Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

“You have a glow about you,” says the plump Latina lady in the crystal shop. “An aura of detoxification and change.”

Molly laughs nervously. “What, like I’m pregnant?” The joke comes out meaner than she meant.

The lady smiles thinly and explains about auras. How they’re particularly visible in the desert air, the same way the stars at night seem magnified. “Your body is expelling toxins on both the physical and spiritual planes. There’s a buildup of negative feeling in your chakras that has suddenly begun to break free.”

Molly brushes at her arms. Pedaling in desert heat, her pores produce not sweat but salt, a whitish haze on clothes and skin. “I’ve been riding a bike across country.”

“For how long?” asks the lady.

“Not long enough.”

“That would explain it.” The lady places a tumbled gemstone on a silver chain around Molly’s neck. “Rhodochrosite. It’s believed to foster acceptance and serenity during periods of radical change.”

The shop has mirrors everywhere. Molly hides a sour face. It’s a pink stone. Pink, with white impurities, and a startling streak of black. Makes her think of her mother. She can’t buy anything anyway. No room for trinkets in her budget, let alone room in her bags. She starts to pull it off. The lady gently grabs her wrists. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that. Negative energy, you understand—its release contaminates all those around you. I’m not asking you to buy the pendant. In fact, why don’t you take it? A gift. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask…. Please get out of my store and don’t come back.”

Speechless, Molly drops the pendant back around her neck.

On the way to the door, she passes a bulletin board full of ads for psychics, reiki, acupuncture. Hot springs excursions. Horseback tours of the canyons, Hopi ruins. A white flyer, pinned at the center of the board, shows a drawing of the church on the cliff. In the drawing, the angel is already in place atop the spire—just a stick-figure really, except for the wings. A halo surrounds it like a lens flare.

She pushes through the door into the heat. The pink pendant sparkles.

She imagines the church service inside that giant white monolith—windows behind the altar opening on desertscape, scraggly clusters of evergreens, red buttes. Someone in a robe, attempting to assign it a meaning different from the one she’s come to on her own.

What day is it? Time blurs, spent rolling down the highway to wind and the whirr of gears. She waits for the bank sign to come around. 107° F. 1:12 PM. Sat., Sept. 6.

A man strolls by in a sandwich board, his shadow sharp against the sidewalk. The words on the board warn of Armageddon, with an illustration of a landscape in flames. A big saguaro cactus going up like a devil’s fork. Molly hasn’t seen saguaros yet—not far enough south. Anyone who takes Revelations at face value must necessarily be immune to irony.

He catches her eye, or she catches his.

Molly breathes in, steady. Just some crazy prophet. Trying to hand out pamphlets and failing, repelling passersby as though surrounded by a magnetic field. He even looks like Jesus.

“This is it,” he’s saying, his voice projecting like a circus barker’s. “Yep, the end of the world. Want to know how I know? We’ve broken our trust with the Lord. He gives us dominion over His creatures, asks us to care for His creation, and we do? Make golf courses out of deserts. We shouldn’t be here. God made deserts as a place of trial, of holy cleansing. He made them beautiful to give us hope during punishment. Jesus came to the desert when he doubted. Moses and his people wandered here for forty years. Now we turn our deserts into resorts. The rich flock here, and the desperate follow. In Revelations, God threatens to punish us for our arrogance, to turn the skies black and the seas to poison. We beat Him to it. This Eden is artificial, a false and fragile paradise. We ourselves are raising the Sign of our end! You all have seen it: this new Temple of the Line, with its paralyzed messenger angel, borne to earth by its own weight—the weight of greed and indifference!” He lifts a sheaf of the white flyers in his fist, tears them down the center, throws them into the street. “Repent! Damn you people, repent!”

Molly is a person of conviction too. She just never managed to distill her convictions to a size that will fit on a t-shirt. This man has found a way around that. His t-shirt is almost the size of a billboard.

She falls into step beside him.

His eyes widen, crow-footed and gray through the panes of her sunglasses. The sandwich board hobbles his gait, trips him up every few strides. Molly has never engaged with a crazy prophet before. In Boston and New York, it’s easy enough to look the other way. But this is the point of her journey, isn’t it? An attempt to understand.

She forces her fingers to quit fiddling with the rhodochrosite stone. “What’s your name?” she asks.

“Daniel.”

“Do you really believe in all that, Daniel?” His face reddens. Molly realizes that she’s questioned the faith of a madman. She braces herself to be called harlot, Jezebel. Her fingers tighten on the helmet strap, ready to clock him if she has to.

His shoulders slump. “Doesn’t it sound like I believe it? Am I not convincing?”

“No…. I mean, I believe that you believe it. I even agree with you, mostly.”

“Mostly. Well, you seem to be the only one.” He sighs. Tosses the rest of his flyers in the trash. “Which part is it you disagree with?”

“The God part,” she says.

“God is the point.”

“Well, that and your methods.”

He kicks at his sandwich board. “Hmm. Very wise.” She is surprised to find this prophet capable of sarcasm.

Daniel’s voice is raw from shouting at the sinners. She gives him what’s left of her tea. They talk about belief, the natural world. Whether it’s more profound for beauty to arise out of meaningless chaos or a divine clockmaker’s plan. He shocks her by quoting the Koran.

He says he came here from the Northwest, from Portland. To preach. This is his pilgrimage, his trial.

Molly explains she came here looking for perspective. There’s something about where she grew up, who she grew up as, that she can’t help but question. Her father the preacher. Her mother. Their faith.

Daniel offers to show her his own perspective.

It feels dangerous opening up to him, even this tiny bit. She’s alone in the desert with some crazy doomsayer. With whom she happens to agree. The pendant swings.

They stop in front of the bank for Molly to collect the ten-speed. She hangs the helmet from the handlebars.

He takes her to his pulpit: a little patch of wilderness surrounding a dry creek at the north edge of town. Sage, dust, a lizard or two, until a roadrunner appears at the top of the draw. A housing development encroaches: clay roofing tiles, uniform landscaping, smooth curbs. A mile away across the desert to the east, cars pull in and out of the church parking lot, points of blinding sunlight reflected in plastic and glass.

Daniel shrugs out of the sandwich board, climbs up on an outcrop of rock. “In other parts of the world, people come to such a place to pray. They walk, some for hundreds of miles. They make offerings they can’t afford. Here people come to take pictures.”