The Search for Reciprocation
I’ve always been fond of conversion tales. When I was younger, whenever there was a lull during church services, I’d grab a Bible off the back of a pew and search for stories there. There are sixty-six books in the Bible, but I kept reading and rereading just one: the Book of Acts. Jesus ascends to Heaven, leaving behind instructions on spreading His message. There were only a hundred and twenty believers at first. Then three thousand. Then five thousand. My mother, who has a master’s degree in theology, never let me forget that the number listed only included men; that if women and children were included, the actual number of conversions was certainly higher. The most defining conversion comes a few chapters later, where Saul, an intense persecutor of Christians, ends up becoming Christianity’s staunchest advocate. He once was (literally) blind(ed), then he saw.
A few hundred years later, Augustine would weave his own conversion story in Confessions, opening his paean to God with the declaration that “You prompt us yourself to find satisfaction in appraising you, since you made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you.” Augustine’s once restless sinful spirit stilled when filled with the Holy Spirit. His philandering gave way to philosophizing. Confessions is considered a classic, perhaps the classic, in the canon of conversions.
A few days ago, a copy of the Christian magazine First Things arrived in my mailbox. A familiar name on the cover looked up at me. I flipped straight to Valerie Stivers’ piece, titled “Stay in My Heart.” It was a story that believers never tire of hearing: a conversion story. Stivers, the daughter of avowed atheists, once did not believe. In just a few pages, she showed the entire world that she now did.
Shortly after I finished reading Stivers’ story, I turned to Nicolette Polek’s new novella Bitter Water Opera. The book’s epigraph is a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: Blessed are the poor in spirit. We quickly learn that the word “spirit” in this book serves two meanings. In the book’s first section, the narrator, a film teacher named Gia, is visited by the ghost, or the spirit, of Marta Becket, a real-life avant-garde dancer who performed at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley, California for decades before retiring and later passing away in 2017. “Amargosa” translates to “bitter water” in the indigenous Paiute language, hence the name of Polek’s novella. Thus, the book can be read as a performance: Marta Becket’s last dance, shown in spirit form.
Gia is the latest iteration of a popular trope in contemporary fiction: the sad girl protagonist. Gia’s partner breaks up with her after she repeatedly cheated on him with a variety of strangers, so she's not exactly the most sympathetic character out there. She yearns for rest and relaxation; she does so by sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring her mother’s calls. One may say that she’s “poor in spirit,” and indeed she is blessed with Marta Becket’s spirit simply by writing a letter to her.
Yet Becket’s spirit does not seem to be enough, because Gia then goes on a road trip. In our supposedly secular age, it's not uncommon for someone, especially someone who has recently terminated a relationship, to go on a journey of “self-discovery.” It's no surprise that Eat, Pray, Love moved millions of copies and became a national phenomenon. But this book does not abide by the post-Protestant narrative of “finding one’s true self.” Gia is looking for something outside, not inside, her locus of control. Amid the disenchantment of modernity, people still seek the otherworldly and supernatural, to be assured that the impossible is indeed possible.
First, Gia decides to regain her bearings by renting a cottage in the middle of a forest. The owner of the cottage is named Simone, which may or may not be a thinly-veiled reference to the quasi-Christian mystic Simone Weil, a woman who traveled the world in search of religious revelations. Gia’s time in the forest is largely uneventful, but Polek has a knack for weaving existential moments out of the mundane: “A bug walked across the wall and when I stubbed it with my thumb it left behind a blue smudge. The bug had been alive and then it suddenly wasn’t, like a flipped switch. It was that kind of death that I wished for then, like a sniped balloon.” Polek turns a humdrum act into a mediation on Gia’s own fragile self.
Later, Gia sees a dead deer in the middle of the lake near the cottage and fashions a makeshift rope to bring the carcass to shore. As she is doing so, she notes that “It was my limerence for other people that afflicted me, my limerence to be in the future, limerence for the so-called beauty of the past, limerence for other places I had no business living in, limerence for stew when I was eating pie, a limerence so strong that I was always in a world that didn’t even exist. My limerent life ran through my head in tandem with my real life, a daydream on steroids, which simultaneously pulsed with dopamine and deflated reality into something transparent and malnourished.” Limerence, for the uninitiated, refers to an attachment to another being that one wishes to have reciprocated. Gia’s whole life is a search for such reciprocation.
In the third act, Gia voyages to the Amargosa Opera House to truly be with Marta Becket, but not before attending a service at a Congregational church. Upon reaching the opera house, she learns that it is also now a hotel. Yet Gia's pilgrimage still fails to find reciprocation for her feelings of limerence. She goes to nearby Death Valley National Park, where she travels to Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the country.
It is thus that, when she is at her lowest point both physically and mentally, that she is visited by a spirit. No, not Marta Becket, but the Holy Spirit. God is revealed to her in a great conflagration in the aptly-named Death Valley: “There on the flat expanse, surrounded by brutal rising mountains, I was awash in what felt like a mix of terror and grace. I became small and unnoticeable, but it was a smallness where something wonderful surged around me. The smaller I became, the more I could see it. Like a fractaling reveal, tying my days together with a single thread.”
Some may think including this detail is a spoiler, but we knew from the beginning that it was bound to happen. Conversion stories, like the nature of belief, are meant to be eternal. Even though Gia’s story is fictional, the effect generated is as if her story was real. Blessed are the poor in spirit, as Polek points at in the beginning, leaving out the next line: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Sheluyang Peng is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
