Matt Bell - How They Were Found

He looks over his men, and he says, It took a quarter of a million years for God to design our last messiah, and even then, he could only come in our form, created in our image, a fallen man. Our new messiah will take only nine months to build, and when it is done it will show us who our own children will be, what they will become in the new kingdom.

This New Motor, it will be the beginning of a new race, unfallen and perfect, characterized by a steamwork perfection our world is only now capable of creating. God has shown the Electricizers and they have shown me and I have shown you, and now you are making it so.

The New Motor is his task, but Spear knows that there are others working too, all of them assigned their own tasks somewhere out in America. He knows this because even on the nights when the others fail to materialize, Franklin comes and takes Spear from his bed and out into the night. The two men walk the empty streets, Spear shivering in his long wool coat and hat and boots, Franklin unaffected by the cold. The specter tells him of other groups sent to help, of other spirits in need of a medium: the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers, the Elementizers, the Governmentizers, perhaps other groups unfamiliar even to Franklin.

Franklin says, I can’t know everything.

Like you, he says, I am merely a vessel.

He puts a cold hand on Spear’s shoulder, causing the medium’s teeth to chatter together hard, too hard. If the specter doesn’t release him soon, Spear worries that he’ll break his molars.

A new age is coming, Franklin says. The Garden restored.

He says, Fear not.

He says, Through God, even one such as you might be made ready.

As the Motor grows in complexity, Spear begins to lose his temper more and more often, always at home, always behind closed doors. He tells his wife again and again that Abigail is not to work, that she is not to lift a finger, but more than once he comes home to find the girl helping his wife with her chores.

To his wife, he says, Why is it that you can’t listen to even the simplest of my instructions?

Pointing to Abigail, he says, She’s pregnant, with the growing king of our new world. Why can’t you do what I say, and treat her accordingly?

His wife begins to weep, but her fury is uncooled by the tears streaming down her face. She says, sounding as tired as he’s ever heard, She’s not pregnant, John. The only reason she’s here is that you want her instead of me.

To Abigail, Spear says, Child, return to your room.

He waits until Abigail has left the room before he strikes his wife across the face with the back of his hand, then says, Christ forgive me, but you watch your tongue. You either recognize the glory of God or you do not. Only you can choose which it will be, and in the end, you must choose.

By December, there have been sixty-five revealments, and by the end of January there are thirty more. The New Motor is growing larger, taking up the entire table with its array of sliding panels and connecting tubes and gears. Loose bundles of wires dangle from the construct’s innards, waiting for the places where they will connect and give life to extremities that only Spear has seen so far, to other appendages even he can’t yet imagine.

This machine, it does not resemble a man, as Spear once thought it would. What’s worse, it doesn’t resemble anything anyone has seen before, causing the other workers to question him. He does his best to quell their worries, but as the team grows they ask their questions louder and louder, until their concerns leak out of the shed and into the congregation below. The collections that once went to feeding the poor or funding abolitionist trips into the South have for months gone to the Motor, and so the congregation’s patience grows thin, especially among those who haven’t seen it, who cannot conceive of what it is, what it will be.

Spear counsels patience, counsels faith. From the pulpit, he says, We have been given a great gift, and we must not question it.

But he does. He questions, he doubts. His resolve wavers. He opens his mouth to speak again, but cannot. He hasn’t eaten or changed his clothes in days, and has taken to sleeping in the shed beneath the copper reflection of the Motor. He does not go home to the cabin except to fetch Abigail in the mornings and to take her back home at night.

On the next Sabbath, he stumbles at the pulpit, but the Electricizers at his side catch him with their frosty hands and return him to his station.

Spear shivers, wipes the drool off his lip with the back of a shaky hand. He waves his hand, motions for the ushers to pass the collection plate. They hesitate, look to the deacons for confirmation, a gesture not lost on Spear, who knows his authority has been questioned, his future dependent on the successful outcome of his great project.

Spear closes his eyes against his congregation’s wavering faith, then says, God blesses you, in this kingdom, and in the one to come. Give freely, for what you have here you will not soon need.

Spear has to stifle a gasp when Maud Trenton comes into his office during the first week of February. She is as pregnant as any woman Spear has ever seen, her belly stressing the seams of her black dress. He can see patches of skin between strained buttons, and momentarily he desires to reach out and touch her stomach, to feel the heat of the baby inside.

Maud sits, her hands and arms wrapped around the round bulk of her belly. She says, I need your help, Reverend.

With quivering lips, she says, I don’t know where this baby came from, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Spear shudders, trying to imagine who would have impregnated this woman. He realizes it has been weeks since he last saw Maud at services or group meetings. She’s been hiding herself away, keeping her shame a secret. The people in the village may not be ready to accept such a thing, but Spear prides himself on his progressive politics, on the radical nature of his insight. He believes a woman should be able to make love to who she wants, that a child can be raised by a village when a father is unavailable. This does not have to be the ruin of this woman, but there must be truth, confession, an accounting.

Spear says, Do you know who the father is?

Maud neither nods nor shakes her head. She makes no motion to the affirmative or the negative. She says, There is no father.

Through the curtain of gray hair falling across her downcast face, she says, I am a virgin.

She looks up and says, I know you know this.

Spear shakes his head. He does not want to believe and so he does not. He says, If you cannot admit your sin, then how can you do penance?

He says, The church can help you, but only if you allow it to. I ask again, Who is the father?

Spear asks and asks, but she refuses to tell the truth, even when he walks around the desk and shakes her by the shoulder. She says nothing, so he sends her away. She will return when she is ready, and when she is ready he will make sure she is taken care of. There is time to save the child, if only she will listen.

At night, Spear wanders the floors of the small cabin, checking and rechecking the doors. He locks Abigail’s door himself each evening but often still awakens in the night, sure her door is open wide. He rushes out into the hall only to find it locked, as he left it. These nights, he stands outside her door with his face pressed to the wood, listening to the sounds of her breathing. Sometimes, he dreams he has been inside the room, that he has said or done something improper, only later he can never remember what. More than once, he wakes up in the morning curled in front of her door, like a guard dog or else a penitent, waiting to be forgiven.

The Electricizers fill Spear’s bedroom with more specters than ever before. He can see some of the others, the older spirits he long ago intuited, can hear the creaky whisper of their instructions. These are past leaders of men, undead but still burdened by their great designs, and Spear can sense the revealments these older ghosts once loosed from their spectral tongues: their Towers of Babel, their great Arks. His fingers cramp into claws as he struggles to write fast enough to keep up with the hours of instruction he receives, his pen scratching across countless pages. Near dawn, he looks down and for one moment he sees himself not as a man but as one of the Electricizers. His freezing, fading muscles ache with iced lightning, shooting jolts of pain through his joints. Spear understands that Franklin and Jefferson and Murray and the rest are merely the latest in a long line of those chosen to lead in both this life and the next, and Spear wonders if he too is being groomed to continue their great works. He looks at Franklin, whose face is only inches away from his own. He sees himself in the specter’s spectacles, sees how wan and wasted he looks.