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Field Notes

Itto & Mekiya Outini

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“I don’t think you is who you says you is,” is the first thing Everett says to me, his eyes like shards from broken bottles scattered under streetlamps, only there are no streetlamps here, just a sickly half-moon rising from a knot of trees. Signing up for this night’s watch, I imagined that the church would have a floodlit parking lot, but there’s not a single floodlight: just live oaks, a steeple, and power lines swooping from north to south, somewhere to nowhere.

“Who do you think I am, then?” I wonder aloud. It’s good for me to know, even if asking only puts more questions in his head: good for me to get a sense of how I come across so that I’ll fine-tune my performance for next time.

He takes the question seriously, giving me the once over, squinting. Along with his Nikes and red cap and overalls, he’s got himself a snakebite piercing, but his mouth is hardly anything at all, the studs so crowded that I can’t imagine what he ever does with spoons. Maybe he subsists on liquids: moonshine through a straw. Everything on his face is too scrunched-up, too close together. Looking at him makes my head feel just like looking at modern art does.

“You show up out of nowhere,” he sums up with a sniff—the world, for him, evidently consists of two parts: his own town, and nowhere—“and the first thing you want to do is watch our church, huh?”

It’s just the two of us out in the moonlight, propped up like mannequins on our folding chairs, which the pastor kindly provided before returning to his truck and heading home to bed: him with his feet stretched out as far as they’ll go, me with one leg hooked over the other—only it occurs to me that men around here do not cross their legs. They cross their arms.

I cross my arms.

“Where you from?” he asks.

“Piedmont.”  

He frowns, weighing this against his own encyclopedic knowledge. “I never heard of no Piedmont.”

“North Carolina piedmont,” I tell him. “It’s a region. Between the mountains and the coast. It comes from French. It means foothills. ‘Pied’ means foot, and ‘mont’ means—”

“You been to college?”

“No,” I say, wanting to kick myself. “I just like knowing what words mean, is all.”

“How come?”

“No reason. Forget it.”

Really, it’s not about the words. It’s never been about the words—though, I suppose, it is about what can be done with words: about standing out, elevating the mind, knowing better, even when I’ve known better than to know better, even when the wisest thing would’ve been to know less, and say even less than that, and be the least of all. What the Bible says about pride, I have tested, and while I don’t like to admit it, I have to: the score is scripture one, me nothing.

But, on a related point, the Bible is mistaken: we’re barely more than chimpanzees. The authors—Moses, Solomon, Isaiah, whoever—would’ve known this for themselves if, back in their day, there’d been high schools, for then they might’ve found themselves, like me, thrown in among the yapping, grunting, clamoring multitudes, snorting crystal meth off toilet tanks and circulating naked selfies snapped in bathroom stalls, and they, too, might’ve felt that rocket-fuel burn: to rise, to shed the stinking animal pelt that is our common nature, to wonder, What more can we be?  

Reading Chekhov for the first time, reading how hard he had to squeeze the serf out of himself, gave me a glimmer of recognition. If I hadn’t put in that same work, I wouldn’t be a few months away from a Master’s degree—but now, again, between me and my data, there has arisen that familiar obstacle, that pride, which I must wrangle and subjugate if I’m to get anything useful out here in the field.

“You said you’re some kind of truck driver?” he wants to know.

“People move,” I say. “They don’t want to drive their own cars—”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “They’re rich. They want to fly or something. They hire me to drive their cars from A to B.”

“What’s the nicest car you ever drove?”

“Well.” I think about it. An expanded edition of my backstory springs extemporaneously to mind. “I used to drive armored cars,” I tell him. “You know. From bank to bank. To get the cash and jewels and stuff from A to B. And before that, I was in the army. I drove all kinds of stuff. Tanks and Humvees. Even helicopters.”

He looks at me with newfound respect, his suspicions temporarily suspended. “No shit.”

“No shit,” I agree.

“My old man was in the army.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Was.” He kicks a pebble. His eyes skitter with it off into the shadows. “An IUD got him.”

“Say what?”

“Pipe bomb. Afghanistan.”

“Oh.” My eyes flop around on the ground like two happy dogs, my face down and away so he won’t see how hard I’m working to keep a straight face.

“You on a secret mission or something?” he wants to know.

Enigmatic silence seems the best course of action.

“Whatever.” He says it like he cares, but not that much. “I get it. You got to keep things classified. I understand.” He chews on his lip for a while. Then, suddenly, as if the question has been brewing in him, and he can’t contain it anymore, “You’re after whoever’s been taking our churches, aren’t you?”

Real slow, in a way that could, if plausible deniability becomes important, be just me getting sleepy, I roll my head up and down in a nod.

“Hell yeah!” He slams a fist into his palm. “We’re going to get the bastards, aren’t we!”

My enigmatic silence does the talking.

He sits forward, elbows on his knees. “So? What do you all got on them?” When I don’t show any sign of having heard, he mutters, “Okay. Okay. Classified.”

Honestly, I’m starting to enjoy myself—though such entertainment is not what I’ve come for.

“Look,” he says, “I don’t want to get you in trouble or nothing, but just tell me one thing, would you?” He leans back with folded arms, his body an echo of my own, gazing lazily out at a clump of trees, his lips barely moving, I guess in case someone’s watching. “Just one thing, okay, and I’ll quit asking.”

My silence pulls him like a current.

“Have you seen one disappear?”

That my persona’s uninclined to answer is a mercy. It would sting to have to say out loud that all my efforts—all the tedious drives from empty lot to empty lot, all the hours spent squinting through orange tape and barricades at ragged foundations and basements abruptly and unceremoniously exposed, like cavities from which great molars have been pulled, not to mention all the interviews with former congregants whose houses of worship have mysteriously gone missing, seemingly plucked off the face of the earth in what has all the trappings of a rapture, except that this one takes up only glass and wood and steel, wires, plumbing, air ducts, asbestos, and fluorescent tubing, not souls—has come to nothing.

Of course, it also stings to be reminded of this fact, whether or not it’s said aloud. And it stings still worse to know that even if my fieldwork goes without a hitch, I still won’t have answered the one question pressing on everyone’s mind. As much as I would like to be the first to furnish, if not a reliable eyewitness account of a disappearance, then at least a CCTV recording—in every known instance, the cameras have failed—I am constrained. If I were an aspiring journalist, or particle physicist, or theologian, then I’d have standing to pursue those questions—the who, the what, the how, the why—but the imprimatur of a sociology department, it seems, requires the production of appropriately sociological knowledge. The question I’ve set out to answer in my thesis is straightforward, well within the bounds of the knowable, though not, perhaps, within the bounds of what’s worth knowing, but that’s of little concern to my committee, who are eager, one and all, for me to demonstrate that these peculiar happenings correlate either with a net increase in religiosity across the American South, or with a net decrease, or perhaps with no discernible change.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that I’ve been freed to employ my own methods. My advisor—my second advisor, that is: my disputes with the first one could not be resolved—even helped me put together a justification for the ethics committee, riddled with formal assertions of “minimal risk” and allusions to the suspicion and hostility with which smalltown Americans, as a rule, regard outsiders, especially those who come wielding recording devices, so that I might be cleared to run my interviews as I saw fit: that is, from undercover. He grew up on the outskirts of Hendersonville, paddling in a shallow sea of Everetts. He understands.

“It’s the Taliban,” blurts out Everett, ruining my enigmatic silence, which has lapsed into a meditative, vaguely anxious one. “Ain’t it?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve been working on it, too,” he says conspiratorially. “I’ve worked it all out. Just from thinking. It’s kind of fishy, ain’t it, how we go and pull all our troops out of Afghanistan, and then, just like that, everyone up and forgets about it? The Taliban, I mean. They’re still out there.”  

“Come on.” I can’t help myself. I’m grinning now. “You don’t really think it’s the Taliban.”

“Why not?” He stares back defiantly.

“You don’t really think they’re taking churches.”

“My old man always used to say that was our big problem. How we underestimate them.”

“How’s it supposed to work, exactly?” I press him. “How’s the Taliban going to steal a whole church? From inside America?”

“Why’re you asking me?” he demands. “Ain’t that your job? Hell, how should I know? Maybe they’re working with extraterrestrials.”

“Maybe,” I agree.

He jerks his head up. “You better quit.”

“Quit what?”

“Quit mocking.”

“I’m not mocking,” I say. “I’m just saying, maybe.”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice a long, coarse rope of resignation, drawn through hands until they burn, “you’re mocking me, all right.”

His indignation raises gooseflesh up and down my arms. There’s real pain between us now, black and deep as oil, and as flammable as oil, too. I want to tell him that I’m not the one who made him stupid. I want to tell him that his old man’s death was just collateral in an endless war his old man’s people voted for. I want to tell him that maybe now, with all their churches disappearing, him and his neighbors will finally have to stand up on their own feet—maybe that’s what all of this is all about—and most of them will not be able, or else they’d be already standing. But those things fall under the heading “unduly influencing the subject,” which I, and my advisor, and the ethics committee unanimously agreed must be avoided.

“I was just thinking,” he mumbles, “maybe I could help you. I got ideas, you know. No one ever wants to listen, but I got ideas. But I guess you don’t need me, do you. I guess you’re just like everyone else.”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” I say. “You—”

Then I guillotine my words. Everett’s hunched forward, drooping, his head in his hands, a pulse in his temples, his fingers in his hair, making it stick up like antennas. He wants to hurt me. I can tell. He wants to leap up from his chair and tackle me. Only his fear of the unknown is stopping him. He wants to spit out something worse than any insult ever said by any man to any other man. He’s just short on imagination, that’s all—and he doesn’t realize he’s already said the worst thing anyone could say.

Get it together, I tell myself, looking away, down the road, where a cool breeze is rattling brittle leaves—or maybe it’s guys in turbans creeping around beneath the trees. Shake it off. Let it go. Breathe. Remember why you’re here. This kid is nothing. Just data. Numbers, splotches on a graph, curving lines. Even the data’s nothing. Just raw material. Even the thesis is nothing. Just a steppingstone.

Then the sound of Everett sucking in his breath works like a string, tugging my head in his direction, and his gaze works like a second string, whipping me all the way around until I’m facing toward the church.

The church is gone.

There’s nothing in this that I haven’t seen before: no flash of light, no rush of sound, no ominous presence preceding the absence, no telltale prickle in the air. Just a big patch of bare dirt, probably rife with acrid acids, lined with cracked foundation stones. The night is still, the moon indifferent, the trees alert but undisturbed—and yet, the immediacy of this happening, the fact that I was there for the before, not just the after, does something ghastly to my lungs, something which Everett, thankfully, is in no condition to notice.

He’s staring at the emptiness, horror crawling up over his face like a raw slice of moon up a treacherous sky—his wretched face, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, no longer much like modern art, more like something out of Van Eyck or Bosch.

Up from the depths of me rises an impulse: to ask him, then and there, with all of this still fresh and beating like a heart torn from a breast—because it’s what I’m here for, isn’t it, what I’m here to do—“Are you now experiencing a decrease in religious feeling, or an increase, or no change at all?” It’s only the uncanny rattle of my own perverse jargon, tumbling loose inside my skull, that calls me back to reality, reminds me that the chance to know what’s in his heart has come and gone, whereas what’s painted on his face, for any fool to see—not just the existential dread, but more significantly, the specific horror of having blinked, of having let a pettiness rise up and swallow him while something precious slips away—is no different, really, than what’s painted on my own.

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Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published fiction and nonfiction in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Southland Alibi, Chautauqua, The Stonecoast Review, Mount Hope, Hidden Peak Review, Jewish Life, The Brussels Review, Eunoia Review, New Contrast, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform. They hold an MA and an MFA, respectively, from the University of Arkansas.

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