by Beth Goobie
“More than God,” said Dee. “More than the Devil. More than your parents, or your boyfriend, or anything anyone’s ever told you. They’ll run you any way they can—fuck, they’ll try to tell you how to come.” She shuddered violently, then added, “Coming’s your soul, man. If they take that, they’ve got everything.”
Eyes fixed on the candle flame, she sat, shoulders slumped, her voice the empty shell of what got left behind. “Okay, so it’s just you and me, Jez,” she said. “Everything else is gone.” Vaguely, she gestured at the black shapeless room. “This is a nothing place we’re in here, nothing but what we think. We’re starting over; our brains are completely free. We run the entire universe; we align stars and planets; whatever we decide happens.” Raising her eyes, she looked directly at Jez. “So,” she asked, “what happens?”
A nothing place, thought Jez, glancing around the room: Darkness. Genesis. The Chosen Ones waiting in the shadows, Dee’s tear-smeared face over a candle flame. Knife of spirit, knife of steel. As she stood pondering, she felt the room pulling at her thoughts, throbbing with the power of a mind coming into being—the dark energy of planets, the slow intention of shadow galaxies dreaming themselves toward solid matter. Kneeling, she placed the jackknife onto the coffee table, where Dee picked it up and passed it through the candle flame; tranced, they watched the quick slant of smoke that rose from the blade.
“I don’t know what happens,” whispered Jez, “except for me. I happen.” Hot tears stung her eyes. “I want to happen.”
“We’ll do a ritual,” Dee said dreamily. “A seeking ritual. You don’t know what you really believe, and I don’t know, either. We’ll be like monarchs—lift up off everything we know and fly toward what we dream.” Pausing, she circled the flame counterclockwise with the tip of the jackknife blade. “From now on,” she added slowly, thinking her way word to word, “we do whatever we want. No rules—their power over you starts when you believe in their rules. Everything’s open—wide open—and we’re on the hunt. Seekers.”
“Seeking what?” asked Jez.
Unfocused, Dee’s eyes seemed to fix on something beyond Jez’s head, and for a moment Jez thought the other girl had seen The Chosen Ones standing in their transparent half-circle, waiting for whatever it was that had brought them here. But Dee’s expression remained neutral, dreamy, lost in thought.
“Whatever we want,” she said finally. “Seekers seek; they find out for themselves. They seek because they don’t know. People who know are assholes. People who know believe what they’re told. When you know, you’re conquered. We’re seekers—we’re still free.”
Pausing, she sat, letting her thoughts pass into silence, then handed the knife to Jez. “Seekers,” said Jez, holding the blade to the candle flame and watching light play across steel. Without warning, she was visited by a memory of her mother sitting with My Answer in hand and reading in a breathy, high-pitched voice. Even now Jez could feel that hiss-whispering voice reaching for her, trying to surround and lift her up into those high, bright places, and seal her in. All those years she had been held prisoner by her mother—sealed against her own mind, her own body. What had been lost?
“Seekers,” she whispered, letting the murmur of her voice sink deep into herself. “To seek and to find. Finding out is what they never let happen. Finding out is what they’re most afraid you’ll do. Finding out is the biggest sin, the darkest evil. Finding out is a part of you, a part of every person—the part that gets stolen away and locked up because it’s what’s closest to sin. Finding out is the part of you that never gets through church doors; it’ll be left behind when you rise to Heaven; it wants the Apocalypse; it wants to win the war against God.”
Suddenly, behind her, The Chosen Ones were keening, their voices shredding the air. Turning, Jez saw that they had taken up a whirling dervish dance, their curved knives rising and falling. The sign, she thought giddily, the secret password—it’s Apocalypse. Yes, Apocalypse. A word that had always belonged to the other side—it was a meaning to fear, to guard against. Yet here it was, the Logos that had risen, unbidden, out of her deepest depths—the Word that belonged not at the end, but at the beginning of things.
“Apocalypse,” she whispered. “I am seeking the Apocalypse.”
“That’s the end of the world, isn’t it?” Dee asked hesitantly.
“The end of everything,” said Jez. “Everything we know.”
Dee’s eyes narrowed and she nodded. “We must give blood,” she said. “Seal our souls to this quest.”
Their eyes met, then drifted to Jez’s bare forearms. Jez held the knife; it was up to her to choose the place where blood would be released from skin. Pensively, she traced the blade along her left forearm. Nothing spoke to her; nothing called it in. Gently, she touched it to her throat, her chin. Again nothing, but unexpectedly her tongue flicked out, tasting the flat of the blade.
Behind her, The Chosen Ones keened louder, their robes rustling feverishly as they danced. Apocalypse, thought Jez, Apocalypse. Turning the jackknife, she ran the tip of her tongue in one swift motion across the blade—the first word was thin, fiery pain, blood birthed into space. Quickly, Dee reached for the jackknife and drew her own tongue across its edge. Then, grimacing, she leaned forward. Jez knew what was required—she had heard of pressed fingers, joined wrists. Also leaning forward, she touched the slashed tip of her tongue to Dee’s as The Chosen Ones whirled about them in frenzied epiphany.
Abruptly, the robed figures were gone, their rustling silenced, the dream cavern vanished. In the black-sheeted room over the garage, two girls drew back from one another, their breathing harsh and frightened, their tongues vivid with pain. Tears sparkled in Dee’s eyes; she drew her bloody tongue over her lips, releasing a dark line of drool that ran down her chin.
“Fuck, this hurts,” she muttered. “Why didn’t you pick fingertips?”
And so the Apocalypse began.
Four
Before the advent of the Tongue of Fire, before the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle, before the house on Quance Crescent, I had a different mother—one not living in constant anticipation of the small white stone that would reveal her secret name. This mother had a casual theology, based on the salvation of laughter, and her favorite version of the Creation myth was one in which the Lord God Jehovah woke one morning belly-laughing so long and hard, the earth rolled fully formed from the tip of His tongue.
“Monday to Sunday,” she would say firmly. “It’s all there together—the fishies, the birdies, you and me.” Discussions regarding the conflict between theology and science left her with little patience. “Darwin, Shmarwin,” she would retort dismissively. “Leviticus, Shmiticus.” And to all those who claimed a special dispensation from God, she replied simply, “Chosen, Shmosen.”
This mother saw the Creator’s touch in everyone and everything, and she saw it everywhere—vibrating among the peonies, dropping slow and leisurely from autumn trees, sighing the color of dusk as it crept across the backyard. “There, can you see it, Mary-Eve?” she would whisper, her breath hollowing a warm cave inside my ear. “Those purple petunias, the way they’re dancing in the breeze—that’s God humming to Himself. The whole world is God’s song. It’s all one big Sunday morning hymn He’s humming to anyone who’ll listen.”
This mother summoned no glowing figures of light, nor did she wake at night and prowl the house, seeking otherworldly realms; it was the death of my seven-year-old twin, Louisie, that triggered these dramatic changes; until Louisie died, the song of our mother’s body was enough for her. Few among our parents’ social circle, however, approved of Rachel Hamilton’s approach to the sacred. Every August, for instance, she volunteered to teach Sunday school at our neighborhood Presbyterian church (in order to get out of listening to the weekly sermon), and every September was once again refused on the basis of a particularly unorthodox lesson she had once given ab
out Jonah and the Loch Ness monster. My father, who came from a long line of Presbyterian ministers, often tried to improve her theological attitudes with pointed discussions concerning the sermon on the drive home from church, but she usually ducked him with comments like “Lawrence, that sounds interesting, but could we stop at the Dairy Queen? I know it’s Sunday and all, but I would so love a soft ice cream cone.”
This mother loved to play. One of the earliest children’s games that she devised was the Flannel Graph Board Story Game. It began with a flannel graph kit from the local Christian store, which contained a flannel graph board, a stand, and a multitude of flannel-backed paper dolls, including brightly robed men and women, shepherd boys, and the Christmas ox, ass, and sheep. Each paper doll wore the obligatory look of wonder, even the animals, and every human had pinkish-white skin, except one of the three wise men, who was a chestnut brown. To round things out, an Adam and Eve had also been thrown into the mix, Eve with foot-length blonde hair to cover all the trouble spots, and Adam with a robust cluster of fig leaves growing between his thighs. A host of angels was also represented, most of them apparently singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and every one of the bunch had blond hair, blue eyes, a white robe, and a close-fitting halo.
“You watch yourself, girls,” warned our mother upon seeing them for the first time. “You get to be too well behaved, and God’ll put a giggle around your head. That’s what a halo is, you know—the head of a goodie goodie with a God-giggle around it.”
Our mother encouraged Louisie and I to play with the flannel graph set and create our own plotlines. To expand the possibilities, she created extra paper dolls, searching through a wide variety of magazines—from National Geographic to Maclean’s and McCall’s—and cutting out children from every country and race, then backing them with cardboard and flannel. We also had a number of Billy Grahams, scrounged from the covers of Christianity Today, a few Diefenbakers and JFKs, Snow White and several of the dwarfs, Annette Funicello in her Mickey Mouse cap, Snap, Crackle, and Pop from the Rice Krispies box, one serenely fluttering Tweety Bird, the Littlest Hobo, Flipper, and two Lassies, not to mention the Breck girls and our favorite models from the Eaton’s Christmas catalogue—more than enough to round out any manger scene, since the latter came bearing carefully wrapped gifts.
The flannel graph board game that Louisie and I most liked to play was called Sunday Morning Church. At Louisie’s request, our mother had drawn a looming pulpit with red Magic Marker flames erupting from both sides, behind which Louisie would set a Billy Graham paper doll (one with an upraised hand and a particularly pleading look), then give long, decorous speeches about being polite, saying your bedtime prayers, and always putting a nickel into the Sunday morning offering plate. I, on the other hand, preferred to channel through one of the Virgin Marys—her downcast eyes looked so subversive—and got an admittedly fiendish delight out of making her say words like “poop,” “fart,” and Woody Woodpecker’s “That’s all, folks! Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha!”
The flannel graph kit also provided a Michelangelo-type Jehovah, a single white dove to represent the Holy Spirit, and a Jesus for every occasion. Satan was depicted by a snake, but it was such an overwhelmingly unimpressive garden-variety type that when Louisie and I played Heaven and Hell, I deputized Eve and Tweety in his place, and had them lead the sinners down into the fiery furnace. While I spent the rest of the game devising all manner of eternal torment for the damned, Louisie handled Heaven, bossing everyone through Billy Graham, to whom she had taken quite a fancy—so much so that she began to carry one of his flannel-backed paper dolls everywhere, keeping it in a small, white purse that she slid under her pillow for after-school naps. At breakfast, she even propped Billy against her milk glass and talked to him as she ate, sometimes falling into long pauses during which she would stare at the paper doll as if listening to its reply.
“That’s stupid,” I would scowl, watching her whisper giggly secrets to the paper cutout.
“Shh,” our mother would whisper back. “She’s just playing. Soon she’ll get tired of Billy, and another giggle will come along.”
But to everyone’s surprise, Louisie’s infatuation with Billy Graham lasted a full year, during which time everyone else took second place to his beatific paper face. Whenever we played Heaven and Hell, she immediately snatched all the Billys for Heaven, which sat atop some flannel-backed cumulonimbus clouds and several sunsets that our mother had delicately removed from library books and our family set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I, of course, ran Hell—a brilliant collage of forest fires and barbecue flames that snapped, crackled, and popped along the bottom of the flannel graph board.
“Hello, down there!” Billy Graham would holler from atop a soaring cumulonimbus. “Hear ye, hear ye, all ye sinners! Are ye getting hot yet?”
“Not too bad,” one of the Breck girls would unrepentantly reply. “But I must wash my hair, and there’s no water down here.”
“That’s what ye get for sinning!” scolded Flipper, riding a particularly lovely sunset. “But maybe I could send you a Popsicle. Mom!” yelled Louisie, switching to her human persona and running to the doorway. “Can we have a Popsicle? Hell is thirsty today.”
“Yes, yes!” I cried, waving the beseeching hands of a Billy Graham that I had quietly confiscated for Hell when Louisie wasn’t looking. “I’m getting thirsty from all this preaching down here.”
“Hey!” yelled Louisie, returning rapidly to the flannel graph board. “Billy Graham’s got to be in Heaven. He’s got no sin in him.”
“But I like him in Hell!” I protested vigorously. “All those flames make him preach better!”
“No!” yelled Louisie, making a grab for the paper doll. “Give me that Billy!”
“You already got three!” I bellowed back, clutching Billy to my chest. “You can’t have all the Billys!”
“Mom!” shrieked Louisie, lunging at me. “Tell her it’s a sin to put Billy Graham in Hell!”
“Now, why is that a sin?” asked our mother, coming into the room from the hall, where she had probably been stifling her giggles as she listened in.
“Because he’s the big church guy! He was on TV!” shouted Louisie, her face contorted with intensity. “He’s God’s best friend, and God wouldn’t let him go to Hell.”
“Eve would,” I interjected slyly, just as I saw her start to calm down. “And Tweety thinks he’s a thilly little puttycat.”
At this, Louisie’s eyes grew huge and her lower lip trembled. “Billy’s going to Heaven and I am too,” she whimpered. “And when we get there, we won’t let you in.” Pointing dramatically at me, she pronounced, “You are the Abomination! God will spit you out of His mouth and you will be damned for all eternity!”
“Louisie, Louisie,” coaxed our mother, adopting a soothing tone. “Billy just needs a holiday for a couple of days, and then he’ll come back to Heaven. Mary-Eve will let him come back up, won’t you, Mary-Eve?”
Louisie’s sobs quieted and they both looked at me expectantly. With an exaggerated wink, our mother gave me the thumbs-up signal, and I reluctantly pulled the crumpled Billy Graham from my chest, straightened his beseeching hands, and handed him to Louisie. “You can have him,” I said sulkily. “Heaven is for sucks, anyway.”
Our personalities were obviously polarized; nevertheless, Louisie and I were as close emotionally as our faces were near-identical. Even so, I was caught entirely unaware when she died during our seventh summer. Though she had always been physically weaker, she had not displayed signs of pronounced illness. And while the autopsy revealed a weak heart that had suddenly given out, it had been a summer of record-high temperatures, and complaints of mild sunstroke, dizzy spells, and headaches were common. Not once had Louisie mentioned chest pains, and her only unusual behavior had come the week before she died, when she began getting up at night and prowling the house. It was one of the few activities
of her short life in which she did not invite me to share, but because we slept in the same bed, all she had to do was turn over and I came awake. So when she began getting up in the middle of the night and slipping out of the room, I followed close on her heels, thinking she intended a midnight foray into the pantry cookie jar.
Instead, I found her wandering window to window, pausing every now and then to stand with both hands on a sill and look out as if expecting someone. At intervals, she turned to face the room, her eyes fixed midair as she whispered excitedly to her favorite Billy. Finally, without showing the slightest interest in the cookie jar, she headed back to bed, where she fell immediately asleep.
Puzzled and hurt by the secret she was apparently keeping from me, I followed her about the house for several nights. Each time, she kept to the same pattern—whispering and staring through various windows and then returning to bed to fall swiftly asleep. On the fourth night, weary of tiptoeing around after her, I hid behind the living room couch and leaped out at her in an attempted surprise attack.
“Hi, Louisie!” I rasped, prancing about in my best hissing cat imitation.
A paper Billy clutched to her chest, Louisie stood in the center of the room, facing the window, her white nightie an eerie glow in the dark. Without looking at me, she said reprovingly, “You should go back to bed, Mary-Eve. This isn’t for little girls like you.”
“I’m the same old as you!” I replied indignantly.
She did not respond, simply continued to stare through the living room window, and gradually I became aware of something invisible but tangible in the room—a quick, soundless pulsing, vibrations that filled the air.
“Oh!” I whispered, stretching out my hands to touch it. “It’s God singing all over the place, just like Mom said. Louisie, can you feel it?” Excited, I grabbed her free hand, then dropped it as I felt the humming pulse that emanated from her body. “It’s you!” I whispered, taking a step back. “You’re the one making the air go funny.”