J Bryan: Dominion

“Honey-”

“They keep good people safe,” Madeline repeated. “Safe and free. I bet they were Communist spies. That big red dragon. Listening in on all those conversations, all those years, while we ate their greasy rice. Think about it.”

Ruppert gaped at her, almost missed his turn, and swerved off at the last second onto Beverly Glen. This time, the other drivers weren’t shy about honking; some of them really laid into it, unleashing the rage they’d been unable to express at his failure to speed away from the gang of gunmen at the first opportunity.

He sped towards the white-walled hive of suburban enclaves that Bel Air had become. Ruppert understood what Madeline was doing; he saw it every day, could even recognize the expression in the face of strangers. She was editing her reality, making things fit. The Hans, who had sung Happy Birthday to her on her twenty-eighth birthday, had been Chinese spies. That was all. They’d been discovered and put to justice. If he ever mentioned the Han family or the Laughing Dragon again, she would snort something about Communists and change the subject.

Ruppert did not possess this talent, at least not to the incredible degree he saw in everyone around him. Even as a child, he’d held back his belief and his trust, wanting to ponder over information for flaws and contradictions. His natural skepticism led him to journalism school, but as his Berkeley professor Jozef Gorski said, “Journalism is a hard and unforgiving search for facts. Reporting is gossip. Most of you, if you want a paycheck, will work as reporters.”

Gorski had, in a distant youth, been a journalist active in the Polish Solidarity movement, then written a Pulitzer-nominated book on the history of nonviolent resistance. He disappeared halfway through the spring semester of 2021. Another teacher took his place, without explanation, and when Ruppert asked where Dr. Gorski had gone, the new teacher scowled at him and shook his head. Ruppert tried to research the new teacher, but had been unable to find any information on the man’s background. He’d certainly never worked as a journalist.

Ruppert slowed as he approached his neighborhood gate. The road in this part of Bel Air was a paved channel between two thirty-foot walls, each occasionally punctuated by one of the large gates. The brass grill of the gate slid aside for his car.

“Daniel.” Madeline’s voice was unusually soft. She seemed to be making eye contact with herself in the mirror, as if trying to look into her own soul. Daniel knew how she felt.

“What is it?”

She touched her pinkie finger to the corner of her mouth. “Do you think I’m getting a zit here? It looks like there might be a zit.”

Daniel turned off the street into his driveway, then looked at her for a long time. She turned toward him, stretched her mouth into a vertical oval, and poked at the corner of her mouth again.

“See it?” she asked.

“No. I think it’s fine.”

“Good.” The car door opened for her, and she gathered her purse and climbed out. “I’d hate to start the week that way.”

Ruppert and Sully spoke very little to each other after Sully’s panicked visit, and they never had lunch together again. Ruppert busied himself trying to patch up his image with his fellow churchgoers. Not only did he attend Revelation Review on Tuesday night, but he arranged to meet a few of the men for lunch the following day, including Liam O’Shea, who accepted the invitation with his usual rubbery, toothy smile. Ruppert spent most of the lunch poking at dry, flavorless slices of grilled chicken on top of a limp salad and feigning interest in O’Shea’s drooling pedantry.

“We have to stay vigilant, you know,” O’Shea said. Ranch dressing dribbled from his lower lip. “You’d be surprised how many families are still raising their children with incorrect beliefs and antisocial values.”

“And your job is to fix that?” Ruppert asked. O’Shea, it turned out, was an analyst for Child and Family Services, a federal program contracted out to Pastor John and Golden Tabernacle. A bureaucrat, as Ruppert had thought.

“We have a hundred-point system to evaluate the morals of parents,” O’Shea said. “It’s very scientific. A score of sixty or below indicates a social crisis, and we get those kids to a Child Salvation Center immediately. It’s important to grab them as young as you can, before their parents corrupt them beyond repair.”

“And what happens to the parents?” Ruppert asked. The question drew sharp glares from the other two men at the table.

“We report them to Terror.” O’Shea shrugged, dipped his thick hamburger into the cup of ranch dressing he’d ordered for just that purpose, and bit off a mouthful. The process of chewing didn’t stop him from speaking; O’Shea was an efficient one. “We’re focused on protecting children, not prosecuting terrorists. You know, we save thousands of young souls in California every year, but it’s never enough. You can’t help but worry about all the children that go unsaved these days, with Judgment Day so close at hand. I wish I could just get my hands on all of them.”

Ruppert nodded solemnly and signaled their waiter for the check.

Sully did not show up to work on Thursday morning, and the producers scrambled to bring in the weekend sports reporter to cover his slot. No one mentioned why Sully was absent, and nobody asked, so Ruppert assumed the man hadn’t simply called in sick.

He tried twice to call Sully from the screen in his office, but the screen spat back that the system had no record of any such person. This was a warning universally understood-look no further, the person you’re trying to reach has been deleted from the official universe.

Ruppert’s top news story concerned the new radical Egyptian cleric, Muhammad al Taba, and his alleged hordes of North African followers. The cleric was finally being introduced to the nation at large, a shiny new enemy to hate, and Ruppert was doing his part. War news often arrived in this fashion, first released by select religious authorities, then confirmed by news reports days or weeks later. It reinforced the faithful’s confidence in the wisdom and infallibility of the Dominionist preachers. What Ruppert didn’t understand was how the preachers got such important, still-classified intelligence ahead of everyone else.

After work, Ruppert wanted to visit his storage unit in south L.A. and get online-he’d earned it, after two consecutive days with O’Shea and his ilk-but instead he made an even less cautious decision and drove east into Silverlake.

Sully lived in a neighborhood of large, decaying old houses with yards of sand and weeds, some of them only burned-out hulls. Silverlake was not a walled community, and literally anyone could walk right up to Sully’s door or window. After four years in Bel Air with Madeline, this seemed to Ruppert like a dangerously exposed way to live.

Sully’s house stood at the top of a hill, an old Victorian with tall, narrow windows and sharply peaked roofs, ancient by California standards. The lawn was patchy here, too, as if Sully wanted to respect the neighborhood’s low standards, but in place of the coarse weeds choking up the other yards, Sully had only desert wildflowers and thick palm trees within the iron fence encircling his property.

Ruppert parked on the street in front of the house and approached the iron gate. He couldn’t see any sign of a callbox, so he lifted the hand latch, opened the gate, and walked up the front steps.

The only sound in the neighborhood was the rush of highway traffic in the distance. He saw one person, a black man with a long gray beard, sitting on broken porch steps across the street from Sully’s house. He smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and read a crumbling paperback, and paid no attention to Ruppert. One corner of his house’s roof was cratered in, and bits of what might have been a second-floor balcony still dangled from the wrecked area.