The degree of difficulty involved in packing for an overnight camping expedition can often be directly related to the amount of telescopic and astronomical equipment one intends to bring along with them when they go. Unfortunately for Craig, he planned to bring a lot. It wasn't often he got the opportunity to travel to Brass Ridge. Since his arrival he had lacked not only the motivation to borrow a vehicle to get there, but sufficient company to come with him as well. However badly Craig might have wanted to go to what was reputed to be the best stargazing location in the region, he knew that it was never, ever reasonable to venture into the desert overnight alone.
When Tweek came out to his caravan at just past eleven am the next day, with his own tired looking backpack stuffed with instant coffee and a sleeping bag (borrowed from Kenny) hitched onto his back, Craig had only succeeded in packing a change of clothes and a large torch. The telescope pieces he had had littering his caravan three nights ago had apparently multiplied three or four times over, and seemingly out of nowhere stacks of charts and co-ordinates had appeared on his sink and on the end of his bed. Still in his pyjamas, Craig was wholly invested in trying to pick which ones were of the most importance. It was a busy sort of activity, and to an outsider it probably looked animated and quite esoteric - he had no right to be offended when Tweek poked his head through the open caravan door and made quite a clear and blasphemous statement of his surprise.
"Jesus Christ Craig! Is something wrong?"
Craig looked up from an eighteen month calendar he was consulting and almost told him to fuck off. All this organising and planning had put in a poor mood - he had more or less completely forgotten the reason he had planned to travel out to the Ridge in the first place, and really he wasn't inclined to explain what he was doing, or why he was quarter of an hour late to meet up with Tweek outside the hotel as they had planned the night before.
"Nothing is wrong," he replied tersely. "I just haven't finished packing yet."
He held up his injured left hand, as though this was some kind of an excuse. In all honestly though, the bruising and bandage had not impeded his time wasting and deliberating at all.
"What? Why? You don't need two hands to pack a change of clothes!” Tweek didn't fall for it. “What is all this junk anyway? You know I was worried you had bailed on me or something."
He gestured to the telescope bits, and the strange vaguely threatening looking scientific instruments cluttering Craig's bench space, and Craig bristled in irritation.
"This 'junk' is a fucking expensive telescope. I'm trying to work out what I will need to bring."
"Uh... binoculars?" Tweek's eyes fell on the dusty and disused pair of binoculars hanging on the hook next to Craig's door. "Food and a blanket maybe?"
Craig thought to himself that the boy was a little too mouthy for his own goddamned good. However when he checked his watch and realised how much delay his predicament has caused him, he decided that binoculars were just going to have to do. It wasn't like he needed all these charts and stuff - he knew the format of the northern hemisphere better than he knew the geography of his own hands. The charts were simply a pleasant thing to have around, because they reminded him of the sense of purpose working in a real lab, surrounded by computers and simulations and the rustling of data on reams of A4 paper had had. It was really so much better than the aimless, sometimes powerless sensation of just sitting and looking and not being able to calculate or theorise about the things he was seeing before him.
Craig sighed and tossed the calendar down to the far end of his bed. He remembered he had forgotten to take his pill this morning, and slightly embarrassed but still quite pissed he reached for the canister and cracked the lid open while Tweek stood in his doorway looking on.
"Can you give me another ten minutes?" He asked. His stomach rumbled, and Tweek narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
"I suppose. Do you want me to grab you something to eat maybe?"
"Yeah. something from the fridge in the kitchen?"
A strange expression of discomfort passed over Tweek's face.
"I would rather not go in there," he reported. "Kenny and the other guy are still having a massive argument about something."
Craig was surprised to hear this - usually, if there was an argument that threatened to draw out longer than an afternoon, Kenny would terminate it by simply saying "fuck off Butters," or some derivative thereof, and Butters would be left to sit in his kitchen for the rest of the afternoon fuming and muttering things about 'finally fucking leaving this dusty godforsaken hellhole' under his breath. But of course, he never did. Had their conflict really been that terrible?
"What kind of something?"
Tweek shrugged.
"I dunno. I could hear it from the dining room. Sounds like the water heater and fridge and stuff have stopped working and whatsisname is taking it personally."
"Butters?"
"Yeah," he chewed the inside of his cheek, and Craig sighed.
"That's not that unusual," he assured him, just in case he was wondering. He didn't want Tweek to think that the appliances and cars and radios in the Basin had a habit of breaking down, but he would feel like a bit of a liar if he said that every single piece of modern technology worked perfectly at all times. Sand issues notwithstanding, there had always been reports of technical difficulties with radio broadcasts and interference with some white ware on occasion. But although Craig didn't say it, he was a little unnerved by the seemingly increasing frequency of this phenomenon. Particularly considering all this had taken place in the space of three days. Hopefully, it would pass just like the menacing but as yet unmaterialized threat of torrential rain and lightning. And no one would ever think of it again. "Things break down here sometimes. If you go to the museum, I think they classify it as low level Alien-related-phenomena."
"Really? I mean, I knew that. But I didn't know that was something that happened here."
Craig shook his head and placed his pill bottle carefully back where it belonged.
"It's one of those things we keep secret for the tourists who bother to come out and see it for themselves."
The corners of Tweek's mouth twitched upwards, as if he could tell that Craig was unconvinced of the extra-terrestrial origin of such incidents.
"Doubting Thomas," he observed, and Craig rolled his eyes.
"Go find me breakfast."
He started shifting papers and stacking them in some kind of order on his bed, and with a final huff of amusement Tweek left him, alone with his charts and the slightly less herculean task of concluding his packing.
They borrowed Kenny's vehicle for the ride out. Craig was glad he had already arranged this with Kenny the night before because when they stopped by the hotel dining room to snatch a few bottles of chilled water from the bar fridge, Craig could hear that his hosts really were engaged in a altercation that transcended the limits of any that had come before.
“You have the keys?” Tweek asked him, as they stood in the car park in front of the hotel. Craig conjured them from his shorts pocket, metallic KISS keychain glinting in the sun, and jingled them to indicate how pleased he was with his forethought.
“Of course. Do you have any food?”
Tweek said he didn't, but that didn't matter. Craig figured it would be fine if they just stopped by the petrol station on their way into the desert, and grabbed a little gas stove and a few things to snack on. He was more in the mood for junk food and soda than he was for leftovers anyway.
“We can go see Scott on the way out,” he said, unlocking the cabin and tossing the keys to Tweek, their driver. “I'll just tell Kenny to take the food money of my pay check.”
“Is that okay?”
“Sure. I mean it's not like –“
He was going to say that he didn't have anything much else to spend it on, but was rudely interrupted by someone calling his name. This was somewhat alarming - in almost eighteen months of his tenure in Barbelo, there had never been any reason for anyone to call out his name.
“What?”
He turned around, trying to spot the caller on the foootpath, and from the road the same person called to him again.
“Craig! Hey! It's Craig right?”
“It's Stan.”
Tweek recognised him first, pointing to the man approaching at a slow jog across the parking area, and Craig scowled.
“What could he possibly want?” He muttered to his company, and Tweek shrugged.
“His bike fixed?”
Craig had a few seconds to glare at Tweek, and then Stan was upon them. He was noticeably over-dressed for the weather, in jeans and a grey raglan which already had half-moons of sweat in the armpits, but he didn't seem too worried to catch his breath upon arrival. Instead, he started talking at an incomprehensible pace. The only thing he said that Craig could make sense of was that he was looking for Butters. Or maybe he wanted some toast and butter. He couldn't be sure.
“… Butters is in the hotel,” Craig said, once Stan had stopped shooting words out of his mouth. “Why did you want him? I didn't catch a word of what you just said.”
Stan heaved a huge sigh and raked his hand through his hair in annoyance.
“I said, he needs to come quickly, there's been a big whole thing at the Post Shop down by Main Street, and he needs to give a report to Token and the deputy right away.”
“… What?”
The phrase ‘Big Whole Thing' could refer to any kind of event imaginable.
“The Post Shop.” Stan was clearly frustrated by his ignorance. “The one he owns? There was like… I don't even know how to describe it. A couple of cult guys came in and started talking to people mailing letters, like they were evangelists or whatever, and then Bebe told Kyle who told me that one of them went full nuts and started beating on Father Maxi. And Ike who was working this morning had to throw a bale of newspapers at him and a window got broken and the sprinklers went off. Kyle is so stressed. He sent me to grab Butters while Ike gives his statement to the police. Or something.”
“… A Disciple came to the post shop and started beating up the priest?”
Stan shrugged.
“That's what I was told.”
“I thought the Foundation was non-violent?”
“Well, yeah. I dunno. It sounds like a fuckin' circus to me, man. I'm just here to get Butters and take him to the police because Kyle is insistent someone press charges. I guess ‘cause he owns the broken window and stuff he has first priority.”
He rubbed the back of his neck in a boyish gesture of irritation, and Craig felt a little bit sorry for him. It seemed unfortunate that he had chosen to come back and see his friend this week, of all weeks. There had been more occurrences in Barbelo over the last four days than there had been in the two preceding years, total.
“Jesus Christ. Okay. Well like I said. Butters is in the hotel. But be warned, him and Kenny are having a hell of an argument. Don't get caught in the firing line.”
He turned away from Stan, and hitched himself up into the passenger seat of the Isuzu. Although the violent and inexplicable change in Foundation behaviour was sudden, Craig didn't think it was particularly unexpected - Sects like FTUC were highly sensitive to events and circumstances that may not necessarily register as significant to an outsider. Strange weather patterns, for instance, or overhead lights. His stance was that it would be easier for everyone involved to just press the charges and move on, rather than question why such an incident had occurred in the first place.
Tweek, however, had other ideas.
“Stan, wait!”
Craig watched from inside the cabin as Tweek leaned across the hood of the vehicle, arm stretched out in urgency to the departing figure in jeans and a grey raglan shirt. “Wait a minute! I have a question.”
Stan paused, and gave him a look backwards over his shoulder.
“What?”
“Do you know… I mean, did Kyle tell you, what the Disciple was looking for?”
An unusual expression passed over Stan's face.
“Looking for what? Why would he have been looking for anything? I figured it was just a religious argument or something. The victim was a fucking priest.”
Stan turned away and ascended the few shallow stairs to the hotel entrance. Tweek dropped his arm and lingered for a moment, watching after him. He looked a little uneasy, almost like he wanted to say something else, but when Craig leaned over to the driver's side and bashed the horn, he jumped and the expression dissipated.
We don't have all day. He mouthed, and Tweek rolled his eyes.
He hopped into the driver's side, took the keys, and soon he pair of them were heading out into the desert.
Craig read the map, not trusting Tweek to navigate their course through a desert that could become very unpleasant very quickly, should they find themselves lost in it. Though Craig had been to Brass Ridge only once, it had admittedly been a long time ago, and his memory of how to get there was limited. Add to that the lack of notable landmarks in the area, he eventually had to admit that even his superior navigation skills were of limited use to them, if they were of any use at all.
"There won't be any snakes where we are going?" Tweek asked him tentatively, about half way to their destination, and in that instant Craig knew that now they had been driving on empty dirt road for forty five minutes, and the town was no more than a dot on the horizon behind them, Tweek was thinking about their fates if the car was to break down like his did and they had to walk back. Craig didn't see the point in lying to him, but he did point out that because the car they were in was a Ute, and because they had had the initiative to bring bedding along for the ride, they could simply camp where they were on the back of the vehicle and wait for assistance to arrive. If they weren't back by tomorrow evening, Scott Malkinson had been given instructions to send out a search party for them. Snakes would be unlikely to make the effort to reach them if they were high up on a pickup trailer. Right?
This only seemed to reassure him a little bit, because he fell silent and didn't say much else for the rest of the trip. Craig wondered if he was regretting saying yes to coming - maybe he wouldn't have agreed if he had thought more about the dangers? That said, the journey wasn't actually that dangerous at all - tourists did it very nearly bi-weekly! And no one had died on a Basin tour trip yet.
Whether Tweek was starting to have misgivings or not, the day stretched on. There was nothing to occupy the senses save the reassuring sound of the engine humming and the shimmering heat of the sun warping the dusty road ahead of them. The bad weather predicted by the Bugle and the radio forecast beaming across the basin two days prior had not materialised. Craig entertained himself by wondering, briefly, why it was that this particular car was still working so efficiently when every other vehicle in Barbelo had been breaking down. His thoughts did not linger on this for long, and soon he found himself hypnotised to thoughtless calm by the strange pendant that swung on Kenny's rear-view, and the blurry view through the windscreen ahead. At the foot of the sky, the huge rim of the Basin grew closer and more looming, and unlike the red of the desert the cliffs that surrounded the crater were dark brown and burned looking, thanks to the distance between them and the car. After driving for one hour, Craig informed Tweek that they were now over half way between the town and the edge of the basin. Their destination was only another twenty minutes drive away.
Tweek glanced at him sideways, from behind his sunglasses, and although he didn't say anything that indicated interest or comprehension of this information, he nodded. Craig was left alone again with only the noise his own thoughts were making inside his head. Distant memories drifted to the surface, then ebbed away again on the rush of cool air expelled from the air conditioner going full blast. He thought about how empty the daytime sky was, the stars blinded by the intensity of the sun, and he thought about long drives on busy highways, with the windows down and the radio playing rock fm full volume. He remembered winter, almost out of nowhere - how it had felt to walk through dusty snow - and as soon as he remembered that he had to tell himself to stop. They were almost at the Ridge. Emerging out of the darker backdrop of the rim he could see the stony outcrop, and the faint haze of salt and dust that obscured it from full view.
When they arrived, and Tweek pulled up into the compacted parking zone only a few metres away from the base, Craig couldn't really remember what it had been he had been thinking about.
Brass Ridge was widely touted as being by far the most interesting feature of the Basin geography, most particularly because by all means, it shouldn't really be there at all. Although the history of the Radiant Basin formation was long and probably very boring, Craig had always gotten the impression that it was not particularly unusual. Most likely it had to do with tectonics and water migration, the result of which was a large and completely flat saline pit which extended several hundred miles in each direction. How a ridge the size of the a high rise building got to be there, however, was a mystery - geologists from all over had visited the ridge during the eighties and nineties in an effort to provide an answer , but their findings had been vague and inconclusive and so interest had waned with the passing decades. Amateur UFO fanatics always took great pleasure in marching into the hotel after their camping trip to the area, exclaiming that they had finally figured it out, but tended to turn slightly bitter when some Basin local or another took a moment to inform them that the idea of the Ridge being some kind of meteor was not only unoriginal, but also improbable and inconsistent with the composition of the rock in any case. Craig was undecided, whether or not he thought Tweek would be the kind of person inclined to ask this elementary question, and when he made it out of the vehicle cabin he got his answer. Conveniently enough, he didn't even need to ask.
"Wow. That's disappointing. It doesn't look like a meteor to me at all."
Craig scoffed and assured him that that was mostly on account of the fact that it was not.
"It's just a rock," he said, leaning over the edge of the Isuzu trailer and lugging his bag of stuff out. Kenny had been sure to provide them with two large logs and some kindling from the hotel fireplace, and in a discrete gesture of self preservation, Craig had neglected to include them in his own pack - his companion looked significantly stronger than he himself felt, and so when he pulled Tweek's pack out of the trailer he made sure to pass the plastic bag of wood along with it. "I don't know why people try so hard to make it out like a mystery. I mean... if it's there, it's there. There's no point arguing the facts. You aren't going to need that, by the way."
He pointed to the grey hoodie Tweek had brought with him out of the vehicle cabin, and Tweek frowned in consideration before realising Craig was right, and tossing it back into the back seat. He held out his hand to receive his backpack and the logs instead.
"What?"
Craig repeated himself, and wearing a most peculiar expression on his face Tweek sighed.
"I don't get you Craig."
Craig arched his eyebrows and checked his kit, to make sure he had brought a lighter and a few other important survival tools.
"What's to get?"
"You're so black and white. It's kind of a downer honestly."
"Yeah, I know."
Craig wondered how Tweek could think he didn't know that - he was, after all, the one stuck inside the confides of his own head.
"I just don't see the point of making something mystical and magic out of something that's not," he insisted, and Tweek locked the car door out of habit rather than because he felt someone might break in and steal the car. There was probably not another human soul for miles. "A rock is a rock. The specifics of how it got here doesn't matter, because the fact is its here now and I suspect its origins are as boring and mundane as the origins of the Basin itself. I mean look at it." He stood at the base of Brass Ridge, about ten feet back from the craggy rocky path extending upwards to the top, and at the back of his mind he was thankful that he hadn't decided to lug a seven kilo telescope up with him because he would probably have dropped dead before he reached the crest.
Tweek sighed again, and tugging an elastic band from around his wrist he pulled his hair back into a slightly grubby looking topknot.
"I need to wash my hair when I get home," he thought aloud. And then he paused for a moment, ands frozen part way in the act of looping his hair up. His brows furrowed as though he was shocked that such an idea had even crossed his mind.
"... What?" Craig asked him, and Tweek dropped his hands in puzzlement. His eyes remained obscured by the sunglasses resting on his face, but Craig thought he could see a flicker of something strange and excited moving behind them.
"I just thought about what I will do when I get home," he replied.
Craig couldn't figure out what the significance of this was. Deciding he didn't care, he coughed and jerked his head in the direction of the path.
"Uh, okay? That's cool and all, but we should probably go now if we want to get to the top before nightfall."
He inched towards the bottom of the trail, but Tweek shook his head and waved his hands.
"No, Craig, you don't understand. I just thought about going home."
"Right. Okay. And I'm currently thinking about going up. Come on."
He turned on his heel and started upwards, leaving Tweek to make a loud sound of alarm and scramble after him, leaping onto the path and almost loosing his balance on a skid of tumbling rocks.
He seemed a lot more cheerful as they ascended, and Craig caught him several times lagging, turning away from the path they were on and looking out in wonder over the desert beyond.
Craig passed Tweek the binoculars and directed him to look to the east, even though the moon was so bloated that night it made the meagre selection of equipment he brought with him superfluous.
“I don't like the colour,” Tweek told him, without bothering to lift the binoculars to his face. “Why is it like that?”
“Well, usually, the light from the sun hits the surface of the moon and reflects back without any interruptions. But tonight, the Earth got in the way and the light has to filter through the planet atmosphere so it looks red. It's pretty simple.”
“Hmm…” Tweek screwed up his nose and placed the binoculars down carefully on the ground, next to the spill of gear the pair of them had pulled out of their bags. “Well, whatever. I still think it's fucking creepy.”
-Natteregn-
Craig rolled his eyes. He hadn't really expected someone like Tweek to understand.
“Fine.” He cocked his head in the direction of the west instead. “Look at the stars then if you're gunna be a baby about it.”
He picked his binoculars back up and wound the neck strap around the middle, before slipping them back into the bottom of his bag. Beside him, Tweek shuffled and huffed, trying to make himself comfortable sitting with his back against the jagged protuberance of rock they had chosen as their camp site. The thin windbreaker he was wearing made a peculiar noise as he moved, and reminded Craig of the sound of a wet umbrella being opened and closed – a noise he hadn't heard for some time.
“I still know its there,” Tweek complained, looking down into his backpack to busy himself with something Craig couldn't guess at. “Being all… menacing.”
“It isn't about to drop out of the sky and kill us all.” Craig insisted, and Tweek raised his eyes to look at him as though it was kind of cute, how naïve he was being.
“That's not what I've heard,” He replied lightly, producing the same manila folder Craig had seen on his desk the day before. He laid the folder down onto his lap and finally, taking care not to look directly at the moon, he turned his face upwards and his attentions to the skies.
Still there was no sign of poor weather encroaching. Not even a single cloud suggested that there may be rain on the way. For this, Craig was glad, because from the ridge the firmament looked more than other worldly, like something from a whole separate universe. Unusual lunar event notwithstanding, stars spilled across the sky thickly in white clusters like sugar on a black tabletop. Everything in the arching cathedral of space glowed as spectral and silent as the ghosts of the resting desert. The silence was nearly overwhelming, and so was the vertigo of standing and seeing noting but an infinite flatness spreading into eternity beyond. Craig didn't remember the Ridge being like this – but then he hadn't been here for some time. The last time he had came here, he had been with others. A large group of them, all wearing caps and carrying cameras and chattering in a way that made even the empty space seem like it was full of life and people. And Clyde…
“It's so quiet out here,” he said, mostly to himself. The lack of animal sounds, or the wind on the window pane, or the hum of his mini refrigerator under his sink made him feel quite lonely. Even afraid.
“Did you live in a big city before you moved here?” Tweek asked. Craig shrugged, adjusting his hand bandage, because even though conversation filled the silence, he wasn't altogether sure he wanted to talk about it.
“Kinda. A small town in the mountains. I went to college in Boulder though.”
“That's right. You're from Colorado.”
Craig hitched his shoulder again, in the most half-hearted confirmation possible, and Tweek turned to look at him thoughtfully.
“How did you end up here?”
Craig knew in a way he couldn't explain that Tweek didn't mean it in the usual sense. The this-happened-then-this-happened chronological recount of his earthly days. He meant it as in what had happened in his head and in his heart that meant that now at age twenty-seven, he was living in a town with no significant population doing a job he never trained for, with absolutely no motivation to leave. What were his goals in life, and when did they leave him? What was going through his mind the morning Craig woke up in Colorado and decided he wanted to leave his only home?
“… I don't know,” he replied, as honestly as possible. “I came to see a friend of mine and he left and I stayed behind. I've spent every day for the last two years trying to figure out why. How did you end up here?”
Talking about himself always made Craig feel stupid. Like a child. Although there was no reason for it, he was embarrassed by the things he had done in his life, and he was far more interested in Tweek's biography besides.
The other boy shrugged, grip tightening on the edges of his skinny brown folder he was holding
“I don't know anymore either," he said. "I thought I did, but it turns out I don't. So after what feels like my entire life I have to start over again.”
"Start over again?"
"My life. My goals. That kind of thing."
He paused in thought, and Craig found himself seized by a sudden and inexplicable urge to reach out and touch him. Just to make sure he was real. He suddenly wasn't very sure he had ever met a real person before, even though he knew in his head that he had. In that second, Tweek just looked far more real than the rest of the scenery around him, or the memory of faces and voices Craig had known in the past.
Craig thought he saw him shiver even though not so much as a whisper of a breeze was passing over them.
While he wrestled with this strange shift in perception, and the jarring sense of unreality that accompanied it, Tweek pressed his lips together and looked back up to the moon, his attention captured by the deep red glow bathing the craters and scars on the surface. He ceased fiddling with the edges of his folder so he could pick at his hands instead. His fingers, with bitten nails and bony knuckles, had frayed the corners away almost to nothing. Left them bucked and dog-eared with sympathy for his worries. Craig wondered briefly what secrets might possibly be contained therein. It was strange, but despite having spent nearly every waking moment of his adult life thinking about space and looking at space and examining all the fleeting details of the sky, Craig did not feel particularly compelled to look upward right now. There were more interesting things to examine - the way the flames from the fire pit made shadows twist and shiver on the rocks, and the way that Tweek's face looked far more sharply contoured in firelight, his cheekbones and the shallows under his eyes suddenly overflowing with darkness and heat.
The air they breathed was dry and dusty, and Craig could taste salt on his lips.
At the back of his mind, he thought he could understand why it was the tourists came out to this place after all. Even though it wasn't that different a view from the one in the town, there was something obscurely mystical about the process of driving out here, and being in a space of such isolation with sleeping bags and strangers. For the inexperienced, hunting through co-ordinates and square maps of space for unusual sightings may have seemed like a unfamiliar and ancient magic, and in the darkness of the middle of nowhere it was easier to spot details lost in urban centres - the faintest specs of light became visible, even the slant and spread of the milky way, and the winking lights of celestial bodies sometimes looked like they were in motion across the cosmos. If Craig was feeling a little more inclined to fantasies or daydreams, he could have almost believed that somewhere out there a beacon from foreign creatures was moving, flying swiftly and silently through incomprehensible gaps of void toward the earth.
"... Why did you think you wanted to come here?"
He settled on, eventually.
He had asked this question of him so many times he didn't really expect to get an answer. He was surprised when his company, rather than negating his question, heaved a loud sigh and passed him the tatty folder in his hands. The contents were just as crumpled and folded as the card itself.
Puzzled, Craig opened the folder and started sifting through clippings and emails and other correspondence which probably contained all kinds of explanations about Tweek's purpose.
"... Did you want me to read all of this?"
Tweek shook his head, and leaned past Craig to rifle through the papers for a particular page - a photocopy of something, a flyer like the kind that protestors handed out at rally's, or (how appropriate,) apocalyptic religious groups passed out to people on street corners.
ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE RAPTURE? The flyer said, in large grey letters at the top of the page. US NEITHER
"I found this in a library book in the Prévost public library in 2013." He explained, as if Craig was supposed to know where that was and why it was significant. "It freaked me out a little, because I don't know about you but I don't really like thinking about the end of the world. It kind of… freaks me out?" He peeled the sheet of paper out from between a receipt for petrol and a handwritten list of book titles that Craig wondered if he ever got to read. "It seemed weird to me, because Prévost is small, and a long way away, and I have no idea how something like that ended up there. It seemed to me like a sign?"
"A sign of what?"
Tweek looked appropriately sheepish. It was a familiar look - Craig had encountered it a few times throughout the course of his life, and usually it appeared on people who believed something with all their heart but worried that someone was going to make fun of them if they admitted it out loud.
"The end times? Maybe? I don't know, it sounds so dumb but I just thought it was weird how somehow a piece of paper printed here, distributed in the USA and more than likely destined to end up in the garbage made it thousands of miles north and ended up between the covers of the exact book I was looking at in the library on that day. And it was me who found the thing. Not anyone else. Me."
Craig coked his eyebrow, his interest piqued by the detail that may possibly have been irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.
"What book was it?" he asked. Tweek's expression shifted to one of annoyance and disbelief.
"I don't remember that!"
"Oh."
Craig pinched the photocopy out of his hand, and decided he may as well give it a read.
The Foundation for the Propagation of Transuniversial Consciousness issues this invitation for you to join us, in our quest to unify within the divine light of the true God.
If the world were to end today, how sure are you that you will live eternally?
We today live in a world of darkness, far away from the light of the highest plane of heaven. Nuclear holocaust, pestilence, and starvation are standing on our doorstep, and the earth itself is crumbling beneath our feet. When we die, our flesh must also die, and our souls will become imprisoned in this sinful universal plane.
How can we, simple men and women of the dark earth, liberate ourselves from this material prison in time for the end days?
Spiritual perfection takes time and effort, and we only have limited space in our lifetimes to find it. We must prevent the end of ages at all costs. We must placate the cruel demon who rules this universe and imprisons us, in order to make time to chase the holy sparks which benevolently guide us through the illusionary medium of time and space. On this day we extend invitations to you to join us. If you feel willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of us all, we can guarantee you salvation instantaneously. Feel free to get in touch with us - contact information can be found on rear of page.
Craig read it twice, before deciding that it was all gibberish, and stating this opinion out loud.
"The Foundation is insane, Tweek. Everyone with half a brain knows it. Even Kevin Stoley." He passed the paper back. "Besides, it's a bit jargony don't you think?"
Tweek blinked at him, and glanced down at the flyer in his hand.
"Not really?"
"Really really. People like this, they invent long words and complicated ideologies in order to convince people they know something they don't."
"Craig. Dude. It's really not complicated at all."
Clearly a little peevish, he snatched the flyer back off him and shuffled around for another in his file. This one was a chart, drawn messily on lined pad. It had labels in the same scratchy caps only hand that covered everything else in the folder. Tweek's hand, more than likely. Squarish and almost illegible.
"The Foundation is a group of people who want to stop Armageddon," he said, pressing the new piece of paper into Craig's hand. "If the world ends, that means they will be trapped in this universe for all eternity, with no chance at an extended spiritual life, or afterlife, or whatever you want to call it in a higher plane of existence. A parallel universe."
"That seems a little unchristian."
"Well, yeah. Mostly because to them, the Christian God is ignorant and nasty and generally unpleasant. They want to unite with the true God figure, who exists beyond the plane of our reality. So they basically spend their lives contemplating the immaterial and looking for messages from beyond space."
"... Says here 'Aliens'."
Craig pointed to the only word on the diagram he could read - it was attached to an arrow, which seemed to indicate that whatever 'aliens' were supposed to be, they were able to transgress all eight circles of whatever it was Tweek had haphazardly sketched in black biro. Tweek nodded and pointed to the centre of the diagram.
"Here's the Big God. The point of creation. Each circle around this point is a separate universal plane. Each one is created by a god who is lesser and lesser than the one who preceded it. And here's us, in the material world," He pointed to the outermost circle. "Foundation Disciples hate the material world, but have to stay here until they find a means to access higher planes. And so they concern themselves utmost with fending off the apocalypse, which isn't like revelations so much. It's more like a reversal of Creation?"
"Okay... and how are they supposed to stop the apocalypse? I mean, if Genesis started reversing right now, I don't think they could do much it."
"Well, how familiar are you with the old testament?"
"Not very."
"How familiar are you with the new testament?"
"Not very."
"... Do you know anything about economic exchange?"
Craig thought he could figure that one out.
"You make a payment, and you get a service back."
"Exactly."
"..." Craig was lost. He glanced down at the manila folder, with its creases and its pen smudges and the little tears at the corners where the card was bent.
"They pay something?" He thought aloud. "What do they pay? How do they know when they need to?"
"The messengers," Tweek replied, "the overhead lights."
He pointed to the sky.
"The UFOS come and assure the Foundation they are right. They come here because this particular area has what they call a 'high trans-universal frequency'. The separation between our universe and others is thinner. It's like… The basin works as a prism, splitting the different planes of reality and making them visible and accessible through various rituals and practices."
"How can the UFOs assure them they are right when they aren't right?"
Craig was bewildered. How could anyone, especially this seemingly ordinary boy from god-knows-where, believe any of this stuff? It was quackery. Bordering on insanity. Bordering on dangerous.
"Aliens don't exist. God doesn't exist. Alternate universe may exist but the Basin is definitely not a gateway to get to them. How does anyone actually believe all that?"
Craig couldn't even begin to imagine. But then again, Craig had never had much room for Gods. When he was a child, he had gone to church with his parents once a week, and he sat in the pews flicking lint from his pockets at his sister until she started hissing and stomping her feet and his mother had had to drag them both outdoors. Craig remembered the sunbeams that filtered through the church windows, and the dust that hung in the light like glinting sparks of gold, but mostly he remembered the heat and the boredom and the stale smell of old women's perfume and honestly, it was an experience so dull he recoiled from the memory like he might recoil from a hot object. Even at age fourteen, when his head was bloated with the fears and confusions of young life, the foundations for his thoughts on God were already formulating and even then, before he knew how exactly it was cosmic bodies moved or what happened to a star swallowed by a black hole, he knew that there was no beauty of value in the dry rice paper pages of a hymn book when outside, there were pine trees, and above there were galaxies, and beneath him were stones a billion years old so how could a figure imprinted on crumbling paper compare to the perfect symmetry of endless space, or the complex elegance of the ground under his feet? How could a God, dysfunctional and susceptible to human flaws, compete with the unfaltering reality of the unimaginable numbers that separated galaxies, or the incomprehensible smallness of the chance that right now in this moment, he was himself and he was sitting with a strange boy with blonde hair and a sunburned face, staring at the red moon over the desert. He couldn't make sense of it now, any more than he could in the past.
He didn't want to.
Tweek scratched the back of his neck tiredly.
"How could they not? I mean, think about it. Do you really want to be stuck here? Lying in some grave on this planet for all of eternity? No one will remember you or what you did and without something to believe in, it's like you never even mattered at all. Aren't you afraid of that even a little bit?"
Craig frowned, trying to recall the last time he worried about something like that? Was it when he received his letter of acceptance to university? Was it when his sister got married and Craig finished two expensive bottles of wine with no assistance and no one at his side? Maybe it was when he got his grade back for his thesis, and realised that he had wasted so much money on a single piece of paper, and now he was going to go back to his dorm room where his roommate would already be sleeping, and spend the rest of the night sitting at his desk figuring out what to do next. Where to go. What were his aims and goals for this life he never actually wanted.
The sound of traffic outside had been loud that night, and the room smelled like ramen noodles and dirty socks. When the digital alarm clock on his desk said three forty nine, Craig realised that even though he was there, and he was alive, there was no one around to see him in that moment and confirm that he was real. No one to assure him that all that work he had done and all that time he had spent had meant something. He felt empty. And tired. Like he wanted to undo that past six years all at once. He wished he could be at high school again. Stupid again. Unaware of everything and able to say it was okay. He was young. One day he will be older and he will be able to do things, and make things, and achieve things no one had ever achieved before.
What if no one wanted to hire him? What if he had to go back to his parents house, and spend all day every day sending out job applications from their basement for the rest of his life? What if he had to get married? Have a child and a mortgage and an affair at age forty, and when he turned sixty five cirrhosis of the liver might set in. Craig had always been predisposed towards ennui and pessimism, but in that moment he had never felt so hopeless in his life. He didn't feel like he had achieved anything. Instead, he felt like that same fourteen year old boy sitting in church, looking at the cracked paint on the face of the Virgin Mary and thinking about how pointless it was, this notion of God. How unfortunate it was that there were people out there who needed faith to compensate for the knowledge that one day, they were going to die. And how he envied them.
"I think it would be worse to live forever," he mused. "To just continue to exist, on and on. I didn't even ask to be alive in the first place."
"Well, yeah." Tweek sounded uneasy. More uneasy than usual. "But the idea is no one did. Not really. people are here because without being here, they will never be able to find God out there."
He waved his hand up in the direction of the sky, and Craig rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, okay. Fine. Do you want my opinion? Seems weird you haven't asked me for my thoughts on the Foundation yet, because I probably know more about this shit than everyone else here put together."
He had been saving up his opinions on the subject ever since the Foundation had cost him his first and only real friend.
Tweek arched his eyebrows, but eventually responded.
"... Go on."
"Wouldn't it make more sense, if the universe ended, for all the souls here to be released into wherever the fuck it is the real God is straight away? How could the 'material prison'," he punctuated this sentence with air quotes, "made by some inferior God be strong enough to keep all the goodness of the real God out? If that was the case, the lesser God would be the stronger one, so then everyone down at that compound would be far better off worshipping him."
Tweek thought about this for a moment, his expression mostly unreadable in the firelight. After a satisfactory period of contemplation, he sighed and let himself slouch a little, shoulders hunching up around his chin in disappointment.
"That's so uninteresting though," he reported. "Where are the aliens?"
Craig wondered if even Tweek himself knew how much of his fascination with the Foundation was related to its religious ideologies, or his apparent inclination toward the unusual.
"Not everything has to be about aliens," Craig assured him. "Besides, you seem to have all this information here, about the Foundation history and whatever, that proving the non-existence of extra-terrestrial messengers hardly seems like it should be important."
He rifled through newspaper articles, including photocopies of an extremely dated booklet published by the Foundation itself. Any number of reasonable explanations for the group and their activities seemed emergent - anxieties about the coming new millennium, the shift of the Hill abduction and similar incidents into public consciousness, the dawn of the nuclear age... the early sixties were an upsetting time for places like the Radiant Basin, and schisms in local churches hardly seemed unusual or out of place. Was Tweek starting to wonder why he had become fixated on this particular one? What made him different from any other single human being who in some way or another thought they had found God?
"... Well, I dunno. It seems important to me. I guess it's like a way of affirming that out in the middle of space we aren't alone. Like something might be guiding us and helping us and just... ugh. Man."
He scratched his arm, listless, raking pale lines over his burned skin. Craig realised with a writhing and uneasy ball of feeling in his belly that he sounded so lost and disappointed that he almost regretted telling him this. Regretted making him stay in Barbelo, and dragging him out here where the skies were beyond comprehension and the emptiness of the desert was crushing in its silence. Craig thought about telling him about radio silence - about all the money and human effort that had gone into firing transmissions deep into space, only to receive nothing in return. About how those transmissions will keep on going, travelling for aeons into the future long after the sun had burned to dust, and how no-one would hear them because there were no aliens. No lights in the sky. Just the endless cycle of life and death, chance and biology playing together and ensuring that whatever happened in this world, no matter how many times a person lied to themselves and said they were a part of something greater than themselves, inside their bodies and inside their minds they would always be alone.
He chewed the inside of his cheek, and shuffled tighter against Tweek's side. The closeness was strange, because he hadn't been close enough to anyone to smell their clothes or feel their body heat for a long time. Tweek smelled like he could use a wash, but not like he couldn't go to the supermarket or run a few errands without offending someone. He was warm.
"You're not alone now," Craig pointed out, half-heartedly "I'm here with you, right?"
"And what are you? An all benevolent all knowing God of the universe?"
"I'm former stardust," he lifted his hand in an unexpected invitation. It was quite spontaneous, but it felt appropriate. "Just like you."
For a second, it seemed as though Tweek was not satisfied. He glanced at Craig's hand critically, and then down at their fire, which was dropping in height and intensity and leaving a faint, smoky odour in its wake. Finally, (leaving enough time for Craig to feel awkward) he relented. He kept his eyes down as he took Craig's hand, and in silence they continued to watch the blood moon passing, first red, then orange, then back to spectral grey. The world didn't end - the sky did not start falling as the hour that Tweek was supposed to be at the compound passed them. In Tweek's palm, Craig could feel his heart beating, and maybe even the motions of his consciousness inside his flesh and bones.
He wondered if this was the closest he was ever going to get to God.
And there was evening and there was morning--the fourth day.