The Molten Sea
“In Solomon’s Temple a large molten sea of brass was placed on the backs of 12 brazen oxen, these oxen being symbolical of the 12 tribes of Israel. This brazen sea was used for performing baptisms for the living. There were no baptisms for the dead until after the resurrection of Christ.”
Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, p. 103-104
I wonder if an animal feels like this the moment before it molts, tight in the skin, a desire to erupt in an unspeakable way.
It seems a beautiful and natural cycle, but growing up in my small town made me feel the terror of a freshly hatched nymph. I felt hunted by the people there. Life felt about avoidance, spinning day after day into some sort of fabric to cloak the self in.
The place I grew up has changed so much it’s hard to believe the world was ever like that at all. The town seemed to shudder and explode from itself like a cicada exhuming itself from its crypt. There is Costco now where before there was a sea of grain. Now there are identical white homes where once there was a field with white horses. As a kid, I waded into irrigation canals in those pastures. It was there I watched a girl snap into the water to catch garter snakes.
I wonder if there are still ditches separating my parents’ backyard from the half-acre lot where our neighbor Don lived, or if they have all been filled and paved. It’s weird to think all that water could soak into the ground so deep you could put a Walmart on top.
We lived in a new development where oxidized farming equipment and big chunks of obsidian and granite would still burst from the earth in the hands of an excavator. Church groups would roll out big carpets of sod around newly constructed homes. Boy Scouts would plant trees and contractors would come to pour concrete gutters and sidewalks in the summer.
At the end of the road was a wide canal that my siblings and I were never allowed to cross. There was a new bridge built across it with high metal railings. In the summer, children would ride down it in inner-tubes, but not us. In the winter, kids would run their dry lengths and catch the stranded trout, but not us. It was the final boundary of our childhood territory.
On the left, just before the canal was a white two story home. The canal ran right along side it. A boy lived there who was around ten years older than me.
There was only one or two non-mormon families in my neighborhood then. Their conservatism still paled in comparison to the strictness and unnecessary literalness with which my parents interpreted the doctrine of the church. No two piece swimsuits, no tank tops, no hats in the ward building, and no shirtlessness.
The boy was a non Mormon, or else his parents were inactive in the congregation and this was the reason he stood glorious and golden and shirtless under the sun. About his feet like two vipers flailing in the sand, a black RC car whipped about, flying across the bridge constructed over the canal and back across the border. Its tiny gears pitted its own weight against its electric motor. A long antennae raised off its back flipped back and forth with the car’s momentum.
I remember there was a smile on his face, an expression of joy and surrender. I walked to him. I must have been six or seven and he must have been in high school. I stepped on apathetic feet across the teeth of the unworn road base to his driveway and stood in his shadow. I stared at him. He stared at the car. A smile lingered in the corner of his mouth at my slack-jawed adoration of his beauty. It was maybe the last time I would look at a boy in that way. It didn’t feel like longing. It felt like the opposite, the end goal of desire, fruition. I was like a reptile in the sun.
In my memory, he turns to gold under my gaze. His eyes, his curly hair, his dark skin were all glimmering and extraterrestrial, like a biblical idol with a remote control in his hands.
“Maxwell Brad!”
My mother’s voice dropped into me like a fang. The boy and I both turned our heads. The RC car spun and stopped like a top falling over.
I saw her standing on our porch. I knew without another word I had upset her somehow. I was too close to the boundary. I was across the road which my mom’s sister always said was “wide enough to turn a horse and buggie around in”.
Most of all though, I sensed then she saw an expression on my face she had seen on her grandpa, on her brother, on her fiancé. She knew to be afraid and was afraid for me.
I returned to her without a word of protest. I stepped over the strawberry plants in the yard that refused to die although the rest of the garden had been abandoned. I heard the toy car be resurrected behind me.
Ten years later, I stood in the packed gymnasium of our stake building, a larger church for gatherings of smaller congregations such as conferences or dances. Youth from the town were drawn together there like planets collapsing into the sun. The lights were dim, the room amazingly humid with the frenetic breath of three hundred teenagers denied their bodies, denied sex, denied their anger and their opinions.
Somewhere in the crowd my brother let go of himself completely and danced. I surrendered myself over to the music sometimes, but not with the abandon that he did. I’m amazed now we were so sober and so completely consumed.
We would dance until we burst from the doors of the foyer into the sharp and dry winter nights to catch our breaths, only to return to the dance floor at the sound of a merciless beat.
In between fast songs, they would play slow songs to dance with a girl to. I would make an endless list of excuses to leave the dance floor during this time. I needed air, a pop, to use the bathroom.
As the crowd of sweaty dancers made way for girls and boys to place their tentative hands on each others’ formal bodies, I lost sight of my brother in the darkness. He liked dancing with girls, so he often left me alone for these songs.
I pushed through the crowd towards a door and came face to face with a boy I’d seen in seminary. He was tan and sandy and a little shorter than me. As the music started, he smiled at me and got so close, pressing his crotch against my leg and turning his thigh to pull mine in slightly. He smiled. We were face to face, breath panting into each others mouths.
I felt his penis soft and astounding in his worn Walmart slacks.
He smiled. “Boing!” he said and left me in the middle with a loud laugh.
The interaction was a few seconds and still I wondered if in the dark someone had seen us. God had seen us. Even as guilt zapped up my spine and into my brain, I felt my desire fly out like a tiny, whizzing car, moving quickly between a thousand destinations, too fast and far away to be controlled by me or God.
I wanted him to take me into my parents truck that my brother and I had driven through the snow to get to the dance. I wanted to throw him into the backseat and let him touch me and laugh if that’s what he wanted.
I laid in bed that night across the room from my brother and thought about that boy and that strange and disturbing word. I fluttered back and forth between thoughts of his body and fear, wondering again and again how he knew to cut through crowd straight for me. Did I still have that expression on my face? Was his the same expression, or a trap laid, a joke at my expense? What had he meant by that word? Was he narrating my body or both of ours?
It took me a long time to figure out the differences between a trap and an invitation. They both had a glowing cherry at the center. A boy here would ask me to make out and I would say no. It had to be a trap. A boy on a scout camping trip would masturbate in the sleeping bag next to me and I would pretend to be asleep for fear he would tell the other boys I was listening. Maybe they were asking me in the way they knew how.
I think about that day with the RC car and the boy by the canal. I want to stand beside the boy and the tinier boy and turn to my mom in the early two thousands. I want to be a stranger and say a hurtful thing to her. I want to tell young me that somewhere in time and space, I love a man who loves me back, who beat me to the punch. I want to tell him somewhere out there desire takes hold and I release myself like I did in the church gym, that I surrender to my own want like surrendering into the water of the baptismal font.
That week of the dance was cold. The temple was next to the ward building. At six in the morning we shuffled through the snow and into the belly of God’s white home. I felt riddled by guilt. I couldn’t put out of my mind that I was ruining the ceremony and the sanctity of the temple by being there after the things I’d thought about that boy.
I leaned back, taking my young men’s leader’s support as I was submerged. His arms were thick like the belly of a lizard, his touch on me made me remember the boy’s penis on my leg. It filled me with shame. I rose from the water and looked at the murals on the walls of the baptistry, of John baptizing Jesus in a river, and of Joseph Smith baptizing a man I couldn’t remember the name of. I blinked water from my eyes and glimpsed grinning witnesses and my fellow shivering deacons. Did they know? Could they see my expression?
I closed my eyes and the elder took my arm. I felt his big hand on my back. I plugged my nose. The witness uttered a dead man’s name. I laid back into duty and was baptized again and again and again, even as desire flew outside of reach like a black car. I felt it skipping like a rock, drunk on the heat like a snake as it surged across the freshly cured asphalt
Thanks for reading!
Beautiful imagery, poetic delivery.
Loved!