by N.D. Brown
I see speculative nonfiction as the process of extracting meaning from objective reality. Certainly, nonfiction owes its readers the truth. And to me, the fullest truth is the delineation and acknowledgment of the writer to its readers of what is fact, what is analysis of those facts, and what is speculation.
Imagine a man alone in an army tent. Not the kind of tent that’s meant for sleeping or overnight trips. The kind that’s in place of a building. The kind with that distinct tarp smell: mildewed and dry. Now imagine that this tent is a church, and the church sits in the middle of a desert, but the desert isn’t empty the way that that church is empty. Empty except for the man. Imagine the man is a priest. That the man stands six feet three inches tall. That he has short brown hair and wears vestments that are normally gold, white, or red. Imagine that these vestments are desert brown. Camouflage. It’s his first night in Kuwait and remember that there is no one inside, but he’s unboxed two, three-foot rectangular icons and has stood them up to create an entrance way in the middle. Imagine the middle as a walkway into the altar. Imagine a square altar table, jungle green, unfolded and covered in sheened, white cloth, frilled at the end with another red cloth placed on top that’s red to hide the color of wine and blood, which in this place can be the same thing.
It’s night, Pascha, Easter for the Orthodox Church which follows a different calendar. Festive bunnies aren’t preparing to fill empty baskets. Just the sounds of war’s continuation: machinery, soldiers, helicopters, and radios. War without the hot heat of the day. Only the cold sounds of war. The priest sets up chairs. Pours wine. Alone.
It’s Easter, the anniversary that god came back from the dead, resurrected up through the sands of a different desert, borne of the same heat both past and present. Imagine rows of empty chairs. The priest alone in the tent beginning the service because the night is still the night regardless if anyone’s inside to see. Imagine the sadness at the emptiness of a church. Celebrating life over death. Hear the priest chanting alone in the empty tent, acting as both call and response. The service, well over a thousand years old, has seen empires fall and world wars come and go. The priest sings to himself with only candles lighting the interior. Now imagine those lights go out. The darkness.
From the end of Saturday into the earliest morning of Sunday, this service is three hours long. Sunday morning is called A Day Without Evening. The following week is called Bright Week. But before the light of Sunday, there must be the darkness of death, even in God. All the lights must go out. The clock strikes midnight on Pascha morning. A single candle in the darkness. When a church is full, the light is supposed to spread, from priest to deacon to a member of the congregation. Just as waves reach out under the gravity of the moon, so does this fire reach out under the gravity of The Son. Dull wicks enflame. Feel a subtle heat build as the light moves into the dark. Obliterating the dark into its inverse. Proving its impermanence.
Here the priest in the tent stands outside the altar with several points of light held within what looks to be a menorah. The priest exits the tent, singing out into the cold, dark desert. He circles the tent three times. Once for The Father. Then for The Son. And then for The Holy Spirit.
Do not imagine anyone coming in at the last second to alter the loneliness of the moment. That did not happen. Do not imagine the priest is content or any less exhausted on this, one of the saddest days of his life.
Imagine instead that this man is your father. That you are his son. His first-born son. That you were in Illinois some 6,881 miles away. A new teenager. That the story he later told you contained almost no details. Just that his first night in Kuwait happened to be during Pascha and that he had to do the service alone in a tent. You saw the camouflage vestments years later hanging in a basement closet. You saw the altar table folded and forgotten. You didn’t need to ask your father anything more. You’ve been to that service every year since second grade. The service unchanging.
Imagine that every Easter your feet hurt, and you’re hungry, but you know the same words are being said in Russia. That the same hymns are being sung in Greece. That in that night you are a Rosetta Stone of an expanse of languages spanning seas and continents and borders, both cultural and political. You can speak Romanian. Ukrainian. Amharic. Syrian. You understand what all these languages are saying because of the tones and inflections you have come to know better than you realized. In the countries of Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Egypt, and Finland, people are circling their church in the same way you are.
But that priest alone in the desert. Circling the tent by himself with the 250 million variegated others spanning the globe. All those lighted candles in the darkness. Chanting together in languages of music and light and fire.
I see speculative nonfiction as the process of extracting meaning from objective reality. Certainly, nonfiction owes its readers the truth. And to me, the fullest truth is the delineation and acknowledgment of the writer to its readers of what is fact, what is analysis of those facts, and what is speculation. Of course, these elements have always been in creative nonfiction; it’s just gone unnamed. My piece, “Imagine: A Day Without Evening,” is the rumination of a son as he pieces together the details of a war story told by his father. The result is a historical and geopolitical juxtaposition of Pascha in the Eastern Orthodox Church, against the backdrop of the Iraq War. Thus, bringing into conversation the ancient past with the urgent present in an attempt to illuminate that which is ubiquitous to humanity.
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N.D. Brown is a second year MFA candidate at The University of South Florida. He’s the Outreach Coordinator for Sweet: A Literary Confection. Occasionally, he enjoys building hand-made furniture with the help of electric drills and large saws, which he’s found makes the process infinitely easier. His work can be found in The Heavy Feather Review.