“Oh. Hey,” I mumbled.
“This is Detective Conrad,” said my father. “He’s, uh…working on the case. On, you know, Ryan’s….”
I acknowledged the man. “Hey.”
The detective sat down in the chair next to me, which made me a little uncomfortable. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I’d never really done too well with figures of authority. He said, “How are you doing, Jonathan?”
The question took me by surprise. No one had really even noticed me since that morning—except Jesus—and now that someone had, it seemed so silly. Maybe I was just numb, or in shock, or confused, because the only thing I could think to say was, “What do you mean? I’m alive. I’m fine.”
He paused, took a breath, and continued. “Now Jonathan, I’ve explained everything we know so far to your father, and he can fill you in on the details, but before you go I just want to ask you a few questions, okay?”
“Sure.”
The detective exchanged a glance with my father, then continued. “Have you noticed anything strange about Ryan lately?”
“No,” I replied, not really understanding what he meant by “strange.”
“Did he seem happy, normal, upbeat over the past few weeks?”
“I guess. Ryan’s always a pretty upbeat guy.”
“When was the last time you saw Ryan?”
And then it happened. The whole thing just came flooding back to me. Alistair, the woods, the drugs—everything. It’s amazing, and almost ridiculous, that I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but I swear that I hadn’t. I was about to blurt it all out, too—tell them everything. But just as I took a breath to speak, something stopped me. And maybe it was just some kind of guilt, or loyalty, or a habitual reaction not to rat out my brother (especially to a cop), but what really stopped me was the one single, absurd, yet irrepressible thought: Ryan will kill you if you tell them.
Of course, I knew, logically, that Ryan would never have the opportunity to “kill” me again…but I couldn’t shake the thought. Ryan will kill you, Jon. And he will never forgive you.
“I don’t know. Yesterday morning, I guess.”
“And did he say anything unusual to you?”
“No. I don’t think he said anything to me at all.”
“Now, according to his teammates, Ryan went for a run after practice, and headed off toward the trail behind the school, alone. Is this something Ryan did often, as far as you know? Go running by himself after a full practice?”
“I…um…guess so. He liked to run.”
The detective put a hand on my shoulder. “And you’re sure he hasn’t been acting strange lately? Even a little?”
“No,” I said, sort of truthfully (other than the drugs, he hadn’t been). “Not that I’ve noticed.”
Conrad seemed satisfied with my answers. “Okay, then, Jonathan. That’s really all I need to know.”
“So…what happened?” I asked.
He looked at my father, then back at me. “Well, it seems that the trail Ryan had taken was still wet from the morning’s rain, and he lost his footing somewhere along a three- or four-foot stretch that follows right by the edge of the ravine.”
The tears began to well in my father’s eyes. He squeezed my shoulder, but I couldn’t really feel it.
The detective continued: “Really, if you want my opinion, this was an accident waiting to happen. Now I’m not saying you should go sue the school or anything, but it’s safe to say they owe you more than just an apology. There should be some kind of barrier along that trail. I mean what happens when one of the other athletes decides to take a jog…?”
My father didn’t seem to be paying attention. The detective squinted over his eyeglasses, waiting for a response, and I nodded comprehension for both of us.
“The good news is, the school already told us they’ll be putting up a fence. Now, I’m no lawyer, but that seems to me to be at least a partial admission that something was wrong in the situation.”
My father finally composed himself enough to speak. He said, “So that’s it? You don’t need anything else from us?”
Conrad rose to his feet. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “The only thing left is for the medical examiner to do an autopsy. In a week or two we’ll get a report back, just to make sure there was nothing unusual.”
“Unusual?” said my dad, turning his eyes sternly on the detective.
“It’s just a formality, sir. We have no ulterior suspicions at all. He was probably just low on blood sugar, or lightheaded, or…” The detective paused. “Or maybe God just thought it was his time to go.”
This seemed to annoy my father, the claim that God was somehow responsible for all of this. And honestly, it annoyed me, too. Why did people always feel the need to corrupt life’s purest moments—whether joyous or tragic—with their own obnoxious beliefs?
Ryan was dead. That was the only truth. Ryan was dead and Ryan was dead and Ryan was dead and Ryan was dead. Ryan was dead and there was nothing I could do about it…but not because God, Harry Potter, the Tooth Fairy, or any other damned fictional character killed him.
Here’s the crazy thing, though: I never once, while I was in that police station, stopped to question Detective Conrad’s judgment. Maybe it was because I was so overwhelmed by my own existential dilemmas, maybe I was in shock, or maybe I was just too damned sad. But it never once occurred to me just how ridiculous his theories were. Of course something more sinister was afoot than low blood sugar. I left Ryan in the midst of a drug-enraged fistfight! Any of a hundred dark and terrible sequences of events could have led to his flying over the edge of that cliff—any of a thousand, even—but certainly it was no accident; I should have at least put that much together. If there was one thing I should have ruled out it was fucking glucose.
Four
I was only nine years old when Ryan told me there was no such thing as God. At the time, it didn’t seem like such a strange thing to do; I was even grateful, for a little while. After all, he was just being honest, just looking out for me, just trying to show me the truth through everyone else’s lies. But now, looking backing on it, I’m not quite so sure. I think maybe he should have known better; maybe he should have kept it to himself; maybe he should have known that one day he might not be there to help me cope with the consequences of such a loss.
I hadn’t thought about that day for years, and I probably never would have if it hadn’t been for Jesus Jackson, and his curious offer to “build” me some faith. So when my dad dropped me off after our trip to the police station, I found myself sitting on the floor in Ryan’s room, thinking back on all of those times we spent talking about gods, about the universe, and about what really happens when you die. It was somehow so comforting and yet so painful at the same time. I loved recalling our endless deep, philosophical conversations, but there’s a darkness about those memories, too. I don’t know—maybe it’s because our little club wound up ending so abruptly. Or then again, maybe it’s because, in the end, we never found any answers.
At any rate, this is how it happened:
It was a lazy summer weekend, a Sunday, and I was playing in the backyard, pretending to be a ninja and getting grass-stains on my church clothes. Ryan called me over to the side of the house, next to the garage where no one could see us from inside. He was twelve at the time, and it was a very clear aspect of our relationship that I did what I was told or suffered the consequences. Besides, I sort of worshipped him.
“Sit down,” he said. He looked serious, and a little sad. “We have to talk.”
I sat Indian-style in the dirt, staring up at him with great attention. I remember assuming that he was about to send me on one of his usual missions—hide a broken vase, steal five dollars from our father’s wallet, return a basketball to the neighbor’s garage—but it was nothing so innocent.
Instea
d, Ryan took a knee, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Jonathan, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the whole God thing? It’s a big lie.”
My first thought was that Ryan must be taking drugs. You see, our mother was a devout Catholic, had raised us as devout Catholics (I had just received my first communion, and was about to begin serving as an altar boy—a fact that nauseates me to this day) and she was always drilling into us her lunatic notion that any lapse in churchly duties would lead instantly and inevitably to drug addiction and death (usually from either a car crash, an STD, or both). Her typical response, for example, to one of us complaining that we didn’t feel like going to church every day of Easter week was a long string of reprimands, followed by something like, “…and the next thing you know you’ll be addicted to the drugs, crashing some god-awful sports car and have a disease you’ll get from one of those tramps up by the gazebo!”
So I asked Ryan point-blank. “Ryan, are you addicted to the drugs?”
“What?” he said, caught off guard. “No. Listen, Jonathan, you can’t always believe everything Mom tells you. That’s kind of the point. She’s been telling you that there’s a god, but it just isn’t true.”
I was still confused. “But Rye, if there’s no god, then who do Jesus and the Holy Spirit sit next to all the time in heaven?”
He shook his head and swirled the dirt with his finger, seeming to find my naiveté profoundly sad. “No, Jon-Jon. There’s no Jesus, either, and no Holy Spirit. There are no saints and no angels and no heaven or hell or devil or any of that stuff.”
Now you’ve got to understand, Ryan had a history of getting me to believe some pretty tall tales—that our father was a Russian spy, that the scruffy-bearded guy down the block was really Wolverine in disguise, that if I ate too many Blow Pops my brain would turn blue—but I could tell he was being serious about this. There was no mischief in his eyes; no sense of fun or amusement at all.
But I just couldn’t quite make sense of it all; not yet. “So then who is the guy on the cross at the church? And who is the priest always talking about the whole time?”
“It’s all just made up, Jon. It’s not real. It’s just a story. It’s fiction.”
It wasn’t until he spoke that last word—fiction—that I began to grasp what he was really telling me. You see, I had some major issues with the whole fiction-versus-reality line when I was little. Until I was almost seven, I just assumed that everything I ever saw or heard was true: every story, every movie, every cartoon—everything.
It’s not that odd, really, when you think about it; no one ever told me differently. I just assumed, naturally, that at one point in real space and time Sam I Am had been really pushy with his favorite breakfast, that Sesame Street was an actual place with a humorous assortment of improbably fluffy residents, and that somewhere under the ocean, probably near Florida, there really was an absorbent, yellow, porous little sponge named Bob, living in a pineapple and doing his darnedest to be employee-of-the-month at the Krusty Krab.
It all began to fall apart, however, with Santa Claus. Ryan (of course) had told me, in very much the same way he had just told me about God, that Santa Claus wasn’t real, and that neither were the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. At first, my parents tried to deny it all, but once I started ranting about how I couldn’t deal with Santa being fake because that would mean that Batman and SpongeBob and Harry Potter probably weren’t real either, they knew that there was a problem.
I won’t get into all of the messy details that followed, but let’s just say that there was a long talk, a lot of me crying and screaming things like, “You lied to me!” and at the end of it I was left with some very sensitive issues about the whole “fiction-versus-reality” thing.
So when Ryan told me that God, and all the other stuff that went with God, actually fit into the “fiction” category, I didn’t doubt it for a moment.
We sat there for a long time in silence. Ryan was swirling endless spirals into the dirt, and I was just staring off into a sky that was now created by nobody. Finally, I turned to my big brother, and said, “Thanks for telling me.”
“No problem. I thought you should know.”
“How did you find out?”
He told me to wait a second and ran into the house. When he came back he was holding a King James Bible in his hand. “Just read this,” he said. “It makes it pretty obvious.”
I ran to my room, opened up to page one, and started to read. It only took me about half a page to see what Ryan was talking about. I mean, the whole creation of everything in the universe in a week was sketchy enough, but as soon as “God” created a woman out of Adam’s rib, I decided I had read enough. That kind of nonsense wouldn’t even fly on Power Rangers.
So I decided right away to confront my mother. I would tell her all about this “no God” thing, and she would either summon up some irrefutable proof of his existence, or crumble (like she had with Santa Claus) behind a long string of nonsense about how he would exist if I just really really believed in him.
I found her in the kitchen, cooking. I stood in the living room for quite a while before I worked up the courage to go in, torn and conflicted and on the verge of tears. I wanted so bad for her to tell me that there was a god and that Ryan was just being silly, but I also wanted her to tell me the truth…and I just didn’t see how she could do both at the same time.
Finally, mustering all of my strength, I turned and stood in the doorway, glaring at her with my hands on my hips. I whispered: “Why did you lie to me about God?”
She looked up from her casserole. “Excuse me?”
“You lied to me. God isn’t real.” Then I lost the battle against my emotions, and the tears just started to fall.
She rushed over, picked me up and sat me on her lap. “What do you mean? Of course God is real.”
“Then why can’t I ever meet him? Why does nobody ever see him except in pictures? Why does he have so many crazy powers that no people could ever really have, just like Santa Claus and Dumbledore?”
She was clearly taken aback, and remained speechless for a few seconds. Finally, she stammered, “It’s just…different. With God you…you have to have faith.”
I was skeptical. “What do you mean?”
“Well faith is when you believe something is real, even though you can’t see it, or touch it, or hear it…because you know it’s real…or…because it is real.”
That was all I needed to hear. She might as well have told me to clap if I believed in fairies. I got up off her lap, and as I moped out of the room, I turned my head slightly and mumbled under my breath, “I used to have faith…in Batman.”
Ryan had taken off somewhere on his bike, so I waited for him on the front stoop of our house, my face in my palms, elbows on my knees. He didn’t come home for nearly an hour, and as I sat there, sweating and crying under the hot July sun, the ramifications of this absence of a god began to dawn on me: If there was no god, then no one was watching me when my parents weren’t around. No one was keeping track of me when I was good or when I was bad. I could do whatever I wanted, and there would be no consequences.
On the other hand, though, no one cared if I lived or died. No one would protect me and my family from a car crash, or a disease, or a robber. No one would fend off a hockey-mask-wearing serial killer at summer camp, or hear me when I wanted a new bike for Christmas…and Christmas, what about that, anyway? I could barely handle there not being a Santa Claus, but no Jesus either? What was left? Did it even have a point anymore? Did any holiday have a point anymore? Or worse—did anything have a point anymore? Was I just going to live my whole life with nobody watching or caring what happens to it, just to die someday, and….
Oh, crap.
After some more consideration, I decided I liked it better when there was a god. So when Ryan finally came around the corner, I told him so. “I thin
k there has to be a god,” I said. “I think I sort of need one.”
Ryan turned his face to the sky. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“But there isn’t one…right?”
He sat down beside me. “Well, at least not the one that everyone’s always talking about. He just doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah. I guess not.”
Ryan put his hand on my back. “But I have plan.”
“What kind of a plan?”
He smiled mischievously. “We’re going to get a new one.”
“A new what?” I didn’t like that smile.
“A new god!” he said, clearly trying to cheer me up. “A better one.”
“Oh.” I sighed, disappointed. “So it’ll just be make-believe too.”
“Oh no. Ours will be real.”
“What are you talking about? If we make it up, it will be fiction. That’s how fiction works.”
“Sure, if we make it up,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “But if we discover it, then it will be real.”
“Discover it? You mean, like, find it?”
“Exactly. The truth has to be there. We just need to find it.”
“But how do we do that?”
“Leave it up to me,” he said, tousling my hair. “I’ll start poking around on the Internet tonight.”
I sat there next to Ryan for a long time, quietly thinking about everything he had said. It did make some sense, after all—people discovered things that were real all the time: Columbus discovered America, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity, and people were constantly discovering things in the ground like new types of dinosaurs and old buildings and ant colonies. And besides, if you were going to discover the truth about God, the Internet did seem like the logical place to start.
“Okay,” I said finally. “What do I do? I want a job too.”
Ryan stroked his chin a few times. “Well, for something like this, I think there’s only so much you can figure out online. Why don’t you go around to some of the other churches in town, maybe even some of the synagogues too? See if you can find anything useful.”
Jesus Jackson Page 3
