Butt Burrito

They put La Tropa in bungalow nineteen, which had four beds, eleven people, and a smell of cupboards.

Saga lay on the floor on a folded blanket between Auxi and the wall and listened to her family not sleeping. Her father had said the sentence about being furious later and had then, being her father, actually delivered on it: they had sat on the step in the dark for half an hour and he had listened to every single thing she had noticed, and had not once told her she was imagining it, and had said at the end of it, "You are right, and it is worse than you think, and we still are not doing anything tonight, and here is why."

The why was this. Two hundred people. Sixty of them children. One vehicle. And a congregation who had, so far, committed the crime of being extremely nice.

"You cannot rescue people who do not think they are captured," Mateo said. "You will just be the man who ruined the party."

At about one in the morning Saga gave up, and got up, and went out.

The night on the dry coast is not like the night at home. There is no fog to hold the world close. It is enormous and cold and dry and the stars go all the way down to the sea, and the whole white grid of Ten-Bel lay out below her under them, silent, with the faded word on every wall.

Ikea was sitting on the wall outside bungalow nineteen.

She had been there, Saga realized, for some time.

"Your dog snores," said Ikea.

"That's Tibor."

"Ah."

Saga sat down on the wall. Neither of them said anything for a while, which Saga had learned from three women up a mountain is a thing you can do with a person.

"They're not coming back," Saga said eventually. "The clothes."

"No."

"They're not even being washed, are they."

"No," said Ikea. "There's no water for that. Two hundred people's clothes? We'd be pumping all night. It's in the store under the stage." She said it flatly, the way you'd give somebody directions. "It's always the store under the stage. They did it at the youth weekend and they did it at the traders' thing in the spring and they'll do it again in March."

Saga's whole chest went cold and bright at once.

"You've seen it before."

"I've carried it before," said Ikea. "I'm on the rota."

She turned and looked at Saga properly for the first time, and in the starlight her face was not the face she had been wearing all day.

"Can I tell you something you're not going to like?"

"Yes."

"You're not the point," said Ikea. "Tonight isn't about you. Your lot are the audience." She pulled her cardigan around herself. "They needed a crowd. Outsiders, specifically. Neighbors. So that when it happens tomorrow there are two hundred people watching who aren't us, and it's witnessed, and after that it's a real thing that really happened in front of the whole coast and you cannot take it back."

"When what happens?"

"I get baptized," said Ikea, "in the pool, at ten o'clock in the morning."

She said it with no drama in it whatsoever, which is what made it land.

"And after that I'm a member. And a member can be spoken for. And in the spring, when I'm sixteen, Brother Eugen is going to be told he can marry me, which he has already been told, and which he thinks is a settled and gentle and proper thing, and he is not lying, that is genuinely how he experiences it."

Saga discovered that her hands had gone into fists.

"Then don't get in the water."

Ikea laughed. It was a short, unhappy, entirely adult laugh.

"You've been here eleven hours," she said. "You have no idea how hard it is not to get in the water."

Here is what Saga learned on that wall between one and three in the morning, and she wrote none of it down, because Ikea asked her not to and because some things you keep in your actual head.

Ikea had been planning to leave for two years.

Not dreaming about it. Planning. She knew that the Hall's house lights ran off one bank and the stage lights off another and the sound booth off a third, and which breaker was which, and that the third one had a wobble in it. She knew that the fly rail on stage left had four working lines and that the second one from the wall came down onto the apron. She knew the trap door had been painted over in 2019 and freed off again in 2034 by a boy who wanted to hide in it, and that it still worked, and that the counterweight was a sandbag with a rope, and that the whole mechanism made a noise like a cough.

She knew where the fog machine was, and that there were three canisters of fluid left, and that nobody else in the building knew what they were.

She had known all of this for years. And she had never once used any of it, because a girl who runs away from Ten-Bel at fifteen with nothing is a girl who gets brought back from Los Cristianos in three days by two kind men in a van, and Ikea had watched exactly that happen to a boy named Joren in 2038 and had learned the entire lesson from it.

"You have to have somewhere to go," she said. "That's the whole thing. That's the only thing. Everybody thinks the hard part is the wall." She looked out at the grid. "The hard part is the other side of the wall."

"Come with us," said Saga.

"To what?"

And Saga opened her mouth to say to us, obviously, to the truck, to Querencia, and then she heard her father's voice in her head, and she shut it again.

Because the answer was: to a truck with eleven people in it that is going to be at a market in Icod on Thursday. To a family that would love her and would also be four hundred kilometers away by the end of the month. To no room, no bed, no door, no papers, and a congregation entitled to come and get her, and a whole coast that would agree they were entitled.

"We don't take people in the dark," said Saga slowly. "That's my dad's rule. Nobody joins us without their family knowing."

"Then your dad's rule and my family are the same problem."

"Yes," said Saga. "I know. I'm thinking."

And she sat on that wall and thought, in the cold, with the stars going all the way down to the sea, and what came up out of her was not a plan for getting a girl out of a building.

It was a name.

"Whose grandmother is the one on the scooter?" she said.

Ikea blinked at the change of direction.

"Reinhilde? She's ⁓ she's nobody's, she's everybody's, she's been here forever. She's an elder. Sort of. They don't have elders but she's an elder."

"Does the congregation listen to her?"

"The congregation is frightened of her," said Ikea. "She drinks in front of them and nobody has ever once said anything about it."

Saga got off the wall.

"Where's the tall Hungarian sleeping?" she said. "The one in his own trousers."

Tibor left Ten-Bel at ten past three in the morning, alone, in the Santana, with the lights off until he was down on the coast road.

He did not ask a single question. Saga told him what she wanted and he listened with his arms folded, and at the end of it he said, "Three hours up, three hours back, I am back by ten," and then he said, "It is a good idea and you should not have had to have it," and then he went and got the keys.

Mateo came out in a bathrobe to see him off and the two of them had a short conversation in the dark that Saga was not part of, which ended with her father putting both hands on Tibor's shoulders.

"If she says no," Mateo said, "you come back anyway."

"She will not say no."

"Tibor. If she says no."

"Then I come back anyway," said Tibor, "and we do it the slow way, and it takes two years, and the girl gets married in the spring." He got in the truck. "Which is why she will not say no."

The Sunday service began at nine.

They had opened the Hall's back doors so that the room ran straight out onto the pool deck, and the morning came in off the sea, and it was, Saga has to admit, beautiful. Two hundred people in white in a gray concrete hall with the light coming in level off the water. Somebody had put flowers in jars along the front of the stage. The old woman who had made the cakes was crying before anything had even happened, out of pure happiness, because a girl she had known since birth was being brought all the way in.

That is the part Saga has never been able to explain to people at home. They were happy. It was not a wicked room. It was a room full of people who loved a girl and had arranged something lovely for her, and who had also, without one of them ever putting it into a sentence, taken two hundred strangers' trousers so that the lovely thing would have a decent audience.

Brother Wouter did a reading and got choked up in the middle of it.

Brother Eugen spoke for six minutes about vigilance, and about how the world had not ended, which was a mercy, and a sign that there was still work, and Saga watched him and understood that this man had never once in his life been alone with a doubt.

And then they called Ikea up.

She came up the middle in a white robe with her hair down for the first time all weekend, and she looked about twelve, and she looked at nobody. Her mother was in the second row with her hands over her mouth. Her father had his arm along the back of the bench.

Saga, four rows back, took her VocaTutor IV out of the sleeve of her robe.

It is important to be accurate about the VocaTutor IV, because everybody who hears this story assumes it is something clever, and it is not.

It is a child's speech toy from 1987. It is yellow. It has nine buttons and a speaker the size of a coin, and it was designed to teach four-year-olds to pronounce words in Spanish and English, and its entire personality is a woman's recorded voice that says INCORRECT in a tone of enormous disappointment. Saga has had it since she was three. Her father rebuilt the guts of it twice and sampled it extensively in his music.

There are five things recorded onto it from her early childhood, and there is no way to record a sixth since the day the record button stopped working. They are:

INCORRECT

I LOVE YOU DAD

PAPÁ HAS GAS

ALERT ALERT! PAPA FARTS INCOMING! CLEAR THE BUILDING

and, for reasons Saga has never been able to explain to anybody and has stopped trying to,

BUTT BURRITO

It has a headphone socket. That is the entire technical basis of everything that follows.

At half past nine, during the second hymn, a fifteen-year-old stagehand had walked into the sound booth she has walked into four times a week for eleven years, and had plugged a yellow plastic toy into channel six, and had walked out again, and nobody had looked up, because she was carrying a mop.

They went into the water at four minutes past ten.

Eugen went in first, down the tiled steps at the shallow end in his robe, and turned, and put out his hand. And Ikea came down the steps and took it, and stood beside him in the water, chest deep, with two hundred people standing up along the deck and the light coming off the surface onto all their faces.

And Eugen said, "Sister, do you present yourself of your own will and understanding ⁓ "

Ikea said, "No."

He did not hear it. That is the thing nobody believes. He was three words into the next sentence before it reached him, and then he stopped, and said, kindly, "I'm sorry?"

And Ikea opened her mouth to say it again, to two hundred people, in front of her mother, at fifteen, having practiced it for two years and never once said it out loud.

And nothing came out.

Saga watched it from the deck. She watched a girl who knew every circuit in that building stand chest deep in warm water with her mouth open and no air in her, and she watched the whole room begin, very gently and with total love, to move toward her, to help her, to carry her over this small stumble the way you help somebody with a heavy bag.

So Saga pushed the button.

What the Hall of Vigilance heard, at four minutes past ten on a Sunday morning, out of a theater sound system built in 1968 for a colony of Belgians who wanted somewhere to put on pantomimes, at a volume that shook water off the surface of the pool, was:

INCORRECT.

The room stopped as though it had hit a wall.

INCORRECT.

Somebody screamed. Two hundred people turned around at once toward the Hall, and the whole white mass of them swung like a shoal.

And in the four seconds while every face in Ten-Bel was pointed at the back of the building, three things happened that had been planned for two years by a girl with tape around her wrist.

The house lights went out.

Every lamp in that hall and along the deck died at once, in bright daylight, which does nothing at all except make two hundred people flinch and look up ⁓ and up on the bar, alone, on the wrong circuit, on the fourth lamp, a single hard white beam stayed on and came down through the doorway onto the pool.

The fog started.

It came off the deck in a low white flood, out of a 2019 fog machine with three canisters left, rolling across the tiles and out over the water, and it was, in the level morning light, the single most beautiful thing that has ever happened in Ten-Bel, and about forty people said ohhh before they could stop themselves.

And the trap door opened.

It came up in the stage with the cough its mechanism makes, and the sandbag ran down, and out of the hole in the floor of the Hall of Vigilance, pushed up on the little lift platform by a boy of fourteen named Joren who had been brought back from Los Cristianos in a van in 2038 and had been waiting three years to be asked, came two hundred and six items of clothing.

Trousers. Shirts. A basket of shoes. Auxi's yellow jacket. Somebody's belt. All of it dry, all of it folded, all of it exactly as clean or as dirty as it had been at five o'clock the previous afternoon, coming up out of the floor into the fog under one white beam while a child's toy said, at a hundred and ten decibels:

PAPÁ HAS GAS.

There is no version of this that is dignified. That is the point. There was never going to be a confrontation in that hall, because a confrontation is a thing the congregation knows how to win. You cannot argue with a laminated invitation. You can only make it impossible to keep a straight face.

I LOVE YOU DAD, said the Hall of Vigilance, in the voice of a disappointed woman from 1987.

The Chacho brothers were on the stage before anybody. They did not run; they arrived, the way they arrive on a wire, and Ayoze picked up an armful of trousers and started handing them out along the front row with the enormous courtesy of a man passing round a plate of cakes, and the front row took them, automatically, because somebody was handing you something.

A trader from Adeje looked at the shirt in his hands. Then he looked at it again.

"This isn't wet," he said.

He said it into a silence, and it carried the whole length of that hall, and it was the loudest thing anybody said all morning.

ALERT ALERT! PAPA FARTS INCOMING! CLEAR THE BUILDING, said the VocaTutor.

ALERT ALERT! PAPA FARTS INCOMING! CLEAR THE BUILDING

Mateo held his palm to his face in amazement as two hundred people in white bathrobes, on a Sunday, in a fog bank, began to work out what had been done to them.

Ikea got out of the pool.

She did it in the fog, in the dark, with the whole room facing the other way, and that is the only reason she could do it. She came up the steps on the far side and she walked out across the deck dripping, and she got to the top of the steps by the diving board, above everybody, and she stood there and she said it again.

And this time it came out.

"No."

It was not a shout. It did not need to be. The sound system had done all the shouting there was to do, and the room was already turned inside out, and a girl's flat voice on a Sunday morning goes a very long way when two hundred people have just discovered they are standing in their underwear's absence.

"I'm not doing it," said Ikea. "I've never wanted to. I've been saying no in my head since I was eleven and everybody's been hearing yes because I'm polite."

BUTT BURRITO, said the Hall of Vigilance.

Her mother made a sound.

And her father ⁓ and this is the part Saga has thought about more than any other part of that entire weekend ⁓ her father put his hand up over his eyes, and did not look at his daughter, and did not look at Brother Eugen either, and started to laugh. Horribly. The way people laugh at funerals. And once he had started, half a dozen people around him went too, and it spread out from him across that hall like a crack across ice, because the fog was still coming and a yellow toy was still going and every soul in that building was in a bathrobe.

The Vigilant Prophets of Ten-Bel had been waiting eighty years for a morning that would be remembered forever.

They got one.

Anna came in through the front doors at twenty past ten with Tibor behind her, and stopped, because a room she had not entered in fourteen years was full of fog and half-dressed people and a small yellow machine repeating itself.

"Oh," she said.

Saga will remember what her aunt was wearing until the day she dies, because it was completely, deliberately wrong: not work clothes, not the apron, but the good koi-print square knotted at her throat, and her hair done, and shoes she must have dug out of the back of something. She had come down a mountain at four in the morning to ask for a girl, and she had dressed for it, and the effect in that hall was of somebody arriving at the wrong funeral.

She found Reinhilde where Reinhilde had sat all morning, at the end of the second row, on the scooter, not having got off it.

The two of them looked at each other.

Saga was close enough to hear it and has never told anybody the whole of it. What she will say is this.

Anna said, "Reinhilde."

And the old woman said, "You cut your hair."

"Eleven years ago."

"Mm," said Reinhilde, and looked at her for a while.

They did not embrace. Neither of them tried. There was fog going past their knees and a fourteen-year-old boy on a stage handing a man his own shoes back, and these two women sat and stood in the middle of it looking at each other's faces like people reading a document.

"They took their clothes, Reinhilde."

"I know what they did."

"Did you know before?"

"I knew before," said Reinhilde.

And she said it without a flicker, and she did not apologize, and she did not explain, and Anna took that in and set it down somewhere and did not pick it up again, and Saga learned a great deal in that moment about what people who love each other can hold.

"The girl doesn't want to be baptized," Anna said.

"I heard her. Everybody heard her." Reinhilde's mouth did something. "She has a carrying voice. Like her mother."

"She wants to leave."

"They always want to leave."

"She has somewhere to go," said Anna.

And then she said the thing she had come three hours down a mountain in the dark to say, and she said it in the plainest sentence available, to a woman on a scooter, in a fog bank, in a hall full of people in bathrobes.

"She can live with me. With care and love. And community that would do anything to help her."

Reinhilde Vandermeersch did not answer for a long time.

She got a cigarette out and did not light it, which Saga has since learned is what that woman does instead of crying.

"With you," she said.

"With me. There's a room. There's a bed in it already and a door on it. She can lock it. She can come and go. Nobody will make her do anything, including come to dinner." Anna's voice was completely level. "Her parents can visit any Sunday for the rest of their lives and I will feed them, and I will not say one word to that girl about God in either direction, and if she wants to come back here in a year then I will drive her myself."

"And what do you get."

"I get somebody in the house," said Anna.

That is all she said. Reinhilde looked at her for a long moment and something moved across the old woman's face and was put away again.

Then she turned the scooter around, and drove it up the center aisle of the Hall of Vigilance through the fog, at walking pace, to the front, where a fifteen-year-old girl was standing wet and shaking on the top step by the diving board with two hundred people not knowing what to do with their hands.

And Reinhilde Vandermeersch, who has never in fourteen years asked one single question about her own daughter, stopped her scooter at the bottom of those steps and said, loudly, in the flat Flemish-Spanish that every person in that room had known their whole lives:

"The girl is going to Querencia. To my son's sister-in-law. She is going to a family, and everybody in this hall is going to hear me say the name of it, and nobody is going to be able to say afterward that she was taken in the night."

She looked around the hall.

"Say it back to me. Where is she going."

And two hundred people in bathrobes, out of eighty years of habit, in the fog, said it back to her.

They left at two in the afternoon, in daylight, with the whole congregation standing in the road.

That was Mateo's condition and he did not bend on it once: not at night, not fast, not quietly.

Ikea's mother packed the bag.

She did it properly, and she took an hour over it, and Saga saw some of what went into it through the bungalow window: the good cardigan, and a stack of folded underthings, and a hairbrush, and a jar of pickles, and a photograph. She packed it the way you pack for a daughter going somewhere cold. She cried the entire time and did not stop once and did not make any noise about it.

Then she carried it out and set it down on the step, and stepped back, and put her hands together in front of her.

She did not hand it over.

Ikea stood about two meters away in the road and looked at the bag on the step and understood, and did not move for a moment, and then walked up and picked her own bag up off the ground in front of forty people.

"Thank you," she said.

Her mother looked at the wall of the bungalow, at a point about a meter to the left of her daughter's head, and said, to Anna:

"There's a jersey in there that wants mending at the elbow. She won't do it. She never does it."

"I'll see to it," said Anna.

"She should eat in the mornings. She says she isn't hungry in the mornings and she is."

"I'll see to it."

"Thank you," said Ikea's mother, to Anna, and went back inside the bungalow and closed the door, and did not look at her daughter once, from beginning to end, because she loved her.

That has to be said plainly, because everybody who hears this story gets it wrong. She was not being cruel. There was no cruelty in that woman anywhere. She had been taught, over forty years, by people she trusted, that when somebody walks out of the congregation the loving thing ⁓ the only loving thing, the thing that brings them home ⁓ is to stop knowing them, so that the cold of it works on them like weather until they come back. She believed that completely. She was doing the hardest thing she had ever done, on a Sunday, in a road, in front of her neighbors, for her daughter's sake.

It was the worst thing Saga had ever watched anybody do, and the woman doing it thought she was saving a life.

Ikea's father came out and stood in front of Mateo.

"You'll want to know the arrangement," he said. He was formal, and he had clearly prepared it, and the words were not his own words. "We don't speak to her while she's out. That's not a punishment. It isn't a punishment." He said it twice because it mattered to him. "It's a door left open. When she's ready she'll know where we are, and everything is exactly as it was, and nothing is held against her. Nothing at all."

"And until then?"

"Until then we don't know her," said Ikea's father.

He put out his hand, and Mateo took it, and shook it, because there was nothing else to do with a hand.

"Look after her," said Ikea's father.

"I will," said Mateo.

And then the man turned round, and walked past his own daughter at a distance of one meter, and went into the bungalow after his wife.

Saga looked at Ikea. Ikea was standing in the road holding her bag with her chin up and her eyes absolutely dry, and she did not look surprised, not for one second, and that was the part Saga could not get out of her head afterward.

She had known. She had known for two years exactly what it was going to cost, and she had priced it, and she had done it anyway, and she had needed somewhere to go for precisely this reason. You have to have somewhere to go. That's the whole thing. That's the only thing.

Anna went and stood beside her. She did not hug her and she did not say anything comforting, because she had been on the wrong end of a family once herself and knew exactly how little there is to say in the first ten minutes.

She took the other handle of the bag, so that they were both holding it.

"Right," she said. "Get in the truck."

Brother Eugen was not in the road. Saga looked for him and did not find him, and Ikea, who saw her looking, said, "He's in the booth. He'll be in the booth all day. He's not a monster, he's just never been told no out loud before, and he doesn't have anywhere to put it."

And Brother Wouter, who was in the road, and who was crying, and who nobody had said one unkind word to all weekend, shook Ikea's hand for eleven seconds and then went and got something out of the Hall and came back and gave it to her.

It was the Sankyo MelodyMate MM-3.

"You take it," he said. "You'll get more use out of it."

And he went back inside, and Ikea stood there holding a thirty-euro keyboard from 2013 with sixteen rhythm presets on it, and Saga watched her face and had to look away.

Anna gave Ikea the alcove bed, which is the bed Saga sleeps in when the fog comes down.

Saga found this out four days later, at the market in Icod, when it came up in the middle of something else, and she has been honest with herself ever since about the fact that she felt it go through her like cold water and that she is not proud of that. It lasted about six seconds. Then she thought about a girl who had never in her life had a door she could shut, and it went away, and it has mostly stayed away.

Anna lays an extra place at the table on Sundays.

She has never once explained why, and nobody in that house has ever asked her about it, and she does it every single week. She sets it and she takes it away again afterward and she washes it with everything else.

Nobody came in December. Nobody came in January.

In March the congregation's motorhome came up the mountain.

Everybody on this island knows that vehicle. It is a diesel Hymer from about 2009, eight meters of it, cream-colored and going chalky, with WAAKZAAM painted along both flanks in letters a meter high and a solar panel on the roof that has been there since before the Quiet. It is the outreach van. It goes out for a fortnight at a time, twice a year, up the north coast and around the Anagas, and if you have lived on Tenerife any length of time you have opened a door to it. It burns the congregation's own biodiesel, which is the only reason a vehicle that size still moves on this island at all.

Bolted to the back of it, above the tow bar, is a hydraulic scooter lift.

It came up the last kilometer of the Querencia road in second gear with everything in it rattling, and stopped in the square, and the lift came down with a whine that brought about nine people out of their houses, and Reinhilde Vandermeersch descended into the cloud forest on an electric two-seater resort scooter like a bishop arriving by crane.

Brother Eugen was driving.

She had made him. Nobody has ever established how, and Saga has asked twice. He handed the old woman down, and got back into the cab, and stayed there for one hour and forty minutes with the window open and a book, and did not come in, and was not asked, and about twenty minutes into the visit Anna went out across the square with a plate ⁓ papas, and a piece of the good cheese, and two of the anise drops ⁓ and knocked on the door of the outreach van and gave it to him without a single word, and went back inside.

He ate it. He washed the plate in the fountain afterward and left it on the step, clean.

Reinhilde stayed one hour and forty minutes. She ate. She smoked in the yard and looked at the coffee terraces and said they were planted wrong, which they were not. She did not once mention the congregation, and she did not ask Ikea a single question about how she was, and she talked instead, for most of an hour, about a dog she had owned in Bruges in 1994, which is possibly the least useful thing she could have chosen to talk about and which Ikea has since described as the kindest.

At the gate, going, she said to Anna: "They're not coming. You know that."

"I know."

"You're laying it anyway."

"Yes."

"Mm," said Reinhilde, and put her cigarette out on the sole of her shoe and put the stub in her pocket, because she was a guest.

"Come back," said Anna.

The old woman did not answer that. She drove the scooter onto the lift, and the lift whined her up into the back of the outreach van, and Brother Eugen closed the gate on her and got in and turned that enormous cream-colored thing around in a square built for donkeys, in about eleven moves, with a fourteen-year-old directing him badly.

She has come back four times since. She has to ask somebody to drive her every time, and she asks somebody different every time, and Saga has come to understand that this is not because she is running out of favors.

It is because each of them has now been up here and seen it.

And she has never once brought a message from anybody, because there has never once been one.

The banana beer recipes came up the mountain in the third week, in Ikea's own handwriting, from memory ⁓ she had been on the brewing rota since she was eleven, and it turns out that when a congregation makes a child do a job for four years they are also teaching her the job.

Anna typed them up. Maddy did the calculations, formalized them, and gave them a title page, and asked one clarifying question about hydrometer readings that improved them.

And on a Tuesday in January they went out over the mesh to every node on the island, open, free, no conditions, along with the biodiesel process, which turned out to be four pages long and not difficult.

Nobody attacked Ten-Bel. Nobody boycotted it. Nobody ever said one word against the Vigilant Prophets, and the traders kept coming to the December gathering, and the food stayed extraordinary.

It is simply that by the following autumn there were nine people brewing banana beer on this island, and by the year after that there were thirty, and one of them was a woman in Icod who added tuno and made it better.

You do not have to defeat a thing that is holding the island by the throat.

You can just hand everybody else a set of hands.