I met Michelle on a new dating app whose CEO had recently migrated from a company that provided $99 pie graphs of their customers’ ancestral origins in exchange for vials of saliva mailed to their Salt Lake City lab. The Mormons had always been interested in identifying their pre-Mormon ancestors for posthumous baptism. I took comfort in the transparency of their motives. There was something quaintly American, maybe even laudable, about the ordeal. So I wasn’t too put off when I gave Latter-Day Singles my credit card information to increase the number of daily matches I had access to. When the app asked me to summarize my current standing in the LDS faith in less than 50 characters for my profile, I made sure to express that I was a newcomer and a seeker of truth.
It was after a coffee shop date that Michelle brought up the topic of my religiosity via text. She’d been too embarrassed to broach the topic in person, and admitted as much. I told her that I was interested in exploration and stability, and I was drawn to how Mormonism allowed for both. I added a book emoticon, and Michelle seemed pleased.
After discussing favorite childhood cartoons and pizza toppings, Michelle invited me to her apartment for dinner and to her meetinghouse the following Sunday. Her profile showed her posing in front of a bronze statue of the prophet John Taylor. Another showed her beaming before a tropical waterfall in a one-piece swimming suit. She liked crosswords, fiction, and dogs; she worked as a web developer in the miniature tech hub in the city center; she was 31 years old.
Michelle’s apartment was in a wealthy, verdurous area of town. The elderly men and women who tended the outdoor gardens looked paradoxically older and healthier the farther outland I ventured, their smiles at me wider and less affected. My mood improved and my steps became more animated with the frequency of boutique ice cream shops that I saw, until I became so drunk that I wandered into a gelato store with such a decorative exterior that I had to squint to read its sign. The proprietor must have been aware of my state of disinhibition, as I purchased twenty-seven dollars of the praline offering before she had finished telling me of her grandson’s wedding. It had taken place on a barrier island requiring ferry access three miles off the Gulf coast and the betrothed had been barefoot when the knot was tied. I told her I’d like to meet them some time and wandered back into the sun.
Michelle met me at the entrance to her apartment building and led me up the stairs. She was wearing moccasins and a floral blouse. Her apartment was spacious and decorated with modern furniture that reminded me of an entry in a home catalog I’d received in the mail the previous week. I was immediately sorry that I hadn’t brought strawberries or blueberries. I couldn’t remember a page in the catalog which hadn’t featured them in a wooden or brushed metal bowl on coffee table, side table, or dining table.
She led me to the linear sectional sofa and offered me a drink. After a brief period of awkwardness in which I wasn’t able to decide from among the options she presented, she brought over two iced glasses of grape soda and sat beside me. She smelled of wood glue, dark and piquant, and sat with ankle on knee.
Michelle was asking whether I’d been kayaking before, and I told her that I hadn’t. She suggested that we go some time. She had an annual pass at the camping grounds forty minutes north of town. I told her as earnestly as I could that I was apprehensive about it, but that I’d consider it. A pair of swimmers had contracted naegleriasis in those lakes in 1992, and a third had gotten it from an improperly chlorinated swimming pool a few miles away.
Michelle left and returned with two miniature pizzas, each with the combination of toppings we’d identified as our favorites the evening before. I asked whether she had made the dough from scratch, understanding from past discussions that dough-making is generally a point of pride for the culinary hobbyist. She told me that she had, and we ate.
I let my eyes meander. The only atypical item in the living room was a wall scroll that showed an orange dog-like character in a cartoon style basking in a green field. Michelle had worn small earrings at the coffee shop date that also depicted this character. Looking over, I saw that she was wearing them again. I mentioned this to her and took a sip of soda. The glass was painted with little enamel sunflowers.
Michelle fidgeted and, after I probed again, this time with a tone I thought might give an impression of open-mindedness, she explained that it was Growlithe, a Pokémon, her favorite. At this point, her compulsion overcame her inhibition, and a series of facts gushed forth, including her childhood fixation with the Japanese franchise, her bimonthly participation in online competitions, and, finally, that she had accumulated one of the most extensive foreign Pokémon card collections in the world. I expressed my awe and was led to a study or office where a cabinet was set up with a glass front, behind which were rows of plastic cases containing cards that had been professionally graded and encapsulated. I was told about the Topsun and Bandai Carddass sets that preceded the official trading card game in Japan, about highly valuable error cards lacking rarity symbols, about English collectors’ lack of appreciation for early Japanese trophy cards, about Meiji, Nissui, and Tommy. A white box in the corner was opened and I was handed tens of cards one at a time, each of which having been assigned a score of ten out of ten for pristineness. The candy-colored cartoon characters pointed out to me began to run together into a murky river running from her hand to mine.
Michelle seemed more exuberant than ever, her cheeks florid. When she returned with praline ice cream scooped into ramekins and sat so near to me that her thigh met mine, I imagined a sequence of events that might occur if I were to relinquish my fixation, allow passivity to pull me out into the warm expanse of domesticity. I imagined living with Michelle somewhere in the sparsely populated Midwest, in a house barely visible amidst a flaxen sea. There would be basal grunting, book-reading, starch-eating. There would be children to fill a minivan. After a day of spoon-feeding and homeschooling, I would wander out into the maize and there he’d be waiting, gold on gold, colossal Moroni with buisine. I’d take from him points of paternal wisdom imparted by celestial hand on head, return to house, to warm milk, warm bed, warm body.
Michelle seemed not to like the ice cream but ate it anyway. I watched as she spooned it in and wished she’d stop.
The journey back to my apartment was dark and blighted by a wind that grew wetter and more aggressive as I progressed. At some point I tripped over a flower pot and fell onto damp sidewalk. I stopped to wait out a bout of rain at a bus stop. A homeless man wearing an expensive jacket wandered over to me, fizzing like a honey bee between enormous jowls. I gave him the contents of my wallet. He squeezed my elbow and seemed to become angrier at me; his eyes became less constrained and he barked that the DOW Jones was as doomed as Asbury Park, New Jersey. I wasn’t sure whether this statement was made in gratitude for my donation or in contempt of it. I thanked him.
At home, I turned to my computer and clicked through the cache of 445 examples I’d downloaded from an Egyptian teaching hospital’s website. I found one that seemed to have decent film quality, something from the late 90s. I knew that the video would do nothing for me well before the placental expulsion. Still, I checked in with myself superficially, palpating myself through my clothes. It was at least the third time I’d tried that set of videos that year.
I generally avoided considering how I had ended up with my fixation. There was no possibility for an etiology that wouldn’t involve some amount of grotesquerie; it was something I’d understood since the paraphilia had emerged fully formed during pubescence like an elaborate wax figure pulled from same-colored liquid paraffin.
It took some exploration of the landscape, several dry wells, to discover where my dowsing rod led. My own video had done nothing for me. My brother’s had made me feel ill, as had my neighbor’s, which had been easy enough to access and was already digitally formatted. Years passed and things became murkier. For long bouts I would ignore the pull, or else it would atrophy from neglect and shrink away for a time. It wasn’t until Debbie Manheim that my instrument struck water. She was the mother of a friend I had briefly dated in high school. It was the summer after my friend had left for a private college in the neighboring state, and I’d run into Debbie at the supermarket. She’d spoken some words of acknowledgement, touched my elbow, and invited me to pick up some textbooks I’d left at the Manheim place the year before.
Debbie had offered me a coffee, and after some preamble began telling me about her diet book diet. As I learned about a compound previously unknown to me that was present in sixty percent of foods and correlated with maladies from gout to gastric cancer, my divining rod awoke, an unusually aggressive pull. I excused myself for the bathroom. My search of the home office adjacent to it was quick, silent, and successful. The Betamax tape was labelled so that there could be no ambiguity.
As I purchased the necessary equipment to convert the tape to DVD later that evening, I knew I was near. I ordered express shipping for the device. That first crest was violent and empty, echoing. I considered seeking psychoanalysis in the ensuing fog of fear but ultimately allowed the thought to fade away refractorily.
The ensuing months marked the learning phase of a process for efficient dowsing. I learned that a romantic past or pretense was required before I viewed the individual’s video. That the dampness of the jaundiced, waxy skin and the timbre of the inaugural cry each played synergistic roles in my excitation, and that the severing of the cable was anathema to my goal and should be edited out with squinted eyes beforehand. I learned of the various analog video formats of the late 20th century. Of the tape format wars, of the high likelihood that Video8s will spill their guts rather than acquiesce to digital formatting, of the way this seppuku leaves horizontal scratches along the entire length of expelled tape. I established profiles on five major dating platforms with a photo of myself that seemed to yield the most success; it showed me a few months before I’d graduated from high school. It was a humorous shot that showed my mother’s hand, fingernails topcoated, jokingly pressing a plastic flyswatter to my forehead. I wore an expression of affected disappointment, my back arched in defeat, my lips curled into a theatrical frown.
I learned that not everyone’s birth is filmed; after several fruitless searches, I learned the rough income level necessary for an average family to have owned a consumer video camera in the late 80s, the early 90s, the mid 90s. I learned to extrapolate the likelihood that my dates’ parents would relinquish the tape of their child’s birth. How dating platforms that branded themselves as progressive tended to attract users whose parents were anything but; the facial piercings and Birkenstocks tended to be exclusive to the latter generation, so much so that I had to completely rework my tactics for an app with a Sanskrit-based name.
The process was straightforward enough. The initial dates provided the necessary pretense for my later psychological needs while also establishing enough intimacy for the location of the individuals’ parents to be extracted. On average this information was forthcoming by date 2.7. Eliciting the video from the parents was a much more complicated thing. If I sensed that the video’s guardians were scientifically minded, I posed as a researcher at a nearby university hospital collecting parturition data. Barring knowledge of the alma mater of one or both parents, I tried to select a university that would be most concordant with the values of the family: Catholic for Catholic, Jewish for Jewish, private for wealthy, public for the civic-minded, or some combination thereof as appropriate. I had acquired over the years a set of scrubs, a lab coat, a skullcap that complimented my hair, and a secondhand suit whose functionality and economy gave an impression that was unequivocally academic. Other solutions were more ad hoc, ranging from Black Forest lederhosen and Haferlschuh to a New Age hierophant ensemble complete with drug rug and Findhorn headdress.
When the Egyptian infant had been handed to oxytocinated mother, her hands quaking as she pulled the thing to her breast, the spell had been broken. I closed the video player window and found myself sifting through individual Pokémon statistics on a fan-made wiki. I thought of the way Michelle had used programming jargon in her everyday language (wall-clock time, parsing, parallel processing, et cetera), how immaculately clean her bathroom had been, the tasteful highlights that had appeared in her hair since our first date. I found myself purchasing a 5-foot long Growlithe plush, officially licensed by The Pokémon Company and with hand-stitched detailing. With the overnight shipping it had cost $118.
I was sinking in a fluid slightly more viscous than water, warmer than a swimming pool but cooler than a hot tub. A gentle current aimed my trajectory at an acute angle from the vertical, sometimes one way, other times another. I had no need of breathing. In the black, I would occasionally brush by massive porous structures made of a jellylike substance warmer than the surrounding fluid. Other times I would run into these gelatinous cityscapes feet-first and find myself passing through the sponge for minutes, hours, its warm walls hugging my body but giving way to it, squeezing me through in a peristalsis-like motion. I grabbed at the pores and cilia that engulfed me to try to stop my descent, but the stuff was so slick that I could never get a proper grip. I tried to count how many spongy structures I passed through between gaps of open ocean but was somehow unable to retain the information. The journey was soundless, and I didn’t bother tasting either fluid or jelly, as countless prior experiences had confirmed their subtle saltiness. My lack of fingernails, toenails, or teeth had long since ceased to surprise me, and I didn’t bother with any kicking or yelling. I knew that the alkaline stuff would flood into me and cause me to choke but never drown.
On Sunday morning I met Michelle at her apartment. She was to drive us the rest of the way to her meetinghouse. I had selected a slight modification of my professorial attire (Oxfords in place of woven loafers, Seiko place of Casio), and she wore a grey knit midi dress with a partial turtleneck. On the way to her car she realized that she’d left her purse in her room. I followed her into her bedroom, which was painted a pale yellow and felt distinctly late-teenage. I noticed with mild shock a Growlithe plush identical to the one I’d purchased on her bed. My copy sat in the back seat of my car; I’d intended to give it to her upon returning to her apartment and had in fact brought my car expressly to conceal the giant thing prior to the date’s conclusion.
The service was surprisingly routine despite the influence of early nineteenth century cunning folk practice. After the sacrament, I was approached in succession by three smiling, immaculately-cut men with children clinging to their legs. All three had made eye contact with me during the service. Their handshakes were firmer than any I’d experienced prior. Two of the three asked me of my interest in the Church, and when I told them of my interest in reformed Egyptian and the 1844 presidential election, they were smitten. They glanced at Michelle as I spoke with nodding grins, and she nodded back, rubbing the outside of my hand with hers as she did. My shoulder was grabbed and lightly jostled, my work history was extracted, and my email taken for addition to a neighborhood LDS men’s group. I was shown what I estimated to be over ten thousand dollars of cosmetic dentistry.
I imagined a fleshy continuum stretching from each of the men, reaching genealogically, son to father, across time and space. One such snake reached northward and then eastward from bespoke suburban mansion to another of its kind to semirural prefabricated house to farmstead to farmstead to makeshift Nauvoo settlement to Palmyra cabin with coniferous frame and animal skins. Brief sensory flashes crackled along the elongated paternities. The pop of Schramsberg bottle over Dallas; the clink of platinum pinky rings meeting in handshake over Provo; the flash of musket-fire over Crooked River, Missouri; the hiss of water on Wayne County hearth. I felt a deep sense of awe at the sociopolitical end products before me.
Following the service, Michelle and I walked to a Sonic across the street. She ordered medium Cherry Limeades for both of us. I found one of the men who had shaken my hand along with wife and child across from Michelle and I at our metal picnic table. Sometime into our drinks, the man asked Michelle how her folks were faring. In the ensuing conversation, her parents’ names were made clear, along with her father’s ownership of a concrete company in Colorado. My chest tightened, but only briefly.
Michelle kissed me on the cheek in front of my car. I rubbed my hand on her back. In my apartment I was able to discover within eight minutes Greg and Cindy’s address and phone number. The temple garments were surprisingly cheap.
The drive to Colorado was 15 hours long. After the fourth Cherry Limeade, I was able to make it to a rest stop before vomiting. I sat in the back seat of the car with my Growlithe and felt its paw, larger than my own hand. I thought of the seamstress stitching the black threads demarcating its digital pads. I thought of Michelle’s teenage venture to the Philippines. She’d told me how she’d learned Tagalog and worked in an area where she was able to really make a difference. She wasn’t certain exactly how many she’d baptized but estimated somewhere between twenty and thirty. She’d offered to check her missionary journal for me.
When the spinning in my head had slowed to a tolerable level, I took Growlithe and strapped him into the passenger seat.
At some point the drilling rigs became prairie became mountains. After that, the journey was dark and altitudinous. I spoke sporadically to my passenger of my past transgressions, of the food allergies I’d outgrown with puberty, of my brother’s current girlfriend and occupation. One of Growlithe’s legs was caught in the seatbelt in a manner that looked uncomfortable, so I pulled over and righted it before continuing.
Fort Collins was a smallish, flat-structured town that looked like it might have been advertised as comfortable and eclectic in a college brochure attempting to market its merits. I passed a self-styled historic district comprised largely of Western themed shops and restaurants adorned with commissioned graffiti.
In the restroom of the Sonic nearest to Michelle’s parents’ house, I changed into my temple garments, a button-down shirt with sleeves short enough to show the former, and the pants, shoes, belt, and watch of my professorial dress. I brushed my teeth, gelled my recently re-administered crew cut, and shaved. In the mirror, which had been vandalized by car key or pocket knife to show an angular, stylized form of the word “Marquee,” I thought that I looked quite old. I might have already been married once, or had had stints where I’d involved myself with tricenarian hobbies like gas-powered remote-control cars or home beer brewing.
The couple’s house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was one story tall and of chocolate stucco. There was a bird bath, a rain gauge, cut grass, and a Chevrolet sedan. I suspected that the couple was living below their means given the annual revenue of Greg’s cement company.
Cindy looked so similar to Michelle that I felt unusually perverse when I complemented the couple’s lawn and repeated my academic intentions to her. She wore a silver hummingbird necklace and, despite my attempts to speak softly and sympathetically, looked as if pre-flinching, expecting some blow from me. I followed her in. There was a pair of pastel-colored cuckoo clocks along the narrow hallway, and another two in the living room. Sliding glass doors revealed an above ground pool and an oak with a birdhouse in the backyard. In the kitchen sat Greg at yellow laminate table, eating baked chicken. He was picking the cartilaginous bits from between his teeth and placing them in a row on his plate while giving me the flat, incurious stare of a hammerhead shark. I knew immediately that there must have been a firearm within three paces of him.
The VHS tape was sitting on the kitchen counter with a sticky note on it. I was given it and left the place with few further words. I thanked Cindy at the entryway and stopped myself from mentioning the clocks. I was glad to see her face untense slightly as she began to close the stained wood door.
By this point I hadn’t slept for 16 hours and drove myself to a motel. The receptionist seemed somehow averse to me, so I asked my Growlithe about it in the elevator to the fourth floor, still hugging him to my chest. The television in my room had a VHS player attached, but I felt a hollow sense of disgust at the idea of penetrating the thing with the videotape.
I didn’t bother undressing before taking Growlithe into bed with me. I rubbed the side of my head against his cheek and felt sorry for him that my hair was still crispy with dried gel.
I was again sinking warmly, viscously. I brushed against a slick surface I hadn’t experienced before. It was membranous and thin enough that an orange glow could be seen through dark streaks of vascularization. There was an acceleration. The fluid’s gentle breeze was becoming more aggressive, forcing me downward, through sponge-city, through void, through a final sphinctered aperture that warmly paint-rollered my body forth. I was squeezed out into scorching heat and light, into warm lap. I blinked the slime from my eyes. There he was, encompassing me, massive Moroni cross-legged atop flattened stalks of corn. Around us, weaving, frolicking among the harvest, were all manner of colorful creatures; Vulpixes, Caterpies, Pidgys, and Rattatas. Moroni’s astral arms enclosed around me, his goodwill growing against me from under his gown. He pulled me close so that my belly, rotund and enceinte, pressed against his pelvis, his growth. I clasped him tight and rubbed, having for once no doubt or thought of my role.
