It was the day after my brother had been gone for six weeks that my father brought Vilonia Kline into our house and sat her down in the living room. My mother, Lucas Cader, Mena Prescott, and I all stood across from her on the other side of the room. My father, awkwardly enough, introduced her as “someone who I think can help us find Gabriel.”
“What?” my mother asked.
“Sarah, Ms. Kline is a spiritual guide,” my father began.
“Oh please,” my mother butted in.
“Mom,” I whispered, nudging her arm.
“Ms. Kline has agreed to help us, so let’s all be supportive of her while she asks us a few things, okay?” My dad’s voice remained calm and steadfast.
“Fine,” my mother said.
“Sure,” I said.
Lucas Cader and Mena Prescott said nothing but looked over at me with expressions that suggested that they were either about to laugh or run for the door. They did neither.
“First, I need a shirt of Gabriel’s. Something he wore often, like a favorite T-shirt or something,” Ms. Kline said in a saner manner than I expected.
My father handed her Gabriel’s favorite T-shirt, a black one with PINK FLOYD written across the chest.
“Okay, did Gabriel have a favorite hobby or sport, something like that?” she asked, managing to look up at all of us at once.
“He read books a lot,” Lucas said uncomfortably, looking over at my mother for a silent approval of his participation.
“Yeah, and he listened to a lot of music,” my father added.
“Well. Let me see.” Ms. Kline closed her eyes and thought for a minute. “Bring me whatever book may have been his favorite, or perhaps the last book he had read, and we’ll start from there, okay?”
Vilonia Kline, who my father said had helped solve four other missing persons cases, held my brother’s T-shirt, his copy of The Catcher in the Rye, and his previous year’s school picture in her hands. She closed her eyes. We all looked at one another with eyebrows raised, standing uncomfortably in our places, swaying back and forth. I was biting my lips and letting each one of my fingers meet my thumbs over and over again.
“He was a smart boy.” Ms. Kline broke our painful silence.
“He was,” my dad agreed.
“And he was funny, too, wasn’t he?”
“Definitely,” Lucas said.
“Where is the last place any of you saw him?”
“His room,” I said.
“Can I see it?” she asked, standing up, his things still in her hands.
She sat on the edge of Gabriel’s bed, her right hand lightly touching his pillow, her fingers wriggling like worms. We stood in the hallway, my parents half in and half out of the room. She lay down on the bed and put her head on the place where my brother’s had been the last time I’d seen him. We all sort of inched forward slowly when she did this, but then settled back to our places and watched. Her eyes closed, she began to hum. I’m pretty sure it was a very slowed-down version of “Stairway to Heaven.” I looked over at Lucas. He was angry. Mena held his hand and twirled her hair nervously. My mother stared at my father with a look of disgust and pity. Vilonia Kline broke the silence once again, standing up to do so.
“He was religious, wasn’t he?” she asked loudly.
“Why do you say that?” my mother asked.
“There have been many prayers spoken here.”
A single tear fell quickly down the side of my father’s face. My mother stood closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. Lucas Cader’s forehead rested lightly on the back of my shoulder before I heard him sniffle and walk quickly down the hallway and outside. Mena followed him. I stood in place. I looked into Vilonia Kline’s light green eyes and stepped closer.
“Can you find him?” I asked softly.
“He is not near water,” she said plainly.
“Is that it? That’s all you’ve got?” I stepped even closer.
“He has left a lot of energy here. He had a strong spirit.”
I remember hearing nothing as I walked down the hallway. It was as if the ringing in my ears was so loud that noise became silence. The door swung open, hitting the outside wall, and I stomped down the front steps. Lucas and Mena sat at the bottom, both staring at the ground. I walked past them. I grabbed the sides of my head with my hands, pulling my hair back. I brought my hands back to cover my eyes and mouth.
“What is it, Cullen?” Lucas asked quietly.
I said nothing.
“Cullen, why don’t you sit down?” Mena suggested.
I did not sit down.
“Cullen!” Lucas stood up, grabbing both my arms and lightly shaking me.
“She said he HAD a strong spirit!” I yelled, tears now running into my mouth.
“What?” Lucas asked, still holding my arms.
“She said he had a strong spirit,” I cried. “She said had.”
I lowered my body down to the ground and Lucas, not letting go, lowered his with mine. We sat on the grass. Mena stood looking down at us.
“What does she know, Cullen?” Lucas whispered. “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t.”
“But what if she does?” I asked.
“She doesn’t.”
He looked at me with a half smile. I wiped my eyes with my shirt collar and stood up. I sat down on the bottom step leading up to the porch, and Lucas and Mena sat beside me. I started laughing. I still tasted tears in my mouth, still felt snot running from my nose.
“What’s funny?” Mena asked.
“There’s a psychic in my house and I’m crying on the porch.” “And?” Lucas said.
“And I’m wondering how much more absurd this can all get.”
“Well,” Lucas began, “a couple of guys said they saw the Lazarus yesterday. Said it swooped down in front of their truck, right behind a diesel, over on Highway Nineteen. That absurd enough for you?”
“Yeah. At least I’m not seeing imaginary birds like everyone else,” I said, knowing that I’d had an imaginary conversation with the bird just six weeks before.
When one’s parents storm out of the house followed by a psychic who is still holding his missing brother’s T-shirt and book, he stands up, looks into his mother’s eyes, and wonders where they are headed. He looks over at his best friend, who has tried his best not to cry, and sees that even he seems to be buying into these terrible theatrics. He follows his mother. She turns around, says, “We’re going to find your brother,” and gets into the backseat of his father’s truck. He waves his best friend and Mena Prescott over, lets them get in first, and then squeezes into the crowded backseat while trying to close the door. He gazes out the window as they pass through town. His forehead is smashed flat against the glass.
Book Title #80: The Looks of Strangers in Stores.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Watchers
The librarian told Cabot Searcy that he could find an Ethiopian Orthodox Bible in the section marked Theology, on the seventh floor, and that he was lucky Dr. Sentell had decided to reference the book in one of his divinity courses three semesters before. Cabot smiled at her, nodded his thanks, and waited for the elevator doors to open. Once inside, he reread the small sheet of paper he held in his hand. It read: The Book of Enoch is found only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. It is a secret writing.
He had jotted this down after doing an hour’s worth of research instead of going to his Human Anatomy lecture that morning. The elevator doors opened. Cabot Searcy was met with silent stares as he walked slowly but confidently to the back corner of the room. He crouched down, scanning row after row of books, his finger gliding lightly over their spines, his eyes bouncing back and forth in his head. When he found what he was looking for, Cabot lugged the thick, heavy book to the nearest table and sat down, looking over his shoulder as if he was doing something secretive or wrong. He opened the book.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible is made up of the largest canon of any Bible in print in the modern world.
Cabot Searcy, having been raised in a Southern Baptist church in Georgia, had little knowledge of this text before this first encounter. He scanned the table of contents and then opened the book up to I Enoch. This book, referred to more commonly as the Book of Enoch, is split into five major sections, those being the Book of Watchers, the Book of Parables, the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries, the Book of Dream Visions, and the Book of the Epistle of Enoch. Cabot Searcy found himself turning to chapter 10 to read the quote that Benton had left behind. This was in the Book of Watchers, which would serve as the focus of Cabot Searcy’s endeavor.
The scripture was highlighted in yellow, causing Cabot to raise one eyebrow as he read word for word the lines that had brought him to the library that morning. And, though highlighted already, the words “angels have corrupted” were also circled in black ink. And farther down the page another line was highlighted and also circled. It read:
And destroy all the spirits of the reprobate and the
children of the Watchers, because they have wronged
mankind.
And even farther down the page another line was marked in similar ways. It read:
And cleanse thou the earth from all oppression, and
from all unrighteousness, and from all sin, and from
all godlessness: and all the uncleanness that is wrought
upon the earth destroy from off the earth.
And at the bottom of the page there was written something so small that Cabot Searcy was forced to squint his eyes and bring his face down as close to the book as possible. He made it out to read, in cursive and black ink: The angels taught the humans too much. So, what if they hadn’t been stopped?
Because Cabot Searcy felt the need to do so, he compared the words jotted down in the Book of Enoch to the words in Benton Sage’s journal and, to his delight, they seemed to be a pretty close match. Now Cabot Searcy felt as if he had been given some sort of posthumous assignment from Benton. Some righteous mission of discovery. Some quest for the truth behind existence. Cabot Searcy suddenly found himself consumed by self-important thoughts as to how he could single-handedly save mankind.
From reading the Book of Watchers, Cabot began to understand what he believed Benton had written about in his scribbled note. He read about the fall of the angels, God speaking to Noah, the Great Flood. He read from his Bible and the Ethiopian one as well. He went back and forth from one to another, Genesis to Enoch. Enoch to Genesis. He read that the angels had taught humans the art of war, had taught them astrology, anatomy. He read that the angels’ children became unruly, savage beasts. He began to put the pieces of Benton Sage’s puzzle together in his mind. The one thing he’d found in Benton’s journal that he’d yet to fit together with the rest of this puzzle was how Benton’s vision of God, the angel Gabriel, and some large bird fit into the picture. All he knew was that he had to carry on the work that God had, in the vision, ascribed to Benton. He had to somehow change the world.
“I’ll tell you why Noah had to build the ark,” Cabot said to his new roommate some time that next semester.
“What?” Chuck Stoppard asked from his bed, where he lay playing a video game.
“The flood. I’ll tell you why God sent the flood and had Noah build the ark.”
“Okay.” Chuck Stoppard never looked away from his game.
“It’s because we were getting too smart. See, these fallen angels—”
“Fallen angels?” Chuck interrupted.
“That’s right. These fallen angels came down, started sleeping with the women here on Earth, and then started teaching us all these things like how to fight and how to understand science and the stars and our bodies, and God looked down and was like, ‘Those humans are learning too much from the angels. This has to stop before they get too powerful.’ So then he sends Gabriel down to kill the angels, and sooner or later he talks to Noah and sends the flood to kill off all the humans who had gotten too smart.”
“Oh,” Chuck Stoppard managed.
“Yeah. It’s crazy. I know.”
“Pretty crazy,” Chuck said sarcastically.
“Just think. If Gabriel hadn’t stopped them, humans could be so much smarter now. We’d know everything. We’d know how to stop wars, how to cure diseases and all that shit.” Cabot flipped through the Bible resting on his chest as he lay in bed.
“Cabot,” Chuck Stoppard said from his bed.
“What?”
“I’m an atheist,” Chuck said, lying simply to keep from having to hear any more of Cabot Searcy’s theories on the potential of humankind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Simplest Thing in the World
We stood in a field, one where trees had been clear-cut and what remained was nothing more than what looked like some sad, ancient war zone. The grass was mostly dead, the dirt had gone from brown to gray, and the one tree that did still stand was bare and leaning like a creature over a small child’s nightmare bed. Vilonia Kline stood before us, her hands outstretched, her eyes closed again, her lips quivering, mumbling something either very important or completely full of shit. Lucas was looking at me the way someone does when a psychic is standing in a field in front of him and talking to the earth. Mena Prescott was now holding my mother’s hand, and my father was leaning against the truck, his eyes fixed on the mumbling woman. She walked out about a hundred yards, stopped, and then turned around. Her eyes flew open. Her shoulders jolted back. She put her hands to her sides.
“He is here,” she said quietly, but loud enough to be heard, pointing to the ground below her.
“Here”—my mother waved her arms around to encompass the entire field—“or there?” she asked, pointing to the ground beneath Vilonia Kline.
“Here,” Vilonia said again, pointing beneath her.
No one, to my surprise, was crying yet. No one was talking, either. Lucas looked over at my father, who looked at me quickly before reaching into the back of his truck and bringing out a shovel. He tossed it onto the ground in front of me. He then brought out another one and propped it against his right shoulder, walking toward the woman. Lucas Cader walked over and grabbed the shovel, looked up at me, and said, “Go sit in the truck.” I did, and Mena Prescott went with me. My mother sat on the hood of the truck, watching as they began to dig into the dead earth. Vilonia Kline sat down on the dirt beside them, watching the hole get wider and deeper with each jab and throw.
When one is sitting in the backseat of his father’s truck beside his best friend’s girlfriend, who has her head resting on his shoulder, and watching as his father and best friend slowly puncture the world to find his little brother, he imagines Vilonia Kline standing up, dusting off her long skirt, and walking down into the hole. He sees her come back out, a dirty, bloodstained T-shirt in her hands. She unwads the shirt, holding it up to her chest the way a mother would hold it up to her child in a clothing store, and it is black, with a big white angel in the center. It is the last shirt that Gabriel Witter was seen wearing. He sees Vilonia Kline gently lay the shirt down on the ground and then walk back down into the hole as they continue to dig around her. She walks back out, now holding a pair of blue jeans, knees stained with grass and dirt, blood caked around the ankles, pockets torn with holes and unraveling. These were the last pants that Gabriel Witter was seen wearing. She sets the jeans gently down under the shirt and begins to walk in a slow circle around the outfit, chanting and holding her hands up in the air. Behind her, from out of the earth, emerges a naked and dirty Gabriel Witter, his hair matted with blood and grime. His skin is clean white in some places but nearly black in others. He turns toward the truck, looks straight at his older brother, and smiles the slightest of smiles.
“I can’t believe this!” Vilonia Kline said, frustratingly, to my father as we drove back home.
“What?” my mother asked.
“You didn’t dig deep enough. We should go back.” Vilonia crossed her arms.
“Ms. Kline, if it’s all right with you, co
uld you please not talk for the rest of the ride?” my father said bluntly, dirt smeared across his forehead.
“We must’ve dug, like, ten feet,” Lucas said quietly, sweat still dripping from his nose.
My mother glared at my father the way a wife does, and then she turned back toward me. She reached one hand back, set it on top of mine, moved it quickly up and down twice, and then turned back around. Mena Prescott was asleep with her head against the window. Lucas Cader was picking dried dirt from the knees of his blue jeans. Vilonia Kline stared out the wind-shield with her lips tightly shut. She sat between my mother and father like some child on the way to a barbecue. She reminded me of sadness.
Seeing my brother’s zombie, or whatever it was, made me think about Russell Quitman and how I probably would never see him again. He was still in Florida, still in a hospital bed, and I was still making out with his ex-girlfriend in the backseat of my mom’s car. Ada said to me once, just after we had begun to know each other, that Russell Quitman, though he was a huge asshole, was actually one of the most sensitive people she’d ever known. “He would cry over the strangest things,” she said, “like a dead dog on the side of the road or a smell that reminded him of his grandmother.”
“Did he cry when you two broke up?” I asked her.
“He wept like a baby.”
“Naturally,” I joked.
“Wouldn’t you?” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said plainly.
“Ha! What does that mean?”
“We’ll just see.”
Ada Taylor said that my friendship with Lucas Cader was probably the only thing getting me through all the madness of that summer. Here is more of what I knew about Lucas Cader: His father was a drunk who used to pay him and his older brother to fight in the front yard. His mother was that sort of woman who rarely speaks and usually says something unintentionally very sad when she does. She let her husband hit her two small children, so I never really took the time to know her. Neither did Lucas. Lucas’s father left them in the middle of the night when he was nine years old. Lucas’s brother, well on his way to becoming the alcoholic that his father had been, burned to death in a car crash three years after that. Lucas Cader had dated every girl in our grade and most of the ones in our school by the time we were sophomores. He still spent most of his time with me and slept on my floor a good four nights of the week. I loved Lucas Cader, in a very nonsexual way, and this all suited me just fine. And Lucas Cader was as heartbroken over Gabriel as I was, if not more so.
Where Things Come Back Page 9