Feels pretty good, turns out.
Issy shouts back: “Who’s there?”
Hilda lets it slide.
The boy is now abandoning his script: he has become an inspired riff, divinely played, and off the top of his head comes a loud and prophetic voice—because of growing talk among the Brothers and Wives in the Lord, his father sometimes talking on the phone. The talk between his parents just this morning—there’s been a whisper, slow-spreading like a fever, feels like all summer long. He hears the brothers talking here and there. The New Millennium is not so far away, a nice round number, and my God, wouldn’t that make sense?
“Look!” Josiah yells, he can’t help himself, a voice speaks through him: “For the Lord and His army come knocking!”
Excited, he lets his sermon notes slip and fall to the floor.
He looks down, pauses for what feels like minutes—and then he looks away to the back of the hall. He puts his hand to his brow as if saluting a brother in the way back row, as if guarding his eyes from the sun. “And there in the heavens, a door has opened!” Josiah’s thin voice careens throughout the hall, even his mother is startled by its power. Kizowski stands from his chair backstage, and stumbles over to the curtain. Call him crazy, but he actually looks for a heavenly door. The kid’s got something, all right. Without realizing, Kizowski, now side-stage, is resting his arm on Pullsey’s shoulder. Trading glances, how old is the boy, again?
But Josiah is well beyond all this now. He sees every heavenly star within reach.
He sees every dream he will ever have, every way he will become, what he certainly must become: a receptacle, an empty bowl, a deep and lucky cup of God.
“The first voice!” he shouts out. “See the returning Christ riding on a great white horse, and here even now He comes riding!” He straightens his back, shouting, and believing every word as it comes to him: “The Lord God has said every star will fall, and the sun will turn black in the sky. And His voice speaks out like a trumpet!” Josiah sees the crowd see him, and their vision of him infuses him, informing him with a wholly new spirit. “And look!” He points to the ceiling. “The Lord God said, Come up here. And I will show you what waits for this world!”
Hundreds of heads, adoring and reverent, bent back now, looking upward.
Sister Hilda Famosa is swooning in her seat.
“And know this, while sitting in the house of Heaven.” Arms spread wide, embracing every last hungry spirit in the audience, he says: “The Lord God said two thousand years must pass since the birth of the Son of Man. And then I will come, in the year two thousand, at the dawning of God’s New Millennium! And in that last year the Messiah, our Lord Christ, will return!” His hands now reach, grabbing for invisible rungs. “And there I see myself standing as an elder before you! And then—only then—on that day—in that hour, a divine vindication, a great rain of tribulation and destruction, and the End will finally be here!
“At once,” he shouts. “I am in the spirit!”
Overwhelmed, the crowd inhales, each one a child of God.
Lay focus on this boy, lay focus on me—O, look at me filling up with breath and divine voice, and seeing with the eyes of Heaven, because my Lord God opens a heavenly door, one that no man can ever shut. And He himself will enter. And He will sup with me, and I with Him, and He will set me on His throne until the End of Days. And He will write on me a brand-new name, and every soul, I swear, will hear it.
THE ENDS
EAST
1
FRIDAY, QUEENS, NEW YORK, 2005
The cabbie tore through a dead-red light and we took off for the expressway, away from the airport and heading for Richmond Hill. He was laughing, fast-talking into his ear clip phone. The sky outside was a cool blue David Hockney pool, but inside, the vinyl seat burned through my pants. I lowered the window. I’m guessing the language was Arabic. The ID card on the back of his seat gave his first name as Abdullah, and Abdullah let loose another howling and happy laugh. He saw me in his mirror and threw me a smiling nod. Pointed at his phone and looked at me like, this guy’s really killing me.
We joined the traffic flow. The whirl of outside, the car horns and sirens, the screech and relentless machine din of city washed over the car like a wave. Everything sounded the same as the car dropped and bounced in jolts, over potholes and swellings all along the Grand Central Parkway. There was a roaring whoosh as a plane zeppelined overhead.
I was ecstatic to be free of the airplane, of its stale dry air, of the small soiled hallways of LaGuardia and those sad plastic baggage carousels. We rolled on solid ground beside the bay. I never liked flying, but I liked the world seen from way up there, the incoming skyline, the blunt slant of the Citigroup Center, and the sterling hubcaps and skyscraping needle of the Chrysler Building. I liked the shipwreck hulk of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, and the concrete sprawl of Queens spreading out from the East River like some elaborate gunmetal carpet. What I didn’t like was the turbulence, the need for airsickness bags. I didn’t like the horror of hollow space between me and what was below, and that some five hundred people died in plane crashes every single year. I had checked before leaving. The odds are maybe not especially good, but actually quite good if it’s your plane that spirals and explodes in the oily Hudson. Manhattan is an island, surrounded by water. People forget this. A sewer stink of sulfur wafted in through the window from the bay.
Abdullah shouted, “What a smell!” Then back to his conversation.
I was amazed by his fluid traversal between the two languages. I waited for him to pause and lean forward. “You’re speaking Arabic, right?”
He said into the earpiece, “Wait a second.” He asked me, “What, you speak Arabic?”
I said, “I’m just wondering if.”
“Well because many of the businessmen speak Arabic.” He lowered his window and slammed his hand against his car door, yelling, “Move, you fucker!”
It was Friday, nearly dusk, and I had only been here in New York for a few minutes but I found the city immediately overwhelming. Sunlight flashed between buildings as if some westward and strobe-bursting ambulance was keeping an exact parallel pace. There must have been a day, one specific day long ago, when I first looked up at the sun and asked out loud, what is that?
Abdullah laughed. “The traffic is starting! What can I do?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
He asked me, “Where are you coming from?”
“California. I moved there. But I’m from here.” I was back, of course, to see my father. Sarah, the lovely ex-wife, she’d told me he was sick, said he sounded “strange” and something seemed “wrong,” but she always exaggerated. I called him and he eventually relented. Really he was fine, just more tired than usual, and he missed Mom. But there was something about his voice.
Abdullah said, “California girls!”
A medium-sized bread truck blared its horn alongside us and briefly slowed, a car length ahead. It was then shot-put forward, barely missing a motorcycle. It screeched to a stop behind a red Buick Regal with T-tops. I imagined loaves of white and wheat, clear plastic packs of hot dog buns scattered between the bumps of back wheel wells.
“He has no patience!” Abdullah slapped his car door. “You’re going to kill somebody! You want I should stay on the expressway? Too much traffic.”
Flushing Meadows Park was under the overpass, and I saw the grassy lakes and rusting sci-fi ruins of the 1964 World’s Fair. That version of the future dated pretty badly. Except for maybe the Unisphere (which I happened to like very much), a hollow steel globe tall as a ten-story building. Abdullah and I were emigrants flying through the Milky Way, our cab a slow yellow rocket, and the Earth was out there lonesome, spinning still in the distance. I played Wiffle ball here as a kid, on congregation picnics. So long ago I hardly remembered them, but still they came alive, flashes of light in my mind. Mom, Dad, and me on a yellow picnic sheet, cooking food on a metal grill sticking out of the ground, i
t smelling like chalk and smoke and soil. Our sheet always a bit removed from the others. A wooden table, a red-checked plastic tablecloth. Watermelon slices in a bowl. Mom talking macramé secrets with the wives, and a flash of Dad turning burgers. There was a picture somewhere among our family photo albums of a seagull, flying away, a stolen frankfurter limp in its beak. I thought of softball, my first game of softball. I was maybe nine or ten, at a church outing. Dad argued with the other dads; it was obvious we didn’t know all the rules. We knew most of the rules, yes, because nobody grows up in Queens without playing Wiffle ball, or stickball, or some other street version of baseball in an empty lot or some neighbor’s driveway. There was even throwball, without sticks. But these were bastard versions, fitted to whatever shitty equipment and how little space we had. We used to even change rules mid-game. Three bases sometimes, other times two. Balls hitting parked cars were fair or foul depending on who was playing. And balls that spun off cracks in the sidewalk were pretty much always played. Unless a hitter called out “Hindu!” Hindu? Where does something like that even come from? My father once told me they said it back when he was kid, too. It wasn’t specific to my block, or to Queens. Dad grew up in Brooklyn, and so he knew how to play stickball, stoopball, skully. Street games. Kid games. But I don’t think he ever graduated from them. No occasion. No need. He never played on a team, or had many friends that I could remember. Church was priority, a friendship with God. Except during that game of softball, we never played catch.
We tossed a ball back and forth, before I got up to bat. Mom had insisted we play because she thought it would be good for me, for us. In good weather, the congregation often organized activities: picnics, park hikes, and softball. But Dad usually said no. Or if we did say yes, it was with reservation, even with suspicion. We were both a part and not a part of the congregation. On the outskirts. Dad was suspicious of people with “too much time on their hands,” like weekends—free time that could be better spent studying the Bible, or praying, or making a witness for the Lord. Why read the paper when there’s scripture? Sometimes I just wanted to play Star Wars, and I’d hide out with action figures under the wooden table in our backyard. Why he allowed my mother to buy them for me, I’m not sure; they were probably not realistic enough to cause him concern. I used to hear the kids in the next yard yelling or swimming in their aboveground pool, or tossing a Frisbee, and I’d wonder why I shouldn’t go join them. What stopped me? I also at some point started wondering if I was already too old for action figures. I also knew Mom wanted Dad to just let me be a regular kid sometimes. She said it would be healthy, more balanced. During the softball game, after I’d struck out for a second time, Dad insisted I get another swing. He said it was only right, and they should let me have another chance. The other dads sort of froze. He encouraged me and said, Go on, go ahead, and get ready to swing. The pitcher was a chubby and pimply thirteen-year-old named Kermit and he was whining “But I got him out…” Kermit looked around at the adults to see if really he had to throw another pitch. I happily accepted defeat and left the plate. Dad claimed the game was rigged. He threw his mitt on the ground and kicked it so hard it soared over a high fence surrounding sewage pipes. The mitt was borrowed. I don’t remember being embarrassed by all this. Not exactly. I sort of liked that Dad and I were a team all our own, but I also remember the other boys in the field looking at me like I was some nutcase, like I’d confirmed everything they’d already thought about me. Weirdo. I do remember feeling like I was now seeing my father more clearly, in a brand-new light, realizing that fathers could actually be wrong, and, worse, not even know they’re wrong. I also remember faking that embarrassment, later on, as a teenager, about the very same game. Whenever I wanted to get the man right between the eyes, I’d say something like “you don’t even know how to play baseball.”
Of course nothing as silly as that had happened between us in a long time, but even all the half memories accrue a sort of crust that eventually feels real and whole. Like plaque on a white fake tooth. We hold on to some memories for way too long. Still, sometimes we bickered, father-and-full-grown-son stuff. Is that surprising? I don’t think so. We didn’t fight much anymore. That’d ended years before. I guess the last actual argument we’d had, a real hot one, was after I’d moved to California. We had a shouting match over the phone. Because I think Dad believed I’d never fully go through with it. I’d pack my things, a week or so after I got there, and run back home fast as I could. I think he would’ve been happy to have me stay at home forever. Just us three—me, him, and Mom, one small team. But Mom never wanted that kind of life for me. She was thrilled when I left. Deep down, I think so. I hope so. Then again it’s not like my father and I ever became best friends, either. There was a cooling-off period after the move, after the phone call. I would call and check on Mom, and if he answered he’d pass her the phone. But by the time I met Sarah, he and I had leveled off, and things were pretty good between us. We were cordial. He even asked questions about where I lived. Sarah pulled us closer together because he loved her. So did Mom. Either way, I hadn’t been back to see him since Mom died, and no way was I letting the man get sick. If he was sick. It also seemed my one chance for redemption. Or maybe better to say redemption for all of us, because I was sure Dad was praying, still, for a late homecoming. Because if there was a Heaven—although I could never take the idea seriously—I figured Mom was looking down, and this would make her happy. I sat there in the cab entertaining fantastical thoughts of me swooping in, just in time. I would save my father.
“A shitty park,” Abdullah said. “Used to be beautiful. You should see it Sunday mornings with all the garbage. I should stay in traffic, or go Queens Boulevard?”
“This used to be a kind of scary place.”
“Safe now. Filthy, but safe.”
A game of soccer was under way. Sub-bass music shook the back ends of SUVs in one of the parking lots.
“You know what, take me to Forest Park.”
Not in such a hurry, after all.
Abdullah nodded. I saw his rusty rotting teeth in the mirror. He said, “They’re trying to make this place beautiful again. Spanish families come every weekend. Music so loud the trees dance.” Then he laughed into his phone. He put something in his mouth and chewed.
I said, “I want to drive through Forest Park for a while. And then we’ll go to Richmond Hill.” The house was waiting, and Dad was waiting. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The cab dipped low and took to an off ramp.
When Mom first got sick, her dying was sort of unthinkable. Because I was so young? I don’t know. Remission came and the cancer went, and the years passed by, but then she got sick again. I definitely knew this time where it was headed. Not where, exactly, but I knew what would likely happen, and still I have to say I had trouble grasping the endgame scenario. Even standing there right beside her bed, in the hospital. She was a ghost, surrounded by mint-green walls and silver bedpans, all the humming precision equipment. I was optimistic. And yet, here, in the cab, pretty sure Dad was doing relatively fine, I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling.
I looked at Abdullah. He put another piece in his mouth.
“What are you eating?”
“You want some?” He grinned. “Is betel nut. You chew the leaves and nut.”
I frowned, making a face at him in the mirror like I have no idea.
“You chew it— What, I have a passenger. What do you mean? Who did?” He punched at the steering wheel. His laugh was all consuming, so great now it almost stole his voice. He wheezed, “Ah, my friend!” We traded glances in the mirror and he pointed at the phone, what’d I tell you about this guy?
A chatter blast of horns screamed out. A drill battering against a distant sidewalk.
He was digging through a plastic bag in the passenger seat beside him. He reached back through the opening in his clear plastic pay box and handed me a small leather pouch. In the mirror he made small fingers at his
mouth, a squirrel pawing a prize. “Like this, gives you a zing.” The leaves were semitough, like wet bay leaves, and the nut slices looked peppery. I handed him back the pouch. “No, no. Keep it till we get there,” he said. “We call it paan.” Rhymed with “wan,” and I was getting a little bit carsick.
“Tastes weird.” It was like the tough skin of a new fruit, and the sensation was bitter, but pleasant. My tongue tingled and I looked up, catching his face in the mirror.
He nodded, grinning. “Keep chewing.”
Ahead was Queens Boulevard.
Six wide lanes of stretch limos and smoke-belching buses racing past the strip joints and the pool halls, for the shopping malls and the nightclubs. My first girlfriend, from way back in high school. Her name. It was. Bhanu. Poor girl. We were young. She was so young. We went to a nearby school the size of a Texas prison, cut classes together, and hid in the stairwells. I remembered running from security officers in the Queens Center Mall, just a few blocks away, and how one time we found ourselves in the rug department at Macy’s, on the very top floor, and how we pushed the rolling stairs between the itchy hanging carpets and sat up there for hours, undetected, in the dark, rug dander all in the air. We talked and pretended this was exactly where we wanted to be. I stopped sneezes by cupping my hands in front of my mouth. She covered her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. It was all very sweet, like something out of a lesser John Hughes movie. We even etched the letters OMD into the wall behind the rugs, but then debated what the letters actually stood for. Bhanu.
Abdullah drove us by a hospital, and then by an old-folks’ home for the near dead. The traffic here was infamous, the street far too wide. It was often called the Boulevard of Death. I gave Abdullah a hearty thumbs-up.
The betel nut was bitter, with a pleasant tongue buzz. The tires bounced, and they bounced. I was getting a little high, which was ridiculous. I was headed home. Had my father ever gotten high in his life? Before I was born? What a thought! The world is alive before we get here. The blacktop whisked by under my outstretched arm.
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 4
