The end of that work day arrived, after Craig checked in to clarify what to do with a few odd hardware items and to say his allergies were still at bay. Philly smiled at the cheerful and unruffled manner with which Craig accepted the healing. He did wonder whether Craig would think differently when no longer faced by Philly and the hidden Jesus, or when his friends scrutinized the story, never fully confident that Craig’s curb appeal carried very far inside. But maybe all of that recursive thinking originated in Philly’s guarded relationship with Dennis and not in Craig or in Philly’s relationship with the pleasant, young computer technician.
As he headed for the front door, Philly realized he was a couple of minutes early. Whether he had genuinely forgotten his ban, or was mulling a revolt against it, he didn’t know himself; but he took two steps toward Brenda’s department before stopping himself and reversing back to the glass doors and the flash of bright sunshine outside them. Jesus had not made the brief detour, walking steadily toward the outside, as if he knew all along that Philly wouldn’t follow that urge to see Brenda. Philly followed Jesus through the doors, though he had to actually open them to pass outside.
Jesus looked back over his shoulder. “She’ll be here,” he said.
Philly nodded in reply and then shot an apologetic look at the architect who had exited the building with him, unsure whether the older man had noticed him nodding to his imaginary friend. The architects generally regarded the computer guys as an alien race, anyway, so Philly wasted no more energy worrying about the impression he left. As he walked to the bus stop with Jesus, his phone rang. Philly answered the generic ring tone of an unrecognized number.
“Hello,” he said, the slight wind only gently buffeting his voice between his lips and the microphone.
“Philly? This is Dad,” said an unfamiliar voice. That voice sounded similar to his father’s, as if Philly were hearing a different version of his father, like Dad 2.0.
“Dad?” he said, his voice arching doubtfully.
“Yeah, I got a new cell phone,” the voice said.
“Dad, you got yourself a cell phone?”
“Yeah, your mother thinks I’m crazy, of course, but it’s about time I got one of these things. It’s not one of those fancy ones with movies and stuff on ‘em, just a freebie that comes with the contract, y’ know.”
“Okay,” Philly said, picking up his pace from the diminishing stagger he had unconsciously adopted.
“I can hear now, of course,” Dad said, “so this all works much better than it did before. I can hear you real clear.”
“Yeah, I guess that would make a big difference,” Philly said. Elements formerly rooted in his brain had broken loose and now floated uncontrollably up and away from the planet on which he had once lived.
“So, here’s the real thing I wanted to call you about. I thought you’d understand,” Dad said, stretching his newly won record for longest initiated phone conversation in his son’s adult life. “I called the pension board from the plant, and the new company that owns them now, and I told them that my ears had been healed, so they could adjust my disability and retirement benefits.”
Philly stood still on the wide, gray sidewalk. His bus approached the stop, but he had ended his own approach twenty feet short. “You told them you were healed?”
“Yeah.” Dad laughed. “I had to explain it to six different people and to three of ‘em twice.” He sounded giddy.
Philly briefly considered whether his dad was drunk so early in the day, but then looked at Jesus, who was gesturing toward the bus. Philly took off at a slow trot and hopped on, just in front of the clamping doors. He fumbled for his pass, ran it through the scanner and then stumbled toward an empty seat, as the bus lurched away from the curb.
“What did they say?” Philly said, as he tried to pocket his wallet and sit down.
“They said they didn’t have any way to process a claim like mine and I should just leave things the way they are. One guy said, I probably should have gotten disability years earlier, anyway, so I deserved to keep getting it,” Dad said, a hilarious bounce in his voice.
“Man, Dad, that was gutsy. I can’t believe you did that. What did Ma say?”
Dad snorted a laugh. “She couldn’t speak. Can you imagine that? She couldn’t speak. She took some aspirins and went to bed. I’ll tell her to stop worrying when she wakes up from her nap,” he said.
Jesus spoke up, as if he were hearing the entire conversation. “Tell him to go ahead and talk to her now. She’s not asleep and she really needs to hear that everything is okay,” he said.
Philly started to report these instructions and then noticed that the woman seated next to him was tuned into his conversation. “Ah, my friend says you should go ahead and tell her now.”
“Your friend?” Dad said.
“You know, the one who helped you with your hearing.”
“Oh, you mean Jesus?”
“Yeah, he says she’s not asleep and needs to hear the news right away.”
“He can do that? I mean he can see her or something?”
Philly could tell that his dad had opened the kitchen door and entered the house. Apparently he had been calling from the driveway, just like Eileen and Philly did with their cell phones. Philly waited a moment as his dad walked without talking.
“Hey, he’s right, she’s awake,” he said in a hushed tone. “Okay, talk to you later. And thank your friend for the advice.” His dad chuckled.
“Okay, bye Dad.”
Philly tapped “End Call,” on the phone and slipped it into his pocket, sleepwalker fashion.
“It wasn’t a nutty thing to do, Philly,” Jesus said, challenging the protester in Philly’s head. “It was honest and trusting and the right thing to do.”
Philly stopped himself from speaking out loud, barely constrained enough to care what people would think if he started shouting at his invisible Jesus seated across the aisle.
“He could have lost his income,” Philly said, adding stern overtones to words with no audible voice.
“Yes, that was a possible outcome of his actions,” Jesus said clinically, like a therapist speaking gentle correction.
Philly shook his head and then froze, surrendering to awakened self-consciousness. “He needs that pension to live on . . . for him and Ma to live on.” His rebuking tone lightened only slightly.
“Do you really think I don’t know everything about every dollar and penny that passes through their hands?” Jesus said, still not matching Philly’s level of perturbation.
Philly filtered those words and then responded internally. “I guess I never thought about it. Like, you have time to think about everyone’s money issues?”
“Two thousand, seven hundred and twenty three dollars and seventy two cents,” Jesus said.
“What?” Philly said internally.
“That’s how much money you have in your main checking account, at this very moment.”
Philly glanced at Jesus, pulled his phone out again, opened up app for his bank account. He logged in and then viewed the list of accounts. There, in his main checking account, was $2723.72, just as Jesus had said.
“I can do these psychic tricks all day and all night,” Jesus said, teasing. “But the real question you have to answer is, ‘Why do I care?’ not ‘What do I know?’”
Philly touched the meaning of this lesson, tried to grip it with his mortal mind and felt it slip free. He tried to focus on what Jesus meant, but it felt to him like trying to play chess on a curving and meandering landscape, instead of the black and white, eight-by-eight checkerboard he knew so well.
“I don’t know what you’re saying to me,” Philly finally confessed, frustrated.
“Go and see that priest your mother wants you to see,” Jesus said. “You’ll learn some things there that will help.”
Philly raised his eyebrows and determined to follow that direction.
Chapter Ten
Tim Amundsen, forty years o
ld, barely over five and a half feet tall, dark conservative-cut hair and clerical garb, sat behind his neat, maple desk looking at Philly. He saw a tense and distracted man who, like so many others, only half wanted to be there and seemed ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. He waited curiously for the explanation of the reason for this visit, genuine sympathy in his eyes.
“So, Phillip, what brings you to see me,” Father Tim said.
Philly looked for a simplified, but genuine, answer. “Ah, well, it was my ma’s idea. I think she’s hoping you can sort of straighten me out or something,” he said.
“Yes, I got a call from your mother, Margaret, about meeting with you. But I couldn’t understand her concern. Can you tell me what she’s worried about?”
Philly decided not to say that she was worried about everything, in answer to that last question. Instead, he said, “I think she’s afraid that I’m hallucinating or delusional. You see, I let her know a couple of days ago that . . .” Here he hesitated, once again lurching over a speed bump toward explaining his unusual revelation. Glancing at Jesus, sitting in the chair next to him, Philly continued. “I told her that I’ve been seeing and hearing Jesus for the last week.”
“Seeing and hearing Jesus?” Father Tim said. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, it’s pretty simple, really. I see Jesus sitting right here next to me and I can hear him when he talks to me. But no one else is able to see him or hear him.”
Father Tim glanced at the empty chair. “Are you seeing him, right now?”
Philly looked at Jesus who lifted his hands from his lap in a gesture that said, “Here I am,” and smiled.
“Yeah, he’s sitting right here, smiling at me.”
Father Tim found that last detail intriguing. “Smiling at you? Does he always smile at you?”
Philly nodded. “Most of the time he’s smiling, unless he’s telling me something serious.”
“What sort of things does he tell you?” The priest adjusted himself in his chair, hinting at a growing discomfort with Philly’s story.
“He gives me advice sometimes, or teaches me things, or sometimes he tells me things that I should say to other people,” Philly said, his voice and his nerves tightening as he detected growing tension in the priest.
“Why do you think you can see him, but no one else can? Why is he just appearing to you?” Father Tim still sounded more clinical than skeptical.
“He says it’s because my grandma prayed for me. You see, she’s in a coma and I was talking to her, telling her how much I missed her, and I asked her to pray for me, if she could hear me. And she did pray and asked Jesus to come be with me while she’s not able to talk to me.”
“Do I know your grandmother?” Father Tim said, wondering if she might be a saintly member of his congregation.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so. She goes to a different kind of church.” Philly had grown up with the contrast between Catholic and Pentecostal, much of which consisted of the contrast between his grandma and his ma. The detailed theology and practice of the two entered into discussions very rarely during his childhood.
Father Tim nodded. He seemed less nervous, but still unconvinced. “So, your mother wanted you to see me so I could convince you that you’re not really seeing and hearing Jesus?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Philly had not attempted to fill in all of the details around his ma’s preferred scenario. “She got really upset when my dad’s ears got healed. After that she was pretty freaked out.”
“Your father’s ears got healed? Tell me about that.”
“Well, Jesus said he wanted to heal my dad’s ears. Dad lost most of his hearing in an explosion at work, about twenty-five years ago. So Jesus stepped up to my dad and told me to put my hands on Dad’s ears. When I did, they got really hot and then he grabbed his hearing aids out and said he could hear. And I know he can hear, because he called me on his cell phone yesterday. He could never talk on the phone before and didn’t even have a cell phone until now.”
Father Tim took all this in and then said, “So was it you who healed your dad’s ears, or Jesus?”
“Well, I’m sure I could never do anything like that by myself. But Jesus insists that I have to put my hands where he wants to heal someone. When he does it by himself it looks to me like his hands just disappear.” Philly actually found it therapeutic to tell all of this to the priest, even if he wasn’t sure that Father Tim would believe him.
Father Tim, on the other hand, had heard all that he could process passively. He followed his compulsion to challenge this strange story. “Do you consider yourself a particularly holy person?”
“Holy? No, not particularly.”
“Many a great saint has lived a long and torturous life of self-denial and devotion and never seen nor heard audibly the Lord himself, or even one of his angels,” the priest said in a firm pedantic voice. “I don’t understand why you would receive such a remarkable visitation.”
Philly looked over at Jesus, whose face shown damp with tears as he sat looking at Father Tim. Instead of his usual self-conscious glance away, Philly stared, perplexed. He thought, “Why are you crying?”
Jesus said, looking back at Philly, “I’ve longed to meet with many of the saints of whom he speaks but they missed my invitation because of their religious busyness.” Then he smiled, “To others I have appeared, in many forms, physically or spiritually, and he would know nothing about those intimate times with the saints that he thinks he knows so well.”
Father Tim became impatient with Philly staring so dramatically at the empty chair. “You’re acting as if you see Jesus now? Is he communicating with you?”
Philly looked back at Father Tim. For the first time, he was more interested in what Jesus was saying and doing, than in protecting his self-image. Without responding he looked back at Jesus and asked silently, “What do you want me to tell him?”
Jesus said, “Tell him that I have loved him all his life and have tried to communicate with him ever since he was seven years old, sitting in his grandfather’s apple tree, wondering if I was real.”
Philly turned to Father Tim. “Jesus says, he has loved you all your life and has tried to communicate with you many times since you were seven years old, sitting in your grandpa’s apple tree, wondering if Jesus was real,” he said plainly, with little emotion.
“My grandpa’s apple tree?” Father Tim said, a haunted look crossing his face.
“Well, technically he said ‘your grandfather’s apple tree.’ I messed that up a little.” As usual Philly apologized.
Father Tim’s face flushed. “What do you know about my childhood?” He stammered before continuing. “Have you been talking to Father O’Neal about me? Who are you?”
Jesus intervened again. “Tell him that Father O’Neal doesn’t know about the time Tim was eight years old and, seeing a dead cat in the road, tried to raise him from the dead.”
Philly passed on the message, more careful to use the exact words Jesus used.
Again, Father Tim stared in disbelief. “What is this? Are you some kind of psychic?”
Philly shook his head. “I’m just a guy that gets to see and hear Jesus. I don’t know anything about saints and being holy. My grandma just prayed for me, in her coma, and this happened. I’m pretty sure it’s not because I’m anything special.”
Jesus smiled now at Philly, delighted with such true statements, proud of his friend’s genuine humility.
“Well, tell me this,” said Father Tim. “If you and Jesus can heal people, why is your grandma still in a coma?”
Philly looked over at Jesus, a flickering light illuminating the answer to a question that he hadn’t yet noticed there in the spiritual darkness of his mind. “Are we gonna heal Grandma?” he thought, excitement rising in every cell.
Jesus smiled more broadly and nodded simply.
“Okay,” Philly said, turning to Father Tim. “Hey, thanks for your help. I’m going with Jesus now to
go heal Grandma. Thanks so much!”
Philly stood up and stretched out his hand to Father Tim. Out of habit, the priest stood too and reached his own hand across the desk and shook Philly’s. Jesus had stood up with Philly and reached over to touch Father Tim at the moment when Philly shook his hand. The priest began to tremble like someone on an old vibrating bed. This stopped Philly, who let go of Father Tim’s hand and watched it shaking rapidly there, suspended over the desk. Philly looked at Jesus, who had withdrawn his hand at the same time he did.
Father Tim tried to speak, “Wha. . . ha. . . ha. . . hat. . . t . . t izszsz thisssssss?”
Philly looked at him and answered without consulting Jesus. “That’s Jesus.”
Jesus had begun to walk toward the door. Philly turned to follow him, glancing back at Father Tim. “I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay. He’d never do anything to hurt you.” He was, however, a bit concerned by the onset of the strange tremors. He thought for a moment how grateful he was that Jesus had never done that to him.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Jesus said, in response to that thought, laughing out loud, at least as far as Philly was concerned.
Philly made a slightly startled face and continued to follow Jesus out of the office, out of the rectory and onto the street.
“Can we really go now and heal Grandma?” Philly stepped off the concrete steps and onto the sidewalk.
“Yes, we can,” Jesus said.
Philly looked at Jesus standing there on the sidewalk, in the sunshine, and then considered the picture of Jesus framed in the stained glass window of the church, next to the rectory. Not a bad likeness, he thought. Jesus looked at the window and smiled, then followed Philly to the car, which he had left parked along the curb just down the block.
As Jesus slid into the passenger seat, a disturbing question occurred to Philly.
“If we heal Grandma, does that mean you leave?”
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