Arch/Eternal - Chapter One

Jackon River introduces himself the long way

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Chapter One - Ancestors

I’m tempted to start in Boston. But my gut tells me I should go back further, and I’m told it’s best to trust your gut with this sort of thing. So here we go.

My name is Jackson River. I was born in Wind Valley, Arizona. 

I’ll tell you about my family — my parents, and their parents — because there’s no escaping lineage. I am, in both the material and spiritual sense, the product of my ancestors. 

But before I get into that, I’ll invite you into a very specific memory, for a brief visit into the mind and heart of a six-year-old boy. I think it will be a good beginning.

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“Jackson, come on back inside,” Nali called. 

Every night, I stood outside our trailer, and watched and drank the horizon like I was dying of thirst. That line between the Earth and the stars. The million, billion stars. In every one a promise, a certainty, a desperation.

I was looking for my mother.

Because on a night just like this one, under those same stars, into that same line that pinched them away from the Earth, Sarah Jacob River had gone to find her God, and hadn’t come back. 

But she would. I knew it in a way that made it unnecessary to say. I knew what Nali and Grandpa Thomas wouldn’t admit — God had called their daughter on a mission. For all their preaching, they didn’t have the faith that I had. They didn’t feel the truth in their hearts the way I did.

She would be back. 

All I needed to do was to keep my eyes fixed on that line between heaven and earth. All I needed to do was to be in that place, skin slowly chilling in the night air, waiting, watching, listening. I knew that if I listened long enough, hard enough, I would hear the Voice calling me. I would know where my mother had gone, so that I could follow, or I would find her coming back to me, to take me with her.

But every night, Nali called me back inside, away from the search, away from my faithful watch. Every night, I was torn away from the only thing that mattered to me. Devoured by the pale and pitiful glow of the trailer, the tungsten despair of the faithless, cocooned in a tomb of manmade lights, sounds, and thoughts. 

No wonder they can’t hear, I thought. How could they? They never spent any time outside at night. They said it was dangerous. More dangerous than failing to hear the call of the stars? Failing to hear the voice of God? I felt sorry for them.

But I was young, barely six. What could I say to them, so old, and so certain?

So I went back inside. 

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow, I would go out again. Every night until the Call came.

Not long now. Not long. 

It won’t surprise you to learn that she never did come back. 

You might wonder what happened to her. We all did. 

My father’s name was Jacob River. He grew up in Wind Valley, and first left that high desert town as a teenager, with vivid dreams of a world full of color and rain. But it became an addiction, and he returned home many times, broken, defeated by his own avarice, and thirsty for what he could only seem to find in the parched waste of Wind Valley. 

One of those times, he wooed a girl named Sarah Sayer. She was 15. I was born 9 months later, Jacob River already long lost in his wanderings. 

Sarah Sayer was the daughter of Thomas and Rebecca Sayer. They had moved to Wind Valley on a mission that I’ll talk more about later. Suffice it to say that they did their best to care for their abandoned daughter and newborn grandson, but she withered without the wild young man who had sired me, and the hope of his return ate at her like a wasting disease.  

Once, after my grandparents got back from some business in town, they found Sarah outside, staring into the vast expanse of wilderness, as I screamed with hunger and loneliness inside. They didn’t leave her alone with me again after that. 

They prayed for her, and Grandpa Thomas gave her a lot of blessings. They were both from old Arizona Mormon stock. Eventually, at the recommendation of their bishop, they went to a counselor in the city. The church helped pay for it, and over the next few years, Sarah came partway back to herself.

These were the hallowed memories of my earliest youth — they are few, and precious to me.

I remember marveling at a thorny bug, then recoiling in fear as it moved. “It’s just walking,” my mother whispered into my ear. “Just walking along.”

I remember her spending what seemed like all day plucking the hair-thin spines of a fuzzy cacti out of my unsuspecting hand. She turned it into a game, teaching me how to count each one. I remember her blowing on my face to dry my tears after I had stopped crying. 

I remember her singing to me as we sat under the stars. I don’t remember the words, just the feeling.

Observing the closeness of my mother and I, my grandparents rejoiced at what they believed was clear evidence of Jesus Christ’s atonement at work, alchemizing tragedy into grace. 

Nali told me her heart broke open to see the way I worshipped my mom, who still had all the sweetness of youth herself. She told me Sarah always had a natural grace and charm that would disarm anyone, and over those few years, it was all for me. 

But still, sometimes, after I’d gone to sleep, she would sit outside and stare into the desert for hours, unmoving, barely blinking.

The news of Jacob River’s death came by way of a letter sent on his behalf. He had, in his final moments, remembered me, and in the terrible pain of regret and shame, had convinced someone to convey the story of his fate back to the family that he never really had.

Nali prayed that the news would liberate my mother, her daughter, from the cankering hope that had so exhausted her vitality. But instead, it was as though the vine had been clipped, and she faded away. 

I was 5. I had no idea why my mom, my best friend, my whole universe, had become so unresponsive. I remember Nali and Grandpa Thomas trying to explain it to me one hot afternoon, as she slept the sleep of despair in her room. 

“Your mother is very sad.” I remember the look they shared, but I can’t remember what else they said. 

They never talked about Jacob. Even my mom didn’t talk about him. I think she knew, by some deep instinct, that she shouldn’t share her own desperation to get him back with me. That I would be better off without it. 

Anyway, one morning, she was gone. 

After two months of desperate searching, red-eyed phonecalls to various agencies, and prayers to heavens of brass, everyone sort of just gave up. 

She had left on two feet, and taken nothing with her. There was no telling what direction she went, or how long she could survive. She was lost, with no trace, not even a body. 

I was young, but I understood the basics. My mom had walked out into the desert one night, while we were all sleeping, and disappeared. And so, in my boyish heart, I knew she would come back for me. I knew. 

My poor grandparents. My calm assurance fractured their very souls. How could they even think to dispossess me of that faith? Instead, they did their best to keep me from wandering out after her.

I don’t remember exactly how or when I realized my mother was really gone. It was kind of like the way most kids find out Santa’s not real. The magical fantasy of young childhood wears away like a sand castle on the beach, until all that remains is a disappearing indentation, and you can’t quite remember what it looked like before it was gone. 

For a while, I was despondent. Grief moved through me like winter. But when spring came, I still had my love of the stars, and my hunger for solitude in the desert had grown sharper.

Nali and Grandpa were obliged to take me camping often. We grew very close. Whatever I knew of parents I knew through the two of them. If not for the hollowness left behind by my mother, those next few years would have been the happiest of my life. Perhaps they were anyway. Even now, I’m a poor judge. 

In any case, that era closed when a heart attack took Grandpa Thomas while the three of us were on one of our camping trips. He was 52. 

Then it was just Nali and me, in the ramshackle trailer at the end of a long dirt road on the outskirts of Wind Valley proper, which, in all my life, never had so much as a stoplight. 

This is how, as a child, loss became my surest companion. I remember many long, sleepless nights, dreading the inevitable moment when the caprices of fate decided to take the one person left on earth who I could call family. Nali was my world, and I feared an apocalypse so viscerally that I suffered from occasional fevers for which there was no other explanation. I remember that fear better than I remember anything else. 

But I think it must have been worse for Nali. She, an aging woman, had lost everyone dear to her. Her daughter ripped away by madness, her husband by a weak heart, and her days filled with the suffering of her only corporeal contribution to the world. 

Like I mentioned before, Nali was from old pioneer stock, but only on her father’s side. Her mother, orphaned on a Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, had been adopted by a family in Phoenix, where she grew up to marry a Mormon boy from Mesa. So Rebecca Lundquist (Nali) grew up in the suburbs, far removed from her indigenous heritage. 

Smart, ambitious, and ardently religious, Rebecca was determined to dive deep into philosophy and physics, and come out on the other side with a language of cosmology that would shame every narrow-minded, dogmatic theist and atheist alike. She went to Harvard Divinity School, but ranged broadly with relentless interdisciplinary passion. In a congregation comprised of “young single adults,” she met Thomas Sayer, who couldn’t believe his luck when she agreed to marry him. 

It was under the name of Rebecca Sayer that Nali began to establish herself as one of Mormonism’s leading intellectual lights. She was a prolific and prodigious writer, and before long, the primary stressor in her life was the need to choose between competing and equally attractive opportunities. 

Then, one night, she woke up from a dream. To my knowledge, she never told anyone what it was about, but whatever it was struck her so powerfully that she woke Thomas up and told him they needed to go to the desert. There, they would tend to God’s children, and be instruments in His hands to restore the Lamanites to glory. 

Thomas, no doubt confused and disquieted, was nevertheless carried along by his love and admiration, and didn’t put up a fight. He was happy to ride in the wake of her determination, and serve the aims of her vision, whatever it was.

The rest of her friends and family, on the other hand, all thought she’d gone crazy. They dispensed poorly calibrated council, entirely failing to understand her intentions. She knew, and she tried to explain, that she had been seduced by the glory of the world. She had come perilously close to selling her birthright for a mess of pottage. She had discovered a craving at the dark bottom of her soul for the approval of her peers, of her detractors, of everyone. She wanted to make the world respect her faith, respect her.

She realized that success, by any metric, might be her undoing. So she would lose herself — her notoriety, her ambition, her prospects — she would lose it all in the elevation of the one thing she knew mattered more than all of it. She would have faith, and serve God. 

There was only one other person who seemed to understand her decision, and the passion that drove it — a woman by the name of Rita Freeman. 

A couple years earlier, they had met at a cross-departmental mixer at which both of them felt out of place, and they left together to spend the entire night in Nali’s apartment, talking about the nature of souls, and the absolute virtue of agency. They were roughly the same age, but Rita seemed impossibly wise. 

They kept in touch, pulling all-night conversations now and again, revisiting similar themes, and using one another as sounding boards for new ideas they’d been working to articulate. But Rita was a scion of the history department, and seemed to always be off traveling somewhere, while Rebecca buried herself in books, and got married.

Rita didn’t make the wedding, but she did show up soon after Rebecca had decided to “throw her life away in the desert.” Once more, they stayed up into the small hours, and this time, the conversation focused like a laser on Nali’s decision, as she tried to communicate the incommunicable. When she was certain she’d failed, when she despaired of convincing this woman she so admired that she wasn’t, in fact, crazy — that was when Rita reached over and took Nali’s hands in hers.

“You do this thing,” she said, with fire. “It could cost you everything, but…do it.”

Those words cleared the clouds of self-doubt, and Nali felt peace. In her journal, she wrote:

The Spirit of God whispered to me that the road would be hard, but that it was the road God had chosen for me, and I would have the strength to travel it.

Shortly after that, she and Thomas drove across the country with all their possessions stuffed in an old Subaru, and bought a mobile home on the outskirts of Wind Valley.

And of course you have some idea of how it all turned out. I’ll add that the people of Wind Valley were, to use something of an understatement, unreceptive. Not only to their efforts to spread the Good Word, but also to their friendship, and, frankly, to their very presence.  

The quiet hostility of those people shrouded us in isolation. After two decades, Nali realized it would never abate. She and hers would never belong. But she had dedicated her life to that place and its people, so she toiled away creating antidotes for the venomous creatures that plagued the inhabitants of the high deserts. When people got bit, they came to her, and owed their lives in bitterness. 

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Since this is a novel in progress, any and all feedback is earnestly welcome. My goal is to finish this book early next year. You can help me make it better:

Continue to Chapter Two…