Resistance

“Eating dry pita bread with alfalfa sprouts & turkey. Hot and bored in Roswell.” – travel journal entry, day 17

Brayden is a Post-Mormon. He is also post-obesity. Nobody remembers which was first, atheism or the low-carb diet. He started shedding his beliefs and his body fat at roughly the same time.

He left Utah five years ago to come to Roswell, New Mexico. I’m not sure what exactly brought him here. He says it was coincidence, I prefer to call it fate. We’re a couple now, Brayden and I, though we’ve both changed a lot since we met. Back then, we were both still believers, though in completely opposite ways. Brayden is now over religion just as I am over the stories I grew up with: alien abductions, red lights over Bottomless Lakes State Park, missing minutes on wristwatches.

As he started to pile up muscle, seven months or so ago, I began my work with Alien Resistance. I’m a graphic designer and the job is surprisingly challenging. There are only so many ways you can cross out an alien head.

Brayden says there are only two things he ever feels he truly wants: his peace and quiet, and a muffin for breakfast. All I want is for my family to stop talking about aliens, and a different shade of red for the Alien Resistance logo: firebrick. My boss, Gordon, says firebrick is too warm and familiar, and what he wants to cross out alien heads is anything that’s cold. I’ve suggested blue, but of course a sign containing blue has no effect whatsoever in the warning and fear department. Fear, of course, is what we’re aiming for, though Gordon insists we shouldn’t be too explicit about it.

So this summer, Brayden and I sit in the heat and contemplate the things we want and we cannot have. It’s a nice way of being miserable together.

On Sundays I go to church and Brayden goes to the German bakery. At church they talk about friendship and loyalty and community, but I always feel like they’re talking about something that’s out of my reach. I’ve participated in study groups and I’ve read the passages we’ve been assigned to read, but in the end I always feel like the kid who is picked last in gym class.

Brayden says I feel the same way in church that he feels at the bakery, where a plexiglas separates him from the display of all the things he cannot have anymore.

He says the feeling goes away once he sits outside in the sun and has a black coffee with three or four packs of Sweet’N Low. I doubt the same thing would work in church, though.

The good thing about being miserable together is that sooner or later there will be progress, if only for one of you. Then you can kind of hang on to one another and move along, though of course that won’t necessarily mean you’re progressing, as well.

Brayden has come a long way over those five years. I remember the beginning, when he had just left the church. There were these strange calls on his cell phone. It was always the same number, starting with an area code that didn’t exist: 933. There were messages that filled up his whole voicemail, running up to five minutes at a time. They were like audio tracks from old detective movies – men with low voices talking, women with high-pitched voices contradicting them, string music, the low hum of a saxophone.

None of it was intelligible. It sounded as if someone was just holding the phone receiver up into a room of people silently watching the movie. It reminded him of growing up. The first time it happened he called his older brother William.

“Hey, did you just call me?”

“What? Is this a joke?”

“Are you guys pulling some Mormon shit on me?”

“Jesus, Brayden. Are you drunk?”

On the bad Sundays, when he really wants the pastry, he will purposely sit down at a table that isn’t cleaned yet and he will grab the trash: the paper bags with pastry crumbs and napkins soaked with fat and sugar. He will stuff them in his pocket when nobody’s looking and carry them home. In his kitchen he will hold a bag over his nose and inhale and exhale until his breathing is calm and slow; just smelling all the things that were once there and now aren’t there anymore.