Article and Art by Maya Rosen
We pull into an empty church parking lot. It's Thursday at 9 am. We’re not sure it's the right place, but then we see the car in the parking lot, across the top, in a taxi-style advertisement, it reads: "Scientific Evidence for God?” Then a link: censoredevidence.org.
We’re definitely in the right place. I snap a picture. We want to pull out the big camera, but some instinct tells us not to. We’re running late — we only got the invite early this morning — and we’re all college students expecting to sleep in. We walk around the church pulling on any door; they're all locked.
A hand snatches the blinds on a window near the front door. An angry old woman’s face appears in the window. We jump, and I half expect her to pull out a gun — you have to be careful around here. She opens the door.
“What are you doing here?” She’s snapping. It’s not a real inquiry, it's a get the hell out right now or bad things might happen.
“We’re friends of Jerry,” I stammer.
“Oh!” She brightens. “Well, why didn’t you say so! Come on in!”
She leads us through a long hallway, and then we enter the small conference room. It’s starkly lit with overhead LEDs, and there's a ring of flimsy chairs in the center. There's nothing overtly church-like about this place. It feels more like an office building than a place of worship. I haven’t been in many churches, but I have learned to expect a certain kind of stained-glass to crucifix ratio. I don’t often find such long and winding passageways. The stained glass to crucifix ratio is 0-10, and in fact, along the whole way, there’s not a single window. At the end of the tunnel, fifteen or so pale, aging faces stare at us as we walk in. We’re not their usual crowd.
A woman in a MAGA hat offers me a donut and asks me if I was sent by the Young Republicans. We try our best to give a vague answer. We settle upon repeating the phrases, “We’re here with Jerry,” and “We’re just here to learn.” That's enough for me to earn a second donut on my napkin and be introduced to the entire party.
I quietly tell my partner to tuck his pants over his inconveniently-worn Hanukkah socks. Evangelicals love Jews: that's not quite what I’m worried about. Conspiracy theorists however, most of them at least, are not often the most trusting of Jews. Trust is important here. I’m sure to wish everyone who approaches me at the donut counter a Merry Christmas.
Carefully, I ask the group leader if we can bring the camera in. He’s dressed in a Trump 2028 hat, a “Lets Go Brandon Shirt”, and he laughs in my face. His voice is gruff, condescending,
“No, that wouldn’t be good. Most of this stuff, it… shouldn't get out.” Then he tells us to take a seat.
We hesitantly sit on the outskirts of the circle of chairs. They add three more chairs, dispersed around the core group. We take our seats, separating from the safety of one another. I don’t think any of us would survive a horror movie. We are too curious to see where things will go.
I’m very nervous to hear what exactly ‘shouldn’t get out’. We’ve been filming our source, and who they believe is our close personal friend, Jerry for the past few days. And he has said plenty of things straight to the camera that certainly ‘shouldn’t get out.’ I try not to think about everything our professor told us about blindly walking into a camera-off meeting.
We’re working on a documentary project for class. We have one week to film it, and so far we only have five hours of Jerry recounting studies on “gender-confused” rats, the truth about Anthony Fauci, and reciting website links by memory.
I debate audio recording them on my phone anyway. But I figure that for a population that is concerned with foreign spies, it probably isn’t the best idea.
They open the meeting with a prayer for Charlie Kirk and the pledge of allegiance. Only they forgot their flag, and their second flag. They all chuckle and point to the large american flag on the group leader’s Lets Go Brandon shirt. Then the room goes quiet. It's a circle, they can all hear me and see me. I put my hand on my heart. I don’t feel like elaborating. The things we do to find a story.
Then the group leader gets up behind the church podium. The first thing he says is he would walk across 20 miles of glass to vote for Donald Trump again. They all cheer.
It was an eerie feeling entering that room. It’s like a portal of sorts. Somewhere in that long hallway, or on the way to the donut counter, I think I crossed over. Maybe the circle of plastic chairs had enough gravitational force to suck us in. We only came hoping to observe, now we are falling deep into the circle.
They ask me if I have seen foreign spies on my college campus. I can feel the portal pulse when the room gets so silent.
The thing about documentaries is you're not supposed to interfere. My project partner tells me in his intro to psych class he learned that they're all at an age where they can’t think critically anymore. Maybe there is no use in trying to pull them back. I am not a part of this. I’m not supposed to be here.
I sit a woman down in a church. I turn the camera on and for two hours I listen to her emphatic warnings about the end of the world. She tells me how her friend died of Turbo Cancer. She was killed 10 days after getting the Covid Vaccine.
We are separated by dimensions. Each in our own universe threaded together from fibers of blabbering podcasts, and family networks, and a lifetime of sticking to your guns. There are stars in between us, there are galaxies, we are lightyears apart, and she lives deep down a hole I'd claw my way out with my fingernails. But I’ve made a tiny pinhole across the void, and across it, I think I hear myself say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She gives us a magazine to read. Its title is “Covid Vaccine Carnage.” She says she has to do things like this, educating people, so she can go to heaven and meet her dad again. She walks us through it page by page.
It reminds me of my mom reading books to me as a kid. Feeding it to me line by line. Those are the things that shaped my universe.
She’s around my mom’s age. They both shop at Whole Foods. My mom does it because she doesn’t trust GMOs; she does it because Joe Biden is poisoning the food.
My mom always texts me about how scared she is, about what the world has come to. They are both so scared, reading labels and checking the news. I wonder about the black stuff separating the universes like in all those photos of space that make me uncomfortable to look at. I wonder if for all of us, the void is made of the same dark stuff. Every gap in the stars is a different nightmare.
I fled the portal when the week ended. I let it zipper shut when I walked out of the churches and never looked back. At first, those places were an interview backdrop, and then they enveloped me. It wasn’t hard for me to leave the void. I was only a visitor. Observing all the wreck, the floating pale faces, the news clippings about the high school football player who dropped dead after he was forced to get vaccinated, magazines, glowing tv screens, facebook groups, a bible.
The “Lets Go Brandon Shirt” I pledged my allegiance to floats past. I see the Bald Eagle on the back of it as I pass by. His talons are gripping a free-flying American flag, he stares me down as I go back towards where I came from. He knows my pledge was full of shit.
It’s been a week-long journey floating back to this portal-gate. When I finally reach it, before I cross back I notice a line of red string at my ankle. It’s connecting me to all of it. Knitting together the fabric of their universe. I loosen it from my ankle, and leave the red string floating unconnecting, against the black.
I feel sorry that to all of them, in my absence, I will be another loose end.
Alt ending: I sealed every leaking pinhole and felt grateful for my firm grasp on everything I believed to be true. I let the galaxies drift apart, and wonder why spending so long in the void didn’t make my stars feel brighter. All of it was still crooked and cold and fucked up.