Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  To be honest, it was pretty fucking troubling. I mean, I’m seventeen years old. I read Spin or Archie magazines in the can. I listen to mind-crushingly loud music. I’ll walk around with glass in my feet for days on end rather than admit that things aren’t going so great. It takes effort for me to engage in an impersonal, thirty-second conversation, never mind getting into any sort of emotional shit. But never mind, here’s Howie, totally stripped down, completely intense. It was like I’d asked him over to my place or something, to show me who he really was, what his life was really about, and instead of talking, he reaches inside his chest and pulls out a handful of what makes him tick, jiggles it around for a minute, filters out any pollutants, before plunging the pureness of himself into the center of my chest.

  Thing is, I hadn’t asked him over, didn’t want to know who he really was. But that didn’t matter. Howie wasn’t waiting for an invite. I was in the bathroom, popping zits or something, when he was shot. I guess there was a part of me that was sort of waiting for him, but still, when he hit I had to grab the edge of the sink to steady myself. I tried to keep my eyes on the mirror, to watch myself as it happened, but when the dying man cut into me, my face crumpled and I dropped my head. At first it was all rage that shook me, but as I stared into the sink the anger faded and his life started playing inside me. A love song for the wife, a joyful melody for the kids, all of it backed up by the steady beat of a man marching to make a living. His echo was strong and sad and rang with a steely chord of disbelief. Disbelief that he’d had no choice in the matter. Disbelief that a stranger with a gun had made the final decision. Disbelief that everything was lost.

  I opened my eyes when he was over and raised my head to meet the mirror. It took me a minute to focus, and even then I wasn’t sure who was looking back. Was there a residue of Howie hanging on? Or Stan? Or Bernoffski? Was I the same person I’d been last fall, before all of this started? Was I even the same person I’d been five minutes before? I had no idea.

  I know Little Bob would have said I was asking the wrong question, and my mom would have recommended a dialogue with Mick, but that day, as I stared in the mirror, I wasn’t thinking about them. And after every other question faded away, I was left wondering one thing. Why? Why bother with me? Why sing for me? I was practically nothing.

  I ENDED UP spending the rest of my Christmas vacation in retreat, doing research. It probably had something to do with the horror show hook-up with Faith and the intensity of Howie’s visit, but mostly it was thanks to Pastor Ted. He called me up between Christmas and New Year’s, and I thought maybe he’d cheer me up, tell me how goddamn special I was, how gifted, but Ted didn’t even bother with the ho ho ho’s. Instead, he jumped right into this aggressive spiel about how he was fully aware Stan’s hadn’t been the only death premonition I’d experienced. He told me he knew there’d been others. He told me he knew about the souls passing through me at the moment of death. I’d stood there in my shiny white kitchen while my lungs collapsed into black holes and my brain exploded. I mean, there was no way the Pastor could know any of the shit he was saying, but that didn’t stop him. He told me about his direct line to God and said I should think seriously, very seriously, about coming down to the church for a chat. He was worried about me. Thought the devil might be involved. Told me he knew he’d be seeing me real soon. And this time it was him hanging up on me.

  I’ll admit Ted’s call was pretty hard to blow off, and it wasn’t long before I found myself picking the bible out of the drawer of my parents’ bedside table where, as far as I knew, it had sat untouched for the last decade or so. But man, that little black book was packed with a billion onionskin pages crammed with minuscule writing and all these flowery let-there-be this’s and letthere-be that’s. I never even made it out of the Garden. Still, I didn’t give up completely on finding the answers, and for a couple days there I dedicated myself to surfing the Net and reading, or at least skimming, everything I could get my hands on about the sweet hereafter and near-death experiences and premonitions and prophets and so on and so forth.

  I started with all the touchy-feely shit in the Oprah magazines lying around the house before moving on to some Jesus-freak mumbo jumbo, got into philosophy, which eventually led me to metaphysics and creative immortality and New Age crap, and all of a sudden I was right back to Oprah and my brain was completely fried. It was so bad that at some point I even gave Mexican Mick a call, but a woman answered and, get this, we didn’t speak the same language. I ended up yelling his name and mine into the mouthpiece for a minute or two while the lady yabbered away in Spanish, but we never got any further than that.

  Eventually, I just gave it up. Because seriously, if the greatest brains in the world couldn’t come up with any answers, what was some loser kid from Stokum going to add to life’s big mysteries?

  Having failed to convince myself of God’s involvement in the mess that was my life, I used my telepathic powers to send the Pastor a mental note, telling him he could go blow himself and his pipeline to heaven unless he came up with some pretty irrefutable, divine-interventionary-type evidence to explain my whole death prophet gig. I’m not positive, but I think he probably got the message, too, because after his last, troubling phone call, he pulled a Lance Winters and quit on me altogether.

  EIGHTTEEN

  I should have been relieved when January rolled around and put an end to my hellish holiday season. But getting back into school proved difficult. In my pre-prophetic period, I’d always managed to pull off average grades in English and most of the other subjects starting with E, but to be honest, my marks had never been anything to really jizz over. But seriously, coming into 2003, I was so all over the place I could barely cast a shadow. I think it was mid-month before I managed to pick up a pen. Even then, the shit I handed in usually bounced back with a big red zero or sometimes just a concerned-looking question mark at the top. Then this one day, at the beginning of semester, I came in to find a note stuck to my locker. According to the yellow Post-it, I had an appointment at two o’clock that afternoon with Mr. Tanner, the principal/guidance counselor/premonition therapist, and I figured what the hell, I’d miss chemistry, so I headed to the office at the requisite hour.

  Tanner greeted me with this complete bullshit smile, looking like everything was just peachy and ripe, but underneath the phony grin I could see he was still bitter about Stan and me mocking his community spirit project way back when. He parked himself behind his big principal’s desk. I slouched in the chair opposite. Tanner opened with a real quiet, concerned voice, so I’d know how sensitive he was to my situation, how he understood this was a “heavy” time for me. He wanted to talk—about things in general, or about what had happened to Stan, or “if that was too difficult” perhaps I might want to discuss what had really “gone down” that night at Todd Delaney’s. Now, I wasn’t expecting Tanner to have any suggestions on how to deal with the problems associated with being a teen death prophet, but all of a sudden I realized he was just like everyone else at Jefferson. He didn’t give a shit about how I was “handling things.” He wanted the details, man. And the whole time he was trying to rattle them loose, he was picking his nose.

  He was doing it in that distracted, marginally socially acceptable way, just a thumb flicking the corner of one nostril. Still, it was distracting—even before some piece of snot got stuck on his finger and he dropped his hand under the desk really fast. I was forced to sit there, knowing he was rolling his prize around between finger and thumb, trying to ball it up so he could flick it or, worse, wipe it on the underside of his sticky desk. Then he had the balls to act all indignant because I wasn’t opening up to him.

  “Luke,” he said, “if there’s any hope of us getting anywhere today, you might want to actually say something.”

  So I obliged. “And you might want to quit picking shit out of your nose,” I said, and, well, let’s just say the session went downhill from there.

  Mr. Tanner got all defensive
and basically laid out this theory about how my “gang” and I had gotten together after Stan died and made the whole premonition thing up. (Which shows how truly out of it he was. I mean, the probability of our “gang” planning something of that magnitude was, like, nil to negative one.) Then he went on to imply that we’d done it because we were such pothead losers that exploiting our friend’s death was probably the only opportunity any of us would ever have to claim our fifteen minutes, which, according to Tanner, was increasingly important for a lot of talentless teens, “you just have to look at the growth of reality TV.”

  If I hadn’t been so pissed off, I might have actually played along just to close the curtain on The Prophet, but I didn’t want to give Tanner the satisfaction of thinking he’d shaken me down. So I sat there with my arms folded across my chest and my legs stuck straight out in front of me and I told him to go screw himself. Which was stupid, because after he kicked me out of the aborted therapy session, the vengeful, nose-picking bastard went around spouting his theory to anyone who’d listen, apparently in such a way that it appeared I’d actually admitted to making the whole thing up. It felt like it took about two seconds for me to make the transition from small-town freak to big-time liar.

  Funny, I didn’t acquire any new friends as a result of the metamorphosis. As for my old “gang,” the only one I could even remotely tolerate was Fang, and, since no-showing on Christmas Eve, he hadn’t even attempted to make contact. He was either too choked or too stoned or too panicked to bother, and given that the one sentence he’d uttered in Faith’s car on the way back from the concert had me as the subject and dick as the adjective, I sure as shit wasn’t going out of my way to track him down, either.

  If Fang and I were casually avoiding each other, then I’d been actively avoiding Faith. I tried to do it in this I’m-super-busy-withmy-hectic-social-schedule, catch-you-later kind of way, which was so false and pathetic, because the truth was, I didn’t have a friend in the fucking world. At the same time, I wasn’t so sadistic that I’d inflict any more of my loser-boy routine on Faith, either. So I pretty much hung alone, took the liar abuse thrown my way straight-on, with an amused fuck-you smile plastered across my face, pretending I didn’t give a shit what everyone was saying. Still, I have to admit, it kind of left me nowhere.

  So I was definitely in a bit of a funk, a bit of a bleak period, when I did the next stupid thing. Seeing how I’m not very inventive, I had to pilfer the idea from John Asscraft, who’d recently handed out some practical advice for staying alive in an orange America. It was near the beginning of February and, poor me, I’d come home from another lonely day at school to roam around my empty house for a while, but I’d ended up in the garage. The walls were lined with tools and old sports equipment and camping gear—remnants of a happier life. The duct tape was sitting right there on the corner of my father’s tidy workbench. I’d had to dig out the plastic drop sheets, spotted with glossy white dots of kitchen paint. The handy-for-hijacking box cutter I shoved in my pocket bit into my thigh all the way up the stairs.

  Constructing the safe room was total cake. I sort of enjoyed the project—the whiz of slicing plastic, the scream of duct tape coming off the roll, the big speckled rectangles I fit snugly over the door and window. Afterwards, I sat on my bed, back against the wall, knees pulled in tight. Except for the dull, grayed light coming through the plasticized window and the walls of my room darkening to a deeper shade of blue, nothing seemed any different. I sure didn’t feel safer or more in control of my life. If anything, I felt more retarded and alone than ever.

  It didn’t take long before the air in the room started getting warm and stale, and I know it was probably just my imagination, but it looked like the fern on my desk was finished, although I couldn’t be bothered getting up to check. I did lean over and let the dead men out of the drawer. I also took little Ms. Jordan out of my wallet and laid her on the bed beside the list. I tried to focus on those unlucky people—and let’s not forget the bird—who’d had to say their final goodbyes to a really bad listener. I tried to get those papery slices of pain to sing for me, but I wasn’t feeling much. Even when I added my name and Astelle’s to the list, it just felt like more of the same. More of nothing.

  Finally, I crawled into bed with my shoes on and everything. I pulled the covers up to my chin. I don’t know what I was doing. I don’t know what I was thinking. My thoughts probably revolved around blowing things with Stan’s old girlfriend and being too lazy and thoughtless to peer over a back fence and save Mrs. Bernoffski from widowhood and people believing I was such a lowlife that I’d exploit my best friend’s death and Fang calling me a dick and the brutal reality that everyone, everyone was going to die. Could have been an array of depressing shit like that. Probably was. Or maybe I was just feeling sorry for my friendless self. I can’t really remember. I know I didn’t have any plans about getting up or getting out or getting on with things. It felt more like I’d chosen a comfortable position for waiting—waiting for the next insane or dismal or completely unfair thing coming my way.

  The air got staler. The room got smaller.

  It was a low, insistent knock thumping through the house that finally forced me out of bed. I crouched by my plastic-coated window and peered out. The tree on our lawn was a dark, fuzzy blob. Past the wavering band of blacktop, the outline of our neighbor’s house ran against the sky like watery paint. And the silhouette on my porch was muted, as if the body below was wrapped in gauze or I was seeing it from a hundred feet up. I had to press the plastic flat and lean my forehead against the glass to even recognize Faith. The warmth of my breath closed around me, and when she tilted back to scan the upper story of my house, her face was featureless. I dropped to the floor and lay frozen there, beneath the window, my cheek, my heart, pressed into the nubbly carpet. Another knock rattled the house. We both waited. The snap of a metal lid cracked the silence, and then the patter of fading footsteps. When I looked out again, the street was empty.

  I ripped my way out of my room a while later and stepped onto the porch. The air was moist and cold. The house across the street cut a straight, sharp line against the darkening sky. I stood there for a long time before I reached into the mailbox. And it wasn’t until late that night, when I was back up in my room, that I pulled the cellophane off Johnny Cash and let him tear into me.

  WHEN MY MOM CAME breezing into my room a couple days later, she was humming as she threw her coat on the bed and started pacing excitedly between the door and the desk, where I was dicking around on the computer. It was weird to see someone in the house looking so happy. My parents had barely spoken since Christmas, my dad was still working nonstop, and lately my mom had looked like total shit—all pale except for the big dark circles under her eyes, the ones that old people get. She wasn’t only pissed at my dad, she was worried about me. She kept reminding me that when she was my age she’d lost her entire family and how devastating that had been, but then, a few years later, she’d met my dad and a few years after that she’d had me, and, well … things had gotten better. A lot better. Things cycled around. Life went on. And every time I passed her in the hall or failed to avoid her downstairs, she’d reach out to rumple my hair or to touch my arm, telling me how much she loved me, asking about the depressing music wailing from my room. “Was that really Johnny Cash I was listening to all the time?” I was pretty sure she thought I was going to kill myself. Which I wasn’t. I mean, why bother putting effort into something that’s going to happen on its own? Still, I didn’t do a whole lot to reassure her she was wrong. I guess I liked to see her suffer, ’cause, you know what they say, misery digs company.

  But the day my mom floated into my room, she was anything but miserable. She was practically bouncing as she started blabbing about the peace rally she’d been to in Rolland, how she’d marched down Aberdeen Street with the rest of Lake Erie’s friends. There’d been hordes of people, she guessed well over five thousand, which she thought was impressive for a
town the size of Rolland. And what a cross section! When she was in range, she’d punctuate the important bits of information with a squeeze to my shoulder. Students from the arts college, old people, veterans, politicians, businessmen, professors, housewives—you name it, they were there. She’d heard that around the globe there’d been millions, tens of millions, demonstrating! Squeeze. She was feeling optimistic about the possibility of the war being quashed by a global voice, and wouldn’t that be something! Squeeze. Yes, she was definitely full of hope.

  “Sounds like a regular Caravan of Love,” I said, referencing an old Housemartins song my mom had played pretty much nonstop since I was a kid. It was a good, happy tune about brotherly love and living in a world of peace and whatnot, and I pretended to hate it just to bug her.

  “Yes, it was. It was a caravan of love. You should have come.” She grinned as she plucked her coat from the bed and Tinkerbelled it out the door, saying she wanted to watch the news to see what was happening elsewhere and oh, by the way, Ms. Banks says hi and wants to know how the shirts are coming along.