At six they drove to the outdoor stage, a massive structure that bore no resemblance to the proscenium stage Lewyn had been imagining. Built into the hill itself, it looked more than anything like a massive gray hamster habitat, with too many levels and surfaces to easily count. Lewyn wondered how they were going to get through the evening, the three of them, when it was clear that he was the only one of them who even wanted to be here. But he did want that, even if he had no idea why, or what was the tug that had been working at him all day, pulling him along like the strongest undertow off Chilmark. Rochelle and Mark, with nothing in common but their profound unhappiness about the afternoon they’d spent together and the evening ahead, would each have leapt wordlessly into Mark’s car and gunned the engine for Ithaca and their utterly different lives there, if only it weren’t for himself and his unfathomable wish to go further in. It was something he would still be thinking about, years later. It was something he would uncoil his path back to, always stopping short of understanding.
They had to walk past a corral of protesters shouting that Joseph Smith was an apostate and Mormons weren’t Christians. “Shame on you for attending this unholy event,” said a woman to Rochelle, who grabbed Lewyn’s hand. “You’re going to burn in hell, you know.”
“Oh I know,” Rochelle said tersely. “But not for this.”
“Freedom of speech at its finest,” said Lewyn, trying for lightheartedness.
“WhatMormonsDontTell.com,” Rochelle read from the group’s signs. “What don’t Mormons tell? Something to do with history or science?”
“Something to do with Satan,” said Mark.
The field was teeming with people dressed as if they’d walked straight out of a swords-and-sandals epic but without having shed their American health, corporeal padding, and straight white teeth. Everywhere Lewyn looked he saw blond and blue-eyed shepherds, double-chinned warriors with leather-like breastplates and what looked like cut-up rugs on their shoulders, giddy kids straight from the mall or the soccer field, dressed as child soldiers and desert maidens. There was a tall man in a vaguely Aztec getup featuring a green dotted skirt with a fringe of beads, a fake black beard, and a towering headdress that might have looked over-the-top on Carmen Miranda. He held the hand of a small child in a dust-colored shift and a green headband, absently sucking on a juice box, and chatted with a guy around Lewyn’s own age who was obviously meant to be Joseph Smith. People kept coming up to “Joseph Smith” and posing with him for pictures.
“I see him,” said Mark. “Over there, in front of the stage.”
Jonas was with a large group of goatherds or nomads, some with oversized faux beards, most with scarves wrapped around their waists and heads and heavy beaded necklaces, as if the whole group had been routed through a Moroccan bazaar and not allowed out until they had piled on the inventory.
“This is my cast team,” Jonas explained, when they reached him. “We’re all in the Prophet Lehi story and later the Prophet Abinadi.”
Rochelle, Lewyn could see, was struggling to process this information.
“It’s quite a production,” she said, truthfully enough.
“It is! It is! Hey Susie!” he called out to an extremely pretty girl who was walking past with a partner, each of them holding a Book of Mormon and a handful of cards and pens. “It’s my friends from school I said were coming.”
Susie and her friend stopped and turned. They were both so tall, Rochelle had to peer sharply upward.
“Hi,” said Susie. “This is Eliza, my friend from home.”
“Where’s home?” asked Rochelle.
“Provo, but I’m at BYU. We both are. You go to Cornell with Jonas?”
Rochelle had likely never before thought of herself as someone who “went to Cornell with Jonas,” but she nodded.