The Best of Electric Velocipede (36 page)

Derek and Emily had made an okay apartment out of the church offices. They used the Reverend Buckley Duncan’s former office as a bedroom. They read to each other out of the family counseling files he’d left behind. They found them inspiring: Screwed up as they were, they weren’t
these
people, who, as far as they could determine, included not a single sufferer from the art disease. Buck Duncan told them to pray and forgive, pray and forgive. Nobody ever did.

There was a working bathroom in the basement with a shower, though you had to flush the toilet with a bucket until they could have it fixed. Emily had plans to turn the other end of the basement into a studio, but Food One had promoted her, so she was working a split shift and never had time to make art.

Derek held his performances in the pewless sanctuary, still with the blanket, though he made a deal with a flight attendant who was a regular to keep him in fresh ones. She brought them cradled in her arms, still wrapped in plastic, laid them reverently on the pile of money at the end of the ceremony, made smoldering eyes at Derek. Trish, her name was. Emily wanted to kick her perfect kneecaps, but you had to expect stuff like that when you were with an artist. When she did the Square Planet installation, and she got a lot of attention, Derek was really cool with it. Even after the thing with Stanley.

Derek was bringing in so much money, they not only made their church payments, they paid off their credit cards, got the car repaired, started buying wine again, fixed the toilet. They replaced the 19-inch TV, and Siena, the electronic music composer who installed cable, ripped off all the premium channels for them for free. They were even getting estimates on a working HVAC system and a new roof, the old one being the main reason they’d gotten the place so cheap. There were places in the sanctuary you could see daylight.

Derek once preached a whole sermon—though he didn’t like her to call them that—to the motes of dust in a shaft of light. That was a good day. Even better was the one to the drops of rain. He knelt on the blue blanket with a stack of conical paper cups, filling them and passing them out, always somebody’s hand eagerly outstretched to take one, and people actually drank the nasty-ass water full of rust and pigeon shit and God knew what-all like it was champagne and they’d just won the lottery. That night she ironed a few fifties from a laundry basket full of soggy money, and they went out and had a great time like they hadn’t had in years, and Emily felt truly happy for his spectacular success, not to mention the great fuck they had on one of those little blue blankets with Jesus watching.

*

But then, of course, just when everything was going so well, and she was thinking about quitting Food One or at least cutting way back on her hours, Derek got tired of it. He always did. He never stayed with anything long. He might get too good at it. He might get a reputation, a following, some success. Emily tried not to judge. Some artists thrive on variety. Derek said, “Some writers just want to write about
one
thing—werewolves or sea captains or neurotic middle-aged fucks with their dicks in their hands—and that’s it for them. Some only write about Canadian werewolves in the nineties who smoke too much—book after book. I’d rather drive a truck. I’d rather be
hit
by a truck!” And though she knew neither thing about the truck was true, she could respect where he was coming from as an artist even though it was bound to lead him nowhere.

So she kept working at Food One, and Derek quit doing his prophetic performances. They kept living in the church, though they quit thinking of it so much as a church and as more of a performance space, though they weren’t performing either. They were waiting on a grant, several grants actually. Depending on which ones came through, Derek could decide the direction his art might next take him.

Emily was thinking she might not wait for the grants to make a move.

*

Derek lay on the floor of the sanctuary doing variations of Da Vinci’s drawing of a man, studying Cock-Eyed Jesus and the Plywood-Faced Sheep, thinking the problem with his prophetic performances was he hadn’t sufficiently adapted the vision to the move indoors, that before it was an exterior vision longing for an interior, a sanctuary, and now it was an interior emptiness longing for the exterior, the outside, the otherness . . . He was thinking 3-D movies . . .

“Reverend Merriweather?”

There was a man in a suit standing over him.

“I’m Derek Merriweather, but I’m no Reverend.”

“This isn’t a church, then?” the man asked.

“Nope. Not anymore.” Derek got up off the little blue blanket wishing he had on more than shorts and a t-shirt, but he always had his best ideas before he showered and dressed and all of that. Some days he had to wait awhile for them to show up. The ideas. The best ones. Lately, they hadn’t been showing up at all.

“I was under the impression this was an institution of religious worship. I’m Paul Throne of the Internal Revenue Service.”

Derek looked to Jesus for guidance, but the Savior wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Yes. Yes. Welcome. We’re most definitely a religious institution. We just don’t use the word ‘Church’ here. We’ve evolved
beyond
‘Church’ and churchiness. Just as my flock don’t address me as Reverend, for we are all equally humble on the path to enlightenment, for the way is difficult, and any one of us might find himself lost.” Derek gestured to the Lamb who looked especially lost this time of day when the bright Son exaggerated the dark, wooden face, graced with mildew fleece.

“What then should I call you, if not Reverend?
Mr
. Merriweather?”

“
Captain
Merriweather,” Trish called out from the back of the sanctuary, where apparently she’d been listening with a fresh bundle of blue blankets swaddled in plastic clutched to her breast. “He pilots our expedition into the unknown,” she trilled.

Derek hadn’t fucked her yet, and he saw in that moment that it was inevitable. She had just saved his life, his art, his freedom. What was Emily going to say about it after that thing with Stanley?

“And you are?” Paul Throne inquired of Trish, as if this were his office instead of Captain Derek’s house of religious worship.

“I’m Trish Van der Waal, a member of the congregation, a
charter
member of the congregation.”

“And what does your denomination believe?” Throne asked, as if it was any of his business. Derek was about to demand a lawyer.

But Trish had all the answers. “We don’t believe in belief. You know those religions that believe in the literal truth of the Bible? We don’t believe it exists.”

“The Bible?”

“No, silly. Literal truth. Have you ever read Wallace Stevens?”

“No, not that I recall.”

Trish’s opinion of any man who called himself a man and yet hadn’t read Wallace Stevens was writ large on her face. “Well, if you had, you’d know.” Derek tried to remember if
he’d
read Wallace Stevens. He was the guy with the Mason jar, right? Or was that the blue guitar? Maybe she wouldn’t ask him. He liked the way she’d taken charge. Paul Throne of the IRS was practically slinking out the door like Satan banished from the Garden. Or was that Adam? Derek hated Sunday School. He suspected his prophetic performances were his revenge on Sunday School, not just for himself. He was nothing. But for everyone who’d ever suffered the whole dreary business.

“When are your next scheduled services?” Throne inquired on his way out. “I would like to attend.”

“That’s what I stopped by to ask Captain Derek,” Trish said.

Captain Derek held his head up high. “Eleven, Sunday morning. We welcome everyone on board.” He moved his hand through the air like a soaring plane, and Mr. Throne smiled.

*

Emily was not happy. “I thought we were driving out to Willow and Fern’s this Sunday. Now you’re preaching again?” Willow and Fern threw pots and grew pot, and Emily finally had a Sunday off from Food One, and Fern was somebody she could talk to about her art, and she figured she could smoke a little since they just random tested her last week.

“It’s not
preaching
. How many times do I have to say it? We’ve got to persuade this IRS guy that we’re a religion. Do you have any idea how much tax we owe if we’re not?”

“You don’t need me to preach. I’ll just go by myself.”

“I need all the people I can get. Right now it’s just me and Trish. You’re on all the forms as one of the church’s
founders
—but don’t call it a church. I told him we were past that. What if he asks questions about the forms? I don’t know what they say. You’re the one who says I don’t understand form.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll come. How long do we have to keep this up?”

“I don’t know. As long as it takes to persuade him we’re for real.”

“I thought you quit. I thought you
had
to quit. I can’t do this anymore. I’m just not into it.’”

“I didn’t have the IRS on my ass.”

“Just me. What do I matter? You’re sure this isn’t about fucking Trish?”

“Who said anything about fucking Trish?”

“Not you. You’d just do it.”

“Listen. Trish was a big help today.”

“Just do it, okay?”

“There’s one more thing. Call me Captain Derek.”

“Fuck you, Captain Derek.”

*

That very night, Sofía came into Food One and found Emily doing yet another sheet cake soccer field. Emily hated soccer, and she’d never even seen a game except to cruise by on the cable. If she were a terrorist, she’d blow up a soccer field.

“Don’t let Barb see you around here,” she said to Sofía. “She’s still pissed off at you.”

“Barb’s home watching
Survivor
thinking up the boring shit she’s going to say tomorrow. I have a business proposition for you.” She was rifling through the decorations cabinet. She took out a bag of plastic cows and spread them across the other table, took a little torch like an aerosol can out of her bag and started hacking them up one by one, arranging the pieces around the as-yet-unstriped green field atop the next cake in the queue—a head here, a hindquarters there. “Here’s the deal. In another hour it’ll be just you and the janitorial crew. They’re never even from the same country twice, and could give a shit what we do back here. All these ovens and mixers and everything are just sitting here. We could be making specialty cakes. I have a market, orders. I need a space, a partner, a designer.”

“What kind of specialty cakes?”

“The ones Food One won’t do. Tits, penises, vaginas, butts—whatever the customer wants. Weird, twisted shit.”

“A virgin maiden being ravaged by a bull?”

“You think there’s a market for that?”

“No. I’m just saying. No boundaries?”

“It’s cheap cake and bad frosting any way you slice it. The only difference is how much you can charge.” The cow pieces arranged to her satisfaction, she oozed blood icing liberally on and around the carcasses.

“You’re fucking up my cake,” Emily said.

“Not to worry.” She held up the invoice. “It’s my order. I called it in this morning, talked to Barb.” The name on the invoice was
Shan Fuque
. “I had to spell it to the dumb cow three times.” Emily didn’t have to ask how it was pronounced. Sofía took the little torch and burned a pentangle into the frosting field, melting a cow butt in the process. “You like? It’s for a friend. It’s her birthday. She’s into bovine mutilation events. I heard your husband’s doing a performance thing with his blankie? I heard it’s clever.”

“He’s not my husband.”

Sofía smiled. “So what do you say? Partners?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Sofía wrote a message on the cake with the blood red icing—
Thanx 4 All Your Sacrifices.
She picked through the remnants of plastic cows, examining the faces until she found a couple she liked, sliced them off with a box knife, dotted the i’s with them, and slid the cake in a box. “Tomorrow night, then. At the midnight hour.”

*

Trish had no spine. The sexual positions she could pretzel herself into were stunning in the intricacy of their design and execution. “I’m not really a flight attendant,” she told Derek. “I’m a dancer.” Her primary inspirations were the kama sutra and the flying trapeze. “That’s why I became a flight attendant,” she said. “Because of the flying thing. But it’s not the same. It’s like you say, the persistent nothingness of everything.”

Whenever she told him the things he’d said, he had no idea what they meant. He hoped if he listened closely enough to her saying them, they would start to make sense. She was so certain about everything. “It gets worse,” Derek told her and explained about Paul Throne of the Internal Revenue Service. “We need all the believers we can get when he comes on Sunday. Bring friends.”

“I’ll bring my dance company.”

“You have a company?”

“I do. Don’t you mean
non
-believers?”

“Whatever,” Derek said, imagining a whole company of pretzeled beauty flying with Captain Derek. The religious side of things was starting to work on him, and he thought about St. John of the Cross, Phil Dick, and William Blake, wondering if at key moments in their journeys, when they apparently started to believe some of their own bullshit, whether, perhaps, they might’ve met a dancer.

*

Emily had an excess of design desire built up inside her after months and months of soccer fields and flags and Sharky the Snowman, a Frosty/Jaws cross that had rescued white frosting from near extinction since his first appearance five Christmases ago, and now had shown up in a Hawaiian shirt, returning to his roots and primetime—and to kids’ birthday cakes year round.

So when Sofía said the client just wanted a big dick, any old dick would do, that wasn’t enough to satisfy Emily’s creative longing. “Tell me about him,” she said.

“Him? It’s for my sister. A divorce party.”

“I know. You said. I mean. Ultimately, it’s
his
dick, right? The ex’s? Who is he?”

“He likes NASCAR. He hunts. My stupid sister married him. He drove a tank. He fucked all her friends. Hit on me, if you can believe it.”

Emily wanted to ask whether it was unbelievable because she was a lesbian or because she was his sister-in-law, or for some other reason entirely, but she didn’t. Instead, they brainstormed about the dick while the ovens were heating up.