Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Ilya was quiet for a moment. Sadie looked at him, her face softer than he’d yet seen it. Somehow telling them Vladimir’s name felt more like tempting fate than telling them that he’d died, as though, if given his name, fate might find a way to make the lie true. “Vladimir,” he said, finally, and his voice was almost a whisper.

The Masons’ church, Star Pilgrim, seemed to have been designed in defiance of the central Louisiana weather. The two walls of glass acted like a magnifying glass, taking the morning sun’s light and focusing it into something capable of burning. Even before the service began, the congregation’s faces dripped. Ilya’s balls chafed in his jeans, and he tried to locate a bathroom where he could air them out, but Mama Jamie herded the girls and him into a pew at the back of the church.

“Is it always so hot?” he asked. He was between Sadie and Marilee, and he let the question float out into the viscous air.

“This isn’t even that bad,” Sadie said.

“Sometimes it’s hotter, but if they turn the air too loud we can’t hear the sermon,” Marilee said, just as music began to blare over the loudspeakers and a tall, slab-jawed man strode to the pulpit.

On the way to Star Pilgrim, Papa Cam and Mama Jamie had explained to Ilya that their church was nondenominational. “We believe in Jesus and all, but we don’t follow the rules of some of your more orthodox religions,” Papa Cam had said, and from that—and from the fact that the girls and Mama Jamie were shawlless and showing a considerable amount of skin—Ilya gathered that their religion was some sort of watered-down version of Christianity. But nothing could have prepared him for a Star Pilgrim service. The pastor looked like a porn star. His teeth were opalescent; his shoulders strained at the seams of his shirt, which gleamed like sealskin. He stayed behind the pulpit for only a millisecond and then, as though the music were rippling through his spine, he began to shimmy back and forth across the stage and up and down the aisle. Above him, a giant projector beamed a rainbow of light that hit the concrete wall and burst into images of mountain streams and sunsets and cuddling baby animals, the same sorts of images that had been posted on Lana’s wall. Three colored spotlights swung to the beat of the music, and an overserious man with a video camera darted among the pews. “He’s streaming,” Marilee said when she saw Ilya staring. “When we’re sick we watch Pastor Kyle from home.”

Pastor Kyle’s sermon was a mishmash of sound bites. He seemed more concerned with volume than with content. His voice was a power hose, blasting the congregation’s brains. Serve. Jesus. Amen. Spread. The. Word. Of. God. Amen.

Pain began to prickle Ilya’s temples. He could feel the sun scorching the back of his neck. Sweat trickled down his spine and into the gully between his buttocks, a sensation that could not have been less celestial, but then Ilya had never been much of a believer. Babushka was the only person in his family to have faith. Under communism, the church in Berlozhniki had been repurposed as the Museum of Atheism, and Babushka had not dared attend the covert services that other women held in their apartments, but after perestroika she made up for lost time. She’d spent the bulk of Ilya’s life at the Church of the Ascension, with its dank nave and incense and the faded, golden ikony that braver families had hidden under their floorboards and in their mattresses. There had been one icon—a chipped, barely distinguishable Virgin Mary—which Babushka said had simply appeared at the church without being painted, and was a miracle. Ilya’s mother always said that she didn’t have time to believe in miracles, but that God could feel free to convince her.

Ilya had never had faith in anything except that knowledge could be gained. Numbers in a column added up to something. If you stared at a word, if you sounded out the letters and visualized its meaning, it could be learned. And there was Vladimir. Vladimir, who could not be counted on for anything, who was untrustworthy in a million little ways, but who had still managed to inspire Ilya’s faith.

As Pastor Kyle danced, Ilya turned these things over in his mind. He stood when the Masons stood. He held a hymnal and let Marilee flip to the right pages. The music grew softer, and then Pastor Kyle announced that it was time for testimonials. A woman took the microphone. She was plump with pinkish hair, and in a soft voice she admitted that in times of trial she turned to food rather than God. Then a kid Ilya’s age mumbled that he had played a video game that was somewhat Satanic. A bookish man told the congregation that he had not gotten a much hoped for promotion. His coworker had gotten it instead, and the man had been angry. He was crying as he spoke, his glasses slipping on the damp planes of his cheeks. The hardest thing, he said, was that his anger and his jealousy—a jealousy so intense that it seemed almost sexual—had clouded his relationship with God. When he prayed, he felt like he was yelling under water, his words muffled and choked and inaudible to anyone above the surface.

Pastor Kyle nodded through transgressions large and small, a beatific smile on his lips, a muscle spasming gently in his jaw. When the last testimonial had been aired, he began to preach. He spoke of a direct line to God. No call waiting. No being put on hold. Then, through a transition that Ilya could not follow, he was describing the gates of Heaven, saying how quickly they would open for the righteous. He began dancing again—a sort of slow gyration, his eager hips leading him down the aisle.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” he said. His lips grazed the microphone. He was only a few meters from the Masons’ pew, and then he stopped, and he looked at Ilya. “There are the Cains and the Abels. There are the believers and those that don’t.” He paused and smiled at Ilya as though he and Ilya were in on some joke. “We have someone new with us today, folks. All the way from Mother Russia, will you give it up for Ilya Morozov!”

The congregation began to clap around him. The man with the video camera hovered behind Pastor Kyle, and Ilya could see that the lens was trained on him.

“You’re supposed to stand,” Sadie whispered, and he looked at her, and she read the fear on his face and said, “Just for a second.”

Ilya stood.

“Ilya,” Pastor Kyle said, “is a top student in his town, which, as I understand it, is in the Siberian wilderness. Can you say ‘hello,’ Ilya?”

Pastor Kyle held the microphone out, and Ilya leaned toward it and said, “Hello,” and his voice sounded sullen and small. He cleared his throat, was about to add that Berlozhniki was not in Siberia, when Pastor Kyle whipped the microphone back and said, “Ilya is here today in the good old U-S-of-A thanks to the generosity of EnerCo and the Mason family.” There was another round of clapping. Papa Cam and Mama Jamie nodded, their cheeks pink, and Pastor Kyle waited for the applause to die down before saying, “But Ilya’s family has suffered a tragedy.”

Ilya stiffened. Beside him Papa Cam and Mama Jamie were flushed with attention. Ilya dug his fingers into his palms, tried to stem an anger that he knew was not entirely justified. He had lied, after all, had used their pity to gain their forgiveness, but still he couldn’t believe how quickly they had told Pastor Kyle. Pastor Kyle, who was looking at Ilya like he was one of Jesus’s lost lambs. Pastor Kyle, who, as he opened his mouth to speak, revealed a wad of something pink and bright between his molars. Bubble gum.

“Ilya’s brother died not long ago, folks,” he said. “And I was thinking there might be something we could do to help his family.”