, instead opting to park on the street.

“Ope, are the boys up?” I looked back at them. Casey had his head on Paul’s shirt, the mop of braids on his head covering up Paul’s face. They slept harder than rocks.

“Nope.”

“Alrighty. You want first pick of the bedrooms? You’re the oldest, after all,” she practically sang the last two words, wagging her eyebrows up and down at me teasingly. I was always envious of the way she could move one and then the other, like a wave.

“Sure! Is there a bedroom upstairs?”

“You betcha, there’s two. The master bedroom’s right by the front, in case, you know,” she wiggled her fingers like she was casting a spell, “We get burgled, then they get to Matthew and I first, and we… tickle them to death!” She reached for me. I squealed and popped my door open, lizard forgotten as I tumbled out with my bookbag and ran up to my room, Momma chasing behind me, running right past Matt and the stranger and up the stairs.

“Carly! How good it is to see you! My Gosh, how are you, I haven’t seen you since you were seventeen years old! Matthew has just been an absolutely lovely host, I had been over watching the deer when he pulled up in that gorgeous truck, why I had no idea that anyone was about to move in here, they’ve had that For Sale sign up for about an eternity, I’ll tell you what. And who is that beautiful, bubbly young lady behind you there?” I had giggled a bit when she said Matt’s lemon truck was gorgeous, but now I stood at full attention, trying to be respectful, since she was older.

She was the strangest looking old person I’d met. Matt’s Mama pretty much wore nightgowns constantly, but this woman was dressed straight out of a book; checkered black and white dress, a long bright red homemade-looking cardigan with firetrucks in the pattern, and matching flame earrings that looked like they’d been painted by hand. All the color contrasted gorgeously with her dark, wrinkled skin and long silvery grey curls, making her whole look entrancing. But in the golden-hour glow, she was nearly headache-inducing to look at.

“My name is Calliope. I’m eleven. It’s very nice to meet you.” I stuck out my shaky hand, which she took in both of hers with eagerness.

“Why aren’t you just such a polite young lady! Just a doll, oh my goodness, Carly, she’s practically your clone, just look at her. Little bit of a tan there, though, you must get some serious sun, miss thing! My name is Mrs. Richter, dear, it’s such a pleasure to make your aquaintance as well. How did you raise such a wonderful child, Carly?” She looked over to Momma, and so did I, realizing she hadn’t said a word yet. Her jaw was clenched, and her hands had been shoved into the pockets of her jeans, clenching into fists inside them. I’d never seen Momma so edgy.

“Think she just came out wonderful. Not sure I did much there.” She didn’t sound like she was joking, but Mrs. Richter laughed anyway. Her grin reminded me of the way a bobcat shows all its teeth.

“I’m sure you’ve done a wonderful job, Carly, you were always so smart when you came in for class, always asking so many questions. Are you a curious cat, Calliope?”

I nodded.

Her earrings waggled back and forth as though truly ablaze as she responded, saying how wonderful it was to be curious, always stay curious, if you’re not learning something new every day, you’ve wasted the day, and you should always be in the world and of the world and on the search for great discovery and fill your heart with openness and a love for live and I may have stood there for five minutes or ten years with the way she preached her life’s gospel to me.

“Well Rachel, I think we should unpack. Cal, get the boys?” Mrs. Richter’s brows shot up in surprise.

“Boys? Are they—?”

“No, they’re not his, they’re Matt’s. Not that it’s any of your business.” Her thorny words struck a chord with Mrs. Richter, who’s shoulders stiffened as she tucked her cardigan closer around her body.

“Well I think it should be my right to know, as well should you, you know how close he was to our family. To all of us.”

I knew they were talking about dad. Momma had only said that he died in an accident right after I was born, and that Matt helped bring light back into her darkness. That was all I really needed to know. I knew she’d had to have mentioned his name once, but I was so young, it didn’t stick.

“Well, Rachel. You people did always have a way of feeling entitled to things that don’t belong to you,” Momma replied coldly, crossing her arms.

“I can see very well where I’m not welcome. Calliope, it was an absolute pleasure to meet you, and Matthew as well. Such a dear, really. If you ever need anything, any one of you, even those boys that Matthew there can’t seem to wake. Won’t you come over for some coffee-cake, if you need anything at all? Anytime, I always got it, anytime, okay?” And with that, Mrs. Richter turned toward the little yellow house on the corner and walked away, joining an older man on a wooden bench swing on the front porch, turning her head away from us.

“Momma, she seemed really nice, did you have to be so… callous?” A word I’d learned the night before.

She took a deep breath, all the way into her belly. Let it out slowly. Then she told me, “It ain’t her I’m mad at, Ope. I don’t even know what I’m mad at.”

The elevator finally begins moving and I feel like sobbing, but I don’t, because isn’t this meant to be the greatest first day of the rest of my eternal life?

The rickety doors finally open up on the second floor to a short, pure white hallway. Upon feeling the wall and the nearly uncomfortably low cieling, it feels like popcorn plaster. I run my fingertips across the wall as I approach the deep, chocolaty brown wooden door. The wood grain almost looks natural. But too perfect; it’s been retouched.

Turning the brass handle engraved with a goat on the cross leads me to yet another ghostly tinted room, the blue lighting making me almost dizzy. I scratch my neck and look toward the person selected to be the Alter Hand for my Commitment. The heavy feeling I’d approached with lurched forward, and I nearly fell to my knees. Pale, drooping, piercing blue eyes meet mine, hurting more than they ever have before. She looks as if she was apologizing for the white fabric draped over her arms.

“Laila?”