“Are you studying to be a vet, too?” said Eliza, the friend. She had light-brown freckles all over her nose and cheeks. Her blond hair was woven with beads, now glinting in the light from the retreating sun.
“Uh, no. Lawyer. What about you?”
“Oh, marketing, I think,” said Susie. “Are you a member of the church?”
Rochelle shook her head. “I am not. Full-blooded Jewish atheist here.”
Eliza’s eyes widened. Which was it, Lewyn wondered: the atheist or the Jew?
“Cool,” said Susie. She looked as if she were trying very hard. He felt a pang of sympathy for her.
“Maybe, if you have questions after the pageant, we can talk about them.”
Rochelle looked briefly at Jonas. She was wondering, Lewyn knew, how she had come to merit this special honor.
“That’s kind,” she said, after a moment. “I must say, everybody’s so colorful. What are you supposed to be?”
“We’re all Lamanites,” said Jonas. He leaned forward and said, conspiratorially: “We’re the bad guys.”
“Well, sometimes the Nephites went wrong, too,” Susie said, very seriously. “I mean, everyone wanders from the righteous, I think that’s the point. What are you two studying?” she asked Lewyn and Mark.
Mark, it turned out, was going into finance. It had never come up in conversation. Lewyn said he was thinking about majoring in art, which sounded downright strange when said aloud.
“Like, painting?”
“Uh, no. I don’t paint. Other people’s paintings.”
“Did you see the painting of Moroni in the Welcome Center?” Susie asked. “It makes you feel, like, the pain and the loneliness of being the last one of his whole line, and the faith that one day Heavenly Father would bring the right person to dig the plates up. Right there,” she said, turning to the great gray stage behind her.
Lewyn didn’t know what to say, though he was already sure he knew the painting she meant. He had seen it at the Smith farm.
“I love that one,” Eliza said. “And the one of the angel next to Joseph Smith’s bed, and the one of Joseph in the Sacred Grove. They were in all the books, and the sacrament meeting presentations. It’s a beautiful thing that Heavenly Father uses his gift of art to sustain our faith.”
Lewyn was about to say that this wasn’t the purpose of art, but the exact truth of that notion had just then struck him for the very first time: For centuries, for millennia, hadn’t this been precisely the “purpose” of art? “I must go back and have a look at those pictures,” he heard himself say.
The three of them found seats far back on the right. Again and again, cast members and missionaries approached, always with the same general script—Where you folks from? Is it your first time here?—till Rochelle started heading them off at the first intake of breath: Ithaca. Our first time, yes. Yes, we are looking forward to it. Nice to meet you. Did they have any questions? Would they like to fill out a card because missionaries could come visit them at home to talk about some of the messages in the pageant. Rochelle declined for all three of them, as Mark remained brutally silent. They seemed to have found an unspoken mutuality, and a determination to keep these eager, insanely dressed people moving on to the next mark in the next seat. When it was finally dark, a tall missionary with a buzz cut led an invocation—Mark, on Lewyn’s left, bowed his head and Rochelle, on his right, did not—and then swarms of actors raced for the stage, coiling up hidden stairs or ramps onto the many levels, filling the hillside with hundreds of now tiny bodies, a vast needlepoint of color.
The people on the stage were so far away from even the nearest audience members that they could not possibly “act” as Lewyn had always understood “acting”; instead, they gestured in great, exaggerated movements as the recorded dialogue, music, and narration washed over the field from massive overhead speakers. He tried to follow what was happening, but it kept jumping around from ancient Jerusalem long before Christ to someone’s vision of a future crucifixion. A ship was assembled onstage to take a righteous prophet and his sons to a new world, but once the first protagonists disappeared there were new characters with unfamiliar names, and generations of Lamanites （who were mainly bad） continued to fight generations of Nephites （who were mainly but not always good）。 Volcanos exploded and violent storms sprayed water all over the stage, and each new prophet called for the wayward to repent and remember the promise of Christ.