Prologue
Being influential can be a curse, Morrison said to the air of the office.
No one answered him. The room was too small for an audience at that hour, and anyway the hour did not encourage answers. It encouraged the highway noise that came through the thin wall—trucks downshifting beyond the mesa, the refrigerator in the pantry cycling on, a door somewhere being closed with great care so as not to wake the house. Morrison listened to all of it the way he listened to everything now, as if every sound were a report that needed filing.
His desk was a folding table from 2009 that bowed slightly in the middle. On it, like an altar that had lost an argument with time, sat the computer.
Beige, or what had once been beige before the desert sun through the window got at it. The tower hummed under the table with a fan that had been dying politely for six years. The monitor was deep as a bucket, and on its screen the Windows XP desktop glowed green and blue and impossibly cheerful — that rolling hill, that sky with clouds nobody had ever seen over New Mexico, the grass too green for any country God had actually made. Bliss, the wallpaper was called. Somebody at Microsoft had named it that in a conference room, and Morrison had thought about that name more than once at three in the morning. Bliss. He kept it because changing it would have meant admitting the machine mattered to him, and because twenty-seven people had learned to find him exactly here, in front of this exact hill.
The startup chime still made him sit up a little straighter. Twenty-two years of that chime. It had played in a dorm room at Red Oak State when he was nineteen and the whole thing was a message board and a conviction; it had played in a rented trailer with the carpet torn out; it played now in an office that had been a storage room when the compound was still calling itself a ranch. He had newer machines offered to him. A man in Albuquerque, a seeker with money, had mailed a laptop in 2019 with a note that said *for the work*. Morrison had thanked him warmly, used it for a week, and given it to the kitchen for recipes, because the old tower had something the laptop did not.
The old tower had everything.
It had the first website, built by a sophomore whose name Morrison no longer permitted himself to forget, though the boy himself had left in 2011 and was selling insurance in Lubbock. Blinking text. A starfield background. A guestbook with four hundred entries, most of them mockery, eleven of them the beginning of everything. It had folders nested in folders: SEEKERS 03, SEEKERS 04, the long patient years when the inbox filled slower than a tap dripping. It had the spreadsheet — one spreadsheet, grown wild, twenty-seven names current, columns for *dietary*, *medical*, *next of kin (do not contact)*, *shoes tied*. It had drafts of statements never sent to newspapers that no longer returned calls. It had the scanned pages of the first notebook, dorm handwriting, the night he had stayed up until the fluorescents buzzed and written *they are not coming down to us, we are being collected* and underlined *collected* three times, so hard the pen had gone through the page.
That tear was still in the notebook. He had checked, earlier that week, the way a man checks a tooth he knows is loose.
The clock in the corner of the screen said 2:47. Morrison read it and then read it again, because reading things twice had become one of the ways he kept the world from sliding. Outside the window the compound lay in its December dark, and somewhere beyond the fence the real sky — not the Microsoft sky — hung over Clydesdale with its indifferent stars.
Christmas Eve was nineteen days away.
He did not say that to the air. The air knew.
Morrison opened the inbox. The modem had long since been replaced by a cable the county ran past the highway, but he still called the process *dialing in*, and nobody corrected him, because correction was a resource the house spent carefully now. The cable gave the old tower a speed it had never been built to survive, and some nights the machine seemed startled by it, the fan gathering itself like an old man rising too fast from a chair. Three new messages. A woman in Tulsa who had seen the old documentary segment and wanted to know if they were *still at it, hahaha*. A man, no location, who wrote in all lowercase and asked whether Hallos had water. And a long one, closely typed, from someone who signed only *R.* and who had been writing every few months for two years, each message nearer than the last to asking the only question that mattered. Morrison read that one three times. He marked it with the little flag. He did not answer it. Answering was for the morning, and the morning version of him was a more merciful correspondent than the one who sat here at 2:47 among his ledgers of loyalty.
*Ledgers of loyalty.* That was his own private name for the third folder, the one that was not on the desktop. DOCTRINE, he had labeled the outer one, which was a lie by about half. Inside were the notes he kept the way other pastors kept prayer lists: who had been cool at supper; who had asked, again, about the shoes; whose sister had written; who laughed when Marquis made the joke about the water tower; who had *not* laughed. He had typed, that evening, a single line about Marquis. *Marquis quiet at table. Watch kindly.*
Marquis. Marquis with his long face and his questions that came dressed as jokes so the room could decide afterward whether to be wounded. *De Sade*, Morrison called him, had called him for a decade, a joking insult worn smooth as a coin in a pocket. “Morning, de Sade,” down the porch steps, and Marquis would grin the grin of a man being needled by his oldest friend in the world, which he was, both halves of that. It occurred to Morrison, typing, that he could not remember the last time he had said it and meant nothing by it at all.
He deleted nothing. He added a period to a sentence that had not needed one. Then he opened the spreadsheet again, because the spreadsheet did not have moods.
Twenty-seven names. He counted them the way he counted everything this year: aloud, under his breath, touching each row with the cursor. Twenty-seven, of whom four had been with him since the trailer. Twenty-seven, of whom eleven had nowhere else on Earth to go, a fact he did not write in any column and did not need to. Twenty-seven people who had learned to say *when they come for us* in the same tone they used for *when the propane truck comes*. Morrison held their leases, their prescriptions, their letters unsent and sent. He had given two of them their names back when they arrived with ones they hated. He had sat up three nights with a third while a fever decided, and signed the clinic form where it said *relationship* with the word *family*, and the nurse had not even blinked. Influence was a word people used on television. It did not feel like this. This felt like holding a tray with twenty-seven glasses on it, for twenty-two years, and developing opinions about the tray.
“Being influential can be a curse,” he said again, more quietly, and this time the sentence seemed to him neither wise nor unwise. It had the flat quality of a man reading his own weather.
The fan under the table clicked, thought, kept going. On the screen the little hill did not weather or fade. Somewhere in the long building a sleeper turned over; the pipes knocked once. Morrison thought about 2003 with the sudden total clarity that sleeplessness sometimes grants instead of sleep: the dorm’s radiator smell, the secondhand telescope, a girl named — a girl whose name he still said in full in his head, out of discipline, though she had left before the trailer, before any of it had walls. He had been nineteen and kind, and the kindness had not been a strategy then. That was the part no one believed anymore, on either side of the fence. It had not been a strategy. It had become one the way a path becomes a path: by being walked on, daily, by people who needed it to go somewhere.
He opened the statement draft — the one for Christmas Eve, for the cameras that might or might not come — and read its first line. *We are not afraid, and we are not leaving anything behind.* He considered the second half of the sentence for a long time. Then he closed it without saving, which was its own kind of saving.
By three the compound had that held-breath quiet it got before the winter dawns, when even the dogs declined to comment. Morrison rose — his knees had begun, this year, to file their own reports — and went down the hall with the care of a man who knows every board. Dormitory doors. The chapel, where the purple cloth hung ready, folded twice, on its peg. The kitchen list on its clipboard: twenty-seven settings, *M. — no peppers*, the ordinary scripture of feeding people. In the laundry, a row of white sneakers stood paired by the door, twenty-seven pairs, cleaned on Sundays, because you would not be collected in dirty shoes and because order was a form of hope you could perform with a brush. He stood among them a moment. Being influential can be a curse. He did not say it. He had said it twice already, and a thing said three times in this house had a way of becoming doctrine.
Back in the office the screen had dimmed itself, patient. Morrison moved the mouse — the old ball mouse, cleaned weekly with a pin — and the green hill came back at once, faithful as a dog. The inbox flag waited. The spreadsheet waited. The cursor blinked in an empty reply window he did not remember opening, nineteen days from the night when everything he had built would either be collected out of the world or left standing in it under the cameras, and he sat down before it the way he had sat down in 2003: nineteen, sleepless, certain, and beginning, though he could not have said so, to be tired in a place that sleep did not reach.
He began, for the third night in a row, to type an answer to R. He typed *Dear*, and then he sat and watched the word for a while, because *Dear* was a decision too, and decisions were the only crop this place had reliably grown.
Outside, over Clydesdale, the stars held their positions. The compound slept in its routines around him — twenty-seven people breathing in the dark, shoes tied by their doors — and Morrison stayed where they would expect to find him: alone with the glow, and the hill that never changed, and the cursor, blinking, patient as doctrine, waiting for the morning to tell him what he believed.
