Free Mission to America by Walter Kirn Page B

why we hadn't “entered” Colorado yet, where “the population” was “denser and more affluent.” I was used to his word ways, but “affluent” still nicked me. In the Church of my childhood, money stayed out of sight behind the things it bought, which weren't much to look at. Most were things to eat, and most things to eat were obtained with Virtue Coupons, which weren't even money, at least to my eye. But when Lauer let rip with his mansion, it cut a string in us. It released some new balloons. Women began to lounge around on sofas that were actually two sofas shoved into an L-shape, or even three sofas joined to form a U, reading catalogs issued by merchants we'd never traded with who dealt in fripperies we'd never needed, such as a wondrous clock one lady fell for that displayed information about the weather—the weather right outside her kitchen window, whose sill was where she'd put the clock! Bluff's men flew off in much puffier balloons. Street by street and block by block, they started building additions out of redwood, that showy lumber unwelcome in our midst since the time of the fire in the 1960s, when a mine foreman used redwood for a deck that obliterated his front yard and swept out to the border of the sidewalk. When the Seeress kicked the monstrous projection during one of her weekly Spirit Strolls, and when a young girl who'd spied the kick (my mother) larked through the co-op singing out the news, the deck reinfolded faster than the Discourser turning into an aphid on a rose, taking a class of lumber with it. Decades passed and everything was fine, but then, thanks to Lauer, our resident Human on Earth, redwood unreinfolded with a vengeance, billowing out in hillside-castle form and then popping up as gazebos and extra bedrooms and backyard sheds for storing an old sofa.
    Sometimes I wondered if Lauer had sent me here to give himself a freer hand back there, maybe to erect a tall new guesthouse. I'd been awfully loose and loud around the co-op with my views about his redwood.
    I had the phone up flat against my ear as Lauer praised the team of missionaries whose region was the Northwest and California for gaining a meeting with a young executive from an expanding computer firm. After taking the Well-being Quiz, the man had signed up for a twelve-week course of classes, to be conducted through the mail, in Edenic Nutritional Science. The missionaries had hooked him, Lauer said, by postering a natural foods store—a trick that he said we should try. He said that the people who shopped in these establishments were just the type we wanted as AFAs. This put me on edge. I'd thought the people we wanted were the people who wanted us. Or who needed us, but didn't know it yet.
    I decided to hold Lauer back by talking more. I felt he'd forgotten the central truth with telephones. They only work in pairs.
    â€œWe met some Wiccan youth in a Casper sweetshop. I'm there right now. I'm in the parking lot. I just stuck our prettiest tract, the one on friendship, on the window of a scraped-up Volvo. That's one of the car makes we've been zooming in on.” I summarized the system then, playing down the poor cars stuffed with rucksacks whose drivers might be headed for the nuthouse as cars we primarily tracted out of fairness, to balance all the dented Cadillacs. Lauer didn't comment. He didn't peep. I shifted to explaining about Wiccans. I built them up some, maybe quite a bit. My aim was to portray them as worthwhile prospects, good people who'd slipped a little in the sand but could easily be transformed into allies. I hinted that Casper was one of their new footholds, although they'd spread through Colorado, too.
    â€œGive away many copies of
Luminaria
?” It was as if he'd just picked up his phone after letting it cool on a table for a while.
    â€œNot boxes and boxes. A few. A healthy few. In a minute I'll take a copy to the Wiccans.”
    â€œSave that. Save that