The New Black

by Richard Thomas

  “You’re right,” I said, looking down at my gray plaid socks. “It’s true. I’m gay. I’m really gay.”

  Jane grinned, tears coming to her eyes. She slid her arms around my neck and hugged me savagely, saying, “Doesn’t it feel like an incredible weight has been lifted, Jack?” and I nodded because it was true in a way. She was hugging me and my father was patting me on the back and Dr. Dank was celebrating by lighting my mother’s cigarette. It did feel good to have Jane feel proud of me, even for a moment, even for the absolute wrong reasons. I told everyone I loved them then and that I needed to get some sleep. Before I closed the door, I heard Dr. Dank announce that couples counseling for my sister and I would resume the very next day, and now that everything was in the open, our sessions were going to have to be bumped-up to twice a week.

  X

  I did not hear from Jill Thirby for almost a month, not until she called me to say that the cat we had found in the trash was dying. She asked me to come over and help her take it to the vet. I didn’t have any reason to say no. When I got to her room, Jill Thirby was standing in the door with a small cardboard box: inside the cat was curled up, mewling. Its eyes were barely open and its entire body seemed to shudder. “He looks bad,” I said.

  “I know. He keeps crying. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why did you call me?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t want to go by myself.”

  Jill Thirby had looked in the phone book and had found an animal shelter in midtown. We called and made an appointment and then waited at the bus stop. Twice I thought the cat was dead, its rheumy eyes gazing up at us without any kind of life, but then it started to cry again, the sound of which made my hands feel shaky.

  After we got to the shelter, after we were led down the hall to a tiny examination room, after the vet looked at the cat’s scrawny stomach and weak legs and failing kidneys, he suggested Jill Thirby have it put to sleep. Jill Thirby immediately started sobbing. I had never seen anyone crying before like that. She was trying to say something but she was crying too hard and so I took her hand. She had yellow mittens on and I felt the stitches there against my palm and said, “It’s okay,” and Jill Thirby nodded and then the vet disappeared, taking the cat with him, and we stood alone in the tiny white room, like we were on the set of some soap opera, and Jill Thirby was still crying, and then we were waiting at the bus stop, and then we were getting on the bus, and the whole time we were sitting there, she was still holding the empty cardboard box, and we sat beside each other, watching the buildings go past in a blur, riding past my stop, past the stop for her school, past the part of the city we knew, at that moment wondering who we were, what was going to happen to us, waiting, like everybody else, for someone to tell us what to do.

  Joe Meno

  is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of six novels including the bestsellers Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, and two short story collections including Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in One Story, McSweeney’s, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Hayden Ferry’s Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American-Review, Fourteen Hills, Washington Square Review, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago Magazine. He was a longtime contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine, before it ceased publication in 2007. His plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Paris, France. He is a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  VANESSA VESELKA

  Lyle claims he can cure faith. I asked him to do it. A year ago I wouldn’t have, I would have paid to believe in anything. But Elena gets worse every night. She fell asleep in my bed and when I checked on her I thought she wasn’t breathing because her little three-year-old face was so gray. It turned out to be nothing but the shadow of the quilt, though. I moved her stuffed sea lion closer to her and she rolled over on it dragging it down to the deep. Moments like those are more than I can take.

  The doctors just tell me to love her. Someone else suggested I pray.

  But belief of any kind at this point feels like being rocked in the arms of an insane mother—faith, that great and breaking bough—not with Elena at stake, I’m done with that.

  When Lyle gave me his card, I thought it was a joke. It had a picture of a beach on it with that poem about the footsteps. He had crossed out the words and written: You can be alone again. According to his website, he can extract the finest strands of transcendent hope. That’s what I’m counting on.

  I did break down and pray last night. I thought I felt something. I told Lyle and he said that it’s natural. He says faith is the only gateway to no faith. I asked what he meant and he said that beliefs, all beliefs, are like a series of tunnels.

  “What we’re after here is an open road.”

  He showed me the room where it’s going to happen. The walls are covered with pictures of Jesus, Shiva, JFK, Osiris, and the Mandelbrot Set. There are big black Xs through each of them. Lining the windowsill were smaller icons—Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Elvis, Malcolm X, Christopher Hitchens, and a woman I recognized from late-night infomercials who sold Ever Bliss™ powdered nutrient drinks. All in cheap plastic frames with the same black X over the image. Lyle had clearly snapped the shot of Hitchens off a TV screen with his phone and printed it out. The frame had no glass so I could see the streaks left by the Sharpie when he drew the X.

  “Nobody is pure anything,” Lyle said, “We have to get it all, even beliefs we think don’t count.”

  “But I don’t have any faith I just wish I did.”

  “Same thing.”

  But it’s not the same thing because if I were capable of any real belief I wouldn’t be here. I’d be gone.

  “I have no faith to take,” I said.

  “Besides,” said Lyle, “I’ll bet you have more faith than you think. It just takes different shapes. In situations like yours it usually just takes different shapes.”

  I thought of my Wiccan high school years and flushed. Then the Marias came to mind, the ones I could only take in Spanish or Bosnian, and the candles for the dead and Mexican rosewater, the vague years of humming rocks and shells and feathers and cigarette smoke blown in all four directions—Lyle was right. Faith was in me. It was like a curtain behind a curtain. Put a gun to my head and ask me if I believe in anything and I’d point to Elena and say, I don’t believe in a goddamned thing. Not if she’s going to die. But take that gun away? Faith grows back in me like a field of mushrooms. Almost overnight.

  “The first thing I need you to do,” Lyle said, “is to write down a history of belief. Like praying you don’t get caught stealing candy or calling Christians cowards when you’re drunk [!]. It’s all the same thing, it all has to go.”

  “Should I write it on anything special?”

  “Write it on anything. That’s the point.”

  I started that night and went all the way back to second grade when I thought I heard God’s voice in a dream. By the time I fell asleep the bush outside my window was filled with chattering finches. I know now what Lyle means when he says faith and no faith is the same thing. I saw both sides of the coin flipping through the air. He means they come from the same place, believing and hating believers, a single tree, and if you don’t pull out all the roots it grows back.

  X

  Elena goes to her Dad on Fridays. I don’t get a choice in that. The worst part is that if something happens to her over the weekend, I won’t be there. The idea that I wouldn’t be there when it counted, that I might be out somewhere not even thinking about her when the real stuff happened it just too much. I try not
to think about it but I do, all the time. I can’t sleep when she’s gone.

  There’s a revival going on down the street in a vacant lot out there in the weeds, right on the corner. They put up a tent. You can hear the preacher’s voice through the PA echoing off the basketball courts in the park two blocks away. I’ve been hearing it every night. At first it was just annoying. Another thing like gunshots and Greenpeace knocking on your door, stuff you should care about but don’t anymore because it happens all the time. All evening and into the night:

  God’s got it! God’s got it!

  And all the black voices calling it back.

  God’s got it! God’s got it!

  If they had been white I would have called the cops.

  Every day I walk through the reedy lot. I see them setting up for the revival. Raking the flattened clumps of grass. Chasing the newspaper tumbleweeds. Bagging the bottles and needles and collecting grocery store circulars, holding them in their hands like garish fans.

  They’ve been there all summer.

  Fix it, Jesus! Fix it!

  They yell out all the things that are wrong—

  Fix it! Fix it, Jesus! Fix it!

  They have a van full of clean white shirts for the converts and they come in all sizes. I saw a man that weighed over 400 pounds get saved. They wrapped him in white like a baby. No one is banned from the arms of Jesus. I imagine myself in white steeped in the smell of starch and irons and lemon water, and for a second, I’m pretty damn sure that if everybody would just get the hell away from me I could ride this feeling down into forever, this moment of grace, but they don’t and I can’t and it all breaks into smaller and smaller bits, even when they’re already so small you think they can’t, they do. Faith is like entropy according to Lyle. The heat it gives off is just from decline. It’s not a closed system.

  X

  Lyle set up our second consultation at the food court tables by the Orange Julius. He has a face like Eric Clapton’s; you’d never recognize him without context. Both times we met I thought it was a stranger approaching me.

  This time Lyle came with diagrams. He set his smoothie down and unfolded a sheet of paper, flattening it with his hand. On it was a genderless human form with tiny lines drawn all over the body. My body.

  “I’m thinking we’ll put the needles here.” He took a slug off his Orange Julius and pointed to a series of hash marks. “One for every belief.”

  I tried to see the pattern, but couldn’t really. Some lines looked like sutures and others more like Amish hex symbols or asterisks. My whole history of hope before me in train trestles and broken rails.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Is that the chakra system?”

  Lyle looked at me for a second then borrowed a pen and drew another set of lines on the figure. “You should have told me about that one.”

  Later on that night, I threw a full can of beer at someone’s head. I was at a show and it was a singer of this band I knew. He was prancing around, doing the Iggy Pop thing, rolling on glass with bloody handprints and finger streaks all over his chest. When he pulled himself up on the microphone stand I threw the beer can as hard as I could. The Pabst logo spun like a ninja shuriken across the heads of the audience.

  Lyle says he sees cases like mine all the time.

  I punched a wall when they threw me out. When I woke up, my knuckles were swollen and there was dried brown streaks of blood on my hand. After I washed up, I snuck over to see Elena. She and Silas were eating macaroni and cheese for breakfast when I came in. Her cheeks were sticky with orange sauce. In front of her was a huge, half-drunk glass of milk.

  “Is it hormone free?”

  “They were out.”

  “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come over.”

  He knows how I feel about those things. I keep Elena away from plastic and fish and she’s never had antibiotics.

  “That’s not the point,” I said, “We had an agreement.”

  “Yeah, and we also had an agreement about you not taking her to the doctor.”

  “There was something wrong with how she was breathing,” I said, “I didn’t take her right away, I watched her, for a long time. You would have taken her, too.”

  Silas looked me like I was wearing a wristband or a day pass or something. But I’m sick of seeing patience on people’s faces. It doesn’t affect me like it used to. You have to be an advocate. Silas will believe anything a doctor tells him. And the doctors say Elena meets all the developmental markers for her age. They say she’s fine. But she’s not fine. They don’t know her like I do and so they can’t see what’s happening. She’s changed. I’ve watched her now through countless car crashes, slips on the stairs, through terrible accidents on the playground when the bigger kids on the chain bridge pretend to shoot each other and knock her off. She’s not the same. It’s written all over her. She is going to die. Someday that is going to happen. And even though I don’t know when, I know it will be too soon.

  X

  Later in the week, I took Elena to the doctor so they could check out her lungs again but they wouldn’t see me. They just sent out a medical assistant and all she did was weigh Elena. I tried to make another appointment but they said to wait and see how she was doing in a few weeks. The scheduler in the waiting room gave Elena a rubber ball. It was the size of a plum, the color of honey and had a dolphin inside. Elena held it up to the light and showed me all the tiny flecks of glitter. I would rather have had some actual information, but I guess the glitter ball is something. Elena liked it, anyway.

  When I pulled back up to the house the evangelists were testing the PA system at the revival down the street.

  Check. Good afternoon. Check.

  The man tapped the microphone. The sound was like a concussion grenade.

  Check. Hello. Check.

  A shrill squeal rang out and then a loud crack. Someone killed the sound. I tried to get Elena out of the car seat but she didn’t want to put her arm through the strap because she had the dolphin ball in her fist and thought I was trying to make her give it up. Like I would take that thing from her? She can have all the glitter dolphin balls she wants.

  Down the street, they raised the volume slowly and I heard the man on the microphone’s clear voice arc upwards.

  Hello. Check. Sisters and brothers. Family in Christ.

  I know everyone dies but if I were a believer I wouldn’t mind. If I were a believer, I would go like a lover to meet my girl the second she was gone.

  I asked the guys on the corner to baptize me. I figured it was the only road left. I waited until Friday when Elena was at her dad’s and went over right when they were setting up.

  “Please,” I said, “I want to be in the arms of Jesus.”

  “Welcome, sister. What is your name?”

  “I want to be baptized.”

  I looked around for a pool or some kind of water.

  “Where do you do it?”

  He smiled. “In good order, sister, in good order.”

  “I live close-by. I have a kid pool. It doesn’t have to look like anything special. I know it’s not about that. I just need it to happen.”

  The man’s moisturized black hands settled on mine. I touched his starched white sleeve. His oiled hair shone, light inside each follicle.

  “Has the Lord called you?”

  “Not really. But can’t I call him?”

  He patted my hands.

  “Come back later. We’ll have you talk to one of the sisters.”

  He released my hand.

  In that moment I was aglow. I walked back towards the park at the end of the street then around the park and through it. It seemed to me like all the leaves were green moths that had only landed on the branch. I cut through the basketball courts and strolled under the Sugar Ma
ple and Ginko trees. I saw Elena in a yellow field. I was beside her and there was no end.

  From several blocks behind me I heard the preacher starting up and the crowd beginning to call back at him. My heart jumped because I thought I might have missed my chance to talk to the sisters and that there might be a list for those who want to be baptized and that it might fill up. I might even be told to come back the next night and I couldn’t, it I had to be on it this night because I don’t know how I will feel tomorrow. I turned and ran back to the revival to see if they were ready for me. They weren’t, though. People were just getting started. The man on the microphone wasn’t the main preacher, but another man and warming up the crowd as the dusk settled. When the last of the violet sky was gone, the street lamps along Martin Luther King Avenue turned on all at once. They cast wide circles of hazy light on the road through which cars passed breaking them into shards that leapt like shamans, like sparks, and threw a net out over the world.

  Sisters and brothers, are you ready to call on Jesus?

  The crowd rippled with small waves of energy and began to answer back. The feeling was leaving me. Already. I moved to the back of the crowd to see if that made a difference. I thought if it was all further away, it might feel more real. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t make it stay.

  I backed up and backed up until I was on the edge of the lot. Behind me was a tagged Plexiglas bus shelter and I sat down on the bench and waited. When it got darker the evangelists broke out the white shirts. One after another, men and women climbed the stairs to the platform and got saved. The preacher and the callers in their own white shirts moved over the stage like great actors. But it was Kabuki to me then. When they were done they packed the leftover white shirts into cardboard boxes and loaded them back into the van with the sound gear for the next night. I called Lyle and asked him to come and get me.