I bought a little tent, a poor little tent very full of holes,
and from that I saved my money and bought a bigger one,
and that has been the history.
AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON
In the beginning, there was the Word, and the word was me, and I was a baby. As I got older, I saw there were others, but still I suspected it was all about me. It wasn’t until I realized that I might be the other myself that I began to feel a vague discomfort, like a hand-me-down sweater a size too small. One day at Sunday school, looming in the dusty night sky of the chalkboard was a giant white eye, unblinking. White lashes, white pupil, and outline of iris, it was upsetting. “God sees you,” said the teacher. Whereas before I had comfortably imagined myself floating in the eyes of everyone, suddenly I craved invisibility.
To my mother, on the ride home, I said, “Surely, he cannot see us in here, through the hood of the buggy?” My mother looked me squarely in the eyes, her needlepoint stare causing them to water, and said, “He can.” At home, in the wooden bin among potatoes and onions, I called out, “And now?” My mother thumped the lid and pronounced: “No escape.”
My mother had told me I am Love, it is my name—Aimee—and when I espied men furtively cupping the faces of women in their hands, I understood that I was the blood rush of heat that pinked those cheeks. Tucked in the middle of my name like a stubborn egg inside a hen was a me I could not suffer anyone hatching, least of all a God who craftily hid in every pocket of Being, whose mug was writ too wide to see. The aim is me, the aim is me, the aim is me! I incanted.
I felt that cold, white eye on me as I twitched my nose, tapped my foot, felt it recording my every move. I could barely breathe beneath its ceaseless observation. At night I undressed under blankets but felt the stare on my skin sure as a rash as the wool prickled against my stomach and legs. Then one night, beneath the covers, in double darkness, I told myself a story. I said, There was a little girl who grew up bigger than God, big, so big God couldn’t keep His eye on all of her, and when the people saw how big she was, they clapped and tossed her chocolate coins, then she shrank to the size of a mite, small small small, and leapt inside God’s eye. Safely on the other side of His vision, she jumped in the air and grabbed God’s frozen eyelid then pulled it shut like a window shade.
It was then that I got an inkling of how I might tell myself a story and lose myself in the words that made me up, and how I might slowly take a shape inside that loss.
Truth is what you get when you let yourself know nothing, really know it. It’s as absolute as a dark hole whose bottom cannot be experienced except in faith and dreams. And that’s the story. The real story.
Silver eyes and lips in the water, my face floating and voice returning to me, my face and rippled skin, no sun, and skin, in the water, my voice speaks to me and I want to meet, my voice speaks, it repeats my words, I follow and I am a child, the voice repeats, the hair falls forward, want to touch her, she knows me, I will fill the pail with myself, my face in the water, she speaks so clearly, I can lower myself into her, into the moving outline of her face, into the soft voice generous as an open hand, the shifting outline the voice moves through, I will lower myself into the beautiful voice, into the mouth, the black circle calling me.
Like that.
This is a story.
I was a little girl, young. I climbed up on the well and saw her. She called me, the little girl in the well. We had chickens and goats and cows and dogs, and now there was a little girl whose face flowered in the water. Her voice was beautiful, like ice breaking on the river. I loved her, of course.
I loved my first husband, Robert. His God-words burned me and my own voice bubbled from the wounds. My whole body spoke; it stuttered and screamed. My limbs flailed with belief.
I would follow him to the other side of the world to gather souls. When I was a child, I tried to dig through the ground to a place I’d seen in picture books, a place where people wore straw hats as big as mixing bowls, upside down, on their heads. Now I would travel there with purpose. I would follow and Robert would end there, his seed stashed inside me.
It was the arithmetic of belief that originally appealed to me, the repetitions that persuade by brute accumulation like the ticking of a clock you ignore until late at night when it clicks in your ear undeniably and you realize your sleep has been keeping time to the sound; it has hummed in your ear while you slept. I was a sensible girl. There are twenty times as many references to His coming with a crown, honored and worshipped by all the ends of the earth, as to His coming with a cross, and being wounded in the house of His friends. In the 260 chapters of the New Testament, the second coming of Jesus Christ is definitely referred to 318 times. One out of every thirty verses, voilá, Jesus Christ redux. The Epistles of Paul, while referring to water baptism only 13 times, refer to the second coming 50 times, which, according to my calculations, provides one hundred opportunities to up the ante on faith (the first coming, came?, implicit, you see, in the return). And there it is. That’s belief. The square root of salvation: our Lord and Savior. He came once, he’ll come again. But these were the idle doodles of a restless schoolgirl. Genuine enlightenment would not turn the gas up on my dim thoughts until I heard Robert’s voice, a voice I had heard in my dreams.
And then I had to let go the innocent heresy of science. In school, I thrilled to discussions of Darwin’s theories and wondered if he had felt the walk out of the water into the light click in his own bones, the weight of that forward movement pressing down on his skeleton. Bones remember. The ache that starts at the base of the spine is a bone memory of another posture. But once Robert’s hot words crackled across my skin and into my small, gray heart, there was no room for natural selection in my spiritual evolution. Suppose faith were to be selected out. What would I be left with? Malingering phantom stirrings of gills and a prehensile tail? Suffer those of us interested in invisible origins.
Nineteen ten, a decade après de siècle, the apocalyptic approach of which I was too young to fear, Hong Kong, fragrant harbor, in the hills above Wanchai in the summer, there was rebellion in the air. You could hear it in the sizzle of mosquitoes. It eventually raged through my Robert’s body. I watched funeral processions march through the thick stew of humidity into the cemetery our house adjoined. Bodies twisted and curled in the flames of the pyres. The black smoke rose without distinction.
Who speaks this? you wonder. I wonder. I am rupture, all gap, space elbowed between pieces once intimate. This voice crawls out of my mouth like so many insects buzzing, a foreign sound, like water dripping in a tin cup, small and hollow. I want to be pure, empty. My true voice is the one heard by the girl in the well. The voice I use to speak to God, frilled with a tremulous piety even when I sit in the closet and pray, is not my real voice.
The voice that will settle inside me rings in a register only the ghosts of the living can hear. That’s who will come to the tents and the temple. Spirits will part the heavy flesh and it is to them I will address the Word. I will see the ghosts dangle and clink like acoustic shingles hung from the ceiling to help my message resonate more clearly. The bodies below will slump and shake with affect, but it is only their own organs and arteries ticking away. They cannot escape the thump of the pulse in their ears.
These bodies and attendant souls will not be drawn by notoriety, by the tongues of flame of my oratory, curled back and forth like a beckoning finger, but by the fragile hum of vowels that lodge in my throat as I sit in my study before the sermon and rock on my knees and see nothing.
In Macao I screamed, my womb wandered, the pink-bellied worms in buckets, black-winged sampans always bobbing on the water, worms held above eager mouths, my face drawn and Robert green and thin; my eyes ached and the heat crawled inside me and fell asleep and still I was cold. With a neighborly clicking of my tongue, I befriended the rats as they scurried past, and little ghosts welled before me, stringy with heat, and Robert’s face the color of cooked cabbage, my womb, weary, settled to sleep in the bounce of a jinriksha and moved away from me toward the molten crowds of Kowloon, the dogs and eggs and the souls unsaved. The rats left too, rubbing sickness from their whiskers, and the amah cried on the other side of the netting; parasols spun in the sunlight as I lay in a soup of sweat and feces.
God was wise to hide Himself from the stench and unholy rolling of our bodies.
There is nothing mystical in shit. Bodies are most themselves when they are immersed in the effluvium of their own potential.
My dream broke with my fever in Matilda Hospital. My body was barely a body, so thin and weak. I was widowed, abroad, a child on the way. I hadn’t the strength to tremble. The doctors said it was the vegetables fertilized with human excrement that claimed Robert’s life.
Everyone loved Robert, his careful eyes, forgiving lips. He listened intently to any confession, any quandary, and I always felt as though it was his devoted attention, a healing poultice, that drew my words to the surface. I think God was lonely for a sympathetic ear.
Here is a story I tell myself when I am tired: Once when I was a child in Ontario, I walked through a thick enclosure of trees and stopped when I heard a rustling behind me. As I turned around, I saw a bear, who saw me and rose up on the black barrels of his legs. A growl thundered from deep in his chest and he lifted his arms. I dropped to my knees and curled into myself, a trembling hedgehog. I heard the bear grunt and lumber toward me, and I felt the smack of his paw on my back. Silently, I begged Jesus to call the bear away. And then I felt the bear’s hot body cover me. The bear stretched himself over me, fitted himself to me like a hat to a head, and dug into the earth near my knees. I felt his rough tongue moving across my neck and hands. The weight of him made my body ache and feel as if it were shrinking into a flattened pebble of bone and flesh. Then the bear nuzzled his snout against my head and pried my arm loose. He pushed his clammy nose into my ear. His breath was hot and smelled of fish, and his breathing rattled like something had come loose inside him. I felt his haunches tighten against my backside, and the bear whispered, “Jesus loves you,” a sentiment he sealed by lapping my ear with his sticky tongue, as if to cleanse it of all the uncertainties it had heard. Then the great weight of the bear lifted, and I heard sticks snap as he left me, small and scared, among the trees.
There are those who will say, Could this not have been one of Satan’s disguises? To which I will respond, No, for I have always been stronger than Satan; even as a little girl I could throw him from my back just by breathing deep.
After five months, I returned from Hong Kong, with losses and gains disproportionate. I had lost my husband, saved scant souls, and given birth to a sickly infant. God’s ways troubled me and left me feeling weak, dispirited, empty of offerings.
My mother took Baby Roberta to live with her. “You must heal your wounds and find your way,” she said. Time passed slowly, as it does when you’re watching.
I moved to the States and eventually found temporary comfort in the strong arms of another, but my days in Rhode Island could not be said to have been providential for either Harold McPherson or me. Though I adopted his name, I never quite warmed to the life it carried with it. A second pregnancy quickly followed. The swell of myself gave me something to stare at and smooth, a place to settle my restless hands, hands whose unconscious longing to caress the hot cheeks of the hungry could be seen in the way they floated in the air toward nothing. But after Rolf was safely delivered into the world, I drew away from that world, into the empty heat inside me; I curled into the blood-soft space they would eventually cut away.
Harold was as practical as soap. It was clear to him that I was broken and he sent for doctors to mend me. The sleeping and crying and praying, fasting and compulsive cleaning had left my hair sprung and wandering, knotted in spots, and my skin hung on me like an old robe, loose and yellow. My eyes were circles of mud sunk deep in my face. My chin was crusted with dried saliva. I didn’t fight it. Inside I was clean and combed and smelled of anise. I looked out at those shaking heads and thought, You can have the outside, this wretched carapace. You can carve it up and feed it to pigs if you like.
There were many operations: bright lights and white masks, white bodies and green walls, knives and needles, and they took away parts of me I was no longer attached to; they cut and things fell away. They thought, Maybe the sickness lives here, Harold’s head shaking with each new failure, knives flashing like sharp metal teeth; blood blooming on starched aprons reminded me of the little white dress with red moons I wore as a child, and I could have told them that when they were finished shearing off bits of disease, I’d be no bigger than a fig or an egg, something Harold could hide in his pocket, yet those clouds of covered faces continued to collect above me, and they trimmed and clamped until they hoisted me out of myself—they popped the crumbling yoke of me out of the carved cup where I hid.
They called it hysteria, an unpleasant condition common to women whose wombs get too restless and cause trouble for others. These strong-willed pouches, when they are empty, get a wild hair and itch for life that can only be found elsewhere, always elsewhere. Perhaps they’re only looking for a reason not to wander, but they’re always corralled in the end, put down like feral dogs.
The cure for hysteria is hysterectomy—pluck the offender from the unwitting vessel. As you can see, language corroborates this choice of treatment.
I died, or almost. In the final swoon, I looked down at the thatch of fresh scars (to this day I have difficulty gauging the whims of my bladder) and God’s voice said—with the same hot insistence of the bear’s—Eternity’s just around the corner. Don’t rush it. Go and do the work. So I sat up. I left my husband. I bought a car.
You end, begin. You continue.
My instincts told me to start at the beginning (as unreliable as I now know this to be), so I returned home to Ontario and in Mount Forest, I drew my first crowd. I dragged a chair to the middle of town one morning and stood on it, stiff and straight, and faced the sky, arms reaching toward the blue flaps visible through the torn bandage of clouds. I stared into the air; birds and insects populated my gaze. Throughout the morning, clouds crowded my view, swam through the sky where my eyes locked. I imagined God looking down at the fraying white backsides of clouds whose bellies I tracked for hours. My body felt tight and pointed; my arms ached, but my aim was sure, and the shuffling of voices and feet around me sent a tingle up my shins, up and up and straight to my fingers. The current of the crowd moved through me into the atmosphere and rivaled the clouds in altitude. It bubbled upward through the spheres on an arrow course for Jesus, and when it reached him, I saw it clearly, it stood his hair on end as though he’d rubbed his head with a balloon.
Someone touched me, testing for catalepsy, and I leapt from the chair and said, “Follow me, quick!” They ran behind me and like a dam breaking they poured into the Victory Mission, where, before the day was through, every last tongue wagged indecipherably in the dialect of angels, and bodies rumbled and fizzed, infused with the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit swept through a crowd, you could feel it start slow in the ground beneath your feet, barely a shiver, until the whole building reverberated with proof of faith, bodies quaking and rolling like coins in the Sunday plate.
When it was over, when all the souls were safely stored in God’s pocket, all I could clearly remember were those clouds connecting His eyes to mine.
That night, Robert came to me as I knelt down beside my bed. His auburn hair was wavier than I remembered. His pallor was certainly that of a ghost, though it was hard to say because he’d always been wan. He knelt beside me and took my hands in his. I felt almost swarthy next to him, sepia-tinted, earth to his air, the divide between proof and faith. His face was much fuller than the picture of him I carried in my head, a shifting composite from the months in China. His days in Heaven seemed to have agreed with him.
He placed his hands on my waist and turned me, drew me to him. He placed his cheek next to mine and I felt moist heat dampen my skin. He whispered in tongues in my ear, syllables snapping, the harsh crack of k’s, the throaty warble of r’s, and a roiling soak of vowels. I felt it deep in the gutted land between my legs. Then he licked my lips and disappeared. I pulled my lips into my mouth and sucked on them through the night and into dreams.
Do I win you? Which words do you pass on, which ones ingest? And chronology, does it lend credibility? ]esus Christ is the same today, yesterday, and forever.
The healing began accidentally as, I suppose, most genuinely divine things do, or so it would seem to us. I’m sure human chance and fortuity are written in God’s design. Monkey Abe was the man in our town who was the receptacle for people’s pent-up, boiling-point anger, held in during long and silent winter months. When folks finally regained their voices, able to speak freely without their words freezing, brittle breathed, in the air outside, they carried with them a gall storm, and who better to weather it than bent and drunken Monkey Abe. A misshapen and simple galoot, how could he have any feelings to hurt? But he did have feelings, in his feet and ankles, whose open sores had given him grief, septic and crippling, and left him hobbling for years.
When the doctors finally told him his feet would have to go, quipping he could bronze them like baby shoes, “Or, better yet,” they said, “you could take them to Everett Sharpe to be stuffed and then sit them on your porch to greet visitors like Elspeth Campbell did with her companion goat, Chewie” (they snorted and laughed), he had to balk. Monkey Abe had borne many an aspersion on his back without complaint—they gave him purpose in those moments between drinks—but his feet, weakened and degenerated by disease, could not bear the attack, so he came to me and asked that I might say a few words to God on their behalf.
He sat on a table and swung his legs up. The stench and decay of those seeping and gnarled knots of flesh, unrecognizable as feet, recalled to me those days of sickness in Hong Kong, and I was steadied. I thought of my own broken ankle and how the bones had knit on the spot when Brother Durham sent the sanctified zap of healing snapping through my foot. I said, “‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord—make straight paths for His feet,’” John the Baptist’s words rolling off my tongue easy as instinct, and I felt my hands float up and hang in the air over Abe’s body, as though they were about to tug a marionette to life.
The feet like flippers, black and green, oozing, the original host disappeared behind sickness feeding on itself, the trembling of scared things, involuntary, nerves damaged, his face streaked with dirt and tears, hands crusted from years of disregard, kept strong enough to hold a cup, the plain green sickness of him, the trembling sickness, my hands shaking to meet such living death, the smell covering me like a film, an odor released to fend off predators, leave them wiping their eyes, the black and patches of yellow, toes lost in it, laid my hands right on the volcanic muck, deep into the dark swamp they went, felt the sticky atrophy, the erosion of will, fingers in the black, both of us trembling and I said, “God!” hands lost, roaming the range of disease, “Help this man!” Then the slight sway begun in my knees, the black so black it seemed silver, “Put your faith in Him. Aim it straight and believe,” and the room rumbled, the table clanked, “Feel the Holy Spirit responding. It swirls about us, summoned by faith,” until Abe rolled off the table and onto the floor, “Reach up and touch the hem of His garment!” body jumping, wired by the transfusion of Spirit, churning flesh on the floor, the clucking of Spirit words, sounds popped from his mouth, Abe spoke the language, words whose lack of meaning means everything, the utterance that opens the gates, the nothing burble of the divine, the language that’s all inclusive, no one denied, words weightless as gossamer, unhindered by gravity, spoken and understood by all God’s children, the tongues of angels filling their mouths, swallowing Jesus, the grace of knowing nothing, the all that nothing is, if only for a moment, and then the shaking stopped.
Abe had small scars, but the sickness was gone and he walked as he hadn’t in years: he ran through the streets, a crier for Jesus.
When I think of those early days of the ministry, what I remember is the clear sense of purpose that possessed me and how struggle strengthened my will, left it lean as sinew. Those were the salad days of my resolve.
I traveled across America in my Packard, a shining, if mechanical, example of faith. The Gospel Car held together over land that was little more than wild terrain cleared of the impediments of boulders and trees, land little more than mud-slung ravines; its triumphs were due less to the ingenuity of Henry Ford than to the fact that it had places to go and people to honk at. There were souls waiting to be saved in the South.
Traveling through Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, I was struck not so much by the topographic and climatic contrast to my native Ontario as by the poverty, the unthinkable living conditions that seemed to stretch the length of the world. At night, beneath the moon, the earth curved against the light like a full belly, and I thought I could see the other side, but in the morning, things remained as before. The air was thick, as though you could spoon it out of your way; it was like breathing pudding.
My memory of that time is swollen with pictures, faded and yellow, of ramshackle lean-tos held together by prayer, scraps of soiled fabric that hung on matchstick bodies bent in all directions and hobbling without aim the way bodies that live against their will and better judgment sometimes do. This is what my remembering mind sees. Pictures of nothing, flat and barren blankness, the landscape gnawed to bone. And I remember the absence of animals.
I forged ahead and spread the word and though I lived a life to starve a Spartan, the kindness of townsfolk and the will of God kept my cup full to overflowing. Plainly stated, I was a success; the people flocked to my tent. I racked up soul after soul and spirits ran high, even in the midst of what seemed like so much lack in this country poised for war.
My sermons were a soothing salve to the sores hidden inside women. They amen-ed the loudest and theirs were always the first bodies to moan and roll with Spirit, so overcome were they with the abandon of divine union. I favored honey to vinegar, and they responded to the way I stressed grace above sin, their souls and nerves worn thin from trying to right that original wrong. They were also smitten with my revision of the principle of sanctification. I clutched at Christ’s airy ankles and pulled him down to the ground. To be Christlike, I said, is to be human, mistaken and clumsy, not floating above, beyond pain and reproach. Perfection is fatal.
Women have always reached out to the wounds of Christ for alliance. It feels natural to us to live in a way that drives small holes through us, makes our brows, our feet and wrists bleed, scars our backs stooped from carrying guilt we never understood but took on faith. Women cheered and formed long lines when conversion seemed to them akin to clearing the slate.
Curiosity was piqued by the plain vexation of it all: A woman, preaching, on her own, in a car, in a tent, on the road? Such a strong voice and sturdy ankles. And that cape she wears. Who is she? Where’s she from? What’s her story?
And the colored folk. They packed the tent and blew it open with joyful screams and songs. They took to my God-gab easily, let my words slip into their ears and through to their hearts, veins and arteries ballooning with love. Of course a ruckus was raised: To think, a little woman gallivanting across the country, waving the Bible as though she’d written it herself, a lady preacher, imagine! (She’s no Billy Sunday, no siree bob.) And consorting with coloreds to boot! If that don’t beat all. Traveling and speaking and singing among them, the dim light of her clearly at ease among the dark shadows. Always butting her head against boundaries, that one, as though they were just there to be stretched, rules nothing more than rubber to her. Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and Henry! Just who does this preacher woman think she is?
But the real scandal came in Key West, when neighboring flocks of white folks, God-starved, poured into colored town, stormed the tent and stood alongside their brown-skinned brethren. And there were those who said, Surely the clompity-clomp of the four horsemen is audible in the distance when a white woman draws together a motley crowd of coloreds and whites, packed into the small space of a circus tent, exchanging breath and knocking knees, and saints preserve us, worshipping the same G-O-D! And I said, Forgive them, Father, for they are small and frightened, deprived of the benefit of bears.
I know the story you wait for is the one where I fall, the one that exposes my Iscariot skin. But clinging to expectations can only end badly. Ask Jesus.
I lived my life by the signs. In 1916 the war in Europe raged like an inextinguishable fire, fed by fields of blood, a braid of bodies across the continent spelling out, with twisted limbs, a language I hoped my country would not have to speak.
We heard such terrible stories.
I have always preferred saving souls to bodies. Souls are simply more bankable, and with bodies you always run the risk of a poor performance, having to rely on props you can’t control. But my reputation caused my tent to bulge with every infirmity imaginable, and the demands of the crowd kept my hands busy. Don’t misunderstand—I have always had a place in my heart for the flesh. It is hard to get to nothing through the insistent corporeality of legs and necks and kidneys, but there is no other way. After all, the body is the site where faith becomes fact as the geyser of Holy Spirit gushes to the surface.
But I knew when my calcium-carbide lamp exploded in my face and the flames raced across my throat and shoulders, my cheeks and scalp, when I smelled the smell of my own hair burning down to nothing like fuses, I knew my sermons would soon have to shift from salvation to consolation, from Heaven to hope. When the fire was out, I laid my hands to my face and felt the blisters flatten; I felt the fevered skin cool. Then I saw how very small my hands seemed, the limited balm.
It wasn’t long after the burning incident that the Germans sank the Lusitania, the same ship Robert and I had taken to visit his mother in Ireland before embarking for China. I remember his mother squeezing my arm and saying, “He’s fragile. He’s always been so fragile.” The lines around her eyes were tight with fear. She could see across the ocean into the future. She leaned over and kissed my flat stomach.
The world was at war. Thousands of people died daily in ways heretofore unimagined. God watched and kept to Himself. I sang songs about mystery, redemption, and war bonds. I dreamt Kaiser Wilhelm crept into my tent one night and breathed poison gas into my sleeping face. He crawled away, into a trench, and said, “Jesus is the same today, yesterday, and forever: dead. The sun has set on deities.”
Guided by the intuitive lurch of the Gospel Car, I followed my calling to the North.
Influenza is such a beautiful word. It sounds like a rare flower that blooms only at night.
The numbers of bodies that mounted from the epidemic began to exceed those of Americans killed in the war. In New York, as I tried to save souls, bodies were lost, two hundred a day the headlines read. There was a shortage of coffins and the dead lay rotting and unburied. That smell clung to the clothes and the hair of the living. It crawled into your nose and filled your mouth. I imagined I could taste the decay. I indulged my morbidity. I ran my tongue across my teeth and thought, I’ve a bit of diseased lung caught between my molars, or, A bitter bowel rests beneath my tongue. It made the ubiquitous flesh unreal. It was all I could do to keep from giving my own body up to the stacks of canceled lives.
When my threadbare dress gave up the ghost, I replaced it with a look befitting that of the ministering angel I hoped to be. I bought a stiff white uniform and together with the black cape that flapped behind me like wings when I walked, I conjured the image of a Savior-sent field nurse, and that’s how I saw myself, a nurse tending the wounds of the sick souls at home.
The crowds continued to grow. So many flagging spirits in need of buttressing. I sensed a new approach was called for. People needed a respite from the woes of war and illness. They needed someone else’s story, someone else’s drama.
The Wise and the Foolish Virgins.
There are women, players, ten women carrying lamps, dressed in white, virgins, going to meet the Bridegroom, off to marry the King, the luckiest of women, they clutch their sleeves, expectant and fearful, at the door of King Jesus, the hearts beating quick in their chests like hummingbirds, sweet women, fed on dates and almonds, here to meet Him, the One, the Only, they laugh and pinch each other’s cheeks, flushed and ready, their legs ache, they’ve saved themselves, no one has been allowed near enough to catch their scent, their feet stretch with yearning inside their shoes, their stomachs are hot, they feel a tug in their navels, they sway, they jump, the light flickers. They lie on the ground and sleep. In dreams they see Him. His teeth are crooked, but they don’t mind. His lips are full, filled with color, body so thin, white marble, a lover’s body, then see-through, beautiful ribs and heart floating behind the glass of his chest, they shift in their sleep, put their fingers in their mouths, to have and to hold, that curling white snake of spine, organs floating like fish in a tank, they tap-tap, cover their mouths and giggle, in sickness and in health, taut thighs, lawfully wedded, legs that have run far, from this day forward, hair coiling everywhere, feet and hands healed, ready to touch, to give and receive, and they wake, hungry, look for cakes and wine. They find their lamps filled with oil and burning, and here is where the cautionary split occurs. The wise ones, five of them, virgins and anxious, they dance and kiss each other’s lips, practice for the real thing. The others, so foolish, untrusting, they question, this oil, where did it come from? What will it cost us? We haven’t much, we’re only virgins, we didn’t ask for this oil, blood from a turnip, take it back, and then they claw their cheeks and tear their hair, they weep to see their sisters being carried to Heaven on the strong arms they all dreamt of.
The virgins bowed. The crowd was silent, breathing. Women looked at the men sitting near them. Men looked at their arms. I had them. They all closed their eyes and dreamt of salvation.
Is He coming? How is He coming? When and for whom is He coming? It was to this inquiry that I addressed my early life. And later: Who is He? What is He? How do I get them to see what I don’t? And, finally, what’s in a pronoun? One that towers like origin even among predicates, as if He were the only subject in the sea. Alpha and Omega indeed. As you may have guessed, the slip of my faith began to show.
The rest you know. It’s a story you’ve heard, the one that gets told. I moved to Los Angeles, a place where my pomp and celebrity flourished. I became wealthy and gilded my sermons with fountains of water and wired angels that flew across stage, trained animals, a llama, a bear, hundreds of dancing feet, a spectacle. Sometimes I rode in on a motorbike or swung across stage on a rope, an evangelical Busby Berkeley, they said. At first I couldn’t empty myself fast enough for the money that flowed in. Then there was debt, heavy as lead, the ballast I tried to evade.
And the too familiar story. Alcohol, adultery. Neglectful mother. I died then rose again (that’s an old one). I disappeared into the ocean then resurfaced later, stooped with fatigue and a desperate tale of abduction. Despite my followers’ unwavering belief in my integrity, my goodness, the authorities found my story pocked with implausibility. I was charged with corruption of morals and obstruction of justice. The beginning.
And there is more. And nothing.
In Angelus Temple, I stopped speaking the language of angels. I put pills on my tongue instead. I swallowed. This makes a good story.
The night before I was to deliver my sermon entitled “The Story of My Life,” I groped in the dark for the bottle of barbiturates. You will say it was an accident. You will say I killed myself. You will say I went to meet my Bridegroom.
But this story must end.
This story, this life is not true. I told you. The truth is I died when I was ten years old, mauled by a bear. The truth is I died of a broken heart. The truth is I died giving birth. I died of malaria alone in a hospital in China. I died consumed in flames, an accident. I died beneath the feet of an angry crowd when a boy fell and crawled toward his crutches. The truth is I hung myself from a tree after surgery gave me no peace. But you know the truth is I’m lying and this admission is enough to make you believe.
I lived knowing I made myself up. You dreamt I was real. The story ends here where I am a hole you look into to see yourself.
Because I am nothing, I can make you believe.