Before I met Bhanu, cutting class was my way to spend the day, and such a lonely way! I often found myself just spending the time, as if I had so much of it, although I guess you really do when you’re young. Sometimes I got as far as the front steps of school, only to turn around and get right back on a city bus. It was thrilling, an autonomous thing to do, a thing done outside, in the world, beyond the stricture of the Laudermilk home. I liked that my parents didn’t know where I was, liked nobody knowing where I was. I liked being alone. And, yes, I sometimes exacerbated that feeling with appropriately morose New Wave music. I had a pale blue Depeche Mode T-shirt, and I kept it hidden from my parents. Sometimes I stuffed it in my backpack before leaving. One time, I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I took the bus back along Woodhaven Boulevard but went beyond my stop, where I usually got off, and I was fascinated to see the bus actually kept on going. Inside me, somewhere, I already knew more existed, of course, but to see where it went, to go where it went, and see all the people on the bus come suddenly alive: it was exhilarating. I took it to the end of the line. Charles Park in Howard Beach. Where it was empty, and desolate, and gray, and I saw what looked like a junkie girl, who I’m pretty sure was pregnant, or had an abnormally round and jutting belly, passed out on a stone park bench, and a little girl was sitting in the dirt beside her looking totally lost. I turned around and walked all the way home, I don’t know how many miles, all along that same bus route, partly to see anything I might have missed, and partly to fill my time, to spend it, but also partly as punishment for cutting class and submitting myself so willingly to such a sad sight so early in the morning. I’d also recently heard—and when I say “recently,” I mean with respect to visiting Dad, with respect to sitting with Mr. Abdullah in his cab, I’m not still talking school, here—I’d heard of Buddhist monks who could literally focus all of their energies, focus their blood flow and brain waves on any ailing organ of the body, harness and direct every cerebral effort. I saw it on the National Geographic channel. I’ve always loved this channel, the volcano documentaries and the earthquake specialists, the end-of-the-world scenarios and the survivalist shows. The idea of the monks, it stayed with me, it attracted me. I wanted control like that. Can you imagine? They even could slow their heart rates just short of death. Then again, who wants to get so close? I mean, who did these monks think they were? Lounging in their fancy saffron-colored robes. It’s not like they were romantic figures for me, not at all. I’d never be comfortable in such loose swaddling, too much freedom. But I was becoming interested in what they did on the inside with all that off-spark, the like-lightning dancing around our skullcapped Tesla coils. How did they do it? Sarah always said to be wary of questions like this, they can be dangerous. She said those stories you hear of pilgrims who climb mountains in search of bearded gurus, those are about the lucky ones who made it back alive. The ones who saunter into town, hair mussed, unshaven and sexy, robe a little soiled, and they spend the remainder of their lazy days pondering the answer to their one very special question. But what about the ones who never make it back, the ones who fall? The ones who slip and break their legs, and die from starvation at the bottom of a gorge? What about the ones who die on the way back down, left to rot on the hard slanting rock? What about them…? Hmmm…?
I started recognizing the old neighborhoods. A corner Te Amo convenience store, where I used to play video games and tried stealing peeks at the girlie magazines. We were close.
“Good, right?” Abdullah pointed at his mouth. “The feeling.”
“What?” I said. “Yeah.” The park roads were empty and the way was smooth.
“It will never come again,” he said. “Your head knows what it tastes like now.” We turned off the boulevard, and took to the hilly asphalt interior roads of Forest Park.
“Now what?”
“Just drive,” I said. “Is that okay? Don’t worry about the meter. I have money.”
“Everything is on the way to everything.”
The green leaves and high bush were everywhere, thousands and thousands of trees among the pour and sway of concrete and blacktop surrounded by the pigeon-shitted rooftops of Queens, over five hundred acres of wood thickets and wilds in the middle of the New York City suburbs. There were rumors, when I was a kid, of families having picnics and going for long walks and vanishing forever among the towering oaks. There was talk of a child-killer living in a dried-up streambed. A lean-to in the sand. The taxi carriage floated some just before descending a large hill, and my heart did a light bird flutter. I thought of Sarah, wondered where she was and what she was having for lunch. I used to do all the cooking and was heartbroken to find out she was apparently eating just fine without me. And her new friend—was he a boyfriend by then? I’m not sure.… I like to think definitely, no. Regardless, he cooked. And the last time we’d talked, I interrupted dinner. She had told me she needed some time, and maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore for a while. I said I called because I wanted to tell her I was going to New York, to see Dad. And I might be gone for a while.
“Good,” she said.
Good?
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you have to say? We might never talk again.”
I heard her friend in the background. He was Greek and every island-accented syllable from his mouth, no matter how banal, sounded like a serenade. I hated it.
“What do you want from me, Josie?”
I didn’t answer. And I stayed quiet like that for a while, until she finally sang out: “I’m hanging up now.…”
I saw Abdullah’s eyes in the mirror.
With my arm jutting through the open window, an upswell of cool air broke on my skin. It smacked at my face. It felt good. I stuck my head out the window and into the wind.
When I was twelve years old I had a vision. Even now saying that makes me uncomfortable. It feels strange, alien, like the memory of a scene from a film. An old and faded dream. What is a vision, anyway? I’m not sure I’m better suited to answer the question than anyone else. I’d even go so far as to say anybody who says they know is lying. Even the word “vision” is tricky, as if it names one of the natural senses. But you don’t really see anything. I read up on the topic, years later, when I was trying to get a handle on the thing. Sarah helped, and gave me some books. She was a translator, mostly of Hebrew poetry, novels, but sometimes scripture, too, religious texts, and so she had a helpful take. Plus, the story appealed to her—the idea of me, onstage, as a kid. But she never fully got how it made me so uneasy. Still does. And how could she? How could anybody?
I did see something, though. But first, I heard something.
I definitely heard a voice. Not a “voicelike sound,” and psychiatrists are careful to point out the difference, but a voice. Not that I’ve seen psychiatrists. I’m not crazy. But I did read books. Which is not to say you’re crazy if you see a psychiatrist. Sarah went to one for years, her mother was one, and Sarah was fine. I probably should’ve seen one. I’m losing my point—I heard a voice, and it told me what to say, and so I said it. What did it sound like? If I’m honest, it sounded like me. Exactly like me. But it wasn’t me. There’s a scientific theory that says our belief in God comes from a voice like this one, that early humans were not fully conscious, not aware they “were,” and so before we knew we were thinking, we simply heard a voice. That voice. The voice was not our own, and it told us what to do, and we did it. I think maybe something like this was happening to me. Which is not so strange, if you think about it. I’ve had a song or piece of music stuck in my head for hours at a time, days, and I swear I’m not the one who put it there. I hear it played inside the concert hall of my head, on repeat, in a loop, and I have no control over the noise whatsoever. What was it I heard back then? I can’t remember, not precisely, but it was something like “Do it now.”
I remember looking out past the audience and what did I see?
I saw what looked like a giant white horse. I then turned to my father. He was
nodding, slow-motion-like, in a dream, and I heard it say again, “Do it now.”
Like it was yesterday, I can see the horse, right out there in front of me, coming through the back wall of the theater. By the lobby doors and under the balcony; the rider wore a golden crown. I blinked, standing out there onstage. I shook my head, lowered my arms, and then I saw what it really was: a huge painted mural of a great white horse. I hadn’t noticed it before—because it was too big? I don’t know. But it was actually back there and beyond the audience, gallop-frozen, on a heavenly burst of cloud luster. I touched the action figure in my pocket, and thought of the tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back, the large horselike creatures that walk reared back on their hind legs, and I pretended the horse was real. It was big, and beautiful, and painted so painstakingly, and its eyes were the glassy kind that stared right back and looked alive. The horse was looking right at me, and it would come hurtling through the wall at any moment. The plaster would crackle and shatter, gushing white powder on the carpet.
I heard it again: “Do it now.” So I spoke.
My parents were sitting there in the front row, their mouths partly open, just looking, and wondering what in the world had come over their boy. The elders and the servant brothers were side-stage, now, and calling me over. But I couldn’t hear them. I looked out at the faces, of friends, and family, and strangers mostly, and of Issy. I don’t like to think about Issy anymore. Waving from his balcony seat, sort of haltingly.
Time slowed.
A cool and clear muffle of silence in the hall, and I could feel a sort of velvety veil about to be lifted. I looked at my notes. They had dropped to the floor. Were my parents angry? Was I in trouble? I saw them as if through thick glass, or deep water, and I couldn’t hear or touch anything outside my head at all. I was standing at the edge of a high cliff, and I looked at my notes on the floor … Was I shouting just now? I think I was shouting. And then the audience exploded with applause. I heard everything, I saw everything, and I felt every texture in the hall for a long moment. I was every last body all at once, and I drank in the applause like it was a large cup of RC Cola. Mom and Dad stood from their seats, and they were clapping. All four thousand people, and they loved me—they loved me! I’d even dropped my notes on the floor, and they loved me. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say next, and so I did what just came naturally: I recited scripture. And then I went off script completely, swept away in a rush of something new, some new me; maybe God did grant me sight, a revelation. A glimpse of what waits for this world.
He showed me a horse.
And I gave them what they wanted, what we all wanted: I gave them a date. I gave them what no one else would give them—or would they? I’ve often wondered, since then, if some other sermon had to be changed that day because of me and my big mouth. I gave them the day and the hour of the End. It would be twenty years more before I was wrong.
But at that moment I was the Josiah, king of the four thousand Christians, God’s mouthpiece. It was like filling up with every bit of light and heat that had ever passed through my body. I was Blake’s Great Revelation Angel, glorious and towering. Of course, I didn’t think it at the time, only later on, like when I first saw that illustration in a coffee-table art book, but my God, that’s just how I felt. I figured everything would be different. School would be different. And I figured if I bowed they would just keep on clapping. So with a small stiff arm at my waist, I bowed. The audience answered again! Another swell of applause! Which did what but just make me hungrier. I can still see that kid from way out here, through all this stuff we think of as time, the small and early spirit-hungry version of me—stepping out from behind the microphone and, boy, just look at him bow. No, he curtseys. Like it’s his grand opening night, like it’s his coronation. He curtseys, and the audience can’t help themselves. Some people actually lose themselves in laughter, in appreciation, an ovation, and maybe some in their enthusiasm actually tarnish the dignity of the whole affair because let’s not forget this is supposed to be worship, a serious business, God’s business, but then again, who are we kidding: the kid is good. Curtseying, for crying out loud! Now raising a hand like No, thank you. Little me waves to the back, like some visiting ambassador. Remembering the scene sent me reeling, feeling every little thing all at once.
I thought of looking out there at my mother’s face, the face of my lovely and still alive mother. Hands folded at her mouth, eyes teary with pride. My father nodding his head, My boy … The elder brothers from the side of the stage whispering: “Hey, psst, hey, time to leave the stage…”
I looked at Mom, and I took in a very deep breath. I concentrated on that small thing that lives way inside (I have tried this since and failed miserably): the tiny, invisible, indestructible point—but sometimes it fills up a room and touches its head to the ceiling; how big a horse would I need, if a heavenly horse came riding and rearing from back in the aisles? Come the final day, come Armageddon, the blood will flow and fill the streets, high as God’s holy horses, the elder brothers waving me over …
Wait a second now: Whose blood?
I literally asked myself this question. This I remember more clearly than anything because it was the question that pulled me down to earth. I’d recited this scripture how many times without thinking? How many things are like this in life? Whose blood? My good mother would one day slip and swim through whose wet blood? The applause started dying away …
And then my mother nudged with her chin, a throw of her chin, like Go on, sweetie, go ahead. And Dad looking like, Hey, it’s gotta end sometime …
I looked around the theater, one more time.
My mother would wade through a river of whose dead blood exactly? Red blood? Real blood? I looked up at the sky, at the cosmic ceiling, at the butter-yellow moon, and I don’t know how I’d missed it! Even from way down there, onstage, I could plainly see it. Across the moon was a jagged line like a lightning bolt, a crack in the painted plaster probably not even wide enough for a finger. But if that moon were real, the crack would have been a canyon twenty miles wide. The ceiling was just a ceiling.
Does this make any kind of sense? Pictures of planets don’t make planets, Josiah! The sky was painted prettily, yes. We were in a theater! In Queens! The trash bags were piled out front by the sidewalk, and the soda trucks were driving by in the street, and there was a whole world of warm-blooded people out there who had not an inkling of our blood-spilling talk inside. I actually played the phrase in my head several times in the following days: “The ceiling is really a ceiling.”
I sat there in the back of Abdullah’s cab, and thought of my father and how many different fathers we all have, of how many I’d had. All of them Gill, but different. There was the father I had when I was a kid, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be present with me in the world, for him to stop acting like I had something to give him, and to momentarily put aside his worship for a game of checkers. There was the father who argued with my mother, who soon insisted that church worship was no longer enough, and he wanted more worship at home. There was the father who eventually refused church altogether—but never God—when Mom got sick; and if already Dad was in a boat all his own—and he very much was—Mom’s getting sick made him pull up the gangplank. There was the father who frightened me, who prayed for hours, on his knees, facing a wall, who I believe at least one time deliberately hurt himself; I was young and so I can’t recall when for sure, but I remember finding him on his knees, in the garage, and slamming his thighs with a large yellow phone book, again, and again, and again; Mom rushed in, took me away, and shut the door behind us. There was my deliberate insomniac of a father, the man who paced, back and forth, in the kitchen, in the garage, on the sidewalk, who stayed up for days sometimes, refusing sleep, showing increasing signs of what I see now was temporary dementia. Mom would tell me not to worry and just leave him be. That my father was praying. One night, I was maybe nine or probably ten, it was three or four in the m
orning, I heard the early insects, and someone talking in our backyard. I went downstairs and looked out the kitchen window. I saw him pacing, talking to himself. I slowly opened the door, very slowly. I heard him repeating scripture like a mantra: “And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from the Earth, and the top of it reached up to Heaven, and the angels were climbing up and down. And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from Earth, and…” This made me afraid, and feel lost, unprotected. Except then I realized, as my eyes got used to the darkness, that my mother was sitting there in front of me, right at my feet, on the top porch step. She didn’t turn around. She said, “Go to bed, love.”
Most of that behavior, the more extreme kind, stopped the famous summer of my “vision,” or whatever you want to call what happened. It seemed the very thing he’d been waiting for. And of course there was the father who tossed me aside when I left New York. Last of all, the father who lost my mother. I’d wondered how he’d go on. But he did. I wondered who he was now, without Mom. Was he different? How different? Without Sarah, I felt lost inside my own body, and she was alive and well.
I decided my favorite version of Dad was a young Gill Laudermilk, looking like an older Luke Skywalker, back when he and I assembled my first sermons in the garage, and I practiced speaking in the full-length mirror by his study desk, when he let me drive his station wagon, a brand-new Ford Country Squire, fire-engine red, in a nearby supermarket parking lot. My favorite mother was the great protector who once boxed the ears of a sixteen-year-old neighborhood bully because he had tripped me. A wide gash had opened in my bottom lip when my chin hit the sidewalk. Mom once said, “Never listen to what others say about your father, because your father is a man of God.” She followed his every revelatory whim, every iteration. My favorite father drove up our street in his Country Squire like he was in a homecoming parade; he honked his horn and grinned from behind the windshield, saying, My son’s gonna learn how to drive! Wheels crunching gravel in the driveway, he shouted: This old world, my boy, it’s sinking! So if now’s not the time to splurge, tell me when? Tell me when!… The porch of our house was a covered porch, yellow with white wooden columns, and you could see the newly built Sikh temple behind our yard, and around the corner its pear-shaped rising roof, and my mother watching the workers disassemble the scaffolding, saying, What happened to the Irish and Italians, good churchgoers, this neighborhood is so brown … From the porch, we watched lightning storms while sitting on the sofa my father had found in a trash pile ten blocks away. It smelled of basement wet and hot asphalt, and sat in front of the living room window, opposite the sofa on the window’s other side, inside, where we watched old movies and ate peanuts from orange plastic cups. Mom used to say, Star Wars makes me so nauseous. I mean it’s exciting, Josiah, it is, but the world can never get that way because we won’t last that long. Armageddon’s right around the corner … Sausages simmering in the Crock-Pot.… It’s not easy! she’d say. But not much longer before our Heavenly Father comes home. And it’s so, so sad that no one in the neighborhood will ever see Heaven, because the Hindus don’t know Jesus. These statues of Ganesh, circus elephants sitting pretty with flowers in their hands, this is God? Abomination!
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 5
