The Believer, page 22
36
The Kingdom of Heaven
Becky
The railing is iced with a thin line of fresh snow as I climb the stairs to Becky Kreider’s front door. Inside, I add my wet Nikes to the dozens of similar pairs on the shoe rack and wander into the kitchen where the noise of her younger sons swirls around her as she peers into a cauliflower through pink-rimmed glasses. Standing at a remove from the chopping board because of her expanding belly, she is gouging out the gray spots with a knife before reducing the whole, slowly, to pieces. Becky is pregnant with her seventh child, although it took me too many visits to realize this on account of her tent-like dress. Also, though she is wan and tired, that is normal for a mother of six.
Loisann and Anthony moved into their two-bedroom apartment when the Kreiders moved out. The Lord, it was explained to me, had provided the former with their own home in New York City and the latter with more spacious accommodation nearby for their family of eight. Though the rent costs more than the mortgage on their previous two-acre property in Pennsylvania, the Kreiders now live in one half of a three-story house. The bedrooms are upstairs, the kitchen and family room are on the entry level and the schoolroom and washing machine are in the basement, where Tim’s desk sits behind a clothesline heavy with laundry.
Becky does not default to a smile to ease conversation but she will give breath to a quick laugh. She employs it variously—Becky having as many kinds of laughter as there are types of rain; sometimes it functions as punctuation, other times as a gesture of tenderness; occasionally as an axe. Originally from Utah, Becky’s family moved when she was young to Providence, Kentucky, which she describes as a back-hills place where nobody can get a job. In Utah, her parents had tried Mormonism. In Kentucky, they joined a Mennonite Church. Becky made her own decision to join when she was fourteen. As with Loisann describing her father, when Becky tells me about her family I understand that not only were they not religious in the way she would have liked, but that this feels to her—insofar as she views it as vital to a child’s care, no less than providing food and shelter—like a dereliction of duty. Perhaps even a betrayal.
When Becky tells me this about her family, I will think about my own. My mother was one of four. Her siblings would grow up to become Orthodox Jews, much more religiously observant than they were raised. She would come to believe that she spoke with angels. To believe is to belong. But it is also something else. The word “safety,” wrote James Baldwin, brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it, by which he meant an internal security as much as, if not more than, a physical one.
“My aunt was a—it slips my mind now—a very liberal evangelical. My uncle very much was a promoter of gay and lesbian lifestyles, a lot of things that would seem not exactly biblical,” she says with the quick laugh. “My mother loved the song ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ I don’t think that’s quite as typical in most Mennonite homes, complete CDs of totally non-Christian songs.” Secular music is unwelcome at the Kreiders’ place. And Becky keeps away from the news. “It’s just not interesting to me to read the news or whatever.”
It slips my mind now. That laugh that functions like a good stiff broom. Becky has a wonderfully dismissive way of sweeping away anything that she deems foolish or wrong or dangerous.
Her toddler waddles around her legs. “Let Mommy get you something,” she says, reaching for a bag of hamburger rolls. I ask her about the process through which children become members of their church. “Douglas is twelve, and he’s been a member for a year,” she explains of her eldest, rapidly folding ham and cheese into the bread. “That’s pretty much on the young side, but it sounded like he understood. It was over the time when we were coming up here, and he was being exposed to a lot more things than what a child at home without much mission influence would have heard. He was hearing stories from people from the city about how God was working in their lives. I think it made him more aware. But it’s not uncommon for them to be fourteen, sixteen, and sometimes even older. And sometimes we have children that don’t choose to follow that at all.”
I ask what happens then.
“Well, we pray for them,” she says, with a laugh. Douglas walks in and around his youngest brothers. “So maybe these boys want to eat on the porch,” she tells him. “You could pray with them and they could eat their sandwiches a while. You need one, too.”
“Get to the porch and I’ll meet you out there . . .” Douglas instructs them gently in his serious voice as Becky hands him the lunches. She points one of the other children towards the puzzle he’s come looking for and returns to chopping vegetables. I ask if there are people who don’t follow the norms in their community—those who come out as gay, for example.
“That can really vary,” she replies. “Usually our children know that they’re hurting their family or their friends and sometimes it’s more comfortable for them to go somewhere else if they want to do something they know is unacceptable. So you have those situations where they just voluntarily leave or disappear.
“We would not allow somebody like that to remain a church member but we would welcome them to come to church if they wanted to just attend. We would probably pray for them, a lot,” she says with another quick laugh.
“Ideally we would still show them love because that’s the only way they have any hope of—I mean, they need to know what’s right and wrong,” she says, her voice growing harder. “But they also need to know that we love them and that Jesus came to save sinners. All of us have sinned somewhere along the way, none of us are exempt, of course. We could grade the sin but the fact of the matter is that any deviation is going to keep you from connecting with God because God is perfect and holy. So our goal is to reconcile them to God, but also to make sure they know they’re loved even though we know they’re not doing the truth.
“Now,” she sighs, “I’ve never had any personal experience with it but I know there are some that if their oldest child would decide to become gay they’d ask them to please live somewhere else for the sake of their younger children, knowing that this is an issue of right and wrong.”
Ethan, ten, wanders in. “What was I supposed to do for reading?”
“That astronomy book,” Becky answers. “It’s upstairs in my room.” And then she turns back to me with a proud smile and tells me how much he loves reading.
The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy, the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said, is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
Becky makes time and energy she does not have to sit with me and answer my questions about her beliefs and her family. She shows me the baby books she has meticulously kept for each of her children. She presents me with a family photo, carefully writing the name of each Kreider on the back with a blue ballpoint. She urges me to eat lunch with them. We talk about New York City and food and childbirth and sons and I can see what a good friend Becky would be to those who live in her world. Her eyes when she looks at me from behind her glasses: dark and flat as a wet river stone.
It was the silence of the women during the church service. The lesson that “efforts of population control stand in opposition to God’s design.” That it is “a joy to submit.”
The perception I had of the men in this community was challenged, however, the first time I saw Tim Kreider reflexively go change his baby’s diaper. Now at the lunch table he wets a dishtowel to wipe that baby’s face, lifts him out of his highchair and steadies him on the floor before returning seamlessly to the conversation in which his older sons are asking what they were like as babies.
“You came out with a little pucker in your brow,” he tells Douglas. “Like you were looking around and thinking about the world.” Then he and Becky remember the nights they took turns walking Ethan up and down the hallway. The boys take extra helpings of smiley-faced potato chips with tomato sauce before a leftover ice-cream cake layered with frozen custard is brought out. Mennonite food is delicious and much of it is vestigially high in the calories required for farming, which many no longer do. (“Plainly said,” Loisann once stated, “there’s a lot of fat Mennonites.”)
In addition to his duties as pastor of the Bronx mission, Tim does some janitorial work and some work for a software company. His main employment, however, is programming for eMyPeople, a company that offers customized internet filtering and whose mission is to provide internet and email service customized to the level that your conscience demands. I ask Tim, who dropped out of school in grade nine, how he learned programming.
“I don’t think my scenario’s uncommon on that score,” he replies. “I got swallowed up in Dad’s footsteps before I was old enough to really know what was happening.”
“You blew up your first computer at what, four?” Becky laughs.
“Yeah,” Tim says, sheepishly. Becky explains how it works with the internet, the polluting potential of which ranges from the annoyingly distracting to the apocalyptically sinful. Use is allowed, but filtered and supervised: each person’s internet history, or “log,” is shared with another church member, and the church sets the parameters regarding acceptable sites.
“We don’t have television,” Becky says, “because it was decided years ago that it was more bad than good and not easy to filter. And we’re fine with that. But the internet came along, and it actually has been argued that it has more bad on it than television, which is probably true, but it can also be used for more good, and it’s more easy to filter. So when the good outweighs the bad, then you try to discern which is which.”
Cleaning up, Becky says she is looking for an affordable midwife to deliver her seventh child—the first baby she will have in the city. The Kreiders do not have health insurance. For larger medical costs, however, the church would step in to assist. “The Bible talks about taking care of your own,” she explains. “So if a member has a medical issue, we would act as their insurance company and all work together to try to take care of their things. We tend to help pay for emergencies or a big thing like chemo or whatever.”
In terms of acceptable medical interventions, whatever is advised by the doctors and chosen by the patient is fine by them. One of their founding members, Rachel—I had seen her comforting one of the older women at church—has chosen a “totally medical” approach to her cancer diagnosis. Others have preferred not to pursue chemotherapy. “Some cancers, I don’t know if it really matters what you pick,” Becky sighs. “Some things are just inevitable.”
37
Theories of Flight
Don
Don has written many books about Roswell. An astronaut wrote the foreword to one of these books, a state governor wrote the foreword to another. “My books have been read by presidents,” he tells me as we sit in a café the day before he speaks to a packed room of rapt Melbournians. He explains how when a book that Monica Lewinsky gave Bill Clinton for Christmas was subpoenaed, it was found between a volume on Churchill and Don’s book The UFO Crash at Roswell, inscribed by him to Clinton.
“I can’t emphasize enough that I was a complete skeptic coming into this,” Don says, speaking with what I imagine to be the force and precision of his father, a World War II army drill sergeant whom he adored. “I came into it with no preconceived expectations or notions of final resolution.
“I find that so often within the American scientific community, they have a preconceived theory and then they set out to prove it, and to me, that’s a faulty premise because you’re not allowing the evidence to take you where it will.”
Don grew up in a town without bookstores. There were books, however, at the department store where he would accompany his parents while they did the Christmas shopping. He remembers gravitating towards a particular book there called Flying Saucers: Serious Business. “Which was a term taken directly from the air force manual,” he explains, taking an accurate sip of green tea. “That was the chapter title—‘Flying Saucers: Serious Business’.”
Thereafter, young Don was on a quest. “Every UFO book I could get. Not that I was believing most of it, even then. But as one of the books would say, ‘Just imagine if even one of these accounts were true.’ And that was good enough for me . . .
“In high school, I would have my speech classes, and I was already giving talks on UFOs without so much as a note card, which impressed my teachers to no end,” he says. “It was like, ‘You need to go into that’—but mostly as a professional entertainer, lecturer, motivational speaker.”
Don—who explains that he had been an “art prodigy”—went on to study technical illustration, a career cut short when a car accident during a snow storm resulted in damage to his optic nerve and the loss of his depth perception. But this worked out well. Don met the late J. Allen Hynek, astronomer turned ufologist, right out of college. Went on to work for Hynek as a “special investigator” before becoming the Director of Special Investigations at, and then a co-director of, the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.
Hynek, the man Don considers his “scientific father,” earned his PhD in astrophysics at the University of Chicago and joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Ohio State University in 1936, initially specializing in stellar evolution. In 1948, Hynek was hired by the United States Air Force as a scientific consultant to examine reports of UFO sightings and determine whether the descriptions could be accounted for by known astronomical phenomena. At the time, Hynek was quoted as saying that he found “the whole subject utterly ridiculous.”
By 1953, however, Hynek would write in the Journal of the Optical Society of America: “Ridicule is not part of the scientific method . . . The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility.” In a 1967 article published in Playboy, Hynek stated, “As a scientist I must be mindful of the lessons of the past; all too often it has happened that matters of great value to science were overlooked because the new phenomenon did not fit the accepted scientific outlook of the time.” By the late 1970s, he was speaking openly about his belief that UFOs were real, and that there was sufficient evidence to defend the hypothesis of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Don is exceptionally proud of his relationship with Hynek. Together, their goal was to conclusively prove what they had come to believe from hearing first-hand the Roswell witness testimonies: the alien origin of the flying objects.
“Most people need everything to be linear, leading to a resolution. I never pattern my research that way. It goes like this,” he says, drawing a circle in the air. “I especially love going back to witnesses. New answers then generate new questions. I don’t rest in that regard.” The witnesses, he explains, appreciate this. They see it as Don looking out for their best interests.
“I have been pallbearers at their funerals,” he continues. “There was a counterintelligence agent who was at Roswell, and I went to see him in his final years in Florida. He and his wife had lost their only son. The last time I saw him, he’d withered down to barely a hundred pounds, and I just sat with him at his retirement facility. They were going to carry him back to his room and I said, ‘No.’ I picked him up and I carried him to his room. And he held on to me and said, ‘I’ll never see you again,’” Don recalls, his eyes getting glassy. “And when I walked out his wife said to me, ‘You became a son to us.’ So, I take this personally . . .
“I have to catch myself when I allow a naysayer—and I don’t even use the word skeptic, but a debunker, a scoffer, who has their own agenda—when I allow them to influence my thought processes,” Don says. “I’ve given them free rent in my head, so to speak. I just refuse to give them it.”
Don is still looking for conclusive proof. “Because I’m a very nuts-and-bolts researcher: I want to be able to kick the tires across the street and then I can say, mission accomplished,” he says. His holy grail is a piece of the physical evidence that he can hold. To that end, he’s led five archaeological digs at the crash site, hoping to find the storied “memory material” witnesses described—a malleable metal-like substance that always sprang back to its original form. “It would be like seeing God himself handling a piece that was manufactured on another planet, or in another dimension, or a parallel universe, or even time travel.”
On the last point, he mentions a doctor he once spoke with who had worked at NASA on the joint Apollo-Soyuz space mission. “He told us they would sit there and contemplate the results of long-term zero-gravity space travel on the human body. How we would start to look the way people describe aliens: our bodies would atrophy, our heads would grow, our eyes would get larger. So then I started to wonder—are we dealing with time travel? Are we dealing with us?”
38
Halfway Home
Lynn
Albany County. Bedford. Albion. Taconic. She lines them up for me in sequence, their syllables cold and hard like hail, the New York State women’s correctional facilities where she lived for about as long as I’ve been alive. Facilities where you had no privacy, where you would sit in your cell eating dinner while someone’s cellmate was shitting nearby. Facilities with dental care so poor that her back teeth were preemptively pulled out. Facilities where someone would piss on your mattress if they didn’t want you in their dorm; cut your face if the way you spoke did not please them. Facilities where you brushed your teeth next to women who placed their children in ovens or in baths of boiling water, where—seeing their eyes, the rise and fall of their chests—you found yourself unable to pass judgment even on them. Facilities where you could be penalized for hugging, or holding hands, or taking one slice of bread back to your cell should you find yourself hungry in the long night. Facilities where every small kindness stood out. The chaplain who shut his door so she could use his phone to call her dying mother. The nun who never asked why she was a lifer. The petty bitch in the kitchen who suddenly threw a dishtowel across Lynn’s lap to conceal the fact that she had pissed her pants after passing out from the pain when a load of frozen meat fell and broke her leg.
