The Prayerist

THE PRAYERIST

In Portland, Oregon, United States of America, on December 20, 2009, a very long interview process began. Number One, who people in this time called John, became aware, as he always did when one occurred, of a pending vacancy. He left his rooms in a downtown hotel where he had lived relatively unobserved for more than two decades.

Modern humans were stubbornly unobservant, save for a few scientists whose observational skills were applied to so narrow a range as to be almost useless. This condition didn't result from unfortunate limitations in the species' DNA, but owed to a strange probabilistic quirk played out in a stupefying and long attempt to create better and better means of destroying one another, an attempt that led more or less directly to the creation of a twelve hundred dollar forty-six inch 1080p LED LCD flat screen television. The result was, for better and worse, that science had become the prevailing mythic system of the wealthier enclaves of the planet, even though comparatively less successful candidates were hanging on with passion, and at the same time encouraged a decided dearth of inquiry.

The concierge saw an older man, graying but dapper, check at the desk and then walk into the Sunday morning mist. Wearing an aging trench coat with a maroon plaid scarf and calfskin gloves, Number One took a bus two blocks east to an intersection near the coffee shop where the applicant waited. Entering the quirky little shop (all independent coffee shops in Portland are quirky), he scanned the sparse crowd before recognizing the applicant. He walked directly to a table where a young man, a boy really, was working furiously at a laptop computer.

"Hi! I'm John."

Kip looked up from his MacBook into a plain face topped with dark brown hair sticking out at a bewildering number of angles, surely unplanned. The eyes, though, were piercing, and Kip felt unnerved. The man, of indeterminate age, wore a black work shirt and black Carhartt jeans, looking like an ecclesiastical appliance repairman. Kip couldn't tell about the body; the guy looked slender, but with broad shoulders. Kip would have been irritated at this interruption by a stranger had John not exuded a kind of endearing sincerity. Sales pitch or pick-up line, it was either brilliant or extremely clumsy. No, Kip decided, definitely the latter.

"Look, man, I'm poor and in a relationship," Kip said, killing both birds with a single implement.

"Oh, I know. The job is available only to attached men," John answered, placing a hand on Kip's forearm.

John's palm was warm, the skin at once pliable and firm. Kip felt caressed, and started to pull his arm back slightly, but stopped, realizing that he didn't want the contact to end.

"Pardon?"

John pulled a chair from another table over and sat beside Kip. That smell. Kip couldn't identify it precisely — maybe the smell of cookies baking in his mother's kitchen or the smell of Jeff the first time they fucked. He came back to focus and realized he had been staring blankly at John.

"What job?"

"May I get you a coffee . . . or tea? We'll get to the details later," Jon said as if assuming that Kip wanted elaboration.

Now, Kip was feeling a creepy vibe. For one thing, he couldn't concentrate. Every time he started to blow John off, he found his gaze rooted to John's, his mind blank. Kip didn't find the guy physically attractive, but was somehow enthralled.

"Look, uhm, John, I have a job, friends, and a nice life. I appreciate the offer, but no thanks."

John leaned back in his chair and checked a rumpled paper he pulled from his shirt pocket.

"No, you're definitely the replacement. Number 7,449."

"Okay, man, you need to go. Now."

"What are you writing?" John asked, ignoring Kip and looking at the laptop screen.

Kip had no idea why he was allowing the conversation to continue. "A novel. My first."

"You could use more time to work on it."

Kip couldn't deny that. He was in a dead end job that took too many hours and paid way too little. John must be hawking some pyramid scheme or real estate investment system. "There isn't enough money in the world to persuade me, John. Sorry, I gotta go."

John was still looking at the paper. He stood when Kip did and reached into his front pants pocket for a card. Handing the obviously expensive card to Kip, John said, "Time is what we both need. Come see me tomorrow. We'll talk money, but more importantly, we'll talk time."

Kip turned to close his laptop and put it in his bag. When he turned back to tell John that he definitely would not see him tomorrow, the man was gone. Almost immediately, Kip had a clear impression that he had seen John somewhere before. All he saw now was an old man in a raincoat leaving the shop. He started to throw the card away, but realized that it was already in his back pocket.

During the entire Max ride and walk back to the apartment, he tried to place the smells and images, so familiar and comforting, of his encounter with John. The guy's voice was utterly incongruous coming from that mouth, a mouth that if taken separately from the rest of the visage was . . . Kip brought himself up short. He had been seized, as he had been when he first met Jeff, and that scared him. Christ, what would Jeff think?

Living in the City focuses one's search for happiness on people. By the time rent on a modest apartment and food were had, the habit of consuming everything in sight couldn't take root. Your friends and lovers were the only ore from which you might extract happiness.

Up a plain stairway surrounding a shabby elevator core, their small space would charitably be described as drab but rescued by color splashed on floors, walls, around windows, and even on the ceiling. Closing the door behind him, Kip threw the dead bolt and shouted in the cheesiest Cuban accent he could manage, "Juicy, I'm home!"

Jeff called from the kitchen, "You're back early. Writer's block?"

"Sweetie, I was trying to catch you with your lovaa."

"He just went out the bedroom window. Should I get him back?"

Jeff was dark where Kip was blond, solid where Kip was slender, shorter than Kip but not quite a Jeff to a Mutt. Kip and Jeff had been friends, then lovers, then friends who fucked, and now were lovers again.

Kip recounted the strange meeting in the coffee shop minus the part about John smelling like a naked Jeff.

"So, you going to see him tomorrow?"

"You're kidding, right? He's probably a serial killer."

"You could use more time to write. Nothing ventured . . . "

"Juicy, you're pretty cavalier with my life here."

"Did he really frighten you?"

"No. But I think he's probably crazy."

"Maybe just eccentric. You know, a billionaire with a job to fill."

"I'll think about it. We need to get in the shower."

Estimating how imminent cosmic calamity is depends almost entirely on a being's perception of time. Even moderately educated humans know that their star is not inexhaustible. Some seven or eight billion years from now Sol will run out of hydrogen to fuse and will promptly (over a billion years) redden, bloat, and incinerate the rocky planets of this entirely unexceptional solar system. Yet, most humans evinced absolutely no anxiety over the impending destruction.

Number One was anxious because, excepting these humans, no creatures in the universe could accomplish what they could, and seven billion years was nothing. Even in the press of events, Number One was expected to do his job. A continuing vacancy would be a major dislocation.

Cuttlefish are the great camouflage artists of Earth's fauna. They pulse with color to communicate and take on not just the color but also the texture of their surroundings when they need to hide, performing this magic without trying. Number one was a cuttlefish in a much bigger pond. He never tried to alter his appearance. In fact, he had been surprised over a great many years at the way humans perceived him.

Although he was entirely disinterested in the constant violence and warfare among humans, especially as the violence related to emotions and behaviors like love, jealousy, and sex, this species had evolved the gift. Before humans emerged and his firm had dispatched him to Earth, another species on another world attempted the work acceptably but not at all as brilliantly as humans. His colleagues at the firm were at first dubious about any significant production from these benighted collections of cell membranes and cytoplasm, but eventually had to admit after the test run that the results were promising. Water was simply amazing.

Humanity's strange quirk of inventing supernatural explanations for perfectly natural circumstances like death did not seem to affect its work. The attempt by the males of the species to develop social hierarchies and to enforce codes of behavior based on mythic systems was not unusual, but that they had concentrated on reproductive behavior was just quaint. The whole notion of sexual reproduction in humans, while a process efficiently encouraging species diversity, was so wrapped in patriarchal power within the prevailing mythic system as to be laughable.

As far as Number One could tell, the object of desire, affection, and sexual attraction of individual humans could be plotted on a roughly bimodal curve, with most of the population's sexual attraction and behavior directed to the opposite sex, a small mode attracted to the same sex, and between the modes an even smaller number attracted to both sexes. Had he been an anthropologist and had anyone else in the universe been even mildly interested, he could have published on this strange constellation of attractions.

A saving grace was that humans' ability to perform was not affected by the nature of their sexual attractions, a fact that confirmed the insignificance of that whole issue. Thus, Kip's place under the second mode of the curve didn't enter Number One's mind as a disqualification.

Kip had been awake for an hour watching Jeff sleep. Jeff had been his first real love interest, and their first break-up was precipitated by a yearning quite natural in young men of any orientation, the desire for more sex with more partners. Although the evolutionary nature of that desire seemed moot for gay men, the principle held. At least that desire was present in both Jeff and Kip. They remained friends as they navigated their one-night and one-month stands all of which lacked an element of friendship that had always been present between the two of them.

Among the opalescent sensual ties between them, friendship was the string for the pearls. Friendship was the least likely development in human nature, which was generally produced as were all aspects of life on the planet by competition. Yet, the deepest feelings that either Kip or Jeff could manage were entangled with friendship — all the passion, envy, lust, greed, well you know — the seven deadly natures. Looking down at his sleeping friend, boyfriend, life partner, partner for a few years, whatever, Kip was happy.

Finally he nudged Jeff and the couple dove back into the mammalian depths to celebrate unreproductive reproductive urges. If an itch could be scratched, the species would find a million ways to scratch it. Even detailed descriptions of the scratching of itches generated new itches to be scratched. Here, though, in their bedroom, somehow, physical needs and emotional needs threaded themselves together to be met in a grand ballet of oral, genital, and anal celebration.

"Man, Kip, you can wake me up that way any time."

"My pleasure, Juicy." The nickname was born of Kip's experience of Jeff's superior ability to secrete the finest lubricant known on the planet, preseminal fluid. Why no one was bottling and selling the elixer remains a great mystery, on a par with the possible existence of dark energy and the Higgs boson.

"God, we're a mess after we fuck."

"All little boys like to make a mess. Besides, cleaning up is fun," Kip said as he ran his tongue over Jeff's belly and chest, ending with a tongue dance held in their joined mouths.

After a shower, prolonged by more itch scratching, Jeff and Kip dressed suitably for participation in cultural rituals that had displaced hunting and gathering. As he finished pulling on a T-shirt, Jeff asked Kip, "So, you going to see John about the job?"