Mission to America Read Online Free PDF Page A

accept my limitations, and love me despite them—or because of them.
    While I waited for the breakup, I trained for my mission at Lauer's mansion. He taught me to indebt the people I met by sending them off with a trinket or a free book. He told me to think the words “I am now inside you” whenever I looked a prospect in the eye. He told me that an angled stance invites your listener to move in closer while a squared-off stance pushes him away. Then he showed me how to end a handshake. “Person One, who's you,” he said, “loosens his grip slightly, cuing Person Two to loosen his grip in response, at which same instant Person One—the power figure—lets go completely.” Another trick he showed me was to sit with my head a bit lower than Person Two's and then, very slowly, over several minutes, straighten back up until my head was the high head.
    â€œPerson Two feels like he shrunk,” I said.
    â€œâ€˜Remote Infantilization.' That's the term.”
    â€œBut how does it help me persuade him to join the Church?”
    â€œIn every interaction between two people, one plays the Parent, the other plays the Child. There's no third way,” Lauer said. “But there's an art to this. The Parent can't just dominate the Child or the Child will resist the Parent. To earn the Child's respect and love and trust, Person Two needs to share his power now and then.”
    â€œPerson One, you mean.”
    Lauer smiled at me. He held the smile in the way a person does when he wants you to ask him why he's smiling so that he can reveal a thought he's having that you, if you were cleverer or sharper, would have already guessed or had yourself.
    â€œWhy are you smiling?” I knew what he'd say next and that my response would be “Tell me, I don't know,” and that his tone when he finally explained things would be the parental power-figure tone. I'd never felt so tired in all my life.
    â€œWhy do you
think
I'm smiling?” Lauer said.
    His secret, when we got that far, was that he'd intentionally erred a moment ago by mixing up Person Two with Person One in order to give me, the Child, a chance to correct him, the Parent, and feel proud and “valued” as a result. Without asking me if I'd actually felt these feelings (which I hadn't, though I would have said I had just to end the session) Lauer declared the experiment a success.
    It was a slip. The Child felt condescended to and erupted with his true thoughts. “If these tricks can really convert people,” I said, “then people aren't worth converting. They're machines. And AFAs are fools.”
    I left the session, my seventh in two weeks, despairing about my mission and my life and unusually eager for Sarah's company. I assumed she'd heard the gossip by then and was weighing the risks of repeating it to me. Our walk the next night was uncomfortable and odd. A porcupine with reflective golden eyes waddled across the road and Sarah said, “Maybe people are nocturnal, too. Maybe we're happiest in the gloomy murk but somehow it's been bred out of us. You think? Maybe we lived in caves because we crave caves but maybe there weren't enough of them eventually so we moved into houses and tried to change.”
    She seemed to be pushing at something, but timidly. There was only one thing to push at by that time.
    â€œWho can say?” I told her. “I know I do get restless when the sun sets.”
    â€œOr maybe it's just men,” she said. “You think?”
    â€œA lot of our primitive hunting took place at night.”
    â€œAnd in groups,” Sarah said. “Men hunted in groups back then. No women. Just men and the mammoths. In the night.”
    But that was as far as Sarah was willing to go that evening.
    I figured we had a week before our rupture. I passed it by getting to know Elias Stark, whom Lauer had chosen as my mission partner. His bristly stiff brown hair was more like beard