BLUE NIGHT AT THE CULT

It’s blue night at the cult again. I’m standing outside the cult, at the end of their little driveway, while blue light shines out of the front windows of the cult house. Through the hole they cut in the roof some blue light spills upwards. Every now and then you can see a soul drift up through the glow and disappear into the dark night, arms and legs thrashing like it’s swimming.

Most of the people walking past aren’t here for the cult. They’re just regular people, heading home to cook their dinner and watch their televisions. Blue nights used to be an event. Used to be there was a line down the street. These days it’s only a handful of stragglers who want to ascend on any given blue night. Middle aged losers, romantic young couples, weirdos. It’s quiet inside too. Most of the cultists who used to meditate on the front yard and in the park on the corner have ascended already. There’s just a few leftovers who put off their own ascension to run the blue nights.

“May I interest you in not ascending?” I politely ask a young woman whose step has slowed as she’s reached the driveway. She smiles and shakes her head. Her face is serene. Her eyes are shiny with anticipation. She's terribly smug. She’s made up her mind about blue night. 

She walks up the driveway to the cult house and knocks at the door. A cultist in his 40s with a square face and a sky blue loincloth opens it and smiles at her. They exchange a few words I can’t hear. From there, as far as anyone knows, she’ll strip down, place all of her possessions in a basket for charity and enter the ascension chamber. Powerful lamps will flood her with blue light of a very specific frequency. In a nanosecond her atoms will reflect and diffuse the light throughout her physical being and she’ll glow for a second and then lift off the floor, her body transformed into pure energy, then float through the night sky, straight to heaven. That's what they say.

I have some pamphlets to hand out to anyone who’s undecided about whether or not to ascend. My personal view is that people shouldn’t ascend, and I made the pamphlets. I have reasons for my beliefs. I spent a lot of my personal time on the pamphlets. I wouldn’t call myself a pamphleteer on account of the connotations of the term but I do respect the form. I collected pamphlets produced by others and sorted them into those I considered successful and those I considered unsuccessful and I analysed the form and function of the successful ones. I applied the lessons to my views on ascension. I took the photos and made the collages and designed the graphics and wrote the text. I was partially reimbursed for the pamphlets by an assortment of organisations opposed to ascending. They include the Catholic Church, for obvious reasons, and Ascension Survivors, a group made up of family members and loved ones of people who ascended. Widows, siblings, parents. To them ascension is a tragedy.

Does anyone know if ascension works? No. It's as mysterious as death. All anyone can agree on is that the blue figures who squirm skyward through the hole in the roof of the cult house look like they’re wriggling in ecstasy and they don’t leave a body behind. It’d be different if they left a body behind. If there was a pile of charred corpses at the end of every blue night there’d be more interest in shutting them down. No one talks about shutting the blue nights down. A group of cops did show up one time asking to see the blue machine but by the end they were so impressed one of them asked the cult to switch it on so he could ascend. And he did. They all did. They sent the youngest one, a goofy country boy called Skip Penton, running back to the squad car to radio dispatch and tell ‘em they weren’t coming back and then the whole squad of cops including Skip just took off their uniforms and unclipped their belts and guns and clambered in, buck naked and ready for eternity.

“Could I interest you in not ascending?” There’s someone else at the end of the driveway. He’s in his late 30s, with a little round face and curly dark hair. He’s wearing track pants and an Asics t-shirt. He’s staring hard at the cult house.

“What?” he says, like it’s a surprising question.

“There are still big questions about ascending,” I say. “Big questions that haven’t been answered by cult leaders. There’s no proof their machine doesn’t just vaporise people. No one actually knows if the souls, if they are souls, which is disputed, by the way, go to heaven. Or even if heaven is real.” I hand him a pamphlet.

He takes it from me and starts to read. I wouldn't tell Ascension Survivors this but no one’s ever actually read a pamphlet in front of me before. I’m excited. I crave feedback. I designed the font myself. I watch his face to see how he reacts to it but he just tucks it in his pocket and nods. Behind us the young woman's soul wriggles skyward. 

It’s a quiet night. No one else looks twice at the cult house. At 10pm I pack up my pamphlets and head home, microwave a little potato salad, watch Bones on the couch, then hit the sack. The next day I'm at work when a gum infection rears its ugly head. I can't get into a dentist anywhere so I just go back to my apartment to sit with the lights off. That's why I'm looking out the window at 3 o'clock when the cult switches the blue light on again.

It's strange to see it in daylight. They usually only switch it on after dark, and rarely two days in a row. I grab my pamphlets and run down the stairs, around the corner, to the front of the cult house. Just in time to see four, five, six figures fly through the hole in the roof, faint and barely noticeable against the bright blue sky. A minute later there's a small popping sound. The blue glow through the front window fades. And then, slowly, it's replaced by a yellow one. A flickering yellow glow that crackles and brightens in a familiar way. 

I drop my pamphlets and rush into the cult house. There's nobody in the front room. Up the corridor flames are licking around a door frame. It’s hot but I rush to see if anyone's in the room and as I get right up near it there's a bigger bang and a bit of shiny steel casing crashes through the drywall just in front of me. It’s so unusual I know what it has to be. It’s part of the reflecting machine they use for ascension. 

The heat is terrible. I stagger back down the corridor and out of the cult house. I can hear sirens. I stand in the front yard and stare. Black smoke pours through the hole they cut in the roof. I realise: that was the last of them. They packed it in and pulled the ladder up behind them. 

I’m standing there in the front yard of the cult house when I feel a rough hand on my shoulder. But it’s not a fireman, it’s the guy from yesterday. He’s changed out of his Asics t-shirt. Good choice. He’s wearing a faded Slazenger t-shirt today. He’s yelling loudly, too. “What happened here?” he’s screaming. 

“They're gone,” I tell him. "I guess."

He’s really not coping with it. He starts crying. Ugly stuff. His mouth is opening and closing convulsively, he’s flushed, his eyes are bloodshot. He screams and grabs his face with his hands like he’s trying to rip it off. He doubles over. I scurry over and right then and there he’s in my face. “Why did you stop me?” he yells. “Who asked you? I was ready!”

“It was only a pamphlet,” I stammer. I don’t have any compunctions about deserting the medium if it suits me, I’ll tell you that no problem. He’s in crying mode again. Hands by his side, howling. I’m not sure what he wants from me. I try to comfort him again and he throws a messy punch. I head back up the street. As I turn the corner I look back and he’s running after me. I break into a sprint but he’s fast. I guess he’s a runner. I dash as fast as I can up the block, into my apartment complex and up the stairs, but he’s gaining on me the whole time and plus I guess I didn’t shut the front door of the apartment building properly because I can hear him stomping up the stairs behind me. My hands are sweaty and I nearly drop my key but I get it in the lock and slam the door behind me. I stagger a few paces in and turn apprehensively. On the other side of the door he’s hammering and yelling something but I’m panting so loudly I can’t actually hear him. There’s a pause for thirty seconds maybe and then he shouts again: “Open the door or I’ll shoot the lock!”

I can’t tell if he’s joking but I duck through the archway into the kitchen anyhow. There’s a tremendous BANG and a PING and the lock cylinder whizzes past and crashes through the sliding glass door at the far end of the apartment. Not good.

I look around for a knife to wave at him but before I can even move he’s around the corner pointing the gun at me. “Hey, c’mon,” I say, “pop that down.” I pat the kitchen counter. 

He’s red in the face like me but with fury rather than exertion. The hand holding the gun shakes as he points it at me. “You’re coming with me,” he snarls.

He puts the gun inside his Slazenger t-shirt with the barrel making a little pointy tent and hustles me back down the stairs. “Where are we going?” I ask, but he doesn’t say anything and I know anyway. When we get back to the driveway of the cult house the firefighters have already arrived and doused it. The air is rich with steam and smoke. It’s tropically humid. He marches me past the firefighters, who aren’t paid to stop irate joggers from accessing the driveways they want to access. 

On the street a small crowd has gathered to watch the hubbub. He stops on the small square of open lawn in front of the cult house’s front porch and shouts to address them. “This man,” he garbles, arm fully extended and with a quivering index finger jabbed uncompromisingly in my face, “has blood on his hands.” 

I check surreptitiously just in case he means it literally and I’ve scratched my hand hard enough to draw blood but I’m out of luck. No blood. I tuck my hands in my pockets to preserve the ambiguity and wince a little bit in case anyone wants to give me the benefit of the doubt.

On the driveway the firefighters stop coiling their hoses. Passers-by have begun to join the original gang of rubberneckers as it becomes clear that a secondary drama is about to unfold. “My wife and son were taken from me,” he continues in a thick and broken voice. “They’re gone but I’m still here. I still have to wake up every day in the house we lived in. Every morning I have to walk past my son’s bedroom and see his little bed with his little crumpled up pyjamas lying on the end. I know they are waiting for me in heaven. I miss them so much.” Jesus Christ. I raise a hand to say something and a firefighter begins to unspool his hose threateningly.

Slazenger’s sobbing. “I was going to join them last night,” he chokes, “until this man and his pamphlet stopped me.”

The crowd on the street is about to cause a civil disturbance. The firefighter with the unspooled hose shakes his head grimly and reaches for the tap. Slazenger pulls the gun out and brandishes it and nobody even flinches. A couple of people nod encouragingly at him. Good grief. He points it at my head. He may be grieving, but a sense of proportionality would be nice. Who brandishes a gun over a pamphlet? In a sense, I think, it’s a compliment paid to my graphic design skills and to the arguments laid out in the crucial centre column paragraphs. I try to be happy about the compliment but I can’t. I’m gloomy about it. Why me? Anyone looking at the cult house on blue night would have had similar reservations. The blue light was eerie, and never mind the rest of it. Is it so wrong that I made a pamphlet?

But he doesn't pull the trigger. “And now he’s going to help me fix the cult machine, since he apparently knows so much about it.”

Forget it. It’s really not my area of expertise. But the guy still has the damn gun pointed at me and as much as I believe he’s not going to murder me in front of a dozen of admittedly sympathetic witnesses I can see the sweat in his palm and the quiver in his finger and a charge downgraded to manslaughter on account of his psychological distress and the accidental nature of the shooting still leaves me deader than I’m comfortable with so I say, “OK. OK. I’ll do it.”

He leads me into the burnt out cult house. There’s not much of it left. A bit of the front room. Blue couches and a blue rug on the floor, soaked and dirty from the firefighters. The closer we get to the back room the less there is. 

We stand in the spot where the cultists kept their machines. The walls are gone.There are three thick steel bowls recessed into the ground, each about the size and shape of the compartment in a car where the spare tyre is stored.

“Well?” He snaps at me. I just don’t know how to help him. The information in my pamphlet was mainly second-hand, with some paragraphs that were third- or, frankly, fourth-hand. If I was genuinely considered an expert then it said something about the state of academia.

I start picking through the wreckage. I find some of the curved chrome panels that I drag into a pile. I find some burnt out light bulbs. I find what seems to be the remains of a speaker. I lay them all out on the ground and look at them. The chrome panels are still glossy and silver. Excellent for refracting light, presumably. I tell Slazenger as much but he’s not paying attention. 

Some of the panels are still intact. I collect the ones that weren’t bent or broken by the explosion and place them together. I’m looking at the edge of one of the panels and I realise it locks into the one next to it. That one locks into another one, and in five minutes I’ve assembled one whole chamber from the detritus of the three destroyed ones and clicked it into one of the floor bowls. I’m warming into this. Maybe I am an expert. It's an intoxicating feeling, to realise you have an intuitive understanding of a subject so beyond your usual palette of typefaces and amateur graphic design. I turn to Slazenger to make a wisecrack about how maybe I am an expert but he’s just standing there looking weird and vacant with shining tears in his big brown eyes. I’m ticked off. “Hey,” I snap at him. “I’m doing this for you, you know. And I’m actually doing a pretty good job of it. I doubted my own abilities but I’m coming through for you. You could act interested. God forbid, you could help.”

He looks at me with insane hatred. I get back to work.

The light bulbs are clearly beyond salvaging so I go looking for more. In a small detached shed there are rows of shelves with dusty tools and spare parts. It’s been spared by the fire. On the bottom shelf I find a big box with one bulb left in it. I screw it in. I go hunting for a new speaker but my luck’s run out. Nothing in the shed. Nothing in the house. Then I have a brainwave. In the tote bag where I carry my pamphlets I also keep a small Bluetooth speaker. I’ve been trialling a jingle to make my anti-ascendance messaging more impactful. To the tune of Journey’s song “Don’t Stop Believin’”, it goes “Don’t try / Ascending / Hold on to your physical being / Streetlights, people / Oh oh oh”. I hadn’t gotten around to adapting the final two lines but felt that, in a certain sense, they fit my message of retaining a corporeal form reasonably well.

I pull the speaker out and switch it on. To my surprise it pairs instantly with an unknown source and begins emitting a high-pitched white noise. I place the speaker in the chamber and the soundwaves bounce off the gleaming metal sides. It makes the bones in my face vibrate. Even without the blue light I get a strange sense of floating.

The light is the last thing missing. I stomp around on the charred floor until I hear a hollow sound, then pull up the boards with my fingers. There’s cabling underneath. I pull it hard until it comes loose from wherever it’s attached to at the other end. I spotted a car battery in the shed. I hook it up and the blue light flickers to life.

Inside the chamber the air fizzes and sparkles. Patterns trace through the blue. It’s amazingly beautiful. Hypnotic like an open fire. Slazenger steps in between me and it. 

“I have to know why,” he hisses.

I remind myself that without principles we’re no better than animals. “I just don’t think ascension is something that people should have the power to do,” I tell him. “It doesn’t seem right.” It's that simple. Do I need a personal angle on it? Can't I just follow my convictions? Isn’t it nobler to believe in the pure and plain truth of something without bringing emotion into it? Don’t we need to fill our lives with reasons to wake again tomorrow and begrudgingly drag the curtains to one side? Am I less entitled to my reasons because I don’t have a dead wife and son? Aren’t there worlds and worlds of little flippers for flipping the ball into the next chute that don’t have “DEAD WIFE & SON” printed on them in bold black letters? And what if? Mightn’t it be possible that I’m right, and if I’m not, that I might live long and die one day and fly up the old fashioned way, an honest ghost, and might god greet me like a colleague and take my hand and say, “listen, don’t sweat it, you were trying to help out and I got all the good ones anyway”? 

Slazenger shakes his head. "You're crazy," he says. "Do you know that?” Well, I know a rhetorical question when I hear one. He pauses for a long time then sighs with immense force, a huge, visceral gust, and shakes his head. The way he shakes it makes me feel awful. I’m not sure if I should have to, by rights, but it’s hard to see another human shake their head at you like that and not pause for a brief moment of reflection. He waves the gun at me again. "Get in."

He says it gently. “I don’t want to,” I tell him. “It would be hypocritical.”

“Get in,” he says again, “I need to know it works.” He wiggles the gun in one hand. 

It's not much of a choice. His finger is dripping with sweat and convulsing on the trigger, so I might as well take my chances with the blue light. I step into the chamber and into a warm bath of effervescent particles. Never again to feel earthly weight. Who'd want to. I look up at my hands, shining with heavenly light, and strike upwards. It's not like swimming through water. With a kick I'm 50 metres up. Then a kilometre. Then I'm over the clouds, but it's not evening anymore. It's morning. A golden glow all around. In a green field I find Slazenger's wife and son. They look deep into my eyes and I understand it all. The way they taught him about a family that could love one another. The terrible accident after the birthday party. The car sinking into the lake. The two little boxes disappearing into the ground at the funeral. His emptiness afterwards. The dull weight. The quiet rooms in the apartment. The very last light bulb in the blue chamber fizzing out as I ascend. I try to look down, back down to the ground, to see Slazenger, to tell him he'll see them again, to just wait, but the clouds have disappeared now, replaced with the green grass of heaven, as solid as it is on Earth.