EAST

1

FRIDAY, QUEENS, NEW YORK, 2005

The cabbie tore through a dead-red light and we took off for the expressway, away from the airport and heading for Richmond Hill. He was laughing, fast-talking into his ear clip phone. The sky outside was a cool blue David Hockney pool, but inside, the vinyl seat burned through my pants. I lowered the window. I’m guessing the language was Arabic. The ID card on the back of his seat gave his first name as Abdullah, and Abdullah let loose another howling and happy laugh. He saw me in his mirror and threw me a smiling nod. Pointed at his phone and looked at me like, this guy’s really killing me.

We joined the traffic flow. The whirl of outside, the car horns and sirens, the screech and relentless machine din of city washed over the car like a wave. Everything sounded the same as the car dropped and bounced in jolts, over potholes and swellings all along the Grand Central Parkway. There was a roaring whoosh as a plane zeppelined overhead.

I was ecstatic to be free of the airplane, of its stale dry air, of the small soiled hallways of LaGuardia and those sad plastic baggage carousels. We rolled on solid ground beside the bay. I never liked flying, but I liked the world seen from way up there, the incoming skyline, the blunt slant of the Citigroup Center, and the sterling hubcaps and skyscraping needle of the Chrysler Building. I liked the shipwreck hulk of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, and the concrete sprawl of Queens spreading out from the East River like some elaborate gunmetal carpet. What I didn’t like was the turbulence, the need for airsickness bags. I didn’t like the horror of hollow space between me and what was below, and that some five hundred people died in plane crashes every single year. I had checked before leaving. The odds are maybe not especially good, but actually quite good if it’s your plane that spirals and explodes in the oily Hudson. Manhattan is an island, surrounded by water. People forget this. A sewer stink of sulfur wafted in through the window from the bay.

Abdullah shouted, “What a smell!” Then back to his conversation.

I was amazed by his fluid traversal between the two languages. I waited for him to pause and lean forward. “You’re speaking Arabic, right?”

He said into the earpiece, “Wait a second.” He asked me, “What, you speak Arabic?”

I said, “I’m just wondering if.”

“Well because many of the businessmen speak Arabic.” He lowered his window and slammed his hand against his car door, yelling, “Move, you fucker!”

It was Friday, nearly dusk, and I had only been here in New York for a few minutes but I found the city immediately overwhelming. Sunlight flashed between buildings as if some westward and strobe-bursting ambulance was keeping an exact parallel pace. There must have been a day, one specific day long ago, when I first looked up at the sun and asked out loud, what is that?

Abdullah laughed. “The traffic is starting! What can I do?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

He asked me, “Where are you coming from?”

“California. I moved there. But I’m from here.” I was back, of course, to see my father. Sarah, the lovely ex-wife, she’d told me he was sick, said he sounded “strange” and something seemed “wrong,” but she always exaggerated. I called him and he eventually relented. Really he was fine, just more tired than usual, and he missed Mom. But there was something about his voice.

Abdullah said, “California girls!”

A medium-sized bread truck blared its horn alongside us and briefly slowed, a car length ahead. It was then shot-put forward, barely missing a motorcycle. It screeched to a stop behind a red Buick Regal with T-tops. I imagined loaves of white and wheat, clear plastic packs of hot dog buns scattered between the bumps of back wheel wells.

“He has no patience!” Abdullah slapped his car door. “You’re going to kill somebody! You want I should stay on the expressway? Too much traffic.”

Flushing Meadows Park was under the overpass, and I saw the grassy lakes and rusting sci-fi ruins of the 1964 World’s Fair. That version of the future dated pretty badly. Except for maybe the Unisphere (which I happened to like very much), a hollow steel globe tall as a ten-story building. Abdullah and I were emigrants flying through the Milky Way, our cab a slow yellow rocket, and the Earth was out there lonesome, spinning still in the distance. I played Wiffle ball here as a kid, on congregation picnics. So long ago I hardly remembered them, but still they came alive, flashes of light in my mind. Mom, Dad, and me on a yellow picnic sheet, cooking food on a metal grill sticking out of the ground, it smelling like chalk and smoke and soil. Our sheet always a bit removed from the others. A wooden table, a red-checked plastic tablecloth. Watermelon slices in a bowl. Mom talking macramé secrets with the wives, and a flash of Dad turning burgers. There was a picture somewhere among our family photo albums of a seagull, flying away, a stolen frankfurter limp in its beak. I thought of softball, my first game of softball. I was maybe nine or ten, at a church outing. Dad argued with the other dads; it was obvious we didn’t know all the rules. We knew most of the rules, yes, because nobody grows up in Queens without playing Wiffle ball, or stickball, or some other street version of baseball in an empty lot or some neighbor’s driveway. There was even throwball, without sticks. But these were bastard versions, fitted to whatever shitty equipment and how little space we had. We used to even change rules mid-game. Three bases sometimes, other times two. Balls hitting parked cars were fair or foul depending on who was playing. And balls that spun off cracks in the sidewalk were pretty much always played. Unless a hitter called out “Hindu!” Hindu? Where does something like that even come from? My father once told me they said it back when he was kid, too. It wasn’t specific to my block, or to Queens. Dad grew up in Brooklyn, and so he knew how to play stickball, stoopball, skully. Street games. Kid games. But I don’t think he ever graduated from them. No occasion. No need. He never played on a team, or had many friends that I could remember. Church was priority, a friendship with God. Except during that game of softball, we never played catch.

We tossed a ball back and forth, before I got up to bat. Mom had insisted we play because she thought it would be good for me, for us. In good weather, the congregation often organized activities: picnics, park hikes, and softball. But Dad usually said no. Or if we did say yes, it was with reservation, even with suspicion. We were both a part and not a part of the congregation. On the outskirts. Dad was suspicious of people with “too much time on their hands,” like weekends—free time that could be better spent studying the Bible, or praying, or making a witness for the Lord. Why read the paper when there’s scripture? Sometimes I just wanted to play Star Wars, and I’d hide out with action figures under the wooden table in our backyard. Why he allowed my mother to buy them for me, I’m not sure; they were probably not realistic enough to cause him concern. I used to hear the kids in the next yard yelling or swimming in their aboveground pool, or tossing a Frisbee, and I’d wonder why I shouldn’t go join them. What stopped me? I also at some point started wondering if I was already too old for action figures. I also knew Mom wanted Dad to just let me be a regular kid sometimes. She said it would be healthy, more balanced. During the softball game, after I’d struck out for a second time, Dad insisted I get another swing. He said it was only right, and they should let me have another chance. The other dads sort of froze. He encouraged me and said, Go on, go ahead, and get ready to swing. The pitcher was a chubby and pimply thirteen-year-old named Kermit and he was whining “But I got him out…” Kermit looked around at the adults to see if really he had to throw another pitch. I happily accepted defeat and left the plate. Dad claimed the game was rigged. He threw his mitt on the ground and kicked it so hard it soared over a high fence surrounding sewage pipes. The mitt was borrowed. I don’t remember being embarrassed by all this. Not exactly. I sort of liked that Dad and I were a team all our own, but I also remember the other boys in the field looking at me like I was some nutcase, like I’d confirmed everything they’d already thought about me. Weirdo. I do remember feeling like I was now seeing my father more clearly, in a brand-new light, realizing that fathers could actually be wrong, and, worse, not even know they’re wrong. I also remember faking that embarrassment, later on, as a teenager, about the very same game. Whenever I wanted to get the man right between the eyes, I’d say something like “you don’t even know how to play baseball.”

Of course nothing as silly as that had happened between us in a long time, but even all the half memories accrue a sort of crust that eventually feels real and whole. Like plaque on a white fake tooth. We hold on to some memories for way too long. Still, sometimes we bickered, father-and-full-grown-son stuff. Is that surprising? I don’t think so. We didn’t fight much anymore. That’d ended years before. I guess the last actual argument we’d had, a real hot one, was after I’d moved to California. We had a shouting match over the phone. Because I think Dad believed I’d never fully go through with it. I’d pack my things, a week or so after I got there, and run back home fast as I could. I think he would’ve been happy to have me stay at home forever. Just us three—me, him, and Mom, one small team. But Mom never wanted that kind of life for me. She was thrilled when I left. Deep down, I think so. I hope so. Then again it’s not like my father and I ever became best friends, either. There was a cooling-off period after the move, after the phone call. I would call and check on Mom, and if he answered he’d pass her the phone. But by the time I met Sarah, he and I had leveled off, and things were pretty good between us. We were cordial. He even asked questions about where I lived. Sarah pulled us closer together because he loved her. So did Mom. Either way, I hadn’t been back to see him since Mom died, and no way was I letting the man get sick. If he was sick. It also seemed my one chance for redemption. Or maybe better to say redemption for all of us, because I was sure Dad was praying, still, for a late homecoming. Because if there was a Heaven—although I could never take the idea seriously—I figured Mom was looking down, and this would make her happy. I sat there in the cab entertaining fantastical thoughts of me swooping in, just in time. I would save my father.

“A shitty park,” Abdullah said. “Used to be beautiful. You should see it Sunday mornings with all the garbage. I should stay in traffic, or go Queens Boulevard?”

“This used to be a kind of scary place.”

“Safe now. Filthy, but safe.”

A game of soccer was under way. Sub-bass music shook the back ends of SUVs in one of the parking lots.

“You know what, take me to Forest Park.”

Not in such a hurry, after all.

Abdullah nodded. I saw his rusty rotting teeth in the mirror. He said, “They’re trying to make this place beautiful again. Spanish families come every weekend. Music so loud the trees dance.” Then he laughed into his phone. He put something in his mouth and chewed.

I said, “I want to drive through Forest Park for a while. And then we’ll go to Richmond Hill.” The house was waiting, and Dad was waiting. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The cab dipped low and took to an off ramp.

When Mom first got sick, her dying was sort of unthinkable. Because I was so young? I don’t know. Remission came and the cancer went, and the years passed by, but then she got sick again. I definitely knew this time where it was headed. Not where, exactly, but I knew what would likely happen, and still I have to say I had trouble grasping the endgame scenario. Even standing there right beside her bed, in the hospital. She was a ghost, surrounded by mint-green walls and silver bedpans, all the humming precision equipment. I was optimistic. And yet, here, in the cab, pretty sure Dad was doing relatively fine, I couldn’t shake my uneasy feeling.

I looked at Abdullah. He put another piece in his mouth.

“What are you eating?”

“You want some?” He grinned. “Is betel nut. You chew the leaves and nut.”

I frowned, making a face at him in the mirror like I have no idea.

“You chew it— What, I have a passenger. What do you mean? Who did?” He punched at the steering wheel. His laugh was all consuming, so great now it almost stole his voice. He wheezed, “Ah, my friend!” We traded glances in the mirror and he pointed at the phone, what’d I tell you about this guy?

A chatter blast of horns screamed out. A drill battering against a distant sidewalk.

He was digging through a plastic bag in the passenger seat beside him. He reached back through the opening in his clear plastic pay box and handed me a small leather pouch. In the mirror he made small fingers at his mouth, a squirrel pawing a prize. “Like this, gives you a zing.” The leaves were semitough, like wet bay leaves, and the nut slices looked peppery. I handed him back the pouch. “No, no. Keep it till we get there,” he said. “We call it paan.” Rhymed with “wan,” and I was getting a little bit carsick.

“Tastes weird.” It was like the tough skin of a new fruit, and the sensation was bitter, but pleasant. My tongue tingled and I looked up, catching his face in the mirror.

He nodded, grinning. “Keep chewing.”

Ahead was Queens Boulevard.

Six wide lanes of stretch limos and smoke-belching buses racing past the strip joints and the pool halls, for the shopping malls and the nightclubs. My first girlfriend, from way back in high school. Her name. It was. Bhanu. Poor girl. We were young. She was so young. We went to a nearby school the size of a Texas prison, cut classes together, and hid in the stairwells. I remembered running from security officers in the Queens Center Mall, just a few blocks away, and how one time we found ourselves in the rug department at Macy’s, on the very top floor, and how we pushed the rolling stairs between the itchy hanging carpets and sat up there for hours, undetected, in the dark, rug dander all in the air. We talked and pretended this was exactly where we wanted to be. I stopped sneezes by cupping my hands in front of my mouth. She covered her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. It was all very sweet, like something out of a lesser John Hughes movie. We even etched the letters OMD into the wall behind the rugs, but then debated what the letters actually stood for. Bhanu.

Abdullah drove us by a hospital, and then by an old-folks’ home for the near dead. The traffic here was infamous, the street far too wide. It was often called the Boulevard of Death. I gave Abdullah a hearty thumbs-up.

The betel nut was bitter, with a pleasant tongue buzz. The tires bounced, and they bounced. I was getting a little high, which was ridiculous. I was headed home. Had my father ever gotten high in his life? Before I was born? What a thought! The world is alive before we get here. The blacktop whisked by under my outstretched arm.

Before I met Bhanu, cutting class was my way to spend the day, and such a lonely way! I often found myself just spending the time, as if I had so much of it, although I guess you really do when you’re young. Sometimes I got as far as the front steps of school, only to turn around and get right back on a city bus. It was thrilling, an autonomous thing to do, a thing done outside, in the world, beyond the stricture of the Laudermilk home. I liked that my parents didn’t know where I was, liked nobody knowing where I was. I liked being alone. And, yes, I sometimes exacerbated that feeling with appropriately morose New Wave music. I had a pale blue Depeche Mode T-shirt, and I kept it hidden from my parents. Sometimes I stuffed it in my backpack before leaving. One time, I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I took the bus back along Woodhaven Boulevard but went beyond my stop, where I usually got off, and I was fascinated to see the bus actually kept on going. Inside me, somewhere, I already knew more existed, of course, but to see where it went, to go where it went, and see all the people on the bus come suddenly alive: it was exhilarating. I took it to the end of the line. Charles Park in Howard Beach. Where it was empty, and desolate, and gray, and I saw what looked like a junkie girl, who I’m pretty sure was pregnant, or had an abnormally round and jutting belly, passed out on a stone park bench, and a little girl was sitting in the dirt beside her looking totally lost. I turned around and walked all the way home, I don’t know how many miles, all along that same bus route, partly to see anything I might have missed, and partly to fill my time, to spend it, but also partly as punishment for cutting class and submitting myself so willingly to such a sad sight so early in the morning. I’d also recently heard—and when I say “recently,” I mean with respect to visiting Dad, with respect to sitting with Mr. Abdullah in his cab, I’m not still talking school, here—I’d heard of Buddhist monks who could literally focus all of their energies, focus their blood flow and brain waves on any ailing organ of the body, harness and direct every cerebral effort. I saw it on the National Geographic channel. I’ve always loved this channel, the volcano documentaries and the earthquake specialists, the end-of-the-world scenarios and the survivalist shows. The idea of the monks, it stayed with me, it attracted me. I wanted control like that. Can you imagine? They even could slow their heart rates just short of death. Then again, who wants to get so close? I mean, who did these monks think they were? Lounging in their fancy saffron-colored robes. It’s not like they were romantic figures for me, not at all. I’d never be comfortable in such loose swaddling, too much freedom. But I was becoming interested in what they did on the inside with all that off-spark, the like-lightning dancing around our skullcapped Tesla coils. How did they do it? Sarah always said to be wary of questions like this, they can be dangerous. She said those stories you hear of pilgrims who climb mountains in search of bearded gurus, those are about the lucky ones who made it back alive. The ones who saunter into town, hair mussed, unshaven and sexy, robe a little soiled, and they spend the remainder of their lazy days pondering the answer to their one very special question. But what about the ones who never make it back, the ones who fall? The ones who slip and break their legs, and die from starvation at the bottom of a gorge? What about the ones who die on the way back down, left to rot on the hard slanting rock? What about them…? Hmmm…?

I started recognizing the old neighborhoods. A corner Te Amo convenience store, where I used to play video games and tried stealing peeks at the girlie magazines. We were close.

“Good, right?” Abdullah pointed at his mouth. “The feeling.”

“What?” I said. “Yeah.” The park roads were empty and the way was smooth.

“It will never come again,” he said. “Your head knows what it tastes like now.” We turned off the boulevard, and took to the hilly asphalt interior roads of Forest Park.

“Now what?”

“Just drive,” I said. “Is that okay? Don’t worry about the meter. I have money.”

“Everything is on the way to everything.”

The green leaves and high bush were everywhere, thousands and thousands of trees among the pour and sway of concrete and blacktop surrounded by the pigeon-shitted rooftops of Queens, over five hundred acres of wood thickets and wilds in the middle of the New York City suburbs. There were rumors, when I was a kid, of families having picnics and going for long walks and vanishing forever among the towering oaks. There was talk of a child-killer living in a dried-up streambed. A lean-to in the sand. The taxi carriage floated some just before descending a large hill, and my heart did a light bird flutter. I thought of Sarah, wondered where she was and what she was having for lunch. I used to do all the cooking and was heartbroken to find out she was apparently eating just fine without me. And her new friend—was he a boyfriend by then? I’m not sure.… I like to think definitely, no. Regardless, he cooked. And the last time we’d talked, I interrupted dinner. She had told me she needed some time, and maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore for a while. I said I called because I wanted to tell her I was going to New York, to see Dad. And I might be gone for a while.

“Good,” she said.

Good?

“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you have to say? We might never talk again.”

I heard her friend in the background. He was Greek and every island-accented syllable from his mouth, no matter how banal, sounded like a serenade. I hated it.

“What do you want from me, Josie?”

I didn’t answer. And I stayed quiet like that for a while, until she finally sang out: “I’m hanging up now.…”

I saw Abdullah’s eyes in the mirror.

With my arm jutting through the open window, an upswell of cool air broke on my skin. It smacked at my face. It felt good. I stuck my head out the window and into the wind.

 

 

 

 

When I was twelve years old I had a vision. Even now saying that makes me uncomfortable. It feels strange, alien, like the memory of a scene from a film. An old and faded dream. What is a vision, anyway? I’m not sure I’m better suited to answer the question than anyone else. I’d even go so far as to say anybody who says they know is lying. Even the word “vision” is tricky, as if it names one of the natural senses. But you don’t really see anything. I read up on the topic, years later, when I was trying to get a handle on the thing. Sarah helped, and gave me some books. She was a translator, mostly of Hebrew poetry, novels, but sometimes scripture, too, religious texts, and so she had a helpful take. Plus, the story appealed to her—the idea of me, onstage, as a kid. But she never fully got how it made me so uneasy. Still does. And how could she? How could anybody?

I did see something, though. But first, I heard something.

I definitely heard a voice. Not a “voicelike sound,” and psychiatrists are careful to point out the difference, but a voice. Not that I’ve seen psychiatrists. I’m not crazy. But I did read books. Which is not to say you’re crazy if you see a psychiatrist. Sarah went to one for years, her mother was one, and Sarah was fine. I probably should’ve seen one. I’m losing my point—I heard a voice, and it told me what to say, and so I said it. What did it sound like? If I’m honest, it sounded like me. Exactly like me. But it wasn’t me. There’s a scientific theory that says our belief in God comes from a voice like this one, that early humans were not fully conscious, not aware they “were,” and so before we knew we were thinking, we simply heard a voice. That voice. The voice was not our own, and it told us what to do, and we did it. I think maybe something like this was happening to me. Which is not so strange, if you think about it. I’ve had a song or piece of music stuck in my head for hours at a time, days, and I swear I’m not the one who put it there. I hear it played inside the concert hall of my head, on repeat, in a loop, and I have no control over the noise whatsoever. What was it I heard back then? I can’t remember, not precisely, but it was something like “Do it now.”

I remember looking out past the audience and what did I see?

I saw what looked like a giant white horse. I then turned to my father. He was nodding, slow-motion-like, in a dream, and I heard it say again, “Do it now.”

Like it was yesterday, I can see the horse, right out there in front of me, coming through the back wall of the theater. By the lobby doors and under the balcony; the rider wore a golden crown. I blinked, standing out there onstage. I shook my head, lowered my arms, and then I saw what it really was: a huge painted mural of a great white horse. I hadn’t noticed it before—because it was too big? I don’t know. But it was actually back there and beyond the audience, gallop-frozen, on a heavenly burst of cloud luster. I touched the action figure in my pocket, and thought of the tauntauns in The Empire Strikes Back, the large horselike creatures that walk reared back on their hind legs, and I pretended the horse was real. It was big, and beautiful, and painted so painstakingly, and its eyes were the glassy kind that stared right back and looked alive. The horse was looking right at me, and it would come hurtling through the wall at any moment. The plaster would crackle and shatter, gushing white powder on the carpet.

I heard it again: “Do it now.” So I spoke.

My parents were sitting there in the front row, their mouths partly open, just looking, and wondering what in the world had come over their boy. The elders and the servant brothers were side-stage, now, and calling me over. But I couldn’t hear them. I looked out at the faces, of friends, and family, and strangers mostly, and of Issy. I don’t like to think about Issy anymore. Waving from his balcony seat, sort of haltingly.

Time slowed.

A cool and clear muffle of silence in the hall, and I could feel a sort of velvety veil about to be lifted. I looked at my notes. They had dropped to the floor. Were my parents angry? Was I in trouble? I saw them as if through thick glass, or deep water, and I couldn’t hear or touch anything outside my head at all. I was standing at the edge of a high cliff, and I looked at my notes on the floor … Was I shouting just now? I think I was shouting. And then the audience exploded with applause. I heard everything, I saw everything, and I felt every texture in the hall for a long moment. I was every last body all at once, and I drank in the applause like it was a large cup of RC Cola. Mom and Dad stood from their seats, and they were clapping. All four thousand people, and they loved me—they loved me! I’d even dropped my notes on the floor, and they loved me. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say next, and so I did what just came naturally: I recited scripture. And then I went off script completely, swept away in a rush of something new, some new me; maybe God did grant me sight, a revelation. A glimpse of what waits for this world.

He showed me a horse.

And I gave them what they wanted, what we all wanted: I gave them a date. I gave them what no one else would give them—or would they? I’ve often wondered, since then, if some other sermon had to be changed that day because of me and my big mouth. I gave them the day and the hour of the End. It would be twenty years more before I was wrong.

But at that moment I was the Josiah, king of the four thousand Christians, God’s mouthpiece. It was like filling up with every bit of light and heat that had ever passed through my body. I was Blake’s Great Revelation Angel, glorious and towering. Of course, I didn’t think it at the time, only later on, like when I first saw that illustration in a coffee-table art book, but my God, that’s just how I felt. I figured everything would be different. School would be different. And I figured if I bowed they would just keep on clapping. So with a small stiff arm at my waist, I bowed. The audience answered again! Another swell of applause! Which did what but just make me hungrier. I can still see that kid from way out here, through all this stuff we think of as time, the small and early spirit-hungry version of me—stepping out from behind the microphone and, boy, just look at him bow. No, he curtseys. Like it’s his grand opening night, like it’s his coronation. He curtseys, and the audience can’t help themselves. Some people actually lose themselves in laughter, in appreciation, an ovation, and maybe some in their enthusiasm actually tarnish the dignity of the whole affair because let’s not forget this is supposed to be worship, a serious business, God’s business, but then again, who are we kidding: the kid is good. Curtseying, for crying out loud! Now raising a hand like No, thank you. Little me waves to the back, like some visiting ambassador. Remembering the scene sent me reeling, feeling every little thing all at once.

I thought of looking out there at my mother’s face, the face of my lovely and still alive mother. Hands folded at her mouth, eyes teary with pride. My father nodding his head, My boy … The elder brothers from the side of the stage whispering: “Hey, psst, hey, time to leave the stage…”

I looked at Mom, and I took in a very deep breath. I concentrated on that small thing that lives way inside (I have tried this since and failed miserably): the tiny, invisible, indestructible point—but sometimes it fills up a room and touches its head to the ceiling; how big a horse would I need, if a heavenly horse came riding and rearing from back in the aisles? Come the final day, come Armageddon, the blood will flow and fill the streets, high as God’s holy horses, the elder brothers waving me over …

Wait a second now: Whose blood?

I literally asked myself this question. This I remember more clearly than anything because it was the question that pulled me down to earth. I’d recited this scripture how many times without thinking? How many things are like this in life? Whose blood? My good mother would one day slip and swim through whose wet blood? The applause started dying away …

And then my mother nudged with her chin, a throw of her chin, like Go on, sweetie, go ahead. And Dad looking like, Hey, it’s gotta end sometime …

I looked around the theater, one more time.

My mother would wade through a river of whose dead blood exactly? Red blood? Real blood? I looked up at the sky, at the cosmic ceiling, at the butter-yellow moon, and I don’t know how I’d missed it! Even from way down there, onstage, I could plainly see it. Across the moon was a jagged line like a lightning bolt, a crack in the painted plaster probably not even wide enough for a finger. But if that moon were real, the crack would have been a canyon twenty miles wide. The ceiling was just a ceiling.

Does this make any kind of sense? Pictures of planets don’t make planets, Josiah! The sky was painted prettily, yes. We were in a theater! In Queens! The trash bags were piled out front by the sidewalk, and the soda trucks were driving by in the street, and there was a whole world of warm-blooded people out there who had not an inkling of our blood-spilling talk inside. I actually played the phrase in my head several times in the following days: “The ceiling is really a ceiling.”

I sat there in the back of Abdullah’s cab, and thought of my father and how many different fathers we all have, of how many I’d had. All of them Gill, but different. There was the father I had when I was a kid, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be present with me in the world, for him to stop acting like I had something to give him, and to momentarily put aside his worship for a game of checkers. There was the father who argued with my mother, who soon insisted that church worship was no longer enough, and he wanted more worship at home. There was the father who eventually refused church altogether—but never God—when Mom got sick; and if already Dad was in a boat all his own—and he very much was—Mom’s getting sick made him pull up the gangplank. There was the father who frightened me, who prayed for hours, on his knees, facing a wall, who I believe at least one time deliberately hurt himself; I was young and so I can’t recall when for sure, but I remember finding him on his knees, in the garage, and slamming his thighs with a large yellow phone book, again, and again, and again; Mom rushed in, took me away, and shut the door behind us. There was my deliberate insomniac of a father, the man who paced, back and forth, in the kitchen, in the garage, on the sidewalk, who stayed up for days sometimes, refusing sleep, showing increasing signs of what I see now was temporary dementia. Mom would tell me not to worry and just leave him be. That my father was praying. One night, I was maybe nine or probably ten, it was three or four in the morning, I heard the early insects, and someone talking in our backyard. I went downstairs and looked out the kitchen window. I saw him pacing, talking to himself. I slowly opened the door, very slowly. I heard him repeating scripture like a mantra: “And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from the Earth, and the top of it reached up to Heaven, and the angels were climbing up and down. And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from Earth, and…” This made me afraid, and feel lost, unprotected. Except then I realized, as my eyes got used to the darkness, that my mother was sitting there in front of me, right at my feet, on the top porch step. She didn’t turn around. She said, “Go to bed, love.”

Most of that behavior, the more extreme kind, stopped the famous summer of my “vision,” or whatever you want to call what happened. It seemed the very thing he’d been waiting for. And of course there was the father who tossed me aside when I left New York. Last of all, the father who lost my mother. I’d wondered how he’d go on. But he did. I wondered who he was now, without Mom. Was he different? How different? Without Sarah, I felt lost inside my own body, and she was alive and well.

I decided my favorite version of Dad was a young Gill Laudermilk, looking like an older Luke Skywalker, back when he and I assembled my first sermons in the garage, and I practiced speaking in the full-length mirror by his study desk, when he let me drive his station wagon, a brand-new Ford Country Squire, fire-engine red, in a nearby supermarket parking lot. My favorite mother was the great protector who once boxed the ears of a sixteen-year-old neighborhood bully because he had tripped me. A wide gash had opened in my bottom lip when my chin hit the sidewalk. Mom once said, “Never listen to what others say about your father, because your father is a man of God.” She followed his every revelatory whim, every iteration. My favorite father drove up our street in his Country Squire like he was in a homecoming parade; he honked his horn and grinned from behind the windshield, saying, My son’s gonna learn how to drive! Wheels crunching gravel in the driveway, he shouted: This old world, my boy, it’s sinking! So if now’s not the time to splurge, tell me when? Tell me when!… The porch of our house was a covered porch, yellow with white wooden columns, and you could see the newly built Sikh temple behind our yard, and around the corner its pear-shaped rising roof, and my mother watching the workers disassemble the scaffolding, saying, What happened to the Irish and Italians, good churchgoers, this neighborhood is so brown … From the porch, we watched lightning storms while sitting on the sofa my father had found in a trash pile ten blocks away. It smelled of basement wet and hot asphalt, and sat in front of the living room window, opposite the sofa on the window’s other side, inside, where we watched old movies and ate peanuts from orange plastic cups. Mom used to say, Star Wars makes me so nauseous. I mean it’s exciting, Josiah, it is, but the world can never get that way because we won’t last that long. Armageddon’s right around the corner … Sausages simmering in the Crock-Pot.… It’s not easy! she’d say. But not much longer before our Heavenly Father comes home. And it’s so, so sad that no one in the neighborhood will ever see Heaven, because the Hindus don’t know Jesus. These statues of Ganesh, circus elephants sitting pretty with flowers in their hands, this is God? Abomination!

And there was something about the way the Bible told them, telling me, Sweetie, the monsters are real. A demon with six hungry heads and the Wild Beast will come from the ocean, and the Whore will ride on its slick, wet back, and that Last Day will be like no other since the floodwaters covered this earth, wiping away every evildoer. And the falling stars will blow like bombs, and the poison mushroom clouds will bloom—

Goddamn! Dad shouts, I’m sorry for my language, but my God, isn’t it high time! Because this generation will not pass away before the Day of the Coming of the Lord! So why not go ahead and get us a brand-new car? Shiny and red like Golgotha’s blood-soaked mud! You heard it spoken by the brothers at church: You were right, Josiah! It’s coming! This is war, so stretch your legs! And I bet everything we have in this life that this world will crack in half, and stink like the dead egg it is! I will not be caught unawares with my family running after buses packed with Catholics. I will not be dependent on Muslims, or Moonies, or anyone but our provider who does not have a car, who does not need a car, but rides on the holiest of horses. And we will follow him to Heaven, to the sun if he takes us, this is not your mother’s world, and this is not your world, so take this place and shove it down Gehenna’s hungry throat. And, my son, when you are a full-grown man, and it’s your time to steer, you will sit in the driver’s seat and take us home in the fashion of real holy worship. And we will lift up ourselves and finally grow wings because this here round nest is done, say it with me, son, “All the former things are passed away, all the former things…”

I once saw my father’s hands on my mother’s neck, just once, on her shoulders. He was pushing her against the dining room wall. I was astonished. I thought they were hugging, but then they weren’t hugging at all. When was this? Sometimes there were finger-thin bruises on her arms, but by the time I was a teenager the bruises had gone away. When I was about thirteen, I saw Dad limp and pale, as if he’d fainted, on the garage concrete floor. My mother was crying out, to me, him, to the ceiling: Your father’s only sleeping, you wake up, honey, so what if they took the car.…

I looked away from the window, and toward Abdullah. A cigarette would have been nice. But the pack was in my bag, the bag was in the trunk, and I’d been quitting for years.

“To Richmond Hill, yes?”

I said, “Let me ask you something, are you Muslim?”

He looked at me in the mirror. “Why do you ask me this?”

“I’m just curious, because if you are, then wouldn’t the betel nut be … well…”

He slung his elbow over the seat and he faced me. His eyes were then back on the road. “I am Abdullah. Almost too much as it is.”

I laughed along with him.

“So where are we going?”

I told him the address.

A low tinny voice chirped from the cell phone’s receiver. Abdullah shouted back in his language.

I looked out the window.

Why take the long way home? Why go out of my way?

A small boy swung from a fire escape on the first-floor front of a high-rise apartment building, and then the boy was gone, and then the building was gone, which was then replaced by other buildings, and storefronts with apartments in the floors above, and more tall buildings. I thought of how this place was vertical, and of beaches, and I actually had trouble imagining them. I’d walked on how many beaches, and I was seriously having trouble picturing them. The West Coast is all horizontal. No need to build upward there. Just bulldoze inland, to the foothills and the flatlands, head for the deserts. And now I was finding real comfort in the difference. I saw the brick buildings and flat roofs crowded with satellite dishes. I saw the pizza shops, and more pizza shops, the 99-cent stores and the sidewalk sales. We drove by myriads of splintering telephone poles shot at with staple guns, and the flapping flyers promising miracles of overnight weight loss.

The elevated trains over Jamaica Avenue rattled overhead.

The diners all along the boulevard.

The cars, so many goddamn cars, and the trees, the dirt squares surrounded by sidewalk, and the maples and towering oaks, four or five on every block, branches resting on saggy telephone wires.

The cars parked on streets, in the driveways. I counted the driveways until I stopped counting, and before long I recognized the store on the corner, “24/7 Milk Depot,” they’d kept the name. Where I used to get bagels, and once I had to ask a tall pretty lady for help, to reach up and get the sanitary napkins that Mom had asked for, up on the highest shelf.

“We are here,” he said. I paid and we stepped outside. He handed me my duffel and winked. Trunk slam. The tires squealed as he pulled way.

I was back in the world.

The burned-out shell of a Volkswagen Beetle sat across the street, parked in front a vacant lot. It had no doors. A small girl played with a Barbie, her little legs splayed behind her on the sidewalk. The house, my father’s house, our house, was looking really old. All of the houses were old, but ours seemed so very old. Which made me what, made my father what? The porch sagged, and leaned forward like it was easing into a recliner. The columns were slightly bowed, had arthritic elbows, and the house appeared to be in mid-exhalation. The chain-link fence was torn in places, rifts in the waffled steel. And the garage looked to have been unused for years. A large burn mark scarred the token front rectangle of browning grass. Weeds covered most of the front yards. I saw a mattress on a roof two doors down. A smell of fuel, gas, kerosene, something pungent was in the air. And the swoop of the Sikh temple’s swooping roof, around the corner, was exactly where it should have been, rising behind and above my father’s house. I am where I was made. I lugged my bag, opened the gate, and walked up the steps.

The porch sofa was gone and the windows were blocked by drapes. One window was broken and banded with silver duct tape, what looked like cardboard behind. I rang the bell, took a deep breath, and waited. I knocked, and rang again. Talk about déjà vu.

There was a rustling inside, a curtain moved slightly.

The door lock clicked.

Why not come home sooner?

The door moved barely away from the jamb, and a brass chain bridged the opening. Then it quickly shut.

“Dad?” I knocked again. “It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Josie.”

“Josie?” His voice was weak. “Josiah?”

He forgot I was coming?

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

I heard the chain fall. He opened the door, and there he was, my father, barefoot and barely dressed, emaciated. Wearing nothing but a loincloth.

 

 

 

 

It was dark inside, and my nose quivered as I watched him shuffle up the hallway. A smell of wet rot and trash, a scuttling on the floor.

“Come in, come in,” he was saying, and waving me on to follow.

I couldn’t move in the hot stink of the foyer; it was a long hall, and it seemed even longer in the dark. The stairs leading upstairs on my left, the smooth wooden banister, and the living and dining rooms on my right. The bathroom was under the stairs. The hall ran between the stairs and the rooms on my right, like a dark alleyway leading on to the brownish glow of the kitchen, far away and half alive with dusk light. He stopped in that doorway, a pale golem shadow sipping from a glass of water.

My eyes were adjusting. I realized I was surrounded by plastic garbage bags. A month of trash, maybe more, in swollen stacks, piled on a broken chair, disemboweled and spilling on the stairs. My face flushed. I squinted.

“Not much food in those,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

He disappeared into the kitchen.

My forehead was warm, not sickly warm but something else. I slapped at my temple. I squeezed the thin bone between my eyes. A fly buzzing at my lips, I blew it away. Breathed in, buckled some, and gagged. I was horrified. By the house. And, frankly, I was scared for my father. A family death can decimate a home, and here he was all alone and living with it.

“Get in here so I can get a look at you!”

I walked past the stairs and saw, beneath them, the door to the bathroom was shut. A faint red light was leaking out from beneath like a darkroom.

“Get in here!”

His back was to me. His white hair in a greasy straggle fell in the groove between sharp shoulder blades. It looked like he was wearing a diaper. Cat turds were scattered on the floor like cigar butts. He stood there in the warm bath of brown light and stretched up on his toes, skinny arms punching out slowly. He turned and faced me, yawning.

“Let me get a good look at you,” he said.

Knots of soiled clothing and dinner plates caked with dry sauces on the kitchen table and counters. A few sofa cushions piled beside the fridge. Towers of torn, yellowing books, wet papers littered the floor and spilled from the pantry. A mustard-colored smear on the linoleum, and the rich bone-stink of food gone dry after too long in the air.

He said, “What?”

I was thinking.

“Close up your mouth,” he said.

Thinking what.

“How about we have us a toast? Come on, Junior. Say something.”

“A toast would be good, I guess.”

“There’s the spirit! I’ve been waiting!” A large white cat, with a gray belly swinging, rubbed its head against his shin. “I have cats now.”

He turned to the refrigerator and with both hands he gripped and pulled the door half open. His elbows poked at the skin, and I thought of groceries falling through wet paper bags. He handed me an open bottle of beer. “I got them all ready, took off the caps.”

I took the bottle.

On the refrigerator racks: a half-full bottle of red wine, no cork; a loaf of bread wrapped in plastic; half a stick of butter on a silver dish; and a clear pitcher of water. He let me close the door.

I followed him into the low-lit dining room to the same wooden table where we’d always had our Sunday family dinners. The table was mostly clear of clutter. And the bottle was cold in my hand, so cold it shocked in the dark warm sweat of the room. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. He sat in a chair not so close to the table. They were heavy chairs. As a boy, I’d had trouble pulling them out from under the table so I could sit down for dinner. I pulled a chair closer to his. It hardly seemed the same room.

“I can explain,” he said. “But first.” He smiled, and there was a glimpse of younger Gill, a flash of resurrection in his eyes. I thought of how different it had been standing at Mom’s sickbed, a year before, a vacuum between Dad and me, like a scooped-out hole in the universe. “This is a momentous thing,” he said. “Never had a doubt, I knew you were coming.” His lips were ashen, corners webbed with spit-milk. Even right here, in his presence, the man was somewhere else. Sarah was right. Something was wrong.

“So how’s my little man doing?”

I wanted a smoke.

“To us!” he said. “Say something! Sit!” He raised his bottle chin high.

I sat, raised mine, and we brought the bottles together, but a lot slower than usual for a cheer. The bottles were collared with a limp silver foil and torn white paper, and they made no noise when they touched. No clink of glass, just a soft papery pat. The reality of the situation was settling on me. Something was very wrong. He had no idea. And I knew he would fight me if I said so.

“So,” I said. “You look pretty good.”

“You look good, taking care of yourself. How’s the beautiful wife?”

“Not my wife anymore. You know that.”

“Always your wife. Nonsense.”

The window behind my father, I broke it once with a Wiffle ball.

“And I’ve never felt better,” he said. “Despite—” He waved a hand. “Your mother, she used to clean.”

So, he was partly aware. I said, “The house could use some attention.”

“No one pays attention anymore.”

My heartbeat, my pulse, and the stink, I was semiacclimating. I dried the back of my neck with my sleeve. “And you’re feeling okay? How are you feeling?”

“Never better.” He patted my arm and slowly stood. The hand was cold.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

He left his bottle and shuffled to the opposite end of the table. He picked up a thin black notebook from a pile of back-to-school-sale spirals. Blue, red, yellow, green. He wrote something down with a pencil. “You always had a way, Junior, cutting right through the fat. Tell me now what’s new. Talk to me.”

I had no idea why he was calling me Junior.

He turned and yanked the pull chain of a small lamp on the other side of the table. The lamp cast a yellow cone over a thick open book. I saw his knotty spine. It zippered down from under his hair, and beneath the loincloth.

I said, “Are you eating? Please tell me you’re eating enough.”

“All I need.” He turned the pages slowly and scratched some notes in the spiral. “Right on down to the meat of things.”

Carefully, he set the book down, shuffled back, and pulled the chair farther from the table. I helped him some. He took hold of the back of the chair, and moved the chair slightly. Looked at it. Moved it again. Went back to the other side of the table and stood looking at his notebooks, shaking his head.

“Dad.”

He took the spirals in a stack and squared them off, against the table, into a neat pile. Set them back down. Nudged them so they were flush with the table edge. Looked at them. Looked at the chair. He picked them up again, squared them off again. I didn’t like seeing this sort of behavior. Compulsive.

“Dad,” I said again.

He came back and sat beside me, and then he started to stand up again. I set my hand on his knee, and broke his concentration. He stayed, took his beer and sipped.

I said, “You look thin.”

He looked at me, a sweet face really, which I didn’t expect. He tucked his hair behind his ears, and I saw his eyes were green. He said, “I’m fine. Fine.” A black cat jumped, landing on the far end of the table.

I took a long swig and thought of having a smoke, that maybe I could just step out back and have one, and wouldn’t it be nice to come back inside and, like in a cheaply plotted movie, find everything up until now was a dream. I’d find Dad doing just fine, in a clean house, of sound mind, doing the weekend crossword in a brand-new blue Barcalounger. Or better—I’d find him a young man again, Mom healthy and alive. I’d had this kind of fantasy before but always cut it short knowing it would mean never having met Sarah.

“Sarah’s worried,” I said.

“No reason to worry.” He gestured toward the hallway with his bottle. “Your mother was here, you missed her.”

I wanted this to be true. Who wouldn’t?

“She was here,” I said.

He pointed to the hall. “You missed her.”

What is it about a father’s face?

I’d never given so much as a single deliberate thought to my father’s eyes. I could talk of Sarah’s pink and mottled cheeks, of the single errant eyebrow stand that poked out from between her eyes. But a father’s face can be a frightening thing, a bridge between two voids. He was in me. I was in him. Where did that leave us? My mother’s eyes were like light on glass, and flickering. Always anxious, and waiting. I used to think she was waiting for the end, like Dad was, a new beginning, whatever you want to call it. But now I realized—it hit me just like that—it was Dad who made her anxious.

“Mom’s gone,” I said.

He put a hand on my face. A minty aftershave mixed with every other smell, and it helped. “You think I’m crazy,” he said. “And that’s okay. We just don’t know much, do we?”

I had questions. “Why are you calling me Junior?”

He was incredulous. “You’re my Junior.”

I looked at my lap. “What’s my name?” I studied what was left in the bottle.

“Clever boy.”

I tapped the bottle with a fingernail.

He touched my face. “I know who you are and who I am for the first time in my whole life.” He grabbed hold of the back of my chair and stood again. “Good enough for you, Josiah? Hmm?” He pressed a hand to my shoulder, and with his eyes he seemed to say, This is what shoulders are for. “Gill Laudermilk,” he said, “is a dead man and dying. I am a son of God, Yahweh’s Junior. See me in my glory!” He raised both arms, and they fell back to his sides, just as fast. “Let me show you something.”

I touched his side as he walked past, his naked skin. I squeezed lightly, partly to see if he was real, and he grimaced.

“I thought you were losing your balance.”

“Follow me,” he said.

His belly was hard, and starting to bloat.

“I gotta say you look really terrible.”

“Never better in my life.”

He led me to the living room where I used to watch TV with my mother. Where we ate ice cream from a shared wooden bowl. The carpet was the same dull gray, but now worn down and matted, balding in places. Outside light leaked in between creases, through rips in the cardboard covering the windows, but mostly the room was dark. An orange tabby beneath the glass coffee table, crouching, stared at me with silver eyes. A computer sat on the table. It was modern, thin-screened, and this was surprising, yes, but no more so than anything else. The sofa was covered by a white sheet, as if he were prepping to paint the walls. A pillow, a body-shaped impression. He’d been living in the living room and it stank of it.

“You can sleep here, or upstairs. I don’t go upstairs much. I have trouble sleeping up there.”

“So where?”

He pointed to the hallway, and waved his hand. “I know, I know, I know.”

“We need to sit, and start from the beginning.”

“You don’t know the half of it!” He sat and turned on a lamp beside the computer, a replica of the lamp in the dining room. “My lifeline, Junior. Isn’t she pretty?”

“You hate TV and you have this?” The sides of the computer were partly covered with yellow Post-it Notes.

“I still hate the TV! I keep two in the hall closet, never use them. But I hardly go out since your mother left.”

“You said she was here.”

“She’s always here. And without this”—he touched the screen—“no legs. I’m exhausted.”

We looked at each other, like we were both looking for the right words because how do you talk about this when you’ve never been here before? It was scary to see him like this. A laugh sprang from my insides. “You know what you look like? A baby. A filthy hairy baby.”

Anxiety fell from his face, and he laughed back at me. “Ha! Now we’re talking. I’m going back, Junior. Crawling back, diving in!” He rubbed his hands together. And then he looked at his hands, itched the back of his hands, one, and then the other. Rubbed, itched. Rubbed, itched …

“Dad.”

The spell broke, and he seemed embarrassed. Put his hands under his legs.

I walked over to the window and took hold of the heavy drapery. I dug among the folds for the drawstring and pulled. Bent back the cardboard. An explosive swirl of dust motes and a long shaft of daylight washed in. I turned to his nasty look.

“Put it back,” he said.

“It’s good for you,” I said, peeling away the cardboard.

“Let there be light!” he shouted, his arms half raised.

I laughed. He didn’t.

He said, “I said put that back.” He covered his eyes.

I walked over to him, and touched his shoulder. “Hey.”

He slapped at my hand, and said: “This is not your house.”

A white cat jumped into his lap and pressed its face against his arms. He stroked its back. “Good kitty.” He looked at me. The cat jumped, as he stood. He walked away, hand pressing to his side.

“We’ll talk more later,” he said. “I promise. I’m tired.”

I watched him walk away and this made me feel more alone than I’d ever felt. I had the terrible feeling that he would leave the room and I would never see him again. I folded the cardboard back in place, and heard the door of the bathroom slam shut. I heard him fasten the lock. It all sounded like he wanted me to hear it. I walked into the hall, and saw the red light spilling from under. I went back to the living room and dragged at the curtains, covering the windows. The shaft of sunlight drowned.

 

 

 

 

Time passed. An hour or so. I sat there in the dining room, at the table, and tried to get my thoughts together. I walked through the rooms, the kitchen, the living and dining rooms, and I was fascinated and moved by the most mundane things. The gilded frames on the living room wall, and how they’d been there for decades. They were now peeling and showing wood from beneath. I remembered my father buying them at a yard sale across the street, and hanging them on the wall just how he’d found them. They stayed empty for months. He eventually set a printed psalm within each.

I walked over to the bathroom door and called out his name. He didn’t respond. I heard him snoring. I shook my head, totally befuddled, feeling uneasy, a little sick. I almost knocked, but went outside for a smoke instead. I felt helpless and dumb, even responsible for what was happening, whatever it was, and my fantasy of saving the day dissolved into nothing but anxiety and shame. Afraid the door would lock shut behind me, I picked up a piece of wood from the porch and wedged it between the door and the frame. The sun was gone. But still that stink of fuel. Across the street two boys played handball in the vacant lot against the side of a neighboring garage. I took out my phone and dialed Sarah.

It rang once, and I ended the call, regretting I had tried.

I dialed again, immediately ended that call, and decided I would never call her again.

I dialed one more time, and left a long and awkward voice mail, telling her where I was. That she was right about Dad, and I thought she should know.

Sitting on the porch step, I lightly stubbed my cigarette on the brick. I lit the tip again. The smoke wiped my busy brain clean. But there was also something in the spark of match to cigarette that I always loved, the simple act of setting fire to the paper’s end. I liked the partial loss of me that came with every cigarette, the surrender, the abandon of will, the mindlessness of it all, like the emptiness you feel during a good long run. If I never turned my head, the house would disappear and take my father with it. I checked the digits on my phone. A blue rubber ball came rolling across the street.

One of the boys jogged over. He wore tube socks over his hands with holes cut for his fingers. The ball bounced against the curb, and the boy grabbed it. He threw it to me. I caught it, threw it back, and he jogged off. I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to stop myself from deciding what to do. I wanted to wait until morning to call someone about Dad. It seemed obvious. I had to call someone. But now? The man was sleeping. For sure, yes, a doctor, psychiatrist, someone would have to look at my father. They’d want to know everything. Where had I been, and how did this happen? How was I supposed to know? Was I supposed to know? I wanted to get drunk and not have to think about it and then drunkenly stew in the facts that my mother was no longer here anymore, not in this house, or on this earth, and it seemed a little unfair that he was stealing my attention away from her memory. But it was also totally unfair of me to think that way, because the man was obviously not doing well without her. I needed a drink, and one solid memory of my mother to cling to, before I could get myself together and attend to Dad. I figured I would look for the family album.

I also figured a fifty–fifty chance Sarah would return the call. But that was not a good bet.

I knew she wouldn’t call. She shouldn’t have. How is it we can love someone who refuses to love us back? A fucking teenager’s question! But still … I mean, can you really love someone who’s not really there? Not anymore? Which one of you is more of a ghost? Three thousand miles away, practically on the moon, and I was pining. Then again, so much of what I’d loved was already gone. Sarah. Mom. My business at the time, or what was left of it, was already swirling in the crapper. Now Dad was not looking especially good. There had to be a reason. Maybe that I hadn’t been to church in over two decades. I mean if I really wanted to cut through the fat, like Dad said, so much fat, the question then was this: What exactly was the trajectory that followed from my brief career as a prophet? Scratch that: the failed prophet from Richmond Hill, Queens. Young Josiah Laudermilk, one of God’s Great American (Would-be) Men. How did I get here? I’d been doing my best as an adult man to avoid the question. In fact, I had run from it, as far as I could.

I had run from east to western ocean, over mountains, and through deserts. Actually, I drove; I rented a green Jeep Cherokee because that vehicle made me feel like I was on a mission, and I never once looked in the rearview mirror. I ran through women, unabashedly, but ashamed, always shamed by needing someone, always someone, a woman, another woman, because love always ends, until I met Sarah. But then I ran from her after pretty much our first talk of children. I ran through cash, and professional success, and away from my livelihood. Thank God for my right-hand man, second in command, and closest friend, Mr. Amad Singh, who kept the great leaky boat afloat without me, minding the store way back in California. I ran from Mom, thinking death might be catching. And I ran from that stage, that damnable podium, practically as soon as I could leave the house (this house!), not realizing, of course, that I was headed right for the future—like all of us—headed for the year of prophecy 2000. (Not to mention the woeful and belatedly apocalyptic September that followed.) I ran from Dad. I ran from his insistence I was special, from his compulsive and overwhelming need to believe, from his very blood, which of course I couldn’t get away from, no matter where I went. In fact, here I was sitting on the steps of his front porch.

 

 

 

 

Something else changed in me that summer. There was the “vision,” yes, but also something else. I felt like I had grown up, which is ridiculous, I guess, because I was only twelve years old. Nonetheless. I felt different. Stronger. More assured. And less lonely—because of Issy, who all of a sudden started coming over to my house. Which brings us back to Issy, who for some reason remains entangled among my thoughts even to this day. Not every thought, no, but thoughts of family, of my parents, and the frightening and attractive idea of having a child.

Havi had apparently grown tired of him. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Yet our subsequent friendship was surprising to me. But also ennobling. Can I say that? Yes. Ennobling. Because he brought out something good in me, and so I was good to Issy. Or as good as a twelve-year-old can be, or be aware of. I was certainly aware that he was good, and not just to me. Just plain good. So when Havi got a girlfriend—who was three years older than him, by the way, which seems so wrong to me now (then again, his mustache had sprouted, on the sides of his lips mostly, a thin hint of a mustache, his mouth in a whisper of parentheses, so he did look older than he was), my point: Havi dropped Issy like a toy he got tired of. And it just so happened that around this time I was playing less and less with action figures, my Star Wars figures propped on shelves, like trophies from much younger days, and no longer climbing from my pockets. I swear it had something to do with that ceiling. Lost innocence? Too much? My point is simply that Issy’s timing was good when one sunny day, after Sunday church, he asked to come over to my house.

This happened right around the same time Mom first got what she called body tired. “My whole body is tired.…” How could we know she was sick? She was tired.

I said, “Mom, you know Issy.”

This was in the front hallway of the church, by a large pastoral painting. Mountains. Blue sky. Green grass. A lake. But no people. Not one person. The kind of painting you see in a thrift store, and wonder who painted such a big, boring, and unpeopled painting? And why such an elaborate wooden frame? What good is the view with no people? An Eden with nobody in it. Just waiting. We prayed daily for the end of the world, and here’s what the world might have looked like before we got there.

Mom said, “Of course, sweetie, is your mother here?”

“No, she no here,” Issy said.

I said, “Issy wants to come over.”

“To hang out,” he finished my thought.

It was plain that this tickled my mother, and she could hardly hold back her smile. I didn’t have lots of friends, hardly any in my own neighborhood, which was only walking distance from Issy’s, it turned out, and, especially since what had happened onstage. I was “weird.” Even the kids at school had found out. Who told them? Mom didn’t like to talk much about what had happened, and maybe this is why I especially felt so much love for her. Not that I loved Dad any less. It was complicated. Mom said my sermon had been lovely, even “inspiring” to the other kids in the congregation. But it had scared her. Dad scared her, too. How he then insisted that our family Bible study should happen twice or three times a week, from now on, not just once anymore, and how he would look at me, right into my eyes, like he might find some revealed secret there. He insisted I had a gift for communion. Take this seriously. A friend could only be a good thing.

She mussed Issy’s hair. “No trouble at all. How about later today? We’ll walk over and pick you up.”

This amazed me. Confused me. How did she know where he lived? She somehow knew, and I didn’t? What else did she know? She knew of whole blocks and neighborhoods, I soon found out, ones I’d never been to or heard of before. So we walked to Issy’s house that afternoon, waved at his mother actually hiding in the window, who never did come out to meet us, and Issy came over. Not all mothers were the same, I knew this now. She stayed at that window and spied on us like we were stealing away her child. I saw scabs and cuts on her face. The house itself was a shambles. The front yard covered in large plastic toys, neon Big Wheels, basketballs, and broken bike parts, all at the feet of a powder-blue Blessed Mother Mary statue. As far as I knew, Issy had no brothers or sisters, and so we figured they weren’t the only ones who lived there. Issy later told me the toys belonged to the other kids his father sometimes brought over, and that his mother always refused to talk to those children or cook them food or even come out of her room when they were in the house.

That day we walked back to my house, and my mother, I see now, was asking all sorts of questions to better understand Issy’s situation. How long had he lived there? Did he like his block? Did he have lots of friends in the neighborhood? Did his mom have a job? And what was his favorite thing to eat, because maybe she could make it for him.

He and I went straight to the backyard, which wasn’t so big a yard compared to some, but Issy just could not get over how huge. He said their landlord wouldn’t let them use their backyard. We sat at the wooden table for a while and talked about Havi, probably because we had that in common, and about how he didn’t call Issy anymore and ignored him at church. I remember more than anything else a small mouse in the grass, and Issy pointing at it. It was a dead mouse, curled up in the grass as if he’d been cupped in a palm and set there to sleep. Issy got up from the table, crouched down beside the mouse, and gently petted his finger along its rounded back. He sat there for a minute or so, and then looked up at me, his face like he wanted to say something, like he was disappointed. I could see he was about to cry, and he wiped his eyes and stared at me. Almost like he was daring me to laugh at him. I didn’t.

I stood over Issy and said, “We have mice.” I pointed at our house.

He smiled a big smile, and dug at the grass and dirt with his fingers and scooped out a hole in the earth and placed the mouse in it, moved it with a stick. We scoured the yard for what seemed like all day long, looking for the perfect rock to cover the hole. The mouse and the hole and the rock put us in the same world somehow, away from Havi, and all that came before. We never mentioned Havi again, and I realized I’d always wanted a brother.

It seems to me that Issy was somehow aware of death, or maybe just of sadness or maybe the harder parts of life, in way I wasn’t, not yet. His life was more precarious than mine, less secure. My father was unorthodox, yes, but he was there. My mother didn’t have marks and cuts on her face. This made me want to be a big brother to Issy. I probably never said it to myself or out loud, but that’s what it was. And here he was a year older than me. But it wasn’t just about wanting to protect him, if I could. There was something in him I recognized, something in myself, but also I was jealous of him. The Laudermilk house was a more secure place, absolutely, when compared with Issy’s. But compared with the average family on our block, we were freaks. Daily life in the Laudermilk home was tricky—it was slippery—and even though I was dealing, always dealing with it, because I had to, it made me anxious. And here was Issy living a life lots more tricky then mine, in everyday ways, and yet he never once seemed anxious. If you could only have seen his face. He was untouched by it, or maybe he was just resigned and I’m romanticizing it all, or maybe he just never knew anything else. I wanted his peaceful way.

He came back that week, almost every day, and pretty much every weekday afternoon for the rest of the summer. Sometimes Saturdays. He occasionally joined us at church. One day, in our backyard, we talked about the girl in the yellow dress. We guessed at her name, and Issy decided to call her Ariel, after Princess Ariel from one of our favorite cartoons. How do I remember this? Thundarr the Barbarian. We loved that cartoon! We watched it, completely rapt, together in the living room, sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV, eating instant Jiffy muffins. I even remember the show’s intro. A runaway cartoon planet flies by the earth and causes a global catastrophe in the future year of “1994.” Just fourteen years away, at the time … Did I ever consider the coincidence, then? I don’t think so. Six years off from my own “prediction.” And in the year 3994, two thousand years later, Thundarr is born to save mankind. I even married Issy and Ariel, one day, the girl in the yellow dress played by a thin maple in my backyard.

Issy said, “You can do it because you’re a priest.”

Later that summer, Issy said we should go meet some girls. What girls? He knew girls? There were two girls that wanted to talk to us, he said. What do you talk about with girls? We spent hours, all morning long, learning how to use hair sprays and gels and trying to look as old as possible.

“You’re supposed to use a hair dryer,” he said. We were in the upstairs bathroom.

I looked in the closet where Mom kept the towels and the sheets and what looked like a tackle box filled with creams and makeup. I found the hair dryer.

“Here.” He took it from me and plugged it in, and we blew our slick hair into deliberate cowlicks over our foreheads and sprayed.

We walked to Issy’s school, and we walked into the school yard where the two girls should’ve been waiting for us. But they weren’t. We sat on the monkey bars, and talked, and we joked, doing Star Wars impressions, and before long we forgot about the girls.

And then they were calling out for Issy.

“Issy! Issy!”

We looked all over, but we couldn’t find them.

“Up here!”

We looked up and saw them standing on the roof of the school.

Issy said, “How’d you get up there?”

“The fence,” one girl said. And she pointed at the fence, and how it extended alongside the school, up past a portico roof. “Climb from the roof,” she said. “You afraid?”

Issy looked at me, and we read each other’s thoughts: We must do this. Everything depends on us doing this. We ran for the fence and climbed like two chimps escaping from a cage, and found ourselves on the portico. We looked up and they were there, two Spanish-looking girls who knew Issy’s name.

“Whas you name?” one of them said.

Me? I looked at Issy. I said, “Me?” And I looked back at them, at the hems of their skirts at their knees, and how did girls walk around in skirts? Climbing fences? In skirts? I was getting lost in thoughts of fences and skirts, and then both girls just started laughing. They said, “You can’t get up here? We could do it!”

They disappeared from our view.

We froze. And then we scrambled.

“Here!” Issy said, “Look, a ladder on the wall.” He was laughing, like how come we didn’t see it? A black metal ladder bolted to the brick. We climbed it, and the upper edge of the building gave way to a view of the flat barren roof: broken soda bottles, cigarettes in piles, five-gallon cans filled with I don’t know what like a janitor forgot they were there, a jellyfish pile of soaking-wet condoms, titillating and repulsive, and the girls. They were sitting on a brick rise that housed a large exhaust fan.

They were laughing and saying, “What took you so long?”

We walked over, and how did our hairdos look by now? More ridiculous? Less ridiculous?

The girls were playing cards.

“You want to play UNO?” one of them asked us, the same one who had asked my name. We sat down on the ground and joined them.

I don’t know what I’d expected to happen, or what Issy had expected to happen, or for that matter what the girls had expected to happen. But whatever it may have been, no matter how grossly exaggerated, or poorly informed, no matter what kinds of kissing I’d dreamed could ever happen on a girl’s mouth and cheek, it would have paled. And yet all we did was play cards. I saw their skirts, they were there, right there! The miracle of their knees. We played cards on a roof above the world.

Later that summer we pondered things other than love. We pondered big things like death, but in the same way we had mulled over love on the roof with those girls, wondering how it might feel. We got up close, and we looked, as close as we could without actually touching. Issy and I did what boys do. We secretly watched horror movies, and pretended to be unafraid. We imagined we were at war, in my backyard, and shot each other dead with rifle-shaped branches. We creatively killed a large insect we found under a stone. We looked at its carcass, amazed that it was here, still here, but also how it wasn’t really here in the world anymore. Death had a hard shell, then, black and metallic. And then, one day—did we go too close?—my friend Issy disappeared.

 

 

 

 

Something hit me softly on the back. I turned and saw the small wedge of wood, and saw that Dad was now standing in the doorway. He was wearing pants—no shirt, but the pants were clean and white.

“What? You think I’d lock you out?” He laughed. “Get in here.”

“So you’re ready to see me, sir?”

He laughed again. “I was tired!”

“I was on the phone.”

“With the pretty wife?”

“Not my wife.”

“Baaah.” He turned back into the house.

“Hold on.” I followed him inside, glad to see him acting more alive. He looked better. I jogged after him, past the bags, past the bathroom door, past the red light, and back into the dining room. Again we sat at the table. The white cat jumped to his lap.

He took the last sip from his beer and said, “So, I should be gone pretty soon now.”

Something caught in my throat, I coughed. “Stop. Don’t talk like that.”

“Tell me now what’s new. I feel rested.”

I said, “Well. I’m here. That’s new.”

“Ha!” He slapped my knee. “Isn’t it?”

I said, “Are you in any pain? At all? You’re too skinny, Dad.”

“Every day I’m here is pain, Junior.”

I looked at his side where the ribs were prominent. “Where?”

“Everywhere.” He looked around the room.

So I looked around the room. I said, “You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”

“I’m fine.” He lifted the cat to his face and kissed the neck, his face in the fur. “I’m done taking care of things,” he said. “Since your mother left, I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?” he said.

“That she left. And you’re tired.”

“You don’t know a thing hiding out there in Hollywood.” He pressed his face against the cat’s back. “Good kitty.”

I put my hand on his knee and the cat swiped at my arm. It ran and hid beneath the table.

“Be careful with the cats.” He made kiss noises, rubbing his fingertips below the table where the cat was.

“You were in the bathroom for a long time.”

He waved it away. “Not what you think.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That your old man is constipated.”

I laughed.

“I’m fine. I think in there. It’s comfortable.”

“You’re napping on the john and it’s comfortable.”

“You don’t get to come here and tell me what’s what.”

“You’re right.” He was right. “Does anyone come over anymore? Friends from church?”

“Bah. Your mother had friends.”

“So no church. Ever?”

“My dream last night.” He rubbed at his mouth, smacked his lips. “Clouds opening up over church. This is not a church I’ve been to, but it was church, you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“The clouds open up and there are these two big feet. You follow?”

“I follow.”

“Tremendous feet, big as Cadillacs. And His robes are swaying there and He’s facing me. But I can’t see His face. He’s way too tall. His head’s up in Heaven. And He lowers himself just enough.”

“Okay.”

“He’s hunkered there above the church.”

“Okay.”

“And He takes a king-size shit. Right through the roof.” He looked at me, like what do you think of that? He said, “I’ve had that one before. Different, but the same. I don’t go to church anymore.” He peeled at the label on his bottle, looking not especially interested in our conversation. Then he looked at me like, you and I, we get each other now?

I laughed. “No, I guess you don’t.”

“It’s all right here,” he said, touching his chest.

I nodded again. Nodding seemed safe.

“There are so many things we got wrong.” He leaned in closer. “You have to read it right.” He lifted himself from his chair.

“Sit down. Please. I just got here and you’re walking away from me again.”

“I wanna show you something.”

“You should sit.”

He walked over to the book on the far end of the table.

I said, “You hungry? I can make us something to eat.”

“Sonny boy, food is for the living.”

I tried not to sound too worried. “You’re ugly, I promise. But very much alive.”

“You always were funny.” He looked at me like he’d just remembered something, or maybe like he’d forgotten himself and he found it again. “Made your mother laugh all the time. You were a real stinker.” He pointed at me.

I noticed his pants were painter’s pants, hooks on the hips for hanging tools. He’d painted houses for a few years, and I’d completely forgotten.

“I saw your mother this morning.” He flipped the pages of the book, looked up. “You still think I’m crazy.”

“I think you’ve had a very hard year.”

“Longer than a year.”

“Mom’s gone a year.”

“I’m not talking about your mother.”

I nodded. “Of course not.”

“You know, she figured things out before she left.”

What little daylight there was dimmed along the edges of the window shades.

I said, “I can get us a pizza.”

“She’s finally gone home, Josiah. Right where she should be. It’s where she always was going. It’s where she belongs.”

I kept my mouth shut. “You should eat something.”

“And I’m going home to see her.”

Bite your lip.

What I wanted to say was, Dad, you got it all wrong. Death is not a home. Cancer is not a reward. When it comes knocking on your door, you should run. And if you don’t run because for some reason you don’t know any better, you should be taken up and protected. You should be lifted by your son, and slung over the shoulder if necessary, and hurried away to a hospital. Like it or not.

He made like he was coming toward me, but then he held fast to the chair.

“Don’t you see, Junior? I’m on your side!” He pointed his finger again and it shook, a slight palsy. “We’re finally talking here.” Then he poked at the book with his finger. “It’s all right here, but you have to wrestle with it. I’m in the Lord because He is in me, you see? Always has been. You see?”

I stood and walked toward the book, which looked sort of like a Bible, the fragmentary prosy-poem look of scripture, chapter and verse, but it was different. I didn’t recognize the names of the books. No Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. No Genesis. “What is this?”

“It’s scripture, what else?” He squeezed my hand and grabbed hold of the chair again quickly. His hair fell and covered his eyes.

I said, “Please. Let me go and get us some dinner.”

“No, no, you go ahead. I’m gonna go lay down.”

“You literally just got up.” Or maybe he was right. He just needed rest. I didn’t want to call someone and make too big a deal. He’d start acting like the Dad I knew, eventually, in the morning maybe. In the meantime, the house needed cleaning, and he needed a shower and shave.

“I’m tired and I take it when it comes,” he said. “Tomorrow will be better, I promise.”

I combed back his hair with my hands, so I could see his eyes. Still green.

He took a set of keys from his pocket. “So you don’t get locked out.” I followed him as he walked to the bathroom. He opened the door and the red light peeked from around like a fire. I tried to peer inside but he deliberately blocked my view.

“You’re going to lie down?” I said.

The white cat snuck by and went in. He actually allowed this.

“Wish me good dreams,” he said.

I let out a sigh. Relented. “Good dreams.”

He took up my hand to his mouth and he kissed it. I don’t think he’d ever done this before, kissed my adult hand. There was a pink swelling around his mouth, maybe from holding back a cry. His chin quivered. “I’m fine,” he said. “I promise.” He closed the door and he locked it. Shuffled about inside. There was a trickle, a scraping whine from the plumbing, and then a falling jet of bathwater. I figured he was taking a bath. Good for him. I needed to clear my head. A walk. A long walk, outside, in the open air. I opened the door, and whispered a brief prayer for the first time in years.

 

 

 

 

I walked back and forth on the sidewalk out front, around the corner, and all I could think about was Dad. And the cats. How were there so many cats? And what in God’s name was going on here? Dad wasn’t sick, as far as I could tell. But what did I know? Maybe he was. Even though he looked terrible, I didn’t want to believe he was physically sick, and I was nervous and totally undecided on how to proceed. Plus all of a sudden, here in this house, I was thinking of Issy, and I didn’t like to think about Issy. I thought of how that same year, in the fall, his father was sort of back in the picture when Issy disappeared, and his mother was getting herself straight, I think. Such a long time ago. I thought hard about it: a Sunday morning, and Issy went to get his dad a newspaper and a gallon of milk. But he never came back. On the news, the neighbors said they saw him come home, paper bag in his arms, and that he was last seen talking to a man in a pickup truck right in front of his house. Which does seem pretty memorable for Queens, because when did I ever see a pickup? But also an old woman from next door said she never left her porch, and she saw him leave that morning and never saw him again. What was it in the eighties? Kids were disappearing like it was some mini-Rapture. One minute they were here, and then poof. Ten years of grainy milk-carton photos and weeping mothers begging for the return of their kid on the local news.

Like it usually went, Issy’s dad was a suspect at first, but he was cleared. I seem to remember this ruined what was left of that marriage. I definitely remember Mom sitting me down to tell me about Issy. She said she had some news to share with me, and that I needed to be a “young man” about it. She called me that, a young man. And this made such a powerful impression on me, because I’d been called a young man by the elder brothers in our congregation ever since I started giving sermons and scripture recitals at church. “What a fine young man … A fine example for the other boys…”

But, until Issy, I was just a boy to Mom.

He and his mother hadn’t been to church that week, which wasn’t so strange a thing because, like I said, sometimes he went with us, and sometimes his dad dropped him off and he went by himself. Sometimes he wouldn’t go to church at all. But by the time Mom talked to me, the whole congregation was already whispering about his disappearance. It was on the local news, in the papers.

She said, “Young man, this world is sick and tired and broken, and one day our Heavenly Father will fix it. But until then, bad things happen. What you’re hearing about Issy is one of those things, because no matter where he is, it’s not where he wants to be, which is home and safe with his family. I want you to pray for him, okay?”

I remembered her makeup, and how much she seemed to have on while she talked to me, how there was a lot more on her face than usual, and how the ceiling fan in our foyer was spinning just above us. I came to know the word “foundation” around this time. Makeup fascinated me, because I figured I was supposed to like it on girls but I really didn’t, the UNO girls on the roof wore no makeup, and wasn’t it sort of like paint? This made me suspicious. I used to wonder what would happen if you kissed a girl who had a lot of makeup on. Would it get on your face and your hands? On your shirt? I thought girls mostly wore makeup to hide problems on their face. Issy’s mom, for instance, wore lots of makeup to cover the pocks and marks. Mom, though, just looked so tired. I looked up at her and I considered the safety of ceiling fans, wondering whether the speed at which they spun was quick enough to take off somebody’s head. I was confused.

Mom and I talked—I don’t think I said much—and then Dad led me into the garage when she wasn’t looking and asked me where Issy was.

“Tell me,” he said.

I thought I was in trouble. “But I wasn’t with him. How could I know?”

He asked me to concentrate, and said, “I don’t mean know where he is like that.” Dad asked me to think of Issy, only Issy, to try and reach up to God. He asked me to see if Issy was in Heaven.

He said, “You need to take this seriously.”

“Commune,” he said. “It’s in your blood.”

This only made me more confused. So I was relieved when Mom suddenly took me away by the hand. She glared back at Dad, and led me into the house. I couldn’t know what that glare was about, not really, only it appeared Mom and Dad thought differently about some things. About me. They were different people. I don’t think I really knew this before. From then on I wasn’t surprised when they had opposite opinions, or when my mom got mad at Dad for whatever reason. I think it was then, when Dad told me to commune, and when I did try to do it, later, in my room—I seriously did—that I began to question what had happened onstage that summer. Maybe not in some clear way, but I certainly asked myself how what Dad called communing with God was different than praying to God. I prayed to God and I did ask Him to tell me where Issy was. So many times I asked this. I also recall hearing my own voice asking for an answer and I remember making a small sound. A kind of “Oh.” My voice. I heard my voice, it was me. Dad asked me again, later that week, in a roundabout way, and I said I couldn’t do what he wanted. I didn’t know how, and I asked him to please not be mad at me. His face fell. We never talked about it again.

I want to say such sad and harrowing news of Issy made me cry, made me weep, but it didn’t. Kids are too self-involved. Or I was, anyway, in the way that young kids can be: life will never end, and my parents will always be here.… But there was something. I didn’t know what, a disturbance in my system of things, a first ripple in the unbothered water. Things did not add up. Where did he go? I asked myself that a lot. I prayed about it, thinking maybe I did have special access to God. But He never answered. One afternoon, I went out back and I cut at the one of the maples with a steak knife. I slashed at the tree. I threw the knife at the dirt at the base of the tree like I was throwing a hatchet. I pulled it from the dirt and I looked at the small hole I had made, and I punched the dirt as hard as I could. There was a small rock there and it cut the back of my hand, and like a bruised piece of fruit I now had a soft spot.

Weirdly, the church brothers started paying me even more attention. They sat me down in the back room and explained that Issy’s disappearance was solid proof we were in the Final Days, and that he was my closest friend was proof of my gift. Satanic forces were actively working against me. Be careful. I must remain strong. And so it was time I give another sermon, perhaps at another local congregation.

I wanted nothing of the sort.

I looked around at the elder brothers. They were so tall.

“Where’s my dad?”

There was a drop ceiling above us, rectangular foam tiles propped by metal ribbing, and I was filled with a sudden urge to push aside a tile and see what lay beyond there. Pipes? Electrical wiring? A dark empty space.

“Your father gave us his blessing,” one of them said.

But I didn’t want to give sermons anymore. Why? Because I was afraid it would happen again. I couldn’t really put it into words, but it was the total loss of self onstage, in front of everybody—or is that the right way to put it? Maybe the opposite. I knew what I’d done up there was special, like nothing anybody there had ever seen. Certainly like nothing I’d ever seen, or done, and yet I’d been physically compelled to do it. It wasn’t by choice, didn’t feel like a choice. But I also knew very well what I had done, knew that it was me who had done it, even though I didn’t exactly know what I was doing at the time. I imagine it like the way a child actor can’t stay away from a camera the very first time he sees one, and he never knows explicitly why. An infant, and he’s posing for pictures! All I knew was that getting onstage would mean doing that “thing” again, playing that part, and, frankly, it meant talking about God doing terrible things to fine people. How did I know who was or wasn’t good? It meant talking about blood, and war, and vengeance, and getting nice people, as far as I could tell, to applaud for it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but I felt it inside my body. In my skin. And I was also a little afraid that it wouldn’t happen—I’ll admit that now: that I could never do it again. I was afraid to find out.

Plus the kids in church, they had already avoided me, but now, after Issy, they acted like I carried some kind of contagion. Get too close and disappear. Havi claimed he was Issy’s best friend, probably for the attention, although by that time I knew it wasn’t true. Some of the others, the older ones, closer to twenty, now started paying me attention. I was invited for after-church lunches. Let’s go to a diner, and see a movie at the Woodhaven Boulevard Cinemas. I think they had some vague religious ambitions, and thought befriending me would improve their standing. I just wanted to be alone. But soon it was settled. Again in the back room, this time with Dad and the congregation elders. I would give a short sermon at the end of October on the satanic evils of Halloween. On devils, and witches, and ghosts, all abominations in the eyes of the Lord.

The year before, a few neighborhood boys were seen trick-or-treating dressed up like the rock band KISS. Obviously because of a local demonic influence. Just look to the acronymic herald: Kids In Satan’s Service. It would be years before I got the unintended irony, when I first heard “Rock and Roll All Nite,” and pretty much anything else from their totally benign catalogue. Evil as Saturday morning cartoons. Nevertheless, my subject: “The Satanic Dangers of Halloween, and the Everyday Demonic Influences Around Us.” Dad was enthused. Mom was not.

Was the timing appropriate? I mean, there was Issy to think about, and that was what I should have been doing—as a family, what all of us should have been doing. Praying for Issy.

She said, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t like it.”

This was in the living room, at the table. We were having our weekly Bible study and she just came out with it.

Dad said, “Let’s not argue in front of the boy.”

That same week Mom went to the doctor, and told him how tired she always was, whole-body tired, and it wasn’t long after that we found out she had cancer. I ran off into the backyard, and sat myself again beside the maples Issy and I used to climb, and I tried to not think about it at all. I slapped at the ground beside me. It didn’t hurt much and so I got on my knees and I punched at the ground. Punched like I wanted to hurt it. And then I stood up and I looked at one of the maples, imagining one of them was me, and one was Issy, and I touched it with a knuckle to see how hard it was. I cocked back my fist, such a small fist, and I punched the tree. I scraped my knuckles on the bark. They bled. I punched it again, squarely, and I heard my knuckle snap. I started crying, and sat back down in the dirt. I prayed, cradling one hand in the other. Where had he gone? Why had he gone anywhere at all? And why that summer? I must have asked for this. Maybe I hadn’t talked with God himself, not had a conversation with him, not a dialogue, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hear me. My God, what had I done? I’d called out and asked for the End. I’d rolled out a red welcome carpet, and, yes, I didn’t know what this meant, not then: that really this meant death. Real blood. Red blood. But it was becoming clearer to me. It hadn’t touched me yet, not exactly, but nonlife, nonbeing, the hole in the air that Issy now was, that had touched me, and I couldn’t help but make a connection between the two. Here was the one kid who let me in, who treated me like a kid, like I wanted to be treated, and so I acted like a kid, the way I wished I could act with the other kids, or with my father. Here was the kid who became my brother, who made me feel less lonely, and now he was gone. My best friend, who never once seemed anxious or afraid. I used to wonder whether Issy somehow knew this would happen, that it was coming. Otherwise, why had we compressed what felt like years of friendship into months, weeks into days, hours? I wondered if it was my fault, whether God had simply answered my call. Issy was the first one to go. And now maybe Mom would go next.

 

 

 

 

All this remembering took work, and walking up and down Dad’s block, taking in the pungent nighttime neighborhood air, I got hungry. And thirsty, and I hoped to scare up some booze. I wanted to sit on the back porch and get tipsy. I wanted to look at the maples. Those same trees. Was it possible? The same dirt? I went back inside and stopped by the bathroom and listened there for Dad. He was talking in his sleep, mumbling. I said his name, quietly. Nothing. I heard his breath quicken and slow, quicken and slow, and I imagined his legs moving like how a dog’s legs quiver when the dog dreams of a chase. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I looked at the red light and walked away into the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out the butter. I rifled through drawers in search of a knife, found one, cut a thick slice of bread. I looked at the kitchen, at the cat turds, at the trash on so many surfaces. I took the bottle from the fridge. Uncorked, and nearly empty. I said to myself, If I don’t move a muscle, then maybe the room will feel clean. I moved, and something crunched underfoot.

On the far wall, there was a simple wooden cross and beside it a decorative plate. I walked closer. These were new. Maybe not new, but I’d never seen them before. A gold Star of David was painted in the center of the dish. And burned into the wooden cross, on the horizontal piece were the words “Beth Sarim,” and on the vertical, in smaller letters, “O. Laudermilk, 1930.” I wondered who the “O.” was. I knew my father’s father was an Orville, and I think he shared the name with his father, my great-grandfather. But I could’ve been wrong. Probably my grandfather’s. I had no idea who Beth Sarim was. Beside the cross was the backyard door. I pulled, but the door was stuck. The weather had done what it does, and the door felt grafted to the frame. I pulled, and again I pulled, until the door gave way, and stray leaves and string, paper cups and newspaper wads, all in an upswept pile against the door, tumbled into the kitchen. I jogged back to the counter. Grabbed the bread and the wine.

It was a quiet evening, and the kerosene smell seemed less everywhere now, and there were lights in the neighboring windows. In a back window of the house behind ours, a family was sitting around a table, and the father, or I assume it was the father, was talking lively with his hands. The backyard was smaller than I remembered. All overgrown with weeds and littered with beer cans and bottles, probably from neighborhood kids. Three bald rubber tires were stacked beside a pile of paint cans, and a twisted bike knotted like a ribbon sat on top of a red metal car hood. The Ford Country Squire! —No. And just as fast, I remembered that poor thing had been repossessed, not so long after Dad brought it home. Because the world in fact kept turning, and it turned out we couldn’t afford the payments. At the back fence, like a V jutting from the ground, were the same two maples.

The evening breeze was slight. The leaves up top were flitting. I sat on the back porch steps.

The wine was cold and not bad at all and I watched evening come down behind the houses. The pearlike shadows of the Sikh temple domes darkened against the sky. I’m here, I’m right here, I thought to myself. And Dad’s here, too, right there inside and asleep. He’s alive. But the man should be in a bed. Were there beds anymore? Upstairs? I hadn’t even been upstairs yet. More wine. Too many years had sloughed off this place, like paint peeling from a surface, all of it and everywhere else, the backyard and metal fence, the rusting wrought-iron porch railing, the blue mailboxes on the street corners, and the ice cream trucks, takeout delivery guys on bikes, and the next-door neighbors asleep in their beds or watching the nightly news in easy chairs, from all of this and everything, the years were sloughing off too fast. What happens next? We’d hug in the bright morning, avoiding all mirrors, and cheer flat beer until he finally gave up and died, “went home.” I opened my phone and the digital green display lit up. I looked at the numbers.

I decided I would march through the house first thing in the morning, and tear every drape and shade from the windows, open every window wide. I wanted to light every bulb and start sweeping. I would wake the man up with a busy morning commotion, fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen. He’d come shouting from the bathroom, blocking the sunlight from his eyes, and see me in the hallway working a broom. The front door open, trash bags piled on the porch. And then he’d say, Thank you, Junior, thank you. He’d say, This is just what I needed, good light in here! Just can’t get enough light! Then we’d go for a walk in the sun, me holding his hand, a giant hand, and my father a giant beside me. I drank. But part of me, I have to say, was also jealous of the man, of how he looked at the thing, unflinching. And yet a small part of me also disliked him for being so goddamn gullible about it all. Life is here. Now. God doesn’t need your company. Leave Heaven be. I would save him after all.

I went back to the kitchen and foraged for more wine. I opened the refrigerator, dumbly, knowing there was no more left. I went through the cabinets, mostly empty; some were filled. One was lovingly stacked with newspapers, and another with pens and pencils bound by rubber bands. Another was stacked with empty wine bottles. One fell, I caught it in my hands, and this gave me hope.

The pantry.

It was a deep closet pantry with louvered doors. I’d hidden inside as a kid when my mother did the dishes, and also when she searched the rooms with a belt in her hands, anxious to give me a strapping for any disobedience. I don’t like to remember this side of her. Plus that sort of thing only happened occasionally, and when I was very young. I saw a worn-down broom leaned against shelves stacked with dusty canned goods, and a stack of cardboard boxes. One had been opened, flaps nicely folded. Inside it, I saw two lamps messily wrapped in bubble packing, the same lamp I’d seen in both the dining room and the living room. Behind, there was a box with four bottles of red wine, screw-topped.

I chose a tall glass from the sink and rinsed it, dried it clean on my shirt.

Back outside, shouting came from a dimly lit basement window next door. Maybe Korean. The night sky in Queens had no stars, and the moon was somewhere up there dozing. It was a nonstop sky of dark blue and nothing. I thought, My mother is here, she’s right here, and also she’s not here at all. She’s out there and nothing at all. And all of her was here when she was still here, even the yelling for my father, saying there’s a spider in the bathroom, and the prayers before meals with a supplicant’s napkin on her head whenever Dad was out of town, even the vein in her neck like the string on her red balloon face when she got angry. I let that memory go when it came. All of her was here when she was here, and nowhere else. I never thought of her name anymore. My father’s name is Gill. I wanted to say his name out loud.

“Gill Laudermilk.”

My glass raised, I said it louder. And I had a terrible feeling that there was more dead space between sons and fathers than all of the night air around me. Which version of Dad did I love? I loved mostly an invention, the best version of him I could think of.

“I am Gill Laudermilk’s son!”

The moon peeked over the roofs, and I was tired. The lightning bugs were blinking, and I thought of the brief electric marks they make when getting snuffed.

I carefully closed the back door and took the wine bottle into the living room. And like rats after hours in a restaurant, the cats came out from the corners. They rubbed against my legs, flirting and following me with caution. I shook the sheet on the couch clean, shut off the lamp, and leaned back easy on the couch. Where was my bag? I pulled the phone from my pocket and tried to relax. The room was dark, very dark, and I set the phone green-lit and open on the table. I smelled the garbage in the hallway, but it was fainter. I was getting used to it. I deeply inhaled, filled my senses like I would in a Christmas kitchen. I drank in the stink and everything was going to be fine. The phone shined weakly and the numbers read “9:21.” Things would be better tomorrow.

The white cat rubbed at my ankles.

I patted my lap: Come up here. Stroked her back. I wanted to ask her about the bathroom, what it looked like inside the red-lit room, and how it felt to be such a good kitty, to be trusted to see what was going on inside there, to be such a perfect fucking kitty. I stood up and, picking her up with both hands, I let her hang. Dangling there from my grip, the softly hissed. I let go one hand and lifted her higher, stretching my arm as far is it could go. She scratched at my forearms with her back feet. Was this the same vicious thing that had scratched my arm before? An itchy red line puffed up on my wrist. I took a gulp from my glass as the cat fought back. I squeezed my hand slightly, and actually moved the cat’s ribs. I felt the shape of her rib cage, her interior, her tiny pink heart shaking there and sweating the closing rib walls between my fingers. The cage was closing in my grip. I put down my glass.

I pressed my fingers against one of the pink pads of her right front paw, and a single claw came curling like a sharp thin pinky finger. I kept pressure on the pad, keeping the claw extended, and I pressed a thumb against the claw. It poked against my skin and broke the skin of my finger but I pushed back more against the claw, bending it backward. She cried out, fighting my grip. I was afraid my father might hear. I squeezed hard on her ribs and reminded her that I actually had two hands. I pushed back on her claw and she cried and she fought.

She whimpered.

She stopped fighting, and let herself hang. I thought of wishbones, totally ashamed. I sat and placed the cat in my lap. She didn’t run. She hopped off and just walked away, but not without stopping at the doorway and giving me a look of absolute disgust before leaving the room. The phone light had gone out. I closed the phone, opened it again, and left it there on the table, green-lit and glowing. I poured another glass and drank it down fast. It had been such a long first day. What would I find in the light of morning? I closed my eyes and the cats were slowly climbing up the couch, up my legs. They came out like shadows and covered me. I closed my eyes and prayed again. Again! I asked if I could please dream of Sarah, and I lay there for what seemed like only seconds before I fell into a deep heavy sleep, before falling into a long and semilucid dream.