The Church of the Darkened Cinema

Wednesday 7:00 PM

In a new American city of coffeehouses, bridges, and boulevards, there stands an old cinema with a
tall, skinny electric sign that once blazed.

In the lobby there are a popcorn machine, a rotating glass pizza baker, and a row of
colorful candy dispensers. On the walls are glossy posters for Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11.

It is 2004, but – as though it possesses a recalcitrant spirit of its own –
the physical structure of the theater does not acknowledge this.

An adolescent girl sits in the back rows, cloaked in the shadow of the
mezzanine seating. She sees looping wires that snake up the walls, past
several missing panels. The high ceiling is lost in blackness, from
which ageless red velvet curtains cascade to the floor: the sexy,
elegant dress donned 80-some-odd years ago, and never relinquished. The
gussied-up date that got stood up and never lost the scars.

Well-dressed guests, either seated or presently arriving, pointedly choose seats no
closer than 10 feet from a stranger. They come single, or in pairs. An
anomalous clutch of five students wears thick black glasses and
stridently discusses Buster Keaton. No stares expectantly at the girl.

That's nice for a change. Probably for the best… could be someone I know.

She reconsiders the notion that anyone she knew would dare step into a place like this. She laughs softly.

The blackness descends and covers everything. The UFA logo flickers across
the screen and bodiless organ music leaps up. The girl can no longer see
her own hands in her lap, but as a pinprick of light opens on a wintry,
colorless garden, an onlooker would see the girl's pale face turned up
to the screen, her eyes glazing over with a growing sensation of wonder.

She came because of the playbill: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
The tale of a sinister old man who travels the German countryside,
showing off a fortune-telling somnambulist at town fairs, always leaving
a string of murders in his wake. The girl had been delving deeply into
Tim Burton's oeuvre for months now, and in her ad hoc exploration of
films that her matronly Mormon supervisors would certainly deem unfit
for her tender eyes, Caligari was the next step.

In the garden, two men huddle on a bench; the young man whispers his tragic
story to his gray elder. Without warning, the woman the young man had
once hoped to make his wife glides past in a pure white sheath. Her eyes
are deep, dead black pools; she sees nothing. The boy gazes at her with
bated breath, his feverish eyes yearning at her. The tempest of his
face and the pungency of his pure feeling – completely lost on the young
woman – flow out of their celluloid prison, trapped there ninety
unbridgeable years ago, straight into the Mormon girl's heart.

In little half-timbered Holstenwall, houses and lampposts twist into
tortuous shapes. Men in suits and derbies and women in coats and cloches
clamor at the carnival, where a hunched man with eyes that linger
cranks a hurdy-gurdy and feeds the vested monkey on his shoulder. The
man who calls himself Caligari, with a cape and top hat and an
unpleasant smile plastered across his face, waves innocent men and women
into his tent, urging them to inquire of his sleeping man about their
futures.

And then… those eyes: large, clear, piteous and pleading.
The Mormon girl has never seen magnetic eyes before, and these are
magnetic as no other pair has ever been. Vulnerable, feminine, empty of
agency.

Poor little Cesare wisps up from her subconscious
like smoke. She thinks he is as beautiful as every man and woman that
ever lived, put together. When his silhouette against Alan's bedroom
wall stabs the shadow of the ill-fated student with a huge knife, the
girl imagines the sleepwalker's better half chained up in a deep, damp
cellar… and guarded in the cigarette light by a jowly, bitter old
schemer.

She is enamored of every wide-eyed stare, every gasp from
black-painted lips cleft into statuesque faces, every trembling white
hand… all beautiful artifacts from the lives of once-people, who now can
only stare back from the grave and yearn for sound to come out of their
mouths when they scream.

Wednesday 9:30 PM

She sat on the dingy bus, sleepy and cold under the yellow fluorescent tube
lighting. Outside, an amorphous black suburban landscape rolled past,
the only significant lights belonging to nondescript strip malls. Her
mind for the moment empty of interesting thoughts, the girl kept a side
eye on the grizzled homeless man who sat too near to her. She kept a
firm grip on the outward signs of her anxiety. When she dismounted from
the bus and began trekking home up vaulting hills of McMansions, she
stared at uneven patches of darkness in the shrubbery and kept her ears
open for rustling.

Trotting up the steps to her house, she retrieved the key from her pocket, and relaxed the first half of her frantic awareness.

The television quacked and the house smelled like Tex Mex. The fluorescent
light from the kitchen was white and clean. She wanted to race up the
pink-carpeted stairs, swaddle herself in the warm envelopment of bed,
and think about the beautiful things she had seen. But first, she had to
present herself.

Children squealed at the sound of the shutting door, and attacked the girl. Jaden and Jordan clamored at her waist for the mythical leftover cupcakes they were convinced she always possessed
on Wednesday nights. Meanwhile, Jaylynn tugged at the doll in Jordan's
cruel grip. Out of the pure white kitchen of strip lighting and
pine-upholstered cabinets swayed the girl's mother, bouncing baby Jacob
on her huge hip. The girl reflected with a sense of dread that her
mother's hips seemed to take up half her body.

"So, how was tonight? Did you-all do something fun?" the woman asked.

The girl had prepared for this.

"We put together care baskets and took them to a bunch of people: Sister England, Sister McCall, you know… and Sister Johnston…"

"Oh, good. She is such a sweet spirit."

Sister Johnston had Downs Syndrome. The girl had wondered before why the women
on whom her mother dropped this verbal kiss were usually overweight or
developmentally disabled.

"….and we talked to them for a while," the girl continued. "They told us we were lovely Daughters of God and bore witness to the peaceful spirit we brought into their homes."

Her mother's face broke into a smile, and her eyes got small and crinkly, like she was about to cry.

"That's wonderful. Did you have a good time?"

The girl thought seriously about this. She responded truthfully.

"Yeah, I guess. I think I made a break-through."

Her mother's spidery mascara eyes widened towards her daughter
mechanically, and her bubblegum pink lips stretched thin in a
you-go-girl smile. The daughter remembered this expression of her
mother's washing over her after she received her period for the first
time.

"Wow. Keep up the good work, Jennifer. You'll find your place with the girls eventually."

Jennifer's mother swiveled on her pelvic axis and swayed back to the kitchen to
feed Jacob. Jennifer climbed the stairs to the warm dark of the second
floor bedrooms, lowering all of her defensive awareness, and felt a bit
sick.

An hour later, after removing her make-up and contact
lenses, showering, and brushing her teeth as she had obediently done
three times a day for every day of her life, she knelt by her bedside.
She tried harder and harder to penetrate the dark void, to feel something call back to her.

"Dear Heavenly Father," she whispered. "We thank thee for this day. We thank
thee for our food and family and for keeping us safe as we traveled home
today. We thank thee for sending us the Gospel… well, not really, but…
yeah, I guess so. Heavenly Father… I lied to my mother. But only because
she wouldn't understand the truth…. or appreciate it. Do I have to
repent for this?"

Jennifer scrunched her eyes even tighter, but saw only multicolored sparks in a muddy abyss. A chill ran up her spine, and she wanted to attribute it to the hand of the Holy Ghost, but as
ever, she did not possess the certitude to conclude this.

How come everyone else always knows, and I can never tell? What did I do wrong? Maybe I was a coward in the pre-existence.

I better repent, just in case.

OK, Step 1: feel remorse. Do I feel remorse for skipping Church activities
to go see a weird movie? Well, kind of, but only because I knew the
whole time I was doing something wrong, something I wasn't supposed to.
That counts, right? Yeah, it should – does anybody else get this
technical when they're repenting? Step 2: confess to God. Well, I'm
doing that right now. Step 3: ask God for forgiveness. Ditto. Step 4:
confess to those you have wounded. Well, I can't do that. She'd never
let me out of the house. And why should I tell her? The fact that I
didn't go to mutual won't hurt her if she doesn't know.

But then how do I pass off this step?

The question grew large in the silence around her, like the weighty philosophical enquiry that it was.

If lying to her mother was a sin worthy of repentance, then why was repenting for it so impossible? Repentance was a list of steps to pass off, like household chores. But it was easy to make her bed,
empty the hamper, and vacuum the rec room… why was it so much harder to
summon up remorse? To be a good girl and meekly give up her ticket to
discovering something unusual…

…and insanely beautiful and worthwhile. Honestly, I feel like dancing, but nobody's gonna get up and dance with me. I don't get it.

Look at how screwy you are, Jen: you can't even get yourself to do the right
thing this time… 'cause the right thing doesn't feel right. I guess I'm evil.

In the midst of her fevered reverie, Jennifer had ended up sprawled across
her duvet. Self-protectively, she scrambled under the covers and curled
into fetal position. She closed her eyes to welcome the sweet sleep. To
legions of teenage American girls, sleep is the only realm in which
they may reclaim the personal authenticity of which puberty and the
accompanying male gaze robbed them.

It was then she remembered that she hadn't finished her prayer.

There is no way I'm leaving this warmth to kneel on the floor.

Gosh, Jen, you're just racking up the unworthiness points tonight, aren't you?

She contemplated her predicament for a long moment, before moving her lips
softly while still in bed: "And I say this in the name of Jesus Christ,
Amen."

Sunday 12:30 PM

In a small, square room, a circle of demure figures sat on metal folding
chairs. Each clasped her hands in her small lap, or placed her palms on
each thigh. Slim legs were shaved immaculately, and bare knees kissed
each other chastely. They were a flurry of white cup-sleeved tops and
powdery pink-and-blue skirts. Jennifer attempted to slouch comfortably.

Sister Sorenson, Jennifer's Mia Maids teacher, had just posed the following
question as a thought exercise: who is a role model for you? Who do you
admire?

After the predictable buck-passing silence, Megan blushed and giggled her answer: "My mom…"

"Yeah, my mom, I guess," Carly acquiesced.

"Mom."

"Mom, too."

"Well, Orlando Bloom is pretty hot," Kelsey drawled.

The circle of mice tittered nervously. A key buttress of Sister Sorenson's grin buckled.

"But if we're talking about role models…" Kelsey amended. "I guess it would be my mom. Yeah."

All eyes flicked to Jennifer. The girls' eyes and teeth, Sister Sorenson's
lips, and the dangling drops at the woman's ears glistened at Jennifer
under the blazing panel lighting. She felt like she was going under the
knife and staring at the operating lamp above her.

Under such harsh light and scrutiny, Jennifer didn't feel brave enough to break the
commandments and lie, as she had done last night.

"I– I just found this actor named Conrad Veidt. He's dead…"

At the mention of something so dark, Sister Sorenson's and Megan's faces
moved into expressions that a little girl might make if someone ripped
apart her favorite stuffed animal. Jennifer faltered; she'd caused them
pain.

"…but he's really great," she finished lamely.

Sister Sorenson was now smiling brightly again, though her eyes blocked the
smile's upward progression. She valiantly held that face for a good long
moment, as if baring her orthodontia-perfect teeth would scare the
awkwardness away. Then, without further inquiry of Jennifer, Sister
Sorenson's face flicked back to the group, and the other girls' laser
eyes left Jennifer to examine her lacerations.

"Isn't that interesting?" Sister Sorenson sang. "The people we admire most are often rock stars or actors or athletes!"

It occurred briefly to Jennifer that nobody had mentioned any rock stars or athletes.

"But you are all Daughters of God," Sister Sorenson continued. "He has
placed special men on this earth to guide you on the path to heaven.
God's prophets have been through everything you girls are experiencing
right now in these tender years of your life."

Jennifer wanted to blush furiously and cry at the same time, because she hated when adults
fondled her body with their words: their voices either 100 years old,
greasy, and male or wailing, 10 years old, and female. Inwardly,
Jennifer cried madly that Sister Sorenson was a grown woman but so, so
wrong.

"Listen to their counsel and you will be blessed," Sister Sorenson admonished. "Now, don't you think such great men are worthy of our admiration and attention?"

But they're boring! Jennifer blurted within the safety of her unobserved mind. How could I possibly admire Gordon B. Hinckley or Boyd K. Packer over true artists?

I don't remember anything after hearing them speak at General Conference…
I've learned nothing from those old men… I'm so stupid.

But it's not my fault! You know, I bet they personally trained their voices to be the most boring thing they could produce.

It feels so much better to go see Conrad do his magic in the dark, from
beyond the grave. I guess it makes sense that temptation appeals more to
me than doing the right thing. That's pretty much what Satan's famous
for, right?

Why does doing the wrong thing feel so right? I think I could do it forever and eventually get rid of my feelings of guilt. If it's truly wrong, then I shouldn't be able to do that, right?

For the remainder of Sister Sorenson's lesson, Jennifer was lost in dreams
of red velvet curtains, mysterious worlds hidden in reels of black and
white film, and the eyes of the magic man.

She planned her next visit to the cinema. This time, she thought she might walk into the
coffeehouse across the street and order a drink. Maybe Satan would pop
out of her mug and eat her. Or maybe, as she was beginning to suspect,
it would just be… an ordinary drink.